The God of Surprises

Last weekend, a rather wonderful thing happened. No, I am not referring to 

       (all glory laud and honour)
Palm Sunday though that was pretty special as always
        (it never seems to rain on Palm Sunday, either).
This year, our Hosannah-ing was followed by the baptism of two youngsters. It should have been a two-family-four-kid baptism week but one of the families cried off with chicken-pox, which is unfortunate. Our prayers
        (and calamine)
are with them at this time. No, what was wonderful was something that was entirely new to me in my modest professional Christian ministry, and also unheard of in the somewhat longer
        (and levitous)
ministry of my brother priest, now retired and a great asset to the parish! 

The two children being baptised were themselves from a clutch of four, and I was dousing Number Two and Number Four - number one was 'done' already and Number Three resolutely refused to be involved! Number Four was a babe-in-arms and Number Two was a 
        (very well turned out)
lad of about 9 or ten years of age. And so it was: we went Declaring and Promising and we even agreed to fight the devil, corruption and evil
        (no theological dilution needed in Whitton, thank you)
and then anointed Two and Four with the usual aplomb and style. The godparents were resplendent and were duly thanked for their service to the ... well, service and returned to their seats for the Half-Time Entertainment - the Collection. Suitably frisked by two youngsters, the assembled throng
        (as distinct from 'thong' which is something else altogether)
turned on their heels to face The Font for the Main Event - the Baptism of Two and Four. 

Suitable quantities of pre-warmed
        (cold is simply anti-social)
living water was poured, tested and blessed - and so it was that Number Four was gently held under my arm 
        (not unlike a rugby ball)
and received the appropriate aspersion. Number Two, being bigger therefore heavier, was trapped and held
        (rather like a jousting thing at a joust)
over The Font and was granted spiritual and fluid entry into the Faith of Our Fathers. Job done a good'n! 

And then it happened. Number Three
        (formerly agin the whole enterprise)
shimmied up, the way one does in a pew-bound church, and asked if she could be baptised. "Yes" I said, "but I haven't got my diary, so I will have to talk to mummy". No, mister, I meant now - right this minute
        (yes, Revd Imaginationless the Un-Creative, Vicar of Failing to Spot Gift Horses)
while we are here, if you please. Well, thought I to myself, what to do. What would Canon Law make of all of this
        (and should I care?)
so I did the only decent think and press-ganged three new Godparents, sent for the oils and did what any right minded cleric would do, and baptised her before she changed her mind!

A spontaneous baptism! It doesn't much better than that!

What we Learn from Katie Price on Palm Sunday

I wrote last year (or maybe even the year before, I lose track) about the Palm Sunday "moral of the story" as made manifest in the life, ups and downs of Britney Spears (a woman for whom I have much sympathy, and therefore no small amount of affection). Take one celebrity, over-baste them in the light of our limitless adoration and tribulation, get bored, drop them like an inadvertently grasped poo, blame the celebrity, go home (mostly tutting). 

Regard this post as the Part Deux of that thought process. 

The woman whose face adorns this post is one Katie Price, aka Jordan, aka the former Mrs Peter Andre, failed Euro-vision singer, mammary-enhanced producer of children and their books, self-publicist extraordinaire and the product of the world that made her. 

I don't know Katie Price, mostly because I am not a cross-dressing kick-boxer, quasi pop-singer, and I am over 18 and therefore unlikely ever to be noticed or courted by one Ms Price of Brighton. I cannot tell you if she is a nice person, a loving mother (because I have chosen not to tune in to her personal TV Channel - known to the rest of us as ITV2). I am no authority on the real person of Katie Price - though to be sure I find her public persona to be grotesque and almost completely without any class. But like I say, she is the product of the public that made her - you and me. She has her body routinely re-built to keep our interests; her chest inflated with increasing volumes of silicone to enhance our ardors,  nasty retail ranges to keep us spending our cash and feeling fashionable, and a readily modified personality and publicly expressed private life to keep us entertained. Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained?

It seems to me that Katie, dear Mr Beckham, his missus (Spindly Spice, or was it Snarling Spice?), One Direction and all that goes with them is a modern manifestation of a problem that has crept up on us for years: an increasing lack of "the other" in our lives. Kids screaming until they barf because a kid who happens to be famous passes them by - a kid, even months before fame, who wouldn't have turned a single head save for his mum's. As a society, we drool over fame - like one of Dr Pavlov's dogs. 

When we lose that due sense of God in our lives we have to be left with a large gap - a hole. Nature, I am told, abhors a vacuum (and I certainly don't like the hoovering) so we do what is inevitable in those circumstances - we place humans into that space and try to make them proto-deities. Then they fail and we are awfully disappointed. There is a danger too, for Christians. Because we live in a society that adores humanity over God, there are some who seem to pursue 'celebrity' in the guise of Christian ministry. Maybe blogging is like that, I don't know (though I am hardly a celebrity by any measure, thank God). However, in the Facebook world, people seem unable not to mention their last celebrity moment or that time when they were the centre of attention. 

This is Holy Week. If we don't or cannot do it at any other time in the year, this is the week when we set aside our own desire for celebrity or the celebrity-fix,  and instead focus on the life of a broken and apparently failed itinerant preacher who was subject to the fickle love of the Jerusalemite crowd; then remember who genuinely fills the Katie Price Space in our hearts and lives. If we get that wrong, the journey of our own lives will surely never find rest or its true destination. 

My New Favouritist Thing In the World for Today

While all of you have been sleeping and waking, working and playing, eating and drinking, fighting and loving - a process has been taking place that few people ever see. It is a thing that takes place in deepest darkest secret, emerging complete like a mysterious creation from another world.

Well, sort of.

Today I have been mostly building services - a sort of Liturgy Construction Site where the framework of our worship has taken form. 

And it is the most fun in the world, let me tell you (unless you happen to be my Sacristan [and he reads this] in which case it is a source of much concern).

With all services and liturgies, you could open up a book, start at the beginning and get to the end, doing as directed in a blind way until it becomes just another register entry. Alternatively, you can build a living thing, that has shades of light and dark, periods of noise and silence, spells of great pathos and emotion. And so it is that I have been putting together the big services that regale the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Our Lord. I have completed Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, and rather than having formed four distinct liturgies, have crafted one liturgy in four movements. 

Fashioning liturgy is a wonderful thing, and this is the first year I have done it on this scale (for, perhaps, obvious reasons). Until now, I have picked up the book or Order of Service and done what is said. This process gives a depth to that which I finding incredibly helpful. It's in little choreographic moments that so much can be achieved in these services that we all know and love (if we know and love them) - for example, matching the three points where the Cross on Good Friday enters the church to those where the Paschal Candle enters a day later. Another is the use of the Pangue Lingua and its tune - once on Maundy Thursday, and again in echo at the time of the Veneration on Good Friday. The use of bells and their discontinuation - all these things, small and apparently accidental, give so much flavour, so much more meaning. 

Finally, I get liturgy. It is orchestral. It isn't linear as it sometimes appears or is delivered, but a beautiful movement of events that rotate, rise and fall. Needless to say, this Easter will now mean even more to me than I ever thought it could - because I have been granted a rare opportunity to shape worship (not as frequent an event in the life of a Vicar as you might imagine)

Palm Sunday and Britney Spears

Today is Palm Sunday, this slightly anomalous blip of joyousness in the midst of Lent and Passiontide. Of course, those of us who creep around churches habitually will know that Palm Sunday recalls the story of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Such is the joy of that occasion that we will hobble around our grounds nursing our newly blessed palm crosses whilst singing 'Ride on Ride on In Majesty' at seven different speeds, losing a verse between the front and back of the procession. It's tradition. It must be done.

The story of Palm Sunday has the implicit taunt of 'how the mighty will fall', and the uncomfortable semi-presence of unseen pedestals upon which we will place the soon-to-be-slain. Of course, we read the Gospel and we inwardly judge the perpetrators, knowing of course that we would never do the same. Oh no, not us, m'lud. 

Palm Sunday, for me, has taken on the tint of modern society and its ways, and dear old Britney Spears seemed always to be the poster girl for that tendency. I have never bought or owned one of her records, have no real desire to either. However, the fortunes of this young woman have always troubled me. She is no saint, and maybe even errs in the opposite direction at times. But we all do. I have to say too, that her fall from grace was painful and upsetting to behold. 

The tendency to which I refer is this psychopathy in all of us to raise people up so that we can enjoy the blood-sport of seeing them fall. Oh how we love to watch people fall into disrepute. Britney Spears, Billie Piper, Charlotte Church, Drew Barrymore, and many others - all relative kids who became idols in one moment, and the meat for the next press sandwich the next. In these cases, it was more to do with too much too young - but we have all enjoyed the parades of their retribution. This picture of Ms Spears summed it all up for me; a talented kid who had lost her way and the world itching to see her fall. Fall she did, watch we did. We bought the press editions too, watching our tellies tutting. 

Palm Sunday feels a little like that for me these days. Those who will eventually crucify the Bethlehemite carpenter will be guilty of not understanding what is really going on with Jesus. They were the ones who were so ready to elevate him to such celebrity in one moment only to haul him down the next. We in our third millennium churches will preach and heap curses upon the Jews of Jerusalem of the fourth decade - mere moments before we return to our newsprint and our internets to bay for the blood of the next hapless celebrity (or, in a fit of decency look away because it has nothing to do with us, of course).