Clap trap
PRIESTHOOD, like all discipleship, is a mixture of triumphs and humiliations, and I think it is fair to say that I have had more experience of the latter. Recently, I seem to have accidentally inflicted two deeply unpopular things on the very Anglo-Catholic parish in which I have been vicar for just under a year.
The first was a 35-minute homily by a wonderful visiting preacher, and the second was “Shine, Jesus, shine” as the entrance hymn at our weekly sung solemn mass. The latter’s unpopularity became clear immediately, as only the celebrant seemed to be singing; the former, however, reminded us all of just how easily our attention is maintained when a sermon is actually saying something.
In fact, “Shine, Jesus, shine” contains some very sound and ancient theology — notably in the final verse, which manages to combine the doctrines of Origen of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and both John and Charles Wesley:
As we gaze on your kingly brightness
So our faces display your likeness
Ever changing from glory to glory
Mirrored here may our lives tell your story. . .
I suspect it is the clapping in the chorus that puts most people off. Anglo-Catholics have yet to discover the liturgical clap — but there is nothing that Jesus and gin can’t solve.
Love without limit
AS A dual citizen of the UK and Jamaica, I am always mindful of the two very different, though occasionally similar, worlds that I inhabit. When I recently told a friend that I was soaking salted pig tails overnight so that I could cook them in my Jamaican Stew Peas, my friend (of Zambian heritage) exclaimed: “Gosh! Is there anything Jamaicans won’t use?!”
This led me to reflect on my upbringing. I was raised by my Jamaican-Cuban grandmother, who was born in Jamaica in 1930. My childhood memories include various bars of soap pushed and hand-moulded into one marble-like substance; bread with the mould cut out; toothpaste squeezed beyond recognition; and a diet of chicken feet, pig tails, hog head, tripe, liver, and even pigeon (which my mother and aunts and uncles spoke of, but which, thankfully, my generation was spared).
Scarcity, in my upbringing, is the polar opposite to the spirituality of scarcity which is evident in the Church today. This is the mindset that causes us to behave as though God were a pie that, when cut up and distributed, gets smaller and smaller and smaller: the absolute opposite to the gospel’s abundance.
My childhood embodied our Jamaican roots, which — as Maroons fleeing to the mountains to escape enslavement — meant that you ate whatever you could get hold of. This has instilled in me something that I hope to nurture here in our parish: the belief that scarcity is an unhealthy mindset for mission and outreach. In my childhood home in west London, God gave us not what we wanted, but what we needed.
We can so easily become a Church in which “Give us this day our daily bread” has come to mean very little, at a time when we seem more and more to be praying “My Father, who art in heaven”. When we learn to share God, we realise that there’s more than enough for absolutely everyone.
Free range worship
THE much over-used maxim “All are welcome” is easy to say but much harder to implement as a community’s default culture. Ideally, all Christian communities are porous: open to difference, open to change — but such openness is hard won, and requires much work to lay the foundations.
One of the strengths of the Anglo-Catholic tradition is that the focus is on the liturgy rather than the individual. On some Sundays here, the priest — whoever they are — wears the vestments that were worn by the very first vicar of the parish.
We are told that God’s house will be a house of prayer for all people (Isaiah 56.7) —but why should we stop there? At mass here, most Sundays, glimpsed through the clouds of incense and basking in the glorious sunlight right at the high altar, will be my 11-year-old Jack Russell terrier.
When I first came to this parish, I had no idea that, under Canon Doxsey (Vicar 1997-2011), Jack Russells were a key feature at St German’s. I admit to having at first been a little hesitant at letting my four-legged companion roam around free in the middle of a solemn mass in the presence of visiting preachers; but the folk here, reminded of times gone by, insisted.
Dogs at mass can teach us something quite profound about learning to share sacred space, about basking in the presence of God, and also about resting in God’s love — particularly when the hymn choices rub us up the wrong way (see above).
Eye of the beholder
TWO images might be said to represent life in this parish. One is the profound beauty of our large golden chalice, which is bejewelled with non-matching wedding rings, donated by widows more than 100 years ago to adorn the vessels used for the mass. The other image can be seen whenever someone takes a walk around our car park: an image of needles, spoons, and whatever other objects have been found useful for helping people use the drugs that have such a strong hold on them.
I often say that, for me, ministry here is about holding the tension between these two images — “doing” theology between them: trying to ensure that we in church do not see beauty only in silver and gold, but also commit ourselves to seeing it in the fractured lives of those who sometimes cannot see the beauty in themselves.
It is in the darkness of those lives that I pray daily, “Shine, Jesus, shine,” that God’s light and love might touch, and heal, and restore.
Canon Jarel Robinson-Brown is Vicar in the Roath and Cathays Ministry Area, in the diocese of Llandaff.
