Divide and rule
I BALANCED my sixth ham sandwich as daintily as I could on the small plate designed for perhaps half that number. I had found myself in the queue for refreshments at the royal garden party with a number of our brothers and sisters from the other Abrahamic faiths, and so, as the egg-and-cress and cucumber were ravaged, the ham and mustard stayed piled high and ripe for the taking. Thank goodness for Acts 10, eh?
Impostor syndrome is real, as most clergy will tell you, but I suspect there are few places where it is quite as prevalent as at Buckingham Palace. It was particularly acute for me that day, since I was invited only as a guest of a friend rather than as someone virtuous in his own right. Still, many of the current crop of bishops were there. So, too, was Mr Farage. Perhaps he was learning their names for a role in future episcopal appointments? That said, I didn’t notice a great deal of interlocution between the respective parties.
I passed pleasantries with the Rector of St Anne’s, Kew, Canon Giles Fraser, who observed that the sight of our “Dr Livingstone, I presume” moment had sent myriad purple cassocks disappearing into the lowest parts of the royal shrubbery. Given that the Bench can sometimes put one more in mind of Machiavelli than St Matthias, I recalled the former’s advice on the relative advantage of being feared rather than loved.
Spirited awakenings
THE dignity of the garden party was quite the contrast to my other great social endeavour this month, which was attendance at May Day in Oxford. It is a deranged event, which I never attended as a student, for much the same reason as I was only occasionally present at morning prayer in the college chapel: the early hours of the morning are ones that I preferred to leave to others. I also have a low tolerance for anything that stinks of neo-paganism, that creed being mostly the work of proto-Nazis and Victorian fraudsters. Yet a-maying I went, albeit grumpily and fortified by a bacon sandwich and a Bloody Mary. Good old Acts 10 again.
In fact, it was marvellous. This year was, regulars tell me, probably a once-in-a-50- year example of the ceremony at its best, courtesy of the dazzling weather. Not only did the sight of teenagers dancing in sunlight and on tables at 6.30 a.m. dispel myths of an upcoming puritanical generation, but so, too, in a different way, did the sight and sound of thousands of people echoing “Amen” to the Dean of Magdalen’s blessing of city and university, and the tangibly holy atmosphere as the crowd listened to the Hymnus Eucharisticus.
I suspect that most people assume that the Latin music that floats ethereally over the waters of the Isis and the tarmac of the High is medieval and Roman in its text and music. In fact — appropriately for such a non-Puritan event — it’s Restoration Anglican. The music is by Benjamin Rogers, whose career as Doctor of Music at Magdalen ended, in part, because “he talked loudly in the organ loft” — organists, take note. The words, meanwhile, were written by the excellently named the Revd Nathanial Ingelo, who was Rector of the even more excellently named Piddlehinton in Dorset.
Origins aside, the crowd were enrapt by it. I don’t think this is a one-off for May Day. Every time I go to chapels in Oxford, they are full to bursting. Something is going on; one just hopes that the dear old C of E has the nous to be part of it. It isn’t only the Church experiencing a quiet revival in that city. The Lamb and Flag pub on St Giles, above which I lived as an undergraduate, is now reporting record profits, having been doomed to closure post-Covid. A group of local worthies teamed together and bought the licence, and it is now a rip-roaring success, not least owing to the steady flow of trade from another resurgent Oxford institution, Pusey House.
There is a lesson here from the most worldly of establishments (the pub, that is, rather than Pusey) for the Church. I have long thought that re-legalising the sale of parish patronage back to private institutions and individuals might be a way to save the Church of England from itself.
Mergers and acquisitions
OXFORD has, alas, learned from the Church’s folly, as well as her wisdom. Instructions to merge the college rugby team with that of another far-off college of which we know nothing have come from on high (or, rather, from behind a desk along the Iffley Road).
This scenario may sound eerily familiar to churchwardens or PCCs in interregnum across the country. Still, if the response of the old members to this attempted Oxonian merger is anything to go by, I dread to think what ear-bending, courtesy of the past incumbents and churchwardens of parishes amalgamated, awaits ecclesiasticial apparatchiks when they arrive on another shore and stand in that greater light.
Generation to generation
OF COURSE, the thing that has really sent sin and sorrow packing this Eastertide hasn’t been Buck House, nor even Broad Street, but the life of the parish. Faith, hope, and love abound in the cycle of church life at Charlbury, even in the prosaic. We have removed a carpet — which had so much living in it that it might well have counted towards the electoral roll — thereby exposing ancient slabs. So now “Dearly beloved brethren” reverberates each day from the grooves of names once dearly loved.
Yet all of it echoes: that’s rather the point of parishes. A couple entered into the estate of holy matrimony under the gaze of the war memorial on which was the name of one of the groom’s family. At Shorthampton, I christened a child in a font that, we suspect, is of Saxon origin. Thank God for new buds, of course, but let us thank him, too, that they grow from such ancient roots.
Saving time
ALONGSIDE these joyous moments, there have been sad ones, too: the deaths of longstanding and much loved parishioners. In the midst of life, we are in death, after all. Yet, as anyone who has had the very great privilege of ministering to, and being ministered to by, the dying will know, these holy partings also can speak of resurrection and the freedom from the chains of sin.
It is, perhaps, appropriate to end with some last words that were related to me recently. Lord Longford, for whom there was never a cause too lost or a person too unpopular, had come up in conversation in the pub. On his deathbed, I was told, he turned to a relative who was keeping vigil, grabbed her arm, and said with absolute clarity, just moments before meeting his Creator, “We must free Jeffrey Archer!”
The Revd Fergus Butler Gallie is Vicar of Charlbury with Shorthampton, in the diocese of Oxford.
