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St Peter’s and HTB
THE Church Commissioners’ Pastoral Committee has announced its decision on the proposed “declaration of redundancy” of St Peter’s, in Brighton. They have decided not to decide. In words spun from fog, they tell us that there is “a real issue about the timing”. Before any decision is taken, they say, “the negotiations with Holy Trinity, Brompton (HTB), and other partners, should be worked through”.
The news that HTB wants to take over St Peter’s has been greeted with consternation by the Brighton branch of Alphaphobics Anonymous.
The Alphaphobes of Brighton are not as odiferously opulent as Holy Trinity, Brompton. Not for us a multi-million pound property in South Kensington as our headquarters. Instead, we make do, as we always have done, with a derelict beach hut near the wreckage of the West Pier where, variously undone by Alpha, we meet each month to compare and lick our wounds.
The main item on the agenda of our last meeting was HTB’s bid for St Peter’s. All agreed that it would never do. St Peter’s, the fine church that greets you as you drive into Brighton, testifies to a faith that is mature, temperate, tentative, and enquiring. Better that not one stone of St Peter’s should stand on another than it should become a purveyor of blister-packed certainties. And, anyway, there would be nowhere to park your Porsche.
The meeting concluded with a moving testimony from one of our members who, on recently returning from an Alpha weekend, was told by his wife that his eyeballs were revolving in opposite directions.
‘Mama Afrika’ on tour
WHEN Miriam Makeba sings, you understand why apartheid collapsed. Apartheid could no more have prevailed against such a sound than the walls of Jericho could have withstood Joshua’s trumpets. Her appearance for one night at the Brighton Dome was indisputably the most thrilling event of this year’s Brighton Festival.
It is now 45 years since her records were banned in South Africa, and her South African citizenship and her right to return to the country was revoked. Her exile endured until apartheid ended.
Miriam Makeba, “Mama Afrika”, is now 76 years old, and she has been on her worldwide farewell tour since 2005. The years that have not quenched her spirit have taken their toll physically. She is no longer quite the sinuous and seductive figure who enraptured her audiences half a century ago.
That said, she occasionally did things with her hips which appeared to agitate a number of elderly gentlemen in the circle. From time to time — evidently she was in pain — she had to use a chair. But when she sang, the years fell away. Her tremendous voice still seems to break from the land she loves and for which she has campaigned for so long.
A striking aspect of her performance was the absence of nostalgia. There were few old battle-songs. In the days before her concert, the papers had been full of pictures of black South Africans turning violently on refugees from the very countries that, a generation ago, had offered their own people sanctuary.
“Forgive us,” Miriam Makeba pleaded. And then she whispered, “Stay with us.”
“Stay with us.” Could any message be briefer or simpler, more eloquent or more compelling?
The travail of artists
“WHAT DO clergy do when they retire?”: part III. They ruminate on the influence of the post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne on the surrealist sculptor Alberto Giacometti.
Giacometti’s debt to Cézanne is explored in a brilliant exhibition that has only a few more days to run at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Hurry if you want to see it. But be careful in planning your trip. The Louisiana to head for is the town in Denmark, not the state in the United States.
The museum is situated in a spacious park on the North Zealand coast. (The North Zealand coast — do pay attention — not the New Zealand coast.) The sumptuous catalogue to the exhibition is subtitled “Paths of doubt”.
I was struck by some comments in its introduction. “The doubt of a Cézanne and a Giacometti contains the triumph hidden somewhere in the shadows”.
So it is with the doubt of a Job or a Jesus.
We sometimes see the works of great artists as an effortless succession of masterpieces. Thus we trivialise their travail. For Cézanne and Giacometti — again I quote from the catalogue — the artistic life was a sequence of “one failed work after another, makeshift solutions, endless sketches”, and of “a sometimes overbearing structure that breeds alienation”.
The sense of failure and of an overbearing alienating structure. One knows the feeling.
Waffling on air
I WAS summoned from my bed early one morning recently to go live on Radio London. They wanted to quiz me about The Inner-city of God, my book about my time in Hackney. It was a kindly interview on the whole, but one question had me at sixes and sevens.
“How did your experience of Hackney affect your faith?” I was asked.
If I had had the time to prepare an answer, I would have said that Hackney made my faith firmer at its core, but softer at its edges. Jesus himself became steadily more important; metaphysical abstractions about him less so.
That is what I wish I had said. Instead I waffled — much, I fear, as I sometimes did in my Hackney pulpit.
The Revd Dr John Pridmore, a former Rector of Hackney, has retired to Brighton.
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