| Wine has been grown around the village of St Emilion for centuries. As far as the eye can see, in all directions, thousands of hectares of vineyard score the gently rolling hills. The overwhelming impression is one of glorious order.
Each row of perfectly manicured vine is concluded with an exclamation mark of roses. With obsessive care and continual effort, nature is tamed and redirected towards human enjoyment, creating some of the finest wines ever drunk. As the sun relentlessly beats down, I sit with M. Rollet in his gem of a chateau, and raise a glass of his 2001 Grand Cru. This is absolute heaven.
As a priest, I cannot think about wine without thinking also about the eucharist. When I was chaplain of Wadham College, Oxford, I used to choose the wine for the eucharist with Gervase, the cellarer. On a number of occasions, I have consecrated some really great bottles of Bordeaux, mostly for funerals. Later, during the Israeli-Lebanese war in 2006, I took to celebrating with Chateau Mussar, that remarkable Lebanese wine grown close to where some of the fiercest fighting took place.
In eucharistic mode, the primary connotations of wine are blood and sacrifice. Such dark and powerful conceptions can, however, easily block out any engagement with the chalice as the cup of joy and of salvation. Unfortunately, some Christian spirituality seems to get stuck on the cross, for ever recapitulating the themes of death, as if endlessly trapped in some gloomy gothic novel.
Of course, the cross cannot be by-passed. The difference between real joy and mere pleasure is that joy is the taste of suffering transformed. And it is precisely this transformation that allows us, rightly, to speak of the eucharist as a celebration.
Drinking wine with M. Rollet makes me ponder that happiness ought to play a greater part in the Christian life than it does at present. Jesus was accused of being a boozer and a glutton. In contrast to the life-changing joie de vivre of our Saviour, too many religious people describe a life that is so utterly miserable one wonders that it attracts anybody other than masochists and self-haters. Of course, they pretend it is not miserable — re-describing starchiness as virtue. But few are genuinely fooled.
I am sure that there are many terribly important things going on in Canterbury. But, speaking to some of the people involved in the meetings and prayer sessions, I think it sounds a dreary and draining experience. Anglicanism is all rather Calvary at the moment. But there is so much more to God than this. Christians ought to throw better parties.
The Revd Dr Giles Fraser is Team Rector of Putney, in London. |
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