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Diary

by
19 December 2006

by David Winter

Holy spooks
TO THE HAGUE, for a weekend with the Anglican chaplaincy. The Saturday was Alpha on the Holy Spirit, and the next morning, to demonstrate the richly varied pattern of modern church life, was the annual Remembrance Sunday service in the presence of the British Ambassador. The Dutch tend to celebrate their own Liberation Day rather than 11 November, but the various expatriate communities of the wartime allies still mark what used to be called Armistice Day.

Holy spooks
TO THE HAGUE, for a weekend with the Anglican chaplaincy. The Saturday was Alpha on the Holy Spirit, and the next morning, to demonstrate the richly varied pattern of modern church life, was the annual Remembrance Sunday service in the presence of the British Ambassador. The Dutch tend to celebrate their own Liberation Day rather than 11 November, but the various expatriate communities of the wartime allies still mark what used to be called Armistice Day.

During the Alpha day, I mentioned in passing the confusion caused in some people’s minds by the continued use in English of the anachronistic title “Holy Ghost”.

In the ensuing discussion, one Dutch participant asserted smugly that they had no such problem in his language. The third Person of the Trinity was known as the Holy Spook.

It was only later that someone explained to me that this was an obscure Dutch joke, something to do with their various words for “spirit”. The Tower of Babel has a great deal to answer for.

Dutch for Murphy
PREACHING at the service on Sunday, I had the familiar but mortifying experience of a faulty microphone. Apparently the last time it happened was on the occasion of a visit by the Queen of the Netherlands.

Why, one wonders, do such things always happen at “significant” services, and never at a sparsely attended evensong or midweek communion?

I recall with horror a battery failure three minutes into the sermon at a packed midnight eucharist, and at a celebrity memorial service in London. One routinely expects the microphone to fail on all episcopal visits. Clearly, Murphy’s wretched Law functions all too efficiently in church.

God for all sizes
JUST WHEN one is beginning to wilt in the face of the secular onslaught of the chattering classes — “No one takes religion seriously any longer,” said an article in The Times portentously — something happens to bring you up short. For instance, sitting in church in Oxford a couple of weeks ago, I got into conversation with the man next to me.

Eventually he revealed that he was the Professor of Nanomaterials Science in the University — a man who spends his life not charting the echoing and terrifying vastness of space, but the equally mind-blowing world of the infinitely tiny. Three dimensions? Four? They’re working on the millionth.

Walking home, I cast my mind back a few days to an item on the Today programme, when John Humphrys sandbagged an unsuspecting bishop (who had come in to talk about something else completely) with a question arising from the previous feature, about space. Did the vastness of the universe make him question his faith?

Suddenly, in the light of my recent conversation in church, it seemed a peculiarly ridiculous question. What on earth has size got to do with it? God is the God of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. Isn’t that true of a story involving a star and a tiny baby: where’s the problem?

Then, just last week, on my occasional visit to the cardiology unit at the John Radcliffe Hospital, the doctor who examined me revealed that he was a new Christian, excited by the gift of faith and bursting to talk about it.

His first degree was in science, he’d been an officer in the army, he was a rugby player — in many ways a quintessentially modern person. And a Christian — strange, isn’t it?

After the pudding
I’M ALWAYS rather suspicious of alleged lists of funny sayings — schoolchildren’s howlers, insurance claims, police reports, that kind of thing. But then I remember my days long ago as a school teacher, and I have to admit that there is nothing intrinsically unlikely about most of them. So I cast a less-than-sceptical eye over a list I was shown recently of answers allegedly provided by children at an RC primary school.

“Lot’s wife was a pillar of salt by day and a pillar of fire by night” neatly elides two Old Testament stories. On the other hand, “Jesus was born because Mary had an Immaculate Contraption” suggests a child who knows there’s something odd going on, but can’t quite put her finger on what it is. (It also suggests that even young Catholics don’t always know the difference between an immaculate conception and a virgin birth.)

For really getting it wrong, however, one would be hard put to beat this offering: “Jesus enunciated the golden rule which says to do unto others before they do one to you.”

A final word, perhaps, for married readers. Asked to explain the Church’s stance on marriage, one pupil wrote: “Christians only have one spouse. This is called mono-tony.”

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