Extempore liturgy
FOR the past few months, I have felt a bit like the sub sitting on the bench wondering when I might be summoned to the field of play and which position I will be expected to occupy. It is the lot of many retired clergy, of course. We miss the familiarity and bonhomie of a regular congregation, but secretly enjoy the heady delights of liturgical and geographical variety.
Recently, for instance, I had a Saturday-afternoon summons from the area dean to cover for the priest of our only local Forward in Faith parish, who had been taken ill and was in hospital. Unsure what to expect (but confident it would be unfamiliar), I was warmly greeted by the master of ceremonies. “It’s Common Worship,” he explained, “just the usual.”
That’s what they always say, but what they mean is that it is “our usual”. It was certainly not usual for me, as he instructed me in the stoking of the thurible and the technique for censing the acolytes, the holy table, and the congregation. I would also be censed, apparently. It gave a whole new meaning to the word “incensed”.
That, however, was as nothing compared with the spontaneous editing I felt I had to do faced with the printed liturgy. Mindful of my canonical vows, my wary eye spotted deviations from the “form prescribed by canon” a few sentences ahead, thus permitting a painless and (I hope) inconspicuous elision.
Chatting over coffee afterwards, no one seemed to have noticed, and certainly not taken offence. That may have been politeness, of course, although I have often noticed a quite remarkable ability on the part of Anglican worshippers to be there but not actually hear anything.
Voice from the pew
ANOTHER retired priest told me recently that he was taking a service in an unfamiliar church. All seemed to be going well, when a voice from the back pew called out, “We usually have the prayers here.”
It is the same with the dreaded notices — do they come at the start, delaying proceedings by anything up to 12 minutes? Or in the middle, just before the Peace, thus disrupting the liturgical flow? Or at the end, while the coffee gets cold? Or, come to think of it, occasionally at any two of those, because someone has suddenly remembered a notice that urgently needed utterance?
Grave thoughts
AS PART of this peripatetic part-time ministry, I have found myself taking quite a few funerals, including one for the patriarch of a large family of Travellers — although most of them have now adopted a conventional lifestyle.
Despite that, the occasion had all the marks of a traditional Traveller funeral: a packed church with scores of children; “The Old Rugged Cross” (obligatory on these occasions); a tribute, punctuated by cries of grief, from one of the innumerable sons; and black-plumed horses pulling a black-and-gold hearse in a long procession from church to cemetery.
After the committal, I was standing by the grave when a small girl — no more than three or four — peered down into it. “Why is it so deep?” she asked. The widow, her grandmother, standing beside me, explained. “Well, dear, when Grannie dies, her coffin will go in there on top of Grandpa’s.”
The little girl thought for a moment. “Oh, poor Grandpa!” she said.
Back to my roots
IN THE manner of the old, I promised myself visits to the places of my youth. Last year, I did rural mid-Wales, gloriously green and full of memories of summer days and cricket in the top field. This year, in late August, it was north London.
I was born in Wood Green, in a nursing home just off White Hart Lane — a name familiar to football fans, of course, because a mile or two away it ends up at the Spurs ground.
I took a photo of our church, St Cuthbert’s, where I was in the choir and later served as a lay reader, as we were then called. Today, it contains a white banner proclaiming an Alpha course; in my day, it would have advertised Billy Graham.
I drove from there to the site of the grammar school at which I completed my secondary education (now a primary school), and thence for a look at the school in Tottenham where I taught in the late 1950s.
This involved a drive down Tottenham High Road. It was just a week or so after the riots, and every shop, from one end to the other, was boarded up. A few had been gutted by fire, as had a pub and a betting shop. Yet crowds thronged the pavements in the sunshine, most of the shops were open, mothers pushed buggies, and children sucked ice lollies. I didn’t see a single police officer.
I found the school – it is now a further-education centre — and then drove through Wood Green back to my friends in Finchley.
It was a strange, almost surreal experience. These were the peaceful streets of my youth, and they were also the scene, a few days earlier, of some of the worst violence and disorder of modern times. The physical marks of the violence remained, and yet, in a way, everything seemed so normal. People were laughing, doing their shopping, making the most of the sunny day before the holiday season ends and Autumn comes.
Not for the first time, I marvelled at the resilience of the human spirit. Perhaps we are created to fall and rise again.
Canon David Winter is a retired cleric in the diocese of Oxford, and a former head of religious broadcasting at the BBC.