Dinner guest

WE RECENTLY had the privilege and pleasure of a pastoral visit from the Archbishop of Canterbury to our diocese, the northern outpost of his province. He began with a walk through a colourful, multi-ethnic inner-city area of Derby, where he greeted people he happened to encounter.

In one of the mosques, he aston­ished and delighted the imam by addressing him in Arabic. (Is there no end to this man’s accomplish­ments?)

In the evening, he was a member of a panel on which, perhaps pre­dictably, he found much common ground with Lord Hattersley, a self-styled “hard-drinking atheist Puri­tan”, who matched his talent for speaking fluently and cogently with­out notes.

On the second day, he engaged with clerics of the diocese and with rural concerns, and attended a gala choral evensong with a massed choir of 300, to which he contributed by singing solos, to general acclaim. (Is there no end . . . ?)

After a festal eucharist in the Cathedral, and another memorable sermon, he and his accompanying staff arrived at our convent to have Sunday dinner with us. (N.B. The midday meal in a convent is always dinner.) At the end of this exhaust­ing weekend, he managed to speak with every one of us and to give the impression that this was the very activity he would have chosen.

I hope he really did enjoy his time in our diocese, because he was about to embark on something vastly more demanding in Zimbabwe. Perhaps the impact of this visit will help people to understand why the Arch­bishop places such value on the Anglican Communion, and why we should all work towards maintaining it as a fellowship that includes and supports all, and does not seek to expel those with whom we disagree.

I was delighted that the some­times acerbic Andrew Brown had the grace to admit, “For what it’s worth, I had thought the visit was going to be a disaster. I was quite wrong, and I’m rather glad of it” (Press, 14 October).

All at sea

ONE of the privileges of belonging to a religious community is the opportunity to spend a holiday with another community.

In my childhood, in the land-locked Midlands, “holiday” always meant “seaside”. Now that I am a Mid­lander again, although I no longer yearn for bucket and spade, I still miss this annual treat of smel­ling the salt and watching the waves breaking; so I decided to invite my­self to stay with the Sisters of Bethany in their convent at Southsea.

Sea and sand are there — well, shingle actually — but also the riches of historic Portsmouth, only a free bus-ride away.

I am an avid reader of the novels of Patrick O’Brian about the Navy in the Napoleonic Wars. Thanks to his detailed drawings, I am familiar with the appearance of an early 19th-century ship, with its masts and rigging, and he is an inexhaustible source of information about naviga­tion, the management of sails in dirty weather, and the difficulty of firing at a ship that is simultan­eously firing at you.

With this information in my memory, I felt better prepared than I might otherwise have been for the guided tour of the Victory, but I was still awed by the sheer complexity of her structure, which was similar to that of a floating five-storey block of flats.

The cramped quarters in which the crew spent weeks or months at sea, eating their monotonous and unpalatable diet, apparently com­pared favourably with the living conditions ashore of the poor, and Nelson was popular not only as a winner of battles, but also as one who did his best for those who served under him.

The other great treasure of the historic dockyard is the Mary Rose — or, rather, an exhibition of arte­facts found in her, and a tantalising promise of her future presence, when conservation work is com­plete.

I well remember the excitement, back in the 1980s, when the wreck was first located, then investigated, and finally, amazingly, lifted. The cathedral clergy laid the recovered bodies of her occupants to rest with a requiem celebrated in the form in use in 1545, and one unidentified sailor lies under a gravestone in the cathedral itself. Here again, the past seems very close.

Telling stories

I WAS delighted to read about the various projects designed to intro­duce the Bible to children by means of telling stories (Features, 14 October), and I was inwardly cheer­ing the children’s adviser who urged adults to let the Bible speak for itself.

I well remember my own rage at Sunday school, or listening to the “children’s address”, when the leader would tell a perfectly good story, biblical or not, which might have led to fruitful reflection — and then laboriously explain what it meant. I often tried to stuff my fingers in my ears, while rebelliously muttering “It’s a story! You either get it or you don’t.”

The Revd Sr Rosemary CHN is a nun at the Convent of the Holy Name in Derby.