Time capsule
I BUMPED into the emeritus professor of cultural and spiritual history at the University of St Andrews in the beer hall next to the Hotel Ambassador in Karlovy Vary. This is what I like about spa towns: one minute you are ordering your slivovice and the next minute you’re talking to a fellow Church Times contributor about the religious music of Sir Arthur Sullivan.
The whole episode felt — as is often the case in spa towns — like a holiday, not just from a particular place, but from a particular time as well. The first sentence of this Notebook might just as well have been written during the premiership of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as (at the time of writing, at least) during the premiership of Sir Keir Starmer. It was nostalgia that had brought Professor Bradley and his wife back to the place where they had spent their honeymoon, some 40 years previously. They were retreading their footsteps through the Bohemian spas at just the time I was visiting during a delayed post-Easter holiday.
My training incumbent always advised me never to take holiday immediately after Easter for two reasons: one, you spend most of that week asleep or ill, and so it’s wasted on a holiday; and, two, most people are a bit “churched out” after Holy Week, and so the load is generally lighter anyway. I have followed this advice assiduously for eight years. This year, however, was the longest gap I had yet left between Easter Day and a holiday, and I rather regretted it.
Destination travel
I ARRIVED first in Mariánské Lázne, having dropped too many balls in the parish; having spread myself too thinly, lecturing; and having comprehensively lost a battle with the parish photocopier, which had been eating pages from S.S. Wesley’s Blessed Be the God and Father with such gay abandon that an engineer had to be called. So it was — with last year’s lecture from the Bishop about proper time off ringing in my ears — that I retreated to Bohemia to lick my wounds.
But bumping into Professor Bradley and his wife was a good reminder that we never really “get away from it all”. The world is too small for that. Indeed, the following morning, we had coffee in the salon favoured by Karl Marx, and then sauntered under the arms of Edward VII at St Luke’s, reminiscing about people and places we had in common. It is nice, when abroad, to be reminded of our real home.
Of course, that’s precisely what, St Thomas Aquinas suggests, worship is all about: to give us reminders and foretastes of our true native land of heaven. I banished such weighty thoughts from my mind and requested the bill for our coffee. Marx, I suspect, would not have approved.
All the devils are here
ONE of the reasons that I return to the Czech Republic (I still cannot bring myself to use the awful neologism Czechia, not least because it sounds too much like Cechy, the name of one region within the nation, but not the whole republic) is that it once was home. As anyone who has heard me preach will know, I’m not really a theologian, but studied history and Czech/Slovak as an undergraduate, and so came to Bohemia every year. Still, there are plenty of parts of it which I don’t know, and it was a joy to go to one of them: the almost unpronounceable little village of Nelahozeves.
Here, the composer Antonín Dvorák was born, son of the butcher-innkeeper. He learned music from playing a violin in the front room of the tavern, which led to his being coached by the village organist and choirmaster. On high days and holidays, the church opposite the inn would have full choral and orchestral Masses by Mozart and Haydn, all played by the people of the village, whose population in the 1860s was just over 1000. As I walked about the little settlement by the Elbe, the sense of something having been lost more widely was tangible.
The inn is now a museum, and the room where little Dvorák played his fiddle at village dances now screens act one of his opera Kate and the Devil, in which dancing is a key plot theme. Nobody will dance with Kate at a village event; so she declares that she would dance even with the devil if he offered. A mysterious huntsman appears, offers to dance with her, and then — predictably, perhaps — drags her to hell.
This, however, is only Act One. The rest of the opera consists of the denizens of hell finding out quite how annoying Kate can be and why nobody wanted to dance with her in the first place. Aided by the romantic hero, they concoct an elaborate plan to send her back to earth. It would make a good piece for theological reflection on why we find some people annoying, the nature of eternal torment, and a theology of hell. Ariel’s line from The Tempest springs to mind — as does my photocopier.
Music of the spheres
THE exhibit ends with a recording of Dvorák’s Symphony “From the New World” — now, alas, more likely to be known to British audiences as “the Hovis music”. Since a recording of this was taken by Neil Armstrong on the Apollo 11 mission, the museum points out that Dvorák can claim to be one of the few musicians “who transcended both time and space”.
It was the best museum that I have been to for years. There were no hectoring and no constant apologies for its existence. Instead, it told the story of how a cassette of music by the innkeeper’s boy from Nelahozeves came to be taken to the moon as representative of humanity’s achievements. And, throughout the exhibition, there was a lot of music — not just extracts, but enough to help you to really lose yourself in a world more beautiful, strange, and true than the one you had left behind.
With that particular thought in mind, it struck me that, just as a bad museum shows a church what not to do, so a good one might perhaps serve as a model for how to do liturgy well: don’t apologise; don’t berate; tell the story; have music.
Return to sender
ON RETURNING to the parish, I said my first matins under the memorial to William Wellwood Stoddard, a predecessor of mine who never came back from his long holiday in Genoa and now awaits the general resurrection at the cemetery of St Benigno. Tempting though it might sometimes be for clergy to follow his example, it is, in fact, very good to be back.
Being called to particular times and particular places is, of course, why we need occasional holidays from them, in the trust that absence makes the heart grow fonder. As I recited the collect, praying that God would “exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before”’, it struck me that the point of our calling to specific places is to engraft that process of exaltation to the ultimate place.
Filled with such holy thoughts, I made my way up to the office, only to discover that the photocopier was still misbehaving. As it whirred, I was transported for a brief moment back to rural Bohemia, and wondered whether I could contrive a way to send it to the other, less desirable, ultimate place. No point, of course: they’d only send it back.
The Revd Fergus Butler-Gallie is Vicar of Charlbury with Shorthampton, in the diocese of Oxford.