Father’s Day (tomorrow) started well yesterday when Someone came round and gave me a bottle of Glenfiddich that they’d be given but they don’t drink whisky and remembered that I sometimes do. I assured them that I do drink whisky but slowly and so it will take me a good while to get through this. Oddly I only need to look at the bottle to start smiling. Perhaps there’s something in random acts of kindness.
While in Jerusalem, feeling the occasional need to keep grounded in England, I listened to Richard Coles narrating his book Murder Before Evensong. This excellently follows in the tradition of all good clerical murder mysteries. Brilliantly written and read and crafted so that the more Church you know the funnier it is. I would not recommend operating heavy machinery whilst listening to this. Also snuck in here is a rather good and kindly apologia for so much of what the CofE does and what clergy are really trying to be about. I had no idea that this was the first of three so I’m making hinting noises about my birthday.
Beard Theology, a holy history of hairy faces by Dave Walker. (Thank you to the Someones who gave this to me a couple of weeks ago) This is obviously a ridiculous pile of nonsense. Until you open the pages. Its actually genius, funny, with cartoons (those ones you see in the Church Times) and profound. Paula Gooder has endorsed it and gets a quote on the front cover and frankly that’s enough for me. This is an excellent book to buy for anyone wearing a beard or with an interest in Church History!
Dave Walker wittily wades through the bible references to beards, starting obviously with Jesus before launching into a succinct summary of Church History. I’ve not read a Church History that is this short and that funny. A longer and better version would be Nick Page’s A Nearly Infallible History of Christianity but that’s missing the point.
Alas I don’t think you could easily footnote it in one of my Church History assignments. That being said, his really short list of his ten favourite heresies (Arianism, Adoptionism, Donatism, Marcionism, Apollinarianism, Gnosticism, Pelagianism, Nestorianism, Monophysiticism, Docetism) is done well though I would have preferred it to be in chronological order at least. I’ll explain those another time but other than Pelagianism, you don’t really suffer from them.
Nonetheless, you could certainly use it to explore further. I had no idea that Harold Bluetooth (975) was keen on making Denmark Christian, or that the word ‘bigot’ is an old French word used by the French to mock sanctimonious Normans who repeatedly threw into their conversation ‘by God’. I checked this and found that during Joan of Arc’s time the French called the English the ‘goddamns’. Perhaps we should mind our Ps and Qs.
I didn’t know that William Tyndale (first translator of an English bible) had an on-going pamphlet battle with Thomas More which has given us this rather challenging quote, especially when you note that it was written in 1528: “Do not our women now christen and minister the sacrament of baptism in a time of need …. Might they not also preach,… minister the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ…”. For more see Tyndale’s An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue.
That’s almost as shocking as realising that 6th November 1942, “the Archbishops of Canterbury and York issued a proclamation in 1942 that women no longer needed to wear a hat in church. The change was made at the request of the Board of Trade who were concerned about wartime shortages of clothing.”
So you learn a new thing every day. Happy Father’s Day
(the photo is of St Stephen, note the beards on the saints on the wall. I’ll explain later)