Today I did it. I went to the end of the line on the 133 bus to Streatham Station. I went with a neighbour, a friend, from further down Kennington Park Road, and we sat upstairs in the front seats of the red, double decker, London bus, masks on, set for an outing.

It was a fascinating journey especially architecturally and it included going past some wonderful churches. There was St Mark’s Kennington at the Oval, a ‘Commissioners Church’,  1824. It is very familiar to me because the Saturday farmers market is in its grounds. Later, on the Brixton Road, Corpus Christi Brixton, 1887 high Victorian and looking as if it’s on a hill but it isn’t.

Others included St Leonard’s, Streatham a little part of it from the fourteenth century. Streatham, St Leonard’s Church is also the name of the bus stop. We had lunch at an English pub in Streatham. The staff were lovely, Brazilian.

On the way to Streatham the architecture, seen from the front of the top deck of the bus, seemed rather grand, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian. Lots of decoration, unnecessary domes and turrets which made me smile. There seemed to be comparatively few post war buildings.

 
On the way back, on exactly the same route, still upstairs though on a 159, the same buildings seen from a different angle didn’t look grand at all. And I didn’t really notice the churches.  Many buildings looked rather drab and uncared for. It can’t just have been the pub lunch. I only had one pint with the Brazilian starter and a caprese salad.

  
It was all totally enjoyable and, on the bus journey there and back, it did remind me how important it is to look at things from different angles. I will do it again and, no doubt, see the same buildings differently.

BEING THERE
A friend’s grandson and his girlfriend went to Portugal for the final of the UEFA Champions League match between Chelsea and Manchester City. Thousands of fans with tickets and without went to Portugal for the match. The young couple, ardent Chelsea supporters, went to Lisbon and watched the match on television in a bar. The match was in the northern city of Porto. The young man said that what mattered was to ‘be there’ even when the ‘There’ wasn’t even in the same town. ‘There’ for them was Portugal where the two English teams battled it out. Thank goodness, for their sake, Chelsea won.

I know very little if anything about football. I can understand something of the importance of ‘being there’. It’s why live streaming of Church Services isn’t good enough for me. I need to be there. But usually inside not outside the church.

THE END OF THE LINE
I have not reached the end of the line by a long shot. But I am determined to, next week. I had coffee with a friend recently and she told me of something that has become rather a hobby. After a day out with her young grandson (a different friend, a different grandson from the above) she was ready to go home. He said, ‘No Granny, I want to go to the end of the line.’ It was the London Underground, the tube line he was talking about. And they did. 

Now from time to time she goes, with a friend, on a bus, in the front seat, upstairs, to the end of the line. Then perhaps to a pleasant pub for a pint or lunch or to visit a park and then home again. I’ve always known the view from the upper deck of a London bus is wonderful. The number 3 from Kennington goes past Lambeth Palace and over Lambeth Bridge before going past the Houses of Parliament. The number 159 from the same stop goes over Westminster Bridge past Big Ben up Whitehall and ends up at Marble Arch. I’ve often recommended the journey to overseas visitors but I’ve never before thought of going to the end of the line. Now I will.

SNEER AND SMEAR
A New Zealand friend has a blog which I read from time to time. It’s amusing with his particular take on life, his medical ups and downs, his visits to restaurants, his encounters with people and, sometimes, his view of people in the public eye, politicians and other public figures.

Then it is, all too often, a matter of ‘sneer and smear’. The only person who seems to escape is President Biden. I suspect that the reluctance of many good men and women to go into  public life and service is because of this tendency to sneer and smear. Others in public life don’t have a choice. 

When I express irritation at something in my friend’s blog my family, rightly I suspect, are irritated with me and say, ‘Then why read it?’ But sometimes the blog is interesting, and, after all, you don’t know you’re going to be irritated by what you read until you’ve read it.

  
I’m told that the negative side of the brain is more developed than the positive. If that is the case it seems to me all the more reason for working on developing the positive.

I’m afraid I was really angry and I ran out of the house into the part of my garden along Braganza Street and I shouted, very loudly, “I’m going to f…ing kill you!” I had already, twice, tried to shoo away the grey squirrels that were nibbling the new leaf shoots on the camellia and the new growth on the climbing roses on the high wall between my garden and the street. The shooing had been in more polite terms and clearly ineffective.

These squirrels are not of the Squirrel Nutkin variety. They are nasty destructive creatures – tree rats. I suspect they are simply sharpening their teeth on the new growth. They are not eating it. They destroyed the tulips. The evidence of their destructive work they leave behind. The garden is littered with severed pieces of my climbing roses. The squirrels probably spread disease as well. This year they are worse than ever and I have not yet found an effective method of dealing with them permanently.

When I went back inside my elder daughter, who was visiting, appeared concerned. She pointed out that if I was to take that line of action again I was to shout, “Squirrels, I’m going to etc.” Somehow, it seemed to me, that doesn’t have quite the same force.

She said that anyone walking along the pavement on the other side of the garden wall, hearing my shout, could well assume that murder was about to be done and call the police.

Context is critical.

When I was appointed Vicar of St Luke’s, Christchurch, New Zealand, in, I think, 1979, I went to visit my predecessor to ask him about the parish. He said, ‘There are nine parishioners, their average age is seventy two, and they’re all mad.’ I said, ‘Father, I’m sure that can’t be true.’ To which he replied, ‘Are you calling me a liar!’ He was exaggerating – a little.

St Luke’s was known as the church with more candles above the high altar than there were people in the congregation. We did have a reputation for being ‘unusual’ or ‘different’. I thought St Luke’s was wonderful. The people were wonderful.

The church was always full on a Sunday. We had chairs not pews. We only put out as many chairs as there were people. Therefore it was always a full house. Well that was the idea. It did mean we sat together to worship. The chairs were together and so were we.

In the early 1900’s, when my grandparents lived in the parish, my grandmother worshipped at St Luke’s. It would have suited her as she was ‘High Church’ and so was St Luke’s. My father was christened there and one of the long granite blocks that formed the steps into the church, (removed when a ramp was put in for wheelchair access) is now the headstone to his grave.

I can’t remember us ever having a ‘strategy’ or a ‘campaign’ to bring people in to St Luke’s. What we were there for was to worship God and people came together to do just that and then to get on with their lives. Many were involved in serving the community locally and nationally.

Some years into my appointment the wife of a Senior Cleric asked me, ‘When are you going to get some normal people coming to St Luke’s?’ I can’t remember how I answered her but I wish I’d thought to say that it’s not me it’s the Holy Spirit who gets people to come to church. It always comes to my mind afterwards what would have been the clever thing to say. And surely, even then, we were not ‘normal’ by definition, simply because we were churchgoers.

I do think that many people in authority in the church seem overly impressed by those they regard as ‘normal’. It usually means people with ‘normal’ skills. Anyone who has a good track record in ‘administration’ or in ‘the city’ is clearly to be noted and looked at with admiration. Similarly they seem to be remarkably dismissive of, or uneasy with, holiness. A pity in a way, especially when you think that becoming holy  is what we Christians are meant to be about.

However, regardless of all that, St Luke’s Christchurch New Zealand is to be no more. The building came down in the earthquakes and now the Anglican Parish of St Luke’s in the City is to close on 18 October this year, its Feast day, St Luke’s Day. This was decided at a Special General Meeting held on 2 May 2021. 

In an article in Anglican Life it states:

• For 162 years St Luke’s has been a liberal voice for the gospel in the heart of Christchurch, sustained by a deep commitment to a contemplative style of spirituality and outreach.
• Since the earthquakes St Luke’s has been at various venues but has not found a permanent home, and congregation numbers have declined.
• Currently the former site of St Luke’s Church is leased to the Side Door Arts Trust who have the 185 white chairs art installation there.

And the article continues:

St Luke’s parishioners are grieving deeply over the loss of their parish, but are also courageously looking forward. The parish is not merging with another but closing and their assets are being gifted to both the Cathedral and the Cathedral Reinstatement fund.

Rev’d Peter Beck says, “Parishioners are very clear that they would like the financial assets of the parish to be invested by the Church Property Trustees in order to fund a fulltime priest or deacon as part of the Cathedral team. This person’s main ministry focus will be chaplaincy to the inner city (e.g. to businesses, to ministries engaging with those who are poor, to the creative arts) as well as ensuring that a regular celebration of the Eucharist in the St Luke’s style is maintained at the Cathedral. Parishioners would also like funds to be available to support contemplative spirituality projects as well as social justice and service projects in the inner city.”

It seems to me from Peter Beck’s message it’s sort of business as usual for St Luke’s. 

In a recent blog a friend from Christchurch wrote, ‘At my Friday lunch yesterday, where my companions are probably more reasonable in their opinions than me, a small group at the end surprised me by criticising Joe Biden…….Of course we agreed to differ, and no plates were thrown – but where are we when even intelligent folk cannot agree, at least in general, on world affairs?’

The idea that intelligence brings people to have a like mind has always seemed to me rather naïve. It is also too close for comfort to that sort of intolerance which condemns anyone who does not share a particular view as being unintelligent. Years ago now a senior cleric of whom I was fond and who I respected said to me, after I expressed a fundamentally different view to his on a matter of doctrine, ‘and I had always thought you were intelligent.’ The worst thing was that he meant it. And of course he may have been right, that on this issue I may be unintelligent. I still hold the same view. I may well still be unintelligent.

However I now fear he was a fundamentalist liberal. I’ve come to accept that inside and outside the church that there are people of great intelligence with profoundly different views. There are also those who believe that only those who share their views are intelligent.

There is something of the ultimate put down when people imply or say of adherents of any religion or political party or group, ‘They’ll grow out of it.’ With all that emphasis of, ‘When they become more educated’, or ‘more intelligent’.

There was, for me, a wonderful moment in a televised conversation between the late Lord Sacks, one time Chief Rabbi, and one of the vocal atheists of our time, Richard Dawkins I think, when the atheist said, in obvious frustration, ‘But you are clearly intelligent. How can you possibly believe the world was created in seven days?’ To which Jonathan Sacks replied, ‘Six, not seven. God rested on the seventh day.’ He did go on to explain his understanding that the Book of Genesis is about the ‘Why’ not the ‘How’ of creation.

And then there’s an attitude I find surprising in those same intelligent people who, when they comment on world affairs, resort to what a politician or public figure looks like as if that is a valid criticism of their policies. When they use as part of their argument a persons hair style, tan, teeth, weight, or whatever. That does not seem to me to be intelligent.

My mother, who was involved in the founding of New Zealand’s National Party, said once, “Why, when people leave the Party, do members say, ‘They’ve let the side down’, and when people join the party, ‘They’ve seen the light.’” Her view was more generous, perhaps more intelligent, than that.

My attention was drawn recently to part of an interview she gave to a newspaper in 1968. I was sent a copy of the clipping. The article finishes with her reported as saying,

“One thing that strikes me about these good kind Americans is that they are so vehement in their political thought and they find it difficult to give credit to the leaders of political parties other than their own.

“If this is the attitude of the thoughtful educated Americans, I fear for the uneducated and unthinking people. With such intense political feeling the danger is that one section of the community is easily stirred up against the other, with tragic results.

“Heaven help New Zealand if we become so bigoted in our thought that a section of the community is lead to violence.

“To be tolerant is sometimes rather patronising. We should be understanding towards other people’s thoughts on religion, politics, race and way of life. Every type of person has something to contribute.”