When I first wrote my last ‘update’ I included a paragraph about spiritual health and then took it out. I thought it was a bit too religious. But I’ve now decided to go the whole hog!

I can still remember, just, some of my Confirmation classes from school. Confirmation is that later part of Christian Initiation when, as an ‘adult’ – we were thirteen or fourteen – you are confirmed in the faith and take on yourself the promises your Godparents made when you were Christened. At Christ’s College, in those days, you were Confirmed in your second year. 

It was part of what you did, like cricket in summer, and rugby in winter – both compulsory. It was taken for granted. Some parents assumed Confirmation was included in the school fees. You didn’t get Confirmed if you were Jewish like my contemporary Ollie Nathan who also didn’t have to come to compulsory singing practice in the chapel on Saturday mornings but did have to go to the Synagogue instead.

You must have been able to get off being Confirmed if you were Roman Catholic but generally you just were – Confirmed that is. It was a Church of England School – in New Zealand. There were no Muslims at College in those days. I guess you could get off compulsory cricket or rugby if you had a doctor’s note but I never heard of anyone managing that – not long term anyway.

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There are two dangers under Lockdown. Well, there are far more than two and I suppose number one danger is that you might catch the virus and that’s always a possibility with panting joggers and runners coming up behind you when you’re on a healthy brisk walk. But leave that to one side. The two dangers for me are being bored and being irritated. Saturday is a dangerous day for me for being irritable especially if I’ve forgotten its Saturday and one of the difficulties these days is remembering which day it is.

My routine on waking up in the morning is to turn on the radio. It’s already set on BBC Radio 3. The problem on Saturdays is that the presenter has a strong regional accent and I cannot understand much of what she’s saying. The other problem is she tells me, frequently, that the next piece of music is ‘gorgeous’. Well it may be, for her, but I would like to make up my own mind over the gorgeousness or not of the piece of music. I’m sure the presenter is a very nice person but if I forget its Saturday and turn on radio 3 when I first wake up I start the day irritated.

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I wore a mask for the first time today. I woke early and I really did need some things from the shop – fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, I was longing for British asparagus, and I was low on butter. One of the decanters was empty as well.

There are many kind people who have offered to shop for me including, of course, fellow parishioners from St Agnes. And there’s my designated local volunteer, Oliver, from down Braganza Street. But he’s running a food bank during the week and last week with forty other volunteers he sorted, packed and delivered eight thousand four hundred meals so I certainly wasn’t going to bother him.

My local Tesco is just down the road and is fine. It also has a cash point outside – the sign ‘free cash’ always irritates me. I know what it means and I’m glad there’s no charge, unlike in New Zealand where there is, but ‘free cash’ seems to have the same meaning as free anything, in other words help yourself, which it certainly does not mean. Be that as it may. After getting some free cash, wearing my gloves of course, I put on my mask.

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Today’s brisk walk was different and it was a battle. It was a battle chiefly because of the wind. When I turned from the Embankment just along from Saint Thomas’s into Westminster Bridge Road the wind was so strong I thought it was going to blow me off the pavement into the road. I had to take shelter behind a sort of kiosk and just pause there while I gathered myself together and then I managed to walk on a bit and i held onto a building at the side. The wind was blowing straight at me so that I could hardly move forward. Then I turned  gradually into Westminster Bridge Road and suddenly the wind was behind me with such  force that I was practically running along the pavement under the railway bridge.

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This is not so much an Update as a response to something of what has gone before. One of my friends to whom I send my updates has told me that whenever he’s reading one and hits the word ‘God’ or ‘prayer’ he skims, skips?, that paragraph and moves on to the next. I wonder if it’s just an excuse for not reading because lately he must’ve left out an awful lot of paragraphs. But really it’s because he’s not a believer – well not a religious believer. He certainly has some very strongly held political views. And he himself has told me he doesn’t think avoiding the God paragraphs is particularly commendable on his part. 

But he has a point, and it did remind me of when I was at Westcott House, the Theological College in Cambridge where I studied in the 60s, saying, in exasperation, to one of my fellow students, ‘Well, do you believe in God or not?’ To which he replied, ‘Simon, it depends what you mean by belief, it depends what you mean by God.’  It was a very 60s response but it was the 60s and actually he was absolutely right, and it doesn’t only apply to God it certainly applies to prayer. We sometimes need to define our terms. What do I mean by God? What do I mean by prayer? What on earth do I think I’m doing when I’m praying? 

So all in all, without getting too boring about it, it’s clearly helpful to some to try to explain what I mean – sometimes. I am very much a child of the 60s or not so much a child as a person of the 60s – I first came to London I’m 1962 and went to Westcott in 1965. The terms for God like ‘The Other’ or ‘The More’ or Paul Tillich’s the, ‘Ground of Being’, appeal to me as they take me beyond the material into there being something, someone more. And then of course, for me, in the person of Jesus Christ I am given a definition, I am given a reality that I can actually cope with and an encounter that means something both personal and general. Insomuch as I can cope with anyone or anything, really. And I grew up in a Christian household. The name Jesus, the assumption that there is a God was simply there, familiar and accepted. 

So what about prayer. The Vicar, Fr Paul Ensor, in his ‘Quote of the Day’ on Wednesday 6th May, on the website of St Agnes Kennington, the church I go to, wrote:

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