Sabbatical Picture No 9: A Palace with Worms

A long way from nearly everywhere the old cathedral of the Isle of Man stands ruined on a peninsula that is almost an island near the town of Peel.  Like many old seaside religious centres it is hard to grasp, travelling from London today, how significant such places have been before global cities and international air transportation.  But observation of the magnificent hilltop ruin appraises the onlooker of its former importance.

It is a suitably spooky ruin to make a fitting reflection for Hallowe'en, but the more so because it is made memorable to me by a self-penned epitaph.

Samuel Rutter was a classically trained clergyman with all the right connections who ended up as the Bishop of this magnificent outpost (having for many years been its Archdeacon too).  By the time he was appointed he was weakening physically, but was still a loved and respected bishop by the islanders.

In 1662, not many years after taking up his bishopric, Samuel died.  He saw it coming and bequeathed to posterity his own epitaph which sits in the midst of the old cathedral addressing every generation of people who seek fame and fortune in this world (as Rutter would certainly have been perceived to have attained via his friendships with nobility in England's troubled Civil War period).

In this house which I have borrowed from my brothers the worms

in the hope of the resurrection to life

lie I SAM by divine grace Bishop of this Island.

Stay reader, behold and laugh at the Bishop's palace.

It is never wise to take our personal bishop's palaces seriously: we should lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven. 

Sabbatical Pictures No 8 Impossible Trees

Years ago I travelled to the Outer Hebrides to visit a friend and later to work on a children's mission.  The latter included a memorable winter sea crossing and a stay in a caravan that only just maintained its connection to the land by means of several large chains as the gales howled around us!

Obviously the Outer Hebrides were no place for trees.  And there were none.  The odd shrub leaned from constant wind attack, most of its branches leafless.  A few hedges well placed in shelter behind walls offered slim vertical greenness.  Otherwise it is all grass and stone walls (and some of the stone walls have scarcely survived).

Yet in Stornoway, in the extensive castle grounds, there are not only trees but a veritable forest.  You could as easily be on a Kent hillside as on an Outer Hebridean bay.  The combination that achieved this is quite simple:

a) It was deliberately planted;

b) The trees are close together for protection;

c) It is looked after.

The existence of a body of people following a man who lived, died and lived again two thousand years ago is unlikely in the 21st century climate.

But the church is

a) Deliberately planted;

b) Together for protection and prospering;

c) Always looked after.

Sabbatical Picture No 7 Still Standing

Storm Ophelia blew through yesterday amid the inevitable 21st century meteorological hysterics - unprecedented, catastrophic (this is a really pop twitter-ism just now), life-threatening (true - but so is the M25 and so why isn't that in the traffic news?).

On the edge of the North Atlantic people live, and lived, for whom Ophelia was just a noticeably windy few hours.  These standing stones show that like Stonehenge the exposed moors of the Isle of Lewis have more history of settlement than London, though faring less well in the last 2000 years or so.

There aren't many warm, still summer days on the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Lewis.  But that didn't mean that people couldn't be warm and still.  The secret is having a fire (conveniently achieved by walking outside and cutting some peat) and by having very thick stone walls (conveniently achieved by utilising vast numbers of boulders broken off the land by the weather).  Unlike the sad stories currently circulating from the balmy climes of California and Iberia (where wildfires are destroying people, their lives and their homes) the crofters of Lewis lived with storms in houses that in part still stand.

The secret of a peaceful life is not found not in the climate, but in the refuge we have found.  

My life is hid with Christ in God, wrote the apostle.

Sabbatical Picture No 6 The Baptist Font

Baptists are in short supply in Jerusalem.  There is nothing new about that.  You may find some near an American Pilgrimage Tour Bus (though there are, to be fair, a handful of Baptist churches in Jerusalem).  Baptists might wish to point out that the first Christians in Jerusalem (Acts 2) were practicing Believers' Baptism which basic jewel of Christian truth was recovered largely thanks to our Baptist forefathers in church history.

Commonly Christian visitors to the Holy Land think of being baptised in the River Jordan, where Christ himself was baptised by John.  A minor tourist industry engages in indiscriminate baptism there which I would howl at theologically were it not that in one of my churches I discovered that one of the most conservative, dependable and hard-working ladies of the church was baptised there on a pilgrimage and it had been her key spiritual moment (as well as her only baptism).

The picture here is not the River Jordan though.  It is in the Anglican Cathedral - St George's - in Jerusalem.  Was the Bishop who built this (otherwise very English) cathedral a closet Baptist?

The answer is no.  This is a diplomatic baptistry (the icon behind it is a clue).  The high Anglican Bishop had it built to indicate his positivity toward the Orthodox Christians in the city and its surrounds.  (As most Baptists probably don't know, the Orthodox Church generally practices baptism by immersion, though most commonly (and scarily) to not-yet-believing infants.)

Today the baptistry is used sometimes, though ironically it was built with no real intention that it should be.

Baptist Churches in Britain usually have a baptistry that was built with the intention that it would be used.  In last year's submitted statistics (though the strongest churches can't be bothered with such things as a rule) the 2000 churches in the Baptist Union averaged one baptism each.   So we have built baptistries that were intended to be used and we don't use them.

Sabbatical Picture No 5 A Street Corner

It smelled of urine and dilapidated cars and vans were parked at weird angles on the sidewalks.  Posters were pealing from the walls, mostly advertising gigs. Weeds grew between paving stones.  Washing hangs from grubby balconies.  Was it Hackney?  Or Leeds?  Bristol?  No, it's Jerusalem.

Just a street away from the tram line - but a street away that tourists would not generally take - here is city life in the Jewish part of Jerusalem for some of its inner city residents.  Few would be surprised to find this kind of scene in the Arab or Palestinian part of the city - but here, in the Promised Land??  How easily we romanticise a name - Jerusalem, all godliness and gold.  I venture that few of the home-owning Christians of England would readily swap their situation for these streets, even those who get dewey eyed singing about Jerusalem.

Referencing Blake's poem Jerusalem, standing on this street in the modern, Jewish Jerusalem a dark satanic mill on the next corner would not have seemed so much of an incongruity as the poem supposes.  Never did the importance of a Jerusalem that descends from heaven (Revelation 21) strike me as so important as it did here.