World Cup Blogs 23: Russia

Russia have done a great job hosting the World Cup.  Despite pre-Tournament misgivings it has been very safe and straightforward into this final week.  Their team - almost incredibly - was the lowest ranked of the 32, below nations with inauspicious football reputations such as Saudi Arabia, Iceland and Panama.  Still, they did very well. The last shall be first . . . (well at least a lot higher than last anyway).

Running through the spirituality of Russia is an almost unique streak of similarly bizarre upside-downness: the holy fools.  Lest you think I have dug this from an obscure corner of Siberia I point out that St Basil's Cathedral in Moscow - featuring often in World Cup preliminary picture shots - is named after one such holy fool.

The monastic practice of foolery was an enactment of a Biblical theme found, for example, in Old Testament prophets who behaved in various unorthodox ways (including nakedness) and in Paul's teaching - e.g.

"For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe."

The historic church in Russia is known as the Orthodox Church so it is amazing to think that its perhaps most iconic church is named after a saint who adopted a life of shoplifting.  I'd call that unorthodox.

Basil shoplifted and gave the proceeds to the poor; more orthodox (for a Holy Fool) he spent a lot of time naked (this is Russia remember, a little chilly in the winter).  He also chained himself with heavy chains, also a common practice adopted by Fools.

St Basil's Cathedral was taken into state and secular ownership in 1929. Because it was too iconic to destroy, God was taken out of it instead,  Doing away with God seemed quite a trendy idea in the 20th Century.  Perhaps the authorities at the time failed to see the irony of St Basil's being taken for atheism.

As the Psalmist wrote: The fool has said in his heart "There is no God". There is a greater fool than a holy fool and someone who tries to remove God is such a one.

Mrs Green

A year and a half ago, not many miles down the road from my Mum, an elderly lady in a Nursing Home slipped quietly away to meet her Maker.  It was a predictable event, given that she was nearly 111 years old - by any contemporary reckoning her passing was almost overdue.

 

What made Mrs Florence Green's death into news was that she was the last living First World War Veteran.  This is a technical term in that as a 17 year old she joined the newly formed Royal Air Force right at the end of the war and worked a few weeks as a waitress in the Mess but this rendered her a servicewoman and therefore an official Veteran.  By starting late and living long she became the symbolic end of the living human story of the Great War, closing the book on the war to end all wars almost 100 years after it began as the reporter rather beautifully put it.

 So there you have it.

The unpalatable human fact that every single man and woman who served in the First World War died.  On Sunday at the Cenotaph Isaac Watts version of Psalm 90 was sung . . .  Time like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away.

Some of us feel very blessed to have avoided the historically frequent shortening of life that war brings on the young.  How much more blessed the believer who realises that death itself has been subject to defeat in Jesus; that the sons of time can be the children of eternity in him.