An April Evening

The first genuinely spring day (as against day in Spring) moves toward its close.  The sun looks like it has forgotten to go down - or at least is staying up late - perhaps to make up for its relative disappearance over several weeks.

It brings to mind something that can only be associated with such an April evening:

Maybe it's down to my male council estate barbarism but this bit of Victorian-Edwardian sacred choral doggerel did nasty things to me.  This has evoked guilt over the years when elderly people have expressed their devotion to it - one wanted me to play it on the organ so they could sing it and some imagination was required to avoid this.

This April I've decided to try to understand myself on this issue.

My initial excuse to myself was the paucity of the performance of a Sunday evening Free Church choir in the 1960s when its finest days would have been its former days.  But listening to this chorally excellent rendition on YouTube convinces me that the problem lies elsewhere.

I like sheep and lambs.  I like the countryside and especially the hills.  I have given my life to the Lamb of God who sacrificed his life for me. So the themes in the song can hardly be the problem.

I have concluded that the problem with Tynan's poem, a problem reinforced by Robertson's mood music, is that it evokes pity for the crucified Christ.  And this is not at all what should happen.

Yes, lambs are pitiful, but the Lamb of God who died was not to be pitied.  Did he not quell the women of Jerusalem's tears and tell them to weep for themselves and their children?  The pity in the Passion is all ours, his is the pain, the sacrifice, the slaughter.  

And the salvation.  It is not of any note that He died between two crosses on a hill: he died between two condemned sinners who were on crosses.  In the end the song takes away the power of the cross and replaces it with pity.  Perhaps that is what I find, pitiful lamb that I am, so pitiful about it.

St George's Cross

Just a week after the celebration of Easter we come, this year, to St George's Day (OK, it's liturgically tomorrow because of Easter but hey . . .).  St George, of course, is legendary for winning his battle against the dragon.  He was not entirely successful as, just next door to England is Wales and it turns out that the dragon just went over the border and looks in fine shape.

Wales, given its Revival History might be expected to have a more Christian flag but it turns out that England has it.  Yet this is not necessarily something to gloat about.  Its origins likely lie in the Crusades when the European princes wielded their power, largely unsuccessfully, in military support of the Christian Mediterranean against the Mohammedans.  The main intention of it was to identify the wearers as being on the same military side.

This dodgy history of this cross continues into its contemporary favoured contexts such as nationalist groups and sports fans.  If you concentrate really hard when looking at the English flag you can almost smell the beer and almost hear a bloke shouting obscenities.  He probably doesn't give too much thought to the Graeco-Roman origin of St George (the real martyr behind the legend) or the Italian adoption of the red cross on white to mark his honour on several of its flags and emblems.

Though the cross of St George has become associated with, first, military, then political, then sporting victory it is deeply ironic that St George actually represents that most enigmatic of victories to the unbelieving nation - the victory of martyrdom when following a crucified, risen Saviour.  

On reflection it would have better suited the spirit in which this flag has been used militarily, politically and in sports teams to have had instead the dragon: a show of might which has no ultimate meaning or reality.

Fore!

Today I feel impelled to tell the story of one of golf's most famous words, aptly pictured here:

The game of golf as we know it developed amid the coastal sand dunes of Eastern Scotland.  St Andrews is enshrined as the town most associated with the development of the sport that now spans the world.  And with it the shout, "Fore" as the now traditional warning.

At the beginning of April in 1877, Alexander Kilcallon was playing on the Royal  course when, like many before and since, he was struck by a ball 'inflicting a wounde grievusse'.  What was to make Alexander's story amazing was that exactly a year later to the day - this day - he was struck by another golf ball in a very similar way.  The duality seemed too much of a coincidence and he consulted the Minister of the Kirk (Church).  The Minister, Rev. Hamish Kincaird, was not at all sympathetic.  He despised the worldly pleasure of sport and pointed Alexander to a Biblical Proverb that occurs identically twice (in Proverbs 22:3 and 27:12) - identical verses for identical incidents. In the King James version it reads

A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself; but the simple pass on, and are punished.

Perhaps it was the way that the Reverend Kincaird pronounced the word foreseeth to make his point, but Alexander Kilcallon took the word back to his golfing party as a cry of warning.  Presumably it was quickly reduced to the one syllable that any passing walker is wise to observe!

Not the intended application of the Proverb but very useful and undoubtedly the most shouted Biblical syllable on the golf course - though perhaps others are sometimes used in anger as well . . .