World Cup Churches 21. Belgium

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

When I first visited Bruges (Brugge) I was, like many visitors, attracted to its canals, wonderful atmosphere and architecture.

I was not attracted by the church tower in this photo, made entirely of bricks and soaring far into the sky.  Yet as you see, I photographed it. I did so because it is such a monumental thing - far higher, for example, than Big Ben/the Elizabeth Tower of the British Houses of Parliament and far higher than any other building in Bruges.

'Being monumental' is not a great Christian virtue, and this tower is a monument to the enormous commercial wealth of Bruges mid-millennium.

Like any Catholic Church of size it is also relatively full of monuments (or in Protestant parlance perhaps idols) inside.  Yet this is where this church has a feature that says something significant about the confusion that is Belgium.

Belgium is about a third of the age of this church and is arguably at least two countries still, the Dutch and the French, plus a small German section.  When this Church was built it was part of the County of Flanders belonging to the House of Burgundy. Later it was under the Spanish, later the Austrians . . . you get the idea.

The feature in question, however, is Italian.

Michelangelo's Madonna and Child was the first of his sculptures to leave Italy and the reason it left Italy was the same reason the ludicrous brick tower was built - money.  No Italian patron could match the offer from Bruges and so this amazing statue has stood . . . no, wait a minute, it has NOT stood for 500 years here.

Three hundred years later the French Revolutionaries were in town and it was shipped off to Paris.  There is stayed until Waterloo, when Napoleon's defeat and demise enabled its return.  It lasted a hundred years or so until the Second World War.  

Peculiarly it became a 'victim' of D Day as retreating German forces retreated with the statue in tow.  Where had it gone?  A year or so later it was found in a salt mine in Austria.

Perhaps the lesson in all this is that although this is a monumental statue in a monumental church (The Church or Our Lady [Eng]) there can be relatively few churches or statues that have changed hands or countries as often as these!  Human things are never changeless things.

World Cup Churches: 13. France

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

'La Porte Ouverte Chrétienne de Mulhouse' is a reminder that France is not quite as Roman Catholic - or, following the Revolution - so secularised as might be assumed.  Unlikely though it may seem, the Open Door Church qualifies - at least by European standards - as a Megachurch, the more so because Mulhouse is not a very big city.

Why choose this church for my France blog?

Partly because it revises some views of France; partly because it briefly became one of the best known churches in Europe.

For anyone familiar with the spiritual geography of France it will come as no surprise that Mulhouse is the site of this type of church.  Mulhouse is deeply connected with the Protestant Reformation and as part of Alsace - and adjacent to Germany (today) and Switzerland - it belongs in a different relationship with Protestantism than most of France (Click here to read about it).

For anyone familiar with Covid-19 (that's all of us isn't it?) this church is also known as a super-spreader.  Until the pandemic, being a super-spreader was somewhat the intention of every church, and certainly every evangelical/Pentecostal megachurch.  Regrettably an enormous church conference week yielded an enormous spread of Covid 19 in its earliest known arrival in France and the church suffered national notoriety for a while.

It did illustrate the strange reality that even apparently innovative churches find it very hard to change direction quickly - a criticism more easily aimed at traditional churches.  By the time of the event the wisdom of cramming singing, coughing people into an airless room for hours was established as unwise.  But canceling a Conference or (as we all later experienced) stopping the singing is an innovation beyond innovators.

Covid taught as all a lot about ourselves.

Happy Birthday, Marie Therese

Happy Birthday.  This the traditional greeting.  Marie Therese, the future Queen of France (admittedly for less than an hour) was born on this day in 1778 to her mother Marie Antoinette and father Louis XVI.  And on the face of it, she was born into great happiness at the Palace of Versailles. 

It was not, however, a happy birth day.  In point of fact, it was a matter of miraculous wonder that she lived to day two.   For hours she struggled to live after a most traumatic birth - a birth so dreadful that from then on the king refused to allow people to be present when his children were born.

And as French politics turned out, it was also a matter of wonder that she lived a life that ended in a natural death, something that most of her family were denied. She was sentenced to death in the French Revolution, but this was moderated to permanent exile.

In this season when we  remember a King born and placed in a manger it is worth remembering that birth into a palace is no guarantee of a happy life - as others have found.

The Fine Art of Christmas - Starry Night over the Rhone

Atmospherically this is certainly Christmassy.

It might look good on the card but  Christmas wasn't in Van Gogh's mind when he painted this night scene of the River Rhone in September 1888.  He was fascinated by the colours of night and the challenge of painting them.

To fit the painting on the card, a devastating transaction has happened however.  Here is the original painting:

Leaving aside the colour differences we can see that the original has Ursa Major (the Great Bear) constellation with great prominence.  Van Gogh's intention was to make the stars the star over against the gas lighting.  Instead, the card has left in the lovers at the expense of the stars.

Every Christmas we are prone to cut out a little or a lot of heavenly glory to keep humans in the centre of the picture.

Notre Dame et Notre Seigneur

I am not well travelled, but even with my limitations it was not hard to dig into my pictures and find one of a recent (rainy!) visit to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, one of the most visited tourist sites in the world.

And yesterday France, to its horror, saw a great fire that reduced the great building to what appears little more than a stone shell.  The French President prioritised a site meeting and vowed that it shall be rebuilt.  At first hearing this appears an unlikely ambition for the ultra-secular French Republic - but an icon is an icon.  Hundreds of millions of Euros are already promised for its restoration.

'The World weeps', reads one newspaper headline, thereby conveniently forgetting hundreds of millions of people in the Muslim and the Eastern world who either don't know or certainly don't care that Notre Dame exists.  It is a little hard to imagine the refugee camps along the Turkish border feeling that this morning they have lost something important.

What a contrast there is, this Easter Week, between the way we regard a Christian cultural icon and the way we regard the One that Christianity is all about.

Not for him a nation hanging a tearful head in mourning;

Not for him a National Leader making pledges of restoration;

Not for him a world weeping or a tweet from Rome's Imperial Palace.

Not for him (despite the written appellation the King of the Jews) a declaration that we have all lost a part of us.

A mocking crowd;

A Governor who has washed his hands;

A world that didn't notice;

A man abandoned, betrayed, denied even by his friends - not a part of us, said Peter.

May the flames of the icon, inflame our love for the Saviour to whom, at its best, the icon seeks to point.

World Cup Blogs 11: France

France are one of the teams you hope to get in the office sweepstakes.  They are a strong possibility to win the World Cup (my wife got Morocco . . .).

Here is a nation that has a strong identity, a famed language and a colourful history that has at times made it as important as any nation on earth.  It's relationship with the Christian faith is very mixed.  It was the home of the popes for a while (or one of the popes for a while too - another story), and still today hoardes of Catholics flock to Lourdes.  On another side of the theological ocean was John Calvin and later the Huguenots.  Then the revolution sent France into a secular tailspin which I feel leaves it artistic, monumental, important but somehow a little empty of a soul.

But in the hectic life of London (Londres, sorry) and in the materialistic 21st century as we all start to share the secular spiral away from true hope, let's enjoy some moments of peace from a 20th century French institution.  The World Cup draws people of many nations, but whether it benefits them is not so clear.  Here's another way:

Martyring

The killing of Father Jacques Hamel while conducting morning mass in his church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray is appalling at every level.  Except one.

It is appalling because of the even-greater-than-usual contrast between the savagery of the attackers and the fragility of the attacked.  It is appalling because of the religious framework of the attackers pitted against the religious framework of the attacked.  It is appalling because it crosses so many boundaries that are rarely crossed outside conventional war (and then quite rarely) - the young against the elderly, the cruel against the kind, the neighbour against the neighbour, the strong against the weak - I could go on.

In one respect this killing was, however, immediately given a different character.  Where the Press and the politicians used the words killed or murdered, some Catholics started to use the word martyred.  

Not only so, but the line of succession of being violently killed at the Eucharist or Mass has been traced through through Oscar Romero (1980) and Thomas Becket (1170), two famous martyrs.

Now there is a considerable theological gulf between Father Hamel, French Catholic Priest, and me, an English Baptist Protestant.  As to that gulf, God is for both of us the judge.  Nevertheless I like the sheer subversion of 'yet another killing in mainland Europe' being transformed by the word martyr.  For the deaths of all Christians who die because they are Christians are a testimonial of their crucified Lord.   "Can you be baptised with the baptism I will be baptised with?" the Lord enquired of his disciple.

To put it another way, very many Islamic leaders will be rushing out disclaimers that the extremists (yet again) in no way represent Mohammed, God or Islam or them.  Meanwhile, all the current Bishop of Rome needs to say about Jacques Hamel is that on that wretched morning he represented the story of the Lord and His love   Three men died, but only one of them died successfully.  Two of them wasted their lives and their deaths.  One I guess hadn't wasted his life, and certainly didn't waste his death.

Bunched

A disconcerting life-fact is the way that the truth of our thoughts comes out a little more when we are wound-up than when we are calm.  My mother has always sounded more Welsh (occasionally repairing into Welsh words even) when she is more worked up.

Yesterday, in the frenetic atmosphere of Prime Ministers Questions (an atmosphere that he himself has encouraged however) Mr Cameron splurged out his collective noun for migrants trying to reach Britain from their staging post in the Calais area.  A bunch of migrants, he called them.

It was part of an insult thrown at Jeremy Corbyn who is unlikely to be much affected by any more insults.  However, plenty of hearers concluded that it was more of an insult to the people wanting to migrate.  There was added poignancy on Holocaust Memorial Day as no other day of the year more accurately reflects the dehumanising of groups of people than that day.  In Jerusalem great care is taken to record as best as is possible the names of everyone who was killed in the Holocaust precisely because in their death they were simply a bunch of Jews.  Here is the Hall of Names:

I am struck by the story told by the Lord Jesus.  (He, remember, was a Nazarene [i.e. one of the bunch from grotty Nazareth] - oh, and God manifest in the flesh).  There were, his story goes, a bunch of sheep.  Strangely the shepherd - the god-figure - leaves that bunch and goes across hill and valley to find one lost sheep.

So it wasn't the outsider that was God's bunch but those in the fold.  Kind of like Ali (who has a degree in Economics and a masters in Business and who owned a chain of supermarkets in Syria) who is on Calais waiting to join a bunch of Britons, David.

Friday 13th

The terrible events on Friday 13th in Paris are all the news just now.

Surprisingly little reference is being made to Friday 13th.  As it happened, earlier in the day I was talking with a receptionist who randomly commented that she hoped I had a nice day even though it was Friday 13th.  As it happened I did.  But then I wasn't in Paris.

I take it that the unwillingness to identify the events that happened with this superstitious date is because of the awkwardness of the idea of bad luck.  Sometimes I find it amazing how the awfulness of the human situation brings people so much nearer the truth.  The awesomeness of evil forbids notions of luck in this case and by wise extension could reveal the same about so much supposed chance.  

Even though the atheist cannot believe in evil but only in fate/luck:  [In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.]  something deep in the human soul will not allow this.  This Friday 13th we can see (though we'd rather be somewhere we couldn't) that humanity is not only part of a system of genetic process but part of a moral and immoral universe.

The real bad luck this Friday 13th was not to be mowed down (that was a result of evil), but to embrace an unbelief that means that those who were mowed down didn't ultimately matter.

Happy Birthday Edith



Today we celebrate various birthdays - including Edith Piaf's.

Edith, short on height (several inches short of five foot) but with an amazing voice, was plucked to fame from the back streets of Paris.

Born during the First World War, she was famed before the Second.  Edith was not noted for her Christian devotion (to the extent that the Catholic Archbishop refused to take her funeral in 1963).  She died at 47 years after a depressingly (literally and metaphorically) familiar story of broken relationships and addictions brought to an early conclusion by a liver that could take no more.

On the plus side, in this famously iconic song Non, je ne regrette rien she hit on the Gospel (admittedly accidentally).

. . . No I regret nothing
It's paid for, wiped away, forgotten . . .
. . . swept away my love stories
And their troubles
Swept away for good
I'll start again from zero . . .

Ah, Edith. 

Your liver was lost but your soul did not need to be.  This is the Christmas joy - Year Zero, a unique opportunity for the human race to start again, no longer in the line of Adam (or the apes - for the benefit of Mr Dawkins) but in the Last Adam, Jesus.  Every life can have no regrets, its debts paid in full, its hope come alive!!

Anyhow, a great 20th Century song, eh?

Except that Piaf's recorded bitter deathbed words (expletives deleted) were something like, "Everything you do in this life, you pay for."

Which seems to show that she was not convinced by the song she made famous.  I suppose the liver drowned out the song.  May God grant us that understanding of the love of God in Jesus that washes away all the regrets in the blood of Jesus. His Son and Mary's Son.