As You Like It

copyright The Observer, UK

I saw As You Like It this afternoon at The Globe. There's lots of reviews on the site linked to above. They're all true. What else can I say? It was uproariously funny. It was witty and erudite and sexy. It had the most preposterous plot, but still managed the trick of suspension of disbelief, perhaps in part because the theatre itself and the audience were part of the make believe. It was utterly, utterly brilliant.

The Globe is a modern reproduction of Shakespeare's original 16th Century theatre. People are seated in three tiers and the floor in front of the stage is filled with the groundlings: 700 people (today including Clemency and me) who have paid 5 pounds to stand there. We lean on the stage or on the surrounding woodwork. We shift out of the way when the action spills into the area around us. The actors make their exits and entrances by pushing through us or appearing suddenly in our midst. The largely voluntary staff move around, dishing our sunhats, and making sure we don't get in the way. Around us this very new building towers up and for the first time ever, after three years of studying English at university, and seeing these plays many times, I get it. Isn't it an odd thing? Stratford On Avon tries hard to be a 16th Century town and only succeeds in making itself look like a bad 21st Century filmset. The Globe makes no apologies for being a modern theatre in the style of, and it transports me back to the fifteen hundreds. I know that if I lived in London I wouldn't be missing a single play at this theatre. I might even sometimes pay a premium for a seat, but I don't think any of the flash seat sitters had as much fun as us plebs on the floor. If you're planning on visitng London, this is the best 5 pounds you could ever possibly spend.

PS. It's our last day in England tomorrow. Then we pack and lug our preposterously large suitcases to Hethrow at 6:30 on Sunday morning for a flight to San Francisco. I'll be back in The Greenstone Waters late on Friday, New Zealand time. I won't have a computer, and don't think I will bother with internet cafes so it'll be radio silence in the coming week, I'm afraid, folks.

Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

Yesterday we rented a car and drove north to attend a family function for Clemency. I had my brain disengaged when booking a car online. I chose one from a depot at Victoria St. Station because it is easy to get to on the tube, completely overlooking the fact that I had to get the car from Central London to the comparative ease of the M1 during rush hour. It happened with not as much difficulty as I'd anticipated and now there's one more thing I can put on my CV. Getting it back again at 1 a.m. with no map was harder, London at 1 a.m. being about as busy as, say, Wellington at 11 a.m., only darker. There were some things about the trip I won't boast of, such as getting pinged by a speed camera in the Oxfordshire countryside, and getting hopelessly lost in Derby on the way home. Derby! Oh the humiliation! And there was Stratford.

I mean the famous one, not the one in London where they are building an enormous white elephant to host the next Olympics, or Old , or Stony but Upon Avon. The home of the bard is a pretty enough place but it is a bit of a warning about the gilded trap of tourism. The town has some interesting old buildings, but the straight edges on all the large timber and the double glazing tells a story. Almost everything has been restored, reshaped, prettified and ye olde Englishified so that it is not so much an Elizabeth 1 town as an Elizabeth II one. Once it was fitted for blokes with pointy beards and pantaloons to dart about having swordfights and putting on plays. Now it is fitted for people - many, many, many people and their buses, to shuffle about taking photos and buying postcards. I am told that the theatres in Stratford showing Shakespearian plays are always booked out but often finish the play half empty as bored people leave after the first act. 'nuff said.

In Holy Trinity church there is the grave of the man himself. The little parish church has the expected gift shop in what was once the baptistry, and there is a string of people paying a pound and a half to do as I did: go to the altar rail and take a digital photo. For a church it all has a quite secular feel. It seems not so much a place of worship as a national monument, which, indeed it is. In England the puritans had a peculiar way of making a public display of their piety. Railing against ostentation, they ostentatiously took up sledgehammers and whitewash and destroyed all the beauty of their churches: paintings, stained glass, statuary all went west in an orgy of self righteousness. The scars are still there in the churches, but something deeper happened in the English national psyche as the result of this mutiny against God and his gift of visual beauty. Without the patronage of the churches, the visual arts languished for a few centuries. Consequently, while England produced Turner and Burne Jones and Rosetti, it never produced a Rembrandt or a Leonardo or a Michaelangelo or a Picasso. Through all the centuries leading up to this one, in painting and sculpture, it was the French and Dutch and Flemish and Spanish and Italians who made all the play, while England for her part, made all the plays. After the Reformation and the Civil War England's artistic genius became focused in things literary. Milton and Jane Austen and Wordsworth and Coleridge and Keats and Dickens and, above everybody else, everywhere else, William Shakespeare. Look in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's and you will see the graves not of holy men but of literate ones. It is words which make England: the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and the collected works of William Shakespeare have shaped the way this nation explains itself to itself, and thus made them, for better or worse, what they are. So we all come and look and collect our digital trophy. Very few say a prayer but most, I think, try out their dimly remembered classroom quotations. A homage to the world's greatest poet and to the language he helped invent and to the people who are, above all, of the word.

Anglican

The parish church of St. Gregory and St. Martin, Wye, Kent.

About 5 years ago our diocese had an electoral synod in which I was a candidate. The events leading up to the synod and the synod itself were particularly grueling for me, and it took me fully two years to recover from them. One of the very unfortunate side effects, for me, of the events surrounding the synod was a sense of alientation from much of my own diocese and a sense of deep disillusionment with the national Anglican church. I remember one of the members of the synod using a metaphor which has stuck with me since that day. She said our diocese was on a roundabout, going round and round looking for the right street to exit into. I had a sense, on that day, and one which has grown every day since, that I got off on one street and the Diocese of Dunedin got off on another. Following the synod, I remained as Vicar General of the diocese, a position I deeply did not want to hold but which I could not quite find a way to relinquish, at least until my illness gave me the excuse I had been looking for. I found myself in a leadership position in a diocese whose decisions often (usually?)baffled me, but also in the odd position of being uniquely unable to comment on or critique those decisions. Further, the Anglican Church at national and international levels was making decisions and doing things which I found more than baffling. My reaction to much of what was said and done was Toto we're not in Kansas anymore. As the months drew on I could find fewer and fewer points at which I could comfortably identify with much of what my church did. I found myself, at times, wondering if I wanted to remain with the church I had given most of my adult life to; but there were two things above all others which kept me loyal: the support of a few friends within the church (particularly my Archdeacon, Graham Langley) and the wonderful community of St. John's Roslyn.

This pilgrimage has been a pilgrimage to the heart of the Anglican Church, and it is one that I completed yesterday when I stood on the spot where, in 1170, Thomas Becket was martyred, and, later, on the spot in St. Martin's churchyard where, in 597 St.Augustine baptised King Aethelbert and thousands of his subjects. These two events were defining moments in the history of Christianity in England, and both were incidents in the long and tortuous relationship of Church and State which have shaped the pragmatism which is Anglicanism's defining characteristic.

The pilgimage began with a journey into Catholicism. Across Spain, Italy and France, week by week I worshipped in Catholic churches and associated with Catholic people. It wasn't an intellectual journey -I couldn't understand a word of the liturgies, readings or sermons - so much as an emotional and spiritual one. I tried to choose ordinary parish churches in which to worship and felt held by the warmth of the congregations. I witnessed many examples of fine pastoring by holy priests. In this way, I experienced something of the seedbed out of which my own church had grown.

Journeying to England has been an experience of the things which set this European country apart from the rest of Europe. A different currency, system of measurement and language and a deeper rigour about immigration matters are only part of it. In the rest of Europe you see the European flag flying as often as the national flag. Not in England. Here it's Union Jacks all the way, proclaiming a sense of difference and independence which is mirrored in the relationship of the Church of England to European Catholicism. This is a different church. Quirkily different. Proudly different. Sometimes different just for the sake of being different.

The Church of England is like that most English of jokes, a curates egg. Parts of it are excellent. The new life bursting out of Holy Trinity Brompton and the deep spirituality of Walsingham could not be more different but they are held in the same organisation and both are inspiring. I have been in dozens of small churches, though, where a tiny congregation struggles with the upkeep of their much beloved ecclesiastical museum (aka the parish church) with diminishing resources of money and personnel. I have seen both the church's impotence in the face of the increasing social and economic malaise which seems to be engulfing Britain, and her small courageous, and often ingenious attempts to make a difference. But it's the history which has helped me to understand the current Anglican church.

The church here is old. I met a vicar who spoke of the damage done to his parish church by "the invasion". He meant the one which took place in 1066 but he spoke of it as if it was last week. In every place the plundering of the dissolution, the ravages of Viking longboats and Luftwaffe bombers and the vandalism of the puritans have left their mark, and the current parishioners are dealing with them still. This is a church which has been part of the fabric of the society around it, and where the demands of being a social institution and of being the body of Christ have caused constant tension. Sometimes the church has become more a part of the social fabric than the spotless Bride of Christ, and it has failed. Sometimes though, it has been a witness to the Gospel in the face of hardship and oppression and sometimes the Spirit has caused rebirth, even centuries after a seeming full stop.

Unsurprisingly, it is where there is a continuing practice of spirituality that the church has flourished. Where there has been prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, meditation, social responsibility and almsgiving the Church of England has thrived. It has also thrived where there has been disciplined, holy, fearless leadership. To see the marks of the Church's history and to hear the stories has been to encounter this deep vein of spirituality and to feel again the influence of her sainted leaders. Where this rich seam is refound, as on Iona and in Mother Julian's cell, the 21st Century church has risen, seemingly invincible, from the ashes. It is this, the great treasure of our church, that I have glimpsed, and which I know to be the only hope of my own diocese and of the Anglican Church of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

I was raised a Methodist and chose to be an Anglican. After this month in England, I choose still to be an Anglican, but I know that much of what occupies our church and seems so important in our councils is froth and bubble: the detritus rising to the surface from the ongoing struggle with our wider culture. I choose to be an Anglican, but know that the only way for my own faith and my own parish to be viable is if I try to dive deeper and find the cool streams beneath. This seeking the depths must be what forms my ministry in this, the last decade of my life as a stipended Anglican priest. Which brings me to reflect on the third thread of my own journey: that inward one of my own soul.

Bits and Pieces

Photo copyright Nick Wright 2009

I have a problem, but not the usual problem I have with blog posts. Usually I am scrabbling around trying to come up with something to write about. Today I am so overwhelmed with topics, I can't quite decide what to leave out. It's now our last week in England, and looking back at the three months or so since we left Dunedin, I suppose I have put 5 or 10 % of the things that have happened to us onto Available Light. There are some fairly minor but still remarkable things I might have commented on: in Spain for example, on the Camino there are drinking fountains all over the place. One of them has two taps. One dispenses water, the other wine: good, rich, fruity, deep red, Spanish wine in unlimited quantities and absolutely free. In Hong Kong there is a pet shop where I saw for sale a toucan and large trays of wriggling live maggots. There are some other things of more significance.

On our last day on Iona I was privileged to help scatter the ashes of Clemency's Aunt Joan and Uncle Mervyn. These were people I had met in Wellington many years ago and who had a deep love of Scotland in general and Iona in particular. They had died some 12 years ago, and now, their daughter, Sue, had brought their ashes to Iona for this last act of love and commitment. At about 5 in the afternoon we climbed to the cairn which marks the top of Dun I, the highest point on the island. There was a rainstorm which cleared as we began our ascent but squalls revisited as we climbed. At the top, the rain finally lifted and the brightest, most distinct rainbow I have seen in my life appeared. I said the Church of England service of commitment of ashes and opened the urns. A strong wind pulled the ashes out and they drifted out over the land so beloved of Mervyn and Joan. The rainbow faded just as we finished and began our descent. It was one of the most memorable moments of my life.


A few days later we visited Swainsley, the country home of Clemency's ancestors, the Wardles. The house had long ago left the family, but on the off chance we called in anyway and were warmly and generously greeted by Sharon and Peter, the present owners. Swainsley is not a stately home but rather a large Victorian gentleman's residence; at about 35 rooms it is roughly the size of Olveston or Larnach's castle. Sir Thomas Wardle who once owned it was an intriguing man: an industrialist but also an engineer and a friend of many of the Pre Raphaelites, he was something of a rennaisance man. His country house showed this. It was built not as a demonstration of wealth and prestige but as a comfortable family base in his much beloved Manifold Valley. The present owners love Swainsley and "get it". They have restored and developed the place with a great deal of taste and tact. Once it had 2000 acres of grounds but now has a more manageable 22, which demonstrate just the right balance of wilderness and domestication. We spent a very enjoyable 3 hours there.

I could speak of the Norfolk coast, or Butterton in Staffordshire, or the Victoria and Albert Museum or the morning service at Holy Trinity Brompton, or the Buddhist take on mindfulness, or a somewhat perplexing experience of deja vu I had in Newcastle Upon Tyne, but I wont. What I want to think about rather, is something more general. Over the past three months I have made three journeys: an outer pilgrimage in Spain and England, Italy and France; a journey into the Anglican church; and a journey into myself. The outer journey I have already alluded to here, so won't bore you any further with the details. The other two.... well... I will write of over the next few days, as computer time and and the limits of personal reserve allow.

Encountering Iona

Columba landed in Iona in 563. He had recently left Ireland after a dispute over a psalter had got out of hand and led to a pitched battle in which many men were killed. Filled with guilt and remorse, he was determined to work for the Lord by converting the pagan Picts and Gaels who inhabited the west coast of Scotland. So he arrived, on the stony beach of what is now Columba Bay and set to work to build a monastery as a base for his evangelical operations. The Island is small and the soil thin. It only rises a few hundred feet above sea level but it is riven with cliffs and crags and rocky outcrops. In winter the wind reaches 70 mph and there is rain all the year round. He prayed, built his community, prayed, collected a library of holy books and prayed. He became known as a holy man and many miracles were attributed to him; consequently, he was trusted by the Pictish chieftains and became arbiter and diplomat between them. His evangelical efforts were wildly successful.

When I followed his trail 1400 years later, all traces of his occupation were gone. There is a cross dating from the 9th century and the shells of some buildings from medieval times. There is a cluster of small houses, some a few hundred years old but all of them extensively rennovated and developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. The modern Iona Community has sensitively restored the medieval abbey buildings, and added to them.

We arrived, like everyone else, on a ferry boat and stayed about a 2km walk from the ferry. Our host was a lovely young woman from Mosgiel who was partner to one of the local farmers, and who had recently restored their farmhouse and now let it out as a B&B. It was warm, quaint and very well appointed. On our first day we saw all the old buildings -quite an easy task - and then walked across the island from one side to the other. The next day we walked from one end of the island to the other, ending in Columba Bay where we sat on the stony beach in company with tough, horned highland ewes and their lambs. It was a wild place to arrive at, and it seemed a strange place to begin a mission.

I thought of the way our own church does things: getting motions passed in synod, gathering money, finding personnel and getting them trained and certified, making sure everything is done according to the canons and to the five fold mission statement. If we were going to convert the Picts I doubt that we would dump a few blokes on a stony beach on a bit of Island that no-one really wanted and leave them there to get on with it. We would at least need to see the budget projections first. But really, Columba's way was the only way to build something lasting. He landed and encountered this beautiful but desolate place and could only proceed by coming to terms with the ferocity of his environment and by utter dependence on God. His mission was grounded in the real world of the Picts, and on the holiness which comes from repeated, daily, disciplined prayer. To sit on the stones at the north end of Iona was to be brought face to face with the bedrock of the faith. Strip away all the accretions: all the synods and buildings and books of canon law and this is what you start with: the surf rolling over the rounded marble pebbles and the wind howling up the bay. That is, we start with God and the earth which is the outworking of his continual creative presence.

I have wandered, blindly most of the time, and ended here: about as far from home as I can get; but I have also made another journey, to the centre of what I have faith (ie trust) in. At the centre of faith it is equally rocky and sparse and desolate; but it is also equally rich in promise and the hope of new life.

Another Set of Surprises

Me at Walsingham. The fountain behind me is not the Holy Well.

I spent most of the morning in a cafe at the railway station in Wymondham (pronounced 'windom'. Proud winner of UK Station Of The Year, 2005) with my brother discussing meditation. Guhyavajra has been teaching meditation for several decades now, and there is a lot I have to learn from him. Then this afternoon I took a long ride through Norfolk, past villages with wonderful names (Great and Little Snoring, Swaffham, Pudding Norton...) to Walsingham.

I had already been to Lindisfarne, Iona and Mother Julian's Cell. Next week I will go to Canterbury, so Walsingham completes the round of British pilgrimage sites I had intended to visit. I am, as most who know me will tell you, from the Protestant end of the Anglican spectrum and Devotion to Our Lady has never featured greatly in my personal spiritual practice. I knew that the modern Anglican shrine was a twentieth century reinterpretation of the cult that had been destroyed by Henry VIII, and to be quite frank, I wasn't expecting much from this centre of Anglo Catholic devotion. Like all of us, I live in the tangled web of my own presuppositions, but in the couse of the day, three things happened to surprise me.

Firstly, a ribald conversation with my brother, the details of which I will spare you, but which ended with an aha moment for me, and I'm sorry to offend your sensibilities by talking of this: even snot is a part of creation, and therefore comes from God and therefore participates in the divine substance. My own sense of revulsion is just that: my own and it originates with me. Now this may not seem to you to be a great revelation, and even if it was, you'd probably prefer me to keep it to myself, but it was the thought I was toying with as I entered Walsingham, and in an odd way it prepared me for the full frontal assault on my own limited prejudices
which was to follow.

Secondly, I was surprised by the village of Walsingham, which must be one of the best preserved Tudor villages in the country. Despite the vandalism of Henry, the roundheads and the reformers, the village remains much as it was, and with a strong sense of vitality and life that is completely contemporary. There is a sense that in this place there is something bigger than Henry and bigger than the various half truths which periodically proclaim themselves to be ultimate and strive to take over the church.

Thirdly I was surprised the beauty and sanctity of the shrine itself, which has been built with great dignity and harmony. We arrived just as a ceremony of sprinkling was taking place. An ancient well was discovered in the 1930s during the reconstruction of the shrine and now, twice a week, a rite of sprinkling is carried out. As an act of commitment to Christ and in hope of restoration and healing, we were led to the well, invited to drink its waters, signed with the cross and sprinkled in remembrance of our baptismal waters and of the Living Water. I found it profoundly moving. I spent time in the reproduction of Richeldis' house, sitting before the statue of Our Lady, and realised something I should have realised decades ago. The cult of Mary is about Incarnation! Of course! How stupid of me not to have known this! The Word could not become flesh without Mary.

Just as the Abbey on Iona is a twentieth century reinterpretation of the monasticism and spirituality of Columba, the modern cult of Walsingham is, on the face of it, a completely contemporary phenomenon, but there is more to it than a group of Anglo Catholics hankering after some past glory. Clemency's illustrious ancestor, Sir Thomas Wardle once tried to change the Manifold River. The river disappears through sink holes every summer, leaving the riverbed dry. Sir Thomas thought he would plug the sinkholes with concrete and allow the local farmers to enjoy the benefits of the river water all year round. In the Autumn, after the first rains, the rising underground water of the Manifold exploded through the concrete, blasting it out of the way with a noise that could be heard for 20 miles in every direction. In much the same way, the spiritual power of Walsingham can't be suppressed or contained. After centuries of neglect and despite the physical destruction of the infrastructure of the shrine, in the 1930s the water bursts out of the ground - in the case of the well, quite literally. I found it easy to pray in this lovely place. The stillness and sanctity soaked in and came with me when I left. Of all the holy sites I have seen so far, Walsingham was the most surprising, and is one to which I will return when and if it is ever possible.

Unspoiled

There's nothing quite as dull as listening to someone else's breathless account of their holiday, so I'll spare you the details. But we strolled around on Hadrians wall. We went to the Lake District and stayed a night on the shore of Buttermere in a B&B with quaintly creaking floors. We saw Dove Cottage, where Wordsworth lived and wrote many of his most famous poems. We had afternoon tea in Cleater Moor where my grandmother grew up. We visited the lovely town of Kendall and then went to Windermere.

The lake is famous as a background to many poems of the Romantic era, and as the place near which Beatrix Potter lived . Windermere is the name of a lake, and also of the town which is perched on its shore. The town is a medium sized provincial centre and town and lake, both, have the great misfortune of being, of all the lakes, the most easily accessible from the South. We had the great misfortune of being there on a Sunday. People were everywhere. I am told that people in Britain, when visting tourist sites, do not like to move more than 400 yards from their cars, so cars were also everywhere. We didn't stop at Hilltop Farm, Beatrix Potter's residence, because we couldn't: the car park was full and the tiny country lanes for miles around were jammed with traffic - including of course the little bit that we were generating. The little seaside resort of Lakeside had a pound in the slot carpark where we could stay long enough to eat lunch, and Windermere we saw only by leaving the car further out of town than the regulation 400 yards.

There were people everywhere: big burly guys with shaved heads, all scrubbed up and wearing clean white T Shirts, being dragged reluctantly around by their girlfriends; middle aged people in matching fairisle jerseys; pushchairs and walking sticks and ladies with blue rinses. They were eating icecreams and pies covered in mushy peas and going for rides on the steamer and fitting it all in before dashing off for Liverpool and Manchester and Middlesbrourgh later in the afternoon. Everywhere were shops and enterprises oriented to processing these visits and which didn't seem to sit happily with the serene beauty all around. The business of frantic relaxation covered the landscape like a scab. We left and after a somewhat tense encounter with Manchester's motorway system, ended the day in the Peak District, on the Staffordshire side of the border, in a little hotel in the Manifold Valley, and here was another of this trip's surprises.

I had never much heard of the Peaks District, before I found myself in it: one of the most beautiful places I have visited in my life. It has rivers and caves and woodlands. It has ancient hills and crags. It has tiny narrow roads bordered with drystone walls and trees. It has villages, each one more jaw droppingly beautiful than the last. I ran out of superlatives and discovered the real meaning of some cliches. Pretty. Rustic. Charming. Picturesque. Unspoiled. It has people. Given the number of villages, the population density must be quite high, but the folk around here don't seem to have plundered and despoiled this landscape they way they have at Windermere. In New Zealand we use the word unspoiled to mean untouched by humans; bearing no discernible mark of human habitation or intervention. Here it means something else. It means a landscape whose cultural artefacts are in keeping with the environment in which they are found. The houses are built of local materials. They fit the countours of the hills and add to, not detract from the natural beauty of the place. The villages and farms were shaped long before anyone imagined a motor car, and they are fitted to the needs of people, not the needs of traffic. They are humanly sized, humanly grouped together and relate to each other in a way which fosters community. Houses are built for the climate and they are built to last. The whole environment, a cultural artefact though it is, still seems natural and still feeds the soul in a way which the stucco and neon excrescences festering around the tourist spots can never do. The land is occupied. It is densely built on and intensively worked, but it is unspoiled.

It is this connection with the land which first hit me with such force on Iona. There is something deeply spiritual in the connection, reflected in the fact that every village finds it necessary to construct and preserve a large church, even when the villagers are not themselves believers. It is there in the erection of crosses and standing stones and shrines. Villages and districts find it necessary to develop folk practices (such as Derbyshire's Well Dressing) which celebrates this earthy spirituality. This connection with place is somewhere near the heart of Anglicanism at its best. The trick is, I guess, to nurture this connection and not let it get overrun by the plastic facade which long ago killed off Blackpool and is in the process of strangling Windermere, and will smother the Anglican church if we let it.