LETTERS
From the Rev J. Stanton Jeans, Richard Keeble, C. M. Woodhouse, Norman St John-Sievas, MP, Stephen Wiggs, Mrs S. N. Nanpona, the Rev J. S. MacArthur, John Biggs-Davison, MP, Douglas Hill, Eric W. White, Shaun Mandy, Derek Hudson, Tibor Szamuely.
Counterblast from the clergy
Sir: Mr A. E. Dyson writes (5 July) of 'a few morose churchmen who believe in God and are mildly unhappy, but is the Church to risk social irrelevance for the likes of them?' This seems to me to be something of a tilt at the Church about its social relevance and I would like to write some- thing about this, especially after Mr Ludo- vic Kennedy's blast (7 June) and the counterblasts (21 June) which followed.
I am aged fifty-five, an ex-naval chaplain (twenty-six years in it) and Vicar of a Suffolk parish which has two churches and a geriatric hospital. Your musical readers will know that very recently my church at Blythburgh was privileged to offer sanctuary to Ben Britten and his Aldeburgh Festival, accommodating almost 700 people in the process. On this occasion the Church was supremely relevant if only as a roof over the heads of many pagans, agnostics, humanists and so-called atheists (I don't believe there is any such animal). But roofs are good things to have when it is raining and the roof had fallen in before mickfight on Saturday, 7 June, at the Maltings at Snape.
Right, so you are roofless, so where do you turn for help? You turn to the church which is not only big enough to take your lot but so beautiful it makes the angels weep to think how an arch swine called Oliver Cromwell (and to hell with his mate Milton, too) to bust it put his horses in it and practised with his muskets on the doors—though the devil himself had failed to burst the doors and only left his filthy finger marks on them.
Anyway, you go for help, so you turn to the Vicar. He has people who back him up, his warden is the foreman on the site for the firm which built the Maltings; his people's warden is a farmer; his treasurer is an ex-Shell-BP executive; his sidesmen are bus conductors, jobbing gardeners, a cashier in the Co-op, a postman, an ex- naval officer, a housewife and an bons maths master. All madly relevant people who have to be pretty relevant in everyday life. So, with visiting and caring and allow- ing yourself to be bothered and relevant, you find yourself with a congregation of about thirty people out of a population of 150 and you think to yourself that if a parson of a parish of 10,000 people in London found 2,000 people in his church one Sunday he would, to quote a bell- ringing politico, think he'd gone stark raving bonkers.
But to go back to this morose Vicar. He won't have 'Series 2' Communion (the non- technically minded won't appreciate this) in his church, he insists on saying 'The Lord be with you' and not 'good morning', per- sists in praying for the Church militant here on earth and asks that justice may be truly and indifferently ministered—not even im- partially. How the hell does he still find himself relevant, so square is he?
I will tell you why. He and his church are relevant because Jesus Christ was
relevant. He didn't care a damn about blokes shoving nails through his hands because he knew that they were misled, and when he died it wasn't because of what they'd done to his body, it was because he died of a broken heart—broken that people could be so stupid—and there are few things in this life worse than a stupid human being; we say asinine, but an ass is an Einstein alongside people like Brezh- nev, who wouldn't recognise a man on a cross if he saw one.
Sir, the Church is so relevant that it hurts—like having nails shoved through your hands.
J. Stanton Jeans Vicar of Walberswick with Blythburgh, Suffolk
Previous page
