Christingle rapping
Jeremy Clarke
Me and my boy and my boy's halfbrother were scoffing our roast pork dinners in manly silence, when my Mum came in, late, from church. She'd stopped off on the way home for a mince pie and a glass of wine, she said. Not having seen the boys for a week she asked them a lot of unimportant questions with the utmost seriousness, to which she received no answer, then she said she had to sit down as she felt giddy. I got her dinner out of the warming oven and placed it in front of her and lifted the lid with a circular flourish. 'What a lot of pork!' she said. 'I couldn't possibly eat all that pork! Who'll have some more pork?' The pork question was also ignored. They didn't even look up from their plates. Then she said, a bit too brightly, 'I was rather hoping you were all going to come to the Christingle service this afternoon?'
This last statement penetrated the boys' consciousness. Knives and forks were suspended in midair. Hoping we were coming to church? It might have sounded like an innocent-enough invitation, but when it is asked by a born-again evangelical charismatic Christian it has the mobilised forces of Heaven and Hell behind it. This apparently throwaway remark was evangelising at its most blatant. You could almost hear the roaring of outraged demons. 'And what's Christingle when it's at home?' we said scathingly. 'I've forgotten!' my mother said brightly. 'But if you come, you'll find Out!'
I thought I'd trained the boys to regard all things ecclesiastical with derision and to give short shrift to evangelists of all persuasions. Normally they wouldn't have dreamed of going. But what can a concerned parent do when the Holy Spirit interferes on behalf of a prayer warrior? All right. They'd go, they said. At 13 and 12 years old respectively, my boy and his half-brother saw the inside of a place of worship for the first time last Sunday afternoon. I went along as well, as devil's advocate, to point out the most glaring of the hypocrisies and inconsistencies being paraded before them.
As we went through the door we were each given an orange with a candle and four cocktail sticks sticking out of it. Skewered on the cocktail sticks, barbecuestyle, were various dolly-mixture sweets and raisins. This was the Christingle. We sat in a pew near the back clutching our spiky oranges. About 20 parishioners, mostly elderly, including one or two who looked like they might not even make Christmas, were scattered about the pews.
The new young vicar (ginger beard) got the show on the road by asking everybody to shout, 'Wake up, Eddie!' By no means in unison, the most brazen of us muttered 'Wake up, Eddie.' The vicar looked wounded. 'You can do better than that!' he yelled. 'Try again!' We tried again, but once again our 'Wake up, Eddie!' was very feeble. Fortunately, Eddie was a light sleeper. He woke up, thank God, and we could stop making fools of ourselves.
Eddie was the vicar's ventriloquist's dummy. He'd been asleep in a box. Wideawake now, and perched on the vicar's arm, Eddie explained to us the history and symbolism of the Christingle orange. It originated in the Moravian church in Germany two centuries ago, he said. It was given to the children at Christmas to remind them of God's love for the world. The orange represents the world. The candle flame, when we light it later on in the safety of our homes, represents the small flame of God's love burning in our hearts. The sweets and the raisins are the 'fruits of the spirit'. And the cocktail sticks? These, said Eddie, also represent God's love, penetrating right to the very centre of the planet.
After we'd all waved goodbye to Eddie and he was put back in his box, the ginger vicar led us in a 'Christmas Rap', the first two lines of which were: 'Check it out, huh! See what it's worth! What ya gonna do about the Miracle Birth?' Apart from the vicar, and the bouncy deacon who looked game for just about anything, only the smelly old man who comes to the door selling spinach was unembarrassed enough to join in. Octogenarian farmer Will Collins, sausage-like fingers interlaced behind his back, stared fixedly ahead. I sneaked a look at my boy. His face was crimson with embarrassment.
After the service we stayed for mince pies. I talked to the spinach man, who had one in each hand and one in his mouth. 'You like rapping then. Brian?' I said. 'It can be a bit fiddly sometimes, I s'pose,' he said. 'But these days I've only got me one sister to buy a present for, so it don't take long.'
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