What an excuse!

We have our grandson with us for half-term - which gives us a perfect pretext for doing new things. Today we went to the Southampton Aircraft Museum (I did not even know where it was) and spent a fascinating hour or two there. Huw (the grandson) sat in the pilot's seat on the Sunderland Flying Boat, which is the centre-piece of the display. I remember seeing these amazing aircraft taking off from Plymouth Sound half a century ago. My aunt and uncle flew in one down to South Africa - making, as I recall, two overnight stops, one on the Nile, the other on a Lake in Central Africa. The sheer space for passengers makes Laker & co the cheapskates they are - then there was real leg-room, to say nothing of the ashtrays built into the armrests of all the seats.

On Sunday next we fly from Gatwick to Rome on Pilgrimage; would that the journey was half as comfortable as those Flying Boats. Not all new things are genuine progress. And I bet our aircraft will not have an anchor in its nose.

It was a bit disconcerting though to see the very uniform I had worn as a Pilot Officer (Fighter Control) when doing my National Service put on display as a historic relic - and the cockpit of a Chipmunk rescued from scrap. Those aircraft were the ones we used for air experience during our training. How quickly the new becomes history! But then, I can remember air raid shelters during the war....

Busy, busy...

Almost like being a Vicar again; Fr Gerry, our Priest in Southbourne, has been poorly (they think it is 'flu) so this has been a long day. We set off at 8.40 from home for the 9.30 Mass at Our Lady Queen of Peace. A quick cup of coffee after Mass with our Ordinariate gang, then it was the second house; a pretty full one at that, for the 11am Parish Mass. I'd only heard yesterday that I was to celebrate and preach at this so I rewrote my intended sermon last evening in the hope that it might make sense to the regular congregation.

Then two of the Ordinariate had invited us home for a bring and share lunch. Great food, great company. A power snooze after that and it was off again for Solemn Evensong and Benediction at 4pm. We were home around 5.30. Tomorrow, the Queen's Accession, is also the second anniversary of my passing the statutory retirement age for Catholic Priests. Somehow, today did not quite feel like retirement. For lack of time to write anything else I append my sermon from this morning - it's all right, you don't have to read it.

'I have made myself the slave of everyone' [I Corinthians ix.22]

Recently a letter was discovered from a former slave to the man who had been his master. It has caused quite a stir in America, where the descendants of slaves remember what their forbears suffered.

The master had offered to employ his former slave: this is part of the very dignified and temperate reply: “Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can …. I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children … go to school and are learning well. .. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores.”

It is hard to recall how recently slavery ended in the USA: even in our own country, it is relatively recent history. And in some places it continues, this notion that one person can own another. St Paul lived in a society where slavery was not just common; without it the Roman Empire could not have survived. When Rome went to war, as it often did, slaves were part of the proceeds, the Victor’s perks. So knowing as he did what it was like, it’s amazing to find Paul saying “I have made myself the slave of everyone”.

In other places you can read how he stood on his dignity. He was arrested in Jerusalem and charged with starting a riot, and they were about to torture him with whips, but Paul said “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man who is a Roman Citizen, and uncondemned?” At which they hastily backed off, untied him and suddenly became very civil towards him.

But then, that is just what we should expect from him, it is what he was writing about in today’s Epistle – he will do anything to get a hearing for the Gospel. If it meant behaving like the meanest servant, he will do it; if it meant throwing his weight about, telling the Jews that he trained under Gamaliel a leading Pharisee scholar, or telling an upstart Roman official that unlike him he Paul is a freeborn Roman Citizen, then he will do it. Look at the Acts of the Apostles, and his letters to the Churches. There is nothing Paul will not do for the sake of the Gospel. “To those outside the law, I became as one outside the law; to the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak; I have become all things to all men, in order to save some at any cost.

I think it is something of that same spirit which guided the Holy Father when he instituted his brilliant idea for enabling former Anglicans to come into the Church as Groups, not just as individuals. So often the Church sends out the wrong signals – “we are right, everyone else is wrong” it seems to say. It was just amazing that Pope Benedict spoke of the gifts which Anglicans might bring into the Church. He was not specific about it, he just spoke of the Anglican Patrimony. That readiness to accept whatever was best in our tradition meant a great deal to many of us.
You might think we should have got over our excitement; after all, some of us have now been Catholics for a year or so. But the fact is, the novelty has not warn off; and we see our former colleagues desperately trying to save what they can of catholic tradition in the Church of England ..... We must pray for them in this difficult time; but we must also prepare to welcome some, perhaps many, who very soon now will see that their much loved church has changed beyond recognition. They might also see that the best of what they knew and loved can be found in the Catholic Church, and that they can leave a lost cause and join people who appreciate and value them.

You can imagine it is not easy, trying to preserve and develop the best of our traditions while at the same time being totally and entirely Catholics. This Church of Our Lady Queen of Peace has done a great deal to help us. It is very encouraging that today, when he is unwell, Fr Gerry was prepared to ask me to stand in at one of his Masses. We all pray for a speedy recovery for him.

One of the elements of our Anglican heritage which we are trying to preserve is a tradition of singing; not just hymns, but also psalms and canticles. This afternoon we will be joined by some singers from a local Anglican Church who will help us celebrate solemn Evensong and Benediction.

We are aiming to do this once every couple of months, hoping that other Anglican might join us occasionally – and also that some long-time Catholics might like to come and support us. You see, we too are trying in our small way to copy St Paul, and the Holy Father, in using every means to win others into the Church. That, after all, is not just part of our Anglican Patrimony; it is a part of being a Catholic Christian – that for the sake of the Gospel we might by all means save some.

Happy Birthday!

Just a year old, but we had a very busy day celebrating the first year of the life of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. It began early, with a beautiful dawn. We had to drive over to Bournemouth in good time, for the car was laden with new goodies. First, the very handsome Lectionary, provided for us by the parish of St Mary the Virgin, Arlington, Texas. The Lectionaries had been awaiting collection at Allen Hall, and I fetched ours on Thursday when we met there with Msgr Keith.



Then with the Lectionaries were some new hymnals - well, new to us. They are copies of English Hymnal which the Anglican Parish of Holy Trinity Millbrook in Southampton has kindly let us have. They had to be offloaded before Mass could begin.

We also had visitors; Ronald Crane and Jackie Ottaway, editors of the Portal (now the OFFICIAL on-line publication of the Ordinariate in England and Wales) came to interview some of us, and take photographs after Mass.


It is too tedious to make another home trip to Lymington, so we stayed in the Church Hall of Our Lady, Queen of Peace, for an hour or so, then had a picnic lunch before setting off in our mini-coach.


One of our Ordinariate priests expressed surprise that we were coming all the way from Hampshire for the Ordinariate's birthday celebration. His group is based within twenty miles of Central London, but it was too far for them. Very strange thing, that when you are in or near London distances appear to multiply.
We left Bournemouth at 1pm and arrived at St James' Spanish Place in Marylebone (just north of Oxford Street) by about 4.30, and no-one thought the journey too long. Certainly everyone thought the worship well worth the effort. Others will no doubt blog about that, so I may save one or two pictures for the Anglo-Catholic.After Mass, a very jolly reception where we caught up with old frinds from Maidstone and Folkestone, Deal and Faversham, Essex and even a few from London.

The pictures here are just to encourage others to make the effort to get to any events commended by Msgr Keith. The next one, I believe, will be a Chrism Mass at 11am on April 2nd, also at St James' Spanish Place; details subject to alteration, but you could make a pencilled note in your diary now. See you there!

The Spring is Sprung, the Grass is Ris....

Acer x Conspicuum Phoenix
And so it was today at Hilliers' Gardens, just twenty miles north of us near Romsey. Spring really sprung - though Ogden Nash was not entirely right; there were plenty of boidies singing their hearts our today.

Most striking of all was the colour. We are supposed to be in midwinter, but it has been amazingly mild this year ('Oh, we'll pay for it later', say the pundits) As for me, I just like to enjoy it while we have the opportunity.

So here are a few pictures from our day out today, a good way of continuing the celebration of the Baptism of the Lord.

Not just the bare stems of dogwoods and maples for colour, though; there were great shows of berries still, and well ahead of their time witch hazels, snowdrops, camellias and even daffodils. Altogether a very cheerful afternoon.

Portsmouth Neighbours

The reception of Bishop Robert Mercer CR has already been covered in the Anglo-Catholic blog. But since I was there, and have a couple of pictures so far unpublished, it may be worth saying a little more about the event.



Bishop Mercer has been a leading figure among "continuing" Anglicans, and was for some years Metropolitan of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada. His reception into the Catholic Church represents the first Bishop from the TAC grouping (the Traditional Anglican Church) to join an Ordinariate. Now we look forward to his ordination as a Priest - and perhaps too to the Episcopate, as the only celibate former Anglican bishop within the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. That is only speculation on my part. He may be considered over the hill, being past the supposed retirement age for Catholic clergy.

I was especially glad that we had a fair representation from our Bournemouth Group. Those who do not know the South Coast readily confuse Plymouth and Portsmouth (about as far apart as London and Leeds) and assume that Bournemouth, between the two, must be next door to both. In fact from our Ordinariate Church to its neighbour in Portsmouth is around fifty miles, much of the route heavily congested. So well done those who made the journey.


It was good to hear once more familiar Prayer Book words - the Prayer of Humble Access, albeit bowdlerised, and other phrases from what Geoffrey Kirk is wont to call "Dr Cranmer's little compendium". Better still to know that those words were being used in a fully Catholic context, and that the Mass was more pre- than post-Reformation.


All credit to Fr Maunder of the TAC and his faithful flock, who made us so welcome and put on a first-rate reception after the Mass.

Party Time

Today we had Open House for members of the Bournemouth Ordinariate Group. Some are away, some down with a dreadful cold, two had car trouble on the way, others again had no transport. Fortunately no one had an ox to try out, nor had anyone married a wife, so in the end more than a dozen managed to find us and squeezed into our little house in Lymington. Accordingly, full justice was done to Jane's cooking.


It was especially good that Fr Danny McAvoy, our local parish priest, joined us.

We furthered our plans for the great visit to London on Jan 15th - Evensong and Benediction at St James' Spanish Place (hope to see you there - 5pm Mgr Keith presiding) and before that a more local event also involving our Ordinary.


On Saturday next at 12.15pm Mgr Keith will be celebrating Mass, and receiving into the Catholic Church Bishop Robert Mercer, CR. This is at St Agatha's Portsea, one-time church of Fr Dolling. If you wish to attend it might be helpful to let Fr Jonathan know (j.redvers_harris@virgin.net)

Washing Up Volunteers

Let's enjoy these small domestic events. When numbers grow, as surely they will during this year, we shall be using Church Halls rather than private houses. We should make the most of these more intimate occasions while we can.
Posing by the puddings

A Jewish Mother

The internet is abuzz with news about the new arrival. Fr Jeffrey Steenson is to be the new Ordinary of the latest Ordinariate, of the Chair of St Peter. My own particular delight is that another former student of St Stephen's House achieves high office in the Catholic Church. Fr Scott Hurd trained with us there and now he is to be a top gun in the Ordinariate; Vicar General, no less. It couldn't happen to a nicer chap.

Here our little Group in Bournemouth is planning a coach for Jan 15 to take us to the Ordinariate Evensong & Benediction at St James', Spanish Place. There are still one or two seats left, so if you are interested let me know. We are hoping there may be a few from the Salisbury Group joining us, too.

This morning, we worshipped with the parish congregation of Our Lady Queen of Peace. Fr Gerry invited me to concelebrate and preach: and here is what I had to say on this happy day:

As for Mary, she treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.

Mothers have a great gift – the gift of embarrassing their children. When the son brings a girlfriend home for the first time, there is mother with the photograph album, ready to let the girl see just what a geek the son was with those braces on his teeth. It is not done with any malice; it is just that to a Mother, her son is always that, her boy. And she remembers so much from his childhood, since it was so important to her. When she was in her nineties my own mother would speak about me. How old is your son now? they would ask. ‘Oh, about forty’ she’d say - very flattering, when you’ve already had your seventieth birthday; but she could just as easily have said “about twenty” or “about fifteen” – that’s how she remembered me.

So it was nothing extraordinary that Mary remembered the events surrounding her Son’s birth – every mother does it. But every mother does not give birth to the Son of God, and the time of Jesus’ birth has been remembered not just for a lifetime but for two millennia. And whereas the day I fell out of the pram, or the day I learned to ride a bike are just the sort of thing that happens to everyone, the day the shepherds came to the stable is eternally significant. Yet unless Mary had treasured these things and pondered them in her heart, they would have been lost to us.



So Mary is a typically proud mother, indeed a proud Jewish mother; but her son never studied to gain an ology (do you remember Maureen Lipman in the BT ads?) What Mary had to remember about Jesus was vastly more important; this child, she was told by Simeon, is set for the rise and fall of many in Israel. She was to be the Mother of her Lord, the Mother of God himself.

There was a Muslim scholar speaking on radio recently, trying to show how inclusive and reasonable Islam was; “but we believe the Bible”, he said, “we honour the prophet Jesus and his virgin mother.” Don’t be deceived. Like every heresy throughout history (and Islam is a heresy, a distortion of Christianity) Muslims pick and choose which parts of Holy Scripture they will believe and which they will ignore or deny. It was like that way back about four hundred years after the Resurrection, centuries before Mohammed was born. There was a false teacher, a monk called Nestorius, who refused to give Our Lady the title “Mother of God” – or rather its Greek version, Theotokos, the God-bearer. For two hundred years that had been how orthodox Christians spoke of the Blessed Virgin; she was the God-bearer. The person who first used the phrase was Origen, and it caught on as a perfect description for the role of Mary in the Christian story. She brought the Son of God into the world; she bore God in her womb. Well, Nestorius did not like it; to him it sounded as though this was damaging Jesus’ humanity. He was fully human – and Mary gave birth to a human son. Eventually it took a Council of the Church, the Council of Ephesus, to decide the matter. That decision we firmly hold, as Catholic Christians; that Jesus is fully human, and fully divine. The Blessed Virgin did not give birth to two sons, but to one, Jesus, and her Son is properly called Son of God and Son of Man.

In all this, the Church relied on what Mary had remembered and what St Luke and others had written from what she told them. She who had seen and heard and experienced all these things treasured them, and pondered them in her heart. She is, before anyone else, the first Christian theologian, the one who contemplated the mystery of Jesus’ birth and realised that this was, indeed, Son of God.

You will find Christians who shy away from the word ‘theology’. They say they are simple Christians, and they are worried by dogma. Theology, though, is simply an attempt to find out the truth about God, and give a coherent account of Him. Doing this, we also have to discern the truth about his creation, especially about human beings. That was the aim of those who wrote scripture; from the first page of Genesis, the question is how mankind came into existence, and how we are connected with our Creator.

The Nativity of Jesus is the greatest step in this journey of discovery; that is what this whole festival is showing us. When the appointed time came, as the Epistle tells us today, God sent his Son, born of a women, born a subject of the Law; that is, he was fully human, governed by the laws of nature as we all are. Unless he had been like us in this, we could not have become like him. But he is truly Son of God, who is sent into the world; and so the Spirit who is in his Son can interact with our spirits, enabling us to cry Abba, Father.

This is why theology matters. The Church’s teaching about God and man is based firmly on Holy Scripture - and especially on how Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. When we pray, when we work at the meaning of the words of Scripture, when we wrestle in our minds with the teaching of the Church, we are honouring Mary – for this is what she did, and our praying and pondering continues her work in this generation. So you see after all this Jewish mother is concerned about an ology. Not Sociology, like Beattie in the ads; but theo-logy; the study and knowledge of God himself.

If Mary had not treasured all these things, from the visit of Gabriel to the birth in the stable, from the visit of the shepherds to the need to become refugees in Egypt, if she had not pondered these things and entrusted their meaning to Our Lord’s disciples, our knowledge of God, our theology, would have been very deficient. As it is, we can trust Mary the theologian more than any other teacher; and part of her lesson is that we can become a little like her if we will treasure these things, and ponder them in our heart too.