LOSING MY RELIGION

 

St.John the Baptist's and St. Botolph's Croxton Kerrial

At the prompting of a friend, I’ve just been reading Clive Marsh and Vaughan Roberts’ 2012 book: ‘Personal Jesus: how popular music shapes our souls.’  The authors explore a mass of connections between ‘popular’ (undefined) music and our faith.  They argue successfully that Christians should pay serious attention to popular culture, and to my mind much less cogently that there’s some kind of equivalence between what people do when listening to ‘their’ music, and what one does in worship and attitude to God.  This isn’t the place to air my differences with them. Sufficient to say that being a music fan in 2024 costs little of necessity(!) while faith in Christ demands ‘my soul, my life, my all’. For many of us, the blood of the martyrs sets horribly high standards. As good Christian children in unreconstructed, colonial days, many of us lived in fear that God’s will was for us to be missionaries, and thus to be boiled and eaten by those to whom we ministered.  Sometimes, as in the case of Chalmers, this sadly turned out to be true. 

Driving to begin my walk in Waltham-on-the-Wolds, the news breaks that Jurgen Klopp is resigning as manager of Liverpool F.C.. This is a surprise, and the even bigger surprise is that having told the directors last November, everyone was able to keep the secret until now.  The grief of Liverpool supporters knows no bounds, and Adrian Chiles, on duty at Radio 5, fields the cries of despair. ‘My God…’ begins one text, as in ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me…’

In the light of Marsh and Roberts’ book, I am caused to stop and think again. As a young teacher, desperate to get kids to engage with the importance of religion back in the nineteen-seventies, I used to consider with them the question of whether people were filling a God-shaped hole with football or music. I do think this is true (although perhaps now adding ‘and computer games’), but these function as distraction activities or a feel-good drug. They stop folk having to confront the problems of the world and mortality. As Bill Shankly remarked, football is far more important than any matter of ‘life or death’. To which we all shout back ‘Oh no, it isn’t!’. Don’t we?

 

'Welby Practice': management consultancy? HTB for all? mediation available?

I park at the bottom of Bescaby Lane and walk north-east towards the tiny hamlet (population 17). Where the Eye stream rises there was once a village, perhaps a monastic settlement, judging by the fish ponds.  To the west lies the heart-shaped site of Croxton Park racecourse. From 1820 or thereabouts the local Hunt season would end with an annual meeting there in April, with races varying in length from five furlongs to two miles on the flat. There are some charming postcard images to be found on-line showing two stands for the spectators, small, but permanent.  The last meeting took place in 1914.  For whatever reason it was never revived thereafter. One poignant thought strikes me – that as well as the appalling loss of men, the toll taken on equine stock was so great that a meeting in a country venue like this was thereafter unfeasible.  These days the well-drained turf is owned by Laura Morgan and run as a training facility. There’s a long gallop across chips, and a few fences, even a starting gate, to remind passers-by of the heritage.

Croxton

Off to the races, or a call to ride home;

Is this an end or a start?

Am I the whole of the maker’s design,

Or just the very first part?

The path onwards should be straightforward, but I’m seduced by the way nice new hardcore has been laid on a track, and turn right too early. My punishment is initial headscratching, and then a forty-five minute diversion because I’ve ended up on the road into Croxton Kerrial way south of where I wanted to be. ‘Kerrial’ isn’t pronounced the way you might think.  Its derivation is the family name ‘Crioll’, and I think given a bit of Leicestershire dialect, it’s probably going to come out more in line with that.  Since there’s no-one on the streets of the village I can’t check this out.  St. John the Baptist and St Botolph’s (and that must surely be a unique pairing!) is round the back of the village on a small prominence next to the site of an old twelfth century manor house.  The archaeologists have been in, and the site is nicely preserved and laid out so the visitor can see what was what.  The door to the church is extraordinarily low – even if you were barely five foot tall, you’d have to stoop.  It’s such an unusual feature, you wonder why. A friend once owned a part-medieval house where there was a similarly-sized bedroom door. The standard answer is that people in medieval times were shorter.  Surely that can’t be the whole story? Was it to keep out the cold? Well possibly, but our St. Mary’s has been colder inside than the weather was outside at times during the last month, so that doesn’t sound right.  Was it in deference to a undersized Lord of the Manor? A shortage of wood?  Answers on a postcard, please.

I cross back over the A607, and find the track I should have arrived on. The way back to Waltham is a steady, slow rise all the way. Strange how one notices an ascent, and not the descent.  Down near Croxton it’s still very sloshy and sticky. Although we’ve had a week of dry weather after Storms Isha and Jocelyn, the water table must be sitting very high at present. Any precipitation at all is adding to the famers’ woes before the new growth starts sucking up the water. 

Now that post-Covid churches have returned to ‘normal’, I’m realising afresh the difficulties we have in heating churches adequately during the winter months. Since feeling cold is now extremely counter-cultural (unless we pay for it when we – not me! – go skiing etc.) this is a severe block to getting ‘new’ people into church.  Last week I huddled in a great-coat as I played the organ in one local church. When dressed thus, it’s hard to look jolly.  The message I’m inevitably sending is ‘Let’s get out of here as quick as possible, please!’ In another church just before Christmas, at a major service with two hundred people present, I was shivering to such an extent that I really didn’t think I was going to get through the two hours I was stuck at the console. Adrenalin carried me through.  In that case the church heating is permanently broken. In others, churches routinely cannot afford to sufficiently raise the temperature against the huge mass of air their building accommodates.  Does rural ministry have to become seasonal?  Well, not the ministry, but the gathering in that place, in that way?    

Waltham-on-the-Wolds – Croxton Kerrial – Waltham-on-the-Wolds

16 km.  4.5 hours.  8 deg C. max.  Clear and sunny until later. A keen breeze slowly moderating.

‘Losing my religion’ is a song by American alt-rockers R.E.M. from their 1991 album ‘Out of time’.  Sometimes ‘Christian songwriters’ try to have it both ways by writing about Jesus or God as if he/she were an object of worldly, even sexual, love and affection.  Maybe they’re hoping for an ‘under the wire’ hit in the mainstream music business. The R.E.M. song seems to me to work the other way round. It’s probably about human love, but there are enough cues in the lyrics to suggest it might be a religious song hiding itself away.  U2 for sure sometimes play the same trick. The video for the song has lead singer Michael Stipe in angels’ wings, but that doesn’t clinch it either way. Rock videos are notorious for their hi-jacking of religious imagery when it suits. The song is referenced by soul/gospel artist Kirk Franklin in his poem/rap of the same name which begins his 2015 album. An ‘AllMusic’ review said this of Franklin’s CD: ‘It’s a rhyming socio-politico-spiritual manifesto, an admonition to evangelists that religion masks God’s love and mercy;  it’s a barrier rather than a bridge’.    Check it out.  ‘Religion’ is such a difficult word, tied and tight with meanings. ‘Faith’ is lovely, and open-ended, a gift not a graft.