Rites surrounding Death: The Palermo Statement of the International Anglican Liturgical Consultation 2007 Edited by Trevor Lloyd

You might be able to guess from the title that this is a recent edition of  Joint Liturgical Studies! And as I have said before (and no doubt will say again) the value of these is that they place before you material that you would not otherwise encounter. 

The International Anglican Liturgical Consultation is one of a number of fora for the production of “normative statements”, either ecumenically or, as in this case, for a particular denomination.   Their relationship to the general thinking of the members of a denomination or the pronouncements of a denomination’s Synods (or equivalent bodies) is often loose or strained.  A clear example of this difficulty was the ARCIC report on the place of Virgin Mary which a large part of the Anglican Church denounced.

Here we have “The Palermo Statement; Rites surrounding Death” along side a commentary by Trevor Lloyd.  The commentary is mostly made up of examples from different Anglican Liturgies of the themes encountered in the Statement.

While of interest neither the Statement nor the commentary had anything particularly earth shattering to say. 

However as someone with no love for Common Worship I need raise an audible cheer when reading the Statement saying,

“We affirm that the liturgy is owned by the Christian community as well as by the minister or clergy leading the rites.  Where church members own a service book in their homes, and also a hymn book, they are more likely to feel they own the liturgy with the clergy.”

This is one of my key critiques of Common Worship – it has fundamentally removed the liturgy from the hands of the people.  The Prayer Book, and even the ASB, gave a sense of a liturgical whole while Common Worship allows only for the encounter of isolated liturgical events.  Also the people saw and knew the rubrics in both the Prayer Book and ASB - allowing at least some small insight into why things were happening – in Common Worship these are hidden from sight encouraging the people to be passive recipients of worship done by the clergy and other leaders.

On similar ground the Statement later says:

“No set of texts or rubrics, however comprehensive or permissive, can do all this without the mediation of pastorally sensitive, theologically astute and liturgically fluent clergy.”

From this I would read that the search for the perfect text (which the endless variation of Common Worship encourages) is flawed.  A decent text placed within an appropriate context of pastoral and liturgical action is powerful enough.  And the search for “pastorally sensitive, theologically astute and liturgically fluent clergy” is somewhat less fruitful than the search for hen’s teeth!

Land of Marvels by Barry Unsworth

I read this on the plane home from Canada and maybe reading in the hours when by rights I should have been sleeping resulted in me missing some essential quality of the novel.

The cover proudly proclaims that Barry Unsworth is a Booker Prize winner and in is within the context of this claim that I found the novel lacking.  The story is fairly engaging and appealed to the bit of me that enjoys reading Agatha Christie but is that enough to place it in Booker Prize territory?

The cast of characters was made up of clichés, many of them paper thin clichés at that – there were few that were in anyway rounded and none that were insightful.  There was a worry that these stereotypes of the Western and the “Arab” were in fact supporting racist assumptions – you can give Agatha Christie some degree of flexibility as she was writing in different era, and so we can hold a critical distance to some of the less enlightened depictions of non-Western characters, but for Barry Unsworth, publishing in 2009, to be deploying the simpleton chai wallah as the basis of his non-Western characters is unsatisfactory.

 

If you have a few hours that need filling with light reading this book “would do” but to be honest my recommendation is to avoid it. 

Mimosa by Susan Wilkinson

The Mimosa was the ship which carried the first Welsh colonists to Patagonia.  Patagonia is the only significant Welsh-speaking community overseas and therefore there is a special affection for it, especially because the life of the early colony was far from easy and on more than one occasion it found itself at the point of collapse.

This book takes perhaps an eccentric approach of chronicling the “life and times” of the Mimosa, such that while the voyage to Patagonia does get special attention it does not dominate the book - and the life of the colony after Mimosa departed is only mentioned incidentally (there are of course plenty of other sources for the story of the colony).

The Mimosa was built in the middle of the 19^th Century in a period of unbelievable change, change which was in part driven by developments in shipping and in part driving the development of shipping.  Therefore the account of this ship’s working life is an excellent key to unlock the period. 

There were little facts that fascinated me as someone working with shipping – for example I knew that ships have to be registered in 64 equal shares, I knew this was an antiquated practice, but I didn’t know that it dates all the way back to the merchants of ancient Rhodes!

In giving the wider story of Mimosa you gain a greater context to the voyage to Patagonia for those first colonists.  We tend to focus our current attention on the negative aspects of British Imperialism (and there are undeniably many such negative aspects).  The “colonists” of Patagonia do not fit into that narrative – they left in order to save there language in the face of ever increasing Anglicisation – as the “Modern” world was born monoglot welsh-speaking life was under threat.  This small poor group of new “Patagonians” are perhaps the anthesis of the arrogantly striding Empire Builder in his pith helmet…

The Radical Disciple by John Stott

This is the final book of an undeniable giant within the English speaking Christian world but it was for me something of a disappointment. 

Having had it on my Amazon Wishlist since its publication (and so before John Stott’s death) I only recently ordered it and read it sat on the beach last weekend. 

I think the disappointment comes from your reference point with the word “Radical” in the title.  Stott divides the book into 8 themes within discipleship which he feels are often overlooked.  Shining a spotlight on them is the essence of his claim to radicalism but I struggle to recognise a Christianity that could continue while overlooking these issues.  Is it that within the depths “Orthodox” Evangelicalism, which is the mainstay of Stott’s audience, Biblical Legalism has allowed them to drift so far from the spirit of the Gospel?

For example one of the themes is “Simplicity” – I read it wondering to what extent it really needed pointing out that wealth is problematic to the Christian.  Perhaps this is written as a challenge to “Health and Wealth” ministries (indeed another of the themes is “Death”).

I don’t want to give this book too much of a hard time, I am not within its target audience.  It is not that I had a problem with what Stott is saying here, just that it left me muttering “No S**T Sherlock…”. If there are people claiming to be Christian for whom this book is “news” then it is a great thing that someone with the authority of John Stott has offered them a wake up call.