The Beaker Collect for the World Cup

Inspired by the Church of England's prayer, the Beaker Folk of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (but not Epsom) has released its own World Cup Prayer. I am delighted to share it with you.

Nativity of Thomas Hardy (1840)

(two besmocked yokels lean over a gate)

Yokel 1: It be that Thomas Hardy's birthday then 

Yokel 2: That it be.

Y1: Shall us goo and wish en well?

Y2: Mortal craters like us voäkes can't do that.

Y1: Why's that?

Y2: Because he's dead and gone, as we all shall be.

Y1: Shall us wish en "Happy Heavenly Birthday" then? Like on Facebook?

Thomas Hardy: No. For an afterlife is but a human invention, to make the modern life more bearable for us as we walk the shaggy heaths below the empty Wessex skies.

Y2: How come you can talk to us then?

TH: Because I am but the personification - the anthropomorphization, if you will - of your hopes for what comes beyond the grave. Incidentally, any chance of getting my ashes back from Westminster Abbey? I'm weary of people treading on me, and never wanted to be there.

Y1: If this is our imagination how can you say words like anthroponilification which we unlearned yokels don't even know?

TH: Bugger. I knew I'd get caught out if I got sucked into the discussion.

Y2: Art coming to Peter's Finger for a pretty drop of tipple?

TH: No. I've got tea and crumpets with TS Eliot.

Y1: And Peter's Finger has been turned into a trendy suburban house.

Y2: The Convivial Rabbit then?

Y1 Wi' all ny heart. It's more expensive than the Royal Oak, but a much nicer place.

When Trinity Sunday coincides with Brian Harvey Day

It occasionally happens that Trinity Sunday coincides with Brian Harvey Day.

On 31st May 2005, Brian Harvey of the boy band East 17 ran over himself with his own car after eating too many jacket potatoes.

And I looked into the history - sometimes troubled, it has to be said, of Brian Harvey and East 17. And I noticed that after many line up changes, only one original member of what is called E-17 now is still in the band. I'm not even convinced that they're all from Walthamstow.

And this isn't unusual, of course. People of a different generation will remember Syston's finest, Showaddywaddy. Still touring. Only one member left from the good old days though.

Or Genesis fans will argue that Genesis weren't Genesis when Peter Gabriel left. Or Steve Hackett. Or Phil Collins. And were Take That still Take That when Robbie left? Or when Jason did?

We don't apply the same criteria to other groupings of course. Nobody claims Liverpool aren't the same football club because the original line-up aren't still playing. It's the club that matters. Nobody says the London Symphony Orchestra aren't the same organisation as when they were founded, or Marks and Spencer fundamentally changed when Spencer left the band.

And I think we can learn a lot about the Trinity from that.

Melt Down in the Moot House

And so as the temperature passed 90°F in the Moot House this afternoon, we had to face a terrible fact.

Not that the world is becoming increasingly hot, though that is disturbing.

Not that the most powerful men in the planet are engaged in a ceaseless flurry of activity to stoke up the warming. Through "drill, baby drill," and endless unnecessary data centres, churning out pictures of trolls carrying badly-rendered Union Jacks and American flags in the cause of "patriotism". Because what says "authentically Ingerlish" more than trolls with bizarre fingers and back-to-front Union Jacks in a computer-generated image that costs the earth?

No.

Worse even than that.

The tea lights have all melted.

So we have spent the afternoon combining them into a giant tea light in the shape of Andy Burnham, "King of the North". Whose puzzled looks and puffing cheeks are now topped by a flame rising from the top of his head, as we celebrate the Feast of St Andy. So we will eat us black pudding pies this evening, and prepare for the liberation of England from something undefinable by a bloke we'd half forgotten. Or, at least, its liberation until in 2 years' time the Labour party panics at the state of the polls and installs Angela Rayner, Jess Phillips or Nigel Farage.

Still - I hope all the Beaker Folk enjoy the Northern Pie Experience. We've packed plenty of tripe in with the black pudding. You can't get much more authentically northern than that.

Trinity Sunday Sermon - pre-release

Every year we get the stress from the people preaching on Easter Sunday. The illustrations that are blatantly heretical. The crying because the vicar has gone away and left the curate to preach (mostly the congregation crying rather than the curate).

So I'm saving you the trouble.

Before you even get near Trinity Sunday. 

It's a traditional three-point sermon, based on insights from three theologians:

1. 'Tis mystery all (Charles Wesley)

2. It's a mystery (Toyah Wilcox)

3. A mystery it is (Yoda)

We may have the wrong Yoder.

St Walpurga's Blight

That's the trouble with such a dry spring.

We lit the Walpurgisnacht / Beltane Wicker person. Next thing we knew the Moot House was surrounded by flame. All the dry grass was just asking for it.

Thankfully the Moot House is safe. After its repeated explosions in the Noughties, we built it fire proof. 

But the potatoes we put in for baking at the bottom of the Wicker Person are probably not fit for consumption.

Looks like it's large fries from McDonald's in Kingston again.

Doored Ash

Why do Anglicans talk about "Communion by Extension" and "(Care) Home Communion"? 

When they could just  call it "Delivereucharist"?

The Local Primary Visit to Church

It is a Truth Universally Acknowledged that any Primary School trip to see the local parish church will end up with at least thirty minutes' worth of focusing on death.

You will tell jolly stories about harvest festivals. About marriages. You can let them splash water in the font.

Feel free to point out the stained glass windows, showing happy tales of Noah's Ark (kids aren't the slightest gone-out about the mass drownings). Let them see happy scenes of hills and sheep.

"Please - look at the lovely sheep. Not the inscription."

Explain what a pipe organ is for. Show them a hymn book. If of the right churchpersonship, discuss the electric guitar on its stand, and the drum kit.

It will be of no avail.

Let them have one nanosecond to consider. And you will hear the fateful words.

"My grandad was buried here."

That's all it takes.

You will be asked why it is that all dead people conveniently die in churchyards.

You will be told that "Nanny died." You will sympathise profoundly that they have lost their grandmother. Say a prayer for Nanny. Offer to help them light a tea light for Nanny.

Then find out that "Nanny" was the gerbil. The grandmothers are respectively called "Gaga" and "Granski" or somesuch. But still, maybe the helium balloon you were conned into sending up for Nanny will have helped with the healing.

Likewise with "Poppa". You thought it was a much-loved family dog? It was great-grandad.

You will be asked if the altar is that size because coffins fit on it so well. You will realise that small children think the only reason churches exist is to provide a portal between this world and the underworld. You will be asked how quickly people become skeletons, whether the "memento mori" skulls on the wall are real. Some children will become nervous of walking on the church floor in case they're treading on dead people.

You wanted to share a happy story of living worship, a living God, a living church.

But the six-year-olds will tell you that you walk among the dead. That the shades are around you. That your building exists only to propel souls into the next life. You will reflect that, based on the inscriptions on the wall, they may be right. You will be drawn into the vortex of realising that all life is doomed to end, all efforts consigned to futility.

And then you'll give them each a bookmark.

A tale of four Marys

Four Marys stood at the cross.

Three Marys went to the tomb.

Two Marys held Jesus' feet 

And the other Mary's husband, Cl(e)opas said "we're going home."

And Mary said, "but he's alive."

And Cleopas said, "we're going home."

And Mary said, "But Mary Magdalene said..." 

And Cleopas said, "we're going home."

And Mary said, "but I saw..." 

And Cleopas got his cloak.

So they set out for Emmaus.

But there was a third who walked with them,

And he broke bread.

And disappeared.

And Mary said, "Didn't I tell you?"

And Cleopas said, "Let's go back to Jerusalem. And tell them the wonderful thing I've seen."

When MAGA went too far

And the King said to them, I was a different colour, and you deported me. I was hungry and you cut off my support. I was sick, and you removed Medicaid. I was oppressed, and you said you'd wipe out my civilisation.

And I let all that go 

But then you posted a picture of yourself trying to look like me.

And enough was enough. Nobody's gonna stand for that.

The Goddess Eostre and the Killer Vampire Bunny-Wunny

Back before the First World War broke out, there was an idea that civilisation was moving forwards and the sum of human knowledge increasing.

Now, I don't know if the sum of human knowledge is increasing these days. But I reckon if it is, the distribution of human knowledge is pretty lumpy.

Take the annual claim expressed by Facebookers that "Easter is a pagan festival". Which I may have mentioned once or twice before.

So taking the claims in turn: they claim that Easter stole the Spring Equinox from the festival of Eostre. Who is probably well-enough attested to accept she was regarded as a goddess by the West Germanic tribes. The main source for her is an 8th Century work by Bede, an Anglo-Saxon Christian, who tells us that the month of April in Old English was named after her. And therefore the feast of "Easter" got its name from her.

So the West Germanic races stole a feast, invented the concept of the Christian "Easter" and named it after her. The modern Eostre-supporters claim the Solstice was named "Ostara" after her. There's no actual evidence for this, and of course "Ostara" doesn't fall in "Eostre-monat". It falls in March.

So far so wacky, proof that anyone who claims that Easter (a celebration dating back to 2nd century Turkey) is based on Eostre (probably an Anglo-Saxon goddess, first named in the 8th century) has been enjoying some festive magic mushrooms. Outside the rain-blighted western Germanic coasts, Easter has a name like "Pasch" that derives from the Hebrew/Aramaic word from Passover. Which it would. Because of course Christianity took its origins (and the principles of its dating) from Passover, the Jewish feast. Not a pagan feast at all. No offence to modern Pagans, who are a kindly and gentle nature-loving bunch in my experience.

But hang on a mo.

What sort of goddess was Eostre? Given we know so little about her. 

Well, obviously she was a Germanic goddess. Do we know anything about Germanic deities in general? 

They had equivalents in Norse deities. Where they were frequently pretty bloodthirsty. The way to get into Valhalla was to die in battle.

And the Anglo-Saxons themselves. Were they peace-and-nature-loving hippies, tripping around saying hello to trees and flowers? Did they think the stars were God's daisy-chain?

Or had they just spent a couple of hundred years before Bede's time, driving the Celtic (also pagan) people of the British isles off to the fringes by a combination of invasion, genocide, and inter-breeding? 

Yes, second one.

So she had mates like Woden, and Thunor. The people who worshipped her were warriors and invaders. 

And then Jacob Grimm suggested her animal familiar may have been the hare. No evidence for this, just made it up. 

So let's pretend for a minute that the Eostre the Angles and Saxons may have worshipped had a pet hare or bunny. What sort of lagomorph might it be? One that just leaps around in spring, mating and eating carrots?

Or Monty Python's Rabbit of Caerbannog? The neck-biting monster?

Break out the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch is all I have to say on the matter.