SOMETIMES YOU GET IT WRONG . . .

Partly because I have spent my professional life in the sixteenth century and its language, and partly because I became an Anglican by falling in love with the texts of Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, I have always preferred to read the liturgy there and the Scriptural passages in the 1611 Authorised Version. Until yesterday, that is; when the lectionary proposed reading St Paul's Epistle to the Romans and when, reading it in the AV, I found my eyes glazing over and realised that I understood not three words together of a text that I thought I knew.

So I went to a website I have come to like a great deal: Bible Gateway, where one can look up any passage in the Bible in a vast number of different versions and in a number of languages. I typed in "Romans 1" and was faced with the choice of versions. There are modern translations I genuinely dislike for their chattiness, but I also thought that going to other older versions, like Douai or Geneva, would probably not be a help. For the Epistle to the Romans is a notoriously theoretical and difficult letter of Paul's -- Karl Barth's most famous work is a book-length study of it --, so a modern version was after all indicated.

Then I remembered that when I was a boy my father used to read us a passage of Scripture at Sunday breakfast, and that these often came from a volume called Letters to Young Churches, translated into modern English by J.B. Phillips. So within the list on Bible Gateway I looked for the name, and found the J.B. Phillips Bible. The result you can follow here: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+1&version=PHILLIPS .

I started reading, and found I couldn't stop: it was fascinating, intelligent, challenging and wholly engrossing. My eyes glued to the screen, I read all 16 chapters. And at the end, I realised that there are moments when one's love for Renaissance English can be a hindrance rather than a help. A sobering thought, entirely suitable for Lent.

J.B. Phillips

COMFORT YE MY PEOPLE?

Fernandel as Don Camillo

Is Christianity no longer a religion for ordinary people?

 This sounds peculiar, I know; but it has been haunting me for a long time. There is, I admit, a splendid congruence between St Paul on the one hand and, say, Pope Francis on the other: both keep hammering away at the extraordinary nature of discipleship, the total availability expected of all followers of Christ, the complete scission beteen them and the “world”, the prodigies of charity we are called upon to perform, the complete solidarity we are expected to show at all times of day, week, or year with the world’s poor and miserable, the entire purity our motives and behaviour must exhibit, and the fact that, as disciples, everyone calling himself a Christian is expected to follow the Master to the Cross, to be nailed there like St Peter or stoned like St Stephen.

 This is the voice of the 21^st-century Church, faced with minority status, massive desertion, indifference on the part of both bond traders and jobless single mothers, and the loss of everything that gave its members simple joys and pleasures.

 Now go back to Giovannino Guareschi’s Don Camillo. Or to the Dutch novelist Aart van der Leeuw’s I and my Minstrel. They show a world – admittedly not in a mode of gritty naturalism – where a village can have a Catholic priest and a Communist mayor, where the former can discuss with the figure on the Cross, where a Sunday can begin with a Mass and end with a dance, where ordinary life (in other words) can be blessed by the priest’s holy water and where ordinary folk can be encouraged, shriven when penitent, and feel that their daily round, with all its difficulties, is regarded by a Father’s benevolent and smiling eye.

 Could it be – I sometimes wonder – that we have put the cart before the horse? That the changes in our Church are not, in fact, a reaction to its desertion by thousands but that said desertion is, on the contrary, at least in part a reaction to the changes?

 There were hundreds, if not thousands, that were touched, healed, fed by Jesus, all over Galilee and points South. There were twelve – count them, twelve – disciples, eleven of whom skedaddled on Good Friday; there were at most 72 apostles, sent to convert the planet. What about the others? What happened to the Roman officer, to the Samaritan woman, to the healed epileptic, to the diners at Emmaus, afterwards?

 To want to re-institute a Church that will bless daily life, expect confession but offer absolution, accompany ordinary people in their problems while projecting a timeless and benevolent authority, is nowadays to put oneself beyond the Pale. I find it deeply sad that not only the Anglican Eucharist but the Catholic Mass no longer offers absolution following the General Confession, giving the worshipper instead only the thin gruel of a conditional.

 The world does not consist only of wealthy financiers on the one hand and immigrant drug dealers in the housing projects on the other. The world mostly consists of simple people doing their best in difficulties ranging from indigence to Alzheimer’s. What they need from the Church is, among other things, a sense of stability, of visibility, of serenity, of being there for them – not (as Pope Francis said at the beginning of his Papacy but has largely negated since) as an activist NGO but as the father and mother they lack, as the kindly encouraging parent or grandparent missing in their world. Not the urgent and absolute love of a saint ready to be stoned for them: the comforting practical love of a family member ready to take them in for a meal, a song, a dance, and a good sleep. They need priests visible in cassocks, nuns visible in habits, timeless liturgies, and a blessing at the end of the day.  

P.S. The original of Guareschi's Don Camillo, Don Camillo Valota, was not only a parish priest but a fighter with the Partisans during World War II and a prisoner in two concentration camps.

DAY OF TWO GIANTS

Two “pillars of the church”. Most of us tend to prefer Peter: he was more like us – impulsive, emotional, lurching from insight and courage to idiocy and cowardice. And yet it was him that Jesus picked out to take on the responsibility of the work on earth, afterwards. Of Paul, too many people nowadays remember mainly his strictures on the role of women, in marriage and in the church, which were of course perfectly in tune with Middle Eastern mores at the time. Paul was an uncompromising character, not entirely devoid of fanaticism. He had been a kind of mullah, stoning, arresting and crucifying supposed apostates, until he was hit hard on the road to Damascus – not a comfortable place, even to this day. Then he went through metanoia, a 180-degree turn, but he remained quite as uncompromising as before. In today’s reading, he tells his protégé Timothy just how tough he’s been, how he’s hung in there, run the race, stuck it out; now all he has left to do is cross the finish line and he will get the winner’s reward. Not really an attractive speech, though you can imagine it coming from a veteran’s chapped lips. A little more modesty, we might think. Yet if you look at all he did, and at all the communities he founded, maintained, blew new life into, gave hell to, you do see his point. We admire Paul; but we can’t help liking Peter, who wept at cock-crow.

Illustration: El Greco, "St Peter and St Paul", at the Hermitage, St Petersburg