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The Dean of Norwich, the Very Rev Jane Hedges, slides down the helter skelter. The Rev Andy Bryant
insists the funfair ride has a ‘serious intent’. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA/Guardian
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Rochester Cathedral's nine-hole, bridge-themed crazy golf course divided opinion. The cathedral said it hoped visitors would learn about faith, building "both emotional and physical bridges". Opponents described the move as sacrilege here and here.
There will be vastly more room in Norwich Cathedral unless there has been a change in fortune. Responding to the fact that the 2011 census highlighted that the City of Norwich was rated the most godless city in England, the then Communications Director for the Diocese of Norwich, the Venerable Jan McFarlane, said the good people of Norwich are 'doing their church-going differently'!" - ie, staying away.
Such inventiveness earned the archdeacon promotion to Bishop of Repton! Perhaps the Canon seeks to emulate her success but in today's Church of England his sex is against him.
As for providing an opportunity to view the ceiling, the helter skelter more likely provides yet another opportunity for racing to the bottom in the Church of England - no pun intended.
The Helter Skelter beats the Majestas any day of the week for me. When are Llandaff going to get rid of the monstrosity?
ReplyDeleteIt will be painted in rainbow colours, covered in tinsel and all the figurines replaced with unicorns long before it's disposed of.
DeleteI'd be surprised if Llandaff could organise anything like a helter skelter. Even a crazy golf course would be too much like hard work for the Dean and his little friends.
DeleteThe best they could manage is an end of the pier-style revue show, with a few camp thesps, some circus freaks and cheesy organ music. Wait a minute, that's a typical Sunday at Llandaff!
...and we all thought that messy church had plumbed the depths of tom foolery. This childish prank strips the CofE of the last vestige of authority.
ReplyDeleteNot sure you get to keep the title 'rev' let alone 'very rev' if you are photographed doing that.
ReplyDeleteDean Hedges is well known to be chasing a purple shirt (have a look at her posing effort at the wedding of William and Kate when she was at St Pauls), no doubt she will be translated to a historic See within the next year or so (maybe York?)
DeletePostie
correction: Westminster Abbey, not St Pauls
DeletePostie
Some female clerics wear a purple shirt, indistinguishable from episcopal purple, even though they remain vicars. I don't recall a male behaving similarly. It is a dead giveaway.
ReplyDeleteRob
How come the Tower of Babel springs into my mind?
ReplyDeleteIf this is mission ( as the lie goes) .....why do they charge £2 per "slide"???
ReplyDeleteIt's bad taste fund raising!
I hate to spoil the party, but I think a little more historical literacy could be brought to be on this particular post, AB. In the Middle Ages, cathedral naves were very much an extension of the market place, where people would meet to transact business, and were even places of secular entertainment. That's why many cathedrals (e.g. Exeter) employed a dog whipper, for example. Worship was reserved to the screened-off Quire, from which most people were excluded. It was only after those earnest bores that ushered-in the Reformation got their sticky fingers on the situation that things became more sedate and seriousness.
ReplyDeleteThe sacred/secular divide in the Middle Ages was less pronounced than it is today (just look at the texts of carols from that period). Only after the Reformation and during the Enlightenment did the boundaries become more pronounced. In that sense, I wouldn't say that Norwich and Rochester are being entirely novel.
The question worthy of consideration is how do cathedrals become places of mission (which they are undoubtedly are - and far more people are drawn to worship in them than the average parish church) without losing their essential gravitas?
Far more important: go farther back to the practice of Jesus, and reflect on his views of the use of his Father's house.
DeleteRob
I agree that the reformation and the puritanism which came in its wake inaugurated the 'po-faced' tendency which, historically, has marked much of British Christianity in subsequent centuries. In principle I agree that there's nothing intrinsically wrong with whoopies of various sorts in naves.
DeleteBut the difference, I suspect, is that the mediaeval church cheerfully went along with all sorts of fun things going on in naves, outside the times when they were needed for worship, because it was confident and, in its confidence, relaxed.
Whereas the contemporary Anglican church instigates things like this as rather desperate gimmicks and wheezes, which the proponents mount as yet another stab at demonstrating 'relevance', but which in reality are merely indicators of loss of confidence, conviction and direction.
Excellent comment Athelstan.
ReplyDeleteNothing wrong with'whoopies' in the nave? Lord help us! There is simply no arguing with a mindset that seems incapable of reverence, and of showing fitting behaviour in God's house. Sad nevertheless, and caused, I suspect, by Protestantism of a certain sort, which views worship as entertainment.
ReplyDeleteRob
@ Anonymous:
DeleteI think that you're right about the increasing tendency, in Britain at least, to conflate worship and entertainment, which seems to me to have its roots in a sort of steady institutional loss of nerve within mainstream non-RC Christian communions in Britain which goes back nearly six decades - at least to the 'Honest to God' debate in the early 1960s. The attempt to offer an 'entertainment menu' does rather readily suggest some gnawing doubt that the Gospel, the life in Christ and personal discipleship isn't enough any more.
But then if the emphasis isn't to be so much the Church as the extension of the Incarnation and the context for living the common life in the Body of Christ, as L S Thornton put it, but rather on keeping the ecclesiastical show on the road in its familiar institutional shape, perhaps it isn't! 'All this, methinks, is for want of faith only', as some 16th century bishop said of the early reformation controversies?
I recall too a parish priest writing to the letters column of the 'Church Times' back in the early 1970s, in which he offered the opinion that the Catholic movement within British Anglicanism seemed to have 'lost conviction'. Most 'letters to the editor' in that journal excited minimal if any response from the readership - a couple of weeks at most. But 'Has Catholicism Lost Conviction?' excited a correspondence that lasted week after week - maybe a couple of months in all. Evidently the correspondent's suggestion that there was a chronic loss of nerve struck a considerable chord. And forty years later, you can see their point!
But none of that greatly bothered the mediaeval western church, which, prior to the reformation, was little troubled with loss of nerve. The division, as Athelstan has noted here, between secular and sacred was perceived differently in that era than it came to be in post-reformation times. Cathedrals, abbeys and collegiate churches were routinely both the largest and the only public buildings in towns and cities and their naves were seen as convenient - and dry! - locations for a wide variety of community activities, secular as well as religious - not excluding some of a 'whoopie' nature, albeit, naturally, whoopies of the mediaeval type! As long as the accepted ground rules were followed - the spiritual took precedence over the secular if the nave were needed, there was no violent disorder or gross breach of the generally accepted behaviours of the era, and there was no sacrilege of sanctuary or shrine, no one thought anything much of secular life permeating naves.
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ReplyDeleteWhere do I stop? I don't come into it. The current antics in Anglican cathedrals have nothing to do with me.
DeleteI just observe and, since the issue's been raised here on this blog, comment on it!
PP. Just seen this picture of the high Altar at Peterborough Cathedral with some huge earth orb with a tribute to Gaia, are we seeing the cathedrals entering the entertainment industry.
ReplyDeletehttps://scontent-lhr3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/fr/cp0/e15/q65/68865626_2356038991110494_5195550276441866240_o.jpg?_nc_cat=106&efg=eyJpIjoidCJ9&_nc_oc=AQnP1T4Purt4yqSbSUv2iOF5zomh9o99gdoizrhMPwlcOgLUsV44SF-pl1EHwukz_617BOYH3tzw59geREdGTAX2&_nc_ht=scontent-lhr3-1.xx&oh=422cceef2c08ece3b28a79b4d2b23f10&oe=5DCA3111
I seem to recall an English cathedral appointing a stipendiary 'director of tourism and marketing' though I think they devised a more elegant title than that for him!
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