A friend who belongs to the Masonic Order once complained that attendance at his Lodge meeting had been so thin that he had played a number of roles to allow the evening’s proceedings to take place, at one point this meant answering his own question. I laughed at the thought of it. He is someone who is always on the edge of a joke or a story and a sense of the absurd cannot have been lost on him.

The Masons are a public lot these days, details of the lodges are readily available , and typing ‘masonic rituals’ into Google will produce any number of possible links. However absurd the whole thing may seem to me, I would never mock those involved; partly because I have friends who find the camaraderie of the organization to be something important, partly because when I look at those who line up to oppose them, I know whose company I would prefer. Vehement opponents have included Hitler, Stalin, the Papacy, anti-Semitic groups, conspiracy theorists (look how many times ‘Jews and Freemasons’ are used in the same sentence), neo-Nazi groups, fundamentalist Protestants, and just about every other extremist group one can imagine.

Perhaps there is something in the absurd that keeps us humble, that stops us becoming arrogant about ourselves. I wonder what Robbie Burns and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would have been like at their respective lodge meetings? Is it possible that Mozart would not have roared with laughter at a lodge officer having to answer his own questions? Or that Rabbie the poet would not have pondered how the best laid plans ‘gang aft agley’? Absurdity helps us retain a sense of perspective.

Without a sense of the absurd, there would be times that the Church of Ireland would be impossible. The Church of Ireland Directory has a Monty Python quality about it at times. Most bishops have more than one diocese – there is one diocese that has no cathedral and just one church; there is another that has no cathedral, but two parishes and two clergy, one of whom is Archdeacon; there is another diocese that has one parish, but this includes a cathedral, so the rector is also dean. One diocese with nine parishes has a bishop, two archdeacons, two deans, a provost and a few canons; most clergy are members of at least one cathedral chapter. Yet I would not mock it, because there is, in the absurdity of it all, a great egalitarian feeling. When everyone is someone, it is very hard for anyone to get above themselves. We would never become deferential towards bishops in the way that sometimes happens with our English brothers and sisters. I would also be mindful that through the years when Ireland was dominated by the Catholic Church, the tiny Church of Ireland community remained a voice for dissent and freedom of conscience.

I have no intention of ever being in anyone’s lodge, and I do think that there might be space for some rationalization of the Church of Ireland in the interests of good stewardship, but preserving a sense of the absurd is important. It is when people start taking themselves too seriously that the way is open for dictators and totalitarianism (and for popes who think they can recover their medieval status).

It’s hard to imagine life in this house in the 1950s; it’s hard to imagine Rectory life in rural Ireland.  Life in rural Ireland was frugal for everyone, and the Rectory would have been no exception.

The Rector would have had a good suit for Sundays and an older one for weekdays, perhaps a sports jacket and trousers to add variety; a black stock and starched white linen clerical collar underneath the jacket. Casual clothes were a luxury, time off would have spent in the clothes that were no longer for good wear.  A sports jacket and Trinity College tie were the marks of a clergyman on his holidays.

Rectories were Victorian, too big for a salary of a few hundred pounds a year. No more than a couple of rooms could be heated with meagre coal fires. Draughts penetrated every window frame and doorway; if electricity had reached the parish, it would have been used sparingly, it would be one more bill that there would be a struggle to pay.

The Rector’s wife was expected to have time for the great and the good, to attend morning coffee and afternoon tea, but constantly made to feel that she was there under sufferance, that she had been invited because they felt it was the right thing to do. Dublin-dressed ladies would have looked down on her home sewn outfits; they would have regarded her appearance as dowdy and would have noticed her worn shoes.

Being a member of a Rectory family was fairly bleak. There was never money for anything. Boarding school education was possible through the bequest of people long dead and through Protestant charities, but the education only exacerbated a sense of isolation, when others talked of all they had and all they did, the Rectory child had no hope of joining the conversation.

Churches were often in poor repair, the dwindling numbers unable to maintain the fabric. The exodus of much of the Protestant population in 1922 followed by decades of economic depression left little money in any parish. The Rector was expected to somehow keep everything going, even when no-one could suggest how this might be possible.

Yet in the midst of the bad things, maybe ministry was easier. People came to church, they said their prayers, they still believed in the God to whom they prayed at Morning Prayer each Sunday morning. Many of those who sat in the pews Sunday by Sunday needed no Prayer Book; they knew the 16th Century prose of Thomas Cranmer off by heart.

Fifty years ago, things were different.  “What has happened?” asked someone last night.

“People have changed”, I said.

Clergy have changed as well.  We will fly down to Bordeaux for ten days in September;  after Christmas, we will go to Austria to go skiing for a week with friends; things unimaginable for my counterparts half a century ago, yet there are moments when I sometimes wish that I was driving an Austin A30 through villages and townlands untouched by the years of the Celtic Tiger.

But then, the people who shaped my picture of fifty years ago would tell me that none of them would wish to return to such times.

The same prelate seemed to have developed a jaundiced view of episcopacy, for he complained that the day he became a bishop was the last day that anyone told him the truth.

Bishops would presumably argue that ‘collegiality’ means they must measure their remarks against the positions taken and comments made by their colleagues.  From the point of view of someone at the bottom rung of the ladder of clerical hierarchy, never having so much as risen to the humble rank of rural dean, the lance corporals of the church, most bishops appear to hide behind their purple shirts.  Hardly one of them says anything of substance and statements issued by them collectively are so nuanced that they are as meaningful as a weather forecast that says it might be wet and it might be dry.  The purple is meant to signify the sacrifice they are prepared to make as leaders of the church; it would seem unwise to rely on too many of them if it came to a fight.

If the ordination service signifies the loss of backbone, the mitre seems to mark the loss of hearing.

There is a trend in the Church of Ireland towards the concentration of power in fewer hands; this being done so, it is argued, to better equip the church for its mission.

Yet such a concentration is contrary to the model of the New Testament, where power is completely dispersed; it is contrary to contemporary missiological movements, where the basic ecclesial communities within the Roman Catholic tradition, and the cell churches within the evangelical tradition, emphasize localness and autonomy; it is even contrary to the secular principle of subsidiarity, whereby decisions are meant to be taken at the lowest possible level.

It is, of course, utterly pointless writing this because no-one is going to listen anyway.  Stuff on the internet is regarded as no more than grumbling in the ranks.  The fact that people vote with their feet, by simply not appearing on Sunday mornings, when they have decisions foisted on them is treated as no more than an inconvenient detail.  And it is no good to say, ‘I told you so’; the mitre is soundproofing against all criticism.

CHURCH OF IRELAND

PHONE: 67359

THE IRISH LAND FINANCE COMPANY LTD
33 KILDARE STREET
DUBLIN

September, 1956
It has been thought advisable to draw the attention of the clergy to one method whereby some check may be applied to the continuing decrease in Church population, this being a very serious matter in many parishes, and one which, at Diocesan level, gives rise to grave concern for the future well-being of our Church.

The Irish Land Finance Company is in a position to lend sums of money to approved applicants with the object of establishing them on their own farms. Sons of farmers may thus be enabled to marry at an earller age than is often possible, and may remain working on the land instead of going abroad. Advances are also made for other purposes at the discretion of the Directors.

Repayment of capital by borrowers is expected within 10 years and the rate of interest charged is governed by current interest. The Board of Directors meets once a month and is composed of twelve gentlemen of large experience from different parts of the country, and includes seven Directors nominated by the Representative Church Body. They give their services free of all fees or expenses.

The clergy are requested to bear in mind that the Company is most anxious to assist any suitable parishioner, now or in the future; and to make a note of the address given.

Is that where things had reached by 1956?

The church in the New Testament grew through its preaching and through the fellowship people found amongst its members; nineteen centuries later the Church of Ireland was seeking to survive through loans to bachelor farmers.

Certainly, it had to cope with the effects of the Roman Catholic Ne Temere decree, which dictated that the children of inter-church marriages should be brought up as Roman Catholics,and the virulent anti-Protestant stance of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, who while Archbishop of Dublin seemed at times to be more powerful than the government, but trying to buy a future seems, in retrospect, a road to nowhere.  The failure of the approach is manifest in the fact that it would be forty years later before the decline in Church of Ireland numbers was arrested.

Wouldn’t Jesus have done things very differently?  But if Jesus had been in charge, neither church would have turned out the way it did.

Most disturbing of all, Googling the Irish Land Finance Company shows its registered office in 1926 being not in Dublin, but in Co Laois.  Its address was:

The Irish Land Finance Company, Limited.
Registered Offices: The Rectory, Mountrath, Queen’s Co.

That’s my address!

It’s time to do things differently.

The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers.

Growing up in the British Welfare State in an age where national government progressively intervened more and more in people’s lives, Jung’s words would have seemed like something from a bygone age.  As the power of the nation-state has been superseded by supra-national European institutions and trans-national corporations, to assert the role of the individual seems odd; what is there a single person can do in the face of such overwhelming power?

Strangely, the growth of state power has coincided with increasing institutional impotence; the massive amount of legislation on the statute books is powerless to prevent simple anti-social behaviour; the huge state bodies struggle to achieve even the most minor of changes.  Whether the inability to effect change is rooted in bureaucratic inertia, legislation simply not being implemented, or in disregard for authority, people simply ignoring what the politicians tell them.

The collapse of institutional authority has been far greater in the church, where the response to statements, if there is a response at all, has increasingly been , “ so what?”

The Church of Ireland General Synod once merited national news coverage in Ireland, but in the space of a decade has disappeared from the scanner, barely gaining brief mention on the inside pages of a newspaper.  The church as an institution persists in behaving as it did in the past, as though keeping things going as they were for decades will somehow usher in some new age; yet all the while there is a crumbling at the edges.

Having completed 14 days in a new incumbency, there is the realization that even deep in rural Ireland, in a parish midway between Dublin and Limerick, the old rules are losing their authority, that old ties and old understandings no longer hold sway.  Relying on external events to shape the future of the parish will be a futile exercise; the great business of ecclesiastical life is profoundly unimportant in local communities.  Godly individuals will shape the future of the parish, as godly individuals shaped the history of the church through the pages of the Acts of the Apostles.  It is a prospect that is at once encouraging and frightening.  The buck will stop not with any high office or institutional gathering, but with a handful of people unaware of the responsibility they bear.

Randomness was frowned upon at college.  There was a prescribed way of leading worship.  Those doing the prescribing had little experience of actual parishes.  The wearing of the black cassock at church services was, we were told, to eliminate individuality.  In Dublin, when I suggested that students training with me for ordination put expression into leading worship and maybe explain the odd thing, I was told by someone who claimed to know about about such things that I was “over-determining the liturgy”.  What did that mean? Don’t ask me.

We have not gone much beyond the thinking that undergirded the Latin Mass, the defence for which was that it was the same everywhere.  We do the predictable, and we do the dull. In a post-modern culture, where the random is the ordinary, we still think guitars and drums are being contemporary, and we think that we will survive by staying in the 1950s.

Thoughts about our dullness came to mind sitting in Langton’s in Kilkenny this evening to watch Duke Special in concert.

Duke Special’s music defies categorisation. Two sets were played: The Silent World of Hector Mann – twelve songs inspired by the twelve films made by the silent movie actor, and Mother Courage and Her Children, songs written to words by Bertolt Brecht, with an encore of a couple of familiar songs

Our daughter delights in things she describes as “random”; things out of the ordinary, things that maybe express individuality and creativity.  Why does Duke Special do half the stuff he does?  Why did he wind up a gramophone and come to sit in the auditorium to listen?  Why did he run upstairs to lead the singing of a song during the encore?

Perhaps it’s about identity; about leaving a mark; about being unafraid of the imagination. He is unpredictable, undefinable, unashamedly fun.

In ecclesiastical terms, Duke Special would be a Protestant.  He does not conform; he trusts his own instincts; he is unconstrained by convention.

The bland liberal conventionality that pervades much of church life is stifling; it is not engaging people and cannot cope with a world filled with randomness.

If there is a church version of Duke Special, he is needed.  Continue as we are and we will become as forgotten as poor Hector Mann.

What was to be done?  The church was sustained by a faithful few dozen. The rector raised the matter at a vestry meeting. “Rector”, said a vestryman, “could we not get a table from a church which is closed”.  So the Rector made inquiries. Sure enough, the church at Clonmellon in Co Westmeath had closed now the last two faithful ladies had been promoted to glory.

The necessary authorities agreed to the acquisition and one fine day in June 1995, the Rector, with two members of the vestry, ventured down to collect the Clonmellon table.

The table was being kept at Athboy church.  It was loaded into a trailer and it was felt that it would be respectful to visit the church from which the table had come.  In memory, gaining access to Clonmellon church included going to a pub to ask for the key, but perhaps that is a piece of retrospective fancy.  The church was a sad sight: slates missing, panes of glass cracked; the interior gutted. The Rector of Ballee stood and stared at the ceiling. The building had no redeeming features and now had no friends. He thought about the people who had worshipped in this place, the children who had been baptised, those whose lives had been joined together in holy matrimony, those who ad followed the mortal remains of their loved ones into the churchyard outside. What had kept them going?

The last two old ladies, worshipping in a building which was gradually falling down, what had inspired them to come to this place on a Sunday? What thoughts had gone through their minds as they stared at the widening patch of damp?

The questions arose again this evening.  It is fifteen years since the table at Clonmellon was restored and installed in Ballee church; it is fourteen years since the Rector moved on to work elsewhere.

In none of the memories of that Irish summer’s day is there a camera.  Yet amongst a pile of photographs of children in the garden, there was appeared this evening a sequence of pictures of Clonmellon church.  As sad now as they were at the time; this place that had been dear to the hearts of its people now dead.

The last interment in the graveyard was marked by a gravestone an inscription which seemed to defy every sermon that might have been preached.  Perhaps a warning on abandoning our heritage.

After posting the above, the following was received from the Revd Roy Byrne,

Poor Clonmellon…

Clonmellon church, dedicated to St. John or St. Lucy was built c.1787. Lewis states that Clonmellon church is: “a neat structure with a handsome spire.” He also notes that it was built partly at the expense of Sir. B. Chapman, Bart. of Killua Castle. The church was repaired c.1835 at a cost of £251, which was granted by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. The parochial school was built on land provided by the Chapman family, who also built the schoolhouse. Lady Chapman provided £10 annually for the school. Under the will of Sir. B. Chapman, Bart, ten Almshouses were built in Clonmellon for aged and infirm labourers, who had each more than one acre of land, and £2 per annum.

The 1868, ‘Established Church Commission’ lists Kilallon as a permanent union of Killallon and Killua, in the village of Clonmellon under the alternate patronage of the Bishop of Meath and the Marquess of Drogheda. The incumbent is listed as Anthony Blackburne, in whose parish resided 172 members of the Established Church. It seems that the parish was in the process of building a new glebe-house in 1868, according to additional information in the Commission report. The church is small and relatively uninteresting. It is a very simple hall and tower church, with a battlemented tower. The “handsome spire” mentioned by Lewis must have been removed soon after he wrote about the church. The date of construction is also disputed, for the church presents an early 19th century ‘Board of First Fruits’ appearance. It is possible that the tower dates from 1787 and the church itself from the early 1800’s.

The interior of the church is plain, with clear windows – three on the south wall and an east window. The ceiling is coved and every wall and ceiling surface is covered with white plywood panelling. A lean-to galvanised iron vestry adjoins the church at the south-east wall. Following years of declining congregations and a building falling into serious disrepair, it was decided to close the church in 1990. It was later de-consecrated and the furnishings removed. It was sold on March 19th 1997.

It was a warm, sunny June afternoon in 1985 and we sat on after our Sunday lunch.  Carlow looked further on the map than our host’s manner suggested, but he knew the roads.

“Right, follow me”.  A gentle, softly spoken, country clergyman, he stepped into his Fiat Ritmo, which seemed to be the standard clerical car at the time and moved off like something at Daytona.

“Perhaps we’ll reach the main road soon and it will be easier to keep up”.

There wasn’t to be a main road; he drove in the straightest line permitted by the network of country roads. Sometimes he would wave his arm from the driver’s window to indicate a left or a right turn coming up; throwing the arm wildly above the roof if we were heading left.  Irish roads twenty-five years ago were not always what they might be and at one point he literally disappeared in a cloud of dust.  The national speed limit in those days was around 55 mph, a speed he seemed to regard as something one should average.

We reached Carlow in time, still battered from the journey.  “We had not expected to travel at such speed”.

He looked quizzically, “What speed?”

There had been a joke in college days that the fastest thing on Irish roads was a Church of Ireland Rector on a Sunday morning; racing between ditches and over potholes to take services in scattered country churches.  A classmate’s father took five services in five different churches each and every Sunday morning; local people presumably knew to avoid the road if the canon was due to be passing by.

Plain logistics are probably the biggest problem facing most country clergy; bi-location skills come with the training, it is tri- and quad-location that is a little more tricky.

Irish people have a very deep sense of place, a very strong identity with the community in which they live, and, just as it is important to understand cultures overseas in order to do effective mission, so it is important to understand the culture at home.  If the church is to have a meaningful presence, there needs to be worship each Sunday at a time that is attractive to those who might attend.  Not only that, it is important to provide worship that is rooted in the traditional culture of the communities.  No-one would go to Africa and say that communities used to singing and dancing should worship in the language of William Shakespeare, but sometimes the approach to our own communities has displayed a similar lack of sensitivity.

Trying to devise possible plans of worship for a group of six churches, scattered over a wide rural area, taxes the brain.  The services themselves will not be the problem – it is the spaces in between that will be the challenge. Anyone still have a Fiat Ritmo?

He being far cleverer than I, not a Protestant, and it being one of those arguments that was so subjective that no conclusion was possible, there seemed no value in arguing the point. Do we really not do revisionism?  Do we really not rewrite the past in our own minds so that we appear differently from the way that others might see us?  Is it the case that we don’t sometimes simply misremember things?

Revisionism is a rewriting of history and his point, I think, was that Protestants so tended towards individualist viewpoints, that no single version ever met with the endorsement of them all.  There was not a collective Protestant memory because there was not a collective Protestant tradition.  Even when a majority of Protestants have tended in one direction, there have always been dissenting voices.  The TG4 documentary in February on the execution of Tipperary IRA man George Plant was a reminder that Loyalism was not the only cause for which Protestants took up arms.  TG4’s programme was about

the execution of George Plant for the murder of an alleged IRA informer, Michael Devereux on Slievenamon Mountain in September 1940. George Plant fought in the War of Independence and the Civil War and continued his involvement in the IRA into the 1930s and 1940s. He was first tried in the Special Criminal Court for the murder, however, the case against him collapsed when witnesses withdrew sworn statements. Under new legislation, he was tried in the Military Court with the same evidence that had been withdrawn at the previous trial. He was found guilty at the second trial and executed by firing squad in Portlaoise prison on March 5th 1942. It has been described as one of the most distressing chapters of Irish legal history.

Perhaps we don’t do revisionism as a community because we cannot agree from whose perspective we might revise history, nevertheless we do rewrite scenes and scripts from an individual or even a local community perspective, maybe because revisionism or plain misremembering seem innate to human nature.

The London Underground thirty years ago was an attractive place in my memory.  Cost trains, tiled walls, polite passengers, newspaper sellers at station entrances, cast iron signs and the distinctive maps and logos.  Watching the opening sequences of Hazel O’Connor’s 1980 film “Breaking Glass”, it was astonishing to see how dark, dingy and dismal the Tube really was; not at all like the memories.

How many dark, dingy and dismal times have been rewritten in the memory?  How much does nostalgia cover the less glorious aspects of Protestant life, including the sectarianism and the snobbery?

It was pointless to argue, but we do revisionism.

Not knowing who the Beatles were in the 1960s would have had little impact upon the reality of daily life.  It might have left one open to mockery, but it would not have affected how one communicated, how one did business, how one heard news, how one went shopping, how one managed one’s finances, how one presented oneself to the world.

As great as the Beatles were, their influence did not change the way we lived.  The Internet, on the other hand, has had a profound impact in almost every area of human activity – it has, at once, shrunk and expanded the world.  Nothing is now remote, but infinite knowledge is now available.

Profound social and ethical issues are raised by questions that range from who controls information on a global basis to what intimate details are being shared in social networks.  Massive opportunities arise for those who are in the business of communicating a message.

Christians, reputedly in the business of being concerned at the issues confronting humanity and alleging that they have news to share with the world, might reasonably be expected to have some interest in the Internet.

In fact, serious Christians could surely be assumed to be running to keep up with all the developments.  Mobile broadband, Wifi hotspots, social networking, iPhone appliances: these are changing the way we live, the way we communicate, the friends we have.  Amongst the vast raft of complex issues, virtual relationships pose questions about personal morality; online trading poses questions about business morality; blog smear campaigns pose questions about political morality; the list is potentially endless.

Imagine yourself as a Christian who believed in changing the world: wouldn’t you be saying, ‘we need to look at these issues’.  Wouldn’t you be saying, ‘this is where our young people are; we need to be here’?  Wouldn’t you be saying, ‘there are an awful lot of people using the Net for an awful lot of thing; I think we should be there in the middle of it all”.

If you were part of a church committee and you wanted to engage with the 21st Century world, you would surely be urging that resources be devoted to taking the church to where the people are.  Mission work has shifted from distant lands to cyber space; but the church cannot comprehend that the world has changed.

The Church of Ireland so struggles with the 21st Century that this morning it approved the disbandment of its Internet Committee (a colleague announced this on his Facebook page using his iPhone).  Perhaps the committee had been very limited in its remit, and perhaps more might have been achieved, but instead of strengthening its resources and expanding its work, the Church of Ireland Standing Committee agreed that the Internet Committee should cease to exist.

It is a decision that is hard to comprehend.  It demonstrates a disconnectedness from reality on a par with the legendary magistrate who asked in the 1960s, “who are the Beatles?” More than that, it demonstrates a turning of the back on the world that Jesus came to save.