Relishing an English Saturday

We spent the first Saturday of April last year in much the way an English family might have. At the market in Notting Hill in the morning and at a football match in the afternoon.

I wish you could smell what this guy was cooking for the crowds at Notting Hill.

Got my coffee and a mural of Samuel Beckitt (or so I'm told).


The crowd started out chanting an expectant "Come on Fulham" and by the second half of a 3-1 drumming to Sunderland it was more of a whining "Come on Fulham." It was cold and rainy, and we were loving it.

Didn't want to leave.

We spent that Saturday night popping up out of tube-stops and walking around London. By now we felt like locals. But then again, they probably don't take pictures in the underground. We loved how the exit signs said "Way Out" and the voice over when the doors opened said "Mind the Gap." We were tempted to buy tourist-trap underwear with that printed on the butt, but didn't.

Reliving Windsor Castle and London

The Queen's gorgeous garden at Windsor Castle.


My beautiful wife as we wait for the changing of the guard to disperse so we can get our rental car back. It is a curious irony that while the guard is changing it is this lady in uniform who protects the lot of them from us.


Not a great photo, but I'll never forget this moment. Take the underground to the city center and emerge from the shadows and this is the first thing you see. Big Ben was bigger, and more impressive, than I expected. It was one of those moments when expectation is exceeded, anticipation arrives and doesn't let you down. The air felt different; more alive.


A better photo from the other side. The Millennium Eye behind and across the Thames. Incidentally, if we move to London and I go to King's College in the fall, my campus will be just below that wheel.


I had no preconceived notions of Westminster Abbey, but the thing that struck me most was how solid it looked, with its immense modelled bricks and relatively nondescript (from the outside) windows.


Statues of saints on the front of the Abbey. I loved that they had Mother Teresa, MLK, and Romero in there. Like saints I could call my own, you know what I mean?


I had just been reading about (and thus admiring) Mandela at seminary, so this was kind of cool for me.


What a great statue this one is.


As a tourist, most of your interactions with people are veiled by a vague and intentional disconnect. They aren't opening huge space in their world to you, and you aren't really there to make friends. Chesterton thought this reality was the bane of tourism. To really visit another land one needed to linger long enough in the normal places and among the local folk to begin to feel what it is like to call it home. I can't say we had a lot of these experiences of "the Other" on our short trip, but this pause with the squirrel-man at Hyde park was an oasis.


Back to the touristy stuff pretty quick though! Hey, we'd never been to a major world city before, and when we joined the Friday night crowds on our way to Les Miserables it was bright-lights-big-city and a welcome respite from a long small-town-prairie-winter.

Reloving England

A year ago today, floored by the magnificence of Oxford.

Lewis and Tolkein hung out here. It was pretty awesome inside, but we stuck out like a sore thumb, clearly tourists in a place revered. We were pretty okay with that actually, and moved on respectfully.

The punts below legendary Magdalen Bridge.

A nice drive south is the romantically normal English town of Swindon.

A little park in Swindon

Stonehenge, obviously.

The breathtakingly tall Salisbury cathedral at dusk. The whole town was well worth the visit. We looked for some Salisbury steak but settled for some excellent pizza and some glass bottles of Coca-Cola.

Reliving England

One year ago today my wife and I went to England and France for our tenth anniversary (which is actually in December). So for the next nine days please indulge me as I post some of the best pictures (or stories) from the trip that still visits me in my dreams. Had I taken the above photo a second earlier that jet would have looked like it was on the roof of our car. Its a good thing they shuttle you to your rental car because the roads around Heathrow are a maze.

Driving on the right: Both a nightmare and a thrill. The first day, though I strongly prefer traffic circles to lights, was chaos. The second, through the thin lanes of the English countryside, was a delight. The final evening, running out of gas outside Heathrow with no "petrol station" in sight, was a disaster. At one point I was the wrong way down a one way bike lane in a tunnel under the highway. That would not have been a good place to hit empty.

First stop: Chesterton's Church, St. Terese's, Beaconsfield. I tried to imagine him shuffling down the aisle with Frances for mass. In my mind I have him sitting on the right near the back, but he would have sat all over the place to keep it real.

Chesterton's house at Top Meadow. Love the old gate.


The view from our hotel room in Witney.

At night we spotted the river that weaves tightly through the town of Witney.

The Church and "Two Cathedrals"

One of the main things missing in church worship today is lamentation. And as a partial result, I daresay, there is a large part of our population missing as well.

When it comes to corporate lament, we don't know very well how to do it publicly and appropriately. To be fair, I'm not sure myself. I've been pastoring for a couple months here and we've only intentionally incorporated lamentation into our worship service once in that time (an "ash wednesday" time), and even then it was never given that name.

One of the things that happens, I think, when we fail to incorporate lament into the rhythms of church life and worship is that it goes elsewhere. Or else it comes in and is not received, or is aimed at the church people with malice. Or other things may happen with it.

There was one West Wing episode in season two where President Jed Bartlett railed at God in the middle of an empty cathedral. It was edgy. It was honest. It was probably off the rails in various places. But boy does it raise this issue. The clip is below, and while it is pretty abrasive, I think there is something about it that was essentially healthy.

To give background, essentially it comes after a funeral for one of the President's loved one, and it comes in the middle of a time when he has to tell the American public about the MS riddling his body and has to deal with one more international crisis among other things. After the funeral service he has a conversation with God who, he imagines, must be punishing him. You can watch it if you want, or skip down and I'll highlight what I want to talk about.



It begins with a quote from Graham Greene's Brighton Rock---"You can't conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God"---and gets rolling from there. During the course of his talking to God President Bartlett starts speaking in Latin. I don't know whether the show's writers thought it a bit safer to do this or not, but there it is. My uncle did me the favour of looking it up for me the other day. Here's the Latin, followed by the translation, followed by an even more literal (and potentially more deeply profound) translation.

gratias tibi ago, domine. (sarcastically)
haec credam a deo pio, a deo justo, a deo scito?
cruciatus in crucem
tuus in terra servus, nuntius fui; officium perfeci.
cruciatus in crucem (with a dismissive wave of the hand)
eas in crucem
----------
Thank you, Lord.
Am I to believe that these are the acts of a righteous god, a just god, a wise god?
To hell with your punishments!
I was your servant here on Earth. And I spread your word and I did your work.
To hell with your punishments!
To hell with you!
----------
Thank you, Lord.
Am I to believe these things from a loving God? A just God? A wise God?
Put your punishments on a cross!
I was your servant, your messenger on the earth; I did my duty.
Put your punishments on a cross!
To the cross with you!

Perhaps someone who actually knows Latin will correct these renderings somewhat, but I think in either case something very profound is being said, not only out of anger to God, but by the writers (whether knowingly or not) about God's response, and our proper response, to suffering and evil in the world.

He puts them on a cross, and puts himself on that cross, and takes them to hell with him.

We don't do ourselves any favours when we gloss over this stuff and leave it to prime time television to deal with it. Nor do we do ourselves any favours when we shelter ourselves from the fact that we still live with a lot of suffering and evil in our world.

I think we need to pause with Jesus outside the tomb of Lazarus or on the outskirts of a broken Jerusalem, and allow ourselves to weep. Even if we don't feel bad, to pause and weep with those who weep. "Blessed are those who mourn," Jesus said.

Of course, thankfully, he did continue: "For they will be comforted." Ultimately our lamentation, if it is enfolded in Christian worship as such, leads us then to our hope, which is that Jesus ascended from hell, rose from the dead, has ascended to heaven, has left us the Spirit in Church, heart, and Word, and is coming again to finish what He started. Too often I think we just skip to the "shiny happy" without dwelling on any of this, and thus we end up with worship services that seem somehow ethereal rather than real.

As a pastor I can sleep at night because I believe God is gracious with us in receiving us in our worship services and utilizing whatever we bring if we bring it with an open hand. And certainly in our worship services there is much that is good. But imagine if our worship services were places that met the world head on, honestly, and hopefully. I'd like to be there for one of those.