Clear St. Swithin's Day

If it rains on St. Swithin's Day, it will be a horrid summer.

But it did not rain yesterday, thanks to the brave efforts of E sitting outside mine reading at the patio table last evening in defiance of the grey clouds looming overhead. But the wind blew them elsewhere, and so we were saved. And the sun is shining again today! (more historical information on the real St. Swithin here)

My activity during this conflict of wills between E and the elements involved fighting a futile frying battle with tuna croquettes, which insisted that they did not wish to cohese in any sense of the word -- but they actually tasted okay... so they might be tried again. I love t'internet recipe and food sites (such as Potlikkery)!

I have had two days off this week (and this is the third) and have completed half of a tea cosy. However, I actually started it last week but it took some time to bend the edge stitches to my will. This week also marks the 175th anniversary of the Oxford Movement, which kind of held as its seminal event the delivery of Keble's sermon on National Apostasy. There is a lecture series at the Cathedral, so I have been going along every day at 1pm.

Monday was a reading of the sermon, and it is an interesting document; but sadly it was read by a (no doubt, intelligent and lovely) person whose voice is soft and absolutely soporific in the regular undulations of every single sentence. It kind of lacked the firey mode in which I imagine it to have been delivered originally :)

Yesterday's lecture was on the 'Literal and Mystical' and the methods of textual analysis

One fascinating thing to me is how this movement was in response to increasing secularisation of the Church and attempted to return focus to its Christian (and, dare one say it, Catholic) heritage and the actual doctrines on which this faith is founded. Today, it seems to me that there is again fairly significant secularisation in the Church, but it is in the direction of a direct rejection of anything Catholic or historical and, in the opinion of the tuna croquette maker, results in one of two (and perhaps more) things:

1. reliance upon each person's individual reading and personal opinion of a translated text
2. no reliance at all upon any reason for church-going except as a social fashion event with the added bonus of a dash of sanctimonious self-aggrandisement. (sometimes enhanced by the Sunday morning equivalent of a Battle of the Bands Saturday night -- in this situation the tithe seems more a cover charge. But this is another rant.).

As regards the first point, I am aware that each person is responsible for his or her own salvatory efforts during life. Persons should always take personal responsibility for investigating their beliefs. And since a translated text is weak in the very fact of its translation and added influences of culturo-historical contexts and probable lack of verbatim 1st-century reporting of events and speech, this investigation is enhanced by spiritual inspiration and faith. But when there is no delving further than the words on a page, a skewed version of reality/opinion must develop, as the divinity of most of us is quite questionable. If we rely only on our individual spiritual link with God (which part I am not disparaging), we will probably be no more successful than the Blind Men and the Elephant. The sad part is that we might never know it.

The Oxford Movement's 2 main tenets were: Authority and Tradition. Because of the humanness of the theorists, one can naturally argue that it is a faulty premise if one is feeling particularly argumentative. However, I would counter that it is the lack of these two things today that is the cause of so much religious disputation and fragmentation (how many denominations of 'Christians' are there?) -- heaven forbid that we should have any Order in our worship (Free Love for God, dude!), and blast and damnation if we are forced to stop whittering on and listen to what anyone else has to say. There can be no unity without dialogue; opinions are not to be drunk in like so much Kool-Aid, they are formed like muscles as a result of exercise.

Today's lecture will be on the 'Oxford Apostles' :)