And a child will lead them

I will never forget the moment, some 10 years ago now, when our Muslim social worker asked my partner and me the casual question - "And what religion will you bring the child up in". We were in the process of adopting our eldest child. We had not even met him yet. We were going through what seemed like a rather long process of being prepared for parenthood.

Being amongst the first Gay male couples to adopt a child in this country - the territory was rather new - for the social worker as well. They wanted us to "practise" for a while - and so for several miserable weekends, we were asked to go to the adoption home and feed the children. Dear Lord! It was a nightmare. I think they thought if we could survive that, we could survive anything - (I know that thought crossed my mind several times). But having passed the test, we were now looking at the nitty gritty of adoption. Who was likely to be the primary parent? Who was likely to provide the discipline? Etcetera, etcetera.

The innocent question about religion caused a three week break in the process, while we discussed the matter. Backwards and forwards it went. My partner, Leon, loathed the Church. The Church had almost proved his mental undoing, in its lack of care for him; in its homophobia; in its dreadful hypocrisy and alienation of Gay and Lesbian people. He was very uncertain indeed. On the other hand, he was pretty much at sea from a religious perspective. A kind of wannabe "spiritual" type, with not a great deal of focus, or specific practise to offer.

I, on the other hand, had been a priest - had studied and taught Theology for gazillions of years and had left the Church the moment the struggle was over. What was the answer to the Muslim social worker’s question? The truth is, it was an inoffensive question. She wasn’t expecting any particular answer. We could have said “None!” and we would just have moved on in the conversation. But we decided to interrogate the matter with what was, for both of us, surprising intensity.

We discussed the nature of faith. We discussed the practise of belief. We discussed our own journeys – the positives and the negatives. And we came to a decision – strange in the eyes of many and peculiar, sometimes, even in our own judgement. We decided that we should raise the children in the context of the Christian faith –despite our own serious misgivings.
And so that is what brought me back to the Church. A baby. The absolute epitome of human frailty and human need. A baby, with a newly minted laugh and eyes so clear, you could see eternity in them. A baby that came into our lives, to change them forever.

We called him Gabriel – and it is his job to put the angel on the top of the Christmas tree every year. We called him Gabriel, the harbinger of good news. We called him Gabriel, because that was the first name we agreed upon while flipping listlessly through a bible one Sunday in Church, during a boring sermon.

And tomorrow, Gabriel will be serving at the High Mass on Christmas Day, dressed in a cassock and surplice and looking utterly angelic, smothered in incense and feeling the surge of the Haydn “Jugendmesse” and the swirl of hieratic language. Of course he may, one day reject it all. That will be his choice and that will be his unquestionable right. But when and if he does so, it will be from the position of an insider. He will know the stories that form such a massive part of our philosophy and our culture, for good or for ill. He will understand why some people pray to a God and have hope for the future and show love to their neighbour. And, hopefully, if he does reject it all, he will be a better person for having taken what is good in religion and making it his own.

Of course, there are dangers. It is also possible that he will imbibe the bewildering levels of prejudice; the terrible bigotry and the hatred, which is also part of religion. It is possible that he will start to see himself as superior to other people. It is possible that his brain will start to ossify and become closed to science, and change, and possibility. That is also a feature of religion. But it is bad religion – and I hope that he will be enabled to see that and to reject it.

In the meantime, I will thrill at the sight of the child I have been entrusted with, dressed like an angel, doing his service with a diligence and dedication that really inspires me, when together we pause at the crib of another baby. A child who, it is said, can lead the lion and the lamb to find peace with each other. That is an ideal I want for Gabriel. That is a vision I want for myself.

Midnight Mass at St Michael and All Angels Observatory, 2009

There is something extremely peculiar about attending Mass on Christmas Eve. It has, of course, the strongest overtones of pagan ritual - which is historically what Christianity simply usurped. Dead of night. Phallic Christmas Trees. Should be the winter solstice, but we live in the south down here. Celebration of new birth etc

So, to see the priest bearing a tiny (what was it? porcelain? alabaster? plastic?) figurine of baby Jesus on a pillow, (looking from the distance I was at, for all the world like a foetus), it cannot fail to make one think about things like that.

As usual at St Michael's, the music was thrilling. I was glad to say the familiar and do the comforting. I breathed in the smoke and I knelt for the incarnation, as is my habit, Sunday by Sunday. And I faced, afresh, the strangeness - the real peculiarity of a human God. A God who might be, as one songwriter put it, "a stranger on a bus, trying to make his way home". The absurdity of the eternal constrained by the temporal.

And, from that temporal point of view, is it not sobering to see that, if you look around the country, that most babies were born on Christmas Day, in the poorest Provinces? In the Western Cape - there was one child born. We are outnumbered some 60 to 1 in some parts of the country - so great is the disparity. So great is the difference between us.

And then there is the great moment after the Mass, where the priest and sub-deacons kneel before the crib and adore the new-born child. All the lights of the church are turned off and we find ourselves in complete darkness, save for the glinting lights of the two Christmas trees which frame the high altar and the candles. And, of course, the light which shines from the Nativity scene. It is a brief moment, and then the carol "Silent Night" is sung, by all, and from memory.

For me, this is the song my father would sing to me as a child, by way of a lullaby, to get me to go to sleep. He would produce, from a drawer in his bedroom, an old and used Christmas card, on which the words of the carol were printed. And he would sing to me, in a voice sonorous and clear and comforting. My father singing me to sleep.

And of course, the Christ-child is the lullaby of the Eternal to this battered world of ours. When we hear it, we can, even if momentarily, let go of our fears and our struggles. We can find peace, if only for a moment. For the briefest of moments.

We can pause in wonder at the place where divinity empties itself into human form. And we can ponder what the point of it all might be. Because it is far from obvious. It is, in reality, anything but clear. The message of Christmas down the ages has been, that here, in this absurity, is where we find the best and the most comforting truth there is. Into our darkness, shines the light.

Mary and the language of symbol

So, this past Sunday was the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. I took a non churchy friend of mine with me, because the service promised to be fairly spectacular. It's an ultra High kind of church, and this kind of feast day lends itself to an explosion of ceremony.

We had the usual bells, whistles, incense enough to choke on, white vestments. Did we stop there? No - we had a full orchestral Mass with 4 soloists singing the Haydn Missa in honorem Beatissimae Virginis Mariae, commonly known as the Grosse Orgelmesse. This was all followed by a fundraising lunch in the hall. (They don't do things in small measures in my church, I can tell you.)

But when my friend asked me, innocently, what it was we were celebrating - I had to pause for a moment or two. "The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary" - I answered brightly. She looked at me quizzically, waiting for the punch-line. "Er...", I stumbled on, "that is about when the Blessed Virgin Mary was assumed into heaven."

"Assumed"? she asked - "Who assumed? Did someone assume that is where she went?" Mercifully, at that point the priest started speaking - uncharacteristically, at the beginning of the service to say that one of the orchestra had an "episode" - (I think was the word he used) - and that explained the ambulance outside.

In his sermon, the priest started by drawing attention to the sheer oddity of the feast:

"When was the last time you saw a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon beneath her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars? Not even in the Cape Quarter at New Year would you see such a sight, unless you were high on something. Yet this woman is the person whom we encounter in the Introit proper of today’s mass, which is quoting from the Revelation of St John the Divine: A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars. With this language, strange and unworldly, we enter into the world of the apocalyptic.

An apocalyptic world view pushes us to edge of the symbolic world, a world where image defines a deeper reality and where flights of fantasy take us into a new world. It is a world of hopes, deeper than the power of the human imagination..."

Yes, indeed. This is the world of fantasy. It cannot be literal. It cannot be real. It is as camp as a row of pink tents! The word Apocalypsis in the Greek, means the act of revelation - but really, we have lost that ability, that apocalyptic ability these days. And it all just comes out weird, strange, extraordinary and... well ... colourful, to say the least!

Does that, or should that stop sensible people from going to Church? I am sure it is a barrier to some - and so be it. The stuff my children understand, like Bakugans - the strange things my six year old demanded for his birthday - is pretty opaque to me, I promise you. They inhabit, in many ways, as different a universe to mine, as mine is to that which clothes the Blessed Virgin Mary in moons and stars. It is just bits of a lost language. It meant something important once, and all we can get of it now, is a kind of feint residue - an echo - a mist.

Undoubtledly, motherhood is a powerful image. But we denude it of its essential value, if we simply accord it to all mothers. There are, after all, terrible mothers - mothers who don't give a damn; mothers who should be in jail; mothers who damage and hurt and destroy. Not all mothers are good.

The symbol of Mary points all of us - in the strange, curious imagery and iconography to another form - a perfect form, a form, if you like, taken appropriately into "heaven" (which is, of course, yet another symbol).

For Gay and Lesbian Christians, the symbol of Mary is one for those of us who are outsiders in a patriarchal (and heteronormative) church, where the phallus holds eternal sway. It speaks to the downtrodden, to the milked, to the millions of women in the world who are controlled by men - and by inference the millions of us who are controlled by heterosexuals. It is a powerful symbol. because it says - this is a picture of what could be, what should be.

In procession

The church I go to is extraordinarily High. I am talking way beyond the clouds, deep space High. I chose it because it was that. And honestly, I can't imagine what people who go to churches where the same preachy thing happens every week get out of it - with the best will in the world, I really can't. The thing about this place is that almost every week there is something new and, fairly often, both surprising and sometimes even spectacular.

My tradition started off sort of Broad church. Then it went Charismatic, with all the talking in tongues and hugging and kissing with arms aloft crap. Then it went High - with genuflections and incense and crossing oneself. Then, through force of circumstance rather than choice, Broad again. Then nothing at all, then High again. High, I say but certainly not as High as St Michael's Observatory.

So in many ways, I sit in some puzzlement and often in wonder. Today, it wasn't so much sitting, as walking. We had a procession with the Blessed Sacrament, through the streets of Observatory. Now, processions, I have done before, certainly on Palm Sunday. But in my limited experience, they have been somewhat stilted affairs trying to keep up with the choir singing "all Glory Laud and Honour" over and over again and holding a palm cross as elegantly as one can. And my experiences of ecclesiastical processions, prior to this have been either around the outside of the church, or even around the inside of the church! Sort of token things. A nod in the direction of what used to be, once upon a time.

This one was anything but that! Richard, the priest, announced that we would not be processing if it was raining - (which it has been the whole of yesterday and the night before). But it became clear towards the end of the service that there was no rain, and that a procession would take place because servers started rushing around with Humeral Veils and other accoutrement. The Blessed Sacrament, displayed in a fairly substantial Monstrance was taken in procession down the aisle. The congregation fell to its knees as it passed. Then, singing hymns, we all followed into the streets of Observatory. A police car with flashing blue lights ahead of the procession.

I noticed some people who live in the area, coming out to have a look at what was passing by. Dogs started barking. One rather cute student type, with no shirt on, came out onto his balcony, then rushed back inside only to appear moments later with a camera. Cars did U-turns and others, filled with the curious and the bewildered, passed us as best they could. There was a group of what looked like tourists, with really big cameras, who seemed to want to get us on camera as well. I felt a bit like one would, I suppose, if one were a participant in the Kaapse Klopse, or a military band, or a protest perhaps.

I started thinking of similar experiences I have had both as a participant and as a spectator. I remember the mighty marches we had in the late 1980s - as part of the "Standing for the Truth" Campaign, (which was really the United Democratic Front/ANC)- formed to pressurise the apartheid state. I remember the fact that it was a staggering 10 000 strong in Pietermaritzburg, at a time when protest actions of this sort were unheard of. I remember the Special Branch videoing the proceedings and frightened white people looking down at us from the safety of a high rise building.

I thought of other processions I went to see in Dorpspruit (also in Pietermaritzburg) on Good Friday, where the Hindu religious community did things which I had never seen in my life before. I saw a woman stare at the sun, in order to get herself to fall into a trance and then started dancing like a monkey. In honour, I understand, of the God Hanuman. I saw men have their backs pierced with meat hooks - no blood - and then pull a chariot with an effigy of the Goddess Draupadi on it - with her hair hanging down - symbolic, I understand, of her rape. I saw a man sticking a dagger right through his tongue, and a spike through both his cheeks - again no blood. I saw people walking across a burning pile of coals.

And so I started to compare what we were doing with the other kinds of processions I have been in. Certainly, the others were more outwardly dramatic. Then again, were they? For me, there was something in the way in which that congregation fell to its knees when the Blessed Sacrament passed them in the aisle, which made me start to wonder.

The sermon made reference to perhaps my all time favourite film - "Shadowlands" - with Anthony Hopkins playing the part of CS Lewis. Lewis was asked, in the film, why he kept on praying. He said, it had nothing to do with changing the situation. It had to do with the change the act of prayer brought about in him - or words to that effect.

Because, let's be honest here. Processing around a suburb of Cape Town carrying the Blessed Sacrament is a bit of an anachronism. It doesn't fit with the modern world at all. And the thin crowd of 50 or so people processing and singing hymns is, also, somewhat archaic. (I can't imagine what the bare-chested student is going to do with his picture of us. I can only wonder what the tourists will do with theirs.) I can only speculate at what effect it might be thought to have on the world.

So why does this church do it? To show off perhaps? Because we know how to do it? Because of the tradition? Because we are proud of this religion?

I think it is actually something far simpler and something easily aligned to the CS Lewis idea, I mentioned above. I think it is because those of us who do it, want the very best for our world. And because this strange and curious tradition (and others like it), effects some kind of positive change in the doer, rather than in the world-order. And maybe that is something really important.