I shall write about what interests me at the time. The problem is, I don’t know where to start. It’s a tangle of loose ends, an interesting time in life, structured in a daily routine so simple, so rewarding that I think of it as a sacred ritual.
I read the Church Times, which has been serving the Anglican community, clerical and lay, since 1863, with access to online readers of its entire archive. It’s a fascinating place to visit, because of or maybe despite never having been a Christian, and averse to any kind of group attendance, apart from our favourite pub. In this household, the coronavirus impact is carried lightly, like one of those pale blue surgical masks.
According to the Church, marriage is a sacrament, like the Eucharist: the body and blood of Christ is ritually taken into the bodies of worshippers, following age-old custom and theology; jealously fenced-in from casual practice by stringent rules for both priest and congregation. I hazard a guess that the Holy Communion of Eucharist touches an erotic nerve which has nothing to do with the “erogenous zones”. The love between Man (in the generic sense) and God: this is the purpose of every form of sacrament. Most of us have no way to put it into words, but a few are called “mystics” not because their experience is more intense & rarefied, but because they’ve found a way to express it in words—poetry or prose—or music. Maybe dance. Certainly in the visual arts, whether cathedrals or ikons, in the sense
A representation of some sacred personage, in painting, bas-relief, or mosaic, itself regarded as sacred, and honoured with a relative worship or adoration
I find that almost every source of news and comment is unpleasantly biased to gratify those who want to be titillated by news of their ideological enemies, especially British newspapers. You feel you are joining a club when you read the Daily Telegraph, or the Guardian, its left-wing opposite.
I’m subscribing to the online Church Times, which has been serving the Anglican community since 1863*. It doesn’t appear to preach.
*?
a wayfarer’s notes 