Moving On

The blog's author is moving to the Diocese of Llandaff in the Church in Wales. She will be installed as Dean of Llandaff Cathedral on Saturday 2nd March 2013. Llandaff's association with St Teilo dates from around 546 and the cathedral is dedicated to Ss Peter and Paul, and Ss Dyfrig, Teilo (whose tomb is situated in the presbytery) and Euddogwy. Llandaff is on the banks of the River Taff, about two miles from the centre of Cardiff.  Thank you all for reading Archdeacon in the Dales over the past two years. Look out for a new blog from Llandaff in due course!



A Celtic Blessing

On our hearts and our homes, the blessing of God.

In our coming and going, the peace of God.

In our life and believing, the love of God.

At our end and new beginning,

The arms of God to welcome us and bring us home.

                                                                                      The Iona Community, Shorter Evening Liturgy



Farewell


Life seems to have been ridiculously busy over the past two weeks with talks to give about the Dioceses Commission, training days for area deans and lay chairs, meetings at Church House and the usual run of services and other meetings. As well as that, organised by Vicki and the good folk of Christ Church Harrogate Centre, we have succeeded in moving the Archdeaconry office to Harrogate. My successor, the Revd Nicholas Henshall, has now been 'in post' for three days he is contactable on nicholas.henshall@riponleeds-diocese.org.uk 

So, sadly, it is time to say 'goodbye' on Archdeacon in the Dales. Thank you to all who have read regularly and to those who have dipped in occasionally. Thank you to all who have commented, encouraged or admonished either on the bolg or by e mail or when we have met. I now realise the potential of digital space to create community. Yes, it is a different sort of community from the one that meets face to face, and it not unrelated to that community as it brokers introductions of people with similar interests and concerns. It is also a community that can lobby for things. I have been astonished how many casues or concerns I have been drawn into through the online community and how much difference can be made by using the internet to organise debate, protest and mutual support. It is also an effective way to get into deep conversations with people about matters of faith. And it can be fun!  

I was delighted to see so many at my farewell service at St Mary's Richmond on 20th January despite the appalling road conditions. A huge thank you to all who braved the elements and also to those who sent their apologies - having broken my arm in the snow in 2009 I am always pleased when people decide to stay at home rather than risk their safety. I cannot reply to everyone individually, but I do thatnk you you all most sincerely for your thoughtfulness, love and friendship. St Mary's choir once again sang a superb evensong and the hospitality flowed. Thank you, too, to John Chambers, Antony Kirby, Colin Hicks, Gillian Lunn and the refreshment team for organising the occasion. It was good to be among freinds and, though we will miss you all a great deal, I am sure we will be back from time to time to visit - we definitely have North Yorkshire on our (short) list of places for future holidays!

Someone asked me what my most abiding memories of the Archdeaconry will be. 'Too many to say,' is the answer, but here are some:

• Slithering around on the ice in Aldbrough St John's on the way to an induction and being rescued by two kind people - one in a landrover and the other who had braved the elements to walk across the ice rink that was the village road.

• Visiting the church at Kirkby Wiske to take a harvest service and finding it almost entirely surrounded by water.

• Carols by candle light and harmonium at Thorton Steward.

• Arranging to meet a farmer in the fog 'at the third cattle grid' on the moors above Nidderdale. I had my doubts, but we connected up OK!

• Chips sitting on the wall with the bikers at Hawes after an evening meeting.

• An open air ordination at Stalling Busk on a sultry summer's evening over looking Semerwater. (I had to remind the congregation that even the mosquitoes are God's own creatures.)

• Complimenting a vet on his goat, only to discover it was a Norwegian sheep!

• Stopping the car in numerous places (The Stang, Buttertubs, the road from Leyburn to Grinton above Swaledale, the road down from Green How across Bewerley Moor to Pateley) just to thank God for the majesty of the land and to drink it in for a few moments.

• Going to countless churches and homes and schools and receiving a warm welcome.

• The wonderful food - I can truly say I have never tasted better food than in Yorkshire!

• Worshipping with 12 people or with 350, using the Book of Common Prayer or a powerpoint projector and Twitter, in a Grade 1 listed building or a tent, sitting on bales.

• The liveliness and willingness to serve of the people who identify themselves as Christian in every community.

Thank you all for 6 years I will never forget. I will keep you in my prayers, especially over the next few months as decisions are made about the future shape of the Church of England in Yorkshire, and hope you will keep me in yours! 

Suchet on Beethoven

Along with about a quarter of the population, we had flu over Christmas. So I was very grateful to have been given John Suchet's new book  Beethoven, the Man Revealed published by Elliott and Thompson Ltd, London 2012.  I almost read it in one sitting. Suchet himself insists that the biography is primarily about Beethoven the man - this is not a study of his music but rather a book that gives us insight into his life (and especially his early formation) which then helps us to listen to his music with greater understanding.

Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler 1819

Beethoven had a singularly chaotic early life, born to parents who were simply not capable of giving him any stability or modelling for him a disciplined approach to everyday living, let alone giving him the personal skills needed to organise the life of a practising musician. The picture I had had of Beethoven's early life was that his later problems stemmed from the ill health, poverty and neglect of his parents. Suchet paints a picture that is a bit more complex - a well connected grandfather whom he hardly knew but of whom he could be proud and a somewhat sporadic relationship of affection with his mother and siblings, for whom he had to assume responsibility in his teenage years as his father's alchoholism took a grip. The memories of contemporaries who knew him as an unkempt and unsociable child tug at the heart strings.

Things started to go rather better for him in his late teenage years and early adulthood. Suchet takes great pains to describe for us a formative trip along the Rhine with fellow musicians showing Beethoven as a young man on a spree with friends who had similar interests. You can imagine the gesting and ribbing that took place though music was never far away and the trip ended with Beethoven giving an 'unparalleled display of virtuosity' at an inprovisation contest with the pianist Sterkel. By the time he was 26 he had moved to Vienna and was demonstrably the city's most accomplished all-round musician, mixing with aristocracy and royalty and making a fair income. His fame was spreading across central Europe and, as well as being outstanding (but often reluctant) at the contemporary fashion for improvisation, he had a good number of compositions to his name - though not yet a symphony. He had not been lucky in love but, in most other respects, it looked as though he had a great future ahead and was well positioned to devote himself to a life of perfomance, conducting and composition. Then disaster struck. He found he was going deaf. He began to lose his hearing shortly after a 'frightful attack of typhus' (it may not have been typhus but it was described as such by contemporaries.) We cannot be sure that the two occurrences were related, but gradually, over the next three years, Beethoven was forced to face the fact that the worst possible fate for a musician had befallen him.

Throughout this time, as at every other period of his life, he continued to pour out a constant stream of compositions, working on ever more demanding and complex works. -At this time he produced his first symphony and the Pathetique Sonata which represented a huge stride forward in the genre. But his increasing deafness was a disaster for him and, as denial gave way to realisation and acceptance that he could no longer hold a normal conversation or hear his own music well enough to conduct without embarrassment, he became depressed.  He sought solitude in the country and considered suicide. His heroic spirit won through. This was the man who, in his early life, admired Napoleon. We can only imagine what superhuman effort it took, but he decided that, for as long as he could compose, he would not end his own life. Although it was his musical genius that made his deafness such a very cruel blow, perhaps it was also this genius, expressing itself in an unstoppable urge to creativity, that saved his life.

The most striking thing about Beethoven is that whatever was going on in his personal life, whether he was in a happy phase, hoping for success in his latest flirtation or tormented by illness, loneliness or business problems, he just went on and on composing. Music, and music such as had never before been conceived of, flowed from him. Chaos, repeated disappointment in love, constant moving around from apartment to apartment, the success or failure of his music - none of these prevented him from composing, advancing all the while in the scope of his creative imagination. In many ways you get the impression that Beethoven did find comfort and fulfilment in his art. Yet he struggled so much in so many areas of his life. A deeply affectionate man, he never found the longed for wife to settle down with and he had to battle with the increasing social isolation that deafness inevitably brought in an age where there were no aids and there was little understanding of the difficulties. 

Beethoven showed his worst side in the way in which he relentlessly pursued the guardianship of his nephew in flagrant disregard for the wishes of both the boy himself and his mother. Why did he do this? Was it a mixture of loneliness, fear, hurt family pride and the obsessiveness which also drove him towards the family weakness - alchohol abuse? Gradually the paradox of a life that was falling apart and music that was reaching sublime heights deepened. At the time he was composing the Missa Solemnis, he was mistaken for a tramp and arrested. The constable who arrested him described him as wearing a moth-eaten old coat and no hat, having a suspicious manner and yelling at the top of his voice, 'I am Beethoven'. Clearly a madman. At the height of his arguments with his remaining brother, sister-in-law and nephew he was composing the sublime late quartets including the String Quartet in F, opus 135 with its almost light-hearted sections.

John Suchet's book achieves its end. He succeeds in telling the story of Beethoven's life in a way that gives some new emphases. He offers some personal theories where there are gaps or mysteries in the available data. But, above all, he presents us with the very moving and human story of a man called to live with an absolute imperative to produce music such as the world had never dreamt of while also bearing the burden of deafness. That he transcended this potent cocktail of potential and limitation is the miracle of Beethoven's life and legacy.   

http://www.johnsuchet.co.uk/John_Suchet_books.htm

   

A Hauxwell Heroine



St Oswald's Church, Hauxwell

Norman Arch, Hauwell Church

 

Today, I visited St Oswald's, Hauxwell, surely one of our more remote churches. There has been a place of worship on this site since at least the seventh century and possibly longer. St Paulinus is associated with the Christianization of the area and the site has Saxon remains. As you walk up the path to this gem of a building, an Anglo-Danish Preaching Cross in the churchyard reminds you of the fusion of Anglian and Dane, as invader and invaded came to acknowledge that they had a common Christian faith. There is a wonderful Norman arch, a font which has mediaeval and Elizabethan features and an unusually long chancel with several interesting memorials including one to Sir John Dalton who was killed accompanying Queen Henrietta Maria (Charles I's consort) from Bridlington to Oxford shortly before the Commonwealth and her husband's arrest, trial and execution. Reading all the memorials gives you a wonderful insight into the variety of life, rich and poor, short and long-lived, in a Yorkshire country village.

 

I was also intrigued by the story of a local girl, Dorothy Wyndlow Pattison, the daughter of the Rector of the parish. She was born in 1832, the tenth daughter of the Revd James Pattison and his wife Jane Winn, whose father had been Mayor of Richmond. From all accounts she had a fairly difficult childhood as her father suffered from mental illness and severely constrained the lives of his unmarried daughters. (Apparently he used to rebuke his unfortunate family from the pulpit!) In 1861, following the death of her mother, she broke away from home and, to begin with, took a teaching post. She then fell ill and went to Marske near Redcar to recuperate. Here she worked with the Christ Church Sisterhood, an Anglican Order  which was devoted to prayer and caring for the poor and the sick. The Order was inspired by the Oxford Movement and so this further alienated her from her father who was a strict Evangelical. Dora (as she was now known) was trained in nursing at the Cottage Hospital in Cleveland and the Order's convalescent home. This was the era of Florence Nightingale and the beginning of systematic training for nurses who were badly needed to tend the burgeoning populations of the industrial cities.  Owing to the fact that another of the Sisters fell ill, Dora was sent to Walsall in Staffordshire to help set up a hospital.       

 

 

 

 

By all accounts, this became a flourishing enterprise with facilities for surgery, men's and women's wards and a large out-patients clinic which Dora mostly ran herself, seeing almost 15,000 patients in one year. Dr Judith Gowland, in her 'Brief Life ' of Sister Dora, quotes from a pupil nurse who describes a typical day. At 6.30am Sister Dora came onto the wards, made beds, gave the patients their breakfast, led prayers and then dressed wounds. From 11am she supervised ward rounds and lunches, sometimes missing lunch herself if there were emergencies. From 2pm she ran the out-patients' clinics often seeing as many as 60-100 people. She dressed wounds (asepsis was in its infancy), set bones and extracted teeth - all pretty physically demanding work! From 5pm she would come onto the wards and 'there would be talk and laughter, hymn singing and stories' followed by supper and prayers. She carried this routine on for 13 years and, despite the odd physical collapse, made a huge impression on the local community by her dedicated care for those who had suffered as a result of colliery and ironworks disasters and during a smallpox epidemic. When she died in 1878, 18 railway men carried her coffin into a packed church.  The townspeople erected a statue for her and a stained glass window in her honour was placed in Walsall parish church. This daughter of Yorkshire had made a great contribution to healthcare in Staffordshire, bringing techniques forged on the battle fields to civilian hospitals at the height of the industrial revolution. She nursed in an age when nurses risked their own lives to care for patients with infections and contagious diseases.

 

On the walls of the peaceful church at Hauxwell and in the churchyard you can read the stories of those who died young and one wonders if these stories had their place in shaping the vocation of the young Dora as she sat, trying to ignore her father's frequent tirades against his own family. Today the church is well cared-for and welcoming with a beatuiful millenium banner made by villagers, a small exhibition and information for visitors. Next week is the harvest festival when the church will be full.

 

Ruth Etchells

I was deeply saddened today to hear of the death, yesterday, of Ruth Etchells, the former Principal of St John's College Durham. Ruth inspired a generation of young people, many of whom have given their lives to the service of Christ in different ways. She preached a wonderful sermon about Esther (the only book in the Bible not to actually mention God but full of characters behind whom there is a great sense of God's activity) at Holy Trinity Cambridge in the early 1980's which I can only describe as one of the reasons I am a priest in the church today. I have so much for which to be grateful to her - in my generation, she opened our eyes to what was possible and believed we could, by the grace of God, and only by the grace of God, achieve it.

The Revd Professor David Wilkinson, present Principal of St John's College writes   

'Ruth was the first female Principal of an Anglican College and was the architect of seeing John's as a place of academic excellence coupled with an ethos of a gentle and confident Christian faith. 

'She was a person who embodied such an ethos.  Many of us were deeply influenced by her pastoral encouragement, wisdom, inspiration and life of prayer.  A gifted preacher and teacher, we were privileged that her last sermon was given as part of College Communion last year.

'We give thanks for such a rich and fruitful life and that at death she looked forward to resurrection with her Lord.

'A few years ago, [Dr] Margaret Masson and I nominated Ruth for an award from the University.  She was awarded the Chancellor's Medal for services to the University.  In what we wrote on that occasion you will get a sense of Ruth's unique contribution to St John's:

''Without Ruth Etchells' vision and tireless work, St John's may not have survived as a recognized College in Durham University.  In addition, she has been a gifted academic, a groundbreaking leader and a servant of the University beyond Durham.

''Ruth Etchells arrived in Durham in 1968 to be a lecturer in the English Department and also to be a resident tutor at Trevelyan College where she was later Vice Principal.  Her first and continuing contribution to the University was as an outstanding and inspiring teacher of undergraduates.

''For many years, she taught a groundbreaking course on Modern Drama which allowed students at the time to study cutting edge, even shocking material - it was the era of Beckett, Osborne, the emerging Pinter - and all this was new and radical within the context of Durham English.  Ruth's course gave students exciting new insights into what it meant to study English Literature and in particular, ways in which it might have something to say about issues of ultimate meaning in their own lives and culture.  Derived from her teaching, Etchell's popular book, "Unafraid to Be" was influential on a whole generation of students across the land and was one of the early catalysts to the emerging discipline of Theology and Literature.  She influenced countless students to continue this kind of cross disciplinary exploration and engagement with contemporary culture; some of them in turn went on to become influential figures in their own right.

''Influential, inspiring and groundbreaking though she was as a teacher, Ruth's key contribution to the University was in her ten year Principalship of St John's College between 1979 and 1989.  When Ruth took up this appointment in January 1979, it seemed like a risky and courageous choice.

''It was unexpected in a number of ways: Ruth was a lay person taking on the leadership of a college which was responsible for training clergy.  Her discipline was English Literature, not Theology.  And she was a woman - the first female Principal of a Church of England Theological College and at a time when the Church did not ordain women to the priesthood.  The college had only started admitting women as students five year previously.


''There is no doubting that Ruth's dynamic leadership established St John's as a flourishing modern college respected in both University and Church.  But her most exceptional contribution has probably been the fruit of her remarkable personal and pastoral skills, her perceptive ability to read people as well as she read her beloved literature and her capacity to inspire others to see even the most mundane as ablaze with meaning.  Her sometimes uncanny prescience about people was always accompanied by a kindness and humanity and a sureness of touch that helped to restore perspective and hope.  Confidante of shy undergraduates and Prince Bishops of the church alike; wise, forgiving, humane, and utterly confidential - Ruth continues to be a much valued advisor long after she has retired.


''Ruth's was one of the leading lay members of her time of the Church of England.  She served most significantly, on the Crown Appointments Committee, using all her political, personal and spiritual skills to help shape the Church of England through the eighties and nineties. 


''In retirement, Ruth has served on a number of significant national and local committees, continuing to serve both Church and local community wherever she could.  She has also continued to write, most notably publishing a number of volumes of prayers. She also took up a new craft: working in stained glass.

''She has excelled in this new medium and her works continue to be in demand around Durham and further afield.

''Uncompromising yet deeply human, utterly serious yet with wonderful taste for the absurd, Ruth Etchells is a remarkable woman whose leadership and life has made an indelible impression on countless individuals and as well as on one small but much loved college in Durham.''


Thank you to Dr Margaret Masson and Professor David Wilkinson for those words of tribute which bring Ruth so vividly to mind. Margaret's address at the time of the award of the Chancellor's Medal to Ruth in 2010 can be read at  http://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/ceremonies/congregation/etchells_ruth.pdf


Ruth was a poet, so I will end with her own words which, like her, gently challenge us to think differently.


The Ballad of the Judas Tree

In Hell there grew a Judas Tree
Where Judas hanged and died
Because he could not bear to see
His master crucified
Our Lord descended into Hell
And found his Judas there
For ever haning on the tree
Grown from his own despair
So Jesus cut his Judas down
And took him in his arms
"It was for this I came" he said
"And not to do you harm
My Father gave me twelve good men
And all of them I kept
Though one betrayed and one denied
Some fled and others slept
In three days' time I must return
To make the others glad
But first I had to come to Hell
And share the death you had
My tree will grow in place of yours
Its roots lie here as well
There is no final victory
Without this soul from Hell"
So when we all condemned him
As of every traitor worst
Remember that of all his men
Our Lord forgave him first

© D. Ruth Etchells

Atgofion am Aberfan; Memories

There can't be anyone who lived in South Wales who does not remember what they were doing on 21st October 1966 as vividly as they recall 9/11. I was sitting in our kitchen, off school for half term, with my mother. She put the radio on.  We couldn't quite take in what we were hearing. We were used to mining disasters in those days. Scarcely a year would pass without news of men being trapped underground and the ensuing days of worry as their colleagues worked to get them to the surface. But what we heard that day was on a different scale. I can remember wondering why there were tears in my mother's eyes; she hardly ever cried. Over the next few days, it became apparent that a slag heap had slid down the mountain at Aberfan near Merthyr Tydfil engulfing houses, a railway embankment and Pantglas Junior School and stopping just short of a second school. This had happened at 9.15 in the morning just after the children had begun their last school day before half term with an assembley. 144 people lost their lives including 116 children aged from 3 months to 14. It was a foggy day in the village and no-one saw the tip slide but everyone recalled the tremendous, eerie rumbling sound. The tipping gang further up the mountain, where the early morning mist had cleared, reported seeing the start of the slide but it all happened so quickly that there was no chance to raise the alarm or give a warning. 

Yesterday the Queen unveiled a plaque to open the new Ynysowen Primary School in Aberfan - a celebration of the life and resilience of the village, but with a sober reminder of those days 50 years ago when the coal industry regularly claimed the life of its workers and affected the health and safety of whole communities. I recently visited the Vale of Neath where I was born and was forcibly struck by the lack of much visual evidence that mining had ever taken place there. Where the slag heaps were once evident, there are green forests and, where the roads and buildings were once grimey and grey, there is a spacious and light feel to the valley. Communities have moved on and the landscape has regained much of its former beauty, but I found myself wondering whether we sometimes wipe out the past too completely and too quickly. It is natural and healthy to remember and to want to understand where we have come from and what has shaped our communities and the identity of our parents and grandparents. 

The Queen has kept faith with the people of Aberfan, visiting four times in the years between 1966 and today. I, too, want to retain that sense of keeping faith with an event that influenced my childhood profoundly and that totally and irrevocably changed the lives of people we knew. Yes, we need to move on, to create a life which does not depend on work that leads to ill health, disaster and loss of life, but we also need to remember the close-knit streets of the mining communities where a child growing up was conscious of being part of a great industrial inheritance and where, that day in 1966, 116 children and their families looked forward, as they began their day, to a future that they would never see.    

Street games, Neath, 1964

The Power of Letters

In this season of resurrection, I had a rather powerful reminder of the way in which parts of life that we think have moved beyond us return in new and transfomred ways. We went to see my aunt, after Easter, and she produced 70 dog-eared letters in an old brown envelope. They were written on fragile sheaves of airmail paper (now smellling musty) by my parents when they were working in Ghana nearly 60 years ago. At that time my aunt was back in the UK doing her children's nurse training at Manchester Children's Hospital and the correspondence, which is mostly between the two sisters (with occasional interpolations from my father), is fascinating. Clearly there was a great affection between them and daily life unfolds over nearly four years in Tacoradi, Koforidua, Accra, Manchester and Colwyn Bay! Those were the days when Ghana and Britain were, for most people, a sea voyage apart and there was no coming home for a couple of weeks holiday or flying out to visit friends and relatives. Mum and Dad were making a new and completely different life, getting to know local people and customs, often trekking into the forests (my father was a forester) and living in tents for days. It's actually quite hard for me to imaging my home-comforts-loving mother in a tent wearing mosquito boots! Meanwhile Mum's sister was nursing at the 'fever hospital' in Manchester, looking after patients with infectious diseases for which there were often no cures - a reminder that nursing was a more risky profession in those days when, to an extent, you risked your own health.

I sat on a balcony overlooking the sea in Devon for three days absolutely transfixed by these letters, devouring every one of them for details of what Mum and Dad did, how they felt, who they met (it was a turbulent political period in Ghana). It was like meeting my parents, both of whom are now dead, all over again. They spoke with the same voices in their mid twenties that I recognised and knew so well from their later years. The contents of the letters brought back many of the stories I  loved to hear as a child about life in West Africa but with more detail and more vivid  descriptions. It also enabled me to identify some of the places and goings-on in Dad's many photos.

I found myself thinking that this experience was a metaphor for resurrection - to find past experiences brought into the present, transformed and able to give new life and new perspective on people and events and especially the parents whose voices I had never expected to be hearing again.

Queen Anne

Been reading an inspiring biography of Queen Anne, just lately. Her reign saw the union of Scotland and England to create the United Kingdom and the establishment of the economic basis for both the stability and the excesses of the eigtheenth century. Anne has often been overlooked as a weak monarch - someone of inferior education who could barely spell. Yet her story shows her to be a dutiful and stubborn person of great integrity and amazing firmness when it came to her beliefs and her sense of what was good for her people. She endured 17 pregnancies in the bid to provide an heir and it is utterly remarkable that, despite the demands on her physical well-being, she ruled with attention to detail and moral constistency.

In her day, the Church of England was beset with problems - the Tory party adopted the slogan 'The Church in Danger'. The problem was that the Church, of which she was Governor, was rent in two between 'High' and 'Low' parties. The Toleration Act of 1689 (which granted freedom of worship to all Trinitarian Protestants) had undermined the monopoly position of the Church of England, proving conclusively that there were a great many more Dissenters in the country than had previously been thought. The High Church Party emphasised loyalty to the Stuart line, the sanctity of the priesthood and the importance of ceremonial while the Low Church Party were wedded to more radical Protestant reform and all that that meant in terms of political alliances. Anne's personal sympathies were more in tune with the High Church party, but, like her predecessor, Elizabeth I, she had a great distrust for anything that tended to divide the nation, cause factions or boulster factious clergy. Henry Compton, the bishop of London, had taught her when she was the Lady Anne and had instilled in her a great respect for the doctrines of the Church of England as representing the true catholic faith.

The things that stand out for me in terms of Queen Anne's reign are to do with balance, duty, family, compassion and determination to assert her own views and independence of mind in a world in which she must have felt inferior in terms of her education and gender. I am not aware that anyone has appraised Anne as a feminist activist or politician but I think that she has something valuable to contribute to the 'can women have it all?' debate. She herself would not understand or sympathize with the question. Yet she is, I think, very much a woman who successfully blended personal belief, the call of family, professional or (in her case) constitutional duty and a real compassion for those for whom she had responsibility. I am not sure that she would have used the word 'successful' or indeed that most political commentators would use it. However, a close reading of her life reveals that Queen Anne worked with the personal, political and religious influences of her time to achieve a great deal that was valuable for the good of the nation.

Her chosen belief that the Church of England embodied a true interpretation of Christian tradition was, frankly, amazingly costly. It set her apart from her own, father, James II . Most historians downplay the significance of this; it is deeply costly to espouse beliefs which alienate us from our families, however remote. From an early age Anne showed her own independence of thought by very decidedly and even calaculatingly placing herself on the Protestant side of the national debate. Her Christian faith and understanding were deeply important to her and she adhered to her beliefs consistently and persistently even when under considerable pressure to give way.

Of course, the need to supply a Protestant heir and the power which accrues to a woman who can fulfill this role shaped Anne's life. Much has been written of the political outfall of her 17 pregnanacies. As someone who has, from time to time, been rendered very ill through gynaecological conditions, I marvel at Anne's capacity to undergo the physical and psychological trauma associated with bearing an heir while also coping with the day to day demands of monarchy in a time when the constitution was emerging and modern notions of monarchy taking shape. Were history to be written predominantly by women, I feel that Anne's contribution would be differently assessed.

Queen Anne's reign demonstrated a new departure in terms of compassion. Her reign had the singular distinction of being the first before 1760 during which there were no political executions despite the capture of several Jacobites who might have been executed for treason. She was recorded as having decreed that it would be 'a barbarous thing' to hang a woman when she was with child or to hang a man 'who has to support a wife and six children.'  Anne also shaped much of her life through friendships, notably with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, but also with other prominent women of the day and, in this, she is very like modern women for whom a series of profound if somethimes turbulent friendships may turn out to to be the defining relationships of their lives.

She established Queen Anne's Bounty, a fund formed in 1704 to augment the livings of poor clergy and which was later used to build and repair parsonages. This was a very practical way of shoring up the ministry of the Church of England and in this, she showed her willingness to support in real terms the outworkings of her theological position as regards the church.

So Queen Anne gets my vote as someone who lived out her theological beliefs in very costly and practical ways and who was also ready to tread the difficult path of combining the moral duties which arise from a working (ie. constitutional or professional) life with the psychological and emotional demands of family life. To my way of thinking, she was the first truly modern monarch and a worthy mother of women who try to combine familial, theological and political vocations. To put it in contemporary language, she is an inspiration to women who wrestle with the demands of family, work, social expectation and traditional models of morality for the sake of our faith and our beliefs. She was more radical than ever she would have thought herself to be and she achieved some notable political advances through a balanced and undramatic sense of duty. 

Make your own assessment by reading Edward Gregg's  Queen Anne  Yale University Press 2001          

       

Florence Nightingale

On 13th August, the Church of England commemorates Florence Nightingale. She was born in 1820 into a very well-connected, upper-class family, Unitarian and Abolitionist on her mother's side, Anglican and Latitudinarian on her father's. Her family knew most of the leading Tory and Whig politicians of the day.

When she was 17, she had what mystics call an 'audition'; she heard God speaking to her, calling her into His service. During her life, she had four further mystical experiences, but this audition, at the age of 17, was particularly interesting since, at the time, she had no knowledge of the mystical tradition and, in fact, came from two traditions that are peculiarly averse to mysticism. In later life, she undertook a learned study of mystics like Catherine of Sienna, Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross, but, at 17, she had little background to help her interpret what God might be asking of her. Later, she said that she had an idea that this call involved turning her back on the conventional expectations that she would marry and live a life of comfort. It was a call to search for active ways in which to serve God. She had a hard time of it! Years later, she wrote, 'I would have given my all to the church but she would not have it; she sent me to teach children, but gave me no training.'

Florence had a hard time with her family, too. She had to fight her mother to continue with her maths studies, deemed unsuitable for a girl. When, in 1844, she anounced that she wished to nurse, her family was horrified, as horrified, she later wrote, as if she had announced her intention to turn to fraud and embezzlement! Eventually, she won their agreement, if not their favour. On her way back from a tour of Europe, she stopped at Kaiserwerth, in Germany, where she trained as a nurse with the Lutheran order of Deaconesses. When she returned to London, she briefly ran a hospital in Harley Street.

In doing all this, she flew in the face of the received wisdom of the time, arguing with her family, achieving a level of education that was thought unsuitable for a woman and introducing the concept of training into the world of nursing, which was largely, at that time, a job carried out by untrained women of the lower classes and ex-soldiers. Undoubtedly, she beacme a very competent nurse by the standards of her time. In England, she introduced cleanliness, decent food, call bells, proper sanitation and individualised care. At Scutari, during the Crimean war, she managed four miles of beds, each 18 inches apart. In today's terms she was something like the Chief Executive of a medium sized hospital trust with all the attendant problems of supply and all the frustrations of constantly changing government policies.

History has sentimentalized her as the 'Lady with the Lamp', a dedicated nurse, smoothing the fevered brows of dying men. Florence Nightingale's outstanding achievement, in fact, was as an administrator and statistician, not as a nurse. Her great contribution to nursing during the Crimean war was to persuade the Generals, by means of detailed statisical research, that 6 times the number of soldiers died of infection in military hospitals as of wounds acquired on the battle field; and then to make use of her family's political influence to improve sanitation and nutrition in British military hospitals. It was through her pioneering work in the use of graphs to represent statisical findings that she made possible advances in sanitation at Scutari and, after the war, in Britain and India. She invented a particular form of pie chart, known as the polar area diagram, which she used to illustrate seasonal causes of patient mortality at Scutari. She was a friend of the mathematicians Mary Somerville and Ada, Lord Byron's daughter and she beacme the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society. 

Historical biography has dealt her a poor hand in the way it has represented her solely as a nurse - the Lady with the Lamp who founded St Thomas's School of Nursing and lost her own health through overwork in the Crimea, becoming a chronic invalid and returning home to write a modest text book, 'Notes for Nurses.' She was so much more! A doggedly brilliant public health reformer, a deeply committed and devout, if unconventional, Christian and a considerable amateur theologian and classical scholar. In 1850-2, she wrote an 800 page work entitled, 'Suggestions for Thought to Searchers After Religious Truth' which includes her own theodicy, unique as a nurse's theory of evil and suffering. The work contains prophetic, radical and heterodox ideas. She believed passionately in education for all and in an educated electorate, predicting that, 'One day, women will take an active share in the affairs of state through parliamentary government'. She utterly eschewed the frivolous, leisured life of women of her class.

In 1850, she wrote in her diary, 'God called me this morning and asked me would I do good for Him? For Him alone, and without reputation.' When God called her, she did not vacillate, making plans haphazardly, saying 'yes' and 'no' at the same time. She single-mindedly sought out, found and followed her vocation. She trusted alone (and often she was very much alone) in God's faithfulness and in the 'Yes' of God that is found in Christ. She wrote, 'The promises of God are fulfilled in loving obedience.'     

Two Good Reads

This year, the sheer luxury of relaxation offered by those glorious after Christmas days has been emphasised by snow and fog. Apart from venturing out to the odd service or party, to collect logs from the garage and to wander along the Ripon canal at twilight in the still crisp snow, the best thing to do has undoubtedly been to stay in and read infront of the fire. For the first time since coming to Yorkshire, we didn't even make the St Stephen's day pilgrimage to Fountains Abbey due to 'flu and chest infections in the family.

So I have finished two really good reads in the last three days. Infact, I think one of them was quite the most remarkable novel I have read in a long time. Lisa Genova's Still Alice  is the story of a Havard professor of cognitive psychology and linguistics who discovers she has early onset Alzheimer's Disease, aged fifty. The novel is a quite brilliant evocation of the slow progress into forgetfulness and disorientation which detatches her from her career (which is at its height), her support networks, her family and even heself. Yet it is not unremittingly depressing. As well as giving the reader some insight into the fear and the increasing sense of confusion felt by those who suffer from dementia, it shows how relationships can continue to change and even to blossom through the early stages of the disease. Alice, the central character, finds that she can increasingly communicate most profoundly with the daughter she has never before got on with. The reason they have continually argued is that Alice is an academic who is intellectually ambitious for her daughter while Lydia, the daughter, wants more than anything to be an actor and is impatient with the notion of studying, theoretically, what she can do in practice. As Alice's grasp on complexity diminishes and her ability to read begins to desert her, she and her daughter find that they can communicate through talking about how character and emotion are developed in the plays her daughter is  in. A long time ago, a geriatrician I knew whose mother had dementia advised me that mood was they key to communication with dementia sufferers. The content of conversations becomes less and less important while picking up on mood and atmosphere and either joining in or purposefully changing them becomes the key to conversation. Alice becomes expert at picking up the atmosphere of an exchange and uses this ability to encourage Lydia as she studies her parts.

The book is choc full of tiny insights into the impact of Alzheimers on both the sufferer and their family but it is written unapologetically entirely from the view point of the person living with the disease. There is humour and hope and a sense that life changes but remains precious as the disease progresses. Probably one of the most chilling aspects of the book is the way it depicts how dementia sufferers become invisible and voiceless. From the colleagues who ingnore her and become embarrassed in her presence early on, to the doctors and family members who discuss her in her hearing later on, and the social worker who is funded to run a support group for care-givers but not for the sufferers themselves, the reader catches a glimpse of what it is like to begin to disappear. Alice manages to capitalize on the transition period where she has the disease but retains some insight and comunication skills in order to deliver a speech at a conference on Dementia showing what the disease is like for the sufferer. I suspect that few sufferers who had not been former university professors would have the support structures to make this kind of thing possible. The poignancy of her achievement in doing this is that she will only remember the contribution she has made and the feeling of restored confidence it has given her for the duration of the day on which it happened.

The second excellent read I have enjoyed is Juliet Barker's  The Brontes which is a biography of the whole family. Barker's thesis is that the individual Brontes can only be understood when studied in the context of the whole family unit and she has used previously untapped sources to provide a more rounded and (in Mr Bronte and Branwell's cases, a more sympathetic) protrait of family members than the usual hagiography of Charlotte, Emily and Anne at the expense of others in their tight knit circle. She also gives some very interesting insights into the vicinity of Haworth and Bradford in the early to mid nineteenth century and the life and work of a conscientious parish priest in the north of England. Patrick Bronte was extremely faithful in his care of his parishioners throughout his own repeated bereavements and personal worries and it is interesting to read the unexpectedly liberal and far sighted views he held on many social issues. He remained, to the end of his life, a true evangelical yet he accommodated the various theological and spiritual outlooks of his own family with realism and compassion. I had not previously grasped the extent to which Emily lived almost entirely in her own world without demonstrating much empathy for those around her. Home bird she might have been, but this was more about home giving her the space to be independently and unashamedly herself than about concern or sympathy for the others. Charlotte did her (and us) a dreadful disservice in destroying her second novel or the parts of it she left. Charlotte could be amazingly negative and critical of those around her and one wonders whether she over estimated the degree to which Emily's work would have added to mid Victorian prudishness and distaste over the Bronte legacy. Well worth a read, whether you are familiar with the Brontes or not.

The Churchyard at Haworth

Still Alice   Lisa Genova,  Simon and Schuster UK Ltd 2009


The Brontes  Juliet Barker,  Abacus 2010 (first published in the UK by Weidenfield & Nicholson 2004)

Both on Amazon