Googlies and Curve Balls

THOUGHTS 

on 

CHIEF EPISCOPAL OFFICERS, 

BLOODY BIG RODENTS, 

and the 

FUTURE of the DANCE

(in three parts to save your sanity).

PART ONE:

“Googlies and Curve Balls”

So Merton writes to Rosemary Radford Ruether (and there’s two names it’s privilege to cite), as quoted in full in Furlong (another worthy of whose sandals, etc) saying,

… where is the Church and where am I in the Church? … Is the Church a community of people who love each other or a big dog fight where you do your religious business, seeking meanwhile your friends somewhere else … I do wonder at times if the Church is real at all. I believe it, you know. But I wonder if I am nuts to do so. Am I part of a great big hoax?[1]

Now there’s a thought. I’m no Merton, but it’s always a treat when the sheer iridescence of the Holy Ones irradiates blundering souls. Renewed acquaintance with Merton this week has done just that. 

“Am I part of a great big hoax”?

In the, I dunno, nearly 40 years since I backslid from atheism into faith I’ve seen increasing degrees of toxicity in Mother Ecclesia. After a brief flirtation with the ecstasies of rah-rah Jesusism, with its fascination with finding Satan hiding in every record cover and determination that women should submit to men (if they didn’t it was probably because Satan had snuck out of a 10CC[2] album and nabbed them), I stumbled more or less by chance into the arms of Mother Cantuar. I have stayed there, by the skin of my toenails, ever since. Probably because I still have 10CC on my shuffle. 

It seems to some that Mother Cantuar is like a secret society. Dig deeper and deeper into the onion and new mysteries are revealed to the elect. Not so, alas, though I admit a few aspects of its culture can seem a little quaint. But that’s Cantuar for you. Actually it’s English for you, the language, the culture. Any race that invents a game with roles like Silly Mid Off, First Drop (though that terminology seems to gave died these days: PhD thesis on semantic shift in cricket, anyone?) and “bowled a googly” is likely to have one or two obscurities. 

Actually many (ecclesiastical, not cricket) terms were borrowed. But, yeah, they can be bewildering, and I still recall, as I mentioned before, my shock before my first theological college chapel service when a sophisticated second year student demanded “Godfrey, grab a corporal and get the ciborium from the aumbry opposite the piscina and place it on the credence table.” I thought it was illegal to grab corporals, at least without mutual adult consent. 

Cricket has been well explained for the more prosaically inclined:

You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out.

When both sides have been in and all the men have gone out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game.[3]

Compared to that, Anglicanism is a cinch. Though there are a few idiosyncrasies. Like archdeacons. To understand that title you have to understand that there are only three “orders” in the Anglican Church (stolen from the Catholics): deacon, priest and bishop. They sometimes seem to be hierarchical, so that bishops are senior to priests who are senior to deacons, all of whom of course are senior to mere laity but that won’t do at all, so a position (not “rank” because that would be hierarchical and therefore naughty) called “archdeacon”, that is a sort of bossy deacon with lots of oversight and some insight, was invented. And anyway, not hierarchical, because that makes the baby Jesus cry.

Noting that a “deacon” is a servant, theoretically waiting at table and washing feet and stuff, the archdeacon is a really important servant who is actually a priest and not a deacon, though all priests and bishops were once deacons (and once a deacon mostly always a deacon unless defrocked but see below) who arches over everyone except bishops and archbishops, and of course archbishops arch over bishops and archdeacons and everyone else. Once a bishop always a bishop of course (except if formally defrocked, because bishops and priests and deacons all wear frocks to remind them how humble they are, and they can be dee-ed if they're really naughty, though some who are naughty just breeze on regardless, surrounded by adoring acolytes) though originally bishops were just pastors shepherding flocks, caring for them like, you know, Jesus said and stuff.  

Oh, and occasionally archdeacons have been deacons but not priests but bishops have never become archdeacons as far as I know though in theory that too could happen if a bishop so decreed and that’s not confusing at all.  

Like both sides having been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out. That’s not confusing. Not at all. Why would it be?

In recent decades some Anglican leaders have got  jack of all this and decided to invent titles like “RMC” (don’t ask) and “Area Dean” or “Rural Dean” so as not to confuse punters, and you know, relevance and all that. Though I’d have to say once you get initials and acronyms things get no clearer. It gets worse when you find that a dean is normally the priest (and occasionally is a bishop but don’t go there) of a cathedral (and a cathedral actually just means “supposedly big and sometimes important church where the bishop parks his or her bottom habitually”) unless he or she is an Area Dean in which case they’re just a sort of RMC with a meaningless title, or perhaps they’re even a sort of Archdeacon (but they’re not normally a deacon except in a perpetual sense), then you discover that, like the explanation of cricket, nothing is much clearer anyway, and the queues have not formed at the door of the core church business of worship because, well, who cares?

Americans of course got rid of things like googlies and silly mids off and wicket keepers, replacing them with back stops and first and second bases and curve balls, which just wasn’t cricket. How they ever produced the great poets and novelists that they have I really don’t know, but it shows poetry can transcend pragmatism. I’m pretty sure they may have got rid of a lot of funny titles, too. And roods, chains and perches, which is why they can't measure a cricket pitch.

Anyway a whole heap of Anglicans drifted into the decision that pragmatism was a thing for Anglicans as well as Americans and bishops (the latter recognizable outside Sydney by wearing really strange hats, called “mitres” after a New Zealand mountain,[4]  in processions, and purple shirts everywhere (except an important bloke called Welby who prefers black shirts) and began to operate like CEOs. 

And that’s another set of initials, though admittedly the boys and girls in purple have not officially adopted it yet. They don’t, after all, want to be confused with an RMC or an LBW. Or a ROUS.[5] Nor have they adopted the iPhone as a symbol of their authority; they still use a crook, but they call it a “crozier” to avoid confusion with anything that might seem crooked. That day might come though, because, you know, relevance and all that? These days far more of their work relates to the sort of business done on an iPhone than the gentle shepherding, the pastoral caring in a Jesus-time Middle Eastern sort of way that was envisaged when bishops really were pastoral. Which was long ago, before 312 CE. One day when they are processing in queues of ritual significance they will carry a strange and important-looking black glass and aluminium tile to signify how busy and important they are and historians will research and discover that in the twenty-first century it was believedthat these rectangular tiles were the means by which the Holy Spirit spoke to and through church leaders).

So: deacons, priests and CEOs? Apprentices, sub-branch managers, RMCs, ADs, RDs and CEOs? Something like that. Phew. Now we’ve sorted that out and ciboria and piscine are in their rightful place in the rubbish dump of history, this strange beast called Church, Anglophile branch,[6] should burst at the seams.
 

[There's more to come ... but perhaps this potted history of Anglican protocol is enough? If you've read this far receive a virtual bronze medal]

---

[1] Merton, to Ruether, January 29^th 1962. Reprinted in Furlong, Merton, 299.

[2] Allegedly named after the average emission of human ejaculate.

[3] I first saw the explanation on a ta towel in the 1970s, which is, I believe, where it first emerged. So I’m sorry I can’t cite origins on this one.

[4] Yes, alright, I jest. About the mountain, not the hats.

[5] But only the cognoscenti know what they are.  And anyway, I don’t think they exist.

[6] Because here in the antipodes we don’t like to think “English”, though sometimes we skip the Angles and Saxons and claim the Celts.