The Apostles' Creed in limericks

by Kim Fabricius

I believe in the Father, Creator
of nice things like pets and potaters;
as for floods, flags, and fleas
and all sorts disease –
yuk, theodicy sooner or later.

I believe in the Christ, Lord and Son,
whose conception was second to none,
for the Spirit had plans
to omit Mary’s man –
so, alas, for poor Joseph, no fun.

I believe in the Lord’s execution,
after torture by state Lilliputians;
and a grievous descent
to a place of lament
that was emptied without retribution.

I believe in the Lord’s resurrection,
as physical as an erection;
he returned to the stars
with his bruises and scars
to portray a new kind of perfection.

I believe in his coming as Judge,
not to raise hell or settle a grudge,
but to reconcile all,
even those who will bawl,
“What, no violence? A liberal fudge!”

I believe in the Spirit and kirk,
(though the latter can be quite a jerk);
and forgiveness – it’s free,
unconditionally
(says the church, with a smile – or a smirk?).

To conclude: the communion of saints:
I’m unsure what it is; but it ain’t
only Christians like you
who believe as you do –  
like the Lord’s under creedal constraint?

Oops, life – Life! – I almost forgot.
What’s it like? Well, I’ll give it a shot:
it’s like visions of Blake,
it’s like ice cream and cake –
it’s a lot, and a lot, and a lot …

Ten beads: protestant meditations on the Ave Maria

Hail Mary

Forgive me, Mary, if I do not hail you as Queen of Heaven, if I hesitate to praise you as Mediatrix or salute you as Co-Redemptrix. Allow me to greet you humbly by the humble name your mother gave you. Mary, a peasant child. A poor girl from a little village. Mary, in whom the joy of heaven came down to dwell. Mary, the little hinge on which the hopes of all the ages turn. I greet you, Mary! If I do not adore your perpetual virginity, I will instead contemplate your perpetual humility, for all riches were laid up in your poverty. If I do not venerate your immaculate conception, I will strive nonetheless to imitate your immaculate fidelity, for through your faith the knot of human faithlessness has been undone.

Full of grace

I believe – I try to believe – in grace. I hope for it. I look for it like watchmen for the morning. I stake my life on something that has never appeared to me. A grace that is always, like my death, just out of reach – near, far, approaching, never yet. I believe, or hope, that grace is coming for me. I believe because I do not know. I believe because I have not seen. But you, Mary, have seen grace and have known it in your body. In you grace became flesh. The grace you knew was as real as a baby's kicks, as real as blood and birth. Even when I cannot quite believe in grace for myself, I will believe in grace for you. Even when grace is hidden from me, I will believe that you have known it, that all the grace the world will ever need has dwelt in you.

The Lord is with thee

I greet you, Mary, with love for you who bore the one I love. He is with me only because he was with you. He wears my nature because he clothed himself in yours.

Blessed art thou amongst women

For as long as men have had the power of speech they have brought curses and laid them at the feet of women (the women they love). God started it, acting like a man that day, cursing Eve and all her daughters. I have cursed a few myself. Forgive me, Mary, but I too am a man, a son of Adam. To curse a woman is as natural to me as making love. Sometimes the two things are the same. But man and woman are blessed in you as at their first creation. In you the sabbath comes again: the maker’s blessing: rest.

And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus

Your body is the little door through which God stooped to enter the small house of my life. God sought me out and found me. Because I could not find the way to God, God sought and found you, Mary, and through you came to visit me in my grief.

Holy Mary

O Mary, the world has been profaned before my eyes. I had ceased to believe that sanctity was possible. I had ceased to believe that anything was holy. I am sorry, Mary, but I am more than twice your age when you conceived, and all the holiness I ever knew as a child has been worn out by time. Yet a holy flame burns in your mind, and the whole world's darkness is defenceless before one light. Mary, I will call you holy in hope for the day when all things will be sanctified, when all minds will be light and not darkness. Until then, I will follow the small flame of your life that leads me to your Son.

Mother of God

Your womb, Mary, nourished in silence the Word that nourishes all worlds. From your blood God took blood into his veins, from your flesh he took flesh. God came forth looking just like you, your spitting image, with the blood of all your ancestors running in his veins.

Pray for us sinners

Pray for me, Mary. Not because your Son is deaf to my cries but because he hears so well. Because each cry of mine echoes yours, you who brought God crying into the world and watched him grow and treasured all these things within your heart. You who stood by at the hour of his passion, broken by the grief of all the world laid on him. You whom he called woman. Your heart was broken by him first. Let the cry of my heart ascend, mingled with yours, to your God and mine.

Now and at the hour of our death

At the hour of your Son’s passion you looked into the face you loved and saw the union of love and death written there – God’s love, the whole world’s death. You who have seen the secret of my dying, pray for me now. Now in the hour of my grief. Now when death's shadow lies across my heart. May the mystery of my dying be made clear in the light of your Son, the only one who ever truly died because he truly (ever) lived.

Amen

If ever your Son should forget me, Mary, take his hand and place it on your abdomen and remind him that he once dwelt there, bearing your flesh (my flesh), your blood (and mine), a stranger no more to grief (my grief and yours). Remind him, holy Mary, that in your body God has already said the one Amen to every human prayer.

Ding-dong doodlings

by Kim Fabricius

It’s impossible to change the past; to change the future can be even harder.

Physically, death is certain; spiritually, certainty is death.

A minister is something of a jack-of-all-trades – without the skills.

Yes, “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 13:14; cf. Galatians 3:27). Just don’t expect him to fit, being at once too large and too tight for comfort.

Jesus said, “Where two are three are gathered together in my name, there is the C of E in 50 years.”

How can anyone read the Bible without a deep and dreadful sense of discombobulation? I’m afraid you’ll have to ask an inerrantist. The Bible is like the Great Boyg in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt – a wild, sprawling, inscrutable, immovable, monster – except that the Boyg, unlike the Bible, finally capitulates.

As ministers merely lead worship, on retirement I was looking forward to actually worshipping. The transition, however, has not been easy. I still often feel like a liturgical inspector and homiletical critic. So-so sermons I expected, but who’d have thought you could screw up a eucharist? Hey- ho, I suspect that even in heaven I’ll be fidgeting in my seat, harrumphing at the elders and angels, and checking my watch, waiting for the service to end. Except that it won’t, will it? Still, for music, at least, there’ll be Handel, not (Lord, have mercy!) Hillsong.

Last Sunday in church we sang a song which went: “Worthy is the Lamb x 4 / Holy is the Lamb x 4 / Precious is … / Praises to … / Glory to … / Jesus is …” So addled was my brain when we reached the 24th line that I continued silently singing: “Little … / Woolly … / Grazing… / Roasted … / Tender … / Mint-sauced …”

Faith can be a wonderful blessing, and a terrible burden; something to be enjoyed, and something to be endured. Alas, some churches are like banks: in profit you are good for business, but in loss you are bad for morale in their lament-free zones.

Whenever I turn to Augustine’s Confessions, I always feel slightly embarrassed – an appropriate disposition, I think, for what is, after all, a love letter.

What was God doing before he created the world? Yes, “preparing Hell for people who pry into mysteries” is a “frivolous retort”; rather, as Augustine continues, the question itself is unintelligible, based on the failure to realise that time, with its before and after, only comes into existence with creation (Confessions, XI, 12-13). Which is true, but prevaricating. Look at the world: it’s a shambles. What was God doing before he created the world? Surely getting drunk.

Which reminds me … My dad was an eminent architect, a VIP in the Raymond Loewy Corporation, specialising in department stores. He would often take clients to lunch, including liquid, of course, which for my father meant a very dry gin martini – or two … Then back to the drafting board. Which leads me to advise: check your life insurance policy before shopping at Lord and Taylor.

In a coffee shop, observing a family of five, each absorbed in their iPhone or iPad (or whatever the fuck they’re called), an old friend of mine opined, “The end of civilisation.” Were he not Welsh, I would have corrected him: “You’re over 40 years too late. The end of civilisation occurred in 1973 – with the advent of the Designated Hitter.”

And now baseball players in camouflage jerseys: “You will see ‘The Awful Horror’ standing in the place where he should not be” (Mark 13:14). Truly, “The ceremony of innocence is drowned” (Yeats, “The Second Coming”).

Speaking of soldiers … If it is trained like a soldier, dresses like a soldier, fights wars (on crime, drugs, etc.) like a soldier, and then pisses on protest like a soldier, it’s probably a soldier. As for any charm offensive by the Ministry of Truth on the militarization of so-called “peace” officers, it’s like – what’s the expression? – “putting lipstick on a pig”.

Still on point: it’s good to see American police forces honouring their European roots – as municipal armies of nascent, born-to-kill nation-states.

Fox News is not the channel of hate and lies, it is the channel of capital – but nothing sells like hate and lies. Is the salvation of Fox News in doubt? Of course not: its damnation is certain.

What is the visible essence of sin? Violence. The first biblical narrative set in our world is the story of violence, murder. What is the visible essence of sinlessness? Nonviolence. The sinlessness of Jesus is evident precisely in the narrative of his nonviolence, culminating in his murder. Interestingly, sinlessness and nonviolence are both negatives, elements (you might say) of an apophatic Christology.

Forget the inconclusive proof-texting, the acrimonious theological jousting, and the philosophical argy-bargy, the best way to disabuse the hard-core Calvinist of the decretum horribilis is parenthood. Only a devil could look into the eyes of his child and think, “Precious, you might, in fact, be damned.” Of course, the condition of the Arminian is little better: “Honey, you might yet be damned.”

“The Lord God said to Abram, ‘Leave your country, your relatives, and your father’s home, and go to a land that I am going to show you. I will give you many descendants, and they will become a great nation. I will bless you and make your name famous, so that you will be a blessing.’ And Abram said, ‘Sounds like a plan.’ And the Lord God said, ‘Plan C, actually, Abe. And if it doesn’t work out, meh: the alphabet is very long’” (Genesis 12:1ff., Original Autograph).

Speaking of plans … You know the old saying, “What makes God laugh? Tell him your plans”? Well, you know what makes me laugh? God telling us his plans. I mean, you gotta be kidding.

The results of fashionable facial cosmetic surgery – I know I’ve seen that look somewhere before … That’s it! – some of Picasso’s cubist portraits, say, The Weeping Woman. Aesthetic refigurement reiterated as plastic disfigurement.

So a 9-year-old girl accidently kills her shooting instructor while being shown how to fire an Uzi. I guess either the complementarians are right – bullets for boys, Barbies for girls – or we’ve got to start teaching all our kids how to use assault weapons by the age of 6.

Suggesting that authentic presidential leadership requires "play acting sometimes", David Usborne would have Obama "Look more outraged" about the ISIS atrocities; "It will make us feel better," he avers (4 September). Ah, yes, like during those golden global years of the ab fab Ronald Reagan. —Unpublished letter to the British daily the i

A masked executioner – he is horrifying and detestable. That is why, in our mind’s eye, we must unmask him, envisage him, lest fear and hatred overwhelm us, and in demonising him we dehumanise ourselves and add to the wreckage of atrocity.

The psalms and the blues: a little help from James Baldwin

In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin makes a characteristically perceptive and acerbic comment about the tradition of African American songs:

White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them – sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defencelessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been “down the line”, as the song puts it, know what this music is about. I think it was Big Bill Broonzy who used to sing, "I Feel So Good." … White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes.

A similar misunderstanding lies beneath the current academic hypersensitivity to the morality of the psalms. If we think the happy psalms are merely happy and the sad psalms are merely sad, then we'll also assume that the psalms of vengeance are merely immoral and vindictive, or that psalms of conquest are mere glorifications of military violence – without seeing the whole tragic history that gives rise to such outrageously tenacious expressions of faith. Perhaps we'd have a better ear for the psalms if we remembered that they are the precursors not so much of Victorian hymnody as of the spirituals and the blues. One catches the true spirit of the psalter in the old African American song:

Nobody knows the trouble I've seen
Nobody knows my sorrow
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen
Glory hallelujah!

Church attendance manual (3): "Please be seated"

When attending church, it is important to understand that certain seemingly familiar liturgical instructions can have different shades of meaning in different traditions. The instruction, please be seated, is one of the most common yet also most easily understood of all liturgical formulae. You will be spared a great deal of confusion and embarrassment if you observe these guidelines when attending a service of worship in one of the following liturgical settings. Please be seated means:

Mainline protestant

Please stop standing and sit down.

Catholic

Please stop kneeling and sit up.

Charismatic

Please stop lying on the floor and return to your seats.

Pentecostal

Please come down from the rafters and return to your seats.

Tent revival

Now that you all have Jesus in your hearts, you may leave the altar and return to your seats.

Evangelical

Once you've stopped chatting among yourselves, please feel free to find a seat. Whenever you're ready, folks, whenever you're ready...

Orthodox

A cruel joke (there are no seats).

Fresh expressions

An ironic joke (there are nothing but seats).

Quaker

Oops. I can't believe I just said that out loud.

Progressive

What an insensitive thing to say. Words like this simply perpetuate cultural stereotypes and the hegemony of able-bodied discourse. The congregation's constant uncertainty about whether to stand or sit is a small price to pay for our moral superiority.

 

Inner city mission

For pity's sake, Johnno, could you please stop heckling the preacher and sit down!

Rural parish

You can both sit down now.

School chapel

That's my final warning, boys.

Sunday school

Oh hell – they're starting to riot – oh hell – I've completely lost control –

Lord of the loo: a sermon on Graham Greene

A sermon by Kim Fabricius
   
Without doubt, one of the greatest 20th century novelists writing in English was Graham Greene. He was also one of the most popular: his prose was lucid, his plots were gripping, and as a “writer who happened to be Catholic” (he hated the term “Catholic writer”), he wrote compellingly about the human condition with theological insight as well as psychological depth, exploring the perennial themes of good and evil, sin and salvation, faith and doubt.

One of my favourite Greene novels is Monsignor Quixote, published in 1982 (I read it during my first month as a minister). Called “a fable for our times”, it’s an affectionate pastiche of Cervantes’ 17th-century masterpiece Don Quixote. It describes the exploits of a small-town priest, unexpectedly made a monsignor by the Pope (“what strange stirring of the Holy Spirit,” observes his resentful bishop), as he travels around Spain in his Seat 600, tilting at windmills, accompanied by his ex-mayor friend nicknamed “Sancho” (what else!), who happens to be a communist. As you might imagine, their conversations are, well, interesting, as the churchman and the atheist not only argue but are forced to re-examine their own beliefs.

One of the funniest scenes in the novel finds Father Quixote in a pub toilet with a man who wants to make his confession. “Never before had he heard a confession in such surroundings. He had always been seated in that box like a coffin … [So] It was almost automatically that he took refuge in the only box available and sat down on a closed lavatory.” It turns out that the man is an undertaker who has stolen the brass handles off the coffin in which he had buried a priest that morning.

“Father Quixote thought: How many times I have felt guilty as he does without knowing why. Sometimes he envied the certitude of those who were able to lay down clear rules.… Himself he lived in a mist, unable to see a path, stumbling.… He said, ‘Don’t worry about such little things. Go home and have a good sleep. Perhaps you have stolen.… Do you think God cares so much about such a small thing like that? He has created a universe.… You have stolen two brass handles – don’t feel so important. Say you are sorry for your pride and go home.’”

Then the priest goes back to the bar. “What on earth have you been up to?” asks Sancho. “Practicing my profession,” Quixote replies. “In a lavatory?” “In a lavatory, in a prison, in a church. What’s the difference?”

Good question: What’s the difference? Is there any? Is a confessional holier than a khazi? What, indeed, is “holiness”?

In the Bible, one opposite of holy is “unclean” – like a lavatory. The Pharisees in particular were sticklers about “purity”, moral as well as ritual. They had a defensive notion of sanctity: pollution is contagious. Contact with the visibly sick and the obviously immoral – with lepers, for example, or “tax-collectors and sinners” (Matthew 11:19) – no way! Don’t touch, don’t talk, keep your distance! Hence the fastidiousness and the fearfulness of their faith. Jesus, by contrast, had an offensive notion of sanctity: it is not stain or sin but goodness – but grace – that is catching. Hence the robustness and the fearlessness of his own faith.

The Reformer Marin Luther also had this bold and feisty faith. He once wrote to an uptight upright colleague (Philip Melanchton): “Sometimes it is necessary to drink a little more, play, joke, even commit sin in defiance and contempt of the devil, in order not to give him the opportunity to make us scrupulous about small things.” Yet does not being “scrupulous about small things” – Father Quixote’s “little thing[s]” – doesn’t this sum-up the nit-picking piety of so much church culture, so fussy, prudish, mischiefless, so downright boring – and so obstructive to mission? You’ve heard of “born-again” Christianity: this is “yawn-again” Christianity.

What is holiness? Can God be found in a lavatory? How interesting that Luther claimed that his own theological breakthrough – justification by faith alone – came to him – you guessed it – in the WC! God is Lord – Lord of the loo too!

Perhaps, then, punctilious notions of purity and probity have little to do with real holiness, the offensive holiness of Jesus. Perhaps in focussing on little sins we miss the big ones, the weightier matters of justice, the weightiest matter of grace. Perhaps such a focus leads to defensive strategies of exclusion, as contemporary Pharisees police the borders of the church to keep out “the unclean” and “the unsound”. Perhaps what we often take to be beyond the moral or doctrinal pale has less to do with God’s righteousness and more to do with our own pathologies of rectitude. Indeed one reviewer of Monsignor Quixote (Robert Towers) suggests that “The rejection of [all] dogmatic authority … is the presiding theme of the book.” Not quite: for ultimately the novel’s “presiding theme” is the kindness of God, incarnate in weakness and doubt, in this hapless little priest, yet counter-intuitively triumphant over the malice and corruption of Grand Inquisitors in church and state alike.

Monsignor Quixote will die from wounds received when, shot at by two Guardia, his little Seat crashes. Yet his atheist friend will muse that “the love he had begun to feel for Father Quixote seemed now to live in spite of the final separation and the final silence – for how long he wondered, with a kind of fear …?” With a kind of faith, be it the size of a mustard seed, we may answer: forever. For God is love, incarnate in Christ, stronger than death, and, yes, eternal.