This morning an acoustic consultant visited St Philip's to advise us on the best way to insulate our building. At the moment it's difficult to let out both of our halls since the noise from one can easily be heard in the other. And it's impossible on a Sunday morning for the Sunday School to make the kind of noise they'd like to, without seriously interfering with our worship downstairs in the main church. So we need to insulate the building: hence our need for acoustic consultants. Now we await their report and recommendations.
I hadn't realised before today that Crusaders, on their way to Palestine, took possession of Constantinople, wresting it away from the control of the Orthodox Church and back into the hands of the Pope. (This, as so much recently, courtesy of Andrew Graham-Dixon's series on early Christian art.)
Yesterday evening a group of ten volunteers completely rearranged the inside of St Philip's Church. As an experiment, we've brought the altar right down into the body of the church for our new monthly all-age service.
One of the volunteers was Flora, a young woman from Nepal, now part of the Community at the Lee Abbey International Students' Club in Lexham Gardens. (Interestingly, one of the other volunteers from the Students' Club, also from Nepal, apparently attended the same school in Katmandu, but they never spoke to each other until they both found themselves in London.)
Danny, a regular member of our church, was also helping last night. He has spent time in Nepal. What was extraordinary was that Flora, who I don't think has been to our church before, said to Danny: ‘I recognise you. I've seen you in Nepal.’ Very strange.
I met today with Barry Perrott, a member of St Mary Abbots who believes he is related to Sir John Perrott, thought to be an illegitimate son of Henry VIII. Barry is a huge devotee of Teilhard de Chardin, and in 2002 privately published a small book ‘ The Ecumenical Journey: A Spiritual Scrapbook.’.
Barry is an enthusiast rather than a scholar, but his enthusasism has reminded me of a long-held desire to read Teilhard.
The Catholic theologian James Alison is someone I come across about once a year. I first met him at Downside Abbey. A couple of years ago Carys shared a platform with him at an event designed to encourage dialogue between psychotherapy and theology. Last year I met him again at the Greenbelt Festival. And this evening he led a Bible Study for the Kensington Deanery Synod on Jesus in Gethesmane.
James drew out the remarkable number of allusions in that story to the Hebrew scriptures, and closed by simply reading Mark's account of the story, a text by then made much richer and more dense by the exposition leading up to it.
Yesterday evening I was having a drink and reading the paper in the ICA Bar, after watching the film ‘Die Große Stille’. After a while I realised I was surrounded by a lively group of people who all knew each other. It turned out to be the celebration party to mark the birth of a first son to a 51 year old man, David, who works at the ICA
David told me he was fiercely anti-religious, so much so that the invitations to the event had described it as an ‘anti-christening’. But he was remarkably relaxed and even amused when I told him I was an Anglican priest. He introduced me to the whole group: "The priest turned up anyway" I told them.
It was also, strangely, the only time I've been to the ICA to see a religious film. Many of the places I go for intellectual stimulation seem to me to be either indifferent or actively hostile to religion: the London Review of Books Bookshop is another such place.
Watching ‘Die Große Stille’ has made me curious about the Carthusians. Who are they? What is their history?
Andrew Graham-Dixon, once again fascinating on early Christian art. The extraordinary mosaics in Ravenna of the Emperor Justinain and his wife Theodora. And a conversation in Athens with a Greek icon maker, who explained how the perspective of the icon is the exact opposite of the perspective of Renaissance Art. In order to understand something in Byzantine art, you need to participate. So you are no longer a static spectator, looking through a window. As Graham-Dixon remarked, we are not just metaphorically, but also literally, moved as we orientate ourselves,working out the best place from which to take part.
One of the functions of this blog seems to be to display my ignorance before the world. I've just watched an episode of Andrew Graham-Dixon's TV series ‘Art of Eternity’. It was a fascinating programme, full of so much I didn't know, especially early Coptic art. But it's one thing to be ignorant about Coptic art, another entirely not to have known about Bourges Cathedral, which from all the pictures looks stunning. I'm not sure how its existence has passed me by. I have a feeling I shall be visiting Bourges one day.
Andrew Graham-Dixon was lyrical about the merits of Christian art, but whether his interest is entirely aesthetic, or whether he also has some religious interest, I have no idea.
I've introduced my first form to this website - the ‘search’ box which appears on every page. Because I simply copied the relevant code from my search software, I'd assumed it was valid XHTML. But the W3C Validation Service tells me my pages are no longer valid XHTML.
The online support area for my search engine, Zoom, has a page about using CSS to format a search form. But I don't fully understand that, probably because I don't understand scripts. (Memo to self: find out about scripts.) The W3C XHTML module for forms is here, but I don't understand that either.
In the meantime I seem to have solved my validation problem by putting the two ‘input’ tags inside an additional ‘div’ tag. I don't know why this works, but the idea came from this webpage (which is about HTML rather than XHTML). It says that the "input" tag is valid within the "div" tag. So I thought I'd see whether something similar was true for XHTML. And the pages now validate.
I've been reading ‘The Pacific Journey of Adam Ewing’ - the first strand in David Mitchell's novel ‘Cloud Atlas’. It talks about the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands, about whom I know nothing. So I thought I'd find out more.
The Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand says more about ‘Nunuko's Law’, the Moriori solemn vow of peace. The Wikipedia entry on the Moriori is here: its recommended reading is Michael King's book Moriori: A People Rediscovered (2000). The ‘National Review’ focuses on the Moriori in an article on pacifism.