Showing posts with label Anglicanism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anglicanism. Show all posts

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Why is church so serious?

http://alcuinbramerton.blogspot.com/2005/01/why-is-church-so-serious.html 
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Picture: Why is church so serious? Cardinal's hat. Twelfth century CE.


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The raw materials 
Of risibility are there.
 
Middle England
In sensible brogues 
Arranging flowers by the pulpit.
 
Bearded priests in pretty dresses.
Prayers for the dead.

Why is church so serious?
Is it because God likes a good laugh?
The best churches
Contain no fewer
Than 0.00037 grams of divine truth 
Per plastic smile.

Holy Trinity Brompton has 0.00038
Spiritual excellence must be broadcast.

Why is church so serious?

Is it because 
Of the hole in the ozone layer?
Church roofs are expensive.
And Jumble Sales
Lack liturgical focus.

And confession
Is heard in coffee shops.

Why is church so serious?

Is it because
A small proportion of some sermons
Is partially true?

Is it because
A large proportion of all sermons
Is never heard?

Empty pews have no ears.
And ears have legs.

But the Bible is a good read
If you can't get Babes Mag.

Why is church so serious?

Picture: Why is church so serious? Laughing statue.

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Images for meditation

>> Go ye into all the world

>> First communion
 
>> Last communion
 
>> Healing the sick
 
>> Preaching the gospel
 
>> Feeding the widows and orphans
 
>> Clothing the widows and orphans

>> Welcoming strangers

>> Cleansing the Temple
 
>> In the world but not of it

>> The great unchurched

>> Enforcing liturgical discipline

>> Embracing interfaith dialogue

>> Remembering the Old Religion

>> Affirming the divine feminine
 
>> Denying the holocaust

>> Father Green awaits the new altar boy

>> Priestly vocation
 
>> Catechist at work

>> Opus Dei arrive for Mass

>> Sufi Master with disciples

Picture: Why is church so serious? Joking popes.

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Churchianity's take on Christianity
A promotional flyer

The theory of substitutionary atonement
An image of salvific fantasy

The Criminal History of The Papacy 1 .. 2 .. 3 
The endemic corruption which has blighted Roman Churchianity for over ten centuries. Tony Bushby writes in Nexus Magazine (2006). These three links connect to pdf files.

Dershowitz silent on absence of Holocaust proof
Alan Dershowitz, the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, has been challenged to provide proof that the popular Zionist narrative about Auschwitz is something other than an expedient fantasy.
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Picture: What caused the death of religion?

Picture: Perhaps pleasure is holiness
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The Theologians' Brains Trust

Sermon abuse

Men make such hopeless priests
Picture: Why is church so serious? Cheery vicar.

Picture: Vicar with dog collar. You sound so sexy when you speak in French.


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Sunday, August 26, 2012

Disappointed at Greenbelt

http://alcuinbramerton.blogspot.co.uk/2005/08/disappointed-at-greenbelt.html
Alcuin Bramerton Twitter .. WikiLeaks Master Mirror Sites .. #1ab archive
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No longer young,
She makes her way
To the Greenbelt Festival
At Cheltenham Racecourse.

It is a sacred site;
Full of Celtic ghosts
And the sense of
Abiding loss.

In her mind
Is the hope
That she may be able
To rediscover
Something of the energy
Of spiritual fascism
Which so excited
Her internal juices
All those years ago
At university.

She is disappointed.

Plenty is happening
At Greenbelt,
But none of it has to do with
Energy,
Spiritual fascism,
Or internal fluidity.

What is happening
At Greenbelt
Is the spiritual self-congratulation
Of materialistic Middle England
As it tries to remember
What all the fuss was about
In the olden days
When angels seemed closer,
And Churchianity seemed more
Than just gender-posing,
And God existed
As a vital,
Immanent
And cosmetically expedient
Fashion accessory.

To be a survivor
At Greenbelt,
You have to be
An out-of-date
Post-evangelical.

And to be
An out-of-date
Post-evangelical,
You have to be
A card-carrying
Associate member
Of the human race
With a half-finished,
Unpublished
Thesis
On "God as Dolphin Mother."

It is all rather disappointing.

But, this year,
The intense quality
Of the disappointment
Is somehow
More gratifying
Than usual.






Greenbelt - the view from the Death Star

Greenbelt anti-pilgrimage

My name is God and these are My instructions

An emerging spirituality for The New Age of Aquarius

Weblog spirituality

Men make such hopeless priests

Why is church so serious?

More Norfolk koans

Index of blog contents
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Friday, January 27, 2012

Not often discussed at Greenbelt



Greenbelt is
The gleeful annual festival
Of transcendental self-congratulation
For the omnipercipient;
A sort of
Trojan horsefair
For biblecreeps,
Pewbuttocks,
And armchair dogma potatoes
Who wish to widen
The horizons
Of their tunnel vision.

Greenbelt at Cheltenham
Is a lot like
Glastonbury at Glastonbury,
Except without the mud
And the noise:
Not only the scrotums are wrinkly.

But there is a tent
For the under-fifties,
With Chorleywood
Colouring books,
Old Testament
Legobricks
By Soul Survivor,
And black and white
Play-Doh
By the African bishops:
Pink not allowed.

Not often discussed
At Greenbelt
Is the fact that
Although post-religious
Christian spirituality
Walked out of church
Decades ago
And exercised its option
Of not returning,
Churchianity at Greenbelt
Is still a
Fashion accessory
Proudly sported by
A minority
Of the spiritually insecure -
Not all of them bishops.

The trousers at Wycliffe Hall
Might object to this
On the grounds that,
In Extremis,
The evangelical God
Must go through the motions
Of noticing the energy
Of the churchbore groupmind
As part of His
Non-negotiable covenant
Of universal condescension.

But it doesn't matter much.
Apparently, Wycliffe Hall
Is only an upgraded
Second division polytechnic
Playfully maintaining
A furtive,
Semi-detached relationship
With Oxford University.

No one of absolutely
Terrific quality
Goes there any more;
No-one of absolutely
Terrific quality
Teaches there any more;
These days it's just
A toothless ghetto
Of masticating misogynists
Chewing the crud
Of Christendom past
And keen
To climax
On Calvin.
Or so it is said
Around the wide acres
Of the Cheltenham racecourse.

But we must tolerate
The new fundamentalism,
And patronise
The Talibanisation
Of Anglican Churchianity
Because it is a legitimate
Voice of dissent
Among the sex-obsessed
Death odours
Of Western religion.
Or so it is suggested,
As a discussion starter,
Before the fish course.

But at Greenbelt
It's OK to be
Vegetarian
On these issues.

Indeed, after four days
Of earnest broad-mindedness
And agenda-free enquiry,
Life itself
Begins to feel
A bit like
A stuffed aubergine.


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Greenbelt - the view from the Death Star

Disappointed at Greenbelt

Greenbelt anti-pilgrimage

Sermon abuse

Why is church so serious?

Religion is a terrorist behaviour

A new scripture shortly to be published

The Piers Stockton cycle of koans

More Norfolk koans

Index of blog contents

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Greenbelt anti-pilgrimage

http://alcuinbramerton.blogspot.co.uk/2006/08/greenbelt-anti-pilgrimage.html
Alcuin Bramerton Twitter .. WikiLeaks Master Mirror Sites .. #1ab archive
Alcuin Bramerton profile ..... Index of blog contents ..... Home .....#1ab


Once again,
Sid and Doris Heeohm-Kountie,
Balding and quasi-menopausal,
Find themselves
At the Greenbelt Festival,
In Cheltenham,
Gloucestershire.

Horses for courses.

It is the annual
Anti-pilgrimage
To yesterday's memories
Of what might have been
If the Holy Spirit
Had been a bit more streetwise
In the pre-mortgage,
Pre-wife-and-two-veg years,
Of fundamentalist
Spiritual formation.

What is the narrative here?
And what is the metanarrative?

The narrative is
That this is Cheltenham,
Not Middlesborough.

Nor is it Baghdad
Or Banda Aceh
Or Darfur
Or Kashmir
Or Lebanon
Or Ramallah.

We're not talking about
Engagement with real issues
On the ground, here;
We're talking about
Talking about
Not engaging with real issues
On the ground,
But not engaging
With empathy:
Christian social action through the arts
As directed from
The depths
Of the middle class armchair.

You need bottom at Greenbelt:
The narrative is radical.

The metanarrative, however,
Is less decisive.

At Greenbelt
You have to learn
To expect the expected.

The Greenbelt Festival
Is Tunbridge Wells
At prayer.

Hold the front page.

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Greenbelt - the view from the Death Star

Disappointed at Greenbelt

Men make such hopeless priests

Why is church so serious?

More Norfolk koans

Index of blog contents
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Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Sermon abuse



The vicar strides solemnly
Up the pulpit steps
To deliver the twenty seventh sermon
In his series on the
Surprisingly contemporaneous words
Of the Old Testament prophet, Obadiah.

In the back pew on the left,
Mrs Hartley is ready.

She takes a machine pistol
Out of her handbag,
Points the weapon steadily
At the vicar,
And empties the magazine
Into his open mouth.

It is a NADFAS magazine
About late medieval church furnishings,
So the vicar's death is slow and agonising.

The police conduct a detailed investigation
Into the murder,
And send the papers
To the Crown Prosecution Service.

Several people at the Crown Prosecution Service
Die of boredom
As they review the NADFAS papers
On late medieval church furnishings.

In the end,
The Crown Prosecution Service
Takes the view
That it would not be in the public interest
To prosecute Mrs Hartley
For murdering the vicar.

On balance, they say,
The public good has been greatly enhanced
By the removal of a notorious pest.

There is a clear limit
To the amount of the Old Testament prophet,
Obadiah,
Which the general public
Can be expected to tolerate.


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These days the church

Female bishops

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