KEV67

I have read 147. Not too bad. Don't think some of those I read were all that great, but I must be wrong in that.

I was going to make a start on the Baptist churches on Sunday, but I think I will return to St Mary's Castle Street. They always pray for the Queen. Actually, I think most Church of England churches do, but St Mary's always does. Other Church of England churches pray that her ministers make wise decisions. It is officially the state church. The Book of Common Prayer will be outdated again. We already skip the bit referring to the Duke of Edinburgh.

Are we talking just about fiction? There are books that can change your life. They might make you change your religion, radicalise your politics, or jack in your safe, steady job to become a lumberjack in British Columbia. Among fiction, I cannot really think of anything I regret, but I sometimes think the books you are made to read at school can put you off reading. A lot of kids hate Lord of the Flies. I did not appreciate having to read Jane Eyre as a fifteen-year-old boy. It was romantic fiction as well as Victorian, so double girly. I think a lot of kids are put off reading Dickens at school, including me. I suppose I slightly regret reading Northern Lights by Philip Pullman. I really did not like what he was trying to do. I suppose there are other books I did not like because they were great until the end. I did not like the endings of Captain Corelli's Mandolin nor Oscar and Lucinda. If it's a choice between an artistic but unhappy ending, and a sappy ending, I usually prefer the sappy ending.

I was on a forum called www.online-literature.com, or it might have been www.literature-online.com. It was quite good, but the site kept getting attacked by hackers. Some idiots kept posting loads of spam messages. Eventually the administrator beefed up the cyber security, but it made the site difficult to logon to and to post to. Most the people I most liked stopped posting. Another slight issue was that it was an American site and I am a bit biased towards British books.

Went to St William of York Roman Catholic Church this morning, which still do Latin mass. As it was Sunday it was High Mass. I went once before on a Friday when it was Low Mass. It was way better than the other Catholic services I went to. Most the women wore lacy headscarves, and I was glad to see most the men wore suits. High Mass is mostly sung. This was a problem for me as I did not know what they were singing. I only just got there in time. If I had been a bit earlier, I might have been able to borrow one of their Missals (I think they're called). The young woman on the same pew as me could sing quite well. The priest faced the altar for the most part. There were several lads of various ages fetching and carrying. At one point a priest addressed the congregation in English. He said to pray because the Channel Islanders are considering legalising euthanasia. He mentioned someone, who if I understood correctly, was about to become a Franciscan monk. The sermon was about ten Samaritan lepers. Jesus cured them all and one of them returned later to thank him. According to the priest, this was the only person in the Gospel to thank Jesus for having been cured of something. He also explained the difference between gratitude and feeling grateful, which I did not bother trying to understand. The service lasted an hour and a half, but I managed to resist looking at my watch. In the evening I went back to St Mary's Castle Street, Church of England (Continuing) church. Gave them another £20. I do not know whether this is enough, too much or too little. The hymns were absolutely unsingable. The sermon this week was about the feeding of the five thousand, but not so much about that miracle as about the crowd being lost sheep. There was a discussion of sheep. Up in Cumbria you can leave sheep on the hillsides all summer long, because there are no lions or wolves, but not so in Judea of classical times. The vicar indulged in a bit of Pharisee and Sadducee bashing, comparing them to wolves. I have done the local Roman Catholic churches. St William of York was quite good. I think Pope Paul VI was wrong to do away with Latin mass. Next week I plan to make a start on the Baptist churches. There is one about five minutes walk away.

I am currently reading this. I was not too sure at first, but I think it is an amazing book.

I am quite excited about my TBR list. I am currently reading only two books: Harrius Potter et Lapis Philosophi, and Hyperion. The books I have to read are as follows: Lamb of God Jesus' Atonement for Sin by Ralph F. Wilson - I think I read this before and I was very impressed. The Celts by Barry Cunliffe - Present from my Irish mother. False Alarm by Bjorn Lomborg - I have read a lot of books about climate change and renewable energy; this one is written by a sceptic. Looking Backwards Over Burma by Dennis Spencer - War memoir by a Beaufighter navigator. Over Fields of Fire by Anna Timofeeva-Egorava - War memoir by a female, Soviet Sturmovik pilot. The Owl and the Nightingale by Simon Armitage - A book of poetry by the Poet Laureate. Famine Inquiry Commission Report on Bengal - A report into the 1943 Bengal Famine, which Churchill gets some stick for. Arnold Bennett Lost Icon by Patrick Donovan - A biography of an author who was big in his day but now nearly forgotten. Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky - I really think this is the one that will change my life. The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope - John Major's favourite book. The Lost Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope - Did not want to risk not be able to buy the last book in the series from the same set. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas - Picked up from my late stepmother's bookshelves.

As worked out by foreign book critics and academics for the BBC in 2015: linky What did you think? I thought it was quite an interesting and varied selection. For me it had four too many books by Virginia Woolf. I have read all the top twenty except for The Waves by V.W. My favourite remains Great Expectations. Next might be Tom Jones. I have read forty-six overall.

The problem I have with gay marriage in church, and even women priests, is that the Bible, in particular the New Testament prohibits it. How can something be wrong for hundreds of years and then be right? Which parts of the New Testament do you feel free to override and have you informed God? Religion is supposed to be about eternal verities. It is not supposed to follow social mores. Some social mores have only developed since medical or technological innovation, so how can they be eternal? I first turned religious about twelve years old when I started reading the Gideon Bibles they distributed at schools. My schoolboy conclusions about Christianity: Being good is about not doing what you want; God is always right (even if it does not seem that way to you); Life is only a test for the afterlife. My understanding from reading the bible was that the worse time you had this life, the better time you had the next, or at least the more likely you were to get there. God has stiffed a lot of people, not just homosexuals. If you do not actually believe in any sort of afterlife then sure, do what you like, but why bother going to church? What is the point in following a discipline that only prohibits what you do not want to do anyway? Then again, my understanding was also that you were supposed to give away all your money, live a life of poverty, and spend your time proselytising unbelievers. I never fancied that. I think there has always been a certain amount of hypocrisy in the church right from the beginning, because a lot of Jesus's teaching were too hard for most people to follow and were incompatible with maintaining a stable society long term.

I tried looking up St Mary's Castle Street Church of England Continuing on the Charity Commission website. I could not find them. I did find a charity entry for St Silas (Continuing Church) Trust, which is one of the other three congregations. Their total income was £4,662 and outgoings were £2,076. I looked up their trustees, and several of them were also trustees of The Association of the Continuing Church Trust, whose total income was £3,720 and outgoings £3,826. It does not look like there is a lot of tithing going on. These figures are less than for the maintenance company for my block of flats. I gave them £20 last week, if I do that every week it would make a significant difference. I doubt the vicar is being paid. I doubt they are paying building insurance. If they are then that is taking up most of their income. When I was at the Unitarians meeting, they said that they had gone to see a talk by Karen Armstrong at this church the evening before. Karen Armstrong is an ex-nun who writes very learned books on religion. So learned in fact, that I had a great deal of difficulty understand a previous book, History of God. She was promoting her new book. Maybe the church gets a bit of money from events like that, but it cannot be much.

Maybe, but I wonder whether the CofE is headed for another split. The Anglican Church is predominantly African these days. They do not hold with homosexuality. There was another Lambeth Conference recently, in which resolution I.10 was reaffirmed, which bans gay weddings and blessings in church. The Methodist Church is in the process of splitting over gay marriage. It probably would have happened already, but for Covid.

Went to Our Lady and St Anne Roman Catholic Church this morning. Another Irish priest. It was alright. The sermon was about how Jesus advised dinner guests not to take the most honoured position at the dinner table, because the host might move you down in favour of a more honoured guest. Instead he advised his disciples to take the least honoured position so that the host might move them up. I do not really agree with all the advice Jesus gave. If everyone followed that advice, everyone would fight for the least honoured position at the table, and other guests would be humiliated by being moved down. Surely, it would be better for everyone to arrive, work out where they should be, then if anyone arrives late, he should have the good manners to say, "No, stay where you are. I will sit at the end here." Later I made an idiot of myself, because I noticed a Latin motto that said "Benedictus Fructus Ventris tui Iesus" over a picture of the Virgin Mary. How many bellies did she have? I posted on a Latin forum that it was odd that ablative plurals were often used in place of singular ablatives, such as 'de profundis', 'Pater noster, qui es in caelis'. Only ventris is not the ablative plural of a second declension noun, it is the genitive singular of a third declension noun: venter, -tris m. In the evening I went back to the Church of England (Continuing) church. I was amused by Psalm 136 where it went, "Who smote Eygpt with their first-born: for his mercy endureth for ever;" The vicar seems to delight in picking impossible to sing hymns. A Christian friend accused me of being pharisaical for preferring the 1662 liturgy to the version the CofE uses now.

Yes, but he is open about it. He is not going to do it and pretend it wasn't him, or needle someone else in to doing it. Besides, Imogen's husband, Posthumus, sent his servant to kill Imogen when he thought she had been unfaithful (if I understood right). Posthumus was forgiven.

Also liked this quote: Mine eyes were not in fault, for she was beautiful;

Have to say, the bits where Innogen dresses as a man, calling herself Fidele, with all the men she meets not understanding why they took such a liking to the young fellow; well those bits reminded me of Blackadder Goes Forth when General Melchett took an unaccountable like to Private Bob.

Alfred Lord Tennyson liked this bit from Cymbeline most. He was buried with the book open at the page. ‘Hang there like fruit, my soul, Till the tree die,’

He does not try to ingratiate himself with anyone. What you see is what you get.

Finished, I made a mistake. Apparently we won, but King Cymbeline decided to pay the Roman tribute anyway. The best bit of verse from the play is this bit from Act 4, Scene 2: Fear no more the heat o’ th’ sun Nor the furious winter’s rages; Thou thy worldly task hast done, Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages. Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust. Fear no more the frown o’ th’ great; Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke. Care no more to clothe and eat; To thee the reed is as the oak. The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this and come to dust. Fear no more the lightning flash, Nor th’ all-dreaded thunder-stone; Fear not slander, censure rash; Thou hast finished joy and moan. All lovers young, all lovers must Consign to thee and come to dust. No exorciser harm thee! Nor no witchcraft charm thee! Ghost unlaid forbear thee! Nothing ill come near thee! Quiet consummation have, And renowned be thy grave! which is the bit that reminded me of A.E. Houseman.

I think John Polkinghorn writes books in this area, although I have not read anything by him.

And still it's not in the bookshops.

What is the long 19th Century?

Scene 5.4 was the most curious so far. Not sure what to make of the dream sequence. The verse meter (if that's what it is) changed. I did like the jolly jailer though.

A battle was described in Act 5.3. I think we lost, but Arviragus, Guiderius and Belarius put up a good show. Where did Shakespeare get these names from? Anyway, from reading the introduction, I gather the best bits (apart from Iachimo getting out of his box) is in the last two scenes. Some of it is a bit A.E. Housemanish I thought.

She's a deep sleeper.

I wonder whether it was supposed to be pronounced Kymbeline or Symbeline? I am guessing Kymbeline as 'C' was always hard in classical Latin. I am not sure about Welsh names. I read Tennyson liked the play. He was holding a copy of it when he died. Apparently Virginia Woolf quoted it in Mrs Dalloway, although I do not remember. The author of the introduction. Valerie Wayne, says Jane Eyre was influenced by the story. A young woman goes out into the country to protect her honour and happens upon her closest relatives.