Divided Household

Holy Trinity before the Carol Concert, excuse the quality, taken on my mobile

My very good friend Linda and I went to our annual Christmas church visit on Sunday night, 9th December. This year we went to see the EYMS brass band, one of the best brass bands in the UK, and the Hull Freedom Choir at the magnificent Holy Trinity Church in Hull. There was a formal carol concert with the packed congregation singing along to the amazing accompaniment of the band interspersed with readings.

After an interval, there was an informal concert with the band playing popular Christmas tunes and the choir singing some unusual Christmas songs. It was a wonderful concert and at times, strangely, very emotional. 

This is a funny time of year for me. The children and I celebrate Christmas, my wife does not - she's a Jehovah's Witness. So the jobs of Christmas are mine; cards get sent out without her name on them for example. The first year I sent them out without her name on, probably twenty years or so ago, I had to write an explanation on them which was awkward and embarrassing, but no-one bothered or commented for which I am very grateful, and I get cards back to this day from the same friends, but without her name on. 

She still eats with us on Christmas day, she has to eat all the same, but she won't put a paper hat on, or pull crackers etc., etc., but life goes on, after all these years I'm quite used to it. She doesn't recognise birthdays either so it saves me a few bob, but there is a gap in our lives at what are special times for the rest of us.

Whilst I read of some communities who revel in differences and feel stronger for it, there is a wedge that religion has driven between us and so the differences between my beliefs and hers are a world apart. There is no meaningful commonality even though we believe in the same God; the theory of what its all about and the interpretation of what the Bible says and how we worship is so different.

Mine is a relaxed and joyful experience in the modern world, hers is brought about by indoctrination and a love of God above everything else taking lessons for life from a time long gone by, written for people also long gone. No doubt she enjoys her religion, I don't really know, it's not shared.

I fully support the freedom to choose and live your life as you see fit within the bounds of the law and therefore I can't criticise her right to choose and follow her path as I have done in my belief. I just dislike the dogma and inflexibility and in some ways the hypocrisy of how JW's conduct their selves within their religion enjoying the worldly advantages of modern life.

They will say the same about me no doubt, the Bible tells them that Spiritualists (me) are receiving messages from Satan to give false hope and deception. Wasn't Jesus one of the greatest of all in His Spiritualism and His love of God. Didn't He bring together Moses and Elijah who had been dead hundreds if not thousands of years on the Mount of Transfiguration and He even spoke to them? 

Angels are littered through the Bible in a whole host of stories - superhuman beings, messengers of God. Is there no greater spiritual being than an Angel or Arch-Angel? Yet these ethereal beings are accepted without question. I believe in Angels - I wonder if that makes my wife uncomfortable?

One thing I have learned in my life living with a JW is that you never argue about the content, meaning and interpretation of the Bible. They know it backwards, forwards and upside down and interpret it in a unique and very literal way. 'The Truth' as they call it.

What is the truth, how do we reconcile out faith and belief with the truth of stories, written in a few cases and handed down by word of mouth for thousands of years and collected together and debated by mortal people centuries after the death of Christ before being put together in an agreed version in a book? 

For me that's the crux of it all: Why is my belief and worse or better than anyone elses? Why does one religion find themselves superior and better knowing than the rest? What do the hundreds of thousands of scrolls written centuries ago which have been ignored say, and how do they lend to the debate?

I am just comfortable with myself and what I believe in. I am what I am. I do what I do. 

I hope you are comfortable about yourself too - you deserve to be without being criticised and lambasted because you have given yourself a label even if that label is 'no religion recognised here.'

I don't think this is a rant and it is not meant to be, this is just a personal observation that relates to how I think as an individual and how religion affects me personally. I know fellow bloggers are interested about people and their lives - well here is mine - laid bare.

If you are angry with what I have written I am sorry; if you agree with it, that is up to you and either way I respect your point of view, but please don't leave a rant or embarrass yourself, be constructive if you make a comment and let me understand how you feel.

Have a great week

Chat soon

Ta-ra.

Feeling Christmassy - At Last

What a weekend of joy, frivolity and mayhem (of the best sort). The weather has shown it's true winter colour here of white - frost that is, on our cars and gardens and today, where the sun did not reach, the frost lasted all day.

Saturday saw a 50th birthday party for a good friend Linda which was organised for a local pub and the theme of the party was sixties and seventies dress and music and this worked wonderfully well. It was a great night with a great singer, a solo female and lovely company. There were straight laced professional people dressed as hippies, sixties fashion Mary Quant type dressed (some deliciously short) and one extraordinarily huge Afro wig. There were pinks and flower patterns, ban the bomb emblems, dark round John Lennon glasses, jaunty hats and frankly a fantastic time was had by all. I never drank a drop of alcohol and enjoyed it all the more because I was in control and danced the night away (and didn't suffer physically surprisingly), something I haven't done for many years. A night that will live in the memory for a long time.

Sunday was all the more poignant and somewhat emotional as firstly I went with a friend to support her as she laid wreaths of remembrance on her husband's and father's grave. Then on Sunday evening, I went with the same friend to the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols at the Holy Trinity Church in Hull - the main church in the old town of Hull. Not the most senior church, but large, expansive and looking much better for renovations internally.

Holy Trinity after the Candlelit Service 

Some of my ancestors were baptised and married and dispatched in this church, yet, it was only the second time I've ever been in it and this was the first service in it I had ever attended. The service was by candlelight with just the lights of the Christmas Tree to show there was any electricity in the Church at all. The carols were traditional: Once in Royal David's City, It Came upon the Midnight Clear, O Little Town of Bethlehem, Away in a  Manger, Shepherds (wash their socks by night) and Hark the Herald Angels Sing. The nine readings were short but told the Christmas story from the Bible. 

The choir rendered some more traditional winter anthems of celebration such as Psallite Unigenito, I Saw a Fair Maiden, In the Bleak Midwinter, Sir Christemas, and the organist finished with the magnificent In Dulce Jubilo by Bach. Tea and mince pies were to be had in the vestry although in this I did not participate. Instead I went for a walk along the dark and chill river Humber at the Horsewash in the old town for a few minutes contemplation. Looking east, the picture below is the famous (locally anyway) The Deep - a huge aquarium, the building of which is shaped like a huge shark.

The Deep - lit against a dark winter's sky

It's many years since I've been to a midnight service - many of them were stopped because of drunks in the nineteen eighties but that means that the services are now more for families and this is a wonderful thing. It was indeed a wonderful atmosphere and thoroughly enjoyable and gave me a chance to exercise the vocal chords.

So two lots of exercise this weekend, dancing and singing. I am now officially in the Christmas mood. I have already finished the the first two parts of Dicken's Christmas Carol, something that I do traditionally and have done for more years than I can recall now; Marley has shown up, rattled his chains and gone to wander the world in torment and the ghost of Christmas past has taken Ebeneezer on the first part of his journey of redemption.

Chat soon

Ta-ra

Scenes from Horseback

I had a brief sojourn into the old town of Hull this morning to meet an old friend who showed me round an old building which goes back to 1698. I am going to lead a paranormal investigation there in January and it gave me a chance to have a look round to get my bearings and soak in a bit of the atmosphere. It promises to be a good one. The picture above shows the church this morning bathed in winter sunlight in the reflection of the bank windows on Market Place.

While there, I decided to have a short wander around, not dwelling too long because of the freezing weather - the only advantage of which was the fact that there was no-one around. I used to work in the old town centered by Holy Trinity Church in the mid to late 1970s and some of my ancestors were baptised and married in the magnificent church, originally built in 1285, just down the road from St Marys which featured on a blog a few weeks ago.

The statue of King William lll sits, unceremoniously in some ways, next to a public toilet in Market Place, just a few yards from Holy Trinity. This is a remarkable statue of a king who was relatively unloved and unmourned. Were it not for his missus, Mary, who was indeed loved at the time, he would be William the Obscure. The statue of him was erected in 1734, and apart from the war years, his gilded figure has remained there ever since, vigilant and proud. It is said that the sculptor committed suicide after realising, following his completion of the statue that he had not included any stirrups for the King's royal tootsies. The truth is that the Sculptor, Dutchman Peter Scheemaker died in 1781 at the grand old age of 90. The statue was probably designed that way to represent a 'classic' style of bareback horsemanship.

I haven't walked down Prince Street opposite Holy Trinity for 30 years plus and although there is a lot of restoration down there, the cobbled streets, the curved nature of the building line, the arched entrance and the old shuttered buildings takes you back centuries; I guess it hasn't changed massively - ghosts from yesteryear would recognise the scene.

 
On the way home, thankful for a warm car, the Humber Bridge presented a fascinating vista being half covered in a fog bank. Fog of course is no stranger to the Humber basin and with a still cold morning, there were attractive wisps of vapour all over the place as the water was considerably warmer than the air! The only problem was that the main A63, Clive Sullivan Way provides nowhere safe to stop and get a good photo.

From a bland chill morning with minus 5 on the car clock and no overnight snow, at the time of writing, an hours continual snow has now turned my village into a winter wonderland. This picture was taken at 12.35 today.

All the pictures were taken today - I love the immediacy of blogs.

Keep warm!

Chat soon

Ta-ra.