Backward in Fear?

Having an extra hour on a Sunday morning gives time to think about what we do - on Sundays, for sure, though not exclusively - when we go to church. Having spent yesterday with a former Moderator of the kirk (great crack, Andy - and a great lunch), having listened, interminably, to the news on the car radio about the defecting Anglicans who are tempted by Rome, and having been Sponged the previous day, I'm feeling particularly turbulent this morning. There. I just asked Mr B how watching the Forward in Faith* people on the telly (somehow even more disturbing) made him feel, and I've just summed up my own reaction: turbulence just about does it.

The rotten thing is that much of what these people (no women priests, certainly no women bishops, no openly gay men) do in their religious practices used to be attractive to me. I still love really good music, incense, order - but I abhor the smugness, the "I'm a man and I'm ordained and you, my dear, are not in my league at all when it comes to the worship of God" underlay, the willing piety of the permed ladies, the self-righteousness. And on this grey Sunday morning I contemplate the essentially man-made edifice that is the church and I despair. I despair partly because I know that all my non-Christian or non-church friends and rellies probably think that what was on the news yesterday was my church and either despise or pity me for it.

But thankfully, it is not my church. My church still has a way to go before it sorts out the Christ-like response to gay Christians, gay church people, the gay ordained; it has yet to elect a woman as bishop though there is no legal barrier to such an election; my church tends to be anything but smug though there are pockets of undeniable smuggery. Personally, I'm on a wee crusade to remove the words "us men" from the Creed as said by the celebrant in Holy T (they don't say it in Southwark Cathedral, I note); Mr B is working to remove the dire hymns of the past from our repertoire (leaving us, it has to be said, with a very small selection that meet any sort of criteria at all); I look forward to this morning's sermon from a lay woman that will disturb and challenge in the light of the week's news.

But there is much to be done before we shake off the bigoted and the entrenched. And yesterday's news, as far as I'm concerned, is good news. Let's wave them off to the diluted form of Rome to which the Holy Father invites them. God speed, folks, God speed.

*Or, if you like, Backward in Fear.

Sistine crush

Sistine Chapel ceiling
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Although I was primarily interested in the remains of Ancient Rome, we took a day to visit the Vatican, leaving early in the morning while the sun was still low and the buses reasonably quiet. Getting a bus is simpler than you might think - you buy the tickets in advance, and then have to validate them on board, just like a French train ticket. Apparently dire financial penalties apply if you are caught with an unvalidated ticket, and we had a great palaver getting the machine to do the biz when we did it ourselves. On that morning, however, I couldn't get near the machine and a kind girl did it for me. All was well, and we leaped from our bendy bus and followed two wee nuns who were heading purposefully up the road.

The rellies who advised us to make a beeline for the Sistine Chapel were not wrong. Even so, the journey along the interminable corridors of the Vatican museum was not one that I would willingly repeat. Crowds of people shuffled along, gazing up at the riot of decoration on the ceiling, bumping into stationary members of tour groups who were being lectured through ear-pieces in a Babel of tinny accents. I thought of the hadj, the Muslim pilgrimage where people are killed in hellish crushes in a walkway, and wondered how we would all cope if anyone panicked. We funnelled into a tiny, utilitarian stair - two people wide - and down to the chapel.

It was, of course, crammed with people. People looking upwards, at Michelangelo's ceiling, swaying and bumping into one another. Uniformed guards - not the stripey Swiss variety, but blue-shirted ones - moved among the crowd. At frequent intervals one of them bellowed "Silenzio!", occasionally adding "Per favore". This would be followed by a tide of loud shushings, like a class caught in flagrante by an approaching teacher. And now and then they would force their way through to someone who was committing the worse crime of all: taking photos.

Prohibition of this kind has a dire effect on me.It brings out the delinquent. And so it was that I found myself sitting on the bench which runs round the walls, my tiny Leica on my lap, pointing it casually at the ceiling and pressing the button. The picture at the top of this post is the first I took, right in the middle, with God and Adam doing the biz in the third panel from the left. I'm rather pleased with it, as I am with the pic here of the Last Judgment, and another two of ceiling and wall frescoes.

The chapel itself is a rectangular box, and it was impossible to imagine it being used for quiet worship of any kind. But as a work of art it is incomparable, and I'm glad to have seen it and wondered. They should, however, do something about their crowd control techniques.

Whose past is it anyway?

Augustus Caesar
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Back in lugubrious Scotland, suffering a drop of 20 degrees Celsius from the heat of Rome, I have at least a proper keyboard to blog on - even if the laptop, after a brief burst of energy, seems to be relapsing into stammering senility. This photo of a statue of Augustus Caesar, perched now on Mussolini's Via dei Fori Imperiali, sums up the effect much of the Roman experience had on me because of its ubiquity in my adolescence. It appeared in my Paterson and MacNaughton's Approach to Latin - the bible for Latin scholars in a school where the redoubtable Paterson was the Headmaster - and as such was there on a daily basis every time I opened the book.

And it was really then that my obsession with all things Roman began. Learning Latin was a matter of much acquisition of vocabulary and grammar - and we did it by rote, turning over the page to see if we'd managed to memorise it yet. As often as not, Augustus would gaze at us as we did this. I could have drawn that pose from memory. It was a part of my life.

And in a fascinating way the Rome of two thousand years ago is still a part of life in Rome today. The excavated Forum, for example, keeps getting in the way when you try to go from one point to another in that area of Rome. You can't cross it, as you have to pay to get in and it shuts at sundown. In the warm evenings, people hang over the fence simply looking down at the shadowy pillars - those still standing, those lying jumbled on the ground. In a small park which we had to cross to get to the main road, two large sections of stone pillar lay half-buried, and people sat on them to eat a sandwich, or merely to take the weight off their pins. Even as we were being driven into the city from the airport, we could see ruins of huge villas off to the left, along the line of the Via Appia Antiqua, and the arches of an aqueduct marching towards Rome.

Some of the time I felt my Italian was coming on a treat - and then realised that I was reading a sign in Latin, not Italian. Street names referred to long-dead first century Romans. They seemed closer by far than the shadowy figures of the Dark Ages, closer even than the Popes and the sculptors who took over from them. I shall have more to say about the ruins we visited - but right now I feel I've been on a visit to my own past as well as that of a civilisation.

I'm glad I didn't leave it any longer.

Petered out

Today, we learned from CNN, it was to be hot - 31ºC hot - and sunny. It was. And we were rubbernecking big style at the Vatican. I shall reflect on this later, when I'm not picking words out on my phone, but I have to remark on the constant yells of 'silenzio' from the guardians of the Sistine Chapel, the effectiveness of a severely pious look when heading for a wee sit down in an area reserved for prayer, and the wonderful unobtrusive nature of the Leica when snatching forbidden photos. And prayer? Never felt less like it.

In foro Romano

Well not quite, not yet. But this is the view from the rooftop bar of the Forum Hotel, where we've just had lunch. All a bit surreal, to leave the shabby grimness of Prestwick Airport this morning and be here now in the warm wind of Ancient Rome - because that's what it feels like. Brilliant!

Interesting bedfellows

Having submitted Mr B to the torments of the barbecue the other night, I feel moved to give pride of place to his bon mot of yesterday. Contemplating the level of our involvement in the church, he was heard to observe that it was like participating in the series Rome only without the sex.

I have to say that I'm a fervent follower of the series - and was gutted to find I hadn't recorded the Battle of Philippi because T in the Park over-ran but got it last night - and am now going to devote some serious research to a comparison of the two genres. Only thing is - I fear Susan Howatch got there first - may I recommend her "Starbridge" novels to any of my readers who haven't already devoured them?