I ask you. How could we (or rather our ancestors) sparkle when we spent all our days steering a couple of heavy horse across a field and looking in at a farrier to get one of them new-shod. If we didn’t manage horses, we set up stooks of corn in one field after another. We hammered hot iron, sawed tree-trunks into planks, mixed mortar, licked toffee-apples. We lived in a world of static jobs on the land. Bright ideas were not welcome. Railways, theatres, football, cricket never got invented. Life was soooooo boring. A bit of compulsory long-bow practice became a bright feature of the day.
Pagans and Christians alike dealt with the hand they had been dealt. The theatre as we know it did not get invented. Nor did turnpikes or railways. And as for boats, they remained in a technology of tar, oakum, row-locks, clinker and gunwales.
Mind you, there was always some time and place for amusement. May day was one such. People had a limited menu. They found you could race one cart against another. – or one boat, against an exactly similar craft. They found dressing-up and delivering lines of verse (however did that come into it?) was worth the effort of getting a carpenter to knock up a mobile stage in the town centre. They discovered Punch and Judy and buskers. They never discovered Rowan Atkinson.
Christians got blamed. They were enemies of fun. For them – especially if they were under the thumb of a puritan like Cartwright. in England or Savonarola in Italy there was no respite. Religion was not about having fun. It was about sabbath observance, modest apparel and a bookshelf supporting the Bible, ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ and ‘Paradise Lost’. A choice emerged; listening to licensed preachers in England, or tearing up the rule-book in Massachusetts or another seaboard neighbourhood. Mummers were there for those who chose fun. Who could blame them?
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Look in the eyes of the dog. The dog does not react when nobody picks up the lead. Pit-ponies probably did the same. The Gospel invites us to sparkle, to be truly ourselves. Now is a good time to start.
FAR NORTH
There is a daily boat service to Aberdeen but Lerwick is a remote part of the UK. The Scottish Episcopal Church contributes to familiar activities – messy church, food bank etc – that with new build and narrow streets make a cosy town surprisingly like the rest of the UK. Lerwick, I guess, has its share of traffic jams plus a busy port.
The rector of the Lerwick S E Church is Neil Brice.
AND NOT SO FAR
Berwick-on-Tweed parish church and its neighbour Tweedmouth parish church have been contributing during September to Berwick open days. B-on-T parish church is the most northerly such church in England.
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