Licensing of Graham Morris as Priest-in-Charge, Holy Trinity with St Catherine’s, Ventnor, St Boniface, Bonchurch, and Commissioning as Rural Dean of East Wight
Monday, 12th September, 7.30 p.m.
Read by the Revd Richard Emblin
Readings: I Tim 2:1-8/ Lk 7:1-10
The name Ventnor is not that old. I thought it might have something to do with ‘wind’, or even a hint of being, as it is, on the south-east coast of the Isle of Wight. But apparently it is not known until about the year 1617, and means ‘farm of the vintner’, a nice indication of vine-growing down here even then. The old name for Ventnor was ‘Holeweia’, which goes back to the 1200’s, and is the Old English for ‘the hollow way’, which perhaps suggests that even in those far-off times there was a ‘hollowed out’ road by the edge of the sea, as there is to this day.
I have little doubt that these two pieces of useless information will be dear to the heart of your new priest and rural dean. Graham Morris, who comes here with his family from the distant fastnesses of Gurnard and Northwood, on the north coast of the Island, will doubtless relish being based in a place associated historically with the making of wine (though he prefers beer), and a ‘hollowed out road’ could well be a signal for his work in the deanery. It’s not my custom to tell congregations much about their new priest, because they will find out soon enough. In any case, if they go by appearances, that’s their problem, but if they’re in for the long haul, then they will be rewarded. But Graham is no corkhead, only an Islander by adoption, and (I hope) grace. He comes from Herefordshire, and that is almost Wales, as Archdeacon Trevor will tell you, though not quite. And just in case you are tempted to live entirely by caricatures, which might suggest that bishops are invariably smooth and cosmopolitan, this particular one shows few signs of smoothness, but retains his Viking stock to the full, rejoicing in the fact that the Island has many place-names that are of Jute-ish origin!
Place-names are a necessity. They help give a place an identity, and identity is a way of saying that this place (or person) is different from the next. Of course, they can produce caricatures, like the folk from the potteries in Staffordshire, who sometimes think that Birmingham is a place for executive folk who spend all their time eating grapes! Caricatures can be funny, but when they cross the threshold into abiding apparent truth, they can become a little tricky.
Caricature, of course, is partly founded on humour, and as someone who uses humour a great deal, I know that it can be turned into a weapon, in order to keep people at a distance. Christians neither have a monopoly on humour, nor are exempt from caricatures. For example, we all know the silly jokes about clergy only working on Sundays; and bishops are for ever trying to prove to sometimes suspicious people that they, too, once ran parishes, and know what it’s like to return home from a difficult PCC meeting and open a bottle of something! But there comes a time when caricature masks true identity – when caricature gets in the way of truth, and prevents us from being ourselves and knowing ourselves. This holds true of celebrities as well: how funny Eric Morecambe was, with that amazing, startled look, that could have us in stitches, and then comes the revealing television programme that tells us just how insecure and humble he really was.
The extraordinary in the ordinary is what we continue see on our screens or hear on the radio or even read in some of our newspapers. And the extraordinary in the ordinary is – much deeper still – the essential message of the gospel. Yes, the Church is full of caricatures. But there will always come the time when the convenient laughter has to stop, and the serious business has to begin. We do not live in easy times, but we do live in times when there are new opportunities for being part of the community of faith. Much of my time is spent traveling round South East Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, where I constantly give thanks for the strength and depth of devoted Christian communities. But we cannot carry on exactly as we have been; nor will everything suddenly become drastically and radically better, if we only just worked that little bit harder. Signals, of course, do matter: although clergy are not the only indication of how the Church operates, I am well aware of the fact that when Don Laurie left the town last year, no other cleric of any Christian community was left in Ventnor. Now along comes Graham, and he will be followed by others as well. But so much of our time and energy needs to go beyond clergy numbers, and into the heart of what it means to be a Christian, without defining identity in terms of separateness, only through distinctiveness, which has a more positive sense to it.
From caricature to identity, and from identity to distinctiveness: these are lessons that I think at least the Church of England could usefully learn, so that even if we disagree about some things, we can still find it in our hearts to love one another. And love, after all, is always at its deepest when it is prepared to open up to vulnerability, to a sense of being fragile. Even the apparently greatest and best cannot do everything: Archbishop Rowan visited a diocese recently where the bishop said to me afterwards, ‘he seems to be able to do everything, but he doesn’t drive a car, so it gave me great pleasure at least to do that for him!’
What is my identity? I am never quite sure. I could give my name, and perhaps add my height, and even my weight! But my identity is not what I might want to claim for myself – like when I go swimming, or write the latest boring book no one will read, or read the latest Ken Follett thriller, or my DNA. My identity has to be about other people: it’s about me, in relation to my family, my work, my leisure, my community, the people I bump into (in more ways than one!) day by day. And that identity is never quite static, because it’s changing, as the people and situations change, or (sometimes) refuse to change when perhaps we both need to. ‘No Man is an Island’, as John Donne put it so succinctly four hundred years ago, and it’s not as if the human race has changed all that much since then. Tonight’s readings tell that truth in a slightly different way: the First Letter to Timothy exhorts us to pray for each other, and for everyone, rulers included, because our identity is bound up with social context; and in the gospel-passage, Jesus encounters a faith that astounds him (and one can almost see the smile on his face), not from the conventionally devout, or the person who turns up to every single service, or who writes all the important letters – but from a Gentile military officer, right outside the community of faith. Both readings push us outwards, and away from seeing identity as a chosen possession that no one else is going to get hold of.
All this means that my identity is something I am always searching for, and the names and the caricatures will help create a bit of fun along the way. More ancient than Ventnor is Bonchurch, perhaps an echo of St Boniface himself doing some missionary work on the Island in the early eighth century before his more extended evangelistic tour in Germany later on. But however ancient or modern the echoes are, we are still left with ourselves, and each other. I am reminded of the first meeting of Danish and Swedish bishops after the Second World War, when the Danes got off the ferry, and were met by their black-clad Swedish hosts, and the aura of Swedish neutrality during the hostilities was very much around; then one of the Danes, the grandfather of the person speaking to you now, broke the ice by saying, ‘well, I suppose you’ll just have to put up with us, and we’ll just have to put up with you.’
+ Kenneth Portsmouth 10/viii/05.
