From the Registers

Funerals

21st November. All Saints, Nether Silton. Lilian Hounslea, 84. Beloved mother of Beryl Berg. Committal at crematorium.

December 2001 - the new birth Young Felix has created a lot of interest and prompts a few theological reflections. With Christmas we think of the Christ child - God made man for us and all mankind - who through the process called The Incarnation took our flesh upon himself and was subject to it. The Gospels tell us of all the interest that the Christ child generated, with all the visitors and all their gifts: wise men, Magi (astrologers, root of word magic, not Kings and not three of them!!), locals, shepherds, angels. He also created unrest, disturbing Herod. Both thoughts encapsulate our hopes on this earth for the future. 

The birth of a child also heralds other considerations and the process alone hints at so much. Thankfully the pain of childbirth is soon forgotten and replaced by the joy of the arrival of the child, placed on the mother's breast. However the advice of the midwife to the mother-to-be in labour is to use the pain, the push to facilitate the birth, and make full use of the contraction. Men are spared such pain save that inflicted by warfare. The use of pain points us to the constructive use of the pain and the cross. We must not lose sight of Easter at Christmas, and vice versa, for the two go hand in hand with their contradiction of the human norm through Virgin birth and Resurrection: truly the hand of God at work in the world. But the pain factor of the cross, reckoned to be one of the most agonising forms of torture, removes the pains of this life with the promise of new life. Our birth into the life to come, our spiritual birth through baptism, is not to be one of painful transition. The cross has used our pain. 

The mechanics of spiritual birth through water and spirit also reflect the process of natural childbirth. The waters break, the child is born, and the first requirement of the child that has come into the world is air, wind, spirit. It is the same word for both in Old and New Testaments: Ruach or Pneuma. That first intake of breath - a cry really - is matched by the cry of life from the Cross as Jesus cried and gave up the Spirit. That first cry thrills and alerts the mother to new life, her labours ended. That cry on the Cross alerted the world to new spiritual life, won for us by painful labour - and breathed upon us.

While there is a certain amount of speculation as to how Felixkirk got its name and who Felix was, for us "Felix" represents what the word simply implies when translated from Latin - Happy. So, it's a Felix Christmas for us and a Felix Christmas to you ...........!!

T H

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ANNOUNCEMENT! On 30th December, after the Service and Baptism of young Felix at Fe-lixkirk Church, 10.30, all are invited to stay on and join us for some Christening Cake - and also to "wet the baby's head" with some bub-ble! We have been most touched and heartened by all your support and interest. We've had more cards than Christmas, and his toes are so long he's already moved up a size or two in socks and babygrows! In fact we need to activate our old baby dresses and nightshirts .......

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THANKS We would like to thank Miriam Hanson for her contributions to the Parish Magazine over the last few years. She has roused our interest and hopefully stretched our grasp of our faith and its application and demands. A Big Thank You and our best wishes for the years ahead. Toddy.

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LEAKE CHURCH Fete, Knayton, November 17th, raised £668 for Church Funds. Many thanks to all those who came to set up, support and clear away!

PCC Notes - A Summary This is a digest of what the various PCCs have discussed or de-cided in their most recent meetings. Three parishes have completed a Ministry Review of the last 2 years. This highlights the need to raise more funds to pay the parish share, currently @ £23,000 to cover the costs of putting a priest in a parish and future pension. Fabrics remain in a good state of repair. K.K. has just repaired the heating following restoration of stonework on the tower (English Heritage grant for most of the latter) . Leake decided to apply for a faculty to install a loo in the choir vestry for £7,000. Has everyone seen Leake's millenium linen? 

Common Worship is used successfully alongside B.C.P. How-ever the Standing Committee finds it increasingly difficult to co-ordinate events with the different demands and varying support of the different parishes. There is to be a closer link with the church primary schools in the parishes and the Church, though costs of transport for them to, say, a church service or visit are prohibitive. 

With the Archbishop's initiative "Living the Gospel", more encouragement was needed to point people in that direction and to try and include newcomers more in the life of their parish church, and increase numbers for Confirmation. Ecumenical Partnership to be launched in the Deanery. PCCs would need to review the cost of incidental charges allowable for occasional offices, especially to defray insurance costs; some would need to to increase theirs whilst some have reduced theirs. It depends largely on on income and size of parish - but, generally, if people expect the Church to be there when they want it, then the running costs will have to be met when they do use it for weddings or funerals. The difficulty of churchyard mowing and costs were also discussed, especially now that sheep are absent following FMD. Over Silton has remained closed all year solely because of FMD and income all round is down. T.H.

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These are the final verses of a South Indian woman's poem. What sort of life are they talking about? Why faggots? India has no natural coal or oil. Rainfall is erratic and there are dangerous earth tremors. But trees, if carefully nursed through the early years, can in some places grow well and provide the cooking stoves, or for outdoor fun with cooking fuel. Firewood to the Dalit women is like well water to the desert dweller. They earn seasonally by migrating as a large group, treated until very recently as disposable and lowest of the low.

I was drawn to this account because of the eight years that Anthony and I spent in Andhra Pradesh, which is the area of land between the estuaries of two mighty rivers (mighty in the rainy season, that is!), Krishna and Godavari. We were in the heart of work begun by Indian Christians from Tamil country - this had had a similar liberating result among Telugas. And I too travelled the same train route to Madras in order to go to the hills, as we were ordered to do annually - not for hard labour but for a holiday, considered essential for our health. They would have taken the train probably at Dornakal Junction (third class - comparable to steerage!) to make their way to Madras from which place they would be dispersed to the rice fields. Madras is 200 miles south of Dornakal and I do not think Indian trains are able to go over 30 m.p.h. On arrival they would live under trees, in open places or cattle sheds, and be at the command of landlords and middlemen.

Another smaller group, after their sons, husbands and cattle had been murdered by brutal landlords:

Most Dalit men, in a not very dissimilar predicament, see women as the more oppressed. They are not alone now in the struggle. Things are beginning to change across India. In 1993 the Dalit Solidarity programme was set up, from different regions and religious groups. They are backed now by the World Council of Churches, which minuted:

Surely the least that fellow Christians can do is to see that we need to insist that regular support goes from our area, through the World Council, to give moral help to our valiantly struggling fellow Christians in their determined witness?

MIRIAM HANSON

Editorial. As we record elsewhere, this is Miriam's last contribution to Hillside Parishes Magazine. She has been submitting her contributions without fail every month for as long as I can remember! Always they "made one think" - and no more so than at the present time, when Afghanistan is so much in the news - we again print the Christian Aid Newsletter in full and express our pleasure at the recent safe return of their workers ............ But, for now, we hope that someone will come forward and fill the intellectual gap in Hillside Magazine that is left following the cessation of Miriam's contributions!

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A Christmas Treat - ‘The Two Rs’

 

"Rector speaking. Can you do a piece for the Anvil on the Gresley Society, please?" That is the genesis of this article. I mused over the next few days what to write about the Gresley Society and decided that, although it might be of great interest to me, the title was probably a bit parochial. However, I thought that I would broaden the topic to the 'Two Rs' – railway enthusiasm and religious belief, do the two go together? They appear to, so let's have a look.

The above paragraph, and the rest of this article, is derived from the September issue of Anvil, the church magazine for Great Smeaton etc.. It has been slightly edited for Hillside readers, and special arrangements made for its inclusion in the Christmas number.

For some, in fact probably quite a significant number of folk, railway enthusiasm is akin to a religion. A number of parallels can be drawn: the major stations are cathedrals, the more common ones are churches and some are closed down. Locomotives are often worshipped like a god. I well remember that after a Deltic diesel locomotive arrived at King's Cross from Edinburgh for the last time in British Rail service, one of the passengers came down the platform (aisle) and knelt down, as if in prayer, at the side of the locomotive. Not one of the 600 or so passengers or the thousands who had filled the station for this event (The End of an Era) thought that there was anything unusual about it. To the contrary his passion was admired. For many the timetable is the Bible, Bradshaw the timetable, which existed until the 1960s is the Authorised version, the British Rail and latterly the National Rail Timetable are the modernised versions. There are, of course, alternative prayer books published by Thomas Cook. Incense is steam and the liturgical chanting takes the form of the station announcer "The train now standing ….".* The railway is hallowed ground, for the author this is the East Coast Route, others belong to different churches - the West Coast, the Western or The Southern. There are occasions when a United Service is held and a tour might take in many routes. The East Coast is special in that it takes in King's Cross, gives magnificent views of great cathedrals and minsters at Peterborough, Lincoln (in the distance), York, Durham, Lindisfarne, and Edinburgh (St Giles and Waverley). * see PS below!

 

The railway station can be thought of in many ways, one of which is that they are reflections of the Society in which we live. The Victorians, the significant builders of the railways in the Industrial Revolution, modelled their stations on cathedrals, for instance the Great Hall at the Old Euston has a ceiling based on St Peter's in Rome. Today, new or rebuilt stations are modelled on Shopping centres and office blocks. Even in the 1920s Sir Edward Elgar described the newly built stations as having 'no soul, no romance, no imagination'. In a book on the 'Railway Station' the authors describe the symbol of the '60s as the new Euston – 'an all-purpose combination of airport lounge and open plan public lavatory!'

As we might ask why do people believe in God and what do they believe, we can also ask why are people so fascinated by railways. Why is it that members of Birkby congregation, not previously known for irrational behaviour, have been seen at the lineside, standing in the light of a watery moon to witness the passage of a famous steam locomotive? They were enthralled by the evocative sight of the footplate crew (the ministers) silhouetted against the night sky by the glow of the fire.

Interestingly one of the few people to have addressed the question of 'fascination' was a cleric, Canon Roger Lloyd who wrote a book 'Fascination of Railways'. In this he says "The curious but intense pleasure that is given to many people by the watching and the study of railway trains, their engines and the detail of their organisation is both an art and a mystery. It is an art because the pleasure to be had is exactly proportionate to the informed enthusiasm one puts into it. It is a mystery because, try as one will, it is impossible to explain to others exactly in what the pleasure consists …. The pleasure of railway watching cannot be explained, but it can perhaps be communicated, and it can certainly be shared." Some parallels here with religious beliefs? It is perhaps also worthy of note that there are parallels in church attendance and the number of people 'trainspotting'; both have declined significantly in the last 50 years. Trainspotting is now the subject of media derision and, although not so strongly tarnished, church going is viewed as a minority activity. (Even though more people go to church on Sunday than go to football on Saturday – true?). Mention of Sunday brings up 'Sunday Services'.

 

On the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 (note this was the first Inter City railway) no train left either terminus between 10 am and 4 pm on Sundays, in order to facilitate religious observance. This practice, which was adopted by a number of other companies became known as the 'Church Interval'. Today, the absence of trains on a Sunday is probably due to 'engineering work'! The running of excursion trains on a Sunday, of course, led to much debate. Sunday observance influenced a great writer on railways Cecil J Allen, whose autobiography was called 'Two Million Miles of Train Travel' (heaven), to decline the opportunity to travel on and time the record breaking run of Mallard in 1938 when it set the world record for steam of 125mph. That is belief in practice. Whereas some stations are regarded as cathedrals, some stations have been used as churches - on the remote Settle & Carlisle railway Ribblehead and Garsdale stations were used for Sunday services.

What about the people? It is interesting to note that a significant proportion of the Chief Mechanical Engineers of the Great Northern and London and North Eastern Railways (the East Coast) were the sons of clergy. To return to Gresley (Sir Nigel), he was the son of the Rector of Netherseale in Derbyshire, in fact there were no less than four generations of Gresley Rectors. If you are in the area of Netherseale, then St Peter's is well worth a visit, an interesting church with a wonderful new Millennium window depicting a scene which would be appropriate in our benefice. Adjacent to the church is the graveyard in which Sir Nigel Gresley, the designer of Flying Scotsman (the first engine to authentically achieve 100mph) and Mallard is buried.

Amongst the railway enthusiast fraternity there have been and are a significant number of clergy. Archbishop Temple is said to have memorised the railway timetable of the day, Canon Reginald Fellows researched the history of Bradshaw (the railway timetable), Canon Victor Whitechurch was the creator of the railway dectective Thorpe Hazell and the Reverend Wilbert Awdry was the author of the much-loved children's books about 'Thomas the Tank Engine'.

However, none was better known than Eric Treacy, the 'railway bishop', Vicar of Edge Hill, Rector of Keighley and finally Bishop of Wakefield. He once preached, using as a pulpit, the tender of Stephenson's Locomotion, which for many years graced Darlington Bank Top station. He was a famous railway photographer, one of the best of his day and died on Appleby Station whilst photographing the last steam locomotive built for British Railways, Evening Star. There is a memorial stone at the station, dedicated there at a special service conducted by another enthusiast, the

 

Bishop of Birmingham. He had the rare, probably unique distinction of having two locomotives named after him, a steam locomotive No.45428 Eric Treacy (currently on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway) and an electric locomotive No.86240 Bishop Eric Treacy. It is said that during the less interesting parts of General Synod he would nip out to other London cathedrals to photograph trains! And, in the Ealing comedy film The Titfield Thunderbolt, the engine was driven by the local vicar and fired by a visiting bishop, so Rector, over to you! Peter Rodgers

PS Since the latter film was made in more southerly pastures, may we slightly redress the overall geographical balance of this article by recalling that in October 1996 a service was held on the platform at Salisbury Station, in memory of a famous driver who used to work the trains down from - and up to! - London Waterloo. "The Headlong Run to Salisbury" (The Times, Nov.1964).

* On station announcements, too, there was: "Why kill’em and cart’em to Canterbury". Oh yes, and there is nowadays a "Cathedrals Express" - but we can’t get it to come up here! All comment welcome!! Ed.

 

One to Remember!

A philosophy professor stood before his class with some items in front of him. When the class began, wordlessly he picked up a large empty mayonnaise jar and filled it with rocks of about 2" diameter. He then asked the class if the jar was full? They agreed it was. So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles, of course, rolled into the open spaces between the rocks. He asked the students again, if the jar was full? The students laughed. The professor picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar. The sand filled up everything else.

"Now", said the professor, "I want you to recognise that this is your life. The rocks are the important things - your family, your partner, your health, your children - if everything else was lost and only those things remained, your life would still be full. The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your house, your car. The sand is everything else. The small stuff. If you put the sand into the jar first, there is no room for the pebbles or the rocks. The same goes for your life. If you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never have room for the important things. Pay attention to the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with the children. Take medical check-ups. Take your partner dancing. There will always be time to go to work, clean the house, give a party, fix the drains. Take care of the rocks first - things that really matter. Set your priorities - the rest is just sand." From the Internet (courtesy St Lawrence Parish magazine, Winchester).

 

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