Posted on 04/11/2008 5:51:39 AM PDT by fweingart
Funny how the "liberals" in the Church have developed this fondness for banning things.
First they banned their own modern Alternative Service Book after only 20 years in use. Now, the Very Reverend Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark, has banned the hymn Jerusalem from his cathedral because it is "not in the glory of God" and is too nationalistic.
But surely there is the radiance of divinity in "And was the Holy Lamb of God on England's pleasant pastures seen"?
The pseudo-scholarly clergy don't like that line because they deny the Glastonbury legend about Jesus coming to England with Joseph of Arimathea. This shows a numbskull literal-mindedness.
When I preach the Resurrection on Easter Day, I try to evoke the Lord's appearances around Galilee, and on the walk to Emmaus, as if they had happened in my beloved Yorkshire Dales.
Blake didn't think Jesus came to England, either. He was a poet and his lines are the stuff of imaginative allusion. But imagination is a bit beyond the reach of the polite mechanicals among the modern clergy.
Christians in England are redeemed by Christ, as surely as the first disciples were redeemed by him in Galilee. Blake's magnificent poem is a way of bringing this home to us, building the truth of the experience into our hearts and minds by using homely, national imagery.
The spirit of God breathes all through Jerusalem. Take the fervent line, "Bring me my chariot of fire." It is straight out of the Bible, the ecstatic vision of the prophet Elijah carried up to heaven in the whirlwind (II Kings 2:11). "Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand" is clearly a reference to "the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God" (Ephesians 6:17).
What the modern clergy can't stand is the powerful evocation of England. When they see the word "England" they don't hear the music of ancient Albion. They see patriotism and national pride, which to them are the next worse things to fascism and expansionary imperialism.
But, as Chesterton said, if a man won't love his country, it is difficult to believe he loves anything. Blake's hymn was a prelude to Milton, and he knew that Paradise Lost, the Fall of Man, happens down the Old Kent Road as definitely as anywhere else.
Odd, the trendy clergy's preference for abstractions and internationalism when it was abstracted international communism under Stalin and Mao which slaughtered millions more even than the über-nationalists in the Third Reich.
There is nothing abstract or theoretical about Blake's hymn. He wasn't writing a report for the General Synod. As a poet of genius, he knew that the way to convey spiritual realities is to incarnate them in things: swords, chariots, clouded hills, mountains green.
St Margaret's, "Parliament's church" in Westminster, disapproves of the line about "dark satanic mills" only by misunderstanding it. No English literature scholar imagines for a minute that Blake was referring to the cotton mills and weaving sheds in Lancashire.
One of our finest biblical commentators, Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, says: "The 'dark satanic mills' were not the cotton mills and steel mills of the new, noisy and smoky industrial revolution. They were the great churches, such as Westminster Abbey and St Paul's Cathedral, which Blake saw as being hopelessly in thrall to the follies of the world, follies he saw all too clearly in the great thinkers of what was already calling itself the Enlightenment.
He faced down the scorn of Voltaire and Rousseau against the deep mysteries of faith. 'You throw the sand against the wind,' he wrote, 'and the wind blows it back again.'?"
Now, at last, we are getting close to understanding this sour prejudice against Jerusalem among so many clergy. For Blake is attacking them - those who, though they promised at ordination to challenge the follies of the age, actually aid and encourage them.
It is the Jerusalem haters who have swallowed whole all the dogmas of Rousseauism and the secular superstitions of the Enlightenment in its most recent form: political-correctness.
If Blake could hear for five minutes these people banging on about their true preoccupations, the follies of the age - anti-racism, gender egalitarianism, compliance, the foreign aid industry and the paranoid fantasy of global warming - he would sing all the more loudly against this lot: "Bring me my bow… bring me my arrows… bring me my sword…"
The Revd Dr Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill
Oh Canada!!!
How Great Thou Art
Jerusalem
and
Amazing Grace
Dad sang those songs all day long in the hospital, rehab, and nursing home much to the delight of the patients
After listening to the ELP version, I can't imagine the hymn any other way.
Exactly.
That was great. I had forgotten how much I love Greg Lake’s voice. I need to get out my ELP CDs.
Now they’ll never get the bag off Mr. Lambert’s head.
Amen.
Sung in the ruins of Glastonbury:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i88eK9y4BPU&feature=related
From Chariots of Fire, with boys choir:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zfOu6QWX0w&feature=related
ping
ping
I loved that part of the service. Thanks!
"Far-called our navies melt away -- / On dune and headland sinks the fire -- / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! / Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, / Lest we forget -- lest we forget!" - Recessional
And that's about all I have to say tonight. Except for one thing. The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the "shining city upon a hill." The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.Guess where is this from. I think on this site more that one knows that. Now, instead of "one hill" think "seven hills" and remember begin tying the loose ends to:
Yerushalayim shel zahav Ve-shel nehoshet ve-shel or Ha-lo le-khol shirayikh Ani kinnor.and then you'll see that it all matches, and Blake's Jerusalem is really really important right now.
well that tune is played at nearly every England football/soccer game by thousands of fans.
Now I would like to see them try and ban it when it gets sung at a game
you started to lost faith
well I am from England and looked for a church which was the Church of England/angligan etc
well I have been to a few churches aroiund and can honestly say that some of these churches have turned liberal
In st augustine Florida I asked all in the congregation after the sermon if they could sign the ammendment to have the law say here in Florida marriage is for just one man and one woman between them
I was shocked when some old ladies said no she feels they should get married
I heard of the church in NH with a gay vicar who marries homo’s
another woman said that they shouldn’t get married but they should have civil unions and when I asked how about straight couples getting civil unions she said er er er er never thought of that
the vicar here in st augustine is too scared to even mention marriage is for normal straight people,mention abortion, mention anything
We go outside to the car and a woman has a hillary bumper sticker, another sticker saying womans choice, another sticker saying something about it’s human to open the borders
mind boggling
why go to church and why have a faith if you don’t live your life by that faithreminds me of ted kennedy and the rest of the catholics in massachusetts/new england
they want abortion
they want homo marriage
they want divorce
they want planned parenthood ands schools to give out contraceptives
they want all this yuet go to church on a sunday thinking they are good catholics then on monday they are back to bening liberals
just hope the pope mentions all this and puts catholics back ontrack, though the dems wouldn’t be happy as if catholics followed thei religion they would be voting for the republicans and certainly not the dems
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