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My own adventures on the back of a scooter were not too far removed from the above.
In my few weeks in Punjab, I saw many strange and mind boggling balancing acts on various forms of transport. Two, three, four, a whole family from the youngest to the oldest, babes in arms, all perched precariously on a scooter, seemingly without a care; these were not unusual sights.
I can´t recall if I saw any animals on scooters, but from what I witnessed; I could not have been surprised. I spent ages trying to take captures of such sights; usually as I was whizzing along on four wheels in he opposite direction; with a bit more cover than that the above. These made it hard to take decent shots and I never did perfect my panning technique while trying to lean out of a fast moving car; which was made doubly worse by the fact that my head was constantly jerking backwards and forwards involuntarily and voluntarily not knowing which extraordinary sight I should rest my millisecond gaze on next.
Little did I realize that before I left I would have my own little adventures on the back of a scooter.
One day, sitting in the pind (village); everyone decided that they would like some pizza and before long I set off with my cousin on his scooter to find a pizza place. We decided to head for Jalandar as there were bound to be places there.
Somewhat half heartedly, in an instant I was straddled at the back of the scooter, legged tucked in, arms holding on to him. This was my first time after all - hold on tight I thought. And instantly, the moment we started along GT road, ducking and weaving through the traffic, not knowing what side of the road we should be on half the time, I relaxed and let fate take control. Arms dropped by my side, my head turned smoothly and slowly from side to side. I leaned backwards, rebalanced my legs and told my self I had been born to do this.
The feeling was so exhilarating my head felt like it was in the clouds. Other vehicles and pedestrians seemed to drift lazily past, in a blur. In that instant, I decided that I could do this for the rest of my life, travel the world on a scooter. The wind in my face, my head in the clouds, my heart floating alongside me on its own little scooter. Mentally I settled upon Godspeed You Black Emperor as my accompaniment and reminded myself of their seering guitars and soundscapes, building to a crescendo; never had had there been a more suitable noise for such a trip.
Zipping along GT road, passing through the military quarters, glancing from side to side, not knowing which way to look, this was a fantastic feeling.
However it ended too quickly, I wanted to continue, towards the Himalayas and beyond; I wasn´t interested in pizza. I wanted my camera, a scooter and endless miles of road; when suddenly a Dominos (yes the same ones you get everywhere else) popped out of nowhere and we were off the bike and again I was looking at the stark contrast around me, beggars by the side of the road, on the steps up to the shop, arms outstretched, street kids and here I was about to buy some pizzas from an air conditioned shop. Just when did the ability to buy a pizza become mistaken as progress? Well the answer to that lies in my old unfriend (one I have an uncomfortable time with) globalization. The confusion of needs versus wants, of the have not´s and the have lots.
The point at which, marketing won out again. The point at which we bought into the system hook, line and deep pan pizza base.
And with no clear resolution in mind, we were back on the bike, five veggie pizzas situated between me and my cousin, my arms clasped around them and I was back in the clouds.
We returned via a slightly different route and while passing through the outskirts of Jalandar, we suddenly hit a small hump in the road and unable to see in front of me before I knew it we jolted into the air, kept our balance and landed. In the process; in extreme slow motion I watched the middle pizza of the pile flew out to the side and land in the road. I glanced back over my shoulder and could see it behind us. Shouting at my cousin to pull over, we came to a halt a way down the road.
Handing him the other pizzas, I turned around and there about 100 yards away was the pizza box lying in the middle of the road. And everyone, on their bikes, their three wheelers, cars and trucks, were swerving around it. I ran back up the road, for all the world like an Olympic runner, amazed at how it had not been flattened into the ground yet. Dignity from the other road users - how unusual. Reaching it I scooped it up, turned and headed back down the road. Nary a glance did I receive, maybe this was something they saw everyday and they were all highly experienced in the art (science?) of pizza lying in the road, avoidance techniques
At the bike, I took the other boxes, balanced the escapee on top and off we headed back again.
Only later did did the irony of my dramatic pizza rescue versus my earlier concerns register. What price pizza now oh hypocrite.
However, little did I know that my balancing tricks on the back of a scooter were in a few days going to be outdone in an even more ludicrous adventure. And I shall tell that story shortly.
R.I.P, Mom..it's been three LONG ASS years already :)
Sufia Sultana, Death Hepatic and Lymphnode Malignancy, 7th March, 2008.
In ihren Lungen wohnt ein Aal
auf meiner Stirn ein Muttermal
entferne es mit Messers Kuss
auch wenn ich verbluten muss
Mutter gib mir kraft.
Translation:
In her lungs ther lives an eel
On my forehead there is a birthmark
Remove it with the kiss of a knife
Even if it makes me bleed to death
Mother, give me strength.
Someone I know/knew once told me, "Atunu bhai, I never take photographs of street-urchins and beggars because that is so "unprofessional"...ha ha, but I do, to me a mother despite her profession...despite being whore or a wall-street broker is at the end of the day, a "Mother". No matter how much I scowl at her gender for being dedicatedly hypocritical, she is the one who bore me in her watery underbelly while I kicked and screamed to get the fuck out...she is the one who fed me her own nutrients, smiled at me when I was being Adolf Hitler. Through my dark times in 2010, she is the one who's apparition consoled me in my forced schizophrenia (I'm not naturally schizophrenic, ladies ;D)...the reason that I've learned to speak the truth despite it's uglyness is because I witnessed her passing first hand, as her cells rebelled..one after another. Today I can say that I'm stronger than any of you because I've strength that surpasses all physical and philosophical boundaries set forth by society. I'm stronger because I'm my mum's son..and her strength, as ephemeral as it might be, resides, deeply embedded in my psyche.
Come, let's have a friendly joust
Illustration by Andy Chen/The New York Times; Zack Seckler/Associated Press
May 11, 2005
Art, Money and Power
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
We had "Sensation" at the Brooklyn Museum, a gift to Charles Saatchi, whose collection it advertised, and shows at the Whitney of artists (Robert Rauschenberg and Agnes Martin come to mind) virtually packaged by the gallery that represents them. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has been renting its Monets to a casino in Las Vegas, while the Guggenheim, which gave us the atrocious "Armani," an even more egregious paid advertisement, is spending resources shopping itself around the globe while canceling shows here at home.
Every year, in one way or another, museums test the public's faith in their integrity. When P.S. 1 unveiled "Greater New York" some weeks back, the exhibition turned out to be a shallow affair in thrall to the booming art market. No one really should have expected otherwise from an event timed to coincide with the city's big contemporary-art fair. Meanwhile, P.S. 1's institutional parent, the Museum of Modern Art, the spanking new headquarters of Modernism Inc., inaugurated its exhibition program with an appalling paean to a corporate sponsor's blue-chip collection. This gave the financial services company, UBS, an excuse to plaster the city with advertisements that made MoMA seem like its tool and minor subsidiary. You can only imagine how that went over with another of the Modern's sponsors, J. P. Morgan, UBS's rival.
Now comes the Met with its current Chanel-sponsored Chanel show, a fawning trifle that resembles a fancy showroom. Sparsely outfitted with white cube display boxes and a bare minimum of meaningful text, this absurdly uncritical exhibition puts Coco's designs alongside work by the current monarch of the House of Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld.
A few years ago, a Chanel show was put off by the Met's director, Philippe de Montebello, because Mr. Lagerfeld wanted to interfere. It makes no difference whether he had a direct hand in it this time or, as the museum keeps insisting, was kept at arm's length from the curatorial process: the impression is the same, and impressions count when it comes to the reputation of a museum.
Museums deal in two kinds of currency, after all: the quality of their collections and public trust. Squander one, and the other suffers. People visit MoMA or the Met to see great art; they will even consider art that they don't know or don't like as great because the museum says so. But this delicate cultural ecosystem depends on the public's perception that museums make independent judgments - that they're not just shilling for trustees or politicians or sponsors.
Naturally, the public wonders whose pockets are greased by what a museum shows, because there's so much money involved in art. But this question can be subordinated if the museum proves that it's acting in the public's interest, and not someone else's. In turn, museums can call on the public. The New York Public Library is auctioning some American art, including a couple of Gilbert Stuarts and an Asher B. Durand that has been a civic landmark for many decades. Some New York museum ought to end up with the picture but will have to rally public enthusiasm swiftly - it will have to bank on public trust.
Of course, this is the real world. Museums need trustees to cover the bills. They depend on galleries and collectors and sponsors and artists for help. Last year, the Modigliani retrospective at the Jewish Museum had a ridiculous painting that turned out to belong to a trustee who insisted it be included. No exhibition of a living artist avoids some negotiation (read: compromise) with the artist or the artist's dealer. The artist or the dealer may demand that this picture, not that one, be shown; that new work be stressed; that a certain collector's holdings be favored; or that the show's catalog be written in a certain way. It's the cost of doing business.
But there are degrees of compromise. Some years back, the National Gallery in Washington presented a show of the collection put together by a Swiss industrialist, Emil Bührle, with a catalog overseen by his heirs that celebrated his "inner flame" for art but made no mention of the fact that his fortune came partly from dealing arms to the Nazis, or that his son, who owned many of the works, was convicted of illegal arms sales. Only the most scrupulous reader of the fine print would have noticed that a Renoir once belonged to Hermann Göring.
The show was about Bührle, so the public could expect to learn who he was. The Chanel show avoids mentioning her activities during the war, when she maintained a life in Paris as the lover of an SS officer and, according to her biographer, Janet Wallach, tried to exploit Nazi laws to wrest control of her perfume business from her Jewish partners. No doubt, the Bührle show would never have happened if the National Gallery had emphasized how Bührle sold arms to the Nazis, and I suspect Chanel would not have been very happy about sponsoring this show if the Met had been more forthcoming about its founder's wartime history.
Is such information irrelevant to what's on view? It depends.
The public should decide. The Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery in London makes clear that he was a murderer. His violent personality explains something about his later work. It would have been irresponsible for the exhibition not to mention it.
Trust us, museums say: the rules need to bend, and we know how much bending is enough and how much is too much. In a curious way, commercial galleries are in a better position. We see where they're coming from. Frank Lloyd Wright had a saying. At an early age he made a choice between "honest arrogance and hypocritical humility." He picked arrogance. Galleries are honest about wanting to sell you something. Museums often traffic in moral hypocrisy - and are then exploited for their presumptive lofty independence. Chanel couldn't have bought better publicity.
As for the Met, it says something that it would allow itself to play this role, just as it says something about the Modern that its first big exhibition seemed like a corporate payoff.
At least MoMA gets something. The museum will get art from UBS. Mr. Saatchi made millions recently selling Damien Hirst's shark, whose value was enhanced by the notoriety of "Sensation." All Brooklyn got was grief.
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tel: 157 0568 5106, Email: robertsontim66@gmail.com (former email: suntala@wavecable.com )
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I was born and grew up in the nation of Peru (South America) where my parents worked as educators and in community development among various tribal groups. I grew up speaking English, Spanish and local village dialects.
I worked for three years as a Med Lab Tech in a rural hospital in Dandeldhura, Nepal. I worked under contract with the Nepalese national government. I also learned to speak, read and write the national language.
I have started, developed and managed my own business providing services to local clients and businesses for 20 years.
I traveled to several cities in China in 2011 to learn about Chinese universities and visit with English teachers and staff.
In the summer of 2012 I took a course at Beijing University of Language and Culture with China Academic Consortium to learn Chinese worldview. I also took field study trips to many historically important locations.
I taught English classes with Education Resources and Referrals, China in Shunyi Middle School near Beijing.
I enjoy travel, hiking, bicycling, reading about history of other cultures, learning, conversation and making friends.
I am 54 years old, in good physical health and single with three adult daughters from a previous marriage.
I am looking for a change of career and I hope to be able to teach EFL in China for several years. I want to learn Mandarin and I’m interested in earning a Master’s degree in a field studies course to improve my teaching ability.
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Mar 14 at 12:00 PM, from Tim Robertson
Dear Friends and Family,
Spring has arrived early in Fuyang this year bringing out the leaves on the willows by the river/canal by my apartment and the plum blossoms outside my backdoor. Some magnolias are already in bloom and the buds are swelling on the Metasequoias (Dawn Redwood) that are planted around the campus. I am fascinated by these trees as they have been called a “living fossil” because this species has remained unchanged (in morphological stasis) for the past 65 million years, according to paleo-botanists looking at their fossilized remains. Until 1948 it was thought have gone extinct over 5 million years ago, until it was discovered in this area of China. Although quite rare at that time, it has since become a popular ornamental tree. What makes it unique is that it sheds its needles during the winter months. This is a testimony to its previous habitat in northern Siberia and Canada where it became the dominant species due to its ability to survive the long dark winters without needles. Because the planet has cooled significantly since then, these trees can no longer grow so far north and can only survive at these latitudes where they no longer need to shed their needles. Maybe with “global warming” they will again be able to reclaim their former range.
This is the fourth week of classes and, having just received my textbook last week, I decided to continue on with using The Lion King as the source for dialogues, grammar and vocabulary. The words and story are simple enough for my students and the pictures and characters maintain their interest enough to read with feeling and enthusiasm the scripts that I transcribe for them each week. Having the whole class engaged and participating is a real challenge since many would rather sit passively as they are expected to do in their other classes. Just getting them to bring paper and pen to class to write down the new expressions and idioms is a real challenge so I have been taking my own note pads to class to show how I have been attempting to learn Mandarin. They have gotten used to my nontraditional approach and insistence that they take an active part in their own learning, and they much prefer it to the text book. Some other teachers have also been interested in finding out about what I do and why. Having taken all the course work for a degree in elementary education a few years ago, I am finding that much of what I learned about teaching techniques and learning styles using multicultural methods has been useful for teaching English at this level. I have also been told that the administration here approves, which I was unsure about, having been required to use the text book last year on the other campus.
I have been looking into other opportunities that I have been approached about to spread my influence beyond this campus. Last week I was invited to have dinner and meet the manager of the only “five star” hotel in Fuyang to discuss the possibility of training the staff, many of whom are interns from the local vocational college. They have also asked me to enjoy a dinner with their customers and engage them in informal conversation on a regular basis. At this point the details are somewhat unclear, but I did enjoy the excellent Indian food prepared by their chef from India. They put on a sumptuous buffet every weekend of different ethnic foods. Having acquired a taste for Indian food during my years in Nepal, I was glad to get a break from the local fare and my own cooking without having to pay for it. In fact, I will be paid to do it! I also would welcome the chance to chat with adults from this city so I can learn from them instead of having to talk to college age kids all of the time. So far, it has been an interesting experience and I am curious to see what will happen. I hope it does not detract from my commitment to my regular job, but it isn’t every day that I can eat roti prata with chopsticks.
I do enjoy teaching my classes and I like my students, but I am often distracted by the everyday irritations and insults of being a foreigner in a Chinese institution. I am constantly having to sort through the source of these frustrations in order to gain some insight. So far I have come up with six overlapping categories: 1. traditional Chinese culture; 2. political control; 3. general attitude toward foreigners; 4. my own personal idiosyncrasies, 5. the language gap and 6. everyday misunderstandings complicated by my own ignorance. Yesterday I ran into several of these while meeting with the college president in his office to request that our salaries be paid at the same time as all the other teachers in the college. We have been receiving payment three weeks later the rest of the faculty each month for no discernable reason. The explanation was that we are foreigners and it is traditional, but that did not happen on the other campus where I worked last year where I was paid at the same time as everyone else. It was with considerable difficulty that I managed to get the appointment with Greg, the other English teacher here and others administrators. I had hoped this absurdity would be quickly resolved by going over the head of my immediate supervisor to the top, but apparently not. The president said that it took three weeks to get the money transferred from the other campus (1 km away) to this one and asked that as foreigners, we should “respect their traditions.” Oh, well. At least we were able to get a copy of our contract, after many requests.
This is but one example of many I could give, and it is at times like these that I wonder whether I should sign another contract for next year at this college But I must remind myself daily that I am here for the students – not the party hacks, half-wits and hypocrites - and they are victimized by the system every day much more. In fact, my troubles seem rather small and petty in relation to what the average Chinese person has to deal with on a constant basis. I would like to think that my status as a foreigner would help me to avoid the disrespect that I feel coming from the administration, but I guess it averages out when I put all of my experiences together. I just can’t get used to being treated so well by most people here, but so poorly (in my view) by the people I work for. It does not seem to bother most Chinese who have come to accept the system the way it is because it is the only one they have ever known, there are no other alternatives and they have learned how to make the system work for them through cultivating special relationships (guanxi) to get what they want and need. It is the traditional Chinese way due to an absence of civil society that goes back thousands of years. This is best seen in the five relationships described that make up “filial piety” by Confucius which has become part of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
All these elements are interesting to see played out in everyday life even if they often make headaches for me. I have to constantly work at trying to figure out what is really going on because no one will say (or knows) the real reason. I guess the real reason for me to be here is that I feel a personal sense of calling. and here is where God has put me for now. Perhaps that will change at some point in the future but at present it is enough to have the privilege to live and teach these kids who are made in his image yet seem to know so little about him. In that category I am wealthy more than I know. It is uncanny how so many of my past experiences and education I have found to be useful in unexpected ways. It seems God has prepared me to do this work which he has also prepared in advance for me to do. God has brought me through the depths and continues to lead me through this” barren land.” I am finding his grace to be sufficient for me, even if the daily grind gets a bit too much at times. So often, when I feel stymied and limited a new chance will come to me that I had not anticipated or imagined. Even in a culture so tied up in ancient traditions, God is doing new things here and I just need him to open my eyes to see his work. In the process he is doing new things in me, even if they get a little uncomfortable. It may be harder, but this old dog can learn new tricks.
The spring weather has allowed me to get out on my bike to see the country side and relieve the tension and frustrations that build up inside. The recent snow and rain have turned the winter wheat fields a lush green and cleaned the air of the dust and coal particles that fill the air alternately in summer and winter. Since the leaves have not yet come out on the cotton wood trees planted along the roads and trails, it is possible to see much more than I will be able to see in a couple of weeks. Each season offers its own view of village life as the peasant farmers plant, cultivate and harvest their various crops year round. You may not think well of me for calling them peasants, but since they do not own their own land, are tied to it by their residential registration, must do work with their own hands and cannot afford machinery or hired laborers, that is an appropriate and accepted term. The government has been considering a reform of the hukou system that will allow migrant workers to take their children with them to the city, but as of now they must be left in the villages in order to be able to go to school. Even with the intensive agriculture, the small plots of land do not provide enough income without having to work in other jobs to earn enough cash. So much of the food is consumed by the producers that there is little left to sell, and the land cannot be leveraged for loans to start a business or buy an apartment in the city where the jobs are. Some of those abandoned children in the villages have become my students.
Tonight I will go to English corner on the other campus again. It is mostly the upper classmen who come to discuss various topics. They feel more confident and motivated than the first and second year students and they are feeling the pressure of preparing for life after college. Many hope to go on to graduate school if their comprehensive test score are high enough. Once accepted they will face an interview to show their ability to speak English, so they are motivated to learn as much as they can in the time they have left before graduation. Others are looking for jobs in the big city using their oral English skills and the ask me to help them write resumes to work with foreign trade and translation. Some are applying to graduate school in America or elsewhere abroad and ask me to help edit and correct their essays. (I generally do, unless they are downloaded from the internet or too incomprehensible.) And others just come to hear about the latest news from a foreigner’s perspective. Controversy can be useful to get past the usual shyness and reticence to express their own emotions and feelings as proud Chinese. If I am accused of being too negative on China, (they are only taught the positive) I tell them to ask me about my country and I will be willing to criticize it just as much for its crazy policies and politics. (Like, “I voted against the president, twice.” Response: “Was it because he is black? Answer, “But his mother was white, so I think he must be white, etc.) But I also tell them that it is just a means of getting them to talk about what matters to them instead of the usual trivial topics that come up every week. It seems natural to include my beliefs and where they come from in the process.
I hope to hear from you as well about what God is doing in your life these days and your insights into the mystery of God’s grace.
Thanks for your prayers.
Your fellow, faithful follower,
Tim
P.S: You can find and read the article that I cited and recommended to you in my last newsletter here:
www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/january-february/world-...
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From Tim Robertson, robertsontim66@gmail.com
Feb 16, 2014
Val-lantern's Day/Festival
Dear Friends and Family,
Last Friday was the final day of the 15-day Spring Festival which started on January 31. It is called the Lantern Festival and happened to fall on February 14 this year. Valentine’s Day is a popular import from the West and serves as a balance for Singles Day which falls on November 11 for obvious reasons. In this case filial piety (duty to one’s family) won out over romance - which is not a traditional Chinese practice. Only recently has love become a goal or a motivation for marriage for young people instead of a duty to follow the expectations and demands of one’s parents and ancestors. So Valentine’s Day has become widely observed as a means to assert individual happiness over pressure of traditional Confucian values. This clash or competition of eastern and western ideas and traditional celebrations is a sign that China is changing in visible external ways as well as invisible internal attitudes toward every aspect of life. It is a long term process that expresses itself in surprising ways.
Not having the means to celebrate the day in the American way I headed down to the local square to observe the local festivities. The entrance to the park was barricaded by carts selling fireworks, food and lanterns to the throngs of people spilling out onto the street. I pushed my way through the crowd with my bicycle hoping to find an isolated corner from which to enjoy the spectacle, but once I had entered the square I noticed that the celebrants were gathered around its perimeter with the center reserved for the firework displays. Indeed, the explosions were loud and intense enough to convince me I was in a combat zone if I had closed my eyes. Fountains spurted from the stone pavement, geysers thrust higher and bursts of sparks blossoming overhead were performing to a cacophony that escalated and merged to a general deafening roar and echoed off the surrounding buildings.
At the same time families with small children were lighting the paraffin fueled lanterns and holding them above their heads until the hot air inside generated enough lift to send them floating upward above the trees and sailing away on the breeze. As I followed their paths upward into the luminous smoky haze I saw hundreds of other glowing orbs ascending from all directions around the city and joining together with thousands of others in a continuous river of lights that flowed into the northwestern night sky. Occasional gusts of wind would cause some lanterns to tip and lose their upward momentum so that they gently descended to be caught and held aloft again for another attempted launch. Others would fail to attain enough altitude and got caught in the bare limbs of the trees where they continued to burn until a man with a long bamboo pole was able to bring them back to earth in an ignominious crash and extinction.
No one seemed at all concerned at the fire hazard such activities might engender or the danger to children as they ran and danced excitedly among the pyrotechnics. I set such concerns aside and constantly shifted my gaze from the greater flashes of lights below to the lesser glowing lights above and back again as the concert of sight and sound, light and darkness, color and shadowy figures filled me with awe. I found it amazing to think that such an event in this small city was being simultaneously carried out in millions of villages as well as the thousands of other small, medium-sized and big cities all over China without any apparent planning or coordination. And I wondered where the final destination would be for each lantern as they floated upward but would eventually lose altitude when the flames died and they came gently back to earth. The image stuck in my mind as I remembered Shakespeare’s description of life as “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” Perhaps I am the one trying to tell that story to you and give it some significance.
That thought had also crept into my mind the previous day as I sat by the carriage window and watched dawn slowly illuminate the Chinese countryside as I rode the train from Shanghai to Fuyang. I had not slept much of the ten hour trip that began around midnight in the center of China’s biggest city of some 23 million souls. The landscape seemed as familiar as the wallpaper back home with a recurring pattern: some trees, a field, a pond, a village, a road, some trees, etc. for hundreds of kilometers. The pattern was occasionally interrupted by a coal fired power plant or a railway station where we would come to stop for a few minutes before rolling onward to the northwest and my destination. The passing bare ground was covered by a thin layer of snow. Conical burial mounds seemed to be randomly scattered over the darker fields of winter wheat that wait for spring to shoot up and bear a harvest among the graves. In the slanting rays of dawn the snow covered mounds seemed to glow as they pointed upward. Who were these people, how long ago did they live, how did they die . . . and what was their destiny? These are stories I cannot tell yet, God knows them and I believe he gives them significance.
The Chinese railway system is a wonder to behold as it runs around the clock all over the nation transporting millions of people each day. Spring Festival is the time of the largest annual migration of people in the world (about 250 million this year) and increasing every year. This is the one time when migrant workers and people who have moved to the city get time off for travel to visit their families and children in small villages and other cities. I had joined this massive flow of people in Los Angeles the day before as millions of Chinese also travel internationally these days to see their relatives. Since the fast trains that travel over 300 km an hour have not made it to Fuyang yet, I must take the slow train for Fuyang, which costs only $16 for the ten hour trip. My car is a sleeper with six bunks to a compartment without bedding or doors. I thanked American Airlines for the small blanket and pillow they gave me for the fourteen hour, 6,000 mile flight across the Pacific.
The car smells of spicy instant noodles, urine and sweat, but my nose adjusts so that I no longer notice except in the morning when smells and the slurping of noodles tells me most people are eating breakfast. Sleep does not come easily to me while I travel. Perhaps it’s the inner tension that comes while in motion, or the smells, snores and other noisy bodily functions from bodies lying so close by, along with the jolts, jostles, squeaks and shrieks of passing trains in the opposite directions. A sign on the WC: “No Occupying While Stabling.” Translation: Don’t use the toilet while in the station so that there will not be an excess of human waste left on the tracks there. The staff frequently lock the doors of the WCs while in the station so as to mitigate the problem. I prefer to use the facilities while the train is stopped because it is difficult to concentrate on hitting the hole in the floor while swaying with the motion of the train and balancing on the blocks provided to stand on above the pools of liquid on the floor. But I am glad that I can do it standing up. Stinky bathrooms are a problem almost everywhere in China, except for KFC and McDonalds – which might help to account for their popularity.
When I arrived in Shanghai last year I was met at the airport by someone from the school who took me to a hotel for the night and then drove the 400 km to Fuyang in a school owned car. This year I am able to find the subway at the airport, buy my ticket to the central railway station and buy a railway ticket to Fuyang by myself. It is the reverse trip I took about five weeks earlier at the end of the semester so I know where to go and what to do without having to ask any questions. Being able to take this trip without assistance is an example of the progress I have made in the past year. It shows me how much I have learned but how little I know and much less comprehend of this other world where I now live and work. It now feels a lot more like coming home and I am glad to arrive in my cramped 300 sq. foot apartment to recover from sleep deprivation and moving to this side of the planet to start a new semester.
Some differences between East and West become clearer but they also seem to blur and run together, mixing and interacting in new unpredictable ways. The last four weeks of travel to see family and friends in Sequim WA, Victoria BC, Stanton MI and Moorpark CA have kept me busy and given me a much needed break from teaching in Fuyang. While Miranda was in classes at Moorpark College I took the opportunity to drive a few miles to visit the Ronald Reagan Museum and Library for a few hours. It helped me to get back in touch with my American roots. Seeing the old Air Force One 27000 in its own pavilion along with Marine One helicopter along with visiting the grave site brought back his words about being a shining city on a hill for the rest of the world to see. His trajectory had brought him to rest there atop this hill. I wondered if that was still true. Do Americans still see America in that light or have they grown fearful of future decline and withdraw from engagement with the world?
I recently read a biography about Dr. Nelson Bell (father of Ruth Graham Bell). It tells how he decides to become a surgeon to serve in China, so in 1912 he enrolled in the Medical College in Richmond, VA. “When this leading state institution learned of his intention to be a medical missionary, they cancelled his tuition fees. ‘I never paid tuition the four years I was there. It was a voluntary action on their part; I never asked for it. I think they looked on it as a small contribution to medical missions.’” This book is titled A Foreign Devil in China and serves to show the changes of the past century. Foreigners are no longer called “Yang Guitze” or Foreign Devils, but a far more respectful title, “Laowai” which translates as Foreign Sir. But perhaps it is more telling how differently missionaries are seen today by institutions of higher learning or even Americans in general. After detailing his long and illustrious career as a surgeon in a mission hospital in China (and later on in America after they were forced to leave) the book ends by telling how Dr. Bell became one of the founders of Christianity Today magazine.
While in a public library I noticed the cover story of the current issue of Christianity Today: The World The Missionaries Made. The article is about an academic study setting out to show the impact of missionaries on the world today. It was exhaustively researched and published in The American Political Science Review – the discipline’s top journal. Sociologist Robert Woodbury is quoted as saying, “I was shocked. It was like an atom bomb. The impact of missions on global democracy was huge.” The article goes on to quote a noted historian, “Why did some countries become democratic, while other went the route of theocracy and dictatorship? Woodbury shows through devastatingly thorough analysis that conversionary Protestants are crucial to what makes a country democratic today. Not only is it another factor – it turns out to be the most important factor. It can’t be anything but startling for scholars of democracy.” Other quotes:
“In short: Want a blossoming democracy to day? The solution is simple – if you have a time machine: Send a 19th century missionary.”
“Looking back now, more than a century later, we see just how long that transformative difference can endure.”
For a better appreciation of what God has done through missionaries, I recommend reading the article.
So the long story comes full circle and continues to roll onward. I like to see the future of China through the lens of this article that was published in the magazine founded by a missionary to and from China. And I see myself as a very small part of that transformative process. I also like to think that is part of being a ”shining city on a hill” or “the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” Hebrews 11:10
Please keep on praying.
God is blessing,
Tim
= = =
from Dec 2013:
Dear Friends and Family,
Christmas is not an official holiday in China so I taught my regular classes and celebrated by presenting a special Christmas presentation of 20 carols, videos and stories. I invited the students to bring treats to share. (Favorite snacks are individual packages of spicy tofu and chickens feet) I provided small Mandarin oranges, White Rabbit candies and potato chips. I presented a variety of traditional American Christmas elements that fell into the sacred, secular, children’s and party/romantic genres. In that way I could show A Charlie Brown Christmas with Linus quoting the original story from the gospel of Luke and ask the students to sing along to Away in a Manger and O Holy Night. I also had video clips of Santa reading Twas the Night Before Christmas along with Rudolf, Frosty and Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree etc. I could have taken the day off from classes if I had wanted, but since everyone else is working that day and my small apartment can only accommodate ten students at a time, I decided it would be better to celebrate with my students all week long during their regularly scheduled classes. I had originally planned to have the students sign up to arrive in half hour shifts at my apartment but that would have taken about eight hours straight. I realized that even though it took several hours to download and arrange the materials from the internet, I could cover much more ground in the classroom than I would have been able to do as a public school teacher in America.
On the day after Christmas I asked my students if they were aware that it was a special day in China. I was surprised to learn that none of them were aware that December 26 was the 120th anniversary of the birth of Mao, the father of modern China. After informing them of it, they seemed impressed that I would know that little factoid but none seemed to be particularly impressed with the importance of the date. I also got the same response from several teachers. That little vignette illustrates the fact that however much the party professes loyalty to their founder, China is moving forward and not looking back for its political inspiration.
I was also impressed at the number of businesses selling and displaying Christmas decorations in this small city. I bought a two-foot-tall tree in the street market with lights for 20 RMB (>$3.00) along with a Santa hat, colorful garland and a small stuffed Santa to use in my classes. I also took them to the private pre-school classes that I teach on Fridays, since I have no college classes scheduled. I was surprised to see that the school had already put up a large decorated Christmas tree in the hallway along with illustrations of Santa Claus and crèches, complete with a baby Jesus (although I doubt that any of the kids were even aware of who the depicted baby was). All this is perhaps a sign that China is rebalancing their economy toward more of a domestic consumer market instead of relying so heavily on exporting all their manufactured goods abroad. But I was glad to put on my Santa cap and add to the impression that Christmas is an important international holiday with great cultural and historical significance for the Chinese too.
This past week has been busy with multiple invitations from students to class parties which can go on for several hours. I was taken completely by surprise while attending a class of my students from last year when they started chanting in my direction, “Sing! Sing! Sing! Sing!” I could only remember the words to Feliz Navidad and O Holy Night which I tried to sing without any musical accompaniment. I discovered that being cold and surrounded by students who were recording the event for God knows what, on their cell phone cameras, can have a deleterious effect on my ability to hold a tune and remember the lyrics. The next party, I came prepared with my USB drive in my pocket. When they suddenly announced I would be the next singer, I was able to plug it into the computer so that the words were displayed on the screen and the music covered my shaky voice. The students showed great appreciation for my effort, which I hope was not the worst performance that night. Karaoke is a staple of these parties and many student groups sang their selections by looking down at the lyrics on their cell phones and singing along to music videos they had recorded.
On Thanksgiving weekend the partners in business were able to sell the last of the custom made flying disks in the park near the street market next to the school. Afterwards we got together in my apartment and split up the proceeds. Although I had invested most of the money, we split the profits evenly so that each of us got 300 RMB or about $50. Considering we each put about 30 hours into the project, it was not a particularly lucrative enterprise, but it was worthwhile for the friendships, the fun and the many lessons I learned in the process. Perhaps I will do it again next semester if I can find some other investors who want to join in. By comparison I was able to earn the identical amount of money in 2 hours by giving a guest lecture at the Voc. Tech. College down the street that same week.
This past Saturday I was invited to be a judge at an English speech competition. Since I was only invited about two hours before, I was a bit unprepared for the experience of having to judge 37 primary school children on their memorized speeches. I found it impossible to be impartial and objective while watching those irresistibly cute China dolls recite their compositions with enthusiastic hand motions. The speeches were interspersed with songs and dance routines that included precocious renditions of the tango and Gangnam Style. The scoring was grueling. I was directed to sit in the middle seat of the front row between four other judges in the cold auditorium where I could barely fit my knees under the desk in front of me. The only source of heat came from numerous cups of tea we were served. Gripping my pen with gloved hands or writing with fingers stiffened with cold was a challenge. I found that by clapping vigorously during the periodic performances I could generate some heat to keep my hands warm enough keep up the pace of churning out my numerical evaluations. After two hours sitting on the cold hard seats without enough room to cross my legs I was looking for an excuse to displace the row of judges for a dash to the WC in the courtyard. Unfortunately, the post-contest awards ceremony required me, as an honored guest to present the participants and winners with their certificates and prizes on stage. I am afraid my smile for the cameras was more of a grimace of desperation by then.
I have gotten used to frequent requests by students and random strangers on the street who approach me camera in hand and ask to have a picture taken with me. Of course, I can never refuse without seeming somewhat petulant, so I just stand close to them with a silly grin on my face and pretend they are one of my closest friends in all the world. And they are always delighted to get a photo to send to their friends and family or post on the internet to show their privileged access to a foreigner. Sometimes after a couple of photos with two friends taking turns pushing the button, others appear and before I know it I have a line forming to one side to get their turn, either individually, or in groups, or both. This can happen in the shopping mall when the sales girls with nothing else to do approach me giggling waving their camera /cell phones. Or it can happen on Mt. Tai where groups of climbers stop to get a quick picture with me while I am resting at a small temple, which is somewhat ironic considering the options of what else is in view. I suppose I should be flattered that I am considered such an exotic oddity that they include me in their family vacation to visit a national monument. One time I was invited to an event in the park to “teach English” but it soon became clear the real purpose was publicity for the school. The head master lined me up between two people dressed as Mickey and Minni Mouse (sorry Disney) in front of a life sized plastic replica of a velociraptor (dinosaur) so each of the students would get a personal memento of the occasion. I felt like a plastic Ronald McDonald sitting on a park bench.
On Christmas day I chose to eat in the dining hall with the students. I usually arrive a little late to the cafeteria to avoid the crush of students getting their tray of rice and vegetables with bits of meat for flavor. Most of them get their food and eat it within ten minutes and leave without saying a word to anyone. I used to wonder how they could eat is so quickly using chopsticks. I soon realized most of them were using the metal soup spoons or just using the chopsticks to scoop the food off the tray and inhaling it without actually picking it up. When I get there for lunch a few minutes after 12:00, most of the students have already left and the tables have several small piles of bones or food that were shoved off the tray or spit out. I wander around looking for a “clean” table or wait for an employee to come by and wipe each table clear with the same cloth. On leaving the facility, it is customary to take ones tray to a cleaning stand where left overs are scraped into a slop bucket to be recycled to the pigs.
Two weeks ago I was finally able to sign a new contract for next semester and my foreign expert certificate has now been renewed until June. I am hoping that the residential permit will be processed this week so that my passport can be returned to me before my departure date on January 10th from Shanghai flying to Seattle via San Francisco. Although I had hoped I would get a contract for a whole year as before, I am glad that the new contract will expire at the end of this academic year, which will allow me to begin a new contract in the fall as is the normal practice. My current contract began in the middle of the academic year which led to numerous problems with interpreting and following its requirements. My switch to teaching on the east campus from the west campus where I taught last year was also a complicating factor. Since the other teacher on this campus will not be renewing his contract after this academic year, I expect that I will be able to renew another year-long contract at the end of the spring semester. If I had not been offered a new contract I was preparing to sign a contract with the Vocational Technical College about a kilometer away since they are currently looking to fill their only foreign teacher post for next semester. They did offer me a contract but I am reluctant to leave my students after only one semester and have to move again. (If anyone is interested in filling the position, I can provide details and an email address to send your resume.)
= = =
Tim Robertson's posts about his time as an English teacher in Anhui at the Fuyang Teachers College are uploaded at: www.flickr.com/photos/ray_mahoney/9114089397/in/photostream, www.flickr.com/photos/ray_mahoney/8302698850/in/photostream, www.flickr.com/photos/ray_mahoney/14217075257/in/photostream; www.flickr.com/photos/ray_mahoney/9012874492/
The Harrisburg Telegraph newspaper in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, printed this amusing essay on an undated postcard sometime before it ceased publication in 1948. The humorous piece itself has circulated in newspapers and magazines since at least 1903.
So What's the Use?
Did it ever occur to you that a man's life is full of crosses and temptations? He comes into this world without his consent and goes out against his will, and the trip between is exceedingly rocky. The rule of contraries is one of the features of this trip.
When he is little the big girls kiss him; and when he is big the little girls kiss him. If he is poor he is a bad manager; if he is rich he is dishonest. If he needs credit he can't get it; if he is prosperous everyone wants to do him a favor.
If he is in politics it is for graft, if he is out of politics you can't find a place for him and he is no good to the country. If he doesn't give to charity he is a stingy cuss; if he does, it's for show. If he is actively religious he is a hypocrite; if he takes no interest in religion, he is a hardened sinner.
If he gives affection, he is a soft specimen; if he cares for no one he is cold blooded. If he dies young there was a great future for him; if he lives to be an old man, he missed his calling.
If you save money you're a grouch. If you spend it you're a loafer. If you get it, you're a grafter. If you don't get it you're a bum--So What's The Use?
Harrisburg Telegraph
Harrisburg's First Paper
This is my first of a few Barbara Kruger inspired photographs. I decided to do this project through the lens of lyrics that I have listened to over time. I wanted to apply both music and photography to complete this project.
The lyric "Liar, lawyer, mirror show me, what's the difference" is from the song entitled "The Pot" from rock band Tool's 2006 album 10,000 days.
This project was intended to highlight some sort of societal and/or personal issue, which I believe this does, but in a way that is completely up to interpretation, just like how music is up to complete interpretation. No two people view music in the same way. I have looked up countless interpretations of this song to find second opinions, and each and every response varied vastly. I interpret the song in terms of hypocrisy, in particular, hypocrisy of both the government and the justice system. What defines guilt? What makes the convicted less of a man than the judge? I think of it in terms of substance use. A man gets convicted for possession of "the pot" whist the judge is doing the same (or worse) on his own terms, and can do so, because of the power dynamic that has been granted to him.
"The pot calling the kettle black" is a proverbial idiom of Spanish origin. In English, it means "to not criticise one for a fault that you have yourself." Again, bringing us back to the main concept of hypocrisy.
Really, the entirety of the song is able to back up my point on this subject. In particular, here are a few lines that I believe to hold the most value to my topic:
(1) "When you [expletive] all over my black kettle, you must've been (high)"
(2) "Who are you to wave your finger, so full of it, eyeballs deep in muddy waters, [expletive] hypocrite"
(3) "Kangaroo done hung the guilty with the innocent" (references to kangaroo/mock courts)
On a final note, the song repeatedly says the lyric "you mustve ben high" when referring to "[expletive] on the black kettle" referencing back to the idea that this hypothetical judge is convicting a man of a minor offence, in this case, the use of "the pot" while, he "must have been high" himself.
Pictured: Reece Rosa
In 1968 the “Sexual Revolution” was at its peak
In 1968 the “Second Wave” of the feminist movement was at its peak
In 1968 the “Cultural Revolution” headed by Dr. Martin Luther King
was working on making all black people in America free from bigotry and persecution….
And ….
All that back of the bus…….. bullshit……..
...........Dr. King was assassinated on April 4 1968............
Harper Valley PTA…1968
I want to tell you all a story 'bout a
Harper Valley widowed wife
Who had a teenage daughter who
attended Harper Valley Junior High
Well, her daughter came home one
afternoon and didn't even stop to play
And she said,
"Mom, I got a note here
from the Harper Valley PTA"
Well, the note said, "Mrs. Johnson,
you're wearin' your dresses way too high
It's reported you've been drinkin' and
a-runnin' 'round with men and goin' wild
And we don't believe you ought to be
a-bringin' up your little girl this way"
And it was signed by the secretary,
Harper Valley PTA
Well, it happened that the PTA was
gonna meet that very afternoon
And they were sure surprised when Mrs.
Johnson wore her mini-skirt into the room
And as she walked up to the blackboard,
I still recall the words she had to say
She said, "I'd like to address this meeting
of the Harper Valley PTA
Well, there's Bobby Taylor sittin' there and
seven times he's asked me for a date
And Mrs. Taylor sure seems to use a lot
of ice whenever he's away
And Mr. Baker, can you tell us why your
secretary had to leave this town ?
And shouldn't widow Jones be told to
keep her window shades all pulled
completely down ?
Well, Mr. Harper couldn't be here 'cause
he stayed too long at Kelly's Bar again
And if you'll smell Shirley Thompson's
breath, you'll find she's had a little nip of gin
And then you have the nerve to tell me you
think that as a mother I'm not fit
Well, this is just a little Peyton Place and
you're all Harper Valley hypocrites"
No, I wouldn't put you on because it really
did, it happened just this way
The day my Mama socked it to the
Harper Valley PTA
The day my Mama socked it to the
Harper Valley PTA
Disclaimer “Fair Use” Act ,- Non Profit - For Educational & Entertainment Purposes Only
The Modern Parents is a comic strip from the British comic Viz created by John Fardell who both writes and illustrates it.
One of the most enduring and frequent strips in Viz, having appeared regularly since the early 1990s, it is a parody of 'ethically aware' middle-class parents and the new age movement.
Similarly to Fardell's other creation, The Critics, it satirises liberal snobbery.
On one occasion, the Modern Parents and the Critics appeared in the same strip, each pair mistakenly attending the event intended for the other, though the two strips are generally slightly different in tone and style.
Malcolm and Cressida
Malcolm and Cressida Wright-Pratt are parents whose obsession with ethical and environmental awareness often works against their basic role as parents to Tarquin and Guinevere.
The Modern Parents do not believe in childhood activities such as fairgrounds, fast food restaurants, games, competitions and sports, toys, normal holidays or mainstream school and impose their moral positions on their children and the children of others.
They take the moral high-ground because of their ideologies and expect everyone to appreciate their actions, however the two are just as hypocritical as much as they are pretentious (as displayed in one strip when they began a campaign against slavery but then employed unpaid interns to do the work for them).
In the March 2008 issue of Viz they visit Uncle Eddie for his daughter Amy's second birthday party and give their niece an ethical gift, which seems (to Eddie) to be a "donation to an Oxfam-funded goat thingy for a starving African family", but turns out to be a donation to their own "Malcolm and Cressida Ethical Living Awareness Project".
Tarquin and Guinevere give her a teddy bear to the dismay of Malcolm and Cressida, who declare it to be "an anthropomorphisation of wild animals", "an attempt to brainwash Amy into keeping pets" and "offensive and oppressive to the Sudanese people" (referring to the contemporary Sudanese teddy bear blasphemy case).
They then assume Amy will "at least appreciate our effort to reduce the bear's carbon footprint by putting it in the recycle bin" and snatch it from her.
Both have large upturned noses. Cressida has her hair pulled back in a tight pony-tail and Malcolm has a scruffy beard and incredibly large teeth.
Malcolm and Cressida were not originally married as they believed it to be an outmoded and sexist institution that enslaved women.
However, they did eventually marry in order to get their wedding gifts.
They had their own pagan ceremony and wrote their own vows ("Do you, Cressida, take Malcolm to be your husband so long as you find acceptable and convenient?")
Cressida delights in pointing out that, as a woman, she is an oppressed minority while Malcolm frequently claims he has "Sensitive Persons Syndrome".
A committed environmentalist, he insists he supports public transport, but cannot use it himself because his Syndrome prevents him from getting on a bus or train and his Volvo "is Scandinavian, so it must be eco-friendly".
The pair often identify themselves with ethnic minorities, claiming to have some Celtic heritage or that they were Native Americans in a previous life.
Malcolm and Cressida believe that all humans are equal even to the extent that there is no such thing as immaturity. Tarquin is often greeted by the sight of his parents openly having sexual intercourse (having also previously announced this intention to their kids).
Each story finds them forcing their children into some new ethically aware activity that ostensibly encourages a policy of togetherness but ends up with Tarquin and Guinevere often escaping to their much more realist Uncle Eddie (Cressida's brother) who supplies them with ice creams and trips to theme parks.
Malcolm has a brother, Oswald, married to Lana (real name Linda), and a neurotic spinster sister, Joy. Oswald and Lana have an extremely snobbish son, Hector James.
The family are Conservative and rich, damning the British worker and the foreigner with equal vigour. Malcolm also used to be a keen Young Conservative before meeting Cressida while canvassing.
Lured by Cressida into a new world of progressive ideological debate and sex, Malcolm abandoned his dreams of becoming a future Tory Prime Minister and grew a beard.
One episode shows Malcolm's lock-up garage where he keeps a motorbike and a topless women calendar on the wall. He goes for a ride on the bike but is injured by Cressida, who does not know it is him and throws a protest sign at the front wheel, throwing him off. Unconscious, he imagines an alternative reality in which he has an attractive wife and is Prime Minister.
Another day Cressida takes two ethically-aware friends for a tour of the house and visits Malcolm's computer den. He is caught in the den playing pornographic computer games such as "Death F**k" and "Karate Whores Must Die" whilst leering and salivating wildly.
Cressida's family have made few appearances: her mother and father seem to be separated and her mother appears to drink.
When Malcolm left her and Tarquin, Cressida wondered what she was going to do for money until Tarquin pointed out that it was always her father who sent her monthly cheques.
However her father had taken a new mistress: since this meant he had no money to give to his daughter, Cressida experimented with prostitution.
An early Viz character, called Mike Smitt, looks similar to the original form of Malcolm. This character is referred to as a patronising git, as all he does is talk to people as if they are stupid, or point out to the whole street that a girl on crutches is disabled and unable to speak up for herself.
Tarquin and Guinevere
Tarquin is the elder child, aged about twelve, often the voice of common sense, a very effective foil to Malcolm & Cressida due to his desire for normality or to make money.
His diplomatic ability is a means of resistance to parental authority diametrically opposed to their schemes: he is calculating and methodical in his manipulation of Malcolm & Cressida.
He has a rational, scientific worldview that rejects vague ideas about spirituality and seems grounded in evidence and deductive reasoning.
As a result, he is very sceptical about ideas such as crystal healing or rebirthing, questioning their rational basis, even asking a practitioner of "Wan-Ki": "Where did you get your diploma, University of Mumbo-Jumbo?"
When Malcolm & Cressida take him to a "Whole Self Centre", claiming that he suffers from an "erotic shame complex", Tarquin talks of a workshop about discovering the inner child.
He gets the attendees to undress and touch each other, dance, and feel each other's bodies while several smartly dressed businessmen queue and pay to watch through the windows. It's a front for a sleazy peep show.
Despite his female name, Guinevere is a boy. Wanting to avoid gender stereotyping, Malcolm and Cressida occasionally try to make one or both of their sons wear girls' clothes or take "female" roles in some psychobabble ceremony.
Guinevere was born during the course of the comic strip and after growing to his current age of about five or six, stopped there. Tarquin appeared to get older in the early years of Modern Parents and in one episode turned thirteen.
Guinevere, whose name is usually just shortened to "Guin" by his brother, is largely a passive character, easily upset, his big brother often coming to his rescue. Guinevere's first word was football although Malcolm and Cressida were keen for it to be dolphin.
Other characters
Malcolm and Cressida have many friends, notably Ashley and Cordelia in the Ethically Aware Parents Support Group, who, like them, are middle-class, politically correct and often into various causes.
Most of them have children who, without exception, have the same despairing and uncooperative attitude towards their parents as Tarquin and Guinevere. Cressida's brother, Edward - more commonly known as simply Uncle Eddie - acts as a counter-weight to his sister and brother-in-law and treats his two nephews, Tarquin and Guinevere, like normal boys.
'Guest' characters include Dr Earnest Rabbitt (who is firmly opposed to killing animals) and Professor Ruth Lesscow (an extreme women's rights activist). In earlier episodes of the strip, Tarquin had a friend called Ian, of whom his parents clearly disapproved, and once a girlfriend called Dawn, of whom Malcolm and Cressida thought Tarquin was controlling and possessive.
I think in Simon's list of 50 best Suffolk churches, Woolpit comes in at number 31. It is now that I remember that I cannot remember why I should go to Woolpit on what would be the last of the EA church visits this year, as Mum was home and in the care of the district nurse, and there was nothing else we could do, not in actions, money or time given. She really has to stand on her own two feet now.
Anyway; Woolpit.
I decided to go, and after looking on the map I saw that with some create route planning, I could go down the 143, then double back and join the A14 eastwards before turning south down our old friend, the A12.
On the way I did also visit Stowlangtoft, which was a wonderful church, a church filled with wonderful things that seemed to hang together as a whole. Woolpit would have to be something special to trup St George.
And it nearly did. Nearly. Woolpit is a picture perfect village, all timber framed buildings, narrow lanes and impossible to park in. I drove through it finding a kind of space just past the church. I could see from the tower and building it was a church on which the Victorians had been very busy.
Most glorious is Mary's roof; double hammerbeam adorned with 208 angels one of the wardens told me. It had been counted several times during a dull sermon. Or two.
The wardens were building the crib for Christmas, so were using a pallet as a base, or something like that. I didn't see it finished, but Ken Bruce was booming out from a radio, preaching the Gospel According to Popmaster to all who would listen.
The angels in the roof and on the walls of the church are indeed impressive, as is the rood screen, but not sure if they are original. There are carved pew ends aplenty, but to my eye, not as well carved or as old as at Stowlangtoft. I could be wrong. But I snap a few anyway.
But I received a warm welcome here, and it is a fantastic church for me.
-----------------------------------------
2008: Woolpit is a village which I often visit, and it is always a pleasure to go into the church. But the entry for St Mary was one of the last on the original Suffolk Churches site, making its appearance in late 2001. In fact, I think it was the last of the old-style entries. I was getting a bit wordy by then.
Woolpit was one of the longest entries, and this wasn't just because there is so much to see. I went off at a great tangent about the meaning of medieval iconography, and how it survived the Reformation. It certainly got some thoughts clear in my own head, even if it confused other people. I actually wrote the entry in the back of an old exercise book sitting outside a café on the Cote d'Azur in southern France. Reading that back, it seems a little pretentious, but I really was there. Here in Ipswich on a frosty February evening, I can't help remembering the heat as I scrawled in the pad.
I've left the original entry almost entirely as it was, apart from the removal of one absolute howler, which I won't mention. I am not sure if Woolpit still has a Sunday market, and I am sure that someone will tell me if it has not. Paul Hocking is no longer Rector of Woolpit, but to my eyes the church continues to go from strength to strength, feeling at once busy and at the heart of its community, the still centre of a busy village. I like it very much.
2001: The clear blue waters of the Mediterranean swirl around my legs, then past me, buffeting the rocks along the silver beach. Millions of tiny flecks of mica swarm through the current, washed out of the hills of Southern Provence. They shine for a fraction of a second with all the light the high summer sun can give, a universe caught in a moment; then turn, disappearing, making of the water a shimmering skein, an ancient memory.
The sea is at the start of all European civilisation. Here, history wells about me. I think of Europe, and the fragmentation of nations. I think of the Balkans, and the Reformation, and the same water surrounding, tending, isolating. I think of time passing.
A week before, I'd been standing in the cool nave of the church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Woolpit - or at least, that is what it probably was once, back then. Today, it is dedicated simply as 'St Mary', in common with the majority of Suffolk's medieval churches, among which it is one of the finest, some say. This is mostly by virtue of its beautiful porch, and extraordinary angel roof.
But is that true? For there are those who love this church that, perhaps, never look up at the porch or roof. Is it the plethora of 15th century bench ends that captures the imagination? Or could it be Richard Phipson's outrageous 1850s tower and lacy spire, straight out of the Nene Valley, its evangelistic slogans around the side in a Victorian equivalent of Piccadilly Circus neon? It ought not to work, and yet it does. Or is it that supremely articulate view to the east, perfect of proportion despite the stripping away of its medieval liturgical apparatus? Above all else, and above most others, this is a church with presence.
It was the bench ends that I was thinking of as I immersed myself out of the intensity of the Provencal sun. A number of questions occured to me, as they have done on other occasions, in other churches. Who made them? What did they mean by them? And how did they survive the iconoclasms of the Protestant Reformation? Here in Southern Europe, I thought I might have found some answers.
Woolpit, then. It is perhaps the most perfect of all Suffolk villages. Not sleepy, and chocolate boxy, but to actually live in. Its shops and pubs are arranged around the pleasant village square, and Phipson's crazy spire towers above them. Woolpit still has its school, and you wouldn't need to get in the car every time you needed a loaf of bread, as you'd have to do in some of Suffolk's more famously picturesque villages, like Kersey and Tuddenham. And Woolpit has its Sunday market, beloved of hundreds of non-sabbatarian junk-hunters each week.
Further, Woolpit has its mythology; the two green children, who climbed out of the ground, speaking a strange language and afraid of the sunlight. The boy died soon after, but the girl grew up and married; she learned to speak English, and told of St Martin's Land, from where she and her brother had emerged. There are holes in the ground around Woolpit, quarries where bricks were made in the 19th century. But perhaps there was once something much older, for every Suffolk schoolchild knows that the name 'Woolpit' is nothing to do with wool, but with the wolves that once lived in the pits here...
So, it is a well-known village. It is because of this as much as anything about St Mary itself that makes this church so well-known to people who haven't heard of the even more interesting and beautiful church of St Ethelbert, Hessett, barely three miles away.
Your first sight of St Mary will be Phipson's crazy spire, visible from miles away, and quite unlike anything else in East Anglia. Suffolk is a county where spires are rare enough, anyway. From the far side of the Gipping valley you can see this one and two others, piercing the soft harvest mist in autumn. They are Phipson's equally absurd Great Finborough, and the 1990s blade of St Peter and St Mary, Stowmarket. There are only about a dozen more in the whole of the county. The excuse for this one was that the tower was struck by lightning in 1852, bringing down the previous lead and timber affair (presumably like the one at Hadleigh). The font is contemporary with the tower, suggesting that the old one was destroyed by the fall.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the artist John Piper produced a series of screen prints of aspects of Suffolk churches; for most, he used the fine perpendicular tower, ramifying it in bold Festival of Britain primary colours. But for Woolpit, he chose the porch, because it is Suffolk's finest. Cautley thought it the best in all England. It is two-storey, 15th century, contemporary with the nave. Mortlock tells us that they were both built by wealthy Bury Abbey, who owned the living here. As at Beccles, it rises way above the south aisle, tower-like in itself.
A rood group of niches surmounts the shields of East Anglia above the door. More flank them. Mortlock says that the work began in the early 1430s, and the niches were filled by a bequest of 1473, suggesting that the porch was forty years in the making. The south aisle and chancel are slightly earlier, the north aisle slightly later, so it is the nave that promises us great things, and doesn't disappoint.
You step into cool darkness, and look up. It is breathtaking. This is Suffolk's most perfectly restored angel hammerbeam roof. It may not have the drama of Mildenhall, the exquisiteness of Blythburgh, the sheer mathematics of Needham Market, but it shows us in detail more than any other what the medieval imagination was aiming at. From the still, small silence of the church floor below, you look up into a great shout of praise. Here are hundreds of figures, both angelic and human. The profusion is ordered, as if some mighty hymn were in progress.
Paul Hocking thinks that it is a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus: We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord... To thee all Angels cry aloud, the Heavens, and all the Powers therein. To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry Holy Holy Holy Lord God of Sabaoth... The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee, the noble army of Martyrs praise thee...
I know this, because he told me so. I was busy photographing bench ends when this very enthusiastic American bounced in with another visitor, and gave him a whistlestop tour of the church, describing the details with great knowledge and understanding. Solicitously, he talked to me afterwards about what I was doing, and asked me if I'd met the Rector of Woolpit yet. I said that I went out of my way to avoid Rectors wherever possible. He laughed, and replied that, on this occasion, I'd failed, because he was, in fact, the Rector.
After I'd coughed miserably, and he'd laughed again, we had a long chat, uncovering a few mutual aquaintances. He described the roof, which he has obviously spent a lot of time exploring. He pointed out the way the wall posts contained Saints, some with apostolic symbols, some with books, and some with martyr's palms. There are angels on the hammerbeams above, and bearing symbols below. John Blatchly counted 128 angels alone. Some of the shields have letters on them. Are they an acrostic, as on the east chancel wall at Blythburgh? Do they indicate individual Saints? The great Henry Ringham completely restored this roof in 1862, but Mortlock thinks that one of the angels is not his, and I agree - you'll find it in the south west corner. Paul Hocking argues that the restoration was nowhere near as complete as has been made out, and that many features are original.
Henry Ringham also restored the range of bench ends, by duplicating some of the medieval ones, as he did at Great Bealings and Tuddenham St Martin. All are rendered with his customary skill. If Ringham did restore this roof, then the imagery must have been destroyed at some point. One instinctively thinks of William Dowsing, the Puritan inspector of the churches of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, who progressed across the counties during the course of 1644. His delight in the destruction of angel roofs was matched only by that at the destruction of stained glass.
And Dowsing did visit this church. He arrived here in the afternoon of February 29th 1644. It was a Thursday, and he had come here across country from Helmingham, where he had found much to do. He also planned to visit Beyton that day, but in the end stayed overnight at the Bull hotel, and inspected All Saints there in the morning. He then rested for the weekend - the following week, he had a busy tour of southern Cambridgeshire ahead of him.
Dowsing records in great detail what he found to do at each church. In the case of Woolpit, the angel roof is the Dog That Didn't Bark: My Deputy. 80 superstitious pictures; some he brake down, and the rest he gave order to take down; and three crosses to be taken down in 20 days. 8s 6d. There are only two possible reasons why Dowsing doesn't mention the roof. Either he didn't notice it (extremely unlikely) or it had already been destroyed. This second option seems certain; mid-Suffolk was a strongly protestant area, and nearby Rougham, which clearly had a similar roof, was not visited by Dowsing, but was vandalised even more comprehensively than Woolpit. Most likely, the destruction at both churches dated from a hundred years earlier, although it is possible that the Rougham and Woolpit congregations had been puritan enough in the 1630s to do it to their own churches themselves.
Beneath the roof, the church is broad, its two aisles giving room for the panoply of medieval liturgical processions. At the east end of the south aisle was once the shrine of Our Lady of Woolpit, a site of medieval pilgrimage in connection with a nearby holy well. Apart from the front rows, many of the benches appear to be in their original positions. Some of the bench ends are 15th century, others are Ringham's 19th century copies. I wandered around the medieval bench ends, running my hands over them, crouching down and engaging them, face to face. For anyone educated in a Marxist or Weberian historical tradition, as most of my generation were, interpreting the less-obviously liturgical or theological features of a medieval church is fraught with difficulties. One possibility is to do a Cautley, and try not to interpret them at all. But it is more fun to try to do so, don't you think?
The bench ends of Woolpit are remarkable for their abundance. They are not representations of sacraments, virtues and vices as at Tannington and elsewhere, or Saints as at Ufford and Athelington. They are almost all non-allegorical animals, although not the art objects we find at Stowlangtoft, or the mysterious beasts of Lakenheath. Perhaps a good comparison is the similar body of work at nearby Combs. Indeed, although they do not appear to be from the same workshop, it is likely that their creators knew of each others' work. There are dogs, with geese hanging from their mouths, and another which may be a cat with a rat or lizard. There are lions and bears, and a chained monkey, and birds in profusion. So who did them, and why are they here?
There is one school of thought that says that they are simply there to beautify the church, and that they were made by local craftsmen doing what they were best at. If they could do lions, they did lions. If they could render a decent rabbit, then that is what they did. And so on.
But I think that there is rather more to it than that. On my journey down through France, I had spent an afternoon in one of my favourite towns, Autun, in Burgundy. One of the reasons I like Autun is its 11th century Cathedral of St-Lazaire; this is Lazurus, raised by Christ from the dead, and until the 18th century his relics were venerated at a shrine here. St-Lazaire is most famous for its great tympanum above the west door, generally recognised as one of the greatest Romanesque art treasures in the world, and with International Heritage status. It was created during the middle years of the 12th century, and shows the Last Judgement. To emphasise Christ's majesty over all the world, it features all manner of beasts, domestic, wild and mythical.
Throughout the Cathedral, animals infest the famous capitals, which tell the Gospel story. Abbe Denis Grivot, in his Un Bestiaire de la Cathedrale D'Autun (Lyon, 1973) argues that the 12th century creators of all this filled it with animals to echo the final verse of the 150th Psalm, the crowning point of that great sequence of hymns of praise: Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord!
Standing in the nave at Autun, I instantly recalled Paul Hocking's words about the roof at Woolpit, when he said he thought it was a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus. The Te Deum is one of the canticles; another is the Benedicite, traditionally sung through Lent: Oh all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him for ever... O ye whales, and all that move in the Waters, bless ye the Lord... O all ye Fowls of the air, bless ye the Lord... O all ye beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever!
Could it be that the bench ends at Woolpit, and elsewhere in Suffolk, were intended to reflect and represent the praise defined in the canticles and psalms? Both would have been central to the liturgy of the medieval Catholic church. Perhaps the bench ends of Woolpit are liturgical and theological after all.
How would a carpenter, or group of carpenters, go about creating a set of benches like the ones at Woolpit? Who were they? Almost certainly, they were locals. They might have been itinerant jobbing carpenters, but I don't think so. The bench ends at adjacent Tostock are clearly by the same hand. But those at nearby Stowlangtoft and Norton are not, and a third hand seems to be responsible for those at Combs, as I previously mentioned. I do not think that the mutilated ones at Rougham and Elmswell are either; they were probably from the same workshop as each other.
So, we have a conscious attempt by skilled members of a community to create a hymn of praise in carved oak, by representing as many beasts as they felt capable of making. Where did they get their ideas from? They would have had no problems with oxen, cocks, conies - these were all around them, in their daily lives. The person who carved the hunting dog here was very familiar with it. Perhaps it was his own. What about monkeys and lions? These are more problematic. In medieval bestiaries, exotic creatures had fabulous legends attached to them, which gave them a theological symbolism.
But this symbolism doesn't usually seem intended when we see them on bench ends. Sometimes they are rendered accurately, but more often wild animals are fairly imaginary; I think particularly of Barningham's camel, and Hadleigh's wolf. It isn't enough to say that the carvers could have seen pictures of exotic beasts. This is fairly unlikely. Probably, the ordinary people of Woolpit never saw a book other than the missals, lectionaries and hagiographies used in church.
They might have seen pictures of lions and monkeys in wall paintings, either in other churches or here at Woolpit. They might have seen them carved in bench ends, for the same reason. In fact, the representation of wild animals varies so much as to suggest that this is not the case - compare, for example, the lions of Combs with those of Stowlangtoft. Probably, they were created in the imagination from descriptions and attributes in stories. But I think that there is a strong possibility that the woodcarvers of Woolpit did see lions and monkeys in real life.
Here in Catholic Southern Europe, there are many remote small towns which, by virtue of being so very far from each other, take on a rich and complex life of their own. Even small villages have their shops, their craftsmen, their tradespeople; they replicate a situation that existed in Suffolk until well into the 19th century, and in some cases beyond, before the great industrialisation and easy transport swept it away. Further, there are traditions here still that we have lost. Whenever I come here, I am fascinated by the itinerant entertainers, who move from village to village, giving a single performance befre moving on. This must also once have been true of England. The thing that fascinates me most is the multitude of small family circuses.
Many of them seem to be of Italian or Romany origin; all family members have multiple roles, from the oldest grandparent to the youngest child, selling tickets, doing acrobatics, being the straight men to the clown (who is typically Grandpa). They all put up the tent before the performance, and take it down afterwards. They move on, through the remote hills of Provence and the Languedoc, performing on village greens, wastegrounds, the corners of fields, even traffic islands.
As I say, I am fascinated, and can rarely resist them, even though I am shocked, even appalled, by the easy cruelty to animals. Performing animals are still often chosen for their curiosity value, if you can call running around in a circle to the crack of a whip 'performing', poor things.
The choices are strange indeed; camels and zebras often feature; I have seen an old bear on a chain, and at one circus in remote Languedoc a hippopotamus of all things - it caught bread thrown by the crowd. There was no safety fence between the seats and the ring, no Health and Safety Executive to penetrate these lost valleys. I do not know if such circuses existed in medieval Suffolk. But I think that they probably did. Suffolk is a maritime county, and exotic animals were widely known and exhibited in medieval Europe. Before the Protestant Reformation cut us of from the mainland, clerics and merchants thought of themselves as European, and travelled widely - English sovereignty was a hazy concept at best, and 'Britishness' was still centuries away from being formulated as an idea. People owed allegiance to their village, their parish, and their lord, not to the Crown and Parliament in London.
Were the woodcarvers of Woolpit and Tostock remembering this? A circus visit, perhaps back in their childhood? Exotic animals rendered inaccurately, to be sure, but with an enthusiastic nostalgia for that exciting moment in their lives? Was there a lion? A monkey, or a bear? How much more powerful if they also knew the fabulous legends about the beasts - and had seen them in real life!
Some of the carvings at Woolpit are allegorical. One shows a monkey dressed in monk's robes. This, I think, is a joke at the expense of the itinerant friars who went from parish to parish, preaching repentance in the streets. They were sanctioned by the Pope, but were beyond the jurisdiction of the local Bishop. They didn't always go down well with the local Priest and congregation, who considered the Friars nosey and hypocritical. A monkey is often a symbol of foolish vanity - hence, a Friar thinking he was better than anyone else. What better way to make the point than to slip him in as one of the creatures praising the Lord?
How did they survive? But why should they have been destroyed? We make the mistake of thinking of the Puritans as vandals. But the more you read about William Dowsing, the more he emerges as being a principled, conservative kind of chap, despite his clearly flawed and fundamentalist theological opinions. He had no reason to destroy animal bench ends. They weren't superstitious - even Dowsing didn't think Catholics worshipped animals. If he didn't think they were meant to represent the canticles, he wouldn't even have considered them religious. Amen to that.
So much for the 17th century. What about the 19th? St Mary is one of the most enthusiastically restored of Suffolk's churches, despite its survivng medieval detail. But it was done well. Mortlock thought that the 19th century pulpit was the work of Ringham - but the brass lectern is pre-Reformation, a fine example. The rood screen dado panels have sentimental 19th century Saints on them, that may or may not duplicate what was there before. They are actually very good, particularly the gorgeous Mary of Magdala. They have their names painted on the cross beams for the less hagiologically articulate Victorians - from left to right across the aisle they are Saints Barbara, Felix, Mary of Magdala, Peter, Paul, Mary, Edmund and Etheldreda. It is unlikely that Saint Felix would have been on a medieval roodscreen, and Mary almost certainly wasn't - it would have relegated her to a position of no more importance than the others. If it reflects anything of what was there before, it was probably St Anne with the infant Virgin.
The top part of the screen was renewed in 1750, and dated so. The gates are probably a Laudian imposition of 120 years earlier, as at Kedington. This may suggest that, by the time of Dowsing's visit, the chancel was being used for some other practical purpose. Above, high above, set in the east nave wall over the chancel arch, is one of the wierdest objects I've seen in a medieval church. It was installed in the 1870s, and is clearly meant to echo the coving of a rood loft. Goodness knows what it actually is, but it is painted in garish colours, and inscribed with texts. In one of those moments where Cautley and credibility part company, he describes anyone who doesn't think it is a genuine medieval canopy of honour as 'stupid'. I suppose that it has a certain curiosity value.
The three-light window above it would have given light to the rood. The east window contains one of Suffolk's best modern Madonna and child images which was made by the artist Ian Keen for the King workshop in the early 1960s. Ian Keen was also responsible for the beautiful St Margaret in St Margaret's church in Norwich, and for the memorable window of St Francis with a labrador at Somerleyton near Lowestoft.
I turned back westwards, past a superb medieval bench end of the three Marys. This is a delight, and you'd travel to London to see it if it was in the V&A. Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James and Mary of Magdala huddle together, perhaps on the morning of the Resurrection. One of them has a lily of the Annunciation. One head is destroyed - but was it vandalised? Or is it the result of carelessness, the wear and tear of the centuries? Would 17th century puritans have destroyed it if they'd seen it?
Dowsing rarely mentions bench ends, so perhaps few were left by then anyway. So how could it possibly have survived the violent zeal of the 16th century Protestants, battering the Church of England into existence with their axes, pikes and bonfires? How, even after the 1540 edict of Edward VI which ordered the destruction of all statues and images of Saints, especially those of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is it still there at all?
Still more questions than answers, I suppose. I dived beneath the water, and there was beneath me a restless current, shifting and reshifting the silver sand into unique patterns, the work of millennia, still changing, never the same.
- le Rayol Canadel, Cote d'Azur, August 2001.
Continued from:
www.flickr.com/photos/42093313@N00/52652388955/in/datepos...
The Belly of the Whale
فَنَادَىٰ فِى ٱلظُّلُمَتِ
أَن لَّآ إِلَهَ إِلَّآ أَنتَ سُبْحَنَكَ إِنِّى كُنتُ مِنَ ٱلظَّلِمِينَ
Then he, the Prophet Yunus (as), called in the darkness of the whale,
“There is no god except You, Glory be to You!
Indeed, I, I am of the wrongdoers.”
Surah Al Anbiya, Verse 87-88
Tafseer e Jilani
Fa nada: Then he invoked his Lord and prayed silently and humbly, scared, covered…
Fi dulumaat: in darkness which concealed him in layers because he was in the belly of the whale and the night was dark.
An: Indeed, He…
La ilaha: There is no God worthy of worship but Allah and deserving of worship which is the Right of His Essence and His Attribute…
Illa anta: except You, O Who in front of Whom necks bend and bow before the Veils of Your Majesty, the necks of the ones who are of intellect and reason…
Subhanaka: Glory is to You, O my Lord, I think of You as free of all flaws which are not mentionable with Your Essence and (all flaws) which are not worthy of mention with Your Grace.
Inni: Indeed, I am, due to my departure from my people without Your Permission and Revelation, while you had sent me to them and raised me among them in appearance as a Prophet, as a preacher and as a guide…
Kuntu min ad-daalimeen: I am of the transgressors of boundaries, the ones who departed from Your Orders and Your Commands so that’s why You made the matter one of distress for me and You imprisoned me and there is no one who can rescue me from this suffering except Your Forgiveness and Your Mercy.
One day, after meeting someone dear to me who seemed deeply unhappy, I wondered how people who had been living in a state of paranoia and doubt for too long would ever emerge from it. I asked Qari Sahib.
“There is only one way out,” he said. “Zikr Allah, remembering Him, being aware of Him, returning to Him again and again.”
Then he pointed me to a verse that blew my mind. For the verse was sent for a Prophet and the Prophets were ma’soom, innocent. They did not possess free will so everything that happened to them was out of their hands. Yet the words of the verse were saying, to teach us the ordinary, that the punishment for not returning to Him in regret praising Him was staying in that darkness forever.
Life would become like a grave and we would be like the dead!
فَلَوۡلَاۤ أَنَّهُۥ كَانَ مِنَ ٱلۡمُسَبِّحِینَ
لَلَبِثَ فِی بَطۡنِهِۦۤ إِلَىٰ یَوۡمِ یُبۡعَثُونَ
And if he was not of those who glorify,
certainly, he (would have) remained in its belly until the Day they are resurrected.
Surah As Saffat, Verse 143-144
Tafseer e Jilani
And overall:
Fa lau la annahu kana min al Mussabiheena: And if he was, indeed, not of the ones who glorify the Glory of Allah, Al Munkashifeena, the ones for whom is unveiled the One-ness of Allah Al Haqq and the one who thinks Allah Subhanahu is pure in totality from the several names and aspects assigned to Him…
La-labitha: then he would have remained and stayed in…
Fi batinihi: in the belly of the whale…
Ila youm-I yubathoon: till the Day of Resurrection and it would be for him, the belly, like a grave the way a grave is for the dead and overall there would be no deliverance from it ever.
I became scared. Even though I hardly ever saw such people, I became scared for them. Till death they would be like that?
“But why won’t someone, especially someone who does believe in God, remember Allah Subhanahu, if that is all that is needed to emerge from that belly? Why would someone want to be like that forever? The lack of happiness or joy or peace of mind or even feeling alive? That anxiety and restlessness? Why won’t someone seek a way out of it?”
“Because,” my young teacher said knowingly, “Satan has made them forget that remembrance.”
My eyes widened as I read the verse he asked me to look up.
ٱسۡتَحۡوَذَ عَلَیۡهِمُ ٱلشَّیۡطَـٰنُ فَأَنسَىٰهُمۡ ذِكۡرَ ٱللَّهِۚ أُو۟لَـٰۤىِٕكَ حِزۡبُ ٱلشَّیۡطَـٰنِۚ
أَلَاۤ إِنَّ حِزۡبَ ٱلشَّیۡطَـٰنِ هُمُ ٱلۡخَـٰسِرُونَ
Shaitaan has overcome them so he made them forget the Remembrance (of) Allah.
Those are the party (of) Shaitaan.
No doubt! Indeed, (the) party (of) the Shaitaan, they (will be) the losers.
Surah Al Mujadilah, Verse 19
Tafseer e Jilani
When…
Istahwada: he overcame, prevailed and took power…
Alaihimu Shaitaan: of them, Shaitaan, Al Mudill, the one who misleads, Al Maghwi, the tempter…
Fa ansaahum dikr Allah: so he made them forget the remembrance of Allah, Al Munqad, The Only Deliverer from deviation from the straight path, Al Murshid, The Only Guide towards guidance.
And overall…
Ulaika: they are the misfortunate, the miserable, the Al Matrodoona, the expelled…
Hizbo Shaitaan: the party of Shaitaan i.e. his army and his followers.
Ala inna hizba Shaitaan hum ul khasiroon: Are they not, the party of Shaitaan, the ones who are doomed, confined upon loss that has no end and humiliation everlasting, without the gain of Ma’rifat, Recognition of Allah and Yaqeen, certainty.
Ghaus Pak (ra) prays: May Allah give us refuge and his ordinary worshippers from the following of Shaitaan, the one who misleads, the one who is the seducer, the tempter. Ameen!
At first my focus just went to the words; the misfortunate, the miserable, the expelled, confinement to loss without end, an eternal humiliation, no knowing Allah, no certainty. Basically hell!
It didn’t take me too long to realize that I was also firmly ensconced in the belly of the whale. After all the verse descended for a believer. I thought I was in a state of remembrance. That was a delusion. My praying and the fasting and ticking the boxes of rituals, giving charity above what was obligatory, going to Medina and Mecca to perform countless pilgrimages, visiting other countries for the shrines of the Friends of God, none of it rendered me in a state of deliverance.
Then realize I was worse than all those others who I was inadvertently judging. The ones whose states I was so worried about.
The Façade of My Obedience
رَبَّنَا فَٱغۡفِرۡ لَنَا ذُنُوبَنَا وَكَفِّرۡ عَنَّا سَیِّءَاتِنَا وَتَوَفَّنَا مَعَ ٱلۡأَبۡرَارِ
Our Lord so forgive for us our sins and remove from us our evil deeds, and cause us to die with the righteous
Surah Aal e Imran, Verse 193
Tafseer e Jilani
Rabbana: O Our Lord, we became certain by his instruction (Nabi Kareem (saw)) in the rank of certainty of Recognition of the Essence of Your One-ness and after we became stable in it…
Faghfir: forgive us and cover…
Lana dunubuna: for us our sins of our ego which made us of those who were deprived of the court of Your Presence until we became steadfast by Your Lutf, Kindness and Your Taufeeq, granted ability in the rank of certainty of Witnessing Your Essence…
Wa: and after we became stable in that…
Kaffir: erase and purify…
An-na sayyi’atina: from us our sins, our characteristics which make us feel duality at all times until we become certain by Your Fazl, Favour and Your Jood, Generosity in the rank of the Truth of Your Essence…
Wa: and after that…
Tawaffana: make us die in the Realm of Your Dissolution…
Ma’a al ibraar: with the righteous, Al Faneena, the ones who dissolve in Allah, Al Baqeena, the ones who remain in His Remaining.
The person is particular who was creating a lot of angst and confusion in my life was lingering. Everything about their nature that was creating distress for me was identified yet I would keep forgetting it. Finally enough sense prevailed that I cut off all ties with them. I didn’t answer calls. I stayed away from occasions where we might meet.
That went against the grain of my nature. I consider myself a polite person. At least as far as communication in the modern age is concerned. I call people back promptly. I return their messages immediately. That combined with my being sensitive as well as finicky, made this a first.
The reason I was able to even execute this going against my nafs was that I had been told to do it. In the preceding weeks when I had been visiting the shrines and reading a page of the Quran at random, not once or twice but over and over, I had been told the state of these people. I had been told how to react to them.
The message had been clear. Turn away and let them be.
Allah Subhanahu would take care of it in the time He chose.
وَتَوَلَّ عَنۡهُمۡ حَتَّىٰ حِینࣲ
So turn away from them for a time.
وَأَبۡصِرۡ فَسَوۡفَ یُبۡصِرُونَ
And see, so soon they will see (what they don’t see now.)
Surah As Saffat, Verse 178-179
Tafseer e Jilani
Wa: And after that they are in a prolonged state of ghaflat, forgetfulness and state of being oppressive, tughyaan, and when they crossed the heights in conceit and desire for admiration of their personal attainments and (the heights of) disobedience…
Tawalla anhum: turn away from them, O Akmal Ar Rusul (greetings and salutations are sent upon you continuously by your Lord), The Messenger who completes Messenger-hood…
Hatta heen: for a time i.e. till the time of the completion of the promise of punishment.
Wa absir: And watch them after the descent of pain (upon them)…
Fasaufa yubsiroon: and they will soon watch i.e. what is it that will be the results of their opposing and their denial on the Day of Resurrection and they, who are of the misguided, will also see.
The Mukhaatib, the addressee, of the verse and the Quran was always Nabi Kareem (salutations and greetings upon the softest heart and his blessed family that pour mercy upon the Universe as gifted to them by their Lord). The Quran, minus a handful of verses, is a dialogue between only the two.
Through his person it then speaks to the rest of us. The word that struck me most when I first read the verse was “prolonged.”
Being in a state of forgetfulness, cruel, crossing the heights of self-importance and desire for admiration of their own selves, not even others, being disobedient for too long.
Other verses were even more severe. One thing was common in all in terms of an open declaration. If someone was unkind to Allah’s Beloved (salutations and greetings upon him and his family by Al Muhayman, The One who protects him), Subhanahu stepped in Himself and the Jalali Attributes of His Awe and Wrath manifested.
Verses like the above starting appearing again and again. To show me eventually that my suffering was caused by own self. That it was because of false gods of hopes and expectations in my heart.
Nabi Kareem (salutations and greetings upon him and his blessed family by His Lord who is his only Guardian), on the other hand, was different from everyone in all of Creation. His sadness bore out of a yearning as the Mercy of the Universe that they, the wicked, the stubborn, the selfish, the refusers, the deniers, the ungrateful, the hypocrites, the worst of all of Mankind, would somehow become believers.
The distress that he placed himself in in that longing brought the descent of such verses in the Quran.
فَلَعَلَّكَ بَـٰخِعࣱ نَّفۡسَكَ عَلَىٰۤ ءَاثَـٰرِهِمۡ إِن لَّمۡ یُؤۡمِنُوا۟ بِهَـٰذَا ٱلۡحَدِیثِ أَسَفًا
Then perhaps you would be the one who kills yourself over their denial in grief, if they don’t believe in this Message.
Surah Al Kahf, Verse 6
Tafseer e Jilani
After that their states in deception and disputing upon this course of action and the intensity of their anger and their enemity with Allah like this:
Falallaka: So perhaps you, O Akmal Ar Rusul (your Lord sends greetings and salutations upon you and your blessed family lovingly), O Messenger who completes Messenger-hood, with your love, unconditional, for their imaan, faith and their compliance and your hopes and your sympathy towards their pledge and their following…
Bakhi’un nafsaka: will kill yourself and devastate yourself…
Ala aasaarihim: because of them when they turn away from you and go…
Il-lam yu’minu: if they don’t believe and they don’t affirm…
Bi hadal hadith: in this Word of Allah i.e. the Quran…
Asafa: (in) traumatic grief i.e. destroy your self by excessive sadness and grief upon their leaving and their turning away from you and the absence of faith and obedience to you.
Even though He urges you (to love) their faith and their obedience and their richness and their kingdom and their elevation and their ranking and their wealth and their leadership among the people. So know that indeed, they don’t have any preparation nor do they have any certainty upon what is happening to them (as a result of your preaching).
The only words applicable for me were “will you kill yourself and devastate yourself because they turn away and go.” I couldn’t help but notice the end in particular. When Allah Subhanahu acknowledges, “Yes, I am The One who indeed sent you to possess this desire for them to be of the faithful and be obedient and have ranking and riches, but they are not of the ones who can respond.”
After that Subhanahu described to His Beloved (salutations and greetings upon his most kind soul) why they could never respond.
فَإِنَّكَ لَا تُسۡمِعُ ٱلۡمَوۡتَىٰ وَلَا تُسۡمِعُ ٱلصُّمَّ ٱلدُّعَاۤءَ إِذَا وَلَّوۡا۟ مُدۡبِرِینَ
So indeed, you cannot make the dead hear and cannot make the deaf hear the call when they turn, retreating.
Surah Ar Rum, Verse 52
Tafseer e Jilani
And overall: The ones who desire to harm people because of their in-born nature and are stone-like in their in-born character due to their being dead in reality and conceptually although they look like they are alive in form, do not care about them O Akmal Ar Rusul (peace and salutations upon you by your Lord with love) and (do not care about) their affairs and do not toil yourself over their guidance or their perfection.
Fa innaka la tusmi’ul mauta: So indeed you cannot make the dead hear, it is not in your power and your control to make the dead hear, but upon you is the conveyance and the inviting.
Wa la tusmi’u summa: And you cannot make the deaf hear, those who are deaf by nature…
Ad dua’a: the call and the invitation, especially…
Ida wal-lau: when they turn away and avoid you…
Mudbireen: turning their backs to you, evading you, denying you, rejecting your Messenger-hood and your invitation.
And again I just stared at the words, “When they turn away and avoid you, turning their backs to you, evading you…”
كَذَلِكَ یَطۡبَعُ ٱللَّهُ عَلَىٰ قُلُوبِ ٱلَّذِینَ لَا یَعۡلَمُونَ
Thus seals Allah the hearts of those who do not know.
Surah Ar Rum, Verse 59
Tafseer e Jilani
Kadalika: Like their natures and their seals, which you witness, Ya Akmal Ar Rusul, (peace and salutation upon you by your Muhibb, The One who loves you and your family), of the ones in jahla, ignorance…
Yatba’ullah: Allah Al Hakim, The Wise One, Al Muttaqin, The Possessor of All Certainty, has branded in their actions and has then sealed…
Ala qulubi: their hearts, all the Kafir, the deniers of truth and stubborn…
Alladina la ya’lamoona: they are the ones who do not know the truth and they do not believe in it because they are setup upon the stubborn-ness in their nature and the ignorance is such that it is kneaded which will not go by proofs and witnessing at all.
وَمَن لَّمۡ یَجۡعَلِ ٱللَّهُ لَهُۥ نُورࣰا فَمَا لَهُۥ مِن نُّورٍ
And (for) whom (has) not made Allah a light, then for him (is) not any light.
Surah An Nur, Verse 40
The words got me thinking of the nature of the crazy people I had come across in life. In the breadth of my experience they were mainly of two types; one was deceitful, the other honest, if perhaps only because they couldn’t hide their feelings because of lack of control. Superficially one appeared mild, the other cruel. The first was more dangerous, deadly. Their façade was calm. The other was a lunatic admittedly so, often proud of it. One was hidden, the other declared. One was passive, the other defiant. Both were stubborn and ignorant, insistent and persistent about their nature.
The truth is I was more like the former. My madness was hidden till it emerged. Anger used to instigate it. The only redeeming quality that I had been bestowed was that I felt regret. I expressed remorse. When I was not forgiven and my entreaties were rejected, I had breakdowns. It was related to abandonment issues which seemed universal but my reaction was at least consistent. I was always dying to be forgiven. Perhaps that is what saved me from that “prolonged” state.
Either way, they were in a prison and I was in a prison. More appeared in commonality than difference.
The Shirrk in My Heart
إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ لَا یَغۡفِرُ أَن یُشۡرَكَ بِهِۦ
وَیَغۡفِرُ مَا دُونَ ذَٰلِكَ لِمَن یَشَاۤءُۚ وَمَن یُشۡرِكۡ بِٱللَّهِ فَقَدۡ ضَلَّ ضَلَـٰلَۢا بَعِیدً
Indeed, Allah does not forgive that partners be associated with Him, but He forgives [what] other than that for whom He wills. And whoever associates partners with Allah then surely he lost (the) way, straying far away.
Surah An-Nisa, Verse 116
Tafseer e Jilani
Then said Subhanahu, entertaining the idea of sinners and drawing them towards remorse and returning (to Him)...
Inallaha: Indeed, Allah Al Mutalli’u, The One Perfectly Informed of the secrets of His Servants…
La yaghfir: does not forgive and does not pardon…
Ayy yushraka bihi: the partners that are associated with Him by anything from His Creation, (he does not pardon) that it be made worthy of worship and (he does not pardon) that the happenings of things are associated with that which is manufactured…
Wa yaghfir ma doona dalika la may-yasha’u: and He forgives everything else (other sins) for whom He chooses if, he, the sinner, may have felt compelled to do the other sin and he may have disliked it (like lying or stealing) and he was remorseful for it and he was not insistent upon it…
Wa mayy yushrik billahi: and the one who associates partners with Allah with the association of happenings in the world to others than Him…
Faqad dallah: so he is astray from the Place of Tauheed…
Dalalan ba’eeda: a waywardness distant, with no hope of guidance for him
In addition to the verses in the Quran I kept being given explicit signs by my blessed Master, Ghaus Pak (ra), that even my state of staying away, cutting off ties, a source of pride for me, was as fickle as a house of cards.
He revealed to me in minute details why it was a lie, why it was superficial.
Once Shaan had been admitted into the institute. I left for my village for a much needed reprieve. I was tired. I wanted to be alone. There I was informed of my state that I was completely unaware of.
Al Fath Ar Rabbani
…When this opening and closing (of the doors of others) is correct for the Servant, then the burden leaves him and he acquires seclusion. The honour comes to his heart and is dispersed upon him. Keys come to him and separated are for him the skins (useless things) and the marrow remains.
The path of lusts forbidden is closed and broken and he prevails upon it and the way to Al Haqq Azzo Jal is opened and the road appears which is the road of His desire, the road of the ones before you from the Prophets and the Messengers and the Friends of God.
What is this way? It is the road of purification without impurity, the road of Tauheed, One-ness, without shirrk, the road of surrender without dispute, the road of truth without lies, the road of Al Haqq Azzo Jal without Creation, the road of Al Musabbib, the Granter of Means, without the means.
This is the road which the elite of the religion and the Sultans of Ma’rifat, the Recognition of Allah, and the Kings were upon, who were the men of Allah Al Haqq Azzo Jal and the cleansed ones and the selected ones, the helpers of the religion, those who hold enemity (only) for Allah and love (only) because of Him.
Woe upon you! How can you be the one who claims to be on the way of such people when you are a mushrik, associate others, with Him and make others from Creation like Him?
There is no imaan, faith, in you upon the Earth while you fear someone or have hopes associated with someone.
There is no zuhd, detachment, for you while in this world there is a thing you desire.
There is no Tauheed, One-ness, for you while you look at anyone else in your way towards Him…
Then Ghaus Pak (ra) says: O hypocrite, Allah Azzo Jal makes appear who He wants from His Servants. He is Al Munaadi, The One who gives fame, for them. He is Al Jami’, The Gatherer, of the hearts of creation to love who He wants from among His Servants. He is Al Mussakhir, He makes subservient what He wants.
You want that with your hypocrisy you collect the hearts of people so that they incline towards you. This will achieve nothing.”
Every word was like an arrow but that line particular revealed my pathetic state to me. I did still want their hearts to incline towards me. It was horrifying and disgusting at the same time.
Then my Master explained the concept of maqsoom, that which has been apportioned for each person in their destiny. Why running after something that was not in it was the cause of humiliation.
Al Fath Ar Rabbani (cont’d): “O Listener! Leave your lusts under your feet and turn away from them with all of your heart. If there is anything in them that is destined for you in the Knowledge of Allah, it will come to you in its own time because in matters of destiny, zuhd, detachment is not correct and the Knowledge of Allah, it cannot be changed and altered.
Your share will come to you in its time, happily, in abundance, pure so you will receive it with the hand of honour rather than humiliation. And with that, you will, indeed, receive the reward of being a zahid in front of Al Haqq Azzo Jal and He will look at you with the eyes of respect because you were not greedy and there was no insistence on your desire being met.
Then however much you run from the share of your destiny, it will become attached to you and run after you and in this, detachment is not correct but it is an absolute must to turn away from it before it comes.
Learn from me zuhd, detachment, and giving and taking. Don’t sit in your isolation with your ignorance. Learn the faith, then isolate yourself. Learn the Commands of Allah, and practice them in deed, then turn away from everyone except the few from the scholars of Allah Azzo Jal. So meeting them and hearing them is better than being separate.
If you see one of them, then it is compulsory to grab onto him and learn from him the understanding of Allah’s Ilm,
Knowledge and Mari’fat, Recognition. Gain learning by hearing the words of knowledge from their mouth, which comes from the tongues of men who these men are who are the scholars of Allah.
When this state of yours becomes correct, then become alone without the nafs, your self that prompts towards wrongdoing and Shaitaan and desires and tabyat, your acquired secondary nature and aadat, habits and seeing of anything in Creation except Him...
Ghaus Pak (ra) then says: I am shafeeq, kind, for you for I lift your burdens and sew your ripped deeds and implore Allah Subhanahu to accepts your good deeds and forgive your mistakes. What is the reason you have no love for me even though I care for you, for your sake, not mine.
I want your benefit and to save you from this murderous and cunning world. How long will you run after it. Soon it will turn around and face you and it will kill you…
…So when your state becomes correct (of learning from them), then adopt seclusion without your nafs and without Shaitaan and without lusts and habits and seeing Creation. Once this state of seclusion becomes right, then the angels and the souls of the Saliheen, the ones who reformed themselves, their powers will surround you.
If your seclusion from Creation is not based on this principle, without it your seclusion is hypocrisy plus a waste of your precious time. You will gain nothing from it. Instead, you will be in fire in the world and in the Hereafter. In the world, the fire is of misfortune and in the Hereafter, it is the fire prepared for the hypocrites and the deniers of truth, the ungrateful.”
Then he prays: “O Allah! Forgive us again and again and forgive us and hide for us and overlook for us and (accept) our repentance. Don’t shred our veils that cover us and don’t hold us accountable on our sins, O Allah, O Kareem, who said:
وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِی یَقۡبَلُ ٱلتَّوۡبَةَ عَنۡ عِبَادِهِۦ وَیَعۡفُوا۟ عَنِ ٱلسَّیِّءَاتِ
And He (is) the One Who accepts the repentance of His slaves and pardons [of] the evil, and He knows what you do.
Surah Ash Shura, Verse 25
Tafseer e Jilani
Wa: And how can He, Subhanahu, not know of the hidden in their breasts…
Huwalladi yaqbalu tauba-tan: who is The One who accepts repentance which is happening solely because of regret and sincerity, (how can He not know of) which are the actions of the heart…
An ibadihi: of His Servants, Al Mustarji’eena, those who want to return towards Him with perfect khashiya, humility and khudu’, submission.
Wa: And after the acceptance of their tauba, repentance, from them…
Ya’fu: He forgives and He overlooks…
An: in totality…
Assiyaat: the sins happening from them upon the path of ghaflat, forgetfulness.
Wa: And overall…
Ya’lamu: He knows from you all of…
Ma tafaloon: what you do with your overt and inner (beings).
Woe upon you! You claim to have knowledge and find happiness the way the ignorant find happiness and are angry like they are angry.
Your happiness with the world and your inclination towards Creation will make you forget wisdom and harden your heart. The Mo’min is only happy with Allah and nobody except Him.”
I was in the village for five nights. In those five days, I read the above then translated it from the Arabic with Qari Sahib. In the quiet, I took it all in slowly.
Each word gave me pause. The crux of the matter was this: I wanted happiness in what they found happiness. Which was only and only the world. I was angry like they were angry. What made me the saddest was that the behaviour hardened my heart. Made me forget everything I tried to learn.
Every single thing I did on my spiritual joutney was with only one goal in mind. One intention alone: I wanted a softer heart. That was the nisbat, the association, that was dearest to me with my Nabi Pak (salutations and greeting upon the one called Ar Rahim by Allah Ar Raheem and his blessed family who transfer that Mercy to others). I wanted a heart that was in a continual, constant state of becoming softer and softer.
What else was there?
And I wanted ease. I had even studied those verses that showed me the way.
فَأَمَّا مَنۡ أَعۡطَىٰ وَٱتَّقَىٰ
وَصَدَّقَ بِٱلۡحُسۡنَىٰ
فَسَنُیَسِّرُهُۥ لِلۡیُسۡرَىٰ
Then as for (him) who gives and is mindful,
and believes in the best,
then We will ease him towards the ease.
Surah Al Layl, Verses 5-8
Tafseer e Jilani
Fa amma man aa’ta: So as for the one who gives from that which he was given from Al Haqq from rizq, sustenance, in (both) form and meaning, along with khushu, humility and khudu, submission and khuloos, sincerity, of intention and inner most feelings and different kinds of obedience and worship commanded for him…
Wa attaqa: and is mindful in totality of that which is forbidden and that which is prohibited about which Allah’s warnings of restraint have come in them…
Wa saddaqa bil husna: and he affirms the limitless demands of the Names of Allah and the effects of His Exalted Attributes which can never be counted and never be enumerated…
Fa sanuyassirruhu: then We will prepare for him and give him ability…
Lil yusra: for ease towards the way, which is easy, connecting towards the goal of Tauheed, One-ness and Ma’rifa, Divine Recognition, that brings deliverance from the darkness of doubts and the shadows of paranoia.
Every single thing that was was troubling my heart was being shown to me in pages of the Quran. I would pick the verses and I was told what was wrong. But being told something is not enough for the ones hiding idols in their hearts. For the ones who claim love for their Creator but no fear of displeasing Him.
The Fire of Possibilities
وَمِنْهُم مَّن يَقُولُ رَبَّنَآ ءَاتِنَا فِى ٱلدُّنْيَا حَسَنَةًۭ
وَفِى ٱلْـَٔاخِرَةِ حَسَنَةًۭ وَقِنَا عَذَابَ ٱلنَّارِ
And from those who say, "Our Lord! Grant us in the world good and in the Hereafter good, and save us from the punishment of the Fire.”
Surah Al Baqarah, Verse 201
Tafseer e Jilani
Wa minhum mayyaqoolu: Amongst them are those who have union in their overt and inner beings, (zahir and batin) and keep this world and the Afterlife together...
Rabbana a’tina fi duniya: who say, “O our Lord, Grant us goodness which makes You pleased with us in this life…
Wa fil akhira: and grant us goodness in the Hereafter, which connects us with Your One-ness (Tauheed)…
Waqina: and by Your Favour and Mercy upon us…
Adaab an naar: save us from the possibilities that cause paranoia and doubt.
I returned to Lahore. The circumstances then became such that almost everyone I knew started meeting said person and casually bringing them up in conversation. That started a thought in my head. That thought began to appear in recurrence and I wasn’t able to avoid it. It ran like a tape.
“They’re mean,” I would say to myself when I felt hurt.
Then a moment later, I would ask my nafs. “But are they really mean?”
And it would reply sounding reasonable, “No, they are not.”
I would agree. They were not really mean. They just had issues like everyone else. They were just one of those who pretended like they were “unaware.” Which is the biggest façade of all. Otherwise they should also be unaware when others did the same to them but in those instances they were always hyper sensitive, upset and terribly hurt. The contrast in their emotional states between being on the receiving end and doling it out is what betrayed their state of deception, with their own self and others.
But at the time I was stuck in my own nightmare!
For a few moments later the thought would reappear like a flash card. “They’re mean.”
Then the self-doubt “But are they mean?”
“No, they are not.”
“Yeah, I guess they’re not.”
And repeat!
I spent one whole day in that state. Distractions from activities did not make it better. By the end of the second evening, I was mentally exhausted. The constitution of my nerves is such that I can take on a continual state of emotional stress for about 48 hours. After that I collapse. It was the sole reason I had to exit relationships that others might allow to linger on for decades.
When I saw that moment looming on the horizon, dangerously close, I became anxious in its anticipation. Still at least I knew what would happen, having been through it before, so I decided to wait for it. There was nothing else to do. I didn’t know how to stop the tape.
Even worse was the truth that I did still wonder if they thought about me. If they realized what they had done. It shouldn’t have mattered. They were sticking to their guns. That was why they were called stubborn and persistent. But the shackles of my nafs were so tightly wound around my neck, even in that state of suffocation, it remained curious about one scenario or another. Like the insane person, I was considering the source of my torment to also be the cure of it.
Leading up to those hours before what I thought was going to be my folding I continued translating verses hoping they would cure the disease of my heart. What they did do was hold up a mirror to the truth of my state. In that intense anxiety though, in each read I would only see the others.
I only focused on the words that were placing them in the negative category Subhanahu was describing to His Beloved (salutations and greetings upon him and his family from the beginning till the end of times). How they would burn in their fires of desires and wealth and power and claims of abundance.
لَهُم مِّن جَهَنَّمَ مِهَادٌۭ وَمِن فَوْقِهِمْ غَوَاشٍۢ ۚ
وَكَذَٰلِكَ نَجْزِى ٱلظَّـٰلِمِينَ
Hell will be their resting place and their covering as well.
And this is how we recompense the wrong doers.
Surah Al-Araaf, Ayaat 41
Tafseer e Jilani:
Lahum min jahannama: Hell is the torture of imkaan, possibility which is doubt…
Mihaad: and they will burn in these fires of their false desires.
Wa min fauqihim ghiwash: They will be covered with the fires of their power and wealth and claims of being great and possessing abundance.
Wa ka daalika najzi ad-dualimeen: And the zalimeen, the ones who transgress the boundaries of Allah due to their nafs, who are unjust, will drown in the addiction of their senses, their paranoia and their delusion.
I didn’t feel better. On top of that I totally missed the line which was about my hell; that it is the torture of imkaan, possibility, which is doubt…
The verses were in a series and about the differences between two and started with a verse ma’roof, well known.
There are two kinds of seas, salty and sweet and they cannot be equal.
وَمَا یَسۡتَوِی ٱلۡبَحۡرَانِ هَـٰذَا عَذۡبࣱ فُرَاتࣱ سَاۤىِٕغࣱ شَرَابُهُۥ وَهَـٰذَا مِلۡحٌ أُجَاجࣱۖ
وَتَرَى ٱلۡفُلۡكَ فِیهِ مَوَاخِرَ لِتَبۡتَغُوا۟ مِن فَضۡلِهِۦ وَلَعَلَّكُمۡ تَشۡكُرُونَ
And not are alike the two seas.
This (is) fresh, sweet, pleasant its drink, and this salty (and) bitter…
…so you see the ships in it, cleaving, so that you may seek of His Bounty, and that you may be grateful.
Surah Fatir, Verse 12
I read the translation. As soon as I realized through the tafseer that the description is in fact of a state, I felt desperate for mine to be that of the Mo’min.
What I wanted most of all was that sip of the water sweet which would “break the persistent feeling of ill will.” It would stop the tape from playing in my head.
Tafseer e Jilani
Then exemplified Subhanahu both of the groups, the Mo’min, the believer and the Kafir, the denier of truth, as two seas sweet and salty, so He said:
Wa ma yastawi al bahraane: And the two seas are not alike in advantage and benefit received from them both because…
Hada: the (state of the) Mo’min, the attester to the sea of Imaan, faith and Irfaan, Divine Recognition, the one upon whom is poured water from the Sea of the Essence of One-ness…
Adb-un: is like water fresh and delightful, giving pleasure to the mind, sweet in perfect sweetness…
Furat-un: sweet, it breaks the persistent feeling of ill will (to harm and avenge people) for those burning with thirst in the mirage of the world with the coolness of Yaqeen, certainty…
Saa’ighun sharaabuhu: easy is its drinking i.e. easy is its going down, for those set up on the nature of Tauheed, Allah Subhanahu’s One-ness.
Wa hada: And this (the other sea/group) i.e. the Kafir, the denier of truth/ungrateful, malevolent, unkind, is in the sea of ghaflat, unawareness and carelessness…
Milh-un: (is like water) salty, it does not reform a person who wants to reform themselves, whoever tastes from it, instead…
Ujaaj-un: (it is) burning, bitter, corrupting for the disposition. The one who tasted from it was destroyed, devastatingly, forever such that there is no rescue for him, instead…
Wa: the sea of bitterness, in it is still an advantage, but there is no benefit for the Kafir, the denier of truth, and the one who refuses to be guided at all.
The thought continued in the verses that followed. What else was never going to be equal? Not the blind and the seeing.
Not the darkness and the light.
وَمَا یَسۡتَوِی ٱلۡأَعۡمَىٰ وَٱلۡبَصِیرُ
وَلَا ٱلظُّلُمَـٰتُ وَلَا ٱلنُّورُ
And not equal (are) the blind and the seeing,
And not the darkness[es] and not [the] light,
Surah Fatir, Verse 19-20
Tafseer e Jilani
Wa: But…
Ma yastawi: they are not equal in closeness and rank according to Allah…
Al a’ma: the blind, Al Ghafil, the forgetful ones, Al Jahil, the ignorant, about how to make the returning and attention…
Wal baseer: and the seeing ones, Al Arif, the ones who recognize Allah, Al Aleem, the knowing ones, seeing with the signs of reaching and ascension.
Wa la dulumaat: And (they are also not equal) the darkness, which is layered upon each other, thick and these are the darkness of tabyat (nature acquired from habits), and the darkness of chaos, and the darkness of what is superficially created, and the darkness of the egos different, which become heavy until it becomes a curtain, hard and a veil heavy, making blind the eyes, which were set up upon seeing and pondering upon the demands of matters of Allah’s Wrath and Awe.
Wa la noor: (with) the one radiant, upon whom come unveilings from the Essence of One-ness according to His Will, Subtle and Beautiful.
They were not equal, the shadow and heat. Nor the dead and the alive. For they may be alive but it was like they were living in a grave.
Now I started noticing the word “possibilities” as it sprung up everywhere. The burning of that heat was “flowing from the possibilities of hopes…the dead were destroyed by the essential nature of possibilities.”
وَلَا ٱلظِّلُّ وَلَا ٱلۡحَرُورُ
وَمَا یَسۡتَوِی ٱلۡأَحۡیَاۤءُ وَلَا ٱلۡأَمۡوَٰتُۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ یُسۡمِعُ مَن یَشَاۤءُۖ
وَمَاۤ أَنتَ بِمُسۡمِعࣲ مَّن فِی ٱلۡقُبُورِ
And not the shade and not the heat,
And not equal (are) the living and not the dead.
Indeed, Allah causes to hear whom He wills, and not you can make hear (those) who (are) in the graves.
Surah Fatir, Verse 21-22
Tafseer e Jilani
Wa la dillu: And (they are not equal) the Shadow of Allah Al Ilahi, The Lord, the Shadow being like Al Mirwah li Arwah, a fan giving tranquility to the souls of the people of love and compliance by the fragrances of the breezes of the different kinds of Divine Treasures and Honour…
Wa lal haroor: and the heat i.e. the burning which destroys rising, flowing from the possibilities of hopes, which are mixed with the darkness of the tabyat (secondary nature) rising from the clouds of desires and the fires of lusts.
Wa: And overall…
Ma yastawi: they are also not equal, according to Allah Al Aleem, The All Knowing, Al Hakeem, The Only Possessor of Wisdom…
Al ahya: the alive with the life of Ma’rifa, His Recognition, and Imaan, faith, and Yaqeen, certainty and irfaan, His Knowledge, a life from the beginning to the end, everlasting. There is no command for that life that it is completed (because it is in the Hereafter and therefore eternal) and there is no occurrence for it that it becomes nothing.
Wa la al-amwaat: and the dead (with the alive) because of the death of jahl, ignorance and adlaal, being astray and the different kinds of ghaflat, carelessness and nisyaan, forgetfulness, the ones who are Haalikeen, destroyed in the essential nature of possibilities, forever abiding in the corner of wasting away and humiliation.
Innallaha: Indeed Allah is, Al Aleem, The All Knowing, Al Hakeem, The Only One with Wisdom, Al Muttaqqin, The One Perfect in His Actions…
Yusmae’u: He causes hearing and He guides…
Mayya sha’u: who He wills from His Servants, bestowing for them and giving favours to them which leads them towards the Path of His One-ness…
Wa maa anta: and you are not, O Akmal Ar Rusul, O Messenger who completed Messengerhood (salutations and greetings upon you and your family continuously by the Heavens and its Angels)…
Bi musmi’-in: able to make them hear, as the guide and the instructor…
Man fil quboor: the ones in the graves i.e. the one who was permanently fixed, whose abode has been made in the hole of jahl, ignorance, (like a) knot, and the fire of possibilities and the happenings from negligence and forgetfulness because they are set up upon the state of being beguiled by their unaware nature and animalistic tendencies. There is no accountability for you regarding giving them guidance or instructing them at all.
By the end of the fifth verse, it was confirmed that I was not in the clear either. As much as my nafs wanted to delude itself that I must be part of the seeing and the light. And the shade and life. Certainly not in a grave. I wasn’t. The one thing I identified undeniably was that the tape in my head was a result of wondering about one imkaan or another. It was a deluge of possibilities.
And still my nafs did not want to let go of them. It didn’t want to let go of the cause of that anxiety. It didn’t want to let go of the idols in my heart. It didn’t want to let go of its associations of hope and expectations with others, its shirrk. That is the nature of the beast. It does not know how to against its wishes. How to refuse them.
So the nightmare continued. That persistence of a careless, deliberate state finally brought my Master’s patience with me to an end.
Continued on: www.flickr.com/photos/42093313@N00/52650032173/in/datepos...
East-German postcard by VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb, Berlin, no. 128/74, 1974. Photo: Linke.
East German actress Angelika Waller (1944) appeared in more than a hundred films and TV productions since 1962. Her first leading role was in Das Kaninchen bin ich/The Rabbit Is Me (1965), a film which was banned in East Germany and which had its world premiere only in 1989.
Angelika Waller was born in 1944 in Bärwalde in der Neumark in former East-Germany (GDR). She went to school in Biesenthal in Brandenburg. As a kid, she already developed an interest in acting. From 1963 to 1966 she was trained as an actress at the youth studio of the Deutscher Fernsehfunk (DFF), the former state television broadcaster in East Germany. To finance her studies, she worked as an ice cream seller and furniture painter. In 1965, Helene Weigel took her to the Berliner Ensemble, and since 1966 she has been a member of the theatre company. She made her stage debut in the comedy Frau Flinz by Helmut Baierl. She appeared in several Bertolt Brecht plays, including as Polly in Brecht's Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera). Her film debut is also her most famous role, which was only made public in 1989 (some sources say 1990). The film, Das Kaninchen bin ich/The Rabbit I Am (Kurt Maetzig, 1965) came in the GDR on the index . She played 19-year-old Maria Morzeck, who dreams of studying Slavistics, but her hopes are shattered when her brother, Dieter, is sent to prison after being convicted of sedition against the state. She cannot enter college, and becomes a waitress. Maria meets and falls in love with Paul Deister, an older, married man who turns out to be the judge who convicted her brother. Their affair ends when Deister is exposed as hypocritical and corrupt. After Dieter's release, he learns of his sister's relationship with the judge and assaults her. Eventually, Maria distances herself from both of them, and decides to pursue her forgotten dream. The film was based on Manfred Bieler's book Maria Morzeck or the Rabbit is Me. It was made in the aftermath of the VI Party Congress of the Socialist Unity Party at January 1963, during which the establishment allowed a measure of liberalisation in the cultural life of East Germany. Although Bieler's novel was highly critical of the court system, he and Maetzig took care to include several "alibi scenes" in the film that were intended to put the state in a better light and also prevent the banning of the picture. The scenes were also meant to present the judicial reforms that took place between 1961 and 1963. The short era of liberalisation ended gradually when Leonid Brezhnev took power in the Soviet Union and introduced a conservative, more repressive course on cultural questions. Das Kaninchen bin ich, alongside eleven other films that were deemed politically damaging, was banned in 1965. In 1989, shortly before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the picture had its world premiere and was released for public screening. It was presented at the Berlin and Locarno film festivals, and was elected as one of the 100 most important German films by a group of historians and critics in 1995.
Angelika Waller became a crowd favourite with her second film, the circus film Schwarze Panther/Black Panthers (Josef Mach, 1966). She played the young Martina, who, despite the opposition of her father, tames the panthers in the circus ring and, according to Filmportal.de, “she impresses, among other things, by her artistic talent.” In subsequent years, she is seen in numerous films in larger and smaller roles, repeated under the direction of Rolf Losansky. In the epic film series Osvobozhdenie/Liberation (Juri Oserow, Julius Kun, 1969-1970), Waller played Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun. The five-part film series is a dramatized account of the liberation of the Soviet Union's territory during World War II and the subsequent defeat of Nazi Germany. The series was a Soviet-Polish-East German-Italian-Yugoslav co-production and according to official Soviet statistics, Liberation sold more than 400 million tickets worldwide. In the English-speaking world, a shorter, 118-minutes long version was distributed as The Great Battle. In the meanwhile the DEFA studio gave Waller only a few meaty parts, in which she could present her many acting facets, but the television offered her more possibilities. At the East-German television, she could convince in modern women's roles. She embodied emancipated women who decide for themselves in difficult situations. An extremely popular role was the title heroine - a postwoman - in the TV film Rotfuchs/Red fox (Manfred Mosblech, 1973). She also regularly played in the Krimi series Polizeiruf 110/Police Call 110 (1972-1987). Very popular was also the TV series Johann Sebastian Bach (1985) in which she played Bach's first wife. Since the 1970s, Angelika Weller worked as a teacher, and later as a professor at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst „Ernst Busch“ Berlin (Academy of Dramatic Arts Ernst Busch in Berlin). She also worked as a director and staged plays at the Berliner Arbeiter-Theater. Until 1992 she remained a member of the Berliner Ensemble. In 1990, she returned to the cinema in the post-war comedy Der Bruch/The Break-In (Frank Beyer, 1990) alongside Götz George, Rolf Hoppe and Otto Sander. Waller played a busty woman, cheated by her spouse, who clearly expresses her material wishes. Next, she appeared in two TV films, the comedy baby-sitter/Babysitter (Peter Welz, 1992) and again together with Götz George - in Tote sterben niemals aus/Dead people never die out (Jürgen Goslar, 1996). She starred in the role of Omi in the experimental film Happiness Is a Warm Gun (Thomas Imbach, 2001) on Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian. In addition, she also lent her voice as a voice actor to among others Geneviève Bujold in the TV film Anthony and Cleopatra (James Cellan Jones, 1976) and Linda Purl in the TV mini-series The last days of Pompeii (Peter R. Hunt, 1984). In 1978 she received the Art Prize of the GDR. Since 2010 Waller has been a regular guest lecturer at the Thomas Bernhard Institute for Acting and Directing at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Most recently, she appeared in the cinemas as the grandmother in Rückenwind von vorn/Away You Go (Philipp Eichholtz, 2018). Angelika Waller lives in Berlin. Her daughter Susann Thiede (born 1963) also works as an actress.
Sources: Ines Walk (Filmzeit.de– German), Wikipedia (German and English) and IMDb.
I think in Simon's list of 50 best Suffolk churches, Woolpit comes in at number 31. It is now that I remember that I cannot remember why I should go to Woolpit on what would be the last of the EA church visits this year, as Mum was home and in the care of the district nurse, and there was nothing else we could do, not in actions, money or time given. She really has to stand on her own two feet now.
Anyway; Woolpit.
I decided to go, and after looking on the map I saw that with some create route planning, I could go down the 143, then double back and join the A14 eastwards before turning south down our old friend, the A12.
On the way I did also visit Stowlangtoft, which was a wonderful church, a church filled with wonderful things that seemed to hang together as a whole. Woolpit would have to be something special to trup St George.
And it nearly did. Nearly. Woolpit is a picture perfect village, all timber framed buildings, narrow lanes and impossible to park in. I drove through it finding a kind of space just past the church. I could see from the tower and building it was a church on which the Victorians had been very busy.
Most glorious is Mary's roof; double hammerbeam adorned with 208 angels one of the wardens told me. It had been counted several times during a dull sermon. Or two.
The wardens were building the crib for Christmas, so were using a pallet as a base, or something like that. I didn't see it finished, but Ken Bruce was booming out from a radio, preaching the Gospel According to Popmaster to all who would listen.
The angels in the roof and on the walls of the church are indeed impressive, as is the rood screen, but not sure if they are original. There are carved pew ends aplenty, but to my eye, not as well carved or as old as at Stowlangtoft. I could be wrong. But I snap a few anyway.
But I received a warm welcome here, and it is a fantastic church for me.
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2008: Woolpit is a village which I often visit, and it is always a pleasure to go into the church. But the entry for St Mary was one of the last on the original Suffolk Churches site, making its appearance in late 2001. In fact, I think it was the last of the old-style entries. I was getting a bit wordy by then.
Woolpit was one of the longest entries, and this wasn't just because there is so much to see. I went off at a great tangent about the meaning of medieval iconography, and how it survived the Reformation. It certainly got some thoughts clear in my own head, even if it confused other people. I actually wrote the entry in the back of an old exercise book sitting outside a café on the Cote d'Azur in southern France. Reading that back, it seems a little pretentious, but I really was there. Here in Ipswich on a frosty February evening, I can't help remembering the heat as I scrawled in the pad.
I've left the original entry almost entirely as it was, apart from the removal of one absolute howler, which I won't mention. I am not sure if Woolpit still has a Sunday market, and I am sure that someone will tell me if it has not. Paul Hocking is no longer Rector of Woolpit, but to my eyes the church continues to go from strength to strength, feeling at once busy and at the heart of its community, the still centre of a busy village. I like it very much.
2001: The clear blue waters of the Mediterranean swirl around my legs, then past me, buffeting the rocks along the silver beach. Millions of tiny flecks of mica swarm through the current, washed out of the hills of Southern Provence. They shine for a fraction of a second with all the light the high summer sun can give, a universe caught in a moment; then turn, disappearing, making of the water a shimmering skein, an ancient memory.
The sea is at the start of all European civilisation. Here, history wells about me. I think of Europe, and the fragmentation of nations. I think of the Balkans, and the Reformation, and the same water surrounding, tending, isolating. I think of time passing.
A week before, I'd been standing in the cool nave of the church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Woolpit - or at least, that is what it probably was once, back then. Today, it is dedicated simply as 'St Mary', in common with the majority of Suffolk's medieval churches, among which it is one of the finest, some say. This is mostly by virtue of its beautiful porch, and extraordinary angel roof.
But is that true? For there are those who love this church that, perhaps, never look up at the porch or roof. Is it the plethora of 15th century bench ends that captures the imagination? Or could it be Richard Phipson's outrageous 1850s tower and lacy spire, straight out of the Nene Valley, its evangelistic slogans around the side in a Victorian equivalent of Piccadilly Circus neon? It ought not to work, and yet it does. Or is it that supremely articulate view to the east, perfect of proportion despite the stripping away of its medieval liturgical apparatus? Above all else, and above most others, this is a church with presence.
It was the bench ends that I was thinking of as I immersed myself out of the intensity of the Provencal sun. A number of questions occured to me, as they have done on other occasions, in other churches. Who made them? What did they mean by them? And how did they survive the iconoclasms of the Protestant Reformation? Here in Southern Europe, I thought I might have found some answers.
Woolpit, then. It is perhaps the most perfect of all Suffolk villages. Not sleepy, and chocolate boxy, but to actually live in. Its shops and pubs are arranged around the pleasant village square, and Phipson's crazy spire towers above them. Woolpit still has its school, and you wouldn't need to get in the car every time you needed a loaf of bread, as you'd have to do in some of Suffolk's more famously picturesque villages, like Kersey and Tuddenham. And Woolpit has its Sunday market, beloved of hundreds of non-sabbatarian junk-hunters each week.
Further, Woolpit has its mythology; the two green children, who climbed out of the ground, speaking a strange language and afraid of the sunlight. The boy died soon after, but the girl grew up and married; she learned to speak English, and told of St Martin's Land, from where she and her brother had emerged. There are holes in the ground around Woolpit, quarries where bricks were made in the 19th century. But perhaps there was once something much older, for every Suffolk schoolchild knows that the name 'Woolpit' is nothing to do with wool, but with the wolves that once lived in the pits here...
So, it is a well-known village. It is because of this as much as anything about St Mary itself that makes this church so well-known to people who haven't heard of the even more interesting and beautiful church of St Ethelbert, Hessett, barely three miles away.
Your first sight of St Mary will be Phipson's crazy spire, visible from miles away, and quite unlike anything else in East Anglia. Suffolk is a county where spires are rare enough, anyway. From the far side of the Gipping valley you can see this one and two others, piercing the soft harvest mist in autumn. They are Phipson's equally absurd Great Finborough, and the 1990s blade of St Peter and St Mary, Stowmarket. There are only about a dozen more in the whole of the county. The excuse for this one was that the tower was struck by lightning in 1852, bringing down the previous lead and timber affair (presumably like the one at Hadleigh). The font is contemporary with the tower, suggesting that the old one was destroyed by the fall.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the artist John Piper produced a series of screen prints of aspects of Suffolk churches; for most, he used the fine perpendicular tower, ramifying it in bold Festival of Britain primary colours. But for Woolpit, he chose the porch, because it is Suffolk's finest. Cautley thought it the best in all England. It is two-storey, 15th century, contemporary with the nave. Mortlock tells us that they were both built by wealthy Bury Abbey, who owned the living here. As at Beccles, it rises way above the south aisle, tower-like in itself.
A rood group of niches surmounts the shields of East Anglia above the door. More flank them. Mortlock says that the work began in the early 1430s, and the niches were filled by a bequest of 1473, suggesting that the porch was forty years in the making. The south aisle and chancel are slightly earlier, the north aisle slightly later, so it is the nave that promises us great things, and doesn't disappoint.
You step into cool darkness, and look up. It is breathtaking. This is Suffolk's most perfectly restored angel hammerbeam roof. It may not have the drama of Mildenhall, the exquisiteness of Blythburgh, the sheer mathematics of Needham Market, but it shows us in detail more than any other what the medieval imagination was aiming at. From the still, small silence of the church floor below, you look up into a great shout of praise. Here are hundreds of figures, both angelic and human. The profusion is ordered, as if some mighty hymn were in progress.
Paul Hocking thinks that it is a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus: We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord... To thee all Angels cry aloud, the Heavens, and all the Powers therein. To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry Holy Holy Holy Lord God of Sabaoth... The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee, the noble army of Martyrs praise thee...
I know this, because he told me so. I was busy photographing bench ends when this very enthusiastic American bounced in with another visitor, and gave him a whistlestop tour of the church, describing the details with great knowledge and understanding. Solicitously, he talked to me afterwards about what I was doing, and asked me if I'd met the Rector of Woolpit yet. I said that I went out of my way to avoid Rectors wherever possible. He laughed, and replied that, on this occasion, I'd failed, because he was, in fact, the Rector.
After I'd coughed miserably, and he'd laughed again, we had a long chat, uncovering a few mutual aquaintances. He described the roof, which he has obviously spent a lot of time exploring. He pointed out the way the wall posts contained Saints, some with apostolic symbols, some with books, and some with martyr's palms. There are angels on the hammerbeams above, and bearing symbols below. John Blatchly counted 128 angels alone. Some of the shields have letters on them. Are they an acrostic, as on the east chancel wall at Blythburgh? Do they indicate individual Saints? The great Henry Ringham completely restored this roof in 1862, but Mortlock thinks that one of the angels is not his, and I agree - you'll find it in the south west corner. Paul Hocking argues that the restoration was nowhere near as complete as has been made out, and that many features are original.
Henry Ringham also restored the range of bench ends, by duplicating some of the medieval ones, as he did at Great Bealings and Tuddenham St Martin. All are rendered with his customary skill. If Ringham did restore this roof, then the imagery must have been destroyed at some point. One instinctively thinks of William Dowsing, the Puritan inspector of the churches of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, who progressed across the counties during the course of 1644. His delight in the destruction of angel roofs was matched only by that at the destruction of stained glass.
And Dowsing did visit this church. He arrived here in the afternoon of February 29th 1644. It was a Thursday, and he had come here across country from Helmingham, where he had found much to do. He also planned to visit Beyton that day, but in the end stayed overnight at the Bull hotel, and inspected All Saints there in the morning. He then rested for the weekend - the following week, he had a busy tour of southern Cambridgeshire ahead of him.
Dowsing records in great detail what he found to do at each church. In the case of Woolpit, the angel roof is the Dog That Didn't Bark: My Deputy. 80 superstitious pictures; some he brake down, and the rest he gave order to take down; and three crosses to be taken down in 20 days. 8s 6d. There are only two possible reasons why Dowsing doesn't mention the roof. Either he didn't notice it (extremely unlikely) or it had already been destroyed. This second option seems certain; mid-Suffolk was a strongly protestant area, and nearby Rougham, which clearly had a similar roof, was not visited by Dowsing, but was vandalised even more comprehensively than Woolpit. Most likely, the destruction at both churches dated from a hundred years earlier, although it is possible that the Rougham and Woolpit congregations had been puritan enough in the 1630s to do it to their own churches themselves.
Beneath the roof, the church is broad, its two aisles giving room for the panoply of medieval liturgical processions. At the east end of the south aisle was once the shrine of Our Lady of Woolpit, a site of medieval pilgrimage in connection with a nearby holy well. Apart from the front rows, many of the benches appear to be in their original positions. Some of the bench ends are 15th century, others are Ringham's 19th century copies. I wandered around the medieval bench ends, running my hands over them, crouching down and engaging them, face to face. For anyone educated in a Marxist or Weberian historical tradition, as most of my generation were, interpreting the less-obviously liturgical or theological features of a medieval church is fraught with difficulties. One possibility is to do a Cautley, and try not to interpret them at all. But it is more fun to try to do so, don't you think?
The bench ends of Woolpit are remarkable for their abundance. They are not representations of sacraments, virtues and vices as at Tannington and elsewhere, or Saints as at Ufford and Athelington. They are almost all non-allegorical animals, although not the art objects we find at Stowlangtoft, or the mysterious beasts of Lakenheath. Perhaps a good comparison is the similar body of work at nearby Combs. Indeed, although they do not appear to be from the same workshop, it is likely that their creators knew of each others' work. There are dogs, with geese hanging from their mouths, and another which may be a cat with a rat or lizard. There are lions and bears, and a chained monkey, and birds in profusion. So who did them, and why are they here?
There is one school of thought that says that they are simply there to beautify the church, and that they were made by local craftsmen doing what they were best at. If they could do lions, they did lions. If they could render a decent rabbit, then that is what they did. And so on.
But I think that there is rather more to it than that. On my journey down through France, I had spent an afternoon in one of my favourite towns, Autun, in Burgundy. One of the reasons I like Autun is its 11th century Cathedral of St-Lazaire; this is Lazurus, raised by Christ from the dead, and until the 18th century his relics were venerated at a shrine here. St-Lazaire is most famous for its great tympanum above the west door, generally recognised as one of the greatest Romanesque art treasures in the world, and with International Heritage status. It was created during the middle years of the 12th century, and shows the Last Judgement. To emphasise Christ's majesty over all the world, it features all manner of beasts, domestic, wild and mythical.
Throughout the Cathedral, animals infest the famous capitals, which tell the Gospel story. Abbe Denis Grivot, in his Un Bestiaire de la Cathedrale D'Autun (Lyon, 1973) argues that the 12th century creators of all this filled it with animals to echo the final verse of the 150th Psalm, the crowning point of that great sequence of hymns of praise: Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord!
Standing in the nave at Autun, I instantly recalled Paul Hocking's words about the roof at Woolpit, when he said he thought it was a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus. The Te Deum is one of the canticles; another is the Benedicite, traditionally sung through Lent: Oh all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him for ever... O ye whales, and all that move in the Waters, bless ye the Lord... O all ye Fowls of the air, bless ye the Lord... O all ye beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever!
Could it be that the bench ends at Woolpit, and elsewhere in Suffolk, were intended to reflect and represent the praise defined in the canticles and psalms? Both would have been central to the liturgy of the medieval Catholic church. Perhaps the bench ends of Woolpit are liturgical and theological after all.
How would a carpenter, or group of carpenters, go about creating a set of benches like the ones at Woolpit? Who were they? Almost certainly, they were locals. They might have been itinerant jobbing carpenters, but I don't think so. The bench ends at adjacent Tostock are clearly by the same hand. But those at nearby Stowlangtoft and Norton are not, and a third hand seems to be responsible for those at Combs, as I previously mentioned. I do not think that the mutilated ones at Rougham and Elmswell are either; they were probably from the same workshop as each other.
So, we have a conscious attempt by skilled members of a community to create a hymn of praise in carved oak, by representing as many beasts as they felt capable of making. Where did they get their ideas from? They would have had no problems with oxen, cocks, conies - these were all around them, in their daily lives. The person who carved the hunting dog here was very familiar with it. Perhaps it was his own. What about monkeys and lions? These are more problematic. In medieval bestiaries, exotic creatures had fabulous legends attached to them, which gave them a theological symbolism.
But this symbolism doesn't usually seem intended when we see them on bench ends. Sometimes they are rendered accurately, but more often wild animals are fairly imaginary; I think particularly of Barningham's camel, and Hadleigh's wolf. It isn't enough to say that the carvers could have seen pictures of exotic beasts. This is fairly unlikely. Probably, the ordinary people of Woolpit never saw a book other than the missals, lectionaries and hagiographies used in church.
They might have seen pictures of lions and monkeys in wall paintings, either in other churches or here at Woolpit. They might have seen them carved in bench ends, for the same reason. In fact, the representation of wild animals varies so much as to suggest that this is not the case - compare, for example, the lions of Combs with those of Stowlangtoft. Probably, they were created in the imagination from descriptions and attributes in stories. But I think that there is a strong possibility that the woodcarvers of Woolpit did see lions and monkeys in real life.
Here in Catholic Southern Europe, there are many remote small towns which, by virtue of being so very far from each other, take on a rich and complex life of their own. Even small villages have their shops, their craftsmen, their tradespeople; they replicate a situation that existed in Suffolk until well into the 19th century, and in some cases beyond, before the great industrialisation and easy transport swept it away. Further, there are traditions here still that we have lost. Whenever I come here, I am fascinated by the itinerant entertainers, who move from village to village, giving a single performance befre moving on. This must also once have been true of England. The thing that fascinates me most is the multitude of small family circuses.
Many of them seem to be of Italian or Romany origin; all family members have multiple roles, from the oldest grandparent to the youngest child, selling tickets, doing acrobatics, being the straight men to the clown (who is typically Grandpa). They all put up the tent before the performance, and take it down afterwards. They move on, through the remote hills of Provence and the Languedoc, performing on village greens, wastegrounds, the corners of fields, even traffic islands.
As I say, I am fascinated, and can rarely resist them, even though I am shocked, even appalled, by the easy cruelty to animals. Performing animals are still often chosen for their curiosity value, if you can call running around in a circle to the crack of a whip 'performing', poor things.
The choices are strange indeed; camels and zebras often feature; I have seen an old bear on a chain, and at one circus in remote Languedoc a hippopotamus of all things - it caught bread thrown by the crowd. There was no safety fence between the seats and the ring, no Health and Safety Executive to penetrate these lost valleys. I do not know if such circuses existed in medieval Suffolk. But I think that they probably did. Suffolk is a maritime county, and exotic animals were widely known and exhibited in medieval Europe. Before the Protestant Reformation cut us of from the mainland, clerics and merchants thought of themselves as European, and travelled widely - English sovereignty was a hazy concept at best, and 'Britishness' was still centuries away from being formulated as an idea. People owed allegiance to their village, their parish, and their lord, not to the Crown and Parliament in London.
Were the woodcarvers of Woolpit and Tostock remembering this? A circus visit, perhaps back in their childhood? Exotic animals rendered inaccurately, to be sure, but with an enthusiastic nostalgia for that exciting moment in their lives? Was there a lion? A monkey, or a bear? How much more powerful if they also knew the fabulous legends about the beasts - and had seen them in real life!
Some of the carvings at Woolpit are allegorical. One shows a monkey dressed in monk's robes. This, I think, is a joke at the expense of the itinerant friars who went from parish to parish, preaching repentance in the streets. They were sanctioned by the Pope, but were beyond the jurisdiction of the local Bishop. They didn't always go down well with the local Priest and congregation, who considered the Friars nosey and hypocritical. A monkey is often a symbol of foolish vanity - hence, a Friar thinking he was better than anyone else. What better way to make the point than to slip him in as one of the creatures praising the Lord?
How did they survive? But why should they have been destroyed? We make the mistake of thinking of the Puritans as vandals. But the more you read about William Dowsing, the more he emerges as being a principled, conservative kind of chap, despite his clearly flawed and fundamentalist theological opinions. He had no reason to destroy animal bench ends. They weren't superstitious - even Dowsing didn't think Catholics worshipped animals. If he didn't think they were meant to represent the canticles, he wouldn't even have considered them religious. Amen to that.
So much for the 17th century. What about the 19th? St Mary is one of the most enthusiastically restored of Suffolk's churches, despite its survivng medieval detail. But it was done well. Mortlock thought that the 19th century pulpit was the work of Ringham - but the brass lectern is pre-Reformation, a fine example. The rood screen dado panels have sentimental 19th century Saints on them, that may or may not duplicate what was there before. They are actually very good, particularly the gorgeous Mary of Magdala. They have their names painted on the cross beams for the less hagiologically articulate Victorians - from left to right across the aisle they are Saints Barbara, Felix, Mary of Magdala, Peter, Paul, Mary, Edmund and Etheldreda. It is unlikely that Saint Felix would have been on a medieval roodscreen, and Mary almost certainly wasn't - it would have relegated her to a position of no more importance than the others. If it reflects anything of what was there before, it was probably St Anne with the infant Virgin.
The top part of the screen was renewed in 1750, and dated so. The gates are probably a Laudian imposition of 120 years earlier, as at Kedington. This may suggest that, by the time of Dowsing's visit, the chancel was being used for some other practical purpose. Above, high above, set in the east nave wall over the chancel arch, is one of the wierdest objects I've seen in a medieval church. It was installed in the 1870s, and is clearly meant to echo the coving of a rood loft. Goodness knows what it actually is, but it is painted in garish colours, and inscribed with texts. In one of those moments where Cautley and credibility part company, he describes anyone who doesn't think it is a genuine medieval canopy of honour as 'stupid'. I suppose that it has a certain curiosity value.
The three-light window above it would have given light to the rood. The east window contains one of Suffolk's best modern Madonna and child images which was made by the artist Ian Keen for the King workshop in the early 1960s. Ian Keen was also responsible for the beautiful St Margaret in St Margaret's church in Norwich, and for the memorable window of St Francis with a labrador at Somerleyton near Lowestoft.
I turned back westwards, past a superb medieval bench end of the three Marys. This is a delight, and you'd travel to London to see it if it was in the V&A. Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James and Mary of Magdala huddle together, perhaps on the morning of the Resurrection. One of them has a lily of the Annunciation. One head is destroyed - but was it vandalised? Or is it the result of carelessness, the wear and tear of the centuries? Would 17th century puritans have destroyed it if they'd seen it?
Dowsing rarely mentions bench ends, so perhaps few were left by then anyway. So how could it possibly have survived the violent zeal of the 16th century Protestants, battering the Church of England into existence with their axes, pikes and bonfires? How, even after the 1540 edict of Edward VI which ordered the destruction of all statues and images of Saints, especially those of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is it still there at all?
Still more questions than answers, I suppose. I dived beneath the water, and there was beneath me a restless current, shifting and reshifting the silver sand into unique patterns, the work of millennia, still changing, never the same.
- le Rayol Canadel, Cote d'Azur, August 2001.
I think in Simon's list of 50 best Suffolk churches, Woolpit comes in at number 31. It is now that I remember that I cannot remember why I should go to Woolpit on what would be the last of the EA church visits this year, as Mum was home and in the care of the district nurse, and there was nothing else we could do, not in actions, money or time given. She really has to stand on her own two feet now.
Anyway; Woolpit.
I decided to go, and after looking on the map I saw that with some create route planning, I could go down the 143, then double back and join the A14 eastwards before turning south down our old friend, the A12.
On the way I did also visit Stowlangtoft, which was a wonderful church, a church filled with wonderful things that seemed to hang together as a whole. Woolpit would have to be something special to trup St George.
And it nearly did. Nearly. Woolpit is a picture perfect village, all timber framed buildings, narrow lanes and impossible to park in. I drove through it finding a kind of space just past the church. I could see from the tower and building it was a church on which the Victorians had been very busy.
Most glorious is Mary's roof; double hammerbeam adorned with 208 angels one of the wardens told me. It had been counted several times during a dull sermon. Or two.
The wardens were building the crib for Christmas, so were using a pallet as a base, or something like that. I didn't see it finished, but Ken Bruce was booming out from a radio, preaching the Gospel According to Popmaster to all who would listen.
The angels in the roof and on the walls of the church are indeed impressive, as is the rood screen, but not sure if they are original. There are carved pew ends aplenty, but to my eye, not as well carved or as old as at Stowlangtoft. I could be wrong. But I snap a few anyway.
But I received a warm welcome here, and it is a fantastic church for me.
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2008: Woolpit is a village which I often visit, and it is always a pleasure to go into the church. But the entry for St Mary was one of the last on the original Suffolk Churches site, making its appearance in late 2001. In fact, I think it was the last of the old-style entries. I was getting a bit wordy by then.
Woolpit was one of the longest entries, and this wasn't just because there is so much to see. I went off at a great tangent about the meaning of medieval iconography, and how it survived the Reformation. It certainly got some thoughts clear in my own head, even if it confused other people. I actually wrote the entry in the back of an old exercise book sitting outside a café on the Cote d'Azur in southern France. Reading that back, it seems a little pretentious, but I really was there. Here in Ipswich on a frosty February evening, I can't help remembering the heat as I scrawled in the pad.
I've left the original entry almost entirely as it was, apart from the removal of one absolute howler, which I won't mention. I am not sure if Woolpit still has a Sunday market, and I am sure that someone will tell me if it has not. Paul Hocking is no longer Rector of Woolpit, but to my eyes the church continues to go from strength to strength, feeling at once busy and at the heart of its community, the still centre of a busy village. I like it very much.
2001: The clear blue waters of the Mediterranean swirl around my legs, then past me, buffeting the rocks along the silver beach. Millions of tiny flecks of mica swarm through the current, washed out of the hills of Southern Provence. They shine for a fraction of a second with all the light the high summer sun can give, a universe caught in a moment; then turn, disappearing, making of the water a shimmering skein, an ancient memory.
The sea is at the start of all European civilisation. Here, history wells about me. I think of Europe, and the fragmentation of nations. I think of the Balkans, and the Reformation, and the same water surrounding, tending, isolating. I think of time passing.
A week before, I'd been standing in the cool nave of the church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Woolpit - or at least, that is what it probably was once, back then. Today, it is dedicated simply as 'St Mary', in common with the majority of Suffolk's medieval churches, among which it is one of the finest, some say. This is mostly by virtue of its beautiful porch, and extraordinary angel roof.
But is that true? For there are those who love this church that, perhaps, never look up at the porch or roof. Is it the plethora of 15th century bench ends that captures the imagination? Or could it be Richard Phipson's outrageous 1850s tower and lacy spire, straight out of the Nene Valley, its evangelistic slogans around the side in a Victorian equivalent of Piccadilly Circus neon? It ought not to work, and yet it does. Or is it that supremely articulate view to the east, perfect of proportion despite the stripping away of its medieval liturgical apparatus? Above all else, and above most others, this is a church with presence.
It was the bench ends that I was thinking of as I immersed myself out of the intensity of the Provencal sun. A number of questions occured to me, as they have done on other occasions, in other churches. Who made them? What did they mean by them? And how did they survive the iconoclasms of the Protestant Reformation? Here in Southern Europe, I thought I might have found some answers.
Woolpit, then. It is perhaps the most perfect of all Suffolk villages. Not sleepy, and chocolate boxy, but to actually live in. Its shops and pubs are arranged around the pleasant village square, and Phipson's crazy spire towers above them. Woolpit still has its school, and you wouldn't need to get in the car every time you needed a loaf of bread, as you'd have to do in some of Suffolk's more famously picturesque villages, like Kersey and Tuddenham. And Woolpit has its Sunday market, beloved of hundreds of non-sabbatarian junk-hunters each week.
Further, Woolpit has its mythology; the two green children, who climbed out of the ground, speaking a strange language and afraid of the sunlight. The boy died soon after, but the girl grew up and married; she learned to speak English, and told of St Martin's Land, from where she and her brother had emerged. There are holes in the ground around Woolpit, quarries where bricks were made in the 19th century. But perhaps there was once something much older, for every Suffolk schoolchild knows that the name 'Woolpit' is nothing to do with wool, but with the wolves that once lived in the pits here...
So, it is a well-known village. It is because of this as much as anything about St Mary itself that makes this church so well-known to people who haven't heard of the even more interesting and beautiful church of St Ethelbert, Hessett, barely three miles away.
Your first sight of St Mary will be Phipson's crazy spire, visible from miles away, and quite unlike anything else in East Anglia. Suffolk is a county where spires are rare enough, anyway. From the far side of the Gipping valley you can see this one and two others, piercing the soft harvest mist in autumn. They are Phipson's equally absurd Great Finborough, and the 1990s blade of St Peter and St Mary, Stowmarket. There are only about a dozen more in the whole of the county. The excuse for this one was that the tower was struck by lightning in 1852, bringing down the previous lead and timber affair (presumably like the one at Hadleigh). The font is contemporary with the tower, suggesting that the old one was destroyed by the fall.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the artist John Piper produced a series of screen prints of aspects of Suffolk churches; for most, he used the fine perpendicular tower, ramifying it in bold Festival of Britain primary colours. But for Woolpit, he chose the porch, because it is Suffolk's finest. Cautley thought it the best in all England. It is two-storey, 15th century, contemporary with the nave. Mortlock tells us that they were both built by wealthy Bury Abbey, who owned the living here. As at Beccles, it rises way above the south aisle, tower-like in itself.
A rood group of niches surmounts the shields of East Anglia above the door. More flank them. Mortlock says that the work began in the early 1430s, and the niches were filled by a bequest of 1473, suggesting that the porch was forty years in the making. The south aisle and chancel are slightly earlier, the north aisle slightly later, so it is the nave that promises us great things, and doesn't disappoint.
You step into cool darkness, and look up. It is breathtaking. This is Suffolk's most perfectly restored angel hammerbeam roof. It may not have the drama of Mildenhall, the exquisiteness of Blythburgh, the sheer mathematics of Needham Market, but it shows us in detail more than any other what the medieval imagination was aiming at. From the still, small silence of the church floor below, you look up into a great shout of praise. Here are hundreds of figures, both angelic and human. The profusion is ordered, as if some mighty hymn were in progress.
Paul Hocking thinks that it is a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus: We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord... To thee all Angels cry aloud, the Heavens, and all the Powers therein. To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry Holy Holy Holy Lord God of Sabaoth... The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee, the noble army of Martyrs praise thee...
I know this, because he told me so. I was busy photographing bench ends when this very enthusiastic American bounced in with another visitor, and gave him a whistlestop tour of the church, describing the details with great knowledge and understanding. Solicitously, he talked to me afterwards about what I was doing, and asked me if I'd met the Rector of Woolpit yet. I said that I went out of my way to avoid Rectors wherever possible. He laughed, and replied that, on this occasion, I'd failed, because he was, in fact, the Rector.
After I'd coughed miserably, and he'd laughed again, we had a long chat, uncovering a few mutual aquaintances. He described the roof, which he has obviously spent a lot of time exploring. He pointed out the way the wall posts contained Saints, some with apostolic symbols, some with books, and some with martyr's palms. There are angels on the hammerbeams above, and bearing symbols below. John Blatchly counted 128 angels alone. Some of the shields have letters on them. Are they an acrostic, as on the east chancel wall at Blythburgh? Do they indicate individual Saints? The great Henry Ringham completely restored this roof in 1862, but Mortlock thinks that one of the angels is not his, and I agree - you'll find it in the south west corner. Paul Hocking argues that the restoration was nowhere near as complete as has been made out, and that many features are original.
Henry Ringham also restored the range of bench ends, by duplicating some of the medieval ones, as he did at Great Bealings and Tuddenham St Martin. All are rendered with his customary skill. If Ringham did restore this roof, then the imagery must have been destroyed at some point. One instinctively thinks of William Dowsing, the Puritan inspector of the churches of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, who progressed across the counties during the course of 1644. His delight in the destruction of angel roofs was matched only by that at the destruction of stained glass.
And Dowsing did visit this church. He arrived here in the afternoon of February 29th 1644. It was a Thursday, and he had come here across country from Helmingham, where he had found much to do. He also planned to visit Beyton that day, but in the end stayed overnight at the Bull hotel, and inspected All Saints there in the morning. He then rested for the weekend - the following week, he had a busy tour of southern Cambridgeshire ahead of him.
Dowsing records in great detail what he found to do at each church. In the case of Woolpit, the angel roof is the Dog That Didn't Bark: My Deputy. 80 superstitious pictures; some he brake down, and the rest he gave order to take down; and three crosses to be taken down in 20 days. 8s 6d. There are only two possible reasons why Dowsing doesn't mention the roof. Either he didn't notice it (extremely unlikely) or it had already been destroyed. This second option seems certain; mid-Suffolk was a strongly protestant area, and nearby Rougham, which clearly had a similar roof, was not visited by Dowsing, but was vandalised even more comprehensively than Woolpit. Most likely, the destruction at both churches dated from a hundred years earlier, although it is possible that the Rougham and Woolpit congregations had been puritan enough in the 1630s to do it to their own churches themselves.
Beneath the roof, the church is broad, its two aisles giving room for the panoply of medieval liturgical processions. At the east end of the south aisle was once the shrine of Our Lady of Woolpit, a site of medieval pilgrimage in connection with a nearby holy well. Apart from the front rows, many of the benches appear to be in their original positions. Some of the bench ends are 15th century, others are Ringham's 19th century copies. I wandered around the medieval bench ends, running my hands over them, crouching down and engaging them, face to face. For anyone educated in a Marxist or Weberian historical tradition, as most of my generation were, interpreting the less-obviously liturgical or theological features of a medieval church is fraught with difficulties. One possibility is to do a Cautley, and try not to interpret them at all. But it is more fun to try to do so, don't you think?
The bench ends of Woolpit are remarkable for their abundance. They are not representations of sacraments, virtues and vices as at Tannington and elsewhere, or Saints as at Ufford and Athelington. They are almost all non-allegorical animals, although not the art objects we find at Stowlangtoft, or the mysterious beasts of Lakenheath. Perhaps a good comparison is the similar body of work at nearby Combs. Indeed, although they do not appear to be from the same workshop, it is likely that their creators knew of each others' work. There are dogs, with geese hanging from their mouths, and another which may be a cat with a rat or lizard. There are lions and bears, and a chained monkey, and birds in profusion. So who did them, and why are they here?
There is one school of thought that says that they are simply there to beautify the church, and that they were made by local craftsmen doing what they were best at. If they could do lions, they did lions. If they could render a decent rabbit, then that is what they did. And so on.
But I think that there is rather more to it than that. On my journey down through France, I had spent an afternoon in one of my favourite towns, Autun, in Burgundy. One of the reasons I like Autun is its 11th century Cathedral of St-Lazaire; this is Lazurus, raised by Christ from the dead, and until the 18th century his relics were venerated at a shrine here. St-Lazaire is most famous for its great tympanum above the west door, generally recognised as one of the greatest Romanesque art treasures in the world, and with International Heritage status. It was created during the middle years of the 12th century, and shows the Last Judgement. To emphasise Christ's majesty over all the world, it features all manner of beasts, domestic, wild and mythical.
Throughout the Cathedral, animals infest the famous capitals, which tell the Gospel story. Abbe Denis Grivot, in his Un Bestiaire de la Cathedrale D'Autun (Lyon, 1973) argues that the 12th century creators of all this filled it with animals to echo the final verse of the 150th Psalm, the crowning point of that great sequence of hymns of praise: Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord!
Standing in the nave at Autun, I instantly recalled Paul Hocking's words about the roof at Woolpit, when he said he thought it was a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus. The Te Deum is one of the canticles; another is the Benedicite, traditionally sung through Lent: Oh all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him for ever... O ye whales, and all that move in the Waters, bless ye the Lord... O all ye Fowls of the air, bless ye the Lord... O all ye beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever!
Could it be that the bench ends at Woolpit, and elsewhere in Suffolk, were intended to reflect and represent the praise defined in the canticles and psalms? Both would have been central to the liturgy of the medieval Catholic church. Perhaps the bench ends of Woolpit are liturgical and theological after all.
How would a carpenter, or group of carpenters, go about creating a set of benches like the ones at Woolpit? Who were they? Almost certainly, they were locals. They might have been itinerant jobbing carpenters, but I don't think so. The bench ends at adjacent Tostock are clearly by the same hand. But those at nearby Stowlangtoft and Norton are not, and a third hand seems to be responsible for those at Combs, as I previously mentioned. I do not think that the mutilated ones at Rougham and Elmswell are either; they were probably from the same workshop as each other.
So, we have a conscious attempt by skilled members of a community to create a hymn of praise in carved oak, by representing as many beasts as they felt capable of making. Where did they get their ideas from? They would have had no problems with oxen, cocks, conies - these were all around them, in their daily lives. The person who carved the hunting dog here was very familiar with it. Perhaps it was his own. What about monkeys and lions? These are more problematic. In medieval bestiaries, exotic creatures had fabulous legends attached to them, which gave them a theological symbolism.
But this symbolism doesn't usually seem intended when we see them on bench ends. Sometimes they are rendered accurately, but more often wild animals are fairly imaginary; I think particularly of Barningham's camel, and Hadleigh's wolf. It isn't enough to say that the carvers could have seen pictures of exotic beasts. This is fairly unlikely. Probably, the ordinary people of Woolpit never saw a book other than the missals, lectionaries and hagiographies used in church.
They might have seen pictures of lions and monkeys in wall paintings, either in other churches or here at Woolpit. They might have seen them carved in bench ends, for the same reason. In fact, the representation of wild animals varies so much as to suggest that this is not the case - compare, for example, the lions of Combs with those of Stowlangtoft. Probably, they were created in the imagination from descriptions and attributes in stories. But I think that there is a strong possibility that the woodcarvers of Woolpit did see lions and monkeys in real life.
Here in Catholic Southern Europe, there are many remote small towns which, by virtue of being so very far from each other, take on a rich and complex life of their own. Even small villages have their shops, their craftsmen, their tradespeople; they replicate a situation that existed in Suffolk until well into the 19th century, and in some cases beyond, before the great industrialisation and easy transport swept it away. Further, there are traditions here still that we have lost. Whenever I come here, I am fascinated by the itinerant entertainers, who move from village to village, giving a single performance befre moving on. This must also once have been true of England. The thing that fascinates me most is the multitude of small family circuses.
Many of them seem to be of Italian or Romany origin; all family members have multiple roles, from the oldest grandparent to the youngest child, selling tickets, doing acrobatics, being the straight men to the clown (who is typically Grandpa). They all put up the tent before the performance, and take it down afterwards. They move on, through the remote hills of Provence and the Languedoc, performing on village greens, wastegrounds, the corners of fields, even traffic islands.
As I say, I am fascinated, and can rarely resist them, even though I am shocked, even appalled, by the easy cruelty to animals. Performing animals are still often chosen for their curiosity value, if you can call running around in a circle to the crack of a whip 'performing', poor things.
The choices are strange indeed; camels and zebras often feature; I have seen an old bear on a chain, and at one circus in remote Languedoc a hippopotamus of all things - it caught bread thrown by the crowd. There was no safety fence between the seats and the ring, no Health and Safety Executive to penetrate these lost valleys. I do not know if such circuses existed in medieval Suffolk. But I think that they probably did. Suffolk is a maritime county, and exotic animals were widely known and exhibited in medieval Europe. Before the Protestant Reformation cut us of from the mainland, clerics and merchants thought of themselves as European, and travelled widely - English sovereignty was a hazy concept at best, and 'Britishness' was still centuries away from being formulated as an idea. People owed allegiance to their village, their parish, and their lord, not to the Crown and Parliament in London.
Were the woodcarvers of Woolpit and Tostock remembering this? A circus visit, perhaps back in their childhood? Exotic animals rendered inaccurately, to be sure, but with an enthusiastic nostalgia for that exciting moment in their lives? Was there a lion? A monkey, or a bear? How much more powerful if they also knew the fabulous legends about the beasts - and had seen them in real life!
Some of the carvings at Woolpit are allegorical. One shows a monkey dressed in monk's robes. This, I think, is a joke at the expense of the itinerant friars who went from parish to parish, preaching repentance in the streets. They were sanctioned by the Pope, but were beyond the jurisdiction of the local Bishop. They didn't always go down well with the local Priest and congregation, who considered the Friars nosey and hypocritical. A monkey is often a symbol of foolish vanity - hence, a Friar thinking he was better than anyone else. What better way to make the point than to slip him in as one of the creatures praising the Lord?
How did they survive? But why should they have been destroyed? We make the mistake of thinking of the Puritans as vandals. But the more you read about William Dowsing, the more he emerges as being a principled, conservative kind of chap, despite his clearly flawed and fundamentalist theological opinions. He had no reason to destroy animal bench ends. They weren't superstitious - even Dowsing didn't think Catholics worshipped animals. If he didn't think they were meant to represent the canticles, he wouldn't even have considered them religious. Amen to that.
So much for the 17th century. What about the 19th? St Mary is one of the most enthusiastically restored of Suffolk's churches, despite its survivng medieval detail. But it was done well. Mortlock thought that the 19th century pulpit was the work of Ringham - but the brass lectern is pre-Reformation, a fine example. The rood screen dado panels have sentimental 19th century Saints on them, that may or may not duplicate what was there before. They are actually very good, particularly the gorgeous Mary of Magdala. They have their names painted on the cross beams for the less hagiologically articulate Victorians - from left to right across the aisle they are Saints Barbara, Felix, Mary of Magdala, Peter, Paul, Mary, Edmund and Etheldreda. It is unlikely that Saint Felix would have been on a medieval roodscreen, and Mary almost certainly wasn't - it would have relegated her to a position of no more importance than the others. If it reflects anything of what was there before, it was probably St Anne with the infant Virgin.
The top part of the screen was renewed in 1750, and dated so. The gates are probably a Laudian imposition of 120 years earlier, as at Kedington. This may suggest that, by the time of Dowsing's visit, the chancel was being used for some other practical purpose. Above, high above, set in the east nave wall over the chancel arch, is one of the wierdest objects I've seen in a medieval church. It was installed in the 1870s, and is clearly meant to echo the coving of a rood loft. Goodness knows what it actually is, but it is painted in garish colours, and inscribed with texts. In one of those moments where Cautley and credibility part company, he describes anyone who doesn't think it is a genuine medieval canopy of honour as 'stupid'. I suppose that it has a certain curiosity value.
The three-light window above it would have given light to the rood. The east window contains one of Suffolk's best modern Madonna and child images which was made by the artist Ian Keen for the King workshop in the early 1960s. Ian Keen was also responsible for the beautiful St Margaret in St Margaret's church in Norwich, and for the memorable window of St Francis with a labrador at Somerleyton near Lowestoft.
I turned back westwards, past a superb medieval bench end of the three Marys. This is a delight, and you'd travel to London to see it if it was in the V&A. Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James and Mary of Magdala huddle together, perhaps on the morning of the Resurrection. One of them has a lily of the Annunciation. One head is destroyed - but was it vandalised? Or is it the result of carelessness, the wear and tear of the centuries? Would 17th century puritans have destroyed it if they'd seen it?
Dowsing rarely mentions bench ends, so perhaps few were left by then anyway. So how could it possibly have survived the violent zeal of the 16th century Protestants, battering the Church of England into existence with their axes, pikes and bonfires? How, even after the 1540 edict of Edward VI which ordered the destruction of all statues and images of Saints, especially those of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is it still there at all?
Still more questions than answers, I suppose. I dived beneath the water, and there was beneath me a restless current, shifting and reshifting the silver sand into unique patterns, the work of millennia, still changing, never the same.
- le Rayol Canadel, Cote d'Azur, August 2001.
Malden Rest Area, Doey Thruway, NEW YORK STATE...Heading North To Albany and Point further..U.S. Customers and Immigration..American Rule of Law... Border Maggots...CBSA..Depuis
East-German postcard by VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb, Berlin, no. 2675, 1966 Photo: Balinski.
East German actress Angelika Waller (1944) appeared in more than hundred films and TV productions since 1962. Her first leading role was in Das Kaninchen bin ich/The Rabbit Is Me (1965), a film which was banned in East Germany and which had its world premiere only in 1989.
Angelika Waller was born in 1944 in Bärwalde in der Neumark in former East-Germany (GDR). She went to school in Biesenthal in Brandenburg. As a kid, she already developed an interest in acting. From 1963 to 1966 she was trained as an actress at the youth studio of the Deutscher Fernsehfunk (DFF), the former state television broadcaster in East Germany. To finance her studies, she worked as an ice cream seller and furniture painter. In 1965, Helene Weigel took her to the Berliner Ensemble, and since 1966 she has been a member of the theatre company. She made her stage debut in the comedy Frau Flinz by Helmut Baierl. She appeared in several Bertolt Brecht plays, including as Polly in Brecht's Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera). Her film debut is also her most famous role, which was only made public in 1989 (some sources say 1990). The film, Das Kaninchen bin ich/The Rabbit I Am (Kurt Maetzig, 1965) came in the GDR on the index . She played 19-year-old Maria Morzeck, who dreams of studying Slavistics, but her hopes are shattered when her brother, Dieter, is sent to prison after being convicted of sedition against the state. She cannot enter college, and becomes a waitress. Maria meets and falls in love with Paul Deister, an older, married man who turns out to be the judge who convicted her brother. Their affair ends when Deister is exposed as hypocritical and corrupt. After Dieter's release, he learns of his sister's relationship with the judge and assaults her. Eventually, Maria distances herself from both of them, and decides to pursue her forgotten dream. The film was based on Manfred Bieler's book Maria Morzeck or the Rabbit is Me. It was made in the aftermath of the VI Party Congress of the Socialist Unity Party at January 1963, during which the establishment allowed a measure of liberalisation in the cultural life of East Germany. Although Bieler's novel was highly critical of the court system, he and Maetzig took care to include several "alibi scenes" in the film that were intended to put the state in a better light and also prevent the banning of the picture. The scenes were also meant to present the judicial reforms that took place between 1961 and 1963. The short era of liberalisation ended gradually when Leonid Brezhnev took power in the Soviet Union and introduced a conservative, more repressive course on cultural questions. Das Kaninchen bin ich, alongside eleven other films that were deemed politically damaging, was banned in 1965. In 1989, shortly before the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the picture had its world premiere and was released for public screening. It was presented at the Berlin and Locarno film festivals, and was elected as one of the 100 most important German films by a group of historians and critics in 1995.
Angelika Waller became a crowd favourite with her second film, the circus film Schwarze Panther/Black Panthers (Josef Mach, 1966). She played the young Martina, who, despite the opposition of her father, tames the panthers in the circus ring and, according to Filmportal.de, “she impresses, among other things, by her artistic talent.” In subsequent years, she is seen in numerous films in larger and smaller roles, repeated under the direction of Rolf Losansky. In the epic film series Osvobozhdenie/Liberation (Juri Oserow, Julius Kun, 1969-1970), Waller played Hitler’s mistress Eva Braun. The five-part film series is a dramatized account of the liberation of the Soviet Union's territory during World War II and the subsequent defeat of Nazi Germany. The series was a Soviet-Polish-East German-Italian-Yugoslav co-production and according to official Soviet statistics, Liberation sold more than 400 million tickets worldwide. In the English-speaking world, a shorter, 118-minutes long version was distributed as The Great Battle. In the meanwhile the DEFA studio gave Waller only a few meaty parts, in which she could present her many acting facets, but the television offered her more possibilities. At the East-German television, she could convince in modern women's roles. She embodied emancipated women who decide for themselves in difficult situations. An extremely popular role was the title heroine - a postwoman - in the TV film Rotfuchs/Red fox (Manfred Mosblech, 1973). She also regularly played in the Krimi series Polizeiruf 110/Police Call 110 (1972-1987). Very popular was also the TV series Johann Sebastian Bach (1985) in which she played Bach's first wife. Since the 1970s, Angelika Weller worked as a teacher, and later as a professor at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst „Ernst Busch“ Berlin (Academy of Dramatic Arts Ernst Busch in Berlin). She also worked as a director and staged plays at the Berliner Arbeiter-Theater. Until 1992 she remained a member of the Berliner Ensemble. In 1990, she returned to the cinema in the post-war comedy Der Bruch/The Break-In (Frank Beyer, 1990) alongside Götz George, Rolf Hoppe and Otto Sander. Waller played a busty woman, cheated by her spouse, who clearly expresses her material wishes. Next, she appeared in two TV films, the comedy baby-sitter/Babysitter (Peter Welz, 1992) and again together with Götz George - in Tote sterben niemals aus/Dead people never die out (Jürgen Goslar, 1996). She starred in the role of Omi in the experimental film Happiness Is a Warm Gun (Thomas Imbach, 2001) on Petra Kelly and Gert Bastian. In addition, she also lent her voice as a voice actor to among others Geneviève Bujold in the TV film Anthony and Cleopatra (James Cellan Jones, 1976) and Linda Purl in the TV mini-series The last days of Pompeii (Peter R. Hunt, 1984). In 1978 she received the Art Prize of the GDR. Since 2010 Waller has been a regular guest lecturer at the Thomas Bernhard Institute for Acting and Directing at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Most recently, she appeared in the cinemas as the grandmother in Rückenwind von vorn/Away You Go (Philipp Eichholtz, 2018). Angelika Waller lives in Berlin. Her daughter Susann Thiede (born 1963) also works as an actress.
Sources: Ines Walk (Filmzeit.de– German), Wikipedia (German and English) and IMDb.
I think in Simon's list of 50 best Suffolk churches, Woolpit comes in at number 31. It is now that I remember that I cannot remember why I should go to Woolpit on what would be the last of the EA church visits this year, as Mum was home and in the care of the district nurse, and there was nothing else we could do, not in actions, money or time given. She really has to stand on her own two feet now.
Anyway; Woolpit.
I decided to go, and after looking on the map I saw that with some create route planning, I could go down the 143, then double back and join the A14 eastwards before turning south down our old friend, the A12.
On the way I did also visit Stowlangtoft, which was a wonderful church, a church filled with wonderful things that seemed to hang together as a whole. Woolpit would have to be something special to trup St George.
And it nearly did. Nearly. Woolpit is a picture perfect village, all timber framed buildings, narrow lanes and impossible to park in. I drove through it finding a kind of space just past the church. I could see from the tower and building it was a church on which the Victorians had been very busy.
Most glorious is Mary's roof; double hammerbeam adorned with 208 angels one of the wardens told me. It had been counted several times during a dull sermon. Or two.
The wardens were building the crib for Christmas, so were using a pallet as a base, or something like that. I didn't see it finished, but Ken Bruce was booming out from a radio, preaching the Gospel According to Popmaster to all who would listen.
The angels in the roof and on the walls of the church are indeed impressive, as is the rood screen, but not sure if they are original. There are carved pew ends aplenty, but to my eye, not as well carved or as old as at Stowlangtoft. I could be wrong. But I snap a few anyway.
But I received a warm welcome here, and it is a fantastic church for me.
-----------------------------------------
2008: Woolpit is a village which I often visit, and it is always a pleasure to go into the church. But the entry for St Mary was one of the last on the original Suffolk Churches site, making its appearance in late 2001. In fact, I think it was the last of the old-style entries. I was getting a bit wordy by then.
Woolpit was one of the longest entries, and this wasn't just because there is so much to see. I went off at a great tangent about the meaning of medieval iconography, and how it survived the Reformation. It certainly got some thoughts clear in my own head, even if it confused other people. I actually wrote the entry in the back of an old exercise book sitting outside a café on the Cote d'Azur in southern France. Reading that back, it seems a little pretentious, but I really was there. Here in Ipswich on a frosty February evening, I can't help remembering the heat as I scrawled in the pad.
I've left the original entry almost entirely as it was, apart from the removal of one absolute howler, which I won't mention. I am not sure if Woolpit still has a Sunday market, and I am sure that someone will tell me if it has not. Paul Hocking is no longer Rector of Woolpit, but to my eyes the church continues to go from strength to strength, feeling at once busy and at the heart of its community, the still centre of a busy village. I like it very much.
2001: The clear blue waters of the Mediterranean swirl around my legs, then past me, buffeting the rocks along the silver beach. Millions of tiny flecks of mica swarm through the current, washed out of the hills of Southern Provence. They shine for a fraction of a second with all the light the high summer sun can give, a universe caught in a moment; then turn, disappearing, making of the water a shimmering skein, an ancient memory.
The sea is at the start of all European civilisation. Here, history wells about me. I think of Europe, and the fragmentation of nations. I think of the Balkans, and the Reformation, and the same water surrounding, tending, isolating. I think of time passing.
A week before, I'd been standing in the cool nave of the church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Woolpit - or at least, that is what it probably was once, back then. Today, it is dedicated simply as 'St Mary', in common with the majority of Suffolk's medieval churches, among which it is one of the finest, some say. This is mostly by virtue of its beautiful porch, and extraordinary angel roof.
But is that true? For there are those who love this church that, perhaps, never look up at the porch or roof. Is it the plethora of 15th century bench ends that captures the imagination? Or could it be Richard Phipson's outrageous 1850s tower and lacy spire, straight out of the Nene Valley, its evangelistic slogans around the side in a Victorian equivalent of Piccadilly Circus neon? It ought not to work, and yet it does. Or is it that supremely articulate view to the east, perfect of proportion despite the stripping away of its medieval liturgical apparatus? Above all else, and above most others, this is a church with presence.
It was the bench ends that I was thinking of as I immersed myself out of the intensity of the Provencal sun. A number of questions occured to me, as they have done on other occasions, in other churches. Who made them? What did they mean by them? And how did they survive the iconoclasms of the Protestant Reformation? Here in Southern Europe, I thought I might have found some answers.
Woolpit, then. It is perhaps the most perfect of all Suffolk villages. Not sleepy, and chocolate boxy, but to actually live in. Its shops and pubs are arranged around the pleasant village square, and Phipson's crazy spire towers above them. Woolpit still has its school, and you wouldn't need to get in the car every time you needed a loaf of bread, as you'd have to do in some of Suffolk's more famously picturesque villages, like Kersey and Tuddenham. And Woolpit has its Sunday market, beloved of hundreds of non-sabbatarian junk-hunters each week.
Further, Woolpit has its mythology; the two green children, who climbed out of the ground, speaking a strange language and afraid of the sunlight. The boy died soon after, but the girl grew up and married; she learned to speak English, and told of St Martin's Land, from where she and her brother had emerged. There are holes in the ground around Woolpit, quarries where bricks were made in the 19th century. But perhaps there was once something much older, for every Suffolk schoolchild knows that the name 'Woolpit' is nothing to do with wool, but with the wolves that once lived in the pits here...
So, it is a well-known village. It is because of this as much as anything about St Mary itself that makes this church so well-known to people who haven't heard of the even more interesting and beautiful church of St Ethelbert, Hessett, barely three miles away.
Your first sight of St Mary will be Phipson's crazy spire, visible from miles away, and quite unlike anything else in East Anglia. Suffolk is a county where spires are rare enough, anyway. From the far side of the Gipping valley you can see this one and two others, piercing the soft harvest mist in autumn. They are Phipson's equally absurd Great Finborough, and the 1990s blade of St Peter and St Mary, Stowmarket. There are only about a dozen more in the whole of the county. The excuse for this one was that the tower was struck by lightning in 1852, bringing down the previous lead and timber affair (presumably like the one at Hadleigh). The font is contemporary with the tower, suggesting that the old one was destroyed by the fall.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the artist John Piper produced a series of screen prints of aspects of Suffolk churches; for most, he used the fine perpendicular tower, ramifying it in bold Festival of Britain primary colours. But for Woolpit, he chose the porch, because it is Suffolk's finest. Cautley thought it the best in all England. It is two-storey, 15th century, contemporary with the nave. Mortlock tells us that they were both built by wealthy Bury Abbey, who owned the living here. As at Beccles, it rises way above the south aisle, tower-like in itself.
A rood group of niches surmounts the shields of East Anglia above the door. More flank them. Mortlock says that the work began in the early 1430s, and the niches were filled by a bequest of 1473, suggesting that the porch was forty years in the making. The south aisle and chancel are slightly earlier, the north aisle slightly later, so it is the nave that promises us great things, and doesn't disappoint.
You step into cool darkness, and look up. It is breathtaking. This is Suffolk's most perfectly restored angel hammerbeam roof. It may not have the drama of Mildenhall, the exquisiteness of Blythburgh, the sheer mathematics of Needham Market, but it shows us in detail more than any other what the medieval imagination was aiming at. From the still, small silence of the church floor below, you look up into a great shout of praise. Here are hundreds of figures, both angelic and human. The profusion is ordered, as if some mighty hymn were in progress.
Paul Hocking thinks that it is a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus: We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord... To thee all Angels cry aloud, the Heavens, and all the Powers therein. To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry Holy Holy Holy Lord God of Sabaoth... The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee, the noble army of Martyrs praise thee...
I know this, because he told me so. I was busy photographing bench ends when this very enthusiastic American bounced in with another visitor, and gave him a whistlestop tour of the church, describing the details with great knowledge and understanding. Solicitously, he talked to me afterwards about what I was doing, and asked me if I'd met the Rector of Woolpit yet. I said that I went out of my way to avoid Rectors wherever possible. He laughed, and replied that, on this occasion, I'd failed, because he was, in fact, the Rector.
After I'd coughed miserably, and he'd laughed again, we had a long chat, uncovering a few mutual aquaintances. He described the roof, which he has obviously spent a lot of time exploring. He pointed out the way the wall posts contained Saints, some with apostolic symbols, some with books, and some with martyr's palms. There are angels on the hammerbeams above, and bearing symbols below. John Blatchly counted 128 angels alone. Some of the shields have letters on them. Are they an acrostic, as on the east chancel wall at Blythburgh? Do they indicate individual Saints? The great Henry Ringham completely restored this roof in 1862, but Mortlock thinks that one of the angels is not his, and I agree - you'll find it in the south west corner. Paul Hocking argues that the restoration was nowhere near as complete as has been made out, and that many features are original.
Henry Ringham also restored the range of bench ends, by duplicating some of the medieval ones, as he did at Great Bealings and Tuddenham St Martin. All are rendered with his customary skill. If Ringham did restore this roof, then the imagery must have been destroyed at some point. One instinctively thinks of William Dowsing, the Puritan inspector of the churches of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, who progressed across the counties during the course of 1644. His delight in the destruction of angel roofs was matched only by that at the destruction of stained glass.
And Dowsing did visit this church. He arrived here in the afternoon of February 29th 1644. It was a Thursday, and he had come here across country from Helmingham, where he had found much to do. He also planned to visit Beyton that day, but in the end stayed overnight at the Bull hotel, and inspected All Saints there in the morning. He then rested for the weekend - the following week, he had a busy tour of southern Cambridgeshire ahead of him.
Dowsing records in great detail what he found to do at each church. In the case of Woolpit, the angel roof is the Dog That Didn't Bark: My Deputy. 80 superstitious pictures; some he brake down, and the rest he gave order to take down; and three crosses to be taken down in 20 days. 8s 6d. There are only two possible reasons why Dowsing doesn't mention the roof. Either he didn't notice it (extremely unlikely) or it had already been destroyed. This second option seems certain; mid-Suffolk was a strongly protestant area, and nearby Rougham, which clearly had a similar roof, was not visited by Dowsing, but was vandalised even more comprehensively than Woolpit. Most likely, the destruction at both churches dated from a hundred years earlier, although it is possible that the Rougham and Woolpit congregations had been puritan enough in the 1630s to do it to their own churches themselves.
Beneath the roof, the church is broad, its two aisles giving room for the panoply of medieval liturgical processions. At the east end of the south aisle was once the shrine of Our Lady of Woolpit, a site of medieval pilgrimage in connection with a nearby holy well. Apart from the front rows, many of the benches appear to be in their original positions. Some of the bench ends are 15th century, others are Ringham's 19th century copies. I wandered around the medieval bench ends, running my hands over them, crouching down and engaging them, face to face. For anyone educated in a Marxist or Weberian historical tradition, as most of my generation were, interpreting the less-obviously liturgical or theological features of a medieval church is fraught with difficulties. One possibility is to do a Cautley, and try not to interpret them at all. But it is more fun to try to do so, don't you think?
The bench ends of Woolpit are remarkable for their abundance. They are not representations of sacraments, virtues and vices as at Tannington and elsewhere, or Saints as at Ufford and Athelington. They are almost all non-allegorical animals, although not the art objects we find at Stowlangtoft, or the mysterious beasts of Lakenheath. Perhaps a good comparison is the similar body of work at nearby Combs. Indeed, although they do not appear to be from the same workshop, it is likely that their creators knew of each others' work. There are dogs, with geese hanging from their mouths, and another which may be a cat with a rat or lizard. There are lions and bears, and a chained monkey, and birds in profusion. So who did them, and why are they here?
There is one school of thought that says that they are simply there to beautify the church, and that they were made by local craftsmen doing what they were best at. If they could do lions, they did lions. If they could render a decent rabbit, then that is what they did. And so on.
But I think that there is rather more to it than that. On my journey down through France, I had spent an afternoon in one of my favourite towns, Autun, in Burgundy. One of the reasons I like Autun is its 11th century Cathedral of St-Lazaire; this is Lazurus, raised by Christ from the dead, and until the 18th century his relics were venerated at a shrine here. St-Lazaire is most famous for its great tympanum above the west door, generally recognised as one of the greatest Romanesque art treasures in the world, and with International Heritage status. It was created during the middle years of the 12th century, and shows the Last Judgement. To emphasise Christ's majesty over all the world, it features all manner of beasts, domestic, wild and mythical.
Throughout the Cathedral, animals infest the famous capitals, which tell the Gospel story. Abbe Denis Grivot, in his Un Bestiaire de la Cathedrale D'Autun (Lyon, 1973) argues that the 12th century creators of all this filled it with animals to echo the final verse of the 150th Psalm, the crowning point of that great sequence of hymns of praise: Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord!
Standing in the nave at Autun, I instantly recalled Paul Hocking's words about the roof at Woolpit, when he said he thought it was a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus. The Te Deum is one of the canticles; another is the Benedicite, traditionally sung through Lent: Oh all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him for ever... O ye whales, and all that move in the Waters, bless ye the Lord... O all ye Fowls of the air, bless ye the Lord... O all ye beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever!
Could it be that the bench ends at Woolpit, and elsewhere in Suffolk, were intended to reflect and represent the praise defined in the canticles and psalms? Both would have been central to the liturgy of the medieval Catholic church. Perhaps the bench ends of Woolpit are liturgical and theological after all.
How would a carpenter, or group of carpenters, go about creating a set of benches like the ones at Woolpit? Who were they? Almost certainly, they were locals. They might have been itinerant jobbing carpenters, but I don't think so. The bench ends at adjacent Tostock are clearly by the same hand. But those at nearby Stowlangtoft and Norton are not, and a third hand seems to be responsible for those at Combs, as I previously mentioned. I do not think that the mutilated ones at Rougham and Elmswell are either; they were probably from the same workshop as each other.
So, we have a conscious attempt by skilled members of a community to create a hymn of praise in carved oak, by representing as many beasts as they felt capable of making. Where did they get their ideas from? They would have had no problems with oxen, cocks, conies - these were all around them, in their daily lives. The person who carved the hunting dog here was very familiar with it. Perhaps it was his own. What about monkeys and lions? These are more problematic. In medieval bestiaries, exotic creatures had fabulous legends attached to them, which gave them a theological symbolism.
But this symbolism doesn't usually seem intended when we see them on bench ends. Sometimes they are rendered accurately, but more often wild animals are fairly imaginary; I think particularly of Barningham's camel, and Hadleigh's wolf. It isn't enough to say that the carvers could have seen pictures of exotic beasts. This is fairly unlikely. Probably, the ordinary people of Woolpit never saw a book other than the missals, lectionaries and hagiographies used in church.
They might have seen pictures of lions and monkeys in wall paintings, either in other churches or here at Woolpit. They might have seen them carved in bench ends, for the same reason. In fact, the representation of wild animals varies so much as to suggest that this is not the case - compare, for example, the lions of Combs with those of Stowlangtoft. Probably, they were created in the imagination from descriptions and attributes in stories. But I think that there is a strong possibility that the woodcarvers of Woolpit did see lions and monkeys in real life.
Here in Catholic Southern Europe, there are many remote small towns which, by virtue of being so very far from each other, take on a rich and complex life of their own. Even small villages have their shops, their craftsmen, their tradespeople; they replicate a situation that existed in Suffolk until well into the 19th century, and in some cases beyond, before the great industrialisation and easy transport swept it away. Further, there are traditions here still that we have lost. Whenever I come here, I am fascinated by the itinerant entertainers, who move from village to village, giving a single performance befre moving on. This must also once have been true of England. The thing that fascinates me most is the multitude of small family circuses.
Many of them seem to be of Italian or Romany origin; all family members have multiple roles, from the oldest grandparent to the youngest child, selling tickets, doing acrobatics, being the straight men to the clown (who is typically Grandpa). They all put up the tent before the performance, and take it down afterwards. They move on, through the remote hills of Provence and the Languedoc, performing on village greens, wastegrounds, the corners of fields, even traffic islands.
As I say, I am fascinated, and can rarely resist them, even though I am shocked, even appalled, by the easy cruelty to animals. Performing animals are still often chosen for their curiosity value, if you can call running around in a circle to the crack of a whip 'performing', poor things.
The choices are strange indeed; camels and zebras often feature; I have seen an old bear on a chain, and at one circus in remote Languedoc a hippopotamus of all things - it caught bread thrown by the crowd. There was no safety fence between the seats and the ring, no Health and Safety Executive to penetrate these lost valleys. I do not know if such circuses existed in medieval Suffolk. But I think that they probably did. Suffolk is a maritime county, and exotic animals were widely known and exhibited in medieval Europe. Before the Protestant Reformation cut us of from the mainland, clerics and merchants thought of themselves as European, and travelled widely - English sovereignty was a hazy concept at best, and 'Britishness' was still centuries away from being formulated as an idea. People owed allegiance to their village, their parish, and their lord, not to the Crown and Parliament in London.
Were the woodcarvers of Woolpit and Tostock remembering this? A circus visit, perhaps back in their childhood? Exotic animals rendered inaccurately, to be sure, but with an enthusiastic nostalgia for that exciting moment in their lives? Was there a lion? A monkey, or a bear? How much more powerful if they also knew the fabulous legends about the beasts - and had seen them in real life!
Some of the carvings at Woolpit are allegorical. One shows a monkey dressed in monk's robes. This, I think, is a joke at the expense of the itinerant friars who went from parish to parish, preaching repentance in the streets. They were sanctioned by the Pope, but were beyond the jurisdiction of the local Bishop. They didn't always go down well with the local Priest and congregation, who considered the Friars nosey and hypocritical. A monkey is often a symbol of foolish vanity - hence, a Friar thinking he was better than anyone else. What better way to make the point than to slip him in as one of the creatures praising the Lord?
How did they survive? But why should they have been destroyed? We make the mistake of thinking of the Puritans as vandals. But the more you read about William Dowsing, the more he emerges as being a principled, conservative kind of chap, despite his clearly flawed and fundamentalist theological opinions. He had no reason to destroy animal bench ends. They weren't superstitious - even Dowsing didn't think Catholics worshipped animals. If he didn't think they were meant to represent the canticles, he wouldn't even have considered them religious. Amen to that.
So much for the 17th century. What about the 19th? St Mary is one of the most enthusiastically restored of Suffolk's churches, despite its survivng medieval detail. But it was done well. Mortlock thought that the 19th century pulpit was the work of Ringham - but the brass lectern is pre-Reformation, a fine example. The rood screen dado panels have sentimental 19th century Saints on them, that may or may not duplicate what was there before. They are actually very good, particularly the gorgeous Mary of Magdala. They have their names painted on the cross beams for the less hagiologically articulate Victorians - from left to right across the aisle they are Saints Barbara, Felix, Mary of Magdala, Peter, Paul, Mary, Edmund and Etheldreda. It is unlikely that Saint Felix would have been on a medieval roodscreen, and Mary almost certainly wasn't - it would have relegated her to a position of no more importance than the others. If it reflects anything of what was there before, it was probably St Anne with the infant Virgin.
The top part of the screen was renewed in 1750, and dated so. The gates are probably a Laudian imposition of 120 years earlier, as at Kedington. This may suggest that, by the time of Dowsing's visit, the chancel was being used for some other practical purpose. Above, high above, set in the east nave wall over the chancel arch, is one of the wierdest objects I've seen in a medieval church. It was installed in the 1870s, and is clearly meant to echo the coving of a rood loft. Goodness knows what it actually is, but it is painted in garish colours, and inscribed with texts. In one of those moments where Cautley and credibility part company, he describes anyone who doesn't think it is a genuine medieval canopy of honour as 'stupid'. I suppose that it has a certain curiosity value.
The three-light window above it would have given light to the rood. The east window contains one of Suffolk's best modern Madonna and child images which was made by the artist Ian Keen for the King workshop in the early 1960s. Ian Keen was also responsible for the beautiful St Margaret in St Margaret's church in Norwich, and for the memorable window of St Francis with a labrador at Somerleyton near Lowestoft.
I turned back westwards, past a superb medieval bench end of the three Marys. This is a delight, and you'd travel to London to see it if it was in the V&A. Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James and Mary of Magdala huddle together, perhaps on the morning of the Resurrection. One of them has a lily of the Annunciation. One head is destroyed - but was it vandalised? Or is it the result of carelessness, the wear and tear of the centuries? Would 17th century puritans have destroyed it if they'd seen it?
Dowsing rarely mentions bench ends, so perhaps few were left by then anyway. So how could it possibly have survived the violent zeal of the 16th century Protestants, battering the Church of England into existence with their axes, pikes and bonfires? How, even after the 1540 edict of Edward VI which ordered the destruction of all statues and images of Saints, especially those of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is it still there at all?
Still more questions than answers, I suppose. I dived beneath the water, and there was beneath me a restless current, shifting and reshifting the silver sand into unique patterns, the work of millennia, still changing, never the same.
- le Rayol Canadel, Cote d'Azur, August 2001.
Billie Eilish - my future
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they were selected for their price! wtf?
these hypocritical greedy pigs will justify anything - the American people don't even have a clue about what really happens in this government. they think they know but they do not know. they know nothing. if the American people really knew what was going on there would be another revolution real fast - and I have a feeling it's coming
I think in Simon's list of 50 best Suffolk churches, Woolpit comes in at number 31. It is now that I remember that I cannot remember why I should go to Woolpit on what would be the last of the EA church visits this year, as Mum was home and in the care of the district nurse, and there was nothing else we could do, not in actions, money or time given. She really has to stand on her own two feet now.
Anyway; Woolpit.
I decided to go, and after looking on the map I saw that with some create route planning, I could go down the 143, then double back and join the A14 eastwards before turning south down our old friend, the A12.
On the way I did also visit Stowlangtoft, which was a wonderful church, a church filled with wonderful things that seemed to hang together as a whole. Woolpit would have to be something special to trup St George.
And it nearly did. Nearly. Woolpit is a picture perfect village, all timber framed buildings, narrow lanes and impossible to park in. I drove through it finding a kind of space just past the church. I could see from the tower and building it was a church on which the Victorians had been very busy.
Most glorious is Mary's roof; double hammerbeam adorned with 208 angels one of the wardens told me. It had been counted several times during a dull sermon. Or two.
The wardens were building the crib for Christmas, so were using a pallet as a base, or something like that. I didn't see it finished, but Ken Bruce was booming out from a radio, preaching the Gospel According to Popmaster to all who would listen.
The angels in the roof and on the walls of the church are indeed impressive, as is the rood screen, but not sure if they are original. There are carved pew ends aplenty, but to my eye, not as well carved or as old as at Stowlangtoft. I could be wrong. But I snap a few anyway.
But I received a warm welcome here, and it is a fantastic church for me.
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2008: Woolpit is a village which I often visit, and it is always a pleasure to go into the church. But the entry for St Mary was one of the last on the original Suffolk Churches site, making its appearance in late 2001. In fact, I think it was the last of the old-style entries. I was getting a bit wordy by then.
Woolpit was one of the longest entries, and this wasn't just because there is so much to see. I went off at a great tangent about the meaning of medieval iconography, and how it survived the Reformation. It certainly got some thoughts clear in my own head, even if it confused other people. I actually wrote the entry in the back of an old exercise book sitting outside a café on the Cote d'Azur in southern France. Reading that back, it seems a little pretentious, but I really was there. Here in Ipswich on a frosty February evening, I can't help remembering the heat as I scrawled in the pad.
I've left the original entry almost entirely as it was, apart from the removal of one absolute howler, which I won't mention. I am not sure if Woolpit still has a Sunday market, and I am sure that someone will tell me if it has not. Paul Hocking is no longer Rector of Woolpit, but to my eyes the church continues to go from strength to strength, feeling at once busy and at the heart of its community, the still centre of a busy village. I like it very much.
2001: The clear blue waters of the Mediterranean swirl around my legs, then past me, buffeting the rocks along the silver beach. Millions of tiny flecks of mica swarm through the current, washed out of the hills of Southern Provence. They shine for a fraction of a second with all the light the high summer sun can give, a universe caught in a moment; then turn, disappearing, making of the water a shimmering skein, an ancient memory.
The sea is at the start of all European civilisation. Here, history wells about me. I think of Europe, and the fragmentation of nations. I think of the Balkans, and the Reformation, and the same water surrounding, tending, isolating. I think of time passing.
A week before, I'd been standing in the cool nave of the church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Woolpit - or at least, that is what it probably was once, back then. Today, it is dedicated simply as 'St Mary', in common with the majority of Suffolk's medieval churches, among which it is one of the finest, some say. This is mostly by virtue of its beautiful porch, and extraordinary angel roof.
But is that true? For there are those who love this church that, perhaps, never look up at the porch or roof. Is it the plethora of 15th century bench ends that captures the imagination? Or could it be Richard Phipson's outrageous 1850s tower and lacy spire, straight out of the Nene Valley, its evangelistic slogans around the side in a Victorian equivalent of Piccadilly Circus neon? It ought not to work, and yet it does. Or is it that supremely articulate view to the east, perfect of proportion despite the stripping away of its medieval liturgical apparatus? Above all else, and above most others, this is a church with presence.
It was the bench ends that I was thinking of as I immersed myself out of the intensity of the Provencal sun. A number of questions occured to me, as they have done on other occasions, in other churches. Who made them? What did they mean by them? And how did they survive the iconoclasms of the Protestant Reformation? Here in Southern Europe, I thought I might have found some answers.
Woolpit, then. It is perhaps the most perfect of all Suffolk villages. Not sleepy, and chocolate boxy, but to actually live in. Its shops and pubs are arranged around the pleasant village square, and Phipson's crazy spire towers above them. Woolpit still has its school, and you wouldn't need to get in the car every time you needed a loaf of bread, as you'd have to do in some of Suffolk's more famously picturesque villages, like Kersey and Tuddenham. And Woolpit has its Sunday market, beloved of hundreds of non-sabbatarian junk-hunters each week.
Further, Woolpit has its mythology; the two green children, who climbed out of the ground, speaking a strange language and afraid of the sunlight. The boy died soon after, but the girl grew up and married; she learned to speak English, and told of St Martin's Land, from where she and her brother had emerged. There are holes in the ground around Woolpit, quarries where bricks were made in the 19th century. But perhaps there was once something much older, for every Suffolk schoolchild knows that the name 'Woolpit' is nothing to do with wool, but with the wolves that once lived in the pits here...
So, it is a well-known village. It is because of this as much as anything about St Mary itself that makes this church so well-known to people who haven't heard of the even more interesting and beautiful church of St Ethelbert, Hessett, barely three miles away.
Your first sight of St Mary will be Phipson's crazy spire, visible from miles away, and quite unlike anything else in East Anglia. Suffolk is a county where spires are rare enough, anyway. From the far side of the Gipping valley you can see this one and two others, piercing the soft harvest mist in autumn. They are Phipson's equally absurd Great Finborough, and the 1990s blade of St Peter and St Mary, Stowmarket. There are only about a dozen more in the whole of the county. The excuse for this one was that the tower was struck by lightning in 1852, bringing down the previous lead and timber affair (presumably like the one at Hadleigh). The font is contemporary with the tower, suggesting that the old one was destroyed by the fall.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the artist John Piper produced a series of screen prints of aspects of Suffolk churches; for most, he used the fine perpendicular tower, ramifying it in bold Festival of Britain primary colours. But for Woolpit, he chose the porch, because it is Suffolk's finest. Cautley thought it the best in all England. It is two-storey, 15th century, contemporary with the nave. Mortlock tells us that they were both built by wealthy Bury Abbey, who owned the living here. As at Beccles, it rises way above the south aisle, tower-like in itself.
A rood group of niches surmounts the shields of East Anglia above the door. More flank them. Mortlock says that the work began in the early 1430s, and the niches were filled by a bequest of 1473, suggesting that the porch was forty years in the making. The south aisle and chancel are slightly earlier, the north aisle slightly later, so it is the nave that promises us great things, and doesn't disappoint.
You step into cool darkness, and look up. It is breathtaking. This is Suffolk's most perfectly restored angel hammerbeam roof. It may not have the drama of Mildenhall, the exquisiteness of Blythburgh, the sheer mathematics of Needham Market, but it shows us in detail more than any other what the medieval imagination was aiming at. From the still, small silence of the church floor below, you look up into a great shout of praise. Here are hundreds of figures, both angelic and human. The profusion is ordered, as if some mighty hymn were in progress.
Paul Hocking thinks that it is a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus: We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord... To thee all Angels cry aloud, the Heavens, and all the Powers therein. To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry Holy Holy Holy Lord God of Sabaoth... The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee, the noble army of Martyrs praise thee...
I know this, because he told me so. I was busy photographing bench ends when this very enthusiastic American bounced in with another visitor, and gave him a whistlestop tour of the church, describing the details with great knowledge and understanding. Solicitously, he talked to me afterwards about what I was doing, and asked me if I'd met the Rector of Woolpit yet. I said that I went out of my way to avoid Rectors wherever possible. He laughed, and replied that, on this occasion, I'd failed, because he was, in fact, the Rector.
After I'd coughed miserably, and he'd laughed again, we had a long chat, uncovering a few mutual aquaintances. He described the roof, which he has obviously spent a lot of time exploring. He pointed out the way the wall posts contained Saints, some with apostolic symbols, some with books, and some with martyr's palms. There are angels on the hammerbeams above, and bearing symbols below. John Blatchly counted 128 angels alone. Some of the shields have letters on them. Are they an acrostic, as on the east chancel wall at Blythburgh? Do they indicate individual Saints? The great Henry Ringham completely restored this roof in 1862, but Mortlock thinks that one of the angels is not his, and I agree - you'll find it in the south west corner. Paul Hocking argues that the restoration was nowhere near as complete as has been made out, and that many features are original.
Henry Ringham also restored the range of bench ends, by duplicating some of the medieval ones, as he did at Great Bealings and Tuddenham St Martin. All are rendered with his customary skill. If Ringham did restore this roof, then the imagery must have been destroyed at some point. One instinctively thinks of William Dowsing, the Puritan inspector of the churches of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, who progressed across the counties during the course of 1644. His delight in the destruction of angel roofs was matched only by that at the destruction of stained glass.
And Dowsing did visit this church. He arrived here in the afternoon of February 29th 1644. It was a Thursday, and he had come here across country from Helmingham, where he had found much to do. He also planned to visit Beyton that day, but in the end stayed overnight at the Bull hotel, and inspected All Saints there in the morning. He then rested for the weekend - the following week, he had a busy tour of southern Cambridgeshire ahead of him.
Dowsing records in great detail what he found to do at each church. In the case of Woolpit, the angel roof is the Dog That Didn't Bark: My Deputy. 80 superstitious pictures; some he brake down, and the rest he gave order to take down; and three crosses to be taken down in 20 days. 8s 6d. There are only two possible reasons why Dowsing doesn't mention the roof. Either he didn't notice it (extremely unlikely) or it had already been destroyed. This second option seems certain; mid-Suffolk was a strongly protestant area, and nearby Rougham, which clearly had a similar roof, was not visited by Dowsing, but was vandalised even more comprehensively than Woolpit. Most likely, the destruction at both churches dated from a hundred years earlier, although it is possible that the Rougham and Woolpit congregations had been puritan enough in the 1630s to do it to their own churches themselves.
Beneath the roof, the church is broad, its two aisles giving room for the panoply of medieval liturgical processions. At the east end of the south aisle was once the shrine of Our Lady of Woolpit, a site of medieval pilgrimage in connection with a nearby holy well. Apart from the front rows, many of the benches appear to be in their original positions. Some of the bench ends are 15th century, others are Ringham's 19th century copies. I wandered around the medieval bench ends, running my hands over them, crouching down and engaging them, face to face. For anyone educated in a Marxist or Weberian historical tradition, as most of my generation were, interpreting the less-obviously liturgical or theological features of a medieval church is fraught with difficulties. One possibility is to do a Cautley, and try not to interpret them at all. But it is more fun to try to do so, don't you think?
The bench ends of Woolpit are remarkable for their abundance. They are not representations of sacraments, virtues and vices as at Tannington and elsewhere, or Saints as at Ufford and Athelington. They are almost all non-allegorical animals, although not the art objects we find at Stowlangtoft, or the mysterious beasts of Lakenheath. Perhaps a good comparison is the similar body of work at nearby Combs. Indeed, although they do not appear to be from the same workshop, it is likely that their creators knew of each others' work. There are dogs, with geese hanging from their mouths, and another which may be a cat with a rat or lizard. There are lions and bears, and a chained monkey, and birds in profusion. So who did them, and why are they here?
There is one school of thought that says that they are simply there to beautify the church, and that they were made by local craftsmen doing what they were best at. If they could do lions, they did lions. If they could render a decent rabbit, then that is what they did. And so on.
But I think that there is rather more to it than that. On my journey down through France, I had spent an afternoon in one of my favourite towns, Autun, in Burgundy. One of the reasons I like Autun is its 11th century Cathedral of St-Lazaire; this is Lazurus, raised by Christ from the dead, and until the 18th century his relics were venerated at a shrine here. St-Lazaire is most famous for its great tympanum above the west door, generally recognised as one of the greatest Romanesque art treasures in the world, and with International Heritage status. It was created during the middle years of the 12th century, and shows the Last Judgement. To emphasise Christ's majesty over all the world, it features all manner of beasts, domestic, wild and mythical.
Throughout the Cathedral, animals infest the famous capitals, which tell the Gospel story. Abbe Denis Grivot, in his Un Bestiaire de la Cathedrale D'Autun (Lyon, 1973) argues that the 12th century creators of all this filled it with animals to echo the final verse of the 150th Psalm, the crowning point of that great sequence of hymns of praise: Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord!
Standing in the nave at Autun, I instantly recalled Paul Hocking's words about the roof at Woolpit, when he said he thought it was a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus. The Te Deum is one of the canticles; another is the Benedicite, traditionally sung through Lent: Oh all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him for ever... O ye whales, and all that move in the Waters, bless ye the Lord... O all ye Fowls of the air, bless ye the Lord... O all ye beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever!
Could it be that the bench ends at Woolpit, and elsewhere in Suffolk, were intended to reflect and represent the praise defined in the canticles and psalms? Both would have been central to the liturgy of the medieval Catholic church. Perhaps the bench ends of Woolpit are liturgical and theological after all.
How would a carpenter, or group of carpenters, go about creating a set of benches like the ones at Woolpit? Who were they? Almost certainly, they were locals. They might have been itinerant jobbing carpenters, but I don't think so. The bench ends at adjacent Tostock are clearly by the same hand. But those at nearby Stowlangtoft and Norton are not, and a third hand seems to be responsible for those at Combs, as I previously mentioned. I do not think that the mutilated ones at Rougham and Elmswell are either; they were probably from the same workshop as each other.
So, we have a conscious attempt by skilled members of a community to create a hymn of praise in carved oak, by representing as many beasts as they felt capable of making. Where did they get their ideas from? They would have had no problems with oxen, cocks, conies - these were all around them, in their daily lives. The person who carved the hunting dog here was very familiar with it. Perhaps it was his own. What about monkeys and lions? These are more problematic. In medieval bestiaries, exotic creatures had fabulous legends attached to them, which gave them a theological symbolism.
But this symbolism doesn't usually seem intended when we see them on bench ends. Sometimes they are rendered accurately, but more often wild animals are fairly imaginary; I think particularly of Barningham's camel, and Hadleigh's wolf. It isn't enough to say that the carvers could have seen pictures of exotic beasts. This is fairly unlikely. Probably, the ordinary people of Woolpit never saw a book other than the missals, lectionaries and hagiographies used in church.
They might have seen pictures of lions and monkeys in wall paintings, either in other churches or here at Woolpit. They might have seen them carved in bench ends, for the same reason. In fact, the representation of wild animals varies so much as to suggest that this is not the case - compare, for example, the lions of Combs with those of Stowlangtoft. Probably, they were created in the imagination from descriptions and attributes in stories. But I think that there is a strong possibility that the woodcarvers of Woolpit did see lions and monkeys in real life.
Here in Catholic Southern Europe, there are many remote small towns which, by virtue of being so very far from each other, take on a rich and complex life of their own. Even small villages have their shops, their craftsmen, their tradespeople; they replicate a situation that existed in Suffolk until well into the 19th century, and in some cases beyond, before the great industrialisation and easy transport swept it away. Further, there are traditions here still that we have lost. Whenever I come here, I am fascinated by the itinerant entertainers, who move from village to village, giving a single performance befre moving on. This must also once have been true of England. The thing that fascinates me most is the multitude of small family circuses.
Many of them seem to be of Italian or Romany origin; all family members have multiple roles, from the oldest grandparent to the youngest child, selling tickets, doing acrobatics, being the straight men to the clown (who is typically Grandpa). They all put up the tent before the performance, and take it down afterwards. They move on, through the remote hills of Provence and the Languedoc, performing on village greens, wastegrounds, the corners of fields, even traffic islands.
As I say, I am fascinated, and can rarely resist them, even though I am shocked, even appalled, by the easy cruelty to animals. Performing animals are still often chosen for their curiosity value, if you can call running around in a circle to the crack of a whip 'performing', poor things.
The choices are strange indeed; camels and zebras often feature; I have seen an old bear on a chain, and at one circus in remote Languedoc a hippopotamus of all things - it caught bread thrown by the crowd. There was no safety fence between the seats and the ring, no Health and Safety Executive to penetrate these lost valleys. I do not know if such circuses existed in medieval Suffolk. But I think that they probably did. Suffolk is a maritime county, and exotic animals were widely known and exhibited in medieval Europe. Before the Protestant Reformation cut us of from the mainland, clerics and merchants thought of themselves as European, and travelled widely - English sovereignty was a hazy concept at best, and 'Britishness' was still centuries away from being formulated as an idea. People owed allegiance to their village, their parish, and their lord, not to the Crown and Parliament in London.
Were the woodcarvers of Woolpit and Tostock remembering this? A circus visit, perhaps back in their childhood? Exotic animals rendered inaccurately, to be sure, but with an enthusiastic nostalgia for that exciting moment in their lives? Was there a lion? A monkey, or a bear? How much more powerful if they also knew the fabulous legends about the beasts - and had seen them in real life!
Some of the carvings at Woolpit are allegorical. One shows a monkey dressed in monk's robes. This, I think, is a joke at the expense of the itinerant friars who went from parish to parish, preaching repentance in the streets. They were sanctioned by the Pope, but were beyond the jurisdiction of the local Bishop. They didn't always go down well with the local Priest and congregation, who considered the Friars nosey and hypocritical. A monkey is often a symbol of foolish vanity - hence, a Friar thinking he was better than anyone else. What better way to make the point than to slip him in as one of the creatures praising the Lord?
How did they survive? But why should they have been destroyed? We make the mistake of thinking of the Puritans as vandals. But the more you read about William Dowsing, the more he emerges as being a principled, conservative kind of chap, despite his clearly flawed and fundamentalist theological opinions. He had no reason to destroy animal bench ends. They weren't superstitious - even Dowsing didn't think Catholics worshipped animals. If he didn't think they were meant to represent the canticles, he wouldn't even have considered them religious. Amen to that.
So much for the 17th century. What about the 19th? St Mary is one of the most enthusiastically restored of Suffolk's churches, despite its survivng medieval detail. But it was done well. Mortlock thought that the 19th century pulpit was the work of Ringham - but the brass lectern is pre-Reformation, a fine example. The rood screen dado panels have sentimental 19th century Saints on them, that may or may not duplicate what was there before. They are actually very good, particularly the gorgeous Mary of Magdala. They have their names painted on the cross beams for the less hagiologically articulate Victorians - from left to right across the aisle they are Saints Barbara, Felix, Mary of Magdala, Peter, Paul, Mary, Edmund and Etheldreda. It is unlikely that Saint Felix would have been on a medieval roodscreen, and Mary almost certainly wasn't - it would have relegated her to a position of no more importance than the others. If it reflects anything of what was there before, it was probably St Anne with the infant Virgin.
The top part of the screen was renewed in 1750, and dated so. The gates are probably a Laudian imposition of 120 years earlier, as at Kedington. This may suggest that, by the time of Dowsing's visit, the chancel was being used for some other practical purpose. Above, high above, set in the east nave wall over the chancel arch, is one of the wierdest objects I've seen in a medieval church. It was installed in the 1870s, and is clearly meant to echo the coving of a rood loft. Goodness knows what it actually is, but it is painted in garish colours, and inscribed with texts. In one of those moments where Cautley and credibility part company, he describes anyone who doesn't think it is a genuine medieval canopy of honour as 'stupid'. I suppose that it has a certain curiosity value.
The three-light window above it would have given light to the rood. The east window contains one of Suffolk's best modern Madonna and child images which was made by the artist Ian Keen for the King workshop in the early 1960s. Ian Keen was also responsible for the beautiful St Margaret in St Margaret's church in Norwich, and for the memorable window of St Francis with a labrador at Somerleyton near Lowestoft.
I turned back westwards, past a superb medieval bench end of the three Marys. This is a delight, and you'd travel to London to see it if it was in the V&A. Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James and Mary of Magdala huddle together, perhaps on the morning of the Resurrection. One of them has a lily of the Annunciation. One head is destroyed - but was it vandalised? Or is it the result of carelessness, the wear and tear of the centuries? Would 17th century puritans have destroyed it if they'd seen it?
Dowsing rarely mentions bench ends, so perhaps few were left by then anyway. So how could it possibly have survived the violent zeal of the 16th century Protestants, battering the Church of England into existence with their axes, pikes and bonfires? How, even after the 1540 edict of Edward VI which ordered the destruction of all statues and images of Saints, especially those of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is it still there at all?
Still more questions than answers, I suppose. I dived beneath the water, and there was beneath me a restless current, shifting and reshifting the silver sand into unique patterns, the work of millennia, still changing, never the same.
- le Rayol Canadel, Cote d'Azur, August 2001.
Hundreds of students and workers linked together to ensure Pride is a Protest! in Birmingham.
As thousands of onlookers lined the streets they were filled with chants of "No ifs, no buts - No LGBT cuts" - Pride is Protest! - Pride not Profit!" - "We're here, we're queer - we cant afford next year!" and "They say cut back - we say fight back!"
The delegations from university and college student unions and trade unions politicised the parade with placards highlighting the disproportional impact of the cuts on LGBT people.
* "LGBT people are more likely to need public services, LGBT people are more likely to work in public services, NO PUBLIC SERVICE CUTS!"
* "Cuts to EMA & higher tuition fees hit young LGBTQ people harder
NO EDUCATION CUTS!"
* "30% of young homeless people are LGBT, NO HOUSING CUTS!"
* "Section 28 is BACK!, In the governments free schools and acdemies -NO PRIVATISATION OF SCHOOLS— SCRAP SECTION 28!"
* "ALL legal aid to asylum/immigration cases cut for LGBTQ people fleeing persecution, NO CUTS TO HUMAN RIGHTS!"
* "Trans unemployment 3 times national average, NO JOB CUTS!"
* "Twice as many LGBT people forced to work after 70, NO PENSION CUTS!"
* "Gender: - reassignment surgery cancelled on NHS, NO HEALTH CUTS!"
* "HIV benefits claimants forced back into work, NO HEALTH CUTS!"
Over 4000 leaflets were taken by protesters, LGBT organisations and community groups and the public.
A public meeting will be held on Monday 11th June at 6:30 in the Birmingham UNISON offices to continue the campaign. For more details birminghamagainstthecuts.wordpress.com
Article below from www.socialistworker.co.uk
Prides are a chance for thousands of LGBT people and our friends to celebrate our lives and how far we’ve come. But this year, Prides take place against a background of growing financial crisis and social injustice.
The Con-Dem government is a disaster for millions of ordinary people, including LGBT people.
It’s the Tories’ banker friends who helped create the economic crisis. But they aren’t suffering. The Chief Executive of HSBC was paid £7.5 million this year. Barclays boss Bob Diamond pocketed over £17 million. The bosses of the top hundred companies are paid an average of over £3 million a year.
Rather than take money off the rich, the government is cutting the services ordinary people use – and that means that those already facing discrimination, like LGBT people, will suffer most.
Education
Cuts are hitting colleges and universities, and hitting LGBT students harder – NUS figures say that 1 in 7 LGBT students, and 1 in 3 trans students, fear losing financial support if they come out to their parents.
Housing
We face a housing crisis: 1 in 12 people is on a waiting list for social housing. Again, LGBT people face discrimination – a report from housing charity Crisis shows that in urban areas thirty percent of young homeless people are LGBT. 1 in 4 transgender people have had to move home because of harassment.
Health
A Stonewall survey, published in April, found that gay and bi men are seven times more likely to attempt suicide than men in general. One in sixteen young gay or bi men had tried to take their own life in the past year. Cuts in the NHS, and in funding for LGBT community groups, can only make these figures worse.
Immigration
The government is scapegoating migrants – LGBT asylum seekers are some of the most vulnerable. They face torture and rape in the countries they have left – Stonewall say that “in many cases they are sent back to countries where the fear of persecution is constant.”
Cameron claims the Tories are different from the homophobes who introduced Section 28 under Thatcher. The Tories said they would introduce gay marriage but after the local elections the bigots are crawling out of the woodwork. Some Tory ministers now oppose marriage equality. Cameron is giving Tory MPs a “free vote” so homophobic Tories will vote against it.
Rights at Work
The government is dismantling much of the protection laws that stop LGBT people being sacked just because they don’t like our face or lifestyle. Access to tribunals for unfair dismissal is being limited and sacking employees for no reason promoted.
Yet the Tories have the nerve to say they are champions of LGBT equality. Cameron has talked about withdrawing aid from countries with homophobic governments. A government that has spent millions killing civilians in Afghanistan and has just done a £1.9 billion deal to sell jets to that champion of human right Saudi Arabia and where gay sex is punishable by death. These Tory hypocrites aren’t going to liberate anybody.
People in Tunisia and Egypt have shown the way towards freedom, and are fighting to do now in Syria, in Greece and Spain.
The British government is a nasty vicious one – but people are fighting back. Thousands of people from UK Uncut and Occupy have taken to the streets – their slogan “we are the 99 percent” sums up how many of us feel. Up to 400,000 public sector workers struck on 10 May. Two and a half million workers went on strike on 30 November – the biggest strike since 1926.
The best way to fight for LGBT liberation is the join the struggles together for a generalised fight to overthrow the system that produces crisis, poverty and equality. Capitalism is destroying peoples life’s and the planet at a frightening pace.
I think in Simon's list of 50 best Suffolk churches, Woolpit comes in at number 31. It is now that I remember that I cannot remember why I should go to Woolpit on what would be the last of the EA church visits this year, as Mum was home and in the care of the district nurse, and there was nothing else we could do, not in actions, money or time given. She really has to stand on her own two feet now.
Anyway; Woolpit.
I decided to go, and after looking on the map I saw that with some create route planning, I could go down the 143, then double back and join the A14 eastwards before turning south down our old friend, the A12.
On the way I did also visit Stowlangtoft, which was a wonderful church, a church filled with wonderful things that seemed to hang together as a whole. Woolpit would have to be something special to trup St George.
And it nearly did. Nearly. Woolpit is a picture perfect village, all timber framed buildings, narrow lanes and impossible to park in. I drove through it finding a kind of space just past the church. I could see from the tower and building it was a church on which the Victorians had been very busy.
Most glorious is Mary's roof; double hammerbeam adorned with 208 angels one of the wardens told me. It had been counted several times during a dull sermon. Or two.
The wardens were building the crib for Christmas, so were using a pallet as a base, or something like that. I didn't see it finished, but Ken Bruce was booming out from a radio, preaching the Gospel According to Popmaster to all who would listen.
The angels in the roof and on the walls of the church are indeed impressive, as is the rood screen, but not sure if they are original. There are carved pew ends aplenty, but to my eye, not as well carved or as old as at Stowlangtoft. I could be wrong. But I snap a few anyway.
But I received a warm welcome here, and it is a fantastic church for me.
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2008: Woolpit is a village which I often visit, and it is always a pleasure to go into the church. But the entry for St Mary was one of the last on the original Suffolk Churches site, making its appearance in late 2001. In fact, I think it was the last of the old-style entries. I was getting a bit wordy by then.
Woolpit was one of the longest entries, and this wasn't just because there is so much to see. I went off at a great tangent about the meaning of medieval iconography, and how it survived the Reformation. It certainly got some thoughts clear in my own head, even if it confused other people. I actually wrote the entry in the back of an old exercise book sitting outside a café on the Cote d'Azur in southern France. Reading that back, it seems a little pretentious, but I really was there. Here in Ipswich on a frosty February evening, I can't help remembering the heat as I scrawled in the pad.
I've left the original entry almost entirely as it was, apart from the removal of one absolute howler, which I won't mention. I am not sure if Woolpit still has a Sunday market, and I am sure that someone will tell me if it has not. Paul Hocking is no longer Rector of Woolpit, but to my eyes the church continues to go from strength to strength, feeling at once busy and at the heart of its community, the still centre of a busy village. I like it very much.
2001: The clear blue waters of the Mediterranean swirl around my legs, then past me, buffeting the rocks along the silver beach. Millions of tiny flecks of mica swarm through the current, washed out of the hills of Southern Provence. They shine for a fraction of a second with all the light the high summer sun can give, a universe caught in a moment; then turn, disappearing, making of the water a shimmering skein, an ancient memory.
The sea is at the start of all European civilisation. Here, history wells about me. I think of Europe, and the fragmentation of nations. I think of the Balkans, and the Reformation, and the same water surrounding, tending, isolating. I think of time passing.
A week before, I'd been standing in the cool nave of the church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Woolpit - or at least, that is what it probably was once, back then. Today, it is dedicated simply as 'St Mary', in common with the majority of Suffolk's medieval churches, among which it is one of the finest, some say. This is mostly by virtue of its beautiful porch, and extraordinary angel roof.
But is that true? For there are those who love this church that, perhaps, never look up at the porch or roof. Is it the plethora of 15th century bench ends that captures the imagination? Or could it be Richard Phipson's outrageous 1850s tower and lacy spire, straight out of the Nene Valley, its evangelistic slogans around the side in a Victorian equivalent of Piccadilly Circus neon? It ought not to work, and yet it does. Or is it that supremely articulate view to the east, perfect of proportion despite the stripping away of its medieval liturgical apparatus? Above all else, and above most others, this is a church with presence.
It was the bench ends that I was thinking of as I immersed myself out of the intensity of the Provencal sun. A number of questions occured to me, as they have done on other occasions, in other churches. Who made them? What did they mean by them? And how did they survive the iconoclasms of the Protestant Reformation? Here in Southern Europe, I thought I might have found some answers.
Woolpit, then. It is perhaps the most perfect of all Suffolk villages. Not sleepy, and chocolate boxy, but to actually live in. Its shops and pubs are arranged around the pleasant village square, and Phipson's crazy spire towers above them. Woolpit still has its school, and you wouldn't need to get in the car every time you needed a loaf of bread, as you'd have to do in some of Suffolk's more famously picturesque villages, like Kersey and Tuddenham. And Woolpit has its Sunday market, beloved of hundreds of non-sabbatarian junk-hunters each week.
Further, Woolpit has its mythology; the two green children, who climbed out of the ground, speaking a strange language and afraid of the sunlight. The boy died soon after, but the girl grew up and married; she learned to speak English, and told of St Martin's Land, from where she and her brother had emerged. There are holes in the ground around Woolpit, quarries where bricks were made in the 19th century. But perhaps there was once something much older, for every Suffolk schoolchild knows that the name 'Woolpit' is nothing to do with wool, but with the wolves that once lived in the pits here...
So, it is a well-known village. It is because of this as much as anything about St Mary itself that makes this church so well-known to people who haven't heard of the even more interesting and beautiful church of St Ethelbert, Hessett, barely three miles away.
Your first sight of St Mary will be Phipson's crazy spire, visible from miles away, and quite unlike anything else in East Anglia. Suffolk is a county where spires are rare enough, anyway. From the far side of the Gipping valley you can see this one and two others, piercing the soft harvest mist in autumn. They are Phipson's equally absurd Great Finborough, and the 1990s blade of St Peter and St Mary, Stowmarket. There are only about a dozen more in the whole of the county. The excuse for this one was that the tower was struck by lightning in 1852, bringing down the previous lead and timber affair (presumably like the one at Hadleigh). The font is contemporary with the tower, suggesting that the old one was destroyed by the fall.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the artist John Piper produced a series of screen prints of aspects of Suffolk churches; for most, he used the fine perpendicular tower, ramifying it in bold Festival of Britain primary colours. But for Woolpit, he chose the porch, because it is Suffolk's finest. Cautley thought it the best in all England. It is two-storey, 15th century, contemporary with the nave. Mortlock tells us that they were both built by wealthy Bury Abbey, who owned the living here. As at Beccles, it rises way above the south aisle, tower-like in itself.
A rood group of niches surmounts the shields of East Anglia above the door. More flank them. Mortlock says that the work began in the early 1430s, and the niches were filled by a bequest of 1473, suggesting that the porch was forty years in the making. The south aisle and chancel are slightly earlier, the north aisle slightly later, so it is the nave that promises us great things, and doesn't disappoint.
You step into cool darkness, and look up. It is breathtaking. This is Suffolk's most perfectly restored angel hammerbeam roof. It may not have the drama of Mildenhall, the exquisiteness of Blythburgh, the sheer mathematics of Needham Market, but it shows us in detail more than any other what the medieval imagination was aiming at. From the still, small silence of the church floor below, you look up into a great shout of praise. Here are hundreds of figures, both angelic and human. The profusion is ordered, as if some mighty hymn were in progress.
Paul Hocking thinks that it is a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus: We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord... To thee all Angels cry aloud, the Heavens, and all the Powers therein. To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry Holy Holy Holy Lord God of Sabaoth... The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee, the noble army of Martyrs praise thee...
I know this, because he told me so. I was busy photographing bench ends when this very enthusiastic American bounced in with another visitor, and gave him a whistlestop tour of the church, describing the details with great knowledge and understanding. Solicitously, he talked to me afterwards about what I was doing, and asked me if I'd met the Rector of Woolpit yet. I said that I went out of my way to avoid Rectors wherever possible. He laughed, and replied that, on this occasion, I'd failed, because he was, in fact, the Rector.
After I'd coughed miserably, and he'd laughed again, we had a long chat, uncovering a few mutual aquaintances. He described the roof, which he has obviously spent a lot of time exploring. He pointed out the way the wall posts contained Saints, some with apostolic symbols, some with books, and some with martyr's palms. There are angels on the hammerbeams above, and bearing symbols below. John Blatchly counted 128 angels alone. Some of the shields have letters on them. Are they an acrostic, as on the east chancel wall at Blythburgh? Do they indicate individual Saints? The great Henry Ringham completely restored this roof in 1862, but Mortlock thinks that one of the angels is not his, and I agree - you'll find it in the south west corner. Paul Hocking argues that the restoration was nowhere near as complete as has been made out, and that many features are original.
Henry Ringham also restored the range of bench ends, by duplicating some of the medieval ones, as he did at Great Bealings and Tuddenham St Martin. All are rendered with his customary skill. If Ringham did restore this roof, then the imagery must have been destroyed at some point. One instinctively thinks of William Dowsing, the Puritan inspector of the churches of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, who progressed across the counties during the course of 1644. His delight in the destruction of angel roofs was matched only by that at the destruction of stained glass.
And Dowsing did visit this church. He arrived here in the afternoon of February 29th 1644. It was a Thursday, and he had come here across country from Helmingham, where he had found much to do. He also planned to visit Beyton that day, but in the end stayed overnight at the Bull hotel, and inspected All Saints there in the morning. He then rested for the weekend - the following week, he had a busy tour of southern Cambridgeshire ahead of him.
Dowsing records in great detail what he found to do at each church. In the case of Woolpit, the angel roof is the Dog That Didn't Bark: My Deputy. 80 superstitious pictures; some he brake down, and the rest he gave order to take down; and three crosses to be taken down in 20 days. 8s 6d. There are only two possible reasons why Dowsing doesn't mention the roof. Either he didn't notice it (extremely unlikely) or it had already been destroyed. This second option seems certain; mid-Suffolk was a strongly protestant area, and nearby Rougham, which clearly had a similar roof, was not visited by Dowsing, but was vandalised even more comprehensively than Woolpit. Most likely, the destruction at both churches dated from a hundred years earlier, although it is possible that the Rougham and Woolpit congregations had been puritan enough in the 1630s to do it to their own churches themselves.
Beneath the roof, the church is broad, its two aisles giving room for the panoply of medieval liturgical processions. At the east end of the south aisle was once the shrine of Our Lady of Woolpit, a site of medieval pilgrimage in connection with a nearby holy well. Apart from the front rows, many of the benches appear to be in their original positions. Some of the bench ends are 15th century, others are Ringham's 19th century copies. I wandered around the medieval bench ends, running my hands over them, crouching down and engaging them, face to face. For anyone educated in a Marxist or Weberian historical tradition, as most of my generation were, interpreting the less-obviously liturgical or theological features of a medieval church is fraught with difficulties. One possibility is to do a Cautley, and try not to interpret them at all. But it is more fun to try to do so, don't you think?
The bench ends of Woolpit are remarkable for their abundance. They are not representations of sacraments, virtues and vices as at Tannington and elsewhere, or Saints as at Ufford and Athelington. They are almost all non-allegorical animals, although not the art objects we find at Stowlangtoft, or the mysterious beasts of Lakenheath. Perhaps a good comparison is the similar body of work at nearby Combs. Indeed, although they do not appear to be from the same workshop, it is likely that their creators knew of each others' work. There are dogs, with geese hanging from their mouths, and another which may be a cat with a rat or lizard. There are lions and bears, and a chained monkey, and birds in profusion. So who did them, and why are they here?
There is one school of thought that says that they are simply there to beautify the church, and that they were made by local craftsmen doing what they were best at. If they could do lions, they did lions. If they could render a decent rabbit, then that is what they did. And so on.
But I think that there is rather more to it than that. On my journey down through France, I had spent an afternoon in one of my favourite towns, Autun, in Burgundy. One of the reasons I like Autun is its 11th century Cathedral of St-Lazaire; this is Lazurus, raised by Christ from the dead, and until the 18th century his relics were venerated at a shrine here. St-Lazaire is most famous for its great tympanum above the west door, generally recognised as one of the greatest Romanesque art treasures in the world, and with International Heritage status. It was created during the middle years of the 12th century, and shows the Last Judgement. To emphasise Christ's majesty over all the world, it features all manner of beasts, domestic, wild and mythical.
Throughout the Cathedral, animals infest the famous capitals, which tell the Gospel story. Abbe Denis Grivot, in his Un Bestiaire de la Cathedrale D'Autun (Lyon, 1973) argues that the 12th century creators of all this filled it with animals to echo the final verse of the 150th Psalm, the crowning point of that great sequence of hymns of praise: Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord!
Standing in the nave at Autun, I instantly recalled Paul Hocking's words about the roof at Woolpit, when he said he thought it was a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus. The Te Deum is one of the canticles; another is the Benedicite, traditionally sung through Lent: Oh all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him for ever... O ye whales, and all that move in the Waters, bless ye the Lord... O all ye Fowls of the air, bless ye the Lord... O all ye beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever!
Could it be that the bench ends at Woolpit, and elsewhere in Suffolk, were intended to reflect and represent the praise defined in the canticles and psalms? Both would have been central to the liturgy of the medieval Catholic church. Perhaps the bench ends of Woolpit are liturgical and theological after all.
How would a carpenter, or group of carpenters, go about creating a set of benches like the ones at Woolpit? Who were they? Almost certainly, they were locals. They might have been itinerant jobbing carpenters, but I don't think so. The bench ends at adjacent Tostock are clearly by the same hand. But those at nearby Stowlangtoft and Norton are not, and a third hand seems to be responsible for those at Combs, as I previously mentioned. I do not think that the mutilated ones at Rougham and Elmswell are either; they were probably from the same workshop as each other.
So, we have a conscious attempt by skilled members of a community to create a hymn of praise in carved oak, by representing as many beasts as they felt capable of making. Where did they get their ideas from? They would have had no problems with oxen, cocks, conies - these were all around them, in their daily lives. The person who carved the hunting dog here was very familiar with it. Perhaps it was his own. What about monkeys and lions? These are more problematic. In medieval bestiaries, exotic creatures had fabulous legends attached to them, which gave them a theological symbolism.
But this symbolism doesn't usually seem intended when we see them on bench ends. Sometimes they are rendered accurately, but more often wild animals are fairly imaginary; I think particularly of Barningham's camel, and Hadleigh's wolf. It isn't enough to say that the carvers could have seen pictures of exotic beasts. This is fairly unlikely. Probably, the ordinary people of Woolpit never saw a book other than the missals, lectionaries and hagiographies used in church.
They might have seen pictures of lions and monkeys in wall paintings, either in other churches or here at Woolpit. They might have seen them carved in bench ends, for the same reason. In fact, the representation of wild animals varies so much as to suggest that this is not the case - compare, for example, the lions of Combs with those of Stowlangtoft. Probably, they were created in the imagination from descriptions and attributes in stories. But I think that there is a strong possibility that the woodcarvers of Woolpit did see lions and monkeys in real life.
Here in Catholic Southern Europe, there are many remote small towns which, by virtue of being so very far from each other, take on a rich and complex life of their own. Even small villages have their shops, their craftsmen, their tradespeople; they replicate a situation that existed in Suffolk until well into the 19th century, and in some cases beyond, before the great industrialisation and easy transport swept it away. Further, there are traditions here still that we have lost. Whenever I come here, I am fascinated by the itinerant entertainers, who move from village to village, giving a single performance befre moving on. This must also once have been true of England. The thing that fascinates me most is the multitude of small family circuses.
Many of them seem to be of Italian or Romany origin; all family members have multiple roles, from the oldest grandparent to the youngest child, selling tickets, doing acrobatics, being the straight men to the clown (who is typically Grandpa). They all put up the tent before the performance, and take it down afterwards. They move on, through the remote hills of Provence and the Languedoc, performing on village greens, wastegrounds, the corners of fields, even traffic islands.
As I say, I am fascinated, and can rarely resist them, even though I am shocked, even appalled, by the easy cruelty to animals. Performing animals are still often chosen for their curiosity value, if you can call running around in a circle to the crack of a whip 'performing', poor things.
The choices are strange indeed; camels and zebras often feature; I have seen an old bear on a chain, and at one circus in remote Languedoc a hippopotamus of all things - it caught bread thrown by the crowd. There was no safety fence between the seats and the ring, no Health and Safety Executive to penetrate these lost valleys. I do not know if such circuses existed in medieval Suffolk. But I think that they probably did. Suffolk is a maritime county, and exotic animals were widely known and exhibited in medieval Europe. Before the Protestant Reformation cut us of from the mainland, clerics and merchants thought of themselves as European, and travelled widely - English sovereignty was a hazy concept at best, and 'Britishness' was still centuries away from being formulated as an idea. People owed allegiance to their village, their parish, and their lord, not to the Crown and Parliament in London.
Were the woodcarvers of Woolpit and Tostock remembering this? A circus visit, perhaps back in their childhood? Exotic animals rendered inaccurately, to be sure, but with an enthusiastic nostalgia for that exciting moment in their lives? Was there a lion? A monkey, or a bear? How much more powerful if they also knew the fabulous legends about the beasts - and had seen them in real life!
Some of the carvings at Woolpit are allegorical. One shows a monkey dressed in monk's robes. This, I think, is a joke at the expense of the itinerant friars who went from parish to parish, preaching repentance in the streets. They were sanctioned by the Pope, but were beyond the jurisdiction of the local Bishop. They didn't always go down well with the local Priest and congregation, who considered the Friars nosey and hypocritical. A monkey is often a symbol of foolish vanity - hence, a Friar thinking he was better than anyone else. What better way to make the point than to slip him in as one of the creatures praising the Lord?
How did they survive? But why should they have been destroyed? We make the mistake of thinking of the Puritans as vandals. But the more you read about William Dowsing, the more he emerges as being a principled, conservative kind of chap, despite his clearly flawed and fundamentalist theological opinions. He had no reason to destroy animal bench ends. They weren't superstitious - even Dowsing didn't think Catholics worshipped animals. If he didn't think they were meant to represent the canticles, he wouldn't even have considered them religious. Amen to that.
So much for the 17th century. What about the 19th? St Mary is one of the most enthusiastically restored of Suffolk's churches, despite its survivng medieval detail. But it was done well. Mortlock thought that the 19th century pulpit was the work of Ringham - but the brass lectern is pre-Reformation, a fine example. The rood screen dado panels have sentimental 19th century Saints on them, that may or may not duplicate what was there before. They are actually very good, particularly the gorgeous Mary of Magdala. They have their names painted on the cross beams for the less hagiologically articulate Victorians - from left to right across the aisle they are Saints Barbara, Felix, Mary of Magdala, Peter, Paul, Mary, Edmund and Etheldreda. It is unlikely that Saint Felix would have been on a medieval roodscreen, and Mary almost certainly wasn't - it would have relegated her to a position of no more importance than the others. If it reflects anything of what was there before, it was probably St Anne with the infant Virgin.
The top part of the screen was renewed in 1750, and dated so. The gates are probably a Laudian imposition of 120 years earlier, as at Kedington. This may suggest that, by the time of Dowsing's visit, the chancel was being used for some other practical purpose. Above, high above, set in the east nave wall over the chancel arch, is one of the wierdest objects I've seen in a medieval church. It was installed in the 1870s, and is clearly meant to echo the coving of a rood loft. Goodness knows what it actually is, but it is painted in garish colours, and inscribed with texts. In one of those moments where Cautley and credibility part company, he describes anyone who doesn't think it is a genuine medieval canopy of honour as 'stupid'. I suppose that it has a certain curiosity value.
The three-light window above it would have given light to the rood. The east window contains one of Suffolk's best modern Madonna and child images which was made by the artist Ian Keen for the King workshop in the early 1960s. Ian Keen was also responsible for the beautiful St Margaret in St Margaret's church in Norwich, and for the memorable window of St Francis with a labrador at Somerleyton near Lowestoft.
I turned back westwards, past a superb medieval bench end of the three Marys. This is a delight, and you'd travel to London to see it if it was in the V&A. Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James and Mary of Magdala huddle together, perhaps on the morning of the Resurrection. One of them has a lily of the Annunciation. One head is destroyed - but was it vandalised? Or is it the result of carelessness, the wear and tear of the centuries? Would 17th century puritans have destroyed it if they'd seen it?
Dowsing rarely mentions bench ends, so perhaps few were left by then anyway. So how could it possibly have survived the violent zeal of the 16th century Protestants, battering the Church of England into existence with their axes, pikes and bonfires? How, even after the 1540 edict of Edward VI which ordered the destruction of all statues and images of Saints, especially those of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is it still there at all?
Still more questions than answers, I suppose. I dived beneath the water, and there was beneath me a restless current, shifting and reshifting the silver sand into unique patterns, the work of millennia, still changing, never the same.
- le Rayol Canadel, Cote d'Azur, August 2001.
I think in Simon's list of 50 best Suffolk churches, Woolpit comes in at number 31. It is now that I remember that I cannot remember why I should go to Woolpit on what would be the last of the EA church visits this year, as Mum was home and in the care of the district nurse, and there was nothing else we could do, not in actions, money or time given. She really has to stand on her own two feet now.
Anyway; Woolpit.
I decided to go, and after looking on the map I saw that with some create route planning, I could go down the 143, then double back and join the A14 eastwards before turning south down our old friend, the A12.
On the way I did also visit Stowlangtoft, which was a wonderful church, a church filled with wonderful things that seemed to hang together as a whole. Woolpit would have to be something special to trup St George.
And it nearly did. Nearly. Woolpit is a picture perfect village, all timber framed buildings, narrow lanes and impossible to park in. I drove through it finding a kind of space just past the church. I could see from the tower and building it was a church on which the Victorians had been very busy.
Most glorious is Mary's roof; double hammerbeam adorned with 208 angels one of the wardens told me. It had been counted several times during a dull sermon. Or two.
The wardens were building the crib for Christmas, so were using a pallet as a base, or something like that. I didn't see it finished, but Ken Bruce was booming out from a radio, preaching the Gospel According to Popmaster to all who would listen.
The angels in the roof and on the walls of the church are indeed impressive, as is the rood screen, but not sure if they are original. There are carved pew ends aplenty, but to my eye, not as well carved or as old as at Stowlangtoft. I could be wrong. But I snap a few anyway.
But I received a warm welcome here, and it is a fantastic church for me.
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2008: Woolpit is a village which I often visit, and it is always a pleasure to go into the church. But the entry for St Mary was one of the last on the original Suffolk Churches site, making its appearance in late 2001. In fact, I think it was the last of the old-style entries. I was getting a bit wordy by then.
Woolpit was one of the longest entries, and this wasn't just because there is so much to see. I went off at a great tangent about the meaning of medieval iconography, and how it survived the Reformation. It certainly got some thoughts clear in my own head, even if it confused other people. I actually wrote the entry in the back of an old exercise book sitting outside a café on the Cote d'Azur in southern France. Reading that back, it seems a little pretentious, but I really was there. Here in Ipswich on a frosty February evening, I can't help remembering the heat as I scrawled in the pad.
I've left the original entry almost entirely as it was, apart from the removal of one absolute howler, which I won't mention. I am not sure if Woolpit still has a Sunday market, and I am sure that someone will tell me if it has not. Paul Hocking is no longer Rector of Woolpit, but to my eyes the church continues to go from strength to strength, feeling at once busy and at the heart of its community, the still centre of a busy village. I like it very much.
2001: The clear blue waters of the Mediterranean swirl around my legs, then past me, buffeting the rocks along the silver beach. Millions of tiny flecks of mica swarm through the current, washed out of the hills of Southern Provence. They shine for a fraction of a second with all the light the high summer sun can give, a universe caught in a moment; then turn, disappearing, making of the water a shimmering skein, an ancient memory.
The sea is at the start of all European civilisation. Here, history wells about me. I think of Europe, and the fragmentation of nations. I think of the Balkans, and the Reformation, and the same water surrounding, tending, isolating. I think of time passing.
A week before, I'd been standing in the cool nave of the church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, Woolpit - or at least, that is what it probably was once, back then. Today, it is dedicated simply as 'St Mary', in common with the majority of Suffolk's medieval churches, among which it is one of the finest, some say. This is mostly by virtue of its beautiful porch, and extraordinary angel roof.
But is that true? For there are those who love this church that, perhaps, never look up at the porch or roof. Is it the plethora of 15th century bench ends that captures the imagination? Or could it be Richard Phipson's outrageous 1850s tower and lacy spire, straight out of the Nene Valley, its evangelistic slogans around the side in a Victorian equivalent of Piccadilly Circus neon? It ought not to work, and yet it does. Or is it that supremely articulate view to the east, perfect of proportion despite the stripping away of its medieval liturgical apparatus? Above all else, and above most others, this is a church with presence.
It was the bench ends that I was thinking of as I immersed myself out of the intensity of the Provencal sun. A number of questions occured to me, as they have done on other occasions, in other churches. Who made them? What did they mean by them? And how did they survive the iconoclasms of the Protestant Reformation? Here in Southern Europe, I thought I might have found some answers.
Woolpit, then. It is perhaps the most perfect of all Suffolk villages. Not sleepy, and chocolate boxy, but to actually live in. Its shops and pubs are arranged around the pleasant village square, and Phipson's crazy spire towers above them. Woolpit still has its school, and you wouldn't need to get in the car every time you needed a loaf of bread, as you'd have to do in some of Suffolk's more famously picturesque villages, like Kersey and Tuddenham. And Woolpit has its Sunday market, beloved of hundreds of non-sabbatarian junk-hunters each week.
Further, Woolpit has its mythology; the two green children, who climbed out of the ground, speaking a strange language and afraid of the sunlight. The boy died soon after, but the girl grew up and married; she learned to speak English, and told of St Martin's Land, from where she and her brother had emerged. There are holes in the ground around Woolpit, quarries where bricks were made in the 19th century. But perhaps there was once something much older, for every Suffolk schoolchild knows that the name 'Woolpit' is nothing to do with wool, but with the wolves that once lived in the pits here...
So, it is a well-known village. It is because of this as much as anything about St Mary itself that makes this church so well-known to people who haven't heard of the even more interesting and beautiful church of St Ethelbert, Hessett, barely three miles away.
Your first sight of St Mary will be Phipson's crazy spire, visible from miles away, and quite unlike anything else in East Anglia. Suffolk is a county where spires are rare enough, anyway. From the far side of the Gipping valley you can see this one and two others, piercing the soft harvest mist in autumn. They are Phipson's equally absurd Great Finborough, and the 1990s blade of St Peter and St Mary, Stowmarket. There are only about a dozen more in the whole of the county. The excuse for this one was that the tower was struck by lightning in 1852, bringing down the previous lead and timber affair (presumably like the one at Hadleigh). The font is contemporary with the tower, suggesting that the old one was destroyed by the fall.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the artist John Piper produced a series of screen prints of aspects of Suffolk churches; for most, he used the fine perpendicular tower, ramifying it in bold Festival of Britain primary colours. But for Woolpit, he chose the porch, because it is Suffolk's finest. Cautley thought it the best in all England. It is two-storey, 15th century, contemporary with the nave. Mortlock tells us that they were both built by wealthy Bury Abbey, who owned the living here. As at Beccles, it rises way above the south aisle, tower-like in itself.
A rood group of niches surmounts the shields of East Anglia above the door. More flank them. Mortlock says that the work began in the early 1430s, and the niches were filled by a bequest of 1473, suggesting that the porch was forty years in the making. The south aisle and chancel are slightly earlier, the north aisle slightly later, so it is the nave that promises us great things, and doesn't disappoint.
You step into cool darkness, and look up. It is breathtaking. This is Suffolk's most perfectly restored angel hammerbeam roof. It may not have the drama of Mildenhall, the exquisiteness of Blythburgh, the sheer mathematics of Needham Market, but it shows us in detail more than any other what the medieval imagination was aiming at. From the still, small silence of the church floor below, you look up into a great shout of praise. Here are hundreds of figures, both angelic and human. The profusion is ordered, as if some mighty hymn were in progress.
Paul Hocking thinks that it is a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus: We praise thee, O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord... To thee all Angels cry aloud, the Heavens, and all the Powers therein. To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry Holy Holy Holy Lord God of Sabaoth... The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee, the goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee, the noble army of Martyrs praise thee...
I know this, because he told me so. I was busy photographing bench ends when this very enthusiastic American bounced in with another visitor, and gave him a whistlestop tour of the church, describing the details with great knowledge and understanding. Solicitously, he talked to me afterwards about what I was doing, and asked me if I'd met the Rector of Woolpit yet. I said that I went out of my way to avoid Rectors wherever possible. He laughed, and replied that, on this occasion, I'd failed, because he was, in fact, the Rector.
After I'd coughed miserably, and he'd laughed again, we had a long chat, uncovering a few mutual aquaintances. He described the roof, which he has obviously spent a lot of time exploring. He pointed out the way the wall posts contained Saints, some with apostolic symbols, some with books, and some with martyr's palms. There are angels on the hammerbeams above, and bearing symbols below. John Blatchly counted 128 angels alone. Some of the shields have letters on them. Are they an acrostic, as on the east chancel wall at Blythburgh? Do they indicate individual Saints? The great Henry Ringham completely restored this roof in 1862, but Mortlock thinks that one of the angels is not his, and I agree - you'll find it in the south west corner. Paul Hocking argues that the restoration was nowhere near as complete as has been made out, and that many features are original.
Henry Ringham also restored the range of bench ends, by duplicating some of the medieval ones, as he did at Great Bealings and Tuddenham St Martin. All are rendered with his customary skill. If Ringham did restore this roof, then the imagery must have been destroyed at some point. One instinctively thinks of William Dowsing, the Puritan inspector of the churches of Cambridgeshire and Suffolk, who progressed across the counties during the course of 1644. His delight in the destruction of angel roofs was matched only by that at the destruction of stained glass.
And Dowsing did visit this church. He arrived here in the afternoon of February 29th 1644. It was a Thursday, and he had come here across country from Helmingham, where he had found much to do. He also planned to visit Beyton that day, but in the end stayed overnight at the Bull hotel, and inspected All Saints there in the morning. He then rested for the weekend - the following week, he had a busy tour of southern Cambridgeshire ahead of him.
Dowsing records in great detail what he found to do at each church. In the case of Woolpit, the angel roof is the Dog That Didn't Bark: My Deputy. 80 superstitious pictures; some he brake down, and the rest he gave order to take down; and three crosses to be taken down in 20 days. 8s 6d. There are only two possible reasons why Dowsing doesn't mention the roof. Either he didn't notice it (extremely unlikely) or it had already been destroyed. This second option seems certain; mid-Suffolk was a strongly protestant area, and nearby Rougham, which clearly had a similar roof, was not visited by Dowsing, but was vandalised even more comprehensively than Woolpit. Most likely, the destruction at both churches dated from a hundred years earlier, although it is possible that the Rougham and Woolpit congregations had been puritan enough in the 1630s to do it to their own churches themselves.
Beneath the roof, the church is broad, its two aisles giving room for the panoply of medieval liturgical processions. At the east end of the south aisle was once the shrine of Our Lady of Woolpit, a site of medieval pilgrimage in connection with a nearby holy well. Apart from the front rows, many of the benches appear to be in their original positions. Some of the bench ends are 15th century, others are Ringham's 19th century copies. I wandered around the medieval bench ends, running my hands over them, crouching down and engaging them, face to face. For anyone educated in a Marxist or Weberian historical tradition, as most of my generation were, interpreting the less-obviously liturgical or theological features of a medieval church is fraught with difficulties. One possibility is to do a Cautley, and try not to interpret them at all. But it is more fun to try to do so, don't you think?
The bench ends of Woolpit are remarkable for their abundance. They are not representations of sacraments, virtues and vices as at Tannington and elsewhere, or Saints as at Ufford and Athelington. They are almost all non-allegorical animals, although not the art objects we find at Stowlangtoft, or the mysterious beasts of Lakenheath. Perhaps a good comparison is the similar body of work at nearby Combs. Indeed, although they do not appear to be from the same workshop, it is likely that their creators knew of each others' work. There are dogs, with geese hanging from their mouths, and another which may be a cat with a rat or lizard. There are lions and bears, and a chained monkey, and birds in profusion. So who did them, and why are they here?
There is one school of thought that says that they are simply there to beautify the church, and that they were made by local craftsmen doing what they were best at. If they could do lions, they did lions. If they could render a decent rabbit, then that is what they did. And so on.
But I think that there is rather more to it than that. On my journey down through France, I had spent an afternoon in one of my favourite towns, Autun, in Burgundy. One of the reasons I like Autun is its 11th century Cathedral of St-Lazaire; this is Lazurus, raised by Christ from the dead, and until the 18th century his relics were venerated at a shrine here. St-Lazaire is most famous for its great tympanum above the west door, generally recognised as one of the greatest Romanesque art treasures in the world, and with International Heritage status. It was created during the middle years of the 12th century, and shows the Last Judgement. To emphasise Christ's majesty over all the world, it features all manner of beasts, domestic, wild and mythical.
Throughout the Cathedral, animals infest the famous capitals, which tell the Gospel story. Abbe Denis Grivot, in his Un Bestiaire de la Cathedrale D'Autun (Lyon, 1973) argues that the 12th century creators of all this filled it with animals to echo the final verse of the 150th Psalm, the crowning point of that great sequence of hymns of praise: Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord!
Standing in the nave at Autun, I instantly recalled Paul Hocking's words about the roof at Woolpit, when he said he thought it was a representation of the Te Deum Laudamus. The Te Deum is one of the canticles; another is the Benedicite, traditionally sung through Lent: Oh all ye Works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him for ever... O ye whales, and all that move in the Waters, bless ye the Lord... O all ye Fowls of the air, bless ye the Lord... O all ye beasts and Cattle, bless ye the Lord: praise him, and magnify him for ever!
Could it be that the bench ends at Woolpit, and elsewhere in Suffolk, were intended to reflect and represent the praise defined in the canticles and psalms? Both would have been central to the liturgy of the medieval Catholic church. Perhaps the bench ends of Woolpit are liturgical and theological after all.
How would a carpenter, or group of carpenters, go about creating a set of benches like the ones at Woolpit? Who were they? Almost certainly, they were locals. They might have been itinerant jobbing carpenters, but I don't think so. The bench ends at adjacent Tostock are clearly by the same hand. But those at nearby Stowlangtoft and Norton are not, and a third hand seems to be responsible for those at Combs, as I previously mentioned. I do not think that the mutilated ones at Rougham and Elmswell are either; they were probably from the same workshop as each other.
So, we have a conscious attempt by skilled members of a community to create a hymn of praise in carved oak, by representing as many beasts as they felt capable of making. Where did they get their ideas from? They would have had no problems with oxen, cocks, conies - these were all around them, in their daily lives. The person who carved the hunting dog here was very familiar with it. Perhaps it was his own. What about monkeys and lions? These are more problematic. In medieval bestiaries, exotic creatures had fabulous legends attached to them, which gave them a theological symbolism.
But this symbolism doesn't usually seem intended when we see them on bench ends. Sometimes they are rendered accurately, but more often wild animals are fairly imaginary; I think particularly of Barningham's camel, and Hadleigh's wolf. It isn't enough to say that the carvers could have seen pictures of exotic beasts. This is fairly unlikely. Probably, the ordinary people of Woolpit never saw a book other than the missals, lectionaries and hagiographies used in church.
They might have seen pictures of lions and monkeys in wall paintings, either in other churches or here at Woolpit. They might have seen them carved in bench ends, for the same reason. In fact, the representation of wild animals varies so much as to suggest that this is not the case - compare, for example, the lions of Combs with those of Stowlangtoft. Probably, they were created in the imagination from descriptions and attributes in stories. But I think that there is a strong possibility that the woodcarvers of Woolpit did see lions and monkeys in real life.
Here in Catholic Southern Europe, there are many remote small towns which, by virtue of being so very far from each other, take on a rich and complex life of their own. Even small villages have their shops, their craftsmen, their tradespeople; they replicate a situation that existed in Suffolk until well into the 19th century, and in some cases beyond, before the great industrialisation and easy transport swept it away. Further, there are traditions here still that we have lost. Whenever I come here, I am fascinated by the itinerant entertainers, who move from village to village, giving a single performance befre moving on. This must also once have been true of England. The thing that fascinates me most is the multitude of small family circuses.
Many of them seem to be of Italian or Romany origin; all family members have multiple roles, from the oldest grandparent to the youngest child, selling tickets, doing acrobatics, being the straight men to the clown (who is typically Grandpa). They all put up the tent before the performance, and take it down afterwards. They move on, through the remote hills of Provence and the Languedoc, performing on village greens, wastegrounds, the corners of fields, even traffic islands.
As I say, I am fascinated, and can rarely resist them, even though I am shocked, even appalled, by the easy cruelty to animals. Performing animals are still often chosen for their curiosity value, if you can call running around in a circle to the crack of a whip 'performing', poor things.
The choices are strange indeed; camels and zebras often feature; I have seen an old bear on a chain, and at one circus in remote Languedoc a hippopotamus of all things - it caught bread thrown by the crowd. There was no safety fence between the seats and the ring, no Health and Safety Executive to penetrate these lost valleys. I do not know if such circuses existed in medieval Suffolk. But I think that they probably did. Suffolk is a maritime county, and exotic animals were widely known and exhibited in medieval Europe. Before the Protestant Reformation cut us of from the mainland, clerics and merchants thought of themselves as European, and travelled widely - English sovereignty was a hazy concept at best, and 'Britishness' was still centuries away from being formulated as an idea. People owed allegiance to their village, their parish, and their lord, not to the Crown and Parliament in London.
Were the woodcarvers of Woolpit and Tostock remembering this? A circus visit, perhaps back in their childhood? Exotic animals rendered inaccurately, to be sure, but with an enthusiastic nostalgia for that exciting moment in their lives? Was there a lion? A monkey, or a bear? How much more powerful if they also knew the fabulous legends about the beasts - and had seen them in real life!
Some of the carvings at Woolpit are allegorical. One shows a monkey dressed in monk's robes. This, I think, is a joke at the expense of the itinerant friars who went from parish to parish, preaching repentance in the streets. They were sanctioned by the Pope, but were beyond the jurisdiction of the local Bishop. They didn't always go down well with the local Priest and congregation, who considered the Friars nosey and hypocritical. A monkey is often a symbol of foolish vanity - hence, a Friar thinking he was better than anyone else. What better way to make the point than to slip him in as one of the creatures praising the Lord?
How did they survive? But why should they have been destroyed? We make the mistake of thinking of the Puritans as vandals. But the more you read about William Dowsing, the more he emerges as being a principled, conservative kind of chap, despite his clearly flawed and fundamentalist theological opinions. He had no reason to destroy animal bench ends. They weren't superstitious - even Dowsing didn't think Catholics worshipped animals. If he didn't think they were meant to represent the canticles, he wouldn't even have considered them religious. Amen to that.
So much for the 17th century. What about the 19th? St Mary is one of the most enthusiastically restored of Suffolk's churches, despite its survivng medieval detail. But it was done well. Mortlock thought that the 19th century pulpit was the work of Ringham - but the brass lectern is pre-Reformation, a fine example. The rood screen dado panels have sentimental 19th century Saints on them, that may or may not duplicate what was there before. They are actually very good, particularly the gorgeous Mary of Magdala. They have their names painted on the cross beams for the less hagiologically articulate Victorians - from left to right across the aisle they are Saints Barbara, Felix, Mary of Magdala, Peter, Paul, Mary, Edmund and Etheldreda. It is unlikely that Saint Felix would have been on a medieval roodscreen, and Mary almost certainly wasn't - it would have relegated her to a position of no more importance than the others. If it reflects anything of what was there before, it was probably St Anne with the infant Virgin.
The top part of the screen was renewed in 1750, and dated so. The gates are probably a Laudian imposition of 120 years earlier, as at Kedington. This may suggest that, by the time of Dowsing's visit, the chancel was being used for some other practical purpose. Above, high above, set in the east nave wall over the chancel arch, is one of the wierdest objects I've seen in a medieval church. It was installed in the 1870s, and is clearly meant to echo the coving of a rood loft. Goodness knows what it actually is, but it is painted in garish colours, and inscribed with texts. In one of those moments where Cautley and credibility part company, he describes anyone who doesn't think it is a genuine medieval canopy of honour as 'stupid'. I suppose that it has a certain curiosity value.
The three-light window above it would have given light to the rood. The east window contains one of Suffolk's best modern Madonna and child images which was made by the artist Ian Keen for the King workshop in the early 1960s. Ian Keen was also responsible for the beautiful St Margaret in St Margaret's church in Norwich, and for the memorable window of St Francis with a labrador at Somerleyton near Lowestoft.
I turned back westwards, past a superb medieval bench end of the three Marys. This is a delight, and you'd travel to London to see it if it was in the V&A. Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary the mother of James and Mary of Magdala huddle together, perhaps on the morning of the Resurrection. One of them has a lily of the Annunciation. One head is destroyed - but was it vandalised? Or is it the result of carelessness, the wear and tear of the centuries? Would 17th century puritans have destroyed it if they'd seen it?
Dowsing rarely mentions bench ends, so perhaps few were left by then anyway. So how could it possibly have survived the violent zeal of the 16th century Protestants, battering the Church of England into existence with their axes, pikes and bonfires? How, even after the 1540 edict of Edward VI which ordered the destruction of all statues and images of Saints, especially those of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is it still there at all?
Still more questions than answers, I suppose. I dived beneath the water, and there was beneath me a restless current, shifting and reshifting the silver sand into unique patterns, the work of millennia, still changing, never the same.
- le Rayol Canadel, Cote d'Azur, August 2001.
Pribeta, 2003
'Don't eat anything you are not willing to kill yourself!' -said a hypocrite.
It's the 21st century, globalisation is thriving, people go by their highly specialised daily business and to be honest hunting and gathering is not on the top of our to-do list. Luckily, 'the dirty job' has been taken off our hands, but we must remember to treat meat with respect.
The world is in deep trouble
the wonderful optimistic and happy news update in 2025:
1. Journalists are now activiists.........
The truth is hidden and no longer the truth............
2. Common sense has gone out the window.........
3. News is not news anymore
its entertainment
4. Politicians/aka HYPOCRITES enrich themselves
and forget the reasons they were elected.
and fYI
A significant portion of the world's poor, around 455 million, live in countries experiencing conflict or fragility, according to a UN-backed study. This represents nearly 40% of the 1.1 billion people living in acute poverty globally. These individuals face significantly harsher deprivations in basic needs compared to those in poverty who live in peaceful settings.
The human crisis in Sudan is the world's largest humanitarian crisis, marked by a devastating civil war, mass displacement, and a crumbling health system. Millions are facing starvation, and widespread diseases like cholera are spreading rapidly. The conflict has led to the forced displacement of over 12 million people, with the country's health infrastructure collapsing.
NOT MUCH HAS CHANGED SINCE THIS COMPOSITE WAS FIRST POSTED.
I lived on the island HISPANOLA for 4 years.
it is shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
I lived a stones throw from the slums of San Pedro de Macoris
where electricity and water shut off daily for hours in the entire city.
Haiti has no government, gangs shoot gangs who shoot other gangs midday and the hot sun rots the corpses.
As of April 18, 2025, one troy ounce of gold is worth $3,322.92. The price has seen recent increases, reaching a maximum of $3,357.54 on April 17, 2025.
in
Man Hat Tan
Photography’s new conscience
This photo was very certainly taken with my brand spankin' new D300. Which is beautiful. And how I missed RAW.
--
So you closed your eyes and dreamed your heart to a safer place
And smiled for awhile with a brand new style and a change of pace.
What a beautiful cover, a talk show makeover, and you'll lose some weight.
But if you wanna get well then why the hell do you hesitate?
Listen to yourself. The king of hypocrites
Who do you think you are you ain't foolin' shit
But if you keep preaching then you might just believe it
(The Littlest Man Band - Always Sayin')
//========================
I have challenged Myself to take 365 days of self portraits, this account is specifically for that purpose.
My main account is todderick42
7/11/08 : PM
The art of war or the tools of Collateral Damage
Any weapon that has triggers, buttons, LCD screens, joysticks, levers, switches, pedals or any other form of ‘human delegates to machine to kill human’ mode of operation is a weapon to be used mostly against civilians.
For the 1000 comments I received that rime with ‘terrorists hiding between civilians’, and regardless of the interpretation of the intentions of the people pulling the triggers, all modern weaponry are fundamentally designed to kill civilians, not soldiers! It’s with much hypocrisy that countries, defense contractors and armies say that they are out there to minimize civilian casualty, for they have never been able to! Battles are never confined to a field in the desert, they are always fought over and/or to control civilian areas!
With the smallest automatic weapon, one man can shoot 40 bullets in few minutes, 40 bullets can potentially kill 40 men. If each solider can potentially kill 40 men, then an army equipped with the smallest weapons can potentially kill 40 times its size! Those weapons have an ‘intrinsic’ potential allowing them to always extend their reach beyond the opponents ‘protected’ army and to extort a much higher cost from the more ‘vulnerable’ civilians!
The Math of modern warfare and weapons is freaky, and regardless of the declared intentions, these little geeky marvels with fancy names (and smart adjectives), auto-manage, every time, to claim back their role as mass civilian exterminators! And this always happens despite the sour, the sorry and the apologetic... All of them!
At the end, Soldiers are the only collateral damage in wars! The rest is the real intended damage…
Dissuasive arms and preemptive wars
The race for those increasingly more lethal weapons is always made while convincing the masses with the hypocritical alibi of strategic balance, dissuasion and strategic peace! In reality it is only a mater of postponing a conflict until you get a much bigger stick!
From the womb of dissuasion, mad-strategists (scarier than mad-scientists) who think straight out of their butts have been preaching the ‘benefits’ and ‘moral correctness’ of preemptive strikes. BS on the side, this is only fostered by their arrogant belief that having a much, much, much longer stick (that happens to work by pushing buttons nowadays) can neutralize a potentially, potential, potentialicious threat. As for verifying whether the potential for the threat would concretize! Why bother?! ‘If you have the strategic dissuasive advantage, don’t sleep on it! Use it!’, it’s cheaper than verifying anything… and it’s boring to wait anyway! Not to forget that, at some point, they also need a ‘when and where’ to test the XXX Billion dollars in offense (defense for them) technology invested every year and to generate new demand! (…And what country boasts about its huge defense industry despite its little size?)
One of the dimensions of the latest war over Lebanon was, also, a pre-emptive strike to neutralize the elusive potential of Iran waging war against Israel and using the ridiculously long stick of the Israeli air force against Hizbollah bases. Needless to say, that once again, the collateral damage on the armed Hizbollah soldiers was low, while the real and painful damage was only imposed on civilians and their infrastructure.
My ‘last war related post’ wish list
When I wrote my first anti-war posting, I didn’t suspect the aggression would last that long nor I thought that I would transform my photo stream into an open anti-war blog.
As the circle of violence expanded, my anger and my pessimism grew with it. The latest events since the 2nd Intifada and the Iraq invasion were not good indicators that such adventures in our region and especially under the current worldwide power imbalance could be mastered at all.
Having the Neo-Cons in charge in the US, a mayor in charge in Tel-Aviv, another mayor in Tehran, weak and visibly resigned (to an un-dead peace) Arab governments and a weak “false” majority in charge in Lebanon were not at all reassuring factors.
I was fearing for the worst, I’m still somehow holding my breath and hoping that things would fall into place until all Israeli soldiers are out of Lebanon and the Lebanese army (and UN forces) take control of the south... But before I can breath a sigh of relief, I will also be crossing my fingers all the long it takes to:
- Israel stopping its regular aggressions into Lebanese territorial airspace and waters
- Lebanese prisoners in Israel (and newly abducted) being swapped against the abducted Israeli soldiers
- Israel refraining from any new -rash- actions such as the ones preached in the last defeat speech of its mayor, for under these conditions Hizbollah will not disarm!
- Lebanese democracy growing stronger as the dynamic forces of the country claim again the power from the current corrupted corruptors and their associates the lords of darkness and civil war
- Hizbollah and Palestinian camps disarm peacefully and a Lebanese national defense force is allowed to rise to the height of the threats and to constitute a stabilizing factor
And my extended wish list
But things being connected the way they are in our regional village, I figured, I will need to keep crossing my fingers even longer! For, as dreamy as the previous wishes are, their concretization will not -unfortunately- be enough to end our plight! We also would need in a not so distant future for:
- Zionism discovering that it made a historical mistake in assessment for the past 100 years and apologizing to its Arab and Jewish victims alike (could be a silent apology even, a thought would suffice maybe!)
- Zionism and Israel denouncing territorial expansion and accepting Israel into the pre-1967 borders (while curbing their drive for negotiatory acrobatics as it has been the case since Madrid accords)
- A Palestinian state under equitable terms is hatched (illegal settlements unsettled etc.)
- A just solution is offered for the Palestinian refugees, duly compensating them for their 60 years predicament and allowing them to -at least- optionally exercise the right of return to their motherland
- The US pulls out gracefully from a ‘civil-war free’ Iraq
- The Middle-East becomes WMD free (…and maybe the rest of the world could follow the next day)
- The clash of civilizations is remembered as a reference to a ‘McDonalds shops fight Falafel joints over market share’ type of situation or to the Olympic Games.
And other wishes too… such as the NeoCons in Washington renouncing to their pipe dreams and scheming and starting to comprehend that the real world is more intricate than what their ‘war games’ and ‘probabilities’ can show them. And while those games can be, nevertheless, a good form of entertainment to the expensive ‘Think tanks’ and ‘strategic consultants’, those people shouldn’t be encouraged to Think anymore that they can apply them to the rest of us each now and then.
I guess whoever is still reading up to here gets the point of why I’m pessimistic, for maybe the 1st bunch of wishes are realizable with lots of good luck but the 2nd are only wishful wishes in the current state of affairs… And meanwhile, the strategic luminaries are still thinking ‘Maybe the stick needs to grow longer’ before the next strike!
Yet there is stuff to feel good about
Flickr has given me the opportunity to meet lots of nice talented photographers, but this time and with this latest wave of war blogging, it gave me the opportunity to dramatically widen my circle. It was heart warming to read all the people from around the world that supported and defended Lebanon (and Palestine) and understood to a great degree the essence of the conflict. I am particularly thankful to the Israelis that did it (and all Israelis who left comments).
Maybe awareness and rising public opinion to the real issues are the magic cure! Maybe this last unique worldwide phenomenon in the history of Arab-Israeli conflict was what contributed into accelerating this happy ending (regardless of its fragility). Despite the sad and hefty toll, seeing the displaced go back to their villages so fast was in itself the most comforting scene!
The more the world public opinion gains insight into the roots and realities of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the more power is taken away from the scheming schemers and given to the real courageous peace builders on both sides of the divide... And that is not a wish this time but the duty for all!
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This anti-war poem was sent to me by a good friend. The text, written by an Israeli poet (Chanoch Levin), is very beautiful and eloquent. I already posted one of his poems earlier. Using his strong words again, was the best way for me to end this series.
Chess Game
Where is my child, my child where has he gone?
A black pawn is striking a white pawn.
Will not return my dad, my dad will not come home.
A white pawn is striking a black pawn.
Mourning in the rooms, and the garden is serene,
The king is playing with his queen.
My child will never wake, he shall sleep forevermore.
A black pawn is striking a white pawn.
My dad is in the dark, and will never see the sun.
A white pawn is striking a black pawn.
Mourning in the rooms, and the garden is serene,
The king is playing with his queen.
My child who's in my lap, now he's in a cloud.
A black pawn is striking a white pawn.
My dad's warm heart, now his heart is cold.
A white pawn is striking a black pawn.
Mourning in the rooms, and the garden is serene,
The king is playing with his queen.
Where is my child, my child where has he gone?
Fell down both black and white pawns.
Will not return my dad, my dad will not come home.
And there are no white or black pawns.
Mourning in the rooms, and the garden is serene;
On empty board remain just king and queen.
Chanoch Levin, 1968
Eric Garcetti is running on a platform of CHANGE, which is very original in 2009, eh?
Apparently, the first thing he's going to change is Barack Obama's logo into his own.
Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
:
ERIC GARCETTI
changing LA....
Changing LA...Neighborhood by Neighborhood
Real change requires vigilance... the day-to-day conviction that energizes others to join in the fight; and the courage to lead the charge. That's what Eric Garcetti has done and will continue to do in our neighborhoods. Eric's commitment: to make every LA neighborhood healthier, safer, cleaner, and abundant with opportunity for everyone.
I tag Moonfairy's Dreamland (Mette) and MademoiselleBlythe (Fanny)
1.Basics: I am a 44 year old and act 24! I am the mother of two toddlers whjo you've all seen here, Caleb, 3 and Elspeth 2.
2. My favourite shows on TV were Twin Peaks by aDavid Lynch -and the current favs are Being Human, Miranda and a comedy which has finished its' first season called Psychoville (sort of dark comedy really)
3. My childrens names are as above: Caleb George and Elspeth Alice. My sister was really upset when i said my husband wanted to call our daughter Elsie Alice instead of Alice Elsie! Her name is Alice! Other names I liked were: Ariel, Gabriella, Oscar but we couldn't agree on those so i aquiesced:)
4.I studied at Uni a few times and have a Bachelor of Arts and a PostGraduate Diploma in Information Management and Library Studies. This is a long-winded way of saying i'm a trained Librarian.
5.My first job was obviously Babysitting for neighbours and a cafe assistant then when i got a real real job I was a waitress at Spaghetti Theatre in Melbourne. Then i was a Copy Editor at a Publishing House then worked in a few Libtraries in Melbourne. The in my thirties I had a job with a partner running a second hand and vintage/collectible shop in Brunswick, Melbourne
6.I think my attitude to children was always just one for me. I was doagnosed with Lupus when I was eighteen and it was recommended that I not attempt a pregnancy but as you can see my stubbornness won out in the end and i have TWO!!
7. I have been to Bali, Italy, England and in Australia I've vistied Darwin, Qld, Nsw, South Australia and now live in Tassie:)
8.My favourite bands are too many to mention but i am very fond of 80s gothic bands: Cure, Sisters of Mercy, Siouxie and the Banshees, also love Nick Cave, Vanessa Paradis and Emilie Simon (French)
9.When i was at Uni I used to run a radio show with my girlfriend doing the same course as me. We also ran a couple of shows on a Community Radio Station in Melbourne - U felt like a Rock Star!
10. I got married in a Church, was confirmed in an Anglican Church at 14 but now I'm not religious at all and I dont think I was then either:) I wanted to get married in a Church because it stamps a certain solemnity and tradition on the occassion and it was a beautiful service and venue:)
11. As you can see by my avatar Ruby Gloom is my little anime heroine:) She is brave, has a good sense of humour, great sense of fashion and enormous loyalty to friends and family.
12.My first boyfriend was really when I was in Year 10 making me 15 years. He was much more emotionally mature tha me and adored me whereas I am ashamed to say that whilst I really liked him a lot I was in that relationship to fit in with social and peer group pressure:) He was in a band which was ultra cool and very good looking and played the trombone (but played guitar in the band!) They were called Wasted Daze - how cute!! He was i year older than me btw
13.My favourite number is three and seven cause they're pretty
14. My family all knew about my first boyfriend and liked him, he was pretty ace!
15. Fashion wise, I love the surprise of eclectic, punky vintage clothes -of course this is a problem now because of my age! I mean I look at other women my age and think to myself -OMG! she shouldn't wear that at her age and stage!!! What a massive hypocrite i am! please forgive me
16.not sure what i'm being asked here -but I'm quite happy with myself and how I am although I have issues with hair - want it long, then short, then dyed then natural - I love a change!
17.Ihave no bad secrets i'm hiding except for my dollie purchases -too many and too often!
18. no, I dont have enough self-confidence but mostly feel good about me :)
19.The most hurtful thing anyone has said to me will not be repeated here - I was in an abusive relationship through my thirties and was too scared and too damaged to work my way out of that situation. It meant I was unable to see my family for around 3 years!! I was also unable to attend my eldest sister's wedding and didn't even know about it!! I am shocked now that I allowed this sipral downward to continue for so long - but I came down to Tasmania to live and am near family and indeed have started my own beautiful family - so everything looks pretty rosy for me and by comparison I am living in clover:) Yay!
20.My elder sis is my best friend but she lives interstate! We catch up a lot tho:)
21. I have friends here in Tas but we have enormous commitments to our respective families (with kids) so we dont catch up nearly enough! People think I have no confidence issues because I am very enthusiastic in a social situation - I think my 'extrovert' tendencies come from the exact opposite end of the spectrum -i am actually shy but it doesn't show:)
22.I read every night, its' my absolute fav pastime except for dollie and art stuff!
23.I love where i am at the moment in my life. Family and friends are good and new friends are going to be made:) My husband is a dream and my kids are unreal (and frustrating!)
24. I have books from childhood, nearly all my cards from when i was born and a little girl.
25. No pets- kids are enough:)
thanks for being friends with me!
The man whose picture is on the $10 Bill, Alexander Hamilton, is buried in Trinity Churchyard Cemetery, Broadway and Wall Street, New York City. He was killed by Aaron Burr in an infamous duel at Weehawken, New Jersey, after an alleged "insult" made to Burr by Hamilton. Hamilton was the cause of Burr losing the presidency to Thomas Jefferson and Burr subsequently lost the governorship of New York as well - because of Hamilton.
Far beyond "The Duel", Hamilton was a major figure in American history, ranked in that famous upper tier that includes Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Adams. Here are a few interesting items about Alexander Hamilton:
1. Hamilton was the first Secretary of the United States Treasury. He supported a national bank, an income tax, tariffs on imported products and was the most influential figure in having the United States government assume the debts of the state during the Revolutionary War, thus creating a large "national debt". He presided over the creation of the United States Mint. He was a founder of the Bank of New York, which is still active today as the "Bank of New York Mellon Corporation" and listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
2. Hamilton, a graduate of Columbia, was a Constitutional Lawyer - one of the first, of course - and the author of over 50 "Federalist Papers", which argued for the ratification of the United States Constitution. He was a founder of the New York Evening Post (yes, the now Rupert Murdoch-owned NY Post). "Founding Father" Hamilton was a congressman and signer of the Constitution - the only one from New York.
3. Hamilton, in addition to serving under George Washington in the Cabinet, was also a Lieutenant who served under Washington's command in the Revolutionary War, actively leading troops at the battle of Yorktown.
4. Hamilton was the most significant influence behind the early development of Paterson, New Jersey, my hometown. Paterson was an major manufacturing and industrial city in the early history of the United States, in accordance with Hamilton's plan. We still have over 150,000 people living in Paterson and it is his statue which stands above the Great Falls, the major Paterson Landmark.
5. Hamilton's personal life was interesting too! He was born out of wedlock on a small island in the West Indies.He had eight children with his wife Eliza (who shares his burial plot). His eldest son, Philip was also killed in a duel earlier. Alexander Hamilton also had at least one extensive documented affair and rumors of another. There are at least two historians who think he was bisexual because of some letters he wrote to a friend. He was anti-slavery in philosophy but returned at least one fugitive slave to his "owner" and was criticized as a hypocrite for this and other actions.
5. Hamilton was part of the process which created the first political parties. He was a founder of the "Federalist Party" - the party of Washington and Adams. The opposition gathered around Jefferson - The "Democratic-Republicans". Hamilton was a rival of Jefferson, Burr and Adams. He - as you might conclude - supported a strong central government.
Of all the founders of this country, Hamilton's vision of America is the one which is predominant today, for better or worse.
We live in Hamilton's America.
This city is at a crossroads. What is there to recommend it ? Take Massey from the equation and the city would die. There is much that is positive here, however, so why, apart from short term financial expediency ,would you despoil the environment and put your water supply at risk ? One answer can be found in the actions of our current mayor and his predecessor. Tanguay was beholden to political ideology and the political science of CO2, Naylor on the other hand is beholden to the city's uber rich who paid for his election campaign. Higgins who gave him $3,500 naturally expect him to continue to refuse to revisit the wind farm issue ( he voted for it in 2006 by the way ) as they stand to win contracts worth millions of dollars. That's worthy of 3rd world politics. Do we change the name of the city to "Palermo South " ? Shouldn't Naylor pay for his own shiny suits ? Still with an SOE anxious to rip off the locals by devaluing 2,000 houses on the Summerhill side of the city by 20 -30 % it comfortably fits in with the government's barmy Kyoto goal of wrecking the economy by trading in the odourless and invisible building block of life, CO2. The timing couldn't be more perfect either, just as we are about to enter a recession and a property slump. As residential property devalues PNCC will have to raise commercial rates to make up the shortfall. Won't those who champion " growth " be screaming then !!
Councillors who continue to support this utter stupidity will have nowhere to hide if the 120 -130 forty story turbines are ever installed.
BTW Ozjet have abandoned Palmerston North. That should save the environment from massive amounts of the "dreaded" CO2. It will also mean a substantial reduction in revenue for this PNCC owned airport ,so of course like a true hypocrite Naylor and his gang will now do everything in their power to get a replacement airline. With the city turned into a wind farm people will only come here to laugh at us. Save your money, folks, if it happens you'll see plenty of pics of the mess on the net !
Plenty on the "climate" here:
www.flickr.com/photos/thegreatoutdoors/344965723/
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Short circuits, friction or lightning strikes can cause wind turbines to go up in flames -- like this one in 2004. Fire fighters can often only stand around and watch, their ladders too short to do anything about it.
An event like this is the last thing needed in the Turitea Reserve. The ridge tops ot the Tarauas are very vulnerable to lightning strikes. 100 metre high steel columns will be very attractive to Mother Nature. Our last notable bush remnant could easily be incinerated and our water supply polluted. What was the Council smoking when they fell for this ? Today there are still people under the illusion that the Council will allow boating trips on the Turitea dams in the " eco park " Can't you just see the empty Chardonnay bottles bobbing along in our water supply ?? You can fool some of the people some of the time.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS.
1/ A 45 metre blade has fallen off one of the new Taraua 3 turbines.
2/ Property owners on the Pahaitua side of Tararua 3 have received a payout as compensation for unacceptable vibration and noise. The recipients are prevented by confidentiality agreements from revealing the details of these settlements.
WATCH A WIND TURBINE ON FIRE HERE.
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8174226968688178689
Here's another video, thanks to John Love for bringing this to our attention in his meritless letter to the Tribune.
www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=HKkTUY2slYQ&feature=related
Image and story here of another fire.
www.windaction.org/pictures/1054
More here:
www.windaction.org/pictures/977
www.windaction.org/pictures/978
www.windaction.org/pictures/1527
www.windaction.org/pictures/1344
Note these are just a few of the images and news stories on this subject.
All you need to know about lightning.
www.liveleak.com/view?i=27a_1187998916
science.howstuffworks.com/lightning.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning
www.nationalgeographic.com/lightning/
The Manawatu Standard reported ( 8/ 10) that the city, built on a flood plain, has run out of room to expand - unless you want to live under a wind farm . A 2,000 section development is planned between Kahuterawa road and Linton, right beneath the proposed wind farm. Mighty River Power is supporting the Motorimu Wind Farm LTD challenge in the Environment Court to have an extra 38 turbines approved without conditions. The commissioners after much careful thought reduced the number of turbines to 75 and one of the conditions imposed was that if the turbines exceeded the allowable noise limit you could phone an 0800 number to have them turned off.
MAYOR DEFEATED.
Heather Tanguay put the Labour government's interests before the interests of the city. Local politicians should not be subservient to a national policy which adversely affects residents. She put her name to a fraudulent document aimed at conning the public into accepting a gigantic wind farm among, around and dominating 2,000 + residences and furthermore putting our water supply , landscape and last remaining bush at risk. Her successor, financed it appears by vested interests who wanted the financial benefits of a wind farm for themselves, now faces a hostile majority on the Council with a mission to stop this madness.
NOW HERE"S A CHALLENGE FOR THOSE WHO WOULD LIKE TO PAY OFF THEIR MORTGAGE.
ultimateglobalwarmingchallenge.com/
WHO NEEDS GIANT WIND TURBINES WHEN YOU CAN DO THIS ! THIS IS A MUST SEE !
link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1214137061?bctid...
blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/10/turbine-free-wi.html?cid=8...
Let's get things back into perspective.
www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/earticle/4096/
Debate on the issue of global warming - listen here.
www.financialsense.com/Experts/2007/Lomborg.html
Interesting item on " global warming "
www.peakoil.com/article32919.html
More here.
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece
The Washington Post on the weather.
The New Statesman on global warming. There is also a variety of conflicting and interesting comment from readers which also accurately reflects the inconclusiveness of the science being used to justify littering the Tararuas with turbines.
Reflection for Today: Does a Church Appearing Fervent Mean That It Has the Work of the Holy Spirit?
Several months ago, I witnessed the pastors in our church vying with each other for the sake of fame and gain and jockeying for position, so much so that they even verbally attacked and disparaged each other during sermons. Their sermons were not enjoyable to listen to, and our spirits went unnourished. Furthermore, there was widespread cooling of the faith of brothers and sisters; they pursued wealth, they coveted physical pleasures and they followed worldly trends, giving all their attention to eating, drinking and having fun. Most of the time, some brothers and sisters simply did not attend gatherings, but instead only came when a disaster occurred in their lives or when there was some important holiday … Faced with this situation in our church, I left to look for a church that had the work of the Holy Spirit . I searched in many places, however, and discovered that most churches were just the same, and I began to lose hope. I recently found a church, however, which often put on shows and held events, and it even had pastors come from overseas to give sermons. The atmosphere in this church was very warm and enthusiastic, and many people attended each gathering. Looking at this church that was so ardent and at the brothers and sisters who attended gatherings so enthusiastically, I thought this must be a church that had the work of the Holy Spirit. It wasn’t long, however, before I discovered that, although appeared ardent, the sermons preached by the pastors were unable to provide benefits for the lives of brothers and sisters and were unable to satisfy our spirits. The singing and dancing that went on only had the effect of changing the atmosphere in the church—while it was going on, we all felt very energetic, but as soon as we sat down to listen to a pastor give a sermon, we would begin to doze off. Moreover, brothers and sisters were always trying to outdo each other with donations and prayers. Whoever donated a lot was considered to be someone who loved , and whoever prayed for a long time and said nice words in their prayers was considered to be a spiritual person…. In this kind of church, the brothers and sisters not only had no honesty or humility but, on the contrary, their vanity just got stronger and stronger and they became more and more hypocritical. They focused on expressing themselves and showing off in front of others and were exceedingly self-righteous and arrogant. Whenever they encountered an issue, they just dealt with it however they wanted, and they didn’t listen to anyone else—they were just not keeping to the Lord’s teachings at all. Faced with this kind of situation in the church, I couldn’t help but wonder: Could such a church that appears to be so fervent from the outside have the work of the Holy Spirit? This question has always perplexed me, so I’d like to ask if you could answer it for me.
recommenda to you: what is the holy spirit
Ah Ipad
Whose apps are heaven
Hallowed be thy name
Don't buy into the Apple folklore myself - bit too much style over content - saying that though I do have a Mac for work and my flickr processing - what kind of hypocrite am I? :)
This fella never noticed me behind him he was utterly absorbed - good job I'm a photographer and not an opportunist ha ha!
Part of my Incomunicado series and my london village project
lareviewofbooks.org/article/arendt-matters-revisiting-ori...
“What the unmaskers too often forget is that every one of us wears a mask that conceals a dark cabinet of hidden vices behind our public personas. A world populated by people unmasked, their secrets exposed, would be one where all immorality is shameless and all claims to respectability are hypocritical. But shame and hypocrisy are essential human drives. The rage against hypocrisy is a rage against civilized life. The danger in totalitarian movements is that the elite’s justified moral disgust at hypocrisy is translated into a carnival of destruction that is just so much fun.” ―Roger Berkowitz
one of the most challenging aspects of my job is experiencing, firsthand, the overwhelming insecurity of women. so many women hate to be in front of the camera (myself included). this young lady was so terrified that she was almost literally shaking when we started her session.
since i dislike being photographed by others, i feel somewhat hypocritical asking women to trust me and let me capture them. but i hope that by helping them to be at ease, and then showing them how beautiful they truly are, that i am helping in some tiny way.
I edited a few more of my Japan photos finally so I thought I'd post this one. This is actually the kyoto subway. To check out the rest of the edited ones (and save my spam) I never know is anyone is interested go here -it's the last eleven shots.
I am Tokyo
I am here
I am blazing lights
on your street.
I'm an upstart
Bound to cross you
I'm the hypocrite
By your side
She won't forget
And I won't forget
And no one around could tell us apart
Cause we are one mouth
and one robot heart
Tokyo - Athlete
You wake up late for school - man you don't wanna go. You ask you mom, "Please?" - but she still says, "No!". You missed two classes - and no homework. But your teacher preaches class like you're some kind of jerk.
You gotta fight for your right to party
You pop caught you smoking - and he said, "No way!". That hypocrite - smokes two packs a day. Man, living at home is such a drag. Now your mom threw away your best porno mag (Bust it!)
Don't step out of this house if that's the clothes you're gonna wear. I'll kick you out of my home if you don't cut that hair. Your mom busted in and said, "What's that noise?". Aw, mom you're just jealous -
St Mary, Great Henny, Essex
John Traill Christie
Head Master of Repton
and of Westminster School
Principal of Jesus College Oxford
' In Boy, Dahl’s memories of that beating surged back with some ferocity. “Michael was ordered to take down his trousers and kneel on the Headmaster’s sofa with the top half of his body hanging over one end of the sofa,” he wrote. In between each “tremendous crack administered upon the trembling buttocks”, the Boss would light his pipe and “lecture the kneeling boy about sin and wrongdoing”.
“At the end of it all,” Roald continued, “a basin, a sponge and a small clean towel were produced by the Headmaster, and the victim was told to wash away the blood before pulling up his trousers.”
Ben Reuss, a fellow pupil, corroborated Dahl’s memory of the bloody “mopping-up operations” and added that the beating made a considerable impression on everyone in the school. Roald would later claim that the incident made him begin “to have doubts about religion and even about God”.
In his mind, it was all the more shocking and hypocritical because the perpetrator was Geoffrey Fisher, the man who later went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Unfortunately, Roald had made a mistake. Not for the first time, he sounded off before he had fully checked his facts. For the culprit was not Fisher at all, but his successor, John Christie. The beating happened in the summer of 1933, a year after Fisher, as Dahl records in his own letters home, had left Repton to become Bishop of Chester. More than 50 years later, however, Dahl blamed the “shoddy, bandy-legged” Fisher for the caning, and painted him as a sanctimonious hypocrite. “I would sit in the dim light of the school chapel and listen to him preaching about the Lamb of God and about Mercy and Forgiveness and my young mind would become totally confused. I knew very well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither Forgiveness nor Mercy in flogging some small boy who had broken the rules.” '
from Roald Dahl's Schooldays, Donald Sturrock, originally published in the Daily Telegraph, 8th August 2010.
I cycled north from Twinstead, the lanes narrowing absurdly now, the road surface barely visible for the sand and clumps of grass up the middle and encroaching from the sides. I went down, down, down, and then up, up, up, and just before I fell over the edge into Suffolk I reached the track which runs up the hill to Henny church. It had seemed rather forbidding on its hill top when I had visited during a sudden snowstorm in 2012. Now it looked delightful, riding the high ridge with its typical Essex wooden spire. A delicious rural 19th Century feel inside. All the churches I'd visited on my journey across north Essex were open, and are open every day, but this is the most welcoming, going out of its way to assume that most of its users would be passing pilgrims and strangers rather than members of the congregation.
You could see all of the Suffolk town of Sudbury spread out in the river valley below from here. I headed down to the Stour and then north through Henny Street before climbing up into the hills one last time for Middleton. The pretty church here had been locked with a keyholder notice when I'd visited on a walk on Boxing Day 2006, but now it was also open, and is also clearly open every day. Here we are in the grounds of the Hall, and this is a delicious little Norman church, very much in the style of Wissington just across the Stour but without the wall paintings. A large amount of pre-ecclesiological early 19th Century glass, but overwhelmingly an early 20th Century Anglo-catholic feel, and of course this was the church of Father Clive Luget, who experienced visions of the Blessed Virgin here in the 1930s and hoped that Middleton would become the English Lourdes. Bizarre to think of that now.
Middleton is virtually a suburb of Sudbury now, so I headed down into Ballingdon and caught the 1630 train back to Ipswich from Sudbury station.
Psalm 119:28 NIV " My soul is weary with sorrow; Strengthen me according to your word."-------------------------------------------------- In this age of electronics we are all very familiar with a power level indicator. That little meter tells you when it is time to "plug-in" and recharge the device. The more it's used, the faster it grows weak. The lower the power level gets, the slower the device runs until it eventually shuts down... I have worked with clean-up crews after floods and hurricanes. I can tell you that some of those refrigerators may look good on the outside, But after several weeks without power- they are dead on the inside! It reminds me of what Jesus told the Pharisees in Matthew 23:27 " Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean."--------- We all have the potential to be this way- Believers and unbelievers alike.. The word of God is our power source, and we need to "Plug-In" daily! The more we do, the more we need to recharge ourselves.. The Bible is not a book of "Good Suggestions" that we quickly read over and choose to do the ones we like. The Bible is the living word of God; It teaches us how to Love, Live, Forgive, and Praise. [ Psalm 119:105] " Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path."---------- We should all take time everyday to "Plug-In" to the word of God, and renew our strength.. [Isaiah 40:31] " but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not grow faint."-------
I waited at the corner of 5th and Market Streets for the light to change when a man approached me from behind and stuck a Street Sheet newspaper in front of me and asked me for a dollar.
I told him I'd buy one if he let me take his photograph and he responded that he charged "five bucks for pictures." I chuckled and so began my conversation with Ricky Teagues, street poet.
We crossed the street and Ricky told me that he'd been living as a street poet for the past eleven years... I guess it's always difficult to know when people are giving me a line, but I went with it. He told me he'd been published in a number of papers and magazines, and then showed me a collection of his poems printed (copied, more likely) onto 8½" x 11" parchment stock and folded into quarter-sheets. Each "booklet" contained four poems and a couple of poorly rendered (printing-wise) illustrations.
As I looked at one of the booklets, Ricky began reciting one of his poems (coincidentally from the booklet I was looking at at the moment).
DWELLING WITHIN YOURSELF
The center of love that you find in your mind,
The peace of life that you have that leaves you
to find yourself.
Within to be or not
To see yourself is to be in the right.
From the id and to the superego
To be the positive person you are and feeling
is to be in the right.
Delightful charm appears to open your mind full
of light as the morning between the warm sun.
To enter and fasten the embrace of the hair of the passing star.
The smile that pleases a rainbow.
© Ricky Teagues
I gave him another couple dollars for one of the booklets to give to my son, then another when I asked again to take his photograph. He asked to pose by the this lamp post as, he said, he refers to it in one of his poems.
Dealing with street people is not something I'm particularly comfortable with... I don't know that there are many people who are, but as someone who tries to be compassionate toward the plight of others, it's not always easy – especially when it occurs on such a regular a basis as it did while I was in San Francisco.
On every occasion but this one, my response to panhandlers was, "I'm sorry."
In this case, I felt more comfortable and willing to give a little cash (despite my not-so-wealthy standing) – not so much because I was getting something out of the transaction, but because Ricky seemed to me to be doing more than simply panhandling; that his life as a street poet created "value" for the world.
Perhaps that's a crass way of looking at things... perhaps it's insensitive... perhaps I'm a hypocrite. I don't know. Would it be any easier for me to give handouts if I were wealthy? That's hard to say as I've never been on that end of the spectrum either. I'd like to think I would be more generous with both my time and money as regards beggars, but there is a possibility that I'd have the tendency, still, to shy away.
A few days ago, I walked into downtown East Lansing with my son for lunch at a local deli. After withdrawing some cash from an ATM, we made our way towards our destination, and along the way, we passed a man carrying a plastic shopping bag and looking a bit haggard.
We were several paces in front of him when he called out to us, saying something about helping him find something to eat. I turned back and to my right and told him, "I'm sorry."
Zachary shot me a look that I couldn't decipher... one that I've not asked him about yet. I was overcome, however, with the feeling that I'd just let my son down, not to mention yet another human being.
________________________________________________
This is actually a two-frame autostitched image. Don't ask me why... sometimes I just do these things!
In May of AD70 Roman General Titus began his final assault on Jerusalem and her temple.
By August of AD70 Jerusalem was totally captured.
Her temple was burned and then was dismantled stone by stone down to its very foundation.
"Israel" was literally wiped off the map and the land was then known as Palestine.
For 1,878 years that land was known as Palestine.
Until 1948, when the United Nations reinstated it as Israel.
The original Israel was founded by God. He was their King. The nation of Israel was a theocracy. Until they decided they wanted an earthly king like the other nations around them.
By the time our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was born all that was left of the original Israel was Judea. And it was contained within Palestine.
After the events of AD70, Judea, the last remaining allotment of the original twelve tribes of Israel, was off the map.
Christ's Return (His "Second Coming") WAS in judgment of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
Matthew 19:28 And Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That ye which have followed me, in the regeneration when the Son of man shall sit in the throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.
Jesus and His Apostles Prophecied that His Return (His "Second Coming") in judgment of the Twelve Tribes of Israel was going to happen during THAT generation's lifetime.
There are many verses that state that Christ's return in His Kingdom, New Jerusalem, (His "Second Coming") in judgment of the twelve tribes of Israel was going to happen during that generation's lifetime.
Matthew 16:28 Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.
Matthew 24:34 Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.
Jesus' Apostles equated the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem with His return (His "Second Coming") in judgment of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
Matthew 24:2 And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.
Matthew 24:3 And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?
Matthew 24:30 And then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven: and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.
Matthew 24:34 Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.
THEY of THAT generation were anticipating God's Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God- NEW JERUSALEM to come during THEIR lifetimes.
Matthew 6:10 Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Luke 11:2 And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.
Matthew 3:2 And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Matthew 4:17 From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say, Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Matthew 10:7 And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.
God's Kingdom, the Kingdom of Heaven, the Kingdom of God- NEW JERUSALEM is a spiritual Kingdom and is NOT in the physical realm.
John 18:36 Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.
Matthew 23:13 But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.
Matthew 25:34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
Hebrews 11:16 But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city.
Revelation 3:12 Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God: and I will write upon him my new name.
Revelation 21:1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.
4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
5 And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. And he said unto me, Write: for these words are true and faithful.
6 And he said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.
7 He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.
8 But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.
The Israel of the Middle East IS NOT the true Israel- the "Israel of God".
Galatians 6:16 And as many as walk according to this rule, peace be on them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God.
The true Israel is the Christian Church which is comprised of those who have faith and belief in Jesus.
The main proof that I rely on to state that Jesus' return (His "Second Coming") in judgment of the Twelve Tribes of Israel and the establishment of His Kingdom, New Jerusalem, was fulfilled in AD70 are His own words and the words of his Apostles. (And NOT the words of anyone's outside of Scripture.)
In Matthew 24:3 Jesus' Apostles ask Him what will be His sign indicating His return (His "Second Coming") in judgment of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.
In Matthew 24:30 He states "then shall appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven..." He said His sign would appear in heaven AFTER all the events from Matthew 24:4 through Matthew 24:29 have taken place.
I personally believe His sign, "the sign of the Son of Man", was "His Star":
Matthew 2:1 Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem,
2 Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.
I believe it was this same star that guided the Magi to Bethlehem that REAPPEARED approximately 70 years later and hovered over Jerusalem indicating its impending doom.
To back this claim I refer to the writings of the historian Flavius Josephus who mentions in his The Jewish Wars of a star hovering over Jerusalem (amongst other phenomena) for a year before it was besieged by Roman General Titus. The historian Tacitus also recorded some noteworthy observations.
Josephus (A.D. 75) - Jewish Historian
"Besides these [signs], a few days after that feast, on the one- and-twentieth day of the month Artemisius, [Jyar,] a certain prodigious and incredible phenomenon appeared; I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable, were it not related by those that saw it, and were not the events that followed it of so considerable a nature as to deserve such signals; for, before sun-setting, chariots and troops of soldiers in their armour were seen running about among the clouds, and surrounding of cities. Moreover, at that feast which we call Pentecost, as the priests were going by night into the inner [court of the] temple, as their custom was, to perform their sacred ministrations, they said that, in the first place, they felt a quaking, and heard a great noise, and after that they heard a sound as of a great multitude, saying, "Let us remove hence" (Jewish Wars, VI-V-3).
“A supernatural apparition was seen, too amazing to be believed. What I am now to relate would, I imagine, be dismissed as imaginary, had this not been vouched for by eyewitnesses, then followed by subsequent disasters that deserved to be thus signalized. For before sunset chariots were seen in the air over the whole country, and armed battalions speeding through the clouds and encircling the cities.” (rendered in Chilton)
Tacitus (A.D. 115) - Roman historian
"13. Prodigies had occurred, but their expiation by the offering of victims or solemn vows is held to be unlawful by a nation which is the slave of superstition and the enemy of true beliefs. In the sky appeared a vision of armies in conflict, of glittering armour. A sudden lightning flash from the clouds lit up the Temple. The doors of the holy place abruptly opened, a superhuman voice was heard to declare that the gods were leaving it, and in the same instant came the rushing tumult of their departure. Few people placed a sinister interpretation upon this. The majority were convinced that the ancient scriptures of their priests alluded to the present as the very time when the Orient would triumph and from Judaea would go forth men destined to rule the world." (Histories, Book 5, v. 13).
War 6.5.3 288-309
Thus were the miserable people persuaded by these deceivers, and such as belied God himself; while they did not attend nor give credit to the signs that were so evident, and did so plainly foretell their future desolation, but, like men infatuated, without either eyes to see or minds to consider, did not regard the denunciations that God made to them.
Star and Comet
Thus there was a star resembling a sword, which stood over the city, and a comet, that continued a whole year.
Light Around the Altar
Thus also before the Jews' rebellion, and before those commotions which preceded the war, when the people were come in great crowds to the feast of unleavened bread, on the eighth day of the month Xanthicus, [Nisan, April, about a week before Passover] and at the ninth hour of the night, so great a light shone round the altar and the holy house, that it appeared to be bright day time; which lasted for half an hour. This light seemed to be a good sign to the unskillful, but was so interpreted by the sacred scribes, as to portend those events that followed immediately upon it.
Cow Gives Birth to Lamb
At the same festival also, a heifer, as she was led by the high priest to be sacrificed, brought forth a lamb in the midst of the temple.
The Eastern Gate
Moreover, the eastern gate of the inner temple, which was of brass, and vastly heavy, and had been with difficulty shut by twenty men, and rested upon a basis armed with iron, and had bolts fastened very deep into the firm floor, which was there made of one entire stone, was seen to be opened of its own accord about the sixth hour of the night. Now those that kept watch in the temple came hereupon running to the captain of the temple, and told him of it; who then came up thither, and not without great difficulty was able to shut the gate again.
This also appeared to the vulgar to be a very happy prodigy, as if God did thereby open them the gate of happiness. But the men of learning understood it, that the security of their holy house was dissolved of its own accord, and that the gate was opened for the advantage of their enemies. So these publicly declared that the signal foreshowed the desolation that was coming upon them.
Miraculous Phenomenon of Chariots in the Air
Besides these, a few days after that feast, on the one and twentieth day of the month Artemisius, [Iyar, May or June] a certain prodigious and incredible phenomenon appeared: I suppose the account of it would seem to be a fable, were it not related by those that saw it, and were not the events that followed it of so considerable a nature as to deserve such signals; for, before sun-setting, chariots and troops of soldiers in their armor were seen running about among the clouds, and surrounding of cities.
Sound of a Great Multitude
Moreover, at that feast which we call Pentecost, as the priests were going by night into the inner [court of the temple,] as their custom was, to perform their sacred ministrations, they said that, in the first place, they felt a quaking, and heard a great noise, and after that they heard a sound as of a great multitude, saying, "Let us remove hence."
Jesus son of Ananias: A Voice from the East
But, what is still more terrible, there was one Jesus, the son of Ananus, a plebeian and a husbandman, who, four years before the war began, and at a time when the city was in very great peace and prosperity, came to that feast whereon it is our custom for every one to make tabernacles to God in the temple [Sukkot, autumn, 62 CE], began on a sudden to cry aloud,
"A voice from the east,
a voice from the west,
a voice from the four winds,
a voice against Jerusalem and the Holy House,
a voice against the bridegrooms and the brides,
and a voice against this whole people!"
This was his cry, as he went about by day and by night, in all the lanes of the city.
However, certain of the most eminent among the populace had great indignation at this dire cry of his, and took up the man, and gave him a great number of severe stripes; yet did not he either say any thing for himself, or any thing peculiar to those that chastised him, but still went on with the same words which he cried before.
Hereupon the magistrates, supposing, as the case proved to be, that this was a sort of divine fury in the man, brought him to the Roman procurator, where he was whipped till his bones were laid bare; yet he did not make any supplication for himself, nor shed any tears, but turning his voice to the most lamentable tone possible, at every stroke of the whip his answer was,
"Woe, woe to Jerusalem!"
And when Albinus (for he was then our procurator) asked him, Who he was? and whence he came? and why he uttered such words? he made no manner of reply to what he said, but still did not leave off his melancholy ditty, till Albinus took him to be a madman, and dismissed him.
Now, during all the time that passed before the war began, this man did not go near any of the citizens, nor was seen by them while he said so; but he every day uttered these lamentable words, as if it were his premeditated vow,
"Woe, woe to Jerusalem!"
Nor did he give ill words to any of those that beat him every day, nor good words to those that gave him food; but this was his reply to all men, and indeed no other than a melancholy presage of what was to come.
This cry of his was the loudest at the festivals; and he continued this ditty for seven years and five months, without growing hoarse, or being tired therewith, until the very time that he saw his presage in earnest fulfilled in our siege, when it ceased; for as he was going round upon the wall, he cried out with his utmost force,
"Woe, woe to the city again, and to the people, and to the Holy House!"
And just as he added at the last,
"Woe, woe to myself also!"
there came a stone out of one of the engines, and smote him, and killed him immediately; and as he was uttering the very same presages he gave up the ghost.
Athanasius of Alexandria (born ~293 CE, Alexandria -- died May 2 373 CE, Alexandria)
Saint Athanasius, theologian, ecclesiastical statesman, and Egyptian national leader, was the chief defender of Christian orthodoxy in the 4th-century battle against Arianism, the heresy that the Son of God was a creature of like, but not of the same, substance as God the Father. Athanasius attended the Council of Nicaea (325) and shortly thereafter became bishop of Alexandria (328). For the rest of his life he was engaged in theological and political struggles with the Emperor and with Arian churchmen, being banished from Alexandria several times. He wrote many important works, including his major theological treatises, The Life of St. Antony and Four Orations against the Arians, and a number of letters on theological, pastoral, and administrative topics. A Catholic Encyclopedia article is online at St. Athanasius.
These are quotes from Athanasius regarding the Jews' interpretation of the New Testament manuscripts and their influence in the development of the creeds of the Church in Rome:
“For now that He has come to our realm, and taken up his abode in one body among His peers, henceforth the whole conspiracy of the enemy against mankind is checked, and the corruption of death which before was prevailing against them is done away. For the race of men had gone to ruin, had not the Lord and Saviour of all, the Son of God, come among us to meet the end of death.” (Athanasius’ On the Incarnation of the Word, Section 9 Verse 4; cf. 1 Cor. 15:21-26)
In reference to the Jews’ rejection of Jesus as the Messiah and their interpretation of the seventy weeks of Daniel 9, Athanasius has this to say:
“Perhaps with regard to the other (prophecies) they may be able even to find excuses and to put off what is written to a future time. But what can they say to this, or can they face it at all? Where not only is the Christ referred to, but He that is to be anointed is declared to be not man simply, but Holy of Holies; and Jerusalem is to stand till His coming, and thenceforth, prophet and vision cease in Israel.” (Athanasius’ On the Incarnation of the Word, Section 39 Verse 3; cf. Dan. 9:24ff)
“For when He that was signified was come, what need was there any longer of any to signify Him? When the truth was there, what need any more of the shadow? For this was the reason of their prophesying at all – namely, till the true Righteousness should come, and He that was to ransom the sins of all. And this was why Jerusalem stood till then – namely, that there they might be exercised in the types as a preparation for the reality. ...the Saviour also Himself cried aloud and said: ‘The law and the prophets prophesied until John.’ If then there is now among the Jews king or prophet or vision, they do well to deny the Christ that is come. But if there is neither king nor vision, but from that time forth all prophecy is sealed and the city and temple taken, why are they so irreligious and so perverse as to see what has happened, and yet to deny Christ, Who has brought it all to pass? ...What then has not come to pass, that the Christ must do? What is left unfulfilled, that the Jews should now disbelieve with impunity?” (Athanasius’ On the Incarnation of the Word, Section 40 Verses 1-8)
“Now, however, that the devil, that tyrant against the whole world, is slain, we do not approach a temporal feast, my beloved, but an eternal and heavenly. Not in shadows do we shew it forth, but we come to it in truth. For [the Jews] being filled with the flesh of a dumb lamb, accomplished the feast, and having anointed their door-posts with the blood, implored aid against the destroyer. But now we, eating of the Word of the Father, and having the lintels of our hearts sealed with the blood of the New Testament, acknowledge the grace given us from the Saviour, who said, ‘Behold, I have given unto you to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy.’ For no more does death reign; but instead of death henceforth is life, since our Lord said, ‘I am the life;’ so that everything is filled with joy and gladness; as it is written, ‘The Lord reigneth, let the earth rejoice.’ ...And God is no longer known only in Judea, but in all the earth, ‘their voice hath gone forth, and the knowledge of Him hath filled all the earth.’ ...in accordance with the injunction of the Apostles, let us go beyond the types, and sing the new song of praise. ...For no longer were these things to be done which belonged to Jerusalem which is beneath; neither there alone was the feast to be celebrated, but wherever God willed it to be. ...when the things pertaining to that time were fulfilled, and those which belonged to shadows had passed away, and the preaching of the Gospel was about to extend everywhere; when indeed the disciples were spreading the feast in all places, they asked the Saviour, ‘Where wilt Thou that we shall make ready?’ The Saviour also, since He was changing the typical for the spiritual, promised them that they should no longer eat the flesh of a lamb, but His own, saying, ‘Take, eat and drink; this is My body, and My blood.’ When we are thus nourished by these things, we also, my beloved, shall truly keep the feast of the
passover.” (Athanasius’ The Festal Letters, Letter IV. No. 3-4)
“For He raised up the falling, healed the sick, satisfied those who were hungry, and filled the poor, and, what is more wonderful, raised us all from the dead; having abolished death, He has brought us from affliction and sighing to the rest and gladness of this feast, a joy which reacheth even to heaven. ...how must all its hosts joy and exult, as they ... look on sinners while they repent ... and finally on the enemy who lies weakened, lifeless, bound hand and foot, so that we may mock at him; ‘Where is thy victory, O Death? where is thy sting, O Grave?’ Let us then sing unto the Lord a song of victory. ...the Lord gives to them at the right hand, saying, ‘Come, ye blessed, inherit the kingdom prepared for you.’ ...Wherefore let us not celebrate the feast after an earthly manner, but as keeping festival in heaven with the angels.” (Athanasius’ The Festal Letters, Letter VI. No. 9-12)
Preterism is true Christianity
WTF? Is it so wrong to play with the shlonginstein? Seriously... we are all human. People are such hypocrites. Everyone has dirty thoughts, everyone loses control at some point. Fuck off if you say you haven't.
Hieronymus Bosch (eigentlich Jheronimus van Aken (’s-Hertogenbosch um 1450 - 1516
Der Tod und der Geizhals - Death and the Miser (1500 - 10)
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA
Of all fifteenth-century artists, Hieronymus Bosch is the most mysterious. His puzzling, sometimes bizarre imagery has prompted a number of false assertions that he was, for example, the member of a heretical sect, a sexual libertine, or a forerunner of the surrealists. What can be said is that he was a moralist, profoundly pessimistic about man's inevitable descent into sin and damnation.
In this slender panel, probably a wing from a larger altarpiece, a dying man seems torn between salvation and his own avarice. At the foot of the bed a younger man, possibly the miser at an earlier age, hypocritically throws coins into a chest with one hand as he fingers a rosary with the other. In his last hour, with death literally at the door, the miser still hesitates; will he reach for the demon's bag of gold or will he follow the angel's gesture and direct his final thoughts to the crucifix in the window?
Avarice was one of the seven deadly sins and among the final temptations described in the Ars moriendi (Art of Dying), a religious treatise probably written about 1400 and later popularized in printed books. Bosch's painting is similar to illustrations in these books, but his introduction of ambiguity and suspense is unique.
This panel is thinly painted. In several areas it is possible to see in the underdrawing where Bosch changed his mind about the composition. His thin paint and unblended brushstrokes differ markedly from the enamellike polish of other works in this gallery.
Source: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC