Thinking allowed

Stedman and Grandsire

Had a few more attempts at ringing Sted­man at Hem­ing­ford Grey last night. We rang a couple of plain courses of doubles: first time I rang bell num­ber 2, and after­wards I tried num­ber 3. Both times I got it right. Later in the even­ing — after more ringers had turned up — we rang triples. I rang bell 4, and star­ted off mak­ing a mess of things. I was imme­di­ately put right by the con­duct­or (‘lead now!’), and from then on I was okay. I real­ized at the time that I had prob­ably gone wrong in exactly the same way as I had done the very first time I had tried to ring Sted­man. But I could not see at all what I was doing wrong.

Later, when driv­ing home, I worked out what I had prob­ably done on both occa­sions. Bell num­ber 4 starts by dodging once with 5 (i.e., from ringing in 4th place at rounds, you ring one blow in 5th, one blow in 4th, and then ‘go in slow’, that is, two blows in 3rd place and down to the lead). I had for­got­ten to do the dodge with 5, instead try­ing to go in slow imme­di­ately with the two blows in 3rd place. Obvi­ously some­thing to remem­ber — not just ‘go in slow’, but ‘dodge 4/5 down’ first.

We also tried to ring a touch of Grand­sire Triples, with me ringing bell 6. In a plain course of Grand­sire Triples there are dodges in 4/5 up, 6/7 up, 6/7 down, 4/5 down, and then make 3rds. But I haven’t got the hang of bobs in this meth­od yet. Ringing 6 the first dodge is in 6/7 up, but a bob called before this means do a double-dodge in 4/5 up; anoth­er bob was called as I was about to make 3rd — which is unaf­fected by the call. We did this a couple of times, then a bob was called in some oth­er pos­i­tion, and I was some­what lost. We struggled to the fin­ish­ing post which was by then in sight. More work needed to under­stand bobs in Grandsire…

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ringing Stedman

After some hints at last Wednesday’s prac­tice at Hem­ing­ford Grey, I have spent a while get­ting to grips with Sted­man, a meth­od (or rather a prin­ciple) devised in the 1670s. A couple of things helped me. First, when I began to learn to ring, Sted­man was the first meth­od that I learnt to ring a cov­er bell to, and one of the things I did was to learn the pat­tern in which pairs of bells come to the back. In a note­book I had sketched this out, writ­ing out a plain course of the last two bells — the first time I had done this. The second help was that I spent an hour each way on the train to Lon­don, and decided to use it to work out the full plain course for Sted­man Doubles. Turn­ing to the back of the note­book I had with me I found my notes of 18 months earli­er which I had entirely for­got­ten about.

Sted­man is based on the two orders in which you can arrange six bells. There are only six ways you can arrange six bells, and in ringing there are only two ways of arran­ging these six dif­fer­ent changes, since a bell can only exchange places with its nearest neigh­bour (or stay in the same place). These two ways can be con­sidered as: ‘for­ward hunt­ing’ in which the bell in first place hunts to third place, and then down to the front again; and ‘back­ward hunt­ing’ where the bell in third place hunts down to the front, leads, and hunts back up to third place again. Sted­man con­sists of each of these ‘sixes’ per­formed altern­ately. At the end of each ‘six’ the bell in third place moves out of the front three into fourth place, and the bell which was in fourth place moves down to take its place. And dur­ing each ‘six’ the bells in fourth and fifth places dodge with each other.

Armed with this inform­a­tion, you can then work out a plain course of Sted­man Doubles, or indeed Triples.

12345
21354
23145
——-
32415
23451
24315
42351
43215
34251
——-
43521
45312
54321
53412
35421
34512
——-
43152
34125
31452
13425
14352
41325
——-
14235
12453
21435
24153
42135
41253
——-
14523
41532
45123
54132
51423
15432
——-
51342
53124
35142
31524
13542
15324
——-
51234
15243
12534
21543
25134
52143
——-
25413
24531
42513
45231
54213
52431
——-
25341
52314
53241
35214
32541
23514
——-
32154
31245
13254
12345

Then came the moment of truth, this Wed­nes­day. ‘Did you have a look at Sted­man?’ I am asked. ‘Right, we’ll ring Sted­man Triples.’ So we rang Sted­man Triples — and I made a com­plete hash of it. Very annoy­ing, hav­ing put some effort into thor­oughly learn­ing the ‘blue line’, and know­ing exactly what I was sup­posed to be doing — but actu­ally try­ing to remem­ber that and ring at the same time was too much. Later in the prac­tice we had anoth­er go, with me again ringing bell num­ber 4. This time — I got it right, and we rang a plain course of Sted­man Triples without me going wrong. I guess my strik­ing could have been bet­ter, but I nev­er lost my place, knew what I should be doing, and was always more or less in the right place. Phew! Now to do it a lot better.

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singles

For quite a while now prac­tice has involved ringing touches of bob doubles, minor, triples, and even bob major, in which the con­duct­or has called vari­ous bobs. So it came as some­thing of a sur­prise tonight when a ‘single’ was called a short way into a touch of bob triples. Of course, I had no idea what to do, and as I was (or should have been) affected by the call, since I would oth­er­wise have been dodging 3/4 up, the whole thing went wrong. Oh well, that’s what prac­tice nights are for.

So we had anoth­er go, after it was explained what I should be doing: if dodging 3/4 up then instead make fourth’s place, hunt to the front, and next time dodge 5/6 down; and if dodging 3/4 down then make third’s place, hunt to the back and next time make second’s place. In oth­er words, the bells that would oth­er­wise be dodging 3/4 up and 3/4 down effect­ively swap places. And it worked! We got through the touch without fur­ther errors, a single being called twice with me affected. Phew!

So in the­ory I can now ring any touch of Plain Bob. We shall see.

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taking a practice

This even­ing for the first time I had to lead bell­ringing prac­tice. We only had six ringers (sev­en ringers for the first half), and just one of those was an exper­i­enced ringer, former tower cap­tain Bob King. So we rang rounds and call changes for the sev­en of us, and plain hunt­ing on four for the five of us. Our two less-exper­i­enced plain hunters had only done this on the treble before, so after a few goes at this, we had each of them have a try at the second bell, with me ringing the ten­or behind. After a little while at this for each of them, we were able to plain hunt on five without the ten­or cov­er­ing. And I got quite a bit of prac­tice at call­ing ‘go’ and ‘stop’ — the lat­ter being the harder one to know when to call!

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calling plain courses

For some time now I have been prac­tising ringing touches of bob doubles, and even bob minor, bob triples and bob major. I have mostly got the hang of the neces­sary dodges, and can start on any bell, and I can usu­ally cope with the calls of bob, though I can only do this by remem­ber­ing the sequence, or cycle of work, and not by noti­cing sign­posts such as when I cross the treble’s path (although this is occa­sion­ally obvi­ous, espe­cially when mak­ing 2nds’ place). And in the even-bell meth­ods, where there is no cov­er bell always in last place from which to lead, I can now usu­ally see the last bell rope go down, so that I can lead appropriately.

Tonight I got to ‘call’ vari­ous plain courses of bob doubles, bob triples and bob minor. The hard part at this stage is to know when to call the end of the meth­od — calls should be made when the lead bell is at hand­stroke, a full stroke before the meth­od ends, and where your bell is at this point depends on which bell you are ringing. Of course, harder than this is call­ing a touch with bobs (and singles) and get­ting back to rounds at the end of it; and being able to cor­rect oth­er ringers if they are about to go wrong. I’m def­in­itely a long way from that. Still, pro­gress is being made.

Now we have two of our ‘new’ ringers who can just about ring touches of plain bob doubles and triples, and we have four who can, with vary­ing degrees of suc­cess, plain hunt to these (and oth­er) meth­ods. We need to get some of these oth­er ringers to be able to ring ‘inside’ to plain bob — then we will be able to try plain courses on Sunday morn­ings and wed­dings when we are not assisted by more exper­i­enced ringers.

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Sydney Carter

Today’s Tele­graph car­ries the obit­u­ary of Sydney Carter, best known as the writer of The Lord of the Dance — writ­ten in 1963 and described in the obit­u­ary as ‘the most cel­eb­rated reli­gious song of the 20th century’.

Carter, who died on Sat­urday 13 March, was much more than the writer of this song — he was a poet, and he wrote folk songs, as well as oth­er reli­gious songs and hymns such as One More Step and When I Needed a Neigh­bour.

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bestselling artist of all time?

The BBC web­site reports that this accol­ade is claimed (by the pub­lish­er) for Annie Vallotton.

Who’s Annie Val­lot­ton you might ask?

She is the Swiss woman who illus­trated the Good News Bible in the 1970s.

Sample quote:

One of the most mem­or­able examples is of the cru­ci­fix­ion in Luke’s gos­pel. The thorn-crowned head hangs for­ward, below the single line of the shoulder. Above it, two right-angles are the cross.
Some­how this plain sketch con­veys the des­ol­a­tion of Jesus far more power­fully than two hours of Mel Gibson’s blood-spattered film, The Pas­sion of the Christ. 

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from the shrine of St Peter

If this is Thursday, this must be the Vat­ic­an! Today we vis­ited the Vat­ic­an Museum, the Sis­tine Chapel, and the Basilica of St Peter. Jonath­an Board­man, chap­lain of All Saints, the Anglic­an church in Rome, gave us a tour of some of the prin­cip­al works in the museum, and talked about the paint­ings in the Sis­tine Chapel. Although I have been in the Chapel twice before, this was the first time since the major res­tor­a­tion of the Michelan­gelo fres­coes. It was also the first time I had really con­sidered the over­all scheme of the dec­or­a­tion: the ceil­ing depict­ing scenes from the Cre­ation to the Flood; the pairs of pic­tures on the side walls by a num­ber of earli­er artists (Old and New Test­a­ment scenes in pairs, where the OT scene is in some way a ‘type’ for the NT one oppos­ite it); and, of course, the Last Judge­ment on the ‘east’ wall. Here we see Peter and Paul as the strong men of Christ, sport­ing their per­fect, resur­rec­ted, bod­ies (or at least, as Jonath­an later noted, per­fect in the eyes of Michelan­gelo; we might not all envis­age our per­fec­ted bod­ies as those of East Ger­man athletes!).

And then to the Basilica of St Peter. The vast­ness of this build­ing nev­er ceases to amaze. I remem­ber vis­it­ing as a school­boy in 1973. Our guide asked a fel­low pupil to walk over to one of the columns and touch the carving of a dove that seemed a few feet off the floor. As he got near­er we real­ized that far from hav­ing to reach down to it, he could not in fact reach it by stretch­ing up. The per­fect scale of the build­ing had con­fused our senses. On the oth­er hand, you do have to won­der what the fish­er­man from the Sea of Galilee might have made of all this splend­our and pomp.

This is a place where the claims of the bish­ops of Rome are most evid­ent, from the ‘Tu es Pet­rus’ mosa­ic in massive let­ters writ­ten around the base of the dome, to the monu­ments recall­ing pap­al declar­a­tions such as the ‘immacu­late con­cep­tion’, and above all the gran­di­ose memori­als to a swathe of popes in the main basilica. These expli­citly pro­claim the primacy and uni­ver­sal imme­di­ate jur­is­dic­tion of the see of Rome. As an Anglic­an, I find it very easy to chal­lenge the show of pride and opu­lance, and the claims to power that these build­ings and memori­als present (whilst not for­get­ting that my own church has its own grand build­ings, monu­ments and claims).

As a con­trast to all the show it is a wel­come change to des­cend to the crypt. Here you stand more or less at the level of the basilica built in the time of Con­stantine in the first half of the fourth cen­tury. Imme­di­ately beneath the dome and the high altar (with its great bal­dachino designed by Bern­ini, and forged from bronze taken from the Pan­theon of ancient Rome) stands the tomb of St Peter. Not his actu­al tomb, I think, which lies anoth­er level down, not access­ible to the gen­er­al pub­lic, but a shrine to the saint, non­ethe­less. This is the place to stand and give thanks for the life of Simon son of Jonah, to whom Christ gave the nick­name ‘Ceph­as’ or ‘rock’ (‘pet­ros’ in Greek), and to pray — espe­cially at this time, in the middle of the Week of Pray­er for Chris­ti­an Unity — for the unity of the Church, uni­on amongst Anglic­ans and uni­on with our oth­er sep­ar­ated broth­ers and sis­ters, and espe­cially in this place, uni­on with the see of Rome, with the suc­cessors of St Peter.

When you stand before, or over, the tomb of the lead­er of the Apostles, you are taken back to New Test­a­ment times, to the days 2000 years ago when Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee and called Simon, son of Jonah, to fol­low him, to the days when Simon Peter acclaimed Jesus as the Mes­si­ah, the Christ, dis­owned him, and was for­giv­en, to the days when he preached the resur­rec­tion of Christ in Jer­u­s­alem, and then through the east­ern Roman Empire, before end­ing up in Rome, to suf­fer and die as a wit­ness to the king­dom of God pro­claimed by the Jesus he had known. Here, in the crypt of the basilica, the pomp of the main church is for­got­ten — the roof is low, the walls are plain. Here are the simple tombs of many of the popes, placed close to where they believed Peter was bur­ied. Here it is pos­sible to for­get the grandeur that is just a few feet over your head, and to recov­er a simple spir­itu­al­ity, and the simple mes­sage at the heart of what Chris­ti­ans believe, and to which Chris­ti­ans down the ages have borne witness.

It is easy to say that the claims of Rome are mis­con­ceived and mis­un­der­stood, but even so I find myself not unwill­ing to allow a primacy of hon­our to this ancient see, effect­ively the only one remain­ing of the ancient pat­ri­arch­ates of Jer­u­s­alem (the see of James, the broth­er of Jesus), of Alex­an­dria, and of Anti­och, all three long since hav­ing lost their Chris­ti­an hin­ter­land. This primacy would not be the primacy of the main basilica, a primacy of marble and costly show, a primacy of uni­ver­sal jur­is­dic­tion or of infal­lible pro­nounce­ments; rather it would be like the crypt, plain and simple, unadorned, the ser­vant of all, exhib­it­ing mor­al strength, uncor­rup­ted per­son­al char­ac­ter, and the love of God the Fath­er and of the cre­ated world, preached by the car­penter of Nazareth.

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on the feast of St Agnes

Today we vis­ited the church of Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura — St Agnes out­side the Walls. It’s the feast day of St Agnes, a young girl of 12 or 13, who was killed in Rome for her Chris­ti­an faith near the end of the per­se­cu­tion under the Emper­or Dio­cletian, around the year 304. This is the church where she is bur­ied, and a great ser­vice is held in this church on this her feast day.

At the start, two tiny (live) lambs, gar­landed and bedecked with flowers are car­ried into the church on trays and placed on the altar. They are blessed, and then, dur­ing the Glor­ia, car­ried out in pro­ces­sion, and away to a con­vent. When they are old enough to be shorn, their wool is woven into the pal­li­ums which the Pope gives to all Roman Cath­ol­ic Arch­bish­ops (as a sym­bol of their met­ro­pol­it­an jurisdiction).

Mar­garet Vis­s­er has writ­ten an inter­est­ing book about this church and the cult of St Agnes, The Geo­metry of Love (see it at Amazon UK, and there are some pic­tures on her web­site). After the ser­vice one of our group spot­ted Mar­garet Vis­s­er in the church and she was kind enough to come and talk to us about the church and the book.

Here we wor­shipped; here we prayed, at this place (as Eli­ot wrote about Little Gid­ding) where pray­er has been val­id; to stand and pray at the shrine of this young girl, mar­tyred for her faith 1700 years ago today; to stand and pray with this young girl and for this young girl, who sur­rendered her life rather than offer incense and pray­ers to pagan gods; to stand and pray with the count­less num­bers who down the cen­tur­ies have stood in this same place, before the tomb-chest of Agnes, and who have sim­il­arly offered their pray­ers — this is a mov­ing exper­i­ence, although one rather won­ders what she would have made of the great church and the great ser­vice held in her name, let alone the incense offered at the altar over her tomb!

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Unity, Rome and all that

Today the Week of Pray­er for Chris­ti­an Unity begins. In some Anglic­an cal­en­dars (though not in Eng­land) this date, 18 Janu­ary, would nor­mally be the feast of the Con­fes­sion of St Peter. The Week of Pray­er ends next Sunday, 25 Janu­ary, a date kept as the feast of the Con­ver­sion of St Paul.

The Con­fes­sion of Peter is kept on a date observed in the cal­en­dar of the Roman Cath­ol­ic Church as ‘the Chair of Peter’, which com­mem­or­ates the arrival of Peter in Rome, the date from which Roman Cath­ol­ics account him as the first Bish­op of Rome, the first Pope (the ‘Chair’ is the cathedra, or chair from which a bish­op teaches in their cathed­ral church — the tra­di­tion­al Chair of St Peter is enshrined in a mag­ni­fi­cent baroque monu­ment by Bern­ini at the west end of St Peter’s Basilica in the Vat­ic­an). This feast has been com­mem­or­ated in Rome from the earli­est times, and the gos­pel read­ing for the day is tra­di­tion­ally the acclam­a­tion by Peter of Jesus as the Mes­si­ah, the Son of the liv­ing God (Mat­thew 16.16). It is this con­fes­sion of faith which gives its name to the feast as com­mem­or­ated by some Anglicans.

The Con­ver­sion of Paul, of course, com­mem­or­ates the event described in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 9.1–9), where Paul, jour­ney­ing to Dam­as­cus to per­se­cute the early Chris­ti­ans, is way­laid by a blind­ing light, and called to serve Christ, whom he has been persecuting.

These two days, the Con­fes­sion of Peter and the Con­ver­sion of Paul, brack­et the Week of Pray­er for Chris­ti­an Unity. As Paul’s con­ver­sion reminds us that we are united in a call to pro­claim Jesus among the nations, so Peter’s con­fes­sion reminds us that we are united in pro­claim­ing the inspired know­ledge of Jesus Christ ‘the Son of the liv­ing God’.

Dur­ing the Week of Pray­er I shall be spend­ing some time in Rome. I hope to be able to pray at the tomb of St Peter, and to vis­it also the basilica of St Paul. Here are some of the ancient memori­als of the Chris­ti­an faith. I hope also to be present at an audi­ence with the Pope, the Bish­op of Rome. Even though Anglic­ans are not in com­mu­nion with the See of Rome, it is that unity — along with unity with our oth­er sep­ar­ated broth­ers and sis­ters — for which we pray most espe­cially next week.

As Anglic­ans, we have long con­sidered ourselves to rep­res­ent the Via Media. His­tor­ic­ally this has meant the ‘middle way’ between the ‘extremes’ of Geneva and Rome, between extreme Prot­est­ant­ism and extreme pap­al­ism. Over the last hun­dred years or so it has per­haps been expressed in the Lam­beth Quad­ri­lat­er­al, emphas­ising our gath­er­ing around the fourfold points of the bible (as con­tain­ing all things neces­sary to sal­va­tion), the sac­ra­ments of bap­tism and the euchar­ist, the liturgy of the Book of Com­mon Pray­er, and gov­ern­ment by bish­ops, suit­ably adap­ted to dif­fer­ent places. We have, per­haps, seen ourselves as a pos­sible mod­el of unity without uni­form­ity, a com­mu­nion of self-gov­ern­ing Churches, not behold­en to one anoth­er, nor gov­erned by one anoth­er, each express­ing the essen­tials of the Chris­ti­an faith in its own area. Each Church too has provided ways in which the bish­op of a dio­cese can take coun­sel with rep­res­ent­at­ives of all their people, laity and clergy alike. This was an import­ant part of the Eng­lish Reform­a­tion, led by the bish­ops and enacted by the people in Par­lia­ment, and it was a prin­ciple fur­ther developed by the Amer­ic­an Church, and then in syn­od­ic­al gov­ern­ment in New Zea­l­and and else­where. All these have been import­ant con­tri­bu­tions by Anglic­ans to our under­stand­ing of the Church — both of our own Church and as a vis­ion of a wider, united Church. Unity not uniformity.

In our time we seem to be strain­ing at the bonds of unity which tie us to each oth­er, to our bish­ops and to the Arch­bish­op of Can­ter­bury. In this Week of Pray­er for Chris­ti­an Unity let us not for­get to pray for all our fel­low Anglic­ans — that our com­mu­nion may not be frag­men­ted — as well as for reunion with those with whom we are not cur­rently in communion.

May we all be one, that the world may believe.

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