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Mrs Joan Deering Telephone: (01525) 715463

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A Claydon Nightingale

 

On a recent visit to Claydon House in Buckinghamshire I was delighted to discover that it had a strong association with Florence Nightingale remembered for her pioneering work in nursing in the 19th century. Claydon House was the first country seat of Edmund Verney who became the first Verney to live on the family land in 1620. Edmund was Knight-Marshall and Standard Bearer to King Charles 1.

 

The Verney/Nightingale connection

Rushing through history, in 1857 Sir Harry Verney, owner of Claydon House, came to know Florence’s family, who were also wealthy people. His first wife had died and in admiration of Florence he paid a visit to her parents and met her sister, Parthenope. Eventually Sir Harry asked Parthenope to marry him and she became Lady Verney. Florence was later to spend many happy hours at Claydon House.

 

Revolutionary nursing

Florence, whose parents had resisted her attraction to nursing thinking it unfit for a lady of her station, was regularly consulted on the building of hospitals and the training of nurses and she set up the first school of nursing at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. Florence also wrote books on nursing which were widely read all over the world. Florence will be especially remembered for her sterling work in the Crimea at the hospital at Scutari. Here she transformed the task of caring for the wounded and dying soldiers and many looked forward to her appearance on the wards as she came with her lamp. Many also tried to resist the changes she was making in hygiene and care, but Florence persisted and eventually won most of them round.

 

Humility through adversity

The motto of the Verney Coat of Arms, in Latin, can be translated, “To do good or to go forward rather than to seek attention or be conspicuous.” Florence lived to the ripe age of 90 years and died in 1910 at her London house in Park Lane. In recognition of her work she could have been buried in Westminster Abbey but her relatives knew that she did not want this and Florence was laid to rest in a very simple grave in the country churchyard of St Margaret’s church, East Wellow, Hampshire.

 

Salvation for all

Florence was a Christian universalist. She believed that in the end all would be saved through the mercy of God. At the heart of her beliefs was the fact that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ provides reconciliation for all mankind and the atonement of all sins. Luke’s Gospel closely follows that way of thinking. I can’t help thinking that so much of what we proclaim as Gospel is in fact a calling down of divine retribution of anyone who will not listen to us or our version of Gospel. I feel a deep sense of sadness whenever I witness the clamour to climb aboard the revenge wagon and hope and pray that when all is revealed we shall all meet merrily in heaven.

  

Revd. Michael Bradley

July/August magazine

 

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Parables ...

as Fresh Expressions

Parables are not some nasty disease but a method of teaching that Jesus frequently used in his day and which is just as relevant for us today. From the Greek word ‘Parabolẽ’ by derivation meaning, ‘putting things side by side’. The object of teaching in parables is to enlighten the listener by presenting them with interesting illustrations from which they can draw out for themselves moral and religious truth. So far, so good!

 

Two Houses

Take, for instance, the story Jesus told about the building of two houses. One of them is built upon sand, the other upon rock. It is not only a story about wisdom and the wise man building his house upon a firm foundation but about the hard work for faith in following the path of obedience. Not only doing the right thing but also about our relationship with God. Perhaps the storms that lash the two houses represent the pressures exerted by society on Christian believers who are struggling to live an alternative lifestyle.

 

Shocking stories

Parables were a well-known method of teaching throughout the East in the days of Jesus. Instead of replying to his critics in abstract terms about humility, simplicity and trustfulness, Jesus captures their attention with concrete, vivid stories designed to shock and turn people’s ideas upside down. All the parables are open ended and none of them has just one meaning. At the end of each one there is usually a challenging question to answer, ‘Which character do you identify with?’.  They require interpretation, yet they all have one direction, as guides to the nature of the Kingdom of God.

 

Commitment now

The aim of the parables of Jesus is to refute the mistaken idea that the Kingdom of God was to be some cataclysmic event in the future. Rather, the Kingdom is present in the here and now demanding decision and commitment. The Kingdom is also not reserved for a chosen few but is open to all – saints, sinners, anyone who will accept the priceless gift offered by God.

 

Two houses again

Those who work hard and do not fall for the usual temptation to take the easy way out, will succeed in the end. Because this is against natural inclination it has to be taught in each successive generation. This needs to be both by example as well as by direct learning. So, how is it possible to get across the messages of a revealed religion in an attractive and convincing way?  How can the Christian story be told on a post-modern society which rejects the claim that there is an over-arching historical narrative into which we fit? If life is about ‘pick and mix’ choices how can people find relevance in the traditions that Christians have inherited?

 

God’s Houses

We all know how important our church buildings are to us. But every generation knows the tensions that the building and maintenance of such places puts upon our witness to the World.

On the one hand they are built ad majorem Dei glorium, to the greater glory of God. They create a rootedness and foundation for reaching out in God’s name to our communities.

 

Pilgrim people

Church buildings are also visible landmarks of the presence of God among us. On the other hand they can also work against the need to change. J H Newman said, ‘In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often’. Jesus taught that his disciples should be a people on the move with no fixed place to lay their heads. A stark contrast to the settled and permanent nature of much of our Church life. How we love the status quo!

 

Fresh expressions

The movement in the modern Church of today called ‘Fresh expressions’ seeks to call Christians everywhere to new radical thinking about the nature and mission of the Church. It does not sit very easily with notions of status quo and it will be sometime before it’s radical and revolutionary ideas seep through the layers of our resistance to change. The final question here must be, ‘Are we currently building on rock or sand?’

 

Revd Michael Bradley

June magazine

 

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Comfort zones

There is always the danger that we will do the same.  After all it’s not very British to openly share our faith.  We are often gripped by the fear that the unfamiliar will be threatening and negative.  So we vacuum pack ourselves to prevent any change which might lead us to be open and therefore vulnerable.  If that is the case then we do not often experience the power from God that will guide and lead us to live out the faith we profess, often so secretly.  God wakes us up from our complacency making us act, driving us out from our comfort zones and onto the streets.  Without the Holy Spirit faith shrivels away and becomes tasteless.  Vacuums have their uses but they are limited.  When exposed to the air of God’s Holy Spirit everything is transformed and not only are we changed, so is the world.

 

Pentecost in the Park

So our local churches in the area are going out – driven out to make a public proclamation of our faith at Katherine’s Cross in Ampthill Park. There will be a service at which the Bishop of Bedford will speak, followed by a picnic, weather permitting. You are invited to attend and celebrate with us. Details can be found elsewhere on this website.

 

Revd. Michael Bradley

May magazine

 

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Post Easter… Post Christian?

As you wipe the last remaining traces of chocolate from your mouth…sorry, I just dropped a piece on the floor…ummm… scrumptious!… ask yourself what is left of Easter? Yes I know you didn’t go to church as you had visitors, visited family, went to work, stayed in bed, went on holiday etc. etc. After all, for the majority Easter is a holiday… time to blow away the cobwebs. Spring is here with it’s bunnies and lambs making us feel comfortable and warmer after the Winter months. Change such as this we can always get used to.

 

This affects you

However, our present era has been a time of substantial and fast moving change. In a relatively short time we have gone through permissiveness, the domination of information and the acknowledgement that, religiously speaking, we are post-Christian. This affects us all and not just the theorists, scientists and academics.

 

Post-modernism

Nothing is ever so simple but at the risk of making it so, some have expressed five key elements in the way we may understand our present society:-Spirituality without Christianity; Environment without a Creator; Words without meaning; Individuality without belonging; The present without a future.

 

Bottom of the barrel

Most of us only complain that ‘things are not what they used to be’ and get on as best we can, practically accepting change but mentally refuting it. So, what resources are we left with to deal with these changes? From the purely human point of view we have our own personal resources which from time to time we muster, almost sub-consciously, to deal with the painful and challenging changes of our lives. The trouble with these is that they often seem to run out and we are left feeling helpless and alone. We then turn to family and friends who also give us love, strength and comfort in our struggles. But these too, we discover, are finite. So, we tend to ditch what we understand as ‘faith’ in ourselves and others and turn even more towards a materialistic, consumerist mode we think we can see and trust.

 

Before and after

For Christians the discovery of ‘faith’ as a gift from God releases many other new resources which enable us to face life and change. Easter was for the first Christians that important discovery. Easter faith transformed their finite worldly vision into something too big to comprehend and yet, something they had actually experienced. The finite was caught up into the infinite and their narrow vision changed into something huge. And it all came about because of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Pre-Easter they were at the very bottom of their human resources; post-Easter they were filled with all the resources they needed to live their lives to the full and to take on board all the changes that they were encountering.

 

The bedrock of faith

We live in a post Christian era where simple, lively, spiritual faith is often counted for very little in everyday life. All the familiar aspects of our society are constantly challenged and often changed, leaving us with a great sense of insecurity. The ‘isms’ which we don’t quite understand, post-modernism, secularism, pluralism etc., buzz around us causing confusion. Post Easter faith can give each of us the resources we need to face these changes positively. This bedrock of faith is not without difficulty and struggle and pain; Jesus never said it would be. When we turn to God in faith we open ourselves to many more new and exciting possibilities and, in the risk of trusting simplicity, discover something of the life God wants us all to experience. To be Christian, post Easter, is to live trusting the faith we have been given to give us light in our darkness and to lead us from death to Life! Try it!

 

Revd. Michael Bradley

 

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St. Pancras International

Travelling to London by train recently it arrived at the new St. Pancras International Terminus right next to the Eurostar trains.(due to engineering works at the weekend)

I have seen it before but to arrive there by train was the wow factor of the

Photo image © Michael Bradley 2008    journey. It is magnificent! But how did it come to look like this and anyway, who was St. Pancras?

 

Holy Saints!

The station is named after St. Pancras. Many saints are famous for themselves whilst others for having things named after them. St. Pancras is in the latter category. We know very little about him except that he was a young, 14 years old Christian from Phrygia and martyred by order of the Emperor Diocletian. (c304?) His parents died when he was 12 years old and he was brought up by his uncle, Dionysus, who had a house in Coelian Hill in Rome. He was converted to Christianity by Bishop Marcellinus. Pancras is buried in the cemetery at Calepodius, just outside the city wall in Rome and the site of his martyrdom is preserved under the Bassilica of St. Pancratius. In the seventh century Pope St.Vitalian sent relics of the saint to Oswy of Northumberland, one of the Anglo-Saxon kings. The Christian Mission landed at Ebbsfleet in 597AD, now the site of the new International Eurostar station, and from there St. Pancras became very popular in England and a church dedicated to him was built at Canterbury.

 

And so to London

(St Pancras, Camden)

Eventually several daughter churches were named after St. Pancras and the one near the present station may have been as early as the seventh century or some say, the fourteenth century. Whatever, making way for the railway station and the famous Midland Hotel meant the removal of a considerable number of bodies and bones from the churchyard. The Architect, Arthur Blomfield (son of the then Bishop of London) was put in charge of seeing that human remains were removed properly and decently and he used to drop by unexpectedly to check this was the case. However, in between times he appointed one of his pupils, a 26 year old Dorset man to continue checking everything was being done decently. His name was Thomas Hardy, later to become famous for his novels. The Hardy tree (Ash) is to be found in the churchyard gardens surrounded by the stacked gravestones Thomas would have directed to be put there.

 

Gothic Masterpiece

The renowned engineer William Barlow designed the famous Train Shed in 1863. This has now been completely repainted and restored and added to with an extension to accommodate the longer Eurostar trains. The famous architect, Sir Gilbert Scott was enlisted to build the famous Gothic Midland Station Hotel with it’s magnificent clock tower between 1867-77.

There have been a number of moves to pull the whole station down but in the 1960’s other attempts were afoot to get the whole site demolished, either St. Pancras or Kings Cross, to make way for housing developments. It would have meant the disappearance of the significant Barlow Train Shed. Among those who saved St. Pancras from demolition on this occasion were the Duke of Edinburgh, Sir Hugh Casson and the famous poet, Sir John Betjeman whose figure now graces one of the stations concourses.

 

Death and Resurrection

The old station is now transformed into the new and continues living to serve present and future generations. As travellers leave they take with them a new technological world as they switch on their virtual worlds, MP3 players, laptop computers or bounce text, speech or images around the world as they travel to Europe and beyond. So, the vision has taken the whole site to a new life issuing from the old. The old is still there of course, but brought again to life in the new.

Easter and St. Pancras

St. Pancras died because he was a Christian. He died very young too. However, his life is still remembered in the most unlikely places and especially in the nearby Old St. Pancras Church. For St. Pancras, Easter spoke of death and resurrection and how God raised Jesus Christ from the dead to live for evermore. It is just the same for us today. That is why Easter is still the most important season of the Church year and of the experience of every believer. By faith, we come to share in the death and resurrection of Christ day by day. We are renewed and restored, just like St. Pancras station, and, risen with Christ, we continue to serve God through the Church and for the World. With St. Pancras, we too share an Easter Faith which cannot be shaken. For Christ is risen; we are risen. Alleluia!

HAPPY EASTER TO YOU ALL.

 

Revd.  Michael Bradley

March 2008

 

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