A monthly bulletin of all that is accomplished by and within our church's community

The Vicar’s Diary

June was another busy month; I had hoped to have a few days off in half term, but that wasn’t to be! One of the reasons was our celebration of the Feast of Corpus Christi, with the Mass and Procession – a lovely festival for a lovely summer evening.

Our excellent Area Dean, the Revd Andrew Corsie, ends his seven-year term of office at the end of June, so both Deanery Synod and the clergy Chapter had meetings and parties to thank Andrew and wish him well. No announcement has yet been made by the bishop about Andrew’s replacement as Area Dean. I heard a couple of rumours that the replacement will be me, but I know that’s not going to happen!

I conducted annual ministerial reviews for a couple of clergy from the Willesden Area this month, which is something that I enjoy. I hope it’s of some use to my victims.

Helen is a great support to me, as the vicar’s wife; I had an opportunity to play the role of head teacher’s husband when Helen’s school’s parents’ association arranged a quiz night, which was great fun. I was slightly worried that my appalling lack of knowledge on sport might hinder the team’s chances and leave the teaching staff in bottom position, which would have been embarrassing, but we managed to do a little better than that and came fourth out of six!

I began optimistically when the first question was about Doctor Who and asked what ‘TARDIS’ stands for. So I got off to a blisteringly good start, but then slumped miserably.

Dan and the choir suggested that we might observe ‘Music Sunday’ on 13th June. I chose suitable hymns, which all had a mention of singing, and the choir sang an introit and a blessing, in addition to their usual communion anthem. One of the hymns (“Lift high the cross”) and the anthems all had links with the Royal School of Church Music who had promoted Music Sunday.

I was also pleased to note that one piece was written by Harry Bramma, sometime RSCM President. Harry taught me piano when I was at the King’s School in Worcester and he was head of music at the school and assistant organist of the cathedral. A retiring collection raised £122 for the RSCM, for which we thank those who contributed.

More music was heard at St Peter’s, as we played host to four concerts this month from different choirs. Then the month drew to a close with St Peter’s Day and more fine music. Our guest preacher for the Patronal Festival Mass was a former Vicar of St Peter’s, the Revd Richard Hayes.

I joined the Afternoon Club for afternoon tea at Harvington School, attended a Mass at St Mary le Bow to mark the completion of the building of their new pipe organ, and I attended a drumming performance at Twyford CE High School, which included a live video satellite link-up with a school in Durban, South Africa. So, June was a month with plenty of culture alongside the round of meetings and office work.

To maintain the Parish Chest’s tradition of ornithological notes, as I was writing this, I saw four beautiful jays, flying around the vicarage garden! A pigeon, I suspect, had had a less satisfactory encounter with a fox, as I found a large pile of feathers on the lawn.

Mark Powell

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Springtime at St Peter’s

Those of you who have been following the story of the birds nesting in our post box this spring will be interested in the following final report from our Parish Administrator:

‘Activity and noise in the nest continued through until Wednesday 2 June. During those 12 days, I watched regularly, with my granddaughter, the parents flying in and out of the nest with worms etc in their mouths to feed their young. The noise grew as feeding time came closer and then went eerily quiet after the parent had flown into the nest!!!!

The family left the nest sometime between Tuesday evening and Wednesday morning, 2 June. I checked the nest on Friday 4 June and sadly found that one chick had not survived, the good news is that at least 6 if not 8 chicks are now happily making their way in the world.

The nest was left in the post box until Friday 18 June, but the family have not returned. It has been fascinating watching and I am sad that I couldn’t get a photo of the chicks, but it would not have been fair to disturb them and run the risk of the parents abandoning the nest.’


Lesley Brooks

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FINANCIAL UPDATE

There was a deficit of expenditure over income of £258 in the Month of May and, after four months, a cumulative deficit of £342.

Rosamund Rowe

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Corpus Christi

A Solemn Mass and Procession of the Host was held at St Peter’s on the evening of 3rd June to celebrate Corpus Christi. This feast takes place on the First Thursday after Trinity Sunday and is held on a Thursday to link it directly to Maundy Thursday, which we recall the institution of the Eucharist during the Last Supper.

Corpus Christi is the Latin for Body of Christ and it was first introduced as a celebration in the mid thirteenth century as a feast, which focused solely on the ‘Holy Eucharist.’ Later, St Thomas Aquinas developed both a special liturgy and hymns for the Corpus Christi Mass.

The climax of our celebration was the Procession of the Host where the Bread, held in a monstrance, was shown to the worshippers and was then processed outside the building to show the people before being returned to the church. The picture (below) shows Mark, who was Celebrant and Preacher, holding the monstrance.

Being half-term the congregation was under thirty, but with a small choir (which, during communion, sang Elgar’s Ave Verum beautifully), six wonderful hymns and Dan Webb, our Director of Music, playing Messiaen’s Le Banquet Celeste for the final voluntary, it was a truly marvellous occasion.

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Thank You

In a phone call to his father on Fathers’ Day (Sunday 20th June), Keith Bates asked for his thanks to be passed on to everyone at St Peter’s who had been kind enough to send parcels to him in Afghanistan. He had just arrived by helicopter in Camp Bastion, intending to move to ‘forward theatre’ imminently and was attempting to ‘hitch a lift’ on another helicopter to do so.

His working day is in excess of 12 hours and he is on duty seven days a week. Keith is presently staying in a large dormitory with other officers; hanging sheets provide a little privacy. The temperature is now 45 degrees (although as they are acclimatised this is not considered too bad) and continues to rise slowly each day as summer approaches (and the air conditioning in his quarters had broken down).

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Congratulations

Our warm congratulations to Peter Cawley (Wendy Quill’s partner) following his recent election as a Fellow of the Royal Society.

This noble society was formed on 30th November 1660 when a dozen men gathered to hear the young Christopher Wren give a lecture on astronomy. In the discussion that followed, they decided to form a society for the study of the new and still controversial Experimental Philosophy. Two years later Charles II made it his ‘Royal Society’ and in the 350 years since it was founded its Fellows have given us gravity, evolution, the electron, the double helix, the Internet and a large part of the modern world.

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‘The Case for God’

Three members of St Peter’s joined a large and enthusiastic audience at Friends’ House, Euston Road, to hear Karen Armstrong’s talk based on her book ‘The Case for God: What Religion Really Means.’

She began this fascinating lecture with the absurdity of attempts to define God. Defining means setting limits, which is precisely what we cannot do to the transcendent God. Even well-meant talk about a Supreme Being is misleading – as though God was a being, one among others, even if the one at the top; for God is not one among others, but that which underlies being itself. All talk about God stretches language to its limit: our words describe things and events, not the eternal Word itself. This is why poetry, music, ritual, the living of life in its fullness, give us better insights into God’s nature than do reams of technical theology.

It was refreshing to hear Karen Armstrong using her sharp mind and huge store of learning to show that religion is not something in the head, but to be lived. Christianity has been made so intellectually complex, but the Gospels are much more about behaviour and attitudes than about ‘believing’ in a cerebral sense. In fact the New Testament word for belief or faith does not mean mental assent to some statement or theory. It is about commitment, loyalty, faithfulness – more believing in than believing that. Jesus says ‘Your faith has saved you’ to people who hadn’t the faintest idea that he was the second person of the Trinity, let alone about atonement theories!

Many live issues got helpful treatment – scripture and science; revelation as an ongoing process, not a fixed ancient monument. ‘Does God Exist?’ was shown up as a meaningless question: even the ‘five proofs’ of Thomas Aquinas – he himself did not really believe they proved anything significant. And the Bible as a collection – the variety of viewpoints not a fault, but different voices that we need to hear, like the four Gospels.

We also heard how the doctrines of the Church at first were for edification and guidance, not as definitions of truth and falsity, still less for enforcing uniformity throughout a fractious empire. The Eastern Orthodox tradition is to see the Trinity less as defining how Jesus and Holy Spirit relate to God, and more as a subject for contemplation – it helps us avoid thinking of God as a single, simple personality; and meditation on each one of the three leads naturally to the others, to hint at the fullness of God’s nature.

Of course, one lecture on such a vast subject raises more questions than it answers. An underlying theme was that the fashionable case against God is made more plausible by the way religious people often talk about God. It’s not that traditional words and images are wrong, but they are just that – words and images, mere pointers towards the indescribable reality that is God.

This timely book should soon be on the church bookstall. I have not yet read it, but feel it could make excellent material for a course or an informal study group.

Harold Stringer

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Child Protection Policy

It was reported in the June issue of the Parish Chest that our ‘Child Protection Policy’ was readopted at the PCC meeting of 25th May.

You may be interested to learn that our policy was first developed and implemented in 1999 and was based on the revised Children in the Diocese of London document, which had been published earlier that year. A full review of this policy was conducted in 2005 and the recommendations of the House of Bishops Child Protection Policy were also incorporated into it. The policy is formally adopted at St Peter’s each year and a statement to this effect may be found at the back of the church (on the wall close to the photographs of the members of the PCC).

At the same meeting Doreen McGovern was re-elected our Children’s Advocate.

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Bollywood

Most of my friends have been worrying about exams these last few weeks, but I’ve had something completely different to get stressed about.

One of the fun things I do outside school is Bollywood dancing – I’ve been going to a class in Southall and it’s a really exciting and colourful thing to do.

I’ve been in a few shows, but this year I decided to take part in the UK Bollywood Dance Championships. Not by myself, but with two of my friends from class, Rakhi and Baljeet.

Tashi Chadwick, Rakhi Raju and Baljeet Arora

We worked on a routine, put together costumes and went to auditions at a hotel in central London. That was wild, because there were thousands of people taking part. We were number 1279 and we were near the beginning on our day. We were interviewed by an Indian TV channel, had our audition piece recorded and put on-line, and a few weeks later found out that we were among the 150 who had made it through to the semi-finals.

That was great, but it turned out to be just the beginning. We had to put together a whole new dance routine, make new costumes and worry about lots of little details, right down to matching our nose rings and bindis.

We rehearsed for weeks, and the day before, last Saturday, had a sort of ‘dress rehearsal’ when we were invited to dance at a Sikh wedding reception in Ruislip.

That was amazing; it really got our confidence up, as everyone was cheering and clapping like mad. So many people came to tell us how much they enjoyed our routine, and someone even asked to hire us for another wedding in the summer!

Then last Sunday was the semi-final, held at the City Pavilion in Romford. We were so nervous, especially when we discovered we had to wait until fourth from last in a three-hour show. We sneaked in to watch the first half of the show, which was scary, because we got to see how good everyone else was. There were also some technical difficulties with the music at the beginning, so that gave us something else to worry about.

But we all had our families there, cheering and waving big posters with our names on, which really helped to boost our confidence.

Our routine seemed to be over in seconds, even though there were three different songs mixed together in it. Then we had to wait again for the judges to make up their minds. We all crowded on stage to hear the results and were completely shocked and amazed when they said we had got through to the finals.

Now I’m going to be dancing at the O2, on live TV! The competition will be really tough, because there are fewer than 50 people who have made it this far, but it’s going to be a fantastic experience whatever the result!

Tashi Chadwick

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Music Sunday

On Sunday 13th June we celebrated the place of music in our worship. One of our choristers, Don Kennedy, had suggested that it might be appropriate to recognise ‘Music Sunday,’ which had been designated by the Royal School of Church Music as a celebration of music and musicianship, which are a vital part of church life.

Our Clergy Team, together with Daniel Webb our Director of Music, rose to the challenge and provided a marvellous service to mark this day.

Dan Webb at the organ

With an ‘introit’ by John Harper, (who was the Director of the RSCM from 1998 to 2007), a communion anthem ‘Be filled with the spirit’ by Bramma, five popular hymns, a sung ‘blessing’ and, finally, the voluntary ‘Sarabande’ by Herbert Howells, there was certainly some wonderful music.

Margaret Joachim was our preacher and delivered a “twenty minute history” of music in religion from the earliest biblical times, through the development of the western Roman church to the Reformation and beyond!

The introit we heard is based on the Choristers’ Prayer, which in fact our choir say together at the end of the service after they have processed out to the vestry:

Bless, O Lord, us thy servants
who minister in thy temple.
Grant that what we may sing with our lips,
we may believe with our hearts,
and that what we believe in our hearts
we may show forth in our lives,
through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

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A Memoir of Arnold Greir

There was a considerable amount of interest in the ‘Did you know?’ article, which appeared in the June issue of the Parish Chest and listed the Organists and Directors of Music there had been at St Peter’s since 1898 and some brief comments on Arnold Greir who had held the post for 55 years.

Mike Tiley put the Parish Chest in contact with Chris Allen who had been in our choir for thirteen years at a time when Henry Cooper was our Vicar and when the title ‘Director of Music’ hadn’t been invented! It then transpired that our present Vicar had been in touch with Mr Allen back in 2004 and had included an article by him on his memories of those days in a previous issue of the parish magazine. Chris Allen has sent through the following:

“I joined St Peter’s choir when I was ten in 1953. I was lured, by my friends at North Ealing School, who were already members, by the promise of 4 shillings (20p) a quarter plus sixpence I think or maybe a shilling, for weddings. I presented myself for audition to Mr Greir. He was always Mr Greir to me even after many years of knowing him and visiting him at his house in Kent Avenue, never Arnold!

My first recollection of him – through the eyes of a ten year old - was of a tall old man slightly bent over with a very large hook nose and of course pretty intimidating to a small boy whose claim to be able to sing in tune was about to be tested. But he was a very kind man and well used to dealing with nervous young choristers. I stood beside him at the organ and he took me through a few hymns (from Hymns Ancient and Modern, the English Hymnal came later at St Peter’s) and chants, played some random notes for me to sing back at him and declared that I would do. I was to start on Sunday, be prepared for three services, 10 o’clock Communion, 11:15 Matins and 6:30 Evensong and come to two practices a week, Wednesday for the boys and Friday for the whole choir. And the money? In fact I started on one shilling and sixpence a quarter; four shillings was the rate for the senior boys, I had to wait a few years for such wealth!

It was a large and excellent choir too, about twenty boys and a good complement of men, altos, tenors and basses. The oldest member was a Mr Squire who sang alto. It was remarkable to us small boys that such a delicate sound came out of such an old face. He had been singing since at least 1902 – later on he gave me his score of the Messiah inscribed with that date. The boys filled the treble stalls on both sides of the chancel and there were enough of us to be split properly into decani and cantoris like the first and second violins.

So began a relationship with the choir and with Arnold Greir that lasted for the next fourteen years and the beginning of a musical education that I value to this day” (to be continued).

C G H Allen

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Harvington School

It is now a ten year old tradition for Harvington School to offer to members of St Peter’s Afternoon Club entertainment and hospitality each year and the afternoon of 22nd June was absolutely delightful. A good sized audience of members was treated to an enchanting performance of songs so beautifully presented by all ages of pupils, which was followed by a most lovely strawberry tea. Tribute must be paid to the Head and her staff for making this occasion yet again a huge success and they deserve our warmest thanks.

David Sladen

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PCC

Jane Campbell has been co-opted to the Parochial Church Council for a period of two years. We are delighted that Jane has agreed to join the Council. She has been actively involved with St Peter’s and currently supervises the Flower Rota. Jane has previously been a member of the PCC.

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Synod

The Ealing Deanery Synod met on Tuesday 8th June at St Mellitus, Hanwell. The business of the evening was set in the context of a Eucharist. There were two main items on the agenda – receiving the Area Dean’s report for the year and the presentation and adoption of the Deanery Accounts, a highlight of which was the grant of £3,800 given to The Dovetail Centre.

As this was likely to be his last Synod meeting as Area Dean, Andrew Corsie took the opportunity to outline some of the highlights from his seven year tenure in this job. This included the development and implementation of the results of three key reports ‘Living Courageously’ (2004), ‘Living with Confidence’ (2006) and ‘Casting the Net’ (2008). Andrew, who has been an excellent and very active Area Dean, received a vote of thanks and warm applause.

St Peter’s is represented on the Synod by the Vicar, Trevor Bates, Wendy Quill and Rosamund Rowe. Rosamund is Secretary to this Synod.
The London Diocesan Synod met on Tuesday 22nd June in the Church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Those who arrived early enough were treated to a tour of the newly opened development, which had cost £36 million. (It is well worth a visit when you are next in central London).

We also learnt that the earliest record of this church was from documents dated to 1222 in connection with a dispute about whether the Abbot of Westminster or the Bishop of London had authority over the church. In 1542, Henry VIII built a new church on the site and the present church was designed by James Gibbs and completed in 1726. Consequently, the current building has never actually been “in the fields,” as London was well developed by the early eighteenth century.

The meeting was chaired by the Bishop of London and there was a very full agenda. In addition to a session of formal questions put to Bishop Richard and some technical items, including a change to the London Diocesan Fund Articles of Association, there was a presentation on ‘Justshare,’ the City of London Investment Fund, which is aiming to raise £1M for microfinance in Africa.

There was also a presentation and discussion on the ‘London Diocesan Board for Schools’ as a key player in the Mission of the Diocese of London. We learnt that students at one Church of England school were 99% Muslim. The parents liked the school with its ethos based on belief in God and, as the local Imam said, ‘what you teach them that is wrong during the week, we can put right at the weekend.’

There was also a presentation and discussion on the ‘Children’s Charter,’ an update from the General Secretary on ‘London Central’ and the plans for a “striking Christian presence” on the new King’s Cross development, the adoption of the Annual Report and Accounts of the LDF for 2009, an update on financial progress in 2010 and a look ahead to 2011.

Finally, the outline Agenda for the forthcoming General Synod sessions in July was presented.

Trevor Bates and Rosamund Rowe represent the Ealing Deanery Synod.

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Please remember in your prayers the following people whose year's mind falls at this time:

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DATES FOR YOUR DIARY

Social Events for 2010

Saturday, 30th January - Quiz Supper

Saturday, 20th March - Visit to Handel House Museum

Saturday, 25th April - APCM Lunch

Thursday, 13th May - Ascension Day

Tuesday, 29th June - Petertide

Sunday, 11th July - Jazz Party

Sunday, 5th September - Beating the Bounds

Saturday, 11th September - Wine Tasting Evening

Saturday, 2nd October - Harvest Supper

Saturday, 27th November - Charity Market

Sunday, 19th December - Carol Service

Saturday, 29th January 2011 - Quiz Supper

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