Author: Gareth Gilbert-Hughes

Gareth Gilbert-Hughes is the Precentor of St George's Anglican Cathedral in Perth, Western Australia. Before moving to Australia in 2016, Gareth was a college chaplain and research officer at the University of Oxford. Gareth has over twenty years of experience in ordained ministry in the Church of England and the Anglican Church of Australia in a number of parish and agency posts. Gareth is a specialist in liturgy, liturgical music and Syriac Christian literature.
Our Lady of Willesden, the Black Virgin

Pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Willesden

On By Gareth Gilbert-HughesIn Christianity7 Comments

This morning I took the train to North-West London on a personal pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Willesden. A few weeks ago I received my copy of the new Britain’s holiest places by Nick Mayhew Smith. It’s a wonderful travel guide with personal observations to the places of Christian heritage around Britain. I must confess that I had never heard of Our Lady of Willesden. Reading Mayhew Smith’s one page write-up, I jumped on the train this morning to make pilgrimage.

Our Lady of Willesden, the Black Virgin
Our Lady of Willesden, the Black Virgin

The Shrine is both oddly English and oddly London. It is in the Parish Church of St Mary Willesden, a rather pretty English parish church surrounded by a verdant graveyard, typical of so many village churches up and down the country. Yet just beyond its stone boundary wall is a busy roundabout with red London double-deckers ferrying passengers to and from Neasden Tube Station.

The church of St Mary dates back to a foundation of King Athelstan, 10th-century King of England and grandson of King Alfred the Great, and was built above the holy well that gives Willesden (well’s ‘down’) its name. The church possesses many hallmarks of its age: an 11th-century oak door, a square stone font of equal age, and the water from the holy well is now piped up into a little fountain in the chancel.

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Transgender and the church

On By Gareth Gilbert-HughesIn Anglicanism, Bible6 Comments

Christina Beardsley
Christina Beardsley

This week has been declared Transgender Faith Action Week by the Interfaith Coalition for Transgender Equality, a fact to which I was drawn by Becky Garrison‘s article for Cif Belief. This comes after the wonderful 4thought.tv (which airs short personal statements on controversial subjects after the evening news on Channel 4) spent a week discussing “Is it wrong to change gender?”

The week began with a video by Christina Beardsley, a Church of England priest, hospital chaplain and vice-chair of Changing Attitude. Beardsley transitioned a decade ago, after 23 years of ordained ministry, and gave a succinct and compelling 105 seconds on the church and transgender. After introducing herself, she loses no time in making the point: “There is no theological objection to someone changing gender”. No ifs, no buts, no cautious relative clauses, and it is a quote she takes from George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, and one who in no way could be labelled as a liberal. If that were not shocking enough for many people ­Christian and non-Christian alike — she continues by lauding the Bible for being transgender friendly. I really enjoyed seeing her hard-hitting approach, made all the more necessary due to the inherent prejudice against transgender, despite strong theological arguments to the contrary.

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Bright sadness: thoughts for Ash Wednesday

On By Gareth Gilbert-HughesIn Christianity, Featured2 Comments

Those who know me know that I take fasting pretty seriously. That does not mean that I am a master of the fast; I get grumpy, get tempted when I fast; I am weak, ill-disciplined and self-centred. However, I am serious about fasting because I am slowly coming to understand that fasting helps me to understand those most deplorable qualities in me. It certainly is not pretty, but does give invaluable insight. It is a pain, but full of gain.

You see, the date of Easter is in the diary, it will come and there will be hallelujahs (that word was typed before Shrove midnight!) aplenty, but it can mean very little if we simply let it fall upon us. A few years ago I walked to the summit of Mount Snowdon. It was a great climb, but I was put out to see people arriving at the summit by train from Llanberis. They had not put in the time and effort, but just bought the ticket. However, I overheard their loud complaining about the weather or the less than perfect view, and I understood that my investment gave the greater enjoyment of the beauty and magnificence of that little bit of creation. We often arrive at Easter like those who roll off the train, and we might get something from the experience, but it is definitely worth arriving the hard way, for the hard way is the way of beauty.

The classic move of giving up chocolate is simply useless. I mean, what is the point or significance of that? Fasting need not be extreme (and should not be if you have health problems), but it should make some significant impact on our lives. This webpage offers some suggestions and advice on fasting. Remember that we can have Sundays off from fasting, and that is why there are 46 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter. As the average British person consumes so much more than the global average, and not just in terms of food, fasting can have a social-justice focus too.

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Why are films so sexist?

On By Gareth Gilbert-HughesIn Uncategorized6 Comments

A 16 mm spring-wound Bolex "H16" Ref...
Image via Wikipedia

Why are films so sexist? I do not have the answer, but they are. In spite of grumpy government ruminations that film studies is a ‘soft’ subject, the medium is a vital expression of our cultural values. Films are mesmerising propaganda tools too. The recent The King’s Speech (which I have not seen, and thus am not reviewing) makes use of the ‘personal triumph against adversity’ genre, which any filmgoer will know, and molds it around one of the richest and most powerful men of his time (he liked people to call him Emperor of India) overcoming a speech impediment. Thus, we have a film in which we hoi poloi and made to root for power and establishment, despite the fact that when applied to life it is against our best interests.

There are many who blithely will tell anyone who cares listen that feminism is no longer necessary as we have sexual equality. Such people will cite all sorts of anecdotes to say it is so, but refuse to listen to the evidence that every sphere of power and money in the UK is dominated by men, be it government, banking, board rooms, chief police officers. And film operates as an amplifying feed-back loop on our society: film reflects our values, intensifies them and dictates them back to us. That is why film studies are necessary, and how they gratuitously exacerbate inequality.

A few days ago, my friend Hannah introduced me to the Bechdel Test. It seems that everyone else knew about this but me. The Bechdel Test was created by Alison Bechdel in her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For to demonstrate the overwhelming sexism of film medium. It is a very simple set of three criteria that any film should be able to pass easily, but almost all fail. The criteria are that a film must contain at least one scene in which

  1. There must be at least two women (usually interpreted to mean two named women characters)
  2. They must talk to each other
  3. They must talk about something other than men

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Spit, more spit and streaking

On By Gareth Gilbert-HughesIn Bible, FeaturedLeave a comment

EphphathaIn the last article, I discussed the strange swearword ‘raca’ that turned up, or got edited out of, last Sunday’s Gospel from Matthew. In this morning’s Mass, the Daily Eucharistic Lectionary gave us Mark 8.22-26 for our Gospel. There’s not really much of a link between the two, apart from the spit.

Today’s Gospel is the pericope of Jesus‘ healing of a blind man by putting his spit in his eyes. The healing takes two goes — first, the man sees people but they look like trees walking around. Characteristically for Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells him not to tell. The spit, the walking trees and the messianic secret all add up to make a rather odd incident.

The oddness of this incident is one of the pieces of evidence that Mark’s is the earliest gospel. The three synoptic gospels — Matthew, Mark and Luke — share a lot of passages in common, some even verbatim, and often order this material in a similar way. Mark, being the shortest gospel, has parallel texts of almost every passage in either or both Matthew and Luke, so it seems that Matthew and Luke are based on Mark. Markan priority — the hypothesis that Mark’s Gospel was written first — is strengthened by the few scraps of Mark that do not appear in the other two. One of them is the spit-and-trees pericope above.

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Whoever would call their brother ‘raca’?

On By Gareth Gilbert-HughesIn Christianity, Featured6 Comments

Raca!

Today, the Fourth Sunday before Lent, we continued reading the Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s Gospel in church. The chunk of gospel appointed for today was Matthew 5.21-37, a fairly hefty chunk of moral instruction covering murder, anger, name calling, adultery, divorce, oaths and promises. I didn’t preach a very good sermon, getting far too bogged down in a process-like interpretation of collective responsibility for ethics and the liberation of understanding that sin is a normal part of ‘fallen’ human existence, albeit non-essential (for Christ was without sin).

Apart from my missing the mark, I noticed that the original Greek text of Matthew 5.22 includes the non-Greek word raca (ρακα, raka, or ραχα, racha). This is one of the handful of Aramaic words and phrases that litter the New Testament, and the gospels in particular, where the Greek text merely transliterates the Aramaic in to Greek letters as best it can (fitting Aramaic into Greek letters is an awkward fit at the best of times). When we translate the Bible into English we then have a choice of leaving the translated Aramaic in, as we do for Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani, or translating it into English too. Where there is a Greek gloss with the phrase, as there is for Eloi, Eloi, it doesn’t matter that we’ve left this foreign language there: it comes with a translation. However, for the word raca in Matthew 5.22, we are given no translation help. Some translators leave it in, some ‘translate’ it to English.

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The Anglican tradition of daily prayer, and a year of praying the Roman Office

On By Gareth Gilbert-HughesIn Featured, Liturgy6 Comments

Prayer, Rosary, Book of Common Prayer 001
Image by bhsher via Flickr

I have spent the last year praying my daily prayers from the Roman Office with my parish. Over the years I have used a number of Anglican office books, from the Book of Common Prayer, the Alternative Service Book, Celebrating Common Prayer and Common Worship: Daily Prayer. The traditional Anglican approach to ordering daily prayer might be summed up in the word from the introduction to the Book of Common Prayer

Moreover, the number and hardness of the Rules called the Pie, and the manifold changings of the Service, was the cause, that to turn the Book only was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.

For Anglicans then, daily prayer has been governed by the aesthetic of the simple; if this is the daily work of the clergy, then it should be likened unto the ploughing of furrows and not bookish cleverness. Of course, traditional Anglican daily prayer can be a thing of great beauty when Solemn Matins (if such a thing still be done) or Evensong is accompanied by a robed choir: simple, yet sublime. The Alternative Service Book 1980 followed this principle of simplicity, but in its updated ‘committee prose’ the business of prayer felt more like it needed to be moved and seconded rather than Amen-ed! The times I prayed the ASB are mostly blanked out as bad memory. Into this spiritual desert we welcomed Celebrating Common Prayer almost lasciviously! Being built through the experience of Anglican Franciscans of the Society of St Francis (SSF) it was tested at the prayer desk. It encouraged Anglicans to think about the occasional Midday or Night Prayer (Compline). It gave us prayer that, while remaining fixed in its shape, moved with the seasons of the liturgical year and flavoured them appropriately with joy or sorrow, hope or conviction. This formed the basis of Common Worship: Daily Prayer, the current standard for the Church of England’s office. E’en so, the Anglican method has always been to take two or three books to the prayer desk: prayer book and Bible, and now the lectionary that reminds us of saints to celebrate and which psalms and readings to use. We Anglicans are not good at knowing our own tradition, so it seems necessary to offer this here as and aide mémoire.

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Lotus rising

On By Gareth Gilbert-HughesIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Egyptian blue lotus
Egyptian blue lotus

The prominent Egyptian opposition leader Saad Eddin Ibrahim has nicknamed the popular uprising that has taken Egypt by storm the Lotus Revolution (ثورة اللوتس Thaurat el-Lotus). Naming popular revolutions after flowers has been the In Thing since the 2003 revolution that swept Mikheil Saakashvili to power in Georgia was dubbed the Rose Revolution (ვარდების რევოლუცია Vardebis Revolutsia), after his supporters demonstrated against the former president’s opening of parliament while holding roses to declare their peaceful intent. The meme continued with other popular uprisings (most being more-or-less peaceful). Ukraine had its Orange Revolution, which while not a flower (and not the fruit either) is comparable. After the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, Lebanon experienced what is known as its Cedar Revolution (ثورة الأرز Thaurat el-Arz), after the national symbol. Back to flowers, Kyrgyzstan had its Tulip Revolution and Burma its Saffron Revolution (although that was named after the colour of the robes of the Buddhist monks). Briefly back to simple colours, Iran experienced its unsuccessful Green Revolution. Now, 2011 is definitely saying it with flowers, with Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution (تورة الياسمين Thaurat el-Yasmin) and now Egypt’s Lotus Revolution.

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Black Swan, a review

On By Gareth Gilbert-HughesIn Uncategorized5 Comments

Black SwanI have just got back home after watching Black Swan at the cinema. I think I want to call it a psychological thriller, but it is not a generic film. It is an intense journey that leads you on a dark, emotional introspection of the fragility of human nature, and self-destructive perfectionism. I was left in such a state that I could not speak as the credits rolled, and could barely manage a ‘wow’.

Black Swan is shocking, mesmerising, brutal and beautiful. It may be a film about ballet, but it is dark and tough, and the dance scenes are hypnotically beautiful — flounce and tutus this is not. Darren Aronofsky has directed his best film yet; the promise of The Fountain and The Wrestler have come to perfection here. He has put together an accomplished cast. Vincent Cassel excels as the intensely demanding director of the NYC Ballet who takes a more than personal interest in the development of his principal dancers, and Barbara Hershey is a brilliant choice for the narcissistic pushy mother living vicariously through her daughter, rising ballet star, whose loving support is overshadowed by an obsessive, controlling and ever-present menace. Both Cassel and Hershey anchor the film with their performances, portraying the two characters who dominate the young dancer’s life — ballet company and home.

Natalie Portman, as Nina, the dancer around whom the story is spun, finally shows that, given a director and script of quality, she can really act. Portman portrays the perfectionist ballerina sympathetically as both a vulnerable innocent and psychologically disturbed (both anorexia nervosa and self-harm are strongly suggested). The camera puts us inside Nina’s head, so that we are left wondering if things we see are really happening or just occur in her inner life — passing daydreams and half-glanced sightings of things keep us unsure of ourselves, our own eyes — is she paranoid or are they really out to get her? The film uses CGI to enhance these, rather than its usual use as a distraction.

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