What is in Kelvin's Head?

Prof Bill Fishman

23/12/2014

I’ve just returned from one funeral of someone (Michael Hare Duke) who inspired me when I was in my late twenties to hear of the death of another one.

I knew Prof William (always Bill) Fishman when I worked in the chaplaincy at Queen Mary and Westfield College – now just Queen Mary, University of London. He was one of those academics at whose fingertips knowledge sizzled.

As well as his formal academic duties he was unofficially the professor of the East End of London. He had been there through all the great upheavals of the 20th Century and no day was more burnt into his memory than the battle of Cable Street, which he witnessed at first hand in 1936 when he was 15. Cable Street was a street I walked down to get to church on a Sunday morning but it was a street that I walked down politically and emotionally with Bill every time I met him.

“It was a day when we all stood together, see. We all stood together against the blackshirts. I saw them – the Irish dockers and the Jews all linking arms to make sure they wouldn’t pass”.

Bill was passionate in his atheism but more passionate to describe himself as a Jewish atheist and even more passionate when lecturing people about what God wanted us to do to make the world a better place. He would come into the chaplaincy regularly when he was in college and march straight into the chapel and start muttering incantations.

It turned out that these were yiddish curses against the Tory government of the day from whom he believed most evil came. I remember the particular obscenity of the curse that he had devised in which he translated Virginia Bottomley’s name into Yiddish and back again into English. He said with a grin that his yiddish curses were more powerful than our domesticated Christian blessings.

But he was a blessing himself. Countless students learned of the great movements of modern history from someone who had witnessed them. Whether it was formal lectures or tours of Jack the Ripper’s London, Bill was eloquent, passionate, angry and fabulously funny all at the same time. The rise of UKIP must have horrified him. But he taught and inspired a generation who will fight them and win.

Bill didn’t have much time for a lot of religious leaders but he was never more at home than standing in chapel preaching, really preaching, against poverty, racism and fascism.

Bill didn’t believe in a far off heaven. He was proud of the struggle for an earthly heaven where all will be fed and housed.

And I’m proud to have known him.

6 responses to “Here or there?”

Gary

01/04/2007

Up there. High altar. No doubt.

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Tom Allen

01/04/2007

I am very much with Richard Giles on this one – there should liturgically only be one main altar – ideally this is achieved by romoving the former High altar and dedicating that space to some other purpose – where that is not possible as in historic cathedrals then it should be left dormant (covered in a simple cloth perhaps) and only the altar which is being used for worship should be dressed since this is in fact THE altar.

Despite all the reservations about removing former altars in the end it solves long-term problems, and provides a single visual focus for Eucharistic worship. At times when a high altar is needed then the new altar can moved there.

This kind of fuzziness illustrates that our liturgical practice has become dominated by hertiage criteria.

I am about to replace our main altar with something moveable and aesthetically more appropriate, but am facing a Registrars ruling that the current altar (and former eastward facing number more recently provided with wheels and moved to the chancel!) must be burnt, and that the wood frontal cannot be used for a screen.

Dont’ we get ourselves tied up in knots!
Tom

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Stewart

01/04/2007

A thought came to my mind this afternoon. At the Creed we all face east. This results in the choir turning their back on the Nave Altar and in most cases put the High Altar in their sight.

Considering Tom’s comments, another thought thinking about some English Cathedrals which have multiple altars around the building, it is not usually possible to see more than one at a time. Some have a chapel behind the High Altar – behind a screen.

Turning back to St Mary’s – all the action at the 10:30 service is centred and focused around the Nave Altar. However there is still the High Altar, the Pheobe Traquair Reredos and Gwyneth Leach mural of Our Lady at the East End. To my mind their presence enhances the worship around the Nave Altar and does not detract from it.

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Andrew

02/04/2007

The Altar is a table, where we commemorate a meal together. Clearly (to my mind) we should all be sitting round it, as we do (more or less) at present. The table reminds me that Jesus instituted the Last Supper when he was among us (HERE), not somewhere else (THERE).

I very much hope that the Altar in St. Mary’s can be left where it is.

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kelvin

03/04/2007

It seems to me curious that the practice that I inherited was to light and dress the high altar whilst using the nave altar. It makes no sense, except perhaps to highlight St Mary’s puzzling parallel worlds of deep conservatism mingled with radical liberalism.

Whist tending to agree with Andrew’s sentiments, it is worth remembering that the nave altar could hardly be said to have stayed in one place these last 20 years.

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Elizabeth

17/04/2007

Here. Both. Loving the paradox.

But maybe I only say that beccause the only church I’ve regularly worshiped in where there are clearly two visible altars is St Mary’s and that’s what I’m used to. I’ve never found it distracting that the high altar is dressed and lit, even though the nave altar is where the action is, so to speak. But then, would I notice if the high altar wasn’t dressed and lit? Probably not.

I do love the nave altar, peripatetic as it is!

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