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.

23 responses to “What if this is the end of the Eucharist?”

Thomas Scott

06/05/2020

Just noticing here that DGD (of happy memory) seems to have left out of his catalogue of joyous, sad, perilous, and solemn occasions any instance of celebrating during a plague or pestilence. I’m not worried about the mass. The eucharist need not be celebrated as though it were a car battery, as if not offering it now would somehow allow the power to run down. It is not at risk, we are, which I think is your point. The questions asked are worth asking, of course.

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Mo Nicholson

06/05/2020

Mo Nicholson. This is an intriguing discussion and what I would like to add to it is the observation that I have had to learn the hard way that participation in the Eucharist being made impossible in no way diminishes an individual’s ability to worship God or be in fellowship with other believers. I am barred from receiving Holy Communion in the Catholic church because allergies make this impossible for me. The pain induced by this has little to do with feeling separation from God, in fact nothing at all as I do not feel that. It comes from feeling excluded from the community, different sections if which regard it as desirable or tolerable that a member of the community should be excluded in this way. This experience has made me understand as never before that if we place prime value on liturgical celebrations, ir indeed anything else, above charity, compassion, welcome and inclusivity, in other words love, then we have become the sounding gong which St Paul warned against. If we truly believe that God is love, as I do, then it is obvious that it is love for one another which makes us true children of God our Father, and in light of this we could begin to look at these present challenging circumstances as simply an opportunity to love more, to reach out to one another in whatever way possible in the knowledge that this is what actually matters and always did. Only perhaps we were tempted to almost make a fetish of our rituals, sacraments and so on. And perhaps this can show us a better way more adapted to the world we are supposed to serve.

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Lynsay Downs

06/05/2020

You and your conversation with Dave Roberts prompted me to write this. Does it resonate for you?

https://astonishing.community/2020/05/06/conversations-in-coronatide/

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1. Kelvin
  
  06/05/2020
  
  Thanks Lynsay – yes, it does resonate with me very much.
  
  I’ve shared it on facebook. I think it is really helpful.
  
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Fr Keith

06/05/2020

Thanks again for such a thoughtful piece. With the Eucharist central to much of, at least Anglican/Episcopalian, worship in recent generations, we perhaps forget that the Church in these islands was, between the Reformation and the liturgical revivals of the 19th and 20th centuries, sustained by Mattins and Evensong as the regular diet of worship on Sundays. I’m not advocating a return to such times, but there is, as you suggest, work to be done on non-Eucharistic worship (though not defining it as a negative). Thanks again.

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Fenland Boy

07/05/2020

For the record, I’m not in favour of lay presidency at the Eucharist. I believe, for better or worse, in an ordered church.

Why are you concerned about lay Presidency?

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Chuck

08/05/2020

May I say respectfully, lighten up. Many Anglicans/Episcopalians lived on the edges of civilization in the nascent U.S. and various elements of the British Empire. Priests to celebrate the Holy Eucharist and to baptize were seldom seen, at most twice a year in many areas. (Bishops, only every several years.) The Church carried on in this manner decade after decade. If circumstances require, the Church will carry on again despite our profound sense of loss.

I should add, to those who grew up under threat or reality of war, persecution, oppression, famine, other disease, etc, the present difficulty is not unfamiliar in many respects.

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Miriam MacCarthy

08/05/2020

Thank you! It is wonderful to read these serious, personal thoughts about the Eucharist. My feeling is that it has become celebrated to the point of boredom. Church, and what we do in it, is in danger of becoming simply a habit. It could just as well be crackerjack for a fast-asleep congregation. My heresy is that the direction Jesus gave is to “do this in remembrance of me”, and that means everything we eat at any time, whether alone or with others, in thanksgiving. If that is seriously done, it has vastly more meaning. It really gets ones attention and requires preparation. Would not become popular or usual, I predict!

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