From the dank crypt

1962 door - 500px

We’ve been clearing some old documents out of the dank crypt this week and one or two interesting things have emerged. Not least a couple of photographs from 1962.

We forget now that we photograph anything and everything all the time that in previous decades a photo was relatively rare.

This one was taken at the church door in 1962 and used in a stewardship brochure. I’ve already posted it on Facebook and there have been a few comments to the effect that it is interesting that the congregation was using a picture of an ethnicly mixed group of people in order to ask for money in 1962. The internationality of the congregation has ebbed and flowed through the years and feels very much who we are at the moment so it does seem significant that this image was used at that point in the congregation’s history.

And then there is the dog. We do like our dogs at St Mary’s. Then and now.

The only other thing I have to say is – “hats!”

Biretta Watch – Snowy Day

biretta5Anyone who has read my 100 things knows that I wear a biretta when it is snowy. People sometimes ask me why. I tell them that it is to keep my head warm. This makes them laugh though I find it hard to understand why. People sometimes ask me whether I know how ridiculous it makes me look. I reply that I do, but am conscious of how much more ridiculous any other hat would look on top of a priest in vestments and ask whether they had thought of that. The answer is usually more hilarity.

I’m fairly sure that I have not given more pleasure to the world this year, than by the simple act of donning that hat on Sunday morning to welcome the faithful. Certainly, members of the choir, which included the young trebles this week, were particulary thrilled to see it.

There is now some debate about what colour my pom-pom should be going on on facebook. Magisterial Purple vs Canon’s Red are the two liturgical options, but I was taken by the suggestion that I should sport a white pom, to represent the snow.

Biretta wearing (in snow or in sunshine) does seem to me to be an inherrantly missional part of the clerical task. It binds the community and draws people ever closer in.

No?

Further Biretta coverage here, here and here.