With Easter Day being quite early in 2013, and with Northern and Central Europe experiencing one of the coldest months of March on record, I did rather expect our Prague Easter Day congregation not to be quite as large as it was in 2012. Added to these two factors, was the change to Central European Summer Time (CEST) during the previous night, another discouragement &/or confusion to add to the mix. In view of the weather, the term ‘summer time’ did seem somewhat inappropriate 🙁
Despite all of this, we did still have a large congregation for Easter Day worship in Prague with a very good turnout of our regular congregation, a few of our ‘lost sheep’ reappearing, and being joined by a good number of English-speaking visitors from around the globe. Amongst the latter were several young Christians from India, all of whom are currently studying at various universities in Germany, who had organised to spend the Easter weekend together in Prague, and had made attending Christian worship on Easter Day, a central priority of their trip.
Having on Easter Eve, put the third member of our family, Oscar our elderly black & white cat, into the care of Hellam family for a few days, it meant that Sybille was able to travel down with me to Brno and attend worship there for the first time. So after fellowship and post-service refreshments in Prague, we set off together in the ‘Carly’, along the D1 – the Prague-Brno motorway.
We stopped for a late lunch at a service area some 60 km out of Prague, which advertises itself as serving the largest rízek/schnitzel on the D1 🙂 As I was eating mine, so snowflakes started falling outside. And as we drove on after lunch, across the Vysocina/Highlands, so the snow got heavier. Fortunately, the motorway remained relatively clear, but we arrived to see Brno covered in snow. Apparently, it had been snowing there for most of the day. So in Brno on Sunday 31st March 2013, I experienced the first ever ‘White Easter’ that I can remember.
Unfortunately, the adverse weather discouraged a small number of people from attending our evening Eucharist in Brno. But I was thrilled that Phil and Lenka, an English-Czech couple whose wedding I conducted in September 2010, came along to boost the regular congregation. They are currently having a house built for themselves, just south of Brno, with a view to moving there permanently from the UK, later this year. Two more future members of the Brno congregation!
Even better was the news that Phil & Lenka had taken note of what I had said in my sermon at their wedding. I had spoken about the Christian understanding of marriage as outlined in the preface to the Marriage Service in ‘Common Worship- Pastoral Services’. In the preface it states that the third reason that marriage is given is, ‘as a foundation of family life in which children may be born and nurtured’. Yes – Lenka is pregnant and is expecting their first child in August this year!
After post-service refreshments, Sybille & I drove out to Komin, a former village that is now a Brno outer suburb, to stay overnight with Katka, my chief Brno service organiser, and her husband Josef. The photo at the beginning of this post, is of the view from their guest bedroom window that greeted us on Easter Monday morning. Please note the snow on the nearby rooftops & the surrounding hills. Bing – I’m not dreaming of a ‘White Christmas’ or a ‘White Easter’ – I’ve just experienced one!
Sunday 17th March 2013 was a significant day for a number of reasons. Firstly it was Passion Sunday – the fifth Sunday of Lent, marking the beginning of Passiontide, the most important two weeks of the Christian year. It also featured the same set of Biblical readings and was the equivalent Sunday of three years previously in 2010, when I had to preach in the presence of Their Royal Highnesses, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. This is something my new Archbishop only did for the first time this past week 🙂
But Sunday 17th March was also very significant for Matthew, a Scottish member of the St. Clement’s congregation, as it was the occasion when he preached his first ever sermon. Matthew is currently exploring a possible vocation to train for ordained ministry within the Church of England. He has already successfully jumped through several initial hoops, including a long interview with the Vocations Advisor for the Eastern Archdeaconry of the Diocese in Europe, and attending an intensive Vocations Weekend in London at the end of January. But in advance of a critical long interview with the Diocesan Director of Ordinands (DDO) in London in early April, he is required to have preached a sermon, the text of which needs to be submitted to the DDO in advance of the interview.
Sunday 17th March both suited Matthew and me as being the occasion for preaching his first sermon. But what I did not initially realise was that the date is also St. Patrick’s Day. Therefore, I was suitably ribbed by my Irish Reader Jack Noonan, for inviting a Scotsman to preach on St. Patrick’s Day 🙂 However, in a show of Celtic solidarity, Matthew chose to wear his kilt in order to ‘to show love and to honour those in our congregation who hail from Ireland or those who have Irish ancestry’, as he so generously put it in the opening lines of his sermon.
The sermon was both well prepared and very well delivered. Matthew concentrated on the Gospel reading set for the day from John 12. 1-8, which tells of how Mary, the sister of Martha & Lazarus, anointed Jesus’ feet with half a litre of expensive perfume whilst he was visiting their home in Bethany. You can listen to and/or read the text of the sermon by following this link to our Church website.
Matthew teaches English to a variety of Czech adults in their workplaces. Having told his students what he was doing, quite a number asked if they could attend. Their reasons for doing so varied I’m sure, ranging from wanting to hear their English teacher preach in a Church service, to experiencing English-language Anglican worship, and to seeing Matthew in his kilt. And the feedback from the students when Matthew next met with them the following day, was fascinating to say the least.
The Czech students fell into two groups. There were the atheists who, in reality, are often more agnostic rather than atheist. They sat together as a small group in the pews near the back of the Church. They told Matthew that they found the service, ‘very nice indeed’. Their greatest surprise was the lack of fancy gold decoration within the Church building, in contrast to the many overly decorated baroque Roman Catholic Churches that you find throughout Prague. One student called it, ‘a Church and service for poor people’ and further expressed his view that, ‘this is what the Church should be about’. Here I hear echoes of the first statements by the newly elected Pope Francis I. Yet it is his Church that owns all these highly decorated buildings which so easily send out the wrong message as to what Christianity is all about. It will be interesting to see how he sets about grasping that nettle.
The other group were practising Roman Catholics who, unlike most Anglicans, sat in the pews right at the front of the Church 🙂 Their response was one I’ve heard many times from Roman Catholics after attending an Anglican Eucharist for the first time – how very similar our liturgy is in its wording and structure, to the Roman Catholic mass. As I have frequently had to explain, when revising and updating their respective liturgies, both Roman Catholics & Anglicans have gone back to the writings of Justin Martyr & Hippolytus, who describe the pattern of the Eucharist as it was celebrated in the Christian Church of the second & third centuries AD.
Their other reaction was one that both pleases but also saddens me. What struck them was how personal (one to one) the service was with my words of welcome to congregation at the beginning, and with the announcements before the final hymn at the end. They said this was really amazing as their own church is very ‘official’ as they described it and none of this would ever happen during their mass. There is almost a sense of their clergy being uncaring and conducting the service, ‘with no room for humility or humour’.
Whilst it is nice to be complimented, it does sadden me that even people who attend Christian worship regularly, still find their own Church uncaring and their clergy lacking warmth and humility. All of this re-echoed what I heard from various Czech young people a year ago, after conducting a Czech-American wedding in March 2012. To most Czech people, the Christian Church, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, is cold and unwelcoming and not a good advert for the Christian faith.
Not only did these Czech people, both those with faith & those of a more agnostic train of thought, find our worship warm and welcoming, they also found individual members of the congregation warm and welcoming too. They expressed their appreciation as to how so many people went out of their way to talk with them and invite them across the road to Coffee Hour after the service. I am both pleased and thankful that the St. Clement’s congregation has been such a good example of what a Christian community should be – showing something of the love and compassion of Jesus Christ to those who have come to worship with us for the first time.
At our Eucharist yesterday – Palm Sunday, we had twenty three visitors of a different kind join us for worship. They were the Chapel Choir and Organist of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. They wonderfully enhanced our worship, singing a setting by Josef Rheinberger, of Kyrie, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei, together with an Introit and a Communion Anthem. Whilst I am a great believer in the whole congregation joining in singing the musical parts of the liturgy, there is a case for sometimes just sitting or standing quietly and letting those gifted by God with great voices and instrumental skills, sing and play in praise of God.
The choir also gave a great lead to our congregational hymns, including ‘All glory, laud and honour, to thee Redeemer King’, ‘Ride on, ride on in majesty’, and my own favourite for Passiontide and Holy Week, ‘My song is love unknown’. As a member of the congregation remarked to me in an email on Sunday evening, ‘As for the music…..Wow!’ It really was a great beginning to once more marking Holy Week before celebrating the joys of Easter Day.
Two weeks ago yesterday, Sybille and I made a short journey in our car, to a Prague City Council facility where it is possible to safely and legally dispose of electrical and other household goods that any Prague resident no longer requires. In the boot of my car, were four – yes four 😀 , old computers, together with a screen monitor, all of which had been rapidly gathering dust for many months, sitting on the floor of my office in the Chaplaincy Flat. Prior to that, two of the computers had been stored in the bottom of the wardrobe of our guest bedroom for at least couple of years.
Before disposing of the computers, Sybille spent several hours completely clearing each of them of all the data they once held, so that no confidential information could end up in wrong hands. It was waiting for Sybille to find the time and this programme to do this, that had delayed their disposal. One thing that particularly struck me as we carried out this whole exercise, was how rapidly technology advances and changes these days. How what was once state-of-the-art technology, has so soon becomes obsolete.
The other question you may well be asking is how on earth we came to possess so many computers in the first place! Well there are explanations, including the important fact that all of them were given to us, second or third hand. We never paid a penny/cent/halér for any of them!
Two of them belonged to Sybille and came with us when we moved to the Czech Republic in September 2008. Both had Windows 98 as their operating system and the facility for inserting a floppy disk. I wonder how many of my readers remember them? 🙂 One of the two when bought new, was the office computer for the group of parishes in North Oxfordshire of which I was Rector from January 1993 until August 2008. It was bought to replace its predecessor which used the DOS operating system. How many readers remember that?
When the Benefice Council agreed to buying a new computer that had Windows XP as its operating system, they also agreed that Sybille could have its predecessor. She inherited the second computer from a husband & wife who lived within that group of parishes and who ran their own business from home and were also upgrading their computer systems.
The other two computers had both been the Prague Chaplaincy Computer in times past. One of them was the computer I inherited when we moved to Prague in September 2008. It had Windows 2000/NT as its operating system and was apparently given to my predecessor as Chaplain, by an American member of the congregation who was returning to the USA and did not wish to take it back with her. It was the computer on which the early posts and associated photographs for this blog were compiled. But by Spring 2010, it was rapidly dying.
The second computer replaced the first. It was given to me by a current member of the congregation whose employers had recently upgraded their computers, and were happy for the old ones to go to voluntary organisations who could make good use of them. It was a vast improvement on the Windows 2000/NT model as it had Windows XP as its operating system. But having previously belonged to a Czech company, it had one major downside – it only spoke to me in Czech 🙁
Despite this, it served me well for just under two years. That was until the on-board battery died, which nearly resulted in me losing all of my data and files. Fortunately, my computer savvy wife came to the rescue, but that incident made it imperative that I moved to another computer as soon as possible. Fortunately, a generous donation and a contribution from Sybille and myself, enabled the purchase of the new laptop computer I’m currently using to compile this post, as I explained in an earlier post of late May 2012 entitled ‘All change!‘
I greatly appreciate the freedom that my laptop computer now gives me to remain connected via email and the internet, when I am travelling. Whilst it normally sits on my desk in the office of the Chaplaincy Flat, connected to mains power and to our home wifi network, I have taken it with me to Brno, when staying there overnight after conducting a service, and also when I visited the UK in August last year. To be able to access my email & answer any urgent enquiries when not residing at home, is a great boon.
Yet when I see people out and about with their tablet computers, iPhones, etc., I am left to wonder as to how quickly my laptop computer, which is still less than one year old, will be considered as being obsolete. After all, its operating system is Windows 7, which has already been succeeded by Windows 8. There are times when I think, can we not stop for a moment and actually appreciate all that modern technology has done for us? Instead, technology continues to advance – and that advance seems to become ever more rapid.
Last weekend, we had the heaviest snowfall here in Prague, since early January 2010. It started snowing late on Friday 22nd February and rarely stopped until just before Sybille and I left the Chaplaincy Flat to go to Church on Sunday morning. To give you a visual impression, here is a picture showing what Kostel sv Kliment / St. Clement’s Church looked like last Sunday, covered and surrounded by freshly fallen snow.
But in contrast to the UK, where everything seems to grind to a halt as soon as any snow falls, here in the Czech Republic, that just does not happen. So it was that Tram 8 arrived on time at 10.07 at the Podbaba tram stop, and whisked us off on our sixteen minute journey to Dlouhá trída, two minutes walk from the Church.
But although public transport almost always keeps going when it snows in Prague, I generally believe that ‘discretion is the better part of valour’, when it comes to trying to drive the ‘Carly’ when it is covered in this amount of snow. The irony of having finally obtained my new Czech driving licence just a few days earlier, was not lost upon me 🙂
After Church, Sybille and I took Tram 26 to Letenské námestí and had a celebratory lunch for Sybille’s birthday, in Fraktal Bar-Restaurace. Then we walked home through Stromovka Park where some park visitors were not put off by the snow, but were sitting out on deckchairs, enjoying liquid and other refreshments from the Slechtovka Restaurace, located in the middle of the park.
Further to my earlier post, and the update in a later post marking the fourth birthday of my blog, today I became the proud owner of a Czech Driving Licence. I now have a driving licence, valid for the next five years, which inevitably also includes a far from flattering photograph of me 🙁
Compared to my two previous visits to Magistrát hl.m. Praha / the HQ of Prague City Council, today’s visit went remarkably quickly and smoothly. Following my second visit on Monday 4th February 2013, when I successfully proved that the Chaplaincy Flat where I live, is my family home, I was given a little slip of paper telling me to return today, with my passport and residency permit, to surrender both parts of my UK Driving Licence and collect my shiny new replacement Czech Driving Licence.
On both my previous visits, I was accompanied by Lisette, an American member of the St. Clement’s congregation, who read Slavic languages at university in the USA, and speaks fluent Czech. But because of health issues, she has since had to return to the US. However, as a result of my earlier posts here, about all that is involved in successfully registering a right-hand drive car in the Czech Republic, I have recently been contacted by a Czech-British couple, Vlad & Jan, who kindly offered to provide language help in future, should I need it, as a ‘thank you’ for meeting with them and giving them the low-down on how to register their British right-hand drive car here.
Unfortunately Vlad had to pay a brief visit back to the UK this week, making himself unavailable. So he organised for his good friend Pavel to substitute for him and, together with Jan, they were both waiting for me when I arrived at Magistrát hl.m. Praha / the HQ of Prague City Council at 3.00 pm this afternoon.
The whole place works on a numbered ticket system. On my two previous visits, Lisette and I had been required to wait for about twenty minutes before our number came up. Today, no sooner had Pavel worked out which button to press to produce our ticket, the ticket number immediately came up, summoning us to cubicle 56. I produced both parts of my UK Driving Licence and my ID, and then my new Czech Driving Licence was shown to me. A quick visit to the cash desk to pay the fee of CZK 50 (about £1.70), produced a receipt. With that, the Czech Driving Licence was mine.
As I have previously explained, the Czech authorities would not allow ‘Rev’ or ‘Rev’d’ as my title as they officially do not recognise religious or hereditary titles. So my new Czech Driving Licence has also made me a layman. But just to make my point, I today deliberately wore my clerical shirt and collar. Therefore here I am, outside Magistrát hl.m. Praha / the HQ of Prague City Council, with my new Czech Driving Licence, having successfully obtained a small victory over Czech bureaucracy, but at the expense of my title 🙁
