Page 65

Advent Sunday

Advent Ring 1 — The Advent Ring in St. Clement’s Church with the first candle lit for Advent Sunday © Ricky Yates

Yesterday was Advent Sunday which marks the beginning of the Church Liturgical Year. Contrary to what the manufacturers of Advent calendars believe, Advent only occasionally begins on 1^st December. Instead it begins four Sundays before Christmas Day. With Christmas Day this year falling on a Sunday, (which is every clergyperson’s delight!), it means that this year, Advent begins on the earliest date possible and lasts a full four weeks.

In preparing for worship last week, I was particularly struck by the opening words of the Collect for Advent Sunday, “Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armour of light….”. It is a reminder of one of the great themes of the Advent season – darkness and light, and the need for each of us to use this season to prepare ourselves once more to receive the light of Christ. To be able to welcome the incarnate Son of God, born into our world on Christmas Day.

It is a particular theme of the Gospel of John and the prologue of that Gospel which I shall read as the last lesson in our Service of Lessons & Carols in a couple of week’s time and at our Midnight Eucharist on Christmas Eve. “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it”. John 1. 4-5 NRSV.

In many Churches throughout the world, there is the tradition of having an Advent Wreath, Advent Ring or Advent Crown, made of greenery and with four candles, one to be lit on each Sunday during the Advent season. Sometimes there is a further, usually white candle, in the middle, which is lit on Christmas Day.

Here in the Czech Republic, rather than having an Advent wreath sitting on a table near the front of the Church or on a windowsill, the tradition is to have a large Advent Ring hanging from the ceiling, behind or at the side of the altar. And because we do not own our Church building but rent it from the Kliment congregation of the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, we do not even need to provide our own Advent Ring as they provide one for us! As they always have their Sunday service at 09.30 before we have our Eucharist at 11.00, we inherit it already appropriately lit. All we have to do is ensure we snuff out the Advent candle(s) at the end our worship as part of our responsibility of leaving the Church safe and secure!

The lighting of an additional candle each Sunday does illustrate the approaching coming of light into our dark world in the person of the Infant Jesus. But the challenge I put to both myself and the congregation last Sunday was the question as to what ‘work of darkness’ each of us needed to ‘cast away’ as the increasing light of Christ shines into the various dark corners of our lives which most of us would prefer to remain hidden.

For contrary to popular opinion, Advent is not simply a countdown to the celebration of Christmas. Rather, it should be a penitential season, a ‘mini Lent’, so that both our hearts and lives are ready to welcome God’s Son Jesus Christ who ‘came to us in great humility’ at his first Advent, and thus be ready, ‘when he shall come again in his glorious majesty’ at his second Advent.

Advent Ring 2 — The Advent Ring hanging behind the altar in St Clement’s Church on Advent Sunday © Ricky Yates

Collect for Advent Sunday

Almighty God,
give us grace to cast away the works of darkness
and to put on the armour of light,
now in the time of this mortal life,
in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility;
that on the last day,
when he shall come again in his glorious majesty
to judge the living and the dead,
we may rise to the life immortal;
through him who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen

The New Atheism and the BBC

As I’ve written previously on this blog, ever since moving to the Czech Republic in September 2008, I have happily lived without having a television. Even in my latter years of living in the UK, I only tended to watch television in order to keep up-to-date with the News, together with enjoying the occasional major sporting event if it still was on terrestrial television. I refuse point blank to pay for satellite or cable TV, particularly as most of it is controlled by Rupert Murdoch. And we all now know quite clearly what journalists and others in his organisation do!

Therefore now, in order to keep abreast of what is happening in the world, I have become a very regular visitor to the BBC News website. I find its coverage to be fairly comprehensive, regularly updated and that it provides news without any particular political bias.

I do however, have a couple of gripes. As one who used to happily pay his annual licence fee, I am someone who always enjoyed the BBC as it was totally free of advertising. Because I now access the BBC News website from a foreign country, unfortunately advertising also appears.

Secondly, as my first degree is in geography, I get irritated by the complete geographical ignorance of some BBC journalists. A couple of years back, a news article about something that had happened in Pau in south-central France, was accompanied by a map showing Pau as being on the Atlantic coast of France when it is 125 kilometres from the sea! More recently, a news article about Serbia included a map purporting to be of Serbia, which showed Montenegro as being wholly within it’s borders when the two countries had separated several years previously and mutually recognise each other.

But my real frustration comes whenever there is a news item that involves some aspect of the Christian faith. Firstly, the theological and ecclesiastical ignorance of many BBC journalists is even greater than the geographical ignorance that I referred to earlier. But what really annoys me is that, if the Archbishop of Canterbury is quoted, or the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster has made a pronouncement, then you can be sure that the news item will also include the completely opposite view of Terry Sanderson or Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society, or Andrew Copson, Chief Executive of the British Humanist Association.

The BBC do this because they want to comply with their obligation to be unbiased and balanced in their reporting. But the reality is that, by giving undue prominence to the views of the National Secular Society and the British Humanist Association, and on BBC TV & Radio, giving them airtime, they are actually being highly unbalanced.

On the average Sunday in the UK, there are around one million people worshiping in Anglican Churches, about one million in Roman Catholic Churches, and a further million in a whole variety of Free Churches. This accounts for about 5% of the UK population. At least six million people in the UK attend Church at least once a month which is 10% of the population. I wish these figures were higher but even so, it still is a significant number of people.

Being aware of this, I set out to try and discover the membership numbers for the National Secular Society and the British Humanist Association. In doing so, I discovered two things. The first is that this information is far from being freely available. The second is, I am not the first person to try to do so and to recognise that both organisations are being given absurdly more recognition than they realistically deserve.

The website of the British Humanist Association states that it has ‘over 28,000 members and supporters’. However, it doesn’t state the difference in numbers between ‘members’ – those who have paid an annual membership fee – and ‘supporters’. What is a ‘supporter’? Someone who made a £5.00 donation in the past or who wrote a friendly email five years ago?

The National Secular Society is even less clear. No membership numbers are published and an email I sent many months ago, asking the question, never got a reply. However, this blogger has looked at their financial returns and has come up with a figure of less than 5,500. Another writer has analysed the figures and come to the conclusion of no more than 7000.

These figures speak volumes. As Gavin Drake says, “If, as the (National Secular) Society claim, the Church is irrelevant on the basis of numbers; then on what basis is the National Secular Society relevant?” The answer is quite obvious – neither the National Secular Society nor the British Humanist Association are relevant. If they were, people would be flocking to join and support them in droves. Quite clearly, they aren’t. I rest my case and hope that, in the interest of balanced reporting, the BBC also takes notice.

The Expat Bible without Religion

Expats.cz 1 — The expats.cz Survival Guide & Business Directory 2012. Photo © Ricky Yates

In more than one previous blog post, I have mentioned the extremely helpful website expats.cz. For example, it was through the forum on their website that I found Adrian Blank of Nepomuk to help me through the various hoops in order to register my right-hand drive car here in the Czech Republic.

As well as their website, expats.cz also annually publishes the ‘Czech Republic Survival Guide & Business Directory’. A new edition comes out around the end of September each year. We discovered the then new edition of the ‘Survival Guide for 2009’ within a few days of our arrival in Prague back in September 2008. At that time, expats.cz were specifically asking for new locations from which the guide could be distributed to English-speaking expats. Finding it such a useful source of information ourselves, we offered to take copies to distribute to newcomers who come to St. Clement’s Church and ask for one of our welcome booklets. Since then, we have distributed around forty copies each year.

The ‘Survival Guide’ is distributed free of charge as the cost of production is more than covered by advertising. It contains a great deal of highly useful information that any expat coming to live in the Czech Republic might need, covering employment and business, accommodation and real estate, health, education and leisure activities. This page of the expats.cz website gives full details of the guide including the claim that it is, “Known locally as the expat ‘bible’”.

Each of the three editions that we have previously helped distribute have included just over a page entitled ‘Religion in Prague’ giving basic details of the English-speaking Churches as well as contact information for other faith groups. Therefore, when I discovered whilst attending and exhibiting at the Expats Expo on Saturday 8^th October, an event sponsored by expats.cz, that the new 2012 edition of the ‘Survival Guide’ was now available, I picked up a copy for myself and made a mental note to go to the expats.cz office during the following week, in order to pick up a supply of the new edition to distribute from Church.

The first thing I did upon picking up my copy of the 2012 ‘Survival Guide’ was to check that the information about St. Clement’s Anglican Episcopal Church was accurate. I went to the contents pages at the front and then to the index at the back, to try and find ‘Churches’ or ‘Religion’. Could I find the information? No – because the 2012 edition of the so-called ‘expat bible’, has been published with all information about both Christian Churches and other religions, completely eliminated.

As well as immediately speaking with two staff members on the expats.cz stand, both of whom claimed to know nothing about the decision to exclude all information about religion, I also sent off a strongly worded email via the ‘contact us’ page of their website. When several days later, I had not received a reply, I rang the expats.cz office. No one there would admit to having even seen my email. But about half-an-hour later, my phone call was returned by their Creative Director Dominic Bignal, who also claimed not to have seen my email but knew about my complaint from feedback from the staff members on their stand to whom I had spoken.

There followed a rather interesting twenty minute phone discussion. Mr Bignall’s main points were as follows.

They had to reduce the size of the new 2012 ‘Survival Guide’ from 220 to 200 pages because of not having sold sufficient advertising, therefore something had to go.
They had judged what to include or exclude based on the number of visits to the various parts of their website.
If we had paid for an advertisement then we would have been included.
Going to Church was so specialised that if people wanted to find us, they would.

I have to say, as I also personally told Mr Bignall, that none of these arguments hold water and/or contradict what expats.cz claims.

If they needed to reduce the size of the ‘Survival Guide’ by twenty pages in order to be commercially viable, why didn’t they just slightly edit down each section rather than completely cut out one section? Allowing for the fact that 25% of guide is advertising, they needed to reduce about 165 pages of text to around 150 – hardly an impossible task.
How does expats.cz know that what people look for on the website is the same as what they look for in the ‘Survival Guide’? Bearing in mind that the information about Churches is already well hidden on the website, it’s not surprising that it doesn’t get so many visitors.
Expats.cz claim to provide unbiased information. But if you advertise……
The last argument can apply to anything that appears in the ‘Survival Guide’. Yes – put ‘English-speaking Church, Prague’ into Google and up will pop St. Clement’s and six or seven other possibilities. But the same applies to Tennis Clubs, Museums, gay bars etc, all of which are included. It is an argument for the ‘Survival Guide’ not to exist in the first place.

What expats.cz (or Howlings s.r.o. – the company who run the website & publish the guide) have done, is a combination of discrimination and ignorance. Discrimination against those who practice the Christian or any other religious faith. Ignorance in thinking we are so small a group of people that we can be safely ignored.

As a commercial organisation, expats.cz/ Howlings s.r.o. are free to choose what they include in their annual ‘Survival Guide’ and what they exclude – a point Dominic Bignall reiterated to me several times over during our phone conversation. Whilst this is true, they also claim that their ‘Survival Guide’ is ‘Prague’s most comprehensive and objective expat publication guide’. As far as I am concerned, following their unilateral decision to exclude all information about the practice of religious faith, both Christian and otherwise, their guide is no longer comprehensive and certainly not objective.

Tábor

As part of my two weeks of annual leave following my return from the Eastern Archdeaconry Synod in Bucharest, Sybille and I spent a long weekend at the beginning of October, staying in Tábor, exploring this fascinating historical town and parts of the surrounding area of South Bohemia. During the whole time we were there, we were blessed by some wonderful ‘Indian Summer’ weather as can be seen in the accompanying photographs featuring very clear blue skies.

Tábor lies about 100 kilometres south-east of Prague and it took us less than two hours to drive there. After walking around the historic centre of the town, we eventually found excellent accommodation in Penzion Modrá ruže which has a gated back yard where we were able to securely park the car.

The historic centre of Tábor is perched on a steep hillside overlooking the Lužnice River and is surrounded on three sides by precipitous wooded slopes. In the fourteenth century, a castle was built here though all that remains of it is the Kotnov Tower by the west town gate which can be seen in my photo accompanying an earlier post.

Tábor proper was founded by the radical followers of Jan Hus in 1420, five years after he was burnt at the stake in Konstanz. The town was named after the Biblical Mount Tábor (Psalm 89. 12) which is thought by some to also be the mountain on which Jesus was transfigured. The Hussites sought to organise the town following the example of the very early Christian believers by holding everything in common ownership as described in Acts 2. 44-45. They joined together in communal work to build the town and its defences and it is often suggested that this extreme variety of nonconformity is what has given rise to the connotations we now associate with the word ‘Bohemian’.

Tábor 6 — Historic building in Tábor © Ricky Yates

Despite its defensive site, the forces of the radical Hussites of Tábor were eventually defeated at the Battle of Lipany in 1434 and thereafter, the significance of the town declined. Fortunately, much of the wonderful architecture of the period has survived.

These two photographs are of buildings that surround Žižkovo námestí, the main central square in Tábor, named after the Hussite leader Jan Žižka. Unfortunately, the Hussite Museum, having been closed for stocktaking the two days before we arrived, did not re-open at the weekend as according to its own website, it should have done. Instead, it was scheduled to re-open on Wednesday 5^th October, the day after we left Tábor to return to Prague. However, not being able to visit it does give me a good excuse to re-visit Tábor some time in the future.

Tábor 7 — Hussite Museum building in the centre of Tábor © Ricky Yates

Tábor also features many buildings with sgraffito decoration. However, I did find it a little incongruous that that this wonderfully beautiful ancient building was now being used as a fast-food outlet!

Tábor 2 — Beautiful scraffito decorated building now used as a fast-food takeaway © Ricky Yates

Tábor 3 — Second World War memorial in Tábor featuring a Soviet soldier, machine gun over his shoulder, lifting a child into the air © Ricky Yates

In the more modern part of Tábor, to the east of the historic centre, I came across two examples of things I’ve previously written about in this blog. The photograph on the left is of a memorial commemorating the liberation of Czechoslovakia, (as it was then), from the occupying Nazi forces. It is a typical example of communist era architecture showing a Soviet soldier, machine gun over his shoulder, lifting a child into the air. Underneath is the correct date of the end of the Second World War, 8^th May 1945. But as I explained in my earlier post entitled ‘Correcting History’, because the Nazi surrender was signed late in the evening of 8^th May 1945, it was already after midnight in Moscow, thus meaning that the former Soviet Union and its satellite states, always celebrated VE Day (Victory in Europe Day) on 9^th May each year.

Since the Velvet Revolution of 1989, VE Day is now celebrated and marked with a public holiday, on 8^th May each year in the Czech Republic. If you look closely at the inscription in the second photograph, it is quite clear that the ‘8’ is far newer and shinier than the rest of the lettering. No doubt it replaced a previous ‘9’! Likewise, because this is a memorial erected in the Communist era, it originally featured the hammer and sickle emblem. This was clearly removed at some point after 1989 but, an outline of where it once was, can still clearly be seen on the stone work above the date.

Tábor 4 — The inscription with a new '8' and with the outline of the now removed hammer & sickle emblem still visible © Ricky Yates

Finally, despite promising not to feature anymore examples of Czenglish, or ‘bad English’ as one of my fellow cricketers thinks I should call it, I cannot help but post this photograph of a sign in Tábor that had Sybille & I in fits of laughter. Bearing in mind that Tábor is not so far from the Austrian border and German speaking visitors are quite numerous, it appears to be an advertisement in German for a ‘Nothing Club’!

Tábor 1 — A sign for the 'Nothing Club' in Tábor © Ricky Yates

A local derby football match

Football 1 — My ticket for Bohemians 1905 versus FK Dukla Praha © Ricky Yates

On Sunday 16th October, after celebrating the Eucharist at St. Clement’s Church and chairing a meeting of the Church Council, I went with eight of the guys I play cricket with, to watch a local derby football match – Bohemians 1905 versus FK Dukla Praha. The game was part of the tenth round of matches in the 2011-2012 season of the Gambrinus liga, the top division of Czech football. For the benefit of my American and Australian readers, the sport I am talking about is what you call ‘soccer’ but everybody else in the world calls ‘football’ or fotbal in Czech.

Bohemians’ emblem & mascot is a kangaroo. This apparently dates from a tour the club did to Australia in 1927 when they were given two live kangaroos which they donated to Prague Zoo. One of the nicknames for the club is Klokani which is ‘kangaroos’ in Czech. Not surprisingly, Australians living in Prague tend to support Bohemians 1905 & Terry, who organised our group, is an Aussie from Brisbane and a very keen supporter.

On the other hand, Dukla are really my local club as their home ground lies directly behind the Residence Podbaba estate where I live. This is their first season for many years back in the top flight of Czech football after they gained promotion as champions of Division Two at the end of last season.

Football 2 — Inside the Synot Tip Arena © Ricky Yates

The match was played at the Synot Tip Arena which is the home ground of the more well-known SK Slavia Praha. Bohemians’ proper home ground is the Dolícek Stadium which is only one kilometre away. However, it needs to be upgraded to Gambrinus liga standards which includes having under soil heating & there is currently a dispute both about ownership of the ground & who will pay for the work. Apparently, the really loyal Bohemians 1905 fans gather at Dolícek before every home match & then march the 1 km to the Synot Tip Arena.

Football 3 — The Dukla Praha supporters © Ricky Yates

The Synot Tip Arena will hold 21,000 spectators so, with only 3100 in the crowd, we did rather rattle. As you can see in the photograph above, the whole seating area on the north side of the ground was unused, with just a couple of stewards in bright yellow high-visibility jackets, guarding the stairways.

Over in the north-eastern corner of the ground were the visiting Dukla fans – surprisingly few in view of the relatively short distance they needed to travel. We all sat in the south stand with the somewhat vocal Bohemians’ supporters, all decked out in their club colours of green and white.

I couldn’t help but contrast numerous differences between attending this match and attending a game in the English Premiership. My ticket cost 150 kc, a little more than £5.00 which is about 10 -15% of what it would cost in the UK. And for 35 Kc (about £1.25), you could buy a 0.5 litre of beer and take it with you and drink it whilst watching the match! Admittedly, the league is sponsored by Gambrinus, an extremely drinkable Czech beer! Whilst there was a police presence outside the ground, they were mainly concerned with manually controlling nearby traffic lights to try and ensure the smooth flow of traffic on the streets surrounding the ground. I didn’t see any police presence inside the stadium.

Sadly we saw no goals as the match ended in a 0 – 0 draw. Even some of my Bohemians supporting friends agreed with me that Dukla were overall the better team. On at least three occasions, Dukla should have scored, but unfortunately, they wanted one touch too many in the penalty area. So it was one point each meaning that Bohemians 1905 drop from second to fifth in the league, whilst Dukla remain seventh.