Birthdays, Anniversaries and Celebrations

I went into the kitchen the other day to find a large live crab swimming around in the sink. Here it is slightly less alive:

On Saturday night seven of us from our house had a night out at the Link House concert, where Cambridge Concert Orchestra played music (including classical, light music and film music) on an astronomical theme (e.g. Holst's Planets suite and the theme from Star Wars). On the way back, with the stars above us and the air crisp and sharp, we half-ran and half-danced back down the street.

A momentous occasion I should have mentioned at the time was my Grandad's 90th birthday on October 31st. Having been born in Shanghai of missionary parents in 1916, a year before the Russian Revolution, Grandad has lived through a fair amount of world history, including being evacuated from Dunkirk in 1940. In his birthday speech he talked about how, looking back, he could see many answered prayers and signs of the faithfulness of God.

We had a celebration the weekend before, in which we all descended on Maidenhead. Some branches of the family there we hadn't met up with for ten years or so, so there was much muddling up the names of siblings and suchlike as well as some new arrivals to the world in that time who were maybe slightly bemused by dozens of excitable unfamiliar faces materialising around them. The spread of faces was accompanied by a spread of wonderful food, and more interesting presents included a handcarved granite inscription made by his nephew for the occasion, a tape of messages from absentees, and the latest edition of the Parry family tree spread across the table.

On October 31st I was asked by a Chinese housemate, "Why is today a special day? Why do people cut melons? What are they celebrating?" I tried to explain that they were celebrating Halloween, which is a celebrations of evil spirits and things. To which my friend replied "Oh? Why would they want to celebrate that?" Good question. I'm glad that our family had occasion to celebrate the goodness of God over the generations on October 31st.

October 31st was also Reformation Day, marking the anniversary of Martin Luther nailing the 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg Church. Subsequent generations of Protestants have read this as a dramatic stand of one man against a powerful and corrupt institution. Actually, this event can't, in isolation, be characterised as such a confrontation. (Luther's trial at the Diet of Worms and his response "Here I stand. I can do no other; so help me God" fits the bill better on this point). The church door was the town noticeboard, and Luther was announcing his intention to hold an academic debate on these issues. The Reformation developed organically out of pre-existing concerns and it wasn't until some time later that Luther's ideas were seen as a serious threat to church authorities. History is often fuzzy and difficult to read, but I hope that academia's anxiety about defining and labelling is not making me too woolly and indeterminate in my thinking.

Providential (often partisan) historiography clusters around the Reformation period and has done ever since the events of the Reformation were happening. Whilst I don't feel able to apply a totally binary grid and place the "goodies" and "baddies" into watertight camps, I do believe that God worked through the messiness of history and through imperfect human agents, who were entangled in often brutal political and polemical games, to bring to the forefront again the message of his free grace.

History segues into the present again on November 5th, when a huddle of Link Housers joined the rest of Cambridge on Midsummer Common to see some spectular fireworks. Having wrapped up tightly to go out, we were warmed up by jacket potatoes, soup and hotdogs back at the house. The day before I heard Lancelot Andrewes, the 17th century bishop, preach a sermon about how November 5th should remind us of God's deliverance of the English people. Well, actually, it wasn't him in person, but Peter McCullough of Lincoln College, Oxford, who performs 17th century sermons as a way of enlivening his study of them.

This was part of an academic conference at CRASSH (the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) on 'Preaching and Politics in Early Modern England' (which roughly equals 16th and 17th centuries). This was really helpful and exciting, particularly as the main speakers were talking about a resurgence of interest in academia in religious topics such as those I'm researching. This is partly due to the current world situation, which has brought religion into the public sphere in a way which it hasn't been for decades, which is good news for my research and which I may write about sometime soon if I can avoid the trap of banality. Peter McCullough, in his splendidly autobiographical opening plenary session, talked about how he had performed the Andrewes sermon at a conference the day after the London bombings, with an eery resonance.

A second conference I attended at CRASSH this term, on theories of language in medieval Christianity and Islam, had some points of interest, but was a little heavy-going at times (such as when a paper was delivered in French about the usage of a particular Arabic word in a debate in the year 932).

Cambridge has played a significant role in shaping world history, in almost ludicrous disproportion to its size (e.g. to continue the Reformation theme, it is said that "Cambridge produced the Reformers and Oxford burned them"). At the last gathering of the Garden Room Club, which takes place once a month at Link House (in the Garden Room) with an international meal and a talk or some other activity, we had Bartow speaking on enjoying Cambridge life. Some of us ended up around the piano singing songs from The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins. Perhaps we should put on a musical sometime.