If you read the most recent edition of Evangelically Departed you know that I made a rather bold statement about the numbers of toilets in Hyde Park, London. There are a lot. I mentioned that, perhaps, I might try to take a photo and include it in this edition. The photos weren’t able to capture the sheer scale of the numbers of toilets, but here is a picture:
This group is three rows deep with no distance between and there were quite a few rows like this in other areas of the park as well. I could have maybe taken a better photo, but in a city absolutely covered in flowers and flags and beautiful decorations I did think that maybe the people around me wondered at a tourist like me working to get a good toilet photo.
I also told you that I’d mention the reading glass guy. That was a story that I read recently in the Toronto Star about a man in England (named Tom Arnold, but not THAT Tom Arnold) who mistakenly ordered and received 60 pairs of reading glasses. The news article was about the kind of mistakes that can be made today that could not have been made in previous times. Even a generation ago, you would most likely be purchasing reading glasses in a retail store, brick and mortar, as they call it. You wouldn’t, in error, pick up 60 pairs and then purchase them and bring them home.
The article mentioned a woman in Nova Scotia, Canada who, two years ago, by her own ordering mistake, bought 222 toasters. That would be quite a delivery. I think I know how that mistake happened.
And here in London, the day before the Coronation, one of the things that is palpable is the sense that the country, and perhaps the world, is in-between times. The Monarchy doesn’t fit the rest of what is going on in the city. It’s a gridlock-inducing, road-closing, visually loud and demanding decoration. Lots of people love it.
The Coronation of King Charles III has an “Is this for real?” feel to it.
The papers have been publishing article after article about who will attend and who will not attend. For some reason, an article about Australian musician Nick Cave was featured. Here is what he said when asked why he is going to be there; “I guess what I am trying to say is that, beyond the interminable but necessary debates about the abolition of the monarchy, I hold an inexplicable emotional attachment to the Royals – the strangeness of them, the deeply eccentric nature of the whole affair that so perfectly reflects the unique weirdness of Britain itself. I’m just drawn to that kind of thing – the bizarre, the uncanny, the stupefyingly spectacular, the awe-inspiring.”
Yesterday, William and Kate took a ride on the tube and visited a pub. The Royals smilingly condescend to the commoners, trying to adapt the Monarchy to the times. They do so from behind fences and barriers. They are all over the city now. I half expect some metal fencing panels to be in the hallway outside my hotel room, directing me to some two block detour to the elevator because the King might be travelling a few blocks away in 16 hours or so.
It is so incongruous, the “then and now” world, and Charles seems like the perfect person to embody the disconnect. Below is a photo that has been running in the Guardian’s online coverage.
The city is swallowed up in a decorative anachronism. You feel as if the whole thing could disintegrate at any moment. When Kate and William took the tube yesterday and had a beer at at a pub, she was smiling so determinatively that you could feel the task of trying hard to communicate “I am just like you" without words. The distance is kept at all costs, though. They wouldn’t be Royal if they truly mixed with the masses.
Then you might imagine, what if the metal barrier disappeared and the super posh coat became just nice, but very much normal? Kate might just walk into the crowd and become one of the people.
There is actually hope in the idea of disintegration, and I am not making a pro or anti monarchy stance. I am speaking of the disintegration of distance as a spiritual idea. Can you imagine such a thing? I won’t quote scripture at you, but for those who know Philippians 2 - Okay, I’ll barely quote scripture - “Jesus, being in very nature God, did consider equality with God something to be grasped, but took on flesh, became human.”
It’s curious that, for a faith that has incarnation as a core concept, there is, in so many religious circles, the constant insistence upon keeping distance. If you grew up in the evangelical church you know this and you may have lived under it - holiness as separation. I have a Joan Osborne song in my head now, “What if God was One of Us?”.
Theologian Karl Barth said that the church is not a “what,” but a “when.” In fact, even in the early and mid twentieth century, he pushed against the word “church.” He warned that it would come to carry all kinds of damaging ideas. Church as place, church as “my church.” Church as denomination or proper belief. Church as separate.
Church is not a “what,” a thing that meets each Sunday morning. Church is a “when.” It is when humanity connects with humanity, compelled by the hopeful idea that every single person ever reflects the image of God.
This “when” welcomes a kind of disintegration, a removal of barriers and distance. The entire sacred/secular divide loses its meaning and ability to separate. The concept of this kind of disintegration is taken further by Ivan Illich. In speaking about the future of the church, of faith, Illich sounded so different than prophets of doom hollering about the decay of society and warning of the horrible terrible world. He saw hope in the church moving away from separation and being, in his words, “thrown into the saeculum” (the age, the secular).
If Kate disappeared into the crowd she would still be Kate. She wouldn’t disintegrate, just the façade. Maybe she would be more Kate than the wealth and trauma of royalty could ever allow her to be.
This would look like a failure to some, I suppose.
Same as it ever was. Jesus looked like a failure, too, in leaving the throne to show his true identity. This was, and remains, His holiness.