22nd April 2011

A Chaplain’s Diary

 

Palm Sunday 17^th April

The PDSA Roll of Honour has a new entry for animal bravery. The awards for brave animals started ten years ago in 2001 and Dotty the donkey joins a whole range of dogs who have won the award for bravery since the scheme started. Some of them are police dogs who have saved the life of human beings in dangerous situations. The stories are many and varied. One dog, Endal, nudged his unconscious owner into the recovery position, covered him with a blanket and pushed a mobile phone towards his mouth. Dotty’s story is not quite so evocative. Her bravery award was for confronting a dog that was attacking Stanley, the ram with which she shared a field. Dotty galloped down and pinned the aggressive dog down until it let Stanley go. Dotty obviously didn’t know she was being brave.  Countless animals defend their young or pack members so she could well have been acting out of pack instinct and probably didn’t have a clue what was going on. It’s Palm Sunday today and in the same way, I don’t suppose that the donkey, which the disciples borrowed for Jesus, realized she was carrying the Creator of the stars and skies on her back.

 

Permission for ‘permiso’

I spent Wednesday morning trying to arrange a three-day ‘permiso’ or parole for someone in Palma Prison.  He’s a delightful young man and I feel some affinity with him because his grandma, who writes to me regularly asking for news of her grandson, lives in a small modern house on the exact site of a huge tower block in Liverpool where I lived on the 14^th floor before it was demolished to make way for the new housing.  I had to go right into the heart of the prison where a Roman Catholic priest and a nun were doing educational work with some of the men.  Although the young man is learning Spanish he was just so pleased to be able to chat away in English.  He shares a cell with another Englishman but, as he explained to me, there’s only so much you can say and being locked up in the same cell for hours on end does mean that conversation is somewhat limited.  Having talked to him I then had to go and persuade the prison authorities that I would stand surety for him.  Hopefully his girlfriend will come over to be with him for the three days and bring their two year old daughter who he hasn’t seen since she was six months old. 

 

Tradition says that Jesus himself spent the night of Maundy Thursday, in prison before being hauled up before Pontius Pilate on Good Friday.  Prisons are never pleasant places and despite mistaken, local opinion, from people who have never been inside the place, Palma Prison is not like a five-star hotel with swimming pool, I can tell you from first hand experience it’s anything but that.  Two things always stick in my mind about prisons, whether here or in the UK. The first is the endless noise, which never stops day or night, with constant shouting, screaming and doors banging.  The other is the smell – over a thousand men banged up for hours on end in hot sweaty conditions creates an ineradicable smell of BO that seems to seep out and cling to every wall.  I always have to remind myself that the punishment is the loss of personal freedom not trying to make the living conditions as unbearable as possible.  To watch the priest and nun working with those incarcerated men was a real tonic, they laughed, they joked and hugged their protégés - and that is probably the best form of rehabilitation imaginable.

 

Holy Week Bargains

Makro have sent me a glossy catalogue of their special offers for Holy Week.  As someone who has spent a lifetime trying to work out the vagaries of the yellow stickers indicating bargains past their sell-by date in Tesco’s and Safeway’s – these Holy Week or Sancta Semana offers are a totally new concept to me.  I fully expected to open the brochure to find special deals on donkey travel, nails, wine vinegar, Passover buffets, Easter lilies and the like.  Instead I find the offers are restricted to two litre jars of ali-oli, party packs of lomo and large tins of asparagus spears. 

The visibility of Holy Week is much stronger here than back in the UK where Good Friday seems to creep up on you unawares and all the shops and offices are open.  Here the phrase Sancta Semana crops up everywhere and one is left in no doubt that this week is particularly sacred and special to Christians.  Even the Ultima Hora carries endless adverts for Sancta Semana holidays to Minorca, Barcelona and Madrid. 

 

Opalescent Pink Lycra

Easter Sunday should be very interesting.  I’ve asked everyone coming to church to put on the brightest coloured clothes they’ve got and many of the congregation seemed to jump at the idea with enthusiasm.  I now have visions of wardrobes being marauded by colour hungry females digging out their fluorescent lime green and opalescent pink lycra garments.  For my part I’m making sure that my sunglasses are well polished for this explosion of colour that will hopefully hit us as we celebrate the Resurrection on Sunday morning in the Anglican Church in Palma.

 

I know the dressing up sounds a silly idea but Easter Sunday is the time when the church really celebrates the fact that death doesn’t have the last word and it really is a party.  It picks up a phrase, which was first used by Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, when he described the church as the “Rainbow People of God”.  Nationality, colour, status and sexuality should have no importance or relevance in the church, so hopefully the “Rainbow People of God” at the Anglican Church in Palma, Puerto Pollensa and Cala d’Or should be out in their full plumage on Sunday to visually shout and scream “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!”

 

 

Church Publicity

We’re in the process of distributing publicity leaflets about the Anglican Church to all the hotels on the island.  It’s an enormous job but I’m quite proud of the little, full-colour leaflet that has been produced for us by a member of our congregation who works in the marketing and advertising business.  His copywriter who knocked our pretty poor English into shape got it absolutely right when the introduction says,

 “If you’re on holiday here or have just moved to the island, you’ll probably be surprised to know that there are 60,000 British residents here at any one time in the year.  Whilst you’re relaxing in the sun, imagine how many people are working hard, giving birth, dealing with dramas, bringing up children, experiencing bereavement and getting married…the Anglican Church here never has a dull moment!

 

“Holy Communion at the Church of St Philip and St James in Palma begins with the words: ‘this is God’s table, not ours.’  Quite right, too.  Since 1966, when our church was consecrated, we’ve welcomed people from every background, whether they’re resident or visitor.  Join us for worship and you’ll soon discover it’s not just the island of Mallorca that’s warm and inviting.”

 

 

Blazing Torches.

On Easter Day there is a ceremony which takes place in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.  The Greek Orthodox Patriarch goes in the darkness to the spot where, according to tradition, the body of Jesus lay after the crucifixion.  No sound can be heard but at last he appears carrying a lighted torch and the pilgrims crowd around the entrance with their unlit candles.  When he comes out, one by one, everyone’s torches and candles are lit until hundreds are blazing away and the church is filled with light, which has all come from the one torch that appeared from Christ’s empty tomb.  Eventually there are candles throughout the city.  Some Christian Arabs put the candle in a glass jar and take this flickering promise of resurrection to their family graves.  Worshippers from churches in Galilee, and from Nablus on the occupied west bank, attempt to take the flame the sixty miles or so back to their own congregations.  One candle – one resurrection – and from it all the other candles and the promise of resurrection spread out for all.

 

Present Tense.

Easter Day, this year as always at the Anglican Church, will start with the cry “Christ is risen –he is risen indeed”.  The news isn’t “He rose from the dead” – the corpse of a state executed man which suddenly came back to life.  That is the past tense of the verb - as though it is something that has taken place in the past and is now over and done with.  But “He is risen” lets us know that something that happened in the past still goes on, and the whole of life can be about “resurrection” if we allow it.  No person and no situation is hopeless and Good Friday certainly doesn’t have the last word.

 

Born in a Grave.

There is a story from the Holocaust during the Second World War which sums it up.  Paul Tillich in his book “The Shaking of the Foundations” tells the story of a Jewish refugee hiding away in a graveyard with many others.  In a grave a young woman gave birth to a baby boy and as the old gravedigger wrapped the newborn baby in a linen shroud he was heard to pray “Great God, Hast thou finally sent the Messiah to us? – for who else other than the Messiah himself could be born in a grave?”  For Christians birth in a grave is what the Christian faith is all about.

 

On behalf of everyone at the Anglican Church whether in Palma or at Puerto Pollensa and Cala d’Or, “A very Happy Easter to you”.

 

 

Fr Robert Ellis is the Anglican Chaplain of Majorca

St Philip and St James Church,

Nunez de Balboa, 6

Son Armadans

Palma 07014

Tel: 971 737279

e-mail: anglicanpalma@gmail.com

www.anglican-mallorca.org