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Bring on the Dancing Girls
Perhaps things have improved over the last half century but, in my day, the officer class consisted mainly of expensively educated public school twits. They were jolly good at finding minute specks of dust on the top of a squaddy's locker, drinking Pimms No.1, or removing a girl's bra with one hand, but, in the decision making department, they were outclassed by the average Marmoset. The one who ordered me to polish the concrete floor of the workshop, when we were dealing with highly sensitive pieces of explosive ordnance, where one slip could have proved fatal, discovered that insubordination carried with it a whole colourful language of its own.
The army was run by the non-commissioned officers, who saluted deferentially, and proceeded to completely ignore instructions. Jesus' disciples, one notes, were hardly the kind of men who had been weaned on the playing fields of Eton. At the end of this month we celebrate the life of S. Aidan of Lindisfarne, a giant in the conversion of the North of England to Christianity, who was neither in the intellectual bracket of S. Augustine of Hippo, nor aspired to the upper class circles of S. Wilfrid of Ripon. He still managed to be very successful.
S. Aidan was a bishop, but not of the kind to which we have become accustomed today. Bishops, in the Celtic Church, were servants, not masters. There will be those, who like me, are wringing their hands at the direction in which the Church of England is heading now that the General Synod seems to have taken complete leave of its senses. After the days of S. Aidan bishops moved from the other ranks to the officer class, so there are those who think that climbing to the top of the greasy pole is an achievement. They do not seem to have grasped the point that the church is run from the bottom and not from the top.
If women become bishops we shall treat them in exactly the same way in which we do the men. We will salute deferentially and completely ignore them. Why, someone commented, do we need women bishops? Why, indeed, do we need bishops at all? Well, we have to do something with the inadequates. May God bless you all, Fr. Allan
May God bless you all, Fr. Allan
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