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Married Couple Or Just “Profound Friends”?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

I didn’t go to Mass last weekend because I knew that all of the Catholic churches in Britain were going to read to their congregations a pastoral letter from the Bishops, exhorting us to fight against the government’s plans to legalise gay marriage in the UK. I don’t have time for that nonsense, and I don’t much care if this puts me at odds with official church teaching, because in 100 years’ time the church will agree with me. People that accept gay marriage and contraception will be looked back upon as latter-day Copernicuses, and those who frown upon it will be looked upon much like the Antebellum South. That’s just how it is, huff and puff about traditional values all you like.

I’m used to seeing cringeworthingly anti-intellectual arguments against gay marriage from my church, but this latest one from the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, really takes the cake:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9147559/Gay-couples-are-just-lifelong-friends-says-Catholic-leader.html

Gay couples are, apparently, just lifelong friends who somehow got confused or duped into incorporating a romantic element into said friendship. Says the Bishop:

“I would want to say to them that I understand their desires, that I understand their experience of love is vitally important in their lives, but I would want to say to them that they are called in my view, in the Church’s view, to a very profound friendship in life … I would want them to be respected, but I would want them to have a vision in themselves that what they are called to is not marriage but a very profound and lifelong friendship.”

Good, well that’s sorted then! No need to continue this argument about marriage equality because gay and lesbian people are just good pals who got a bit confused after a few drinks.

Sigh.

The Daily Telegraph has a poll on the subject, which, as is so often the case, misses the point entirely:

It is not for Daily Telegraph readers to decide whether gay marriage in churches should be allowed. That is a matter that does, and should always, remain with the various religions and denominations. No one is suggesting that Vincent Nichols be frog-marched to the altar of Westminster Cathedral and made to bestow the Catholic sacrament of marriage on a gay couple. As long as the official church position is that homosexual unions are a sin, clergymen should and must not be required to violate their churches teaching in such a way.

However, neither does any one religion, church or denomination have the right to impose their particular standards for marriage – or dietary customs or anything else – on the population as a whole. The Catholic church can object to gay marriage and ensure that no such unions are sanctioned within the church, but beyond that it has no authority, spiritual, moral or otherwise, to lecture other people. And any claims to the moral high ground are roundly rebuffed by their tolerance of civil heterosexual unions, and their deafening silence on the topic of extra-marital affairs and the astonishingly high divorce rate.

I’ll leave it to Nick Herbert, the UK government Home Office minister to have the last word in this case:

“I don’t seek to dictate to the Archbishop what happens inside his Church, what standards he sets and what he seeks to do. It would be quite wrong for me or the state to do so. But equally I wonder why he should seek to dictate the institution of civil marriage outside of his Church which is not a matter for the Church.”

Amen.

Cat Of The Day – 15th March 2012

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Introducing a new segment. Please meet Alex, my wife’s much-loved cat:

A hard day of watching TV

Here she is, in all her glory.

At some point, we have to relocate her from Texas to London. This is likely to prove both interesting and expensive, and will no doubt deserve a separate blog post all of its own when the time comes!

They Also Choose To Go To The Moon

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As my blog approaches its one week birthday and surpasses 500 views, I noticed the other day that one of the views came from Russia. I thought that this was rather cool, but little did I know that either Mr. Putin or Mr. Medvedev himself must have been reading my blog, and took inspiration from my recent post, “We Choose To Go To The Moon”:

https://semipartisansam.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/we-choose-to-go-to-the-moon/

Clearly my words had quite an impact, as Russia has now decided to resurrect its plans to send humans to the moon:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9141416/Russia-to-finally-send-man-to-the-Moon.html

Writes the correspondent in the Daily Telegraph:

“Mr Putin said piloted space missions should be revived by 2018, when the first flights are expected from Vostochny, a $13.5 billion (£8.6 billion) spaceport being built in Russia’s far east. The Soviet Union, the United States and China are the only countries so far to have launched manned space flights. India’s space agency declared in 2010 that it wanted to launch a human mission to the Moon by 2020, and scientists have indicated that China could do the same by 2025.”

Russia – like India and China, who also aim to land on the moon within the next 10-20 years – clearly has far better things to spend its money on than going to the moon, a modern-day re-enactment of what by that time will be a 60-year-old accomplishment. It is hard to see that it will generate anything close to the same return on investment as did the Apollo program, in terms of scientific knowledge, industrial growth or new inventions.

It should also be noted that the Russians have made similarly grandiose plans before, only to walk away from them.

But at the same time, in this day and age of austerity and retrenchment, it is somehow comforting that someone somewhere in the world – besides Newt Gingrich and his moon base – is still looking up to the stars and making plans to return to space.

In Honour Of Philip Langridge

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

philip langridge 1

 

I have been meaning to write this blog for about six years now,  but only managed to start five days ago. That is quite a remarkable feat of procrastination by anyone’s standards. But there were some long-imagined blog posts that I am not willing to let slip into oblivion, no matter how overdue they may be. And this is the much-condensed version of the post that I would and should have written upon learning of the death of the much esteemed British tenor, Philip Langridge, in March 2010. His obituary can be read here.

I have been a fan of classical music ever since I first listened to my mother’s old tape recording of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony (conducted by Colin Davis) when I was too young to even remember. I would arrange my stuffed animals in the rough approximation of an orchestral layout and pretend to conduct them. Go ahead and laugh all you want! And she would take to me classical music concerts at the Barbican Centre (once we discovered how to find it, buried as it is in one of the more labyrinthine parts of London) and the Royal Festival Hall, and I will forever be grateful for this because there is nothing – nothing– that compares to hearing a great symphony or an amazing piece of chamber music played live in front of you by some of the most talented players in the world. My late grandfather was also an enormous fan of music of all kinds – from classical to Scottish country dancing – and he also played an enormous part in my musical development. To this day, I practice playing the piano on his old electric Yamaha Clavinova piano.

After I graduated from university and gained a position at a respectable firm paying a decent salary, I wanted to give something back after all that classical music had done for me. And so after some discussions I decided to become a patron of the London Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble that I would hear most in my childhood, providing a modest amount of financial support to help to keep ticket prices low so that future Samuel Hoopers could attend the finest classical music concerts in the world (bar none) for a low, affordable price. My association with the London Symphony Orchestra has been wonderful and is one of the things in my life of which I am most proud.

Since I have been a Patron of the LSO I have had the great fortune to be able to meet and speak with Sir Colin Davis, the former Principal Conductor and now the President of the LSO, and the first thing that I mentioned to him was that old tape recording of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, without which my life might quite literally have taken a very different path. He told me that he remembered recording it, at Abbey Road Studios, just a stones throw from where I used to live at the bottom of West End Lane in West Hampstead, London.

But the single most special, musical moment of my life occurred a full year before I commenced my patronage of the LSO. I had only just moved to London, and for comfort and the knowledge that I would be in familiar surroundings, I booked a ticket to an LSO concert at the Barbican. To be quite honest, I bought the ticket online and did not even look at the programme until I had arrived at the concert hall after rushing across town from the office. It turned out that the programme was a performance of “The Dream of Gerontius” by Edward Elgar.

I took my seat (in the stalls for the first time, since I was now a man of at least some limited means) and sat back, ready to unwind after a hard week in the office. But before the orchestra took the stage a man from the Barbican Centre came out with a microphone and informed us that although this evening’s concert would go ahead, the soloist, Philip Langridge, was recovering from a heavy cold, and that the performance might not be up to its usual standard.

What followed was the single most amazing, breathtaking concert that I have ever been to. Even when recovering from the ‘flu, Philip Langridge brought a passion and intensity and musicality to the part that I have never heard matched, before or subsequently. In both the first half (where he sings the part of the dying Gerontius on his death bed) and the second half (where he plays the part of the soul of Gerontius in purgatory) his voice was clear and articulate and sublime, and I don’t mind admitting that mine were among the many non-dry eyes as the final part, “Softly and gently, dearly-ransomed soul” drew to a close.

Whether I have another five years or fifty years left on this good Earth I will never forget that most special of concerts, and all of the concerts that my mother took me to when I was young, and all of the concerts that it has been my privilege to bring my dearest friends and family, and my darling wife to, at my second home, the Barbican Arts Centre in London.

And though he may have passed away two years ago last week, I will never forget how the voice of Philip Langridge made me feel on that evening in 2007.

Angel: Softly and gently, dearly-ransomed soul,
In my most loving arms I now enfold thee,
And o’er the penal waters, as they roll,
I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee.

And carefully I dip thee in the lake,
And thou, without a sob or a resistance,
Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take,
Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance.

Angels to whom the willing task is given,
Shall tend, and nurse, and lull thee, as thou liest;
And Masses on the earth, and prayers in heaven,
Shall aid thee at the Throne of the Most Highest.

Farewell, but not for ever! brother dear,
Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;
Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,
And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.
Farewell! Farewell!