The Ugandan Adventure: Part VI: Meeting Nicholas Cage and Receiving Homage

One of the stranger things to happen to me of late was a discovery of a time portal, through which I (and a few friends) could travel to any point in history. Furthermore, it allowed us to communicate across the eras. One friend travelled through to the 19^th Century, at which point he walked into a shop to buy a sandwich, only to discover that the menu did not have any prices on. When the sandwich arrived, it lacked any bread (it was, essentially, a pile of chicken pieces) and cost £20. I, on the other hand, went to Ancient Rome where I encountered the Hollywood actor Nicholas Cage, who was a traffic warden. Furthermore, he was also a traffic warden in the 19^th Century, and the present day. He had gone for a career change to become the Doctor Who of road traffic.

‘I knew this would happen’ I hear you say. ‘Your great learning has driven you insane, Josh’ the distant voices cry. No, as it happens. This was yet another malaria-tablet-induced dream. Despite what the naysayer may say, I am completely sane, or at least my good friend the King of Assyria tells me so.

To move onto more sensible climbs, I will tell you about religion. Ugandan style. You see, when I first arrived in Uganda (at my hotel with a view of a million dollars in Kampala), I noticed there was a picture on the wall. Who was it of? Not the Pope, nor the Ugandan President, but rather the Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Uganda. For those who are used to the nice, cosy image of Anglicanism in the Church of England (where it would be rather unusual to find pictures of our dear Archbishop Justin Welby hanging around in the leading hotels in the country), Anglicanism in Uganda is a different kettle of fish. For one thing it is thriving. And I don’t mean ‘The-church-has-a-nice-new-young-couple’ type of thriving, but rather, ‘the-church-has-a-nice-new-large-village-of-two-thousand’ type of thriving. Although Roman Catholicism is still the largest denomination, Anglicanism is not too far behind.

I realised this when I went to a village in a Kuman region (a district near Soroti) for a Confirmation Service (for children and young people - and a few older ones as well - who are being confirmed into the Anglican denomination). Not only was the whole village present for the Confirmation (the church was packed to overflowing - it would make many a British ‘mega-church’ blush), but I also discovered that the local school was Anglican, its political representatives were Anglican, and I think even the animals were the ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ type of Anglican as well. This is not the type of liberal incense and candles Anglicanism that you would find in the American Episcopalian Church, or the quiet little Matins Service in an English Country Parish. Instead, this is full-blooded African Anglicanism: a service can easily last five hours (with a two hour sermon), with a strange combination of a translated version of Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer and hypnotic traditional African music (repetitive, with call-and-response, dominated by voices, drums and African harps). Even though the bishop was garbed like his European Medieval predecessors, his faith is full-throttle Conservative Evangelicalism. He preaches with an astonishing passion and energy and without notes. Sometimes he is so loud, the microphones start screeching. Once again, in contrast to much Western Christianity, his is a typically African sermon of death, judgment, and hope in Jesus Christ. A two hour sermon is quite usual for him.

The whole village processes to church

Indeed, with the village churches packed, the Cathedral in Soroti packed (easily over a thousand in each of its four Sunday services), and a total of 276 schools in the Soroti district alone, it appears that the author of the book ‘The New Christendom’, Philip Jenkins, is right: Christendom is no longer found in Europe or North America, but in Africa and South America (and increasingly in China and the Far East). Whilst religion in Europe has taken three centuries of battering by an increasingly confident secularism, introducing public secularism into somewhere like Uganda would probably cause the country (or at least the educational system) to collapse. The ancient tribal religions have mostly fled into the shadows of the country; Islam is a minority. Secularism is nowhere to be found. Christianity is culturally, socially and politically dominant.

I got a taste of how much things have changed. To a certain extent figures like bishops have taken on the traditional role of the tribal elders. Roles can take a long time to change in cultures; the gestures may remain the same even if the type of person in a social role has changed. In this village in the Kuman region, the whole church gathered into a line to shake the bishop’s hand. But where this differed from a Church of England model is that the bishop stayed seated at the front, and the church processed to greet him there. And when they did shake his hand, they would kneel before him, as if he were a tribal elder: not just the women - as is the custom of the Kumi - but the men as well. I also was greeted thus: people would walk up to my chair and kneel before me as they shook my hand. In a sense, I was paid homage.

This is a pleasant experience to have, despite my egalitarian principles, and I have decided to introduce this gesture as soon as I head back to the UK.

Tune in tomorrow to see more fun, sun and adventures in Penduck of Life’s Ugandan Adventures. Tomorrow we’ll be encountering the children of Uganda, and how Ugandan six-year-olds are better than me at football, and have an interested habit of staring at me… endlessly…

The Ugandan Adventure

So, first things first: who am I, and why am I writing this blog? I’m Josh Penduck, an ordinand (trainee Anglican priest) at Cranmer Hall in Durham. I’m currently in the Diocese of Soroti in Uganda for a month, on a placement (as part of my training) observing the Anglican Church in this part of the world. I thought a few people might be interested to read some of my experiences…

Second, when I was about to start a blog, I discovered I had already begun a (very) short-lived one several years ago (2009). I had forgotten about it, and I was almost certain that everyone else had forgotten it. Nevertheless, my one-entry blog (a sermon I made several years ago) spread like wildfire through Poland in 2011, with a total of nearly 500 hits. I imagine that many in Poland have been having frequent sleepless nights, awaiting the next instalment of the mighty blog. Now, my Polish friends, I’m happy to say your ceaseless faithfulness has paid its rewards: the blog continues.

So, finally, I have the internet! I bought a dongle after a few days’ delay, and am happily working again ‘on-the-line’. This is the fifth good thing to happen to me today:

1) I had an excellent night’s sleep, the first since I have since I arrived in Uganda last Monday. This is a mixture of jet lag and heat, but I think I’m finally getting the hang of this ‘sleeping’ thing. I had strange dreams, which included me suffering from vertigo in a skyscraper in London, attempting to get a picture of the sunrise; subsequently, I was floating over the city, eating a box of marshmallows. This has improved upon dreams where I accidentally insulted someone’s face and they took me to court, or another dream where I miss my train because my brother decides to start playing the trumpet to my grandfather instead of dropping me off at the station. Ah, malaria tablets! Who needs illegal drugs when I have you to keep me entertained?

2) I had a normally heated shower. After an initial stop in a hotel in Kampala, I have been using the shower in the Guest House in Soroti, next to where Bishop George Ewau (of Soroti Diocese) lives. The Guest House is beautiful, and caters for all my needs. Unfortunately, I first experienced the shower as an onslaught of ice-cold water. The next day, I discovered I needed to turn the heat on. However, this led to the opposite: scaldingly hot water. Finally, after seven days here (who says I lack common sense?) I worked out how to get the shower to be ‘warm’. Naturally, this is an immensely complicated procedure, and no brilliant mind could have worked it out in less time… It would take hours to explain, and doesn’t in any involve turning the heat off for five minutes before I enter…

3) George cooked some excellent toast. Who’s George? He is my housekeeper. [In a sense, having a housekeeper makes me feel like I’m in Downton Abbey, except there’s no white-tie dress code, and so far I am sadly not engaged to Lady Mary]. George fries the toast with the butter already spread, turning this ancient English cuisine into a delightfully hedonistic encounter. Once the Ugandan honey or plum jam is applied, I’m sure it is categorically redefined as a ‘sin’.

4) The fourth thing is something unmentionable in public. A description would involve the consequences of being in contact with unEnglish germs. What is good about this situation is that it has stopped. For the time being.

5) I have internet. This is surprisingly difficult to get (more on that later). Nevertheless, it is got. I came, I searched, I blogged.

So, what have I been up to? In order to find out, you must check out tomorrow’s blog (I’m told short blog entries are the most successful… was this short?). But for a quick taster, the blog over the next few days involves Afro-Pop versions of ‘Here comes the bride’, ten hour funerals, the world’s biggest potholes, walking a pig, and lots and lots of starch!

Hope at Christmas

Let me be honest with you: I really, really hate picking up the newpapers at times. Perhaps I was in a good mood beforehand, but after a quick reading, I find that my pleasantries have been twisted into anger, rage, depression, bitterness - above all, hopelessness. Just a brief glance through any national newspaper, news website or magazine, and you will find a deep, deep, deep well of agonized pessimism towards the future. What ever you're passionate about - or even have a light interest in - it seems that hope is gone. At this Christmas time, it seems we've entered a much darker and depressing world than one perhaps, say, five years ago - whether that is because of international recession, joblessness, government cuts, or inequality in life; or perhaps we have a claustrophobic fear that the country - or the world - that we love so much is being replaced by something 'other'. Maybe we have a fear of crime and street gangs, or of immigration, or of extremism and terrorism, or of the increasing indifference that people have to God and morals, or of the apocalyptic descriptions people give to climate change or nuclear war.

If the papers are to be believed, within ten years we'll somehow be living in the bewildering paradox of a secular and atheistic bureaucratic dictatorship which is run by Islamic extremists, which believes in complete and utter moral freedom and depravity whilst at the same time being infuriatingly puritanical, whilst losing all economic competitiveness against the rising economies of the east, whilst facing global flooding, the annihilation of the human race by war, disease or climate change, which is meaningless anyway because the human race will eventually go extinct, the earth will be swallowed up by an exploding sun, the universe will either collapse or expand so far that it becomes a cold, empty and dark place of useless existence.

Sounds fun.

Woody Allen expresses this feeling well when he says,

'Life is full of misery, loneliness and suffering and it's all over much too soon.'

The thing is, this fatalistic attitude to life may sell well, but it isn't necessarily true. Take, for example, the situation of the nation of Judea in the First Century AD. Here we have a nation that used to be powerful, rich and respected, but by the time of the Christmas story, everything has changed: at that time, the country was occupied by a brutal, vicious and uncaring foreign empire called Rome, which would do the most heinous and shocking crimes against humanity in the name of the misnamed 'pax Romana' - Roman peace; there is a corrupt, sadistic and perverted dictator installed on the Jewish throne infamously known as King Herod; there is also a religious elite that could not care less about the spiritual and emotional needs of the average person, and the only religious people who do have a sense of moral integrity - the Pharisees - are so severe at times that any chance of 'living' is utterly sapped away; there are prophecies that had been given in the ancient past about a saviour whom God would send, but every day this promise seemed ever less likely; some of the religious elites - in the form of the Sadducees, even said that God had no interest in human affairs (at least according to the historian Josephus). The world of 1st Century Judea was politically, morally, religiously and economically corrupt and - above all - hopeless. In the end, most people did little more than simply exist.

So far, this seems to be turning out to be an incredibly depressing thought. It seems to be about a world without hope in the past, and now hopeless in the present. And yet we now look upon that ancient time as a moment of supreme joy; we celebrate it with songs, poems, gifts, bright lights and wrapping paper, decorated trees, Handel's Messiah and the best films on television. That period in the past where hope seemed dead is now - bizarrely - seen by children as the most wonderful day of the year; for adults it is a time where - hopefully - we can relax after the year's strains, with a cup of hot mulled wine or even just a cup of tea. Christmas time is a festival about joy; but how could such a festival - celebrated across the whole of the world - come out of such a joyless, hopeless situation in 1st Century Judea?

We all know the reason: it's about the birth of a child in a small town of Bethlehem. Yet even that story in itself could be seen as hopeless:

Here we have a pregnant teenager called Mary;

Here we have a child whose father was not Mary's fiance;

Here we have an unnecessary and dangerous trek across the unforgiving landscape of the Middle East;

Here we have a situation where a child cannot even be born inside a house, but instead inside a filthy cave meant for the animals, not people;

Here we have a government so oppresive and sadistic that it would be willing to kill baby children out of paranoid fear.

But we don't celebrate Christmas for that - after all, does that deserve being celebrated? Instead, we celebrate the birth of a special child, and unnusual child, a remarkable child. Through some mystery inconcievable through human intellect, the ultimate reality, the ground of all existence - the being, which as St. Paul writes, 'we live and move and have our being' - was 'made flesh' in the birth of Jesus Christ. And for two thousand years, we've been celebrating His birthday. Now that's some remarkable child!

That child was light in a world of darkness.
That child was love in a loveless age.
That child was true joy in a world fundamentally joyless.
That child brought healing where sickness thrived.
That child brought meaning where life seemed meaningless.
That child brought peace where violence reigned.
That child gave value to unvalued people.
That child gave compassion to those who society hated.
That child gave friendship to those who were isolated.
That child is hope where hope seems to die.

December is the most depressing time of the year: it is the time where the days are shorter, the nights are longer, the hours are colder, and the minutes seem to be more loveless. It is a time of insecurity, fear and pressure. For many, Christmas is still the most depressing 24 hours on the calendar.

And yet, through Jesus Christ, we have hope. Real substantial hope. Though it is quiet - almost silence - it stirs. You can hear it in the soft whispers Mary and Joseph spoke in love towards their child. You can hear it in those wailing tears that the child Jesus first cried out into the world. You can hear it in the penniless adoration of the shepherds, and the generous giving of the wise men.

Wherever there is darkness, fear, silence and indifference, there is also hope. That is why we sing this carol:

'O little town of Bethlehem,
How still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by.
Yet...in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.'