.png)
Welcome to St Mary's the Virgin
In the late third century the Bishop of Alexandria was talking a wander along the beach. As he gazed north across the Mediterranean towards Rome his eye was drawn to a group of boys playing in the sea. Dunking one’s peers’ heads under water when you are in it is a time honoured piece of tomfoolery, but before doing this to his friends, one of the boys was orating; “I baptise you in the name of the Father…” (you know the rest) and the Bishop was thrown into a theological conundrum, or at least a Church law conundrum, (sadly these don’t very often overlap): – was the baptism legitimate?
The story goes that he waded into the sea, told the boys who he was and that if they were going to be baptising people they needed to be ordained. The fledgling Baptist said “All right then” and duly was. We know this because his name was Athanasius, and he was instrumental in the distillation and writing of the Creed we say in Church each Sunday.
I tell you this because yesterday we celebrated Saint Teresa of Avila. When children, she and her brother Rodrigo used to play a game they called ‘Hermitages’. It is unclear how the game worked, but it was favourite enough to have its own title and frequent enough to be commented upon by the rest of the family, what is clear is that the two youngsters were playing at being some sort of saints. The family felt the game had gone too far when they discovered Teresa and Rodrigo’s plans to run away to Morocco in hopes of becoming martyrs.
Teresa did go on to become one of the celebrated saints; her writings on the Christian life and prayer are still widely read. She is patron saint of, among other things, chess. This is partly because she refers to the game in one of her books on prayer – she encourages her readers to plan not just when, but how they will pray, explaining that you wouldn’t try to play chess without at the very least knowing where the pieces start and how they move and that you will never win without having a plan. I like to think that it is also because her inner child never lost the art and joy of play. Like Athanasius, Teresa’s spiritual journey had begun when she perceived that the faith could be fun and played at it.
Next time you pray, ponder how you would respond if the Almighty said to you before you began, “Let’s enjoy ourselves….”
Fr Neil.
