HACKNEY PREACHER

A reading from the Fifteenth Chapter of the Holy Gospel of John

I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.

Please be seated.

The City’s spokesman tells me that the City Cash, the City’s private money, is used for “various philanthropic purposes for the benefit of all Londoners.” So let’s take a look at one of these City Cash purposes to get a better idea of how the City Corporation understands philanthropy. This will also give us a clue as to how it sees itself.

The “purpose” in question? To promote the financial services.

In 2008 the City Corporation took the decision to help set up a new forum to advance the interests of the financial services. In 2010 this group became CityUK.  Today it is one of the most effective City lobbyists, a kind of doctrine commission for the financial services.

I was at the non-public Council meeting when the decision to support the setting up of this body took place.  This proposal incited an unusual debate (debate itself being unusual in this chamber) as to the purpose of the City Corporation itself.  One Councillor said we spent too much time in the City promoting and selling and too little time understanding – to which the Chairman of Policy replied that this represented “a misunderstanding of the Corporation’s role” within the life of the City and the nation.

But as CityUk comes under scrutiny again we can learn much about how this lobby group is organised by looking at its key sponsoring institution, the City Corporation. If the branch indicates the health of the vine so it is through its roots, its origins, that you shall know its fruits.

The Domination System is more important than the individual

On 4th December 2008, six weeks after the banks had stared into the bonfire of the equities, the Corporation meets for its monthly lunchtime Court of Common Council meeting. This is normally a Pooterish affair, preceded by a buffet lunch of scampi and dill sauce in the Members’ Dining Room and followed by drinks and gossip in the Members’ bar. The public assembly part itself is the civic equivalent of the notices at the end of Mass: the assorted mumbo jumbo of parish pump politics in the context of high church ceremonial.

December’s is the final Council meeting before the Christmas break and the first of its incoming Lord Mayor. As is the custom, the  newcomer heaps generous praise on the former for his year in residence at Mansion House and, in doing so, asserts seamless institutional continuity, stability, control.

The first thing to note is that what is important for the City is the continuity of the historic office of Lord Mayor rather than the particularities of the man who occupies it at any one time. In any case these men are largely interchangeable from year to year. Unlike the elected Mayor of London, the Lord Mayor of the City of London, effectively appointed annually by the Court of Alderman, should ideally have no visible personality at all. Indeed the one qualifying characteristic of all Lord Mayors is that they can pass as political ciphers, better to serve the interests of the international capital markets. That’s the nature of the Domination System.

This one, we are told, has been a safe pair of hands at the helm of the ship at time of particularly choppy waters in the world’s economy. Over the course of his year in office he has hosted a series of “glittering” state visits and has fronted a range of equally successful foreign delegations. He has wide charitable interests, a distinguished career, a lovely wife.  I forget his name.

The Domination System is always dramatically enacted

As the end of the public part of the meeting draws to a close, the City Marshall is called upon to clear the gallery. It is time to move into the non-public zone of the meeting. About five or six people shuffle out at this point. This number includes an elderly couple who always come to the meeting of the Common Council as part of their monthly schedule of retirement entertainment. As they slip away, the City Marshall, in full military get-up marches from the elevated dias, where the Lord Mayor is sitting surrounded by his Aldermanic Barons, to the “bar”, really just a low shelf, separating the Common Council from the seats at the back of the Guildhall. It is here, turning to face the Lord Mayor, that he declares the successful evacuation of all “strangers” from the Hall, oyez, oyez, oyez.  Then he marches back to his seat.

It is a brilliantly camp piece of political theatre.  And it comes from the same production company, with the Pikemen and Musketeers as extras, that gives us the Silent Ceremony, the sharing of the Livery’s Loving Cup as well as the Lord Mayor’s parade itself. Some say that these pageants and performance pieces are merely colourful and entertaining but largely irrelevant interludes, heritage rather than living history. Nothing to take too seriously: harmless fun, colourful history, essentially redundant.

Not so. These rituals are ways in which we consolidate power relations, who’s in and who’s out, who’s part of the vine and who’s to be thrown into the fire and burned. It’s how we separate the public business from the private business. It’s how we evacuate strangers. Actually these are the liturgies of  finance capitalism. And as we look at the way the City pursues its particular purposes these help us interpret them as part of a wider religious system. This is the second thing to note.

The Domination System hinders self critical thinking

The third thing to note is related and it is as follows. The City’s liturgies have no rite of confession. They have no mechanism to acknowledge transgression, nor open up the possibility of grace and fresh imagination. With the systemic failure of the ballot box ever to interrupt the consensus, there is no point of reckoning with past sins and therefore no real possibility for new directions and new energies for the future. All business collapses into an edgeless airless present.

When the galleries are cleared and the doorways are sealed, the Chairman of Policy, Mr Stuart Fraser, rises to introduce a previously circulated ‘non public’ report, “Promoting London’s Financial Services.”

Enterprising a sentence with no subject. Delivering an on-going programme of present participles. Offering a fiesta of “maintaining and enhancing” that managed to avoid any real reckoning with those nasty little nowns of 2008 such as debt or collapse or toxicity. Fraser explained to the Council Assembly:

“we do not make judgements about what went wrong, other people do that. We are apolitical which means we often have to bite our tongues. Getting involved in politics is a total misunderstanding of our role. Our task in the City Corporation is to turn a political crisis into a political opportunity.”

In other words the Corporation is an institution keen to sustain its own life – “to bolster our promotional efforts” and to “safeguard what we term the City ‘brand’” – without asking the difficult question: what’s actually gone wrong?

Two months after the City witnessed banking at the brink,  after the worst collapse of confidence in the financial services in living memory, the City sees its role as cheerleader-in-chief for a new lobby group – the CityUK (“partnering prosperity”).  The money the City continues to give to this lobby group enables it to maintain control of key appointments and key policy directions.  So, for example, the report requires that “the overall composition of the Board and the choice of its chairman would be the City Corporation’s prerogative.”

Though funded out of the City’s Cash – the fund that we are told serves “a philanthropic purpose for the benefit of all Londoners” –  is it not inevitable this new cutting will grow into a plant with the same fungus in its roots and the same diseased and toxic fruit at its leaf? In due course will not its branches need to be gathered and thrown into the fire and burned?

The Christian counter-narrative of the Commons

In the meantime it is our task to tend the vineyards of our Commons. For Christians, flourishing is necessarily relational: the fruiting branch is always part of the vine and the health of the leaves and the health of the roots is intimately connected. It is not a mediated and abstracted principle. It’s about sharing with one another the little we have so that together we have an abundance to enjoy. The key word in our scripture today is “abiding”. It invokes a lovely mutuality between separate bodies over time.

We like to form ourselves into cells. That’s why we meet together in upper rooms and small conventicles to sing hymns and spiritual songs and that’s why we operate as motley crews arranged into parishes and chapters and deaneries and dioceses.  That’s why the Church is always experienced as local and particular, even where it may also be experienced as institutional and international.  And that’s why the key Christian virtue is charity, the love of neighbour, a calling to reciprocity, rather than  philanthropy, the abstracted love of Mankind, where the relationships are always refracted through grant generating bodies and Corporate Social Responsibility officers and the giving always seems to roll down-hill.

And the City of London is that city set on a hill, a demonic parody of our calling as Christians to be a beacon and to proclaim an alternative reality.  This Square Mile, which once bankrolled an empire, is still an imperious force in our nation’s life.  The City retains the arrogance of power, not just because of its money and its resources, but because of its unchallenged authority. And because its governing body, the City Corporation, is part of the Ancient Constitution its position is institutionally guaranteed through a network of ritual relationships, symbolically enacted.  In other words the City has locus without being confined to a physical location: it is everywhere.

This institution and these relationships advance what may be termed the Domination System. This system doesn’t begin and end with the City of London but here is the place where its doctrines are most clearly articulated. And in so far as it has its Gods and its high priests and its narratives of salvation and in so far as it sustains a range of practices that bring apparent coherence to random events and seeming meaning to our lives, the Square Mile is the Vatican City of this religion. Guildhall is the cathedral. And CityUk is a Pontifical Council.

It is magnificent and it is idolatrous. And it needs to be regenerated.

And all for His sake.

Parishes Notices

In Memoriam: Walter Wink (May 21, 1935 – May 10, 2012),  theologian and peace activist

A reading from the Gospel of Matthew:

So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.  

Please be seated.

Earlier this year the Hackney Preacher was looking into what happened to Sir Thomas Gresham’s bequest. Through his Will, signed in 1575, he made over his fortune in trust jointly to the City Corporation and the Mercers Livery Company, for the purposes of contributing towards “the proffitte of the common weale.”

Specifically, he gave it for the benefit the poor, to assist prisoners and to set up a teaching College in the City of London, along the lines of those found in Oxford or Cambridge.

So what happened to this money and where is this college? Where are the prisoners who continue to receive the benefit? Which poor?

I asked Greg Williams, the City’s Head of Media.

He told me that whereas the Gresham Charity continued to serve these ends, the Gresham Estate had been absorbed into the City’s Cash, the City’s private money.

In fact, this is what said:

“The Gresham Estate is part of City’s Cash and the legal obligations upon the City of London Corporation under the terms of Sir Thomas Gresham’s will are delivered through the Sir Thomas Gresham Charity. The City of London Corporation funds the net expenditure of this charity. The income from the Estate is not held on trust but belongs to the City Corporation as beneficial owner.”

All clear? The left hand knowing exactly what the right hand is doing?

But, here’s a question:

Where does a bequest held in charitable trust end  . . . and a beneficial ownership begin?

Answer:

In court.

You see, in 1885, there was a dispute between the City Corporation and the Inland Revenue over the rental income from the Royal Exchange, part of the Gresham bequest. The City said that it was not liable to pay tax on the surplus income because, ahem, it was only held in trust as part of the original moiety.

In other words The City, at this time, claimed that they were not the beneficial owner.

The Master of the Rolls, sitting in the Court of Appeal, disagreed, overturning an earlier judgement of the Divisional Court and concurring with the Inland Revenue that the rent belonged to the Corporation for their own  benefit absolutely and that consequently tax was payable – see Chartres and Vermont, A Brief History of Gresham College, Gresham College, 1998, p 75.

Still, the City Corporation disagreed. We’re not the beneficial owner! We’re going to take the case to the House of Lords!

In fact, in the London Metropolitan archive, the Hackney Preacher found half incinerated legal papers from leading Counsel for the Mercers Livery Company dated Feb 1898.

The legal advice warns of the dangers of such an Appeal:

“Should the Appeal prove successful it is probable that some scheme would be insisted upon by the Crown which would in effect take the disposition of the surplus funds out of the hands of the Corporation and Company respectively, and possibly cause them to be applied to objects or in a way which neither the Corporation nor the Company might desire.”

This, of course, remains the City Corporation’s fear in relation to the City’s Cash and it may also be the reason that the Petition of Appeal was never pursued nor the case ever tested. The City thought it prudent to “concede” ownership and pay its tax liability. And so it has proved.

On what grounds, however, could such an Appeal be made, even now, by way of challenge?

This is the way it works. A Court tries to determine a testator’s intention. What was his actual Will? This is decisive in any challenge. This principle was established in the late sixteenth century –  a period of rapid inflation  - where the problem often arose.  In G H Jones’ book, the History of the Law of Charity, 1532-1827 (Cambridge, 1969), there is a discussion about a related matter in which the author states, “It is not insignificant that in every reported case before the beginning of the eighteenth century, the charity was given the benefit of the increase in value.” (p. 92).

So we need to ask: Did Gresham intend to give the whole of his land’s rent at any time to charity?  Or was his intention merely to devise a fixed sum of money or to meet a fixed purpose and give the rest to the City to do with what they want?

As the legal Counsel in 1898 says, “something may be urged from [Sir Thomas Gresham's] words, whereas I do mean the same to the Common Weal“.

Here is how Richard Chartres, the current Bishop of London, puts it:

“No doubt, like other Tudor patriachs, Sir Thomas would have passed the bulk of his estate to his son and heir Richard, had not the boy died in 1564. Gresham’s natural daughter Anne, who married Francis Bacon’s elder half-brother Nathaniel, also died before her father, and so when Thomas Gresham came to make his Will in 1575 he was free, having made provision for his wife, to consider other ways of disposing of his vast fortune.” (p. 6, A Brief History of Gresham College).

In 1575 Gresham was a man facing his own appearance in that final Court of Appeal and he was settling his accounts accordingly. One imagines that his interests were pretty philanthropic.

Greg Williams, the City’s Head of Media, suggests, however, that Gresham’s interest was essentially commercial, as a trader and merchant, and that he would frankly be pretty relaxed with the way the City Corporation has chosen to deploy his bequest through the City Cash.

“And how is that?”

“Various philanthropic purposes for the benefit of all Londoners,” he says without blinking.

Though obviously, as a private fund, he’s not at liberty to discuss this in detail. The distribution of the alms is done in secret. The left hand need not know what the right hand is doing. While both hands may remain deep inside the trouser pockets.

And all for His sake.

A reading from the Gospel of Matthew

Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road

Please be seated.

The City of London has three treasure chests and only two of them are for public display.

The public funds are the City Fund and the City Bridge Trust; the rate money and the charitable money respectively.

The first of these funds pays for the services of the City. It covers everything from street cleaning to the work that the City of London Police does to combat money laundering. It enables the City of London to fulfil its role as the Local Authority with responsibility for the Square Mile. It keeps it all going. It is the City’s Gold.

Then there is the City Bridge Trust. This is the money that the City has put aside for charitable work. It brings balm to the broken-hearted through its support for good causes throughout London. This is the sweet-smelling Frankincense.

Finally there is the mysterious City’s Cash account. This is the money that The City says is its “private money” and for which it refuses to publish the accounts. Just as Myrrh was used as a burial spice, this is the fund that derives its resources in part from the bequests and the estates of the deceased.

Although held in trust for Citizens of London, this money is now partly used to lobby for that system of finance capitalism that is causing chaos throughout the world.

Two weeks ago I published some non-public pages from the City’s Cash account from 2007  from my time as an elected councillor in the City of London. I opened this treasure chest as an early offering of Myrrh. Now is the time to look a little closer at this burial spice.

One of the funds wrapped up in the City’s Cash account is the Gresham Estate.

The Gresham Estate is described in the Accounts as one of the “registered charities which [is] also included in the City’s Cash consolidated accounts” and it is managed by the City’s Gresham Committee which “acts on behalf of the City of London Corporation in relation to its responsibilities deriving from the Will of Sir Thomas Gresham (dated 1575)”

Sir Thomas Gresham left his estate jointly to the “maior and cominalty and cittezens of the citty of London and theire successors” (the legal definition of the corporate body of the City) and to the Mercers’ Livery Company. This bequest included Gresham House (no longer extant) in Bishopsgate as well as the Royal Exchange.

The City subsequently used money from this estate to buy 89/91 Gresham Street, a property that is now let to the Bank of New Zealand.

According to the City’s Cash accounts the ‘targets‘ generated by this Will include the providing of lectures and the keeping of Almshouses (now in Brixton) along with with all the associated costs.

You can read Thomas Gresham’s Will here in which he warns (in paragraph 24) that if the City fails to discharge these charitable ‘targets’ then “the defaulte thereof shal be to the reproach and condempnation of the said corporations afore God.”

And what is Gresham’s overall intention for his Will? He states (in paragraph 25) that he wishes his estate to contribute to “the proffitte of the commen weale, and relief of the carefull and true poore, accordinge to the pleasure and will of Almighty God.” Old fashioned language but clearly demonstrating a concern for the Common Good or, as he puts it, the “common weal”.

There is no reference in the City’s Cash accounts as to how much money is spent on these charitable charges but the Charity Commission website reveals, in the 2007 accounts for the Sir Thomas Gresham Charity (no 221981), that the City spent £31,810. They further state, by way of clarification, that “the charity has no underlying assets and is wholly supported by the City of London. The City of London Corporation owns all the fixed assets used by the charity.”

In other words the charitable purpose of Sir Thomas Gresham’s bequest has been wholly subsumed within the City’s Cash account.

When we go back to the City’s Cash, 2007 consolidated accounts we learn, however, that the income from the Gresham Estate (one of the funds that make up this so-called “private fund”) amounts to £514K. Additionally £709K from this fund is being re-invested. That looks like quite a sizeable property portfolio to me. More than the relatively modest payment from the Sir Thomas Gresham Charity fund would suggest.

So, some questions:

1.   What is the relationship between the Gresham Estate and the Sir Thomas Gresham Charity?

2. How do they both relate to Sir Thomas Gresham’s Will that the bequest should contribute towards “the proffitte of the commen weale”?

3.  Is there any surplus from the Gresham Estate that is used towards sustaining the Mayoralty, paying for the banquets or funding “Economic Development” initiatives of the City Corporation, as evidenced in the City’s Cash accounts?

No doubt there are good answers to these questions but when the City’s Cash is kept from public scrutiny they are not immediately apparent.  At the very least there is need for proper public deliberation as to whether the financial services do, indeed, contribute to the “profitt of the common weale”.

With these questions in mind I ring Greg Williams, the City’s cheerfully gruff Head of Media. He says he will look into it. And then he asks,

“Are you the one who published the private accounts that were given to you in confidence as a councillor?”

“Yes,” I say.

“That’s an interesting choice to make.  As a public servant I believe you take on certain responsibilities and when you start bending the rules to suit yourself then that is a very difficult place to be,” and then adds, “May I ask how do you reconcile that with your conscience as a preacher?”

“That’s a good question,” I say, unsure at this point whether he is in fact warning me not to return to Herod but to leave for home by another road.

And all for His sake.

Parish Notices

Here is background information on the Gresham Estate from the City’s Cash non-public accounts: gresham2007

A reading from the Holy Gospel according to John

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.

Please be seated.

In this passage at the beginning of John’s Gospel the Greek word for ‘dwelt among us’ – skenoo – is more literally translated as ‘tabernacled’ or ‘tented among us’.

John is telling us that, with the birth of Jesus, God is pitching his tent among us, as he had previously done in the midst of the people of Israel in the wilderness. He’s on the move again, exposed just as we are to the elements, to the powers and principalities, to the unruly fathoms of the human heart. Christians usually lump this lot together as Sin.

It’s a very rich semantic field, this verse from John.

It’s almost as rich as the field of meaning in the encampment around the Cathedral Church of St Paul’s in the City of London. And because preaching a Word at Christmas, amidst the surfeit of festive cheer, is not an easy thing to do, I decide to take the 76 bus from Hackney into the City to go and visit the tent people for some inspiration.

The bus passes the Finsbury Square encampment, which now looks like the morning-after-the-party.  It’s become a field of mud with a deserted ‘info tent’ and a sign, fallen over in the breeze, offering ‘free hugs’ – but with no indication of any happy huggers to dispense them. The bus continues through the City, sloping along the wall of the Bank of England, and then loops round beside the Cathedral itself. I stay on and get out at the Royal Courts of Justice.

This is where the City of London Corporation is making its case in the High Court to rid itself of the campers. The City says that it does not object to lawful protest, but that it does not consider that the tents themselves are a necessary part of the protest. It says they are an obstruction on the public highway and they need to be removed.

I arrive just in time to hear the camp’s barrister cross examine the Registrar of the Cathedral (the chief administrator), Nicholas Cottam, who has been called as a witness in support of the City’s case for eviction.

Mr Cottam, a former Major General, says that he wishes to remain neutral in relation to the substantive issues raised by the camp, but that he has been particularly agitated from the start about the hazards of fire (amongst the other health and safety concerns). He says that, given the location of the tents and the emergency service’s reliance on Sat Nav devices, the fire brigade would be confounded by the camp were they ever required to extinguish a blaze in the burning building.

Maybe it is understandable that the administrator for Wren’s cathedral, which emerged from the cinders of the Fire of London, should be peculiarly sensitive to these incendiary dangers.

But the counsel for the campers is not entirely satisfied:

“A place of worship does not need to be wrapped up in metaphorical protective clothing does it?” he says in that leading way that barristers have, “the cathedral is surely a working building.”

“It is not a working building,” says Mr Cottam, “It is a sacred space – a place of sacred worship and respect.”

But what of ‘liturgy’, commonly understood as ‘the work of the people’, that is at the heart of that collective experience of sacred worship? Has London’s original dome become simply a grand mausoleum for state ceremonial performing cultic rituals of order and control? Have we forgotten that the building is itself no more than a big top with some fancy equestrian statues and a great acoustic?

When we identify too closely with these physical pillars we are in danger of taking our eyes from that pillar of fire that led the Israelites through the wilderness and will lead us also through the dark days ahead. To follow this fire we need to be ready to pitch and strike our inner Tent.

We have something to learn here from Jews who, annually at the feast of Sukkot, the feast of Tabernacles (or Tents), remind themselves of their years in the wilderness; that they are a people on the move.

If the camp is a judgment on the Church, recalling us to our biblical roots, it also a judgment on the City of London Corporation.

Occupy St Pauls’ daily General Assembly brings to mind the Saxon folk-moot that gathered at St Paul’s Cross in the churchyard of the Cathedral.  This is where the City of London Corporation has its origins. This is where the Citizens of London historically deliberated on matters of common concern, in the lee of the Cathedral, and it is where they elected their Portreve, the office that became the Mayor after 1189, as well as their Chamberlain, the man responsible for the money.

Although the current High Court action to evict the tent people is lodged in the name of the “Lord Mayor, Commonalty and Citizens of London” – legally a body corporate, constitutionally representing a balance of interests amongst the Citizenry – in much of its operational life the City Corporation has come to represent the single interest of capital.

And so we have a situation in which the oldest democratic institution in the world has now become a lobby group for the financial services, the ‘business city’.

“We have no ‘authority’ to take on this role [promoting the business city],” concedes Stuart Fraser (the current Chairman of the City’s Policy and Resources Committee) in an exchange of letters with me at the time when I was also a City Councillor, “which is why it is funded from our private funds – City Cash.”

No one knows for sure how much money is in this particular pot because the City Corporation refuses to publish the accounts.  The City puts the total equity amount in the Cash at around £1 billion. Some say, however, the funds are at least double that. As the consolidated accounts below show there is about £500M tied up in cash. Because the City doesn’t put a value on its vast property portfolio these figures are all speculative and more work still needs to be done on unravelling these accounts.

But how can money held in trust for the Citizens of London be considered ‘private’ money? And on what grounds can it be used to promote the ‘business city’, a role the Chairman of Policy concedes the City Corporation has no ‘authority’ to perform, beyond that which it gives itself and that which Parliament, in turn, allows?

Statements of accounts are not just financial ledgers. They are also moral inventories. They reveal our priorities and expose our commitments. Our January credit card statements bear witness to this. The City of London Corporation should not be fearful of publishing the Cash Accounts.

The Gospel writer’s story of the Word ‘dwelling among us’ is also a judgement on our well-defended distinctions between what is private and what is public.

In this new age we are called to participate in a common life where we belong to one another in mutual dependence and with mutual accountability. At times this may be place of windy exposure and vulnerability. It’s a campsite.

If we let them do so the tents may remind both the Cathedral and the City of our origins.

But in the end they will be swept away.

In the end we will all be swept away. There is no abiding city.

For now let’s remember faithfully, with grace and truth, where we have come from and whose we are and be thankful.

And all for His sake.

Parish Notices

Summary information relating to the 2006/7 City’s Cash accounts may be downloaded here: City’s Cash, 2007

For more information on the background to the City’s Cash go to Reclaim the City

For further Midrash by BBC London News reporter Paraic O’Brien go here and by AOL finance journalist Adrian Holliday go here

A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke:

When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

Please be seated.

Three months before my daughter was born, while she was still swimming around in the watery world, our doctor became concerned about the progress of the pregnancy. He told us that there was too much amniotic fluid and it was putting pressure on the baby.

What caused this? He didn’t know. What would be the result? He didn’t know. But he was worried that the baby was going to be born before term and arranged for some further tests at King’s College Hospital in London.

He booked us with Dr Nicolaides and his ultra powerful ultra-sound machine.

“If there is anything wrong with ‘baby’ then Dr Nicolaides will be able to see it. He’s the best in the business. He has something of a reputation as a miracle worker.”

Having a baby was miracle enough for us and so we went up to London ready to hate this Greek consultant and his powerful machinery. We were full of anxiety. Actually the best thing about Dr Nicolaides turned out to be the fact that, notwithstanding his intrusive introspective devices, he said he also had absolutely no idea why our baby was swimming around in so much fluid.

When we got home I boasted to my brother that our baby defied cutting edge medical technology. Privately I was quite worried about this.

A few days later my girlfriend invited round to the house the woman who ran her yoga class for pre-natal mothers in the local church hall. She had studied natural birthing practices and had done her field-work living with women in the Amazonian jungle.

She came and sat with us on the bed and made some shamanic sounding grunts:

“You have a healthy happy baby,” she said after a few moments, “I have a good feeling about your baby.”

Having told us this we relaxed and talked at length about the whole experience of having a baby and how we weren’t married and how I was training to be a preacher and how the college of preachers wanted to get rid of me and how we didn’t know we what to do and so on.

“Talk to your baby,” she said, “tell the baby that you love her (it turned out to be a her).”

We started talking to the baby together, singing her songs and playing her music.

In fact I put together a little playlist. It included John Taverner’s setting for a William Blake poem, some hauntingly simple early English choral music by Thomas Tallis as well as Benjamin Britten’s depiction of dawn breaking over the Suffolk sea. It was quite mysterious stuff. Watery, we thought. Fluidy. It was hypnotic amniotic music.

The tide subsided and our daughter was born within a few days of her due date.

This all happened many years ago.

*

One day earlier this year I am rung up by a woman – we’ll call her Mary. She asks me about a ‘Mother and Baby’ home in the parish. She says that her half sister had been born in the home in 1945 (or so she thought) and she is trying to find any records that relate to her birth or early life.

For instance, are there Baptism records in the church? She gives me her sister’s names.

“I’ll ring you back,” she says.

I know where the home had been. It was run by a group of nuns but had closed in the 70s and the land had been sold for development as a school. Many of the children from the home had been baptised in our font. One predecessor preacher seemed regularly to have baptised a job lot – wash and go – and then inscribed all their names in his copperplate hand in the Register of Baptisms that we keep in the church safe.

The following Saturday evening, as I am just putting the final few inflections into my sermon, I fetch the Baptism Register from the vestry safe and check to see whether I can find the child’s name.

It turns out she was baptised with eight other babies at Whitsun 1945.

When Mary rings up a few days later I am able to give her the details.

Excited to be making progress in her investigation, she tells me a little more of her family story.

It turns out that the baby had been conceived out of wedlock (as a consequence of a brief liaison with an American GI) at a point when her mother had thought that her father had died. He hadn’t.  He returned home a few months before the baby was  due to be born having spent the previous two years as a prisoner-of-war.

He had insisted that the child be given up for adoption and that his wife go into the Mother and Baby home to have the child.

It turns out that Mary knew nothing of any of this until six months after her mother had died and she was going through her belongings and found a copy of diary and read of the heartbreak that this had caused her mother.

As she continued to pick through her mother’s possessions she found little trinkets from the time of the birth and the baptism, including the sheet music of a song that had been sung at the service:

O Father, bless the children
Brought hither to Thy gate;
Lift up their fallen nature,
Restore their lost estate;
Renew Thine image in them,
And own them, by this sign,
The very sons and daughters
New born of birth divine.

And all for His sake.

A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew:

Jesus said to his disciples: ‘When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people from one another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at his left.’

Please be seated.

So the Hackney Preacher found himself, on the occasion of the Lord Mayor’s Show, standing with his “Reclaim the City” banners against the wall of some Chinese-owned bank opposite the Mansion House balcony. The painted sheets were flapping like wet washing on a too-loose line.  He was out in protest against the destestable enormities of the Corporation of London.

The forces of resistance may have been a bit motley but the battle lines were clearly drawn. It was a black and a white thing, a right and a left thing, a this and a that thing. It was Spurs v. Arsenal.

Yet as he stood there, opposite the new Lord Mayor, the late Lord Mayor, various other bleached out mayoral has-beens with their consorts and their tawdry retinue of crony councillors, the Hackney Preacher couldn’t help but notice that there was also, amongst their number, a couple of the City clergy.

There was that Mr Fraser from the cathedral church of Saint Paul as well Mr Crossley, the clergyman with responsibility for the parish of the Bank of England – the vicar of St Margaret Lothbury. Or to give him his full pageant master’s title: the vicar of St Margaret Lothbury and St Stephen Coleman with St Christopher-le-Stocks, St Bartholomew-by-the-Exchange, St Olave Old Jewry, St Martin Pomeroy, St Mildred Poultry and St Mary Colechurch.

For it is a sad fact that, just as their redundant patronal designations hover around these streets like angels around the throne of heaven, whispering in the vicar’s ear of the Glory that has departed, the once fine steeples of this medieval benefice have now been replaced by the steel and glass and stones of Babylon.

In his person, Mr Crossley is like one of those coastal ghost towns whose churches have all been claimed by the progress of tide and storm, crumbling into the sea and leaving behind (such as in the case of Dunwich in Suffolk) only a ruined abbey, a pub and a fish and chip van for the visiting curious: the residents have long gone.

This was all almost too grievous to contemplate for the Hackney Preacher as he made his way back through the Shore Ditch along the High Road to his parish up at the top of the Hill at Stamford.

The Day of Judgment is surely coming, is surely coming, he tells himself on the poop deck of the 149 bus as it passes over Dalston Junction and Shacklewell Lane, but we’re not there yet, oh no, my brothers and sisters, we’re not there yet and for the time being the sheep will continue to bleat with the goats and the tares will continue to grow with the wheat and the rain will continue fall on the just and on the unjust alike; praise the Lord.

And as he turned into the Terrace, lowing to himself of the coming tremendous Judgment of the Lord, he nearly tripped up over a couple of men who had parked themselves on his church steps, swigging their cans of lager and generally despoiling the Eastern prospect of his Georgian Tower.

The one nearest to him looked pretty comfortably enthroned. He occupied the whole step and was flicking ash onto the pavement.

“Could you please move your arse off my steps?” said the Hackney Preacher.

“Hey Preacher Man, what’s your problem? Take it easy, man. We’re cool, take it easy man.”

The two men shuffled off the steps onto the street, too pissed to resist, stumbling like like a couple of stunned animals.

“And take your beers with you.”

The Hackney Preacher went into the Vicarage and straight upstairs to his study. Before turning on the light he went to his desk and, opening a top drawer, he fingered his way through the detritus of paperclips and broken pens. Where was his rolling tobacco? He hadn’t used it for a few weeks. When he found it he sniffed it: dry as a sprig of thyme.

Putting it into his cassock pocket, where such things usually disappeared altogether, he pushed open a hatch in the ceiling of his study and made his way across a small intersecting grill onto the roof of the vestry and then up ladder and across a low ledge and onto the roof of his church.  This is where the Hackney Preacher went to keep an eye on his parishioners and to smoke.

He could see the two drunks settling onto another step a little further up the Terrace. As he sat back in his lounger he felt a certain fellow feeling. Turning in the opposite direction, across the rooftops and above the housing estates of Hackney, his gaze rested on the office cluster of the City of London. Tall towers gathering like self important doctors on a ward round circling the bed of a sick patient.

Sheep or goat? he asked himself in a unlikely moment of self-scrutiny.

And all for His sake.

Parish Notices

The Parish Council meets on Monday at the Vicarage to discuss the drains.

On the feast day of Saint Cecilia (22 Nov) prayers will be said for the second-century virgin martyr who was suffocated by her retinue while visiting the baths. It is also exactly 21 years since Mrs M Thatcher was done over by her cabinet and resigned.

Further Midrash concerning about the detestable enormities of The Corporation of London by BBC Radio 4′s The Report is available here

A reading from the book of the Prophet Zephaniah:

That day will be a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness, a day of trumpet blast and battle cry against the fortified cities and against the lofty battlements. Neither their silver nor their gold will be able to save them on the day of the Lord’s wrath.

Please be seated.

November 12, the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show, is an important anniversary for the Hackney Preacher. It’s ten years since he became a Freeman of the City: a Citizen of London.

Why did he want to become a Freeman?

The reason is this: It is a qualification to stand for election to the Corporation of London.

It’s the first step on the route to becoming Lord Mayor of the City of London.

Actually to qualify for the Freedom (as a Freeman) he needed to find two sponsors and they had to fall into one of two categories: Liverymen or previously elected members of the City Corporation.

So he asks the Area Dean of the City of London, a member of the Worshipful Company of Skinners, to propose him.

And then he ask a Common Councilman of his acquaintance to second him.

That’s how it works.

To offer yourself for election to the Corporation of London you first have to be deemed worthy to be a member of the club.

But what is that all about?

At the ceremony in the Guildhall, where he is offered the hand of friendship and welcomed to the fraternity of the Free, he seeks some clarification from the Clerk to the Chamberlain’s Court.

What, for example, is the constitutional relationship between this electoral requirement to be a Freeman of the City and the way that the Corporation of London promotes the liberalization of economies and the deregulation of markets throughout the world?

How does this practice of the granting of the Freedom, with its origins in the medieval guild City, underpin the interests of the modern capitalist City?

The Hackney Preacher asks this question because he doesn’t know the answer.

But nor, it seems, does the Clerk to the Chamberlain’s Court.

Or not an immediate one.

The following day the Hackney Preacher is summoned by Area Dean to explain his behavior in the Chamberlain’s Court.

He is told that he has used the ceremony “as a soapbox for [his] personal political agenda”.

He is told that he has turned a “friends and family occasion” into a media event.

The Area Dean says he now realises that the Hackney Preacher is going to be trouble for as long as he remains in the City.

Then, the following day, a letter from the Common Councillor of his acquaintance arrives. This is how it reada:

“ . . . you are, of course, entitled to your political views but as a Christian you should show charity and respect in all your dealings, which you have failed to do. I feel you should apologise to the Chamberlain’s staff and give an undertaking not to use the material you obtained at the ceremony. I feel too you owe me an apology. You should be aware of the tremendous amount of good which institutions you appear to despise do for [your university] and for churches in the Square Mile. Your behavior puts such support in jeopardy.”

Some weeks later, following up on one of his threats, the Councilman places an official complaint with the Bishop of London, who instructs the Archdeacon of London to investigate the behaviour of the Hackney Preacher.

The Councilman asks, in his letter of complaint:

“Did [the Hackney Preacher] make any disparaging remarks about the City Corporation or the Livery Companies?”

And in his same letter of complaint to the Bishop of London he goes on to demand that, were he to have made such remarks, the Hackney Preacher be reprimanded. Roundly.

It was not the best of starts. Nor was it to get better (the Area Dean was right in this).

Ten years later the Hackney Preacher still finds himself, on this anniversary day, opposite the Mansion House on the occasion of the Lord Mayor’s Show with his placards and his soapbox.

Once more he finds himself turning another medieval ceremony, a friends and family pageant, into an occasion for political protest, charging the new Lord Mayor with the demands of Reclaim the City.

And why?

Is it because the lofty battlements of the City of London are not defended with guns and canons but with the silent midnight patrol of shame and fear?

Is it because the fortifications are not protected by the imminent threat of physical attack but with the sweet reasonableness of interests quietly vesting in their ruffs and furs and scarlet gowns, waving at the passing floats, waving at the floating passersby?

Wrath, like broth, can be a messy potage.

And all for His sake.