Can
anyone please advise me if there is a set tradition for the lighting
of candles in the altar area of the anglican church. Particularly
with reference to different services, i.e. Morning Prayer, Holy
Eucharist, Evening Prayer and others. Please also include when
the Paschal candle should be lit.
There
seem to be several conflicting answers to this question and as
a budding lay-reader I am interested in determining what is done
in other churches. I have been unable to find any written material
on the subject.
Geoff
Tothill
St John the Baptist Anglican Church
River John, Nova Scotia, CANADA
dynatron@auracom.com
1 June 2006
Dr Werner
Pelz (b. 25 September 1921, Berlin – d. 14 May 2006, Melbourne)
was a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany, prisoner of war, Anglican
priest, Guardian columnist, theologian, BBC broadcaster and lecturer
in Sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Despite
this rich life experience which influenced so many, Werner was
a modest man and would have felt any tributes unnecessary. As a
former student, however, it would be remiss to let his recent death
pass without comment.
Werner
first gained notoriety as a priest-theologian in the Diocese of
("Honest to God") Bishop John A.T. Robinson in the 1950's and 60's,
when he began writing articles for the UK’s Guardian and
the Listener. The SCM Press published his first book “Irreligious
Reflections on the Church” in 1959. This was followed by
two more controversial books, "God is No More" (1963) and "True
Deceivers" (1966), co-written with his first wife Lotte Hensl,
a fellow Jewish refugee. He also wrote a play that attempted to
fathom the all too human, inhumanity of a megalomaniac entitled "I
am Adolf Hitler" (first published by SCM Press in 1969). Werner
contributed to critical anthologies alongside other Church reformers
and critics such as Harvey Cox, Bishop James Pike and Monica Furlong.
His works had the blessing of Bishop Robinson, who saw them as
part of the movement he advocated towards a more mature and intellectually
honest Christianity that didn't require of its believers to accept
the mytho-poetic aspects of scripture as empirical facts. They
certainly were of this ilk but Werner wanted to go much further.
Werner
came to Christianity as a relative stranger from a secular Jewish
background in Weimar and then Nazi Germany. In his autobiographical
work "Distant Strains of Triumph" (1964), Werner said his family
did not think of itself as Jewish until Hitler's rise to power.
His father was a decorated war veteran but such honours made no
difference to the Nazis and all of Werners' family was sent to
Auschwitz, where his parents soon perished. Werner only just escaped
a similar fate by being sent to Britain as a guest worker in 1939.
When the war started, he was incarcerated as a "friendly enemy
alien" but elected to do labouring work in Australia, to which
he was transported on the troop ship Dunera, along with a number
of notable immigrants. Werner then worked in labour camps at Tatura
and Hay before being released in 1942 and returned to Britain.
In retrospect, he had no bitterness about his indentured sojourn.
He told his students: "There were no fences or barbed wire. We
were treated the same as the soldiers, who left us to ourselves.
We even had our own 'University' classes run by other internees
who were scholars". The contrast between his humane wartime treatment
and the harshness meted out to today's asylum-seekers by a more
affluent Australia was something that never ceased to appall Werner.
After
the war, when the unimaginable scale and horror of the Holocaust
was revealed, Werner said he was looking for a faith to make sense
of life. At the time, there only seemed to be two alternatives,
Nihilism or Christianity. He chose the latter but not through any
conventional route. Werner's entry into the Church was the result
of a profound existential encounter with the words of the first-century,
Rabbi-prophet, Jesus of Nazareth. This began with his reading the
Bible in the solitude of the Australian outback. In Jesus words,
as presented in the New Testament, Werner experienced a disturbing
urgency and power, calling those who heard them out of all our
conventional, "civilized" and rationally-ordered structures of
division, exploitation and indifference. Werner insisted that the
words of Jesus still had an immediacy and potential to speak to
everybody, whereas the terms "Word of God" or "Word of Christ" were
no longer intelligible or recoverable for most people in contemporary
society. As he would later write: "Today we could be met by the
simple, 'naked', 'untheologized' words of Jesus, and if we are
lucky they will disturb and frighten us -- as life itself" (1963:12).
While
Werner had no difficulty affirming Jesus as Messiah, he worried
that the label had been used to stifle Jesus, preventing readers
of the gospels from meeting Jesus in the fullness of his possibilities
and theirs. Unlike Bishop Robinson’s apologetic argumentation,
the Pelz’s work represented a poetic meditation upon the
possibilities of Jesus for contemporary society. He and Lotte invited
people to share their experience of Jesus as a neighbour, Jesus
as poet, Jesus as artist, Jesus as rebel and law-breaker, Jesus
as artisan of a new humanity, Jesus the Jew and Jesus as prophet,
to name only the most obvious.
The
words of Jesus, for Werner, demanded a response, envisioning a
new life of radical egalitarian communality, a communality in which
we become "responsive to each other's needs, take responsibility
on our should
Dr Phillip
Ablett
St Andrews, West End, Queensland
University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, AUSTRALIA
Pablett@usc.edu.au
2 June 2006
