At 8:45 am on Friday, June 12, Dulais drove us up to the Model Church-in-Wales Primary School, whose website is here. (I mentioned them earlier in my June 23 post to St. Blogory's.) We met Mari Hughes, the Acting Head Teacher, who brought us into the gymnasium where the every-Friday morning worship service is held. She reviewed the service, which is projected on a screen, and decided I should lead the service in addition to giving my little talk.
(I had hoped to have a copy of that service to share with you by now, but I will keep trying to get it because it's a really lovely service and I so want to share it with you.)
Soon the children began to filter in for the 9 o'clock service, for the most part quietly and well-behaved, beginning with the younger children and ending with the older children, with one remarkable exception. When most of the students had been seated, in came a middle group of students, each wearing funny sunglasses as part of a class project to learn about protecting the eyes against the sun. The sunglasses were very colourful (this is Wales!), and came in many shapes, some of animals and some very Picasso-esque! All of the theretofore well-behaved and quiet children began to laugh and turn their heads to see this parade of zany sunglasses!
I did two things in my little talk. First, because it had just been Trinity Sunday, I did my famous Trinity Sunday rope trick. If you don't know what that is, it's because I haven't done it in years. In fact, I couldn't quite remember how to do it, and I literally had scissors in hand as we drove to the school! And then I couldn't remember the sequence! But in the nick of time it all came together, and the children were a little in awe!
Second, I taught them the little song I learned years ago from Brother Robert of the Society of St. Francis, American Province. In fact, the kids did better than I did in remembering the sequences as we sang it several times through:
One Two Three, Jesus love me; One Two, Jesus loves you. Three Four, he loves you more than you've ever been loved before. One Two Three, Jesus love me; One Two, Jesus loves you. Five Six Seven, we're going to heaven; Eight Nine, it's really divine. One Two Three, Jesus love me; One Two, Jesus loves you. Now it's Ten, it's time to end, but first why don't we sing it again. One Two Three, Jesus love me; One Two, Jesus loves you. (et cetera!)
After the service, Dulais and I drove to Trinity College Carmarthen to see the works of two artists who also sing in a community choir, the Myrddin Chorale, in which Leigh also sings and for which Dulais is the Musical Director. Victoria Malcolm displayed paintings of photographs, capturing both people and landscapes with equal effect; and Ted Barlow used horses as subjects, drawing dramatic portraits in browns and blacks and grays. I have postcards from their exhibits to share with you when we return.
Next Dulais drove me back to his house, and I grabbed my brown leather notebook and headed out on foot for my 10:30 appointment with Patrick Thomas, Vicar/Ficer of Christ Church Carmarthen in the Parish of St. David's. Here is their website.
As I walked along, I noticed (not for the first time) the names that people have given (some years and years ago) to their houses. In fact, in many places, in England as well as in Wales, houses have names rather than numbers (which makes GPS reckoning problematic indeed!). So here are a few I jotted down in my notebook:
Ger Y Parc (Near the Park); Sŵn Y Gwynt (Sound of Wind); Llwyn Celyn (Holly Grove); Coedfryn (Woodhill); and Brynteg (Fairhill).
Patrick greeted me at the door and led me through to his office for our conversation. As with every prior conversation about Wales and the Welsh language, mine with Patrick disclosed new layers of the complexities behind my simple question, "In what ways has the resurgence of the Welsh language been used as an opportunity for evangelism?"
As recently as the 1980's people moving into Wales wanted to become part of their new communities, which included learning Welsh, and joining a bilingual church was seen as one way of learning the language. Increasingly, though, those moving in have preferred to join non-Welsh speaking subcultures.
Carmarthen, in fact, was once considered a crisis center for the collapse of Welsh-speaking, and in response the schools tried hard and succeeded in raising the numbers of Welsh-speakers. Even so, parents in Carmarthen have a choice between sending their children to the Welsh-medium school or to the Church in Wales' Model School, and many Dewi Sant parents choose the Church School, which has an Anglicizing effect. (Dulais and Leigh sent their children to the Welsh School, but later switched to the Church School because the Principal at the Welsh School was so abusive. This also reminds us that sometimes individual circumstances can enhance, or in this case worsen, the systemic problems.)
Most of the parishioners in the Welsh-speaking church, Dewi Sant (St. David's), are in their 70s and 80s, some of them having retired from the country and moved into town. And the few younger Welsh speaking parishioners send their children to the Sunday School of Christ Church, the English-speaking congregation. (In Abertawe [Swansea], in southeast Wales, there are two strata of Welsh-speakers: those in their 20s and those over 70.) The histories of the two churches, Dewi Sant and Christ Church, are emblematic of the challenges and opportunities for bilingualism. In 1837, Dewi Sant held its first services as the daughter church of St. Peter's, to accommodate a near doubling of the Welsh-speaking population of Carmarthen since the turn of the century. In 1869, Christ Church held its first services to serve the English-speaking population. In 2003, Dewi Sant's east gable wall fell through the roof, and the church building had to be abandoned. The next year Dewi Sant's congregation had to move into Christ Church's building and begin the difficult transition that happens when any independent person or community must move into another's "household." This particular transition is all the more painful for Dewi Sant because it is the "Parish Church," and Christ Church is the daughter church. Patrick formed a Transition Committee comprised of six members from each congregation. They meet before each Parish Council [Vestry] meeting in order to work through potential problems. For 135 years, each congregation had operated separately, and apart from the language divide there were other cultural divides as well. For example, and the importance of this will be seen when we remember that many church meetings are accompanied by food, the Welsh have dinner at 12 noon, and the English have dinner at 1 pm. Next, Patrick offered some fascinating information, and new insights, into Welsh preaching. In the Chapels, because of the centrality of the Word of God in Non-Conformist preaching, most sermons were highly intellectual and literary. As a result, many began to fear that if they went to hear a sermon in Welsh it would be too deep for them. (Carmarthenshire preaching tried to be more accessible, mixing colloquial and literary Welsh.) Another aspect in Welsh preaching was a kind of chanting style which released a response of religious fervor, or, hwyl. This was often accompanied by dramatic gestures. For example, if the sermon's text were the Great Judgment, the preacher would use his arms to show the King pushing away the goats and then welcoming in the sheep. (As I was transcribing this portion of Patrick's comments, I searched "hwyl chant" on the internet and found this description from Answers.com, inexplicably slotted under the heading "Occultism and Parapsychology Encyclopedia." Hmmm. No anti-religious or -Christian bias here! Hwyl is also Welsh for "the sails of a ship," and a possible derivation is that as a breeze fills the sails and transports the vessel, so a strong current of emotion lifts the spiritual awareness of the preacher and his congregation. . . . The congregation catches the spirit of the preacher and shouts deeply felt responses of Bendigedig! (literally, Blessed!) or Diolch byth! (literally, Thanks forever!). Patrick returned to the subject of the Welsh language and Church in Wales evangelism by commenting on the great fear among Welsh Non-Conformists of giving anything up, and that for some of them their Non-Conformist traditions are more important than their Welsh identities. The Church, then, was the Church for the English, and the gentry, and also the church for sinners, that is, for those thrown out of the Chapels. The Church was also called "The Old Foreign Woman," accused of undermining the Welsh language. As a result, Welsh-speaking Anglicans became a double minority in Wales. The new Welsh-language media (radio and television) have tended to be anti-religious for a somewhat surprising reason: many of its people are the sons and daughters of Non-Conformists whose memories of the Chapels turned them against their religious heritages. Patrick estimates that as recently as the 1970's more than 50% of the Welsh-speaking community would have heard a sermon in Welsh within in the past week. By the 199o's most Welsh speakers would have heard Welsh while watching the latest episode of Pobol y Cwm, the BBC's longest running television soap opera. A few other barriers to using the Welsh language as an opportunity for evangelism: 1. Sometimes Welsh-speakers are apologetic about their culture, including their language, as a result of the long history of England's dominance and oppression, militarily, culturally, and linguistically. 2. Partly as a result of 1., Welsh speakers often struggle between a stance of defensive insularity and one of generous hospitality and welcome. The advent of Perthyn.com, as a Welsh language version of Facebook, is an example of an attempt to build up relationships within the Welsh-speaking community. (Perthyn is a Welsh verbnoun which denotes "belonging" or "being related to a people and a place.") 3. A final interesting phenomenon: the language in which one first establishes a pastoral relationship tends to fix that relationship from then on. So, if the pastoral relationship is established in the English language, then it will continue in English even if both persons are fluent Welsh-speakers. And, conversely, if the relationship begins in Welsh, it will continue in Welsh even if both speak Welsh as a second language. Patrick also recounted how surprised he was the first time he met someone who spoke Welsh but didn't go to Church or Chapel, so linked has Christianity and Cymraeg been from the 1st century. Historically, the Church and Chapels were the bedrock for Welsh learning. In Patrick's first cure in the village of Brechfa, 80% of the children in the Welsh-medium schools had non-Welsh speaking parents. Patrick began offering Welsh-language courses for those parents, and many of them started coming to church. (I was glad to hear Patrick's story about this, because I had suggested the same idea when I was in Cardiff. I had been concerned that the idea might sound like a stereotypically naive American solution, and here was Patrick's witness to its effectiveness!) We ended our conversation with Patrick's moving story about he came to learn and speak Welsh fluently. Patrick's grandfather had been a Cymro Cymraeg (Welsh-speaking Welshman), but his father was raised during one of those recurring phases in the history of Wales when Welsh speaking was discouraged. Still, his father, John Bryan Thomas, was aware that he had lost something by not being raised as a Cymro Cymraeg himself. In the spring of 1940, Hitler's army invaded France, and Patrick's father was captured before Dunkirk. He was held in prisoner of war camps in Germany and Poland for the rest of the war. He decided the ask for books in Welsh so he could study the language, and many other fellow English-speaking members in his Welsh regiment joined him in learning the language. Of course, without Welsh speakers to help with pronunciation, he could only learn the written language with any degree of confidence until after the war. Subsequently, when Patrick began studing English at Cambridge University, his father asked him why he wasn't studying his own language! The only Welsh language course offered at Cambridge was Medieval Welsh, so that's where Patrick started! After Patrick was ordained, his father gave him a book entitled The Linguistic Geography of Wales. So when Patrick moved to Brechfa the villagers were astounded- and delighted- that Patrick knew "their" distinctive local words! Before leaving I met Patrick's wife, Helen, and thanked her for helping us as a go-between when Patrick and I were trying to coordinate my time at Dewi Sant and Christ Church. On the way home I saw another sign in Welsh that I enjoyed reading. It was a sign pointing to a place for "Indoor Bowling," rendered in Welsh as "Bowlio dan do": literally, "Bowling Under Roof." A final note on context. Before leaving home, Ingrid and I saw the new Star Trek movie, which we enjoyed very much. At the end of this long day, Dulais and Leigh invited me to join a friend of theirs on an excursion to Swansea to see Star Trek. This time, the movie took on an entirely different significance because I was watching it in Wales. [Spoiler Alert: if you haven't seen Star Trek yet, but you intend to, stop reading until you have seen the movie!] The story of Spock, raised half-human and half-Vulcan, who is forced to watch as his world and its culture is destroyed, served in this Welsh context as a metaphor for the Welsh people, who are in many ways half-Welsh and half-English, and whose world and culture, and language, are continually under threat of being destroyed by the dominant English culture and language, the erosion of Church and Chapel membership, and the emptying of many traditional Welsh-speaking rural communities. Tomorrow: Pictures from Sea Sunday, and from my Welsh Course in Lampeter. Diolch byth!
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