District Six Anglicans embrace new priest

THE APPOINTMENT of a new priest, imam, rabbi or guru to a congregation is marked by the pageantry of whatever customs regulate such occasions. But even as the daltjies and Hertzog-twee gevrietjies are savoured and the nowdays condensed milk-less, but still sweet and milky tea is sipped, some anxiety might surface in the minds of the tried-and-tested faithful: which of the established traditions will remain after the new broom of best intentions and transformation urgencies has swept through their lives?

Hopefully, a shared experience of sometimes unintended conflict, but always inevitable grace will lead each to the open embrace of understanding and acceptance.

The people of the Anglican Parish of St Mark, District Six, with their gallant history of defiance, find themselves once more at the point of familiar uncertainty and anticipation of new beginnings.

The gentle, avuncular Father Julian Titus will rejoin his wife, Devona, in the busy shade of retirement. Along with the churchwardens. Mildred Judzen and Lesley Apollis, Fr Julian helped to provide pastoral care and presence during St Mark’s long interregnum.

Father Austen Jackson is being instituted as the 13th incumbent of the parish this afternoon.

Recollections of the much-loved, now of blessed memory, late Father John Oliver will surface in the thoughts of many on this occasion. This guitar-playing, troubadour priest became a popular feature of gatherings of celebration or protest focused on the blessings and challenges of our post-1994 society.

The character of the immediate predecessor will surface in keening hearts, longing for the comfort of the familiar. This response is natural as a new entrant signals that memories have reached the point of rupture from hermetically sealed certainties.

TS Eliot observes that our collective yesterdays are where “Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take”. And yet the present, paradoxically, can lead us “Towards the door we never opened”.

The saints of the St Mark faith community will find their new pastor will zealously nurture the seeds sown by his predecessors. Along with them, he will water the pastoral fields ploughed by those monks who arrived from Cowley in Oxfordshire in the 19th century, aided, as they were, by their African confederates such as the liberated slave, Lydia Williams, and the Mozambican migrant, Bernard Mizeki.

The now-retired bishop Merwyn Castle once recalled that as a young man he had known a number of eccentric priests whom he remembered with affection. He found in Fr Austen a modern version of those clerics. Austen, our new man on the old Clifton Hill, has something of the focused absentmindedness of Father Brown, GK Chesterton’s fictitious Roman Catholic priest. He would appreciate Chesterton’s view that, “One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.”

The joy of when angels sang at the dawn creation is co-mingled by some trepidation that we are possibly at the point of venturing onto the holy ground of where our city and country finds itself: a democracy sensing the rising whisper of an unfulfilled revolution urged from the lives of the betrayed and ignored masses of the land.

The etymological root of the word “eccentric” is in the medieval Latin eccentricus as in “out of centre”. It also has an astronomical reference as “a circle in which the earth, sun,.. deviates from its centre”.

Utilitarian thinker John Stuart Mill reasoned eccentricity was indicative of character and “the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained”.

The salted earth of District Six and of our country cries for redemption from the curse of the iniquities of our history. Free us, O Beloved, from “the tyranny of opinion” and bless us with a proliferation of eccentrics in our midst.