Our Rector has written articles over the years for The Church Times Diaries.  We reflect this month, at looking back at the article written in December 2022.

Somewhat to my surprise, I recently came across St. Athanasius the Great, Patriarch of Alexandria, Confessor and Doctor of the Church, in the flesh. I’ve always been somewhat wary of this heavyweight theologian, despite Prof. Henry Chadwick’s comment in his classic “The Early Church” that Athanasius had a great following among the dockers of the city “for whom he wrote theological sea-shanties”, a hagiographic detail I’ve always found rather endearing. Coming face to face with him unexpectedly, though, was disconcerting to say the least. I was in the glorious Renaissance church of San. Zaccaria in Venice, on my first proper holiday abroad in some three years. I’d been there before but hadn’t previously noticed the aforementioned Patriarch lying in an elaborate tomb immediately below the (purported) body of St. John the Baptist’s father, St. Zachariah, the church’s Patron. Both saintly corpses had, I believe, been “liberated” by the enterprising Venetians during the sack of Constantinople, in a similar way to how they appropriated the body of St. Mark, smuggling him out of Alexandria in a pork barrel. I looked up the history of the relics online (as one does) and one website sniffily said it was not the 4^thcentury Athanasius the Great but another 15^th century Athanasius the Great. The Venetians believe it is the former. I lit a candle and moved on….

I was actually there for a different reason, to look at a painting I’m fond of, the San. Zaccaria Altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini. I’m a huge Bellini fan, and my cunning plan is to study him on my next sabbatical in three years’ time. (Any excuse to live in Venice for a while). In it the virgin and child are enthroned in an apse surmounted by a shimmering Byzantine mosaic half-dome, with Ss. Peter, Catherine, Lucy and Jerome standing in front serene and oblivious. An angel playing a viola da gamba sits on the steps of the throne, looking out at us somewhat pensively, inviting us in. The detail is fine and the colours luminous and vivid, with glimpses of a landscape just out of sight beyond. But then I noticed something odd, which I had not registered before: it didn’t fit its frame. There were gaps above and below, and moreover the painted trompe l’oeil architecture did not match up with the real stone architecture in the surround, which in other Bellini paintings it very much does. I realise that it wasn’t in its original setting and had – like St. Athanasius opposite – shifted its ground.  Venetian reality is actually quite fluid, despite the veneer of timelessness. It reminds me of what T.S. Eliott said about poetry, that words “slip, slide, will not stay in place”. Venice is the same.
 
I felt all this partly because I was seeing Venice through the prism of a book I was reading, John Berendt’s “The City of Falling Angels”. It follows the story of the burning and tortuous rebuilding of Venice’s Opera House, “la Fenice”, and was full of engaging, larger than life but somewhat  ambivalent characters. At the heart of it all is the Anglican Church of St. George, a place I’m hugely fond of. It has a small resident congregation which gamely carries on not for its own sake but for the tide of visitors that sweeps in and out like the tidal waters of the lagoon. In the book I loved the appearances by the chaplain of the time, the jovial Reverend Jim Harkins with his generous dry Martinis at cocktail hour. And the title of the book? Apparently at one time the marble angels on the façade of the church of Santa Maria della Salute were precarious and the owner of “Harry’s Bar” had put up a sign “Beware of Falling Angels”. A perceptive warning for us all.
Sophie, my little black Labrador, has a real ministry of welcome at the church door at every service: she’s a working Labrador, and that is her work.  A couple of days ago, I held a birthday party for her in the Rectory. She was ten. I’m not doing a Christmas party this year (too much going on in December) and so it really was an excuse to have a parish get-together. Some sixty parishioners came through the house (the most I’ve entertained in three years) for a tea party and an evening do; there were many birthday cards and doggie toys and chews, & much fuss was made of her. She even had a a Battersea Dogs’ Home recipe birthday cake made of carrot and banana, with mashed potato icing topped with dog treats.  My wonderful Crafty Ladies’ Group made her a birthday bandana with bones on it and “SOPHIE” embroidered in big red letters. But it was a thanksgiving too. She has a sort of Muscular Dystrophy and was almost put down before she was two. She had a long course of strong steroids to help her through the early days with the warning that her life would be shortened by it, so ten years is a real milestone. It was a good, if exhausting, evening!

Bellini would I think been more of a cat person and I suspect that St. Athanasius would not have approved of something as frivolous as a birthday party for a dog (despite the sea shanties, I don’t think he was hugely given to frivolity): but you know what, I don’t care!

With thanks to The Church Times to allow us to publish this.