Two threads

Or to be more precise, two ecclesiastical threads.

First, we have just finishing watching an ecclesiastical soap from Denmark,  'Ride upon the storm' offered to us by ITVX and summarised at reference 1. Twenty episodes consumed at the rate of approximately one a night. A bit more torrid that the sort of fare offered by Trollope in his Barchester novels, in that the central characters really care about God and his place in their world. They take him terribly seriously: not very C of E at all. Notwithstanding, the Church of Denmark looks to be organised on similar lines to our C of E, albeit a bit more democratic and less having bishops in the House of Lords. Interesting churches and costumes.

Along the way we gather in various important social issues, such as the role of lady bishops, marital breakdown, abortion, helping people to die a decent death and dealing with the homeless. We are also reminded of the difficulties consequent on the meeting of people having and deeply caring about very different monotheistic faiths. I have always had trouble understanding how people who truly believe that their God is the one and only God manage to get on with other people who truly believe much the same thing of their very different God. In this case, serious Christians bumping into, perhaps marrying, serious Muslims. Any worse than a serious Protestant marrying a serious Catholic?

Second, at roughly the same time I have been dipping into what for me is an unusual book bought some years ago from the souvenir shop at Ely Cathedral, as noticed at reference 2 and with the book being reference 3. A book which attempts to piece together something of the life of one Bishop Osmund, who died at Ely at about the time of Hereward the Wake, seemingly having visited Rome, having been consecrated in Poland and then did serious time as a missionary to the then largely pagan Kingdom of Sweden. Pagan not least because they still had pagan temples and believed that a predatory lifestyle was the proper thing for young men. Turning the other cheek in the Christian way was for little people, for women and for the old.

We get interesting glimpses of the messy state of Poland, Russia (Rus) and the Ukraine (Kiev) at that time. Not least because of the fluidity of their boundaries. And I have been reminded how these places looked down river, south to Constantinople, as much as to Rome, still less to what became western Europe. This despite taking in the occasional missionary from the Emerald Isle.

PS: I now know that us Christian Europeans come from one of the sons of Abraham while the Moslem Arabs come from the another. Also that there is a fair bit about sacrifice of first born sons in the Bible, in which connection I had muddled up Job with Abraham.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herrens_Veje. An entry in English, title notwithstanding.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/cathedral.html.

Reference 3: Bishop Osmund: a missionary to Sweden in the late Viking age - Janet Fairweather - 2014.