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By Hannah Strange
It is one of the nation's best loved hymns and a favourite of Gordon Brown's. But William Blake's "Jerusalem" will
no longer ring from the spires of Southwark Cathedral after it was banned by the church's dean on the grounds that it was unchristian and too nationalistic.
Regarded by many as a paean to Englishness, it has over the centuries become an unofficial national anthem, sung at the last night of the Proms and by England rugby and cricket fans. It is such a favourite of the Women's Institute that a recent BBC drama based on the group was titled "Jam and Jerusalem."
But the Very Reverend Colin Slee believes it is not "to the glory of God" and as such should not be sung by choirs or congregations at the South Bank cathedral, one of Britain's foremost churches.
[....]"The Dean of Southwark does not believe that it is to the glory of God and it is not therefore used in private memorial services."
The words of the hymn are a poem by William Blake, which starts: "And did those feet in ancient time/ Walk upon England's mountains green?"
The verses, written in 1804 as a preface to Blake's epic poem "Milton", are said to be based on a legend that Jesus Christ came to England as a young boy and visited the Somerset town of Glastonbury. It is linked to a section in the Book of Revelation describing a Second Coming in which Jesus establishes a new Jerusalem.
The idea of Jerusalem is often used as a metaphor for Heaven by the Christian Church, particularly the Church of England. Though interpretations of the poem differ, it is often seen as suggesting that Jesus briefly created heaven in England and that we should strive to re-establish this once more. The reference to "dark Satanic mills" is usually thought to allude to the early industrial revolution and the damage it wreaked on nature and the poorest sections of society.
The words were set to music by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916, as an anthem for the suffragettes' movement.
It is not the first time the hymn has been deemed unchristian by the clergy.
In 2001 it was banned from a Manchester wedding ceremony because the vicar thought it overly nationalistic and inappropriate to the occasion.
Meanwhile the parish church of Parliament, St Margaret's in Westminster, has excluded it from services in the past on the grounds that the "dark satanic mills" discriminated against city-dwellers.
For much of the 1990s it was banned by St Paul's Cathedral but the church has now relented.
[....]http://www.timesonline.co.uk
I think this would be a directive from the same Church of England that recently announced the inevitaility of sharia in Britain and the need for British accommodation with it. Fine that, but none of that Blake.
For Blake's oem and a lovely backdrop by Bruegel, click HERE.
2 comments:
Please explain how this song is objectionable. I don't understand.
Is it muslims objecting? They don't go to the Anglican church anyway. The poem seems innocuous to me. Is it in an effort to be PC?
The Church of England has a lot of nerve claiming they don't want the song performed in church because it's not Christian enough for their services, given that the C of E is so corrupt they don't even want English Christians in their pews. The Archbishop of Canterbury is more interested in playing at some idiot neo-Trotskite version of himself as Lawrence of Arabia than he is in seemingly anything else. He and so many others like him are self-emasculated fools who love dressing up and playing tough guys for the tv cameras; and since they're really sissies they don't want to get hurt in the genuine tumble of real life so they pander to those they have a crush on now but who will later take them in the back room for some rough and nasty buggary. Too late then. But these fools are too enamored of their new-found images as cool guys and tough guys to see that they're in for a rough ride when the lights go out.
Dumping Blake is just one more way of posing, given that there's not a sincere Muslim on Earth who cares a hoot for Blake and his work except to wish to burn the illustrations. It's a pose on the part of the dhimmis who do know Blake, who understand his place in the canon of English literature and fine art, who know they can upset the literate community by disparaging Blake and currying favor with their new "friends". This is a game of sado-sexual phantasy on the part of the dhimmis. I find it creepy and disgusting, and I suspect many others in the coming term will find it equally so.
Banning Blake from church services is not because of any objection to Blake, whose work is by now, given the state of education in Britain, probably as unknown to the average student as would be T.S. Eliot or John Donne, but simply a way of disparaging the natives in the presence of Muslims, a way of showing how cool are the dhimmis, how far they'll go in despising their own in favor of the new, the cool, the hip and dangerous boys they like hanging with now. If the average soccer fan liked poetry by Marvell, then the C of E would find something to complain about in it, though I can't imagine what. No, this is nothing to do with anything but smearing the noses of the great unwashed in their own proletarian class deficiencies.
God, I'm sure, insisted on narthexes to have a place in which to hang these fools as a delight to Christians entering into the Spirit of the Lord.
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