The local vicar called me the other day and asked if she could stop by for a visit. I guess that’s a sign that her parish isn’t terribly large when she does something like that – and can keep track of when new people move to the parish.
She had an agenda, which was why she wanted to meet me… She had heard from the couple down the road that I had dinner with last week that I was a bit of a leftie, so she thought I might be interested in helping her with a collection that the Church of Denmark is making Sunday after next to help disadvantaged women in developing countries.
When she arrived, though, she was very apologetic – it seems the parish border is some 200 yards west of my house, so I’m not even in her parish, though my postcode is named for the village… I pointed out that technically I belong to the parish by my Copenhagen apartment anyway, and besides I doubted if women in Burkina Faso and elsewhere really cared much about Danish parish borders…
So 9 days from now I’ll spend a Sunday morning going door to door, collecting money to give women access to healthcare and education. Surely there are worse ways to spend a Sunday, right?
I love this aspect of country life; that you are assumed to be part of a community, even as a part-time resident. (And even if you happen to live 200 yards over the parish border…) I’ve never in my life tried having a vicar invite herself over, nor been directly asked to take part in this sort of thing – though I’ve previously volunteered to collect for the Red Cross and the Danish Refugee Council, so she couldn’t have found an easier person to talk into this.
It certainly didn’t do any harm that she’s a charming and interesting person; she was ordained in the late 1960’s, some 20 years after the first female priest was ordained in the Church of Denmark, so she’s a bit of an old, feminist hippie in some ways – as am I, only a bit younger… I could definitely imagine myself dropping in for coffee at the vicarage in the future, though sadly she’s retiring this summer when she turns 70 as per church policy.
Funnily, though, she will move from the vicarage to an apartment some 500 yards from my apartment in Copenhagen! I would say “it’s a small world”, but of course the truth is that Denmark is a small country… (I mean, my local electrician used to date the daughter of the man I bought the house from, so he came here frequently in the 60’s – though he never saw the upstairs bedrooms before I bought the house!)
It sounds like a nice community. When we first moved to the country we did not know a soul so, even if we were not religious, we went to the Anglican church of Canada to meet some people. We did not know what kind of reception we would get. We were very welcome and made the acquaintance of lots of interesting people.
I hope your fund raising goes well.
I’m rather on the fence about religion, but the Church of Denmark isn’t the most religious of religions – in that respect it’s not very dissimilar to Anglicanism – and the vicar is probably the most educated person in the vicinity, so that alone makes her interesting company. God was only mentioned jokingly when I said that I could presumably be forgiven for not attending service if I was out there collecting money for my neighbour – or, as it were, for people in developing countries. Not that I normally spend my Sunday morning in church anyway…
(The Church of Denmark is one of very few Protestant state churches in the world… Church tax is levied on your regular tax bill if you’re a member, and all births, deaths and name changes are recorded by the parish wardens… And church regulations are ordered through acts of parliament, so when gay church marriages became possible in Denmark, that was because parliament made it legal – and the queen signed it into law, being both Head of State and Head of the Church of Denmark… It’s really rather bizarre…)
Did she ask you to sing in the choir? 😉
I believe the church is actually too small to have a choir as such; the congregational singing is lead by the church warden… The church seats around 50 people, though at most services there are between 5 and 15 in attendance unless there is a baptism or similar. (And it’s not entirely unheard-of for the vicar, the church warden and the organist to outnumber the congregation…)
Here the queen of England is also the queen of Canada but she is not the head of the Anglican church of Canada. The Anglican church is to have a synod this summer to decide whether it will allow gay marriage. It is rather late in the day. We got married in 08 (it was more symbolic than anything else as by then we had been living together for 33 years).