‘The Godfather’ trilogy      

Mystic River

To these I would add Gary Lewis’s

wonderful portrayal of Palmer,

the Chaplain in the trenches in Joyeux Noel (2005)

Bad on-screen vicars? There is vicar who is a spoof of the TV Vicar caricature in Emma Thompson’s romp of a kids’ movie, Nanny McPhee. My son has his impression of this simpering Vicar down to a tee – but then he also asks me why they put strange vicars, not "normal" ones, in stories like that (this the child who has grown up amid an assortment of pretty normal people who are also priests).

What are your favourite good and bad on-screen portrayals of priests, ministers etc?

A Wrinkle in Time was my first. I read Circle of Quiet for the third time this summer in France.

I learned from Ms L’Engle how to hold faith together with imagination, obedience and respect together with a healthy degree of rebellion, and that life is to  be lived right now, not as a down-payment for the hereafter.

“Why does anybody tell a story?” Ms. L’Engle once asked, even though she knew the answer.
“It does indeed have something to do with faith,” she said, “faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

Rest in Peace, Madeleine. Thank you, thank you for all you have given to your readers. Obits in the NY Times. and Episocopal Life

Fauré said some stuff about his Requiem that may well chime with Emerging Church afficionados – he wanted to do something that was a funeral but not as we know it, church but not as we know it. His own faith and belief were an interesting mix of orthodoxy and complete maverick individualism. But then he was an artist, so that’s pretty unsurprising. Creatives are often feared in the Church because they want to reshape things. Odd, perhaps, that displaying creativity – that most God-like of qualities – often sidelines artists within Church circles.  Anyway, here’s what Fauré said about his Requiem:

"It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience. The music of Gounod has been criticized for its overinclination towards human tenderness. But his nature predisposed him to feel this way: religious emotion took this form inside him. Is it not necessary to accept the artist’s nature? As to my Requiem, perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper, after all the years of accompanying burial services on the organ! I know it all by heart. I wanted to write something different."

If you want to join us for our Choral Requiem for Remembrance, it’s at Robinson College Chapel, Grange Road, Sunday 12th November. 6pm.