Fast Forward To The Past: Spirit

A wooden cross cast into the sea near the pier in the annual blessing of the waters in East Dorset.

Father Raphael performed the service on the beach every year from 1990 until his death. I saw him often walking along the sands, sometimes wandering in the shallow sea water, with black robes billowing and flapping incongruously in the hot summer sun or freezing winter wind.

He once told a local newspaper:

"I bless the waters for the harvest and for the safety of everyone who sails or swims in them.

"It is symbolic of Christ's baptism in the River Jordan which was part of his showing to the gentiles."

The Very Rev Arch Priest Father Raphael served as priest at the St Joseph of Arimathea Church at Cemetery Junction for more than fifteen years before his death following a heart operation in 2008.

He was just sixty-five.

Father Raphael was born David Norman in Northamptonshire, educated at Wellingborough public school, and later the Polytechnic of the South Bank in London, where he studied bakery and catering.

In his thirties he made the decision to become a priest and took up theological studies at Southampton University. He became a lay priest in the Anglican Church before joining the Greek Orthodox Church, and later the Celtic Orthodox Church with its strong Glastonbury connection. In that small town many years ago I also made the acquaintance of Father John of the Celtic Orthodox Church.

Father Raphael was also a trained conjuror and member of the Magic Circle and performed on stage regularly during the 1970s, on one occasion on the same bill as pop group the New Seekers.

We communicated by smiling and a wave as the sea shore's waves lapped as he briskly made his way east or west, as the case might be. Sometimes I would encounter him atop the cliffs. Strolling. Contemplating A smile. A wave. St Joseph of Arimathea important to us both, as was the tradition of the Sacred Cup of the Last Supper brought to these Isles by the First Apostle of Great Britain. I speak of this extensively in my work The Grail Church, which I am confident Father Raphael absorbed.

John of Glastonbury, on the right in the photograph, is John Ives who is a church history scholar and former Anglican priest who moved to Orthodoxy in 1994. This was when I relocated from Hertfordshire to the English south coast where I established the Holy Grail retreat centre. By this time I was already into the third year of my episcopate, having been consecrated in South Hertfordshire on the feast of St Francis of Assisi in 1991. Having already made a friend in John Ives in Glastonbury, who was now a hieromonk supported by the idiorrhythmic monastery, I was delighted to discover him wafting through in my own residential area on the south coast. He moved to Orthodoxy after serving as an Anglican for several years.

"I learned about the Orthodoxy and then became an Anglican priest," he said. "But I left in 1994, mainly because they had started to ordain women. We don't believe we have that authority to make drastic alterations and so made the permanent move to this faith."

The Orthodox congregation (the Community of St Aristobolos), formerly part of the Celtic Orthodox Church worshipping in the Resurrection Chapel in St Peter's churchyard, was received into the Patriarchate of Constantinople (Istanbul) under the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, in 2012, and therefore became part of mainstream worldwide Orthodoxy. This above photograph was taken on the Orthodox Good Friday (hence the liturgical violet and veiling of crucifixes). Sadly, the Anglican Church removed Father John due to wanting the chapel for more community based projects which had nothing to do with worship. He has now found a place elsewhere, but I rather liked the churchyard chapel, and deeply regretted the decision of St Peter's church to expel him from it.