‘When we talk about the Mysteries of the Church’, I told the congregation on Sunday, ‘we usually mean baptism or holy communion. But there are more local mysteries too. We have recently solved some, such as where the electricity meter is (in the cupboard at the back of the church – I was looking for an old-fashioned spinny-roundy one when in fact it’s digital), or who puts out the bins on Wednesdays (it’s Chloe the bookkeeper). But the other day I noticed that next to the electrics cupboard is a jar of pickled onions. I have no idea where it has come from. If it belongs to you, or if you want it, your name is on it, and do remove it’.

Nobody has decided they want the jar of pickled onions yet. Its continued presence causes me to reflect on something not entirely banal, which is the issue of how laypeople interact with the church building they use and inhabit. To do something that they are helping with or organising, people will happily take matters into their own hands: they will seize the initiative. They will move heavy wooden chairs from the church space where they normally sit into the hall so a particular person can sit on those rather than a plastic one. They will shift the dial on the thermostat if it is cold. They will open the hall windows if it is hot. They will almost invariably forget, or not think it necessary, to restore affairs to the status quo ante, to move back the chair, to reset the thermostat, or to close the window, because the circumstance that engages their commitment, the particular event, is past, and they’re on to the next thing. In contrast, something that is not their direct concern can be screened out. A jar of pickled onions can be indefinitely left next to a cupboard, or a cafetiere full of four-day-old coffee left on the kitchen worktop can be deftly manoeuvred around rather than tipped down the sink (‘Oh that was here when we arrived’). The wonderful example I always quote, even after 14 years, is Mr and Mrs Bowdry, now both long gone to their eternal reward, putting their faulty service booklets back on the pile at an 8am mass in 2011 to confuse the next person to pick them up. I suppose people do this out of self-defence, to conserve their resources for the next important challenge they will actually need them for. I suppose I do, too.

Transcendent Moments in Clerical Life #983

Swanvale Halt church was refurbished in 2012, as some may recall, as part of which we installed a handsome range of new furniture, benches and chairs made from light American oak. They are light in colour, not in weight; they are substantial bits of kit. When first placed in the church, each had beneath every foot a small plastic roundel holding a felt pad, so that they would move smoothly across the floor when called upon to do so.

Thirteen years have taken their toll and those felt pads that remain are now compacted, but still just about doing their job. But many have disappeared and in some cases even the plastic roundels that held them have also vanished. There is one point in the church, the runnels into which the folding doors that close off the entrance area sit, where if you are not careful they will tear the little fixings off the feet of the chairs and benches, but the latter are moved over them so rarely that it surprises me it's happened at all. 

I love the smooth oak floor of the church building. I remember, when it was newly laid down and before the furniture arrived, Peter the then churchwarden and his wife Paula the pastoral assistant went waltzing across its shiny surface. It is always a moment, then, of horrible distress when I move a bench ready for Toddler Praise or the Pilates class on the second Wednesday in the month only to hear a scratch and realise a tiny fragment of flint caught beneath a leg where a pad should be has just scored a white gouge across the wood.

It takes organisation to move from the pained regret of these moments to actually doing anything about it, as I managed to yesterday, replacing the missing pads with squares of felt cut out of sheets supplied by the local ironmongery. Moving the kneeling-screens and benches back to their places and feeling them slide gently across the floor was more delightful than I know how to tell you.

You think this is banal? Wait until next time when I post about the significance of pickled onions to Church life.

The Most Beautiful Dogs in the World No Matter What Anyone Says

Since Professor Cotillion's amazing Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Bartle and Brindle, captured my heart I have discovered more about these impossibly cute dogs than someone who doesn't own one needs to know. I now find them everywhere. As the conclusion of my Oxford Holy Wells project appears in the distance I wondered what to write about next and the Holy Wells of the New Forest occurred to me. I looked up the Abbot’s Well at Frogham which I haven’t seen in 35 years and what should come up but this picture of a beautiful tricolour Cavalier. His name is Merlin and his owner Nicky took him on a walk around the Abbot’s Well. She founded the Dog Friendly Dorset website so I considered all those links providential. Nicky has a rare cancer so hopefully with enough fundraising for her treatment she’ll be around to look after Merlin as long as he needs. Then my local community board highlighted an ex-breeding stock Cavalier called Betty who needs adoption, and I found that it’s because of a rescued Cavalier called Lucy that third-party pet sales were banned in England as a step towards eradicating puppy-farming. Poor Betty wasn't house-trained (unsurprisingly as she had never lived in a house), and had never been walked on a lead: these are dogs that are bred to interact with humans, and they find their greatest joy and contentment in human company, so there's a particular cruelty to keeping one in a cage away from human beings. 

No wonder people fall in love with them. Dr Cotillion's Brindle is a bit of an exception being an only pup who is extremely protective of his owner and barks at anyone else who approaches, but almost every other Cavie treats any human they come across as a friend (they are not good guard dogs). They will let their humans do anything to them, dress them up in everything from crowns to sunglasses and take it completely in their stride. They are almost completely hopeless at anything other than looking cute. A nice Youtube video from Canada entitled 'Why our Cavaliers would not survive in nature' includes as reasons 'they need weekly manicures', 'they wear snoods to eat', and 'we are their emotional support rather than the other way round'. If you are their human, they will love you to distraction.

And this is partly the cause of their major problem. Cavaliers descend from the toy spaniels that have been known for centuries before modern breeds became recognised and established. Over the years these dogs were cross-bred with flat-nosed animals such as pugs and became what we now know as King Charles Spaniels, with domed skulls and short faces. Then in the 1910s breeders began to reflect that these dogs didn't look like the ones they could see in old paintings, and it might be nice to breed them back in that direction again. This was all going well until World War Two intervened. My very battered copy of The Observer's Book of Dogs from 1945 which I was obsessed with as a child describes the breed as 'the latest of these attractive spaniels to have come before the public eye' which was an optimistic account as at that point the entire breeding stock had been reduced to six animals. Maintaining a lap dog which was effectively useless at anything but being cute wasn't a high priority for a nation fighting for its life, and the breed almost disappeared. Every Cavie in the world now descends from those six dogs, meaning that whatever health problems they had, are now found through the whole breed. Among a host of common conditions, the most serious are the heart murmurs that virtually every Cavalier suffers from by middle-age, and syringomyelia, the formation of pockets of fluid around the spine caused by a skull malformation which Cavaliers inherit from the brachycephalic dogs they were bred from, and which can cause extreme pain. I told you I know too much.

Cavalier owners' groups often campaign for better breeding standards so that only healthy dogs are bred from, and if you're buying a puppy you're advised to get proof of good health from its ancestors for at least a couple of generations, but evidence from places such as Denmark which have had very strict quality control for some years suggests that the breed's genetic stock is so restricted it doesn't really make much difference how careful breeders are. Some vets argue that the whole Cavalier breed needs to be 'rebooted' by being cross-bred with (say) Cocker spaniels for a couple of generations, and then bred back towards the Cavie. That could help; but nobody wants to lose these dogs. They're too beautiful, and too loving. They reflect the best of us - until they have a toy-destroying party, or (as Bartle and Brindle did recently) have a competition as who could wee over the other the most, necessitating two baths in one day. 

I can't have one, at least now. They fixate on their humans so much that they require training to be left alone for a few hours, and I couldn't give one the time and attention it would need. Instead I have a china one I picked up via Ebay which sits on my windowsill, and it demands hardly any attention at all. That may be the closest I ever get.

Warming Up

From the vaguely theological and definitely pastoral we venture today into the realms of the severely practical. Back in the Old Days once an incumbent had been inducted into the real and legal possession of the temporalities of his [sic] benefice, he was responsible for it until such time as he left it, including any improvements or making good such dilapidations might have occurred to the parsonage house during the time he was there. The only thing he couldn't do was sell it. Such times are long past, and the diocese now takes a far closer interest in its properties, even if, some clergy find, they have to be persuaded actually to do anything practical.

The diocese has been telling me my boiler needs replacing since I moved in fifteen years ago, and has finally got round to it. I have been sceptical: the last time any change was made to the system was after I got help for a leaky pipe, when the visiting plumbers looked at the valves on my radiators, sucked in their breath, and informed me they would all have to be replaced to bring them up to modern standards. This was done, and a lovely silent heating/hot water system was changed in a trice into one that hummed, hissed and rattled no matter what was done to it, requiring careful management so I wasn't woken up at inconvenient hours. Now, I was warned that a new combi boiler would have to be mounted on an outside wall, requiring additional exposed ducting and pipework. At first I was horrified, thinking this meant vast industrial-size pipes leading round the kitchen, but was assured they would just be standard copper ones.

The actual work was done pretty efficiently even though the contractors discovered that a wall they had to take pipes through was in fact composed of plasterboard over about six inches of void space before they hit good Bargate stone. But when they were all gone and I turned everything on there was a noise like the thundering of mighty waters, as the Psalm says. Such noise persisted. I put this down to air in the system but bleeding my bedroom radiator for two hours didn't seem to stop it. The morning after a second contractors' visit to fix that, I got up to find there was no hot water at all. That fault turned out to be caused by a failed thermostat on the cylinder. Everything now seems to be both quiet and effective.

How expensive this would all have been I dread to think. I'm glad it's not been me paying for it. The new boiler sits unobtrusively on its wall, but the carcass of the old one is still in its cupboard. There is no getting it out, not least because the chaps were concerned there might be asbestos in it. You'd also have to take the cupboard apart. The works required my fridge-freezer to be moved, so I now have a kind of demarcated 'utility area' I didn't have before. It's as though the house is larger!

Through the Garden Gate June 2025

Although I'm no longer posting updates for the sake of it (posts about boilers and dog-friendly churches may follow), the heat will keep me indoors on this day off until I venture down to the steeple house for Corpus Christi and then to Malham church where the new incumbent is being installed; so thought a few garden snaps cheer up everyone, including myself. 

I thought this might be a new arrival, but in fact it seems just to be the Biting Stonecrop flower. It's just that the plant has never bothered flowering before!

Meanwhile, just above it, the bonsai-ed rowan is starting to look convincing and in very healthy leaf (provided I remember to water it). 

The same could be said of the slightly spindly rowan and the lovely red acer along the bank, which have to be watched in this hot weather. The acer was almost burned to death two years ago.

Meanwhile I can't work out how the old damson tree, with its split bark and powdery wood, survives from one year to the next. What's still alive? But yet again what's left of it is fruiting very well. Lady Arlen suggests I should save some stones and try to plant them, which I will. Meanwhile the roof of the Temple is rotten and needs replacing but finding somewhere that will supply the board seems less straightforward than one might hope! I can't fit a big sheet in my car, nobody will cut one in two, and delivery charges are steep.

The wildlife pond inserted into the midst of the big bramble bank is a great success, especially now I've managed to rig up a little pump fed by a solar panel on top of the damson, which circulates the water a bit. I often disturb a bird taking the water when I go to check on the pond. 

I am very glad to have seen off another incursion of the box-moth caterpillars - at least I haven't detected any for a couple of weeks - but the beautiful cinnabar moth caterpillars happily chomping the ragwort are far more welcome guests. 

Finally here is some hedge woundwort - stinky if you break the leaves, but fun to have.

Keeping Promises

M asked me about being married in the church. I knew, not only that they’d been married before, but also met their new partner before being divorced. It was a kind of request, surprisingly, that I'd never had before. ‘But did the new relationship cause the end of the marriage?’ the priest I talked it through with asked me: ‘Can they assure you it didn’t?’ I put this to M and they were honest enough to say they couldn’t be definite that the marriage wouldn’t have carried on had they not met the new partner. It’s all very uncertain, though I was happier having some kind of objective criteria rather than just relying on what I felt.

If you’re a Roman Catholic, or a certain kind of Anglican, there is no question: you can only get married in church once. If you’re (some sorts of) Orthodox, again, you get three goes at it after which you are deemed to be taking the mickey, but a subsequent marriage omits some of the celebratory ceremonies of a first. Anglican churches are left to work out their own approach, provided it is consistent with the House of Bishops’ guidance, which includes the caveat about the new relationship not being a direct cause of the marriage ending. Again, I very much want something more than my own judgement to go on. Who am I to wade into the complexities of human relationships?

The House of Bishops’ guidance advises the priest to make sure that celebrating a subsequent marriage does not ‘undermine the Church’s teaching’ that marriage is for life, but given our apparently limited enthusiasm for our own teaching I think of it more basically. If the core of all sacraments is about promises, your approach, be it ever so gentle and pastoral, has to speak to the integrity of promises, of which the promises couples make, and which God promises to help them keep, is only one. Society has an interest in promises being kept, because we all rely on trusting that most people will do their best to keep their promises, most of the time.

And yet we know (frail beings that we are) we break other promises. We take part in the sacrament of reconciliation and promise God we won’t do this or that, and it is very likely that we will. Does breaking a promise preclude us from making another one? Or does the public, communal nature of the matrimonial promise make a difference? 

The Period of All Human Glory

The sacristan at Goremead church, which I looked after for a few months 17 years ago now, was Agnes. In her very young days she’d been on the secretarial staff of Archbishop Cosmo Lang. At the end of any discussion about her unsatisfactory health or general state she would usually conclude, ‘Still, we're getting there’, the first person I can remember using a phrase I now hear almost universally. It’s another way of saying ‘Can’t complain’, which is itself a way of glossing over the fact that there is no point complaining; of putting to one side the uncomfortable truth both parties to the conversation are only too aware of, that the situation concerned probably isn’t going to get any better. The actual words do not mean what they are intended to convey, the consciousness that we are all on a single trajectory with a single conclusion. One day I was bold enough to ask Agnes where it was we were getting to: she narrowed her eyes and replied ‘You know perfectly well’.

We will leave aside the more cosmic consideration that we don’t know quite where we’re getting to – the supernal or infernal postmortem realms – and think about what it means for this life alone. Knowing in theory that your time in this earthly realm is limited, as we all do, feels very different from being told it is, even if no actual span is put on it. This has recently happened to someone I know, and if that’s happened to you personally, it’s also happened, to a lesser degree, to the people close to you. No doctor is brutal enough to say ‘What you have wrong with you can only be cured by interventions we will not try because of all the other things that are wrong with you, so all we can do is manage it, and it will eventually kill you within the foreseeable future if one of your other problems doesn’t get to you first’, but that’s what they want you to understand.

Traditional Christian spirituality uses the transitoriness of life to point us away from this world towards eternal considerations, but that’s not the problem here, which is to invest the remainder of our human lives with meaning and joy. The confidence we might have in Christ’s saving grace may blunt the edge of death: we may tell ourselves that all that is good about us is held in divine remembrance and will be brought into the heavenly Jerusalem, part of the ‘treasures of the nations’ the Book of Revelation talks about. If we can successfully pit that spiritual knowledge against our every natural human instinct to be afraid, all well and good. But it seems to me that carrying on living fully is a separate spiritual issue. Call some of us weak and foolish, but we need some motivation not just to turn our faces to the wall and collapse into depression. What is the point of the strife? Even if we engage in battle to make it easier for others to do so, that just pushes the question one step away from us, rather than answering it.

Once when I was dealing with someone with suicidal temptations I stressed that death was the enemy, an interloper in God’s world (this only stands any chance of working with a Christian). But if that’s the case we know that we will eventually lose: and that loss may even come as a mercy depending on our circumstances. Perhaps we can see each day lived well as a victory against a different Angel of Death that comes to us, rather than a struggle daily renewed against the same foe.

And yet why should we? Death doesn’t have to be approaching that quickly to make that a valid question. The humanist concern to gather experiences against the day of death seems a hollow endeavour as it leads nowhere. Why should we try daily when we are weary and dispirited? Rather, the thought that occurs to me that nobody else will ever have our experiences, our precise mixture of impressions, reflections and memories. Those are the treasures of the nations to be brought into the heavenly city. What God will do with them exactly we do not know, but every moment is not just one of blessing to us but to the whole of creation, connected as we are through him who is the Head. That might be enough to keep me thankful each morning, no matter how long or short a time that might remain to me.