Visit to the Homeland

More than a couple of weeks has gone by since I attended the installation of a college friend of mine as priest-in-charge of St Benet's Church, Kentish Town. St Benet's needs a bit of love. It needs a bit more than that, actually, including a new roof, but love goes a long way and I trust Peter will love the place and its people. 

St Benet's is one of a type of Anglo-Catholic churches which are very recognisable - tall, narrow hall-spaces organised around a single focus, soaring and transcendent, like St Silas not far away, or St Bartholomew in Brighton.  It's a bit down-at-heel, and designed to make a firm and definite statement in its roughish streets rather than a refined one, but you can see how grand and glorious it once was.

I joke that I may not be the only priest in the Diocese of Guildford who owns a biretta but I'm the only one who wears it now and again. At St Benet's there were rows and rows of biretta-ed clergy, and nobody batted an eyelid at incense, plainchant, maniples, and relics on the altar. This is the sort of environment which fostered my spiritual life and what I find wonderfully comfortable, and comforting. Yet I have moved rather far away from it and find myself in a parish which, though it may have had a Catholic tradition once, hasn't really understood what that is for quite some time. it's also a village parish church rather than a gathered church in an urban setting with lots of other ecclesiastical choices nearby. Catholicism in the Swanvale Halt mould will never look quite like Kentish Town, anyway. What I find myself doing is reminding people that there is such a thing as a Catholic Church - looking for the principles behind all those intoxicating delicacies we got used to at Staggers and the churches that may have sent us there, and trying to work out ways of expressing those principles rather than just importing the frills wholesale. Teaching people what a cake is and how cakes work rather than making them eat Black Forest Gateau, I suppose.