Sad Church Syndrome

I sat in Hornington Parish Church some time ago, reflecting, as I usually do when there, how relieved I am not to be looking after it. It’s a sprawling great building on a medieval plan, and however quaint its little corners and features seem to be, it doesn’t work as a liturgical space. Little Swanvale Halt church, conversely, is basically a single square space with a chancel attached, and that makes it much easier to manage.

It isn’t just that, though. It isn’t even the thunderous dark pews and utterly inadequate lighting, which battles forlornly against the vastness of the building whenever the sun goes in, that make Hornington feel miserable and strangely empty. There’s a vague, undefinable sense that something isn’t right there; of unhappiness, unfriendliness. I don’t often pick up on ‘atmospheres’, but I feel it there.

Churches do acquire personalities. Despite its tattiness and batteredness, the first time I went into Swanvale Halt church I felt the warmth and sense of gentle devotion; Hornington feels different. Of course all this is just a set of subjective responses, until you discover that person after person says the same thing, and you may then start to suspect some objective factor behind it; and you discover that the atmosphere, whatever it is, affects the people who go to a church and what happens to it.

My old parish church had a difficult history. Two priests in succession had nervous breakdowns and the church gathered a reputation as odd and unkind. There was a story that the Abbess of a convent not far away had banned the church from visiting after two members of the congregation had had a fist-fight in the convent chapel during what was supposed to be a Quiet Day. The vicar had been told by the bishop that he was its last chance, and when I arrived he was off sick too having been found gibbering on the floor of his sitting room by a friend. As a result of his efforts to pull the church back towards mainstream Anglo-Catholicism he’d had dog shit posted through his door and other helpful support from members of the congregation. Eventually things began to turn around and the congregation started growing again. The vicar still bore the scars, though, and left at the first sensible opportunity he was offered.

Not long after moving in he detected the smell of woodbines in the vicarage at strange times of day, and when he acquired a dog the animal behaved very strangely. He was thoroughly freaked to discover that the hilltop where the church was built had been the site of a gallows in the 1700s. Eventually the whole area was prayed over by the area bishop and a selection of clergy. The woodbines were never smelled again, the dog got much happier, and things began to improve. If you accept the notion of a non-material aspect to reality and a linkage between that and the physical world, I see no reason why strong emotions should not affect particular places where they’ve been felt. It may not operate through any more mysterious process than suggestion, but, looking at it as rationalistically as you may, the history of a place affects the way people feel and hence their relationships with one another – and hence, in a cycle, the history of the place.

Not long ago, I discovered that one of Hornington church’s historical features pointed out to visitors is a beam built into the bell loft which came from the old gallows on the hilltop. I wonder if the screams have seeped into the rest of the building.