Restoration

It's good that Swanvale Halt church hosts music concerts (of different kinds) so regularly. We are particularly the venue for some of the events organised by John a local gentleman who left a City job years ago to work as a music promoter. As a result, many people come to the church who otherwise wouldn't find their way into it. The refurbished church building, where furniture can be moved conveniently (well, relatively so) into an endless variety of configurations, makes such events easy to accommodate.

John's team were in on Friday setting up for a Saturday concert this week, an especially large one which required extra work on their part. I got into church on Saturday morning to find that not only had the chairs and benches been shifted into the required layout, but the altar had been moved already into the chancel which during concerts becomes a dark recess, invisible behind the artists.

The church was going to remain open until about mid-day, and I had a meeting in an hour's time with a baptism family. Without its altar, hung with the green Victorian altar frontal which is the main point of colour in the building, it no longer looked like a church. The World is never absent from the Church: the two interpenetrate each other. But the whole point of having a church building at all is that what happens in it affects the world around it more than if it didn't exist. The constant sign of the sacred allows the presence and activity of God in the world beyond it to become open and visible. It is the mark of God's promise, and it's God's promise that makes the world sacred in so far as it is. I shifted the altar back into its proper position, at least for a few hours until the doors were closed.

I intended to tell John what I'd done and then forgot. Happily he is a tolerant cove.