Not Entirely Following the Liturgical Manuals

Stumbling through the liturgy took on a very literal sense this morning, as managing the Rectory stairs with the Paschal Candle in one hand and my phone in the other proved slightly beyond my abilities. Originally I wasn’t going to do anything other than a missa solitaria but when Il Rettore told me that the ceremonies of the day would be broadcast from Lamford Rectory I thought I would try too. We usually get about twenty souls at the Dawn Mass and so this would give everyone at least a taste of what happens. The trouble is that Il Rettore has a second pair of hands available and I don’t. As well as tripping on the stairs, the first part of the video I managed to shoot consists of almost total darkness, the Service of Light is out of focus (though you do get the birdsong effect I was keen to capture), the incense grains managed to avoid the charcoal almost completely and so produced nothing more than a congealed mess in the thurible, and I repeatedly forgot where things were and had to move around in a less than ideally decisive way. I haven’t sung the Exsultet since I was curate at Lamford: it doesn’t half go on a long time but at least I didn’t choke.

Even if you have one other person available it makes doing this sort of thing a lot easier. Other churches, of course, are much better resourced and can produce professional-looking experiences by layering music and speech and film together and so on; I’m not going to be able to make anything of that kind. Canon Lucy Winkett of St James’ Piccadilly made the point on the wireless this morning that the current crisis hasn’t really brought out any new moral challenges, just cast sharper light on old ones, not least our human competitiveness: how ‘productive’ you can be during lockdown. This applies to everyone including clergy. Some people find it hard enough to get up in the morning while others stifle their uncertainties, if they feel any, under activity. (Was Abi, the terrifyingly competent, holy, and sympathetic curate who gets so far under Fr Adam Smallbone’s skin in the TV series Rev that he’s relieved when she’s moved, based on Canon Winkett as the rumour goes? No one has ever confirmed, or denied … ).

If it was just my own spiritual life I was concerned about, I’d be content to sit and say the Office and pray for the parish and its people for the duration of the lockdown. I’m not exposing my meagre efforts at technological engagement and mangled liturgy, or even celebrating services alone at all, because it’s fun. I’ve taken the view that what the congregation need most is something to maintain first their connection with God, and, second, their connection with the parish, the other human beings in relationship with whom they deepen their experience of God. Quite minimal material can do that: it doesn’t need to be a multimedia sound-and-light extravaganza, thankfully. I also have a sense that our instinct to try and reproduce our normal experience as much as we can should be resisted: you can’t learn the lessons of deprivation if you’re pushing the sign of deprivation away. In the garden on Maundy Thursday, bringing the Vigil to an end, I said as usual the Passiontide hymn from Malling Abbey:

God’s Israel, a remnant left,

Must die, to bring to life

New Israel.

And God only knows what that will look like.

One of the resources I’ve sent out to the good folk of Swanvale Halt included simple ‘table services’ for Holy Week, adapted from stuff prepared some years ago by the Anglican Franciscans in Australia, and I’ve been following them as it seems the least I can do. They are structured around mealtimes, and draw the connection between the table of the altar and the table at homes. Normally I would break my Lenten fast at breakfast after the Dawn Mass with champagne and pain-au-chocolat; this morning I had the drink, and a defrosted chocolate cupcake preserved from the last pre-lockdown Messy Church. When we get through that early service, and meet in the hall for breakfast, there are always a number of sensations feeding into it. There is the feeling that we’ve been through something ever-so-slightly testing together, in the sense of getting up early and doing something complicated that could easily collapse into a shambles, the tiniest, tiniest intimation of ordeal; there’s the sense that we’re grown-ups doing something slightly mad, silly and naughty; and the knowledge that we’re taking up rituals and customs that we set down six weeks before, things that tell us who we are in Christ. Those add up to a sort of slight hysteria, all defused and dissipated over breakfast: a release. You can’t do that the same way, on your own, no matter how you might strain to reproduce the customary patterns. Of course I should have had the Scriptures in my mind, but instead it was filled with the lyrics of PJ Harvey’s ‘Good Fortune’: ‘Threw my bad fortune off the top of a tall building/I’d rather have done it with you.’