Wreathed

Rick the verger reminded me that today was going to be Advent Sunday and normally we would begin lighting the Advent candles. We hadn't ordered any! But he had scouted around the boxes in the vestry and found enough left over from previous years to make up a usable set. Thank goodness we were too stingy to throw any away. 

I would usually also make an Advent Wreath from greenery in the church grounds, but I couldn't find the circular reservoir I used last year, so resorted to buying one from the florists'. They are under new management and don't use old-fashioned crumbly green reservoir for environmental reasons, instead preferring tightly-packed pads of moss which they say function the same way. If they do, the only disadvantage will be to those of us who still derive a childish pleasure from sticking our fingers in the old stuff.

And they gave us a massive wreath to hang over the church door! I suspect this may be because they couldn't find anything else to do with it but it's very welcome and clears my head by a couple of inches so shouldn't cause anybody else in the congregation too much trouble. That's if it survives the attention of the village ne'er-do-wells - perhaps in the semi-darkness of the winter evenings they won't spot it.

The Self-Caging of the Left

Fr Alternator from Lamford, a political animal, has decided to isolate political-religious topics from his general LiberFaciorum feed for the sake of his friendships, and hive them off into a separate group for people he knows who are interested in such things. Many of us there seem to be progressive types frustrated by the way the Left behaves in dealing with its own, and members of the group have over the last few days shared articles complaining about the exclusivity of the Corbynite wing of Labour and journalists who say the wrong thing being hounded out of the Guardian. These pieces describe their frustrations and analyse the phenomena of their particular moment, but don’t draw the lessons together into any broader view of why this happens. So I thought I would try.

To be a conservative is to be more dissatisfied with the way things appear to be going than with where they are now, while if you have a progressive mindset you feel the other way around. It’s quite possible, depending on conditions, for people to move from one into the other category, but most of the time the differences is fairly stable. The factors that incline people to either point of view are probably very variable. The trouble for progressives who want things to change is that people with little power or influence on their circumstances – the majority – are compelled to work out a modus vivendi that allows them to make a living, to provide for their families and fulfil their most basic needs, and the fear that change will rob them even of the little security they have carved out is not irrational, because it happens: revolutions have often swept away the defences people have built up within unjust systems and left them open to new and worse forms of exploitation. Such people will only occasionally move onto the progressive side of the scale, and most of the time progressives will find it hard to motivate them: they stand to lose the little that makes life bearable. The habit of broadening one’s vision beyond the immediate in terms of time, locality and social relationships and the concerns they bring with them is quite a rare and tender plant which takes a lot of cultivating. Our evolution hasn’t bred us to it: we’re the only animal that does it, and it’s no surprise that we don’t do it that well, that we don’t do it all the time, and that some of us don’t do it at all. Most souls don’t have the bandwidth.

So the temptation for progressives is to create a reserve, a niche, an institution perhaps, where these frustrations can be put to one side and where you can relax mentally, where you don’t have to argue continually against people reluctant to be convinced by your point of view. It’s a psychological, or ideological, version of what most people do with the practical aspects of their lives: creating a space to be safe in. Actually making anything happen in the world outside the reserve becomes less urgent than maintaining the reserve itself; making yourself feel better about your marginal position becomes a higher priority than change. The way you maintain the reserve is by pushing out those who ask awkward questions and don’t fit in with the ideological template, and by cultivating a sense of superiority and martyrdom: your very marginalisation proves you are right, and being right is more important than being effective. You tell yourself the reserve is a necessary instrument in achieving your aims, when the truth is that the harder you work to preserve it, the more it gets in the way of them. You have locked yourself in your own cage.

Progressives would be much happier and almost certainly much more influential if they realised that their dissatisfaction is built into the very business of being human. They are only ever going to be intermittently successful, as each spasm of energy for reform and change wanes and the majority turn back to the work of getting by as best they can. Catching the tide when it turns again is a hard enough task without retreating to an emotional dugout and pretending things are other than they are.

Devotion Partly Frustrated

St Nick's in Guildford is without an incumbent at the moment and the parish office asked some time ago if I would care to lead the mid-day prayers for St Catherine's Day at the ruined chapel on the hill south of the town. With the current restrictions coming in, we concluded that there wouldn't be a service after all: the Government guidelines state they only apply to 'places of worship' and not 'woodlands, cultural sites, and other outdoor spaces where worship may take place', but a service still meant people travelling for a purpose not officially authorised. I thought I might go on my own, though, just to make the point, as for me it would be Work.

I arrived at St Catherine's Hill to find the combination lock on the outer metal fence around the chapel had been replaced by an ordinary padlock. The inner door still had a combination lock, but short of trying to jump over the railings or squeeze in between them that put paid to any idea of actually going in. I stood wondering what to do when a lady I recognised from previous St Catherine's Day gatherings came into view and so we said some of the prayers and readings I had prepared, exchanged good wishes, and returned to our homes. 'I've been coming here for St Catherine's Day for thirty years', she said, 'And this is far from the first time we've not been able to get in.'

'Timeless'

It's not St Catherine's Day yet - St Clement is the saint culted on November 23rd, in fact - but this post has something of a St Catherine connection. Continuing my interest in the work of Dorset musician Sammy Hurden, some while ago I managed to chase down a secondhand copy of her short album Jurassic Journey; it seems to be the only example of her music in any recorded form, apart from snippets on Youtube. One of the tracks, 'Timeless', was recorded in where else but St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury. One day early in 2011 Ms Hurden took singer Abbie Lathe (one of the participants in the early-1990s women's choir Brilliant Birthdays along with PJ Harvey and the late Kate Garrett) and West Country folk performer Jess Upton (whose school band, some accounts say, Polly had also played with in her teens) up to the chapel along with Lucy Roberts who played the five-string fiddle, and together they recorded this haunting, wordless evocation of place, memory and time. 

As nothing of this music exists anywhere except on a handful of CDs, I thought I would put together a little video to go with 'Timeless'. I assembled my photos of the chapel going back over many years to form a journey there and back. Have a look if you have a moment. Sammy Hurden's website seems to have disappeared sometime over the last year, so I am glad to publicise her work (which I trust she would not mind - it's impossible to ask her). 

Small and Achievable Goals

It is a measure of the times that a trip to the tip was the highlight of my day off last week. A collection of broken mugs and glasses, bits of unusable equipment from an iPod docker to a hedge trimmer, and four years' worth of printer cartridges, all went into the appropriate bins and skips. Actually this is an exaggeration: it was the subsequent walk over Witley Common and Rodborough Heath that was the highlight, even more than disposing of my trash.

I usually like walking to look at something, even if that something isn't especially spectacular. This time it was a tunnel under the A3 that I'd never walked through before - what a characteristically 1960s texturing pattern in the concrete, I thought to myself - and (intake of breath) a Trig pillar. It wasn't easy to locate. I made my way towards the high ground in the wood where the pillar should have been, found the Rodborough Borehole pumping station and was nonplussed at the disappearance of the footpath. It took a few moments to discern what was not so much a path as a slight gap in the bracken leading steeply up the hill, and that was indeed where my destination awaited. The 'path' stopped there, and it had presumably been made solely by the feet of Trig pillar enthusiasts toiling to the hilltop to view the object (yes, there are such things). 

I am not a Trig pillar devotee but I can see why people get captured by these features (a bit like holy wells): there are not quite 16,000 of them remaining scattered around the UK, relics of the great Ordnance Survey mapping exercise of the 1930s onwards which resulted in the country being so accurately measured. Their brooding charisma is possibly only enhanced by their obsolescence; this one doesn't even have a view, the wood having grown up around it since it was actually used. 

The sun was so low as I returned that only the very tops of the birch trees remained lit by it.

Witley Common was famously occupied by Canadian troops in both World Wars, and their presence is still remembered:

Even a short stroll can reveal delights - you just have to be alive to the possibility.

Rebellion

'During the first lockdown,' S.D. told me when we spoke via the wireless telegraph yesterday, 'it was completely wrong that we weren't allowed to take communion to people who needed it. My friend Fr Clarke went out several times anyway and concealed his home-communion kit under a pile of toilet rolls on the back seat of the car in case the police stopped him'. The naughtiest things I did during that initial period when we were not supposed even to go into church buildings were a) to say to Rick our verger that if his state-permitted daily exercise happened to take him in the direction of the church, and he happened to have his keys with him, it could very well be the case that he might find himself going in and doing some polishing or something, and b) we hand-delivered our newsletters and printed services to parishioners who weren't online in any way when the instruction from Lambeth Palace was that such literature should only be sent through the post. In fact sometimes we even spoke to people on the doorstep. That first week in March when public worship was suspended, when I was self-isolating but before the lockdown actually began, Marion the curate did the delivery and made a point of speaking to everyone on the list. It took her hours. She's always been more conscientious than me.

Back then of course we didn't know much about COVID and some of the concerns that the Church got very agitated about seem over-the-top now. As the above shows, I felt many were exaggerated even then: I couldn't see what terrible risk was run by standing outside well away from someone and asking them whether they were OK. Nevertheless, Government - as opposed to the Archbishop of Canterbury - has the unenviable task of coming up with overall guidelines as to what we should and should not do. This is mostly couched in terms of balancing the demands of public health and the economy, but there is also the different attitudes of the public to consider. Some people are more cautious than others: one person's carefulness is another's over-anxiety, and one's reasonable confidence is another's recklessness. Government has to negotiate and promote common ways of behaving which most people will accept most of the time, together with what it knows about considerations of health and economics. Government is a central part of our social conversation.

The rogue baptism staged by London pastor Regan King the other day was almost certainly not expected actually to go ahead, which is why he told everybody about it beforehand: if you really want to do something illicit, you don't publicise it. Even Extinction Rebellion steer clear of that. However much I sympathise, I won't be doing the same. But the socially-distanced, pared-down, tightly-controlled spoken mass we got used to at Swanvale Halt before the second closure is as safe as any activity a group of people could engage in indoors, and if that isn't allowed again after December 2nd it will be a harsh choice indeed.

Boring for Some

It comes to something when the most exciting thing I can think to write in my letter to my mother is that I went out to buy a new kettle. As a church community with a closed church we're aware that we need to maintain contact with the congregation members who weren't joining in physical worship even when it was possible, but Lillian the former lay reader told me today how her phone conversations had revealed boredom rather than any more basic need. We want to talk to one another, but have precious little to talk about. The main topic of conversation concerns how wretched it is that we can't do this or that, the things that would normally form the grist to the mill of social interaction, and the overall mood seems to be a mixture of anxiety and tedium.

But of course some undergo more than that. Our councillor-congregant Polly (who wasn't coming to church even when it was open because her elderly mother lives with her) told me about rocketing numbers of Universal Credit applicants locally, businesses that are almost bound to fail once government support comes to an end, and the Community Store - a council-run food bank not termed a food bank out of deference to the church-run one not far away - having its busiest ever week in the days after Remembrance Sunday. Curiously our church has little connection with any of this except by report as our congregation is mainly retired, with older children who live away, as I may have mentioned. We contribute to the food (etc.) collections but all the ways we would usually contact and support locals in any kind of distress are suspended. I think perhaps I ought to hang around the centre of the village with a coffee a bit more.

Wrestling with the Digital World

'The problem is with this unit', said the man from the security company to myself and Hannah the churchwarden yesterday morning, tapping the newly-installed bit of kit, 'and what's happening is that custard flapdoodle velveteen theodolite round the back of the ionised abalone'. At least he might as well have done. The take-away message was that our long-awaited CCTV system wasn't going to work because one of the components had been supplied with a fault and would have to be replaced. He'd put in an order the moment he got back to the office, he promised. And after that he was going on holiday.

In a similar vein, several years ago we ran a short course for people interested in finding out more about Christianity. I didn't want to do what Alpha or even Emmaus did and try to impart a short version of what Christians are supposed to believe, but rather examine what it was like to be a Christian, to share experience in an effort to encourage understanding as much as anyone else. I did a couple of sessions and Marion the curate and Lillian the lay reader did one each. We had a sole, single attender. She became a Christian, though: 100% success rate, suck on that, Nicky Gumbel. 

Under the current restrictions I had the idea of perhaps adapting these sessions into video form so they could be used remotely, a first step towards online evangelism. Somehow I managed to find out that Powerpoint presentations could be converted into videos: and thus an adventure began. Powerpoint shows themselves provoke no fear in me but when I came to try to record audio and timings things got more complex. I found out how to play a single audio file all the way through the slideshow. At first I got hideous echoes rendering the audio unlistenable, then kept erasing the timings. I copied and recopied, recorded and re-recorded a slideshow using a variety of formats and methods, and found the apparent length of the show stretching when it was converted into a video, as though there was a law of relativity governing the nature of time which applied in this circumstance and which had remained unknown to Einstein, unsurprisingly as he didn't have Powerpoint, or indeed any Microsoft application. The diocesan evangelism advisor told me you can use Zoom to record slideshows (why not, as Zoom does everything else) and that seemed to offer a way forward, but try as I might I couldn't get the audio and the visual to marry up.

I suspect at the root of the matter is the antiquity of my laptop which probably has to be replaced: as so much of our lives has moved online over recent months, its limitations have been revealed in distressing detail. Finally, and in some despair, I split the audio up into chunks to be started at different points in the slideshow, and that seems to work, producing something which is basically watchable. Whether I'll be able to remember what I did to get there is another matter.

People will advise me on the best way of achieving this: you are kind. But refrain, as I don't think I can bear it ...

Ordure, Ordure

The above may be the dullest picture I have ever posted on this blog, but it's what this small patch of dug-over ground represents that's important. As my sprawling garden, in front and to the rear of the Rectory, is no-cat's-land, all the neighbourhood's felines tend to prowl around it, glaring at each other when their visits coincide, and making their presence felt in even more disagreeable ways when so disposed. In fact, there have been times when it has barely seemed possible to step outside the door without treading in cat poo within moments. It tends to be left in unexpected places, and you are unaware of what you've done until the stench reaches you and that, depending on the weather and wind conditions, may be some time after you disturbed the excrement in question. There was one occasion when I caught a cat at it, and its expression could only be described as defiant.

Over the years I have cursed and raged as I have gingerly removed my shoes, washed them under the outside tap with the aid of a stick, and left them on the step to dry. Then, realising that my interlopers made a particular beeline for disturbed soil to pursue their defecatory activities, I reasoned that, if I was unable to prevent these offensive habits I could perhaps at least confine them. 

So around the garden there are now four dug-over areas for the cats to make use of, and (somewhat to my surprise) that's just what's happening. So far I haven't found any unwelcome surprises elsewhere. It only requires me to rake the ground across every few days, and possibly I might be able to avoid future horrors at the hands (or other parts) of these appalling beasts. I wonder if anyone else has taken the same step?

The Man of Lawlessness

The other day I sat saying Morning Prayer – on my own, of course at the moment – and turned to 2 Thessalonians chapter 2:

for that day will not come unless the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction. He opposes and exalts himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, declaring himself to be God … For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work … The coming of the lawless one is apparent in the working of Satan, who uses all power, signs, lying wonders, and every kind of wicked deception ...

Blimey, I thought, that’s a bit strong for what the Church of England usually tells us to read, and in fact I’m not sure it ever comes up even in the Office readings. I checked and found I should have been reading 2 Timothy instead.

You might guess who I had in mind as I read about the Man of Lawlessness. Now that he has been defeated – if, indeed, he has, as this may be the bit in the horror film where you think the monster’s dead, but what’s that heaving out of the swamp? – perhaps Mr Trump isn’t the Antichrist, and I can revert to my previous assumption that Antichrist is not a person but a tendency in human nature. It was a close thing, though: listening to his devotees on the radio referring to him as a ‘saviour’, and describing his profound faith where everyone else can see fakery and blasphemy.

Working out what they actually mean by this would take a long time, but it’s almost completely (I think) a matter of secular considerations dressed up in religious language, ranging from cultural-stroke-racial identitarianism to the natural fear of being put out of work and your community devastated by economic change. The only real influence of religion on the (hopefully outgoing) President is that of the pastor of his childhood family church, Norman Vincent Peale, whose 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking was denounced across many denominations as a mixture of psychological snake-oil and heresy. You can see how it plays out in someone whose life is built on the assumption that he can get away with anything. It’s the opposite of Christianity. 

Now, I constantly argue for making the effort to understand the people you disagree with. I think the West’s progressive forces and parties absolutely must do so, and cure themselves of the idea that the best way to change anyone’s mind is to tell them they are evil and shout at them; and that democracy involves recognising that the people you oppose are never just going to go away, that you can’t have any kind of final victory over them, but must continue to negotiate and compromise and settle. But not even I can deny I feel some schadenfreude. The President’s term ending with his lawyer having an hysterical meltdown in front of a rusting garage door in a car park with a porn shop on one side and burning corpses on the other seems an icon of the last four years if ever there was one. It is blasphemy being brought down.

I still can’t see our civilisation making it beyond the end of this century, given how fast the climate catastrophe seems to be advancing. Perhaps the Lord has given us a reprieve. But the Apocalypse is slow, and moves through human affairs, revealing the truth about who we are, exposing to the terrible light of the Spirit the lies we tell ourselves, even if not everyone can see them. At the moment there is a welcome chink of light in the dark clouds, but every light casts a shadow.

Distant Remembrance

 

I'm often very thankful that our War Memorial is inside the church and not in a chilly churchyard, or indeed at some distance. Today Rick the verger set the church up for a short Act of Remembrance which I could record for virtual use. Dean our Treasurer plays the trumpet and had recorded a faultless version of the Last Post & Reveille (with two minutes' silence in between to make it even easier for me) which I was able to team up with a generic recording of 'Nimrod' and 'O God our Help' on the organ, all played off my computer and routed through the church sound system, such as it is. It all worked perfectly and was very dignified, not that it's hard to be dignified if there's nobody else there. 

And then I discovered my phone had slipped and the Memorial and everything else was filmed at a positively Caligari-ish angle, so I had to do it all over again at 11.15. Don't tell anyone.

Call To Prayer

The archbishops have designated this second period of lockdown as a time of special prayer for the nation, with a simple weekly scheme of subjects they hope will be observed by as many churches as possible. It cannot but help to be told this, but one does hope it was what Anglican churches were doing anyway: the list broadly reflects what we've been sending out in our weekly bulletins and services to the congregation ever since the first lockdown started.

We are all intended to observe this focused prayer time at 6pm each day, and, 'if safe to do so', ring the bell of the church to announce the moment. Funnily enough I would hope that the folk of Swanvale Halt are already quite used to the church bell ringing at about 6pm as the Angelus tolls out across the village at that time, to the comfort of some (I know because they have told me) and the confusion of others. As the sacristan at Goremead, who had in her very younger days been a secretary to Archbishop Cosmo Lang, told me when I was over there and suggested I might ring it at noon when I was in the office, 'I'll understand what it means; I'm not sure anyone else will'. It amuses me to think of hundreds of parish clergy perhaps discovering what their church bell is for, or even working out where the rope is.

Toeing the Line

The rector of Uphill had a question for his clergy colleagues the other day; even though apparently the archbishops (the same ones who wanted clergy to go nowhere near their churches during the first lockdown, even if they lived next door to them) are arguing that public worship should not cease after all this time round, the question asked is now irrelevant; but it still got me thinking. Assuming, as His Grace of Uphill did, that churches would remain open in the coming lockdown v.2, he worried that Christians might eventually be blamed for any continued spread of the epidemic in the same way that the media turned on students. If they did: I didn't notice much of it.

In fact I get the impression that every organisation, business and group is straining the guidance to justify carrying on. We've only had two groups using the church facilities since we reopened, a music exam board and a slimming class. The former's umbrella body are arguing they are an 'educational provider' and so should continue with a planned round of exams, while the latter's want to stay operating because of their 'wellbeing agenda'. Both these seem pretty optimistic interpretations of government guidance, to say the very least. They are little indicators that this set of restrictions, quite apart from being much looser than before, don't have the same degree of public solidarity behind them as the March ones did.

Even though a quiet communion service in Swanvale Halt church is hardly a high-risk event, I can quite understand why it along with every other religious service except funerals, should cease for a while if the broad aim is to reduce the total amount of social contacts people have; there's barely anyone not able to stake some sort of credible claim for staying in business, but someone has to make the sacrifice. Nevertheless, had public worship been permitted I would have had no embarrassment about keeping going. I find people are generally very sympathetic, but in truth the idea of arousing any sort of public ire had never occurred to me.

I wonder whether evangelical churches (such as Uphill) are likely to think about their worship differently from more catholic ones like Swanvale Halt, and that this may have emerged in my colleague's anxiety. An evangelical congregation is, perhaps, inclined to conceive worship as a gathering of God's people to celebrate: maybe they are more likely to think of themselves as a privileged group for being able to do so, and therefore to project a sense of resentment on  those outside the group. A more catholic account of worship sees it as a response to God's command, less about the self-defined Christian community than about him and about the wider world: a mass includes celebration, of course, but also lament, and is less an expression of what we feel as Christians than a declaration of the nature of God. It's a different, and I think tellingly different, emphasis.

Last Hurrah

With the aim of lessening the number of services in these straitened times I cheated yesterday and kept the 8am mass at Swanvale Halt church as All Saints and the 10.30 one as All Souls. We had more living souls turn out for the latter than at any time since the first lockdown began in March, in fact more or less equivalent to what we'd been getting before it began (and not leaving much space in the church). I wondered whether people were coming because it might have been their last chance for some time, but we hadn't actually had confirmation that places of worship would be closing, so it may not have been the case. That will be it for some time, though: it's back to the missa solitaria for now.

On Halloween night I tottered down to the church to make my customary toast to the dead. There was a variety of litter around the churchyard which I cleared up. Whoever had left the litter had also discarded (quite neatly) a Silent Pool gin glass, which I was happy to confiscate and convert to good use.