Quiet Day

Clarissa, who looks after Gristham church not far away and has kindly heard my confession a couple of times after the Cathedral ceased to be interested in such things, lives with her husband Simon in a former mill building in Bortley. They have a music room in a refurbished outbuilding and offered it to me should I ever want a place to run off to. I have been too disorganised to arrange a proper retreat this year, either to Malling Abbey or anywhere else, so yesterday I availed myself of their generosity and spent the entire day (at least from 9am to 5.30pm) in that space. Maintaining my faltering connection with holy Malling and its holy Sisters, I took the community's office book and read Lauds, Sext and Vespers for Lent, similar enough to the normal Anglican Office to feel I was indeed doing what I am enjoined to by Canon Law but different enough from it to be refreshing. I had with me my Bible (funnily enough), Fr Somerset Ward, and Michael Yelton's An Anglo-Catholic Miscellany, from which I learned about another religious order which passed through Surrey, the very weird Servants of Christ the King who once ran a home for boys with learning difficulties at Frensham, and which was governed by the odd Brother Joseph: he became convinced that God wanted him to utilise the talents of his young charges in a circus, at which he would appear as ringmaster in a monastic habit and a black top hat. But he had crossed the Tiber by then so this is one eccentricity the Church of England can't be blamed for.

My time at Bortley was, I think, rather fruitful if for nothing else than the picture that when the Holy Spirit deals with our sins it's a bit like unravelling a tangled skein of wool which has to be done one knot at a time before the stuff can be made into anything very useful; and tabulating all the instructions Jesus gives the people he speaks to, and demonstrating my suspicion that he mentions the sins of individuals only a handful of times. 

I did leave the premises once, and walked the short distance up the muddy lane to the millpond where I saw three swans attempting to dismember a frog so they could eat it. If only two of them had gripped it and pulled it would have been easy, but they could only get as far as gobbling at it and throwing it about. There's a spiritual message in there somewhere. This is real old Surrey, all hollow lanes, tangled trees, tile-hung cottages, Bargate stone, and frost-nibbled antique red brick.