At the Guru's Feet

It’s been quite some time since I saw my spiritual director. The trains weren’t helping on Monday, down to one an hour from Swanvale Halt, and to be sure of making it on time meant hanging around in London rather longer than I normally like. I wanted to run past him a couple of situations in which I hadn’t been sure of my motivations or whether the outcomes had been the right ones. As usual his judgements were quite robust, and I offer them as one perspective on the way churches work, and sometimes don’t:

“Of course people are drawn to churches because they have problems that need dealing with, but you will always have individuals who don’t really want to deal with them, or can’t, so what they’re looking for is to feel better about themselves without any real self-examination or questioning. In large churches this isn’t a problem, because they’ll be swamped by other people and established processes which mean they can’t usually do too much damage. But in small churches they will often exert a disproportionate influence. They’ll take on roles and think of it as service, but what they actually want is self-validation. If they leave as a result of some crisis, you’re lucky: usually they stay, and eventually it’s the sensible people who leave.”

I’d outlined the situations beforehand so that left plenty of time to talk about folded chasubles, what went wrong with the Coronation (‘the trouble with the Archbishop is that he doesn’t really understand liturgy. He’s much at his best when he isn’t in church’), the numinous quality of the Shrine of St Wite at Whitchurch Canonicorum which a friend had taken S.D. to (‘there are no candles for pilgrims any more, the vicar has taken them away in case someone lights one’), and the parish magazine from St Paul’s Weymouth which is full of articles on the Precious Blood, the role of the subdeacon, and the like. And a lasagne recipe.