Swanvale Halt Book Club: The Towers of Trebizond, by Rose Macaulay (1956)

I read Rose Macaulay's The Pleasure of Ruins many years ago, but it has taken me until now to get around to her final and most celebrated novel. It's a book you couldn't write now, if only because nobody would understand all the stuff about Anglicanism, as the narrator Laurie makes her way across Turkey with her Anglo-Catholic Aunt Dot and priest friend Fr Hugh Chantry-Pigg who aim to establish an Anglican school. Just occasionally Laurie's guileless and lengthy sentences of linked clauses come close to wearing out their welcome, and I wasn't quite sure what to make of her taking home an ape she bought from a Greek sailor and teaches to drive (only round the estate, obviously), but I looked forward to reading it each night and finding out what becomes of the characters. 

The Towers of Trebizond is usually described as comic, understandably so when the famous first line is '"Take my camel, dear", said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass'. She and Fr Pigg wander over the border into the Soviet Union to look at a lake and disappear, only to be 'escorted' to an interrogation when they return to Britain. Laurie takes back her aunt's bad-tempered camel (along with the ape), unsure what she will do with it. Yet, not only does the book contain perhaps the best and most humane account of how religion goes wrong, and right, in a couple of pages that I've ever read, serious moments emerge through the silliness and become ever more prominent as time goes on. We learn in passing that Laurie is in an adulterous relationship which complicates how she relates to the Church she can't help being attracted to; we meet David and Charles (surely a gay couple) who fall out while writing books about Turkey, and, after Charles gets eaten by sharks, David takes to passing his work off as his own. Everyone is engaged in some sort of deception or self-deception, Dot and Fr Pigg's plans as illusory as David's reputation or Laurie's scheme of primate education. Trebizond itself, the famed capital of a tiny, dream-like Byzantine offshoot empire, exists only in the imagination, now being represented by quotidian Turkish Trabzon. 

Finally an incident so terrible, violent and unexpected turns the novel into a tragedy and show that a work can be both frivolous and profound. Any book whose narrator says at the end 'I now live in two hells, for I have lost God and live also without love', can only be overwhelmingly sad. Dreams, the dreams of Trebizond and its towers, are what power us poor human beings, and yet sometimes - often - dreams can't be reconciled.

Lion Head Spring, Forest Row

Down a muddy lane in the Wealden village of Forest Row lies the Lion Head Spring. It’s a very fine well indeed: stone walls and benches surround the round spring basin on three sides, while the eponymous lion’s head pours water into the pool. When I saw it this week, there were (relatively) fresh flowers lying in front of the basin, remains of candles around, clootie ribbons tied onto the yew tree that overshadows the well, and even some printed Buddhist prayer flags. You can find online lots of lovely pictures of the well decorated with flowers in jugs and vases, or with petals gently circulating in the water (here, for instance, here, or here). This is clearly a well-visited site. But why, and by who?

There wasn’t much to Forest Row apart from an inn beside the turnpike road and a few cottages until the railway arrived in 1866. The well doesn’t appear even on the largest-scale Ordnance Survey maps; though strangely the recess it’s set in does, at least from 1897 – it isn’t shown in 1873. Between those two dates we have Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1887, a good date for monuments of this kind to be erected, and the fabric of the well, as well as the lion’s head, looks right for that sort of time. However we might have expected some kind of inscription or dedication if it was indeed a Jubilee memorial.

You will come across suggestions online that the lion inspired CS Lewis to create Aslan, the Christ-figure of the Narnia stories. Naturally I pooh-poohed this at first, but in fact it isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility. Among Lewis’s early Oxford friends were the artist Cecil Harwood, who later became associated with the Steiner educational movement which, after WWII, was established at Kidbrooke Park in Forest Row, yards from the well. Harwood died at the house in the village he shared with his second wife Marguerite in 1975. Lewis was also friends with the philosopher Owen Barfield, who spent his last years in the late 1980s at a residential home in Forest Row, an odd choice if he had no existing connections with the place. Both Harwood and Barfield were Lewis’s executors, and The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe is dedicated to Barfield’s daughter. Lewis was conceiving of the Narnia narrative in 1948, just enough time for him to make a trip to see Harwood at Forest Row and find the lion’s head. However, Lewis always claimed he didn’t know where the idea for Aslan had come from, and as he had no reason to obfuscate, the lion at Forest Row is probably a coincidence.

The Parish Council owns the well, and also a plot of land at the top of the lane: they call it Gilham Spring, rather than referring to the Lion in any way. Many people seem keen to drink the water, even if the Council very much say they shouldn’t, at least not without boiling it, and the Friends of the River Medway advise the same. Some enthusiastic souls saw fit to vandalise the sign near the well telling them not to drink it (a sign which I didn’t see on my visit). This is an issue that regularly pops up on the LiberFaciorum Holy Wells page, among those anxious to avoid drinking what comes out of the tap, to the extent of claiming that a spring filtering through a disused graveyard in a city centre ‘can’t be any worse than tap water’, which of course it very, very much can be.

Not far away from the Lion Head Spring is Plaw Hatch Farm, which has its own filtered spring where visitors are welcome to fill up their bottles. Plaw Hatch is a biodynamic farm operating under the aegis of the St Anthony’s Trust, closely linked to the Steiner set-up at Kidbrooke since the 1970s, and some visitors clearly make a joint pilgrimage both to the Lion Head Spring and to the rather safer supply at the farm. I wonder whether this gently alternative spiritual presence is why the well has achieved its prominence, when its history is so obscure and probably not very long at that.

Into the Unknown

My amazing friend Professor Cotillion regularly photographs orbs in her beautiful 17^th-century cottage, little blobs of blue light that aren’t visible to the natural sight but appear to the camera. She’s a brave and intelligent woman and is perfectly aware of the obvious explanation that they are reflections or refractions (and that sometimes the patterning of them makes it very likely that they are), but she likes to think of them as friendly spirits, guarding the space that she’s been lucky enough to inhabit and enhance with her striking decorative gifts.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, I was in the café opposite the church, and Peter, a man in his late 60s perhaps, came over to speak to me, apologising for interrupting me. He described how, a few weeks before his wife had a stroke (from which, happily, she’s slowly recovering), he woke in the small hours of the morning to a strange white light from behind the TV and a voice which stated, firmly and definitely, ‘Do not move from where you are’. ‘Whoever you are, you’re not taking me or Elaine’, my interlocutor said – though he told me he had no sense that the presence was in any way malevolent. He didn’t feel afraid, though he did feel annoyed at being woken and disturbed. The voice repeated its instruction and the experience faded. ‘I couldn’t have moved even if I’d wanted to’, Peter went on, ‘I tried’. That puts the ‘vision’ into the familiar category of sleep paralysis, but that wasn’t really the point, I felt. I assured Peter that his experience was unusual but one many people undergo, and that the context in which it could make sense might not become clear for a long while. I wondered about the link with his wife’s illness. Peter thanked me, said he was going to go over to the church ‘to spend a few minutes with the Lord – I’ve often told him I’ll make him tea if he turns up and tells me what he’s about’, and he paid for my coffee too. (‘Can I buy you a pie, Father?’)

Over the years I’ve become much more tolerant of these experiences which one might term paranormal. You can see how they might get such a grip of a vulnerable soul that they might need to be gently prised away from them, have it pointed out that they are not rational and they shouldn’t base their life around them; but at the same time, if I believe that human beings are immensely complex, that we are holistic structures, and that therefore our subconscious mind can communicate with us through our conscious awareness, most of the time I don’t feel that, when I meet rational people who paranormal experiences, that my first response should be to explain those experiences away. Professor Cotillion’s friendly orbs externalise her own capacity for love, while Peter’s early-morning voice might well be telling him something he needs to take account of. They are both worth something, because God is everywhere, and not absent from these events either.

Live and Let Die

Typical, you might well think, one of the most momentous changes, potentially, in the way the State relates to the life of the individual, and all Fr Weepingcross can think to post about is some woman’s rattled-off opinions on Goth. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about the Assisted Dying Bill: I just wasn’t in any way surprised by the outcome.

Christians can’t all be found on one side of this question: it was Pope John Paul II who originated, or at least popularised, the ringing phrase ‘the Culture of Death’ to net together euthanasia (as we used to call ‘assisted dying’), abortion, execution, and war; but not all of us go along with it. What we seem to have, in this particular matter, is a culture of autonomy before all else – assuming as an obvious fact that the sandcastle of individual choice can stand against the tide of social expectation. And I am not sure that Christians themselves know what it is they support, or oppose, in this as in many other respects. For centuries the law has defended us against our own ignorance and incuriosity, bolstered our assumption that we are right, and allowed us to continue without examining the basis for what we think we think. That protection has long, long been rolling back, and this is just another step.

But I find myself drawn, the more I think, more in the direction of mad things I would hesitate to say out loud. That the Enemy wants us dead. That he wants us out of the ring as soon as possible, where we can do no more good. That when we begin believing that one life is worth less than another, we make his work easier. That when we take our own life, or someone else’s, it’s like prising open the door of a plane: the air and the other passengers begin to be sucked out along with us. That there are, essentially, no individual choices.

Except I can’t go all that way. I revolt against making someone else fall in line with what I think in this most radical way. Maybe one day our long, bitter process of discernment will resolve that, as well.

Until then, in my imagination, I look to the potential time thirty years hence when medical professionals and others will start subtly hinting to me that the money spent on keeping me going could be better used elsewhere, on more worthy subjects, on children for heaven’s sake, and steeling myself to say, No. I might sacrifice myself for a child, but not for abstract children the State conjures in front of me to persuade me I am worth less. I demand my right to be a burden. I will not disappear for your convenience, I will not weigh my worth against others, not because I’m anything important, but because all human beings are, and accidentally I am one.

Goth on a (Large) Budget: 'How to be a Goth' by Tish Weinstock (Octopus Books, 2024)

This is a book I wouldn’t have bought but for my vague sense of being honour-bound to cast an eye over anything about the Goth world that emerges into print, and this isn’t so much a review (theblogginggoth did a fuller one a few weeks ago) as a reflection. I will say that it can’t have been a hard book to write, whatever experience a reader of it might have: Ms Weinstock delivers her authorised lists of books, movies and clothing items in a series of short paragraphs which anyone could have come up with internet assistance. The second point is that the book offers a very narrow vision of ‘how to be a Goth’, driven by an unusual personal experience. This is Goth as it appears to an ennobled, wealthy industrialist’s granddaughter who becomes beauty editor of Vogue and marries a Guinness, a background Ms Weinstock never mentions beyond alluding to growing up in a ‘house full of precious antiques’ and her father’s death when she was five. When they aren’t long-dead actresses or fictional characters, her list of role models for young Goth women is heavy with fashion designers and artists; her roll of clothing retailers includes outlets in New York and LA, which is fine for anyone who casually jets across the Atlantic. This is a world most of us come nowhere near.

In such a world, when the rich adhere to the markers of revolt, what does Goth mean? For the author her ‘dark’ enthusiasms clearly became a means of negotiating a sense of alienation, but in circumstances of relative privilege – very different from so many first-generation Goths’ experience of suburban emptiness, as outlined by Cathi Unsworth – what’s in the darkness? Ms Weinstock praises her arty heroines for their ‘rebellion’ and ‘individuality’, but these instincts are pursued primarily through consumer choices which aren’t going to frighten anyone, no matter how edgy you regard yourself. Capitalism doesn’t care how you express your individual identity, provided you hand over cash for it; you can have any colour, including black.

In 1993, when Tish Weinstock was all of two, one of her suggested idols, Christina Ricci, played Wednesday Addams in Addams Family Values. In the movie, Wednesday gets packed off to summer camp, that particularly American childhood horror that features so largely in the narratives of alienated US children, and naturally does all she can to obstruct the compulsory wholesomeness inflicted on the youngsters there. Traditionally, that’s what all Goths have felt they’re doing: resisting the mindlessly sunny and optimistic. But 2024 isn’t 1993. This is an age of individualism, in which the ideals Goths say they stand for are precisely those that wider society claims it values too; and one of anxiety, where sunny optimism might come as relief. How To Be A Goth unwittingly contributes to the sort of debate that writing on Goth has grappled with for about a decade, for instance in Catherine Spooner’s speculations about ‘happy Gothic’ and the Spracklens’ rage about Goth going consumerist. Has it become nothing more than a vacuous style choice? This book poses the question in an acute form. The answer is, Not quite, I think.

Conformity and adherence to a common, all-embracing narrative are not what our society values now, but the urge to demand such obedience – not just to an outward standard of appearance, but an inner submission of the soul – is an abiding part of human thinking, one of our instinctive survival mechanisms. It’s easy to reach for such narratives when the times are anxious, and when malign parties are there to exploit the instinct. Goth, on the other hand, always says, No, it’s not that simple; no, I will not do as you tell me; I will not tell your story; I will tell my own.

Maybe Goth’s committed to deathliness isn’t about deathliness, but about what can’t be accommodated in univocal statements of identity and purpose, about what can’t be digested and understood. It points towards the truth that there is always more, always something else, in the same way that the priest’s black garb signposts beyond this world and therefore always unsettles by suggesting there might be another scale of value than our own. The deathliness stands not for itself, but for irreducible complexity, and the critique of any grand narrative other than ruin. Beware, it says. In that sense, we can’t tame it, no matter whether we’re onlookers or adherents – and no matter how much or how little privilege we enjoy. In that way, even a Goth on a trust fund can think of themselves as an eternal outsider. But they should beware, too: there is a subtle enemy who can buy off the Church, and it can buy them off as well.

An Underground Mystery for St Catherine's Day

Behind the patchouli-scented shop of crystals and esoteric books that looks as though it should be in Glastonbury, an unassuming doorway opens off a yard. Yesterday a small group of intrepid souls followed a lady with a torch down a steep staircase behind this door, into a strange bell-shaped chamber decorated with images roughly scored into the chalk the cave is made from. One of the figures is a crowned woman who holds a wheel - blessed Catherine the Great-Martyr, in whose honour the place has been opened. 'This is who we're all here to see', says the guide. For this is Royston Cave, and the time is about 1pm on St Catherine's Day.

The cave is decidedly eerie. There's no mistaking the Christian nature of the crucifixion scenes - three of them - and the saints, not only Catherine, but Christopher and Lawrence waving his gridiron aloft. But the rest of it, a chaos of figures, insignia, and ambiguous marks, lurches out of the dark into the torchlight and back again, keeping its secrets. That figure might be St George, or it might just be a man with a sword. The man and woman who seem to be wearing crowns were identified by William Stukeley, who saw the cave when it was first discovered in 1742, as Richard I and Queen Berengaria on the grounds that the 'queen''s crown seems to be hovering above her head (Berengaria was never crowned); not one of Stukeley's better guesses, it seems to me. There is an excited pony and what seems to be a sheela-na-gig; there are rows of rough figures that look like versions of the Lewis Chessmen made by a less accomplished hand; there are hands bearing hearts. 

Nobody, whatever they might tell you, knows why this place exists or what it means. One volunteer has written an entire erudite book arguing that it was a secret Knights Templar chapel created after the order was suppressed in 1307: but even if the virtually-vertical entrance shaft was outside the town centre when the cave was made, any surviving loyal Templars would have been pushing their luck coming in and out of such a bizarre and inaccessible site, let alone making it in the first place. Such an argument puts aside the simple fact, too, that there's not one single unequivocal bit of Templar imagery in the whole place. The saints presumably date it to the late Middle Ages, but that's the best we can do. 

When one of the visitors began describing how the Templars were founded to look after the secrets of Atlantis I decided it was time to go! I emerged blinking into the sun and reflected that the long journey was far from a waste.

Bishop Down

Ironically, as it was pointed out to us at Deanery Chapter today, this coming Sunday is designated Safeguarding Sunday in the Church of England. Some of my colleagues wanted some kind of diocesan statement to be made about the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury that they could share, but although I might allude to it in what I say in any sermons I won't be making any declaration to the parish or even the church as such. Other incumbents found themselves dispirited and concerned for the effect on parish relationships, but my experience is that in so far as people in local communities have any attitude to the Church at all they detach the immediate manifestation of it, the clergy and individuals they know, from anything that might be going on more widely. Haters gonna hate, but everyone else carries on. This generosity is, of course, exactly the phenomenon that benefits abusers - nobody believes the person they know could be wicked - but the rest of us can be thankful for it for now. I will very much let the whole thing lie unless anyone mentions it. 

In general, I wish I could be anything more than wearied and unsurprised by the outcome. It's not that I have no sympathy: were someone to tell me an issue had been referred to the police, I might well assume the police were dealing with it, and move on to the next thing (and there is always a Next Thing onto which to move). It wouldn't make it right, though. If I say that Justin Welby's decision to resign could well turn out to be his best day's work during his tenure at Lambeth Palace, I do so not to be mean or sarcastic, but because I genuinely think the Church will ultimately benefit. It's exactly the dramatic, galvanizing event required to blow the whole thing open, to tip the balance away from power, display, and inertia, and it would not be beyond possibility that Archbishop Justin's will not be the only pointy hat rolling in the dust before too long.

Strain in All Directions

Curiously – or perhaps not – while I am away on holiday pastoral issues often seem to blow up in the parish. That happened this October, and eventually I found myself sitting with a church volunteer hearing a series of complaints about events which occurred in my absence. I investigated, and found that, in all conscience, I couldn’t do what the person concerned wanted me to, whereon they resigned their role.

I don’t handle these things well. This particular situation comes at the end of a long series of strains and difficulties, and, though I strive not to, I find myself rehearsing angry speeches about the rights and wrongs of the matter. Then, when faced by someone who's behaving reasonably and calmly, at least when I’m talking to them, I have to exert a different effort to try and remember the times when they weren’t reasonable and calm, either with me or others.

Not only will the person you’re dealing with probably frame events with an entirely different narrative, and, were they confronted with yours, sit and blink uncomprehendingly (assuming they didn’t fly off the handle with rage), it’s a rare history which contains nothing positive, no matter how hard the end has been. The particular person concerned in this one has done many helpful and worthwhile things in the church’s life, and has been diligent and hardworking to a fault. They could point to the efforts they’ve made and the sacrifices they’ve undergone on the church’s behalf absolutely justly. For those tasks, they were the right person at the right time. As a pastor you have to acknowledge this, while keeping your sight on the actual situation in hand and what you simply must do about it.

The ambiguity and contradictions inherent in such events means that none of this feels good, even if you work to detach yourself from your own individual feelings.

I always pray for the church when I’m on leave. Imagine what would happen if I didn’t.

Wearing Stuff

The new archdeacon, a jovial, bustling lady who used to work in the Diocese of Oxford, came to say hello. We sat in the café opposite the church. She decided to go for a creamy hot chocolate sprinkled with Smarties so I suppose she must have needed more sugar than me. She comes from a moderate evangelical background, like most clergy now. Somehow we ended up talking about vestments. She brought the subject up, I swear. 'Does what you're wearing make a difference to what you feel?' she asked. 'Does it feel different to use something very traditional as opposed to something modern-style?'

It was a very good question: when you preside, you know the Eucharist is still the Eucharist no matter what you're wearing. In extremis I once stepped in to take a service when Miriam the curate when I arrived here got a coughing fit and couldn't carry on: I was wearing Wellingtons and a waterproof over which I draped a stole. A couple of weeks ago I found myself filling in at a church not far away where they turned out to have no kit at all, so I wore a surplice over a cassock. I have no doubt at all that either Mass was valid, whether I had a maniple or not, and the same applies to my Evangelical brethren who appear at an altar vested in chinos and a sweatshirt, no matter how objectionable I might find it. The Holy Spirit, I have no doubt, still turns up, even if He holds His nose. If He had one.

Psychologically, too, once I'm in the zone the schmutter doesn't matter. I'm concentrating on the words and actions, and the kit only comes into it when I am avoiding tripping or knocking things over with the maniple. But it does make a difference to know, before I start really, that what we're using is the best we can provide. It should be the best. It should be clean and seemly, and not draw attention to itself. It shouldn't be slapdash or careless: time and attention is part of the sacrifice. It should also be visibly part of the great continuum of Christian worship, not novel or individualist, which is where the messy aesthetics of the 1960s to the 1980s stumble: the kit's form and style should refer to our brethren across time and space, and not to ourselves. So yes, it does make a difference of some kind to know we've got it more right than wrong. Thank you for asking. 

Devotionally Challenged

On my great trip north I called in on my friend Clare (no point disguising her name) who is Chaplain to the University of Cumbria in Lancaster. It's a peculiar kind of arrangement: the University grew out of St Martin's College, a Church of England teacher-training college occupying the site of the old barracks in Lancaster. It gradually acquired other scattered sites and when it was finally instituted as a university in 2007, it couldn't call itself Lancaster University or the University of Lancashire as those titles were taken, so it became the University of Cumbria even though its biggest campus is in Lancaster. Clare describes it as 'very, very secular' but part of the foundation arrangements was that there should be a number of Anglican appointments on the staff, of which the Chaplain in Lancaster is one. So Clare finds herself something of what we would in other circumstances call a 'pioneer minister', sent to a group of people who don't have any longstanding interaction with Christianity (the previous chaplain had, let's say, not been particularly active and the Chapel, built in the 1960s to be a sort of parish church of the College, hasn't had much of a congregation for a long while). 

One of Clare's challenges in restoring the Chapel of St Martin to something like a devotional space can be found behind the altar. Here she is, then, displaying one of the Church of England's greatest artistic treasures, John Bratby's Me as Christ, Crucified by My Ex-Wives and Art Critics. 

I'm teasing you, of course. The mural doesn't have that title (if it has one, it's the tedious Golgotha), but it would be an accurate description. John Bratby's name has virtually disappeared from the story of twentieth-century British art but he was flavour of the day at one point in the 1960s. He was, by all accounts, a dreadful, dreadful man, but his portraiture in particular has a psychedelic verve to it even if, as Clare points out, he seems consistently to lose interest in his figures by the time he gets to their feet. 

The mural was acquired by the College's first Principal, Hugh Pollard, after a theological college in Manchester got queasy about buying it. It does present some challenges as a devotional image, in that it isn't intended as one but rather an unpleasant joke. I'm reminded a bit, in another mode, of Jean Fouquet's portrait of French royal mistress Agnes Sorel as a bare-breasted Virgin Mary, an icon of something else quite a long way from religious feeling. The story goes that when the late Queen Mother opened the College in 1967 and was shown the painting she remarked of the artist 'Do you think he has the slightest idea of what Christianity is about?' Taking a broad view of the doctrine of the Incarnation, you might reply Yes, but only just enough to get it wrong.

So, what is a chaplain to do with it? Clare's predecessor had it covered with a curtain which, she thinks, 'was worse - it means it's lurking unseen like a monster'. Given that hardly anyone comes to worship in St Martin's anymore Clare plans to reorganise the space so that there's a smaller liturgical area with its altar to one side while, for the considerable number of Cumbria students who are studying medicine and allied subjects, she will offer some sessions reflecting spiritually on pain, physicality and selfhood. Take the horror and work with it. It's a bit like the Parable of the Talents. 

Holiday Catherines

I'll post further about aspects of my holiday to Lancashire just past, which included swings past Sheffield on the journey up and back to see friends and my niece who's studying at the University; but for now, by way of recording, here are the images of St Catherine I came across last week. First, from the Lady Chapel reredos in Sheffield Cathedral; then two renaissance images from the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool; and lastly from the Lady Chapel in the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool. It's interesting in that it's just post-War, when all the stained glass was destroyed, and so it marks the end of the traditionalist style of stained glass, just before it would have embarked on a very different trajectory.

Angels in Ordinary

Michaelmas Day gives me an opportunity not just to speak about angels but also our former sacristan Sister Mary, the ex-nun who 'always kept her vows' even when the Community of the Sacred Passion told her that because she couldn't put up with the climate in the parts of Africa where they worked, there was no place for her in the Order at all (poverty and chastity weren't a problem, obedience was a bit more difficult). This is because September 29th was the day she took her final vows all those years ago, and I always regard it as a subsidiary, local festival to Swanvale Halt: the Feast of the Solemn Profession of Vows of Blessed Mary Fontingham. We didn't always see things from the same point of view but our disagreements were mostly aesthetic: she felt Roman vestments made priests 'look like beetles scuttling about', and I never got my head around her fondness for gold lamé in the embroidered items she made. Yesterday, though, we did use the burse and veil from the old 'best white' set in Mary's honour.

I talked about Christianity's insistence on a hidden level of reality and the way the religious life is committed to uncovering that reality with an intensity that laypeople don't necessarily have to, even though we're called to acknowledge and proclaim it. We're not alone in doing so - the angels sing with us, but while we sing from a place of hope, they sing from one of certainty.

The congregation wasn't large yesterday; I looked out and realised that probably barely half the people there knew Sister Mary, but have joined the church since she died back in 2013. That caught me by surprise. Even the saints disappear gradually from human recollection, and are left to God's. 

Named in Stone (and glass/brass)

It's the 175th anniversary of the church this year and, for Heritage Open Weekend, I did a short tour of the church and churchyard looking at the memorials and monuments and thinking about some of the people represented. I haven't had time to research in-depth biographies of many of them, but there were enough details to fill a good 45 minutes exploring the nature of history and memory in our small community. We discovered -

- the former slaveowning incumbent of the church and his complex family ramifications

- the beloved parish worker whose life was glowingly written up in the parish magazine and who nobody now recalls

- the Victorian army officer who brought his horse back from the Crimea and buried it at his house when it died

- the lyrically-named lady married to a Quaker papermill master

- the anonymous 16-year-old commemorated in a window, whose face was almost certainly used for St Agnes and was therefore presumably called that

- the militant suffragette remembered in the statue of the Virgin & Child from a London convent

... and we also talked about headstones and footstones, the 19th-century stonemasonry trade, and what happens when monuments are moved around. Ours is a small and pretty unremarkable parish church, and yet look at what it contains. Most of all, what struck me - having not known it until I looked up our burial records - is that during the mere 30 years our churchyard was open more than 420 souls were laid to rest in it. And it's tiny. Half of them were aged 15 or under; 39%, nearly 2 in every 5, were aged 3 or under. That was the kind of place Swanvale Halt was in the mid-1800s: like, presumably, most other such places. 

Parochial Views

It was Mad Trevor's birthday last week and as he wouldn't have done anything to mark it otherwise I thought it was time to invite him over for lunch. He was really enthusiastic. The day came and I called to remind him, but got no answer. I carried on getting no answer, and eventually put the pork sausages I wouldn't otherwise have bought into the freezer. The following day I called round at the flat and found the front door wide open. Trevor himself was fast asleep in bed. I left a note on the cooker where I'd be sure he'd see it. I still haven't been able to get him on the phone. 

 *    *    *    *    *

Esme and Molly are Roman Catholics, really, but come to our service. Esme also attends the Roman Catholic mass but Molly only makes it to ours. Over coffee after the service I came to sit next to them. 'The Catholic service is too early for me, I can't manage it', said Molly, 'This one is the next best thing.' 'I told you not to say that!!' hissed Esme. In fact, given that I was right in front of them both, it was the second statement that struck me as more careless than the first.

We Do Things Differently Now

Usually the safeguarding training I'm obliged to attend is run by the Diocese, but today I was at a school-based session. It wasn't compulsory, but as our parish school begins its adventure of being joined with a secular school locally I thought I would come along to show willing. The outlines are the same, but whereas in a church setting safeguarding focuses on the supervision of children and vulnerable adults, safer recruitment and the occasional interactions with children which characterise the life of most churches, in a school setting everything's all the more intense - you deal with children all the time. 

Topics came up that edged around the core of what I normally understand as safeguarding, and into areas to do more with wellbeing and welfare: drug use, underage vaping, online bullying, and so on. The contrast with my own schooling in the 1980s struck me. The teachers at my provincial boys' state grammar school were mainly decent sorts, but they saw their job as keeping order and delivering lessons. Quite apart from the tendency of some members of staff to involve the use of projectiles to carry out these basic tasks - I suppose the woodwork master must have worked out how to throw a chisel across a classroom so as to minimise the possibility of serious injury - there was really very little interest in what happened outside the school. That just wasn't its concern. Even on the premises, beyond the classroom we were left to our own devices, and the school was pretty much a feral environment of persecution, low-level violence and cruelty. I think any suggestion that anyone should look for signs of pupils being unhappy would have been met with incomprehension: of course they were unhappy. Misery was built into the experience. Even in the early 2000s, a friend told me when I talked about this, her own grammar school turned a deliberate blind eye to the difficulties she was having at home. Someone else's problem. 

It occurs to me that this is a colossal change that has happened over the last couple of decades: how the life-experiences of children has become the business of schools in particular is remarkable and would be worth someone studying properly.

Mr Happy

‘I do believe our prayers are heard and answered’, says Michael Mayne, the late Dean of Westminster, in the book I’m reading at the moment, The Enduring Melody, dealing with his experience of terminal cancer. ‘But we have to be clear about what we really want’. Prayer is, we might add, a way of discovering what it is we really want, too. It’s a question that’s worth asking ourselves when we sit with the Lord wondering what, if anything, to say.

Want I really want is, I think, something I am slightly ashamed of. I want everyone to be happy. That desire applies most strongly to the people I interact with most closely, but it’s a general one that I’ve realised conditions a lot of what I do. It seems so superficial, somehow, when you state it so baldly.

Of course that desire comes with caveats. I don’t believe you can be properly happy if you are committed to falsehoods, as eventually they will find you out: creation is a unity, and ultimately falsehood corrupts even if you don’t know you are enmeshed in it. I don’t believe you can be properly happy without God: God is the final truth of all things, and we are, as the saint says, restless till we find our rest in him. Rest and peace lie nowhere else. ‘We seek Christ where he is not to be found, amidst graves and sepulchres’, says the 17^th-century bishop Mark Frank, whose sermons I must look up one day. And it is true that what one person requires for what they think of as their happiness, may bring sorrow to another; they are seeking Christ in the sepulchres, in that case, but it’s what they think, and in such cases I can’t take their self-definitions of happiness as read.

Yet nevertheless, all that taken into account, I still want everyone to be happy. It hurts me when they can’t be, or when people I love seem to be seeking happiness in places they won’t find it (perhaps I am, too. I still have a lot to learn). I fear contributing to their unhappiness.

I’m not sure many Christians have this as their governing desire. They want to tell the truth regardless of consequences, to rescue souls from hell, to please God. So do I, I suppose, but I think of it in terms of bringing them happiness, which I believe would bring happiness to God as well.

Am I happy? Can I say that coming to Christ will bring happiness to those I meet? For decades I thought of faith in terms of truth, and never demanded that it would bring me any kind of joy. Perhaps it wouldn’t. Perhaps it would bring me the opposite by making demands of me I might not be inclined to meet. That’s a criticism of my own failings, to be sure, but I’m being no more than honest. Yet now, nearly 30 years after my conversion, I can sit in front of God, as I conceive it, and feel – joy at simply being there. The vicissitudes of my life (such as they are!) all occur in the context of God’s presence. They remain challenging, painful perhaps, but they are still held within something bigger than they are, and the bigger thing they are held in is the deep conviction that the centre of creation is love. It is, perhaps we might say, a deeper life. I am grateful for it. I am, maybe, happy. At least now and again.

Blazing Infernos and How Not To Have Them

Ever since Grant and Matt went on their Churchwardens' training day last year the matter of fire safety has been, as it were, smouldering away under the surface of the church's life. The last time I talked about this I mentioned that, when we last thought seriously about this some years ago, we decided we weren't completely convinced by our consultant, but on reflection this was a bit unfair although 'opinion was divided' among the people who were obliged to work most closely with him. It was more the case that our insurers, carrying out a general risk audit of the church plant, pointed our attention to their own fire risk assessment template to guide us in our thinking, and that suggested (to me, anyway) that all our level of risk required was to put up exit signs and make sure all our sidespeople and hirers knew what to do if they smelled smoke. And then we had to shut the place because of Covid anyway, and anything more involved was forgotten.

But that was all before the new regulations issued after the Grenfell Tower fire. A little while ago the Fire Service visited, walked around the site, tutted and shook their heads, and issued us with Notice to Comply with all the new laws within three months. It took two months to take the first step of managing to find a consultant with the time to visit and draw up a new, authoritative report on what we should actually do. Now we begin the process of getting quotes for fire alarms, emergency lighting, making our electrics and heating boilers safe (they shouldn't really be in the loft over the hall, but moving them is really unfeasible), and raising awareness among church members, to which end I produced a short and bad video outlining what everyone needs to know. 

To a degree this feels a bit unfair. It's not as though anyone lives at the church, and it compares in any way to, well, I don't know, plucking an example out of the air, a block of flats covered in flammable cladding where lots of souls might have to be roused from their beds in the middle of the night. But it is true that a fire might engulf the boilers and race down the pipes into the church before anyone knew what was going on, or the antique electrics of the organ spark and smoulder away long enough to catch the roof timbers without the aroma of smoke reaching responsible nostrils. We might even be able to get some help with costs from a grant, but I may have to ambush churchwardens from other parishes on their way to the Council offices. 

Two Overlooked Martyrs

Reviewing my photos of Surrey churches I realise that somehow I'd overlooked two representations of St Catherine which should go here, as it's the only place they will be recorded. This is from Holmbury St Mary, one light of a window where she appears as a pair with St Lucy:

More remarkable is one from Dunsfold; here St Catherine peeps from a crowd of adoring saints, only just identifiable by a fragment of wheel. It took a while before I noticed her among the faces. Following the great tradition of depicting female saints looking curiously remiscent of stars of the day, I think this Catherine has a touch of Fay Wray.

The Bond of Love

Something actually spiritual for a change!

Some time ago a parishioner gave me a copy of the Northumbria Community office book Celtic Daily Prayer, published by the company she worked for. I was a bit sceptical as for most people ‘Celtic Christianity’ seems to be Hello-Clouds-Hello-Sky-skip-through-the-fields stuff rather than, say, the Culdees spending hours up the waist in the freezing water of holy wells reciting Psalms. But this book turned out to be rather rigorous in its spirituality, albeit a bit rude to St Wilfrid, so that was all right.

The bit I’m reading at the moment centres on the experience of St Columba on the isle of Iona, and some of the texts come from a long poem published in the early 1900s by Fr Richard Meux Benson, founder of the Society of St John the Evangelist, the Cowley Fathers. My old theological college occupies the SSJE buildings in Oxford, and Father Benson is as abiding a presence there as anyone actually related to the college itself. I was surprised that he was so inspired by Columba, who didn’t seem a likely saint to have come to the attention of a Victorian Anglican priest who spent most of his ministry in East Oxford; but they were both austere characters, and Fr Benson might have felt a connection with the Irishman’s creation of a mission community among the rocks and inlets of Dark Age Scotland.

And death can never break 
the bond of love which God’s own hand 
hath wrought.

- I read this morning. One of the lines I tend, I admit, to reach for when I’ve taken funeral services for people I may not have known very well, or at all, is to speak about ‘the bonds of love which death is powerless to overcome’. I’ve sometimes wondered if this is a bit sentimental. Maybe friends and relatives seldom listen that carefully to homilies at their loved ones’ funerals, but, just in case they might, I want to give hope, but not sell the Gospel short either. Not everything makes it through the process of purgation. Yet at the same time I do believe that love comes from nowhere but God, and that therefore that must survive. What is good about us is gathered by him, and no genuine love we have shared can be lost.

And here is the great and founder of the Cowley Fathers, whose faith was nothing if not demanding, using the same phrase. It also made me think something else. If it’s our love of God which carries us into the new creation, and that love is itself a bond God’s own hand hath wrought, it too is unbreakable. What happiness there is in this, that even in our love of him, we rely not on our own frailty, but his eternal faithfulness.

Unedifying Accounts

The latest Anglican safeguarding scandal to come to public attention depresses in the same way any other has, though it carries its own special quality with it, apparently coming close to closing an entire cathedral in an attempt to get rid of one residentiary canon. The current Bishop of Blackburn, Philip North – as redoubtably Anglo-Catholic as his predecessor Julian Henderson was a conservative Evangelical – blames it all on the outmoded structures of the Church, though there do seem to be other factors at play. I raise an eyebrow when anonymous sources complain of the ‘absolute power’ Canon Hindley exercised at the Cathedral – I’ve never met a member of any cathedral staff who felt they had the slightest influence over their colleagues at all – but when you hear that a judge concluded he had assaulted a man, but nothing was done because nobody could be sure the victim was underage, you do gape a bit.

It takes me back a few weeks when my Antipodean regular reader and correspondent Dr Wellington asked me whether I’d come across the older scandal in the Diocese of London, where the one-time diocesan ‘fixer’ and Head of Operations Martin Sargeant had been convicted of fraud. Yes I had, I replied, and my interest was more than it might usually have been because when the miscreant’s name was first reported I’d realised I’d been to school with him. Within the outline of the middle-aged bloke in the pictures I could just about glimpse the teenage boy I remembered from Bournemouth: you didn't believe much of what he told you even then.

Part of Mr Sargeant’s story involved a now-infamous debrief with the Archdeacon of London when the former left his diocesan post in which he delivered what was described as a ‘brain-dump’ of what he claimed to know about London’s clergy. We now know that this was a compendium of gossip and personal bile with very little truth to it, but the Diocese treated it as positive allegations of abusive behaviour that had to be followed up. The typical Church of England habits of secrecy and inefficiency kicked into motion and one result was the suicide of Fr Alan Griffin who spent a year being investigated for crimes that were never made known to him, and which, the coroner who examined his death decided, ‘were supported by no complainant, no witness, and no accuser’.

It struck me that given our current, and completely understandable, safeguarding culture, it’s hard to stop this happening. We are all taught that any allegation must be reported and followed up: it rests with others to decide what is to be done next. What if, as seems to have happened in London, everyone in the chain feels they dare not be the one who says, ‘this is just poisonous gossip and we will take it no further’?

The integrity of the local safeguarding team is presumably crucial. I have had a case which ours regarded as less serious than I did, and it turned out they were right. On the other hand, I know someone against whom an allegation was made many years ago, then withdrawn (in neither case by the supposed victim, who maintained nothing had happened) and, when the priest demanded in a meeting with the bishop and the Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser the right to begin the long, difficult process of having the matter expunged from his record, was told by the DSA that as far as she was concerned he was guilty no matter what anyone said, and implied that him being ‘obviously a homosexual’ was proof of paedophilia. The bishop, my informant said, ‘went white’ and insisted on dissociating himself from the remark (I can mention this as all concerned are long gone).

At theological college I once found myself marvelling at the ability of the kitchen to both overcook and undercook rice at the same time, and the CofE’s safeguarding practice seems caught in the same place, at once hopelessly lax and unacceptably hypervigilant. The answer, as so many voices say, is simply to bring the police in whenever any allegation is made, like every other organisation. Why, yet again, should we imagine we’re so special?

Strain on the Bookshelf

One thing among many that happens when you are an ordained member of the Body of Christ is that you acquire other people’s cast-off books. Sometimes they are very useful. Over recent weeks, for instance, Il Rettore has given me copies of Mitri Raheb’s Faith in the Face of Empire, a profound examination on what it means to be a Palestinian Christian and why, in Dr Raheb’s view, God chose to be incarnate in this scarred region contended between global powers; and Monica Furlong’s biography of St Therese of Lisieux, an account of how God took a near-pathological personality and made holiness out of it. Again, occasionally an elderly book proves valuable when it might not have seemed so when you got it, like Agnes Sanford’s Sealed Orders which I almost randomly plucked out of a box at the home of a parishioner at Goremead when called on to do so without knowing who Agnes Sanford was and how illuminating the book would be.

Some older religious books remain worthwhile. Not long ago I mentioned Catherine de Houeck Doherty’s Poustinia; once St Therese is out of the way I will probably begin The Enduring Melody, the late Dean of Westminster Michael Mayne’s thoughts on his terminal cancer, and CS Lewis’s essay collection Christian Reflections: Lewis’s originality is always good value even if I find him a bit smug now and again. These works aren’t that affected by the passage of time.

But the truth is that few genres of literature age more rapidly than religious books. From Biblical exegesis to prophetic declarations about ‘the Church of the Future’, their outlooks and concerns – and even graphic design, I find – fall behind the times horribly quickly. This may be partly a reflection of the anxious state of the Western Church in the last sixty years (always seeking ways to keep up with the contemporary world, and never quite managing it), but looking into the past it seems that there has always been a vast ocean of religious books that is doomed to become forgotten and sargassum-covered. I think it’s more to do with the openness of the subject: everyone with a clerical collar and very many of those without one thinks their opinions are worth other people’s time, if they can get someone to publish them. The result is that the bookshelves of lots of good churchgoers are clogged with these flotsam of past spiritual thought, and, stricken by the kind of guilt that leads people to dump stuff outside charity shops so they can take it to the tip rather than face doing it themselves, they give them to the nearest clergyperson.

And, when I retire and have to strip my bookshelves, children, I WILL DO THE SAME. 

Asking the Question

If you listen to coverage of the violent riots and disturbances disrupting various English towns and cities at the moment, one of the more powerful sentiments expressed by people who form the crowds that eventually turn nasty – whether they stick around to take part or not – is that they were never asked whether they wanted their country to change the way it has. They weren’t consulted about it becoming multiracial, multicultural, or however you want to term it, and have ended up in an unsettling and unfamiliar place, or at least that’s what they think. There are many sorts of perceived hurt and neglect behind this – as William Cobbett famously said, ‘I defy you to agitate any fellow with a full stomach’ – and, were anyone of progressive opinions ever to have a conversation with someone who thinks it, you might want to explore whether those changes have actually had any negative impact on their wellbeing at all. But put that aside for a moment. On the face of it, the complaint is true: the UK has never formally asked itself what kind of future it preferred. True; but that’s because it couldn’t have.

The biggest changes within a society are never consulted about, mainly because we don’t know they’re happening, and by the time they have it’s too late to do anything about it. We look back and, contrasting where we are now with where we were once, we can characterise the change in a single pithy phrase such as ‘multicultural society’, but we can only do so in retrospect. In retrospect, we might be able to identify a symbolic point when the shift, whatever it was, began, or even when it had taken effect. But it’s precisely that perspective that enables us to do so.

The UK was never asked in about 1962 whether it wanted to become a society in which Christianity was marginalised from public discourse and influence. The UK was never asked in about 1980 whether it wanted to move to an economy significantly powered by property price inflation with all the attendant social problems. The UK, and the world in general, was never asked, when the building of the Old Forge at Coalbrookdale in 1709 began the Industrial Revolution, whether it wanted to begin the process of exploitation of fossil fuels which would, possibly, threaten the continued existence of our civilisation. All the biggest changes that affect us are never consulted on, because we never see them happening. As far as a multicultural society is concerned, we could stop immigration tomorrow and it wouldn’t change what Britain now is, with 12% of its population non-white and an increasing proportion mixed-race. Nobody is going to undo that. During the Brexit referendum campaign, my spiritual director overheard an elderly couple talking at a bus stop and complaining that though they couldn’t see a GP it would get better once we were out of the EU because there’d be so much more money to spend on the NHS, ‘And then’, the old chap said to the old woman beside him, ‘we can start sending the darkies back’. ‘Of course’, commented the half-Indian Ms Formerly Aldgate when I related this to her, ‘because that’s where the darkies come from, Romania’. That absurdity reveals the fantasy of return to the past for what it is.

In a way, the question is asked, but it’s asked in a million tiny decisions rather than one big one. It’s asked, and answered, in the individual choices people make, and in the election of governments who don’t do anything to reverse the movement in a particular direction. As far as race is concerned, we had an opportunity to choose a National Front-dominated government in the 1970s, but chose not to elect even a single MP. Sometimes, and this is far worse, a government suggests in its rhetoric that it’s going to reverse something, it will, for instance, ‘Stop the Boats’, and then doesn’t. In that specific example there’s little excuse because there were plenty of people telling the last administration that it couldn’t succeed, which raises the question of whether it was pure cynicism or the ministers concerned managed to convince themselves that they meant it. Either way, they now find the phrase thrown back along with bricks and bottles.

Sometimes, there is indeed a moment when a society is asked a question that marks a decisive move in one direction or another. In 2015 and 2018 the people of the Irish Republic voted to legalise same-sex relationships and abortion, marking an unmistakable shift away from being a conservative religious country to being a secular liberal one. But it’s worth noting that the very majorities achieved in those referendums, about two thirds to one third, proved that the shift in attitude had already happened. I recall Malawian comedian Daliso Chaponda remarking that the UK should have learned from Africa ‘where we only ever have a referendum when the government already knows the result’. The joke has a good point: referenda whose outcome is uncertainly close don’t bring any debate to an end. The only sensible referendum is one that confirms what people already think.

You could play a game, maybe, as to what symbolic question you could ask the British public to make them feel they had indeed been consulted over whether to remain a multicultural society. Finding one that would simultaneously be both meaningful and yet bound to be answered one way would test anyone's ingenuity. But, if the research is correct to show that the British at least want to be liberal about immigration more than virtually any other country, it wouldn't break it. 

Two More Museums

The whole reason I went to Maidstone last week was to pay my respects to Ta-Kush, 'the Lady of the House, Daughter of Osiris' at the Museum. As I dripped my way through the rainy streets and finally found the Museum, I found a grand Tudor house - Chillington Manor, originally - a far more impressive setting than I envisaged, even if I quickly discovered that you don't go in here, but through a modern annexe at the side.

Like Hastings Town Museum which I visited last year, but on a bigger scale, Maidstone houses different collections of stuff which it's been given over the years, and what is in fact technically an entirely separate institution, the Royal West Kent Regimental Museum. There's the Bentlif Art Gallery, the Oyler Collection of Toys and Games, Lady Brabourn's Costume Collection, two distinct huge donations of Japanese artefacts, and the Brenchley Collection of South Sea Island ethnography. It's exhausting, and means that if you don't warm to one gallery there's always something different round a corner (and there are a lot of corners). When I visited there was also a temporary display 'I Grew Up 1980s' full of things I have disturbingly clear memories of as well as dark oak rooms full of dark oak furniture and suits of armour. I could have spent much longer here had I not already been a bit worn out by my trip to Knole House in the morning. And at the centre, in her own dark alcove - appropriately the former chapel of an almshouse - is Ta-Kush. They treat her kindly now, but she was cut about after being confiscated in 1820 by Customs & Excise as they checked her for smuggled goods. The children boggled at her, and I stood in silent salute. She has come all this way across time and space, as it were, to teach us about her vanished world. I didn't photograph her.

Then on Friday last week I was in London seeing my god-daughter to hear about the frustrations of life as a very junior civil servant living in the capital and a young Christian who can't find a local church where they don't worship a drum kit. I made a day of it by exploring the City of London Cemetery in Wanstead (which has a café!) and then dropping by at Hackney Museum. As far as you can get from the model of local history museum represented by Maidstone, Hackney's is one room (they have a gallery for temporary exhibitions, but it was closed when I went) under the borough library dating from 1999. Nobody has given them hundreds of oil paintings, Japanese sword hilts or Egyptian mummies; they don't have much, but they make what they have work hard. They focus, as far as possible, on the multifarious stories of the varied people who have made their home in this part of London over the centuries. There is the paraffin stove used by a West Indian couple in their rented room in the 1950s because the landlord turned the gas off at a certain point in the day. There's a net used to catch eels from the tank at the back of an eel-and-pie shop. There's a tiny artwork made by a schoolchild showing how their parents met. There is enormous compassion and commitment. And when I visited there were lots of children enjoying the games and toys for free, and some of the older ones even looking at the displays. 

Go and find your local museum. They're all gorgeous. Well, nearly all.