A Brush with the Dark

When I met up with Dr Bones and LadySunHouse for lunch on Saturday, I jokingly apologized for having been obstructed by fascists in Trafalgar Square. Dr Bones quite reasonably asked me whether that was an insult or whether that’s how they’d think about themselves. It turned out it was the demonstration addressed by Tommy Robinson before he fled the country for breaching a court order forbidding him to repeat libels against a Syrian refugee.

Nigel Farage suggested this morning that the public might be being lied to about recent violent acts around the country, including the awful murders of three children in Southport. He doesn’t say explicitly that Muslims are responsible for these acts and the authorities are hiding it, but he doesn’t need to: it's plausible deniability. Like Mr Trump in the States, he can insinuate to the extent that everyone knows what he means, without being indictably precise.

This is a conscious campaign to undermine social discourse, to set up an alternative narrative. It may well be that there are communities in the UK who have reasons not to be well-disposed towards the police, but this is different: it’s about hinting that the police, the courts, the government, and the media are all part of a grand cover-up keeping the truth from ordinary people. It’s about saying, You can’t trust what these structures tell you: you can only trust what we tell you. And you cannot rely on them to protect you: you can only rely on us, and on your own willingness to take up arms, to throw paving slabs at a mosque in a Lancashire town.

'Nazis gonna Nazi', commented a friend, but while this is so, I think it's important that those of us who are broadly on the progressive side of things understand the process, which is why I keep posting about the links between violence, corruption, and the undermining of truth. It's not just 'these people are right wing so they are nasty'. You can be a perfectly constitutional, lawful party of the Right, even a long way to the Right, and still not be an intrinsic threat to the liberal order which protects our persons. These people are not constitutional and lawful, and there's a link between the malignity of Mr Farage and the corruption of Boris Johnson which is more than just being on the same side of the spectrum.

This is pre-fascism: this is the stage of deliberately softening society up for polarisation and violence. This is the condition we are in.

St Catherine in Maidstone

My holiday last week took me to Wells Cathedral, a likely place to find images of my patron saint, and yet there were none I could see. My archive already contains this stained glass window I have labelled 'Wells', yet I couldn't see anything like it, and Googling doesn't help either:

Instead it was Thursday's visit to Maidstone that brought images to light that were new to me. First, in the Museum, a tiny gold ring, way down in a display case and not at all easy to photograph, and next to it a pilgrim badge. The image on the ring is quite sweet, as much as you can make it out.

The vast edifice of All Saints' Church needs a bit of care and attention: there are parts of the building where the floor is too unsafe for you to tread on, while it took a little while for me to realise that the tapping noise I could hear wasn't a person moving around but rain dripping onto the plastic sheeting covering a group of pews. St Catherine was there on the high altar reredos - looking a little masculine, but surely it's her?

But round the corner was a complete surprise. The tomb of Master John Wootton, first Master of the College of All Saints, is surmounted by a 15th-century wall-painting slightly later than the tomb itself, showing the Annunciation, the Virgin and Gabriel flanked by saints. One of these is St Catherine. In common with the others, she was attacked during the Reformation, her face scratched out and her body scored with sword-cuts. I was feeling a little vulnerable myself at the time, and I think St Catherine Slighted of Maidstone will be my preferred image of her for some while. 

Celebration

Swanvale Halt church has made it to the age of 175. Back in 1849 (or some time before) the curate at Hornington, Mr Bellman, took up a hint that had been made a few years earlier that the railway might well bring a station to the scattered hamlets that existed north of the town and thus many new residents, and began raising the money to build a church. And here we still are, though how far we have, as Mr Bellman hoped, 'counteracted the notorious and manifold evils' of the churchless settlement, I am not sure.

There have been some newcomers to the church lately, so on Saturday last I invited them to the Rectory for tea, and the evening afterwards, the closest Sunday to the date of the church's consecration, we had a celebratory Evensong. An augmented choir was assembled (Il Rettore joined it), a visiting organist was procured, and a particularly challenging set of settings for the Mag and Nunc was rehearsed. 'We haven't quite managed to make a mess of it yet', Robert the choir director told me in the week; 'Good', I replied, 'that's what I'll tell everyone at the start'. Friends from neighbouring churches came, wine was drunk, and I think we even managed to give proper thanks to the Lord for all that has gone before us. And then I managed to go on leave for a week!

Away Fixture

This Sunday I was at Canley next door to Swanvale Halt, filling in for Sue the priest-in-charge, who was away. Canley is much, much older than our church, Norman in origin at least, and has a more modestly centrist tradition. Still, the green chasuble arrived back from another church where it had been borrowed in time for me to wear it.

Not all went as smoothly as that. A member of the congregation apparently fainted on the way in to the church and fell, knocking his head and requiring a call to 999. The sound system buzzed and whistled unaccountably. A party of Americans walking a pilgrim route didn’t turn up as expected (perhaps they were as discombobulated by the attempted assassination of Mr Trump as everyone else was), but a couple wanting to light a candle in memory of a deceased friend did, and Canley isn’t the kind of church that has candles hanging around for that purpose.

I was able to help out at Canley because Il Rettore was holding the fort at Swanvale Halt. Retired though he is, he does appreciate having an altar once a month, and has been standing in now and again at other parishes which are in vacancy. Vacancies are another matter. In Hornington Deanery we have two parishes which are vacant currently, and Curtbridge Deanery next to ours is positively devastated. Meanwhile the incumbent of Sands & Piddenton in our Deanery which contains several small churches is on long-term sick leave. And the Area Dean tells me that he was in the Diocesan War Room with our Archdeacon and suffragan bishop a few days ago watching them push little models of clergy across the map, as they do, and heard them remarking about how I had only one church to manage, and I had Il Rettore around, so could I not look after Sands & Piddenton pro tem as well? Donald, the retired hospital chaplain who worships with us, seems to have evaded their attention: nor will I draw it to Claudia, who used to be a worshipper at Swanvale Halt before she was ordained and, now she is newly retired, appears keen to return ‘home’.

This seems to me a misapprehension of what it means to be a retired priest. Retired clergy take different views of how to continue their ministry once they are no longer in full-time paid work. Il Rettore, as I’ve said, likes to preside at the Holy Sacrifice occasionally, but Fr Donald is less concerned with that and merely says that he will fill in if I ever need him to, as he indeed has done when I’ve been ill or on holiday. I don’t know what attitude Claudia will take. We have another retired priest worshipping with us who has chosen not to exercise their ministry in any public way at all. None of these souls are simply ‘members of staff’ for me to dispose at will. If I had a stipendiary curate I might well say to them (in a way Il Rettore never did to me) that conditions in the Deanery were such that I thought we might both help out in this or that church, but retired clergy have done their bit. What they do is, as far as I’m concerned, voluntary.

If the Archdeacon or the Bishop wants to phone up Donald, or Il Rettore, or Claudia when that time comes, and politely ask if they might consider going to another parish to help out one Sunday or two, fine, but I am not telling them to do anything. Nor would putting them on the Swanvale Halt rota so I can go elsewhere be anything other than crazy. I think.

Swanvale Halt Book Club: Guy & Catharine English, 'Holy Wells Cornwall, Odyssey & Memorial' (Culture & Democracy Press 2024)

In 2014 Guy and Catharine English began a retirement project of visiting the holy wells of Cornwall. They acquired copies of the books that have surveyed them and started listing, cross-checking, and trudging around lanes and across muddy fields to find out what was there. Sometimes they discovered an entirely unlisted ancient well, which was a special excitement. Then came the covid year of 2020, which separated the couple from the wells and ultimately from each other after fifty years of marriage – not a direct result of the pandemic, but of Catharine’s cancer which they thought had been dealt with. Once the world reopened, and Guy could bear to do so, he carried on their mission – as the book’s title suggests, an ‘odyssey’, which had become a memorial. He acquired a new travelling companion in the form of holy wells photographer and author Phil Cope, who would help pull the book together.

For holy well hunters the corrected map references and descriptions of wells’ current conditions in this book are useful, even if some of the directions are a bit indistinct; necessarily so in the case of St Michael’s Well at Roughtor which, according to Guy English, mysteriously appeared and then was unfindable again from visit to visit. You have to squint a bit at some of the smaller photographs. But, in any case, this isn’t a book to go to for a lot of information as such. Instead it’s an account of Guy and Catharine’s pilgrimage, and together they make it easily the most moving description not just of Cornish holy wells, but sacred waters anywhere. They battle with the weather, sit in the car and eat a pasty, visit a friend while out looking for this or that site, and dry off in a tea room or a pub. Described in very few and unflamboyant words – as is Catharine’s illness and departure from their shared odyssey to go on one of her own – this is the kind of thing we all do when going well-hunting: ordinary, small actions, contained and framed within the very extraordinary action of looking for holy wells, engaging with their deep and powerful history, and moving through their landscapes. Yet nobody has ever thought to describe them in print before.

Captured almost unawares by the strange magic of the wells, Guy and Catharine English are all of us. How gracious of them to share with us their gentle, hopeful journey.

Book website here. 

Democracy in Action

Chairing the Churches Together-organised General Election hustings at Hornington Baptist Church yesterday was one of the most intense 90-minute periods I've ever spent. People had submitted questions - fewer than I anticipated, to be honest - which I then grouped into subjects and reworded so a single question was asked for each. It became clear that a set of questions were being asked not so much by individuals as by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Arundel & Brighton using those individuals, so I put a discount on those when assembling a list actually to be put to the candidates. All the candidates got back to me, apart from the Womens' Equality Party (though I think their candidate attended another hustings not far away), while the Greens had a bit of an internal issue after the national party imposed a candidate on the local Greens who preferred to stand aside and allow the Lib Dem standardbearer a free run at the incumbent Tory: a local councillor stood in for her. So we had a full podium and to get through at least six questions I intended to limit each candidate to a statement of two minutes only.

Given some of the statements of the leader of Reform and the opinion of some of the party's candidates, I was rather worried about how to handle their local representative if he started claiming there were streets in Oldham where nobody spoke English, for instance. So I warned the candidates that, as well as expecting them to concentrate on their own policies and not one anothers' record or proposals, if any of them came up with statements I couldn't see the basis for I might ask them to elaborate. In the end I did this with the Conservative candidate who seemed to suggest that there were potential illegal immigrants waiting on the French coast for a Labour administration to take control ('You can't know that', I said), and the Labour candidate, just to confirm that some very optimistic-sounding figures were in the manifesto. The Lib Dem candidate and Green spokesperson needed restraining from some negative rhetorical flourishes, ad hominem attacks and straying from the point. Ironically the only person I didn't take to task in any way was the gentleman from Reform who, even if you might disagree with him about this or that point, did express himself in a completely unobjectionable and well-behaved way.

Constantly trying to watch the clock, remember who should speak next, and concentrating on what the candidates were saying in case I felt I should intervene, while all the time striving to make sure I put my own personal opinions to one side, was surprisingly hard work. Il Rettore told me that when he'd done the same job once in Devon he'd ended up telling all the candidates to shut up, which I'm glad was farther than I reached. I'm glad it's over and not sure I want to repeat the experience. 

I finished by pointing out the dangers MPs now face and how we should appreciate the willingness of anyone who wanted to do the job, even if we disagree with them - and by asking anyone who was in the habit of praying to do so for our nation on July 4th. The number of plain-clothes police in the church, and their uniformed colleagues keeping an eye on the pro-Palestinian demo outside, brought home the point.