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.