Keeping Promises

M asked me about being married in the church. I knew, not only that they’d been married before, but also met their new partner before being divorced. It was a kind of request, surprisingly, that I'd never had before. ‘But did the new relationship cause the end of the marriage?’ the priest I talked it through with asked me: ‘Can they assure you it didn’t?’ I put this to M and they were honest enough to say they couldn’t be definite that the marriage wouldn’t have carried on had they not met the new partner. It’s all very uncertain, though I was happier having some kind of objective criteria rather than just relying on what I felt.

If you’re a Roman Catholic, or a certain kind of Anglican, there is no question: you can only get married in church once. If you’re (some sorts of) Orthodox, again, you get three goes at it after which you are deemed to be taking the mickey, but a subsequent marriage omits some of the celebratory ceremonies of a first. Anglican churches are left to work out their own approach, provided it is consistent with the House of Bishops’ guidance, which includes the caveat about the new relationship not being a direct cause of the marriage ending. Again, I very much want something more than my own judgement to go on. Who am I to wade into the complexities of human relationships?

The House of Bishops’ guidance advises the priest to make sure that celebrating a subsequent marriage does not ‘undermine the Church’s teaching’ that marriage is for life, but given our apparently limited enthusiasm for our own teaching I think of it more basically. If the core of all sacraments is about promises, your approach, be it ever so gentle and pastoral, has to speak to the integrity of promises, of which the promises couples make, and which God promises to help them keep, is only one. Society has an interest in promises being kept, because we all rely on trusting that most people will do their best to keep their promises, most of the time.

And yet we know (frail beings that we are) we break other promises. We take part in the sacrament of reconciliation and promise God we won’t do this or that, and it is very likely that we will. Does breaking a promise preclude us from making another one? Or does the public, communal nature of the matrimonial promise make a difference? 

The Period of All Human Glory

The sacristan at Goremead church, which I looked after for a few months 17 years ago now, was Agnes. In her very young days she’d been on the secretarial staff of Archbishop Cosmo Lang. At the end of any discussion about her unsatisfactory health or general state she would usually conclude, ‘Still, we're getting there’, the first person I can remember using a phrase I now hear almost universally. It’s another way of saying ‘Can’t complain’, which is itself a way of glossing over the fact that there is no point complaining; of putting to one side the uncomfortable truth both parties to the conversation are only too aware of, that the situation concerned probably isn’t going to get any better. The actual words do not mean what they are intended to convey, the consciousness that we are all on a single trajectory with a single conclusion. One day I was bold enough to ask Agnes where it was we were getting to: she narrowed her eyes and replied ‘You know perfectly well’.

We will leave aside the more cosmic consideration that we don’t know quite where we’re getting to – the supernal or infernal postmortem realms – and think about what it means for this life alone. Knowing in theory that your time in this earthly realm is limited, as we all do, feels very different from being told it is, even if no actual span is put on it. This has recently happened to someone I know, and if that’s happened to you personally, it’s also happened, to a lesser degree, to the people close to you. No doctor is brutal enough to say ‘What you have wrong with you can only be cured by interventions we will not try because of all the other things that are wrong with you, so all we can do is manage it, and it will eventually kill you within the foreseeable future if one of your other problems doesn’t get to you first’, but that’s what they want you to understand.

Traditional Christian spirituality uses the transitoriness of life to point us away from this world towards eternal considerations, but that’s not the problem here, which is to invest the remainder of our human lives with meaning and joy. The confidence we might have in Christ’s saving grace may blunt the edge of death: we may tell ourselves that all that is good about us is held in divine remembrance and will be brought into the heavenly Jerusalem, part of the ‘treasures of the nations’ the Book of Revelation talks about. If we can successfully pit that spiritual knowledge against our every natural human instinct to be afraid, all well and good. But it seems to me that carrying on living fully is a separate spiritual issue. Call some of us weak and foolish, but we need some motivation not just to turn our faces to the wall and collapse into depression. What is the point of the strife? Even if we engage in battle to make it easier for others to do so, that just pushes the question one step away from us, rather than answering it.

Once when I was dealing with someone with suicidal temptations I stressed that death was the enemy, an interloper in God’s world (this only stands any chance of working with a Christian). But if that’s the case we know that we will eventually lose: and that loss may even come as a mercy depending on our circumstances. Perhaps we can see each day lived well as a victory against a different Angel of Death that comes to us, rather than a struggle daily renewed against the same foe.

And yet why should we? Death doesn’t have to be approaching that quickly to make that a valid question. The humanist concern to gather experiences against the day of death seems a hollow endeavour as it leads nowhere. Why should we try daily when we are weary and dispirited? Rather, the thought that occurs to me that nobody else will ever have our experiences, our precise mixture of impressions, reflections and memories. Those are the treasures of the nations to be brought into the heavenly city. What God will do with them exactly we do not know, but every moment is not just one of blessing to us but to the whole of creation, connected as we are through him who is the Head. That might be enough to keep me thankful each morning, no matter how long or short a time that might remain to me.

St Michael's Well, Sopley - or Not

Some time in the summer of 1986, I was driving with my family along the B3347 between Christchurch and Ringwood as we passed through the village of Sopley. As we negotiated a tight left bend over a little bridge next to the Woolpack Inn, I spotted an arch over an alcove in a redbrick wall beside a gateway on the right-hand side of the road. We stopped, and I found what seemed to be a holy well. This was only a year after visiting my very first holy well, St Trillo's Well at Rhos-on-Sea in north Wales, and I was full of excitement to find more. There was a metal spout on the back wall of the well in the shape, as I later described it, of 'some fabulous animal' (my mind, I think, going back to David Attenborough's TV series of that name in 1975). I even dared to taste the water which I thought was chalybeate, and I certainly wouldn't risk that now. 

This week I found myself back on that road again, stopped, and took a picture of the well as the only one I had was very poor. The water, bright green with pondweed, completely submerged the Fabulous Animal up to the tips of its iron ears. There was as much mud and leaf-mulch in the basin as water, and the image on the back of Christ (presumably) offering a jar to a kneeling figure, flanked by Alpha and Omega signs, seems less distinct than when I first saw it forty years ago. Forty years! Well, 39. 

I find that there's quite a lot online about this well now, which there definitely wasn't in 1986. In fact I think I am responsible for most of it. I wrote up my visit, among a set of similarly slightly dubious wells, in the old holy wells magazine, Source, then run by Mark Valentine. I called it 'St Michael's Well', because Sopley's ancient church is dedicated to St Michael and I had the belief in those days that once upon a time every holy well would have shared a dedication with its parish church, as they appeared to in Ireland. Now, of course, I know that this is not the case and the history of holy wells is complex and fascinatingly multifarious. But I find that everyone refers to this site as 'St Michael's Well'. Members of the New Forest Wells and Springs group on LiberFaciorum organised cleaning the well out in 2024, following an earlier tidy-up in 2008; the Parish Council also knows the site under this name that I entirely made up. The strange spout is now almost universally described as a dragon which makes perfect sense for a holy well dedicated to St Michael. The well's real history is obscure. It sits opposite a Picturesque Gothic lodge built between 1870 and 1896 to judge by the Ordnance Survey, and its wall seems designed to look like a ruin; the Kemp-Welch family of Poole owned the big house, Sopley Park, at that time, though what led either John Kemp-Welch the Schweppes magnate or his son (also John) to build this remarkable structure is anyone's guess. The pipes that convey the water from a spring in the park seem to have collapsed, and what fills the well now is probably just rain run-off. 

Provided everyone understands (as I've tried to ensure) that the name of the well is of no great antiquity, I see no problem with its new general title. Oddly at Bisterne nearby there is a story of a 'real' dragon that once menaced the neighbourhood, and on the widespread assumption that dragon tales encode struggles between Christianity and paganism people have told me this fits in rather well with 'St Michael's Well'. Who knows? Did I mysteriously understand more than I knew back in 1986? Remember St Catherine's Well at Guildford, another wild guess that turned out to be entirely true!

The Limits of Engagement

My thinking regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict has evolved over the course of the Gaza war. I’ve occasionally referred to the entrenched anti-Israel stance of nice liberal British Christians which, on one occasion, slipped into open anti-semitism in front me, out of the mouth of a member of my own congregation who was given to wearing a keffiyeh from time to time. I have remained suspicious of Christians wearing keffiyehs, and pro-Palestinian demonstrations and activism no matter what the good intentions of most of the people involved may have been. My niece, no stranger to radical politics, said she has steered clear of the issue at her university for the same reason. I have questioned why so many British people, perhaps Christians especially, feel the need to comment on this conflict out of all the brutal struggles which deface the world: there are various answers, some less pleasant than others.

But we are 18 months of slaughter on now, and I have come to admit that this is different. It’s partly the scale, partly the open avowal of ethnic cleansing by some Israeli ministers, and partly the lies which it seems to me quite clear that the Israelis want the world to believe. Il Rettore also gave me a book, Faith in the Face of Empire by Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb. This examines the interesting question of why God chose to be incarnate in this part of the world when he could have picked anywhere; its answer is the geopolitical position of the Holy Land on the contested border of great empires, in the past as much as now. This is the right location for God to critique human lusts and insecurities and offer an alternative to them, Kingdom against Empire, Cross against sword. The Word didn't become incarnate in Judaea because that’s where the chosen people were, but the Israelites became the chosen people because they inhabited the land where the Word would become incarnate. So perhaps this conflict does have cosmic significance in a way others do not.

I mention lies. There are few nations and governments which always tell the truth, but few whose falsehoods extend to their military killing aid workers and burying not just their bodies but the vehicle they were travelling in and then maintaining an entirely false account of events until caught in the lie. It is very clear the statements the Israelis give are untrue, and if I were responsible for policy at an august news organisation such as the BBC I would have begun treating them as such, in the same way that we quite reasonably gave up routinely asking the Russians to comment on the war in Ukraine. In both cases, you occasionally need to be reminded of the argument, and whether people do themselves believe the lies they tell is an interesting and useful question to consider. I think the Israelis probably do tell themselves that their state is a liberal democracy the same as other liberal democracies because they had a trans woman win Eurovision in 1998 (except those who loathe the fact). But there’s limited value to wasting your time on untruths. Remember how long it took the BBC to decide that it didn’t actually have to have a climate change denier on every time the issue got mentioned.

There is a broader point here. I always approach any disagreement (if I have my wits about me) along the Dominican lines of identifying assumptions you have in common with your interlocutor and proceeding from there. But there is no point rehearsing lies. You have to distinguish the people from whom you might genuinely learn something from those who are only trying to defeat you. Such people are not even interested in being understood, in affecting the way you think: they would really rather you were not there at all. There is nothing to be gained in dealing with them.

‘Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes’ run two adjoining verses in the Book of Proverbs. Christ negotiates this treacherous landscape with skill. He encounters and distinguishes between those who ask him questions in order to elicit a genuine answer, and those who ask them in order to entrap him: the latter attacks he turns round in their own terms, exposing the falsehood of the premises by bringing in some other idea or statement from Scripture.

So here is a relevant question. When King David numbered the people of Israel, how did the Lord respond? He sent a plague. Where did the plague end? At the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite. What did David do? He bought the threshing-floor. What did the threshing-floor become later? It became the site of the Temple. Now David was king: he could have done what he wanted. Araunah even offered him the place for free. But David insisted on buying it lawfully, so his offerings would not have cost him nothing. He did not seize it, not even from a foreigner, one of the People of the Land who the Israelites were supposed to have displaced.

Busy Doing Nothing

Something very odd happened on Sunday. It wasn't a heavy day in terms of duties, just the services at 8 and 10 and a conversation with a potential baptizand afterwards. As well as household chores I intended to prepare for a meeting on Monday evening, only to realise that most people who would normally be there are away leaving me, Jean the sacristan, and a church member who is hardly ever in church, to talk about worship arrangements. I was just about to send out an email suggesting we postpone the gathering when I found one from Jean saying exactly that. An alternative job was to rough out an account of the various ideas I have for the rest of the year for the PCC; on investigation I found I'd done that, but had forgotten. 

There are always things one could do, but on this occasion I couldn't face any of them. So I sort of faffed about pretending I was still at work but in fact looking up entirely irrelevant matters on the internet and things like that. Eventually I read a chapter of an improving book to clear my head and put the slight sense of self-reproach behind me. That somehow got me through to an acceptable time to return to the church, say Evening Prayer and lock up. It would have been more productive, including spiritually productive, just to stare out of the window. So why hadn't I?

Gradually I realised that I'd fallen into exactly the same habit I try to warn other people against, of validating myself by activity. When there is no activity, when I can't do the things I have planned to do and nothing else intrudes itself, I feel dull and deflated. My non-work life is also defined by activity, by filling the time with tasks. Of course you should be diligent and productive in the use of time, but when idleness comes upon you without being sought, and your response is to fill disturbed and ill-at-ease, this is a spiritual warning sign. My activity was for myself, not for the Lord. 

Turning this over prayerfully on Monday I began feeling that I was enjoying God's company - as the old man famously told the Curé d'Ars, 'I looks at him and he looks at me', that some kind of pressure had been relieved. How unexpected. The next time idleness ambushes me, I will be more prepared by being happier not to do anything!

2025 Museums

That is, museums I've visited this year, not two thousand and twenty-five palaces of culture. It is International Museums Day, which is no bad thing at all even if this year's theme, 'The Future of Museums in Rapidly Changing Communities' does sound like the old historian's joke that the perfect title for any work of historiography is 'Change and Continuity in an Age of Transition'. So, even though I no longer habitually post here every time I visit a museum, I would describe very briefly the ones my travels have taken me to so far this year, special exhibitions in London excepted.

1. West Berkshire Museum, Newbury

Many years ago I applied for a job at Newbury Museum, as it was then, and remember absolutely nothing about it apart from the building that houses it, the 17th-century Old Cloth Hall & Granary Store. The strongest memory from my second visit early this year is of the café where the visitor services manager acted as barista. The collection is rather the usual kind of thing you would find in a museum of its sort, though there's some impressive commitment to contemporary collecting with Greenham Common Peace Camp memorabilia (oh dear, that's not really very contemporary now, is it), and a covid vaccination centre sign. 

2. Islington Museum

Between tracing the route of the next Goth Walk and seeing my god-daughter for dinner I found I had enough time to stride down Essex Road and visit Islington Museum, which is nowhere near what you might imagine Islington to be but serves the London Borough of that name. It is basically one big room under the Library, accessed down a flight of bleak concrete steps. I was not the only visitor but I caused confusion when I approached the desk and asked if I could make a donation. A collection of radical badges, a bust of Lenin from the Town Hall (power to the people!), a cow's skull and artefacts found under the floorboards of an 18th-century house: I am so glad this museum exists in the middle of what might seem like an unpromising chunk of the capital.

3. East Grinstead Museum

I had no idea East Grinstead was the location for a pioneering plastic surgery hospital in WWII, but that's the sort of thing museums can teach you. The town museum deals with that potentially queasy topic with compassion and interest, and contains plenty of the more common stuff you'd associate with the history of a market town.

4. Leigh on Sea Heritage Centre & Museum

'Museum' is a generous title for the Old Smithy as it has only a handful of artefacts, but it is the closest this seaside town has, a collection of photographs and a reconstructed forge in an old building which adjoins 2 Plumb Cottages. The Old Leigh Society leased that from the Council to restore and display as an example of a mid-19th-century fisherman's home, but it promptly fell down and so what you see now is more a reconstruction. Still, both were free to go in and I bought lots of postcards which is one of my key performance indicators for a heritage site.  

5. Havant Museum

This is really one room with a mocked-up 1950s kitchen to one side (these seem to be eclipsing Victorian Kitchens which were the standard when I was a museum curator). There was an amusing mechanical toy involving a windmill, a yacht, and lots of cogs which I couldn't resist playing with, a graveyard-keeper's badge, and plenty of objects jammed into a small area, though I should have paid more attention to the significance of the stuffed big cat.

Happy museum-going!

Spring Fair 2025

Plants, books, burgers, singing and dancing, bottles and dogs and Hook-a-Duck: every church fair has the same elements, and thankfully I have little to do with the organising of ours. My main role is to consume cake, and tell everyone they've done very, very well. Which in the end we did, raising something like £5000 in addition to whatever the various charities represented managed to make. I did worry that the weather might be too good and everyone would head off to the beach, but this was not the case. Yesterday I passed two young gentlemen who I recognised from the visitors and they greeted me. It turned out one was a Polish student and his host took him to the Fair 'to see something of England', and that was probably achieved.

Spring Adventures

It feels as though I've been waiting a long while for this week off that is just coming to an end: the lateness of Easter has removed it far from my last break. I spent a couple of days in Dorset, taking my Mum to West Bay and my sister to Knowlton Rings; zoomed to South Wales to see my friend Rain who has been going through all sorts of trouble, taking them to an antiques emporium (their choice) and Llandaff Cathedral (mine); London yesterday to see two more friends, one for lunch in the amazing surroundings of Mercato Mayfair which used to be the church of St Mark North Audley Street, and the other at Pret London Bridge (probably less worthy of a photo), and two exhibitions, Tim Burton at the Design Museum and Secrets of the Thames at the Museum of Docklands; and a final excursion today to Leigh-on-Sea. Funny place, with one old street along the shoreline full of fishing-themed pubs and a more modern one at the hilltop where the shops are. I spent a good amount of my time in Leigh trying to find somewhere that would serve me a sandwich and a cup of tea for lunch rather than fish-and-chips or tapas; I should just have gone to the church where they were offering community lunches!

I was also delighted to be shown a new and unheralded image of St Catherine at the Docklands exhibition - on a gold ring plucked from the Thames. Here she is, just visible, holding a tiny, tiny wheel, the last of a trio with St John the Baptist and the Blessed Virgin.

Swanvale Halt Book Club: "Gaudy Night" by Dorothy L Sayers (Gollancz, 1935)

A friend may be leaving Oxford, a city she loves, after more than two decades. The 1930s is not her favoured period, but having heard Dorothy L Sayers’s Gaudy Night described as ‘a love letter to Oxford disguised as a mystery novel’, I thought I’d buy an appropriately elderly copy as a present. I felt I should read it first, never having done any Sayers. 

Good heavens, it was hard going. The action focuses on a fictional women’s college based on Somerville, the author’s alma mater, located somewhere off Jowett’s Walk where the modern Balliol housing now stands; and many of the characters, and suspects in the crime, are the college’s academic staff, a parade of virtually-indistinguishable Misses This or That, occasionally and even more confusingly referred to by their title instead of their name. They engage in bouts of verbal sparring of the kind I thought I might encounter myself in Oxford, but never did: perhaps such displays of intellectual prowess had died out long before I arrived, around the time fluency in Latin stopped being an entry exam requirement.

And at the heart of that is Lord Peter Wimsey, quite the most loathsomely annoying character I have ever read presented as a hero. Any such person you might meet in real life, whose every other sentence is a recondite quotation and who politely refrains from making his intellectual superiority over everyone else around them too apparent except obliquely, would be an individual you would quickly learn to avoid. The romance between Wimsey and Harriet Vane is part of the story, and you cannot help feeling she has been absolutely correct to repel his matrimonial suggestions for five years and should very much carry on doing so. At one point Harriet has discovered that the antique chess pieces he has bought for her from an Oxford antiques shop have been violently smashed by the unknown miscreant causing havoc to the College’s wellbeing. One pawn has survived:

“My dear girl [counsels Wimsey], don’t cry about it. What the hell does it matter?”

“I loved them”, said Harriet, “and you gave them to me.”

He shook his head.

“It’s a pity it’s that way round. ‘You gave them to me, and I loved them’ is all right, but ‘I loved them and you gave them to me’ is irreparable …”

A quotation, with grim inevitability, follows. At this point, were I Miss Vane, the antiquity and belovedness of the chess-set notwithstanding, I would have found a use for that surviving pawn that His Lordship might have been surprised by.

Allied to the maddening quality of Peter Wimsey is the tendency of this novel – as so many of the mid-twentieth century – to drew conclusions about its characters from their physical appearance. Harriet notes that Lord Peter’s nephew, a student at Christ Church who falls a bit in love with her, has similar features to Peter’s but ‘with a certain weakness about the jaw’. Of course the dashing aristocratic detective is a master at this dubious neo-phrenological analysis, but everyone in the book whose inner thoughts we know does it, and it’s a feature you simply cannot imagine emerging in fiction now. How did it come to an end?

This all adds up to a high price for a spot of Oxford romanticism. But as the narrative builds towards the climactic unmasking of the villain, there is a certain cathartic violence which culminates in the speech that villain gives to the assembled members of the College, an attack on both academic culture and first-wave feminism so daring, violent, and all-encompassing, that it almost justifies the time you have spent reading so far: regardless of whether you agree with the character in question, which Sayers certainly does not. Whether I will in fact pass Gaudy Night on as planned having experienced it, I am not decided!

[The picture shows 'the first cheap edition' of 1936, a copy of which I purchased at a very modest price. The presence of the original dust jacket would have raised it to £200 or more.]

Keeping a Kind of Vigil

It wasn't the first time I found myself negotiating my way through another sort of spiritual space. On St George's Day this week - the customary St George's Day, though in the Church calendar the Great-Martyr George has been bumped backward to next Monday because you can't celebrate a feast day in the Octave of Easter - I attended the monthly Vigil at Crossbones Graveyard in Southwark. Without recounting the contested history of the site, which you can look up for yourself, in later years the graveyard has become 'a shrine for the outcast dead' as that history has been recovered, publicised, and acknowledged, and therefore part of the consciousness of those living who also feel themselves marginalised and outcast and who read their own experiences in those souls who are memorialised at Crossbones. Although the acknowledgment of the site has included recognition by the cathedral community mere yards away, this place belongs to those the Church has traditionally pushed away, which makes it all the more affecting that it can make sincere use of Christian imagery and words from time to time.

This week's Vigil was especially poignant as it took place after an apparent attack on the shrine, burning some of the memorials and decorations. It was stressed that the rituals weren't religious, and indeed there is nothing specifically religious about burning incense, ringing bells, silence, tying ribbons in remembrance, and reciting poems. It was only the final bit I felt I had to stand back from - a collective act of re-hallowing the memorial by the assembled community touching the gates, while a prayer was recited and repeated with the aim of 'concentrating energy', a mode of operating that goes all the way back to the New Thought of the 1880s. It was described as an act of 'magic', so I touched nothing and said nothing. But then, it seems to me, Crossbones is a place of integrity, for me as for anyone.

Holy Week 2025 ...

… has offered a variety of experiences.

Monday: I attend on my Spiritual Director and mention that the Bishop, for the first time ever, is doing my ministerial review this year. 

    Me: I don’t want to say the wrong thing. 

    SD: Would it matter if you said the wrong thing? 

    Me: Well, he is my father-in-Christ to whom I owe canonical obedience – 

    SD: Oh, don’t give me that ****ing ****.

Wednesday: The new Dean at the Cathedral offers to hear confessions at a set time for the first occasion in years. I don’t have much to say but go and find myself tearful with thanks.

Thursday: I and Il Rettore are back at the Cathedral for the Chrism Mass. As always, the Bishop preaches but delegates the service and blessing of oils to his suffragan, which mitigates the point of the whole thing somewhat. I am tired enough to enter a dubious state during his sermon in which I hear every word but can’t recall a single one. (At least I think I am hearing them: I’ve noticed that when I reach the stage of nodding off while reading in bed I can start fully awake and then fail to find on the page the words I have just read absolutely clearly). Fr Donald from Lamford, sitting beside me, makes some theological point I can barely understand. Afterwards Il Rettore asks me what I thought and I tell him the Devil seldom rages at me as hard as during the Chrism Mass. He shares that he felt like walking out during the sermon. At the Maundy Thursday vigil I do my usual exercise of bringing my friends into Gethsemane. Of course Professor Cotillion’s dogs are there, and Bartle barks to keep the demons away while Brindle licks the Lord’s hand to comfort him.

Friday: During the Mass of the Presanctified I get caught out by Drop Drop Slow Tears as the communion hymn and almost can’t carry on. In her new position in a big choral church in the North, my friend Cara has her first experience of prostrating herself in their equivalent liturgy and finds it ‘curiously restful’. Two priests of the Society mansplain administering the chalice to her during the administration itself: ‘I’ll administer it in a way you really won’t like in a minute’, she didn’t say. Paula the pastoral assistant and her husband Peter drop off hot-cross buns on my doorstep which present the ideal way of breaking my fast in the evening.

Saturday: I take communion to Janet, among others that day. We get to the end, and then she says ‘Did I tell you my friend is going to bring me to church tomorrow? I didn’t like to tell you not to come after all. Thank you, I know you’re so busy’. I mentally tot up all the things I have yet to do, from polishing the wall plaques to setting out the crockery for breakfast tomorrow.

Easter Day: A few fewer than in recent years at the Dawn Mass but the other services drew numbers pretty similar to last year. A pink rubber duck appeared in the churchyard, apparently part of a cancer awareness campaign, so it came to the Dawn Mass and I popped a photo on LiberFaciorum.

Decease of pontiffs notwithstanding, happy Easter Week to you all!

Healing Words, Maybe

Past healing masses at Swanvale Halt haven't gone all that well, but eight souls at last night's for Holy Week was all right. The priest rehearses the words and actions of Jesus at every eucharist anyway, and yet it seemed like a special kind of impertinence - a sense of 'privilege', which is what you're supposed to say, was far away - to lay my hand on people's heads and recite 'Receive God's healing touch to make you whole'. 

Only a few minutes before we began I discovered that my homily notes were nowhere to be found, so I had to try and remember what I wanted to say. Il Rettore said it had effectively skated the theological thin ice that holds the healing service up above the abyssal waters of blaming God for our sorrows or blaming ourselves, so I thought I'd put a tidied-up version here. 

When people tell you in response to you sharing some trouble that ‘God has a plan’ they mean it kindly, but it raises questions about the purpose of what happens to us. If we think that our sufferings and sorrows are God’s choice for us, what does ‘healing’ mean?

We can understand healing in different ways – the palpable, natural problems we have that we ask for help with, and the inward shift in our attitudes and understanding that enables us to see things differently. Both make sense: the fact that in the Gospels people come to Jesus and he very much does heal physical issues implies that Christian healing doesn’t only mean passive acceptance of what might come our way, though it might include coming to see our problems in a new light.

Preparing the readings I was reminded of the way the coming of the Christ is prepared for through long ages, foreshadowed in the declarations of the Prophets. God’s saving work unfolds across the centuries, and in so far as we are united with Jesus, we and what befalls us are part of that narrative. We can be confident that, though the fallen world may be arbitrary, and therefore no direct reason lies behind whatever sorrows and sufferings come our way, God is not.

As we follow the way of Christ this Holy Week, we find that he is the site of understanding, the means by which we can place what happens to us in the light of God’s purposes. The events of his passion and resurrection point towards that time when even our sorrows and pains will be made sense of. Christian healing is a declaration of faith in that, here and now.

Ready for Anything

Last Wednesday we finished the five sessions of the Lent course I’d put together, the first time in several years that we’d done anything of the kind. I wanted to do something that both encouraged and equipped laypeople to take on more of the spiritual management of the church if no ordained people were available. Say a church at the Catholic end of the spectrum has no prospect of an incumbent for some time, and visiting priests coming in on a Sunday now and then: what can laypeople do to maintain its spiritual life? I did sessions on the nature of the Church and its mission; how the Church relates to society, and society to it (somewhat sobering, bits of that); the Church calendar; the building as a house for prayer; and shoehorned in something about faith-sharing for the last one. The diocese will be pleased with that, anyway. I pointed out how ringing the bell is easy, and each session got attenders joining in with a plainchant psalm, because having experienced it I think getting your head round plainchant can really increase people’s confidence. It was a bit of a rod for my own back, but I did each session twice, once on a Monday afternoon and once on a Wednesday evening, to give as many people as possible a chance to attend. Not everyone managed to get to all the instalments, but I was pleased with getting roughly thirty souls along.

When I described the idea, more than one member of the congregation took it as a signal that I was thinking of leaving, which is not the case, but it does rather suggest that they’re a bit scared of that happening. Which maybe means I should! The whole concept of the thing was to reduce laypeoples’ dependence on clergy in general and me in particular, but will that happen in any way while I’m still around?

Biblical Relics

Anna comes to speak to me about various things, including her old family Bible. None of her family wants it, she says, and she doesn't feel she can look after it. What should she do with it?

It's actually a Prayer Book and Bible bound as one volume, and dates from 1773 with all the family names and dates inscribed on an initial leaf (the one in my illustrative picture would be much later). It's potentially a nice artefact, but isn't in good shape: the covers are detached, the leather almost worn away, and it smells strongly enough of mould that you don't want to breathe in too deeply in its company. Despite its date, the problem is that there are simply too many of these Bibles around for anyone other than the family involved to be interested in it, unless there was something unusual about the family or the circumstances in which it was compiled. Every family that could afford a book like this would have had one, and the question of what to do with them regularly arises, at museums as much as at churches (at my last workplace we had a couple). 

The old Jewish custom is that worn-out texts and manuscripts that might contain the name of God are held in a storeroom in the synagogue, the Genizah, and then formally buried perhaps every seven years. Maybe churches should offer a similar service! If nobody in her family was interested in keeping the book, I told Anna, the most respectful thing would be to bury it, to return it to earth. She seemed to like that. I remember doing the same some years ago with copies of the Book of Mormon Mad Trevor gave me, but respect wasn't the issue there.

Sew Surprising

Fr Thesis is well-known as a dab hand with a needle and thread and I have been known to delve into needlecraft myself, but I have always relied on hand techniques - if in my case they can be called 'techniques' - only. This makes the exercise massively laborious and inefficient. 

One of the articles Ms Formerly Aldgate left in the Rectory was the sewing machine which she hardly ever used (clothes making was an idea she took up but never got very far with). I wonder whether she was aware it would - at least now, several years later - cost about £130 to replace? In any case it has sat in its box ever since she left. 

Now, with two amices rapidly declining in effectiveness but some old altarcloths ready to be turned into something else, I wondered whether I might increase my productivity by pressing the contraption into service in making replacements. And so it has proved! An amice, admittedly, is about the most simple sewing project you could imagine (an oblong of white linen!), and my first foray into the realm of mechanised needlework has been a bit wavering resulting in a slightly wonky line of stitches, but it's a start. I was amazed it worked out at all.

I wonder what proportion of clergy sew? I do rather think use of a sewing machine could profitably have been added to the Leavers' Course at Staggers.

Beautiful Badbury

When this blog passed its 2000th post I said I wasn't going to be striving to find something to say every other day, as I had in the past, but only post when there was something positive happening. Nothing very much has gone on today apart from a trip to Dorset to see my mum, going out with her for a meal, and visiting the farm shop at Pamphill Dairy, finishing with my obligatory walk around Badbury Rings. But Badbury Rings is always restful and calming, and maybe you find my photos the same! Today I did the opposite of my usual route of going straight through the monument and then following the southern ramparts back, by turning north along the banks and then cutting back through the wooded centre. I couldn't remember ever seeing the Trig. pillar before, somehow.

Keeping One's Council

The CEO of the local Council was only supposed to be a couple of minutes, but I was waiting for him for about twenty. Well, things come up, I know that. I have agreed to be 'Borough Dean', which is something our Bishop is very keen on: a point of contact between the local authority and the churches of the area, explaining the ways and concerns of the one to the other. When he did arrive, full of apologies and offers of coffee, the CEO made it gently clear that I was representing one of a variety of faith communities, albeit the vastly most numerous in sunny Surrey: that was quite understandable and a role I don't mind filling.

While waiting, I watched the receptionist field enquiries. She has to know who to get in touch with and broadly how the structure works to be able to help the people who turn up. Today, a Council tenant was pursuing a Gas Safety inspection on his property which was supposed to have taken place, but the plumber never turned up and he'd heard nothing back (the same happened to me the other day). The receptionist waited on the phone to someone for about ten minutes and then gave it to the man while she dealt with another gentleman who had some papers to hand to a Council officer who she also couldn't get on the phone (it turned out the officer was out at lunch - she came by later). There was also a woman with a non-native-English accent pursuing a housing enquiry with a man who I presumed was from the CAB or a housing charity or something - he was certainly acting as her advocate. She seemed to be about to be ejected from a friend's house and they were trying to secure her a place in a night shelter. They were shown into a meeting room to call either an advisor or a Council officer, I wasn't clear which. It was quite a tally for twenty minutes, though perhaps mid-day is a busy period. 

At Swanvale Halt church, we pray for aspects of our local community on a cyclical basis, including our local authorities, the elected members and staff. That's all very well, and I'm sure the Lord does something more than absolutely nothing with prayers like it. But watching the Council in action for just a few minutes on this very basic level adds some meat to those outline aspirations. How complex it all is - and how worthwhile the odd prayer seems. 

Oxford Springtime

I couldn't have picked a better day to visit Oxford than yesterday. The pellucid blue skies framed the golden-coloured buildings, reminding me of our trip to Florence many years ago (I'm not a very good traveller so it remains a rare foray beyond these shores). Here's a view of one of the Clarendon Building muses (which have an interesting history), seen beyond the Bridge of Sighs along New College Lane.

Although I did get to see some friends, the centrepiece of my day was a visit to the Holy Well of Holywell Manor. The Manor is the graduate block of Balliol College, and although I studied at Balliol it was only as an undergraduate so I never went there, and had only glimpsed the Well through a window in the gate of the Praefectus's garden. Yesterday I was allowed in to examine the site itself - though apparently my request had prompted the Manor's health-and-safety manager to examine the well and decide that it isn't as safe as it could be and needs to be added to Balliol's lengthening list of works! There is a horribly corroded-looking set of steps leading down to into the well-chamber and as Mr H&S had been down there to look that morning I was perfectly happy to rely on his photos. I am still picking through the tangled history of the Well so won't go through it here, but the chamber still seems to contain the stone tub identified by the Clewer Sisters who occupied the Manor in the late 1800s as an Anglo-Saxon font, rather dubiously I fear. The Praefectus's PA gave me a copy of the history of the Manor by Oswyn Murray, who I overlapped with at Balliol all those years ago but who I didn't have anything directly to do with. It has some useful details of ghosts and folklore!

The 'Oracles, Omens and Answers' show at the Bodleian is fun (the central African custom of divination using land spiders was news to me) and I went into St Mary Mag's, rather scandalously for the first time ever considering I lived yards away from it for three years. There is a dramatic statue of St Catherine on the high altar reredos.

Dialogue of the Partly Deaf

The young man accosted me as I was returning home from Vespers, with a phrase (whatever it was) which is like the usual opening gambit from a cult: ‘Excuse me, sir, are you worried about the way our country is going?’ He told me there were ‘13 colleges in London where you can’t wish people Happy Christmas’ and that churches were being closed to be replaced by ‘mosques and synagogues’. If I’d had more time I would have tried to explore whether there was a genuine anxiety beneath these statements – I thought his stare and slightly ragged appearance suggested some kind of mental distress – but I hadn’t, I fear. I said things seemed very different in Swanvale Halt where I was doing work in local schools and so on and if churches were closing it was mainly because people didn’t go to them. Did he go to church, I asked? Yes, he said, ‘the main church’ in Guildford, which was an interesting way of describing what was clearly not Holy Trinity on the High Street or even the Cathedral, but Emmaus Road. That’s if it was true.

On Saturday I did a funeral visit. I knew the gentleman whose wife’s service we were discussing, and must have met his stepson before though I couldn’t remember. The deceased lady had been a Roman Catholic at one stage in her life, at least, and her son had attended a convent school and been an altar server in his teens before leaving that behind. ‘I have to say I think religion is a crutch for people who need it’, he said, while his stepfather believed that God had directed his life in various ways, not least leading him towards his wife via some unlikely coincidences. How the conversation got onto aliens and Neanderthal technology I wasn’t sure, but it felt like a talk I was supposed to contribute to but couldn’t find a rational way into, or indeed to steer back to what we were supposed to be talking about. It was absolutely exhausting.

As was the third unsatisfactory encounter within a few days. This one was at a friend’s early-retirement party where I found myself sitting next to a friend of his who had some potentially interesting things to say about her frustrated career as an engineer, being married to a soldier, running a club for bikers in Camden in the 1990s, and dealing with her son’s schooling. But it became clear that behind each story there was a point being made about the unreasonable behaviour of other people, and I was not so much participating in a conversation as being invited to agree. If I missed the narrative clues to how I was supposed to understand each anecdote there was no way back, and it was easy enough to do that in a loud pub. I was almost weeping by the end.

How rarely one has conversations that actually mean anything, in which the participants are listening to what each other has to say rather than simply speaking at one another. I do strive to view my encounters as opportunities to learn more about other people but they don’t always make it easy!

Quiet

2022 was, I think, the last time I spent a Lenten retreat at Malling Abbey. For the last couple of years I've instead gone to Clarissa and Simon's garden music room at Bortley for a quiet day of reading and prayer. There are various reasons: it doesn't take as much time away from the parish, it seems to be just as productive if more concentrated, and, being very honest, joining in corporate worship with the holy Sisters became harder as they themselves age and become more crumbly. There was a sense of sorrow, of something passing away, and I feel that keenly in life more generally. So Bortley Mill it is for the time being.

In fact my resistance to change and sorrow at the passing-away of things formed some part of my reflections. On the music room bookshelves was a copy of Patrick Bringley's All The Beauty in the World, his reflections on ten years spent as a warder at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, finding solace in art and discovering other people also processing their own lives by means of the things they encounter in the museum. A small book laying out the experiences of an ordinary life: and it made me think of all the worthwhile books (meaning the worthwhile experiences of other people) I will never manage to read, and the beautiful things I will never fit in seeing or enjoying. I could live a thousand lifetimes and barely scratch the surface of the wonders the world has to offer. I felt ashamed at the times I have failed to feel grateful, failed to appreciate the tiny, tiny time I have to enjoy beauty and love. 

As it was a Friday in Lent, I was fasting until sunset. I arrived at the music room to find that Simon had laid out a plate of delicious shortbread biscuits which assailed me through the day with their aroma as I sipped my black, unsweetened coffee. But they would have gone soft being left out like that, so I took them home. 

School Day

The local secondary school, Widelake, isn't completely foreign territory to me, but I don't go there very often. I paid a visit back in 2013, and then again the year before last, when I spoke to an RE class about communion and then answered questions at a philosophy group. 'When you talk about the way prayer affects you', asked one girl, 'How can you be sure it's actually due to contact with something beyond you or is just the effect of long-term self-examination and reflection?' I felt like bringing in the politician's answer along the lines of 'That's a very good question and I'm very glad you asked me' before moving swiftly on. But now I seem to have an arrangement to offer seasonal assemblies before the main festivals. Before Christmas I spoke about the sense of history embodied in the Christmas Proclamation: 'today, the 25th day of December, untold ages after God created the heavens and the earth ...' And yesterday I delivered one of my strange discursions about Lent and Easter, fasting customs and evidence for the Christian story. We met in the sports hall, which has no heating apart from the presence of hundreds of teenagers, and a tiny projector screen at one end. Can they see it at the back? And can they hear me at the back, even if I'm quite used to projecting, myself?

In the afternoon I was in the very different surroundings of the Infants School, doing another assembly and then Church Club. The children are off on a sports day on Friday and so I decided to talk about rules and how Jesus didn't always follow them but remembered what they were there for. My illustrative material included a croquet mallet and ball from my battered old Jacques set at home. 'Oh I never come into school without a croquet mallet', I said in answer to Sandra's incredulity when she turned up for Church Club. 

The Churches of David Nye

The Bishop is supposedly keen on the concept of Borough Deans, clergy who will have regular conversations with local authorities and act as a contact between the Church and secular life. I offered to be one, and quickly learned with weary resignation that a role sold to me as involving ‘a couple of meetings a year’ actually implicates me in sundry other things, all of which so far I haven’t been able to attend. The Bishop should have written to me formally to welcome me, but hasn’t. One of these additional things was planning something called a Community Day. I came in partway through the process, wasn’t able to attend any of the meetings, and never received any notes, so I turned up at the event yesterday with no idea what was supposed to happen. It turned out to be a session encouraging churches to think about their community work as opportunities for evangelism. I was amused that the main speaker outlined a vision of encounters developing into church communities linked to the parish like the rim of a wheel to the hub, exactly the theme of my long Missiology essay at St Stephen’s House twenty years ago, while the new resources for adding spiritual content to community events pretty much mirror the things I am developing and thinking through in Swanvale Halt. But I found myself looking at the building we were meeting in, St Peter’s, Guildford, which I had neglected to visit in my great survey of the diocese over recent years. Ah, I thought, it’s another one of these.

David Nye, the architect of St Peter’s, is better known as a cinema designer, but his church work is relatively prolific too. Quite substantial buildings in Purley and Dulwich offer no clue to a personal style, but for Surrey – and a couple of other places, it seems – he developed a model of church based on pyramidal roofs, big windows, and glulam timber arches. The pattern could be scaled up to something like the Good Shepherd, Pyrford, or down, to St Stephen’s Langley Vale in Epsom, and could be adapted to a variety of church traditions; so St Peter’s is a joint Anglican-and-Methodist community, Pyrford is evangelical, while Christ the King, Salfords (which though in Surrey I haven’t seen as it’s in Southwark diocese) is Anglo-Catholic. The family resemblance, though, is very strong.

St Peter's, Guildford

Good Shepherd, Pyrford

St Stephen's, Langley Vale (from the church website)

Christ the King, Salfords (Photo © Stephen Craven (cc-by-sa/2.0))

Holy Spirit, Burpham

Some time ago, realising I would find it hard to get into another David Nye church, St Alban’s Wood Street, I went looking online for photos, and got thoroughly confused by what I found. Here is St Alban’s, from the church website:

And this was also ‘St Alban’s’:

It took me a while to twig that the second wasn't Wood Street at another stage of its development, but an entirely different St Alban’s: a church at West Leigh in Havant (so, the diocese of Portsmouth), but virtually a twin of the Surrey one. It’s not described as one of David Nye’s, but it must surely be. I wonder how many more there are? The list on the website of his practice, now Nye Saunders in Godalming, isn’t very comprehensive.

All Saints' Onslow Village in Guildford is another Nye church, but apart from being modernist stands apart from the above examples. Its roof is virtually flat with windows fitted into an upright section rather than along the walls. Neither does it have the big glulam arches:

Yet another research project for someone ... !