San Flaviano Montefiascone

This time it's Madame Morbidfrog who has photographed St Catherine abroad, at Montefiascone in the Lazio region of Italy. The basilica of San Flaviano there is oddly composed of two churches, one on top of the other; it's the older, lower one that boasts a range of frescos including a nice Triumph of Death and several crucifixions. There are two depictions of St Catherine as an iconic figure, one damaged and the other full-length and very unusual as it has clear Byzantine influence but shows the saint holding her wheel, which wasn't customary in Byzantine images in the 14th century. That's the one Madame captured, and it led me to discover the others.

But there is also a set of images of episodes from St Catherine's legend, which are hard to find online and difficult to interpret as they have suffered over the centuries. The painting of the saint strapped up between the two terrifying flaying wheels (in fact there are even more behind, which I've never seen before - they may represent the wheels breaking apart and crushing the torturers) is pretty clear, and I think we can see Catherine being beheaded too, but it's not obvious what the others depict. In one, gruesomely, the saint appears to be having her breasts cut off, which comes not from St Catherine's legend but St Agatha's, so how did it end up here?

For He Spoke With Authority

I’ve known Fr Embridge for ages: he used to be on the team at Lamford when he worked in the secular world, and now looks after a parish while continuing to write about how the Church can manage the business of change. He is a deep-thinking soul. He often posts about politics on LiberFaciorum; I’m not sure how outspoken he is from the pulpit. You will know how I am very, very reluctant to run my own political preferences up the flagpole (literally) for all sorts of reasons. I don’t believe detailed comment about policy is the Church’s role, at least not unless we have made a definite study of a particular topic; what do I know, after all? What gives me the right to opine out of no greater knowledge than anyone else, just because I have a stole round my neck? Am I not in the position of holding the whole of my parish before God, and holding God before them, souls who have a great variety of attitudes? Looking across the Atlantic, I also see the danger of a society devolving into two non-communicating camps, competing for the control of the space they are both forced to inhabit: a healthy democracy, where you must assume that you will never have a final victory over the people who you disagree with, has to have spaces which nobody controls, where signs and symbols of allegiance and commitment are absent. In our current epoch where it’s absolutely possible to assimilate everything we do into an ideologically-coded identity politics, neutrality is a positive virtue that we have to cultivate, because the pressure is all in the other direction.

Even Mr Farage’s latest pronouncements don’t quite cause me to breach my self-imposed guidelines, although the idea of deporting people to circumstances where they might face torture and death without any investigation treads over one of my own lines and it’s hard for me to see how any Christian might feel different. Instead of denouncing this or that, I strive to think about underlying ideas or attitudes and probe around beneath the surface, which is what I see Christ doing in the Gospels. I might talk about our absolute moral obligation to reduce suffering; the moral danger of polarising language, eroding our ability to share social space with those we disagree with; the inescapable reality of our sinfulness, meaning any idea we can make ourselves generally safer by getting rid of a category of person is a damaging fantasy; and the corrosive effect of developing habitual indifference to the suffering of some groups of others. These seem to me to be legitimate subjects for clerical comment, and perhaps very necessary ones.

St Catherine in Dijon

Yet another friend - Miss T in this case - has recorded an image of the Great-Martyr while on holiday. This 15th-century wall-painting is in Dijon Cathedral. It's definitely St Catherine (her name appears), though the wheel is not easy to see. It might be in the damaged area of the image beneath where her left hand should be, behind the kneeling figure (a Beguine?).

Haslemere Revisited

Haslemere is only a bearable train journey away so on my day off I went there today. It's an odd arrangement: the station lies in a no-man's-land in between the old town clustering around the crossroads leading to Guildford, Midhurst and Liphook, and at the other end a new bit where the supermarkets are. These are very distinct, witnessed by the differences between the artisanal ciabattas and loose-leaf teas served by the café in the old bit and the basic sandwich and mug of best builder's I got in the one in the new. 

The Museum is in the old town. Again, it's an unusual place, set up in the 1880s by Sir Joseph Hutchinson who used his collection of natural history to create a little version of the national Natural History Museum on the grounds that, pre-railway, most denizens of Haslemere would never make it to South Kensington and they really needed to know about whale sharks and lemurs. Over the years, for complex reasons, the Museum has acquired an Egyptology collection (including a mummy) and a range of European folk art: I don't think I've heard the word 'treen' used in earnest since I left Wycombe Museum in 2003. 

I've seen Haslemere Educational Museum (its title) once before, in 2012, but I discovered that I only really remembered it through the photographs I took at the time. I recognised some of the artefacts, but I'd made startlingly unfamiliar images of them, and it was rather pleasing to find that most of the displays came as a surprise. 

I began working in museums because I was inspired by the idea that they could do social good, interpreting a community to itself. I had before my imagination the example of Elspeth King at the People's Palace in Glasgow, a kind of history-from-the-bottom-up heroic socialist-realist model of the museum world. 35 years later I think about them differently - I see their treasuries of objects and stories as revealing, not a master narrative, but the interlocking, overlapping, and contradictory complexity of human lives, and that that's really the point. Some of those lives, in fact, aren't even human. We are brought together with experiences which are not our own, and made to reflect on them. Isn't that amazing?

Word from the Pulpit (if there was one)

The readings today were from Jeremiah 23 where God lambasts prophets who prophesy their own fantasies, and Luke 12.49-56, in which Jesus talks about bringing a sword on the earth rather than peace, kindling a fire, and waiting to be baptised with a baptism which is not of water. At the main service I preached a rather rambly sermon which began with God’s rhetorical question through Jeremiah, ‘Am I not a god close at hand, and not only far away?’, and would have ended with the violent imagery drawn from both readings – ‘fire, and a hammer breaking the rock, and a baptism of blood’ – had I not at the last minute veered away to stress how the Cross stands in judgement over us, over the Church and over the world, but the point is that it leads us somewhere better. Somewhere in the middle I touched on the doctrine of the Real Presence – ‘in that cupboard with the gold curtain is the most important thing in your life’ – my own failings (not enumerated in detail), the possibility of some wrong arising in our community which must be named, say a corrupt Council operation, and imagery of angels. There was a lot in it, but I thought it held together, just about.

Over the years I have struggled with understanding the relationship between the pastor and the congregation. What exactly does it mean? Why does the Lord want it to function in this strange way, if indeed he does? I can get my head around the idea that it creates an inescapable relationship (inescapable unless either the minister is driven out or the laypeople leave) and that training in relationship is at the heart of the spiritual life, but why have one person set aside to take this role? You can drag in the traditional Catholic explanation, that ordained people exist to provide the sacraments, but that’s an unsatisfactorily circular argument.

As I was contemplating finishing the sermon with that brutal statement about fire and hammers and blood I imagined myself saying to Giselle the lay reader, ‘Of course you can’t say that’. My feeling would be that it wouldn’t be right for Il Rettore or Marion, when she was with us, or Ted the public school teacher who preaches occasionally, to say it either. I think this is because it is risky. Not only is the expression slightly extreme, but it’s also very directive in a way I rarely am. This is partly what an ordained person sent to a Christian community to speak with the authority of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is for in a way a layperson (even an authorised one), a retired priest or a curate is not. That status both protects the minister in that they are commissioned to say such things, and also raises the stakes when they do: they’re still going to be there next week (probably), and the congregation’s relationship with them is ongoing and not easy to escape, as we’ve said. The possibility of a strong and directive statement grating like grit in an oyster is part of the point, it seems to me. 

A Relic

Many years ago, during my time looking after the church at Goremead, I took part in a joint Anglican-Greek Orthodox wedding, or it may have been the one I did when, for legal reasons, we went through the Orthodox ceremony straight after the Anglican one, a picturesque but protracted occasion. It may also have been the time the bride was referred to throughout as the servant-of-God-Irene because that was the closest saint's name to her actual one of Rianne. Anyway, at the end of the second service, after the exchange of crowns and the little dance around the altar singing a song about martyrdom, the celebrant Bishop Gregorios gave me the bottle of sweet Cypriot Commandaria wine the couple had had a sip out of. For some reason I never really drank very much of it, though it got put to other uses (now I would welcome it as an addition to/substitute for my usual treat of port). Eventually I reckoned that, even with its high alcohol content it probably wouldn't be all that good to consume after all that time, and I have instead been using it as the thank-offering at my little wall-shrine that inaugurates my day off, just a little bit each time. Yesterday it finally ran out. We use all sorts of things to encapsulate memory, and every time I have picked up this squat brown bottle my mind has gone back to those funny experiences in Goremead, but nothing endures forever, neither the memories nor the items that embody them. I could buy another one, I suppose!

L' Ecumenisme en Plein Air

As nobody else had volunteered with just a few weeks to go, I ended up organising the Churches Together annual open-air service at Hornington Bandstand, which mighty demonstration of divine love and ecumenical togetherness took place last Sunday. The main issue was that almost everyone was away. Not only were most of the ministers who took place last year absent or had moved on, we would normally rely for musical accompaniment on the musicians from Tophill, who were also away. I was steered towards a gentleman from the Baptist Church who gathered a range of friends, so that all worked out OK, even if it took us close to the wire. Then someone asked about sound production and I realised the Tophill folk had always brought that with them. The minister at Tophill (one of the many who wasn't going to be around) arranged to have a gigantic amp/mixer available which I picked up and somehow manoeuvred in and out of my car several times, and then got it down to the Bandstand by 9.10 on Sunday morning long before anyone else arrived. We didn't even use it in the end.

One of the absences was the entire staff of the local ecumenical Christian youth work team who would normally deal with any children present. I emailed round the ministers to see whether some other children's or youth worker could do it - 'You don't want me doing it', I warned, but the world was deaf to my admonitions and when the time came I gathered a group of five bewildered children around the steps of the Bandstand and had a rather stilted conversation with them about the story in the Bible reading. One of my colleagues later sent me an email congratulating me for 'so wonderfully and enigmatically engaging with the children' which I have to assume is an autocorrect quirk. At one point an angelic little girl of about three turned to her dad and said 'I don't like this bit'. I wonder whether the mic picked her up.

I was also thanked for 'moving all the chairs' which normally reside in a tiny shed belonging to the Council just on the edge of the field. In fact I didn't as there were others helping, though the gentleman who enthusiastically ran off with the parcel trolley and deposited a towering stack of chairs in the nearby car park was less help than he intended to be.

I will never, ever, ever do this again even for Jesus.

Of Course I Didn't Say Anything

... at the meeting this week when a clerical colleague due to leave his role the day after described the frustrations of his prospective retirement. 'I've slipped a couple of non-religious funerals under the radar over the years', he said, 'and I'd like to carry on doing funerals, I enjoy them. But if you have Permission To Officiate in the diocese I'm going to they keep the fees. I'd prefer to do non-religious funerals anyway but that would still be the case.'

Embarrassment and inarticulacy silenced me. I'd never met him before and there would be limited point in protesting even if I could have speedily recovered from my surprise and worked out what to say. It would never occur to me that I would carry out any religious act except as a minister of the Church of Jesus Christ. Although, as we always say, the priest is ordained by the Church in response to and in recognition of the call of God on that individual, nevertheless I am ordained in order to do, and only in order to do, the things the Church is charged by God with doing. It's not a declaration of what a fine fellow I am, and whatever I might do only has value not because I do it but because it's done within the context of the promises of God expressed in the sacrament of Orders. Dear me. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

The Spiritual Bounds of Satire

Lately, Death stalks the halls of Euterpe: Ozzy Osbourne, Cleo Laine, Connie Francis, and now Tom Lehrer. I was introduced to the oeuvre of Mr Lehrer at university by Comrade Tankengine; 35 years after that, and up to 70 after the songs were written, I think I can appreciate their bold savagery more than ever. Far from being blunted by time, they get sharper as you can perceive how they must have landed at the time. Drug-taking, pornography, venereal disease, nuclear annihilation, inter-community prejudice, and cruelty to animals: no target is beyond their scope, all wrapped up in razor-sharp and inventive rhyme and meter. For a slightly less sulphurous way of making the point, listen to Lehrer’s introduction, and his audience’s reaction, to ‘The Vatican Rag’, a 1965 song about the Second Vatican Council. His phrases about the Church becoming more ‘commercial’ and ‘selling the product’ sound shocking (as I think they should be) rather than the commonplace cliches they now are; once the song begins, as it converts solemn ritual into absurd pantomime without any actual, definite abuse, the audience responds with whoops and gasps, simply unable to believe that anyone is saying this stuff.

And you wonder whether anyone would say it now. On the one hand, Tom Lehrer was always the first to point out that satire changed nothing: ‘it’s not even preaching to the converted, it’s titillating the converted’, he believed. On the other, just a little bit further down the road of eroding the rule of law we currently travel, and the ivory-fingering academic would surely run the risk of being shot up against a wall. Tyrants have notoriously poor senses of humour, even if the joke doesn’t really threaten them. In The Libertine John Malkovich’s Charles II watches in fury as Johnny Depp’s Earl of Rochester savages him theatrically as King Bolloxinion: ‘This is very funny’, says a beaming French ambassador to the King, ‘if this was Paris, the playwright would already be dead by now’. Thank heavens for the Civil War.

But does satire do us any spiritual good? Back in Oxford days I collaborated with Comrade Tankengine and others in a gossipy weekly political newsletter which was occasionally witty and always scabrous, directed at the University society we belonged to. For me, it was a kind of continuation of some of the things I’d done, or, more often, imagined doing, at school. We told ourselves that it was all about catharsis, about carving out a space for ourselves and those who felt similarly alienated which at least kept us within the bounds of the Party. But we couldn’t half be cruel sometimes. There is a strain of self-congratulation and contempt even in the best of satire – and you can argue Tom Lehrer’s is that, as it’s the cleverest. ‘If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while’, he said. The Roman Catholic Church was given lenient treatment in the light of that.

I will still flick to Lehrer on my creaking, steam-powered iPod from time to time, but part of me will always feel I should apologise to the Lord. And I will not visit the park to poison a single pigeon.

Farewell RRM

The River & Rowing Museum at Henley opened the year after I arrived at Wycombe Museum. We were local authority, they were independent, but broadly speaking still within the 'social history' sector, and immediately we sort of looked to them as one of the more prestigious, grander vessels within the great fleet of British museums. The year after opening, its building won a major architectural award and it was declared National Heritage Museum of the Year. Yet despite attending a couple of events there I'd never actually done the basic thing of looking round the galleries. This holiday week I decided to remedy that - and discovered that my resolution was just as well, as in February the RRM announced its intention to close. It's been losing about £1M per annum for years and has reached the end of the road, or the river if you prefer. 

A visit reveals why, really. The place is enormous: the galleries alone are vast, and attached to them is an array of ancillary rooms for school groups and meetings which have never been fully used. It's gorgeously and imaginatively designed and considering the mainstay of the place is a sport I have minimal interest in, even I could just about see the point. Also, the extreme heterogeneity of the displays might be considered an advantage: as well as all the actual rowing stuff, there's a 'Wind in the Willows Experience' which recreates the illustrations in the book in 3-D form, an array of artworks from John Piper's time at Fawley Bottom round the corner, a gallery of contemporary riverine art, and local history material about Henley itself. But although the Museum seemed quite busy to me on Thursday, parts of it I wandered around without meeting another soul, a bit like the minerals rooms at the Natural History Museum. Nobody seemed that interested in the great John Piper, while the huge Henley Gallery, isolated from the rest of the displays by the long, narrow corridor that was the art gallery, I had entirely to myself. There's a whole room devoted to one painting - I can see why, as it's a photo-realistic image showing Henley town by a 17th-century Dutch artist full of architectural, social, and environmental information, but even so, it's a whole room devoted to one painting. Ironically, if anything survives of the RRM it's likely to be just that collection of artefacts, forming the basis for a new Museum of Henley. But what about the rest of it? Museums think of themselves as permanent, but of course they are as much a part of the flow of history as the communities or subjects they curate on behalf of the rest of us. 

St Catherine in Henley

I'll write more about aspects of my visits today, but just for now here are the representations of St Catherine I found in Henley-on-Thames. Two, predictably, come from the parish church, a stained-glass one and a a detail (a bit indistinct, the church is quite dark) from the chancel arch's great mural of the Adoration of the Lamb; but the third is more unexpected, a pub sign from the street outside. 

Evensong At Binsey

My week off has coincided so far with an attack of sciatica which hopefully won't stop me doing too many of the things I've planned. Those began with a prelude on Sunday, in which I zoomed from Swanvale Halt as far as appalling traffic along the M25 would allow to Binsey on the west side of Oxford, where, MissT had alerted me, Evensong was to be celebrated on the feast day of the chapel's patron saint Margaret, and a ceremony of blessing held at her well in the churchyard. The tiny lane to Binsey also leads to The Perch, one of the area's most popular pubs among the class of people who can afford its prices, and tends to be lined with cars. I parked at some distance and despite my discomfort found myself running towards the chapel as the bell rang, only to discover I could have left the car quite close by. I arrived panting seconds before we began. There were ten of us including the Rector of Osney and two students, one of whom was studying the ecological role of churchyards and the other doing a DPhil in mining including the possibility of lithium extraction in Cornwall. Amazing the people you meet. 

The holy Office concluded (and my obligation fulfilled) we moved out into the churchyard to the well. Although it's dedicated to St Margaret, the well is supposed to have arisen at the prayers of St Frideswide, Anglo-Saxon princess and founder-abbess of Oxford Priory, now the University's patron saint. By the mid-1800s there was nothing remaining, until 1874 when the perpetual curate of Binsey, TJ Prout - a classics lecturer, university reformer, mountaineer, and, according to legend, so prone to fall asleep in meetings that his friend Lewis Carroll turned him into Alice In Wonderland's Dormouse - rebuilt the well. He may have tapped the original source of the water, but on Sunday after weeks of dry weather there was so little remaining (and you wouldn't have wanted to be aspersed with what there was) that Revd Clare brought some finest Thames Water tap fluid in for the purpose. The Baptismal blessing of water, the Collect for St Margaret, a modern poem inspired by the churchyard and a blessing concluded the ceremony. 

Unlike some holy wells, St Margaret's Well operates in a predominately Christian context, but all sorts of people visit it. On a previous inspection in November I found rosaries, saintly prayer cards, and a candle bearing the image of the Indian Roman Catholic devotion of Our Lady of Vailankanni; on Sunday there were more pagan feathers and stones, a few coins, and a little pair of china shoes from somewhere in Holland. 

V&A East Storehouse

Alerted by a friend, I found my way yesterday to the new V&A Museum Storehouse halfway between Hackney Wick and Stratford, a slightly otherworldly area of rebuilding, new estates, and gigantic square structures of which the Storehouse is one. The marketing is that this is a new, radical approach to museum display, a warehouse of open storage through which visitors can wander at will, forming their own connections and stories as they look up details of the artefacts they're interested in via QR codes. This is not quite the case. Much of the cavernous space, which really resembles a cross between a cash-and-carry store and the entrance atrium of some vast company office, is out of bounds, and I rather would have liked to inspect, for instance, the five-foot-high plastic anime pandas I could glimpse through the shelves and gantries, but couldn't. There is a rational storage scheme, but operating at the level of 'chair' or 'cabinet' it's less than helpful. 

But it's an interesting experience even if it doesn't do quite what it promises. As well as the artefacts there are some charismatic set-piece displays, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Kaufmann Office from 1937 (an oppressively soporific space you can't imagine anyone doing a stroke of work in) and the Moorish Torrijos Ceiling, or the frontage from a Robin Hood Gardens flat demolished in the 2000s (we like a bit of Brutalism, we do). Here and there you can peer down a corridor and glimpse a conservator at work. Quite the most startling experience lies around a corner I wouldn't have found without some staff pointing visitors in its direction - a gigantic darkened space with nothing in it but a seat, and a colossal stage cloth copy of a Picasso painting. And I found alabaster panels of the Imprisonment & Martyrdom of St Catherine (very poor photo).

Entry is free, and I wanted to go before the David Bowie archive arrives in September and the whole thing becomes impossible. However, part of the cost may be recouped through the café, where I gibbed at paying £8 for a very small bun made with what looked like burned bread but which is probably artisanal. I had better stop before I start sounding like a member of Reform UK and stress that I went round the corner to a café called Badu run by a Mr Badu and staffed by a polite young woman in a hijab where I had a spicy veg pattie and side salad with a cup of tea and it was very pleasing indeed thank you very much.

For the Record, from Gozo

My friends Lady Wildwood and Captain Jackson were in Malta the other week and visited the Cathedral Museum on Gozo. As well as a mosaic skull wearing a biretta and a range of episcopal buskins in liturgical colours, in the background of one of the Lady's photos I spotted a painting of what was unmistakably St Catherine. Here it is, bent and twisted into proper perspective and sharpened up a bit. I can find out nothing about it - it's interesting that it follows the post-Reformation Iberian iconography of the saint in which wicked Emperor Maxentius appears as a disembodied head rolling at her feet, ironically as she was the who ended up with her head cut off rather than him. It has rather an odd look about it, almost as though it's a pastiche of a 17th-century image of St Catherine rather than the real thing. But it's hard to tell from an image this indistinct. Oh well, nothing for it but to go to Gozo myself : )

Pickled in Church

‘When we talk about the Mysteries of the Church’, I told the congregation on Sunday, ‘we usually mean baptism or holy communion. But there are more local mysteries too. We have recently solved some, such as where the electricity meter is (in the cupboard at the back of the church – I was looking for an old-fashioned spinny-roundy one when in fact it’s digital), or who puts out the bins on Wednesdays (it’s Chloe the bookkeeper). But the other day I noticed that next to the electrics cupboard is a jar of pickled onions. I have no idea where it has come from. If it belongs to you, or if you want it, your name is on it, and do remove it’.

Nobody has decided they want the jar of pickled onions yet. Its continued presence causes me to reflect on something not entirely banal, which is the issue of how laypeople interact with the church building they use and inhabit. To do something that they are helping with or organising, people will happily take matters into their own hands: they will seize the initiative. They will move heavy wooden chairs from the church space where they normally sit into the hall so a particular person can sit on those rather than a plastic one. They will shift the dial on the thermostat if it is cold. They will open the hall windows if it is hot. They will almost invariably forget, or not think it necessary, to restore affairs to the status quo ante, to move back the chair, to reset the thermostat, or to close the window, because the circumstance that engages their commitment, the particular event, is past, and they’re on to the next thing. In contrast, something that is not their direct concern can be screened out. A jar of pickled onions can be indefinitely left next to a cupboard, or a cafetiere full of four-day-old coffee left on the kitchen worktop can be deftly manoeuvred around rather than tipped down the sink (‘Oh that was here when we arrived’). The wonderful example I always quote, even after 14 years, is Mr and Mrs Bowdry, now both long gone to their eternal reward, putting their faulty service booklets back on the pile at an 8am mass in 2011 to confuse the next person to pick them up. I suppose people do this out of self-defence, to conserve their resources for the next important challenge they will actually need them for. I suppose I do, too.

Transcendent Moments in Clerical Life #983

Swanvale Halt church was refurbished in 2012, as some may recall, as part of which we installed a handsome range of new furniture, benches and chairs made from light American oak. They are light in colour, not in weight; they are substantial bits of kit. When first placed in the church, each had beneath every foot a small plastic roundel holding a felt pad, so that they would move smoothly across the floor when called upon to do so.

Thirteen years have taken their toll and those felt pads that remain are now compacted, but still just about doing their job. But many have disappeared and in some cases even the plastic roundels that held them have also vanished. There is one point in the church, the runnels into which the folding doors that close off the entrance area sit, where if you are not careful they will tear the little fixings off the feet of the chairs and benches, but the latter are moved over them so rarely that it surprises me it's happened at all. 

I love the smooth oak floor of the church building. I remember, when it was newly laid down and before the furniture arrived, Peter the then churchwarden and his wife Paula the pastoral assistant went waltzing across its shiny surface. It is always a moment, then, of horrible distress when I move a bench ready for Toddler Praise or the Pilates class on the second Wednesday in the month only to hear a scratch and realise a tiny fragment of flint caught beneath a leg where a pad should be has just scored a white gouge across the wood.

It takes organisation to move from the pained regret of these moments to actually doing anything about it, as I managed to yesterday, replacing the missing pads with squares of felt cut out of sheets supplied by the local ironmongery. Moving the kneeling-screens and benches back to their places and feeling them slide gently across the floor was more delightful than I know how to tell you.

You think this is banal? Wait until next time when I post about the significance of pickled onions to Church life.

The Most Beautiful Dogs in the World No Matter What Anyone Says

Since Professor Cotillion's amazing Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Bartle and Brindle, captured my heart I have discovered more about these impossibly cute dogs than someone who doesn't own one needs to know. I now find them everywhere. As the conclusion of my Oxford Holy Wells project appears in the distance I wondered what to write about next and the Holy Wells of the New Forest occurred to me. I looked up the Abbot’s Well at Frogham which I haven’t seen in 35 years and what should come up but this picture of a beautiful tricolour Cavalier. His name is Merlin and his owner Nicky took him on a walk around the Abbot’s Well. She founded the Dog Friendly Dorset website so I considered all those links providential. Nicky has a rare cancer so hopefully with enough fundraising for her treatment she’ll be around to look after Merlin as long as he needs. Then my local community board highlighted an ex-breeding stock Cavalier called Betty who needs adoption, and I found that it’s because of a rescued Cavalier called Lucy that third-party pet sales were banned in England as a step towards eradicating puppy-farming. Poor Betty wasn't house-trained (unsurprisingly as she had never lived in a house), and had never been walked on a lead: these are dogs that are bred to interact with humans, and they find their greatest joy and contentment in human company, so there's a particular cruelty to keeping one in a cage away from human beings. 

No wonder people fall in love with them. Dr Cotillion's Brindle is a bit of an exception being an only pup who is extremely protective of his owner and barks at anyone else who approaches, but almost every other Cavie treats any human they come across as a friend (they are not good guard dogs). They will let their humans do anything to them, dress them up in everything from crowns to sunglasses and take it completely in their stride. They are almost completely hopeless at anything other than looking cute. A nice Youtube video from Canada entitled 'Why our Cavaliers would not survive in nature' includes as reasons 'they need weekly manicures', 'they wear snoods to eat', and 'we are their emotional support rather than the other way round'. If you are their human, they will love you to distraction.

And this is partly the cause of their major problem. Cavaliers descend from the toy spaniels that have been known for centuries before modern breeds became recognised and established. Over the years these dogs were cross-bred with flat-nosed animals such as pugs and became what we now know as King Charles Spaniels, with domed skulls and short faces. Then in the 1910s breeders began to reflect that these dogs didn't look like the ones they could see in old paintings, and it might be nice to breed them back in that direction again. This was all going well until World War Two intervened. My very battered copy of The Observer's Book of Dogs from 1945 which I was obsessed with as a child describes the breed as 'the latest of these attractive spaniels to have come before the public eye' which was an optimistic account as at that point the entire breeding stock had been reduced to six animals. Maintaining a lap dog which was effectively useless at anything but being cute wasn't a high priority for a nation fighting for its life, and the breed almost disappeared. Every Cavie in the world now descends from those six dogs, meaning that whatever health problems they had, are now found through the whole breed. Among a host of common conditions, the most serious are the heart murmurs that virtually every Cavalier suffers from by middle-age, and syringomyelia, the formation of pockets of fluid around the spine caused by a skull malformation which Cavaliers inherit from the brachycephalic dogs they were bred from, and which can cause extreme pain. I told you I know too much.

Cavalier owners' groups often campaign for better breeding standards so that only healthy dogs are bred from, and if you're buying a puppy you're advised to get proof of good health from its ancestors for at least a couple of generations, but evidence from places such as Denmark which have had very strict quality control for some years suggests that the breed's genetic stock is so restricted it doesn't really make much difference how careful breeders are. Some vets argue that the whole Cavalier breed needs to be 'rebooted' by being cross-bred with (say) Cocker spaniels for a couple of generations, and then bred back towards the Cavie. That could help; but nobody wants to lose these dogs. They're too beautiful, and too loving. They reflect the best of us - until they have a toy-destroying party, or (as Bartle and Brindle did recently) have a competition as who could wee over the other the most, necessitating two baths in one day. 

I can't have one, at least now. They fixate on their humans so much that they require training to be left alone for a few hours, and I couldn't give one the time and attention it would need. Instead I have a china one I picked up via Ebay which sits on my windowsill, and it demands hardly any attention at all. That may be the closest I ever get.

Warming Up

From the vaguely theological and definitely pastoral we venture today into the realms of the severely practical. Back in the Old Days once an incumbent had been inducted into the real and legal possession of the temporalities of his [sic] benefice, he was responsible for it until such time as he left it, including any improvements or making good such dilapidations might have occurred to the parsonage house during the time he was there. The only thing he couldn't do was sell it. Such times are long past, and the diocese now takes a far closer interest in its properties, even if, some clergy find, they have to be persuaded actually to do anything practical.

The diocese has been telling me my boiler needs replacing since I moved in fifteen years ago, and has finally got round to it. I have been sceptical: the last time any change was made to the system was after I got help for a leaky pipe, when the visiting plumbers looked at the valves on my radiators, sucked in their breath, and informed me they would all have to be replaced to bring them up to modern standards. This was done, and a lovely silent heating/hot water system was changed in a trice into one that hummed, hissed and rattled no matter what was done to it, requiring careful management so I wasn't woken up at inconvenient hours. Now, I was warned that a new combi boiler would have to be mounted on an outside wall, requiring additional exposed ducting and pipework. At first I was horrified, thinking this meant vast industrial-size pipes leading round the kitchen, but was assured they would just be standard copper ones.

The actual work was done pretty efficiently even though the contractors discovered that a wall they had to take pipes through was in fact composed of plasterboard over about six inches of void space before they hit good Bargate stone. But when they were all gone and I turned everything on there was a noise like the thundering of mighty waters, as the Psalm says. Such noise persisted. I put this down to air in the system but bleeding my bedroom radiator for two hours didn't seem to stop it. The morning after a second contractors' visit to fix that, I got up to find there was no hot water at all. That fault turned out to be caused by a failed thermostat on the cylinder. Everything now seems to be both quiet and effective.

How expensive this would all have been I dread to think. I'm glad it's not been me paying for it. The new boiler sits unobtrusively on its wall, but the carcass of the old one is still in its cupboard. There is no getting it out, not least because the chaps were concerned there might be asbestos in it. You'd also have to take the cupboard apart. The works required my fridge-freezer to be moved, so I now have a kind of demarcated 'utility area' I didn't have before. It's as though the house is larger!

Through the Garden Gate June 2025

Although I'm no longer posting updates for the sake of it (posts about boilers and dog-friendly churches may follow), the heat will keep me indoors on this day off until I venture down to the steeple house for Corpus Christi and then to Malham church where the new incumbent is being installed; so thought a few garden snaps cheer up everyone, including myself. 

I thought this might be a new arrival, but in fact it seems just to be the Biting Stonecrop flower. It's just that the plant has never bothered flowering before!

Meanwhile, just above it, the bonsai-ed rowan is starting to look convincing and in very healthy leaf (provided I remember to water it). 

The same could be said of the slightly spindly rowan and the lovely red acer along the bank, which have to be watched in this hot weather. The acer was almost burned to death two years ago.

Meanwhile I can't work out how the old damson tree, with its split bark and powdery wood, survives from one year to the next. What's still alive? But yet again what's left of it is fruiting very well. Lady Arlen suggests I should save some stones and try to plant them, which I will. Meanwhile the roof of the Temple is rotten and needs replacing but finding somewhere that will supply the board seems less straightforward than one might hope! I can't fit a big sheet in my car, nobody will cut one in two, and delivery charges are steep.

The wildlife pond inserted into the midst of the big bramble bank is a great success, especially now I've managed to rig up a little pump fed by a solar panel on top of the damson, which circulates the water a bit. I often disturb a bird taking the water when I go to check on the pond. 

I am very glad to have seen off another incursion of the box-moth caterpillars - at least I haven't detected any for a couple of weeks - but the beautiful cinnabar moth caterpillars happily chomping the ragwort are far more welcome guests. 

Finally here is some hedge woundwort - stinky if you break the leaves, but fun to have.

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!