Steering Clear of the Rocks

The horrid oesophagal spasm which occasionally hits me very rarely starts up in the middle of the day, but that’s what happened as I was setting up for the midweek mass on the feast of blessed St Thomas Aquinas. The only way of stopping it is to swallow something. Water didn’t make any difference, so, avoiding Slimming World who were occupying the church hall, I shot into the kitchen and grabbed a tin of biscuits from the cupboard: eating one breached (my own interpretation of) the eucharistic fast, but the biscuit was horrible, so at least I suffered for it. The spasm was stilled and I was able to carry on.

That was physical pain; I took some emotional turbulence into the service as well. In the midst of my distractions, I reflected how wonderful it is to be carrying out this act that connects us to the eternal worship of the angels, and also that, whoever I may be estranged from in this earthly realm, those broken relationships will (in so far as they can, consonant with the eternal justice of God) be made whole. That’s all very well: it blunts the upset, or puts it into a wider context. At the very least, the words of redemption and praise take you to a different place if only temporarily. But the liturgy and the prayer it is part of doesn’t make the damage go away.

My Spiritual Director was told, as a young priest, ‘You will never get anywhere in the Church if you insist on being so personal in your sermons’. I talk about my own experiences and those of people I know all the time, so I disagree (not that I have ever wanted to ‘get anywhere’ in the Church); but a pastor’s congregation, I think, are caught in contradictory feelings about this. They want their minister to ‘seem human’, to have some sense that they too are subject to frailties and disappointments, but they don’t necessarily want to know in any detail what they are. Equally, the pastor may want to bring personal experience to bear to inject some reality into what they talk about, but it's a tactic fraught with hazard. Oversharing might not only head into areas that most people would rightly be reluctant to talk about, but might also be burdensome. You can think of circumstances (of illness or another misfortune) when a minister might need to be ‘held up’ by their people, but you don’t want them to become reluctant to share difficulties with you themselves out of concern for your own welfare.

The Feast of the Angelic Doctor afforded me limited opportunity to discuss my own difficulties anyway, and in the end I tend to veer away from deep emotional waters unless I have navigated them many times before and know how to talk about them in a way others may find helpful. Because ultimately the pastor's job is to serve, and only relieve your own burdens when it will definitely benefit your listeners to do so.

The Hidden Paths

When I moved into Swanvale Halt, I realised on exploring my surroundings that the footpath that ran up the hill between the fields and woods at the back of the Rectory and a 1990s estate was originally a road. Even today it has traces of the white lines down the middle. That has fascinated me ever since, even more so since realising that there are paths between the blocks of new houses, connecting the old road with the new; it's like a hidden landscape secreted inside the obvious, external one. Before the new streets were built, there were big houses here, some of them accommodation for the public school that used to own the area, and even tennis courts. I thought it might be a fun location for a Forest Church excursion, following the paths and reflecting on the way communities change, including the various people we used to know who lived in these cul-de-sacs and roads. Doing my recces I found a lone sequoia tree, and a curious double-trunked oak amid the yews and beeches. If God is to be found in the contemplation of landscape, the way landscapes, habits and memories alter affects our interaction with him as well. 

Today the wind blew and the rain fell, and only three of us braved the venture. I think I'll use this walk for a Forest Church later in the year, but I find myself reflecting that I often put material together that ends up not being used, and have to trust that in some way - divine providence, perhaps - it doesn't go to waste. It also struck me that that desire that the great lumber-box of things we have done and had to relinquish, whether creative efforts, loves and relationships, joys and sorrows, shouldn't go to waste either, has been perhaps more of a driving force in impelling me to investigate faith than I've realised. 

I joke that the great thing about the movies of The Lord of the Rings is that nobody has to read the books again, but I do like the walking rhyme Frodo sings near the end. I thought of it again as we traversed the secret paths on the hilltop.

Still round the corner there may wait
a new road or a secret gate
and though I oft have passed them by
the time will come at last when I 
shall take the hidden paths that run
west of the Moon, east of the Sun.

Offering

Fr Donald sat with me saying Evening Prayer. At the moment, the Common Worship Office book gives us the option of reciting words from the Epiphanytide hymn, 'O Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness'. It was written by John Monsell, the Tractarian priest who died after a fall while checking the building works at St Nicolas's church in Guildford, where he was incumbent, in 1875. At first he seemed to have suffered nothing more serious than a broken arm - no joke at 64, but not fatal - but it became clear that he'd undergone internal injuries which did end up carrying him out of this world. 'Fight the good fight' is another of his lyrics, a bit more foursquare Victorian than the Epiphany one; 'Truth in its beauty, and love in its tenderness/These are the offerings to lay at his shrine', the latter goes.

I find myself pondering the nature and worth of love, the core and heart of human life but sometimes so evanescent. Mr Monsell's hymn shows how it's useful to have some buttressing, some additional apparatus, to the Scriptures, to aid us as we navigate the sometimes cold waters of life, and the wisdom of Our Holy Mother the Church in putting the words of a Tractarian worthy into its daily meditations. A particular expression of love might last just a little time. But if it's real and sincere it's not wasted. What is the infant Christ going to do with the Magi's gifts, after all? It can be an offering, which God holds to his everlasting heart, and works with in ways we never know. We can hope.

Enquiring

Some years ago we devised a series of short videos to be used as the base material for what everyone tells you a church needs, a course of some kind for people who are new to the Christian faith or who want to ask questions about it. We didn't want to sign up to the mighty brand that is Alpha or use any of the others available. When we first did it, Marion the curate and Lillian the lay reader and I, one person took us up. The next attempt had no one at all. But this time we've garnered a feasible handful of souls. So last night they met in the church hall, I did the catering and set the video up, and Giselle the lay reader led the discussion. One person didn't show and there's a couple who couldn't attend but will come in other weeks. It must have been all right because the group, small as it was, kept talking for about 45 minutes.

What this placid picture doesn't reveal is the chaos after I managed to burn a jacket potato in the microwave. I intended using the kitchen oven anyway, but realised too late that I'd only turned its fan on and not the heat. I am not used to microwaves, as events revealed. I only cooked that last one because one of the previous batch had shrivelled to nothing and I wanted to be prepared in case our last attender did attend. At least we know the new fire alarms do work.  

Angry Gods

How did I get on the Little Watchman mailing list? I have no more idea than I have of who Little Watchman is. He sends me occasional emails with his short online sermons. The last one, which came into my inbox at just the right time he says ironically, is entitled ‘Is God Angry With You?’ The answer is very emphatically Yes, God is incandescently angry, and rightly. He’s told us what he wants of us, and we don’t do it. So, rage. But it’s all right, because Jesus (who Little Watchman insists on calling Yeshua) is the offering that makes God calm down. This is just how the writer puts it. Now, Substitutionary Atonement is no more than a standard, though to my thinking only partial, explanation of how the sacrifice of Christ changes our relationship with God, and there is a lot in Christianity that doesn’t quite make sense no matter how you describe it. But boil Substitutionary Atonement down this brutally, and what you end up isn’t a statement that includes the odd logical lacuna, but something that reads as so sick and insane you can understand why people go nowhere near a religion that promotes it.

Leaving aside most of the many questions or issues one could ask, how much sense does it make to think of God as angry? This is slightly separate from the Biblical language of the wrath of God, which strikes me as a description of a status rather than an emotion God might have: the estrangement the whole Creation, and most especially human beings, exists in as a result of the Fall, however one might characterise that event. A status in which all things find themselves, or, indeed, an experience humans, who are conscious of it as the mute creation is not, might have; but not something God feels. But anger is certainly ascribed to God in the Scriptures. Is it really anything like ours?

Our primary icon of what God is like is Jesus. He clearly experiences anger, just as he does sorrow, grief, joy, and even scorn. But because he is human, he experiences them in the way we do, with the exception that for him there is no admixture of sin in them; he is limited by time and space, so he goes through these feelings in sequence and not concurrently. Like us, he doesn’t seem to feel different things at once, even when his feelings are conflicted (as they are in Gethsemane). This is only what we would expect. But in his divine nature, God is interacting with the whole of creation, all the time, not just in the contemporary moment but eternally. This is nothing like the emotions we experience: it is so far from the emotions we experience that we ought be cautious about how we describe or think of it. The emotional life of God is perhaps as mysterious to us as the mechanics of the Trinity.

You might question why I am so keen to defuse this bomb of God being angry. I think it is probably because I draw my image of anger from the human anger I have experienced (and I don’t mean I have always been on the receiving end of it, either): contorted faces, shouting, raised hands. The suspicion is that the emotion is almost always tied up with that individual’s view of themselves and the effect their desires should have, and the physical effects of anger come from deep within our evolutionary history: they are designed to intimidate, to try to get our own way. Angry though he may have been from time to time, I can’t imagine Jesus in any of those states.

We might contrast anger with love. The Biblical imagery of God’s love – aside from the life of Christ – includes similes such as the sun shining and the rain falling. There are very human images, too, the mother with the child at her breast, the parent giving good gifts, and so on, but it’s clear that God’s love relates to those images metaphorically: it isn’t a complete parallel. The imagery of God’s anger should be taken the same way. To imagine God as an angry human, snarling and screaming because his will isn’t obeyed (rather than ‘a righteous judge, provoked all the day’ as Psalm 7 puts it) – even if that will is perfectly just and right – doesn’t help anyone.  

I see little sense in continuing with my unaccountable subscription to Little Watchman.

St Catherine at the British Library

I learned a variety of things from the 'Medieval Women' exhibition at the British Library yesterday. Among them was that there is a patron saint of ice skating (Lidwina of Schiedam), and what Margery Kempe thought the Devil smelled like (rather nicer than one might presume, as it turns out); that the last ruler of a Crusader state was a woman (Countess Lucia of Tripoli), that Margaret of Anjou had a pet lion, and that about a third of medieval medical practitioners were women (not all of them midwives). There were also two images of St Catherine: a small woodcut made by the sisters of the Bridgettine convent of Marienwater, and the terrible, charismatic painting on the Battel Retable, with its face scratched out like its sister of Maidstone. But there is more: like the other saints depicted on the Retable, she is surrounded by astrological graffiti, charms against witchcraft, and geometrical patterns whose significance remains obscure. She is a saint not merely maimed, but neutered, and recruited to some other cause.

St Catherine at the Trust

I met up with Professor Cotillion at the National Trust's Greys Court. The place was thronged with visitors, such that the car park was one in, one out. Eventually we got in, but took so long over lunch and attending to the needs of the Professor's lovely King Charles spaniels that the house was shut with only half an hour to go before all the patrons were expelled. Well, I'd paid for my ticket, so I snuck in the back door while nobody was looking and made my way around the (not all that inspiring) house in the wrong direction. On the stairs was an unexpected reward for my duplicity, a stained glass image of St Catherine. It looks 17th or 18th-century to me, but more than that I couldn't venture: German, to judge by the black-letter Gothic text? Big sword, I'll hazard that.

New Year Follies - Ingress Abbey, Greenhithe

This year I will carry on the approach of only posting here when there is something definitely worth posting about rather than as a discipline every other day, but although this isn't a church-related subject I nevertheless think it's a useful topic. It was only by accident that I very recently became aware of the follies of Ingress Abbey at Greenhithe in Kent, when someone on the Holy Wells LiberFaciorum page posted a picture of the Monk's Well. This was already mentioned in Ross Parish's book on Kentish wells, but I'd paid no attention to it and certainly not twigged that it formed part of a larger landscape of follies and garden design. So today I took the North Kent line out of London Bridge station and then the short walk to the park.

Ingress Abbey is an old estate going back to the 14th century, the current Tudor-Gothic house dating to 1833; between 1922 and the 19970s it was a nautical training college, but then fell into ruin. When the folly writers Headley & Meulenkamp came to the site, they found the park overgrown and the follies all but invisible, and worried about the whole place falling victim to redevelopment. This it did, but Crest Nicholson, who bought Ingress in 1998, restored the mansion and cleared out the grounds as well as building a sprawling new estate which strikes me as a sort of cut-price version of Poundbury in Dorset with its emphasis on the picturesque and individual. The current residents of the Abbey itself are British-Canadian oil and gas tycoon Sam Malin and his Cameroonian model and singer wife Irene Major: Mr Malin happens to be an Honorary Consul for Lithuania which is why the country's arms appear on the Abbey gates.

Following the Fastway road from the railway station, the first folly I came across was the Grotto, a set of shallow flint niches to the right of what was once the Abbey drive:

But this is just a very modest taster. Round the corner to the left in a close of modern dwellings, and down a flight of steps, is the very weird Cave of the Seven Heads. There are now only six of the eponymous Heads left, but very baleful they are indeed. The Cave itself has niches set into the flint interior. 

We then follow the road round to the east, and take a flight of steps, which brings us to the gate of the Abbey and the way into the Park. Here we find the glorious ruined arch known as the Grange and its associated tunnel and ancillary chambers; the Monk's Well, which does actually have a well in it; and a decorated flint seat, the Lover's Arch, looking out over the lawn of the Park. 

There are other structures around the Park which may have a more utilitarian origin - the blocked-up Georgian Tunnel, and what it variously called the Model Farm or the Limekiln:

Finally, to the east of the Park, in the middle of Palladian Circus, is a grass-covered mound topped by a flint needle capped with steel: you follow a spiral path to the top. This modern folly courtesy of the estate developers supposedly commemorates a Hermit's Cave which some say occupied the site (the mound was once taken to be Tudor, but it is not). 

Along what remains of Greenhithe High Street is what seems to be a former chapel flanked by single-bay cottages, all in Gothic style and faced in flints. It might have nothing at all to do with the Abbey estate, but it seems worth mentioning too. 

This is a very incongruous set of structures to find surrounded by modern housing on the south side of the Thames Estuary. The redevelopment of the estate makes it hard to envisage how all the follies related to one another, especially the Cave of the Seven Heads which is separated from the others by a busy road and faces west rather than inwards towards the rest of the composition: perhaps it dates to a different phase. The Heads have a distinctly Mannerist flavour to them and I wonder whether they were imported from elsewhere, rather than made especially for the purpose. The truth is that we don't know who was responsible for the follies: Historic England and most sources simply assume they date to 1833 and the rebuilding of the house, but Headley & Meulenkamp hedge their bets and I suspect they are right to do so. The structures look older to me. 

Is Ingress a Gothic Garden? I was reluctant to award this status to Deepdene, the last designed landscape which I thought might qualify for the title. I'm more inclined to look favourably on Ingress. There seems to be a genuine response here to the melancholy potential of topography which binds the follies together, rather than scattering them at random around a site. The Park originates in a quarry whose use goes back to Roman times, and the towering chalk cliffs still loom picturesquely through the trees, so whoever was responsible looked at the landscape they had inherited and saw the capacity for developing it in a Gothic direction. The Grange forms an entrance to the wild area to the rear of the house (I suspect the tidy lawn is a bit more tame than it once was), while the broad green to the front forms a contrast. 

Now, one folly I am kicking myself for missing is the Prioress's Tomb which apparently lies near the Grange. The story goes that this is the burial place of the heart of Jane Fane, last Abbess of Dartford who owned Ingress when Dartford Priory was dissolved in 1539, and that she cursed bad King Henry and all the subsequent owners of Ingress to come to ruin. This is quite something to decide to call attention to when you are building follies on your estate. One local resident even photographed a supposed White Lady weeping at the Lovers Arch seat: could she be Dame Jane herself? If Ingress was not designed as a Gothic Garden, I think it probably is now.