The Hearth of Mopsus

More Sourness!

2012-02-17T21:18:00.004Z

I got this email yesterday from the Bishop's media officer.

"Dear XXXXX,

Bishop XXXXXX is aware that the Queen's speech at Lambeth Palace last night was very warmly received, and commends it to us as an affirmation of the part the Church of England plays in contemporary Britain:

"Your Grace, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Prince Philip and I are delighted to be with you today to pay tribute to the particular mission of Christianity and the general value of faith in this country.

This gathering is a reminder of how much we owe the nine major religious traditions represented here. They are sources of a rich cultural heritage and have given rise to beautiful sacred objects and holy texts, as we have seen today.

Yet these traditions are also contemporary families of faith. Our religions provide critical guidance for the way we live our lives, and for the way in which we treat each other. Many of the values and ideas we take for granted in this and other countries originate in the ancient wisdom of our traditions. Even the concept of a Jubilee is rooted in the Bible.

Here at Lambeth Palace we should remind ourselves of the significant position of the Church of England in our nation’s life. The concept of our established Church is occasionally misunderstood and, I believe, commonly under-appreciated. Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.

It certainly provides an identity and spiritual dimension for its own many adherents. But also, gently and assuredly, the Church of England has created an environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith to live freely. Woven into the fabric of this country, the Church has helped to build a better society – more and more in active co-operation for the common good with those of other faiths.

This occasion is thus an opportunity to reflect on the importance of faith in creating and sustaining communities all over the United Kingdom. Faith plays a key role in the identity of many millions of people, providing not only a system of belief but also a sense of belonging. It can act as a spur for social action. Indeed, religious groups have a proud track record of helping those in the greatest need, including the sick, the elderly, the lonely and the disadvantaged. They remind us of the responsibilities we have beyond ourselves.

Your Grace, the presence of your fellow distinguished religious leaders and the objects on display demonstrate how each of these traditions has contributed distinctively to the history and development of the United Kingdom. Prince Philip and I wish to send our good wishes, through you, to each of your communities, in the hope that – with the assurance of the protection of our established Church – you will continue to flourish and display strength and vision in your relations with each other and the rest of society."

Now, the Bishop is my Father in Christ to whom I owe due and canonical obedience, to say nothing of the Queen. Nevertheless, I'm afraid I sent a message back saying that, in so far as it describes the position of the Church of England now, Her Majesty may be speaking no more than the truth, but in historical terms, that "environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith" was not graciously granted by the Established Church, but carved out in the teeth of its occasionally violent opposition. I refrained from stating that the Supreme Governor was talking out of her (doubtless very nice) hat which was my first thought. The news that the Church of England has a duty to protect the free exercise of other faiths would have had every Archbishop of Canterbury until perhaps the great Michael Ramsey falling right off the Throne of St Augustine in shock.

Bothering God

2012-02-13T19:30:00.003Z

It's not a surprise that Heresy Corner has been discussing the ban on saying prayers as part of the agenda of local authority meetings. Along with other local clergy, I've led the prayers at the start of Hornington Town Council meetings on a couple of occasions and couldn't actually remember whether they were part of the formal agenda or not. A congregation member who's an ex-councillor recently confirmed it for me: they aren't, but were quite intentionally put before the formal calling-to-order of the meeting when the practice of praying publicly was revived some years ago. It's a moot point, though: prayers only occur when the Mayor has been led in and the mace put in its place, even if attendance is only recorded from the end of the prayers onwards.

I feel conflicted about leading prayers on these occasions. I'm very aware that there is, let's say, a possibility that, even if none of the councillors positively objects to being present, their degrees of devotion may differ. I therefore find myself framing the petitions in such a way that, if you are serious about offering the business of the Council to God, you can use the time in that way, or if (the Lord forfend) you're indifferent about doing so, you can let the words wash over you. It's not exactly an intense demonstration of faith - not that I am very prone to intense demonstrations of faith. Would the prayers be more genuine, the faith more profound, if the Christian councillors were praying privately on their own without the formality of the meeting and the intervention of a professional?

The Hornington prayers were instituted by the Lib Dems on the Council. I wonder if Dr Evan Harris knows?

'Through the Narrow Gate', by Karen Armstrong

2012-02-12T20:35:00.002Z

I've just finished reading Karen Armstrong's memoir of her time as a nun in a restrictive Roman Catholic order in the 1960s. A very good read indeed - though given Ms Armstrong's less than fastidious approach to religious history you must wonder, all allowances being made for the novelistic style, whether everything really did happen quite like that. The contrast between the etiolated emotional life of the convent and the warm, supportive community of women students the former nun has entered at the end of the book is a little too neat and tidy. What emerges most strongly is the bizarre attempt such orders made to live entirely in the head, to the extent of repeatedly ignoring what were clearly physical illnesses (not just Karen Armstrong's, though years later her fainting fits were traced to temporal lobe epilepsy) on the grounds that the sisters concerned were hysterical or not being tough enough. 'If seven years in the order taught me anything', Ms Armstrong states, 'it was the relative feebleness of the human will' - a lesson which should have been a fundamental assumption in any Christian spiritual venture. Vatican II got shot of a lot of things which would have been better retained, but the excessive and very unChristian Platonism of the religious orders is not one of them.

St Catherine Commission

2012-02-12T20:19:00.002Z

I keep meaning to add things to this blog, but the mood keeps passing and I forget what I wanted to say.

This, however, should have up ages ago. My friend Cylene the Goth is an artist, and creates various things under the name of Zoe Monday. Her blog is locatable here.

I commissioned Cylene to produce an image of St Catherine. She settled for watercolour and, as it turned out, gold leaf on a heavy laid paper. I wasn't sure what she would come out with as part of the point of the exercise was leaving it entirely for her to work her imagination on without any specifications from me. I would not, to be honest, have been surprised by something a little bloody and extreme, but as it turned out the treatment Cylene gave Catherine was very 'straight' and classical. 'I just kept thinking of strength and grace', she said; so the only hint of martyrdom is the tiny line of blood around the saint's neck. The halo forms the wheel (which I like) and you also have the martyr's sword and palm. I haven't found a frame and a place to put it yet and must get on with it (perhaps when this year's chutney is out of the way ...).

Turkish Coffee

2012-01-31T08:09:00.009Z

This is something nice. On Saturday I hosted a small get-together of the London Goths at the Bridge Coffee House in Shoreditch. It was visited by a friend of ours not so long ago, and the pictures on her blog were so enticing I decided to organise a little soirée on an official basis. There were ten of us in the end, and it was a lovely couple of hours spent talking, sipping coffee and nibbling on cake.

The Bridge has been open for a couple of years and the decor is quite astonishing, a mixture of vintage paraphernalia and Turkish harem chic - drapes at the windows, faux-Deco statues holding up faux-Tiffany lamps, gigantic vases, tables smothered in heavy brocade, gilded sofas and glittering mirrors. It was no great surprise to find there, as well as ourselves and the sort of good-looking if ill-dressed young people who tend to inhabit the area (if you're over 30 in Shoreditch you really stick out), a bewhiskered young gentleman in tweed and a victory-rolled forties girl in a dinnerplate hat, yet more proof if proof were needed that Goths and vintage-freaks are often strangely drawn to the same sort of things. 'Just a shame it's in Shoreditch', commented Ms Soomarah.

Sorts of Anger

2012-01-31T08:09:00.006Z

God has had plenty of rage and frustration directed his way from Swanvale Halt lately. Just after Christmas a devout and lovely lady from the congregation, who's waited nearly two years for a knee operation which has been delayed and delayed owing to infections and problems, was rushed into hospital with what turned out to be a ruptured intestine. This was itself probably due to the painkillers she's been taking at terrifically high levels for months and months to cope with her knee and back. For a while it looked as though she was about to die and I spent four hours with her on New Year's Day in expectation of that happening. But she's still here, now tracheotomised and ileostomised and heaven knows what else, somehow keeping going. I had this in my mind when I preached on the Sunday before last about the injustice of things and the uselessness of some forms of comfort, which people seemed to appreciate. As St Teresa said, 'Lord, no wonder you have so many enemies, when this is the way you treat your friends'.

The other day I heard Mad Trevor ranting and shouting in the church while I was in the hall next door. There's no point intervening when he's like this, and I don't have anything to contribute anyway, so I let him get on with it: I suspect spiritually it's rather positive. What he was saying wasn't even especially mad. He has been somewhat persecuted by life, has had a rough time of things, and, it seems to me, has every right to be angry.

Over at Heresy Corner the Heresiarch's correspondents (including myself)have been commenting on philosopher Alain de Botton's idea for a 'Temple of Atheism' in the City and his theories as to why atheists of his generation are rather less angry and strident than their older fellows, such as Dr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens. As one pointed out, Dr Dawkins isn't even that angry, and pointed us towards this post by Greta Christina, who really is.

I could make niggling points about bits of it, but, in broad terms, I find it unanswerable. There is so very, very much for Christians to be ashamed of historically, and to guard against in the way they try to think now, and any sense of Christian entitlement to special treatment from a largely non-Christian polity is grotesque.

I sometimes wonder that I am not angry about the right things. All my moods of anger seem essentially selfish, arising from a sense of my own entitlement, of jealousy or wounded amour propre. I have discovered more and more of it thanks to the process of being a priest. But apart from that I'm almost excessively easygoing, very prone to making sympathetic noises to people in bad situations without being able to cut through the emotion and visualise the process that leads to the bad situation, the structure, the relationships of power and injustice. Christ was angry on occasion. Perhaps I need to work on it.

Times of Change

2012-01-31T08:07:00.004Z

Nearly forty years ago, one of my illustrious predecessors at Swanvale Halt embarked on a reordering of the church, removing the chancel screen, bringing the altar forward, and moving some of the pews so that they faced inward towards it - the sort of thing that many churches at that time and subsequently did. The changes never went any further because Swanvale Halt has never had a lot of cash sloshing around, unlike Lamford, for instance.

Then, two years ago just before I arrived, a longstanding member of the church died and left the church her house, a one-bed 1920s bungalow she'd lived in since 1946. It was just a shell, but we sold it and raised a tidy sum of cash. Now we could begin thinking about the 'final' stage of those changes begun in the 1970s. The floor, the atrocious floor with its twelve different materials ranging from cracked Victorian tiles to battered timber boards stuck down with tape, to the beige carpet all Anglican churches are obliged to have some of, could go, along with the dreadful glaring lights which are so inaccessible we have to wait until more than half of them have blown to justify the cost of bringing in an electrician, and the tatty, viciously uncomfortable pews which were, so the story goes, secondhand when the church was built and which, the church clearers tell me, are 'of no commercial value'.

It's taken since then, but last Friday I put up the statutory notices inviting the good folk of the parish to make comments, objections and representations to the Diocesan Chancellor about the plans. Two years of sketches and diagrams, of berating the architect for being an idle git who spends most of his time in France, and of marvelling when you discover that 'Yes, we have all the information we need to make a decision' actually means, when used by the diocesan powers-that-be, 'No, we don't have the information'. Two years of thinking something is going to happen at a particular point, then having to reschedule not once but three times.

The notices remain up for four weeks, and then, presuming no serious objections are made, we apply to the Chancellor for a faculty for the work. He doesn't usually deny permission once the Diocesan authorities have recommended approval. Then, hopefully early in March, we begin, vacating the church to the gentle attentions of the builders before moving back in some time early in June.

It's terrifying. The vision of a clean-looking, more efficient, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing building is enticing, but once the first pews come out there's no going back. I know it will all be better, but a mere two years in to the job and I'm already more comfortable than I was with the existing structure, its quirks and difficulties.

I was in the office writing out the notices on Friday and one of the older members of the church was there, who remembers not just my predecessor who carried out the first reordering, but the rector before him, too. 'Thank goodness', she said, 'I was cleaning the other day and thought, This all looks so tatty. It's time it was done.'

Procedure

2012-01-22T21:35:00.002Z

A story the Rural Dean told me.

It's a meeting of the Rural Deans with the two Archdeacons. One R.D. is just about to move out of his parish. He's a very Low Churchman who inherited a rather more Catholic church.

R.D.: Before I go I want to get rid of a load of vestments. I never used them, I just wear a suit. What should I do, do you think?

Archdeacon: You need to apply for a faculty.

R.D.: Great, who do I apply to for that?

Archdeacon: Me.

R.D.: Right, and who do I send it to?

Archdeacon: Me. And then I reject it.

Trying to Work It Out

2012-01-09T18:49:00.005Z

I write after having anointed Mad Trevor again only to have him storming out of the church once more cursing me and the whole Church. So a lot of good that did. We got off on the wrong foot when he turned up, to be given prayer-for-healing-with-anointing, demanding I sprinkle him with water as well to break a curse. I refused because that wasn't what we agreed to do and the rite of anointing doesn't include sprinkling with water. It would be easier to give him whatever he wants, but pastorally wrong. So he went around the church shouting to God to take the curse off him and put it on me before 'blessing' the font and using the water in that. After the rite of anointing, I gently raised the possibility that his 'voices' are his own thoughts amplified by his illness and that, while they may go away eventually, the thoughts never will and he would be happier not expecting God to do this. Could I perhaps speak to his doctor and organise a case conference for him? 'No, I don't want you talking to my doctor, the doctors are ignorant and evil, science is lies. I am not ill.' He asked for a key to the church so he could come in and pray when he liked and I refused. 'This church is shutting me away from God, you and all the wicked servants will be punished by God, I can't believe you've treated me so badly since I've been here.' I didn't raise the hours I've spent trying to talk through his problems, including the time I helped him fill out entries for internet dating sites that he then abandoned two days later; the £200 I gave him from my own pocket to buy a new cooker he then spent on a keyboard; the urgent appointment last week I arranged for him with the CAB to talk through his debts which he never turned up to 'because I was too busy'. Sorry; I'm just venting.

Mad Trevor now has a friend, Mad Terry, who is superficially more sensible but is perhaps an even bigger fantasist. He wants me to exorcise Trevor as well. Both of them are quite talented musicians in their own way and have an idea about breaking into the music business and Mad Terry quotes various people he says he knows and has worked with. It all sounds nearly plausible, and on the thinking that God's hand might be somewhere in it, I even had a small commissioning service for their venture before Christmas, and persuaded some congregation members to join in. But then Terry talks about marrying Tamara Ecclestone ('I'm meeting her tomorrow') and you think; hang on, 27-year old millionaire heiress and model; balding, overweight, unemployed early-50s musician with mental issues? Does this compute? Do you actually look in the mirror when you shave? 'Fantasist' is a kind non-Christian way of characterising his thinking; an unkinder word might be 'liar'. The truth is that when Terry tells you something is happening, for instance that he has a music contract or is meeting Paul Weller or test-driving a £20,000 car on the basis of the advance he's getting from the publisher, none of this is actually happening in the ordinary sense: he thinks God has told him it will happen, and so he talks about it as though it was going to.

'Why do you think this affects you so much?' asks my S.D. I suppose because it presses all my most uncomfortable buttons about what I believe concerning God, truth and reality. 'You don't realise that most people don't think about things philosophically', he warned me. 'You try to fit everything into some sort of rational structure. Most people just have a few phrases and ideas that they don't examine or think about, they're just enough to help them cope'. This is perhaps the key to being a bit more forgiving and relaxed about Mad Trevor and Terry, and to stop trying to incorporate them into my own world-view. They're two lonely, unfulfilled middle-aged men with a lot of problems wrapping themselves in fantasy to cope with the fact that their lives are crap. Sad really, rather than threatening.

Getting Together Again

2012-01-09T18:49:00.003Z

Given the shudders that the annual ecumenical service at Hornington Parish Church tends to induce in me, there was bitter irony in the fact that it fell to me to organise it this year. Even more bitter was the fact that the first Sunday in the year, when this traditionally takes place, was New Year's Day this occasion. It was an additional factor in not going to attend the final outing of Vagabonds at The Minories the evening before - even if, after my Dad's death, I had wanted to.

Anyway. It is accepted that the service takes the form of a Communion, and provided the URC church manages to provide its non-alcoholic wine (rather than the Ribena we had to make do with in 2010) it's not too overtly offensive: we have to struggle with loaf bread rather than sensible wafers, but you have to compromise. I insisted that, in honour of the day, the theme should be 'bearing the Name of Jesus' but managed to get the Circumcision of the Lord in by using the proper Collect for the feast. The music, after a certain degree of argument with the music group, was pretty acceptable and included some good traditional hymns to top and tail the service, rather than anything that might be converted into a Nazi rally like usual. There were a couple of hairy moments when the bread and 'wine' refused to arrive on the altar because nobody had thought to bring them, and when all the clergy waited forlornly at the end for a crucifer to lead us out and again nobody turned up. But it was all ok. AND I don't have to do it again for years.

I wore my old gold set. 'That's the first time I've seen a maniple in 50 years', said the URC minister. 'It's the first time I've seen one in 74 years' put in one of my colleagues from Binpont up the hill. Who is 74.

Carping

2012-01-09T18:48:00.004Z

The best part of my Dad's funeral was that we had 'Walkin' to New Orleans' by Fats Domino played as the coffin was being carried out. Strangely that was one of the couple of Fats Domino tracks I already had clattering around in my collection: now it'll always be associated with my Dad. It was also good that the undertakers took us a long, windy route through Parkstone on the way to the church, past his parents' house, the recreation ground where he and Mum first met, and other places. I thought it was a bit gruelling at the time, but looking back on it is actually rather comforting.

The worst part was the minister. At least he wasn't the 'crem cowboy' who'd taken my uncle's funeral, but he was cracking on a bit then and may well not be around himself now. The chap who performed my Dad's obsequies was a somewhat offhand Ulsterman who preached not on the Bible text that I'd chosen but on The Lord Is My Shepherd which was one of the hymns. The argument was: the Psalm that hymn was based on was written by King David. King David was a great sinner. He found peace and hope in his relationship with the Good Shepherd, and so must we. 'We must do business with the Good Shepherd', he said several times, having come up with a line he liked. This makes it sound all very reasonable, but a) it was a disquisition on substitutionary atonement which is dodgy ground when you're taking a funeral service for somebody who never 'made a commitment to Jesus as their personal Lord and Saviour' in their earthly life, b) it was something he'd clearly learned long ago, c) he hadn't got it written down and so wasn't entirely careful about phraseology ('If you're past your sell-by date you'll know what I mean'; 'David committed adultery. David was a murderer'), d) it was utterly impersonal and e) it was awfully long. The whole demeanour was of someone who didn't want to be there and thought he was basically wasting his breath exhorting his audience to repentance, but thought he had to.

As indeed he was really. In the limousine on the way back Mum asked me what I thought and I said I wouldn't have been so preachy. 'I thought that', said my sister, 'But I have to admit I'd turned off after a couple of minutes'. 'Some of them', put in the undertaker from the front passenger seat, 'do like the sound of their own voices'. We were surprised she could hear us.

I don't know, perhaps I do it all wrong - perhaps I should be completely ignoring the deceased and whatever the bereaved might be feeling, and trying to convert people by making them feel bad rather than loved. You may detect a degree of scepticism in my tone. Thank God for Fats Domino or I would have been left thinking I'd prefer a secular funeral. Perhaps I still would.

Christmas and New Year

2012-01-09T18:31:00.002Z

It's been a long time since I've added anything here; my brain has been too addled. Of course Christmas at Swanvale Halt was as busy as you might expect, in fact busier as there were extra events over the festive season: the local secondary school and a nursery group both requested Christmas services for the first time, and I was asked over to a strange little estate chapel a couple of miles away to lead their Christmas service, which takes place on the Thursday after Christmas and involves a walk down a muddy lane to sing carols to sheep. Unfortunately I seem to have done this well so I will probably have to do it next year too. Then on New Year's Day there was the ecumenical service at Hornington, which I'll post about separately.

All of this liturgy was sadly overshadowed by the death of my Dad on December 28th. You will know he's been ill for some time, and had a place booked in a local care home. In the week before he was due to go there, he became increasingly poorly and on the Friday had three successively more serious falls, finally hitting his head and blacking out. Once in hospital he became unresponsive and drowsy, and there not being any other clear cause despite lumbar punctures and brain scans the doctors diagnosed a urinary infection. We thought he was becoming dehydrated but they have maintained this wasn't the case until Boxing Day when he was put on a drip. He never recovered, rapidly declined, and by the 27th it was clear he was dying. I was there, joining my mother and sister, from about 1.30 for about twelve hours as Dad gradually got weaker and finally died just after 1am. It's a terrible, piteous thing to see someone die, not an experience I've had before and not one I want to repeat soon.

Mum was faced with the prospect of a rather quick funeral a week later or waiting three weeks, so went for the early option - waiting would have been purgatorial. It was at St John's, Parkstone, where they were married. As well as family and local friends, Dr Bones and Miss T both made it down from the Oxford region to the service, which is more tribute than anything else to what a lovely man my Dad was.

I can't be sad that Dad has avoided a long, horrible decline - at least, no further than he'd already got - and having to go into care. His life was no fun for the last six months. But even though I've been losing him for some time it's strange that he's no longer actually around. I still feel rather numb and my feelings are very difficult to put into words. He ought to have had a better hand dealt him, is what keeps coming back to me.

Think of the Children

2011-12-02T20:14:00.002Z

I am gradually collecting all the instalments of the famous Haggerston Catechism composed by Fr HA Wilson in the years around the War and published in seven parts in later years. They aren't very common as they were printed on floppy paper, and having bought the sections that survive in reasonable numbers I'm now down to the rarer ones; the volume on The Lord's Prayer is on Abebooks at the moment for £90 ...

The striking thing about Fr Wilson's catechism classes was that they comprised a two-year introduction to the Christian faith for children, spread out over a full 120 sessions. There was an assumption, probably in those days not completely unrealistic, that children would be there on most of those weeks. They also must have been pretty attentive for any of it to go in.

We have an after-school club at Swanvale Halt that runs for an hour on Wednesday afternoons in term time. There are never more than a dozen children (whereas it's clear that Fr Wilson expected many more than that at his catechism classes) and we start with a paper-based activity, have a story, craft activity, run-around game and prayer at the end. Imparting any information to the children, even in the form of a story, is like pulling teeth. Getting them to be quiet long enough to get a word in edgeways is sometimes an achievement, as it was this week. They clearly don't think of our sessions as 'school' in any sense. None of them are maliciously rude, they're just enfuriatingly silly and it's difficult to know how to approach it: we adults continually comiserate with one another after it's all over that 'we never behaved like that with grown-ups' and therefore I don't think we know what to do. A conversation with the headmistress, who commands the entire school in whispers, may be in order!

Reflecting

2011-12-02T20:01:00.003Z

We have a new colleague in the clergy team locally who is looking after the daughter church of Hornington Parish Church. She led Morning Prayer the other day, on the weekly occasion when we gather together to say the Office rather than doing so in our respective churches. We read the unwieldy wodges of Scripture that the Lectionary foists on us daily, and our new colleague asked if we'd like to share any reflections on them, not something we're used to. There was silence and to kick things off she made a very proper, pious statement about trust in God the connection of which to the Old Testament reading I couldn't quite see. I then said I'd found that particular reading completely incomprehensible until I remembered how a New Testament passage had taken up the imagery. The Rector of Hornington commented how the reference to trees had made him think of Christmas trees which were much on his mind.

Perhaps it's because, alone among the other clergy locally, I am single that I reach the point where I can't stand the sound of my own voice. There are moments when I'm attempting to lead prayers, for instance, when disgust at the appallingly trite agglomeration of reorganised Christian clichés that's coming out of my mouth threatens to overwhelm me completely. 'Oh for God's sake, shut up', I want to tell myself. That's one of the reasons why I like the Office, because they are not my words, I'm not constantly having to produce stuff, but can just listen to God for a while. Does anyone else ever feel the same? Perhaps I may find out.

Electro Swung

2011-11-28T20:21:00.005Z

A few friends of mine from the Goth world attended White Mischief a couple of nights before Halloween. White Mischief has been a predominately Steampunk event since 2008 but the last outing had (so I'm led to understand) a considerable dollop of music that has come to be called Electro-Swing, some of which, some of which I stress, I find myself quite fond of as well.

How people come across new genres and styles is always interesting. In my case I was sojourning with my parents over Christmas in 2008 and caught the festive edition of Jonathan Creek which featured in a garden party scene a trio of close-harmony singing ladies in vintage hairstyles. These were the Puppini Sisters whose Myspace profile I swiftly looked up. The song they were singing was 'Spooky', and they also did (and do) both covers of modern pop and classic songs from the swing and big-band era in a fairly staightforward style - though their version of 'Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B' is so fast, a full minute quicker than the Andrews Sisters', that some vintage fans can't take it. Some of their stuff, however, came under the category they themselves, lacking any other label at the time, referred to as 'swingpunk': music that took a swing-era idiom and updated it with modern rhythm and production. 'Crazy in Love', with its initial sample of 'Puttin' on the Ritz', was a prime example. Eventually I got around to buying a couple of their albums on Amazon, which, in its helpful way, suggested I have a look at White Mink/Black Cotton as well.
Obviously what caught my eye was the reference to the iconic ER Richée photograph of Louise Brooks, 'Kansas Cleopatra'. What caught my ear when I actually listened to it, however, was a number of pieces that, like 'Crazy in Love', melded vintage music samples (and sometimes more sophisticatedly musical motifs played in a vintage style) with contemporary instrumentation. In particular I found myself rather adoring Gry and FM Einheit's 'Princess Crocodile' and 'Jolie Coquine' by Caravan Palace. I now know that White Mink/Black Cotton was crucial in consolidating and spreading the whole idea of Electro-Swing beyond a few experimental tracks and turning it into a genre.

Of course it's begun taking off hugely and feeds into the burgeoning vintage scene as well. A lot of electro-swing is heavy and strongly rhythmic, and can be seen as a close relative of house or hiphop, but Caravan Palace and other bands do play real instruments. I've just come across Michael Biboulakis and Nina Zeitlin's 'Is That Too Much To Ask' which, as well as the heavy beat, features a clarinet, bass and trumpet/. The closer an interest you take in the music of the past, of course, the bigger the temptation is to adopt other aspects of the past's styles too, especially when there are pre-existing organs such as The Chap encouraging you to do so. Have a look at Caravan Palace's video for their second single, 'Suzy', to see how they succumbed. It's rather gorgeous.

'After an evening of Steampunk and Electro-Swing it's good to get back to Goth basics', commented a friend on Facebook after coming home from White Mischief, linking one feels with some relief to an online deathrock radio station. Other Goths can't get enough of the stuff; another friend talks of 'rescuing electro-swing from the house crowd'. I suspect it's the genre's tongue-in-cheek quality which appeals so strongly to the mischievous side of Goth as well as its creativity and references to the past, and elides very smoothly into other varieties of dark-tinged music such as Sepiachord and Dark Cabaret: compare both the sound and look of The Scarring Party performing 'No More Room' and the Diablo Swing Orchestra, for instance.

On its edges Electro-Swing goes very poppy, and shades into some of Caro Emerald's brilliant output, most notably 'That Man' which I've even heard being played on Radio Co-Op in the local Swanvale Halt branch; or The Correspondents who, I'm afraid, are slightly too soft for my tastes. This is bound to make Goth fondness for it a controversial matter in the scene. But we've been there before, and will be again.

Against Nature (1884), by JK Huysmans

2011-11-19T20:55:00.004Z

I've just finished Against Nature, the great decadent classic novel which Oscar Wilde lifted into the narrative of Dorian Gray as the pestilential book which opens up to Dorian a world of sin and decay. I actually found it rather fun. Le Comte Des Esseintes's efforts to alleviate his boredom through obscure Latin literature, perfume-making and liqueurs, obstructed all the while by migraines and a gippy tummy, are amusing, bordering on the hilarious, provided you don't mind the overwrought prose (which the introduction assures us is an attempt to imitate Huysmans's French). It all seems faintly ludicrous - although real-life eccentrics have been known to go to parallel lengths in the pursuit of their enthusiasms - and Huysmans packs his anti-hero off back to Paris for a more sensible way of life at the end, though how well he will take to it is doubtful. A charming little confection.

Martyrs in Hackney

2011-11-18T21:03:00.005Z

I thought I was never going to get to the Elevator Gallery, with only 20 minutes to go before it closed and White Post Lane in Hackney Wick winding darkly down from the station. Finally there was an A4 notice pointing the way and, just as I was again despairing, another which meant I did, finally, locate Unit 9 on the Hamlet Industrial Estate and the exhibition I'd come to see, having had to miss the opening night a few days before. 'Martyrs' looks at the theme of martyrdom and suffering for a cause - or just suffering - with especial reference to some of the more extreme stories of Christian saints. Some of the work on show was cathartic mental-illness art, all very well but nothing technically special. The highlights were the treatments of saints produced by Consuelo Giorgi whose lurid photography decorates the exhibition poster, and by Matteo Alfonsi. Their styles are very different but as both are Italian Goths you can guess where they're coming from.

Consuelo's images are ultra-glossy, brightly-coloured photographs with an awful lot of blood in them: the poster has St Apollonia in the process of having her tongue cut out by an unseen torturer whose arms reach from behind her. There is a rather witty statement in her picture of St Cecilia: Cecilia is patron saint of music and musicians, supposedly not-quite decapitated in a botched execution and left dying for three days, and if you go to the catacombs in Rome you can see the statue of her laid in the position she died in. Consuelo poses her Cecilia in the same way ... only lying on a piano with music ready. Matteo's saints are depicted in a strange, stylised pop-art style and look like they've stepped out of Slimelight moments before. I like his St Apollonia with her halo tipped with torn-out teeth; the only problem is that he's seen a pair of what he thinks are torturer's pincers and doesn't realise they are sugar nippers, but then I don't suppose he's ever worked in a small local museum with a whole box of the wretched things.

Despite all the blood and dismemberment, like the Catholic iconography they draw on, these Gothic treatments of saintly martyrs don't really involve any real pain; pain is hard to depict in any case, but these ladies (there is one St Sebastian in the show) are serenely beyond physical feeling. I'm not sure that's what happens to genuine saints.

We Shall Remember (most of the time)

2011-11-14T21:48:00.004Z

At 9.20am on Sunday I opened up the computer file containing my Remebrance Sunday sermon, to find there were only two paragraphs of sermon there. God alone knows where the rest of it was; I'm now unsure I even wrote it. Consequently I had to busk it from a quarter-page of scribbled notes, not that it seemed to damage the occasion too much.

As I've said before Swanvale Halt doesn't have an outdoor war memorial and some of the congregation (including the children who are in uniformed organisations) were away taking part in the great civic extravaganza in Hornington. That notwithstanding, we had 100 people there yesterday morning; I don't know where they came from. Actually I do and none of them were there solely for Remembrance Sunday, though I've no doubt people made a special effort to turn out. Very good, anyway, and a good few children to lead our Act of Remembrance complete with Last Post. The organist played Crown Imperial as the recessional which really gave the instrument a going-over. Jocelyn's organ-ising always sounds magnificent but it only ever blows a gasket when he's playing it, too.

Going, Going, Goth

2011-11-14T21:29:00.002Z

I was at Reptile again on Saturday evening, and it was quiet. There were a number of other things going on that night which diverted people elsewhere, but it was noticeable that the Minories was remarkably less busy than it was back in October, even taking into account the fact that I left early, as I always have to.

Somebody told me there that The Coven in Luton has closed, and another alternative rock night at a pub in, I think, Abingdon or somewhere that way is also coming to an end after fifty years as an off-centre music venue of one sort or another. Back in the capital, Vagabonds, another Goth night which has had a rocky time after moving from the very pleasant surroundings of the Barrowboy & Banker near London Bridge last year, is struggling on until New Year's Eve and then giving up too. The alternative scene waxes and wanes over time, and of course tough economic conditions also encourages a shake-out, but this is a lot to lose around the same point.

St Seiriol's Well, Penmon

2011-11-08T18:57:00.003Z

Here's something a bit nicer. On holiday in Wales I went to Penmon, on the eastern tip of Anglesey (or Ynys Mon as they insist nowadays), having wanted to go for a long while. This was the monastery of St Seiriol, one of those shadowy holy men of the Dark Ages who founded religious communities through the Celtic lands. It feels as though it takes a long while to get to, though Penmon isn't really all that isolated and Anglesey isn't all that rough. Before long there was a daughter settlement over on Puffin Island a mile or so out in the Irish Sea, and that must have been a bit more challenging, as though the monks felt life on the not-quite-mainland wasn't tough enough. The legend was that whenever the brothers fell out with each other a plague of mice would eat all their food, so perhaps Puffin Island was where they sent the specially fractious ones.

Today Penmon is an odd sort of place. You park in a rough car park and a rotund cove in a beanie hat toddles out of a hut to collect your fee. All around are the monastic relics, including ruins, a very grand dovecote, and the church with some more modern cottages built onto it around a little yard, and beyond them remains of quarry workings and derelict houses. Then there's a little path which takes you round the corner towards St Seiriol's Well.

This is one of the loveliest religious landscapes I've ever visited. The rock forms a natural enclosure, the well huddling beside them, and the remnants of what may be circular monastic cells scattered around. Were they the actual dwelling places of Seiriol himself and his early companions? Well, that may be wishful thinking - and certainly the well-house itself was substantially rebuilt in the 1700s - but it at least has the feel of those remote times. It is a bit neat and tidy, a bit like a theme park display of Dark Age monasticism, but there is a beautifully romantic sense of contact with antiquity. And, after all, St Seiriol did walk this greensward even if he may not have laid these precise stones.

Sad Day

2011-11-07T22:26:00.000Z

My dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease about two years ago and since then the progress of the disease has been shockingly rapid, although looking back we realise he had the first signs of confusion, of something not being right, eight years ago. Last May my parents came to visit and stay with me for a few days, managing to negotiate the train journey from Bournemouth (not having done such a trip for forty years or more); today my mum decided she couldn’t cope any longer, and has booked dad into a room at a local care home with every expectation that he will not be back again.

Of course she feels appallingly guilty, but there isn’t any realistic alternative. She can’t manage, I and my sister can’t do it either, live-in help wouldn’t work, and dad now needs someone watching him all day and night. At Beech House he won’t be able to hurt himself or damage anything, and can either sit or wander as he wants, which is all he does at home. We will be able to take him out on walks and as the GP told my mum, ‘your relationship will actually improve’.

My relationship with my dad has never been terribly close, and the shame is that as I’ve got to an age and state in my life that I feel I could perhaps have got to know him better, that’s no longer possible. Despite not being a believer he was so proud when I was ordained, and I will try to remember that. Last year when mum had an accident and I had to stay and look after dad for a week was I think when I came to terms with the state he was in, so now I have a degree of equilibrium about it.

Doubt only sets in when I think about something that can’t be answered, which is the question of what is actually going on in his mind. Now and again I can have a short conversation with him that seems to make sense, before confusion takes over again, but what does confusion mean? Is it simply an inability to express or process thought, or is he really unaware of who is around him or where he is? He certainly seems to have forgotten after a couple of days back home after his last period of respite care that he was ever away. What is it really like for him? He can’t tell us.

"Somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist"

2011-11-07T22:21:00.002Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2011/oct/24/richard-dawkins-video-interview

You read this headline and the first thought is how completely self-parodic it is. Then you reflect and think, well, you know what Dr D is driving at. Jesus is, in many ways, a great sceptic, a great questioner of tradition and observance, a rationalist. You can understand a degree of fellow-feeling the good Doctor might experience when he contemplates our Lord.

And then you think a third time. The trouble with the proposition of ‘Jesus the Sceptic’ is that, if that’s how he appears, that’s how the Church represents him, because the Church’s representation of Jesus is all we have. We only have the Bible stories to judge his 'intelligence' by, the same Bible stories that insist he was the Son of God and came back from the dead. As Christian scholars have generally accepted for some time, there simply is no ‘real’ Jesus who can be pitted against the Jesus of scripture and tradition – at least, none we have access to – quite apart from how silly it is even to imagine as a game lifting a human being out of their own time and context and dumping them in another one. Jesus, in atheist terms, isn’t alive today and couldn’t be, because if he was he wouldn’t be the Jesus we think we know. But Dr D, nothwithstanding his other virtues, does have a simplistic approach to anything outside his field – especially, as here, historiography and philosophy.

On Not Being Able to Tell

2011-11-07T22:20:00.001Z

The Family Service always worries me: even if the subject is heavy the children need to be involved in some way and it helps if it’s something people can’t remember us doing twenty times before. The games or illustrations usually involve me making something rather frantically on a Saturday afternoon after a trip to the art shop in Hornington.
This Sunday I began, got a couple of children up to the front to help me, and realised having got part of the way through that I’d left part of the stuff at home. This was after having had to start the service late because I thought I’d sent the reader the text being read, and discovering I hadn’t. There was no rescuing it: I had to send the youngsters back to their places and carry on as best I could. The congregation found my discomfiture very amusing – ‘It makes you human’ was the kind remark though when Mad Trevor referred to my talk, a very sketchy and knockabout take on the history of interdenominational relationships, as ‘the entertainment’, I felt I should have torn my alb. I really don’t like the idea of worship, even the more informal and unstructured kind, as ‘entertainment’ rather than something which directs us towards God.
Yet during the talk I mentioned how all human organisations can split and divide, from political parties to knitting circles, and how the fact that churches usually manage to keep going despite all the differences between their members is little short of a miracle. One lady told me her parents were nearly in tears having just begun re-attending their own church after a particularly acrimonious and horrendous falling-out. There’s no predicting where and how what you say is going to hit.

Hawksmoor (1985) by Peter Ackroyd

2011-11-06T21:57:00.003Z

I recently finished reading Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, a narrative woven around the figure of 18th-century architect Nicholas Hawksmoor and the very strange churches he built in the fast-growing London of the early 1700s. Poet Iain Sinclair had speculated ten years earlier that the Hawksmoor churches formed an occult pattern in the London landscape pointing to hidden and dark meanings. Peter Ackroyd took this idea and turned the historical Hawksmoor into Nicholas Dyer, secret Satanist intent on encoding his beliefs into the churches he was commissioned to build and consecrating each one with a blood sacrifice. Meanwhile, in our own time, the novel shows detective Nicholas Hawksmoor investigating a series of incomprehensible murders centred on those same churches and gradually becoming unhinged by his findings. Hawksmoor is an elusive, nightmare-like story in which nothing is really resolved, no answer provided for the mysterious interweaving and mirroring of times and events, and the only information we are provided with is that there is an unseen pattern behind the visible world which shapes what happens into recurring forms. The book is thin on plot, heavy on atmosphere, but moves compulsively towards a doom-laden conclusion. It reads very well, in a horrible way; a love-letter to Fate.

She Did Down By The Water. With The Sticks

2011-10-31T17:04:00.004Z

This is almost the only picture I managed to take at the Albert Hall last night which actually shows any features. I was wedged right up in the circle to see Polly Harvey perform. It was her first time there too ...

Nearly twenty years have passed since first hearing 'Sheela-na-Gig' on John Peel's Radio 1 show, and this is, amazingly, the first time I've ever seen her perform. I only managed it this time thanks to the good offices of Minerva McHenry from the LGMG who alerted me to the concert - and then I could only get one ticket! Sorry Min, and thank you.

The bulk of the set was of course extracts from Let England Shake but there was plenty from the back catalogue; in fact the performance will send me back to some of the songs again, as they seemed to sound significantly different from my memory of them. The strange, ethereal melancholy of some of the material on Let England Shake and White Chalk was augmented by the percussion and guitars and had far more weight and solidity than I remember.

Swathed in black and apparently balancing a dead raven on her head, Polly was a virtually static presence, isolated from the rest of the band, until she got out her percussive sticks for 'Down By the Water' and on another occasion wove back and forth before eventually disappearing into the darkness at the back of the stage. During that track she was virtually demonic, delving back down into the low, swamp-water voice she hasn't recorded in for several years; then at other times (during 'Dear Darkness', for instance) a shaft of green light struck down and turned her upturned face into something utterly unearthly. As ever, she seems to be opening up a window into an experience beyond the moment of the performance.

I was glad she chose not to put 'Last Living Rose' at the end of the set, as I suspected it might be, because it makes me cry, and cry I did. Good to have some space to recover ... Sadly this whole episode will do very, very little to shift my obsession.

It was an odd evening all told. On the platform of Westminster Station on the way to South Ken I bumped into Ms Frenzel from the LGMG who is normally based in Germany and was only back in the UK for a week, accompanying a friend to Victoria, and then at Waterloo afterwards I spotted a young woman who happened to be Fleur de Guerre, of The Chap as well as other things. She didn't seem too displeased to be recognised.

Reckless Disregard for Public Safety

2011-10-26T18:42:00.003+01:00

The Metropolitical Cathedral Church of the Diocese of London is currently closed because some people are camping outside it, for reasons which evade most outside observers, but rather smaller churches have their issues too. Recently our secretary alerted me to a paragraph in the latest newsletter from Ecclesiastical, the church insurers, advising that churches remove votive candle stands unless someone was in the church to keep watch on them.

You can see what they mean, but for us it would mean not having candles available outside service times, and that's the case for most small churches. This, I suppose, as much as waffly 'Celtic' spirituality, is why you see alternative means of expressing prayers becoming more popular - prayer trees that you hang a bit of paper from, prayer pools you put a pebble in. None of them quite measure up to a candle, in my opinion, the symbolism of light and hope. But a metal stand, placed on a tiled floor, is only a fire risk if people take the flame elsewhere and positively set light to something. A possibility, but less of one than faulty wiring.

Barely a day goes by at Swanvale Halt but I find some candles have been lit over the course of the day, and sometimes the lot go. This seems to me so important a means of expressing prayer, most especially for those who are on the edges of the Christian faith and whose belief is inarticulate or unformed, that I can't envisage depriving them of it; and I can't think of an easy alternative. I can only hope God feels the same way.

Goth Walk XXV: The Cock Lane Ghost

2011-10-25T19:27:00.004+01:00

Last Saturday, to mark the conclusion of my holiday, I took the LGMG on a history walk looking at the story of that 18th-century fraudulent haunting, the Cock Lane Ghost, for which I donned my Georgian clergyman's gear (although the gown isn't exactly authentic, being a rather basic modern academic gown rather than ankle-length and gathered at the cuffs as a proper 18th-century one would have been). The sun shone as we made our way from the Slaughtered Lamb in Clerkenwell and meandered through Smithfield, Newgate and the City, concluding down by Southwark Bridge as we recalled other made-up spectres and wondered whether poor Scratching Fanny had indeed died the natural death she was supposed to have done. Dr Johnson, Hogarth and Horace Walpole all cropped up in the story, and when we visited Bartletts Court where Fanny and William Kent had lodged and I described the seances where the supposed ghost was contacted by what is now the standard method of communicating with spirits by raps and knocks, even though nothing survives there from 1762, a metal pillar presented itself as an ideal source for sound effects - 'Knock once for yes, twice for no!'

Photograph by Mr Christian Zaire.

The Other Priest's House

2011-10-24T13:19:00.006+01:00

Poking around an antiques shop in Llanrwst on holiday I was very surprised to find a mounted A4-size watercolour showing the church at Shapwick and a couple of cottages from across the river Stour, not far away from where I come from. The back bore evidence of several reductions in price and now it was down to £5, so I bought it in case the museum at Wimborne, the Priest's House, where I used to work, would like it - they cover Shapwick among other villages and when I was there we always complained that the outlying parishes were woefully under-represented in the collection.

Last week I took the painting in to the Museum and they were very glad to have it. The Curator, Emma, recognised my name from the archives: in 1991-2 I was responsible for computerising all the museum's collection records and so my initials should have been in about 15,000 separate places. My favourite recollection of that work is still coming across an index card which simply bore the words 'OBJECT. Donor: Commander ?', a record I diligently popped on the computer in the pious hope it might actually one day be connected with an actual Thing.

Among the jobs I had to do was to examine and list all the items in the external stores. These included a vile, freezing hut which contained boxes and boxes of archaeological crap from various excavations, among them four or five ice-cream cartons full of corroded nails from the Tarrant Hinton Roman villa (I didn't list the nails individually; never make an archaeologist, me). Then there was the Long Shed: a store as ominous as its name sounds. This black, leaking wooden structure was lined with shelves, the topmost of which were devoted to wooden machinery moulds and patterns from the Witchampton Paper Mills, vertiginously piled and threatening to collapse at a breath, sheltering the biggest spiders in Christendom. It was a charnel house for objects, which sat in the dark recesses of the shelves, gradually rusting and rotting. I was supposed to treat a wooden shotgun stock for woodworm, and decided the thing was already so badly damaged I just dunked it in the tin.

All these buildings, along with the garden machinery shed and the Tea Room (which was held together with layer upon layer of green gloss paint) have been swept away and the museum is having new stores, tea room and schools room provided for £900K courtesy of the Heritage Lottery Fund. It's very exciting, and I may even be able to go back for the grand opening in July next year.

The Village

2011-10-22T20:41:00.004+01:00

Portmeirion haunts the imagination. Its bizarre appearance in The Prisoner makes it seem a landscape of madness, both surreal and incarcerating, like a dungeon covered in icing sugar. So while in North Wales I had to go and look round.

I found it, in fact, immensely funny. It's entirely fake, but completely delightful, with nothing like the nightmarish note it had in that paranoid TV series. It's full of architectural jokes, conceits, like the grand Palladian villa (a pink one!) which actually hides a bungalow behind it, little bits and pieces salvaged from all sorts of buildings, plonked in a completely different context, and then, more often than not, gilded or painted turquoise. You could spend your whole day here taking photographs, and I'm sure some people did. No one view can do justice to the place, it's simply too varied.

Of course everyone knows rogue architect Clough Williams-Ellis, who constructed the place, wanted it to be 'delightful' and to make people smile, but I'm sure his playfulness went even further than most realise. Look about you in Portmeirion, and you see faces:

Or perhaps that's just me ...

Hols

2011-10-22T20:22:00.005+01:00

I went on holiday to North Wales the week before last. I'd intended to stay in Ty Capel at Rhiwddolion last year, but that never happened for one reason and another, and I was very happy to make it there for five days this year. This is Ty Capel:

And this is what it looks like inside:

Ty Capel is a former Calvinistic Methodist Chapel which eventually became redundant in about 1960 and was taken over by the Landmark Trust in 1967. They've converted it to a holiday cottage by inserting into the big empty space a gallery with beds beneath which are the bathroom, kitchenand hallway. Rhiwddolion used to be a village, with enough people living there to support both the chapel and a school associated with it. Naturally there was originally sheep farming (as there still is), but it was the slate industry that brought people in greater numbers to this remote area. Slate, however, was relatively short-lived, and so was the prosperity of Rhiwddolion. Now there are two inhabited houses, and three properties owned by Landmark - and lots and lots of ruined slate cottages, silent evidence of what was once a thriving community of human beings.

Reptile

2011-10-09T14:36:00.006+01:00

This is Goth club night Reptile at the Minories in London, about 9.30pm last night. I was very surprised so many people were there, as I've been along here before and it's got to 10.30 with no more than three souls in the place. I know it doesn't look exactly throbbing here, but it did pick up quite a lot.

I may have got my memories confused, because the Minories used to house an allegedly different but substantially the same club night, Invocation, at the same hour, in the same place, a different Saturday in the month. Cancelling one of the evenings seems to have been a good decision. There was a band playing yesterday, and though industrial metal music isn't my thing really, it's curious how competently done live music can be entertaining even if in recorded form you wouldn't give it house room.

This isn't from Reptile, but from Tanz Macabre last week. I thought my friend Cecile's syringes-and-flowers hairpiece was terribly creative.

A Privilege

2011-10-09T14:19:00.002+01:00

For the first time ever, I was called to the bedside of a dying Christian while they were still conscious. This gentleman was a former local Scoutmaster who has had cancer for some time and was clearly in the last days of his life. All they wanted me to do was to say some prayers, which I did while his wife sat at the foot of the bed. He was very weak but joined in as he could. It was so very different from the awkward, uncertain situations I usually find myself in once someone is really incapable of responding, and it was an honour to be there.

Decorations

2011-10-09T14:15:00.003+01:00

I was very pleased to buy these recently:

The little plaster cherub came from an antique shop in Kingston I visited with Cylene. The hideous Javanese mask (I don't really know if it's Javanese or not) came from a local charity shop for £2.50.

Crystal Balling

2011-10-09T13:38:00.003+01:00

The Bishop has been 'visiting' the Deanery with a certain degree of world-weariness as it wasn't originally his idea. He has attended acts of worship (some rather eccentric ones), viewed various examples of churches engaging with communities (I took him to the Day Centre next to the church where various of our congregation work or volunteer, and was disappointed Sister Frances of the Cross wasn't there to tell him about her stroke as she does everyone else) and 'encouraged the clergy and laity in their mission and vocation', which is lovely.

First of these events was a Deanery-wide eucharist at Hornington parish church last Sunday evening, which I attended before zooming up to London to Tanz Macabre to wash my brain out with some loud music. I couldn't help looking around and reflecting that in twenty years' time half the people there would be dead or at least not able to do much in the Church. Yes, people do tend to get more religious as they get older, and yes, some churches have moderately successful evangelistic endeavours, but the level of loss isn't going to made up on current form, and to imagine some sudden reversal in social trends which will lead to rapidly increasing numbers of people in church is just that, imagination. It's not going to happen. The diocesan bishop encourages us to 'resist talk of decline as inevitable', but the purpose of growth seems to be so that we can keep everything going as it is and not have to face change.

So over the next generation the Church of England will almost certainly face a demographic crisis in which there will simply not be the people or the money to keep everything functioning as it is, the hierarchy, the churches, the structures. At Swanvale Halt the age profile of the congregation is fairly high, so I think we will face this same trough within the next ten years or so. We will have to face serious questions about what we do.

However, Swanvale Halt has something not every church now has: an incumbent priest with freehold. I envisage that, as things get worse, parishes will be amalgamated and churches will close in a desperate effort by the hierarchy to salvage as much of business-as-usual as possible. And, here and there among the wreckage will be a diminished band of clergy with freehold, saying No. Because freehold means we can't be moved, gotten rid of, or have our parishes reorganised, without our agreement, until we reach the statutory retirement age of 70.

What I suspect (and hope) will happen is this: as significant parts of the Anglican Church reel and stagger twenty years from now, Swanvale Halt and churches like it will have been through their demographic trough and will be coming out the other side. Age will take a whole echelon of people out of the church within a relatively short period, and it will feel different, be a significantly different community; and that will be the beginning of new growth. Nothing to do with whether I perform well or badly, really, though I imagine I could stymie the whole thing if I was seriously crap. But that will only happen if clergy with freehold can hold on and preserve the core of those church communities. Which is why I suspect (unless God shouts very clearly to the contrary) the folk of Swanvale Halt will have to put up with me for some considerable time!

I could be wrong, of course.

Flogging a Dead Emotion

2011-09-30T13:24:00.002+01:00

My friend Cylene, who has her problems, asked me last night why she should get a hard time from her psychologists for cutting when self-flagellation was an acceptable and even encouraged practice in certain Christian traditions. Cutting is(at least for her) equally ritualistic, she maintains, and brings a feeling of catharsis which can be seen as therapeutic even though most people are very disturbed by the practice.

I've never read very much about pain-inflicting practices within the Christian Church, nor have I spoken to anyone who's ever admitted practising them. Extreme groups like the medieval Flagellants were usually regarded as being illegitimate by Church authorities, though I'm not sure whether that was more for their bizarre practices or their tendency to slip into heretical beliefs. More mainstream instances are more mysterious. Karen Armstrong talks about it a little in Through the Narrow Gate, her narrative of leaving a pre-Reform Roman Catholic convent in the late 1960s, and of how dissatisfaction with 'the Discipline', as beating oneself with knotted cords was known, focused her issues with the religious life in general. She concluded that, at least in her case, it twisted sexual feelings in an unhealthy direction and confronted her superiors with the conclusion, but it's clear that The Discipline was intended not to deal with sexual feelings alone, but with all the other 'worldly' emotions and thoughts aroused by the intense experience of community living: resentment, anger, or just boredom. It was, I suppose, a means of processing negativity in circumstances where there was no safe way of expressing it, and converting unhelpful emotions into physical pain allowed them to be connected with the sufferings of Jesus.

Like most forms of self-harm, it seems to me (and of course I may be wrong, but Cylene agrees) that cutting is also a means of processing negative emotions. Anger and rage towards people you rationally don't want to damage can be dealt with in a very formal, ritualised way by self-damage: the feelings are psychologically so unacceptable that rather than face them they can be converted into something which, because of its ritual nature, is more contained. 'I'm frightened that if I don't cut I might hurt someone', Cylene says. The danger is that, if you happen to have suicidal feelings (which is rather likely), the ritualised, contained business of cutting may take you further than you originally intend. But, considered on its own, I think she's right: there's not much to separate it from self-harm in a religious context.

Nuts and Bolts

2011-09-29T20:24:00.001+01:00

Long ages ago, one of my great predecessors in the parish sent a group of his folk on the diocesan course for lay Readers. 'You should get a degree in theology after all this', he said on them reporting back, 'this isn't what we need in Swanvale Halt.' Being the kind of character he was, he set up his own training course and produced a whole set of 'Lay Pastoral Assistants' who were sort-of communion-ministers-plus. Over the years this group of people not only performed a liturgical and pastoral role but also took on leadership responsibilities including furnishing a number of churchwardens. It struck me that what the then Rector had done was begin what big Evangelical churches tend to call 'leadership courses', creating a set of people who were trained not necessarily for any particular role but encouraged to feel they had the confidence to take on things when they came up.

I decided to have a go at this, and came up with what I called 'Nuts & Bolts'. It's not intended to have that much of a spiritual element, but more to introduce people to the practicalities of what the church does and why. We begin on a Saturday morning with Morning Prayer, so that introduces people to a different sort of worship without laying it on very heavily - and also the idea of reading the Bible publicly without much preparation. So far we've covered what the Church is for, the history of the church in this parish, and types of ministry; this week we'll examine church properties, timetable, and regular events. The idea is that people will emerge the other end with a greater sense of ownership and knowledge about what the worshipping community they're part of is actually up to. The problem is that so far almost all my takers have been people who already have a good deal of responsibility in the church or who are, realistically, past doing so. I can only hope that we're setting a sort of marker by doing this and that in years to come it may fulfill more of the purpose I envisaged. As with so much else that I'm doing!

Be Vewy Vewy Quiet I'm Hunting Wabbits

2011-09-28T22:25:00.002+01:00

I came out of the front door intending to go and look for 4-stroke oil for my new petrol lawnmower, which I've concluded is the only sort of thing meaty enough to tackle the huge Rectory garden. There was a cat, and something running away from it which was clearly not a cat. I peered under the car where it had hidden, and discovered a long-haired, short-eared rabbit.

Where had it come from? More to the point, what was I to do with it? It was clearly a pet rabbit, and I could only hope hadn't come very far so I might stand a chance of reuniting it with its owner quite quickly and not have to look after it very long. I don't overly like animals, and find the idea of caring for one unacceptably stressful. It's bad enough checking whether the fish in the pond are still alive.

I eventually shooed the rabbit into the garage, left it with a bowl of water and some cabbage leaves, and drove to the big vet's on the far side of the village to seek advice. They told me not to give it lettuce, whatever else I did, which immediately got me worried whether I had sealed its fate by locking it in the dark with some cabbage. However they lent me a cage and some straw and told me to call back if I couldn't find who it belonged to.

By this point I was cursing my lot, having had my afternoon entirely disrupted by this completely unexpected event. Being called to Widelake House to give the last rites or something is within the usual parameters of the clergyman's lot, and even some sudden disaster befalling the village (as happened a few years ago when there was a fire in the sheltered housing block next to the church and the inhabitants had to be billetted on various members of the congregation) is acceptable, but pet rescue is another matter. However, these curses were nothing compared to what was about to escape my lips when, in an attempt to separate the rabbit from the potentially lethal food I'd left it with and unsure whether or not to put it in the cage, it ran past me whereupon the garage door fell down and clouted me on the side of the head. Interestingly, the people I've told this story to assumed I was about to tell them it had decapitated the rabbit, and were relieved to find it was only me that was damaged.

My staggerings around the drive clutching my temple and crying imprecations against the rodent could not help but attract some attention, if there was anyone around. After a minute or two during which the rabbit seemed to think it was playing a game involving retreating under the car at the most irritating moments, one of my neighbours appeared at the bottom of the path from the houses to the side with her two young sons in tow (ironically she's the stepdaughter of a member of the congregation). They looked strangely as though they were looking for something and, on my querying, it did turn out to the rabbit. His name is Mo, which should really be short for Mown Down, but there you are.

It's over 24 hours later, so I think that if I had any intra-cranial haemorrhaging it would have been apparent by now.

Afternoon Tea at the Soho Secret Tea Rooms

2011-09-28T22:08:00.005+01:00

The Soho Secret Tea Rooms, above the Coach & Horses in Greek Street, aren't terribly secret, although access is via a steep staircase behind the downstairs bar, which does make you feel as though you're going to do something rather disreputable instead of just having tea. The Goths liked the idea of going there and so with a lot of faffing about involving dates and deposits to book the private room, I organised it. In the end only half the attenders actually turned up, which, given that I'd sent out several messages warning people to update their response on the Meetup site if they couldn't come because numbers were limited, did not please me at all. Anyway, those of us who were left enjoyed ourselves being stuffed with sandwiches, cake, scones, and of course tea, in lovely vintage surroundings with sofas and doilie-draped tables and being serenaded by Ella Fitzgerald. Mr Valentine even treated himself to champagne to celebrate his new job.

We are actually enjoying ourselves in the last photo, honest we are.

Hadrian the Seventh, by Fr. Rolfe

2011-09-28T21:54:00.007+01:00

I've just finished reading this (though not in this particular edition), which has sat on my shelf for ages. It is, famously, a wish-fulfilment fantasy by failed aspirant priest Frederick Rolfe, in which the Roman Church changes its mind about ordaining George Arthur Rose, the character who represents Rolfe himself, having spurned him for twenty years during which time he has eked out a wretched living as a journalist and other things. Rose is then almost accidentally elected Pope and proceeds to reward his friends and punish his enemies, purge the Church of its wealth, its aspirations to secular power and its 'Keltic' influence, and then carve up the political settlement of the globe, re-erecting the Holy Roman Empire in the process.

It's a fascinating mixture of some quite good writing and some god-awful rubbish. There are passages where Hadrian becomes almost believable, though barely anybody else is. Rolfe clearly hated the Irish and the Scots (and there's a bit where Hadrian denounces, pontifically, any attempt to retain the Welsh language on the grounds that the Welsh are a conquered race and so don't deserve it), and in fact hated most Roman Catholics too. But most of all he hates anyone on the political Left, and his depiction of villainous Socialists as the most venal, ignorant, self-seeking and corrupt semi-human beings you can conceive is virtually unworthy of being committed to print. An enchantingly pathological book.

Arbour Master

2011-09-28T21:49:00.003+01:00

A new improvement to the Rectory garden: an arbour looking out from the top of the slope out over the valley to the hills beyond (at least it will do once I've cut back the sycamore seedlings). It took ages: anti-worm proofing, painting in an acceptably 18th-century shade of green, and then dragging right to the top end of the garden before assembling it. I eventually got fed up with the process of drilling holes for screws and then getting blisters inserting them, and just got some bloody big nails and whacked them until the thing was basically in shape.

Late Bank Holiday

2011-09-28T21:47:00.001+01:00

In keeping with what is now an ancient tradition, I invited a selection of LGMG friends over to consume the produce of my garden and what turned out to be a quite heroic quantity of gin over the weekend of the August bank holiday, and of course it was lovely. It's comforting that drink will enable a disparate group of people to get on with each other. I had to go to a station (not Swanvale Halt station) to rescue Cylene, whose inability to negotiate the British rail system is unparalleled, and came back to find Mr Valentine, Ms Narain, Ms Orphanides, Mr Boulton, Mr Garnett, Ms Luczak and Mr Webb being disgraceful Goth stereotypes and playing a card game called Gloom.

Lowering The Sights

2011-09-06T17:08:00.000+01:00

Last week I had a very serious row with somebody who attends the church occasionally but who I have a lot of dealings with. I will spare you the boring details, but they involved his overdraft and tangled family relationships, and his rejection of the way I went about trying to assist. Because of who this person is and the way they have reacted, I have decided I can’t deal with them, at least for some time. Our last meeting left me shaking, and in fact I was shaking even as I recounted the story to our church secretary this morning. He has, so far, respected my request to stay away from the church and not contact me, which I’m grateful for – especially as it hasn’t been so easy in the past. I’ve yet to talk it through with my spiritual director.

Of course the problem is still with me all the time, and I feel divided between, frankly, some relief that this individual isn’t around and guilt at feeling relieved. I stood at the altar on Sunday evening listening to a visiting priest from a neighbouring church invite the people to confession: ‘Jesus says, before you offer your gift, go and be reconciled’, and of course with this person I am not reconciled, neither can I be until I sort out my own reactions and recover from what has been a horrible experience. The words of forgiveness I pronounce over others cannot but ring somewhat hollow. And even forgiveness, in the sense of understanding how both I and the other person may have got things wrong, can’t on its own bring about reconciliation.

Yet I can’t just ‘leave my gift at the altar’, and abandon public worship until this is sorted. There is much in our lives which is never ‘sorted’ and stands no chance of being. To refuse to preside at worship once might actually have a tremendously salutary effect on the congregation, but you couldn’t keep doing it, and frankly there is hardly a time in my life when I’m free from one sin or another. The other morning there were scant minutes to go before the start of a service, and the people reading the prayers and scripture readings were nowhere in sight: I fell instantly into angry and self-pitying thoughts which were all guiltily dispelled when they arrived. I wonder whether this, as much as the inconvenience of keeping a fast, is why early-morning Mass developed – so the priest wouldn’t have had as much time to screw anything up. As so often, I can do nothing other than throw myself on the Mercy of the Court.

St Augustine's Well, Cerne Abbas

2011-08-26T14:02:00.006+01:00

St Augustine's Well was one of the very first holy wells I ever visited, over 25 years ago, and since then I've been back many times. I've seen the retaining wall around the enclosure collapse and be rebuilt, a carved stone seat appear beside the pool, and one of the ancient lime trees leading to the well, the Twelve Apostles, felled.

I returned a couple of days ago. The lower branches of the lime trees were hung with multicoloured ribbons, and there were a number of people around including a family with three young children, but the well is in a very sorry state. It's virtually dry when there should be a foot or more of water, and the stones which line its base and are normally seen through bright, cold spring water are coated with horrible mud. The stream which usually runs down the street and makes Cerne such an attractive place is full of grass and weeds, and the duck pond is a shadow of its usual self.

This seems sad, but Cerne has had its rough times before. The little display on the history of the village in the church mentions how there were hopes that the railway was going to come through the Cerne valley in the 1850s, but in the end the Somerset & Dorset line was laid along the Frome Valley and linked Dorchester and Yeovil that way. The coaching trade which was so important to Cerne (you can still spot a number of houses that clearly used to be inns) fell away, and by 1900 the population of the parish had dropped by 50% - an astonishing statistic.

Dorset Gothic

2011-08-25T20:52:00.010+01:00

I spent a lovely couple of days in Dorset at the start of this week. Since reading the book Nightmares in the Sky I have become morbidly sensitive to gargoyles, these strange beings that inhabit a world above our heads. Near where my sister lives in Wimborne is this house, which someone has chosen to decorate with a variety of corbel-stop heads - ten of them, to either side of each window. I say 'chosen', because a couple of faces repeat themselves and I imagine they've been bought out of a catalogue of some kind:

There's nothing fake about the gruesome cow-skull carved on the doorframe, however.

Meanwhile, in all my years of visiting Wimborne Minster, I've never noticed this floriate skull:

While I've also managed to avoid the Congregational Chapel in the town, which seems uniquely grim and threatening:

Cerne Abbas Church has a crop of absolutely demented gargoyles, and a very pleasing Gothic chair:

St Osmund's church at Evershot boasts gargoyles which are equally as unhappy as Cerne Abbas's (especially the one which has lost its head but gained a wasps' nest), but one of the houses in the village has a much more benign one:

Out From Under the Stones

2011-08-16T19:49:00.003+01:00

I've always been able to tell people what a pacific, placid church Swanvale Halt's is. Nobody ever criticises anyone else. Well, last night we had the first sidespersons' meeting in three years; sidespeople are officially assistants to the churchwardens and, in most churches, this means getting books ready for services, welcoming people who come through the door, and keeping an eye on anyone who may need help.

I was amazed by the little rancours that have obviously been slumbering for ages! Among them were:

- the accusation that we keep running out of service leaflets. I could only remember this occurring once since I've been at S.H., but people maintained it often happened, including two weeks ago. I thought this was odd as we'd printed the usual 80 service sheets and according to the sidesperson who did the counting there were barely 70 people in the building.

- a discussion about the need to have a table in the entrance area to assemble books and leaflets on. One of the sidespeople described an extraordinary dance around the book trolley she found herself engaging in so as to avoid people coming through the door while simultaneously getting books ready for the next few. 'Well, we used to have a table', said another person, 'I had a row with Miriam Block [my predecessor] about getting rid of it. She said it was divisive'. Another longstanding church member couldn't see what the problem was.

- my favourite memory of the evening: we were going through the sidespeople's rota and the names of the two people who set up for the Taizé service came up. 'They won't do anything else', said one former churchwarden with a tone of barely-suppressed contempt, 'They came once when the services had been changed and found it wasn't Taizé and I asked whether they would help with the service and they wouldn't and left. So they won't do anything else.' It turned out this was during the chap's last stint as churchwarden, and therefore at least eleven years ago. We speak a lot of guff about the Church being 'a family', but how true it is: we nurse tiny grievances over decades, just like real families.

I find myself hugely pleased with this outbreak of minor rankling in the congregation. It's all very well slopping around words like 'love' and 'community', but it means next to nothing without a bit of grit. How can I learn seriously to love the people committed to my charge unless there are bits of us all which aren't entirely loveable?

Garden Party

2011-08-15T13:25:00.004+01:00

I threw the Rectory garden open to the parish for a tea party on Sunday and people came and enjoyed themselves (as did one of the dozens of cats that periodically visits). Some even braved the nettles and brambles and wandered up to the top of the garden, having misidentified Melpomene as the Virgin Mary.

Messy Church out and about

2011-08-15T13:19:00.003+01:00

We took Messy Church to a Swanvale Halt housing estate this Saturday and had about forty people turn up which I thought was really good. The local community action group lent us their gazebo and tables and our volunteers ran the activities. Religious content was deliberately low but the children made animal pictures, faces and models to add to a 'Noah's Ark' which is now on show in the church.

I'm Distraught

2011-08-01T19:21:00.002+01:00

On Friday morning I was surprised to receive this in my email inbox:

"God’s anathema upon the Church of England
General Synod of Your Church resolved that “homosexual orientation in itself is no bar to a faithful Christian life or to full participation in lay and ordained ministry in the Church”.
You have rejected God’s laws and the authority of God the Creator and Supreme Lawgiver.
You no longer call evil evil, a sin a sin, an abomination an abomination. You exchanged the truth for a lie and turned the Church of God into a synagogue of Satan (Rev 2:9).
The fruit of perversion is no blessing but a curse and self-destruction. The apostatical Church of England has ceased to be a blessing for the nation and brings down a curse upon it as well as upon all Europe.
The Byzantine Catholic Patriarchate, by authority of the apostolic and prophetic office before God and before the Mystical Body of Christ, which is the true Church of Christ, hereby declares before all Christians of the world (Mt 18:18): The anti-Church of England is no longer the Church of Christ but spiritual Babylon and the harlot of antichrist (Rev 17:1-6). We hereby call upon every member of this Church to be converted, to repent and to go out from that spiritual Babylon (Isa 52:11). The spirit of antichrist cast the Spirit of God out of this Church. All who want
to be saved must separate from this anti-Church because it leads the deceived souls to eternal damnation in hell. This anti-Church has become a synagogue of Satan (see Rev 3:9; Rev 2:20-24) and preaches a different gospel. “Even if an angel from heaven should preach any other gospel to you, let him be accursed.” (Gal 1:8-9) By reason of apostasy from the Gospel of God, God has cast this curse upon the anti-Church of England.
On behalf of the Byzantine Catholic Patriarchate
+ Elijah
Patriarch"

Apparently everyone has had these, and the Patriarch was thoughtful enough to send a copy to the Queen as well. His Church hasn't been going very long, but in a couple of months, what with calling down God's wrath upon both the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury and who knows who else, he's managed to excommunicate the great majority of the world's Christians. At this rate, there'll just be him and the Westboro Baptists left. And I have an idea that there will be some slight matters that divide them, too.

Nightmares in the Sky

2011-08-01T19:10:00.004+01:00

While on my trip to Worthing last week I visited Badger Books and discovered (as well as a copy of The Mysteries of Udolpho to replace my old one that went astray some years ago) this amusing work:

It's a luscious photographic examination of gargoyles - in the broad sense of faces on buildings - to be discovered in New York and environs, and in his introduction horror novelist Stephen King has some interesting thoughts about what these generally horrific creatures represent:

'Gargoyles, with their dreamlike, hideous array of faces, may well serve much the same purpose [as they ever did]: as a way of venting the mental waste material made up of our hidden fears, inadequacies and even our unrealised and mostly unacknowledged aggressions ... they are dark throats, dark gullets, dark drains from which accumulated muck may spew - and thus be dissipated.'

And, mark you, 'even when you don't see them, they are watching you.'

Worthing Museum

2011-07-28T19:40:00.005+01:00

Last year I went with the old people's outing to Worthing, and I did the same yesterday. I think I've exhausted the possibilities of the town, now, I have to say. Anyway.

I went to the Museum. You're not supposed to take photographs in the museum, I know, but this bit of the costume display was irrestistible (though you may have to squint to see the Tudor-style woodwork properly):

And if you look carefully at this case of jet Victorian mourning jewellery, you'll see that the brooch in the middle is in the form of a little ruined Gothic arch ...

Kensal Green - Beauty and Bile

2011-07-28T19:30:00.005+01:00

A couple of weeks ago was the Kensal Green Cemetery Open Day. I'd never been to Kensal Green, and it's usually treated as an informal get-together for parts of the London Goth community (my friend Ms Sandells had set up her jewellery stall among the other stallholders next to the Anglican chapel. The monuments were absolutely gorgeous; Kensal Green is the British cemetery that manages to get closest to the over-the-top grandeur of the European necropolises such as the Pere Lachaise. Some of the tombs are like little cathedrals complete with flying buttresses and gargoyles, while at the other end of the spectrum are modern family mausolea which are best described as 'chalets for the dead'. I went down to the catacombs, whose most disturbing elements are the sense of decay - rotting leather and lead, rust, chemical reaction continuing around you - and the weird realisation that all the little chambers for coffins, or lacunae, are privately owned and so not even the cemetery company has keys - anything could be in them, the ideal setting for all sorts of mystery stories. There was even a man in a top hat offering rides on a penny-farthing: I always thought 'Goth on a bike' was an oath, and that irrestistibly came to mind. Not sure what exactly he was doing there, but as a friend of mine said, 'Where else can you ride a penny-farthing around and not look out of place?'

Sadly memories of the day are a little soured by the discovery that the young woman going round asking Goths questions and taking photographs with the justification that she was 'researching subcultures' turned out to be an aspirant journalist whose piece about the Goths at Kensal Green for an online magazine was a snide, nasty catalogue of insults (and misquoted me). Why do such people bother?

Gratifying

2011-07-10T20:07:00.001+01:00

We had a derisory turnout at 8am this morning, so it was nice to have a relatively full church at 10. Then we had even more for a baptism at 12, of the great-granddaughter of a member of the congregation. Present among them were her sons (and therefore the baby's great-uncles) who run the cycle shop where I get my bike seen to, the ladies from the bakery in the village where I get my iced buns and bread for our ex-nun sacristan who is confined to barracks at present with knee trouble, and the couple getting married in church next month who turned out to be former neighbours of the baby's dad. Isn't that lovely?

Damnation!

2011-07-07T20:18:00.004+01:00

Miss Vale of the LGMG organised a trip to the Globe on Saturday to see the production of Christopher Marlowe's play Doctor Faustus. It was an energetic production, done with great inventiveness and enthusiasm, but as some of the critics have said, strangely unaffecting. Perhaps the problem is with the play itself, some suggest: it's just not really that good. There certainly does seem to be something hollow at the heart of it, and you wonder how far Marlowe, the great sceptic, took it seriously at all. Then again, perhaps the problem is with us. 'You can imagine how terrifying that must have been to people at the time', Miss Vale commented afterwards - not that Marlowe seems to have been very terrified - but that is perhaps the difficulty. What terrors do ideas like 'damnation', 'selling your soul to the devil' and so on actually have for modern human beings? It isn't clear from the play what Faustus does that is actually so very bad, apart from denying God; this is so vastly remote from modern experience that it needs detailed unpacking before you even begin to appreciate what it might be about, and the play doesn't give you that: it assumes you already know. It's a piece from a lost world, and performing it straight leaves it lying on the floor.

Bedside Manners

2011-07-06T19:06:00.003+01:00

It's been over a month since I've added anything here, shameful really. It was partly because something went awry with Blogger and I couldn't sign in, which eventually sapped my will to keep trying. Then when vaguely interesting things happened they weren't interesting enough to overcome my inertia or I was too busy until the moment, and the vividness such as it was, had passed.

Today I was at Widelake House to take the monthly communion service for the increasingly daft, and before we began went to see a former member of our congregation who is resident there and who I'd been told wasn't doing well. Pat is 98. Until the later part of last year she lived alone in a development of old people's flats until she managed to fall down a flight of stairs. How she escaped completely beating herself to pieces is anyone's guess, but despite not doing herself any dramatic injuries the process of recuperation took an agonising time, stretched out longer than necessary because the powers that be insisted she shouldn't go back home where she could potentially fall down the stairs again. The only place that could take her was Widelake - not an ideal location because it's largely for dementia sufferers and while Pat is a bit confused sometimes she doesn't really fall into that bracket. Still, here she's been since about March and no alternative has arisen.

I went to her room to find it darkened, and Pat in bed, hardly speaking. She's stopped eating and engaging with the world, or that somewhat unsatisfactory corner of the world that is Widelake House. 'Everything is horrible', she said, eyes still closed. 'I want to stop'. I didn't have a great deal of time, so I sympathised, prayed a little while, held her hand and told her to leave it to God. Pat has always been a cheerful person and this wasn't pleasant at all.

What am I supposed to do here? I suppose we have an instinct to try and chivvy people along when they're feeling low, but I've never felt attitudinally very inclined to do that, and on the occasions when it occurs to me to do so the hackneyed clichés die on my lips as I think of them. It seems somehow dishonest. To cope in extreme old age with the removal of things we enjoy, to face loss with cheer, requires a great deal of spiritual strength which you can't just suddenly acquire; and is depression an unreasonable response? All we have to weigh against these losses is the hope of the resurrection. Perhaps that's what those contentless but gentle words 'it'll be all right' hint at. I know that someone saying them to me has been a comfort even when it is by no means clear that it will indeed be all right. I will go back to Pat at some point, but I don't think my job is to try to reconcile her to the pains of this life, but to point beyond them.

Stuff without Story

2011-06-06T21:41:00.003+01:00

Lots of things have been going on but I'm not sure how interesting any of them are. I remember two things last week. On Thursday evening I lost my temper with Mad Trevor who called me in the evening after having spoken to me twice during the day (one occasion a half-hour consultation in which I refused to hear his confession after I decided I wouldn't talk to him about religious things any more). He was in an awful state having seen 'a spirit' in the form of a colour 'moving into him' earlier in the day and was now convinced he was 'falling into darkness' and being possessed by Satan. In the day he'd told me God was angry with me for not being friends with him, and that he would 'despise me in heaven'. I snapped, and found myself shouting at Satan to get out. 'It's gone, it's gone' he said. Of course I'd shocked him and given him something else to think about. At least it seems very clear his manifestations are to do with guilt about a particular issue - he's had a long while doing a lot better, and suddenly the delusions surged up again because I wouldn't hear his confession earlier in the day. The whole thing has been absolutely hateful. I feel very much ashamed for losing my temper, but as Dr Bones assured me Trevor is so mad probably nothing I say can do that much harm. I wonder how much he takes in.

A couple of days before I was about to take the weekday service and discovered my clean whites (alb, amice and girdle) were at home, so I had to borrow one of the cassock-albs from the corner of the vestry used by the Roman Catholic congregation who borrow Swanvale Halt church for their Mass on a Sunday morning. They were filthy. All the adult servers' albs had great black and brown splotches of God-knows-what down the side. The only one that was acceptable was the priest's, and that was grubby to say the least. The RCs get significantly more people than we do on a Sunday and I often wonder what it is that keeps them going. Father Brendan is delightful, but he should have retired ten years ago and I wonder he doesn't fall over half the time. The general sloppiness is atrocious. What's the secret? They're not all Irish.

Lady Giulia's Bower

2011-05-19T18:57:00.003+01:00

I don't know why I think of the grumpy medieval lady I bought a few weeks ago as 'Giulia', but she has given a bit of focus to the messy and unused area to the southeast of the house. There's a steep rise here because the house is cut into the hillside; to the left is the enclosure where my predecessor kept ducks. I've popped Giulia on the plinth of a staddle stone which sat pointlessly in the former scullery area within the trellis which was the duck run, and taken down some of the fencing so you can go right round out of the back garden, past the statue and out to the front. What I need to do is find a nice climbing plant which can cover up the trellis and fence and screen Giulia off in her own discrete area.

Goth Walk XXIII: Down the Well

2011-05-19T18:36:00.006+01:00

On Saturday I had the privilege of taking the London Goth Meetup Group on another history walk around the capital, this time looking at wells and spas. I shall be in a quandary about the next one; I've exhausted all the subjects I can do without looking it all up first ... We were able to visit the well at Sadlers Wells theatre (much to the bemusement of the staff) and at least squint through a window at the Clerk's Well in Farringdon Lane, but understandably all the rest are gone with the exception of the rather splendid Gothic drinking fountain in Lincoln's Inn Fields which finished the walk off. Despite the forecast of 'heavy showers with the possibilty of hail', the weather was perfect. Thanks to Costume Queen for the photo.

Swanvale Halt Film Club: Black Swan

2011-05-19T18:14:00.004+01:00

Well, this breaks the sequence of child-friendly movies fairly comprehensively. The Town Hall in Hornington shows films every few weeks and this was my first visit; it has something of the feel of an old-time picture house, with space for only about 150people. Friendly, but I felt a bit consciously the need not to block the view of whoever was behind me.

A triumph of style, certainly; a dripping shank of Grand Guignol - or perhaps Petit Guignol, because while there are a number of moments that make you wince, they are small, little wounds horribly inflicted. But though the damage seems nastily realistic, you're never sure how much takes place in the lead character's disintegrating mind. You're never sure, in fact, right to the end, and the sense of disconnection means that nobody in the story is much of a real character, and nothing they do cuts to the heart, so to speak.

But the style! There is barely a scene, apart from those set outside, when a mirror is not present, and a significant proportion of the time we see Nina reflected in a mirror rather than directly, signifying double identities (the Black and White Swan Queens) and the separation of appearance and reality. Again, for much of the time the camera follows very close behind her, generating claustrophobia and disorientation and putting the viewer in a very disagreeable, implicated position. On the production level it's a huge achievement.

While searching for pictures to accompany this post I found these equally striking poster images, which are both Deco in their style and Gothic in their extremity, so meet with approval on all sorts of levels.

Madness in the Methodism

2011-05-11T23:26:00.001+01:00

We sometimes wonder whether mad people design Gothic buildings, or whether designing Gothic buildings turns architects mad. Driving through the Isle of Portland yesterday I came across the Methodist Chapel in Easton, which Pevsner describes as 'fanciful' but I would argue 'completely demented' is more appropriate.

Round the side there's a row of practically insane windows:

And then there's the screaming doorway:

Back to the Future

2011-05-11T22:57:00.001+01:00

It's very inconvenient having 27th December as the feast day of your patron saint, so we have shifted our Patronal Festival to the Sunday closest to the feast of St John before the Latin Gate, which is much more user-friendly. I thought we might have Solemn Evensong & Benediction to mark the occasion. There is only one hymn I can find in honour of St John, which is 'Word Supreme Before Creation', a slightly weird piece by Blessed John Keble, so I wrote another one, 'John, Belov'd disciple, pray' to the medieval tune 'L'Homme Armée'. It took a lot of fiddling around with the rhyming scheme, I can tell you. A choir was assembled and began rehearsing. As always as the time drew nearer my feet got colder and colder.

I shouldn't have worried. The choir were superb, and our head server wielded the thurible with applomb having not done it for heaven-knows-how-long. Col the other server had never handled a set of Orthodox hand-bells, not surprising as nobody from Swanvale Halt church has, I think, but did that splendidly too. We had fifty or so people, half of whom were virtually in tears by the end - 'not been to a service like that for 30/40/50 years' was the most common category of comment. I said goodbye to everyone, took off my cassock and scooted off to Tanz Macabre.

It's strange how this, once upon a time the great evangelistic event in the Anglo-Catholic movement, has fallen out of the repertoire almost completely. I've always found Benediction, whether small, quiet and devotional or grand and impressive, profoundly moving and I can't be the only one. I also wonder whether we neglect the forms of devotion preferred by older people at our peril; they are the ones who generate the devotion of the young, it doesn't come out of nowhere. 'Same again next month?' asked one of the congregaton. I doubt it, but it deserves to be part of the mix.

Swanvale Halt Film Club: The Secret of Kells

2011-05-01T14:12:00.004+01:00

It's somewhat worrying that I've only mentioned two films so far, both of them children's animated features, but there you go. The Secret of Kells is, unsurprisingly, a fantasy about the writing of the Book of Kells, the astonishing eighth-century manuscript Gospel Book now in the British Museum. 12-year-old Brendan is a novice at the Abbey of Kells and nephew of Abbot Cellach. When the famed manuscript illuminator Brother Aidan arrives from Iona, fleeing the Vikings, Brendan is captivated into assisting him, much to the fury of Cellach who insists it's much more important to complete the Abbey's great walls so that the monks and villagers will be protected from Viking raiders. Brendan, befriended by the wood-fairy Aisling, has to decide where his future lies and brave the dangers that choice entails.

The animation is extremely beautiful and accomplished, obviously inspired by the swirling, fractal (and slightly mad) patterns and abstractions of the Book of Kells itself: visually, the film is incredible, especially in the set-pieces including Brendan and Aisling's exploration of the forest, Brendan's battle with the snake god Crom Cruach, and the Viking attack on the Abbey which is actually harrowing. It's very stylised, but as is often the case this stylisation makes the sense of reality more vivid. The story is as slender as you could imagine, but the dazzling visuals mean that doesn't matter. The film wears the Christian context very lightly - the Book is never even stated to be a copy of the Gospels - but the Abbey is clearly Christian with its crosses and plainchant, and Abbot Cellach, from appearing a stereotyped, authoritarian cleric at the start, emerges as a self-sacrificing, responsible leader who suffers for the sake of the people in his care. When he's lying on the burning ground of the Abbey with an arrow in his shoulder and a sword wound in his back and Brother Tang tells him, 'You are the Abbot of Kells. You must stand up', it's rather moving. Despite, or perhaps because of, the stylisation, The Secret of Kells gives you some sense of why the Dark Ages were called that: the impression of the Abbey being an island of civilisation surrounded by the hostile or merely wild world comes over beautifully.

Quite aside from that, there's a spiritual debate embedded in the film, though very sotto voce. Cellach's model for the spiritual life is to defend it against evil by constructing protective walls; Brother Aidan insists that the Book 'which will give the people hope' has to be taken out into the world to do its work. Naturally we need both on different occasions, the defensive and the defenceless, the wary and the hopeful. It isn't often that a children's animated movie can make one think along lines like that.

Parish Easter

2011-04-26T18:38:00.006+01:00

This is a picture of the Altar of Repose on Maundy Thursday, but it's still from the Triduum (I posted pictures of the high altar bedecked for Easter last year).

This year we moved the Paschal Liturgy to the early morning for the first time in over thirty years; twenty-odd people came, and we ironed out almost all the teething problems from last year. One of the congregation arranged champagne and pain-au-chocolat for breakfast! We followed that with Communion according to the Book of Common Prayer at 8am (again, the first time that's been used for years), and finally the 10am, with smoke, aspersing, and a baptism. It was a huge relief after all the privation and restraint of Lent and Holy Week. Numbers-wise we were about the same as last year overall, though I've heard that other local churches had record attendances.

I spent a certain amount of time over the Sacred Triduum arguing with atheists over on Heresy Corner about the resurrection. My friend the Heresiarch will insist on putting up stuff over the holy season that he knows full well I will have to comment on and so diverts my attention dreadfully ... Anyway, his point was regarding Derek Murphy's book Jesus Potter Harry Christ which argues not only that there are parallels between the eternal Son and the boy-magician, but also that 'Jesus' was a fictional vehicle to bear certain mystical ideas on which the idea of the historical rabbi-teacher was based.

Of course I think this is tosh, and, when you examine the idea, utterly incredible, but it excites my sympathy (because there is no killer proof of Jesus's existence, only a weight of circumstancial argument) rather more than all those laboured attempts to explain the faith of the early Church by arguing that they made a mistake, or were covering the truth up, or any of the other stories that get concocted. If the 'there-never-was-a-Jesus' line is gathering popularity among atheists, it could be a recognition that the alternative explanations are simply too strained and implausible to bear weight.

Bishop Talking Sense (I think)

2011-04-25T20:42:00.002+01:00

Perhaps the Sacred Triduum wasn't the best of times for saying it, but the Bishop of Oxford's statement that church schools should limit their intake of children of practising Christian parents to 10% was one I virtually cheered. I really support Church schools. We have a parish infant's school and much to my surprise I've enjoyed building up a relationship with the school institutionally, the staff, and the parents as well as the children. It's less an opportunity for spreading the Gospel (though it is that to some extent) than keeping myself in touch with society more widely, especially in terms of how the education system works or fails to work. It doesn't have a restricted admissions policy, and you have to get a long way down the list of groups which are given priority in terms of admission before any sort of Christian commitment gets mentioned. It was the same at the parish school in Lamford, and the school in Hilltop Corner, where I looked after the church for a few months (unusually that was a Church Junior school with secular infant schools as feeders).

But I did check our admissions criteria when I arrived in Swanvale Halt. At Hilltop Corner I got a call from a former parishioner who was trying to get his son into a church school in Uxbridge, St Lawrence's I think although I couldn't swear to it. The family lived almost opposite the church, but he was having to prove that he'd been a regular churchgoer for five years prior to the application, no small task as the family had moved twice in that time. He correctly identified the former vicar of Hilltop Corner so I took his word for it and wrote a letter of support. A couple of weeks later I got another call. 'They say it's not good enough', he said, 'I have to prove my wife has been going to church for five years too.'

Recently I went back to the church I was baptised in, St Mark's Talbot Village in Dorset. I was at a said Eucharist at 8.30 on a Sunday morning, the sort of service that normally attracts twenty or so people if you're lucky. By the time the service began there were well over a hundred people in the church, most of them in their '30s or '40s, some with prams. As the service finished, I headed towards the door, noticing that the 20 or so people aged over 60 were doing the same, while everyone else was going the other way, towards the front of the church. Looking at the service sheet, I saw the notice 'Parents, don't forget to sign the attendance register at each service you come to'. The phenomenon of parents turning up solely so their children will qualify for the parish school is a clerical joke (it was the subject of an episode of Rev, of course), but I'd never seen it so blatantly, shamelessly organised as this. I am told this has been the pattern at St Mark's (and I am not disguising names this time) for twenty years or more, and a vast extension to the church was built simply to accommodate the influx of parents, barely any of whom turn up once their children are safely in the school. The 8.30am service is particularly popular because people know they won't have to sit through a sermon.

I find the entire thing revolting. The Church simultaneously sits in judgement on parents and families, and encourages hypocrisy among them. It degrades the sacraments of Christ's Kingdom by making them entry requirements for something they have nothing to do with. And why is it that we should expect non-Christians happily and supinely to fork out for our sectarian schools when their kids can't even go there? Few things make me so angry.

I'm all for maintaining the ethos of Church schools, but that depends on the governing body and staff rather than the children. The ones I've been involved with have managed it - and of course half the CofE schools in the country are Controlled, not Aided, schools, and so don't control their own admissions policy anyway.

An Opportunity for Reflection

2011-04-20T07:52:00.002+01:00

I wasn't expecting to be granted a curate to start in the summer of 2012, and yesterday had confirmation that this is so. I am not that long from being a curate myself and only became a 'training incumbent' because there was already a curate at Swanvale Halt when I arrived; and given the somewhat hazardous financial situation of the church we could do with having the curate's house rented out and bringing in a few thousand pounds a year. But I was rather taken aback by the email from the diocese which informed me I had failed to 'demonstrate that you fully understood the role a training incumbent undertakes'.

It made me think about my own curacy at Lamford. In my first week Il Rettore told me 'I can't do anything for you except teach you how to say the Mass' and so that was what he did. In my first year we had Mass practice most weeks, but everything else I had to work out for myself. I asked about what he did to prepare couples for their wedding or having their children baptised and he would shrug and say 'I don't know, I just chat to them'. Whenever I saw him take a funeral service his preparation seemed to consist of scribbling a few notes on a scrap of paper in the Vestry before the service started. Our 'staff meetings' (the diocese is very, very keen on staff meetings) occurred over coffee on a Monday morning in the café run by the Turks round the corner from the church, and consisted of me, Il Rettore, the organist, and sometimes the parish secretary if she wasn't too hung over from the weekend. Occasionally we opened a diary but never a Bible. I don't think the powers-that-be like this model very much.

But the thing about Il Rettore was that he cared about people. He could get away with pretty rough prep for funerals in a way I never could, but he dealt so brilliantly with bereaved people it didn't matter. He couldn't tell me what he did with wedding or baptism couples because each time he just engaged with them and who they were, not with a scheme or system (I need a scheme or system). And as for myself, he cared about me. He was my friend and I could always take him into my confidence in absolute trust that he would keep it; the advice he might give me was almost invariably wrong, but that wasn't the point. He was there and cared, and being given advice mattered less than being given tea and being taken to look at the new season's tomatoes in the greenhouse.

It's worth saying that we were all rather scandalised to discover that a curate in an adjoining parish to Lamford was approaching presiding at his first Mass having had no liturgical preparation at all from his incumbent, who was the husband of the diocesan Director of Training. He came, rather on the quiet, to Il Rettore for that.

I'm being offered the chance to talk this over so it will be interesting to discover what the diocese thinks the role of a training incumbent really is!

Palm Sunday

2011-04-19T08:13:00.002+01:00

This is the old High Altar at Swanvale Halt decorated for Palm Sunday. I rather like the arrangement because from a distance it looks slightly sinister.

The Pains of Being a Trailblazer

2011-04-15T22:36:00.000+01:00

As we congratulated ourselves on rescuing an amazing black and red silk 1950s dress from a vintage store near Waterloo, Cylene explained to me her progression through Goth style since abandoning shapeless skater-boy tee-shirts and jeans at about 17. ‘Once I was reconciled to the fact of actually being female, that was it. Dresses from then on’.

‘I brought Gothic Lolita style back from Okinawa. In Albuquerque in 2001 nobody else was dressed like that. Nobody thought I could manage it practically, as a way of dressing the whole time rather than just club gear, but I did. But then it got taken up by the wrong crowd and I had to move on, and went more Victorian. By the time I was in Portland I had a bit of an identity crisis. I said to a friend, ‘I dress Victorian but I like Industrial as well’. I think he thought that by ‘Industrial’ I actually meant machines and technology rather than stompy music, and he thought and said ‘Hmm, it sounds as though you should go Steampunk’. This was 2006, nobody had heard the word in Portland. So I tried it – and it was the real thing then, not just putting machine cogs on everything. But for some reason it was the Neo-Nazis took up Steampunk and again I had to leave it behind eventually.

‘Then I came to England and everyone does Victorian. I suppose you guys invented it, after all. And half these girls make their own clothes! There’s no way I can compete. And anyway, it’s not always practical. I wanted a style that I could actually wear all the time and you can’t drive a truck in a shelf-bustle! I like vintage, but the thing about ‘vintage’ is that everyone immediately thinks ‘Psychobilly’, polkadots and Bettie Page bangs, and that’s done to death already. And I thought, well, I want to be a 1950s housewife, and nobody else is doing that. You can make anything Gothic, so let’s try’ – she says, sat at Costa Coffee in the dark blue house-dress with lace collar, small black gloves, and big dinner-plate silk hat kept on with a hatpin.

‘Trouble is, how long will it be before this gets popular too? I’m already planning the next move. I haven’t got a name for it yet, apart from “Inpatient Gothic”. What I’ll need to do is work out some way of doing straitjackets and bandages that’ll actually be wearable day-to-day …’

Back to the Beginning

2011-04-13T21:23:00.002+01:00

I went round to visit a couple who would like their (3rd) child baptised at the church, nice, enthusiastic pair. They started talking about childraising and religious issues.

Mother: 'I told Benjamin that not everyone thinks like us. Some people think human beings came from monkeys. And he said, "But that's silly, mummy. If human beings come from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?" How cool is that? Even a five-year-old can see through the Theory of Evolution!'

They were so happy I didn't feel it was appropriate to have the conversation then. But how blinkered must their religious background be to allow them to assume blithely that I'm a creationist? It is, after all, a pretty marginal opinion in this country, even among Christians. It was remarkably disorientating!

Missing the Wood

2011-04-05T13:29:00.003+01:00

Last week a reverend gentleman wrote to the Church Times:

"The evidence is there for all to see. The churches that water down the teaching and replace the Christ-given holy eucharist with 'home-made services' drawn up by a committee, and fall over backwards to conform to the inroads of secularism, are the ones in decline. ... The churches that teach the Catholic and apostolic faith in all its fulness, and have a dignified parish eucharist at the centre, every Sunday, backed with solid teaching, are invariably growing churches."

And this is my reply; not sure whether it will get printed, so I put it here.

"While I share Revd Geoffrey Squire's frustration at churches (and Churches) 'watering down the faith' and not recognising the effect (Letters, 1st April 2011), I'm not sure that trad Anglo-Catholics should be quite so self-congratulatory. There are far, far fewer churches in the Catholic tradition than there once were. Of those I've attended, two have closed in the last 15 years and one is struggling to keep going. If we look at the 21 churches involved in the 'Battle over Benediction' in London in the 1920s, only seven survive in any form and only three (St Mary Bourne Street, St Stephen Gloucester Road and St Peter London Docks) are in any sense part of the Catholic movement; St John Holland Road has just been taken over by HTB. London is a special case but almost every town has its closed church or churches from the Catholic tradition. This means that people who like Catholic worship have to gravitate towards a smaller number of churches which, naturally, look more flourishing as a result, and younger, enthusiastic clergy also have less choice as to where to go. The strength of a small number of trad Anglo-Catholic churches is, I suspect, less about teaching and more about demographics.

"The good side of this is that such churches have a wonderful opportunity to help the Catholic movement revive, if they can manage it. Some of that will involve precisely the kind of imaginative outreach work that our Tractarian forebears engaged in, as well as reverent and beautiful celebration of the Mass."

Mess

2011-03-28T16:52:00.006+01:00

We've been doing Messy Church at Swanvale Halt for a couple of years now. If you're not familiar with this concept, it's a way of providing some religious input for families who may not have a close relationship with the church, but move on the periphery - the sort who will come to Mothering Sunday and Harvest Festival but not much else. The way we work it, we pick a theme, people come and do various sorts of craft stuff connected with that theme, then we go into church for a bit of undemanding worship, and finally back into the hall again for tea. I suppose it's 'messy' not just because of the activities but because you don't know what's going to happen. One of the nice things is that because our volunteers tend to be older, and parents definitely do NOT leave their children and go off elsewhere, you get a splendid cross-generational mix. we've built up quite a number of regulars, but on the last couple of occasions numbers have been down a bit. Law of diminishing returns, I thought as we opened up on Saturday afternoon and a trickle of people came in. But that trickle turned into a total of 85 souls of whom about 45 were children, rather more than came to Mass the following day.

Fr Robin Ward, principal of my old vicar school, has written a book on Christian priesthood which recently outsold the latest volume of Messy Church on Amazon. He put this amusing news on his Facebook profile. Another priest commented, 'I don't do Messy Church, I do real church'. Well, Solemn High Mass is certainly easier for people like me who like order and structure, and to whom designing worship that will mean something to small children and unchurched people doesn't come easily. But, I thought, with an attitude like that you won't be 'doing' any kind of church in twenty years time.

The Eucharist (which I suppose this priest means by 'real church') is indeed the core and heart of the Church. More than anything else it shows us what God is like and brings us face to face with Jesus. It should be grand and glorious, and at Swanvale Halt I do my level best to make it so. But the truth is that very many people aren't ready to be dumped into the middle of Solemn High Mass, and perhaps they never will be. Provided somebody is doing it, I'm rather relaxed about that, and will do anything I attitudinally can do to provide people with avenues down which to find their way to God, short of making worship a circus. Messy Church is quite definitely not circus-like. The children are proud of the work they do and when we go into church we aim at reverence. We lit the candles on the old benediction candelabrum on Saturday to pray, and you'd never believe over forty small children could be so silent. There are questions to be asked about how those seeds of faith can be encouraged, but for a lot of the people there, Messy Church is 'real church', which is how it's supposed to be.

Shelley's Ghost

2011-03-25T21:05:00.003Z

This is Shelley's copy of Sophocles, found, so the story went, in the trouser pocket of his drowned body, but more likely from the trunk of his belongings rescued from the wreck of the Don Juan. It was one of the things on display in 'Shelley's Ghost', the exhibition at the Bodleian Library exploring the way the Shelley family attempted to shape their own and the public's perception of the poet's memory and legacy. There was a nice mixture of memorabilia and literary remains (it's not easy to make 19th-century letters on their own interesting display material), although I did find the layout and scheme of the display rather confusing ('Did you work out which way to go around it?' asked Dr Bones. However, it could have done with a bit of increase in the emotional volume. I got the impression that the life and death of Shelley hung over his family for decades afterwards and the relics are evidence of an intense, lasting relationship with the dead. We're told that it was Shelley's daughter-in-law, rather than his straightforward son and heir Sir Percy Florence Shelley, who became entranced by his memory. Why was this? What about this woman made her so determined to champion her long-dead father-in-law's case? Or was it something about Mary?
What also comes across remarkably is that this was a family already memorialising itself before Shelleys death had even occurred. More objects are constructed from snippets of human hair - Bysshe's, Mary's, John Keats's, and other friends' - than I could easily count. Was this conscious creation of faintly creepy keepsakes common among people of that class and time, or was it just the Romantics who went in for it so heavily?
The most moving item was surely Mary's notebook of thoughts she kept after Shelley's death, titled 'The Journal of Sorrow, begun 1822. But for my Child it could not end too soon'. Anguished, angry, desperate and hysterical reflections and outbursts scratched on thick paper, scrawled, underscored or crossed out. Why did she not destroy it? Did she consciously intend anything to be done with it?

Salutary Effects

2011-03-21T13:16:00.002Z

At Swanvale Halt we have a vestry prayer before the Eucharist begins. It's all very well but a bit unfocused, rather along the lines of 'Oh God you are really lovely, help us to remember that you are really lovely'. Back in the days of the old English Missal the vestry prayer was a means for the priest to make his own confession and be absolved before absolving everyone else, something I rather like as it emphasises our human solidarity in sin and forgiveness, and makes it possible for the laypeople (acting together) to pronounce God's forgiveness over an ordained person. So for Lent I introduced a new prayer including that element along with other very, very trad bits taken from the old pre-service Prayers at the Foot of the Altar.

We've now done this a few times and I wondered how comfortable people really were with it. I wondered how comfortable I was with it, for that matter, and thought perhaps I shouldn't have bothered. Then yesterday morning for the first time Alan, our retired priest, presided, and so he said the confession and was absolved by the rest of us. How moving it was to hear someone, one other person, making an admission of sinfulness and being absolved. If that's how I felt in my agitated state (I am usually far from calm on a Sunday morning a minute or two before Mass), perhaps others felt the same.

Mysterious Ways

2011-03-18T17:16:00.005Z

The phone rang at 6.25am and as I suspected it was Mad Trevor. Once I'd ascertained that nothing was actually wrong I rather too firmly informed him we'd speak later and virtually put the phone down. Armed with a cup of tea, I called back. 'I've been awake worried all night, and I tried my best not to call you till the morning,' he said, 'You were lucky I didn't call you in the middle of the night.' I refrained from saying that, on the contrary, it was he who was lucky he hadn't called in the middle of the night. 'God has revealed to me', he went on, 'that he is angry with me for asking him for a wife and that's why I'm being punished. He has other things in store for me. That's why you're on your own, too', he added for good measure. I no longer try to argue with Trevor and just let him get on with it.

God had a lot on that day. We have a local Christian youth work charity whose newest member decided she wasn't going to stay, not an easy decision as she doesn't have a job to return to. So she had to be clear that that's what God wanted her to do, and not only prayed herself but 'all the Bible verses people gave me pointed in the same direction'. But she was equally clear God wanted her to come here in the first place. God hadn't seen fit to inform the director of the organisation who took her on that he'd decided to send her back home again. How to explain this? Well, God must have had his reasons for uprooting her a hundred miles and then sending her all the way back again that justified wasting the money the charity spent on job adverts, salary, accommodation and so on. The alternative is to believe that God is less interested in where we happen to be or what we happen to be doing in any detail than in the state of our souls, and as virtually any situation can be one of spiritual growth (and in fact should be) we can read his activity into anything that happens. Hm. Perhaps we've hit on an answer.

I spoke to Trevor later on in the day, and he told me that because he had asked God again for a wife, the Lord had changed his mind.

The Most Important Irrelevant Thing You've Ever Done

2011-03-17T09:24:00.000Z

One of the delights of the unexpected BBC comedy series Rev was the appearance of the phrase ‘Deanery Synod’ in the first episode, perhaps the first (indeed only) occasion it has cropped up in a work of televisual fiction, a bit like the word ‘soteriology’ a couple of weeks later. On Monday I was at Deanery Synod, for what the Rural Dean described as ‘probably the most important Synod debate any of you have taken part in’ which, considering the vote we eventually reached had no legal status at all and was binding on nobody, says something about how important Deanery Synod usually is.
We were discussing the consecration of women to the episcopate. Of course the Church of England’s national General Synod has already voted for women to be made bishops, but now each diocese is being called upon to support or reject that stance and to debate what is called a ‘following motion’. This is the interesting bit. The two Archbishops and the bishops advised the General Synod that parishes which can’t accept the ministry of a woman bishop (largely conservative Anglo-Catholic ones) should have the right to be looked after by a male alternative written into the legislation; that is, the authority of such male bishops should come from the Church as a whole, rather than being delegated by individual local bishops. Basically the General Synod said to the episcopate (by a narrow margin) ‘Naaah’, and voted to support establishing a ‘Code of Practice’ by which deputy bishops would be allowed to look after the ‘anti’ parishes only at the sayso of individual diocesan bishops. The ‘Code of Practice’ doesn’t actually have anything in it at the moment. The ‘antis’ were flabbergasted at what amounted to a complete breach of the promises to protect them made when the Church voted to ordain women priests in 1992. Perhaps those promises shouldn’t have been made. But they were, and knowing many people on that side of the debate who aren’t lunatics or bigots, I feel rather sympathetic. The ‘following motion’ is basically the bishops’ way of making General Synod think again. It calls for alternative bishops to be provided for ‘anti’ parishes directly by the legislation, not by delegation from this or that local bishop.
The debate was dire. We had two speakers, one from Women And The Church (who was male) and one from the anti-women priests brigade Forward in Faith. The former was dismissive and tendentious, the latter bizarre: he had a DVD to play (the sound wouldn’t work so he had to talk us through it) which compared the Anglo-Catholic ‘antis’ to the Bengal tiger, ‘beautiful and endangered animals which need their own reserves where they can breed and flourish’. It was so cringeworthy I could barely look up. We were divided into discussion groups and the laypeople I was with seemed to agree strongly with whatever was said, by anyone, whether it was ‘These people who are against women bishops should just leave and become Roman Catholics’ or ‘We must do what we can to preserve and honour the Catholic heritage of the Church of England’. In the end we decided by only two votes to support the following motion – the clergy were much more strongly in favour than the laypeople. Of course our vote is only there for the information of the diocesan synod anyway, and that’s where the decision will actually be made.
I came out of the church where the meeting was being held and for some minutes completely lost my car. In fact, I lost the entire street it was in. That’s how exciting it was.

Black Roses: the Killing of Sophie Lancaster

2011-03-11T21:49:00.005Z

I was delighted to discover that Radio 4's Afternoon Play was about the death of Goth martyr Sophie Lancaster back in 2007. It wasn't really a play, wasn't a drama of any kind really: a set of reminiscences by Sophie's wonderfully dignified mother Sylvia and poems by Simon Armitage, outlining the story. It was about as good as such a broadcast could have been, although I couldn't help hearing Simon Armitage's voice, which is after all such a distinctive one, rather than anything one might imagine Sophie's as being. 'Martyr' is perhaps the wrong word, too deliberate, too political, for something for which rage was not the main response, just a sense of heartbreaking loss and waste.

A Definition of Futility

2011-03-11T21:33:00.004Z

Some time over the last couple of days the church had out-of-hours visitors who inspected the roof in search of something which might be of interest, to themselves and their scrapmetal procurers. Of course the insurance will help out with the damage to the lead, the stonework, the tiles, and the drainpipe, but it was a faff to be called out on my day off and to have to spend a while with the secretary fastening the tarpaulin her dog usually sleeps on in the car to the damaged roof of the organ chamber (you can't run the risk of water getting in there). It's the stupidity of the criminal 'mind' that depresses most. They haven't got away with anything in this case, and there's precious little to get away with anyway. Instead they've risked life and limb with rotten old iron drainpipe, tiles and stone collapsing beneath them wherever they trod, and all for nowt but causing us, and Ecclesiastical Insurance, a lot of fuss.

Industrial Accident

2011-03-11T21:25:00.002Z

Some people pay good money to have hot wax dribbled over them. Can't understand the appeal myself when a candle misbehaves.

'Let England Shake' - PJ Harvey

2011-03-07T21:01:00.004Z

In the New Yorker Sasha Frere-Jones has a decidedly damning-with-faint-praise review of Let England Shake, Polly Jean Harvey's latest album, but he manages to stumble on something insightful, namely the Corscombe siren's career-long shift from singing from the viscera to composing from the head. This is partly true: PJ herself has talked (to that international arts journal The Bridport News) about the primacy of words in Let England Shake, of words coming first and then having the music fitted around them - which, it has to be said, results in some very odd song structures indeed. But even her early output, from the abandoned woman of 'Sheela-na-Gig' onwards, so apparently gutsy and instinctive, in fact involved the adoption of a series of masks. You could never be quite sure where the singer's approval rested, where gender lines lay, what, exactly, was going on. Despite all the attention given to the political and historical elements of Let England Shake, nothing is any clearer, which is what makes it all the more compelling.

Take, for instance, the heartbreaking evocation of somebody's England, 'The Last Living Rose'. 'Goddamn Europeans!' spits the singer to start off, completely unconvincingly on any level; 'Take me back to beautiful England' - an England whose 'beauty' is described in images of rain, rot, and waste. What is being condemned and what approved here? If anything, it's about the impossibility of love, the longing for home and distress at what home has become; or, perhaps instead of distress, we should read perverse, defiant endorsement. Everything is ambiguity. The much-discussed war-inspired pieces, even those that seem to relate to Afghanistan, are so decontextualised, so reduced to an experience, a feeling, that it's impossible to know where we are treading exactly. Each snippet of emotion is made simultaneously tiny and universal. It is nothing else than PJ Harvey has always done, though the keynote here is distance, reflection, rather than visceral immediacy. She uses again the high, thin voice she first showcased on White Chalk, and plays her usual games with instruments she doesn't really know very well: her description of herself as an artist rather than a musician is very accurate (just as well she can attract such proficient musicians to work with her). Both these serve to distance the emotion from the expression. Yet what pictures she manages to paint. Let England Shake is a series of drownings, losses, seen through veils of mist. Like the Dorset coast.

Into Eternity

2011-03-03T22:18:00.003Z

Our friend Donovan died last month in very sad circumstances. This is a picture of him on one of the Young Lord Declan's Goth Walks in the spring of 2009. We were all following the traditional route of the condemned from Newgate to Tyburn and, having finally reached Tyburn itself, were listening to Dex expatiate upon its history from a plinth. As usual bemused tourists couldn't resist listening too. I looked round and saw Donovan framed by 'ordinary' folk and was so tickled by the contrast I decided to take the photo. He clearly saw what I was up to and made an heroic effort to stop himself laughing.

We had a 'wake' for Donovan a couple of weeks ago and some of his family were there. They're very strong Christians from South Africa and always felt Donovan rather 'came from the planet Zog' as his father put it. I thought they might like to know they weren't the only Christians there and spoke to Donovan's dad. He told me (though I hadn't asked about it) that they felt assured of Donovan's being received by God, in fact having received two 'revelations' from different quarters about it. I wasn't sure what to say and still am not. I never had any remotely religious conversation with my friend and have no idea what he thought, but I'd be surprised if his opinions were anything like those of the rest of his family - and he certainly never showed any obvious signs of Christian commitment.

I often find that even people who are very hot conservative Christians, when it comes down to it, find themselves convinced that their loved ones are OK with the Lord even when they show none of the classic characteristics of conversion or commitment which the same conservative Christians insist on in everyone else. Ages ago I took the funeral service of a man with three children one of whom had opinions of this kind. 'He may not have known Jesus,' the son said firmly, 'but Jesus knew him'. Well, presumably so, but that's not exactly classic Protestant Evangelicalism, is it?

In fact I don't mean to criticise as I think this kind of, let's say, 'creative engagement with the tradition' is positive. Conservative Christians accept the damnation of those outside the boundaries with little worry, until those sinners happen to be people they care for whereupon the principles start to bend.

Happily God cares for all of us. I wouldn't have pitched my friend into the flames, and I can hardly imagine God would be less understanding than me.

Good Vestments

2011-02-11T19:24:00.006Z

The Bad Vestments Blog is a little acerbic at the moment, so I thought it would be uplifting to look at some nice tat instead.

This black set is interesting rather than very beautiful - perhaps a 1950s or 60s attempt to produce something up-to-date while retaining the old forms. The round-ended cross orphrey is a bit uncomfortable, but the Celtic knots and the weave in the black silk ground fabric looks very handsome.

The white set to the right is quite similar to my own old white set. The floral patterns on the orphrey are nicely elaborate without being as, well, flowery as some you occasionally see.

Both these chasubles appeared in recent eBay sales.

Last Things

2011-02-07T19:15:00.003Z

'Could you come and see my mother?' said the lady on the phone yesterday. 'She's dying and we think she would like to see a vicar.' So I pedalled down to the church, collected the Oil of the Sick and the Blessed Sacrament, and headed off to one of the local nursing homes where I met Ruth, unable to speak and possibly not hearing much either, drifting in and out of sleep. So I did as much of the standard Last Rites as made sense, assured Ruth had been a regular churchgoer in the past, and her daughters seemed to think that would have helped.

My experience of ministering to the dying has been unsatisfactory, really. I don't remember getting any preparation at theological college, and I think Il Rettore at Lambourne assumed I knew what to do, while I assumed I did as well until it became clear that there was an actual form to follow, at least in the old rites. In fact, I've only just become aware that there is a provision in Common Worship that covers the standard Last Rites of Confession, Absolution, Unction and Communion. The trouble is that none of the available rites seem completely satisfactory. The old 1662 Prayer Book order for the Visitation of the Sick has some beautifully moving prayers in it, but also suggests rather too strongly for modern tastes that any given sickness is a distinct expression of God's will. The traditional Roman Rite is better in tone and explicitly includes Unction, of course, but is massively lengthy and has a number of rather bizarre prayers. The Common Worship provision includes all four elements, which is a considerable triumph for Catholicism in the Anglican Church, but its prayers are comparatively watery. So, as so often, I've ended up cobbling together my own version, which is not what you're supposed to do.

Clergy are so rarely now called to somebody in the final stages of life, still less have a chance to minister to a person over the course of an illness, which is what the liturgies anticipate as the standard. This makes it all the more necessary to have some kind of coherent, standard pattern that at least satisfies you so that you can depart from it as circumstances dictate. As even the Rituale Romanum says:

The Church presupposes ideal circumstances, or at least normal ones, as witnessed by the Roman Ritual, for carrying out her many prescriptions with dignity, edification, and effectiveness. Take, for example, the rubrics for processions, for the burial service, for communion brought to the sick, and for the sacrament of anointing of the sick. Yet how often her wishes in these matters are interfered with by enfeebled faith, by adverse conditions of weather, by an urge to rush through everything, or by inadequacies as to place, appurtenances, and participants. This is especially true in the case of conferring the sacrament of Christian consolation to the sick or dying. How often in our day, when negligence or violence or accidents or sudden seizure with fatal illness are by no means the exception, it is impossible to give this sacrament at all, or it is administered only in greatest haste, with curtailment of all but the essential anointing, thereby losing for the recipient as well as the bystanders so much of its signification as the Christ-mystery which heals, soothes, strengthens, purifies, consecrates, and ushers the Christian's soul into the joys of everlasting beatitude.

The V&A's Medieval Galleries

2011-02-03T19:24:00.007Z

When I last went to the Medieval Galleries at the V&A they were very new, and my second visit today revealed a lot of different stuff. I was particularly struck by this wonderfully inventive way of dislaying religious tat:

OK, this is a completely fictitious set-up - no chasubles would appear in a procession, nor would all these objects find themselves together at the same time or in this order - but it's a marvellous way of animating the artefacts while not distracting in any way from their charisma - quite the opposite, in fact. Plus the boost this single display must have given to the plate-glass industry!

Misbehaviour

2011-02-02T20:08:00.003Z

What a day of contrasts. At Widelake House this morning they'd forgotten we were coming and the staff rounded up a strange collection of residents and day visitors, virtually none of whom we'd ever seen before. Normally they're very placid but today were actually rather awkward; one lady was tearful and repeatedly complained of being lost (which is quite understandable), but another remarked loudly and scornfully 'What's wrong with 'er?' and, regarding me, ' 'E don't look like any vicar I've ever seen. If 'e's a vicar, I'll eat my 'at'.' I wonder what vicars do look like, and should I change?

(Only yesterday a parishioner - not one I've ever seen in church - accosted me and congratulated me precisely for 'dressing like a proper vicar'. 'I'm glad that bloody woman's gone,' he further offered, meaning my predecessor, 'couldn't get on with her'. The day before, one of the local alcoholics had been telling me what a good friend she'd been to him, which just goes to show. What will be said about me after I've gone? I shall just have to outlive them all).

Then this afternoon we had Church Club after school. The children were particularly nuts today. Ben couldn't seem to sit up straight and continually ended up on the floor, gyrating in strange convolutions and cycles, while Michael appeared to have his hands permanently down the front of his trousers. You can't help speculating what will become of them.

I finished off the day with the solemn observance of Candlemas which attracted a dozen people. I'm very pleased about this! We processed around a darkened church to the accompaniment of the Office Hymn, Quod Chorus Vatum, which has been a pig to learn but went rather well. Next step is to get the people themselves learning plainchant ...

Bus Stop Ornée

2011-02-01T21:29:00.004Z

My travels took me to Guildford today. On Farnham Road I found what may be, unless you know better, Britain's most elaborate bus stop.

And it's not just the balustrade, but these amazing carved figures inside. Turkish chap with a pipe and a figure with a lyre - not sure what that's about, nor why it should be here. On the 1873 Ordnance Survey there is nothing along Farnham Road apart from the Hospital, which lies a couple of hundred yards downhill from this. A mystery.

Gabby Young & Other Animals

2011-01-30T14:22:00.008Z

Another roundabout story of discovering an interesting band: I heard Gabby Young & Other Animals on Loose Ends and thought their stuff sounded interesting. Then at the end Clive Anderson remarked, 'I do like your hair, Gabby, I should have mine that colour', the joke being that he doesn't have any. That sounded even more interesting, so I looked them up and discovered a girl in a black and white striped jacket, bright red hair and a tendency to decorate one eye.
I persuaded my friend Ms Vale that she might like to go and see them at the Barbican yesterday, and she decided she would as she already knew the headline band, the Irrepressibles. This was a very good thing as she works in music festival organising and was able to wangle free tickets. Much to our surprise as we entered we found ourselves positioned in exceptionally good seats at the front of a very crowded auditorium.
I was unconvinced by the Irrepressibles. They are clearly very musically proficient, but despite all the publicity praising the 'visual spectacle' they always put on I found I was only able to enjoy the admirable music by closing my eyes so I couldn't see what they were doing, particularly the messianic maestro and lead singer, who moved ponderously and portentously from one pose to another. There's only so many songs about disappearing up your own bottom you can write, surely, and by the time the finale, which was something to do with drifting away on a pearly ocean of self-pity and falling into a golden rainbow, mercifully arrived, both of us remained rooted to our seats as the auditorium rose in ecstatic acclamation around us. The metaphor I'd mentally devised about disappearing bottom-ward now took material and awful form as the large gentleman sat in front of us stood up and left his jeans behind. That image will, sadly, remain with me a long while.
But first we had Gabby Young, a glorious experience. Whereas the Irrepressibles are clearly a Project with a capital P, they came over like a group of friends having fun and involving us in it. When a friend of mine saw Ms Young's image their response was 'Isn't she just doing a take-off of Emilie Autumn?' I tend to think GY&OA are rather like Emilie Autumn will be when she finishes the therapy, the same way Amanda Palmer has cheered up no end since marrying Neil Gaiman. At the moment the resemblance is no more than superficial - the mood is entirely different, and majors not on bitter and sardonic humour but a sense of mischief which nicely darkens the general upbeat temper. The episodes of quiet - 'We're All In This Together' is a gentle, lyrical statement of human solidarity in the midst of sorrow - set off the more raucous moments with brass to the fore. There's a lot going on, but it's not trying to be terribly sophisticated. The slight movements of the overgrown rose petals surrounding Ms Young's right eye continually drew the attention. We were left uplifted and, bizarrely for a pair of old Goths, not even feeling slightly disconcerted as a result.

Living in a Strange Country

2011-01-28T18:30:00.002Z

'I don't have a problem with Jesus,', said Cylene the Goth, the American in Britain, over dinner. 'I'm fine with Jesus. Jesus was great. It's being made to feel a pariah unbeliever I can't take.

'Imagine you think there's life on Mars and hardly anybody else does. Yet they can't help reminding you you're wrong, all the time. People come and knock on your door to tell you, Did you know, There's no life on Mars? Athletes get their medals and say how great it is and then, 'By the way, There's no life on Mars', and everyone cheers. It says on all the coins and banknotes, 'No life on Mars!!' Schoolkids line up in front of the flag everyday and chant in unison to remind themselves There's no life on Mars. Is it any wonder I got to hate religion? It's just self-defence.'

Compared to that, the UK seems so refreshing to Cylene. There's an Established Church, but it's polite and reticent and tries not to annoy.

I know hot Christians decry the Church of England for its lukewarmness, but it has its benefits, and it arises from kindness. Jesus preached to the congregation: the nation of Israel was already supposed to believe, was already 'inside', and in any case, if any of us could preach like he did, would it really get up the atheists' noses? The rest of the time he said nothing until people asked him questions. Seems like a good pattern to me. Reticence about spiritual matters is right: you don't know where people are until you talk to them and get to know them, don't know what they need. And liturgical religion is just that, reticent. Its predictability and control allows space for individual emotion and reflection; it meets people in a variety of different places. And reticent public religion gives people who aren't 'inside' space as well. Long may that continue.

Enough is Enough

2011-01-24T19:11:00.004Z

You know I have a tendency towards liturgical conservatism, perhaps even favouring a modest revival of the customs and forms which have fallen out of favour over the last forty years and more in the Western Church. I drop in on traditionalist Catholic blogs, either of the Roman or Anglican variety, such as the New Liturgical Movement, the effusions of Father Zuhlsdorf, or Father Hunwicke's syllable-by-syllable dissection of every change the Western liturgy has ever undergone. I sympathise with Pope Benedict's attempts to restore the Roman Church's centre of gravity liturgically speaking. I accept completely all that 'hermeneutic of continuity' stuff, and the concept of the unfolding liturgical tradition of the centuries as the Holy Spirit's gift to the Church, not some form of artistic self-expression to be juggled with until it fits in with whatever happens to be the enthusiasm of the moment. That's fine. It really is.

But. Some people. It will not bother me a bit if I never, ever, again come across anyone advocating the following:

1. Returning to the pre-1955 (or pre-1951, depends what you mean) Holy Week liturgy. Oh yes, what a splendid example of the Western tradition that was. Because it was so disagreeable to keep fasting until the first Mass of Easter on the night of Holy Saturday, the Mass crept earlier and earlier until it was being celebrated at 10 o'clock in the morning. That meant all the Offices had to be rearranged to fit in and you ended up saying Mattins on the evening of the preceding day and Vespers in the morning. Brilliant. Not to mention that the whole Paschal symbolism of light was completely vitiated by celebrating the rite in the middle of the day!

2. The Cappa Magna, the ridiculously huge ceremonial train some bishops and cardinals are entitled to use on certain occasions. Just what we need to revive respect for the Church in a sceptical society, along with the sedia gestatoria and the ostrich feathers being waved either side of the Pope. Tell the truth: the Cappa Magna was designed in the Middle Ages for horse-riding bishops in order to cover up the horse's arse. And one could argue it's still performing the same function.

3. The Folded Chasuble. Deacons and subdeacons have their own proper garments, the dalmatic and the tunicle, graceful, elegant, and grand. But no, for penitential seasons we simply must revive the ugliest and most pointless form of liturgical vesture the Church ever devised. Otherwise everything is lost.

4. I actually read somebody commenting on the New Liturgical Movement that the Western Church should go back to the Julian calendar. No, the suggestion hasn't met with much approval, but somehow it seems iconic.

What next? Reclaiming modern society for Christianity by returning to Ptolemaic cosmology? So much more beautiful and Christian than all this heliocentric Copernican nonsense, after all.

Normal service resumed soon. Grrr.

Quality Control

2011-01-24T19:00:00.004Z

Our retired Assistant Priest was taking the early Mass on Sunday so I was able to sit and contemplate. It didn't take much attention to realise that when the new Epiphanytide service leaflets were assembled I'd arranged the pages of the particular one I was holding in the wrong order for Doris to staple together. I was confident most of them would be OK, but were any more like that? Towards the end of the service, I overheard one of the elderly couple, Mr & Mrs Bowdry, seated behind me, whisper to her husband, 'The pages are the wrong way round'. At least one other faulty one, then, I thought. I happened to follow them on the way out of church - and saw Mrs B. dutifully put her dud service booklet back on the pile with the others, so it could inconvenience somebody else.

I really find it quite difficult to pick my way through the psychology here. It could just be sheer forgetfulness, or the most maddening case of 'Mustn't Grumble-ism'.

Blessed Statistics

2011-01-22T21:32:00.003Z

'Church attendance figures are up' - or down, of course - says the Church Times once a year. The figures are compiled by the dioceses sending out annual questionnaires to churches, and I've just returned Swanvale Halt's - not even very late. But as well as asking us to list Easter and Christmas attendances and communicants, the authorities are well aware that all sorts of factors can affect one-off occasions like that (the weather this year, most obviously). A broader picture is needed. So we are asked to add up attendances in the month of October. All well and good. But the Church wants to be honest and present a credible picture, and so we parish clergy are asked, nay commanded, to exclude anyone who comes to the church on multiple occasions. Everyone should only be counted once, not only each Sunday, but also during the week too. Only additional attendances should be counted.

Of course this is virtually impossible. It's particularly difficult for us as we hold our Harvest Festival on the first Sunday of October, and the church is packed. I have only the very vaguest idea how many people came to both that and the Sung Eucharist in the evening, still less how many of the attenders at the midweek mass on a Tuesday were there on Sunday too. Actually, although Harvest is an acute instance of the problem, it's not absent for Christmas and Easter either; most irregular church worshippers are probably only there for one service over the season, but can I really remember how many folk who were there at the Midnight also came at 10am on Christmas Day? I ended up lopping off pretty arbitrary figures from each service based on - well, a few cursory glances out at the church. After all, I'm supposed to be praying while I'm at the altar ...

The figures are, being generous, not inaccurate, but their accuracy is, shall we say, impressionistic. Over time it doesn't matter, as one year won't be any more or less impressionistic than the one before, but it does make you wonder what any church with a congregation more than about a dozen does with its Annual Return.

Decorations

2011-01-13T21:26:00.002Z

Dr Bones bought me this trio of Gothy angels for my Christmas tree -they'll have to wait for next year, now. Unless I can find another occasion to bring them out ...

Shifting Sands

2011-01-11T21:37:00.003Z

I haven't said much lately although there has been a considerable change in the parish with the departure of our curate to her new charge in the Diocese of Norwich. Of course there was a big farewell service on Sunday and the traditional party afterwards. I only hope the vestment carrying case we bought her from Vanpoulles is worth the extraordinary amount they charged for it! If you bought your tat from Vanpoulles as well, the vestments would be worth rather less than the case you put them in ...
This ought to mark a huge change in my life in the parish, not only, or even primarily, because I will now have a lot less slack in my schedule and will have to be rather more determined and efficient (not something that comes very easily!). I'm certain it will be difficult not to have a colleague to work with on an equal basis (Mrs Curate was rather older and more experienced than me, and had been in the parish for nearly two years when I arrived, so it was never a normal training incumbent-curate relationship), but how that actually plays out isn't clear yet. I'm most concerned at the moment with not letting the saying of the Office decline into a cursory observance rather than a proper spiritual discipline and offering as it was when either she was leading it for us, or I was and having to batter my thoughts into some coherent form in order to pray.

Second Christmas

2011-01-01T16:38:00.003Z

This Christmas passed off with considerably less stress and strain than last, as I knew what to expect this time. Of course St Rita of Cascia doesn't like everything to go completely smoothly, so fifteen minutes before Midnight Mass was due to start it was pointed out to me that one of the selected hymns wasn't in the service booklet we use for this occasion. What would be less disruptive - to rearrange the hymns, or hand out hymn books to people already in the church? I chose the former, and despite our novice organist (novice to this organ - in general terms he's far from being a novice) balking and warning me not to expect anything wonderful out of him for the new hymn, it was splendid. I'd insisted that our curate should preside, as she's leaving soon, and in deference to her dodgy throat we eschewed incense on this occasion. We'll just have to have extra next year.

Thanks to the entire parish continuing to be encased in ice, we were about a third to a quarter down at the midnight and the 10am on Christmas Day, and, at the 8am, about half what we were last year. Even at the Crib Service, which is usually the one young families come to, we lost about a tenth on last year's numbers. The Romans suffered the same so this was no surprise.

It's a bit cruel when Boxing Day is a Sunday. I insisted that there be no 8am mass and instead we just gathered at 10 - only about 30 of us, but there was a nice feel about the whole event. It gave a chance to sing Good King Wenceslas as the first hymn, which nobody could remember singing as part of a service before!

Waste

2010-12-22T20:31:00.003Z

There's a young woman who was something of a pain to people I care about. Or there was. Early today she killed herself after threatening to do so for years. I don't know any of the details. I was far from being a friend of hers, and in fact because she brought someone I am close to such a great deal of trouble, my opinion of her was negative to say the least. But to anyone who didn't have to spend a great deal of time with her, I get the impression she came across as charming, idealistic, talented and moral. 'She wasn't evil', said my friend who suffered most from her problems, 'she was just ill'. The illness would have been clear to anyone but the poor screwed-up girl herself, but she positively refused to get help, worrying about the stigma of being labelled mentally ill. Christians usually think of the Devil trying to nudge us to do things that will land us in hell, but I doubt whether the Enemy knows how the details of salvation or damnation play out in any individual's life any more than we do. I certainly don't believe Ms L's suicide will, by itself, pitch her into the fire. But the damage it wreaks on all the people who loved her, and even those who didn't have anything to thank her for, and the waste of any of the good she might have done, is a result for him. It hurts the world, when our job is to try to heal it. Please God to remember the times when that was indeed what L tried to do.

Christmas Cheer

2010-12-22T20:23:00.002Z

I went to make my Advent confession on Monday. The snow is melting now, but two days ago it still lay deep and thick if not very even across the middle of Surrey. I caught a train which was twenty minutes late and then crawled its way to the city where it terminated, despite being scheduled to go on to Waterloo, because of some undefined technical fault. At least it got that far, it seemed touch and go at one stage. (The train home was amazing - jam-packed to a degree you usually only find on the Tube, literally with no room to move, at least in the carriage I was). I toiled up the hill to the cathedral and told my spiritual director all. He advised me to turn my negative thoughts into positive prayers for parallel virtues, and to be thankful for these insights into my faults, and gave me the Benedictus to read as my penance. I was on my way out of the chapel full of gratitude for this encounter with the Lord's mercy when S.D.'s voice rang out behind me. 'Don't worry', he called, 'Life just gets worse and then there's death'.

Bring on the Sub

2010-12-22T20:13:00.002Z

There were only six of us at the 8am Mass at snowy Swanvale Halt on Sunday morning. The curate was presiding, and having got to the end of the prayers looking increasingly pink choked at the peace and lost her voice completely, so I had to step in. I'd been so weary, under-the-weather and generally pissed off when I got up that I nearly didn't go at all, there being no actual need for me to be there. Lucky I did, and got the experience of presiding at the Holy Sacrifice in an overcoat and wellingtons.

Something similar happened to me when I was looking after Goremead a couple of years ago. There it was the midweek service when the bout of food-poisoning that had been threatening me all morning finally sent out a conquering wave of nausea. Luckily a) the congregation included two retired priests one of whom stepped in from the Creed onwards and b) there is a toilet adjoining the vestry where the other retired priest found me a minute later with my head down the bowl. Fully vested in fiddleback and maniple too.

Another instance: at the confirmation service in November the bishop managed to choke and only recovered slowly and with a great deal of concentration. The trouble with a confirmation service is that nobody else can do it. Churches tend to have rather few retired bishops lying around for this sort of emergency.

All Flesh is Grasse

2010-12-17T13:26:00.003Z

You wouldn't expect me to enjoy humanist funeral services very much. Perhaps 'enjoyment' isn't the right word for funerals anyway, but you know what I mean. I've been to a couple and always find them 'thin' compared to Christian funerals. I haven't warmed to any of the officiants who've taken the ones I've been to, but that's probably no worse than Christian ministers of different sorts. Of course you daren't, daren't so much as suggest any negative feelings, because what can you do with them? But what I most dislike came in front of me on Wednesday. That afternoon I took a funeral service at the crematorium and noticed a folder on the table where I was putting my things. This turned out to be the notes left by the officiant at a humanist funeral earlier in the day. Usually humanist funerals spend the vast bulk of their time waxing lyrical about the heroic achievements of the deceased, but there was no trace of a biography in the notes, so I assume somebody else had read a tribute or something of that sort. Instead there was a passage from Lucretius's De Rerum Natura and some heartwarming statements along the following lines.

For those of us who hold that the individual life concludes with death, it is nevertheless not the end. ... Arnold may be gone, but he lives on in your memories.

It is nevertheless not the end? Yes it is. In any commonly understood sense, for Arnold it definitely is the end. This particular celebrant didn't say 'his life returns to the earth', as I have heard on other occasions, but it doesn't do that either. At best, the incinerated remains of the minerals that made Arnold's physical body return to the earth, but not 'his life', his consciousness. As for Arnold 'living on' in his loved ones' memories, no he doesn't. They may have memories of him, but those memories are not 'him living', they're a set of synaptic responses in the brains of those who shared some aspect of his life when it was a life which will themselves decay and come to an end. Call me simple-minded, but all this is metaphor, not truth. I never, ever use language like this.

In a way I sympathise, because what on earth can you say? A truly honest humanist funeral would state, if it said anything, 'Arnold is dead and we are here to dispose efficiently and cleanly of the collection of carbon, phosphor and other elements that make up his body. Some of the things he did were good and some were bad. You will remember him for a while, less and less accurately as time goes on, and eventually you too will die and nobody will remember him at all.' What we have here is an attempt to accommodate through linguistic sleight-of-hand what the officiant believes, or doesn't believe, with the perceived need to comfort Arnold's family and friends with the thought that in some way he 'lives on'. Shouldn't atheists be brave enough to combat this weak-mindedness? Or perhaps it doesn't really matter?

Sound and Fury

2010-12-17T08:03:00.004Z

Aeons ago the Heresiarch posted about the 'debate' between Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens in Toronto on whether religion benefits the human race, the world, and the universe. I hadn't bothered with it until a few days ago when I heard it broadcast on Radio 4; even then I couldn't manage more than the opening statements by both participants before boredom got the better of me. You know exactly what the protagonists are going to say in these circumstances; the only interest lies in discovering exactly how it's going to be said and, as the Heresiarch points out, Mr Hitchens's contribution was far more elegant.

My main conclusion was that the discussion was not merely sterile, but entirely wrong-headed. I find myself continually insisting that there are such things as 'religions', ideological structures and traditions based on various propositions, but 'religion' is usually too vague a category to be helpful. And the outset of this debate made the point. The core and heart of Mr Hitchens's argument was this, wonderfully modulated and beautifully delivered phrase:

"Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick, and commanded to be well. I'll repeat that. Created sick, and then ordered to be well."

The repetition shows how important it is in Mr Hitchens's thinking. But it seems to me that it's a criticism not of religion in general, but of Christianity. The tension in Christianity between the doctrine of the inevitable human tendency to sin and the command to be holy generates huge theological difficulties and, it could be argued, psychological stress which human beings can do without. But it is, I think, unique to this particular religious tradition. Allah, for instance, demands only that human beings follow a few easily-enumerated rules; the deities of many animist traditions make no moral demands on their adherents at all; Buddhist or Daoist traditions again have very clear statements of what human beings have to do in order to live the good life which fall well within the bounds of possibility. Only Christianity has this inescapable tension between divine perfection and inborn human frailty, and even then there have been Christian heretics who've thought differently.

Religions are different and teach different things. Atheist campaigners prefer to tackle a single phenomenon, 'religion', but what they think religion is seems usually to be their own creation drawn from real ideologies - Christianity, for instance - and arguing about that construction seems to me to be the merest pointlessness. It's as sterile as discussing whether 'politics' is good for the world.

A Little Light Art

2010-12-13T19:31:00.007Z

I've posted before about the Crypt Gallery space at St Pancras Church in London and also about Illumini which organises artistic events around the capital. This Sunday we combined the two by going to Illumini's charming 'Cryptmas' event at St Pancras, which spattered the whole space with fake snow and filled the niches and corridors with a series of light-based artworks inspired by Christmas customs, present-giving, angels, and the whole of the festive season. Even the gigantic glowing animatronic winged skull wasn't particularly eerie, I thought, and instead it was all rather innocuously delightful.

The Calling

2010-12-07T18:42:00.005Z

Today is St Ambrose's Day. I told our small congregation the famous story of how Ambrose moved from being a Roman governor to Bishop of Milan after trying to restore peace in a particularly rowdy public meeting called to elect the new bishop, and a child's voice calling out from the crowd, 'Ambrose for Bishop!' Quite something when he wasn't even baptised at that stage.

'I've always liked that story about Ambrose', said Fred, who is our longest-serving server and who usually serves the Tuesday mass, 'because it happened to me'. He then told me how he went to church when he was little, but stopped as he got older and then a bit later was walking past the church when a voice called out 'Fred!'. There was nobody there and he thought nothing of it, but then it kept happening whenever he went past the church, and only stopped when he started going again. Fred's great-grandson was confirmed last month, so there are now four generations of his family involved with the church. Of course there are any number of natural explanations, but that doesn't really matter. From Fred, a story like that was very unexpected.

The Cemetery Looked Lovely

2010-12-03T22:33:00.002Z

A friend asked why I haven't put up any photographs of Swanvale Halt in the snow. It hasn't been particularly picturesque so far and in any case I have little to thank the bad weather for, as a saucepan resting on a towel sit in my kitchen to catch the drips coming through the ceiling from what is presumably a ruptured pipe. But I wish I'd had a camera with me this afternoon, or that it would have been decent to use it. We had a funeral of a popular local man, with probably something around 200 people in the church, and for the first time in days the sun came out for the occasion. The Council had gritted the steep hill to the cemetery specially, and by the time we got there the sun was straking across the hilltop turning the snow a beautiful blue-white. The cemetery staff had even cleared the snow to make a path to the graveside, revealing the dark green of the grass underneath. It's usually a bleak, windswept place, but never looked lovelier than it did this afternoon.

Mystery

2010-12-03T22:28:00.003Z

... which means, in New Testament speak, something revealed rather than something concealed. I forgot to mention that at Widelake House the other day as I came round bringing the residents communion one lady was crying and murmuring, 'That poor girl, God bless her, that poor young girl'. I sometimes tell people that the Eucharist involves a collapse of time, a movement of humans into God's eternal time in which sequential chronology is no longer paramount (which modern physics and neuroscience suggests may be close to scientific, as well as intuitive religious, truth), and have heard about the similar collapse of time and sequence in people with dementia or in the final stages of life. On this occasion both ran together. I don't know what was going on in the lady's mind, though of course God does: it is both mysterious and Mystery.