Epiphany 2021

My first Epiphany in Swanvale Halt was celebrated in snow and ice; I would happily have swapped the pandemic conditions of 2021 for that. But ten of us managed to meet and celebrate, and pray especially for our Orthodox friends who keep January 6th as a higher and holier festival than December 25th.

I experimented with using my new laptop to record, and in fact livestream, the service - not that I told anyone else that it was being beamed onto Youtube! It worked, but the sound was muddy and the video indistinct. I have asked my friend Cara the vicar of Emwood's husband for advice as he is a wiz with these things and he has recommended a nice neat webcam which I think I may well ask the diocese for help with buying, given the price. Oh, nothing about this is easy.

As is customary (here, anyway), chalk was blessed and taken home to mark our door lintels, or anywhere else suitable. 'Mine are all white plastic', Martha from the flats next to the church told me. 'I'll have to be creative.'

Incensed

Epiphany is one of the occasions when we take the opportunity to use incense at Swanvale Halt, though it isn't quite as spectacular as the employment of the gigantic botafumeiro at Santiago, as illustrated here, not even when Fr C presided a few years ago and stoked the thurible more than usual, swirling the charcoal and incense pastilles around with the spoon. However that did make me wonder whether I was being a little stingy with the stuff, and on Sunday evening I gaily popped four pastilles, supplied by an Orthodox monastery not far away, into the pot. The resulting amount of smoke surprised even me, and I now know that four is enough to polish off the weaker of the parishioners. Subsequent chargings of the thurible were restricted to two. 

You might say this is a small practical experiment. Following on from our discussion of science and humanism the other day, it occurred to me that while reason is of course a very good thing, and God can never be anything other than absolutely rational (if only we knew what the rational thing was), the scientific method is a different matter. Life is not a laboratory, and I don't mean that metaphorically. There are indeed circumstances in which we can determine what course of action to adopt by testing hypotheses, such as how much incense a particular congregation can stand wafting from a thurible. The thurible, the incense, and probably the people, remain the same from instance to instance: the variables are limited. But most of the time we inhabit immensely complex, nay chaotic, systems, and the accurate replication of experimental circumstances which is central to the scientific method becomes impossible. For instance, if you are a finance minister debating whether to adopt a particular fiscal strategy, you can't repeatedly test your guesses out on the level of an entire national economy and exclude all the variable circumstances which would make the resulting data meaningful. It is exactly those variable circumstances which make for so much dissension among economists (I wait for Dr Abacus to comment). There's only so much the scientific method can do: and beyond it, we're left with the arguable. 

The Doorposts and the Lintels

I can't remember how I came across the practice customary in some places in Christendom of blessing chalk at Epiphany so that the faithful can mark the doorframes of their homes and invoke the blessing of the Saviour on the house for the coming year. However it came about, I imported it into Swanvale Halt within a couple of years of arriving and everyone looks forward to it now, as you do to something which is a bit crackers but has some actual spiritual weight to it. 

I should really have had a mass on the day of the Epiphany itself, which would have been Saturday this year, even if it was for just a handful of souls in the morning. But I decided to transfer it to the Sunday, forgetting that that was also the Baptism of Christ - cue a collision of theological elements. Oh well. The Epiphany theme was more to the fore at the Family Service today than the others, meaning I could rope in some younger members of the congregation to help me bless the chalk. Ben held the basket of chalk while Abi and Ewan stood either side with little wooden candlesticks. Ben had chosen to face the congregation so I had to kneel in front of him, but that was all right. Afterwards we took the chalk to the table at the back of church from where people could pick bits to take home. The children won't have known what on earth to make of it, but that doesn't matter. Liturgy is a game, really, just a serious rather than a frivolous one. 

The cypher for marking this year is 20+C+M+B+18. There are differing opinions over what the letters stand for; either the traditional names of the Three Magi, Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, or 'Christus Mansionem Benedicat', Christ bless this house. Not that many Swanvale Halt souls inhabit anything that could really be described as a mansio.

A couple of years ago an elderly pair of congregation members marked their house in the approved manner as did Marion our curate who lives opposite. Not far away lived someone from the Roman Catholic congregation who'd done the same. My parishioners soon had a visit from the police, who were worried that there was a criminal gang in the area casing their properties as potential targets and leaving coded messages in chalk. 

A Treat at Epiphany

This is not a photo of me, nor is it Swanvale Halt church: it is my friend Fr Newcombe at Hoxton celebrating the holy Epiphany of Christ last weekend. I do like those spangly drapes creating a special space in the church where there was none. Andrew has a knack of using ordinary things to introduce the celebratory and grand into somewhat commonplace church spaces, as he did for Pentecost at Ponders End. 

Meanwhile, at Swanvale Halt itself we doggedly keep the big feasts, as a rule, on the specified days themselves rather than gravitate them all to the nearest Sunday, so this year Epiphany fell on Wednesday and we had an evening Mass. Epiphany is my one chance in the year to remind myself how to be thurifer so I invited my colleagues from the Deanery to volunteer to celebrate the mass with our curate Marion as deacon, and first to put up his hand was Fr C from Nigeria who would, he pointed out, be marking the anniversary of his ordination. He presided with great applomb and wielded the thurible even more flamboyantly than I would have done. One of the choir sang a splendid Journey-of-the-Magi solo during communion (a last-minute decision, apparently), and we had 26 in the congregation of whom no fewer than 6 were clergy - not just the three of us up front, but also Fr C's vicar, the retired hospital chaplain who has started coming to us occasionally, and an OLM from a nearby parish. I was especially delighted to see someone else wearing my old gold vestments which I was relieved to observe do actually look as splendid as I imagined. Although I am officially on leave this week and so was breaking into my time off in just the way one shouldn't do, the mass was a complete treat, a bit like doing Christmas without all the stress and expectation. Thank you, Lord.