Holy Week 2025 ...

… has offered a variety of experiences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Healing Words, Maybe

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ready for Anything

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

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

Quiet

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

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

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

School Day

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

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

Easter 2024

Holy Week at Swanvale Halt was bookended by syncope. Lillian, our former Lay Reader, keeled over during the Palm Sunday mass, and at 8am on Easter Day a pregnant young woman who I’d never seen in church before but came accompanied by two older women one of whom I recognised from the streets of the village, also found standing up and sitting down in order too much, and passed out briefly. She was ever so embarrassed.

This was how it all worked. I decided to do a healing mass on Monday evening, Compline and Benediction on Tuesday, and Tenebrae on Wednesday, as ever, low-key services which brought the expected handful of faithful souls (not quite the same handful on each evening, but nearly). The bigger Triduum observances of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday had lower gates than the unusually high numbers of last year, but it wasn’t bad to get 23 at the dawn mass on the Sunday the clocks went forward (most of the conversation in the vestry beforehand orbited around how little we’d slept and how we couldn’t remember which of our timepieces would automatically update), 18 at 8am and 100 at 10am for the first time since 2018.

For the first time in some years I remembered to order a garland for the Paschal Candle from the local florists: if only I’d also remembered that I had to carry on watering it after the great excitement was past, the daisies would have survived longer than they did. 

Extra Solemn

The annual task of veiling the church for Passiontide is something I normally look forward to as a sign that Lent is mostly past, even if the taxing time of Holy Week is yet to come. I especially like putting the panels that show the Instruments of the Passion onto the reredos, covering the mosaics that are usually visible; I don't know any other church that has anything quite the same, and ours are homemade, designed to slip beneath the canopies of the arches.

But without someone to assist me and foot the ladder, veiling two large paintings and one wall-mounted mosaic panel presents a disagreeable prospect to someone who gets vertiginous even standing on a chair to change a light bulb. So last Saturday I moved very carefully, shifting the ladder laboriously and sensibly (or what I thought was sensibly) and not overreaching. 

I realised I'd missed a Pollyday and hadn't listened to Let England Shake on its anniversary, February 14th, as I should, so did the veiling to the accompaniment of the maestra on headphones. Shimmering music of war and death, and the terrible destructiveness of human folly, alongside this act of preparation for the symbolic violence of the Passion. Neither alone has ever felt quite the same before. 

Passiontide Devotion

Yesterday evening our 'augmented' choir (all the singers we can muster from ourselves, plus the odd soul dragged in from other churches) laid on their musical offering for Passiontide, this year for reasons of convenience on Passion Sunday rather than Palm Sunday. In the past I have moaned a bit about the music, and the form, alternating between examples of what I can't help but regard as somewhat turgid and uninvolving Victorian fare. This year was very different, a selection of readings, anthems, and congregational hymns, along the same pattern as our Advent and Christmas carol services, and I liked that much more: it was less of a performance and more of a service, and though that might make it harder to market beyond the church, the takers for the previous version, if they weren't already church members, were family and friends of the singers anyway. 

Delving into old service registers as I am at the moment has shown how common this kind of musical event in the days leading up to Easter was at one time. Lots of churches seem to have put on a similar kind of devotion, performance, or whatever, on a Sunday evening at the end of Lent, and I wonder whether this reflects the paucity of official Anglican liturgical provision for the season. Until Lent, Holy Week and Easter was published as late as 1984, if you wanted to do anything beyond what was available in the Prayer Book you had to borrow from Roman sources. Of course plenty did, even if they weren't all-out Roman Rite churches, but these musical offerings may have been part of the same attempt to add something appropriate to the diet.

Two Little Girls

The fact that it was Ash Wednesday hadn't been mentioned at Church Club, but Etta spontaneously raised the subject. 'You didn't come to do the crosses this morning', she upbraided me, and it was true, I hadn't, because I ran out of time to arrange it with the school. Etta also reminded me of a story involving my elder niece which I had no idea I'd told the children. 'Yes, she has a photographic memory', her mum told me when the parents came to collect them, 'It can be quite disconcerting'.

At the evening mass the Swallow family came, mum, dad, baby daughter, and Edie, who is eight. When the Swallows first arrived in Swanvale Halt, Edie too was a babe-in-arms. They came to the main Sunday service and as soon as the singing started she bawled the place down, and did it again on every occasion they turned up. Discerning child, you might think, but it meant that they beat a retreat and didn't come back until Edie was old enough to see things differently. Now she seems to be growing very religious. 'I'm not saying we didn't want to come', said her dad, 'But it was Edie who insisted that we did'. I have seldom seen a more solemn recipient of an ash cross, and when the family knelt at the rail for communion and I blessed her sister, Edie reached along to touch the baby's hand with hers. Just as well I am a hard-hearted soul impervious to such sentiment or it might have been embarassing. 

Notes To Self

The list of 'things that we must do differently next year' has grown and grown as this Holy week has gone on, moving inexorably forward beneath (almost) clear blue skies. I have been intending to get a proper, nice iron brazier for the New Fire rather than the increasingly ratty movable barbeque we have been managing with since we first celebrated the Easter Vigil in 2010, but I still haven't managed it and it remains on the list. I have noticed things that need changing with the orders of service for almost every liturgy, and come 2023 (if we are all spared) I will be doing some new things in Holy week, replacing the three Meditations with Compline we used to run, and which I haven't done this year as post-pandemic I thought most of our usual takers wouldn't be around. And minutes before the Liturgy of the Passion on Good Friday, I found myself racing around the church trying to find the gold velvet-covered bucket of stones we wedge the big wooden cross in for people to venerate. I couldn't, and had to improve with another bucket, and other stones. we need something other than a bucket next time round.

I am, though, finding it hard to summon up any spiritual thoughts; not that this is an abnormal situation. The Chrism Mass at the cathedral was bearable enough: we now all collect little bottles of the holy oils, so the days are long gone when the aisle leading to the little side chapel where the oils were being siphoned out of big jars into bottles, pots, or whatever we'd brought, were strewn with the bodies of fellow clergy Il Rettore had elbowed aside. 'Do you include the Solemn Reception of the Oils in the Maundy Thursday mass?' the Dean had asked me when I went to make my confession on Monday; we did, I said. 'well, that makes you and one other church in the diocese, I think.' I got back to the church, reached into my bag to retrieve the oils, and found my hand had brought out two, and a bottle of First Defence instead. It's a long week. Other anti-cold medicaments are available. 

Holy Week and its Variations

Fr Thesis points us all towards a series of talks Dr Robin ward at our old alma mater St Stephen’s House, Oxford, has been giving over recent days about the development of the liturgies of Holy week, and good value they are too if you like that kind of thing (I’m not surprised Dr ward’s audience in the House Chapel is not a large one: even when I and Fr Thesis were there, one would have to be extraordinarily dedicated to attend the most interesting of talks if you didn’t actually have to). The Father Principal points out that what we tend to think of as extremely venerable ceremonies are in fact often not that old at all (‘going all the way back to 1956’) and have been moved around, reorganised according to different assumptions, and altered to make different points on many occasions before reaching the forms we are familiar with now, either in Anglican Common worship or in the Roman Rite. What a Christian in late-medieval England would have been used to doing was quite different from either the pre-1955 Roman ceremonies or the current ones.

A few days ago, Marion, our former curate, came back to Swanvale Halt for a memorial service and found me at the café opposite the church to snatch a couple of minutes’ conversation. She is now part of a parish in Devon, and told me how good it felt to look through the door of our church ‘where it’s all tidy and orderly’. Her current incumbent has a tendency ‘to make up liturgy as they go along – it’s never the same two times running’.

I can’t find any evidence that I have talked about this before, so I will take this Holy week occasion to admit that, despite my bias against home-made liturgy, I have made up at least two things myself. The first comes on Ascension Day. During Eastertide, the Paschal Candle, the big one carried into church in the darkness of Easter morning to signify the resurrected light of Christ, sits beside the altar, but when Eastertide is over it only comes out for baptisms, and for funerals if you are so inclined. Here there is an ambiguity. Under the modern Roman Rite, the Candle moves to the Baptistery on Pentecost Day; but in the old version it was taken away at the end of Mass on Ascension Day, and not used again until the blessing of the font at the Vigil of Pentecost. One year at Lamford I and Il Rettore had a discussion about this and neither of us could remember for sure which it should be. We decided to move the Candle on Ascension Day, as it made more symbolic sense: Jesus has now returned to heaven and we await the coming of the Spirit. So after communion at the Ascension Day mass and before the final blessing he and I took the Paschal Candle to the back of the church and placed it on its stand beside the font. Once installed at Swanvale Halt I felt something could be made of this and devised a little chant based on the words of Psalm 47 and lifting the first few notes shamelessly from Finzi’s anthem 'God is Gone Up', to accompany the motion. Gratifyingly in Ceremonies of the Liturgical Year I see that Mgr Peter Elliott also suggests transferring the Candle in procession to the final hymn or an appropriate chant, and includes a form for doing so, even though it’s not an official part of the Roman liturgy. Great minds and all that.

The other extra I do at Swanvale Halt will come tomorrow, on Good Friday. When I first became interested in all this as a layperson, I discovered the medieval custom of ‘burying’ the Host at the end of the services of Good Friday, in the Easter Sepulchre many churches had then or some other place, and then ‘resurrecting’ it to great joy and celebration on Easter Day: I also realised this was basically incompatible with the emphasis on the entry of the light which is the focus of the ancient, and the modern, Easter Vigil. Now my predecessor at Swanvale Halt had celebrated Good Friday with a rather formless service including poetry and interaction but no communion or Passion narrative, and I brought back something more like the version of the liturgy I’d known at Lamford. But after communion, you still need some hosts to reserve in case they’re needed, even during the Triduum. There they are on the stripped altar; what to do with them? Here we have two aumbries, the one in the Lady Chapel where the Sacrament is normally reserved, and a secondary one in the north aisle where we keep the oils. I decided to return the remaining Hosts not to the first aumbry whence they’d been brought, but the second, wrapping the ciborium in the corporal that had been spread on the altar for communion. It was a bit like burying the Host in the Easter Sepulchre as medieval Christians would have done, the burial of Jesus being something our modern rites miss out. So the next time I did it, I added some texts, taken from the miserable Psalm 88 (Diamanda Galás’s favourite) and the Troparion of the Burial from the Orthodox liturgy: words put into the mouth of Joseph of Arimathea to address Pilate, ‘Give me that stranger, who all his life had walked as a stranger …’.

I like to think that these two little observances, probably without any parallel across the Church of England, aren’t indulgent stuff I have made up for the sake of making a point, but very practical customs that arise from the existing liturgy and the form of our church building. At least that is what I will tell the bishop, not that he would ever be that interested! 

Sort Of How It Is Supposed To Work

Unlike last year when it all went a bit wrong, we had a full Mothering Sunday posy-making team and the posies were pleasantly presentable. Today the Roman Catholic congregation also distributed posies, which I can’t remember them doing in the past. It was almost back to normal as the children from the Infants School came to sing for us and brought their families with them, so we had about 120 people in the church for the main service. It was great and everyone enjoyed themselves. But where were our usual congregation members? Without the visitors I calculated we would have been few indeed, possibly fewer than 30. Yesterday I’d seen emails from members of the refreshments team appealing for help as all the people usually available were away or struck down by covid, and so before we began this morning I checked to see whether anyone was available to do it – no hands went up, so we saved on the biscuits. I haven’t heard of anyone newly afflicted by covid for a few days, so I wonder whether the peak is passing us, but it’s still having a noticeable impact.

A Loathsome Lent

One should not say this, but Lent is loathsome. It is supposed to be six weeks of deepened spiritual wrestling but for many clergy it involves more activity rather than more reflection. That’s certainly what it’s felt like for me these first few days as I race a bit to keep up. I expect a lot of it depends what the ordinary schedule of your particular church is like, and when Ash Wednesday happens to fall in it.

My usual Lenten disciplines involve not consuming specially pleasurable things – alcohol and chocolate – and fasting on Fridays and Ash Wednesday itself. It’s not a very strict fast as I break it at 6pm in the evening and do drink water (only sensible) and black tea or coffee (necessary to stave off caffeine withdrawal symptoms), but I never enjoy not eating. It always makes me feel cold and distracted. Once upon a time I fasted on Wednesdays in Lent as well as Fridays but decided on balance it was doing more harm than good!

This year, though, I have something extra, and it’s not giving up biscuits which I tried on one occasion and hated; I am not listening to radio news programmes. In fact I stopped at the beginning of this week when I realised I was trying to gauge whether any particular report meant we were an inch closer to or further from nuclear obliteration and of course there is no end to this (unless obliteration comes). I still listen to a couple of bulletins through the day, but have turned off Today, The world at One, PM, and The world Tonight for the first time since my teens. This has been very odd: Radio 4 has been my constant companion and I find the silence strange. Even now I am typing with seashore noises in the background to provide some sound in the house. But what began as a means of preserving mental health and my ability to work has become a sort of fast. It remains to be seen what the Lord will do with it.

Time Present and Time Past

The three hours of the Maundy Thursday vigil always seems to pass quicker than three hours should. By this time I was unaccountably weary and my ability to enter into the sufferings of Christ in Gethsemane was very limited; I had brought along a book about George Herbert to read but couldn't manage more than a page, and was in little mood for more scripture. Once upon a time I would try and pray through my whole list of personal intercessions, bringing my friends and family into the Garden, to be with the Lord as he readied himself for the ordeal to come, but mustering up the concentration is harder than that sounds. Now I just visualise them, as they are, rather than do anything with them. Mostly, my mind wanders, occasionally pulled back to our Lord. I manage by getting up and having a stretch every hour or so.

I've always had the feeling, near-blasphemous though it sounds, that at this moment you are not so much praying with Jesus as for him, that he will indeed have what he needs to take the Via Dolorosa. Perhaps it isn't so fanciful: perhaps the prayers of the faithful and less-faithful, all down the centuries, have indeed been some help to our brother and champion. 

Swanvale Halt was mostly quiet. A young woman came in and sat at the back of the church, tearful: 'just the usual rubbish', she told me when I asked. Another crying female voice went along the path outside at one point, but its owner was gone by the time I arrived. The village was silent as I went up the hill with Marion and her family, the last vigil-keepers that night - within the church, at least.

The Royal Banners Forward Go Albeit Not Very Far

It may not look like it from this snapshot but there were nearly 60 souls (living ones) at our Palm Sunday mass this morning as we resumed public worship for the first time since mid-January, which is not far off capacity at the moment. We had a smattering of refugees from Tophill who are not yet open and a handful of newcomers to the parish trying us out for the first time - not sure Palm Sunday is the most representative occasion to do it! - so we may not be as full again but I have asked people to book in for the main service on Easter Day so we will see what happens. No Palm Sunday procession this year and no full-scale reading of the Passion: it was just me and Marion. At one point I lost concentration and carried on into her next line, but we recovered. I was going to preach a tiny, tiny sermon, but in the end decided not to; I think rightly, as you can see the whole service took fifty minutes what with that long Passion reading, and that's right at the top end of what I think is advisable at the moment. Our Holy Week diet includes some remote worship and some in-person stuff and everything that is normally done, will be done - if in a somewhat truncated form. No champagne and pain-au-chocolat on Easter Day but there's always next year, we pray.

Finding Your Place

NB. I discover I'd only saved this post as a draft, not published it!

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The PCC decided on Friday to resume public worship on Palm Sunday, a week today. When I did the newsletter delivery round that morning everyone I spoke to asked me when the church was reopening: one of our most faithful members positively begged me. ‘I need to be back in church!’ So I am working out how to celebrate the Triduum in a curtailed and Covid-compliant form: there won’t be a procession on Palm Sunday, and the Easter Vigil will be done by just me and Julie the sacristan and recorded. But there will be live-streamed Compline, and an Easter Messy Church via Zoom, and I will need to work out how (and whether) to do the Passion Service for families on Good Friday. There’ll be a booking system for the Easter services, as there was for Christmas though I will be very encouraged if we turn out to need it!

It strikes even me as contextually incongruous, this antique formulation of what I do, but in fact, the more I considered what to put on the census form today, the more it seemed like a reasonable and accurate summary. It would have been more pious to put something about Jesus, but harder to encapsulate in 120 characters or less. This is both open and precise, even if, to all intents and purposes, the bishop doesn’t take an obviously close interest in his share of the cure of souls here. It is, still, not a bad place to find oneself – physically and metaphorically.

Easy Enough In Theory

"Shall we give out flowers for Mothering Sunday like usual?" Rick the verger asked. I reckoned we couldn't do it in person, as he wanted to, but there would be no problem with having a tray of posies outside the church. Jill who usually coordinates them was willing to make them ("it'll give me something to do") so that was all under control, wasn't it.

I thought there ought to be a little prayer slip to go with them and knocked one up. I got to the church this evening ready to sort them all out and found that the posies - well, weren't quite what I envisaged. Materials seemed to have been a bit limited. But for no very apparent reason there was an unused bunch of supermarket tulips so I reduced the number of posies, made use of the tulips, and got some more greenery from the church garden to bolster them a bit. 

If the posies were to be left in water overnight, the little prayer slips might get damp. They would be better laminated. Within five minutes I had broken the laminator and even with the aid of the only, very small and awkward, Phillips screwdriver to open it up, there was no rescuing it. Argos is not far away but this was turning into as unexpectedly costly a venture as it was a time-consuming one. The whole episode ended up taking about three hours rather than the one I anticipated. Mighty works for Jesus, as Fr Gooley would say, or something like that.

Remote Resources

'What you should do', said Don, the American former member of the congregation who I sometimes talk to via the wonder of Zoom, 'is get a six-foot stick and cut a cross into the end and then stamp people with it!' He was very pleased at that, an idea for facilitating the traditional ashing to begin Lent in a socially-distanced age. I was less sure.

Then a colleague mentioned entirely in passing at a Deanery Chapter meeting that she'd spent hours laminating cards including an ash cross to send out to members of the church and I had my solution. There was a way of actually bringing the chief physical expression of penitence and forgiveness that inaugurates the Lenten season in front of people who wouldn't be able to come to church to do it. I could include not just regular congregation members but also Messy Churchers and a few others we know well but don't often see in church.

The task has dominated everything since Friday: constructing a distribution list and route, designing the prayer card, copying them (this time it took an hour on freezing Saturday morning for the photocopier in the church office to decide it was sufficiently warm for it to get on and do its work); addressing the envelopes, and making the cards. I eventually worked out the best way of doing it was to mark each card with a cross in glue, then press it onto a pile of ash. It was messy but that didn't matter. But the laminating took ages: the cards had to go through at least three times and occasionally four. 

Should the cards be posted, or delivered? Some had to go out by post, but the rest amounted to just over 120. That would have cost about £80. It was just about cost-effective for me to deliver them myself, following a wildly circuitous route which took me up hill and down dale and incorporated almost every street in the parish. I estimated it would take a couple of hours: it was, in the event, four and a half before I propelled my bicycle unsteadily back into the drive. I suppose I'd had some useful conversations on the way.

And I realised that there was one person on the list I hadn't delivered to. Even though, if asked, I would have sworn that I remembered writing his name on an envelope, I had, inadvertently and inexplicably, missed out the sole and only black member of the congregation. Instantly that episode of Father Ted flashed into my mind: 'I hear you're a racist now, Father'. Don't worry, I returned to pop one through his door separately.

Not Entirely Following the Liturgical Manuals

Stumbling through the liturgy took on a very literal sense this morning, as managing the Rectory stairs with the Paschal Candle in one hand and my phone in the other proved slightly beyond my abilities. Originally I wasn’t going to do anything other than a missa solitaria but when Il Rettore told me that the ceremonies of the day would be broadcast from Lamford Rectory I thought I would try too. We usually get about twenty souls at the Dawn Mass and so this would give everyone at least a taste of what happens. The trouble is that Il Rettore has a second pair of hands available and I don’t. As well as tripping on the stairs, the first part of the video I managed to shoot consists of almost total darkness, the Service of Light is out of focus (though you do get the birdsong effect I was keen to capture), the incense grains managed to avoid the charcoal almost completely and so produced nothing more than a congealed mess in the thurible, and I repeatedly forgot where things were and had to move around in a less than ideally decisive way. I haven’t sung the Exsultet since I was curate at Lamford: it doesn’t half go on a long time but at least I didn’t choke.

Even if you have one other person available it makes doing this sort of thing a lot easier. Other churches, of course, are much better resourced and can produce professional-looking experiences by layering music and speech and film together and so on; I’m not going to be able to make anything of that kind. Canon Lucy Winkett of St James’ Piccadilly made the point on the wireless this morning that the current crisis hasn’t really brought out any new moral challenges, just cast sharper light on old ones, not least our human competitiveness: how ‘productive’ you can be during lockdown. This applies to everyone including clergy. Some people find it hard enough to get up in the morning while others stifle their uncertainties, if they feel any, under activity. (Was Abi, the terrifyingly competent, holy, and sympathetic curate who gets so far under Fr Adam Smallbone’s skin in the TV series Rev that he’s relieved when she’s moved, based on Canon Winkett as the rumour goes? No one has ever confirmed, or denied … ).

If it was just my own spiritual life I was concerned about, I’d be content to sit and say the Office and pray for the parish and its people for the duration of the lockdown. I’m not exposing my meagre efforts at technological engagement and mangled liturgy, or even celebrating services alone at all, because it’s fun. I’ve taken the view that what the congregation need most is something to maintain first their connection with God, and, second, their connection with the parish, the other human beings in relationship with whom they deepen their experience of God. Quite minimal material can do that: it doesn’t need to be a multimedia sound-and-light extravaganza, thankfully. I also have a sense that our instinct to try and reproduce our normal experience as much as we can should be resisted: you can’t learn the lessons of deprivation if you’re pushing the sign of deprivation away. In the garden on Maundy Thursday, bringing the Vigil to an end, I said as usual the Passiontide hymn from Malling Abbey:

God’s Israel, a remnant left,

Must die, to bring to life

New Israel.

And God only knows what that will look like.

One of the resources I’ve sent out to the good folk of Swanvale Halt included simple ‘table services’ for Holy Week, adapted from stuff prepared some years ago by the Anglican Franciscans in Australia, and I’ve been following them as it seems the least I can do. They are structured around mealtimes, and draw the connection between the table of the altar and the table at homes. Normally I would break my Lenten fast at breakfast after the Dawn Mass with champagne and pain-au-chocolat; this morning I had the drink, and a defrosted chocolate cupcake preserved from the last pre-lockdown Messy Church. When we get through that early service, and meet in the hall for breakfast, there are always a number of sensations feeding into it. There is the feeling that we’ve been through something ever-so-slightly testing together, in the sense of getting up early and doing something complicated that could easily collapse into a shambles, the tiniest, tiniest intimation of ordeal; there’s the sense that we’re grown-ups doing something slightly mad, silly and naughty; and the knowledge that we’re taking up rituals and customs that we set down six weeks before, things that tell us who we are in Christ. Those add up to a sort of slight hysteria, all defused and dissipated over breakfast: a release. You can’t do that the same way, on your own, no matter how you might strain to reproduce the customary patterns. Of course I should have had the Scriptures in my mind, but instead it was filled with the lyrics of PJ Harvey’s ‘Good Fortune’: ‘Threw my bad fortune off the top of a tall building/I’d rather have done it with you.’

Ash After

A day after Ash Wednesday, the little bowl of ash I took to the Infants School yesterday is a bit dry. The attendances at the services in church were somewhat lower (I think) this year, but although the number of people - adults and children - ashed at school must not have been in total that far off the ones in church, I don't think we're quite there yet. At Church Club in the afternoon most of the children wanted to receive the ash and Cleo took great delight in ashing me. Matthew told us he was giving up jam sandwiches for Lent, which is no small sacrifice when you're six.