Election Time

I have never, ever voted in a Synod election, either Diocesan or General, but now we have a vacancy for a Clergy representative and Fr Benedict from North Corley, a fellow SCP member, is standing. This is rather to my surprise, and it seems to his as well. He told me someone else was lined up as the catch-all-bit-progressive-something-other-than-conservative-evangelical candidate, but with something like half an hour to go before nominations closed they turned out to be ineligible because they only had Permission To Officiate in the diocese, prompting a frantic set of phone calls and Benedict emerging from the smoke, as it were. 'We so often lose out because the evangelicals are better organised', he complained, and this episode doesn't really do anything to dispel that.

We have 'hustings' coming up, though they take the somewhat bloodless shape of electors submitting written questions online which the candidates then answer, also in written form. Fr Benedict has encouraged me to ask something but although as we all know the burning issue is the General Synod's stumbling muck-up of Living in Love and Faith I really can't think of anything I might ask that could possibly be illuminating. He further points me towards the Evangelical Council's suggestion that parishes who find themselves out of line with their bishops might divert some funds from the diocese towards other organisations, and suggests I might ask the candidates what they think about this. I wonder: left to my own devices, I might want to ask something like:

Why do the candidates think God might want the Church of England (as opposed to any other ecclesial body) to continue to exist?

... but that might be too abstract!

An Elevation

Before yesterday I’d never hosted the SCP at Swanvale Halt church, and was surprisingly nervous about doing so. Part of my anxiety was over food. We have our lovely café just opposite the church, but that’s not open in the evening, and there’s nowhere else you can sit very close at hand: there’s a pizza takeway and a kebab shop in the next street, a Greek food van some distance away, and a couple of Indian restaurants of (to me) unknown quality in far-flung parts of the parish. But round the corner is a fish-and-chip emporium, so I took orders from my colleagues, let the friers know in advance, and once mass was over dashed out in the rain to collect it all. It worked out fine, even if I did confuse one attender with someone who never made it through the traffic and the deluge, and ended up with an extra bit of cod. We huddled at the back of the church to eat, hoping not too much of the aroma of grease and fish made it through to Slimming World in the church hall, and trying not to turn the discussion into a complete whingefest.

Fr Donald now has far too much to do at Lamford and so I have ascended to the rectorship of the Diocesan Chapter of SCP. My first step, apart from arranging the next gathering at the Cathedral in September, will probably be to try and learn who everyone is, and order an SCP badge which I don’t even have yet. Whether I can actually do anything practical remains to be seen.

New Responsibilities

From now on, when he occurs, I will refer to the new incumbent of Lamford as Fr Dominic to distinguish him from Fr Donald the retired hospital chaplain in our parish. So, that said, today Fr Dominic served me vegetable soup (‘During the vacancy the Diocese cut off the power and water supply to the greenhouse; it would be very handy to be able to grow some tomatoes’), bread and cheese for lunch. Very Lenten, though St David whose feast day it is would have baulked at such indulgence as cheese. We were meeting to discuss my potential taking over as Rector of the Guildford Chapter of the Society of Catholic Priests. ‘The Bishop’, he went on, ‘will see you as more congenial than me after my civil partnership with Jake, but probably only just. All these things are relative.’ SCP has been doing next to nothing lately while Dominic has been relocating to Lamford, the Secretary is looking for a new job and the Treasurer is run off his feet. I will probably assume the role in July, provided the existing committee – all three of them – can work out some dates to meet.

And the evening offered another gathering, Churches Together in Hornington & District. Now, this I’ve known I will be taking on for quite some time as I’ve been Vice-Chair for the past year, preparing to ascend to Chair at the AGM. I’m not sure what to do with SCP particularly, apart from providing a space for my colleagues to bend a sympathetic ear, but I do have some thoughts about Churches Together. The schedule of events could do with being pruned a bit; for instance, in this year’s calendar a ‘Pentecost Songs of Praise’ appears which was done last year over the Jubilee weekend as part of those celebrations, and I would quite like that not to become a regular fixture without anyone actually taking a decision about it. We also claim to be co-operating in service to the community, but we don’t really. I wonder whether getting our various pastoral assistants together to swap experiences and think about issues of concern to the Hornington area we might be able to tackle together in some way. It might come to nothing, but it’s a different way of going about what we say we do.

How I fit it all in is another matter, but as our Area Dean is resigning and I really did not want to be considered for that thankless task, I thought it a wise precaution to do take on something else instead!

Revelation at Guildford

Today's SCP eucharist and lunch at the Cathedral made a number of things clear to me. Probably the first was how unobservant I can be. It struck me that the altar furniture in the Lady Chapel where we gathered was really quite surprisingly unattractive, and I couldn't remember ever seeing it before. Yet here the cross and candlesticks are, in this photo, rendered slightly less unappealing by the height of the candles, which today were mere stumps. Perhaps they'd been regilded which caused them to make themselves more apparent to my eye.

As we repaired to the café I further realised how problematic covid protocols now are. We ended up huddled around one table because nobody felt it was their responsibility to start a new one or insist that anyone else did. As soon as my soup was finished I pushed my chair back a little in a pathetic and half-hearted attempt to make a gesture in the direction of physical distancing. Of course now that Dr Spector's ZOE covid symptom tracker has announced that the disease's signs are more or less indistinguishable from a cold's I think I might have it all the time. There is scarcely a day when I don't have a headache, a tickle in the throat, or feel tired. When does one not feel tired!

Everyone else seemed fully clued-up about the resignation of the Bishop of Winchester and his mysterious CV and dubious validity, something which had entirely passed me by. We strove to find something positive to say about the Archbishop of Canterbury's forthcoming evangelistic visit to the diocese, and some of my colleagues worried that any failure to produce the expected waves of converts would be blamed on our unhelpful attitude. Surely there aren't enough of us? Even if we all had dolls of Justin Welby to stick needles in? and most of us, we discovered, had missed the Voodoo module in our training. 

My final discovery was that I am even sloppier than I thought, getting home to find that my phone was nowhere in my bag, or my car. It was apparently on the floor beneath the chair where I'd been sitting, having failed to be properly lodged in the bag. Will I learn from the experience? I only wish I might. 

The Grinding of the Land

The SCP Zoom mass yesterday was challenging in ways these things always are - sudden changes in volume between one voice and another, a row of faces confronting you in a way they never would in life (I turned my video off, nobody wants to look at my face), clunks and knocks and audio wobbles and tinniness coming and going. I get absolutely nothing out of these experiences and still don't understand everyone else's enthusiasm for them. In fact they leave me agitated and unsettled, the exact opposite of being in touch with the divine. I think.

It was interesting, though, to hear about other clergy's plans for reopening their churches. The Cathedral will be aiming for a couple of weeks' time, Fr Donald at Elmham is going for this Sunday (as we are), and others are scattered in between. 

Who knows who will come. Everyone I speak to says they are anxious to get back into the church to worship, but I'm not convinced. 'Will we ever get back to normal?' people ask. I think we will, because the likelihood is that like every other disease of its kind COVID will become one of the things we deal with every year, eventually becoming milder until the next infection comes along. The permanent changes won't be those, they won't be the social-distancing and communion in one kind. Those will, eventually, be forgotten. Instead the changes will be - I suspect - the breaking of faith as people find they can get on well enough without church, without God, or that God has let them down; or find they can't walk to church as they did a few months ago and there is no one in a weakening and shrinking church community to give them a lift, even if precautions allowed them to.

The closest COVID has got to the congregation was a former member of the church who'd moved elsewhere, and the son of a pair of faithful worshippers. Yesterday the latter's mother told me that while he was in intensive care she 'held a little service' at home and randomly opening the Bible for a reading found John 11, the Raising of Lazarus. She took it as a message that Nigel would recover; and he didn't. She struggles to incorporate his death within a faith that's always rested on the idea that 'God has a plan': it's been the key that has unlocked unbelief, and Pat becomes another in the list I now have of Christians who have been propelled towards faithlessness by losing someone they love. I don't know whether this will be permanent in her case, or something that passes. How complex we human beings are: we all know that death comes to everyone, yet somehow we manage to think it will avoid us, and create ways of believing so. We succeed in looking across a world that orbits around arbitrary suffering, and imagining that we're not part of it. 'We have made a covenant with death,' Isaiah reminded me this morning, 'When the overwhelming scourge passes, it will not touch us'.

Perhaps some people will discover faith as a result of the last few months, but I expect more to lose it: the virus has swept over us like a glacier, and like a glacier will grind the land beneath it. And I don't think the coming time will be easy.

New Broom

There weren't a lot of us at the SCP meeting at North Corley last night, and when we came to divide up the responsibilities I decided to second the appointment of the new Assistant Rector of the Chapter just so that the committee wouldn't be entirely nominating and seconding one another. I have successfully avoided being on it.

The new Rector is Fr Donald from Elmham, who wants to see to it that we make a proper contribution to the diocese, convincing those who might think otherwise that Catholic Anglicanism has something positive to say to the Church in general and isn't mere inward-looking poncing about, especially now that the leadership is predominately Evangelical. 'They need us,' he said. I wonder!

(Inadvertent) Words of Wisdom

The private chapel of the Bishop of Guildford at his house, Willow Grange, has a nice selection of benches for folk to sit on, a couple of icons, and a solid oak table as an altar. It even has a holy-water stoup, a shallow ceramic basin held up by curlicued metalwork. It doesn't have a cross anywhere, curiously enough.

I made use of the holy-water stoup yesterday when the diocesan chapter of the Society of Catholic Priests met at the Bishop's house, for mass, lunch, and a discussion of the Society's aims and Rule of Life. Mass was unobjectionable, lunch was pleasant, and the talk mildly encouraging. We spoke quite a lot about the commitment in the Manual of the SCP to 'catholic evangelism', to using the tools of the Catholic tradition to communicate the Gospel. There were a number of interesting ideas, though the discussion made me reflect on my lack of focus and clarity in my own ministry. 

We got to the bit in the SCP Manual which commits the Society and its members to 'seeking the peace and unity of Christ's Church', a Church which - even the little bit of it called the Church of England - comprises trad-Catholics and modernisers as well as Evangelicals of various brands, who are increasingly dominant in the Diocese of Guildford. 'As liberal Catholics everyone hates us', said one of my colleagues. 'Everyone thinks everyone hates them' joked the Bishop, a throwaway remark which I thought was perhaps the most profound insight of the day. It's true: each grouping feels itself misunderstood and embattled, even the big Evangelical churches who have such a triumphalist tone to what they do. They have it precisely because they suspect it isn't true. In recognising each other's insecurity, perhaps, and forgiving its shrill and unwelcome consequences, lies the possibility of kindness and hope.

Mutual Enrichment

The SCP was in something of a glum mood the other day (a splendid and very widely-applicable word, ‘glum’, I don’t use it enough), contemplating the depredations of evangelicalism across the diocese (and I hadn’t even raised the matter of the proposed parish share system).

The very first post I made on this blog, eight years ago, concerned a tall tale told in the parish of Elmham near Lamford, which I strongly suspect was put about by the then incumbent of that church, a man of some peculiarities himself. Fr Donald looks after Elmham now, and is in rather better favour with the powers-that-be than his predecessor. Because Donald is thought of as a safe pair of Anglo-Catholic hands he occasionally has ordinands or curates from evangelical parishes sent to him to get a dose of an alternative way of doing things, and has lately been working with one of these, a curate who’s been ordained for two years now. ‘He said that before he came to us he’d been warned that he should on no account receive communion from me, because I was gay and he’d go to hell,’ Donald told us. He’d go to hell! I related this to Ms Formerly Aldgate who commented ‘it’s like the idea people had in the ‘80s that you could catch gayness’.

That kind of prejudice is one thing, and Donald said the curate had admitted that ‘the idea seemed completely unsustainable within two days of me getting here’. More concerning, perhaps, was what Donald had also found out about this new priest’s experience: two years into his curacy and he’d only done one funeral service; he’d never led a school assembly; never taken part in a meeting of a community body. That’s not what his church does. Any kind of community-based, pastoral ministry isn’t on the agenda there. Clergy there are preachers and ‘mission leaders’, not pastors. The assembled SCP members fulminated and huffed about how pastoral ministry was the core of being a proper priest. ‘That’s what I got ordained to do’, said one.

When a church gets bigger, and more laypeople get involved with the work of the Body of Christ (which is exactly what you want to happen), it’s all too easy for a clergyperson to think that their role of leadership and strategy means that they should always delegate pastoral, community stuff to laypeople. The temptation is to create a hierarchy of church activity in which taking communion to an old lady who can’t get to church, or visiting a family with a poorly child, or helping distraught next-of-kin with a funeral service even if they’ve never been anywhere near the church, or speaking to a group of fidgety six-year-olds, or – God help me – going through with schizophrenic Trevor for the tenth time in a week why he isn’t being persecuted and needn’t be afraid, is fundamentally less important than writing a sermon or reorganising church committees. Perhaps I see this temptation more acutely because I’m not much of a pastor and am bad at it, and heading out to the hospital to see a member of the congregation is something I have to grit my teeth a bit to do. I didn’t get ordained for the sake of this aspect of the work, but it’s vital – it is, in metaphorical terms, washing the feet of Christ’s poor.

To miss it out or downgrade its importance is to miss what being an ordained person is, not just because it’s part of what you’re supposed to do, but because it’s part of what the Body of Christ is supposed to do and you are in yourself a sacrament of the Body of Christ. That is why you’re ordained, set aside from the laos as a whole. You represent what the whole of the Church is intended to do, and if you didn't do it, eventually nobody would. The pastoral ministry would wither from the heart of the Church first, and then from the whole of it.

Of course most evangelical churches are rooted in their local communities and do exactly the same kind of pastoral work as Anglo-Catholic ones. Also the training of curates in this diocese does insist that they should have experience of pastoral stuff, which may be exactly why they get sent to places like Elmham, not merely so they can learn what a thurible is and which way round you wear a chasuble. What a placement will find harder to do is to combat the instrumental, technocratic concept of priesthood which seems to be creeping across the Church – and that’s the deeper issue.

And at some point I will post something vaguely cheerful.

Tinsel Maniples and Sparkling Coffee

At the meeting of the local chapter of the SCP last week the conversation, reprehensibly, turned to vestments and the impracticality of the maniple, the embroidered strip of cloth a priest of a traditionalist bent might wear over their left arm (in origin it was a napkin to wipe things up). The consensus was that people don't use them for fear of knocking over everything on the altar. 'Oh, you get used to it', I said ostentatiously. 'I wore a maniple at Christmas', put in one of my brethren. 'It was made of tinsel'. I decided not to pursue the matter. A bit later I saw another of my colleagues blithely topping up his coffee with sparkling water from a bottle. I don't think it'll catch on. 

As we stood in the chancel of the church which was hosting us for Mass, my imagination was suddenly taken back a millennium or more to some sparsely-decorated chapel of Anglo-Saxon England where a group of monks or clerics would have been gathered around an altar in exactly the same way doing pretty much the same sort of thing. All those figures would, in their time, have been linked into the eternal worship of Heaven just as we, a group of miscellanously-shaped and -gendered Anglican priests, were in ours. They took part in it, died, and handed their role on to others who took their place - and so on, until there we all were centuries later. The liturgy abides: we who celebrate it come and go. We are part of its story, not it of ours. It's more real than we are. And there's something profoundly comforting about that.

What Happens When Priests Get Together

It's like an episode of Father Ted, of course.

- Were you ordained in Guildford diocese?

- No, I used to be at Wantage.

- Ah, were you there when Frank Frinton was there?

- No, he'd already gone to Birmingham by my time. My rector was Fr Bendybus.

- Is that the same Fr Bendybus who was at St Frottage-by-the-Gasworks with old Doddy Manhole?'

- No, there was a curate who looked like him though. But you can tell Fr Bendybus because he's got the, y'now, the thing.

- Of course, the thing, I'd forgotten.

- How could you forget the thing?

Giving It Time

When I had my biennial review it was suggested that I should get involved in some aspect of Church life on a broader base that the parish. Why not try the Society of Catholic Priests, my reviewer said. Now, the SCP is the pro-ordination of women counterpart to the traditionalist Society of the Holy Cross, and its priests members sometimes wear a little badge like the one to the left. It aims at providing support for priests from the Catholic end of the Church of England who aren't within the anti-women's ordination orbit. At least it reminds such clergy that they aren't entirely on their own, often in parishes that are ecclesiologically of a rather different colour to themselves. 

I've been to a couple of diocesan SCP gatherings so far and found them, well, less than inspiring. Folk have a habit of calling each other self-consciously 'Father' this and 'Mother' that, an affectation I do thoroughly despise when clergy use it among themselves. I know the point it's trying to make, but it's awfully precious. Although the SCP aims at mirroring the SSC, and its Rule has a sense of the Catholic disciplines to it, its style in practice is much more liberal (not that the SSC is as ascetic as it appears in theory): last night's do took place at Leighton church on the far side of Woking after a 'Rainbow Mass' which is dedicated to the LGBT community, although it's not a prominent element in Leighton's locale. I was tempted to say that go to some parts of the Diocese of London and every day's a rainbow mass. I actually feel rather more instinctive sympathy with my trad colleagues than the libs. 

So I trailed along last night feeling less than enthusiastic, missed the Mass (deliberately, I feared it would have grated on my nerves too much), and tried to miss the refreshments afterwards. In fact the Mass went on so long that there was very little time for the actual SCP meeting, but I dutifully sat with the six souls crammed into the awful vestry while we tried to get through all the business in ten minutes, and even with the secretary's determined recalling us to our purpose failed. I was very, very anxious to begin my half-hour drive home but didn't begin it until nearly 9.55. In fact, the SCP members are no weirder than any other group of clergy and after what I now see as a bit of an epiphany at the last Diocesan Conference which left me regarding my brethren as essentially as daft and harmless as everyone else, I might even get to like them. Leighton church has a lovely Lady Chapel and I sat in front of the Blessed Sacrament for a bit, so that was nice too.