Goth Old, Goth New

The display about the foundational Goth club, the Batcave, at the Museum of Youth Culture in Soho, is only open for a few days. Madame Morbidfrog and others were there for the private view during the week, but I could only get along today with Ms Mauritia after celebrating Mass for the Annunciation this morning - a case of from blue to black. Lots of monochrome photos of young people in the particular style of that moment (spiky hair, studded collars and fishnets all derived from punk), posters and flyers covered a wall, introduced by a very helpful big map showing the Batcave's various venues during the years of its existence. There was also a little display case of objects, again mainly paper, but also including a club t-shirt and what looked like a teddy bear in a gimp suit: without a caption its significance was unclear. Between the map and the display were a set of information captions which for inaccessibility in size or type rivalled any I have seen in my career in or out of museums. We eventually realised, from the page numbers, that they were taken from a book. Now, I would have been prepared to pay and even pay through the nose for a nice glossy history of the Batcave, but it turned out that the book accompanied a compendium of music which amounted to a do-it-yourself guide to '80s Goth, and even if it has a few unfamiliar gems in it I could live without that. The show, essentially, was promotion for the product. We were not delayed long, therefore, and set off in search of free art galleries and afternoon tea.

Tea gave us a chance to complain about the current domination of the Goth world by nostalgia, or at least the sense of retrospect. I know it's a bit rich for me to moan about this as I've been banging on about its history for ages, but nobody now seems to produce anything else. As real Goth clubs go under, we celebrate one of the places where it all started; as fewer Goths seem to appear in public, we analyse where those that remain have come from. There are two major books coming up in a month or two examining the history of Gothic, John Robb's The Art of Darkness and Cathi Unsworth's The Season of the Witch - I wonder how they will each justify their space in an increasingly crowded field? The bands our friends occasionally rave about, even when they're newcomers, don't seem to bring anything very fresh to the table. On LiberFaciorum at the moment I seem to be bombarded with adverts for Goth-friendly clothing retailers - Disturbia, EMP, Killstar - and under the televisual influence of Wednesday Addams big white collars in various styles seem to be in for women, but, most of the fashion seems to be, in Ms Mauritia's words,  'Goth as Shein imagines it'. (Mind you, Stylesock seems to be doing interesting things, not all of them Gothic by any means, if you're a young person with enough money to spend on them, even with much-neglected men's clothing, which most of the time boils down to t-shirts and little else). Ah, age does terrible things to us, friends, and not even just physically.

Omissions and Interpretations

'Barbara isn't here this morning', Betty told me at Tuesday's mid-morning mass, 'She had a fall and didn't feel able to come. She's staying over at the Day Centre this morning.' 'Oh goodness, once we're done here I'll pop over and see her', I said. Of course I forgot, so tried to give Barbara a call yesterday morning. I had no idea she was quite so deaf: 'I can't hear, you'll have to write a letter', she hollered, and hung up. So I called round in the afternoon. 'I haven't fallen over, how did she get that idea? I'm fine,' she insisted, and certainly didn't look like a nonagenarian who'd taken a tumble. 

That afternoon a warm drizzle descended as we waited to begin a funeral at the church. The deceased was only 49: a gentleman who'd had a variety of vicissitudes in life, and keeled over taking something out of the oven. 'Can we hold on for Oscar?' asked the deceased's brother as a small knot of people loitered in the Day Centre car park, 'He's doing the eulogy'. 'That's fine', I said, having made sure the undertakers didn't mind, 'we can wait a little while'. Regular updates came by phone: Oscar was only coming from about half-a-dozen miles away but making heavy going of it. Finally he arrived: our organist's fingers weren't quite rubbed raw but he'd been twiddling inconsequentially for about twenty minutes by this stage. 'Have you got your words?' I asked Oscar, and was answered with a horrified look. 'I'm not saying anything', he stammered, looking at the brother for support, 'I mean, we talked about it, but it wasn't settled'. Ah. I think the brother pressed something into service that he was going to use at the wake.

It was Church Club that put things into perspective. The story was the Parable of the Lost Coin and the initial puzzle included a picture of the lady in Our Saviour's tale searching her house for the errant currency. Arnie pointed towards the big wooden door in the picture. 'You need a door like that to keep out bad people, like Zombies', he informed me, 'If they tried to get in, they might get splinters.'

Chercher La Femme

Some of the moments I will best remember (I hope I will remember them!) from my ministry will be from communion at home with older congregation members. Today, I took communion to Angela who lives in the flats next to the church. Afterwards she told me: 'I live alone, but I never feel alone. I mean, I know who's there. It's when I get up in the morning and I'm reeling about a bit, and then He comes to me and I know I've got another few days to do. But sometimes I do wish He'd get on and take me!'

Are you ready, Angela? I asked. 'Well, I'm 91 and yes, I am ready, but not in a hurry, if that makes sense. I look out of the window and I've got trees and birds and squirrels and it's so beautiful. I've got so much to be thankful for.' As a result, I reflected I had, too.

On the door of the flats I saw this sign. The question is, who is the mysterious woman referred to?

Mellow at Enton Mill

Usually I prefer walks to have some specific thing or feature to aim at, but despite the degree of inertia one needs to overcome, it's always worth while to change your surroundings, even if not by very  much, and even if there's nothing very remarkable at the end. The mere variation has good mental effects and therefore physical ones. Today my destination was Enton Mill, an extraordinarily picturesque range of buildings which Pevsner managed to overlook completely - a 17th-century mill Tudorified in the early 1900s and augmented with a cottage or two. You can't get near the pools (well, not legitimately), but you can sit beneath the footpath sign by the side of the lane and eat your lunch if you happen to have one. And that was the focus of my walk today. The photo includes my tea perched on my knee, in honour of Dr Bones who inherited the ability to balance teacups (sometimes adding the saucer) in that position from her clergyman father. It was very unstable and I removed it as soon as the image was achieved.

As I sat munching my lovely sandwich prepared by John at the Swanvale Halt railway station kiosk I could see the brim of my hat bobbing up and down and it struck me how funny I must look, a middle-aged man all alone sat snacking on a bank, and also that I didn't mind this. I had a vague memory of what must be a cartoon I have seen in which a character sits in a park or something, doing the same thing, and of having felt affection for that character, a reaction which must have had something to do with the story, whatever it was. I could see myself as childlike, oddly.

If we are lucky, perhaps we become more childlike as we grow old, but it's a childlikeness which incorporates a sort of awareness children themselves can't have. We are indulgent and forgiving towards children, and if we can glimpse the childlikeness in ourselves we might also be tender towards our silliness. From that it's an easy step to discovering the same tenderness for others too. 

Seeing Differently

It was when I noticed the headmaster's bald pate shining as though he had a sort of halo round his head that I realised something was up with my eyes. That was when I was 16, and since then my 'spec spec' has altered a bit as my eyesight has changed. Over the last couple of years I've found the small print of the Missal we read from at the midweek mass easier to use if I take my glasses off to do so, and depending on conditions that's also the case with the Sunday hymnbook. This is no more than one can expect with advancing age, of course. Very recently, though, my right eye in particular seems to have altered so that its focal range now covers only a couple of inches, and annoyingly a couple of inches which don't coincide with the ones the left one can cover. I can manage for the time being, but doubtless the optician will pick it up the next time I go and perhaps advise a new prescription.

The odd effect of this change, apart from the mild inconvenience, is a psychological one - that, with or without my glasses, the world hardly ever appears completely clear. It's as though I no longer have access to things as they truly are: a strange distance has opened up between me and reality and I can no longer be completely sure what things in themselves are. It's as though I am suddenly more separate than I was before from the landscape through which I move; it becomes a place in which I am a little less at home. Perhaps that, too, is a facet of aging.

Pastoral Visiting

Bill hasn't really recovered from the respiratory complaint that knocked him out a couple of weeks ago. I called round to see him at his daughter's house and found him in a right state, mentally rather than physically, saying that he couldn't concentrate, had been having suicidal thoughts, that his mind had gone. 'I've got this tune that goes round and round in my head, I don't know what it is. There's just nothing, nothing.' We had a bit of a pray. The doctors think this may be a result of the steroids he's been given, but when I spoke to another member of the church they remembered a time when Bill had been found in the church porch, unable to remember where he was. 'I've often thought that if Bill couldn't do his duties in the church, it'd be the end of him.'

That opinion came from Stephanie, who I went to see next and who's been having health difficulties of her own. She and husband Don have been a formidable pair over the years and are now finding things very tough indeed, struggling to maintain routines and not able to get out as in the past. 'Sometimes I've wondered where God is,' Stephanie told me. Pain and boredom wear down faith so easily. As with Bill, we had a bit of a pray.

Finally I called in on Nicole and Ali and their daughter who have been at the church quite a bit lately. They moved to Swanvale Halt from London a few years ago and deliberately came and sought us out but to their consternation found their daughter couldn't cope with music and singing and so disappeared again! Now she seems fine with what happens in church and so they've popped up again. I had no idea that they were those unusual things, adult converts: they also converted within an Anglo-Catholic setting and do not seem to be obvious nutcases, and all this amounts to a sufficiently rare combination to make it remarkable. The dogs looked askance at me and the chickens crowded at the patio door to see what was going on. I didn't feel it necessary to have a bit of a pray in this context, but perhaps I should have done.

Wearing Faith Out

I know the Roman Catholics and Orthodox insist that what we call the Apocrypha – the texts included in the Greek Old Testament but not in the Hebrew – are just part of the O.T., but they can be quite weird on occasions. At the moment I’m reading through the book Wisdom, which contains some hair-raisingly misogynist ramblings mingled with interesting insights. The other morning, though, I stumbled across something which tied in precisely with the way my mind was moving:

If you have gathered nothing in your youth,

How can you find anything in old age?

A few days before I spent an hour talking to Victor, who’s been involved with the Church all his life but has found it next to impossible even to come into the building since his wife died after a swift descent into dementia a couple of years ago. ‘I just don’t have any faith left’, he explained, ‘I think I still believe in God, but I don’t care. I don’t feel anything.’ A range of physical ailments had worn Victor down as well. I thought of another member of the congregation to whom exactly the same thing happened: ‘church’ was bound up with the wife he spent years looking after, and while he seemed to go through the experience of her death and the immediate period afterwards with great dignity and grace, everything soon collapsed and it took him two years, at least, before he could appear at church again. A couple of days later I spoke to Miriam who, with her husband, were absolute stalwarts of the 8am mass for years. In her case, it wasn’t his death which knocked her sideways, but the experience of physical illness over the last year which has worn her faith down.

Bereavement in older age isn’t a circumstance uniquely disturbing to people’s faith; I’ve recently had conversations with two much younger Christians who have found it in one case hard and in the other plain impossible to take part in public worship since losing someone close to them. Echoing Victor, Cal told me ‘I haven’t lost my faith, but there’s no feeling there’. It’s odd, and sad, that Christians should feel that lacking an emotional response to religion should bar them from church. Isn’t ‘faith’ precisely a matter of carrying on practising religion even when you don’t feel anything? But, in this state, even the quietest and most low-key of church services will still confront you not just perhaps with the loss of a person who was deeply connected with your experience of churchgoing, but also with your own sense of loss and inadequacy at not being able to summon up the feelings you imagine you’re supposed to have: a different sort of bereavement. It can be unbearably hard to face that.

That’s one factor: another is the disruption to routines which may have been followed for decades, routines in which church and loved one formed key elements. You have to be very determined, or your faith to be very definite and protected, for there not to be some sense of collapse, of the pieces of your life falling to the ground and refusing to reassemble in an acceptable new pattern. Why bother? is a perfectly reasonable question to ask: it always is for anyone contemplating religious practice, but, faced with the challenges of age, it’s perhaps harder to answer. The grind of poor health and frailty, the lessening of the comfort which beauty brings (‘the gradual closing of the doors of the senses’, Gladstone said) and perhaps the weakening of the bonds that tie an individual into human society can combine to make a sort of low-level depression entirely understandable.

Accounts of great Christians who struggled with these challenges I find sobering indeed. Trevor Huddleston, mighty campaigner against apartheid, monk, and archbishop, spent his last couple of years being cared for in his old monastery at Mirfield. He’d been a difficult brother and was a worse patient, hating his frailty and venting his anger on those who looked after him. By the end the man who had done such great works for Jesus Christ of Nazareth could barely bring himself to speak his name.

On the other hand, I regularly meet elderly people who are transfigured, whose eyes contain a purity and serenity which is all but angelic, no matter what life may have thrown at them. In them, faith has become a rough stone cut and polished to a jewel-like brilliance. Is the Book of Wisdom right – that there are foundations laid in our younger years that only become obvious as we get older? That we can only find that rough stone when we are young enough to go hunting in the mud and chiselling out the ore, ready for the final work to be done when we are old and face the real test of who we are?

We’re told a great deal at present about preparing for old age financially; we should also prepare spiritually, building up, you might say, a spiritual pension fund. I have to pray – both for myself and those I love – that we will have done enough work to have a spiritually positive old age; and that, if we don’t, bearing in mind that good or bad fortune will form a major part in how these things play out, those who have the task of caring for us will be kind and look beyond our dry and bitter behaviour. Of whom God will be one.  

Looking At the End

I have a very bad habit of skipping to the end of books to see how they conclude. This is particularly reprehensible when the book in question is a biography of a person no longer living, as you know perfectly well how it's going to end. One of the volumes I have on the go at the moment is Owen Chadwick's 1990 biography of Archbishop Michael Ramsey, one of my 'minor patrons' and once a mentor of my spiritual director. However I'm not talking today about Ramsey as such: that can wait for another time. 

Nearly at the end of Chadwick's book, he tells how, less than a year from his own death, the retired Archbishop attended the funeral of his friend and former colleague on the teaching staff at Durham University, Reggie Cant, who became a Canon of York Minster. Ramsey was already frail and nearly blind, and was helped to his place in the Minster looking, a friend said, 'like a great ruined crag'. The order of service for the funeral included two paragraphs by Canon Cant himself:

"Death itself does not frighten me so much as the thought of a long and feeble old age. The litany in the Prayer Book prays that we may be delivered from sudden death, but it means sudden and unprepared, and we are not meant to linger ... More difficult is to learn to hand over to God one's willingness to be old and feeble, to enter a second childhood in which one loses all one's adult dignity, and is stripped of all one's painfully acquired knowledge, and has to begin all over again, at the mercy of other people. ...

"My bodily life will be finished, and it will be a relief if the body is worn out, and the purpose of my life will have been achieved, and I shall be with God ... I shall see him face to face. It will not be pleasant, for my sins will have spoiled my taste for him. But I believe he wills to cleanse me in the saving death of Jesus, and I know that I will to receive his cleansing love here, and there; now, and then. Through his mercy I believe that I shall achieve my true end for which I was born, and towards which all my prayer and daily life have been pointing, the enjoyment of God for ever in communion with the blessed company of all faithful people."

Google Reginald Cant and you will find his history of York Minster, written in conjunction with GE Aylmer; but of his spiritual writings you will find none. I ought to search some out, perhaps; because, reading those words, I think, who could say better?

You Can't Really Say That, Though

It was the funeral of a member of the congregation a couple of days ago. I wrote a homily and said how what I would remember about Leonard was his gentlemanliness and impeccable manners, and how they reflected a determination to assume that everyone he met was a decent human being deserving of respect, which is what manners do. That was true enough, but I found myself thinking that what I would actually, truly remember more about him are his eyes looking at me when I went to visit him in the care home where he spent his last couple of years. Leonard looked at me with the same kind of gaze I find in some of my oldest parishioners: and they look at me the same way as children do, with the same sort of perspicacity. They've reached a sort of purification, and to be on the receiving end of it is a blessing. It would be nice to think that we might, given the right circumstances, regain that childlike gaze when we are very old. 

Bedside Manners

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.