A Chrism Mass, or Something

Several of my colleagues of The Other Integrity have been posting pictures this Holy Week of the Chrism Masses they've attended with the Bishop of Oswestry or His Grace of Fulham all wearing nice Roman vestments and cohorts of clergy in concelebration gear. I doubted I would do the same for ours from Guildford, although the occasion is less trying than it once used to be since the suppression of the clergy music group who used to accompany the worship: the cathedral musicians wrested back control in a coup and the Mass sounds much the better for it.

But why wasn't the Bishop presiding? He preached, but left Her Serenity the Dean actually to celebrate the Eucharist. To be fair he is a very efficient preacher, although on this occasion I remembered his introductory gambit 'If you met Jesus in your parish, would you invite him to dinner?' and my attention wandered after that, I fear. But really part of the point of the Chrism Mass is that the Bishop celebrates with their presbyters around them, as was the case in the first few centuries of the Church: it isn't just to 'celebrate ministry' (which now includes laypeople who we are all encouraged to bring along) and pick up three small bottles of oil. In fact Bishop Andrew always used to delegate the Mass to the Bishop of Dorking, but even in those circumstances it at least expressed something of the idea of shared episkope between the two. Even most generously interpreted, that can't encompass the Dean. Could it possibly be that the Bishop thinks it's more important to signal inclusion by making sure a woman presides at an all-diocese eucharist, rather than do what the Chrism Mass is actually there for? Could he really have that 'thin' an appreciation of what he does?

(Mind you, a few years' time and we may all have to go somewhere else for the event anyway)

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. 

Missa Not Quite Solitaria

After venturing to Hindhead for the first Sunday of my Autumn break, I played safe this week and went to the 8am mass at the Cathedral. Last time I attended, way, way back in the far-off days of 2019, there were about ten of us present: this time, there were four, including the priest (who I didn't know) and one of the virgers. The other member of the congregation was a woman who had a coughing fit partway through and left. When the sermon began I looked round to find that the virger had slipped out too so I was being preached at on my own. The celebrant did his best to cast his eyes around the empty Lady Chapel, perhaps engaging with the innumerable host of angels who may, possibly, have been present, speaking about Isaiah and the nature of service, exposing ourselves to the chance of suffering. We were back up to a full four a few minutes later. I wonder what has happened at Swanvale Halt while I've been gadding about!

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. 

Of Cats and Men

In her rather brutal memoir of life in a pre-reform Roman Catholic convent, Through the Narrow Gate, Karen Armstrong relates how her Sisters went a bit crackers after a stray cat found its way into the precincts. They competed to feed it and look after it, and got hysterically jealous and angry with each other. It was, Armstrong suggested, very clearly a function of the locked-down emotional lives the nuns were forced to live by a regime which deliberately stifled and thwarted affection developing between the human inmates of the convent, in the belief that human love and divine love are necessarily rivals. 

Last Wednesday, at Southwark Cathedral, they buried a cat. Bishop Philip North of Burnley, doughty champion of Catholic orthodoxy in the Church of England, was incredulous, Tweeting that he hoped it was a joke for the sake of the bereaved people whose loved ones' funeral services were restricted and curtailed during the pandemic. Not at all, responded the Southwark Cathedral clergy, this ceremony, for this animal, was a means for others to mourn when other forms of mourning were unavailable. Doorkins the cathedral cat had become as much a member of the community as any of its human inhabitants.

Animals aren't human: their mental worlds are closed to us, and while we can observe how they behave, our interpretations of that behaviour, or at least of how they conceive it, are projections. In The Four Loves, CS Lewis rates our love of animals not as an example of the amatory category he calls 'the love of the sub-human', but of 'affection', akin to the kind of feeling we might have for certain sorts of human beings with whom we are generously but not intimately involved. Thinking about it that way side-steps barren discussions about whether animals have 'souls'; but Lewis still only ascribes to them 'personality, or the illusion of personality'. It's more about us, than them.

Even so, this is not nothing. I have no interest in animals at all though I am moderately well disposed to my fish and the birds that find their way into my garden (I could easily live without the cats), but have been educated in these matters by meeting people whose relationship with their pets is emotional and meaningful, however unequal it may be. I've even carried out a funeral service for a dog. Animals aren't people: but their connection with us is real enough. There is no issue about recognising that, even at a cathedral.

The one aspect of the passing of Doorkins, as with her life, that troubles me is the particular projections placed on her. The cathedral was happy to make use of her commercially, and arguably her very name was a snarky exploitation of a mute creature in order to poke fun at a celebrity atheist. She treated the bishop with disdain, the Dean recalled. No, she didn't: she had no idea who the bishop was. You may have wanted to think she did. Her inner world was utterly unknown to any of the people who may have interacted with her day by day, or theirs to her. Had it been me, I would have been perfectly content to commend her into the Lord's keeping, but I might not have made such a fuss of it: there's something not quite seemly in doing so.

(As I will never have another reason to show it to you, here is Susan Herbert's reimagining of St Catherine as a cat:)

Cardinal Point

The origin of the adoption by the incumbent of the Anglican church of St Magnus the Martyr, London Bridge, of the title Cardinal Rector is a matter I have still not been able to clear up, some time after I and S.D. discussed it. Perhaps I can get myself referred to as Cardinal Rector of Swanvale Halt. But in the course of trying to chase down the truth I discovered the mortifying fact that the Church of England's other two Cardinals are no more. 

These were two of the Minor Canons of St Paul's Cathedral in London, long referred to as Senior Cardinal and Junior Cardinal, and whose privilege of being so designated was confirmed by Pope Urban VI in 1378: the titles were described as ab antiquo then, so how they originally arose is anyone's guess. The Cardinals were the most important members of the College of Minor Canons at St Paul's, which originally numbered twelve but by the early 2010s had shrunk to just three. They had various liturgical and pastoral responsibilities but on their own these weren't too onerous: one 19th-century Cardinal, Richard Barham, found the time to write that wonderful collection of alternately humorous and creepy ghost stories, The Ingoldsby Legends. But in 2016 St Paul's streamlined its management and did away with the College of Minor Canons (Hereford is the only other English cathedral with one of these), and the ancient titles of the Cardinals with them. 

I am most opposed to this. Not only was it fun to reflect that the Church of England had Cardinals of its own whose antecedents were impeccable (confirmed by a Pope, you can't argue with that) and fantasise about what might happen were they to turn up at the Sistine Chapel to vote in Conclave along with all the others; not only was it instructive to remember that the Anglican Church contains all sorts of reminders of its Catholic past; but such picturesque anachronisms, provided they offer no impediment to the running of an organisation, are part of the rooting and continuity we all need, the things that place us and the institutions that we inhabit into a wider, longer-lasting context. Even when they mean next to nothing in any practical terms, perhaps particularly because they don't, they retain a psychic importance. Shame the St Paul's Cardinals are no more; but the Church being what it is, that may not be forever!

A Confident Priesthood

On Monday evening it was the Archdeacon’s Visitation service at the Cathedral, where all the churchwardens from the parish churches, of all ages, shapes, sizes and churchpersonships, go to swear undying allegiance to the Bishop and hear the Archdeacon preach a variant on his usual sermon which, he always stresses, is not about drainpipes and insurance policies. One of our Swanvale Halt churchwardens is new this year, and this was her first proper engagement. Two more would follow in quick succession this week: a safeguarding training evening and a church council meeting. Gosh.

I sat during all this and contemplated the pillar next to me, which I realised was covered for some distance up in strange, small parallel scratch marks. A mischievous angel whispered in my ear that these were, according to legend, made by Bishop Reindorp as he marked off the days until his retirement, gnawing the hem of his surplice during Evensong. I will have to spread this fact now. On reflection, I’m not completely sure it was an angel.

In fact the spiritual entity, whatever it was, was misinformed as George Reindorp went on from Guildford to be Bishop of Salisbury. But it prompted me to look him up. Some while ago his former parish of St Stephen’s, Rochester Row, Westminster produced a booklet about his time there (1946-57) bits of which found its way into an article in the Church Times. A priest who went to the parish in the mid-1950s as a curate had kept Fr Reindorp’s letter to him before he arrived. ‘I want to see your manuscripts [of sermons] not less than one week before you preach’, the prospective curate was advised (and I use ‘advised’ in its strongest sense). ‘Learn by heart a) the Ten Commandments, b) the long Exhortation at Mattins and c) the exhortation from the 1928 Prayer Book …’ and so on, through paragraphs headed ‘Money’, ‘Punctuality’, and ‘The Vicar’s Wife’. I especially like this bit:

A small point with implications. In this parish there is a Vicar, and Mr Shepherd, Mr Case and Mr Todd. Don’t be led off by high-church coddlers into Father this or that. I like the term, but it is not expedient with this parish set in the midst of Cardinal Griffin’s Mission on one side, and a very "extreme" neighbour on the other. Then there are the loveable folk who refer to Philip Case and Bill Todd. Be advised by an old hand. Look polite and say, "Do you mean Mr Case?" It only has to be done once! Only a small point, you may say, but begin as you mean to go on.

Reindorp insisted on absolute uniformity of practice among all the clergy of the parish, and absolute uniformity of opinion, at least in public. ‘Don’t let it be dreamed that you could think differently from the Vicar on any important matter, although in point of fact you could willingly murder him’. In fact, he told curates that they were in their training parish to learn and not to think.

And then there’s the bit at the heart of the whole thing:

Above all, be prepared to challenge anyone. You are not ordained to be liked. When you leave St Stephen’s more people should love God than when you came, even if they can’t remember your name, and though some may not come to that knowledge till long after your departure.

Of course the curate in question, Timothy Raphael (later an Archdeacon) ‘found this maddening’ a lot of the time, but recognised in Reindorp someone who knew what he was doing, and in whom others could have similar confidence. ‘He cared about people rather than ideas. He had no great academic ability, nor claimed any. No one has ever infuriated me more, given me more, or supported me more.’

My own practice is less directive, partly by inclination, partly because of the time we live in. I inherited my first curate at Swanvale Halt and Marion came to us as what’s known as a Self-Supporting Minister from a moderately Evangelical background: she probably won’t have a parish of her own to run, and I wouldn’t have felt it appropriate to enforce on her complete uniformity with what I do (I have put in her final appraisal, however, that her disinclination to wear a maniple is an area for development). All that stuff from Reindorp’s letter about clergy being addressed as ‘Mister’, too, comes from a very bygone age in which the authority of the ordained person was deemed to be suitably maintained by a sense of distance.

But sometimes I wonder that I am not firm enough about some things. I want to believe that I choose my battles, and the issues that are worth drawing an absolute line on are few, but that can be an excuse for a laxity that does nobody any good. You’ve got to communicate that this business of the spiritual life is important, that choices have to be made, and that they are serious; and perhaps that requires not that a parish priest be rigid about any particular thing, but give the impression that he or she might be when it matters, and has no thought of being popular. ‘When you leave Swanvale Halt, more people should love God than when you came’.

(Most of the nicest pictures of George Reindorp available online seem to come from his famous Christmas cards, which usually showed him doing something priestly (including talking to the Queen), but they’re copyright to Getty. This one is from Guildford Cathedral, and shows him keeping an eye on the Supreme Governor of the Church of England signing the deed during the consecration of the Cathedral in 1961. He only wore his fantastically gigantic mitre once, on this occasion, before Mrs Reindorp told him it looked ridiculous. ‘The vicar’s wife’, he wrote in his letter to Timothy Raphael, ‘seldom interferes’; but, one might add, when she does … ).

How to Close a Cathedral

A couple of years ago I was on holiday in Norfolk and went to a village called North Elmham. In the eleventh century this was the seat of the Bishop of East Anglia, before the conquering Normans decided that it was a ridiculously small place to be the episcopal residence and moved the bishopric to Norwich, as they did elsewhere in England too. The Anglo-Saxon cathedral eventually vanished, to the extent that all that remains now are its footings. Nowadays, however, we invest rather more in the maintenance of cathedrals – financially, socially and emotionally as well as spiritually – and the idea of closing one boggles the mind a bit.

That, apparently, is what faces our diocesan cathedral at Guildford.

A few days ago the cathedral chapter’s application to Guildford Borough Council for planning permission to sell off a portion of the land around the building for housing was turned down, and turned down decisively – only three councillors voted in favour. Despite worries about increased pressure on local roads and facilities that might be caused by the 134-home development, the real issue lay with the balance between social housing and more commercially-priced property and housing density within the proposed estate – the ‘Cathedral Quarter’, as the chapter grandly refers to it – and the overall idea of developing the green if rather overgrown slopes of Stag Hill. This presents the cathedral with a problem: it runs at a loss each year which varies between £50K and £100K, and without the endowments that older cathedrals enjoy there’s only so long this can go on. Selling the land for development would provide a fund that might, given a favourable wind and stock market situation, make up the difference. Bishop Andrew told the planning committee meeting ‘the cathedral faces the real possibility, in fact probability, of financial failure, of closing its doors, if this planning permission is not granted’. 

Not many people are very sympathetic to the cathedral’s plight. There were allegations that the cathedral was being allowed to plead special treatment for a development which broke the provisions of Guildford Borough’s Local Plan: the word ‘blackmail’ was thrown around. The chairman of a local residents’ association said 'The Church of England has assets of almost £8bn, and in 2013 they made more money than McDonald’s. It is for them to bail out their own institutions'. Others doubted that the threat that the cathedral might close was a realistic one. ‘Are we really meant to believe that they are going to bolt the door and walk away?’

It seems unlikely, but we live in an age of the monstrously unlikely coming true. The new Diocese of Leeds was created in 2014 out of the previous dioceses of Bradford, Ripon and Wakefield, essentially because the Diocese of Bradford was bankrupt; once upon a time the idea of an Anglican diocese actually ceasing to trade for lack of money would have had archdeacons and bishops blinking in disbelief, but those days are past. In Leeds, all the previous cathedrals were in fact retained, stripped of their chapters and administration, but then they are historic buildings: Guildford’s history goes back to the 1930s, and that’s it.*

One correspondent to the independent online newsletter The Guildford Dragon commented: 'So what was the plan to fund the continuing maintenance and running costs of the building as a place of worship [when it was built]? It’s inconceivable that there wasn’t such a plan.' Well, in fact it’s completely conceivable. The Church of England in the 1930s was on the rise, confident, embedded in the establishment and national life. Guildford Cathedral was started then and completed and consecrated in 1966, just as the great 1960s collapse in organised religion which changed the spiritual face of Britain began. The idea of not enough money coming in to support the place just wouldn’t have occurred to the people who built it. Nobody would have imagined that £1.5M per year would be needed to run it; nobody would have thought it would need to be stripped of asbestos and re-plastered inside within fifty years.

It must have looked like such a coup, the Earl of Onslow giving Stag Hill as the striking location for the new and last cathedral the Church of England would ever build. It dominates the landscape for miles, even if its redbrick exterior is hard to love; architecturally it’s the very last flower of the Gothic Revival. When the foundations were first laid, and half the building completed before the outbreak of the War, it stood in isolation on the hilltop. But, after 1945, the tide of building began to lap closer and closer, leaving it an island in a sea of houses. To the north, the 1960s blocks of the University of Surrey occupied acres more. It’s actually an awkward position to be in, however grand it looks.

Couldn’t the cathedral charge its 90,000 annual visitors a fee of say £2 a head like other cathedrals do, asked one correspondent to the Dragon? But I doubt that figure: it’s the kind of thing institutions claim when they want to emphasise their importance to the local community, but Guildford Cathedral isn’t the greatest tourist draw in the country. Its interior is striking, but Il Rettore once astutely described it as looking ‘like a set for Wagner’s Ring’- matching the somewhat Wagnerian politics of its architect, Sir Edward Maufe – and it has none of the warmth and detail of its older peers. A lot of those 90,000 visitors attend as part of civic and other functions such as the University degree ceremonies the cathedral hosts each summer. Ask the staff, too, and they will tell you how many ‘visitors’ arrive in coach parties – who come, not to marvel at the architecture, but to break their journey down the A3 to the Isle of Wight, and who very commonly pile off the coach, have a wee in the restaurant toilets, pile back on again, and drive off without so much as darkening the door of the cathedral itself.

I’ve been told in the past that when the cathedral was built the original plan was, indeed, to set aside some of the site for housing; but it never happened, partly because it never needed to happen, and partly because the green land around the building seemed more useful to the town. Holy Trinity church in the town centre fulfilled the cathedral role before the cathedral itself was built, but it’s much too small to house many of the events which now take place on the top of Stag Hill; so here we have a cathedral which, realistically, can’t survive, but which must.

In the 1960s, the Church of England rationalised the income of its parishes. In each diocese the parishes agreed to pool their endowments and revenues and clergy were paid from that central pot, whereas before the income of different parishes had varied massively. Is it time to do that with cathedrals? Would the cathedral chapters – none of whom are exactly rolling in money – agree to it? Particularly, would the medieval cathedrals which cost so much to maintain be willing to bail out redbrick Guildford?

[*And, while it occurs to me, the three demoted Yorkshire cathedrals are in fact overgrown parish churches that were bumped up to cathedral status in the 19th century: they had an existence before they were cathedrals, and can potentially revert to that. Guildford was purpose-built.]

Christmas Cheer

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

Old and New

I'm not a great fan of trad-language Anglicanism, though I didn't go as far as someone at a church I used to attend who would alter the 'thees' and 'thous' in traditional hymns to 'you' regardless of what it did to the rhyme or rhythm. But I don't see much sense in continuing to address God in a manner which hasn't made social sense since about 1670.

Last week I went to the cathedral to make my confession for Advent. My penance was to say Psalm 8, and only the Book of Common Prayer is available in the cathedral pews. Here's part of the psalm in the Common Worship translation:

O Lord our governor,
how glorious is your name in all the world!
Your majesty above the heavens is praised
out of the mouths of babes at the breast.
You have founded a stronghold against your foes
that you might still the enemy and the avenger.
When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have ordained,
what is man, that you should be mindful of him;
the son of man, that you should seek him out?
You have made them little lower than the angels,
and crown them with glory and honour.

And this is the same text from Miles Coverdale's 16th-century rendering:

O Lord our governor,
how excellent is thy name in all the world:
thou that hast set thy glory above the heavens!
Out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies:
that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.
For I will consider thy heavens, even the works of thy fingers:
the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained.
What is man, that thou art mindful of him:
and the son of man, that thou visitest him?
Thou madest him lower than the angels:
to crown him with glory and worship.

I sat and prayed very slowly through this antique text which, because it occurs quite often in the modern Office, I know almost by heart. And the subtleties of Coverdale's language threw into relief a whole set of different themes which I hadn't seen were there. For instance, God makes babes and sucklings speak for him precisely in order to still the powerful and vengeful, as though they can only be defeated by him deliberately using the weak and lowly things of the earth, a sense which is completely lost in the changes in sentence-order in the modern version. Again, in the modern translation human beings are simply made lower than the angels, and then crowned with glory; in the old one, the glorification of man is a consequence of his lowliness, and his humbleness a necessary condition of his glory. The modern text seems to have one meaning; it speaks with a single voice. The Tudor one is multivocal, full of ambiguities, partly because of its very obscurity. It's ambiguity that gives poetry its power; suddenly, I can see why the poetic-minded tend to prefer the subtle strangeness of Coverdale, Cranmer and the King James Version to the clarity and accuracy of latter-day scholars.

Here We Are Again

All is well despite my long, long absence from this online account of my doings. After my departure from Lamford the great majority of my worldly goods went into storage: Il Rettore somehow managed to persuade the storage company to let me have a unit free in return for 'advertising' - I think they thought the reach of the parish magazine was somewhat wider than it is. Out of guilt I almost emptied them of bubble-wrap and boxes.
I spent two months holed up in a room at the Deanery, in His Majesty the Dean's absence. In fact for almost all the time I had the run of the place - a rather extensive place, as it happens - which felt like nothing so much as a rather superior holiday let. I was desperately concerned about killing the Dean's cat, but to my relief found that it had in fact had the good grace to die some time before.
I took the odd service at the Cathedral when nobody else was around, and elsewhere. A college friend died of a brain tumour and I took his funeral and memorial service, which went OK. I heard my first confession. I enjoyed being on Light Duties.
I was, after all, appointed Rector of Swanvale Halt, to which position I ascend on the 7th of September. I moved out of the Deanery and into my rather lovely Rectory, about which more at some other time. Now I'm squeezing my final few days of liberty visiting friends and doing fun things before Real Life returns.

Surprised by Joy

I went to make my Lenten confession yesterday. Most people who don't make a regular confession find it a perplexing business when others do. So do I, if I'm honest: the process of dredging through the muck of my soul which I know God has already forgiven seems formalised and bizarre. I arrived at the Cathedral a bit early, having just come from another appointment, and sat in the car park with a mixture of trepidation and, frankly, indifference. Yet as I was waiting to go in - confessions are heard in the Lady Chapel and there's no pretence at anonymity, my confessor knows who I am and vice versa - I was absolutely overcome with an intense feeling of blessedness, grace, and connection, connection to God and to the people of our parish whose own sins and struggles I bear with me. My sins are being forgiven as I pronounce forgiveness for theirs. I had to wait quite a while and by the end of half an hour felt a lightness and calm which hardly ever finds me in day-to-day life. It's called joy, I think. What a wonderful privilege to be able to bring all the petty mess of human frailty to Jesus for his healing in these light, beautiful surroundings from which everything evil and mean seems banished, and how right it is that his forgiveness is mediated through another frail human being. 'Go in peace, and pray for me, a sinner too'.