Celebration

Swanvale Halt church has made it to the age of 175. Back in 1849 (or some time before) the curate at Hornington, Mr Bellman, took up a hint that had been made a few years earlier that the railway might well bring a station to the scattered hamlets that existed north of the town and thus many new residents, and began raising the money to build a church. And here we still are, though how far we have, as Mr Bellman hoped, 'counteracted the notorious and manifold evils' of the churchless settlement, I am not sure.

There have been some newcomers to the church lately, so on Saturday last I invited them to the Rectory for tea, and the evening afterwards, the closest Sunday to the date of the church's consecration, we had a celebratory Evensong. An augmented choir was assembled (Il Rettore joined it), a visiting organist was procured, and a particularly challenging set of settings for the Mag and Nunc was rehearsed. 'We haven't quite managed to make a mess of it yet', Robert the choir director told me in the week; 'Good', I replied, 'that's what I'll tell everyone at the start'. Friends from neighbouring churches came, wine was drunk, and I think we even managed to give proper thanks to the Lord for all that has gone before us. And then I managed to go on leave for a week!

Two Cheers

Dear me, at various churches in the Deanery there are manifold celebrations of the Queen's birthday taking place this weekend, although I must say that at Chapter this week I did detect a certain degree of reluctance to be quite as gung-ho about it as doubtless some Surrey parishioners would like to be. At Swanvale Halt our suggestions were gradually diluted until they amounted to a cake after tomorrow's Mass, provided by one of the churchwardens. Whether it turns out to be corgi-shaped, I'm not sure. They could be bunting, we have some in a box somewhere. 

I have carried out my threat to do a little display about the significance of the Coronation and its liturgy and am quite pleased with how it worked out - pointing out the similarities between it and ordination, and the anointings of baptisms and confirmations, the vows and rings of weddings. The point is not so much that 'the Queen is just like the rest of us', as that we, in God's eyes, are Royal.

The Boss's Birthday

You can argue that Her Madge is Chairman of the Board of the Church of England and we are all being thoroughly encouraged to use her 90th birthday, spread, as royal birthdays are, throughout the convenient Spring and Summer months, as a means of talking about her faith. You can see the point of this: there are few other heads of state who are so sincerely and publicly Christian as the Queen is, and there have indeed been occasions when her own personal faith has poked through the official Anglican carapace of the Monarchy into clear view. The book you see illustrated here, The Servant Queen and the King She Serves, was produced by the Scripture Union as part of that effort, and we were all sent copies by the diocese. 

It is, let it be said, a game attempt to direct attention to the links between the Queen's work and her personal beliefs. In a way the slimmed-down version for schools is an improvement on the full one as it describes more clearly the liturgy and symbolism of the Coronation service that meant so much to the Queen and has shaped her life subsequently. I am toying with the idea of doing something here in Swanvale Halt that looks more directly at that liturgy, and its connections with the apparently humbler, but spiritually just as grand, liturgies which the rest of us take part in - baptism, matrimony, ordination.

As I say, a game attempt. But one which almost inevitably, no matter how decorated it may be in funny stories about Tommy Cooper and Saudi princes, can't avoid the reverent sycophancy which the subject-matter demands (again, the schools version is a bit better in this respect). Probably the most grating declaration in the book comes when we are shown a windswept monarch stomping along a beach with four corgis: 'She employs 1200 people', the caption tells us, 'but feeds her own dogs'. Well, bona. I can't help reflecting that a couple of dozen generations ago her ancestors would have been feeding their employees to the dogs, but then part of the genius of the British establishment has always been to ignore actual history while constantly banging on about how important it is. As somebody who is neither a republican nor a monarchist (my King sleeps in Leicester), I also can't help the feeling that concentrating on the personal faith and humility of this individual monarch diverts attention from the nature of the institution of monarchy, and I would quite like people to think about that as well. 

We discussed at the Staff Meeting what we should do to respond to the diocese's call to mark the Queen's birthday and use it as a means of talking about the faith. The meeting has a general leftish bias and there was a bit of reluctance evident, but we thought that perhaps we could get something for the garden around the church and use that a means of celebrating the event, which is rather like many communities marked the Jubilee a couple of years ago. However the chap who manages the garden is a definite republican and told me 'the obvious thing would be a plastic corgi', which was entirely unhelpful.

Interestingly I had lunch yesterday with a friend who is (partly) an employee of the Queen - even more directly than I am - and he said they'd been told not to celebrate the event with anything more than tea and cake as it was 'not an achievement'. I wonder whether this represents the opinion of Her Madge herself?

Fully Charged with Magic Fairy Dust

... has been my somewhat facetious description to our curate of what would happen to her once she was ordained priest, as she was at the end of June. It was a great delight to me (and to everyone else) when she was able to preside at the Eucharist for the first time on the feast of SS Peter & Paul. The picture shows the occasion - I bought a secondhand red dalmatic (which I'll post about separately when time arises) to deacon for her, which we can, under my Grand Plan to up the temperature on the great feast days, use on Pentecost in years to come.

Last Sunday I was able, for the first time in years, to come to the 8am mass in our church without leading it. I could sit in a pew along with everyone else and pray, and look at the beautiful Crucifixion in the east window, while our curate celebrated with such dignity and warmth. I am very fortunate that I have a colleague who is no prima donna but wants earnestly and reverently to serve the mysteries which open the doors to the Kingdom and reveal God in his nature.

New Year's Eve

We were determined to drag ourselves to the capital for Reptile's New Year's Eve party, as for residents living out beyond the suburbs it's the only night when one can stay late and still catch a train home before the following Sunday morning. It's also the night when Reptile takes over the whole of the Minories premises and the Goths can spread out in leisurely but obviously still pestilential fashion into the other half of the pub with its congenial cages and cubbyholes. For some reason there was a strange undercurrent of discomfort which several people remarked on. Apparently there was some kind of tantrum later in the evening after we left; the fire alarms went off at one point; and one friend remarked on the difficulties presented by having to wade through shoals of bustles to reach the bar. I put it down to the event being remarkably busy making it therefore harder to move around, to see, and to hear anyone even than it usually is.

'You could tell who were the regulars and who was there just for New Year', it was said, the line being between those who came wearing 'meringues' and those in more sensible attire. 'Goth does have an element of panto' commented another person, 'which is why I don't have anything to do with it any more'. Yes, it does indeed, and the dividing line, I prefer to think, is not to be found between this or that style or elaboration of dress or between people who are or aren't club regulars, but between knowing that it is panto and not realising the fact. And beneath the fanfalou and folderol of pantomime, remember, there are matters of deadly seriousness - and that juxtaposition is exactly what makes Goth both terribly amusing and quite interesting, quite apart from the pleasant individuals one might meet there.

We left the Minories at about 1.30 and fought our way through the Tube, out and into the one-way system which operates around Waterloo on New Year's Eve. This is the third year I have done this, and the route seems to grow more extensive each time. I could hardly believe it when, funnelled with the thousands of other lost souls stumbling through increasingly rain- and wind-lashed Southwark streets not quite knowing where we all were, I saw a sign pointing towards Blackfriars Station which we'd passed through about forty minutes before; we should have got out then. We must have walked for over a mile, and the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds began much earlier than last year. Arriving at Waterloo just before 3am only to find there was no 3am train to Guildford after all, we 'enjoyed' a bagel and execrable tea from one of the station outlets before spotting a train scheduled to leave, apparently, at 3.35 - a horrible, raucous, weary train as it happened, and one which meant getting back in to the rectory at 5, strongly suspecting that alternative plans may be made for next year.

As Much of the Jubilee as I can Manage

It's all very well, this Jubilee business, but while not a republican I've never been that much of a monarchist either. At the Family Service on Sunday I spoke about everyone being kings and queens in God's eyes, and played a game with the children involving trying on different sized crowns which I'd knocked up the day before. I started to cut out fleur-de-lys shaped prongs for the crowns before realising I'd be there for several days and so they got triangles instead. I'd made most of the crowns far too small. 'I never realised children had such big heads', I complained afterwards. 'You've clearly never given birth' commented one of the mums.

And that would have been the only Jubilee-related thing I did, had I not had a last-minute invitation to the Overingly street party. Overingly is a tiny village on the estate of a local stately home, complete with its own church built by the landowners because the parish they officially belonged to was too High-Church for their tastes. I led the Christmas service in the church (ironically - I took great delight wearing my biretta) and so was invited to the party. It was lovely, marquees set up at the house next to the church, a band playing the pop tracks everyone can remember, a hog roast, pony rides, and lots and lots of people, teenagers, children, babies. I hadn't wanted to go after the evening mass at Swanvale Halt, but was very glad I did. In the church itself, not far from a table laden with strawberries and cream, was a little exhibition of memorabilia about the history of Overingly, maps, documents, photographs, relics from the wartime Home Guard and things dug up from the fields.

Her Maj the Q. didn't feature very heavily; she was there in the form of the odd photo and a photocopied sheet of songs on a couple of the tables - Land of Hope and Glory and so on - but that was it. What this was, mostly, was less a celebration of her than of a community seeing itself and its own history reflected in her role over the last 60 years. In a way this couldn't have happened at any time before now: the monarchy has become, or is striving to become, ordinary, and so is less a sign of contradiction than a sign of who we are too. That, I think, is what people have been celebrating.

A Morden Marriage

The lovely Minerva and Declan from the LGMG were married this week. Steve and Jaki were their witnesses. The Registrar seemed to find it quite fun.