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!

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!

Hills of the North

I would like to have more photos of services and other church events to pop onto social media, but it's actually quite hard to arrange unless (like some churches I know) you've got someone handy to do it. We haven't! On Sunday evening I grabbed a blurry shot of the procession out of the church during the Service of Light, the Advent Sunday liturgy of carols and readings whose major distinctive element is the lighting of candles and carrying them out of the church and round to the hall at the end. It felt somewhat furtive and undignified but at least I had something to share.

When I came to Swanvale Halt the Service of Light seemed unusual, and I was told my predecessor in the 1980s had borrowed the idea from Salisbury Cathedral; but I've become more aware that Advent carol services of different kinds have been common for a long time, even if I'd never encountered them at my previous churches. I wonder if they've increased in popularity (or at least frequency) as a way of trying to preserve the distinctiveness of Advent at the same time as churches gave in to social expectation and moved their Christmas carol services, typically, to the Sunday before Christmas from the one after, where they used to be until about the early 1970s.

'Hills of the North' was our last carol on Sunday. We had to sing it twice as the congregation took so long to make it round to the hall, but it was none the worse for that.

Who Turned the Hard Rock Into Pools of Water

... goes Psalm 114, the traditional psalm associated with baptism. Anything watery has particular resonances in this area today. Yesterday evening I noticed my kitchen cold tap running less strongly until not long before I went to bed it gave up entirely. Today was supposed to culminate in us hosting the Deanery confirmation service with twelve candidates from six different congregations, and I did think that the sense of dread and foreboding that strangely affected me when I first woke up was to do with that. But now I wonder. Sandra our pastoral assistant and her husband, who were organising the food after the confirmation, unusually turned up at the 8am mass to tell me No, the problem wasn't with my kitchen mixer tap but with the water supply generally. Through the day it got worse and the water company organised bottle distributions in a couple of local car parks. I was OK - a large house with only one person in it retains quite a bit of water in its pipework - but I ended up delivering some water to Trevor, and church members collected more for others they knew. People said intemperate things online to local councillors and anyone else who would listen. The problem seemed to originate with a local water treatment plant being deluged with dirty water after the recent storms. Hopefully the situation is now improving, but it'll be hours before the reservoirs fill up again enough to apply pressure for the pipes.

Everything went wrong with the confirmation. Somehow I'd missed one of the candidates off the order of service, and mangled printing the first hymn so had to run it off on a separate sheet. I forgot about microphones and the card reader until the last minute. The retired bishop leading the service forgot his kit and had to go home to get it: he was so late we assumed he was stuck in traffic trying to get to the water distribution point. But we got it done and I think even the toilets somehow kept working thanks to our own residual water in the system. The choir sang Psalm 114 as the bishop led the confirmands to the font. I'm glad we went ahead, though as much official advice I had was to cancel. I can now barely think two things in a straight line, if you see what I mean.

An Absence of Presence

This morning I had the rare experience of getting ready for the 10.30am midweek service and having no congregation. I followed the standard practice of reading the service through to the Creed and finishing with the Prayer for the Church Militant, which you’re supposed to do just in case anyone turns up at the last moment. After that, you'd be into the Canon of the Mass, so newcomers have had it really.

This midweek service is the last relic of the time when Swanvale Halt, like many others, was a ‘daily mass church’ with a service of holy communion most days; and that wasn’t all that long ago, the tradition finally ending in the late 1990s. The Tuesday service survived because it was the one that had most people attending, but it’s gone up and down over the years. When I arrived in 2009, the church was trying to build it up into a social occasion for older people with refreshments and board games afterwards, but that never took off. Sometimes there have been just a couple of us present, sometimes as many as 15. The congregation tended to be older people who found a long Sunday service too much, and others who happened to be around at that time. At the moment we don’t have many people that applies to.

I’m committed to the idea that the holy eucharist should be offered on a weekday, but I wonder if 10.30am on Tuesday is the right time. Over the years I’ve floated the idea of celebrating the service at a variety of different points – early morning for people before they go to work, after school drop-off, lunchtime, or the evening as folk head home from work – anything that would make it easier for people to build some time for God into their busy lives. No suggestion has ever resulted in much, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be made again.

As today was St Benedict’s Day, this is a precis of what I was going to say in my homily, so it doesn’t go to waste: I sometimes tell myself, ‘well, I can reuse that in a few years’ time’, but I never remember!

Readings: Proverbs 2.1-6, Luke 18.18-22

I didn’t know before preparing my homily that, after some years, a group of the monks at the monastery St Benedict founded and led decided they couldn’t bear him any more and tried to poison him. If you look at our icon of St Benedict in the church, you’ll see a broken chalice, which I think refers to that legend. Nobody has tried to poison me yet as far as I know, but the story shows rather graphically that living in a Christian community can be as far from easy as it’s possible to be. That’s what Benedict and his monks were prepared to undergo to follow the spiritual life. They’d already done what Jesus describes in the Gospel reading today and ‘given up all their possessions’, and you might imagine they could be tempted to say to God, ‘Isn’t that enough, Lord?’ but apparently not! It’s even more costly than that.

We’re prone to take prayer and the presence of God for granted because we can do it any time and any place. But in reality, these things are (as the reading from Proverbs says) silver and treasure, a gift which is the most precious thing we could have. Compared to what we receive from God, our richest possessions are dust, and the dangers we might encounter no more threatening than a mown field, if we see things rightly. What might we be prepared to undergo for the sake of that treasure? Amen.

Words, Words

It wasn’t the fault of the planning team that the non-eucharistic first-Sunday-in-the-month service had a few issues this week. The order of service was passed to me for setting and printing, I noted the lack of the Lord’s Prayer and popped it in but forgot actually to tell Gisele the lay reader who led the service based on her original notes. Our new sound system still has an annoying buzz on the audio loop for those using hearing aids, so the affected parties tell me – but that’s well beyond my ability to sort out at the moment.

This is the second time the team have led the service, and I offer the following observation without speculation. I notice that while I tend to err on the side of reticence and brevity in liturgical matters, if I hand liturgy to laypeople to devise they seem to prefer lots of words, and making them as lyrical as possible. This isn’t invariably the case (we have some lay intercessors who also keep their words simple and straightforward) but it happens often enough to be remarkable. I’m also nervous about straying too far from Biblical texts, and the language yesterday landed quite a distance from them (‘Early in the morning, in the multicoloured company of your Church’ being the most obvious example): I wonder whether laypeople realise how much of the liturgy is composed of chopped-up bits of Scripture or at the very least imagery and language drawn from it, rather than something someone made up at some point. In hymns, of course, a greater latitude is customary: a theological student once asked Archbishop Ramsey whether there was a readily-available dictionary of heresies, to which he replied ‘Yes, it’s called Hymns Ancient and Modern’.

Lay Led

'The thing about the informal service pattern', Giselle the lay reader said to me, 'is that what's informal for Swanvale Halt would be very formal in most other places'. That's nothing more than the truth, I thought, and there and then I determined that we should work towards having a team of laypeople planning and leading one of these non-eucharistic first-Sunday-in-the-month services. Giselle was the obvious person to organise it. We are not used to services here that aren't led by clergy: a Family Service in the month before I arrived back in 2009 was taken by Paula the Pastoral Assistant (who is used to speaking in public anyway), Lillian occasionally led Compline in Holy Week when she was lay reader, and the last time I was down with Covid Jack the retired former teacher did the talk at Messy Church. But that's about all. Part of me knows that to break things open a bit I need to be willing to step back and let others take a lead, but another part suspects I am selling the church short if I don't give them their money's worth out of me.

I certainly couldn't have stomached going so heavily on the Coronation theme as Giselle's team did this Sunday (not that there was anything sycophantic about the service - it focused on heavenly kingship as earthly), and it all went fine though Matthew who led some of the responses was a bit quiet (his microphone seemed to be working OK, however). I knew that the people involved were normally quite reticent souls with a genuine spiritual life who I could trust. In fact it was me who got things wrong. I'd managed to run off some copies of the service leaflet with two pages out of order, thought I'd junked all those, but hadn't, and so we began one hymn with half the congregation singing the wrong thing and had to stop. Shades of the 1727 Coronation - but there the resemblance ended. 

And All The People Rejoiced

'We do pageantry better than anyone else', you often hear as a verdict on royal spectaculars, and it would be churlish to reply to anyone who might say so that you might rather we did cancer screening better than anyone else. We never used to, of course. Struck by how magnificent and simultaneously manipulating Handel's Zadok the Priest is, I looked it up and discovered that when it was first performed at George II's Coronation in 1727, the Westminster Abbey choir got it in the wrong place, having forgotten to sing one anthem completely, and mangled another so badly that the choristers couldn't finish anywhere near together. Famously at George IV's Coronation his estranged Queen Caroline ran round the Abbey knocking the doors and shouting to be let in, while Queen Victoria had the ring jammed on the wrong finger before the Archbishop of Canterbury tried to hand her the orb when she'd already had it. 

So we might legitimately ask when we began to do it better than anyone else, and why. Even at Edward VII's Coronation (which had to be delayed after the King fell badly ill) the Archbishop put the crown on the monarch back to front, but it was around that time that royal events became carefully-managed spectacles that aimed at perfection. This must have been for two reasons. Before the early 1900s, the only way of recording Coronations would have been in paintings and prints, rather than photos and film, and ritual howlers could be safely erased. Secondly, they only matter when the audience isn't the aristocrats and grandees for whom the ritual was originally devised, who know what to expect, but the mass of the population. Errors and blunders may lead them to find their betters ridiculous, and learn to hold them in contempt, whereas the point of the thing is that they should become accustomed to revere them. Because no matter how fine a person Charles III may be, and however much he may believe the moving words about service and humility embedded in his oaths, the institution he embodies locks together and renders more palatable the way things are. It makes them look eternal and natural, and at the same time as it radiates 'history', it obscures the actual historical processes which have led to our current moment.

Some lovely musical moments, especially, aside, I found the Coronation service looked curiously cheap. This sounds like an absurd thing to say given how expensive we know it all is, but the merciless clarity of television made it look like The Mikado done by a ropey travelling theatre. Take the Crown of St Edward, a lavish, grandiose, charismatic object if ever there was one. Under the camera it might as well have been plastic. As it was, it rested on the head of a tired elderly gentleman who very clearly was anxious it didn't fall off (a reasonable worry as he apparently isn't allowed to touch it). Even for me it was hard to discern the mystical action of the Holy Spirit in this.

I wonder whether the issue is to do with what we expect. Any liturgical function has to work with the human as well as the inanimate material to hand, and I think we may have come to expect that such events should be managed by movie directors and carried out by beautiful or at least impressive thesps. Everything should look like Game of Thrones, and it just can't. The basic bonkersness of the whole thing becomes unavoidable, and it will interesting to see what long-term effect seeing it all will have. 

In the same way, watching a eucharist online is a strangely weird and unaffecting experience even if it's done perfectly. You are supposed to be there - and a Coronation is designed for those present too. But the British establishment wants it to be a moment when they can persuade the whole population to buy into their continued dominance. Can it do so the next time round?

A Sunday of Contrasts

Our baptisms are moderately conservative affairs. I keep the old language about 'sin, the world, and the devil' and I even do the little gesture called the Ephphatha, making the sign of the Cross over the child's ears and lips, symbolising the newly-baptised soul's ears being opened to hear the Word and their mouth to speak it, which comes from the old Roman rite and which I so liked I adopted it. I've even been asked, occasionally, as I was today, to baptise a child who's wearing a traditional christening gown, but that's quite rare as most families now find their beloved baby doesn't fit the gown by the time they get around to organising the ceremony. But I've never been asked additionally to wrap the child in a white shawl before. The christening gown itself derives from the white robe in which a baptismal candidate was wrapped in the ancient rite after the baptism itself, signifying their clothing with Christ, and after the custom of baptising children naked fell into disapproval in the Western Church they would arrive at the ceremony already wearing it. I see that the old Roman Rite includes clothing with a shawl or somesuch, but also allows this to be commuted, as it were, to a white cloth placed on the child's head. The sense of this arrangement was revealed today when none of us could work out easily how to hold little Isabella so the shawl could be applied. 

Later in the afternoon it was our Spring Forest Church. I didn't know quite where we were going, so Julie the Sacristan led the small procession (including two dogs) to a local SSSI where we were surrounded by meadows and birdsong yet with the 21st century very audible in the form of the main road not far away. This is of course much less formal liturgy, but as yet hasn't attracted a single soul who is not already a member of some church community! Will more publicity make a difference?

Opening the Word

On Tuesday morning I emerged from the vestry to discover that nobody had braved the chill and damp to join Rick and myself for mass. Like many churches at our end of the spectrum, we gave up a daily eucharist, in the late 1990s in our case, because it had become unsustainable - though my scouring of old service registers is revealing how it was barely sustainable almost everywhere even when it was happening. The Tuesday service is the only survivor of that tradition, and again you can find that pattern in many churches.

We carried on through the service just in case anyone else came along, which has happened in the past, but it meant my meditation on the Feast of SS Perpetua, Felicity, and Companions didn't reach more than a pair of ears, so here it is. I offer it not because it's a masterpiece of the form, but because it's representative of the kind of short homily I usually offer on such occasions. Readings were Revelation 12.10-12 and Matthew 24.9-13 (mercifully brief).

I often say that the early martyrs we commemorate in the calendar are people we know next to nothing about, but that’s not quite the case with Perpetua, Felicity and their companions – though what we know about them is mainly the story of their martyrdom, which we have a detailed account of, some of which could even be in their own words. In fact, through that account they became the model for the early martyrs of the Church, and accounts of what happened to them, as well.

Some of the story might seem a bit morbid and odd, especially perhaps the bit where the gladiator is making a mess of despatching Perpetua and she basically says ‘Oh, give it here’ and grabs his sword-arm to guide the knife to her own throat – but then if you’re on the way out anyway you probably want to expedite matters!

In fact in the story I find myself thinking today less about the saints and more about the crowd in the arena in Carthage at the time. Martyrdom is hard, but cruelty is all too easy. For the crowd watching Perpetua, Felicity and the others, that kind of cruelty was part of public life, the culture they were brought up with. Even if what happened in the arena was often a way of executing people, it was death as a spectacle, an entertainment, whether people were being gored by wild animals, or someone who’d never handled a weapon before was being put up against a professional gladiator – they weren’t going to last very long. The crowds had learned their cruelty.

We must be aware of every step that takes us along that road, whether as individuals or collectively, even if it seems like a small one – because we know where it goes. To argue and act against cruelty in our own time, which may not be popular at all, may just be the martyrdom we are called to. 

Give Me Your Hand, My Friend

It was Patrick, the former Methodist minister at the joint Methodist-United Reformed church down the road, who concluded the Churches Together United Service his church was hosting one year with the hymn 'What Shall Our Greeting Be', and ambushed us, his clergy colleagues from other churches, by grabbing the hands he could reach and insisting we should do the same. Had he been a silly young fellow and not a doughty elderly one who should have retired several years before, I would have found it maddening and not splendidly nuts, which is the attitude I did in fact have. Today we were hosting the same event which included communion for the first time since 2019. Paula and husband Peter brought along the bread - boxes of little cubes of sliced white, not what we usually use - and some grotty de-alcoholised wine. I thought as a gesture in the direction of unity, Patrick's successor Alan should preside at communion, and as I hadn't warned any of my other clerical compatriots it was only his hand I grasped during the singing of that hymn at the end. We just about got away with it all, and there were nearly 200 people in church, far more than I thought there would be.

'That', said Alan afterwards, 'was so nerve-racking. I haven't been as anxious as that since seminary.' This surprised me. Once I'd got all the elements in place and everyone turned up, I was pretty unconcerned about the whole occasion. I suppose once you accept that communion isn't going to take place in the way you expect - that it will be in the form of little cubes of bread and wine whose best recommendation was that it didn't actually make you grimace, and that Paula will take the leftovers and give them to the ducks - you're not that worried about the rest. How strange to find myself the more relaxed party.

Enough Already!

Many years ago, the Church of England didn't make much provision for weekday worship on days when nothing very much was going on liturgically, and Anglo-Catholic churches got used to making use of the material provided for their Roman counterparts. Here at Swanvale Halt we've used the 1970 Roman Daily Missal for years (albeit in a post-1970 copy!). Of course I never use the Collects: they are almost always vapid variants on the theme of 'Jesus loves us so may we love him', which is all very well but gets you only so far. I am also used to making on-the-hoof amendments to the texts of the Jerusalem Bible which is what the Daily Missal uses, when those texts seem clunky and awkward.

This morning, though, I opened the Missal before the assembled masses in the Lady Chapel (all four souls) and found my eye and brain confronted by Hebrews 2.5:

He did not appoint angels to be rulers of the world to come, and that world is what we are talking about.

Now the J.B. tries to improve comprehension of the text by removing any doubt at all about what it might mean, which I suppose is a characteristically Roman approach. But this just reads horrendously. For a second I flailed as I tried to come up with an alternative that both kept the sense of Holy Writ and expressed it in a way which treated the ear less brutally, and failed, and apologised for my failure. By way of comparison, let us turn to The Message, which is the most extreme paraphrastic version of the Bible in general use, and which renders the same verse thus:

God didn't put angels in charge of this business of salvation that we're dealing with here. 

To me this is nowhere near as bad. It does scarcely more violence to the text than the J.B. and at least reads energetically and appealingly within its American idiom. The NRSV which we would use on Sundays says:

Now God did not subject the coming world, about which we are speaking, to angels. 

This is by no means the most elegant of sentences and some people may fight shy of the subordinate clause in the middle. But it is more stately and less banal, and the subordinate clause slows the phrase down, giving the listener the chance to digest what is being said: it comes to rest on the word 'angels' who are the point of the statement and the thought behind it. The verse leads into the discussion of the role of human beings, to whom creation has been subjected, based on the quotation of Psalm 8. It is better in every respect. From now on I think the Missal will remain on its shelf in the vestry.

Oleum Infirmorum

It must have been a copy of the parish magazine from the 1950s that recently came my way in which I learned that my illustrious predecessor-but-four Canon Artington had intended to start a healing service, which seemed a rather unusual thing for the time, and even more for a solemn graduate of King’s College London and St Stephen’s House. Without access to the service registers from then I don’t know whether anything came of it. Anyway, I had Canon Artington in mind on Tuesday when we had a contemporary go at the same kind of thing. It struck me months ago that there was an Autumn gap in the calendar of Churches Together in Hornington & District between the August open-air service and the Christmas excitements, and St Luke’s Day on October 18^th caught my eye. He is the patron saint of physicians. None of the local churches does anything explicitly connected to the healing ministry; as a healing service isn’t necessarily eucharistic, it ought to be something all our local congregations could subscribe to. Of course having come up with the idea I had created a rod for my own back in planning it, but in the event everyone I asked to take on a task said yes. It was quiet, reflective and candle-heavy, with piano music and a modest schola singing the Ubi Caritas, laying-on-of-hands and anointing in the proper manner, and a team from Tophill to provide individual prayer if people wanted it – in fact that caused the only slip in the liturgy as they were still praying with some people as the main action reached a pause, with no sign that they were coming to a halt: even in a ‘quiet and reflective’ event, if you are sitting doing nothing when you know that there’s something left that you will be doing, there’s a point when expectation shifts uncomfortably into tension. I found myself approaching the service with more trepidation than I expected, and not for fear that it might go wrong or nobody turn up, but that I was deeply unworthy to be saying the words I would have to. I kept a semi-fast through the day (fluids and bread only), and felt more acutely than usual having to recall that these are the declarations and actions of Christ, not me. As well as being candle-heavy, the service was also clergy-heavy, but their feedback afterwards was especially appreciative. Perhaps clergy have an unusual need for the healing grace of the Spirit.

Back Inside

On Wednesday I and Margaret from the congregation went in through the airlock-like door of Widelake care home, and followed a member of staff to the 'pub' where we celebrated Holy Communion for a group of residents. This unremarkable event was the first of its kind to happen since March 2020 when covid was first gripping us. I'd had discussions on and off with Amy who runs Widelake about starting up services again, but for a long while we would have had to stand behind a perspex screen and have no contact with residents, which makes a communion service a bit of a non-starter and there's little point in doing much else. But now all is, more or less, back to normal. My face mask was all very well but seemed a little bit tokenistic.

One change is that we no longer have the services of Alec who used to play the piano so I had rigged up some music and a couple of hymns on my iPod. It turned out that the speakers weren't up to the job, leaving the music so quiet that even on 'All Things B&B' and 'We Plough the Fields' we were a bar out of time after a single verse. More kit required. I could barely remember what to put in the bag as it was, and spent a good chunk of Tuesday morning frantically photocopying hymns after the folder with the old hymn sheets was nowhere to be found.

Move Along Now

Well, I was disappointed. From the descriptions ahead of the event, I really thought the Lord Chamberlain was literally going to snap a ceremonial white rod over his knee at the Queen’s funeral and lay it on her coffin, whereas what he actually carried was a plain wooden stick somewhat less charismatic than a snooker cue and which just clicked apart with the slightest touch. How undramatic.

There was something to offend everyone within the space of ten minutes on the World Service this afternoon. Rob Watson’s statement that the monarchy makes British people ‘think, Our history is pretty cool’ might be taken as an insult to all the many victims of that history, but it was a matter of opinion. When, however, he went on to say that ‘a head of government and a head of state were changed in 3 days with the minimum of fuss’ he neatly glossed over the fact that changing the head of government took months of the ruling party arguing with itself, and then that new head of government being selected by a tiny group of party members without reference to anyone else; and that it would never have happened in the first place without the previous incumbent’s trashing of truth, the law, and the constitution. Pretty cool, all that. He was followed by Professor Alice Hunt from Southampton University, who topped her comment that the Coronation would be ‘the only ceremony that has any constitutional standing’ (OK, so Edward VIII was never really king and the many Acts of Parliament he signed were invalid) with the breathtaking insistence, speaking for the late Queen and the whole nation, that ‘nobody really believes that there is a divine being at work here, and yet that is what the Coronation will say’. Where does the BBC get these people from? Southampton University, apparently.

I pondered my own reaction. I don't feel emotionally involved in the Queen's passing, though I appreciate the emotions of those who are, and in fact it's those who affect me. I don't feel watching a TV programme is 'taking part in history', and I deal with death and life every day so I don't need more meditations on mortality. And yet, even I could hardly fail to be affected by the pipes and drums, especially when the pipes, at least, were at a safe distance. When the jabbering commentators straining to find something meaningful to say fell silent it was even moving, not least because inside that grand coffin draped in the royal standard was the body of a tiny old lady: ‘if she gets any smaller, she’ll disappear completely’, S.D. said to me the last time we met – but he was friendlier with the late Queen Mother, it has to be said.

At Swanvale Halt, we had just enough big candles to keep the memorial to the Queen illuminated until today was passed. In the short commemoration we kept at the end of mass on the 11^th I used the Kontakion, so it was pleasing to hear it in the committal service today; and because His Grace of Hornington was on holiday I ended up reading prayers at the local Accession Proclamation alongside our republican Mayor. I hadn't intended to do anything else: I watched in increasing incredulity the goings-on at Fr Thesis’s church in London where it seems nothing has been celebrated but Requiem Masses for the Queen since her death, and pondered dropping him a line to remind him he was allowed to do something else. But in the end I weakened and did do a Requiem of our own yesterday evening; we sang a bit, and got 16 souls. 73 people signed the Book of Condolence deposited with us by the Town Council, and a member of the congregation had to be persuaded not to walk out yesterday morning after Greta the Lay Reader alluded to the new King not paying inheritance tax in her sermon. She was the only one.

As we say with our Spring Fair, planning for the next one has (probably) already begun. I look forward to the choir of St George’s Chapel Windsor singing ‘Ying Tong Iddle I Po’ in twenty-odd years' time ... !

Remote Access

Pastoral Assistant and local councillor Paula and her husband Pete are on holiday in Jamaica at the moment, and sent me this snap of their laptop and screen set up to join in with Compline over Zoom yesterday evening, while the blue sea ripples outside the window. It was a bit odd, for them, to be celebrating the Night Office of Prayer at 1.30 in the afternoon, but still.

This was really how I intended the online Compline to work, building on the experience of the pandemic and other, more sophisticated churches than ours, and of our former curate Marion’s son who became part of an online community of Christian teenagers that worked very well. But it hasn’t really achieved that. It’s rare that anyone, like Paula and Pete, joins in who hasn’t been in church already that day (sometimes more than once), so it is less outreach, or an alternative for people who can’t get to church physically, than yet another addition to the liturgical diet for those who already have plenty going on. My only attempt to use Facebook Live for Compline during the lockdown, as several colleagues were, was a bit rough, but had a lot of people joining in: I migrated to Zoom as everyone with a computer can access that, and Facebook is more limited, but the online Compline isn’t doing what I wanted it to. It’s been suggested that a weekday evening might be better. Certainly what I didn’t expect was to get down to the church at 7pm and find verger Rick there. I haven’t asked him yet whether he specifically came in order to take part in the service, which is completely the opposite of the point of it!

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! 

Carrying Candles

'It's the candle that holds the boy', Gordon our head server is fond of saying, referring to the bygone days - at least for us - when Anglo-Catholic churches would field phalanxes of youthful acolytes, given something to do as a way of keeping them on board with the business of church. In this photo Jack has just blown his candle out as I tried to take a snap of him, his sister Ruby, and Polly who had been deputed to carry the cross. As you know, I endlessly scratch my head trying to think of ways of getting the children we have contact with engaged with Church life in a way that might actually lead to some sort of development of faith.  In the past we've had 'family communion' services where children who might turn up are allocated the jobs grown-ups would normally do, but as the position of Mothering Sunday meant swapping the eucharist we would usually have celebrated on March 27th to April 3rd instead, I thought I would try to get some of our children to act as servers by getting them to commit in advance. It was a bit of a risk but went fine in the end, the youngsters being ably marshalled by Gordon and Jean the Sacristan to do their bits and they seem even to have enjoyed it, which was the idea. we would have had a fourth child had not illness struck his family at the crucial moment. I think Pentecost might be a good time to try this again. That's a good complicated service!

Have This One On Me

"I expect an answer next time we speak!" Dale told me over Zoom this week. Former member of the Swanvale Halt flock, Dale comes from an American Lutheran background and I have been talking to him regularly since the first lockdown. This time we were discussing the resumption of communion being administered to the laity in both kinds, which we suspended nearly two years ago. Nobody doubts it would be preferable to return to giving the wine to the congregation; many of my (even) more Anglo-Catholic colleagues did so long ago. Others have adopted the use of the president intincting the Host before adminstering it, but I've never been able to see how you safely do that without ending up pressing a mushy disc into the communicant's hand. But how we are to go about it? Dale, you see, would be delighted if I plumped for individual communion cups. 

Evangelical Anglican commentators such as Ian Paul, when he has caught breath between agitating for bishops to give up mitres and Anglican churches to stop putting out crib scenes at Christmas, saw the pandemic as a God-given opportunity to promote the use of individual communion cups. But then he went on from there to suggest that it would better to decamp communion services permanently to domestic settings, so perhaps we should leave him to one side. Anyway, the bishops came out with a statement against this particular form of administering the Sacrament in July 2020, which according to some parties was based on a very inadequate legal opinion on the matter dating from 2011; but in October last year they discussed it again, and agreed that there was nothing to be gained by putting the matter to Synod (something generally best avoided in any circumstance) and that they had no intention of telling individual churches what to do. I don't know of any churches in Guildford diocese that have taken this option, but some evangelical churches elsewhere have.

We rightly associate individual communion cups with Nonconformist churches. Until the late 1800s Dissenters were content with common cups like everyone else, but from the 1890s an increasing awareness of the mechanisms of infection led to a movement among Dissenting churches in the northeastern United States to use separate communion vessels for each communicant, and the habit spread as quickly as the sicknesses everyone was afraid of. Asked about the matter in the early 1900s, Archbishop Randall Davidson decided using individual communion cups, were any church to do so, would indeed be legal, and the 1908 Lambeth Conference stated that bishops could authorise their use, though there was no medical case for abandoning the common cup wholesale (if it was all that risky clergy would be endlessly ill from consuming the dregs of the chalice at the end of communion, whereas they are not obviously sicker than anyone else and it would be presumptuous to ascribe this to divine intervention). 

Still, the standard Catholic objections to using separate cups do ring a bit hollow. We administer the bread in separate wafers happily enough, and any argument in favour of sharing a cup would equally apply to sharing a loaf. Any remains left in the cups could be reverently dealt with by collecting them, rinsing them, and then pouring the water with its diluted wine to earth in the same way we do when laundering purificators. No, the core of the problem is elsewhere.

I'm surprised that nobody ever talks much about the psychology of receiving the sacrament.  During lockdown, Marion our then-curate got into a rough debate in the group of Franciscan Tertiaries she belonged to (imagine that!) about the validity of 'remote consecration', in which clergy who refused to consecrate bread and wine over Zoom were accused of 'denying the sacrament' to the laypeople. This is not the mindset of passive, thankful reception, but of the exercise of rights. We come to the altar, into the real presence of the Lord, as recipients of grace. Think about the difference between coming to an altar, kneeling, and having a chalice put to your lips, and on the other hand approaching, standing, taking a small cup, and knocking it back either off to one side, or, worse, back in your seat. This is not the same as having a Host put into your hand which you then eat; it is like coming forward, breaking off a portion of a loaf of bread yourself, and taking it away. It is, psychologically, administering the Sacrament to yourself, rather than having it administered to you; it is claiming your grace from Jesus, rather than accepting it as his gift. This, I suspect, is why Protestants rather warm to it, because it promotes the sense of freedom, choice and independence which is at the heart of the Protestant mindset, one which - I feel constrained to argue - history suggests leads eventually to effective unbelief. I shouldn't think they themselves know that's what's happening, and would resist the case if it was made. 

I can see a Catholic way of using individual communion cups: they would have to be given to the communicant, ideally kneeling if they are able to do so; the Blood consumed there and then, and returned to the minister. Hard to manage, though. Any harder than a chalice? I'm not sure.