The Spiritual Bounds of Satire

Lately, Death stalks the halls of Euterpe: Ozzy Osbourne, Cleo Laine, Connie Francis, and now Tom Lehrer. I was introduced to the oeuvre of Mr Lehrer at university by Comrade Tankengine; 35 years after that, and up to 70 after the songs were written, I think I can appreciate their bold savagery more than ever. Far from being blunted by time, they get sharper as you can perceive how they must have landed at the time. Drug-taking, pornography, venereal disease, nuclear annihilation, inter-community prejudice, and cruelty to animals: no target is beyond their scope, all wrapped up in razor-sharp and inventive rhyme and meter. For a slightly less sulphurous way of making the point, listen to Lehrer’s introduction, and his audience’s reaction, to ‘The Vatican Rag’, a 1965 song about the Second Vatican Council. His phrases about the Church becoming more ‘commercial’ and ‘selling the product’ sound shocking (as I think they should be) rather than the commonplace cliches they now are; once the song begins, as it converts solemn ritual into absurd pantomime without any actual, definite abuse, the audience responds with whoops and gasps, simply unable to believe that anyone is saying this stuff.

And you wonder whether anyone would say it now. On the one hand, Tom Lehrer was always the first to point out that satire changed nothing: ‘it’s not even preaching to the converted, it’s titillating the converted’, he believed. On the other, just a little bit further down the road of eroding the rule of law we currently travel, and the ivory-fingering academic would surely run the risk of being shot up against a wall. Tyrants have notoriously poor senses of humour, even if the joke doesn’t really threaten them. In The Libertine John Malkovich’s Charles II watches in fury as Johnny Depp’s Earl of Rochester savages him theatrically as King Bolloxinion: ‘This is very funny’, says a beaming French ambassador to the King, ‘if this was Paris, the playwright would already be dead by now’. Thank heavens for the Civil War.

But does satire do us any spiritual good? Back in Oxford days I collaborated with Comrade Tankengine and others in a gossipy weekly political newsletter which was occasionally witty and always scabrous, directed at the University society we belonged to. For me, it was a kind of continuation of some of the things I’d done, or, more often, imagined doing, at school. We told ourselves that it was all about catharsis, about carving out a space for ourselves and those who felt similarly alienated which at least kept us within the bounds of the Party. But we couldn’t half be cruel sometimes. There is a strain of self-congratulation and contempt even in the best of satire – and you can argue Tom Lehrer’s is that, as it’s the cleverest. ‘If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while’, he said. The Roman Catholic Church was given lenient treatment in the light of that.

I will still flick to Lehrer on my creaking, steam-powered iPod from time to time, but part of me will always feel I should apologise to the Lord. And I will not visit the park to poison a single pigeon.

The Period of All Human Glory

The sacristan at Goremead church, which I looked after for a few months 17 years ago now, was Agnes. In her very young days she’d been on the secretarial staff of Archbishop Cosmo Lang. At the end of any discussion about her unsatisfactory health or general state she would usually conclude, ‘Still, we're getting there’, the first person I can remember using a phrase I now hear almost universally. It’s another way of saying ‘Can’t complain’, which is itself a way of glossing over the fact that there is no point complaining; of putting to one side the uncomfortable truth both parties to the conversation are only too aware of, that the situation concerned probably isn’t going to get any better. The actual words do not mean what they are intended to convey, the consciousness that we are all on a single trajectory with a single conclusion. One day I was bold enough to ask Agnes where it was we were getting to: she narrowed her eyes and replied ‘You know perfectly well’.

We will leave aside the more cosmic consideration that we don’t know quite where we’re getting to – the supernal or infernal postmortem realms – and think about what it means for this life alone. Knowing in theory that your time in this earthly realm is limited, as we all do, feels very different from being told it is, even if no actual span is put on it. This has recently happened to someone I know, and if that’s happened to you personally, it’s also happened, to a lesser degree, to the people close to you. No doctor is brutal enough to say ‘What you have wrong with you can only be cured by interventions we will not try because of all the other things that are wrong with you, so all we can do is manage it, and it will eventually kill you within the foreseeable future if one of your other problems doesn’t get to you first’, but that’s what they want you to understand.

Traditional Christian spirituality uses the transitoriness of life to point us away from this world towards eternal considerations, but that’s not the problem here, which is to invest the remainder of our human lives with meaning and joy. The confidence we might have in Christ’s saving grace may blunt the edge of death: we may tell ourselves that all that is good about us is held in divine remembrance and will be brought into the heavenly Jerusalem, part of the ‘treasures of the nations’ the Book of Revelation talks about. If we can successfully pit that spiritual knowledge against our every natural human instinct to be afraid, all well and good. But it seems to me that carrying on living fully is a separate spiritual issue. Call some of us weak and foolish, but we need some motivation not just to turn our faces to the wall and collapse into depression. What is the point of the strife? Even if we engage in battle to make it easier for others to do so, that just pushes the question one step away from us, rather than answering it.

Once when I was dealing with someone with suicidal temptations I stressed that death was the enemy, an interloper in God’s world (this only stands any chance of working with a Christian). But if that’s the case we know that we will eventually lose: and that loss may even come as a mercy depending on our circumstances. Perhaps we can see each day lived well as a victory against a different Angel of Death that comes to us, rather than a struggle daily renewed against the same foe.

And yet why should we? Death doesn’t have to be approaching that quickly to make that a valid question. The humanist concern to gather experiences against the day of death seems a hollow endeavour as it leads nowhere. Why should we try daily when we are weary and dispirited? Rather, the thought that occurs to me that nobody else will ever have our experiences, our precise mixture of impressions, reflections and memories. Those are the treasures of the nations to be brought into the heavenly city. What God will do with them exactly we do not know, but every moment is not just one of blessing to us but to the whole of creation, connected as we are through him who is the Head. That might be enough to keep me thankful each morning, no matter how long or short a time that might remain to me.

Busy Doing Nothing

Something very odd happened on Sunday. It wasn't a heavy day in terms of duties, just the services at 8 and 10 and a conversation with a potential baptizand afterwards. As well as household chores I intended to prepare for a meeting on Monday evening, only to realise that most people who would normally be there are away leaving me, Jean the sacristan, and a church member who is hardly ever in church, to talk about worship arrangements. I was just about to send out an email suggesting we postpone the gathering when I found one from Jean saying exactly that. An alternative job was to rough out an account of the various ideas I have for the rest of the year for the PCC; on investigation I found I'd done that, but had forgotten. 

There are always things one could do, but on this occasion I couldn't face any of them. So I sort of faffed about pretending I was still at work but in fact looking up entirely irrelevant matters on the internet and things like that. Eventually I read a chapter of an improving book to clear my head and put the slight sense of self-reproach behind me. That somehow got me through to an acceptable time to return to the church, say Evening Prayer and lock up. It would have been more productive, including spiritually productive, just to stare out of the window. So why hadn't I?

Gradually I realised that I'd fallen into exactly the same habit I try to warn other people against, of validating myself by activity. When there is no activity, when I can't do the things I have planned to do and nothing else intrudes itself, I feel dull and deflated. My non-work life is also defined by activity, by filling the time with tasks. Of course you should be diligent and productive in the use of time, but when idleness comes upon you without being sought, and your response is to fill disturbed and ill-at-ease, this is a spiritual warning sign. My activity was for myself, not for the Lord. 

Turning this over prayerfully on Monday I began feeling that I was enjoying God's company - as the old man famously told the Curé d'Ars, 'I looks at him and he looks at me', that some kind of pressure had been relieved. How unexpected. The next time idleness ambushes me, I will be more prepared by being happier not to do anything!

Quiet

2022 was, I think, the last time I spent a Lenten retreat at Malling Abbey. For the last couple of years I've instead gone to Clarissa and Simon's garden music room at Bortley for a quiet day of reading and prayer. There are various reasons: it doesn't take as much time away from the parish, it seems to be just as productive if more concentrated, and, being very honest, joining in corporate worship with the holy Sisters became harder as they themselves age and become more crumbly. There was a sense of sorrow, of something passing away, and I feel that keenly in life more generally. So Bortley Mill it is for the time being.

In fact my resistance to change and sorrow at the passing-away of things formed some part of my reflections. On the music room bookshelves was a copy of Patrick Bringley's All The Beauty in the World, his reflections on ten years spent as a warder at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, finding solace in art and discovering other people also processing their own lives by means of the things they encounter in the museum. A small book laying out the experiences of an ordinary life: and it made me think of all the worthwhile books (meaning the worthwhile experiences of other people) I will never manage to read, and the beautiful things I will never fit in seeing or enjoying. I could live a thousand lifetimes and barely scratch the surface of the wonders the world has to offer. I felt ashamed at the times I have failed to feel grateful, failed to appreciate the tiny, tiny time I have to enjoy beauty and love. 

As it was a Friday in Lent, I was fasting until sunset. I arrived at the music room to find that Simon had laid out a plate of delicious shortbread biscuits which assailed me through the day with their aroma as I sipped my black, unsweetened coffee. But they would have gone soft being left out like that, so I took them home. 

Mr Happy

‘I do believe our prayers are heard and answered’, says Michael Mayne, the late Dean of Westminster, in the book I’m reading at the moment, The Enduring Melody, dealing with his experience of terminal cancer. ‘But we have to be clear about what we really want’. Prayer is, we might add, a way of discovering what it is we really want, too. It’s a question that’s worth asking ourselves when we sit with the Lord wondering what, if anything, to say.

Want I really want is, I think, something I am slightly ashamed of. I want everyone to be happy. That desire applies most strongly to the people I interact with most closely, but it’s a general one that I’ve realised conditions a lot of what I do. It seems so superficial, somehow, when you state it so baldly.

Of course that desire comes with caveats. I don’t believe you can be properly happy if you are committed to falsehoods, as eventually they will find you out: creation is a unity, and ultimately falsehood corrupts even if you don’t know you are enmeshed in it. I don’t believe you can be properly happy without God: God is the final truth of all things, and we are, as the saint says, restless till we find our rest in him. Rest and peace lie nowhere else. ‘We seek Christ where he is not to be found, amidst graves and sepulchres’, says the 17^th-century bishop Mark Frank, whose sermons I must look up one day. And it is true that what one person requires for what they think of as their happiness, may bring sorrow to another; they are seeking Christ in the sepulchres, in that case, but it’s what they think, and in such cases I can’t take their self-definitions of happiness as read.

Yet nevertheless, all that taken into account, I still want everyone to be happy. It hurts me when they can’t be, or when people I love seem to be seeking happiness in places they won’t find it (perhaps I am, too. I still have a lot to learn). I fear contributing to their unhappiness.

I’m not sure many Christians have this as their governing desire. They want to tell the truth regardless of consequences, to rescue souls from hell, to please God. So do I, I suppose, but I think of it in terms of bringing them happiness, which I believe would bring happiness to God as well.

Am I happy? Can I say that coming to Christ will bring happiness to those I meet? For decades I thought of faith in terms of truth, and never demanded that it would bring me any kind of joy. Perhaps it wouldn’t. Perhaps it would bring me the opposite by making demands of me I might not be inclined to meet. That’s a criticism of my own failings, to be sure, but I’m being no more than honest. Yet now, nearly 30 years after my conversion, I can sit in front of God, as I conceive it, and feel – joy at simply being there. The vicissitudes of my life (such as they are!) all occur in the context of God’s presence. They remain challenging, painful perhaps, but they are still held within something bigger than they are, and the bigger thing they are held in is the deep conviction that the centre of creation is love. It is, perhaps we might say, a deeper life. I am grateful for it. I am, maybe, happy. At least now and again.

The Bond of Love

Something actually spiritual for a change!

Some time ago a parishioner gave me a copy of the Northumbria Community office book Celtic Daily Prayer, published by the company she worked for. I was a bit sceptical as for most people ‘Celtic Christianity’ seems to be Hello-Clouds-Hello-Sky-skip-through-the-fields stuff rather than, say, the Culdees spending hours up the waist in the freezing water of holy wells reciting Psalms. But this book turned out to be rather rigorous in its spirituality, albeit a bit rude to St Wilfrid, so that was all right.

The bit I’m reading at the moment centres on the experience of St Columba on the isle of Iona, and some of the texts come from a long poem published in the early 1900s by Fr Richard Meux Benson, founder of the Society of St John the Evangelist, the Cowley Fathers. My old theological college occupies the SSJE buildings in Oxford, and Father Benson is as abiding a presence there as anyone actually related to the college itself. I was surprised that he was so inspired by Columba, who didn’t seem a likely saint to have come to the attention of a Victorian Anglican priest who spent most of his ministry in East Oxford; but they were both austere characters, and Fr Benson might have felt a connection with the Irishman’s creation of a mission community among the rocks and inlets of Dark Age Scotland.

And death can never break 
the bond of love which God’s own hand 
hath wrought.

- I read this morning. One of the lines I tend, I admit, to reach for when I’ve taken funeral services for people I may not have known very well, or at all, is to speak about ‘the bonds of love which death is powerless to overcome’. I’ve sometimes wondered if this is a bit sentimental. Maybe friends and relatives seldom listen that carefully to homilies at their loved ones’ funerals, but, just in case they might, I want to give hope, but not sell the Gospel short either. Not everything makes it through the process of purgation. Yet at the same time I do believe that love comes from nowhere but God, and that therefore that must survive. What is good about us is gathered by him, and no genuine love we have shared can be lost.

And here is the great and founder of the Cowley Fathers, whose faith was nothing if not demanding, using the same phrase. It also made me think something else. If it’s our love of God which carries us into the new creation, and that love is itself a bond God’s own hand hath wrought, it too is unbreakable. What happiness there is in this, that even in our love of him, we rely not on our own frailty, but his eternal faithfulness.

Poustinia Practice

My spiritual reading at the moment is Catherine de Hueck Doherty's Poustinia from 1977, an examination of the Orthodox Christian conception of physical withdrawal to a particular place from which distractions are banished in order more effectively to encounter God, and how it might work in a Western context. Typically I had never heard of it until very recently but discover it as a 'spiritual classic'. When something is written exceedingly simply but those simple sentences are dense with power it's a good sign. 

I'm not called to be a poustinik, at least I don't think I am. I gib a little at Bd Catherine's injunction that the bed in the poustinia should be 'a board, with a blanket if necessary', as someone who currently has three blankets on their bed as well as a duvet and a top sheet (the weight helps me sleep). But basically she is outlining how the whole of the Christian spiritual life works, for every Christian, in concentrated form, and so there are lessons to be drawn even for a poor secular priest like me.

The lesson I'm thinking about most is the idea that 'the poustinia has three walls'. In the classic Russian model, the poustinik who takes this on as a long-term vocation rather than an exercise for a day or two, is always available to whoever wants their help, and that help might be spiritual or very practical. Someone might come and seek the poustinik out and say 'Friend, I need some help putting up a fence' and the poustinik must leave their prayers and do as they are bidden. That's the point. To a person willing to exploit, they're free labour. Yet they mustn't complain or resist, but leave it to God to deal with. 

One of my Minor Patron Saints (as opposed to my Major Patron, Great-Martyr Catherine) is St Serafim of Sarov, the very doyen of poustiniks, who was wont to greet anyone who turned up at his hut with a beaming smile, outstretched arms, and the words 'My joy! Christ is risen!' I could do with a little more of that spirit, so I am trying to offer thanks to God when the phone rings or the doorbell sounds, treating interruptions as the work of the Spirit. Who knows? I might be entertaining angels unawares. I confess, friends, that I am not there yet!

Up in the Rafters

The most striking event in the parish this week has been the opening of a new fast-food outlet on the row of businesses which already has two, and the main happening in the life of the church has been an internal glazing area being cleaned for the first time in about twenty years so it no longer presents a canvas of spattered swift guano, but these are fairly pedestrian occurrences. So my mind turns to times past. The alma mater St Stephen's House has just reorganised the Founder's Chapel, the little worship space that crouches beneath the roof of the old building opening off Oxford's Marston Street that was the original home of the Society of St John the Evangelist, and very handsome it is too to judge by this photo on the College's LiberFaciorum page. That's not Comper Pink, but most agreeable nevertheless, a nice contrast with the black.

When I was there it didn't have the little wooden statue of the Virgin and Child, nor was it a space where people spent a great deal of time. We students were discouraged from holding any events there at all, allegedly because it would have been a death-trap in the event of a fire, but somehow that didn't appear to prevent Compline happening there once a week. It was dusty, alternately freezing or suffocating hot according to the season, and occasionally worse, as during the several days when it was invaded by the College's resident colony of pigeons who made it part of their festering empire until it was recaptured.

There were people who found the Founder's Chapel spooky. We were once treated to the local diocesan exorcist recounting some of his stories, and he referred to the unseen denizens of the Marston Street building, though he wasn't at the House to talk to us about that at all. He was quite a peculiar character, the most uncanny thing about him being the mysterious way his toupée moved around his head. He and colleagues had, he told us, been called in to clear out the whole place spiritually, but by the time they got to the Founder's Chapel there was one presence they decided to leave alone 'as it had more of a right to be there than anyone living'. We all knew who that meant. 

So there were certain physical challenges to spending time in the Founder's Chapel (not least getting up the steep stairs to the very pointy pinnacle of the building) but I never felt that Fr Benson or anyone else posed any kind of threat to my spiritual wellbeing. Instead the Chapel was my retreat of final resort when I was too distressed or disillusioned to go anywhere else. I wouldn't go to the House Chapel: that was where we repaired morning and evening for the Office and, like all my fellow ordinands, I even had my own allocated seat. The House Chapel was too much official Staggers for it to be anywhere I wanted to go at the worst of times. St John's Iffley Road, the old monastic church we looked after and which was open to the public for services, was a vast, empty space that I never had any sympathy with. Instead I would ascend those steps to the slight dereliction of the Founder's Chapel and try to pray there, if praying was allowed to mean throwing my anger in front of God and asking him to do something with it. If I felt he was there at all. Like my old schools, I don't have any great desire to revisit Staggers itself: I was 'clapped out' at the end of my time there, went out the door, and that was it. But the Founder's Chapel is, perhaps, one place I would be happy to be teleported back to. 

Prayer and Fasting, Sort Of

'We call upon the people of our congregations and all those of goodwill around the world to observe a Day of Prayer and Fasting' ran the letter from the Patriarchs and Heads of Churches in Jerusalem, issued last Friday. More prayer can never be a bad thing, though only having got back to work (and found out about the letter) on Monday there wasn't time for me to organise anything collective. I put the appeal on the church LiberFaciorum page and prepared to keep the day in some way myself. 

You might ask what this actually means in practice. What it probably ought to mean is literally an entire day devoted to prayer about a particular matter, and a fast means abstinence from anything with any calorific value at least until the evening when, liturgically, the day is over. But I faced a number of problems. The first was that I'd come back from leave with a cold which first made itself known on Saturday/Sunday night: two covid tests have suggested it isn't that, in so far as you can rely on these things, but I do feel grotty, and prayer and fasting when you are ill are a particular challenge. The second issue was the number of other things I had to do - the usual midweek mass in the morning, a range of jobs mainly based on the computer, and a session at the Air Cadets in the evening. Prayer would have to fit around those.

So my fast was an etiolated observance which permitted some cups of black tea and dry bread until dinner-time, and prayer consisted of a couple of short interludes through the day when I laid the terrible current events in the Holy Land before the Lord. I got back from the Squadron where I discussed the deceptions and subterfuges of war to the news of the bombing of a hospital in Gaza, and not just a hospital but a hospital run by the Anglican Church. It seemed a sort of demonic mockery of any miserable prayers I'd been able to offer. 

Rainbow Over Swanvale Halt

Or even a double rainbow, as has been pointed out to me. Rainbows are always a tremendous delight to me. They stand for renewal and optimism, quite apart from any resonances with the story of the Flood. I think it might be because of their gratuitous, and mostly entirely unexpected loveliness. 

If I worry in any existential way, it's about the amount of time I've wasted, and the chance that I could reach the end of my life and conclude that I might have taken the wrong turn at some point, and there was another place where I could have been more use. This is not to do with any problem of faith - that's a separate business - but it might be to do with my fitness to be a parish priest, as sometimes it feels that I'm no good at it at all. When we went on our ordination retreat from Staggers at Alton Abbey, the retreat conductor Bishop Timothy Bavin told us, among other gems such as the advice that there was no shame in going to sleep under the table if a meeting got particularly pointless and boring, that we might well conclude at some point that the Church had made a dreadful mistake in ordaining us, and if so we should (as a first resort, anyway), try to recall that despite appearances the Holy Spirit knows better than we do and that God would honour the call and equip us with what we needed even if something had gone awry with the process. I try to hold on to that. I suppose we all have shadow selves, paths we might have trodden and routes we could have taken had things been different, and we can't pursue them all. 

Tomorrow's Gospel is the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard from Matthew, the labourers who get paid the same by the landowner regardless of how late in the day they turn up. Perhaps I regret not getting going in my Christian life earlier, but then again maybe that brings me some insights I wouldn't otherwise have had. All in the end is harvest, and the Lord can work with the least we bring him, no matter how late we arrive.

A Vocal Vocation

All the profiles of Sinéad O’Connor after her death drew attention to a song I thought among the least interesting in her output: ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ is a basically schmaltzy piece of work lent dignity and emotion by the power and passion she puts into it, though it made sense to hang her off it for a general public most likely to have known her through her biggest hit, rather than the eerie gothic of ‘Jackie’ or the operatics of ‘Troy’ – for instance.

It was good to read and hear proper acknowledgement of O’Connor’s religion – for this most religious of performers – including from Christian commentators. This is someone who claimed her contract made with the Holy Spirit before she began performing was far more important than any agreed with a record company. In fact that reviewer of O’Connor’s memoir from 2021, Jessica Mesman, I see, makes the good point that religious is a much better word for the singer than spiritual. Religion, the word, relates to a Latin root meaning ‘to bind’, and O’Connor’s pursuit of faith resulted in her exactly binding herself to religious tradition, to successive religious traditions, with a passion that’s a long, long way from the self-centred and dilletante sampling we too often associate with the idea of spirituality. She gave herself to them, even when it invited ridicule. Fundamentally, she wasn’t looking for something that made her feel better, that ‘worked for her’, something experiential that put her at the centre: she was following where (she felt) the Spirit led her, seeking to make sense out of what had happened to her, Ireland, and the world. She admitted she was crazy, but beneath the craziness was a basic unity of purpose that held together a woman who could come on stage as a Christian priest – properly if irregularly ordained – and then a few years later as a Muslim in a hijab. None of it was done for effect. Well, it was: but the effect was not focused on herself, but on the eternal.

Prophets are uncomfortable presences, and O’Connor, like the even less amenable Diamanda Galás, was definitely that, proclaiming to the Church its own corruption and falsehood. The Church will always be corrupt and false, and in a week when the Bishop of Newcastle decides to refuse Lord Sentamu Permission To Officiate on the grounds of his response to being criticised in a safeguarding report, you needn’t think the Church of England differs that much from the Church of Rome.

Of course, she was wrong about the Church, though right enough about the caricature of itself which it so regularly holds up for the admiration of human beings. The Church, it seems to me, exists only to do two things, to state definitely and dauntlessly the reality and nature of God and what he has done, and to demonstrate that we don’t live the spiritual life alone, even when we are alone; that we need one another. That’s why you can’t be ordained without a Christian community to be ordained into, to live out that vocation with: vocation isn’t a solitary matter, and I don’t think O’Connor ever really considered the possibility of taking assemblies in an infant school or talking to old ladies about their hip operations over tea after Bishop Michael Brown laid hands on her. But the Church itself forgets that, and assumes a role God never envisaged for it.

Part of me looks at O’Connor’s religious life and wonders what might have happened if she had found it possible to stay concertedly in one Christian tradition. My instinct is to see people fixed: say the Office and go to Mass, I’d have said, settle and listen and you'll find some healing. But perhaps prophets have to stay broken and difficult to remain true to their calling; perhaps God might sometimes want a priest to turn into a Muslim. The Church can’t dare to say so much, but it ought dare to think it.

Stages of Faith

Giselle the lay reader and I met to discuss one of the goals of the Church Development Plan, to establish a small group to pray deliberately and consciously for the work of the church and to wait on what God might want to tell us about it. Despite coming from very different experiences of the Church, we see this matter very similarly and I will be very happy to let her run with it and just occasionally turn up now and again.

Giselle gave me a print-out of an article by one Richard J Vincent (who I can’t find out very much about – his name is attached to this piece of writing and others) outlining a model for spiritual development which was probably news to his evangelical church audience in 2004 when he wrote it. His point, and I’m not sure how far it is his originally or comes from elsewhere, is that evangelical church communities tend to aim at getting their members to be committed, active and engaged, living the life of Christian service, and stop there, leaving them to run into the buffers when they undergo any kind of challenge to their faith, a challenge which Mr Vincent suggests is not only likely but actually a necessary step towards a further stage of development. That is a stage which leads inward, he says, detaching ourselves from the things we once thought were spiritually valuable, and ending in a greater degree of union with Christ.

I see the point of this, but I question any sense that it’s a tidy process. Mr Vincent and his sources also stress it isn’t, and yet the very fact of describing it in terms of ‘stages’ (even termed ‘early’ and ‘later’) tends to make it look neater than in fact it is. I can’t recall any single ‘Wall’ experience (that’s what the paper calls it) where my spiritual assumptions all had to be questioned and reformulated; rather it seems to be something that happens all the time, though perhaps I have yet to run into a very solid Wall. Meanwhile you continue to discover more and more about yourself, things that need unpicking and occasionally repenting; and in fact the spiritual life isn’t only about divesting yourself progressively of the bad habits of the past, but, sadly, also about chipping away the new ones, and the new delusions and illusions, that you develop as time goes on. The soul may grow closer to Christ over the years, but most of us need to go through the business of renewal and reformulation over and over again.

Then again, how much of this just comes from age? One would hope that a soul might progressively shed its illusions and attachments to nonsense as the business of merely putting one foot in front of another becomes more of a concern, and when I think of such advances as I may have made spiritually I find it hard to tell the difference between changes that show me growing closer to the Lord, and those that just result from getting older!

Quiet Day

Clarissa, who looks after Gristham church not far away and has kindly heard my confession a couple of times after the Cathedral ceased to be interested in such things, lives with her husband Simon in a former mill building in Bortley. They have a music room in a refurbished outbuilding and offered it to me should I ever want a place to run off to. I have been too disorganised to arrange a proper retreat this year, either to Malling Abbey or anywhere else, so yesterday I availed myself of their generosity and spent the entire day (at least from 9am to 5.30pm) in that space. Maintaining my faltering connection with holy Malling and its holy Sisters, I took the community's office book and read Lauds, Sext and Vespers for Lent, similar enough to the normal Anglican Office to feel I was indeed doing what I am enjoined to by Canon Law but different enough from it to be refreshing. I had with me my Bible (funnily enough), Fr Somerset Ward, and Michael Yelton's An Anglo-Catholic Miscellany, from which I learned about another religious order which passed through Surrey, the very weird Servants of Christ the King who once ran a home for boys with learning difficulties at Frensham, and which was governed by the odd Brother Joseph: he became convinced that God wanted him to utilise the talents of his young charges in a circus, at which he would appear as ringmaster in a monastic habit and a black top hat. But he had crossed the Tiber by then so this is one eccentricity the Church of England can't be blamed for.

My time at Bortley was, I think, rather fruitful if for nothing else than the picture that when the Holy Spirit deals with our sins it's a bit like unravelling a tangled skein of wool which has to be done one knot at a time before the stuff can be made into anything very useful; and tabulating all the instructions Jesus gives the people he speaks to, and demonstrating my suspicion that he mentions the sins of individuals only a handful of times. 

I did leave the premises once, and walked the short distance up the muddy lane to the millpond where I saw three swans attempting to dismember a frog so they could eat it. If only two of them had gripped it and pulled it would have been easy, but they could only get as far as gobbling at it and throwing it about. There's a spiritual message in there somewhere. This is real old Surrey, all hollow lanes, tangled trees, tile-hung cottages, Bargate stone, and frost-nibbled antique red brick. 

Refer It Upwards

A US-based friend once told me of a young Christian friend of theirs who, when asked (for instance) whether they wanted to go to the shops or something, would screw up her eyes in an attitude of intense concentration. When asked what she was doing, she would say she was ‘asking Jesus what to do’. After a moment or two the answer would come and she would, or would not, go shopping.

Although this might be a somewhat eccentric model of bringing the Lord into your decision-making, I find the great spiritual director Fr Somerset Ward advocates something not that far off. ‘Every day we make innumerable choices’, he argues (to summarise) in one of his Instructions I read this week, ‘and to bring those choices before God allows our decision-making faculties to be shaped by his will. Even when the choices seem small and trivial, perhaps from the divine viewpoint they are not; and if they are, the habit of referring them regularly to God will prepare us for those greater decisions which really matter’.

I think, contrastingly, that clear choices occur less frequently in a day than Fr Somerset Ward imagined. Many of the things we do are constrained by the decisions we have already taken: my day is dominated by routine and the tasks my role places upon me, and what I need to do in order to fulfil those obligations. Some decisions are what I call phantom choices: that is, they are theoretically there, but in fact unrealistically distant. As I stand at the level-crossing waiting for the train to arrive, for instance, in theory I face a choice whether or not to jump the gates and run across, but really this is something that operates at a lower level than a choice, which I think has to consist of two options either of which you might realistically take, and I am vanishingly unlikely, on a cold winter’s day, to make the physical or moral effort to leap the gates, break the law and risk the fine. I don’t feel a need to refer that to God.

And you may be familiar with the technique Christians sometimes employ of considering ‘What Would Jesus Do?’, perhaps wearing a pastel-shaded rubber wristband to remind them of it. It strikes me that most of the time, concerning most situations, we haven’t got the faintest idea what Jesus would have done, and this is very different from referring a choice to God: instead it’s a way of organising our own reasoning, still relying on ourselves more than the divine.

Once upon a time I would have said that God is almost certainly uninterested in whether I go shopping or not and so to bring him to bear on the choice to do so would be a bit weird. I’m not sure this is true now. I don’t expect any positive response to referring my choice to God (and might doubt my soundness of mind if there was one) but instead I’ve found that doing so does have an interesting effect; it makes me more aware that he is there, a far more subtle and strange effect than a voice or vision might have, and that to an extent reshapes my expectations and reasoning. Fr Somerset Ward was basically right: quelle surprise.

Who Cares About What

'The aumbry light was on, but the churchwardens didn't know what it was for', the retired incumbent told me of a visit to a church as Area Dean, 'and when we opened it, it was clear the Sacrament had been in there for a long, long time'. I thought of visiting that very church a little while ago and noticing the light on but the door of the aumbry ajar, rather implying that there was nothing in it. What with the new united parish of Hornington and Tophill being handed into the care of the CPAS, it occurred to me to make another little effort to make sure the good people of Swanvale Halt do have some dim idea of what's distinct about the Catholic tradition within the Anglican Church, partly so they can use it spiritually, and partly so that they are on guard if anything happens to me. I began last Sunday with 'The Communion of Saints', to a congregation depleted by illness and torrential rain, but an appreciative one at least.

'Do people really care about this?' Giselle the lay reader asked me. It's a fair question and fair, too, coming from someone who has spent most of her ministry at Tophill but comes from a Roman Catholic background so does at least understand what it's about. If what we are dealing with is simply a set of markers of partisan identity, they probably shouldn't, but equally Swanvale Halt has to think about why it exists at all in these hard times. I think the fact is that a minority do care because they 'get it' and do indeed consciously understand and value what I've been talking about for twelve years. What most people in the church care about is comfort and familiarity, and in a world of hectic change, and a life of inevitable change, comfort and familiarity are not things to be treated automatically with contempt. On a spiritual level, the things they find comforting and familiar about their church life are the ways they have become accustomed to talk to God and to hear him talking to them. What I would say is that they may not realise the degree to which those things depend on the principles and ideas behind Catholic spiritual life. They may by the time I finish!

Alternative Readings

My copy of Celebrating the Seasons is a bit worn and battered now. It was brought out as a companion volume to Celebrating Common Prayer, the Daily Office book produced in the 1990s by the Anglican Franciscans and which became the model for the daily prayer services included in Common Worship from 2000 which most of us use now. Celebrating the Seasons is a compendium of spiritual readings for each day of the liturgical year; most of them are extracts from sermons or scriptural commentaries though there is also a bit of poetry or hymnody. The most refreshing feature is that the readings come from the whole scope of Christian history, from St Irenaeus of Lyons and the Desert Fathers, through medieval mystics such as Mechtilde of Magdeburg and Puritan divines to modern poets including RS Thomas. I've used these passages alongside my daily morning Bible reading as a means of trying to find some thoughts to help shape the day.

But I have been reading them for years now so they are perhaps unhelpfully familiar! Just lately I remembered that a few years ago I was given Celtic Daily Prayer, the office book of the Northumbria Community, and when I was planning our Forest Church I looked to see whether there was any helpful material - there wasn't, but I found in the book two cycles of daily readings. Where Celebrating the Seasons concentrates on theological meditation, Celtic Daily Prayer is more experiential, including far more material that reflects the lives of the saints. At least, the saints in the 'Celtic tradition' - a phrase I usually shy away from, as the people who use it customarily leave out how tough the holy people in that tradition were, and major instead on the 'hello clouds, hello sky' stereotype of Celtic spirituality. But my few days' reading in this book so far has produced an account of St Columba scorning the idea of going to sleep on straw as self-indulgent luxury and instead taking his rest on a stone with another as a pillow, so I think the authors are not unaware of what Celtic Christians were really like. 

I will, for a while anyway, put aside the thumbed pages of Celebrating the Seasons and try something different. It's not too radical a step!

O Come Magnify the Lord with Me

For a couple of weeks our gates have been a bit low on Sunday mornings. I went through the list of the congregation and discovered that I knew why almost all the absentees were away, but that itself shows how our active membership has shrunk as a result of the pandemic, and even more so our penumbra of occasional attenders. I regularly go through little bouts of wondering whether I am doing any good, or doing any good here: the congregation would say Yes, but if it was the case, wouldn’t we be achieving more? What am I missing? What’s the key to changing things?

Curiously it was the state of the world more generally that made me think about it differently this time. I find it hard to think of the work of a parish priest in terms of rescuing souls from hell; though that might ultimately be the effect, I am too uncertain about the exact conditions of salvation in any case to be very definite about that. Instead we will need the virtues of charity, courage and faithfulness in the challenges the human race faces, and those are rooted, finally, in the victory of God. It’s sometimes hard to see the connection between what happens in a small parish church and such grand considerations, but every prayer is a weapon in the Lord’s armoury.

And in the end, like every Christian I should be focused on God and not on myself and my own concerns. Of course I have a task entrusted to me, on one level, and have to carry it out to the best of my ability, but are my hopes for my church not about God, and not even about the welfare of souls, but really about my own sense of self-respect – of stopping up the hole in the dyke of my own anxieties and insecurities? Nothing will ever be achieved that way. Only joy works, not fear.

At Malling Abbey every recitation of the Holy Office begins with a little chant from Psalm 34: one of the sisters sings ‘I will bless the Lord at all times’. She sings it on her own behalf, that though this is corporate worship, the worship of the community she belongs to and of the whole Catholic Church, it is, first and foremost, hers, in which she invites others to join. So should my worship be, full of the joy of the Lord’s presence, and if there are others there to join, many or few, all the better.

A Loathsome Lent

One should not say this, but Lent is loathsome. It is supposed to be six weeks of deepened spiritual wrestling but for many clergy it involves more activity rather than more reflection. That’s certainly what it’s felt like for me these first few days as I race a bit to keep up. I expect a lot of it depends what the ordinary schedule of your particular church is like, and when Ash Wednesday happens to fall in it.

My usual Lenten disciplines involve not consuming specially pleasurable things – alcohol and chocolate – and fasting on Fridays and Ash Wednesday itself. It’s not a very strict fast as I break it at 6pm in the evening and do drink water (only sensible) and black tea or coffee (necessary to stave off caffeine withdrawal symptoms), but I never enjoy not eating. It always makes me feel cold and distracted. Once upon a time I fasted on Wednesdays in Lent as well as Fridays but decided on balance it was doing more harm than good!

This year, though, I have something extra, and it’s not giving up biscuits which I tried on one occasion and hated; I am not listening to radio news programmes. In fact I stopped at the beginning of this week when I realised I was trying to gauge whether any particular report meant we were an inch closer to or further from nuclear obliteration and of course there is no end to this (unless obliteration comes). I still listen to a couple of bulletins through the day, but have turned off Today, The world at One, PM, and The world Tonight for the first time since my teens. This has been very odd: Radio 4 has been my constant companion and I find the silence strange. Even now I am typing with seashore noises in the background to provide some sound in the house. But what began as a means of preserving mental health and my ability to work has become a sort of fast. It remains to be seen what the Lord will do with it.

Coming Around Again

One of my current projects is to reunite as many as possible of the Spiritual Instructions of Fr Reginald Somerset Ward, the Anglican spiritual director in whom I’ve had an interest for some while. He issued more or less one a month for years, eventually totalling about 450. Some time ago I was sent printed copies of the majority of them, and I now have copies of his books in which many more were published in extracted form. Some are lost, but it should be able to compile three-quarters or more of them.

Fr Ward eventually gave up issuing his Instructions in 1957 on doctor’s advice (he was already 76 by then) and was evidently flagging a bit in the years before that, sometimes only managing one missive to his directees every two months. I wonder whether the slowdown was caused not only by health but by the lack of much new to say after forty years or so. I am only scanning the documents rapidly at the moment rather than reading them, but even so I can detect pet themes and writers being repeatedly mentioned. In contrast, I’ve only been ordained 17 years but there are already many times when I finish composing a little homily for a quiet said mass that I am pretty sure I’ve said essentially the same thing, on maybe more than one occasion!

Nevertheless the round of preaching, driven as it is by the lectionary cycle, does mean you try to come up with new thoughts. At least they may be new to you: it seems to me vanishingly unlikely, even when I produce something I’ve never considered before, that nobody else in the past two thousand years of Christian history has ever stumbled across the same motif.

Now and again you draw something from the texts you are given which seems to offer you some help as much as your audience, but it turns out to be a variation on a theme. Last Sunday was the Baptism of Christ and I spoke, naturally enough, about the relationship between Christ’s baptism and our own. Take whatever it is that causes separation between you and God, and drown it in the waters, I said, or something like it. But is that very different from nailing it to the cross – the kind of imagery we might use in Lent?

The supposed spiritual insights we happen across either for ourselves or from others have a resemblance to, say, dieting fads: here is the thing, the new thing, which is going to make the lasting difference. And we fall on it enthusiastically, pursue it for a little while, and then find it not working, and eventually forget about it.

But perhaps such spiritual techniques can only work for a short time, and that’s all we can expect from them. I try to follow the advice of Metropolitan Anthony, and draw a phrase or verse from my morning Bible reading which shapes my thoughts for the day ahead, usually turning to a new one the following day. I find Fr Somerset Ward counselled the same sort of thing: to take something from your morning meditation (he assumed that would be when you’d do it) and use this as the basis for spontaneous prayers through the day. None of these phrases are supposed to be the one thing that can revolutionise your spiritual life, because nothing will. It’s a long-term business, and such is the dullness, perhaps, of the human soul that we constantly need some new direction to approach God – which will do no harm, provided we recall the unchanging nature of the one who draws us near. 

Grace Is Everywhere

When he was a curate, Il Rettore was handed the list of home communicants in the parish and sent off to see them. It's a way of doing something useful with a new curate who can't do much else and isn't supposed to be deluged with preaching duties and the like, and also gets them to meet people. But the temptation is just to get them doing all of it. Il Rettore once took communion to fourteen people in the same day. I wondered that his mental equilibrium was maintained, saying the same words over and over again. Perhaps it wasn't. 

It isn't like that in Swanvale Halt, but I tend to do a series of home communions just before Christmas and Easter, to make sure people are included at these vital times. Some of my most moving moments in my ministry have been doing this as I encounter people who have lived lives of faith and faithfulness, and share with me their thankfulness for the mercies they have received and still do. They are always grateful to me, but when I say thank you at the end of the meeting I do mean it. Taking communion to someone in their own home, not celebrating a eucharist but simply administering the sacrament - to myself as well as them - is a situation of great equality. We are both recipients, approaching the Lord in his sacramental presence, even if I say most of the words. When Marion the curate was with us she did some home communions, but not all of them. I think any incumbent who delegates this job because they're awfully, awfully busy doing more important things is genuinely missing out.