A Relic

Many years ago, during my time looking after the church at Goremead, I took part in a joint Anglican-Greek Orthodox wedding, or it may have been the one I did when, for legal reasons, we went through the Orthodox ceremony straight after the Anglican one, a picturesque but protracted occasion. It may also have been the time the bride was referred to throughout as the servant-of-God-Irene because that was the closest saint's name to her actual one of Rianne. Anyway, at the end of the second service, after the exchange of crowns and the little dance around the altar singing a song about martyrdom, the celebrant Bishop Gregorios gave me the bottle of sweet Cypriot Commandaria wine the couple had had a sip out of. For some reason I never really drank very much of it, though it got put to other uses (now I would welcome it as an addition to/substitute for my usual treat of port). Eventually I reckoned that, even with its high alcohol content it probably wouldn't be all that good to consume after all that time, and I have instead been using it as the thank-offering at my little wall-shrine that inaugurates my day off, just a little bit each time. Yesterday it finally ran out. We use all sorts of things to encapsulate memory, and every time I have picked up this squat brown bottle my mind has gone back to those funny experiences in Goremead, but nothing endures forever, neither the memories nor the items that embody them. I could buy another one, I suppose!

This Weekend Was Brought To You By A Popular Variety of Cough Remedy

It's the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and we have been doing more than our bit at Swanvale Halt. The couple getting married on Saturday are members of Vineyard, an independent congregation in Guildford, and they took the service over rather, providing all the music and the preacher, a young woman who appeared about 17 to me but couldn't be as she referred to her teenage children. It's the bride's second go and she has a small son who at one point led his mum and stepfather-to-be on a little dance during one of the songs. I pointed out that during the Orthodox wedding rite the priest leads the couple on a (very stately) dance around the altar, but sadly I never got the chance for that. The couple wanted to take communion and that made it all very High Church even without my cope and biretta. 

Today it was the annual United Service at Hornington Parish Church, now itself united with evangelical Tophill. Tophill, it's worth pointing out, hate Vineyard Church as lots of their young families have defected there because they have a better band. I preached and told them all two stories about Nusreddin the Sage - it was relevant, honest, but I did get the impression that many people might only take away the final line, 'Who knows? The horse might sing' (you'll have to look it up). In my cassock, I was the only clergyperson who wore anything other than ordinary clothes. From my point of view, it was a bit sad to see that Hornington's aumbry is empty and surrounded by stacks of chairs, and there's no longer anything that you can point out as a Lady Chapel.

Technically, the Roman Catholics aren't supposed to come to the United Service (go to Mass, is the rule), and so in the evening we had a joint Evensong at Swanvale Halt so they could take part. That worked very well, and it was all to the good that the choir were augmented by some RCs and they managed to find someone to coax them all through the plainchant, as my vocal chords are still misbehaving as a result of a cold earlier in the week. I did warn the remarkably healthy congregation of nearly 60 that it would probably be more Evencroak than Evensong, but I got through it.

Then at 8pm I had an email to say that Sheila might not make it through the night. Sheila is Malcolm's partner, they are both 60-ish and they are the loveliest and sweetest couple you can imagine. She has been in hospital undergoing chemotherapy and the situation has not looked too bad until today. I found her fast asleep and unresponsive in the ICU, and did what was necessary, managing to get through it, as I had the rest of the weekend, with the aid of vicious Volcazone pastilles. At least they seemed vicious when I first encountered them not long after I arrived in Swanvale Halt: now I seem acclimatized to the wretched things and, like a junkie, need an ever-higher dose to have any effect.

The Last Wedding (like this)

It's not every wedding where the groom’s outfit gives rise to more comment than the bride’s, but on Saturday Adele’s gear was relatively standard (white dress, veil), while Cal’s included a leather top hat, black brocade jacket and pointy purple patent leather shoes. That wasn’t the only unusual aspect of the proceedings: as well as general covid-compliant considerations we were joined by Cal’s granddad in the form of a small wooden urn containing his ashes, were treated to his stepfather singing 'Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring', concluded the ceremony with 'Fly Me to the Moon', and, as Adele’s family were in sunny California, livestreamed the entire proceedings. For some reason the laptop didn’t recognise the external webcam so we had to make do with the integrated one but at least they saw something. In fact, as I mentioned, Swanvale Halt was probably as sunny as the west coast of the USA that day if probably not as warm.

Because Adele is a US citizen she and Cal had to be married by what is called a Superintendent Registrar’s Certificate, the legal preliminary you use for a church wedding where one or both party is a national of a country outside the EEA. They (ideally) get the agreement of a priest to marry them, then lay their case before the civil registrar who does all the paperwork; they take the said certificate back to the church as proof of permission to marry. Cal and Adele are the first couple I can remember doing this for in sixteen years, so it isn’t all that common though I have advised people marrying at other churches to go down that route. In theory a couple can get a SRC and just turn up at a church asking to be married, but in those circumstances a priest can tell them to swivel and any sensible registrar will want to know they’ve got that sorted out first.

Unless something very unexpected happens, Cal and Adele will also be the last couple to be entered in our marriage registers, because that entire method of marriage registration, in place since 1836, is coming to an end. Finally exasperated at having to harry parish clergy for their data, the civil registrars are now about to begin doing it all themselves. From the start of May, every couple marrying in a church will have a document filled in by the minister which will then be passed to the Registry as the basis for producing their actual marriage certificate. In the first draft of the legislation it was the couple themselves who were to be responsible for doing this: in a rare outbreak of sense which may be their most significant positive contribution to the life of this country in years, the bishops managed to argue that a couple who’d just got married were probably not the best people to arrange this and that even parish clergy were more likely to get it right, or indeed do it at all. There have apparently been some complaints about the inadequacy of the training we’ve been given about this quite serious change in what we do, and there is to be an online seminar in a couple of days’ time, but I didn’t think it was that bad – although I did do an executive summary for Marion the curate’s benefit which may have been a bit clearer. In fact I’d’ve been dismayed if it wasn’t.

Wedding in the Garden

The Young Lord Declan and Lady Minster were married twice. The first occasion was a mildly pagan handfasting ceremony some time before the civil marriage I took part in – just to do a reading. They have always regarded the first event, which of course had no legal status at all, as their ‘real wedding’.

Since the news came out of what the Duke and Duchess of Sussex did in a garden with the Archbishop of Canterbury, my priest friend Cara at Emwood has already had two couples ask whether they can do what they did, which they can’t; or at least that can’t be their ‘real wedding’. I carry no great brief for Justin Welby, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be him in that situation. The Area Dean of Paddington posted on Fr Thesis’s blog a very severe and definite account of why what the Primate had done was dreadful, but I can’t see very many couples we might deal with being able to grasp what he’s on about and why this event has opened a very smelly can of worms. In fact, I doubt most modern people will even be able to see the worms. At root what we have here is a clash between the individualism which characterises the modern world and the inclusive, objective account of human identity embedded in Christian thinking.

Why shouldn’t a couple devise their own vows? In fact, it became clear as a result of a discussion on LiberFaciorum that many people think they do, and that led me to recall a radio comedy where an Anglican vicar character described exactly that happening. Isn’t it all about the couple, and their happiness, and what they mean to each other?

Theologically, the couple are indeed 'the ministers of the sacrament of matrimony' in a Christian marriage, i.e. they do it to each other. But that doesn't mean they can do and say anything they like, any more than as the minister of baptism or communion I can make up my own ceremonies; when I do those, I speak for the whole Christian Church across the globe and two thousand years. I can only do what the Church does, or my acts have no real meaning. If I do something else, it's not the sacrament, and the Church has done hundreds of years of thinking about how far I can stretch the boundaries of one of these acts before it stops being what it is supposed to be - a human event that expresses and enacts the saving work of God in time.

Just as you can't make up your own vows in an Anglican wedding, you can't have a 'private wedding' in the sense that nobody else apart from a clergyperson is there. The whole human community is involved in a couple vowing to serve, honour and be faithful to each other, which why the witnesses are present: they don't just have a legal function, but a theological one too. They represent humanity.

Finally, when the couple use the words that millions of people have used before them, and will use afterwards, they are becoming part of something bigger than they are - the whole history of the human race, and (in Christian terms) of God's interaction with it, written into their specific relationship. When in the Orthodox marriage rite the couple are called 'the king and queen of all creation' it isn't just a nice phrase, it means what they are doing has an eternal and cosmic significance, way beyond themselves. Ultimately, your individual identity, even your identity as two individuals, is less important than what you are becoming, recipients and ministers of divine grace through being married.

I suspect that for most modern people, an individually-tailored marriage sounds more meaningful because it’s about the couple; in Christian understanding, the words that everyone says, and the things that everyone does, are more meaningful because it’s about the divine story, because our small human identities, struggles and joys are assumed into the great framing narrative of creation: the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Can we really expect anyone outside to grasp this?

Perhaps there’s something in them that still responds, though. Although Christianity bolts us into the story of the Christ, every religion points individuals to something bigger, connects them to something beyond themselves: it would be a poor religion that did not. For pagans it means the pattern of the seasons, the rhythm of the earth, the soaring cycle of the heavens. Lord Declan and Lady Minster couldn’t bring any of that into their civil ceremony, not even a reference to its being Imbolc that day; so their more individual handfasting was in fact a more inclusive, collective event too (and it wasn’t something they did alone, either). It was, maybe, a bit closer to the Christian than they imagined.

Oops I Did It Again

... except that Mr Magoo was always oblivious to the reality of his mishaps and rescued from them by good luck. Well, I suppose the latter is usually true for me. 

Acting as one of the Bishop's Surrogates is one of the tasks I quite like as it involves dealing with nice young couples and helping them get married. But there is also nothing that seems to bring me as much stress because I keep getting things wrong. There is a lot more business for surrogates at the moment because no church marriages can happen by the usual method of banns, so in most cases couples need Common Licences, and the surrogates hear the oaths in support of those applications. Not long after the restrictions came in, I had an awful day when I thought I had mucked up the process for several couples, and though it turned out I hadn't, this wasn't before having to admit to them and various Church officials that I had, and then that I hadn't after all. Then I made a mistake on one form and ended up driving to see a couple to swear the oath over again. Now it turns out that as well as taking evidence of identity I should have been asking for proof of nationality, as detailed in a document from 2016 I can't recall ever having seen. It stretches belief that every couple I've seen until now has always given me passports to demonstrate their identity, thus proving nationality into the bargain, but the issue has certainly never actually come up before. Nobody has been illegally married - there's no doubt of anyone's nationality - but if they don't have passports proving it becomes quite problematic, involving birth certificates and passports of parents at the time the person was born, which is a lot to ask for. And I do have to ask. I was in despair for a while and am very inclined to give the job up as something else I am not very good at.

But then Ms Kittywitch posted on LiberFaciorum about her recent experiences at her local hospital with gastroenteritus, no joke in its own right but even less amusing when you are a heart-and-lung transplant survivor of thirty years standing with a compromised immune system and various other things awry. The hospital could have killed her several times over the course of a few days, culminating in an attempt to inject an anti-coagulant again two hours after having done so, which would almost definitely have carried her into the other world had she not had her wits about her. Now she is at Harefield ('the mothership'), and feels much safer. At least, as I have often comforted myself, when I make a mistake it is vanishingly unlikely that anyone will die.

Compliant Connubials

You don't often get images of me here, but as you can see, in this case it hardly matters. Alan and Lisa's wedding was the first we've done under Current Restrictions - only thirty souls, no singing, and masks on most of the time: those leading services are allowed to remove them as are those reading or speaking liturgically, and I certainly thought that meant the couple as they said their vows but we replaced them for the signing of the registers. Lisa and Alan arrived in a campervan and entered the church together, as Lisa's dad isn't in the same bubble and so couldn't 'give her away'. She's a teacher at the infants school and so although her colleagues couldn't come in, they lined the road to cheer her on. The photographer had a camera on a drone but only used it outside the church so I didn't notice until it was all over. I rather like these somewhat shorter services, but don't tell anyone that. Sorry my stole is skew-whiff (to say nothing of my mask, I didn't know I was wanted for a picture).

Unfinished Business

When public worship was ended in the middle of March, there was a period when weddings were still permitted in a minimal form, with only the legal minimum of five people allowed to be present (the priest, the couple and the witnesses). As Bishop's Surrogate for Oaths - how grand a title that sounds! - I had to deal with a sudden flurry of enquiries as couples struggled to get across the line before the gates closed, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor, needing to swear affidavits for a licence to be married, given that banns could not be read in church services. Some managed it, some didn't.

This week, to my surprise at least, the government permitted both weddings to resume from July 4th, and public worship. This created an ambiguity. Would the Registry allow marriages to be solemnised by licence, or insist that when church services could be held, banns must be read? As not all churches will be reopening for worship next week, the former would be the sensible solution, but as I found myself saying on more than one occasion, the sensible option doesn't always happen.

I still haven't had any word direct from the Bishop's Registry, but the Diocese, at least, has said that all marriages for the foreseeable future must take place by Common Licence (unless they're unusual cases that proceed by other means) - a surprising instance of reasonableness. And, my mind dizzy whenever I think of the couples in their kaleidoscopically various circumstances who have contacted me, or whose proposed churches of marriage have, over the last few months, I have asked everyone to email me with their details: who are you, where are hoping to get married, and when. And we'd take it from there. 

This afternoon I sat going through the messages, working out what information I'd had from who, what I still needed, who was the priority (two couples are hoping to marry as soon as they can, meaning next Saturday), and by the end I was wincing a bit. These days my brain feels like it's fragmenting most of the time, so it was an encouragement that I could still get through it without having to stop for a cup of tea. Now for the easy bit - actually seeing the young people themselves. Details, details.

Gentleman in England Now A-Bed

This seems like an appropriate heading for St Crispin's Day, although my post refers to yesterday, a feast day of nobody in particular. It was a day off: despite just having been on leave for a fortnight I do still jealously guard my times of recess, acutely aware as I have over the years become of how I absolutely need them. However they are sometimes unavoidably eroded, and so was yesterday's.

I had agreed to do a wedding, not at Swanvale Halt church, but at the grand chapel of a school not very far away. This is something which has happened a couple of times before but always makes me nervous: there is different paperwork to be done, the logistics of the service are not what they are in my humble church, and I feel much less at home. Yesterday was the rehearsal, that's all, yet I lay in bed very reluctant indeed to get up and face the day. It was far more congenial to spend time in that shadowy world on the boundaries of sleep and wakefulness not quite paying attention to the Today presenters quietly chuntering from the radio by my bedside, observing the strange and varied thoughts that crossed my mind, and putting off the moment when reality would begin. 

I often find that the anticipation of doing something is much more taxing than actually doing it, and in fact whereas I should get more confident as time goes on, I find my nervousness is growing rather than diminishing. I am less and less inclined to do anything out of the ordinary, which probably is not very healthy. At least I can recognise it. S.D. has encouraged me to keep a record of my passing moods and though I am very bad at doing it I manage it often enough to be able to observe how mobile and malleable they are. But knowing that my nameless dread is silly hasn't so far helped me stop it! 

All That Glitters

Carys and Dan originally approached us asking about having their daughter christened (their son was baptised at Swanvale Halt eleven years ago, and the daughter was new). Then Dan called me to ask whether it would be possible for them to 'do their marriage vows' at the same time, as he wanted it 'to be a surprise' for Carys. I persuaded him that you can't really marry someone as a surprise, as that's not how it works, but once he actually broached the subject with Carys they decided that yes, they would like to get married at the same time as Ruby was christened. That was OK, although unusual - I'd never done such a service before (though there is provision for it in the Anglican liturgy), and it would be on a Sunday. In the end it was all very informal and relaxed and went fine.

Carys said they were going to have bubbles rather than confetti, which I thought was fun. However, it soon became clear that some of the guests had their own ideas and had come armed with sachets of confetti containing not just bits of white paper but also gold, silver, and transparent plastic discs. As they all dispersed, I and verger Rick watched the plastic bits blowing about outside the church. A young family came past. 'Look, there's been a wedding,' mum said to the little boy; Dad was trailing behind with a daughter in hand. 'Yes, it's terrible', he tutted. And it was. With heavy hearts, Rick and I went to get the vacuum cleaners and extension leads and, as the sun beat down on us, we began clearing up the confetti. It took longer than the wedding had: by the time we were done I was so exhausted I could barely speak, and I have seldom felt so much of an idiot as when I was hoovering the grass. But at least David Attenborough wasn't going to come and haunt me in visionary form that night. 'We're going to keep finding bits of it for months', said Rick ruefully.

'I didn't know you could marry people on Sundays', a churchwarden from another church mused today when I told him the story. I suddenly realised I'd never had a conversation with anyone about that particular matter. My heart was pounding as I leafed through my folder containing the Canon Laws of the Church of England, but thankfully it's only the time of day which is restricted!

God Brought a Plus One

"Dear Revd Plumpinghorn,

"I had the privilege of being at a wedding at St Uncumber's Church, Slappington, on June 22^nd, and I know that the way you conducted that service was appreciated by many of the congregation. However, I was dismayed by the form of the final blessing, delivered in the name of ‘the Father, the Mother, the Son and the Holy Spirit’. I must say, this is not the Holy and Undivided Trinity with which I am familiar. One of my friends attempted to interpret ‘Mother’ generously as a reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary, but as far as I can see this doesn’t make it any better, or any less at odds with ‘the Catholic faith as the Church of England has received it’. I understand the service was technically a blessing rather than a legal wedding, so at least you were spared the dilemma of which Church’s ‘rites and ceremonies’ to record in the register … Had Bishop Martin been there, I imagine his Paddingtonian ‘hard stare’ would have been enough to scorch the very stonework. I remember the occasion he came to fill in one Sunday at the church where I used to worship while he was still at Walsingham, and I don’t think any liturgical experience I’ve ever had has matched the grim terror of serving at Mass that morning. You may not be concerned by the effect this reckless usage might have had on a moderately traditionally-minded clergyperson like me, but, for the sake of the souls who pass through your churches, especially on occasions when so many non-churchgoers are present, do please reconsider it."

I'm not yet sure whether I'll send the letter ...

Omission Pt 2

My post about the saga of the missed banns now needs an update. I administered the oath to the couple, gathered up all the paperwork, and happily sent it off to the Registry in London. All was well.

Then on Thursday the Registry called me. I had not spotted, had I, that Andrew and Valerie were getting married in the Diocese of York; that is, in the Northern Province of the Church of England and, therefore, in an entirely different jurisdiction. The oath they'd sworn with me was invalid and they would have to find a surrogate for oaths in Yorkshire.

My immediate and overemotional reaction, composed of parts of shame, mortification, fear, and worry for the couple, needs analysing somewhere else than here as I don't quite understand it myself; the sleepless night that followed did nobody any good. What might be of interest to you is the process of trying to sort the mess out. Off the phone to the Registry, I then called, in quick succession: the curate due to marry Andrew and Valerie; his vicar; the Area Dean; not just one but two numbers at the offices of the Diocese of York; and finally the York Diocesan Registry. None of these people answered. It was several hours before I did finally manage to speak to one, the vicar of the benefice where the wedding was due to happen. She told me she used to be the Surrogate for the Deanery (how convenient had she still been!) but resigned about 18 months ago and didn't know who the new one was. She couldn't find out for me because the Diocese of York has replaced its paper Yearbook with an online 'information portal' and she wasn't yet registered. She gave me the name of someone she thought was a Surrogate, but he turned out to be away.

That was as far as I could get before my sleepless Thursday night. On Friday morning I successfully spoke to a clerk at the Diocesan Registry in York who gave me the name of a vicar not far away from where the couple were due to get married. Bona. But a few hours later she called me to say that, although her name might be down as Surrogate, she hadn't yet had any training and so couldn't help (I just about refrained from sharing the information that my 'training' for the role had come in the form of a booklet in a brown envelope). The Registry had given me two other names, one of the priest who was away until next week, and another, vicar of a parish on the east side of York. He, thank God, kindly responded to a message despite it being his day off and enabled me actually to go and tell the couple what had happened. Getting married is stressful enough: I wanted to be able to provide them with a plan of action, not just a problem waiting to be resolved. 

I set out in pouring rain on Friday night and found Andrew and Valerie just packing to go to Yorkshire that evening. I told them I had screwed the process up, again, told them that Fr So and So would give them a call and gave them his details, handed over a bottle of wine in apology, and wished them well. They were so relaxed about it, and even grateful, yet what they were thanking me for was clearing up after my own mess. After my dreadful stress and worry it was a beautiful experience of graciousness. 

Sins of Omission

Being Bishop's Surrogate for Oaths often puts me in the position of sorting the situation out when churches fail to read banns for people who are getting married or, as quite often happens, people don't realise they need to have them read. That made it doubly embarrassing when, a couple of weeks ago, I realised I had failed to arrange the reading of a couple's banns in Swanvale Halt when I was away. Usually I copy the banns to be read into the register for the first Sunday each month, the month before the wedding concerned. In October my last Sunday before going away was so busy I forgot all about it, and by the time the mistake was discovered it was too late and the couple had to be married by licence instead. 

So the embarrassment was cubed this morning as I realised, on going to check whether there were banns to be read, that the mistake affected a second couple. A second mortifying phone call to explain what had happened and what we were going to do about it. 'If that's the worst thing that goes wrong I'll be pleased!' said the bride-to-be, all understanding. Still, apart from the fact that I will have to fork out to pay for their licence, and apart from the bureaucratic faff, it's the last thing you want as your wedding approaches. I recall one couple coming to see me last year to swear an oath in application for a marriage licence the day before their wedding as the mistake had only been discovered the previous day. They were shaking.

It is a sin because I have not paid attention and caused people upset as a result. But as it was the morning after the accident at the Woking Fireworks not far away from here, the sin was put into perspective. Nobody has died and it can be dealt with. I thought how it might be, not just to suffer from an accident for which someone else is responsible, but also to be that person: what might it take to face your culpability?

Rites of Passage and Other Mission Opportunities

Couples have to be determined to get married at Swanvale Halt church. This is not because we have a parish policy of making them somersault through a hoop backwards whistling 'The Star Spangled Banner' to qualify, but because it takes a hard-nosed bride to choose a church where the first sight she and her new husband will see as they emerge after their marriage service will be the supermarket across the street. If they have the option of a church set in a field or a nice cobbled street, they tend to go for that (also we have no car park). That's why we only have two weddings this year, one of which has already happened.

In my last year at Lamford I did no fewer than twenty-five weddings, because I was looking after Goremead as well for eight months and we had a good few there. Fifteen at Lamford was probably average. So I was most surprised to hear from Il Rettore the other day that the parish's wedding tally for 2018 is four. This is quite a decline in nine years. Il Rettore wonders whether the fees are putting couples off, as the choir and bells do cost a certain amount as is only fair, but it can't be just that. You can refuse the frills if you want. At Swanvale Halt I offer couples the chance of a choir turning out for a very modest fee, but in nine years the offer has, I think, only been taken up once.

The Church of England has had a number of initiatives over the years - the Wedding Project, the Christening Project, and - yes - even the Funeral Project - to promote best practice in providing these rites of passage. We are supposed to be friendly and welcoming and understand better what it is that people unfamiliar with church may expect and want out of the experience, so that it's as user-friendly and accessible for them as it can be. This is of course good for all sorts of reasons. It hasn't, however, stemmed the catastrophic decline in the numbers of weddings, christenings and funerals most churches conduct. 

I've had plenty of positive feedback from our dealings with the couples who come to us to be married, to baptise their children, or to conduct the funerals of their loved ones. I don't think I've ever had any negative feedback although there have been a couple of rare occasions when I deserved it. It's nice to be appreciated. But I'm not sure it makes any difference, at least not in the short term; I'd doubt whether a single person has ended up attending church as a result of coming to one of the services I've conducted, however good their experience was. 

There is a gulf between how people feel as a result of their lives taking them inside a church building, and incorporating those feelings into altered behaviour. I remember Dr Bones reporting a conversation she'd had with the cleaners at the university department she worked at many years ago. 'If my vicar was like Weepingcross, I'd go to church', one said, and gratifyingly for me the others agreed. 'Have you been to your church?' asked the Dr. No, they hadn't. 'So how do you know your vicar isn't like him?' 'Well, they wouldn't be.' People can discount their own immediate experience in the face of what they think is the universal case, and recast it as an exception. 

Of course each priest doing their best to make people welcome and comfortable in their church - which is virtually all of us - is doing a good thing, eroding gradually whatever negative ideas and stereotypes people may have about Christians and how they behave, but you see what a weight they have to shift. It isn't just the actual attitudes and prejudices people have, but also the kind of experiential exceptionalism which locks those attitudes in.

Fair Comment

As she came into the church with her dad, Carrie looked dreadfully nervous. 'I was terrified', she admitted later, 'and then as we started I just thought, it's going to be all right, let's just go for it, and I was fine.' At the door I said her dress looked great and the benefit of the huge train was that we'd get the church floor swept into the bargain.

Carrie and Ted had, for the first time in my clerical career (such as it is) opted to get married according to the 'old service' rather than the contemporary one. It meant a bit of extra trepidation for me as I tried to remember how to fit the choreography Swanvale Halt church demands into the different order of the service. I still think the modern one makes more sense, although the prayer that the bride make herself 'a follower of holy and godly matrons' is rather picturesque.

We got to the bit where I asked the congregation for any 'just impediment' to the marriage taking place and a toddler in the front row began to clap excitedly. I said I didn't think that counted as an objection, though perhaps he knew something I didn't.

Distance Learning

It's sufficiently unusual for a person in their 20s to come to Swanvale Halt church when they don't have to for some reason that I take notice. Rebecca has attended the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass on a number of occasions. She and her fiancé live in the parish and are having their wedding banns read out later in the year, but not yet, and so she doesn't have to be there. In fact she was in church when I began reading them last August, and therefore able to point out that I was a year early in doing so.

I spoke to Rebecca on Sunday. She and her chap aren't around much at the moment, she said, partly because they have to go to wedding preparation sessions at the church where they are marrying - which is not Hornington next door (as it often is) but in Gloucestershire. We don't have long-distance weddings at Swanvale Halt because it's not a pretty rural church and so we hardly have weddings of any kind. At Lamford we used to get lots, but they were almost always from within the local area. Goremead, however, drew a variety of couples who were looking for the nearest 'nice old-fashioned' church to the sundry reception venues in the area which they'd already booked: the farthest-flung of these couples came from Balham. They didn't mind coming to do wedding prep in my sitting-room in Lamford, but I was always aware it was quite a jaunt for them (and they had to attend worship at Goremead to qualify to get married at the church).

But Rebecca and her partner already qualify to marry at the Gloucester church because she was born there. I wonder at the policy which makes them travel periodically all that way so a clergyperson can lecture them on the importance of Christian marriage or go through the details of their order of service. If it had been me, I'd have tried to persuade their local incumbent to do it. It's not as though I have much else on ...

A Different Way

Marriage blessings are something I do even less often than weddings themselves, and those I have done have mostly been for couples who years before married after a previous divorce, and either never thought of wanting a religious element or weren't able to. I've never before blessed the marriage of a couple who've married before the civil registrar straight after that ceremony, as I've recently done. Given the strict exclusion of religious elements from civil weddings I was surprised it was allowed to take place in the same location, with barely a break.

I took Ivan with me: he's an ordinand based at an Evangelical Anglican church not far away and is with us on placement at Swanvale Halt to experience another brand of worshipping community. Astonishingly for a middle-aged gentleman, to me, he'd never attended a civil service before. 'I found it a bit 'thin' ', he commented, which is what I always think, too, when I attend civil rites of passage, whether weddings or funerals. I don't think this is simply a matter of my own particular ideological framework being absent; it's to do with the whole thing resting on the individuals concerned, rather than connecting them with something bigger (even eternal). Even if you know them that's a bit limited in comparison. 

You could argue that I shouldn't have been there at all. I know clergy who wouldn't have been. You could regard my presence as adding a gloss of legitimacy to an occasion whose assumptions and understandings are far removed from God's, or even salving the conscience of people who would be better off having their conscience pricked a bit. I prefer to think that, if a thing is capable of working for God's purposes, it can be blessed in his name, and his presence acknowledged. I did do a little preamble to explain what I was doing there and the different natures of the two halves of the ceremony, which the standard Order for the Blessing of a Civil Marriage actually does quite well. 

But those differences are ever clearer. The words the Registrar now uses are even less personal than before now they have to incorporate the marriage of same-sex couples: 'the State regards marriage as the union of two persons ...'. There is no open mention of sex or family life, while the Anglican ritual proclaims both, and apart from the statement that the couple are uniting 'to the exclusion of all others', which does sort-of imply a sexual relationship, it strikes me that this is a contract which could be entered into by siblings, or by more than two people (as some of my non-Christian friends would like to see). I now wouldn't object to that happening, as it would clarify further the distinction between what the State now sees marriage to be on the one hand, and the sacrament of matrimony on the other.

'I prefer 'thin' weddings', said Ms Formerly Aldgate later on. 'Most weddings can do with losing a bit of weight.'

Slips on the Critical Path

We don't get many weddings at Swanvale Halt. Brides, I suspect, don't necessarily warm to the idea of being confronted by the Co-Op when they emerge from their wedding ceremony, and try to go somewhere else if they can. That means I find myself organising the banns for couples getting married elsewhere far more often than I get requests for weddings here.

However, I'm also what is called the Bishop's Surrogate for Oaths for this area, which means that whenever couples are getting married in church without banns being read first, and have to apply to the Bishop's Registry in Westminster for permission to seek a Common Licence instead, they come to me to deal with the paperwork and swear and oath that what they're saying is true. The usual reasons for doing this are that one party is a foreign national, or that they live abroad where banns can't be read.

A third reason is that something's been screwed up in the legal preliminaries for the wedding. Yesterday I saw two couples getting married in local churches this coming Saturday who'd suddenly found out that something had gone wrong in their case: the first had moved a couple of months ago and forgotten to have their banns read in their new parish church, and the second live just outside the parish where they're getting married and didn't realise they had to have their banns read there too - the vicar's email had gone into a junk inbox. So they all needed a Common Licence which meant coming to me to swear an oath. Just to make things slightly more interesting, the lady of the first couple is a divorcee, meaning that the bishop had to give his explicit permission for them to apply for a licence (this is how the Church gets around some of its members disapproving of divorcees remarrying in church).

I'd spoken to the lady I deal with at the Bishop's Registry about the first couple and she warned me another case would be coming through. 'There's a lot of this at the moment', she told me with some weariness. 'People come back from holiday and clergy come back from holiday and find that something they thought had been done hasn't been.' The summer is definitely over.

Move On, Please

On Thursday (my day off) I had the radio on as I usually do and caught (bits of) the morning 15-minute drama on Radio 4. This week it's been another series of HighLites, a comedy series about a pair of incompetent hairdressers in a Northern town whose almost complete and sometimes criminal disregard of professional standards is covered up with bluster and bravado. This run of episodes features the elder hairdresser Bev's attempt to moonlight as a wedding organiser. In Thursday's excerpt, Harriet, the vicar, calls in for a trim and finds herself somewhat at odds with Bev as to the arrangements for the forthcoming nuptials. 

Oh dear. Harriet may have a Yorkshire accent rather than the singsong Derek Nimmo intonation one typically associates with comedic vicars, but in all other respects she could have stepped out of All Gas And Gaiters or in fact any media representation of the clerical state from as far back as the 1950s. She affects shock at ordinary human doings; she quotes very, very familiar verses from the Bible at people who have no interest in having the Bible quoted to them with the sort of simpering condescension some adults direct at children, and with the implication that the Scriptures are a collection of wise saws from the same stable as Aesop's fables. She resembles no vicar I have ever, ever met.

That's just depressing. I find the ideas the author has about how weddings work actually worrying. In the show Bev and Harriet come to verbal blows over the vows Bev has devised for the ceremony, some of which are drawn from The Lion King. 'I can't allow the ceremony you have designed to take place in my church', Harriet flusters. What gets missed out is that she can't not because of any issue of conscience, which is what the drama suggests, but because it would be against the law. The marriage service, including its vows, is a legal ceremony whose wording is not allowed to be changed by anyone, whether clergy or not. You could argue that depicting women vicars as just as much idiots as the men is a step forward for equality; but misrepresenting the fundamental assumptions behind the business of marrying people shows an ignorance which is truly contemporary. Everything's basically a matter of individual preference, isn't it, so how can church weddings be any different?

What All the Fuss May Be About

A bit of an essay, I'm afraid:

Radio 4’s early-morning Ramblings programme is a very unlikely-seeming place to discover a sexually radical niche in the schedules, but presenter Clare Balding is gay and there seem, to this casual listener, to be quite a number of same-sex couples walking with her. The other morning the conversation involved a lady who naturally mentioned her wife as not being a great walker and disagreeing about the way to manage dogs. I still do a slight mental double-take when I hear the language of marriage applied to same-sex couples and am not completely sure why.

The Church as a whole has rather less mild reactions, but the CofE’s response to the Government’s consultation paper on same-sex marriages marks a very important step in developing its ideas. I say ‘developing’ because it’s not very clear what those ideas are, no more clear than mine as an individual.

The CofE’s ideas on marriage have been able to stay vague because the Anglican Church has been shielded by its legally-privileged position from having to think. As European countries succumbed to revolution and occupation over the centuries they developed their legal systems in a direction which left Britain behind. Elsewhere, the Church, whether Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, or whatever, doesn’t have the right to legalise marriages: the State does that and, if people want a religious marriage too, they do it on another occasion. In England and Wales Anglican clergy act as registrars, as State functionaries, for marriages, and a legally clotted and convoluted business it is too. Ministers of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland used to do the same, but surrendered this right in 1977. One of the benefits for the Anglican Church has been that it hasn’t had to decide how what it does when it marries people is any different from what the State does: the law assumes, as the Response points out, there is a pre-existing thing called ‘marriage’ and two different ways, one religious, one secular, of legally entering into it. Both versions are the same. 

The Response says that what the British Government is proposing creates a new situation in which there are two separate things, religious marriage and civil marriage. This is absolutely correct, but it’s only what happens everywhere else in the Christian world.

The Church’s next argument is that it doesn’t trust the legal safeguards the Government is promising to prevent it from having to preside over same-sex unions and shielding clergy who refuse to carry them out from prosecution. It has a point. When I marry a couple, I’m acting as a State functionary, and it’s not unreasonable for the State to expect me to carry out the whole of what it means to be a State registrar. I can’t pick and choose who I agree to marry. There have been parallel cases where Christian professionals have been prosecuted, in my view sometimes rightly, for refusing to carry out the duties of their job as it may relate to areas that affect their conscience – the therapist who didn’t want to counsel a same-sex couple, for instance. The Church’s argument that the European Court of Human Rights may well refuse to recognise any exemptions the British Government may grant to the duty to marry has a certain amount of weight. But you can argue the other way too. At the moment, as an Anglican clergyman, I don’t have to marry divorcees or ‘persons of acquired gender’ if I don’t want to, and neither of those positions has been affected by equality legislation. So that’s a moot point.

Not mentioned in the Response itself, but in the public discussion of it, is the possibility that, if such exemptions were overturned legally, it would mean the Church of England having to withdraw from conducting legal marriage services and thus weaken the Establishment of the Church. Other than that being legally extremely complicated, it’s difficult to see why too many people should care about the ‘weakening of the Establishment’. OK, it may be a bit of a shame, but the rights and privileges of the Anglican Church can hardly trump the legal rights of same-sex couples. What nobody talks about openly is the amount of money the Church would stand to lose if it no longer carried out its legal role in marriage. At the moment every couple who marry in an Anglican church pay at least about £350 for doing so, roughly half of which stays with the local church while the other half passes up to the diocese. That’s not including fees for things like certificates, flowers, bells, music and so on. It’s not a huge amount of money, but multiplied by the quarter of all marriages in England the Church conducts at the moment, and it more than covers the canapés at the Bishop’s tea party.

These are all pretty thin arguments. Behind them is a basic lack of clarity about what marriage is and therefore why same-sex couples shouldn’t marry. And that’s no surprise to me.

I’ve just been back to my theological college notes to look at what we were taught about marriage. There’s a single A4 page reflecting one 45-minute lecture, two-thirds of which are taken up with Scriptural quotes about divorce. The closest we got to thinking about what marriage was and what it was for was the first bit of the lecture, on ‘Models for Understanding Marriage’, with beneath the heading the four words, ‘Contract – Creation ordinance – covenant – sacrament’. Even the ‘sacrament’ bit, to judge by my notes, was mainly about the technical details of how the ritual works and its dissolubility, which is typical Western-Catholic thinking. None of it thought about how marriage actually related to real people and what they did with one another.

That wasn’t a lot of help. It didn’t answer the question of why the Church marries people at all. I’ve only developed my ideas about what marriage is since being ordained, partly through the business of having to take couples through the process of preparing for their wedding, talking and listening to them and their experiences. I think most people, including most Christians, have a ‘rites of passage’ model of the sacramental life of the Church. Baptism for babies, marriage for adults, funerals when you’re dead. It’s completely natural, and completely wrong. Only when you see the sacraments as signs of God’s saving work going on in us that you come to view them differently. Baptism is the sign of the rebirth of the natural human life into the divine, raised life of Jesus; the funeral office proclaims the hope of the resurrection as witnessed in the life of one particular human being. So what is the sacrament of matrimony about? Why marry people in a religious rite?

From my conversations and reading – especially Orthodox theologians – I got as far as this: marriage is, as one writer put it, the sacrament of rage. It takes natural human love, which involves sexual desire, and puts it into a situation which demands commitment, compromise, the dealing together with mutual anger and sorrow. Of course many other human relationships do this to some degree, but marriage is voluntary, exclusive, and intense in a way that no others are. A good marriage becomes God’s means of processing sin and hurt: it bears fruit. The basic linkage of sex with procreation comes in here: the generation of children from their parents’ sexual relationship is a sign of the fruit the marriage bears in other forms too. Not, as the Response recognises, all marriages result in children, but that’s the model which lies behind the ritual: the union of difference, the processing of cosmic damage, the emergence of fruit.

At this point we come to the most important of the Response’s statements. Firstly, and dramatically, it acknowledges the presence of positive virtues in same-sex relationships: “Same-sex relationships often embody genuine mutuality and fidelity, two of the virtues which the Book of Common Prayer uses to commend marriage”, it states. That raises the question of what heterosexual relationships do which homosexual ones don’t. Clearly the difference lies in, well, difference, as the Response suggests:

However, the uniqueness of marriage – and a further aspect of its virtuous nature – is that it embodies the underlying, objective, distinctiveness of men and women. This distinctiveness and complementarity are seen most explicitly in the biological union of man and woman which potentially brings to the relationship the fruitfulness of procreation. And, even where, for reasons of age, biology or simply choice, a marriage does not have issue, the distinctiveness of male and female is part of what gives marriage its unique social meaning.

Marriage has from the beginning of history been the way in which societies have worked out and handled issues of sexual difference. To remove from the definition of marriage this essential complementarity is to lose any social institution in which sexual difference is explicitly acknowledged.

To argue that this is of no social value is to assert that men and women are simply interchangeable individuals. It also undermines many of the arguments which support the deeper involvement of women in all social institutions on the grounds that a society cannot flourish without the specific and distinctive contributions of each gender.

Here we actually get at something worthwhile and substantial, even if it’s expressed in vague terms. It will be difficult for the Church to make its case over this, partly because society is indeed very busy working on the assumption that men and women are interchangeable in every way that matters, and past oppression of women was justified for so long on objectionable assumptions of sexually-determined differences that such a reaction is quite understandable. You don’t have to spend much time dealing with real men and women, especially real men and women in relationships with one another, to discover that they differ; but in what, and where these differences may come from, is contested ground. The Church’s discovery of complementarity fits in with the conclusions I’ve come to, in so far as any of them are settled, through actually talking to men and women in sexual relationships with each other, but I don’t think it really understands it any more than I do. Nonetheless, here are the beginnings, the first inklings, of a proper, clear theology of Christian marriage. Christian marriage is a sign of the model of Christian relationships generally. The problem with marrying people of the same sex is that they are not different enough to be effective signifiers of what Christian marriage represents.

To think about another sacrament: the wine of the Eucharist represents the blood of Jesus; it is an effective signifier of blood in its fluidity and redness, and of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in its burning quality and intoxicating effect (not that you drink enough to be intoxicated unless you’ve over-provided). The Church’s law provides that, in extreme circumstances, you can consecrate water instead of wine if no wine is available. You can’t consecrate ink, though, because it’s not intended for drinking and is too far away from the thing it signifies to be an effective signifier. Two people of the same sex in the marriage rite are in that position: their relationship may be perfectly valid for what it is, but it’s too far away from the thing it wants to signify to represent it effectively. A sacrament doesn’t necessarily present what is, but what is supposed to be.

The Response is absolutely right when it says that the Government’s proposals represent a change in what the law has hitherto presumed marriage to be. Where it’s wrong, I think, is that the Church assumes British society hasn’t already made that shift. I believe it has. For most people, marriage simply means ‘two people who love each other promising to stay with each other’. They can’t understand what the Church’s problem with same-sex marriage is, because as far as they can see Christian marriage is just about the Church saying, ‘Here are two people who love each other, isn’t it lovely, thanks very much God’ with lots of dressing up and parading about. And the Church, frankly, has allowed them to believe that and lots of other nonsense as well. A proper Christian idea of marriage is only beginning, shyly and reluctantly, to emerge, under the pressure of challenge. As for society as a whole, its idea of marriage doesn’t need to be ‘diluted’, it already has been.

The general response of the Christian Churches to the prospect of same-sex marriage is, at least in part, a howl of pain at being forced, for the first time, to work out what it actually thinks in the horrible knowledge that most people don’t understand it any more. The Church isn’t in a position any longer to enforce its views; and refusing people of the same sex the ability to participate in society’s new definition of marriage that institution is plainly iniquitous. The separation of Christian and secular ideas of what marriage is has already happened and the Church hasn’t even realised it. Well, it’s starting to. This is a process that has to be undergone. If I and other priests lose our legal status as regards marriages, so, with ambivalent feelings, be it.

Ups and Downs

This hasn't been the best of weeks. On Monday, over a month after our paperwork was lodged with the Diocesan Registry in London, I had a call from the Clerk to say that the Chancellor was away for a week and so we wouldn't hear about our faculty application this week: he knew it was important, however, and so would be taking it with him to work on. That was encouraging. However it was too late. Tuesday had been a deadline I'd settled with myself: no news that week, and there was no leeway for the work to be done ready for our first wedding on June 8th. So I had to go and tell the couple due to be married on that day that they couldn't be married in Swanvale Halt church. The bride used to bring her grandfather to church when he was alive, and now helps with our Junior Church despite being a Roman Catholic by upbringing. It was atrocious, and I didn't know what to do: the culmination of weeks of hoping, praying, tensely waiting. A sense of breakdown. I'm also having to negotiate between two fairground suppliers who each claim the right to attend our Spring Fair in May, and one of whom is quite nasty. Sadly he's the one who seems to have right on his side.

That meant there was no point hanging around, and so I went on my annual retreat for a couple of days to Malling Abbey. It was lovely to be quiet and non-interactive, but I suspect I was so tired I actually wasn't focusing very much. Here are a couple of photographs:


I was just about recovered from the sense of hysteria, though, and was driving back along the M25 through the sunshine when the car engine cut out. Simply stopped. Terrified I pulled over to the hard shoulder and called the AA who, thankfully, came very speedily indeed, gave the car the definite thumbs-down, and towed it back to the garage at the bottom of the hill. It turned out the cam belt had broken, and everything in the engine had smashed into everything else causing catastrophic damage. Two hours before I'd been congratulating myself on buying some particularly heavy books at a charity shop in West Malling, and now had to lug them back up the hill along with everything else.

Home to discover sixty emails, news that the retired priest in the parish is in hospital, and then almost immediately out for a meeting with the Town Clerk in Hornington about a civic service. The only relief (and an ambiguous and guilty one) was four phone messages from Mad Trevor, who I was due to meet that afternoon, and who has been sectioned. I'm not sure quite how I managed to propel myself out of the house on the bicycle to the Council offices. I caught the train to the cathedral to make my confession for Lent, but it felt a bit cursory. I couldn't either concentrate or relax.

In the evening I tried to call my mum, and got no reply. It was mid-evening, so I thought she might be babysitting at my sister's or eating there. But there was no reply there either. My mother hardly ever turns her mobile on and tonight was no exception, but my sister wasn't picking up either. It wore on past nine o'clock, nine-thirty, ten. By this time I was screaming and raving round the house. My mother, grandmother, sister, brother-in-law or nieces, or a combination of them, were in hospital I imagined and there was nothing I could do about it, stranded in Surrey with no car (and in any case piles and piles of things to do on Friday which was supposed to be a day off). It was an over-reaction, but I was running on empty: anything set me off. It wasn't until ten-thirty that my sister texted to say she'd been in a concert so didn't hear her phone: mum was indeed babysitting. Why she managed not to hear the phone in my sister's house the half-dozen times I called it over three hours I can't quite imagine.

For ages now I've woken up not wanting to face the day, sometimes whining and shrieking at the (perfectly ordinary) things I will have to do and interactions I'll have to engage in. Friday, thank God almighty, was some slight recovery. I was shaking as I made a to-do list, but gradually worked through it. I went to see a parishioner who's just had a cancer operation and her calmness and good temper was lifting; the garage called to say that, although the car probably wasn't worth repairing, they happened to have a very cheap Polo for sale which had just had an MOT test and might tide me over for a year to give me the chance to sort out something more permanent, so that was very lucky. I managed to chutney-fy the last of the 2011 apples (they haven't been prolific or up to much this year), and cooked for my lovely friends from Lamford, Caroline and John, who were as ridiculously appreciative as usual. So I've now had nearly 48 hours with nothing going wrong and nothing new coming up, and am calming down a bit. I'm not proud of myself for all this, and will have to watch my mental state.