The young couple wanted their baby son baptised as part of the main service. Great, people so very rarely ask for that. They also wondered whether it could be 14th March. Fine, I said, not realising when I agreed that it was Mothering Sunday and so not the usual Sunday morning eucharist but a Family Service, and not a common-or-garden Family Service, but a super-charged Family Service with all sorts of stuff going on. Hmm. Oh well, I decided, let's go mad. What can happen? Do the lot!
So, yesterday morning we had over three hundred souls in the church. It can't hold many more, and I suspect that level is illegal anyway. Various assemblages of Brownies, Guides, Cubs, Beavers and Rainbows paraded their standards which were inserted into a strange iron holder affectionately known as the 'Rocket Launcher'. I apologised to the congregation about the amount of paperwork they had to deal with (service sheet, baptism service card, notices, hymnbook, and flyer for the Spring Fair) and pointed out that I had more. The children from the infants' school came to sing, we dunked small child who behaved very well apart from a wriggling reluctance to be anointed, blessed and distributed posies for mums, and somehow prayed. The organist played a storm and finished with Vidor's Toccata. 'You seem capable of making something out of chaos' said one of the regular congregation to me. Whatever it was it can't have been 'order'. We usually think Maundy Thursday or the Paschal Vigil is the most complex liturgical event of the year, but now I'm not entirely sure.
Monday, 15 March 2010
Monday, 8 March 2010
Saturday, 6 March 2010
What I Learned
I've just come back from the New Vicars Course, or 'consultation' as they are pleased to call it. About ten of us from the southern dioceses (surprising there weren't more, really) gathered at a Roman Catholic abbey and discussed paperwork, conflict management, attitudes to change, and a variety of fascinating matters. The trouble with all this is that, while people are the same the Church over, context is everything and every parish's context is different. 'Understanding Change' is an interesting term. My problem is not some amorphous thing called 'Change', as everything changes all the time, even when it doesn't look like it is. It's changes, the real, actual things you may have to face and do, that are more difficult. Moves away from the concrete and the real to the theoretical are, I think, usually a sign of something wrong intellectually.
Whatever the event ended up being called, it didn't really tell me anything earth-shattering I didn't know, though it provided a good deal of food for thought. Chief among my thoughts, which I think I probably voiced a bit too often, was the growing realisation that I was in a rather different position from all my brother and sister clergy. Firstly they were almost all struggling to move sluggish congregations from hidebound services - Prayer Book Mattins being the chief culprit (I know what the Heresiarch will say, but people simply don't come to Prayer Book Mattins, and nor would you), whereas I'm trying to take things backward if anything at all. Secondly, and far more importantly, I realised that Swanvale Halt is simply rather an excellent parish.
Notwithstanding my grouses when I started, I eventually realised that not one member of the church has criticised any other member of the church to me. There are two good and supportive wardens, an efficient administrator - not enough money or people, but that's my problem as much as anyone else's. My colleagues complained of curates they'd inherited undermining them, being denounced by their own church councils, woefully inadequate staff they can't do anything about ... 'I almost lost it over Christmas', said one young female vicar in her mid-thirties. 'My administrator isn't very good, but the PCCs want to bully her out, and if I let them, they'll be after me next'. My old vicar at the last church I worshipped used to wonder 'how people can come to church and say the same things week after week and it doesn't make the blindest bit of difference to them'. Apparently, it actually has affected my lot, thank God.
Whatever the event ended up being called, it didn't really tell me anything earth-shattering I didn't know, though it provided a good deal of food for thought. Chief among my thoughts, which I think I probably voiced a bit too often, was the growing realisation that I was in a rather different position from all my brother and sister clergy. Firstly they were almost all struggling to move sluggish congregations from hidebound services - Prayer Book Mattins being the chief culprit (I know what the Heresiarch will say, but people simply don't come to Prayer Book Mattins, and nor would you), whereas I'm trying to take things backward if anything at all. Secondly, and far more importantly, I realised that Swanvale Halt is simply rather an excellent parish.
Notwithstanding my grouses when I started, I eventually realised that not one member of the church has criticised any other member of the church to me. There are two good and supportive wardens, an efficient administrator - not enough money or people, but that's my problem as much as anyone else's. My colleagues complained of curates they'd inherited undermining them, being denounced by their own church councils, woefully inadequate staff they can't do anything about ... 'I almost lost it over Christmas', said one young female vicar in her mid-thirties. 'My administrator isn't very good, but the PCCs want to bully her out, and if I let them, they'll be after me next'. My old vicar at the last church I worshipped used to wonder 'how people can come to church and say the same things week after week and it doesn't make the blindest bit of difference to them'. Apparently, it actually has affected my lot, thank God.
Thursday, 25 February 2010
Visiting Dark Places
On Tuesday I had a disappointment: something nice that was due to happen today wasn't going to happen after all. This began a spiral of unhappy feelings which, I'm ashamed to say, went down rather a long way. I woke up on Wednesday with a lot of back pain reviving nasty fears about a repeat of my slipped disc two years ago, and pain is terribly draining: I'm full of admiration for people who cope with chronic discomfort. Wednesday was a bad, bad day, at least so far as my internal state was concerned; externally, it wasn't particularly rough or demanding and I was even able to get a few things done. By bed-time I'd begun to clamber out of the hole, and this morning I was much happier, helped by my back being almost completely fine.
What strikes me is not that akedia (for it is the familiar demon again) comes down like a black cloud but that the cloud can blow itself out apparently without any external encouragement. I desperately wanted some reassurance but didn't get any, didn't speak to any friends, didn't have any good experiences to dispel the black thoughts. Nor did religion play any role whatever. When I'm in this state no pious thoughts can break through and have any impact at all. God feels not absent, so much as irrelevant: I don't care about him or what he thinks. Religious practice, on the other hand, I think probably does a great deal - saying the Office, going through the motions. I think that probably helps, not at the time, but to generate a personality that is a bit more resistant to the demon's goads and lies. Not much, maybe, but a bit. Then when the clouds clear, I can look back and be thankful.
What strikes me is not that akedia (for it is the familiar demon again) comes down like a black cloud but that the cloud can blow itself out apparently without any external encouragement. I desperately wanted some reassurance but didn't get any, didn't speak to any friends, didn't have any good experiences to dispel the black thoughts. Nor did religion play any role whatever. When I'm in this state no pious thoughts can break through and have any impact at all. God feels not absent, so much as irrelevant: I don't care about him or what he thinks. Religious practice, on the other hand, I think probably does a great deal - saying the Office, going through the motions. I think that probably helps, not at the time, but to generate a personality that is a bit more resistant to the demon's goads and lies. Not much, maybe, but a bit. Then when the clouds clear, I can look back and be thankful.
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
For Virginia
Our friend Virginia has an enthusiasm for postboxes. Here's a black one from Swanvale Halt for her.
Monday, 22 February 2010
Goth: Vamps and Dandies
I've just bought and read this new book on Goth by Gavin Baddeley. I've been a bit overcritical about his work in the past, largely through congratulating myself too much for being clever. I'm glad, however, to say that this book is really good. Anyone who ventures to trace the story of such a fissiparous, centrifugal and slippery thing as modern Goth is embarking on a fool's errand - and yet Gavin Baddeley makes it work. I've put a longer review on Amazon.
Friday, 19 February 2010
On Being a Lightning Rod
This week I've taken two big funerals at the crematorium, big enough to fill the chapel and some, attenders standing all round the sides and down the central aisle, and out into the narthex. The first was for a woman who died of an aggressive and nasty cancer in her forties, and naturally there was a lot of emotion. The second was for a man who was also only in his sixties, and carried a certain amount of intra-family tension; he was also a member of the ambulance service and so the local branch's banner was carried ahead of the coffin and there was an honour guard of boys and girls in green Service overalls.
I was exhausted at the end of both these services. I feel increasingly that the priest acts as a spiritual lightning rod on these occasions, and that all the emotion present ends up channelled through you. The size of the funeral makes no difference: I've presided at big funerals where that sense of strain has not been present at all. Nor do tears, on their own, seem to be the deciding factor: some tearful funerals I've taken haven't been charged in this way at all. There is something more subtle happening. It would be interesting to see whether humanist funeral celebrants have the same experience.
I was exhausted at the end of both these services. I feel increasingly that the priest acts as a spiritual lightning rod on these occasions, and that all the emotion present ends up channelled through you. The size of the funeral makes no difference: I've presided at big funerals where that sense of strain has not been present at all. Nor do tears, on their own, seem to be the deciding factor: some tearful funerals I've taken haven't been charged in this way at all. There is something more subtle happening. It would be interesting to see whether humanist funeral celebrants have the same experience.
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