Thunder God

I had the most astounding phone call the other day. Last Sunday I baptised a baby boy for a young couple from the parish who are very marginally in contact with the Church. Their ideas about God are as vague and unformed as you could imagine. I went round to visit and explained the service and what it was about as I always do, at least when first children are involved. They were obviously slightly nervous and uncertain but doing their best to be agreeable, and the baptism service was a good occasion. It was, however, the Sunday when the weather turned dull and oppressive, and it was thundery, hot and overcast as I went home and left them to mill around outside the church taking photographs.

In the middle of the week I got a phone call from the baby's mum. She was stood outside the church, crying. 'I just wanted to have my baby christened,' she said, 'And we came out of the church and there was thunder. I know one of the godparents isn't religious. I need to know if Jack's going to be all right.' She couldn't say much more because she was so tearful, so we talked a little, in as understandable a way as I could make it, about her ideas about what God is like, about the fact that there would have been loads of christenings that day and thunder is a natural thing, and that God knows she wants the best for her son and will accept that and take it seriously. I said she should light a candle for him in the church, pray for him and encourage him to pray when he's old enough. I said these are the kind of thoughts that go around the heads of many people, but we don't all talk about them.

I felt both amazed that she was so upset by these superstitious thoughts and not able to brush them away like most of us do, and quite pleased that she felt the priest was the right person to talk to about them. At least she must have thought I wasn't likely to tell her off. And she loves her son.

Auden

I’ve just finished reading Richard Davenport-Hines’s 1995 biography of WH Auden. D-H is a wonderfully fluent and involved writer and his book on Gothic (subtitled ‘Four Hundred Years of Excess,Horror, Evil, and Ruin’) is still, I believe, the best thing written on the subject. I enjoyed the Auden book though it is, I understand, not without its omissions and flaws. It struck me that this kind of literary biography is virtually impossible now, not only because we write so little down and communicate electronically when at one time it would have been done by letter, but because I think times have changed and behaviour has changed. There was a whole class of twentieth-century intellectuals who were constantly reaching judgements and conclusions about one another, and gossiping to each other about them in those letters and documents; a lot of this book rests on that kind of gossip, in the form of Auden’s friends’ confident opinions about him and his about them. I’m not sure we do this in the same way: certainly I don’t. This may be something to do with the post-modern collapse of grand narratives. Auden, for instance, comes across as full of insights and interesting opinions, but they come from a series of fixed beliefs, conclusions and attitudes which he contracted fairly early on and then used to analyse the world, and people, around him. Sometimes they hit the target; and quite often they didn’t. Sometimes they read terribly sententiously but on examining them you wonder what they’re actually about. Do we really do this any more?

Glimpses of the Presence

Friends of mine live in North Berwick. I was there last week and one evening went out and sat on the beach to watch the sun set. For some strange reason I was struck by the presence of God, a very quiet, thankful, but ecstatic experience. ‘Thank you for being here, how kind of you’, I felt constrained to say.

I looked out at the Bass Rock across the Firth, where sixteen or so centuries ago St Baldred had founded his monastery clinging to the cliffs. The Dark Age saints are often somewhat grim-set, granite-like presences in Christian history. What was it they experienced, all those years past, in between fishing and catching the occasional gannet which must have occupied so much of their time? Did it comprise – elation? Did God seem to them the way he does to me?

Returning to the Church

The Feast of the Magdalene, July 22^nd, marked the day the congregation of Swanvale Halt church re-took possession of the church building. Everything came together wonderfully last week, the lighting, furniture and cleaners all arriving absolutely on time. Everybody was very complimentary – at least, everyone who spoke to me was – and we had celebratory cake and champagne afterwards. ‘Are you pleased?’ asked a member of the Roman Catholic congregation. ‘After all, you’re the most important person to please’, which I thought was rather an odd statement. That I am ‘pleased’ matters least of all, really; it isn’t about my preferences.

We ceremonially re-filled the font, with various people pouring in buckets of water and the font then being blessed; the choir sang Stanford’s Te Deum; and we used the old Victorian altar frontal which will be packed off to Janet the Goth seamstress to be repaired so it can make an appearance a bit more often in the future.

It was all lovely, and I’m now on holiday so the relief is unbounded. But fiddling around with buildings is the easy bit of it all, really. Bringing some spiritual dividend out of the changes will be a far longer-term job. I hope we’ve done the right thing.

Modern Mores Pt.468

Last Friday it was my grandmother’s funeral. She’d only been a few weeks off her 100^th birthday, but a gallstone and the ensuing infection made sure she didn’t quite make it.

We waited, me, my mum, sister and brother-in-law, mum’s cousins and a couple of Nan’s neighbours, in the supermarket car park just outside her flat for the hearse to arrive. It wove a circuitous route through Parkstone where she lived longest. The atmosphere was rather different from the horrible strain of my Dad’s funeral only 6 months ago, and so I caught more of people’s reactions as the hearse went past. Mostly people don’t do anything, beyond looking very obviously uncomfortable; a good few don’t notice (perhaps they don’t notice anything going on around them, some people don’t), and I only saw one individual who actually made any positive response to the presence of the dead. He was a middle-aged man doing some work on a house, and paused on the scaffolding as we drove past, and saluted. I thought that was rather lovely. Of course he had no idea whose body was being transported along the street, but that shouldn’t matter. We ought to acknowledge the passage of one of our brothers and sisters, as a recognition of our common humanity. It’s a shame we don’t know how anymore.

Telling Stories

A while ago I had reason to look up a prayer to St Michael for protection against evil on behalf of a parishioner. There is quite a well-known one from Roman Catholic sources and whose authorship is ascribed to Pope Leo XIII. But it has an interesting story behind it, involving a gradual inflation of the drama allegedly surrounding its composition. Originally it was simply promulgated by the Pope without comment. Then in the 1940s one of Leo’s secretaries claimed the prayer originated from a vision the Pope underwent at Mass one morning, in which the Church’s spiritual enemies were revealed to him. In its most developed form, the story has Leo collapsing, passing out and remaining insensible for days before coming round and revealing the details of his vision. That, of course, is complete fiction.

Then a few days later a former parishioner from Lamford sent me an email. ‘Greetings from the Shrine of Our Lady of Yankalilla!’ he said. Our Lady of where? Yankalilla turns out to be in New South Wales. In 1995 a damp patch mysteriously appeared on the wall of a very unremarkable Anglican church in this unremarkable Australian town, and, with some imagination, you can see how it resembles the traditional pieta image of Mary holding the dead body of Jesus. And so up popped the Shrine – endorsed by the Anglican bishop of The Murray, complete with a holy well and all the accoutrements of an albeit relatively minor sacred place.

In both these examples you can see very old patterns re-emerging, stories escalating and ideas gathering as imagination gets to work and tales get re-told. I can’t exactly forget these patterns as I re-tell the older stories in the Biblical texts, especially to the children at school. We’re careful to couch them in terms of being stories, and even fairly small children are aware that some stories are real and some aren’t. I wonder what exactly they think about the Bible’s, though, and how easily they distinguish between the categories.

Terminological Inexactitude

'Matilda', wrote Hilaire Belloc, 'told such dreadful lies/It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes'. I shouldn't be surprised by anything in the lives of Mad Trevor and his occasional chum Mad Terry, the demon-smeller and Charismatic Christian, but they still catch me out. They have resumed their musical ambitions and I was asked to go round to Terry's house, an old cottage in the village, or part of one, to re-bless them for their plans. I arrived, as I had on a previous occasion, to find Terry's landlord and landlady there to sign his new lease. 'You were here last time we visited', said the lady. 'What a coincidence!' 'Isn't it,' I agreed. 'Oh, we always have a blessing when we sign a new contract', put in Terry. Do we? News to me. That wasn't what I'd been asked for. He then pointed to me and told his landlady, 'This man's one of the ones who've been praying for you, that's why you're better, thanks to Jesus!' I wasn't, I had not the faintest idea that anything was wrong with her having only met her once and never given her a second thought since then. It was very clear the owners wanted Terry out of their house and were reluctantly signing another six-month lease and taking the property back into their possession after that; the lady began talking about that, then indicated me and said, 'But you won't want to talk about that with your friend here'. 'James knows all about the situation', Terry assured her. No I didn't, I didn't know a single thing.

Three blatant lies in five minutes implicating me was impressive going. Later on Terry ascribed the failure of his and Trevor's earlier efforts, and a similar blessing ceremony, due to the presence at the time of a couple who turned out to be 'living in sin'. Isn't Christianity wonderful. The falsehoods seem to trip off this particular Christian's tongue with such facility I doubt he's even aware of them.