Out of the Box

Back in Lamford I was given a beautiful Victorian home-communion set which had been owned by a previous incumbent of the parish, but that got stolen. So I bought another from eBay, slipping out of a meeting to bid for it on the church office computer. I've never mentioned it before so thought I would post a picture of it. The paten is engraved: 'Presented with a cheque to THE REV. E.C.HAYWARD, B.Sc., A.T.C.L., by the Congregation & Parish of ST. BARNABAS' CHURCH, HEATON, BRADFORD, as a sincere token of affection & high regard for his FAITHFUL MINISTRY, 1936-1941'. I rather like the idea that the set was rescued from potential collectors and restored to use.

I used it yesterday, in fact, going to take the last rites to a member of the church who very probably only has a couple of days to live. I'd been to take communion to Jeff many times at home since he became unable to get to church, and he was able to receive the sacrament again, though not to speak. We do what we can, and leave the rest to God.

Some Confusion

On Wednesday evening I went to a briefing session for school governors about recent changes to the education system we should all be aware of. The Government has rejigged the National Curriculum, OfStEd guidelines and advice for governors, and the main theme is that we have to avoid children becoming Islamic fundamentalists. This might not seem like a huge problem in Surrey, but, the chap leading the session warned us, 'If your school doesn't have a policy defining how it understands "British Values" and how it promotes them, I strongly suggest you work one out'.

I was more interested, immediately, in the advice on safeguarding. Mr Consultant was adamant that the legislation stated that employees in schools only needed DBS clearance on entry to a new post, and that volunteers should not be put through the process, as their interactions with children are supposed to be controlled by proper supervision. 'If you're being told that DBS clearances have to be renewed, or that volunteers should be DBSed, it's a waste of time and money. It isn't what the legislation says.' This is peculiar as I have just myself gone through the clearance process again: the diocese is very clear that DBS is only 'valid' for five years and that mine was about to 'expire'. Meanwhile all our volunteers are indeed being put through. We have an issue at the moment with an elderly lady member of the congregation who helps out with the children's groups and who couldn't supply sufficient proof of identity: she'd never had a driving licence, never been abroad so had no passport, and had changed her name after divorce many years ago, so her birth certificate was ambiguous. None of her utility bills showed the name by which she was actually known. 'If she can't find enough documents all she can do is have a DNA test', was the response.

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.

You Wait For Ages

It took a while to start taking funeral services after I was ordained: in Lamford in summer 2005 we went for weeks without any at all. Once I got going, though, I probably took 20 or so over the course of the year and Il Rettore did the same. That wasn't particularly impressive compared to the way it would have been once upon a time, nor to other places elsewhere: any time I spoke to my old vicar in his new Yorkshire parish he ended the conversation with 'I've got to go and get ready for a funeral, that's five this week', making one wonder how many people were actually left in the town.

How different all that is now. A few short years later and most clergy find they're doing a paltry number of funerals. I've taken only a couple this year, and even though it's true that I try to channel those that do come up towards our curate so she can have the practice, nevertheless even with hers added to the total I don't think we're into double figures since July last year. The local undertakers are quite apologetic about it, but the fact is that most people choose secular celebrants to take their services, even if those celebrants apparently quite often find themselves asked to incorporate the Lord's Prayer and the 23rd Psalm into the services they assemble. The generation that automatically assumed the local vicar is the right person to see you out of this world has passed and the consumer mentality has affected this aspect of human life as much as others.

And all of a sudden I have three funerals to do in the course of ten days, one of which is a burial - I haven't buried anyone for three or four years. I sat with a family going through the details of their mum's service the other day and had to struggle to remember what I usually say in such circumstances, which once upon a time tripped off my tongue with smooth facility. None of the deceased people are members of the Swanvale Halt congregation and only one attended church anywhere at all.

Praying Positions

There was a time when I found it impossible to pray indoors. I don't mean reading or reciting prayers, but longer-scale, silent, sitting-alone-and-concentrating kind of prayer. I think the noises and sensations of the outdoors made it easier to forget all the various chatter that clutters up one's mind and silencing which is part of the point of prayer. So when I was in Lamford I tended to go and sit in a shelter in the garden, and here I have done the same - although until recently when I built the Grotto there wasn't really anywhere to escape from rain when there was rain.

Gradually I found myself more and more reluctant to go outside for my early-morning prayers. This was mainly because there was a spell of bad weather a couple of years ago when the meteorological conditions would have provided somewhat too much of a distraction from my own thoughts, and encouraged me to stay indoors instead. But eventually I would look out at the garden and take a slight breeze shaking the upper branches of the oak tree as a good enough reason not to venture out.

This was clearly little more than laziness linked to a reluctance to pray generally. As part of my discipline I aim at having a second short prayer session between noon and 1pm, if I happen to be at home to do it; my resistance to complying with this observance shocks even me, and I am at something of a loss to account for it. It should not be the case that concerted contact with God is something I subconsciously try to avoid, yet it seems to be at the root of my hesitancy.

I now try to go outside and stay indoors to pray roughly on alternate days, though I'm not completely sure, these days, what effect either has.

Choose Your Change

I mentioned in my last post about Swanvale Halt’s ecumenical history, and the Swanvale Sisters’ role in that. By accident the other day I came across the website of Revd Murdoch Mackenzie, who had connections with the Sisters and the organisations that succeeded to their work after the community itself came to an end in 1989: he had worked in India with Sister Caroline who had founded the Sisterhood. On the website is the text of a lecture from 2002 given by Revd Mackenzie headed ‘Christianity Must Change or Die’, which is the sort of title that makes you scan an eye over a bit of text if nothing else.

As the author points out, changing, in spiritual language dying to self and rising to something new, is what Christianity is about, figuratively and very literally in terms of what happens to Jesus. No individual Christian or Christian institution can avoid engaging with dying-that-we-may-live. But it’s abundantly easy to tell yourself that at the same time as shying away from thinking about those actual, concrete things to which we must die, the ways in which we must change: working that out is far harder.

The answers proponents of Change give to that question are revealing. Murdoch Mackenzie reveals a rage at the encasing of Christians within dogmatic denominational boundaries which he struggled against for decades, and wants to see them disappear: they are all reflections, he argues, of how human beings have re-created the ‘religion’ which Christ abolished on the Cross. I have a great deal of sympathy with that. But then he starts to discuss the Eucharist as a prime example of how ‘religion’ has crept back into the humble, simple faith of Jesus. ‘It began just as a meal around a breakfast table’ he says (actually there is quite some debate about that) and it’s that to which we should essentially return. It’s clear that when Revd Mackenzie talks about the Church ‘changing’, the kind of change he envisages is in the direction of a purified Protestantism, a shape of Christian life which he equally clearly favours for strongly-held ideological reasons.

I often find that people who demand that Christianity changes have already decided firmly what that change should look like; but this is to demand really that other Christians change, not themselves. Not to specify in advance what the change should be, but to wait to see what arises from discussion, interaction, thought, and necessity – the ways in which the Holy Spirit speaks to the Church – is far more risky. I am happy, basically, with the way we do things at Swanvale Halt: I like Catholic Anglican worship and if there were to be a ‘change’ to my taste it would be more in the Catholic direction than less. But that’s not good enough. Standstill is no good to the Spirit, and nor is reshaping a church community simply according to my own predilections: it may be them to which I must inwardly die. When we do change, it will be driven by a reassessment of our basic purposes, and contact with new situations and new people, and it’s likely not to look completely like anything we envisage before we begin.

Rubbing Along

Swanvale Halt parish has a history of involvement with ecumenism, the effort to foster positive relations between Christian denominations. For some years the parish housed the Swanvale Sisters, a group of women dedicated to praying for inter-church unity which had been established by a former deaconess of the Church of South India, and the sisters often came to address the congregation. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of our sharing the church building with the local Roman Catholic congregation who squeeze their Sunday mass in between our two.

A little while ago we hosted the local King’s Church for a couple of events, and out of this came a suggestion to our curate that it might be a good thing to get together to pray for the village and its concerns. And that’s what she’s done. The group has been meeting for a couple of months and last week I went along for the first time.

The composition for that event was four members of local Charismatic congregations, four Anglicans, and one Roman Catholic. The experience is not entirely an uncomplicated one as the Charismatics tend to be vocal in their prayers and the Anglicans tend to incorporate more silence. I can let it wash over me to a certain degree, and doing some thinking about it came to see the sort of torrent of words you get with Charismatic prayer as being in some sense a groping after the same suspension of ego and the seeking of God that absolute silence aims for – a different kind of silence. Not everyone can manage that, though. We’ve had a couple of members of our church who’ve tried this group and have decided not to come back. You have to be very robust and settled in your own prayer life not to be disconcerted by a different style. For me the only very hard moment was when a member of the local Free Evangelical church who our curate didn’t know and who had never been to the group before began praying about the Eastern European care assistants on the staff of a local home where she works – ‘They’re often staunch Roman Catholics, Lord, and we just pray that you will enable them to be released from their darkness’ – unaware there was a Roman Catholic sat yards away from her. There will have to be some ground rules set down (such as no praying against other Christian Churches), and some minimal structure placed on the proceedings so that silent silence doesn’t get squeezed out.

That said, our two lay Anglican attenders were entirely comfortable with the way things went. One, Mary, is a former Companion of the Swanvale Sisters and commented later ‘while I have previously experienced the Charismatic Movement from time to time, nevertheless it was not in conjunction with other Christian Groups, so this is a very unique venture that we’re fostering, and we will stick with it!’ Plus it’s worth remembering what a journey into the unknown our Charismatic colleagues are taking – walking past a statue of the Blessed Virgin with a candle next to it and praying in a chapel beside an altar surrounded by Gothic arches and with the Sacrament reserved in an aumbry in the wall.