Did I Say That?

My only contribution to the election autopsy is this. Apparently Tory canvassers were going round the country waving copies of former Labour Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liam Byrne's famous note to his successor – ‘Dear Chief Secretary, I'm afraid there is no money. Kind regards and good luck! Liam.’ I'm not surprised if that was so; I was fairly outraged when I heard about it, and Mr Byrne himself admits to being ‘burnt with shame’ every day since, as well he might be. It seemed to speak of such arrogance: to treat the finances of the country, which have such an impact on the lives of millions of people, as a bit of a game. No, there wasn't any money left. No, it wasn't really very funny.

The trouble is, we've all been there. My friend the Dean Emeritus of Guildford Fr Victor Stock once published a book of diaries from his time as Vicar of St Mary le Bow in the City (he maintains half the hierarchy of the Church of England lives in fear of the next volume coming out), and in it there are several absolutely cringeworthy accounts of mis-speaking, usually in attempts to be amusing. ‘Why did I say that?’ Fr Victor asks himself on a number of occasions. And I can recall equally appalling instances – using appalling in its original meaning, implying something that positively drains the blood from one's face – of throwaway remarks I have made which are just not the right thing to say. They have, for some reason, usually occurred in the context of weddings when I am trying to be amusing to put people at their ease, and instead go a bit hysterical. As Fr Victor warns, ‘too funny isn't funny at all’.

These moments of catastrophic inappropriateness are as demonic in nature as anything is, and steal upon us when we feel just comfortable enough in our role, whatever it is, to forget ourselves and allow the sort of humour that helps us get through a job to leak out into the light. At least my slip-ups will have done nothing more damaging than make people think I'm an idiot, rather than contribute perhaps rather significantly to the loss of a General Election. Poor man; silly bugger.

Signs and Wonders - 2

The other book that I managed finally to take down from the shelf and read - mainly in Paris - is Gareth Knight's Dion Fortune and the Inner Light. Having bought some book or other about holy wells many years ago, for some time I was regularly sent a catalogue from an esoteric bookseller in Glastonbury (almost inevitably) and must have bought it from that.

Dion Fortune - or Violet Firth to use her birth name - was, like Agnes Sanford, a sceptical and questioning presence within the tradition in which she stood. Violet came from a Christian Science background, significantly in view of her later opinions. She originally pursued a career in agricultural science, researching the properties and qualities of soya during World War One (and remaining something of an evangelist for its virtues), before moving into psychotherapy. It was a growing awareness in her mid-20s of the apparent inability of psychotherapeutic techniques actually to help people that propelled her towards occultism, as a more holistic way of looking at psychological and spiritual problems.

She joined, not the original Order of the Golden Dawn, but the Alpha Et Omega, its 'official' offshoot headed by Moina Mathers, widow of the Golden Dawn's founder. She and Mrs Mathers later fell out, and Fortune was expelled for having 'incorrect inner sigils in her aura' - an accusation she confessed she didn't even understand. Heavily influenced by the somewhat mysterious occultist and exorcist Theodore Moriarty, Fortune eventually set up her own organisation, which eventually became the Society of the Inner Light. It made use of the Golden Dawn's symbolic system but moved away from its customs of secrecy and hierarchy. Dion Fortune was, in general, a remarkably affable and pacific person, which may help to explain why the Society still survives. It doesn't talk much these days about contacting the Secret Masters on the Higher Planes, though some of that may well go on, and majors instead on teaching meditation techniques.

Dion Fortune's Christian Science upbringing - which was, after all, Christian, albeit of a heretical variety - lingered in her occult work. She headed the Christian Mystic Lodge of the Theosophical Society for a time, and in fact left the T.S. over its promotion of Jiddu Krishnamurti as the coming World Teacher - 'for us in the West', she insisted, 'the Master of Masters is Jesus of Nazareth'; the Inner Light maintained for years a Guild of the Master Jesus which held services on Sunday mornings to cater for members of the Society who regarded themselves as Christians. Notwithstanding the very clear Biblical warnings against consulting spirits, the Secret Masters who guided the Society through Dion Fortune's mediumship tended to strengthen the Christian allegiance of the group, especially the Master who identified himself as the 18th- and 19th-century lawyer Lord Erskine (and who was rather stern about the matter) and even, strange though it might seem, Socrates. On her death in 1946, Dion Fortune was buried in an Anglican funeral service conducted by that other rather odd character, the then Vicar of Glastonbury, Lionel Smithett Lewis.

Dion Fortune and the Inner Light has bits which are, as reading, hard to take, mainly the lengthy transcripts of trance communications from the Masters, but it gave me an interesting insight into the development and practice of an occult society. I will talk about this on future occasions, as well as the similarities with and differences from the more thoroughly Christian charismatic tradition represented by Agnes Sanford.

Signs and Wonders - 1

My reading lately has taken me down some peculiar byways, and led to some interesting reflections, which I will probably outline in a number of posts (not yet sure how many). There are two books in question, both of which I've had hanging around for a number of years.

First was Sealed Orders, the rather creaky autobiography of Agnes Sanford – creaky because, although it only dates to 1972, it looks and feels considerably older due to its author’s style and the way in which it's printed. It turned out to be rather compelling, for all sorts of reasons.

I'd never heard of Agnes Sanford; while I was looking after the parish of Goremead I met someone from a Charismatic Christian background who was disposing of a set of books and asked me to take what I wanted from a box, and for some reason I picked Sealed Orders. Agnes was the daughter of a Presbyterian missionary in China, which was where she met her future husband, American Episcopal minister Edgar Sanford. She went through a deep spiritual and psychological trough when they relocated to the US, mainly generated by repressed frustration at trying to sink her identity into being a wife and mother and nothing besides. Then, sometime about 1931, when their small son John was dangerously ill with an ear infection, he seemed to be miraculously healed by Hollis Colwell, the priest of a neighbouring Episcopal parish. Fr Colwell encouraged Agnes to experiment with praying for healing for particular people, and she found, much to her astonishment, that more often than not it worked. This was the beginning of a life-long healing ministry that had repercussions in many Churches affected by what we have come to call the Charismatic movement.

It's safe to say that Mrs Sanford is a profoundly controversial figure, and this excellent article gives you an idea why. Her thinking acquired all sorts of somewhat peculiar features, from a Christian point of view: she became convinced that she had in some sense been reincarnated to carry out a specific mission from Jesus, and key to her analysis of prayer and healing was the notion of visualisation, a theme inherited from the New Thought movement of the mid-19^th century which had links with Theosophy, Christian Science, and other somewhat heretical ways of thinking. For instance, Mrs Sanford insisted that effective healing prayer had to involve positive compassion for the sick person, with no other aim in mind than to relieve their suffering, as this was the attitude of Christ and the work of a Christian healer was to channel his power. She taught that the healer must envisage the person having been healed, and found that visualising light from God shining on them had a particularly powerful effect. For many orthodox Christians this is simply far too New-Agey (though perhaps New Age avant la lettre), as well as placing too much emphasis on the imaginative powers of the healer, and you can find many such critics denouncing Agnes Sanford and all her works, as well as other figures connected with her.

However, Mrs Sanford, and others, were reacting (and naturally over-reacting) against the dominant cessationist thinking of especially Protestant mainstream Churches – the idea that God's miraculous intervention in the natural order had, for various plausible reasons, come to an end with the age of the Apostles, and healing, exorcism and other supernatural events were the province of Popish superstition (not that Mrs Sanford saw them as ‘supernatural’ at all). Furthermore, some of her more bizarre ideas were the result of attempting to understand things she experienced and to place them within an explicatory framework without very much to go on, and Sealed Orders itself is fairly reticent about some of its author's more off-the-wall speculations. She wasn't the only one doing this: her initial mentor Hollis Colwell had absorbed some remarkably cranky concepts about diet and its influence on healing, which Mrs Sanford didn't follow at all; she remained surprisingly and refreshingly sceptical about grand claims. It's hard to see that her opinions are any less Biblical than cessationism: the New Testament does mention Jesus, and the apostles, healing, casting out spirits, and working other dunamis rather a lot, and nothing in the Scripture hints that this is intended to stop at some point, so I would argue she was on sounder ground than her critics.

There is one claim in Sealed Orders which catches you up short, however. After Ted's death, Agnes was considering moving from New England when she felt a vague sense of threat regarding the northwestern states:

I asked, “Lord, may I pray for it to be fended off, just not to happen?” The answer was “No.” This answer did not come in words. In fact, I would not quite trust words unless they sounded loud and clear within me, for it is all too easy to imagine “Yes” or “No” according to one’s desires. The answer came in this way: when I tried to pray thus, the prayer did not rise. I could feel only heaviness. … So I asked, “Lord, may I pray for it to be minimised, so that it will not cause too much damage?” And the answer was “Yes” for when I prayed after this pattern I could feel a lifting of my spirits and knew that the prayer was going forth … [The threat] was, of course, the earthquake … but it just missed being a really destructive one and caused little or no damage. Of course, no one can prove that prayer had anything to do with this, but I felt sure that it did. For four days the prayer project lay heavy on my heart, and after the earthquake came, it was lifted from me.

Mrs Sanford became convinced that God wanted her to move to California specifically to pray against earthquakes. She felt that it would be more effective to do so on the spot than from a distance:

I had found from experience that my friends and I could pray away a hurricane [my emphasis] in an almost laughable manner if it were coming toward the East Coast, but that hurricanes far away in the Gulf did not seem to respond to our prayers.

To some people reading, this kind of thing will seem sheer madness. The only response one can make is that Agnes Sanford was clearly not ‘mad’ in any obvious sense; and that, sensible and compassionate woman working firmly within the tradition of the Episcopal Church (which in those days was a bit more ‘traditional’ than it is now) as she was, the effects of her ministry seem to have been entirely benign, if you lay aside any theological objections to some of her more heretical speculations; and further that Christian tradition, at least in the Catholic and Orthodox spheres, has always insisted that a human will aligned with that of God and open to his influence will be able to discern his voice and work his works. Mad though it might seem to be, and whatever questions the business of praying against earthquakes might raise about how God and nature work, if we take the Gospel of Jesus Christ seriously, this is the kind of thing we should expect to happen.

We will bear this in mind when considering the other figure I found myself reading about – another influential and controversial woman, the occultist Dion Fortune. 

Resistance Is Useless

It was a busy day yesterday: as well as the usual services, two baptisms, with a total of four children and sixteen godparents. I didn't even attempt to remember all the names - keeping track of the children's was enough to cope with.

The children concerned were a six-year-old, a two-year-old, a moderately small baby of about 6 months, and a tiny one of six weeks. The two-year-old posed the most difficulties.

Me: Saffron, Christ claims you for his own. Receive -
Saffron: No! No!
Me: Right, Saffron, are you ready?
Saffron: Yes.
Me: Saffron, I baptise you in the name of -
Saffron: No! NO!
Me: Saffron, receive the sign and seal of G-
Saffron: NO! NO!!!

At no point has the practice of infant baptism in which small children are assumed to be 'covered' by the faith of their parents ever seemed so ambiguous. The only saving grace (perhaps literally) is that Saffron almost certainly was not raising theological objections to the sacrament of holy baptism, only personal animosity to me. She seemed quite interested in the candle given to her parents at the end, possibly indicating a future pyromaniacal career.

Two-Exhibition Day

On my own I wouldn't have chosen to go to 'Savage Beauty', the exhibition about fashion designer Alexander McQueen at the V&A: it was Ms Formerly Aldgate's suggestion, and I wasn't sure what to expect, but the spectacle was worth the travel and the ticket. I know very little about the branch of the art industry that is high fashion, though perhaps just enough about clothes to be able to recognise when somebody knows how to stitch, but this was extremely entertaining and engaging, even if the weakest element of the show are the words of Mr McQueen himself, scattered here and there throughout the displays - you should never take seriously what artists say, and arguably if they had anything worthwhile to put into words they wouldn't need to make the art. As a former museum curator I find myself paying almost as much attention to the staging of these big shows as to what's in them, and here the arrangement, set-dressing, lighting and even music renders devastating what could otherwise be an enervating experience, if done in a less imaginative way. Of course fashion designers often have the label 'Gothic' slapped onto their work, but there is more justification than usual for describing some of Mr McQueen's designs in those terms, and there's a whole row of black outfits that wouldn't be at all out of place at Whitby.

From there we found our way to the slightly less spectacular surroundings of the London Metropolitan Archives, wedged into a sidestreet in Clerkenwell and not at all easy to get to, for the very last day of their London Gothic show. This is mainly a display of reproduced images and graphics although there are some documents on show too as well as a very odd mock-up of one of those spatchcock 'mermaids' that used to appear in sideshows. The exhibition is a bit of a rag-bag of Gothic themes and history though none the less amusing for that. I liked particularly the 1980s footage of the Batcave (awful), the 17th- and 18th-century Bills of Mortality (who would have thought so many people would have died of 'evil'), and the sketches of Boris Karloff's feet made by a travelling shoe salesman. I didn't take any photos, so this one is pinched from www.badwitch.co.uk. The show is now closed so if you wanted to see it I hope you already have!

Heavenly Bodies

It wasn't entirely clear why this book was displayed so prominently in the shop at Two Temple Place in London the last time we went there, but it made it very tempting to buy, especially when I discovered it concerned a aspect of religious history I knew absolutely nothing about. Paul Koudounaris's previous sumptuous book, The Empire of Death, covered the various caches of human remains in catacombs and crypts around Europe and the elaborate means sometimes adopted to display them. The story behind Heavenly Bodies is different. In 1578 the authorities in Rome discovered the Catacombs there, the vast labyrinth of underground tombs in which much of the citizenry of the ancient city had been interred. Over the subsequent 200 years, many of these skeletons, assumed to be Christians and therefore martyrs and therefore saints, were disinterred, sent north to mainly German-speaking parts of Europe ravaged by religious conflict, and reassembled as cult objects, lavished with expensive decoration and much public affection and reverence. They became mute foot-soldiers in the Catholic Church's attempt to reconquer the hearts and minds of middle-Europeans.

Even at the time sceptical voices pointed out that the identification of many of these figures with saints was, let us say, a little optimistic. Despite the authentications sent out with the bodies from the office at the Vatican concerned with such matters, which detailed as much as could be gleaned about the life of whichever particular warrior of the Faith whose remains were being posted out to some small town in Bavaria or Austria - a lot of these saints are named things like Benedictus or Felicianus - it was not actually clear that the bones had belonged to people who were even Christians in life, let alone martyrs; not everyone buried in the Catacombs had been either. Notwithstanding the miracles they worked and the devotion they provoked, as the nineteenth century drew on the Catacomb Saints became something of an embarrassment, their insistently carnal presence felt to be a bit grotesque as well as dubious historically. Many disappeared, others were covered up or banished to obscure sacristies; only occasionally do they still remain in situ, reigning still from an altarpiece or shrine.

Clearly something for our Mission Planning Group to consider.

St Jean de Montmartre

I was due to go on leave last week anyway, but any intentions at adding to this blog were rather stymied by a bout of food poisoning (or something like it) last weekend whose final weakening effects didn't disappear until the Thursday of our holiday. Although my first meal for several days was a very welcome one indeed, there was some irony in going all the way to Paris to eat beans on toast.

We steered clear of the main touristy sites, so no visits to Notre-Dame or the Sacre-Coeur, though we did get into the Sainte Chapelle, a church interior (if you can still so describe it) rendered somewhat less numinous by the very loud hoovering going on somewhere to the left of the sanctuary as well as the visitors milling around the space. Instead I was much more pleased that we decided to nip into St Jean de Montmartre, a late-19th-century church facing the Place des Abbesses. Formed from concrete and clad in red brick, this remarkable Art Nouveau building is a bold and confident attempt to do something different with the normal vocabulary of church art and architecture, while remaining within a recognisable tradition: what the New Liturgical Movement might refer to as 'The Other Modern'. My only regret is not taking more photographs!