That's The Way It Is

Unfortunately, my regular interlocutor Mad Trevor is supporting a friend through a very unpleasant legal case. Sitting in a courtroom while people and lawyers argue about horrible things isn't good for anyone, let alone someone with paranoid schizophrenia. He phoned me, this time, with a good reason to be agitated.

Trevor: Please pray for protection for me.
Me: Of course I will.
Trevor: Only, the Devil loves this sort of thing.
Me: Yes, it's his bread-and-butter, really.
Trevor: [pause] It's like him having a jam sandwich.

I know I introduced the food-related metaphor, but it's an interesting further stage to which to take it. In fact, he's not wrong. People throwing horrible accusations at each other in a court *is* a jam sandwich for Satan. There's a film title in that.

Head Above the Parapet

Had I still been a liberal - and still more a Liberal Democrat - I probably would have voted for Tim Farron as party leader, normally being drawn to people who aren't 'safe pairs of hands' but who might actually cause a bit of trouble, who have a few jagged edges and unpolished surfaces. 

The decision wouldn't necessarily have been affected by his much-reported Christian faith, although in the British context it makes him even more an outsider, and therefore interesting. As Mr Farron has pointed out, in the US politicians are virtually obliged to invent a faith, while in Britain they feel compelled to deny it. 

This will bring him problems. Of course Christians vary like clouds in the sky, and for some Mr Farron's unsoundness on matters such as same-sex marriage is enough to deny him the title at all. His interview on the Today Programme yesterday gave something of the flavour of what he may be in for from rather less specialised audiences: John Humphrys gave rather a lot of time over to the MP's prayer life and how that might feed into his political attitudes. His question 'Would you seek advice from God before making important political decisions, such as whether to invade Iraq or something?' drew the response that 'this is the shocking revelation that a Christian says his prayers sometimes'. I thought Mr Farron took it all rather effectively, replying that what you pray for is wisdom rather than a particular answer, that everyone, religious or secular, brings value judgements to a decision, meaning Christians could conscientiously reach quite different conclusions about a specific matter. So why bother? Mr Humphrys insisted. 'It's what we do,' Mr Farron countered.

In a largely secular society, this is a fair matter to inquire about. People don't understand how a person's prayer life might work because they don't do it themselves, and seem to believe:

1. That a Christian will pray and expect to receive an answer by a voice or some means that they can interpret as supernatural;
2. That prayer requires setting reason to one side (when told that Mr Farron would 'consider the evidence' in a decision, Mr Humphrys insisted 'So you wouldn't ask God for advice?') in deference to some other authority - the Bible, an ecclesiastical magisterium, or an internal concept of God. 

Believe this, and somebody in a position of power admitting to praying becomes creepy and worrying. It's not unreasonable that reasonable people should want to know more.

At times over the last 15 years or so the Liberal Democrats appeared to be turning into the political wing of the British Humanist Association, so Mr Farron's ascendancy - albeit in the circumstances of the party's shredding in the elections - is remarkable. Of course, those who are perturbed by the role God might play in his decision-making processes probably need not be very concerned, as for some time to come no Liberal Democrat MP will be taking any more momentous decision than what colour to paint his constituency office. 

Back to Basics

A few days ago a friend of mine posted on his Facebook feed that it was the 10th anniversary of his ordination:

I've marked the anniversary by doing the things I was ordained to do. Among them praying the office in church; presiding and preaching at Mass; praying with people; talking with and providing some food and washing powder for a heroine addict; a funeral/bereavement visit; and getting out and about in the community.

Ah, I realised, If young Christopher was celebrating the 10th anniversary of his ordination (and good for him), so must I have been; although I can’t remember the date itself without looking it up (he was ordained in a different diocese to me and so possibly on a different date), I must have been on holiday, so I may well have marked the day by getting up late, going shopping, and mucking about in the garden. Not quite so priestly. Or not so specifically.

Normally, then, the actual anniversary of my ordination passes me by. I do get recalled to my sense of what I’m supposed to be doing at two other points, though: the Chrism Mass at the Cathedral on Maundy Thursday, when all the diocesan clergy renew their vows along with the bishop, and the closest Sunday to the date in September when I was installed at Swanvale Halt, when it is my custom to rehearse my vows before the churchwardens as representatives of the laypeople. I don’t know whether anyone else does this, but I find it as instructive and useful for me to be reminded what I’m there for as for the congregation.

In amidst all the convincing and absorbing stuff about church management, mission planning, co-ordinating change and so on, it’s easy to lose track of what priestly ministry actually means. A competent layperson could do any of those things, and probably be better than me at them. They might well carry out the pastoral work young Christopher describes better than me, and – did only Canon Law permit them – could perhaps even perform the strictly liturgical stuff which is proper to my ordained office with greater concentration, spiritual seriousness or aplomb than I do. But they would not be a sacramental sign of God’s presence, as I am.

I – for better or worse – am surrounded by promises, mine and God’s, which is what the word sacrament means. There's a difference between doing things, and promising to do them. When I knelt before the Bishop ten years ago and he laid his hands on me I was promising to be a public, identifiable, inescapable sign of God’s presence, and God was promising that I would be too. I was promising that I would do the things our holy Mother the Church does to make God’s presence visible, those other ‘sacraments’ which form the ‘religious stuff’ I do – as I say, for better or worse, adequately or inadequately. That was the reason why it was done; looking at who I am and how far I have to go even to be a good Christian, there can’t be another one.

'Church Preparation'

When I did my time-recording exercise last year there was a category of activity, at least in my detailed listing, I called 'church preparation'. As far as Saturday morning was concerned, it was this kind of thing.

- Said Morning Prayer. So far, so spiritual.

- Set out to clean cycle tyre marks left by teenagers from the floor, and discovered the floor polish I put in the vestry had gone. Over to the Co-Op to buy more.

- Cleaned cycle tyre marks from the floor.

- Hoovered children's corner of detritus left by teenagers.

- Put hoover back together as it'd been wrongly assembled.

- Reorganised the chairs as people seem incapable of leaving them where they are supposed to be. (They were all put out again in the evening by a concert using the church, so I put them back again before the 8am mass on Sunday).

- Took down old notices in the entrance. People are very keen to put them up, less so to take them down.

- Looked for bookmarks made for use during Morning and Evening Prayer and missing for some months. Found them in the office.

- Wrote up banns book.

- Wrote up service register.

- Tidied up vestry, although to be fair it's mainly my fault if it gets untidy in the first place.

- Changed dirty altar cloths.

It strikes me that other people could very easily and profitably be doing most of these things, and also that I am very, very bad at asking them to. Mind you, Il Rettore spent an entire winter mainly dealing with the boiler, and one of our churchwardens is a whiz at heating equipment, or I have told her she is.

Tell Me Another

An atmosphere of nigh-hysterical hilarity prevailed at our Deanery Chapter meeting on Wednesday. Our curate Marion's account of the Pet Service we had last Sunday led to repeated references to animal-related news from our colleagues around the area, and I was able to point another vicar whose church is plagued by bats to the service of Cursing Against Pests and Vermin contained in the 1962 Rituale Romanum. The Rural Dean announced that Rural Deans are to be retitled because our new bishop has trouble pronouncing the letter 'R'. The vicar of Ashlake recounted how one member of the PCC is threatening to leave the church over the establishment of a Mens' Group. Apparently she put her name on the list of those who might be interested in attending, only to have it crossed out by some unknown person who inscribed the words 'MEN ONLY' next to the erasure, all in green crayon. We agreed that all church members should be issued with green crayons for just such emergencies. Had I not fallen off my bicycle on the way to the meeting I might have quite enjoyed it.

Venice Scene

I went to a local antiques warehouse to buy an appropriate housewarming gift for a friend from London Gothic who is setting up home. I accidentally ended up buying something for my own house - this engraving which caught my eye. Venetian carnival-goers, I thought, observed from a peculiarly high angle. So it turned out to be: the print is helpfully signed, and Wilfred Fairclough turns out to be quite well-known. This image was made in 1988. I like it for its oddness and the slight eerie quality that results from almost anything to do with the strange city in the lagoon, and masked figures.

Excursio Caledoniensis

My god-daughter and her family moved a couple of years ago and this week has been the first chance I've had to go and see them in their new surroundings - admittedly not very far from the previous ones, just a bit along the coast westwards from their previous home in the East Lothian town of North Berwick. Their new residence is one of an estate of houses built in the former park of a big house. As a result they now have their very own folly just round the corner:

Deliriously, it even has a pineapple on the top, that most Rococo and follisome of fruits. 

I managed to encounter a couple of less private ruinous pleasures on the trip, such as Prestonpans Tower, which is nice:

A longish walk to Aberlady took me past what is allegedly a ruined chapel on the coast path. I strongly suspect it isn't a chapel at all, but a tiny one-room cottage or shed, optimistically identified as ecclesiastical when the Ordnance Survey was first compiled and remaining that way ever since. It's square, for a start, and built onto a wall. However the remains frame a nice view across the Firth.

Wartime defences form their own subcategory of ruinous places, and the walk revealed a lookout post and row upon row of anti-tank concrete cubes, though you can't really imagine the Nazis being foolhardy enough to try and bring tanks across the sands and marshes of Gullane Head. Like many WWII defences, they may well have been put there just to give people the sense of doing something worthwhile for the war effort:

Although Kilspindie Castle at Aberlady is decidedly underwhelming - I could see it wasn't worth crossing the field to inspect the bits of two-foot-high wall which constituted the remains - the village does boast the ruins of a medieval friary in the woods, minimal but spooky:

And finally, in the grounds of the old Glebe House at Aberlady, and visible over the churchyard wall, is a Gothick gazebo decorated with flints and seashells. There's a pile of tufa by the garden wall, and that didn't get there by accident either. Whoever is responsible for this deserves undying admiration. Although the mighty Headley & Meulenkamp note the follies of Gosford House a mile or so away, this structure has escaped their observation; and it justified my long walk that day, and almost my entire trip to Scotland ...