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One of the great delights of Swanvale Halt church is our Toddler Group, which has been going for years and has undergone a series of ups and downs over that time. At the moment we have gravitated towards operating on a Friday morning and regularly get 15-20 children and their parents and carers, whereas 18 months ago the numbers were down into single figures. Some families have prior connections with the church, some don't, and some don't even come from the village. Every month we have a short service in the church mainly involving lighting candles and rattling instruments, and the photo shows Marion our curate struggling with the CD player. She says that when it's my turn to do it it's more Solemn High Toddler Praise.
Of course part of the rationale for the Group is to provide a space for conversations about faith, which do sometimes happen, though that's not why we do it. One of the spin-off benefits is that I get to speak to a variety of people I wouldn't normally interact with during most other facets of the church's work, and gain some insight into the lives of a rather wider cross-section of my parishioners. One of the things, for instance, that strikes me is that about a quarter-to-a-third of the parents-and-carers there on any particular occasion are chaps (though you might not think so from the photo). Talking to them all I realise the levels of part-time and shift-working which either allow, or force depending on your point of view, families to share the childcare duties between parents rather than automatically devolving them on the mother. People (and not just middle-class professionals) are now used to the sort of fragmented and somewhat more ad hoc working arrangements which mean that any notion of gender-based role-assignment doesn't work.
It was Glenda's funeral on Friday - one of three longstanding members of the congregation who have died over as many weeks. As I was waiting for the undertakers to unload her coffin from the hearse outside the church there was an elderly lady and a small boy, aged about 3 or 4, standing nearby, and I heard what she was telling him as I came closer.
"This man is called a vicar. He's going to read some words, and they're going to take this person who has died into the church. He'll tell all the people how good they have been, and how they're going to go to heaven, because everyone goes to heaven, no matter what they believe or what religion they are."
And I think that was probably all I caught. It wasn't the right occasion to get into a discussion, but then it never does seem to be, does it?
Very oddly when I Googled the term 'slap on the wrist', this scary nun was one of the first images I got. I don't think she actually is a nun, you know, but there's a truly righteous slap on the wrist coming in the direction of anyone on the wrong end of that ruler.
And probably a rather more painful one than was inflicted on the Episcopal Church of the USA yesterday as a result of the global primates' meeting in Canterbury. I'm not sure what are the precise consequences of the measures outlined in the statement here but they will of course have next to no effect in any Episcopal parish in the US. It's a somewhat symbolic act of discipline designed to make it possible for the extremes of Anglicanism to keep meeting and talking to each other for a few more years in the hope that the Holy Spirit might lead us towards some greater degree of understanding in the future. And probably just about worth it for that.
Justin Welby made it all a bit easier to swallow by apologising publicly for the way Anglicans have traditionally treated LGBT people. This is itself significant enough. The Today programme yesterday decided to get the most extreme bishops they could uncover on either side - Alan Wilson, the ultra-liberal Bishop of Buckingham, and the former Archbishop of Sydney Peter Jensen, where they ban chasubles and aren't totally convinced slavery is a bad thing - to talk about the matter. Bishop Jensen quoted the Abp of Uganda saying 'our doors are open for those facing sexual disorientation to be counselled, healed and prayed for' which is a million miles away from recognising any degree of responsibility for real human beings being hurt and damaged, and, therefore, from Justin Welby's apology. When the head of an organisation in which most people don't feel they have anything to apologise for apologises, the words carry dramatic importance: they are not the first step in the process of coming to terms with people of minority sexual identities, but perhaps the second, as the first is to recognise the common humanity and rights of such people. In their context, most of the African Churches dare not take that first step even if they wanted to; while in South Africa the Anglican Church is grappling with new realities more open-mindedly, in a more liberal cultural setting. I'm not sure what the Archdiocese of Sydney's excuse is.
So far three of the congregation of Swanvale Halt have collared me in person or via email to express their dismay at the result of the events in Canterbury, and I replied basically in the terms of my previous post about the necessity of living with difference. It continues to be miraculous that (the Archbishop of Uganda aside) the meeting concluded with a result that everyone accepted, ECUSA even voluntarily holding out its corporate hand to be slapped by its brethren. The Church proceeds falteringly and frustratingly, trying to glimpse the mind of God through the fog of Christians' own desires, delusions and fears. How could it be any other way? But it is still the Church, both before and after any decision it might take, the same sacramental sign of the same God preparing for the same End.
And I hold in veneration
for the love of Him alone,
holy Church as his creation,
and her teachings as his own
even when it's not very easy.
Four days into the global Primates' meeting at Canterbury and no mass walkout of conservatives or liberals has taken place, yet, although media continue to report one is imminent, as they have done consistently for a couple of days. Getting 38 archbishops together from every wing of the Anglican Communion from New York to Nairobi is achievement enough: getting them to stay together talking and drinking mediocre wine over dinner without ludicrous grandstanding and mutual denunciations is surely a motion of the Holy Spirit.
It surely can't be that either side on the homosexuality debate seriously thinks they can actually 'win', at least in the medium term, in the sense of defeating and driving out the opposing party: neither the gays nor the gay-bashers are going away any time soon. All that can be settled is whether there is to be a modus vivendi for the Anglican Communion, and what it might look like.
I have no idea how that could work, but the crucial element I would like to see emerging from the conference is a structure that keeps the mutual interdependence and discussion going. It's a commonplace that as one goes on in life one realises how little one knows; what we positively need, as individuals, as churches, is people who disagree, who can hold us to the account of values we claim to have but for all sorts of different reasons have a tendency to neglect. The liberals need the conservatives to hold them to the account of scripture, which is all we have that tells us about God; the conservatives need the liberals to hold them to the account of the experience, which is what tells us whether our view of God is realistic rather than projected from our own delusions, desires and fears. None of us can reach the truth alone. We all think we believe the right stuff and so can come to the right conclusions; we are all incorrect.
Of course the Roman Catholic Church has begun learning how to do Anglican disagreement. I once heard the Anglican Church being described by one ex-pat European to another as 'the Catholic Church without the Pope', whereas it might now be appropriate to invert the tag and characterise the Catholic Church as 'the Church of England plus the Pope'.
It could all be worse. Meanwhile, in the world of Orthodoxy, they're arguing over whether homosexuals can legitimately be spat at in the street.
To combat the impression that all we watch here is horror and anime, here's a movie you almost certainly won't have heard of, and yet one which won an Oscar in its day. I read about Seven Days to Noon in Paul Spode's book Forgotten Films of the Fifties: some of them have been forgotten for very good reasons, but I was very glad I ordered this and watched it, even if Ms Formerly Aldgate rather tolerated it, as her tastes run in different and less monochrome directions.
Professor Willingdon, played by Barry Jones in a manner Paul Spode describes as 'superbly nondescript', is a humble man caught in a moral crisis. He steals a weapon (an atom bomb, though it's never described as such) from the secret research establishment where he works and sends a very polite letter to the Prime Minister threatening to detonate it in central London unless the Government renounces all such research. As the search for Willingdon proves fruitless the Cabinet orders the evacuation of the capital and slowly the net closes in on the scientist who is prepared to destroy a city, and himself, for the good of humanity, as he sees it.
The film starts sedately enough and gradually escalates into tension as the deadline draws closer. The whole machinery of the State is dedicated to hunting down the one man who threatens it, who moves towards his goal dodging soldiers in eerily deserted London streets, but in the end it's just him and a handful of others in a bombed-out church in Westminster.
I enjoyed the post-War setting and the time taken to include random, but very real, vignettes and exchanges between characters which have nothing to do with the story but which add to the verisimilitude: a pawnbroker dealing with a customer, two generals grumbling about lack of equipment, a soldier caught drinking in a cellar when he should be searching. It would all have seemed horribly familiar to audiences for whom the War was a very close memory, but even now its reality is impressive. Of course it's actually very stylised indeed, but then perhaps we were all simultaneously more understated and more stylised in those days.
This is not a photo of me, nor is it Swanvale Halt church: it is my friend Fr Newcombe at Hoxton celebrating the holy Epiphany of Christ last weekend. I do like those spangly drapes creating a special space in the church where there was none. Andrew has a knack of using ordinary things to introduce the celebratory and grand into somewhat commonplace church spaces, as he did for Pentecost at Ponders End.
Meanwhile, at Swanvale Halt itself we doggedly keep the big feasts, as a rule, on the specified days themselves rather than gravitate them all to the nearest Sunday, so this year Epiphany fell on Wednesday and we had an evening Mass. Epiphany is my one chance in the year to remind myself how to be thurifer so I invited my colleagues from the Deanery to volunteer to celebrate the mass with our curate Marion as deacon, and first to put up his hand was Fr C from Nigeria who would, he pointed out, be marking the anniversary of his ordination. He presided with great applomb and wielded the thurible even more flamboyantly than I would have done. One of the choir sang a splendid Journey-of-the-Magi solo during communion (a last-minute decision, apparently), and we had 26 in the congregation of whom no fewer than 6 were clergy - not just the three of us up front, but also Fr C's vicar, the retired hospital chaplain who has started coming to us occasionally, and an OLM from a nearby parish. I was especially delighted to see someone else wearing my old gold vestments which I was relieved to observe do actually look as splendid as I imagined. Although I am officially on leave this week and so was breaking into my time off in just the way one shouldn't do, the mass was a complete treat, a bit like doing Christmas without all the stress and expectation. Thank you, Lord.
'Why,' I asked the children in the church porch a couple of days ago, 'would someone not only trash the children's corner in church with half-eaten packets of chocolate biscuits, kebab boxes and fag papers, and scatter the toys around the church, but actually tear apart two rag dollies?' 'You ask us like it was us, and it wasn't!' protested Liam. 'I'm not saying it was you, I'm just a bit bewildered,' I said, because I was.
