Casuistry

It is half-term. 'The boys are in the porch again', our Lay Reader Lillian told me before Mass began yesterday. 'They're not supposed to be, are they?' 'No, they're not', I confirmed, and then we listened to the rain pouring down outside the church, pummelling the garden where the raised beds had only just been planted with new shrubs and swilling round the pavement. Neither of us had the heart to tell them to go out into that. 'I'll tell them they can stay until it eases off', Lillian went on, 'Not that it helps that we keep making exceptions for this and that'. 

I thought about my strictures banning certain young individuals from the vicinity of the church due to the disruptions they bring in their wake. How could an exception be made without making it? 'Once mass is over I will go out the back way', I concluded,  'So I will neither have seen them nor spoken to them. I won't even know whether they're there.'

Lillian gave me a look.

Corpus Christi

Thursday was Corpus Christi, the feast of Thanksgiving for the Institution of the Eucharist. I have never made much of it at Swanvale Halt, mainly because it always falls on a Thursday and Thursday is my accustomed day off. I used to attend Evensong & Benediction at the Cathedral on the succeeding Sunday, but in recent years other commitments have made it impossible for me to do even that. This year, I've been rearranging so many days off that I decided one more wouldn't make any difference, so I offered Evensong & Benediction on Thursday, an offer taken up by the grand total of two of our most devout parishioners, both retired teachers, oddly enough. We sang the canticles, responses and the Office Hymn Pange Lingua and did I thought rather well for such an intimate gathering. 'I don't think I've sung plainsong since I was 10', said Emma.

I was glad of the opportunity to keep the day not just because of the principle of the thing, but also because when I last went to see S.D. I complained of feeling a sense of lukewarmness and routine about my relationship with God, feeling rather that I had, in the words of Revelation, 'fallen from the love I had at the first' (which to a certain extent is inevitable, of course). The last few days have turned that around completely with a certain degree of emotional dislocation focused on my sense of connection with somebody who is very important to me but who I have never met and probably never will, and yet who weaves in and out of many of my experiences and enthusiasms. I've been reminded how I am nevertheless linked to that person by the sacramental presence of Christ - and not just to them, but, by God's grace, to everyone I have loved and love now, including those I have hurt and disappointed in different ways. I've found myself thoroughly weepy and emotional, and if I was suffering from lukewarmness, I'm not now. And that's a good thing. 

Ave verum corpus ...

Conflict of Interest

The Swanvale Halt Mothers’ Union branch is celebrating its 125^th anniversary this year, but is not in a flourishing state, finding it hard to maintain its meetings and fill its committee. The Branch holds a couple of meetings through the month. About 18 months ago they agreed to adopt the midweek mass after their Prayer Group meeting as their ‘corporate communion’, and get together for coffee afterwards, with the hope that that gathering might grow into a bigger one to which a speaker might come every now and again. That hasn’t happened, so the members present have some tea and biscuits in the church hall and then go home within the hour.

Now a local theatre group wants to make a long-term booking on one afternoon a week that would bring the church £3000 per year in hiring fees. One week per month that potential booking would clash with the MU - who could move to the back of the church itself to have tea (as we used to do in Goremead, where there was no church hall), but don’t want to. ‘If we have to move this meeting we’ll be made to move the other one’, the committee says.

Dispassionately viewed there is no contest between income of great value to an organisation which finds it hard to pay its way on the one hand, and on the other half-a-dozen elderly ladies drinking tea in one place rather than another a few yards away. But the venerable MU feels raw and demoralised in Swanvale Halt, and even if it mainly functions now as a support group for its members rather than the crusading network it was intended to be, that’s a function that is at the centre of what the Church is called to be. Were I the chief executive of a company I’d have no compunction (or very little) about simply telling them to do what was in the best interests of the organisation as a whole – but I’m not, am I?

Hedonic Editing Down Under

A correspondent alerts me to the more recent history of the great Anglican Diocese of Sydney, in response to my mention of SD’s encounter with a (perhaps deliberately) obtuse bishop from that part of the ecclesiastical world. Sydney Anglicanism has always, from its foundation, had its own particular character, one shaped by conservative evangelicalism. It is the only Anglican diocese in the world in which chasubles are banned, and some Australian parishioners I knew in Lamford used to attend the university chapel in Sydney in order to get a glimpse of one, as it was outside the jurisdiction of the diocese. The diocese has raised – though not followed through – the possibility of allowing laypeople to preside at the Eucharist. Tracts lie around its churches announcing that Christians must accept the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement in order to be Saved. The cathedral doesn’t have a permanent altar, but trundles in a table on wheels when the Lord’s Supper is to be celebrated.

Some years ago the diocese of Sydney was unstoppable. Ever-so-slightly hysterical articles about its habits, beliefs and activities would periodically appear in the Church Times and other outlets. What I didn’t know was that from the early 2000s a daring programme of investment had begun, raising the diocese’s assets from about $200M to around $550M by September 2007, and income accordingly. The prosperity was underpinned by an equally dramatic degree of leveraged spending which, as in so many other ways, marked Sydney out from worldwide Anglicanism. This was not merely some kind of ecclesiological greed: there was a messianic quality about Sydney’s acquisitiveness. The money would fund the flow of graduates through Moore College, the diocese’s ultra-conservative theological seminary, as well as the construction of new churches, carrying its message of resistance to the modern world and its works out beyond the diocesan boundaries to the Australian Church as a whole, and to the globe, supporting other conservative Anglican structures into the bargain.

Then came the financial crash of 2008. A year after its peak, the value of the Sydney diocesan endowment had slumped to $126M. Curiously, this was a repeat of what had happened about twenty years before when the diocese had invested massively in property and then massively lost out in the then Australian recession, bailing out at just the right moment to maximise its losses. Archbishop Peter Jensen addressed the diocesan synod that October, trying to work out why God had apparently withdrawn his favour from Sydney’s masterplan. He couldn’t really. While admitting that God might be chastising evangelical Sydney, he never suggested what its sin might have been: words such as ‘hubris’, ‘vainglory’, or ‘triumphalism’ did not force their way past the Archbishop’s lips; as redundancies and cuts slashed their way through the diocesan structures, he wondered whether Sydney’s Christians were being ‘tested’, or whether God was thwarting something ‘right in itself but not in accordance with his secret will’. In the end everybody was forgiven, nobody was held accountable, answers were not really sought or found, and the Synod restated that it ‘continues in thankfulness to and dependence on our Almighty Father’, which of course it did because what on earth else was it going to do. I wonder whether the ground is prepared for the whole cycle to happen again a generation down the line.

A few months ago I mentioned reading Tim Harford’s great book Adapt, one part of which touches on the mechanisms people adopt to avoid facing the fact that something they’ve tried hasn’t worked, and the real reasons why. It’s the kind of thing we all know but need spelling out to us now and again. Harford introduced me to the phrase ‘hedonic editing’ (not his coining), describing the phenomenon of reinterpreting experiences of failure so that they become part of a larger, more emotionally-acceptable narrative, or in fact successes in disguise. We all do this as a means of coming to terms with our experiences, and in many cases we have to in order to assimilate and make peace with situations we can’t do anything about, but very often the process is delusory, and Christians are subject to peculiar sorts of delusion.

If God controls your life and the conditions in which you operate to the extent that he not only wants you to learn from particular events but has in fact brought them about so that you can learn special personally-tailored lessons from them – and you believe he will reward you for learning them – you are positively compelled to seek a theological meaning and purpose in your failures when all they actually reveal is the normal processes of the world.

Archbishop Jensen told his Synod eight years ago that “I do not feel that gearing was ethically dubious … though I had to have an argument with myself to come to that conclusion.” Funny that when people have arguments with themselves they invariably conclude that what they did was right after all. And of course once you’ve worked out what the lesson in a particular experience is, you’ve learned it, haven’t you? You can go out and do the same thing again, in the sunny expectation that God will bless your endeavours this time round. Good luck with that. 

Oh Do Concentrate

Intercession is terribly good for you spiritually, quite apart from the good it may do the person for whom you are interceding. I know, for instance, that it's helpful to focus particularly on the people with whom you have problems and disagreements, holding them before God and asking for insight into your relationship with them and what their motivations may be. In the past I've found this has indeed achieved something, as a difficulty or disagreement, perhaps irresolvable in itself, has at least become less painful and fraught with resentment or self-justification as God has got to work on it. 

Yet focusing on anyone is hard enough. As well as praying my personal intercessions in the morning - which can sometimes rather be clattered through - I try to set aside a few minutes in the middle of the day, when the diary finds me at home between mid-day and 1pm, to pray for folk in the parish, as well as more generally trying to reconnect with God from whom my thoughts may have wandered over the course of the morning. But more often than not I find individuals drift in and out of my mind with great rapidity, and when I try and grab one of them as they waft past, no sooner have I done so than my imagination has already leapt on to someone else. Actually turning over the particular problems or experiences of this or that person requires much effort, and even while I try to do so a fog of alternative thoughts and demands clouds the attention.

The answer is probably to pray consistently through my parish lists, which in the past I've tried to do - the problem being that it's dull, unspontaneous and adds yet another challenge of discipline to the one of merely managing to pray at all. 

I take comfort from a story about the sainted former Archbishop Michael Ramsey, who, while staying with friends in his retirement, once came in from the garden and announced 'Well, I've spent half an hour praying and actually spoke to God for about five minutes of it'. 

PJH's 'Shaker Aamer' Revisited

Hope Six has prompted me to reassess some of PJ Harvey’s earlier work and more particularly those parts of it I’ve ignored up till now, including her 2013 song ‘Shaker Aamer’, dedicated to the last British detainee in Guantánamo Bay, who finally came home last year. When its release was first announced my heart sank a little bit: what would this song be like, deliberately and self-consciously (and, you might well argue, pretentiously) commenting on a particular and very real situation rather than the imagined emotions and personae which form the accustomed landscape of Ms Harvey’s musical endeavours. It reminded me uncomfortably of that painfully right-on band of the ‘80s, The The, whose lead singer would periodically issue portentous declarations to the press about the state of the nation as though anyone cared what he thought. Ms Harvey, in contrast, gave out no statement about ‘Shaker Aamer’ apart from a very taciturn press release whose traces you can detect in the identical wording used to describe the song on various websites dating from the time. Back then, I listened to about ten seconds of it, and heard a bald account of the horrors of Shaker Aamer’s detention, set to unremarkable music: I was disappointed but unsurprised, and mentally put it aside after that.

Coming back to the song, and giving it a bit more time to settle in the ear, I hear something completely different. It isn’t a masterwork by any means, yet, nevertheless, its insistent, repetitive rhythms fit the purpose rather well. But what raises it to the level of something remarkable is the phrase, occurring several times and emphasised by periods in the music, ‘Shaker Aamer – your friend’. This is a very strange, and bold, description to slip into a protest song. It attempts to generate not a sense of outrage, or pity, but actually to claim a personal relationship between the wretchedly incarcerated man and the listener. He is our friend. He isn’t a threat (as the US government claimed), a fundamentalist, a terrorist: he is a friend, someone who means us no harm. Nobody else, surely, would dare to be so humanistic, so personal.

But my thoughts went further. This line – ‘your friend, Shaker Aamer’ – is what you would put at the end of a letter. This song is intended as a letter written on behalf of someone who can’t write one. It’s not only that, of course, because if it was, the sign-off line would be precisely that, rather than appearing three times through the lyric; but it makes it clear that the song’s function is not just to comment on the prisoner but to give him a voice.

But we aren’t finished yet: there is another, final layer. As a result of re-listening to ‘Shaker Aamer’, I looked up the details of his case (as far as Dr Wikipedia reports them), and noticed that his lawyer, during the time of his incarceration, was one Clive Stafford-Smith of campaign group Reprieve. I know that name, I thought. And Mr Stafford-Smith was the man who, the year before Shaker Aamer was eventually released, Ms Harvey got to do a report on Dorchester County Hospital as part of her act of assault and battery on the Today Programme in early 2014. So, therefore, she had an ongoing relationship with one of the few people in a position to know what Shaker Aamer himself thought of his own situation. Knowing that, it becomes impossible to see anything other than the detainee’s own words in what Ms Harvey sings. This isn’t only her imagination at work: it’s someone else’s actual speech, presaging what she’d do on Hope Six. If Shaker Aamer is our friend, it’s because he wants to be, because he’s used those words.

How wrong I’d been. This isn’t just a socially-conscious musician sitting in her studio taking it upon herself to call our attention to a dreadful injustice and commenting on it from a position of safety. This isn’t even a socially-conscious musician sitting in her studio and imagining what it might be like to be the victim of that injustice. It’s a musician giving that victim a voice in the most direct way imaginable. And then not even telling anyone that that’s what she’s done.

A New Arrival

I never cease to be surprised by the wildflowers that pop up in the garden, especially when my attempts actually to grow plants deliberately so often come to grief (the latest casualties are some indoor herbs and the hawthorn hedge I hoped to grow at the top of the plot). These flowers have never appeared before. They are Bugle, a nice little plant which once had the reputation of being a wound-heal, good for ulcers and external application. However in parts of Germany it was thought that if you brought the flowers into the house it would soon burn down. It used to be called Thunder-and-Lightning in Gloucestershire and in Somerset, delightfully, Babies' Shoes.