Death and After

Anyone who becomes known to people they haven’t met runs the risk of becoming a lightning-rod for hate and disturbance. A pop singer is shot dead in the USA; an MP in a small Yorkshire town. Rarely this happens to clergy too, although when they are killed – unless it’s as a result of the kind of random event that could befall anyone – it tends to be by someone they have met and dealt with. I sometimes wonder whether that might happen to me one day, though it doesn’t seem very likely.

You can’t stop unbalanced people being overcome by hate, and attaching it to a particular figure. You can make it harder for them to do anything very damaging with that hate. To kill someone with a knife you have to be very lucky, or really to know what you’re doing, and most unbalanced individuals don’t; guns make it so much easier.

The character of the individual who dies, or the context, makes a difference to what happens afterwards. Years ago Phyl Saville, the President of the Priest’s House Museum Trust in Wimborne where I used to work, was stabbed on her way to church one Sunday morning. It always felt to me as though her gentle, tough, serene faith had already reached out to defuse the evil of her death long before it had taken place. Other deaths are surrounded by revenge and resentment and as a result the hatred escalates. Only lives lived after the pattern of the Cross – whether by religious people or not  – can absorb evil and transform it into hope.

St Catherine in Dorset: Holy Wells and Wishing Chapels

Of course, I have every interest in seeing wells of St Catherine everywhere, but when I finally get going with The Holy Wells of Dorset (which curiously I’ve never done, apart from a brief gazetteer for a learned journal many years ago) I’ll have to grapple as honestly as I can with the conundrum of whether she does or doesn’t have a well dedication in the county. Once upon a time the first stop for any holy well enthusiast was RC Hope’s The Legendary Lore of the Holy Wells of England, an 1893 compendium of all sorts of bits and pieces gleaned from local histories, journals, and magazines. In his Dorset section we find:

"ABBOTSBURY: WISHING WELL

On a certain day every year the young women of Abbotsbury used to go up to the Norman chapel of St. Catharine, Melton Abbey, where, after drinking the water of the Saint's well, they made use of the following invocation:

A husband, St. Catharine.

A handsome one, St. Catharine.

A rich one, St. Catharine.

A nice one, St. Catharine.

And soon, St. Catharine."

Of course the oddity that springs immediately to the attention of anyone who knows Dorset is the confusion between Abbotsbury and Milton Abbas, places which both have chapels of St Catherine, though only the Milton one is Norman in origin. It’s only at Milton, too, that one finds a well – or rather one finds a 1950s street called Catherine’s Well, rather than any actual watery site. On the old OS maps there’s what looks like a pond at the end of the lane that will one day become Catherine’s Well, but it doesn’t have a name.

Where did RC Hope get his information? He knew very little about the wells of the southern counties, especially, and often relied on bits and pieces of information sent to him. A few years ago the estimable Jeremy Harte (author of English Holy Wells: a Sourcebook) spotted where the Abbotsbury reference had come from (although in that book even he doesn’t include the whole citation). In September 1873 ‘C.W.’ wrote to the literary journal Notes & Queries as follows:

"WISHING WELLS. Can any of your readers help me to the words of the formula or charm used at the Wishing Wells of the West of England? I have heard it repeated, but can only recall the last two lines, when the young lady sums up the qualifications she wishes to find in her future husband thus:

“And rich, St Catherine,

And soon, St Catherine!” "

C.W. had to wait a fortnight for a reply. Mr Gulson of Teignmouth offered in October:

"At a recent meeting of the Archaeological Institute in Dorset, a party visited the little Norman chapel of St Catherine at Milton Abbey, where the Rev CW Bingham told us of the legend to which CW refers. On a certain day in the year the young women of Abbotsbury used to go up to St Catherine’s Chapel, where they made use of the following prayer … Mr Beresford Hope, who at these gatherings is always equal to any emergency, modestly proposed that all gentlemen and married ladies should retire from the chapel, so as to afford the young ladies present the opportunity of using so desirable a prayer."

Ho ho. You can see how this has become garbled into Hope’s account, either directly by him or by some other correspondent with no clear idea of the distinction between Abbotsbury and Milton Abbas. However, it’s peculiar that a well appears in Hope's version at all: although CW’s original query was made in the context of wishing wells, there is no mention of a well directly in Mr Gulson’s reply, still less a Saint’s well. Who added that?

The plot thickens further when we turn, as we should on such occasions, to JS Udal’s authoritative Dorsetshire Folklore of 1922. Here the author quotes The Bridport News of February 1886 itself quoting The Family Herald of September 1865, and an account therein of the Archaeological Institute’s visit to Dorset that year, to which Mr Gulson referred. This time the trip is reported as having been to Abbotsbury, not to Milton Abbas at all, although the wording is so precisely similar to the Gulson account that both he and Udal must have had the same printed words in front of them – which is most strange, given that Mr Gulson implies that he was there but clearly can’t give the correct venue. ‘A very similar custom seems to have prevailed at Milton Abbas’, Mr Udal goes on, and later on cites Rev H Pentin’s Memorials of Old Dorset (1907) in support, with a couple of rhymes which differ rather in form from the Abbotsbury one, suggesting an independent origin.

What’s going on here? Jeremy Harte suggests that Hope’s record in Legendary Lore gave rise to the well-name at Milton Abbas. Certainly neither Udal nor Pentin seem to show any awareness of Hope’s book, and neither of them mention a well, so the Catherine’s Well name hasn’t come via them or any Dorset source we know about.

In the merry world of folklore study we rather blithely refer to the idea of the transfer of motifs, but that somewhat obscures the necessity of having someone to transfer them. This can happen by accident when people misremember a story they’ve heard from somewhere else; when they overinterpret some evidence before them in the light of evidence from elsewhere; or when they tell fibs. In the case of the Dorset St Catherine traditions, my guess is that there were genuine, independent wishing traditions associated with both chapels, and if they are linked, it’s a linkage which goes back beyond our records of them. As for the well, it would make sense if it had arisen from the combined misunderstandings or misrepresentations of RC Hope and whoever his Dorset informant was; but anyone actually based in Dorset would have known that Abbotsbury and Milton Abbas aren’t the same, and that the former’s spinsters are highly unlikely to have toiled all the way to the latter to wish for a husband.

There are several points about this tangled story which are hard to believe. Although RC Hope wasn’t the most careful compiler of folklore, it stretches credulity to imagine that he can have been so credulous or so careless as to make the well up by mistake. Did someone else concoct it? Looking at the root accounts in Notes & Queries, again, it seems to require something more than just error: something close to a deliberate untruth. Would a Blandford Rural District Council apparatchik in the early 1950s really have known or cared enough about Hope’s book to name a street after a well that isn’t even explicitly named in its pages? But could it be even conceivable that a holy well concocted by a mistake or an actual fib coincidentally did exist?

Study

Last Thursday was the Bishop's Study Day, an opportunity for clergy from across the diocese to gather at a big church in a location with good transport links and marvel anew at how weird their colleagues are. Our previous bishop used to source a variety of speakers for these events, some of whom were more insightful and/or interesting than others. Our new bishop clearly feels it's part of his responsibilities to tell us what he thinks instead, so we got a couple of hours of him talking about 'Leadership styles' (what else do evangelical commentators ever think about?) 'in the ministry of Jesus', interspersed with the usual 'breaking into small groups' to talk about whatever it was he'd been discoursing on in the previous half hour. Thankfully I was sat next to Marion our curate so that wasn't painful. The bishop occasionally digressed into discussing some of his own experiences which was actually rather engaging, but for the most part it was the kind of thing any secular management guru could, and would, have told us. Christians so often dupe themselves into thinking they're saying anything very distinctive.

Marion had just bought the bishop's book on David and Goliath, and showed it to me with something of a wince. I have not, but it makes me reflect whether this phenomenon is a typically and perhaps exclusively evangelical habit - to take Bible stories and try to draw little moral lessons from them, or indeed big lessons, in areas of life to which they have strictly very little relevance. I did bad-temperedly fulminate about this tendency as 'building Jewish folk stories into vast structures to guide our behaviour, a bit like basing your life on Hansel & Gretl', which was only slightly an exaggeration. It hardly ever results in anything very startling, because, it occurs to me, the radical nature of what God has done in his relations with human beings is only visible in the vast sweep of the Biblical narrative and in the context of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, not this kind of infants-school assembly approach to the spiritual life. 

The great mercy of the Study Day is that it isn't a Day any longer, but now just a morning, which, even if it's going to be repeated later on in the year, makes it much more palatable!

Two Cheers

Dear me, at various churches in the Deanery there are manifold celebrations of the Queen's birthday taking place this weekend, although I must say that at Chapter this week I did detect a certain degree of reluctance to be quite as gung-ho about it as doubtless some Surrey parishioners would like to be. At Swanvale Halt our suggestions were gradually diluted until they amounted to a cake after tomorrow's Mass, provided by one of the churchwardens. Whether it turns out to be corgi-shaped, I'm not sure. They could be bunting, we have some in a box somewhere. 

I have carried out my threat to do a little display about the significance of the Coronation and its liturgy and am quite pleased with how it worked out - pointing out the similarities between it and ordination, and the anointings of baptisms and confirmations, the vows and rings of weddings. The point is not so much that 'the Queen is just like the rest of us', as that we, in God's eyes, are Royal.

A Need for Peace

Important insights don't always come out of our local Chapter gatherings, but yesterday we fell to talking about the upcoming referendum. Charles, curate at a church not far away, was born in Nigeria and served a while at Glasgow's Anglican Cathedral. He was there during the Scottish Referendum campaign, and was reminded of his own native Biafran struggle for independence from the rest of Nigeria. 'The Sunday after the result, I was so surprised by the depth of emotion people felt, no matter which side they'd been on', he said. 'People in the cathedral were in tears. We need to be prepared for that this time. There have been so many lies told in the campaign, and so much personal nastiness, on both sides. There will be a need for reconciliation.'

He is absolutely right. No matter what happens on June 23rd (and no matter what God would prefer to happen, if he has any preference), there is actually an act of reparation required. I certainly feel that, whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, there has been deep and profound evil abroad which can't simply be left. What we do - exposition of the Blessed Sacrament and a time of prayer, perhaps - remains to be seen, but this poisoning of the spirit requires we do something.

Fitting Faces

One of the aims I have in this blog is, occasionally, to shine light on some of the more arcane processes of the Church of England, and the business of how clergy arrive in their positions is one of the more unnecessarily reticent of them (let's not say secretive). When an ordinand is in training, it's normally assumed that the diocese which sponsored their training will find a place for them to 'serve their title' as a curate, which in Guildford diocese should take no fewer than three years and no more than four. Dioceses have some constraints acting on how many ordinands they can support and place, which are a mixture of the financial and of trying to preserve a balance of ecclesiastical flavour across the area; ordinands deemed surplus to requirements are 'released' to look for work elsewhere. This commonly happens in dioceses such as Oxford or London which historically have produced more ordinands than they can place once their training is over. Occasionally somebody is 'released' because they are actually completely unsuitable for anything and their sponsoring diocese doesn't want them around, although the training process has been tightened up in recent years to avoid duds getting that far. I have heard this phenomenon charmingly referred to as 'throwing dead cats over the wall'.

Our ordinand-in-training, Debbie, has been 'released'. She only learned this after trying for three weeks to get some kind of information from the training department as to what should be happening to her, suddenly aware that some of her colleagues had training parishes already sorted out. She had a brief, uninformative email from the diocese saying they had 'no place' for her, without any hint of help finding a position somewhere else, or an explanation why. Her training institution, Sarum College, is up in arms about this as it's not the first of their graduates this has happened to. Our curate, Marion, recalled exactly the same fate befalling one of her echelon; meanwhile, as she and other curates have noted, the diocese seems perfectly happy to import ordinands from evangelical colleges such as Wycliffe or Trinity Bristol at the same time as telling non-evangelical ordinands that they aren't required. The training department hasn't seen fit to inform me, as Debbie's training incumbent, about this decision at all. 

Is Debbie perceived as a 'dead cat' to be thrown over the wall, or does she simply not fit the bill the diocese, or a certain bit of it, thinks it wants? I and I daresay Sarum College as well will be trying at least to get some answers. 

A New Little Task

I have been wondering for a while about having an ongoing task to return to whenever time weighs heavy on my hands hem-hem (more likely when I haven't got the mental or physical energy to tackle the things which will have to occupy my attention eventually). It does me good to have a Project. Last year I exasperated several people and intrigued others by forcing myself to preach a year-long series of sermons based on the Revised Anglican Catechism. It was a surprise to many that such a thing existed; my thinking was that it would allow me actually to talk about a variety of topics which the iron constraints of the lectionary don't often permit, and to deal more with doctrine and belief rather than spirituality in the narrower sense. Some of the congregation members who found the series valuable asked whether I would put the twenty-or-so 'sermons', if that's what they were, into a book format and though I fought shy of doing so - I may be prepared to talk about my interpretation of the doctrine of the Anglican Church, but am less confident about writing it down - I now think this might be worth doing. The exercise made me think more about how classic ideas and theological positions make sense, or don't, in the contemporary world, so having it all in a more permanent form which can be referred to could be helpful. It will divert me from vestment websites, anyway. Probably.