Assault

What was I saying about paying attention to beauty? ‘We’ve had visitors’, were the words that greeted me when I arrived for our hymn practice on Sunday evening. The visitors had made their presence felt, disturbing altar cloths and smashing the coloured candle holders at the statue of the BVM and the icon of St John. Altar cloths can be rearranged and smashed glass can be replaced, thanks to the offices of Hayes & Finch the church suppliers; but then I noticed a burn mark across the icon of St John itself. I unscrewed it from the wall and took it home. Below is what it should look like:

When I bought the icon from eBay a few years ago I thought it was just painted directly onto the wood, but the damage reveals that it was made in a far more traditional manner, with a layer of gauze laid on the wood and then covered with gesso. That makes it harder to repair the picture, and increases the sense of loss.

Icons aren’t just pictures: they are sacramental, bound up within the structure of promise and covenant which keeps the Church of Jesus Christ together. God promises to hear our prayers and we promise to make them, and in the midst is the icon, an image of faithfulness made in faithfulness. To attack an icon is to attack more than the icon. Icons have personalities, and even if only I have really invested that much prayer in this one, for me, at least, our St John is linked to the nature and identity of our little group of Christians. I look at the vile blister obliterating the saint’s face and I can feel the burn. Of course the children who did this won’t have thought about it like that: they won’t have thought about it at all. This act isn’t a product of thought.

To attack an image of a human being isn’t that far from attacking a human being themselves. And this morning as I thought about what had happened and the burning seared into my imagination again a thought came into my heart, This is what your sins do. The aggression and desire and fear you direct towards souls made in God’s image leave scorches and burns on you and on the world. You are implicated in this. So God have mercy on me, too.

Details and Distractions

In a world of seeming madness paying attention to the beauty around you is therapeutic. Some beautiful forms are natural, others artificial; some are produced by collaboration between the hand of nature and of humankind. This door ambushed me halfway down the hill towards church this morning, embraced by its wisteria (I think) which awaits the Spring. The door is caught between stripping and repainting, and just for the moment it shows its loveliest face: it won't be anything like as charismatic when finished.

Stress Points

Between Christmas and New Year, Mad Trevor went to A&E at the Royal Surrey Hospital. He had a very low-level, if painful, medical problem which anyone else would have lived with, but because he has essentially a child's impulsiveness and lack of perspective which magnifies any misfortune into a cosmic calamity (I am not exaggerating) and any pain into the worst suffering anyone has ever had, he had to have something done about it. It would have taken a while to see his GP, so he took himself to the hospital. Once there, and seen by a nurse, he was told it would then take a few hours before he could consult a doctor who might attend to him; he was besieged by his usual obsessional and paranoid thoughts which made sitting in a waiting room absolutely impossible, so he came home without any treatment, and had to live with his problem the way an average person might have done anyway.

I don't know whether poor Trevor's visit to A&E would have made it into the figures, figures which show the NHS straining to meet its targets and obligations. He does reveal some interesting themes, though. I remember a few months ago talking about the state of the health service to a local GP who was barely able to conceal his resentment at the resources being poured into general hospitals rather than the lower tiers of healthcare where they might prevent patients having to get as far as hospital. Trevor needed to see a GP, or someone at a GP practice, rather than go to hospital. He needs to have his mental illnesses treated more imaginatively than by a kaleidoscope of drugs which are all more or less ineffective. He needs, perhaps most of all, to have people around him, perhaps even in some sort of residential setting, who can respond to his obsessional thinking and remind him of what's reasonable and sensible, to introduce the degree of perspective which he isn't capable of providing for himself. Along the lines of the support workers the local council used to provide for a couple of years, who took him out for coffee and shopping and helped him tidy his flat; until the council decided they couldn't fund that anymore, and he had to pay for them himself with money he hasn't got, partly because the mental disabilities the support workers were intended to alleviate mean he can't manage his money in the first place.

Put more resources into those aspects of health and social care and it would go some way to alleviating the pressure on acute health care. I'm hearing some voices on the radio today suggesting this, but I doubt it will happen. Instead more money, if more money there is to be, will be directed towards hospitals, towards the aspects of health care that TV dramas are made about, and more and more patient time will inevitably be sucked towards them. The stress points will simply become more and more sore if that happens. 

Provoking Wrath

It's been a while since I had young men calling at my door selling domestic bits and pieces from a bag, claiming to be ex-prisoners on a work-creation programme. I've long since decided that I won't buy anything from door-to-door hawkers, having done so frequently in the past. It's surprising that you can find little unequivocal advice on the matter, and that what is out there - at least online - seems to cut-and-paste one particular statement made by some body, at some time. But whenever the police have made any kind of pronouncement about it, the consensus has been that, whatever the truth about the young men with the bags of dusters themselves, the 'scheme' they are part of isn't being organised by any official body but by criminals who are, at the very least, exploiting them, and buying their wares helps no one. Since I started turning the hawkers away, they've stopped turning up, which does suggest there is some sharing of information between groups about who will hand over money and who won't.

One hawker came around yesterday, and I refused quietly and definitely to buy anything from him. Imagining, for a moment, that his story may have had some truth to it, it might have been good to have something positive to offer than just refusal to take part in the structure he's part of, but I hadn't worked that out. He went off cursing me, quite literally, and calling me the Devil. I doubt he would have been quite so vehement about someone who wasn't visibly a clergyperson. People are always taken aback and sometimes angrily resentful whenever I refuse to do something they want, I suppose because at some level they see a priest as an index of reasonable goodness and, if the priest won't go along with their desires, it implies that those desires might not be either reasonable or good. 

The Doorposts and the Lintels

I can't remember how I came across the practice customary in some places in Christendom of blessing chalk at Epiphany so that the faithful can mark the doorframes of their homes and invoke the blessing of the Saviour on the house for the coming year. However it came about, I imported it into Swanvale Halt within a couple of years of arriving and everyone looks forward to it now, as you do to something which is a bit crackers but has some actual spiritual weight to it. 

I should really have had a mass on the day of the Epiphany itself, which would have been Saturday this year, even if it was for just a handful of souls in the morning. But I decided to transfer it to the Sunday, forgetting that that was also the Baptism of Christ - cue a collision of theological elements. Oh well. The Epiphany theme was more to the fore at the Family Service today than the others, meaning I could rope in some younger members of the congregation to help me bless the chalk. Ben held the basket of chalk while Abi and Ewan stood either side with little wooden candlesticks. Ben had chosen to face the congregation so I had to kneel in front of him, but that was all right. Afterwards we took the chalk to the table at the back of church from where people could pick bits to take home. The children won't have known what on earth to make of it, but that doesn't matter. Liturgy is a game, really, just a serious rather than a frivolous one. 

The cypher for marking this year is 20+C+M+B+18. There are differing opinions over what the letters stand for; either the traditional names of the Three Magi, Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, or 'Christus Mansionem Benedicat', Christ bless this house. Not that many Swanvale Halt souls inhabit anything that could really be described as a mansio.

A couple of years ago an elderly pair of congregation members marked their house in the approved manner as did Marion our curate who lives opposite. Not far away lived someone from the Roman Catholic congregation who'd done the same. My parishioners soon had a visit from the police, who were worried that there was a criminal gang in the area casing their properties as potential targets and leaving coded messages in chalk. 

Royal Peculiar

Coincidentally, after recounting Oenone's visit to the Royal Chapel of Hampton Court, I was there yesterday, visiting a friend and former colleague from Museum days who has long worked for the Royal Palaces. The mid-week service was a 1662 Prayer Book Low Mass, cracked through at a pace worthy of any Continental cathedral: we arrived about 8 minutes late, and the Chaplain had already got to the Preparation of the Table. The congregation of about 15 included a couple of Palace staff, identifiable by their ID badges, but most were apparently visitors, and you don't want to divert them too long, it's true. The service was virtually all eastward-facing (even I don't do that) and for a moment during the consecration I wondered what the Chaplain was doing that caused the right side of his outline to wobble rhythmically until I worked out he was making the sign of the cross over the Elements, three times, very, very fast. 

I say '1662 Prayer Book': but technically I'm not sure what rite this was, as it did include the 'blessed are you, Lord God of all creation ...' Offertory dialogue which comes from the reformed Roman Rite of the 1970s. Hardly anyone celebrates the Lord's Supper in the absolute Prayer Book form, after all.

The Chaplain wore Gothic vestments and a maniple, which would have filled most of those who have presided at the Chapel Royal over the centuries with horror, and which is Very Sound.

Differing Experiences

There is much made in Church circles of the fact that, while local churches struggle to maintain congregations, those of cathedrals and greater churches are growing apparently without doing anything very special to make this happen, other than what they’ve been doing for a couple of centuries already. My Goth friends Archangel Janet and her partner Mart have recently moved to Glastonbury partly because it’s the centre of neo-pagan Britain; they were visited over Christmas by Ms Valery and Msr Peugeot who are also of that general bent. And they all went to Midnight Mass at Wells Cathedral. It struck me that this was an unusual decision to take and so I asked why, and they were kind enough to tell me.

Archangel Janet herself said she’d ‘Always wanted to go to Midnight mass. The Pagans went to church in the early days and followed both I think. Personally l love the music and singing and the building … I also wanted to see the embroidery up close on the altar cloth’ (which makes sense, from a former employee of the Royal School of Needlework). Valery and Msr Peugeot also said they enjoyed the choral music. Valery ‘did feel slightly anxious that I would be criticised for being a “tourist” ‘ although to an extent Msr Peugeot recognised that that’s what the group of friends were: ‘I considered myself a tourist while there and in a way I went like I'd go to a show (and I don't mean it in any derogatory way). It was pretty spectacular.’

Valery speculated more about why Goths might be drawn to Christian worship: ‘I think every goth has some 'old Catholic' sensibilities, being drawn to mediaeval churches, crosses and (altar cloth) velvet. Or perhaps it's the fascination with mediaeval history and culture, drawing you to the high gothic architecture of churches and cathedrals. And of course the mediaeval music, most of which is religious.’ But although my friends liked the worship, the setting and the music ‘traditional’, they also wanted enough modernity and flexibility to make them feel welcome. ‘I was very surprised when the bishop turned up and it was a woman!’ said Janet, ‘I even got a blessing from her’ (it would have been Ruth Worsley, the Bishop of Taunton). Another friend who wasn’t at Wells on Christmas Eve but joined in the Facebook conversation, Oenone, commented ‘I was brought up Orthodox but I find the Anglican Church much more friendly and welcoming. For example, the mass is in English and I can understand it, people join in the singing of hymns, etc. (Though I have been to a mass at Hampton Court, and hated it … ). My neighbourhood church is LGBT friendly, flies the rainbow flag’.

My friends are aware of the distance between joining in worship and subscribing to dogma. Valery says ‘I do experience a sense of the sacred in churches, although more in a universal way’, and Msr Peugeot added ‘I enjoy the spirituality of places of worship as well as the cultural influences they had on our history but I keep a distance from the teaching and have no part in their rituals’. Oenone finds her experience slightly different: ‘I’d feel more ‘at home’ in a simple country church than a magnificent cathedral where I’d feel more like a tourist. For me, the grandeur gets in the way of spirituality. I’ve been in Buddhist temples and Shinto temples where I’ve felt the same. But many people feel more or less like tourists in church, I think it’s normal, and some churches welcome them more than others.’

At the Midnight at Swanvale Halt a bare minority of the congregation were people I knew, and I can but speculate about what drew the rest of the souls there. It may have been many things, far more than a normal Sunday gathering. The task of those who organise that worship, whether the deliberate grandeur of Christmas Eve or the humbler liturgical offerings week-by-week, is to honour the threads of God-ward-ness woven through those mixed and perhaps inarticulate motivations, and to salute with welcome those who are guests of Christ, not of us.