Strange Paths

You are used to me describing episodes which I usually characterise as passing through a cloud - the way it can suddenly come down and then as suddenly lift. The last couple of days have seen me feeling something linked to that experience, but distinct from it. It's been a peculiar sort of mild derangement - a sense of cognitive fracturing alongside a very negative mindset, which is unusually directed not at my situation but outward. A friend says something on LiberFaciorum and my first mental response is to pick holes in it, no matter what it might be, while I find myself unable to compose any positive, coherent thoughts or concentrate on anything beyond the immediate tasks I absolutely can't avoid doing. Having come across extracts from it for some time, I've just bought an old copy of CS Lewis's The Four Loves and have been finding myself getting to the foot of a page and having very little idea what I've read: it's CS Lewis, for heaven's sake, not Hegel. I faff about in the study, and in the middle of one task think of another but then in the middle of looking something up or finding an envelope or whatever can't hold on to either long enough to move forward on them. Am I ageing, mentally declining, or just tired?

Church life is part of this. Swanvale Halt faces the same challenges as any small community of English Christians and there are innumerable suggestions for what a pastor might do about them, or about themselves, a kaleidoscope of answers to a welter of ways of characterising the problem. A lot of the time all I can do is think of objections. I don't actually know what to do. There are projects I begin, and then conclude that they aren't going to work after all, which I suppose is no bad thing but it's difficult to see them as more than a waste of time.

I haven't seen S.D. for a long while. I called him this morning to fix a meeting before Easter. 'I suppose I can fit you in,' he said wearily. I related one of my favourite stories, of how the future Fr Joe Williamson went as a young man straight back from World War One to visit the notoriously sarcastic Fr Montgomery-Campbell at St Saviour's Poplar, who listened to this stumbling, nervous Cockney lad on his doorstep describing how he felt God was calling him to be a priest, and replied with 'Really? How interesting,' and then shut the door. 'That's how it should be,' put in S.D., 'none of this nonsense about feelings.' He put me in the diary and to cheer me up told me a story about how he and a disabled friend got stuck in a lift at a reception in an Oxford college recently and had to climb/be lifted out with the aid of two chairs. They both thought it was a hoot while the college is mortified and launching an enquiry. Funnily enough, it did cheer me up a bit.

Nothing Worse Than ...

... and you can fill in your own conclusion. High on the list of rankling ecclesiastical impedimenta comes a wonky thurible. We don't actually use ours very often, but when we do it invariably misbehaves, coming open at inconvenient points and spraying ash. In the past I have blamed our head server but in fact I do no better with it, and the application of pliers a little while ago has made no difference. Having found a friendly metalworker not far away the time is ripe for him to have a look at it to see whether it really is as misaligned as it seems to be. Candlemas out of the way, we shouldn't be using it again till Easter morning, and by then it might be more biddable. Of course everyone is too terrified to polish it in case they tangle the chains. 

Three More Churches

The wind and rain has howled around the Rectory this afternoon and my mind turns to a group of churches recently seen. Coldharbour, Capel and Newdigate offer their own interesting features but not much in terms of the history of the Catholic movement in the area. Ockley, though, still has the Sacrament reserved and quite a lush sanctuary decorated in pinky marble. The reredos dates to 1873, but the marble work was done in 1917 in memory of a young man killed at the First Battle of Ypres: yet another example of World War One affecting the way churches looked and acted.

Not far away is St Mary Magdalene's, South Holmwood. This is a Victorian church with a longstanding Catholic tradition as witnessed, again, by its fixtures and fittings, although I happened to meet the incumbent who characterised the church now as 'closer to the candlestick than the flame'. The church guide says the 'reredos' was installed in 1887, but what they have in the church now looks a bit later to me. There seem to have been curtains on riddel-posts around the altar at some time to judge by the markings in the floor, and I wonder whether those nice little wooden angels you can see on the predella used to stand on top of them. The Lady Chapel and its aumbry has a more modernist austerity to it, dating as it does only from 1979.

 

Further up the road towards Dorking is North Holmwood, where we find not just reserved sacrament, but Stations of the Cross, three sanctuary lights, a statue of Our Lady, a Corpus Christi banner, and something I've never seen before - a text for the Sacrament of Reconciliation, kept in a small wall-mounted box. The mere presence of any of these things, of course, doesn't mean they are used now, but they must have been once. The sanctuary is remarkably unremarkable compared to Ockley and South Holmwood.

I'm not sure whether Ladies Anne and Mary Legge - daughters of the 3rd Earl of Dartmouth, it seems - who paid for North Holmwood in 1874, intended it as an outpost of Catholic Anglicanism, though one of its architect Rohde Hawkins's other churches, St Michael's Mount Dinham in Exeter, definitely is. However it's South Holmwood that provides us with the first 'ritualism conflict' I know about from Surrey. In 1901 Sir Leopold Heath of Kitlands fell out with Revd Gill the vicar over two silver candlesticks which Sir Leopold insisted should be removed from the altar. On Mr Gill's refusal to comply, Sir Leopold then began a door-to-door petition in the parish and made it an issue in the Vestry election: the vicar was compelled to concede, though three years later Sir Leopold was dead and it didn't take long for the candlesticks to reappear. Mind you, he might just not have liked the person who gave them to the church, Lady Laura Hampton of Oakdale house not far away. She wrote children's books - at least one of which was illustrated by Thomas Noyes Lewis, q.v. And there we had better end!

Just Not Making the Grade

On more than one occasion I’ve bought some of the merchandise from the wonderful people at The Caravan Gallery who specialise in memorabilia celebrating (or at least marking for public attention) the unsung Britain: one-eyed dogs, elderly couples having sandwiches next to an A-road, out-of-season funfairs, the obligatory dead fir tree in a pot almost all of us seem to have somewhere around provided there’s enough space. Jan Williams is one of the creative geniuses behind this vision, and, as it turns out, her uncle was a creative genius in his own way and she and partner Chris Teasdale have told all their subscribers about it.

Ron Gittins lived for most of his life in a flat in a Victorian house in Oxton near Liverpool. Over the course of decades he turned it into a fantasy which combined bits of Roman temple with Napoleonic-era Nelson shrine. He carted bags of cement back home to turn a fireplace into a colossal lion’s mouth, and had to take down the two Egyptian figures which flanked the outside door before they collapsed. He wouldn’t let his landlord in in case changes had to be made and he had to move out, which was why for the last couple of years of his life he had no heating, cooked on a camping stove and slept in a sleeping bag in the hall. Ron had violently Tory opinions, walked around Oxton in what appears to be a suit designed as a publicity prop for BP with a papier-mache figure of Cleopatra, which – as it appears covered up with a cloth in the photos in the Liverpool Echo – was probably not entirely decent, and filled his home not just with gloriously inept art but also piles of what to anyone else would be junk, but to him was the raw material of an imaginary world.

I am put in mind of other such wonderful defiers of reality:

Andrew Dracup, the Bridgnorth tunneller who extended his modest Railway Street cottage into an underground Roman temple;

William Lyttle, the ‘Mole Man of Hackney’, whose excavations beneath his house on Mortimer Street (now owned by Sue Webster) were stopped after the surrounding pavements began to collapse; and, of course,

Colin Armstrong, whose Forbidden Corner folly-park at Tupgill, Yorkshire, I have seen or I wouldn’t have believed it.

My modest folly-making pales into insignificance: I’m just too sensible to make a real contribution to the world, I fear.

Not for the first time, Considering Children

I had the sequence of the changes we'd made to our children's ministry at Swanvale Halt in my mind, but, when I looked back in preparation for a meeting on Monday evening, I'd forgotten how long it had taken. By 2014, though attendance at our Family Service was spiralling up regularly in the direction of 100 a fifth of whom were children, the Junior Church had dwindled to the point where there was often only one forlorn little lad there, so in February that year we suspended it, convinced it wasn't what people wanted any more. Mid-2016 saw us having another go, but offering Junior Church only on the 3rd Sunday each month so that the first-Sunday Family Service wasn't the only time families felt they could safely bring their children. Now, we find ourselves in possession of a Family Service to which no families have come for a long while, and a Junior Church which sometimes gets feasible figures but is hard going: you really need five or six children of similar abilities. When it works, it feels great, and when it doesn't, it's miserable for all concerned.

'Over the twenty years I've been here, we've tried virtually every configuration,' said Erica, 'and can't find a way to crack it.' We're not sure whether our Catholic-end worship puts people off - given the experience of Anglo-Catholic churches with very flourishing children's work, I suspect not, and that the experience of coming into a church full of grey and white heads in which you are virtually the only young family is far more influential on what people do. What people tell me is that they'll choose a church where they feel their children will be catered for, whatever it is, over their own liturgical preferences. The Roman Catholic congregation we share the building with has a well-supported Junior Church which they run every week, led by one member of the congregation but with parent helpers. Marion our curate is convinced that we really have to offer children's provision more often in order to build up support - but can we manage it? Can we drum up enough assistance to get that far? We're also thinking about ways of including children in the liturgy, and beefing up the music so they could be part of the choir (needs money, that). 

My friend Fr Thesis shared pictures on LiberFaciorum of him surrounded by children for the Candlemas mass at his church. He wore a biretta, gold cope and a crossed stole, and his deacon and subdeacon were keeping control of their maniples. There were candles (obviously), incense, aspersed water, and loads of youngsters with their families. He told me:

We definitely benefit from having an excellent parish school, that can’t be denied. However, above and beyond the detail of all the various theories and strategies one can adopt, I think the most important thing is a question of culture. Do kids feel welcomed and included and at home in church? I think that makes the biggest difference and has to underpin whatever projects and plans you adopt. I hope that’s the most significant thing we’ve managed to achieve at all levels of what we do. I rarely if ever hear moaning about children at St Benet’s and try to exemplify that in my own attitude. 

And crucially, I think:

Also - kids don’t want rubbish religion. They like the proper thing and don’t want to be talked down to. Religion should be fundamentally different from school and clubs and all the other things they do.

Perhaps we need more liturgy rather than less!

Transition Period

It is absolutely true that the UK is different, spiritually, from the country that it was before the EU referendum – but how, exactly, beyond the strictly practical matters of trade and migration, is harder to gauge. Ethnic minorities have apparently experienced more racism; and yet public attitudes to immigration and race appear to be more liberal than ever before. Leaving the EU can be described as the UK turning away from a wider world, or towards one, depending on your initial prejudices. Both things can be true. There has been a dreadful process of polarisation through the last three years of misjudgements and mistakes, a process promoted and endorsed by the Conservative Party in its own interests since Mrs May’s disgraceful crack about ‘citizens of nowhere’, and it’s uncorked an emboldened substrate of racism and viciousness which was successfully held down since the late 1970s; but paradoxically it’s also been crowned by a Tory cabinet which is more racially diverse than any in British history (of course possessing a non-white skin doesn’t stop you being a reprehensible individual). The upsurge in racial hate (or, rather, in the willingness to express it) is perhaps not the rise of a cultural wave, but the desperate cry of a nationalism gurgling down the plughole of time. Who knows, yet?

The polarisation has, as these things usually do, enabled different points of view to discover themselves. Before the Referendum I never heard anyone, even the most liberal and internationalist of my friends, arguing that the European Union was the crowning expression of everything good and noble in the human spirit; but that’s it then became. That blue-and-yellow flag developed into a symbol of what it meant to be modern, outward-looking, and generous of heart, even though before the Referendum the chasm between the EU’s lofty humanist claims and what it actually did made the 'Ode to Joy' something of a mournful joke: go on, sing it even now to the erstwhile Syriza voters in Greece whose loved-ones were dying as a result of EU-imposed austerity a few short years ago. Beyond a relatively small number of Euro-enthusiasts, the kind of people I occasionally met in the Liberal Democrats many years back, most liberal-minded British voters only realised that the EU was the core of their sense of self once the country had decided to leave it: no wonder they felt so bereft and angry.

I was caught up in that development, just like everyone else. A Eurosceptic since as long as I thought about it, I found myself absolutely unable to vote Leave as the time approached: I feared disruption to international order, and couldn’t abide finding myself on the same side as the xenophobes and nationalists promoting it, whatever I might have thought in the past. I decided with just a few days to go. The separation was salutary, like all facing-up to the truth.

What’s happened since has certainly made some things clearer. Brexit has been like cold water poured on the hot rocks of the UK constitution. The political system we have has positively encouraged the polarisation of the post-Referendum landscape, making discussion and compromise even less likely than it already was. The executive has hid behind the Crown and strictly political decisions have been forced into the courts. The centralisation of power in the UK – only slightly mitigated by the changes brought in by the last Labour governments – fits into the general winner-takes-all mentality that shapes our whole political life: if you get Westminster, you get everything. And in a general election it doesn’t even have to be winner takes all: yet again we have a Government rewarded by the electoral system with an exaggerated Parliamentary majority on the basis of a minority of the vote. It’s not just unfair, it’s not just unrepresentative, it distorts the whole way we think about ourselves. We’re not a mature democracy at all, because we clearly think that ‘democracy’ means not discussion, compromise and respect for minorities, but dictatorship of the majority, even if that majority might be won by a single vote, and often not that. It all needs to go, and I wasn’t as definite about that before.

Alongside the civilisation-smashing potential of climate change, alongside the need to secure our polity against the minority of bigots who might push it in a malign direction, striving to rejoin the EU looks otiose and I have despaired a bit at the tendency of some of my friends to commit themselves to trying. That battle is done, surely. But perhaps the starry banner has something to offer still: perhaps, paradoxically divested of the actual institution it belongs to, it could indeed stand for the kind of Britain we want to be, and which it isn’t yet. Progress needs a symbol, and it doesn’t yet have one.

Post Op the Second

Just now I find myself in the same position I did in March 2018 - recovering from a hernia operation. I suspected ever since I had the first repair that a second on the other side would be needed at some point but it took a while before it became apparent enough for the medical profession to agree. It's only the second day so far, and unsurprisingly I am quite sore and moving around very gingerly. 

So far, so much like last time. In fact it feels rather as though I am doing a bit better, less afflicted by painful indigestion and shiveriness than two years ago, and of course the graphic I've attached to this post is misleading because I've not been sewn up in traditional fashion but, as before, glued ('dissolvable sutures', they call them). But the differences are striking too. My nice, attentive surgeon hasn't supplied my wounds with dressings which is slightly worrying though I suppose must be right. When the nurse came to wheel me off and found that I hadn't got any surgical stockings on, he had to go and check what the drill would be, as 'some surgeons don't believe in them.' Oh. Nor have I had any laxatives issued as I was before, and have had to toddle carefully down the hill and get some (a member of the congregation accosted me and gave me a lift home, which I took as providential). 

One of my convalescence books is Alex Bremner's Ecclesiology Abroad, published in 2012 by the Victorian Society. In its pages I have discovered how the first Roman Catholic bishop of Tasmania, Robert Willson, was an ardent supporter of Pugin and, in contrast to Pugin's Catholic patrons in the home country, swallowed completely the great architect's line that the only really permissible form of liturgy was the Sarum Rite, and the only buildings that could house it were 14th-century Gothic ones; Anglican church-builders in New Zealand were more flexible. Meanwhile, the oldest Anglican diocese outside England and Wales, Nova Scotia, was the scene of conflict as Bishop no.4, Hibbert Binney, tried to bend his recalcitrant clergy in the direction of the Tractarianism he'd absorbed at Oxford, with new churches built according to proper Ecclesiological principles. 

But the greatest surprise came from South Africa where the first Bishop of Cape Colony, Robert Gray, also a sound High Churchman, brought with him his wife Sophy who became not just effectively his diocesan secretary but also architect - and how many other woman Gothic Revival architects have you heard of? She designed about fifty Anglican churches across the Cape, and even St Mark's Cathedral, George - not a big cathedral, admittedly, but a cathedral nonetheless. My time hors de combat has not been wasted, just for that!