Holy Week and its Variations

Fr Thesis points us all towards a series of talks Dr Robin ward at our old alma mater St Stephen’s House, Oxford, has been giving over recent days about the development of the liturgies of Holy week, and good value they are too if you like that kind of thing (I’m not surprised Dr ward’s audience in the House Chapel is not a large one: even when I and Fr Thesis were there, one would have to be extraordinarily dedicated to attend the most interesting of talks if you didn’t actually have to). The Father Principal points out that what we tend to think of as extremely venerable ceremonies are in fact often not that old at all (‘going all the way back to 1956’) and have been moved around, reorganised according to different assumptions, and altered to make different points on many occasions before reaching the forms we are familiar with now, either in Anglican Common worship or in the Roman Rite. What a Christian in late-medieval England would have been used to doing was quite different from either the pre-1955 Roman ceremonies or the current ones.

A few days ago, Marion, our former curate, came back to Swanvale Halt for a memorial service and found me at the café opposite the church to snatch a couple of minutes’ conversation. She is now part of a parish in Devon, and told me how good it felt to look through the door of our church ‘where it’s all tidy and orderly’. Her current incumbent has a tendency ‘to make up liturgy as they go along – it’s never the same two times running’.

I can’t find any evidence that I have talked about this before, so I will take this Holy week occasion to admit that, despite my bias against home-made liturgy, I have made up at least two things myself. The first comes on Ascension Day. During Eastertide, the Paschal Candle, the big one carried into church in the darkness of Easter morning to signify the resurrected light of Christ, sits beside the altar, but when Eastertide is over it only comes out for baptisms, and for funerals if you are so inclined. Here there is an ambiguity. Under the modern Roman Rite, the Candle moves to the Baptistery on Pentecost Day; but in the old version it was taken away at the end of Mass on Ascension Day, and not used again until the blessing of the font at the Vigil of Pentecost. One year at Lamford I and Il Rettore had a discussion about this and neither of us could remember for sure which it should be. We decided to move the Candle on Ascension Day, as it made more symbolic sense: Jesus has now returned to heaven and we await the coming of the Spirit. So after communion at the Ascension Day mass and before the final blessing he and I took the Paschal Candle to the back of the church and placed it on its stand beside the font. Once installed at Swanvale Halt I felt something could be made of this and devised a little chant based on the words of Psalm 47 and lifting the first few notes shamelessly from Finzi’s anthem 'God is Gone Up', to accompany the motion. Gratifyingly in Ceremonies of the Liturgical Year I see that Mgr Peter Elliott also suggests transferring the Candle in procession to the final hymn or an appropriate chant, and includes a form for doing so, even though it’s not an official part of the Roman liturgy. Great minds and all that.

The other extra I do at Swanvale Halt will come tomorrow, on Good Friday. When I first became interested in all this as a layperson, I discovered the medieval custom of ‘burying’ the Host at the end of the services of Good Friday, in the Easter Sepulchre many churches had then or some other place, and then ‘resurrecting’ it to great joy and celebration on Easter Day: I also realised this was basically incompatible with the emphasis on the entry of the light which is the focus of the ancient, and the modern, Easter Vigil. Now my predecessor at Swanvale Halt had celebrated Good Friday with a rather formless service including poetry and interaction but no communion or Passion narrative, and I brought back something more like the version of the liturgy I’d known at Lamford. But after communion, you still need some hosts to reserve in case they’re needed, even during the Triduum. There they are on the stripped altar; what to do with them? Here we have two aumbries, the one in the Lady Chapel where the Sacrament is normally reserved, and a secondary one in the north aisle where we keep the oils. I decided to return the remaining Hosts not to the first aumbry whence they’d been brought, but the second, wrapping the ciborium in the corporal that had been spread on the altar for communion. It was a bit like burying the Host in the Easter Sepulchre as medieval Christians would have done, the burial of Jesus being something our modern rites miss out. So the next time I did it, I added some texts, taken from the miserable Psalm 88 (Diamanda Galás’s favourite) and the Troparion of the Burial from the Orthodox liturgy: words put into the mouth of Joseph of Arimathea to address Pilate, ‘Give me that stranger, who all his life had walked as a stranger …’.

I like to think that these two little observances, probably without any parallel across the Church of England, aren’t indulgent stuff I have made up for the sake of making a point, but very practical customs that arise from the existing liturgy and the form of our church building. At least that is what I will tell the bishop, not that he would ever be that interested! 

Crossing the Boundaries

My sister-in-the-Spirit Cylene has told me they don’t want to be that any more – not because there is a problem between us, but because their dissatisfaction with being female has reached the point where it can only be resolved by not being that. Cylene has been asking us to use nonbinary pronouns for a while, but this is a step further, a determination eventually to move away from a female physical identity, however that may pan out. For me, having known them for nearly 13 years and having framed my sense of who the person I think of as my best friend around them being a woman, it will mean a bit of recalibration. For my own part (as I’ve detailed before) I have never really identified that much with maleness; though that’s the hand that life has dealt me and I’m perfectly content playing it, all my instinctive sympathies are with the female, and the idea of anyone wanting to become male is very alien. But if that’s what Cylene needs to do to achieve some resolution and peace, it’s their life, not mine. I can sense the excitement as they start to settle their new name, even via text message.

In my previous posts on gender politics here and here, I tried to think through my continued belief that sexual difference exists on some level, a belief which the Christian Church does seem committed to, even if we find it hard to distinguish how much is performative and what might be rooted in biology. I continue to consider it. Conservative Christians (and remember, Mr Putin presents himself as one) point to the Creation order to insist that any suggestion that gender has a performative element and people might change that aspect of themselves is wrong and damaging: ‘God created the adam: in his own image he created him; male and female created he them’. In fact this is a much more ambiguous statement than it first appears. It seems to suggest that the adam, the primeval human, is ungendered, and gender comes in as a secondary consideration. But God is beyond binary gender, and both sexes must embody his image, rather than one more than the other. What if, I found myself thinking, this meant that what God creates here is not individuals with a tightly bounded and defined binary gender identity, but maleness and femaleness both of which discrete individuals might partake of? The language doesn't reveal that, but that’s not surprising. I even began to wonder about Jesus: could he perhaps not be as complicatedly male as we are used to thinking? The earliest images of him, in the Roman Catacombs and the Hinton St Mary mosaic from Dorset, show him as a short-haired, clean-shaven Roman in a toga; it isn’t until the later 4^th century that a beard appears on him. Now of course early Christian art depicted all Biblical figures, from Moses to the Magi to St Paul, as short-haired, clean-shaven Romans in togas: the point is not that those images are in any way accurate, but rather that the picture of Jesus we might have in our imagination is a construct, based on assumptions rather than descriptions. At no point do the Biblical texts give us so much as a hint of his appearance. We can make it up. What if the Incarnate word was intersex – something among the great variety of conditions that term can mean? Could he even be a better representative of all humanity if he had been? Of course I am not saying this is the case (I don’t think we could ever know), only that it is possible to imagine it.

Still, I know people who are increasingly committed to the idea that gender doesn’t exist at all: this is not the line Cylene takes, nor is it something the Church can, I think, go along with. I’ve done some thinking about what the spiritual significance of sexual difference might be in previous posts, but as time goes on I wonder more about the performative and socially-determined elements of gender identity, especially if I am on to something that what God creates is a pair of gender poles and not individuals with bounded, settled identities. If this vital organising structure of human identity and relationships is to an extent socially-negotiated, that makes us dependent on each other. Thinking what there is to question when someone has concerns about their gender identity, Christians might want to suggest that genuine and lasting peace isn’t to be found when we turn inward in an attempt to discover and settle who we truly are, but when we seek our identity in the objective, external things we are committed to; when we look beyond ourselves. This applies more broadly than matters of sex and gender, too. They might want to point attention away from individuality, which is a liquid and unsettled thing, towards God. As in everything, that which leads away from God is to be avoided; that which leads towards him, to be followed. Recognising gender as to an extent socially-determined means that our identity in this area isn’t a thing inside us, bounded and discrete, which we then express: it is something we develop in negotiation with those around us and their understanding of us. God has made us radically dependent on one another as a result, not sovereign individuals, but collaborators in a work, players in a common game. 

Spawn of Different Kinds

It is good to be able to send out a report on the garden which doesn't involve unpleasant death. Trying to get a good view of one of the fish who seems to have been in the wars yet again - it's the one who has been in and out of the quarantine tank with illness and then apparently savaged by something-or-other more than once, why it's always him who gets damaged I'm not sure - I spotted some unexpected new arrivals. There is one frog in this composite photo, but in fact two are present; and then there are two new fish! The pale one is very, very tiny, barely an inch in length, while the black one is perhaps a little less than twice that size. How long have they been there? I only noticed the adults spawning in the Spring a year ago, but can the pale one really be as much as a year old? Given the disparity in their sizes, can the large one be as much as two years in age, and been lurking in the murk of the pond all that time? I would have thought that the more likely explanation is that the adults spawned early one morning when I didn't notice, and these fish are the result of a Spring and a Summer round of spawning. Either way, they've done pretty well to get this far, surviving in a relatively small pond with four adults rampaging around. Goldfish are very bad parents, and happily gobble up their own little fry when they catch them. Apparently most small goldfish go through a black stage before they turn orange, but the only other fish I've ever seen spawned in the pond didn't - it stayed pale, like the little one in this picture, and never developed much pigment.

It's often said that goldfish grow to fit their numbers and environment, which is sort-of true, but they shouldn't - they have a natural size and only fail to achieve it if they're constrained, meaning they're not very happy. The ones I have ought to get to about seven inches in length, and the older among them have, but if I want to keep these two as well, I may have to get a bigger pond!

Carrying Candles

'It's the candle that holds the boy', Gordon our head server is fond of saying, referring to the bygone days - at least for us - when Anglo-Catholic churches would field phalanxes of youthful acolytes, given something to do as a way of keeping them on board with the business of church. In this photo Jack has just blown his candle out as I tried to take a snap of him, his sister Ruby, and Polly who had been deputed to carry the cross. As you know, I endlessly scratch my head trying to think of ways of getting the children we have contact with engaged with Church life in a way that might actually lead to some sort of development of faith.  In the past we've had 'family communion' services where children who might turn up are allocated the jobs grown-ups would normally do, but as the position of Mothering Sunday meant swapping the eucharist we would usually have celebrated on March 27th to April 3rd instead, I thought I would try to get some of our children to act as servers by getting them to commit in advance. It was a bit of a risk but went fine in the end, the youngsters being ably marshalled by Gordon and Jean the Sacristan to do their bits and they seem even to have enjoyed it, which was the idea. we would have had a fourth child had not illness struck his family at the crucial moment. I think Pentecost might be a good time to try this again. That's a good complicated service!

Somewhere Towards the End

It must be well over a year since I last saw Jill. That was at her previous care home, an unsatisfactory encounter in a stuffy and hot visiting room, unsure what she was taking in: she’s quite hard of hearing. A stay in hospital has meant a move to a more nursing-focused home and she is now ‘holding on’, as they say. But, half-expecting as I was to find her completely unconscious, in fact she was able to take communion – a sip of watered-down wine with a fragment of the Host in it – and ask me for some water. She said something about ‘church’, but I couldn’t catch what it was. She was probably apologising for not being able to come.

Jill has been a member of the congregation for many years so our meeting – surely our last – was able to follow a set form, the set form for the Last Rites, of confession, absolution, anointing and communion. Later in the day I went to a different care home (the one Jill used to live in, in fact) to see Celia, and Celia not being a believer meant there was nothing to shape the encounter. Celia has no family and has outlived all her friends apart from Andrea, a member of the church who along with a solicitor has been looking after Celia’s interests in recent years - and according to Andrea the solicitor doesn’t actually do much. Andrea came to my door in some agitation to tell me Celia was almost certainly dying and desperately wanted someone to talk to who wasn’t just the carers, who don’t really want to talk much about death in any case. Happily I had some time in the evening so after Evening Prayer I was able to go over, show my covid test strip from the morning, don a mask and gloves and visit Celia in her room. We ended up talking for about an hour. This stage in her life is turning out to be a struggle – ‘I never thought this would happen to me’ – but the things I would normally say to a Christian in the same circumstances would have been no help, so we spoke about the mysteries of life and death in a more general way, about her life and feelings. Celia’s bookshelf included Shelley, Keats, and Shakespeare, and, perhaps more unusually, Alice in wonderland and wG Hoskins’s The Making of the English Landscape, that pioneering work of local history, so we could discuss those things too. She told me how beautiful growing up by the sea in Lancashire had been. I don’t know whether Celia’s path out of this life was made any smoother or more bearable by our talk, but I think I would have welcomed it had I been her. I hope I did it right.

This felt like proper vicar-ing compared to a lot of the things I do, so I was grateful for the encounters, quite apart from what my parishioners may have felt. If we are able to in the circumstances in which we find ourselves, a final gathering-together of our lives before we let them go is a wonderful thing, and just as wonderful to take part in it.

Canterbury

It was Lady Wildwood's suggestion that a group of us go to Canterbury on Saturday. I managed to squeeze all my necessary work either side of the date and after a couple of tasks set off. It was a cold but bright day and I was very glad of the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the Cathedral for the first time since 1986, and my friends after a bit less time.

The town of Canterbury is crying 'Slava Ukraini' along with everyone else.

I had forgotten the wonder of the Cathedral. I think its special quality lies in the dramatic disjuncture between the nave and the earlier quire, the monks' part of the church, built in a different style - the earliest Gothic architecture in England - and the fact that the crypt raises the east end up on a far higher level than the nave, so going through the tower arch and then the pulpitum is like entering a different building. It means that you can't see the whole Cathedral in one vista, and makes the layout complex, meaning it takes a bit of exploring; you can't make a simple circuit as you can in most cathedrals. 

There are interesting details everywhere. Inside the Deans' Chapel is

the macabre tomb of Dean Fotherby, carved as a charnel:

The Throne of St Augustine is deservedly charismatic, but I have never read about the Zodiac laid into the floor just to its east, in the foreground in this picture:

There is the Black Prince's aerodynamic armour. No wonder he was invincible:

St Thomas Becket's Well in the Crypt is a bit underwhelming, but I was glad to find it. It's supposedly under the round slab visible here:

I found one unmistakable image of St Catherine, in the windows of St Edward the Confessor's chapel, and another probable one, defaced (literally) on the tomb of Cardinal Morton: I think that must be the remains of the Emperor Maxentius at her feet.

The others had come by train, while I'd driven, so after I left them I popped to see St Augustine's Conduit on the east side of the city. It captured the water of a number of notable springs for the use of the Abbey not far away, though now it could do with a bit of a tidy. It also afforded me a lovely last image of the Cathedral against the setting sun.

Garden Massacres

Pass this post by, if you are of a squeamish disposition!

Last year I realised my box hedges were under attack from box moth caterpillar. I have tried spraying them with supposedly eco-friendly anti-bug stuff but there is no sign that this particular liquid has that much effect on them. I experimented by taking a caterpillar away and spraying it in a pot: it died, but I suspect that it may have drowned rather than suffered any chemical effects.

A gardening website suggests ‘physical removal’ is the only way forward: you take the caterpillars away, and dispose of them. I quickly decided that physical removal, putting the insects into a bucket and, I don’t know, pouring boiling water on them, would be a bit of a waste of time, and I am afraid I have taken to squidging them in situ. If they have to die, squidging is probably quicker and more humane than the chemical or boiling options, and it helps that they don’t get bigger than about 15mm long. They are not hard to spot, although I rarely see them out and about, as they mainly stay secluded in their little webby shelters made by fastening leaves together. I don’t know why they bother doing this until they are ready to pupate, as one of the frustrating things about box moth caterpillar is that they have no natural predators: their green-and-black bodies are full of toxins which make the birds avoid them, when they would otherwise benefit greatly from the easy-to-eat protein crawling everywhere across the hedges. Possibly the funky smell that arises from crushed caterpillars gives a clue to their unpalatability. There would be enough to feed quite a few hungry birds.

It's all very unpleasant and not something I really like to admit doing; perhaps I rightly ought to let the caterpillars reduce my box hedges to bare sticks, which they will happily do if allowed. I do apologise to God, or nature, before beginning a few minutes’ murderous work over a lunchtime. At least, given the caterpillar numbers, I will not be stuck for a garden job for some time to come.