Prayers at the Hour

‘I think that clock is fast’, observed the Chief Executive as he cast his eye across the Council chamber, and so it was – by about five minutes. ‘Someone’s been overzealous winding it’, suggested one of the councillors.  I couldn’t help Brian Cant’s voice running through my mind: ‘Here is the clock, the Trumpton clock, telling the time, never too quickly, never too slowly …’

The reason I was there, and waiting for 6pm to arrive, was that I was leading prayers before the full council meeting of the Borough, an authority which includes Hornington and a couple of other towns and the villages in between them. Paula, still technically one of our Pastoral Assistants, is Mayor this year, having been Mayor of this or that authority on several occasions, including stepping in one year when the sitting Mayor of Hornington had to stop sitting and go to prison. She is perhaps unusual in being a Christian of progressive political opinions in public life, and a definite supporter of the principle of the Council being prayed for when it meets.

Now this has been an area of some controversy in the past. I’m not sure about the Borough, but Hornington Town Council went through a period when prayers were deliberately not being offered, one of the rare occasions when Paula found herself on the same side as the Conservative councillors. It threatened to become a little skirmish in the culture wars, until Paula became Mayor again and offered the compromise that prayers would be offered before the Council meeting was formally opened, giving councillors who didn’t want to be present the chance not to be, and to enter the chamber only once prayers were finished. 

The whole issue seems to have calmed down since then. Not all the current councillors are Christians by any means, including the present Mayor of Hornington (also a Borough Councillor – I hope you’re keeping up at the back, there), as evidenced by his own civic service back in June. I noticed that none of the elected members availed themselves of the opportunity not to be present as I offered their deliberations and decisions to the Lord. I also note, consulting the Youtube video recording the meeting, that the proceedings went on until twenty to nine, so I’m glad I wasn’t obliged to listen to the debate as the councillors had to listen to me ...

Taking Centre Stage

'Come to the Year Two nativity' advised the head teacher at the Infants School, 'They're more likely to have got it together'. And so they had. I spotted all the attenders at our after-school club, including Billie ('girl Billie' as she points out when there might be confusion) who was the most animated star - a starring star, not just the stellar chorus - I've ever seen; and Miriam, the oldest child in the school who sometimes looks remarkably out-of-place when stood against some of her tinier classmates, and who carried off the Angel Gabriel with RADA applomb. It was, we all agreed, the best show you'll see this Christmas.

I can remember nothing of the nativity plays of my own childhood. In contrast to the situation now, when school events are virtually illuminated by the light of phones held aloft by parents recording the occasion,  in our own family archive there are just three relevant images, all from the same event in 1975. I'm invisible in every one, and in fact not much can be seen at all, the only identifiable person being the teacher whose name I forget and who looked a bit like Princess Anne. That initial failure was probably why my mum didn't bother trying to take photographs again. I rather envy Billie, Miriam and the others their apparently easy enjoyment of taking the limelight and dancing about the stage: certainly by the time my memories really begin in junior school I was so atrociously self-conscious any movement was torment. The role I was best suited for was the Magic Mirror in a production of Snow White when I could read my lines completely unseen behind a cardboard screen!

Better Than Feared

The world looked less than inviting through the window of the café opposite the church this morning: drizzly and chilly, with worse threatened for later in the morning. It was one of those days when there is a coffee morning at the church and as well as my parish coffee over the road I feel it would be rude not to pop back for tea and, this morning, inevitably a mince pie, with such of the congregation as may be present. I'd waited weeks and weeks for Rightmove to update the information on properties in the area that have changed hands: the last update was in September, but now it had, I was faced with inclement conditions for visiting. Would anyone welcome me arriving unexpectedly on their doorstep? Still, I didn't want the backlog to build up. I steeled myself to head out. The weather, in fact, didn't look too bad.

As often happens, my reluctance to set about this self-imposed task is balanced by the pleasure of how it turns out. Today I met an older couple who've moved into the village and already attend an Anglican church in Guildford of moderate churchmanship, so I can't complain too much about that; a vicar's daughter who asked about our Christmas services; a completely bemused young woman; a recently divorced lady whose doorstep I arrived at hard on the heels of an Amazon delivery fellow who rang her bell and ran away leaving me to hand over the parcel; and a former member of the congregation who I haven't spoken to for ages, and who drifted away after their own marriage broke down, and now has a new home with a new partner. Of their daughters (both former Junior Church members when we had such a thing) the elder is now a teaching assistant at a special needs school, while the younger is studying Fine Art at university. Next door to them is a house I visited on my last 'rounds', and found another family I already knew and whose children used to be Messy Church regulars.

Wasn't that worth doing? I think so, and it barely rained at all. 

(The photo is from my day-off walk around Frensham Little Pond, excitingly bleak!)

Cast of Thousands

You can look back through these posts and check the previous times we've hosted the ATC enrolments. On this occasion it all went off more or less perfectly, even though there were no fewer than 23 new recruits to be sworn in. One of the NCOs put them all in alphabetical order and whispered their names to me as I went along the row shaking their hands. I didn't need to do that, but I think that it's a good gesture to make - a formal expression of welcome. This time the conversations withe relatives included questions about what being a 'chaplain' meant and what my hat is called, and you know the answer to that query if not the first.

Hills of the North

I would like to have more photos of services and other church events to pop onto social media, but it's actually quite hard to arrange unless (like some churches I know) you've got someone handy to do it. We haven't! On Sunday evening I grabbed a blurry shot of the procession out of the church during the Service of Light, the Advent Sunday liturgy of carols and readings whose major distinctive element is the lighting of candles and carrying them out of the church and round to the hall at the end. It felt somewhat furtive and undignified but at least I had something to share.

When I came to Swanvale Halt the Service of Light seemed unusual, and I was told my predecessor in the 1980s had borrowed the idea from Salisbury Cathedral; but I've become more aware that Advent carol services of different kinds have been common for a long time, even if I'd never encountered them at my previous churches. I wonder if they've increased in popularity (or at least frequency) as a way of trying to preserve the distinctiveness of Advent at the same time as churches gave in to social expectation and moved their Christmas carol services, typically, to the Sunday before Christmas from the one after, where they used to be until about the early 1970s.

'Hills of the North' was our last carol on Sunday. We had to sing it twice as the congregation took so long to make it round to the hall, but it was none the worse for that.

Changing Times

Keeping with the principals of theological colleges, Fr Robin Ward of Staggers lately posted a link to this video of Pope John XXIII being carried to St Peter's in Rome for the inaugural mass at the start of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. What a glimpse into a long-past world. John's successor Paul VI was also borne aloft on the sedia gestatoria and fanned with ostrich feathers on ceremonial occasions with visibly less and less enthusiasm, until John Paul I refused to use them, only being persuaded to be carried on the sedia by the argument that people needed to see him, provided he could dispense with the rest of the regalia and just wear a plain white cassock. John Paul II got rid of it entirely and you simply can't imagine a pope using it again. 

But why can't you? Benedict XVI revived lots of bits and pieces of old papal kit that his two predecessors had dispensed with (including things John Paul II had gradually discarded over the course of his long reign). Here, he can be seen wearing Pope John's mitre and mantum, visible in the video from 1962 - except that the mantum has been shortened and reduced to the dimensions of an ordinary cope. Lots of trad-Roman Catholics (and the Anglo variety, too) would be very excited to think it might all make a comeback one day. No, this kind of prelatical ceremony is inconceivable now because it belongs to a version of religion that Christians have moved away from, and it's worth thinking about what is going on here, in emotional terms.

When I first saw the film, I, even I, pursed my lips in a slightly Protestant way and found myself wondering where Jesus might be in it all, what he would make of such a spectacle if he was among those watching crowds. The interesting retort to that is that this is Good Pope John being carried through the throngs flanked by ostrich feathers and surrounded by men in Renaissance uniforms: Angelo Roncalli, the peasants' son who became pontiff, and who we know was one of the humblest and holiest souls ever to occupy the throne of St Peter. He's doing it because it's part of the job. His jewelled mitre is uncomfortably rammed down on his head making his ears poke out; he's tired and even after mass has to go through the business of having his gloved hand kissed by a succession of bishops and heads of religious orders: for each of them it's a special encounter, but for him it's one in a long, long chain of bowed heads. The pomp itself is not the issue. 

The point to remember is that there's nothing religious about the grand spectacle of the papal procession, whatever might have happened in St Peter's afterwards. Before the age of film or photography, only those present would have had any idea of its existence: the audience for such an event were the people of Rome, watching their head of state in his pomp. It's essentially monarchical. If there was any kind of Christian element, it would have been the gestures of blessing His Holiness made to those on the ground. But after the Papal States were lost (around the same time, coincidentally, that it became possible to transmit images of such ceremonies around the world) it became something else - a way of declaring and dramatising Catholic identity. One poster on LiberFaciorum commented on the film 'This was spectacle - on the scale of Cecil B DeMille when I was little - 6th grade I think. It was awesome and edifying - the school sisters were filled with anticipation - we prayed for the Council - it was epic for me'.

Certainly this is what it looks like from the video; but as in any such occasion it might feel different to experience it in person. Noise, difficulty in seeing what's happening, discomfort of various sorts, indigestion distracting you from the thoughts and reflections you're supposed to have: we're well versed in the distance between image and reality now, and are a bit wry about it. 

Perhaps this why we've become very unused to expressing our sense of self-hood, even when it involves being part of a wider group, through this kind of grand spectacle. It's not just a matter of taste, or even the individualism which leads us to prefer the small and local. At least partly, it's because we know, deep down, that it doesn't really work.  

Setting Goals in Oxford

Oxford was wintry yesterday when I arrived (despite the best efforts of the rail network completely thrown into chaos by a points failure at Slough) to fill in the gaps in my lists of Surrey clergy with a visit to the ranks of Crockford's and the Clergy List on the shelves of the Bodleian. I also wanted to look up Old Cornwall, the magazine of the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies, to pursue accounts of the restoration of holy wells, which meant my first-ever visit to the Taylorian Library. I was shown to the farthest recesses of the basement where there was a tiny, tiny desk at the end of a row of rolling shelves. 'I could give you directions', said the thoughtful young woman at the enquiry desk, 'but they'd be too complicated to remember'. I think she just wanted a break. On my way out I looked through a doorway and saw a bust of Voltaire seasonally-decorated.

I made my way up the Banbury Road to Wycliffe Hall to see the Principal, Michael Lloyd, who was my doctrine tutor at St Stephen's House. What's happening at Wickers these days, I asked? 'It's interesting, we have quite a number of students who regularly worship at Pusey House', said Michael, 'so we're working out how to negotiate that without losing the basic Evangelical nature of the college.'

'Our current ambition is to help renew the Church of England's engagement with society on an intellectual level - trying to do something about its current habit of anti-intellectualism. We want to encourage Christian academics who work in different fields, not just theology. Strangely though there's a lot of talk about the conflict of religion and science, there are lots of Christian physicists and chemists, but hardly anyone working in English literature or sociology. It impoverishes the Christian mind. We have a writer-in-residence here: I'd like to have an artist-in-residence, a musician, a film-maker. The Church has spent too long just talking to itself, so it's no wonder the rest of society ignores us.'

'I'm so pleased to hear that', I said, 'it's been something I've complained about for years (to myself) - that we talk all the time about engagement with the world but don't do it. All we seem to do is shout at it.'

'Yes', went on Michael, 'we're calling it "The Renaissance of Christian Intellectual Life".

'I don't know what we'll do next year.'