All In the Wording

It is, of course, a privilege to host the Civic Service for the new Mayor of Hornington. Peter is a member of the congregation and it was no surprise that he wanted to come here for the event. The service happens to be his birthday as well as being Father's Day (not that that's a specifically Christian observance, and I wonder why we didn't come up with a churchy version as we did with the modern Mother's Day), and he had ideas over what he wanted to happen. Which basically meant keeping it simple - a reading, a few hymns chosen by chaps from the area. The reading is from Psalm 103: 'as a father is tender with his children, so is the Lord merciful towards those that fear him'. 'Can we change fear to love?' asked Peter. Well, no, we can't, I said: Hebrew was never my subject but whatever that word is it won't equate to 'love' no matter what you do to it. 'Those who hold him in awe' might be an acceptable alternative if you find 'fear' a bit jarring. 

Given that Peter has been in and around the Church for the whole of his life it did make me wonder what people in our congregations actually think about the Scriptures. The only reason for reading these ancient texts publicly is that we feel they represent God, however we might understand that. Even if (as I do) we accept that the texts come through human experience and occasionally reflect human fallibility, as when clear errors of recollection or transmission creep in, we also recognise that behind them there is both divine activity, and the Church's settled consensus that they represent divine activity. And yet the possibility arises that we might change a word to something entirely unrelated because we find it a bit awkward, as though it had the same status as something in the English Hymnal, as though its ultimate author was JM Neale rather than God. I suppose the fact that Peter asked me does suggest that he thought I might say no. He is a politician, after all. 

Clearout

My computer, like most people’s I suspect, is clogged with irrelevant stuff. In the time I’ve been at Swanvale Halt I’ve changed laptop three times and have meekly and unthinkingly copied everything across from one to another. Now I’ve decided to dispose of everything that doesn’t seem useful – all the duplicated photos, the outdated downloaded documents, the superceded liturgies, the items that are far better off on the church office computer than mine – and the sermons.

I preach a great deal, on average three times a week, perhaps (at least that seems like a great deal to me, perhaps it’s not). It’s probably, in fact, my major form of creative output. When I started out at Lambourne I used to write everything out longhand, but when I arrived at Swanvale Halt this seemed too onerous to keep up and for 8am and midweek Masses I got into the habit of scribbling notes and then preaching from them. But when we reopened after the first Covid lockdown I began preaching from a brief outline as part of the attempt to be as brief as possible. I preferred it: it felt more lively, if less polished. It’s not a disaster if I stumble in my search for the right word (as I often do), but I have to steer clear of the hazardous waters of repetitious waffle and be very clear how the sermon is going to end! For one-off occasions – funerals, weddings, and special events – I still write everything out. But there were between four and five hundred written sermon texts remaining on the machine.

I felt a bit of a pang deleting them, as I suppose they represent a significant part of my creative energy, but the fact is that I have never, ever looked back at a single one of them. What would be the point in keeping them? Once upon a time clergy were in the habit of publishing books of sermons, but unless you are John Donne this would seem to be a decidedly otiose activity in this day and age. I remember once picking up a book of ‘Best Sermons of All Time’ and turning to the offering from the mighty Charles Spurgeon: it was turgid and lifeless by our standards. If any of my efforts have ever touched anyone for the good, it will have been for that moment, that time and place, and a sermon lifted into another context from the one in which it’s preached is likely to be baffling and hollow. Getting rid of these files is a small act of liberation. 

Perpetual Guest

It took the local council a matter of minutes after the Prime Minister stood in the rain in Downing Street and announced the date of the General Election to phone up Grant the churchwarden to book the church as a polling station on July 4^th. In fact I expect it’s the hall that will be used rather than the church, as it was for the Police & Crime Commissioner election in May, a rather less exciting affair it must be said but our first experience of performing this public role. This week I’ve also been trying to sort out the hustings event traditionally hosted by Churches Together in Hornington & District, which won’t be at Swanvale Halt because of the limited parking locally. The Greens have yet to nominate a candidate for the constituency (they only have till tomorrow) and our incumbent Tory MP has yet to reply; disconcertingly it was the Reform candidate who was first back to me. Perhaps he has more time to check emails, or alternatively a laid-back agent who doesn’t do it for him.

It all leads me to reflect again on the oddness of the Church of England parson’s position in society. In so many ways we are the go-to persons, and our churches the default venues, for such events. But equally we operate in a society whose assumptions are secular and non-sectarian and I would really not have it any other way. On Tuesday morning I looked in my diary and found the inscription ‘2pm Willow Grange’ and embarrassingly had to contact the Bishop’s secretary to remind me what it was I’d agreed to come to. The event was part of what the diocesan staff call ‘Tent Week’ when the bishop invites cohorts of folk across the diocese to have tea in a marquee in his garden. This particular gathering was for those involved in ‘the ministry of listening’ for which I qualified as a Local Vocations Adviser, apparently, along with the Chaplains, Mentors, and Spiritual Directors. Anyway, the point I am coming to is that we had a short talk by a pleasant woman priest whose name and role I can’t remember who mentioned the experience of ministering in contexts we do not control, where we are guests, and which are sometimes indifferent to us and sometimes actively hostile. It made the event slightly more than pointless (though there may have been a point in simply showing my face as it's likely to be the only time I will be in the proximity of the bishop for some time). 

In my parish, I do have a clear identity and status signalled by my distinctive dress and my link with the big old stone building with the little steeple in the centre of the community, but in another way the parish isn’t mine at all. It is a space I have a responsibility for, and yet do not control in any way. There is nobody I can command. I am always a guest, and just occasionally one who nobody is quite sure what to do with. But then I suspect that may have been the Lord’s position as well.

In Memoriam

Yesterday I went back to Holy Trinity Hawley to rifle through the vestment drawers, discovering in the process a pink fiddleback (the only Roman-style kit the church has apart from the incumbent's own). 'I came through the cemetery', I told him, 'You have a remarkable line in floral tributes here'. 'Yes', he responded dubiously, 'I'm not sure everything there is entirely legal'. 

On my return journey to the car I looked more carefully at the monuments. I remember S.D. telling me once that to demand most people to think coherently and philosophically was expecting too much, and that the great majority of souls gather together a collection of images and ideas that work for them. This is what you find in Hawley Cemetery. 

The arch of flowers around the heavenly gates - with the cross atop for good measure, does announce some kind of belief in a postmortem existence:

There's a little devotional card in the above picture (as well as some souvenirs of Cyprus), and at the monument below there's not just one but two large Jesuses draped with rosaries. But you also get some extremely eclectic bits and pieces. That's a small black elephant decorated with pieces of mirror in front of Jesus, a little old chap sitting in a chair, various toy vehicles, and cut off on the left side, a squirrel with a candle holder. In addition this tomb has china birds, metal ladybirds, and a photo of a dog among other objects.

I would very much like to know what's going on in some of the assemblages. A laminated picture of Last of the Summer Wine laid on astroturf (there's a lot of astroturf in the cemetery, perhaps a symbol of eternity) made me gape at first, but I suppose it must have been a show especially beloved by the deceased. Presumably the cigarette lighters and beer can in the second photo below are an insight into the enthusiasms of that grave's occupant, too.

But I'm not sure that applies to everything. Are some of the toys and ornaments reflecting not the commitments of the dead, but the feelings of the living, perhaps children?

If you had to summarise the ideas you can see expressed in these groups of artefacts, they would be something like 'This is what we want to remember about Grandad, we trust he's safe, and we think his safety has something to do with Jesus and angels'. Functionally it's a cheap, demotic version of the grandiose stuff aristocrats used to fill churches with, though I fear it won't last as long.

Shades of Netley Abbey

Here's a tangled story. My investigations of the holy wells of Glastonbury led me to the history of the town published in 1826 by the Revd Richard Warner, a great partisan of the claims to sanctity of the well in the Abbey crypt, which he seems to have been the first person to have recorded as 'St Joseph's Well'. He was a remarkable character whose father had kept a delicatessen in Marylebone, and who might have had a Naval career before becoming curate to the travel writer William Gilpin and eventually attracting controversy for preaching pacifist sermons during the Napoleonic wars, finishing as the pluralist incumbent of Great Chalfield in Wiltshire and Timberscombe in Somerset. Gilpin - an important figure in early Picturesque travel writing and therefore in the history of the Gothic Garden - was a strong influence on Richard Warner who ended up writing accounts of his own walking tours. Another friend was John Losh, uncle of Wreay church's singular architect Sarah Losh. Warner's extensive literary output (his clerical duties clearly left him plenty of time for this) included reissuing historic cookbooks and antiquarian works as well as gossipy fiction about Bath society. But the work of his that I've just finished reading is his Gothic novel from 1795, Netley Abbey. 

I was intrigued enough by the mention of the novel in Richard Warner's Wikipedia entry to look it up and then buy it. Obviously I knew that what would arrive would not be a pair of 18th-century volumes with thick board covers and marbled endpapers, but I wasn't quite expecting an absolute facsimile, complete with long 's's that look like 'f's, contained in floppy covers and printed so badly that in places the reader has to reconstruct the text. In fact, that, and the inevitable temptation to read it to oneself like Nigel Molesworth's take on Shakespeare ("Fie, fir, if I may fa fo"), are the main pleasures to be derived, because it is difficult to express how bad this book is. The majority of the story is reported speech as characters relate to others what has happened to them in very unlikely prose. There is an impoverished good baron and a very wicked one, dashing knights and an evil abbot presiding over a monastery where a maiden in a white dress (very flimsy, one imagines) is confined to a subterranean chamber. (I know, spoilers, but you're not likely to venture further into this text anyway). This could all be exciting or at least camp fun, but most of the first volume is irrelevant and you virtually know what's going to happen before the plot starts. The main benefit is to get something of a feel for what the book's original 18th-century readers might have experienced: the facsimile reproduction, however faulty, does replicate the typesetting with on average no more than 100 words to each of its 390-odd pages. It does make me appreciate far more the last initial-wave Gothic novel I read, Charlotte Dacre's Zofloya: or, The Moor from 1806, which is itself no great shakes as literature, but at least has some flair to it.

And there is also this question that occurs to me. Although the setting of Netley Abbey is medieval, the world it depicts is, of course, nothing like the actual Middle Ages at all. Neither the castle of good Baron de Villars nor that of dastardly Sir Hildebrand de Warren function anything like a medieval household: they are 18th-century aristocratic establishments projected into the past. The hero young Edward de Villars sniffs at the superstitious monuments of the umbrageous Abbey like a rational Georgian Protestant. Now, given that this book was written by someone who fancied himself as a historian, what did Revd Warner believe the past was actually like? His account of St Joseph's Well in his History of the Abbey of Glaston is highly romantic and coloured, and hardly unsympathetic to the Age of Faith and its monastic institutions which he criticises as a Gothic novelist. It's interesting that the same person can adopt both variant modes when writing in different genres.

Like The Wheels

Every few years at Swanvale Halt church, we go through a process of trying to sort out a new rota for giving lifts to church to congregation members who might need them. This time it’s been Sally our Pastoral Assistant who has with some degree of annoyance asked to put an appeal on the notice sheet for help, because the list of lifters has shrunk until it’s basically her. She is not the first driver to whom this has happened, and it’s one instance of the general phenomenon in churches, and I suspect in voluntary organisations more widely, that once one person shows an aptitude or willingness to do a particular task, everyone else is happy to step back and let them do it. To be absolutely fair, this is almost always because they are themselves doing half a dozen other tasks as well, but then so is the victim.

I warned Sally that the likelihood was that nobody would volunteer. There is only a handful of people who need lifts to church, but there’s also only a handful of people in a position to offer them. You wouldn’t have thought this very basic act of Christian service should be hard to arrange, but it is. People’s individual preferences and circumstances need negotiating around – absences to see family members, a desire to stay for coffee after the service or a positive preference not to, for instance – and while it ought to be possible for grown-up people to compromise, it adds effort to what’s already the effortful decision to go to church in the first place. Elderly and less able souls may decide at the last minute that they don’t feel up to coming after all, while drivers, most of whom are themselves elderly and not that able, may be hesitant about taking on responsibility for people who are even more liable to fall over. Parking in the centre of the village is very difficult – only today Sally found herself parking so far away that her car was probably equidistant between the church and her house. Finally, everyone who can give a lift is cramming in several other church-related tasks, as well as trying to fit in family commitments and so on. For instance, I could take people home after the service, but I can’t take people there because I absolutely have to be on time, at least twenty minutes before we’re due to begin, and even then I sometimes have baptisms which rule out any possibility of giving lifts home.

At one extreme of the liftees is Roland. Roland has learning difficulties and lives a good half-mile from the church, but doggedly walks to us for 10am, week in, week out, in a jacket and tie. The other week he wrote me a letter, referring to himself, as he does, in the third person: ‘When Roland is old Roland won’t be able to come to church’. He already is old, of course, so in Sally’s absence I took him home for two weeks, in the first case going home to get my car, and in the second parking, as I’ve said, some distance away (driving, parking, and walking took exactly the same amount of time as if I’d merely walked). I’ve spoken to Roland’s care providers who think they can probably rejig their Sunday duties so they can at least bring him to us.

At the other pole of difficulty we find Edna. Edna lives near one church member but for obscure reasons I prefer not even to know about would rather not have a lift from them, so it was Andrew and Sheila who brought her to church before they moved. On one occasion they were en route when she asked to divert to the Post Office. Andrew pointed out that he was churchwarden at the time, while Sheila was sidesperson that morning, and leading the intercessions, and they were both on tea duty which meant they had to get to church as soon as they could. Edna did not get her trip to the Post Office, much apparently to her chagrin. The situation was compounded by the knowledge that, unlike some members of the church, Edna is well able to get a taxi if she chose to – which is exactly what my Mum does. My Mum, in fact, lives no less than three miles away from the church she attends, though she usually gets a lift home from a very kind lady whose house is nowhere nearby, and the cost of a taxi is a significant sacrifice, rather more so than it would be for Edna.

Of course, time was that when you couldn’t walk to church, you didn’t come to church and that was it. The Lord of the Manor was unlikely to send a pony-and-trap to pick you up from the parish’s far-flung parts. Thinking back to +Rowan’s talk the other night, I wondered whether this might be an opportunity not just to take communion to people in their homes in lieu of them attending in person, but have ‘communion services to which they can invite their families and friends’, as he said. It could be a real chance for mission – if only what Rene didn’t want, as well as the Sacrament, was tea and a chat with Queenie, and vice versa (though Edna doesn’t want tea with anyone).

This Sunday, Sally told me that she had indeed spoken to a couple of souls who might be able to offer the odd lift, provided the liftees were flexible and realistic. Good, I thought. There’s the rub, though; or one of the rubs.

O For A Thousand Tongues

Continuing the Rowan Williams theme, Dr Abacus does me a great service in pointing me to an article from The Times I would have to pay to consult myself, in which the former ABC opines about the plight of modern hymn-singing. Absent anything more than the vaguest knowledge of religious music on the part of the general public, he says, people asking for hymns at funerals or weddings are driven back to ‘primary-school level’ songs. It’s worse that that, I would think: every clergyperson despairs at having to sing ‘All Things B&B’ again, but that’s the ‘primary school level’ of 50 years ago or more. This is not just a random outburst from Dr Williams, as he is president of the Hymn Society of Great Britain & Ireland, but it does edge in the direction of grumpy-old-priest-ism. He pleads for priests ‘to encourage children at local schools to do more hymn-singing’ (I will do my best and we’ll see how that goes) and it’s left to the Society’s secretary, Fr Richard Cranham, to offer thanks that people still know 'All Things B&B' even if they’re ignorant of everything else. 'Apart from Away In a Manger', probably.

When we used to get together to plan the monthly Family Service (RIP) at Swanvale Halt, Edgar (RIP) could usually be relied on to argue that we needed to strive to include modern hymns that non-churchgoers knew. "But Edgar", I would say, knowing that what he meant was something written in the 1970s, "the problem is that people now don’t know any hymns. We can’t just restrict ourselves to the half-a-dozen that they might possibly have heard of" (especially when that includes the aforementioned 'Away In a Manger'). My main reflection is that, quite apart from any spiritual deficit that might result, the lack of hymn-knowledge is a tremendous cultural impoverishment. Lots of traditional hymns are nothing very special, but some are stunning. Anyone who thinks that trad church music is boring should have been at our evening mass last Sunday when we sang 'O For A Thousand Tongues' to the tune Lyngham. As I told the congregation, it’s a good 18^th-century hymn tune so for the bit where you repeat lines you can basically sing the words you want and whatever notes you want and provided we all come together at the end it will be all right. And it was sensationally uplifting. As for schools, the usual fare at our Infant School – apart from the songs the children sing, which tend to be seasonal rather than religious – we troop into assembly to the worship songs the head teacher is familiar with from her own place of worship, but I remember the day when she instead decided to play 'Eternal Father Strong to Save', which is one of my favourites, rigorous in its theology and incomparably powerful in its emotion. I definitely got a lump in my throat. And yet, although I think many people would probably recognise this song if it was put in front of them, they probably aren’t aware enough of it, or many, many more like it, to remember it otherwise.

What we do about this is another matter. Once upon a time we had a thing called ‘Sunday Sing’ which was simply a group of us gathering one Sunday evening a month to sing hymns that might be coming up in worship in the next couple of months, with tea afterwards. But only the usual suspects ever came, not the souls who could have benefited most from singing them. Still, I’ve often wondered whether hymns are, potentially, a bridge to unchurched people.

Perhaps the Goth-inflected Irish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest, Bambie Thug, has some knowledge of hymns, though they show no overt sign of it and Roman Catholics aren’t all that used to singing compared to Anglicans. Following the usual Goth strategy of turning negative emotions and experiences into something positive and active – victimhood to autonomy – the artist’s witchy imagery of candles, pentangles, and baths full of flower petals and coloured dye, provokes Irish priests to outbursts that read more like an old bloke ranting in the pub than a sermon, but although I’m sympathetic I don’t warm to it a lot either. I understand what’s going on, but these occult mechanisms of blessings and hexings are either a way of talking to and animating elements within yourself – a form of meditation – or an attempt to make things happen in the real and concrete world by bargaining with forces that in fact aren’t there – a form of magic. Either way, they're a spiritual dead end. Mx Thug would be far better off, ultimately, getting to know a few hymns: I can't help feeling that they, and the great majority of people, are missing out terribly.