Stories from the Sea

Burton Bradstock was where I stayed on holiday - not in some quirky folly this time, but just a wee cottage a bit worryingly close to a filling station and car showroom, but in fact that caused no problem at all. I have a lot of pictures to show off now, so will bore you with them over the coming days.

Mere yards up the lane from the Old Pottery Cottage was Burton Cliff, from which you can survey the coast all the way from Portland Bill to Start Point, when the weather's right. The moods of the sea, even this modest sea called the English Channel, vary so hugely. The water was bright blue on Friday, apparently calm and inviting; on Saturday, grey and wild. Before leaving that morning I went up the lane to say farewell to the sea and stood awhile as the waves smashed against the shingle far below. I thought of the story I'd read at Lyme Regis Museum, of the wreck of the Heroine in 1852, when five Lyme men went to the aid of the stricken ship and four of them were drowned themselves. However ordered and structured our human environment becomes, the sea remains alien, untameable. Looking out from Burton Cliff, how strange it seems to imagine that there's anything beyond that stretching, level blue, or grey.

My activities on Friday, though, had a haunted aspect, due to the overshadowing presence of a bad dream I'd had in the morning, in which I was awaiting my own execution at 2 in the afternoon, not for anything I had done, but inescapably. The uneasy feeling was compounded in real life later in morning by meeting a white horse in a field at Abbotsbury: owing to another dream many years ago I've come to recognise white horses as my personal harbinger of danger. I know this all sounds very weird, but as 2pm drew nearer I really felt remarkably strange and was glad I was able to park by the roadside in case I was about to have a stroke or some uncontrollable affliction. Of course nothing happened, but I'll remember the experience.

I found myself thinking that, even if Friday 6th October 2017 was going to be my last day in this earthly existence, it wouldn't have been a bad one, and I could think of nothing I would rather be doing than what I'd planned to do, visiting wells, churches and historic sites. In the evening, once the hysteria had passed, I was again looking out over the water, this time in the dark outside Eype Church (a very sacred spot because it's where Let England Shake was recorded), waiting for a concert to start. When I do die, I thought, the strange mixture of things I've experienced, seen and heard will all come to an end, at least as far as human knowledge can access, and this is true for all of us. We must each put that mixture to work, processing the experiences the world through it, struggling to make sense of it, producing. It's how we take part in the work of God.

Back to the Beginning

The Harvest Festival service had broadly speaking gone well enough. In amongst all the excitement, I’d delivered a sermon about creation, wonder and human responsibility, which was a bit involved but one which I hoped had been carried through by sheer enthusiasm. At the church door I was accosted by a gentleman who said he would like to ask me a bit further about some of the things I said – the things, particularly, about the idea of creation extending over a colossally long period rather than the apparent seven days of Genesis, to which I had explicitly alluded. We had a discussion the details of which I will not bore you with, but they culminated in the following exchange:

Mr 7-Days: You teach false ideas and in a world which has abandoned God frankly it’s very dangerous. This is why we part company with the Church, with the Church of England and the Roman Catholics. The churches abandon the Scriptures and they take up with things like gay marriage and women being in teaching positions, which is also against Scripture, because they want to be popular.

Me: I would say that you’re underestimating the degree of conscientious thought which contributes to those decisions.

Mr 7-Days: Well, I think that too much conscientious thought might be the problem. We need less thought and more reading.

At that point I thought there probably wasn’t very much further we could go. We did end up shaking hands and Mr 7-Days thanked me for being willing to talk ‘because a lot of Church people just won’t engage at all.’ Well, what kind of liberal would I be if I blamed him for taking a different position from me?

We did indeed touch on some very interesting areas. How, indeed, as Mr 7-Days asked me, do we know what we think we know? We all accept on trust vast acreages of alleged facts which lie outside our direct experience. There’s a famous essay by George Orwell questioning, I think, how we really know the world is round; that's a matter of calculation. In fact, I was perturbed enough over the last few days to spend a little while looking up such matters as mineralisation, radiometric decay, and the tracing of mitochondrial DNA. 

I sympathise with Biblical fundamentalists, and not only because every discussion I ever have with someone who radically disagrees with me necessarily leaves me thinking how secure my own beliefs are. People like Mr 7-Days aren’t stupid or ignorant, except to the extent that they are ignorant by choice. They’ve found themselves edged into the position where, to safeguard the things they really do value, the outer ramparts of truth have to be patrolled and defended without the slightest thought of conceding a wing or wall to the enemy outside. No seven-day Creation, no God. I have my own fundamental positions. I believe that once you erode belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist – an idea which Mr 7-Days certainly wouldn’t accept – you’re a long distance down the road to atheism. That seems, doubtless, like an extreme position to some, but I’d defend it, and so I know where the Biblical literalists are coming from. Where they go to is another matter.

And Harvest Festival is just supposed to be a nice occasion when the Infants come to the church and sing and we all Plough the Fields and Scatter over a pile of tinned ham, pasta, and Angel Delight.

Ironically, for the last week I've been holidaying on the Dorset coast, where you can't move for dinosaurs and where every tea shop has an ammonite either on its sign or in the corner. The whole region is a standing insult to Biblical fundamentalism.

Divine Discontent

Fr Andris came for a coffee this morning. I shared my experience of trying to kick-start a second round of Mission Planning by sharing the ideas that had arisen from various conversations over the months, and not getting a great deal of response as a result. I wondered whether I had presented the information in the wrong form, whether it was the wrong time of the year to expect people to think about things, or whether the whole approach was awry. We’d decided to seek another Away Day for the PCC facilitated by an outsider. I explained that I had in my mind an ideal that devising a Mission Plan will involve a series of expanding discussions among a church’s membership eventually leading to the whole church endorsing a document which is then worked through and reported back on, but was now wondering whether this was a flexible enough approach.

Andris said that he’d found exactly the same in his church and wondered whether part of the ‘problem’ (if we think of it as a problem) is that our congregations are, generally, happy and content. They’re not necessarily resistant to change (resistance tends to be generated by fear rather than contentment), but their contentment means they have little investment in the idea of change. A lot of our people, perhaps including ourselves, have been Christians for a long time and the inevitable tendency of decades of prayer and practice is to rub off the sharp edges of our religious experience and to induce an ever-greater sense of peace and acceptance. That isn’t a bad thing: in fact it’s the way our spiritual lives are supposed to develop. What it risks is eroding the awareness that the Kingdom is always beyond us, always something to achieve, always calling us to discontent with a world not as God wants it to be.

That doesn’t apply to everyone. Newer Christians are often more questioning of the way things are, and long-established believers may undergo disruptive experiences which result in a kind of reassessment of their faith which may feel like encountering it for the first time. Such people are very valuable to the Body of Christ as a whole.

We found ourselves considering whether the whole-church model of mission planning is realistic for our church communities, who are happy and perhaps even pleased to be presented with a programme and to have a feeling that someone else has the future of the church in hand, but who don’t necessarily want to shape the programme themselves. It may be that the shaping has to rely on a smaller group of individuals (which may well not be identical with the PCC) who can contribute discontent to the whole process. There are resonances, we realised, with leadership-development models pursued mainly by evangelical churches, or the discipleship-development group at one of the nearby moderate-middling churches one of our fellow incumbents described a few months ago. 'This is all great,' pondered Fr Andris, 'It's how we actually do it that's the problem.'

The Sights of Basingstoke

Those readers who reside outside the UK (and I think there are a couple) may not appreciate at once the resonances of the name Basingstoke. Within these islands, the Hampshire town is one of a select group of places whose very mention summons up associations of soulless blandness, of modernist weariness of spirit, coupled with a resentful defiance of this image by the governing bodies of the locality. My experience of Basingstoke has been confined to the journey from the railway station to the old church on the high street where I went to a couple of meetings some while ago. I find the excursion through the covered malls and small squares that punctuate them strangely exciting, but it's true, there isn't much to it.

My day off, however, took me to this unglamorous town to find the ruins. Within sight of the railway are the remains of two medieval chapels now surrounded by the understated necropolis that is Basingstoke cemetery. They're good, the ruins. You can see why Basingstoke's heritage organisations puff them a bit, because there's not much old stuff around otherwise. There's not a lot to delay you, even in pleasant sunshine. But they're fun. Really.

The entrance lodge is a fine example of 'rogue Gothic': Victoriana doesn't get much more freakish.

Chapel Hill didn't delay me long, so I took that journey through the malls once more and went to the Willis Museum. There's a display on about Jane Austen at the moment, and an exhibition by an artist who makes tiny cut-out images from railway tickets, which is a brilliant idea. I enjoyed that, and the transgressive thrill of looking out of the upstairs window and observing the good citizens of Basingstoke about their business.

Jigsaws

There is a school of thought among clergy, and those who train them, that you should never allude to personal circumstances in sermons for various reasons: maintaining the distance appropriate to authority, not giving the ill-disposed ammunition against you, or exercising a proper reticence over things that may pertain to other people. I don’t follow this line: you, as pastor, are a human being struggling with the business of trying to live the spiritual life just like the people listening to you, and it helps for them to know that.

On Sunday I was talking broadly about occasions when we’re compelled to reassess our relationships with others and our view of ourselves, and described, very broadly, my dealings with someone formerly very close to me, and now less so, and how my conflicted emotions had made me realise that what I thought was me responding to their need actually included a neediness of my own - the need to be useful and to imagine myself as self-sacrificing and generous.

Amanda, a member of the congregation who often gets into arguments with other worshippers about the way the church works and who can seem a bit prickly wanted to talk to me about it. ‘I think there are times when our needs meet the needs of others and something good comes out of it,’ she said. ‘I think of us being a bit like jigsaw pieces, fitting together in a way we don’t always see at the time.’ Not a surprising thing to say, but you often need someone else to tell you what you know.

Amanda looked at the people milling around and drinking tea in the church hall. ‘I know I can be argumentative, it’s the way my family was,’ she went on, ‘but I look around at the church and I see people helping each other and I think, They’re not a bad bunch.’ No, I agreed, they’re not. They can help me along in ways I don't expect.

To Soothe the Savage Breast

The coat-of-arms of the Royal School of Church Music is fairly normal apart from the little bishop perched on top of the helm: he seems to be holding a small woolsack, for reasons best known to himself and the College of Heralds, presumably.

This occurred to me last week while I was looking at the medal I was about to hand over to one of our choristers marking his fifty years’ service with the Choir. During the notices after Mass I brought Nigel forward and he described how he’d arrived at the then thriving choir of Swanvale Halt church as a probationer, was then given his surplice a little while later, and the choirmasters-cum-organists he’d known in his earlier years and the influence they’d had on him (positive, as it turned out).

Church choirs can be a pain in the neck, frankly, as they have a habit – especially when they are in decline – of assuming they are rather better than they are. When they work well, though, they can be a force for definite spiritual good, not merely in what they may contribute to the worship, but providing an arena for spiritual development and companionship among their members.

There seems to be a proper affinity between churches and music of all kinds. At Lamford we had an enormous choir, nurtured over decades, which provided a musical training-ground for young people from across the town regardless of whether they remained within a Christian milieu or what kind of music they pursued. I remember once attending a concert in the church hall there which included a heavy-metal band of late teens all of whom had passed through the church choir at one time or another (the singer had learned how to do that growly voice metal vocalists often adopt and which can wreck your vocal chords if you don’t do it properly). We have a new organist on the rota at Swanvale Halt, a 17-year-old from the village who hardly had to do more than turn up and hit a note to make the congregation adore him but who is seriously good as well. We also host regular concerts staged by a local music promoter which tend to be in the folk-rock genre (‘old blokes with guitars’, I have occasionally teased, unfairly as sometimes a woman finds her way onto the schedule). The connection between church and music surely arises partly because churches are simply a space to be used, sometimes the biggest space in their vicinity, but it’s more than that. It reflects the lingering sense that a church is ‘owned’ by the whole of the community, even those who profess different religious beliefs or none at all; and because of that it stands dimly for the community’s own identity. We know that ‘communities’ comprise any number of different sorts of people with different and sometimes conflicting tastes, beliefs and experiences, but the church building speaks to the common humanity of all. Music does the same, and this is the link. You may not like organ recitals or folk rock or heavy metal, but there’s nothing stopping you doing so whoever you happen to be. Music of all kinds is made and sent out by its makers to the whole human race. They can’t control whose heart will reverberate to its particular sound. Music is, in that sense, neutral, in the same way a church is. It makes sense for one to shelter the other.

It was a friend of mine who pointed me towards the recent furore at St-Sepulchre-without-Newgate in London, where the leadership has decided to stop non-religious music from being performed in the building. For a church long nicknamed ‘the musicians’ church’ this is quite some decision, justified by pressures on the use of the building, ‘an increasingly busy programme of worship and church activities’, so the website states. As worship seems to take place on only three occasions in the week (Sunday morning, Tuesday lunchtime and Tuesday evening), as there are only a couple of other regular bookings, and as very few people actually live in this part of London, this seems on the face of it an unconvincing explanation. The politics here relates to the approach of the vicar who was parachuted in from the great evangelical hothouse down the road, Holy Trinity Brompton, in 2013, and who clearly finds marrying his own priorities with those he’s inherited at St Sepulchre less than easy. The church has been stung by the reaction to its proposal and is ‘praying and reflecting’ (although given the way these things usually work I’d be astonished if prayer resulted in anything changing, it very rarely does). Most church communities are anxious to find ways to connect with the world around them, and music provides one; but if you come from the rarefied context of a self-confident ecclesiastical corporation like HTB, you see things differently, and policing the boundaries between Christ and the world becomes more of a priority.

One of my spiritual director’s favourite stories concerns the first occasion he opened up his cathedral to the evangelical church in town with whose vicar he had struck up an unlikely friendship. They were preparing for a special celebration service in the cathedral, and S.D. was picking his way through the speakers and cables when he met a stern elderly lady who was part of the cathedral congregation. ‘Mr Dean, what’s going on?’ she asked, tapping her stick on the paving, ‘is there going to be a rock concert in the cathedral?’ S.D. shuddered inwardly and thought he was about to have his ear bent. ‘Oh no, Mrs Simms, it’s just those dreadful evangelicals from Christ Church, they’re having a service here this evening.’ ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Simms, pursing her lips, ‘What a shame. I would quite have enjoyed a rock concert.’

Vanity, Vanity, Saith the Preacher

Someone lent me a book of old postcard views of Hornington, the small town to which Swanvale Halt is appended and with which it has a somewhat conflicted relationship. Its first words are 'Hornington, like Rome, is surrounded by hills.'

And the Romans, at least educated ones who spoke Greek, would have called that setting a new bar for hubris.