A Sunday of Contrasts

Our baptisms are moderately conservative affairs. I keep the old language about 'sin, the world, and the devil' and I even do the little gesture called the Ephphatha, making the sign of the Cross over the child's ears and lips, symbolising the newly-baptised soul's ears being opened to hear the Word and their mouth to speak it, which comes from the old Roman rite and which I so liked I adopted it. I've even been asked, occasionally, as I was today, to baptise a child who's wearing a traditional christening gown, but that's quite rare as most families now find their beloved baby doesn't fit the gown by the time they get around to organising the ceremony. But I've never been asked additionally to wrap the child in a white shawl before. The christening gown itself derives from the white robe in which a baptismal candidate was wrapped in the ancient rite after the baptism itself, signifying their clothing with Christ, and after the custom of baptising children naked fell into disapproval in the Western Church they would arrive at the ceremony already wearing it. I see that the old Roman Rite includes clothing with a shawl or somesuch, but also allows this to be commuted, as it were, to a white cloth placed on the child's head. The sense of this arrangement was revealed today when none of us could work out easily how to hold little Isabella so the shawl could be applied. 

Later in the afternoon it was our Spring Forest Church. I didn't know quite where we were going, so Julie the Sacristan led the small procession (including two dogs) to a local SSSI where we were surrounded by meadows and birdsong yet with the 21st century very audible in the form of the main road not far away. This is of course much less formal liturgy, but as yet hasn't attracted a single soul who is not already a member of some church community! Will more publicity make a difference?

Work Done

For the first time, I realise, in over a month, there is no work pending on my house. I rose, did all my usual early-morning tasks, and set out for the Steeple House without a cheery artisan ringing the bell for access. The loft has been lagged, the porch reconstructed, the pillars holding up the back porch and the garage repaired, the roof tiles replaced, a ventilator put in the shower room and all the irrelevant ceiling grilles which allow free flow to waking wasps more than air blocked, and, as you can see, a little radiator installed in the downstairs toilet so that it will be a little less glacial in the winter months. It was redecorated before the radiator was put in, which is a curious way of going about things, but then I didn't ask for either to be done so I can't complain. I do find the plain white a little disappointing when so much of the rest of the house is plain white, so I may repaint it anyway. Not all the garage roof tiles were replaced ('I wanted to but they wouldn't let me', stressed the roofer, who I discovered a few days ago listening to Round The Horne which disposed me in his favour), so the roof now has a little steel grille around the bottom to catch any tiles that might still come adrift and crash into my neighbours' cars parked below. So the house is much tidier now, and I can't help wondering if I'm going to be evicted.

A Brief Visit

A familiar kind of encounter for me yesterday with a longstanding member of the church who, to all appearances, is about to leave this world behind. I zoomed over to the hospital in between a ministers' lunch and a virtual meeting to make certain I had a few minutes, at least, with Derek, former churchwarden and many other things. He and his wife had only just moved into a local care home when he had a cardiac arrest and ended up in hospital being told off for not eating food he has no inclination to eat. 'I go to sleep and each time I wake up - well, I don't need to tell you,' he said. 'I wish that clock wasn't right opposite my bed'. It isn't lack of faith, as Derek's thankfully remains intact, but he is very, very tired and knowing that his wife is being looked after relieves him of any anxiety to linger longer than he needs. This sounds like a bit of a grim encounter, but it wasn't: 'I've got a lot to be thankful for', Derek told me, 'All those years as a lay pastoral assistant. It was a great privilege. They were good times'.

I say I zoomed over to the hospital, but my zooming concluded with twenty minutes of crawling round the car park trying to find a space. As the line of vehicles ahead of mine didn't decrease with time, but rather extended, I realised I was going to be unlucky, and parked at the cathedral instead, yomping over grass and through underpasses to get to the hospital. I told the chaplains about Derek and asked them to keep an eye on him. In their email back, the lead chaplain said Derek had relayed my story of parking at the cathedral (poor fellow, he'd probably bent their ear about it) and said I should have gone to the superstore which is halfway between the cathedral and the hospital. I was surprised they would advocate such naughtiness. 

Eternal City Limits

When the Rt Rev Jonathan Baker, Bishop of Fulham, was just Fr Jonathan, vicar of Holy Trinity Reading, he was the first person I was taken to by my then vicar (who’d been at college with him) to discuss my sense of vocation. His main bit of advice was for me to begin praying the Office, which I have dutifully passed on to the enquirers who come and speak to me!

We all ribbed Fr Thesis of the West End when he revealed on LiberFaciorum that, led by Bishop Jonathan, he and the clergy of the trad-Cath Fulham Episcopal Area were going to Rome for their clergy conference. Many priests shared the less glamorous locations of their own conferences; ‘In Guildford Diocese’, I commented, ‘we say that all roads lead to Swanwick’ (but at least Swanwick isn’t Butlins). Little did anyone realise that the trip would result in an ecclesiastical row that had nothing to do with its intrinsic merits but the circumstances of a particular act of worship.

Even I was somewhat astonished to see photographs of Bishop Jonathan celebrating mass for the Anglican party in the basilica of St John Lateran. Now, St Peter’s in the Vatican may be the Pope’s own chapel, but St John’s is the cathedral of the diocese of Rome itself, and in terms of significance and seniority it outranks any other church in the city. Nobody seems to want to be very explicit about how an Anglican bishop came to be presiding over the Eucharist at its main altar, but it wasn’t some kind of guerilla service in which the Fulham clergy ran in with their kit in black holdalls, hurriedly set it all up, and rattled out a mass without asking: it seems to have been done with the full knowledge of the Lateran chapter. To normal, non-churchy people, it would be baffling to have any problem with this, but not if you’re a conservative Roman Catholic for whom Anglicans are at the very best well-meaning heretics whose sacraments are invalid, and at worst deluded deceivers whose services are snares and traps for the unwary soul. To have an Anglican bishop – if you can describe him as such, rather than a man dressed as a bishop – carrying out a pretended mass in the very heart of the Catholic Church mocks the truth, to them. From the photographs of the service you can't easily see that it's taking place in a roped-off area of the cathedral so that no Catholics in communion with the See of Rome might wander in, accidentally take communion, and endanger their immortal souls.

Who was responsible for this appalling event? The day after it took place and Twitter went ballistic the Lateran Chapter issued an abject apology blaming ‘a breakdown in communication’. Presumably they simply didn’t enquire very deeply as to who this group of clergy were: they were, of course, all male, and the presence of a female or two would have given the game away. Fr Jeffrey here in Swanvale Halt hadn’t heard of the fuss, but he could see how it might have happened: ‘In Italy nobody understands what Anglicans are’ (rather the same as in England, then). There are photos of Bishop Jonathan by the side of Pope Francis in St Peter’s Square, and again, you can excuse the Pontiff for not investigating when he gets photobombed by a random character in purple. The same could not be said for Cardinal Kaspar who came to address the Fulham clergy during their tour, but had it been just him, and had the mass taken place in some back-street church in Rome, probably nobody would have noticed, because Anglicans, I fear, are loaned Roman altars all the time, in the same way Fr Jeffrey is loaned ours each and every week. I wouldn’t ask to use his, though; as I know he wouldn’t be able to say yes.

No News

Unless something goes dramatically wrong tomorrow or Monday - say, as my friend Ms Mauritia suggested, the London Marathon runners find their way through the capital impeded by people glued to the pavement - you won't see much in the news about the latest Extinction Rebellion events in Westminster, which have been specifically designed as big-tent traditional demonstrations rather than direct-action stunts designed to cause disruption: nobody's much bothered by even tens of thousands of people doing legal things. They were the focus of the last day of my break yesterday. I arrived in the rain to listen to someone from XR Cornwall talking about their experience of getting the Council there to work alongside citizens' panels: he struggled boldly against the lack of a working microphone and the better-amplified efforts of other attractions against the railings of the Palace of Westminster along Abingdon Road. For no very good reason I'd decided I would join the picket outside the Department of Transport, and found a crowd being led by a gentleman from Greenpeace in the cry 'We're from South Yorkshire and we want better buses!', while across the road a similar mass blockaded DEFRA (though not so much the staff couldn't get in or out, obviously). After about 45 minutes in which my most active contribution was helping someone get her cardboard placard pinned to her backpack, I decided to go and seek lunch, and found that someone I knew from London Gothic and who I last met at a birthday gathering had been standing right behind me. All the protests in all the world ...

A visit to the Astral Café as recommended by Comrade Tankengine (all the clientele, including me, being grumpy old chaps until a couple of schoolgirls came in seeking chips and broke the uniformity) and a call at Westminster Cathedral later, I found myself again at the Citizens' Assembly Hub outside Parliament. this time the speaker was a fellow from Reboot Democracy who described the group's plan to refashion our political system by replacing parliaments and councils with randomly-chosen Agenda Groups and Consultative Assemblies, although I was sceptical how this could cope with the short-term crises which are the lot of government most of the time. 'We aim to put up candidates in every council seat and every parliamentary constituency, who will have no policy but to introduce this system', he said. 'Unfortunately when a friend of mine did this in a local council seat, her intervention let the Conservative candidate in, so we have to work out how to avoid that'.

As always, it's XR's commitment to imagining, and in so far as possible, enacting, an alternative vision of society that impresses most (especially on the day when the UN stated that, effectively, saving the world's glaciers is no longer feasible). If only that vision didn't involve so much drumming.

Dorset, and Chelmsford 2023

In our family Badbury Rings is the go-to place for a picnic, and Wednesday found me, my mum and sister there, reliving long-ago times and wandering the windy ramparts. I think the mysterious features we could see on the skyline that looked like a row of gigantic solar panels and a tower of some kind are associated with a sand quarry on the hillside over toward Corfe Mullen. Later on I made it to Blue Pool on the Isle of Purbeck, somewhere I haven't seen for forty years; the colour of the clay-infused water varies greatly, but it had its customary hue of turquoise on Wednesday. There were a few other visitors, but I had the woods almost to myself.

But today's excursion was very different and took me to Chelmsford, mainly to see the Cathedral as it's one I've never done. There isn't much to Chelmsford, nor to its Cathedral, a big parish church bumped up to cathedral status in 1914 and never altered much to look like it unlike some other parish-church cathedrals such as Leicester or Newcastle. It has also been architecturally cleansed a couple of times over the years and so very little of any antiquity remains. It is quite the most un-cathedral-like cathedral I've seen. The font, altar and bishop's throne look disconcertingly as though they are made of recycled plastic, but are in fact of Westmorland stone.

Chelmsford City Museum, though, is a delight: clear, arranged with quite a bit of visual flair, and done with a genuine passion for the history of the area. The story of the building housing the museum is covered, and even the military bit about the Essex Regiment is good. There's also a completely uncontextualised reference in the Roman display to a certain locally-relevant 1980s TV sitcom, and I do appreciate curatorial jokes. And it's still run by the local council, and free to go in!

Thanks to the Museum, I know that Moulsham Street marks the course of the old Roman road to the waystation halfway between Londinium and Camulodonum that was the original settlement here, and it was on Moulsham Street that I found the Little Café, a small eatery which - like Tyfu Café in Caerphilly - I added to the list of nice places I've had sandwiches in. Let's not call them 'greasy-spoons', but good basic cafés. Always look for a place where old people go to eat, and where the staff know the patrons' names! 'Other cafés are available', but why would you bother?

Tale of Two Castles

Thankfully Rian-who-was-Cylene and their partner Deri now live in a part of South Wales I can leave my car in and feel reasonably confident it will still be there in the morning - a town a local apparently described as 'tired but functional', which was rather not the case with their previous location - so that's where I was yesterday and today. On the way there, and on the way back, I visited two castles, one offering the real Middle Ages and one a pretend version. The former is Caerphilly, a colossal Marcher fortress with a bloody history of treachery and exploitation; the latter, Castell Coch, which hangs in the woods overlooking faraway Cardiff, built on a medieval site but designed by Victorian Gothic Revival nutcase William Burges for the Marquis of Bute as a fantasy of what might have been there before.

Aesthetically there's little resemblance between craggy Caerphilly and the psychedelic polychromy of Castell Coch, but they both represent engineering triumphs even beyond the usual involved in the construction of castles. Caerphilly is the biggest castle in Wales by area, but what impresses most in building terms is the massive curtain wall that dams the moat-lake, fashioned of huge buttresses flanking concave walls in order to restrain the enormous weight of earth and water behind it. Castell Coch required ridiculous investment in stone-moving and stone-working, artisanship and ingenuity. It used to have a chapel which Burges designed to hang off a series of corbels built into one of the towers and projecting out over the courtyard: it was taken down in the 1890s. Mass there must have demanded faith of a particular kind.