Holiday Catherines

I'll post further about aspects of my holiday to Lancashire just past, which included swings past Sheffield on the journey up and back to see friends and my niece who's studying at the University; but for now, by way of recording, here are the images of St Catherine I came across last week. First, from the Lady Chapel reredos in Sheffield Cathedral; then two renaissance images from the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool; and lastly from the Lady Chapel in the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool. It's interesting in that it's just post-War, when all the stained glass was destroyed, and so it marks the end of the traditionalist style of stained glass, just before it would have embarked on a very different trajectory.

Angels in Ordinary

Michaelmas Day gives me an opportunity not just to speak about angels but also our former sacristan Sister Mary, the ex-nun who 'always kept her vows' even when the Community of the Sacred Passion told her that because she couldn't put up with the climate in the parts of Africa where they worked, there was no place for her in the Order at all (poverty and chastity weren't a problem, obedience was a bit more difficult). This is because September 29th was the day she took her final vows all those years ago, and I always regard it as a subsidiary, local festival to Swanvale Halt: the Feast of the Solemn Profession of Vows of Blessed Mary Fontingham. We didn't always see things from the same point of view but our disagreements were mostly aesthetic: she felt Roman vestments made priests 'look like beetles scuttling about', and I never got my head around her fondness for gold lamé in the embroidered items she made. Yesterday, though, we did use the burse and veil from the old 'best white' set in Mary's honour.

I talked about Christianity's insistence on a hidden level of reality and the way the religious life is committed to uncovering that reality with an intensity that laypeople don't necessarily have to, even though we're called to acknowledge and proclaim it. We're not alone in doing so - the angels sing with us, but while we sing from a place of hope, they sing from one of certainty.

The congregation wasn't large yesterday; I looked out and realised that probably barely half the people there knew Sister Mary, but have joined the church since she died back in 2013. That caught me by surprise. Even the saints disappear gradually from human recollection, and are left to God's. 

Named in Stone (and glass/brass)

It's the 175th anniversary of the church this year and, for Heritage Open Weekend, I did a short tour of the church and churchyard looking at the memorials and monuments and thinking about some of the people represented. I haven't had time to research in-depth biographies of many of them, but there were enough details to fill a good 45 minutes exploring the nature of history and memory in our small community. We discovered -

- the former slaveowning incumbent of the church and his complex family ramifications

- the beloved parish worker whose life was glowingly written up in the parish magazine and who nobody now recalls

- the Victorian army officer who brought his horse back from the Crimea and buried it at his house when it died

- the lyrically-named lady married to a Quaker papermill master

- the anonymous 16-year-old commemorated in a window, whose face was almost certainly used for St Agnes and was therefore presumably called that

- the militant suffragette remembered in the statue of the Virgin & Child from a London convent

... and we also talked about headstones and footstones, the 19th-century stonemasonry trade, and what happens when monuments are moved around. Ours is a small and pretty unremarkable parish church, and yet look at what it contains. Most of all, what struck me - having not known it until I looked up our burial records - is that during the mere 30 years our churchyard was open more than 420 souls were laid to rest in it. And it's tiny. Half of them were aged 15 or under; 39%, nearly 2 in every 5, were aged 3 or under. That was the kind of place Swanvale Halt was in the mid-1800s: like, presumably, most other such places. 

Parochial Views

It was Mad Trevor's birthday last week and as he wouldn't have done anything to mark it otherwise I thought it was time to invite him over for lunch. He was really enthusiastic. The day came and I called to remind him, but got no answer. I carried on getting no answer, and eventually put the pork sausages I wouldn't otherwise have bought into the freezer. The following day I called round at the flat and found the front door wide open. Trevor himself was fast asleep in bed. I left a note on the cooker where I'd be sure he'd see it. I still haven't been able to get him on the phone. 

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Esme and Molly are Roman Catholics, really, but come to our service. Esme also attends the Roman Catholic mass but Molly only makes it to ours. Over coffee after the service I came to sit next to them. 'The Catholic service is too early for me, I can't manage it', said Molly, 'This one is the next best thing.' 'I told you not to say that!!' hissed Esme. In fact, given that I was right in front of them both, it was the second statement that struck me as more careless than the first.

We Do Things Differently Now

Usually the safeguarding training I'm obliged to attend is run by the Diocese, but today I was at a school-based session. It wasn't compulsory, but as our parish school begins its adventure of being joined with a secular school locally I thought I would come along to show willing. The outlines are the same, but whereas in a church setting safeguarding focuses on the supervision of children and vulnerable adults, safer recruitment and the occasional interactions with children which characterise the life of most churches, in a school setting everything's all the more intense - you deal with children all the time. 

Topics came up that edged around the core of what I normally understand as safeguarding, and into areas to do more with wellbeing and welfare: drug use, underage vaping, online bullying, and so on. The contrast with my own schooling in the 1980s struck me. The teachers at my provincial boys' state grammar school were mainly decent sorts, but they saw their job as keeping order and delivering lessons. Quite apart from the tendency of some members of staff to involve the use of projectiles to carry out these basic tasks - I suppose the woodwork master must have worked out how to throw a chisel across a classroom so as to minimise the possibility of serious injury - there was really very little interest in what happened outside the school. That just wasn't its concern. Even on the premises, beyond the classroom we were left to our own devices, and the school was pretty much a feral environment of persecution, low-level violence and cruelty. I think any suggestion that anyone should look for signs of pupils being unhappy would have been met with incomprehension: of course they were unhappy. Misery was built into the experience. Even in the early 2000s, a friend told me when I talked about this, her own grammar school turned a deliberate blind eye to the difficulties she was having at home. Someone else's problem. 

It occurs to me that this is a colossal change that has happened over the last couple of decades: how the life-experiences of children has become the business of schools in particular is remarkable and would be worth someone studying properly.

Mr Happy

‘I do believe our prayers are heard and answered’, says Michael Mayne, the late Dean of Westminster, in the book I’m reading at the moment, The Enduring Melody, dealing with his experience of terminal cancer. ‘But we have to be clear about what we really want’. Prayer is, we might add, a way of discovering what it is we really want, too. It’s a question that’s worth asking ourselves when we sit with the Lord wondering what, if anything, to say.

Want I really want is, I think, something I am slightly ashamed of. I want everyone to be happy. That desire applies most strongly to the people I interact with most closely, but it’s a general one that I’ve realised conditions a lot of what I do. It seems so superficial, somehow, when you state it so baldly.

Of course that desire comes with caveats. I don’t believe you can be properly happy if you are committed to falsehoods, as eventually they will find you out: creation is a unity, and ultimately falsehood corrupts even if you don’t know you are enmeshed in it. I don’t believe you can be properly happy without God: God is the final truth of all things, and we are, as the saint says, restless till we find our rest in him. Rest and peace lie nowhere else. ‘We seek Christ where he is not to be found, amidst graves and sepulchres’, says the 17^th-century bishop Mark Frank, whose sermons I must look up one day. And it is true that what one person requires for what they think of as their happiness, may bring sorrow to another; they are seeking Christ in the sepulchres, in that case, but it’s what they think, and in such cases I can’t take their self-definitions of happiness as read.

Yet nevertheless, all that taken into account, I still want everyone to be happy. It hurts me when they can’t be, or when people I love seem to be seeking happiness in places they won’t find it (perhaps I am, too. I still have a lot to learn). I fear contributing to their unhappiness.

I’m not sure many Christians have this as their governing desire. They want to tell the truth regardless of consequences, to rescue souls from hell, to please God. So do I, I suppose, but I think of it in terms of bringing them happiness, which I believe would bring happiness to God as well.

Am I happy? Can I say that coming to Christ will bring happiness to those I meet? For decades I thought of faith in terms of truth, and never demanded that it would bring me any kind of joy. Perhaps it wouldn’t. Perhaps it would bring me the opposite by making demands of me I might not be inclined to meet. That’s a criticism of my own failings, to be sure, but I’m being no more than honest. Yet now, nearly 30 years after my conversion, I can sit in front of God, as I conceive it, and feel – joy at simply being there. The vicissitudes of my life (such as they are!) all occur in the context of God’s presence. They remain challenging, painful perhaps, but they are still held within something bigger than they are, and the bigger thing they are held in is the deep conviction that the centre of creation is love. It is, perhaps we might say, a deeper life. I am grateful for it. I am, maybe, happy. At least now and again.

Blazing Infernos and How Not To Have Them

Ever since Grant and Matt went on their Churchwardens' training day last year the matter of fire safety has been, as it were, smouldering away under the surface of the church's life. The last time I talked about this I mentioned that, when we last thought seriously about this some years ago, we decided we weren't completely convinced by our consultant, but on reflection this was a bit unfair although 'opinion was divided' among the people who were obliged to work most closely with him. It was more the case that our insurers, carrying out a general risk audit of the church plant, pointed our attention to their own fire risk assessment template to guide us in our thinking, and that suggested (to me, anyway) that all our level of risk required was to put up exit signs and make sure all our sidespeople and hirers knew what to do if they smelled smoke. And then we had to shut the place because of Covid anyway, and anything more involved was forgotten.

But that was all before the new regulations issued after the Grenfell Tower fire. A little while ago the Fire Service visited, walked around the site, tutted and shook their heads, and issued us with Notice to Comply with all the new laws within three months. It took two months to take the first step of managing to find a consultant with the time to visit and draw up a new, authoritative report on what we should actually do. Now we begin the process of getting quotes for fire alarms, emergency lighting, making our electrics and heating boilers safe (they shouldn't really be in the loft over the hall, but moving them is really unfeasible), and raising awareness among church members, to which end I produced a short and bad video outlining what everyone needs to know. 

To a degree this feels a bit unfair. It's not as though anyone lives at the church, and it compares in any way to, well, I don't know, plucking an example out of the air, a block of flats covered in flammable cladding where lots of souls might have to be roused from their beds in the middle of the night. But it is true that a fire might engulf the boilers and race down the pipes into the church before anyone knew what was going on, or the antique electrics of the organ spark and smoulder away long enough to catch the roof timbers without the aroma of smoke reaching responsible nostrils. We might even be able to get some help with costs from a grant, but I may have to ambush churchwardens from other parishes on their way to the Council offices.