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.
Sunday 13 October 2024
Monday 30 September 2024
Angels in Ordinary
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.
Saturday 14 September 2024
Named in Stone (and glass/brass)
- 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.
Sunday 8 September 2024
Parochial Views
Monday 2 September 2024
We Do Things Differently Now
Saturday 31 August 2024
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 17th-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.
Thursday 29 August 2024
Blazing Infernos and How Not To Have Them
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.