Strain in All Directions

Curiously – or perhaps not – while I am away on holiday pastoral issues often seem to blow up in the parish. That happened this October, and eventually I found myself sitting with a church volunteer hearing a series of complaints about events which occurred in my absence. I investigated, and found that, in all conscience, I couldn’t do what the person concerned wanted me to, whereon they resigned their role.

I don’t handle these things well. This particular situation comes at the end of a long series of strains and difficulties, and, though I strive not to, I find myself rehearsing angry speeches about the rights and wrongs of the matter. Then, when faced by someone who's behaving reasonably and calmly, at least when I’m talking to them, I have to exert a different effort to try and remember the times when they weren’t reasonable and calm, either with me or others.

Not only will the person you’re dealing with probably frame events with an entirely different narrative, and, were they confronted with yours, sit and blink uncomprehendingly (assuming they didn’t fly off the handle with rage), it’s a rare history which contains nothing positive, no matter how hard the end has been. The particular person concerned in this one has done many helpful and worthwhile things in the church’s life, and has been diligent and hardworking to a fault. They could point to the efforts they’ve made and the sacrifices they’ve undergone on the church’s behalf absolutely justly. For those tasks, they were the right person at the right time. As a pastor you have to acknowledge this, while keeping your sight on the actual situation in hand and what you simply must do about it.

The ambiguity and contradictions inherent in such events means that none of this feels good, even if you work to detach yourself from your own individual feelings.

I always pray for the church when I’m on leave. Imagine what would happen if I didn’t.

Wearing Stuff

The new archdeacon, a jovial, bustling lady who used to work in the Diocese of Oxford, came to say hello. We sat in the café opposite the church. She decided to go for a creamy hot chocolate sprinkled with Smarties so I suppose she must have needed more sugar than me. She comes from a moderate evangelical background, like most clergy now. Somehow we ended up talking about vestments. She brought the subject up, I swear. 'Does what you're wearing make a difference to what you feel?' she asked. 'Does it feel different to use something very traditional as opposed to something modern-style?'

It was a very good question: when you preside, you know the Eucharist is still the Eucharist no matter what you're wearing. In extremis I once stepped in to take a service when Miriam the curate when I arrived here got a coughing fit and couldn't carry on: I was wearing Wellingtons and a waterproof over which I draped a stole. A couple of weeks ago I found myself filling in at a church not far away where they turned out to have no kit at all, so I wore a surplice over a cassock. I have no doubt at all that either Mass was valid, whether I had a maniple or not, and the same applies to my Evangelical brethren who appear at an altar vested in chinos and a sweatshirt, no matter how objectionable I might find it. The Holy Spirit, I have no doubt, still turns up, even if He holds His nose. If He had one.

Psychologically, too, once I'm in the zone the schmutter doesn't matter. I'm concentrating on the words and actions, and the kit only comes into it when I am avoiding tripping or knocking things over with the maniple. But it does make a difference to know, before I start really, that what we're using is the best we can provide. It should be the best. It should be clean and seemly, and not draw attention to itself. It shouldn't be slapdash or careless: time and attention is part of the sacrifice. It should also be visibly part of the great continuum of Christian worship, not novel or individualist, which is where the messy aesthetics of the 1960s to the 1980s stumble: the kit's form and style should refer to our brethren across time and space, and not to ourselves. So yes, it does make a difference of some kind to know we've got it more right than wrong. Thank you for asking. 

Devotionally Challenged

On my great trip north I called in on my friend Clare (no point disguising her name) who is Chaplain to the University of Cumbria in Lancaster. It's a peculiar kind of arrangement: the University grew out of St Martin's College, a Church of England teacher-training college occupying the site of the old barracks in Lancaster. It gradually acquired other scattered sites and when it was finally instituted as a university in 2007, it couldn't call itself Lancaster University or the University of Lancashire as those titles were taken, so it became the University of Cumbria even though its biggest campus is in Lancaster. Clare describes it as 'very, very secular' but part of the foundation arrangements was that there should be a number of Anglican appointments on the staff, of which the Chaplain in Lancaster is one. So Clare finds herself something of what we would in other circumstances call a 'pioneer minister', sent to a group of people who don't have any longstanding interaction with Christianity (the previous chaplain had, let's say, not been particularly active and the Chapel, built in the 1960s to be a sort of parish church of the College, hasn't had much of a congregation for a long while). 

One of Clare's challenges in restoring the Chapel of St Martin to something like a devotional space can be found behind the altar. Here she is, then, displaying one of the Church of England's greatest artistic treasures, John Bratby's Me as Christ, Crucified by My Ex-Wives and Art Critics. 

I'm teasing you, of course. The mural doesn't have that title (if it has one, it's the tedious Golgotha), but it would be an accurate description. John Bratby's name has virtually disappeared from the story of twentieth-century British art but he was flavour of the day at one point in the 1960s. He was, by all accounts, a dreadful, dreadful man, but his portraiture in particular has a psychedelic verve to it even if, as Clare points out, he seems consistently to lose interest in his figures by the time he gets to their feet. 

The mural was acquired by the College's first Principal, Hugh Pollard, after a theological college in Manchester got queasy about buying it. It does present some challenges as a devotional image, in that it isn't intended as one but rather an unpleasant joke. I'm reminded a bit, in another mode, of Jean Fouquet's portrait of French royal mistress Agnes Sorel as a bare-breasted Virgin Mary, an icon of something else quite a long way from religious feeling. The story goes that when the late Queen Mother opened the College in 1967 and was shown the painting she remarked of the artist 'Do you think he has the slightest idea of what Christianity is about?' Taking a broad view of the doctrine of the Incarnation, you might reply Yes, but only just enough to get it wrong.

So, what is a chaplain to do with it? Clare's predecessor had it covered with a curtain which, she thinks, 'was worse - it means it's lurking unseen like a monster'. Given that hardly anyone comes to worship in St Martin's anymore Clare plans to reorganise the space so that there's a smaller liturgical area with its altar to one side while, for the considerable number of Cumbria students who are studying medicine and allied subjects, she will offer some sessions reflecting spiritually on pain, physicality and selfhood. Take the horror and work with it. It's a bit like the Parable of the Talents. 

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.