Rainbow Bridge

My journey towards thinking about animals differently didn’t start with Professor Cotillion’s cavaliers, as it really began years ago with my dealings with Christine and her boxers, but since dropping in on online groups such as the charity Bliss Cavalier Rescue’s LiberFaciorum page I’ve become aware of a phrase, an idea, that Christine never used, that of the Rainbow Bridge. ‘Run free at Rainbow Bridge’, grieving pet owners and their comforters will say of their lost animal.

The idea – a beautiful one – is that dead pets go to a meadow landscape where they are restored to health and wholeness, where there is always water and food, and where they play. They wait for their owners to arrive and, when they glimpse them on the edge of the meadow, leave the other animals and run to meet them. Human and pet then cross the Rainbow Bridge together into eternity. Sentimental, maybe, but as I age I'm more reluctant to dismiss sentiment.

The motif of Rainbow Bridge comes, improbably, from a scrap of paper written in 1959 by a 19-year-old Scottish girl who’d just lost her Labrador. It, and she, were chased down by Paul Koudounaris whose book about the spectacular ‘catacomb saints’ distributed across Catholic Mitteleuropa in the 17^th & 18^th centuries, Heavenly Bodies, I have. She was Edna Clyne (later Clyne-Rekhy), and when Mr Koudounaris found her in 2023 she had literally no earthly inkling that her words, originally handed to a few friends in typescript, had, via a 1990s US magazine advice column, found their way around the world - handed to grieving pet owners in vets’ surgeries, shared between friends, carved into stone and placed in pet cemeteries.

Edna disclaimed any direct spiritual influence on her imaginary picture, but the imagery of the rainbow as a sign of hope and its link with animals seems subconsciously to link to the story of the Ark. The rainbow now carries additional meanings, of inclusion and togetherness. But can the motif be accommodated within orthodox Christian thinking in any way?

Even within its own terms, Rainbow Bridge begs questions. What happens to animals humans have wronged, and whose relationship with us is marred beyond repair? The picture clearly imagines dogs as the beloved pets, not surprisingly, though it can easily be extended to cats; where do other animals fit in? And dogs and cats are carnivorous. As far as Christianity is concerned, the idea of Rainbow Bridge is clearly based on popular misconceptions of Christian views of postmortem experience, one of spiritual survival (‘we die and go to heaven’) rather than the resurrection to a new, physical life. Traditionally Christians have shut down discussion about what happens to animals when they die by saying that they have no souls – no soul, no survival – but that seems to fall into the same error. More to the point, the question of what happens to animals is linked to what happens to humans. We participate in the resurrected life not because some immortal part of us survives, but because we acknowledge our sins and turn to Christ; animals have no sin, and so are not redeemed.

But Edna Clyne was only inventing an image, not devising a theology, and if that’s true of her, very substantially the Bible is little different. You’d struggle to define a clear idea of what the soul means – other than being ‘not the body’ – from Scripture, and nothing about the process of what happens to us after death is very clear either.  The greatest clarity we are given, the vision of the Heavenly City, comes in the form of an image, not details about how we get there or what we will do when we arrive. And we know that animals are part of it, because it was part of what Isaiah glimpsed seven centuries before Christ, a renewed world where the wolf would lie down with the lamb and the child place its hand in the adder’s den and not be harmed. None of the ambiguities are insoluble.

You can’t offer a requiem for an animal which has no sin, but you can say as much as that, and maybe that’s all you need to say. We humans have black vestments and unbleached candles to commend us to divine mercy, the tremor of knowing what we are: the beasts, bold and unaware, have the rainbow.

Competition

When Emily's family first came to Swanvale Halt, they arrived at our Toddler Group before they'd even moved into the area. They were looking for a church, they said. Unfortunately when they came with Emily as a babe-in-arms to a Sunday service she bawled her eyes out whenever any music started (everyone's a critic) and so that was that until she was about eight and she became quite enthusiastic, especially when she could bring along her little sister and make a fuss of her. She and her dad were on the serving team for a while, him carrying the cross splendidly and Emily herself making an angelic acolyte. 

Now Emily is in Year 7 and as well as the usual lethargy which I gather creeps over tween/teenagers for physiological reasons she has taken up jiu jitsu which inevitably takes place on Sunday mornings. Her dad has had a few health challenges making carrying a heavy cross around not a good idea, while her younger sister now gets dragged to multiple toddler groups and nurseries during the week as her mum has had to work as a childminder, and going out again on a Sunday to something which doesn't feel very different is less of a draw than staying home and playing with her own toys, thank you very much. 

I mention all this not because it is anything new or results in groundbreaking reflections, but precisely because this is a really quite well-disposed young family which has been very well embedded in the church in the past, and, in an ideal world, would want to be again, but just finds it a challenge. Emily is interested in the putative youth group we want to start later in the month, which is just as well as she's our best prospect of anyone coming at all. It shows that sometimes, perhaps, in the world as we find it, the bits of church life we think of as add-on extras could well be the best way of keeping an entire group of people in contact with God. 

San Flaviano Montefiascone

This time it's Madame Morbidfrog who has photographed St Catherine abroad, at Montefiascone in the Lazio region of Italy. The basilica of San Flaviano there is oddly composed of two churches, one on top of the other; it's the older, lower one that boasts a range of frescos including a nice Triumph of Death and several crucifixions. There are two depictions of St Catherine as an iconic figure, one damaged and the other full-length and very unusual as it has clear Byzantine influence but shows the saint holding her wheel, which wasn't customary in Byzantine images in the 14th century. That's the one Madame captured, and it led me to discover the others.

But there is also a set of images of episodes from St Catherine's legend, which are hard to find online and difficult to interpret as they have suffered over the centuries. The painting of the saint strapped up between the two terrifying flaying wheels (in fact there are even more behind, which I've never seen before - they may represent the wheels breaking apart and crushing the torturers) is pretty clear, and I think we can see Catherine being beheaded too, but it's not obvious what the others depict. In one, gruesomely, the saint appears to be having her breasts cut off, which comes not from St Catherine's legend but St Agatha's, so how did it end up here?

For He Spoke With Authority

I’ve known Fr Embridge for ages: he used to be on the team at Lamford when he worked in the secular world, and now looks after a parish while continuing to write about how the Church can manage the business of change. He is a deep-thinking soul. He often posts about politics on LiberFaciorum; I’m not sure how outspoken he is from the pulpit. You will know how I am very, very reluctant to run my own political preferences up the flagpole (literally) for all sorts of reasons. I don’t believe detailed comment about policy is the Church’s role, at least not unless we have made a definite study of a particular topic; what do I know, after all? What gives me the right to opine out of no greater knowledge than anyone else, just because I have a stole round my neck? Am I not in the position of holding the whole of my parish before God, and holding God before them, souls who have a great variety of attitudes? Looking across the Atlantic, I also see the danger of a society devolving into two non-communicating camps, competing for the control of the space they are both forced to inhabit: a healthy democracy, where you must assume that you will never have a final victory over the people who you disagree with, has to have spaces which nobody controls, where signs and symbols of allegiance and commitment are absent. In our current epoch where it’s absolutely possible to assimilate everything we do into an ideologically-coded identity politics, neutrality is a positive virtue that we have to cultivate, because the pressure is all in the other direction.

Even Mr Farage’s latest pronouncements don’t quite cause me to breach my self-imposed guidelines, although the idea of deporting people to circumstances where they might face torture and death without any investigation treads over one of my own lines and it’s hard for me to see how any Christian might feel different. Instead of denouncing this or that, I strive to think about underlying ideas or attitudes and probe around beneath the surface, which is what I see Christ doing in the Gospels. I might talk about our absolute moral obligation to reduce suffering; the moral danger of polarising language, eroding our ability to share social space with those we disagree with; the inescapable reality of our sinfulness, meaning any idea we can make ourselves generally safer by getting rid of a category of person is a damaging fantasy; and the corrosive effect of developing habitual indifference to the suffering of some groups of others. These seem to me to be legitimate subjects for clerical comment, and perhaps very necessary ones.

St Catherine in Dijon

Yet another friend - Miss T in this case - has recorded an image of the Great-Martyr while on holiday. This 15th-century wall-painting is in Dijon Cathedral. It's definitely St Catherine (her name appears), though the wheel is not easy to see. It might be in the damaged area of the image beneath where her left hand should be, behind the kneeling figure (a Beguine?).

Haslemere Revisited

Haslemere is only a bearable train journey away so on my day off I went there today. It's an odd arrangement: the station lies in a no-man's-land in between the old town clustering around the crossroads leading to Guildford, Midhurst and Liphook, and at the other end a new bit where the supermarkets are. These are very distinct, witnessed by the differences between the artisanal ciabattas and loose-leaf teas served by the café in the old bit and the basic sandwich and mug of best builder's I got in the one in the new. 

The Museum is in the old town. Again, it's an unusual place, set up in the 1880s by Sir Joseph Hutchinson who used his collection of natural history to create a little version of the national Natural History Museum on the grounds that, pre-railway, most denizens of Haslemere would never make it to South Kensington and they really needed to know about whale sharks and lemurs. Over the years, for complex reasons, the Museum has acquired an Egyptology collection (including a mummy) and a range of European folk art: I don't think I've heard the word 'treen' used in earnest since I left Wycombe Museum in 2003. 

I've seen Haslemere Educational Museum (its title) once before, in 2012, but I discovered that I only really remembered it through the photographs I took at the time. I recognised some of the artefacts, but I'd made startlingly unfamiliar images of them, and it was rather pleasing to find that most of the displays came as a surprise. 

I began working in museums because I was inspired by the idea that they could do social good, interpreting a community to itself. I had before my imagination the example of Elspeth King at the People's Palace in Glasgow, a kind of history-from-the-bottom-up heroic socialist-realist model of the museum world. 35 years later I think about them differently - I see their treasuries of objects and stories as revealing, not a master narrative, but the interlocking, overlapping, and contradictory complexity of human lives, and that that's really the point. Some of those lives, in fact, aren't even human. We are brought together with experiences which are not our own, and made to reflect on them. Isn't that amazing?

Word from the Pulpit (if there was one)

The readings today were from Jeremiah 23 where God lambasts prophets who prophesy their own fantasies, and Luke 12.49-56, in which Jesus talks about bringing a sword on the earth rather than peace, kindling a fire, and waiting to be baptised with a baptism which is not of water. At the main service I preached a rather rambly sermon which began with God’s rhetorical question through Jeremiah, ‘Am I not a god close at hand, and not only far away?’, and would have ended with the violent imagery drawn from both readings – ‘fire, and a hammer breaking the rock, and a baptism of blood’ – had I not at the last minute veered away to stress how the Cross stands in judgement over us, over the Church and over the world, but the point is that it leads us somewhere better. Somewhere in the middle I touched on the doctrine of the Real Presence – ‘in that cupboard with the gold curtain is the most important thing in your life’ – my own failings (not enumerated in detail), the possibility of some wrong arising in our community which must be named, say a corrupt Council operation, and imagery of angels. There was a lot in it, but I thought it held together, just about.

Over the years I have struggled with understanding the relationship between the pastor and the congregation. What exactly does it mean? Why does the Lord want it to function in this strange way, if indeed he does? I can get my head around the idea that it creates an inescapable relationship (inescapable unless either the minister is driven out or the laypeople leave) and that training in relationship is at the heart of the spiritual life, but why have one person set aside to take this role? You can drag in the traditional Catholic explanation, that ordained people exist to provide the sacraments, but that’s an unsatisfactorily circular argument.

As I was contemplating finishing the sermon with that brutal statement about fire and hammers and blood I imagined myself saying to Giselle the lay reader, ‘Of course you can’t say that’. My feeling would be that it wouldn’t be right for Il Rettore or Marion, when she was with us, or Ted the public school teacher who preaches occasionally, to say it either. I think this is because it is risky. Not only is the expression slightly extreme, but it’s also very directive in a way I rarely am. This is partly what an ordained person sent to a Christian community to speak with the authority of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is for in a way a layperson (even an authorised one), a retired priest or a curate is not. That status both protects the minister in that they are commissioned to say such things, and also raises the stakes when they do: they’re still going to be there next week (probably), and the congregation’s relationship with them is ongoing and not easy to escape, as we’ve said. The possibility of a strong and directive statement grating like grit in an oyster is part of the point, it seems to me.