Apologia Pro Vita Sua

The Principal of St Stephen’s House while I was there, Fr Sheehy, remains an Anglican parish priest in Lancashire, but his successor Robin Ward (who I have only met a couple of times) crossed the Tiber a few months ago in a move which surprised absolutely no one. The most recent edition of the magazine The Lamp carried an explanation of Canon Ward’s conversion – ‘Shivering at the Gates’, he called it, lifting a phrase from John Henry Newman whose experience he feels he shares. There is a lot here that’s moving and illuminating, even if one’s eyes widen at a panegyric of the stern ‘sacramental Protestantism’ of the old Prayer Book coming from a quarter of the Anglican Church which spurned that very Book whenever it got the chance. But the article also reveals to me how remote I now feel from some of the concerns that seemed to occupy my thinking in those strange, far-off days when I first found myself becoming a Christian in an Anglo-Catholic context.

I think the shift first began when I came to regard the model of the Holy Spirit working as a kind of divine electricity for which the wiring had to be exactly right as fundamentally loopy. It’s an idea that Dr Ward still subscribes to: he describes realising that because of the increasing number of women bishops in the Church of England ‘it would eventually be the case that the lineage of all or at least most male bishops would trace back to a female consecrator’ (what did you think would happen? one might ask). This is the idea that an ecclesial body, a Church, is legitimised because it contains legitimate bishops rather than the other way around – in Fr Couratin’s deft summary, a belief in ‘hands on heads’ rather than ‘bums on thrones’. There are other ways of framing the issue. Do we see Christians in a variety of ecclesial structures showing the fruits of the Spirit? Of course we do. Can a soul be saved outside this or that ecclesial structure? Of course it can: not even the Roman Church now reserves that capacity to itself alone. It could very well be that God intends one kind over another, and I certainly believe schism is a sin – though against charity, more than against truth – but it’s a secondary matter. The point is, in so far as you can, to pursue your salvation where you are: ‘let every one abide in the same calling wherein he was called’, says St Paul. We might also remember Christ saying to the disciples that he has ‘other sheep not of this fold’ when Dr Ward describes his sense of homecoming into ‘the One True Fold of the Redeemer’: I have long since ceased to believe that on earth there is any such thing, whatever the Lord meant by that ambiguous statement.

Of course Dr Ward never says the Church of England is illegitimate. He says it is compromised: ‘pluralist, strained, apprehensive’, and in saying so is quite right. It is the prospect of escaping that environment which seems to appeal most to him, and as life draws on the sense of rest has a powerful appeal. Who wants to carry on battling for what seems constantly under threat? I have often thought that a basic motivation in our Church lives is to try to safeguard the experiences which led to our conversion, unless we have consciously moved on from them. Dr Ward’s apologia makes me reflect that sometimes – no, often – those experiences come packages in an entire ecclesiology. But to the me of 2026, ultimately, all these things seem of little importance beside the ability to say my prayers, and carry on discovering the way of Christ alongside others. So long as a quiet 8am communion service exists within reach, I still have that even if I am not saying it anymore. Nothing else seems to matter overmuch.

Lending a Hand

Revd Harriet looks after the church at Temple Piper; one of four in her patch, though the diocese is doing its best to close one of them. Mind you, they've been trying to do that for about fifteen years. Several years of looking after four churches has taken its toll and Harriet is off sick, and I went over to Temple Piper to fill in at their main service.

It is always instructive to see how other churches do things, because within the main tramlines of Church tradition we tend to believe that we are representative. Swanvale Halt may be a moderate Catholic church but we shouldn't be that much different from any other church which has a eucharistic tradition, should we? The Mass is the Mass, even if you call it something else.

All right, Temple Piper used a slightly different order of service with a baptismal creed and a simplified confession and absolution, but the eucharistic prayer was the same, and there were the same kind of hymns and texts from the same translation of the Scriptures. I didn't have a chasuble to wear (a maniple? you jest) but there was a stole, and at the last church I helped in they didn't even have that. 

It was the communion arrangements that differed. At Temple Piper they have got into the reprehensible habit of using individual tumblers of wine, though the president still has a chalice. They use a small oval gate-leg table as an altar, exactly the same as one I have at home and which I have photographed so you can get some idea of what I'm talking about. Into this constricted space, I had to cram rather more than luxuriates across the full-size altar at Swanvale Halt, namely:

• a brass missal stand
• a wooden holder with thirty-five tumblers of ordinary wine and a handful of non-alcoholic ones which had to be moved from a pew to, well, somewhere I could get to them, and an inconveniently large cloth laid over the top of the whole thing
• a chalice and a cloth that was probably intended as a purificator
• a dish of loose wafers under a plastic dome with a handle on the top
• a tray with cruets and a lavabo towel
• an ablutions bowl

At least there were no candles. Those were on the old high altar a couple of yards behind me. 

I found myself constantly recalibrating my gestures to try and make what I had to work with conform to what I felt I absolutely had to do, without tipping it all over and causing chaos. My main problems was that there was no spare space to move anything into, and I could have done with a couple of extra hands. The sidespeople had overestimated the number of people taking communion by about ten, which was no mean number for a congregation of a bit less than forty. With no other instructions I ended up tipping the unused wine tumblers into the chalice and swigging what was left, but in theory I suppose I should have rinsed them all out. I have a horrible feeling they were just taken to the sink. I was sweating and trembly by the end and it wasn't really to do with the warmth of the morning.

A Little Light Shining

Christine the dog lady maintained in 2021 that she would never have another Boxer after her third died. In the end she took a final beast in from rescue. The next few years were a roller-coaster in terms of her own health and Larry's, and I was with them both when a kind vet came to ease his passage from this existence during a storm on Hallowe'en last year. 

A few days ago Christine called in at her local church to pray and light a candle. This church usually has a volunteer at hand when open; the votive candles they use are not the tea-light kind but upright ones that are stood in a tray of sand. Christine says all the candles available had been lit before, so she asked whether there were any new ones: the answer was that this particular church was committed to Eco-Church policies and when there were candles left alight at the end of the day blew them out to be used again. Christine doesn't have any superstitious feeling that if a candle is blown out the prayer is cancelled or anything of that sort: but on a deep level she found it hard to articulate it felt dismissive. 'I wouldn't have minded if they were used for something else in the church', she told me, 'but not reused in that way'.

At Swanvale Halt we use little tea-lights at the votive candle stand. Occasionally I have found a row of candles lit and then clearly blown out very soon afterwards. I don't know whether this happens when people don't understand the normal candle-lighting protocol, or when someone might be mucking about, but what is obvious is that nobody ever chooses to light a candle that's already been lit once. If I find a candle that's been lit and then extinguished, I usually relight it and let it burn down: the alternative is to gather them up to use for decoration at Christmas or something, but really for that you want candles that will reliably burn for a certain amount of time, so typically it isn't worth it.

This raises the question of what we think we're doing when we light a votive candle. 'The candle burning its life out before a statue', the New Advent Catholic Encyclopaedia says sensibly, 'is no doubt felt in some ill-defined way to be symbolical of prayer and sacrifice', but that 'no doubt' suggests that the custom is not really talked about. I think we feel that the candle flame is carrying on our prayer once we have stopped, not of course in any literal way, but that it represents our continued intention to which we may return. To extinguish a votive candle, or to expect someone to reuse one, does go against that sense (note that nobody cares at all about having a secondhand candle for a liturgical purpose, like the ones lit for the Crib Service or the processions at Candlemas and Advent Sunday - they don't perform the same function). I wonder whether church communities realise how pursuing a perfectly reasonable objective can make them seem mean and petty in practice.

Nearly Forgot

I can only imagine Il Rettore was to blame for prompting the church, completely unsuspected by me untill it happened, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of my priesting on Sunday. We had fizz and cake and I cannot complain because there ought to be more occasions for that. I was also presented with a very striking vase I'd admired when it was under consideration for sale at the Spring Fair, and a certificate from the diocese. I had no idea such things existed - I suppose just remaining functioning is an achievement when I think of all those who have left the ministry!

Strangely the anniversary is never one I pay much attention to unlike some of the people I was ordained with and I wonder why that is. In any case I always think of my ordination to the diaconate as being the moment my status changed in the eyes of society, myself, and maybe even God. Perhaps it was because I never really sought this peculiar existence and would have been perfectly content to remain in the museum world had I been turned down at my selection conference: I thought it was what God wanted me to do, but I could have been wrong. I do always think an ordained person should have an idea of what they might try to do if they lost their faith or just their job, but my shadow life has changed over time. I now think it might be good to work for a dog rescue, but I don't think there's much scope there. Even fantastic Bliss Cavalier Rescue only has one part-time employee helping to save beautiful canines!

St Catherine in Bruges

Jean our sacristan and her husband have been on holiday in Bruges and spotted this image of St Catherine in the city museum, part of a group from 1623 including St Barbara and the Magdalene. I like the fact that she's treading on a bit of the wheel.

To Put It Mildly I Remain Unconvinced

Late to the party as ever, I hadn’t heard of Accelerationism before Liber Faciorum decided to place before my eyes an article describing it. As a philosophy it’s nothing new: in a way Karl Marx was the original Accelerationist, positing the idea that the contradictions and conflicts within capitalism would intensify until they reached breaking point. Marxists, though, usually tend to prepare for the inevitable crisis rather than start monstrous capitalist monopoly businesses in an attempt to hasten it, which is the hallmark of all different brands of Accelerationism – that steps taken in the direction of breakdown and collapse are actually to be welcomed as they hasten us towards the catastrophic change we need. Contemporary sorts of Accelerationism spend time thinking about how technology fits into the picture, and they are often popular with those who work in, or are in charge of, tech businesses pushing the boundaries of what it can do.

The article pointed to the central influence of Nick Land. A philosopher at the University of Warwick in the 1980s and ‘90s, Mr Land developed a set of ideas about capitalism, technology, and how-we-know-what-we-know that eventually settled on the idea that we must ‘grasp the real by stripping it of all anthropomorphic dissimulations’, that is, by facing the inevitable fact that our truths, hopes, dreams, pleasures, pains and thoughts are all ended by death, and that any form of apocalypse is to be welcomed as it forces us up against the limits of our illusions. Death, for Land, becomes the ultimate test of the validity of any system of thought. I wonder whether anyone has written more than in passing about his gathering of like-minded souls, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, as anything that nuts sounds something of a hoot. Nick Land resigned from Warwick in 1998, went off his head on amphetamines, and resurfaced in Shanghai where he has become an inspiration to the alt-right. I was led inexorably from him to various sorts of pessimist philosophy – to David Benatar’s Better Never to have Been of 2006, Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race of 2010, Ray Brassier, the Dark Enlightenment, and other kindred distractions. You can look all that up should you choose.

Pessimist philosophies, of their nature, are convinced of the unbearable horribleness of existence and that regarding it as unbearably horrible is the only rational response to life. David Benatar has a neat set of logical propositions about the nature of pleasure and suffering which prove that human life (and arguably all life) inevitably comprises more of the latter, and that any feeling we might have to the contrary is delusional. Reading them you can almost picture him sitting back and dusting off his hands: job done.

Back in the days when I would argue how little we could rely on the evidence of our senses as bases for moral systems, my friend The Heresiarch used to say to me, ‘These are just philosophical problems, most people just get on with life’. I was annoyed with him then, as it seemed to me to amount to a refusal to think, but I have more sympathy now than I once did. Yes, they do just get on with life, and with more of it behind me I rather think they are right to. Even David Benatar’s deft syllogisms are a bit of a trick, as they sidestep what people actually feel about their lives and declare that they are incorrect to feel it. I suspect that at the root of such pessimistic systems of thought is something like the following: I am really clever, and I am miserable. How can it be that the great majority of human beings appear existentially untroubled by the sheer levels of misery which seem so obvious to me? It can only be that they are able to ignore it because they are stupid, because they have failed to grasp the reality of their situation in the clearsighted way I have.

You can see how this conviction that you are part of at least one sort of elite (nobody ever seems to imagine they might not be) could push you towards the kind of far-right position Nick Land now seems to espouse from his eyrie in China, but you can also glimpse it in all sorts of extreme ideologies, both political and religious, that absolutely require convincing everyone that human life is much more wretched than they think it is. If this means you, you run the risk of falling into your own pit, as Nick Land did, and succumb to the logic of your misery. I think, perhaps, of William Perkins, the Puritan divine who, to accommodate the fact that Christians could say all the right things and maybe even feel all the right things and still remain inescapably sinners subject to the inscrutable and unaccountable will of God, developed the idea of ‘temporary faith’. This looked exactly like real faith even down to the internal feelings of conviction a believer might experience, and could conceivably last all the way to death; but it would not be the kind of faith that saved a person and you might pass beyond the Bar only to find you were damned after all. Not surprisingly, because he was not a psychopath, Perkins seems to have ended his life in a sort of depressive breakdown as a result of his own thought.

WH Auden was fond of dividing human beings into contrasting categories, and one of these was what he called Alices versus Muriels. Muriels, he described, were sensitive souls so shocked by the failure of the world to be perfect that they ended up regarding it as hopelessly corrupt and compromised, while Alices were pragmatic characters who just got on with life. You can imagine which group he thought he fell into. I suspect that much of my time I have been a bit of a Muriel, but strangely while being a Muriel has I think propelled me towards Christianity – how do I find a sense of meaning in a world which seems unable to support one of itself? – it has refashioned me into more of an Alice. Whether ‘life is worth living’ judged by balancing values and disvalues seems to me a meaningless question, and I am less interested even in the strictly existential question of ‘meaning’; I may have sought one, but I can easily see how the great majority of human beings rub along without one beyond what they experience.

If all you want is to lament how awful humans are and human life is, and you’re not interested in how it could be better, I really don’t want to know. Do shut up, and don’t expect a research grant.

Back to Painshill

It is fully twenty-one years since I was last at Painshill Park, with Dr Bones on that occasion. That was blazing summer, but a rainy weekday ('holy well weather') works just as well to follow the walks, wonder at the follies, and muse around the lake. Here and there I could glimpse other visitors, but no more than a dozen of them.

On our last visit the Grotto - the largest in the country - was still being restored and on walking through it it's boggling to remember that it had been entirely ruined, the roof falling in during the 1940s. In fact many of Painshill's features were even more ruinous than they were intended to be, as the garden's designer Charles Hamilton did things as cheaply as he could, often using timber painted to look like stone - and even then he couldn't repay the colossal sums he'd borrowed (from the bank run by his fellow gardener Henry Hoare of Stourhead) without selling the estate and having to leave the very landscape he'd created. The Painshill Trust has in many cases not just restored the follies and features, but actually reconstructed them. 

I'd not really noticed what a superb composition Painshill is - how carefully the views are arranged, how skilfully the experiences are built on until you reach the fairytale Gothic Tower right at the far end of the estate, how the lake is constructed to look like a huge expanse of water here, a tranquil pool there, or a river in a third place, because you never see it in its entirety. It doesn't count as a 'Gothic Garden', but it's a huge delight.

As you approach the Gothic Tower you can hear the A3 thundering just beyond the trees, which explains part of Nia Broomhall's strangely moving poem displayed outside: