A Matter of Time

The new-ish contemplative service on the third Sunday evening in the month was over. I've been trying this since September: there are very simple, regular prayers, a reading, and two blocks of music, swirly kaleidoscope patterns projected on the rear wall, a few candles and a bit of smoke, and the Lord joins us in the monstrance. There had been, as usual, a small but appreciative congregation. I was just about to start packing up when Ellie who had attended came back in with the news that 'you've got two more takers who thought it was a 6.30 start'. That turned out to be Malcolm and Dora who are far too regular church members to get something as basic as this wrong. I was very apologetic and in these circumstances you doubt your own self even if you are in the majority. '6 is a bangin' time for me and Katie', Ellie said encouragingly. Once everyone had gone ('Well it's a nice evening for a walk' offered Malcolm) I checked the service register: this service has always been at 6, not 6.30, since I started it. It is fascinating that two people can get this wrong independently. It is the case that evening services at Swanvale Halt are often at 6.30 unless there's a good reason why they shouldn't be (it's a bit early for Compline, for instance) and I suppose in their minds people might group this one with those. I do the same: I still shudder at the memory of the time I turned up late at a service in a neighbouring parish having convinced myself they started at 10.30am, just about on time to preach even if it would have been more help had I presided too. Many has been the time I have waited to see, say, a banns couple at the church only to find they have been waiting at my house where we'd agreed to meet. I strive to stop this and it hasn't happened for a while - but who knows how long my triumph over myself will last?!

Cyfarthfa Castle Museum

Raven (who used to be Cylene, keep up) now lives considerably up the Rhondda Valley and so I don't see them very often. Yet it's surprisingly doable as a day trip provided the roads are favourable. Yesterday the weather was against us and Raven had an appointment in the middle of the day so although they would like to go to St Fagans one day we in fact stayed local and went to Cyfarthfa Castle, which functions as the municipal museum for Merthyr Tydfil. Even covered with scaffolding (and looking a bit rough in places) few local museum services have settings as grandiose as Cyfarthfa, complete with a park and lake. The Castle was built as the home of the Crawshay family who built their fortune on ironworking, and once they vacated it, oddly, the Council opened part of the ground floor as a museum and the rest as a school. You have to piece this history together from the displays rather than being oriented as you go in, but as we went round them in the wrong direction the task was made especially taxing! The collection is remarkably eclectic as the museum attracted art and artefacts from a variety of well-to-do gentlemen and only later began an effort to represent the social and working history of Merthyr. You are rightly not allowed to overlook the fact that the fantastic wealth of the Crawshays derived from the unspeakable toil of generations of local residents and often involved their injury and harm, exactly as you would expect from Red South Wales, as once was. Maybe that political identity only survives in its museums now. 

Smaller Than You Thought

In fact all the Easter services went rather well apart from a confusion about hymn numbers on Sunday ('I feel like a bingo caller', said Il Rettore as he tried to read out the correct one), but having also had to pop to the hospital to take communion to a congregation member on Easter afternoon as all the chaplains were off sick I was very glad to observe 'Bank Holiday Order' on Monday and only do the work I absolutely had to. This was complete early enough in the day to allow me to take advantage of the weather and zoom to Uffington. Algorithms had thoughtfully brought to my attention a new display at the museum there and as I'd never seen either Wayland's Smithy or the White Horse of Uffington I decided to go. 

Apart from the distance I ended up walking (further than anticipated) things being on the small side was the theme of the day. The Neolithic long barrow of Wayland's Smithy has two massive sarsens guarding its entrance but the proof that it was made by fairies is that only the Wee Folk could have fitted inside the burial chamber. I'd thought it was like the West Kennet Long Barrow which has space for visitors to wander around inside but no, it's only tall enough for an adult to crouch in. At the foot of a tree I found what were clearly 'cremated remains', reinforcing how important the place is for some people.

The Horse, too, I had imagined ranging over perhaps a hundred yards of a broad hillside, and P Newman in Lost Gods of Albion says that's how long it is, but I wouldn't have put it much bigger than 50 feet! Curiously that made the figure all the more moving to me - to think firstly that our remote ancestors made this effigy that they wouldn't even have been able to see properly, and also that it has survived three thousand years or more, just a fragile, delicate thing, an absence more than a presence, turf removed to reveal the chalk beneath. 

I did know that Uffington Museum was going to be tiny. It started out as a 17th-century schoolroom, and Bank Holidays are one of the few times it's open. There is basically one room, with a mezzanine forming a separate display area; that 'exhibition' that tempted me there was a small display about mythological landscapes, and I was very pleased with it. Very good graphics and information, a video with an Anglo-Saxon poem being recited against a background of spooky trees, and items left by visitors at Wayland's Smithy, from dreamcatchers to decorated stones. Easily the eeriest is a white-painted plaster ram's head deposited in the chamber itself. Most odd. I'm glad I wasn't the one who found it. 

Near the Finish Line

'Everywhere the glint of brass', as Howard Carter didn't say. Brass polishing is a Holy Week job which is not my province alone anymore as Julia our Sacristan does some of it, but I cleaned the old altar cross, the candlesticks I bought, the thurible (which everyone is too scared to touch in case they tangle the chains inextricably) and its stand, and the memorial plaques. A couple of years ago we discovered that one of my illustrious predecessors was a slave-owner, and I always feel slightly uneasy polishing his plaque, but it adorns the church so he gets the same treatment as (probably) worthier souls, or at least less ambiguous ones. 

Given my last post I am wary of being too gloomy, and as I've said before clergy should not burden laypeople in their churches with their problems, but part of this blog has always been about exploring the things others may be reluctant to say. Spiritually things have felt rather level for a long while, in a positive way, but, as I read in a compilation of Fr Benson's writings only yesterday, when you feel most confident is just when you are most in danger. For no very good reason Maundy Thursday and much of Good Friday were spent almost screaming interiorly and I have no idea what brought it about. Every thought was negative and the slightest mishap sent me spinning. This came about quite suddenly. At least I now realise what you do in these circumstances. You recognise it for what it is: a diabolical attack (however you want to understand that) intended to strike at your most vulnerable point in order to do the maximum harm to the people around you, in this case to try to provoke some explosion of temper. You don't try to analyse or negotiate with the negative thoughts, nor do you try to turn them to something prayerful and positive, because that won't work. You concentrate simply on remaining calm, you do your best to anticipate things that might set you off (I didn't always succeed in that), and wait it out. In my instance it seemed to lift after the Liturgy of the Passion on Good Friday, not because of any pious reflection or conviction of grace, or conscious cause at all, but simply dissipating in the way it had arrived. 

It really is a curious business and I can always be surprised by the violence with which these moods strike. I suppose that being more aware of how to deal with them than I once was is a positive step, but it seems to have taken such a long time!

And, after all that, a happy and blessed Easter to one and all!

Holy Week Weary

Holy Week at Swanvale Halt wouldn't happen without lots of people doing and arranging things, and discussions with colleagues makes the point that there is much they do that I don't have to - driving to Covent Garden to buy its entire stock of flowers like Fr Thesis, or cooking eleven legs of lamb as a neighbour is doing for a Maundy Thursday meal. That sounds worryingly like a pretend seder to me, but even if it wasn't I do try to persuade the church that a mammal doesn't absolutely have to die to provide you with a proper meal. Anyway, not my problem, thankfully. But it all makes me reflect that I shouldn't really feel as worn as I do. 

The Chrism Mass this morning was all right: colleagues of the Other Integrity have been posting images of their own Chrism Masses usually featuring the Bishop of Oswestry bearing up under the weight of his mitre, and for once I felt ours was getting there. I found enough flowers in the garden to make up our own modest Altar of Repose, took communion to someone, and I have every expectation that the Maundy service this evening will be fine and basically if I turn up and say the words all manner of things shall be well. Yesterday I even managed to pop to the Kensington Borough Archives (why is a story for another day) and have lunch with a friend. Kensington High Street is graced by this Victorian temperance water fountain provided by the congregation of St Mary Abbotts, which was restored a little while ago and still works. I think some judiciously-selected non-religious activities may just get me through all the faith!

Disappearing Act

Over the months since it came out, I was the very least important person pouring scepticism on last year's Bible Society report 'The Quiet Revival', with its startling and much-discussed claim that the proportion of people aged 18 to 24 who attended church at least once a month had risen from 4% in 2018 to 16% in 2024, and yesterday polling company Yougov withdrew the research the paper had been based on. It had been affected by fraudulent responses, they said, that would normally be screened out of results but because of 'human error' hadn't been. The Bible Society played the injured party, stating that Yougov had repeatedly assured them the data was reliable. Now tens of thousands of new Christians, and the hopes they engendered in both institutional and less mainstream church bodies, have faded away into the sociological mist. 

In a way I suppose it's quite encouraging that it's taken less than a year for this to happen. But it's very revealing that so many people (not just the Bible Society) were prepared to go over the top on the basis of research which absolutely was not supported by experience and, more importantly, contradicted any other data set that you might care to mention. News stories covering the 'Revival' were always able to find churches where lots of new people seemed to be turning up (the Church Times was careful to balance a Pentecostal Free Church in the South Wales valleys with an Anglo-Catholic congregation in London), but that's always the case. My colleagues enthusiastically reported people trickling in here and there, but it all amounted to nothing out of the ordinary. Still, that's only anecdotal, and anecdotal evidence reveals only what's possible, not what's representative. But every other actual, quantified survey pointed in the same direction: religious observance in the UK has recovered from the pit it collapsed into during the Pandemic, but not even to the level it was at before it, let alone anything more. It's striking, then, how reputable organisations can so readily overlook problems with information if it suits them. 

To be fair to the Bible Society and others, this was a big survey - 13,000 people. It looked credible. If the problem was really that fraudulent results hadn't been extracted in advance of publication - enough fraud to skew those figures - how compromised is public-opinion sampling more generally? Is it actually that easy to deflect it into unreality?

Requiem for a Bishop

Purcell; Duruflé; Fauré; and Rutter's 'The Lord Bless You and Keep You', which I find a bit soppy but says what you want it to; the Cathedral choir acquitted themselves superbly at Bishop Andrew's Requiem Mass today. Not that the order of service referred to the liturgy in those terms, but it was all very traditional. Even the piece of music that nodded most in the direction of +Andrew's usual Evangelical constituency, Stuart Townend's 'In Christ Alone' (complete with the words about God's wrath that some of us can't sing), is about as close to an old-fashioned hymn form as you get from modern Church songwriters. Serried ranks of bishops in proper black chimeres rather than the red they usually wear nowadays whether or not they are Doctors of Divinity, the Diocesan Chancellor in a full-bottomed legal wig, ++Sarah preceded by the primatial cross of Canterbury, and some Orthodox fellow in a black hood - it was all very fine indeed. The only disappointment was that the Lord Lieutenant came in a suit rather than full uniform. He even came to talk to the Swanvale Halt Men's Breakfast once in that, I must point out. Though he was on his way somewhere else, admittedly.

Resting on the coffin were 'the diocesan crozier', which I didn't know existed, a chalice and paten representing +Andrew's priestly ministry, and a mitre standing for his episcopal role. The mitre was rather nicer than the one he usually wore, and I wonder why Anglican bishops can't have nice mitres all the time. Even +Paul and ++Sarah's mitrae simplices were rather handsome in their plainness. In the picture above you can see the Dean carrying the formal crozier up to the high altar where it was laid, the bishop's pastoral ministry being symbolically relinquished. At least he didn't have to snap it in two like the Lord Great Chamberlain at the Queen's funeral, or we'd still be there.

I've already said that the manner of his dying might well have been +Andrew's greatest ministry and, while nobody wanted to say that out loud today, the same sense did hang in the air. It was a great act of faithfulness and I remember most strongly his expression of relief in his second, and last, pastoral letter to the diocese that his faith had not given way in the face of his diagnosis. He talked in a way so personal that you felt it was a kind of liberation: a pastor shouldn't be personal in a way that throws attention on themselves rather than on Christ, but this end-of-life candour was completely appropriate.

A couple of my Evangelical colleagues insisted on raising their hands in the air during the hymns as though they felt they had to, but the communion worked its spiritual wonders and I found any irritation that flashed into my heart was swiftly and rightly drowned by the amazement that after 2000 years Jesus still gives himself up for all these flawed, ridiculous human beings, of whom I am one. The Passion of the Christ draws sombrely closer.

I had an hour to wait for the next train and rather than even attempt to find any lunch at the Cathedral café I went in the other direction and down the hill where there was a 'Pan-Asian' eatery that served me tea and a spicy Indian potato fritter in a bun drizzled with chutneys. 'There were some really fresh green chillis in that' the proprietor grinned proudly. Indeed there were.