Fruits of the Spirit

It was the morning of the Village Show and, despite the extraordinarily unfavourable growing conditions in recent months, some dogged local allotment holders and gardeners were turning up to drop off their entries. Ella the former Rainbows group leader was guarding the car park beside the church (which we use on sufferance of our neighbours) and was accosted by Lara who'd been for a run. Lara is still just about a parent-governor at the Infants School and Ella was a parent more years ago than she might prefer to recall. It was a lovely community occasion, they agreed, and from that moved on to a discussion about how communities like Swanvale Halt function. There are economic elements - the few remaining businesses, especially the café and the small supermarket - and social ones, including the Infants School itself. There's a secular primary school further away from the village centre, but from our point of view, and that of people with at least some faith such as Ella and Lara, the Infants School links into the church, bringing one into the other. The children may not grow up with any particular degree of faith, but they will have had some exposure to the deposit of stories and images that make Christianity up. It, and the building constructed to express them, will be something they have in common even if the theology that makes it more than that isn't something they buy into very much. 

That doesn't sound a lot. In fact it is very nebulous and unmeasurable and impossible to capture in Church of England mission statistics. But I would argue (as I think I mightn't have done once upon a time) that it is not nothing, especially in an age when there is little else that brings communities together. Remove it, and you would miss it. You can attempt to construct ways of communities expressing their solidarity and identity and they always seem hollow. I'm reminded of the various well-meaning efforts of humanist groups to come up with some sort of alternative to 'church' that functions in the same way as 'church': they eventually seem to devolve down to stand-up comedy and singing 'Sweet Caroline', and fizzle out. It is as if, to express our common humanity, we need to be committed, however fuzzily, to something more than our common humanity. Funny that.

Caniculares Dies

 ... only with fewer actual dogs. In Swanvale Halt this sharp summer, the canines keep inside for most of the day the same way the humans do. These are quiet times at the church, punctuated only by the roster of events that happen every year - the Feast of the Transfiguration which we try to observe with an outdoor mass in the churchyard (and easily succeeded this year), the ecumenical open-air service in Hornington, and, yet to come, the Village Show. That's likely to be the least successful of the three, given current conditions which have shrivelled the dahlias and reduced the allotment tomatoes to the size of, well, currants. 

 When I can come up with literally nothing I can bear to do at home at the moment, I have a wander about, pray for the people I know or indeed don't know in the streets I go along, and challenge the Lord to bring me into contact with someone who might appreciate talking to me. Sometimes he does, but I'm realising this venture is not very effective if I follow my usual inclination and try to polish off whatever tasks I might need to do before heading out, maybe in the middle of the afternoon; in the middle of the afternoon, everyone who can is hiding out of the sun. The café opposite the church is deserted; the roads are silent. 

I take with me my little directory that lists not just members of the congregation but also baptism families, funeral next of kin, wedding couples, and other contacts. I tell myself I might even knock on a door or two. And at that point I realise how neglectful I have been. Not only have the numbers of all these pastoral contacts declined over the years - which I can't do much about - I have been very shy about keeping in touch with people, and now it's a bit late to go calling on someone whose child I baptised a few years ago and haven't seen since. Despite having a set of very good excuses to knock on a door, I think 'shy' is probably the right description. At the back of my mind I have a conviction that they will have no interest in hearing from the priest, and at the front of it a set of rationalisations for holding back - it's raining, it's the weekend, it's the holidays, it's not the holidays. I have been very foolish, and changing my outlook would do everyone good, not least me.

Apocalypse on the Wireless

Time to use the Giles Fraser graphic again, though I think he has a beard now. I do my best to avoid ‘Thought for the Day’ but I caught it on Monday which was a great way to begin a week off. In this particular instance Fr Fraser was dealing in apocalyptic, ‘the End is Nigh’ language which he averred that the Church had given up since the possibility of nuclear annihilation pushed it towards encouraging optimism instead. This was only good sense, Fraser says, because nobody believes in the Book of Revelation stuff anymore. But now, as he sits looking at wildfires eating up acres of English countryside, it seems to have suddenly struck him that human society might actually, really, be under threat. He couldn’t bring himself to be hopeful in any way, he concluded, to come up with some statement about God stepping in to sort it all out: he sounded on the brink of tears. And indeed, ‘Thought for the Day’ is not usually so revealing.

I was surprised. Giles Fraser claimed never to have heard a sermon in an Anglican church that dealt with the Apocalypse, but I talk about it relatively frequently, and it’s there in the background even if not explicit. The final section of the 1996 Anglican Cataclysm – sorry, Catechism – begins ‘The Christian lives in certain hope of the advent of Christ, the last judgement, and the resurrection to life eternal’, while I’ve just finished reading a book on the suffering of the non-human Creation all five of whose theological contributors, from very different perspectives, nevertheless envisage a final sovereign act of God in which creation will be renewed, the current order of things pass away to be replaced by a perfected one. When I was in the process of converting, my friend Comrade Tankengine, son of an old-fashioned High Church Anglican clergyman, told me the prospect of the End of All Things was the only thing that gave him the hope to carry on at all.

We could take the apocalyptic tradition as symbolic rather than literal. In fact we probably should, unless we’re really ready to countenance the appearance of multi-headed dragons as part of God’s process of preparing the world for the End. In this reading, the strain and violence embedded in the texts represent the increasing recognition of good and evil as humanity advances towards what God wants for it. And it may be so; but that recognition could still require the destruction of everything we hold dear: the two might go hand-in-hand, and we should take account of the possibility.

I faced this a few years ago when thinking my way through the climate emergency. I was not sure then, and am not now, exactly how likely the End is to arise from the changes we can see around us at the moment: for what it’s worth, I think not, though I’m not at all sure our current civilisation will make it through, and that’s a shame enough. But it behoves us to think about it, and pray, and not for that Day to take us by surprise, like the thief in the night.

Gronthill Fottoes, I mean Fonthill Grottoes

Everyone knows how William Beckford built with slave-plantation cash the mighty, impossible Fonthill Abbey, whose central tower collapsed, before decamping to Bath and constructing the more feasible Beckford’s Tower where friends of mine have stayed, courtesy of the Landmark Trust. But the Fonthill Estate also contains follies, in addition to the insane folly of the Abbey itself. You know when you’re entering what was the Fonthill Estate – the modern version comprises only the eastern half of the land Beckford would have been familiar with – because of the monumental gateway with its hideous faces which was built not by Beckford, but his father (also, helpfully, William Beckford). Beckford pere also created the lake which his son enlarged, and it was around the lake that the follies were grouped. The most accessible now is a ruinous cromlech-like structure on a steep slope, quite rightly fenced off as it looks as though a good gust of wind would bring it down: this is sometimes described as ‘The Hermitage’, but I think that’s more likely to be the towering stone structure in the wood just below the cromlech, with a little arched doorway and two small windows. That building is separate from the Tunnel, which runs beneath the road that follows the west side of the lake: that you can only glimpse through two roughly circular apertures and a largely filled-in doorway, though according to Historic England it has ‘three arched openings leading to a domed chamber and then to a curving tunnel’. Probably the best site, the main grotto on the east side of the lake, is on private estate land and inaccessible, though a LiberFaciorum page has some photos of a structure with fake stalactites which may be it, unless that’s yet another unmarked folly on the public side which I missed. Headley & Meulenkamp don’t cover the Fonthill Lake follies at all, only mentioning a grotto in passing when they discuss Old Wardour and the grotto there; I got the reference from Dave Hamilton’s recent Weird Guide and he rather implies he followed the private path on the east of the lake to find the big grotto, which I balked at doing having seen two vans resplendent with the Fonthill Estate logo either driving about or parked up. An angler I asked insisted you could see the private grotto from the western side just by the boathouse, but that’s the Landing Stage constructed by William Beckford Senior, complete with four huge stone ‘urns’ (except that they don’t contain anything).

Does Fonthill count as a Gothic Garden? I’m inclined to say No. It has some of the elements we see in places that do, especially the arrangement of features around a lake or river, and Beckford was familiar with such sites – Hackfall drove him almost to distraction with imaginative excitement – but there’s nothing here that tends to the sublime, nothing intended to excite terror or induce gloom. Maybe if we had a clearer idea of how the structures we can see now were intended to work as an ensemble we might take a different view.

Weary Words

Swanvale Halt is quiet at the moment. Some of this is down to the schools being out, and some to the heat (it was absolutely deathly at the height of the heatwave). And things are quiet for me: a little spate of funerals and baptisms has come to an end, and it was in any case nothing like the numbers that I used to deal with when I was first ordained. I have found myself feeling increasingly exhausted; there have been days when dragging myself back up the hill from the church has actually been hard work, and I don’t think that was entirely to do with the heat. Why should it be, if I have less to do?

Every now and again I speak to Dale, a former parishioner, over Zoom: we started during the pandemic. American Dale has had so many careers and courses of academic study that I find it a challenge to work out how they all fit in: now he lives a somewhat health-restricted life in a south Midlands town. He thinks I am a cleverer and better person than I am. This week he mused on the kind of relationship he and I have, which is a sort of pastoral one but also one of peers. I used my tiredness as an example: I can’t tell actual parishioners how weary I feel as this will probably make them less willing to bother me with things I really should be bothered with. ‘Reverting to the career as a therapist I never pursued’, Dale says (another one? really?) ‘I would say that close attention to people – which is what Jesus does – is exhausting and a day that ends in a feeling of exhaustion and fulfilment has succeeded’.

I wondered how often ‘fulfilment’ described how I feel at the end of a day. Certainly I appreciate the sense of having had a helpful interaction with someone, even Mad Trevor, no matter how tiring it has been. My frustration is that I am so often unable to offer anything which feels meaningful. But is the meaning simply in the interaction, in the listening? Dale’s thoughts suggested it might be. I also reflected that I might also draw some energy from those interactions, a different kind of energy from the sort I expend, in the same way that in the world of physics kinetic energy gets converted to potential energy and vice versa. Maybe it was having fewer such interactions that made me feel exhausted, and the quiet time was a sudden withdrawal of a kind of energization I relied on.

That could be something that changes the whole way I view areas of my work, and life beyond my work in fact. Amazing that one can reach 56 and not know something so basic.

(Photo of my day-off lunchtime trip to a local pool for context)

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 packaged 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.