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. 

Quiet!!!

I find my Lent Quiet Days in Simon and Clarissa's Garden Room at Bortley Mill just as worthwhile as the more extended time I spent over many years at Malling Abbey. This time as it was a Monday I wasn't fasting for the day but in homage to Catherine de Hueck Doherty's strictures about time in the poustinia I subsisted only on bread and black coffee for the day! Not that the privilege of spending a day praying and reading is a great privation. 

The Holy Scriptures aside (I had never before realised that the Parables of the Great Banquet in Matthew 22 and Luke 14 are two profoundly different stories, and I concluded the keynote of the latter is the Lord satirising social customs), the book I took with me was one recently given to me by Dr Michael Lloyd, my former doctrine tutor from Staggers and now gloriously reigning as Principal of Wyckers. God, Struggle and Suffering in the Evolution of Life (2025) is a series of written conversations between six scholars including the Revd Dr himself around the knotted issues of where God fits into the suffering we see embedded in the mechanics of the non-human world. It is, as you might guess, very dense. I was encouraged to know that not only are thoughtful people devoting energy to this ('I have been examining this subject for the last 35 years', writes Prof Paul Fiddes, with the slight suggestion that his younger colleagues might have found some of their conundrums answered by reading his earlier books), but that they actually take the trouble to listen to what each other says and deal with it respectfully, dedicating time and thought to opening debates out rather than closing them down. No odium theologicum obvious here. As someone recently congratulated me on an article I'd written for opinions I hadn't expressed, I can only rejoice. 

No flash of kingfisher by the millstream this year, only grey wagtails.

Sede Vacante

That progressed shockingly quickly. The announcement that the Bishop of Guildford had inoperable pancreatic cancer only came a month ago. Very quickly a message followed to say that the disease was advancing faster than expected - 'possibly my last letter to the diocese', he stated - and this morning he passed to his reward. Last week I went to the Cathedral to take part in a vigil of prayer for the Bishop - nothing organised, simply (and rather affectingly) people sitting quietly in the nave for as long as they wanted to - and now the journey is over. This happened recently to a neighbour, therefore a parishioner though not a member of any church, who went from diagnosis to death within a month; a much-loved member of the congregation died a couple of years ago from a brain tumour, but that took three months, and we all thought that was fast. This gives no time for adjustment and assimilation, and as I'm not sure any bishop in recent times has ever perished in an accident, such an experience is very rare. This is not something that happens to bishops: they retire, write the odd book, maybe wait for the media to start questioning the decisions they took in office. Recently I reflected that the business of his 'dying well', as he put it, might be the most important ministry +Andrew would carry out - but, as it has turned out, there hasn't even been much of that.

Of course my relationship with my diocesan has been an odd, distant one. At times I got the impression he rather preferred that, not just with me but with everyone apart from those immediately around him. He was my father-in-Christ who I was committed to obeying in all things lawful and honest, as the phrase goes, but that was about it. Nevertheless he was the one person the whole of the diocese related to, in whatever way: a bishop is 'the focus of unity' not in the sense that everyone agrees with them, or even ought to, but simply because the bishop is connected with them all and, through the bishop, they to each other (including the worshippers of the past in the diocese's churches, as the bishop is a link in a chain). So +Andrew's sudden removal plucks out a kind of axle around which everything else revolves, however eccentrically or remotely. Without a bishop, with a sedes left vacans for stretching months or years, would we spin away from one another? No, we would be kept in tenuous connection by the diocesan mechanisms of parish share and safeguarding training. But there would not even be the potential of love, which is what any relationship should include.

Cross and Flag

Remember my stricture about not saying anything, if you can't say anything good? This afternoon's Radio 4 drama about a local community struggling to come to terms with the election of a radical right-wing council (who could they be thinking about as a model?) tested that resolution, so I will draw a veil over that save to mention that one of the strands of the story concerned the sudden arrival of an influx of new worshippers in the parish church whose motivations might be other than strictly spiritual. 'This is Christian nationalism, Cath. That's what it is, it's got to be!' 'Twice the congregation again, wouldn't you say?... They want to spread the word of the Lord, love and kindness, and that's what I want to do too!' Not only is this kind of dialogue used by no-one, anywhere, but I wouldn't like anyone to get the idea that anything like this is actually happening. I've heard colleagues wondering whether the 'Quiet Revival' might partly be a reflection of people being tempted in the direction of Christian nationalism, but not only do we now know the Quiet Revival was a myth but there is absolutely no sign at all that such people find their way to traditional Anglican parish churches (I discount the tweedy young fellows who have always turned up at high-class shrines such as Fr Rubric's in the West End, as they are a very different brand of soul).

Another of my strictures is to avoid political partisanship, but Reform UK did rather smoke me out this week by announcing an intention to 'restore Britain's Christian heritage' by various means. I will not get into the meat of this now as you can predict what my line might be, but instead think a little about what the circumstances are in which I do feel obliged to speak. It's a matter of conviction for me that there can be conservative courses of action which flow from Christian ideas as there can be progressive ones, and so I am deeply reluctant, most of the time, to use the platforms given to me to critique specific policies. I think the line must be when policies, or a political platform generally, are explicitly given a Christian justification and understanding: then it becomes absolutely incumbent on Christian ministers to talk about what the Christian understanding of a matter might be, and especially the principles behind that thinking. That's part of our mission, not to comment on civil public life as such, so much as to explain the Faith.

In this case, the relationship between Christianity and nationhood is not simple. A nation's law may be more informed by Christian ideas or less, and a polity may make it easier to pursue a Christian life or harder. But it is absolutely clear that God never had any relationship with a nation of people, as such, other than ancient Israel, and the whole understanding of the Christian faith is that the Church is the nova Israel, the covenant extended to all humankind through the shedding of Christ's blood. 'Nations' are of very secondary importance, and the concept of 'a Christian nation' in anything other than historical terms is something close to an oxymoron. 

Oh dear, I've fallen into talking about actual political stuff. Probably doesn't do too much harm, I suppose.

Telling Me The Story

As the diocese digests, as it seems to be, the imminent death of its bishop - things have moved on since the news got to the BBC - I'm conscious that I have been silent lately, but even though my thoughts today weren't connected with the update +Andrew issued they are not a million miles away from relevant. 

I am struggling towards the end of a number of projects, themselves the conclusion of a series which has occupied me really since the early Covid lockdown. I think that, once they're done, I may well have a rest for a while. I find myself writing about something contemporary over which opinion is very divided, to the point that different groups involved seem to inhabit entirely separate mental worlds. I fall more on one side than the other, though I will strive to be fair and at least do justice to both.

As you know I am a historian in a small way: even my holy well compendia are, in a way, gathered stories. When you set out to write history, you almost always have a thesis, a story already vaguely formed in your mind, if only because the smaller subject you're writing about is set within the grander story of humanity and you probably have that pretty much sketched out according to your beliefs. It's rare that you know nothing about your topic in advance. As you do your research, you'll be looking for anything that bears on that narrative, but not only what confirms it; you'll continually be checking it against what you find. It's a process of constant revision and re-evaluation, and to do it properly and honestly you have to be prepared for the possibility you might uncover something that sends you in a different direction from where you thought. It's not an exact business, but neither is it simply a rehearsal of one's own biases. That's how it works.

That's as it may be. As we draw closer to the end of our lives we might wonder how an impossible collection of events and impressions, of memories and experiences, can conceivably be shaped into a story, something we could put into a memoir or tell to a child. It cannot be, really. We don't know where in the human story we are: closer to its beginning or its end, or what that story means, even whether there is one. I tell the good people of Swanvale Halt Church that the story of Christ is the one overarching narrative of Creation in which our individual stories are gathered and made sense of. His is the book of which we are sentences. There is a comfort in that.