A Conservative Habit of Mind

Some years ago I came up with what I called the Law of the Conservation of Church Fittings which stated that there was a hierarchy of change, or lack of change, in ecclesiastical settings. Liturgical words can be shifted with reasonable ease, at least once you get past a 'block' such as the Book of Common Prayer which very largely determined the form of Anglican liturgy for about 300 years, and before long everyone forgets that it was any different. Liturgical forms and practices take a bit more to move. Hardest to change of all are the bits and pieces that hang around a church. This is partly because they tend to be introduced by clergy who leave them behind when they move on without really having explained them to the laypeople, who then don't like to take it into their own hands to do anything about them, just in case they're important. They become part of the furniture, even when they no longer actually perform any useful function.

This little glass pot has sat on a windowsill in Swanvale Halt church next to the aumbry where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved ever since I arrived. It rests on a linen purificator. Neither are ever changed, moved, or used for anything. I had no idea what the pot was for although had I thought about it I might have been able to guess by virtue of the limescale marks that you can see running round the inside of the glass.

When she was alive, I asked our ex-nun sacristan about the pot, and she didn't know what it was for either. I asked the master server and one of our longest-serving altar servers and they had no idea. It had just 'always been there' and they'd never thought about it. Finally I mentioned it to the former PCC secretary who didn't know either, but said she would ask our revered former incumbent from the late '60s and early '70s who is now a Roman Catholic priest.

The pot is, apparently, supposed to contain water so that when someone needs to handle the Blessed Sacrament they can cleanse their fingers before doing so. However, our former incumbent admitted that he'd never actually used it himself; it was left over from the days of his predecessor, and he'd just never bothered to move it. That means that this particular bit of liturgical impedimenta has sat on its windowsill unused for forty-seven years.

There is, as people have pointed out to me, a sermon in that. Or several.