Left Field

On Thursday I was, as usual, off work, but aware that our curate was off as well I'd undertaken to open up the church. On my way back from shopping in the middle of the morning I suddenly realised I'd forgotten this duty, and was collecting the keys from home when I had a message on my phone: we have in Swanvale Halt church a memorial to a mildly well-known person and a gentleman had come from the Isle of Wight to look at places associated with him; could he have access to the church? As I was heading there anyway I stifled any suggestion that it might have been sensible to check the church was indeed going to be open before catching the ferry across the Solent, found the visitor outside, and let him in.

The traveller turned out to be a Roman Catholic gentleman who attends a church run by the Ordinariate, and spent most of our encounter trying to persuade me it would be a terribly good idea if I moved in that direction as well. 'It's about the beauty of holiness, isn't it. You could have all of that!' I used Archbishop Laud's line when he was offered a cardinal's hat if he would shift his allegiance to the Roman observance: 'My conscience would not suffer that to be until Rome is something other than it is'. In fact my appreciation of (what I believe to be) the special mission of the Church of England - its tension of different viewpoints, its commitment both to tradition and openness to change - has never been as definite as now. It helps that the local Roman Catholic parish here is dominated by a mixture of modernists and Charismatics, but I didn't point that out.