Apt

At my elder niece's school, a girl called Lydia seems to be the lynchpin around which 'popularity' orbits. But popularity is a fickle principle, and some may find themselves no longer as popular as they once were, with Lydia and, therefore, with everyone else.

'There's a group of girls at school who used to be popular, but aren't any more,' my niece explained, 'I call them the rejects of Lydia'.

I thought 'The Rejects of Lydia' was probably the best name for a Goth band I've ever heard. I look forward to their first EP.

Happy New Year!

Gatton Park

Thursday was a beautiful day, mainly, in contrast to the rest of the week so far, and I took advantage of my day off to take a walk around Gatton Park near Reigate; I was drawn there by a particular historical feature which I’ll talk about in a minute. I didn’t know until setting out that there’s a National Trust car park with a little café where you can enter the Park, and on arriving found it jammed with vehicles after the whole population of eastern Surrey had apparently had the same idea as me: I was lucky to find a space. Dogs, bikers, walkers, children, in profusion: then I plunged down the footpath into the Park and they all but disappeared, leaving me mostly alone in the chilly, sunny woods with glimpses through the bare trees of the fields beyond.

The woods part and reveal the parkland, a swooping Capability Brown landscape centred on the lakes at the foot of the slope. Those are private, but you can reach the Millennium Stones, seven sharp slab monoliths carved with verses that muse on the nature of eternity, from the Bible to TS Eliot, and from that strange artwork pass round the stupendously ugly buildings of the school which now occupies the estate to the church (cobbled together from bits and pieces) and, finally, to the focus of my visit, Gatton Town Hall.

Gatton, you see, I remember from history lessons at school as one of the very rottenest of the Rotten Boroughs of the pre-Reform House of Commons. The village was designated a ‘borough’ in 1450 as a bribe by King Henry VI to his steward for his support over the king marrying Margaret of Anjou, giving it representation in Parliament. By the middle of the 1700s the electors of the Borough of Gatton numbered about half a dozen, all of whom were tenants of the Lord of the Manor and not likely to want to vote for anyone other than his preferred nominees. The Town Hall was erected in 1765, a little gazebo like a Classical temple, framing an urn: it was here that the voters gathered solemnly, or perhaps not so solemnly, to elect Gatton’s two Members of Parliament. The urn is inscribed, in Latin, ‘Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law’. It’s a political joke of breathtaking cynicism; it could only have made sense in the 18^th century, not just because the constitutional arrangements only existed then, but because an open mockery of political principle would become impossible later.

The photograph of the Town Hall in Pevsner’s Buildings of England shows it surrounded by trees which lend the shocking humour a kind of Romantick melancholy; today it sits hemmed in by school bungalows, next to a children’s playground, facing the old mansion house which is almost as ugly, in its neo-Classical way. It makes the joke seem all the more outrageous.

Christmas Passed

In 2016 the late-Advent and Christmas period seemed entirely manageable, but this year the timing has brought a certain sense of strain, at least to me. Christmas Eve falling on a Sunday has meant that I was preaching five times over a twenty-four-hour period and, I’m afraid, all my sermons did cluster rather around the doctrine of the Incarnation, with a variety of different emphases. This came after the usual repertoire of nativity plays, carol concerts and other events which extends the Christmas season to the whole of the month of December, and backwards.

One of the tasks which occupies the last days of Advent is taking communion to people who aren’t going to be able to be in church over Christmas itself. This is no problem provided you know about them, and can build visits into the schedule. This year we only located one of Marion’s regulars on the Saturday before Christmas: she’d been trying to phone the lady in question but only that day did we discover she’d moved to a care home outside the parish a couple of weeks previously. I ended up arranging to see another indisposed couple on Christmas Eve after they failed to show for the morning service – had Christmas Eve been any other day than a Sunday, it would have made things easier. The liturgical concertina-ing was very strange as the day started out the Fourth Sunday of Advent and then magically transmuted into Christmas Eve partway through; all the usual preparations of moving furniture, changing altar linens, bringing in flowers and reordering had to be done after the morning Mass was over.

The one liturgical event I didn’t have to worry about was the Crib Service, as Marion the curate looked after it. Some of our usual actors and narrators for the tableau-style nativity we’ve done for the last few years weren’t available, so she thought it would be good to change to the more widespread model of having groups of children bringing up figures to assemble the crib scene at appropriate points in the story. I had visions of our china figures smashing to smithereens on the floor as the fingers of nervous infants turned to butter, so the congregation members responsible for the wooden figures of Mary and Joseph that already tour the parish during Advent in the homes of Messy Church families constructed all the other characters too. We used to do this at Lamford – a plastic crib set was used at the Crib Service and the ‘proper’ china ones were put in place afterwards. What we also did at Lamford was to have two younger choristers robed up and leading the groups of children with a pair of acolyte’s candles, so we imported that custom as well, and two of our more reliable youngsters did those honours. It all worked very well, even if some local people still wistfully remark what a shame it is we don’t have real donkeys taking part. If they could find them for me, I’d happily have the wretched creatures there.

Numbers at the Cribbage were significantly up; perhaps because it was a Sunday evening. The Midnight and 10am on Christmas Day were about level, and the 8am Prayer Book Mass down, but numbers for that are so low anyway it means very little, I suspect. The Midnight passed off without incident for virtually the first time, and certainly no repetition of the thurible mishap of last year.

We normally have a midweek Mass on Tuesday, but it being Boxing Day the worship committee had decided against it. It’s my usual day off tomorrow, and whereas once upon a time I would have said, well, I’ve already had a day off this week so I will work, I now take all the time off I can, not out of any particular sense of deserving it but simply from considerations of self-preservation. Boxing Day was my first full day without any church business since November. I will probably go to Marks and Spencer and look for trousers.

The thing I learned about myself was that I don’t think I could ever be a monk. Rick our faithful verger now attends Morning Prayer virtually every day, but in recent weeks he’s started turning up at Evening Prayer as well from time to time. We’ve also been joined in the morning lately by Ken, who is one of the churchwardens of a nearby evangelical parish church. Then he began to arrive in the evening too. As the last week before Christmas drew on they were both there, all the time. I came into church on Saturday 23^rd intending to do some photocopying before saying the holy Office and found them both seated in the Lady Chapel ready to pray. ‘Have you been waiting long?’ I asked, fearful that they’d been hanging round for ages, but they assured me they’d only just got there. ‘Only I don’t usually say Evening Prayer at any set time on Saturdays, just when I can get here,’ I went on. ‘It’s very faithful of you to come to the Office in the evening, Ken’, I offered. ‘It’s an oasis of calm amid all the madness’, he smiled. The trouble is that it turns the Evening Office, from my point of view, into yet another liturgical performance in which I lead other people in their prayer, albeit a very low-key one. When you come in to church and your heart sinks at the prospect of joining your fellow-Christians in worship, even if ever so slightly before you catch it up, to the extent that you have to combat the inner thought ‘oh not these buggers again', then your faith has worn quite threadbare underfoot, I fear. That's not what monks are supposed to think about their brethren.

On Christmas Eve when I came into the church after taking communion to Mr & Mrs Stirling, nobody else was there. I said Evening Prayer, in the dark, on my own for the first time in ages. As the liturgical season always changes in the evening, it was the first Office of Christmastide and it was lovely.

A Moving Scene

In the midst of a late Advent season which has made my head spin a little it is a tonic to witness a vision of the Holy Family portrayed with such serenity as the snow swirls around them, just as it would have done on that first Christmas night, hem-hem. Cal and family came to the Carol Service on Sunday and, being familiar with my mantelpiece full of dreadful religious tat, decided to pass on this find from the back of a drawer, in the expectation that I could give it a more appreciative home. Oy, can I.

Moulettes Again

The West End Centre in Aldershot seems to be a converted school or something of the kind, and is now a performance venue and art space. We went there last Saturday evening for our second rendezvous with Moulettes, the excitingly unusual band we first saw at the wet and chilly Haslemere Festival back in 2014. We weren't aware there was a support act: a young woman singer-songwriter whose guitar work Ms Formerly Aldgate assured me was quite good, but whose vocals only exacerbated the headache she'd brought into the building and forced us back to the quiet of the bar in search of water. A break allowed her to recover and tackle the main event.

Moulettes have sadly lost Ms Skipper who played autoharp and bassoon, and the only instrumentally unusual element is currently provided by lead Hannah Miller's electric cello. This means their sound has become heavier and more rock-orientated, and makes the arty avant-garde ensemble echo the Diablo Swing Orchestra a bit. The music is still exciting, but in a different direction (signature tune 'Lady Vengeance' doesn't work anything like as well with this new mix of sounds). The latest album is inspired by strange sea creatures, which the band members seem to be wearing in the sleeve art, lit uncannily like a series of stills from a BBC nature documentary.

Afterwards we jostled our way to the merchandise table and found Ms Miller herself flogging CDs: I'm surprised she had the energy. 

PS. It turns out that the reason Ms Skipper - or, as I should say really, Dr Skipper - has vanished is nothing sinister, but a decision that she couldn't hold playing in a band together with her day job as a doctor, which is fair enough.

Brightest and Best

The liturgical high point of the nursery nativity service (ah! but there are so many) comes when I lead the children around the church singing Away In A Manger while I carry a helium-filled balloon star. But this year I was caught out having forgotten to buy one. On Sunday evening I popped a note through the letterbox of the florist's in the village (they also sell balloons) to ask whether they could put one aside for me. It was only on Monday morning that I remembered that there was a backup option - the silver foil star-on-a-stick the Infants School had used for their Christmas production last week.  On my way to church in the wind and sleet I went to borrow that, and then battled round to the florist's where a balloon was indeed waiting for me - blue rather than silver or gold, but it was considerably better than nothing. But when I got into the church and popped the balloon on the altar, instead of soaring upwards majestically it flopped straight to the floor! I would have to rely on the school star after all. 

9.30 came and so did the nursery children, making their way along the footpath with the staff, nearly sixty souls all told. I said hello and we lit some candles and I turned to my props - and the balloon was now floating! As Rick our verger pointed out to me later on, it must have been the chilly weather outside the church contracting the helium so that the balloon failed to inflate properly; brought into the warmer surroundings of the church its aeronautic qualities were restored. 

That's the scientific explanation. I and the children agreed it was a Christmas miracle, or an Advent one.

Comfort O Comfort My People

‘We and the evangelicals do believe in the same God, after all,’ I once feebly told my spiritual director. ‘But do we?’ he countered. ‘I’m not at all sure we do. When I hear some people on the extreme end of the evangelical wing of Christianity talking about it, the God they describe is really quite different from the one I imagine.’

You can ignore this for most of the time. But occasionally you encounter it stated in so brutal a manner that S.D.’s reasoning seems no more than the plain truth. Here is the core of the Christian message, according to a commentator on a blog post I read the other day.

… both essential elements of the Apostolic Gospel: the terrible truth and warning that we all face from birth onwards the wrath and condemnation of God and we are all born with a nature inclined to evil; and the wonderful, sincere, genuine command, invitation, and exhortation to all of us to respond to the love, mercy and grace of God by repenting and submitting to Christ in his atoning propitiatory death and life giving resurrection, and thus to be delivered from that wrath and condemnation and to be ultimately conformed by the Holy Spirit to the image of God’s Son.

Put these strictures another way and I don’t dissent much from them. It is, indeed, a core element of the Christian faith’s account of human nature and the human situation that we are fallen, unable by our own efforts to be holy or to choose the good, to be anything more than moderately acceptable pagans; that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ repairs this damage, and that to be repaired we have to turn to him and allow him to do his work. It’s the same idea, re-expressed. But the phraseology and arrangement of this statement, this creed, is the whole point of it: to ‘put it another way’ would be to rob it of its power, for those for whom it resonates. Wrath and condemnation is its emotional crown, and satisfaction at it the lavish pleasure at its centre. It is, genuinely, a different imagining of God from mine, and I have no doubt from the great majority of all the Christians I know who I call, or might call themselves, evangelicals.

You could say much about this. The phraseology of divine wrath is there throughout the Scriptures; we can see the understanding of what it means widening from a belief in God’s jealous and personal hunger for the loyalty of the people of Israel through a sense that he will punish not just unfaithfulness and ritual transgression, but all injustice. Finally, in the writings of St Paul, it becomes a way of describing an existential state and an eschatological hope, the knowledge that you are radically estranged from God on the one hand, and the promise that evil will one day be destroyed and purged from creation on the other. Wrath refers to both these things. It is not, however, anywhere abstracted into a neat phrase that imputes to God the human emotion of rage; still less that he looks on humans with that kind of rage until they follow a certain specific set of actions. Evangelistically, you wouldn’t use this kind of language: most human beings, left to themselves, aspire to be nothing more than ‘moderately acceptable pagans’, and it is waking to the grand love of God which throws into relief our own unloveliness. Without that, we don’t see the Fall for what it is: and God’s wholesale ‘condemnation’ of humanity looks arbitrary, pathological, and unjust. It’s exactly this process that Paul grapples with in the convoluted, paradoxical 7^th chapter of Romans: ‘Once I was alive apart from law; when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died’. It takes a revelation of holiness to show us what’s really going on, and God’s definition of holiness is Jesus. The Church’s proclamation of the Good News should start with him, not with us. The primary fact of the Christian revelation is God’s nature, not our need.

Hearing that ‘we all face from birth onwards the wrath and condemnation of God’, many people will think first of children. Nobody should doubt, or could doubt if they spent long with them, that small children are as marked by the Fall as grown-ups are; if they are ‘innocent’ it’s because they’re inexperienced, as yet unschooled in the dangers and horrors of the world and how they might affect them, not in the sense that original sin, our common inherited tendency to go astray, doesn’t touch their acts. But virtually every human being will revolt against the idea that God looks at children, at their children in their arms, with rage and disgust. And that isn’t what we see him doing. God incarnate in Jesus Christ gathers children in his own arms, children as deeply wounded by the effects of original sin as any grown-up is, and blesses them.  He makes them the measure of the faith of adults, even though they haven’t made any conscious expression of belief in him (I can imagine extreme Protestants suggesting they might have done, but such would be a fond invention and an unwarrantable addition to the holy text). He does this in Mark 10, and a moment later in that account he can be found looking with love on someone else who hasn’t expressed any faith in him, either – except to come and ask him a question, a childlike act too.

The closest Scripture comes to that ‘evangelical’ creed is a passage in Ephesians 2. ‘Like the rest’, says Paul in that text, ‘we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions.’ That phrase, ‘objects of wrath’ is there, surely, yet you see easily how mercy and wrath can, according to the holy Apostle, co-exist in the mind of God, even if not in ours. There is no clear, sequential process. To illustrate this with a picture – in fact, to supersede it by one – which shows God’s expression flicking from contorted frown to beneficent smile as we pray the Prayer of Faith is to traduce the Scriptures, and Him.

I would like to offer that the Gospel is more this: the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ shows us the truth about ourselves and the world; and the truth is, that the unconquerable love of God is the great fact of all creation, that the sign of love is the Cross, and that though our first ancestors fell away from that love, and we are permanently wounded by their fall, he has not abandoned us, but in Christ reaches to lift us out of death into his coming Kingdom. Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Shifting Perspective

My first brush with political life at University late in 1988 found me plunged into the midst of the merger between the Liberal Party and the SDP. I attended a meeting of the student group attempting at that time to call themselves the Democrats (later to become the Social & Liberal Democrats, and finally just the Liberal Democrats, which is the title which has sort-of stuck): I was instantly given an insight into what was happening as the Secretary of the society, Comrade Tankengine, sat virtually biting his ring-binder, emblazoned with a sticker labelled ‘I’m Staying Liberal’, while the President stood beside him saying exactly the opposite. I got to know Comrade Tankengine fairly well and contributed ill-natured screeds now and again to the satirical-political newsletter he used to produce. In those days I found myself definitely opposed to the European Union, that sprawling behemoth which managed to combine grinding bureaucracy with destructive capitalism. Comrade Tankengine didn’t see completely eye-to-eye with me on that, though he appreciated where I was coming from and allowed me to say it in print.

As I sat with the radio this morning and heard Mrs May and Mr Tusk announcing the agreement which enables the negotiations between the UK and the EU to proceed to the next phase – whatever the ambiguities of that agreement – I thought of how far I’d come, and why. I ceased to think of myself as any kind of liberal, philosophically, long ago, concluding that liberalism was insufficient to answer the difficulties human beings face. The EU referendum campaign last year, in which I havered and hesitated and changed my mind repeatedly until, surveying the massed ranks of madness on the Leave side, I concluded I had to vote to Remain, forced me to face another change in the way I view political priorities.

Frankly, money has become my ultimate concern. Not my own personal finances, which are likely to remain reasonably healthy unless there’s a complete social and economic collapse, an eventuality the UK’s membership of the EU will probably have no effect on either way. Rather I look around me at how hard things are for many people I know, how public services are pinched and restricted, how mean-spirited and sclerotic the benefits system has become, and I really, really don’t want these aspects of British life to become any worse. Spiritually, a downward spiral of resources and services is hardly the kind of national environment which encourages optimism, kindness, and openness to the world: it was disproportionately the poor who voted to Leave. Monetary security, like physical security, reduces the grip of the fear and rage which ever threatens to engulf us. Money’s important, or rather, security is: it produces the things we really value.

So now I care very little about abstract matters of government and control, definitely if the choice is between two structures which both allow people to participate in governmental and economic processes – say, the UK within, or the UK outside, the EU. The question is what gives people the greatest scope for self-expression, mutual support and organisation, and problem-solving. If they’ve got that, they can cope, and gradually improve their condition, which is as much as anyone can ever expect. Everything else is detail.

It’s a surprise to discover what really bothers me, and how prosaic my concerns ultimately are; chastening, in fact.

"Who cares where national borders lie

Who cares whose laws you’re governed by

Who cares what name you call a town

Who'll care when you're six feet beneath the ground"

The Holy Well of Eastbourne (perhaps)

Back in the days of the old Source magazine paranormal researcher Alan Cleaver wrote a piece for it on holy wells as 'Wormholes in Reality', places where people might slip from one dimension to another. One of the individuals he mentioned was Donald Dent of Exning in Cambridgeshire, the man who allegedly vanished in 1975 after having visited the holy well nearby, and the other was Jessie Earl, the young woman who disappeared from her bedsit in Eastbourne in 1980 near the area called Holywell west of the town centre. There's only one other mention of Donald Dent online which makes me wonder whether he ever existed at all; while poor Ms Earl's body was found nine years later, meaning that her disappearance was entirely explicable, if, as yet, a crime that remains unsolved. Holy wells had nothing to do with either event, or non-event, yet the Holy Well of Eastbourne has remained in my imagination, and in other people's.

My friend Ms Kittywitch has recently moved to Eastbourne where she grew up, and last week I went to visit her new residence, a nice town-centre flat presided over by her ageing Siamese cat. She had to wait in for a parcel, so as the light faded from the day I went alone to find the Holy Well. 

Although eighteenth-century works mention the Well, and the name dates back as far as the 1300s, its actual location was unclear. Then in 2009 a group of local people identified it as a spring dribbling out of the chalk cliff face not far from the Holywell beach huts. It was cleared up, decorated with a wooden name board and a cup for the water, and even blessed by a Catholic priest (there's a video of this event available). It isn't entirely clear that this is the historic site of the original Holy Well, but, as is the manner of these things, that probably matters less than the fact that people treat it as though it was. 

When I found it, a couple of hundred yards beyond the beach huts, the tides had washed a layer of pebbles and shingle up to the foot of the cliff, inundating the big stones placed there to mark the well-basin. The water was no more than a dribble, and the cup and framed account of the well's history had gone, replaced by a rusting supermarket basket on a ledge: I'm not sure what that's supposed to signify. But the white crags make this an unusual well, strangely untamed, even if I certainly don't fancy sampling the water.

The Abyss Stares Back

Yesterday morning the passage I was reading (for my own edification) before my prayer time was the healing of the demoniac from Luke 8. For some reason the snippet that impressed itself on me was the fact that the demons infesting the man called Legion 'begged Jesus not to order them to go into the abyss'. From there I turned to my copy of the compilation of spiritual writings, Celebrating the Seasons, which offered me an excerpt from St Augustine's Confessions. 'Indeed, Lord, to your eyes, the abyss of human consciousness is exposed'. There was no question as to what would form the matter of my meditation later on (it's not always as clear, or as substantial, as that).

Leaving aside all questions as to what the demons really are or what they mean, why do they fear the 'abyss' and want to escape it? I've heard it argued that the unclean spirits, assuming there are such things, yearn to elbow their way into human beings so that they can, through them, enjoy the bodily lusts which as spirits they cannot exercise by nature; which is all well enough, but can't be found in Scripture. If, as Augustine suggests, the abyss is in fact the depth of our true nature, however, you can see why the demons fear it. Our lusts - our 'inordinate desires' - are a means, for us humans, of avoiding the truth about who we really are, and it's the same for them. In the abyss, as in the desert, the desert we enter spiritually in Lent to confront reality at its starkest, we are stripped of illusions and delusions and have no choice but to face the truth. The demons' stock-in-trade is lying and deceit: untruth about what they are and what we are, too. If they were banished away from their distractions into the 'abyss', they would have to face the truth about what they were and had done. They might repent, and no longer be demons. And that they fear. As, all too often, we do. 

The Extra Candle

‘Why haven’t you asked me to come to Swanvale Halt?’ our bishop asked when I went to see him about the Parish Share proposals in the summer. ‘I didn’t know I was supposed to ask,’ I answered, and eventually we arranged for him to come and preside at our 10am mass on the Feast of Christ the King, which was yesterday. It’s a long time since this happened, though while I’ve been in the parish we’ve had two evening confirmation services. 

The question arises of what you should do with a bishop, particularly what you should do in a moderate-Catholic Anglican church which has been firmly in a modern liturgical tradition since the late 1960s. Look in the old liturgical books such as Ritual Notes and you will find a confusing welter of regulations without any insight into the governing principles that might help you navigate your way. Is our 10am service at Swanvale Halt more like a High Mass or a Low Mass? For the former a bishop requires a whole phalanx of assistant clergy to handle his (or now her) ritual bits and pieces. At least a diocesan bishop within their own jurisdiction does: there are separate instructions for what you do with other sorts of bishop, visiting bishops or retired bishops, or what happens when one sort of bishop presides at a service and the diocesan bishop assists or merely sits and watches. And we will not touch on mitred abbots. I was originally trying to find out what happens to the bishop’s ring, remembering the time at High Wycombe when our sacristan found a little silver stand at the back of the cupboard on which the bishop was supposed to put his ring when he was washing his hands before the consecration, but I ended up finding out about all sorts of other completely bewildering things; even I’d never heard of the scotula, the small candle the bishop has the right to have near him whenever he reads from anything (this requires, of course, another server to carry). 

In the old rites, the bishop does virtually nothing for himself: he has assistants to vest him before the service begins, and even during the service itself, a deacon-assistant removes and replaces his mitre. You can understand this theologically as representing the fact that the bishop does not take authority on themselves, but has it conferred on them by the Church, expressing the identity of the Church in one person and providing the bishop themselves with a physical meditation on who they are. However, that’s an attempt to read as Christian symbolism something whose origin is in fact sociological, a signal that the bishop is Very Important. Having someone (several people, in fact) to help the bishop dress perhaps seemed less weird in a society in which gentlemen had valets, and ladies, maids, and the marking of social hierarchy was more clear; it definitely does seem odd now and even the highest of liturgical functions would feel cluttered and confused rather than enhanced by a group of servers of different ranks fluttering in attendance to one figure. In the modern rites we’ve also abandoned all the complexities of hand-kissing whenever bits of kit are transferred between one ecclesiastical personage and another, replacing the osculae (that’s the technical word) with slight bows which feel far more natural.

Mitres and croziers still have to be dealt with, however. I volunteered myself as chaplain for the occasion as I’d never done it before, and before the service started I and the bishop talked through how it would work. We agreed the etiquette would be:

• Hat and stick on the way in, removed after the altar is reverenced
• Hat and stick back for the Absolution, taken away after the Collect
• Stick only for the reading of the Gospel, taken away afterwards
• Hat and stick for the final blessing and on the way out

I consoled myself that, being from the Evangelical end of the spectrum, +Andrew was unlikely to be very fussy about what should or shouldn’t happen, and in fact might not even know what it was. It all went fine, even if his interpretation of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats as a warning that ‘the nations’ would be judged by God on the basis of how they treated their Christian minorities was one I might question, if I had the occasion.

And the extra candle? The presence of a diocesan bishop presiding at Mass is traditionally signalled by a seventh candle placed among the six on the high altar. We don’t have six at Swanvale Halt, we have two, but I thought this was ‘an innocent and laudable custom’ and, because all our own candlesticks were in use, pressed one of my nan’s into service for the morning. 

Festa Caterinae 2017

Like last year, the weather was beautiful for Mid-Day Prayer at the Chapel of St Catherine at Guildford; unlike last year, the congregation included no dogs or under-fives. Earlier on in the day we'd had Mass at Swanvale Halt, and I was as ever hugely grateful for the good souls of the parish who turn out loyally so that I can observe the feast of my patron saint, especially when one was a gentleman who only joined us from the most extremely hard-line Protestant church locally a couple of years ago. There always seem to be six of us present, no matter when the mass is, or what day St Catherine's Day falls on. Next year it's a Sunday; I have a fantasy of saying Mass in the chapel at Abbotsbury, but it may remain no more than that.

The Wheel

In the chapel, Christ's Athene

Holds her wheel

Like a weapon,

Its riveted and silvered blades poised to plunge

And part the millrace of my poor flesh

Like the Red Sea.

‘It wasn’t like that’, she insists,

‘It really wasn’t. Look:

I set it turning, ever-so-gentle -

And all the mute hues of the hills

Are fired by the gold of heaven.’

‘You’re right,’ I say, wide-eyed,

And return down the long hillside to my car

To go on,

Branded with the sign of light.

Pro Ceciliae

The feast day of my patron saint is approaching fast, but this period of November furnishes the festivals of a number of others. There is Edmund on the 20th, brave King of East Anglia who ended pincushioned with arrows by the wicked Danes, and gentle Pope Clement on the 23rd, drowned late in the 1st century with an anchor dragging him to the bottom of the Black Sea. And then, yesterday, the 22nd marks the entry into eternity of blessed St Cecilia.

Like Catherine of the Wheel, Cecilia was usually listed as one of the medieval Fourteen Holy Helpers, and appears luminously in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century rood screens in Norfolk. Like Catherine, too, and several other members of the Fourteen - Barbara, George, Christopher, and Margaret of Antioch - notwithstanding her popularity, her cult was suppressed by the Vatican in 1969 and she was expunged from the calendar, at the peak of the Roman Church's embarrassment at the credulous and picturesque pieties of its past. 

This was a shame, not just because it meant losing a branch off the great tree of the Church's devotional heritage but because Cecilia was very useful. In the 16th century she'd become the patron saint of musicians, mainly because of the line from her Acts which became part of the liturgy for her feast day: 'as the organs at her wedding feast were playing, Cecilia sang in her heart to the Lord, saying: May my heart remain unsullied, so that I be not confounded'. Musicians need a saint to pray for them, no matter what her history may or may not have been. Chris, our late organist at Lamford, when the new edition of the Guildford Diocesan Directory arrived in the church office, would never fail to flick through it and fulminate that organists and directors of music weren't included alongside all the pastoral assistants and youth workers and the like. Since then I've always prayed for our church musicians. 

Cecilia is still there in the Anglican calendar, but only as a minor observance, which means she doesn't get a collect of her own. If you observe her feast day you have to use the Common of Martyrs and stick her name in it, which strikes me as a bit stingy. There are collects for Cecilia online, but they seem to have been written by people who don't know the strict haiku-like conventions that govern the structure of collects. So here is mine, compiled from 'other sources'.

Gracious God,
whose blessed martyr Cecilia sang in her heart
to strengthen her witness to you:
grant that we may join with her in Creation's canticle of praise until the last,
and share in the song of those redeemed
by our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns,
one God, in glory everlasting. Amen. 

Infidelity Rules

Polling company IPSOS Mori have recently published the results of a global survey into religious attitudes, which I learned about through the Christian information blog Word On The Streets (I'm not sure how I ended up on their mailing list). 'Britain is one of the least religious countries in the world', was how WOTS reported the story. This is indeed the case: in the survey, for all the statements about belief and attitudes towards it, towards people with other or no religious traditions, and towards the relationship between religion and wider society, the aggregate results from UK residents were further along the secular end of the spectrum than the global average. Most Britons feel that religion doesn't play a role in defining them or their country; that religion doesn't make people better citizens; that they don't care what religion people have, or whether they have one or not. They also agree, substantially, that religion is a harmful force in human affairs. Looking at the fuller data, though, you discover that only puts the British in line with most of the rest of Europe: in this respect, if no other, the UK is impeccably European. 

There are some peculiar combinations of opinion. The people of Belgium are those most likely to agree that 'Religion has done more harm than good in the world', but they are also the least enthusiastic about being around people who profess a different religion from them. The most tolerant country in that respect is South Africa, but South Africans are the most likely to agree that religion is important for moral life and that their faith defines them as a person. The Japanese are least likely to think that, but also furnish the lowest proportion of people who think that religion is harmful. Although you can see how all of these bundles of attitudes have emerged, there's no clear proportional relationship between tolerance and lack of faith. 

The question it would, at least in faithless western Europe, have been most interesting to ask isn't here; not 'do you lose respect for people if you discover they are not religious', but rather 'do you lose respect for them if you discover that they are'. 

Breeding Pairs ...

... was Il Rettore's not-entirely-complimentary term for husband-and-wife clergy couples. I never cease to be grateful that Ms Formerly Aldgate isn’t involved in Church life to any great extent. She strives to make it to church for Christmas and Easter and comes to the occasional lunch or other event, but doesn’t claim to be anything other than a well-disposed agnostic. It’s useful to have someone around who is an outsider, both in terms of what the Church does and in terms of parish life.

I’d find other forms of clerical domestic arrangements a little bit confining. Of course, allowing clergy to marry and then opening the priesthood to both sexes inevitably means that you will eventually have priests marrying each other, or a priest marrying someone else who later themselves decides that they have a vocation to the ordained life. I’m starting to feel, I confess, a little itchy about this. My edition of the Guildford Diocesan Directory is out of date by two years, but with its assistance I can count eight parishes in this small diocese which now have married couples of priests on their staff. The arrangements vary: in one parish the incumbent’s wife was ordained deacon this year, in another the couple were appointed as a unit and are designated ‘Joint Vicar’ in a job-share. Both our bishops are married to other clergy: our suffragan’s husband is a leading incumbent in London, while our diocesan Andrew’s wife was found a parish in the diocese after he moved in. She is by all accounts doing a perfectly good job there, but I wasn't the only one whose eyes widened at the news. There are other clergy couples outside the parish level: one may be an incumbent, for instance, while the other works for the diocese.

What happens when you have bishops who are in a relationship with each other? Everyone rather expected our suffragan’s husband to get a pointy hat before she did, and he still might. How would that affect relationships within the College of Bishops? Married relationships are at least overt, but you can’t just suddenly marry someone, so relationships happen, or might happen, before they become public. In the senior management of a business, you’d expect such relationships to be declared to the HR people to avoid conflicts of interest, but we don’t seem to have thought of that. Typically, the Church of England absorbs more and more of the World’s way of doing things, without adopting the safeguards and standards that, in the World, make those habits tolerable.

Then, of course, there’s the Gay Thing. Homosexual clergy can’t marry, but they can contract civil partnerships; there’s at least one parish priest in the diocese of Guildford who is in one. How is the Church going to cope with two priests in a civil partnership who want to look after a parish together? It will, I think, have no choice but to accommodate them, and one part of Anglicanism will go through the roof as a result. Perhaps this has already happened somewhere, I don’t know.

Now, to be sure, this situation reveals something which was masked in the older way of doing things. In many traditional parishes, it was expected that the vicar’s wife would be in charge of something or other, usually to do with specifically female experience – chairing the local branch of the Mothers’ Union, for instance. At the big conservative-evangelical church of St Aldate’s in Oxford, where Dr Bones used to take me on free Sunday evenings while I was at St Stephen’s House, Rector Charlie Cleverly shares the leadership with his wife Anita, who is designated ‘Staff Pastor’; this reflects traditionalist approaches to gender roles, in which women do the cuddly peopley stuff while a man runs the show (although they do have one ordained woman on the staff now). Some of the parish set-ups headed by a husband-and-wife clergy couple round here, especially in evangelical churches, may work like that.

I never thought the St Aldates model was completely healthy, quite apart from the gendered division of labour it sets up – and quite apart from conflicts of interest and the issues of accountability it raises. The Church of Jesus Christ is supposed to represent the irruption of the values of the Kingdom into the fleshly world, and once it becomes penetrated by the World’s habits, something of that otherness, that radicalism, is lost. ‘He who does not hate his father and mother, brothers and sisters, cannot be my disciple’, warns Jesus hyperbolically; where is that troubling, dramatic, outsider-edge in a Church where husbands and wives (or same-sex partners, potentially), run church communities? Is it not turning into something else, something more conventional and everyday? It’s instructive, if odd, that non-Church people often expect this is how the Church is organised. I once came across someone in Swanvale Halt parish who clearly assumed I would be married to the then curate, and in Lamford I and Dr Bones met a man whose first thought was that we were Il Rettore’s children: it was weird, but you can see where he was coming from - a kind of childlike attempt to conform an unfamiliar structure to a familial model. The expectation is sort of natural, and natural, in any simple sense, is not what we are called to be. I wonder whether the outcome of all this cozification, if the Church of England survives at all, will be to conclude that there was a point to clerical celibacy after all. 

On the Wrong Tracks

Trevor's computer has packed up, so when he downloaded a 'relaxation meditation' he had no means of putting it on a CD to play on his stereo. Could I do it, he asked me. Well, that was a fairly easy, self-contained task. He sent me the email, I popped the audio track onto a blank CD and dropped it round to his flat. How was it? I asked him a couple of days later. 'It's got some funny music on it, I don't think it's right,' he said. 

I am initially sceptical at anything Trevor tells me so when I was nearby I asked whether I could call round, and listened to the CD. Somehow I'd copied an existing playlist onto it so what Trevor got began with Amanda Palmer hollering her head off. Admittedly, not everyone would find that as relaxing as waves breaking on a tropical island.

The Widening Circles of PJ Harvey's Reach

In retrospect, PJ Harvey’s 6^th album – if you count her first collaboration with John Parish, Dance Hall at Louse Point – 2004’s Uh Huh Her, marked a pivot in her work, at least so far. She signalled this in several ways that created a sense of valediction. Firstly, there were the self-portraits in the record sleeve booklet, documenting the masks and guises she had worn up till then; secondly, taking the album on the road, she wore dresses printed with press images of herself taken in earlier years. It was more like a farewell tour than anything else. The music itself, while far from standing still creatively, nevertheless echoed places she’d been before: later on she would admit it was ‘the closest I’ve ever got to plagiarising myself’. She took the opportunity to release several old tracks as ‘b-sides’ (if you can use that archaic language) to singles: ‘Liverpool Tide’ seemed to date from a couple of years before, while the raucous ‘Angel’ and ‘Dance’ came from the early 1990s. Uh Huh Her was the end of a number of lines. It was a mopping-up exercise, and by the time the album actually emerged, Ms H seemed absolutely clearsighted about what was going on. After the tour concluded, when she next appeared on stage, at three relatively small venues in the middle of 2006, she would seem virtually a different performer. She was alone; she wore plain black; she played the piano. And the next album, White Chalk, would be a total, lurching contrast, not just an evolution but a boggling abandonment of everything that had gone before it.

Remembrance Sunday made me want to write about this. I realised how, setting the second Parish-Harvey collaboration A Woman A Man Walked By to one side, Polly’s three solo albums since that great mid-2000s about-face have made me reformulate central aspects of my identity in a way that, however wonderful it may have been, her earlier work never did. Poppies and the Last Post, of course, reverberate with echoes of Let England Shake, that titanic achievement from 2011. But it’s more than LES. As PJH turned deliberately away from delving into her own imagination and reactions and instead has begun stitching together her compositions from other materials, she has reached further and further, redefining successively broader aspects of what it means to be human (what it means to be her, ultimately). I want to say more about the effect this has on me, as I understand it more deeply.

White Chalk reconfigures Dorset. It doesn’t appear to; only the title track refers to anything specific about that landscape, namechecking Lyme Regis, Cerne Abbas, the chalk hills themselves. The other tracks contain little in terms of physical setting – an oak grove, an old milestone, a mountainside (and Dorset doesn’t have those). Yet when she spoke to the authors of the 2006 book Dorset Women she said clearly ‘Really now for the first time on my new album, my new project, I’m singing about Dorset, which has never happened before … I’m embracing it more, the older I get.’ She would write around fifty songs in preparation for what became the baleful masterpiece of White Chalk, and possibly the title track was the only directly Dorset-related one that made it through; yet what survived the filtration was something less obvious – a feeling, an atmosphere. I’ve had a go at critics who were misled by the piano and Polly’s mutton-sleeve dress on the album cover into characterising the album as pastiche Victoriana, but although I don’t repent that intolerance, I can understand the error. There is something Hardyesque about White Chalk, to be sure. The sense of regret, of fate, of something happening in the next room, the fact that every track articulates a female experience (admittedly Harvey would probably deny that, if pressed): it’s as though a succession of Thomas Hardy’s heroines are drifting before us, white-clad and spectral. And somehow when I listen to the keening line ‘Come, come, on a night with no moon’ in ‘The Devil’ I can only picture it being sung beside a dead tree next to a rotten field gate on a hillside above Portesham, or mist-swathed Nine Barrow Down; while the insistent, almost discordant piano of ‘To Talk To You’, sounds to me like it’s being played on the seafront at Swanage, deserted in the rain in about 1905. White Chalk is notoriously comfortless listening, but from its ten songs Dorset emerges changed: an ectoplasmic thread now links its real landscape to its sideways, shadow counterpart, seen reflected in a rainy window pane, a place familiar and intimate, but haunted by human sorrow. I’m not sure I felt before it that ‘these chalk hills will rot my bones’, but I do now. I feel as though I see my county through these visions.

Let England Shake reconfigures England. Far from being narrowly an exploration of World War One, it decontextualises motifs from that symbolic conflict into an account of all war, and nails the identity of England to it, insisting that the inner meaning of Englishness is not only green fields and bucolic landscape, but blood and ambiguity, loss and regret. ‘The Last Living Rose’ begins with cartoonish nationalism and ends with a strange amalgam of love and anguish: England is always something that is passing away, a tide that’s just retreated. ‘The Glorious Land’ bolts together words from a Russian folk song and a lament for the West’s complicity in horror and exploitation with utterly simple words that could be mawkish if the music were not so strong: ‘O America. O England.’ (Eng-er-land, actually, to make it scan). What have you done? What have you been? the song asks. The deformed and orphaned children of the lyrics are the fruit of the war-scarred land, but also of the countries who bring war to it. Nothing is stated explicitly, leaving it to the listener to write specifics into the gaps. The starkly-titled ‘England’ is offered as a revisionist National Anthem. Out of 1932, the sampled voice of Kurdish singer Said-el-Kurdi, an anguished cry for a wrecked homeland, opens in a wail, around which Harvey curls her own, repeatedly and painfully not quite hitting the note until the two voices coincide, which is the spur for her to launch into her own lament, a series of broken, fragmentary statements that culminate in helplessness but also utter commitment: ‘I cannot go on as I am/I cannot leave … Undaunted, never-failing love for you, England/Is all to which I cling’. There are flutes – actually almost certainly electronic mimicry – in the background, referencing the flutes on that other great pop lovesong to England, Kate Bush’s ‘England My Lionheart’. And what has England to do with Iraq, you’re left to ask. I don’t even know what to call this. It isn’t patriotism. It isn’t Bush’s swooning Romanticism. Is it a sort of historicist nationalism, which recognises the vital nature of national identity, but looks steadily and unflinchingly at the truth of it? What I can tell you is that, as my country undergoes a collective nervous breakdown and enters an unreal realm filled with the narcotic fumes of imperialist fantasy, Let England Shake provides me with a means of remaining absolutely English while defying that madness. This flag I can stand and salute.

The Hope Six Demolition Project reconfigures global humanity. Here, Harvey uses the same technique of mingling close focus on human experience with decontextualisation, so the images become universal ones, owned by a common humanity. For instance, the bluesy musical setting of ‘The Ministry of Social Affairs’, incorporating scraps of Jerry McCain’s ‘That’s What They Want’, might make you assume the original inspiration for the track came from the Washington stage of PJ’s journeyings; but the original poem in The Hollow of the Hand is clearly set in Afghanistan. The songs are not arranged in geographical sections as would have been obvious, and as the book is: so, slamming together disparate vignettes suggests connections and resemblances. Poverty is not just something that exists elsewhere; destruction is not merely a foreign experience. Episodes here and there are connected: there are networks of action and inaction which produce them and in which we are all implicated. The singer moves through them all, but what results is not some empyrean account, delivered from an all-seeing, detached vantage point, but a babel of voices, confusion, incoherence. There is no answer. All that remains is the insistence that this matters, that this side of the world and that are linked by feeling and by causation, that we should open our eyes and look. And I have been looking: not that I didn’t before, but the glowing web of global interconnection is clearer now than it was. Thinking through the imagery of Hope Six, I find myself a world citizen, though not via anything as simple and rationally-apprehensible as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Instead my citizenship is in disjuncture and disruption, in hope and grimy reality. Of that, I see more. The album has sharpened my sight and honed my sensitivity. I am more alert.

Polly didn’t aim at this redefinition of ever-widening identities: the achievement resulted naturally from the more modest interests she wanted to run to ground. It wouldn’t have worked if she had set out to do it, and in fact would have been disastrously vainglorious. I am filled with wonder at how this slight woman from a West Dorset village has managed, without trying, to reshape the entire globe around her own vision, and yet remain herself. She’s been preserved from catastrophic egotism by always remaining in the service of something else, and by her original, quarter-century-old determination to eschew everything that goes with the business of stardom. Fans sometimes complain about her lack of interaction with them, but it is exactly that which protects her from the spiritual dangers of her ambitions, keeping her rooted in relationships which have nothing to do with her public persona. This has shielded her and kept her work uncontaminated by any expectations except her own; and it’s this that’s made her the Voice of the Resistance, raising a hand and saying No, this is not how things really are, this is not how people really are, and the truth lies elsewhere than in your partial and skewed narratives.

At least, that’s how it seems to me, and why I become so misty-eyed at what she’s done. I find that much of my conception of what is most humane, most generous and good, is filtered through ten years of her work. Of course I know that the woman herself is a different matter, separate, sometimes – as she herself admits – as startled as anyone else by what emerges from the recording studio; but that’s where she is. And where next? Where to go once you’ve conquered the world? All you can predict is that she won’t think about it like that. It will be some small thought, some feeling in the air, that will lead her to an unexpected vista, a new and unclaimed territory.

Au Secours!

Coming down the hill to say Morning Prayer yesterday I spied a figure on the other side of the road which resembled the curate. And so it turned out to be. I wondered what she might be doing standing on the driveway of no.16.

What Marion was doing was looking upwards to a first-floor window, conversing with an older lady who was holding a baby. Further investigation revealed that this was because said lady and baby had managed to lock themselves in an upstairs bedroom and the child’s parents were out. What to do? Call the parents? She didn’t have their numbers. Call the fire brigade?

Eventually it was decided that I should go home and retrieve a screwdriver so the handle of the bedroom door could be removed. How to get it to the incarcerated lady? A Colditz-like arrangement of a knotted bedsheet lowered from the window didn’t achieve the desired result. I thought I could aim the implement through the window, although Marion voiced some scepticism.

Now, you probably expect this story to conclude in some calamity, a smashed window or worse still small child. But no: at the third attempt the screwdriver found its way safely onto the bedroom floor and although removing the door handle didn’t effect escape, while I was away fetching my ladder to try and get over the side gate and into the house at the back, the lady managed to use it to trip the catch and get out. We all had a friendly conversation at the door. ‘God bless,’ I said to her on parting: ‘I think he already has,’ she responded.

Marion said she would inform her husband, who runs several sports teams at his school, about my throwing skills which she thought might warrant inclusion on the cricket team. I was less sure, not only because my success was flukey but because lobbing a screwdriver in at a window is more akin to darts than cricket, and I don’t think darts is a suitable pastime for a clergyman. 

Walke of St Hilary

During my Autumn holiday in Cornwall in 2013 I visited St Hilary near St Michael’s Mount. In 1932 this tiny village became the focus of national attention after a group of Protestant activists gained access to the church, acting, they averred, under the authority of a court order, to lever, break, and remove a number of disputed fittings which had been introduced into the building by its vicar, Fr Bernard Walke. It was the last great cause célèbre of the Anglo-Catholic movement, occurring at a time when nobody apart from the hardline protestors really cared, when it was clear that the Anglo-Catholics were not engaged in a sulphurous conspiracy to drag freeborn Englishmen bodily into the thrall of Rome, but were (mainly) hardworking priests trying their best to bring the light and colour of Catholic Christianity to what were often among the most difficult parts of the land for the Anglican Church.

Walke had arrived at St Hilary in 1913, upper-class but erratically-educated, firmly Anglo-Catholic but socialistic and pacifistic in his politics and married in his personal life. He and his wife Annie never had children, though they were very fond of them and adopted a collection of Austrian refugees as well as taking village children under their wing from time to time, including Joan Manning-Sanders, whose artistic ability (the Walkes were friends with lots of artists) led Bernard to encourage her to paint part of the Life of St Endelienta on the screen in the church; as Michael Yelton writes in Anglican Papalism, probably no other Anglican priest at that time, Anglo-Catholic or otherwise, would have thought of allowing a twelve-year-old to decorate his church.

All these enthusiasms led me to enrol Fr Walke as one of my Minor Patrons, but it was only recently that I read his autobiographical Twenty Years at St Hilary, written when he was recovering from TB in a sanatorium at Trehidy. This once well-known book confirms everything I thought about him. Walke’s humility, endless generosity of heart, and love of the people and land he cared for all those years shines from every page. There is not a trace of waspishness or sarcasm, even when he describes so prickly and difficult a character as the perpetually maddening Fr Sandys Wason, ex-vicar of Cury, depicting him, rather than an idiot, as a wanderer from another sort of world. He always puts the most gentle and generous interpretation possible on the actions and character of other people, from the tramps who call at the vicarage door and spin a yarn to gain his charity to a City magistrate dealing with children from slum homes. He has a chapter about ‘Donkeys’ (he kept a number and rode several around the parish over the years), and quotes William Blake.

How Fr Walke managed to fit in all his many activities and projects, from writing Nativity plays to trying to establish a children’s home in the village to an ambitious venture to run the Cornish mining industry on Christian-Socialist lines (called, in strangely Tolkeinesque fashion, the Communion of the Ring), when he seems to have spent much of his time in and around the vicarage garden, quietly observing, I can’t imagine. My years spin by and I have less and less idea where they have gone and how they have been spent.

It’s a little while since I read Twenty Years now, and though I remember getting awfully weepy at various points I’m not sure I can now find them. Perhaps there aren’t any passages which, on their own, are especially moving: it’s more the effect of a gradual rising tide of faith and faithfulness revealed in the pages which overtops the vessel of the reader’s awareness every now and again. Bernard Walke saw heaven in his parish, the clouds of human weakness and muddiness parting surprisingly often to let the glory of God shine through, and everything which was less than glorious he managed to offer to God for him to deal with. The human beings he met were of the same company as the saints of old Cornwall, or the global Church, depicted in the paintings and statues of St Hilary’s, even if very few of his parishioners quite shared his vision of Catholic Christianity. He knew that the sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood bound them all together, made possible this fiery gentleness that saw fallen human beings as Jesus sees them, and it didn’t matter that not many others knew it.

One day I must go to see Bernard Walke’s grave at St Erth. For the time being, I ask for his prayers that some of the qualities of his ministry might be present in mine, and, as a truly and not falsely humble person who from his heavenly vantage point now knows his true qualities, he will not refuse.