Prejudices Confirmed

It is a rare privilege to be able to offer parishioners from Swanvale Halt for the sacrament of confirmation. In fact, with Wilma and Elaine, our two candidates this autumn, my average is now ever-so-slightly more than one for every year of my incumbency. On Sunday evening I took them to the church of Tophill where our suffragan bishop would anoint and lay hands on them and sacramentally admit them to the fullness of the life of the Spirit. It was a great pleasure I was looking forward to.

Tophill is a very inconveniently arranged church from whose impediments the congregation has only just liberated itself by ripping out the pews. The church has only put up with them as long as it has because its Evangelical tradition has led it to hold services in the local school hall as well as the church itself. But now the building is filled with nice chairs which don't actually look too bad. 

I have a longstanding prejudice against the use of drums in church worship. As we began the first hymn on Sunday it occurred to me that it wasn't going to be too objectionable after all, but the moment of hope passed very quickly as the percussion swiftly took over from the gentler instruments, hogging attention and buffeting the ears. We sang the same creed setting as we did at the Clergy Study Day a few weeks ago, and once again I found myself reflecting how pleasant it was until we had to sing some bits over and over again to no very great effect. 'I believe in the resurrection ...' 'Well, I believed in all of it when we started,' I muttered to a clergyman next to me, 'but now I'm not as sure.'

The altar still sits against a marble reredos at the end of the chancel, not moved forward. To my astonishment the bishop - arrayed admittedly in choir dress rather than mass vestments - moved up and celebrated the eucharist ad orientem. I made a point of mentioning it to her afterwards. 'Well, they said they usually do North End but I wasn't doing that,' she said. 'And pulling the altar back when you're the only person standing behind it is just ridiculous. I like eastward-facing. So many clergy preside like they're doing show-and-tell, rather than speaking to God.'

As we all chewed cheese straws and sipped wine some of the Swanvale parishioners who'd come along crowded round. 'We won't have to sing those hymns when we have a screen, will we?' grinned Sandra who runs Messy Church. I said that merely having a screen didn't determine what you projected on to it. Lillian the ex-Lay Reader was more concerned that whatever went on it had proper punctuation.

St Catherine's Day 2019

Some previous St Catherine's Days the weather around the ruined chapel just south of Guildford has been splendid (though last year, remember, I was at Abbotsbury), but this year was a little challenging and led to a reduction in the quantity of hardy souls who braved it to the top of the hill to mark the solemnity with Mid-day Prayers: there were, I think, six of us, in fact. The other difference from earlier occasions was that I led the ceremony! The priest who usually leads the service couldn't, and asked if I would. Despite the chill and damp, it was, of course, a lovely occasion. Best of all, I now know the combinations of the locks to get in ...

Christ the King 2019

Some clergy post all their sermons online. I don't very often, but this was a tidied-up version of the 8am homily today, and I thought was almost a blog post anyway.

Readings: Jeremiah 23.1-6; Luke 23.33-43

"The feast of Christ the King was only introduced in the Roman Catholic Church in 1925, and found its way into the Anglican calendar from the 1970s. So this year is the very first time in the UK that this feast day, when we celebrate the kingship of Jesus Christ and his sovereignty over all creation, has coincided with a general election campaign.

"Now, far be it from me, brothers and sisters, to influence how you might cast your ballots in any way, even if I could! But that declaration in Jeremiah that God will send his people a shepherd who will rule in righteousness and justice does compel us to think how that’s reflected in the earthly powers who govern us day by day.

"It seems to me that there are at least four kinds of political lies. The first are the kind of lies you tell to get out of trouble, to cover up something you’ve done or not done, and those come to all of us depressingly easily. Secondly, there are the lies you have to tell to avoid bad things happening, what Winston Churchill called not lies but ‘terminological inexactitudes’, like Jim Callaghan as Chancellor in the 1960s saying he had no plans to devalue the pound. Then there are the lies which represent what people want to believe is true, as when political parties say what they intend to do when they know they probably can’t, or when governments say they’ve spent X amount of money on a thing when it takes creative accountancy to arrive at that figure. Often the people who tell that sort of lie actually convince themselves it really is the case. But the fourth kind of lie is the deliberate, conscious attempt to deceive, and that, it strikes me, is uniquely corrupting.

"The whole of human society rests on trust. We have to believe that most of us, most of the time, mean what we say. If we stop believing that, normal human interaction starts to become impossible. It’s all very well to talk about ‘public trust in politicians being at an all-time low’, but I don’t think distrust in politics stays within politics: it bleeds outwards, affecting how we view each other and the kind of society we are part of. I’m not sure our politicians really understand how dangerous it is when they lie, dangerous not just to themselves and their own prospects, but to the whole of society: it corrupts all our relationships by shifting what we think is normal.

"The Crucifixion is a brutal reading to have on this last Sunday of the Church year. But what it holds before us is an unavoidable truth revealing who Jesus is, what God is like, and our own nature too. The Crucifixion shows us that it is the suffering one, the lowly and despised one, who God vindicates and crowns as the king of all creation. There is no dissembling here, no covering up, and no attempt to gloss over the real condition of things. There is instead in the Cross the triumph of something beyond all human control and power, which does not break down the truth, but makes honesty about who we are the basis for trust and hope. And at that all the powers of the earth should tremble. If they were paying attention! Amen."

Engagement

After the safeguarding course was over yesterday, I felt compelled to compliment the Diocesan Safeguarding Officer, especially as she'd been battling a cold all the way through the morning. I said I thought the courses were really very engaging and clear now, and how appreciated this was.

'Good,' she said, 'because I remember you were at one course at the cathedral a few years ago and slept through most of it. I kept raising my voice to try and wake you up.'

Changing Churches

The churches I visit are sometimes at their most interesting when I meet signs of a former Catholic identity in what is now an Evangelical parish. This has happened several times over recent months. 

I'd seen a photograph of the interior of St Paul's, Addlestone, but wasn't prepared for the reality until I managed to get inside during the summer. The building is undistinguished to put it at its kindest, but the east end, while not perhaps what one might describe as beautiful, is at least striking. It's another example of the way World War One advanced liturgical practice and church fittings, as it was reordered in 1919, a fact made very clear by the details of the rood screen. Old photos of the church show a curtained altar in the apse before the triptych of saints flanking the Virgin and Child was installed. There's a 'big six' set of candlesticks secreted below the altar to be brought out when required, and still a curtained aumbry, but it's not clear anything is kept in it any more: certainly there's no lamp burning in that candle-holder.

Not far away from Addlestone is St Peter's, Chertsey, a church now housing what is technically a joint Anglican-Methodist congregation. Some years ago, before I started at Lamford, I and Dr Bones attended a service there and were presented with a massive ring-bound booklet containing a host of liturgical variations covering all the various services. Up at the old high altar are the remains of a mid-Victorian tile frieze apparently showing the Wedding at Cana and now obscured by a later reredos, but more interesting is the side chapel. Yet again this was built as a World War One memorial, this time in memory of a specific person, Nathaniel Cook of Chertsey Abbey House. There's an aumbry built into the wall and a mysterious wooden thing which could be the remains of a hanging lamp which nobody has got around to throwing away. It's now a bit disorganised and doesn't look as though it's used for communion services.

Finally a clergy meeting at St Stephen's, Shottermill, gave me the chance to examine some of the fittings which I'd spotted on a previous visit. This is a fairly mainstream Evangelical church now, with a baptismal pool beneath the nave floor ('As far as I can tell it hasn't been used in ten years', the vicar told me) ...

... but while the building's interior has, like a number of Evangelical churches, been reorientated so that it faces south rather than east, the old chancel remains as a side chapel, still distinguished by yet another post-WWI screen. This one was not a war memorial - it was dedicated to a lady by a grieving husband - but it is dated 1919 and in fact an inscription records its dedication on All Souls' Day that year. In the chancel are signs of former hanging lamps and another aumbry - apparently empty.

Innovation

The Anglican Church, not surprisingly, hasn't got a rite for the installation of an icon; I'm not sure anyone has, to be fair. But when Hazel, the widow of our retired priest Jim, decided after he died in 2014 that his memorial should be a pair of icons, I didn't want just to have them put up in the church without any fuss being made, so I had to make something up.

The icons show St Benedict and St Edmund; one was the patron of the last church Jim served as incumbent, and the other has a link with the Roman Catholic parish with whom we share our church building. Both have been painted by a member of the RC congregation. I wanted their 'unveiling' to be an occasion we could both share, so thought we could have a short ceremony in between our two normal services on a Sunday morning. St Benedict's Day is back in July; the closest Sunday to St Edmund's Day this year is November 17th, and the date just happens to be Jim's anniversary. 

I wasn't sure how many people would be around and if necessary the little rite was one I could do with one other person. In the end most of both our congregations were present, so it became a cast of thousands, including Fr Julian, the new priest of the RC parish, Marion our curate, Rick the verger, a server from each congregation, and Rob who carried the cross. The choir were augmented by some Catholics. We emerged from the vestry and made our way to the pillar where the icons had been placed while singing the old plainchant Office Hymn for All Saints: 'Father in whom thy saints are one ...'. I said a brief introduction and prayed for Jim's soul before reading a slightly odd but useful passage from 2 Esdras (most of the Apocrypha is a bit odd, if you ask me), then unveiled the icons which had been covered with a corporal. I anointed them, read the Collects for St Benedict and St Edmund: Rick handed me the lamp which I hung in front of the icons and then lit. I said a final prayer asking for God's blessing on the images, and we retreated while the choir sang Rutter's 'The Lord bless you and keep you'. Once in the vestry, it was off with the cope and on with the mass vestments.

I wasn't half shaky by the I got back! I suppose that's what comes from making it up as you go along.

Many Happy Returns

'I wish I could have my life over again,' said my mum when I went to Dorset yesterday for my early birthday celebrations. I am thankful I don't have to, but the splendid cake my elder niece baked for me conjures up the idea of travelling back in time to relive experiences. 'It's bigger on the inside,' she offered. 

Happy Interruptions

Not for the first time I am going through Metropolitan Anthony Bloom's School for Prayer in the hope that something might go in. The best spiritual writings have qualities of definiteness and simplicity and call me back to sense. As I sit in my living room with the book, I am feeling very spiritual for a change.

The doorbell rings. It's Ken, the churchwarden at an evangelical church not far away who occasionally comes to the Office at Swanvale Halt (in the process wearing down my goodwill a couple of Advents ago, through no fault of his!) and now and again even braves the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. He's heard it's my birthday (actually it's a bit early yet) and has brought me a bottle of wine. I put away the bag, and settle down once more with Archbishop Anthony.

Moments later, the bell goes again. This time the postman has brought me a box - another bottle of wine, from Dr Bones as it turns out! She remembers that I am a couple of years her senior. My cellar is restocked with no effort on my part at all. I am no connoisseur, but the combined sweetness and astringency of red wine is a great joy I have come to be thankful for.

These are not interruptions to prayer (or to reading about praying, which is only one step removed) which I can much complain about! In fact as Metropolitan Anthony's words were about gratitude, they seem to become part of the business of spiritual reflection when I come to actually praying. How good people are and how little I deserve it: if I can manage to pray for as much as a minute with any sense of God's presence it's a minor miracle, and these expressions of mindful kindness are small miracles too, tiny reflections of the divine grace which surrounds us and pours endlessly on us. How blessed my life has been to be touched by such mercies.

Misapprehensions

'It is Armistice Day, and, all across the land, clergy will be leading acts of remembrance at 11am', said Lucy Winkett on Thought for the Day yesterday. I and Marion looked awkwardly at each other when we met at church: we'd both heard it, and both thought the same thing: Yes, it's Armistice Day, but I thought we did all that yesterday. 

After I was finished at the Infants School, in shame, I came back to church, struck the bell at 11 and 11.02, and stood silently and solemnly while the toddler group caroused in the hall next door. At least I didn't have to go outside as our Swanvale Halt war memorial is in the Lady Chapel.

On Remembrance Sunday itself, I preached on how we live in a time of tumult and can't even be confident that our civilisation will survive the next century, but that God takes the smallest of our good acts and builds them into the Kingdom.

'I like that', smiled Sandra after the service. 'I'll be dead long before all this happens. I don't need to worry about anything, the world's going to end so there's no point!'

Which is comfort of a sort, but wasn't quite the take-home message I anticipated.

Amazement at The Bourne

I have built up something of a backlog of church interiors to share with you, but something brief for now. On Friday I managed to tick off a whole seven churches, all of which were open with the exception of Good Shepherd, Dockenfield, a lovely little Arts-and-Craftsy building of 1910 and possibly the most architecturally creative of the lot, but which I hadn't expected to be open anyway; in fact before seeing the name of the village on the road sign I'd forgotten it even existed. But the biggest surprise of the trip lay elsewhere. 

St Thomas on the Bourne on the edge of Farnham is somewhere I've been before, but have only been inside the meeting room and not ventured into the church. The building is stripped-down, whitewashed Gothic, begun in 1910 and not finished until the 1920s, World War One intervening. And opening the solid oak doors gave me a distant sight of the most spectacular English Gothic altar I've seen anywhere, let alone in Surrey. If you can hear a mysterious thump, it is the ghost of Percy Dearmer fainting and falling over.

I hadn't numbered St Thomas's mentally as a Catholic-end church, but clearly should have done. I had certainly never expected to find a gilded Virgin-and-Child over an altar anywhere in the Diocese of Guildford. This beautiful bit of kit I suspect incorporates, at the very least, some of the work of Christopher Webb, who was also responsible for a similar reredos at Shalford and who was a pupil of Sir Ninian Comper; Milford has the frame of another one.

At St Mary's, Frensham, as I groped around in the semi-dark unable to find a light switch, I found a card on the table reading 'This is a church where the Catholic Faith is taught'. The card looks like 1950s vintage and I wonder how accurate that statement actually is now. 

Much Study is a Weariness of the Flesh

... so it was just as well the Clergy Study Morning yesterday only went as far as lunch time before we were all released from Christ Church, Woking, to scarper in our various homeward directions. 'A study day like no other', the diocesan authorities had promised, apparently referring to the invitation we'd been asked to extend to laypeople to come along, because there was no other obvious difference from the usual format, and style. A pair of gentlemen from the musical team at Christ Church, armed with a guitar and a keyboard, assaulted 'Holy Holy Holy Lord God Almighty' until that noble hymn lay down and died, we had a sung version of the Creed that had me begging for it to end as one of said gentlemen led us in yet another repetition of part of it, and then we were ready for the speakers. A fellow called Nick spoke about how the Church of England had been issuing reports on how to integrate laypeople and clergy in evangelism, and working life and church life, since the 1940s and that 'if we're still talking about this in twenty years I shall scream'. I didn't think anything he came up with was particularly groundbreaking, though, but perhaps you can't after seventy years of Church of England reports. Then Paul Williams, the CEO of the Bible Society, outlined how the overarching narrative of the Scriptures could be used as 'a lens to interrogate the messages of contemporary culture': I quite liked this, but it was slightly depressing to hear him suggest that most Christians aren't aware there is an overarching narrative, as opposed to a succession of disconnected bits which they cherry-pick to justify their own ideological viewpoints. In between the two speakers, the Bishop pushed ahead of me (and several more people) in the queue for tea and asked me what I thought so far. I wasn't feeling all that well and couldn't help thinking of the scene in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the Vogon captain challenges the captive Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, catching their breath after the psychic and physical pain of listening to some of his verses, 'either die in the vacuum of space; or [CHORD] tell me how good you thought my poem was'. As I waffled, the Bishop sort of became aware that he'd ended up halfway along the queue and insisted on handing me a paper cup in recognition of the fact.

The point arrived for breaking into groups, as it inevitably does. As we were sat in close-serried ranks of linked steel-framed chairs with very little room to manoeuvre round each other, this proved more logistically challenging than usual. I had forgotten we were supposed to bring along a layperson: Marion was there in her capacity as a chaplain at HMP Send, so the laypeople she usually deals with are not easily able to attend external events, and we agreed that clergy are laypeople underneath, as we are so often told. In our small group we concluded that the 'thing we would take away' was Nick's very touching anecdote of the hairdresser whose way of integrating church and work life was to pray for her customers as she massaged shampoo into their hair. This was a better suggestion than my statement that what I would take away was my cup, to put into the compost.

Finally we were shown a short video about the reorganisation at Church House. Little stylised graphics of happy clergy, laypeople and central staff, and even the odd dog, bounced across the screens to describe how the diocese was being restructured around meeting the real needs of parishes, although the Suffragan Bishop's hairstyle seemed to have changed in her translation into digital form. Wondrously, the presentation concluded without at any point using the phrase 'we've sacked a cartload of people because we can't pay for them anymore'.

Wisley

Back in the far-off days of my holiday, I and Ms Brightshades went to Wisley Gardens. We were so suboptimal, we just wandered around taking photographs of pretty things and didn't note down the name of a single plant (I already know some trees, though). Many years ago while I was in Lamford some friends bought me a year's membership of Wisley as a birthday present so I could go there on my days off and relax by reading in the pagoda by the pool, that sort of thing; I think I managed two visits. Well, on this particular day I saw many bits of the garden I certainly hadn't before and the rain only made the landscape shine all the more.

No Way Out

A day going past without a phone call, or several, from Trevor would normally be a welcome bonus, but a run of such days started to arouse my suspicions. I tried to call him and heard the phone being picked up and then put down; a second call later in the day went entirely unanswered. The day after, I had a call from a social worker saying Trevor had refused to let in the mental health Home Treatment Team for nearly a week. In his only conversation with the doctors he'd claimed that God had cured him and that he no longer needed treatment, a belief somewhat belied by the complaints from his neighbours that he was shouting and screaming at night. He would probably be sectioned, she said.

This was indeed what happened, and Trevor was taken to the mental health inpatient unit at St Peter's Hospital in Chertsey, where I went to see him on Saturday. The wind and rain battered the buildings making the setting seem even more bleak than it would otherwise be. Trevor's brother was there, in the middle of cancelling one of Trevor's phones (he has had two, draining his limited resources along with the three TV sets and multiple pianos and keyboards, for a long time). I hadn't seen Trevor for over a month: he is unkempt and haggard, not looking at all like someone who has undergone a miraculous healing. He was calm enough, but is now completely lost within his paranoiac world: every sound was turned into someone making horrible accusations against him, he maintained that one of his longstanding enemies from years and years ago had come to the unit to have sex with one of the staff in the shower, that a well-known US TV evangelist had been there 'to break the spell', and that 'the witches' had 'murdered me by stabbing me six thousand times and God had to bring me back from the dead'. He couldn't talk about anything else. 

You may remember that a couple of years ago I facilitated, against the rules, a series of encounters between Trevor and Martin, who believed he could help him. I would have been delighted had this actually resulted in anything, but in fact it went depressingly along the lines I had predicted to myself: a set of long, inconclusive meetings during which Trevor shook and shouted and tried to make himself sick as he knows that this is what demoniacs do, culminating in failure to achieve anything and the would-be exorcist blaming his patient. Martin conceded that all Trevor's manifestations were assumed rather than 'real', but his convoluted diagnosis was that 'he has a demon that makes it look as though he doesn't and is just pretending', and that 'he doesn't really want to be delivered ... Trevor and his demon are like a pair of elderly sisters who live together, always complaining about the other but never doing anything about it. As soon as anyone drives the spirit out of him, he invites it back in again'. In fact, buried within this nonsense is what I think is a truth, which is that Trevor has become so committed to aspects of his paranoid narrative - to the idea that God has made certain promises to him - that he can't escape it. But that's not quite the same as self-induced demonic possession. 

Martin simply abandoned contact with Trevor and now doesn't refer to him; to be fair, he had some professional issues to deal with, but his neglect did involve absolutely not doing things he said he would do. It was the same story with the third Diocesan Deliverance Adviser I got to come and see Trevor: he'd discovered there was a new one and begged me to set up an encounter. We had one meeting; I and the priest agreed that there was nothing supernatural going on with Trevor's situation. The advisor said he would arrange another session with Trevor to go through things with him, but never did. 

So we now have a soul who seems entirely trapped. 'He'll be here a long time', Trevor's brother told me, though the doctors were uncommunicative. I am not sure that I could have done much different over the last ten years, but it's been a learning experience. I only wish Trevor could have learned something, too.

The Black and the Gold

Once upon a time, the relationship between All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day was clear. On the first, the Church remembered all those - including the nameless - whose sanctity had propelled them into the immediate post-mortem presence of God, especially those who were recognised publicly by the Church as souls whose intercession could be sought by ordinary worshippers, dwelling spiritually as they did in the curtilage of Divinity. All Souls was for the rest of us, who had first to pass through the fires of Purgatory before we attained the Sublime, and who, far from praying for the living,  required their intercessions to speed our passage through. All neat and tidy.

At least in the fully-developed Western tradition: the East had never got that far, and didn't draw hard-and-fast lines between different categories of Christians. I've long come to the view that the wonderful side-by-side contrast of All Saints and All Souls on successive days in the Church calendar - the Gold and the Black - represent, in a way, our different attitudes to the dead, to perhaps conflicted feelings of thankfulness and joy mingled perhaps with fear, sorrow, regret and maybe even anger. But I hadn't thought this year about the two days embodying different feelings about death itself, even though this is really quite an obvious extension of the theme. If we are Christians, we know that Christ has won the victory over sin and death, and that we are part of it. But equally we know that we do not deserve to be part of it, that we remain sinners, in need of repentance; and the saints are the very first to kneel, and strike their breasts, and say, 'Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner'. Confidence and humility, hope and realism, all work together: together in the sight of God are woven the Gold and the Black.