Dorset Music

Something, hopefully, uplifting for the end of the year! It came to the attention of folk on the PJ Harvey fan boards that back in the early 1990s she'd taken uncharacteristic part in an overtly feminist music project, the Brilliant Birthdays choir, based in Salisbury. The organiser was Sammy Hurden, who you can see in the only photograph of the choir publicly available, holding the guitar, with the young Polly to the right of the girl in the stripy top. Ms Hurden and PJH obviously kept in touch with one another, because she appears among the voices on 'The Colour of the Earth', the last track from the mighty Let England Shake, and, so the sleeve notes imply, organised the other voices. 

Perhaps this isn't a surprise, as Ms Hurden hasn't moved very far from West Dorset, so she would have been around for that very Dorset-based recording. Her website relates her ongoing work with community choirs, gathering and coaching people to sing pieces that evoke the landscape around them. 'The Chalk Legends', part of the cultural side of the 2012 Olympics for which Weymouth was one of the locations, took singers and musicians to St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury and the church of St George Reforne on Portland. 

You can't get more Dorset than The Hare and the Harp, though. It was inspired by a medieval carving in the County Museum in Dorchester, and was performed in Powerstock church - the piece is in the key of the bells which are rung in the background throughout the songs. It's not just the beauty of the landscape and the woven depth of history which makes this piece so moving, though, but (despite the bolstering presence of a few professional musicians) the commitment you see here to getting ordinary people to make music. A very happy new year to you all.

The Unmaking of the English Working Class

Jan from the congregation told me that over Christmas dinner she and her family had avoided talking politics but eventually couldn’t keep entirely away from the subject of the election. Her great-nephew’s partner, she avers, is ‘a bit slow on the uptake’ and at one point to everyone’s confusion asked ‘So the election, who was it won in the end?’

I doubt most of us will ever attain that degree of merciful amnesia, but the feather-spitting rage some of my best friends have expressed at the result seems to be receding a little, a couple of weeks after the event. It was so very different from the disappointment those of us from the progressive side of the equation find ourselves very often feeling at the result of elections (I can’t recall ever voting for a successful Parliamentary candidate since I first cast a ballot in 1992), and I suspect arose from the unacknowledged realisation that this was the last possible throw of the dice to reverse the 2016 Referendum on the part of those who couldn’t accept that it had gone the way it did.

But there is still much anger, and I do hope that some of the terms people have used about former Labour voters who switched to the Conservatives are not representative of Labour members, or much more sorrow lies ahead. This video commentary by George Monbiot seems a little more positive:

I’m not convinced by all of the analysis, as I would tend not to be by anything Mr Monbiot produces. The disruptive political figures he mentions in support of his thesis are certainly all nationalists, but not all ‘clowns’ in the Trump & Johnson mould: you can’t say that of Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán, or Jair Bolsonaro. Nor are these disruptive nationalists all necessarily right-wing, as the Five Star movement in Italy, and Volodymyr Zelensky whose only qualification as President of the Ukraine was playing one in a TV show, demonstrate. The picture of a few wealthy men manipulating public opinion may make left-wingers feel better, but it ignores why those manipulations resonate and succeed. Nor has Finland, despite its campaign to educate its citizens in resisting online nonsense, avoided the wave: it may have a 34-year-old female Social Democrat PM but she has had to cobble together a five-party coalition to fend off the second-biggest party in the country, a nationalist climate-change-sceptic outfit. But Mr Monbiot’s emphasis on the development of local democracy, education and citizens’ involvement seems a plausible response to the inadequacy of national elections at providing ways of dealing with the challenges societies face.

I think there are slight signs that some folk on the progressive side are starting to think historically, and face up to the slow and epochal detachment of elements of ‘the working class’ from political parties they used to support; I’ve also just finished David Cannadine’s sparky 1998 book Class in Britain which examines the historical development of the term, and that has made me contemplate the same themes. Communities in the UK where people worked with their hands and could directly see how their labour supported the income of others, the business owners, attached themselves to the Labour Party as a result of that shared experience; take away the shared experience, and the sense of belonging to groups of human beings who are subject to the same forces, pressures and circumstances weakens, and the conservative worldview that instead stresses independence, autonomy and the rightness of inequality becomes more plausible. Professor Cannadine points out that in her 1989 book The Revival of Britain Mrs Thatcher claimed that she had brought about ‘an irreversible shift of power in favour of working people and their families’ during her premiership, a phrase almost the same as one in the Labour Party manifesto of October 1974. Of course the two texts meant something very different by ‘working people’: they referred to sets of voters motivated by entirely separate experiences, the one of manual labour supporting those who did not work manually, and the other of property ownership and self-reliance.

Even Karl Marx had to admit that there were categories of workers who didn’t comfortably fit into his class analysis, Dr Cannadine points out, and it’s arguable that his attempt to make ‘working class’ into a scientific description of the role of an actual group of people in the process of production was always misjudged. It certainly is now. But if it ever made any sense at all, as summarising an experience of manual work supporting business owners, it now exists only as a memory of members of one’s family having had such an experience in the past. Hardly anyone’s work is like that now, and the processes of ownership and exploitation are far more obscure. The English Working Class, pace EP Thompson, has been unmade. There are poor people, but they aren’t a class any more.

Christmas 2019

As usual, the carol service at Smallham (altar pictured left) concludes my Christmas duties. The little chapel was packed again this year. As for Swanvale Halt church itself, the Crib Service recovered from its noticeable decline in numbers in 2018, and every seat was occupied although it was my turn to lead the children with the wooden crib figures up towards the crib, and for some reason I forgot where 'the south aisle' was. The Midnight was a bit down, as was the 8am on Christmas Day, but the 10am was up. None of this really means that much, on its own!

I am getting quite bored with doing the Christmas Day 8am according to the Prayer Book: all that business of praying repeatedly for the Queen and Humbly Beseeching Thee over and over again is starting to grate a bit. I don't think any tears would be wept if I abandoned it as it was my choice to start it. This year a young couple arrived who I instantly and accurately guessed were Roman Catholics who'd turned up early for their 8.45am mass. They didn't know what was going on.

But that's not as boring as keeping the church locked outside service times this Christmas. The troublesome youngsters have been orbiting around constantly, when they should have been tucked up in bed sucking their thumbs and wondering what Father Christmas was going to bring them, and I didn't feel as though I could risk the security of the Crib; justifiably, I think, as the ecumenical Crib which has stood unmolested in Hornington High Street for twenty years was smashed one night. I loathe locking the church against the world outside, but I hope next year we will be back to normal. 

Holmbury St Mary

I am not the only clergyperson to find Advent wears one's faith a bit thin and certainly it seems to have left me with less brainspace to blog. I have additional thoughts about the recent political discombobulations but they will have to wait until I can think. However I did have time last week on a semi-day off to drop in at the church of Holmbury St Mary where I discovered another unsung Victorian gem. 

There was no church here until 1879: in fact, very oddly, the village came to be named after it. Before then it was Felday, its only place of worship being a little brick Dissenting chapel. In 1874 the Gothic Revivalist architect GE Street came here with his wife Maraquita and both were captivated by the remoteness of the landscape so near London. Maraquita died soon after they moved to Felday, and although Street married again his new wife Jessie also died very soon: the church is a sort of memorial to them both. Street was a convinced Anglo-Catholic who served as churchwarden at the Ecclesiological Society's model church of All Saints' Margaret Street, and it's no surprise that Holmbury, while not as lavish as that London jewel, is firmly in the same camp. It has a chancel screen (presumably Bishop Wilberforce was less outraged by such things than Bishop Sumner had been a few years before) and a genuine 14th-century Italian triptych as its reredos which Street always intended should go into the church and which - notwithstanding all the new chairs in the nave - renders the view along the church into something magical. 

Holmbury's tradition is watered-down nowadays as it is part of a team with churches that come from a different viewpoint, but as so often happens all the fittings are still there. I'm not sure when the Sacrament began to be reserved, or when the nave was reordered, but at least they resisted the temptation to install an unnecessary nave altar. And those are really the only changes from the church Street would have been familiar with.

The Sunday After

Turning up at the polling station on Thursday rehearsing my internal monologue about the weird sociopathic qualities of the leader of the Conservative Party, I was confronted with Selma from the Swanvale Halt congregation, wearing a blue rosette alongside her fellow tellers from the other parties. Selma lost her husband a couple of years ago and has early-stage dementia so she can be a bit forgetful. I wasn’t going to say anything rude to her, was I, or even think anything.

Which is why it’s a struggle to read the LiberFaciorum feeds of the overwhelming majority of my friends who are unimaginably enraged by the result of the election. When it was called, I scribbled a scratch forecast of Parliamentary seats on the back of an envelope, which turned out to be almost precisely what happened; and you tend be less angry if you’re not caught out. It strikes me as ironic that the Left has an ideology that declares the equality and dignity of all human beings, but when any actual human beings disagree with them in practice, those people become stupid, ignorant and selfish. It’s not a good position from which to win their votes the next time round: ‘we despise you, can we count on your support?’ Progressive people also tend to see politics in very moral terms. Electoral success should be a reward for virtue, so if a manifestly unvirtuous person wins an election it's deeply shocking. I am absolutely sure this is an unrealistic approach which underestimates the pragmatic way most people cast their votes, in favour of which political grouping they think will be most practically effective.

I’ve never thought that the media manufactures opinion: people develop their fragmentary, contradictory, often incoherent and inarticulate opinions mainly from their own lived experience. Often that experience is quite narrow, and very few people go out of their way to seek anything beyond it: they’re too busy, and haven’t the time and mental bandwidth. What newspapers (and so on) can do is to make articulate what people feel without necessarily being able to express clearly. So the individual criticisms in the media of a particular politician (for instance) may be quite unjust, but they can express an aspect of their character which is true enough: they become untrue symbols of true things, and if they don’t resonate with anything true, they won’t stick.

I’ve also been struggling with what basically separates people with progressive views of the world from those who see things from a conservative perspective. I wonder whether it is at least partly this. A quarter of a million years ago, we human beings were trying to survive on the steppes of Africa. Our brains, remember, are still there: that’s where we evolved and where we remain in our root responses to things. It was tough work and our basic attitude towards the world would have been insecurity and fear. We didn’t know where our next meal was coming from or whether what security we had would be taken from us at any moment. If you manage to survive in this environment, you can draw two conclusions. Either you have been lucky or skilful. You can emphasise to yourself the role of circumstances and other people in keeping you going, or you can focus on your own abilities and aptitudes in securing your survival. This is nothing to do with actual facts: it’s a story you tell yourself, a way you interpret your own experience.

As society becomes more complex, this root division over how far individuals affect their own fate ramifies, and it replicates in the changed circumstances of history. If you believe that peoples have a lot of control over what happens to them, you’ll be more inclined to support the existing social order as it reflects the natural distribution of ability and effort, and less inclined to take complaints of structural inequality all that seriously. Conversely, if you see individuals as relatively constrained by their environment, you will be sceptical of the claims of natural justice and more likely to accept that people will need help to survive and flourish. Now, most of us can see the virtue in the other side of this divide whichever one we mainly fall on, and we appreciate that it’s not all one or the other. Few of us are so far at either extreme that we could never be attracted by a conservative or progressive party: there are some who are, but not a huge number. Even less does a person's position on this spectrum infallibly determine how they might vote on particular occasions because so much else feeds into that decision. But the basic separation, it seems to me, rumbles below almost everything else, two divergent models of human life.

The point of churches is that we do not, beyond a certain point, choose our fellow members. We are brought together with people whose backgrounds and life-experiences should be quite divergent from our own: they are more like family than freely-chosen friends, although we tend to share more basic assumptions and attitudes with our families. The people in the pews around you will fall on different sides of the control-constraint line, and you might find yourself discovering what your fellow-members in the Body of Christ feel about things in very discomforting ways.

This morning I found myself praying at the 8am mass for both those who were excited by the result and those who were anxious about the future, and lo and behold Marion mentioned the same theme in her sermon at the 10am service. If both of us could come up independently with the same thing, it is probably limply mainstream, but wet though it might sound, a Christian community is given no alternative but to attempt to understand everyone who belongs to it.

And In Other News

As the wind and rain raged around Swanvale Halt church yesterday, the old stones rang to the songs and dances of the Infant School Christmas Production, done this year, for the second time, in two separate chunks for Reception year children and the rest. 'A logistical triumph', I described it in my introduction to the later event, and so it was. This year, the headmistress decreed that the children's costumes should not include tinsel or cotton wool, thus reducing the clearing-up quite considerably. Umbrellas were a necessary defence in the face of the inclement conditions outside (though they are not sure against everything). 

Partisanship

My friend Fr Thesis in London said on LiberFaciorum the other day:

All Masses over the coming next days will be offered for the political life of our country as we approach Polling Day. Join with us in praying for all candidates standing for election, and for wisdom and insight for those casting their ballot …

To which a chum of his commented:

I always remember Fr Holroyd at St Bart's, Brighton, announcing that he would as usual be saying a Votive Mass for a Conservative Victory on election day …

Often after Morning Prayer we find ourselves touching on political matters, it must be said, and the General Election campaign has appeared, as neutrally as Fr Thesis expresses his intentions, in my prayers when I lead them and in the intercessions when others do. But I would never dare to offer a Mass, or even express a desire, for the hegemony of my preferred party.

This is partly because I am aware that as a parish priest I have a sort of representative function, in a community – thinking of the Church community specifically rather than the wider one – which bears a variety of different opinions. I am reluctant to rope my flock in to my own views, given that the Church as a whole does not express any in this matter. I am still more reluctant to imply that God thinks the way I do: nay, I tremble in case I might speak falsely on God’s behalf, as blessed Paul fears to do in 1Corinthians 14. It could be that in divine providence, there is a point, at this stage in history, in having a truly awful individual leading this or another country: it may be that good may come of it that could not come any other way. Absent a prophetic revelation, I must leave that to the Father.

Yet in many respects we are encouraged to tell God whatever might be on our minds, to share our hopes and desires with him, and then to leave him to enlighten us wherever we might be mistaken. I cannot get past the idea that offering a Mass for a particular election result is tasteless and leaves insufficient space for conscience and disagreement, but perhaps I am being too squeamish. If the State were really under threat of being taken over by an organisation whose aims and methods were clearly unchristian, would I really be so reticent? How far would we have to advance down that road before the matter became clear?

Do go to vote tomorrow! Unless you’re voting for the wrong candidate, in which case stay in bed.

Just Checking

The first time the nurse checked my blood pressure it was disturbingly high, but I pointed out that this was because I'd run to my appointment from the supermarket car park where I'd had to park, the hospital's own being choc-a-block with cars and a dozen more waiting to come in as I drove out in despair to seek a place somewhere else. It was reassuringly normal a few minutes later. I was there for another series of pre-op checks as I have another little issue to be sorted out, along the same lines as I had last year. 

Other health issues have resolved themselves, mercifully. The disturbances to my eyesight have disappeared and (with spectacular assistance) my sight seems again to be as sharp as it ever was in the past. Perhaps, as my optician diagnosed, part of the problem was to do with blepharitis and better ocular hygiene has sorted it out.

These are only minor matters, and many parishioners as well as my mum seem to spend a good proportion of their time at the doctor's if not in hospital. But turning 50 has had a very unanticipated effect. I have the strange sensation that I ought really to be dead, and any time I have from now on, certainly time spent in relative good health, is something of a bonus. It brings with it a kind of lightness and, if not irresponsibility (surely not!), still a sense of proportion, of my relative unimportance in the great flow of existence. A liberation, then. We will see how long it lasts.

Transdanubian Interrogations

Amisia from Romania was only part of the congregation at Swanvale Halt for a little while, but she made a great impact, not being much like many other worshippers here. She came as carer for a regular member of the church and loyally brought her to church every Sunday so she could meet her friends, having been poorly and isolated for quite a while. Amisia herself was feeling her way forward after some hard times and so they did each other a lot of good.

Not unexpectedly Amisia was Romanian Orthodox by tradition. She told me that her brother had had a terminal cancer diagnosis and she had gone to pray at the tomb of the local saint, St Parascheva, and from that moment he began to improve and today is fine. Like many Europeans she found the concept of Anglicanism a little bewildering and had a lot of questions, not all of which were of a technical nature. Queries that begin ‘What does the Anglican Church believe about …’ are often quite hard to answer because there is not much that the Anglican Church does have definite beliefs about. As I like to quote, the Catechism of the Church of England has 21 pages and 60 clauses; its Roman Catholic counterpart (at least in the edition I have) weighs in at 675 and 2863 respectively …

One thing Amisia wanted to know about was sin. Here, you see, I ran up against the fact that the Anglican Catechism only mentions sin once, in the account of the assurance of ‘forgiveness of sins’ in baptism: nowhere does it say what sin is or what acts are sins. I found myself compelled to define what the Church of England’s general attitude to sin is, which seems to be that it exists and, very vaguely and indefinitely, can be defined as ‘that which goes against the will of God generally or for a specific person’, but, beyond that, mainly leaves believers to work out for themselves what their sins may be. I am certainly very, very reluctant to determine for people what their sins are and to tell them from the pulpit (or I would be if our church had one). I feel that this is the business of the Holy Spirit rather than ministers of the Gospel, and that I am only intended by the Lord to comment specifically if asked to do so. Even then I am loth to do so without having at least some idea why something might be sinful. In a modern and very individualistic world we have lost the sense that acts which apparently only concern the individual have an impact on the community because they affect how a person’s character grows, and exactly how that might happen involves quite a lot of guesswork. I have a great fear of sounding like the late Cardinal Siri, for instance, denouncing women wearing trousers because it ‘caused them to forget their natural function in childbearing’.

I prefer rather, and I think the Church of England prefers, to develop the believer’s conscience so that they can work these things out for themselves. Some sins are obvious in that they cause clear hurt and damage or involve the breaking of promises, but some aren’t. Now writing to the Corinthians the Blessed and Holy Apostle Paul (see how Orthodox my phrases can turn!) says that Christians should not eat meat offered in the temples of pagan gods, not of course because there is anything wrong with the meat or that the pagan gods really exist, but to avoid wounding the conscience of a Christian who might still have residual pagan inclinations: in the company of such a person, to avoid any hint that they might be eating it because it’s been offered in a temple, they shouldn’t eat it. In fact, he says it twice: ‘if you sin against your brother in this way …’ Clearly it isn’t the consumption of the food which is sinful, it’s the thoughtless effect it has on the other person. Now cases of this kind, when innocent acts become sinful in particular contexts, could be infinitely multiplied, and any Church that sought to list them all would be a foolhardy institution indeed. Instead Christians need a Spirit-formed conscience to negotiate the way forward, to know what’s the right thing to do, and when to say sorry.

But the hazard with such tolerance is that we say the words of the General Confession in the Mass and let them wash over us, as impervious to the Holy Spirit as a stone is to water, like the lady who once said to me, years before I became a priest, ‘I don’t know why we have to confess our sins every week, sometimes I don’t have any!’ I told Amisia that Anglican priests aren't given lists of sins. 'Then how do we know what's a sin and what isn't?' she asked. It’s a quandary I still haven’t found a good way out of (though I can only comfort myself that the Blessed and Holy Apostle Paul probably hadn’t, either).

"A Conscious Effort to Listen"

As chair of our local Churches Together, Marion our curate organised the General Election hustings at another local church today, an interesting occasion in what is a Remain constituency with a sitting Tory MP. It had already caused her enough of a headache when the Town Council decided the Mayor should not chair it and she had to find someone else. A sufficiently independent local figure was located and an alternative venue after the original one couldn't manage it after all. So yesterday afternoon arrived and virtually as soon as the doors opened Marion watched the local Conservative Association pile in and fill all the front seats. She read the Archbishops of Canterbury and York's letter about conducting the election respectfully. 'Very well said!' a Tory councillor told her. He presumably thought the prelates meant someone else, as the Conservatives then proceeded to heckle and jeer whenever the Liberal Democrat candidate opened his mouth. One woman scrunched a plastic water bottle loudly during his answers to questions from the floor until Marion gave her a Hard Stare and then she pretended to drink from it. Shocked by the childishness of it, Marion said she did feel constrained to say that as a floating voter she wasn't favourably impressed. I pointed out that, to be fair, she hadn't been floating in that direction anyway.