Dorset Day Trip

'Whenever I see  Badbury Rings I think of childhood picnics', commented my friend Archangel Janet on these pictures. Mum and I were not far off a picnic on Thursday, huddled in the car with our fish and chips as the clouds scudded past driven by a stiff wind across the east Dorset downs. I did get out for a short stroll up to the Rings, which were quite soggy as well as windblown. The crows hung in the air, making very little headway.

The view of the towers of Wimborne Minster along East Street is a classic one which hasn't changed significantly in a century and more. One change in the offing for the town is the refurbishment of my former workplace, the Priest's House Museum. This is in the process of being transformed into the Museum of East Dorset which is exactly what my boss the then curator dreamed of turning it into. It's set to lose its characteristic double-bow-window frontage (much to his chagrin, I know), but it's only had that since the last reconstruction. I wonder whether the Tinsmith's Forge will retain the little labels I put on all the objects when I was documenting the collection in 1992 and which were still there in 2013 ...

Ash After

A day after Ash Wednesday, the little bowl of ash I took to the Infants School yesterday is a bit dry. The attendances at the services in church were somewhat lower (I think) this year, but although the number of people - adults and children - ashed at school must not have been in total that far off the ones in church, I don't think we're quite there yet. At Church Club in the afternoon most of the children wanted to receive the ash and Cleo took great delight in ashing me. Matthew told us he was giving up jam sandwiches for Lent, which is no small sacrifice when you're six.

The Night Journey

It wasn't the usual troublemakers disturbing the good residents of Swanvale Halt yesterday evening, but their parson. Going out to visit Valerie and Craig who are getting married at the church later this year, I not only managed to go to the wrong street and knock on the wrong door, but while going up an alleyway that allowed me to approach the church from the south side and to check whether there was anyone hanging around in the churchyard, I set off a whole pack of dogs, it seemed. 'Shut up, there's no one there!' shouted a voice to at least one of the agitated canines. But there was.

Valerie and Craig have decided to marry after being together for quite a while, and have daughter Jade and twin boys. I was late getting to their house, but Jade was waiting up to hand me an envelope of cash. Her school had asked pupils to do something for a local charity and she had decided to bake cakes and biscuits for sale in aid of the church. £30 represents a lot of work for a seven-year-old. I will retain the envelope and put it in the files, as a holy relic of the kindness of children.

Fallen Again

The tragic and awful post-mortem shaming of Jean Vanier opens up again the question of how apparently deeply spiritual people go wrong. At least the Church is becoming accustomed to acknowledging the failures of those who were formerly trusted and even revered, but there are vitally important questions that I am not sure anyone is yet asking: not just ‘How did we let this happen?’ but ‘How did this individual do this and maintain a ministry?’ My old theology tutor at Staggers once said, ‘If I were to attack Christianity, it wouldn’t be on the basis of history – the case for Christianity is far too strong – but on the behaviour of Christians. If Christianity is true, they should be better than this.’ These scandals are a deep, deep fault line in Christianity and to stop it happening so very often we should ask not just how it's allowed to happen, but why it happens in the first place.

Did Jean Vanier succumb to temptation once L’Arche gave him the power to abuse, or did he set it up in order to have that power? Was it a conspiracy between him and Fr Thomas Philippe, or was the L’Arche idea a brainchild of two abusers who didn’t intend anything malign at all? Once people are dead we can’t ask and nobody seems to want to ask. Having asked the question before, my feeling is that people who found radical Christian communities often do so to escape their own hangups and end up trapped by them.

Christians are not, generally, unaware of their sins. Those who come through a Charismatic Evangelical experience, it seems, believe that those sins are put behind them, only to be quietly ambushed by them as time goes on. But Catholics like Jean Vanier are supposed to make confession, not just once but regularly. I wonder whether something like this is what happens:

1. You make your confession. There is some besetting sin, whatever it might be, of thought or act, that you are glad to talk about. You really intend to change: you’re not so daft you expect the sin to die off at once, but you hope that a new phase has begun.

2. Then you find yourself confessing the same thing over and over. It’s wearying. You know that confession is supposed to generate change, not excuse sin. What can your confessor say to your repeated admissions? What can you say? What’s the point of repeating this? You convince yourself it’s more dealt with than it is, and stop talking about it to spare yourself the humiliation.

3. You tell yourself that the sin is not that bad after all. Perhaps at some stage your confessor has told you that, too, to be kind and encouraging.

4. You then tell yourself, Nobody’s perfect; I have this fault, but I do good things otherwise. You use one part of your nature to buy off the other, and the good purchases you credit so you can more easily ignore the bad. It’s not just religious people who do this; it’s the kind of mindset we all have, frankly. Having stopped talking about the sin, you stop even trying to deal with it. You live with it. You leave it to God, not trustingly, but lazily.

5. You erect a mental structure that justifies the fault, and step by step you stop caring. You wall it off from the rest of your life, a life that should be integrated and whole. 

6. Perhaps you achieve even more with the ‘good’ part of yourself than you would have done otherwise. Good is a compensation measure, a subconscious means of keeping that wall high. You pray more, write about the spiritual life if you’re in a position to do so, do more and more good. But at the heart of you is that fundamental discontinuity, and depending what it is, it can be catastrophic. It’s like a bit of the garden full of rampant weeds, and within the wall the sin advances in the same way that the good side of you advances outside it. At some point the weeds are going to scale the wall, or burrow under it, and come out.

Or is it all as simple as Jesus says of the Pharisees in Mark 12, which I happened to read this morning: 'They devour widows' houses, and for a show make lengthy prayers'? 

A Perfect World Where Everyone's Like Me

Over on another social media platform, Fr Robin Ward, the principal of my old theological college, decided boldly to wade into the matter of the ejection of Mr Andrew Sabitsky as a Downing Street advisor on the grounds that he knows him: Mr Sabitsky was at least at one time an habitué of various Anglo-Catholic churches around Oxford. ‘He would make a very good archbishop’ comments Dr Ward in response to one outburst, ‘there would be compulsory folded chasubles all round’.

As a result, there was much talk of the notion of ‘high-end’ and ‘low-end decoupling’, an idea I’d not encountered before. A high-end decoupler has a mental habit of considering a concept or proposition in isolation from its context, as an intellectual exercise, and surrounding that discussion with verbal disclaimers to make it clear, at least to other high-end decouplers, that any wider considerations are being put to one side. Low-end decouplers find it hard to examine an idea apart from its context and often react very badly to such examinations of controversial ideas. I am not convinced this entirely explains what happened to Mr Sabitsky.

In one of the original comments on Dominic Cummings’s famous blog which gave rise to all this fuss, Mr Sabitsky talks about the heritability of intelligence, and potentially of other characteristics such as compassion, things which genetic fiddling might encourage: the production of better humans. It’s no surprise that he concludes that it’s more realistic to manipulate intelligence because it is easier to measure than those other faculties – no surprise, because people who perform well in IQ tests always end up saying this.

Easy to measure, but less easy to predict. For instance, I know that I am not in the top echelon of intelligence: my mind works slowly and in a fragmented fashion, and I know plenty of people who are cleverer than me. I don’t believe I am stupid, although I can be very dim about some things; I take comfort in my one-time academic successes rather like an old soldier’s campaign medals, and like those they only bear a remote relationship to who I am now. I describe myself as being in the upper ranks of the second-rate. But I am the first person in my family to have any academic qualifications at all; had my ancestors taken the IQ test, would they have scored highly? Is it simply that they never had the chance, or are there other factors at play? Am I a mutant in my lineage?

The real problem is the use of intelligence, however measured, as the most important index of a person’s worth. I wonder when this started? Human society used to privilege other virtues. I’m put in mind of Song no.92 of the Carmina Burana, usually called ‘The Dispute of Phyllis and Flora’, or something of the sort, in which two medieval ladies debate whose boyfriend is the most worthwhile: Phyllis’s is a knight and Flora’s a clergyman (how naughty). Back and forth they reason, until they agree to submit the judgement to the court of Cupid whose assembled nymphs eventually conclude ‘By virtue of their learning and the customs they inherit/ We declare the love of clerics worthier of merit’. This poem is one of a category of medieval lyrics around the same theme and, as David Parrett, the author of the Penguin Classics selection of the Carmina writes, ‘that the clerics always win [is a bit of] a foregone conclusion in view of their obvious authorship’. In this and similar works, medieval clergy were a class based in education and learning, arguing for their precedence over the military virtues. In the modern world, however, eugenic fantasies, rather than those of courtly romance, form the nerd’s revenge.

I suspect we privilege intellect because of the progressivist vision of human history we’ve developed since the Reformation, or the Enlightenment at the very least. We have come to associate human progress with technological advance and scientific understanding, and see these as driven by the application of intellect; and even though we find brainy people often baffling and comic – or worrying – we cannot help but enthrone intelligence as the most important of human characteristics because of the advantages it brings us all; as opposed to, say, courage or kindness, which are admirable but don’t move the world forward, or so it seems.

The truth is that as very few people fortuitously combine in their single persons the necessary virtues to greater-than-average degrees, we need all sorts of human beings in a society. Even sociopaths sometimes have a use. Predicting what sorts of human beings we might need and in what proportions at particular times would require a level of superforecasting hard to envisage.

Misanthropy 2 - Worlds That Pass

My mind, still trying to process the attitudes I encounter online, turns to my friend Dr TransHuman who got into the newspapers a few days ago because of her latest book – ‘Goth professor says, Stop breeding to save the Earth’. While I come from a very different place ideologically, not only do I think nobody deserves the death threats she got, but I also suspect she has a bit of a point. There are a lot of human beings about, and we don’t necessarily need lots more. Then again, yesterday I shared a table at the café opposite the church with a lady who told me her large brood of five daughters reflected a fear of loneliness that had dogged her for many years. Many of the people I know have experiences of life which are more marginal than they realise; but so, to a degree, are mine.

In a way, I live a life which is more similar to the way most people once did. Swanvale Halt is not just the place I sleep; I spend the great majority of my time in it and I know some hundreds of its people to some extent: the congregation and their extended contacts, business owners and workers, teachers, schoolchildren, and their families. They behave pleasantly to me and I strive to do the same, and often I get some insight into their habits, struggles and thoughts. They are very varied, apart from sharing the same geographical location. This used to be quite close to common experience, when people lived surrounded by a network of acquaintance, work and family, but now it’s almost wildly off-centre. This is especially so if you’ve moved halfway across the country, and perhaps changed countries, to come to London and work there; but even if you haven’t, the stability of communities and the opportunities for casual interactions of the kind that generate fellowship are much weakened from the way they used to be. It’s my bizarre position as parson which opens the possibility of something different, an older way of living, and which allows me to move between different sub-groups within my community and interact with them all. It is true that my relationships with most of these people are, necessarily, relatively superficial. But they are not nothing, and when interacting with the people I don’t know that well, I tend to extrapolate from the experiences of those I do know something about, and to extend the love and generosity I try to have for them.

Now, many people I know don’t have experiences which are anything like this. If they are remote from family, geographically or emotionally (and many are), they will perhaps interact with a relatively small group of co-workers, and for the rest of the time move past a mass of anonymous souls about whom they know nothing apart from fleeting impressions. They have no idea who they are, where they have come from or where they are going, what stresses they may be under or what they may be looking forward to. They are unknown.

If your life is like this, your main relationships will be with friends (including partners) and pets. The latter in particular are very likely to bias you against the anonymous human beings who rush past you in your daily life. They will make no demands on you except very obvious physical ones, and will never have any needs that you will struggle to meet. They will never tell you you’re wrong, and never have a disagreement with you. You can project anything you like onto them, and say anything to them; you can insult them or coo over them, and they will react to you the same way; the basic nature of their existence will never challenge you or your ideas. They are utterly uncomplicated and that’s their appeal, though the idea leaves me a bit cold. I am very sceptical about human beings’ ability to read animal thoughts and emotions: most of the time (and I know I do this as I watch and occasionally talk to the cats in my garden) we judge them according to models of human behaviour that we then impute to them, barely recognising that that’s what we’re doing. We underestimate how remote their mental lives are from ours.

Friends and lovers, of course, you select. You gravitate towards people who share experiences and outlooks. They will almost universally reflect back at you exactly the same reactions and understandings you have. They will reinforce your impressions and back up your conclusions about the world, and when they don’t – which is what we’re talking about here – it can be very painful and you are more likely to dispose of them than to incorporate the fact in your life, as you would to some degree have to if you lived in an old-fashioned organic community and couldn’t escape them. You can maintain the sense that your friends are distinct from the rest of humanity, because they are like you and think the things that you think. You can place them in a separate conceptual category. Of course everyone has some relationships which are closer than others, but some don’t have much to give a broader perspective on them.

So if people find themselves expressing anti-humanist ideas, those ideas come from experience and probably pain, anger and disillusionment. That doesn’t mean they can be dismissed as merely personal bias: ideas have a life of their own and should be dealt with on their own rational terms. But understanding where they come from is a counterbalance against the anger that might bubble up in us when confronted with ideas that challenge us very deeply. We have to work very hard to see through the opacity of our own experience to understand those of others; we are not, sadly, the Son of Man, whose unfailing sight had the clarity of the Spirit. And I’m not sure who has the more oddball life, or whose is more representative of modernity – me, or my friends.

The Trouble With Humans

At some point I'll be able to write something upbeat here - but not today! A few months ago I put together a short pamphlet on the relationship of the Church to the climate emergency and the theological issues it raised, mainly because nothing I heard tackled it the way that concerned me. In it, I thought about the danger the politics of climate change seemed to pose of anti-humanism, of falling into a misanthropic rhetoric which viewed human beings as a polluting presence, a disease that nature would be justified in wiping out.  That wasn't very present just a short time back, but it seems to be now. My LiberFaciorum feed is full of it: often brutal and violent, accusatory, angry not with categories of human being (like the Brexit debate), but with humans as such. The Earth would be fine if they weren't around. It's hard to read, and often comes from people I care about and who are even, in at least one case, engaged in work which concerns saving people's lives. 

One of my favourite little stories involves Metropolitan Anthony of Sourezh who, on his first trip back to the Soviet Union from which his family had fled during the Revolution, was welcomed at the airport by a commissar from the Ministry of Religious Affairs. 'Do you believe in God, my child?' asked the archbishop. 'Certainly not,' replied the official firmly, 'As a member of the Communist Party I believe in human beings.' 'Good!', said Anthony, shaking his hand, 'So does God!'

There is a misanthropic strain in Christian spirituality, with disgust at the depth of human sin as its justification, but it's marginal. Rather, we are used to the tension between the fact that human life cannot be radically bad if the eternal Son came to share it and we are to carry on his work, and on the other hand the inescapable truth that humans' response to the arrival of absolute goodness was to turn on it and attempt to destroy it. The liturgy consistently rehearses both. I don't know whether the atheistic sort of misanthropy, released by the climate crisis, has long roots in people's thinking - was it always there - or whether it results from being surprised at how humans have failed? Christians have always known we are Fallen; perhaps non-believers are only now really finding out.

There's a more philosophical question below this, which is how far we should think of humans as part of the natural order, and how far we are separate from it. This is a complex matter for both Christians and non-believers. Traditionally Christians could maintain that humans were set radically apart from the beasts, but accepting evolution muddies those waters: we become both, part of a natural continuum but also endowed with something else, something which makes us capable of great good and also great evil. Our animal nature can be bent in either direction. However, if you're an atheist, everything we have is part of our genetic inheritance, and the way we behave must also derive from it. Whatever selfishness and short-sightedness we display must come from there. If we act badly, it can't be because we are too distinct from nature, but precisely because we are part of it: not because we are insufficiently like your pet cat, but because we're like it too much. If that's true, there's no great sense in castigating humans for being what they can't help. 

The conclusion a Christian must draw is that, if our imagination, the aspects of us that are 'the image of God', can be used positively or negatively; though it be ever so hard, we can choose to exercise the better side of what we are. And we must, for disaster lies otherwise. And without us, Creation returns not to a state of goodness and grace, but to chaos, to inarticulacy, to nothingness; beauty, perhaps, but with nothing capable of discerning, describing or enjoying beauty. Try Romans 8.19-22, which our holy mother the Church made us read last Sunday, if you don't believe me. Blessed Paul, of course, got there ahead of us.

I Never Cared You Knew

I have no idea what algorithm led to an advert for Fewer Funerals popping up on my LiberFaciorum feed. This jolly initiative provides a place where people who vaguely know one another can agree not to go to one another's funerals. The image gives you some idea of the level of the humour: 'That's Fewer Funerals, not Fuhrer Funerals'. 

There are, as the video points out, many reasons for not going to someone's funeral. Perhaps you can't find the time off work, or you didn't know the deceased very well, or the calculation of utility - involving distance, time, familiarity, the desire to support friends or family - simply works out negative. We've all been there. The website, where you and others can register your desire not to have vague acquaintances or work colleagues attend your obsequies, states that its main consideration is to fend off criticism from others for not going, and it's unhelpful for anyone to feel positive pressure to go to a funeral service.

What strikes one, though, is the cheerful callousness dressed up as humour. On the video, neighbours blithely disregard one another's horrible deaths (not funerals, note, but deaths), while the website's logo looks like this:

One of the stated reasons for going to fewer funerals is that you'll contribute less to global warming (well, you could do that either by being strict about using trains or buying an electric car), or, 'last but not least, having more time to do things you want to do, like watching your favourite box sets'. The little character on the screen is watching Six Feet Under, but given the guidance the website gives you on 'Five Things You Can Do Instead of Attending a Funeral', I'm not that sure it's a joke at all. 

The gentleman behind all this states that:

A man who’s been involved in the funeral business for decades and the first person to introduce the concept of natural burials, Ken West, said if only he’d had a pound for everyone who has told him ‘just put me in a bag and throw me in a hole when I pop my clogs.’ I think this shows that there are a lot of like minded people out there who are aware that, if their own funeral isn’t of great importance to them, then it shouldn’t be of great importance to the people who are thinking about attending.

It is true that you do hear that, though usually second-hand because it is reported by relatives. Funnily enough, they never want to stick granddad in a bag in a hole. And 'granddad' is correct, because I've never heard of a woman expressing these opinions. That's because, I suspect, they are fake. They are a weird assertion of self-reliance, an insistence on 'not making a fuss', and a declaration of bravado, all of which are ways of avoiding emotion. It's mainly men who are prey to this sort of nonsense. 

Once upon a time none of this would arise. If someone died in your community, you'd be there: the coffin would be carried past even if you weren't following it. If they died away from your community, even if you knew them well, even if you loved them, you probably wouldn't be able to go. There was, rightly, no individual choice to be exercised; rightly, because death is not an individual matter. It is a matter of our common humanity, and those who shy away from marking that probably steer clear of the depths - and heights - of life as well.

One of the reasons the Fewer Funerals video gives for not going to a funeral (or any, perhaps) is that 'some people just don't like getting dressed up'. I doubt they'd say the same about weddings, though I don't particularly enjoy those most of the time. There are all sorts of justifications you can force yourself to, if you're desperate enough to avoid life, and the death that is part of it.

Strange Paths

You are used to me describing episodes which I usually characterise as passing through a cloud - the way it can suddenly come down and then as suddenly lift. The last couple of days have seen me feeling something linked to that experience, but distinct from it. It's been a peculiar sort of mild derangement - a sense of cognitive fracturing alongside a very negative mindset, which is unusually directed not at my situation but outward. A friend says something on LiberFaciorum and my first mental response is to pick holes in it, no matter what it might be, while I find myself unable to compose any positive, coherent thoughts or concentrate on anything beyond the immediate tasks I absolutely can't avoid doing. Having come across extracts from it for some time, I've just bought an old copy of CS Lewis's The Four Loves and have been finding myself getting to the foot of a page and having very little idea what I've read: it's CS Lewis, for heaven's sake, not Hegel. I faff about in the study, and in the middle of one task think of another but then in the middle of looking something up or finding an envelope or whatever can't hold on to either long enough to move forward on them. Am I ageing, mentally declining, or just tired?

Church life is part of this. Swanvale Halt faces the same challenges as any small community of English Christians and there are innumerable suggestions for what a pastor might do about them, or about themselves, a kaleidoscope of answers to a welter of ways of characterising the problem. A lot of the time all I can do is think of objections. I don't actually know what to do. There are projects I begin, and then conclude that they aren't going to work after all, which I suppose is no bad thing but it's difficult to see them as more than a waste of time.

I haven't seen S.D. for a long while. I called him this morning to fix a meeting before Easter. 'I suppose I can fit you in,' he said wearily. I related one of my favourite stories, of how the future Fr Joe Williamson went as a young man straight back from World War One to visit the notoriously sarcastic Fr Montgomery-Campbell at St Saviour's Poplar, who listened to this stumbling, nervous Cockney lad on his doorstep describing how he felt God was calling him to be a priest, and replied with 'Really? How interesting,' and then shut the door. 'That's how it should be,' put in S.D., 'none of this nonsense about feelings.' He put me in the diary and to cheer me up told me a story about how he and a disabled friend got stuck in a lift at a reception in an Oxford college recently and had to climb/be lifted out with the aid of two chairs. They both thought it was a hoot while the college is mortified and launching an enquiry. Funnily enough, it did cheer me up a bit.

Nothing Worse Than ...

... and you can fill in your own conclusion. High on the list of rankling ecclesiastical impedimenta comes a wonky thurible. We don't actually use ours very often, but when we do it invariably misbehaves, coming open at inconvenient points and spraying ash. In the past I have blamed our head server but in fact I do no better with it, and the application of pliers a little while ago has made no difference. Having found a friendly metalworker not far away the time is ripe for him to have a look at it to see whether it really is as misaligned as it seems to be. Candlemas out of the way, we shouldn't be using it again till Easter morning, and by then it might be more biddable. Of course everyone is too terrified to polish it in case they tangle the chains. 

Three More Churches

The wind and rain has howled around the Rectory this afternoon and my mind turns to a group of churches recently seen. Coldharbour, Capel and Newdigate offer their own interesting features but not much in terms of the history of the Catholic movement in the area. Ockley, though, still has the Sacrament reserved and quite a lush sanctuary decorated in pinky marble. The reredos dates to 1873, but the marble work was done in 1917 in memory of a young man killed at the First Battle of Ypres: yet another example of World War One affecting the way churches looked and acted.

Not far away is St Mary Magdalene's, South Holmwood. This is a Victorian church with a longstanding Catholic tradition as witnessed, again, by its fixtures and fittings, although I happened to meet the incumbent who characterised the church now as 'closer to the candlestick than the flame'. The church guide says the 'reredos' was installed in 1887, but what they have in the church now looks a bit later to me. There seem to have been curtains on riddel-posts around the altar at some time to judge by the markings in the floor, and I wonder whether those nice little wooden angels you can see on the predella used to stand on top of them. The Lady Chapel and its aumbry has a more modernist austerity to it, dating as it does only from 1979.

 

Further up the road towards Dorking is North Holmwood, where we find not just reserved sacrament, but Stations of the Cross, three sanctuary lights, a statue of Our Lady, a Corpus Christi banner, and something I've never seen before - a text for the Sacrament of Reconciliation, kept in a small wall-mounted box. The mere presence of any of these things, of course, doesn't mean they are used now, but they must have been once. The sanctuary is remarkably unremarkable compared to Ockley and South Holmwood.

I'm not sure whether Ladies Anne and Mary Legge - daughters of the 3rd Earl of Dartmouth, it seems - who paid for North Holmwood in 1874, intended it as an outpost of Catholic Anglicanism, though one of its architect Rohde Hawkins's other churches, St Michael's Mount Dinham in Exeter, definitely is. However it's South Holmwood that provides us with the first 'ritualism conflict' I know about from Surrey. In 1901 Sir Leopold Heath of Kitlands fell out with Revd Gill the vicar over two silver candlesticks which Sir Leopold insisted should be removed from the altar. On Mr Gill's refusal to comply, Sir Leopold then began a door-to-door petition in the parish and made it an issue in the Vestry election: the vicar was compelled to concede, though three years later Sir Leopold was dead and it didn't take long for the candlesticks to reappear. Mind you, he might just not have liked the person who gave them to the church, Lady Laura Hampton of Oakdale house not far away. She wrote children's books - at least one of which was illustrated by Thomas Noyes Lewis, q.v. And there we had better end!

Just Not Making the Grade

On more than one occasion I’ve bought some of the merchandise from the wonderful people at The Caravan Gallery who specialise in memorabilia celebrating (or at least marking for public attention) the unsung Britain: one-eyed dogs, elderly couples having sandwiches next to an A-road, out-of-season funfairs, the obligatory dead fir tree in a pot almost all of us seem to have somewhere around provided there’s enough space. Jan Williams is one of the creative geniuses behind this vision, and, as it turns out, her uncle was a creative genius in his own way and she and partner Chris Teasdale have told all their subscribers about it.

Ron Gittins lived for most of his life in a flat in a Victorian house in Oxton near Liverpool. Over the course of decades he turned it into a fantasy which combined bits of Roman temple with Napoleonic-era Nelson shrine. He carted bags of cement back home to turn a fireplace into a colossal lion’s mouth, and had to take down the two Egyptian figures which flanked the outside door before they collapsed. He wouldn’t let his landlord in in case changes had to be made and he had to move out, which was why for the last couple of years of his life he had no heating, cooked on a camping stove and slept in a sleeping bag in the hall. Ron had violently Tory opinions, walked around Oxton in what appears to be a suit designed as a publicity prop for BP with a papier-mache figure of Cleopatra, which – as it appears covered up with a cloth in the photos in the Liverpool Echo – was probably not entirely decent, and filled his home not just with gloriously inept art but also piles of what to anyone else would be junk, but to him was the raw material of an imaginary world.

I am put in mind of other such wonderful defiers of reality:

Andrew Dracup, the Bridgnorth tunneller who extended his modest Railway Street cottage into an underground Roman temple;

William Lyttle, the ‘Mole Man of Hackney’, whose excavations beneath his house on Mortimer Street (now owned by Sue Webster) were stopped after the surrounding pavements began to collapse; and, of course,

Colin Armstrong, whose Forbidden Corner folly-park at Tupgill, Yorkshire, I have seen or I wouldn’t have believed it.

My modest folly-making pales into insignificance: I’m just too sensible to make a real contribution to the world, I fear.

Not for the first time, Considering Children

I had the sequence of the changes we'd made to our children's ministry at Swanvale Halt in my mind, but, when I looked back in preparation for a meeting on Monday evening, I'd forgotten how long it had taken. By 2014, though attendance at our Family Service was spiralling up regularly in the direction of 100 a fifth of whom were children, the Junior Church had dwindled to the point where there was often only one forlorn little lad there, so in February that year we suspended it, convinced it wasn't what people wanted any more. Mid-2016 saw us having another go, but offering Junior Church only on the 3rd Sunday each month so that the first-Sunday Family Service wasn't the only time families felt they could safely bring their children. Now, we find ourselves in possession of a Family Service to which no families have come for a long while, and a Junior Church which sometimes gets feasible figures but is hard going: you really need five or six children of similar abilities. When it works, it feels great, and when it doesn't, it's miserable for all concerned.

'Over the twenty years I've been here, we've tried virtually every configuration,' said Erica, 'and can't find a way to crack it.' We're not sure whether our Catholic-end worship puts people off - given the experience of Anglo-Catholic churches with very flourishing children's work, I suspect not, and that the experience of coming into a church full of grey and white heads in which you are virtually the only young family is far more influential on what people do. What people tell me is that they'll choose a church where they feel their children will be catered for, whatever it is, over their own liturgical preferences. The Roman Catholic congregation we share the building with has a well-supported Junior Church which they run every week, led by one member of the congregation but with parent helpers. Marion our curate is convinced that we really have to offer children's provision more often in order to build up support - but can we manage it? Can we drum up enough assistance to get that far? We're also thinking about ways of including children in the liturgy, and beefing up the music so they could be part of the choir (needs money, that). 

My friend Fr Thesis shared pictures on LiberFaciorum of him surrounded by children for the Candlemas mass at his church. He wore a biretta, gold cope and a crossed stole, and his deacon and subdeacon were keeping control of their maniples. There were candles (obviously), incense, aspersed water, and loads of youngsters with their families. He told me:

We definitely benefit from having an excellent parish school, that can’t be denied. However, above and beyond the detail of all the various theories and strategies one can adopt, I think the most important thing is a question of culture. Do kids feel welcomed and included and at home in church? I think that makes the biggest difference and has to underpin whatever projects and plans you adopt. I hope that’s the most significant thing we’ve managed to achieve at all levels of what we do. I rarely if ever hear moaning about children at St Benet’s and try to exemplify that in my own attitude. 

And crucially, I think:

Also - kids don’t want rubbish religion. They like the proper thing and don’t want to be talked down to. Religion should be fundamentally different from school and clubs and all the other things they do.

Perhaps we need more liturgy rather than less!

Transition Period

It is absolutely true that the UK is different, spiritually, from the country that it was before the EU referendum – but how, exactly, beyond the strictly practical matters of trade and migration, is harder to gauge. Ethnic minorities have apparently experienced more racism; and yet public attitudes to immigration and race appear to be more liberal than ever before. Leaving the EU can be described as the UK turning away from a wider world, or towards one, depending on your initial prejudices. Both things can be true. There has been a dreadful process of polarisation through the last three years of misjudgements and mistakes, a process promoted and endorsed by the Conservative Party in its own interests since Mrs May’s disgraceful crack about ‘citizens of nowhere’, and it’s uncorked an emboldened substrate of racism and viciousness which was successfully held down since the late 1970s; but paradoxically it’s also been crowned by a Tory cabinet which is more racially diverse than any in British history (of course possessing a non-white skin doesn’t stop you being a reprehensible individual). The upsurge in racial hate (or, rather, in the willingness to express it) is perhaps not the rise of a cultural wave, but the desperate cry of a nationalism gurgling down the plughole of time. Who knows, yet?

The polarisation has, as these things usually do, enabled different points of view to discover themselves. Before the Referendum I never heard anyone, even the most liberal and internationalist of my friends, arguing that the European Union was the crowning expression of everything good and noble in the human spirit; but that’s it then became. That blue-and-yellow flag developed into a symbol of what it meant to be modern, outward-looking, and generous of heart, even though before the Referendum the chasm between the EU’s lofty humanist claims and what it actually did made the 'Ode to Joy' something of a mournful joke: go on, sing it even now to the erstwhile Syriza voters in Greece whose loved-ones were dying as a result of EU-imposed austerity a few short years ago. Beyond a relatively small number of Euro-enthusiasts, the kind of people I occasionally met in the Liberal Democrats many years back, most liberal-minded British voters only realised that the EU was the core of their sense of self once the country had decided to leave it: no wonder they felt so bereft and angry.

I was caught up in that development, just like everyone else. A Eurosceptic since as long as I thought about it, I found myself absolutely unable to vote Leave as the time approached: I feared disruption to international order, and couldn’t abide finding myself on the same side as the xenophobes and nationalists promoting it, whatever I might have thought in the past. I decided with just a few days to go. The separation was salutary, like all facing-up to the truth.

What’s happened since has certainly made some things clearer. Brexit has been like cold water poured on the hot rocks of the UK constitution. The political system we have has positively encouraged the polarisation of the post-Referendum landscape, making discussion and compromise even less likely than it already was. The executive has hid behind the Crown and strictly political decisions have been forced into the courts. The centralisation of power in the UK – only slightly mitigated by the changes brought in by the last Labour governments – fits into the general winner-takes-all mentality that shapes our whole political life: if you get Westminster, you get everything. And in a general election it doesn’t even have to be winner takes all: yet again we have a Government rewarded by the electoral system with an exaggerated Parliamentary majority on the basis of a minority of the vote. It’s not just unfair, it’s not just unrepresentative, it distorts the whole way we think about ourselves. We’re not a mature democracy at all, because we clearly think that ‘democracy’ means not discussion, compromise and respect for minorities, but dictatorship of the majority, even if that majority might be won by a single vote, and often not that. It all needs to go, and I wasn’t as definite about that before.

Alongside the civilisation-smashing potential of climate change, alongside the need to secure our polity against the minority of bigots who might push it in a malign direction, striving to rejoin the EU looks otiose and I have despaired a bit at the tendency of some of my friends to commit themselves to trying. That battle is done, surely. But perhaps the starry banner has something to offer still: perhaps, paradoxically divested of the actual institution it belongs to, it could indeed stand for the kind of Britain we want to be, and which it isn’t yet. Progress needs a symbol, and it doesn’t yet have one.

Post Op the Second

Just now I find myself in the same position I did in March 2018 - recovering from a hernia operation. I suspected ever since I had the first repair that a second on the other side would be needed at some point but it took a while before it became apparent enough for the medical profession to agree. It's only the second day so far, and unsurprisingly I am quite sore and moving around very gingerly. 

So far, so much like last time. In fact it feels rather as though I am doing a bit better, less afflicted by painful indigestion and shiveriness than two years ago, and of course the graphic I've attached to this post is misleading because I've not been sewn up in traditional fashion but, as before, glued ('dissolvable sutures', they call them). But the differences are striking too. My nice, attentive surgeon hasn't supplied my wounds with dressings which is slightly worrying though I suppose must be right. When the nurse came to wheel me off and found that I hadn't got any surgical stockings on, he had to go and check what the drill would be, as 'some surgeons don't believe in them.' Oh. Nor have I had any laxatives issued as I was before, and have had to toddle carefully down the hill and get some (a member of the congregation accosted me and gave me a lift home, which I took as providential). 

One of my convalescence books is Alex Bremner's Ecclesiology Abroad, published in 2012 by the Victorian Society. In its pages I have discovered how the first Roman Catholic bishop of Tasmania, Robert Willson, was an ardent supporter of Pugin and, in contrast to Pugin's Catholic patrons in the home country, swallowed completely the great architect's line that the only really permissible form of liturgy was the Sarum Rite, and the only buildings that could house it were 14th-century Gothic ones; Anglican church-builders in New Zealand were more flexible. Meanwhile, the oldest Anglican diocese outside England and Wales, Nova Scotia, was the scene of conflict as Bishop no.4, Hibbert Binney, tried to bend his recalcitrant clergy in the direction of the Tractarianism he'd absorbed at Oxford, with new churches built according to proper Ecclesiological principles. 

But the greatest surprise came from South Africa where the first Bishop of Cape Colony, Robert Gray, also a sound High Churchman, brought with him his wife Sophy who became not just effectively his diocesan secretary but also architect - and how many other woman Gothic Revival architects have you heard of? She designed about fifty Anglican churches across the Cape, and even St Mark's Cathedral, George - not a big cathedral, admittedly, but a cathedral nonetheless. My time hors de combat has not been wasted, just for that!