Proof

You very rarely get any photographs of me here, but this is sufficiently indistinct not to be troubling ... I slightly rearranged my makeshift altar in the red bedroom as I thought the Gothic side chair was a bit outré for the occasion of a missa solitaria. I did record the event, but the recording was so awful and difficult to manage that I didn't do anything with it. Next week I'll try recording with my phone, rather than my computer, and see whether that produces better results. 

It was very odd, of course, but not as odd as I thought it might be. It seemed as though I was able to slip into the 'space of the liturgy' and the context in which it was happening became irrelevant. I suppose that's how it's intended to be, all the time: an entrance into divine time and heavenly space. Several people have said that it was a comfort just to know that I was doing it, even if they were remote. This is the time God has set for us to bring him who we are, and, anomalous though doing it alone might be, I am happy to obey.

Working From Home

Once upon a time, while I was using up my leave from work before starting at St Stephen’s House, I went to the church to collect something and found the new-ish incumbent, Sarah, standing in her cassock just a couple of minutes before Mass was due to start. ‘Can you stay?’ she implored. ‘The only other person here is Mary and she won’t take communion from me, so unless there’s someone else here we can’t celebrate the mass.’ I couldn’t as I had something else arranged, and I am not sure Sarah was completely right: that there needs to be someone to communicate with the priest as well as to make the responses in the liturgy.

But at 8am tomorrow I will have neither someone to communicate with, nor to say the words of the faithful. I will be in the Red Room upstairs at my temporary plague altar, there to offer the holy sacrifice, if by God’s mercy that’s what it will really be. Many of my friends have been doing this since public worship was suspended, in fact daily in churches which have that tradition. For them the more urgent argument is whether they can enter their church buildings to do so. Fr Thesis in Kentish Town points to the fact that the emergency legislation specifically exempts from the restrictions on travel ministers of religion on their way to and from places of worship, whatever the archbishops may have said. He lives right next door to his church anyway, as do many others. I don’t, and constantly making the journey up and down the hill when I didn’t absolutely have to would seem to me to be going against the principle of keeping journeys to a minimum. So I will offer the Eucharist here.

We know that the eucharist is essentially a corporate act. Beneath every Solemn High Mass, bedecked with silk and gold and heavy with incense smoke, lies hidden a meal with wooden platters and rough bread, and within every incised marble altar stone is the plank table of the Last Supper: no doubt about that. Looking back to that event, it demands the presence of more than a single soul. In its very structure it envisages call-and-response from priest and people; ‘the Lord be with you’ ‘and with your spirit’ (or whatever variant); ‘lift up your hearts’, ‘We lift them up to the Lord.’

We also know the history of how, in the West, it mutated into something different; how ordained monks at the great abbeys of the early Middle Ages (most accounts talk about Cluny in the tenth century; Fr Marian Szablewski’s thesis Mass without a Congregation, a text I haven’t seen, apparently pushes the development back to the 7th) began celebrating mass daily at side chapels in the great church, supposedly but not always with a lay brother present; how this very minimal form of the eucharist became the norm most lay people would encounter; how the Reformers attempted to make the eucharist once more a corporate act involving the people, with very limited results; and how the Liturgical Movement from the second quarter of the 20th century onwards championed changes in the forms of worship in both Catholic and Protestant Churches to recapture the idea of this central act of Christian liturgy as something the whole of the community of believers did together. That’s all familiar enough.

That awkward and brilliant monk Gregory Dix acutely wrote that ‘in extending to the presbyter the liturgical ‘priesthood’ of the bishop and making him the usual celebrant of the eucharist, the Church has laid upon him the necessity of fulfilling his ‘liturgy’ regularly and frequently. His ‘liturgy’ is not merely his ‘possibility’, it is the ground of his being in the Body of Christ.’ Thus, it became felt, priests existed in order to offer the mass for the salvation of humankind; the more masses, the better, no matter whether anyone else was there. You can see here the seeds of an attitude I find ever so slightly present in some of my spikier colleagues (in other dioceses, I must say), that restrictions to communion motivated by the health emergency – at first, denying the laity the chalice, and now excluding them completely – are actually rather salutary, a corrective to any idea that receiving communion is the right of the attendant laypeople. The ritual changes of the 1900s are to blame for that, such clergy say, and here’s a chance to push back against them. It's an outlook whose roots lie in reactionary romanticism, an ideal of Church life that is at odds with where we've been headed for decades.

More positively there is no doubt that priests can use a solitary mass to enter very deeply into the mystery which is at the heart of Christian experience, and of which they are the special stewards, in a way which is seldom possible with all the distractions of a full-scale Sunday service. Fr Szablewski suggests this was part of the reason why the Cluny-style ‘low mass’ developed in the first place, ‘as the most effective means for their personal sanctity and a guarantee of salvation’. On his blog, that detached but sensitive Catholic Fr Anthony Chadwick describes how

I have had the experience of being in the Benedictine Abbey church at Fontgombault (France) at about 7 in the morning (after Matins and Lauds) and seeing a priest at each side altar silently offering Mass as if it were his last. The piety and spirit of prayer are overwhelming in the golden candle light reflecting on the stone walls of the ancient church.

You can see the power of this; and exemptions from the rule that a layperson needed to be present for a mass to take place were, and still are, commonly granted for just that reason of piety, when priests are in circumstances where the rule is impossible or very hard to observe – classically, those in mission fields or pars aliena when no other Christians are very likely to wander along. As Fr Chadwick says, the world is none the worse for another solitary mass, so why worry overmuch.

But those remain exemptions. We need not resort to the Book of Common Prayer with its injunction that 'there shall be no celebration of the Lord’s Supper, except there be a convenient number to communicate with the Priest', because things have moved on a lot since then; and in any case the current Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law also insists ‘A priest may not celebrate the eucharistic Sacrifice without the participation of at least one of the faithful, unless there is a good and reasonable cause for doing so’, and if that ‘good and reasonable cause’ was resorted to over time, the bishop would surely want to know about it. There is no doubt at all that, no matter how beneficial a solitary mass might be to the piety of a priest, its very nature mutilates the image of the event, the Last Supper, into which it is a mystical entrance. It’s all very well to say that the angels are there, and the souls of the departed, that we are ‘surrounded by a great crowd of witnesses’, and that people can participate distantly in spirit from their homes. But to be physically, humanly alone, hearing no other voice, sensing no other breath than yours, while doing it, is not what the Lord intended; it is not what He did.

And yet I know that our people want us to celebrate the eucharist for them: comments made on social media on videos my friends have posted of themselves celebrating at home, or in church when they’re able to, and statements people have made to me, demonstrate that enough. The sense of comfort that there is something normal, something transcending the time and its trials, and something connected to the very deepest truths of their lives, is very strong. It is bad enough that I can’t do it in the very place which has sheltered their prayers, their hopes and fears and sorrows and joys, that place where God has promised to be present, for a century and threescore years. Not to do it at all would be an appalling deprivation, not for me, but for us. 

Gregory Dix concludes The Shape of the Liturgy by stating that ‘in the eucharist we Christians concentrate our motives and act out our theory of human living. Mankind are not to be “as Gods” … we are [God’s] creatures, fallen and redeemed … who by His free love are “made partakers of the divine nature”’. The eucharist is where we are most truly ourselves, becoming what God intends us to become. The Supper of the Lord is the right place to bring before God the fear and the sorrow, the death and the deprivation, so that he can transfigure it. As a priest, it is that that I am most bound to do, that I promised to do at my ordination: to bear in my hands before God the prayer-offering of his people, of which the eucharist is not the only, but is the exemplary instance. Laypeople, broadly, can do the same; but I promised to do it, and was surrounded by the promises of the holy Church when I did so. So, tomorrow, reluctantly and awkwardly, I will stand at the makeshift altar upstairs, celebrating this wounded rite – a necessary wound, a beloved loss. May the storm soon pass.

Looking for Landfall

The checkout operator at the supermarket today isn't the only person to have expressed in conversation with me a hope that positive things will come from our current privations: 'a better society'. My sister has talked about 'pressing the reset button'. Of course at the moment these hopes don't have much content or shape: it needs more discussion, discussion which is hard to have in the midst of crisis and especially in one which cuts people physically off from one another. But as people share memes of clear canals in Venice and maps of drastically-declined pollution over China, as they cheer health workers and line more or less pacifically in supermarket queues, you can see the outlines starting to form. It's hard to think of an aspect of modern life which is not affected, in a situation in which the global economy is put into a protective coma and nobody can go out, and the State takes over vast areas of national life.

'We're putting these measures in place so the economy can bounce back once this is over,' I heard a Conservative MP state on the radio over the weekend. I am not at all sure that it can just 'bounce back', as opposed to being painstakingly reconstructed. Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979 determined to suck out of the economy the inflationary public spending which she and her partisans believed it had become dependent on; now we find the inflationary spiral of discretionary consumer spending which (along with, in this country, ever-escalating property prices) has substantially powered much of the international economy abruptly halted, vast amounts of spending and manufacture being sucked out in the same way. Some of this we may find we don't really want after all; some of it will simply disappear, never to be replaced. We don't know what, and how much, will survive.

This is a revolutionary situation, but revolutions don't always result in positive change. Instead, the solvent they apply to societies can be hugely destructive. Over time, human beings develop ways of managing their sometimes challenging circumstances to make the best of them: they surround themselves with defences built up over generations, perhaps. Revolutionary change sweeps those away, and with the possibility that things will get better also comes the danger that the structural advantages that already favour the rich and powerful will simply be magnified. Alternatively, we may just forget completely. Governments post-COVID will be under huge pressure to rebuild as quickly as they can, and that could easily mean returning to trashing the world with renewed energy. Rather than thinking 'Well, we just about got away with that, let's learn the lessons,' we could as easily conclude 'Well, thank God we can get back to normal'.

As the sheer shock of the Brexit referendum subsided I toyed with the idea of hosting a set of talks at the church which might go some way to examining the issues that were behind it and looking towards something beyond. How long ago that now seems, but the concept comes back to me now. Any moves towards social reorganisation will involve questions of value, of what we think is important, and that's the Church's business. An initial list of people to invite might include the manager of the Co-Op, someone from the care agency based by the railway line, the local co-ordinator of Extinction Rebellion, one of the GPs from the surgery, all to discuss aspects of what change might mean from their point of view. If I never refer to this again, remind me!

Life During Wartime

Monday was a day of great relief (well, for me), as I was released from seclusion, and of course then went back into it in the evening along with everyone else. On Sunday at 10am I prayed through the short liturgy I'd posted out to everyone on my email list, and strangely felt the prayers of the parish pressing on me. 

I knew Marion had offered the mass at the church with Rick the verger in attendance. This was what I thought might continue, but by the evening it was clear that the Diocese of London was closing churches entirely, and it was only a matter of time before everyone else followed suit, as of course it proved. I am not at all sure about the business of saying mass entirely alone: it should only be done in circumstances of absolute emergency, which I suppose these are. If, confined to the house, I try - and it seems I ought - it will be even more a sign of deprivation. What a desert Lent this is. I've found the bleak Psalms appointed for the season leaping off the page with sharp intensity: they refer to different times, places and experiences, but the same emotions. 

So many of my colleagues are live-streaming and recording masses, and even themselves saying the Office. The discombobulation of the times and the usual distraction that dogs me when saying it alone results in so many mistakes I wouldn't inflict it on anyone though perhaps it might increase my discipline. I think somehow the audio is more intimate, and stripped of so many of our usual forms of activity we strive to find new ones, I suspect.

Phoning round the congregation I discover all sorts of things. Families are ensuring that older relatives are considerably more technologically plugged-in than I tend to be! Within our acquaintance we've had three definite cases of C-19 and many suspected ones, not least my own. Tania the hairdresser told me two of her elderly lady clients have fallen out after arguing whether the current situation was worse than the War or not. 

I went out shopping yesterday and was able to get pretty much everything I wanted. Praying on Sunday morning, I realised that the constant background hum from the A3 some miles away had stopped, and going to the postbox under dead of night the silence was deep, as though this is the middle of the countryside; strangely, it even seemed to smell differently.

Black Moods

It's time to post about something else! 

Friends let me know about this nice article from The Guardian about superannuated Goths. I am older than all of them. I do know one, but recognised Mel Butler who was interviewed for Woman's Hour a couple of weeks ago. I meant to put up the interview here, and in need of a missive from normal times, thought I would do so now. 

"I kind of pinpoint it to the year 1985. I’d just turned 13, but prior to that, I used to watch Top of the Pops a lot, and I was exposed to bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, Bauhaus, Echo & the Bunnymen, and there was also The Tube as well, and also Whistle Test, so it was always music driven, but as you gradually got into being a teenager, you try to find your own identity, and that to me was the start of it. I didn’t consider myself a Goth, it was more like sort of an alternative person, it’s just like, I like to wear black a lot. So I  just graduated on from there. In the 1980s, especially where I grew up in the Northeast, there was high unemployment, and there wasn’t really much to do for teenagers, so I suppose music and being part of a subculture and getting an identity was like escapism, really.

"I would never ever leave the house without full make-up and my hair crimped and back-combed; it was dyed black. I used to wear a really long skirt. They used to be called tasselled hippy skirts. They were floor-length skirts and they had like tassels on the bottom, and pointy boots. I used to wear cinchers. The biker jacket was also part of the look as well, usually embellished with band logos and badges and things. I really didn’t like mainstream fashion. I think round about 1985, 1986, everybody started wearing pastel colours and that was not me at all. And the big perms as well, what was all that about? I wasn’t one for wearing black lipstick, I used to go for the heavy eye make up, a lot of black eyeliner – it’s strange, I plucked all my eyebrows out and you’d just draw them back on again, which is a bit surreal. I used to crimp my hair every day and back-comb it to an inch of its life, it never used to move because of all the hairspray which is quite amusing.

"I had a terrible time at school. I got bullied a lot because of the way I looked, just to be slightly different. I mean, I did tone down a bit at school, I might have had my hair crimped and slightly spiky, and I did try and customise my school uniform a little bit. So yeah, it wasn’t a good time but you develop a thick skin, and when you do get out into the wider world you do find people with a similar taste in music, well a similar outlook in life basically.

"I remember my first day at art college when all the new students assemble in one room and you look across and think, My God, there’s somebody who looks like me, and another person who looks like me! It was a good two years and good friendships were formed.

"I just mainly sat up in my bedroom and listened to music and read music magazines like Melody Maker and Sounds and NME, and when I did reach the age when I was able to go out clubbing and things like that, I used to go to places like the Riverside in Newcastle, and there was a couple of nightclubs close to where I lived. The first band that I saw was The Damned in 1986 in Newcastle City Hall. I was just mesmerised by it. I felt a little, I wouldn’t say intimidated by it, because a lot of the audience was four or five years older than me 'cause I was only about 14 at the time. I still go and see them to this day and I still get that sort of tingly feeling, when I see them, with excitement, I just think they’re an amazing band.

"My late father, he didn’t like it at all, but I think because of my nature, I’m quite determined, and a little bit stubborn, it just made me rebel even more. My mum was more understanding. At first she thought it was just a phase, but nearly 35 years on, No, it’s not a phase, it’s just me. 

"I used to wander the town centre of Middlesbrough, and also York, taking photographs of people who looked alternative, either with black crimped hair, or ripped jeans, biker jackets, paisley shirts, that sort of clothing. That’s how I met my husband, I took his photograph. A couple of years later I saw him in a nightclub and I tried chatting him up, and he wasn’t having any of it, so fast-forward about twenty years after that event, and we found each other on Myspace, and obviously romance blossomed and we got married. He had long black crimped hair, and he was wearing a big overcoat and he had pointy boots – yeah, he was pretty cute-looking then. He still is!"

Virtual Reality and the Real

Many clergy confined to vicarages or just unable to meet their parishioners as they usually would are taking to livestreaming private masses and Compline and recitals of the Office. I am so far sparing the good people of Swanvale Halt the same. When I say the Office on my own I make so many mistakes I wouldn't want anyone to share it. Today I discovered at Evening Prayer that at Morning Prayer I'd read the Lectionary wrong and used the bits and pieces for Saturday's observance of Bd Thomas Cranmer (hem-hem) instead of St Cuthbert, as it should have been. Wrong psalm, the lot. I'm experimenting with recording something in the audio field, though, replacing our weekly newsletter and Sunday mass with a read version which I can send out by email and pop on the website (a podcast!!). 

The rhythm of Christian prayer affects not just the day, or the week, but the whole year. Holy Week and Easter will be very strange in 2020, etiolated and wan, a dim flickering light instead of the climactic outburst of joy which it should be. But then it has been that before, in different times and places, if not for us these last decades. Anything we can do to tend that flame is worthwhile.

It's not just the Church, of course. I was invited yesterday to a virtual Goth club being run by a German DJ, although I only made it through the door for the last two tracks; it'll be run again next week, all being well. It's called Isolation. 

I benefit from my garden, as I've said. This afternoon I went on a journey of five circuits as the wind strafed across the mossy grass, through the arch with the vine waiting to bud, past the Shrine of Bacchus and round by Melpomene and the Grotto, then up the path overlooked by the Philosopher's Seat, past the Armillary Sphere by the little area of woodland, across the main lawn with its damson and apple tree and the Temple of Reason to one side, skirting the Maze and into the little dell which the eucalyptus used to shade, and down the steps by the pond and Diana the Huntress to the start again. Right down near the front of the house, below the Secret Garden and Lady Julia's Bower, I found these lovely violets just poking above the soil. This is where the cats normally come and poo so I hope the little blighters have found somewhere else.

The Same, But Different

Although I haven't been anywhere since the middle of Monday, I still intend to keep Thursday as a sort-of day off, because that's what Sabbath means. I will mark it by wearing non-clerical clothes (in so far as I ever do) and not saying the Office. The last three days have been quite dramatic enough. Monday was the beginning of the really biting social restrictions across the country, and of course they continue; Tuesday was closing-churches day; and today has been wedding-fallout day. On all three I have tried to keep up with a waxing tide of announcements and emails and our response to them. I feel most for our wedding couples, five of them this year. At the moment they seem to want to go ahead, but further restrictions over the coming days may make that impossible. The Church of England nationally reminds us that only five people are legally required in a wedding service: the couple, the clergyperson, and the witnesses. This is true, but I fear the archbishops may be forgetting why people choose to get married in church. 

My cough has remained that. It comes and goes and isn't accompanied by any other symptoms. I don't know whether I have had the Plague at all and perhaps never will; contrast my experience with that of two friends in Birmingham one of whom got the dry cough and a four-day fever, pneumonia-like symptoms, and racking pain, while his partner got a bit of a tickle in her throat. It would be a great relief if this minor cost is all I pay for immunity; but without being tested, I can't confirm what I've had. 

Marion is saying Morning Prayer for us at the moment and when I am able to get out again the evening office will join it, as well as keeping the church open for prayer when we can and possibly a restricted mass on a Sunday just, as I am telling people, to keep the church's pilot light flickering. But I am feeling the loss of routines. There isn't anything quite like being a parish priest, and the relationship you develop with your church building, the people who go there, the wider parish, and the liturgy of prayer and eucharist which seems to lock the other elements together into one, bringing them to God and God to them. No matter what structure I impose on my days at home, I can feel my landmarks sliding, and it will be a relief at least to get back to the church, to make that journey up and down the hill again. Today, of course (well, just yesterday really) we learned that the school will be closed. They'd already decided to have their Mothering Sunday singing in the school hall as they couldn't join us in church; but I can't be there for the last event before the school shuts down - for how long? 

On Tuesday the Archbishops issued a statement calling on the Church to become 'radically different'. Well, in one way, yes: you can't shut down public worship and claim that everything is the same. But in more important ways, this is the same mission the Church has always had, to serve and to pray. And while any crisis brings growth, don't pretend that this is anything other than a terrible deprivation. 

As for serving: the crisis reveals how precious few people this church actually has to do any serving. Knock out the over-70s and there's next to no one left in the church community who doesn't need help themselves. 

Smiting Times

It is very fortunate for me that the Rectory in Swanvale Halt and its garden are so ridiculously overlarge for my requirements, as I will be seeing very little else for the next week. I have had a tickle in my throat for a couple of days – though nothing more – and today this turned unmistakably into a cough accompanied by intermittent tightness across the chest. I will be the first test of the church’s ability to help those in isolation! The symptoms are fairly ambiguous and if it turns out to be nothing at all and I get the Plague at some future point instead I will be most annoyed. Humans being what they are, I spent the time while I had the tickle trying not to cough in an attempt to justify not taking any action, and now find myself consciously coughing to justify doing so.

Equally, at the moment we don’t know whether the Church will interpret the Government’s advice to avoid ‘unnecessary social gatherings’ as including public church services. I can’t see why it wouldn’t.

‘I’m not telling you what to say in your sermons’, said Margaret, who lives in the sheltered housing flats next to the church, ‘but I spoke to someone about the epidemic and they thought it was God’s punishment on us and I don’t think that’s right!’ I may now not get a chance to deliver any such sermon in person, though it might emerge in another form. I wonder whether she might have spoken to Sandra who made some remark about the Horsemen of the Apocalypse as we were setting up for Messy Church on Saturday, and has a habit of coming out with the odd provocative statement. ‘I’ve decided I will die of a stroke’, she happily informed us once as we were getting ready for Church Club at the Infants School.

The ancient Israelites looked at their history and interpreted it in terms of their rocky relationship with God: they were unfaithful, they got smited. Gradually their views became less simplistic as they realised that not all disasters that befell human beings could easily be interpreted in terms of their own sinfulness. They did, though, retain a sense that divine justice lay beneath cosmic events, holding both beliefs in tension.

The sense that disaster is not a visitation upon sin but a consequence of it is there in the story of the first sin of all; ‘Cursed is the ground because of you,’ God tells Adam, ‘through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life’, and so on. The disruption in the fabric of creation results from the humans’ action, not God’s: it arises from the violation of the very nature of the Garden, and God doesn’t need to sit outside the event, sending down thunderbolts from a distance.

Many of our epidemics, and not just the current one, arise when viruses which are endemic in animals make the leap to human hosts. Our relationship with animals, as with the whole of the natural world, is deeply awry. We caused the earth to be cursed, and spent most of our history regarding it as an adversary from whose grudging hands we had to wrest the means of our survival. We have kept on behaving that way even though our increased numbers and power mean we have greater and greater scope to damage the world which alone sustains us. Someone eats a bushmeat chimp in Kenya and contracts the virus that turns into AIDS; a seafood market in China packs together animals in tiny cages that would never normally be anywhere near each other and another microbe makes the jump from them to the humans using them. Neither of these things should be happening.

And the global economy we have created over the last sixty years or so transmits the infections around the world at lightning speed. I and former BBC economics correspondent Stephanie Flanders overlapped at Balliol by a couple of years: the other day I heard her remarking that the coronavirus hits the modern world precisely at its most vulnerable points. The international system of trade and, in fact, culture, rests on lengthy supply lines, swift and inexpensive travel, consumer demand, and cheap food: the virus feeds on all of them. Our vulnerability is the dark side of the benefits of the global economy, and though we may protest that we haven’t imprisoned pangolins in a marketplace cage, we haven’t treated the world as our cesspit, we haven’t regarded the entire globe as an entertainment played for our benefit, our individual innocence cuts no ice: we are, individually, part of the race that has, and as a race we stand or fall.

I have a suspicion that the economy which emerges from this crisis will be, in significant ways, ruined. Vast areas of demand and supply will have been sucked out of the system: people won’t be spending as much money or making things for them to spend it on if they had it. Airlines, manufacturers, entertainment and catering companies, will have gone under in their thousands and their tens of thousands. We will, probably, find ourselves having to remember that money is a useful fiction, and that we can only rebuild by governments agreeing to change the rules of the game of money quite radically, and by the rest of us discovering the unsustainability of the system we built. ‘There is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed’, I read this morning in chapter 8 of Luke.

‘I do genuinely think this is the best fighting chance we have had yet. We needed a miracle and this just might be it’, commented my eco-campaigner friend Lady Metalmoomin on LiberFaciorum, looking forward to the virus's more salutary effects. I wonder. We have had epidemics before and usually we are so relieved to get through them that once they're past we begin trashing the world again with renewed energy. The situation is different this time – we have never lived in quite this kind of world before – but human beings are the same as ever.

Ah well: here in Swanvale Halt the magnolia is coming out. The blooms blaze. My little magnolia seems to be thriving, though I will see no blossoms this year. 

The Plague Doctor Will See You Perhaps

‘It’s so good to have some normality for a while’, more than one set of parents said to me at today’s Messy Church at Swanvale Halt. Yesterday it was touch-and-go whether we would hold it and I didn’t decide until gone 7pm. Sandra the Messy Church leader was ambivalent; I headed up the hill to speak to Marion the curate and couldn’t get any answer at the house despite ringing both doorbells, and knocking. It turned out both she and her son were inside at the time. She didn’t hear at all, while Saul apparently commented that he ‘thought he heard someone at the door’ but in typical teenage boy fashion didn’t conclude that he should do anything about it. Anyway, in that moment I decided Messy Church ought to go ahead. If there are about 10,000 coronavirus cases in the UK, the chances that any of them would be there were about 130 to 1, I reckoned. Another week, and things would have been different. A last hurrah before the curtain descends on relative normalcy.

Earlier in the evening I’d had to rewrite my pastoral letter to the church on the subject after the Church of England issued new guidance. This was to stop offering refreshments after services, to empty fonts and holy water stoups, and to suspend taking a collection. The guidelines also mention hanging up vestments ‘which might become contaminated’ for 48 hours after use. I think this refers to chasubles you might inadvertently have sneezed or coughed on, rather than any old bit of tat, otherwise it’s a bit much. All this stuff about handling things is pretty marginal, after all: it’s the droplets of fluid from nose and mouth which probably carry the infection, and sheer proximity of human beings breathing in each other’s microbes is more of an issue than handling the teacups. Whether to gather at all is the question.

Apart from Messy Church, I spent a good part of today looking through the template ‘Continuity Plan’ the diocese has sent out, and a version knocked up by one of our larger evangelical neighbour churches. The Plan is partly lists of names, of who is responsible for this and that aspect of church life and who might deputise for them, but also demand that we ponder imponderables, such as what will happen if our ‘suppliers’ are unable to meet their obligations; well, if they are Charles Farris, we can probably manage without the odd candle, but the services of the water company will be harder to cope without, and it probably isn’t our place to think about.

Otherwise I make all the usual observations on the situation that you will have heard, such as marvelling that everyone I ever hear remark about it deprecates panic shopping, thus raising the question of who is actually doing it; and wondering what would happen if modern Britons ever did face an actual existential crisis, rather than this mild dose of Reality Flu. Here Lies the Stiff Upper Lip. 

However I also notice that there is among people I know a psychological divide between catastrophism and complacency. I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that the individuals who are most exercised about this plague are also the ones who express most dismay about climate change, while if you are sceptical about one, you tend to be about both (there is a partial exception for the climate change campaigners who think coronavirus is drawing attention away from the big picture). Equally, you might find the same kind of bitter pleasure in both, that apocalyptic frisson religious people know too well. 

I am going to stop measuring the national temperature, which is no more productive than constantly checking my own. There is, sad to say, no single article online which is going to help me judge whether the UK government is right or wrong in its approach to the crisis, nothing to settle what I might think or feel one way or another. I can predict the outcome no more than I can tell in advance, when I look out at the depleted congregation tomorrow, whose funerals I will be taking by the end of the year – assuming, low probability that it is, that it will not see my own.

Success! For Someone

I haven't told you about Trevor for a long while. This is because he was in hospital for quite some time, as it turned out - the middle of October to the middle of January, in fact. When he came out he was much, much quieter than he had been before. He still had social problems and money worries to battle with, but his delusions and hallucinations had all but disappeared. He could even interrogate his obsessive impulses. He ended up buying three new keyboards on eBay, with the thought that he could cannibalise them for parts and make some wonderful single new keyboard, but halfway through the process actually realised this was daft - not early enough to save his money, apparently, but at least he realised it. He went through one wobble when he wasn't talking to the mental health team, but now seems to be seeing them again. All that serious examination of the possibility that there might be something supernatural happening to him (even if it wasn't what he thought it might be), all that anxiety and irritation, resolved into nothing, by finally getting his medication right and consistent. The Devil, in this case, vanquished by a combination of plant-derived pills and injections. All those manifestations and utterances, the product of a bizarre and awry psychology.

'If anything, the Devil is in the effect he has on you,' the last Deliverance Advisor Trevor consulted told me. The mental convulsions and contortions I've gone through over the years when I entertained the idea that God might, just perhaps, be trying to tell me something through Trevor, certainly did me no good. I wonder whether I should write it all down for the instruction of my brothers and sisters ... Well, write it somewhere else. 

Sounding the Depths

'I know the Church doesn't look too favourably on tarot and so on' wrote my friend Ms Trollsmiter, 'but I got this I Ching reading for you'. I had shared a tough situation on LiberFaciorum, and this was her attempt to shed some helpful light on what was happening.

I was surprised as Ms Trollsmiter is a firmly sceptical soul and not the sort of person to be favourable to woo-woo of any sort. I know Cylene has been doing tarot readings for a couple of years. She looks at it as a means of tapping her unconscious in order to find ways through issues that she faces, and this is surely correct. I don't think either of them regards the way the hexagrams fall or the cards turn out as directed consciously by a superhuman power: instead they are something like mental tricks, means of reordering thought in order to bring extra insights into a situation which has become stuck conceptually. I think of the parallels with William S. Burroughs's 'cut-ups' and Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, methods of breaking through normal processes of thinking to develop creative ways forward.

Of course a Christian's way of reading the Bible is different in that we believe a positive and personal intelligence is at work behind that text, but not that different: very few Christians, I suspect, actually believe the Lord directs their Bible reading in a very specific way. I very regularly find insights (though sometimes very oblique ones) into things that are happening to me in my daily scriptural reading, but given that I read sequentially it's completely incredible that my eye is being purposefully directed to particular passages or lines. Instead, like Providence itself, Scripture moves forward in a great wave and in that mighty force we find something that helps - sometimes.

In this case, my advice from the ancient Chinese divination tool of the I Ching was a contradictory combination of the very directive and the vague ('do not attempt to force the status quo because you are no match for the forces of change ... A sensitive and innocent outlook allows for a rebirth in your thinking. Allow a child to be your guide'). I wasn't sure what to make of it. It could mean anything from 'Go and ask Bella at the infants school what to do' to 'Give up and go to bed'. Actually I quite like that interpretation.

How to Welcome

'All are welcome', claims the website, noticeboard, or outside A-board of every church in the land. It's not always true, of course. But most of us try. 

The sidespeople - legally, at least once upon a time, the assistants to the churchwardens - are the first faces visitors see in most churches. They hand out booklets and news sheets and point newcomers in the right direction. We hadn't had a meeting of our sidespeople for years and years and I thought it was about time we did.

I felt more than vindicated by last week's main Sunday service when Sally found herself as the sole sidesperson and nobody noticed. I didn't twig that she was on her own. Towards the end of the first hymn, I saw a young woman with a baby hanging about in the entrance area of the church, looking a bit lost. Sally had returned to her seat, close to the front; a pillar blocked her from the sightline of Peter the churchwarden; Rick the verger was sat right at the back of the baptistery and so couldn't see her either. I was the only one who could. As soon as the second hymn started and I could move, I went to find her as she'd just slipped out of the door: there was no sign of her. Of course she might have had no intention of joining in, but now nobody would know. There were only two children present, sisters who I know well, and they were getting a bit vocal as the service went on. I thought they could take up the collection as a way of including them, so as that began during the last hymn I suggested it to Sally, still not realising she was managing alone, realising as I was speaking that she had no idea who I meant. 

At the meeting we discussed all sorts of things from fire extinguishers to credit card readers, but the first decision was what should be the abundantly obvious one that no sidesperson should ever have to try to manage on their own!

Confirmation Again

Dr Abacus responded to my previous post to say that his daughter was confirmed with a group of others from a range of local churches, so that was a shared event. This is standard practice, in fact, unless a single church can muster enough confirmands to justify a bishop turning out to do the magic, and that rarely happens (in Guildford Diocese you are now supposed to have at least twelve). In fact, the usual time you see a bishop visiting a church to confirm its members alone, it tends to be at trad-Catholic churches under Alternative Episcopal Oversight, as they are usually so far between that joining up isn't feasible.

As I said, my issue really is with what might get taught, unquestioningly, in confirmation preparation. Different groups also require different approaches, too, and paradoxically the smaller the group the more you can spot their individuality and the sense a tailored approach has. I haven't had that many confirmands since I was ordained, so I can pretty much remember them all.

At Lamford: Seven teenagers and one retired professional man.
At Goremead: One teenage girl.
At Swanvale Halt: on separate occasions, a teenage boy; a middle-aged professional woman; six mixed adults aged 40-60; another teenage boy, the curate's son; a professional young man; two middle-aged women.

On none of these occasions was I able to use exactly the same preparation; I found myself adapting my model material to each of their specific circumstances and background. The earlier teenage boy at Swanvale Halt was especially interesting as his level of comprehension was pretty basic. The host parish for the confirmation service had asked for written 'testimonies' to include in the order of service and I had to write his for him (at least he wasn't expected to deliver it out loud); when we arrived, we discovered that all the other confirmands were confident, slightly hyper middle-class teenage girls from prep schools. Poor Luke stuck out dreadfully and he would never have got on with combined preparation. I do deplore the habit of asking confirmands for 'testimonies' which is a typical middle-class Church practice. What happens if you're inarticulate, or just shy? Furthermore it pushes you towards thinking about your spiritual development in a classically evangelical manner, identifying the point of catastrophic crisis at which you 'turn to Christ', and for most people exaggerates the darkness of the time before and the light of the time after. I don't want to launch tender souls into that! So, again, if there's going to be joint confirmation prep anywhere near here, I want to do it ...

Pooling Resources

'Thank you for your card', Fr Andris's email began. I was uncomfortably aware that we hadn't spoken about the Mission Planning process for at least 18 months and I thought I'd drop a line to say I hadn't forgotten him (or at least I had intermittently remembered him) but that our experiences didn't seem to require a meeting.

However he did say that in his Deanery they are thinking more about collaborative working between church communities; in Germany, where his sister-in-law works as a Roman Catholic Pastoral Assistant, the local diocese has amalgamated parishes quite radically and such things as confirmation classes and activities for teenagers are now operating on that broader scale, making life easier for clergy and more rewarding for them. Lessons we could learn, suggests Fr Andris.

While people identify with their own church and the community which uses it, it would be very beneficial to organise such things as confirmation, baptism and marriage preparation, or youth activities, at a higher level than the parish. There are also the environmental drawbacks of getting groups of people travelling to a central point rather than a series of local ones. But it occurred to me that the main obstacle to doing this in the Anglican context is the variety of churches. A group of Roman Catholic churches could be expected to have a degree of uniformity in teaching which you wouldn't necessarily expect between Anglican parishes. I would be most reluctant to hand any confirmands, for instance, that might come from Swanvale Halt (and there are occasionally some!) to conservative evangelical churches to be taught silly things about the Bible, and would want them to think about sacraments and spiritual life in a broadly Catholic way. So I would want to do it! Of the churches that are our most natural local theological and spiritual bedfellows, some are in our Deanery, some aren't. I like the idea of working across boundaries, but it's not completely straightforward.

The Cloister and the World

The world, as the holy Sisters of West Malling have always insisted, flows through the Abbey and through the prayers of its residents, permanent and temporary. Until this year’s Lenten visit, I hadn’t thought about how the presence of the stream watering its ancient grounds reflects this; it rises at St Leonard’s Well about two-thirds of a mile to the south, passes through, and out the famous cascade painted by Turner, before meandering around the Leybourne lakes, and reaching the Medway at Snodland (one of England’s most mellifluous placenames!). It enters from the worldly world, passes through the prayerful stillness of the Abbey, and emerges on the far side. It brings the world to the Abbey, and takes the Abbey and its prayers out into the world.

We stood in the customary circle at mass in the morning, but the World intrudes even here. We exchanged the Peace with our neighbours in the form of a courteous bow, and only the priest received the Chalice. This is a time of plague, and the Wuhan Distemper would wreak havoc at Malling if it got its microscopic foot in the door.

My spiritual book this year was not all that brilliant. I was surprised to see it on my shelves, and reckon I must have bought it years ago at Dr Bones’s suggestion. It says useful stuff in a pretty straightforward way. Still, its theme is precisely the connection between faith and action, and the tenderness of Jesus, which was apposite considering my own lack of tenderness was on my mind. The other book, though, was Robert Harvey’s Liberators: South America’s Savage Wars of Freedom, which I bought because it’s a period I know next to nothing about. I am only a quarter through, but that’s enough to convince me that I am grateful for not living in Venezuela, let alone the other Hispanic colonies, in the 1810s. By the time the narrative reaches the fall of the Second Venezuelan Republic, it’s a wonder there are any human beings left given the number of towns whose inhabitants have been slaughtered by one side or another, on top of disease, earthquake, and the ever-present backdrop of colonial exploitation imposed by brutal force. As ever, the social solvent of war throws up evil characters who outbid even the savagery of the age.

In the Abbey church, the plainchant bears the ancient words of the Psalms on its swooping, stately wings, an icon of eternity. These age-old poems insist that God hears the anguish of the world, even if they speak specifically of the suffering – and occasionally pride – of Israel. Israel stands for everyone, after all. His answer was the Cross, where mercy and justice meet; and it’s the cross we carry into the world, attempting as best we can to bear it.

Aldershot Religion

Although it's in Hampshire, Aldershot is part of the Guildford Diocese so I went to look at its churches a couple of weeks ago. I couldn't get into Holy Trinity, the evangelical church in the town centre, but it seems to have the usual sort of decor one would expect for a building of its nature and history. The other three Anglican churches have a Catholic tradition - but how long for is a significant question.

The old parish church is St Michael's, hugely expanded in the late 19th century to fit the requirements of a growing town. I wasn't prepared for the interior (sorry for the blurry photograph), with its chancel screen, Stations of the Cross, statues and reserved sacrament. St Michael's has acquired all the paraphernalia of Anglo-Catholicism, the last item being a statue of the Archangel himself in the 1980s, including a massive curtained English altar (unusually, with saints topping the riddel-posts instead of angels), but it isn't clear it's using any of them. Its current incumbent is certainly a moderate evangelical and it's definitely moving away from the sort of worship its fittings imply.

Further along, the Church of the Ascension was very specifically built as an Anglo-Catholic establishment in the 1930s. It reminds me a bit of the church I used to worship at back in High Wycombe, 
and while it lacks SS Mary & George's monumental presence it does aim at that sort of wide-open monumentality with its white walls and barrel-vault roof. Unfortunately the building is not at all sound and unless something very dramatic happens its days are numbered. I've seldom seen anything as splendid as the little altar under the tabernacle in the side chapel, but that space is a bit of a mess otherwise.

Finally, St Augustine's sits on a corner plot in the northern estates of the town. Built in the early 1900s, this barn-like church also had a Catholic tradition from the start though possibly not as spiky as it later became. It's beautiful, clean and immaculate though I suspect nothing less than a labour of love by its current incumbent who I met and spoke to. Replete with shrines and statuary, this is proper Anglo-Catholicism and it's no surprise that it's now one of only two Guildford Diocese churches under alternative episcopal oversight. the east end was re-ordered in the mid-1990s, and very unusually the old altar was cut in half to form a narrow shelf on which sit the tabernacle and the Big Six flanking it. Fr Keith told me he is moving swiftly towards retirement and has for a long time done most of the work around St Augustine's - he doesn't have a parish office or a treasurer - and I wonder what will become of it after his faithful ministry does come to an end.