Pentecost Triptych

Like the Paschal Liturgy, Pentecost Day presents another challenge - at least it does at Swanvale Halt, where I've adopted the practice of transferring the full-scale Blessing of the Font from the Easter Vigil to Pentecost Day, celebrating the Church being equipped for its mission by the coming of the Holy Spirit. Of course at the moment, as with everything else, I'm doing it on my own and so the 8am mass required me to carry my phone through the church from its now-customary station near the high altar to the font where the ceremonies took place. At least the journey presented fewer trip hazards than my adventures on Easter morning. Instead of a homily I described what I was doing and why for the benefit of the video and those bold souls who might be watching it - the Litany of the Saints, the scattering of the water, the Sufflation and infusion of the Oils, dipping the Paschal Candle in the water, and the Commission of the (absent) People. Apart from the phone slipping and so not being exactly positioned where I wanted, it all went fine.

It couldn't last. Having put my potatoes in the oven to roast for lunch, after about twenty minutes I was disturbed by a mysterious odour whose nature I couldn't quite tie down. I then remembered I'd been trying to get grease off the roasting dish, and had left it to soak, so the aroma was the combined perfume of heated vegetable oil and washing-up liquid. I prepared new potatoes. A shameful waste, I know, but I couldn't think of them in the same way. 

'Vanishing Dorset', by George Wright (2008)

One of the hazards of the COVID restrictions, like drinking too much or putting on what the Germans call coronaspeck, is (for me) buying books. I have one on the way and may, depending what my bank account looks like when I check, be buying more later on. One of them has been George Wright's 2008 volume of photographs, Vanishing Dorset. 

'In 1983', he says, 'I went to live in an old farmhouse, up a potholed track, over a flooding stream, in a remote corner of West Dorset'. It was a wonderful place for Wright to retreat to from his globetrotting life as a photographer. Eventually, though, everything changed: 'when the newly formed village hall committee decided against allowing live music, I realised ... it was time to move on.'

But in the meantime he had documented some of the places he visited and people he met in the villages round about. The oldest of these images dates from 1980, and that's an outlier: most are from the 1990s or the second half of the 1980s. It's hardly a bygone age; it was when I wad doing most of my visiting of Dorset churches, barrows, and other historic sites. Yet Wright's photographs make this landscape appear antediluvian and its denizens barely like contemporary humans at all. It may just be the way they're dressed, these old boys in their cloth caps and drab overcoats, and ladies in stubby brown shoes and thick stockings, but they could be another race, albeit one no less individual than ours - in some ways, more so. Mr Chick of Rampisham used to serenade his pigs, shirtless, on an electronic organ. They were, apparently, very fond of 'Fly Me to the Moon'. These characters move through a backdrop of derelict farms and impractical cottages. The chaps at James Foote the forage merchants at Dorchester look very little different from the sort of Edwardian shopholders you see in photographs, standing outside their stores. Wright keeps the most elegaic photo to last: the Trysting Tree at Wytherston, in one 1986 shot proud and upright and carved with initials and hearts, and opposite it in 2008 lopped and segmented, lying by the road. Things do change. 

West Bay in 1986 - just three years before my dad's photograph here. 

A Trip to the Beach!

Itching to get out of the house (and its immediate environs) I went walking on my day off. The beach is surprisingly close at hand: it's at Earling Bridge, not more than a couple of miles away along the footpaths. It's just a scrap of sand next to the river, but it's still a beach.

I wasn't the only soul who decided to use the sunshine to go to Earling Bridges. Some came well-equipped for river exploration.

Earling has some appealing old houses.

The journey home took me past the epilepsy home in Hornington; the old chapel appears shyly through the trees.

But the first leg of the walk took me past the Dark House which I first saw in 2009 and again in 2016. The steel fences have been removed so you can view the building in its austere 1930s splendour, but signs now warn you that the whole site is alarmed and arrests of trespassers have been made. Nothing is happening to it apart from its continued dereliction, and sure enough the chimney on the right looks about to topple!

An Age of Delusion, Yet Again

You might have thought, given what I’ve said in the past and my interest in the interior arrangements of church buildings, that I am a steadfast defender of the stone and brick steeple houses we Anglicans inhabit. I mainly am, but I also recognise that they are burdens as well. The Body of Christ needs somewhere to meet, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be so large, so old, or so expensive as it often is. While at theological college I remember writing about the notion of ‘cell church’ which had a vogue at one time – a form of Christian community in which small groups become not adjuncts to the church which allow greater discipleship, but the basic structure in which people live their Christian lives, only gathering together in larger numbers on special occasions. Some evangelical Anglican churches went for that, although I don’t know that any actually disposed of their old church buildings; they did, after all, still need them, and might not have been allowed simply to abandon them anyway. I heard a story of a church in Coventry diocese which, driven from their old building after a fire, found their new home in a school hall so congenial that they refused to return once the church was repaired. The diocese didn’t like that at all. But ‘selecting cell’ (as Mission-Shaped Church – remember that? put it) would shift the focus towards a different way of doing things in which the building becomes less important. I remember writing an essay on ecclesiology at Staggers and musing how historic parish churches might turn into ‘network cathedrals’ linking a variety of forms of Church life into the Apostolic structure. Certainly that might mean not needing as many of them.

I’ve long thought a reckoning was coming, driven by strain on resources; not even I think that decades of numerical and therefore financial reduction can go unrecognised indefinitely.  In our diocese the line is now that if a church can’t cover the costs of a stipendiary clergyperson, it won’t get one unless the diocese decides there are special circumstances, and had it not been for the unnecessarily punitive and capitalist language our bishop used when introducing the new policy (‘we must move away from a system that penalises success and rewards failure’) I wouldn’t have minded so much.

This is also the strategy adopted in Chelmsford, where Stephen Cottrell has been bishop for ten years. Becoming Bishop of Reading by accident in 2004 when the Oxford Diocese’s evangelical powerhouses played merry hell at the prospect of celebrity gay parson Jeffrey John taking up that post, +Stephen’s first episcopal task was coming to St Stephen’s House for our Founder’s Day. He comes from the Catholic tradition, but most of us don’t practice being bishops before the pointy hat drops on our head and it was most amusing to see him being pointed in the right direction by the House Sacristans who knew more about being a bishop than he did.

Now in the process of being translated to York, future Archbishop Cottrell is, we learned over the weekend, being charged with running a commission to restructure the Anglican Church. The Sunday Times had spoken to ‘a source familiar with Cottrell’s thinking’ and reported them as saying ‘The crisis is going to lead to a massive shrinkage in the number of cathedrals, dioceses and parish churches … [the COVID emergency] has vastly accelerated a dramatic change in the way the Church of England will do its stuff because of declining attendance and declining revenues.’ The photograph of +Stephen shows him looking unconscionably smug, which he never used to be, unless sixteen years of bishoping have made him so. It was a shame we had to find out this way, and shows yet again that the bishops really have very little idea how to manage the system of which they are in charge or the people who make it up. Bishop Philip North (him again) Tweeted that he didn’t recognise the report, and that discussing closing dioceses ‘would lead to years of pointless debate and introspection at a time when we need to be looking outwards, naming injustice and addressing a nation with a message of hope’. The cynic in me whispers that, this being the Church of England, ‘years of pointless debate and introspection’ is presumably just what we will opt for.

‘We are at a crossroads,’ an unnamed bishop told the Sunday Times, ‘everything’s a blank sheet of paper. It is allowing us to get back to that question of first principle, what it means to be the church. People haven’t stopped gathering for worship. They’ve been doing it over Zoom or over YouTube’. I want to scream, This isn’t ‘gathering’! It’s a replacement for gathering, a weak, etiolated stopgap, a plug in the hole left by the shutting-down of genuine Christian community. People hate it, and they only do it because it’s the best they’ve got. Getting back to first principles is fine, but you wouldn’t have thought that one of the principles in question would be that of human beings actually physically being together.

What I think ‘the Church’ means is something like ‘the community called into existence by the saving work of Jesus Christ, organised around the sacraments and gathering to proclaim his coming Kingdom’. There is no 'new way of being church' which doesn't include those things. No, you don’t need lovely old buildings to do them, but I wonder what the Body of Christ here in Swanvale Halt might look like without the Steeple House. It’s worth thinking about, but, I suspect, far from a panacea. We would presumably meet in houses or pub rooms. Instead of the infants school and other institutions coming to us for their celebratory events, we would have to beg use of their facilities when they’re not using them, the same as Slimming World or a pilates class. We would instantly lose our visibility; and I’m far from convinced that a lot of reticent Anglicans are suddenly going to become the Durutti Column of guerrilla evangelists that the theory envisages. We know that even the most outgoing evangelical churches rarely bring any new souls to faith, but largely shuffle them around between each other, or breed them. I worry that I am deluded in thinking I can have much effect through my work to communicate the Gospel, but if I am I’m not alone. Bishops keep talking as though our current situation is something wonderful rather than a mutilation of what we are supposed to be: ‘Now’s our chance to reimagine church’ that article Bishop Graham Tomlin Tweeted the day the churches were locked to the communities in which they sit. I think the bishops are in for a rude awakening if they think that shutting that inconvenient Gothic building in the centre of the estate is going to revive the Faith in England any time soon.

In this mood I sat with my early-morning tea and read John 22. ‘It is the Lord!’ cries Peter, and leaps into the water of the Sea of Galilee to swim to the beach where he’s glimpsed Jesus. It is indeed, I found myself thinking, and that’s what matters. As Jesus speaks to Peter over breakfast, joking whether he loves him more than he does the fish – that’s my take on the text, anyway – I thought of Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, and other desperate atheist attempts to shut the experience of the apostles into a box they can understand, and to defuse its danger. Christ is risen and everything else is relative. I will carry on doing what I can do here to tell everyone that, to proclaim the Kingdom, to make sure Swanvale Halt Church makes its contribution to its parish and the wider Church as long as it can. Sometimes I weary of it; sometimes I think I’ve barely started. 

Two slogans for you:

Battling with the Tech

Ascension Day is one of the occasions in the year when Churches Together in Hornington & District tries to hold a joint service. This year I and the Roman Catholic priest were going to do Evensong & Benediction together but this being impossible it was suggested we hold Compline over Zoom. My heart sank a bit.

In fact although I was leading the service someone far more technologically literate from the RC congregation set it all up. I think the main problem I have with liturgy done via Zoom is the claustrophobic feel it has - in real life you are not quite so close to your fellow worshippers. Until the time for interaction comes, I don't really want to look at them: it's quite enough to know they're there. Christian communities always face the hazard of turning in on themselves and liturgy over Zoom can mark another step in that direction, shifting the balance from community being the context in which worship happens to worship becoming the language in which community is expressed. (We will leave aside how far this is genuine community: I am coming to the conclusion that 'if you can turn it off, it's not Church').

However you can avert most of this by the simple expedient of showing something other than lots of people's faces, or even the face of the person leading (mine doesn't appear on the photo here). For Compline we displayed a copy of the liturgy so people could follow it. How many warbled their way through Te Ante Lucis Terminum along with me I don't know, given that they were muted. I was far too busy coping with the Catholic lady who was reading the responses and alternate psalm verses for the benefit of the congregation. She was uncomfortably slow for my tastes, but I slowed down to try to shadow her. Then it occurred to me that she was in turn slowing down even further to coincide with me. It was like a liturgical slow bicycle ride. 

Before and After

'We've had some cases of COVID in the parish,' the vicar of Tophill, on the other side of Hornington from Swanvale Halt, 'and they all seem to be related to a single funeral which was held in the church just before lockdown began. Trace the instances back, and everyone seemed to have been at that.' We were having a virtual Deanery meeting over Zoom, each of us bringing coffee and biscuits to our computer screens. We noted that though the Government is talking about possibly, possibly, reopening places of worship from the start of July, nobody has any real idea how that will work. We'd discussed it at a virtual Swanvale Halt PCC meeting the evening before, and while we'd begun planning how many people could realistically fit in the church building sitting 2 metres apart - possibly sixty or so - hope was expressed (if hope is the word) that the diocese 'will send out reams and reams of instructions about it.' The clergy were less sanguine. 'I think the national Church has looked at the horrific complexity of how to arrange reopening, and aren't saying anything,' suggested a colleague. Revd Tophill said their PCC 'are assuming we will never "get back to normal". This is is it, no carol services, no concerts, no school leavers' days, from now on, ever. That's the base we start from.' Tophill has an admirably courageous approach to much in Church life but I suspect this is extreme, and that the urge to recover communal events will be very strong indeed. 

On the hill later on I met Martin, an occasional congregant who works for the Mental Health Foundation. We discussed what happens next, a bit breathlessly on his side as he'd been running. 'The question now is how we convert goodwill and aspiration into action,' he said 'they have to be embodied in institutions and decisions.' The MHF is developing a way of pre-assessing policy in relation to kindness, and working on aspects of wellbeing economics.

In the evening I rang a bell out of the upstairs window which has been my way of joining in with the weekly Clap for Carers. Some people I know hate this ritual, regarding it as hypocritical and beside the point. I've thought of it as a way of levering political awareness into unwilling minds: you will struggle to make the NHS anything other than an inclusive and progressive cause. This week watching ministers take part and then having to be shamed into treating healthcare workers decently does make the point rather inescapable. But I'm relieved that signs it's coming to an end will remove the ambiguity for me.

Cumulative Effect

It’s been a long while since, as happened on Friday, I took two funerals in a day. The crematorium has been working at a distinctly elevated rate and our village undertakers were responsible for no fewer than nine of the day’s ceremonies. Oddly, it’s hard to ascribe the apparent upsurge to COVID. Since the emergency began I’ve carried out one funeral of someone who clearly died because of it, and another of a member of the congregation who died with it, but given his record of being dragged back from the brink repeatedly over the last couple of years there was every likelihood that he wouldn’t have left hospital after being admitted with yet another seizure. All the other deaths seem unrelated.

So last week we lost Miriam, one of the longest-standing church members, a former churchwarden and treasurer who knew absolutely everything there was to know about the church’s life, past and present: she’d fallen over at home, broken an ankle and hip and never recovered from the resultant operation. No Wuhan Distemper involvement there. But then there’s Daphne, former congregant (she and her husband moved away 18 months ago), who had a stroke, and Richard, who died yesterday of a heart attack. Neither has any apparent link to the virus, and yet the rate of death within a relatively limited network of souls does appear to me to be elevated from normal. Is low-level stress and uncertainty hitting people who would normally not be dying? I start to wonder about vague things like the sudden increase in my tinnitus over the last couple of months, and the sense of ‘cerebral congestion’ I seem to feel. Heaven knows what people who are actually under real strain feel.

It is Rogationtide, when the Church prays especially for the fruitfulness of the earth, prosperity for communities, and divine protection for localities. There will be no Beating of the Bounds in Anglican parishes this year. But yesterday I went into the churchyard and prayed a Litany in time of plague, invoking the prayers of a variety of relevant saints (patrons of nurses and hospitals and so on) culled from a Roman Catholic website and adding petitions for the sick, the dying, the dead, and against this sign of wrath under which we labour. The sun shone and the birds sang as though there was nothing wrong at all.

Marion the curate said her phone had auto-corrected ‘Rogation’ to ‘Rotation Sunday’, a liturgical observance which I think has a great deal of mileage in it.

Take Them To Mass!

One of the mortifications the Church has had to undergo during the current COVID-related restrictions has been facing its lack of influence and relevance. This is not universally the case as there are churches that run night shelters, food banks, and so on, and bishops have traditionally focused on these when arguing for politicians to continue to pay Christians attention, but unfortunately the majority of our volunteers who keep these initiatives running tend to be fall into vulnerable categories themselves, knocking them out of action. Meanwhile, the non-Christian world has stepped up to the plate: people with time on their hands have volunteered in greater numbers than required to meet the apparent need, and such needs as remain are not very amenable to good-natured phone calls or food deliveries. Bishop Philip North has had a go at clergy complaining about being shut out from their churches during lockdown and suggested they pay more attention the effects it has on the poor – something I’m aware of enough, but have no idea how to tackle from my desk.

Swanvale Halt Church’s social action tends to be in three areas: charity support, some specific initiatives such as hearing-aid servicing and bringing together carers or people on their own, and things I define broadly as ‘community-building’, such as our Quiet Garden and parish newspaper. We’ve become a drop-off point for the local food bank, along with other places. Some of these activities have had to cease, while some can carry on. But it seems so limited and I wonder what needs there are present in the community that we can barely touch, and possibly do little about even if we could. None of it is exactly like Fr Basil Jellicoe’s activity galvanising the great reforming housing projects of Somers Town in the 1930s, is it?

Once upon a time I came across a website called Frankly Unfriendly Catholics which spoofed the aloof and precious peccadilloes of the Anglo-Catholic movement (it no longer exists though WayBackMachine has an archive). The site included a quiz for readers to work out whether or not they were proper Catholics. A variety of pastoral challenges could be met with various ways of helping the people involved, of which the last (and correct) one was always ‘Take them to mass!’ It was intended as a mickey-take, but years afterwards I just happened to meet one of the masterminds of fuc.org.uk who had ended up as Dr Bones’s vicar, his parishes including the chunk of the Oxford Canal where she was customarily moored. ‘Strangely after ten years caring for my own parishes I find more and more that “Take them to mass” is just about the best thing I can offer,’ he admitted. Ex-Goth, funnily enough.

At moments of outrage, which probably don’t come frequently enough, I go back to that conversation. The absolute dignity of human beings – of all human beings without differentiation, irrespective of the divisions we create between us – rests on our common creation and is proved by the fact that the Eternal Word shared our life, being born, killed and raised for each of us. Everyone who is shut out and disadvantaged, exploited and trampled, denied and stifled, needs to hear the words of grace, as do those on the other side of the balance, we who wittingly or otherwise conspire in the wounding of our brethren. The liturgy opens a shaft of light into a different way of living, a different world, because it proclaims that our true nature is rooted in the Kingdom where Christ reigns, where that world has already come to pass. If only they would all come to mass!

An Encounter with Something

In the course me complaining to him, my spiritual director commented casually that he had managed to find a relic that had touched the tongue of St Anthony, so he was thoroughly all right at the moment despite the madness of the times. Which St Anthony? I asked. 'Padua', replied S.D., going on 'his tongue is in a reliquary there, as is his voicebox because he was such a lovely preacher. Sadly viewing these sacred items finally finished Christianity for a friend of mine, and he never went to church again.'

The cathedral authorities at Padua do seem to have done their best to display the remains of St Anthony in as nightmarishly surreal a manner as possible:

Thin and Thick

I still can't work out whether I was unreasonable in detecting a reluctant, nay disappointed, tone in the Bishop's note to us on Tuesday. He writes:

In last Wednesday’s Morning Prayer we heard about the so-called ‘tent of meeting’ which was pitched ‘far off’ from the makeshift campsites which characterised the Israelites’ forty years in the wilderness … (Exodus 33:8). And there ‘the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend’. ‘Tents of meeting’ don’t have to be physical structures .... Elsewhere in the scriptures we read of a whole diversity of ‘thin places’ where such divine encounters take place …Similarly for us, there will most likely be particular places – whether outdoors or in – which we approach with a sense of prayerful expectation  … I have made the decision that it is now possible for one clergyperson (and their household, if applicable) to pray in each church … For many of our church communities, I suspect, the arrangements of the past few weeks will continue, as clergy choose to model home (or a series of parishioners’ homes) as ‘thin places’, and I certainly want to give that every encouragement. But if clergy wish to re-enter their church buildings for prayer or broadcasting purposes, please feel free to do so.

I could be awkward, because, as we know, legally we've been perfectly free to do exactly that all along: I haven't done so out of obedience and solidarity with the restricted society around me. But I preferred to focus on the assumptions behind what the Bishop wrote, as those are dodgy enough. In fact, in this short statement, you can hear cats leap positively yowling out of bags.

Supposedly, the spiritual notion of the ‘thin place’ derives from Celtic Christianity. This is convenient because you can say anything you like about Celtic Christianity. Real Celtic Christianity, in so far as it had any separate identity at all, was St Cuthbert subsisting on shellfish on Inner Farne, the brethren of Skellig Michil clinging to their storm-racked perpendicular rock in the Irish Sea, the Culdees reciting Psalms for hours standing up to their necks in freezing water, or St David feeding his monks on a diet of water and leeks as they pulled their own ploughs across the fields. But usually people mean something more approachable than that.

Look up ‘thin place’ online, and you'll soon be told that it’s an English translation of the Gaelic term Caol Ait. This is informative, as it is completely ungrammatical. What someone has done, at some stage in the not-too-distant past, is simply translate the words separately into their Gaelic equivalents with no concern as to how they fit together. This should alert us to the fact that the term ‘thin place’ is of no great antiquity. It is absent, in either Gaelic or English, from Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887), and Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920), the authoritative compendia of Irish folklore from that epoch.

It’s certainly used by Christians to mean a locale where divine presence can be specially discerned. Mindie Burgoyne writes from a pagan perspective and ‘feels compelled to keep the original definition [of ‘thin place’] as it relates to pre-Christian Ireland’, but also describes conversations with various Irish ecclesiastics including four monks and nuns at venerable abbeys, who all told her about the notion of the ‘thin place’. The first use of the term in a Christian context appears to come from George MacLeod, the Church of Scotland minister and founder of the Iona Community in 1938. He referred to Iona as ‘a thin place where only a tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual’ (or ‘earth from heaven’, as some people give the quote). MacLeod doesn’t seem to have published this statement anywhere, and all of the twenty-or-so online citations are secondhand, but let’s assume he did communicate it in some semi-permanent form. Perhaps this is how it found its way into Christian thinking.

Back beyond MacLeod, there is only one reference to ‘thin places’. This comes in the 1885 memoir of an American spiritualist from Boston called John Wetherbee, entitled Shadows, being a familiar presentation of thoughts and experiences in spiritual matters.  ‘The Spiritualist’ writes Wetherbee, ‘knows from his experience that … the light shines through the thin places or cracks in the curtain between the two worlds whether the thin places or the cracks know it or not’. He goes on to relate a lecture in which Congregational minister Nehemiah Adams reported a story a dying parishioner had told him of seeing a spirit, and concluded that ‘the curtain between the two worlds was thinner than it once was’. From this, Wetherbee starts musing on such experiences and, just as there are special sensitive ‘ganglionic’ locations in the human brain, concludes that similar locations might exist in the world at large. He even wondered whether Boston might be one, or contain many, explaining why Spiritualism had made such headway in the Massachusetts city. Wetherbee gives no indication that he acquired the notion of the ‘thin place’ from anyone else: rather it was his reflecting on Revd Adams’s story that led to the idea. How it made the viral journey from Spiritualist Wetherbee to Presbyterian MacLeod is anyone’s guess, but it’s definitely not some ancient Irish folk wisdom.

So much for history. As for theology, we can see perhaps four principles converging in the idea of the ‘thin place’, and the holy place more generally, which are relevant to current discussions about the role of the church building in this time of plague. I say they converge: they are not all compatible with orthodox Christian thinking.

Firstly, that God is omnipresent and can everywhere be spoken to and heard from is a truism. ‘Go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret’ says Jesus (Matt 6.6). This would seem to argue against the identification of any special ‘sacred space’ at all. The universal extent of divine presence underlies the multifarious encounters with God that speckle the Scriptures: as Bishop Andrew notes, ‘including homes, gardens, mountains, rivers, lakesides, weddings, mealtimes and religious festivals’.

Secondly, there may be locations, or occasions, where as individuals we are used to meeting with God. They are, if you like, reflections of personal rituals, of moments when we are accustomed to concentrating on God. My ex-partner’s father, a fundamentalist Evangelical clergyman, still talks to the Lord while digging in the garden at dawn, and, during the time the church here has been closed, my morning and evening Office has been said in the ‘Children’s Room’, the only one in my house with a window that looks directly onto the garden. These ‘thin places’ are personal, and mean nothing to anyone but us. They reflect nothing other than our own spiritual habits, based exactly on the Christian belief that God is not specially present in one particular place, but everywhere. This is the type of ‘thin place’ Bishop Andrew means when he refers to ‘particular places – whether outdoors or in – which we approach with a sense of prayerful expectation’.

However, the third notion involved in the concept of the ‘thin space’ is emphatically not Christian at all, and it is just the one its originator, John Wetherbee apparently, intended. This is the idea that there are particular physical, geographical points where, due to some occult quality of the place itself, ‘the veil between worlds’ is lowered and human beings can expect spiritual experiences. The assumption that such an experience is more likely to happen in a particular place has no scientific or Christian basis, and yet it seems to be the one which informs most use of the term: it is what it means in popular usage. It is, basically, pagan.

The Bishop makes an error when he elides this sense of the ‘thin place’ into the specifically Christian creation of the church building. This place does not derive its spiritual significance from our choices or preferences. It is not holy because we like it or want it to be holy. It is not holy because it is beautiful or historic. It is not holy because the soil it is built on sits across a ley line, or because there is a holy well, an ancient yew tree, or an oddly-shaped rock, in the churchyard. It is not like a clearing in the woods where we might go to peep at the Wee Folk. It is holy because it is the physical sign of God’s promises. To think its sanctity relies on what we feel or want to feel or choose is a fundamental misunderstanding of its nature, of the nature of sacraments, and of the Church. This leads us to the fourth point.

When the Christian community meets, it is constituted around the sacraments which reveal the saving work of God made known to us in Jesus Christ. It carries out the acts that he commanded us to carry out, communion and baptism (as well as others he didn’t command but which we’ve also found express the promises of God). We Christians began meeting in private rooms, or outside, and there is nothing illegitimate about that. But whenever Christians meet in numbers larger than a household, they require an appropriate space, and we discovered it was useful and more safe to own those spaces. It was natural that they began to be organised physically around the sacramental acts that took place in them, although ultimately it is the community, not the building, which is galvanised by those acts.

The point is that the acts embody the commands and promises of God. They are not our possession; we belong to them, since they express the real nature of the God who commanded us to carry them out. The tabernacle was not where the Israelites chose to meet God, but where he had commanded them to meet him. When the cloud over the tabernacle lifted, they moved camp; when it rested, they remained. Later, the Lord, not them, selects a place for his name to dwell, first Shiloh and then Zion. The varied encounters with God related in the Scriptures, again, take place at God’s initiative, not human beings’. They are, at no stage, their choice. People do not turn up and hang around ‘with a prayerful expectation’ that God is going to arrive, somehow compelled either by human desire or by the nature of a location.

Whatever significance the church building has, it has it because it is where the community called into existence by the saving work of Jesus Christ gathers, over time, to carry out his commands. This is what is behind TS Eliot’s statement in the Four Quartets that

You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid.

The validity of prayer, again, doesn't come from our piety or feelings, but from the promises of God. Has prayer been valid in your kitchen? If so, whose prayers other than yours? Who but you has responded, there, to the commands of God? To call a church by the pagan language of the ‘thin place’ is to make a deep mistake. It is not a thin place, but a thick one, woven into dense fabric by God’s promises to us and ours to him, inhabited by a community shaped by the life of Jesus.

If the terminology of the ‘thin place’ leaked into the Christian Church via George MacLeod, there is an irony. He was referring to Iona – a church, a monastery, a cathedral, a burying ground, a place where the promises of God, and God’s commands, had been responded to and lived out by a Christian community over centuries; where life had been offered to him and seen through the lens of the Cross; where human mourning and joy had been transfigured into the life of the coming Kingdom. Iona, like all churches, is the opposite of the pagan Thin Place, where human beings linger in the hope of a vague glimpse into some reality beyond this world. It is, rather, an effective sign of the Kingdom. As thick a place as ever there could be. 

'Rid of Me' by Kate Schatz (2007)

Kate Schatz’s short 2007 novel based on PJ Harvey’s second album is a seductive oddity. It’s part of Continuum’s '33 1/3' series of monographs in which an author focuses intensely on one musical album at a time, but it’s the only one, I think, which chooses to do that in the form of fiction. ‘This is not about Rid of Me - it’s because of it’, says Ms Schatz in her Prologue, describing how the experience of listening over and over to Harvey’s music on that vicious 1993 compilation developed into a series of:

Characters, lyrics, and landscapes. Moods, and tones, and those feelings. You begin writing. With each song, to each song, from each song. Around and near and under and then, at some point, it takes a shape. … Chapters like songs, book like an album. It becomes a new story, years of listening spiralled out into new words and meanings.

Each chapter is named from one of Rid of Me’s 14 songs, and begins and ends with the first and last words from its eponymous lyric. Cumulatively they tell the story of Mary and Kathleen (names taken, of course, from the album as well), two young women who flee terrible circumstances and, encountering each other in a roadside bar, set up house in a shack in the darkling woods that both have long regarded from afar – a mythical place of danger and threat becoming a refuge for a pair of marooned souls. Their experience is hallucinatory, violent, and finally redemptive.

Continuum (in Britain the publisher is Bloomsbury) are proud of the design of the 33 1/3 series: the books are slightly larger than A6 size and varied within a uniform style, and Rid of Me is cool black, off-white, and silver-grey. The small size makes reading the book an intimate experience of entering into a tiny imaginative world, appropriate to the story. It is also, naturally, great fun for PJH fans. There is an introductory quote from the maestra herself (not provided specially, don’t be silly) and as well as the quotes from Rid of Me, there are echoes of other songs, especially in the last couple of chapters. The apple tree Mary and Kathleen find on p.102, ‘dripping with fruit, bruised and rotting’ where Mary glimpses in Kathleen an image of ‘the first woman on earth’ harks back to the Biblical allusions of Harvey’s first album, Dry, and especially the imagery of ‘Happy and Bleeding’; on the very last page we get a kind of joint voice declaring ‘this is love, this is love’ as the women reach an ecstatic apotheosis, ‘alone … flying, about to rush down into a pure new space’, and that comes from 2000’s Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. You could play Polly Bingo with the somewhat phantasmagoric and highly-wrought text, if you felt inclined.

The novel is a work of love, obviously, but just as clearly, it’s an exercise, and an effort. Ms Schatz’s scheme forces her into some odd narrative contortions, perhaps most obviously in the chapter ‘Luna’, where, with no warning, Kathleen, like Harvey’s celestially-obsessed narrator in the original song, addresses the Moon at some length. It’s a bit like twelve-tone music, constrained by rules which don’t always gel into anything naturalistic. Engaging and sometimes moving though it might be, nobody could say the story is remotely convincing; not much of it, in fact, ‘makes sense’ at all.

Thanks to all its virtues, though, Rid of Me is very far from being a waste of money, and another testament to the generative power of Harvey’s work for that of other artists. So I also bought the 33 1/3 volume about the Banshees' Peepshow and will report on that at some point!

Good News and Bad News from the Rectory Garden

Last year the oak tree wasn't looking all that happy. It came into leaf far later than the other trees in the garden, and later than other oaks round about, and its leaf cover was patchy, the leaves clumping in small groups along the branches. Over the autumn and winter, it's been looking progressively more hoary and lichen-covered. Small branches have obviously been dying and dropping off. This year, the effects are even more marked, and I've found four or five of the dark lower-trunk wounds which are the tell-tale marks of Acute Oak Decline Syndrome. There's no clear known cause for AODS, and certainly no treatment. You might as well hug your tree and talk to it encouragingly, so I'm doing that. 

Meanwhile there is a spot where I would quite like a small tree, but which has successfully killed three so far, the prunus that was there when I moved in, a little fir, and an ash sapling transferred from a less favourable spot. I was beginning to feel reluctant to risk even a self-seeded rowan there. But now I discover an ash has put itself there and looks fairly healthy so far.

Meanwhile some flowers are back this Spring as usual, and others are here for the first time. The lawn (such as it is) is enlivened with beautiful blue patches of germander speedwell ...

... while the Great Burnet and Spotted Medick are new, I believe. The latter is tiny and hard to see. I'm used to its cousin Black Medick, but this plant has dark marks on the leaves, which you can just about glimpse in the photo.

IOU what?

As you know I am a fan of economics, albeit as an outsider. This morning the Today programme had former Chancellor Norman Lamont and left-wing economist Mariana Mazzucato discussing the appropriate economic response to the COVID epidemic, for about a minute and a half. ‘We’ll be talking about this again,’ concluded Nick Robinson. You bet. But the minimal discussion nevertheless unveiled what will be the broad outlines of the divide: using the levers of government and society to rebuild economic life in a better way, versus getting everything back to normal as quickly as possible. Lord Lamont characterised Dr Mazzucato’s approach as ‘political … based on prejudice’, which, if you take ‘prejudice’ as a rude way of describing ‘opinion’, is not an inaccurate description, but it leaves out what should be the equally obvious truth that to return to the status quo ante is also a political choice: it’s not some sort of neutral option.

Naturally I would prefer change. An economy that works better for the poor and secures human future against the threat of a shifting climate is a goal worth thinking about, and revolutionary events open up the possibility of such change. But revolutions are a dangerously universal solvent and there is no guarantee that they make things better: in fact usually the opposite is true. I worry that all the weight will be behind business-as-usual, never mind how catastrophically damaging that business has been: acting against that will require courage, imagination and international co-operation, and I don’t see much of any of those about. Where will the resources come from that we will need to spend to make a fairer and more sustainable world?

We’re used to people arguing that the current dramatic increases in government spending will make previously fiscally conservative states permanently more willing to pour resources into the economy: the UK furloughing scheme is costing more than the NHS each year, which makes the Government’s previous qualms about increasing health spending by 1% look a bit risible. But under the current financial system it all has to be paid for eventually. Now, it’s true that government debt isn’t the same sort of stuff as the debt we owe one another, small-scale concrete amounts of money, or perhaps objects (a lawnmower, for instance), that we provide for a limited amount of time and which remain our property even while the other person is using them. Commercial debts become something rather different: the money loaned often exists only notionally – it exists as something that could be repaid in the future - and of course it was the overlending of non-existent money which resulted in the financial crisis of 2008. Debt, then, is something separate from real property that someone owns; or rather, is a thing in itself as opposed to representing real property. This is how it can become an investment and can be bought and sold.

When governments borrow from each other debt becomes even more notional. In some circumstances, it does no harm for debt to be written off. The Jubilee 2000 campaign successfully resulted in more than $100BN of inter-governmental debt being cancelled and arguably helped a number of African economies begin to take off over the last decade-and-a-bit before the coronavirus came and kicked them in the teeth.

However a lot of the money the UK government (and I suppose others) is having to borrow comes not from other governments but from private sources: pension funds, investment banks, individuals. My three pensions – local government, Army, and Church – all include quantities of Government bonds. Cancelling any of that debt would be problematic to say the least: it's property, in a way, including property owned by me.

The philosophy of money is a bit beyond me, as economics and finance is beyond most of us, most of the time. For instance I only discovered today, as a result of some stray reference to the transparency or otherwise of the Bank of England’s Covid Corporate Financing Facility, about the debt instrument called ‘commercial paper’, a short-term promissory note issued by a financial institution to a large company for a specific purpose, effectively a loan. The financial industry’s creativity in devising ways of moving notional money about from place to place really dazzles in some ways. But it produces a system of such complexity that we are in danger of forgetting that nobody really knows what money is, and that it merely represents real interactions and real goods passing between people; a system that constrains and controls us rather than serving our interests. Distinguishing between different sorts of debts with the aim of making sure that we are not crushed by the ones we are incurring now is a task I have to pass to those who know more than me, but one I do think is urgent, especially as growth-based economics is almost certainly coming to an end, and growth essentially powered by the exploitation of fossil fuels definitely is.

Anyway, the swifts are back in Swanvale Halt, including this one caught on camera flitting behind the Rectory (just in front of the window). They are free even if we are constrained and confined. 

A Literary Itch Scratched

This evening I will (provided the technology works) have a session with the Air Cadets about reading, arising from thinking about what people are doing with their time under the current restrictions. In fact I am somewhat mortified by the fact that I do no more reading than I ever did though I would quite like to, and certainly not reading improving and challenging works. Instead one of the books I've chased down has been John Gordon's 1968 children's fantasy novel The Giant Under the Snow which has haunted me ever since I was a child but which I never actually read. The haunting quality has much to do with Anthony Maitland's amazing book cover which echoes that other baleful image that I felt stared at me out of the past, the Sutton Hoo helmet. 

As it turns out, The Giant isn't the most dazzling example of its genre. Its virtues and flaws are mirror-image of each other. On the one hand it proceeds with breathless excitement; on the other its brevity means it skates over background and detail and much of it is quite sketchy. Its achievement lies in atmosphere - the snowbound wood just outside a frosty city which is never named but is clearly Norwich, more by hint and suggestion than description. 

There are a surprising number of children's fantasy books set in snowy winter landscapes: not only The Giant Under the Snow, but The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Box of Delights, and possibly the best of them all, Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising. Snow means isolation, the suspension of the normal outlines of daily life, visual and existential starkness. Come up with an idea you can locate in those surroundings, and half your battle is won.

What's This Here Then

Mentioning St Catherine's Chapel last week reminded me that I'd intended to post about it anyway, when the time was right - the right time being when there was nothing much else to say!

Ms Kittywitch in Eastbourne wasn't the only one to alert me to press reports of a mysterious discovery at St Catherine's at the start of April. Some while before, the rail line had been closed owing to a landslip. The hill here is composed of relatively soft sandstone, as opposed to the chalk that forms the Hog's Back and the rest of the North Downs ridge that extends through the middle of Surrey, and the heavy rains earlier in the year brought a collapse in the slope right next to the Portsmouth line. While clearing the sand away, workers inspecting the surface just below the hilltop (by ropes, as it was the only way to reach it) noticed a recess with what appeared to be markings cut into the stone. The contractors, Arcadis, called in South East Archaeology from University College, London, who identified a small 'shrine' in the form of a Gothic arch, a cross, initials and other markings, all within a cave which survived to head height but which was probably originally much larger, this small bit of it being all that remained after the railway was driven through the hill in the 1840s. In this photo (from Network Rail) the cave is just below the second upright in the fence, above the railway arch and to its left, obscured by a pile of fallen sand.

I'm not sure how the archaeologists narrowed the carvings down to the 14th century, and the idea that they represents ritual activity going back into pagan times based on the hill's earlier name of Drakehull seems a bit fanciful to say the least. But this is a numinous place: the chapel on the hill, the holy well (of doubtful vintage, admittedly) at its foot. This decorated cave, whatever it was, lies just west of the chapel and there are other caves, including a very dramatic one you can see from the road, burrowed into the friable sandstone. There are marks which suggest fire pits and soot from lamps, and the little arched niche must have had something in it, all suggesting a period of use rather than transient sacred medieval graffiti. Was the cave the remnants of a hermit's cell, or - if the chapel had its own hermit dwelling there, like the one at Abbotsbury likely did - was this some subsidiary and home-made holy place, a further hallowing of the hill?

Medium-Distance Social Distancing

Sometimes misty drizzle on an overcast day makes me think 'holy well weather' but it was rather more than that yesterday as I determined that my first proper walk under the Current Restrictions would take me along the canal towpath to St Catherine's Chapel, even if the journey did take in a holy well, the one at the foot of Chapel Hill. Once I got there it was fine and sunny, but thunder and lightning accompanied my egress from Swanvale Halt, and heralded my return some time later. The weather did mean social distancing wasn't much of an issue: I've never crossed the park without meeting a single human soul before. Narrowboats look cosy in the rain though that depends on your heating system. Have I really never noticed the pillbox before, or is my memory failing me?