A Final Word (for 2020)

At Lamford, they have shut up shop and resorted to online worship only. COVID case rates in that area are nearly twice what they are here, but the hair-raising reports of ambulance queues and escalating infections have made me, and not just me, wobble. Are our churches contributing to national disaster?

Swanvale Halt services are as COVID-compliant as they can be, even if I have to keep reminding people (including myself) not to have social conversations inside the church building, and opening the doors when helpful souls close them 'to keep the warmth in' when of course at the moment that isn't the only thing you keep in. But it's not just the safety of the event: the event is surrounded by ancillary risks, of people moving in and out of a vestry, handling things (not matter how careful they may be), and travelling to and from church. Multiply these risk-events by thousands of churches across the country, and there is almost bound to be some infection arising from them somewhere. If the focus is not on making discrete events tolerably safe, but reducing infection by reducing general interaction, you should shut up everything you can, and in Tier 4 there's precious little left to shut up except worship settings.

The trouble is that this is not a decision about the management of a particular church - as deciding you can't comply with the rules would be - but about public health. It is to say that the Government should be closing churches. If I were them I might well decide to do so, but I'm not. I'm not taking decisions about public health. In this blog I've stressed the vital importance of rule-based orders, societal norms and legal structures over individual preference over and over again: I feel deeply uncomfortable about making my own choices on these matters based on what must surely be arbitrary and very personal factors.

People are different, and we need people to be different for society to change and progress. Human difference is an absolute social necessity. It’s also an uncomfortable necessity because the behaviour that arises from difference is not necessarily morally neutral and often even when it is it can be couched in moral terms. For instance, people are more or less risk-tolerant. Most of the time the effects are marginal, and we can debate whether mountain-climbers are responsible or whether it’s acceptable to drive faster than the speed limit safely, without much at stake.

These decisions can have radical consequences but they affect very few people at any one time. During an outbreak of infection, however, everyone is faced by the same situation, and thus everyone has a stake in each other’s behaviour. But this behaviour is still conditioned by personality more than pure reason. Because those differences remain, what may seem to one person to be a rational response to risk appears reckless to another. This is why relying on ‘common sense’ to guide behaviour is problematic: what appears to be ‘common sense’ differs from one person to another, sometimes quite radically. Ultimately there is little that is ‘common’. We end up justifying our own behaviour and by implication criticising the next person’s when, in rational terms, there’s little to choose between them.

This is why, in the current circumstances, we absolutely must set, and stick by, common rules and standards, which means they are settled by Government. Today the Government kept the Tier 4 rules as they are, and the Bishop told me that he couldn't give any positive direction as that would mean being out of step with other dioceses. So I will keep the church open for those that want to use it.

Although I am sort-of off work, we were open today for a quiet midweek mass. At first the readings (1John 2.12-17 and Luke 2.36-40) befuddled me but then I remembered Fr Montgomery-Wright and his description of how the Prayer at the Foot of the Altar, introibo ad altarem Dei, helped him enter into a place where age seemed immaterial, where youth was eternally renewed by the Spirit. So I found myself saying:

1. Here is this character Quintin Montgomery-Wright and what he said.

2. Here is what St John said. Why is he addressing these three groups within the Christian community ('children', 'fathers', 'young people') and what does it say to those of us who are none of them?

3. In fact seen in the eyes of God we are all of them, spiritually, and at different times. However old we might feel, he renews our youth. That's part of what it means, as John says, not to be attached to the world, but to the Spirit.

4. Anna the prophetess discovers the fulfilment of her life right at the end of it, when the longed-for Messiah comes to the Temple and she greets him. God still has work for us all as he renews us day by day!

So that is my last homily for this year, but not, apparently, my last at Swanvale Halt for a while. And, just to round things off, the mower is now working:

PS. However there is also the possibility that the Government is actually giving no thought to this specific matter at all, and the bishops are not wanting to give any lead because that would be to criticise the Government in turn. In which case, the balance of conflicting considerations becomes different.

It's Not Just About Money

It was a long while ago that I heard journalist-cum-development activist-cum-historian Sarah Chayes talking on an edition of Thinking Allowed on Radio 4 about the subject of corruption, and I have kept meaning to write about it, but haven't had the energy. Ms Chayes's latest book is about the growth of corruption in the US governmental system, drawing parallels with what she saw in Afghanistan in the mid-2000s: what she said fitted in with some of the things I'd been thinking about in respect of the situation in the UK, which she mentions only in passing. At first, Chayes says, corruption seems small and local, and only when you step back can you see that the limited instance you might have come up against is part of something bigger:

I started thinking about corruption in Afghanistan where I lived for about a decade … What I began to see was that when, for example, you were driving down a dirt road and a police officer, usually about 17 or 18 years old, would stride out into the middle of the road and block you with a Kalashnikov and demand not much money, maybe it might add up to a pound at most, what I learned was that that didn’t go into the police officer’s pocket, not all of it. Some of it went up the line. And so I realised, this is actually a system, it’s a network, and corruption is the operating system of this network … and in Afghanistan, one of the poorest nations in the world, it was adding up to something like 2 ½ billion US dollars in a year. In return, those at the top of this system were providing absolute immunity from any kind of repercussions from this behaviour. That was the model. And so that was what I looked at, everywhere from Honduras to Nepal. 

Chayes argues that large parts of the US political system, disproportionately but not exclusively in the Republican Party, are now dedicated not to any concept of the public good but to the extraction of financial advantage from political office, and that the ruling class defines corruption so narrowly that there is increasingly little judicial redress. She quotes the shocking example of the prosecution of Robert McDonnell, former Governor of Virginia, in 2016 for receiving a wide range of benefits-in-kind from a fraudulent businessman: he was convicted, a judgement then unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court on the grounds that what he had done was not corrupt because no specific political decisions had been influenced by it.

 

When I last thought about this issue in September and related the story of Njal's Saga, I was prompted by the UK's announcement that it was prepared to break international law in pursuit of its Brexit ambitions. I was thinking about the implications of eroding the rule of law and how that could lead to the entrenchment of violence and criminality, but I hadn't cottoned on to the direct relationship between financial corruption and violence: I was imagining a cultural rather than an instrumental process. But when money begins to trump law and those who have money are able to circumvent the consequences of stepping outside it, that is exactly when criminality and violence seep into the system, because the source of the money becomes immaterial. It is the erection of money into the measure of value that embeds violence into the institutions of the State, especially the police, to whom we customarily grant a monopoly of the use of force.

The antidote, Chayes suggests, is an ethic of solidarity, but this is always apt to be eroded by self-interest, and only bitter experience can bring it back once it's gone. Forgive the long quote: it's to the point.

In that period roughly between about 1870 and the mid-1930s, this phenomenon stretched across the globe, regardless not just of political party but of political system; so you had the German Empire, the French republic, the British constitutional monarchy, the United States republic, all behaving in fundamentally the same ways. The networks were interwoven in exactly the same ways, and they included very much the same revenue streams I mentioned, energy, finance, and high-end real estate. I would say that today the additions might be pharmaceuticals, industrial agriculture, and tech, but you have exactly the same weaving back and forth between the private sector and the public sector. I looked at how we got out of the kleptocratic control of our economies and politics in those days, and the rather sad answer is that it took the repeated global calamities of the first half of the 20^th century to generate a solidarity ethos: two world wars, two genocides, use of a nuclear weapon, a gigantic pandemic, and a gigantic global economic meltdown.  That bought us about 40-45 years of gradual hard-fought reform. Then, starting in about 1980, it’s like the generation aged out and we went back to, first, the use of money as the yardstick to measure our social success; and once you do that you get coalitions of the super-rich getting together to figure out how they can rig the rules to benefit their network, and we’re back into systemic corruption. That really begins to take hold in the 1990s, and continues through to today. ...

That means it’s up to us to absolutely hold our own leadership up to its highest standards, maybe asking candidates to sign some kind of an ethics pledge [to] reinforce laws against the revolving door, conflicts of interest … in the private sector we can choose to take our money out of banks that continue to violate our laws.  … And we must, because if it took wars and economic meltdown to get us out of kleptocracy last time, what would the calamities look like in this century? 

Through By the Skin of Our Teeth

My first Christmas in Swanvale Halt was a maelstrom in which I felt I had no idea what was happening, when of course I did. The low point came two-thirds of the way into the Churches Together Christmas Lunch when I had to shut myself in a toilet for ten minutes to regain the composure to carry on talking to people. Over subsequent years I got control of the whole process and paced events so that if anything did go wrong there was at least the space to put it right.

The trouble with Christmas 2020 is that, in that respect if no other, it felt like lurching back to 2009. Many things are not happening, but they are largely things like concerts and carol services which I must attend but which don't actually require that much input; the things which are happening are largely down to me. I was once again surrounded by a whirlpool of events whose outcome was completely uncertain.

For instance: our biggest service of the year, the Crib Service, can't happen so I thought we would have three mini-Crib Services instead, all very low-key and quiet. Low-key they may have been but the visuals were all run off my antique laptop and through an even older projector, and the music came out of my iPod (and iPod! imagine that), wired into the sound system. Normally the Crib Service is devised by a planning group and I and Marion usually come on to lead, or preach, or both; this year it was all down to me, the tech, and a lot of candles. Meanwhile two audio services had to be put together and the paper versions delivered to those who have no internet access, and communion taken to housebound parishioners who felt confident enough to receive it. There was just enough time to get it all done, provided nothing went wrong, and nothing, praise God, did.

Another element was that everyone had to book in for the services, lists had to be compiled, and seating plans worked out. In the end I needn't have bothered, as every service apart from the 8am on Christmas Day had gaps where people had signed up but not turned up. I was a bit furious at first after putting in so much effort and anxiety assembling the services, but as well as people simply forgetting to come which applied in a couple of cases, other absences arose from positive COVID tests, tests being awaited, nerves hitting in, and virus rampant in a child's year at school. It became clear as Christmas Eve wore on how the pandemic is cutting a swathe through our outlying clientele at the moment: ironically, I think elderly people living on their own are possibly less affected than anyone else, or so it seems as any rate. 

How glorious it will be for this all to be past! The whole area is now in Tier Four so I had to zoom (but not Zoom) down to Dorset to see my family on Christmas Day afternoon, and hand over my niece's goldfish (at arm's length, obviously), which I nervously transported ninety-odd miles in a bag of water in a bucket. I photographed the sunset behind the towers of Wimborne Minster, the last view I will have of Dorset for quite some time to come.

By a Road Divided

On the edge of the parish is a road - an unremarkable enough thoroughfare in itself. One side of the road is Tier 2, where I live. Here there are bunnies frolicking in the fields, children make daisy chains, policemen cycle the streets whistling, and the clergy sit at tea and cake. The other side, however, is Tier 4, where the fields are on fire, triffids attack the children, post-apocalyptic biker gangs roam the streets, and processions of flagellants ring the churches. Actually Tier 4 starts a field to one side of the road, but you get the point.

The Tiers make no difference to public worship, which continues in all. I would have accepted churches being closed under the highest restrictions, and some people have told me that their remaining open is crazy, even though I still maintain a distanced and ventilated said communion service is about the safest thing you can do indoors. That doesn't mean everything you might do in a church is equally safe. This week we hosted a concert which, Rick the verger and his sidekick Rob tell me, had what we might best describe as 'an atmosphere of incaution' and aspects didn't quite happen as agreed. Meanwhile, the only church-centred infection event I've heard about in months involved someone in Swanvale Halt parish who is Director of Music at a well-known London church, and who caught COVID along with ten members of the choir there at a rehearsal about a month ago. Singing, a relatively confined space, people being drawn from a wide distance (in my parishioner's case, some thirty miles away) - all these make for a risky setting, a risk increased by the heightened infectability of the new-variant virus. He's all right, thankfully.

My network of acquaintance spans a wide spectrum of opinion about the epidemic, including left-wing souls who believe the Government is exaggerating the figures so their friends can make money out of dubious PPE contracts, hyper-cautious worriers and those who chafe under restrictions. My own sceptical ponderings have been vanquished one after another. Back in May, I think, an undigested study was produced by a group of epidemiologists and statisticians at Oxford suggesting that up to 60% of the population had already had COVID; the pandemic has produced a lot of research which isn't peer-reviewed and which the media leap on for the sake of a story. This one I rather wanted to believe as it would have meant we were rather further through the danger than we thought at the time, but of course it wasn't true: it was a group of graduate students footling with calculators. I kept wondering whether the Swedish model of response made the sense the Swedes claimed it did, which again would have been very convenient. I began to waver when I heard Sweden's chief epidemiologist Anders Tegnell being interviewed by Evan Davies (or someone) and when asked why Swedes weren't being advised to wear face masks answering 'We don't wear masks in Sweden. In Sweden we stay home when we're sick' - an argument even I could see the flaw with, and I'm not paid a lot of money by the Swedish government. Now it's clear that the Swedish approach has been disastrous.

No, there is no conspiracy, no secret plot, and no way out other than what we're doing. Whatever mistakes might have been made in western European countries early on in the pandemic's progress (and we could talk about those a long while), they allowed the virus to be seeded too widely to be extirpated in the same way countries such as Australia and New Zealand have managed, or kept suppressed as Taiwan and South Korea have. As I've said before, whether you think it's 'worth it' is basically a value judgement, no less now than it was in April; but this is it, until the pharmaceutical mills get grinding and rescue us all. 

The Hascombe Dragonstones

Normally in the second week before Christmas I would be lucky to have any time to myself, let alone a whole day off (well, apart from Zooming some prayers for Hornington Town Council's meeting in the evening). But yesterday I managed to get out for a walk around Hascombe Hill, somewhere I know relatively well; the specific reason for going there was to find a site I have only just found out about, the Dragonstones. 

Around the UK you can find a variety of would-be megalithic sites which have been knocked up in relatively recent times. Some look very fake indeed such as the Temple at Ilton (though, as I discovered on my visit some years ago, there's nothing inauthentic about its horrid and threatening atmosphere) or this one somewhere in Shropshire. When they hove into view, provided you keep your eyes peeled, just to the south of the footpath that runs itself to the south of Hascombe Hill between Nore and Lodge Farm, you could easily be forgiven for thinking the Dragonstones have been there millennia rather than just over two decades, which is in fact the case. They really look the part.

It would probably be invidious to describe the circle as a 'folly' anyway: everyone says it was erected by 'the Modern Order of Druids' and so it perhaps counts as a genuine religious monument. Everyone, it turns out, is copying Wikipedia, and there doesn't appear to be an actual organisation with that name, but the stones have been erected with an eye on the numinous according to this gentleman who did it, even if he doesn't let on who employed him. He knows what genuine Neolithic monuments are supposed to look like, and which stones to pick to make his circles appear genuine second cousins to Avebury. Most interestingly of all, Surrey has very little suitable stone for this kind of thing so the raw material for the Dragonstones Circle was trucked all the way from a quarry on the Isle of Portland - a little bit of Dorset in the midst of Surrey! 

Playing With Your Mind

Years ago I and Il Rettore attended a diocesan event at a benighted church elsewhere in the diocese. As we left the then Archdeacon - now a bishop in some far-flung part of Christendom - made a point of rushing over and fulsomely shaking his hand with a big smile. Il Rettore turned to me with a look which veered between incredulity and disgust. 'Did you see that?' he grimaced, still holding his hand out as though it needed a wash. 'He's trying to be nice to me!!' 'The bastard!' I offered, 'Is there no villainy to which he will not stoop?'

This Sunday I toiled up the hill from the 8am mass and found our current Archdeacon on my doorstep. He is a far cry from his predecessor and has no apparent desire for a pointy hat, but nevertheless an unannounced archidiaconal visit conjures up images of many, many scenes in the series Rev and is not at all what you want. In fact, as it turned out, it wasn't unannounced, though an email at 23.48 on a Saturday night is not something most clergy are likely to see - not too far off 'on display in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"', as Douglas Adams described. 

On the doorstep were three bottles of wine, one for me, one for Marion the curate, and one for the headmistress of the Infants School. They had come from the Lord Bishop of Guildford and every clergyperson and Church school head-teacher was in receipt of one. If I could deliver them that would be great, the Archdeacon said from his car, and zoomed (but not Zoomed) off somewhere else.

Now, one understands and appreciates the gesture but. Guildford is not a large diocese and I suppose there are about 160 parishes. Let's be conservative and estimate that on average, excluding retireds, there are two clergy per parish, plus about sixty Church schools. That makes 380 bottles of Sea Change wine. Even if the diocese has got a good deal on them they'll be at least £5 a bottle: that's the better part of £2K. I can't imagine the Bishop is paying it, and I do wonder whether it's quite the best use of the time of two members of the senior leadership team to shuttle round eighty parishes apiece handing out drink. I'd've been content with a Christmas card and even more perhaps a phone call.

'Well', offered Marion, 'You could argue that it counts as a pastoral visit. Although if they're delivering the wine on Sunday mornings it does imply they don't actually want to catch any clergy in.' She and her husband drank theirs almost instantly.

Mechanical and Biological

Dr Abacus is right: you can find a video to help you do virtually everything these days. So when my mower wouldn't start and there didn't appear to be anything wrong with the spark plug (which was as far as my technical knowledge went, as I always say my Dad was a car mechanic by trade but it never rubbed off on me) I consulted Youtube and found a film by a bluff Yorkshireman - not that there is any other kind - offering to show me how to service a 400 series McCulloch mower with a Briggs & Stratton engine. Mowing my grass this time of the year is an oddity, I know, but it will encourage the wild flowers come the Spring, or at least that's the idea.

The very first thing I attempted to do demonstrated that I didn't have the right tools and so I bought a box of socket drivers from the ironmonger's in Hornington. However even then none of them fitted the first bolts I needed to remove. I borrowed a very old set from Jack at church who reminded me that as Briggs & Stratton is an American company their bolts will be imperial and not metric. Embarrassingly I have never serviced the mower once in all the years I've had it so it's no surprise that it was mucky to a Stygian degree, and I'm hoping that a mere clean should be enough to make it fire up again. In fact towards the end of the video Mr Yorkshire presents us with a sparkling clean and refurbished mower which still won't work, and which turns out to need a new spark plug. I am also relieved to discover that he does go through reassembling the mower after you've finished servicing it, as I was surveying the growing spread of parts laid out around it and wondering how I successfully I'd remember how it fitted together again.

One thing Mr Yorkshire couldn't have forewarned me about was the mummified frog I found in the bowl I got down off a shelf in the garage so I could wash off the air filter. I don't think I put it there.

Death of a DJ

As I've recalled on another occasion, I've only ever ventured in through the doors of the UK's and arguably the world's longest-standing and grandest Goth club, Slimelight, on two occasions. My contact with its organiser, Mak Ma Yuan, was confined to asking and receiving permission to lift images from the 1987 home movie of the club to use in that blog post a couple of years ago. But discovering that the reason why so many of my friends were quartering their LiberFaciorum profile images with the Slimelight logo was because he had died gave even me a jolt. Yuan had opened the doors of the club in its various homes for 33 years, and under the current restrictions had kept it going virtually. He'd been instrumental in securing Slimelight's venue, Electrowerkz, a £78K grant from the Cultural Recovery Fund via the Arts Council to help the recuperation from COVID, when that becomes possible, a fact which shows as nothing else could how culturally indispensable and uncontroversial the Goth world now is. As I say, my contact with him was fleeting and remote, and that seems to be the case with the far greater number of the people I've seen commenting about his death. But he is one of ours, and one whose work allowed many others to express an important part of who they are: a benefactor, then, whose passing deserves notice and regret.

The other day I found myself encountering a funeral procession in the village - not one I was taking, obviously. Peter from the undertakers, top-hatted and frock-coated, led the hearse over the crossroads not far below my house, and what were obviously members of the family made their way variously across the road, a black car following behind and other vehicles waiting to move with differing degrees of impatience. I took my hat off and waited for them to pass, wondering not for the first time how virtually everyone else on the street ignored what was happening, pretending that the death of an individual they do not know is nothing to do with them, an event which they don't know how to react to and have no obligation to acknowledge. No man's death diminisheth them, it seems.

Synchronicities

It was just as well that nobody taking part in the Royal School of Music exams at the church today around noon was learning the tuba, and instead were all angelic children plonking out whatever the current version of 'Chopsticks' is, as that was when, rashly, I had chosen to revive a midweek Eucharist at Swanvale Halt, celebrating for the first time since March and at several points realising that neither I nor Rick had remembered to put out this or that bit of kit we needed. It was me, and him, and Eva, the only member of the congregation who'd taken notice of the several emails and other mentions I'd made of the change. And even she'd only seen the message an hour and a half before. The old and holy words competed with the modern and less sacred ones of a music teacher chiding his small charges in the midst of their scales. This does often happen in normal times, to be fair.

The reason Eva was especially moved to come to church today was that it was the anniversary of her confirmation, many years ago. By chance it is also an Ember Day, one of the occasions set aside by the Church to pray for the vocation of all God's people, and your confirmation is a step forward, at least, in discovering your vocation. There are all sorts of routes we do not take in our lives, identities we do not take up and possibilities we have to surrender for our genuine vocation to come to birth. Concert pianist was not one of Eva's rejected life choices. As she listened today to the students banging out scales on the practice piano before facing the ordeal itself in the church hall, she remembered, she told me, he own struggles aged eleven with exactly the same things. We prayed for the examinees in the mass. 'It was good to be part of that,' Eva said, 'and', she added definitely, 'apart from it, too.'

There, and Back Again

It was with a jolt that I realised this Sunday morning that I hadn't attended an 8am service at Swanvale Halt, as opposed to leading it, since March. As Marion took the service - 'struggling to remember what to do', she admitted - I found myself ever so slightly uncomfortable in my seat, not due to fearing infection (I have made the point ad infinitum that a quiet, said communion service is quite the most controllable and safe indoors religious activity you can engage in) but simply because of the unfamiliarity of the circumstances. It's odd to be seated on a chair isolated by space all around without the usual oak benches to separate you from your fellow worshippers. The oddness faded quickly, but I felt the unease which some members of the congregation have described to me on venturing back into the COVID-compliant church for the first time, and which when you're leading the service it's all too easy to ignore.

One of the Tophill clergy casually mentioned in a remote conversation the other day that they haven't celebrated the Eucharist there in nine months ('If people want that we direct them to you or the Cathedral'). Even I was slightly shocked. Churchmanship is part of this - even a fairly moderate church might gib at giving up the Sacrament for quite so long - but from conversations we have had I suspect the Rector of Tophill is on the extremely cautious side and regards communion as fraught with risk which, as I say, is not my view. It's from Tophill that we are starting to get stories of congregants who are positively preferring to stay home and watch services on their computers in dressing gowns and slippers on a Sunday morning rather than drag themselves into their church building.

Originality is Overrated

So much of church life is impossible this year: Christmas's usual big draw of the Crib Service can't happen, and I won't be going to Smallham Chapel for their Christmas service, which I rather enjoy. The sheep will go uncarolled in 2020. While we were discussing how we might replace some of the usual observances someone suggested that we could put the Messy Church wooden crib figures in windows around the parish, and do a trail for people to follow. (I refer to them as the Messy Church crib figures: in fact it was only Mary and Joseph who were originally that, and the set was expanded afterwards for general use). 

I contacted various local businesses and the figures are now out in the windows of six of them, with a form on the website for entrants to fill out their answers, prize to be determined (something less than a holiday in Bermuda). The Polish proprietor of the computer repair shop was slightly nonplussed but happy to go along with it. I did leave out one of the shepherds, who strikes me as a bit scary.

Of course I discovered that almost every community in the country is doing the same kind of thing. Up in Leeds, for instance, Professor Purplepen has produced a silhouette inspired by The Box of Delights for her street's Window Advent Calendar. I hadn't imagined that nobody else would have had a similar idea, but its sheer ubiquity is humbling!

The Latest Missives

Any idea (hope, perhaps) that the hierarchy of the Church of England had got its act together after a recent series of mis-steps was scotched a couple of days ago when the Archbishops sent out what appeared to be a draft encyclical about arrangements for administering communion in churches over Christmas. Since the beginning of the pandemic we have got used to the laity receiving communion in bread only, an anomalous situation but one perfectly acceptable legally and theologically. Their Graces of Canterbury and York decided that this was a shame, as most of us agree, and wrote to the effect that the priest could intinct the Host before giving it to each communicant. They did this in a letter which had to be rescinded hours later in favour of an updated version which corrected the grammatical and legal errors, but that still left the basic issue untouched of how practical it is to dip a wafer or even a cube of leavened bread into a chalice and then hand it to a communicant without it dripping, without contaminating the wine, or without hands touching which they are not supposed to do, notwithstanding the excessive detail in which the letter described how it might be done. One might have the strange impression that neither of Their Graces had ever presided at the Eucharist before. The country echoed to the sound of diocesan bishops, to their credit, incredulously choking, stressing to their clergy that they had seen nothing of this before it was published, and stating that it was probably better if everyone continue as they were. 

The idea that the Archbishops are now trying to make policy on such a practical matter without talking to anyone outside their own offices is quite bad enough, but they also took the opportunity to advise what is arguably a complete breach of canon law. Non-alcoholic wine is permissible at communion, the letter said. Now Canon B17 defines wine as 'fermented juice of the grape', and it's a nice matter whether it remains that once you artificially remove the product of fermentation, that is, the alcohol. I have since seen Anglicans anxiously debating what is, and isn't wine, or what is brought to the table, as it were, by the alcohol. Now sacraments must in some way represent the thing signified: the matter they employ must be capable of bearing the symbolic meanings and resonances of the act, and canonical statements of what is or is not valid matter represent the consensus of the mind of the Church about what can or can't do so. You could see debates about the matter of other sacraments - whether you can ordain women, or celebrate marriages with two people of the same sex - as subsets of this issue. What seems clear, however, is that two metropolitan bishops can't change the Mind of the Church on their own as though they were a sort of Anglican Papacy.

Meanwhile the Diocese of Manchester is advertising for seven full-time Area Dean positions. This is a diocese that can hardly pay its stipendiary curates. Traditionally Area Dean is a thankless job that clergy do in addition to being a parish incumbent, but over recent years it has been drawn upwards into the hierarchy, transmitting and implementing the management initiatives of the new breed of activist bishops who think their mission is to 'transform' their areas of charge. The new Area Deans in Manchester are to 'play a significant part in our exciting transformation', 'to implement pioneering and strategic decisions', 'bringing about change and transformation to the way we are church'. 

At St Stephen's House I did a long project on 'Catholic Mission' and envisaged a time when stipendiary clergy would be something like little bishops in their own areas, tying together a series of Christian communities which would not necessarily be parish churches. To be honest, this would not be all that very different from the situation in many big parishes in the past: my reflections were helped on their way by the weeks I spent on placement in the parish of Poplar, which before World War Two had half a dozen churches and about ten curates all presided over by the Rector from his Georgian pile next to All Saints Church. Moving towards seeing the Area Deanery as the fundamental organisational unit, rather than the traditional parish, isn't a million miles away from what I was thinking about some 16 years ago now. 

I wouldn't mind that, although I am feeling old enough and tired enough not to look forward much to reorganising the way I think in this way. If the bishops, if our bishop, would be honest and talk humbly, realistically and genuinely about a way of advancing which might stand a better chance of making sure we are still bringing people into contact with the God who loves them in generations to come (presuming there are any generations to come, which must always be a caveat in these times of climate emergency), I would give them a hearing. But what we get - and forgive me because I am just sounding off, really - is management guff and corporate bollocks, and I'm very much afraid I am coming to the conclusion that there are few less honest and straightforward groups of people than the episcopal bench of the Church of England. And as the letter on intinction shows, an episode every bit as messy as trying to dip a bit of bread in a cup of wine and then give it to someone, they're not even very good at it. 

Living in Love and Faith

It was an irony that for the very first time I was actually looking forward to attending one of the bishop’s Clergy Study Mornings, and couldn’t find the link to the Zoom gathering. Eventually Marion chased it down on the diocesan website, and I arrived twenty minutes late, just missing the opening worship: quel dommage.

The topic for our investigations was the Living in Love and Faith material produced by the Church of England in advance of a potential revision, or not, of its policies in the field of human sexuality. Chaired by the Bishop of Dorking, we spent a couple of hours hearing about how the material was devised, and engaging in a miniature version of the ‘course’ the Church envisages parishes and institutions following in order to take the process, the ‘conversation’, forward.

I think I will have to get the book associated with the LLF matter: in the little I've read I can already see both some coherent and wide-ranging thinking about the topic and also some obvious gaps, but even at this stage it is at least impressive that the Church is bothering to do this at all. Clearly it’s bothering to do it because it has despaired of reaching any sort of consensus by the normal means, scarred as it was by the terrible precedent of the ordination of women and their consecration to the episcopate, but never before, I think, has any religious organisation engaged in a similar exercise of exchanging different viewpoints and experiences, in such detail and at such luxuriating length. The videos we were shown bear testimony to the colossal variety of personal narratives which disrupt any simple set of categories we might want people to fit into. Nevertheless, we all suspect that we are unlikely to do more than learn to disagree with one another less vituperatively – which is not nothing, as Cardinal Ratzinger would have put it, but is a limited result.

I am not sure what we will do with all this at Swanvale Halt. When I first came here a gay male couple were part of the congregation, though they split up within a year or so and disappeared. I gather that when they first joined the church my predecessor had given the assembled masses a lecture from the pulpit (metaphorically, if we had had a pulpit) to the effect that she would come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who gave them a hard time. The collection of grey heads looked at her nonplussed, as nobody had thought of doing so. Their main concern was, and is, managing to walk round the corner to the shops and back without falling over, and what anyone else gets up to in their bedrooms is something they are perfectly happy not to think about at all.