Everyday Extraordinary

As we've remarked before, just a short walk can reveal worthwhile sights and experiences. 

Nothing more dramatic than a pile of logs presents a sort of beauty:

At a sluice diverting some of the river into a backwater, the water is slow and swirling to the south, and tempestuous to the north, and the footbridge is decorated with fishy stencils:

But someone has decorated a nearby wartime pillbox with quite different images. The crescent-star-and-serpent must mean something. The eeriness is heightened by the fact that they can only really be seen with the aid of a torch ...

A Circular Book

When did Geza Vermes’s Jesus and the World of Judaism find its way onto my bookshelves? It dates to 1983, has some loose pages (more since I actually tried to read it) and however long it is since it appeared in the library I have never really consulted it. As it turns out, its outlook makes it of very limited use and I have seldom come so close to simply abandoning a book!

Geza Vermes’s personal history is illuminating: he came from a Jewish background and spent time as a Roman Catholic priest (a member of an order specifically dedicated to praying for the conversion of the Jews) before renouncing Christianity and turning to a non-religious sort of Judaism later in life, and teaching at Newcastle followed by Oxford. At the time Vermes was writing, it was easy enough when reading any sort of Biblical exegesis to ignore the fact that Jesus was a Jew; he was part of shifting that perception, but it was pretty clear that he came to the conclusion that Jesus was only a Jew.

I say ‘came to the conclusion’, but it wasn’t a position drawn from evidence: it was a belief derived from Vermes’s own conflicts and then read into the texts he knew so well. His work was part of the ‘quest for the historical Jesus’ movement that tried to uncover what we could know for certain about him; all very well, but there is an unavoidable circularity: the evidence you deem admissible in this search is already pre-determined by who you think Jesus is. So for Vermes, Jesus is a 1^st-century Jewish reformer and nothing more; anything which suggests otherwise (the Gospel of John, the Epistles) is ‘Hellenic’ influence imposed on his original, and very limited, message, and should be discounted. Even material in Matthew, Mark and Luke which tends to hint at a divine significance to Jesus’s acts is also to be excised as representing later impositions by Christians. Once you’ve done this, you examine what’s left to find your ‘historical Jesus’ and, wonder of wonders, you get a Palestinian preacher with nothing groundbreaking to say at all: you wonder why anyone got so excited about the man. Again and again, Vermes says in various ways ‘we can trust that this passage or saying is authentic because it conflicts with the doctrine of the Church’. You can see the point of that, but its inverse – that anything in the New Testament which coincides with the doctrine of the Church must therefore be a false imposition – leads to the dismantling of the very texts you claim to investigate. The trouble is (as scholars have pointed out increasingly over the last few decades) that all our evidence about Jesus is already part of the Church’s proclamation, part of the kerygma, and you can’t disentangle him from the doctrinal presentation of him. Vermes recognises this objection, even in 1983, but swipes it away as it tends to undercut his entire project and leave him with nothing to say.

I didn’t entirely give up on Jesus and the World of Judaism because I realised there are chapters which usefully talk about the contribution of Jewish texts to understanding his context; but I did, at one point, literally shut the book in frustration and put it to one side. It was here, as Vermes discusses the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. For him, any hint of patience, or waiting, of readiness or preparation for the Judgement, indicates a later interpolation by a Church facing up to the indefinite delay of the Parousia. It can’t come from Jesus, it just can’t:

The parable of the ‘wise’ virgins – supposedly wise, but to my mind cunning and selfish – reflects an insistence on the part of the church to be constantly ready; it contributes nothing to an active participation in the work for the kingdom of God … Did Matthew or his later editor not realise that this parable is a travesty of Jesus’s teachings on generosity and confident prayer contained in the same gospel?

And so this approach leads you not to try to work out what Jesus’s teachings were from the texts, but to judge the texts by the version of Jesus you want to believe in. The writers of the texts are fools, who know Jesus so much less well than you do. I'm afraid I can see little reason for me spending time on this.

It All Becomes Clear

My grapplings with technology are a minor theme of this blog and last year I related how my main image-processing program, CorelDraw, decided that it was no longer prepared to speak to Windows 10 and I would have to bring in its younger cousin which was better equipped for the system's new demands. 

I mentioned this to Dave, the Diocesan Mission Enabler, a few weeks ago. Our conversation was one of the earlier ones he had with parish incumbents, calling round to find out how things were going. It was a congenial enough chat, in which I described how the life of the church had developed since the pandemic began, the mixture of remote and in-person worship (when that was possible) and the sense that for a long while people had really been just hanging on and coping, but since the summer had gradually been finding it easier to manage again, negotiating their way around the maelstrom of change.

Some while later Dave sent me an email letting me know about an alternative to CorelDraw, Canva. 'Lots of churches use it', he told me. Canva turned out to be an online image-processing and design package, which is all very well but as your designs and documents are pinged into The Cloud to be stored (though you can download them) and I've already paid not only through the nose but other orifices for it, Canva doesn't bring me much advantage.

Lots of churches do use it, though. I suddenly realised that all the wonderful shiny posters and fliers I've seen on church websites, noticeboards and leaflet holders look so professional not because they've been designed by members of congregations up and down the diocese who work in advertising or something, but because they've been based on the templates Canva supplies. I'm not sure whether my feelings of relief at not being so inferior after all are outweighed by the sense that it's a bit of a cheat ...

Weather Change

Who can resist snow photos? I can't.

A friend of mine confesses to not usually liking snow but being quite excited to see it this morning: I think it's because anything breaks the monotony at the moment. Snow is irresistible but I am also quite happy to see the back of it as its appeal quickly wears thin once a chilly night coats the pavements in a crackly carapace of ice.

Narrow Escape Parts One and Two

A little while ago I mentioned the Instructions of Fr Reginald Somerset Ward. In a little tract on 'Gratitude' he advises Christians should identify at the end of each day a specific list of mercies for which to thank God. Mine today will have to include the occasions when, on my newsletter delivery round, I almost fell off my bicycle - once on mud by the roadside, and once on a slippery drain cover. I'm not sure these will count as one item or two, though: I suppose it will depend how many more I can think of.

This isn't my current location, or even my current bicycle. On this long-ago occasion, the thing I was grateful for was that it didn't fall off the bridge.

Musique Concrete

It has taken several years for me to finish the task of working through the draft book of music for the sacred Office I use, or try to use, making sure the office hymns are in order, there are antiphons attached to all the proper days, and the psalms are properly pointed for the plainchant tones; and thanks to the epidemic I have achieved it! A copy now sits in my house and another in the Lady Chapel at church to be used when appropriate (that is, when I am alone).

There are, as far as I know, no official tones or music set for much of the material in Common Worship, so I have them made up myself. This process has been made a bit easier once I discovered, in brief, how plainchant works, and the antiphons, in particular, make more sense now.

That doesn't mean I know how they go. It's all very well sitting playing around with my borrowed piano and coming up with something that sounds nice to me, but if I am going to use them - even on my own - it will take rehearsal time first and I wouldn't recommend anyone being present until then!

Brazen Images

Mr Jenrick, the Communities Secretary, thinks that monuments to controversial figures 'are almost always best explained and contextualised, not taken and hidden away'. Oddly, I feel that they are almost always best taken and hidden away, not explained and contextualised. We've talked about this before, but the government's proposed legislation in this area brings the topic up again. 

Of course when you put it as I have deliberately done, my position sounds entirely unreasonable. In fact I would much rather monuments and statues were only removed after proper public debate and accountable decision-making, because that's how we develop our self-understanding as a society. However it's worth remembering that the authorities in Bristol had talked for years about de-plinthing Edward Colston, the removal of whom sparked this whole current debate off, and had never quite got round to it. Equally, any fair-minded person baulks a bit about our public art being subject to the passing whims and enthusiasms of crowds and 'town hall militants', as Mr Jenrick puts it, but we should recall that it is often passing whims and enthusiasms which result in statues being there in the first place. Coming from a background in history I'm fairly relaxed about public art changing on a regular basis as this is what's always happened, and who may move from hero of the decade to persona non grata is an interesting reflection of social change, rather than an outrage to be resisted. 

One of my favourite instances comes from that comfortingly mad tome A272, an Ode to a Road by Dutch folly enthusiasts Pieter and (the late) Rita Boogart. On their journey along and around that thoroughly English thoroughfare they came across, in monumentally bronze equestrian form, Field Marshal Lord Strathnairn. This statue was originally erected in 1895 in Knightsbridge, outside Harrods, in fact, but was eventually removed as an obstruction to traffic. It was spotted in a scrapyard in 1965 by a Mr Northcott who was told that if he could move the damn thing, he could have it for free, and move it he did, to Foley Manor near Liphook where it stands resolutely if irrelevantly at the entrance to the drive. Like almost every military man of his day, Hugh Rose, 1st Baron Strathnairn, was implicated in a variety of Imperial escapades including the Crimean War and suppressing the Indian Revolt, but on a personal level seems to have been quite a good egg to judge by some of the anecdotes concerning him. In his current location, though, the locals have neither knowledge of nor interest in the identity and achievements of this once-lauded general. They know him only, so the Boogarts relate, as 'The Banana Man', owing to the fruit-like appearance of his plumed helmet. In his case 'contextualisation' would be rather a shame.

The closest public statues to me are in Guildford, and it's interesting to think of the objections that might be raised to any of them. The Surrey Scholar by Alan Sly (2002) at the bottom of the High Street depicts a young chap running to a lecture, and the only quibble might be against his sex: perhaps a female scholar would be preferable. Then there are two sculptural depictions of Alice of Wonderland fame, Alice and the White Rabbit (Edwin Russell, 1984) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (Jeanne Argent, 1990); again, surely no problem with these unless we are very sensitive about the Revd. Charles Dodgson's familiar relationships with small girls. Somewhere on the University of Surrey campus nearby is a statue of Alan Turing, which I've never seen, and he is definitely safe.

I'm not quite so confident for George Abbot (Faith Winter, 1993). who stands at the top of the High Street, the only real and genuinely local figure of the lot: Turing stayed in Guildford in the summer as a child, which is a bit tenuous. Abbot (d.1633) has the distinction of being the only Archbishop of Canterbury to have killed someone while in office, and had the statue depicted him with one hand clapped to his mouth and a crossbow in the other having just realised he's accidentally despatched a deer-keeper while out hunting, it would be far more interesting than the staid figure we actually see. 

Seeing that ++Abbot had written a tome entitled Geography, or a Brief Description of the Whole World in 1599 I thought, well, a sixteenth-century clergyman almost certainly had some unpalatable opinions which might be found therein, and so it proved. The African races get off lightly, Abbot merely remarking that the inhabitants of the coastal states of West Africa are 'blacker than all other men', but he describes the Jews as 'runnagates', 'scattered upon the face of the earth', 'a curse upon them and their children for killing Christ'; and as for the Muslims, his salacious account of the founding of Islam and the character of its prophet culminates in the statement that he was 'much given to lasciviousness, and all uncleanness of body, even with very beasts'. Oh dear. You won't tell anyone, will you, so poor Archbishop Abbot can remain unmolested on his plinth?

Real and Unreal Music

Musical instruments, crocheted depictions of the Nativity, Swahili with Duolingo – how many ways have people used their enforced quietude, if they’ve been able to muster up the enthusiasm, over the last ten months or so? (I haven’t). Perhaps it’s been the unusual circumstances of the time which have prompted PJ Harvey to crack on with a project her chief lieutenant John Parish mentioned as far back as 2016, the reissue of her back catalogue. Starting in July, each album has reappeared, tidied up and accompanied by a vinyl issue and, in most cases, the demo versions of the album songs. We already had these for PJH’s first album, Dry from 1992, as the first 5000 copies had been issued with an extra CD containing the demos, and in 1993 Rid of Me had been succeeded by 4-Track Demos which included some of the preliminary versions of that album's tracks along with a range of other songs.

The demo versions for Dry were already two years old and more by the time the album was released, and they are interesting because Harvey's voice has developed audibly by the time of the final treatments; some of the demos for the songs on Rid of Me sound completely different from the album, recorded as they were not in Steve Albini’s snowbound Minnesota hideaway studio in an atmosphere of exhaustion and hysteria but by Harvey on her own in a flat over a restaurant in West Bay, with bits from her landlord’s mother-in-law’s collection of old Georgian 78s added. But most of the demos that are being released now aren’t really that much removed from the album versions; we know that, at least for To Bring You My Love and Is This Desire? the final recordings mostly lifted her vocals direct from the demos with the odd tweak here and there.

The main exceptions are some of the tracks on Is This Desire? For this album Harvey was experimenting with electronic and synthesised sounds and in a couple of instances followed them to very heavy places indeed; ‘unlistenable’ has been a word not only confined to some critics but even current in the fanbase, and I appear to be the only person on earth who likes the brutal, unforgiving soundscape of ‘Joy’ whose savage nihilism appeals to a dark little corner of my heart. Obviously this couldn’t be produced live, and concerts included a version which was utterly different, featuring a muscular guitar riff and drums that were almost jazzy, while Harvey virtually reproduced the album vocal, like two separate songs being performed in parallel.

Well, the real fans now have their undiluted versions of the songs, which feature just Harvey and her guitar; and many clearly prefer them, while I find it as hard to see the point in those as I do in that of buying expensive vinyl discs just for the clunk and the hiss. There’s an issue here about authenticity, which has always been a valuable quality in ‘rock’, and which is almost the feature, allegedly, which distinguishes it from ‘pop’. Authentic rock has got guitars in it and connects with some sort of experience, though applying it to Polly Jean Harvey who has always fought very shy indeed of any sort of identification between her music and her own story is problematic if not completely beside the point. Perhaps, even when we accept that there's no genuine experience in an artwork - especially music - we still want to get close to the authentic personality, and we the idea that the initial sketches for Harvey's work, just her and a guitar, allow us to draw nearer than the finished treatments do; and vinyl is more authentic than a download. We'll see what happens when she gets round to reissuing 2007’s nightmarish White Chalk, which didn’t have a single guitar on it. (And of course what all of us really want are the b-sides, out-takes and musical doodlings which the maestra must have kicking about somewhere).

I haven’t bought any of the reissues, with one exception: the demo of ‘The Dancer’, the final track from To Bring You My Love. This is because it is a genuinely separate experience from the album version. Across a quarter of a century some more astute critics have pointed out that, far from being ‘Americana’ as lazier writers have described the rest of the recording, ‘The Dancer’ is more influenced by flamenco than anything else. And the demo has Harvey whooping, clapping and clacking castanets: the song’s overwrought Gothicism, the devastating, gut-shredding climax to the album’s haunted soundscape, emerges in the demo as a joke, a deft wielding of cliché, a glorious pastiche. Talk about authenticity. 

Against Debate

A couple of days ago Dr Sam Wells of St Martin-in-the-Fields read a Thought for the Day considering certain people being banned from certain social media platforms, and why it was fundamentally a Bad Thing. It was a classic liberal defence of the power of reasoned discussion, of debate and the exchange of ideas shining light into dark places, the kind of reasoning a reasonable person might advocate.

As we live in an age of polarisation some of the most interesting thinking at the moment tackles how people fall into unreason. A little while ago (also, inevitably, on Radio 4) Sarah Dunant described how she’d seen her hairdresser for the first time after the Spring lockdown and discovered that during the time shut up at home he’d transformed from someone who evinced no interest in politics to a teeterer on the brink of QAnon and other fringe ideas, beliefs which he didn’t swallow whole, but felt there was something to. Not so long ago I had to do Prevent training as chaplain to the Air Cadets locally; like everything else at the moment it consisted of watching a couple of videos and answering a multiple-choice quiz you’d have to be remarkably inattentive to fail, but at least it discussed the various circumstances which might propel individuals to fall into extremist ideologies either of Islamism or the far-Right, the common factors which, quite apart from the actual belief in question, lead someone to view these overarching explanations of what was wrong with the world and with their lives: how they become committed to them as essential constituents of who they are.

One of the relevant articles a friend shared via LiberFaciorum asked why Christians are prone to conspiracy theories. Among the broader reasons why such theories take hold, the writer reckoned, was narcissism: the feeling that, by subscribing to the non-mainstream truth you are privy to superior knowledge and understanding, which makes you superior to non-believers. Perhaps Christians, as well as people who think they are marginalised more generally, are primed for that sort of thinking. In fact, as we know, not all Christians go down these rabbit holes and I do wonder whether they are really statistically more likely to do so even if atheists might see an exact parallel between, say, the unreason of QAnon and the unreason of believing in the Resurrection. I think, rather, that Christianity is, to an extent, inoculated against grand, maximalist narratives of unreason partly because the Lord himself is notoriously hard to pin down ideologically, focusing instead on human relationships, states of mind, and standing with God, but more importantly because the Faith rests on such a small, single, self-contained event: what happened to one man two thousand years ago. You can believe he was raised from the dead, and this does not require you to form any opinion about who runs the world, or why, or who should do. It does not unproblematically map onto other beliefs, though it can.

Recently I was sent almost a full set of the Instructions of the great Anglican spiritual director, Fr Reginald Somerset Ward, and have been reading through them. In the most recent one I’ve read, he discusses the distinction between opinion and conviction, using the story of the Blind Man in chapter 9 of the Gospel of John, whose conflict with the authorities moved him, says Somerset Ward, from an opinion about Jesus to a conviction:

An opinion is a view held as probable but based on grounds which are short of proof. A conviction is a settled belief so final that it is accepted as absolutely true by its owner. … We are constantly observing facts and people around us and trying to work them into some logical scheme … These opinions seem to us probable although we cannot prove them. We do not in practice give very great weight either to our own opinions or the opinions of others; we are ready to lay them aside or to alter them under the pressure of events or feelings … In contrast to this, convictions have the highest value in any life; we are prepared to sacrifice almost anything in preference to them; we expect them to be recognised by others as unalterable; they dominate our actions and colour our whole view of life. … We can change our opinions without any sense of guilt, we can even act in a manner contrary to our opinions without feeling that we are doing wrong … In the case of convictions we believe that the highest spiritual authority of our lives in in question … to deny them is a high treason of the spirit, a breaking of the law of life. … There is always some form of struggle before a conviction takes shape, an intellectual struggle or an emotional struggle … It was in this manner that the Blind Man attained his conviction [about Christ].

Reason is the proving-ground of opinion: individuals can debate and perhaps shift each other’s views when they don’t have the whole of their identity at stake. But reason can do little with convictions in Fr Somerset Ward’s sense. Those represent deep decisions which the individual has taken long before any debate happens, and to deny any aspect of them will deny a profound element of who they are. So Trump supporters, or Brexiteers, or Haute-Remainers for that matter, are absolutely impervious to detailed arguments refuting this or that aspect of their position: they can always find an alternative explanation, one which comes not from a place of reason but from the basic commitment the person has made, like reinforcements sent to remote outposts of a battle line from the fortress far, far in the rear. People like this need engaging with on a far more intense and deep level (which, for all its faults, is what the Prevent initiative recognises).

Timothy Snyder, professor of politics at Yale, was also on the wireless this morning making three points about all this: that fascism can happen anywhere and longstanding democratic institutions are no guarantee that it can’t; that the collapse of truth is the first stage in the rise of fascism; and that the bigger the lie a malign politician tells, the deeper it draws in the people who have identified with that figure – the less amenable to reason they become because the more reality they have already discounted.

So don’t be deceived about what free speech can, and can’t do. Shine a light onto a rock and it remains a rock; if the rock is a problem, you either have to smash it or cast it into a place of darkness – which is only one of the reasons I don’t think of myself as a liberal anymore.

Shutting the Doors Again

Thankfully the fundraising thermometers you used to see quite frequently outside churches, revealing how far away the congregation of St Shoddy's was from plugging the leaks in the roof, seem to be much rarer now. Over recent days I've felt rather like putting one of my own outside the church in Swanvale Halt, detailing the latest local COVID infection rate, as I have checked the government website daily to see how things are going. On Sunday we ticked above our self-defined trigger point of 500 cases per 100,000 population average across the seven Medium Layer Super Output Areas that (in my opinion, playing epidemiologist as I am apparently supposed to do) form the Hornington 'catchment area'. The PCC voted to close yesterday, and today the Bishop confirmed the decision. 

I didn't really feel the relief I expected given how tense I have been since it became clear that this was on the cards. I think this has been because the last few services in the church have had such a warm and devout atmosphere, possibly due to people being aware that this was something they valued and which was probably about to be denied to them. That's a useful sensation which I'm trying to encourage!

Ironically yesterday and today the figures slipped back to 498. Perhaps we have hit a peak after all ... but I'll need more data before I believe that.

A Name to Note

Under current circumstances I can't get very far with the Anglo-Catholic history project, because it's a bit difficult getting into churches and in fact going anywhere that's too far to walk to. All I can do is scout out the website of some churches and associated information. 

I've already mentioned here the church of St Peter, Hascombe, a dizzy Tractarian jewelbox designed by Henry Woodyer. The Catholic tradition at Hascombe didn't halt in the 19th century, as there are photos of incumbents wearing birettas in the 1930s (as my predecessor at Swanvale Halt did at the same time). But I'm becoming more interested, too, in the role of the man responsible for the rebuilding of the ruinous former church, Vincent Musgrave. Fr Musgrave came from a clerical family: his father Charles was Vicar of Halifax and Archdeacon of Craven. He himself had had a first incumbency at Mattersey in Nottinghamshire, and spent the rest of his ministry at Hascombe. He wasn't in the position to found daughter churches as his slightly earlier contemporary John Brownlow Chandler at Witley did - more about him another time - and instead concentrated on schools. He was part of the committees that set up Cranleigh School and St Catherine's School in Bramley, both of which ended up having something of a Catholic tradition: I will have to see the splendid chapel at Cranleigh, and Bramley I had the chance to visit a few years ago; Musgrave gave an amazing reredos, designed by Kempe and carved in Oberammergau, to the chapel at St Catherine's in memory of his wife in 1903. The role of schools in the Surrey church landscape is something to which I will have to give more thought.

In a little book describing the rebuilding of St Peter's, Fr Musgrave makes a statement that probably tells us why he became a Tractarian: early in the 19th century, he believed, 'through the Abuses of the Episcopate, and the worldliness of the Clergy, religious feeling had sunk to a low ebb', inplying he was part of the generation to restore it. I wonder whether he included his uncle, Archbishop of York Thomas Musgrave, among the Abusive Bishops.

Epiphany 2021

My first Epiphany in Swanvale Halt was celebrated in snow and ice; I would happily have swapped the pandemic conditions of 2021 for that. But ten of us managed to meet and celebrate, and pray especially for our Orthodox friends who keep January 6th as a higher and holier festival than December 25th.

I experimented with using my new laptop to record, and in fact livestream, the service - not that I told anyone else that it was being beamed onto Youtube! It worked, but the sound was muddy and the video indistinct. I have asked my friend Cara the vicar of Emwood's husband for advice as he is a wiz with these things and he has recommended a nice neat webcam which I think I may well ask the diocese for help with buying, given the price. Oh, nothing about this is easy.

As is customary (here, anyway), chalk was blessed and taken home to mark our door lintels, or anywhere else suitable. 'Mine are all white plastic', Martha from the flats next to the church told me. 'I'll have to be creative.'

Hitting the Bar

The Government’s decision to allow public worship to continue even under the current ‘lockdown’ caught me so much by surprise that, reading the details on Monday night only from the BBC website, I changed the church website to inform the public that services were suspended only to have to change it back after finding the actual regulations. I am deeply torn. If I were responsible for public health policy, I would have closed places of worship in Tier 4; but equally I know that worship at Swanvale Halt is as safe as anything else you might choose to do, including doing your shopping at the cramped village supermarket or sending your children to school. More importantly, I've argued over and over again in all sorts of contexts that private judgement is hazardous. We take decisions, these sorts of decisions anyway, as a whole society so that they carry weight and authority. People are different, so their own individual decisions will inevitably lead them in awkwardly different directions.

Not only have I met the entire range of opinions from ‘churches should have been closed since March, it’s obvious’, through to ‘churches don’t have to close, so we shouldn’t, it’s obvious’, but I also find that people almost universally find it very hard to distinguish between the risk for individuals in a particular setting, and wider considerations of public health. So I am sure that coming to worship at Swanvale Halt church carries a relatively low risk of infection, say, 1 in 300. Every time you attend, the risk is the same: it’s always 1 in 300. But add up a whole set of ‘attendance events’ over the course of a pandemic and it will be much higher. It’s like tossing a coin: every time, the chance of getting Heads is 50% (or as near to 50% as makes no odds), and always will be, but the chance of getting Tails at some stage in a long run of throws is much greater than that. Multiply the ‘attendance events’ across thousands of churches, perhaps, and someone is going to be infected, somewhere, sometime. It could be you. People in general seem to find that very hard to grasp: talk to them about it and they almost invariably gravitate back to the question of how safe it is to do this particular thing in this particular setting.

Not only did the Government throw the choice whether to stay open or close back to us, so did the hierarchy of the Church of England. The Church’s response to the lockdown announcement came from the Bishop of London, former Chief Nurse Sarah Mullaly: ‘the government has chosen to allow public worship to continue’, she said, a weird phrase which sort of implied that the bishops wanted to disassociate themselves from the decision without publicly dissenting from it, ‘but we understand any churches that decide to suspend it’. I was frankly furious at being put in this position. I’m not a virologist, and, going back to the previous paragraph, while I might be qualified to decide on the safety of the venue I’m responsible for, I am definitely not qualified to take decisions on matters of public health. That’s the government’s job, and at least the bishops could give me a steer.

It took a day before the bishops began writing to their clergy. ‘The government has calculated that only a tiny number of infections have occurred in worship settings’, +Andrew told us in an ad clerum. Other bishops were prepared to quote figures: 47 since the pandemic began, apparently. This at least drew a little of my anger as it demonstrated that there was evidence behind the decision, and someone was asking the question I wanted asked. But it didn’t resolve the matter. First, the figure of 47 is misleading as very few people know how they were infected; secondly, we don’t know how the new version of the virus changes things; and third, there’s still the public-health landscape to take into account.

I proposed – and the PCC accepted – that we should suspend public worship when local infection rates topped 500 per 100,000, and then resume when they fell below 300 for a fortnight. Then a church member pointed out that you can drill down to a lower level of data than the local authority here and that shows, in our area, that infections are considerably lower in Swanvale Halt’s immediate vicinity than elsewhere in the district. So I ended up defining a region of seven Middle-layer Super Output Areas (basically, postcode areas amended to net roughly 7000 souls each) based on Hornington, the local ‘catchment area’ that includes everyone who uses the supermarkets and other facilities in town. That’s our Valley of Decision.

Up the figures tick every day: we’re at 401 today, as opposed to 368 yesterday. We celebrated the Holy Epiphany today, but I suspect Sunday will be our last face-to-face worship for some time. 

New Year Navigation

Posting about COVID restrictions is thoroughly uncongenial today so here are some pictures from my alleged week off between the First and Second Sundays of Christmastide! They were taken on two separate occasions but the conditions were pretty similar both days - cold, dull, and damp underfoot.

Widelake Park has become a site of memorialisation. I can't remember seeing the collections before, but this one was clearly there for at least the second anniversary of the death of a child.

I liked the textures of this ruinous roof.

The dual bridge - one over a disused railway, the lower spanning an old canal bed - fascinated me. I could hear rough voices beneath the canal bridge, presumably from trolls. In the arch of the rail bridge you can glimpse the cheerful visage of what might be taken as a troll, but I think is in fact a tidied-up graffito phallus. Phalluses are perhaps not cheerful enough.

Chinthurst Tower - a folly I've visited before but on this occasion the focal point of my otherwise unfocused journey, and of many other people's as it happened.

This incredible and frankly baleful lopped tree is in fact two trees: as far as I could see, a birch growing inside the living carcass of a willow. 

Christmas Redux

In years to come we will recall the expedients to which we were driven in order to maintain the life of God's people and the connection with Him of the community more widely. I will certainly remember sitting at our 'Mini-Crib Services' on Christmas Eve, juggling the visual and audio input and my aging laptop and iPod providing them. I may even remember how Dennis from the congregation photographed me and managed to give me a very Bacchanalian crown of Advent greenery.