A Scrap of Grass in East London

Not my boots - apart from being black, my footwear has always been decidedly un-Goth - but a sign of a modest venturing into a social world which has been impossible for a long while. A group of us gathered for a picnic in Greenwich on Saturday; I discovered I still feel quite cautious, and found myself automatically edging away from friends who might not see things the same way, though I only really felt particularly uncomfortable for a few minutes on a relatively crowded Jubilee Line. But this is only what we know, and if we didn't we should have done, that people are different.

Coming away, I realised the most pleasing thing about the picnic was having conversations, sometimes delving beneath the surface of ordinary social interactions to something more meaningful, which I could take notice of but which I wasn't expected to do anything with. It was taking an interest in people, but without being responsible for them in any way, and for me that's refreshing. I also realised how pleasant it is to have people bother to speak to oneself and that determines me to make a point of always doing so around Swanvale Halt. It's easy to see my own brief interactions with parishioners as superficial and not really achieving anything, but perhaps they do merely by the fact of happening, by making the point that the other person matters enough to speak to. I often forget that. 

The Very Hungry Caterpillars

At first I thought it was box blight, but then decided it wasn't: mind you, it took cutting out a chunk of the hedge to work out. It is, rather, damage caused by box-tree moth caterpillar and the tiny pests did their terrible work in no more than a week. I couldn't see any of the culprits themselves, but that's who they are. At the moment the more important box hedges, the ones that form 'The Maze' (not a very difficult maze) are not very affected and I do hope the chemical treatment will see the caterpillars off. By the winter they are all pupating so that may be a time for another blitz.

Conversely the oak tree which I am concerned about on an ongoing basis seems to have quite good leaf coverage this year after all. It's right beside the box hedges and offers a contrast to their current poorliness.

You Have A Choice Of Fabrics

On my church travels I always look to see whether the Blessed Sacrament is reserved in a particular church, and in doing so have come across an amazing variety of aumbries and tabernacles, from the Gothic sacramenthaus at Hascombe to a vast iron-bound oak door at West Byfleet. Ours here at Swanvale Halt is a humble affair dating from 1924 when we were given permission to reserve by Bishop Talbot.

Our former sacristan Mary was a saint, but she did have an unconscionable fondness for gold lamé. It appears on a number of items she made for the church including the curtain over the aumbry. At long last - eight years after Mary passed to her eternal reward - Penny who is also a dab hand with a needle and thread made us a new one in a less dramatic fabric. I do hope Mary understands!

Scrub-a-Dub

At the Museum our cleaner was Vin, who along with quite a chunk of the population of High Wycombe came from St Vincent, and who was laid-back to a stereotypically West Indian degree. Skimming a mop over the carpets was his speciality: perhaps the intention was to keep dust down, but we never questioned him about it. Spiders in corners had no fear of being badly disturbed. When you find a good cleaner, then, you do your best to retain them.

Pre-pandemic, our cleaner at church was Jenny who was efficient and obliging and would always try to come in for a special session if we needed it: her husband has health issues so she made herself scarce as soon as covid kicked off. Since then either I, Rick and Rob, or Sandra and Carrie in the office have done such cleaning as has been necessary but with some of our groups starting up again we need something a bit more systematic.

Our social media adverts for the position brought in four applications. Two were from young mums who were looking for a bit more flexible work; they were both married in the church (one by me, one by Marion) and both have had children baptised with us so I was disposed in their favour. One was a woman who had her own small cleaning company and was well set up with all the necessary requirements. The fourth was a girl who gave as her reference one of our local beat police officers. 'She's got her heart in the right place,' PC Terry told me, 'if I need to know what's going on on the estate I always ask her mum. She's 17 but looks about 12.' There was a fifth message from one company which just read 'We have contract cleaners for all your needs', and that was so lazy I just discarded it.

Sandra the office manager and I did a couple of interviews yesterday and as suspected Diana who has been doing this for years was clearly the best bet. She even told us how much she enjoys 'going into somewhere really dirty and leaving it clean', so we might have to get the Toddler Group, when there is a Toddler Group again, to be especially mucky just so she gets even more out of it. I felt it wasn't necessary to have someone who was 'passionate about cleaning' but Sandra pointed out that we've both had experience of cleaners who are not only not passionate but would observably rather be somewhere other than standing in a church hall with a bucket and a pair of marigolds. As for pastoral connections with the two young mums, it turns out I took Diana's mother's funeral eight years ago and baptised her granddaughter a couple of years after that!

The Dregs

Talking about spiritual disorder brings us to Mad Trevor. This afternoon I took him the third set of groceries in a week, and have said I won’t be doing it again until his benefits are paid next. I also paid off his phone bill. His current acute lack of money arose from two computer antivirus companies emptying his bank account: he accidentally took out subscriptions to them a year ago, when in fact he didn’t need either. He promises he will repay me: he is expecting up to £100K to be paid to him in the autumn by an insurance company who he has a funeral policy with. His social worker has warned him that no insurance company pays ‘loyalty bonuses’ of six figures to someone who’s had a £30-per-month policy for under a year, but he won’t be told. I tried to raise the subject today and he put the phone down. I don’t overly want to be repaid, even if I thought it was possible; what I want is not to be asked, though I know this is an instinct which reflects badly on me.

When I called round at the flat I knew Trevor was in as I could hear the keyboard (well, one of his keyboards) being played, but couldn’t make him hear: he had headphones on and I had to wait for a gap in the music. He was playing via the phone to a cousin who also plays the piano, someone who, the last time he was mentioned in conversation, Trevor characterised as a ‘fucking bastard’ and ‘a shit player, nothing compared to me’. But then I also found his crosses thrown outside on the gravel, presumably as a result of one of his at-least-weekly fallings-out with God.

Longstanding readers will be aware of my interactions with Trevor over the years. I am not sure my conclusion that nothing I can do, spiritually speaking, can help him, has improved our relationship, as such, though it has improved my sense of equilibrium. I strive not to argue, reason, cajole, or even comfort him, because ultimately his beliefs are so engrained that I can offer no comfort he will accept. When he is adamant that his dead Aunty Renee (mother of the forementioned cousin) is now an angel of such power that God is helpless to stop her attacking Trevor and taking away his musical abilities, there are no resources normal Christian belief can bring to bear even to make him feel better. If I tell him that's not how angels work, he insists that he is psychic, or a prophet, and knows I am wrong, so I end up limply remarking that I am sorry he has to put up with this. Seeing a soul so imprisoned is truly awful.

The consolation is that, however horrible the things he feels or experiences, he doesn’t feel them for long before moving on to something else; it’s taken me years to realise how childlike his responses are, flitting unreflectively from one thing to another, from rage to exultation to misery and back. There isn’t anything to be gained from engaging with any of them. How is it that I hadn't really cottoned onto this until so late in the day?

This means we’ve got very little now to talk about and our relationship is mainly reduced to him asking me for food. Today he included dishwasher tablets in the order which at least provided some variety. Given how resentful I get at his requests – a mirror-image of Trevor’s resentment aimed at God and the world in general – it was very uncomfortable when his social worker told me ‘I don’t know how he would manage without you helping him’. She is trying to arrange a legal guardianship for him so his finances will be dealt with and bills paid. In his more lucid times he knows he can’t manage, but she will have to catch him in one of those times to get him to sign the form. I hold onto that, as a possible light at the end of the tunnel.

The Fringes of the Weird

My spiritual director’s training incumbent had been a directee of Fr Reginald Somerset Ward (which takes us back quite a way as Fr Ward retired in 1958), and has pondered whether some of RSW’s attitudes have rubbed off on him as a result. He will sometimes solemnly inform me that ‘Fr Somerset Ward would have advised you to take up woodwork’ or the like. It was a surprise that, when we were once discussing a brush I’d had (at second hand, I hasten to stress) with some anomalous spiritual phenomena, he claimed that ‘Somerset Ward was sort of on the outer fringe of that kind of world’ – because there is no trace of it in Ward’s writings that I have ever found.

But – following on from some of my speculations about the Golden Dawn the other week – I discover that there is a certain family connection between that outré ritual magicking and Fr Ward’s sober English mysticism. I already knew that there were clergy involved in the Golden Dawn, most notably Revd William Ayton, who married the G.D.’s Supreme Magus Samuel MacGregor Mathers to his formidable wife Moina Bergson, and who, so WB Yeats alleged, lived in perpetual terror of his bishop discovering the alchemical laboratory in his cellar. However, I hadn’t quite twigged how one of the Golden Dawn’s offshoots, the Stella Matutina, was explicitly Christian in focus. Adherents of other religions could be members of the S.M., but whereas the parent order had thought of Christianity as one reflection of an overarching esoteric tradition, the Stella Matutina saw the occult work as an aspect of Christianity. As the head of the order, Robert Felkin, stated, the suggestion was that in addition to the open, exoteric doctrines of the Church, Jesus had communicated to the disciples secret techniques of spiritual working which the occult world had now rediscovered for the benefit of the human race. We now know that what various writers have hinted was indeed actually the case, that several brothers of the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield were members of the S.M., including Timothy Rees who eventually became Bishop of Llandaff and Frank Selwyn Bennett who was eventually Dean of Chester, as was – perhaps most surprisingly – the redoubtable Fr Alban Baverstock, twice Master of the Society of the Holy Cross. The old suggestion that there was a link between clergy who were members of the Stella Matutina and the founding of the Guild of St Raphael, which revived the healing ministry within the Anglican Church, seems to be true. When Felkin set up the branch of his Order in New Zealand – the Smaragdus-Thalasses Temple – not one bishop but several ended up as members, joining while they were bishops. That future mystical writer Evelyn Underhill was part of this was already well known, but the extent of clerical involvement is news.

We all know this because of a 2009 PhD Exeter PhD thesis by one Anthony Fuller, which traces particularly the links between Anglo-Catholics and these occult organisations. As Mr (I presume now Dr) Fuller points out, at the time the Community of the Resurrection wasn’t that large, and given that members of the Stella Matutina had to carry out a whole series of practical magical exercises and even take exams to advance in the order, its Superior, Fr Walter Frere – later Bishop of Truro – must have known what they were doing and, like them, seen no necessary contradiction between such occult antics and Christian orthodoxy, however weird we might find it now. Dr Fuller’s most striking claim is that some aspects of the original Golden Dawn’s ways of doing things were transferred from the Society of the Holy Cross – founded thirty years earlier – probably via CM Davies, an Anglican priest who had founded the SSC along with Fr Charles Lowder and others, but then renounced his orders. He wasn’t actually an adept of the G.D., but his wife was and he organised his own group for mystical Christian meditation, the Guild of the Holy Spirit. A bold and unprovable speculation; but not an unreasonable one.

So what of Fr Somerset Ward – neither, clearly, an occultist, nor even really an Anglo-Catholic (though definitely a Catholic Anglican)? His interest was in the English mystical tradition of the Middle Ages – the tradition of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and Mother Julian, all of whom were being rediscovered by Anglican Churchpeople in the later 1800s. Ordained in London in 1896 – at exactly the same time that MacGregor Mathers was at his height – Ward was part of a movement to develop a deeper, more serious spiritual life among Christians. He looked back to the Middle Ages for clues as how to do it, how to recover a tradition of spiritual working which was more than just Bible reading and creed-reciting and which was not a million miles from the sacramentalism championed by the first couple of generations of the Catholic Revival in the Church of England. Others, conversely, delved into more esoteric ways of doing things to achieve exactly the same. In a sardonic mood we might ascribe the occult’s appeal to some Anglo-Catholics to dressing-up and ritual complexity, but we could read it more generously as a reflection of a genuine religious instinct: a desire to go deeper into God, even (as in the Guild of St Raphael and the experiences of Agnes Sanford) to see the most altruistic and hopeful of one’s prayers answered, prayers for healing and reconciliation. Fr Somerset Ward appears in stone on the west front of Guildford Cathedral, and just feet away from him is Evelyn Underhill, who was definitely a member of the Stella Matutina and – so Golden Dawn writer Ithell Colquhoun wondered – whose vision that led to her conversion may have been sparked off by G.D. techniques.

AC Fuller states (though without any source) that an Anglican episcopal enquiry about the year 1939 resulted in an instruction that no ordained person should be a member of any occult society. This would have been five years after Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out was serialized in the Daily Mail and by then Middle England might have been very familiar with the motif of the clerical diabolist operating under the cover of collar and cassock. If this enquiry did actually happen (and I can’t uncover any actual evidence it did) the Anglican hierarchy would have realised, if they didn’t already know, that the picture wasn’t completely removed from the truth. In 1946 that odd figure Fr Lionel Smithett Lewis, vicar of Glastonbury, carried out the funeral service for Dion Fortune, who had always thought of herself as a Christian; by then, occultism wasn’t just a neutral spiritual technique. The ‘fringes’ of that world were far more clearly defined.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

After the midweek mass on Tuesday I went to the café opposite the church and sat in their 'garden room' to contemplate what I might say in the sermon for the recorded service this week. The cane chairs, basket in the centre, the bamboo growing up the wall and the rattan sunscreen all gave the space a vaguely colonial air, and I wondered whether I ought to have been wearing a sola topi rather than a panama. In the past I've been tempted to buy a sola topi but wasn't sure the number of occasions I might wear it would justify it. Strangely one of the congregation told me this week that he'd been at school with the explorer John Blashford-Snell who always wears a sola topi when he goes on expedition, which he still does in his eighties. I met him when I worked for the Royal Engineers which regiment he belonged to and where he was universally referred to as Blashers. 'That wasn't what we called him at school,' Francois told me, 'but I'd better not share that'.

As an elderly couple were leaving the café they came to speak to me, spotting my collar. They used to live in Swanvale Halt many years ago and were complimentary about the improvements since that time of which the café was one. Then the woman let on that she had predicted the arrival of the pandemic long before it happened. 'It's one of the Seven Plagues, you see'. Covid, unlike the first of the seven plagues of Revelation, isn't accompanied by sores and boils, but I thought it would be fruitless to get into that. Thankfully I had some coffee left.

Memento Mori

Ms Kittywitch has been in hospital with what, eventually, turned out to be a perforated bowel and an infection on top of it. This is no joke for anyone, let alone a longstanding heart-and-lung transplant survivor whose immune system barely functions. Lots of prayers were offered from various religious traditions and I found myself arguing to the Lord that I was sure her earthly work wasn’t done yet, and although there was a day or two early on when the doctors really thought it was unlikely she would make it, she’s now conscious, communicating, and posting on LiberFaciorum again.

Paradoxically my miserable nature prompts me always to reflect that my earthly work may well be coming to an end – although it does one good to remember that one’s time is indeed limited, this is a silly thought otherwise. Yet this dour consideration doesn’t have the effect it used to: once I would have said I was quite frightened by the prospect of dying, and now I don’t think I am. I find myself reflecting more and more frequently what a good and gentle life I have had which has furnished me with much to enjoy and be thankful for, and if I had to leave it tomorrow I wouldn’t feel hard done by in any way. Even the prospect of what might happen afterwards doesn’t impinge on that feeling of contentment too much as it has to be left to the God who is merciful and just and will do with me just what I, were I in my right mind and possession of all the facts, would choose to do with myself.

Yet it occurs to me that contentment is privileged. Oppressed people down the centuries have looked to the postmortem state to bring reward, restitution, and justice – or, at the very least, rest – and so the story in Luke 16 becomes naggingly appropriate: ‘remember, son, in life you received your good things, and Lazarus his evil things’.

I was in a far darker place some while ago when my daily Bible reading placed a line from Psalm 118 in front of me: ‘I will live, and declare the works of the Lord’. This is probably all I need to remember, and maybe I should carry it with me!

A Superfluity of Supply

A simple enough post: a book. It's the new register book in which we are encouraged to record marriage services that take place in the church, now we are not legally registering marriages but following the new, slightly involved process of downloading a 'Marriage Document', filling it out and then posting it off to the Registry once the service is completed. Note that in recent years the Registry had been issuing much, much thinner register books with spaces for, I think, twenty weddings so they stood some chance of seeing them again within the lifetimes of the peoples whose names were recorded there. The new book is a handsome volume and our sacristan went to collect it from the Cathedral bookshop a couple of days ago and it will take a century to fill it. I suppose that's an expression of confidence. 

Church Crookham

There must be few churches - certainly I have never been to one until I visited Church Crookham a few weeks ago - that house a shrine to Blessed John Keble. He worshipped here in late years, and a cross marks the spot. Or near the spot, as the church was cleared of pews in recent years, and wherever the holy posterior may have rested is not entirely clear.

Keble can only have made it to Church Crookham now and again, because by the time the church was built in 1841 he was already Vicar of Hursley and he remained that until he died. There is every reason to think All Saints' was a horrid redbrick fabrication at first, but its first incumbent, Anthony Cottrell Lefroy, Gent., was clearly not content to rest with that and employed Henry Woodyer to extend the chancel in 1877. A sanctuary rail followed in 1891, reredos in 1910, and the north aisle was extended to form a Lady Chapel in 1924. The Lady Chapel houses something pretty unusual in Guildford Diocese, a tabernacle, and something absolutely unique anywhere - a glass Madonna, installed - when? A question that must be answered another time.

There are other pleasures at Church Crookham including painted angels, a Rood window rather than a Rood Screen (Swanvale Halt has the same), and sgraffito murals in the chancel made by Heywood Sumner, son of the founder of the Mothers Union but who I first encountered in my teens as an archaeological illustrator, his meticulous pictures of the barrows and henges of Cranborne Chase making them into Tolkeinesque landscapes. Henry Woodyer would definitely have approved of what has been done with his chancel.

And while I couldn't see any sign of the nave altar they must surely use, I do like the fact that the wooden floor laid down in the latest refurbishment has been made such good use of, decorated with an inlaid Trinitarian emblem where the altar stands. An admirable church, then - something originally bog-standard, and turned really good. 

Bishop's Move

I learn that the Diocese of Rochester is seeking a new bishop. I will not bother applying as I doubt I could fit the requirements. The first half of the explicatory video is fair, though dull, enough. And then they get on to trying to explain the role of bishops to people who don't understand churchy language (weird, technical language, it seems, such as 'listening', or 'worship'). No, the huddled masses need to know that 'a bishop is a bit like the lead singer of a rock band. A front man, or woman, who shapes the band's identity and brand'.

Priorities, even strategic vision, I could understand. But identity? Brand? What brand could a diocese of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ conceivably have that it does not have by way of being a diocese of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ? A diocese is a jurisdiction of church communities in communion with a bishop who is, in theory, themselves in communion with the Church Catholic or as much of it as possible. It doesn't have a brand which is separate from the Church because it doesn't exist separate from the Church. 

If this reflects how the current bench of bishops understand their role, heaven help us all. I'm not sure they understand how rock bands tend to work either: the phrase 'splitting because of artistic differences' comes to mind.

Swanvale Halt Book Club: Elizabeth Rees, 'Early Christianity in South-West Britain' (Windgather Press, 2020)

My bad habit of looking sneakily at the end of a book first might have been helpful with Sister Elizabeth Rees’s Early Christianity in South-West Britain. I only cover it here at all because I was so eagerly looking forward to it, having discovered its existence a couple of months ago. It covers a lot of ground and includes welcome references to an impressive quantity of holy wells, but isn’t quite the definitive study I thought it might be.

Rees begins by looking at the evidence for early Christianity in the core area of what became Anglo-Saxon Wessex – Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire and Gloucestershire – examining Roman villas and possible early monastic sites, then sweeping down westwards into Cornwall with a few concluding details of the Channel Islands, the Life of St Samson of Dol forming the pivot between these two. And what emerges most strongly, perhaps, from the book is just how different from each other the experiences of these regions were: the River Tamar really did form a distinct dividing line between two markedly separate Dark Age cultural worlds, and although you can find elements of each in the other – there are big oval Celtic churchyards in Somerset, and Roman sites in Cornwall – they are very much not the model. In most of England, Christianity seems to have been grafted onto the superstructure of sub-Roman Britain, its villa estates and road network; Rees cites the many examples we know, several of which are of course from Dorset, of villas being adapted for Christian worship or the remains of Roman civilisation being used as a framework for Christian institutions. In Cornwall, contrastingly, the Roman sites are coastal trading stations and military settings rather than housesteads, and early Christian establishments fitted instead into a shifting landscape of small monastic sites and individual holy people living alongside farms in a far less ordered pattern.

The Life of St Samson probably dates to the seventh century based on earlier materials, so it predates Bede’s Life of St Cuthbert, at least in part; it’s the earliest depiction we have of the existence of a Christian holy person in western Britain, and shows how unstructured it could be. At various times in his life, Samson was a monk, abbot, bishop, hermit, and wandering sage, moving repeatedly back and forth between these categories. It isn’t even very clear how he became a bishop: he was Abbot of Caldey for 18 years, then spent a while as a hermit before being drafted in as Abbot of Llanilltud Fawr, and acquired a pointy hat (metaphorically; it wouldn’t have been that pointy in the 6th century) some time around then. Samson was the very archetype of the wandering bishop-monk who travelled from South Wales to Cornwall and then to Brittany, interacting with other holy people, family members who often became church-founders themselves, and the nobility, and his story makes clear how these three areas were highly interconnected, in some ways a single domain, with far more links between them than any had with the regions to their east. It exemplifies the processes at work, and the nature of early Christianity in Cornwall.

Everywhere Samson went, there were holy wells: springs rose miraculously in his hermitage sites, including one at ‘Samson’s fort’, his retreat after he left Caldey, a location which is now unidentifiable. But although Elizabeth Rees mentions lots of wells, the book gives no clear idea of how they may have fitted into the processes she’s describing. Were they baptismal springs hallowed for (or by) the evangelisation of a district; were they the water supplies for hermits or monasteries, later sanctified by tradition; or a bit of both? What’s the relationship between the numerous small chapels of the Cornish religious landscape, and the parish system? How did the structures, institutions and methods of the Dark Age Church differ either side of the Tamar? In her very final couple of paragraphs Sister Elizabeth delivers, basically, a review of the entire work: ‘a survey, but not a synthesis … [because] the pre-Saxon evidence is fragmentary’; fair enough, but a synthesis is exactly what we want.

Have a look at Rees’s summary of what we know about the possible monastic site of St-Antony-in-Meneage in Cornwall. This appears to be a foundation of a local holy man, Entenin; its well is mentioned in the first book on holy wells I ever bought, John Meyrick’s A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Holy Wells of Cornwall from 1982, though he doesn’t include what Rees says is St Entenin’s other well at Ventoninney in Probus parish. A fortified site showing continuity from the Iron Age to sub-Roman times is just half a mile away. Rees catalogues all this. But how does it fit into Cornwall as a whole? What’s the sequence of events here, and elsewhere? The role of a historian is precisely to make good guesses based on what we know.

The book has the odd mistake – Rees describes and gives a photo of St Carantoc’s Well at Crantock, saying that ‘its beehive-shaped top, a later addition, has now been removed’, which is news to everyone I’ve asked including people who saw it a couple of weeks ago – and the occasional weird digression. The account of the Bodmin Gospels and the manumission of slaves recorded in it does shed some light on the functioning of a late Saxon monastery, but the discourse on Cornish bagpiping in the section on Davidstow is quite the most bizarre byway I think I’ve ever seen in an academic work. Unfortunately the reverend author herself died recently so she isn’t around to ask what her thinking was.

So, in short, I may keep on thinking about minsters, well-chapels, and wandering bishops. We haven’t got the bottom of this matter yet.

Corpus Christi on the Quiet

Several of my clerical colleagues shared videos or images of their celebrations of Corpus Christi celebrations on Thursday – grand church settings, socially-distanced processions in the streets around, altars laden with candles and flowers. At Swanvale Halt, for the second year, it was just me singing Evensong and offering Benediction. 

Even something so apparently uncomplicated has the potential to go awry. Having emailed and put on the website an order of service, I remembered too late that I’d thought it would be nicer, given that we were using the old 1662 Evensong pattern, to use the Prayer Book versions of the Psalms – but that the printed copy I was using in church still had the Common Worship texts. The microphone never seems to work that well no matter where I put it. Finally it only struck me that the relative positions of the camera, the Blessed Sacrament, and me, might mean a viewer would see more of my head than the Sacramental Presence of the Lord, not something you can check easily alone. But people should still have had a glimpse of Him.

To be honest though I have always enjoyed Benediction it’s never been a big part of the diet in this church. Its incumbents had a hard enough time trying to ease the Eucharist into being the central part of worship every Sunday – a process which took fifty years or so regardless of all their efforts – and by the time we entered the central stream of Anglican Catholicism in the late 1960s that stream was full of post-Vatican 2 enthusiasm and gaily junking such picturesque observances as Benediction anyway. Although my dreams include parading round the streets of the parish with Jesus beneath a canopy surrounded by so much incense you can’t see, we’re not going to get there. Just putting down markers for the Real Presence is enough.

Views of the Human

An email arrives from the rector of Ashlake, who is coordinating the local engagement with Living in Love and Faith. There will soon be an LLF introductory course to which all the Deanery churches are invited to send up to four people; the first date, typically, falls when I’m on holiday. Meanwhile it is the month of Pride and my LiberFaciorum feed is full of rainbow flags and declarations of support, especially for the surge in people self-defining as trans or non-binary (nobody ‘comes out’ as homosexual any more as this is a matter of no controversy or even note). I haven’t joined in and I wonder why: I try to dig beneath what, I must confess, is sometimes, just sometimes, a sense of irritation. Transphobe is currently the worst accusation that can be levelled at someone of would-be progressive opinions, but I don’t think I’m that.

I think it’s about how you conceive human identity. Some time ago, I was told that a classmate of my god-daughter changed gender identification from day to day; the name they used showed which pronoun they wished to be employed for that period. That may have been what this particular student needed at that time in their life. But it’s the extreme end of the kind of ultra-liberal individualism which I do think is odd. I consciously abandoned that way of thinking years ago, although I still carry shreds of it – I could hardly do anything else considering how it so totally dominates the culture I belong to.

Its first proposition is that individual choice trumps every other factor in life. Genetics, history and culture are minor elements compared to sovereign choice: I am, ultimately, whatever I decide to be. Now, honest liberal individualists have to accept this is an aspiration rather than a fact, but the assumption is that it should be made as much a fact as possible. Choice is right; ideally it is the only thing that should make a difference to a person. Certainly, it is not appropriate to examine the context of choices, to suggest that other factors may be in play than pure self-volition: merely to ask the question is an insult.  

Secondly, liberal individualism asserts that choices don’t have any real consequences, because that would limit the sovereignty of choice in the future. We can decide to be something one day, and the opposite the next, and these choices have no effect on us or the world around us.

Dare I suggest (I do!) that this ideology is seen so acutely at work in the field of gender and sexuality because those choices don’t matter in a capitalist economy. Individuals can be consumers and producers regardless of their sexual identity, and regardless of whether they choose to change it. From a capitalist point of view, breaking down gender roles is actually more worthwhile than maintaining them, as it allows individuals to be exploited in different ways as either workers or consumers. Liberal individualists barely ever talk about class, mind, because the whole notion of economic class opens up debates about money and power concerning which liberal individualism has nothing to say. Surely, you can wake up in the morning and tell yourself, ‘today I do not identify as a wage-slave’, but your sovereign choice will do absolutely nothing.

On a personal level, I became a lot happier, existentially, when I gave up this sort of thinking. I accepted that there is no ‘real me’ to be expressed, and that ‘I’ am a locus of negotiation between forces that exist outside me, some that existed millions of years before I did, and that will do millions into the future. The choices I make decide the direction I will travel, but that means that even if I decide to change trajectory completely I will be doing it from a different place from where I made the previous choice. Ceasing to be a liberal individualist was so very liberating, and life became much less of a surprise and much less angst-ridden as a result, presumably because my view of the world was more truthful than it had been.

One of the ancient, unfolding forces that shape who we are is sexual difference. Many of my friends are very anxious to claim that sexual difference doesn’t exist, because of all things it doesn’t fit with the ultra-liberal model of what human beings are; but there does seem to be some basis to it. Of course it’s a matter of averages and aggregates, of spectra and fuzzy boundaries: although I think that God has a use for maleness and femaleness, I can’t see that the actual content of either is very stable. Instead we all pick our way across that landscape working out how to manage, each of us a wavering, uncertain compromise between physical being, memory, experience, genetics and ideals. That makes us all unique, but unique in very similar ways to one another – variations on a theme, if you like – and it means that none of us owns who we are, in no way is our identity a fixed kernel of being that we carry around inside us. Instead, it’s truer to say that we are owned by energies beyond us. If that undermines the notion that ‘male’ and ‘female’ are stably expressed in any individual, it also means that labels like trans and non-binary don’t refer to anything stable either.

Here in Swanvale Halt I know a couple of gay people and if there’s anyone trans about it’s hard to tell. Even admitting that, their numbers are almost certainly vanishingly small. Things seem different in London where many of my more radical friends are based, and it's easy to see them as living in a very rarefied world. But I have to hold on to that idea of gender as being a landscape, possibly a scarred and pitted battlefield, which we all have to find our way across, and the excitable adoption of labels and identities as an aspect of just that, driven by the sudden liberation of possibilities which never existed before.

And the fact is that, at least for now, this is a secondary issue. The primary one is whether human beings are safe and free, or whether their lives are made hazardous and constrained by threats of violence made against them justified by their membership of particular groups, whether self-defined or socially-defined. And it remains the case that, however kooky and self-involved a lot of modern gender politics especially in Western liberal democracies seems to be, humans continue to attack and violate other humans on the basis of who they love, what they wear and what label they carry. Over recent years I have become much more concerned about illiberal politics in other places because I realise how fragile our liberty is: authoritarianism anywhere undermines liberty and fraternity everywhere, and in the same way regressive violence anywhere encourages bigotry across boundaries. So wave the rainbow flag and leave the philosophy for another day.

Bank Holiday Trail

A walk along a footpath I'd never taken before took me in yesterday's sun across fields, through woods and along the canal. St Catherine's Well by Guildford is a perfect objective for a ramble as ever:

The journey brought me into contact with a variety of wildlife, from a very pregnant cow on her own in a field (I hope she was pregnant, anyway, or she had quite a lot to worry about) to a slow-worm sunning itself on a woodland path ...

... and who would have predicted I'd find an alpaca in the outlying gardens of Swanvale Halt?