'Milk, Meat, Forbidden'

My purchase of cheese on our recent trip to Castle Cary was a sort of temptation. I told myself I was supporting local suppliers, which I was, although the Calverley Mill Scorpion here pictured is local to Cheshire, not Somerset, but since discovering that soy milk and coconut-based cheese – vegetable fats – behave in pretty much the same culinary ways as, and produce not dissimilar results from, their animal equivalents, my dairy intake has been reduced to a splash of cow juice in tea and on cereal, as the vegetable milks are much less pleasing for those purposes. So I shouldn't really have done.

Generally, people seem to assume that you put a cow in a field of lush grass and it will automatically turn it into milk, which it won’t. The cow (or whatever) has to be pregnant or nursing, and in modern farming cows and calves are usually separated very early on, the calves being then fed artificially while their mothers’ natural milk is retained for human use. Modern cows are bred to maximise their periods of pregnancy, and very rarely get anywhere near a bull: insemination is usually artificial too. You don’t have to express this process in emotive and inappropriate human terms such as ‘theft’ and ‘rape’ to get the point that it isn’t a very natural life for an animal to be living; you can do it in a more natural way, but it’s very cost-inefficient and rarely happens.

The last time I bought any meat it was part of a cow I am pretty sure I would have met. Our Swanvale Halt butcher takes its Aberdeen Angus beef from a local herd which is sometimes pastured on the meadowlands around Hornington, so you can see the cows every time you walk along the main road during the season, or at a farm in Shintleham where I happen sometimes to go for meetings of a local charity. The butcher even tells you where the animals are slaughtered, a small, family-run slaughterhouse a few miles away. This is about as animal-friendly and environmentally-acceptable as modern meat production gets. When I bought it, I looked at my tiny, expensive steak and hoped I wouldn’t ruin it in the oven.

Most of our meat and dairy produce doesn’t come from farms like the one at Shintleham. It’s produced by vast agribusinesses, some of them international ones, the expression of an industrial farming system making cheap food out of specialised forms of animals designed to do one thing out of the many a given animal might do, at maximum efficiency. And, though I know that 1) an animal ending its life by becoming food is hardly an unnatural or unjust fate, and 2) you can’t have traditional, holistic, what is in modern parlance called regenerative farming without the poo of animals to fertilise the land where you grow your crops; despite all that, even the Shintleham cows are being bred so that I can eat them, when I really, really don’t need to. I can, with care, get my protein and vitamins elsewhere; and so, I have concluded, I should. My romantic attachment to the ideal of small-scale holistic farming, the sort my grandad would have been familiar with in the second quarter of the last century, is basically fed by delusion. That’s not what farming usually is in the first quarter of this one. I don’t like animals and wouldn’t share my home with one, apart from the insects I can do little about, but I can’t justify eating beings that have been created for me to eat by a colossal global industry, whose five biggest companies pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than Exxon, when it isn’t necessary.

The other evening The Moral Maze on Radio 4 was discussing proposals to enshrine the sentience of animals in law. Roman Catholic commentator Tim Stanley came out with the following extraordinary statement:

There is a practical consequence of an all-out war on abuses against animals, and that is the decimation of industries around which human beings have built their lives, leisure, food etc. … Imagine if we woke up tomorrow and really confronted what eating meat means. We would be appalled with ourselves, we would regard ourselves as genocidal maniacs. It has a huge impact on our moral view of ourselves, not just our treatment of animals but our entire moral identity. That’s why it’s right to be cautious, because there are huge consequences for doing something that seems so obviously benign.

Mr Stanley finds his way to reconcile knowing what happens to animals in the meat industry with his belief that they should be treated justly, through the Christian idea of dominion, a God-ordered structure of relationships which includes humans within a natural order of killing and eating. My question is whether what actually happens in the 2020s genuinely reflects that. Instead I have found myself (as Christian does in the Pilgrims Progress) living in the City of Destruction. ‘Arise, Peter, kill and eat’, it says in the Book of Acts; but now, it isn’t the animals that are unclean, it’s our human usage of them. 

(I didn't spoil the wee steak, but I didn't enjoy it that much either). 

Art Weird: The Watts Chapel

My canal holiday in 2006 with Dr Bones was moderately calamitous, at least after she broke her thumb and we found ourselves moored only yards from where we started, opposite a house owned by members of the Lamford congregation, and hiding whenever anyone came along the towpath in case we knew them. But we did visit the Watts Cemetery Chapel at Compton, and last Monday I had a return trip there, led round by a volunteer at the Watts Gallery who happens to belong to the Catholic congregation in Swanvale Halt.

Despite our guide's best efforts to convince us of the Christian orthodoxy of the building I am no better disposed towards it in that respect than I was before. The dense, elaborate symbolism does include an extremely disguised cross on the dramatic main door, but the rest of it renders abstract concepts and ideals in plaster, terracotta and paint, and has that sense of conceptual (and angelic) hierarchy you get with late 19th-century occult thought of different sorts. At least the weird and off-putting altarpiece, Watts's painting The All-Pervading, is away for restoration. To me it looks like the Emperor Palpatine in a relatively benign mood.

But there is no denying the specifically artistic achievement of the Chapel, the imagination behind it and the industry which produced it. The exterior is covered with terracotta panels, the inside with gesso laid on chicken wire with gesso panels bearing the artwork laid on top and then painted. What I hadn't realised was that Mary Watts, deeply committed all her life to the ideal of art education, had virtually the whole village involved in the Chapel's construction. Everyone in the pottery classes, from well-to-do ladies to farm hands, combined to produce the terracotta panels and you can see this if you look carefully: they've clearly been made by people of differing abilities. Whether the rougher ones were the work of the ladies or the labourers we will never know.

Future Prospect

I sat opposite our newer churchwarden, Grant, talking about a church property whose management has worried me for a long while. Grant very much sees his year as churchwarden – his first, I hope! – as concentrating on the church’s finances and properties and making sure we make the best of what we have as we emerge from the pandemic. He, and others who have talked about this to me, are right, and I am aware that there is a series of questions I’ve pushed to one side over the course of years that relate not just to this but to other organisations we are linked with, and which we either give money to or receive it from. They have niggled, but I have devoted my energy and mental bandwidth to other things. Now those questions must be brought out again and tackled.

Nothing comes to life except first it dies, the Apostle Paul reminds us, and over the last fifteen months like so many other churches (and organisations generally), while it has not died, Swanvale Halt church has been ground down close to it. In March and April 2020 we existed in no more substantial form than me saying the mass on my own in a bedroom and an invisible web of prayer across the parish. Now we face the task of rebuilding, reconstructing activities and relationships which have dwindled or been impossible. Decisions between priorities are forced on us by our remaining resources both financial and human: my plan for resuming worship supposes having a crucifer as well as a server, and eventually a full serving team, but we now have only three people who can act as crucifer at all. What’s best and more encouraging: for more people to remain in the congregation, or for them to see more souls participating in the liturgy? We will need a determined concentration on what does the mission of the church most good rather than what we are used to doing, and some things are already falling by the wayside as the people who used to run them decide that they no longer can. For us, as for so much else in society, the pandemic has accelerated developments which were already underway.

Yet there is a great deal to be encouraged by. Our curate may have left, but it looks as though over the course of a few months the church will have acquired two retired priests, a lay reader, and an occasional preacher, as well as a variety of souls whose experiences and abilities promise to be very useful. We will have a revamped and explicitly evangelistic non-eucharistic service to add to the mix, and I will be a better pastor to the organisers within the church and the souls on the edge. So I tell myself: and one has to cultivate hope!

Ashtead Churches

Ashtead is now an evangelical parish but I wonder when it became that. It has two churches, an old parish church and an Edwardian chapel-of-ease. St Giles's, the old one, is an awkward, odd building, with a long and narrow nave-and-chancel and a huge north transept. Physically not much has happened to it since the days of the Revd William Legge, incumbent for 57 years, who was responsible for an extensive rebuilding which left only the tower untouched, including an elaborate wooden roof Pevsner describes as 'preposterous'. I wonder whether he was able to inspect the picture now on display of what the church used to look like before Mr Legge's restoration, packed with pews and with a roof so elaborate it beggars belief. 

Nobody could say the reconstruction wasn't grand. The woodwork includes massively solid choir stalls, carvings of the four evangelists on the stall-ends, and a western gallery allowing access to the bell chamber. 

But grandeur aside, there is nothing that unequivocally points in a Catholic direction. Look at the reredos: it's a Gothic riot of pinnacles and hood-mouldings, but also houses Tables of the Commandments, the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, just like the unrestored churches the Ecclesiologists were so keen to change. A nice altar frontal, though: the cross is dated 1907.

And there, St Giles's has virtually frozen apart from the importation of a bit of tech here and there, and a few comfy chairs in what is clearly a 'prayer corner' in the gargantuan north transept.

This means the more modern St George's is in fact the more interesting of the two. A completely unpretentious redbrick building opened in 1906, which Pevsner is actually reasonably complimentary about, it's been adapted to the needs of an evangelical congregation: a baptismal pool with a nice cover, all sorts of tech, and movable altar furniture made by a local woodworker. There's a prayer corner with sofas and a stack of Bibles, and a dais installed in the 1980s. 

But there are hints of something else having gone on here. The east window, installed in the 1960s, was designed by Christopher Webb, that one-time pupil of Ninian Comper, and there's a very unusual one of St Joseph the Worker, of all things. The area north of the chancel, so the church website says, was converted to a Lady Chapel in 1950, which it certainly isn't now. 

Road Stress

It looked such an easy win. The vicar of Goremead phoned to tell me Canon John, retired priest there, had died, and that his funeral was tomorrow, and that was partly why she'd phoned, but also, and this was a big ask she knew, but she'd been covid-pinged and could I, possibly, possibly, take the funeral? She'd done all the work and all I needed to do was read the words and everyone in the church who remembered my stint there in 2008-9 would be delighted to see me. Well, I was planning to be out in that bit of Surrey anyway, so magnanimously I would donate a chunk of my day off for the sake of John who was so good to me while I was playing being incumbent of Goremead. It wouldn't take me long to look round the Ashtead churches, and if I was early at Goremead I could buy a sandwich and eat it in the churchyard.

Ashtead, indeed, did not delay me long, and more of that on another occasion, perhaps. I had seen the appalling state of the M25 so thought I'd be better off taking the A-roads to Goremead; an hour and a half to go 20 miles. A sandwich beckoned. 

Then the road between Leatherhead and Cobham was closed. I set off on a diversion to Oxshott, which was jammed with traffic for no readily apparent reason. Cobham was OK, so, a bit flustered but not yet discouraged, I was on my way again. Lunch could wait. Then I hit the roundabout on the A245/A3 junction; from there, thanks to roadworks, all the way to Byfleet, was solid, virtually stationary traffic. That must have taken half an hour, or more, to get through. By now it was necessary to make a frantic call to the undertakers. Janet the isolating vicar could be called in but that would obviate the whole point so I pressed on. 'Let us know if you're going to be more than 15 minutes late', the undertakers said soothingly. At least all the ceremony was going to take place in the church so there was no special time to make at the Crem.

Finally through the roadworks and it seemed as though we were moving. There was no tractor, horsebox, or caravan awaiting me, but all the way through Addlestone I followed an elderly man wearing a kaftan who insisted on cycling so nobody could pass him, painfully slowly and at intervals insouciantly freewheeling, or perhaps it was insolently. 

I arrived that fifteen minutes behind time, barely able to remember my own name, after a journey at an average speed of about 11 miles an hour, at over 30 degrees. Everyone was most understanding. I discovered from his daughter's eulogy that Canon John's wedding started late after the clergyman taking it failed to turn up; there was no indication his baptism had been late starting or that would have made the whole set. 'It happened to me once', Janet told me on the phone later, 'and I was filling in for someone else as well. It's a wonder I didn't have a stroke on the journey'. I suppose I should have more faith in the Lord that everything will be all right, but I am not sure how far to push that. I was reminded of a funeral I once did at Goremead, when I forgot the CDs for the music and had to drive back to Lamford to get them; the lights were in my favour all the way and I got back with a few minutes to spare before the service began. 'The angels were clearing the way', I mentioned to Vera, the sacristan. Vera, who has long since gone to her eternal reward, fixed me with her gimlet eye and stated definitively, 'If the angels had been doing their job you'd never have forgotten the CDs in the first place.'

'Sacred Waters: A cross-cultural compendium of hallowed springs and holy wells' by Celeste Ray (Routledge, 2020)

Sixteen years ago now, I was asked to write an article about the then-current state of holy well research, on the tenth anniversary of the publication of my own overall survey of the subject. I concluded it like this:

If we are to have a new overview of the history of holy wells, whether looking at England, the whole of Britain, or wider, perhaps the way forward is through a collaborative venture which draws on the skills and knowledge of researchers in different areas and allows contentious subjects to be assessed from different methodological angles. My own experience has been that the scholarly apparatus the subject demands is more than one person can ever hope to provide.

Sacred Waters, edited by Celeste Ray of the University of the South in the USA, isn’t a history of holy wells, just a collection of essays; but otherwise it fulfils that hope of mine so long ago rather triumphantly. It’s a stupendous achievement: no fewer than 36 separate chapters penned by scholars from across the globe, drawn from a kaleidoscope of disciplines – historians, geologists, anthropologists, linguists, students of religion, and environmental engineers. Together they comprise an overview of worldwide hydrolatry that we have simply never had before. We (in the English-speaking West) have never heard about the wandering springs and water sources of Aboriginal Australia, or the dragon wells of China and how they have been used, the waterfront shrines of Varanasi or the Inca well-sanctuaries of Chuquipalta and Chuspiyoq. What a cornucopia!

As a historian, of course, I find many of these essays beg as many questions as they answer, and the most satisfying, to me, are those that discuss how the meanings of holy water sites have changed and shifted in different contexts: we get most of that in the sections on ‘Medieval Europe’ and ‘Contested and Shared Sites’. Dr Ray has deliberately chosen to emphasise the shared and common aspects of well-worship across the world, where I would say that the very breadth her work encompasses demonstrates the differences between them, but that pales beside the sheer delight one feels in discovering so much that’s new and fresh. Packed into less than 400 pages, the chapters are all pretty short and easy to digest, and if you find the one you’re reading a bit thin you won’t have to put up with it for very long. There are some illustrations, and though one yearns for many, many more we also accept that they would have made the book unfeasibly pricey.

This work is easily the greatest contribution to holy well studies since Jeremy Harte’s English Holy Wells of 2008, and its grand scope makes it arguably even more important.

The Lion in Summer

My trip to Somerset with my mum last Tuesday solved one mystery: the building we always referred to in my childhood as 'Lady Hobhouses' is in fact Hadspen House, or rather (brace yourselves) The Newt, so named since the Hobhouses sold it and it reopened as a hotel. But that was an aside. We were aiming instead at Wyke Farm just north of Castle Cary. My granddad once worked at Wyke Farm and my sister has a painted Wyke milk churn in the garden; now you need more than a couple of dozen cows to provide enough cheese for every supermarket in the country, and when you pull into the site at Wyke Champflower its vast silos and silent warehouses look, I always think, like the menacing industrial sites Jon Pertwee spent a lot of time running around as Dr Who in the early '70s. How iconic of modern farming. This opinion has led to my sister referring to Wyke Farm's produce as 'Dalek cheese' which I think they are missing a trick not to make. But my mum just bought the sort of standard cheddar you can get anywhere though she maintains it adds something to buy it on-site. I am cutting my dairy intake, but it being a special occasion it was back in Cary itself that I picked up some cheese at the market, Cricket St Thomas Camembert and spicy Calveley Mill Scorpion; though I steered clear of one labelled starkly 'Hard Goat'.  

I also found this little figurine in a junk shop in town. At first glance it seems to be a finial from something larger but then you realise it has a base and was always intended as freestanding, so I suspect that while it may look old but it's in fact been copied from something else. It will go ... somewhere.

Rye Looks

I went to Rye for two reasons: because I drove through it accidentally last year on my way to Winchelsea, and because Ms Brightshades and her partner were there a few weeks ago and her photos looked most appealing, so I wanted to make the effort to get there. It turned out to be more of an effort than anticipated because thanks to being hemmed in by lorries I missed the turn off the motorway and spent half an hour getting back to where I should have been. 

Rye is extraordinarily picturesque, Mermaid Street allegedly one of the most photographed thoroughfares in Britain, so I could hardly avoid following suit. There is a museum divided into two sites - one closed when I was there, but the other the grim little medieval fortress and former prison known as the Ypres Tower. References to Captain Pugwash (creator John Ryan was a Rye resident) and the presence in the displays of a box of 'Dr Wilson's Hydrostatic Balls' (which I realised you can sing to the tune of Dr Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) can't detract from the awfulness of the tiny turret cells where prisoners contemplated their usually dreadful fates.

What fascinates me most is Rye's geography. Warehouse streets and wharves (or former wharves) form the skirts of the town, but in its centre - the Citadel - its roads wind around a lump of Wealden sandstone that rears above the muddy flats that spread for miles around. In places, behind and below the houses, you can still see it.

Rye Church reminds me very much of the now-curtailed church at Winchelsea, the town's twin Cinque Port which stares at it across the Rother Estuary, and I suppose that's no surprise. Its most charismatic relic is the pendulum of the tower clock which swings majestically against the roof timbers ...

... but the Roman Catholic church of St Anthony of Padua just along the way is a surprise. Built in 1929, it retains pre-Vatican 2 character at its vulgar, tasteless best. In contrast with most Anglican churches, there is nothing polite about St Anthony's. It had no past to accommodate and, despite a slight Art Deco blush, no real present to acknowledge. It must be heavenly, because it ain't earthly.

Swanvale Halt Book Club: Laura Moriarty, 'The Chaperone' (2012)

Louise Brooks appears on the cover of this novel, albeit without her instantly recognisable haircut, but she's the catalyst of the action, not the protagonist. After all, the title's The Chaperone, not The Problematic Teenage Star-to-Be, and that is Cora Carlisle, respectable Wichita mother and wife, corset-clad and cliché-armoured, who nevertheless bears uncomfortable secrets from Kansas to New York as she accompanies Brooks to her audition with the Denishawn dance company in the summer of 1922. Mrs Carlisle discovers her charge has no virtue to defend, and instead finds herself being changed by the encounter, a change she carries with her into a better, more open, honest and loving life.

My mum is a great fan of Catherine Cookson (or the artist formerly known as Catherine Cookson, as books were brought out under her name for some years after her death, such was the power of the brand), and The Chaperone is not all that far away from Cookson's world of doughty Geordie orphan girls who by sheer determination make good and eventually run their own sock factory. Although it is very, very far from bad, it's not going to tax you much. Ms Moriarty achieves two great things. First, she very deftly builds a narrative which isn't essentially to do with Louise Brooks around what we know about her life, and fans can smile whenever they recognise something from Barry Paris's 1989 biography (even Myra Brooks's 'fattest and richest friend' Zana Henderson appears, transformed from Brooks's acerbic account of her in the Paris book into someone Cora likes); and, second, she makes the reader happy. This is a story in which everyone is flawed and everyone is basically good, and even their flaws become the raw material of growth into kindness and understanding. You need a bit of that every now and again.

View from the Hill

The hill in question being Chapel Hill at Abbotsbury. I am on leave this week and St Catherine's Chapel is now open again so I made my way there, as always wondering whether I will be back again one day. The lowering clouds over Portland and the Fleet avoided the hill itself and while the long closure will have emptied the niche where the votive deposit gets left there are candle stubs and prayer notes again, and some hopeful evangelist has donated some more substantial devotional literature. 

One Door Closes

A busy churchyard scene today with most people, most of the time, more distanced than they appear to be here and those that aren't either unshakeably convinced that their vaccinations make them invulnerable or as nonchalant about the chances of death as ever. We were saying goodbye to Marion the curate by coming out into the churchyard to sing for the first time since the pandemic started, encouraged by many other churches doing the same. We will, I suspect, get some guidance from the Church as to what we might do or not do from July 19th, but while I don't expect much to change, finishing the service with a single hymn, outside when weather permits, is one relaxation that seems reasonable. At least the grass has been cut, one of the factors that I was concerned about.

When I have told people about Marion leaving the next question is invariably 'will you get another curate' and I draw in my breath to explain why we won't. It was only an accident that Marion was with us at all, as she could neither serve in her 'sending parish' of Hornington nor move due to her husband's work, so of the various available surrounding parishes we got the benefit of her ministry. I have endlessly reminded her that while she may owe God much she owes the Church of England nothing, as it doesn't even pay her; a stipendiary curate would have to occupy the curate's house, currently rented out, and attract an increased Parish Share, so to have one we would need to find an extra £20K or so per year - not much of a prospect when money is as tight as it is. 

But I am also able to tell people that the Lord seems as dismayed as I am by the prospect of the good folk of Swanvale Halt being subjected to a constant diet of me henceforward, and has nudged a clutch of helpful people in our direction - two retired priests moving into the area, a lay reader shifting her allegiance during the pandemic to us, a family from the Colonies with some very useful experience, a teacher who has done some preaching in his school - so while some of the things Marion did will have reached a natural conclusion, there is the chance of good new things. Once we are allowed some of the good old things again!

Thanksgiving Day

My joke has always been that Hornington is a bit like Trumpton and it felt particularly Trumpton-like on Monday as I took part in a thanksgiving service for NHS and social care workers, myself and Jack the Salvation Army bugler moving backward and forward in and out of the Market House in the town centre like the figures on the Trumpton Town Hall clock. Telling the time, never too quickly, never too slowly.

I found it quite hard to put together the prayers. The NHS is a human institution and much as we in the UK load on it the ideals of charity and self-sacrifice we tell ourselves we believe in, it's nothing more than that. My family and friends of mine have suffered from mistakes it has made, structural shortcomings that have nothing essentially to do with resources, and, though I shudder at the resentment Jasper expresses at the NHS and all its works, you don't have to be a hardline anti-vaxxer to find some of its pro-vaccine propaganda a bit awkward and weird and wonder at how much it cost. 

There was recommended CofE liturgical material available for the day, but meek endorsement of whatever middle-of-the-road majority opinion is at the time is standard CofE practice so I didn't feel completely comfortable with it. I ended up focusing very much on the people who work in the NHS (and other care settings) with a single line referring to the 'vision and tenacity' involved in its founding. At least I felt I avoided the idolatry of structures and mainstream beliefs. Next stop the monarchy.

Opening Up

'Not before 18^th July 2115’ is the O/C of the Air Cadets’ estimate of when the Corps will issue guidance to local squadrons responding to the Government’s announcements on Monday releasing coronavirus restrictions, ‘and even then it will amount to “local commanders are finally responsible for any decisions”’. I expect the Church of England to come out with something earlier than that, and imagine Bishop Sarah Mullaly of London who is the lead of the Covid Recovery Group will have something to do with it; but to judge by previous experience the bottom line with us will also be ‘it’s down to you’. We will of course have to interpret and mould whatever guidance we get around our local circumstances, but a steer, a rationale, would be helpful, and I don’t know whether we will get that, because it will require making some sort of implied public judgement about the wisdom of the national approach and the Church doesn’t seem to want to wade into those waters.

Not that the Government is telling us what it really thinks, how many deaths or cases of post-covid syndromes it regards as ‘worth it’ in that impossible but inescapable calculation of risk and benefit. Driven by a historical perspective – covid-19 isn’t the Black Death, it isn’t even SARS, MERS or Ebola – I’ve always looked on the pandemic with what I like to think of as a ‘robust’ attitude though I concede others might have different words for it. We have got off, so far, really relatively lightly from this. We have vaccines which have been developed miraculously quickly and which batter infection down significantly at every degree of severity. While we can argue which of the measures the Government is casting aside we might prefer to retain (as I write I’ve only just heard that lateral flow tests will no longer be freely available from the end of the month, which is not exactly helpful), it is hard to see, in broad terms, how things are going to be much better than they are now. And this is what, I suspect, we may not want to face. Looking at my own reactions, I see a conflict between what I know rationally and what I feel emotionally.

Rationally, once we (we, being humanity in general) let covid escape and circulate, that was it: eradication became impossible. The misjudgements made by virtually every western government made it inevitable that it would eventually become an endemic disease. SARS, MERS and Ebola are all far, far more deadly, but they’re also easier to control: in the case of MERS (case fatality rate 35%) you basically have to steer clear of camels and you should be OK, and even the terrifying Ebola can be stamped on pretty effectively with determined hygiene measures. In contrast, a disease that can only be controlled by stopping ordinary human contact, but at least a third of whose victims won’t even know they’re infected, can’t be contained indefinitely, unless you test your whole population, constantly, forever. Eventually, even the countries which have been far more effective than us at preventing infection, New Zealand, South Korea and the like, will face the question of what to do in the long term when vaccines don’t provide anything like full protection. We (we being the British) can’t get to where they are, and the likelihood is that they will end up closer to where we are. So, rationally speaking, this is probably as good as it gets.

But even I don’t want that. What I want is a world in which I don’t think about covid any more, about the possibility of being infected or infecting others. This is my emotional, as opposed to my rational, state. I think it’s the desire I have been secretly harbouring behind the longing to ‘get back to normal’: ‘normal’ doesn’t really mean the absence of restrictions, it means the absence of anxiety. And while I expect that will probably come, it will only come after several years, perhaps, of living with it, of our expectations being reordered around this new reality. We will have to grow towards normality, not legislate for it: the relaxation of rules doesn’t mean the relaxation of the heart. Although a government can help it or hinder it, it can’t make it happen.

Ten Thousand Churches?

It is the infelicitous description of trained, paid clergy as ‘limiting factors’ on church growth in a recent report on church planting which General Synod is set to debate that has many people I know fulminating on social media. This is not surprising: nobody likes to be told that they are worthless, in fact retarding the very thing they want to facilitate, and I find myself as aggrieved as anyone. (Predictably, the report is written by a trained, paid clergyman in the form of Canon John McGinley of Leicester, who I very much doubt sees himself as a limiting factor on growth).

For myself, I would be delighted to see my parish speckled with little lay-organised church cells that I could pastor and plug into the historic ministry and tradition of a sacramental Church, but I see precious few of the laypeople I interact with (no – this is historian’s caution – I see none) who really want or are able to do anything of the kind. Even the most active and committed of them have extra-Church lives to lead which take up quite a lot of time. ‘Many of the 10,000 [planned] churches would start small’, says the article, ‘and some would remain as 20 or 30 people meeting in a home’. They’re not going to be led by the poor, then, who are unlikely to have homes that 20 or 30 people could meet in.

There is so very, very much one could object to in this ‘vision’ but I will rest content with pointing out the fantasy at the heart of it. It’s another project, destined, I fear, to join the abject failure of every other such vision: Archbishop George Carey’s ‘Decade for Evangelism’; ‘Mission-Shaped Church’ ten years later; even Reinhard Bonnke’s mid-1990s mission which the German evangelist was insistent was going to result in a million converts (‘we know God is calling us to do this’) and which our rector in Chatham tried to get us interested in. Perhaps we might eventually face the idea that God might actually not want these vainglorious initiatives which are more about us and our ideas of success and self-validation than about him. Studies of small-scale successes in local churches, which are perfectly real, miss out the bigger picture that only becomes clear when you draw back. We know that, in the late-capitalist West, the great bulk of church growth is not driven by conversion, but by people moving between congregations. Zoom out even further than that, and you can see how Christian growth across the world is largely determined by non-religious factors: church membership is, mainly, an index of something else which the individuals concerned actually care about more. In the USA church allegiance is a cultural and political statement, and no church is growing faster than the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation at all. In China to be a Christian is to have an internal life which is not under the day-to-day control of the Communist Party, but not in open opposition to it, and therefore safe. In Africa to be a Christian is not to be a Muslim, the religious division mapped onto cultural, economic and national or tribal ones. In Eastern Europe, to be Orthodox is to subscribe to nostalgic nationalism, rebuilding a sense of social identity after the collapse of Communist hegemony. In Western Europe, though – I say, ironically but sincerely, ‘thank God’ – religion is mainly decoupled from anything like this. It exists on its own, in the chilly waters of secular societies, swimming without political water-wings to hold it up. Though I have my gripes against him, to his great credit Archbishop Stephen Cottrell does seem to hint at understanding this: ‘it would be foolish to ignore the huge shift in the tectonic plates of European and world culture that have shaped the world in which we serve and witness’, he is quoted as saying.

We can find our clerical amour-propre outraged and our Anglo-Catholic convictions about sacraments and tradition provoked by all this stuff. But the real blood-chilling statement in this report comes at the end of Canon McGinley’s statement to the Church Times: ‘in church planting’, he says, ‘there are no passengers’. You, worshipper, will not be allowed simply to turn up. You will be expected to get on board with the project. There is no sense here that a layperson could be pursuing their vocation in some other way than in church: that they could be a carer, or a young mum, or a harassed worker, or a weary elderly person who has striven all their life and needs a rest, who needs to bathe in the presence of God just in order to get through the rest of their week, to put one foot spiritually in front of another. I am taken spinning back a couple of years to our bishop, denouncing a diocesan finance system that ‘punishes success and rewards failure’. When I see clergy described as ‘leaders’ (I have never seen myself as a ‘leader’, just as someone called sometimes to exercise leadership. People who see themselves as leaders shouldn't be allowed to lead anything), I know that this comes from somewhere other than the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, who came not to be served but to serve.

Good evangelical that I am, I sat as ever with my Bible this morning and – simply following through sequentially as I always do – I read 1Thessalonians 2 and 3. I had never properly registered Paul commiserating with the Thessalonians in their ‘persecutions’; ‘you suffered from your own compatriots the same thing those churches [in Judaea] suffered from the Jews’, he sympathises. We live in a time when God’s Church is penetrated by the understandings of the flesh – I suppose it ever is! – by the standards and the expectations of the world, and yet does not know it. Those of us who disagree suffer nothing worse than marginalisation and insults, not fire and rack. But, remember, the Apostle writes ‘so that no one will be unsettled by these persecutions’, and unsettlement should be alien to the faithful. We keep going, not in our own strength but in the Lord’s.

Un-Anniversary

Unlike many of my contemporaries, I've never marked (inwardly or formally) the anniversary of my ordination. It's sometime around now - I was a Petertide ordinand, or, to be more accurate, a Thomastide one though strangely it's never called that - but I can't remember the exact date and though it would be abundantly easy to check it I prefer not to. Occasionally it does one good not to know such things, it seems to me.

But this is my ordination stole, made for me by Mr Taylor (Robemaker) on the Cowley Road in Oxford. I wanted something straightforward and classical. Many new deacons have all sorts of things embroidered on their ordination stoles, to express something about their personality or outlook on things; all I wanted to express, in so far as I wanted to express anything, was 'I'm being ordained'. I used to use it regularly for baptisms, but then a former member of our congregation who was himself ordained returned to Swanvale Halt church a stole which had been owned by a priest who served his title here in the 1940s and which had passed through a couple of hands since: that one is much fancier, so I employ it for such solemn occasions now instead. So my ordination stole hardly ever has an outing now.

But, barring unforeseen events, it will be used again at least once. It will bind my hands after my death - the hands I have used to bless, baptise, marry and anoint, the hands that have taken holy things, like untold hands that have gone before mine. So I had better not lose it!

Harmonic Hazards

On Tuesday, Fr Thesis was walking the streets of his new parish in west London and marvelling at the spectacle of a public house very visibly and audibly full of people singing in support of the English national football team. He found himself reflecting on the contrast between this, and his church, where, of course, nobody sings even in a sedate (nay devout) way. He has been quite peppery in his criticism of the Church of England for not pushing the case for congregational singing, as has Fr Giles Fraser, predictably enough, and others have made the same point to me. 

To an extent, I can see several levels on which this resentment is slightly unfair. The Government has not positively authorised communal singing at the mass sporting events it has licensed, though you can argue it was fairly predictable that it would occur. As for snarking at the coronavirus's apparent ability to be rendered inactive by the fact that a singer is paid to perform rather than doing it for free, the nonsensical distinction between professional and amateur performers is drawn out of understanding for artists whose entire income-streams have collapsed, while those of the WI Choir haven't. Still, even though we all accept that the restrictions are to an extent unavoidably arbitrary, when the arbitrariness becomes too blatant it threatens compliance.

It's been a surprise to me how much the congregation at Swanvale Halt misses singing, or say they do; perhaps when they're able to do it once again they'll be a bit more enthusiastic about it, he says sourly. I know many churches have experimented with singing outside at the end of their normal services, and while our physical surroundings present a challenge to this we will have a go at it to celebrate our curate Marion's last mass with us on Sunday week, and see how it goes. At least the Council have cut the grass in the churchyard - they've been leaving it to encourage the wild-flowers and the municipal coffers - so our more unsteady members stand less of a chance of tripping over!