The Stuff of the Kingdom

Rob who assists Rick the verger sends me an email saying he wants to leave all his church roles as he is fed up with people (including Rick) questioning what he does: 'it's always the wrong candles etc'. Rick denies all knowledge. We have an ongoing knotty problem with a church property and the legal arrangements surrounding it. Grant the churchwarden is questioning the (minimal) overtime paid to Chloe the bookkeeper. A neighbour is complaining about the sound of the organ coming from the church. I contemplate all these matters and would quite like to chuck the whole thing in and go and do something that has no responsibility attached to it.

Probably the key to managing is a certain sense of detachment. I am the pastor to my church community but I can't manage relationships within it such that everything will always be all right. Ultimately my fundamental role is pointing towards God and restating that all our structures and relationships need to be ordered in reference to him, and the key to that is keeping my own sights fixed on him as well. I will be soaking up conflict and disagreement to a certain extent as to do this is to follow the Lord, but on its own this is not guaranteed to make everything good and happy. That's really what I would like to happen, but I can't make it happen. Can I discern the way forward between defending the weak and recognising that I can't stop every bit of the bad stuff people carry around with them emerging? And that, of course, includes me as well. 

Marx Was Right

Lady SteamThreader alerted me to the strange circumstance that my blog post from last year about Slimelight and the death of its founder Mak MaYuan has, as she said, ‘been screen shot to prove something in the feud over Slimelight’. I wasn’t aware there was a ‘feud’, and I can’t see that anything I wrote can possibly be of use to anyone as all my information came from a modicum of Googling, but angry people clutch at straws, perhaps.

There’s little to be gained by delving deep into what seems to have been happening, but in brief Mak MaYuan ran Slimelight (the Goth club), Electrowerkz (the music venue) and the Islington Metal Works (the ground floor of the same property, 7 Torrens Street, a broader events location) as businesses with his wife, even after they separated and he found a new partner with whom, as the newspapers reported at the time of his sudden death, he’d recently had a baby. Whatever may have been said or not, he doesn’t seem to have updated his will or maybe had one at all, so said partner has no rights over anything other than what said wife chooses to concede, except perhaps the baby. As said wife was a bit older than Mak, she would be very unwise indeed not to have a will, and said baby might stand to inherit a profitable business and chunk of real estate in the middle of London. Even though Mak, wife and partner rubbed along relatively amicably while he was still alive, you can see how this had the potential to get very grubby now he’s gone. Given that so much of London Goth life has now retracted itself into Electrowerkz, whatever happens to that site and business also has an impact on the entire community.

Part of the point of my earlier blog post was to argue that Goth is now an accepted part of British cultural life, recognised by the Arts Council grant to keep Slimelight afloat during the pandemic. The current Slimes situation proves that Goth is normal in a different way: as much as the Goth world thinks of itself as alternative, once personal rivalries get overlaid by money and property, it turns out to be subject to the same strains and conflicts as mainstream society. You can read the longstanding frictions afflicting Whitby Goth Weekend in the same way. It takes more than a bit of black leather and lace to deflect the iron laws of capital, it seems.

Stand-In

I turned up at St Catherine's Chapel south of Guildford for what I hoped would be the customary mid-day prayer service - and ended up leading it because the new incumbent of the parish church was poorly. At least one of the other attenders had brought an old order of service along so I could improvise on a theme!

I don't remember seeing the mosaic on the wall of Pilgrim Cottage by the side of the path down to the holy well, so here it is. 

 

Acts of Restraint

Back in the old days, if your church used the English (or even the Roman) Missal, you might have been used to the way the liturgical calendar was organised. The complex system of hierarchies between feast days was mainly intended to determine which prayers should be said, on what day, and in which order. Things are, thankfully, rather simpler in Anglican Common Worship (and in fact in the Roman observance nowadays – there is only ever supposed to be one collect on any occasion rather than a set ordered by the rank of the feasts they commemorate), but even with us the system survives in the form of its Principal Feasts and Holy Days, Festivals, Lesser Festivals, and Commemorations. Individual churches will always have had their own ways of marking these liturgical distinctions which have grown up according to local circumstances – best sets of vestments, or candlesticks that are brought out for special occasions, and the like. That’s only natural, as much a way of meditating on the mystery of Christ as general things like liturgical colours are.

Now Rick our verger is a great blessing, but he does illustrate the law that liturgical custom, left to its own devices, tends to escalate. Not long ago I came out into the Lady Chapel to celebrate a quiet midweek mass to find that, unbeknownst to me, he’d arranged with a relatively new member of the congregation who collects icons to bring in a massive icon of whatever-day-it-was, which was sat on an easel atop a draped table right in the centre of the very modest available space. I have had to stress that extra elements are not introduced into services without me being asked, but Rick does keep forgetting. A few days before Remembrance Day I arrived to find little standard British Legion poppies fixed on all the pillars with blu-tack, and palm crosses coloured green in strategic positions, over doors and on chair-backs – because green is the seasonal colour. They all had to come down, and I had to devise a form of words which expressed the truth ‘this looks rubbish’ in a kindly way. Last Sunday, it being the feast of Christ the King, I realised too late as the 8am mass started that Rick had put the great brass cross and accompanying candlesticks on the old High Altar to mark, as he thought, a special day – but not as special as Christmas and Easter when we usually make use of them. Joy the sacristan took them down later on, replacing them by our standard, simpler ones. 

I despair at having to restrict people’s enthusiasm over such petty matters, but beneath them is the tendency we all have to impose ourselves on our surroundings, and that’s a spiritual business. The point about the rules of managing feasts and observances, complex or simple, is that they provide an agreed way of controlling the worship space, and making sure we all serve them rather than bend it to our own predilections. They are about restraining our self-regard. The church doesn’t belong to us as individuals, no matter how well-meaning we think we are: it is the physical medium by which a community talks to God and God talks to them: lose sight of that, and there's no end to it. From time to time, even I have to remember that, too.

Recasting the Past

A zoom down to Dorset to celebrate my birthday brought the chance to revisit two museums which have been completely refurbished over the last few years. The mighty County Museum in Dorchester, which I reported on in 2017, is all but unrecognisable inside. They are understandably keen to recoup some of the enormous cost of the rebuilding, and so not only is there now a rather steep entrance charge but the one-time centrepiece of the whole museum, the Victorian Hall, its galleries jam-packed with miscellaneous social-history collectanea, is now an 'events space' - I could only peer into it and watch it being set with tables for rich people to come and eat at. The new organising space is a colossal Brutalist stairwell with the Fordington Mosaic up one wall, a bit like the Ashmolean's only rougher, with the exhibition areas opening off it: those are sleek and imaginatively laid out, and ever so slightly antiseptic. I know it's churlish to quibble at that, especially when four years ago I was complaining about it being a bit old-fashioned! I wonder whether even more of the collections could be brought out, now there is so much space to display them in. 

I have more invested in what used to be the Priest's House Museum in Wimborne and is now the Museum of East Dorset, as it was my workplace in 1991 and 1992. I was there in the midst of the great refurbishment which marked its transformation from an essentially volunteer-run, somewhat quaint little place to a more professional set-up whose arrangements were shaped around historical and architectural knowledge. Stephen, the curator, had a vision of exploring the very varied history of the building through the people who had lived there, decorating a series of rooms to fit in with those themes based on the fragments visible in them. Expensive handmade mannequins were purchased and displayed. So the entrance area became an old-fashioned ironmonger's; grumpy Victorian Mr Low glowered behind his counter in the stationery shop; in the Georgian parlour, Mrs King consulted with her plumber whose initials had been found on the lead rainwater heads; and in a 17th-century back room an anonymous woman we all called Harriet sat sewing against a background of painted wallcloths based on those surviving in Owlpen Manor. Every day the first and last jobs (which fell to me when I was on duty) were to take down or replace the wooden shutters along the bow-fronted windows: Stephen had had these reconstructed to recreate the 18th-century shop frontage.

Thirty years later and all of this has gone. Mannequins are certainly not flavour of the day any more, notwithstanding how well-made they are; the bow-fronted windows have been replaced by a plate-glass panel. Not only has a lot of the reconstruction been driven by the need to provide a fully-accessible space, but the whole display philosophy is different - instead of a succession of period rooms, the construction of the building is highlighted. Upstairs there is a massive stone fireplace I don't even recall existing, which must have been covered up behind later plasterwork. I can't work out where the Tinsmith's Forge was: it was an horrendous mess, but still part of the history of the site, so I'm surprised it's gone completely. I spent several freezing days listing all the objects, and on my last visit, with Ms Formerly Aldgate back in 2013, was able to point out the little tags I'd put on them in 1991, left undisturbed, so it's probably understandable that they are all gone. The only things that remain from those far-off days are the Victorian Kitchen, and the mummified cat, which inhabits a tiny case upstairs and, I suspect, always will, as long as the museum survives! 

A Sensible Approach

Remembrancetide - as witnessed by this display in the window of the village florist - is way in the past now, but I hadn't wanted the reaction of the children at Church Club when we discussed it to go unrecorded. Having talked about it in assembly in the morning, they were as clued-up as 6-year-olds are likely to be about the history. Genevieve stuck up her hand. 'My great-grandad was in that war,' she informed us; I think there might have been a generation missing there, or she got the wrong war. 'But he wasn't killed,' she went on brightly, 'he was all right, because he ran away.'

Four Northwest Surrey Churches

I’d been trying for ages to visit Christ Church, Ottershaw, and finally managed it a couple of weeks ago, along with a group of other churches in northwest Surrey. Every church should have someone who takes a particular interest in its history, and Ottershaw has Sheila Binns who kindly showed me around. Her theory is that the church wasn’t built as an estate church or an ordinary chapel-of-ease as such, but a memorial to the young son of the lord of the manor, and this explains its strange location, the references to the Ascension in its decoration, and the dedication on the font, which you can only see when you are prone on the floor beside it.

Christ Church has never been at the forefront of the Catholic movement but it has a splendid bit of kit in the form of its gigantic Kempe reredos. This is something of a mixed blessing as it obscures the original windows in the east end; Mrs Binns reckons ‘Kempe’s workshop must have had it hanging around’ and from the local records Kempe seems to have persuaded the churchwardens that it was something they really, really needed in their church at the same time as having a new set of windows installed.

All Saints’ New Haw is a charming though now unremarkable little church. It secured four stars in Fr Blagdon-Gamlen’s Guide of 1973, but I can’t even see where an aumbry for the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament might have been.  

Meanwhile, at Egham Hythe, St Paul’s is a monumental great structure with a pyramidal steeple which seems far, far too big for the building, and a new altar installed in about 2000 which seems far, far too small. The incumbent told me that the main donor, Mr Budgen of grocery fame, sought assurance from the bishop that St Paul’s would not be ‘a party church’, but it was fairly quickly a firm part of the Catholic movement. It still has the signs – icons, statues, reserved sacrament, and an old high altar with six candlesticks. But St Michael has been banished from the shelf he used to occupy into the vestry, for unclear reasons.

St John’s Egham is definitely Protestant, and there is no mistaking what it thinks from the inscription of 1820 over the door. Its satisfyingly grim monuments are not our concern here: it has a baptismal pool beneath a dais installed in about 1999 (which many years ago I saw actually in use!) and a very striking and unexpected painting of the Adoration of the Magi put behind the altar after a fire in 1950. The old altar is covered up now, but that marble suggests it’s a remarkable piece in its own right.

Radical Traditionalism

'You know I don't go in for liturgy,' Emily wrote in an email, 'so I don't know why it's Compline that gets to me'. Emily turned up with her mum (all the way from South Wales in her case!) at our first Zoom Compline on Sunday evening. As I may have mentioned I have fought shy of simply shoving our ordinary worship online once the progress of the pandemic allowed us to meet in person again, partly because our kit isn't very good, partly because a standard Parish Eucharist isn't really a very involving business if you're watching it on a screen, and partly because I don't want it to get into people's heads that online worship is any replacement for the real thing, the real thing being Christians actually being in the same place where they stand a chance of forming relationships that lead them on in their spiritual lives. But I still felt I wanted to do something that allowed those at a far distance to access our worshipping life. Compline, the Night Office, once a month seemed an ideal thing to try.

And so I sat in the Lady Chapel with a candelabra lit having put the link and an order of service on the website. There were seven of us in the end, which I thought was fine. I greeted everyone and then muted them: my experience is that online worship where you can hear everyone else is horrendous as attempts to speak in unison inevitably mean the pace gets slower and slower until you can't see how you're actually managing to move forward at all. There was a space for people to chip in with their own prayers, but nobody did (perhaps they will eventually). We sang Te Lucis Ante Terminum, the antiphon and Nunc Dimittis - at least, I did, I don't know what everyone else did - and at the end I snuffed the candles: 'very evocative!' Emily reported. 

Apart from practicalities such as trying to read and simultaneously keep an eye on the Participants list for stragglers, and having the camera elsewhere than my computer screen, there was one unanticipated issue. As Compline is the conclusion of the liturgical day, worshippers are supposed to leave in virtual silence; but in our online lives since March 2020 we have begun accustomed to waving goodbye to each other as we leave a meeting, to the extent that not to do so feels strangely uncomfortable and rude. Worshippers physically in the Lady Chapel wouldn't have felt the need to wave to each other, but that is now an engrained part of our social etiquette, and so should probably be retained!

Minding the Language

Looking up what was meant by an ‘external solemnity’ –  in case you wonder, it’s when, for pastoral reasons, you celebrate a liturgical feast day on a different occasion from the usual set day – I came across a post over on the New Liturgical Movement blog setting out a spiritual/aesthetic argument for the use of archaic language in worship. This shouldn’t be a surprise coming from the NLM: although I haven’t yet noticed anyone there pleading for the restoration of the Julian calendar or the moral superiority of Ptolemaic cosmology, it is surely only a matter of time. But whereas it’s tempting to dismiss all this stuff as conservative waffle, I am more sympathetic to it than I might once have been. Of course NLM’s writers come to it from a Roman Catholic standpoint, and our brethren of the Roman observance do labour under some awful liturgical language and scriptural translation which seem designed to be vapid and banal, while I find the Anglican Common Worship material has a sober resonance which neither waters down any depth and meaning, nor strains to be poetic (something which is bound to produce embarrassment). So we must be understanding.

For the first time, over the last couple of years, I’ve had occasions for using the Authorised Version of the Bible liturgically, for small celebrations of Evensong at Corpus Christi, for instance. It seemed odd to be using the Prayer Book language for the liturgy alongside a modern Bible translation for the readings, so I brought the two into line. In the past I’ve recognised the greater ‘creative ambiguity’ of some passages in the old text as opposed to modern translations, but reading the AV text aloud in the context of a liturgy that fits it was a different experience. Being forced to try to read it in a way which made it make sense, with the natural rhythms of speech, intensified my relationship with the text, which is of course the Word of God (however we understand that phrase). I can see the point, then, for using this heightened language – especially for the Gospel, though it may make the already-complex formulations of some of St Paul’s letters positively clotted.

The argument that comprehension doesn’t matter, though, takes the case too far. The theory is that worshippers don’t really need anything more than the overall sense of what is happening in the liturgy, which becomes the backdrop for their separate devotions, built into their spiritual reflections. But what shapes those reflections?

My first regular place of worship was a ‘Prayer Book Catholic’ church where, although a little red copy of the BCP was thrust into your hand when you arrived, the liturgy bore little relation to anything in it. That didn’t matter too much, because I knew what was supposed to be happening. But, to work, that approach has to rest on a bedrock of serious catechesis, and on people reading their Bibles, studying their mass books, and saying their prayers at home. We know that worship comes from the Holy Spirit, almost regardless of words and languages, but the Holy Spirit still needs something to work with. Otherwise, other considerations and thoughts will fill the void: self-congratulation at being a reactionary Catholic, perhaps.

I suppose the real question is over what shapes the mind of the Church. How far can a society far removed from the kind of basic familiarity with Christian culture that can decode liturgy manage when faced with archaic language; when – for instance – confronted with a chanted AV reading of John 2, can it bring readily to mind the imagery of a wedding, water jars, and a startled bridegroom? I can, but can a single mum straight from the bus stop of Swanvale Halt?

Demand the Impossible

When I started out in the diocese, each Archdeacon had a secretary. Then they had to share one; now they have none, and must open all their letters themselves. I wasn’t aware of this until Deanery Chapter yesterday, not being in the habit of scanning the staff lists on the diocesan website, or having any contacts in Church House who might tell me what’s happening there. Sandra the church office manager tells me people doing their own admin is pretty standard practice in business now, but I wouldn’t like to be either archdeacon, knowing how hard it is to administer myself. I'm waiting for some kind of response to an important letter I sent our poor archdeacon this week and wondering what might have happened to it, absent someone whose job is not to lose it.

Chapter was full, if not exactly of complaints, of concerns that the diocese no longer really knows what’s going on or what to do. At the start of the pandemic we had regular updates on how the diocesan authorities and the Church in general were responding, and in fact there was the slight impression that dozens of bishops suddenly stuck in their palaces with time on their hands were if anything doing a bit too much thinking and sharing of those thoughts: now, the tap has been turned off. My colleagues are looking for a steer, for something more than the self-defeating ‘management of decline’ models that they see as coming out from the Church as a whole, cutting parish clergy positions and closing churches. Where are we supposed to be going? Can’t we respond in some more positive way to the challenges we face than cuts?

I know what they mean, but for once I have a bit of sympathy with the bishops. What seems to me to be the outrageous proliferation of managerial roles in many dioceses (though not in ours), accompanied with slashing numbers of parish clergy, has all too painfully often been couched in hifalutin religious language that dresses up cuts due to lack of money as spiritual renewal; it might turn out to be that, long hence, but it’s hard to see at the moment. We could do with a little less of that. When the pandemic hit, the original narrative from the Church was that this was a great opportunity to ‘rethink Church’, and most of us rightly resented the apparent blindness to the fact that things were really hard and, not least, lots of people were dying. Stung by this, at least locally, the emphasis heaved round to acknowledging stress and strain and mourning the losses we’ve undergone, to the extent that we hardly got anything else from Church House. When I was a child I learned not to mention that I enjoyed certain brands of sweet, because I knew that if I did I’d get nothing other than those; and the same sort of thing seemed to be happening.

Managerialist blather and top-down schemes are not what we want; but neither is a Church that has nothing to say about where we might be going. We want leadership, but also autonomy. We want realism, but also positivity. But not too much positivity. We want an awful lot. I’m not sure I could supply the required mix if I had a pointy hat.

Coals to South Kensington

It isn't often that museums get into the news and when they do it tends not to be for positive reasons: museums doing their job happily and uncontroversially isn't news. It seems to me self-evident that the mighty Science Museum shouldn't be going to fossil-fuel companies to fund its exhibitions, but the matter doesn't appear to be quite so clear-cut to its leadership, no matter how many of its trustees or advisors resign, or prospective trustees refuse to go near it. Director Ian Blatchford's argument that taking money from Indian energy conglomerate Adani is somehow about 'editorial balance' is, I think, risible. The Museum could mention their viewpoint without being paid to do so. Am I missing something?

Mind you, were I still in the museum world I think I would be resisting any attempt by donors of artefacts, no matter how I agreed with their outlook, to determine how they might be used and displayed. You give something to a museum and it enters into a different conceptual space from yours. It becomes an interpretive device, an element in other stories than you might have imagined. You don't control it any more. 

Hearts to Heaven and Voices Raise

Provided the numbers don't drop below six, I told Neil who organises the choir, we can give it another go. Sadly that was becoming a tall order even before the pandemic, and I really don't want to repeat choir processions which only have two or three people in them: six seems a not unreasonable minimum, especially if they're going to spread out a bit among the stalls, bearing in mind we're still supposed to be sensible. 

This evening the choir reconvened for the first time since March 2020. Or was it February? Did we suspend it even before the lockdown? I can't remember. In the event we had precisely six singers, and they made a rather pleasing noise, knowing 'Ave Verum Corpus' pretty well. I found myself borne up by the vocal waves and that was good to experience again. Surprising how much sound a modest group of voices can produce. 

So Much History in Such a Small Space

Not far away from here is Eashing, a hamlet scattered in bits around the River Wey: as if this was too much to accommodate in mind, it subdivides itself into Upper and Lower Eashing. Having passed through it umpteen times and even sat by the bridge with a sandwich, I decided to do the same again, but having a closer look at the place this time. 

The beautiful bridge is, we think, one of the suite of similar ones built along the river by the monks of Waverley Abbey. Some 700 years later, it still serves its purpose, and does it so very picturesquely despite those clamping timbers.

The odd little potting-shed chapel seen by Pevsner in the 1950s is gone now, as is Eashing House, the manor demolished in 1957. The stables remain, grand enough in their own right to suggest the splendour of what has disappeared. As a clerical friend reminded me, Eashing House was the home of Lord Penzance, the hardline judge and Dean of the Court of Arches who delighted in throwing Anglo-Catholic clergy into prison for putting candles on altars. He was also a noted rose grower, which Country Life in 1889 predicted would be what he would be remembered for in a couple of generations. Wrong. 

On this dull day there were several little items that had escaped my attention before, such as the roadside pump and this fantastic sconce on a cottage. 

But the historical relic that most struck me was the burh. The fact that Eashing was one of King Alfred's 9th-century defensive structures developed to counteract the Danish threat was one I knew theoretically but had never really thought what that meant. It was an obscure site: unlike most of the others, it lasted only about 50 years before being superceded by up-and-coming Guildford. There it is, the top of the escarpment behind those cottages. The defensive line follows the hilltop north to south, and then turns eastwards along the contour of a hollow road. Somehow to think that was it made me boggle, more than so many other similar or far more ancient sites I've found myself at.

And finally on the way back I passed beautiful, sad Fonthill, still being left to decay by Charterhouse School. Another photograph of it never does any harm. 

All Hallowtide - Presences and Visitors

A couple of days late, here is my obligatory Halloween lantern photo. Keeping the candles lit this year was challenging: my home lantern was eventually moved down to the doorstep where it was sheltered enough to keep burning, and the one I left to guard the churchyard went out very rapidly to judge by the state of the candle when I picked it up in the morning. 

Meanwhile inside the church, we wondered whether we would get any of our Roman Catholic brethren attending our services as Fr Jeffrey is self-isolating after a positive covid test and so there was no mass here, but the only visitors were a lady and daughter at the 8am service. The little girl was 8 or so, arrayed in a hooded cloak for Halloween, and said the Lord's Prayer louder than anyone else. She appeared at would have been the altar rail had we one at the moment, and asked 'Can I have a blessing, Father, it's my birthday'. How could a poor priest refuse.

In the afternoon we held the annual Memorial Service for relatives of those whose funerals we'd conducted - annual except for last year, when we couldn't. There were 35 living souls present, which was OK. Rick the verger laid out the candles to be lit, a bit closely packed for comfort (in previous years they have occasionally melted together!) but very impressive left to burn down in the dark of the chancel.

The Parson's Freehold

Why would you give any office-holder absolute security of tenure? It makes no sense in the modern world of accountability, targets and strategic planning. The ‘parson’s freehold’ dates to the time when a clergyman’s tenure (and of course it always was a man) of their parish was a matter of property and revenues, and they were not an employee but a possessor of a package of rights, which, before the equalisation of clerical incomes from the 1960s onwards, produced a lot of money in some places and not as much in others. Of course parish clergy are not exactly employees now, but occupy a strange hinterland increasingly governed by the legal language of ‘common tenure’ , something which exists nowhere outside the Church. In some respects – at least for clergy who didn’t have freehold before the new rules came in ten years ago – common tenure makes for a more secure life: no longer can priests or deacons have their licenses summarily removed by a bishop without explanation or recourse, for instance. But overall, anyone who still has freehold would be nuts to give it up voluntarily.

Of course, bishops who may have enjoyed the security of freehold when they were humble parish priests can only see its disadvantages on their elevation to the episcopate. A priest has to do something positively illegal before they can be levered out of their parsonage house, and even then it isn’t easy. I have heard at least one relatively recent case of an incumbent having to resign after ‘a complete breakdown in pastoral relationships’, freehold notwithstanding, but most of the time, drunkenness, depression, mild neglect of duty, rudeness and ineffectiveness are not enough to make a secure case against a priest, though perhaps if you combined them all, they might.

I am not the last priest in the diocese to be appointed with freehold, but almost the last: possibly the last but one. The vicar of Tophill was in about three weeks after me, and he has it too, a similar administrative oversight: what was the bishop thinking? It wasn’t as though he was about to retire and was blasé about bequeathing a few parochial headaches to his successor, a bit like hiding sardines in the curtain rods. Now, of course, were I to move to another position I would lose it, quite a powerful incentive to staying put until the Lord says pretty unequivocally that I should shift.

I’ve never read anything about the spiritual effects of the parson’s freehold. Christians are supposed to cultivate a sense of distance from what happens to us, a detachment from the torrid ups and downs of community life; a realisation that what really matters about us lies elsewhere, in the realm of the eternal, and we should not lend the petty battles of our earthly existence more weight than they deserve. For those of us who have not yet managed to reach the degree of spiritual equilibrium and development of our Lord, knowing that your home and livelihood can’t be removed from you by accident, malice, or anything other than extreme provocation, does lend a security which not only allows you to smile at the antics of the bishop but also work at dealing more Christianly with those who might dislike or disagree with you than you might otherwise be able to muster. It allows – a degree of objectivity.

Until you take to drink and bolt the rectory door …