Cheers

Which group would be out of the church premises first, the Pilates class or the Townswomen’s Guild? It would be nicer for Deanery Chapter to meet in the church rather than the hall, but that would require the former to vacate, and they were lingering as I put out biscuits and a carafe of coffee on a trolley. We ended up in the hall, as the ladies of the Townswomen’s Guild were long gone, but Pilates can’t be rushed.

‘I reckon there’ll be six of us’, predicted the vicar of Watwood, the deputy area dean, explaining that the dean himself, the rector of Tophill, was absent at another engagement. In the end he was wrong by a factor of 100%, but those twelve souls took quite a while to gather, grappling with the challenging parking situation in the centre of Swanvale Halt.

We shared how Christmas had gone. Through all our different local permutations of services, whether we tried to sustain the normal diet of worship or slim it down, move carol services outside our buildings or restrict numbers, the leitmotif throughout was just trying to get through it all and being grateful that we did. At Ackbury Hill the curate-in-charge held a Crib Service for eight people, two of whom were her own children: ‘I felt so deflated’. At Thawton the vicar was persuaded by her congregation (she looks after more than one church) that nobody would turn up on Christmas Day because they were all too worried about the Plague, and so there was no service; then she was invited to carols in the village pub on Christmas Eve and found several of the congregation, singing perfectly happily at the tops of their voices, clearly having decided that setting was much less risky than a church. This was the parish whose Profile asked for a priest who ‘won’t keep talking about discipleship like the previous vicar did’. Rebecca at Charlington had enquired about sabbatical leave and had been told ‘You can forget about that – no matter how long you stay in this diocese we won’t get through the backlog that’s ahead of you’. I can’t quite picture the authorities putting it that bluntly, but even so.

We were all getting a bit morose until John from Campham called us back to why we were all ordained: the Ordinal’s words of ‘speaking the Word in season and out of season’ take our attention away from the circumstances of the moment and back to God’s time, which is what we represent.

That may have been the thinking behind the crib scene at Holy Trinity Hawley, a visit I will describe on another occasion: it included an elephant.