Tying the (Tangled) Knot

‘It’s Paul from the Bishop’s Registry,’ said the phone message, ‘Please get back to me before 4.30, it’s a bit urgent’. I saw the message at 4.21. For a Surrogate for Oaths, a call from the Registry is a little like a police car pulling into the drive - you automatically assume you’ve done something wrong. In fact the call concerned a forthcoming wedding for which I needed to adminster an oath, and it would all turn out more complex than usual.

Liam and Rianne wanted to get married at Ellington, in the eastern part of the diocese. They come from a Traveller background; Travellers typically marry younger than has ever been the custom in mainstream English culture (except for medieval nobility), let alone now, and that applied in this case. Rianne was 17, and therein lay their problem: the minimum marriage age in England and wales has been raised to 18 to counteract forced marriages, and nobody was quite sure when it would come in. Their parish priest suggested they wait, but they were adamant they didn’t want to, and that left only a couple of days for the wedding to take place.

Nothing about it was straightforward. A little while before the couple were due to see me, I flicked through the guidance notes and suddenly remembered that, as a minor, Rianne needed to have permission to marry from her parents or guardians. The guidance notes give no instructions as to the form or wording for this. I knew Rianne had no relationship with her father, but Marian their priest had already met her mother, so I hurriedly phoned and asked Liam to make sure his prospective mother-in-law wrote and signed a note to this effect. It turned out to be scribbled on a sheet torn from a pad, which I trimmed so that when I sent it to the Registry it didn’t look quite so dodgy. Rianne had no relationship with her father, and last year changed her name by deed-poll so the name on her passport, issued before the change, was now different from her legal name. when she and Liam arrived – they’d come into the church as Toddler Praise was finishing so they were treated to that! – they discovered that they’d forgotten the deed poll certificate so had to drive ‘home’ to get it. while they were gone I looked at Liam’s driving licence and realised the address was somewhere in Sussex, neither Ellington nor wherever it was they’d just gone which they’d assured me was only ten minutes away. So what was their connection with Ellington? Marian had told me they lived there. When they got back they told me they were all staying with Rianne’s brother, but their actual home was in Ellington. I would have to send all the stuff off to London and trust that, if any question was raised, Marian had something to prove it was true.

Liam is actually a Christian who goes to a ‘gypsy church’ – these tend to be pretty serious, and he gibbed a bit about swearing the oath, but in the end did so. So all was well, and I sent them off to Ellington (via Rianne’s brother’s house) to get married. I assembled all the bits of paper, rather more than I usually put together, and posted it all off to the Registry. If I get another call on Monday, my heart will beat uneasily!

Three More Churches

Many years ago, I and Il Rettore attended a Deanery Chapter meeting at St Peter's Hersham, where the incumbent was very keen to show off the new altar. We gasped. 'It's got drawers', he said, 'where you can put extra wafers, cloths, that kind of thing. Like an extension to the vestry'. 'It looks', I whispered to Il Rettore unkindly, 'like an 18th-century French tart's dressing-table'.

The intervening years haven't really changed my opinion of that particular bit of kit - I can see it's well-made but I remain thoroughly shocked by it - but they have led me to appreciate the rest of the building better. It is, in fact, quite grand: a rare reja screens the chancel, which is decorated with elaborate tiles and wall-paintings (I met the incumbent, who asked me whether I knew who had done them!), stencilling that looks a bit like flock wallpaper, and on a marble reredos Christ is surrounded by sundry saints. What I imagine is the previous altar is now in the side chapel, and I think it's rather smart for what it is. Eucharistic elements in the decoration and the reserved Sacrament reflect the fact that St Peter's was once a Four-Star Church. 

As was my next stop on that particular day, St Andrew's Cobham. Here there are more screens, two grand altars, an elaborate sanctuary lamp holder, and a pair of towering and unusual wooden sedilia. Cobham is an old church, but it's been tinkered with so often that it's hard to see anything other than various elements. A salmon-pink dais now runs across in front of the screen and a drum kit sits in the transept.

A churchwarden at Byfleet very kindly let me into that church - it never had much of a Catholic tradition, but there are some interesting facets. First you have to get your head round the fact that the south aisle is bigger than the nave. The sanctuary has a very pleasing painted ceiling, while, lurking behind a screen when I visited, it being Lent - I knew there was something there - is a gold and mosaic reredos.

It was a special treat to spot St Catherine in the west window at Hersham!

Peace and Arms

‘The war challenges my pacifism,’ Paula our Pastoral Assistant and former Mayor told me when I caught up with her a couple of weeks ago. ‘when I hear the Ukrainians have managed to shoot another Russian general, I can’t help being pleased.’ I have a great sympathy with pacifism: I accept that most wars solve nothing on their own, and are better not fought at all even if not doing so results in a temporary loss of something you value. But pacifism has no answer once fighting starts; its best case is to build up a culture in which conflicts are managed by negotiation rather than arms, and that needs a long time, and favourable institutions which some states do not have.

The last few years since the election of Mr Trump have made me reflect how fragile those free institutions are, and how slender our grasp can be on the things that allow us to live relatively free of fear, and to have a tolerable degree of autonomy and agency; I have come to think, in fact, that any liberal state, no matter how stable and secure it seems, no matter how longstanding its institutions and structures might be, is at most only (say) four elections away from fascism. By ‘fascism’ I mean a state whose governing elite maintains power by violence (including war with other states), and protects its interests by undermining law, personal autonomy, security and property, and free expression, and works to stop its citizens even thinking about any alternative way of living (which is why they always hate gays so much). What such a state says it believes is irrelevant: look at Russia, which seems to have convinced itself that Russian nationalism is in truth no nationalism at all, but a kind of neutral position against which any other kind of independent communal expression is ‘Nazism’, and then reads this back into the history of the Soviet Union (reconceived as a sort of pan-Asian EU with added poverty) and the Russian Empire before it. This stuff means nothing, and results merely in subverting any useful understanding of words (the Russians refer to liberal movements in places such as Moldova as ‘the right’ and their own nationalist proxies as ‘the left’). Fascism isn’t fundamentally about ideology, which is just set-dressing for the self-interest of fascist elites: it’s about practice.

So what do you do in response? You regard it as important, in the first place. I got into a mild spat online with left-wing Goth friend Comrade TartanVamp who argued, regarding the French elections, that Mr Macron and Ms Le Pen are both enemies of the workers and that had he been French he probably would have stayed at home or spoiled his ballot paper. I, and Ms Mauritia, who has skin in the game being both of French-colonial extraction and a minority ethnicity, and having a home in France (in a Le Pen-voting area), couldn’t help arguing that this was a bit complacent. If you can’t see that a France run by Ms Le Pen would have taken a huge step away from civilisation and towards a place where a step wrong could land you in a windowless basement in the middle of the night having your teeth wrenched out with pliers, you need to recalibrate your political compass. If you are sufficiently left-wing you might want to say the difference between Macron and Le Pen is one of degree and not kind: I would argue it’s so big a degree it doesn’t matter. Perhaps such fears haunt me because I am comfortable, middle-class and privileged; perhaps the poor wouldn’t care so much. I don’t think that’s the case, though. The poor may have less to lose, but everyone wants to keep their teeth. And authoritarianism advancing anywhere threatens liberty everywhere: the poor always suffer most from it.

You are also prepared to engage in hybrid warfare, which aims to steer clear of armed conflict, certainly, but recognises that in extreme cases this might be necessary. Part of hybrid warfare is actively, consciously, shoring up the civil institutions of a free society. Every time you insist on truth, on individual autonomy, on free expression, you strike a blow against the enemy. I don’t think our Prime Minister is anything like an authoritarian, and forced to make a choice between him and Ms Le Pen I would plonk my cross in the JOHNSON box not only with reluctant acquiescence but with firm conviction that it was the right thing to do. But, with other choices on offer, he isn’t what we need. His disregard for law, his scorn for truth, weakens our defences against fascism every minute he and the crooks around him remain in office. He is wrong for this time of danger: and for freedom, it is always a time of danger.

Back to pacifism, where we started. Pacifism must explain how, absent any form of force, bad regimes change. I’ve sort of assumed in the past that every tyrannical polity contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction and what you have to do is sit out the pain and wait for the inevitable collapse; but, thinking about it, I am not sure I can point to a clear example of this happening, and I’m not sure I even know what it means. Instead, bad regimes are always forced out. Extinction Rebellion (to pick a radical group) was founded on the assumption that governing elites always cave in given enough mass protest, but I think experience belies this. You need a governing elite that has some sense of shame, that knows it’s subject to electoral displeasure, and that is reluctant simply to kill people who oppose it: not all are. In the UK, the Government tries changing the law to stop XR doing what it wants, but it's still a legal organisation, and I can stand speaking to a local councillor or police officer in Swanvale Halt with an XR sticker on my cycle helmet without any fear that I'm going to be dragged from my home at night and thrown into that windowless basement to the hazard of my teeth. XR have managed to have a significant degree of leverage in the UK; in Belarus, we'd all have been imprisoned or shot. Regimes like that don’t spontaneously crumble, they need a crumbling agent to make them.

What does the Scripture say? Only this morning I was reading Jeremiah’s jeremiads against the land of Moab, predicting what God was about to do to it for its oppression of the Israelites. The notion of cyclical regime change is very much there in the prophetic writings, and once they are ousted from possession of the land the Israelites are indeed told simply to wait until God takes his vengeance on their enemies and they are vindicated. But, disconcertingly, on a national level at least, violence is always involved in this process, and the Lord does not seem squeamish about it. Biblical regime change doesn’t happen by magic. In what seems like a miracle, the Israelites are sent back from exile to Jerusalem by Cyrus the Mede to rebuild the Temple, but the only reason Cyrus is there to send them is that his father Darius invaded Babylon and killed its king: violence being violently chastised.

Better red than dead, I would always argue, but how do we judge when conflict is avoidable, or when it can succeed? Is this the moment of choice, or this? I wish there was a blueprint.

Sun and Clouds

The weather for John and Felicity’s wedding was unexpectedly sunny: they deserved it, as they came to sign all the paperwork no less than three years ago, and had to wait all this time because of pandemic delays. While I was in the vestry thinking that my cotta was so creased I really ought to run the iron over it, I checked my phone and found a message from church member Elaine. ‘Rest in peace Annabel’, it said, ‘they found her’. 

Annabel had been missing since the day before, and unlike Bill, the search for her didn’t end as we wanted. Deeply unhappy over recent months and increasingly lost, Annabel had been engulfed by sadness and it defeated her. All the good she might have done is gone and we will mourn that as well as the loss of what she was. The last time I’d spoken to her had been for the parish newspaper, talking about the series of children’s fantasy books she’d just begun to publish as she left her teaching job to pursue new avenues, it seemed then. Now I wonder what the families who bought those books and have them on their shelves, excited by a work whose author’s name they knew, will do with them. What will parents say to their children? How will Annabel’s family, and all her friends at school, absorb her loss? 

 And then there are the questions that are unanswerable but you can’t help asking: what must her last thoughts have been? Were they despairing? Did she imagine herself unloved, or did the knowledge of being loved just make no difference to a soul in such darkness? Could she have taken any comfort from dying outside among trees and birds? ‘Could any of us have said anything? Could we have made a difference?’ asked Elaine on the phone. From a Christian point of view, we can at least say Annabel knows the truth now, about herself, and about what we felt. 

She was the very opposite of isolated, socially, even if she was shut off within her own sorrow, and although we are, rightly, encouraged to speak up about our mental health struggles, she did and yet didn’t make it through. Survival seems so arbitrary. 

One former colleague of Annabel’s was at the 8am mass this morning and another congregant mentioned her to me on the way out. As I came home after the main service and the Annual Church Meeting (‘People say Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year, when we know it’s the APCM’, I told them), a neighbour called to me on the hill. How could she tell her five-year-old that Annabel wouldn’t be coming to give her lessons anymore, she asked? It’s another question with no easy answer, but how she planned to do it seemed about right to me. I offered the thought that very small children are usually quite matter-of-fact about death because they don’t necessarily understand it, and may have more searching questions later. 

This is not the first suicide in the parish in my twelve years, and certainly not the only dramatic death. About 18 months ago someone I knew well was murdered in a very public way, and for legal reasons that case has never been reported in the media or officially referred to at all, but we all know it happened. It’s part of a community’s human scar tissue – and in fact we do well not to forget, but to be kind to our most tender souls, in the hope that, perhaps, we might help keep them alive.

A Week's Sights

Ms T was ill; Ms Brightshades was poorly as well; Dr RedMedea was in Greece for the Orthodox Easter ('I like having two Easters', she protested when I said we really should sort this date-clash out); and Fr Allegro (late of Hoxton) was visiting family. My post-Easter week off seeing friends, therefore, didn't go according to plan. Apart from my own family, I only managed to catch up with my colleague from High Wycombe, the Chevalier de Viellecuisine, for lunch and a tour of our old stamping-grounds. 

Despite Ms T's absence, then, I did go to Oxford to make more use of my Bod. card and to see the newly-refurbished City Museum. I remember it from undergraduate days as a tatty little place that tried hard but struggled against the fact that bigger and more prestigious museums had grabbed all the stuff, especially archaeology. I found the 'new' museum very impressive, the various bits and pieces and individual stories bound together by strong graphic design, an unintrusive but definite house style; it's rather a triumph. 

High Wycombe looks a bit tired, and as M. Viellecuisine says, all the 'we buy your gold' shops that opened in the wake of the last recession are now closed in their turn, but that's no different from any other equivalent town. You can still catch a glimpse of a smarter place from the arches of the Guildhall. The Museum is tidy and charming as ever, though it's taking a long time to sort its labelling out!

There was no point going to a London empty of friends I could visit so I decided to see the sea and took the train in the opposite direction, down to Portsmouth. Technically I spent most of the day in Southsea, visiting the Castle, beach, and Highlands Cemetery, and having lunch on the Pier. 'Best of British', insisted the café of its fare, but thankfully it offered some options that didn't involve bacon, including a nice bulky Stilton-and-salad sandwich on granary bread. It all qualifies as British, no doubt. Having finished an ice cream I was sitting by the pier remembering when I and my younger niece had found a mermaid's purse on the beach at Sandbanks a few years ago, and one washed up in the advancing tide right at my feet. Like Mr Benn, I decided to take it home to help me remember.  

Abbotsbury in April

St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury seems different on every visit. The weather is an aspect of that: on this occasion (Bank Holiday Monday) it was bright, but not especially warm. Lots of people were about, and a couple of children stumbled in while I was in the middle of the Office Hymn. As I left I could hear them trying out the famous acoustic: perhaps they wouldn't have, had they not heard me. The other changing aspect is the prayers people leave in the wall niches. There were two little stones decorated with Ukraine hearts, a range of love tokens ('we were engaged here 14.2.2022'), prayers of remembrance, and some heartache: 'I wish I had a child', read one. Although none of the prayers address St Catherine by name at the moment (that has been a trend in the past, but I've not observed it for some time), one either unwittingly or by design picked up on the traditional use of the chapel: 'Dear God/Universe, whatever. Please can I meet my love. I think I'm ready now.'

Easter Gone

No evening Easter services at Swanvale Halt this year (I've tried doing Evensong in the past but had only a handful of takers all of whom had already been in church in the morning) so my liturgical duties were all over by noon; I still had some work to do, but no more church. We were still not completely back to normal, as our usual post-dawn mass breakfast team had covid in the family, and numbers are not what they were in 2019, but it all went smoothly considering the disruptions of the past two years and the main mass had more communicants than at any service since the pandemic started. There was even a family I'd never seen before and a scattering of children. Polly and her little brother Warren were among them. They gave me this portrait and a pair of eggs - one fresh from the family chickens, one chocolate - in these charming egg-cozies. My eggs in future will never be cold, and I will never want for an image of myself to use on official documents. I am so very, very fortunate that the people give so much (not just the eggs, to God's work as well) and love so freely.

Meanwhile Marion our former curate is confined to her house with covid and missing out on Holy Week and Easter in her new church at Tipley in Devon. She and her husband joined with the online worship at where else but Fr Thesis's renowned church in the west end. His internet ministry burgeons!

Notes To Self

The list of 'things that we must do differently next year' has grown and grown as this Holy week has gone on, moving inexorably forward beneath (almost) clear blue skies. I have been intending to get a proper, nice iron brazier for the New Fire rather than the increasingly ratty movable barbeque we have been managing with since we first celebrated the Easter Vigil in 2010, but I still haven't managed it and it remains on the list. I have noticed things that need changing with the orders of service for almost every liturgy, and come 2023 (if we are all spared) I will be doing some new things in Holy week, replacing the three Meditations with Compline we used to run, and which I haven't done this year as post-pandemic I thought most of our usual takers wouldn't be around. And minutes before the Liturgy of the Passion on Good Friday, I found myself racing around the church trying to find the gold velvet-covered bucket of stones we wedge the big wooden cross in for people to venerate. I couldn't, and had to improve with another bucket, and other stones. we need something other than a bucket next time round.

I am, though, finding it hard to summon up any spiritual thoughts; not that this is an abnormal situation. The Chrism Mass at the cathedral was bearable enough: we now all collect little bottles of the holy oils, so the days are long gone when the aisle leading to the little side chapel where the oils were being siphoned out of big jars into bottles, pots, or whatever we'd brought, were strewn with the bodies of fellow clergy Il Rettore had elbowed aside. 'Do you include the Solemn Reception of the Oils in the Maundy Thursday mass?' the Dean had asked me when I went to make my confession on Monday; we did, I said. 'well, that makes you and one other church in the diocese, I think.' I got back to the church, reached into my bag to retrieve the oils, and found my hand had brought out two, and a bottle of First Defence instead. It's a long week. Other anti-cold medicaments are available. 

Holy Week and its Variations

Fr Thesis points us all towards a series of talks Dr Robin ward at our old alma mater St Stephen’s House, Oxford, has been giving over recent days about the development of the liturgies of Holy week, and good value they are too if you like that kind of thing (I’m not surprised Dr ward’s audience in the House Chapel is not a large one: even when I and Fr Thesis were there, one would have to be extraordinarily dedicated to attend the most interesting of talks if you didn’t actually have to). The Father Principal points out that what we tend to think of as extremely venerable ceremonies are in fact often not that old at all (‘going all the way back to 1956’) and have been moved around, reorganised according to different assumptions, and altered to make different points on many occasions before reaching the forms we are familiar with now, either in Anglican Common worship or in the Roman Rite. What a Christian in late-medieval England would have been used to doing was quite different from either the pre-1955 Roman ceremonies or the current ones.

A few days ago, Marion, our former curate, came back to Swanvale Halt for a memorial service and found me at the café opposite the church to snatch a couple of minutes’ conversation. She is now part of a parish in Devon, and told me how good it felt to look through the door of our church ‘where it’s all tidy and orderly’. Her current incumbent has a tendency ‘to make up liturgy as they go along – it’s never the same two times running’.

I can’t find any evidence that I have talked about this before, so I will take this Holy week occasion to admit that, despite my bias against home-made liturgy, I have made up at least two things myself. The first comes on Ascension Day. During Eastertide, the Paschal Candle, the big one carried into church in the darkness of Easter morning to signify the resurrected light of Christ, sits beside the altar, but when Eastertide is over it only comes out for baptisms, and for funerals if you are so inclined. Here there is an ambiguity. Under the modern Roman Rite, the Candle moves to the Baptistery on Pentecost Day; but in the old version it was taken away at the end of Mass on Ascension Day, and not used again until the blessing of the font at the Vigil of Pentecost. One year at Lamford I and Il Rettore had a discussion about this and neither of us could remember for sure which it should be. We decided to move the Candle on Ascension Day, as it made more symbolic sense: Jesus has now returned to heaven and we await the coming of the Spirit. So after communion at the Ascension Day mass and before the final blessing he and I took the Paschal Candle to the back of the church and placed it on its stand beside the font. Once installed at Swanvale Halt I felt something could be made of this and devised a little chant based on the words of Psalm 47 and lifting the first few notes shamelessly from Finzi’s anthem 'God is Gone Up', to accompany the motion. Gratifyingly in Ceremonies of the Liturgical Year I see that Mgr Peter Elliott also suggests transferring the Candle in procession to the final hymn or an appropriate chant, and includes a form for doing so, even though it’s not an official part of the Roman liturgy. Great minds and all that.

The other extra I do at Swanvale Halt will come tomorrow, on Good Friday. When I first became interested in all this as a layperson, I discovered the medieval custom of ‘burying’ the Host at the end of the services of Good Friday, in the Easter Sepulchre many churches had then or some other place, and then ‘resurrecting’ it to great joy and celebration on Easter Day: I also realised this was basically incompatible with the emphasis on the entry of the light which is the focus of the ancient, and the modern, Easter Vigil. Now my predecessor at Swanvale Halt had celebrated Good Friday with a rather formless service including poetry and interaction but no communion or Passion narrative, and I brought back something more like the version of the liturgy I’d known at Lamford. But after communion, you still need some hosts to reserve in case they’re needed, even during the Triduum. There they are on the stripped altar; what to do with them? Here we have two aumbries, the one in the Lady Chapel where the Sacrament is normally reserved, and a secondary one in the north aisle where we keep the oils. I decided to return the remaining Hosts not to the first aumbry whence they’d been brought, but the second, wrapping the ciborium in the corporal that had been spread on the altar for communion. It was a bit like burying the Host in the Easter Sepulchre as medieval Christians would have done, the burial of Jesus being something our modern rites miss out. So the next time I did it, I added some texts, taken from the miserable Psalm 88 (Diamanda Galás’s favourite) and the Troparion of the Burial from the Orthodox liturgy: words put into the mouth of Joseph of Arimathea to address Pilate, ‘Give me that stranger, who all his life had walked as a stranger …’.

I like to think that these two little observances, probably without any parallel across the Church of England, aren’t indulgent stuff I have made up for the sake of making a point, but very practical customs that arise from the existing liturgy and the form of our church building. At least that is what I will tell the bishop, not that he would ever be that interested! 

Crossing the Boundaries

My sister-in-the-Spirit Cylene has told me they don’t want to be that any more – not because there is a problem between us, but because their dissatisfaction with being female has reached the point where it can only be resolved by not being that. Cylene has been asking us to use nonbinary pronouns for a while, but this is a step further, a determination eventually to move away from a female physical identity, however that may pan out. For me, having known them for nearly 13 years and having framed my sense of who the person I think of as my best friend around them being a woman, it will mean a bit of recalibration. For my own part (as I’ve detailed before) I have never really identified that much with maleness; though that’s the hand that life has dealt me and I’m perfectly content playing it, all my instinctive sympathies are with the female, and the idea of anyone wanting to become male is very alien. But if that’s what Cylene needs to do to achieve some resolution and peace, it’s their life, not mine. I can sense the excitement as they start to settle their new name, even via text message.

In my previous posts on gender politics here and here, I tried to think through my continued belief that sexual difference exists on some level, a belief which the Christian Church does seem committed to, even if we find it hard to distinguish how much is performative and what might be rooted in biology. I continue to consider it. Conservative Christians (and remember, Mr Putin presents himself as one) point to the Creation order to insist that any suggestion that gender has a performative element and people might change that aspect of themselves is wrong and damaging: ‘God created the adam: in his own image he created him; male and female created he them’. In fact this is a much more ambiguous statement than it first appears. It seems to suggest that the adam, the primeval human, is ungendered, and gender comes in as a secondary consideration. But God is beyond binary gender, and both sexes must embody his image, rather than one more than the other. What if, I found myself thinking, this meant that what God creates here is not individuals with a tightly bounded and defined binary gender identity, but maleness and femaleness both of which discrete individuals might partake of? The language doesn't reveal that, but that’s not surprising. I even began to wonder about Jesus: could he perhaps not be as complicatedly male as we are used to thinking? The earliest images of him, in the Roman Catacombs and the Hinton St Mary mosaic from Dorset, show him as a short-haired, clean-shaven Roman in a toga; it isn’t until the later 4^th century that a beard appears on him. Now of course early Christian art depicted all Biblical figures, from Moses to the Magi to St Paul, as short-haired, clean-shaven Romans in togas: the point is not that those images are in any way accurate, but rather that the picture of Jesus we might have in our imagination is a construct, based on assumptions rather than descriptions. At no point do the Biblical texts give us so much as a hint of his appearance. We can make it up. What if the Incarnate word was intersex – something among the great variety of conditions that term can mean? Could he even be a better representative of all humanity if he had been? Of course I am not saying this is the case (I don’t think we could ever know), only that it is possible to imagine it.

Still, I know people who are increasingly committed to the idea that gender doesn’t exist at all: this is not the line Cylene takes, nor is it something the Church can, I think, go along with. I’ve done some thinking about what the spiritual significance of sexual difference might be in previous posts, but as time goes on I wonder more about the performative and socially-determined elements of gender identity, especially if I am on to something that what God creates is a pair of gender poles and not individuals with bounded, settled identities. If this vital organising structure of human identity and relationships is to an extent socially-negotiated, that makes us dependent on each other. Thinking what there is to question when someone has concerns about their gender identity, Christians might want to suggest that genuine and lasting peace isn’t to be found when we turn inward in an attempt to discover and settle who we truly are, but when we seek our identity in the objective, external things we are committed to; when we look beyond ourselves. This applies more broadly than matters of sex and gender, too. They might want to point attention away from individuality, which is a liquid and unsettled thing, towards God. As in everything, that which leads away from God is to be avoided; that which leads towards him, to be followed. Recognising gender as to an extent socially-determined means that our identity in this area isn’t a thing inside us, bounded and discrete, which we then express: it is something we develop in negotiation with those around us and their understanding of us. God has made us radically dependent on one another as a result, not sovereign individuals, but collaborators in a work, players in a common game. 

Spawn of Different Kinds

It is good to be able to send out a report on the garden which doesn't involve unpleasant death. Trying to get a good view of one of the fish who seems to have been in the wars yet again - it's the one who has been in and out of the quarantine tank with illness and then apparently savaged by something-or-other more than once, why it's always him who gets damaged I'm not sure - I spotted some unexpected new arrivals. There is one frog in this composite photo, but in fact two are present; and then there are two new fish! The pale one is very, very tiny, barely an inch in length, while the black one is perhaps a little less than twice that size. How long have they been there? I only noticed the adults spawning in the Spring a year ago, but can the pale one really be as much as a year old? Given the disparity in their sizes, can the large one be as much as two years in age, and been lurking in the murk of the pond all that time? I would have thought that the more likely explanation is that the adults spawned early one morning when I didn't notice, and these fish are the result of a Spring and a Summer round of spawning. Either way, they've done pretty well to get this far, surviving in a relatively small pond with four adults rampaging around. Goldfish are very bad parents, and happily gobble up their own little fry when they catch them. Apparently most small goldfish go through a black stage before they turn orange, but the only other fish I've ever seen spawned in the pond didn't - it stayed pale, like the little one in this picture, and never developed much pigment.

It's often said that goldfish grow to fit their numbers and environment, which is sort-of true, but they shouldn't - they have a natural size and only fail to achieve it if they're constrained, meaning they're not very happy. The ones I have ought to get to about seven inches in length, and the older among them have, but if I want to keep these two as well, I may have to get a bigger pond!

Carrying Candles

'It's the candle that holds the boy', Gordon our head server is fond of saying, referring to the bygone days - at least for us - when Anglo-Catholic churches would field phalanxes of youthful acolytes, given something to do as a way of keeping them on board with the business of church. In this photo Jack has just blown his candle out as I tried to take a snap of him, his sister Ruby, and Polly who had been deputed to carry the cross. As you know, I endlessly scratch my head trying to think of ways of getting the children we have contact with engaged with Church life in a way that might actually lead to some sort of development of faith.  In the past we've had 'family communion' services where children who might turn up are allocated the jobs grown-ups would normally do, but as the position of Mothering Sunday meant swapping the eucharist we would usually have celebrated on March 27th to April 3rd instead, I thought I would try to get some of our children to act as servers by getting them to commit in advance. It was a bit of a risk but went fine in the end, the youngsters being ably marshalled by Gordon and Jean the Sacristan to do their bits and they seem even to have enjoyed it, which was the idea. we would have had a fourth child had not illness struck his family at the crucial moment. I think Pentecost might be a good time to try this again. That's a good complicated service!

Somewhere Towards the End

It must be well over a year since I last saw Jill. That was at her previous care home, an unsatisfactory encounter in a stuffy and hot visiting room, unsure what she was taking in: she’s quite hard of hearing. A stay in hospital has meant a move to a more nursing-focused home and she is now ‘holding on’, as they say. But, half-expecting as I was to find her completely unconscious, in fact she was able to take communion – a sip of watered-down wine with a fragment of the Host in it – and ask me for some water. She said something about ‘church’, but I couldn’t catch what it was. She was probably apologising for not being able to come.

Jill has been a member of the congregation for many years so our meeting – surely our last – was able to follow a set form, the set form for the Last Rites, of confession, absolution, anointing and communion. Later in the day I went to a different care home (the one Jill used to live in, in fact) to see Celia, and Celia not being a believer meant there was nothing to shape the encounter. Celia has no family and has outlived all her friends apart from Andrea, a member of the church who along with a solicitor has been looking after Celia’s interests in recent years - and according to Andrea the solicitor doesn’t actually do much. Andrea came to my door in some agitation to tell me Celia was almost certainly dying and desperately wanted someone to talk to who wasn’t just the carers, who don’t really want to talk much about death in any case. Happily I had some time in the evening so after Evening Prayer I was able to go over, show my covid test strip from the morning, don a mask and gloves and visit Celia in her room. We ended up talking for about an hour. This stage in her life is turning out to be a struggle – ‘I never thought this would happen to me’ – but the things I would normally say to a Christian in the same circumstances would have been no help, so we spoke about the mysteries of life and death in a more general way, about her life and feelings. Celia’s bookshelf included Shelley, Keats, and Shakespeare, and, perhaps more unusually, Alice in wonderland and wG Hoskins’s The Making of the English Landscape, that pioneering work of local history, so we could discuss those things too. She told me how beautiful growing up by the sea in Lancashire had been. I don’t know whether Celia’s path out of this life was made any smoother or more bearable by our talk, but I think I would have welcomed it had I been her. I hope I did it right.

This felt like proper vicar-ing compared to a lot of the things I do, so I was grateful for the encounters, quite apart from what my parishioners may have felt. If we are able to in the circumstances in which we find ourselves, a final gathering-together of our lives before we let them go is a wonderful thing, and just as wonderful to take part in it.

Canterbury

It was Lady Wildwood's suggestion that a group of us go to Canterbury on Saturday. I managed to squeeze all my necessary work either side of the date and after a couple of tasks set off. It was a cold but bright day and I was very glad of the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the Cathedral for the first time since 1986, and my friends after a bit less time.

The town of Canterbury is crying 'Slava Ukraini' along with everyone else.

I had forgotten the wonder of the Cathedral. I think its special quality lies in the dramatic disjuncture between the nave and the earlier quire, the monks' part of the church, built in a different style - the earliest Gothic architecture in England - and the fact that the crypt raises the east end up on a far higher level than the nave, so going through the tower arch and then the pulpitum is like entering a different building. It means that you can't see the whole Cathedral in one vista, and makes the layout complex, meaning it takes a bit of exploring; you can't make a simple circuit as you can in most cathedrals. 

There are interesting details everywhere. Inside the Deans' Chapel is

the macabre tomb of Dean Fotherby, carved as a charnel:

The Throne of St Augustine is deservedly charismatic, but I have never read about the Zodiac laid into the floor just to its east, in the foreground in this picture:

There is the Black Prince's aerodynamic armour. No wonder he was invincible:

St Thomas Becket's Well in the Crypt is a bit underwhelming, but I was glad to find it. It's supposedly under the round slab visible here:

I found one unmistakable image of St Catherine, in the windows of St Edward the Confessor's chapel, and another probable one, defaced (literally) on the tomb of Cardinal Morton: I think that must be the remains of the Emperor Maxentius at her feet.

The others had come by train, while I'd driven, so after I left them I popped to see St Augustine's Conduit on the east side of the city. It captured the water of a number of notable springs for the use of the Abbey not far away, though now it could do with a bit of a tidy. It also afforded me a lovely last image of the Cathedral against the setting sun.