O Come Magnify the Lord with Me

For a couple of weeks our gates have been a bit low on Sunday mornings. I went through the list of the congregation and discovered that I knew why almost all the absentees were away, but that itself shows how our active membership has shrunk as a result of the pandemic, and even more so our penumbra of occasional attenders. I regularly go through little bouts of wondering whether I am doing any good, or doing any good here: the congregation would say Yes, but if it was the case, wouldn’t we be achieving more? What am I missing? What’s the key to changing things?

Curiously it was the state of the world more generally that made me think about it differently this time. I find it hard to think of the work of a parish priest in terms of rescuing souls from hell; though that might ultimately be the effect, I am too uncertain about the exact conditions of salvation in any case to be very definite about that. Instead we will need the virtues of charity, courage and faithfulness in the challenges the human race faces, and those are rooted, finally, in the victory of God. It’s sometimes hard to see the connection between what happens in a small parish church and such grand considerations, but every prayer is a weapon in the Lord’s armoury.

And in the end, like every Christian I should be focused on God and not on myself and my own concerns. Of course I have a task entrusted to me, on one level, and have to carry it out to the best of my ability, but are my hopes for my church not about God, and not even about the welfare of souls, but really about my own sense of self-respect – of stopping up the hole in the dyke of my own anxieties and insecurities? Nothing will ever be achieved that way. Only joy works, not fear.

At Malling Abbey every recitation of the Holy Office begins with a little chant from Psalm 34: one of the sisters sings ‘I will bless the Lord at all times’. She sings it on her own behalf, that though this is corporate worship, the worship of the community she belongs to and of the whole Catholic Church, it is, first and foremost, hers, in which she invites others to join. So should my worship be, full of the joy of the Lord’s presence, and if there are others there to join, many or few, all the better.

Early Summer Garden Notes

For days I have found no caterpillars on the box hedges, and there seems to be a good deal of new growth on the plants which bodes well; I’m told you should give the hedges a bit of a water at the base if they are to recover from an infestation. I did find a moth yesterday – it fluttered out of the bush straight into my hands where, I’m afraid, it met its end. The pheromone trap has also captured a couple. It does seem that this infestation is over, but box moth is endemic to southeast England now so they will almost certainly be back at some stage.

Meanwhile my three remaining adult fish are now massive, and I am wondering whether I will need a bigger pond! The water has gone bright green, but the fish don’t seem to mind this; in fact I think they may quite like it as they are venturing out a bit in the daytime, perhaps feeling a bit more secure in the murk than they would if the water was nice and clear. It means that I don’t know where the two juvenile fish are, and I don’t want to clear the water out until the Autumn when – if they are indeed still there – they may be a bit bigger and I won’t miss them!

When people talk about planting more trees to combat climate change I always reflect that my problem is stopping them. My garden is perpetually in danger of being overrun by unplanned hazels, oaks, ashes and sycamores. There is no tree I love more than the rowan, but that seems to seed in the least convenient places too: the other day I pulled one out of a crack in the tarmac of my drive. I’m going to leave the copper beech seedling near the top steps: it’s made quite a journey to be there, as there aren’t any copper beeches anywhere nearby.

The Vortex of Opinion

The great Terrance Dicks, referring to the time he was Script Editor of Dr Who, pointed out that the show had nothing like a continuity guide at that stage: ‘continuity was what I could remember of my predecessor’s shows, and what my successor could remember of mine’. I rather yearn for those days, before the series became run by uberfans endlessly dropping in references to a line in an obscure story from 1984, and then not even the good bits. I was almost tempted into commenting on a series of videos posted on Youtube by a young Dr Who fan who clearly knows far more about it than I ever will, and who was trying to prove that some plotline or other was foreshadowed back to the Hartnell era: this, in a show that often can’t maintain a consistent narrative across one episode, let alone sixty years. But I reasoned that they are looking for different things in a TV series from me, and refrained.

It struck me, facetiously, that Christians arguing about the Bible, or US lawyers debating what is or isn’t in the Constitution, are a bit like Dr Who fans discussing continuity, only less acrimonious: it’s just as well they don’t have access to ballistic weapons, I can tell you. All three groups are, in similar ways, working to resolve a problematic text, to draw conclusions from it about cases which are not necessarily explicitly mentioned in it.

Now I’ve enjoyed Dr Who since I was a child, if you can describe as ‘enjoyment’ being reduced to a quivering wreck watching the end of the first episode of Pyramids of Mars in 1976 as Marcus Scarman kills Namin by apparently roasting him from the inside out (‘I bring Sutekh’s gift of death to all humanity!’ – unsuitable for almost anyone, let alone children); I have of course a professional interest in scriptural theology, and a fascination with law and the role it plays. In all three areas I find myself something of a moderate textual conservative: I would prefer at least to begin from what’s patently in the text, rather than draw in matter from elsewhere or use the interpreter’s own preferences. I like canon to have clear boundaries.

When, about a year ago, I decided to look up what the 1973 US Supreme Court judgement in Roe v. Wade actually included, I was rather shocked at how tendentious it seemed to be. Clearly abortion itself couldn’t have been explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, and I realised the Court’s decision rested on reading into that two-century-old document a right of privacy. Was that right really there? Not in so many words, of course. I found I had some sympathy with what has eventually, and inevitably, emerged as the 2022 Court’s criticism of its predecessor of 1973’s analysis: you must rely predominately on what is explicitly in your legal text, or you hand far too much authority over to the opinions of justices arbitrarily sampled at any particular moment. It’s also a very bad move for a polity to delegate decisions on contested matters to courts because the politicians can’t or won’t reach a judgement about them: that generates resentment and powerlessness, and you can see where it takes you.

But equally clearly you can’t be too much of a textual conservative. The US Constitution’s very opening words, ringing as they are, about all men (sic) being created equal and endowed with inalienable rights, were never intended to apply to black people, for instance: they were penned and signed by cheerful and unrepentant slaveholders. You can’t simply rest content with what that document’s drafters either actually wrote, or intended by what they wrote. As time goes on, our interpretation of what those words mean and imply changes, and changes quite legitimately; which means there has to be some means of bringing those developing insights to bear on the text.

The 1973 Court relied on the knotty and very contested doctrine of ‘substantive due process’, which I think I only just about understand. The 5^th and 14^th Amendments to the Constitution both state that citizens shall not be deprived of life, liberty or property without ‘due process of law’. This tiny but momentous phrase is understood to have two applications. First, ‘due process’ means, very basically, that all such deprivations must be valid, fair and impartial, decided by legitimate authority and properly enacted. There is plenty of scope to discuss what that actually means. Secondly, such deprivations must be ‘lawful’: that is, not just procedurally correct, but in accordance with the whole body of law. It’s that concept that allows the Constitution to be interrogated by changing ideas derived from legal precedent or legislative action, and prevents the legislature from simply doing anything it wants (I’m not sure UK law, controlled as it is by the idea of Parliamentary sovereignty, contains such a safeguard). The 1973 Court decided that US law, taken as a whole, did contain a right to privacy and therefore to procure termination of pregnancy, which, given the state of the various legal provisions across the States at that time, was quite a leap.

Nowadays those who take a liberal view of abortion rights would almost certainly rely on different arguments from those of fifty years past; we might talk about the notion of ‘bodily autonomy’ as a fundamental principle of law in a free society, and I suspect it would be far easier to discern the outline of that in the legal practice of the US than a right of ‘privacy’ even if, in this practical case, they amount to the same thing: of such nice distinctions are legal arguments made. Even if the 2022 Court has criticised the 1973 one for its quasi-legislative investigation of the gestational process, any bench grappling with this issue would still have had to decide what the Constitution thinks ‘life’ means, and would have to do something very similar to what happened fifty years ago.

I did cast an eye over the 2022 judgement, and I’m afraid the Court reveals its true colours when Chief Justice Thomas includes the 63 million abortions carried out since 1973 in the ‘harms’ wrought by reckless application of the ‘substantive due process’ doctrine. Beneath its superficial concern for judicial correctness, and no matter what sympathy I as a ‘textual conservative’ might feel for its arguments, the 2022 Court is a partisan bench selected for partisan purposes, or rather, for this one purpose, posing as a defender of juridical purity. It has no interest in uncovering a principle of bodily autonomy in US law, as a more liberal bench might, even if it might be there. 

We all know that interpretation of Biblical texts, especially about sexual and gender matters at the moment, is conditioned by what people want to find in them. In the same way, the young Dr Who fan I almost tackled on Youtube has decided that whoever queries the current trajectory of the series, no matter what reason they may state, is in fact a sexist bigot covering up the fact that they can’t get past a woman being cast as the central character. That fan may well, in many cases, be right. The interpreters of your legal code also bring their own ideas to bear on it, and how you choose who you get to do it - in the US, one single elected politician abetted by a gerrymandered legislature, or, in the UK, basically the legal profession as a whole - is perhaps even more important than who decides where the Doctor’s fezzes fit in the narrative.

Distance Learning

One of the few boons of the pandemic period was that we all became accustomed to online meetings. Although they are, in form, horrible, they can sometimes be a great mercy: you don't have to drag yourself to a distant venue with all the palaver that entails, especially when rail strikes mean the alternative is driving to Woking, dumping the car somewhere, and sitting in a bleak independent church for an hour listening to the speakers at the Bishop's Study Morning. Had I been at home on my own with all the proceedings beamed in on my laptop I would have got on with some sewing, but, as it turned out, going to the neighbouring parish of Tunfield and sitting in Fr Jonathan's ancient church with him and retired SSM Jean in front of his laptop wasn't all that bad. 

The theme was 'Leadership and the Abuse of Power'. The first speaker, Debbie Sellin, used to be an incumbent in Guildford Diocese, but is now Bishop of Southampton and in fact Acting Diocesan Bishop for Winchester after the forced resignation of Bishop Tim Dakin. Frustratingly, if understandably, she wouldn't say anything about that. Nor would the next speaker up, Marion Peters, talk in any detail about her experience of 'spiritual abuse', just her reaction to it and what it felt like to be a victim. Finally our own Bishop Andrew came on to talk about Christian leadership styles with the aid of pictures of gardens. It was all completely irrelevant until the very last couple of minutes, when he mentioned accountability mechanisms, before running off the platform so that, we all agreed, the Director of Mission couldn't pray for him as he had for the other speakers before and after they spoke. Can't we give the Lord an occasional rest from our jabbering? 

I, Jonathan and Jean agreed three things. Firstly, and positively, it was remarkable that the Church was even dealing with this subject in such explicit terms: we couldn't imagine it being done even ten years ago. Secondly (and less positively), we noted the the focus on experience rather than theology which does seem to epitomise the approach of the Church to a whole variety of issues currently. Thirdly (and linked to the second point), there was very little analysis, and therefore very little advice. We thought it would have been good to have a psychologist, or a management consultant, to talk about exactly why and how abuses of power happen in church contexts, and what might be done about them. Instead - as the Church seems reluctant to draw on the insights of anything outside itself - the only advice we got was 'be more like Jesus', which is pretty useless as advice goes: we know that, thank you.

Unbeknownst to him, Bishop Andrew had already provided us with the high point of the event before he even began his talk by saying, invisibly and therefore completely out of context, 'I can never remember which way up these things go'.

Swanvale Halt Book Club: Review, PJ Harvey, 'Orlam' (Picador, 2022)

When Polly Harvey was four, she found a dead lamb in the woods near her house: the crows had pecked its eyes out. At home, her parents had just bought Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and had it on the turntable endlessly. Thereafter, she said, that record never failed to make her feel physically sick; though it took until the 2010s before she would admit in interviews why it did. Harvey takes this horrible experience and spins out of it her second collection of poetry, Orlam.

Her protagonist Ira-Abel Rawles is nine, and lives in the fictional Dorset village of UNDERWHELEM – in the text, it’s always capitalised, as though in a print transcription of Domesday Book. It’s a place where females and animals are never safe from predation of different kinds. Not that Ira thinks of herself as female, as her double name suggests – she’s a ‘not-gurrel’, she insists, a ‘wether on the nether-edge’ who should have been born a ‘tarble tup’, and who identifies with Joan of Arc as well as the lambs she has a reluctant hand (literally) in castrating. That sexual ambiguity will not protect her. All this also opens out of Harvey’s childhood, though I hope not much of the rest of the story does, or I doubt she’ll ever be able to show her face in her home village of Corscombe again (1).

I say ‘story’, and that is what Orlam is – a verse novel spanning a calendar year and written, as the quotes so far make clear, in old Dorset dialect mainly lifted from William Barnes’s 1886 Dictionary; so the ‘tarble tup’ Ira imagines she might have been is, in what Barnes would have called ‘book-English’, a ‘tolerable ram’. Readers should not imagine that Harvey would actually have heard much of this during her real 1970s Dorset upbringing, beyond perhaps the odd word: instead it’s a very conscious anachronism that allows the author to prise open Ira’s experience, its earthy Anglo-Saxon shapes generating a very particular relationship between that, the landscape, and the people around her. The dialect doesn’t entirely lift us away from West Dorset in the 1970s – the jerrycans and sheep-dip chemicals see to that – but it gives that setting a depth and resonance which makes it seem a landscape of myth.

Ira creates her own myths, to cope with the horrors she encounters. The dead lamb’s eyeball becomes Orlam, her guardian spirit, floating over the fields on its trailing optic nerve; in the only place she finds refuge, Gore Woods, she meets the bleeding Civil War soldier Wyman-Elvis and his entourage of ghosts, and the Ash-Wraiths, the shades of every child who has ever played there. She ‘scratches’ out her myths, her sorrows and enmities, writing to take control of what she undergoes. She needs these spectral allies, because she has few enough among the human residents of Underwhelem. She loves her mother, but her mother is neglectful and absent; she loves her grandmother (called Mary, like Harvey’s own), but Mary is dead, and hovers over the hollow lane; she adores her elder brother Kane-Jude, but he betrays her (predestined by his names, Cain and Judas). The rest, from Ira’s drunken, inadequate father Chalmers-Adam, to Emerson-Dogger Bowditch who rapes her in the Red Shed, are deserving objects of her scorn and hatred. She casts spells against them (apparently successfully in her father’s case), and makes songs to defend herself. It’s a mythology woven from plants and wildlife, the details of sheep-rearing, Shakespeare, pop songs and weather rhymes, Christian imagery, and Dorset folklore (2), and makes a heady enough mix – though the intoxicant isn’t good old Dorset cider, but the cheap whisky and Palmer’s bitter served up in Underwhelem’s grotty pub, the Golden Fleece.

I often find that I have to reorientate myself to get into a new PJ Harvey album, and this book turned out the same: it took me three reads before it really gelled. It isn’t hard to read: you can tackle it quite quickly, and in fact I think it helps to read it quickly, once you’re familiar with the rich but restricted vocabulary of the dialect. Polly’s mentor Don Paterson’s simultaneous ‘English’ translations of her words are best ignored as they will mislead you into one particular reading of a multivocal text. I found at first that the poem’s conventions, such as the capitalisation of placenames and the fabricated names of the characters, separated me from the emotion it should have contained, but after repeated readings those distractions faded. And they may only be Ira’s imaginings anyway, though Harvey has been rightly non-committal about that. So I got there, in the end.

But it is brutal. ‘Sex and death all roundabout/Sonny with ‘es eyes pecked out/Scoff the vlesh vlee and the yis/This is how the wordle is’. Ira excepted, all the living characters are grotesques, who seem to exist only to cause others pain, notably her. The miasma of horror barely lifts, whether it’s the dramatic hideousness of the pervert forester John Forsey dressing as the Dorset Ooser, or the more prosaic terrors of the new school term, which Ira dreads so much she throws up on her teacher’s shoes. The Christ-figure (that’s how Harvey describes him, not me) Wyman-Elvis hands The Word to Ira – in Presley’s phrase, love me tender, a marker of hope amid the evil, but she finds it hard to hold onto it. For all Orlam’s skill, its near-relentless morbidity is wearing, as though Harvey is working through something. Mind you, if this still doesn’t represent the mature outworking of her poetic voice, what might be to come?

The book ends with a recapitulation of its first lyric, ‘Prayer at the Gate’, in almost Christian terms:

So look before and look behind

At life and death all innertwined

And teake towards your dark-haired Lord

Forever bleeding with The Word.

By now, the end of the year and the beginning of a new one, Ira’s mother seems to have resurfaced, her father appears to have succumbed to the curse Ira laid on him, and the ghost of her childhood has joined the Ash-Wraiths while she carries on into a more knowing near-adolescence. And that’s as optimistic as Orlam gets. It is, I think, a brilliant achievement, but hard to take, and even harder – for me, yet – to love.

(There haven't been that many reviews of Orlam yet, either because people don't know what to make of it, or hate it but are too polite to say so. You can have a look at this one, or this, or this.)

1.Earnest Pollywatchers heard drafts of these poems as far back as 2017 when she read them at King’s Place in London. They've hardly altered, but where they have it's weakened the specific local references. So the early version of ‘Black Saturday’ described Ira and her brother playing war in ‘Luther’s Coppice’, a real location in Corscombe; in the book, this has become ‘Blaggot’s Copse’.

2.I especially like the references to the Red Post which in the book is ‘UNDERWHELEM’s hanging post’ (p.75). There are four real Red Posts in Dorset, roadside waymarkers, and because nobody really knows why they are coloured red, you can make up what you like. I think of them as the mystic axial points around which the county revolves, which rivet it into its past. The nearest to Corscombe is at Benville Bridge. 

A Visit to the Home of Time

This afternoon I visited someone in hospital for the first time since the pandemic started. It's relatively easy now, though inflexible: you wouldn't be able to remember another parishioner in a different ward and just pop to see them on your way out. Now every visit has to be booked in. I was seeing Dol, who was anxious to know 'all the scandal, who's misbehaving'. In fact she was so keen she asked me this repeatedly. The truth is that nobody at all connected to the church is misbehaving, and in fact barely anything is happening at all.

So I will instead put up some photos from my trip to Greenwich with Sir Binarycode and Lady Arlen on Friday, which encompassed St Alfege's Church, the Junk Shop (an aptly-named emporium offering items ranging from Windsor chairs to a traffic light), the Observatory, and the Foot Tunnel. I had never actually seen the Meridian before: it was amusing to find that while you have to pay to get into the famous Observatory courtyard across which runs the metal line from which Time is measured, there's a free bit accessible by a path around the hilltop for plebs. The Foot Tunnel has wood-panelled lifts as though to recall its Edwardian origins (not very nice wood-panelling, but still). Looking across the Thames at the Naval College and up to the hilltop you get some dim impression of what might have been had the Stuart government decided to go with Nicholas Hawksmoor's ruinously expensive plan to turn Greenwich into an English Vatican, combining royalty, science, the military and religion, including a Chapel Royal with a dome big enough to fit St Peter's Basilica's inside it. I was taken with Gothick Trinity Hospital vastly overshadowed by the old power station, and will have to investigate it one day.

St Paul's, Nork

I was looking forward to going to see Nork church, and my expectations weren't disappointed. Nork was a daughter church of the longstanding Catholic parish of Banstead; the building, dating from the 1930s, was intended to remain a parish hall but when it became clear that the permanent church was never actually going to be built, the hall was retained as the church itself. The aisles are a 1950s addition. St Paul's was made a parish in its own right in 1959, and then amalgamated with Burgh Heath in 2018. Nork hides away in the suburbs of Epsom, but a community with its own identity.

St Paul's a perfect illustration of the law that liturgical fittings and arrangements linger long after the patterns of worship that gave rise to them have changed. There is an aumbry, but I suspect empty; a holy water stoup, but with no water. At some point the church has been reordered, leaving the old font (very like the one in Guildford Cathedral) lost at the west end, and replaced by a portable one; the high altar has given way to one that can be brought in from the side; there is a shadow of an old pulpit on the floor. The Lady Chapel survives (with a luminous window of the Virgin, dedicated in memory of Marie Lloyd of all people) but is stuffed with chairs. 

I was lucky enough to be shown around by the administrator, so in the vestry-cum-office I found a nice black Roman set and some Lenten Array, which probably gets used no more often than the thuribles and incense-boats in their box.

The Wood and the Trees

A scribbled note reminded me to copy a passage from the book of daily meditations into the little devotional book I use. This morning I looked back and couldn't for the life of me identify which passage had struck me. It was as though, whatever it had been, it had vanished.

I'm toying with experimenting with the increasingly popular phenomenon of Forest Church, and have in mind to use a small area of public woodland on the other side of the parish, which links two estates we have little contact with. I'd identified a suitable clearing and visited it a couple of times. Today I went looking again just to check how to access the site, and couldn't find the clearing I remembered at all. I did find a large overtoppled pine tree which must have been there for years to judge by the look of it, but which I hadn't noticed on previous visits. It feels like one of those scenes in a horror movie when the protagonist finds the hallways in the haunted house reconfiguring themselves!

Remote Access

Pastoral Assistant and local councillor Paula and her husband Pete are on holiday in Jamaica at the moment, and sent me this snap of their laptop and screen set up to join in with Compline over Zoom yesterday evening, while the blue sea ripples outside the window. It was a bit odd, for them, to be celebrating the Night Office of Prayer at 1.30 in the afternoon, but still.

This was really how I intended the online Compline to work, building on the experience of the pandemic and other, more sophisticated churches than ours, and of our former curate Marion’s son who became part of an online community of Christian teenagers that worked very well. But it hasn’t really achieved that. It’s rare that anyone, like Paula and Pete, joins in who hasn’t been in church already that day (sometimes more than once), so it is less outreach, or an alternative for people who can’t get to church physically, than yet another addition to the liturgical diet for those who already have plenty going on. My only attempt to use Facebook Live for Compline during the lockdown, as several colleagues were, was a bit rough, but had a lot of people joining in: I migrated to Zoom as everyone with a computer can access that, and Facebook is more limited, but the online Compline isn’t doing what I wanted it to. It’s been suggested that a weekday evening might be better. Certainly what I didn’t expect was to get down to the church at 7pm and find verger Rick there. I haven’t asked him yet whether he specifically came in order to take part in the service, which is completely the opposite of the point of it!

The Next Iteration

Every few years we go through a phase of being the centre of attention from a group of bored teenagers. They all do exactly the same things, behave in exactly the same ways, and all come to the conclusion that there’s more to life than hanging around the centre of the village annoying people, and move on, some to settled normality, and some to more elaborate forms of nuisance. Each group invariably thinks that it’s the first ever to go through this cycle, but in fact all that distinguishes them is that some are more trouble than others.

Our last group moved on during the pandemic: all it took to sort out the problem out (and they were particularly problematic, that gang) was a global public health emergency. Of all the solutions the community discussed, that wasn’t one of them.

Now we seem to have a new group: same pattern, same nonsense: mess in the churchyard and graffiti on the walls, and annoyance to the Co-Op and the police. The other day the police caught a lad with a kitchen knife, which is discouraging. They’ve kept out of the church building itself, so far. After the graffiti you can see in the photo was left, I checked the CCTV, which is the major difference since the last time we went through the cycle. It had mysteriously turned off at 8.20am the day before because the monitor unit on the table in the office had become unplugged. How did that happen? Very few people have a key to the office, and nobody who would have been there at that time. It took a while before I realised that the system didn’t automatically reset the time when BST begins, so what I thought was 8.20am was in fact 9.20. That would have been when I was waiting for the mid-morning service. So it was me that did it.

(NB. The name on the bench arm reads 'Trevor' but I am pretty sure it doesn't refer to Mad Trevor).

Omissions and Interpretations

'Barbara isn't here this morning', Betty told me at Tuesday's mid-morning mass, 'She had a fall and didn't feel able to come. She's staying over at the Day Centre this morning.' 'Oh goodness, once we're done here I'll pop over and see her', I said. Of course I forgot, so tried to give Barbara a call yesterday morning. I had no idea she was quite so deaf: 'I can't hear, you'll have to write a letter', she hollered, and hung up. So I called round in the afternoon. 'I haven't fallen over, how did she get that idea? I'm fine,' she insisted, and certainly didn't look like a nonagenarian who'd taken a tumble. 

That afternoon a warm drizzle descended as we waited to begin a funeral at the church. The deceased was only 49: a gentleman who'd had a variety of vicissitudes in life, and keeled over taking something out of the oven. 'Can we hold on for Oscar?' asked the deceased's brother as a small knot of people loitered in the Day Centre car park, 'He's doing the eulogy'. 'That's fine', I said, having made sure the undertakers didn't mind, 'we can wait a little while'. Regular updates came by phone: Oscar was only coming from about half-a-dozen miles away but making heavy going of it. Finally he arrived: our organist's fingers weren't quite rubbed raw but he'd been twiddling inconsequentially for about twenty minutes by this stage. 'Have you got your words?' I asked Oscar, and was answered with a horrified look. 'I'm not saying anything', he stammered, looking at the brother for support, 'I mean, we talked about it, but it wasn't settled'. Ah. I think the brother pressed something into service that he was going to use at the wake.

It was Church Club that put things into perspective. The story was the Parable of the Lost Coin and the initial puzzle included a picture of the lady in Our Saviour's tale searching her house for the errant currency. Arnie pointed towards the big wooden door in the picture. 'You need a door like that to keep out bad people, like Zombies', he informed me, 'If they tried to get in, they might get splinters.'

Nitty If Not Gritty

One of the reasons I had for starting this blog, many years ago now, was to describe something of the reality of parish life from a priest’s point of view. I was prompted, especially, by a blog started by someone I was at theological college with and which, I realised, told the reader absolutely nothing apart from which feast day was coming up and how glorious and wonderful everything was. Not long after I began my own, that erstwhile colleague’s stopped with an announcement that he had joined the Roman observance and was leaving his parish. Not a hint of anything untoward had appeared beforehand, nothing that suggested his state of mind or even gave any insight into the life of the parish he looked after. It seemed so – forgive me – fake.

Sometimes, I know, trying to deal with reality means a reality that’s a bit granular, and also grappling with the minutiae of my own reactions to things, in the hope that some of it might be enlightening. That was uppermost in my mind yesterday. Putting up the lanterns for Pentecost (as we had last year) was a bit fiddly on Saturday, and I thought I had a way of making it easier next year, but arrived at church yesterday morning to find that Rick had already removed the lanterns. He'd intended to be helpful but had done it – to summarise – in such a way that caused more problems than if he’d left them alone. After doing assembly at the school, and then returning to the church to tidy up, I went out to the newly-established Community Store with Greg the churchwarden to meet the volunteers and hear about their work, and then got back home to an-almost-immediately ringing phone. It was Harriet, whose Parkinson’s has advanced to the point where I, at least, often find it very hard to work out what she’s telling me over the phone, when the conversation has ended, or distinguishing whether she’s talking to her carer rather than me. A face-to-face conversation isn’t straightforward, but it removes a lot of these problems so yet again I set out yet again on the bicycle so I could speak to her in person (and going virtually anywhere from my house means a steep journey uphill when I return home). I’d just put the spoon in my bowl of lunchtime salad when the phone rang again – it was a gentleman whose pastoral needs I’d been alerted to by a parishioner and whose door I’d put a note through a few days ago.

Now all of these are perfectly normal and not particularly stressful events, even added together. Yet I was a bit shaken by my inability to respond very well. I didn’t snap at Rick, but my inarticulacy in response – I just couldn’t think what to say – told its own story. All morning, in fact, it rather felt that my brain was in fragments, and I don’t mean scintillating and glittery ones. It was as much as I could do to marshal any coherent thoughts at all. At the Community Store I asked a question of the staff and realised as I did so that my sentence was getting so tangled that it would be very hard to answer (and so it turned out). Realising I had no option but to go and see Harriet almost reduced me to tears. Anything I hadn’t actually planned to say presented an almost insuperable mental challenge.

This may be simply tiredness. I have a bad habit of recovering from having a lot of things to do that make demands on my social or mental resources by building in more down time than is sensible, setting unreasonable targets for the non-work as well as the work day, and getting to bed much too late as a result. And that’s what the life of this parish priest, at least, is like for the moment! Will more sleep really be the solution?

Pentecost Red

When in doubt, post about vestments, as I have said repeatedly in the past. That line of thought led to me to recall that the set I have been wearing today is a unique Swanvale Halt possession, because it was made by members of the congregation. The ‘Marley Red’, as I dub it after its donors, Mr & Mrs of that name, has the customary Pentecost motifs of dove and flames picked out in gold kid leather, or something synthetic that resembles it. It’s made from a surprisingly heavy and quite coarse-woven fabric with a slightly slippery silky lining. I am not all that fond of it, because of the rather modern design; but I’m happy to use it on Pentecost Day, when it makes most sense, to do honour to the makers who are still around, and because despite its style it’s surprisingly traditional in some ways. As well as the dove-and-flames there’s a cross on the back, which is very proper, and the Marleys even saw fit to provide a maniple, when I would have thought Fr Edgar had consigned the maniples from all the church’s sets to the back of a drawer by that time. This thoughtfulness means I don’t feel improperly dressed in the Marley Red. It’s now back in its drawer again, probably to evade the moths for another year!

A Particular Celebration

Hornington has few claims to notoriety: one of them is that it acquired electrical street-lighting unusually early, though most of the time when this is mentioned the fact that it only lasted about ten years before the town returned to gas gets omitted. Anyway, when most of the country was lighting beacons for the Queen's Jubilee, Hornington decided instead to turn on an environmentally-efficient electric light mounted on the side of the Market House. 

There is no need to involve Christian clergy in these sorts of events, so I consider it a huge privilege that I was asked. I walked alongside the Mayor (who is a Green councillor and a republican), and ahead of her husband (ditto) and the Deputy Mayor (a Lib Dem councillor and a republican) and hers (ditto). Behind us were the other councillors; ahead, the Town Band and the Air Cadets bearing the Union Flag, and RAF Sergeant Tina who, in lieu of the vacationing mace-bearer, carried the silver symbol of Mayoral authority. I gather that just before we set off the nearest Band members asked the Cadets, in a whisper, whether they knew what anyone was supposed to be doing. 'Just walk to the Market House', answered the standard-bearer. In fact, they didn't know either, but they always give a good impression of doing so.

Of course we gave thanks for 'the lifelong service of our sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth', but also for all those who served during the pandemic and really every act of service and dedication in the community which, I said, were our light in times of sickness, war, and want. And the light was successfully switched on. It was all celebratory and strangely tongue-in-cheek as well. We all knew it was both good and right and proper and yet a bit daft as well. You can't get more British than a group of non-Royalists all giving a hearty three cheers for Her Maj. Is this because she has outlived any sense of outrage at her position - that it hardly seems worth protesting at the position of someone who - whatever else happens - has little time left to her in this earthly realm? Our Hornington celebration was about us all, as much as her, and it is not a bad thing that we can hang from this one individual our sense of solidarity and care, and practice our charity towards one another. How different things will be when she is gone.

St Michael's, Sheerwater

It's indicative of the curious story relating to the history of Surrey churches I am trying to uncover, that the most interesting church of three I visited on one recent research trip was neither of the two medieval ones. Holy Trinity, Send, and St Nicholas’s Pyrford, were both churches that the Catholic Movement barely glanced at. Pyrford was the subject of a very conservative restoration in 1869 which resulted in choir stalls and barely any other change, while Send has no central aisle in the nave, but a row of pews with a tiny passageway either side, which would have given any Ecclesiologist an attack of the vapours. No, the pick of the trip was, of all places, St Michael’s, Sheerwater. Holy Trinity Woodham had planted a tin church of St Michael on Woking’s Sheerwater estate in 1952; the permanent church, opened in 1976, was a joint venture between Woodham parish and the local Methodist Circuit, and is a very rare example of a post-war daughter church of an older Anglo-Catholic one: it shows how Anglo-Catholicism could be translated into this kind of setting, at this kind of time. The church is largely a hall with a few Christian symbols, except for the sanctuary which can be screened off for secular events. Here we find a plain aumbry and icons of the Blessed Virgin and St Michael, what appears to be some older (Methodist?) furniture, an abstract modern window of the Cross, and some of the weirdest church furnishings I have ever seen. The set consists of altar, lectern, font, and credence table; the first three are each organised around a cube, partly wood with two sides that seem to be tin or zinc, tapering inwards to a square hole. The pieces sit on concrete feet. They must surely be home-made. Who designed them? Lighting the sanctuary is a strip of stained glass windows which can only be seen looking outwards; they show fish, crosses, a flaming wheel, and a parade of coloured Roman chasubles. What is this about? I've never seen anything else like it. The church now retains little of its Catholic practice, and these clues are all that remains. Outside the church door there is a little concrete statue of St Michael, looking like a garden ornament.