The Church amid the Heat

At the very moment at tea-time on Tuesday that I was listening to a BBC reporter talking about the fire at Wennington in Essex, and mentioning the parish church there, I was watching this aerial footage on Sky, showing that very building. The church was safe in the end, though as you can see the flames came very close, the scorched grassland just a yard or two from the foot of the tower. The image reminded me of the famous photo of St Paul's Cathedral emerging from the smoke of the Blitz, although SS Peter & Paul's, Wennington, is not the grand cathedral of the diocese of London: this doesn't look like an image of defiance, but of vulnerability. The photos of burning houses from Wennington that appeared in the newspapers were more terrible and violent than this, and people live in houses and not in churches, but for me this picture is about the fragility, not merely of the Church, but of the whole of human society in the face of the chaos our hydrocarbon-based economies are unleashing. Of course there are always wildfires in heatwaves. Accounts of holy wells and other folkloric springs often refer to water-sources which 'kept running even in 1921', a once-proverbial time of drought when, again, crops spontaneously caught light in the fields; but as we know the temperatures are significantly higher now.

Here in Swanvale Halt I had a number of tasks on Tuesday which took me out into the heat. There was a mass in the morning (attendance: 4), and then, just after lunch, the Infants School Leavers' Service. The church felt relatively cool when we started and less so after 150 people had been in it for an hour. I stood outside to say goodbye to everyone as they left; there was quite a breeze, but it just felt like being in a fan oven rather than a conventional one. Finally I was at the Air Cadets in the evening. Turnout was unsurprisingly low but the remaining youngsters sat dutiful and even engaged through my presentation on Change. They had the option of leaving the hut if it became unbearable but none of them did. I did cut it a bit out of compassion, though. I'm coming up to a week's leave which means I am psychologically winding down somewhat, but even putting that to one side the heat hardly encouraged me to do anything more than I absolutely had to!