All Saints', Weston Green

When posting about St Christopher’s Hinchley Wood a couple of weeks ago, I realised to my mortification that I had neglected to give an account of a similar kind of building in the same part of the county, All Saints’ Weston Green, which I in fact visited in the autumn of 2019! Weston Green church is a little earlier than Hinchley Wood, having been dedicated in 1939, and had a rather more distinguished designer, Sir Edward Maufe, whose works would also include, of course, Guildford Cathedral itself. But the building has many of the same features – a monumental simplicity, plain round arches, sedilia reduced to a basic outline, and the twin ambos either side of the chancel. Old photos show that originally the arrangements included a curtained English altar (as the temporary mission church which preceded it had – though not the same one, as that was smaller); but there was never provision for a choir, interestingly. The Lady Chapel has an integral aumbry and a piscina built into the windowsill, while the altar rails are very typically Maufe, almost exactly the same as the ones in the Cathedral, as is the piscina by the high altar. All Saints’ – and Hinchley Wood, and other churches such as SS Mary & George’s in Sands where I used to worship – fall into a distinct architectural and liturgical category that typified modern churches at that time, between the tail-end of Gothic and later experiments.

Adapting to Circumstances

The garden at Swanvale Halt Rectory is ill-suited for croquet. The lawn area is small so the customary pitch needs to be scaled down. It has two trees in the middle. It has a sunken path to one side, and a severe slope, front-to-back. This means that you only ever really play crazy croquet, a variant I have never heard of, but if we've invented it, then so be it. This includes extra rules, such as being able to retrieve your ball if it rolls down into the path, or legitimately stopping it if it is threatening to do so; and with every stroke you have to take account of the gradient. Or gradients. And the remains of molehills, pits and holes. And, in this year of drought and 'false autumn', the leaves. 

We started late during my Bank Holiday Sunday garden party yesterday, so the croquet had to be not just crazy but also carried out at some speed to fit in the evening meal: I expected some leftovers but did want to ensure some inroads were made into the lasagne. It was such a pleasure to be able to have friends over to share my home for a little while, as I haven't done since 2018: it's always a lot of work, but I get my reward. 

I've learned to prepare as much in advance as possible, making food and freezing it. On Thursday evening the task was to cook the lasagne. Most of my friends are, or at least prefer to be, vegan, so I'd bought some soya milk, but contemplating the pan I was going to use I was pretty sure I'd need more than I had, so set out as the sun set to find some. The Co-Op had none, neither did the corner store nearby. Neither did Sainsbury's. Waitrose was shut. So was the convenience store on the corner. So was Corbett's back in the village. I eventually found some the following morning at the newsagents that contains the post office. They've come to my assistance before when I needed an emergency aubergine.

Time Remaining

Normally, Jill would have been on hand to deliver the Village Show together with her husband Andy. They've managed it with flawless efficiency and good humour for years, but this year Jill was in hospital instead. She's had a terminal cancer diagnosis - though 'terminal' could mean a few months or some years. I went to see her and found her and Andy and daughter Carrie playing Yahtzee to help with her cognition and fine motor functions. The treatment is working in so far as it can, restoring the capacities that have become impossible over the last few days. Jill is keeping a diary of her treatment, in the thought it might help someone. She was delighted to get back the use of her hand so she could send an email to an inmate at the prison where she volunteers who was being released, and who she was worried about. She says, 'I've entered a new world. I have to think what I can do to help in it. It's about what I can do with my time from now on, not what I can't do.'

It is to all the family's credit, as well as Jill's, that they're taking the risk of letting everyone know what's happening, when that means running the gauntlet of people's well-meaning care. But that way her boldness, generosity and hope will, indeed, help.

Analysing Mess

Dr Abacus would, I’m sure, warn all of us that we should pay attention to facts and figures and not our own vague impressions of things. Our recent Messy Church gatherings have been very modestly attended, and my recollection had been that this was quite a long-term phenomenon. But on actually tabulating the figures ahead of a staff team meeting where I wanted to mention it, I found that this wasn’t really the case. We’ve been holding Messy Church events since just before I arrived at Swanvale Halt in 2009 and in this graph you can see how widely attendance has varied: the top line shows the highest attendance of children in each year, the bottom one the lowest, and the one in the middle the mean attendance for all the gatherings in the year concerned. In 2011, 2016 and 2018 the bottom figure is less than half the top one, and it’s very hard to discern the reason why it varies quite so much; some Messy Churches were very sparse, though I think the one in May 2016 only attracted 16 children because I’d forgotten to tell anyone it was happening, so it was a marvel that we had a soul there at all.

The graph shows that the figures for the last few years before the pandemic were not, in fact, declining at all, but experienced the same ups and downs as the earlier period. The most recent peak in the middle of 2018 of 41 children wasn’t far off the all-time maximum of 45 in 2011. Bearing in mind that, counting all the church helpers, the child attenders are typically matched by the same number of adults, 80-90 people results in bedlam, and is really too much for our space and facilities. 70ish is a more comfortable result to aim at.

The latest few years’ results are of limited value: we only had two Messy Churches in 2020 before the first lockdown; two in 2021; and only three so far this year. But our extremely low current figures do seem to be a very clear effect of the pandemic. I think my impression that the decline was more long-term is related to my memory of other aspects of worship - that we’ve been unable to sustain a Sunday School for some years, or that attendance at the Family Service, which drew about a hundred people on a couple of occasions in 2014 and 2015, with 20-25 children, suddenly virtually halved in the course of two years, losing all its children in the process. Why this happened when nothing actually changed with the worship itself remains mysterious; and, in fact, while you can see that our Messy Church’s decline is related to the pandemic, the detail of that is also foggy. Nobody can give us a clear reason.

Village Show 2022

The 2021 Village Show was the first big community event Swanvale Halt was able to stage after the relaxation of the pandemic restrictions, so the sense of excitement and relief of that occasion was always going to be impossible to recreate, quite apart from the challenging conditions for the parish's growers, preservers and bakers this year. But in fact by some measures participation was up. Mind you, we might have to rethink the Photography category, triumphantly won by Sally's husband Jim after he submitted the only entry.

Resisting Restitution

On Tuesday this week, the morning mass readings offered as the Epistle a particularly brutal denunciation of the arrogance of the King of Tyre from Ezekiel, and for the Gospel Jesus’s exchange with the Rich Young Man from Matthew – camels going through the eyes of needles, and so on. I preached about power and wealth, and their spiritual dangers, and how little I would have wanted to be the King of Tyre. The evening brought a radio discussion about the Horniman Museum’s decision to repatriate 72 items from its collection to Nigeria, including twelve of the notorious Benin Bronzes (in fact the Museum decided this a week earlier, but it wasn’t widely reported).

‘Go, sell what you own and give to the poor’, Jesus tells the Rich Young Man, who ‘goes away grieving, for he had many possessions’. Renunciation of things we hold dear is a common theme in Christian life, and as a former museum curator I have to confess I hold dear the collections of the great national museums. The Benin Bronzes are a particularly appalling example of objects looted in an act of imperialist violence, but other museums are positively stuffed with artefacts acquired under dubious circumstances. Even at Wycombe we had a cuneiform brick, which we always joked was a laundry list, and we had no idea how it had ended up with us. But what about the collection of the Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham, another former workplace of mine? Because the RE were involved in every campaign the British Empire ever fought, we had material essentially looted from all over the world, the most striking examples being a Tibetan libation cup made from a human skull and brought back from the Younghusband Expedition, and bits of the Mahdi’s Tomb grabbed during the Omdurman War led by Lord Kitchener to punish the Sudanese for the murder of General Gordon in 1885.

Notwithstanding the grisly insensitivity of receiving and displaying these artefacts, this is all small-scale stuff, and nobody’s clamouring for its repatriation. Most of it is of very little interest to its nations of origin: Egypt isn’t going to ask for all its mummies back, no matter how municipal museums from Buxton to Brighton got hold of them. I think instead about objects of real charismatic power, such as the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum. Who did that ever rightfully belong to – the imperial Turks, the French who occupied Egypt at the time, or the British who seized it from them? I can never walk past the Rosetta Stone without a shiver that here is this thing which not only unlocked an entire landscape of human history and knowledge, but also entered the language – and an uneasy recognition of my own privilege at having it in front of me, whenever I want to get on a train to London and through the august portals of the BM. I am a citizen of a former imperial state, and the bloody processes of history have dumped this artefact of intense human lustre in what amounts to my own cabinet of curiosities. I may share the cabinet with millions of my fellow-citizens; it may not be in my house and only accessible to those I choose to admit; but it is mine, nevertheless. And let us not pretend that giving up, if not it, then objects like it, will hurt. We go away grieving, for our possessions are very great. 

Talking About Wells

A year ago I was very excited to read Celeste Ray's book on global holy well traditions, Sacred Waters, which I thought was the most important contribution to the field of study for many years, worldwide in its scope and interdisciplinary in its approach - exactly what I'd been waiting for! By pure chance I was copied in on a talk Dr Ray was giving this week for the Last Tuesday Society, all the way from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., and really had no choice but to join in: it turned out to be as brilliant as I expected.

To a degree Dr Ray's talk was an introduction to the phenomenon of the holy well for those who might not be aware of it, but her point was that traditions related to the reverence for sacred springs often include 'folk science' that can be of relevance to the management of water resources specifically and rebalancing the human relationship with the environment generally. In this selection of images, you can see that alluded to in reference to what happened in Bali in the 1980s: traditionally, the water management of the rice fields was regulated by reference to rituals carried out at springhead temples, and when this was swept away by more modernistic, technocratic schemes of management designed to raise yields, the results were terrible. I'm not completely sure that such traditions can be maintained separate from their old religious superstructures, though I'm sure Dr Ray is right when she says that a spiritual exploration of well-traditions is 'a good way to hook people into caring for water sources'. As a result of the talk I got into a conversation with someone who'd recently visited the Swallowhead Springs at Avebury and found them dry as a bone, which brings the point home. 

During the Q&A session at the end, I was also struck by Dr Ray's description of how things have changed in Ireland since she first began researching holy well traditions there a generation and more ago:

The divide is the smartphone generation. When I started researching Irish holy wells, my best guides were the little kids on their bikes, they knew where the well was, and who the oldest person in the village was who could spell the saint’s name. .... In the 1980s people had so many terms for different types of holy well, the water … Now that’s all gone. The smartphone is the deathknell of placelore and local tradition.

Can more studied and self-conscious traditions, events, and rituals surrounding water-sources achieve real environmental results, I wonder?

Silent Progress

Just as my morning orisons were coming to an end a few days ago I heard a peculiar noise like some huge celestial librarian enjoining 'Ssh!' Opening my eyes I saw instead a balloon drifting through the clear sky. This is not that unusual a sight, of course, but one which always lifts my spirits. I think it's because of the balloon's silent, peaceful passage across the sky, which has to take place when the air is still and clear, its round shape which always seems strangely friendly. Mind you, a hot-air balloon burns quite a lot of propane so it doesn't lend itself readily to being a means of mass transport.

We've established that in general I'm catastrophically vertiginous, but for some odd reason I quite like the idea of going up in a balloon. I always meant to take to the sky in the nice, safe, tethered balloon that used to ascend over the centre of Bournemouth, until that was taken away five years ago after being damaged in a bit of bad weather. A matter of unending regret!

Payback

While we were keeping today as the Ninth Sunday after Trinity, the Roman Catholic parish were observing the Assumption of the BVM. But, disaster! Deacon Justin had turned up in a white-and-blue dalmatic, while Fr Jeffrey had left the parish’s Marian kit in Hornington. ‘We have a white-and-blue set’, I offered, showing Fr Jeffrey the vestments in question. ‘And it’s a nice lightweight one, too’, he said enthusiastically. Indeed it is, and in my view the very best of the church’s own kit, a beautiful ivory damask from the late 1940s. The Assumption is, in the immortal words of Bishop Mervyn Stockwood, ‘not an assumption we share’, but I was delighted to see the vestments used.

In fact we had no main service at all, observing whichever observance, being invited instead to Hornington Bandstand for the Churches Together summer service. It was the usual hymn-sandwich which I see, in the terms of traditional moral theology, as materia exercitandi virtutis: it had the benefit of being short. We did consider whether to move the service into the parish church because of the heat, but decided to stick it out – we’d had to shift the Jubilee one in June indoors, and it would have been a shame to have to do so again. If some worshippers succumbed, well, there are others. I was given Psalm 8 and preached on drought, the fragility of civilisation, and apocalyptic. My punishment was to be collared afterwards by a woman who wanted to convince me that the ‘killer injections’ (otherwise known as the covid vaccines) were about to murder hundreds of thousands of people. Served me right for ignoring Our Lady. 

St Christopher's, Hinchley Wood

Hinchley Wood church is dedicated to St Christopher, patron saint of travellers, because the first services here took place from 1933 in a ballroom attached to Esher Filling Station. Its altar was donated by the House of Compassion in Thames Ditton and, in the general sub-Dearmer manner of the time, it was surrounded by curtains in the liturgical colours hung on rails. The first baptism took place using a milk pan lent by a local dairy owner.

The new church, sort of small-town Italy filtered through post-War modernism, dates from 1953 and it shows rather beautifully what had become expected of a parish church in the Church of England at that time. The font is older than the church itself, having been donated by Holy Trinity, Claygate; there was a wooden reredos (if you can call it that) and before long a Lady Chapel with the sacrament reserved. The church has a variety of very striking glass, both stained and engraved. The piscina and sedilia are typical of the mid-20th century, as are the twin pulpits facing one another across the church - let us remind ourselves of Stoneleigh, for instance. The statue of St Christopher carrying the Christ Child outside the church dates from 1975.

The church underwent a major reordering a couple of decades ago. You can just about see the outline of the old pews on the floor, while a new altar sits on a circular carpeted dais (I know I'm wasting my time complaining that the old altar is completely visible from the whole of the church, so eastward-facing is perfectly reasonable in this space) adn the reredos stands in an aisle - the aisles are so narrow it's very hard indeed to get a picture! The old altar frontals (that green one is so very, very 1960s, but they aren't all like that) are displayed around the walls, a unique decision as far as I know.

It's fun to learn that the makeshift spirit of St Christopher's early days survived in the permanent church - one of its first churchwardens organised a collection of silver from the congregation that was then melted down and used to make the cross and candlesticks, borrowing a precedent from the ancient Israelites!

Animal Behaviour

Yesterday morning I was pretty sure the goldfish were in spawning mode. The remaining adult male fish was chasing one of the females around persistently and aggressively. He's a bit of a bully anyway, but that normally comes out at mealtimes when he will attempt to drive the other adult fish away from whatever food I may have put in the pond; similar behaviour early on Spring or Summer days is likely to be related to spawning, and sure enough the female fish looked fat and full of eggs. 

We've already noted what bad parents goldfish are: they view both eggs and fry as extra protein and will gaily eat them if they notice them around, which is why my two juvenile fish have done pretty well to survive to the point that they are too big for their parents to gobble up. I gather the reason why some goldfish go black until they are big enough not to be treated as a foodstuff by the adults is that it makes them harder to spot. But goldfish romance leaves much to be desired, too. If females have eggs to lay, the males will chase them around the pond or tank to 'encourage' them to do so, and this encouragement is quite rough. The females will be bumped and butted, knocked against surfaces, nipped, and chased to exhaustion before they finally lay their eggs ready for the males to fertilise. Presumably the reason why the female doesn't just save herself a lot of trouble by laying as soon as any male fish show an interest, is that a male capable of chasing her around for hours is likely to make a genetically sounder mate. I don't think the males get much out of the process either, as they always seem pretty worn out after it's all over too.

Just before heading down to the church, I went back outside to see if I could take a photo of the fish, but they were all calm by then so I imagined the eggs must have been laid, not that I can see them anywhere. In the process I managed to sit straight in a pool of pigeon guano on the surround of the pond, even though I'd noticed it earlier on. The natural world had its revenge.

Unity Breaking Out

When I suggested to S.D. last week that Archbishop Justin should trumpet as a great step forward the fact that the Anglican bishops at the Lambeth Conference were refraining from knifing each other in the way they would have done during the Church's formative conflicts over Christology or iconoclasm - look how far we've come in 1600 years! That's progress for you - I was joking, but this does indeed seem to be the lesson of the Conference. On Sunday the RC parish priest, Fr Jeffrey, told me warmly in the vestry that the compromise statement on how the Anglican Communion was to manage same-sex relationships was 'a move in the right direction', a declaration which made me blink a bit. Which direction was that? Surely not the one he's not officially supposed to approve of? But then, stricte dictu, he shouldn't really be genuflecting in front of our aumbry whenever he passes it!

Some of ++Justin's statements make one gasp with their ineptness ...

... BUT his brief summary of The State We're In was, I thought, rather deft. The African Churches oppose homosexuality, he said, because they will be shredded if they don't: for them, it's an existential question. Meanwhile, the Western Churches, by and large, strain to take a liberal position for exactly the same reason: they face scorn, rejection and irrelevance if they don't. You could even argue (though I don't think ++Justin did) that, in a context where African states are harrassing and persecuting LGBT+ advocacy groups and people physically attack neighbours who come out as members of sexual minorities, to insist that, yes, gays are disgusting and horrible but really we shouldn't be stoning them to death is perhaps as far as the Churches can realistically go. You can hope people might be heroes, but I fear you can't demand it.

When African bishops argue that their Churches are growing 'because they are Scriptural' this is, of course, a fantasy. Their Churches are growing because Africa is being polarised between Islam and that which isn't Islam - i.e., different brands of Christianity in different places - and in this crossfire the old animist religions are vanishing. Religions almost never grow for reasons unconnected with politics and community relations. But recognising that is perhaps a step too far, just for the moment.

Home From Home

Edgar is in respite some miles away from Swanvale Halt. Back in May he had an operation to correct an ‘essential tremor’ he’s had for many years and this was entirely successful, so he now has a usable right hand for the first time in a long while. However, he reacted unusually badly to his medication and had to stay in hospital longer than expected, and at home, having been doing very well for some days, took a tumble and broke his ankle. Back to hospital for Edgar, then, and finally out – but not to his and wife Jennifer’s impractical house with its ground-floor garage and lots of stairs, but to a care home in a leafy part of the county.

The staff are kind but overworked and management could be more effective than it is. The place ran out of insulin last week and the manager had to drive Jennifer all the way back to Swanvale Halt to pick up Edgar’s entire supply. Edgar is currently the only resident without dementia and, he says, once the staff got used to not treating him the same way, now pop in to see him suspiciously often as they can expect a reasonable conversation. It would be better to move him to a different home just up the hill from me, but Edgar is a tall gentleman and that particular establishment doesn’t have any extendable beds! All the care facilities in the area are packed, as are the hospitals: normally the kind of physiotherapy and rehabilitation Edgar needs would be handled at Milford, but they have no beds at all.

I spent about 45 minutes with Edgar, having not seen him for several weeks. And as I drew back I realised that the one thing I’d decided I needed to talk to him about – his role as the church’s licensee for events where alcohol is served – I’d completely forgotten!

Intimations of Mortality in a Leading London Gallery

The idea was that I would meet S.D. at Tate Britain, but at first we managed to miss one another – I had, inexplicably, the wrong time and the wrong entrance, and at one stage we were both waiting for one another in different places. Neither of us had a mobile number for the other! But we did coincide eventually, and began our lunch in the Tate café rather hungrier than we intended to be. S.D. had a triple-bypass operation earlier in the year and two cataract removals, so feels a bit fragile and is having to get used to pacing himself rather more than usual. ‘I’ve reached the point where getting through each day, and then waking up in the morning, counts as a success’. I admitted I already felt like that, and that it would be better to leave something to look forward to in the future.

S.D. is covering for one of the Canons at Westminster Abbey as Canon in Residence (‘I only have to  read the first lesson at Mattins and Evensong, and be on hand in case the place burns down’), so as he left I looked round the shop. On the way we passed the Tate’s monumental current installation, ‘Procession’ by Hew Locke, a witty and thoroughly scary investigation of politics and social identity through something that looks like a religious event (‘Just like St Mary’s Bourne Street’ – that’s S.D., not Hew Locke) but with no liturgical content.

Usually I can be relied on to leave a gallery or museum shop with a handful of postcards but I thought 85p was a bit cheeky. I looked at the books. At the moment, as far as books are concerned, I am battling my way through three: Andrew Hickey’s The Mind Robber (one of Obverse Books’ ‘Black Archive’ volumes about individual Dr Who stories), Brian Bailey’s Great British Ruins from 1984 (a nice easy come-down bedtime read), and Airhead by Emily Maitlis, recounting the real experience of being a leading BBC news interviewer. I only got hold of that because there was a pile of copies in one of the churches I visited recently, with the instruction to take one away for free, but it has nice, short chapters and is physically light, making it an ideal train read – and very revealing of Maitlis and her interviewees. In the Tate shop there were hundreds of fascinating titles I would like to read, but I know I never would (I congratulated myself for owning a couple already). Analyses of colonialism and feminist art, of cultural trends and social phenomena: some of these are important, and in fact they might change the way you look at the world. Most of them will have been laboured over with commitment and dedication. But who will read them? Will they happen to find their way into the mind of someone who might have their worldview shifted by them, might as a result go on to do something which would affect their own life and others’?

It is no surprise that at my time of life I might think about what I have done with it. I know I’ve wasted a lot of time, but am I wasting it now? I’m not necessarily haunted by the thought that I might not have gone to the right places, had the most worthwhile experiences, or read the most enjoyable books from the Tate shop: that’s a consumerist approach to life I don’t endorse. But have I produced the most worthwhile things? Who will have listened to all my sermons, or read all the things I have written? I know what Father Somerset Ward would say, which is that our main concern should be to pray, so that our minds can be shaped after the mind of Christ: that there is no other way of pouring our own contribution into the life of the world that goes with the flow of the heavenly will. One can hope!

Alternative Readings

My copy of Celebrating the Seasons is a bit worn and battered now. It was brought out as a companion volume to Celebrating Common Prayer, the Daily Office book produced in the 1990s by the Anglican Franciscans and which became the model for the daily prayer services included in Common Worship from 2000 which most of us use now. Celebrating the Seasons is a compendium of spiritual readings for each day of the liturgical year; most of them are extracts from sermons or scriptural commentaries though there is also a bit of poetry or hymnody. The most refreshing feature is that the readings come from the whole scope of Christian history, from St Irenaeus of Lyons and the Desert Fathers, through medieval mystics such as Mechtilde of Magdeburg and Puritan divines to modern poets including RS Thomas. I've used these passages alongside my daily morning Bible reading as a means of trying to find some thoughts to help shape the day.

But I have been reading them for years now so they are perhaps unhelpfully familiar! Just lately I remembered that a few years ago I was given Celtic Daily Prayer, the office book of the Northumbria Community, and when I was planning our Forest Church I looked to see whether there was any helpful material - there wasn't, but I found in the book two cycles of daily readings. Where Celebrating the Seasons concentrates on theological meditation, Celtic Daily Prayer is more experiential, including far more material that reflects the lives of the saints. At least, the saints in the 'Celtic tradition' - a phrase I usually shy away from, as the people who use it customarily leave out how tough the holy people in that tradition were, and major instead on the 'hello clouds, hello sky' stereotype of Celtic spirituality. But my few days' reading in this book so far has produced an account of St Columba scorning the idea of going to sleep on straw as self-indulgent luxury and instead taking his rest on a stone with another as a pillow, so I think the authors are not unaware of what Celtic Christians were really like. 

I will, for a while anyway, put aside the thumbed pages of Celebrating the Seasons and try something different. It's not too radical a step!