A Sunday of Contrasts

Our baptisms are moderately conservative affairs. I keep the old language about 'sin, the world, and the devil' and I even do the little gesture called the Ephphatha, making the sign of the Cross over the child's ears and lips, symbolising the newly-baptised soul's ears being opened to hear the Word and their mouth to speak it, which comes from the old Roman rite and which I so liked I adopted it. I've even been asked, occasionally, as I was today, to baptise a child who's wearing a traditional christening gown, but that's quite rare as most families now find their beloved baby doesn't fit the gown by the time they get around to organising the ceremony. But I've never been asked additionally to wrap the child in a white shawl before. The christening gown itself derives from the white robe in which a baptismal candidate was wrapped in the ancient rite after the baptism itself, signifying their clothing with Christ, and after the custom of baptising children naked fell into disapproval in the Western Church they would arrive at the ceremony already wearing it. I see that the old Roman Rite includes clothing with a shawl or somesuch, but also allows this to be commuted, as it were, to a white cloth placed on the child's head. The sense of this arrangement was revealed today when none of us could work out easily how to hold little Isabella so the shawl could be applied. 

Later in the afternoon it was our Spring Forest Church. I didn't know quite where we were going, so Julie the Sacristan led the small procession (including two dogs) to a local SSSI where we were surrounded by meadows and birdsong yet with the 21st century very audible in the form of the main road not far away. This is of course much less formal liturgy, but as yet hasn't attracted a single soul who is not already a member of some church community! Will more publicity make a difference?

Work Done

For the first time, I realise, in over a month, there is no work pending on my house. I rose, did all my usual early-morning tasks, and set out for the Steeple House without a cheery artisan ringing the bell for access. The loft has been lagged, the porch reconstructed, the pillars holding up the back porch and the garage repaired, the roof tiles replaced, a ventilator put in the shower room and all the irrelevant ceiling grilles which allow free flow to waking wasps more than air blocked, and, as you can see, a little radiator installed in the downstairs toilet so that it will be a little less glacial in the winter months. It was redecorated before the radiator was put in, which is a curious way of going about things, but then I didn't ask for either to be done so I can't complain. I do find the plain white a little disappointing when so much of the rest of the house is plain white, so I may repaint it anyway. Not all the garage roof tiles were replaced ('I wanted to but they wouldn't let me', stressed the roofer, who I discovered a few days ago listening to Round The Horne which disposed me in his favour), so the roof now has a little steel grille around the bottom to catch any tiles that might still come adrift and crash into my neighbours' cars parked below. So the house is much tidier now, and I can't help wondering if I'm going to be evicted.

A Brief Visit

A familiar kind of encounter for me yesterday with a longstanding member of the church who, to all appearances, is about to leave this world behind. I zoomed over to the hospital in between a ministers' lunch and a virtual meeting to make certain I had a few minutes, at least, with Derek, former churchwarden and many other things. He and his wife had only just moved into a local care home when he had a cardiac arrest and ended up in hospital being told off for not eating food he has no inclination to eat. 'I go to sleep and each time I wake up - well, I don't need to tell you,' he said. 'I wish that clock wasn't right opposite my bed'. It isn't lack of faith, as Derek's thankfully remains intact, but he is very, very tired and knowing that his wife is being looked after relieves him of any anxiety to linger longer than he needs. This sounds like a bit of a grim encounter, but it wasn't: 'I've got a lot to be thankful for', Derek told me, 'All those years as a lay pastoral assistant. It was a great privilege. They were good times'.

I say I zoomed over to the hospital, but my zooming concluded with twenty minutes of crawling round the car park trying to find a space. As the line of vehicles ahead of mine didn't decrease with time, but rather extended, I realised I was going to be unlucky, and parked at the cathedral instead, yomping over grass and through underpasses to get to the hospital. I told the chaplains about Derek and asked them to keep an eye on him. In their email back, the lead chaplain said Derek had relayed my story of parking at the cathedral (poor fellow, he'd probably bent their ear about it) and said I should have gone to the superstore which is halfway between the cathedral and the hospital. I was surprised they would advocate such naughtiness. 

Eternal City Limits

When the Rt Rev Jonathan Baker, Bishop of Fulham, was just Fr Jonathan, vicar of Holy Trinity Reading, he was the first person I was taken to by my then vicar (who’d been at college with him) to discuss my sense of vocation. His main bit of advice was for me to begin praying the Office, which I have dutifully passed on to the enquirers who come and speak to me!

We all ribbed Fr Thesis of the West End when he revealed on LiberFaciorum that, led by Bishop Jonathan, he and the clergy of the trad-Cath Fulham Episcopal Area were going to Rome for their clergy conference. Many priests shared the less glamorous locations of their own conferences; ‘In Guildford Diocese’, I commented, ‘we say that all roads lead to Swanwick’ (but at least Swanwick isn’t Butlins). Little did anyone realise that the trip would result in an ecclesiastical row that had nothing to do with its intrinsic merits but the circumstances of a particular act of worship.

Even I was somewhat astonished to see photographs of Bishop Jonathan celebrating mass for the Anglican party in the basilica of St John Lateran. Now, St Peter’s in the Vatican may be the Pope’s own chapel, but St John’s is the cathedral of the diocese of Rome itself, and in terms of significance and seniority it outranks any other church in the city. Nobody seems to want to be very explicit about how an Anglican bishop came to be presiding over the Eucharist at its main altar, but it wasn’t some kind of guerilla service in which the Fulham clergy ran in with their kit in black holdalls, hurriedly set it all up, and rattled out a mass without asking: it seems to have been done with the full knowledge of the Lateran chapter. To normal, non-churchy people, it would be baffling to have any problem with this, but not if you’re a conservative Roman Catholic for whom Anglicans are at the very best well-meaning heretics whose sacraments are invalid, and at worst deluded deceivers whose services are snares and traps for the unwary soul. To have an Anglican bishop – if you can describe him as such, rather than a man dressed as a bishop – carrying out a pretended mass in the very heart of the Catholic Church mocks the truth, to them. From the photographs of the service you can't easily see that it's taking place in a roped-off area of the cathedral so that no Catholics in communion with the See of Rome might wander in, accidentally take communion, and endanger their immortal souls.

Who was responsible for this appalling event? The day after it took place and Twitter went ballistic the Lateran Chapter issued an abject apology blaming ‘a breakdown in communication’. Presumably they simply didn’t enquire very deeply as to who this group of clergy were: they were, of course, all male, and the presence of a female or two would have given the game away. Fr Jeffrey here in Swanvale Halt hadn’t heard of the fuss, but he could see how it might have happened: ‘In Italy nobody understands what Anglicans are’ (rather the same as in England, then). There are photos of Bishop Jonathan by the side of Pope Francis in St Peter’s Square, and again, you can excuse the Pontiff for not investigating when he gets photobombed by a random character in purple. The same could not be said for Cardinal Kaspar who came to address the Fulham clergy during their tour, but had it been just him, and had the mass taken place in some back-street church in Rome, probably nobody would have noticed, because Anglicans, I fear, are loaned Roman altars all the time, in the same way Fr Jeffrey is loaned ours each and every week. I wouldn’t ask to use his, though; as I know he wouldn’t be able to say yes.

No News

Unless something goes dramatically wrong tomorrow or Monday - say, as my friend Ms Mauritia suggested, the London Marathon runners find their way through the capital impeded by people glued to the pavement - you won't see much in the news about the latest Extinction Rebellion events in Westminster, which have been specifically designed as big-tent traditional demonstrations rather than direct-action stunts designed to cause disruption: nobody's much bothered by even tens of thousands of people doing legal things. They were the focus of the last day of my break yesterday. I arrived in the rain to listen to someone from XR Cornwall talking about their experience of getting the Council there to work alongside citizens' panels: he struggled boldly against the lack of a working microphone and the better-amplified efforts of other attractions against the railings of the Palace of Westminster along Abingdon Road. For no very good reason I'd decided I would join the picket outside the Department of Transport, and found a crowd being led by a gentleman from Greenpeace in the cry 'We're from South Yorkshire and we want better buses!', while across the road a similar mass blockaded DEFRA (though not so much the staff couldn't get in or out, obviously). After about 45 minutes in which my most active contribution was helping someone get her cardboard placard pinned to her backpack, I decided to go and seek lunch, and found that someone I knew from London Gothic and who I last met at a birthday gathering had been standing right behind me. All the protests in all the world ...

A visit to the Astral Café as recommended by Comrade Tankengine (all the clientele, including me, being grumpy old chaps until a couple of schoolgirls came in seeking chips and broke the uniformity) and a call at Westminster Cathedral later, I found myself again at the Citizens' Assembly Hub outside Parliament. this time the speaker was a fellow from Reboot Democracy who described the group's plan to refashion our political system by replacing parliaments and councils with randomly-chosen Agenda Groups and Consultative Assemblies, although I was sceptical how this could cope with the short-term crises which are the lot of government most of the time. 'We aim to put up candidates in every council seat and every parliamentary constituency, who will have no policy but to introduce this system', he said. 'Unfortunately when a friend of mine did this in a local council seat, her intervention let the Conservative candidate in, so we have to work out how to avoid that'.

As always, it's XR's commitment to imagining, and in so far as possible, enacting, an alternative vision of society that impresses most (especially on the day when the UN stated that, effectively, saving the world's glaciers is no longer feasible). If only that vision didn't involve so much drumming.

Dorset, and Chelmsford 2023

In our family Badbury Rings is the go-to place for a picnic, and Wednesday found me, my mum and sister there, reliving long-ago times and wandering the windy ramparts. I think the mysterious features we could see on the skyline that looked like a row of gigantic solar panels and a tower of some kind are associated with a sand quarry on the hillside over toward Corfe Mullen. Later on I made it to Blue Pool on the Isle of Purbeck, somewhere I haven't seen for forty years; the colour of the clay-infused water varies greatly, but it had its customary hue of turquoise on Wednesday. There were a few other visitors, but I had the woods almost to myself.

But today's excursion was very different and took me to Chelmsford, mainly to see the Cathedral as it's one I've never done. There isn't much to Chelmsford, nor to its Cathedral, a big parish church bumped up to cathedral status in 1914 and never altered much to look like it unlike some other parish-church cathedrals such as Leicester or Newcastle. It has also been architecturally cleansed a couple of times over the years and so very little of any antiquity remains. It is quite the most un-cathedral-like cathedral I've seen. The font, altar and bishop's throne look disconcertingly as though they are made of recycled plastic, but are in fact of Westmorland stone.

Chelmsford City Museum, though, is a delight: clear, arranged with quite a bit of visual flair, and done with a genuine passion for the history of the area. The story of the building housing the museum is covered, and even the military bit about the Essex Regiment is good. There's also a completely uncontextualised reference in the Roman display to a certain locally-relevant 1980s TV sitcom, and I do appreciate curatorial jokes. And it's still run by the local council, and free to go in!

Thanks to the Museum, I know that Moulsham Street marks the course of the old Roman road to the waystation halfway between Londinium and Camulodonum that was the original settlement here, and it was on Moulsham Street that I found the Little Café, a small eatery which - like Tyfu Café in Caerphilly - I added to the list of nice places I've had sandwiches in. Let's not call them 'greasy-spoons', but good basic cafés. Always look for a place where old people go to eat, and where the staff know the patrons' names! 'Other cafés are available', but why would you bother?

Tale of Two Castles

Thankfully Rian-who-was-Cylene and their partner Deri now live in a part of South Wales I can leave my car in and feel reasonably confident it will still be there in the morning - a town a local apparently described as 'tired but functional', which was rather not the case with their previous location - so that's where I was yesterday and today. On the way there, and on the way back, I visited two castles, one offering the real Middle Ages and one a pretend version. The former is Caerphilly, a colossal Marcher fortress with a bloody history of treachery and exploitation; the latter, Castell Coch, which hangs in the woods overlooking faraway Cardiff, built on a medieval site but designed by Victorian Gothic Revival nutcase William Burges for the Marquis of Bute as a fantasy of what might have been there before.

Aesthetically there's little resemblance between craggy Caerphilly and the psychedelic polychromy of Castell Coch, but they both represent engineering triumphs even beyond the usual involved in the construction of castles. Caerphilly is the biggest castle in Wales by area, but what impresses most in building terms is the massive curtain wall that dams the moat-lake, fashioned of huge buttresses flanking concave walls in order to restrain the enormous weight of earth and water behind it. Castell Coch required ridiculous investment in stone-moving and stone-working, artisanship and ingenuity. It used to have a chapel which Burges designed to hang off a series of corbels built into one of the towers and projecting out over the courtyard: it was taken down in the 1890s. Mass there must have demanded faith of a particular kind. 

St Catherine at Ely

Ellie from the church visited Ely (appropriately enough) and walking round the stained glass museum at the Cathedral came upon this image of St Catherine. It's a well-known depiction, as it's clear and classic, and very accessible, and I already knew about it, though not that it originally came from the church at Wood Walton rather than Ely itself. But it's lovely that people who know me also know to look out for images of my patron saint!

Meanwhile I got it wrong when Dr Spooner (real name, no point obscuring her) posted her pictures from a visit to Roscoff in Brittany. This figure on the church altarpiece looks very much like the blessed saint, but the Dr assures me it's instead identified as Judith: that would, to be fair, make more sense, as in the legend it's Catherine who gets her head cut off, not the wicked Emperor Maxentius, otherwise often seen as a cringing presence at her feet. It has sometimes struck me as odd that in some representations of St Catherine, Maxentius gets reduced to a head: they are all post-reformation, and tend to be Spanish in cultural context, like this intensely dramatic treatment by Antonio Vela Cobo. Now I wonder whether there wasn't some iconographical crossover with Judith, another feminist hero avant la lettre. No wonder Artemisia Gentileschi was fascinated by both of them.

Moonbathing and Other Adventures

My visit to London yesterday had three purposes: to plot out the route for my proposed next history walk; to pop to the Victoria Library for the show of art by the late Paula Hibbert Lewis, who I didn't know but various of my Goth friends did and I'm sure I've been in the same space as her at various points; and finally to meet up with Lady Wildwood, MaisyMaid and Ms DawnStar to Moon-bathe, which I will explain shortly. The first obstacle was a signalling failure at Waterloo which basically closed the whole south-eastern rail network: 'What should we do?' I asked the helpful fellow at Swanvale Halt station, to which his answer was 'Go home and forget about it'. I thought that instead I could catch the Tube at Morden, the most accessible station on the Underground network to me. The most accessible - until it came to parking the car. That took about 45 minutes, longer than it did to drive there, and involved deleting the RingGo app account I didn't know I had, and setting up a new one. 

Anyway, I eventually got there. The route I'd worked out for the Walk was a bit too long: we will have to lose Carlton House Terrace, for instance, one of the more charismatic locations on the original plan. Together with my diversion to the Victoria Library I ended up traipsing about six miles at some speed and so it was no surprise I felt a bit footsore and achey at the end. Ms Lewis's pictures included some beautiful portraits and small, colourful collages, so it was worth the walk to pay a silent trubite to a soul from the Goth world. I even finished, amazingly, a bit early so I was able to have a tea at a little café in front of Kings Cross Station. Very oddly, the barista insisted to me that not only did they have no decaffeinated tea, but that such a thing didn't exist, so I gave in and had a full-fat one.

Lady Wildwood currently works at Kings Place, the Kings Cross arts venue which not that long ago hosted PJ Harvey discussing poetry with Don Paterson, and she alerted us to the Moonbathing event which is one of a series of sound installations. You lie, or sit, in a darkened room while a big inflatable Moon hangs impassively above you and your fellow audio explorers, gradually changing colour or lapsing into entire darkness, while noise goes on around you which I would describe as a kind of sonic massage. Like massage, it isn't always gentle and the floor vibrates and pounds before everything shifts a gear and the industrial noise is replaced by tinkly bells and the like. It rather reminded me at times of being in an MRI scanner, something which I have only done once and which I quite enjoyed but I know not everyone does. I felt it teetered on the cusp of the relaxing and the disturbing. This might be because of the images you end up thinking about - Lady Wildwood, who has done it before, found herself imagining 'alien creatures running across the ceiling and preparing to abduct you ... giant spiders scuttling at the edge of the room' while I was reminded of someone going through a drawer trying to find a pair of scissors. On the other hand, my sense of 'disturbance' came from the slight worry that all this aural pounding might not be doing me all that good. Has this been tested on mice first, I wondered? Anyway, it was worth doing (once).

The floor slabs at Kings Place have ammonite fossils embedded in them. Lady Wildwood had never spotted them before! I don't think they're Dorset stone, so I wonder where they come from?

Enrolling, Enrolling, Enrolling

Once upon a fair time, the Mothers' Union was a power in the land, and in some lands it still is, but in its country of origin it tends to have aged into the Grandmothers' Union (or even an additional generation). You can visit a lot of churches and find a very fine MU banner embroidered with gold thread and a beautiful Virgin & Child bearing witness to a branch of the organisation which has long since been dissolved, rather like the standard of a vanished regiment laid up. I tend to see the MU as a bit of a sleeping giant, full of potential for social and spiritual good, but its hidebound constitution doesn't help: it's very hard to establish a Branch, as Branches require quite a lot of structural organisation rather than making it easy for a group of women who sympathise with the MU's aims getting together and doing stuff. In desperation the MU decided to admit gentlemen to membership some years ago, a move I have to say I entirely disapprove of, but then that's my old-fashioned feminism coming to the surface.

As the MU has a spiritual element, new members have to be admitted by a clergyperson. When Marion was our curate she was an MU member and she did it when necessary, so now she is gone the task devolves on me and I can't recall a time when I have ever been involved in admitting four members at once (only three of them female, and none under the age of 70). The rite of enrolment is simple and reminded me very much of admitting new cadets to the ATC: you state that the particular person is being admitted as a member of the branch concerned, shake their hand, and give them a membership card and a badge. This took place in the context of a Branch meeting where the members listened to the chap from the Town Council Youth Service describing his work, and in fact they asked some pretty astute questions. 

Our Pastoral Assistant Sally was one of the new members being enrolled. It was just as well she called to remind me I should have been there or it would have slipped my mind completely, despite me knowing full well about it two hours before. She and the other Swanvale Halt contingent in the Branch said I'd been delayed by an awkward phone call.

And That Was Easter

If attendance is an indicator of success, our Holy Week and Easter services were successful this year. In previous years I've had to abandon the outdoor Stations of the Cross in which we follow a little route around the centre of the village because nobody had turned up to join me, but this year there were ten souls including Clarke who is 14 and autistic and after each station wanted to know where we were going next whereupon, having been told, he expressed his incredulity with enthusiasm. We had more people at the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday liturgies than I think any time since I arrived in Swanvale Halt, and that was also true of the Dawn Mass on Easter Day. Several congregation members who might normally be expected to turn up later in the day were there for that early service, but the others held up decently too. 74 (including 6 under-16s) at the main mass is no great shakes compared to pre-pandemic days, but it's still a slight advance on 2022.

Once the rain stopped today, I went out for a wander around the paths and lanes east of Swanvale Halt. I'm pretty sure I've been to all these places before, if not approaching them from that direction! As ever the Surrey hills present an intriguing patchwork of textures and visions.

A Chrism Mass, or Something

Several of my colleagues of The Other Integrity have been posting pictures this Holy Week of the Chrism Masses they've attended with the Bishop of Oswestry or His Grace of Fulham all wearing nice Roman vestments and cohorts of clergy in concelebration gear. I doubted I would do the same for ours from Guildford, although the occasion is less trying than it once used to be since the suppression of the clergy music group who used to accompany the worship: the cathedral musicians wrested back control in a coup and the Mass sounds much the better for it.

But why wasn't the Bishop presiding? He preached, but left Her Serenity the Dean actually to celebrate the Eucharist. To be fair he is a very efficient preacher, although on this occasion I remembered his introductory gambit 'If you met Jesus in your parish, would you invite him to dinner?' and my attention wandered after that, I fear. But really part of the point of the Chrism Mass is that the Bishop celebrates with their presbyters around them, as was the case in the first few centuries of the Church: it isn't just to 'celebrate ministry' (which now includes laypeople who we are all encouraged to bring along) and pick up three small bottles of oil. In fact Bishop Andrew always used to delegate the Mass to the Bishop of Dorking, but even in those circumstances it at least expressed something of the idea of shared episkope between the two. Even most generously interpreted, that can't encompass the Dean. Could it possibly be that the Bishop thinks it's more important to signal inclusion by making sure a woman presides at an all-diocese eucharist, rather than do what the Chrism Mass is actually there for? Could he really have that 'thin' an appreciation of what he does?

(Mind you, a few years' time and we may all have to go somewhere else for the event anyway)

St Mary's, Headley

We are eking out these last few church explorations, so it was some time ago that I managed to get into St Mary’s, Headley, on the east of the diocese. The church was entirely rebuilt in the 1850s and although the Sacrament is reserved the overall impression is less of a church in the Catholic tradition than of a slightly brutal Victorian rebuild humanised by various eccentric bits and pieces, not least the wood panelling which surrounds the interior. One of the more striking of these items is the screen across the tower commemorating Revd Theodore Phillips, vicar 1916-41, but who seems to have spent most of his time as an amateur astronomer, rising to President of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1927 and making the best observations of Jupiter of the time. The panels of the screen are decorated with the Zodiacal signs, which must be a fairly unique feature within Anglican churches. The new parish room, with its transplanted window of St John the Baptist, is rather a nice (albeit non-liturgical) space. The churchyard has something entirely opposite – a grotto made from fragments of the old church, including the 1855 font moved there after a new one was installed inside the church. At first glance I thought it might be an attempt at a holy well, but there’s not a drop of water, alas.

Informality Rules

This is a scene that can’t happen now. In 2013 we hosted the Town Council Rogation service that used to rotate around the local Anglican churches, the last time we did so before it lapsed into desuetude. It can’t happen because a few years ago the Councillors, faced with the cost of replacing their ceremonial robes which were running to the threadbare, opted to get rid of them instead. Hornington was, it was pointed out, the only town for some distance whose Council retained its robes, and you can see why it might seem very indulgent to buy a whole set of new schmutter when there are always rather bigger demands on the public purse. The officials – the Mayor, Town Clerk, and Sergeant-at-Mace – are now the only ones who have any special kit.

Rogation was always a rather eccentric observance, but when the Councillors abandoned their robes it made it less likely that they would want to do anything corporate in public at all. Today I was talking to some of the Council staff about what might happen at Christmas: last year Town Carols was a very lacklustre affair in a municipal hall, so the churches would like to revert to the civic occasion it was pre-Pandemic, gathering at the Market House in the High Street and then processing down to the old parish church. The trouble is that without their gear, the Councillors are just a bunch of people in suits, not so much processing as ambling in a fundamentally unimpressive way. In an increasingly secular world they might not care that much about Christmas, but then we have events such as the Jubilee and the Accession Proclamation last year, and rare though they are, our elected representatives certainly care about those.

And I think it’s their role precisely as representatives which is relevant here. The councillors aren’t only technocratic managers of a local authority, elected to carry through a particular set of policies: they also, by appearing en masse at a few very formal occasions, show what a community thinks is important, and some kind of distinctive dress would seem to be an element in that. It says, This group of people aren’t just a random rattle-bag of individuals, they have a role, and a relationship with you, the electors and onlookers. You might just be able to think of other folk in fancy dress to whom similar statements might apply.