Out of the Depths

Installing a new audio system in the vestry has meant emptying the rickety old wooden cupboard which housed the old one. I thought that, after 13 years here, there was nothing left to discover, but wedged in the bottom of a drawer in the cupboard was this hideous artefact which I can’t remember looking at before. Perhaps I had blanked it from my memory.

Any horrid hessian chasuble must surely date to the time of Fr Edward in the 1970s and makes me ponder yet again what was going on in that far-off epoch. It wasn’t just a liturgical reflection of the Time That Taste Forgot the secular world was passing through, but represented a real belief that the future of religion lay with jettisoning past ideals of beauty and order. We are to retain Catholic markers like vestments – we’re not getting rid of them – but our credibility rests on abandoning elaboration, decoration and richness in favour of something that signals simplicity and ordinariness. That will be part of the renewal of the Church. Clearly this didn’t work, because the causes of the modern world’s disenchantment with Christianity lay elsewhere; but, even within its own terms, just the same kind of aesthetic hamfistedness that could produce over-elaboration and over-decoration could also result in the ugliness of hessian and orange (and the latter isn’t as entertaining as OTT baroque is).

Fr Thesis is well-known for 'discovering' wonders in the recesses of his West-End vestry and some of us are convinced the Ark of the Covenant is hidden there somewhere; but I, apparently, only unearth horrors.