Renewing the Kit

Essentially derived from the winter gown most medieval people might have worn from time to time, a cassock is the most basic item of the clergyperson’s kit. No matter what liturgical setting I’m functioning in, the cassock is the level below which I will not descend. Take from me my cotta, my chasuble and alb, but leave me my plain black! 

Ever since I was at theological college, I have had two cassocks. They were made by lovely Mr Taylor (a man captured by nominative determinism if ever anyone was) at his shop along the Cowley Road in Oxford, and have done sterling service for nearly twenty years. Thankfully my dimensions haven’t altered very much over that time! It was Mr Taylor who first alerted me to the fact that I am a bit wonky, my left shoulder being higher than my right.

The first warning I had that my cassocks were not immortal came quite some time ago when I tore the lining in first one and then the other while putting them on. Gradually the damage extended and this became more and more irritating as it was progressively harder to get my arms where they should be. Then I began to notice that the cuffs were wearing at the folds. There was no alternative but to replace them.

Sadly Mr Taylor, who has for all this time kept me supplied with ecclesiastical gear even after he’d decamped from the Cowley Road and set up shop in an industrial unit in rural Oxfordshire, had given up making cassocks. I turned to a well-known firm of clergy outfitters who I’ve dealt with very satisfactorily in the past, and tackled the options on their website – fabric, buttons, cuffs, number of back pleats. The company is based some distance away and unless I wanted to catch up with them at a church resources conference or something my measurements would have to be sent on. Helpfully the website gives a comprehensive list of what’s required and my sister was willing to wield a tape measure. There was a bit of a delay after the fabric I’d requested turned out to be ‘unsatisfactory’ to the company and had to be replaced with something similar: ‘only the weave is different’, they assured me.

But there are risks involved, especially when you’re spending something like £400 on a single garment. Medium barathea turns out to be quite heavy (about a third as weighty again as my old cassock) and I think the second cassock I order will be in a lighter fabric. We’ve also been a bit generous in measurements and the new cassock pokes out about an inch below the hem of my alb which looks ungracious. I’ve discussed this with the makers, and as they didn’t offer to alter it for me it looks like that job falls to me!

A Vocal Vocation

All the profiles of Sinéad O’Connor after her death drew attention to a song I thought among the least interesting in her output: ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ is a basically schmaltzy piece of work lent dignity and emotion by the power and passion she puts into it, though it made sense to hang her off it for a general public most likely to have known her through her biggest hit, rather than the eerie gothic of ‘Jackie’ or the operatics of ‘Troy’ – for instance.

It was good to read and hear proper acknowledgement of O’Connor’s religion – for this most religious of performers – including from Christian commentators. This is someone who claimed her contract made with the Holy Spirit before she began performing was far more important than any agreed with a record company. In fact that reviewer of O’Connor’s memoir from 2021, Jessica Mesman, I see, makes the good point that religious is a much better word for the singer than spiritual. Religion, the word, relates to a Latin root meaning ‘to bind’, and O’Connor’s pursuit of faith resulted in her exactly binding herself to religious tradition, to successive religious traditions, with a passion that’s a long, long way from the self-centred and dilletante sampling we too often associate with the idea of spirituality. She gave herself to them, even when it invited ridicule. Fundamentally, she wasn’t looking for something that made her feel better, that ‘worked for her’, something experiential that put her at the centre: she was following where (she felt) the Spirit led her, seeking to make sense out of what had happened to her, Ireland, and the world. She admitted she was crazy, but beneath the craziness was a basic unity of purpose that held together a woman who could come on stage as a Christian priest – properly if irregularly ordained – and then a few years later as a Muslim in a hijab. None of it was done for effect. Well, it was: but the effect was not focused on herself, but on the eternal.

Prophets are uncomfortable presences, and O’Connor, like the even less amenable Diamanda Galás, was definitely that, proclaiming to the Church its own corruption and falsehood. The Church will always be corrupt and false, and in a week when the Bishop of Newcastle decides to refuse Lord Sentamu Permission To Officiate on the grounds of his response to being criticised in a safeguarding report, you needn’t think the Church of England differs that much from the Church of Rome.

Of course, she was wrong about the Church, though right enough about the caricature of itself which it so regularly holds up for the admiration of human beings. The Church, it seems to me, exists only to do two things, to state definitely and dauntlessly the reality and nature of God and what he has done, and to demonstrate that we don’t live the spiritual life alone, even when we are alone; that we need one another. That’s why you can’t be ordained without a Christian community to be ordained into, to live out that vocation with: vocation isn’t a solitary matter, and I don’t think O’Connor ever really considered the possibility of taking assemblies in an infant school or talking to old ladies about their hip operations over tea after Bishop Michael Brown laid hands on her. But the Church itself forgets that, and assumes a role God never envisaged for it.

Part of me looks at O’Connor’s religious life and wonders what might have happened if she had found it possible to stay concertedly in one Christian tradition. My instinct is to see people fixed: say the Office and go to Mass, I’d have said, settle and listen and you'll find some healing. But perhaps prophets have to stay broken and difficult to remain true to their calling; perhaps God might sometimes want a priest to turn into a Muslim. The Church can’t dare to say so much, but it ought dare to think it.

Cambridgeshire, July 2023

Archangel Janet and Mal moved from Glastonbury to March a few months ago, and so this holiday I decided to pop up and see them. I stopped along the way in Huntingdon, where the parish church was just setting up for its drop-in café when I arrived, too tempting a chance to turn down. Huntingdon was clearly very smart at one time, though I don't think has that much to show for it in the 21st century.

Everyone told me there was nothing to see in March, though it has a grand church and market place, and a river with canal boats, and I thought it was fairly neat, albeit apparently under wholesale reconstruction at the moment, a bit like Janet and Mal's house.

My last appointment was to see Dr Bones, sister and brother-in-law at her father's vicarage in Ashambury near Cambridge, where he has been incumbent since Abraham was a young man. On the way I revisited Ely, its cathedral long and narrow before exploding outwards into the unique space of the Octagon - the closest medieval English cathedral architecture got to a dome.

The afforded me two contrasting museum experiences. Ely City Museum in the Old Gaol dates to 1972 but was refurbished a couple of years ago, and is now swish and stylish, designed to the hilt ...

... but some of the displays at March Museum look as though they haven't changed since about 1972, and it crams in more objects than you might think possible. It's every bit of slightly corroded farm equipment you've ever imagined, and then some more. Were I designing a museum nowadays, it would look like Ely; but I have a suspicion that March's model is more fun.

Trip to the Tip

... was the ritual cry of delight, repeated ad libitem by the staff of Wycombe Museum when a visit to the 'local amenity centre' beckoned to dispose of, not items from the collection I hasten to add, but broken bits of equipment, surplus display materials and the like. Unable, as I said last time, to make it to Robbie and Freida's housewarming, instead I indulged in a Trip to the Tip of my own. I seemed to come away with almost as much as I took there. 

I've been looking for a small glass bowl to use when we do external communion services at Widelake and other places since our last one got broken, so this is a welcome and useful find. My eye was caught by the little handpainted blue bowl, a small item which can happily sit on a variety of windowsills in my house. Thereafter even I admit my finds become a bit more questionable. I have no idea what the silvery thing you can see at the back of the photo is: it looks bizarrely like a metal pomegranate and has a little stalk to hang from. I ought to have known what the small object that looks like a titled eggcup was, but it took my knowledgeable friend Ms Brumneedle to identify it as, probably, a cigar rest. It's silver plate, even though it doesn't have an EPNS mark, and just needs a bit of buffing up. I now have a stand for the cigars I don't smoke to add to the ebony watch stand for the fob watch I usually keep upstairs, which Ms T gave me all of ten years ago. 

And then there is the La Virgen de la Candelaría key rack. La Virgen de la Candelaría is a particular image of the BVM (and a Black Madonna, too) who is the patron saint of Tenerife, and this stunning item is a prime example of the tat a tourist might bring home from a trip to that island. The icon is a bit of printed paper, the wood it's mounted on looks like it comes from an orange box, and everything else is gold plastic. How could I resist that.

Travel Mode

It would have been nice to have gone to Robbie and Freida's housewarming, but it was in Bedfordshire and the rail strikes made the whole thing rather inconvenient. I could still have battled my way round the M25 for a couple of hours, but others such as MaisyMaid, Lady Wildwood and Ms Mauritia didn't have that option; Her Ladyship lives not far away, so I could conceivably have given her a lift, but the others have to come from central London. Had they been able to go, I would have braced myself for the drive; had they not but had the trains been running anyway, I would have got there that way. The combination of both, however, meant I elected to stay home. 

When my current vehicle gives up, I'll probably replace it with an electric car, but I'm not quite confident of the charging network and technological efficiency yet, and so for now I try to avoid driving if I can. Yesterday morning Churches Together had a Prayer Breakfast at the Baptist Church in Midbury, and I thought that really I ought to cycle there if I could. It's only about 3 1/2 miles and should take about twenty minutes. They turned out to be twenty long and arduous minutes although, as is curiously common, the return journey was noticeably less trying. Ironically as I wasn't going to Robbie and Freida's after all I used part of the time by taking some trash to the tip, which journey takes me along exactly the same route I'd done on two wheels earlier in the day.

I have a lot of driving to do next week, when I am off, popping down to Dorset and hopefully to Cambridgeshire. I'd rather go there on the train, but even though the Tube strikes have been called off the journey turns out to be off-puttingly expensive. A visit to Oxford looks feasible, though, although as the line down from Swanvale Halt is closed due to engineering works I'll have to go to the next station to catch it. I ought to cycle there, I suppose.

Moving Along Again

It's the end of another term, and another year, school-wise. Church Club came to an end, as did the Toddler Group, and on Wednesday the children of the infants school were in the church to celebrate their Leavers' Service. The event culminates, as ever, in handing over the Lions Picture Bibles which the church funds, each of which contains the relevant child's name. They've been redesigned a bit over the years, but not basically changed - not that they will probably date all that quickly. The school brings over its own sound equipment these days, but I must admit I heard barely a word the children said. That didn't matter: the event made its point. And so off the Year 2s go, scattering far and wide (well, mostly to Hornington Juniors), and I will have far less to do with them than I have done up till now. For most, that Lions Picture Bible has to do an awful lot of work! 

At the Guru's Feet

It’s been quite some time since I saw my spiritual director. The trains weren’t helping on Monday, down to one an hour from Swanvale Halt, and to be sure of making it on time meant hanging around in London rather longer than I normally like. I wanted to run past him a couple of situations in which I hadn’t been sure of my motivations or whether the outcomes had been the right ones. As usual his judgements were quite robust, and I offer them as one perspective on the way churches work, and sometimes don’t:

“Of course people are drawn to churches because they have problems that need dealing with, but you will always have individuals who don’t really want to deal with them, or can’t, so what they’re looking for is to feel better about themselves without any real self-examination or questioning. In large churches this isn’t a problem, because they’ll be swamped by other people and established processes which mean they can’t usually do too much damage. But in small churches they will often exert a disproportionate influence. They’ll take on roles and think of it as service, but what they actually want is self-validation. If they leave as a result of some crisis, you’re lucky: usually they stay, and eventually it’s the sensible people who leave.”

I’d outlined the situations beforehand so that left plenty of time to talk about folded chasubles, what went wrong with the Coronation (‘the trouble with the Archbishop is that he doesn’t really understand liturgy. He’s much at his best when he isn’t in church’), the numinous quality of the Shrine of St Wite at Whitchurch Canonicorum which a friend had taken S.D. to (‘there are no candles for pilgrims any more, the vicar has taken them away in case someone lights one’), and the parish magazine from St Paul’s Weymouth which is full of articles on the Precious Blood, the role of the subdeacon, and the like. And a lasagne recipe.

Over the Threshold

Last week I was saying Evensong when I became aware someone had come in. It turned out to be a gentleman of about 40, who was sitting in a pew on his own when I finished. He was Ted, and had come to church because he'd successfully come home from hospital after a medical emergency, and wanted to say thank you. I introduced myself: 'I know who you are, my kids have been through the infant school', he said. Ted made it to the 8am service on Sunday - and, even more to my surprise, came back for the 10am, saying that he was trying to get used to church and how it worked. He stayed for coffee afterwards - I do hope someone spoke to him, as I was dealing with all sorts of things and couldn't. 

Meanwhile, Jessie has been to the church a number of times now. She's a neighbour of Sandra who coordinates so much of our children's activities, and originally attended with her, but now has made it on her own enough to think she might stick. She's been in to coffee-time too, and seems able to have friendly conversations with the folk around her. She's had a tough time with many things to work through, and I'm glad she might think the Church could be part of that. 

Making it through the door of a church when you have no real experience of doing so is a daunting business and I applaud anyone who manages it. It took me, I think, five years between standing in the porch of Christchurch Priory listening to the Tre Ore on Good Friday - hardly the most accessible of services! - to attending the 100th anniversary Mass at St Paul's Kirby Road in Leicester, and a couple of weeks later the Mass for St Lucy's Day at St Mary de Castro in that city on a snowy December night - and, remember, I knew all the stuff before I ever set foot inside a real live church. Up and down and round about, turn to this page, speech and silence, singing at this service but not this one: well done all those souls who make it through, and God bless you!

Renewal & Reform: The Times of the Church

Everything that my friend Fr Keith Elford of West Byfleet & New Haw might choose to write for the Church Times would be worthwhile, especially as I don’t see that august journal directly and rely on those who do expose themselves to it to tell me what’s in it. But his recent piece analysing the Church of England’s ‘Renewal and Reform’ initiative from 2015 had me blinking slightly, because I don’t remember ‘Renewal and Reform’ at all. It’s sobering to think that an ambitious initiative that was intended to transform the way the Church of England works passed me by entirely, demonstrating either that it was woefully badly implemented, or that I am appallingly inattentive, or very likely both.

‘The Church’s vocation is to proclaim the Good News afresh in each generation’, the Archbishops announced grandly in their press release inaugurating Renewal & Reform in February 2015. And Keith reckons that many of the targets set out in the final report (or rather the reports of the five working groups, on lay discipleship, resourcing ministerial education, using resources across the Church, ‘simplification’, and training bishops and deans) were indeed achieved, though he wonders whether or not that really amounted to a success in terms of R&R’s original ambitions for the Church. But, for a scheme that was supposed to galvanise the Church of England ‘for a generation’, R&R seemed nebulous and lacking in any rigorous analysis of the Church’s institutions or, more radically and importantly, what it was for.

As Keith points out, R&R was underpinned by the assumption of ‘decline’ across the Church – in numbers of worshippers, clergy, and finance (though the last wasn’t as serious as the first two) and thought about what should be done about it. But there was absolutely nothing about what this decline might be about, or (an even more uncomfortable question) why this was a bad thing. Using churchy language, what’s the specific charism and the specific vocation of the Anglican Church? Anglicanism’s traditional justifications have been eroded away entirely: the Empire is gone, Englishness means little and what little is there has next to no connection with religion anymore, and holding the middle ground between Catholicism and Protestantism are not terms anyone thinks in. Absent those purposes, might we as well pack up and hand all our worshipping communities and the buildings that house them to the Italian Mission (or someone else, as you prefer)? I concluded some time ago that if the Church of England has any point at all it is to force together different varieties of Christians within the same institutional framework and make them, at some level, live together and talk together. If God has any purpose for us, it is this; and I most especially suspect that’s the case because it’s happened by accident rather than because anyone planned it this way. It would be a mortifying consideration for all of us, Catholic, liberal or evangelical, to follow through with this idea, as much as it should be to imagine that (as I have said many, many times before) that the Lord is purging the Body of Christ of its desire for power and control, dressed up as it often is in evangelistic zeal or cynical resignation.

Does the Church of England really not know why it exists in this third decade of the 21^st century, as it didn’t seem to in the second – or, at least, didn’t ask the question? This week in my capacity as a Local Vocations Advisor I had a conversation with a gentleman sent to me, a Charismatic Christian from an Eastern European Roman Catholic background who has curiously become beguiled by the history, openness and breadth of Anglicanism, and wants to find out whether he has a vocation within it: ‘I see part of my purpose as bringing different sorts of Christians together’, he told me. If we want a ‘strategy’ in the future, we have to begin with what we think God might want of us, not just as Christians, but as these Christians in this time.

St Mary's Stoke D'Abernon

What a stonkingly odd church Stoke D'Abernon is. Its oddness begins with its location, way outside Stoke D'Abernon in the grounds of what is now a school, but used to be the manor house. The church website claims that it began life as an Anglo-Saxon manorial chapel possibly as early as the 7th century, whereas The Buildings of England chooses to lead on Ian Nairn's description of it as 'the classic example of bad 19th-century restoration, the worst even in Surrey'. Certainly from the outside it looks weird. Inside you can see what Nairn meant even more clearly: the restoration of the 1850s and 60s disposed of a perfectly serviceable Norman chancel arch and replaced it with a Gothic one, for instance. At some stage the original fragmentary wall paintings were expanded by an imaginative reconstruction - but still presented as a fragment, as though something larger remained to be uncovered. Which it didn't. But then along came the postwar incumbent Canon JHL Waterson, who did away with as much Victoriana as he possibly could and stuffed the church with bits and pieces ransacked from elsewhere. To him we owe much of the glass, the bizarre oak aumbry, and I suspect the towering figure of the BVM. These now sit among the older fragments - the 13th-century chest, the Jacobean pulpit, the brasses and effigies - lending a degree of crazy dignity to what's essentially an unremarkable building. At some point a coloured reredos was done away with, leaving the east wall blank. 

The lords of the manor were the Vincents, but it was the Vaillants who monopolised the Rectory in the pre-restoration days. Julia, daughter of Francis Maceroni (‘soldier, diplomat, revolutionary, balloonist, author, inventor, and bigamist’), whose jewels ended up adorning the processional cross at St James's Weybridge, was married to a Vaillant - but that's a story for another day. 

So here you have a church which has a variety of Catholic bits and pieces in it. The current priest, Rev'd Phaedra, can be seen on the website (the photo comes up if you wait long enough) wearing some nice Gothic vestments which I know her predecessor took on board as well, and he was an SCP member. But while in line with most moderate churches these days the core of the worship is Eucharistic, I once preached at Stoke d'Abernon at a bracingly stiff 1662 Choral Evensong and I also know another incumbent had a hard time with some of the more traditionalist elements there. St Mary's never figured in any of the Anglo-Catholic church guidebooks, no matter how determined Canon Waterson was to make it look the part. What you see, brethren, sometimes misleads. 

An Absence of Presence

This morning I had the rare experience of getting ready for the 10.30am midweek service and having no congregation. I followed the standard practice of reading the service through to the Creed and finishing with the Prayer for the Church Militant, which you’re supposed to do just in case anyone turns up at the last moment. After that, you'd be into the Canon of the Mass, so newcomers have had it really.

This midweek service is the last relic of the time when Swanvale Halt, like many others, was a ‘daily mass church’ with a service of holy communion most days; and that wasn’t all that long ago, the tradition finally ending in the late 1990s. The Tuesday service survived because it was the one that had most people attending, but it’s gone up and down over the years. When I arrived in 2009, the church was trying to build it up into a social occasion for older people with refreshments and board games afterwards, but that never took off. Sometimes there have been just a couple of us present, sometimes as many as 15. The congregation tended to be older people who found a long Sunday service too much, and others who happened to be around at that time. At the moment we don’t have many people that applies to.

I’m committed to the idea that the holy eucharist should be offered on a weekday, but I wonder if 10.30am on Tuesday is the right time. Over the years I’ve floated the idea of celebrating the service at a variety of different points – early morning for people before they go to work, after school drop-off, lunchtime, or the evening as folk head home from work – anything that would make it easier for people to build some time for God into their busy lives. No suggestion has ever resulted in much, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be made again.

As today was St Benedict’s Day, this is a precis of what I was going to say in my homily, so it doesn’t go to waste: I sometimes tell myself, ‘well, I can reuse that in a few years’ time’, but I never remember!

Readings: Proverbs 2.1-6, Luke 18.18-22

I didn’t know before preparing my homily that, after some years, a group of the monks at the monastery St Benedict founded and led decided they couldn’t bear him any more and tried to poison him. If you look at our icon of St Benedict in the church, you’ll see a broken chalice, which I think refers to that legend. Nobody has tried to poison me yet as far as I know, but the story shows rather graphically that living in a Christian community can be as far from easy as it’s possible to be. That’s what Benedict and his monks were prepared to undergo to follow the spiritual life. They’d already done what Jesus describes in the Gospel reading today and ‘given up all their possessions’, and you might imagine they could be tempted to say to God, ‘Isn’t that enough, Lord?’ but apparently not! It’s even more costly than that.

We’re prone to take prayer and the presence of God for granted because we can do it any time and any place. But in reality, these things are (as the reading from Proverbs says) silver and treasure, a gift which is the most precious thing we could have. Compared to what we receive from God, our richest possessions are dust, and the dangers we might encounter no more threatening than a mown field, if we see things rightly. What might we be prepared to undergo for the sake of that treasure? Amen.

PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying (2023)

The first reaction to PJ Harvey’s latest studio album, seven years in the waiting for those of us who were (notwithstanding her soundtrack projects for All About Eve, The Virtues or Bad Sisters), must be astonishment that thirty years into their career an artist can still produce something so radically distinct from what’s come before. There are, almost inevitably, hints and echoes of the past, but they are merely that, just as the blushes of other artists – Patti Smith’s ‘Ghost Dance’ on the title track, for instance, rhythms that call to mind Kylie Minogue at her best or vocals mimicking Siouxsie when she still had a voice – amount to nothing more than a drop or two of flavour added to the mix.

It's also necessary to say that this isn’t ‘Orlam put to music’, even though every song derives from a lyric in that book. I’ve said how I found Orlam a baleful and horrible work notwithstanding its brilliance; the album runs with the folklore, flora and fauna, and the personal mythology of the book, but excises the rapes and menace to favour something far less definite and monstrous. It’s weird, but dreamy-weird rather than bloody-weird. Structurally, the poems are bent and reshaped into songs, in the same way Harvey refashioned elements of The Hollow of the Hand into Hope Six. This means that the recording isn’t telling the same story as the book, even when it begins where the book does with ‘Prayer at the Gate’. The twelve tracks don’t follow the year the way Orlam does, but leap around the months, leaving us somewhere toward the end of summer. Mind you, there’s a slight feel of the early 1970s about ‘Autumn Term’ and ‘Seem an I’, or the witchy folk-horror sensibility of ‘A Child’s Question: July’, just the time Harvey was growing up and when Orlam is imagined.

The narrative indeterminacy is intensified by techniques Harvey has never used before, especially sampling found sounds - the children playing on ‘Autumn Term’ or the birds and insects on ‘Noiseless Noise’ - or the rhythmic distortion of her voice (‘The Nether-Edge’). None of it is obvious or clear: the sampled noises are not straightforward scene-setting like the seagulls on Uh Huh Her, but cut into tiny fragments and looped, often placed so low in the mix that you’re not sure what you’re hearing. This means they are not intrusions of the real world into that of the album, but parts of the real world captured and transformed, a bit like a human hair used in a magic spell. Are there church bells close to the end of ‘I Inside the Old I Dying’? And what’s the scraping noise repeated through the first half of ‘August’? Sometimes you fasten onto a sound or aural shape, only to find it disappearing. This is a recording which you absolutely need to listen to on headphones or a high-quality sound system, else most of its subtleties will escape you.

The album in Harvey’s oeuvre closest to the atmosphere of I Inside the Old Year Dying is 1998’s Is This Desire?, a similarly enclosed, dreamy series of soundscapes; but the earlier record’s intense tales were models of clarity and comprensibility compared to this, so internal and hazy. The final track, ‘A Noiseless Noise’, finishes with the plea ‘Come away, love, and leave your wandering’, as though addressing someone emerging from a strange reverie, and perhaps, in the previous forty minutes, that’s just where we’ve been. 

Third of Three

The Mayor’s Civic Service, the SCP, and yesterday the Air Cadets for their enrolment ceremony: three special events piling up in the same week in just the way I would rather they didn’t. Last time we tried using the church for the enrolment we started ridiculously early; I should have insisted we wait a bit to make sure people arrived, as one parent turned up bang on time to watch their proud offspring, only to find they had entered a parallel universe in which they were already late. On this occasion it went perfectly, the boys and girls had a chance to parade outside, I remembered to scribble down the names of the cadets being enrolled so I could use them, and the only mistake was that two of the cadets who were supposed to be there weren’t and two who weren’t were, so that, while they all got a certificate, it wasn’t necessarily their certificate. All of the right teenagers, then, but not all of them in the right order. There were refreshments for the relatives in the hall afterwards. One parent was the Clerk of Governors to the Infants School, while another had come to see a son make his promises who was baptised at the church thirteen years ago (I thought I recognised the name, and checked in the register); she has a daughter she’d been saving up for a baptism for a while, she told me. It’s beguiling, this business of being a priest of a parish church. It makes it seem as though you have friends. Perhaps you do. 

An Elevation

Before yesterday I’d never hosted the SCP at Swanvale Halt church, and was surprisingly nervous about doing so. Part of my anxiety was over food. We have our lovely café just opposite the church, but that’s not open in the evening, and there’s nowhere else you can sit very close at hand: there’s a pizza takeway and a kebab shop in the next street, a Greek food van some distance away, and a couple of Indian restaurants of (to me) unknown quality in far-flung parts of the parish. But round the corner is a fish-and-chip emporium, so I took orders from my colleagues, let the friers know in advance, and once mass was over dashed out in the rain to collect it all. It worked out fine, even if I did confuse one attender with someone who never made it through the traffic and the deluge, and ended up with an extra bit of cod. We huddled at the back of the church to eat, hoping not too much of the aroma of grease and fish made it through to Slimming World in the church hall, and trying not to turn the discussion into a complete whingefest.

Fr Donald now has far too much to do at Lamford and so I have ascended to the rectorship of the Diocesan Chapter of SCP. My first step, apart from arranging the next gathering at the Cathedral in September, will probably be to try and learn who everyone is, and order an SCP badge which I don’t even have yet. Whether I can actually do anything practical remains to be seen.

The Welcome Mat

It was, of course, a great privilege to be able to host Paula’s Civic Service as Mayor of the Borough, but I’m glad it’s behind us. We were working out the choreography until just before we started, and deciding which of our organist and the Town Band (twenty of them!) was going to play what piece of music. Thankfully both of them were extremely flexible and understanding, and I came away with a respect for the organist’s sense of diplomacy which is not a quality you always associate with church musicians. Mayoral chains of various local authorities glittered around the pews. The centrepiece of this sort of event is an exchange of commitments rather like a wedding, when the Mayor promises to do their best and everyone else promises to support them. Afterwards I blessed the Mayor’s cake, and a gentleman visitor told me how as a young man in South Africa he’d seen a Roman Catholic priest in Soweto blessing a popcorn machine (it was intended to raise money for the Society of St Vincent de Paul, apparently).

As usual whenever I lead a service where I can expect the congregation will include people of a variety of different opinions, I began by acknowledging the possibility that some might not want to say some Christian things, but if so they should just keep Paula in mind; and in my homily – which was about the ambiguities and sacrifices implied in the idea of ‘community’ – I referred to the different ways Christians and non-believers might think about and describe the process of learning to live with diversity and conflict. A young woman who works for one of the charities Paula is supporting during her year as Mayor came up to me after the service, and told me ‘I was quite emotional during the service because as a humanist it’s the first time I can ever remember being specifically included in a religious event. Normally I expect just to let it all go past me, but this time I felt I was welcome’.

How affirming that was! Until I opened my bible this morning and read 1Thessalonians 2.4, ‘we speak not to please mortals, but to please God, who tests our hearts’. I do have an intense dislike of making people sad. If I was challenged to name my strongest motivation in life, I would say that I wanted everyone to be happy. I know they can’t be because some end up wanting things that are incompatible with the happiness of others, and many of us fallen souls wrap ourselves in delusions which need to be eroded before we find happiness; but is it a reprehensible thing to aim at? It might be, if my true instinct is less to avoid pain for others, than too avoid the pain I experience by causing it to them. I suppose my only security is that it is indeed God who tests my heart. Nor can you be confident that a course of action which brings people unhappiness is ipso facto pleasing to the Lord.

I became a believer in 1995, and nearly thirty years later still don’t know with any clarity where the boundary lies between the saved and the lost, or which side of it the young woman who spoke to me yesterday falls; or where I do, for that matter. I leave it to God, and throw myself and others on his mercy. What else can I do?

The Church has never before really faced a situation in which a previously believing culture decides that Christianity is something it wants to turn away from. The first apostles preached to Jews, and the task was to convince them that Jesus of Nazareth was the fulfilment of what they already believed; and to Gentile pagans, for whom ‘God’ was another deity like the ones they already knew. The Scriptures really give us very little clue as to how to approach a world which has judged the Church and found it wanting, or judged Christianity and found it unconvincing, nor do they tell us what God thinks about such a situation.

As the Church of England sacks the ‘independent’ safeguarding advisors it employed to hold it to account precisely because it didn’t agree with the way they were holding it to account, it seems that the Church’s desire for power and security still hasn’t been sufficiently burned out of it, and there is more disciplining yet to go. I increasingly feel that the task of this generation’s believers is to begin, just begin, the work of convincing the world that Christians are not monsters, made monstrous by belief in a monstrous God. A modest aim, but one we will struggle with enough.

Should That Really Be Here?

It was my fault that I and the churchwardens had to drag ourselves all the way to All Saints’ Fleet this week for the Archdeacon’s Visitation service (confusingly we use the same name for this event, when the Archdeacon admits churchwardens to their office for the year ahead, as we do for their inspection visits of individual churches). Last Thursday we’d all turned up at a completely different church, only to realise that when I told everyone the date and venue, I’d been looking at a memo from 2022.

All Saints is a church I’d never been into. It burned down in 2015 and has now been meticulously rebuilt, and was only reconsecrated in April; I find its red brick fabric rather brutal, unrelieved by any of the usual bits and pieces a church accumulates, because those have all been reduced to ash. The old high altar is still there, though, blackened and strikingly odd, and that’s a nice touch. The arched tomb of the founder Charles Lefroy and his wife also survives, movingly battered and beaten about. The new church has a fancy audiovisual system, but we were all given the poshest orders of service I’ve ever seen for any religious event, full-colour and heavy-gauge, glossy paper and card covers.

One of the troughs of the Triennial Conference last week came when we were all called on to sing a hymn framed around the diocesan slogan ‘Transforming Church, Transforming Lives’. There’s an earnest well-meaningness behind the attempt to shoehorn in the Bishop’s ‘three transformation goals’, but the question is whether it should be done at all. When we stumbled our way through the hymn in Derbyshire – the whole thing was obviously designed to be sung to the familiar tune ‘Woodlands’, but that wasn’t good enough for the Conference’s imported worship leader who felt the need to muck about with the melody of every other verse – I had a horrible feeling that it would henceforth make an appearance at every diocesan event. And so with grim inevitability it popped up at Fleet this week, along with an amendment to the usual ‘Collect for Churchwardens’ that God will ‘hold before them the vision of Transforming Church, Transforming Lives’.

It isn’t just taste that makes me cringe at this. It’s the importation into liturgy of what amounts to a corporate management slogan, the pretence that it’s something else: dressing a completely human idea as a divine one. It’s not quite ‘the abomination that causes desolation standing where it does not belong’, but it’s a step in its direction. What makes it more awkward is that the thing has been written by the Archdeacon, who I like and who has been supportive and helpful to me in the past, so what I’m left with is probably less anger than depressed resignation.