It Sounds So Simple

One of the actions listed in our Church Development Plan is to equip our people with more practical advice on talking about faith. When I, Grant the churchwarden and Celine from the congregation had our session with the diocesan facilitator, she asked what thought had been given to how, if possible, activities such as the Toddler Group might have scope to lead those who take part to ask questions about faith. 'Everyone will just discount what you say because you're the clergyperson', she told me reasonably, 'So it's the laypeople who have to do the work'. I think you have to be careful with the Talking Jesus stuff: some years ago there was a study - I wrote about it here at the time, but now can't find the reference - that produced the shocking result that more non-Christians reported feeling more negative towards faith as a result of talking to a Christian that those that felt more positive. But if we are even to have a fairly open and receptive conversation with a non-Christian society, somebody has to start that conversation, and it will by definition have to be us. 

So I've begun looking through a set of resources on the diocesan website which is intended to help church leaders think about evangelism. Now to me the word 'leader' is one that gets my back up instantly, but in fact the material I've scanned rapidly through so far seems quite honest, modest and straightforward; it may turn out to be like the full-on Alpha Course and go batshitcrazy before the end, but for now I'm surprisingly favourable. In one short video Dr Sandra Millar of Gloucester Diocese outlines some findings of the research on how people outside the Church of England perceive it and, when discussing how contacts made through the occasional offices can affect those perceptions, advised us always to offer to pray with people. After all, she says, the worst people can say is 'No thank you', and no one else is going to.

Strangely for someone who gets paid to devote their attention to the spiritual life, I have always found this really hard to do. Occasionally if there has seemed to be an issue I particularly want to lay before God - a funeral with circumstances which may prove difficult, for instance - I do pray in my meeting with the next-of-kin, but mainly I'm acutely aware that the people I'm dealing with probably won't be used to praying, and fight shy of doing so, leaving me with the feeling that I've short-changed the Lord and them. 

Prayer starts not from what you think you ought to say, but what you want to say. What do I want to say to God about the souls I meet? How can I put it simply - because simplicity is what they will need, not a display of eloquence and would-be insight? I might say something like this:

    Lord, please bless these good people.

    Please hear their hopes and fears.

    Please strengthen them in all they have to do. 

Perhaps it's always been that straightforward.

Crooksbury Hill & Waverley Abbey

My days off being absorbed by record office work, I haven't been on a proper walk for a long time. Apart from a desperate attempt to escape the Clergy Triennial Conference, and an excursion around follies near Dorking in May (neither of which really count), it's been April since I ventured out for a stroll. Today's walk was more of a stroll-ette as a) I was working this morning and b) I'm afflicted by a bout of plantar-fasciitis at the moment which makes a lot of walking a bit of a strain. So I didn't go anywhere I hadn't seen before, though I followed slightly different paths to the trig. pillar on the top of Crooksbury Hill and then down to Waverley Abbey. The paths were surprisingly busy with Bank Holiday business, but the Soldier's Ring in the woods north of the Abbey was strangely calm - and calmly strange, even if you wouldn't have noticed you were walking across a hillfort unless you knew it was there. I continue to be surprised by Waverley Abbey's ruins: I've been there innumerable times, but always find new views and angles to enjoy.

How to Steal from a Museum

People who are not fortunate enough to have worked in the magical world of museums are often surprised to discover how much of their collections usually remain shut away in the stores. Sometimes this surprise is tinged with a blush of outrage, as though wonderful things are being kept from them, the curators hoarding them behind the scenes to enjoy without pesky visitors getting in the way. Of course, this is indeed how we regard the wretched masses who come through our doors (or the wretched handfuls, in most cases), but that picture is not really accurate. For the most part, you would find wandering corridors filled with what museums hold in their reserve collections massively dull.

Consider, for instance, the mighty British Museum, arguably the greatest such institution in the world. We will leave to one side, for now, the claims of rivals from the Guggenheim to the Braxiatel Collection, or questions of how it came to in that position in the first place. It has (so we are told) about 8 million items in its vaults, and roughly 80,000 on display, but you don’t really want to look at tray after tray of Anglo-Saxon coins. The other great national museums are the same: only a fraction of the Natural History Museum’s holdings are out on show, but most of what’s in the stores are drawers full of beetles and you have to be really, really interested in beetles to get any fun out of that. The national museums are universities of material culture: they are where you learn to tell an Offan penny from a Northumbrian sceatta, or mormolyce phyllodes from mormolyce tridens.

I have never worked anywhere like that, but even humbler institutions function in the same sort of way. My museum workplaces were the Priest’s House Museum in Wimborne (collection: about 13,000 items, provided you counted ten boxes of iron nails from the Tarrant Hinton Roman Villa as a single entry), the Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham (about 25,000), and Wycombe Museum in High Wycombe (about 20,000). Museums like this don’t usually have vast reserve holdings of single categories of item for scholars to examine, but they tend to store two groups of artefacts: objects that might go on display at some stage, for a special exhibition or when the galleries are reorganised; and things that will probably never fit in a show, but which illustrate the subject at hand and so need to be held onto.

The Priest’s House had undergone a complete evacuation and refurbishment in 1990-1991, just before I arrived there, so we had the advantage that every single item in the place had been recorded during the process, however sketchily, while the RE Museum had pretty well-established documentation procedures dating back to the early 1900s when it was established; even there, we had objects that couldn’t be readily matched up with records due to inadequate description, or things that had gone astray. I vividly remember retrospectively cataloguing a group of items supposedly related to General Gordon of Khartoum that had never been properly listed before, including ‘Gordon’s last pencil’, ‘Gordon’s last buttonhole’, ‘a piece of lace off Gordon’s chemise’, and ‘a fly said to have walked on Gordon’s nose’ which turned out to be a dark blob glued on a bit of card. At Wycombe, we were painfully aware of the odd ‘black hole’ in the attics with boxes whose contents were not completely familiar to us. There was, for instance, a cache of items related to a local man with no information as to how we acquired it: I often thought it would make a nice little temporary display, but I left without even being completely aware of what was in it. The catalogue, then, was fairly good, but unless we needed a particular item we didn’t tend to check. The question occasionally arose, at Wycombe at any rate, whether we should do a random check every now and again, pick a box and make sure its actual contents matched what the computer said should be in it. But it was hard to fit such activities in. Imagine how much harder it might be keep track of 8 million objects, rather than 1/320^th of that.

At the PHM and the RE Museum I was solely responsible for cataloguing, and had some input into that area at Wycombe even though Ms Quercus was the Documentation Officer. But at all three I could wander the stores at will, and when time was on my hands, that was how I occupied it. Most of what we owned, in all three places, was the kind of stuff, generously, that it would have been hard even to give away. Anything that was particularly valuable tended to be big, and it would be a tough job to go home in the evening with a six-foot painting of the Earl of Shelburne unnoticed under your coat. However, technically, had I wanted to, it would have been more than possible to abstract any number of objects to my own use and nobody would have been any the wiser until years later.

You can’t very easily strip-search everyone with access to your museum’s stores before they leave each night to make sure they haven’t got an Etruscan ring up their bottom. As well as relying on the fact that much of what we store is outrageous tat that nobody could sell anyway, we assume that our staff are dedicated professionals who love their collections and the museums they work for. Perhaps we need to check the boxes now and again as well; but then I say I need to cross-reference an odd invoice and payment at the church office every month, and do I manage that? 

Who Peeps From The Unhewn Dolmen Arch?

A long while ago I posted about my interactions with Ms V, the historical ultra-sceptic whose shifting beliefs about the origins of Cerne Abbey and various other Dark Age issues gradually reduced me to incredulity. I concluded that to justify those ideas, someone would have to dispose of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon writing. Yesterday, as a result of a similar discussion about what may or may not have happened at Beckery just west of Glastonbury in the 5^th century (archaeological opinion at the moment is that it was a very early monastic settlement of some kind), I spent far too long discovering that yes, that is indeed exactly the proposition. Every document claiming to be prior to the 12^th century is a forgery. 

At this point, because it would be impossible not to, I will name Ms V fully as Harriet Vered. Her main claim to public notice is The Megalithic Empire (2012), a book arguing that the stone monuments of western Europe were markers in a vast system of trading routes. This is quite a fun suggestion taking advantage of the fact that we don’t really know what most of these places were, even if it doesn’t work in detail (a mystical earth-mysteries site, no less, has a nice review pointing out the gaps in the argument, especially when it cavalierly sweeps aside the possibility of water-based transport in prehistory). Meanwhile, this elderly website promoting the book does so in rather a light-hearted way, suggesting that it is, if not exactly satire as some have guessed, aimed modestly at injecting some new ideas into a field devoid of them; and who could object to that, even if one of the ideas is that modern humans originated not in Africa but the Arctic. It’s positive to have insights coming into the discipline of history from outside, even if they turn out not to have legs.

The Megalithic Empire’s co-author is Michael J Harper, a far more challenging figure, it turns out, than Ms Vered. His other books include 2003’s The History of Britain Revealed, which champions the idea that the inhabitants of the British Isles have always spoken English (not Old English, mind you, but modern English, the stuff I’m typing) and that French and German are derived from it; 2014’s Meetings With Remarkable Forgeries, arguing that ten axial historical texts from Caesar’s De Bello Gallico to Voltaire’s Candide are fakes; and the latest, Revisionist Historiography, which was only published last year and hasn’t received any reviews. It’s a bit expensive for me to try out, especially given the amount I’ve been spending recently.

I grappled with all this rather more than I should have done, but then much of my approach to the world has manuscripts and their implications at its heart. I’m used to people attacking the credibility of the Gospels, and have often made the point that compared to many other ancient texts their credentials are actually rather good, but at least Mr Harper is fair in asserting that virtually every important text historians rely on is fake.

As far as English historical documents are concerned, the Harper-Vered thesis is that there were two great campaigns of forgery, in the 12^th century and the 16^th, both politically-motivated: the first to cement the rule of the Norman kings and the Church they brought with them, and the second to bolster the Tudors and their pet Church as they justified a national identity separate from that of Europe and Rome. This is, I feel, not remotely likely: such initiatives were unnecessary, and the theory requires assuming, contrary to what we know, that texts are no older than the oldest datable copy: that inevitably leads you to look for fakes and forgeries regardless of the circumstances surrounding the texts themselves. Cast an eye towards this interview with Harriet Vered. The interviewer is generally very sympathetic to her ideas, but when (at 0.59) he asks why, given their absolute control over land, the Norman kings couldn’t just give their new abbeys and churches anything they wanted without engaging in an elaborate fraud involving inventing an entire fake history for a country, Ms Vered can’t answer, merely repeating that that’s what happened. At 1.09-1.10, discussing Samuel Pepys’s diary, she clearly thinks it’s prima facie absurd that such a document could have existed for 150 years without being published, and therefore that too must be a much later fake.

Because these assertions don't rest on evidence, I thought there must be a set of beliefs behind them, and so there is. Mr Harper and those he associates with call it Applied Epistemology, though it bears only a remote relationship to the philosophical study which goes under that title. In the account of The Applied Epistemology Library, this is translated into a set of rules to govern enquiry, to which a set of people are committed: AEists, they call themselves. The rules boil down thus:

- If the truth is not simple, prove it!

- If what was differs from what is, prove it!

- If different inputs will produce the same outcome, prove it!

I’m not clear where these dicta come from, and I’m not sure I can think of practical meanings for the last one, but on the face of it these are not particularly objectionable guides to thinking in a variety of disciplines. The AEists don’t often stick to them, though, because there are other motivations operating. It must surely be simpler to believe that English history is real, and its core texts genuine, than to assume they were all produced in two completely otiose campaigns of fraud.

In fact, the bigger rule and the one which clearly excites the AEists more than the stated ones, is the injunction to come up with interesting, unorthodox ideas, even if they involve contradicting yourself. Mr Harper says:

    an orthodoxy is established as soon as two people are agreed on something. This is the origin of the Applied Epistemological mantra 'Everything you say must be original to you (or it isn't worth saying)'.
    To an extremist, and all AE-ists are extremists, if you say something completely original except that you said it last week, an orthodoxy has been formed, and you shouldn't say it. But this is a counsel of perfection and, so as long as you feel a little uncomfortable spouting something you said last week, that is usually enough since it will force the brain to put a slight spin (even a literary flourish) on such a hackneyed thought.
    Obviously you would rip your own tongue out rather than repeat what somebody else said last week. … As long as you get your brain used to constantly 'diving down' you will eventually bottom out ie actually start being compulsively original.

This is, of course, an ideology – a counter-orthodoxy, if you will – and where it takes you is, for instance, claiming (as Mr Harper implied on well-known alternative historian Graham Hancock’s website in 2003), that the Ancient Egyptians created Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika as reservoirs and the northern course of the Nile is due to artificial engineering. One might counter that this is explanation is a lot less ‘simple’ than the Nile not flowing into the Indian Ocean or west to the Atlantic because there are bloody great mountains in the way, or that Lake Victoria doesn’t look ‘squarish’ at all, but one suspects Mr Harper is just saying something plainly ludicrous for the sake of it. Should you be tempted to believe any of this, consider the 14 species of Mastacembelus spiny eels unique to Lake Tanganyika, which would have taken longer than 5000 years to develop.

No, the root of AEism, if such a thing can be said to exist, lies not in high-minded rationalistic principles, but rather in the belief that people are largely liars or fools, and those who expose them should consider themselves superior. You will recognise this as the same energies that drive conspiracy theories. It produces ideas that dissipate when actual data are applied to them, but you have to wonder how much their proponents actually believe in them: perhaps they just find reality a bit dull. It's hard to tell. In Harriet Vered’s interview on Adzcast, she insists that ‘we don’t have a single Anglo-Saxon church in this country’ (which will be news to the good parishioners of Wing, Brixworth, or St Peter’s Monkwearmouth), ‘you can’t date a stone cross’ (pity poor Rosemary Cramp, then, who devoted her entire life to dating Dark Age sculpture), and alleges that orthodox archaeologists force their unsubstantiated ideas on the general public. In fact, for instance, English Heritage who own Stonehenge are quite open in stating that nobody knows what it was for (though they speculate, quite reasonably). Is she ignorant, malicious, or mischievous?

My contrary experience is that people, no matter their degree of ignorance about facts, are generally neither liars nor fools, though they might be either on occasion. And this is probably where my unconscionable credulity arises.

What Is The Lord Trying To Tell Us?

Among the tasks we've set ourselves in our Church Development Plan is the aim 'To establish a group to regularly, deliberately and expectantly for the work of the church'. The idea behind this simple concept is that rather than going off in pursuit of grand schemes that sound good, from employing a musical director to installing a new audiovisual system, we ought first to try and pay attention to what God might have in mind. 'Absolutely right', the Archdeacon endorsed. I spoke to Gizel the lay reader who said she'd had exactly the same idea and she would be happy to run with it. Good, I thought, I wanted this to be something that drew on the spiritual life of the laypeople and got them listening to the voice of the Spirit in some sort of concerted way. We discussed some individuals we reckoned would be likely candidates, souls we could rely on to be thoughtful and reflective.

Gizel held a meeting of herself and the three people we'd identified. One said she prayed the Office daily as part of her obligations as a member of a dispersed religious community, so she didn't think she would have the time to take on anything new. Another stated that his hearing problems made it difficult for him to be involved. The third really wanted to take part in an ecumenical group that prayed for issues relating to the community at large, like the one that used to be run by Marion our curate. 'That really wasn't the point of the exercise', I told Gizel. 'I know', she replied, 'I was somewhat disappointed as well. We could begin with just you and me and take it from there'. We could, but part of the reasoning was to get me out of the way and let God speak to the creativity and thoughtfulness of the laypeople. Perhaps there are others he wants to speak to. Perhaps he doesn't want to speak at all. Surely not.

The Village Show

Before a retired clerical friend posted on Liber Faciorum a few weeks ago about receiving one from someone in his current village, I had no idea tromboncine even existed. Which end do you blow in, I thought. Now they suddenly seem to be everywhere; there was an entire (small) table of them at the Swanvale Halt Village Show yesterday, mostly apparently entered in the Show by children who must particularly enjoy watching their weird shapes developing.

The Show was a spectacular success; I can safely say this as I had nothing to do with it. For years it was organised by the Simpsons, a lovely couple from the congregation. Then last summer Jenny Simpson was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour and by November she was gone. Not surprisingly Andy, her husband, had little stomach for anything after that, and in fact has more or less left the village: he worships at Portsmouth Cathedral now, as they had a flat there, much to my relief as I've seen too many good souls lose their faith after a bereavement. It's a new team that put together the Show this year. Entries were up a third ('the highest since records began' - though records go no further back than 2014, admittedly) and the church made an unprecedented £700, not that we do it to raise money. Most importantly, people enjoyed themselves and we reminded ourselves how community is built up - especially important as our garage is to close and we may well lose our pharmacy before the end of the year, too.

Book Night

A little while ago I reported on Cathi Unsworth's fantastic epic on Goth In The Time Of Thatcher, Season of the Witch, and on Wednesday managed to catch a date in her tour promoting it. The Dublin Castle in Camden, along the road towards Regents Park, I discovered, doesn't serve wine, so I opted for a half of Camden Pale and took it through the swinging doors that led to the music area at the back of the pub. There were about thirty of us listening not just to Ms Unsworth but also to writer Richard Cabut, a gentleman more central to the historiography of Goth than I realised, reading from his novel Looking For A Kiss. Both painted a picture of this particular part of London as a psychogeography of the marginal and the uneasy, which Goth, or Positive Punk, or whatever you might want to call it, fitted into. The authors answered some questions from compere Travis Elborough and from the floor - always a hit-and-miss business, that, but it gave some opportunity to reflect on the debatable politics of Goth.

While I was waiting for the doors to open I wandered down to Gloucester Gate and came across this incredible fountain from 1878 in the form of a Coad-stone folly by the side of the road, looking like a grotto or tiny cave incongruously topped by a bronze milkmaid. I couldn't remember seeing mention of it before, but to my relief it's in Philip Davies's Troughs and Drinking Fountains. He rejoices that Camden Council has been persuaded to restore it. That was in 1989: it could do with a tidy-up again. 

Quantum of Thought

The BBC can be forgiven for saving money by rebroadcasting programmes when they suddenly become relevant again, and when I heard Sarah Montague and Brian Cox discussing Robert Oppenheimer’s 1953 Reith Lectures a few days ago in a show which first appeared in 2017, I assumed that was just what the Radio 4 authorities were up to – linking the discussion to the recent movie about the physicist. But in fact Reith Revisited is being repeated as a series wholesale over August. This means it was a coincidence, and it was an equal coincidence that I’d just finished reading a book that covered the same subject at the time.

According to the presenters, one of Oppenheimer’s points was to make suggestions about how quantum mechanics might affect not just the approach of scientists to their own endeavours, but also have implications for society more widely. Sometimes, he argued, you have to treat light as though it’s a particle, and sometimes you have to treat it like a wave. Neither sort of measurement comprehensively defines the observed phenomenon: you need both. If this is the case with something as ubiquitous and obvious as light, with the absolute basics of physics, surely it is just so with the scientific project as a whole, and even more with the complex and subtle matters of human social organisation, of politics and economics. No one single viewpoint can manage alone. It’s a prescription for pluralism.

The book was Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall’s The Quantum Society from 1993, which, according to the price label, I bought from a branch of Oxfam at some unknown date. It was (apparently) one of a trio of books examining essentially the same theme at rather greater length than Robert Oppenheimer’s Reith Lecture. Dr Zohar essentially wrote the text to which her husband Ian Marshall then contributed ideas, and she doesn’t refer to Oppenheimer at all so we have to assume that she came up with her concept independently. She treats the quantum model of the universe as a ‘metaphor’ for understanding society, but also regards it as affecting reality very concretely. So the shift she’s suggesting is from an individualistic, ‘Newtonian’ culture in which people regard themselves as tightly bounded beings like atomic particles, to a ‘quantum’ world in which we see ourselves as simultaneously particles and waves, overlapping and interacting, and building something different as a result of our interactions that we could not have otherwise; but she also suggests that this model has a basis not just in the concept of the quantum but in the actual mechanisms of brain function which seem to obey the quantum rules of superposition and indeterminacy. I don’t swallow this all wholesale, but you can see the point.

Dr Zohar stresses that her vision for human social organisation along ‘quantum’ lines is not in any way relativistic – it assumes there is a real truth to be discovered, even if we rely on each others’ conflicting approaches and viewpoints to get there. Just as well, because the great point I would feel compelled to make (though we know anyway that Schrodinger’s great thought-experiment was devised to ridicule the idea that observation determines reality) is that God can already see inside the box, and is well aware what’s happened to the cat.

A Sense of Purpose

Delving back into the history of the Church of England reminds me how we have always, it seems, believed that British society wanted less to do with us than we might wish, and how sour we felt about it. A little while ago I described poor Fr Francis Wheeler of Wheatley & Farnborough and his Primer of Pastoral Theology which assumed, even back in the 1940s, that the flock assigned to him by Our Holy Mother the Church would be mainly unresponsive, tempted by the fleshly pleasures of modernity to spend their Sunday mornings doing other things than following Mattins in their copies of the Prayer Book. Then, last week, I came across a small card given to new godparents, shoved into the pages of an old service register book from the 1920s. Hectoring and miserable, its tiny type demanded of its readers, ‘Do YOU mean the promises you have made? Or will you forget them like so many?’; it clearly assumed that most people would not want to observe their obligations, and would not in fact do so, that they would prove false and feckless. To encounter this kind of Church was to be plunged into the dank, chilly air of depression and condemnation, to be told right from the off that you had no right to be there and should be grateful for the opportunity. It was a form of religion that only stood a real chance of sweeping up the self-righteous and the neurotic.

And curiously I find few expressions of this discouraging outlook which really seem very spiritual. Instead the concerns of the clergy who voice it, like Francis Wheeler, seem more to do with moral decadence and the refusal of so many people around him to conform to his idea of what good citizenship should look like, rather than, for instance, the fate of their eternal souls. It seems to be very secular worries that really animate them. I remember speaking to Dr Bones’s father about his own dad, a priest in rural Devon in the 1950s, who, he said, ‘saw his role as making people good and useful members of society’ (Bones père became a fundamentalist Evangelical in contrast). No wonder the Church of England’s experience of the last century has been so disappointing, as it’s watched most people find perfectly serviceable ways of being good citizens without any reference to what it might do or say.

The myths Christians tell themselves are legion, if I may put it in those terms. One of my favourites is that ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’, a line which goes back to Tertullian. I am rather fond of quoting Tertullian’s credo quod absurdum est, but semen est sanguis Christianorum ignored the truth both in the third century and ever since. Christians were a tiny, disregarded minority until Constantine converted; and, across the centuries, from Roman North Africa overrun by the Umayyads to Moorish Spain to 17^th-century Japan, to crush Christianity out of existence by either bloody persecution or social pressure short of it has proved a matter of relative ease. Again, modern Christians tell themselves that the Church flourishes most when it is at its most counter-cultural, but Dame History tells us something different: that Christianity is at its most popular when it reflects, by and large, the values of the culture it inhabits, and especially those of the class in charge; if ‘popular’ is what we want to be, of course. We might well wonder what difference we really, truly make to the society around us.

If most of us have abandoned the belief that the people around us (in any uncomplicated or predictable way) are going to Hell unless they’re in our churches; and the lesser, etiolated idea that Britain (in any uncomplicated or predictable way) will go to Hell in a handcart unless people are in our churches; what, then, brethren, is left? Where can contemporary Anglicans find the impetus to get out of bed and go down to the steeple house to say Mattins in the morning?

I recall Dr Bones’s statement, when I was approaching my ordination, that ‘You’ll be spending your time helping people enjoy their lives’ which, considering her background, was a remarkable thing to say. It’s always remained with me: because a life lived in alignment with the cosmic truth must be more capable of enjoyment than the alternative – not in a superficial, consumerist way, but in the sense of deep fulfilment and peace. Sometimes as I prepare myself for the Eucharist I look out of the vestry windows on the souls going past on the path that runs alongside the churchyard, and think how sad it is that they aren’t hearing the words that tell them they are flawed but loved, that their joys and sorrows are heard, that they are capable of glory, and that glory wants to welcome them.

Is that enough? Is it too close to self-centredness and self-help? What else might there be, once threats, guilt, and utility are sent away?

Great Leap Forward

If you thought a post about mislaid water bottles was banal, here is something that might possibly rival it. It's the biggest event to befall Swanvale Halt church this week, unless someone has had a spiritual awakening that I don't yet know about. Our office manager suggested it would be a good idea to pave the area where the bins sit so that it doesn't become a quagmire in winter, and, thanks to Grant the churchwarden, it's been done.

The garden around the church was intended as its graveyard, but it's been closed since the 1880s and now only cremated remains are buried in one particular area. It was my predecessor who had the idea of tidying and reordering it as a Quiet Garden for the use of the community, and, although as we know it often gets used for activities that were not what she envisaged, I think it was her great lasting contribution. 

The garden is managed by a team of volunteers, partly from the congregation and partly the parish beyond. They have kindly paid for the paving work out of Quiet Garden funds. I am not sure, I must admit, exactly where these funds come from, but you don't turn down a gift, do you? The slabs look as though they've been Photoshopped on, but they haven't, promise.

A Piece of Time

My sweep around the centre of Ely a couple of weeks ago finished (as the rain began to fall) with a very rapid visit to an antiques centre by the Great Ouse, curtailed by it closing, I thought a bit too sharply. On one of the upstairs stalls was a nice ammonite. I've wanted an ammonite for ages, and there are very few things I want. But then I realised that what I wanted wasn't just any old ammonite, but a Dorset ammonite, so I came away not with a fossil but a 19th-century print of the Ruins of Hierapolis. I'll have to find a place for that somewhere. 

I'm not quite sure when South Dorset became 'The Jurassic Coast': it wasn't 185 million years ago, because it wasn't that when I was a child and actually lived a few miles away. Perhaps it was 2001, the year when the area became a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its geology, features, and natural beauty; since then the tag has become crucial in the marketing of Dorset to tourists, and even the bus which runs along the sea road is known as the Jurassic Coaster. And the central and most charismatic icon of that whole identity is the coil of the ammonite.

The ammonite appears everywhere in south Dorset, decorating shops, hotels, brochures and bus stops. It's set into the ground outside Lyme Regis Museum, and on the town's lampposts. It even lends its name to a movie, as a symbol of the woman who has become herself a symbol, Mary Anning - again, in my childhood she was just a curiosity, but now, recast as a brilliant, misunderstood gay scientist in a peak bonnet with a basket full of fossils, she strangely binds in her own person past and present, and makes a landscape of cliffs and crashing seas hold contemporary imaginings. In her new statue at Lyme, only unveiled last year, she both holds an ammonite, and they decorate the hem of her skirts.

So I conceded that an ammonite would cost about £10 per inch of Jurassic stone, and went about the not-very-difficult task of sourcing one on Ebay. Here it is: it came not from the coast, but from Bradford Abbas, a long way inland but at the bottom of the same sea as (say) Burton Bradstock would have been 170 million years ago when the rock that held it was laid down. That doesn't matter. Its coil moves inward and pastward to the lost ages that have made the holy land of Dorset, and all of us. I disentangled it from its packaging, held it, and felt unexpectedly tearful.

Only A Remnant Left

It's a definite, if probably inconsequential, sign of our times that the most numerous class of object currently adding to the church lost property box is not umbrellas or spectacles (though those still turn up), but small water bottles and flasks. We joke that we could put together an entire stall at the next Spring Fair with these artefacts alone. Nobody ever asks after them, even the pink ones with unicorns which are likely (I say no more than that) to belong to children. They are ubiquitous, and yet almost valueless.

Talking to the Rector

It was a large and somewhat chaotic baptism, for the younger sister of a boy who I baptised five years ago: about a third of the congregation was under 16 by my estimation. I knew a lot of them have been there for multiple baptisms, and it's reached the point on such occasions that I acknowledge that many people will have heard my spiel before but I'm going to say pretty much the same just in case they've forgotten. There were eleven godparents, several of whose names I recognised, a number being young fellows whose awkwardness in their unaccustomed suits was rivalled by their awkwardness in being in church at all. So far as young fellows are concerned, this discomfort often manifests itself in mild mucking about. There was one who fell under this temptation more than the others: when we were almost right at the end and I thanked everyone for being there to celebrate and acknowledging that they would be going 'to celebrate in a different way and a different place' he said very audibly 'right, off to the bar then, ho ho ho'. I was on the brink of saying something to him after it was all over, but restrained myself. The baby, in contrast, behaved impeccably.

The congregation bundled out of the church as quickly as they could manage without positively trampling one another, leaving about enough in the collection plate for a return bus ticket to Guildford (and we didn't notice anyone using the card reader). It was as I was tidying up that the joker in the pack of godparents came up to me. 'That was great, thank you', he said. 'You won't remember, but you baptised my daughter in 2010. Look, this is her now,' he went on, showing me a snap of a disgruntled looking fourteen-year-old on his phone. We had a very pleasing talk about what had happened to him since, and the passage of time more generally. There you are, do not rush to action, I thought to myself.

Earlier, our lay reader Gizel overheard me quoting Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes to the ladies serving coffee, which they'd clearly never heard of. My 'sermon' that morning had been an examination of the spiritual relationship between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy, with various audiovisual aids including a scary video of the Russian Military Cathedral built in 2020. 'You're a virtually inexhaustible source of nonsense', Gizel told me, which I think she meant kindly. Being German it's sometimes difficult to tell. I suppose it's positive that I cultivate such a warm and approachable working environment that she feels she can say something like that. 

Clerical Cavalcade

When I wandered into St Mark’s Farnborough South a little while ago, I wasn’t expecting the Anglo-Catholic adventure playground I discovered there. As I begin compiling lists of clergy I discover that those who’ve served St Mark’s are also more remarkable than you might expect for this unreported, uncelebrated suburban parish.

During my visit, the good folk of St Mark’s alleged that the church ‘had never been forgiven’ for going Anglo-Catholic at some point, but I’m not yet sure when that point was. Looking at the clergy I know about so far, L.G. Tugwell (1904-11) served curacies at St Saviour’s Battersea and Holy Trinity Guildford before becoming Anglican Chaplain at Frieburg, all appointments you might expect of a High Churchman. Basil Philips (1911-23) studied at Keble College and Wells Theological College and had done his curacy at Dorking before coming to Farnborough, and was briefly succeeded by the celebrated Bernard Keymer (1923-5). Now Keymer had been curate at the moderately Anglo-Catholic St Mary’s Portsea where future Archbishop Cosmo Lang was vicar (mind you, there were a dozen curates in the parish at that stage), before becoming Vicar of Eastleigh and then a military chaplain. His war service was heroic as he won the MC for rescuing soldiers trapped in barbed wire, and after the Armistice was appointed the first chaplain of the RAF college at Cranwell. Presumably it was St Mark’s connections with first the RFC and then RAF that led to him moving there.

Frs Tugwell, Philips and Keymer all have the stamp of moderate High Church clergy, but I think it was their successors who took St Mark’s to the top of the candle. The next vicar after Mr Keymer was – take a deep breath – the Revd the Viscount Mountmorres. William Geoffrey Bouchard de Montmorency came from Irish aristocracy, and succeeded to his title unexpectedly in 1880 at the age of eight, after his father, the 5^th Viscount and a magistrate, was assassinated in the midst of the Irish Land Wars. Unlike the rest of the family William went to England for his education, firstly at the Anglo-Catholic Radley School and then Balliol. After graduating he travelled and became an expert in ‘tropical economics’, the tropics in question being mainly in central Africa. In 1904 Montmorency took part in an expedition to the Congo with the journalist Maurice Dorman and both wrote up their experiences, his Lordship in The Congo Independent State: a report on a journey of enquiry, and Mr Dorman in A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State. The Viscount reported quite favourably of some at least of the people he met (the Bonjo and Dongo tribes, for instance, were ‘a splendid, intelligent, and fearless race’), but his journalist companion dedicated his book to the ruling Belgian authorities and devoted it to refuting reports of the Belgians’ ill-treatment of the natives – it is ‘distressing to read, showing a complete lack of sympathy with the Africans’, says the British Museum, to which Montmorency sold his collection of African artefacts in 1911. He’d also dabbled in politics, sitting as a Moderate Party (that is, Conservative) member of the London County Council for Tower Hamlets from 1894 to 1898, and finally in 1911 could be found lecturing in an Edinburgh cinema to accompany a film about the lives of the late Edward VII and George V: ‘he possesses the gift of vivid description’, reported The Scotsman, ‘and his running commentary on every depicted item … is not only happily phrased, but always interesting and instructive’. By then the Viscount had probably already decided to follow a clerical life: he went to Cuddesdon college and was ordained in 1913, serving his title at Ryde on the Isle of Wight, an advanced Catholic parish, before moving to Swinton in Lancashire as Rector in 1917 (he was also a Royal Navy Reserve chaplain). 1925 was the year he relocated to Farnborough, and remained for ten years, before leaving for St Paul’s, Wokingham, but he was only able to enjoy those grander surroundings for a year until he died. Despite two marriages Montmorency only had a single daughter, so on his death the titles passed to his cousin Arthur, the incumbent of St Modoc’s, Doune, in Scotland, who thus became the second ordained Viscount Mountmorres in a row. There’s an interesting character.

For William Montmorency’s last two years at St Mark’s, his curate was Cecil – or Charles, sometimes – de Lyons-Pike. Under normal Anglo-Catholic circumstances I would suspect him of having invented the double-barrelled name, but his father Charles, a Shropshire-born solicitor who practised in Bloomsbury, also used it so Cecil/Charles is not to blame. He began his professional life as a schoolmaster, eventually (after being rejected for military service) becoming head of Holland House School in Hove. One pupil at the time was the future author Patrick Hamilton who ‘remembered de Lyons-Pike as being a young, bespectacled man who was extremely High Church. On one occasion he shocked the school assembly by saying to a boy “You’re the one who called Walker’s cousin a damned bloody fool”. After he had doled out a thrashing, he commented “You didn’t expect me to repeat that, did you?”’ In 1922 de Lyons-Pike moved the school to Burgess Hill, renaming it St Peter’s Court, and left in 1927 apparently after deciding to be ordained. He attended the theological college at Ely and was deaconed in 1928. St Mark’s was his first appointment, where he moved smoothly from curate to vicar in 1935 after Fr Montmorency moved on. Fr de Lyons-Pike stayed until 1952 and I will tell you what happened to him next in a minute.

His successor was Francis Wheeler. Mr Wheeler was yet again a non-standard figure having been ordained in Accra in 1926, an outpost of the Anglican Church where anything other than Anglo-Catholics were thin on the ground. He was principal of St Augustine’s College at Kumasi, and served three English curacies at St Michael’s Shoreditch, Christ Church Woburn Square, and St Michael’s Paddington, before becoming priest in charge of Holy Trinity, Marlow, Vicar of East & West Hanney, and finally incumbent of Wheatley in 1944. Somewhat over 30 years before, Mr Wheeler’s predecessor there had been burned in effigy in his own garden after trying to introduce a Sung Eucharist to the parish church, so, for a priest who believed schoolchildren should be ‘taught to sing the Mass, starting with the Kyries and the Sanctus’, it might be wondered whether this Oxfordshire village was really the right place. According to the history of the Church in Wheatley (written in 2006, coincidentally, by John Prest who was my tutor at Balliol), Fr Wheeler certainly doesn’t seem to have been that happy. Having already written a book entitled Modernity (1929), which concluded that Modernity was generally to be regretted, his Primer of Pastoral Theology (1948) finds reason to denounce lipstick, the cinema, and jazz (‘negroid in origin’), and assumes that the modern clergyman’s work will largely be confined to a small and dwindling group of committed people: ‘the flock is far less biddable, far less disposed to listen obediently … The influence of the pulpit has waned until it has become practically negligible … You may stand at the door of the fold and call persuasively “The Bible says …”, “The Church teaches …”, but there will be little or no response from the majority. They have never been in the fold, they feel no need of its security, and as for the shepherd, he is superfluous’.

Mr Wheeler lists his pastoral, theological and devotional works in his entry in Crockford’s; he doesn’t mention his novels. These were a string of thrillers set before, during, and after the War with European conflict as the backdrop; the exception was the fourth, the supernatural chiller Unholy Alliance (1951), which included a depiction of a Black Mass so lurid the Vicar of Wheatley had to deny he’d actually been to one.

By 1952 Francis Wheeler had stuck it out in uncongenial Wheatley for eight years and decided on a move. He went to St Mark’s, and remained there for thirteen uneventful and, one hopes, less frustrating years. The good folk of the Oxfordshire parish found that their new priest was none other than Fr C.R. de Lyons-Pike, swapping livings with Mr Wheeler in what must have been one of the last arrangements of its kind. Perhaps Wheatley had become more accepting of Anglo-Catholics, or time had rubbed off some of Fr de Lyons-Pike’s sharp edges in the decades since Patrick Hamilton encountered him at Holland House School, but his six years there seemed rather happier than his predecessor’s time. At least, John Prest says, a widower when he arrived, he ‘lost no time in marrying his housekeeper’s daughter’.

Fr de Lyons-Pike is (I think) the figure on the left of this picture, and I suspect that’s Fr Montmorency in the middle – not sure of the chap on the right. That’s enough clergy!

Is There Anybody There?

My science-fiction enthusiasms are limited and lie elsewhere, so I never got into the BBC comedy series Red Dwarf. I did read one of the books, though (I can’t quite remember how I was in a position to do so) and was struck by the fact that in the story there are no aliens. Obnoxious former spaceship maintenance technician Rimmer, reduced to a virtual existence as a hologram, dreams of one day encountering aliens who will have the technology to restore his body, but he is doomed to disappointment as the somewhat bleak narrative insists that life was a one-off terrestrial accident, and all the races the Red Dwarf crew meet are evolved from Earth creatures. Gradually the truth becomes clear, even while Rimmer refuses to accept it.

I suspect that life is indeed unique to this planet, but I might be about to be proved wrong. On Sunday the BBC carried reports of the US Congress investigative sessions looking into Unidentified Aerial Phemonena, UAPs, as UFOs are now generally known having undergone a rebranding. The committee had been hearing from David Grusch, a former senior military intelligence officer who claims – while not having seen the evidence directly himself – that for some decades, according to many officials he had spoken to, the US military has been in possession of alien technology and ‘non-human biologics’. The congressmen and -women seemed to be trying deliberately to remain sober and unexcitable at this startling claim, The World This Weekend averred. Why should we believe Mr Grusch? Jim Naughtie asked US journalist and writer on UAPs Leslie Kean; ‘not only have I spoken to him about this’, she said, ‘but to others off the record, and they all told me exactly the same thing’. And there, somewhat frustratingly, the news show left it.

If any of this has substance, the question arises as to why everyone involved has kept quiet about it for so long. To all appearances, alien technology doesn’t seem to have made its way into US military hardware, so it doesn’t seem that there are secrets of that sort which have been guarded to keep them away from the States’ enemies. I’m also unconvinced by the picture we seem to have that cities will be full of people running around screaming the moment it becomes clear that there are aliens: ‘the government keeps it quiet to avoid panic’. In fact most people seem to accept the argument that the universe is so vast that there must logically be life out there somewhere, so it would seem bizarre to be thrown into hysteria by having this belief confirmed. If the aliens are technologically advanced enough to have reached Earth (and then crashed), presumably they could destroy us already if they wanted to, so that doesn’t seem worth worrying about either. In fact, the sheer unlikelihood of so big a secret being kept for decades is, for me, the strongest argument that there isn’t a secret at all.

The Christian religion is absolutely Earth-centric: ‘in the fullness of time you made us, the crown of all creation’, one of the Common Worship communion prayers goes, echoing the language of Psalm 8. It will take quite some readjustment to cope with a sudden expansion of the horizons of life beyond the bounds of this small globe, to shapes and forms that possibly won’t resemble us and our understandings at all. I have no doubt that we can do it, given flexibility and imagination, and come up with some explanation for the eternal and universal God choosing this one miniscule corner of the Milky Way to be incarnate that might, perhaps, make sense to a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri. Perhaps the time is approaching when we will have to.