Poustinia Practice

My spiritual reading at the moment is Catherine de Hueck Doherty's Poustinia from 1977, an examination of the Orthodox Christian conception of physical withdrawal to a particular place from which distractions are banished in order more effectively to encounter God, and how it might work in a Western context. Typically I had never heard of it until very recently but discover it as a 'spiritual classic'. When something is written exceedingly simply but those simple sentences are dense with power it's a good sign. 

I'm not called to be a poustinik, at least I don't think I am. I gib a little at Bd Catherine's injunction that the bed in the poustinia should be 'a board, with a blanket if necessary', as someone who currently has three blankets on their bed as well as a duvet and a top sheet (the weight helps me sleep). But basically she is outlining how the whole of the Christian spiritual life works, for every Christian, in concentrated form, and so there are lessons to be drawn even for a poor secular priest like me.

The lesson I'm thinking about most is the idea that 'the poustinia has three walls'. In the classic Russian model, the poustinik who takes this on as a long-term vocation rather than an exercise for a day or two, is always available to whoever wants their help, and that help might be spiritual or very practical. Someone might come and seek the poustinik out and say 'Friend, I need some help putting up a fence' and the poustinik must leave their prayers and do as they are bidden. That's the point. To a person willing to exploit, they're free labour. Yet they mustn't complain or resist, but leave it to God to deal with. 

One of my Minor Patron Saints (as opposed to my Major Patron, Great-Martyr Catherine) is St Serafim of Sarov, the very doyen of poustiniks, who was wont to greet anyone who turned up at his hut with a beaming smile, outstretched arms, and the words 'My joy! Christ is risen!' I could do with a little more of that spirit, so I am trying to offer thanks to God when the phone rings or the doorbell sounds, treating interruptions as the work of the Spirit. Who knows? I might be entertaining angels unawares. I confess, friends, that I am not there yet!

What Prayers Mean

We prayed for Sheila - of course we did for such a loved member of the church, hoping that somehow the fast-developing cancer had been caught in time, that the doctors had got the right treatment. She died, nevertheless, early one morning, a gentle, generous and positive soul of the kind the world could do with more of, not fewer. 

What are we doing when we pray for someone with an apparently mortal illness? We all know that most of the time these illnesses take their normal course, but also that it doesn't always end that way, and that just occasionally there is a recovery that defies all expectation. Is that what we're praying for, for Sheila or anyone else? The old texts I use when I administer the Last Rites are a masterly blend of fortitude and hope:

We know, O Lord, that there is no word impossible with you; and that, if you will, you can even yet raise her up, and grant her a longer continuance amongst us: Yet, forasmuch as in all appearance the time of her dissolution draws near, so fit and prepare her, we pray you, against the hour of death, that after her departure hence in peace, and in your favour, her soul may be received into your everlasting kingdom ...

Yet our attitude can't be simply one of balancing probabilities, hoping for remission but facing up to the likelihood of dissolution. We know, more radically than this, that something will, sooner or later, carry us out of this world. That event could be disease or accident, fast or slow, sudden or long-anticipated. It would be anything: but, notwithstanding the people I sometimes encounter who seem astonished and bewildered that Death has come seeking them - it will eventually arrive.

Is what we want full and perfect health until we finally peg out silently, in our sleep, at the age of 112? Even granted the inevitability of death, why can God not concede us that? Is it too much to ask? Perhaps praying for that is a bit like praying for someone in a different, less medical situation, like Carly. We know that nobody is suddenly going to intervene in such a way that everything is made all right for her, and that it probably wouldn't work if anyone tried. But the way society is arranged offers the possibility that her difficulties might be made a little better, as might those of many other people in the same boat. Are we intended to advance not as isolated individuals, but generally, together, in the direction God has show that he wants?

In many ways, we are generalities, statistics: the kinds of things that befall Sheila, or Carly, or you and me, are the same sorts of afflictions which happen to millions, a common human lot that nobody escapes. If only the Lord had not been the very one who taught us we were more than that in his Father's eyes, such a truth might be easier to assmiliate. 

This Weekend Was Brought To You By A Popular Variety of Cough Remedy

It's the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and we have been doing more than our bit at Swanvale Halt. The couple getting married on Saturday are members of Vineyard, an independent congregation in Guildford, and they took the service over rather, providing all the music and the preacher, a young woman who appeared about 17 to me but couldn't be as she referred to her teenage children. It's the bride's second go and she has a small son who at one point led his mum and stepfather-to-be on a little dance during one of the songs. I pointed out that during the Orthodox wedding rite the priest leads the couple on a (very stately) dance around the altar, but sadly I never got the chance for that. The couple wanted to take communion and that made it all very High Church even without my cope and biretta. 

Today it was the annual United Service at Hornington Parish Church, now itself united with evangelical Tophill. Tophill, it's worth pointing out, hate Vineyard Church as lots of their young families have defected there because they have a better band. I preached and told them all two stories about Nusreddin the Sage - it was relevant, honest, but I did get the impression that many people might only take away the final line, 'Who knows? The horse might sing' (you'll have to look it up). In my cassock, I was the only clergyperson who wore anything other than ordinary clothes. From my point of view, it was a bit sad to see that Hornington's aumbry is empty and surrounded by stacks of chairs, and there's no longer anything that you can point out as a Lady Chapel.

Technically, the Roman Catholics aren't supposed to come to the United Service (go to Mass, is the rule), and so in the evening we had a joint Evensong at Swanvale Halt so they could take part. That worked very well, and it was all to the good that the choir were augmented by some RCs and they managed to find someone to coax them all through the plainchant, as my vocal chords are still misbehaving as a result of a cold earlier in the week. I did warn the remarkably healthy congregation of nearly 60 that it would probably be more Evencroak than Evensong, but I got through it.

Then at 8pm I had an email to say that Sheila might not make it through the night. Sheila is Malcolm's partner, they are both 60-ish and they are the loveliest and sweetest couple you can imagine. She has been in hospital undergoing chemotherapy and the situation has not looked too bad until today. I found her fast asleep and unresponsive in the ICU, and did what was necessary, managing to get through it, as I had the rest of the weekend, with the aid of vicious Volcazone pastilles. At least they seemed vicious when I first encountered them not long after I arrived in Swanvale Halt: now I seem acclimatized to the wretched things and, like a junkie, need an ever-higher dose to have any effect.

Election Time

I have never, ever voted in a Synod election, either Diocesan or General, but now we have a vacancy for a Clergy representative and Fr Benedict from North Corley, a fellow SCP member, is standing. This is rather to my surprise, and it seems to his as well. He told me someone else was lined up as the catch-all-bit-progressive-something-other-than-conservative-evangelical candidate, but with something like half an hour to go before nominations closed they turned out to be ineligible because they only had Permission To Officiate in the diocese, prompting a frantic set of phone calls and Benedict emerging from the smoke, as it were. 'We so often lose out because the evangelicals are better organised', he complained, and this episode doesn't really do anything to dispel that.

We have 'hustings' coming up, though they take the somewhat bloodless shape of electors submitting written questions online which the candidates then answer, also in written form. Fr Benedict has encouraged me to ask something but although as we all know the burning issue is the General Synod's stumbling muck-up of Living in Love and Faith I really can't think of anything I might ask that could possibly be illuminating. He further points me towards the Evangelical Council's suggestion that parishes who find themselves out of line with their bishops might divert some funds from the diocese towards other organisations, and suggests I might ask the candidates what they think about this. I wonder: left to my own devices, I might want to ask something like:

Why do the candidates think God might want the Church of England (as opposed to any other ecclesial body) to continue to exist?

... but that might be too abstract!

Post Offices and Pointy Hats

At the time, the time being early 2018, Paula Vennells’s personal involvement in the case of our Swanvale Halt subpostmaster’s suspension, and the transfer of the license (or whatever it is technically) to a relative so the post office could reopen, seemed like an act of generous flexibility. Having written to her more than once to complain about what was happening, I felt it was only fair to write again to thank her for finding some way for the service to resume, without the subpostmaster being prosecuted. Even then, only about 18 months before Mr Justice Fraser’s excoriating judgement on the Post Office’s behaviour since introducing the Horizon accounting system in 1999, Ms Vennells maintained to me that ‘I can’t go into the circumstances in this case, but we never suspend a post office without good reason’, and to others that there was no problem with the system at all.

A long while later, when things were clearer, the redoubtable Estelle had discovered that Ms Vennells was also the Revd Vennells, holding a license to officiate in the diocese of St Albans. Estelle wanted to write to the Bishop there to protest, and asked for copies of my correspondence. As I had, indeed, written, I felt I couldn’t say no, but I warned our Bishop that I was agreeing just in case the Bishop of St Albans might corner him in a corridor at the House of Lords waving my letters at him and shouting ‘What’s this?! What’s this?!’ I can’t recall how our Bishop replied to me – I think it must have been in person at a rare moment we were in the same place at the same time – but I do remember he said something to the effect that he’d ‘always found Paula Vennells very impressive’, which he may have done, but it was an entirely otiose thing to say. And what were the circumstances in which he came to any conclusions at all about an NSM working in an obscure parish in another diocese?

We now know exactly how impressive the hierarchy of the Church of England found her – enough to shortlist her for Bishop of London when that position was being filled in 2017, and for the Archbishop of Canterbury to support her candidacy personally. When the BBC reports that Ms Vennells is ‘an ordained Anglican priest but does not hold a senior position in the Church of England’ this is a bit of an understatement. She’s never been anything other than a Non Stipendiary Minister, part of a team in a group of rural parishes. To catapult such a person into the Church’s third most senior bishopric would be the most gobsmacking promotion since Thomas Becket. That it could even be thought of, let alone that it could reach the point of her being interviewed, is quite stunning. Thankfully there may have been angels making sure it didn’t happen.

For quite some time, the Church of England has been in an episode of bewitchment by the world of business and management: I hesitate to say it’s now passing out of it. Of course having a variety of backgrounds and experiences in your leadership to bring other viewpoints to the table is not a bad thing, and I wouldn’t want the Church to be composed entirely of Oxbridge arts graduates like me. Assuming that this equally narrow band of expertise is exactly the one which is going to save your organisation is quite a different matter, but that seems to be what the current cohort in control of the Church of England has thought. The Archbishop of Canterbury supports one individual businessperson-turned-priest’s promotion; another bishop thinks they’re ‘very impressive’; a third speaks up in their support, while carefully and typically not saying anything actually untrue.

You see what’s going on here. The first instinct of the hierarchy of the Church is to support the powerful, because that’s who they mix with. A priest made bishop can be ever so good and upright, but from the moment of their consecration they enter a world of MPs, Lords Lieutenant, CEOs and Chief Constables. They talk to them and get to know them. They can see their good points. Eventually they can see nothing but their good points, because they have become like them. The last sentence of Animal Farm comes to mind.

And here I am, a small and lowly counterpart, bathed in the beguiling warmth of the Establishment in this one place. It is a great privilege to be invited to schools, to turn on Christmas lights, to sit on committees, to bless this and that – to have an established and settled role in a community. A privilege, but a temptation. It is a great mercy that I would never, ever be a bishop, because I know what would happen. I’m exactly the same as them. I would kid myself that I could resist, and a year or two later would be as rusted and corroded as anyone else.

Rebuild the Boundaries!

Amazingly, it’s a full seven years since Carly told me she was dying of leukaemia, a belief she now says came from a wrongly-addressed letter from the hospital. Since then, she’s been in and out of prison, has orbited around Swanvale Halt but never resettled here, and eventually was offered a place in a shared house managed by an alcohol recovery charity. We (the church) took her for her interview and I’d arranged moving her stuff there before she said she’d found someone else to help with it. Her troubles carried on, however. She maintained she’d had her food and money stolen, and yet again I was drawn into sending her a sub – at first, a one-off as she was moving in to the new house, then another one-off because it was Christmas, and then … A couple of days after Christmas I gave her a lift from the house to the village because she’d been beaten up there and her money taken, and was going to stay with a friend and see her family; on New Year’s Eve, before zooming to London, I took her back to the house after a row with her family and, supposedly, the ‘friend’ again beating her up and taking her money. Now she has to leave the house having broken its rules, not, her social worker who has again made contact with me, for the first time.

This is wearyingly familiar stuff and tracking back in the blog you can piece together similar stories. What made it slightly different this time was that Carly was in a meeting at the probation office yesterday and asked me if I could send her the fare home. The problem was that I was, at that moment, in Reading seeing a friend and not just in Reading but temporarily stranded in Reading. On Tuesday I’d been marooned in Portsmouth due to the storm closing down the rail network, and finally boarded a bus that took me to Victoria Coach Station from where, via train and taxi, I made it home; Thursday’s problem was rain flooding the line to Guildford, and while I did get home it required another diversion to the capital to take a different route. Carly proved very unwilling to accept this, asking me repeatedly why I couldn’t send her the money and then why I was away from home for a second time in a week. As soon as I got back at 10.30 I did, and even offered to give her yet another lift, but heard nothing. I still had to clear away the Christmas decorations in the church and set up for the Toddler Group in the morning (our churchwardens are both indisposed).

I couldn’t send her the money because I am old-fashioned and use a physical key to access my bank account. I don’t see why I should order my financial arrangements around the possibility that someone else may want an emergency transfer while I’m out. Also, I was absent for more than a day in a week because I was on leave. I had explained this already, but Carly couldn’t grasp the relevance of it. I thought of saying ‘What the hell business is it of yours to dictate what I do?’ During an earlier episode of the same sort of thing Ms Formerly Aldgate once fumed ‘These people seem to think they’ve got an absolute right to your money’, and Carly appeared to believe I should put myself in a position always to meet her potential needs, as well. In fact I’m afraid I got very annoyed about it, albeit only to myself.

I know maintaining boundaries is important, but here I am in the same kind of situation as so many times before, with (unlike the Lord) an account of what it is I’m supposed to do or not do that’s so fuzzy it’s barely workable. At least I didn’t have a chance to tell Carly just what I thought, as I would have spoken out of tiredness and bitterness that was nothing to do with her at all.

Having Said That ...

... I was at the V&A today to see the "Diva" exhibition, mainly tempted by PJ Harvey's Hope Six drum which is on show there, but I also dropped in at the medieval gallery and was astonished that I'd never spotted several representations of my patron saint, not Polly but St Catherine. There's an English alabaster panel showing the Martyrom, a German wooden statue, a golden reliquary, and a tiny plaque no more than an inch across.

Rerum Novarum

Even a couple of hours beforehand, I wasn't convinced about setting out to London to see the New Year in at Tarantella. It wasn't just the usual Sunday services in the morning, or even preparing for my week off to come (in fact today Il Rettore warned me he has covid, so I'll be doing the Tuesday mass after all), but I was a bit weary. It didn't help that I came to lock up the church at tea-time and found Carly on the Lady Chapel step surrounded by bags and charging her phone. Only on Friday I'd given her a lift from the shared alcohol-recovery house ten miles away where she has a room to Swanvale Halt, because she said she'd been beaten up there and her money stolen. She was going to stay with a friend and see her family for Christmas. This didn't go well: the friend also beat her up and stole from her, and she got into a row with her brother who hit her for good measure. Could I take her back to the shared house again? At least it being New Year's Eve the roads were quiet. 

Well. I set my teeth and drove to Guildford to catch a slow, late-running train that got me to The Albany on Great Portland Street at 10.45. And it was rather fine: the couple of hours I spent there were in the company of friends expected and unexpected and I learned a little about what's going on with them, in so far as you can grab some intelligible words in an environment of loud music in a dark, enclosed space. After the customary countdown to midnight, whoever was DJing put on 'Heroes' - most of the time I can't abide Bowie, but the song's melancholy defiance was most apposite and brought a bit of a tear to the eye. Back at Waterloo and dreading the usual exhausting diversion around the massive pedestrian gyratory system that, one time I and Ms Formerly Aldgate braved it, took us as far as Blackfriars, I found there wasn't one. I went straight up the escalator from the Tube and onto the concourse. I was so surprised and pleased I had to find a member of staff and congratulate them, much to their confusion.

I think I will be posting here a bit less in 2024.  I began this blog way, way back in 2009 because I found that clergy blogs essentially told you nothing interesting. I was especially thinking of someone who was at Staggers at the same time as me and whose posts on a blog that was supposed to be about hs parish essentially described whatever feast day it was according to the Roman calendar and then out of the blue announced he was crossing the Tiber, and that was that. I wanted to give at least a flavour of what looking after a small and unremarkable parish church is like, and after a couple of years settled into a discipline of posting basically every other day as all the advice in those days suggested that was how you built up an audience, even if I ended up showing readers pictures of the garden or some dimly-lit club as I am today. But all these years later, a blog of this kind is something of an anachronism - hardly anyone does anything like it now. Sometimes it's been a helpful mechanism for settling my thoughts on a particular topic, and just now and again I've posted something which people have been specifically interested in. 

Far and away the most popular of these has been my examination of fringe churches, as the algorithms pick up on David Farrant, Sean Manchester and the saga of the Highgate Vampire very readily. The runners-up are:

- My account of Chapel House, Blackfen, an East London folly;

- My speculations on the real identity of Witch House musician Hvcci Gvcci;

- A description of what happened to the burned-out church of St Saviour, Poplar;

- A post about a handful of holy wells in Norfolk;

- A few words about Anglo-Catholic artist Thomas Noyes Lewis; and 

- My visit to the Hascombe Dragonstones in 2020. 

Presumably this is because there's not much else online about any of them! Anyway, a little while ago I passed the symbolic milestone of 2000 posts and as themes and ideas begin to repeat themselves it's time to slow down a bit. I will still post when something occurs to me, but be driven more by events and concerns than by that alternate-day discipline. 

Every blessing in 2024 to any reader I may have!