St Catherine in Guildford

Although I am posting here less these days, it's still the only place I have to disseminate images of the blessed Great-Martyr Catherine I happen to have found. My researches into Surrey Anglo-Catholicism are now taking me on return visits to some churches to check their kit as well as the buildings themselves, and last week I was rifling through the drawers at St Nicolas's in Guildford. One contained this stole embroidered with what seems to be St Catherine even if the wheel isn't all that clear - just a broken fragment emerging from behind the figure, and, oddly, in front of her sword. That must predate about 1930. I wonder why it was made; an awareness on someone's part of the medieval chapel just south of the town, perhaps?

Happily at St Nic's they have just uprooted the slab-like nave altar installed in 1978 and moved it to a side chapel where it serves the Romanian Orthodox community who use the church on Sunday afternoons very nicely. The central axis of the building is now clear again all the way up to the high altar at the far end. 

Erasure

A longstanding member of the church dies before their time after a short illness. There is tension in the relationships involved, although all of them are of longstanding too – no suspicious new partner within the last few years, for instance, as sometimes happens. But their experience as a Christian is part of this; for some reason, which is never stated (at least to me), their blood family have problems with it. Unless the deceased was, towards them, utterly different from the sweet and gentle person they appeared to me and everyone else, it’s hard to account for. Anger against the relationships that went along with their church life? Anger at God for letting them die?

It's arranged that I will do the funeral, and I have an initial meeting with the deceased’s children. Their requirements are not easy to meet but I prepare to try. But a week beforehand the undertaker phones me and, clearly embarrassed, tells me my services aren’t wanted after all. There will be a civil celebrant instead. It would be untrue to say I’m not saddened, but it also relieves me of the impossible task of having to keep everyone involved happy. I imagine I won’t be welcome at the funeral and so stay away: many other members of the church do attend, and find there’s no mention at all of the faith that was such a central part of the deceased’s life from childhood.

The family got what they presumably wanted, but they will always carry the awareness that, at the moment when most people try to sum up the life of someone they love, they chose to scrub out whole areas of the life concerned. Saddest of all, I imagine it will never be talked about, never dealt with, a rage that’s never questioned, a wound that never gets healed.

Further Observations on the Abyss

Being overtaken by black moods and in fact talking about them is nothing new for me or this blog, but I have some revised or additional things to say about it.

1. The episodes seem to get more intense as I get older. It may be because they are now tangled up with my sense of mortality and the question of how far I might or might not fight a serious illness should it come my way (or when it does), or with issues of how far I’ve made the best use of my life hitherto. I say more intense: that doesn’t mean longer in duration, rather that they feel more dangerous.

2. There is nothing positive or useful about them. They bring no new insights or sympathies – except perhaps for other people who are afflicted in the same way – and in fact they clog up and obscure clarity of thought and vision.

3. There is no shifting them by effort, or by trying to spot and avoid the conditions that give rise to them. This is because this enemy is subtle, and can make use of any stimulus to achieve its result, no matter how innocuous. Most of the time you won’t even be able to spot or isolate the origin of the mood: it moves as quick as thought.

4. But if there is no guilt either in suffering from black thoughts or being unable to dispel them by will (and that kind of guilt can just deepen and intensify the thoughts), neither should they be acquiesced in. They need to be positively closed down whenever you find yourself caught up in them (and ‘find yourself’ is the correct characterisation, because it will happen before you know it), or they will deepen.

5. In fact, I am reticent about talking about them at all, for fear that they might catch! The cunning of this condition is such that recognising that others suffer from it could itself be an encouragement not to resist it when it comes, not to treat it as the adversary of all things human it really is.

6. It absolutely needs outside intervention to cure. If nothing the sufferer can do will shift the black mood, and it can be fuelled by absolutely anything, the best kind of intervention is a surprise, including to the person (if there is one) who brings it about.

7. The contribution the sufferer makes is therefore to be open to intervention, to be willing to put themselves in the kind of position where something surprising, unchosen and unanticipated can take place. A deliberate exposure to (say) the company of other people may not work, but it provides the space and occasion for something to work, and that’s about all we can do.

8. We must always rejoice and offer thanks whenever the danger passes.

Now then, does that help! 

Is There Anybody There? Yes, There Is, Says The Lord

Once we got beyond the basics, the conversation with the woman who’s joined the team of one of our regular events went in an unexpected direction as she described the comfort she’d derived from visiting spiritualist gatherings, and how Christian friends had reacted (she said) with horror. We discussed why someone might want to engage in spiritualist activity and what the problems might be from a Christian point of view. She agreed that there were possibly malign things lurking in the hidden world, but stressed how her experience had been positive. ‘You’re not going to hear this church announcing “And now we’ll have a séance”’, I said, ‘but I’m not shocked’, which I’m not.

Curiously the readings at mass the day after were the consecration of the Temple from 1Kings, and Christ’s critique of the concepts of clean and unclean practices in Mark 7: these led into a reflection about one of my recurring themes, the contrast between two opposed approaches to religious life. The first is that you ring-fence the sense of the divine with rules and structures to prevent it being contaminated by the profane world and eventually eroding altogether; and the second that you use the sense of the divine to find its presence elsewhere. In my own Bible reading in the morning, too, I found the Lord assuring Moses in Exodus 4 ‘I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak’, encouraging a degree of trust in God which I fall short of all too often. ‘He reigns’, I concluded to our small congregation, and if he reigns there is little to fear in the sometimes wayward spiritual practice we encounter in others. One of the issues, in fact, with seeking solace in talking to spirits is that it’s based in a basic lack of trust in God that we are called to grow away from.

If we are critical of what others do, we must surely know that they aren’t simply going to change as a result of something we say. Nobody is going to blink at us and reply ‘You know, I never thought about it like that. I’m going to stop from this point forward’ – although they might, at some point distant from now, shift their ideas and reflect that perhaps we were right. If we don’t expect change in that way, it raises the question of what we’re doing when we react ‘with horror’ at someone else’s behaviour. I think it may be that we fear that if we don’t rebuke the sin, God will blame us for not distancing ourselves from it. The sin will contaminate us and we need to protect ourselves, to signal to God that we want nothing to do with it, to put up a protective barrier between us and it. It’s not the other person that’s uppermost in our minds.

Now, there might well be particular sins that beset us and from which we do need to flee. When Christ says to St Peter ‘get behind me, Satan’, it’s because the Apostle is raising something that’s a genuine temptation for him: it’s actually important. Knowing this is just proper spiritual self-awareness. But that’s not the other sinner’s fault; most of the time it’s not at issue (I have no desire whatever to contact my long-dead relatives); and our words are seldom as much to the point as the Saviour’s.

Locating Christians

A few weeks ago we touched on Will Self’s reasons for going to church, and this morning on the magic wireless journalist Sara Wheeler decided to share hers – ‘not because a bearded old man lives in the sky or because I want to hear a sermon of the “dearly beloved” variety’, whatever she means by that, but because church supplies ritual that ‘helps me cope with anxieties about the gas bill’. Repetitive symbolic behaviour, Ms Wheeler speculates with the aid of Emil Durkheim, is about imposing structure on essentially structureless experience and so reducing anxiety; ‘public telling of morally-charged stories’ helps us understand ourselves; and being aware that you’re doing the same things as others have done before you and will do after you puts your own experiences into a longer, and more realistic, perspective.

Clearly not every ritualised action will carry out these personally and socially worthwhile functions, although you can see shades and reflections of them in everything from the Brownies to golf clubs. Religion is a bit more all-embracing in its explanatory narratives, and has that element of pointing to eternity which is harder for the Brownies to manage. But although many of us may not find it a sufficient reason to engage in religious practice or to persuade others to do so, for others, perhaps lots, it will be enough. You don’t have to believe to get something out of it.

Most of modern evangelistic practice is focused around belief, about bringing nonbelievers to the point of believing, and making sure people who are already in believe harder, as it were. Now, there have to be some who believe in order to make the whole thing work, which is why clergy have to make vows and are encouraged to sharpen and hone their spiritual lives, but perhaps we ought to be less fixated about belief as such. Experience seems to be that people who develop what you might call a dogma-based faith are recruited from the larger number of Will Selfs and Sara Wheelers who have a practice-based faith, and always have been: they ‘catch’ it as a result of doing it. We seem to need more of the latter to generate the former, and not the other way around.