St Catherine at St Cross

On the way back from having fish and chips with my mum and sister in Bournemouth I, Lady Arlen and her daughter stopped at the Hospital of St Cross, the medieval almshouses just south of Winchester, which I last visited in 1991. A lovely interlude aided by tea and ice cream, and I discovered at least one image of St Catherine and possibly two. The window, high up at the east end, is named, and seems to be medieval although St Swithun who is paired with Catherine is modern. The painting is the right-hand wing of what seems to be a Renaissance triptych behind one of the side altars, and I'm not entirely sure it's Catherine. It could be, but though she has a book and a martyr's palm, there's no giveaway wheel.

I also include a snap of a detail from the choir stalls, which were installed in about 1515 and look quite strange, with plenty of imagery which isn't obviously Christian!

Appropriate Culture

‘What was all that Egyptian stuff?’ Ruby asks the Doctor in the middle of Empire of Death, a messy, nonsensical Dr Who story I didn’t enjoy at all, but we’ll put that to one side. They’re referring back to The Pyramids of Mars, the Tom Baker tale broadcast in 1975 and whose appalling first-episode cliffhanger is one of my childhood landmarks, where Sutekh, the death-god who is their adversary of the moment, first appears. There, he was trapped in an Ancient Egyptian tomb by an opponent of his own race named Horus, constructed robots that looked like mummies, and prepared a pyramidal spaceship. ‘Cultural appropriation’, the Doctor answers. It’s quite an odd statement: as a comment, albeit a smug and self-congratulatory one, by writer Russell T Davies on his predecessors from 1975, it's fair enough; the great Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes were very capable of making effective TV out of material we wouldn’t dare to use now, and Pyramids isn’t the most egregious example. But as a diegetic utterance within the story itself, it makes little sense. Back in Pyramids the Doctor is clear that Ancient Egyptian religion and art was organised around memories of the struggles of the alien Osirans, not the other way around, and it would have been very odd for an immensely powerful race of alien beings to restructure their activities around a less advanced culture they encountered on a world they happened to drop onto in the middle of their own civil war.

Ruby and the Doctor discuss all this further in one of the little sequences of midrash the BBC occasionally puts out around the main TV story. ‘An Englishman was looting the tombs of the Pharaohs and disturbing the dead’, he explains. I wondered whether that’s how we think of the early Egyptologists now, whether this is the now-established summary of a century of exploration within the context of the old European empires?

For centuries the Egyptians paid little attention to their heritage of antiquities. Neither Copts nor Muslims had any more interest in the culture that preceded them than medieval European Christians had in the monuments of their own pagan past. Occasionally an Arabic travel writer would describe the statues and temples, but they were relics of a world that was long gone, interesting exactly because they felt no connection with it. When Omm Sety first lived in Egypt in the 1930s, she found that, even then, pregnant women in Abydos would touch the belly of a statue of Isis for luck – not that they had a clear idea who Isis was. It was folklore, magic, not a source of national pride. Historically Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled over by foreign governors who had absolutely no interest in encouraging the population to identify with their national past, even had they thought of such a thing.

I don’t know whether anything’s been written about how the Egyptians themselves picked up the significance of their astonishing archaeological inheritance from the Europeans who started investigating them from the early 1800s, but it took a while, that’s clear. The governors of Egypt had as proprietorial a view of antiquities as any rapacious Imperial tomb-digger: there had been an Egyptian Museum since 1835, but in 1855 governor Mohammed Said Pasha gave the entire collection as a present to the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, which is how all that stuff ended up in Vienna. In the heroic age of Egyptology, the epoch of Giovani Belzoni, Wallis Budge and Flinders Petrie, the exploration of Egyptian antiquities may have been marred by Imperial competition played out as rivalries between museums and universities, but the front-line commanders in that effort were also serious scholars who believed in the relevance of the past, not mere tomb-robbers, and it was from them that the Egyptians learned how important their heritage was.

Aida, I thought, there’s a clear example of cultural appropriation, an opera in Ancient Egyptian fancy dress written by an Italian. Except that, I didn’t realise, it was commissioned from Verdi by the Egyptian ruler Ismail Pasha, in response to a suggestion by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette who acted as the opera’s artistic consultant. Although he came from an Albanian dynasty of Ottoman officials, Ismail was keen to stress the independence of the country he governed. Four years after he took over in 1863, the Empire agreed to give him the title Khedive, ‘viceroy’, much classier than a mere governor. Ismail was an ardent moderniser and built a state opera house in Cairo – Aida ended up not being the very first performance there because all the costumes and sets were stuck in Paris while the Prussians besieged the city, but when it finally played in 1871 it was the first great celebration of Egyptian national identity that drew in Pharaonic Egypt. It was Khedive Ismail saying to his people, ‘this is who we are’ – an aspirant modern nation, but one which had given the world its first great civilization too.

Of course, from that point on, it became quite important that Europeans stopped carting everything off to museums in London, Paris and Berlin, or to private collections. The Egyptian Antiquities Department was supposed to control the whole business of excavations and removals, though the Egyptian Museum (under both French and Egyptian directors) derived a valuable income from flogging ‘unimportant’ artefacts in its sale room all the way to 1979, and wasn’t able to stop Howard Carter apparently slipping the odd bit into his pocket while he was cataloguing Tutankhamun’s tomb. Anyway, we carry on with the Egyptians taking more and more charge over their own past until the process culminated in the Golden Parade of the Pharaohs in 2021: 22 royal mummies from the caches of Deir-el-Bahari and the tomb of Amenhotep II were moved in tank-like atmosphere-controlled vehicles from the old Egyptian Museum to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (a telling title) in a procession of jaw-dropping splendour. You can watch a cinematic treatment of this event on Youtube, simultaneously moving, and slightly terrifying, as these papery bits of desiccated human in their battered sarcophagi are invested with so much grand significance. ‘I cried when I saw Queen Hatshepsut’, says one viewer, ‘because her enemies tried to erase her existence, and this is the glory she deserved’ – and funnily enough I got a bit tearful too, even though we know they didn’t, that Hatshepsut isn’t the star of this show, and she wasn’t even the only female Pharaoh as she was once believed to be: still, she’s not just an Egyptian now, but a feminist as well, a Woman Wronged. The monarchs’ names appear in English and Arabic script, but in hieroglyphic cartouches, while the choir sings in Ancient Egyptian, and the not-terribly-impressive President El-Sisi tries not to look completely out of place amidst the colossal, eclipsing charisma of the dead.

That is the positive story, of how European scholarship rescued the past of an ancient civilisation and ended up giving it back to the people who are its true heirs. It's not untrue, but it is incomplete. Those careful scholars all felt that if they’d dug stuff up it was only logical that they should take it back home with them. That was simply part of the mindset. There was a time when that wasn’t completely unreasonable because nowhere in Egypt could have looked after delicate artefacts very securely, but that wasn’t the justification, and it carried on being the assumption long after the Egyptians did begin developing credible archaeological institutions of their own. Just as Britain and France ended up carving up Africa between them not really because gigantic swathes of African territory were of any use to them, but just to stop each other getting it, the process of acquisition, of tens and hundreds of thousands of objects flowing into great museums, was driven by that rivalry, played out through the work of whiskered scholars scratching trowels in sandy pits. When Howard Carter pilfered the odd pendant from the Valley of the Kings, it’s hard to decide whether the acquisitiveness that made him do it was his own human moral failing situated within the prejudice of Empire, or conversely whether the Imperial looting of Egyptian artefacts was a case of that ordinary, petty greed writ large.

And, in any case, not all the diggers were careful scholars. Some were just opportunists and collectors: the sheer mind-boggling quantity of antiquities in Egypt made ransacking seem less consequential. Looking back at The Pyramids of Mars, perhaps Marcus Scarman, the linen-suited excavator who curses his superstitious native labourers and stumbles into Sutekh’s tomb, is just that: I’ve always thought his Egyptology must be pretty ropey if he thinks the structure is First Dynasty as he claims. Maybe he is nothing more than ‘an Englishman looting tombs and disturbing the dead’.

The respect of the dead, rather than their living descendants, is a separate matter from imperialist looting, material or cultural. I’m the first person to regard how we treat the remains of the dead as an analogue for our attitude towards the living: a dead person – the phrase we often automatically use – is honoured because they represent the individual they were before death, and the web of relationships they were part of. But who do they belong to once they have no identifiable living relatives?

I haven’t been to Maidstone Museum; I must go some time. But in common with many large and not-even-all-that-large museums in Britain, they have a mummy. She is ‘the Lady of the House, Ta-Kush, Daughter of Osiris’, a 25^th-Dynasty woman whose remains came to Britain in the 1820s and eventually found their way via a private collector to the Museum. Once thought to have died at about 14, research in the 2010s showed that she was likely to have been 40 or so, and of Nubian origin. She had poor teeth and osteoporosis. We have a good idea of what she may have looked like thanks to facial reconstruction. Ta-Kush was not well treated when she first arrived here, and whoever owned her waited twenty years before she was even looked at by anyone with any expertise; but now she gazes at us across 2700 years or so, and, to my mind, works more for human sympathy and understanding than she would ever have done undisturbed in the sands of her homeland. An ambassador for fellowship and compassion from the long-distant past: really, that’s not a bad fate to have.

Thick Red Line

My last brush with covid - as far as I can tell - was two years ago, and I consider I've done rather well to avoid it until now. I went to bed thinking that something was amiss, what with a headache and a tickly throat, and on rising to a headache this morning decided to check: the result was unmistakable, though now the symptoms seem to have morphed into those of a standard cold I'm very used to. Plus an upset stomach - though that's so common an experience it may not be to do with the pesky coronavirus at all. Possibly the arena of infection was the Goth night at Chislehurst Caves I spent a couple of hours at on Saturday night, but I fear, with only a day from that until the emergence of first symptoms, I was probably more infector than infectee; maybe my visit to a café in Banstead on Thursday was to blame, or Toddler Group on Friday morning. It's been so long since my last infection that I had to check what the NHS advises one does and I see it's now acceptable to get back to normal life 5 days after a positive result and see vulnerable people - such as my mum, who I hope to visit along with Lady Arlen and her daughter at the end of the month - after 10. I absolutely must meet tomorrow with a couple who need a wedding licence (we will do so outdoors and masked), and have a funeral of a beloved church member on Friday, which should be OK as the person I will interact most closely with is already dead.

It leads me to recollect that hallucinatory period that began when Mr Johnson appeared on our TV screens to say 'You must all stay at home', of which the children now at Church Club at the Infants School (which I will miss on Wednesday) will remember nothing. We treat covid remarkably casually now. My mum had it and made it through; so did Ms Kittywitch, who has several organs that aren't the ones she was born with and next to no immune system at all. It's fatally easy to forget how dreadful it seemed early in 2020, to forget that its fatality rate was 1% or so in the first wave, meaning that in this country not far short of 3/4 of a million people would have had to die before that resonant state, 'herd immunity', was achieved; to forget how we expected that sub-Saharan Africa was going to be devastated by the disease, when in fact it turned out to be relatively lenient with that part of the world. It sounds outrageous given the scale of death and suffering, but we got off reasonably lightly compared to how it might have been.

Back at (nearly) the beginning, I asked asked whether it was all worth it, the restrictions we placed on ourselves and the consequent economic and social damage, and I concluded that we would never reach a clear answer. The current covid enquiry isn't looking at all into the question of whether the Swedish solution or the Chinese or whatever would have been better than what we did in the UK, or rather the variants of what we did, as our constituent regional governments bickered and manoeuvred for advantage. I wondered whether the current advice on 'avoiding meeting people' for 5 days rather than complete isolation for 10 as it was in 2022 more reflects medical reality in terms of better epidemiology and dissemination of vaccines, or a different assessment of the balance between medical safety and socioeconomic harm. Now and again a news report appears in the lower reaches of the BBC homepage discussing some new finding about 'long-covid' or the like, but their obscurity reflects how we have moved on and don't want to think about it anymore. It's foolish, but I suppose, at the time, it's what I wanted as much as anyone.

All In the Wording

It is, of course, a privilege to host the Civic Service for the new Mayor of Hornington. Peter is a member of the congregation and it was no surprise that he wanted to come here for the event. The service happens to be his birthday as well as being Father's Day (not that that's a specifically Christian observance, and I wonder why we didn't come up with a churchy version as we did with the modern Mother's Day), and he had ideas over what he wanted to happen. Which basically meant keeping it simple - a reading, a few hymns chosen by chaps from the area. The reading is from Psalm 103: 'as a father is tender with his children, so is the Lord merciful towards those that fear him'. 'Can we change fear to love?' asked Peter. Well, no, we can't, I said: Hebrew was never my subject but whatever that word is it won't equate to 'love' no matter what you do to it. 'Those who hold him in awe' might be an acceptable alternative if you find 'fear' a bit jarring. 

Given that Peter has been in and around the Church for the whole of his life it did make me wonder what people in our congregations actually think about the Scriptures. The only reason for reading these ancient texts publicly is that we feel they represent God, however we might understand that. Even if (as I do) we accept that the texts come through human experience and occasionally reflect human fallibility, as when clear errors of recollection or transmission creep in, we also recognise that behind them there is both divine activity, and the Church's settled consensus that they represent divine activity. And yet the possibility arises that we might change a word to something entirely unrelated because we find it a bit awkward, as though it had the same status as something in the English Hymnal, as though its ultimate author was JM Neale rather than God. I suppose the fact that Peter asked me does suggest that he thought I might say no. He is a politician, after all. 

Clearout

My computer, like most people’s I suspect, is clogged with irrelevant stuff. In the time I’ve been at Swanvale Halt I’ve changed laptop three times and have meekly and unthinkingly copied everything across from one to another. Now I’ve decided to dispose of everything that doesn’t seem useful – all the duplicated photos, the outdated downloaded documents, the superceded liturgies, the items that are far better off on the church office computer than mine – and the sermons.

I preach a great deal, on average three times a week, perhaps (at least that seems like a great deal to me, perhaps it’s not). It’s probably, in fact, my major form of creative output. When I started out at Lambourne I used to write everything out longhand, but when I arrived at Swanvale Halt this seemed too onerous to keep up and for 8am and midweek Masses I got into the habit of scribbling notes and then preaching from them. But when we reopened after the first Covid lockdown I began preaching from a brief outline as part of the attempt to be as brief as possible. I preferred it: it felt more lively, if less polished. It’s not a disaster if I stumble in my search for the right word (as I often do), but I have to steer clear of the hazardous waters of repetitious waffle and be very clear how the sermon is going to end! For one-off occasions – funerals, weddings, and special events – I still write everything out. But there were between four and five hundred written sermon texts remaining on the machine.

I felt a bit of a pang deleting them, as I suppose they represent a significant part of my creative energy, but the fact is that I have never, ever looked back at a single one of them. What would be the point in keeping them? Once upon a time clergy were in the habit of publishing books of sermons, but unless you are John Donne this would seem to be a decidedly otiose activity in this day and age. I remember once picking up a book of ‘Best Sermons of All Time’ and turning to the offering from the mighty Charles Spurgeon: it was turgid and lifeless by our standards. If any of my efforts have ever touched anyone for the good, it will have been for that moment, that time and place, and a sermon lifted into another context from the one in which it’s preached is likely to be baffling and hollow. Getting rid of these files is a small act of liberation. 

Perpetual Guest

It took the local council a matter of minutes after the Prime Minister stood in the rain in Downing Street and announced the date of the General Election to phone up Grant the churchwarden to book the church as a polling station on July 4^th. In fact I expect it’s the hall that will be used rather than the church, as it was for the Police & Crime Commissioner election in May, a rather less exciting affair it must be said but our first experience of performing this public role. This week I’ve also been trying to sort out the hustings event traditionally hosted by Churches Together in Hornington & District, which won’t be at Swanvale Halt because of the limited parking locally. The Greens have yet to nominate a candidate for the constituency (they only have till tomorrow) and our incumbent Tory MP has yet to reply; disconcertingly it was the Reform candidate who was first back to me. Perhaps he has more time to check emails, or alternatively a laid-back agent who doesn’t do it for him.

It all leads me to reflect again on the oddness of the Church of England parson’s position in society. In so many ways we are the go-to persons, and our churches the default venues, for such events. But equally we operate in a society whose assumptions are secular and non-sectarian and I would really not have it any other way. On Tuesday morning I looked in my diary and found the inscription ‘2pm Willow Grange’ and embarrassingly had to contact the Bishop’s secretary to remind me what it was I’d agreed to come to. The event was part of what the diocesan staff call ‘Tent Week’ when the bishop invites cohorts of folk across the diocese to have tea in a marquee in his garden. This particular gathering was for those involved in ‘the ministry of listening’ for which I qualified as a Local Vocations Adviser, apparently, along with the Chaplains, Mentors, and Spiritual Directors. Anyway, the point I am coming to is that we had a short talk by a pleasant woman priest whose name and role I can’t remember who mentioned the experience of ministering in contexts we do not control, where we are guests, and which are sometimes indifferent to us and sometimes actively hostile. It made the event slightly more than pointless (though there may have been a point in simply showing my face as it's likely to be the only time I will be in the proximity of the bishop for some time). 

In my parish, I do have a clear identity and status signalled by my distinctive dress and my link with the big old stone building with the little steeple in the centre of the community, but in another way the parish isn’t mine at all. It is a space I have a responsibility for, and yet do not control in any way. There is nobody I can command. I am always a guest, and just occasionally one who nobody is quite sure what to do with. But then I suspect that may have been the Lord’s position as well.