Angels in Ordinary

Michaelmas Day gives me an opportunity not just to speak about angels but also our former sacristan Sister Mary, the ex-nun who 'always kept her vows' even when the Community of the Sacred Passion told her that because she couldn't put up with the climate in the parts of Africa where they worked, there was no place for her in the Order at all (poverty and chastity weren't a problem, obedience was a bit more difficult). This is because September 29th was the day she took her final vows all those years ago, and I always regard it as a subsidiary, local festival to Swanvale Halt: the Feast of the Solemn Profession of Vows of Blessed Mary Fontingham. We didn't always see things from the same point of view but our disagreements were mostly aesthetic: she felt Roman vestments made priests 'look like beetles scuttling about', and I never got my head around her fondness for gold lamé in the embroidered items she made. Yesterday, though, we did use the burse and veil from the old 'best white' set in Mary's honour.

I talked about Christianity's insistence on a hidden level of reality and the way the religious life is committed to uncovering that reality with an intensity that laypeople don't necessarily have to, even though we're called to acknowledge and proclaim it. We're not alone in doing so - the angels sing with us, but while we sing from a place of hope, they sing from one of certainty.

The congregation wasn't large yesterday; I looked out and realised that probably barely half the people there knew Sister Mary, but have joined the church since she died back in 2013. That caught me by surprise. Even the saints disappear gradually from human recollection, and are left to God's. 

Named in Stone (and glass/brass)

It's the 175th anniversary of the church this year and, for Heritage Open Weekend, I did a short tour of the church and churchyard looking at the memorials and monuments and thinking about some of the people represented. I haven't had time to research in-depth biographies of many of them, but there were enough details to fill a good 45 minutes exploring the nature of history and memory in our small community. We discovered -

- the former slaveowning incumbent of the church and his complex family ramifications

- the beloved parish worker whose life was glowingly written up in the parish magazine and who nobody now recalls

- the Victorian army officer who brought his horse back from the Crimea and buried it at his house when it died

- the lyrically-named lady married to a Quaker papermill master

- the anonymous 16-year-old commemorated in a window, whose face was almost certainly used for St Agnes and was therefore presumably called that

- the militant suffragette remembered in the statue of the Virgin & Child from a London convent

... and we also talked about headstones and footstones, the 19th-century stonemasonry trade, and what happens when monuments are moved around. Ours is a small and pretty unremarkable parish church, and yet look at what it contains. Most of all, what struck me - having not known it until I looked up our burial records - is that during the mere 30 years our churchyard was open more than 420 souls were laid to rest in it. And it's tiny. Half of them were aged 15 or under; 39%, nearly 2 in every 5, were aged 3 or under. That was the kind of place Swanvale Halt was in the mid-1800s: like, presumably, most other such places. 

Parochial Views

It was Mad Trevor's birthday last week and as he wouldn't have done anything to mark it otherwise I thought it was time to invite him over for lunch. He was really enthusiastic. The day came and I called to remind him, but got no answer. I carried on getting no answer, and eventually put the pork sausages I wouldn't otherwise have bought into the freezer. The following day I called round at the flat and found the front door wide open. Trevor himself was fast asleep in bed. I left a note on the cooker where I'd be sure he'd see it. I still haven't been able to get him on the phone. 

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Esme and Molly are Roman Catholics, really, but come to our service. Esme also attends the Roman Catholic mass but Molly only makes it to ours. Over coffee after the service I came to sit next to them. 'The Catholic service is too early for me, I can't manage it', said Molly, 'This one is the next best thing.' 'I told you not to say that!!' hissed Esme. In fact, given that I was right in front of them both, it was the second statement that struck me as more careless than the first.

We Do Things Differently Now

Usually the safeguarding training I'm obliged to attend is run by the Diocese, but today I was at a school-based session. It wasn't compulsory, but as our parish school begins its adventure of being joined with a secular school locally I thought I would come along to show willing. The outlines are the same, but whereas in a church setting safeguarding focuses on the supervision of children and vulnerable adults, safer recruitment and the occasional interactions with children which characterise the life of most churches, in a school setting everything's all the more intense - you deal with children all the time. 

Topics came up that edged around the core of what I normally understand as safeguarding, and into areas to do more with wellbeing and welfare: drug use, underage vaping, online bullying, and so on. The contrast with my own schooling in the 1980s struck me. The teachers at my provincial boys' state grammar school were mainly decent sorts, but they saw their job as keeping order and delivering lessons. Quite apart from the tendency of some members of staff to involve the use of projectiles to carry out these basic tasks - I suppose the woodwork master must have worked out how to throw a chisel across a classroom so as to minimise the possibility of serious injury - there was really very little interest in what happened outside the school. That just wasn't its concern. Even on the premises, beyond the classroom we were left to our own devices, and the school was pretty much a feral environment of persecution, low-level violence and cruelty. I think any suggestion that anyone should look for signs of pupils being unhappy would have been met with incomprehension: of course they were unhappy. Misery was built into the experience. Even in the early 2000s, a friend told me when I talked about this, her own grammar school turned a deliberate blind eye to the difficulties she was having at home. Someone else's problem. 

It occurs to me that this is a colossal change that has happened over the last couple of decades: how the life-experiences of children has become the business of schools in particular is remarkable and would be worth someone studying properly.