An Hour With +Rowan

Although it was my day off, all I had to do was click the Zoom link and sit and listen to Rowan Williams talk about ‘The Catholic understanding of mission’ as part of a series organised by the diocese, so I thought it would be churlish not to.  Of course the venerable ex-Archbishop has a useful ability to summarise complex matters in simple, or simplish, formulations: he pointed us away from any definition of Catholicism that stressed universality – the straightforward meaning we might be familiar with – but what he described as a more Orthodox conception, qualitative rather than quantitative: ‘that form of Christian life which intends its members to live a risen life’, ‘to receive and give more radically than in any other form of human living’. +Rowan went on to discuss what tradition does and doesn’t mean (‘always a way of praying, not something passed on by a Masonic elite but a steady regularity of reading and reflecting’), the sacramental life as our response to God’s promises, the conviction that God is at work in the world and so our action must not be based on anxiety, and the belief that the Church is something God has made, not us.

Hmm, as I thought – I thought – we’re not actually going to get anything very practical here. The gentleman from the diocesan Mission Enabling Team hosting the seminar asked +Rowan what it might mean when a parish followed these ideas well, a rather deft way of saying ‘But what do we actually do?’ without using those specific words, it seemed to me, and Lord Williams remembered some of his own experience in parishes where the eucharist was celebrated in the homes of people who invited their neighbours and friends, or where parishioners gathered in small groups for an hour of contemplative prayer. That was OK. I suspect what we need, maybe what we really wanted, was the next step beyond what our speaker gave us – ‘Applying the Catholic Understanding of Mission’, perhaps.

Disgusted Of

'Never read the comments' is of course sound advice in almost any corner of the Internet (not here as all the comments are informative and kind). So I can't recall what led me to take note of some letter to the Telegraph lately in which a gentleman in where else but Tunbridge Wells opined in the following terms:

SIR – Although there are social and demographic reasons for the Church of England’s decline, a major contributory factor must be finance. The wasteful pursuit of woke causes by both the central Church and dioceses, as well as the unnecessarily large number of bishops, are putting huge burdens on the parishes. ... It is not clear to me why there are nearly twice as many now as there were 200 years ago, and four times as many bishops, while the number of parish clergy has fallen by three quarters.

As soon as anyone denounces 'woke causes' their views should very largely be put carefully to one side, but apart from that I bring this up only to mention that I don't recognise any of this picture. I'm not sure about the decline in numbers of parish clergy, but there are about 13,000 ordained people in current ministerial roles (as opposed to retired priests still doing stuff) and just over 100 bishops, which doesn't seem all that top-heavy a structure. And bishops don't really cost all that much either, certainly not enough for cutting their numbers by, say, half to make any material difference to the funding of the Church of England. I have questions as to what bishops do - at least ours, who we barely see from one year to the next - but there's little reason to think that their existence is pulling the rest of the structure down. I also struggle to think of a single 'woke cause' that might be imposing any burden on the parish of Swanvale Halt. Race, sexuality and gender identity - no, there's absolutely nothing that our diocese has demanded we campaign on or develop a position about. I think the hearing aid clinic run by Sally our Pastoral Assistant is the closest I can come up with. Special treatment for the hard of hearing? It's political correctness gone mad!

Leave Miscellanea

Although I'm not really posting about things that don't relate to the church, my post-Easter leave this week did take me to Dorset and St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury, which I found still a bit forlorn as its west window remains boarded up awaiting repair by English Heritage. For the first time in about twenty years there was no votive deposit at all apart from a few candle stubs and a bundle of dry flowers and the prayer I left on a scrap of paper was the sole offering. 

On Tuesday I had a trip to Rochester having not seen the Cathedral since I left the area in 1997. Not a single image of St Catherine there: in fact there are very few female saints represented at all, and most of the holy figures are military, fitting in with the martial tone of much of the cathedral. I walked along the road to Chatham, checking the house where I used to live (which looks exactly the same) and St John's Church where I once worshipped. When I left the town the congregation was on the brink of decamping to Emmaus, the United Reform Church on the right side of the ring road which had left the poor Anglican church isolated from the town centre, and St John's spent a while derelict before the Diocese of Rochester decided they wanted to reopen it. Now apparently the congregation is moving out to Emmaus yet again - but only temporarily, while the church is refurbished.

Yesterday I was in London and found another tiny St Catherine hiding on some Netherlandish stained glass in Sir John Soane's Museum. I doubt anyone else has ever noticed her!

I was in town to see the Cult of Beauty exhibition at the Wellcome with Lady Wildwood before we both went to hear Bettany Hughes speak about the Seven Wonders of the World, but strangely what caught my interest most was her incidental remark about Karahan Tepe in Turkey, 'a city in a time and place where there shouldn't be one'. She's overstating slightly it being a 'city', but it certainly does seem to be a permanent settlement with sophisticated monuments (including a ritual chamber of gigantic penis pillars) dating back over 11,000 years and possibly more. The carvings show lots of people with six fingers on their hands, and the whole site was deliberately buried after a couple of millennia. I'm mortified I had never heard of this! 

More about Karahan Tepe here.

Easter 2024

Holy Week at Swanvale Halt was bookended by syncope. Lillian, our former Lay Reader, keeled over during the Palm Sunday mass, and at 8am on Easter Day a pregnant young woman who I’d never seen in church before but came accompanied by two older women one of whom I recognised from the streets of the village, also found standing up and sitting down in order too much, and passed out briefly. She was ever so embarrassed.

This was how it all worked. I decided to do a healing mass on Monday evening, Compline and Benediction on Tuesday, and Tenebrae on Wednesday, as ever, low-key services which brought the expected handful of faithful souls (not quite the same handful on each evening, but nearly). The bigger Triduum observances of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday had lower gates than the unusually high numbers of last year, but it wasn’t bad to get 23 at the dawn mass on the Sunday the clocks went forward (most of the conversation in the vestry beforehand orbited around how little we’d slept and how we couldn’t remember which of our timepieces would automatically update), 18 at 8am and 100 at 10am for the first time since 2018.

For the first time in some years I remembered to order a garland for the Paschal Candle from the local florists: if only I’d also remembered that I had to carry on watering it after the great excitement was past, the daisies would have survived longer than they did. 

Heathen Rights

Il Rettore is due to take the funeral of an old friend – but not as a clergyman, just as a friend, as the gentleman was a determined atheist. ‘We knew each other well enough to argue about it’, he told me over coffee.

I mentioned that a little while ago a couple I know well asked whether the funeral of their son, who’d died suddenly in his 30s, could be held in the church. They aren’t Christians, and for a few hours I didn’t realise they were asking for a funeral service in their own tradition. There is no chance of this happening: canon law says specifically that any act of worship in a church must not ‘be contrary to, nor indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter’, and an act of non-Christian worship clearly is that. Thankfully I know the people well enough for them not to take my refusal personally, and they’d already been warned by a knowledgeable friend this would probably be the case.

At almost the same time someone I know posted on LiberFaciorum a link to the funeral of Stuart Brogan, who ran the Wyrdraven Viking shop in Glastonbury. This took place in Glastonbury parish church and was led jointly by Revd Diana Greenfield, the ‘Avalon Pioneer Minister’ who worked (she’s moved on very recently) with alternative communities in and around Glastonbury, and a pagan officiant. Revd Diana said at the start that the service would ‘reflect Stu’s respect for a variety of faiths’, but while the pagan officiant mentioned pagan deities and ideas, there was no specifically Christian content to the service at all as far as I could see or hear. Local media referred to the service as a ‘heathen funeral’, which didn’t seem unfair.

Without delving into the specifics of Mr Brogan’s funeral and why it came about in the way it did, I don’t think I could have taken part with any integrity. A church isn’t a neutral space as a crematorium properly is, and the presence of a Christian minister isn’t neutral either. I want to welcome everyone, but I also want to welcome them to something – to Christ’s presence, and to the place where he has promised to be. I don't think I can do that unless he is named. 

Extra Solemn

The annual task of veiling the church for Passiontide is something I normally look forward to as a sign that Lent is mostly past, even if the taxing time of Holy Week is yet to come. I especially like putting the panels that show the Instruments of the Passion onto the reredos, covering the mosaics that are usually visible; I don't know any other church that has anything quite the same, and ours are homemade, designed to slip beneath the canopies of the arches.

But without someone to assist me and foot the ladder, veiling two large paintings and one wall-mounted mosaic panel presents a disagreeable prospect to someone who gets vertiginous even standing on a chair to change a light bulb. So last Saturday I moved very carefully, shifting the ladder laboriously and sensibly (or what I thought was sensibly) and not overreaching. 

I realised I'd missed a Pollyday and hadn't listened to Let England Shake on its anniversary, February 14th, as I should, so did the veiling to the accompaniment of the maestra on headphones. Shimmering music of war and death, and the terrible destructiveness of human folly, alongside this act of preparation for the symbolic violence of the Passion. Neither alone has ever felt quite the same before. 

Sham Rock

Years and years ago I may have railed about the nonsense pedalled by pagans (and some Christians) about Easter, but I hadn't any idea that St Patrick's Day was the subject of similar balderdash until a friend of mine posted on LiberFaciorum yesterday. I should resist going down these kind of rabbit holes, but here's the original statement, with my own responses interposed.

"St Patrick's Day - a very very bizarre celebration indeed. A British and Roman priest

That’s the last accurate statement in the passage.

"who attempted to annihilate the Druids,

There’s no evidence of anything approaching this. All the evidence (as opposed to later mythologising) suggests that Patrick’s mission was relatively limited. His Confessio makes it clear that he was highly dependent on the goodwill of the powerful in Irish society, and instead (very, very rarely among Christian missionaries) he says ‘towards the pagan people too among whom I live, I have lived in good faith, and will continue to do so. God knows that I have not been devious with even one of them, nor do I think of doing so, for the sake of God and his church. I would not want to arouse persecution of them and of all of us’.

"conducted exorcisms to banish the great Irish faery deity Ainé, who told lies about the faery,

The only information we have about pre-Christian Irish deities come from later sources produced within a Christian context, such as the Book of Invasions. But Ainé doesn’t appear there: she occurs in the 11th-century The Fitness of Names. There, she isn’t treated as a goddess, and isn’t a supernatural personality, just a powerful woman. In Limerick folklore, she becomes ‘an old woman who was in with the Good People’, not ‘Queen of the Fairies’ as old-style mythologists such as Charles Squire in Celtic Myth and Legend (1919) claimed, or the ‘goddess of summer, wealth, and sovereignty’ as she is now described. There is nothing that links St Patrick with any supposed worship of Aine and his own writings do not mention her.

"who claimed he threw Pagan women who would not convert into the ocean

He doesn’t. We have all the words Patrick wrote about himself in his Confessio and Letter to Coroticus, and that story isn’t in them.

"and they became mermaids,

This statement sounds like it might have come from later hagiography of Patrick, but it seems to be derived from a garbled amalgam of folk stories. I tried to chase it down. In Legends and Superstitions of the Sea (1885), FS Bassett refers to a legend of people who dwelt under the sea (not strictly mermaids) in Wales because their ancestors had refused to believe St Patrick and so had sunk beneath the water, but that’s the closest I can get to any old source for this story. It’s not Irish, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the historical Patrick. I came across references to ‘old women being thrown into the sea on St Patrick’s Day and becoming mermaids’, but they’re all from modern sources.

"who "drove out the snakes" (the Pagan ways)

Indeed an older generation of writers accounted for this legend, which doesn’t date any earlier than the 11th century, by claiming it referred to Patrick exterminating paganism, and therefore by extension pagans themselves. You come across more elaborate versions such as the claims that the Druids had snake tattoos, or revered snakes because they represented the circle of life (that seems especially odd, as snakes don’t naturally curl into circles, and the Druids couldn't have revered animals that weren't around in the first place). There is no evidence for any of it. Today most commentators accept that it’s a ‘just-so’ story concocted to explain the fact that Ireland has no snakes, in the same way that by the 6th century there was a legend circulating that St Hilary had driven the snakes from the island of Gallinara in Italy. The snakes in the story aren’t druids, or even paganism more generally: they’re just snakes.

"and attempted to turn the great bright god Lugh into Lugh-chromain (Little stooping Lugh)

Apart from Lugh being a genuine deity who appears in the Book of Invasions and versions of whom are attested in Britain and Gaul, similar remarks apply to him as to Ainé. There’s no record of St Patrick having any dealings relating to him, and there’s no evidence that the holy mountain eventually called Croagh Patrick was a sanctuary of Lugh.

 "which would become "lephrecaun".

Etymologists now derive leprechaun from the pagan Roman feast of the Lupercalia, so this name for Irish fairy people dates from well into the Christian era of monkish writers who knew what Lupercalia was. It’s nothing to do with Lugh.

"I adore the Irish. I revere Ireland. I have that old blood singing within my veins. But this day is a day to celebrate the survival of the Old Ways despite what this "Saint" represented and the cruel action he took. Today, I wear the green, for the fae, for the Old Ways, for the shining ones and the deep love of the land. Blessings to you all my friends. A blessing on the survival of the old ways, and of the Truth emerging from the distortions of history."

One despairs at people's willingness to take garbled misunderstandings, utterly ahistorical garbage, and other guesses and falsehoods, which could all be corrected with a modicum of curiosity, and call them 'Truth'. At least thoughtful pagans aren't taken in.

Bottom Up (or another part of the anatomy)

The Deanery Chapter gathered yesterday to hear the head of the Mission Department at the Diocese talk about lay ministry. That's what the deanery secretary had told us, but he didn't, except in passing. Instead he said he was there to 'begin a bottom-up conversation about how we resource parish ministry in ten years' time'. 'I want to record these conversations', he went on, putting a small flashing device on the floor, 'and I'll feed it all into an AI processing program to pick out the details later'. That made sure most people didn't want to contribute anything at all. He outlined his impression of the pressures on parishes, particularly in terms of finding laypeople to fill important roles, and suggested that we were working within a structure designed for a time when 45% of the population was in church on a Sunday at a moment when that figure is more like 1.5%. The diocese would work with parishes to try to provide for the continued existence of worshipping communities into the future, 'developing creative solutions tailored for local circumstances', etc. etc. It would all have sounded more convincing did we not know that the parish of Manton, which fell vacant just before Christmas, has already been told there's no question of their previous full-time incumbent being replaced and instead they will have someone on house-for-duty. Bottom up? Certainly, if you'll excuse the vulgarity, the phrase 'my arse' comes into any response. 

Still, there's a serious question to be asked about the pattern of Anglican church life in a choppy and uncertain future. As some of my colleagues complained, worshippers simply will not willingly be relocated from one church to another, even for a Sunday, and the reason for this is not just cussed awkwardness but because their experience of Christian community, and therefore of Christian discipleship, is deeply linked to a particular place. 

The point is that we are called into community, and that community, the group of people with whom we journey and experience what it means to be Christians, has to have a degree of continuity over time. It has to be deep and committed, especially because, in the Catholic way of looking at it, it isn't something we fundamentally choose ourselves, and Christian churches are not primarily voluntary associations of people who come and go as they decide. We acquire obligations and those obligations shape who we are becoming. We enter into a something which existed before us and will exist after us. The primary way the life of the Christian community is shaped is the action of the Holy Spirit through the sacraments. Each community is eucharistic and baptismal; each community hallows time through the rhythm of its daily prayer. 

Signs of continuity are not absolutely necessary, but they are helpful. They include the buildings we worship in, which acquire their own personalities. We have a relationship with those physical surroundings and they come to shape our spiritual lives and imaginations. Ordained ministers are another sign of continuity because they are sent into the community from outside it, and occupy an office in a visible sequence unfolding across time. Bishops are the paramount mark of the continuity of the Christian community, linking together individual, local communities into an Apostolic lineage. You can imagine Christian communities persisting without historic buildings or ordained leadership, but their presence makes continuity easier to maintain. Without them, they may well drift in many directions, and the task would be all the harder. 

A Problem Shared

Faye started attending the church quite recently after her mother's funeral, and attending quite frequently. She even brought a friend to one of the masses on Ash Wednesday, and took part in contemplative prayer sessions more than once. I knew from conversation that she was reassessing aspects of her life and wondering where she might go next. She was full of ideas and reflections and I thought she might be a useful person to have around, even if this initial burst of enthusiasm might not last. I began to speculate about what I might ask her to do.

Then having emailed out the weekly news sheet I had a reply from Faye: 'Please remove me from the mailing list.' That was all. I'd seen her at a service two days before and she'd spoken in the usual friendly, thoughtful manner. What had happened? I said I would if that's what she wanted, but also suggested she might like to speak to me. Was it some kind of disappointment? Something she expected to happen and hadn't, or someone who'd said something stupid and unhelpful? (I couldn't see how it could have been me). Although I'm used to people who come to worship for different reasons and seem enthusiastic, but then disappear after a short while - the sort of disturbance that impels souls towards church often impels them away from it again - this was a particularly extreme version of the phenomenon. I couldn't think of anything else that afternoon. How sad it was if Faye had had some sort of negative circumstance and it was never addressed, and she was left to deal with the disappointment.

In the end, after an evening service, I spoke to Estelle who was one of the people who'd spoken to Faye at the prayer sessions (another faithful person who turns up to everything, but has done so all her life). She reminded me - without being able to cast any particular light on the matter, as she last saw Faye exactly when I did - that Faye was in an uncertain place and subject to all sorts of questions and upsets that were nothing to do with us. I commended Faye to her prayers and was very grateful. 

It would be easy to think that as pastor I should keep this all to myself and deal with it. In fact merely by hearing what Estelle had to say, which was nothing very remarkable, I found I was able to break out of my cyclical gloom and move on. 'We are the body of Christ', we say: it's not just me alone. We may never discover what happened to Faye, but the Lord has the prayers of a better soul than me.

Jaws 2

A return visit on Thursday to St Augustine's Aldershot gave me the chance to check through the vestry there. I found my second local instance of one of the 'Jaws' chasubles promoted by the Church Society and made by Watts during the 150th anniversary of the Oxford Movement in 1983 (the other one's at Nork); a range of Slabbinck/Vanpoulles creations of varying tastefulness; and a couple of battered fiddlebacks the current incumbent knew nothing of. There's a drawer labelled 'BLACK' with nothing in it, which tells its own story.

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.

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!