Biblical Relics

Anna comes to speak to me about various things, including her old family Bible. None of her family wants it, she says, and she doesn't feel she can look after it. What should she do with it?

It's actually a Prayer Book and Bible bound as one volume, and dates from 1773 with all the family names and dates inscribed on an initial leaf (the one in my illustrative picture would be much later). It's potentially a nice artefact, but isn't in good shape: the covers are detached, the leather almost worn away, and it smells strongly enough of mould that you don't want to breathe in too deeply in its company. Despite its date, the problem is that there are simply too many of these Bibles around for anyone other than the family involved to be interested in it, unless there was something unusual about the family or the circumstances in which it was compiled. Every family that could afford a book like this would have had one, and the question of what to do with them regularly arises, at museums as much as at churches (at my last workplace we had a couple). 

The old Jewish custom is that worn-out texts and manuscripts that might contain the name of God are held in a storeroom in the synagogue, the Genizah, and then formally buried perhaps every seven years. Maybe churches should offer a similar service! If nobody in her family was interested in keeping the book, I told Anna, the most respectful thing would be to bury it, to return it to earth. She seemed to like that. I remember doing the same some years ago with copies of the Book of Mormon Mad Trevor gave me, but respect wasn't the issue there.

Sew Surprising

Fr Thesis is well-known as a dab hand with a needle and thread and I have been known to delve into needlecraft myself, but I have always relied on hand techniques - if in my case they can be called 'techniques' - only. This makes the exercise massively laborious and inefficient. 

One of the articles Ms Formerly Aldgate left in the Rectory was the sewing machine which she hardly ever used (clothes making was an idea she took up but never got very far with). I wonder whether she was aware it would - at least now, several years later - cost about £130 to replace? In any case it has sat in its box ever since she left. 

Now, with two amices rapidly declining in effectiveness but some old altarcloths ready to be turned into something else, I wondered whether I might increase my productivity by pressing the contraption into service in making replacements. And so it has proved! An amice, admittedly, is about the most simple sewing project you could imagine (an oblong of white linen!), and my first foray into the realm of mechanised needlework has been a bit wavering resulting in a slightly wonky line of stitches, but it's a start. I was amazed it worked out at all.

I wonder what proportion of clergy sew? I do rather think use of a sewing machine could profitably have been added to the Leavers' Course at Staggers.

Beautiful Badbury

When this blog passed its 2000th post I said I wasn't going to be striving to find something to say every other day, as I had in the past, but only post when there was something positive happening. Nothing very much has gone on today apart from a trip to Dorset to see my mum, going out with her for a meal, and visiting the farm shop at Pamphill Dairy, finishing with my obligatory walk around Badbury Rings. But Badbury Rings is always restful and calming, and maybe you find my photos the same! Today I did the opposite of my usual route of going straight through the monument and then following the southern ramparts back, by turning north along the banks and then cutting back through the wooded centre. I couldn't remember ever seeing the Trig. pillar before, somehow.

Keeping One's Council

The CEO of the local Council was only supposed to be a couple of minutes, but I was waiting for him for about twenty. Well, things come up, I know that. I have agreed to be 'Borough Dean', which is something our Bishop is very keen on: a point of contact between the local authority and the churches of the area, explaining the ways and concerns of the one to the other. When he did arrive, full of apologies and offers of coffee, the CEO made it gently clear that I was representing one of a variety of faith communities, albeit the vastly most numerous in sunny Surrey: that was quite understandable and a role I don't mind filling.

While waiting, I watched the receptionist field enquiries. She has to know who to get in touch with and broadly how the structure works to be able to help the people who turn up. Today, a Council tenant was pursuing a Gas Safety inspection on his property which was supposed to have taken place, but the plumber never turned up and he'd heard nothing back (the same happened to me the other day). The receptionist waited on the phone to someone for about ten minutes and then gave it to the man while she dealt with another gentleman who had some papers to hand to a Council officer who she also couldn't get on the phone (it turned out the officer was out at lunch - she came by later). There was also a woman with a non-native-English accent pursuing a housing enquiry with a man who I presumed was from the CAB or a housing charity or something - he was certainly acting as her advocate. She seemed to be about to be ejected from a friend's house and they were trying to secure her a place in a night shelter. They were shown into a meeting room to call either an advisor or a Council officer, I wasn't clear which. It was quite a tally for twenty minutes, though perhaps mid-day is a busy period. 

At Swanvale Halt church, we pray for aspects of our local community on a cyclical basis, including our local authorities, the elected members and staff. That's all very well, and I'm sure the Lord does something more than absolutely nothing with prayers like it. But watching the Council in action for just a few minutes on this very basic level adds some meat to those outline aspirations. How complex it all is - and how worthwhile the odd prayer seems. 

Oxford Springtime

I couldn't have picked a better day to visit Oxford than yesterday. The pellucid blue skies framed the golden-coloured buildings, reminding me of our trip to Florence many years ago (I'm not a very good traveller so it remains a rare foray beyond these shores). Here's a view of one of the Clarendon Building muses (which have an interesting history), seen beyond the Bridge of Sighs along New College Lane.

Although I did get to see some friends, the centrepiece of my day was a visit to the Holy Well of Holywell Manor. The Manor is the graduate block of Balliol College, and although I studied at Balliol it was only as an undergraduate so I never went there, and had only glimpsed the Well through a window in the gate of the Praefectus's garden. Yesterday I was allowed in to examine the site itself - though apparently my request had prompted the Manor's health-and-safety manager to examine the well and decide that it isn't as safe as it could be and needs to be added to Balliol's lengthening list of works! There is a horribly corroded-looking set of steps leading down to into the well-chamber and as Mr H&S had been down there to look that morning I was perfectly happy to rely on his photos. I am still picking through the tangled history of the Well so won't go through it here, but the chamber still seems to contain the stone tub identified by the Clewer Sisters who occupied the Manor in the late 1800s as an Anglo-Saxon font, rather dubiously I fear. The Praefectus's PA gave me a copy of the history of the Manor by Oswyn Murray, who I overlapped with at Balliol all those years ago but who I didn't have anything directly to do with. It has some useful details of ghosts and folklore!

The 'Oracles, Omens and Answers' show at the Bodleian is fun (the central African custom of divination using land spiders was news to me) and I went into St Mary Mag's, rather scandalously for the first time ever considering I lived yards away from it for three years. There is a dramatic statue of St Catherine on the high altar reredos.

Dialogue of the Partly Deaf

The young man accosted me as I was returning home from Vespers, with a phrase (whatever it was) which is like the usual opening gambit from a cult: ‘Excuse me, sir, are you worried about the way our country is going?’ He told me there were ‘13 colleges in London where you can’t wish people Happy Christmas’ and that churches were being closed to be replaced by ‘mosques and synagogues’. If I’d had more time I would have tried to explore whether there was a genuine anxiety beneath these statements – I thought his stare and slightly ragged appearance suggested some kind of mental distress – but I hadn’t, I fear. I said things seemed very different in Swanvale Halt where I was doing work in local schools and so on and if churches were closing it was mainly because people didn’t go to them. Did he go to church, I asked? Yes, he said, ‘the main church’ in Guildford, which was an interesting way of describing what was clearly not Holy Trinity on the High Street or even the Cathedral, but Emmaus Road. That’s if it was true.

On Saturday I did a funeral visit. I knew the gentleman whose wife’s service we were discussing, and must have met his stepson before though I couldn’t remember. The deceased lady had been a Roman Catholic at one stage in her life, at least, and her son had attended a convent school and been an altar server in his teens before leaving that behind. ‘I have to say I think religion is a crutch for people who need it’, he said, while his stepfather believed that God had directed his life in various ways, not least leading him towards his wife via some unlikely coincidences. How the conversation got onto aliens and Neanderthal technology I wasn’t sure, but it felt like a talk I was supposed to contribute to but couldn’t find a rational way into, or indeed to steer back to what we were supposed to be talking about. It was absolutely exhausting.

As was the third unsatisfactory encounter within a few days. This one was at a friend’s early-retirement party where I found myself sitting next to a friend of his who had some potentially interesting things to say about her frustrated career as an engineer, being married to a soldier, running a club for bikers in Camden in the 1990s, and dealing with her son’s schooling. But it became clear that behind each story there was a point being made about the unreasonable behaviour of other people, and I was not so much participating in a conversation as being invited to agree. If I missed the narrative clues to how I was supposed to understand each anecdote there was no way back, and it was easy enough to do that in a loud pub. I was almost weeping by the end.

How rarely one has conversations that actually mean anything, in which the participants are listening to what each other has to say rather than simply speaking at one another. I do strive to view my encounters as opportunities to learn more about other people but they don’t always make it easy!

Quiet

2022 was, I think, the last time I spent a Lenten retreat at Malling Abbey. For the last couple of years I've instead gone to Clarissa and Simon's garden music room at Bortley for a quiet day of reading and prayer. There are various reasons: it doesn't take as much time away from the parish, it seems to be just as productive if more concentrated, and, being very honest, joining in corporate worship with the holy Sisters became harder as they themselves age and become more crumbly. There was a sense of sorrow, of something passing away, and I feel that keenly in life more generally. So Bortley Mill it is for the time being.

In fact my resistance to change and sorrow at the passing-away of things formed some part of my reflections. On the music room bookshelves was a copy of Patrick Bringley's All The Beauty in the World, his reflections on ten years spent as a warder at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, finding solace in art and discovering other people also processing their own lives by means of the things they encounter in the museum. A small book laying out the experiences of an ordinary life: and it made me think of all the worthwhile books (meaning the worthwhile experiences of other people) I will never manage to read, and the beautiful things I will never fit in seeing or enjoying. I could live a thousand lifetimes and barely scratch the surface of the wonders the world has to offer. I felt ashamed at the times I have failed to feel grateful, failed to appreciate the tiny, tiny time I have to enjoy beauty and love. 

As it was a Friday in Lent, I was fasting until sunset. I arrived at the music room to find that Simon had laid out a plate of delicious shortbread biscuits which assailed me through the day with their aroma as I sipped my black, unsweetened coffee. But they would have gone soft being left out like that, so I took them home. 

School Day

The local secondary school, Widelake, isn't completely foreign territory to me, but I don't go there very often. I paid a visit back in 2013, and then again the year before last, when I spoke to an RE class about communion and then answered questions at a philosophy group. 'When you talk about the way prayer affects you', asked one girl, 'How can you be sure it's actually due to contact with something beyond you or is just the effect of long-term self-examination and reflection?' I felt like bringing in the politician's answer along the lines of 'That's a very good question and I'm very glad you asked me' before moving swiftly on. But now I seem to have an arrangement to offer seasonal assemblies before the main festivals. Before Christmas I spoke about the sense of history embodied in the Christmas Proclamation: 'today, the 25th day of December, untold ages after God created the heavens and the earth ...' And yesterday I delivered one of my strange discursions about Lent and Easter, fasting customs and evidence for the Christian story. We met in the sports hall, which has no heating apart from the presence of hundreds of teenagers, and a tiny projector screen at one end. Can they see it at the back? And can they hear me at the back, even if I'm quite used to projecting, myself?

In the afternoon I was in the very different surroundings of the Infants School, doing another assembly and then Church Club. The children are off on a sports day on Friday and so I decided to talk about rules and how Jesus didn't always follow them but remembered what they were there for. My illustrative material included a croquet mallet and ball from my battered old Jacques set at home. 'Oh I never come into school without a croquet mallet', I said in answer to Sandra's incredulity when she turned up for Church Club. 

The Churches of David Nye

The Bishop is supposedly keen on the concept of Borough Deans, clergy who will have regular conversations with local authorities and act as a contact between the Church and secular life. I offered to be one, and quickly learned with weary resignation that a role sold to me as involving ‘a couple of meetings a year’ actually implicates me in sundry other things, all of which so far I haven’t been able to attend. The Bishop should have written to me formally to welcome me, but hasn’t. One of these additional things was planning something called a Community Day. I came in partway through the process, wasn’t able to attend any of the meetings, and never received any notes, so I turned up at the event yesterday with no idea what was supposed to happen. It turned out to be a session encouraging churches to think about their community work as opportunities for evangelism. I was amused that the main speaker outlined a vision of encounters developing into church communities linked to the parish like the rim of a wheel to the hub, exactly the theme of my long Missiology essay at St Stephen’s House twenty years ago, while the new resources for adding spiritual content to community events pretty much mirror the things I am developing and thinking through in Swanvale Halt. But I found myself looking at the building we were meeting in, St Peter’s, Guildford, which I had neglected to visit in my great survey of the diocese over recent years. Ah, I thought, it’s another one of these.

David Nye, the architect of St Peter’s, is better known as a cinema designer, but his church work is relatively prolific too. Quite substantial buildings in Purley and Dulwich offer no clue to a personal style, but for Surrey – and a couple of other places, it seems – he developed a model of church based on pyramidal roofs, big windows, and glulam timber arches. The pattern could be scaled up to something like the Good Shepherd, Pyrford, or down, to St Stephen’s Langley Vale in Epsom, and could be adapted to a variety of church traditions; so St Peter’s is a joint Anglican-and-Methodist community, Pyrford is evangelical, while Christ the King, Salfords (which though in Surrey I haven’t seen as it’s in Southwark diocese) is Anglo-Catholic. The family resemblance, though, is very strong.

St Peter's, Guildford

Good Shepherd, Pyrford

St Stephen's, Langley Vale (from the church website)

Christ the King, Salfords (Photo © Stephen Craven (cc-by-sa/2.0))

Holy Spirit, Burpham

Some time ago, realising I would find it hard to get into another David Nye church, St Alban’s Wood Street, I went looking online for photos, and got thoroughly confused by what I found. Here is St Alban’s, from the church website:

And this was also ‘St Alban’s’:

It took me a while to twig that the second wasn't Wood Street at another stage of its development, but an entirely different St Alban’s: a church at West Leigh in Havant (so, the diocese of Portsmouth), but virtually a twin of the Surrey one. It’s not described as one of David Nye’s, but it must surely be. I wonder how many more there are? The list on the website of his practice, now Nye Saunders in Godalming, isn’t very comprehensive.

All Saints' Onslow Village in Guildford is another Nye church, but apart from being modernist stands apart from the above examples. Its roof is virtually flat with windows fitted into an upright section rather than along the walls. Neither does it have the big glulam arches:

Yet another research project for someone ... !

A Wave of the Wand at Burley

On my way back from a visit to my Mum in Dorset I called in at Burley in the New Forest, a place I haven’t visited in probably 35 years or so. It’s an odd sort of place: most of the dwellings are at some distance from the t-junction around which the centre of the village is organised, and as New Forest-style ‘commoning’ is still practised locally you can often come across ponies wandering around (though I didn’t). Two pubs, several tea shops, a couple of spas, a cycle hire outfit and a grand mock-Tudor mansion now turned into a hotel make for a collection of businesses largely orientated around tourism, or other sorts of visitors. But what most strikes the tripper to Burley (or this one, anyway) now is how witchy it is.

In what’s effectively two short streets there are four, or maybe five, witch-themed gift shops: it depends how you categorise ‘Away With the Fairies’, which has more of a fairy theme though it does overlap with the other four – ‘Witchcraft’, ‘The Sorceror’s Apprentice’, ‘Cobwebs and Crystals’, and ‘A Coven of Witches’. The last-named is the oldest store, beginning as an antiques shop run by the person responsible for all this, Sybil Leek. Ms Leek lived in Burley from some unspecified time until 1964, a familiar and flamboyant character often accompanied by her pet jackdaw, Hotfoot Jackson. In his history of wicca The Triumph of the Moon the great Ronald Hutton gives short shrift to her claims to have been trained by Aleister Crowley, or even to have met him, and even less to her historical sense, quoting a sentence ‘which manages in twelve words to confuse a nineteenth-century personality with a seventeenth-century one, and locate both in the wrong period’. Sybil Leek worked for a local TV station and for a brief period was able to promote herself as Britain’s chief spokesperson for witchcraft, before falling out with almost everyone else in the wiccan world, claiming she was under attack from Satanists, being evicted from her house in Burley, and relocating to the USA.

The stores share a family resemblance – they all have the same racks of crystals and incense and other knickknacks – but differ subtly from one another. At Cobwebs & Crystals, amongst the bottles of charged crystals and figurines I observed a vintage plastic telephone for sale not far from a small articulated toy of Matt Smith as the 12^th Doctor, while Coven is clearly catering for the serious wiccan practitioner as it sells altar tables, cauldrons and wands (the kit’s small as I suppose it has to fit in teenagers’ bedrooms a lot of the time). All those items are seriously kitschy but there’s a certain seductiveness about the whole aesthetic, which overlaps with Goth although not identical with it.

In my long-distant memory Burley majored more on saddlery and leather goods, and although the witchcraft connection is clearly longstanding, it’s intensified in relatively recent years. Those horsey shops have been replaced by witchy ones, and it would be an interesting project to trace exactly how it has happened.

On the way out of Burley I stopped and walked down a muddy track to pay my respects to the Lady Well, which I certainly hadn’t seen since 1987. It hadn’t changed at all, which was a bit disappointing as I thought someone had tidied it up!

The Difficulties of Leaving

One of yesterday morning’s tasks was to deliver a letter to a parishioner and to drop off a CD played at a funeral a couple of weeks ago at the deceased’s house so their family could pick it up. I trudged along the rainy roads and reached the house, only to realise the CD wasn’t in the case as I thought. It was just about worth while to make the journey back to the church and try again …

While on my progress I saw someone who turned up at the church for a little while and even came to Morning Prayer on a couple of occasions, and then disappeared. They are just one of a vast company of souls in the same kind of situation and who almost certainly outnumber the folk who actually do remain as members of the congregation. Sometimes people turn up on a Sunday morning to dip their toes in the spiritual water, speak very positively about the experience, and you never see them again. Others come for a time: there was a young couple who turned up almost every week at our 8am mass for about 18 months, a period which included the woman being baptised, and then stopped. They never said why, or responded to gentle enquiries about their welfare, so I have no idea whether something bad happened in another aspect of their lives, whether they became dissatisfied with their experience with us, or what. Those occasions are the tougher for a pastor to deal with: you have come to care about these people, and they vanish.

Of course Jesus envisages this situation in the Parable of the Sower, but it doesn’t completely wipe away the frustration and sense of failure. I inevitably think of friends who have disappeared from my own life too, including more than one potential partner who closed the process down with no clear explanation of their thinking, leaving the dump-ee to imagine the worst: if the reason was good, you can’t help feeling, if they felt confident about it, they’d tell you. I suppose it speaks to the difficulty we have in sharing truths we fear may be unwelcome, and we’d rather just avoid the conversation completely; and also to the fact that for most people, I fear, involvement with a church community is a nice add-on to life but not something which it hurts much to leave behind. But leavers may not even be facing the fact that they have left: people tell themselves they are going to come to worship long after they’re practically able to, or determined enough to set aside the time from the many other demands they have. It's all a cause of sadness, and I would rather people were happy. Including me!

D'oh!

What we must now all refer to as Hornington Minster Parish is under-strength at the moment, without an incumbent and short of clergy to look after two of the four churches, so with Il Rettore holding the pass at Swanvale Halt I offered myself to help this Sunday. Given that they do have a reasonable supply of people to preach, I was expecting to be asked to take a communion service somewhere, but no, I was despatched to Hintinghill to do a sermon which anyone, or at least a number of people, might have done. The Minster Parish is one of those kind of outfits that goes in for sermon series based around the enthusiasms of the leadership team rather than the lectionary, so I was given the story of the Feeding of the 5000 from John 6 to speak about to the assembled masses.

This Monday evening I was out at Helgi’s, the rock bar in Hackney, to hear Mr Vadim Kosmos from the Viktor Wyld Museum talk about death-themed cabarets and other morbid entertainments in late 19th-century Paris. The event was originally billed as starting at 8pm; then when I booked a ticket it had moved to 8.45, when I arrived I was told it wouldn’t start until 9, and as is the usual manner of things Mr Kosmos didn’t actually get going until a few minutes after that. 9.05pm is far too late for a midweek lecture to begin if you have a distance to go to get home, and I ended up leaving before even getting to the bit I was actually interested in, as opposed to information about Napoleon III, satirical stereoscopes, and how morgues got their name. Before the talk began I was left with some free time and sat in an alcove opposite a lurid mural of Baphomet and a cascade of skulls to think about what I might say at Hintinghill. I thought of it as claiming the territory (silently). I couldn’t actually remember which of the four versions of the story would be read, and found myself thinking about the differences between them and what conclusions I could draw from that.

At home later in the week, I checked the briefing notes I’d been sent, and these are worth quoting:

The people come in droves to be taught, hanging on Jesus’ every word. It is late and there is no immediately obvious source of food for them all.  … Jesus enacts what will become a familiar pattern, as he takes the bread, gives thanks, breaks it and gives it out. Nothing is wasted and the (twelve) disciples fill twelve baskets with leftovers. The crowds return home satisfied in body, mind and spirit.

Except none of this is actually in John’s account. In that version, there is no preaching, the crowds converge on Jesus as he is with the disciples, and he initiates the events by asking the Twelve to feed them. At the end of the episode, the crowds don’t return home: as a result of the miracle, they identify Jesus as ‘the Prophet’, and he flees out of fear that ‘they were about to come and make him king by force’. The briefing notes aren’t actually based on the reading at all, but on the versions of the story by the other Gospel writers. Curiously this makes John’s point: the crowd is interpreting Jesus according to their own preconceptions of what the Messiah is coming to do, and not paying attention to what he is actually doing. Several of John's stories, I realised, pivot on misunderstandings or deliberate distortions of the significance of Jesus’s acts.

I talked about this, obviously without having a go at the briefing notes. Visiting preachers are always well-regarded unless they’re really awful, and that was the case at Hintinghill this morning. I downed a cup of coffee and a pain-au-chocolat with the good folk there and drove home only to find my William Hartnell fingerless gloves were nowhere to be seen. Back to Hintinghill church – but they’d all left, so I sent the lay reader who was my main contact an email. He later phoned to say he’d been at lunch in the village so popped back into the church but couldn’t find my gloves anywhere. At that very moment I found them in my jacket pocket where for some unaccountable reason my hand had not strayed before that point.

Bel and Yahweh

Given that the Office works on a three-year lectionary cycle, I must surely have read the Book of Bel & the Dragon publicly at Morning Prayer before, but I really can’t remember doing so. In fact I am so shamefully unfamiliar with it I couldn’t even recall what happens. You can see why it’s confined to the Apocrypha: having already been vindicated in his worship of the God of Israel, the prophet Daniel, in Babylon along with the other Jewish exiles, is rather illogically tested again by being called on to do obeisance first to a brazen image and then a hideous beast. At least the text attaches this story, or two stories, to a different Babylonian king, Cyrus rather than Artaxerxes, but it has Daniel being cast into the lions’ den for a second time. This time, not only does the Lord shut the lions’ mouths, but rather charmingly the prophet Habbakuk is magically transported to Babylon with a bowl of stew so Daniel won’t go hungry. Angela Carter once defined a fairy story as ‘one in which a king can call on another king and ask to borrow a cup of sugar’, and Bel & the Dragon clearly falls into the same category, dare I say it.

It's the brazen image which interested me. Every day twelve bushels of flour, forty sheep and fifty gallons of wine are sacrificed to this thing, Bel, and King Cyrus adduces its daily disappearance as evidence that Bel is indeed a god. Daniel naturally scoffs, and persuades Cyrus to test the divinity of Bel by scattering ash around his sanctuary and sealing his temple after the daily sacrifice. Lo and behold, when the door is reopened, the offerings have vanished, but there in the ash are the tell-tale footprints of the priests of Bel and their families who have sneaked in through a secret trapdoor to snaffle the lot. Enraged, Cyrus has them all slaughtered and the temple pulled down forthwith.

Enraged; and one might imagine humiliated, as Cyrus the Mede would have had to have been prenaturally unobservant not to realise this was happening at the Temple of Bel given something similar took place at every other temple in the ancient world, even at the Temple in Jerusalem where it was quite explicit that, apart from the portion of offerings that were burned to a crisp ‘as an odour pleasing to the Lord’, the priests ate the sacrifices. It was standard practice. In this story the great conqueror of much of the ancient world is shown up as the equivalent of a grown-up who still thinks Santa consumes the brandy and mince pie left out on Christmas Eve. Yes, all across the ancient Levant gods were ‘woken up’ in the morning and put to sleep at night in the persons of their statues, but while everyone felt there was some sense in which the deity was connected with their cult image, nobody really thought it was them. Does this tale, then, show that the Jews really thought the pagans did?

My mind goes back to a parallel we talked about some years ago – the non-existent scandal of the mechanical statues of medieval cults mocked and vilified by the 16^th-century Reformers who had never actually seen them move or knew how they had functioned in their contexts. They felt comfortable ridiculing the credulous believers of the past precisely because they were far enough in the past to do so. The writers of these Biblical texts were also sufficiently distant from the worship patterns they described to be able to tell such mocking stories. Nobody was going to say them nay.

But there was some point to it all. The other night I led a discussion about the Exodus story for a group of folk from other parishes on a diocesan course, and we touched on the ways in which the worship of the God of Israel differed from that of pagan deities, and what it meant for the Hebrews to be in relationship with him. I decided not to stray into the hazardous area that had occurred to me when I was preparing that in some ways the whole narrative reads uncomfortably. You can caricature the Lord’s declaration to Israel as ‘You are in a relationship with me; you have entered voluntarily into this relationship; and if you try to leave it, I will hurt you’. Once upon a time this kind of thing might not have raised any concern at all but nowadays we know what to call it. It occurs to me that the Church has to do some work to say why this image of God as an abusive partner is not in fact accurate.

The nature of the pagan gods is I think part of the answer. After all, they are not real. When the ancient Hebrews neglect YHWH and put up images of Baal and Ashtoreth they are not really exchanging like for like, one partner for another, even if that’s the language the scriptures couch it in. The pagan gods are the manufactures of human beings: they are projections of our longings, fears, and failings onto the world around us. A temple of Dagon is a shrine essentially to ourselves. Hence the urgency of God’s objections – when his people wander faithlessly away, they are going somewhere they will find nothing that will help them or improve them. They will find themselves bargaining with aspects of their own natures without knowing, and there is every likelihood that they will spiral downwards into the worst elements of who they are.

Paganism now is different. The pagans I know personally almost invariably regard their worship as a form of meditation and self-improvement, not dealing with deities who are actual personalities. But I wonder whether the danger is not still there. Bel is no more true now than he was when that text was written.

Steering Clear of the Rocks

The horrid oesophagal spasm which occasionally hits me very rarely starts up in the middle of the day, but that’s what happened as I was setting up for the midweek mass on the feast of blessed St Thomas Aquinas. The only way of stopping it is to swallow something. Water didn’t make any difference, so, avoiding Slimming World who were occupying the church hall, I shot into the kitchen and grabbed a tin of biscuits from the cupboard: eating one breached (my own interpretation of) the eucharistic fast, but the biscuit was horrible, so at least I suffered for it. The spasm was stilled and I was able to carry on.

That was physical pain; I took some emotional turbulence into the service as well. In the midst of my distractions, I reflected how wonderful it is to be carrying out this act that connects us to the eternal worship of the angels, and also that, whoever I may be estranged from in this earthly realm, those broken relationships will (in so far as they can, consonant with the eternal justice of God) be made whole. That’s all very well: it blunts the upset, or puts it into a wider context. At the very least, the words of redemption and praise take you to a different place if only temporarily. But the liturgy and the prayer it is part of doesn’t make the damage go away.

My Spiritual Director was told, as a young priest, ‘You will never get anywhere in the Church if you insist on being so personal in your sermons’. I talk about my own experiences and those of people I know all the time, so I disagree (not that I have ever wanted to ‘get anywhere’ in the Church); but a pastor’s congregation, I think, are caught in contradictory feelings about this. They want their minister to ‘seem human’, to have some sense that they too are subject to frailties and disappointments, but they don’t necessarily want to know in any detail what they are. Equally, the pastor may want to bring personal experience to bear to inject some reality into what they talk about, but it's a tactic fraught with hazard. Oversharing might not only head into areas that most people would rightly be reluctant to talk about, but might also be burdensome. You can think of circumstances (of illness or another misfortune) when a minister might need to be ‘held up’ by their people, but you don’t want them to become reluctant to share difficulties with you themselves out of concern for your own welfare.

The Feast of the Angelic Doctor afforded me limited opportunity to discuss my own difficulties anyway, and in the end I tend to veer away from deep emotional waters unless I have navigated them many times before and know how to talk about them in a way others may find helpful. Because ultimately the pastor's job is to serve, and only relieve your own burdens when it will definitely benefit your listeners to do so.

The Hidden Paths

When I moved into Swanvale Halt, I realised on exploring my surroundings that the footpath that ran up the hill between the fields and woods at the back of the Rectory and a 1990s estate was originally a road. Even today it has traces of the white lines down the middle. That has fascinated me ever since, even more so since realising that there are paths between the blocks of new houses, connecting the old road with the new; it's like a hidden landscape secreted inside the obvious, external one. Before the new streets were built, there were big houses here, some of them accommodation for the public school that used to own the area, and even tennis courts. I thought it might be a fun location for a Forest Church excursion, following the paths and reflecting on the way communities change, including the various people we used to know who lived in these cul-de-sacs and roads. Doing my recces I found a lone sequoia tree, and a curious double-trunked oak amid the yews and beeches. If God is to be found in the contemplation of landscape, the way landscapes, habits and memories alter affects our interaction with him as well. 

Today the wind blew and the rain fell, and only three of us braved the venture. I think I'll use this walk for a Forest Church later in the year, but I find myself reflecting that I often put material together that ends up not being used, and have to trust that in some way - divine providence, perhaps - it doesn't go to waste. It also struck me that that desire that the great lumber-box of things we have done and had to relinquish, whether creative efforts, loves and relationships, joys and sorrows, shouldn't go to waste either, has been perhaps more of a driving force in impelling me to investigate faith than I've realised. 

I joke that the great thing about the movies of The Lord of the Rings is that nobody has to read the books again, but I do like the walking rhyme Frodo sings near the end. I thought of it again as we traversed the secret paths on the hilltop.

Still round the corner there may wait
a new road or a secret gate
and though I oft have passed them by
the time will come at last when I 
shall take the hidden paths that run
west of the Moon, east of the Sun.

Offering

Fr Donald sat with me saying Evening Prayer. At the moment, the Common Worship Office book gives us the option of reciting words from the Epiphanytide hymn, 'O Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness'. It was written by John Monsell, the Tractarian priest who died after a fall while checking the building works at St Nicolas's church in Guildford, where he was incumbent, in 1875. At first he seemed to have suffered nothing more serious than a broken arm - no joke at 64, but not fatal - but it became clear that he'd undergone internal injuries which did end up carrying him out of this world. 'Fight the good fight' is another of his lyrics, a bit more foursquare Victorian than the Epiphany one; 'Truth in its beauty, and love in its tenderness/These are the offerings to lay at his shrine', the latter goes.

I find myself pondering the nature and worth of love, the core and heart of human life but sometimes so evanescent. Mr Monsell's hymn shows how it's useful to have some buttressing, some additional apparatus, to the Scriptures, to aid us as we navigate the sometimes cold waters of life, and the wisdom of Our Holy Mother the Church in putting the words of a Tractarian worthy into its daily meditations. A particular expression of love might last just a little time. But if it's real and sincere it's not wasted. What is the infant Christ going to do with the Magi's gifts, after all? It can be an offering, which God holds to his everlasting heart, and works with in ways we never know. We can hope.

Enquiring

Some years ago we devised a series of short videos to be used as the base material for what everyone tells you a church needs, a course of some kind for people who are new to the Christian faith or who want to ask questions about it. We didn't want to sign up to the mighty brand that is Alpha or use any of the others available. When we first did it, Marion the curate and Lillian the lay reader and I, one person took us up. The next attempt had no one at all. But this time we've garnered a feasible handful of souls. So last night they met in the church hall, I did the catering and set the video up, and Giselle the lay reader led the discussion. One person didn't show and there's a couple who couldn't attend but will come in other weeks. It must have been all right because the group, small as it was, kept talking for about 45 minutes.

What this placid picture doesn't reveal is the chaos after I managed to burn a jacket potato in the microwave. I intended using the kitchen oven anyway, but realised too late that I'd only turned its fan on and not the heat. I am not used to microwaves, as events revealed. I only cooked that last one because one of the previous batch had shrivelled to nothing and I wanted to be prepared in case our last attender did attend. At least we know the new fire alarms do work.  

Angry Gods

How did I get on the Little Watchman mailing list? I have no more idea than I have of who Little Watchman is. He sends me occasional emails with his short online sermons. The last one, which came into my inbox at just the right time he says ironically, is entitled ‘Is God Angry With You?’ The answer is very emphatically Yes, God is incandescently angry, and rightly. He’s told us what he wants of us, and we don’t do it. So, rage. But it’s all right, because Jesus (who Little Watchman insists on calling Yeshua) is the offering that makes God calm down. This is just how the writer puts it. Now, Substitutionary Atonement is no more than a standard, though to my thinking only partial, explanation of how the sacrifice of Christ changes our relationship with God, and there is a lot in Christianity that doesn’t quite make sense no matter how you describe it. But boil Substitutionary Atonement down this brutally, and what you end up isn’t a statement that includes the odd logical lacuna, but something that reads as so sick and insane you can understand why people go nowhere near a religion that promotes it.

Leaving aside most of the many questions or issues one could ask, how much sense does it make to think of God as angry? This is slightly separate from the Biblical language of the wrath of God, which strikes me as a description of a status rather than an emotion God might have: the estrangement the whole Creation, and most especially human beings, exists in as a result of the Fall, however one might characterise that event. A status in which all things find themselves, or, indeed, an experience humans, who are conscious of it as the mute creation is not, might have; but not something God feels. But anger is certainly ascribed to God in the Scriptures. Is it really anything like ours?

Our primary icon of what God is like is Jesus. He clearly experiences anger, just as he does sorrow, grief, joy, and even scorn. But because he is human, he experiences them in the way we do, with the exception that for him there is no admixture of sin in them; he is limited by time and space, so he goes through these feelings in sequence and not concurrently. Like us, he doesn’t seem to feel different things at once, even when his feelings are conflicted (as they are in Gethsemane). This is only what we would expect. But in his divine nature, God is interacting with the whole of creation, all the time, not just in the contemporary moment but eternally. This is nothing like the emotions we experience: it is so far from the emotions we experience that we ought be cautious about how we describe or think of it. The emotional life of God is perhaps as mysterious to us as the mechanics of the Trinity.

You might question why I am so keen to defuse this bomb of God being angry. I think it is probably because I draw my image of anger from the human anger I have experienced (and I don’t mean I have always been on the receiving end of it, either): contorted faces, shouting, raised hands. The suspicion is that the emotion is almost always tied up with that individual’s view of themselves and the effect their desires should have, and the physical effects of anger come from deep within our evolutionary history: they are designed to intimidate, to try to get our own way. Angry though he may have been from time to time, I can’t imagine Jesus in any of those states.

We might contrast anger with love. The Biblical imagery of God’s love – aside from the life of Christ – includes similes such as the sun shining and the rain falling. There are very human images, too, the mother with the child at her breast, the parent giving good gifts, and so on, but it’s clear that God’s love relates to those images metaphorically: it isn’t a complete parallel. The imagery of God’s anger should be taken the same way. To imagine God as an angry human, snarling and screaming because his will isn’t obeyed (rather than ‘a righteous judge, provoked all the day’ as Psalm 7 puts it) – even if that will is perfectly just and right – doesn’t help anyone.  

I see little sense in continuing with my unaccountable subscription to Little Watchman.

St Catherine at the British Library

I learned a variety of things from the 'Medieval Women' exhibition at the British Library yesterday. Among them was that there is a patron saint of ice skating (Lidwina of Schiedam), and what Margery Kempe thought the Devil smelled like (rather nicer than one might presume, as it turns out); that the last ruler of a Crusader state was a woman (Countess Lucia of Tripoli), that Margaret of Anjou had a pet lion, and that about a third of medieval medical practitioners were women (not all of them midwives). There were also two images of St Catherine: a small woodcut made by the sisters of the Bridgettine convent of Marienwater, and the terrible, charismatic painting on the Battel Retable, with its face scratched out like its sister of Maidstone. But there is more: like the other saints depicted on the Retable, she is surrounded by astrological graffiti, charms against witchcraft, and geometrical patterns whose significance remains obscure. She is a saint not merely maimed, but neutered, and recruited to some other cause.

St Catherine at the Trust

I met up with Professor Cotillion at the National Trust's Greys Court. The place was thronged with visitors, such that the car park was one in, one out. Eventually we got in, but took so long over lunch and attending to the needs of the Professor's lovely King Charles spaniels that the house was shut with only half an hour to go before all the patrons were expelled. Well, I'd paid for my ticket, so I snuck in the back door while nobody was looking and made my way around the (not all that inspiring) house in the wrong direction. On the stairs was an unexpected reward for my duplicity, a stained glass image of St Catherine. It looks 17th or 18th-century to me, but more than that I couldn't venture: German, to judge by the black-letter Gothic text? Big sword, I'll hazard that.

New Year Follies - Ingress Abbey, Greenhithe

This year I will carry on the approach of only posting here when there is something definitely worth posting about rather than as a discipline every other day, but although this isn't a church-related subject I nevertheless think it's a useful topic. It was only by accident that I very recently became aware of the follies of Ingress Abbey at Greenhithe in Kent, when someone on the Holy Wells LiberFaciorum page posted a picture of the Monk's Well. This was already mentioned in Ross Parish's book on Kentish wells, but I'd paid no attention to it and certainly not twigged that it formed part of a larger landscape of follies and garden design. So today I took the North Kent line out of London Bridge station and then the short walk to the park.

Ingress Abbey is an old estate going back to the 14th century, the current Tudor-Gothic house dating to 1833; between 1922 and the 19970s it was a nautical training college, but then fell into ruin. When the folly writers Headley & Meulenkamp came to the site, they found the park overgrown and the follies all but invisible, and worried about the whole place falling victim to redevelopment. This it did, but Crest Nicholson, who bought Ingress in 1998, restored the mansion and cleared out the grounds as well as building a sprawling new estate which strikes me as a sort of cut-price version of Poundbury in Dorset with its emphasis on the picturesque and individual. The current residents of the Abbey itself are British-Canadian oil and gas tycoon Sam Malin and his Cameroonian model and singer wife Irene Major: Mr Malin happens to be an Honorary Consul for Lithuania which is why the country's arms appear on the Abbey gates.

Following the Fastway road from the railway station, the first folly I came across was the Grotto, a set of shallow flint niches to the right of what was once the Abbey drive:

But this is just a very modest taster. Round the corner to the left in a close of modern dwellings, and down a flight of steps, is the very weird Cave of the Seven Heads. There are now only six of the eponymous Heads left, but very baleful they are indeed. The Cave itself has niches set into the flint interior. 

We then follow the road round to the east, and take a flight of steps, which brings us to the gate of the Abbey and the way into the Park. Here we find the glorious ruined arch known as the Grange and its associated tunnel and ancillary chambers; the Monk's Well, which does actually have a well in it; and a decorated flint seat, the Lover's Arch, looking out over the lawn of the Park. 

There are other structures around the Park which may have a more utilitarian origin - the blocked-up Georgian Tunnel, and what it variously called the Model Farm or the Limekiln:

Finally, to the east of the Park, in the middle of Palladian Circus, is a grass-covered mound topped by a flint needle capped with steel: you follow a spiral path to the top. This modern folly courtesy of the estate developers supposedly commemorates a Hermit's Cave which some say occupied the site (the mound was once taken to be Tudor, but it is not). 

Along what remains of Greenhithe High Street is what seems to be a former chapel flanked by single-bay cottages, all in Gothic style and faced in flints. It might have nothing at all to do with the Abbey estate, but it seems worth mentioning too. 

This is a very incongruous set of structures to find surrounded by modern housing on the south side of the Thames Estuary. The redevelopment of the estate makes it hard to envisage how all the follies related to one another, especially the Cave of the Seven Heads which is separated from the others by a busy road and faces west rather than inwards towards the rest of the composition: perhaps it dates to a different phase. The Heads have a distinctly Mannerist flavour to them and I wonder whether they were imported from elsewhere, rather than made especially for the purpose. The truth is that we don't know who was responsible for the follies: Historic England and most sources simply assume they date to 1833 and the rebuilding of the house, but Headley & Meulenkamp hedge their bets and I suspect they are right to do so. The structures look older to me. 

Is Ingress a Gothic Garden? I was reluctant to award this status to Deepdene, the last designed landscape which I thought might qualify for the title. I'm more inclined to look favourably on Ingress. There seems to be a genuine response here to the melancholy potential of topography which binds the follies together, rather than scattering them at random around a site. The Park originates in a quarry whose use goes back to Roman times, and the towering chalk cliffs still loom picturesquely through the trees, so whoever was responsible looked at the landscape they had inherited and saw the capacity for developing it in a Gothic direction. The Grange forms an entrance to the wild area to the rear of the house (I suspect the tidy lawn is a bit more tame than it once was), while the broad green to the front forms a contrast. 

Now, one folly I am kicking myself for missing is the Prioress's Tomb which apparently lies near the Grange. The story goes that this is the burial place of the heart of Jane Fane, last Abbess of Dartford who owned Ingress when Dartford Priory was dissolved in 1539, and that she cursed bad King Henry and all the subsequent owners of Ingress to come to ruin. This is quite something to decide to call attention to when you are building follies on your estate. One local resident even photographed a supposed White Lady weeping at the Lovers Arch seat: could she be Dame Jane herself? If Ingress was not designed as a Gothic Garden, I think it probably is now.