Keeping Promises

M asked me about being married in the church. I knew, not only that they’d been married before, but also met their new partner before being divorced. It was a kind of request, surprisingly, that I'd never had before. ‘But did the new relationship cause the end of the marriage?’ the priest I talked it through with asked me: ‘Can they assure you it didn’t?’ I put this to M and they were honest enough to say they couldn’t be definite that the marriage wouldn’t have carried on had they not met the new partner. It’s all very uncertain, though I was happier having some kind of objective criteria rather than just relying on what I felt.

If you’re a Roman Catholic, or a certain kind of Anglican, there is no question: you can only get married in church once. If you’re (some sorts of) Orthodox, again, you get three goes at it after which you are deemed to be taking the mickey, but a subsequent marriage omits some of the celebratory ceremonies of a first. Anglican churches are left to work out their own approach, provided it is consistent with the House of Bishops’ guidance, which includes the caveat about the new relationship not being a direct cause of the marriage ending. Again, I very much want something more than my own judgement to go on. Who am I to wade into the complexities of human relationships?

The House of Bishops’ guidance advises the priest to make sure that celebrating a subsequent marriage does not ‘undermine the Church’s teaching’ that marriage is for life, but given our apparently limited enthusiasm for our own teaching I think of it more basically. If the core of all sacraments is about promises, your approach, be it ever so gentle and pastoral, has to speak to the integrity of promises, of which the promises couples make, and which God promises to help them keep, is only one. Society has an interest in promises being kept, because we all rely on trusting that most people will do their best to keep their promises, most of the time.

And yet we know (frail beings that we are) we break other promises. We take part in the sacrament of reconciliation and promise God we won’t do this or that, and it is very likely that we will. Does breaking a promise preclude us from making another one? Or does the public, communal nature of the matrimonial promise make a difference? 

The Period of All Human Glory

The sacristan at Goremead church, which I looked after for a few months 17 years ago now, was Agnes. In her very young days she’d been on the secretarial staff of Archbishop Cosmo Lang. At the end of any discussion about her unsatisfactory health or general state she would usually conclude, ‘Still, we're getting there’, the first person I can remember using a phrase I now hear almost universally. It’s another way of saying ‘Can’t complain’, which is itself a way of glossing over the fact that there is no point complaining; of putting to one side the uncomfortable truth both parties to the conversation are only too aware of, that the situation concerned probably isn’t going to get any better. The actual words do not mean what they are intended to convey, the consciousness that we are all on a single trajectory with a single conclusion. One day I was bold enough to ask Agnes where it was we were getting to: she narrowed her eyes and replied ‘You know perfectly well’.

We will leave aside the more cosmic consideration that we don’t know quite where we’re getting to – the supernal or infernal postmortem realms – and think about what it means for this life alone. Knowing in theory that your time in this earthly realm is limited, as we all do, feels very different from being told it is, even if no actual span is put on it. This has recently happened to someone I know, and if that’s happened to you personally, it’s also happened, to a lesser degree, to the people close to you. No doctor is brutal enough to say ‘What you have wrong with you can only be cured by interventions we will not try because of all the other things that are wrong with you, so all we can do is manage it, and it will eventually kill you within the foreseeable future if one of your other problems doesn’t get to you first’, but that’s what they want you to understand.

Traditional Christian spirituality uses the transitoriness of life to point us away from this world towards eternal considerations, but that’s not the problem here, which is to invest the remainder of our human lives with meaning and joy. The confidence we might have in Christ’s saving grace may blunt the edge of death: we may tell ourselves that all that is good about us is held in divine remembrance and will be brought into the heavenly Jerusalem, part of the ‘treasures of the nations’ the Book of Revelation talks about. If we can successfully pit that spiritual knowledge against our every natural human instinct to be afraid, all well and good. But it seems to me that carrying on living fully is a separate spiritual issue. Call some of us weak and foolish, but we need some motivation not just to turn our faces to the wall and collapse into depression. What is the point of the strife? Even if we engage in battle to make it easier for others to do so, that just pushes the question one step away from us, rather than answering it.

Once when I was dealing with someone with suicidal temptations I stressed that death was the enemy, an interloper in God’s world (this only stands any chance of working with a Christian). But if that’s the case we know that we will eventually lose: and that loss may even come as a mercy depending on our circumstances. Perhaps we can see each day lived well as a victory against a different Angel of Death that comes to us, rather than a struggle daily renewed against the same foe.

And yet why should we? Death doesn’t have to be approaching that quickly to make that a valid question. The humanist concern to gather experiences against the day of death seems a hollow endeavour as it leads nowhere. Why should we try daily when we are weary and dispirited? Rather, the thought that occurs to me that nobody else will ever have our experiences, our precise mixture of impressions, reflections and memories. Those are the treasures of the nations to be brought into the heavenly city. What God will do with them exactly we do not know, but every moment is not just one of blessing to us but to the whole of creation, connected as we are through him who is the Head. That might be enough to keep me thankful each morning, no matter how long or short a time that might remain to me.

St Michael's Well, Sopley - or Not

Some time in the summer of 1986, I was driving with my family along the B3347 between Christchurch and Ringwood as we passed through the village of Sopley. As we negotiated a tight left bend over a little bridge next to the Woolpack Inn, I spotted an arch over an alcove in a redbrick wall beside a gateway on the right-hand side of the road. We stopped, and I found what seemed to be a holy well. This was only a year after visiting my very first holy well, St Trillo's Well at Rhos-on-Sea in north Wales, and I was full of excitement to find more. There was a metal spout on the back wall of the well in the shape, as I later described it, of 'some fabulous animal' (my mind, I think, going back to David Attenborough's TV series of that name in 1975). I even dared to taste the water which I thought was chalybeate, and I certainly wouldn't risk that now. 

This week I found myself back on that road again, stopped, and took a picture of the well as the only one I had was very poor. The water, bright green with pondweed, completely submerged the Fabulous Animal up to the tips of its iron ears. There was as much mud and leaf-mulch in the basin as water, and the image on the back of Christ (presumably) offering a jar to a kneeling figure, flanked by Alpha and Omega signs, seems less distinct than when I first saw it forty years ago. Forty years! Well, 39. 

I find that there's quite a lot online about this well now, which there definitely wasn't in 1986. In fact I think I am responsible for most of it. I wrote up my visit, among a set of similarly slightly dubious wells, in the old holy wells magazine, Source, then run by Mark Valentine. I called it 'St Michael's Well', because Sopley's ancient church is dedicated to St Michael and I had the belief in those days that once upon a time every holy well would have shared a dedication with its parish church, as they appeared to in Ireland. Now, of course, I know that this is not the case and the history of holy wells is complex and fascinatingly multifarious. But I find that everyone refers to this site as 'St Michael's Well'. Members of the New Forest Wells and Springs group on LiberFaciorum organised cleaning the well out in 2024, following an earlier tidy-up in 2008; the Parish Council also knows the site under this name that I entirely made up. The strange spout is now almost universally described as a dragon which makes perfect sense for a holy well dedicated to St Michael. The well's real history is obscure. It sits opposite a Picturesque Gothic lodge built between 1870 and 1896 to judge by the Ordnance Survey, and its wall seems designed to look like a ruin; the Kemp-Welch family of Poole owned the big house, Sopley Park, at that time, though what led either John Kemp-Welch the Schweppes magnate or his son (also John) to build this remarkable structure is anyone's guess. The pipes that convey the water from a spring in the park seem to have collapsed, and what fills the well now is probably just rain run-off. 

Provided everyone understands (as I've tried to ensure) that the name of the well is of no great antiquity, I see no problem with its new general title. Oddly at Bisterne nearby there is a story of a 'real' dragon that once menaced the neighbourhood, and on the widespread assumption that dragon tales encode struggles between Christianity and paganism people have told me this fits in rather well with 'St Michael's Well'. Who knows? Did I mysteriously understand more than I knew back in 1986? Remember St Catherine's Well at Guildford, another wild guess that turned out to be entirely true!