When the Wolves Were Running

I suppose on a personal level I should be grateful to the White House Deputy Chief of Staff Mr Miller, who over recent days has provided me with material for a Facebook post, a newsletter article, a sermon, and now a blog entry. That’s good going for the following few words, spoken to US TV channel CNN in reference to recent events in Venezuela:

The US is operating in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world from the beginning of time.

Generously, you could say, yes, they are. International relationships are indeed shaped by balances and imbalances of economic and military power and, as the Lord himself said, if a king goes to war with another king he first decides if he has enough resources to do so. Any nation must have the wherewithal to defend the things it holds important from those who would destroy or steal them. In World War Two the Allies did many immoral things to secure our way of life, ranging from simple deceit to the mass killing of civilians. We know this is the case.

But ‘securing our way of life’ is the point here. Then, we deployed strength, force, and power to defend a state of living which, however imperfectly, said it valued every human being as an individual, which recognised their worth and dignity, and which was expressed in a political and legal system which the human race has, over centuries, devised to protect the ordinary majority from the powerful, the cruel and the violent: the psychopaths who believe there’s nothing wrong with the rule of strength and force. We call it ‘democracy’, and it includes not just periodic elections (tyrants are content with those as they are so easy to manipulate), but limited, accountable government as a whole; free exchange of ideas; universal free education; security of property; and equality before the law. You know full well that this is not what the current US administration intends its strength, force, and power to defend. Instead, they are the kind of people that system is designed to constrain, the wolves it attempts to defang. That’s something of an injustice to wolves, but you get the point. And you know, too, that when they call strength, force, and power ‘the iron laws of the world’ they don’t just apply it to foreign adventures: the world is the whole of life. It’s why, in this view, it’s right not to allow extra support for the poor or marginalised, why law doesn’t matter, why the deaths of small people don’t matter, why there’s no problem with the powerful doing what they like. That’s just the way it’s always been.

By coincidence (or providence) tomorrow is the Feast of the Baptism of Christ; the Old Testament lesson set for the day is Isaiah 42.1-9, which describes the character of the Messiah: ‘a bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out’. He will not crush the weak, because they are children who can yet grow Godwards. Such bold restraint, such heroic tenderness, is what we are summoned to as well if we are baptised into his death and resurrection. And remember: the world was made through the Word, and ultimately it stands under the hand of God. He is in charge of it, and the Christ shows how he works. The laws of the world belong to him, not the apes and the wolves.

Episcopal Dealings

A few weeks ago I shared the text of the letter we sent on behalf of the SCP to our diocesan bishop outlining our 'dissatisfaction' with the way the Living in Love and Faith initiative, or its results, were handled. A couple of people wanted to know what happened next:

I wasn't expecting the Bishop to ask whether he might meet with us to talk through the matter, and I wondered what there was to say. In the end 'us' turned out to mean me, and it was slightly odd: both the Bishop and I knew each others' position, we weren't actually negotiating anything, and I don't think he expected me to change my mind any more than I expected him to. I had the strange impression that he wanted to talk for his own satisfaction as much as to exchange views. He outlined some of the ways in which he thought the process had gone wrong, and said he felt too much had been expected of the LLF initiative - that no consensus was ever likely to emerge about a subject that, in his view, required consensus before significant forward movement. He wasn't sure where we went from here now that General Synod had said it rejected the bishops' opinion, while for a substantial body of Anglicans not blessing same-sex relationships had become an absolute touchstone issue, regardless of what anyone else might prefer. He said he felt very keenly a responsibility to keep talking to divergent bodies of opinion within the diocese while trying his best not to say different things to different people, and maintaining his own sense of integrity.

So I was released from the Bishop's house and not consigned to the dungeons. It was a perfectly agreeable meeting but what it achieved was another matter!

Turning Up The Dimmer Switch

As I've been (mainly) off this week, I was able to catch bits of Tuesday's edition of the Today programme on Radio 4, guest-edited by historian Tom Holland. Mr Holland's biggest work so far has been Dominion, in which he traces the influence of Christianity on the culture of the West. Maybe he told part of his own story when interviewed for UnHerd alongside Nick Cave earlier this year; but if so, I hadn't heard it, so here are his words to Amol Rajan a couple of days ago. He'd been given a cancer diagnosis:

They said, this looks terrible. It’s probably spread to your lymph nodes, we’ll let you know the results of all the scans we’re going to give you before Christmas so you don’t have it hanging over you. And Christmas Eve came, and there was nothing. And I went to Midnight Mass at St Bartholomew the Great. And so I sat there and thought, I might as well give it a go. So I made a wholehearted prayer for the first time since I was about ten, I should think. This church is very distinctive because it’s part of a medieval priory and the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared there, it’s the only recorded appearance of the Virgin Mary in London. I went to the place where the Virgin is supposed to have appeared, and I said Come on, please help me out here, because I was that desperate! And my brother James turned out to have been at university with and shared a flat with the daughter of the surgeon, this great man called Bill Hill, who developed this technique where you cut out the infected section of the bowel, and he said, I’ll get in touch with him … And he managed to see the scans and they weren’t nearly as bad as had been thought … I really felt as though I’d massively dodged a bullet there. My rational side says, It’s a reflection of luck, or of privilege … But another part of me did think, Goodness, I’ve been a participant in a medieval miracle. I was a Protestant atheist, and then a Protestant agnostic, and I like the idea that if there’s a God he has such a sense of humour that it was the Virgin Mary who intervened … maybe this is a way I can believe in it, and it makes life much more interesting. … The dimmer switch has definitely gone back up. When I read about medieval people who had a personal devotion to the Virgin, I can now nurture that possibility of a personal devotion to the Virgin in a way that would have seemed – well, I might as well have been sacrificing animals to Athena or something. It’s like a fire I can warm my hands by, and I make sure I keep that fire alight.

I thought this was great - sceptical and yet leading, very gently and very indeterminately, in the direction, not just of Christian spirituality, but of this kind of Christian spirituality. And perhaps the nicest point is that Mr Holland comments with a historian's fastidiousness that the Virgin's manifestation at St Bartholomew's, Smithfield, is her only recorded appearance in London, because of course she may have been around without it being committed to the record.

Picture is another St Bartholomew's, Brighton's, where I was this afternoon. Happy New Year everyone!

Year's End

By mid-day on Christmas Eve, the church and the outbuildings were starting to get chilly. Still warmer than my house, but not very warm. This was because there was no heating, and that in turn was because the gas had been turned off on Saturday evening. The carbon-monoxide alarm in the kitchen had sounded. It had sounded on the Thursday evening (the 18th), but I didn’t learn about this until the hirers told me they’d taken the alarm off the wall, wrapped it in a towel and put it in a drawer so it didn’t disturb the concert taking place in the church. By that stage nobody needed actually to go in the kitchen so I decided to leave it until Friday morning. I wasn’t even sure what to do; I hadn’t realised there is a company that maintains the gas network and it’s them you call when this kind of thing happens. Our boiler engineers told me on Friday to run the heating system and see if it happened again; it didn’t, so I left it. Until Saturday, when it happened again, and this time there was no avoiding action. I thought it might be due to one of the stove’s gas rings that seemed to be misbehaving. 

So on Christmas Eve, about noon, the engineers arrived, spent quite a while investigating, and concluded – wonder of wonders – that the original alarm was faulty. They put up a new one, turned the gas back on, and left with the plea that we not use the hob anyway as the ventilation was insufficient and it should never have been fitted. But at least we had heat. 

At least we had heat – especially welcome when ten or so souls turned up half an hour early for the Crib Service because the wrong time had been on the church website and they hadn’t checked (why would they?) since it was put right. This year the Cribbage was so full that I, the server, and the children bringing up the crib figures could barely move around: I think somewhat over 300 people were present. Attendance at the other Christmas services was similar to last year, but that was remarkable, easily the highest we have had since we last had donkeys attending many years ago. My final seasonal duty, as usual, was at Smallham Chapel where the carol service went beautifully smoothly including our customary visit to the barn to sing a carol to the nonplussed sheep. 

And this week I am off. Yesterday I was in Salisbury having not looked properly round the cathedral for many years. There are two relatively modern images of St Catherine, one on the reredos in the chapel of St Martin, and one on an altar frontal. I also add one from the Ashwellthorpe Triptych, seen by friends at Norwich Castle Museum. Happy New Year all!

Easy Come, Easy Go

In the church office email inbox on Friday I found one from a solicitor's office. 'We act on behalf of the late Mrs JN of Bradley House Care Home, Sherton', it read, 'and are pleased to inform you that our client, who died in June, left your church 5% of her estate. Please use the attached form to tell us how you would like this to be paid'. 

The world is full of people trying to pull one over on you and as the solicitor was 200 miles away and I didn't recognise the name of Mrs JN despite being here for 16 years I was initially suspicious. A brief search did all check out, though, so I called, just to check. It was all absolutely genuine, the solicitor, the deceased legator, everything. It was a very nice present in the run-up to Christmas and I wondered whether it would be enough to buy some new folding chairs to replace the decreasing number of increasingly scrappy old plastic seats we have in the church hall. 

The lady I spoke to at the office was very bright and enthusiastic. 'Let me check your address,', she said. 'All Saints' Church, Church Road, Milbury. That's you, isn't it?' And of course it is not, it is a church four miles away with the same dedication. All my plans dissipated like fog in the morning sun.

As a friend said to me, 'You don't know how much it was 5% of'. It was supposed to be supportive ...

The Two Cultures?

In the parish there are three secular, non-Church schools in addition to our Church infants school. On Monday the all-through primary school sent a class to the church to look at art, which inevitably involved some discussion of the purpose of that art (because it's a church); on Thursday I was in the other primary school doing an assembly on their value of the term, 'Forgiveness', which was of course Christian in content; and this Wednesday I'll be in the secondary school delivering a seasonal assembly on Christmas. I know that secular-minded people would prefer there was no contact between State schools and religion at all, but what I can say is that, certainly in sunny Surrey, there is no marginalisation of Christian thinking or institutions in the way the new Christian Nationalist right would have you believe. Oh, and last week I did a reflection at the turning-on of the Swanvale Halt Christmas lights. All of these are secular settings and occasions and to be asked to participate in them is nothing other than a privilege. 

The Other Side of the Tiber

A couple of years ago the Roman Catholic diocese of Arundel & Brighton was considering what to do with the parishes in Surrey. They have no shortage of laypeople, and most of the parishes are thriving tolerably; it's just clergy they can't find enough of. I gather about 35% of RC priests in Britain are now reordained Anglican converts, but they can't only rely on that pipeline. So our local parish went into a process of soul-searching to work out which of its three mass centres should close, and after much angst and trouble the diocese decided to take the easy option and just make the existing clergy work harder, retaining all the existing communities and spread the clergy more thinly between them. The whole of the area, everything south and west of Guildford, would be constituted as a single parish.

I was invited to the inaugural mass on Saturday evening. It was lovely to be asked and our local RC priest Fr Jeffrey couldn't stop repeating how grateful he was I was there to the extent that I wondered whether anything else had been said about it. Maybe I was the only ecumenical representative who turned up. I decided to leave my biretta and stole at home and appear just in surplice, scarf and hood, seemly but unmistakably Anglican, as I thought that was polite.

Aesthetically the church in Guildford is no more than functional, but it is big, and was fairly full on Saturday evening. Perhaps it should have been given that so many congregations were represented, but it's always encouraging to be in a full church. If I envy the Italian Mission for anything, it's its comprehensiveness and cosmopolitan nature. We've had a young Nigerian-born carer attending our church recently who wants to get married at home and needs Fr Jeffrey to confirm that he's doing his best to worship somewhere at least: 'Tell him I will write a nihil obstat', Jeffrey told me, and it amuses me to think that such formularies are still expressed in Latin even south of the Sahara. But this is what the Church of Jesus Christ is supposed to be. 

But I was soon reminded what I don't envy, as Jeffrey and his colleagues lined up before the Bishop to affirm their oaths, and they made the customary declaration of acceptance of the teaching magisterium of the Church - not only in what it has taught hitherto, but whatever it will teach in the future. This has always hit me as an intellectual leap I could not perform. I understand it's about expressing the belief that the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit, that God's hand rests upon it and therefore it can never not be so guided, but it epitomises a model of how the Spirit works that is not what I observe from the Church's history, full of dead ends, re-emphases, re-interpretations, and plain error as it is. 'The magisterium has never erred in vital doctrine', you might argue; but how do we tell what vital doctrine is? 'Vital doctrine is that in which the magisterium has never erred', and that I find basically unconvincing. In the Anglican dispensation our declarations of acceptance are far less exact, and our relationship with our Bishop is described in terms of personal allegiance. Battered and compromised as the Anglican Church is, I have never been more sure of the fundamental rightness of that.