St Catherine in Dijon

Yet another friend - Miss T in this case - has recorded an image of the Great-Martyr while on holiday. This 15th-century wall-painting is in Dijon Cathedral. It's definitely St Catherine (her name appears), though the wheel is not easy to see. It might be in the damaged area of the image beneath where her left hand should be, behind the kneeling figure (a Beguine?).

Haslemere Revisited

Haslemere is only a bearable train journey away so on my day off I went there today. It's an odd arrangement: the station lies in a no-man's-land in between the old town clustering around the crossroads leading to Guildford, Midhurst and Liphook, and at the other end a new bit where the supermarkets are. These are very distinct, witnessed by the differences between the artisanal ciabattas and loose-leaf teas served by the café in the old bit and the basic sandwich and mug of best builder's I got in the one in the new. 

The Museum is in the old town. Again, it's an unusual place, set up in the 1880s by Sir Joseph Hutchinson who used his collection of natural history to create a little version of the national Natural History Museum on the grounds that, pre-railway, most denizens of Haslemere would never make it to South Kensington and they really needed to know about whale sharks and lemurs. Over the years, for complex reasons, the Museum has acquired an Egyptology collection (including a mummy) and a range of European folk art: I don't think I've heard the word 'treen' used in earnest since I left Wycombe Museum in 2003. 

I've seen Haslemere Educational Museum (its title) once before, in 2012, but I discovered that I only really remembered it through the photographs I took at the time. I recognised some of the artefacts, but I'd made startlingly unfamiliar images of them, and it was rather pleasing to find that most of the displays came as a surprise. 

I began working in museums because I was inspired by the idea that they could do social good, interpreting a community to itself. I had before my imagination the example of Elspeth King at the People's Palace in Glasgow, a kind of history-from-the-bottom-up heroic socialist-realist model of the museum world. 35 years later I think about them differently - I see their treasuries of objects and stories as revealing, not a master narrative, but the interlocking, overlapping, and contradictory complexity of human lives, and that that's really the point. Some of those lives, in fact, aren't even human. We are brought together with experiences which are not our own, and made to reflect on them. Isn't that amazing?

Word from the Pulpit (if there was one)

The readings today were from Jeremiah 23 where God lambasts prophets who prophesy their own fantasies, and Luke 12.49-56, in which Jesus talks about bringing a sword on the earth rather than peace, kindling a fire, and waiting to be baptised with a baptism which is not of water. At the main service I preached a rather rambly sermon which began with God’s rhetorical question through Jeremiah, ‘Am I not a god close at hand, and not only far away?’, and would have ended with the violent imagery drawn from both readings – ‘fire, and a hammer breaking the rock, and a baptism of blood’ – had I not at the last minute veered away to stress how the Cross stands in judgement over us, over the Church and over the world, but the point is that it leads us somewhere better. Somewhere in the middle I touched on the doctrine of the Real Presence – ‘in that cupboard with the gold curtain is the most important thing in your life’ – my own failings (not enumerated in detail), the possibility of some wrong arising in our community which must be named, say a corrupt Council operation, and imagery of angels. There was a lot in it, but I thought it held together, just about.

Over the years I have struggled with understanding the relationship between the pastor and the congregation. What exactly does it mean? Why does the Lord want it to function in this strange way, if indeed he does? I can get my head around the idea that it creates an inescapable relationship (inescapable unless either the minister is driven out or the laypeople leave) and that training in relationship is at the heart of the spiritual life, but why have one person set aside to take this role? You can drag in the traditional Catholic explanation, that ordained people exist to provide the sacraments, but that’s an unsatisfactorily circular argument.

As I was contemplating finishing the sermon with that brutal statement about fire and hammers and blood I imagined myself saying to Giselle the lay reader, ‘Of course you can’t say that’. My feeling would be that it wouldn’t be right for Il Rettore or Marion, when she was with us, or Ted the public school teacher who preaches occasionally, to say it either. I think this is because it is risky. Not only is the expression slightly extreme, but it’s also very directive in a way I rarely am. This is partly what an ordained person sent to a Christian community to speak with the authority of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church is for in a way a layperson (even an authorised one), a retired priest or a curate is not. That status both protects the minister in that they are commissioned to say such things, and also raises the stakes when they do: they’re still going to be there next week (probably), and the congregation’s relationship with them is ongoing and not easy to escape, as we’ve said. The possibility of a strong and directive statement grating like grit in an oyster is part of the point, it seems to me. 

A Relic

Many years ago, during my time looking after the church at Goremead, I took part in a joint Anglican-Greek Orthodox wedding, or it may have been the one I did when, for legal reasons, we went through the Orthodox ceremony straight after the Anglican one, a picturesque but protracted occasion. It may also have been the time the bride was referred to throughout as the servant-of-God-Irene because that was the closest saint's name to her actual one of Rianne. Anyway, at the end of the second service, after the exchange of crowns and the little dance around the altar singing a song about martyrdom, the celebrant Bishop Gregorios gave me the bottle of sweet Cypriot Commandaria wine the couple had had a sip out of. For some reason I never really drank very much of it, though it got put to other uses (now I would welcome it as an addition to/substitute for my usual treat of port). Eventually I reckoned that, even with its high alcohol content it probably wouldn't be all that good to consume after all that time, and I have instead been using it as the thank-offering at my little wall-shrine that inaugurates my day off, just a little bit each time. Yesterday it finally ran out. We use all sorts of things to encapsulate memory, and every time I have picked up this squat brown bottle my mind has gone back to those funny experiences in Goremead, but nothing endures forever, neither the memories nor the items that embody them. I could buy another one, I suppose!

L' Ecumenisme en Plein Air

As nobody else had volunteered with just a few weeks to go, I ended up organising the Churches Together annual open-air service at Hornington Bandstand, which mighty demonstration of divine love and ecumenical togetherness took place last Sunday. The main issue was that almost everyone was away. Not only were most of the ministers who took place last year absent or had moved on, we would normally rely for musical accompaniment on the musicians from Tophill, who were also away. I was steered towards a gentleman from the Baptist Church who gathered a range of friends, so that all worked out OK, even if it took us close to the wire. Then someone asked about sound production and I realised the Tophill folk had always brought that with them. The minister at Tophill (one of the many who wasn't going to be around) arranged to have a gigantic amp/mixer available which I picked up and somehow manoeuvred in and out of my car several times, and then got it down to the Bandstand by 9.10 on Sunday morning long before anyone else arrived. We didn't even use it in the end.

One of the absences was the entire staff of the local ecumenical Christian youth work team who would normally deal with any children present. I emailed round the ministers to see whether some other children's or youth worker could do it - 'You don't want me doing it', I warned, but the world was deaf to my admonitions and when the time came I gathered a group of five bewildered children around the steps of the Bandstand and had a rather stilted conversation with them about the story in the Bible reading. One of my colleagues later sent me an email congratulating me for 'so wonderfully and enigmatically engaging with the children' which I have to assume is an autocorrect quirk. At one point an angelic little girl of about three turned to her dad and said 'I don't like this bit'. I wonder whether the mic picked her up.

I was also thanked for 'moving all the chairs' which normally reside in a tiny shed belonging to the Council just on the edge of the field. In fact I didn't as there were others helping, though the gentleman who enthusiastically ran off with the parcel trolley and deposited a towering stack of chairs in the nearby car park was less help than he intended to be.

I will never, ever, ever do this again even for Jesus.

Of Course I Didn't Say Anything

... at the meeting this week when a clerical colleague due to leave his role the day after described the frustrations of his prospective retirement. 'I've slipped a couple of non-religious funerals under the radar over the years', he said, 'and I'd like to carry on doing funerals, I enjoy them. But if you have Permission To Officiate in the diocese I'm going to they keep the fees. I'd prefer to do non-religious funerals anyway but that would still be the case.'

Embarrassment and inarticulacy silenced me. I'd never met him before and there would be limited point in protesting even if I could have speedily recovered from my surprise and worked out what to say. It would never occur to me that I would carry out any religious act except as a minister of the Church of Jesus Christ. Although, as we always say, the priest is ordained by the Church in response to and in recognition of the call of God on that individual, nevertheless I am ordained in order to do, and only in order to do, the things the Church is charged by God with doing. It's not a declaration of what a fine fellow I am, and whatever I might do only has value not because I do it but because it's done within the context of the promises of God expressed in the sacrament of Orders. Dear me. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

The Spiritual Bounds of Satire

Lately, Death stalks the halls of Euterpe: Ozzy Osbourne, Cleo Laine, Connie Francis, and now Tom Lehrer. I was introduced to the oeuvre of Mr Lehrer at university by Comrade Tankengine; 35 years after that, and up to 70 after the songs were written, I think I can appreciate their bold savagery more than ever. Far from being blunted by time, they get sharper as you can perceive how they must have landed at the time. Drug-taking, pornography, venereal disease, nuclear annihilation, inter-community prejudice, and cruelty to animals: no target is beyond their scope, all wrapped up in razor-sharp and inventive rhyme and meter. For a slightly less sulphurous way of making the point, listen to Lehrer’s introduction, and his audience’s reaction, to ‘The Vatican Rag’, a 1965 song about the Second Vatican Council. His phrases about the Church becoming more ‘commercial’ and ‘selling the product’ sound shocking (as I think they should be) rather than the commonplace cliches they now are; once the song begins, as it converts solemn ritual into absurd pantomime without any actual, definite abuse, the audience responds with whoops and gasps, simply unable to believe that anyone is saying this stuff.

And you wonder whether anyone would say it now. On the one hand, Tom Lehrer was always the first to point out that satire changed nothing: ‘it’s not even preaching to the converted, it’s titillating the converted’, he believed. On the other, just a little bit further down the road of eroding the rule of law we currently travel, and the ivory-fingering academic would surely run the risk of being shot up against a wall. Tyrants have notoriously poor senses of humour, even if the joke doesn’t really threaten them. In The Libertine John Malkovich’s Charles II watches in fury as Johnny Depp’s Earl of Rochester savages him theatrically as King Bolloxinion: ‘This is very funny’, says a beaming French ambassador to the King, ‘if this was Paris, the playwright would already be dead by now’. Thank heavens for the Civil War.

But does satire do us any spiritual good? Back in Oxford days I collaborated with Comrade Tankengine and others in a gossipy weekly political newsletter which was occasionally witty and always scabrous, directed at the University society we belonged to. For me, it was a kind of continuation of some of the things I’d done, or, more often, imagined doing, at school. We told ourselves that it was all about catharsis, about carving out a space for ourselves and those who felt similarly alienated which at least kept us within the bounds of the Party. But we couldn’t half be cruel sometimes. There is a strain of self-congratulation and contempt even in the best of satire – and you can argue Tom Lehrer’s is that, as it’s the cleverest. ‘If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while’, he said. The Roman Catholic Church was given lenient treatment in the light of that.

I will still flick to Lehrer on my creaking, steam-powered iPod from time to time, but part of me will always feel I should apologise to the Lord. And I will not visit the park to poison a single pigeon.