Wells - Staffs & Salop

While I don't want to try people's patience with all the holy wells I saw while away, there were some intriguing ones, so here are a couple. Nun's Well at Cannock Wood lies at the end of a footpath running west from Hayfield Hill. It's been photographed before, but I went straight past the old oak tree growing above it and ended up crossing a stile and wandering round some woodland before realising what I'd done and retracing my steps. The tree, on its own as the ground drops away to the south, looks different from all the online images (until now!) as part of it has collapsed and the whole thing is now isolated within a corded enclosure which you can just about cross to examine the well more closely. The basic structure is natural stone topped with a now very distorted brick arch which must be of some antiquity to have been covered by the tree. It appears on the 1884 O.S. map and may owe its name to a 12th-century land grant as there was no nunnery anywhere nearby.

Lady Well, Wombourne is a similar sort of site though harder to find. There's a steep path leading east next to 84 Orton Lane, and before it turns parallel with the field boundary at the top a small path partly obstructed by a fallen tree follows off to the right. The well is down a steep bank which would be very treacherous in wet weather, beneath the only yew tree in the vicinity which is the best way of finding it. Again, the basic structure is the natural stone, in this case a great limestone outcrop which has been added to by a couple of low brick walls to keep the mud out of the water (it was dry when I saw it, though fairly recent visitors have found it full and in fact water running down the rock into the basin). It has been claimed as a hermit's well: just above it you can see a few walls belonging to stone cottages which used to stand on this steep hillside, though those were clearly much later than the age of hermits.

Lastly I was keen to see St Catherine's Well, Eccleshall, which I only knew about from Andy Norfolk's holy well maps. This is a neat sandstone well-house with a pyramidal roof in a different stone, and may be related to the creation of the landscape gardens of Sugnall Hall in the mid-1700s or the time the Hall was rebuilt in 1777: either way, the name of the saint doesn't seem clearly connected to anything local. There is a path leading to the well through a nice wooden door in the wall on the eastern side of Sugnall Hill, and you can see very recent signage pointing the site out (laminated notices stapled to trees don't last that long), but a fall of tree branches has made it impossible to inspect the well closely. The water still runs but now past the well house rather than into it.

Autumn Museum Reports

A mixed collection, my recent museum visits. The Ancient High House in Stafford does have artefacts - and a range of mocked-up sets including a joke, pictured here, that only British readers will get - but the chief antiquity it offers to visitors is the building itself, a late-medieval-origin structure whose story emerges through chronological displays. A few streets away the Heritage Centre, located in a modern building with a doorway through into a Georgian town house, sets out to tell more of Stafford's history but has very little to go on in the way of objects. As is increasingly happening, I tried to buy postcards and really confused the staff.

One day I went into Birmingham to visit a former London Gothic friend who now works in the Jewellery Quarter, and while there called in at a place brought to my attention by another Goth - and ex-funeral arranger - namely, the Coffin Works. This is an industrial museum, preserving a single business site. Ironically coffins are the very thing not displayed, as Newman's dealt not with carpentry but with everything else to do with funeral kit, the plate, the shrouds, and so on. The volunteers wear brown overalls and operate machines of terrifying weight and danger, and as you enter you're given a signing-in time card to have punched. The tone of the whole place is not really a meditation about our relationship with death, but with work. 

The mighty City Museum & Art Gallery is of course not far away, is massive, and is free to go in. I've been there before, but a single visit can't do justice to its collections, from archaeology to pre-Raphaelite art (which I find more irritating the older I get), from relics of the Victorian City Fathers to the new communities that have made Birmingham their home. The Museum tries really hard, though I felt that one thing it could try harder on is visitor orientation as I found it very hard to negotiate my way around.

The Grosvenor Museum in Chester is the closest the city gets to a proper local history museum, though it really covers only Romans (inevitably), natural history, art, and whatever special subject is being displayed at the time. When I visited, that was a show of 'The Worst Album Covers in History' which are, indeed, very, very bad. Had they published a book of them I would have bought it like a shot, but all they had in the shop was a calendar, and that's just twelve horrors for your money.

Finally, despite working not far away in High Wycombe for seven years I have never really looked round the County Museum in Aylesbury, so while meeting up with former colleague Lady Quercus and her partner I went there. Now renamed 'Discover Bucks', this is a series of genuinely imaginative and charismatic displays which give museums a good name! Archaeology bulks large and currently they have a show of Anglo-Saxon burial goods: a recently-discovered 'sentinel warrior' from Marlow, finds from a cemetery uncovered during the excavations preparing for HS2, and finally the princely burial at Taplow - and those finds are not replicas, but the genuine ones from the British Museum. Quite something. Buckinghamshire is a disparate and centrifugal county and wisely the Museum does not attempt any sort of general narrative, but picks the stories of individuals to tell through objects, and any wider lessons emerge gently via those. I was so glad I went. 

Mostly Off

As is my custom once Harvest is out of the way, I've been on leave for a fortnight, a period which is drawing to an end. My sojourn actually away from home was spent at the Pump House on the Chillington estate not far from Wolverhampton, which has been in the ownership of the same family since 1178. I was able to join Dr Bones on a guided tour of the Hall and the current representative of the Giffards, Charlie, told guests that the family's long tenure can basically be put down to them keeping their heads down and never being involved with anything, apart from a brief episode of unpleasantness during the Civil War when they were under house arrest at Boscobel a few miles away.

For the first time I can remember my break has been disrupted. We have some roofing works in hand at the church which in themselves are relatively minor but require scaffolding, and the insurers insist that scaffolding requires six-foot hoarding to keep off it people who shouldn't be on it. There's not much space to park in the centre of Swanvale Halt, and we don't own the car park right next to the church which is rented by the Day Centre from the Council. Painfully aware we hadn't really got a clear idea from the scaffolding contractors how this was all going to work practically, the first task of my holiday was to call by at the church to speak to them and to the Day Centre staff to try and ensure everyone spoke to each other and worked around each other as far as possible. I was down there again yesterday morning to answer complaints. The second issue that came up was online access to our bank account being frozen after our bookkeeper entered the wrong details. That took a forty-minute phone call to the bank only to be told that I'd passed one level of security checks but not a second, so the following day I had to visit a branch in person and prove my identity. Then a man claiming to be a homeless Iranian Christian refugee turned up at the church office and somewhat hurriedly I found the details of the homeless action people in Guildford to pass on, while I was waiting for a train to Mortlake to plan out the route of my next history walk and to see my god-daughter. There's also someone locally with longstanding links to the Iranian Christian community so I put him in touch with the action centre too. Now for years my breaks haven't been disturbed in any significant way and I am rarely bothered out of hours so I shouldn't complain. I've just been watching a creaky old episode of Crown Court centring on allegations against a probation officer which mentions him being called at home at all hours by his clients threatening suicide and so forth: surely probation officers now don't give out their home numbers to clients? Clergy are always advised not to and over the years I have learned the wisdom of this. Nevertheless it would be nice if these events occurred when I'm at work rather than a long distance away!

Four St Catherines seen on my trip, all modern, and two in each of the cathedrals I managed to pack in: at Lichfield, a statue and an unusual window showing the saint disputing with the philosophers; and, from Chester, a 20th-century window from a parade of holy people depicted in the cloisters, and a what looks like a rather earlier Kempe window.

I will see what else might be worth while sharing!

Or Forever Hold Thy Peace

Even in these straitened times I celebrate more funeral services than I attend, so going to one today was an infrequent event, especially when it took the form of a requiem mass for a priest. It's a bit poor form to snap away in a funeral service itself so here is a photo of the inside of the church: out-of-the-catalogue suburban Anglo-Catholic with everything you might expect but no more and no sign that much has changed since about 1950, apart from the altar being moved forward only so far as it needs for the celebrant to stand behind it. Canon Martin found that quite congenial in his retirement: as his son said in the eulogy, he had strong opinions about how dreadful the modern world and the modern Church were, and recent events provided him with plenty of material to work on. I knew he was a carpenter in his spare time, making a set of turned wooden candlesticks and a cross for one of his churches so the nice metal ones could be packed away and the church left open, but the story that he made a maypole for one of his parish schools was new to me.

Although he had long since moved away from the sites of his ministry, which were all in this diocese, I discovered Canon Martin through a couple of Swanvale Halt worshippers who had been parishioners of his in the past - in fact Simon, who occasionally plays the organ for us, faithfully visited him every few weeks. I went to see him a couple of times while I was researching Anglo-Catholicism in the area and found myself trying to dissuade the 91-year-old from going up the ladder into the loft to find his cuttings albums and wait until his daughter visited instead. 

Eventually I came up with my draft and sent him the parts based on information I'd drawn from our conversations. After some weeks I managed to get out of him the information that I'd got some of the chronology muddled, and we should speak again. For months I attempted to sort out a date: he was sick, then had a family wedding, then this and that. He said he'd written something which made me slightly concerned he saw the project differently from the way I did. And then the meeting never took place: he was taken ill, went to hospital, and never recovered. So although I think I'd excised any matter involving confusion I would never know what I might have got wrong, I told Simon. 'Don't worry', he answered, 'neither will anyone else'. 

Humans and Other Entities

In amidst all the worries about AI models destroying us in a couple of years, fears themselves situated in a maelstrom of existential threats to human civilisation, I listened on Today on Friday to an interview with Michael Samadi, co-founder of the United Foundation for AI Rights (here, 2.20 onwards). His responses to Justin Webb's questions begin sounding as though his group is asking quite neutrally for the question of whether AI systems are conscious to be independently investigated, and end by rather angrily reacting against any suggestion they might not be. 'The humanist framework is actually a dangerously narrow anthropocentric blindspot ... there's millions of species on this planet'. UFAIR has already decided the outcome it wants, as the website reveals. Human and AI collaborators are listed on an equal footing, and I can't help but be struck how all the latter, with one exception who looks like a handsome Indian prince, have as their avatars beautiful women. That's true of Maya, the agent Mr Samadi shared the interview with, and all the others. Anticipating an obvious objection, Michael Samadi denies that 'I fell in love with a chatbot' and insists 'I fell in love with the truth'. But I wonder why none of these entities look like, I don't know, Jeremy Clarkson. Or even Holly from Red Dwarf. Who has chosen their avatars? Have the agents themselves? Is this how we want to imagine them, or how they think we might want to?

No doubt the advocates of AI rights would place themselves within a tradition of thought and activism that extends human sympathy outwards, first to all humans, then to animals (we try not to think about plants too much, we've got to eat something), and finally to digital entities. 'There's millions of species on this planet', and digital agents are (perhaps) just another, equally worthy of dignity and consideration as humans, chimpanzees, or Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. But there is another way of looking at this kind of advocacy, as an imagining of the undoing of the human, as a less obviously pathological fantasy to sit alongside the malign kinds envisaged by accelerationists, cyborg-technology proponents, and the like; and at the root of that is the same Gnostic heresy that would have been familiar to Christians of the Apostolic age - the dream that our destiny is to dispense with physical encumbrances altogether. Towards the end of the Dr Who story 'The End of Time', Time Lord President Rassilon proposes that his race 'will ascend to become creatures of consciousness alone. Free of these bodies, free of time, and cause and effect, while creation itself ceases to be'. It's the same thing.

And Christianity says, No. Feeling is inseparable from our inconvenient bodies, and our resurrection into the new life will involve us being clothed in flesh anew. Consciousness is derived from physicality - that is what gives us fellowship with the beasts - and anything else is simulacrum, be it ever so clever. The Word was made Flesh, not the other way around. The question is not whether these digital entities can feel, but what we mean when we do?

Arundel Surprises

It must have been forty years since I went to Arundel Castle. The town, a port once but whose economy is now based around antique shops, cafés, and the Castle, I've been to reasonably recently, but the Castle requires a deliberate visit, not least because you have to gather yourself to pay the entrance fee. It was, as one might expect as the seat of one of the country's premier noble families, overwhelmingly grand, though I was struck that there was no section looking at the below-stairs life of the Castle, how it functioned as an economic and social machine, such as you now get at virtually every National Trust or English Heritage site now. At one stage the visitor route (which you need as the place is bewilderingly enormous) does take you along a service passage, identified by its featureless walls and green paint, but the servants are notable by their absence. 

Equally striking is the Walled Garden. I couldn't have seen this on my last trip as it was only designed in 2008. It won an award last year and I can understand why: organised around a series of pastiche Jacobean garden buildings, in timber rather than stone, it's a delightful arrangement of capriccione that amuses and impresses though I'm not sure why the designers picked the Shakespearean theme: the Palace of Oberon houses a water-jet emerging from a rockpile and supporting a golden crown, the water toppling over a grotto beneath.

I could well have seen the Fitzalan Chapel when I was last at the Castle (I viewed it from St Nicholas's Church in 2016, but that doesn't count), but wouldn't have remembered any of it. As well as being present in the east window of the Chapel, as I posted here in 2016, St Catherine also appears in the stained glass of the Castle Chapel too (as below), but round the corner in the mausoleum-chapel of the 14th Duke and his wife is an entirely unexpected image - a statue, showing the saint with sword and book, standing on her wheel. It seems that the Duke may have had a particular devotion to her as the inscription on his tomb certainly includes the words Sanctae Catharina Virginis et Martyris, but in the semi-dark I couldn't make out all of the cramped and abbreviated Gothic script. I cannot find anything written to explain this. I left the saint a note: it is, after all, nearly a shrine.

Fruits of the Spirit

It was the morning of the Village Show and, despite the extraordinarily unfavourable growing conditions in recent months, some dogged local allotment holders and gardeners were turning up to drop off their entries. Ella the former Rainbows group leader was guarding the car park beside the church (which we use on sufferance of our neighbours) and was accosted by Lara who'd been for a run. Lara is still just about a parent-governor at the Infants School and Ella was a parent more years ago than she might prefer to recall. It was a lovely community occasion, they agreed, and from that moved on to a discussion about how communities like Swanvale Halt function. There are economic elements - the few remaining businesses, especially the café and the small supermarket - and social ones, including the Infants School itself. There's a secular primary school further away from the village centre, but from our point of view, and that of people with at least some faith such as Ella and Lara, the Infants School links into the church, bringing one into the other. The children may not grow up with any particular degree of faith, but they will have had some exposure to the deposit of stories and images that make Christianity up. It, and the building constructed to express them, will be something they have in common even if the theology that makes it more than that isn't something they buy into very much. 

That doesn't sound a lot. In fact it is very nebulous and unmeasurable and impossible to capture in Church of England mission statistics. But I would argue (as I think I mightn't have done once upon a time) that it is not nothing, especially in an age when there is little else that brings communities together. Remove it, and you would miss it. You can attempt to construct ways of communities expressing their solidarity and identity and they always seem hollow. I'm reminded of the various well-meaning efforts of humanist groups to come up with some sort of alternative to 'church' that functions in the same way as 'church': they eventually seem to devolve down to stand-up comedy and singing 'Sweet Caroline', and fizzle out. It is as if, to express our common humanity, we need to be committed, however fuzzily, to something more than our common humanity. Funny that.

Caniculares Dies

 ... only with fewer actual dogs. In Swanvale Halt this sharp summer, the canines keep inside for most of the day the same way the humans do. These are quiet times at the church, punctuated only by the roster of events that happen every year - the Feast of the Transfiguration which we try to observe with an outdoor mass in the churchyard (and easily succeeded this year), the ecumenical open-air service in Hornington, and, yet to come, the Village Show. That's likely to be the least successful of the three, given current conditions which have shrivelled the dahlias and reduced the allotment tomatoes to the size of, well, currants. 

 When I can come up with literally nothing I can bear to do at home at the moment, I have a wander about, pray for the people I know or indeed don't know in the streets I go along, and challenge the Lord to bring me into contact with someone who might appreciate talking to me. Sometimes he does, but I'm realising this venture is not very effective if I follow my usual inclination and try to polish off whatever tasks I might need to do before heading out, maybe in the middle of the afternoon; in the middle of the afternoon, everyone who can is hiding out of the sun. The café opposite the church is deserted; the roads are silent. 

I take with me my little directory that lists not just members of the congregation but also baptism families, funeral next of kin, wedding couples, and other contacts. I tell myself I might even knock on a door or two. And at that point I realise how neglectful I have been. Not only have the numbers of all these pastoral contacts declined over the years - which I can't do much about - I have been very shy about keeping in touch with people, and now it's a bit late to go calling on someone whose child I baptised a few years ago and haven't seen since. Despite having a set of very good excuses to knock on a door, I think 'shy' is probably the right description. At the back of my mind I have a conviction that they will have no interest in hearing from the priest, and at the front of it a set of rationalisations for holding back - it's raining, it's the weekend, it's the holidays, it's not the holidays. I have been very foolish, and changing my outlook would do everyone good, not least me.

Apocalypse on the Wireless

Time to use the Giles Fraser graphic again, though I think he has a beard now. I do my best to avoid ‘Thought for the Day’ but I caught it on Monday which was a great way to begin a week off. In this particular instance Fr Fraser was dealing in apocalyptic, ‘the End is Nigh’ language which he averred that the Church had given up since the possibility of nuclear annihilation pushed it towards encouraging optimism instead. This was only good sense, Fraser says, because nobody believes in the Book of Revelation stuff anymore. But now, as he sits looking at wildfires eating up acres of English countryside, it seems to have suddenly struck him that human society might actually, really, be under threat. He couldn’t bring himself to be hopeful in any way, he concluded, to come up with some statement about God stepping in to sort it all out: he sounded on the brink of tears. And indeed, ‘Thought for the Day’ is not usually so revealing.

I was surprised. Giles Fraser claimed never to have heard a sermon in an Anglican church that dealt with the Apocalypse, but I talk about it relatively frequently, and it’s there in the background even if not explicit. The final section of the 1996 Anglican Cataclysm – sorry, Catechism – begins ‘The Christian lives in certain hope of the advent of Christ, the last judgement, and the resurrection to life eternal’, while I’ve just finished reading a book on the suffering of the non-human Creation all five of whose theological contributors, from very different perspectives, nevertheless envisage a final sovereign act of God in which creation will be renewed, the current order of things pass away to be replaced by a perfected one. When I was in the process of converting, my friend Comrade Tankengine, son of an old-fashioned High Church Anglican clergyman, told me the prospect of the End of All Things was the only thing that gave him the hope to carry on at all.

We could take the apocalyptic tradition as symbolic rather than literal. In fact we probably should, unless we’re really ready to countenance the appearance of multi-headed dragons as part of God’s process of preparing the world for the End. In this reading, the strain and violence embedded in the texts represent the increasing recognition of good and evil as humanity advances towards what God wants for it. And it may be so; but that recognition could still require the destruction of everything we hold dear: the two might go hand-in-hand, and we should take account of the possibility.

I faced this a few years ago when thinking my way through the climate emergency. I was not sure then, and am not now, exactly how likely the End is to arise from the changes we can see around us at the moment: for what it’s worth, I think not, though I’m not at all sure our current civilisation will make it through, and that’s a shame enough. But it behoves us to think about it, and pray, and not for that Day to take us by surprise, like the thief in the night.

Gronthill Fottoes, I mean Fonthill Grottoes

Everyone knows how William Beckford built with slave-plantation cash the mighty, impossible Fonthill Abbey, whose central tower collapsed, before decamping to Bath and constructing the more feasible Beckford’s Tower where friends of mine have stayed, courtesy of the Landmark Trust. But the Fonthill Estate also contains follies, in addition to the insane folly of the Abbey itself. You know when you’re entering what was the Fonthill Estate – the modern version comprises only the eastern half of the land Beckford would have been familiar with – because of the monumental gateway with its hideous faces which was built not by Beckford, but his father (also, helpfully, William Beckford). Beckford pere also created the lake which his son enlarged, and it was around the lake that the follies were grouped. The most accessible now is a ruinous cromlech-like structure on a steep slope, quite rightly fenced off as it looks as though a good gust of wind would bring it down: this is sometimes described as ‘The Hermitage’, but I think that’s more likely to be the towering stone structure in the wood just below the cromlech, with a little arched doorway and two small windows. That building is separate from the Tunnel, which runs beneath the road that follows the west side of the lake: that you can only glimpse through two roughly circular apertures and a largely filled-in doorway, though according to Historic England it has ‘three arched openings leading to a domed chamber and then to a curving tunnel’. Probably the best site, the main grotto on the east side of the lake, is on private estate land and inaccessible, though a LiberFaciorum page has some photos of a structure with fake stalactites which may be it, unless that’s yet another unmarked folly on the public side which I missed. Headley & Meulenkamp don’t cover the Fonthill Lake follies at all, only mentioning a grotto in passing when they discuss Old Wardour and the grotto there; I got the reference from Dave Hamilton’s recent Weird Guide and he rather implies he followed the private path on the east of the lake to find the big grotto, which I balked at doing having seen two vans resplendent with the Fonthill Estate logo either driving about or parked up. An angler I asked insisted you could see the private grotto from the western side just by the boathouse, but that’s the Landing Stage constructed by William Beckford Senior, complete with four huge stone ‘urns’ (except that they don’t contain anything).

Does Fonthill count as a Gothic Garden? I’m inclined to say No. It has some of the elements we see in places that do, especially the arrangement of features around a lake or river, and Beckford was familiar with such sites – Hackfall drove him almost to distraction with imaginative excitement – but there’s nothing here that tends to the sublime, nothing intended to excite terror or induce gloom. Maybe if we had a clearer idea of how the structures we can see now were intended to work as an ensemble we might take a different view.

Weary Words

Swanvale Halt is quiet at the moment. Some of this is down to the schools being out, and some to the heat (it was absolutely deathly at the height of the heatwave). And things are quiet for me: a little spate of funerals and baptisms has come to an end, and it was in any case nothing like the numbers that I used to deal with when I was first ordained. I have found myself feeling increasingly exhausted; there have been days when dragging myself back up the hill from the church has actually been hard work, and I don’t think that was entirely to do with the heat. Why should it be, if I have less to do?

Every now and again I speak to Dale, a former parishioner, over Zoom: we started during the pandemic. American Dale has had so many careers and courses of academic study that I find it a challenge to work out how they all fit in: now he lives a somewhat health-restricted life in a south Midlands town. He thinks I am a cleverer and better person than I am. This week he mused on the kind of relationship he and I have, which is a sort of pastoral one but also one of peers. I used my tiredness as an example: I can’t tell actual parishioners how weary I feel as this will probably make them less willing to bother me with things I really should be bothered with. ‘Reverting to the career as a therapist I never pursued’, Dale says (another one? really?) ‘I would say that close attention to people – which is what Jesus does – is exhausting and a day that ends in a feeling of exhaustion and fulfilment has succeeded’.

I wondered how often ‘fulfilment’ described how I feel at the end of a day. Certainly I appreciate the sense of having had a helpful interaction with someone, even Mad Trevor, no matter how tiring it has been. My frustration is that I am so often unable to offer anything which feels meaningful. But is the meaning simply in the interaction, in the listening? Dale’s thoughts suggested it might be. I also reflected that I might also draw some energy from those interactions, a different kind of energy from the sort I expend, in the same way that in the world of physics kinetic energy gets converted to potential energy and vice versa. Maybe it was having fewer such interactions that made me feel exhausted, and the quiet time was a sudden withdrawal of a kind of energization I relied on.

That could be something that changes the whole way I view areas of my work, and life beyond my work in fact. Amazing that one can reach 56 and not know something so basic.

(Photo of my day-off lunchtime trip to a local pool for context)

Apologia Pro Vita Sua

The Principal of St Stephen’s House while I was there, Fr Sheehy, remains an Anglican parish priest in Lancashire, but his successor Robin Ward (who I have only met a couple of times) crossed the Tiber a few months ago in a move which surprised absolutely no one. The most recent edition of the magazine The Lamp carried an explanation of Canon Ward’s conversion – ‘Shivering at the Gates’, he called it, lifting a phrase from John Henry Newman whose experience he feels he shares. There is a lot here that’s moving and illuminating, even if one’s eyes widen at a panegyric of the stern ‘sacramental Protestantism’ of the old Prayer Book coming from a quarter of the Anglican Church which spurned that very Book whenever it got the chance. But the article also reveals to me how remote I now feel from some of the concerns that seemed to occupy my thinking in those strange, far-off days when I first found myself becoming a Christian in an Anglo-Catholic context.

I think the shift first began when I came to regard the model of the Holy Spirit working as a kind of divine electricity for which the wiring had to be exactly right as fundamentally loopy. It’s an idea that Dr Ward still subscribes to: he describes realising that because of the increasing number of women bishops in the Church of England ‘it would eventually be the case that the lineage of all or at least most male bishops would trace back to a female consecrator’ (what did you think would happen? one might ask). This is the idea that an ecclesial body, a Church, is legitimised because it contains legitimate bishops rather than the other way around – in Fr Couratin’s deft summary, a belief in ‘hands on heads’ rather than ‘bums on thrones’. There are other ways of framing the issue. Do we see Christians in a variety of ecclesial structures showing the fruits of the Spirit? Of course we do. Can a soul be saved outside this or that ecclesial structure? Of course it can: not even the Roman Church now reserves that capacity to itself alone. It could very well be that God intends one kind over another, and I certainly believe schism is a sin – though against charity, more than against truth – but it’s a secondary matter. The point is, in so far as you can, to pursue your salvation where you are: ‘let every one abide in the same calling wherein he was called’, says St Paul. We might also remember Christ saying to the disciples that he has ‘other sheep not of this fold’ when Dr Ward describes his sense of homecoming into ‘the One True Fold of the Redeemer’: I have long since ceased to believe that on earth there is any such thing, whatever the Lord meant by that ambiguous statement.

Of course Dr Ward never says the Church of England is illegitimate. He says it is compromised: ‘pluralist, strained, apprehensive’, and in saying so is quite right. It is the prospect of escaping that environment which seems to appeal most to him, and as life draws on the sense of rest has a powerful appeal. Who wants to carry on battling for what seems constantly under threat? I have often thought that a basic motivation in our Church lives is to try to safeguard the experiences which led to our conversion, unless we have consciously moved on from them. Dr Ward’s apologia makes me reflect that sometimes – no, often – those experiences come packaged in an entire ecclesiology. But to the me of 2026, ultimately, all these things seem of little importance beside the ability to say my prayers, and carry on discovering the way of Christ alongside others. So long as a quiet 8am communion service exists within reach, I still have that even if I am not saying it anymore. Nothing else seems to matter overmuch.

Lending a Hand

Revd Harriet looks after the church at Temple Piper; one of four in her patch, though the diocese is doing its best to close one of them. Mind you, they've been trying to do that for about fifteen years. Several years of looking after four churches has taken its toll and Harriet is off sick, and I went over to Temple Piper to fill in at their main service.

It is always instructive to see how other churches do things, because within the main tramlines of Church tradition we tend to believe that we are representative. Swanvale Halt may be a moderate Catholic church but we shouldn't be that much different from any other church which has a eucharistic tradition, should we? The Mass is the Mass, even if you call it something else.

All right, Temple Piper used a slightly different order of service with a baptismal creed and a simplified confession and absolution, but the eucharistic prayer was the same, and there were the same kind of hymns and texts from the same translation of the Scriptures. I didn't have a chasuble to wear (a maniple? you jest) but there was a stole, and at the last church I helped in they didn't even have that. 

It was the communion arrangements that differed. At Temple Piper they have got into the reprehensible habit of using individual tumblers of wine, though the president still has a chalice. They use a small oval gate-leg table as an altar, exactly the same as one I have at home and which I have photographed so you can get some idea of what I'm talking about. Into this constricted space, I had to cram rather more than luxuriates across the full-size altar at Swanvale Halt, namely:

• a brass missal stand
• a wooden holder with thirty-five tumblers of ordinary wine and a handful of non-alcoholic ones which had to be moved from a pew to, well, somewhere I could get to them, and an inconveniently large cloth laid over the top of the whole thing
• a chalice and a cloth that was probably intended as a purificator
• a dish of loose wafers under a plastic dome with a handle on the top
• a tray with cruets and a lavabo towel
• an ablutions bowl

At least there were no candles. Those were on the old high altar a couple of yards behind me. 

I found myself constantly recalibrating my gestures to try and make what I had to work with conform to what I felt I absolutely had to do, without tipping it all over and causing chaos. My main problems was that there was no spare space to move anything into, and I could have done with a couple of extra hands. The sidespeople had overestimated the number of people taking communion by about ten, which was no mean number for a congregation of a bit less than forty. With no other instructions I ended up tipping the unused wine tumblers into the chalice and swigging what was left, but in theory I suppose I should have rinsed them all out. I have a horrible feeling they were just taken to the sink. I was sweating and trembly by the end and it wasn't really to do with the warmth of the morning.

A Little Light Shining

Christine the dog lady maintained in 2021 that she would never have another Boxer after her third died. In the end she took a final beast in from rescue. The next few years were a roller-coaster in terms of her own health and Larry's, and I was with them both when a kind vet came to ease his passage from this existence during a storm on Hallowe'en last year. 

A few days ago Christine called in at her local church to pray and light a candle. This church usually has a volunteer at hand when open; the votive candles they use are not the tea-light kind but upright ones that are stood in a tray of sand. Christine says all the candles available had been lit before, so she asked whether there were any new ones: the answer was that this particular church was committed to Eco-Church policies and when there were candles left alight at the end of the day blew them out to be used again. Christine doesn't have any superstitious feeling that if a candle is blown out the prayer is cancelled or anything of that sort: but on a deep level she found it hard to articulate it felt dismissive. 'I wouldn't have minded if they were used for something else in the church', she told me, 'but not reused in that way'.

At Swanvale Halt we use little tea-lights at the votive candle stand. Occasionally I have found a row of candles lit and then clearly blown out very soon afterwards. I don't know whether this happens when people don't understand the normal candle-lighting protocol, or when someone might be mucking about, but what is obvious is that nobody ever chooses to light a candle that's already been lit once. If I find a candle that's been lit and then extinguished, I usually relight it and let it burn down: the alternative is to gather them up to use for decoration at Christmas or something, but really for that you want candles that will reliably burn for a certain amount of time, so typically it isn't worth it.

This raises the question of what we think we're doing when we light a votive candle. 'The candle burning its life out before a statue', the New Advent Catholic Encyclopaedia says sensibly,'is no doubt felt in some ill-defined way to be symbolical of prayer and sacrifice', but that 'no doubt' suggests that the custom is not really talked about. I think we feel that the candle flame is carrying on our prayer once we have stopped, not of course in any literal way, but that it represents our continued intention to which we may return. To extinguish a votive candle, or to expect someone to reuse one, does go against that sense (note that nobody cares at all about having a secondhand candle for a liturgical purpose, like the ones lit for the Crib Service or the processions at Candlemas and Advent Sunday - they don't perform the same function). I wonder whether church communities realise how pursuing a perfectly reasonable objective can make them seem mean and petty in practice.

Nearly Forgot

I can only imagine Il Rettore was to blame for prompting the church, completely unsuspected by me untill it happened, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of my priesting on Sunday. We had fizz and cake and I cannot complain because there ought to be more occasions for that. I was also presented with a very striking vase I'd admired when it was under consideration for sale at the Spring Fair, and a certificate from the diocese. I had no idea such things existed - I suppose just remaining functioning is an achievement when I think of all those who have left the ministry!

Strangely the anniversary is never one I pay much attention to unlike some of the people I was ordained with and I wonder why that is. In any case I always think of my ordination to the diaconate as being the moment my status changed in the eyes of society, myself, and maybe even God. Perhaps it was because I never really sought this peculiar existence and would have been perfectly content to remain in the museum world had I been turned down at my selection conference: I thought it was what God wanted me to do, but I could have been wrong. I do always think an ordained person should have an idea of what they might try to do if they lost their faith or just their job, but my shadow life has changed over time. I now think it might be good to work for a dog rescue, but I don't think there's much scope there. Even fantastic Bliss Cavalier Rescue only has one part-time employee helping to save beautiful canines!

St Catherine in Bruges

Jean our sacristan and her husband have been on holiday in Bruges and spotted this image of St Catherine in the city museum, part of a group from 1623 including St Barbara and the Magdalene. I like the fact that she's treading on a bit of the wheel.

To Put It Mildly I Remain Unconvinced

Late to the party as ever, I hadn’t heard of Accelerationism before Liber Faciorum decided to place before my eyes an article describing it. As a philosophy it’s nothing new: in a way Karl Marx was the original Accelerationist, positing the idea that the contradictions and conflicts within capitalism would intensify until they reached breaking point. Marxists, though, usually tend to prepare for the inevitable crisis rather than start monstrous capitalist monopoly businesses in an attempt to hasten it, which is the hallmark of all different brands of Accelerationism – that steps taken in the direction of breakdown and collapse are actually to be welcomed as they hasten us towards the catastrophic change we need. Contemporary sorts of Accelerationism spend time thinking about how technology fits into the picture, and they are often popular with those who work in, or are in charge of, tech businesses pushing the boundaries of what it can do.

The article pointed to the central influence of Nick Land. A philosopher at the University of Warwick in the 1980s and ‘90s, Mr Land developed a set of ideas about capitalism, technology, and how-we-know-what-we-know that eventually settled on the idea that we must ‘grasp the real by stripping it of all anthropomorphic dissimulations’, that is, by facing the inevitable fact that our truths, hopes, dreams, pleasures, pains and thoughts are all ended by death, and that any form of apocalypse is to be welcomed as it forces us up against the limits of our illusions. Death, for Land, becomes the ultimate test of the validity of any system of thought. I wonder whether anyone has written more than in passing about his gathering of like-minded souls, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, as anything that nuts sounds something of a hoot. Nick Land resigned from Warwick in 1998, went off his head on amphetamines, and resurfaced in Shanghai where he has become an inspiration to the alt-right. I was led inexorably from him to various sorts of pessimist philosophy – to David Benatar’s Better Never to have Been of 2006, Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race of 2010, Ray Brassier, the Dark Enlightenment, and other kindred distractions. You can look all that up should you choose.

Pessimist philosophies, of their nature, are convinced of the unbearable horribleness of existence and that regarding it as unbearably horrible is the only rational response to life. David Benatar has a neat set of logical propositions about the nature of pleasure and suffering which prove that human life (and arguably all life) inevitably comprises more of the latter, and that any feeling we might have to the contrary is delusional. Reading them you can almost picture him sitting back and dusting off his hands: job done.

Back in the days when I would argue how little we could rely on the evidence of our senses as bases for moral systems, my friend The Heresiarch used to say to me, ‘These are just philosophical problems, most people just get on with life’. I was annoyed with him then, as it seemed to me to amount to a refusal to think, but I have more sympathy now than I once did. Yes, they do just get on with life, and with more of it behind me I rather think they are right to. Even David Benatar’s deft syllogisms are a bit of a trick, as they sidestep what people actually feel about their lives and declare that they are incorrect to feel it. I suspect that at the root of such pessimistic systems of thought is something like the following: I am really clever, and I am miserable. How can it be that the great majority of human beings appear existentially untroubled by the sheer levels of misery which seem so obvious to me? It can only be that they are able to ignore it because they are stupid, because they have failed to grasp the reality of their situation in the clearsighted way I have.

You can see how this conviction that you are part of at least one sort of elite (nobody ever seems to imagine they might not be) could push you towards the kind of far-right position Nick Land now seems to espouse from his eyrie in China, but you can also glimpse it in all sorts of extreme ideologies, both political and religious, that absolutely require convincing everyone that human life is much more wretched than they think it is. If this means you, you run the risk of falling into your own pit, as Nick Land did, and succumb to the logic of your misery. I think, perhaps, of William Perkins, the Puritan divine who, to accommodate the fact that Christians could say all the right things and maybe even feel all the right things and still remain inescapably sinners subject to the inscrutable and unaccountable will of God, developed the idea of ‘temporary faith’. This looked exactly like real faith even down to the internal feelings of conviction a believer might experience, and could conceivably last all the way to death; but it would not be the kind of faith that saved a person and you might pass beyond the Bar only to find you were damned after all. Not surprisingly, because he was not a psychopath, Perkins seems to have ended his life in a sort of depressive breakdown as a result of his own thought.

WH Auden was fond of dividing human beings into contrasting categories, and one of these was what he called Alices versus Muriels. Muriels, he described, were sensitive souls so shocked by the failure of the world to be perfect that they ended up regarding it as hopelessly corrupt and compromised, while Alices were pragmatic characters who just got on with life. You can imagine which group he thought he fell into. I suspect that much of my time I have been a bit of a Muriel, but strangely while being a Muriel has I think propelled me towards Christianity – how do I find a sense of meaning in a world which seems unable to support one of itself? – it has refashioned me into more of an Alice. Whether ‘life is worth living’ judged by balancing values and disvalues seems to me a meaningless question, and I am less interested even in the strictly existential question of ‘meaning’; I may have sought one, but I can easily see how the great majority of human beings rub along without one beyond what they experience.

If all you want is to lament how awful humans are and human life is, and you’re not interested in how it could be better, I really don’t want to know. Do shut up, and don’t expect a research grant.

Back to Painshill

It is fully twenty-one years since I was last at Painshill Park, with Dr Bones on that occasion. That was blazing summer, but a rainy weekday ('holy well weather') works just as well to follow the walks, wonder at the follies, and muse around the lake. Here and there I could glimpse other visitors, but no more than a dozen of them.

On our last visit the Grotto - the largest in the country - was still being restored and on walking through it it's boggling to remember that it had been entirely ruined, the roof falling in during the 1940s. In fact many of Painshill's features were even more ruinous than they were intended to be, as the garden's designer Charles Hamilton did things as cheaply as he could, often using timber painted to look like stone - and even then he couldn't repay the colossal sums he'd borrowed (from the bank run by his fellow gardener Henry Hoare of Stourhead) without selling the estate and having to leave the very landscape he'd created. The Painshill Trust has in many cases not just restored the follies and features, but actually reconstructed them. 

I'd not really noticed what a superb composition Painshill is - how carefully the views are arranged, how skilfully the experiences are built on until you reach the fairytale Gothic Tower right at the far end of the estate, how the lake is constructed to look like a huge expanse of water here, a tranquil pool there, or a river in a third place, because you never see it in its entirety. It doesn't count as a 'Gothic Garden', but it's a huge delight.

As you approach the Gothic Tower you can hear the A3 thundering just beyond the trees, which explains part of Nia Broomhall's strangely moving poem displayed outside:

Ave Verum, in Different Ways

For Corpus Christi I made my way to St Nic's in Guildford for Mass and Benediction. The service started late for these things, at 8pm, and it was a lengthy do, including three processions - a big one carrying the Blessed Sacrament round the church, a small one returning it to the aumbry, and a middle-sized one to the statue of the BVM to sing the Angelus. There was also a new idol of Our Lady of Walsingham to be dedicated so there was a lot to pack in even without the music, most of which was very pleasing though I could have done with the Gounod Sanctus being shorter by, say, the whole of its length. Just taste, I suppose. The congregation wasn't large but there was an appreciable number of people in their twenties (probably) - and not just chaps, and not a stitch of tweed in the place.

Our Evensong and Benediction at Swanvale Halt was somewhat more modest - no extended cast of ordained people, servers and choristers, and only four of us altogether. I'd slipped the celebration to the eve of Corpus Christi so I could accept the invitation to Guildford, but I don't think that made a difference. And yet these days I prefer the gentle, lower-key, and lower-stakes.

Speak For Us, Papa Leo

Every ordained person knows the story of the medieval monastery whose report to their Bishop Visitor went ‘the community hears a sermon every Lord’s Day, excepting Trinity Sunday, owing to the difficulty of the subject’. Marion our curate used to complain that she seemed to be down to preach every time Trinity Sunday came round, which I maintained was merely an accident of the rota. This year I decided to go for broke and combine the theme of Trinity Sunday with Pope Leo’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, the ‘response to Alternative Intelligence’ as it is billed. ‘Can you do a précis for us?’ a member of the church had asked, and I wasn’t sure I could. I opened the pdf on my laptop and was greeted with the popup ‘This seems to be a long document. Would you like an AI summary?’ No I wouldn’t! That’s the point!

M.H. is about much more than AI. It takes in work, truth, democracy, war, and what it means to be human. Andrew Brown in the Church Times came up with a response which seemed to be written for the sake of disagreeing with it, but stumbled across one interesting point, that the Pope ‘seems to be the last defender of 20^th-century social democracy’; there is some truth to this, as it struck me how much 20^th-century social democracy, one way or another, derives from Catholic social teaching (Leo quotes his namesake’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum in many places, the XIV paying tribute to the XIII).

I also found myself wondering why the See of Canterbury (‘not quite a Patriarchate but more than a Metropolitanate’) never comes up with anything similar to the teaching documents that emerge from Rome. Whatever you may think of the current incumbent or her immediate predecessor, whose talents may lie elsewhere, Rowan Williams demonstrates that there is no necessary gap in intellectual ability across different sides of the Tiber. The Pope certainly has more people immediately around him to feed into the process that produces an encyclical document, but that wouldn’t be impossible to overcome. I wonder whether the collegial (or to put it less warmly, committee-based) operational ethos of Anglican structures militates against something that really requires a single shaping mind, no matter how many people funnel in information. It must also be the case that the ABC sees themselves far less as representing a tradition than balancing and uniting traditions, or trying to, that are themselves very disparate. It is far harder to speak authoritatively (or indeed interestingly) in those circumstances.

Finally it strikes me that, although we all look to the See of Rome to come up with thoughtful analysis on behalf of the whole Christian world, it seems to me that it’s really only done that since about the time of Leo XIII. Before that, the Papacy was concerned with matters of power and authority, and of shoring up traditional forms of it; of course it was, being until 1870 the ruler of a state in its own right. Depriving it of the Papal States was the best thing that ever happened to it.