Cast of Thousands

You can look back through these posts and check the previous times we've hosted the ATC enrolments. On this occasion it all went off more or less perfectly, even though there were no fewer than 23 new recruits to be sworn in. One of the NCOs put them all in alphabetical order and whispered their names to me as I went along the row shaking their hands. I didn't need to do that, but I think that it's a good gesture to make - a formal expression of welcome. This time the conversations withe relatives included questions about what being a 'chaplain' meant and what my hat is called, and you know the answer to that query if not the first.

Third of Three

The Mayor’s Civic Service, the SCP, and yesterday the Air Cadets for their enrolment ceremony: three special events piling up in the same week in just the way I would rather they didn’t. Last time we tried using the church for the enrolment we started ridiculously early; I should have insisted we wait a bit to make sure people arrived, as one parent turned up bang on time to watch their proud offspring, only to find they had entered a parallel universe in which they were already late. On this occasion it went perfectly, the boys and girls had a chance to parade outside, I remembered to scribble down the names of the cadets being enrolled so I could use them, and the only mistake was that two of the cadets who were supposed to be there weren’t and two who weren’t were, so that, while they all got a certificate, it wasn’t necessarily their certificate. All of the right teenagers, then, but not all of them in the right order. There were refreshments for the relatives in the hall afterwards. One parent was the Clerk of Governors to the Infants School, while another had come to see a son make his promises who was baptised at the church thirteen years ago (I thought I recognised the name, and checked in the register); she has a daughter she’d been saving up for a baptism for a while, she told me. It’s beguiling, this business of being a priest of a parish church. It makes it seem as though you have friends. Perhaps you do. 

Taking Aim

Here in Swanvale Halt Rectory, whatever regard we may necessarily have for the Supreme Governor, our interest in his family is slightly less than we have in, say, the historic rolling stock of the railways of New South Wales. However, in all the current controversy over the apparent declarations of the S.G.'s younger son - 'apparent' pending the actual emergence of the English text of his book, in which we will take no interest either - we were most surprised by the reaction to his statements about his service in Afghanistan. They were markedly less tasteless than the ones he made about the same matter a decade ago, and his point seems to be that it wasn't so much a case of him deliberately keeping count of the number of Taliban insurgents he despatched, as the Army Air Corps counting for him: something a person in that situation couldn't avoid knowing. 

Far more interesting than this, for someone who has worked with the military and is still linked to them in the form of the Air Cadets, is the vocal rage and apparent shock from senior military figures at the idea that soldiers might have a sense of detachment from the people they kill. 'That's not what we teach personnel' they insist; but, though they might not be taught, personnel are hazarding their mental health if that's not what they learn, because how can you conceivably kill someone while wondering about their family, their hobbies, or what they might have had for breakfast? To argue that such detachment isn't an absolutely necessary part of combat life is fastidious in the extreme, though there is another word for it. The question everyone wants to dare to ask a veteran of active service is 'Did you kill anyone?', and the inevitable followup is 'How do you feel about that?'  Well, here is one answer: uncomfortable, but not more. What do you expect? I doubt the Taliban put many of their servicemen through trauma counselling either.

I've not long since finished reading Angela Beleznay's Incident 48, an account of the worst bombing raid on my home town of Bournemouth during World War Two. In a little over a minute one May afternoon in 1943 - although it's hard even now to tally up a completely reliable figure - something over 200 people died, slightly more than a third of them civilians. The youngest was a toddler of 21 months. The attack on Bournemouth, where the Germans knew many Allied personnel were concentrated in the hotels awaiting deployment, was itself part of a retaliation for Allied bombing of industrial centres in the Ruhr which had killed hundreds of civilians, let alone military personnel. That's what war is like. It's monstrous, terrible, and that's why you don't engage in it unless you absolutely have to.

A few weeks ago we held the ceremony to swear in the new ATC recruits in the church. I told their parents that part of my role was to help the cadets think through their identity as cadets in a more reflective way than they might otherwise get a chance to do. I think we might be having a conversation at some point shaped around the statements of Citizen H Windsor and see where that takes us. 

The Church amid the Heat

At the very moment at tea-time on Tuesday that I was listening to a BBC reporter talking about the fire at Wennington in Essex, and mentioning the parish church there, I was watching this aerial footage on Sky, showing that very building. The church was safe in the end, though as you can see the flames came very close, the scorched grassland just a yard or two from the foot of the tower. The image reminded me of the famous photo of St Paul's Cathedral emerging from the smoke of the Blitz, although SS Peter & Paul's, Wennington, is not the grand cathedral of the diocese of London: this doesn't look like an image of defiance, but of vulnerability. The photos of burning houses from Wennington that appeared in the newspapers were more terrible and violent than this, and people live in houses and not in churches, but for me this picture is about the fragility, not merely of the Church, but of the whole of human society in the face of the chaos our hydrocarbon-based economies are unleashing. Of course there are always wildfires in heatwaves. Accounts of holy wells and other folkloric springs often refer to water-sources which 'kept running even in 1921', a once-proverbial time of drought when, again, crops spontaneously caught light in the fields; but as we know the temperatures are significantly higher now.

Here in Swanvale Halt I had a number of tasks on Tuesday which took me out into the heat. There was a mass in the morning (attendance: 4), and then, just after lunch, the Infants School Leavers' Service. The church felt relatively cool when we started and less so after 150 people had been in it for an hour. I stood outside to say goodbye to everyone as they left; there was quite a breeze, but it just felt like being in a fan oven rather than a conventional one. Finally I was at the Air Cadets in the evening. Turnout was unsurprisingly low but the remaining youngsters sat dutiful and even engaged through my presentation on Change. They had the option of leaving the hut if it became unbearable but none of them did. I did cut it a bit out of compassion, though. I'm coming up to a week's leave which means I am psychologically winding down somewhat, but even putting that to one side the heat hardly encouraged me to do anything more than I absolutely had to!

A Particular Celebration

Hornington has few claims to notoriety: one of them is that it acquired electrical street-lighting unusually early, though most of the time when this is mentioned the fact that it only lasted about ten years before the town returned to gas gets omitted. Anyway, when most of the country was lighting beacons for the Queen's Jubilee, Hornington decided instead to turn on an environmentally-efficient electric light mounted on the side of the Market House. 

There is no need to involve Christian clergy in these sorts of events, so I consider it a huge privilege that I was asked. I walked alongside the Mayor (who is a Green councillor and a republican), and ahead of her husband (ditto) and the Deputy Mayor (a Lib Dem councillor and a republican) and hers (ditto). Behind us were the other councillors; ahead, the Town Band and the Air Cadets bearing the Union Flag, and RAF Sergeant Tina who, in lieu of the vacationing mace-bearer, carried the silver symbol of Mayoral authority. I gather that just before we set off the nearest Band members asked the Cadets, in a whisper, whether they knew what anyone was supposed to be doing. 'Just walk to the Market House', answered the standard-bearer. In fact, they didn't know either, but they always give a good impression of doing so.

Of course we gave thanks for 'the lifelong service of our sovereign lady Queen Elizabeth', but also for all those who served during the pandemic and really every act of service and dedication in the community which, I said, were our light in times of sickness, war, and want. And the light was successfully switched on. It was all celebratory and strangely tongue-in-cheek as well. We all knew it was both good and right and proper and yet a bit daft as well. You can't get more British than a group of non-Royalists all giving a hearty three cheers for Her Maj. Is this because she has outlived any sense of outrage at her position - that it hardly seems worth protesting at the position of someone who - whatever else happens - has little time left to her in this earthly realm? Our Hornington celebration was about us all, as much as her, and it is not a bad thing that we can hang from this one individual our sense of solidarity and care, and practice our charity towards one another. How different things will be when she is gone.

Opening Up

'Not before 18^th July 2115’ is the O/C of the Air Cadets’ estimate of when the Corps will issue guidance to local squadrons responding to the Government’s announcements on Monday releasing coronavirus restrictions, ‘and even then it will amount to “local commanders are finally responsible for any decisions”’. I expect the Church of England to come out with something earlier than that, and imagine Bishop Sarah Mullaly of London who is the lead of the Covid Recovery Group will have something to do with it; but to judge by previous experience the bottom line with us will also be ‘it’s down to you’. We will of course have to interpret and mould whatever guidance we get around our local circumstances, but a steer, a rationale, would be helpful, and I don’t know whether we will get that, because it will require making some sort of implied public judgement about the wisdom of the national approach and the Church doesn’t seem to want to wade into those waters.

Not that the Government is telling us what it really thinks, how many deaths or cases of post-covid syndromes it regards as ‘worth it’ in that impossible but inescapable calculation of risk and benefit. Driven by a historical perspective – covid-19 isn’t the Black Death, it isn’t even SARS, MERS or Ebola – I’ve always looked on the pandemic with what I like to think of as a ‘robust’ attitude though I concede others might have different words for it. We have got off, so far, really relatively lightly from this. We have vaccines which have been developed miraculously quickly and which batter infection down significantly at every degree of severity. While we can argue which of the measures the Government is casting aside we might prefer to retain (as I write I’ve only just heard that lateral flow tests will no longer be freely available from the end of the month, which is not exactly helpful), it is hard to see, in broad terms, how things are going to be much better than they are now. And this is what, I suspect, we may not want to face. Looking at my own reactions, I see a conflict between what I know rationally and what I feel emotionally.

Rationally, once we (we, being humanity in general) let covid escape and circulate, that was it: eradication became impossible. The misjudgements made by virtually every western government made it inevitable that it would eventually become an endemic disease. SARS, MERS and Ebola are all far, far more deadly, but they’re also easier to control: in the case of MERS (case fatality rate 35%) you basically have to steer clear of camels and you should be OK, and even the terrifying Ebola can be stamped on pretty effectively with determined hygiene measures. In contrast, a disease that can only be controlled by stopping ordinary human contact, but at least a third of whose victims won’t even know they’re infected, can’t be contained indefinitely, unless you test your whole population, constantly, forever. Eventually, even the countries which have been far more effective than us at preventing infection, New Zealand, South Korea and the like, will face the question of what to do in the long term when vaccines don’t provide anything like full protection. We (we being the British) can’t get to where they are, and the likelihood is that they will end up closer to where we are. So, rationally speaking, this is probably as good as it gets.

But even I don’t want that. What I want is a world in which I don’t think about covid any more, about the possibility of being infected or infecting others. This is my emotional, as opposed to my rational, state. I think it’s the desire I have been secretly harbouring behind the longing to ‘get back to normal’: ‘normal’ doesn’t really mean the absence of restrictions, it means the absence of anxiety. And while I expect that will probably come, it will only come after several years, perhaps, of living with it, of our expectations being reordered around this new reality. We will have to grow towards normality, not legislate for it: the relaxation of rules doesn’t mean the relaxation of the heart. Although a government can help it or hinder it, it can’t make it happen.

Stood Up

On Tuesday we were all masked up and socially-distanced for the standing-up of the ATC squadron. In this photo it doesn't look as though there are many cadets present, because most of them are in fact in the classrooms at the side of the main hall, watching o/c Brian's presentation via linked computer screens. It's all very well thought-out including a strict one-way system operating through the building, which makes you think very carefully about whether you really need to move at all and necessitate a journey outside to get back to where you have to be. The staff and NCOs have all worked tirelessly (once they've been allowed to) to make it all function, though Brian has not implemented the recommendation that the HQ have a 'sterile room' where the cadets can leave stuff. Not only would it cease to be sterile as soon as the door was opened, it makes you wonder whether the authorities have any idea what a sterile room is and the challenges that any squadron HQ in the country might pose to providing one without complete rebuilding.

I have a pretty robust attitude to COVID risks, mainly because, thankfully, I am pretty robust, but of course there is the matter of the other people I am in regular contact with and the sheer inconvenience of either being ill, or having to shut yourself away because you might be, which in the context of Swanvale Halt church would be extremely inconvenient. Tuesday was the first time since March I've been in an enclosed environment with people moving around other than shops and the church, both of which are far easier to cope with and believe are safe. The HQ building is actually quite constrained and I couldn't help a little tremor of concern at the thought of all that breath swirling around, even with the windows open. It's most unlikely, I think, that we will make it through to vaccine-land without being shut down again at least once. 

Remote Access

Just a couple of weeks ago, there were certain areas of our computers where very few of us had ever been; under the stresses of the times intrepid souls have ventured into those unfamiliar hinterlands and have discovered - Microsoft Teams. From never having participated in anything of the kind before, yesterday I attended two meetings via Teams in the evening. I couldn't get the program to recognise my computer's camera, which seems thoroughly suspicious but appears to be due to a box not being ticked on the Teams website. The school governors' meeting was calm and orderly, marshalled by the school secretary who'd worked out how to manage the program and then tutored individually those of us who were a bit clueless; the ATC committee meeting, in contrast, was chaotic as nobody knew quite what to do and everybody kept playing with the format. It was a bit like watching attenders at the Toddler Group battling over a favoured toy.

I could have attended a third meeting had I had the will, of the management board of our local ecumenical Christian youth work charity. That wasn't carried out via Microsoft Teams but Zoom, another application people have only just discovered. Unfortunately - having just mentioned the Toddler Group - I can't get out of my head one of the songs we customarily sing, 'Zoom zoom zoom, we're going to the Moon.' And now, friends, if you are familiar with that lyric, neither can you.

Gaps In Knowledge

My evenings at the ATC are sometimes quite straightforward: I have to talk through the Corps' 'basic values' and encourage the cadets to think a bit more deeply about what they're doing, and to see some of the ambiguities around authority and responsibility. But when I am doing 'Padré's Hour' with the more senior cadets I am left to my own devices and must therefore, as HL Mencken said and as I am fond of quoting, 'squeeze my brain until something comes out'. The truth is that I have a very limited idea of what's really of concern to a collection of teenagers (albeit the best-behaved teenagers you could imagine), and so try to come up with a session that opens out of something that's happened to me, or is happening at the moment, and out of that provide some opportunity for thought and exploration.

But I am increasingly aware of how I have gathered rafts of general knowledge over the course of fifty years and they haven't, and I'm not certain whether it's simply because they haven't had the time or because young people don't come across the same things now. On Tuesday I found myself explaining what the Elgin Marbles are and, perhaps more surprisingly, that there had been such a thing as the Spanish Civil War - I covered that, to some degree, at school when we did The Causes of the Second World War. I suppose if I can communicate the sense that the world is a richer and stranger place than the cadets might otherwise have realised, and that Christianity is part of that, I won't be completely wasting my time.

Mind you - I remember the time when I asked them what the bloodiest battle fought on British soil was. The Battle of Britain? they tried, and a couple of other guesses. Then one of the chaps who always reminded me of a young Matt Smith put up his hand hesitantly and it was though I could see him dredging something up from the back of his mind. With a slight frown he said, 'Was it ... Towton?' 

And, dear reader, of course it was. I could have wept for joy.

The 2019 Spring Fair

Over the course of Spring Fair Day this Saturday the meteorological keynotes were a nippy breeze and intermittent sunshine, but in fact we had virtually every kind of weather at some point apart from snow. There were a couple of spits and spots of rain and one thirty-second shower accompanied by sudden gusty wind which sent the fainter-hearted fairgoers scattering, but most of the time it was fine and another of those years when I could see ranks of dark cloud heading over the hills and then peeling off to east and west and harmlessly passing by. We would have had a hard job to match up to the bumper takings of last year, but things went moderately and there were no disasters. The Air Cadets attended for the first time and their assistance putting up and taking down tents and gazebos bought them free hot dogs and burgers. When the Infants School came on to do their customary Country Dancing I heard two teenage girls reminiscing about when they did the same. 

Remembrance

Two new war memorials, a session with the ATC and one Remembrance service later, and the 100th anniversary of the Armistice at Swanvale Halt is over. The memorials were the one at Smallham against the road outside the little chapel there, and the garden at Hornington Cemetery where I did a double-headed service with the Vicar of Hornington. Our service went as well as it could possibly have done: more by luck than judgement we began the Silence at precisely 11am, which doesn't always happen.

I and the Air Cadets talked about what we might be thinking in our various Remembrance events. Much of the public comment, whether from those who support or oppose the whole circus, assumes it's 'about' one thing, which is not my experience nor that of the young people at the Squadron. In my teens I saw it as a horrendous, irredeemably imperialist display, but now I find my feelings are an amalgam of the effects of personal, national, and universal human history. I think of my Dad and his National Service with the Devon & Dorsets, and my great-uncle who was a prisoner of the Japanese in WWII. I think of the young men of Swanvale Halt whose names are on our memorial, and of those who fought against them in exactly the same conditions and with exactly the same feelings: of the victims of war, civilian and military, on all and every side, in conflicts wasteful and arguably justified, past and present. I think of what we might do to avoid such pain in the future. All these remembrances flow together and the mute poppy somehow expresses them. We write our own meanings onto it, rather than passively accepting anyone else's.

Heartfelt Thanks

In between my two sessions at the ATC I was sipping a cup of tea (there's something amiss with the Squadron kettle, the tea was cappuccino-frothy even before I put the milk in) and spotted a handmade thank you card on the noticeboard. As I suspected, it turned out to be from a young woman who was a member of the Corps and is just about to go off to university. Becky used to come to Swanvale Halt church too, and though she claims to be an unbeliever she still volunteers with children with learning difficulties at another, much bigger church not far away. In tiny, exceedingly neat handwriting Becky described all the benefits she'd gained from membership of the ATC, physically and emotionally. It was very sincere and yet curiously formal. (It didn't look like this picture, by the way, in case you get the wrong impression).

As Becky gets older she'll develop in other directions and her few years in the Air Training Corps and its effects may seem to occupy a different and less crucial place in her life, but for now it's central  in the business of growing up, a transitional phase. We all learn to contextualise our life events out of all recognition, and be a little more reticent, perhaps, about them, perfectly reasonably so. But her youthful commitment opens the possibility of change and development which any organisation, especially a church with its truly cosmic weight of inertia, vitally needs. I would like it at Swanvale Halt.

Sorry to Break It To You, but Not All of the Bible is That Edifying

It was a long session with the Air Cadets on Tuesday: I led a group through their session on Integrity (which is one of the ATC's four Core Values), took another for Padré's Hour (which turned out to be about half an hour as other things needed to be done) and enrolled three new cadets. It was very cold outside the HQ building, which must be why the O/C forgot that I usually say a prayer after the enrolment, and led us all back inside as soon as possible. Yes, that must have been it.

I try to finish sessions with a relevant Bible story if I can, as plenty of the cadets will only have the vaguest idea what's in it. For Integrity, I summarised the story of David and Bathsheba, as it's quite long, and then read the bit where Nathan the Prophet confronts David with the truth about his bad behaviour. Five teenage boys sat with their mouths open. 'That's not much of a example to set,' offered one, which is quite true. I got the impression that their shock was as much that the Bible might contain such gritty realism as a comment on the narrative itself. 

Inconsistencies Here and There

There were a number of reasons why poor Tim Farron (sad that the phrase 'poor Tim Farron' trips so easily off the keyboard) should have resigned as leader of the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems' election strategy of trumpeting themselves as the Voice of the EU-Remainers got them nowhere, or next to nowhere. Mr Farron barely held on to his own constituency, and the former leader Mr Clegg was chucked out of his Sheffield seat. The resignation of a front-bench spokesman could have turned into a stream of similar events, explaining why the announcement was made when there were, well, other news stories ongoing. But Mr Farron himself put his decision to go down mainly to the difficulty he found combining leading a political party ('especially a progressive, liberal party') with his Christian faith.

Over the course of the last couple of years Mr Farron has been questioned repeatedly about his attitude to homosexuality and has never been able to come up with a clear enough answer to stop the question being asked again. 'A better, wiser person than me might have been able to deal with this more successfully', he admitted in his resignation statement, but humble though that is the rest of his announcement makes it clear that he thinks virtually any liberal-minded Christian faces an almost impossible task. He can't reconcile political leadership with 'holding faithfully to the Bible's teaching', and has found himself 'the subject of suspicion because of what I believe and who my faith is in'; from which, he concludes, 'we are kidding ourselves if we think we yet live in a tolerant, liberal society'. 

Sad though Tim Farron's statement is, I don't agree with him. What his experience perhaps shows is that, indeed, someone who aspires to be the Prime Minister of the UK can't believe that a whole segment of the population is morally repugnant when this is not what the country at large thinks. I'm not sure this is a sign of intolerance: a government and the person who (potentially) leads it should, to some degree, represent the way the polity conceives itself. It'd be a bit like arguing that it's OK to be a racist if you're not going to do anything about it. And in any case, not all Christians accept that 'the Bible's teaching' points inexorably in one direction, the direction that does indeed demonise a segment of the population. We do not all think this, and the calamitous aspect of Mr Farron's departure is that it reinforces the impression the general public already has that we do. 

Yesterday our Deanery Chapter met and the Area Dean related some of the matters that had come up in a recent meeting with the Bishop. Our Bishop is apparently scared that the decision of the Anglican Church in Scotland to endorse same-sex marriage will embolden his own clergy to bless same-sex relationships and he's made it clear that anyone who does so will be disciplined. We can, as has been stated before, 'say prayers with' same-sex couples, but not bless them. So what might be the tone of those prayers that we can say? 'Dear Lord, your servants Ellie and Isla come before you here today. We just bring them before you, Lord, and we just ask that you will draw them away from the vile and unnatural path that they have taken. We just hold them before you, Lord, we just, we just, we just ...' And if that's not what you pray, but your prayers are in some sense positive and generous, then how does that differ from 'pronouncing a blessing'? I have sworn an oath of canonical obedience to my Bishop, and so I have to do as I am told, but I don't have to like it, and I don't have to pretend otherwise.

The other day I looked up the Naval Military and Air Force Bible Society's Cadets Prayer Book to see whether it might be of any help to me with the ATC. In its pages it includes 'a prayer for accepting my sexuality' which is a non-committal enough bit of text but whose mere existence indicates the ambiguous position in which Christian clergy find themselves. Anyone who works with secular organisations of any kind now finds themselves in a world which is absolutely and unshakeably committed to equality between different forms of sexual expression and, if they are so inclined, has to go through hoops and convolutions in order to toe the party line against it. The whole exercise disgusts me, and I hope to God that sooner rather than later the bishops will damn well get over themselves. 

Who Is Sent My Way

A middle-aged professional gentleman sits in my living room talking to me about his spiritual journey and his sense of being called to be ordained. I'm one of the local vocations advisors, my role being to meet with people who feel a call to some kind of 'authorised ministry' in the Church and to help them work out what that might be, if they aren't already sure. Most of the ones who come my way are from an evangelical background, some from a non-Anglican one and who have been directed to this or that evangelical Anglican church to be gently inducted into the ways of the Church of England. This man, however, is very much an Anglo-Catholic, which is unusual. He has a devotion to a rather obscure European shrine of the Virgin Mary, rather than Walsingham like everyone else, which is also unusual; his experience of Anglicanism runs the whole gamut from All Saints Margaret Street to St Mary's Bourne Street (a bit unfair but you know what I mean). He has by his own admission a somewhat rambling style of discussing any particular topic - our discussions are punctuated by statements such as 'how did we get there?' and 'what was the question?' - which is rather fun. I listen to him and hear curious echoes of other people I've known over the years, including me. 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Later in the day Evening Prayer is interrupted by a young man who comes through the darkness of the church to tell me he's decided to become a Christian as a result of going to a Traveller-oriented church meeting some miles away. It's not convenient for him to get there regularly, so he asks what time our services are. I listen to him and conclude that plunging him straight into the deep waters of a Swanvale Halt Sung Eucharist is probably not what he needs at this stage, so I say I will make enquiries locally and get back to him.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I head off for an evening at the Air Cadets to go through the enrolment promise with nine new recruits aged 12 to 14 or so. We are wedged into a tiny classroom as I go through the things they will have to say. They're brilliant, actually, and I have a great time, quite apart from what they may think of it all. When I mention that when Mr Trump becomes President of the US he will also have to make public promises, they all groan and cough. It takes me a while to twig that the most articulate of them, disguised in short hair and identikit combats, is a girl. It's rather exciting to have a group of teenagers listening to my every word, no matter how inadequate and bluffing those words sometimes are, and I must make sure it doesn't get too exciting. They are not my cadre of acolytes! 

Mess and Un-Mess

This is my new favourite image of the church, drawn by Sofia for her visit to Messy Church on Saturday. I think the figure may be me, although it's not completely clear. 'I have allwais been happy when I have been to Mesee Church', she comments on the reverse, and she seemed fairly happy on this occasion. It was our highest attendance at M.C. for nearly two years, though mainly because it was wet and a selection of Toddler Group families agreed that they were going to come along for something to do.

Our Messy Church has evolved over the seven years it's been running. Intended by its originators as 'church for people who don't do church', we've never found that that is the case: instead our congregation tends to be a mixture of church families, members of other churches, and only a minority of folk for whom M.C. is their only contact with Church life at all. It functions instead as part of our children's and families work more generally, and there's a lot of crossover with the Toddler Group and the club we run at the Infants School. We've noticed over the last couple of years that the children are on average getting younger, which is probably a function of the fact that our Toddler Group has been doing well and producing more contacts.

So that was that. Sunday was something of a contrast as I was drafted in to lead the main Remembrance service at Hornington as the parish church is in a vacancy at the moment. As in most places, we start with a parade and wreath-laying at the War Memorial in the park and then go back to the church for a service. It's all fairly standard: town band, councillors, uniformed organisations of sundry sorts and varieties. It was the ATC's turn to carry the Union flag this year and I like to think they acquitted themselves pretty well. I have of course had a lot of relevant thoughts running round my mind lately in preparing my sermon for what's always the biggest congregation of the year at Hornington. I was going to allude to intra-national conflict and the need for reconciliation but gradually thoughts provoked by my recent intensive immersion in PJ Harvey's work took me back to the nature of Englishness, war, and how God's judgement differs from ours. This was going to be my Let England Shake sermon, although it would be unlikely that anyone there would recognise the submerged references scattered through it. I did wonder whether this was all terribly self-indulgent, but thinking and praying didn't result in anything else coming to my mind so I went ahead. 

A family I knew from Farncombe Infants were there so I could rope them in to begin the theme of how we think about ourselves and others. 'How would you describe yourself in three words?' I asked master Lee, sitting with the Cubs. 'Confident, chatty and cheeky,' he offered, having been coached by his Mum to say that and nothing else, and from there it was into the meat of the thing. I'd requested a lapel mike rather than using the pulpit - I do dislike pulpits, though we had one at Lamford, and for this occasion of all occasions which can so easily escalate from reverent solemnity into unrelieved pomposity, preaching from a pulpit is just too much. 

I think it was all right. Our MP had the affrontery to be complimentary, but then I suppose that's what he's there for and would have said the same had I read out a script from an episode of the Teletubbies. While I was on my way back to the car I was called back by a quartet of elderly medal-decked people who thanked me very heartily which is the memory I will be grateful for. They addressed me as 'Father', though I suppose I had been wearing my biretta, which I always do when I mean business. 

Grace-Less

We've been looking forward to the ATC Squadron's 75th anniversary for some time. I turned up to the parade in the afternoon to find that I wasn't obliged to do anything at all apart from provide moral support, so that was fine. I didn't even have that many remarks about my responsibility for the weather (it rained before the parade and afterwards, but not during). In passing the chairman then asked whether I'd say a grace at the celebratory meal in the evening: 'it seems right that we should have one', he said.

Now, you'd have thought there was a suitable RAF grace somewhere around that I could use or at least adapt, but a round of mild Googling revealed nothing at all. I did find the blog of a clerical colleague elsewhere with some sound advice on how not to offer grace at a meal; but nothing that was actually helpful. Consequently I felt constrained to make something up, which was something like this:

"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

God of grace, you ride upon the wings of the wind and make the cloud your chariot; look with tender mercy on all the business of this earth below, on those who serve and those who wait, and on this company gathered here as we mark the history that connects us. In what we share, both the benefits of this food and the fellowship of one another, may we be blessed, and tender to you the joy of gratitude, and the true service of the heart. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

It has a sort of pseudo-Prayer Book rhythm to it which rather pleased me. One can go either minimally religious or very religious indeed and I found myself veering towards the latter but did say to the multitudes that they could give thanks inwardly in whatever way they felt moved. Ms Formerly Aldgate liked it, anyway, though she was drinking her wine quite fast at that stage in the evening.

How Did This Happen?

When, some years ago, I became the Bishop’s Surrogate for this area – the person deputed to hear oaths which, technically, should be sworn before the bishop for the purpose of getting married without banns being read and things of that order – I said I’d do it provided I got appropriate training as I was very unsure what to do. My training arrived in a brown envelope from the Bishop’s Registry and consisted of a booklet. Well, I thought, that’s distance learning.

As you know not so long ago I became Chaplain to the local squadron of the Air Cadets as I thought it was a helpful institution to have links with. My predecessor didn’t do a great deal apart from turn up for enrolment services, but it was suggested to me that I might be a bit more involved and do ‘Padre’s Hour’ with the cadets from time to time, to which I breezily said Yes, it being entirely open as to what Padre’s Hour might comprise. I was advised to contact one of the other padres in the area, who, it turned out, had moved. A second I haven’t been able to coincide diaries with. A third was friendly but uninformative apart from advising me to pay as much attention to the welfare of the adults as to the cadets. There was a ‘manual’, I was told, which followed the national RAF chaplains’ ‘Patterns for Life’ scheme, dealing with a variety of big moral and emotional matters such as ‘Respect’ or ‘Integrity’.

And so in advance of my first session this Tuesday I looked through the bewildering pages of ‘Patterns for Life’ and battered together something which I hoped would take about 40-50 minutes depending on how talkative the cadets turned out to be. I was terrified. Of course these teenagers were likely to be more tolerant, helpful and respectful than any other group I am ever likely to encounter, but I still had next to no idea how what I wanted to do or say would go down. They weren’t awfully talkative although probably more so than they would have been had I simply launched into the work without the ice-breaking exercise I worked out beforehand. I do sometimes get the impression that I just suck the initiative and confidence out of any group of people I deal with. I came home, insisted on doing the washing-up alone (Ms Formerly Aldgate and I would normally do it together), and had some port to recover. I spend so much of my time doing things I seem attitudinally completely unsuited to. There must be some purpose to it, mustn’t there? 

First Duty

On the day that the UK began taking part in bombing Islamic State, there was some irony - not quite a bitter irony, I settled on the adjective 'sour' - that in the evening I did my first duty as Chaplain of the local Air Cadet Squadron, helping to enrol a group of new cadets. Years ago I used to work for the Army (only as a museum curator, very civilian) and came out of that experience with a great deal of sympathy with the Force, which I manage somehow to combine with near-pacifism in political terms. 

The Drill Hall area is like a little world to itself at the end of a street, surrounded by houses. It was raining quite heavily last night so out of compassion for the families of the new cadets to be enrolled the parade and enrolment took place indoors in the rather cramped surroundings of the hall. It strikes me as rather quaint that the local rector is seen to have a natural role in this process (although the guidance notes you get from the RAF do at least recognise that, shockingly, some cadets may well not be even nominal Christians), and equally quaint to be referred to as 'Sir'. Being confronted with a lad I knew from the infants school a few years ago as one of the recruits, saluting and heel-clicking, was something for which 'quaint' was hardly the word, as was the fact that the staff refer to the recruits' mums and dads as 'the parental units'. 

I am usually very reluctant indeed to take on new responsibilities but have done in this case as it gives me a rare opportunity to talk to young people who I get next to no chance to interact with in any other context. Having a padré around to 'do moral leadership' with the cadets offers, in the o/c's words, 'a slight counterbalance to some of the more gung-ho chaps who think the answer to anything is probably to bomb it'. Perhaps Mr Cameron could come and take part. I am trying to think of the ritual of the military as similar to the ritual of the Church, somewhat silly but with a serious purpose. As opposed to somewhat serious but with a silly purpose.