Smaller Than You Thought

In fact all the Easter services went rather well apart from a confusion about hymn numbers on Sunday ('I feel like a bingo caller', said Il Rettore as he tried to read out the correct one), but having also had to pop to the hospital to take communion to a congregation member on Easter afternoon as all the chaplains were off sick I was very glad to observe 'Bank Holiday Order' on Monday and only do the work I absolutely had to. This was complete early enough in the day to allow me to take advantage of the weather and zoom to Uffington. Algorithms had thoughtfully brought to my attention a new display at the museum there and as I'd never seen either Wayland's Smithy or the White Horse of Uffington I decided to go. 

Apart from the distance I ended up walking (further than anticipated) things being on the small side was the theme of the day. The Neolithic long barrow of Wayland's Smithy has two massive sarsens guarding its entrance but the proof that it was made by fairies is that only the Wee Folk could have fitted inside the burial chamber. I'd thought it was like the West Kennet Long Barrow which has space for visitors to wander around inside but no, it's only tall enough for an adult to crouch in. At the foot of a tree I found what were clearly 'cremated remains', reinforcing how important the place is for some people.

The Horse, too, I had imagined ranging over perhaps a hundred yards of a broad hillside, and P Newman in Lost Gods of Albion says that's how long it is, but I wouldn't have put it much bigger than 50 feet! Curiously that made the figure all the more moving to me - to think firstly that our remote ancestors made this effigy that they wouldn't even have been able to see properly, and also that it has survived three thousand years or more, just a fragile, delicate thing, an absence more than a presence, turf removed to reveal the chalk beneath. 

I did know that Uffington Museum was going to be tiny. It started out as a 17th-century schoolroom, and Bank Holidays are one of the few times it's open. There is basically one room, with a mezzanine forming a separate display area; that 'exhibition' that tempted me there was a small display about mythological landscapes, and I was very pleased with it. Very good graphics and information, a video with an Anglo-Saxon poem being recited against a background of spooky trees, and items left by visitors at Wayland's Smithy, from dreamcatchers to decorated stones. Easily the eeriest is a white-painted plaster ram's head deposited in the chamber itself. Most odd. I'm glad I wasn't the one who found it. 

Holy Week 2025 ...

… has offered a variety of experiences.

Monday: I attend on my Spiritual Director and mention that the Bishop, for the first time ever, is doing my ministerial review this year. 

    Me: I don’t want to say the wrong thing. 

    SD: Would it matter if you said the wrong thing? 

    Me: Well, he is my father-in-Christ to whom I owe canonical obedience – 

    SD: Oh, don’t give me that ****ing ****.

Wednesday: The new Dean at the Cathedral offers to hear confessions at a set time for the first occasion in years. I don’t have much to say but go and find myself tearful with thanks.

Thursday: I and Il Rettore are back at the Cathedral for the Chrism Mass. As always, the Bishop preaches but delegates the service and blessing of oils to his suffragan, which mitigates the point of the whole thing somewhat. I am tired enough to enter a dubious state during his sermon in which I hear every word but can’t recall a single one. (At least I think I am hearing them: I’ve noticed that when I reach the stage of nodding off while reading in bed I can start fully awake and then fail to find on the page the words I have just read absolutely clearly). Fr Donald from Lamford, sitting beside me, makes some theological point I can barely understand. Afterwards Il Rettore asks me what I thought and I tell him the Devil seldom rages at me as hard as during the Chrism Mass. He shares that he felt like walking out during the sermon. At the Maundy Thursday vigil I do my usual exercise of bringing my friends into Gethsemane. Of course Professor Cotillion’s dogs are there, and Bartle barks to keep the demons away while Brindle licks the Lord’s hand to comfort him.

Friday: During the Mass of the Presanctified I get caught out by Drop Drop Slow Tears as the communion hymn and almost can’t carry on. In her new position in a big choral church in the North, my friend Cara has her first experience of prostrating herself in their equivalent liturgy and finds it ‘curiously restful’. Two priests of the Society mansplain administering the chalice to her during the administration itself: ‘I’ll administer it in a way you really won’t like in a minute’, she didn’t say. Paula the pastoral assistant and her husband Peter drop off hot-cross buns on my doorstep which present the ideal way of breaking my fast in the evening.

Saturday: I take communion to Janet, among others that day. We get to the end, and then she says ‘Did I tell you my friend is going to bring me to church tomorrow? I didn’t like to tell you not to come after all. Thank you, I know you’re so busy’. I mentally tot up all the things I have yet to do, from polishing the wall plaques to setting out the crockery for breakfast tomorrow.

Easter Day: A few fewer than in recent years at the Dawn Mass but the other services drew numbers pretty similar to last year. A pink rubber duck appeared in the churchyard, apparently part of a cancer awareness campaign, so it came to the Dawn Mass and I popped a photo on LiberFaciorum.

Decease of pontiffs notwithstanding, happy Easter Week to you all!

Easter 2024

Holy Week at Swanvale Halt was bookended by syncope. Lillian, our former Lay Reader, keeled over during the Palm Sunday mass, and at 8am on Easter Day a pregnant young woman who I’d never seen in church before but came accompanied by two older women one of whom I recognised from the streets of the village, also found standing up and sitting down in order too much, and passed out briefly. She was ever so embarrassed.

This was how it all worked. I decided to do a healing mass on Monday evening, Compline and Benediction on Tuesday, and Tenebrae on Wednesday, as ever, low-key services which brought the expected handful of faithful souls (not quite the same handful on each evening, but nearly). The bigger Triduum observances of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday had lower gates than the unusually high numbers of last year, but it wasn’t bad to get 23 at the dawn mass on the Sunday the clocks went forward (most of the conversation in the vestry beforehand orbited around how little we’d slept and how we couldn’t remember which of our timepieces would automatically update), 18 at 8am and 100 at 10am for the first time since 2018.

For the first time in some years I remembered to order a garland for the Paschal Candle from the local florists: if only I’d also remembered that I had to carry on watering it after the great excitement was past, the daisies would have survived longer than they did. 

And That Was Easter

If attendance is an indicator of success, our Holy Week and Easter services were successful this year. In previous years I've had to abandon the outdoor Stations of the Cross in which we follow a little route around the centre of the village because nobody had turned up to join me, but this year there were ten souls including Clarke who is 14 and autistic and after each station wanted to know where we were going next whereupon, having been told, he expressed his incredulity with enthusiasm. We had more people at the Maundy Thursday and Good Friday liturgies than I think any time since I arrived in Swanvale Halt, and that was also true of the Dawn Mass on Easter Day. Several congregation members who might normally be expected to turn up later in the day were there for that early service, but the others held up decently too. 74 (including 6 under-16s) at the main mass is no great shakes compared to pre-pandemic days, but it's still a slight advance on 2022.

Once the rain stopped today, I went out for a wander around the paths and lanes east of Swanvale Halt. I'm pretty sure I've been to all these places before, if not approaching them from that direction! As ever the Surrey hills present an intriguing patchwork of textures and visions.

A Chrism Mass, or Something

Several of my colleagues of The Other Integrity have been posting pictures this Holy Week of the Chrism Masses they've attended with the Bishop of Oswestry or His Grace of Fulham all wearing nice Roman vestments and cohorts of clergy in concelebration gear. I doubted I would do the same for ours from Guildford, although the occasion is less trying than it once used to be since the suppression of the clergy music group who used to accompany the worship: the cathedral musicians wrested back control in a coup and the Mass sounds much the better for it.

But why wasn't the Bishop presiding? He preached, but left Her Serenity the Dean actually to celebrate the Eucharist. To be fair he is a very efficient preacher, although on this occasion I remembered his introductory gambit 'If you met Jesus in your parish, would you invite him to dinner?' and my attention wandered after that, I fear. But really part of the point of the Chrism Mass is that the Bishop celebrates with their presbyters around them, as was the case in the first few centuries of the Church: it isn't just to 'celebrate ministry' (which now includes laypeople who we are all encouraged to bring along) and pick up three small bottles of oil. In fact Bishop Andrew always used to delegate the Mass to the Bishop of Dorking, but even in those circumstances it at least expressed something of the idea of shared episkope between the two. Even most generously interpreted, that can't encompass the Dean. Could it possibly be that the Bishop thinks it's more important to signal inclusion by making sure a woman presides at an all-diocese eucharist, rather than do what the Chrism Mass is actually there for? Could he really have that 'thin' an appreciation of what he does?

(Mind you, a few years' time and we may all have to go somewhere else for the event anyway)

Easter Gone

No evening Easter services at Swanvale Halt this year (I've tried doing Evensong in the past but had only a handful of takers all of whom had already been in church in the morning) so my liturgical duties were all over by noon; I still had some work to do, but no more church. We were still not completely back to normal, as our usual post-dawn mass breakfast team had covid in the family, and numbers are not what they were in 2019, but it all went smoothly considering the disruptions of the past two years and the main mass had more communicants than at any service since the pandemic started. There was even a family I'd never seen before and a scattering of children. Polly and her little brother Warren were among them. They gave me this portrait and a pair of eggs - one fresh from the family chickens, one chocolate - in these charming egg-cozies. My eggs in future will never be cold, and I will never want for an image of myself to use on official documents. I am so very, very fortunate that the people give so much (not just the eggs, to God's work as well) and love so freely.

Meanwhile Marion our former curate is confined to her house with covid and missing out on Holy Week and Easter in her new church at Tipley in Devon. She and her husband joined with the online worship at where else but Fr Thesis's renowned church in the west end. His internet ministry burgeons!

Christos Anesti!

By now that should not be news, but Dr RedMedea is Greek and so for her Easter has come a bit later than in the Anglican calendar. On her terrace on Sunday afternoon we were introduced to the custom of egg-smashing, which does require some temporary relaxation of social-distancing regulations. The red-dyed hard-boiled Pasch eggs are knocked together and the holder of the smashed egg has to eat it: that was me, on this occasion. You might have thought that Greeks do seem to like smashing things but in fact this custom was once very widespread and still takes place in bits of England even if I had never encountered it before. Dr RedMedea was disappointed with the dyeing of her eggs but they seemed appropriately livid to the rest of us. 

Easter Contrasts

Last year I courted disaster doing the Easter Vigil on my own at home: this time there was a handful of us observing the proper rites at the church. Things that went wrong included the Paschal Candle, whose wax motifs I managed to break and which doesn't quite fit in the holder unlike every other 2"-diameter candle we've ever bought, but the fire, which is easily the most hazardous element of the whole proceedings, was lit and then extinguished without adverse incident. We had over 60 souls at the main service, more than at any time in a year, and for them it didn't matter that halfway through Bill Gates decided to send my laptop a message, thus diverting its attention from livestreaming the liturgy. Oh well.

Rounding off the day's activity (apart from Vespers) was a protest against the Policing Bill in Guildford. It wasn't a big protest, and I was glad to see someone from Hornington Extinction Rebellion, another person, at least, who could remember the last millennium as the crowd contained more teenagers than I've seen together for a long time. The speeches, once we stopped, were awful and it was a relief not to be able to hear most of them. Almost enough to make you sympathise with Priti Patel, but not quite. 

Meanwhile St Catherine's Chapel was at its Romantic best against the blue. Happy Easter!

Finding Your Place

NB. I discover I'd only saved this post as a draft, not published it!

-    -    -    -    -    -

The PCC decided on Friday to resume public worship on Palm Sunday, a week today. When I did the newsletter delivery round that morning everyone I spoke to asked me when the church was reopening: one of our most faithful members positively begged me. ‘I need to be back in church!’ So I am working out how to celebrate the Triduum in a curtailed and Covid-compliant form: there won’t be a procession on Palm Sunday, and the Easter Vigil will be done by just me and Julie the sacristan and recorded. But there will be live-streamed Compline, and an Easter Messy Church via Zoom, and I will need to work out how (and whether) to do the Passion Service for families on Good Friday. There’ll be a booking system for the Easter services, as there was for Christmas though I will be very encouraged if we turn out to need it!

It strikes even me as contextually incongruous, this antique formulation of what I do, but in fact, the more I considered what to put on the census form today, the more it seemed like a reasonable and accurate summary. It would have been more pious to put something about Jesus, but harder to encapsulate in 120 characters or less. This is both open and precise, even if, to all intents and purposes, the bishop doesn’t take an obviously close interest in his share of the cure of souls here. It is, still, not a bad place to find oneself – physically and metaphorically.

Don't Forget the Cross

Oh dear, poor Archbishop Justin can do nothing right this Easter. A peevish appearance on Youtube last week implying that keeping clergy out of church buildings seemed to be the biggest issue facing the See of Canterbury was matched by an Easter Day sermon to the nation described by one thoughtful commentator as ‘quietly disastrous’. In fact there was a link: Abp Justin couldn’t help stressing on Sunday that the Resurrection gives us ‘a hope that is surer than stone; than any architecture’. Take that to mean, ‘You don’t need churches, do as you’re told.’ But that was a minor if noticeable lapse; more serious was the quite striking secularism dressed up in religious language.   

When he wrote his short article ‘Easter and the End of Christianity’, Mark Vernon only had access to Lambeth Palace’s initial taster for the Archbishop’s sermon, but the full version didn’t change the picture. ++Justin ran with St Peter’s speech in Acts 10 to draw the lesson “the resurrection of Jesus is the solid foundation of all hopes for a better world … the first Christians were empowered with the resources to live in ways that brought abundant life to rich and poor, strong and weak, the privileged and the rejected … Even in the dark days of this Easter we can feed on hope. We can dream of what our country and our world will look like after the pandemic … There needs to be a resurrection of our common life … In the new life of the resurrection of Jesus, we dare to have faith in life before death”. “Hope”, he states, “is the Christian distinctive”. The Archbishop clearly wanted to speak to the moment, to our chaotic and uncertain circumstances.

“The message sounds commendable”, says Dr Vernon, “the words of a civic leader fulfilling his responsibilities. But it turns bishops into exemplary citizens, not heralds of another country that’s already here … Jesus did not preach a better life”. I’m not sure I’d go along with that completely, remembering John 10 – “I have come that they may have life and have it fully” – but there is certainly an abiding tension in Christian thinking between an otherworldly and a this-worldly focus. The question is what 'new life' means, and where it comes from. 

The ‘new life’ to which Christians are called in Christ can’t be completely disconnected from what happens to us in this world. Living in Christ has consequences in terms of relationships, resources and social organisation; it does indeed mean recognising the unique value of others as beloved by God, immersion with thankfulness into a life which cannot at heart be bad because the eternal Son came to share it. God is concerned with what we do. Yet the risen life means, above all, being committed to never-ending change; and the central metaphor for change in Christianity is death, dying to our sins, to our delusions, to the falsehoods that distort life. Ultimately there is actual death to face, an experience (if our faith is up to it) transformed by the knowledge that Jesus has been there first. The first Christians were indeed empowered to live in different ways, but what empowered them was the death they underwent, the dying to selfhood that they took on board when they bought into the death of Jesus. It wasn’t the hope of reforming everyday experience that drove them forward, but the revolution in relationships and the order of priorities brought about by God in Christ. It wasn’t a case of saying ‘Christ is risen, we can build a better world’ but ‘Christ is risen, his Kingdom comes’. The Cross isn’t just a horrible accident reversed by the Empty Tomb so that we mop our brows and conclude ‘that’s all right then’: both are part of the same experience. The great paradox at the heart of Christian experience is that you die and receive life back, but a life transfigured by the crucifixion, and leaving out the Cross nudges Christianity towards the this-worldly end of the scale. The one and the other sound similar, but they’re not. 

I can’t imagine ++Justin doesn’t know this, so perhaps he just felt it was a little hard to express to the millions of unchurched souls hungry for hope who would be listening to him. He wouldn’t be wrong if so. I am wondering what deaths I am being summoned to die currently. 

I’ve been deeply disheartened at times since the churches were shut and worship stopped, and I’ve become aware how much of my own productivity is driven by external pressures rather than by anything I choose to do; only today I suddenly realised that the lockdown casts a paralysing shadow over my thinking, exaggerating a tendency I have always had of coming up with reasons for delaying this or that task until something else becomes clear. I wonder where that particular sort of procrastination comes from. I’ve dipped into envy and despair. None of this is new, but it comes at me with renewed force because of the removal of some of the outside forces that usually operate on me. I found it exceptionally hard to pray for the Prime Minister when he was ill; perhaps he will discover he is called to change aspects of himself, too. Hope, after all, is the Christian distinctive.

Not Entirely Following the Liturgical Manuals

Stumbling through the liturgy took on a very literal sense this morning, as managing the Rectory stairs with the Paschal Candle in one hand and my phone in the other proved slightly beyond my abilities. Originally I wasn’t going to do anything other than a missa solitaria but when Il Rettore told me that the ceremonies of the day would be broadcast from Lamford Rectory I thought I would try too. We usually get about twenty souls at the Dawn Mass and so this would give everyone at least a taste of what happens. The trouble is that Il Rettore has a second pair of hands available and I don’t. As well as tripping on the stairs, the first part of the video I managed to shoot consists of almost total darkness, the Service of Light is out of focus (though you do get the birdsong effect I was keen to capture), the incense grains managed to avoid the charcoal almost completely and so produced nothing more than a congealed mess in the thurible, and I repeatedly forgot where things were and had to move around in a less than ideally decisive way. I haven’t sung the Exsultet since I was curate at Lamford: it doesn’t half go on a long time but at least I didn’t choke.

Even if you have one other person available it makes doing this sort of thing a lot easier. Other churches, of course, are much better resourced and can produce professional-looking experiences by layering music and speech and film together and so on; I’m not going to be able to make anything of that kind. Canon Lucy Winkett of St James’ Piccadilly made the point on the wireless this morning that the current crisis hasn’t really brought out any new moral challenges, just cast sharper light on old ones, not least our human competitiveness: how ‘productive’ you can be during lockdown. This applies to everyone including clergy. Some people find it hard enough to get up in the morning while others stifle their uncertainties, if they feel any, under activity. (Was Abi, the terrifyingly competent, holy, and sympathetic curate who gets so far under Fr Adam Smallbone’s skin in the TV series Rev that he’s relieved when she’s moved, based on Canon Winkett as the rumour goes? No one has ever confirmed, or denied … ).

If it was just my own spiritual life I was concerned about, I’d be content to sit and say the Office and pray for the parish and its people for the duration of the lockdown. I’m not exposing my meagre efforts at technological engagement and mangled liturgy, or even celebrating services alone at all, because it’s fun. I’ve taken the view that what the congregation need most is something to maintain first their connection with God, and, second, their connection with the parish, the other human beings in relationship with whom they deepen their experience of God. Quite minimal material can do that: it doesn’t need to be a multimedia sound-and-light extravaganza, thankfully. I also have a sense that our instinct to try and reproduce our normal experience as much as we can should be resisted: you can’t learn the lessons of deprivation if you’re pushing the sign of deprivation away. In the garden on Maundy Thursday, bringing the Vigil to an end, I said as usual the Passiontide hymn from Malling Abbey:

God’s Israel, a remnant left,

Must die, to bring to life

New Israel.

And God only knows what that will look like.

One of the resources I’ve sent out to the good folk of Swanvale Halt included simple ‘table services’ for Holy Week, adapted from stuff prepared some years ago by the Anglican Franciscans in Australia, and I’ve been following them as it seems the least I can do. They are structured around mealtimes, and draw the connection between the table of the altar and the table at homes. Normally I would break my Lenten fast at breakfast after the Dawn Mass with champagne and pain-au-chocolat; this morning I had the drink, and a defrosted chocolate cupcake preserved from the last pre-lockdown Messy Church. When we get through that early service, and meet in the hall for breakfast, there are always a number of sensations feeding into it. There is the feeling that we’ve been through something ever-so-slightly testing together, in the sense of getting up early and doing something complicated that could easily collapse into a shambles, the tiniest, tiniest intimation of ordeal; there’s the sense that we’re grown-ups doing something slightly mad, silly and naughty; and the knowledge that we’re taking up rituals and customs that we set down six weeks before, things that tell us who we are in Christ. Those add up to a sort of slight hysteria, all defused and dissipated over breakfast: a release. You can’t do that the same way, on your own, no matter how you might strain to reproduce the customary patterns. Of course I should have had the Scriptures in my mind, but instead it was filled with the lyrics of PJ Harvey’s ‘Good Fortune’: ‘Threw my bad fortune off the top of a tall building/I’d rather have done it with you.’

Easter 2018

This closeup picture of the Maundy Thursday Altar of Repose makes the candles look crazier than in fact they were. The flowers, as usual raided from the Rectory garden, don't amount to the spectacular displays you might see in some churches, but it was done with devotion (and some weariness). Most of the services were roughly parallel in numbers to last year, though the main 10am service today slumped by about a third from its seventeen-year peak of last year. You can't read too much into that as it's usually due to where in the week, and in the case of Easter where in the year, the big days fall. The 8am Prayer Book service was a thing of chaos. I forgot the order of events, which differs quite significantly from the modern service, and then wondered why Rick the verger hadn't brought up the offerings. I went to investigate and found there weren't any, which threw me even more.

I'm not sure I achieved much spiritually over this Lent and Easter: it remains to be seen, perhaps, in reflecting on the various things that have happened including my op. But today I finally waved goodbye to Julie's car, which has sat under a hedge at the side of my drive for well over two years. A friend of hers wanted it and took it away. I am very, very glad at this. 

Alleluia Again

Strangely the most intense moment of Easter Day came right at the beginning, as I sat with a cup of tea (not a very nice one, as it happened) at 4.30am saying the Office. Once upon a time I would omit Morning Prayer on Easter Day, reasoning that I had to get up early enough without it, but decided eventually that that was a bit lightweight and I should do it all properly. 'Properly' means that the Office comes before Mass. Now it's the beginning of the Resurrection, and it opens the floodgates of joy and thanksgiving - in a very restrained way, of course. Through the whole of Lent, the word 'alleluia' has not been heard in the Liturgy; and from the dawn of Good Friday, the Office itself has been cut to its bones, consisting only of psalms, Bible readings, Gospel Canticle and collect - even the Lord's Prayer is left out. With the first light of Easter Day all the familiar elements, said so often they've worn grooves in the soul, come bursting back and how the heart welcomes them. I often say that gratitude is where the spiritual life begins, and this all shows how wise the Church is in arranging these apparently tiny, irrelevant liturgical details. We don't have to work at summoning up feelings towards God: the liturgy does it for us and all we have to do is let it do its work, because it's the Holy Spirit's work too.

The Dawn Mass at Swanvale Halt drew more people than ever before - only by a couple, but still - and, for the first time, a dog (which did have human owners). As for the main service at 10am, although we didn't quite have a hundred communicants, the stewards counted nearly 150 souls there, which certainly tops any Easter Day since I arrived and probably for many years before then (I will have to check the figures). Where did they all come from?

Eggs Without Easter

We're used to Christians complaining about the marginalisation of Christmas from seasonal celebrations, and used to discovering that most of these stories are based on falsehoods.  Gripes about Easter are less common, which was why the Archbishop of York's current fulminations about confectionery firm Cadbury 'spitting on the grave' of its Quaker founders caught my eye. The complaint is that Cadbury and the National Trust have dropped mention of the word 'Easter' from the publicity for the nationwide egg hunt events they organise together. Is this a similar case of Christians wanting to imagine themselves marginalised, because it allows them to write themselves into a narrative in which they seem heroic?

It's a minor matter, but not one of precisely no importance. Like 'Christmas', for most British people 'Easter' has a largely seasonal, rather than religious significance, but the word means that the festivities, whatever they may be, are still distantly attached to a Christian identity which the Church can usefully exploit. 

My first thought was to try and find publicity from previous years' egg hunts, but it's not actually that easy. The National Trust and Cadbury have been collaborating over the events, held at NT sites around the country but funded and therefore branded by the confectioners, for ten years, but the logos and images used in the past aren't readily available. What little you can find does seem to indicate a desire to drop the word 'Easter'. This was from 2015:

and this from 2016:

The current image (which in fact I find rather terrifying) is almost identical to last year's, except that the somewhat apologetic explainer 'this Easter' has indeed disappeared. However it's still present, quite prominently, in some versions of the poster:

However, what may lie behind these branding decisions is less clear. National Trust and Cadbury spokespersons talk blandly and lazily about 'appealing to people of all faiths and none' which tells you nothing very much. Last year the religious Easter Egg providers, the Meaningful Chocolate Company, virtually accused other confectioners of being part of a Satanic conspiracy to 'lure children and families away from celebrating the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus', but to me the more shocking aspect of the whole thing is not the atheistic but the capitalistic.

What the publicity seems to reveal is not just the marginalisation of Easter over time, but also that of the National Trust in favour of Cadbury's own branding. The appeal of the Egg Trails is that they take place in and around the charismatic surroundings of the NT's properties, but it's the Cadbury style which now dominates the advertising, and the Trust appears happy to go along with this. Far from the chocolate company benefiting from association with the Trust, it seems definitely to be the Trust that's the 'bottom' in this particular Fifty Shades of Purple relationship. 

As you should always look for the people who are really responsible for things, you should know that Cadbury's publicity for the Easter events is handled by this company, RPM Limited, and has been for some years. 'We believe in the power of experience', they say, 'delivering value for businesses by specialising in how people experience their brands'. That tells you everything you need to know. Easter isn't bowing before the power of militant anti-Christianity so much as the power of capital. Mind you ...

Easter 2016

Easter at Swanvale Halt was a bit lacklustre this year: numbers were down at most of the services, and the Passion service for families which went so well last year was a complete disaster this, the attenders halved to twelve only two of whom were children. Partly I suspect this was because Good Friday was the only day forecast to be sunny over the holiday weekend! I can also see signs that Easter is now becoming another occasion, like Christmas, when dispersed families are under pressure to make an effort to see one another, so even in households which have some faith the emphasis is not on that but on providing huge meals and competitive present-buying followed (or, depending on the weather, preceded by) a trip out somewhere to stop children going completely ape.

However I will remember two things. At the Liturgy of the Passion on Good Friday the thirty-ish parishioners present come forward to venerate the cross in a variety of different ways while the Reproaches are sung and, as I said last year, this is always a moment of deep significance. It struck me this time how important this quiet demonstration of faith is in binding us together as the Body of Christ: our making clear to one another (though not in any self-conscious way, because our attention is focused on him) what is most crucial in our lives means we all go through this experience together. Then, after the Dawn Mass on Easter Day I watched the congregation partaking of our now-traditional breakfast of champagne and pain au chocolat and saw the same people who went through that experience of desolation now united in doing something very different, in celebrating a return to light and hope. Christ is here, too.

An Unusual Liturgical Observance

As the traditional Churches Together in Hornington Good Friday Walk of Witness got under way a week ago, it was clear that the drizzly weather had proved a disincentive to many: there were, generously estimated (I didn't count) no more than sixty of us and probably fewer. It brought into sharper focus than usual all the questions I have about what it is we are doing.  In cultures which have a stronger sense of Christian self-identification than ours, public expressions of Christian faith are also expressions of community identity; but in ours it's more about sectarian identity, about Christians saying we are still here, that the day as a holiday has something to do with the story we own and communicate. But we walked along a High Street where virtually all the shops were open, making the point that Good Friday is hardly even a day off for many people now, let alone anything like a religious observance. Are we really just making ourselves feel better? Is that enough to justify doing it? Twenty years ago my vicar in Chatham suggested we should do away with the Walk because nobody understood what it was about, and just have somebody stood silently with a cross in a corner of the local shopping centre. I didn't think he was right then: I wonder now whether the time for his idea has well and truly come.

Our local Baptist minister has argued for some years that as well as marking the gloom of Good Friday we ought as a group of churches also to mark the Resurrection. That makes sense but the we're all so exhausted by Easter Day that the idea of adding something else to the cursus ritualorum had very limited appeal. Anyway, this year the Baptists bit the bullet and did it, and a group of us - not a very extensive or ecumenically-mixed group - turned up to do the Good Friday walk in reverse on Easter Day. The question arises of what you actually do: on Good Friday you rather logically carry a cross, but what object can express Easter, whose central motif is the absence of a body? The organisers decided on a stone, the stone that closed Jesus's tomb and was rolled away when the women arrived that first Easter morning. Roll a stone along the High Street, that sounds good. Firstly the chicken-wire and painted-cloth stone turned out not to be disc-shaped, as I'd always imagined it, but spherical: and discovering it was a bit less robust than imagined the decision was taken not to roll it but carry it in a sheet. This added an element of weirdness not even I had anticipated.

I wish I'd had my camera.

Easter Passed

Nothing happens in the church on Easter Monday, so I had a pleasing day off yesterday. Nevertheless I'm somewhat reluctant to go out of the door back into the fray this morning! This doesn't mean that Holy Week and Easter were not splendid occasions at Swanvale Halt this year, which they were. Across the Triduum attendances at all our services were up - albeit sometimes up only by ones and twos - and the crunch point with the children's Tenebrae which we did for the first time last year was very pleasingly passed with double the number of people we had for that dry run, meaning that about sixty people marked the Passion in pretty traditional ways on Good Friday. At the Dawn Mass on Easter Day several people remarked how we were starting to get the hang of it (after four years!) - 'it felt a bit strange the first time we did it', said one of the servers, 'but it just seems normal now'. There were some very moving moments: the Liturgy of the Passion on Good Friday sticks in my mind, people lining up to venerate the Cross while the Choir sang the haunting version of the Reproaches written by our late organist at Lamford -

 'O my people, what have I done to you? How have I offended you? Answer me' 

Somehow the sense of God's lament, so personal and so intense, came over more strongly to me than ever before, along with the sense that these people, the people I know and pray for, are his people, the ones for whom he cares with a passion that I can only glimpse the outline of.

Of course hardly anyone comes to everything: that's not the point, it seems to me, the point being for a church community to provide across the course of Holy Week and the Sacred Triduum some opportunity for everyone to enter into the reality of God's nature as both crucified and risen, both sides of who he eternally is, and what we are called to be.

I did also participate in a liturgical observance so peculiar it will have to feature in an entirely separate post ... !

Mixed Bag

Of course despite my earlier post Easter was fine. Attendance at the Triduum services was pretty much the same as last year, except for the 8am Prayer Book Communion on Easter Day which was well down, and the 10am which was noticeably up. I felt much less under strain this year. One thing I did was to adapt the old gold altar frontal so I could hang it properly on the high altar on a rod, rather than struggle trying to fix it with drawing pins. As I sat at home with it doing the sewing I actually said to myself, 'This will immeasurably improve the quality of my life', before realising what a thoroughly sad statement this was.

The only new thing we did this year was a children's service on Good Friday, the sort of thing which has been done in previous years but not for some considerable time. I've increasingly thought it's vital for there to be some family-friendly way of marking the Passion as otherwise families go straight to Easter morning and bypass the Cross; it isn't really the children I'm thinking of, it's their parents. We didn't get a high turnout but it proved the service can work and I can polish it for next year. I adapted the pattern of the Tenebrae, reading the Passion story and extinguishing candles one after another, and having the children bring up objects relating to the story culminating in the slamming-shut of a Bible, just as would have been done at a 'proper' Tenebrae. It amuses me to take a service which is a touchstone of liturgical conservatism and do it for children.

The high point of this year was perhaps when a well-known retired bishop of a Charismatic bent and who now usually attends a big Evangelical church not far away came on our ecumenical Good Friday Walk of Witness and had a conversation with our curate. 'Have you come across a service called Tenebrae?' he asked. 'We've just done it at Emmanuel and it was very good indeed'. 'Funny you should say that,', she replied.

The low point was the pall cast, at least for me, by the fact that a homeless gentleman who had been sleeping round the back of the church has disappeared and none of his family and friends have heard from him for a week now. Some of our local youngsters thoughtfully gave him a kicking last Monday night and apparently he said he was going to go and sleep in the woods at the top of the hill, but I couldn't see any obvious sign of him there. I know, from having tried, that I can't function with problem people in or around my house, but if something bad has happened to him I'm still involved in that.

Right Let's Do This

I am fed up with the number of people telling me they're away over Easter. The way the day falls this year seems to be playing havoc as the entire parish goes on holiday, and who will be left to keep the Sacred Triduum I don't know. I suppose it's better than last year when Easter Day coincided with the clocks going forward, and getting up for the Dawn Mass was positively painful.

I shared my concerns with the local Methodist minister at our Wednesday morning shared Morning Prayer. 'It always feels like that', he said comfortingly, 'But it turns out all right.' I am not at all convinced.

I am trying to remember (among other things) that I, our curate and God will be there and anything else is a bonus, but I'm not sure I really believe that. Il Rettore used to call the reprehensible habit of looking back through your registers to see how attendance at a service compares with what you got last year as 'the sin of multitudinism', but one does like to feel one isn't entirely wasting one's time.

It did occur to me that the holy Sisters at West Malling begin every Office with the words from Psalm 34: the cantor sings 'O magnify the Lord with me', whereupon the other Sisters reply with 'Let us praise his name together'. I like this as it creates the impression that one person is inviting the others to take part in their act of devotion. I may even introduce it as part of our vestry prayers. Very comforting!

Festal Set

This Easter Day I wore my old gold set for both the 5.45am and the 10am. I don't believe I've posted about it before, so to celebrate the festal season (and my post-Easter break), here it is:

 

 

On the right-hand photograph you can see the embroidered monstrance which is highlighted with blue and white jewels. The orphreys are woven with gold fibre and the edging is in gold as well - though it's not actually particularly bold or showy, it just catches the light.

 

The set came from the now-redundant church of St Margaret, Upper Norwood, more details of which can be found here. At least I think it's only redundant, it may actually have been demolished. It came to me via the good offices of Church Antiques at Walton on Thames, as has quite a bit of my personal stuff.

 

You will notice that the maniple is not of the same design; when I bought the set it didn't have a maniple so I got that separately from eBay. You can imagine how spectacular the set this once belonged to must have been:

 

Roman chasubles have a lot of strain put on the shoulders which is why the silk tends to go there first. My set it no exception and I've had to do quite a bit of repair work as you can see in this photo:

 

From a distance it looks fine, but although I use the stole quite a bit for special occasions, notably weddings, I don't put the set to too much work. So I was twitching a bit when I came back into the vestry to get ready for the 10am only to see the Roman Catholic congregation's latest stand-in priest, Fr Stan from Poland, breeze in wearing it, sling it off his shoulders and plonk it on the table. The one they'd brought along for him was too small, so he wore mine. There's ecumenism for you.