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 packages 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.

"Escape to Danger"

Well, if not danger, mild irritation, anyway. At the beginning of the Clergy Conference at Swanwick it is now the custom to ask everyone to stand, and then those whose first conference it is to sit, and so on until the longest-serving (or -suffering) clergyperson is left standing. This year our suffragan bishop had brought along a bar of chocolate which he claimed had been in his fridge for nine years to reward the final upright cleric and it went to Barry who actually retired three years ago and is house-for-duty so had the perfect reason not to be there. Can't he find anything else to do? I forget whether it was my seventh or eighth Conference: they blur. 

I ran away on two occasions, after breakfast on each morning. On Wednesday I went to the convenience store in the village as I was desperate for digestive biscuits, and on Thursday my destination was the same but I wanted a sandwich to take away for lunch as I was anxious to get back to Swanvale Halt for Ascension Day as soon as I could. On the way I spotted what looked like an ornamental drinking fountain in a Classical arch erected to celebrate the Golden Jubilee in 2002, but on inspection it turned out, disappointingly, to be a seat. Or a niche, anyway, with no obvious purpose if it wasn't a seat. I suppose you could put a vase or something in it to mark a notable occasion, but only if you could get through the iron railings surrounding it.

There was mercifully little breaking into small groups during the sessions. There was one occasion during a presentation on statistics about public attitudes to faith when we were encouraged to talk about ways we felt the environment for faith had changed, and I and two colleagues from mainstream moderate evangelical churches were rather taken aback by another gent none of us knew who stated 'As far as I'm concerned the bishops should be repenting for leading the Church into disaster with all this liberal garbage'. There wasn't really a good reply to that as it wasn't really what we were discussing, but in the spirit of engaging with those I disagree with I should have said something like, 'So do you speak to people outside your congregation who tell you that they would come back to church if only the bishops would be tougher on the gays?' but in fact we ended up talking about the Bible as this chap clearly felt he'd succeeded someone who was so liberal they were barely Christian at all and having found a bookcase of Bibles facing the wall his first act as incumbent was to turn them round to face outwards instead. I quite approve of people reading the Bible so that was a point of contact, anyway.

The highlight of the conference wasn't quite my two visits to the corner shop but the short meeting of the SCP chapter we were able to squeeze into Wednesday afternoon between lunch and the afternoon session on Wellbeing. Seven of us gathered in an upper room and had what turned out to be a very pleasant hour in which we heard about a couple of Catholic-side-of-centre churches served by members which had grown very considerably over the last couple of years through nothing more than faithfulness and diligent care of the things of the Spirit. 'A bit of a life saver' said one colleague. 

An Hour With +Rowan

Although it was my day off, all I had to do was click the Zoom link and sit and listen to Rowan Williams talk about ‘The Catholic understanding of mission’ as part of a series organised by the diocese, so I thought it would be churlish not to.  Of course the venerable ex-Archbishop has a useful ability to summarise complex matters in simple, or simplish, formulations: he pointed us away from any definition of Catholicism that stressed universality – the straightforward meaning we might be familiar with – but what he described as a more Orthodox conception, qualitative rather than quantitative: ‘that form of Christian life which intends its members to live a risen life’, ‘to receive and give more radically than in any other form of human living’. +Rowan went on to discuss what tradition does and doesn’t mean (‘always a way of praying, not something passed on by a Masonic elite but a steady regularity of reading and reflecting’), the sacramental life as our response to God’s promises, the conviction that God is at work in the world and so our action must not be based on anxiety, and the belief that the Church is something God has made, not us.

Hmm, as I thought – I thought – we’re not actually going to get anything very practical here. The gentleman from the diocesan Mission Enabling Team hosting the seminar asked +Rowan what it might mean when a parish followed these ideas well, a rather deft way of saying ‘But what do we actually do?’ without using those specific words, it seemed to me, and Lord Williams remembered some of his own experience in parishes where the eucharist was celebrated in the homes of people who invited their neighbours and friends, or where parishioners gathered in small groups for an hour of contemplative prayer. That was OK. I suspect what we need, maybe what we really wanted, was the next step beyond what our speaker gave us – ‘Applying the Catholic Understanding of Mission’, perhaps.

This Weekend Was Brought To You By A Popular Variety of Cough Remedy

It's the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and we have been doing more than our bit at Swanvale Halt. The couple getting married on Saturday are members of Vineyard, an independent congregation in Guildford, and they took the service over rather, providing all the music and the preacher, a young woman who appeared about 17 to me but couldn't be as she referred to her teenage children. It's the bride's second go and she has a small son who at one point led his mum and stepfather-to-be on a little dance during one of the songs. I pointed out that during the Orthodox wedding rite the priest leads the couple on a (very stately) dance around the altar, but sadly I never got the chance for that. The couple wanted to take communion and that made it all very High Church even without my cope and biretta. 

Today it was the annual United Service at Hornington Parish Church, now itself united with evangelical Tophill. Tophill, it's worth pointing out, hate Vineyard Church as lots of their young families have defected there because they have a better band. I preached and told them all two stories about Nusreddin the Sage - it was relevant, honest, but I did get the impression that many people might only take away the final line, 'Who knows? The horse might sing' (you'll have to look it up). In my cassock, I was the only clergyperson who wore anything other than ordinary clothes. From my point of view, it was a bit sad to see that Hornington's aumbry is empty and surrounded by stacks of chairs, and there's no longer anything that you can point out as a Lady Chapel.

Technically, the Roman Catholics aren't supposed to come to the United Service (go to Mass, is the rule), and so in the evening we had a joint Evensong at Swanvale Halt so they could take part. That worked very well, and it was all to the good that the choir were augmented by some RCs and they managed to find someone to coax them all through the plainchant, as my vocal chords are still misbehaving as a result of a cold earlier in the week. I did warn the remarkably healthy congregation of nearly 60 that it would probably be more Evencroak than Evensong, but I got through it.

Then at 8pm I had an email to say that Sheila might not make it through the night. Sheila is Malcolm's partner, they are both 60-ish and they are the loveliest and sweetest couple you can imagine. She has been in hospital undergoing chemotherapy and the situation has not looked too bad until today. I found her fast asleep and unresponsive in the ICU, and did what was necessary, managing to get through it, as I had the rest of the weekend, with the aid of vicious Volcazone pastilles. At least they seemed vicious when I first encountered them not long after I arrived in Swanvale Halt: now I seem acclimatized to the wretched things and, like a junkie, need an ever-higher dose to have any effect.

Election Time

I have never, ever voted in a Synod election, either Diocesan or General, but now we have a vacancy for a Clergy representative and Fr Benedict from North Corley, a fellow SCP member, is standing. This is rather to my surprise, and it seems to his as well. He told me someone else was lined up as the catch-all-bit-progressive-something-other-than-conservative-evangelical candidate, but with something like half an hour to go before nominations closed they turned out to be ineligible because they only had Permission To Officiate in the diocese, prompting a frantic set of phone calls and Benedict emerging from the smoke, as it were. 'We so often lose out because the evangelicals are better organised', he complained, and this episode doesn't really do anything to dispel that.

We have 'hustings' coming up, though they take the somewhat bloodless shape of electors submitting written questions online which the candidates then answer, also in written form. Fr Benedict has encouraged me to ask something but although as we all know the burning issue is the General Synod's stumbling muck-up of Living in Love and Faith I really can't think of anything I might ask that could possibly be illuminating. He further points me towards the Evangelical Council's suggestion that parishes who find themselves out of line with their bishops might divert some funds from the diocese towards other organisations, and suggests I might ask the candidates what they think about this. I wonder: left to my own devices, I might want to ask something like:

Why do the candidates think God might want the Church of England (as opposed to any other ecclesial body) to continue to exist?

... but that might be too abstract!

Changing Times

Keeping with the principals of theological colleges, Fr Robin Ward of Staggers lately posted a link to this video of Pope John XXIII being carried to St Peter's in Rome for the inaugural mass at the start of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. What a glimpse into a long-past world. John's successor Paul VI was also borne aloft on the sedia gestatoria and fanned with ostrich feathers on ceremonial occasions with visibly less and less enthusiasm, until John Paul I refused to use them, only being persuaded to be carried on the sedia by the argument that people needed to see him, provided he could dispense with the rest of the regalia and just wear a plain white cassock. John Paul II got rid of it entirely and you simply can't imagine a pope using it again. 

But why can't you? Benedict XVI revived lots of bits and pieces of old papal kit that his two predecessors had dispensed with (including things John Paul II had gradually discarded over the course of his long reign). Here, he can be seen wearing Pope John's mitre and mantum, visible in the video from 1962 - except that the mantum has been shortened and reduced to the dimensions of an ordinary cope. Lots of trad-Roman Catholics (and the Anglo variety, too) would be very excited to think it might all make a comeback one day. No, this kind of prelatical ceremony is inconceivable now because it belongs to a version of religion that Christians have moved away from, and it's worth thinking about what is going on here, in emotional terms.

When I first saw the film, I, even I, pursed my lips in a slightly Protestant way and found myself wondering where Jesus might be in it all, what he would make of such a spectacle if he was among those watching crowds. The interesting retort to that is that this is Good Pope John being carried through the throngs flanked by ostrich feathers and surrounded by men in Renaissance uniforms: Angelo Roncalli, the peasants' son who became pontiff, and who we know was one of the humblest and holiest souls ever to occupy the throne of St Peter. He's doing it because it's part of the job. His jewelled mitre is uncomfortably rammed down on his head making his ears poke out; he's tired and even after mass has to go through the business of having his gloved hand kissed by a succession of bishops and heads of religious orders: for each of them it's a special encounter, but for him it's one in a long, long chain of bowed heads. The pomp itself is not the issue. 

The point to remember is that there's nothing religious about the grand spectacle of the papal procession, whatever might have happened in St Peter's afterwards. Before the age of film or photography, only those present would have had any idea of its existence: the audience for such an event were the people of Rome, watching their head of state in his pomp. It's essentially monarchical. If there was any kind of Christian element, it would have been the gestures of blessing His Holiness made to those on the ground. But after the Papal States were lost (around the same time, coincidentally, that it became possible to transmit images of such ceremonies around the world) it became something else - a way of declaring and dramatising Catholic identity. One poster on LiberFaciorum commented on the film 'This was spectacle - on the scale of Cecil B DeMille when I was little - 6th grade I think. It was awesome and edifying - the school sisters were filled with anticipation - we prayed for the Council - it was epic for me'.

Certainly this is what it looks like from the video; but as in any such occasion it might feel different to experience it in person. Noise, difficulty in seeing what's happening, discomfort of various sorts, indigestion distracting you from the thoughts and reflections you're supposed to have: we're well versed in the distance between image and reality now, and are a bit wry about it. 

Perhaps this why we've become very unused to expressing our sense of self-hood, even when it involves being part of a wider group, through this kind of grand spectacle. It's not just a matter of taste, or even the individualism which leads us to prefer the small and local. At least partly, it's because we know, deep down, that it doesn't really work.  

Objection

There are many occasions when I take great comfort from not following the debates of the national Church in any detail: there are plenty of strains and stresses in ministry and life generally without adding to them, and my only interest in Synodical acrobatics is in how they might impact on what I am called on to do or not do. So there are many people more invested than me, for differing reasons, in the Synod vote this week to go ahead with experimental services to pray for, or bless, relationships in which both partners are of the same sex. I’m not entirely sure how it’s decided which measures do or don’t require an Act of Synod to enact: the admission of women to the ministry did, which was why two-thirds of Synod members had to support each measure, whereas this current change only needed a simple majority in each House of Bishops, Clergy, and Laity. And the Bishop of Oxford’s amendment to the effect that blessing services could be separate events rather than incorporated in other acts of worship only squeezed through by one vote in the House of Laity. Although some of the votes against might well have been cast by Synod members who would have preferred to go further than the proposal on the table, this isn’t a consensus, whatever else it is.

The Church of England Evangelical Council is now exploring ways of supporting dissenting clergy ‘who in some way might feel their membership of the CofE to be compromised’, including feeling unable to relate to their bishop on anything other than a legal basis. This is clearly inspired by the similar arrangements that have been in place for many years for trad Anglo-Catholics opposed to the ordination of women, but it’s odd, because Evangelical objections to these changes to do with sex arise within a different sort of ecclesiology. For those trad Anglo-Catholics, the Church itself, including its organisational arrangements, is the creation of the Holy Spirit, and fundamentally altering those arrangements is, arguably, cutting the organisation off from the Paracletal electric current. It’s not just about cohabiting organisationally with people you disagree with. But Evangelicals don’t think about the Church in that way. If you’re an Evangelical Anglican, your relationship with God is direct. It doesn’t make any fundamental difference to you what the church down the road does, or what your bishop believes. Your bishop’s opinions are probably massively divergent from yours already. It may be uncomfortable that she, or that putative church a few streets away, might be blessing or even eventually marrying same-sex couples, but you will still have the option of regarding them with the same derision and contempt that you probably do now. You may find it awkward that a same-sex couple might turn up to worship with you (though they’ll probably steer well clear), but they could easily do that already. No, my brethren who take a more conservative view on this matter won’t be forced to do anything they don’t want to do, and neither will I, so, as I have no interest in compelling anyone to fall in line with what I think, my sympathy is really very limited.

++Justin is clearly very content that he abstained on the vote, ‘to act as a focus of unity’. This too is modelled on the way the Church has accommodated trad Anglo-Catholics over women, and again it shows the same kind of misconception. A trad Anglo-Catholic objects to a bishop (or Archbishop) who has actually ordained a woman, not because that prelate thinks ordaining a woman is right or wrong: it’s not a matter of opinions, but of deeds. Evangelical objections are precisely about opinions, and we all know what the ABC thinks. That's why, I imagine, sundry Christians might find him hard to talk to from now on, if they hadn't before.

Among the Archives

For the last several months I’ve become something of a weekly fixture at the History Centre in Woking, working through first wodges of service registers and more recently copies of Crockford’s to investigate the clergy who have served churches in the diocese at the Catholic end of the spectrum. I can’t find any indication that I’ve mentioned it here before, so I admit now how crushingly dull a lot of this has been. At the History Centre you can order up to ten documents from the stacks in advance, though you can request more once you’re there. Oh dear, I thought before I started, how restricting that will be, but I discovered that working through ten old service registers over the course of three hours or so was quite sufficient to exhaust and render me almost incapable of speech. I rarely saw a church in the middle of a transition from one way of doing things to another, though here and there you could tell when a new incumbent had brought a sudden change of direction. I found books where clergy doggedly recorded every time they said Morning or Evening Prayer, even when alone, and ones where they listed the times of services but not what they were. I found churches which helpfully recorded numbers at every service, but this was rare: most of the time, until priests became defensive about how many people were turning up (or weren’t), only totals of communicants were noted down. I discovered the odd rude remark scrawled in a margin by a frustrated incumbent. I recoiled from the aroma of mould and marvelled at teacup rings or mice nibblings.

Going through the lists of clergy uncovers a couple of very late exchanges of livings, some interesting connections between churches, and several clergy passing through the big mission parish of St Mary’s Portsea. Few of them go on from serving a Catholic parish in Surrey to anything more high-profile, but given the career structure of the Church of England this is no great surprise and you could probably say the same of any sample of incumbents. It’s very clear how the turn into the twentieth century leads to the increasing dominance of theological colleges in the training of curates: go back before WWI and it’s rarer and rarer for a priest to have been to one, and before 1900 it’s extremely uncommon. But I did find that Fr Lushington, who caused such ructions at Thorpe, had been trained at Sarum College in the 1870s; and, even more strikingly, Vincent Musgrave of Hascombe had attended Wells College as far back as 1853. That would have made him exceedingly unusual: there were only about 15 students at Wells then and none of the other colleges would have had many more in an age when there were far, far more clergy about. Gems, my beloveds, gems. 

Performance

A little while ago S.D. told me of the traumatic experience a group of friends had suffered when attempting to go to church the Christmas-before-last. Today we have an uncannily similar occurrence which makes me wonder how common they are. My brother-in-law works at a church school: there is a new incumbent at the parish church. The term starts with a service for the staff, something I'd been thinking of offering. In came the new vicar whose words of welcome were 'This is going to be an informal communion service. I've brought my guitar and I'm going to sing you a song'. 'It would have been rude if we'd all put our heads in our hands', my brother-in-law said.

This is an artist's impression of what it would be like if I was to try doing it. Ha-ruuuuu!

St Mary's Stoke D'Abernon

What a stonkingly odd church Stoke D'Abernon is. Its oddness begins with its location, way outside Stoke D'Abernon in the grounds of what is now a school, but used to be the manor house. The church website claims that it began life as an Anglo-Saxon manorial chapel possibly as early as the 7th century, whereas The Buildings of England chooses to lead on Ian Nairn's description of it as 'the classic example of bad 19th-century restoration, the worst even in Surrey'. Certainly from the outside it looks weird. Inside you can see what Nairn meant even more clearly: the restoration of the 1850s and 60s disposed of a perfectly serviceable Norman chancel arch and replaced it with a Gothic one, for instance. At some stage the original fragmentary wall paintings were expanded by an imaginative reconstruction - but still presented as a fragment, as though something larger remained to be uncovered. Which it didn't. But then along came the postwar incumbent Canon JHL Waterson, who did away with as much Victoriana as he possibly could and stuffed the church with bits and pieces ransacked from elsewhere. To him we owe much of the glass, the bizarre oak aumbry, and I suspect the towering figure of the BVM. These now sit among the older fragments - the 13th-century chest, the Jacobean pulpit, the brasses and effigies - lending a degree of crazy dignity to what's essentially an unremarkable building. At some point a coloured reredos was done away with, leaving the east wall blank. 

The lords of the manor were the Vincents, but it was the Vaillants who monopolised the Rectory in the pre-restoration days. Julia, daughter of Francis Maceroni (‘soldier, diplomat, revolutionary, balloonist, author, inventor, and bigamist’), whose jewels ended up adorning the processional cross at St James's Weybridge, was married to a Vaillant - but that's a story for another day. 

So here you have a church which has a variety of Catholic bits and pieces in it. The current priest, Rev'd Phaedra, can be seen on the website (the photo comes up if you wait long enough) wearing some nice Gothic vestments which I know her predecessor took on board as well, and he was an SCP member. But while in line with most moderate churches these days the core of the worship is Eucharistic, I once preached at Stoke d'Abernon at a bracingly stiff 1662 Choral Evensong and I also know another incumbent had a hard time with some of the more traditionalist elements there. St Mary's never figured in any of the Anglo-Catholic church guidebooks, no matter how determined Canon Waterson was to make it look the part. What you see, brethren, sometimes misleads. 

Come Holy Ghost, Do

On the second day of the Triennial Clergy Conference this week, I went for what was a short walk down the hill and back again, and got dreadfully lost, eventually making my way back to the conference centre hot, exhausted and half an hour after the beginning of the afternoon’s first lecture, but I got a nice photograph of some cows from a footpath I shouldn’t even have been on.

There were a lot of words. Revd Isabelle Hamley gave us a series of Bible studies examining examples of spiritual change (when the Bishop asked us to share with our neighbour what one insight we might take away from the conference, Fr Benjamin beside me claimed that it would be Revd Isabelle’s revelation that her native French has no separate words for tortoise and turtle – ‘I tell my husband, it’s just the same animal in a different place’); Bishop Ruth Bushyager of Horsham encouraged us to subject everything we did to the test of whether it took people forward in discipleship; Dr Sam Wells of St-Martin-in-the-Fields urged us to start doing ‘interesting things’ (the Church had abandoned all these to the Welfare State in 1948, he maintained) beginning with more interaction with our communities; and Bishop Tim Wambunya, who told us a tale of discrimination which has led to him going back into parish ministry in Slough. There was other stuff, but they were the headliners.

Over the years I have become less prone to plunge into a depressive spiral at the Triennial, questioning the worth of my ministry and even of my own existence. Partly this is because I’ve learned to see my clergy colleagues as just as frail and ridiculous as me, and their self-confidence, where it exists, as a bit of a show. It’s just as well, because the Diocese of Guildford’s descent into monocultural Evangelicalism has now reached the point where it feels hard for any other kind of crop to flourish. Accounts from my colleagues indicate without any shadow of a doubt that if Bishop Andrew can wrest a church from any kind of high-side-of-centre orientation, he will, without any regard to what it may have been in the past, or the health and viability of its current congregation. To stand in the main hall at The Hayes as we did this past week for Morning or Evening Prayer, and find oneself surrounded by people holding their hands in the air ‘like they’re trying to grab God’s bollocks’, as my old vicar Fr Barkley so picturesquely put it, does make one feel less than fully at home. I tend to keep my mouth shut because I know hardly anyone will understand anything I feel inclined to say.

I was glad I stayed for the final eucharist, though. The outgoing cathedral dean presided, a woman, I have been told by two people independently, ‘who doesn’t give a shit anymore’, not that that was particularly in evidence. The Bishop presided and, notwithstanding what he does, his words usually come across rather well. This time he decided to finish his sermon by reminding us of the truth of our ordination by singing the Veni Creator. For someone it was the most natural thing in the world to follow him intoning ‘Come Holy Ghost our souls inspire’ with ‘And lighten with celestial fire …’ – only sotto voce – and within a moment or two that whisper went round the whole hall so those of us who knew it were all joined in with that ancient hymn linking us, not just to Anglicanism past, but to the whole of the Western Church. A glorious moment, if a lonely one.

Quiet Day

Clarissa, who looks after Gristham church not far away and has kindly heard my confession a couple of times after the Cathedral ceased to be interested in such things, lives with her husband Simon in a former mill building in Bortley. They have a music room in a refurbished outbuilding and offered it to me should I ever want a place to run off to. I have been too disorganised to arrange a proper retreat this year, either to Malling Abbey or anywhere else, so yesterday I availed myself of their generosity and spent the entire day (at least from 9am to 5.30pm) in that space. Maintaining my faltering connection with holy Malling and its holy Sisters, I took the community's office book and read Lauds, Sext and Vespers for Lent, similar enough to the normal Anglican Office to feel I was indeed doing what I am enjoined to by Canon Law but different enough from it to be refreshing. I had with me my Bible (funnily enough), Fr Somerset Ward, and Michael Yelton's An Anglo-Catholic Miscellany, from which I learned about another religious order which passed through Surrey, the very weird Servants of Christ the King who once ran a home for boys with learning difficulties at Frensham, and which was governed by the odd Brother Joseph: he became convinced that God wanted him to utilise the talents of his young charges in a circus, at which he would appear as ringmaster in a monastic habit and a black top hat. But he had crossed the Tiber by then so this is one eccentricity the Church of England can't be blamed for.

My time at Bortley was, I think, rather fruitful if for nothing else than the picture that when the Holy Spirit deals with our sins it's a bit like unravelling a tangled skein of wool which has to be done one knot at a time before the stuff can be made into anything very useful; and tabulating all the instructions Jesus gives the people he speaks to, and demonstrating my suspicion that he mentions the sins of individuals only a handful of times. 

I did leave the premises once, and walked the short distance up the muddy lane to the millpond where I saw three swans attempting to dismember a frog so they could eat it. If only two of them had gripped it and pulled it would have been easy, but they could only get as far as gobbling at it and throwing it about. There's a spiritual message in there somewhere. This is real old Surrey, all hollow lanes, tangled trees, tile-hung cottages, Bargate stone, and frost-nibbled antique red brick. 

Talking Catholic

Back in November I began my series of talks about elements of what (in my opinion) it means to be a Christian and specifically an Anglican who includes the word catholic in their sense of identity and purpose, inspired by the story of the empty aumbry discovered in a nearby church by a former Area Dean: I've just completed it, in a rather hurried fashion as I wanted to get it all done before Lent begins. My aim was to escape from any impression that Catholic Anglicanism is primarily about incense and vestments - despite any appearances to that effect - and instead talked about The Communion of Saints, The Real Presence, Authority, Tradition & Obedience, and The Prayer of the Church, about the Office and how it works. The fifth and final talk, however, did major on worship and its features, thinking about how what churches like ours (and further up the candle) do is a way of helping embodied, fleshly beings meditate on the saving mystery of Christ, and reflects the fruit of long spiritual experience in the past. As well as The Beauty of Holiness, I also touched on Spiritual Disciplines and how they help anchor our worship in reality and stop it all wafting away into self-indulgence. 

Has it made an impression? People have certainly been interested, but if they also show an increased knowledge of these themes and self-awareness of our particular charism within the Church of England, I will be pleased. I started today's talk with this image: I can always rely on Fr Thesis's west-end church if I need a nice splurge of high-churchery to share.

The Churches of Cove

The Hampshire-yet-Guildford parish of Cove is another where an established old church is less interesting from our point of view than a new one. The former is St John the Baptist, built in 1844 supposedly in imitation of the Hospital of St Cross near Winchester, a pleasing but not spectacular church with the usual sort of flashy high-Victorian reredos and not a bad nave altar as these things go, plus some very odd details such as a font cover topped with a weird sort of winged urn thing, and a wooden screen of round-headed arches in the transept.

But then I went to what is now Christ Church, between Cove and Farnborough centre. This was built as St Christopher’s in 1934, and represents Gothic boiled down to its absolute essentials. There is a tall tub-shaped font very typical of the time, and a dramatic east end now rendered a bit of a liturgical backwater behind the nave altar on its dais, a somewhat paltry little table, I’m afraid, compared even to the straightforward one at St John the Baptist’s. Five years after its construction St Christopher’s gained a plaque depicting its patron saint, and it seems to have got its aumbry to celebrate its golden jubilee in 1984. I was rather taken aback by the pentagram-style light fittings, and the church feels quite uncomfortable about them too!

There was a third church in Cove: it was an Anglican congregation that used the Southwood Community Centre from its construction in 1993. In 2019 it ceased to exist as a separate grouping and the members relocated to St Christopher’s, which was renamed Christ Church.

Although we see that the sacrament was once reserved at Christ Church – to judge from experience I wouldn’t like to bet that it is now! – and it had an image of its one-time patron saint, I’ve never seen it referred to as a particularly Catholic church. Instead it shows where expectations of any new church in the mid-20^th century lay.

Who Cares About What

'The aumbry light was on, but the churchwardens didn't know what it was for', the retired incumbent told me of a visit to a church as Area Dean, 'and when we opened it, it was clear the Sacrament had been in there for a long, long time'. I thought of visiting that very church a little while ago and noticing the light on but the door of the aumbry ajar, rather implying that there was nothing in it. What with the new united parish of Hornington and Tophill being handed into the care of the CPAS, it occurred to me to make another little effort to make sure the good people of Swanvale Halt do have some dim idea of what's distinct about the Catholic tradition within the Anglican Church, partly so they can use it spiritually, and partly so that they are on guard if anything happens to me. I began last Sunday with 'The Communion of Saints', to a congregation depleted by illness and torrential rain, but an appreciative one at least.

'Do people really care about this?' Giselle the lay reader asked me. It's a fair question and fair, too, coming from someone who has spent most of her ministry at Tophill but comes from a Roman Catholic background so does at least understand what it's about. If what we are dealing with is simply a set of markers of partisan identity, they probably shouldn't, but equally Swanvale Halt has to think about why it exists at all in these hard times. I think the fact is that a minority do care because they 'get it' and do indeed consciously understand and value what I've been talking about for twelve years. What most people in the church care about is comfort and familiarity, and in a world of hectic change, and a life of inevitable change, comfort and familiarity are not things to be treated automatically with contempt. On a spiritual level, the things they find comforting and familiar about their church life are the ways they have become accustomed to talk to God and to hear him talking to them. What I would say is that they may not realise the degree to which those things depend on the principles and ideas behind Catholic spiritual life. They may by the time I finish!

St Peter's, Ash

This church is a bit of an oddity. Gilbert Wall Heathcote was the incumbent between 1835 and 1884, a sound Tractarian who had been vicar of Hursley before John Keble, and paid for the rebuilding and extension of St Peter’s in 1863, but the church never advanced very far liturgically and didn’t feature in any of the Anglo-Catholic church directories. Yet it now has a number of features which you’d expect to find in those settings, and nowhere else.

The marble and mosaic reredos has the brutal vigour of the period before church architecture and fittings began to become correct and tasteful. There is a chancel screen which must be rather later than the 1863 rebuilding, but of a different date from the choir stalls as it’s in a different style. The old chancel became, eventually, a Lady Chapel which now has a couple of icons and a slender little statue. There’s a figure of the Christ Child installed in 1938 as a memorial to AM Lichfold – whoever they were – and a set of Stations of the Cross put in about 15 years ago at the cost of a parishioner. All of this points in quite a Catholic direction but there is no suggestion that here it’s seen as part of anything of that kind. I was allowed to look at the vestments and found a set exactly the same as one we use in Swanvale Halt, with the exception that the main colour of the orphreys is red on ours.

Long Ditton & West Molesey

The fundamental impressions St Mary's Long Ditton left me with were grandeur and cleanliness: its surfaces shine and nothing seems out of place. It isn't one of my 'core' churches but the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, so perhaps it reached a degree of soundness even later than The Church Traveller's Guide could reveal. It's what the church was designed for, with those sedilia. Nobody could describe that mighty pink marble reredos as beautiful, but it impresses by sheer force. 

It has an elegant Lady Chapel where the Sacrament resides behind a brass aumbry door decorated very pleasingly with the Sacred Heart, though the altar cross and candlesticks are the spindly, spiky kind beloved of the 1960s and 70s. Why does it have a brass set as well?

Some of the glass is obviously Kempe ...

... and some isn't. Just because it's modern doesn't mean it's bad, though.

The passage of Long Ditton up the candle isn't clear to me (as yet), but St Peter's West Molesey was a 3-star church in the 1933 Guide and then hit four stars in 1948, staying there afterwards. It used to have an east window of three lancets given to the church by a priest called William Giffard, who may have been the Rector of Weybridge responsible for the dreadfully unpopular decision to demolish that church and set it on an Anglo-Catholic path: the window was part of the wholesale rebuilding of St Peter's in 1843. Not that it was St Peter's then: it had no dedication until Fr Arthur Sydenham (1927-42) realised the building was aligned to the sunrise on St Peter's Day. Fr Sydenham was responsible for carving the church's reredoses with his own fair hand. The Stations look Faithcraft to me, probably dating to the same time. His tradition - if he was the one that introduced it - was cemented by the very long incumbency of Fr John Yeend (1949-97) who was responsible for installing the altar steps and rearranging the Lady Chapel in 1996 in memory of his wife. West Molesey is lovely, but it does have that slight feeling of bitty overkill you sometimes meet in Anglo-Catholic churches - why are there two tabernacles, for instance? It is beautifully well-kept, though now part of an Evangelical parish who seem content to polish brass, dust woodwork, and light candles, but may have little idea of the actual spirituality behind them all. 

St Peter's last Catholic incumbent was the lovely Peter Tailby, a man of such gentle and transparent saintliness that I and Il Rettore used to try and sit next to him at diocesan events because we felt embarrassed at the mere idea of misbehaving if he was around. 

All Saints', Banstead

Banstead parish church was a delight to visit, though I’m quite glad I don’t have to look after it. It’s a complex, slow-growth medieval church whose compartmented space and fixed pews make it ill-suited to many modern forms of corporate worship – ‘modern’ meaning anything from a mid-twentieth century Parish Communion onwards. The parish history shows the pre-restoration building, jammed with box pews; the Victorian restorations were the initial stage in the development of an early Catholic tradition, with a daily mass being celebrated by the 1920s (according to the guidebooks it didn’t have the sacrament reserved until the 1970s, but they aren’t always right). There has been a mild reordering at some point, probably the 1980s, with new floor tiles and some of the pews being turned inward to face the centre – which is still a very awkward place to put an altar. The tabernacle is astonishing, and the church guidebook says nothing about where it came from or when it was installed. The painted crucifix over the chancel arch is the only remnant of a more extensive image, as old photos reveal.

I wanted to buy a copy of that guidebook, but had no change with me. Still, the booklet stand had a helpful QR code to facilitate payments to the church, so cheerfully I thought I would use that, congratulating myself for being so modern. At first I had to prove I wasn’t a robot, then I got sent a code to input, and finally the bank refused to believe it was me trying to make a payment (of £5!) and asked me to phone them. At that point I gave up and just took photographs from it. Sorry!