That Was a Lovely Sermon

This will probably come across as immensely ungrateful, but I’m thinking today about the business of a clergyperson being praised. A lot of the time you get thanked for doing nothing more than being there, and can mentally brush this off very easily as you know very well it’s nothing to do with you, really. You are God’s presence in that situation in the way anyone could be. But there are also compliments you get for something you have put some effort into and that feels more ambiguous. 

Today was the Family Service at Swanvale Halt, non-eucharistic and aimed at being more informal with elements of interaction and occasionally game-playing in the sermon slot. I had to arrange a projector and screen, discovered I’d left my notes at home with ten minutes to go, and was already feeling under-prepared and ill at ease. It all passed off OK, and people said very nice things, to which I reply as I always do, ‘I’m glad it all worked all right’. Anything which isn’t the Mass and involves unscripted speaking – Family Services, Messy Church, Church Club, school assemblies – I tend to find immensely stressful, even after ten years of leading them and even though nothing I do is really that demanding, and mostly I’m just relieved to have got through whatever it is.

I’m fairly indifferent to what people think of what I’ve done, as I know when it’s been good and when it hasn’t been. This morning, for instance, I covered ground I’m sure I’ve been over before and covered better, and it was far from cohesive. But what do I really want? Would it really feel better if nobody complimented me at all? Marion our curate usually gets a scathing and entirely unreasonable critique from her teenage son and that doesn’t sound comforting. What should I say in response, anyway? I remember advice from ages ago that when being complimented you should put the attention back onto Jesus, but it’s a challenge to do that without being weird. I have sometimes said ‘I just say what the Lord gives me to say’ but find myself putting a slightly sardonic edge on the statement because I don’t exactly receive my words by telepathy. Perhaps praise for the service as a whole is better, but that has an ambiguity about it too: what we ‘enjoy’ may not be what God wants us to take to heart at all.

Of course anyone engaged in any creative activity faces this. Only this morning on the wireless Adam Gopnik was reflecting on Bob Dylan, ‘a man who has known nothing but unimaginable adulation since he was absurdly young [and yet] who adopts a tone of aggrieved ill-will in almost every circumstance’ and concluding that ‘to idolise the indifferent puts us in touch with the first springs of love and religion’ and that ‘charisma’ means not the ability to seduce others but rather not caring at all about what they think. You produce some work: unless it communicates it isn’t doing what it’s supposed to: but, if you craft it to what you think people will accept, it will eventually collapse into mental and spiritual comfort-food. Hence the conflicted relationship with praise.

This gives me an opportunity to talk about Polly Harvey again (not that I really need one), another artist famously indifferent to what anyone beyond her immediate circle of family and friends thinks about her output. When she started out back in the early 1990s interviews with her were a journalist’s dream as she gabbled the first thing she thought of. She soon realised how damaging that was and became equally uncooperative.  My favourite example is the 1995 one with an unsuspecting Swedish music journalist who wanted to tackle her about her noted scorn for feminism:

Journo: I’ve just been reading Liz Evans’s Women, Sex and Rock ‘n’ Roll [goes on about it for a while]. Don’t you think any of that is relevant to you?

PJH: I’ve never really felt like a woman, I haven’t had much sex, and I don’t play rock ‘n’ roll. Apart from that, yes.

Or:

Journo: Is it true that you never interact with your fans?

PJH: Never.

Journo: Not even to –

PJH: No.

Journo: You don’t like interviews, do you?

PJH: They mean nothing to me.

Journo: Don’t you even use them to –

PJH: No.

Journo: What’s that written on the back of your hand?

PJH: It says ‘serum’. I’m not going to tell you what that means, either.

Eventually journalists gave up trying to winkle stuff out of her, and she grew less prickly, so by the late 1990s interviews were conducted more along the lines of ‘Do you have any other message for a grateful nation?’ Now she doesn’t do them at all. But unlike Mr Dylan, PJ remains impeccably polite even under insufferable provocation (such as being seated next to David Cameron on Andrew Marr’s TV show), and gracious if reticent in accepting the accolades that come her way: she manages to combine ‘indifference’ to passing opinion with grace, and unsurprisingly that’s what has more influence with me.

Given that I’m very sensitive to the danger of playing to the gallery, are people responding favourably to what I serve up because I am, or because I’m not, due to the 'adulation of indifference'? Having people listen to you, and listen avidly, is somewhat intoxicating and therefore dangerous. I suppose all you can do is keep firmly directed somewhere else (in my case, towards God), in the same way that Polly keeps the focus rigidly on her work rather than on the way it’s received. You can do that without being rude, though, and perhaps what I need to take into account is that what people say to me is a reflection of where they are: of their own receptiveness and grace, more than of anything I have done.

Looking Back

Before Easter I was in a bad state of mind, waiting for news from the authorities about our refurbishment of the church. Things were already improving as my mum asked me the very sensible question, 'What's the worst that can happen?' and the answer - we'll have to put the church back together again, and abandon all our plans - was bad, but not un-cope-able with. It got my mind back onto something like stable footing. Since the Faculty arrived there has been another nailbiting delay as the electrical side of the work, which is the first stage after the clearing of the pews, can't begin until early May. THAT means the fifth anniversary concert of the local music club which uses the church will have to be moved to the secondary school, and we'll lose a round of very lucrative music exams which we normally host - hopefully we'll be able to find them an alternative venue and they'll be back. That was all it took to plunge me, very briefly, into an extremely bad frame of mind. Strangely it only lasted a few hours, especially as it coincided with discovering that somebody I hoped was rather interested in me isn't (that's something that happens with dull regularity too - there's sense in priests either being married or celibate).

I have a very good friend who I can go and talk to about psychological issues and she thinks my difficulties are due to low self-esteem. I'm not sure about this as naturally I imagine I'm strictly realistic! However it would help to reflect on the things I have coped with to decrease my assumption that the situations I get involved with are as threatening as I seem to think, and to challenge the leap I usually make to the most extreme reaction to what are fairly normal stresses.

Whatever the truth of that, one of the consoling, and anchoring, thoughts has been to relate what I've been going through to the Cross, a sensible reflection given that it was all happening over Holy Week and Easter. Our own small sacrifices and mortifications are reflected in the great sacrifice of Good Friday and, just as that was utterly transformed by the great working of God into triumph and transcendence, so our lesser deaths can, if we nail them to the Cross and put them into the Tomb with Jesus, be the points of takeoff for new insights and change. Nothing comes to life except first it dies. I have never felt my weakness as I have done over the last few weeks, but God became weak so that our infirmities might be carried up and made the means of victory. I believe there is a reason why someone of my inadequacies and inabilities has been placed in this impossible vocation. I am not sure yet what it is, and may not be for years, but even if, if, the Church made in human terms a mistake ordaining me, God will still take the offering and work with it. And so I have to pray, always, and learn to be thankful for my mortification, because if I do not discover how to die joyfully I will not be able to live as I should.

Veni Creator Spiritus

It's a shame that Pentecost Day, the Birthday of the Church - or, as I think of it, its baptism - passes by almost unremarked in the Western Church. There have never been widespread liturgical observances to celebrate the great day of the descent of the Holy Spirit to match the solemnities of Easter. Once upon a time Victorian Dissenting chapels held parades and children's outings on 'Whit Sunday', and the modern Anglican Common Worship makes some attempt to recognise the day with a special (if low-key) rite of 'Commissioning' the congregation to carry on the Church's work, but that's about it.

Looking back some time ago at the old rites of the Easter Vigil (the ritual 'charging-up' of the font by blessing the water, breathing on it, dipping the Paschal Candle in it and pouring in the oils of the Catechumens and of Chrism), I came across references to this also happening on the Vigil of Pentecost. I couldn't find any explanation for this until I asked a well-known liturgical scholar who happens to live in Lamford parish. Originally all baptisms took place at the Easter Vigil, which was the only occasion in the year when the baptismal water would be solemnly blessed, but eventually numbers grew too many and some baptisms were postponed to the Pentecost Vigil; the ritual was repeated that night too. And it froze in that position, rather anomalously.

Swanvale Halt can't exactly match the festivities at the Pantheon in Rome, but I wanted to do something which marked Pentecost as the celebration of the 'charging-up' of the Church as the Body of Christ with the energy of the Holy Spirit. So, after the Creed, we processed down to the font to the accompaniment of a Litany of the Saints, but those saints actually depicted in the church rather than the usual lists, finishing with great holy figures from the parish's past and 'all the holy souls of this parish'. Then I took some of the blessing prayers from the old English Missal rite, judiciously, I hope, cut down as they are pretty long and repetitious, carried out the full ceremony of blessing the baptismal water. We then returned to the front of the church while I read the 'blessing of the light' prayer from Common Worship and we concluded with the Commissioning rite before carrying on with the prayers in the usual pattern.

We blessed the font at the Paschal Vigil too, but not with the full-scale ceremonies, so this marks the completion of my attempt to work out a pattern that restores the Catholic liturgical order and makes coherent sense too: I was very pleased with how it went down. And I wore the new St Catherine red set, but more of that another time!

More spiritually, it was very fitting that at the 8am mass conducted by our curate I seemed to feel the first shiftings of the tectonic plates of my heart about the unpleasant events of seven weeks ago: the first signs of, perhaps, being able to share in somebody else's happiness through my own disappointment. The Mass is where we are all united in one Body, and I stand a chance of sharing joys which strictly don't belong to me at all. Thanks be to God.

Ecumenism

Back in the parish of Lamford, they've just been on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Il Rettore thought he would hate it, but in fact it turned out to be rather fun. All the establshments of the Roman observance they visited along the way knew perfectly well the Lamford crowd adhered to the See of Canterbury - not least because Mrs Rettore was there - and yet at one Spanish abbey Father Abbot actually asked him to concelebrate at Mass. Doesn't that invalidate the sacraments of the entire diocese, or something? Then at Compostela itself the Lamford pilgrims were given a chapel in the Cathedral and Rettore was draped with antique vestments and chalices to say Mass for them.

I think Il Papa should be told. Or perhaps not.

Deacon Your Priesthood, My Boy ...

... was apparently the advice of Eric Abbott to somebody. Or it may have been someone else entirely. Anyway, on Sunday evening, after the chaos of the Harvest Festival in the morning, I acted as deacon for the evening eucharist we share, in theory, with the folk of Hornington parish. The president came from an evangelical background and so wasn't completely familiar with how the roles are normally divided between the ministers, but what a wonderful thing it was to be able to be deacon of the Mass for the first time in months. To serve at the Lord's Table, and not to preside, brings home the wonderful nature of God's choosing us weak vessels for his service.

Tell It Like It Seems

At a wedding on Saturday I met a former parish priest I know who now divides his time between management consultancy and a guitar. 'Parish ministry', he said, 'Is mainly about having continual battles with strong-minded women. That's why I gave up: I couldn't be bothered any more.'

My first week at Swanvale Halt left me feeling agitated and uneasy, mainly at the feeling of being slotted into a pre-existing round of engagements and activities that I've played no part in developing. But as I thought it might the Mass on Sunday made things suddenly feel very different. Here I was doing the thing I was sent to the parish to do among the people I'm supposed to care for and pray for. I poured all the frustrations, such as they are, into the chalice for Jesus to deal with, and they were drowned in the wine - even if, thanks to the swine-flu regulations, we're only using a dribble.

Last night somebody I was at college with phoned me. He's gaily taking his windswept Yorkshire parish back forty years and having vast fun doing so - reintroducing weekly Evensong, unbleached candles for the Requiem Mass, hymns they haven't sung for a generation - and they think it's marvellous. He said the other Sunday, 'Aren't you lucky to have such a young, trendy, forward-looking Rector?'

Surprised by Joy

I went to make my Lenten confession yesterday. Most people who don't make a regular confession find it a perplexing business when others do. So do I, if I'm honest: the process of dredging through the muck of my soul which I know God has already forgiven seems formalised and bizarre. I arrived at the Cathedral a bit early, having just come from another appointment, and sat in the car park with a mixture of trepidation and, frankly, indifference. Yet as I was waiting to go in - confessions are heard in the Lady Chapel and there's no pretence at anonymity, my confessor knows who I am and vice versa - I was absolutely overcome with an intense feeling of blessedness, grace, and connection, connection to God and to the people of our parish whose own sins and struggles I bear with me. My sins are being forgiven as I pronounce forgiveness for theirs. I had to wait quite a while and by the end of half an hour felt a lightness and calm which hardly ever finds me in day-to-day life. It's called joy, I think. What a wonderful privilege to be able to bring all the petty mess of human frailty to Jesus for his healing in these light, beautiful surroundings from which everything evil and mean seems banished, and how right it is that his forgiveness is mediated through another frail human being. 'Go in peace, and pray for me, a sinner too'.