Weary Words

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

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

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

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

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

A Little Light Shining

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

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

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

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

Half Term Conversations

It has been deathly quiet in Swanvale Halt over the last week. Not only is it half term so as usual everyone who can be absent is, but the heat has ensured that those souls who are around hardly dare stir abroad. Each time I have tried, if I had any choice about it, I regretted it, apart from the Bank Holiday walk around the lake which furnished this nice photo.

Yesterday I tried to visit someone who I haven't seen for ages, and either they weren't in or weren't responding. Returning home my weariness (though I'd gone no further than a quarter of a mile) was interrupted by glancing into the windscreen of the parked truck of a gardening contractor and seeing a tatty Bible on the dashboard. The young fellow concerned appeared around the side. 'Must be an issue for you wearing all black', was his opening gambit - though it's a mild inconvenience compared to doing actual physical work while sweating through a reflective tabard. As one of the sessions at the Clergy Conference had discussed what seems to be a doubling in the purchase of new Bibles in the last five years (outstripping any Harry Potter volumes - The Bible! Less transphobic than JK Rowling!!), I asked him about his. He'd been given it by a customer after admitting he'd been having a hard time lately. 'I'm not much of a reader', he went on, 'but I follow some extracts on my phone and I've been finding it really helpful'.

That evening in my capacity as Bishop's Surrogate for Oaths I was seeing a couple applying for a licence to marry on Saturday having discovered their banns hadn't been read in their home churches; they assumed the church marrying them would arrange it, so it hadn't happened. Still, it's easily sorted out. Not only do they live in different parishes and are marrying in a third, but they actually attend an independent congregation in Guildford, so one might expect a little bit of Biblical literacy. It was decided that the groom would swear the oath, and I handed him a Bible with the customary instruction to take it in his right hand - 'the rule', I said, 'specifies the New Testament but this includes it so that's all right' - he did question how justifiable that was. I said we could deal with the theology on a different occasion if need be (once I'd thought about it). 

Two conversations with laypeople about the Bible must use up at least a season's quota in just one day! 

A Matter of Time

The new-ish contemplative service on the third Sunday evening in the month was over. I've been trying this since September: there are very simple, regular prayers, a reading, and two blocks of music, swirly kaleidoscope patterns projected on the rear wall, a few candles and a bit of smoke, and the Lord joins us in the monstrance. There had been, as usual, a small but appreciative congregation. I was just about to start packing up when Ellie who had attended came back in with the news that 'you've got two more takers who thought it was a 6.30 start'. That turned out to be Malcolm and Dora who are far too regular church members to get something as basic as this wrong. I was very apologetic and in these circumstances you doubt your own self even if you are in the majority. '6 is a bangin' time for me and Katie', Ellie said encouragingly. Once everyone had gone ('Well it's a nice evening for a walk' offered Malcolm) I checked the service register: this service has always been at 6, not 6.30, since I started it. It is fascinating that two people can get this wrong independently. It is the case that evening services at Swanvale Halt are often at 6.30 unless there's a good reason why they shouldn't be (it's a bit early for Compline, for instance) and I suppose in their minds people might group this one with those. I do the same: I still shudder at the memory of the time I turned up late at a service in a neighbouring parish having convinced myself they started at 10.30am, just about on time to preach even if it would have been more help had I presided too. Many has been the time I have waited to see, say, a banns couple at the church only to find they have been waiting at my house where we'd agreed to meet. I strive to stop this and it hasn't happened for a while - but who knows how long my triumph over myself will last?!

Visited

It wasn't even the Archdeacon who came to do the Archdeacon's Visitation at the church this week; it was the Deputy Archdeacon, the affable newly-retired Vicar of Crowfield who is clearly in need of some activity to ease himself into retirement (I'm pretty sure he doesn't get paid anything more than petrol money). In fact the last Visitation was the only time when an Archdeacon did do it, and as the Archdeacon then very soon became our Suffragan Bishop I had forgotten he wasn't when he came, if you're following me. On this occasion, Deputy Archdeacon Ray's first task was to swear Colin in as our new churchwarden, taking on the remaining months of the term of office until the Annual Meeting after Easter, and then to examine various register books and policies. This time we were mildly upbraided for not having our Certificate of Public Liability Insurance on display in both the church entrance and the hall, and for the Safeguarding Officer's details on show in the former but not the latter. Nobody has ever mentioned those, but ratcheting-up is the point of these things, so far do's. 'Your Safeguarding Dashboard is a bit of a dog's dinner', Ray stated, rather to my surprise, showing us a screen capture on his phone of a range of amber and red boxes, 'though you're not the worst in the diocese'. I suppose that's a comfort to everyone except the worst parish in the diocese, to whom the rest of us should be grateful. Curiously when I went onto the Dashboard the following day I saw much more green, and was able to turn another box green just by confirming the PCC had discussed something, so I don't know where Ray had got his image from, but again, I'm not disagreeing that more needs to be done.

Then we discussed our draft Church Development Plan. I was a bit conscious that a lot of it involves taking decisions about where to go with various ideas, such as whether to instal AV equipment or employ a Musical Director, rather than actually doing any of these things, but Ray was less fazed by that rather than the fact that much rests on me finding people to run with these ideas and build small groups of congregation members to do the thinking. 'Your initials are next to a lot of this', he pointed out, though I think at this stage it's inescapable that they would be. Poor Colin and Robert, the existing churchwarden, who didn't have a great deal to contribute to the discussion.

'What did you make of the previous iteration of this?' asked Ray. 'Well', I said, 'The fact that it was called the Parish Needs Process and the way it was marketed led us to think that we were identifying what our parishes wanted to do and then the diocese would provide what we needed to achieve our dreams, and it became clear that it wasn't really like that'. 'Yes', mused Ray, 'That's right. I think they've probably learned from that'. Which tells you everything you need to know.

Here's the glorious photo of Archdeacon Colley of Stockton I used for the last Visitation post.

Competition

When Emily's family first came to Swanvale Halt, they arrived at our Toddler Group before they'd even moved into the area. They were looking for a church, they said. Unfortunately when they came with Emily as a babe-in-arms to a Sunday service she bawled her eyes out whenever any music started (everyone's a critic) and so that was that until she was about eight and she became quite enthusiastic, especially when she could bring along her little sister and make a fuss of her. She and her dad were on the serving team for a while, him carrying the cross splendidly and Emily herself making an angelic acolyte. 

Now Emily is in Year 7 and as well as the usual lethargy which I gather creeps over tween/teenagers for physiological reasons she has taken up jiu jitsu which inevitably takes place on Sunday mornings. Her dad has had a few health challenges making carrying a heavy cross around not a good idea, while her younger sister now gets dragged to multiple toddler groups and nurseries during the week as her mum has had to work as a childminder, and going out again on a Sunday to something which doesn't feel very different is less of a draw than staying home and playing with her own toys, thank you very much. 

I mention all this not because it is anything new or results in groundbreaking reflections, but precisely because this is a really quite well-disposed young family which has been very well embedded in the church in the past, and, in an ideal world, would want to be again, but just finds it a challenge. Emily is interested in the putative youth group we want to start later in the month, which is just as well as she's our best prospect of anyone coming at all. It shows that sometimes, perhaps, in the world as we find it, the bits of church life we think of as add-on extras could well be the best way of keeping an entire group of people in contact with God. 

Pickled in Church

‘When we talk about the Mysteries of the Church’, I told the congregation on Sunday, ‘we usually mean baptism or holy communion. But there are more local mysteries too. We have recently solved some, such as where the electricity meter is (in the cupboard at the back of the church – I was looking for an old-fashioned spinny-roundy one when in fact it’s digital), or who puts out the bins on Wednesdays (it’s Chloe the bookkeeper). But the other day I noticed that next to the electrics cupboard is a jar of pickled onions. I have no idea where it has come from. If it belongs to you, or if you want it, your name is on it, and do remove it’.

Nobody has decided they want the jar of pickled onions yet. Its continued presence causes me to reflect on something not entirely banal, which is the issue of how laypeople interact with the church building they use and inhabit. To do something that they are helping with or organising, people will happily take matters into their own hands: they will seize the initiative. They will move heavy wooden chairs from the church space where they normally sit into the hall so a particular person can sit on those rather than a plastic one. They will shift the dial on the thermostat if it is cold. They will open the hall windows if it is hot. They will almost invariably forget, or not think it necessary, to restore affairs to the status quo ante, to move back the chair, to reset the thermostat, or to close the window, because the circumstance that engages their commitment, the particular event, is past, and they’re on to the next thing. In contrast, something that is not their direct concern can be screened out. A jar of pickled onions can be indefinitely left next to a cupboard, or a cafetiere full of four-day-old coffee left on the kitchen worktop can be deftly manoeuvred around rather than tipped down the sink (‘Oh that was here when we arrived’). The wonderful example I always quote, even after 14 years, is Mr and Mrs Bowdry, now both long gone to their eternal reward, putting their faulty service booklets back on the pile at an 8am mass in 2011 to confuse the next person to pick them up. I suppose people do this out of self-defence, to conserve their resources for the next important challenge they will actually need them for. I suppose I do, too.

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!

Ready for Anything

Last Wednesday we finished the five sessions of the Lent course I’d put together, the first time in several years that we’d done anything of the kind. I wanted to do something that both encouraged and equipped laypeople to take on more of the spiritual management of the church if no ordained people were available. Say a church at the Catholic end of the spectrum has no prospect of an incumbent for some time, and visiting priests coming in on a Sunday now and then: what can laypeople do to maintain its spiritual life? I did sessions on the nature of the Church and its mission; how the Church relates to society, and society to it (somewhat sobering, bits of that); the Church calendar; the building as a house for prayer; and shoehorned in something about faith-sharing for the last one. The diocese will be pleased with that, anyway. I pointed out how ringing the bell is easy, and each session got attenders joining in with a plainchant psalm, because having experienced it I think getting your head round plainchant can really increase people’s confidence. It was a bit of a rod for my own back, but I did each session twice, once on a Monday afternoon and once on a Wednesday evening, to give as many people as possible a chance to attend. Not everyone managed to get to all the instalments, but I was pleased with getting roughly thirty souls along.

When I described the idea, more than one member of the congregation took it as a signal that I was thinking of leaving, which is not the case, but it does rather suggest that they’re a bit scared of that happening. Which maybe means I should! The whole concept of the thing was to reduce laypeoples’ dependence on clergy in general and me in particular, but will that happen in any way while I’m still around?

Christmas 2024 ...

... it would be easier to say, was the same as nearly every year, except there are always variations on a theme. Every event was better attended than in 2023, in fact better than for several years. The Crib Service has never been quite the same since the tragic loss of our friendly donkeys (don't worry - it was only tragic for us, nothing malign befell them), but this time we were standing-room only which was very gratifying. The slightly quieter and more intimate model of Midnight Mass suited the fifty-plus attenders, and on Christmas Day itself - which I had been concerned was dying off - we numbered 14 at the Missa Ad Gallicantu and over 80 later on. This would have been fairly unremarkable about twenty years ago, but it's quite pleasing to experience now in these dark days. 

This is especially so because I'd been feeling a little ground down earlier on. Not for the first time, the usefulness of the Office struck me: its quiet concentration on texts contrasts with all the whizz and bang around it, and allows clergy especially, I think, to focus on what the season means. There is a deep wisdom in arranging that the transition from Advent to Christmas should happen with this undemonstrative liturgy - undemonstrative even if you belong to a religious community such as a cathedral celebrating it as Evensong, and all the more so a parish priest on their own like me. You're not really going to be nourished anywhere else.

Outside the church after the Crib Service I noticed Robert and a group of other fellows whose children have passed through the church (and I fear out of it, but such is life) together. The grown-ups still come to this service even if the children are elsewhere. And the chaps, at least, have for years marked the occasion by downing a shot of Croft Original supplied by a hip flask Robert is charged with carrying. I've never noticed this quaint custom before. Then at the midnight I greeted one young man on his way out - it was Iain, who ten years or so ago belonged to one iteration of the fluctuating group of youngsters who used to cause havoc in and around the church. I think he may have had a young woman with him. But I don't mind what brings them in!

Picture from Smallham Chapel as we sing to the sheep. 

All In the Wording

It is, of course, a privilege to host the Civic Service for the new Mayor of Hornington. Peter is a member of the congregation and it was no surprise that he wanted to come here for the event. The service happens to be his birthday as well as being Father's Day (not that that's a specifically Christian observance, and I wonder why we didn't come up with a churchy version as we did with the modern Mother's Day), and he had ideas over what he wanted to happen. Which basically meant keeping it simple - a reading, a few hymns chosen by chaps from the area. The reading is from Psalm 103: 'as a father is tender with his children, so is the Lord merciful towards those that fear him'. 'Can we change fear to love?' asked Peter. Well, no, we can't, I said: Hebrew was never my subject but whatever that word is it won't equate to 'love' no matter what you do to it. 'Those who hold him in awe' might be an acceptable alternative if you find 'fear' a bit jarring. 

Given that Peter has been in and around the Church for the whole of his life it did make me wonder what people in our congregations actually think about the Scriptures. The only reason for reading these ancient texts publicly is that we feel they represent God, however we might understand that. Even if (as I do) we accept that the texts come through human experience and occasionally reflect human fallibility, as when clear errors of recollection or transmission creep in, we also recognise that behind them there is both divine activity, and the Church's settled consensus that they represent divine activity. And yet the possibility arises that we might change a word to something entirely unrelated because we find it a bit awkward, as though it had the same status as something in the English Hymnal, as though its ultimate author was JM Neale rather than God. I suppose the fact that Peter asked me does suggest that he thought I might say no. He is a politician, after all. 

Like The Wheels

Every few years at Swanvale Halt church, we go through a process of trying to sort out a new rota for giving lifts to church to congregation members who might need them. This time it’s been Sally our Pastoral Assistant who has with some degree of annoyance asked to put an appeal on the notice sheet for help, because the list of lifters has shrunk until it’s basically her. She is not the first driver to whom this has happened, and it’s one instance of the general phenomenon in churches, and I suspect in voluntary organisations more widely, that once one person shows an aptitude or willingness to do a particular task, everyone else is happy to step back and let them do it. To be absolutely fair, this is almost always because they are themselves doing half a dozen other tasks as well, but then so is the victim.

I warned Sally that the likelihood was that nobody would volunteer. There is only a handful of people who need lifts to church, but there’s also only a handful of people in a position to offer them. You wouldn’t have thought this very basic act of Christian service should be hard to arrange, but it is. People’s individual preferences and circumstances need negotiating around – absences to see family members, a desire to stay for coffee after the service or a positive preference not to, for instance – and while it ought to be possible for grown-up people to compromise, it adds effort to what’s already the effortful decision to go to church in the first place. Elderly and less able souls may decide at the last minute that they don’t feel up to coming after all, while drivers, most of whom are themselves elderly and not that able, may be hesitant about taking on responsibility for people who are even more liable to fall over. Parking in the centre of the village is very difficult – only today Sally found herself parking so far away that her car was probably equidistant between the church and her house. Finally, everyone who can give a lift is cramming in several other church-related tasks, as well as trying to fit in family commitments and so on. For instance, I could take people home after the service, but I can’t take people there because I absolutely have to be on time, at least twenty minutes before we’re due to begin, and even then I sometimes have baptisms which rule out any possibility of giving lifts home.

At one extreme of the liftees is Roland. Roland has learning difficulties and lives a good half-mile from the church, but doggedly walks to us for 10am, week in, week out, in a jacket and tie. The other week he wrote me a letter, referring to himself, as he does, in the third person: ‘When Roland is old Roland won’t be able to come to church’. He already is old, of course, so in Sally’s absence I took him home for two weeks, in the first case going home to get my car, and in the second parking, as I’ve said, some distance away (driving, parking, and walking took exactly the same amount of time as if I’d merely walked). I’ve spoken to Roland’s care providers who think they can probably rejig their Sunday duties so they can at least bring him to us.

At the other pole of difficulty we find Edna. Edna lives near one church member but for obscure reasons I prefer not even to know about would rather not have a lift from them, so it was Andrew and Sheila who brought her to church before they moved. On one occasion they were en route when she asked to divert to the Post Office. Andrew pointed out that he was churchwarden at the time, while Sheila was sidesperson that morning, and leading the intercessions, and they were both on tea duty which meant they had to get to church as soon as they could. Edna did not get her trip to the Post Office, much apparently to her chagrin. The situation was compounded by the knowledge that, unlike some members of the church, Edna is well able to get a taxi if she chose to – which is exactly what my Mum does. My Mum, in fact, lives no less than three miles away from the church she attends, though she usually gets a lift home from a very kind lady whose house is nowhere nearby, and the cost of a taxi is a significant sacrifice, rather more so than it would be for Edna.

Of course, time was that when you couldn’t walk to church, you didn’t come to church and that was it. The Lord of the Manor was unlikely to send a pony-and-trap to pick you up from the parish’s far-flung parts. Thinking back to +Rowan’s talk the other night, I wondered whether this might be an opportunity not just to take communion to people in their homes in lieu of them attending in person, but have ‘communion services to which they can invite their families and friends’, as he said. It could be a real chance for mission – if only what Rene didn’t want, as well as the Sacrament, was tea and a chat with Queenie, and vice versa (though Edna doesn’t want tea with anyone).

This Sunday, Sally told me that she had indeed spoken to a couple of souls who might be able to offer the odd lift, provided the liftees were flexible and realistic. Good, I thought. There’s the rub, though; or one of the rubs.

A Problem Shared

Faye started attending the church quite recently after her mother's funeral, and attending quite frequently. She even brought a friend to one of the masses on Ash Wednesday, and took part in contemplative prayer sessions more than once. I knew from conversation that she was reassessing aspects of her life and wondering where she might go next. She was full of ideas and reflections and I thought she might be a useful person to have around, even if this initial burst of enthusiasm might not last. I began to speculate about what I might ask her to do.

Then having emailed out the weekly news sheet I had a reply from Faye: 'Please remove me from the mailing list.' That was all. I'd seen her at a service two days before and she'd spoken in the usual friendly, thoughtful manner. What had happened? I said I would if that's what she wanted, but also suggested she might like to speak to me. Was it some kind of disappointment? Something she expected to happen and hadn't, or someone who'd said something stupid and unhelpful? (I couldn't see how it could have been me). Although I'm used to people who come to worship for different reasons and seem enthusiastic, but then disappear after a short while - the sort of disturbance that impels souls towards church often impels them away from it again - this was a particularly extreme version of the phenomenon. I couldn't think of anything else that afternoon. How sad it was if Faye had had some sort of negative circumstance and it was never addressed, and she was left to deal with the disappointment.

In the end, after an evening service, I spoke to Estelle who was one of the people who'd spoken to Faye at the prayer sessions (another faithful person who turns up to everything, but has done so all her life). She reminded me - without being able to cast any particular light on the matter, as she last saw Faye exactly when I did - that Faye was in an uncertain place and subject to all sorts of questions and upsets that were nothing to do with us. I commended Faye to her prayers and was very grateful. 

It would be easy to think that as pastor I should keep this all to myself and deal with it. In fact merely by hearing what Estelle had to say, which was nothing very remarkable, I found I was able to break out of my cyclical gloom and move on. 'We are the body of Christ', we say: it's not just me alone. We may never discover what happened to Faye, but the Lord has the prayers of a better soul than me.

Real Presence

The approach of Christmas is about concerts and nativities, but it's also about taking communion to members of the Church who won't be able to make it any time over the season itself. It's strange that this is more a Thing in some parishes than others; I once spoke to a priest who looked after two rural Oxfordshire parishes with completely different traditions, the one where there were lots of home communicants, and the other where they assumed that being brought the Sacrament in their own surroundings was a certain prelude to death. At his training parish in the mid-1980s, Il Rettore was once charged with taking communion to 14 people in one day, and surviving that without derangement was quite an achievement. Here in Swanvale Halt, my illustrious 1970s predecessor Fr Edward introduced the Roman Catholic practice of communion being taken to home communicants by lay ministers directly after the Sunday mass, an ideal long since gone by the wayside, and now it's almost invariably me visiting a fluctuating group of souls. 

So yesterday found me visiting two homes with two people in each, and today I've seen five more in four visits. Tomorrow I'll call on Sarah who has just been discharged from hospital. It's helped me feel that I've been doing something worthwhile on a day which began with looking for my keys and grappling with an unco-operative photocopier. I suppose delivering Lemsip tablets to Mad Trevor also counts as 'worthwhile', though his insistence that he has flu is undermined by the fact that he insists it every other week. 

Seven home communions over three days isn't twice that in one, and I don't know how I'd react to that: I probably wouldn't want to do it every week, either. But curiously it doesn't seem wearying (any more than I already was weary) or tedious. Each encounter, which has exactly the same shape, feels different. It involves a different person or persons in specific surroundings, each with a special history of their own that they bring to that moment. Tomorrow we begin the great celebration of the Incarnation, so the presence of the Christ in each unique individual is part of the point. The Sacrament brings him together with them. This is the best way I can imagine of making it real.

Precautionary Principle

Matt our New Churchwarden has been on the New Churchwardens’ Course and has had it drummed into him how local churches are responsible for such things as first aid and fire safety. It’s the kind of area he has done at work for some time so I am quite happy to have someone with an actual aptitude for matters of basic compliance to run with it. The other New Churchwardens had a lot of questions for the diocesan officials who were running the event: what advice can to give us on how to make sure we comply with the law, they asked? None, was the answer, It’s your job to find out. Ask your insurers. When the insurers are asked, their response is that they can’t tell churches what to do either, they must tailor their policies to their local circumstances and should probably employ the services of a consultant. So far as fire safety is concerned, we did this a few years ago, but the chap the office found turned out to have doubtful accreditation and we didn’t have the money to do as he advised anyway.

This attitude of ‘You must do something on pain of terrible recompense but you have to guess what it is’ is not that satisfactory. I decided to consult with my Deanery colleagues to see what they do. I imagine Tophill is well up to speed with this but it’s all done by the office so the clergy have no idea what happens, and that explains why they didn’t say anything. Best organised (predictably given the incumbent) was Wothay where their policies outline which activities need to be covered by first-aiders and they send members of the congregation for training when a gap arises, and they review their fire prevention policy whenever the Archdeacon’s Visitation comes round. Not far away at Holmpool they have some first-aiders across their two churches, but it doesn’t sound like a huge number, while as far as fire safety was concerned the rector knew the fire extinguishers were serviced each year, and that was it. Nobody else replied.

Matt suggested that, seeing that first aid was so important, the diocese might like to arrange training for a proportion of PCC members and, even though people move on and off the PCC, it would still raise the levels of knowledge and confidence and make the Church a safer place. I suggested Colin the Area Dean might raise this at the next diocesan meeting. ‘I will’, he answered, ‘but don’t hold your breath.’

Getting Together

Two single mums get talking at the Messy Church tea, just when we were despairing that it was our worst-attended Messy Church ever. They decide it would be great to create an occasion for single mums generally to get together and Sheila who organises everything to do with families at Swanvale Halt church agrees to book the church hall and be there as a responsible person. At 5.15 on evening last week they turned up and began. Sally our Pastoral Assistant baked a cake: it was huge but all disappeared. There were eight young women and ten children. One bought board games and three women sat with a Scrabble board for two hours. 'I didn't have to do anything apart from buy some food' said Sheila. Something to serve a group of people we don't normally reach, spontaneously arising out of our contacts: it's the kind of thing I've waited fourteen years to see happen. 

You Can Do Without That Kind of Excitement

The church was full for the main service on Sunday for a baptism, which is an infrequent event as most of ours happen separately. But this was the baby daughter of Allie our Treasurer, a birth from within the congregation and thus a great delight. Lots of children came with their families and with all dad Danny's friends from the Swanvale Halt Rugby Club.

So that was exciting. Forest Church should have been a complete contrast, quiet and contemplative. Usually Allie, her mother and sister, would have been among the attenders, but obviously they had other things to do and so we were seven human souls and one dog making our way into the woods where we'd begun our Forest Church explorations in the summer of last year. I was relieved to discover that it wasn't quite as boggy as when I'd done my usual recce on Saturday afternoon. We had read from Geoffrey Grigson's Englishman's Flora about the folklore and properties of the willow tree (did you know that aspirin was developed from a chemical isolated from willow bark?) as well as the Bible, and sung a slightly eccentric hymn, and were just getting into a time of prayer when Derek, an elderly gent who lives not far away from the woods, keeled over and fell on the ground. That rather put an end to contemplation. It seemed like a transitory faint, and guided by a paramedic over the phone we got Derek out, and into the only car close at hand belonging to Jean the sacristan. Another congregation member accompanied them, and stayed at the hospital until Derek's son arrived. There was nothing obviously wrong with him, but unsurprisingly the doctors kept him in overnight much to his chagrin. 

As we'd made our way along the path through the woods, I'd glanced aloft at the sunlight glinting through the canopy of trees. When we stopped and took in our surroundings I encouraged us to look up as well. I've an uncomfortable feeling that Derek looked up a bit too long.

What Is The Lord Trying To Tell Us?

Among the tasks we've set ourselves in our Church Development Plan is the aim 'To establish a group to regularly, deliberately and expectantly for the work of the church'. The idea behind this simple concept is that rather than going off in pursuit of grand schemes that sound good, from employing a musical director to installing a new audiovisual system, we ought first to try and pay attention to what God might have in mind. 'Absolutely right', the Archdeacon endorsed. I spoke to Gizel the lay reader who said she'd had exactly the same idea and she would be happy to run with it. Good, I thought, I wanted this to be something that drew on the spiritual life of the laypeople and got them listening to the voice of the Spirit in some sort of concerted way. We discussed some individuals we reckoned would be likely candidates, souls we could rely on to be thoughtful and reflective.

Gizel held a meeting of herself and the three people we'd identified. One said she prayed the Office daily as part of her obligations as a member of a dispersed religious community, so she didn't think she would have the time to take on anything new. Another stated that his hearing problems made it difficult for him to be involved. The third really wanted to take part in an ecumenical group that prayed for issues relating to the community at large, like the one that used to be run by Marion our curate. 'That really wasn't the point of the exercise', I told Gizel. 'I know', she replied, 'I was somewhat disappointed as well. We could begin with just you and me and take it from there'. We could, but part of the reasoning was to get me out of the way and let God speak to the creativity and thoughtfulness of the laypeople. Perhaps there are others he wants to speak to. Perhaps he doesn't want to speak at all. Surely not.

Talking to the Rector

It was a large and somewhat chaotic baptism, for the younger sister of a boy who I baptised five years ago: about a third of the congregation was under 16 by my estimation. I knew a lot of them have been there for multiple baptisms, and it's reached the point on such occasions that I acknowledge that many people will have heard my spiel before but I'm going to say pretty much the same just in case they've forgotten. There were eleven godparents, several of whose names I recognised, a number being young fellows whose awkwardness in their unaccustomed suits was rivalled by their awkwardness in being in church at all. So far as young fellows are concerned, this discomfort often manifests itself in mild mucking about. There was one who fell under this temptation more than the others: when we were almost right at the end and I thanked everyone for being there to celebrate and acknowledging that they would be going 'to celebrate in a different way and a different place' he said very audibly 'right, off to the bar then, ho ho ho'. I was on the brink of saying something to him after it was all over, but restrained myself. The baby, in contrast, behaved impeccably.

The congregation bundled out of the church as quickly as they could manage without positively trampling one another, leaving about enough in the collection plate for a return bus ticket to Guildford (and we didn't notice anyone using the card reader). It was as I was tidying up that the joker in the pack of godparents came up to me. 'That was great, thank you', he said. 'You won't remember, but you baptised my daughter in 2010. Look, this is her now,' he went on, showing me a snap of a disgruntled looking fourteen-year-old on his phone. We had a very pleasing talk about what had happened to him since, and the passage of time more generally. There you are, do not rush to action, I thought to myself.

Earlier, our lay reader Gizel overheard me quoting Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes to the ladies serving coffee, which they'd clearly never heard of. My 'sermon' that morning had been an examination of the spiritual relationship between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy, with various audiovisual aids including a scary video of the Russian Military Cathedral built in 2020. 'You're a virtually inexhaustible source of nonsense', Gizel told me, which I think she meant kindly. Being German it's sometimes difficult to tell. I suppose it's positive that I cultivate such a warm and approachable working environment that she feels she can say something like that. 

Words, Words

It wasn’t the fault of the planning team that the non-eucharistic first-Sunday-in-the-month service had a few issues this week. The order of service was passed to me for setting and printing, I noted the lack of the Lord’s Prayer and popped it in but forgot actually to tell Gisele the lay reader who led the service based on her original notes. Our new sound system still has an annoying buzz on the audio loop for those using hearing aids, so the affected parties tell me – but that’s well beyond my ability to sort out at the moment.

This is the second time the team have led the service, and I offer the following observation without speculation. I notice that while I tend to err on the side of reticence and brevity in liturgical matters, if I hand liturgy to laypeople to devise they seem to prefer lots of words, and making them as lyrical as possible. This isn’t invariably the case (we have some lay intercessors who also keep their words simple and straightforward) but it happens often enough to be remarkable. I’m also nervous about straying too far from Biblical texts, and the language yesterday landed quite a distance from them (‘Early in the morning, in the multicoloured company of your Church’ being the most obvious example): I wonder whether laypeople realise how much of the liturgy is composed of chopped-up bits of Scripture or at the very least imagery and language drawn from it, rather than something someone made up at some point. In hymns, of course, a greater latitude is customary: a theological student once asked Archbishop Ramsey whether there was a readily-available dictionary of heresies, to which he replied ‘Yes, it’s called Hymns Ancient and Modern’.