Caniculares Dies

 ... only with fewer actual dogs. In Swanvale Halt this sharp summer, the canines keep inside for most of the day the same way the humans do. These are quiet times at the church, punctuated only by the roster of events that happen every year - the Feast of the Transfiguration which we try to observe with an outdoor mass in the churchyard (and easily succeeded this year), the ecumenical open-air service in Hornington, and, yet to come, the Village Show. That's likely to be the least successful of the three, given current conditions which have shrivelled the dahlias and reduced the allotment tomatoes to the size of, well, currants. 

 When I can come up with literally nothing I can bear to do at home at the moment, I have a wander about, pray for the people I know or indeed don't know in the streets I go along, and challenge the Lord to bring me into contact with someone who might appreciate talking to me. Sometimes he does, but I'm realising this venture is not very effective if I follow my usual inclination and try to polish off whatever tasks I might need to do before heading out, maybe in the middle of the afternoon; in the middle of the afternoon, everyone who can is hiding out of the sun. The café opposite the church is deserted; the roads are silent. 

I take with me my little directory that lists not just members of the congregation but also baptism families, funeral next of kin, wedding couples, and other contacts. I tell myself I might even knock on a door or two. And at that point I realise how neglectful I have been. Not only have the numbers of all these pastoral contacts declined over the years - which I can't do much about - I have been very shy about keeping in touch with people, and now it's a bit late to go calling on someone whose child I baptised a few years ago and haven't seen since. Despite having a set of very good excuses to knock on a door, I think 'shy' is probably the right description. At the back of my mind I have a conviction that they will have no interest in hearing from the priest, and at the front of it a set of rationalisations for holding back - it's raining, it's the weekend, it's the holidays, it's not the holidays. I have been very foolish, and changing my outlook would do everyone good, not least me.

Let Not Your Right Hand Know

It's sort of appropriate that tomorrow is the feast day of St Elizabeth of Hungary, the 13th-century princess who ended her life prematurely from severe austerity imposed on her by her spiritual director, the appalling Konrad of Marburg, but who is remembered less for being a victim of abuse than for her charity to the poor of her day. The readings are St James on faith and works and the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats - no ambiguity there. 

Appropriate because a couple of days ago my friend Peter - I would say something like, 'Who has a conflicted relationship with the Church', but who doesn't - posted on LiberFaciorum a link to a story about a young woman in the US calling various churches to find out 'if they would help a starving baby', and discovering that quite a lot allegedly wouldn't. Cue all Peter's atheist friends weighing in to say how disgusting it was. I thought the article was quite thin: it didn't quote what Nikalie Monroe was actually saying to the churches she called, what information she gave them, or what their actual response was in any detail. I decided rashly to comment that, if I'd had such a contact out of the blue my first response would be to ask where the caller was: if they were local, I would visit and take it from there, and if not direct another church (and perhaps whatever other agencies were available) in that locality. Such a situation has certainly never happened to me and I have to say were it to my first thought would be how odd it was. The response to my reflections was not thoughtful, and reinforced what one should always remember, that hardly anyone ever engages in this kind of discussion to learn anything, genuinely to exchange ideas, or have their minds changed. It was very clear that the atheists felt the Church should respond to such a request in a way they would not dream of doing themselves. OK, it's appropriate for individuals to behave differently from organisations, but I can tell you absolutely that secular agencies and charities would not respond to unsolicited and uninvestigated requests any more than a church would. In fact I would guess churches are probably more likely to.

At Swanvale Halt church we're talking about setting up a hardship fund: a member of the congregation has a significant amount of money available and thought that might be a useful way of employing some of it. But if I think of the times I as an individual have ended up giving support to people it's almost always ended badly. I have given what must be many hundreds of pounds to Mad Trevor to tide him over crises, always with the assurance that he would reimburse me one day: when he got his substantial payout from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority last year, there was no talk of me getting a penny of it. Not that I ever expected it, I mention it only to make the point that this is what charity is like. I have subsidised people I should not have: one case I recall I finally called a halt to after about a week during which I was giving him up to £40 a day, with the result that he screamed at me in the street: 'What the fuck am I supposed to do now? Call yourself a Christian?' a line I knew was coming. What I was doing, I later realised, was merely supporting him in his addictions, and the people I really needed to apologise to were the local community, not him. Years later he wrote to me from prison to say sorry. And there have been others.

But the only case remotely like that of Nikalie Monroe's experiment that has ever come my way was a woman who I'd come across through yet another hard case - someone my contact had herself given money to and had it all go wrong. This woman called me one Sunday night saying she didn't want money, but had literally nothing in the house to feed her children - could I spare some groceries? I dug everything I could spare out of my cupboards and gave it to her in a bag when she called round. She was, I suppose understandably, awkward and taciturn and tried not to catch my eye. Though I may have seen her about, I might not recognise her, and to my knowledge I have never interacted with her again. 

Keeping Promises

M asked me about being married in the church. I knew, not only that they’d been married before, but also met their new partner before being divorced. It was a kind of request, surprisingly, that I'd never had before. ‘But did the new relationship cause the end of the marriage?’ the priest I talked it through with asked me: ‘Can they assure you it didn’t?’ I put this to M and they were honest enough to say they couldn’t be definite that the marriage wouldn’t have carried on had they not met the new partner. It’s all very uncertain, though I was happier having some kind of objective criteria rather than just relying on what I felt.

If you’re a Roman Catholic, or a certain kind of Anglican, there is no question: you can only get married in church once. If you’re (some sorts of) Orthodox, again, you get three goes at it after which you are deemed to be taking the mickey, but a subsequent marriage omits some of the celebratory ceremonies of a first. Anglican churches are left to work out their own approach, provided it is consistent with the House of Bishops’ guidance, which includes the caveat about the new relationship not being a direct cause of the marriage ending. Again, I very much want something more than my own judgement to go on. Who am I to wade into the complexities of human relationships?

The House of Bishops’ guidance advises the priest to make sure that celebrating a subsequent marriage does not ‘undermine the Church’s teaching’ that marriage is for life, but given our apparently limited enthusiasm for our own teaching I think of it more basically. If the core of all sacraments is about promises, your approach, be it ever so gentle and pastoral, has to speak to the integrity of promises, of which the promises couples make, and which God promises to help them keep, is only one. Society has an interest in promises being kept, because we all rely on trusting that most people will do their best to keep their promises, most of the time.

And yet we know (frail beings that we are) we break other promises. We take part in the sacrament of reconciliation and promise God we won’t do this or that, and it is very likely that we will. Does breaking a promise preclude us from making another one? Or does the public, communal nature of the matrimonial promise make a difference? 

Dialogue of the Partly Deaf

The young man accosted me as I was returning home from Vespers, with a phrase (whatever it was) which is like the usual opening gambit from a cult: ‘Excuse me, sir, are you worried about the way our country is going?’ He told me there were ‘13 colleges in London where you can’t wish people Happy Christmas’ and that churches were being closed to be replaced by ‘mosques and synagogues’. If I’d had more time I would have tried to explore whether there was a genuine anxiety beneath these statements – I thought his stare and slightly ragged appearance suggested some kind of mental distress – but I hadn’t, I fear. I said things seemed very different in Swanvale Halt where I was doing work in local schools and so on and if churches were closing it was mainly because people didn’t go to them. Did he go to church, I asked? Yes, he said, ‘the main church’ in Guildford, which was an interesting way of describing what was clearly not Holy Trinity on the High Street or even the Cathedral, but Emmaus Road. That’s if it was true.

On Saturday I did a funeral visit. I knew the gentleman whose wife’s service we were discussing, and must have met his stepson before though I couldn’t remember. The deceased lady had been a Roman Catholic at one stage in her life, at least, and her son had attended a convent school and been an altar server in his teens before leaving that behind. ‘I have to say I think religion is a crutch for people who need it’, he said, while his stepfather believed that God had directed his life in various ways, not least leading him towards his wife via some unlikely coincidences. How the conversation got onto aliens and Neanderthal technology I wasn’t sure, but it felt like a talk I was supposed to contribute to but couldn’t find a rational way into, or indeed to steer back to what we were supposed to be talking about. It was absolutely exhausting.

As was the third unsatisfactory encounter within a few days. This one was at a friend’s early-retirement party where I found myself sitting next to a friend of his who had some potentially interesting things to say about her frustrated career as an engineer, being married to a soldier, running a club for bikers in Camden in the 1990s, and dealing with her son’s schooling. But it became clear that behind each story there was a point being made about the unreasonable behaviour of other people, and I was not so much participating in a conversation as being invited to agree. If I missed the narrative clues to how I was supposed to understand each anecdote there was no way back, and it was easy enough to do that in a loud pub. I was almost weeping by the end.

How rarely one has conversations that actually mean anything, in which the participants are listening to what each other has to say rather than simply speaking at one another. I do strive to view my encounters as opportunities to learn more about other people but they don’t always make it easy!

Steering Clear of the Rocks

The horrid oesophagal spasm which occasionally hits me very rarely starts up in the middle of the day, but that’s what happened as I was setting up for the midweek mass on the feast of blessed St Thomas Aquinas. The only way of stopping it is to swallow something. Water didn’t make any difference, so, avoiding Slimming World who were occupying the church hall, I shot into the kitchen and grabbed a tin of biscuits from the cupboard: eating one breached (my own interpretation of) the eucharistic fast, but the biscuit was horrible, so at least I suffered for it. The spasm was stilled and I was able to carry on.

That was physical pain; I took some emotional turbulence into the service as well. In the midst of my distractions, I reflected how wonderful it is to be carrying out this act that connects us to the eternal worship of the angels, and also that, whoever I may be estranged from in this earthly realm, those broken relationships will (in so far as they can, consonant with the eternal justice of God) be made whole. That’s all very well: it blunts the upset, or puts it into a wider context. At the very least, the words of redemption and praise take you to a different place if only temporarily. But the liturgy and the prayer it is part of doesn’t make the damage go away.

My Spiritual Director was told, as a young priest, ‘You will never get anywhere in the Church if you insist on being so personal in your sermons’. I talk about my own experiences and those of people I know all the time, so I disagree (not that I have ever wanted to ‘get anywhere’ in the Church); but a pastor’s congregation, I think, are caught in contradictory feelings about this. They want their minister to ‘seem human’, to have some sense that they too are subject to frailties and disappointments, but they don’t necessarily want to know in any detail what they are. Equally, the pastor may want to bring personal experience to bear to inject some reality into what they talk about, but it's a tactic fraught with hazard. Oversharing might not only head into areas that most people would rightly be reluctant to talk about, but might also be burdensome. You can think of circumstances (of illness or another misfortune) when a minister might need to be ‘held up’ by their people, but you don’t want them to become reluctant to share difficulties with you themselves out of concern for your own welfare.

The Feast of the Angelic Doctor afforded me limited opportunity to discuss my own difficulties anyway, and in the end I tend to veer away from deep emotional waters unless I have navigated them many times before and know how to talk about them in a way others may find helpful. Because ultimately the pastor's job is to serve, and only relieve your own burdens when it will definitely benefit your listeners to do so.

Into the Unknown

My amazing friend Professor Cotillion regularly photographs orbs in her beautiful 17^th-century cottage, little blobs of blue light that aren’t visible to the natural sight but appear to the camera. She’s a brave and intelligent woman and is perfectly aware of the obvious explanation that they are reflections or refractions (and that sometimes the patterning of them makes it very likely that they are), but she likes to think of them as friendly spirits, guarding the space that she’s been lucky enough to inhabit and enhance with her striking decorative gifts.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, I was in the café opposite the church, and Peter, a man in his late 60s perhaps, came over to speak to me, apologising for interrupting me. He described how, a few weeks before his wife had a stroke (from which, happily, she’s slowly recovering), he woke in the small hours of the morning to a strange white light from behind the TV and a voice which stated, firmly and definitely, ‘Do not move from where you are’. ‘Whoever you are, you’re not taking me or Elaine’, my interlocutor said – though he told me he had no sense that the presence was in any way malevolent. He didn’t feel afraid, though he did feel annoyed at being woken and disturbed. The voice repeated its instruction and the experience faded. ‘I couldn’t have moved even if I’d wanted to’, Peter went on, ‘I tried’. That puts the ‘vision’ into the familiar category of sleep paralysis, but that wasn’t really the point, I felt. I assured Peter that his experience was unusual but one many people undergo, and that the context in which it could make sense might not become clear for a long while. I wondered about the link with his wife’s illness. Peter thanked me, said he was going to go over to the church ‘to spend a few minutes with the Lord – I’ve often told him I’ll make him tea if he turns up and tells me what he’s about’, and he paid for my coffee too. (‘Can I buy you a pie, Father?’)

Over the years I’ve become much more tolerant of these experiences which one might term paranormal. You can see how they might get such a grip of a vulnerable soul that they might need to be gently prised away from them, have it pointed out that they are not rational and they shouldn’t base their life around them; but at the same time, if I believe that human beings are immensely complex, that we are holistic structures, and that therefore our subconscious mind can communicate with us through our conscious awareness, most of the time I don’t feel that, when I meet rational people who paranormal experiences, that my first response should be to explain those experiences away. Professor Cotillion’s friendly orbs externalise her own capacity for love, while Peter’s early-morning voice might well be telling him something he needs to take account of. They are both worth something, because God is everywhere, and not absent from these events either.

Strain in All Directions

Curiously – or perhaps not – while I am away on holiday pastoral issues often seem to blow up in the parish. That happened this October, and eventually I found myself sitting with a church volunteer hearing a series of complaints about events which occurred in my absence. I investigated, and found that, in all conscience, I couldn’t do what the person concerned wanted me to, whereon they resigned their role.

I don’t handle these things well. This particular situation comes at the end of a long series of strains and difficulties, and, though I strive not to, I find myself rehearsing angry speeches about the rights and wrongs of the matter. Then, when faced by someone who's behaving reasonably and calmly, at least when I’m talking to them, I have to exert a different effort to try and remember the times when they weren’t reasonable and calm, either with me or others.

Not only will the person you’re dealing with probably frame events with an entirely different narrative, and, were they confronted with yours, sit and blink uncomprehendingly (assuming they didn’t fly off the handle with rage), it’s a rare history which contains nothing positive, no matter how hard the end has been. The particular person concerned in this one has done many helpful and worthwhile things in the church’s life, and has been diligent and hardworking to a fault. They could point to the efforts they’ve made and the sacrifices they’ve undergone on the church’s behalf absolutely justly. For those tasks, they were the right person at the right time. As a pastor you have to acknowledge this, while keeping your sight on the actual situation in hand and what you simply must do about it.

The ambiguity and contradictions inherent in such events means that none of this feels good, even if you work to detach yourself from your own individual feelings.

I always pray for the church when I’m on leave. Imagine what would happen if I didn’t.

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.

What Prayers Mean

We prayed for Sheila - of course we did for such a loved member of the church, hoping that somehow the fast-developing cancer had been caught in time, that the doctors had got the right treatment. She died, nevertheless, early one morning, a gentle, generous and positive soul of the kind the world could do with more of, not fewer. 

What are we doing when we pray for someone with an apparently mortal illness? We all know that most of the time these illnesses take their normal course, but also that it doesn't always end that way, and that just occasionally there is a recovery that defies all expectation. Is that what we're praying for, for Sheila or anyone else? The old texts I use when I administer the Last Rites are a masterly blend of fortitude and hope:

We know, O Lord, that there is no word impossible with you; and that, if you will, you can even yet raise her up, and grant her a longer continuance amongst us: Yet, forasmuch as in all appearance the time of her dissolution draws near, so fit and prepare her, we pray you, against the hour of death, that after her departure hence in peace, and in your favour, her soul may be received into your everlasting kingdom ...

Yet our attitude can't be simply one of balancing probabilities, hoping for remission but facing up to the likelihood of dissolution. We know, more radically than this, that something will, sooner or later, carry us out of this world. That event could be disease or accident, fast or slow, sudden or long-anticipated. It would be anything: but, notwithstanding the people I sometimes encounter who seem astonished and bewildered that Death has come seeking them - it will eventually arrive.

Is what we want full and perfect health until we finally peg out silently, in our sleep, at the age of 112? Even granted the inevitability of death, why can God not concede us that? Is it too much to ask? Perhaps praying for that is a bit like praying for someone in a different, less medical situation, like Carly. We know that nobody is suddenly going to intervene in such a way that everything is made all right for her, and that it probably wouldn't work if anyone tried. But the way society is arranged offers the possibility that her difficulties might be made a little better, as might those of many other people in the same boat. Are we intended to advance not as isolated individuals, but generally, together, in the direction God has show that he wants?

In many ways, we are generalities, statistics: the kinds of things that befall Sheila, or Carly, or you and me, are the same sorts of afflictions which happen to millions, a common human lot that nobody escapes. If only the Lord had not been the very one who taught us we were more than that in his Father's eyes, such a truth might be easier to assmiliate. 

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.

Rebuild the Boundaries!

Amazingly, it’s a full seven years since Carly told me she was dying of leukaemia, a belief she now says came from a wrongly-addressed letter from the hospital. Since then, she’s been in and out of prison, has orbited around Swanvale Halt but never resettled here, and eventually was offered a place in a shared house managed by an alcohol recovery charity. We (the church) took her for her interview and I’d arranged moving her stuff there before she said she’d found someone else to help with it. Her troubles carried on, however. She maintained she’d had her food and money stolen, and yet again I was drawn into sending her a sub – at first, a one-off as she was moving in to the new house, then another one-off because it was Christmas, and then … A couple of days after Christmas I gave her a lift from the house to the village because she’d been beaten up there and her money taken, and was going to stay with a friend and see her family; on New Year’s Eve, before zooming to London, I took her back to the house after a row with her family and, supposedly, the ‘friend’ again beating her up and taking her money. Now she has to leave the house having broken its rules, not, her social worker who has again made contact with me, for the first time.

This is wearyingly familiar stuff and tracking back in the blog you can piece together similar stories. What made it slightly different this time was that Carly was in a meeting at the probation office yesterday and asked me if I could send her the fare home. The problem was that I was, at that moment, in Reading seeing a friend and not just in Reading but temporarily stranded in Reading. On Tuesday I’d been marooned in Portsmouth due to the storm closing down the rail network, and finally boarded a bus that took me to Victoria Coach Station from where, via train and taxi, I made it home; Thursday’s problem was rain flooding the line to Guildford, and while I did get home it required another diversion to the capital to take a different route. Carly proved very unwilling to accept this, asking me repeatedly why I couldn’t send her the money and then why I was away from home for a second time in a week. As soon as I got back at 10.30 I did, and even offered to give her yet another lift, but heard nothing. I still had to clear away the Christmas decorations in the church and set up for the Toddler Group in the morning (our churchwardens are both indisposed).

I couldn’t send her the money because I am old-fashioned and use a physical key to access my bank account. I don’t see why I should order my financial arrangements around the possibility that someone else may want an emergency transfer while I’m out. Also, I was absent for more than a day in a week because I was on leave. I had explained this already, but Carly couldn’t grasp the relevance of it. I thought of saying ‘What the hell business is it of yours to dictate what I do?’ During an earlier episode of the same sort of thing Ms Formerly Aldgate once fumed ‘These people seem to think they’ve got an absolute right to your money’, and Carly appeared to believe I should put myself in a position always to meet her potential needs, as well. In fact I’m afraid I got very annoyed about it, albeit only to myself.

I know maintaining boundaries is important, but here I am in the same kind of situation as so many times before, with (unlike the Lord) an account of what it is I’m supposed to do or not do that’s so fuzzy it’s barely workable. At least I didn’t have a chance to tell Carly just what I thought, as I would have spoken out of tiredness and bitterness that was nothing to do with her at all.

Rerum Novarum

Even a couple of hours beforehand, I wasn't convinced about setting out to London to see the New Year in at Tarantella. It wasn't just the usual Sunday services in the morning, or even preparing for my week off to come (in fact today Il Rettore warned me he has covid, so I'll be doing the Tuesday mass after all), but I was a bit weary. It didn't help that I came to lock up the church at tea-time and found Carly on the Lady Chapel step surrounded by bags and charging her phone. Only on Friday I'd given her a lift from the shared alcohol-recovery house ten miles away where she has a room to Swanvale Halt, because she said she'd been beaten up there and her money stolen. She was going to stay with a friend and see her family for Christmas. This didn't go well: the friend also beat her up and stole from her, and she got into a row with her brother who hit her for good measure. Could I take her back to the shared house again? At least it being New Year's Eve the roads were quiet. 

Well. I set my teeth and drove to Guildford to catch a slow, late-running train that got me to The Albany on Great Portland Street at 10.45. And it was rather fine: the couple of hours I spent there were in the company of friends expected and unexpected and I learned a little about what's going on with them, in so far as you can grab some intelligible words in an environment of loud music in a dark, enclosed space. After the customary countdown to midnight, whoever was DJing put on 'Heroes' - most of the time I can't abide Bowie, but the song's melancholy defiance was most apposite and brought a bit of a tear to the eye. Back at Waterloo and dreading the usual exhausting diversion around the massive pedestrian gyratory system that, one time I and Ms Formerly Aldgate braved it, took us as far as Blackfriars, I found there wasn't one. I went straight up the escalator from the Tube and onto the concourse. I was so surprised and pleased I had to find a member of staff and congratulate them, much to their confusion.

I think I will be posting here a bit less in 2024.  I began this blog way, way back in 2009 because I found that clergy blogs essentially told you nothing interesting. I was especially thinking of someone who was at Staggers at the same time as me and whose posts on a blog that was supposed to be about hs parish essentially described whatever feast day it was according to the Roman calendar and then out of the blue announced he was crossing the Tiber, and that was that. I wanted to give at least a flavour of what looking after a small and unremarkable parish church is like, and after a couple of years settled into a discipline of posting basically every other day as all the advice in those days suggested that was how you built up an audience, even if I ended up showing readers pictures of the garden or some dimly-lit club as I am today. But all these years later, a blog of this kind is something of an anachronism - hardly anyone does anything like it now. Sometimes it's been a helpful mechanism for settling my thoughts on a particular topic, and just now and again I've posted something which people have been specifically interested in. 

Far and away the most popular of these has been my examination of fringe churches, as the algorithms pick up on David Farrant, Sean Manchester and the saga of the Highgate Vampire very readily. The runners-up are:

- My account of Chapel House, Blackfen, an East London folly;

- My speculations on the real identity of Witch House musician Hvcci Gvcci;

- A description of what happened to the burned-out church of St Saviour, Poplar;

- A post about a handful of holy wells in Norfolk;

- A few words about Anglo-Catholic artist Thomas Noyes Lewis; and 

- My visit to the Hascombe Dragonstones in 2020. 

Presumably this is because there's not much else online about any of them! Anyway, a little while ago I passed the symbolic milestone of 2000 posts and as themes and ideas begin to repeat themselves it's time to slow down a bit. I will still post when something occurs to me, but be driven more by events and concerns than by that alternate-day discipline. 

Every blessing in 2024 to any reader I may have!

A Brief Visit

A familiar kind of encounter for me yesterday with a longstanding member of the church who, to all appearances, is about to leave this world behind. I zoomed over to the hospital in between a ministers' lunch and a virtual meeting to make certain I had a few minutes, at least, with Derek, former churchwarden and many other things. He and his wife had only just moved into a local care home when he had a cardiac arrest and ended up in hospital being told off for not eating food he has no inclination to eat. 'I go to sleep and each time I wake up - well, I don't need to tell you,' he said. 'I wish that clock wasn't right opposite my bed'. It isn't lack of faith, as Derek's thankfully remains intact, but he is very, very tired and knowing that his wife is being looked after relieves him of any anxiety to linger longer than he needs. This sounds like a bit of a grim encounter, but it wasn't: 'I've got a lot to be thankful for', Derek told me, 'All those years as a lay pastoral assistant. It was a great privilege. They were good times'.

I say I zoomed over to the hospital, but my zooming concluded with twenty minutes of crawling round the car park trying to find a space. As the line of vehicles ahead of mine didn't decrease with time, but rather extended, I realised I was going to be unlucky, and parked at the cathedral instead, yomping over grass and through underpasses to get to the hospital. I told the chaplains about Derek and asked them to keep an eye on him. In their email back, the lead chaplain said Derek had relayed my story of parking at the cathedral (poor fellow, he'd probably bent their ear about it) and said I should have gone to the superstore which is halfway between the cathedral and the hospital. I was surprised they would advocate such naughtiness. 

What To Pray

At first, Sally our pastoral assistant told me that Harriet wasn't going to be able to get to church anymore. Her Parkinson's had advanced to the point where she would now need two people to get her out of the house, and while we have some very obliging members of the congregation, there are few confident, and none trained, in moving around the dead weight of a human being, even one rendered lighter by long illness. So I dropped round a note saying I would be very happy to bring Harriet communion at home, and suggesting Friday after our Toddler Group. Then in the middle of the week I had another conversation with Sally who reported that Harriet was determined to get to church. I thought this would turn out to be unrealistic and let things stand as they were. After the toddlers were finished, then, I toddled round to Harriet's and was let in by Nadia the carer who told me Harriet was having a tough day. She was in her usual chair, but barely able to move or speak. The sign of the Cross was a vague movement of her hand across her chest. It was no surprise when her son called me later in the day to say she'd been taken to hospital, or that her daughter rang me this morning with the news that she'd succumbed to pneumonia and died in the early hours. Given how weak and ill Harriet was, the nine-hour wait for the ambulance probably didn't make any material difference, but it doesn't look good that her daughter was able to fly back from Spain and get there in less time than it took an ambulance to arrive from Guildford. At least receiving the Sacrament was virtually the last positive act of Harriet's life, as she would have wanted it to be.

As soon as I had the news that Harriet was in hospital I asked Giselle the lay reader to ask the prayer chain to keep her in mind. I stood in front of my little shrine at home and wondered what I should pray. Of course basically you hold the person before the Lord and pray that his will for their best interest be done, but you still have your own feelings. Harriet's has been a long and hard road and there have been times I have found her 'courage' - which has seemed occasionally to involve a refusal to accept that her illness brings limitations on what she can do - enfuriating. She began to lose track of time and would call late in the evening and spend ten minutes telling me - what? Usually I could only pick out a few words. Sometimes it was to apologise for not being present at a service I never expected her to attend. Didn't she realise it was virtually impossible, by that stage, to understand what she was saying over the phone? I tried to see it as an act of service in its own right, but I feared so much misunderstanding something that was actually important. What was that like, to have a functioning brain, except when pharmaceutical fog affected it, and not to be able to communicate? I couldn't pray, Friday and yesterday, that Harriet wouldn't make it, and I expect she would have wanted to. But it was part of what I felt. 

The last words of Harriet, our friend and sister, that I understood, repeated over and over until I could grasp at them before they fled away again, were 'Where am I?'

Resident Not Available - a Pastoral Episode

A freezing Swanvale Halt afternoon: I went to the church to collect the reserved sacrament to take to Alison, who lives in the block of sheltered housing flats adjoining the churchyard. I should have seen her in the week before Christmas, but she'd been in hospital and this was the first time we could set something up. I keyed in the number of her flat and waited a minute while the keypad beeped. 'Resident not available', the machine told me. So I tried to phone her, and found the line busy. I had a leaflet to drop round to a new resident around the corner, so did that, returned, and tried again, with the same result. I popped to the Post Office before coming back, and yet another attempt to make contact brought no further success. It was now 25 minutes after our appointment, cold, and getting dark.

I went to the church office, and happened to mention the situation to Sandra the office manager. She sings in a community choir with one of the other residents of the flats, and before I really knew what was happening called him: he wasn't at home, but gave us the number of another neighbour. This all seemed to be spinning a little out of control: I didn't really have any reason to think Alison was lying incapacitated on the floor of her flat and we were now only one over-excited misinterpretation of a sentence away from the fire brigade turning up. Sandra's friend's neighbour pinged me in to the flats and I eventually found Alison's door open and Alison herself contentedly watching the TV with the sound turned up so loud it obliterated even the residual chance she might have had of hearing the intercom when I called. The phone was still hooked up to a call from 2 1/4 hours earlier, explaining why the line was busy. The number was displayed as 'withheld', so possibly Alison had been unwittingly saving any number of other people from nuisance calls from the same source. 'It's lovely to see you', she said, having completely and blissfully forgotten our appointment.

That Doesn't Make Any Sense

Trevor has been quiet for quite some time: his delusions haven't been of the kind I can do anything about, and I have stopped arguing with him as there is no point. They are so deep-rooted and such a part of him that there is no dislodging them even as they upset him. But just over the last couple of weeks he has been complaining about the Adversary's activities again.

Trevor: I'm experiencing supernatural events. I keep levitating.

Me: When does this happen? Are you sitting watching the TV and then lift up out of your seat?

Trevor: It's when I'm lying on my bed. [clue: this means he's asleep].

Me: Has anyone ever seen this happen to you?

Trevor: Leeeet meee thiiiiink ....

Me: I think you'd probably remember if anyone else had been there.

- As indeed any potential observer would have done. Trevor wants to be exorcised, but I reminded him that I can't do that without referring to the Diocesan Advisor on Deliverance, and I have taken him to three of those over the years and none of them have deemed exorcism a necessary step to take. He accepted that without complaining, for now.

In the afternoon it was Church Club. The story was Gideon, and taking a cue from the episode of the fleece my theme was experiments. For some years when I've told this story I've taken a pair of tarnished copper coins into school and, during storytime, put one in a jar of vinegar until the end of the session to show how the vinegar cleans it. I sat down to do this yesterday and Disaster! found no bottle of vinegar in my bag|: I was convinced I'd brought it. I apologised to the children. 'There's some vinegar at the bottom of the toy box!' cried Bryony brightly. The toy box sits at the side of the hall, full of foam rubber balls and the like and the children had all been playing with them while we got ready for storytime; it seemed prima facie most unlikely that the school would be storing vinegar in it. I went to investigate, surrounded by a crowd of excited children, and, sure enough, right at the bottom, was a bottle of vinegar.

For a moment, I admit, I was bewildered. All my expectations, which seemed so reasonable, were confounded and I could not work out any reason why the school would want to have vinegar around other than in the canteen, let alone hide it in the hall under a mountain of foam rubber balls and rings. But this was only a moment: I realised it was my bottle of vinegar, which must have fallen out of my bag thanks to the children rummaging around, and found its way to the bottom. This was a relief, or I might have had to concede that perhaps Trevor had been levitating after all.

The Manner of Our Departure

It was a beautiful, elegaic moment as Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor regenerated yesterday evening into – well, if you don’t mind spoilers, an earlier version of herself. And every Dorset native will have been squee-ing to see where she chose to watch ‘one last sunrise’ – the unmistakable outline of Durdle Door on the Purbeck coast. My first thought was how lovely it was, and my second how aghast the Dorset emergency services would be at the prospect of viewers thinking it might be fun to try and recreate the moment. Sure enough, the Lulworth Estate which owns Durdle Door has denounced the BBC’s ‘duplicity’ (now that’s a strong word) in not telling it what the request to film at the limestone arch would actually produce. There’s no safe way along the top of the headland and people have been badly injured diving off it. Unless you actually have access to a TARDIS, it’s best admired from a distance.

‘It’s such a shame you can’t pick the date, time, place and manner of departure, isn’t it? Well, you can in some sense, but that’s obviously more likely to be a messy route, and I don’t like mess’, mused Ms Kittywitch to us the other day. Ms K, who has battled a bewildering variety of medical dangers since before her heart-and-lung transplant at the age of 13, now faces a new diagnosis I can barely remember, and a new drug which might buy her another X years or finish her off with an allergic reaction. She is right, though I would choose not a sunrise on Durdle Door (or indeed chucking myself off it), but a rainy late afternoon on Chesil Beach, the ‘melancholy, long withdrawing roar’ of the Lyme Bay seas on the shingle. I can’t see how that could be managed, though, and might have to settle for Dorothy Parker’s more realistic option: ‘O let it be a night of lyric rain/And singing breezes when my bell is tolled’.

Most of us will be ushered from this earthly existence as part of a medical drama. On Thursday night I was called to the hospital to see Edgar: Jackie, his wife, apologised for calling me on my day off once she realised that’s what it was, but I’ve learned that you mustn’t delay these things if you can help it, and had we left it to Friday morning Edgar would have been unresponsive. It was hard to understand him, beyond the single word 'Amen'. His operation months ago to correct an essential tremor was successful but his enjoyment of it never materialised as his recuperation was interrupted by a fall and broken ankle, pneumonia and finally a fatal infection. That’s how it goes. Not for most of us the singing breezes or the crashing waves, but the quiet of a ward side room and the hiss of an oxygen mask, and as much faith as, with God’s grace, we can muster.

Home From Home

Edgar is in respite some miles away from Swanvale Halt. Back in May he had an operation to correct an ‘essential tremor’ he’s had for many years and this was entirely successful, so he now has a usable right hand for the first time in a long while. However, he reacted unusually badly to his medication and had to stay in hospital longer than expected, and at home, having been doing very well for some days, took a tumble and broke his ankle. Back to hospital for Edgar, then, and finally out – but not to his and wife Jennifer’s impractical house with its ground-floor garage and lots of stairs, but to a care home in a leafy part of the county.

The staff are kind but overworked and management could be more effective than it is. The place ran out of insulin last week and the manager had to drive Jennifer all the way back to Swanvale Halt to pick up Edgar’s entire supply. Edgar is currently the only resident without dementia and, he says, once the staff got used to not treating him the same way, now pop in to see him suspiciously often as they can expect a reasonable conversation. It would be better to move him to a different home just up the hill from me, but Edgar is a tall gentleman and that particular establishment doesn’t have any extendable beds! All the care facilities in the area are packed, as are the hospitals: normally the kind of physiotherapy and rehabilitation Edgar needs would be handled at Milford, but they have no beds at all.

I spent about 45 minutes with Edgar, having not seen him for several weeks. And as I drew back I realised that the one thing I’d decided I needed to talk to him about – his role as the church’s licensee for events where alcohol is served – I’d completely forgotten!

Beauties

It is as hot in Swanvale Halt as anywhere else, and the landscape still looks lush rather than parched. I took Mad Trevor out for a short drive, as we now do occasionally. It gets him out of his flat, now that his car sits rusting, mouldy and unusable, and it seems the most useful thing I can do for him. Today I took him to Cutmill Tarn, which is not far away. He didn't get out of the car, claiming a bad back, but I did, and was glad I had.

Sun and Clouds

The weather for John and Felicity’s wedding was unexpectedly sunny: they deserved it, as they came to sign all the paperwork no less than three years ago, and had to wait all this time because of pandemic delays. While I was in the vestry thinking that my cotta was so creased I really ought to run the iron over it, I checked my phone and found a message from church member Elaine. ‘Rest in peace Annabel’, it said, ‘they found her’. 

Annabel had been missing since the day before, and unlike Bill, the search for her didn’t end as we wanted. Deeply unhappy over recent months and increasingly lost, Annabel had been engulfed by sadness and it defeated her. All the good she might have done is gone and we will mourn that as well as the loss of what she was. The last time I’d spoken to her had been for the parish newspaper, talking about the series of children’s fantasy books she’d just begun to publish as she left her teaching job to pursue new avenues, it seemed then. Now I wonder what the families who bought those books and have them on their shelves, excited by a work whose author’s name they knew, will do with them. What will parents say to their children? How will Annabel’s family, and all her friends at school, absorb her loss? 

 And then there are the questions that are unanswerable but you can’t help asking: what must her last thoughts have been? Were they despairing? Did she imagine herself unloved, or did the knowledge of being loved just make no difference to a soul in such darkness? Could she have taken any comfort from dying outside among trees and birds? ‘Could any of us have said anything? Could we have made a difference?’ asked Elaine on the phone. From a Christian point of view, we can at least say Annabel knows the truth now, about herself, and about what we felt. 

She was the very opposite of isolated, socially, even if she was shut off within her own sorrow, and although we are, rightly, encouraged to speak up about our mental health struggles, she did and yet didn’t make it through. Survival seems so arbitrary. 

One former colleague of Annabel’s was at the 8am mass this morning and another congregant mentioned her to me on the way out. As I came home after the main service and the Annual Church Meeting (‘People say Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year, when we know it’s the APCM’, I told them), a neighbour called to me on the hill. How could she tell her five-year-old that Annabel wouldn’t be coming to give her lessons anymore, she asked? It’s another question with no easy answer, but how she planned to do it seemed about right to me. I offered the thought that very small children are usually quite matter-of-fact about death because they don’t necessarily understand it, and may have more searching questions later. 

This is not the first suicide in the parish in my twelve years, and certainly not the only dramatic death. About 18 months ago someone I knew well was murdered in a very public way, and for legal reasons that case has never been reported in the media or officially referred to at all, but we all know it happened. It’s part of a community’s human scar tissue – and in fact we do well not to forget, but to be kind to our most tender souls, in the hope that, perhaps, we might help keep them alive.