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.

Quiet!!!

I find my Lent Quiet Days in Simon and Clarissa's Garden Room at Bortley Mill just as worthwhile as the more extended time I spent over many years at Malling Abbey. This time as it was a Monday I wasn't fasting for the day but in homage to Catherine de Hueck Doherty's strictures about time in the poustinia I subsisted only on bread and black coffee for the day! Not that the privilege of spending a day praying and reading is a great privation. 

The Holy Scriptures aside (I had never before realised that the Parables of the Great Banquet in Matthew 22 and Luke 14 are two profoundly different stories, and I concluded the keynote of the latter is the Lord satirising social customs), the book I took with me was one recently given to me by Dr Michael Lloyd, my former doctrine tutor from Staggers and now gloriously reigning as Principal of Wyckers. God, Struggle and Suffering in the Evolution of Life (2025) is a series of written conversations between six scholars including the Revd Dr himself around the knotted issues of where God fits into the suffering we see embedded in the mechanics of the non-human world. It is, as you might guess, very dense. I was encouraged to know that not only are thoughtful people devoting energy to this ('I have been examining this subject for the last 35 years', writes Prof Paul Fiddes, with the slight suggestion that his younger colleagues might have found some of their conundrums answered by reading his earlier books), but that they actually take the trouble to listen to what each other says and deal with it respectfully, dedicating time and thought to opening debates out rather than closing them down. No odium theologicum obvious here. As someone recently congratulated me on an article I'd written for opinions I hadn't expressed, I can only rejoice. 

No flash of kingfisher by the millstream this year, only grey wagtails.

Busy Doing Nothing

Something very odd happened on Sunday. It wasn't a heavy day in terms of duties, just the services at 8 and 10 and a conversation with a potential baptizand afterwards. As well as household chores I intended to prepare for a meeting on Monday evening, only to realise that most people who would normally be there are away leaving me, Jean the sacristan, and a church member who is hardly ever in church, to talk about worship arrangements. I was just about to send out an email suggesting we postpone the gathering when I found one from Jean saying exactly that. An alternative job was to rough out an account of the various ideas I have for the rest of the year for the PCC; on investigation I found I'd done that, but had forgotten. 

There are always things one could do, but on this occasion I couldn't face any of them. So I sort of faffed about pretending I was still at work but in fact looking up entirely irrelevant matters on the internet and things like that. Eventually I read a chapter of an improving book to clear my head and put the slight sense of self-reproach behind me. That somehow got me through to an acceptable time to return to the church, say Evening Prayer and lock up. It would have been more productive, including spiritually productive, just to stare out of the window. So why hadn't I?

Gradually I realised that I'd fallen into exactly the same habit I try to warn other people against, of validating myself by activity. When there is no activity, when I can't do the things I have planned to do and nothing else intrudes itself, I feel dull and deflated. My non-work life is also defined by activity, by filling the time with tasks. Of course you should be diligent and productive in the use of time, but when idleness comes upon you without being sought, and your response is to fill disturbed and ill-at-ease, this is a spiritual warning sign. My activity was for myself, not for the Lord. 

Turning this over prayerfully on Monday I began feeling that I was enjoying God's company - as the old man famously told the Curé d'Ars, 'I looks at him and he looks at me', that some kind of pressure had been relieved. How unexpected. The next time idleness ambushes me, I will be more prepared by being happier not to do anything!

Keeping One's Council

The CEO of the local Council was only supposed to be a couple of minutes, but I was waiting for him for about twenty. Well, things come up, I know that. I have agreed to be 'Borough Dean', which is something our Bishop is very keen on: a point of contact between the local authority and the churches of the area, explaining the ways and concerns of the one to the other. When he did arrive, full of apologies and offers of coffee, the CEO made it gently clear that I was representing one of a variety of faith communities, albeit the vastly most numerous in sunny Surrey: that was quite understandable and a role I don't mind filling.

While waiting, I watched the receptionist field enquiries. She has to know who to get in touch with and broadly how the structure works to be able to help the people who turn up. Today, a Council tenant was pursuing a Gas Safety inspection on his property which was supposed to have taken place, but the plumber never turned up and he'd heard nothing back (the same happened to me the other day). The receptionist waited on the phone to someone for about ten minutes and then gave it to the man while she dealt with another gentleman who had some papers to hand to a Council officer who she also couldn't get on the phone (it turned out the officer was out at lunch - she came by later). There was also a woman with a non-native-English accent pursuing a housing enquiry with a man who I presumed was from the CAB or a housing charity or something - he was certainly acting as her advocate. She seemed to be about to be ejected from a friend's house and they were trying to secure her a place in a night shelter. They were shown into a meeting room to call either an advisor or a Council officer, I wasn't clear which. It was quite a tally for twenty minutes, though perhaps mid-day is a busy period. 

At Swanvale Halt church, we pray for aspects of our local community on a cyclical basis, including our local authorities, the elected members and staff. That's all very well, and I'm sure the Lord does something more than absolutely nothing with prayers like it. But watching the Council in action for just a few minutes on this very basic level adds some meat to those outline aspirations. How complex it all is - and how worthwhile the odd prayer seems. 

Offering

Fr Donald sat with me saying Evening Prayer. At the moment, the Common Worship Office book gives us the option of reciting words from the Epiphanytide hymn, 'O Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness'. It was written by John Monsell, the Tractarian priest who died after a fall while checking the building works at St Nicolas's church in Guildford, where he was incumbent, in 1875. At first he seemed to have suffered nothing more serious than a broken arm - no joke at 64, but not fatal - but it became clear that he'd undergone internal injuries which did end up carrying him out of this world. 'Fight the good fight' is another of his lyrics, a bit more foursquare Victorian than the Epiphany one; 'Truth in its beauty, and love in its tenderness/These are the offerings to lay at his shrine', the latter goes.

I find myself pondering the nature and worth of love, the core and heart of human life but sometimes so evanescent. Mr Monsell's hymn shows how it's useful to have some buttressing, some additional apparatus, to the Scriptures, to aid us as we navigate the sometimes cold waters of life, and the wisdom of Our Holy Mother the Church in putting the words of a Tractarian worthy into its daily meditations. A particular expression of love might last just a little time. But if it's real and sincere it's not wasted. What is the infant Christ going to do with the Magi's gifts, after all? It can be an offering, which God holds to his everlasting heart, and works with in ways we never know. We can hope.

Mr Happy

‘I do believe our prayers are heard and answered’, says Michael Mayne, the late Dean of Westminster, in the book I’m reading at the moment, The Enduring Melody, dealing with his experience of terminal cancer. ‘But we have to be clear about what we really want’. Prayer is, we might add, a way of discovering what it is we really want, too. It’s a question that’s worth asking ourselves when we sit with the Lord wondering what, if anything, to say.

Want I really want is, I think, something I am slightly ashamed of. I want everyone to be happy. That desire applies most strongly to the people I interact with most closely, but it’s a general one that I’ve realised conditions a lot of what I do. It seems so superficial, somehow, when you state it so baldly.

Of course that desire comes with caveats. I don’t believe you can be properly happy if you are committed to falsehoods, as eventually they will find you out: creation is a unity, and ultimately falsehood corrupts even if you don’t know you are enmeshed in it. I don’t believe you can be properly happy without God: God is the final truth of all things, and we are, as the saint says, restless till we find our rest in him. Rest and peace lie nowhere else. ‘We seek Christ where he is not to be found, amidst graves and sepulchres’, says the 17^th-century bishop Mark Frank, whose sermons I must look up one day. And it is true that what one person requires for what they think of as their happiness, may bring sorrow to another; they are seeking Christ in the sepulchres, in that case, but it’s what they think, and in such cases I can’t take their self-definitions of happiness as read.

Yet nevertheless, all that taken into account, I still want everyone to be happy. It hurts me when they can’t be, or when people I love seem to be seeking happiness in places they won’t find it (perhaps I am, too. I still have a lot to learn). I fear contributing to their unhappiness.

I’m not sure many Christians have this as their governing desire. They want to tell the truth regardless of consequences, to rescue souls from hell, to please God. So do I, I suppose, but I think of it in terms of bringing them happiness, which I believe would bring happiness to God as well.

Am I happy? Can I say that coming to Christ will bring happiness to those I meet? For decades I thought of faith in terms of truth, and never demanded that it would bring me any kind of joy. Perhaps it wouldn’t. Perhaps it would bring me the opposite by making demands of me I might not be inclined to meet. That’s a criticism of my own failings, to be sure, but I’m being no more than honest. Yet now, nearly 30 years after my conversion, I can sit in front of God, as I conceive it, and feel – joy at simply being there. The vicissitudes of my life (such as they are!) all occur in the context of God’s presence. They remain challenging, painful perhaps, but they are still held within something bigger than they are, and the bigger thing they are held in is the deep conviction that the centre of creation is love. It is, perhaps we might say, a deeper life. I am grateful for it. I am, maybe, happy. At least now and again.

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. 

Prayers at the Hour

‘I think that clock is fast’, observed the Chief Executive as he cast his eye across the Council chamber, and so it was – by about five minutes. ‘Someone’s been overzealous winding it’, suggested one of the councillors.  I couldn’t help Brian Cant’s voice running through my mind: ‘Here is the clock, the Trumpton clock, telling the time, never too quickly, never too slowly …’

The reason I was there, and waiting for 6pm to arrive, was that I was leading prayers before the full council meeting of the Borough, an authority which includes Hornington and a couple of other towns and the villages in between them. Paula, still technically one of our Pastoral Assistants, is Mayor this year, having been Mayor of this or that authority on several occasions, including stepping in one year when the sitting Mayor of Hornington had to stop sitting and go to prison. She is perhaps unusual in being a Christian of progressive political opinions in public life, and a definite supporter of the principle of the Council being prayed for when it meets.

Now this has been an area of some controversy in the past. I’m not sure about the Borough, but Hornington Town Council went through a period when prayers were deliberately not being offered, one of the rare occasions when Paula found herself on the same side as the Conservative councillors. It threatened to become a little skirmish in the culture wars, until Paula became Mayor again and offered the compromise that prayers would be offered before the Council meeting was formally opened, giving councillors who didn’t want to be present the chance not to be, and to enter the chamber only once prayers were finished. 

The whole issue seems to have calmed down since then. Not all the current councillors are Christians by any means, including the present Mayor of Hornington (also a Borough Councillor – I hope you’re keeping up at the back, there), as evidenced by his own civic service back in June. I noticed that none of the elected members availed themselves of the opportunity not to be present as I offered their deliberations and decisions to the Lord. I also note, consulting the Youtube video recording the meeting, that the proceedings went on until twenty to nine, so I’m glad I wasn’t obliged to listen to the debate as the councillors had to listen to me ...

Up in the Rafters

The most striking event in the parish this week has been the opening of a new fast-food outlet on the row of businesses which already has two, and the main happening in the life of the church has been an internal glazing area being cleaned for the first time in about twenty years so it no longer presents a canvas of spattered swift guano, but these are fairly pedestrian occurrences. So my mind turns to times past. The alma mater St Stephen's House has just reorganised the Founder's Chapel, the little worship space that crouches beneath the roof of the old building opening off Oxford's Marston Street that was the original home of the Society of St John the Evangelist, and very handsome it is too to judge by this photo on the College's LiberFaciorum page. That's not Comper Pink, but most agreeable nevertheless, a nice contrast with the black.

When I was there it didn't have the little wooden statue of the Virgin and Child, nor was it a space where people spent a great deal of time. We students were discouraged from holding any events there at all, allegedly because it would have been a death-trap in the event of a fire, but somehow that didn't appear to prevent Compline happening there once a week. It was dusty, alternately freezing or suffocating hot according to the season, and occasionally worse, as during the several days when it was invaded by the College's resident colony of pigeons who made it part of their festering empire until it was recaptured.

There were people who found the Founder's Chapel spooky. We were once treated to the local diocesan exorcist recounting some of his stories, and he referred to the unseen denizens of the Marston Street building, though he wasn't at the House to talk to us about that at all. He was quite a peculiar character, the most uncanny thing about him being the mysterious way his toupée moved around his head. He and colleagues had, he told us, been called in to clear out the whole place spiritually, but by the time they got to the Founder's Chapel there was one presence they decided to leave alone 'as it had more of a right to be there than anyone living'. We all knew who that meant. 

So there were certain physical challenges to spending time in the Founder's Chapel (not least getting up the steep stairs to the very pointy pinnacle of the building) but I never felt that Fr Benson or anyone else posed any kind of threat to my spiritual wellbeing. Instead the Chapel was my retreat of final resort when I was too distressed or disillusioned to go anywhere else. I wouldn't go to the House Chapel: that was where we repaired morning and evening for the Office and, like all my fellow ordinands, I even had my own allocated seat. The House Chapel was too much official Staggers for it to be anywhere I wanted to go at the worst of times. St John's Iffley Road, the old monastic church we looked after and which was open to the public for services, was a vast, empty space that I never had any sympathy with. Instead I would ascend those steps to the slight dereliction of the Founder's Chapel and try to pray there, if praying was allowed to mean throwing my anger in front of God and asking him to do something with it. If I felt he was there at all. Like my old schools, I don't have any great desire to revisit Staggers itself: I was 'clapped out' at the end of my time there, went out the door, and that was it. But the Founder's Chapel is, perhaps, one place I would be happy to be teleported back to. 

It Sounds So Simple

One of the actions listed in our Church Development Plan is to equip our people with more practical advice on talking about faith. When I, Grant the churchwarden and Celine from the congregation had our session with the diocesan facilitator, she asked what thought had been given to how, if possible, activities such as the Toddler Group might have scope to lead those who take part to ask questions about faith. 'Everyone will just discount what you say because you're the clergyperson', she told me reasonably, 'So it's the laypeople who have to do the work'. I think you have to be careful with the Talking Jesus stuff: some years ago there was a study - I wrote about it here at the time, but now can't find the reference - that produced the shocking result that more non-Christians reported feeling more negative towards faith as a result of talking to a Christian that those that felt more positive. But if we are even to have a fairly open and receptive conversation with a non-Christian society, somebody has to start that conversation, and it will by definition have to be us. 

So I've begun looking through a set of resources on the diocesan website which is intended to help church leaders think about evangelism. Now to me the word 'leader' is one that gets my back up instantly, but in fact the material I've scanned rapidly through so far seems quite honest, modest and straightforward; it may turn out to be like the full-on Alpha Course and go batshitcrazy before the end, but for now I'm surprisingly favourable. In one short video Dr Sandra Millar of Gloucester Diocese outlines some findings of the research on how people outside the Church of England perceive it and, when discussing how contacts made through the occasional offices can affect those perceptions, advised us always to offer to pray with people. After all, she says, the worst people can say is 'No thank you', and no one else is going to.

Strangely for someone who gets paid to devote their attention to the spiritual life, I have always found this really hard to do. Occasionally if there has seemed to be an issue I particularly want to lay before God - a funeral with circumstances which may prove difficult, for instance - I do pray in my meeting with the next-of-kin, but mainly I'm acutely aware that the people I'm dealing with probably won't be used to praying, and fight shy of doing so, leaving me with the feeling that I've short-changed the Lord and them. 

Prayer starts not from what you think you ought to say, but what you want to say. What do I want to say to God about the souls I meet? How can I put it simply - because simplicity is what they will need, not a display of eloquence and would-be insight? I might say something like this:

    Lord, please bless these good people.

    Please hear their hopes and fears.

    Please strengthen them in all they have to do. 

Perhaps it's always been that straightforward.

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.

Quiet Day

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

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

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

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?'

Refer It Upwards

A US-based friend once told me of a young Christian friend of theirs who, when asked (for instance) whether they wanted to go to the shops or something, would screw up her eyes in an attitude of intense concentration. When asked what she was doing, she would say she was ‘asking Jesus what to do’. After a moment or two the answer would come and she would, or would not, go shopping.

Although this might be a somewhat eccentric model of bringing the Lord into your decision-making, I find the great spiritual director Fr Somerset Ward advocates something not that far off. ‘Every day we make innumerable choices’, he argues (to summarise) in one of his Instructions I read this week, ‘and to bring those choices before God allows our decision-making faculties to be shaped by his will. Even when the choices seem small and trivial, perhaps from the divine viewpoint they are not; and if they are, the habit of referring them regularly to God will prepare us for those greater decisions which really matter’.

I think, contrastingly, that clear choices occur less frequently in a day than Fr Somerset Ward imagined. Many of the things we do are constrained by the decisions we have already taken: my day is dominated by routine and the tasks my role places upon me, and what I need to do in order to fulfil those obligations. Some decisions are what I call phantom choices: that is, they are theoretically there, but in fact unrealistically distant. As I stand at the level-crossing waiting for the train to arrive, for instance, in theory I face a choice whether or not to jump the gates and run across, but really this is something that operates at a lower level than a choice, which I think has to consist of two options either of which you might realistically take, and I am vanishingly unlikely, on a cold winter’s day, to make the physical or moral effort to leap the gates, break the law and risk the fine. I don’t feel a need to refer that to God.

And you may be familiar with the technique Christians sometimes employ of considering ‘What Would Jesus Do?’, perhaps wearing a pastel-shaded rubber wristband to remind them of it. It strikes me that most of the time, concerning most situations, we haven’t got the faintest idea what Jesus would have done, and this is very different from referring a choice to God: instead it’s a way of organising our own reasoning, still relying on ourselves more than the divine.

Once upon a time I would have said that God is almost certainly uninterested in whether I go shopping or not and so to bring him to bear on the choice to do so would be a bit weird. I’m not sure this is true now. I don’t expect any positive response to referring my choice to God (and might doubt my soundness of mind if there was one) but instead I’ve found that doing so does have an interesting effect; it makes me more aware that he is there, a far more subtle and strange effect than a voice or vision might have, and that to an extent reshapes my expectations and reasoning. Fr Somerset Ward was basically right: quelle surprise.

Alternative Readings

My copy of Celebrating the Seasons is a bit worn and battered now. It was brought out as a companion volume to Celebrating Common Prayer, the Daily Office book produced in the 1990s by the Anglican Franciscans and which became the model for the daily prayer services included in Common Worship from 2000 which most of us use now. Celebrating the Seasons is a compendium of spiritual readings for each day of the liturgical year; most of them are extracts from sermons or scriptural commentaries though there is also a bit of poetry or hymnody. The most refreshing feature is that the readings come from the whole scope of Christian history, from St Irenaeus of Lyons and the Desert Fathers, through medieval mystics such as Mechtilde of Magdeburg and Puritan divines to modern poets including RS Thomas. I've used these passages alongside my daily morning Bible reading as a means of trying to find some thoughts to help shape the day.

But I have been reading them for years now so they are perhaps unhelpfully familiar! Just lately I remembered that a few years ago I was given Celtic Daily Prayer, the office book of the Northumbria Community, and when I was planning our Forest Church I looked to see whether there was any helpful material - there wasn't, but I found in the book two cycles of daily readings. Where Celebrating the Seasons concentrates on theological meditation, Celtic Daily Prayer is more experiential, including far more material that reflects the lives of the saints. At least, the saints in the 'Celtic tradition' - a phrase I usually shy away from, as the people who use it customarily leave out how tough the holy people in that tradition were, and major instead on the 'hello clouds, hello sky' stereotype of Celtic spirituality. But my few days' reading in this book so far has produced an account of St Columba scorning the idea of going to sleep on straw as self-indulgent luxury and instead taking his rest on a stone with another as a pillow, so I think the authors are not unaware of what Celtic Christians were really like. 

I will, for a while anyway, put aside the thumbed pages of Celebrating the Seasons and try something different. It's not too radical a step!

O Come Magnify the Lord with Me

For a couple of weeks our gates have been a bit low on Sunday mornings. I went through the list of the congregation and discovered that I knew why almost all the absentees were away, but that itself shows how our active membership has shrunk as a result of the pandemic, and even more so our penumbra of occasional attenders. I regularly go through little bouts of wondering whether I am doing any good, or doing any good here: the congregation would say Yes, but if it was the case, wouldn’t we be achieving more? What am I missing? What’s the key to changing things?

Curiously it was the state of the world more generally that made me think about it differently this time. I find it hard to think of the work of a parish priest in terms of rescuing souls from hell; though that might ultimately be the effect, I am too uncertain about the exact conditions of salvation in any case to be very definite about that. Instead we will need the virtues of charity, courage and faithfulness in the challenges the human race faces, and those are rooted, finally, in the victory of God. It’s sometimes hard to see the connection between what happens in a small parish church and such grand considerations, but every prayer is a weapon in the Lord’s armoury.

And in the end, like every Christian I should be focused on God and not on myself and my own concerns. Of course I have a task entrusted to me, on one level, and have to carry it out to the best of my ability, but are my hopes for my church not about God, and not even about the welfare of souls, but really about my own sense of self-respect – of stopping up the hole in the dyke of my own anxieties and insecurities? Nothing will ever be achieved that way. Only joy works, not fear.

At Malling Abbey every recitation of the Holy Office begins with a little chant from Psalm 34: one of the sisters sings ‘I will bless the Lord at all times’. She sings it on her own behalf, that though this is corporate worship, the worship of the community she belongs to and of the whole Catholic Church, it is, first and foremost, hers, in which she invites others to join. So should my worship be, full of the joy of the Lord’s presence, and if there are others there to join, many or few, all the better.

Welcome in the Spirit

'To you that hear prayer shall all flesh come', it says in Psalm 65. 'You are the hope of all the ends of the earth, and of the farthest seas'. I am not someone who says there is only one God, and so it doesn't matter what you call him. I am someone who says there is only one God, and so there is nobody else to receive prayers offered in faithfulness and truth. There is only one place where prayers like that can conceivably go, and it is to him.

Pam, former Mayor, local councillor and congregation member, was told that one of the refugee families relocated to the UK after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan was coming nearby. She and Sylv our Pastoral Assistant doubted they would have brought prayer mats and wanted to make a present of a pair of mats as a sign of welcome, and asked if I would bless them. We prayed for the family to find peace, security, and the support they will need in an unfamiliar environment. A Christian prayer, certainly, offered in Christ's name, but in faith in his universal power. Grace is everyhere, and he will do the rest. 

Coming Around Again

One of my current projects is to reunite as many as possible of the Spiritual Instructions of Fr Reginald Somerset Ward, the Anglican spiritual director in whom I’ve had an interest for some while. He issued more or less one a month for years, eventually totalling about 450. Some time ago I was sent printed copies of the majority of them, and I now have copies of his books in which many more were published in extracted form. Some are lost, but it should be able to compile three-quarters or more of them.

Fr Ward eventually gave up issuing his Instructions in 1957 on doctor’s advice (he was already 76 by then) and was evidently flagging a bit in the years before that, sometimes only managing one missive to his directees every two months. I wonder whether the slowdown was caused not only by health but by the lack of much new to say after forty years or so. I am only scanning the documents rapidly at the moment rather than reading them, but even so I can detect pet themes and writers being repeatedly mentioned. In contrast, I’ve only been ordained 17 years but there are already many times when I finish composing a little homily for a quiet said mass that I am pretty sure I’ve said essentially the same thing, on maybe more than one occasion!

Nevertheless the round of preaching, driven as it is by the lectionary cycle, does mean you try to come up with new thoughts. At least they may be new to you: it seems to me vanishingly unlikely, even when I produce something I’ve never considered before, that nobody else in the past two thousand years of Christian history has ever stumbled across the same motif.

Now and again you draw something from the texts you are given which seems to offer you some help as much as your audience, but it turns out to be a variation on a theme. Last Sunday was the Baptism of Christ and I spoke, naturally enough, about the relationship between Christ’s baptism and our own. Take whatever it is that causes separation between you and God, and drown it in the waters, I said, or something like it. But is that very different from nailing it to the cross – the kind of imagery we might use in Lent?

The supposed spiritual insights we happen across either for ourselves or from others have a resemblance to, say, dieting fads: here is the thing, the new thing, which is going to make the lasting difference. And we fall on it enthusiastically, pursue it for a little while, and then find it not working, and eventually forget about it.

But perhaps such spiritual techniques can only work for a short time, and that’s all we can expect from them. I try to follow the advice of Metropolitan Anthony, and draw a phrase or verse from my morning Bible reading which shapes my thoughts for the day ahead, usually turning to a new one the following day. I find Fr Somerset Ward counselled the same sort of thing: to take something from your morning meditation (he assumed that would be when you’d do it) and use this as the basis for spontaneous prayers through the day. None of these phrases are supposed to be the one thing that can revolutionise your spiritual life, because nothing will. It’s a long-term business, and such is the dullness, perhaps, of the human soul that we constantly need some new direction to approach God – which will do no harm, provided we recall the unchanging nature of the one who draws us near. 

Love Divine

Actor Lena Headey was on the radio yesterday talking about her relationship with the Hindu god Ganesh.

[On a trip to India] I picked up a very ancient Ganesh and carried it in my backpack … I felt, this is just extremely peaceful to me, and it makes sense … I don’t sit and pray, but in my daily move around the world, I think about him. I love him. I love what he represents, I genuinely ask him to help me when I’m stuck … he’s my one constant.

Ms Headey is white, English and born in Bermuda. She doesn’t consider herself a Hindu by belief, but has what’s obviously an intense connection with the unlikely figure of the elephant-headed deity, who has a presence in Swanvale Halt in the form of a little statuette in the Post Office as the family who run it have a Hindu background. It makes me ponder what Christian love for God really means, in terms of its content.

Perhaps surprisingly, love for God isn’t that big a theme in the New Testament. St Paul mentions it in passing in a couple of places, but he is far keener to stress God’s love for us and ours for each other, flowing from God’s. Even the Blessed Apostle John whose first Letter is all about love is anxious to tell us that love consists in the fact ‘not that we loved God, but that he loved us’. The kind of intense personalised emotion we tend to find expressed in many modern worship songs isn’t really present in the Scriptures. There is adoration at what God is, and exultation at what he has done; there is a beneficent restfulness and gratitude that comes from knowing that ultimately everything is all right. It’s a philosophical sort of love, which is not to say it is not deep and powerful, but that it comes from applying a universal divine action to oneself. Another element that is missing is the intense focus on the humanity of Jesus which was so strong an element of medieval piety. Notoriously, St Paul says next to nothing about the earthly life of the Lord at all, and it took a thousand and more years before Christians began to meditate seriously on the features of that life which made him vulnerable, which brought the Godhead closest to the creation. If we’re talking about love in the way we normally understand it, that sense of Christ needing us (that is, human beings) for his protection, and his suffering, opens a different avenue towards it.

Unlike Ganesh, God is not one image. He is at once the glorious light to be adored, and the unfathomable abyss of ultimate being to be lost in. He is the baby held in a woman’s arms and the man crucified. He is historical and eternal. A parent looks at a child as they grow older, or a lover at their long-term love who they have grown along with, and can see all they were, and what they will be too, is present in what they are. We see God that way, and in that gaze is the tenderness of love, knowing that the beloved also loves us.  

Time Present and Time Past

The three hours of the Maundy Thursday vigil always seems to pass quicker than three hours should. By this time I was unaccountably weary and my ability to enter into the sufferings of Christ in Gethsemane was very limited; I had brought along a book about George Herbert to read but couldn't manage more than a page, and was in little mood for more scripture. Once upon a time I would try and pray through my whole list of personal intercessions, bringing my friends and family into the Garden, to be with the Lord as he readied himself for the ordeal to come, but mustering up the concentration is harder than that sounds. Now I just visualise them, as they are, rather than do anything with them. Mostly, my mind wanders, occasionally pulled back to our Lord. I manage by getting up and having a stretch every hour or so.

I've always had the feeling, near-blasphemous though it sounds, that at this moment you are not so much praying with Jesus as for him, that he will indeed have what he needs to take the Via Dolorosa. Perhaps it isn't so fanciful: perhaps the prayers of the faithful and less-faithful, all down the centuries, have indeed been some help to our brother and champion. 

Swanvale Halt was mostly quiet. A young woman came in and sat at the back of the church, tearful: 'just the usual rubbish', she told me when I asked. Another crying female voice went along the path outside at one point, but its owner was gone by the time I arrived. The village was silent as I went up the hill with Marion and her family, the last vigil-keepers that night - within the church, at least.