Changing Assumptions

At Fr Thesis’s central London church the grand festival of the Assumption of the BVM yesterday involved a procession around the streets with a statue of the Virgin being carried in a flower-decked litter flanked by Chelsea Pensioners: at Swanvale Halt we are a little lower-key, and the observation was confined to liturgical propers, vestments (my 18^th-century blue set) and reciting the Angelus at the main morning service. Our statue can’t really be moved anywhere as it is rooted to its plinth very firmly. As I pointed out in my sermon to mark the occasion, I think the B.V. of Swanvale Halt looks remarkably like 1920s movie star Lillian Gish, who made her last movie at the age of 94: you can often guess when bits of religious art have been produced by which celebrities they remind you of. The statue arrived in the church at the end of the 1960s from the London convent of an order of sisters based in Surrey, and we suspect that our late sacristan Mary had connections with them; but on the back is a plaque recording that it was donated in memory of a member of the congregation. Miss Lanfield was, in her younger days, a militant suffragette who was known for such exploits as following Asquith to a wedding with a dogwhip concealed in her umbrella intending to give him a thrashing; throwing a tomato at the Director of Public Prosecutions; infiltrating the House of Commons disguised as a man; and smashing windows at the General Post Office. She was imprisoned and force-fed, and was awarded the WSPU’s medal with a variety of bars for it. There can’t be many Virgins in churches with that kind of history behind them: all on the day when women in Afghanistan see twenty years of liberty about to be thrown into the fire.

Pontifex Minimus

A visit to Il Rettore furnished me with something to post about at a rather thin time for news. My mantelpiece of religious tat has been joined by an image of Papa Francesco, eternally waving his benediction across the living room - at least when the sunlight penetrates to the far wall sufficiently to charge him up and set him wobbling from one side to the other. I didn't think it really looked that much like him, though Il Rettore commented that it couldn't really be anyone else; yes, I considered, it may be the dressing all in white that does that.

Il Rettore is starting to plan how his retirement may pan out, and although mine is much further away my mind does occasionally turn in that direction too. As I walked down the road from the railway station in Lamford towards the rectory, a place I was once so familiar with, I reflected that I didn't like it a great deal, and that applies to the whole of Surrey, even though there are some very picturesque corners. Dorset, however, perpetually summons, waiting in green patience.

If You Go Down in the Woods

Not far away from Swanvale Halt, sequestered in the Surrey hills, is Summerstock, a medium-sized estate based around a big house set in woody grounds. Here the owners have established a sort of mini religious theme park. You visit and find the woodland and ponds scattered with grottoes and statues. There's a charitable trust supporting religious education, including a variety of open-air dramatic presentations about the life of Jesus which take place not just locally but in London. Every Friday Summerstock hosts the Stations of the Cross, following a route around the grounds; the Stations were designed by a group of art students from Italy. Local clergy are asked to come and lead the devotion, and last Friday that meant me.

We started at 7am: gosh, it was cold. I should have brought my gloves although I was glad I thought of taking wellies. There were about ten old hands including a retired Anglican parish priest and his wife and a smattering of local Roman Catholics some of whom I knew, and they led me around rather than me them as I had no idea where to go next. It took about half an hour (I gather I was more reticent than some clergy as I kept being thanked for giving everyone 'time to reflect', which could be interpreted as a double-edged comment) and then we went back to the house for tea and hot-cross buns. I decided not to use my somewhat lacerating version of the Stations I usually employ at church, as this was Easter Week, but to have something slightly more upbeat and resurrection-focused.

The little Chapel of St Francis where we started reminded me of the similar one dedicated to St Joseph at Errwood I saw on holiday in Derbyshire some years ago: there's the same sense that you're stepping back into a style of devotion which is somewhat in the past now. 'Whenever a Catholic church closes,' the Anglican priest told me, 'Ann and Paul [the owners] buy up all the kit and move it here,' and you can tell.

A Moving Scene

In the midst of a late Advent season which has made my head spin a little it is a tonic to witness a vision of the Holy Family portrayed with such serenity as the snow swirls around them, just as it would have done on that first Christmas night, hem-hem. Cal and family came to the Carol Service on Sunday and, being familiar with my mantelpiece full of dreadful religious tat, decided to pass on this find from the back of a drawer, in the expectation that I could give it a more appreciative home. Oy, can I.

Making Assumptions

I see I don't have time to write the complicated blog post I planned, so here instead, to celebrate the day, is a dramatically sidelit photo of the plaque of the Virgin and Child we have in Swanvale Halt church. Made in the early 1900s by Mary Watts, it has a suitably Italianate look to it despite originating in the Home Counties. And of course, Jesus looks about as baby-like as Brian Blessed playing the Emperor Augustus in I Claudius, which is an authentically medieval/Renaissance approach.

It was the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin today, or the Dormition if you're being Orthodox in mood (for Roman Catholics, the bodily assumption of the Virgin into heaven at the end of her life is a dogma you have to believe; for Orthodox believers, it's an opinion you are free to hold or not; for Anglicans, it's a phrase that makes a churchperson either compose their face into a blank look or go into a swoon depending which bit of the Church they belong to). As Bishop Mervyn Stockwood once reportedly told an Anglo-Catholic clergyman in his diocese who remarked on the day in question, 'I'm afraid that's not an Assumption we share'.

I dragged out S.D.'s old Marian vestments for Mass this morning, and at the end we said the Angelus prayer at the statue of the BVM much to the delight of some present and the bemusement of others. They ring the Angelus here as the call to prayer before Mass and probably have done since my predecessor Fr Barlow's day, but I'm not sure how many people know the words (or, indeed, that there are any words to know). 

Disposals

The loft at church has been in a dreadful state for quite some time, and last Saturday we had a clear-up. In the course of this, young Carl who often comes up with bright ideas suggested that we move the boxes of books awaiting sale at the next Spring Fair down from the loft, where they are inaccessible and probably overloading the floor, down to the North Vestry. It took quite a long while and left me feeling a bit shaky, but they fitted in there rather neatly. However, that involved also clearing out some other junk, or at least what I thought of as junk, in boxes in the vestry: six brass vases, a metal finial, a pair of missal stands, a wooden cross, and a little prie-dieu whose penitential character consisted not only of the fact that of course you kneel at it but also its extremely uncomfortable narrowness. To these were added a dreadful parian statue of Our Lord which was once at least sound, if not exactly appealing, but which suffered a fall from the vestment chest during a break-in in about 1995 and was repaired in a somewhat rough-and-ready manner. They are the kind of things churches acquire over the years. The churchwardens were not averse to me disposing of them.

This morning I carted them all in the boot to Church Antiques in Walton, one of my favourite places in all the world. Mr Church Antiques cast a kindly eye over the vases, for which he was prepared to offer us 'Not quite nothing but close to it', and winced at the statue. 'That looks like wood glue,' he suggested. 'That's ... a project.' 'The prie-dieu is nice but we've got quite a lot of them.' As I rather suspected, the missal stands were 'the stars' of the batch (and the only items I was tempted to keep) and justified the bulk of the cheque for the PCC I got in return for their acceptance.

It goes against the grain to get rid of anything, but even those nice brass missal stands were just catalogue-bought stuff even in their prime, and we haven't used them in forty years to say the least. Even they are one element of the past I am not sorry to discard. 

I was so ashamed of the little plaster crib figures I didn't even get the box out of the boot.

Singular Iconography

Among the interesting facets of sharing a church building with a Roman Catholic congregation is the literature that sometimes gets left about. The other day I spotted a small collection of children's books, among which was volume 12 of Fr Lawrence Lovasik's Books of Saints. Volume 12, no less. Fr Lovasik was an extremely prolific clerical author with a passion for bringing the treasures of Church culture to the attention of its younger members, mainly through these little books.

The Book of Saints is of the same vintage as the great days of Ladybird Books, but its illustrations aim at something different: a sense of grandeur. The book doesn't credit its illustrator by name, but I get the strange but distinct impression that he or she was seeking inspiration in the mid-twentieth century cinema. See whether you find the same.

"Burt Lancaster IS St Bertrand of Le Mans"

"Claudia Cardinale IS St Lucy Filippini"

"Richard Chamberlain IS St William of York"

"Hayley Mills IS Blessed Mary Fontanella"

Relic Overload

A couple of weeks ago a sunny day off took me walking the footpaths north of Guildford and to the church of St Edward, Sutton Green. I came here some years ago to visit the very nice holy well of St Edward in the churchyard (a site whose history is somewhat obscure), but had never managed to get inside the church itself. On this particular day the building was open, and although the church - beautifully situated across the fields as you can see in the photograph - isn't a great success architecturally (it's too much out-of-the-catalogue 19th-century Roman Catholic for that), it contains the most astonishing collection of relics. There are various bits of sanctified bone encased in glittering Gothic reliquaries, a fifteenth-century cupboard which once did service as a tabernacle in the church, and even - not pictured here - Cardinal Heenan's biretta, though why that should be a particularly revered object I don't know.

St Nectan's Kieve

One of our earlier stops on the Cornwall trip was St Nectan's Kieve. It was 1986, I think, that I first made a visit to St Piran's Well at the entrance to the Kieve but have never walked up the valley itself. I knew about the waterfall, but wasn't completely prepared for what we found there. St Piran's Well has recently been tidied up and isn't the ivy-choked ruin that relatively recent writers have described, which is good.

As for the Kieve, you must be able to drive to the tea room and complex at the top, but we picked our way up the gorge through the woods, crossing wooden bridges and clambering around stones and tree roots. As always with these things you wonder how long it's going to take but the journey does increase the sense of anticipation and separation from the world outside. You arrive at the shop, where, if you're lucky (the staff seem reluctant to linger in one place very long) you will be greeted, given tickets, and offered a pair of wellington boots. You then pass through a gate and down slippery steps to make the descent to the waterfall.

And the waterfall does not disappoint! With your wellies you can wade into the stream and gaze up at the classic view you may have seen from books, with the water thundering down past the rocky cliffs and under that unlikely stone arch into the pool beneath, the air thronged with drops of water. It's exhilarating.

But the Kieve is more than an interesting natural feature: it's become a pagan shrine. This was certainly not the case some thirty-odd years ago so it would have been interesting to have some more information available about the history of the place, but this doesn't seem to be available. Nevertheless, as you cross the stream and look about you can see how important this place is to people: the walls of the gorge are full of little mementoes of visitors and their loved ones, and in the stream itself are artful piles of stones which are apparently known as 'fairy stacks', not something I've seen anywhere else.

Back at the top of the steps you can also visit St Nectan's Cell, a tiny room underneath the shop complex which has the reputation of being the place where Nectan lived as a hermit in the sixth century. Alternatively it may be no older than the 18th century and the identification as the hermitage ascribable to Fr Hawker of Morwenstow's very active historical imagination, but that doesn't matter as it is now a pagan cult room festooned with ribbons, strings of beads, figurines, interesting pebbles, and records of loved ones and relationships which have the same moving quality that they have in Christian shrines, or indeed those of any other religion. The instinct to commemorate such an immaterial element as love, to turn it into something physical and (at least semi-) permanent, is as strong in this context as it is anywhere else, and carries the same sensation of reverence and sympathy. What, from his now-heavenly perspective, St Nectan makes of it is a different matter.

Missed It By A Whisker

Many friends will know about my fondness for my patron saint, St Catherine. I keep an eye peeled for any representations of her, and have even gone to the lengths of commissioning two images of her. A little while ago I wandered onto eBay and discovered this lovely 19th-century silk banner with St Catherine on the front, resplendent with martyr's palm branch and wheel. The embroidery was a bit battered but heavy and rather glorious. The back of the banner appears to have had an image of the Virgin Mary once, but that's disappeared, so this isn't a piece in exactly pristine condition. Lovely though.

I thought I'd put in a bid for it. It's a fairly unique item, so anything up to, I don't know, a hundred quid I thought was fair and depending on how the bidding was going I could go a bit higher.

Five hundred and thirty-five pounds that went for. Five hundred and thirty-five pounds. Somebody likes St Catherine even more than I do.