Of Course I Didn't Say Anything

... at the meeting this week when a clerical colleague due to leave his role the day after described the frustrations of his prospective retirement. 'I've slipped a couple of non-religious funerals under the radar over the years', he said, 'and I'd like to carry on doing funerals, I enjoy them. But if you have Permission To Officiate in the diocese I'm going to they keep the fees. I'd prefer to do non-religious funerals anyway but that would still be the case.'

Embarrassment and inarticulacy silenced me. I'd never met him before and there would be limited point in protesting even if I could have speedily recovered from my surprise and worked out what to say. It would never occur to me that I would carry out any religious act except as a minister of the Church of Jesus Christ. Although, as we always say, the priest is ordained by the Church in response to and in recognition of the call of God on that individual, nevertheless I am ordained in order to do, and only in order to do, the things the Church is charged by God with doing. It's not a declaration of what a fine fellow I am, and whatever I might do only has value not because I do it but because it's done within the context of the promises of God expressed in the sacrament of Orders. Dear me. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

Real Presence

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

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

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

There, and Back Again

It was with a jolt that I realised this Sunday morning that I hadn't attended an 8am service at Swanvale Halt, as opposed to leading it, since March. As Marion took the service - 'struggling to remember what to do', she admitted - I found myself ever so slightly uncomfortable in my seat, not due to fearing infection (I have made the point ad infinitum that a quiet, said communion service is quite the most controllable and safe indoors religious activity you can engage in) but simply because of the unfamiliarity of the circumstances. It's odd to be seated on a chair isolated by space all around without the usual oak benches to separate you from your fellow worshippers. The oddness faded quickly, but I felt the unease which some members of the congregation have described to me on venturing back into the COVID-compliant church for the first time, and which when you're leading the service it's all too easy to ignore.

One of the Tophill clergy casually mentioned in a remote conversation the other day that they haven't celebrated the Eucharist there in nine months ('If people want that we direct them to you or the Cathedral'). Even I was slightly shocked. Churchmanship is part of this - even a fairly moderate church might gib at giving up the Sacrament for quite so long - but from conversations we have had I suspect the Rector of Tophill is on the extremely cautious side and regards communion as fraught with risk which, as I say, is not my view. It's from Tophill that we are starting to get stories of congregants who are positively preferring to stay home and watch services on their computers in dressing gowns and slippers on a Sunday morning rather than drag themselves into their church building.

Sitting It Out

Marion the curate presided at communion for the first time since March this morning, at what is now our standard time for the main service of 10.30. I wasn't sure whether I should stay given that I didn't have anything positively to do, but there was a notice to give out about the forthcoming Annual Parish Meeting, so I sat at the back - it's also the closest Sunday to the date I became rector, now 11 years ago, so it was good to be there. In other years I have renewed my ordination vows with the churchwardens, but didn't this year as it would be an unnecessary addition to the mass. As it turned out, the person designated to read the first Bible reading forgot so I stepped in, and there was nobody to ring the bell, so I did have some function after all.

I realised that this is the very first time in eleven years that I have sat out a Parish Eucharist in my own church. Despite the weirdness of receiving the Host and taking it away, consuming it either en route to one's seat or once there, I had a great sense of being upheld by a network of prayer all around me, which was rather lovely.

Thin and Thick

I still can't work out whether I was unreasonable in detecting a reluctant, nay disappointed, tone in the Bishop's note to us on Tuesday. He writes:

In last Wednesday’s Morning Prayer we heard about the so-called ‘tent of meeting’ which was pitched ‘far off’ from the makeshift campsites which characterised the Israelites’ forty years in the wilderness … (Exodus 33:8). And there ‘the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend’. ‘Tents of meeting’ don’t have to be physical structures .... Elsewhere in the scriptures we read of a whole diversity of ‘thin places’ where such divine encounters take place …Similarly for us, there will most likely be particular places – whether outdoors or in – which we approach with a sense of prayerful expectation  … I have made the decision that it is now possible for one clergyperson (and their household, if applicable) to pray in each church … For many of our church communities, I suspect, the arrangements of the past few weeks will continue, as clergy choose to model home (or a series of parishioners’ homes) as ‘thin places’, and I certainly want to give that every encouragement. But if clergy wish to re-enter their church buildings for prayer or broadcasting purposes, please feel free to do so.

I could be awkward, because, as we know, legally we've been perfectly free to do exactly that all along: I haven't done so out of obedience and solidarity with the restricted society around me. But I preferred to focus on the assumptions behind what the Bishop wrote, as those are dodgy enough. In fact, in this short statement, you can hear cats leap positively yowling out of bags.

Supposedly, the spiritual notion of the ‘thin place’ derives from Celtic Christianity. This is convenient because you can say anything you like about Celtic Christianity. Real Celtic Christianity, in so far as it had any separate identity at all, was St Cuthbert subsisting on shellfish on Inner Farne, the brethren of Skellig Michil clinging to their storm-racked perpendicular rock in the Irish Sea, the Culdees reciting Psalms for hours standing up to their necks in freezing water, or St David feeding his monks on a diet of water and leeks as they pulled their own ploughs across the fields. But usually people mean something more approachable than that.

Look up ‘thin place’ online, and you'll soon be told that it’s an English translation of the Gaelic term Caol Ait. This is informative, as it is completely ungrammatical. What someone has done, at some stage in the not-too-distant past, is simply translate the words separately into their Gaelic equivalents with no concern as to how they fit together. This should alert us to the fact that the term ‘thin place’ is of no great antiquity. It is absent, in either Gaelic or English, from Lady Wilde’s Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland (1887), and Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920), the authoritative compendia of Irish folklore from that epoch.

It’s certainly used by Christians to mean a locale where divine presence can be specially discerned. Mindie Burgoyne writes from a pagan perspective and ‘feels compelled to keep the original definition [of ‘thin place’] as it relates to pre-Christian Ireland’, but also describes conversations with various Irish ecclesiastics including four monks and nuns at venerable abbeys, who all told her about the notion of the ‘thin place’. The first use of the term in a Christian context appears to come from George MacLeod, the Church of Scotland minister and founder of the Iona Community in 1938. He referred to Iona as ‘a thin place where only a tissue paper separates the material from the spiritual’ (or ‘earth from heaven’, as some people give the quote). MacLeod doesn’t seem to have published this statement anywhere, and all of the twenty-or-so online citations are secondhand, but let’s assume he did communicate it in some semi-permanent form. Perhaps this is how it found its way into Christian thinking.

Back beyond MacLeod, there is only one reference to ‘thin places’. This comes in the 1885 memoir of an American spiritualist from Boston called John Wetherbee, entitled Shadows, being a familiar presentation of thoughts and experiences in spiritual matters.  ‘The Spiritualist’ writes Wetherbee, ‘knows from his experience that … the light shines through the thin places or cracks in the curtain between the two worlds whether the thin places or the cracks know it or not’. He goes on to relate a lecture in which Congregational minister Nehemiah Adams reported a story a dying parishioner had told him of seeing a spirit, and concluded that ‘the curtain between the two worlds was thinner than it once was’. From this, Wetherbee starts musing on such experiences and, just as there are special sensitive ‘ganglionic’ locations in the human brain, concludes that similar locations might exist in the world at large. He even wondered whether Boston might be one, or contain many, explaining why Spiritualism had made such headway in the Massachusetts city. Wetherbee gives no indication that he acquired the notion of the ‘thin place’ from anyone else: rather it was his reflecting on Revd Adams’s story that led to the idea. How it made the viral journey from Spiritualist Wetherbee to Presbyterian MacLeod is anyone’s guess, but it’s definitely not some ancient Irish folk wisdom.

So much for history. As for theology, we can see perhaps four principles converging in the idea of the ‘thin place’, and the holy place more generally, which are relevant to current discussions about the role of the church building in this time of plague. I say they converge: they are not all compatible with orthodox Christian thinking.

Firstly, that God is omnipresent and can everywhere be spoken to and heard from is a truism. ‘Go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret’ says Jesus (Matt 6.6). This would seem to argue against the identification of any special ‘sacred space’ at all. The universal extent of divine presence underlies the multifarious encounters with God that speckle the Scriptures: as Bishop Andrew notes, ‘including homes, gardens, mountains, rivers, lakesides, weddings, mealtimes and religious festivals’.

Secondly, there may be locations, or occasions, where as individuals we are used to meeting with God. They are, if you like, reflections of personal rituals, of moments when we are accustomed to concentrating on God. My ex-partner’s father, a fundamentalist Evangelical clergyman, still talks to the Lord while digging in the garden at dawn, and, during the time the church here has been closed, my morning and evening Office has been said in the ‘Children’s Room’, the only one in my house with a window that looks directly onto the garden. These ‘thin places’ are personal, and mean nothing to anyone but us. They reflect nothing other than our own spiritual habits, based exactly on the Christian belief that God is not specially present in one particular place, but everywhere. This is the type of ‘thin place’ Bishop Andrew means when he refers to ‘particular places – whether outdoors or in – which we approach with a sense of prayerful expectation’.

However, the third notion involved in the concept of the ‘thin space’ is emphatically not Christian at all, and it is just the one its originator, John Wetherbee apparently, intended. This is the idea that there are particular physical, geographical points where, due to some occult quality of the place itself, ‘the veil between worlds’ is lowered and human beings can expect spiritual experiences. The assumption that such an experience is more likely to happen in a particular place has no scientific or Christian basis, and yet it seems to be the one which informs most use of the term: it is what it means in popular usage. It is, basically, pagan.

The Bishop makes an error when he elides this sense of the ‘thin place’ into the specifically Christian creation of the church building. This place does not derive its spiritual significance from our choices or preferences. It is not holy because we like it or want it to be holy. It is not holy because it is beautiful or historic. It is not holy because the soil it is built on sits across a ley line, or because there is a holy well, an ancient yew tree, or an oddly-shaped rock, in the churchyard. It is not like a clearing in the woods where we might go to peep at the Wee Folk. It is holy because it is the physical sign of God’s promises. To think its sanctity relies on what we feel or want to feel or choose is a fundamental misunderstanding of its nature, of the nature of sacraments, and of the Church. This leads us to the fourth point.

When the Christian community meets, it is constituted around the sacraments which reveal the saving work of God made known to us in Jesus Christ. It carries out the acts that he commanded us to carry out, communion and baptism (as well as others he didn’t command but which we’ve also found express the promises of God). We Christians began meeting in private rooms, or outside, and there is nothing illegitimate about that. But whenever Christians meet in numbers larger than a household, they require an appropriate space, and we discovered it was useful and more safe to own those spaces. It was natural that they began to be organised physically around the sacramental acts that took place in them, although ultimately it is the community, not the building, which is galvanised by those acts.

The point is that the acts embody the commands and promises of God. They are not our possession; we belong to them, since they express the real nature of the God who commanded us to carry them out. The tabernacle was not where the Israelites chose to meet God, but where he had commanded them to meet him. When the cloud over the tabernacle lifted, they moved camp; when it rested, they remained. Later, the Lord, not them, selects a place for his name to dwell, first Shiloh and then Zion. The varied encounters with God related in the Scriptures, again, take place at God’s initiative, not human beings’. They are, at no stage, their choice. People do not turn up and hang around ‘with a prayerful expectation’ that God is going to arrive, somehow compelled either by human desire or by the nature of a location.

Whatever significance the church building has, it has it because it is where the community called into existence by the saving work of Jesus Christ gathers, over time, to carry out his commands. This is what is behind TS Eliot’s statement in the Four Quartets that

You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid.

The validity of prayer, again, doesn't come from our piety or feelings, but from the promises of God. Has prayer been valid in your kitchen? If so, whose prayers other than yours? Who but you has responded, there, to the commands of God? To call a church by the pagan language of the ‘thin place’ is to make a deep mistake. It is not a thin place, but a thick one, woven into dense fabric by God’s promises to us and ours to him, inhabited by a community shaped by the life of Jesus.

If the terminology of the ‘thin place’ leaked into the Christian Church via George MacLeod, there is an irony. He was referring to Iona – a church, a monastery, a cathedral, a burying ground, a place where the promises of God, and God’s commands, had been responded to and lived out by a Christian community over centuries; where life had been offered to him and seen through the lens of the Cross; where human mourning and joy had been transfigured into the life of the coming Kingdom. Iona, like all churches, is the opposite of the pagan Thin Place, where human beings linger in the hope of a vague glimpse into some reality beyond this world. It is, rather, an effective sign of the Kingdom. As thick a place as ever there could be. 

Proof

You very rarely get any photographs of me here, but this is sufficiently indistinct not to be troubling ... I slightly rearranged my makeshift altar in the red bedroom as I thought the Gothic side chair was a bit outré for the occasion of a missa solitaria. I did record the event, but the recording was so awful and difficult to manage that I didn't do anything with it. Next week I'll try recording with my phone, rather than my computer, and see whether that produces better results. 

It was very odd, of course, but not as odd as I thought it might be. It seemed as though I was able to slip into the 'space of the liturgy' and the context in which it was happening became irrelevant. I suppose that's how it's intended to be, all the time: an entrance into divine time and heavenly space. Several people have said that it was a comfort just to know that I was doing it, even if they were remote. This is the time God has set for us to bring him who we are, and, anomalous though doing it alone might be, I am happy to obey.

Working From Home

Once upon a time, while I was using up my leave from work before starting at St Stephen’s House, I went to the church to collect something and found the new-ish incumbent, Sarah, standing in her cassock just a couple of minutes before Mass was due to start. ‘Can you stay?’ she implored. ‘The only other person here is Mary and she won’t take communion from me, so unless there’s someone else here we can’t celebrate the mass.’ I couldn’t as I had something else arranged, and I am not sure Sarah was completely right: that there needs to be someone to communicate with the priest as well as to make the responses in the liturgy.

But at 8am tomorrow I will have neither someone to communicate with, nor to say the words of the faithful. I will be in the Red Room upstairs at my temporary plague altar, there to offer the holy sacrifice, if by God’s mercy that’s what it will really be. Many of my friends have been doing this since public worship was suspended, in fact daily in churches which have that tradition. For them the more urgent argument is whether they can enter their church buildings to do so. Fr Thesis in Kentish Town points to the fact that the emergency legislation specifically exempts from the restrictions on travel ministers of religion on their way to and from places of worship, whatever the archbishops may have said. He lives right next door to his church anyway, as do many others. I don’t, and constantly making the journey up and down the hill when I didn’t absolutely have to would seem to me to be going against the principle of keeping journeys to a minimum. So I will offer the Eucharist here.

We know that the eucharist is essentially a corporate act. Beneath every Solemn High Mass, bedecked with silk and gold and heavy with incense smoke, lies hidden a meal with wooden platters and rough bread, and within every incised marble altar stone is the plank table of the Last Supper: no doubt about that. Looking back to that event, it demands the presence of more than a single soul. In its very structure it envisages call-and-response from priest and people; ‘the Lord be with you’ ‘and with your spirit’ (or whatever variant); ‘lift up your hearts’, ‘We lift them up to the Lord.’

We also know the history of how, in the West, it mutated into something different; how ordained monks at the great abbeys of the early Middle Ages (most accounts talk about Cluny in the tenth century; Fr Marian Szablewski’s thesis Mass without a Congregation, a text I haven’t seen, apparently pushes the development back to the 7th) began celebrating mass daily at side chapels in the great church, supposedly but not always with a lay brother present; how this very minimal form of the eucharist became the norm most lay people would encounter; how the Reformers attempted to make the eucharist once more a corporate act involving the people, with very limited results; and how the Liturgical Movement from the second quarter of the 20th century onwards championed changes in the forms of worship in both Catholic and Protestant Churches to recapture the idea of this central act of Christian liturgy as something the whole of the community of believers did together. That’s all familiar enough.

That awkward and brilliant monk Gregory Dix acutely wrote that ‘in extending to the presbyter the liturgical ‘priesthood’ of the bishop and making him the usual celebrant of the eucharist, the Church has laid upon him the necessity of fulfilling his ‘liturgy’ regularly and frequently. His ‘liturgy’ is not merely his ‘possibility’, it is the ground of his being in the Body of Christ.’ Thus, it became felt, priests existed in order to offer the mass for the salvation of humankind; the more masses, the better, no matter whether anyone else was there. You can see here the seeds of an attitude I find ever so slightly present in some of my spikier colleagues (in other dioceses, I must say), that restrictions to communion motivated by the health emergency – at first, denying the laity the chalice, and now excluding them completely – are actually rather salutary, a corrective to any idea that receiving communion is the right of the attendant laypeople. The ritual changes of the 1900s are to blame for that, such clergy say, and here’s a chance to push back against them. It's an outlook whose roots lie in reactionary romanticism, an ideal of Church life that is at odds with where we've been headed for decades.

More positively there is no doubt that priests can use a solitary mass to enter very deeply into the mystery which is at the heart of Christian experience, and of which they are the special stewards, in a way which is seldom possible with all the distractions of a full-scale Sunday service. Fr Szablewski suggests this was part of the reason why the Cluny-style ‘low mass’ developed in the first place, ‘as the most effective means for their personal sanctity and a guarantee of salvation’. On his blog, that detached but sensitive Catholic Fr Anthony Chadwick describes how

I have had the experience of being in the Benedictine Abbey church at Fontgombault (France) at about 7 in the morning (after Matins and Lauds) and seeing a priest at each side altar silently offering Mass as if it were his last. The piety and spirit of prayer are overwhelming in the golden candle light reflecting on the stone walls of the ancient church.

You can see the power of this; and exemptions from the rule that a layperson needed to be present for a mass to take place were, and still are, commonly granted for just that reason of piety, when priests are in circumstances where the rule is impossible or very hard to observe – classically, those in mission fields or pars aliena when no other Christians are very likely to wander along. As Fr Chadwick says, the world is none the worse for another solitary mass, so why worry overmuch.

But those remain exemptions. We need not resort to the Book of Common Prayer with its injunction that 'there shall be no celebration of the Lord’s Supper, except there be a convenient number to communicate with the Priest', because things have moved on a lot since then; and in any case the current Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law also insists ‘A priest may not celebrate the eucharistic Sacrifice without the participation of at least one of the faithful, unless there is a good and reasonable cause for doing so’, and if that ‘good and reasonable cause’ was resorted to over time, the bishop would surely want to know about it. There is no doubt at all that, no matter how beneficial a solitary mass might be to the piety of a priest, its very nature mutilates the image of the event, the Last Supper, into which it is a mystical entrance. It’s all very well to say that the angels are there, and the souls of the departed, that we are ‘surrounded by a great crowd of witnesses’, and that people can participate distantly in spirit from their homes. But to be physically, humanly alone, hearing no other voice, sensing no other breath than yours, while doing it, is not what the Lord intended; it is not what He did.

And yet I know that our people want us to celebrate the eucharist for them: comments made on social media on videos my friends have posted of themselves celebrating at home, or in church when they’re able to, and statements people have made to me, demonstrate that enough. The sense of comfort that there is something normal, something transcending the time and its trials, and something connected to the very deepest truths of their lives, is very strong. It is bad enough that I can’t do it in the very place which has sheltered their prayers, their hopes and fears and sorrows and joys, that place where God has promised to be present, for a century and threescore years. Not to do it at all would be an appalling deprivation, not for me, but for us. 

Gregory Dix concludes The Shape of the Liturgy by stating that ‘in the eucharist we Christians concentrate our motives and act out our theory of human living. Mankind are not to be “as Gods” … we are [God’s] creatures, fallen and redeemed … who by His free love are “made partakers of the divine nature”’. The eucharist is where we are most truly ourselves, becoming what God intends us to become. The Supper of the Lord is the right place to bring before God the fear and the sorrow, the death and the deprivation, so that he can transfigure it. As a priest, it is that that I am most bound to do, that I promised to do at my ordination: to bear in my hands before God the prayer-offering of his people, of which the eucharist is not the only, but is the exemplary instance. Laypeople, broadly, can do the same; but I promised to do it, and was surrounded by the promises of the holy Church when I did so. So, tomorrow, reluctantly and awkwardly, I will stand at the makeshift altar upstairs, celebrating this wounded rite – a necessary wound, a beloved loss. May the storm soon pass.

Interment

The monthly communion service at Widelake House had a great sense of peace about it today. A gentleman I'd never seen before was there, taking a very full part in proceedings and even crossing himself at proper points.

That doesn't mean it was entirely without its slips. When Arthur, who plays the piano, returned the hymn sheets to me, there were the pulpy remains of two hosts, rejected by their recipients, adhering to the paper. I popped them in my pocket for later ...

Consecrated elements can only be disposed of in certain ways. Bread, now the Body of Christ, has to be eaten, burned or buried. Most of the soil in my garden is dry and hard at the moment, but the recent works have exposed a little bare patch to the east of the house and that was where the Lord, on this occasion, was put to rest. 

Corpus Christi

Thursday was Corpus Christi, the feast of Thanksgiving for the Institution of the Eucharist. I have never made much of it at Swanvale Halt, mainly because it always falls on a Thursday and Thursday is my accustomed day off. I used to attend Evensong & Benediction at the Cathedral on the succeeding Sunday, but in recent years other commitments have made it impossible for me to do even that. This year, I've been rearranging so many days off that I decided one more wouldn't make any difference, so I offered Evensong & Benediction on Thursday, an offer taken up by the grand total of two of our most devout parishioners, both retired teachers, oddly enough. We sang the canticles, responses and the Office Hymn Pange Lingua and did I thought rather well for such an intimate gathering. 'I don't think I've sung plainsong since I was 10', said Emma.

I was glad of the opportunity to keep the day not just because of the principle of the thing, but also because when I last went to see S.D. I complained of feeling a sense of lukewarmness and routine about my relationship with God, feeling rather that I had, in the words of Revelation, 'fallen from the love I had at the first' (which to a certain extent is inevitable, of course). The last few days have turned that around completely with a certain degree of emotional dislocation focused on my sense of connection with somebody who is very important to me but who I have never met and probably never will, and yet who weaves in and out of many of my experiences and enthusiasms. I've been reminded how I am nevertheless linked to that person by the sacramental presence of Christ - and not just to them, but, by God's grace, to everyone I have loved and love now, including those I have hurt and disappointed in different ways. I've found myself thoroughly weepy and emotional, and if I was suffering from lukewarmness, I'm not now. And that's a good thing. 

Ave verum corpus ...

Now Concentrate

Over time I'd developed the habit of closing my eyes as I say the words of consecration. It felt more devout and respectful. 

I can't remember why I recently shifted to keeping my eyes open and fixed on the bread and wine as I say the prayer. It coincided with Ivan, an ordinand from an evangelical Anglican church not far away, being with us on placement over the summer, as I explained to him what we did and why, and went through in some detail all the little gestures of the Mass, so it may have been something to do with that, with suddenly rethinking what I was doing and changing my mind. If I say This Is My Body and This Is My Blood, perhaps I should be looking at it as I do so. And so I now am. One changes habits as one goes on.

You should treat the Sacrament tenderly: it is Christ given into your hands, the one you love, the centre, weight and lodestone of your life; the greatest of all treasures, the summit of all miracles, the gate of heaven opened in the middle of earthly things. You should look on Christ in your hands with gentleness and great care.

Until you break him. 'We break this bread [crack!] to share in the Body of Christ.' Until you snap his flesh in two, then in four. Because you do not approach the Throne of Grace without cost: the cost of his brokenness, of the Cross. 

(The priest in this photo is wearing a chasuble with really horrid gold lamé appliqué, but that probably doesn't matter very much.)

Back to Basics

A few days ago a friend of mine posted on his Facebook feed that it was the 10th anniversary of his ordination:

I've marked the anniversary by doing the things I was ordained to do. Among them praying the office in church; presiding and preaching at Mass; praying with people; talking with and providing some food and washing powder for a heroine addict; a funeral/bereavement visit; and getting out and about in the community.

Ah, I realised, If young Christopher was celebrating the 10th anniversary of his ordination (and good for him), so must I have been; although I can’t remember the date itself without looking it up (he was ordained in a different diocese to me and so possibly on a different date), I must have been on holiday, so I may well have marked the day by getting up late, going shopping, and mucking about in the garden. Not quite so priestly. Or not so specifically.

Normally, then, the actual anniversary of my ordination passes me by. I do get recalled to my sense of what I’m supposed to be doing at two other points, though: the Chrism Mass at the Cathedral on Maundy Thursday, when all the diocesan clergy renew their vows along with the bishop, and the closest Sunday to the date in September when I was installed at Swanvale Halt, when it is my custom to rehearse my vows before the churchwardens as representatives of the laypeople. I don’t know whether anyone else does this, but I find it as instructive and useful for me to be reminded what I’m there for as for the congregation.

In amidst all the convincing and absorbing stuff about church management, mission planning, co-ordinating change and so on, it’s easy to lose track of what priestly ministry actually means. A competent layperson could do any of those things, and probably be better than me at them. They might well carry out the pastoral work young Christopher describes better than me, and – did only Canon Law permit them – could perhaps even perform the strictly liturgical stuff which is proper to my ordained office with greater concentration, spiritual seriousness or aplomb than I do. But they would not be a sacramental sign of God’s presence, as I am.

I – for better or worse – am surrounded by promises, mine and God’s, which is what the word sacrament means. There's a difference between doing things, and promising to do them. When I knelt before the Bishop ten years ago and he laid his hands on me I was promising to be a public, identifiable, inescapable sign of God’s presence, and God was promising that I would be too. I was promising that I would do the things our holy Mother the Church does to make God’s presence visible, those other ‘sacraments’ which form the ‘religious stuff’ I do – as I say, for better or worse, adequately or inadequately. That was the reason why it was done; looking at who I am and how far I have to go even to be a good Christian, there can’t be another one.

Resistance Is Useless

It was a busy day yesterday: as well as the usual services, two baptisms, with a total of four children and sixteen godparents. I didn't even attempt to remember all the names - keeping track of the children's was enough to cope with.

The children concerned were a six-year-old, a two-year-old, a moderately small baby of about 6 months, and a tiny one of six weeks. The two-year-old posed the most difficulties.

Me: Saffron, Christ claims you for his own. Receive -
Saffron: No! No!
Me: Right, Saffron, are you ready?
Saffron: Yes.
Me: Saffron, I baptise you in the name of -
Saffron: No! NO!
Me: Saffron, receive the sign and seal of G-
Saffron: NO! NO!!!

At no point has the practice of infant baptism in which small children are assumed to be 'covered' by the faith of their parents ever seemed so ambiguous. The only saving grace (perhaps literally) is that Saffron almost certainly was not raising theological objections to the sacrament of holy baptism, only personal animosity to me. She seemed quite interested in the candle given to her parents at the end, possibly indicating a future pyromaniacal career.

Mad Sunday

... which is not an official observance within the Church of England calendar, but Swanvale Halt seemed nevertheless to be observing it last week when two big milestones happened inadvertently on the same day. Our 10am Family Service became for the occasion a Family Communion in which we tried out a model of eucharist involving the children at every stage. There were about a couple of dozen children there - thankfully as it would have been even more difficult to do had there only been a handful - and they began by joining in with the procession up from the font where the penitential rite was said, took part in the Gospel procession armed with battery-powered candles which I didn't realise when I ordered them were all turned on magically by me with a remote control, adding another little bit of excitement, sat around me on the chancel step for the sermon, and then did all the business of getting the altar ready for communion. The real star here was Geoff, our head server, who marshalled the children and gave them all their jobs in such a way that it all moved pretty smoothly. There were a couple of hiatuses and awkward bits but for an experiment it worked remarkably well and, with the odd exception (which I may deal with on a separate occasion as it's interesting in its own right), was very well received. This is a bit off-the-wall for us, but similar sorts of service happen not very far away. I borrowed most of the ideas from All Hallows Twickenham, and discovered a couple of weeks ago that St James's Somerton whose former incumbent I know has been trying out something along the same lines.

Then in the evening we had the opposite end of the liturgical scale. The church is celebrating the 40th anniversary of its agreement to share the building with the local Roman Catholic parish, and we decided to mark the event with a service.  I suggested Evensong & Benediction could be something we could both join in without arousing issues of conscience, and so I led Evensong, Fr Malcolm the Roman Catholic priest offered Benediction, our (female) curate did one of the readings and my predecessor-but-four, who started the arrangement in 1974 and is now in the Ordinariate, came to preach. At one or two points I wondered where he was going with it but he veered away from anything too controversial and was remarkably gracious. The RCs found a magnificent Gothic monstrance at the back of a cupboard in their church in Hornington ('most of our people have never seen this', said their assisting server), we had over 150 people there and a massive party afterwards. 

Originally the 40th anniversary service was supposed to be on November 23rd, the closest Sunday to the time when regular masses started at the church, but it turned out that was Fr Malcolm's 20th anniversary as parish priest. We couldn't do November 30th as we have our Service of Light that evening, and so ended up having it on the same day as the Family Communion. One of our churchwardens described the day as 'like being put into a paper bag, shaken very vigorously around and then gently tipped out'.

Superstitious Reverence

It was the small midweek Mass yesterday, just the eight of us to mark the feast of SS Simon & Jude. Discarding the planned theme for my two-minute homily I spoke instead about the idea of Simon and Jude as companions, about the importance of discovering God via our friendships and relationships, and how I increasingly thought less during the Eucharist about the great theological truths of the Christian faith and more about the actual community of people around me. Ironically, after that, as I was giving the Host to Ray - 'the Body of Christ preserve your body and soul to everlasting life' - a tiny flake, a miniscule fragment, of wafer flew up and adhered to the flesh of his palm above the fingers held out actually to receive the Host.

In that infinitesimal object is contained the whole of creation: the novas and nebulae, the tempests and seas, the teeming galaxies. Sufficient to cover every sin from Adam to the Last Day, it sits on the hand of a man in an obscure church at this one moment nobody knows or will remember, ready, probably, simply to dissolve in a tiny tear of sweat, or disappear into the air. The Cross crosses at that point, that second, the eternal mark and method of the divine will opening out through time. Ah, grace. Grace is everywhere.

Messing About

I like this collage our last Messy Church gathering put together. The Last Supper might have gone so differently had there been cake, especially, if you look at the relative sizes of the food and the figures (even Jesus), cake this big.

In his book Sacramental Worship with Children Fr Simon Rundell, late of  the much-lauded St Thomas the Apostle, Gosport, says 'If our liturgies are creative, innovative, and yet still correspond to the shape of the liturgy, and are done in sincerity and authenticity, then the liturgical police should not come knocking at your door in the middle of the night'. I bore his words in mind as we broke a lot of rules the other Saturday and did communion at Messy Church. 'As we know', remarked one of my colleagues a couple of weeks beforehand, 'you can call it an agape and do whatever you like'. The trouble is that if you call it an agape nobody will know what you're talking about, so I merely said as we began whatever it was that we were going to do, that the Church was gathered, God was there, and whether it was a real communion service or whether we were just pretending was up to them to decide. However, I pointed out, 'If you ever meet a man in a pointy hat who says, "Hello, I'm the Bishop of Guildford", you are to swear blind that nothing happened.'

Everything passed off with great quietness and dignity and the simple service - following, as Fr Simon would put it, 'the shape of the liturgy', was much appreciated and worked very well. I know that many of the people I trained with, and many others besides, would probably throw up hands in horror at this debasement of the holy rite of the Eucharist (if it was a eucharist, which of course I am honour bound to dispute). To an extent I know exactly what they might mean and sympathise. As my experience of Christian life and ministry has gone on the ideal of the Eucharist as something which expresses the mind of the Church, something we all serve and in which we discover God, has grown. You don't muck about with that because it isn't your property, which is why I cavil a bit at Fr Simon's use of words such as 'creativity' - I don't necessarily regard creativity, as such, as a liturgical virtue. However, within the liturgical experiments suggested in his book, as, I hope, in our 'Messy Communion', there is a very definite determination to concentrate on what God is doing, not on what we think, feel, or are trying to do, which I would hope is the essence of a Catholic liturgical approach, no matter how wacky the form appears to be.

This will be in the forefront of my thinking as we start to consider how Swanvale Halt church responds to the social shifts which are necessarily forcing change on virtually all sorts and brands of church. The liturgy is how God speaks to us, and is not our plaything to do with as we choose. But we have to make sure, as best we can, that there are people there to listen to him.

Out of the Box

Back in Lamford I was given a beautiful Victorian home-communion set which had been owned by a previous incumbent of the parish, but that got stolen. So I bought another from eBay, slipping out of a meeting to bid for it on the church office computer. I've never mentioned it before so thought I would post a picture of it. The paten is engraved: 'Presented with a cheque to THE REV. E.C.HAYWARD, B.Sc., A.T.C.L., by the Congregation & Parish of ST. BARNABAS' CHURCH, HEATON, BRADFORD, as a sincere token of affection & high regard for his FAITHFUL MINISTRY, 1936-1941'. I rather like the idea that the set was rescued from potential collectors and restored to use.

I used it yesterday, in fact, going to take the last rites to a member of the church who very probably only has a couple of days to live. I'd been to take communion to Jeff many times at home since he became unable to get to church, and he was able to receive the sacrament again, though not to speak. We do what we can, and leave the rest to God.

Fully Charged with Magic Fairy Dust

... has been my somewhat facetious description to our curate of what would happen to her once she was ordained priest, as she was at the end of June. It was a great delight to me (and to everyone else) when she was able to preside at the Eucharist for the first time on the feast of SS Peter & Paul. The picture shows the occasion - I bought a secondhand red dalmatic (which I'll post about separately when time arises) to deacon for her, which we can, under my Grand Plan to up the temperature on the great feast days, use on Pentecost in years to come.

Last Sunday I was able, for the first time in years, to come to the 8am mass in our church without leading it. I could sit in a pew along with everyone else and pray, and look at the beautiful Crucifixion in the east window, while our curate celebrated with such dignity and warmth. I am very fortunate that I have a colleague who is no prima donna but wants earnestly and reverently to serve the mysteries which open the doors to the Kingdom and reveal God in his nature.

Present in the World

Once a month I visit a development of sheltered accommodation close to the church to lead a small service of Holy Communion. I have come to like it, even when there's only a handful of people there. I think this is not just because of the sense of fellowship the community has, but also because I stand facing a window looking down on a footpath which leads between the main road to Hornington and the centre of Swanvale Halt with the church, Co-Op and railway station. People are always coming and going and you have a moving sense of the Church making clear the presence of God in the everyday world, even though and perhaps because hardly a person glances up to see what might be going on above them.

Mystery

... which means, in New Testament speak, something revealed rather than something concealed. I forgot to mention that at Widelake House the other day as I came round bringing the residents communion one lady was crying and murmuring, 'That poor girl, God bless her, that poor young girl'. I sometimes tell people that the Eucharist involves a collapse of time, a movement of humans into God's eternal time in which sequential chronology is no longer paramount (which modern physics and neuroscience suggests may be close to scientific, as well as intuitive religious, truth), and have heard about the similar collapse of time and sequence in people with dementia or in the final stages of life. On this occasion both ran together. I don't know what was going on in the lady's mind, though of course God does: it is both mysterious and Mystery.

Ah, It's Yourself

Here is a small photograph of Jesus looking rather sorry for himself.

I was taking the service at Widelake House and turned the page of the service booklet to find a consecrated Host laser-bonded to the paper. It's not what you expect. Presumably on a previous occasion one of the residents half-sucked their Saviour, didn't fancy him much and deposited him back on the booklet, to be dutifully gathered up and put away for several weeks. Procedure in these circumstances is to bury or burn the Host. Weather conditions make burying a little impractical, so incineration was the order.