Apocalypse on the Wireless

Time to use the Giles Fraser graphic again, though I think he has a beard now. I do my best to avoid ‘Thought for the Day’ but I caught it on Monday which was a great way to begin a week off. In this particular instance Fr Fraser was dealing in apocalyptic, ‘the End is Nigh’ language which he averred that the Church had given up since the possibility of nuclear annihilation pushed it towards encouraging optimism instead. This was only good sense, Fraser says, because nobody believes in the Book of Revelation stuff anymore. But now, as he sits looking at wildfires eating up acres of English countryside, it seems to have suddenly struck him that human society might actually, really, be under threat. He couldn’t bring himself to be hopeful in any way, he concluded, to come up with some statement about God stepping in to sort it all out: he sounded on the brink of tears. And indeed, ‘Thought for the Day’ is not usually so revealing.

I was surprised. Giles Fraser claimed never to have heard a sermon in an Anglican church that dealt with the Apocalypse, but I talk about it relatively frequently, and it’s there in the background even if not explicit. The final section of the 1996 Anglican Cataclysm – sorry, Catechism – begins ‘The Christian lives in certain hope of the advent of Christ, the last judgement, and the resurrection to life eternal’, while I’ve just finished reading a book on the suffering of the non-human Creation all five of whose theological contributors, from very different perspectives, nevertheless envisage a final sovereign act of God in which creation will be renewed, the current order of things pass away to be replaced by a perfected one. When I was in the process of converting, my friend Comrade Tankengine, son of an old-fashioned High Church Anglican clergyman, told me the prospect of the End of All Things was the only thing that gave him the hope to carry on at all.

We could take the apocalyptic tradition as symbolic rather than literal. In fact we probably should, unless we’re really ready to countenance the appearance of multi-headed dragons as part of God’s process of preparing the world for the End. In this reading, the strain and violence embedded in the texts represent the increasing recognition of good and evil as humanity advances towards what God wants for it. And it may be so; but that recognition could still require the destruction of everything we hold dear: the two might go hand-in-hand, and we should take account of the possibility.

I faced this a few years ago when thinking my way through the climate emergency. I was not sure then, and am not now, exactly how likely the End is to arise from the changes we can see around us at the moment: for what it’s worth, I think not, though I’m not at all sure our current civilisation will make it through, and that’s a shame enough. But it behoves us to think about it, and pray, and not for that Day to take us by surprise, like the thief in the night.

Half Term Conversations

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

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

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

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

Rainbow Bridge

My journey towards thinking about animals differently didn’t start with Professor Cotillion’s cavaliers, as it really began years ago with my dealings with Christine and her boxers, but since dropping in on online groups such as the charity Bliss Cavalier Rescue’s LiberFaciorum page I’ve become aware of a phrase, an idea, that Christine never used, that of the Rainbow Bridge. ‘Run free at Rainbow Bridge’, grieving pet owners and their comforters will say of their lost animal.

The idea – a beautiful one – is that dead pets go to a meadow landscape where they are restored to health and wholeness, where there is always water and food, and where they play. They wait for their owners to arrive and, when they glimpse them on the edge of the meadow, leave the other animals and run to meet them. Human and pet then cross the Rainbow Bridge together into eternity. Sentimental, maybe, but as I age I'm more reluctant to dismiss sentiment.

The motif of Rainbow Bridge comes, improbably, from a scrap of paper written in 1959 by a 19-year-old Scottish girl who’d just lost her Labrador. It, and she, were chased down by Paul Koudounaris whose book about the spectacular ‘catacomb saints’ distributed across Catholic Mitteleuropa in the 17^th & 18^th centuries, Heavenly Bodies, I have. She was Edna Clyne (later Clyne-Rekhy), and when Mr Koudounaris found her in 2023 she had literally no earthly inkling that her words, originally handed to a few friends in typescript, had, via a 1990s US magazine advice column, found their way around the world - handed to grieving pet owners in vets’ surgeries, shared between friends, carved into stone and placed in pet cemeteries.

Edna disclaimed any direct spiritual influence on her imaginary picture, but the imagery of the rainbow as a sign of hope and its link with animals seems subconsciously to link to the story of the Ark. The rainbow now carries additional meanings, of inclusion and togetherness. But can the motif be accommodated within orthodox Christian thinking in any way?

Even within its own terms, Rainbow Bridge begs questions. What happens to animals humans have wronged, and whose relationship with us is marred beyond repair? The picture clearly imagines dogs as the beloved pets, not surprisingly, though it can easily be extended to cats; where do other animals fit in? And dogs and cats are carnivorous. As far as Christianity is concerned, the idea of Rainbow Bridge is clearly based on popular misconceptions of Christian views of postmortem experience, one of spiritual survival (‘we die and go to heaven’) rather than the resurrection to a new, physical life. Traditionally Christians have shut down discussion about what happens to animals when they die by saying that they have no souls – no soul, no survival – but that seems to fall into the same error. More to the point, the question of what happens to animals is linked to what happens to humans. We participate in the resurrected life not because some immortal part of us survives, but because we acknowledge our sins and turn to Christ; animals have no sin, and so are not redeemed.

But Edna Clyne was only inventing an image, not devising a theology, and if that’s true of her, very substantially the Bible is little different. You’d struggle to define a clear idea of what the soul means – other than being ‘not the body’ – from Scripture, and nothing about the process of what happens to us after death is very clear either.  The greatest clarity we are given, the vision of the Heavenly City, comes in the form of an image, not details about how we get there or what we will do when we arrive. And we know that animals are part of it, because it was part of what Isaiah glimpsed seven centuries before Christ, a renewed world where the wolf would lie down with the lamb and the child place its hand in the adder’s den and not be harmed. None of the ambiguities are insoluble.

You can’t offer a requiem for an animal which has no sin, but you can say as much as that, and maybe that’s all you need to say. We humans have black vestments and unbleached candles to commend us to divine mercy, the tremor of knowing what we are: the beasts, bold and unaware, have the rainbow.

The Limits of Engagement

My thinking regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict has evolved over the course of the Gaza war. I’ve occasionally referred to the entrenched anti-Israel stance of nice liberal British Christians which, on one occasion, slipped into open anti-semitism in front me, out of the mouth of a member of my own congregation who was given to wearing a keffiyeh from time to time. I have remained suspicious of Christians wearing keffiyehs, and pro-Palestinian demonstrations and activism no matter what the good intentions of most of the people involved may have been. My niece, no stranger to radical politics, said she has steered clear of the issue at her university for the same reason. I have questioned why so many British people, perhaps Christians especially, feel the need to comment on this conflict out of all the brutal struggles which deface the world: there are various answers, some less pleasant than others.

But we are 18 months of slaughter on now, and I have come to admit that this is different. It’s partly the scale, partly the open avowal of ethnic cleansing by some Israeli ministers, and partly the lies which it seems to me quite clear that the Israelis want the world to believe. Il Rettore also gave me a book, Faith in the Face of Empire by Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb. This examines the interesting question of why God chose to be incarnate in this part of the world when he could have picked anywhere; its answer is the geopolitical position of the Holy Land on the contested border of great empires, in the past as much as now. This is the right location for God to critique human lusts and insecurities and offer an alternative to them, Kingdom against Empire, Cross against sword. The Word didn't become incarnate in Judaea because that’s where the chosen people were, but the Israelites became the chosen people because they inhabited the land where the Word would become incarnate. So perhaps this conflict does have cosmic significance in a way others do not.

I mention lies. There are few nations and governments which always tell the truth, but few whose falsehoods extend to their military killing aid workers and burying not just their bodies but the vehicle they were travelling in and then maintaining an entirely false account of events until caught in the lie. It is very clear the statements the Israelis give are untrue, and if I were responsible for policy at an august news organisation such as the BBC I would have begun treating them as such, in the same way that we quite reasonably gave up routinely asking the Russians to comment on the war in Ukraine. In both cases, you occasionally need to be reminded of the argument, and whether people do themselves believe the lies they tell is an interesting and useful question to consider. I think the Israelis probably do tell themselves that their state is a liberal democracy the same as other liberal democracies because they had a trans woman win Eurovision in 1998 (except those who loathe the fact). But there’s limited value to wasting your time on untruths. Remember how long it took the BBC to decide that it didn’t actually have to have a climate change denier on every time the issue got mentioned.

There is a broader point here. I always approach any disagreement (if I have my wits about me) along the Dominican lines of identifying assumptions you have in common with your interlocutor and proceeding from there. But there is no point rehearsing lies. You have to distinguish the people from whom you might genuinely learn something from those who are only trying to defeat you. Such people are not even interested in being understood, in affecting the way you think: they would really rather you were not there at all. There is nothing to be gained in dealing with them.

‘Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes’ run two adjoining verses in the Book of Proverbs. Christ negotiates this treacherous landscape with skill. He encounters and distinguishes between those who ask him questions in order to elicit a genuine answer, and those who ask them in order to entrap him: the latter attacks he turns round in their own terms, exposing the falsehood of the premises by bringing in some other idea or statement from Scripture.

So here is a relevant question. When King David numbered the people of Israel, how did the Lord respond? He sent a plague. Where did the plague end? At the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite. What did David do? He bought the threshing-floor. What did the threshing-floor become later? It became the site of the Temple. Now David was king: he could have done what he wanted. Araunah even offered him the place for free. But David insisted on buying it lawfully, so his offerings would not have cost him nothing. He did not seize it, not even from a foreigner, one of the People of the Land who the Israelites were supposed to have displaced.

Biblical Relics

Anna comes to speak to me about various things, including her old family Bible. None of her family wants it, she says, and she doesn't feel she can look after it. What should she do with it?

It's actually a Prayer Book and Bible bound as one volume, and dates from 1773 with all the family names and dates inscribed on an initial leaf (the one in my illustrative picture would be much later). It's potentially a nice artefact, but isn't in good shape: the covers are detached, the leather almost worn away, and it smells strongly enough of mould that you don't want to breathe in too deeply in its company. Despite its date, the problem is that there are simply too many of these Bibles around for anyone other than the family involved to be interested in it, unless there was something unusual about the family or the circumstances in which it was compiled. Every family that could afford a book like this would have had one, and the question of what to do with them regularly arises, at museums as much as at churches (at my last workplace we had a couple). 

The old Jewish custom is that worn-out texts and manuscripts that might contain the name of God are held in a storeroom in the synagogue, the Genizah, and then formally buried perhaps every seven years. Maybe churches should offer a similar service! If nobody in her family was interested in keeping the book, I told Anna, the most respectful thing would be to bury it, to return it to earth. She seemed to like that. I remember doing the same some years ago with copies of the Book of Mormon Mad Trevor gave me, but respect wasn't the issue there.

D'oh!

What we must now all refer to as Hornington Minster Parish is under-strength at the moment, without an incumbent and short of clergy to look after two of the four churches, so with Il Rettore holding the pass at Swanvale Halt I offered myself to help this Sunday. Given that they do have a reasonable supply of people to preach, I was expecting to be asked to take a communion service somewhere, but no, I was despatched to Hintinghill to do a sermon which anyone, or at least a number of people, might have done. The Minster Parish is one of those kind of outfits that goes in for sermon series based around the enthusiasms of the leadership team rather than the lectionary, so I was given the story of the Feeding of the 5000 from John 6 to speak about to the assembled masses.

This Monday evening I was out at Helgi’s, the rock bar in Hackney, to hear Mr Vadim Kosmos from the Viktor Wyld Museum talk about death-themed cabarets and other morbid entertainments in late 19th-century Paris. The event was originally billed as starting at 8pm; then when I booked a ticket it had moved to 8.45, when I arrived I was told it wouldn’t start until 9, and as is the usual manner of things Mr Kosmos didn’t actually get going until a few minutes after that. 9.05pm is far too late for a midweek lecture to begin if you have a distance to go to get home, and I ended up leaving before even getting to the bit I was actually interested in, as opposed to information about Napoleon III, satirical stereoscopes, and how morgues got their name. Before the talk began I was left with some free time and sat in an alcove opposite a lurid mural of Baphomet and a cascade of skulls to think about what I might say at Hintinghill. I thought of it as claiming the territory (silently). I couldn’t actually remember which of the four versions of the story would be read, and found myself thinking about the differences between them and what conclusions I could draw from that.

At home later in the week, I checked the briefing notes I’d been sent, and these are worth quoting:

The people come in droves to be taught, hanging on Jesus’ every word. It is late and there is no immediately obvious source of food for them all.  … Jesus enacts what will become a familiar pattern, as he takes the bread, gives thanks, breaks it and gives it out. Nothing is wasted and the (twelve) disciples fill twelve baskets with leftovers. The crowds return home satisfied in body, mind and spirit.

Except none of this is actually in John’s account. In that version, there is no preaching, the crowds converge on Jesus as he is with the disciples, and he initiates the events by asking the Twelve to feed them. At the end of the episode, the crowds don’t return home: as a result of the miracle, they identify Jesus as ‘the Prophet’, and he flees out of fear that ‘they were about to come and make him king by force’. The briefing notes aren’t actually based on the reading at all, but on the versions of the story by the other Gospel writers. Curiously this makes John’s point: the crowd is interpreting Jesus according to their own preconceptions of what the Messiah is coming to do, and not paying attention to what he is actually doing. Several of John's stories, I realised, pivot on misunderstandings or deliberate distortions of the significance of Jesus’s acts.

I talked about this, obviously without having a go at the briefing notes. Visiting preachers are always well-regarded unless they’re really awful, and that was the case at Hintinghill this morning. I downed a cup of coffee and a pain-au-chocolat with the good folk there and drove home only to find my William Hartnell fingerless gloves were nowhere to be seen. Back to Hintinghill church – but they’d all left, so I sent the lay reader who was my main contact an email. He later phoned to say he’d been at lunch in the village so popped back into the church but couldn’t find my gloves anywhere. At that very moment I found them in my jacket pocket where for some unaccountable reason my hand had not strayed before that point.

Bel and Yahweh

Given that the Office works on a three-year lectionary cycle, I must surely have read the Book of Bel & the Dragon publicly at Morning Prayer before, but I really can’t remember doing so. In fact I am so shamefully unfamiliar with it I couldn’t even recall what happens. You can see why it’s confined to the Apocrypha: having already been vindicated in his worship of the God of Israel, the prophet Daniel, in Babylon along with the other Jewish exiles, is rather illogically tested again by being called on to do obeisance first to a brazen image and then a hideous beast. At least the text attaches this story, or two stories, to a different Babylonian king, Cyrus rather than Artaxerxes, but it has Daniel being cast into the lions’ den for a second time. This time, not only does the Lord shut the lions’ mouths, but rather charmingly the prophet Habbakuk is magically transported to Babylon with a bowl of stew so Daniel won’t go hungry. Angela Carter once defined a fairy story as ‘one in which a king can call on another king and ask to borrow a cup of sugar’, and Bel & the Dragon clearly falls into the same category, dare I say it.

It's the brazen image which interested me. Every day twelve bushels of flour, forty sheep and fifty gallons of wine are sacrificed to this thing, Bel, and King Cyrus adduces its daily disappearance as evidence that Bel is indeed a god. Daniel naturally scoffs, and persuades Cyrus to test the divinity of Bel by scattering ash around his sanctuary and sealing his temple after the daily sacrifice. Lo and behold, when the door is reopened, the offerings have vanished, but there in the ash are the tell-tale footprints of the priests of Bel and their families who have sneaked in through a secret trapdoor to snaffle the lot. Enraged, Cyrus has them all slaughtered and the temple pulled down forthwith.

Enraged; and one might imagine humiliated, as Cyrus the Mede would have had to have been prenaturally unobservant not to realise this was happening at the Temple of Bel given something similar took place at every other temple in the ancient world, even at the Temple in Jerusalem where it was quite explicit that, apart from the portion of offerings that were burned to a crisp ‘as an odour pleasing to the Lord’, the priests ate the sacrifices. It was standard practice. In this story the great conqueror of much of the ancient world is shown up as the equivalent of a grown-up who still thinks Santa consumes the brandy and mince pie left out on Christmas Eve. Yes, all across the ancient Levant gods were ‘woken up’ in the morning and put to sleep at night in the persons of their statues, but while everyone felt there was some sense in which the deity was connected with their cult image, nobody really thought it was them. Does this tale, then, show that the Jews really thought the pagans did?

My mind goes back to a parallel we talked about some years ago – the non-existent scandal of the mechanical statues of medieval cults mocked and vilified by the 16^th-century Reformers who had never actually seen them move or knew how they had functioned in their contexts. They felt comfortable ridiculing the credulous believers of the past precisely because they were far enough in the past to do so. The writers of these Biblical texts were also sufficiently distant from the worship patterns they described to be able to tell such mocking stories. Nobody was going to say them nay.

But there was some point to it all. The other night I led a discussion about the Exodus story for a group of folk from other parishes on a diocesan course, and we touched on the ways in which the worship of the God of Israel differed from that of pagan deities, and what it meant for the Hebrews to be in relationship with him. I decided not to stray into the hazardous area that had occurred to me when I was preparing that in some ways the whole narrative reads uncomfortably. You can caricature the Lord’s declaration to Israel as ‘You are in a relationship with me; you have entered voluntarily into this relationship; and if you try to leave it, I will hurt you’. Once upon a time this kind of thing might not have raised any concern at all but nowadays we know what to call it. It occurs to me that the Church has to do some work to say why this image of God as an abusive partner is not in fact accurate.

The nature of the pagan gods is I think part of the answer. After all, they are not real. When the ancient Hebrews neglect YHWH and put up images of Baal and Ashtoreth they are not really exchanging like for like, one partner for another, even if that’s the language the scriptures couch it in. The pagan gods are the manufactures of human beings: they are projections of our longings, fears, and failings onto the world around us. A temple of Dagon is a shrine essentially to ourselves. Hence the urgency of God’s objections – when his people wander faithlessly away, they are going somewhere they will find nothing that will help them or improve them. They will find themselves bargaining with aspects of their own natures without knowing, and there is every likelihood that they will spiral downwards into the worst elements of who they are.

Paganism now is different. The pagans I know personally almost invariably regard their worship as a form of meditation and self-improvement, not dealing with deities who are actual personalities. But I wonder whether the danger is not still there. Bel is no more true now than he was when that text was written.

Angry Gods

How did I get on the Little Watchman mailing list? I have no more idea than I have of who Little Watchman is. He sends me occasional emails with his short online sermons. The last one, which came into my inbox at just the right time he says ironically, is entitled ‘Is God Angry With You?’ The answer is very emphatically Yes, God is incandescently angry, and rightly. He’s told us what he wants of us, and we don’t do it. So, rage. But it’s all right, because Jesus (who Little Watchman insists on calling Yeshua) is the offering that makes God calm down. This is just how the writer puts it. Now, Substitutionary Atonement is no more than a standard, though to my thinking only partial, explanation of how the sacrifice of Christ changes our relationship with God, and there is a lot in Christianity that doesn’t quite make sense no matter how you describe it. But boil Substitutionary Atonement down this brutally, and what you end up isn’t a statement that includes the odd logical lacuna, but something that reads as so sick and insane you can understand why people go nowhere near a religion that promotes it.

Leaving aside most of the many questions or issues one could ask, how much sense does it make to think of God as angry? This is slightly separate from the Biblical language of the wrath of God, which strikes me as a description of a status rather than an emotion God might have: the estrangement the whole Creation, and most especially human beings, exists in as a result of the Fall, however one might characterise that event. A status in which all things find themselves, or, indeed, an experience humans, who are conscious of it as the mute creation is not, might have; but not something God feels. But anger is certainly ascribed to God in the Scriptures. Is it really anything like ours?

Our primary icon of what God is like is Jesus. He clearly experiences anger, just as he does sorrow, grief, joy, and even scorn. But because he is human, he experiences them in the way we do, with the exception that for him there is no admixture of sin in them; he is limited by time and space, so he goes through these feelings in sequence and not concurrently. Like us, he doesn’t seem to feel different things at once, even when his feelings are conflicted (as they are in Gethsemane). This is only what we would expect. But in his divine nature, God is interacting with the whole of creation, all the time, not just in the contemporary moment but eternally. This is nothing like the emotions we experience: it is so far from the emotions we experience that we ought be cautious about how we describe or think of it. The emotional life of God is perhaps as mysterious to us as the mechanics of the Trinity.

You might question why I am so keen to defuse this bomb of God being angry. I think it is probably because I draw my image of anger from the human anger I have experienced (and I don’t mean I have always been on the receiving end of it, either): contorted faces, shouting, raised hands. The suspicion is that the emotion is almost always tied up with that individual’s view of themselves and the effect their desires should have, and the physical effects of anger come from deep within our evolutionary history: they are designed to intimidate, to try to get our own way. Angry though he may have been from time to time, I can’t imagine Jesus in any of those states.

We might contrast anger with love. The Biblical imagery of God’s love – aside from the life of Christ – includes similes such as the sun shining and the rain falling. There are very human images, too, the mother with the child at her breast, the parent giving good gifts, and so on, but it’s clear that God’s love relates to those images metaphorically: it isn’t a complete parallel. The imagery of God’s anger should be taken the same way. To imagine God as an angry human, snarling and screaming because his will isn’t obeyed (rather than ‘a righteous judge, provoked all the day’ as Psalm 7 puts it) – even if that will is perfectly just and right – doesn’t help anyone.  

I see little sense in continuing with my unaccountable subscription to Little Watchman.

All In the Wording

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

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

Is There Anybody There? Yes, There Is, Says The Lord

Once we got beyond the basics, the conversation with the woman who’s joined the team of one of our regular events went in an unexpected direction as she described the comfort she’d derived from visiting spiritualist gatherings, and how Christian friends had reacted (she said) with horror. We discussed why someone might want to engage in spiritualist activity and what the problems might be from a Christian point of view. She agreed that there were possibly malign things lurking in the hidden world, but stressed how her experience had been positive. ‘You’re not going to hear this church announcing “And now we’ll have a séance”’, I said, ‘but I’m not shocked’, which I’m not.

Curiously the readings at mass the day after were the consecration of the Temple from 1Kings, and Christ’s critique of the concepts of clean and unclean practices in Mark 7: these led into a reflection about one of my recurring themes, the contrast between two opposed approaches to religious life. The first is that you ring-fence the sense of the divine with rules and structures to prevent it being contaminated by the profane world and eventually eroding altogether; and the second that you use the sense of the divine to find its presence elsewhere. In my own Bible reading in the morning, too, I found the Lord assuring Moses in Exodus 4 ‘I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak’, encouraging a degree of trust in God which I fall short of all too often. ‘He reigns’, I concluded to our small congregation, and if he reigns there is little to fear in the sometimes wayward spiritual practice we encounter in others. One of the issues, in fact, with seeking solace in talking to spirits is that it’s based in a basic lack of trust in God that we are called to grow away from.

If we are critical of what others do, we must surely know that they aren’t simply going to change as a result of something we say. Nobody is going to blink at us and reply ‘You know, I never thought about it like that. I’m going to stop from this point forward’ – although they might, at some point distant from now, shift their ideas and reflect that perhaps we were right. If we don’t expect change in that way, it raises the question of what we’re doing when we react ‘with horror’ at someone else’s behaviour. I think it may be that we fear that if we don’t rebuke the sin, God will blame us for not distancing ourselves from it. The sin will contaminate us and we need to protect ourselves, to signal to God that we want nothing to do with it, to put up a protective barrier between us and it. It’s not the other person that’s uppermost in our minds.

Now, there might well be particular sins that beset us and from which we do need to flee. When Christ says to St Peter ‘get behind me, Satan’, it’s because the Apostle is raising something that’s a genuine temptation for him: it’s actually important. Knowing this is just proper spiritual self-awareness. But that’s not the other sinner’s fault; most of the time it’s not at issue (I have no desire whatever to contact my long-dead relatives); and our words are seldom as much to the point as the Saviour’s.

Enough Already!

Many years ago, the Church of England didn't make much provision for weekday worship on days when nothing very much was going on liturgically, and Anglo-Catholic churches got used to making use of the material provided for their Roman counterparts. Here at Swanvale Halt we've used the 1970 Roman Daily Missal for years (albeit in a post-1970 copy!). Of course I never use the Collects: they are almost always vapid variants on the theme of 'Jesus loves us so may we love him', which is all very well but gets you only so far. I am also used to making on-the-hoof amendments to the texts of the Jerusalem Bible which is what the Daily Missal uses, when those texts seem clunky and awkward.

This morning, though, I opened the Missal before the assembled masses in the Lady Chapel (all four souls) and found my eye and brain confronted by Hebrews 2.5:

He did not appoint angels to be rulers of the world to come, and that world is what we are talking about.

Now the J.B. tries to improve comprehension of the text by removing any doubt at all about what it might mean, which I suppose is a characteristically Roman approach. But this just reads horrendously. For a second I flailed as I tried to come up with an alternative that both kept the sense of Holy Writ and expressed it in a way which treated the ear less brutally, and failed, and apologised for my failure. By way of comparison, let us turn to The Message, which is the most extreme paraphrastic version of the Bible in general use, and which renders the same verse thus:

God didn't put angels in charge of this business of salvation that we're dealing with here. 

To me this is nowhere near as bad. It does scarcely more violence to the text than the J.B. and at least reads energetically and appealingly within its American idiom. The NRSV which we would use on Sundays says:

Now God did not subject the coming world, about which we are speaking, to angels. 

This is by no means the most elegant of sentences and some people may fight shy of the subordinate clause in the middle. But it is more stately and less banal, and the subordinate clause slows the phrase down, giving the listener the chance to digest what is being said: it comes to rest on the word 'angels' who are the point of the statement and the thought behind it. The verse leads into the discussion of the role of human beings, to whom creation has been subjected, based on the quotation of Psalm 8. It is better in every respect. From now on I think the Missal will remain on its shelf in the vestry.

And Just the Wrong Time of Year for a Journey

Oh dear, I realise that I have ascribed the name ‘Fr Donald’ to both the vicar of Elmham who runs the local bit of the SCP and my retired hospital chaplain colleague locally. Well, there is little to be done now and I can’t think of an alternative name for the time being and so will just say it was Fr Donald of Elmham who posted on LiberFaciorum yesterday about everything that was happening in the church there this week running up to Christmas. He does it because he loves it, he says.

As you know I have never felt that in the same way! The same period here at Swanvale Halt is very similar, though we will only have the one Crib Service today because the church is quite a bit larger than Elmham’s. This first relatively normal Christmas since 2019 is, as they always tend to be, a dragged-out, draining business, essentially three weeks of the same thing over and over again. I find myself even more than usual clinging on to the recitation of the Office which has doggedly remained in apocalyptic Advent mode even while the rest of the world is singing Hark the Herald. That provides some spiritual balance, it seems, as I try to wrap my vocal chords around the Great O Antiphons. Even those seem to have begun a long time ago, when it was only last Saturday!

This morning my Bible reading was the very last bit of the Gospel of St John, and the phrase that leapt to my attention was Jesus’s instruction to Peter, ‘feed my sheep’. Regardless of what I might be experiencing, and regardless of how remote any of the Christmas activities – the concerts, the turning-on of lights, and so on – might seem to be from the kind of spiritual activity that stands a chance of changing souls, they are all, in varying degrees, food for the sheep and therefore vitally part of what I am supposed to be doing. Weak as I am, I might find a lot of what I do burdensome, even when there are moments of joy and the conviction that the work is right and what I am called to. Perhaps the Lord felt the same. If misery was all I felt, I might be compelled to consider whether I should carry on doing it; but there is still the fundamental sense of rightness, surprisingly often love pokes through the surface, and ultimately I rest on the fact that it is a command: ‘feed my sheep’.

After all, this is what Jesus does, and what we are all called to take part in. I found myself thinking in my prayer time this morning that he who is the Bread of Heaven is laid where the animals feed. In 2000 years of meditation on this mystery I can’t imagine nobody has had this thought before, but I can’t remember anyone mentioning it. It was a bit thunderstriking, terrible and glorious. That's the business we are in. Happy Christmas! 

Peace Be With You All

Returning to work after a fortnight’s break in the Autumn is always a bit of a rude awakening for me: no matter how much activity I may have packed into those two weeks, they very soon recede into the mists of memory. The last out-of-the-ordinary event of my holiday was attending a Goth night at Aces and Eights in Tufnell Park: I was glad I did, but the transport system has now made it very hard for me to manage nights out like this, as the last train for Swanvale Halt leaves London well before midnight. On Saturday I parked in Kingston and caught the train there, and even the Kingston trains ran no later than 0.42 unless I’d wanted to catch the one an hour after that culminated in a bus journey from Surbiton. I managed to make it to an 8am mass the next day, but the church I first tried was shut leading to a mad rush to the Cathedral. I’m not sure which edition of the Prayer Book the celebrant was using, but their prayer that the Lord might ‘so rule and govern the heart of thy chosen servant George our Queen’ suggests they’d been up late as well.

So Monday morning began with Bible reading. While I was away various things had gone slightly awry, people not being where others expected them to be, and allegations of unhelpfulness by some parties against others, and I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with them (I shouldn’t have looked at the emails in advance). My eye was drawn to Christ’s instructions to the disciples in Luke 10, ‘First say, Peace be to this house’, and that seemed like a clear instruction if ever there was one. We mustn’t allow a high value placed on the Peace of God to obscure real problems in a Church community, but it does no harm for it to be the first word the pastor says to it. It reminded me what I am here to do, and I thank God for that.

Peace and Arms

‘The war challenges my pacifism,’ Paula our Pastoral Assistant and former Mayor told me when I caught up with her a couple of weeks ago. ‘when I hear the Ukrainians have managed to shoot another Russian general, I can’t help being pleased.’ I have a great sympathy with pacifism: I accept that most wars solve nothing on their own, and are better not fought at all even if not doing so results in a temporary loss of something you value. But pacifism has no answer once fighting starts; its best case is to build up a culture in which conflicts are managed by negotiation rather than arms, and that needs a long time, and favourable institutions which some states do not have.

The last few years since the election of Mr Trump have made me reflect how fragile those free institutions are, and how slender our grasp can be on the things that allow us to live relatively free of fear, and to have a tolerable degree of autonomy and agency; I have come to think, in fact, that any liberal state, no matter how stable and secure it seems, no matter how longstanding its institutions and structures might be, is at most only (say) four elections away from fascism. By ‘fascism’ I mean a state whose governing elite maintains power by violence (including war with other states), and protects its interests by undermining law, personal autonomy, security and property, and free expression, and works to stop its citizens even thinking about any alternative way of living (which is why they always hate gays so much). What such a state says it believes is irrelevant: look at Russia, which seems to have convinced itself that Russian nationalism is in truth no nationalism at all, but a kind of neutral position against which any other kind of independent communal expression is ‘Nazism’, and then reads this back into the history of the Soviet Union (reconceived as a sort of pan-Asian EU with added poverty) and the Russian Empire before it. This stuff means nothing, and results merely in subverting any useful understanding of words (the Russians refer to liberal movements in places such as Moldova as ‘the right’ and their own nationalist proxies as ‘the left’). Fascism isn’t fundamentally about ideology, which is just set-dressing for the self-interest of fascist elites: it’s about practice.

So what do you do in response? You regard it as important, in the first place. I got into a mild spat online with left-wing Goth friend Comrade TartanVamp who argued, regarding the French elections, that Mr Macron and Ms Le Pen are both enemies of the workers and that had he been French he probably would have stayed at home or spoiled his ballot paper. I, and Ms Mauritia, who has skin in the game being both of French-colonial extraction and a minority ethnicity, and having a home in France (in a Le Pen-voting area), couldn’t help arguing that this was a bit complacent. If you can’t see that a France run by Ms Le Pen would have taken a huge step away from civilisation and towards a place where a step wrong could land you in a windowless basement in the middle of the night having your teeth wrenched out with pliers, you need to recalibrate your political compass. If you are sufficiently left-wing you might want to say the difference between Macron and Le Pen is one of degree and not kind: I would argue it’s so big a degree it doesn’t matter. Perhaps such fears haunt me because I am comfortable, middle-class and privileged; perhaps the poor wouldn’t care so much. I don’t think that’s the case, though. The poor may have less to lose, but everyone wants to keep their teeth. And authoritarianism advancing anywhere threatens liberty everywhere: the poor always suffer most from it.

You are also prepared to engage in hybrid warfare, which aims to steer clear of armed conflict, certainly, but recognises that in extreme cases this might be necessary. Part of hybrid warfare is actively, consciously, shoring up the civil institutions of a free society. Every time you insist on truth, on individual autonomy, on free expression, you strike a blow against the enemy. I don’t think our Prime Minister is anything like an authoritarian, and forced to make a choice between him and Ms Le Pen I would plonk my cross in the JOHNSON box not only with reluctant acquiescence but with firm conviction that it was the right thing to do. But, with other choices on offer, he isn’t what we need. His disregard for law, his scorn for truth, weakens our defences against fascism every minute he and the crooks around him remain in office. He is wrong for this time of danger: and for freedom, it is always a time of danger.

Back to pacifism, where we started. Pacifism must explain how, absent any form of force, bad regimes change. I’ve sort of assumed in the past that every tyrannical polity contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction and what you have to do is sit out the pain and wait for the inevitable collapse; but, thinking about it, I am not sure I can point to a clear example of this happening, and I’m not sure I even know what it means. Instead, bad regimes are always forced out. Extinction Rebellion (to pick a radical group) was founded on the assumption that governing elites always cave in given enough mass protest, but I think experience belies this. You need a governing elite that has some sense of shame, that knows it’s subject to electoral displeasure, and that is reluctant simply to kill people who oppose it: not all are. In the UK, the Government tries changing the law to stop XR doing what it wants, but it's still a legal organisation, and I can stand speaking to a local councillor or police officer in Swanvale Halt with an XR sticker on my cycle helmet without any fear that I'm going to be dragged from my home at night and thrown into that windowless basement to the hazard of my teeth. XR have managed to have a significant degree of leverage in the UK; in Belarus, we'd all have been imprisoned or shot. Regimes like that don’t spontaneously crumble, they need a crumbling agent to make them.

What does the Scripture say? Only this morning I was reading Jeremiah’s jeremiads against the land of Moab, predicting what God was about to do to it for its oppression of the Israelites. The notion of cyclical regime change is very much there in the prophetic writings, and once they are ousted from possession of the land the Israelites are indeed told simply to wait until God takes his vengeance on their enemies and they are vindicated. But, disconcertingly, on a national level at least, violence is always involved in this process, and the Lord does not seem squeamish about it. Biblical regime change doesn’t happen by magic. In what seems like a miracle, the Israelites are sent back from exile to Jerusalem by Cyrus the Mede to rebuild the Temple, but the only reason Cyrus is there to send them is that his father Darius invaded Babylon and killed its king: violence being violently chastised.

Better red than dead, I would always argue, but how do we judge when conflict is avoidable, or when it can succeed? Is this the moment of choice, or this? I wish there was a blueprint.

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. 

The Lord's Rivals

The last time I discussed covid-scepticism I mentioned Florence who refuses to take the vaccines on ethical grounds - that is, their development using foetal cell material, like many modern medicines. I recently got into a discussion about it, rather to my trepidation, as she’d stated a quoted mortality rate for covid-19 of 1.37% made it ‘mild’, which I suppose it is compared to many other sicknesses, but of course 1.37% of a lot, is a lot, as any statistician knows. We disagree about the moral status of early-stage foetuses, but some of the other challenges Florence makes seem worth thinking about.

Should we not learn to rely on God rather than the idol of medicine, Florence asks. I don’t think anything in the Bible suggests that Christians ought in every situation to expect the miraculous intervention of God rather than ordinary secular healing. In Jesus’s time sickness was viewed as a sign of God’s displeasure on specific individuals and the Lord gave that very short shrift (John 3.1-3). His healing ministry was a way of revealing God’s will, and restoring individuals to the fellowship of Israel. Though Christians were also likely to slip into seeing illness and disability as a divine visitation, the Scriptures themselves don’t: in his short discussion of healing, St James (5.14-16) neither claims that, nor that Christians should not avail themselves of secular medicine as well as prayer. Miraculous healings still take place, but a) we now think about sickness differently and b) in order to reveal God’s will they necessarily have to be extraordinary events rather than things we expect to happen all the time. I don’t see any reason to believe that God wants us not to use ordinary, normal human methods of fighting covid.

Florence is a serious soul and also raised the fact that the word the New Testament uses for medicine, pharmakeia, also means ‘sorcery’, and ultimately derives from pharmakon, ‘poison’. Isn’t this a suspicious view of medical science, she suggests, and therefore presumably one Christians should also exercise. I hadn’t thought about the way the Scriptures deal with medicine: it’s easy enough to claim that it is merely a matter of ignorance (obviously at the time nobody (including the physicians themselves) would have understood the process of healing so the use of drugs was close to magic and therefore suspect); also, the texts use another word, iatros, for ‘doctor’ when talking about ordinary physicians and St Luke the evangelist himself. But we have to be more positive than that and assume that the Biblical language has something to tell us – that there might be a valuable point to that apparent connection between doctors and sorcerers. Perhaps there’s a link between both magic and medicine in our human desire for quick fixes to our problems that don’t require us to change anything about ourselves. There are all sorts of lessons to learn from the current pandemic involving our society and behaviour and early on almost everyone I spoke to talked about that, but now we’re just exhausted and yearn for it to be over: we really want the vaccines to be a get-out-of-jail-free-card. In terms of the pandemic's origins, for instance, we may never know whether the virus emerged from a laboratory accident or a crossover from animals being kept in bad conditions; but, whichever it was, human actions have played a major part. A purely medical solution that leaves out any spiritual reflection or room for repentance plays to the very understandable desire (which I feel as much as anyone) to ‘get back to normal’. Could that be the insight that lies underneath the Biblical language?

Minding the Language

Looking up what was meant by an ‘external solemnity’ –  in case you wonder, it’s when, for pastoral reasons, you celebrate a liturgical feast day on a different occasion from the usual set day – I came across a post over on the New Liturgical Movement blog setting out a spiritual/aesthetic argument for the use of archaic language in worship. This shouldn’t be a surprise coming from the NLM: although I haven’t yet noticed anyone there pleading for the restoration of the Julian calendar or the moral superiority of Ptolemaic cosmology, it is surely only a matter of time. But whereas it’s tempting to dismiss all this stuff as conservative waffle, I am more sympathetic to it than I might once have been. Of course NLM’s writers come to it from a Roman Catholic standpoint, and our brethren of the Roman observance do labour under some awful liturgical language and scriptural translation which seem designed to be vapid and banal, while I find the Anglican Common Worship material has a sober resonance which neither waters down any depth and meaning, nor strains to be poetic (something which is bound to produce embarrassment). So we must be understanding.

For the first time, over the last couple of years, I’ve had occasions for using the Authorised Version of the Bible liturgically, for small celebrations of Evensong at Corpus Christi, for instance. It seemed odd to be using the Prayer Book language for the liturgy alongside a modern Bible translation for the readings, so I brought the two into line. In the past I’ve recognised the greater ‘creative ambiguity’ of some passages in the old text as opposed to modern translations, but reading the AV text aloud in the context of a liturgy that fits it was a different experience. Being forced to try to read it in a way which made it make sense, with the natural rhythms of speech, intensified my relationship with the text, which is of course the Word of God (however we understand that phrase). I can see the point, then, for using this heightened language – especially for the Gospel, though it may make the already-complex formulations of some of St Paul’s letters positively clotted.

The argument that comprehension doesn’t matter, though, takes the case too far. The theory is that worshippers don’t really need anything more than the overall sense of what is happening in the liturgy, which becomes the backdrop for their separate devotions, built into their spiritual reflections. But what shapes those reflections?

My first regular place of worship was a ‘Prayer Book Catholic’ church where, although a little red copy of the BCP was thrust into your hand when you arrived, the liturgy bore little relation to anything in it. That didn’t matter too much, because I knew what was supposed to be happening. But, to work, that approach has to rest on a bedrock of serious catechesis, and on people reading their Bibles, studying their mass books, and saying their prayers at home. We know that worship comes from the Holy Spirit, almost regardless of words and languages, but the Holy Spirit still needs something to work with. Otherwise, other considerations and thoughts will fill the void: self-congratulation at being a reactionary Catholic, perhaps.

I suppose the real question is over what shapes the mind of the Church. How far can a society far removed from the kind of basic familiarity with Christian culture that can decode liturgy manage when faced with archaic language; when – for instance – confronted with a chanted AV reading of John 2, can it bring readily to mind the imagery of a wedding, water jars, and a startled bridegroom? I can, but can a single mum straight from the bus stop of Swanvale Halt?

Ten Thousand Churches?

It is the infelicitous description of trained, paid clergy as ‘limiting factors’ on church growth in a recent report on church planting which General Synod is set to debate that has many people I know fulminating on social media. This is not surprising: nobody likes to be told that they are worthless, in fact retarding the very thing they want to facilitate, and I find myself as aggrieved as anyone. (Predictably, the report is written by a trained, paid clergyman in the form of Canon John McGinley of Leicester, who I very much doubt sees himself as a limiting factor on growth).

For myself, I would be delighted to see my parish speckled with little lay-organised church cells that I could pastor and plug into the historic ministry and tradition of a sacramental Church, but I see precious few of the laypeople I interact with (no – this is historian’s caution – I see none) who really want or are able to do anything of the kind. Even the most active and committed of them have extra-Church lives to lead which take up quite a lot of time. ‘Many of the 10,000 [planned] churches would start small’, says the article, ‘and some would remain as 20 or 30 people meeting in a home’. They’re not going to be led by the poor, then, who are unlikely to have homes that 20 or 30 people could meet in.

There is so very, very much one could object to in this ‘vision’ but I will rest content with pointing out the fantasy at the heart of it. It’s another project, destined, I fear, to join the abject failure of every other such vision: Archbishop George Carey’s ‘Decade for Evangelism’; ‘Mission-Shaped Church’ ten years later; even Reinhard Bonnke’s mid-1990s mission which the German evangelist was insistent was going to result in a million converts (‘we know God is calling us to do this’) and which our rector in Chatham tried to get us interested in. Perhaps we might eventually face the idea that God might actually not want these vainglorious initiatives which are more about us and our ideas of success and self-validation than about him. Studies of small-scale successes in local churches, which are perfectly real, miss out the bigger picture that only becomes clear when you draw back. We know that, in the late-capitalist West, the great bulk of church growth is not driven by conversion, but by people moving between congregations. Zoom out even further than that, and you can see how Christian growth across the world is largely determined by non-religious factors: church membership is, mainly, an index of something else which the individuals concerned actually care about more. In the USA church allegiance is a cultural and political statement, and no church is growing faster than the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation at all. In China to be a Christian is to have an internal life which is not under the day-to-day control of the Communist Party, but not in open opposition to it, and therefore safe. In Africa to be a Christian is not to be a Muslim, the religious division mapped onto cultural, economic and national or tribal ones. In Eastern Europe, to be Orthodox is to subscribe to nostalgic nationalism, rebuilding a sense of social identity after the collapse of Communist hegemony. In Western Europe, though – I say, ironically but sincerely, ‘thank God’ – religion is mainly decoupled from anything like this. It exists on its own, in the chilly waters of secular societies, swimming without political water-wings to hold it up. Though I have my gripes against him, to his great credit Archbishop Stephen Cottrell does seem to hint at understanding this: ‘it would be foolish to ignore the huge shift in the tectonic plates of European and world culture that have shaped the world in which we serve and witness’, he is quoted as saying.

We can find our clerical amour-propre outraged and our Anglo-Catholic convictions about sacraments and tradition provoked by all this stuff. But the real blood-chilling statement in this report comes at the end of Canon McGinley’s statement to the Church Times: ‘in church planting’, he says, ‘there are no passengers’. You, worshipper, will not be allowed simply to turn up. You will be expected to get on board with the project. There is no sense here that a layperson could be pursuing their vocation in some other way than in church: that they could be a carer, or a young mum, or a harassed worker, or a weary elderly person who has striven all their life and needs a rest, who needs to bathe in the presence of God just in order to get through the rest of their week, to put one foot spiritually in front of another. I am taken spinning back a couple of years to our bishop, denouncing a diocesan finance system that ‘punishes success and rewards failure’. When I see clergy described as ‘leaders’ (I have never seen myself as a ‘leader’, just as someone called sometimes to exercise leadership. People who see themselves as leaders shouldn't be allowed to lead anything), I know that this comes from somewhere other than the Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, who came not to be served but to serve.

Good evangelical that I am, I sat as ever with my Bible this morning and – simply following through sequentially as I always do – I read 1Thessalonians 2 and 3. I had never properly registered Paul commiserating with the Thessalonians in their ‘persecutions’; ‘you suffered from your own compatriots the same thing those churches [in Judaea] suffered from the Jews’, he sympathises. We live in a time when God’s Church is penetrated by the understandings of the flesh – I suppose it ever is! – by the standards and the expectations of the world, and yet does not know it. Those of us who disagree suffer nothing worse than marginalisation and insults, not fire and rack. But, remember, the Apostle writes ‘so that no one will be unsettled by these persecutions’, and unsettlement should be alien to the faithful. We keep going, not in our own strength but in the Lord’s.

Memento Mori

Ms Kittywitch has been in hospital with what, eventually, turned out to be a perforated bowel and an infection on top of it. This is no joke for anyone, let alone a longstanding heart-and-lung transplant survivor whose immune system barely functions. Lots of prayers were offered from various religious traditions and I found myself arguing to the Lord that I was sure her earthly work wasn’t done yet, and although there was a day or two early on when the doctors really thought it was unlikely she would make it, she’s now conscious, communicating, and posting on LiberFaciorum again.

Paradoxically my miserable nature prompts me always to reflect that my earthly work may well be coming to an end – although it does one good to remember that one’s time is indeed limited, this is a silly thought otherwise. Yet this dour consideration doesn’t have the effect it used to: once I would have said I was quite frightened by the prospect of dying, and now I don’t think I am. I find myself reflecting more and more frequently what a good and gentle life I have had which has furnished me with much to enjoy and be thankful for, and if I had to leave it tomorrow I wouldn’t feel hard done by in any way. Even the prospect of what might happen afterwards doesn’t impinge on that feeling of contentment too much as it has to be left to the God who is merciful and just and will do with me just what I, were I in my right mind and possession of all the facts, would choose to do with myself.

Yet it occurs to me that contentment is privileged. Oppressed people down the centuries have looked to the postmortem state to bring reward, restitution, and justice – or, at the very least, rest – and so the story in Luke 16 becomes naggingly appropriate: ‘remember, son, in life you received your good things, and Lazarus his evil things’.

I was in a far darker place some while ago when my daily Bible reading placed a line from Psalm 118 in front of me: ‘I will live, and declare the works of the Lord’. This is probably all I need to remember, and maybe I should carry it with me!

Back to School

From toast to bread to an encounter with the Risen Lord: this was the narrative trajectory, yesterday, of my first assembly at the Infants School since September. I began by asking the children about what they'd had for breakfast, following which we discussed what you needed to make bread, and then I told the story of the Road to Emmaus, which isn't in the Lion Storyteller Bible which they are customarily read from so I presume most of them had never heard it. It was either that, or the life of St Alphege whose feast day it was and for once I shied away from bishops, martyrdom and Danish invaders. 'Did you say Emmaus in the story?' one girl asked. 'I go to a church, it's not your church, but it's called Emmaus Church'. 

I realised that thanks to my disconnection from the school over the last year I could only name a handful of the children (or rather a smaller handful than I used to know). They still seem to know who I am when I meet them about the roads of the parish, but this is just one aspect of the church's life which needs some urgent rebuilding as we start to get back into gear again.