Quiet!!!

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

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

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

When the Wolves Were Running

I suppose on a personal level I should be grateful to the White House Deputy Chief of Staff Mr Miller, who over recent days has provided me with material for a Facebook post, a newsletter article, a sermon, and now a blog entry. That’s good going for the following few words, spoken to US TV channel CNN in reference to recent events in Venezuela:

The US is operating in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world from the beginning of time.

Generously, you could say, yes, they are. International relationships are indeed shaped by balances and imbalances of economic and military power and, as the Lord himself said, if a king goes to war with another king he first decides if he has enough resources to do so. Any nation must have the wherewithal to defend the things it holds important from those who would destroy or steal them. In World War Two the Allies did many immoral things to secure our way of life, ranging from simple deceit to the mass killing of civilians. We know this is the case.

But ‘securing our way of life’ is the point here. Then, we deployed strength, force, and power to defend a state of living which, however imperfectly, said it valued every human being as an individual, which recognised their worth and dignity, and which was expressed in a political and legal system which the human race has, over centuries, devised to protect the ordinary majority from the powerful, the cruel and the violent: the psychopaths who believe there’s nothing wrong with the rule of strength and force. We call it ‘democracy’, and it includes not just periodic elections (tyrants are content with those as they are so easy to manipulate), but limited, accountable government as a whole; free exchange of ideas; universal free education; security of property; and equality before the law. You know full well that this is not what the current US administration intends its strength, force, and power to defend. Instead, they are the kind of people that system is designed to constrain, the wolves it attempts to defang. That’s something of an injustice to wolves, but you get the point. And you know, too, that when they call strength, force, and power ‘the iron laws of the world’ they don’t just apply it to foreign adventures: the world is the whole of life. It’s why, in this view, it’s right not to allow extra support for the poor or marginalised, why law doesn’t matter, why the deaths of small people don’t matter, why there’s no problem with the powerful doing what they like. That’s just the way it’s always been.

By coincidence (or providence) tomorrow is the Feast of the Baptism of Christ; the Old Testament lesson set for the day is Isaiah 42.1-9, which describes the character of the Messiah: ‘a bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out’. He will not crush the weak, because they are children who can yet grow Godwards. Such bold restraint, such heroic tenderness, is what we are summoned to as well if we are baptised into his death and resurrection. And remember: the world was made through the Word, and ultimately it stands under the hand of God. He is in charge of it, and the Christ shows how he works. The laws of the world belong to him, not the apes and the wolves.

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.

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.

An Hour With +Rowan

Although it was my day off, all I had to do was click the Zoom link and sit and listen to Rowan Williams talk about ‘The Catholic understanding of mission’ as part of a series organised by the diocese, so I thought it would be churlish not to.  Of course the venerable ex-Archbishop has a useful ability to summarise complex matters in simple, or simplish, formulations: he pointed us away from any definition of Catholicism that stressed universality – the straightforward meaning we might be familiar with – but what he described as a more Orthodox conception, qualitative rather than quantitative: ‘that form of Christian life which intends its members to live a risen life’, ‘to receive and give more radically than in any other form of human living’. +Rowan went on to discuss what tradition does and doesn’t mean (‘always a way of praying, not something passed on by a Masonic elite but a steady regularity of reading and reflecting’), the sacramental life as our response to God’s promises, the conviction that God is at work in the world and so our action must not be based on anxiety, and the belief that the Church is something God has made, not us.

Hmm, as I thought – I thought – we’re not actually going to get anything very practical here. The gentleman from the diocesan Mission Enabling Team hosting the seminar asked +Rowan what it might mean when a parish followed these ideas well, a rather deft way of saying ‘But what do we actually do?’ without using those specific words, it seemed to me, and Lord Williams remembered some of his own experience in parishes where the eucharist was celebrated in the homes of people who invited their neighbours and friends, or where parishioners gathered in small groups for an hour of contemplative prayer. That was OK. I suspect what we need, maybe what we really wanted, was the next step beyond what our speaker gave us – ‘Applying the Catholic Understanding of Mission’, perhaps.

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?

The Mechanics of Grief

'I don't think I've ever grieved anyone', Cylene told me. She discovered a few days ago that her friend Harry has been dead a month and she knew nothing about it. Harry was 31, a young man buffeted by the world and conflicted against his family. Cylene doesn't know whether it was suicide, a drug overdose, an accident of another kind, or whatever. Notwithstanding her own problems, which have seen her hospitalised twice in the last few months, Cylene 'dreamed I could do good things with him, show him something good in life. You know how it is with abused people, sometimes they can never accept anything good for themselves, they attract more abuse'. She could be talking about herself. Now she has only her self-devised magical rituals to try and hold on to Harry's memory, to offer him to - what?

We talked through how a Christian might view the loss of Harry. If you are a conservative evangelical, there is nothing much to say: Harry didn't give himself to Jesus in life, and so must face the penalty of his sins. You might come up with the bogus line I have heard from Christians of that stamp, that in the last moments of life an unbeliever might have accepted the Lord and thus be welcomed into his everlasting mansions. It's hardly likely, is it. Poor Harry never gave the Lord a second thought through his short and unhappy life so what on earth would propel him in that direction as it drew to a close? Was he ever in a place where that would have been likely? Where is the justice in substitutionary atonement for him?

At funeral services I tell people that what is good about us is not lost: how can it be, when God has made it? But how does that relate to our individual identity, salted with purgatorial fire and cleansed of everything unholy, if that process leaves little enough of us behind? I'm not confident what the answer is. Souls like Harry test all our doctrines. 

So I am reading again. The Matthean Beatitudes are as far as I've got; they help a little. I'd never been struck before how little they have to do with faith. Until the last clause, where Jesus tells the crowd that they are blessed if they are reviled for the sake of his name, the statements all proclaim that those who suffer in this earthly life will be rewarded: and that's it. There's no sense in the text that they have to have any kind of faith before that happens: rather that poverty, mourning, and hungering and thirsting after righteousness predisposes a soul in God's direction, that they generate faith. This is God's 'option for the poor': even for those as poor in spirit as Harry, maybe. 

Love Divine

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

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

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

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

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

Wedding in the Garden

The Young Lord Declan and Lady Minster were married twice. The first occasion was a mildly pagan handfasting ceremony some time before the civil marriage I took part in – just to do a reading. They have always regarded the first event, which of course had no legal status at all, as their ‘real wedding’.

Since the news came out of what the Duke and Duchess of Sussex did in a garden with the Archbishop of Canterbury, my priest friend Cara at Emwood has already had two couples ask whether they can do what they did, which they can’t; or at least that can’t be their ‘real wedding’. I carry no great brief for Justin Welby, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be him in that situation. The Area Dean of Paddington posted on Fr Thesis’s blog a very severe and definite account of why what the Primate had done was dreadful, but I can’t see very many couples we might deal with being able to grasp what he’s on about and why this event has opened a very smelly can of worms. In fact, I doubt most modern people will even be able to see the worms. At root what we have here is a clash between the individualism which characterises the modern world and the inclusive, objective account of human identity embedded in Christian thinking.

Why shouldn’t a couple devise their own vows? In fact, it became clear as a result of a discussion on LiberFaciorum that many people think they do, and that led me to recall a radio comedy where an Anglican vicar character described exactly that happening. Isn’t it all about the couple, and their happiness, and what they mean to each other?

Theologically, the couple are indeed 'the ministers of the sacrament of matrimony' in a Christian marriage, i.e. they do it to each other. But that doesn't mean they can do and say anything they like, any more than as the minister of baptism or communion I can make up my own ceremonies; when I do those, I speak for the whole Christian Church across the globe and two thousand years. I can only do what the Church does, or my acts have no real meaning. If I do something else, it's not the sacrament, and the Church has done hundreds of years of thinking about how far I can stretch the boundaries of one of these acts before it stops being what it is supposed to be - a human event that expresses and enacts the saving work of God in time.

Just as you can't make up your own vows in an Anglican wedding, you can't have a 'private wedding' in the sense that nobody else apart from a clergyperson is there. The whole human community is involved in a couple vowing to serve, honour and be faithful to each other, which why the witnesses are present: they don't just have a legal function, but a theological one too. They represent humanity.

Finally, when the couple use the words that millions of people have used before them, and will use afterwards, they are becoming part of something bigger than they are - the whole history of the human race, and (in Christian terms) of God's interaction with it, written into their specific relationship. When in the Orthodox marriage rite the couple are called 'the king and queen of all creation' it isn't just a nice phrase, it means what they are doing has an eternal and cosmic significance, way beyond themselves. Ultimately, your individual identity, even your identity as two individuals, is less important than what you are becoming, recipients and ministers of divine grace through being married.

I suspect that for most modern people, an individually-tailored marriage sounds more meaningful because it’s about the couple; in Christian understanding, the words that everyone says, and the things that everyone does, are more meaningful because it’s about the divine story, because our small human identities, struggles and joys are assumed into the great framing narrative of creation: the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Can we really expect anyone outside to grasp this?

Perhaps there’s something in them that still responds, though. Although Christianity bolts us into the story of the Christ, every religion points individuals to something bigger, connects them to something beyond themselves: it would be a poor religion that did not. For pagans it means the pattern of the seasons, the rhythm of the earth, the soaring cycle of the heavens. Lord Declan and Lady Minster couldn’t bring any of that into their civil ceremony, not even a reference to its being Imbolc that day; so their more individual handfasting was in fact a more inclusive, collective event too (and it wasn’t something they did alone, either). It was, maybe, a bit closer to the Christian than they imagined.

A Circular Book

When did Geza Vermes’s Jesus and the World of Judaism find its way onto my bookshelves? It dates to 1983, has some loose pages (more since I actually tried to read it) and however long it is since it appeared in the library I have never really consulted it. As it turns out, its outlook makes it of very limited use and I have seldom come so close to simply abandoning a book!

Geza Vermes’s personal history is illuminating: he came from a Jewish background and spent time as a Roman Catholic priest (a member of an order specifically dedicated to praying for the conversion of the Jews) before renouncing Christianity and turning to a non-religious sort of Judaism later in life, and teaching at Newcastle followed by Oxford. At the time Vermes was writing, it was easy enough when reading any sort of Biblical exegesis to ignore the fact that Jesus was a Jew; he was part of shifting that perception, but it was pretty clear that he came to the conclusion that Jesus was only a Jew.

I say ‘came to the conclusion’, but it wasn’t a position drawn from evidence: it was a belief derived from Vermes’s own conflicts and then read into the texts he knew so well. His work was part of the ‘quest for the historical Jesus’ movement that tried to uncover what we could know for certain about him; all very well, but there is an unavoidable circularity: the evidence you deem admissible in this search is already pre-determined by who you think Jesus is. So for Vermes, Jesus is a 1^st-century Jewish reformer and nothing more; anything which suggests otherwise (the Gospel of John, the Epistles) is ‘Hellenic’ influence imposed on his original, and very limited, message, and should be discounted. Even material in Matthew, Mark and Luke which tends to hint at a divine significance to Jesus’s acts is also to be excised as representing later impositions by Christians. Once you’ve done this, you examine what’s left to find your ‘historical Jesus’ and, wonder of wonders, you get a Palestinian preacher with nothing groundbreaking to say at all: you wonder why anyone got so excited about the man. Again and again, Vermes says in various ways ‘we can trust that this passage or saying is authentic because it conflicts with the doctrine of the Church’. You can see the point of that, but its inverse – that anything in the New Testament which coincides with the doctrine of the Church must therefore be a false imposition – leads to the dismantling of the very texts you claim to investigate. The trouble is (as scholars have pointed out increasingly over the last few decades) that all our evidence about Jesus is already part of the Church’s proclamation, part of the kerygma, and you can’t disentangle him from the doctrinal presentation of him. Vermes recognises this objection, even in 1983, but swipes it away as it tends to undercut his entire project and leave him with nothing to say.

I didn’t entirely give up on Jesus and the World of Judaism because I realised there are chapters which usefully talk about the contribution of Jewish texts to understanding his context; but I did, at one point, literally shut the book in frustration and put it to one side. It was here, as Vermes discusses the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. For him, any hint of patience, or waiting, of readiness or preparation for the Judgement, indicates a later interpolation by a Church facing up to the indefinite delay of the Parousia. It can’t come from Jesus, it just can’t:

The parable of the ‘wise’ virgins – supposedly wise, but to my mind cunning and selfish – reflects an insistence on the part of the church to be constantly ready; it contributes nothing to an active participation in the work for the kingdom of God … Did Matthew or his later editor not realise that this parable is a travesty of Jesus’s teachings on generosity and confident prayer contained in the same gospel?

And so this approach leads you not to try to work out what Jesus’s teachings were from the texts, but to judge the texts by the version of Jesus you want to believe in. The writers of the texts are fools, who know Jesus so much less well than you do. I'm afraid I can see little reason for me spending time on this.

Living in Love and Faith

It was an irony that for the very first time I was actually looking forward to attending one of the bishop’s Clergy Study Mornings, and couldn’t find the link to the Zoom gathering. Eventually Marion chased it down on the diocesan website, and I arrived twenty minutes late, just missing the opening worship: quel dommage.

The topic for our investigations was the Living in Love and Faith material produced by the Church of England in advance of a potential revision, or not, of its policies in the field of human sexuality. Chaired by the Bishop of Dorking, we spent a couple of hours hearing about how the material was devised, and engaging in a miniature version of the ‘course’ the Church envisages parishes and institutions following in order to take the process, the ‘conversation’, forward.

I think I will have to get the book associated with the LLF matter: in the little I've read I can already see both some coherent and wide-ranging thinking about the topic and also some obvious gaps, but even at this stage it is at least impressive that the Church is bothering to do this at all. Clearly it’s bothering to do it because it has despaired of reaching any sort of consensus by the normal means, scarred as it was by the terrible precedent of the ordination of women and their consecration to the episcopate, but never before, I think, has any religious organisation engaged in a similar exercise of exchanging different viewpoints and experiences, in such detail and at such luxuriating length. The videos we were shown bear testimony to the colossal variety of personal narratives which disrupt any simple set of categories we might want people to fit into. Nevertheless, we all suspect that we are unlikely to do more than learn to disagree with one another less vituperatively – which is not nothing, as Cardinal Ratzinger would have put it, but is a limited result.

I am not sure what we will do with all this at Swanvale Halt. When I first came here a gay male couple were part of the congregation, though they split up within a year or so and disappeared. I gather that when they first joined the church my predecessor had given the assembled masses a lecture from the pulpit (metaphorically, if we had had a pulpit) to the effect that she would come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who gave them a hard time. The collection of grey heads looked at her nonplussed, as nobody had thought of doing so. Their main concern was, and is, managing to walk round the corner to the shops and back without falling over, and what anyone else gets up to in their bedrooms is something they are perfectly happy not to think about at all.   

God's Ape

The Today programme this morning interviewed US sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, known especially for her 2016 book on Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, Strangers in Their Own Land. She outlined why the poor white Americans she'd spoken to then, and revisited recently, would still vote for Donald Trump next week (if they hadn't already done so), despite dislike for his character and 'weariness' at the chaos and conflict he has brought with him. He is 'a representative of their way of life': he speaks for them, he seems to respect them, so they are electorally and emotionally loyal in return for being 'culturally uplifted'. 

The evangelical Christians among them, Dr Hochschild says, have a particular viewpoint. Some have moved on from seeing the President as Cyrus, the instrument in God's hand no matter what his personal opinions may be, to placing him in a different context:

some of them, especially the evangelicals, are thinking, Oh, he’s suffering for us. It fits into a religious theme: he’s taking on our welfare, he’s facing enemies for us, almost like he’s Jesus.

Now, this is visibly different from the kind of sloppy and imprecise use of religious language that might describe a secular political figure as 'a saviour' because they are regarded as coming to the rescue of a particular point of view or group of people. It places Mr Trump in a redemptive framework, and interprets events such as his contracting Covid or being vilified in the media as equivalent to the sufferings of Christ: by these experiences he draws fire from his supporters in a strangely mystical way justifying them as people and the way they look at the world. I can't think of any other political figures being regarded in quite this way. To ascribe the redemptive role of Jesus to any other person could not unreasonably described as blasphemy. 

If the President wins next week, you can expect this to increase apace, and it leads me to disturbing reflections. I am already coming round to the conclusion that the effects of climate change mean that our civilisation will not outlast this century, and realistically I can't see anything that will avert that. But although this may entail the end of the current order of things, I still thought the religious element was missing. The Book of Revelation depicts a situation in which the climactic division of good and evil takes place through the activities of a figure who presents themselves as a suffering servant, a parody of Christ, and who deceives the world - or part of it. That piece of the puzzle may be sliding into place, and St Levan's Stone is pulled a little farther apart.

PS. I'd forgotten until today that Mr Trump stated that him catching Covid was 'a gift from God' ...

And the World Will be Done

Next to the church of St Levan in west Cornwall is a huge geological erratic boulder, split in two by some colossal force; if you believe the folklore, by St Levan striking it with his staff. The rhyme goes:

When with panniers astride
A packhorse can ride
Through Saint Levan's Stone
The world will be done

And, so the legend goes, on nights when the storms rage above the Penwith Peninsula the Devil comes and pulls the stone a little farther apart. Why he should want to do this when it means his inevitable final defeat, who knows, but then although the Devil is shrewd he has fundamentally got the wrong end of the stick, and is sadly misled about his chances.

The other day, feeling entirely unable to do anything other than read a bit, I took down off my shelves Essays Catholic and Radical, which, elderly though it is - it was jointly compiled by Archbishop Rowan Williams when he was but a slip of a college tutor, and when giants such as Fr Ken Leech and Fr Gresham Kirby still bestrode the land - I had never dipped into. 

To my surprise there is an essay included, by the aforesaid Gresham Kirby, entitled 'Kingdom Come: the Catholic Faith and Millennial Hopes'. Now this last year I have been grappling to bring together two impulses that I find warring within my outlook: a reformist instinct and an apocalyptic conviction. I want things to get better, for human beings (all human beings, so far as it can be arranged) to lead fuller and richer and happier lives, and for the lovely things that I have enjoyed so far in my life to continue, and for others to enjoy them too. Yet, at the same time, I am part of a faith which looks towards a cataclysmic upheaval ushering in the Kingdom, the everlasting reign of God, which presumes, at the very least, a sense of division, the final separation of good and evil, and that will not be an easy process. So I want someone to help me through this. 

Sadly Fr Kirby does not. Although his essay begins with a thorough castigation of the Catholic Movement for its Platonism and idealism, its neglect of eschatology, it turns out to be promoting another version of reformist Christianity, just a more radical and left-wing one than envisaged by the majority of the bench of bishops. The giveaway comes when he discusses the Ascension, dismissing any idea of Jesus's earthly return as 'a misreading of the symbols' - without even bothering to mention the statement the angels make to the disciples in Acts that 'you will see him return in the same way as you saw him depart'. I am far from ever arguing that the Scripture needs to be taken literally, but it does need to be taken in some way, and not just ignored because it doesn't fit.

What I think I am moving towards is the idea that the apocalyptic motion involves our efforts to reform the current order - that discovering the effects of our economic life on the planet, or the deep embedding of racial hierarchy and the legacy of Empire, or the things we may do or fail to do as a result of the pandemic, are themselves steps along the way towards the final crisis. It is not that we will be either passively waiting for Christ to return and doing nothing, or making the world so Godly and perfected that he will then return, or even that human effort at building the Kingdom is what the parousia means, and so that is the Apocalypse; but that our discoveries are an inescapable part of it - inescapable, because this trajectory is the will of God. It isn't the Devil who pulls apart the Stone of St Levan every storm-racked night: led by the Holy Spirit, it's us.

Parochial Concerns

The last Clergy Study Day hadn't left me very enthused. The advantage of doing it over Zoom is that you don't have to go anywhere, and when the clergy colleague who was talking about sports ministry began lecturing us on the connections between bodily and spiritual strength I was able to turn him off until it was safe again. I don't want you to get the impression there was nothing interesting, but - well, I was relieved not to have to engage any more than I did. 

This afternoon's 'webinar' I'd completely forgotten about. Marion the curate 'went' and reported that the question 'What is God telling us in the COVID crisis?' was apparently mainly answered with 'To use Zoom more'. People talked about the 'productivity and creativity' the restrictions had brought. I asked her whether anyone had mentioned the tens of thousands of people who had died, the colossal economic damage we will be living with for years, the families suffering, the businesses going bankrupt, the impossibility of many of the things that make human life worth living, and whether God was trying to tell us anything from those things? Nary a word, she related. The Church of England's use of technology is clearly more important than all of that. What do we have to say to the world at large, beyond our own tiny, miniscule interests - the practices of a small Church in one historical moment?

In fact there was a bibliography attached to the webinar which does include some weighty theology examining the way God works, or doesn't work, through calamity and disaster, but it doesn't seem to have poked its way into the discussions themselves. I find myself thinking more about the nature of apocalyptic, the revelatory motion of truth which draws creation forward to whatever consummation God has planned for it, and I will say more about this some time. It's a word nobody seems to want much to deal with.

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. 

Don't Forget the Cross

Oh dear, poor Archbishop Justin can do nothing right this Easter. A peevish appearance on Youtube last week implying that keeping clergy out of church buildings seemed to be the biggest issue facing the See of Canterbury was matched by an Easter Day sermon to the nation described by one thoughtful commentator as ‘quietly disastrous’. In fact there was a link: Abp Justin couldn’t help stressing on Sunday that the Resurrection gives us ‘a hope that is surer than stone; than any architecture’. Take that to mean, ‘You don’t need churches, do as you’re told.’ But that was a minor if noticeable lapse; more serious was the quite striking secularism dressed up in religious language.   

When he wrote his short article ‘Easter and the End of Christianity’, Mark Vernon only had access to Lambeth Palace’s initial taster for the Archbishop’s sermon, but the full version didn’t change the picture. ++Justin ran with St Peter’s speech in Acts 10 to draw the lesson “the resurrection of Jesus is the solid foundation of all hopes for a better world … the first Christians were empowered with the resources to live in ways that brought abundant life to rich and poor, strong and weak, the privileged and the rejected … Even in the dark days of this Easter we can feed on hope. We can dream of what our country and our world will look like after the pandemic … There needs to be a resurrection of our common life … In the new life of the resurrection of Jesus, we dare to have faith in life before death”. “Hope”, he states, “is the Christian distinctive”. The Archbishop clearly wanted to speak to the moment, to our chaotic and uncertain circumstances.

“The message sounds commendable”, says Dr Vernon, “the words of a civic leader fulfilling his responsibilities. But it turns bishops into exemplary citizens, not heralds of another country that’s already here … Jesus did not preach a better life”. I’m not sure I’d go along with that completely, remembering John 10 – “I have come that they may have life and have it fully” – but there is certainly an abiding tension in Christian thinking between an otherworldly and a this-worldly focus. The question is what 'new life' means, and where it comes from. 

The ‘new life’ to which Christians are called in Christ can’t be completely disconnected from what happens to us in this world. Living in Christ has consequences in terms of relationships, resources and social organisation; it does indeed mean recognising the unique value of others as beloved by God, immersion with thankfulness into a life which cannot at heart be bad because the eternal Son came to share it. God is concerned with what we do. Yet the risen life means, above all, being committed to never-ending change; and the central metaphor for change in Christianity is death, dying to our sins, to our delusions, to the falsehoods that distort life. Ultimately there is actual death to face, an experience (if our faith is up to it) transformed by the knowledge that Jesus has been there first. The first Christians were indeed empowered to live in different ways, but what empowered them was the death they underwent, the dying to selfhood that they took on board when they bought into the death of Jesus. It wasn’t the hope of reforming everyday experience that drove them forward, but the revolution in relationships and the order of priorities brought about by God in Christ. It wasn’t a case of saying ‘Christ is risen, we can build a better world’ but ‘Christ is risen, his Kingdom comes’. The Cross isn’t just a horrible accident reversed by the Empty Tomb so that we mop our brows and conclude ‘that’s all right then’: both are part of the same experience. The great paradox at the heart of Christian experience is that you die and receive life back, but a life transfigured by the crucifixion, and leaving out the Cross nudges Christianity towards the this-worldly end of the scale. The one and the other sound similar, but they’re not. 

I can’t imagine ++Justin doesn’t know this, so perhaps he just felt it was a little hard to express to the millions of unchurched souls hungry for hope who would be listening to him. He wouldn’t be wrong if so. I am wondering what deaths I am being summoned to die currently. 

I’ve been deeply disheartened at times since the churches were shut and worship stopped, and I’ve become aware how much of my own productivity is driven by external pressures rather than by anything I choose to do; only today I suddenly realised that the lockdown casts a paralysing shadow over my thinking, exaggerating a tendency I have always had of coming up with reasons for delaying this or that task until something else becomes clear. I wonder where that particular sort of procrastination comes from. I’ve dipped into envy and despair. None of this is new, but it comes at me with renewed force because of the removal of some of the outside forces that usually operate on me. I found it exceptionally hard to pray for the Prime Minister when he was ill; perhaps he will discover he is called to change aspects of himself, too. Hope, after all, is the Christian distinctive.

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.