Requiem for a Bishop

Purcell; Duruflé; Fauré; and Rutter's 'The Lord Bless You and Keep You', which I find a bit soppy but says what you want it to; the Cathedral choir acquitted themselves superbly at Bishop Andrew's Requiem Mass today. Not that the order of service referred to the liturgy in those terms, but it was all very traditional. Even the piece of music that nodded most in the direction of +Andrew's usual Evangelical constituency, Stuart Townend's 'In Christ Alone' (complete with the words about God's wrath that some of us can't sing), is about as close to an old-fashioned hymn form as you get from modern Church songwriters. Serried ranks of bishops in proper black chimeres rather than the red they usually wear nowadays whether or not they are Doctors of Divinity, the Diocesan Chancellor in a full-bottomed legal wig, ++Sarah preceded by the primatial cross of Canterbury, and some Orthodox fellow in a black hood - it was all very fine indeed. The only disappointment was that the Lord Lieutenant came in a suit rather than full uniform. He even came to talk to the Swanvale Halt Men's Breakfast once in that, I must point out. Though he was on his way somewhere else, admittedly.

Resting on the coffin were 'the diocesan crozier', which I didn't know existed, a chalice and paten representing +Andrew's priestly ministry, and a mitre standing for his episcopal role. The mitre was rather nicer than the one he usually wore, and I wonder why Anglican bishops can't have nice mitres all the time. Even +Paul and ++Sarah's mitrae simplices were rather handsome in their plainness. In the picture above you can see the Dean carrying the formal crozier up to the high altar where it was laid, the bishop's pastoral ministry being symbolically relinquished. At least he didn't have to snap it in two like the Lord Great Chamberlain at the Queen's funeral, or we'd still be there.

I've already said that the manner of his dying might well have been +Andrew's greatest ministry and, while nobody wanted to say that out loud today, the same sense did hang in the air. It was a great act of faithfulness and I remember most strongly his expression of relief in his second, and last, pastoral letter to the diocese that his faith had not given way in the face of his diagnosis. He talked in a way so personal that you felt it was a kind of liberation: a pastor shouldn't be personal in a way that throws attention on themselves rather than on Christ, but this end-of-life candour was completely appropriate.

A couple of my Evangelical colleagues insisted on raising their hands in the air during the hymns as though they felt they had to, but the communion worked its spiritual wonders and I found any irritation that flashed into my heart was swiftly and rightly drowned by the amazement that after 2000 years Jesus still gives himself up for all these flawed, ridiculous human beings, of whom I am one. The Passion of the Christ draws sombrely closer.

I had an hour to wait for the next train and rather than even attempt to find any lunch at the Cathedral café I went in the other direction and down the hill where there was a 'Pan-Asian' eatery that served me tea and a spicy Indian potato fritter in a bun drizzled with chutneys. 'There were some really fresh green chillis in that' the proprietor grinned proudly. Indeed there were. 

Wearing Stuff

The new archdeacon, a jovial, bustling lady who used to work in the Diocese of Oxford, came to say hello. We sat in the café opposite the church. She decided to go for a creamy hot chocolate sprinkled with Smarties so I suppose she must have needed more sugar than me. She comes from a moderate evangelical background, like most clergy now. Somehow we ended up talking about vestments. She brought the subject up, I swear. 'Does what you're wearing make a difference to what you feel?' she asked. 'Does it feel different to use something very traditional as opposed to something modern-style?'

It was a very good question: when you preside, you know the Eucharist is still the Eucharist no matter what you're wearing. In extremis I once stepped in to take a service when Miriam the curate when I arrived here got a coughing fit and couldn't carry on: I was wearing Wellingtons and a waterproof over which I draped a stole. A couple of weeks ago I found myself filling in at a church not far away where they turned out to have no kit at all, so I wore a surplice over a cassock. I have no doubt at all that either Mass was valid, whether I had a maniple or not, and the same applies to my Evangelical brethren who appear at an altar vested in chinos and a sweatshirt, no matter how objectionable I might find it. The Holy Spirit, I have no doubt, still turns up, even if He holds His nose. If He had one.

Psychologically, too, once I'm in the zone the schmutter doesn't matter. I'm concentrating on the words and actions, and the kit only comes into it when I am avoiding tripping or knocking things over with the maniple. But it does make a difference to know, before I start really, that what we're using is the best we can provide. It should be the best. It should be clean and seemly, and not draw attention to itself. It shouldn't be slapdash or careless: time and attention is part of the sacrifice. It should also be visibly part of the great continuum of Christian worship, not novel or individualist, which is where the messy aesthetics of the 1960s to the 1980s stumble: the kit's form and style should refer to our brethren across time and space, and not to ourselves. So yes, it does make a difference of some kind to know we've got it more right than wrong. Thank you for asking. 

Jaws 2

A return visit on Thursday to St Augustine's Aldershot gave me the chance to check through the vestry there. I found my second local instance of one of the 'Jaws' chasubles promoted by the Church Society and made by Watts during the 150th anniversary of the Oxford Movement in 1983 (the other one's at Nork); a range of Slabbinck/Vanpoulles creations of varying tastefulness; and a couple of battered fiddlebacks the current incumbent knew nothing of. There's a drawer labelled 'BLACK' with nothing in it, which tells its own story.

Out of the Depths

Installing a new audio system in the vestry has meant emptying the rickety old wooden cupboard which housed the old one. I thought that, after 13 years here, there was nothing left to discover, but wedged in the bottom of a drawer in the cupboard was this hideous artefact which I can’t remember looking at before. Perhaps I had blanked it from my memory.

Any horrid hessian chasuble must surely date to the time of Fr Edward in the 1970s and makes me ponder yet again what was going on in that far-off epoch. It wasn’t just a liturgical reflection of the Time That Taste Forgot the secular world was passing through, but represented a real belief that the future of religion lay with jettisoning past ideals of beauty and order. We are to retain Catholic markers like vestments – we’re not getting rid of them – but our credibility rests on abandoning elaboration, decoration and richness in favour of something that signals simplicity and ordinariness. That will be part of the renewal of the Church. Clearly this didn’t work, because the causes of the modern world’s disenchantment with Christianity lay elsewhere; but, even within its own terms, just the same kind of aesthetic hamfistedness that could produce over-elaboration and over-decoration could also result in the ugliness of hessian and orange (and the latter isn’t as entertaining as OTT baroque is).

Fr Thesis is well-known for 'discovering' wonders in the recesses of his West-End vestry and some of us are convinced the Ark of the Covenant is hidden there somewhere; but I, apparently, only unearth horrors.

Bling

Earlier in the year I mentioned the fabric I ordered from Mat. Yulia in Zhytomyr and which near-miraculously made its way here from Ukraine. It's finally been turned into the long-planned new 'best white' set of vestments, and we used them for the first time on Christmas Day. I used our existing Gothic sets, which I think were probably bought to celebrate the church's centenary in 1949, as a model, but in the event opened up the collar by an inch to make it easier to put on: in fact sewing around the collar was the most difficult bit. I'm pleased, because we now have a 'best' set that includes a maniple but doesn't have any gold lamé, and which others will be happy to use! It also stands as something of an expression of solidarity with the people of Ukraine and a reminder of the links between nations, peoples, and international politics. We are all connected.

Payback

While we were keeping today as the Ninth Sunday after Trinity, the Roman Catholic parish were observing the Assumption of the BVM. But, disaster! Deacon Justin had turned up in a white-and-blue dalmatic, while Fr Jeffrey had left the parish’s Marian kit in Hornington. ‘We have a white-and-blue set’, I offered, showing Fr Jeffrey the vestments in question. ‘And it’s a nice lightweight one, too’, he said enthusiastically. Indeed it is, and in my view the very best of the church’s own kit, a beautiful ivory damask from the late 1940s. The Assumption is, in the immortal words of Bishop Mervyn Stockwood, ‘not an assumption we share’, but I was delighted to see the vestments used.

In fact we had no main service at all, observing whichever observance, being invited instead to Hornington Bandstand for the Churches Together summer service. It was the usual hymn-sandwich which I see, in the terms of traditional moral theology, as materia exercitandi virtutis: it had the benefit of being short. We did consider whether to move the service into the parish church because of the heat, but decided to stick it out – we’d had to shift the Jubilee one in June indoors, and it would have been a shame to have to do so again. If some worshippers succumbed, well, there are others. I was given Psalm 8 and preached on drought, the fragility of civilisation, and apocalyptic. My punishment was to be collared afterwards by a woman who wanted to convince me that the ‘killer injections’ (otherwise known as the covid vaccines) were about to murder hundreds of thousands of people. Served me right for ignoring Our Lady. 

Pentecost Red

When in doubt, post about vestments, as I have said repeatedly in the past. That line of thought led to me to recall that the set I have been wearing today is a unique Swanvale Halt possession, because it was made by members of the congregation. The ‘Marley Red’, as I dub it after its donors, Mr & Mrs of that name, has the customary Pentecost motifs of dove and flames picked out in gold kid leather, or something synthetic that resembles it. It’s made from a surprisingly heavy and quite coarse-woven fabric with a slightly slippery silky lining. I am not all that fond of it, because of the rather modern design; but I’m happy to use it on Pentecost Day, when it makes most sense, to do honour to the makers who are still around, and because despite its style it’s surprisingly traditional in some ways. As well as the dove-and-flames there’s a cross on the back, which is very proper, and the Marleys even saw fit to provide a maniple, when I would have thought Fr Edgar had consigned the maniples from all the church’s sets to the back of a drawer by that time. This thoughtfulness means I don’t feel improperly dressed in the Marley Red. It’s now back in its drawer again, probably to evade the moths for another year!

An Emissary from the East

For a long time I've wanted to replace our 'best white' set of vestments. The existing set, made by Mary our long-departed ex-nun sacristan in the 1980s, betrays her unaccountable fondness for gold lamé, and doesn't have a maniple. These days I feel semi-naked if I don't have a maniple. My own 'old gold' set is fine, but a) it's mine, b) it's a bit threadbare, and c) it's Roman-style so some, like our former diocesan bishop, might gib a bit at using it, though not everyone is as fussy. (Just to pre-empt any queries, in Church terms 'white' includes gold, silver, cream, and all stops in between).

When the war started I remembered that Yulia whose Etsy shop EkklesiaStore I've bought stuff from before was based in Ukraine, so as an expression of hope and solidarity I thought I'd order some fabric. Mat. Yulia was brilliant, as I expected, but the parcel, having found its way from Zhytomyr quite rapidly, sat so long in a warehouse in Lviv that I'd really given up on it ever getting here, and thought a missile from Mr Putin had probably incinerated it along with a collection of Ukrainian postal staff. But suddenly it started to move again and this morning it arrived - tat, all the way from a war zone.

'I'm very ashamed of the long delivery', says Mat. Yulia, who's married to an Orthodox priest, Fr Ivan. 'Thank you for your patience and kindness. Thank you for your prayers. God protects us from all dangers. May God protect you!' He's certainly been casting an eye over this package from a place of hazard.

Needling

Valerie's mother frequents car-boot sales and other such events and a couple of years ago passed to her some items of ecclesiastical fabric. Now Valerie is a member of a Baptist congregation in Guildford which, with the best will in the world, has little use for such things so she in turn gave them to Marion our then curate. I was amazed to discover that one bit was in fact a complete black requiem altar frontal and that was soon pressed into use as we didn't have one - I'd been making do with a big bit of black cloth spread over the altar. But the other was a large piece of predominately red fabric, somewhat on the garish side but still rather splendid for that. We already have a nice red altar frontal so we thought this cloth could be used for a cope. Our in-house seamstress Pat felt hulking about large bits of fabric was beyond her and I found myself thinking, Well, a cope isn't a very complicated garment, so what was stopping me having a go at it? I used my own cope as a pattern and with a bit of amendment to work around the shape of the red, some red velvet from Hertfordshire, red cloth lining from the local craft shop, braid from the Ukraine and trim from Thailand (!), this was the result. My sewing is not up to much if you look carefully but from a distance it's OK: I made a few mistakes which had to be rectified and even after it was all done found a pin buried in the lining which somehow I'd missed and had to be wiggled carefully out, but overall I am pleased. I produced the cope in the odd half-hour here and there, and it has renewed my admiration for people like my friend Archangel Janet who do this for a living and often find - if they are freelance makers - that their clients have shockingly unrealistic expectations of how much they should pay for what is actually long, painstaking and hard work.

I must confess that in sixteen years of ministry I have only worn a red cope once, when we had a children's mass one Pentecost Day and Choral Evensong later on, and on that occasion I borrowed it. But it's good to have and makes use of something that might otherwise go to waste. Unless my stitching is worse than I realise and it falls apart!

St Anne's Bagshot

It was some time ago now that I looked over Bagshot church. The present building dates from 1883 - there was a little Georgian chapel previously - and was paid for by Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, whose family had its own door to get in, leading direct from the carriage drive to Bagshot Park; it's no surprise that the church has a lot of royal and noble memorials scattered about. The tradition is moderate Catholic, encouraged by Fr Andreas the incumbent: a few years ago he was given a thurible by the local priest of the Roman observance who'd 'needed help with the hinges of his confessional'. He tutted on noticing that the aumbry hadn't got a candle next to it, disavowing responsibility. Apart from the odd detail of decoration probably the most striking items in the building are the spectacular reredoses; certainly the one in the Lady Chapel was made by the Warham Guild, and I wonder whether the rather nice cope I found in the vestry is Sarum blue. 

I didn't ask Andreas about the prayer bowl I found in front of the altar and its heterogeneous collection of bits. A cursory glance would suggest it's an Easter Garden but it was the wrong time of year. It does contain - taking us back to the Shrine of Blessed John Keble at Church Crookham - the tiniest ever copy of The Christian Year, possibly a relic in its own right.

Un-Anniversary

Unlike many of my contemporaries, I've never marked (inwardly or formally) the anniversary of my ordination. It's sometime around now - I was a Petertide ordinand, or, to be more accurate, a Thomastide one though strangely it's never called that - but I can't remember the exact date and though it would be abundantly easy to check it I prefer not to. Occasionally it does one good not to know such things, it seems to me.

But this is my ordination stole, made for me by Mr Taylor (Robemaker) on the Cowley Road in Oxford. I wanted something straightforward and classical. Many new deacons have all sorts of things embroidered on their ordination stoles, to express something about their personality or outlook on things; all I wanted to express, in so far as I wanted to express anything, was 'I'm being ordained'. I used to use it regularly for baptisms, but then a former member of our congregation who was himself ordained returned to Swanvale Halt church a stole which had been owned by a priest who served his title here in the 1940s and which had passed through a couple of hands since: that one is much fancier, so I employ it for such solemn occasions now instead. So my ordination stole hardly ever has an outing now.

But, barring unforeseen events, it will be used again at least once. It will bind my hands after my death - the hands I have used to bless, baptise, marry and anoint, the hands that have taken holy things, like untold hands that have gone before mine. So I had better not lose it!

Invasive Tech

The picture of the church's livestream this morning was much improved on what I was able to achieve using my phone, and the sound was appreciably better thanks to the new microphone. Rejigging the signal meant there were no glitches or drop-outs, so it looks as though we've got this sorted now. The mike made its presence known by insisting on appearing in frame, as you can see bottom left. Just as well I don't work for the BBC.

I realised that there are now two lights in the church I instinctively check are on: the white light flickering in front of the Blessed Sacrament, and the blue light flickering on the blessed wi-fi booster.

Just a Moment's Carelessness

I will, in future, never attempt to fill out the service register until I have removed my vestments. This Sunday I managed to spatter myself with Registrar's Ink, entirely unbeknown to me, and probably by merely removing the lid from the pen. By the time I did notice it was too late to do anything about it: nothing much makes an impact on Registrar's Ink, that's the point of the stuff.

This is the Green Set I bought while I was at Goremead, so I've had it a dozen years. Thankfully the ink hit the orphrey down the front of the chasuble, and I still have some of the fabric left even after all that time, so I replace it. But there are always more useful things one can do with one's time ...

Tailoring Tale

My cassocks have served me well, really. I had them made while I was at theological college so they have lasted the better part of seventeen years before the cuffs have started to look a bit worn. To be fair, I look a bit worn after seventeen years too, but I can do something about the cassocks.

Mr Taylor (appropriately enough) made my cassocks. He used to have a shop on the Cowley Road in Oxford which was convenient both for him and the theological students who found their way there, but a few years ago he decamped some distance away to Eynsham Sawmill. 'I hoped that things would get a bit quieter, but they haven't,' he told me, which is a surprise considering that students can no longer literally walk across the road from where they live to buy clerical shirts, collars and stoles. 

The nearest railway station to Eynsham Sawmill is Hanborough, about a mile and a half away. Miss T lives nearby and gave me a lift from the station before we went for a coffee, so I outsourced some of my carbon emissions. Mr Taylor has recreated his shop within the smaller and somewhat rougher surroundings of the sawmill outbuildings, though I didn't spot the antique till he used to use in picturesque fashion. 'It'll be a while before I can get the work done,' he apologised, blaming the company that usually supplies his Russell Cord for dragging its feet. 'They did a load before Christmas but then mucked up the dyeing'. 

Miss T realised that she knows one of the other businesses working out of the mill. Corset-maker Julia runs Sew Curvy, a couple of units down. Apparently Mr Taylor occasionally gives her offcuts of dramatic ecclesiastical fabric to be turned into very upmarket underthings.

I made sure we went through the right door.

Too Much of a Good Thing

S.D. has had great fun helping out at various High gaffs in the Diocese of London recently. These included preaching at St Magnus the Martyr London Bridge, an absolute citadel of trad Anglo-Catholicism whose drawbridge has been lowered to allow him, a longstanding and vocal proponent of women being ordained, in to defile its pulpit. 'We had the Silent Canon, and the subdeacon held the paten under a humeral veil. It was lovely. Mad, but lovely.'

Meanwhile at St Mary Bourne Street 'there has been great controversy as the vicar thinks it might be a good idea to thin the vestment collection out a bit. This is because they can't close some of the drawers in the vestry any more. There's one drawer labelled "Vestments not to be used".'

My, My, Mitres

During my few months looking after the church at Goremead I presented one candidate for confirmation. The service took place in an evangelical parish nearby. I was waiting with the bishop in the vestry when the vicar popped his head round the door. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said, with no sense that he was asking permission, ‘But I won’t wear a surplice until the communion. It looks so silly.’ And with that he vanished again. The expression of the bishop – properly attired in stole and alb and carrying his crozier – was priceless, as it would be again at several points as the evening wore on. I felt like saying, ‘You don’t think you look any less silly in a suit?’ but that would have been cruel.

I will talk more about General Synod’s July decisions and indecisions later, but I will warm up, as you might expect, by discussing vestments. Synod decided to dispose of the old rule that when celebrating communion clergy had to wear either surplice, scarf and hood (the conservative evangelical option) or the traditional Mass vestments (the Catholic option), and instead they only need dress in a way which is ‘seemly’or ‘appropriate’. It was nice that the Torygraph mentioned Goth services in one of its write-ups of this subject, and perhaps even nicer not only that they got Fr Giles Fraser to admit wearing a Chelsea T-shirt while celebrating Mass (albeit under his vestments), but put up a completely irrelevant photo of a rural church in the golden light of a setting sun, which is how Torygraph readers imagine the Church of England always is.

To be honest I had a memory that the Church had already dealt with this some time ago. In so many congregations, everyday dress is considered de rigueur even for the least quotidian of events (albeit it happens every day) – the re-creation of the sacramental presence of the eternal Word of God in bread and wine – that the rules haven’t actually been enforced in years. This is just catching up with reality.

Piggybacking on this more general matter, though, came the specific one of the bishops’ mitres. Dr Ian Paul, who is on the staff of resolutely evangelical vicar-factory St John’s College, Nottingham, did a good job of publicising his opinion that the bishops should give up their pointy hats. On his own blog he begins by suggesting mildly that there is ‘nothing very Anglican’ about bishops wearing mitres, and that they’re silly-looking, and works himself up to arguing that they’re a facet of covering up child abuse, which is quite good going. He turned up on the Today programme on the 10th: the editors put him on opposite Ruth Gledhill, enough to make anyone lose their will to live, and he reeled out his potted history of vestment-wearing which Gledhill managed to collude with in a frankly loopy contribution. I was most struck by the bit where Fr Paul described Blessed Edward King as ‘the first bishop we know to have worn a mitre’ (sic) and said he adopted it ‘because he wanted the Church of England to look more like the Church of Rome’. This is both true and untrue. It would be more accurate to say that Bishop King, like other 19^th-century Tractarians, believed that the bishops of the Church of England had as great a claim to the title ‘Catholic’ as their brethren of the Roman observance, and adopting the mitre was a sign of that. Far from being a signal of pomp and self-aggrandisement, it existed – as a recollection of the flame of the Holy Spirit which drove the Apostles from their Jerusalem bolt-hole on the first Pentecost Day to proclaim the risen Christ – to stress the Church’s independence of the powers of the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. Bishops were the successors of the Apostles, the Tractarians argued, not ecclesiastical civil servants in the pay of the State. It seems clear that what we have in Fr Paul is a late flowering of that perplexing anti-Catholicism which thankfully has almost died out even of the crustiest corners of evangelical England – though not completely, it seems. No Popery! is still the cry there.

(Of course, he’s not entirely right about the history of the mitre. Robert Pursglove, Henry VIII’s Bishop of Hull who died in 1579, had his memorial brass in Tideswell Church depict him in full Mass vestments, mitre included, pushing the wearing of one way past the Reformation. The Coggeshall brass of Charles I’s Archbishop of York, Samuel Harsnett, also shows him in one, and he died in 1631. Even when Anglican bishops ceased to wear mitres, they still had wooden ones carried in front of them at their funeral processions.)

I don’t know whether mitres do look that silly: I certainly don’t think they have to. A woeful lack of any kind of aesthetic sense afflicts the modern Church, and as a result we have some awful rubbish paraded about. Archbishop Justin’s mitre gains its bizarre appearance – no bishop has ever worn one of its shape before – from the fact that it was made for someone else with a bigger head, and he had it taken in. I can't decide whether he deliberately decided to make it look ludicrous, or whether it just didn't occur to him. 

Much of the time bishops do not cart their tat around with them, any more than the rest of us do, and they make do with whatever the setting they’re worshipping in has available. Here are our two archbishops at York Minster sporting particularly egregious examples:

Yet Archbishop Sentamu can look splendid given the right kit:

And of course when bishops wore stuff that followed the lines of proper medieval examples, and was put together by proper embroiderers, even the most personally shambolic of prelates looked the part:

Well. Underneath the anti-Catholic prejudice and partial history is a more interesting question. How far should what the Church does be accommodated to what the world expects, and how far should it be distinguished from it? Does the Gospel transform culture, or does it fit in with it? Is it more effective – does it make souls more likely to encounter Jesus Christ – to signal difference, or sameness? I certainly believe that at the centre of the Church there has to be difference, there has to be some sense that God transcends the world, and wants to pull it towards him, and that the Church is anchored there, not here. You might think the result of human beings trying to hook themselves into divine eternity by means of needlework ‘looks a bit silly’. It looks something, anyway. But bodies, with all their silliness, are all we’ve got to work with.

Moving Church Antiques

This photo from the Spring of 2014 is something of an historic document now. Over the years I've been a regular customer at Church Antiques at Walton-on-Thames, buying several sets of discarded vestments and other ecclesiastical impedimenta either for me or the church. Even when I didn't buy anything it was always fun to visit and poke around the dusty tables of statuary and lamps. Very occasionally I've been able to contribute to the amusement arcade as I did last August.

On my way back from Malling Abbey last week I thought it might be good for Marion our curate to have a rose-pink stole for Mothering Sunday, so we were colour-co-ordinated. Much to my surprise, I arrived at Riverbrook Farm just north of Walton to find the gates chained shut. Church Antiques has decamped to Betchworth, though I don't remember this being much publicised. I haven't been to the new site yet: it might be harder to get to, which would probably be a good thing for me, spiritually.

Tinsel Maniples and Sparkling Coffee

At the meeting of the local chapter of the SCP last week the conversation, reprehensibly, turned to vestments and the impracticality of the maniple, the embroidered strip of cloth a priest of a traditionalist bent might wear over their left arm (in origin it was a napkin to wipe things up). The consensus was that people don't use them for fear of knocking over everything on the altar. 'Oh, you get used to it', I said ostentatiously. 'I wore a maniple at Christmas', put in one of my brethren. 'It was made of tinsel'. I decided not to pursue the matter. A bit later I saw another of my colleagues blithely topping up his coffee with sparkling water from a bottle. I don't think it'll catch on. 

As we stood in the chancel of the church which was hosting us for Mass, my imagination was suddenly taken back a millennium or more to some sparsely-decorated chapel of Anglo-Saxon England where a group of monks or clerics would have been gathered around an altar in exactly the same way doing pretty much the same sort of thing. All those figures would, in their time, have been linked into the eternal worship of Heaven just as we, a group of miscellanously-shaped and -gendered Anglican priests, were in ours. They took part in it, died, and handed their role on to others who took their place - and so on, until there we all were centuries later. The liturgy abides: we who celebrate it come and go. We are part of its story, not it of ours. It's more real than we are. And there's something profoundly comforting about that.

Embroidery and Entombment

Sunny though it was, Thursday turned out to be a day of Gothic concerns. I sped up to London on the train with Is This Desire? on the headphones (a good start) and by noon was at the V&A for ‘Opus Anglicanum’, its show of material from the time – the 14^th and 15^th centuries – when English needlework was the envy of Europe. Amid the dark of the V&A’s temporary exhibition space, islanded within pools of light were works of such sumptuous detail and grandeur that they made one gasp. Of course I’ve seen a lot of this before, illustrated, but to see it in the flesh, in the thread and the silk, is a different matter. I was caught out by how long the vestments are: the great Clare Chasuble would come down nearly to my feet, and your average medieval clergyman would have been a bit shorter than me. Catherine-spotting was rewarding: she was present quite a bit. The ‘Embroiderers’ Lantern’, a hanging table-top-sized lamp with the known names of craftspeople picked out in black fretwork, managed to move me rather: these were the people whose fingers made these beautiful things, whose minds planned them, whose hearts rejoiced to see them complete and ready to be used.

The only one of the ‘magnificent seven’ Victorian cemeteries ringing the capital I’d never visited was Abney Park, so from Kensington that was where I went. The great Egyptian piers of the entrance are rather grander than anything you find inside the rails: there are no big, elaborate monuments or characterful culturally-distinct sections such as you find at Highgate, Kensal Rise, or West Norwood. The cemetery’s status as a nature reserve (like its cousin at Tower Hamlets) means that much of it is even wilder than it would otherwise be, and straying off the main paths is a hazardous enterprise. The tree cover is such that even Abney Park’s grandiose centrepiece, the heroically unattractive Chapel, can easily be missed if you don’t know it’s there, no matter that it’s winter. The sun filters through somewhat reluctantly. There are many moving and pretty corners, though. The Chapel’s being renovated at the moment, hopefully rendering it a bit less dangerous than it is now: my Goth accountant friend Ms Death-and-Taxes was once photographed posing inside it for the cover of Accountancy News, and it looked as though the arches could collapse any moment. In the Visitor Centre I met the custodian, a middle-aged gentleman in a black leather coat and a pair of New-Rock boots who clearly has his ideal job. He was touchingly uncertain what to do when I requested to buy a guidebook and a handful of postcards, implying it was an unexpected eventuality. 

Playing Host

Before 2013 it had been back in the 1990s that Swanvale Halt had hosted a confirmation service. Apparently the 2013 gig went so well that our Area Dean asked us to do it again last Sunday. It was a somewhat smaller affair because the whole Deanery could only rustle up four candidates as opposed to the 16 we had last time, but our new suffragan bishop was happy to come for that many, or few (she is 'keen to get out and about' according to the diocesan newspaper) and apart from asking to change one of the readings acceded to everything we would normally do here. That meant a touch of smoke and wearing my old gold Roman set to preside.

Bp: What do you want me to wear? I've bought my cope.
Me: Well, we'd normally use a chasuble.
Bp: Ah good, wearing a cope at the eucharist is really hard work. Have you got everything?
Me (opening drawer): Yes, it's all here.
Bp: What's that?
Me: It's a chasuble.
Bp: I've never seen one like that!

Considering the bishop is married to a prominent incumbent in the City of London this is quite a surprise, but doubtless when she does the New Bishops Course they'll explain the differences between Roman and Gothic. If anyone running it knows. I didn't mind at all, as our former diocesan positively blanched when I showed him the Old Gold Set whereas our new suffragan was blithely unconcerned. 

St Rita of Cascia made her presence felt during the proceedings only in the fact that our visitors from other churches of course had no idea what to do at communion (next time I will prime everyone what to expect), and that I, acting as thurifer, and the bishop had great fun with the business of passing the thurible to one another. She'd told me she was left-handed, so I tried to pass it the opposite way round to usual, but we got so confused we both ended up crossing our arms over in all sorts of bizarre ways, biting our lower lips to stop ourselves giggling. Jesus would have done the same. 

As ever Swanvale Halt did itself proud and provided a wonderful spread after the service. The bishop and everyone else who expressed an opinion were fulsome in their praise of the building, the service, the food, and the general ambience. It was a lovely party to celebrate four people's faithfulness.