Swanvale Halt Film Club: Black Swan

Well, this breaks the sequence of child-friendly movies fairly comprehensively. The Town Hall in Hornington shows films every few weeks and this was my first visit; it has something of the feel of an old-time picture house, with space for only about 150people. Friendly, but I felt a bit consciously the need not to block the view of whoever was behind me.

A triumph of style, certainly; a dripping shank of Grand Guignol - or perhaps Petit Guignol, because while there are a number of moments that make you wince, they are small, little wounds horribly inflicted. But though the damage seems nastily realistic, you're never sure how much takes place in the lead character's disintegrating mind. You're never sure, in fact, right to the end, and the sense of disconnection means that nobody in the story is much of a real character, and nothing they do cuts to the heart, so to speak.

But the style! There is barely a scene, apart from those set outside, when a mirror is not present, and a significant proportion of the time we see Nina reflected in a mirror rather than directly, signifying double identities (the Black and White Swan Queens) and the separation of appearance and reality. Again, for much of the time the camera follows very close behind her, generating claustrophobia and disorientation and putting the viewer in a very disagreeable, implicated position. On the production level it's a huge achievement.

While searching for pictures to accompany this post I found these equally striking poster images, which are both Deco in their style and Gothic in their extremity, so meet with approval on all sorts of levels.

Madness in the Methodism

We sometimes wonder whether mad people design Gothic buildings, or whether designing Gothic buildings turns architects mad. Driving through the Isle of Portland yesterday I came across the Methodist Chapel in Easton, which Pevsner describes as 'fanciful' but I would argue 'completely demented' is more appropriate.

Round the side there's a row of practically insane windows:

And then there's the screaming doorway:

Back to the Future

It's very inconvenient having 27th December as the feast day of your patron saint, so we have shifted our Patronal Festival to the Sunday closest to the feast of St John before the Latin Gate, which is much more user-friendly. I thought we might have Solemn Evensong & Benediction to mark the occasion. There is only one hymn I can find in honour of St John, which is 'Word Supreme Before Creation', a slightly weird piece by Blessed John Keble, so I wrote another one, 'John, Belov'd disciple, pray' to the medieval tune 'L'Homme Armée'. It took a lot of fiddling around with the rhyming scheme, I can tell you. A choir was assembled and began rehearsing. As always as the time drew nearer my feet got colder and colder.

I shouldn't have worried. The choir were superb, and our head server wielded the thurible with applomb having not done it for heaven-knows-how-long. Col the other server had never handled a set of Orthodox hand-bells, not surprising as nobody from Swanvale Halt church has, I think, but did that splendidly too. We had fifty or so people, half of whom were virtually in tears by the end - 'not been to a service like that for 30/40/50 years' was the most common category of comment. I said goodbye to everyone, took off my cassock and scooted off to Tanz Macabre.

It's strange how this, once upon a time the great evangelistic event in the Anglo-Catholic movement, has fallen out of the repertoire almost completely. I've always found Benediction, whether small, quiet and devotional or grand and impressive, profoundly moving and I can't be the only one. I also wonder whether we neglect the forms of devotion preferred by older people at our peril; they are the ones who generate the devotion of the young, it doesn't come out of nowhere. 'Same again next month?' asked one of the congregaton. I doubt it, but it deserves to be part of the mix.

Swanvale Halt Film Club: The Secret of Kells

It's somewhat worrying that I've only mentioned two films so far, both of them children's animated features, but there you go. The Secret of Kells is, unsurprisingly, a fantasy about the writing of the Book of Kells, the astonishing eighth-century manuscript Gospel Book now in the British Museum. 12-year-old Brendan is a novice at the Abbey of Kells and nephew of Abbot Cellach. When the famed manuscript illuminator Brother Aidan arrives from Iona, fleeing the Vikings, Brendan is captivated into assisting him, much to the fury of Cellach who insists it's much more important to complete the Abbey's great walls so that the monks and villagers will be protected from Viking raiders. Brendan, befriended by the wood-fairy Aisling, has to decide where his future lies and brave the dangers that choice entails.

The animation is extremely beautiful and accomplished, obviously inspired by the swirling, fractal (and slightly mad) patterns and abstractions of the Book of Kells itself: visually, the film is incredible, especially in the set-pieces including Brendan and Aisling's exploration of the forest, Brendan's battle with the snake god Crom Cruach, and the Viking attack on the Abbey which is actually harrowing. It's very stylised, but as is often the case this stylisation makes the sense of reality more vivid. The story is as slender as you could imagine, but the dazzling visuals mean that doesn't matter. The film wears the Christian context very lightly - the Book is never even stated to be a copy of the Gospels - but the Abbey is clearly Christian with its crosses and plainchant, and Abbot Cellach, from appearing a stereotyped, authoritarian cleric at the start, emerges as a self-sacrificing, responsible leader who suffers for the sake of the people in his care. When he's lying on the burning ground of the Abbey with an arrow in his shoulder and a sword wound in his back and Brother Tang tells him, 'You are the Abbot of Kells. You must stand up', it's rather moving. Despite, or perhaps because of, the stylisation, The Secret of Kells gives you some sense of why the Dark Ages were called that: the impression of the Abbey being an island of civilisation surrounded by the hostile or merely wild world comes over beautifully.

Quite aside from that, there's a spiritual debate embedded in the film, though very sotto voce. Cellach's model for the spiritual life is to defend it against evil by constructing protective walls; Brother Aidan insists that the Book 'which will give the people hope' has to be taken out into the world to do its work. Naturally we need both on different occasions, the defensive and the defenceless, the wary and the hopeful. It isn't often that a children's animated movie can make one think along lines like that.

Parish Easter

This is a picture of the Altar of Repose on Maundy Thursday, but it's still from the Triduum (I posted pictures of the high altar bedecked for Easter last year).

This year we moved the Paschal Liturgy to the early morning for the first time in over thirty years; twenty-odd people came, and we ironed out almost all the teething problems from last year. One of the congregation arranged champagne and pain-au-chocolat for breakfast! We followed that with Communion according to the Book of Common Prayer at 8am (again, the first time that's been used for years), and finally the 10am, with smoke, aspersing, and a baptism. It was a huge relief after all the privation and restraint of Lent and Holy Week. Numbers-wise we were about the same as last year overall, though I've heard that other local churches had record attendances.

I spent a certain amount of time over the Sacred Triduum arguing with atheists over on Heresy Corner about the resurrection. My friend the Heresiarch will insist on putting up stuff over the holy season that he knows full well I will have to comment on and so diverts my attention dreadfully ... Anyway, his point was regarding Derek Murphy's book Jesus Potter Harry Christ which argues not only that there are parallels between the eternal Son and the boy-magician, but also that 'Jesus' was a fictional vehicle to bear certain mystical ideas on which the idea of the historical rabbi-teacher was based.

Of course I think this is tosh, and, when you examine the idea, utterly incredible, but it excites my sympathy (because there is no killer proof of Jesus's existence, only a weight of circumstancial argument) rather more than all those laboured attempts to explain the faith of the early Church by arguing that they made a mistake, or were covering the truth up, or any of the other stories that get concocted. If the 'there-never-was-a-Jesus' line is gathering popularity among atheists, it could be a recognition that the alternative explanations are simply too strained and implausible to bear weight.

Bishop Talking Sense (I think)

Perhaps the Sacred Triduum wasn't the best of times for saying it, but the Bishop of Oxford's statement that church schools should limit their intake of children of practising Christian parents to 10% was one I virtually cheered. I really support Church schools. We have a parish infant's school and much to my surprise I've enjoyed building up a relationship with the school institutionally, the staff, and the parents as well as the children. It's less an opportunity for spreading the Gospel (though it is that to some extent) than keeping myself in touch with society more widely, especially in terms of how the education system works or fails to work. It doesn't have a restricted admissions policy, and you have to get a long way down the list of groups which are given priority in terms of admission before any sort of Christian commitment gets mentioned. It was the same at the parish school in Lamford, and the school in Hilltop Corner, where I looked after the church for a few months (unusually that was a Church Junior school with secular infant schools as feeders).

But I did check our admissions criteria when I arrived in Swanvale Halt. At Hilltop Corner I got a call from a former parishioner who was trying to get his son into a church school in Uxbridge, St Lawrence's I think although I couldn't swear to it. The family lived almost opposite the church, but he was having to prove that he'd been a regular churchgoer for five years prior to the application, no small task as the family had moved twice in that time. He correctly identified the former vicar of Hilltop Corner so I took his word for it and wrote a letter of support. A couple of weeks later I got another call. 'They say it's not good enough', he said, 'I have to prove my wife has been going to church for five years too.'

Recently I went back to the church I was baptised in, St Mark's Talbot Village in Dorset. I was at a said Eucharist at 8.30 on a Sunday morning, the sort of service that normally attracts twenty or so people if you're lucky. By the time the service began there were well over a hundred people in the church, most of them in their '30s or '40s, some with prams. As the service finished, I headed towards the door, noticing that the 20 or so people aged over 60 were doing the same, while everyone else was going the other way, towards the front of the church. Looking at the service sheet, I saw the notice 'Parents, don't forget to sign the attendance register at each service you come to'. The phenomenon of parents turning up solely so their children will qualify for the parish school is a clerical joke (it was the subject of an episode of Rev, of course), but I'd never seen it so blatantly, shamelessly organised as this. I am told this has been the pattern at St Mark's (and I am not disguising names this time) for twenty years or more, and a vast extension to the church was built simply to accommodate the influx of parents, barely any of whom turn up once their children are safely in the school. The 8.30am service is particularly popular because people know they won't have to sit through a sermon.

I find the entire thing revolting. The Church simultaneously sits in judgement on parents and families, and encourages hypocrisy among them. It degrades the sacraments of Christ's Kingdom by making them entry requirements for something they have nothing to do with. And why is it that we should expect non-Christians happily and supinely to fork out for our sectarian schools when their kids can't even go there? Few things make me so angry.

I'm all for maintaining the ethos of Church schools, but that depends on the governing body and staff rather than the children. The ones I've been involved with have managed it - and of course half the CofE schools in the country are Controlled, not Aided, schools, and so don't control their own admissions policy anyway.

An Opportunity for Reflection

I wasn't expecting to be granted a curate to start in the summer of 2012, and yesterday had confirmation that this is so. I am not that long from being a curate myself and only became a 'training incumbent' because there was already a curate at Swanvale Halt when I arrived; and given the somewhat hazardous financial situation of the church we could do with having the curate's house rented out and bringing in a few thousand pounds a year. But I was rather taken aback by the email from the diocese which informed me I had failed to 'demonstrate that you fully understood the role a training incumbent undertakes'.

It made me think about my own curacy at Lamford. In my first week Il Rettore told me 'I can't do anything for you except teach you how to say the Mass' and so that was what he did. In my first year we had Mass practice most weeks, but everything else I had to work out for myself. I asked about what he did to prepare couples for their wedding or having their children baptised and he would shrug and say 'I don't know, I just chat to them'. Whenever I saw him take a funeral service his preparation seemed to consist of scribbling a few notes on a scrap of paper in the Vestry before the service started. Our 'staff meetings' (the diocese is very, very keen on staff meetings) occurred over coffee on a Monday morning in the café run by the Turks round the corner from the church, and consisted of me, Il Rettore, the organist, and sometimes the parish secretary if she wasn't too hung over from the weekend. Occasionally we opened a diary but never a Bible. I don't think the powers-that-be like this model very much.

But the thing about Il Rettore was that he cared about people. He could get away with pretty rough prep for funerals in a way I never could, but he dealt so brilliantly with bereaved people it didn't matter. He couldn't tell me what he did with wedding or baptism couples because each time he just engaged with them and who they were, not with a scheme or system (I need a scheme or system). And as for myself, he cared about me. He was my friend and I could always take him into my confidence in absolute trust that he would keep it; the advice he might give me was almost invariably wrong, but that wasn't the point. He was there and cared, and being given advice mattered less than being given tea and being taken to look at the new season's tomatoes in the greenhouse.

It's worth saying that we were all rather scandalised to discover that a curate in an adjoining parish to Lamford was approaching presiding at his first Mass having had no liturgical preparation at all from his incumbent, who was the husband of the diocesan Director of Training. He came, rather on the quiet, to Il Rettore for that.

I'm being offered the chance to talk this over so it will be interesting to discover what the diocese thinks the role of a training incumbent really is!