All In The Mind

I bought a pound of Blachernae Rose incense from the Orthodox brothers at Brookwood Monastery a few weeks ago and in an excess of enthusiasm used it three times over the Advent and Christmas season, the last occasion at the main service on Christmas Day - not full-works censing, just a bit to wave over the altar at the appropriate moment.

On Boxing Day morning I was down in the church tidying up and met Jack. Jack is one of the most useful people in the church, as not only is he basically a Pastoral Assistant sans la lettre but also, being a Northern Presbyterian by extraction, tells me what he thinks in no uncertain terms whereas most southern English people hem and har and beat around an entirely different bush, usually, from the one in question.

'Can you warn me when you're going to burn incense?' he said. 'That was why I had to go out yesterday morning. When we had it at the Advent Service it was three days before my throat was back to normal.'

Now part of the point of using the Orthodox incense is that you get fragrance off it rather than acrid smoke, but it is the case that a few people react badly to some perfectly natural substances in frankincense gum, and the last thing I'm bothered about is putting obstacles in the way of people coming to worship: it isn't a matter of high principle. So at the very least incense can be flagged up before use to give folk the choice of coming or not.

I compromise over most things, awful wet liberal that I am. My Victorian Anglo-Catholic forebears like the great Fr Mackonochie went to prison so I could wave incense about. Reading as I am that strange, waspish and yet horribly fascinating book Fashions in Church Furnishings 1840-1940 by Peter Anson, I came across this passage:

The 'Six Points' were almost a matter of life and death to the ritualistic clergymen and layfolk of the 'sixties and 'seventies. ... They could not be given up under pain of mortal sin. Rather than do so, Anglo-Catholic incumbents were willing to face persecution, fines, imprisonment and even martyrdom. Looking back over nearly a century, it is difficult to understand the mentality of those utterly sincere and devoted clergymen ... Considering that there seems to have been no uniformity in the position of the celebrant of the eucharist during the first three centuries of the Christian era, it is curious that [they] attached so much importance to the eastward position ... [or that they] were convinced that they could not fully proclaim their priesthood unless they were clothed in certain garments, usually of a rather debased late medieval shape ... After the ceremonial use of altar lights had been forbidden, all that had to be done was to black-out the chancels, and illuminate them with lamps filled with olive oil ... Again, one wonders why so such importance was attached to the use of wafer bread, considering that all the Eastern Churches, including those in communion with Rome, use leavened bread.

And so on. I know that, had I been a 19th-century Anglican priest, I would have had my own opinions, but have been equally ready to cavil on virtually all of them so as not to outrage the faithful needlessly. I would have told myself I was leading them gently and sacrificing my own preferences for the sake of the weaker brethren. Yet had everyone been like me nothing would have moved at all. It was, and usually is, the nutcases who drive change forward; the reasonable just bob along in their wake. I suppose, being generous to myself, it takes both sorts.

Leaving Jack, I went into the vestry and emptied the thurible. It turned out that, as I'd put in only one charcoal on Christmas Day morning thinking that would be plenty, by the time it came to the censing so much had burned off that the grains of incense never actually ignited and so essentially nothing was coming out of the thing; whatever had caused Jack such physical difficulty it wasn't the smoke. 'Psychosomatic incense' was our Reader's diagnosis.

Yes, It Went All Right, Thank You

Venturing back into blogging after a bit of a gap, but not being too hard on myself, I thought I would write a very very little about Christmas. It was fine, thank you very much, as people are just about ceasing to ask me, it being the latter stages of January now. All the celebrations were a bit concertina-ed this year, as the last Sunday before Christmas - traditionally the day for a lot of churches' Carol Services - was the day before Christmas Eve so everything was crammed into a couple of days. Everything was pretty much the same as in previous years, as you have to summon up quite some reserves of energy to do anything ground-breaking over Christmas; the only thing we did differently this year was to replace the simple Christmas story readings at the Crib Service with an equally simple Nativity drama, all narrated by a few voices and acted by a few (adult) people. The Crib Service, as similar services in churches the country over, draws enough people to fill the building to bursting, and isn't always easy to manage. This time, there were real moments of attentive quiet, which was a lot to do with the drama. It was nothing at all to do with me, but originated, planned and executed by congregation members, which pleases me very much indeed. All the numbers were similar to last year, too, though my colleagues at other churches in the area report quite a lot of fluctuation.

I am still smarting a bit from a statement by one long-standing member of the congregation who told me some time after the event that he thought the Midnight Mass was 'incomprehensible to anyone new'. It was a quick phone conversation and I haven't delved into the matter yet, but it's hard to see how it's any more incomprehensible to anyone new than an ordinary Sunday Eucharist is. My guess is that this is a rationalisation of not liking the eastward-facing celebration, which we only adopt for the Midnight and the Easter Vigil; another guess would be that it's based on a sample size of one, i.e. the complainant, as it's difficult to see how they could have sampled the actual opinions of anyone coming through the door for the first time. I will have to ask the 19-year-old who I baptised earlier in the year so she could be a godmother to her friend's baby, and who turned up at the Midnight with two of her friends, and see what she thought.

There Once Was A Curate from Riga

More than one friend has recently sent me links to articles about the Revd Sally Hitchiner, Senior Chaplain (one wonders what the junior ones are like) at Brunel University. If you don't know who she is, you can find out more, quite a lot more in fact, here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here ... and here. And that's not counting the places where she writes about herself. She's another priest who likes clothes. Actually rather a lot of priests like clothes, but those clothes tend to involve brocade, gold braid and maniple fringes, and that sort of covers it up. I'm not going to talk much about Revd Hitchiner per se because she's become the object of rampant hatred across the wonderful world of the internet which I can't see that she deserves. She clearly thinks rather a lot of herself, otherwise she wouldn't be going along with the exposure, but that's a matter between her and her spiritual director, really, not the rest of us.

As a priest who likes clothes, including secular as well as liturgical ones, I do worry about this aspect of who I have become. I'm a bit older than Revd Hitchiner so I've had more time to ponder the ambiguities; and they come into being part of the Goth world, too. It may seem perverse and hypocritical to resent people paying you attention when you dress in a nonconformist way, but Goths nevertheless do it, and are, by and large, adamant that they don't dress to be looked at. This seems to me to indicate a relationship with clothing which is more complex than the explanation Goths themselves usually give for adopting Goth style (and that Revd Hitchiner gives for dressing the way she does), that it 'expresses their personality'. I see it as adopting a role, as to a certain extent play-acting. It's not only that the clothes bring out part of what is within you, but that you put on an identity when you wear them. In a way, the clothing bears the primary identity, rather than the person. I think Goths use Goth clothing in the same way a Christian priest uses liturgical dress: to express, not something which is inside you (at least not in a straightforward way), but outside you, beyond you.

For my part, my church uniform is absolutely standard clerical dress, with the only refinements being that I wear a waistcoat and a hat of some variety most of the time. Once in a while, for very special occasions, I don't wear a cheap little plastic clerical collar but a white necktie, and as even Fr Benson of Cowley did that I don't consider it especially noteworthy. Non-work-wise I wear very conservative male dress with a bit of a twist. I like the way this cove the Sinister Sartorialist carries himself, but he's a lot younger than me and I don't think it would be appropriate for a middle-aged clergyman to dress like that. I like the beauty and interest of clothes; I don't think they 'express my personality' at all. I don't even think I have that much of a personality, certainly not one I want to 'express'. So I hope I am safe, at least at the moment, from dire spiritual peril at the hands of my cufflinks and ties.

However: there's another aspect of all this that concerns me, and I suspect a dire warning to young clergy who might find the world taking an interest in them. All priests, certainly all parish incumbents, find themselves inevitably, just as did the Lord they serve, the focus of the transferred adoration and hatreds of the people around them, and they wade into wider, deeper waters to their utter danger. Deal with a parish and you can through personal contact do something to control the way people see you and think about you; deal with people on the virtual level of the media and you have no control at all. When somebody first sent me a picture of Sally Hitchiner I thought, Ah, she thinks, deluded young woman, that she can counteract people's stuffy idea of what the Church is like by using the media. And, sure enough, she wrote (I think on Facebook, the Mail article is difficult to disentangle) 'There is that perception that religion is in a box with everything middle-aged and that everything else is in another box'. It won't work, because the media's agenda is not hers, and, as all the coverage of her rise to fame shows, she can't control how people understand the images they see of her.

My mind goes back to the BBC TV production A Country Parish and poor Revd Jamie Allen, who was seen in the series floundering in a generally well-meaning and good-natured way in his Wiltshire villages and trying to be a good priest. The programme played down the fact that he had three churches to look after (too complicated) and gave a completely inaccurate picture of what any clergyperson's life is actually like (go to Rev for a more realistic view). More tragically, the poor sod found it was completely impossible to do his work once the cameras had gone: he turned down the offer of a second series but by then it was too late. 'My ability to minister effectively in the villages has been irrevocably compromised', he told the world when he resigned his charge. The programme doubtless had positive effects on some people, but Jamie Allen had to pay the price, and now works in New Zealand.

Advice to young clergy no.715: Go nowhere near the media. Don't kid yourself you can ride the tiger.

New Found Catherines

I kept St Catherine's Day on Sunday with a votive mass at the 8am (it was the Feast of Christ the King, but then Jesus is such a self-effacing fellow) and then promptly forgot about the Octave until this morning. Anyway. Here are two recently-noted Catherines to mark the season:


This first narrow one comes from St Petroc's Church in Padstow and was spotted by Miss Traves, on holiday a few weeks ago in Cornwall with Dr Bones. Very stately.






While this Catherine appears in a manuscript volume on display in the V&A's medieval galleries. I like the double wheel, you don't see that very often.

Keeping It Together

One of the questions I said the other day that I wanted the majority in the Church of England to answer was, Why are we bothering to accommodate those who are against the consecration of woman as bishops? If we discover answers to that question, more than just the cynical ‘Because we can’t do what we want unless we do accommodate them’, we might be willing to do more actually to make it happen. One of the possible answers is that the antis bring something valuable to the Church which we don’t want to lose, and I’ve been thinking around that over the last couple of days.

Richard Hooker wrote that the three sources of thought on which the Anglican Church relies are Scripture, Tradition and Reason: we were taught that at St Stephen’s House and I trust it gets mentioned in other colleges and training courses too. You can obviously relate these to the three main divisions within the Anglican Church today. Evangelicals place the Biblical documents at the centre of their thinking; Catholics put a strong emphasis on what the Church as a whole has taught across time and geographical distance; Liberals draw lessons from the world they observe and experience to interrogate both the words of Scripture and the tradition of the Church.

All three in their thinking will inevitably get stuff wrong. I am rather a conservative sort of liberal, and so while I support the consecration of women as bishops I can understand the arguments the two sorts of antis, Catholic and Evangelical, are making. I think they are wrong, but possibly that they are wrong for the right reasons. I believe that, in their anxiety to preserve the importance of the Biblical witness, the conservative Evangelicals are misinterpreting that witness; and I also believe that, in their concern to keep Anglicanism linked (at least in the way it looks) with the other bits of Catholic Christianity, the Catholics are overemphasising the wrong parts of that tradition. But their concerns are, at root, sound ones.

My frustration with some, let’s say, less reflective liberal Christians is that they are, conversely, often right for the wrong reasons. It’s perfectly possible to be a Liberal Anglican and have a great concern for Scripture and the Catholic identity of the Church, but too many Liberals seem to sit very light to both, and often not even to understand them. I suspect, as I’ve let on in the past, that there is stuff in Scripture and the Tradition of the Church that we don’t really grasp yet, but that we have to engage with rather than just junk in order to work out what it is that God really wants us to take on board.  The tragedy of schism, of Christians breaking fellowship and ceasing to talk and worship together, is that it makes it less likely that this will happen. When Churches divide and set up new, separate structures, we fall in with the competitive model under which the World operates, not the model of the Kingdom – with all its frustrations. Different sorts of Christians with different biases get nice, comforting, if smaller groupings in which they will only need to deal with people who think the same way they do, and they then compete with each other.

We need to think deeper than just that ‘the Church of England is a broad church and so we want to keep everyone on board’. That’s a weak version of the real situation – which is that precisely because we think differently we need those differences in order to tack towards the truth. You only have to look across the Atlantic to see what happens when Anglicanism blithely severs itself from parts of its identity. Think of Catholics, Evangelicals and Liberals not as ‘bringing different things to the table’, because that image implies that you could, if necessary, live without any of those things (I’m pretty sure my Catholic and Evangelical brethren each believe they could very cheerfully manage without the other two). It pays lip-service to the ideal of unity without really believing that you might be affected, changed, as a result of dealing with those challenging others. Instead, those three elements are like tethers that keep us attached to what are, basically, channels of the Holy Spirit’s teaching us: the Biblical witness to Jesus, the Church’s inheritance of spiritual experience and thinking, and the constant interrogation of both those things by what we actually see and hear around us. We need people who prioritise one or another of those, because our natural human tendency is to downplay the ones we’re less biased towards. And that’s what it is and what makes it so maddening at times – a necessary combination of prejudices.

And why should we bother preserving that? Why not just let one wing or another go off and do their own thing? I believe very strongly that the answer is because the Church of England has, dare I say it, a particular eschatological role. We have, very peculiarly and strangely, developed this mad, frustrating, divided identity – alone among the Churches, at least to this degree. It’s because we are committed to keeping together our connections to those three sources of the Spirit’s guidance that we mediate those other Churches which emphasise one or another. The time will come, I think, when the Church of England will play some deep role in the reunification of the sundered branches of Christ’s Church, and we’ll be able to do it precisely because we’ve kept together internally. Of course God’s plans will happen regardless, but if we actually get in the way of them he’ll be terribly sad …

Maintaining the breadth of the Church of England isn’t just nice if we can manage it. It’s the point of the whole thing. We need those people we disagree with in order to do what God wants of us. None of us, Catholics, Evangelicals, or Liberals, can do it on our own, because we are flawed, limited, biased human beings. And we should be willing to sacrifice virtually anything to keep it.

A Culture of Suspicion!

As light relief to having a go at my own religion, here's a short jab at non-Christianity for a change.

I know a number of people who are vegans and pro-animal campaigners. A short while ago, one of them put up this photo on a well-known social-networking site:

This prompted a lot of discussion, arising out of the quotation in the picture. I can't find the thread now so I can't quote from it, but it was mainly along the lines of how wicked Christianity in particular and religion in general is for promoting exploitation of animals, and, in contrast, how atheism, being natural and rational, promotes instead respect and kindness towards them.

William Ralph Inge? I thought. I recognise that name. He was, it doesn't take long to confirm if you want to, the famous Gloomy Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in the 1910s, 20s and 30s; this quotation is from Outspoken Essays, published in 1922 and based on an earlier lecture.

As always, it only takes a moment to look this up but you have to have a mental culture of suspicion. I suppose it may be having a background in studying history that I automatically want to know the context of any statement or fact I'm presented with, what the qualifications are of the person who is quoted or who reports an event. This is another tiny instance of our willingness not to question or investigate things that conform to our preconceptions, made all the more glaring because of the sad assumption behind it that atheists can't be unkind to animals or Christians promote their welfare.

And Relax

Yesterday, a day after my birthday, I went out with Ms Narain, Mrs Monday and Mr Valentine to see Caravan Palace at Koko in Camden. I'd never been to Koko - it's a fantastic venue, occupying the old Camden Palace Theatre built in a wonderfully Rococo style in 1900 and now decked out in gold and sumptuous velvety red (actually the walls aren't velvety at all, and instead are painted woodchip, but look velvety). Caravan Palace, the pinnacle of electroswing, were promoting their new album, and while some of the tracks are veering more in the House direction than what I find particularly appealing, it was huge fun - even though our view of anything was blocked by security men of increasing girth as the evening wore on.

I looked down over the balcony at the mass of mainly young, mainly ordinarily-dressed people on the dancefloor below. They were happily bouncing up and down as Caravan Palace thumped away on the stage (in fact Mrs Monday bounced so much she felt sick). I've recently been dipping back into Richard Davenport-Hines's Sex, Death and Punishment which he wrote a few years before his great history of Gothic, and marvelling how, within the last half-century, we have ceased in so many ways to be the vicious, vicitimising culture we once were, wrapping ourselves in fear and lies and hitting out at queers and deviants in our fear and self-deceit. Or at least, we now deem it socially unacceptable to voice such opinions. A mass of young people being happy is not a threat, and how grateful I am to live now rather than then. It is a society from which the influence of the Church has largely been removed, and that's a good thing too. We Christians have connived at the evils society has inflicted on its minorities, and I am grateful that we are being flung to the margins: we deserve it. As all the bullshit about women bishops proves, we still aren't to be trusted, and God needs to purge us a little more yet.