Edges of Liberty

The lady sat in church with me and told me about trying to cope with her son, an alcoholic and drug user with mental health issues. She felt terrible guilt at not being able to help him and, I suspect though she did not say as much, at reaching the point where she had to push him away. 'Nobody will do anything', she said, wiping tears. 'I've spoken to doctors and the police and they say that until he asks for help they can't get involved. And he won't. He's been this way for years.'

Her complaint was that 'I've prayed and prayed for something to happen but God doesn't listen.' I said he always does but lets us make our own choices and all she could do was move her son towards a place where he had to face a choice, which was what she'd done. And yes, all the statutory bodies are set up to assume we are free agents and can rationally decide for ourselves what our best interests are. 'But why? People can't always choose for themselves. They're not capable. My son can't.'

And of course the truth is that all of us are only rational up to a point. We don't see what our best interests are, and even when we do we often lack the ability to act in them. We often need help, perhaps a lot. We need choices that are inescapable, dramatic, black-and-white, before we know what it is that we face, and what we really want to do.

These days I get impatient with political standpoints that fetishise freedom of choice, having long recognised how constrained and limited our human ability to choose really is, and the great engines which compel us in certain directions, mostly unseen and unrecognised. Public policy makes significant leaps when a society admits that a basic need or good is universal and seeks to bring it about. I only recently heard about the very directive public health campaign in Finland which over decades (arguably in tow with other societal factors) reduced deaths from cardiovascular disease by more than 80%: avoiding early death is mostly good, most of the time, for enough people, to assume that adopting such a policy is a reasonable reduction in pure liberty.

How much easier it would be to take people's lives over for them, either as a pastor or a deity. Would such limitations, 'waving the magic wand', really produce passive and untransfigured souls and frustrate God's desires for what we should be becoming? Must we really wait for desperation to wear down those who suffer before we can act? And how many go under in that process? Is expecting people to grow towards liberty not a Western, and in some way bourgeois, prejudice? It's a hard road littered on this side and that with the fallen.

St Catherine at St Albans

Of course when visiting a great church (or even a small one) I've never looked round before my eyes are peeled for images of St Catherine, and at St Albans Cathedral on Thursday I noticed not one, but three, in the south transept, the Lady Chapel, and the south aisle.

They all look very late-Victorian or early 20th-century to me. The earnest-faced one in the crowned turban is my favourite. Although the first has crown, book and sword, there's no hint of a wheel, which is unusual.

Snaps around the Southeast

Yesterday my travels took me to Hertfordshire, a part of the country I know very little indeed. Some years ago I went to a memorial service at St Albans Cathedral but that didn't leave me with much chance to look around; yesterday was much more leisurely. The Cathedral nave is immensely long but what impresses most is the massive Norman crossing which seems strangely un-English with its polychromatic stone. There were no fewer than three windows depicting St Catherine which I will post separately.

The city clambers up and down a steep hill and is wonderfully picturesque as a result. 

I think the City Museum & Art Gallery has recently opened, or re-opened. It's an amazing space with very little in it. Its main treasure derives from the fact that the Town Hall, where it's situated, also housed the City law-court and the lock-ups underneath it. The courtroom is now the Museum café, and you can emerge from the cells below straight into the dock via a short, and terrifying, flight of stairs.

I suppose it's good that St Alban's Well does exist in a 'restored' form, but it's pretty grim.

I spent a wonderful evening with friends, having tea with Ms DarkMorte in Stevenage and dinner with her and Lady Wildwood in Welwyn. I had no idea Stevenage had an Old Town: it's only one street, admittedly, but it's a nice street. I saw a Dalek holding a bucket outside an ironmonger's.

Today I was in London, looking around St James's and having tea in Crown Passage, meeting Ms Sepiatone for lunch, and walking across town in the heat of what the media was describing as 'Thermos Friday', via the legal quarter around Lincoln's Inn, to visit the Old Operating Theatre Museum in Lambeth.

St James's in Piccadilly:

The fountain at St Paul's Covent Garden:

You enter the Old Operating Theatre Museum via a staircase of 53 steps which is an affecting experience in itself. The centrepiece is the 1822 operating theatre of old St Thomas's Hospital, accidentally preserved in the attic of St Thomas's Church (now a bar) when the hospital relocated, and you can only wonder at what may have gone on on those scrubbed tables with medical students clambering around the seats. The display space, though, is the most chaotically-organised I've seen in any kind of national museum context. It's like an antique shop crossed with a witch's storeroom, which I suppose tells you something about pre-modern medicine. The main impression I took away was thanks for living when I do.

Dorset in July

Green and lovely Dorset is parched in the heatwave, but is still glorious. I spent Tuesday of my week off looking for holy wells, and had a trip out with my mum this morning.

At Stoke Abbott they'd just had the Street Fair which not all the inhabitants regard with unmixed delight as, one local told me, 'the main road is closed off and strangers come and traipse through your garden'. Someone decided it would be appropriate to 'bless' the spring-fed water-trough in the village centre as some souls believe it's a holy well, which it isn't. No official of any religious tradition, Christian, pagan or otherwise, took part, but I found bunches of flowers floating in the water which is apparently what 'blessing a well' means. 

Of course I took in a trip to St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury, toiled up the hill - now yellow with lack of rain - and sang the office hymn to the blessed Martyr. Sweat ran off me. The doves - many fewer than last year - watched me quizzically and a group of tourists waited outside until I'd finished! The votive deposit remains, including, this time, a prayer headed 'Dearest St Catherine'. There was another for a daughter about to have a baby - also Catherine. 

The iconic Colmer's Hill, which dominates the landscape around Bridport, stood out beyond Symondsbury village.

The most beautiful manor house in the county, Waddon House, looks simply amazing against the impossible blue sky.

Mum decided she wanted to go to Sturminster Newton today, a place neither of us has visited for years. The Museum is closed at the moment, but the roof is being thatched:

The parish church boasts some very good stained glass including this somewhat odd effort by the great Harry Clarke. I was gratified that I recognised it as one of his! Apparently nobody knows why he (a Roman Catholic) was given the commission:

In the much more standard window showing the Crucifixion, the artist - a Mr Webb - has signed the design not with a signature but with a rebus:

At first Mum was disappointed by "Stur'" which she remembered as a bustling market town where her own dad, my Grandad, used to attend the cattle fair (that was probably in the 1950s), but although there is a closed bank and pub along the main street which look a bit forlorn, it still has a greengrocer, butcher, hardware store, library, Post Office, a big Co-Op, and a flourishing farmers' market on a Saturday, as well as the now-ubiquitous small clothing, trinket and what-have-you shops, so this is probably all a small town now needs. On Tuesday I'd driven through Beaminster, and remembered a LiberFaciorum conversation with my Goth friend Archangel Janet who, along with her partner, has moved to Glastonbury and who finds the conservative attitudes she's encountering there rather trying: I was surprised as I always thought Glastonbury would be a pretty liberal place considering the people who are attracted there (like her). Beaminster's economy now seems to rely on organic food shops, beauty salons, alternative therapists and, of course, cafés. I even saw a Black Person. How the world changes.

Emotion and Eruption

On Friday Rick our verger lit the candles on the altar as the people gathered for one of the liturgical highlights of the year - the Infants' School Leavers' Service. How would the children celebrate their time in school as they looked forward to moving on to their new almae matrae in the Autumn? What role would the papier-mâché volcano play in proceedings? As the children trooped in to some rock song I didn't recognise (and there are a lot of those) they were led by Samantha who has spent several terms as part of Church Club and as the oldest girl in the school has internalised her reputation for responsibility - I wonder whether she will find it burdensome one day - so it was only appropriate that she appeared as a circus ringmaster complete with top hat, cane and a fantastic gold-frogged red jacket. Lauren, the little girl who strangely reminds me of PJ Harvey, came in holding hands with Chloe who looks like Louise Brooks and they sat on the front row. That's what things will be like in heaven, I thought, when we're all like children again.

The purpose of the volcano became clear when Samantha introduced the topic of science at school and the structure was hoisted up onto the staging. Forward came a cabal of child 'scientists' in goggles and white coats, including Church Clubbers Rebecca and Dylan who was easily the naughtiest child of the last two years, and into the volcano's waiting cone they poured, I think, vinegar and bicarbonate of soda. In moments the volcano erupted! Once it had calmed down it was replaced back on the floor in front of Lauren and Chloe, who started holding their noses and gagging.

As the service proceeded there were tears. Oh, there were tears, and they didn't even sing 'Friendship Forever' as in previous years. Rebecca cries at the drop of a hat but this time there was weeping all over the place. I saw teachers dabbing their eyes although Ms Sarensson the head was gently steely. As she and I handed out the Leavers' Bibles each child got a woop from their supporting adults, of whom there were more this year. Although one shouldn't approve of such individualism, I felt I wanted to cheer them, too.

Taketime

We found out about Taketime through our curate Marion who knows the chap who runs it, a Methodist minister based in Reigate. It's a way of using Ignatian meditation to facilitate an encounter with Jesus in the context of prayer. Ignatian meditation involves imagining yourself into Bible stories, either as one of the characters or an observer, and noting your reactions. Taketime's scripted versions of Gospel narratives shape that imaginary work and at the end you usually 'see Jesus coming towards you. He sits beside you and asks you to tell him whatever's on your mind.' Then you spend some time listening to the answer, whatever form it may come in. Sometimes there isn't very much distinct at all, and sometimes there is. Meditative prayer is like that. A full-works session is supposed to take about 90 minutes but as a prison chaplain Revd Clive has done it very effectively with prisoners in as many seconds.

We wondered whether we might introduce something of this sort at Swanvale Halt to take the place of an existing contemplative event which seems to be dribbling to a halt, and preserving the quiet, contemplative element people appear to value; so on Monday I, Marion and Lillian the Lay Reader went to Reigate to take part in a Taketime training day. It would begin with a sample session. 

And the sample session begins with a relaxation exercise. At this sort of point I usually have running through my mind a dreadful story Il Rettore used to delight in telling, of his wife attending a day for clergy spouses in the Exeter diocese: I will merely write the words 'and let those lemons go!' and leave it there. But I dutifully pictured relaxing warmth flowing up through my toes and so on and tried my best not to be resistant.

And then we got into the story: Jesus's encounter with the first disciples and the miraculous catch of fish. I am not that imaginative a soul and struggled to stay focused. 'Listen as Jesus calls you, by name ... And just tell Jesus whatever may be on your mind and in your heart ... and now just listen to his answer to you, however it may come ...' the calming, measured voice of Revd Clive moved through the room. And so I did. It was something personal I was battling with, something I'm not going to share here let alone with anyone else in that room.

I was caught out by getting an answer. Not a picture or a word as such, but an insight which led me to see the issue I was grappling with in a different and more helpful way. Of course if you're not a believer you're free to see it as the subconscious working away at problems unbeknownst to the waking mind. But that's exactly what makes Taketime a fruitful method for working with people with a variety of religious opinions and none. 

I went and had my lunch in the Castle grounds in Reigate, sitting on a baking hot bench and wondering how so many mussel shells got into the grass a couple of yards away. I felt an unfamiliar sense of lightness and liberty. I had gone along to a training day, and would be taking home a new understanding of myself rather than just a folder with some handouts in it, though I would have that too. 

God from Both Sides

Christians think a lot about what leads people to faith: less so about what leads them away from it. There’s a silly programme on Radio 4 on which celebrities read extracts from the diaries they kept in their teenage years. While we were away at the Clergy Conference I heard bits of the episode with Pippa Evans as guest. Ms Evans is a comedian and co-founder of the secular Sunday Assembly gathering, and the diary she was reading from covered the years 1997 to 2001 (mostly just the first year or so) when she was 15 to 19, living in Ealing, and very religious indeed.

Pippa Evans’s family don’t seem to have been particularly religious but in her mid-teens she started attending an excitable Baptist church (‘there was a lot of hand-work’); her mother’s theory was that it provided a safe space for the teenager to make the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Ms Evans found an echo in the experience of the show’s presenter Rufus Hound who along with his brother also went through a Christian phase in his teens after their parents divorced: they were looking for a sort of security, he speculated.

Of course the young Pippa Evans had exactly the same maelstrom of emotional concerns as any other young person and in her spiritual setting expected that God would help her work out what to do in a very definite way. At one point, praying about her crush on a friend, she reported ‘God gave me a picture of a hot air balloon and said to me that if I want Ollie I mustn’t pull on the fraying ropes or he’ll slip away’. ‘You believed God was sending you actual visions, and this felt entirely normal?’ asked Hound. ‘If the company you keep says that’s how prayers are answered …’ said Ms Evans, ‘I do remember sometimes seeing things; this would still happen now, but … now I’d say that my brain had figured something out and made a connection – maybe “be less clingy”!’ Both presenter and guest agreed that a large factor in their teenage church attendance was feeling part of a gang, not one bounded by age but by sentiment and belief. Ms Evans’s diary petered out and her near-last entry described how ‘I don’t go to church any more due to a lack of trust and hope in God. Is he there? I think so. Does he care? I’m not so sure.’ The present-day Pippa Evans expanded, ‘he didn’t give me everything I requested, what an arse! … I was trusting a very kind of two-dimensional children’s picture of what God is.’

There are whole essays to be written opening out of this encounter. But, for now, let’s just note that it’s impossible to draw a hard-and-fast line between God and the subconscious. Only very, very occasionally will a Christian ‘receive’ a mental impression so strikingly disconnected from what they may have been thinking about that it can easily be conceived as coming out of a different place from those buried mental processes that go on constantly. A Christian would expect that God works through the unconscious anyway, and the unremarkable nature of such revelations doesn’t rule out a divine nudge behind them. Pippa Evans’s narrative shows how easy it is to shift from one paradigm to the other without any objective, observable difference in mental activity taking place. The picture stays the same, only the frame alters.

My second observation is that I find it really encouraging that, for these two people, Christianity provided a helpful clearing house for the troubles of adolescence. All right, they moved through it, but unlike, say, souls brought up within the Church who all too often, after becoming aware of the tensions, ambiguities, stresses and pains of Church life, fail to make the transition to a mature sort of faith, they have come through without any rancour or regret, at least that I could hear. They don’t seem scarred. Pippa Evans’s involvement with the Sunday Assembly certainly acknowledges something positive about the Church experience, however much those of us who believe might raise an eyebrow at the feasibility of it.