Final Acts

Bill is dying at the moment. Two years ago he watched Reg breathing his last in the traumatic funeral service that was supposed to be for someone else entirely, as the paramedics battled around him, and muttered, 'Let him go, let him go.' Now it's Bill's own turn. The last time I saw him in hospital, he could just about say my name and the phrase 'I go in and out', which cost him a lot of effort. A week later, lying in bed instead of sitting beside it, he couldn't say anything no matter how hard he tried. He looked dehydrated to me, his lips dry and flaky, but wouldn't or couldn't take any water from a straw, and happily a doctor came by so I was able to tell her: she would put him on some fluids, she said. The doctor gone, Bill's eyes mainly looked forward rather than at me. I assured him of the love of the parish and of God for him. And he started to cry out. I couldn't tell whether it meant laughter or distress. I have known the most faithful people, and Bill is nothing if not that, collapse into numbness or rage at the end, as though they never really believed it was going to happen to them. But whatever he felt, he couldn't communicate to me in any way I could understand. It was under the chain of inarticulacy.

There is nothing peaceful about this slow death. It's a battle, a concluding struggle to the end of a long life, as the body closes down. I suppose it's unreasonable to expect anything else, and we should brace ourselves for it: anything else is a bonus. But what a damnable business it is. In humanist terms, are there any earthly pleasures that can balance the terrible process of leaving them?

March 30th is also the 27th anniversary of the release of Dry and so I have listened to it again in line with my devotional programme. The unfocused rage behind it was helpful. 'Happy and Bleeding' is about a specifically female experience, but there was something applicable about some of the lyrics:

This fruit was bruised
dropped off and blue 
out of season ...
Long overdue
too early and it's late, too

If it were not for the Cross, for the divine sharing in the human sorrow, I would not be here doing this, I can tell you. Even with it, holding on to faith is a near thing.

Opting Out

Although our visitors to the church on Monday were pretty young, I was aware that talking about weddings nevertheless raises some fraught matters. For all I knew, among those sixty children might have been some who had two mums or dads in their family. So I said that the Church of England only marries people of different sexes, and that's why the service looks the way it does, but people of the same sex can marry each other elsewhere. 

Of course not everyone is happy with children being told this. I can't see, however, that one's moral opinions, regardless of what they might be or where they come from, give one the right to opt out of reality, still less to pretend to one's children that reality is different from what is the case. In this jurisdiction, people of the same sex can marry: it is wrong to shield children from this truth, or for clergy of the Established Church to gloss it over as though it did not exist.

(A friend of mine pointed out that all Germany's Muslim MPs voted in 2017 to support same-sex marriage, which is the case: 'being part of a certain demographic doesn't make you an idiot; being an idiot makes you an idiot', she says reasonably. Although I note that all those MPs come from Turkish backgrounds, and Turkey, until its current leader's efforts, was the most unMuslimish Muslim country in the world, and proud of it). 

Safety First

The visit of two Year 4 classes from the local junior school to the church yesterday went quite well. They were here to look at Christian weddings and the promises made as part of them. I put together a programme which took about an hour to deliver and they weren't too restive. I knew lots of them from Swanvale Halt Infants so that helped. The first question I asked was how the building made them feel. One boy said it made him feel old: 'I'm not very old,' he stressed (he was 8), 'but I first came here one year, and then the next year, and then the next, so it makes me think how old I am now and how time goes.' A serious place on serious ground, you see.

At the end the children had 15 minutes or so to look around the building. I let them into the vestry by groups and the thing that seemed to catch their attention most was the safe. I heard one girl discussing with her friends how you'd need a hair grip to pick the lock. This is very advanced for 8, I was sure they don't normally cover basic burglary until Year 5.

Spring Sun

Do you remember the magnolia I planted a couple of months ago? That one potential bloom has now opened and looks like this:

I am so delighted that this has happened. All across the parish the magnolia trees are in splendid bloom and I am full of joy that my sapling has added to the glory albeit with just one flower!

But the other garden flowers have been joining in. The banks are full of primroses, which I can't see lasting this year long enough for me to be able to use them to decorate the Altar of Repose; the deep pink of the camellias and the delicate pink-white of the prunus blossom adds to the colour.

After the morning's services and lunch, the afternoon was too sunny to spend entirely at home. I've often been to Waggoners' Wells but this beauty spot not far away always affords some pleasure no matter the conditions. The line of ducks was obliging and the Wishing Well flowing plentifully. All very recuperative.

Caught Speechless

The induction of the new incumbent of Steepmoor was going so well, and it should have done with three bishops present. We were singing a modern hymnette which I thought was perfectly acceptable until we got to the bit which implored God to 'win this nation back', and I found myself unable to carry on. 

There is a minor theme in a lot of modern Evangelical hymnody which deals with 'the nation' and the hope that it will return to God. I've long wondered what people think this might mean. The United Kingdom is a secular state with a Christian symbolic discourse in the form of its monarchy and established Church, and I rather prefer that combination to the toxic coupling of religion and power you find in the USA or, currently, Hungary. Souls turning to Christ is one thing: the idea of a nation doing so fills me with horror, because it will not be Christ to which it truly turns but an idol of its own imagining, generated from its fears and desires. God only ever had a covenant relationship with one nation, the people of Israel, and never gave any indication that he planned another. That role passed to the nova Israel, the Church.

Which brings us to the next bit that made me fall silent. 'We are your Church, and we are the hope on earth'. No, we very emphatically are not. If the Christian Nation theme teeters on the brink of blasphemy, this jumps gaily in. Only Christ can ever be the hope on earth and to place that hope anywhere else - even in a supposedly Spirit-filled body of believers - is going to lead you down paths with flashing warning signs above them. 

Surely Christians, and most particularly those who call themselves Evangelical, can't have failed to notice how questionable this stuff is? Or are they so caught up in emotion that they don't pay any attention to it, even while they sing it?

They Came, They Saw, They Made Suggestions

Barely any families ever come now to our Family Service, the non-eucharistic and slightly less formal service we hold on the first Sunday in the month. Not so long ago this was not the case and a few times back in 2014 we hovered close to a hundred souls in church a fifth of whom were under 16, but times change. I want to do something useful with this slot, and something less formal than a mass but not focused on children, as such. I increasingly feel that 'formal' versus 'informal' is the fundamental dichotomy around which people who don't know that much about church life think, rather than 'high church' and 'low church' or anything like that; and the core of 'formality' is reading things out of books or leaflets, something which people don't do on any other occasion. Moving away from that sort of formality, and providing something for people who find it alienating without forcing them to seek it outside the parish, means installing a screen to project words and images onto.

We thought about doing this during the big refurbishment of the church in 2012, but in the end decided not to go ahead. Last year when Dr & Mrs Abacus came to visit I talked about this with them and the Dr. came up with a back-of-a-fag-packet design for how a screen might be mounted on a beam which could hang down at the side of the chancel arch and then be fixed in position by a pulley-and-rope system. Dr Abacus is an old hand at such practicalities and this sounded both plausible and cheap, but I couldn't find anyone who would advise on it. I arranged a visit by a cheerful young fellow from a company that installs audiovisual systems in churches who told me how much it would be to put in a drop-down screen behind the chancel arch - the trouble being that the arch is quite sharp and you can't fit more than an 8-foot screen across it without it being very intrusively visible when not wanted, nor do the sight lines in the building make it very easy to see. 

Finally today a couple of helpful consultants from the Diocesan Advisory Committee, the body that advises on works in church buildings, came to help me think through the matter. Once they'd managed to find somewhere to park (no easy matter in itself in Swanvale Halt at the moment) it didn't take them long to suggest a very obvious option - placing Dr Abacus's screen against the wall above the choir stalls, so instead of being lifted into place it could be swung out across the chancel arch and fixed. That would allow something much wider if need be. The aisles could have subsidiary, portable screens on trolleys. We could go for one of those amazing glass screens that hangs permanently and invisibly in place, and is projected onto from behind, but those are pricey.

Why couldn't I think of that? Well, that's what other people's brains are for, I suppose.

Brighton Museum

My journey back from West Malling last week took me on a detour to Brighton, mainly to visit Mad Hatters in Trafalgar Street as my old fedora is getting a bit rough after a few years, and I can only get the style I like there (they had none but have kindly offered to order one and post it on). I had lunch at a marvellous little greasy-spoon café and then visited the Museum with some bemusement that I'd never done so before. 

The building is part of the Pavilion complex and consequently is a bit nuts. Gorgeous encaustic tiles accompany you up a staircase at the rear of the grand central atrium, and on the upper floor Moorish arches open into vistas of distant galleries.

This is a big municipal museum and gallery, and one in a town with a distinctive personality. The displays are very eclectic and there is no coherent story, rather a collection of glittering fragments, but everything is sort-of there, from fishing boats to Prinny and his Regency pretensions, Mods and Rockers on 1960s beaches to a moving examination of contemporary trans identity. There are strong archaeology galleries, and rooms of global cultural artefacts put into human context rather well. We've already mentioned Paula Huntbach's 1980s Goth gear which occupies a place in a show about how gender and identity are expressed in niche clothing.

However I thought the crowning glory of the museum is that great central atrium, devoted to a ravishing collection of twentieth-century decorative art. It's a charismatic space, spectacularly rendered with some of the most sumptuous kit I've ever seen in a single museum gallery.