Of Cats and Men

In her rather brutal memoir of life in a pre-reform Roman Catholic convent, Through the Narrow Gate, Karen Armstrong relates how her Sisters went a bit crackers after a stray cat found its way into the precincts. They competed to feed it and look after it, and got hysterically jealous and angry with each other. It was, Armstrong suggested, very clearly a function of the locked-down emotional lives the nuns were forced to live by a regime which deliberately stifled and thwarted affection developing between the human inmates of the convent, in the belief that human love and divine love are necessarily rivals. 

Last Wednesday, at Southwark Cathedral, they buried a cat. Bishop Philip North of Burnley, doughty champion of Catholic orthodoxy in the Church of England, was incredulous, Tweeting that he hoped it was a joke for the sake of the bereaved people whose loved ones' funeral services were restricted and curtailed during the pandemic. Not at all, responded the Southwark Cathedral clergy, this ceremony, for this animal, was a means for others to mourn when other forms of mourning were unavailable. Doorkins the cathedral cat had become as much a member of the community as any of its human inhabitants.

Animals aren't human: their mental worlds are closed to us, and while we can observe how they behave, our interpretations of that behaviour, or at least of how they conceive it, are projections. In The Four Loves, CS Lewis rates our love of animals not as an example of the amatory category he calls 'the love of the sub-human', but of 'affection', akin to the kind of feeling we might have for certain sorts of human beings with whom we are generously but not intimately involved. Thinking about it that way side-steps barren discussions about whether animals have 'souls'; but Lewis still only ascribes to them 'personality, or the illusion of personality'. It's more about us, than them.

Even so, this is not nothing. I have no interest in animals at all though I am moderately well disposed to my fish and the birds that find their way into my garden (I could easily live without the cats), but have been educated in these matters by meeting people whose relationship with their pets is emotional and meaningful, however unequal it may be. I've even carried out a funeral service for a dog. Animals aren't people: but their connection with us is real enough. There is no issue about recognising that, even at a cathedral.

The one aspect of the passing of Doorkins, as with her life, that troubles me is the particular projections placed on her. The cathedral was happy to make use of her commercially, and arguably her very name was a snarky exploitation of a mute creature in order to poke fun at a celebrity atheist. She treated the bishop with disdain, the Dean recalled. No, she didn't: she had no idea who the bishop was. You may have wanted to think she did. Her inner world was utterly unknown to any of the people who may have interacted with her day by day, or theirs to her. Had it been me, I would have been perfectly content to commend her into the Lord's keeping, but I might not have made such a fuss of it: there's something not quite seemly in doing so.

(As I will never have another reason to show it to you, here is Susan Herbert's reimagining of St Catherine as a cat:)

God's Ape

The Today programme this morning interviewed US sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, known especially for her 2016 book on Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, Strangers in Their Own Land. She outlined why the poor white Americans she'd spoken to then, and revisited recently, would still vote for Donald Trump next week (if they hadn't already done so), despite dislike for his character and 'weariness' at the chaos and conflict he has brought with him. He is 'a representative of their way of life': he speaks for them, he seems to respect them, so they are electorally and emotionally loyal in return for being 'culturally uplifted'. 

The evangelical Christians among them, Dr Hochschild says, have a particular viewpoint. Some have moved on from seeing the President as Cyrus, the instrument in God's hand no matter what his personal opinions may be, to placing him in a different context:

some of them, especially the evangelicals, are thinking, Oh, he’s suffering for us. It fits into a religious theme: he’s taking on our welfare, he’s facing enemies for us, almost like he’s Jesus.

Now, this is visibly different from the kind of sloppy and imprecise use of religious language that might describe a secular political figure as 'a saviour' because they are regarded as coming to the rescue of a particular point of view or group of people. It places Mr Trump in a redemptive framework, and interprets events such as his contracting Covid or being vilified in the media as equivalent to the sufferings of Christ: by these experiences he draws fire from his supporters in a strangely mystical way justifying them as people and the way they look at the world. I can't think of any other political figures being regarded in quite this way. To ascribe the redemptive role of Jesus to any other person could not unreasonably described as blasphemy. 

If the President wins next week, you can expect this to increase apace, and it leads me to disturbing reflections. I am already coming round to the conclusion that the effects of climate change mean that our civilisation will not outlast this century, and realistically I can't see anything that will avert that. But although this may entail the end of the current order of things, I still thought the religious element was missing. The Book of Revelation depicts a situation in which the climactic division of good and evil takes place through the activities of a figure who presents themselves as a suffering servant, a parody of Christ, and who deceives the world - or part of it. That piece of the puzzle may be sliding into place, and St Levan's Stone is pulled a little farther apart.

PS. I'd forgotten until today that Mr Trump stated that him catching Covid was 'a gift from God' ...

Keep Up At The Back

There is one aspect of their work in which I have a great deal of sympathy with Government ministers, which is keeping track of information. Today there has been a mixup over where to put our Slimming World group - the only external hirers we have at the moment - caused by me not taking account of Rick the verger acting on his initiative; an apparent misunderstanding of a mailout I sent about our annual Memorial Service, which led to reports of people planning to do the opposite of what I'd intended and had me checking the text of the letter back in the church office (it was as I remembered, and really hard to misinterpret); and, at the evening visit to the Air Cadets, forgetting that I needed to broadcast my session online as well as in person (in the end it didn't matter, but it was still very unsettling). After a few unexpected incidents of this kind my head starts to spin and I feel like my ganglions are getting tangled up. I become incapable of remembering anything at all. What is my Microsoft password? How do I open up this application? Which firm serviced the church boilers last? What's this person's surname? And I wonder how politicians, who deal daily with situations that shift and rearrange themselves like sand dunes in a storm, manage at all. Those who offer themselves for public office must be to some extent a different breed from me, is the only conclusion I can draw.

Dorset in the Autumn 6: A Mystery

Now, I said I wasn't going to post about my Dorset holiday again, but I'd forgotten that there was one more site which I ought to have added to the post on follies. On my walk from Corfe I wanted to see the 'Monument' marked on the map at Bucknowle House. Bucknowle has a long history: there was a Romano-British villa on the site, one of a series demonstrating that the Isle of Purbeck was perhaps the most heavily-populated part of Dorset at that time. The Monument, however, appears on the modern Ordnance Survey map ...

 ... but not, as far as I can tell, any others, even fairly detailed maps from a few decades ago. You can see how the site is easy to pinpoint, at the top of a long plot of land which tapers to the north, away from the house called West Bucknowle, just above the contour line marked '47' in the map. But when you get there, this is what you find:

Under this mass of leaves is a concrete platform, and at its rear beneath the bush and to its right are several hefty shaped granite blocks loosely arranged in a semicircle. Nothing like granite is native to Purbeck. The blocks don't seem to have anything carved on them (not that I could see very well). Is this the 'Monument'? It's in the right place, and is an artificial structure of some sort, but isn't much of one. What does it commemorate? Is it really, like the 'ruined cottage' at St Catherine's Hill, a very recent piece of work even though it looks so overgrown - although the tendency of the Ordnance Survey is the other way round, keeping items recorded even when they've long disappeared? I'm really noting it here just so that there is some record of it: there's nothing else about it anywhere online.

Think Big

'It's so good that you're back', said Sheila when I dropped round her newsletter this morning. 'You make us feel safe, spiritually.' That was nice, and a warming thought when the rain began and soaked me as I cycled the parish.

The rain had cleared a bit by the time I got to the house of our Pastoral Assistant Sarah, who delivers a wodge of newsletters for me. She and her husband had watched a conversation I'd recorded and uploaded with a Green councillor and XR activist about the environmental implications and possible consequences of the epidemic. 

'I know we're all recycling and trying to use our cars less and things to help the environment', said Sarah, 'but is there anything bigger we can do, as a church?'

'Well', I answered, 'apart from the global overthrow of capitalism I'm not sure.'

'Hmm', Sarah thought, 'that might be a bit big. I mean, on our own.'

Back to Change

In many ways, the parish seems normal on my return to work, despite the masks ubiquitous in the shops. I was able to go for a coffee yesterday, the children make their way to school, the bell of the church rings, just as usual. Meanwhile in Wales my friends Cylene and Dee are incarcerated apart from food shopping, even though just up the valley from them the infection rates are lower than here. That's devolution for you.

Yesterday's coffee fortified me for a virtual school governors' meeting in the evening. This year, we were told, there are 18 pupils who qualify for pupil premium, a little over one child in every ten. At Branscombe Meads school at the other end of the village, this would be nothing remarkable, but Swanvale Halt Infants has never had more than a handful of PP children. The great majority are in this year's Reception class, so they have been assessed since the epidemic started. Meanwhile the headteacher's been contacted four times this half-term by social workers with concerns about pupils; normally, she says, she gets one such enquiry every term or so, so by this rough index family strain is running at eight times the standard. Things look normal-ish, but they aren't.

The church congregation is generally on the older side, like many, and I get the impression - not that I have counted it up - that where members have families including younger children they tend to live elsewhere. It means that my sense of what is actually going on in the parish has to come more from random scraps of information and conversation with those who feel confident enough to talk to me about troubling matters, and not everyone does. I encourage church members to talk to their neighbours, too, and to pray for them.

Dorset in the Autumn 5: The Tank Museum, Bovington

Swanage, Wimborne, Blandford, Wareham: all the little Dorset museums are closed by the pandemic at the moment, and a couple are caught in the middle of refurbishment projects. So my museum-visiting was confined to the Tank Museum at Bovington, another place I hadn’t seen in maybe forty years. Reports from my sister and family encouraged me to return to a collection which wouldn’t normally have tempted me much, but of course times have moved on since the 1970s and the Tank Museum is now imaginatively displayed and has a pleasant café on a mezzanine above the great hangar (with the tanks) which used to be all you got. 

Walking down the incline after my lunch into that dramatic space, I was hit by the aroma of metal, oil, and canvas, which took me back to my years working for the Royal Engineers Museum in the mid-1990s. There’s much too much to take in over the course of a mere ninety minutes or so (several of which were spent waiting to take that photograph of the film reflected on a female tank factory worker’s denims), and I felt the most intense section of the displays was the first, exploring early tank development in World War One. Those first machines look so weird, so alien, that they have a hideous power even surpassing the sleeker and more familiar violence of their modern counterparts. You can easily imagine the impact that they would have had crawling across the trenches towards the German lines, even before they managed to fire a shot: an emissary from somewhere hellish, within that general hell.