There is no reason to share this photograph of our amazing and towering rhododendron bush in the church grounds other than its beauty, dramatically placed against a perfect blue sky yesterday. Of course the splendid weather comes with a slight tremor of worry at yet another near record-breaking temperature (though not quite), but put that to one side and enjoy the stunning sight.
South of Hornington is Toslam Farm. I hadn't walked the footpaths that lead across the farmland in several years; when I first arrived in the area there was some controversy over the planning permission for Toslam Farm's polytunnels, and now there are hundreds of acres of them. The farm produces soft fruits - raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries - on a vast scale. Possibly smarting a bit from the criticism it endured a decade and more ago, the company that runs it has opened its own footpaths leading across the land to add to the public ones, and positively encourages people to wander.
So this was where I was walking on Thursday: it's a strange, somewhat bleak landscape in the early Spring, with stretching rows of budding plants and flapping polytunnels that need a bit of repair before things get going in a couple of months. The time will come when these fields are busy with work, but barely a human being is to be seen at the moment.
There are no special treats for the birds in my garden. It's always seemed perverse to me to strafe your lawn and borders with pesticides and then put out specially-grown nuts for the birds when, left to its own devices, a garden - particularly one like mine! - should provide enough to sustain a reasonable community of feathery visitors. So my avian fauna aren't usually very diverse. But just over the last couple of days in addition to the great tits, blue tits and shouty robins I've seen goldfinches where they have never been before and, today, what seemed to be a blackcap in the distance.
And the leucistic blackbird has reappeared! Below is an old photo as I wasn't organised enough to snap it. Blackbirds don't live more than a few years so every time it's absent for a while I wonder whether it's still around. But not only did it reappear, it was scrapping with another leucistic blackbird: the one I'm familiar with has a white patch at its shoulder, whereas the newcomer sported white tail feathers and a patch along its side. Which raises the question of the levels of leucism in the bird population: are they increasing? What are the chances of two birds of the same species with the same mutation turning up in the same garden?
There is some evidence that
people did come into the church to mark the National Day of Reflection, a year
after the Prime Minister loomed into view on our television screens (not having
a TV, I was spared this particular trial) and told us all to stay indoors. Candles
were lit and some prayer sheets disappeared. But nobody was there when I ran
down the hill to ring the bell for the noon act of remembrance, and then ran
back again for a consultation with my spiritual director. Most of the first part
of the conversation consisted of him relating how many chasubles they’d managed
to find in the drawers at St Mary Bourne Street. ‘I do my best to distract you,
as I think this helps’, he said, before adding how he was recently slated to
appear at a Zoom-facilitated book launch and, summarising the contributions of
the other contributors, was stumbling with slight anxiety at the format of the
whole thing when to his horror he noticed Rowan Williams’s face appear at the
bottom right-hand corner of the screen: ‘Yet another of my Rowan Williams moments’.
As we spoke I remembered
getting used to Rick the Verger turning up for Morning Prayer again. One morning
just after he resurfaced I was a bit late and as I crossed the road he began
ringing the bell. My first instinct was to regard it almost as a personal
reproach before I realised this was ridiculous: he was being helpful and my
reaction was really a result of surprise. I am now doing my best not to immediately
think everything is a reflection on me: it’s a common sort of paranoia, but
neurotic nonetheless.
That was a bit of a shift in perception, when it happened. In the same vein, I was thinking yesterday about vaccine provision. Some of my left-er friends advocate the suspension of patents to increase the supply of vaccines worldwide, especially to the poorer nations. I wondered why I was sceptical about this without knowing much about it. Mr Johnson characterised the vaccine developments as a triumph of private enterprise, but it’s not clear it would have been so triumphant without the colossal sums of public money that have been poured into the research, so you can argue that either way. Thinking about my own reaction, I realised it was really a sort of intellectual inertia: this system has come up with the goods, so the argument that removing the keystone of the system – competition between private businesses – would be dangerous the next time we hit a pandemic sounded reasonable. But our experience is full of examples of publicly-funded bodies whose staff work just as hard for the public good as private businesses do, so this is hardly a knock-down argument. In any case, a market economy is good at coming up with solutions to problems, but sometimes needs to be told what problems to work on. When I was researching the history of High Wycombe one of the surprises I uncovered was the role of government in shifting the town’s industrial base during WW2 by moving furniture factories over to making munitions, relocating engineering companies from London, amalgamating small, less efficient businesses and refitting antiquated factories. It did the local economy a power of good and if anyone complained that it was socialism there was no trace of it in what I read. Another sort of shift in perception.
NB. I discover I'd only saved this post as a draft, not published it!
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The PCC decided on Friday to resume public worship on Palm Sunday, a week today. When I did the newsletter delivery round that morning everyone I spoke to asked me when the church was reopening: one of our most faithful members positively begged me. ‘I need to be back in church!’ So I am working out how to celebrate the Triduum in a curtailed and Covid-compliant form: there won’t be a procession on Palm Sunday, and the Easter Vigil will be done by just me and Julie the sacristan and recorded. But there will be live-streamed Compline, and an Easter Messy Church via Zoom, and I will need to work out how (and whether) to do the Passion Service for families on Good Friday. There’ll be a booking system for the Easter services, as there was for Christmas though I will be very encouraged if we turn out to need it!
It strikes even me as contextually incongruous, this antique formulation of what I do, but in fact, the more I considered what to put on the census form today, the more it seemed like a reasonable and accurate summary. It would have been more pious to put something about Jesus, but harder to encapsulate in 120 characters or less. This is both open and precise, even if, to all intents and purposes, the bishop doesn’t take an obviously close interest in his share of the cure of souls here. It is, still, not a bad place to find oneself – physically and metaphorically.
The hardline Anglo-Papalists
held somewhat aloof even from the Congresses of the 1920s and 1930s, which were
never quite extreme enough for them. ‘Modernism is the problem, Rome is the
remedy’, they were once fond of saying. I never really felt that, and while the
Papalists’ concerns for Union with Rome is now read as a sort of ecumenism, which
it wasn’t, so many of their hopes and fears seem a long, long way in the past
now.
So do a lot of my own early
enthusiasms. I was led to my conversion by the imagery and spirituality of the Middle
Ages (among other things) and so it was the version of Anglo-Catholicism that stressed
the Church of England’s continuity with its medieval identity that captured my
imagination. While reading up on holy wells years and years ago I came across Fr
Herbert Dale’s history of St Leonard’s, Hythe, whose chapter on the Reformation
is titled ‘The Schism of the Romanists’, as though it was the Catholic Church that
broke away from the CofE rather than the other way around. I was not so far gone
as not to see the humour in that, but there was a naughty part of me that found
it rather thrilling.
It was somewhat to my
surprise that I ended up concluding while I was at Lamford that Roman vestments
and birettas were rather smart. Il
Rettore insisted I would soon get
fed up with trad-albs and amices, but I haven’t and now regard them as a way of
maintaining my faltering links with the trad-Catholics who are my friends.
The links – not so much
with my friends, but with trad-Anglo-Catholicism – falter because I care
remarkably little about the things I used to, and the things that animated
earlier generations of my spiritual forebears. Authority was what haunted them,
and what drove Newman towards his own crossing the Tiber: the search for certainty
and security, something that might be conceived in intellectual terms, but
which is rooted deeper in the human soul. I have spent my time in Christian communities
which have come from traditional Anglo-Catholicism, but which have long
ceased to understand it beyond a certain sort of worship that they know they
prefer to others, and in the process of trying to interpret and explain things
that people no longer understand, to translate Catholicism into terms that they
can grasp, the instinctive appeal of authority and continuity has faded far
into the background. What is authority in a Christian body for? What is the worth of continuity? I eventually decided that the point is not to defend an ancient deposit
of ‘faith once delivered to the saints’, because it is clear enough – as even
Newman concluded once he’d been a Roman Catholic a while – that we grow towards
understanding God, not begin with an eternal understanding which we are
constantly in danger of losing and which only the right structures can defend. It is instead about community, about maintaining
the conditions for the discernment of God’s will and the training of souls in
holiness to take place.
The business of actually
living in a Christian community with its struggles and joys brings other priorities.
Living the spiritual life seems to have little to do with who consecrated your
bishop: the real meat of Christian existence is prayer, service, charity and
holiness, the work of the Spirit. The Spirit flows through the Body of Christ like
electricity, and he doesn’t seem to need particular patterns of wiring in order
to work: he can act in the unlikeliest of places. Like the Spirit, God’s absolute
and final self-revelation in Jesus of Nazareth is ultimately independent of our
ecclesial structures.
But not completely separate from them.
I remain enough of a Catholic to remember that it was the action of the Holy Spirit
in the Church that established the canon of Scripture; that developed its life
of prayer and worship; that leads it into all truth. These things have to be done
in community, in fellowship with the Body of Christ: we interpret them together, we develop interpretations of what we do together. Anything that disturbs
this fellowship is a danger, and schism is a terrible sin. But it is primarily a
sin against charity rather than truth, and while it stands the risk of
obscuring our sight of God, it never quite hides it, and he works to re-establish
it.
My differences with my Church are well-rehearsed enough, but along with seeing its own failings I see more clearly those of its rivals. Though I may sniff at the sayings and doings of the Primate of All England, I have never been so far away from breaking communion with him!
