Tipping Point

The latest LiberFaciorum post from my friend Jasper, who as I mentioned a little while ago has advanced over the last year from lockdown-scepticism to full-scale covid-conspiracism, includes a Tweet from Dr Zoe Harcombe, alleging that nothing unusual is happening in India at the moment and that reports of covid deaths there are exaggerated by Western media. I don’t know what her expertise in this matter might be, as she is a dietician, and a much-criticised peddler of pseudoscience. But Jasper has reached the point where criticisms of someone’s integrity or expertise by the mainstream of their profession is precisely a reason to accept their opinions: my enemy’s enemy is my friend. Not that I expect he’s checked her out.

It's interesting (if depressing) to speculate how individuals make this progress. Once you adopt a very non-mainstream opinion, for which there is, ipso facto, little evidence, you must cast around to find that evidence and before long every little scrap of overinterpreted information has to be pressed into service. The world in general isn’t going to endorse your opinion and you have to come up with an explanation why. As far as covid-sceptics are concerned, the most egregious manifestation of this is their approach to medical professionals. There has to be something that explains why the overwhelming majority of doctors across the world, trained in a wide variety of independent institutions and operating in very different political and professional structures, are all saying the same thing: they must have been brainwashed, or bribed. Following Jasper’s promoted links I have found myself staring on my computer screen at the most extraordinary statements of rage and hate against doctors – as the chief promoters of lies, dangerous medicines, and fake diagnoses and death certificates, it must be infuriating for sceptics to see them taken so seriously by the rest of the population.

Just in case there was any doubt, I do talk to a great number of people from day to day and find little evidence of the situation Jasper believes is prevalent. Most of our congregation, being older folk, have been vaccinated and a great number double-vaccinated, along with people I meet in the Co-Op, the cafes, the school, the streets in general. Nobody has had a reaction worse than a few hours of headaches, while Jasper believes ‘if you don’t end up blind or dead from your vaccine you’ve been lucky’; technically this may be true, but not very lucky as it was never all that likely to happen. He reports that ‘I am overwhelmed with the amount of people I am discovering daily, cowering in their homes, nervous wrecks as a result of the fear inducement in order to get onboard a clinical trial [ie, receive a vaccine]’. I, on the other hand, haven’t heard of a single one. We live in very different worlds, he and I.

Unless you’re going to do a volte-face and admit you were wrong, when contrary evidence grows, the only option is to double down, and that forces you further and further away from the surface. Jasper now seems to be veering off into climate-change scepticism as well, because anything there is a consensus over becomes suspect. It’s a strange alternative world, but a very beguiling one as it provides its residents with a sense of self-worth: look at the photographs of the last anti-lockdown protest in London and you can see a woman with a placard reading ‘We R the ones you failed to fool’. Jasper has been known to make references to sheep and other allegedly unthinking herd animals when describing the rest of us.

Just like the farther reaches of the climate change movement, there are similarities between covid-scepticism and Christianity, or at least the brands of it that take you far away from the worldview of most other people. There, you are also given a sense that you have a privileged insight into the way things really are beneath the apparent reality the herd accepts, but at the same cost. If your insight relies on denying the evidence everyone else accepts, and positing a hidden enemy who directs the deception, you’re inevitably pulled by the same current, forced to interpret everything you see in the light of that denial and polarising the entire world into facts which endorse your view and those which don’t (in short, lies). What a bargain to make.

Bish Mish

Before the webinar on Monday evening, I thought the Archbishop of Canterbury's visit to the Guildford Diocese scheduled for September was merely an opportunity for him to share with his clergy his opinions about cheese (I jest: had that been the case I wouldn't have minded going). But it is not. It is a Mission. It is Welby as John Wesley come among us again. There will be a launch for clergy and selected congregation members followed by a series of local mass meetings to which churches are supposed to bring along souls they have been praying for over preceding months. They will go away, enthused, to take part in enquirers' courses run in the parishes, and at some point in 2022 His Grace will return to confirm all the new Christians this process will produce.

I have, I'm afraid, questions to ask. I am not convinced that Archbishop Welby is as down with the kids as he imagines given what he has said in the past; I have never really conceived of him as someone who communicates easily with the world beyond the Church, but perhaps this is how he pictures himself. Are we sure that this is not the good primate trying, perhaps with some desperation, to make a contribution to the Church he heads and identifying this as a way of doing so - that it is more about bolstering his sense of mission than the Church's? 

Then I recalled the Talking Jesus report which also came out in 2015 and which shocked General Synod with its research suggesting that Christians talking about their faith to non-Christians was more likely to put people off belief rather than attract them. Clearly it wasn't the whole story, but have we actually engaged with it, or have we chosen simply to ignore it? I've never heard it referred to since it was published.

Finally I wish I could reformulate in some way my discomfort at praying for people to come to faith. If I had, say, a Muslim or a pagan friend and discovered that they'd mentally identified me as someone who might convert and were praying about it - or whatever it is a pagan might do - I could well feel a bit differently about that person, no matter how much they might simply be acting in what they thought was my best interests. I do know people who I have had conversations of a spiritual nature with and it might not be completely weird to pray for those enquiries to develop into something more, but such people will have identified themselves rather than being targeted by me. 

Of course we wait to hear more. In the meantime I try to work out what I can conscientiously ask the Swanvale Halt congregation to do.

The Last Wedding (like this)

It's not every wedding where the groom’s outfit gives rise to more comment than the bride’s, but on Saturday Adele’s gear was relatively standard (white dress, veil), while Cal’s included a leather top hat, black brocade jacket and pointy purple patent leather shoes. That wasn’t the only unusual aspect of the proceedings: as well as general covid-compliant considerations we were joined by Cal’s granddad in the form of a small wooden urn containing his ashes, were treated to his stepfather singing 'Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring', concluded the ceremony with 'Fly Me to the Moon', and, as Adele’s family were in sunny California, livestreamed the entire proceedings. For some reason the laptop didn’t recognise the external webcam so we had to make do with the integrated one but at least they saw something. In fact, as I mentioned, Swanvale Halt was probably as sunny as the west coast of the USA that day if probably not as warm.

Because Adele is a US citizen she and Cal had to be married by what is called a Superintendent Registrar’s Certificate, the legal preliminary you use for a church wedding where one or both party is a national of a country outside the EEA. They (ideally) get the agreement of a priest to marry them, then lay their case before the civil registrar who does all the paperwork; they take the said certificate back to the church as proof of permission to marry. Cal and Adele are the first couple I can remember doing this for in sixteen years, so it isn’t all that common though I have advised people marrying at other churches to go down that route. In theory a couple can get a SRC and just turn up at a church asking to be married, but in those circumstances a priest can tell them to swivel and any sensible registrar will want to know they’ve got that sorted out first.

Unless something very unexpected happens, Cal and Adele will also be the last couple to be entered in our marriage registers, because that entire method of marriage registration, in place since 1836, is coming to an end. Finally exasperated at having to harry parish clergy for their data, the civil registrars are now about to begin doing it all themselves. From the start of May, every couple marrying in a church will have a document filled in by the minister which will then be passed to the Registry as the basis for producing their actual marriage certificate. In the first draft of the legislation it was the couple themselves who were to be responsible for doing this: in a rare outbreak of sense which may be their most significant positive contribution to the life of this country in years, the bishops managed to argue that a couple who’d just got married were probably not the best people to arrange this and that even parish clergy were more likely to get it right, or indeed do it at all. There have apparently been some complaints about the inadequacy of the training we’ve been given about this quite serious change in what we do, and there is to be an online seminar in a couple of days’ time, but I didn’t think it was that bad – although I did do an executive summary for Marion the curate’s benefit which may have been a bit clearer. In fact I’d’ve been dismayed if it wasn’t.

Part Vindicated

Estelle is a Teaching Assistant at Swanvale Halt infants school; she has family history with the Post Office and when our sub-postmaster was caught up within the scandal which has finally made headlines a decade after it should have done she first took an interest, then raised a petition, then began working with Nick Wallis, the journalist who has pursued the case as it has made its way through progressively less obscure corners of the media and finally the courts (and who, it turns out, is the son-in-law of one of the Lamford churchwardens - it's a small world!). Estelle was outside the High Court a day ago to hear 39 sub-postmasters have their convictions for fraud and theft overturned. There is something deeply moving about these utterly ordinary people winning a victory against an institution which has been for so long apparently above the law, which has distorted and suppressed information, and which has lied so massively and shockingly to its employees, to official investigators, and to the Parliament to which it is in theory accountable. At last the media is referring to the Post Office scandal as what it is: the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

How was it, exactly, that Post Office Ltd managed to convince itself - if it did - that reality was something entirely different from what they claimed? How could Fujitsu, the company that devised the fatal Horizon accounting system, keep so silent throughout this whole event? Why did court after court never notice or comment on the apparent irregularity of a single institution being both complainant and investigator? I heard a former Conservative business minister on the radio yesterday regretting that she had never paid more attention to this matter while she was in office; why didn't she? Why did a succession of government ministers in both Labour and Tory administrations simply turn aside from the rising tide of complaints and claim they couldn't do anything? When our Swanvale Halt Post Office was closed, I wrote to doyenne-of-the-Corbynites Rebecca Long-Bailey as Labour business spokesperson to complain, and didn't get so much as an automatic email from her office (our own Tory MP was more forthcoming). Was everyone just scared?

Last year, as the original trial relating to Horizon was reaching its conclusion and Mr Justice Fraser issued what must be one of the most damning judgements ever laid down against a public corporation, Estelle was trying to find out the legal basis for the governance of Post Office Ltd. Discovering that as what is technically referred to as an 'Arms-Length Body' - a corporation which is not formally part of Government but related to it - it should be governed by a 'Framework Document' which lays out its precise relationship with civil servants and ministers, Estelle put in a Freedom of Information Request to see the document. At first she was sent irrelevant papers, and then was stonewalled by civil servants. Finally the Business Department admitted that there wasn't one. There was, in effect, nothing that described how Post Office Ltd should be run. This, presumably, was what allowed it to act as though it wasn't subject to the law and which made Government ministers so reluctant to tackle it.

Forget Mr Johnson and his text messages, or even his wallpaper: if there is not a public inquiry into these events it will be a dreadful shame: there are so many questions that need answering.

Water at Eastbourne & Fulking

I'd forgotten to mention my visit to the south coast last week to see Ms Kittywitch. We picked our way along the beach at Eastbourne to view the Holy Well. You may remember I have already visited this site, or what is now identified as it. The problem with this Holy Well is that every time there's a major storm that sweeps shingle onto the beach it gets swamped, and that was the case in 2017. Now, though, it has once again been cleared by local enthusiasts and given a new sign, and better repays a visit, its boulder-ringed basin filled with blueish water which has made its journey through the chalk cliff above. Sorry about my photo, I don't know why I ended up taking it so wonkily.

My journey home took me within reasonable striking distance of Fulking where there is another interesting spring - not really a holy well except by adoption, in the way that Victorian decorators of such sites often linked them with divine grace by means of improving Scriptural citations, a tradition which has not completely disappeared even now. In this little Sussex village, so the tale goes, the water supply was pitiful before regular visitor John Ruskin, who sometimes joked that he had missed an alternative career as a civil engineer, and local brewer Henry Willett set up a hydraulic ram at the source of the stream next to the Shepherd & Dog pub and from there pumped water all over the village, including to a fountain a couple of hundred yards away. This site has all the details. The well-house covering the ram is an appropriately Gothic little building and, like the fountain which is a memorial to Ruskin and his ingenuity, incorporates Bible texts in lovely encaustic tiles. 

Back to School

From toast to bread to an encounter with the Risen Lord: this was the narrative trajectory, yesterday, of my first assembly at the Infants School since September. I began by asking the children about what they'd had for breakfast, following which we discussed what you needed to make bread, and then I told the story of the Road to Emmaus, which isn't in the Lion Storyteller Bible which they are customarily read from so I presume most of them had never heard it. It was either that, or the life of St Alphege whose feast day it was and for once I shied away from bishops, martyrdom and Danish invaders. 'Did you say Emmaus in the story?' one girl asked. 'I go to a church, it's not your church, but it's called Emmaus Church'. 

I realised that thanks to my disconnection from the school over the last year I could only name a handful of the children (or rather a smaller handful than I used to know). They still seem to know who I am when I meet them about the roads of the parish, but this is just one aspect of the church's life which needs some urgent rebuilding as we start to get back into gear again.
 

At Last, Some Churches

My break this week helpfully coincided with some local churches reopening to visitors (some of whom might have been looking to commemorate Prince Philip) and they're an interesting collection. Apart from a low-key Lady Chapel with a blue frontal on the altar, St Nicholas's Thames Ditton seems to have avoided any contact with the Catholic movement at all, but the East Molesey churches have certainly been affected by it - even if they've moved on now. The first sign of interest at St Paul's comes before you even go in, as there's a holy water stoup beside the door. That's empty, but the Sacrament is still reserved inside and there are Stations of the Cross which look post-World War Two to me. I couldn't tell when the carpeted dais was installed, but the Catholic fixtures are now relics of a past the church has left behind: the tambourine resting on the unremarkable nave altar is symbolic ...

No lack of detail along the road at St Mary's, though, where I was told very definitely that the reordering of the nave took place in 2015 and the chancel a couple of years later. Here, the nave has been cleared and carpeted, fitted with metal-framed chairs, and the 1929 chancel screen left in place to provide a backdrop for the band (it's the sort of church where that's the centre of attention). Behind the screen, the old chancel is kept as a beautiful space though I'm not sure what they do with it. They have a range of sumptuous altar frontals and a nice Art Nouveau cross of a type I've seen elsewhere, but I can't quite work out where to place the church as a whole. There are Eucharistic motifs and the Instruments of the Passion carved into the wooden reredos, and three sedilia next to the altar now very strikingly bisected by a prie-dieu repositioned and repurposed as a sound system desk, but I can't see any sign that the chancel screen had a rood or a cross on it, or that there was ever an aumbry anywhere. 

The story is a bit unclear at Chobham too, where St Andrew's is a heavily restored medieval church with the Sacrament reserved in a Lady Chapel with a jarring modern altar frontal (the aumbry door embroidery looks very like what we saw at Shere). It has a stone dais leading into the nave, but no sign of a nave altar, nor do there seem to have been choir stalls which your standard Victorian restoration would normally have put in. The panelling round the altar is dated both 1937 and 1950 and the pews look more modern than you would usually expect (the latest memorial date they bear is 1977 but they must have been installed long before that). On the north side of the church opposite the Lady Chapel is another chapel whose altar must once have had curtains on three sides but it's a bit of a junkyard now. At least that cabinet blocks the view of the altar frontal. I can't really work out what's happened with this church.

Finally to St James's Weybridge, a JL Pearson-designed church which I know well and which furnishes far too many clues to a varied past to describe here, a past that includes the illegal requiem mass conducted by Rector Edward Rose in 1866, an incumbent in the 1930s who had been curate at All Saints' Margaret Street, and a gentle downward slide in churchpersonship during the 1970s and 80s abruptly ended by an upward heave in the mid-1990s. The current incumbent is a devotee of St Pio and you will now find an icon of the Padre in St James's, as well as one of the church's patron saint on the grandiose High Altar; you can also see from these photos that while the church was open for people to pay their respects to the Duke of Edinburgh, the altar frontal has not been changed to purple as the Diocese of Guildford rather shockingly advised us, and it is the Blessed Sacrament in its monstrance which has central place. You can also see in these images the bizarre triptych in the All Souls Chapel (a WW1 memorial, as these things so often are) which bears an image of Sir Galahad, presumably as an epitome of Christian knighthood; and St James's 'Trisagion' altar and accompanying furniture, consecrated by Rowan Williams, no less, in 2007 and helping to make this a rather unique church within the Catholic tradition.