Hornington Scenes, and Queries

My day off yesterday was only a partial one as there was no other time to squeeze in the Infants School Harvest services first thing, but the afternoon took me to Hornington town to run some errands and I ended up taking out the camera more than I expected. This house was the first thing that struck me: I must have walked past it several times but have never noticed how unusual it is, wedged into an unremarkable terrace but looking like a remnant of something grander.

This alleyway leading onto the High Street seemed, as I imagine Pevsner remarking, 'strikingly metropolitan', like a sidestreet in the City:

Our local Pride event was at the weekend. I toyed with going to catch the end until the PA system broadcast in the direction of the Rectory the most awful rendering of 'Dancing Queen' and persuaded me I really ought to stay at home. One relic of Pride, perhaps, is this rainbow pedestrian crossing over the ring-road. If you were a conservative evangelical, I mused, you'd face the question whether to use it or whether your principles mattered enough to divert you 200 yards to the next crossing.

Finally, another question arises here, in a car spotted by the roadside. This little figure is Buddy Christ from the movie Dogma, which makes one wonder why he appears in this vehicle. If you wanted a Plastic Jesus Ridin' On The Dashboard Of Your Car for genuinely religious reasons, I'd expect you to pick something - well, more standard. He's very cheerful, admittedly.

Huggy Church

A couple of days ago we had a big funeral. Several things went wrong and the memory is so traumatic I'm not going to rehearse them, but they were things that were not fatally disruptive. The deceased lady was a parishioner and mother of a former churchwarden and had been ill a long time, surrounded and looked after by a large family of strong and contrasting opinions and carrying a lot of weight from the past: there was much emotion and I think everyone was simply glad it was done, and done as Priscilla would have wanted, and the things people wanted said, said. One of her grand-daughters present was a Goth girl of about 20. I told her there should be a rule there is at least one Goth at every church service. 

'Some churches are so grim and cold', one of the mourners told me after the service, 'this church feels like it's giving you a hug'. The very first time I ever came into the building, I certainly felt a warmth, and a quiet prayerfulness; I am not a big hugger or a very willing huggee and wouldn't have thought of it in those terms, but I think I'm glad someone else does. Below-pictured is Fr Thesis's church in London, and there's part of me that thinks it's what a church ought really to be like. This is just the Lady Chapel, too.

You can't imagine this church giving you a hug, but it does express the transcendent beauty of God, and in such a building God doesn't seem remote, I find, just different. Does he feel different in the surroundings of Swanvale Halt? Is the church distinct enough from the secular world around it to make it clear how holy and awesome the Lord is, and how he has come to raise us heavenward in heart and soul?

Part of the point of the Christian faith is that the Eternal stoops down to embrace us, to reach us in our fallenness. He does not simply wait for us to find him: he seeks us out. The quietness at the core of our church life we aspire to is enough, I hope, to point to his otherness, his eternity, even though we are humble and lowly and not at all grand, little Swanvale Halt. Sometimes sorrowing souls need a hug.

The Archbishop Flies In

The hall at the independent school not far away was full enough not to make the Archbishop's 'Big Questions' event in our deanery too awkward - but I could tell looking around that the majority of people there were already church members, not the souls on the fringes of faith that the session was originally intended for. I'd faced a quandary: should I come in clericals to demonstrate I was there to show willing, or dress in mufti to pretend to be a real person? In the end I kept my clerical collar more because there was no time to change rather than anything else. I spotted colleagues who had taken either position. The questions were just the ones you could predict people would ask, and nothing Archbishop Justin said in response was any surprise, it has to be said: the only left-field query was one which asked what the Church can do to help the people of Afghanistan and ++Justin's response was that, whatever it might be, he couldn't really tell anyone about it publicly.  The Archbishop left the platform and our Area Dean then spoke to his aides who 'gave their testimony' of coming to faith earlier in life, again quite comfortingly undramatic. It was all quite short and low-key; worthy, but hardly earthshaking.

The whole event was supposed to provide a springboard for evangelism. Churches would invite people on the edges of their worshipping communities to these sessions, and then follow up with enquirers' courses. In a moment of weakness I'd told the organising committee about the one we were planning and there it was, one of only three such courses mentioned in the Big Questions leaflet given out to the audience. I don't know whether I would have been more annoyed to be ignored than I was horrified at the prospect of actually having to do it.

The Mechanics of Grief

'I don't think I've ever grieved anyone', Cylene told me. She discovered a few days ago that her friend Harry has been dead a month and she knew nothing about it. Harry was 31, a young man buffeted by the world and conflicted against his family. Cylene doesn't know whether it was suicide, a drug overdose, an accident of another kind, or whatever. Notwithstanding her own problems, which have seen her hospitalised twice in the last few months, Cylene 'dreamed I could do good things with him, show him something good in life. You know how it is with abused people, sometimes they can never accept anything good for themselves, they attract more abuse'. She could be talking about herself. Now she has only her self-devised magical rituals to try and hold on to Harry's memory, to offer him to - what?

We talked through how a Christian might view the loss of Harry. If you are a conservative evangelical, there is nothing much to say: Harry didn't give himself to Jesus in life, and so must face the penalty of his sins. You might come up with the bogus line I have heard from Christians of that stamp, that in the last moments of life an unbeliever might have accepted the Lord and thus be welcomed into his everlasting mansions. It's hardly likely, is it. Poor Harry never gave the Lord a second thought through his short and unhappy life so what on earth would propel him in that direction as it drew to a close? Was he ever in a place where that would have been likely? Where is the justice in substitutionary atonement for him?

At funeral services I tell people that what is good about us is not lost: how can it be, when God has made it? But how does that relate to our individual identity, salted with purgatorial fire and cleansed of everything unholy, if that process leaves little enough of us behind? I'm not confident what the answer is. Souls like Harry test all our doctrines. 

So I am reading again. The Matthean Beatitudes are as far as I've got; they help a little. I'd never been struck before how little they have to do with faith. Until the last clause, where Jesus tells the crowd that they are blessed if they are reviled for the sake of his name, the statements all proclaim that those who suffer in this earthly life will be rewarded: and that's it. There's no sense in the text that they have to have any kind of faith before that happens: rather that poverty, mourning, and hungering and thirsting after righteousness predisposes a soul in God's direction, that they generate faith. This is God's 'option for the poor': even for those as poor in spirit as Harry, maybe. 

Tempted by Things

My destination this morning was St Paul's Tongham (which I will post about another time), but this took me only a mile or two from Bourne Mill Antiques in Farnham. Once upon a time this, and the Bourne Buildings shed- and garden ornament-emporium next door, known for its splendid advertisements - 'Now Is the Winter of our Discount Sheds', one declared - could provide an entire morning or afternoon out, and I and Ms Formerly Aldgate did that more than once. Then in 2015 Bourne Mill caught fire. Five floors of cramped, timber-framed and tile-roofed rooms packed with stuff were left in a dreadful condition, and took more than four years to reopen: I began to fear it never would. I failed to make it there before the pandemic began, and then finding my way around Bourne Mill's convoluted arrangements trying to stay 2m away from anyone else didn't seem very attractive. So today has been my first trip back since the fire.

'It seems a lot tidier,' I told the woman at the desk who replied that she hoped that was the case. In particular the staircases used to be flanked with shelves and cubbyholes packed with books and junk and that is no longer the case. I suppose it will be some years before the dealers who use Bourne Mill manage to stuff it with unsold stock to the same dizzying level as before. Mind you I looked down one hallway which I didn't remember existing and saw a lamp in the shape of a duck lighting the dark corner so not all Bourne Mill's old surrealism has been lost.

There was a variety of Nice Things I would have been happy to give a home, though I have yet to discover the bust of General Gordon which is my dream find of many years' standing. But the appeal even of nice things has palled over the years and I resist filling my space with more stuff. But I did find this, which was inexpensive and has potential: a clock frame I presume, labelled on the inside AGDA. These are post-War German, apparently. I thought I could stick a mirror in it with some improving inscription about the illusory nature of existence.

This inspired me to do something about a little, battered watercolour I inherited from Dr Bones and which had travelled over the years our of her narrowboat into the boot of my car and then to the garage. I have always been rather fond of it though that fondness has only run to looking at it face-down in its metal frame on top of a dead car battery and thinking that I ought to do something about it. It's finally made it into a new frame, and into the bathroom! 

Revelation at Guildford

Today's SCP eucharist and lunch at the Cathedral made a number of things clear to me. Probably the first was how unobservant I can be. It struck me that the altar furniture in the Lady Chapel where we gathered was really quite surprisingly unattractive, and I couldn't remember ever seeing it before. Yet here the cross and candlesticks are, in this photo, rendered slightly less unappealing by the height of the candles, which today were mere stumps. Perhaps they'd been regilded which caused them to make themselves more apparent to my eye.

As we repaired to the café I further realised how problematic covid protocols now are. We ended up huddled around one table because nobody felt it was their responsibility to start a new one or insist that anyone else did. As soon as my soup was finished I pushed my chair back a little in a pathetic and half-hearted attempt to make a gesture in the direction of physical distancing. Of course now that Dr Spector's ZOE covid symptom tracker has announced that the disease's signs are more or less indistinguishable from a cold's I think I might have it all the time. There is scarcely a day when I don't have a headache, a tickle in the throat, or feel tired. When does one not feel tired!

Everyone else seemed fully clued-up about the resignation of the Bishop of Winchester and his mysterious CV and dubious validity, something which had entirely passed me by. We strove to find something positive to say about the Archbishop of Canterbury's forthcoming evangelistic visit to the diocese, and some of my colleagues worried that any failure to produce the expected waves of converts would be blamed on our unhelpful attitude. Surely there aren't enough of us? Even if we all had dolls of Justin Welby to stick needles in? and most of us, we discovered, had missed the Voodoo module in our training. 

My final discovery was that I am even sloppier than I thought, getting home to find that my phone was nowhere in my bag, or my car. It was apparently on the floor beneath the chair where I'd been sitting, having failed to be properly lodged in the bag. Will I learn from the experience? I only wish I might. 

A Load of Rubbish

The architect who did our Quinquennial Inspection back in June counselled us to seek the advice of a structural engineer about the floor-loading capacity of the loft over the church hall built in the 1980s. In common, I suspect, with your loft if you have one, the church's attracts junk. It is not the only space that does so: the Choir Vestry has also been treated as though it is an infinitely expandable space, and dumped with stuff nobody can quite bear to throw out to the extent that, even if we had much of a choir, it would be hard to fit them in it.

This is something of an inevitable process. The tempting voice that whispers in your ear that 'it would be a shame to get rid of X' or 'Y might come in useful' is not actually that wide of the mark. It may take some time to discover that something isn't going to be used again: that those empty boxes that you didn't make use of for Messy Church and kept just in case (which is partly what you can see in the photo) actually won't be making an appearance any time soon. Sometimes you may not know at first that a particular activity has come to a permanent end and not a temporary one, and so that box of paints and brushes, for instance, is going to sit in a dark corner for 20 years until they are completely incapable of being used. Time tells. When it comes to junking stuff, virtually everything could be of use to someone, but your chance of finding that person might be vanishingly slim. They could be in Ulaanbaatar which is not a lot of good. So a skip was hired, and sits being gradually filled at the house of one of the churchwardens.

The most jarring ambiguities come with old books. I found a little stack of varied copies of the Book of Common Prayer and it certainly goes against the grain just to send these to a skip, but the sad truth is that these are not all that rare: once upon a time pious Anglicans in their hundreds of thousands would have had them, and frankly nobody wants them now. Out they must go. Strangely enough, being a museum curator made me quite ruthless when you might expect it would have the opposite effect: I suppose it gave me an appreciation of the sheer quantity of stuff human beings have produced, and the impossibility of preserving it all. Instead it was precisely the destruction of things that gave surviving stuff its value. 

Examining the loft, and other places, I found:

• A suitcase containing ladies' shoes left over from a tabletop sale
• A xylophone
• A pot full of gravel
• A stack of very home-made wooden easels
• A pottery Nativity set which hasn't been touched in two decades - too delicate for handling and too nasty for best
• A set of speakers labelled 'Wives Group' which seems to have nothing to do with the Wives Group
• A box of Victorian school log-books which should be in the Record Office
• A headless statue of St Joseph - I did know this was there as it came from the Churches Together nativity scene which was vandalised several years ago. I remember people saying that the head might turn up: well, it hasn't. The statue would be about four feet tall if it still possessed its head

- but no sign, probably thankfully, of a Golem.