Fire Fire

When churches catch fire, it’s usually due to either an electrical fault or arson. When I was visiting a church a few days ago the archivist told me how very severe damage was caused to the building in the 1990s when someone pushed burning paper through a letterbox which, eccentrically, led into a vestry, and onto a carpet, and from there the flames led to the organ and the woodwork. Vandals have made their presence felt at Swanvale Halt but it’s actually quite hard to set large bits of wood alight: near the candle stand is a scorch mark on the floor where a lighted taper was left burning, but that’s all it did; while on another occasion an Easter Garden was burned but the 17^th-century chest it sat on wasn’t so much as marked. You need a lot of heat to make an impression and a single candle, or even a bagful of candles, won’t do it. Electrical faults are another matter: you try to carry out the inspections at the right time and check the often antique arrangements of the organ, and trust that the risk is fairly low, at least when someone is present in the building.

Low, but not absent. We’ve been aware for some time that our fire precautions – in terms of what to do in the remote eventuality of something happening while the building is in use – need to be tightened up. We had a survey done towards the end of 2019, and I filled out our insurer’s risk assessment template, but then the pandemic intervened and everything ground to a halt. Over the last few weeks, as we suddenly twigged that a range of concerts and other events were coming up, the whole issue lurched into life again. Another consultant visited and did a lot of estimation how many people could get out of our exits: the big clear-out we had recently brought another underused doorway into realistic play for the first time, which helped. Sandra in the office has worked very hard coming up a rough emergency plan, we now have relatively discreet exit signs over the doors, and I have briefed the hirers.

It is vanishingly unlikely that anything could actually happen during an event like a concert: a far greater risk, it seems to me, is that in the heat of the moment (as it were) everyone forgets what they’re supposed to do. Calm and collected action is a harder thing to arrange than an evacuation plan on a bit of paper.

Community Building

One of the people who has joined the congregation pretty recently is Malcolm, and just as I was thinking I ought to call round and visit him, he asked me to do so. It was mild enough to sit in the garden with tea and talk about his pond, but not just that. He's been living in the area for decades, as first a lecturer in physics and then computing, and latterly working in the IT department at the university. He was brought up as a Baptist but much of the time has worshipped at Hilltop, before gravitating towards us over the last few months. He's always been concerned about community issues, from the local development taskforce to promoting the welfare of summer-visiting swifts; and has come to see attending the parish church as a way of integrating his community activism and his spiritual life. 

I've always seen 'community-building' as part of the mission of Swanvale Halt church. This isn't vague and wishful thinking; we try to provide opportunities for people to meet and discover more about one another, sharing experiences and endeavours - to regard one another as more than just anonymous faces passing on the street. Ultimately we are God's, equally in our diversity and need, and while most people will not get as far as articulating it in that way, a church can do something, at least, to counteract the forces that conspire to make us despise and scorn each other, but engage with more of the reality of who we all are. That seems to be a worthwhile endeavour for a Christian community.

'Yes, I agree with you,' Malcolm told me. 'Good man', I confirmed.

St Catherine at Ottershaw

Before long I will report on a day of church-crawling last week, but, just for now, here is an image of St Catherine from Ottershaw church. I could tell it was there before I even went inside the building because I could see the outline of the wheel! The Catherine window is one of a suite in the church supplied by the studio of the great CE Kempe in 1901. The stereotype is that Kempe's glass always has a predominately greeny-yellowy tinge, but you can't see that very much in the Ottershaw windows. What you can see is a sweetness of composition and meticulous detail in the saint's cloak - the black flashes of the ermine, and the roundels of pearl. The window was a great bonus on my day out, as was the marvellous café in Egham where I had tea in an enamel mug and the best chips I think I've ever tasted.

Making an Exception

Some years ago I occasionally used to see Justin around Swanvale Halt. Little did I suspect, when a woman with a heavy foreign accent (Russian, as it turned out) left a message on the church answerphone enquiring about a christening for her son, that I would discover when I went to see the family that Justin was her husband. She did most of the talking, and what a lot of talking it was! I could see quickly that this was not going to work out in the way the Church of England tends to assume. No, the Church (in a Reformation mood) assumes that people should be attentive and take things on board intellectually, but Justin and Sara failed to pick up on anything that I said and it felt as though I was having to plunge through conceptual fog to find out what I needed to know. They couldn’t come up with godparents – Canon Law says there must be ‘at least three, saving that when three cannot conveniently be had [what an Anglican phrase!] two only … may suffice’. Justin has family,  but nowhere nearby and it didn’t sound as though the relationships were of the sort that would produce godparents in the way that people normally rope in their siblings or in-laws. He and Sara didn’t know their neighbours that well, and they couldn’t think of any close friends.

I remembered my beloved accidental god-daughter Karina who I acquired at Lamford when she was baptised at the age of 9 and no godparents could be had, and she is a great delight to me. Could I stand as godfather to little Owen, or could I find a generous soul in the congregation to do so? The trouble is that being a godparent should be a genuine and ongoing relationship, a commitment to the future. I’ve kept in touch with Karina (she’s just left Oxford and gone to Italy to teach English for a year), but she and her mother sang in the Lamford church choir so I already knew them and that they were not crackers: I didn’t really know that about Justin and Sara, and in fact knew next to nothing about them. I didn’t feel I could take them on as a pseudo-family, nor ask anyone else to.

Donald, the retired hospital chaplain who is an occasional worshipper with us, understood this instantly and in fact mentioned it before I did. Although it was irregular, he suggested, perhaps the whole church should be treated as Owen’s godparent. ‘The question is’, Donald said, ‘would sticking to the rules and saying no to this family encourage them in whatever kind of faith they have more than breaking the rules and saying yes?’ and of course you hardly need ask that to answer it.

Sara was very keen that a group of the congregation could attend the baptism as witnesses. Over the last few weeks the family has been coming to the Toddler Group so most of the people who joined in the very small baptism service were helpers at the Group. Those who weren’t were Paul with some of his amazing collection of icons and Lillian the ex-lay reader, who used to work at the British Embassy in Moscow and speaks Russian. It was a quiet, gentle, and thanks to their presence, a very devout gathering. I will defend it, should the bishop ever want to tell me off. 

Finding a Substitute

My recent long break was the first time I've been in the position of leaving the parish to its own devices without any ordained person around. Previously, so far as services are concerned, I could leave our curate Marion to do the lions' share and call in an odd favour or two to make sure she wasn't overburdened. This time, Swanvale Halt has no curate, so lots of favours had to be called on. My stand-ins this time were an ordained couple who are on the staff of Hilltop and are always happy to come to us; an NSM from a neighbouring parish; Catherine, who used to be a member of our congregation before her ordination and now looks after a tiny church nearby; and Colin, chaplain of a public school for whom I have done several weddings and whose chapel I've agreed to preach in later in the year. Just as well, as his was the biggest favour: I wanted him to cover a baptism for a couple who were anxious to have their son baptised before his second birthday and had already delayed the service twice due to plague. Just as knotty a matter as the services is Church Club at the Infants School: for that, I roped in the families worker from Hornington Baptist Church who to my relief found the children 'delightful' and apparently had them acting out the story of David being chosen as King of Israel - not his fight with Goliath, that could have got dangerous.

Parishes in need of a priest to cover a service can always apply to the Register of Clergy on Call, but if they do, they have to pay them the standard fees and expenses. For the period of my holiday, as I worked out the duties, doing that would have cost us £231 rather than the four bottles of wine and a box of chocolates it did, and I'd rather have people I know looking after the congregation, in any case.

As I was in the middle of trying to arrange the cover, the Area Dean reminded me that we'd agreed as a Deanery not to approach people individually, but to send out a general request for help through the Chapter secretary. I thought nobody would respond if I did that, but complied. Nobody responded. Thankfully Catherine and Colin aren't in the Deanery.

Anti Vaxx

Three non-mainstream views from people I know: not because I agree with them, of course, but because they interest me. 

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Neither Julia nor her partner Stan have been vaccinated. They’ve both had bad reactions to vaccinations in the past, and prefer to rely on other measures. Julia says Stan is generally very healthy and never gets colds or bugs, while although she has a range of health difficulties this makes her less worried about covid than you might imagine: it’s just another thing to take into account when she goes out, in the way she always has. She had hand-sanitiser in her bag long before it became the fashion. Reason holds her back from being a full-fat covid-sceptic: ‘people are saying the same thing across the world, so I suppose it must be true.’ This is very sound reasoning. Nevertheless she feels governments are exaggerating the threat in order to take control of more of our lives.

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Florence is an evangelical Christian, and life experiences have given her a firm opposition to abortion and the scientific use of foetal material. This is the root of her objection to the covid vaccines. It leads her to seek out media stories which emphasise their ineffectiveness, and the self-interest of the bodies that produce them and the governments that promote them. It’s not that she’s a covid-denier: she’s had the disease, and been ill with it, and faith pulled her through, she insists. It’s that, for her, the damage of the sickness is outweighed by the immorality of the measures taken to combat it. Because she can’t understand how any Christian could take a different view, she sees the response to the pandemic as an aspect of an ongoing, long-term secular attack on Christian values. Friends who comment on her posts on social media use more extreme language than Florence does: one said that while there might be a case for vaccinating the old, vaccinating young or otherwise healthy people, or children, was ‘demonic’.

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I’ve mentioned Jasper before. He has a rational reason for not wanting to be vaccinated, having had relevant health problems in the past, but even were that not the case his deep ideological stance conditions his attitude to the pandemic as a whole. His basic belief (which I took a long time to work out) is that human beings have within themselves everything they need to solve their problems naturally, and that therefore anyone who promotes scientific or technocratic solutions does so out of self-interest or malign intentions. He sees the medical response to covid as part of a widespread assault on human nature that began decades ago, leading to humans being enslaved by technology and those who control it. Like Florence, he was ill with covid, so he doesn’t think it’s a hoax, but as far as he’s concerned he saw the disease off with meditation and willpower. He not only rages against the powerful individuals he sees as responsible for what’s happening, but is also contemptuous of the majority of people who are meekly falling in line with their agenda, mocks mask-wearing, insists the vaccines are causing the deaths of thousands of people, and describes medical professionals as liars and stooges, and worse. He publicises, very uncritically, anything that seems to endorse this viewpoint. Like Florence’s friends, it’s Jasper’s who say the more extreme things: commenting on his social media posts, they use words like ‘genocide’ to describe the vaccination programme, and predict that the officials of the World Health Organisation will be ‘tried for crimes against humanity’, hanged, or end up in front of ‘a firing squad’.

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All three begin from their own experience, but Florence and Jasper place over theirs an ideological framework which leads them to interpret what has happened to them, and their own instinctive feelings, as just one aspect of something much larger. This larger context is a society-wide conflict in which they are on the side of right, and, precisely because it positions them as part of a minority who understand what is truly going on, powerfully validates who they feel they are. It’s also polarising: it forces them to see everyone else as an ally or an enemy. Violent language both reinforces that sense of polarisation and pushes it farther. I wonder, in the case of the people who comment on Florence’s and Jasper’s posts, how far? I have a university friend who works for the WHO, and would like him to remain safe, thank you.

Missa Not Quite Solitaria

After venturing to Hindhead for the first Sunday of my Autumn break, I played safe this week and went to the 8am mass at the Cathedral. Last time I attended, way, way back in the far-off days of 2019, there were about ten of us present: this time, there were four, including the priest (who I didn't know) and one of the virgers. The other member of the congregation was a woman who had a coughing fit partway through and left. When the sermon began I looked round to find that the virger had slipped out too so I was being preached at on my own. The celebrant did his best to cast his eyes around the empty Lady Chapel, perhaps engaging with the innumerable host of angels who may, possibly, have been present, speaking about Isaiah and the nature of service, exposing ourselves to the chance of suffering. We were back up to a full four a few minutes later. I wonder what has happened at Swanvale Halt while I've been gadding about!