All Saints', Weston Green

When posting about St Christopher’s Hinchley Wood a couple of weeks ago, I realised to my mortification that I had neglected to give an account of a similar kind of building in the same part of the county, All Saints’ Weston Green, which I in fact visited in the autumn of 2019! Weston Green church is a little earlier than Hinchley Wood, having been dedicated in 1939, and had a rather more distinguished designer, Sir Edward Maufe, whose works would also include, of course, Guildford Cathedral itself. But the building has many of the same features – a monumental simplicity, plain round arches, sedilia reduced to a basic outline, and the twin ambos either side of the chancel. Old photos show that originally the arrangements included a curtained English altar (as the temporary mission church which preceded it had – though not the same one, as that was smaller); but there was never provision for a choir, interestingly. The Lady Chapel has an integral aumbry and a piscina built into the windowsill, while the altar rails are very typically Maufe, almost exactly the same as the ones in the Cathedral, as is the piscina by the high altar. All Saints’ – and Hinchley Wood, and other churches such as SS Mary & George’s in Sands where I used to worship – fall into a distinct architectural and liturgical category that typified modern churches at that time, between the tail-end of Gothic and later experiments.

Adapting to Circumstances

The garden at Swanvale Halt Rectory is ill-suited for croquet. The lawn area is small so the customary pitch needs to be scaled down. It has two trees in the middle. It has a sunken path to one side, and a severe slope, front-to-back. This means that you only ever really play crazy croquet, a variant I have never heard of, but if we've invented it, then so be it. This includes extra rules, such as being able to retrieve your ball if it rolls down into the path, or legitimately stopping it if it is threatening to do so; and with every stroke you have to take account of the gradient. Or gradients. And the remains of molehills, pits and holes. And, in this year of drought and 'false autumn', the leaves. 

We started late during my Bank Holiday Sunday garden party yesterday, so the croquet had to be not just crazy but also carried out at some speed to fit in the evening meal: I expected some leftovers but did want to ensure some inroads were made into the lasagne. It was such a pleasure to be able to have friends over to share my home for a little while, as I haven't done since 2018: it's always a lot of work, but I get my reward. 

I've learned to prepare as much in advance as possible, making food and freezing it. On Thursday evening the task was to cook the lasagne. Most of my friends are, or at least prefer to be, vegan, so I'd bought some soya milk, but contemplating the pan I was going to use I was pretty sure I'd need more than I had, so set out as the sun set to find some. The Co-Op had none, neither did the corner store nearby. Neither did Sainsbury's. Waitrose was shut. So was the convenience store on the corner. So was Corbett's back in the village. I eventually found some the following morning at the newsagents that contains the post office. They've come to my assistance before when I needed an emergency aubergine.

Time Remaining

Normally, Jill would have been on hand to deliver the Village Show together with her husband Andy. They've managed it with flawless efficiency and good humour for years, but this year Jill was in hospital instead. She's had a terminal cancer diagnosis - though 'terminal' could mean a few months or some years. I went to see her and found her and Andy and daughter Carrie playing Yahtzee to help with her cognition and fine motor functions. The treatment is working in so far as it can, restoring the capacities that have become impossible over the last few days. Jill is keeping a diary of her treatment, in the thought it might help someone. She was delighted to get back the use of her hand so she could send an email to an inmate at the prison where she volunteers who was being released, and who she was worried about. She says, 'I've entered a new world. I have to think what I can do to help in it. It's about what I can do with my time from now on, not what I can't do.'

It is to all the family's credit, as well as Jill's, that they're taking the risk of letting everyone know what's happening, when that means running the gauntlet of people's well-meaning care. But that way her boldness, generosity and hope will, indeed, help.

Analysing Mess

Dr Abacus would, I’m sure, warn all of us that we should pay attention to facts and figures and not our own vague impressions of things. Our recent Messy Church gatherings have been very modestly attended, and my recollection had been that this was quite a long-term phenomenon. But on actually tabulating the figures ahead of a staff team meeting where I wanted to mention it, I found that this wasn’t really the case. We’ve been holding Messy Church events since just before I arrived at Swanvale Halt in 2009 and in this graph you can see how widely attendance has varied: the top line shows the highest attendance of children in each year, the bottom one the lowest, and the one in the middle the mean attendance for all the gatherings in the year concerned. In 2011, 2016 and 2018 the bottom figure is less than half the top one, and it’s very hard to discern the reason why it varies quite so much; some Messy Churches were very sparse, though I think the one in May 2016 only attracted 16 children because I’d forgotten to tell anyone it was happening, so it was a marvel that we had a soul there at all.

The graph shows that the figures for the last few years before the pandemic were not, in fact, declining at all, but experienced the same ups and downs as the earlier period. The most recent peak in the middle of 2018 of 41 children wasn’t far off the all-time maximum of 45 in 2011. Bearing in mind that, counting all the church helpers, the child attenders are typically matched by the same number of adults, 80-90 people results in bedlam, and is really too much for our space and facilities. 70ish is a more comfortable result to aim at.

The latest few years’ results are of limited value: we only had two Messy Churches in 2020 before the first lockdown; two in 2021; and only three so far this year. But our extremely low current figures do seem to be a very clear effect of the pandemic. I think my impression that the decline was more long-term is related to my memory of other aspects of worship - that we’ve been unable to sustain a Sunday School for some years, or that attendance at the Family Service, which drew about a hundred people on a couple of occasions in 2014 and 2015, with 20-25 children, suddenly virtually halved in the course of two years, losing all its children in the process. Why this happened when nothing actually changed with the worship itself remains mysterious; and, in fact, while you can see that our Messy Church’s decline is related to the pandemic, the detail of that is also foggy. Nobody can give us a clear reason.

Village Show 2022

The 2021 Village Show was the first big community event Swanvale Halt was able to stage after the relaxation of the pandemic restrictions, so the sense of excitement and relief of that occasion was always going to be impossible to recreate, quite apart from the challenging conditions for the parish's growers, preservers and bakers this year. But in fact by some measures participation was up. Mind you, we might have to rethink the Photography category, triumphantly won by Sally's husband Jim after he submitted the only entry.

Resisting Restitution

On Tuesday this week, the morning mass readings offered as the Epistle a particularly brutal denunciation of the arrogance of the King of Tyre from Ezekiel, and for the Gospel Jesus’s exchange with the Rich Young Man from Matthew – camels going through the eyes of needles, and so on. I preached about power and wealth, and their spiritual dangers, and how little I would have wanted to be the King of Tyre. The evening brought a radio discussion about the Horniman Museum’s decision to repatriate 72 items from its collection to Nigeria, including twelve of the notorious Benin Bronzes (in fact the Museum decided this a week earlier, but it wasn’t widely reported).

‘Go, sell what you own and give to the poor’, Jesus tells the Rich Young Man, who ‘goes away grieving, for he had many possessions’. Renunciation of things we hold dear is a common theme in Christian life, and as a former museum curator I have to confess I hold dear the collections of the great national museums. The Benin Bronzes are a particularly appalling example of objects looted in an act of imperialist violence, but other museums are positively stuffed with artefacts acquired under dubious circumstances. Even at Wycombe we had a cuneiform brick, which we always joked was a laundry list, and we had no idea how it had ended up with us. But what about the collection of the Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham, another former workplace of mine? Because the RE were involved in every campaign the British Empire ever fought, we had material essentially looted from all over the world, the most striking examples being a Tibetan libation cup made from a human skull and brought back from the Younghusband Expedition, and bits of the Mahdi’s Tomb grabbed during the Omdurman War led by Lord Kitchener to punish the Sudanese for the murder of General Gordon in 1885.

Notwithstanding the grisly insensitivity of receiving and displaying these artefacts, this is all small-scale stuff, and nobody’s clamouring for its repatriation. Most of it is of very little interest to its nations of origin: Egypt isn’t going to ask for all its mummies back, no matter how municipal museums from Buxton to Brighton got hold of them. I think instead about objects of real charismatic power, such as the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum. Who did that ever rightfully belong to – the imperial Turks, the French who occupied Egypt at the time, or the British who seized it from them? I can never walk past the Rosetta Stone without a shiver that here is this thing which not only unlocked an entire landscape of human history and knowledge, but also entered the language – and an uneasy recognition of my own privilege at having it in front of me, whenever I want to get on a train to London and through the august portals of the BM. I am a citizen of a former imperial state, and the bloody processes of history have dumped this artefact of intense human lustre in what amounts to my own cabinet of curiosities. I may share the cabinet with millions of my fellow-citizens; it may not be in my house and only accessible to those I choose to admit; but it is mine, nevertheless. And let us not pretend that giving up, if not it, then objects like it, will hurt. We go away grieving, for our possessions are very great. 

Talking About Wells

A year ago I was very excited to read Celeste Ray's book on global holy well traditions, Sacred Waters, which I thought was the most important contribution to the field of study for many years, worldwide in its scope and interdisciplinary in its approach - exactly what I'd been waiting for! By pure chance I was copied in on a talk Dr Ray was giving this week for the Last Tuesday Society, all the way from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., and really had no choice but to join in: it turned out to be as brilliant as I expected.

To a degree Dr Ray's talk was an introduction to the phenomenon of the holy well for those who might not be aware of it, but her point was that traditions related to the reverence for sacred springs often include 'folk science' that can be of relevance to the management of water resources specifically and rebalancing the human relationship with the environment generally. In this selection of images, you can see that alluded to in reference to what happened in Bali in the 1980s: traditionally, the water management of the rice fields was regulated by reference to rituals carried out at springhead temples, and when this was swept away by more modernistic, technocratic schemes of management designed to raise yields, the results were terrible. I'm not completely sure that such traditions can be maintained separate from their old religious superstructures, though I'm sure Dr Ray is right when she says that a spiritual exploration of well-traditions is 'a good way to hook people into caring for water sources'. As a result of the talk I got into a conversation with someone who'd recently visited the Swallowhead Springs at Avebury and found them dry as a bone, which brings the point home. 

During the Q&A session at the end, I was also struck by Dr Ray's description of how things have changed in Ireland since she first began researching holy well traditions there a generation and more ago:

The divide is the smartphone generation. When I started researching Irish holy wells, my best guides were the little kids on their bikes, they knew where the well was, and who the oldest person in the village was who could spell the saint’s name. .... In the 1980s people had so many terms for different types of holy well, the water … Now that’s all gone. The smartphone is the deathknell of placelore and local tradition.

Can more studied and self-conscious traditions, events, and rituals surrounding water-sources achieve real environmental results, I wonder?