Bling

Earlier in the year I mentioned the fabric I ordered from Mat. Yulia in Zhytomyr and which near-miraculously made its way here from Ukraine. It's finally been turned into the long-planned new 'best white' set of vestments, and we used them for the first time on Christmas Day. I used our existing Gothic sets, which I think were probably bought to celebrate the church's centenary in 1949, as a model, but in the event opened up the collar by an inch to make it easier to put on: in fact sewing around the collar was the most difficult bit. I'm pleased, because we now have a 'best' set that includes a maniple but doesn't have any gold lamé, and which others will be happy to use! It also stands as something of an expression of solidarity with the people of Ukraine and a reminder of the links between nations, peoples, and international politics. We are all connected.

Swanvale Halt Book Club: 'Tess' by Emma Tennant (1994)

When Emma Tennant’s Tess went into shops in 1994, I hope nobody bought it looking for a light bit of romantic fiction with a happy ending. That’s what you might conclude it was, based on the cover, but if so you’d be sadly disappointed. I thought I had to read it after tackling Queen of Stones earlier in the year, and anticipated it would be a baleful piece of work to judge by its predecessor. I hadn’t expected my initial confusion: Tess is the title, and there are three Tesses – it’s a theme of the book that the fate of women repeats in successive generations, ‘the ballad is played and played again’ – the fictional one imagined by Thomas Hardy, the narrator Liza-Lu’s sister, and the baby to whom the story is being told. There are also two Marys, the narrator’s mother, and her niece. Deft writer as she is, Tennant keeps pointing out in the text who is being referred to, but it takes a while to get your head around the repetitions. There are other aspects of the book that you might struggle to get your head around: it’s moving towards the revelation of a secret, repeatedly signalled by the narrator in case we forget it’s coming, which might have seemed shocking in 1994 but now feels predictable; and the narrative is broken up by wodges of a feminist manifesto which may, or may not, be the author’s own. It might have been better to let the story make the point.

And the point is pointed enough, and well enough made, when the tale gets the chance to: that females are the raw material of the fantasies of males, and suffer for it. Baby Tess, granddaughter of Liza-Lu’s sister Tess, represents the generation who might break the cycle and begin the healing of both humanity and the earth (the novel’s environmental urgency was unusual for the time). Part of Tennant’s programme is to wrest control of the Dorset landscape from Thomas Hardy, and she never misses an opportunity to insult or malign him: in this novel he becomes not a complex and divided man with deep flaws, but an unmitigated monster, so captivated by the imaginary woman he creates that he manipulates and damages every real one he  has anything to do with. The action takes place between Abbotsbury, West Bay and Beaminster, the landscape spared the phantasmagoric treatment evident in Queen of Stones so that Tennant’s characters can realistically inhabit it. She imagines the eagles on the gateposts at Mapperton House coming alive, and mentions in passing the old nightclub that ran on the coast road out of Bridport near Burton Bradstock, and you have to be fairly familiar with the history of Dorset to know about that. Casterbridge seems a long way away.

Tess is ambitious and extreme, but not so complex that you can’t look past its flaws. It’s never going to displace the ‘real’ Tess, but it does enough to stake a place in Hardy’s shadow, insisting that his vision isn’t the only way of looking at Dorset, and at humanity.

No Use Crying

Never was anything so rightly characterised as a mixture of triumph and disaster as Christmas 2022 at Swanvale Halt. The chief instance of the first was the Crib Service, the first time we have followed the old pattern since 2019. I say 'the old pattern', but in fact this was the pattern devised by former curate Marion which we'd only actually done once anyway, and which I cobbled together from her notes. The keynote is the children bringing up the crib figures - nice, robust wooden ones - to form the crib scene. The children were led by Poppy with robe and candle, and that all went pretty swimmingly with a couple of hundred souls in church. But the Midnight - the Midnight was another matter. Now I have always regarded the Midnight Mass as one of the high points of the liturgical year and have worked to set it as a marker of proper Catholic practice, so I already feel a bit pressurised to get it right, not least because there are always going to be people there making an occasional, or even once-a-year visit to church. It's important. This year the choir could muster only two voices, thanks to illness and absences, and we had as organist Corinne who has only just begun playing again after a long gap. She wasn't the most confident of presences and the music was hesitant and a bit inconsistent. There were very few people there anyway - no more than 40 - and I was on edge enough by the time we got to the high altar for communion. Then I noticed Gordon the head server had managed to lose the new charcoal from the thurible, and it lay smoking on the Victorian tiles. The thing now only contained a charcoal that had long gone out, and so though I went through the motions of putting incense in it I knew it wouldn't burn. The altar itself was an inch or two too far towards the wall meaning it was awkward to lean over. And then, somehow, unaccountably, I managed to spill the wine - a big, significant spillage of already-consecrated fluid. I hadn't knocked anything, or caught my sleeve or anything like that: instead it felt as though something unseen had knocked my arm (demons, presumably). It took some time to recover. The tiny miracle was that, although I'd registered to my horror that there was no plastic sheet under the altarcloth and on top of the superfrontal, and although the cloth was soaked in wine, we discovered at the end of the service that none had gone through to the superfrontal. Washing winey linens is one thing; getting consecrated wine out of a piece of kit you can't wash is another. So I went home a little less horrorstruck and shakey, and clutching an armful of linens. 

It all makes me reflect that I may have to retreat from my ideal of how the Midnight works. We seem not to have the resources to run an event on the Lamford pattern, or even how we did it at Goremead that one year I was there. It needs a confident musical lead and if we can't find that, and have to scrape around to find servers and singers, we need to rethink.

The Christmas Day services were fine, thankfully!

And Just the Wrong Time of Year for a Journey

Oh dear, I realise that I have ascribed the name ‘Fr Donald’ to both the vicar of Elmham who runs the local bit of the SCP and my retired hospital chaplain colleague locally. Well, there is little to be done now and I can’t think of an alternative name for the time being and so will just say it was Fr Donald of Elmham who posted on LiberFaciorum yesterday about everything that was happening in the church there this week running up to Christmas. He does it because he loves it, he says.

As you know I have never felt that in the same way! The same period here at Swanvale Halt is very similar, though we will only have the one Crib Service today because the church is quite a bit larger than Elmham’s. This first relatively normal Christmas since 2019 is, as they always tend to be, a dragged-out, draining business, essentially three weeks of the same thing over and over again. I find myself even more than usual clinging on to the recitation of the Office which has doggedly remained in apocalyptic Advent mode even while the rest of the world is singing Hark the Herald. That provides some spiritual balance, it seems, as I try to wrap my vocal chords around the Great O Antiphons. Even those seem to have begun a long time ago, when it was only last Saturday!

This morning my Bible reading was the very last bit of the Gospel of St John, and the phrase that leapt to my attention was Jesus’s instruction to Peter, ‘feed my sheep’. Regardless of what I might be experiencing, and regardless of how remote any of the Christmas activities – the concerts, the turning-on of lights, and so on – might seem to be from the kind of spiritual activity that stands a chance of changing souls, they are all, in varying degrees, food for the sheep and therefore vitally part of what I am supposed to be doing. Weak as I am, I might find a lot of what I do burdensome, even when there are moments of joy and the conviction that the work is right and what I am called to. Perhaps the Lord felt the same. If misery was all I felt, I might be compelled to consider whether I should carry on doing it; but there is still the fundamental sense of rightness, surprisingly often love pokes through the surface, and ultimately I rest on the fact that it is a command: ‘feed my sheep’.

After all, this is what Jesus does, and what we are all called to take part in. I found myself thinking in my prayer time this morning that he who is the Bread of Heaven is laid where the animals feed. In 2000 years of meditation on this mystery I can’t imagine nobody has had this thought before, but I can’t remember anyone mentioning it. It was a bit thunderstriking, terrible and glorious. That's the business we are in. Happy Christmas! 

Season's Greetings

On my way back from the Air Cadets on Tuesday I saw these on a garage door. Now of course my Christmas tree is bedecked with bats and spiders, but I hadn't expected them anywhere else. I'm sure they are not left over from Halloween or I would have spotted them before. But compliments of the season to those responsible, anyway.

Singing All of the Wrong Notes

Weston House is the other care home in the parish, as well as Widelake at its other end. In fact it isn't quite in the parish, but just within the Hornington boundary. However many Swanvale Halt people find their way there, and it's in the area that doesn't really feel like Hornington, being just north of the meadows that delineate the northern edge of the town. There used to be monthly communion services at Weston, led by one of the Hornington pastoral assistants, in which Paula, one of ours, participated: they used reserved sacrament from Hornington church. Naturally all that stopped in the pandemic and, just as we recently started going into Widelake again, the staff at Weston asked if we might be able to hold a service there before Christmas. Canon Jim who is looking after Hornington was extremely content for us to take it on, so we did. In fact Paula - despite now being a local councillor at three different levels! - said it was one of the things she missed most from the pandemic time and would be very happy to lead a service on her own once we'd relaid the ground, so yesterday we went in to do a complete communion service.

I wanted to have an Advent carol and then a Christmas one. I inherited a list of about thirty hymns used at the remote services, mostly copied from the New English Hymnal. Arthur used to come and play the piano for us at Widelake, but again that arrangement has come to an end, so now I have a CD bodged from recordings lifted from Youtube. As far as Advent songs go, the thirty include 'Lo he comes with clouds descending', and 'The Lord will come and will not be slow'. I am always a bit wary of the former because of the bit about gazing on Jesus's glorious scars which I think is somewhat strong meat for those not used to it, so yesterday I went for 'The Lord will come'. Barely anyone in our pretty elderly congregation knew it. I have sometimes wondered how long it will be before what are pretty familiar hymns to anyone who has much to do with ordinary English church life drop out of general knowledge and we're left with 'The Lord is my shepherd' and 'Away in a manger'. There might be some other Advent hymns that would work - 'Long ago prophets knew' is pretty easy to pick up even if you aren't that familiar with it - but there's no time to make the change before we go back to Widelake tomorrow. At least they ought to know 'O little town of Bethlehem'!

Renewal

'I am shocked that you have had a carol service rather than watching the football as the Church of England ordered us to,' said S.D. who I am due to see tomorrow depending on the trains. I pointed out that not only did we have a carol service at Swanvale Halt, but I'd also led the one for the local uniformed groups in the huge public school chapel nearby just as the football was due to start: 'This is obviously the way forward,' said S.D., 'order people not to come to church, and they will'.

'A friend came to visit yesterday and was describing how he and his family decided to go to church last Christmas,' he went on. 'There was a new vicar. Her first words were "We're going to start the service by singing Happy Birthday to Jesus, and I've brought my guitar". They all came out saying they were never going to that church again. So even when people do come to church, we have all these fun new ways of making sure they never, ever come back.'