It Sounds So Simple

One of the actions listed in our Church Development Plan is to equip our people with more practical advice on talking about faith. When I, Grant the churchwarden and Celine from the congregation had our session with the diocesan facilitator, she asked what thought had been given to how, if possible, activities such as the Toddler Group might have scope to lead those who take part to ask questions about faith. 'Everyone will just discount what you say because you're the clergyperson', she told me reasonably, 'So it's the laypeople who have to do the work'. I think you have to be careful with the Talking Jesus stuff: some years ago there was a study - I wrote about it here at the time, but now can't find the reference - that produced the shocking result that more non-Christians reported feeling more negative towards faith as a result of talking to a Christian that those that felt more positive. But if we are even to have a fairly open and receptive conversation with a non-Christian society, somebody has to start that conversation, and it will by definition have to be us. 

So I've begun looking through a set of resources on the diocesan website which is intended to help church leaders think about evangelism. Now to me the word 'leader' is one that gets my back up instantly, but in fact the material I've scanned rapidly through so far seems quite honest, modest and straightforward; it may turn out to be like the full-on Alpha Course and go batshitcrazy before the end, but for now I'm surprisingly favourable. In one short video Dr Sandra Millar of Gloucester Diocese outlines some findings of the research on how people outside the Church of England perceive it and, when discussing how contacts made through the occasional offices can affect those perceptions, advised us always to offer to pray with people. After all, she says, the worst people can say is 'No thank you', and no one else is going to.

Strangely for someone who gets paid to devote their attention to the spiritual life, I have always found this really hard to do. Occasionally if there has seemed to be an issue I particularly want to lay before God - a funeral with circumstances which may prove difficult, for instance - I do pray in my meeting with the next-of-kin, but mainly I'm acutely aware that the people I'm dealing with probably won't be used to praying, and fight shy of doing so, leaving me with the feeling that I've short-changed the Lord and them. 

Prayer starts not from what you think you ought to say, but what you want to say. What do I want to say to God about the souls I meet? How can I put it simply - because simplicity is what they will need, not a display of eloquence and would-be insight? I might say something like this:

    Lord, please bless these good people.

    Please hear their hopes and fears.

    Please strengthen them in all they have to do. 

Perhaps it's always been that straightforward.

Crooksbury Hill & Waverley Abbey

My days off being absorbed by record office work, I haven't been on a proper walk for a long time. Apart from a desperate attempt to escape the Clergy Triennial Conference, and an excursion around follies near Dorking in May (neither of which really count), it's been April since I ventured out for a stroll. Today's walk was more of a stroll-ette as a) I was working this morning and b) I'm afflicted by a bout of plantar-fasciitis at the moment which makes a lot of walking a bit of a strain. So I didn't go anywhere I hadn't seen before, though I followed slightly different paths to the trig. pillar on the top of Crooksbury Hill and then down to Waverley Abbey. The paths were surprisingly busy with Bank Holiday business, but the Soldier's Ring in the woods north of the Abbey was strangely calm - and calmly strange, even if you wouldn't have noticed you were walking across a hillfort unless you knew it was there. I continue to be surprised by Waverley Abbey's ruins: I've been there innumerable times, but always find new views and angles to enjoy.

How to Steal from a Museum

People who are not fortunate enough to have worked in the magical world of museums are often surprised to discover how much of their collections usually remain shut away in the stores. Sometimes this surprise is tinged with a blush of outrage, as though wonderful things are being kept from them, the curators hoarding them behind the scenes to enjoy without pesky visitors getting in the way. Of course, this is indeed how we regard the wretched masses who come through our doors (or the wretched handfuls, in most cases), but that picture is not really accurate. For the most part, you would find wandering corridors filled with what museums hold in their reserve collections massively dull.

Consider, for instance, the mighty British Museum, arguably the greatest such institution in the world. We will leave to one side, for now, the claims of rivals from the Guggenheim to the Braxiatel Collection, or questions of how it came to in that position in the first place. It has (so we are told) about 8 million items in its vaults, and roughly 80,000 on display, but you don’t really want to look at tray after tray of Anglo-Saxon coins. The other great national museums are the same: only a fraction of the Natural History Museum’s holdings are out on show, but most of what’s in the stores are drawers full of beetles and you have to be really, really interested in beetles to get any fun out of that. The national museums are universities of material culture: they are where you learn to tell an Offan penny from a Northumbrian sceatta, or mormolyce phyllodes from mormolyce tridens.

I have never worked anywhere like that, but even humbler institutions function in the same sort of way. My museum workplaces were the Priest’s House Museum in Wimborne (collection: about 13,000 items, provided you counted ten boxes of iron nails from the Tarrant Hinton Roman Villa as a single entry), the Royal Engineers Museum in Chatham (about 25,000), and Wycombe Museum in High Wycombe (about 20,000). Museums like this don’t usually have vast reserve holdings of single categories of item for scholars to examine, but they tend to store two groups of artefacts: objects that might go on display at some stage, for a special exhibition or when the galleries are reorganised; and things that will probably never fit in a show, but which illustrate the subject at hand and so need to be held onto.

The Priest’s House had undergone a complete evacuation and refurbishment in 1990-1991, just before I arrived there, so we had the advantage that every single item in the place had been recorded during the process, however sketchily, while the RE Museum had pretty well-established documentation procedures dating back to the early 1900s when it was established; even there, we had objects that couldn’t be readily matched up with records due to inadequate description, or things that had gone astray. I vividly remember retrospectively cataloguing a group of items supposedly related to General Gordon of Khartoum that had never been properly listed before, including ‘Gordon’s last pencil’, ‘Gordon’s last buttonhole’, ‘a piece of lace off Gordon’s chemise’, and ‘a fly said to have walked on Gordon’s nose’ which turned out to be a dark blob glued on a bit of card. At Wycombe, we were painfully aware of the odd ‘black hole’ in the attics with boxes whose contents were not completely familiar to us. There was, for instance, a cache of items related to a local man with no information as to how we acquired it: I often thought it would make a nice little temporary display, but I left without even being completely aware of what was in it. The catalogue, then, was fairly good, but unless we needed a particular item we didn’t tend to check. The question occasionally arose, at Wycombe at any rate, whether we should do a random check every now and again, pick a box and make sure its actual contents matched what the computer said should be in it. But it was hard to fit such activities in. Imagine how much harder it might be keep track of 8 million objects, rather than 1/320^th of that.

At the PHM and the RE Museum I was solely responsible for cataloguing, and had some input into that area at Wycombe even though Ms Quercus was the Documentation Officer. But at all three I could wander the stores at will, and when time was on my hands, that was how I occupied it. Most of what we owned, in all three places, was the kind of stuff, generously, that it would have been hard even to give away. Anything that was particularly valuable tended to be big, and it would be a tough job to go home in the evening with a six-foot painting of the Earl of Shelburne unnoticed under your coat. However, technically, had I wanted to, it would have been more than possible to abstract any number of objects to my own use and nobody would have been any the wiser until years later.

You can’t very easily strip-search everyone with access to your museum’s stores before they leave each night to make sure they haven’t got an Etruscan ring up their bottom. As well as relying on the fact that much of what we store is outrageous tat that nobody could sell anyway, we assume that our staff are dedicated professionals who love their collections and the museums they work for. Perhaps we need to check the boxes now and again as well; but then I say I need to cross-reference an odd invoice and payment at the church office every month, and do I manage that? 

Who Peeps From The Unhewn Dolmen Arch?

A long while ago I posted about my interactions with Ms V, the historical ultra-sceptic whose shifting beliefs about the origins of Cerne Abbey and various other Dark Age issues gradually reduced me to incredulity. I concluded that to justify those ideas, someone would have to dispose of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon writing. Yesterday, as a result of a similar discussion about what may or may not have happened at Beckery just west of Glastonbury in the 5^th century (archaeological opinion at the moment is that it was a very early monastic settlement of some kind), I spent far too long discovering that yes, that is indeed exactly the proposition. Every document claiming to be prior to the 12^th century is a forgery. 

At this point, because it would be impossible not to, I will name Ms V fully as Harriet Vered. Her main claim to public notice is The Megalithic Empire (2012), a book arguing that the stone monuments of western Europe were markers in a vast system of trading routes. This is quite a fun suggestion taking advantage of the fact that we don’t really know what most of these places were, even if it doesn’t work in detail (a mystical earth-mysteries site, no less, has a nice review pointing out the gaps in the argument, especially when it cavalierly sweeps aside the possibility of water-based transport in prehistory). Meanwhile, this elderly website promoting the book does so in rather a light-hearted way, suggesting that it is, if not exactly satire as some have guessed, aimed modestly at injecting some new ideas into a field devoid of them; and who could object to that, even if one of the ideas is that modern humans originated not in Africa but the Arctic. It’s positive to have insights coming into the discipline of history from outside, even if they turn out not to have legs.

The Megalithic Empire’s co-author is Michael J Harper, a far more challenging figure, it turns out, than Ms Vered. His other books include 2003’s The History of Britain Revealed, which champions the idea that the inhabitants of the British Isles have always spoken English (not Old English, mind you, but modern English, the stuff I’m typing) and that French and German are derived from it; 2014’s Meetings With Remarkable Forgeries, arguing that ten axial historical texts from Caesar’s De Bello Gallico to Voltaire’s Candide are fakes; and the latest, Revisionist Historiography, which was only published last year and hasn’t received any reviews. It’s a bit expensive for me to try out, especially given the amount I’ve been spending recently.

I grappled with all this rather more than I should have done, but then much of my approach to the world has manuscripts and their implications at its heart. I’m used to people attacking the credibility of the Gospels, and have often made the point that compared to many other ancient texts their credentials are actually rather good, but at least Mr Harper is fair in asserting that virtually every important text historians rely on is fake.

As far as English historical documents are concerned, the Harper-Vered thesis is that there were two great campaigns of forgery, in the 12^th century and the 16^th, both politically-motivated: the first to cement the rule of the Norman kings and the Church they brought with them, and the second to bolster the Tudors and their pet Church as they justified a national identity separate from that of Europe and Rome. This is, I feel, not remotely likely: such initiatives were unnecessary, and the theory requires assuming, contrary to what we know, that texts are no older than the oldest datable copy: that inevitably leads you to look for fakes and forgeries regardless of the circumstances surrounding the texts themselves. Cast an eye towards this interview with Harriet Vered. The interviewer is generally very sympathetic to her ideas, but when (at 0.59) he asks why, given their absolute control over land, the Norman kings couldn’t just give their new abbeys and churches anything they wanted without engaging in an elaborate fraud involving inventing an entire fake history for a country, Ms Vered can’t answer, merely repeating that that’s what happened. At 1.09-1.10, discussing Samuel Pepys’s diary, she clearly thinks it’s prima facie absurd that such a document could have existed for 150 years without being published, and therefore that too must be a much later fake.

Because these assertions don't rest on evidence, I thought there must be a set of beliefs behind them, and so there is. Mr Harper and those he associates with call it Applied Epistemology, though it bears only a remote relationship to the philosophical study which goes under that title. In the account of The Applied Epistemology Library, this is translated into a set of rules to govern enquiry, to which a set of people are committed: AEists, they call themselves. The rules boil down thus:

- If the truth is not simple, prove it!

- If what was differs from what is, prove it!

- If different inputs will produce the same outcome, prove it!

I’m not clear where these dicta come from, and I’m not sure I can think of practical meanings for the last one, but on the face of it these are not particularly objectionable guides to thinking in a variety of disciplines. The AEists don’t often stick to them, though, because there are other motivations operating. It must surely be simpler to believe that English history is real, and its core texts genuine, than to assume they were all produced in two completely otiose campaigns of fraud.

In fact, the bigger rule and the one which clearly excites the AEists more than the stated ones, is the injunction to come up with interesting, unorthodox ideas, even if they involve contradicting yourself. Mr Harper says:

    an orthodoxy is established as soon as two people are agreed on something. This is the origin of the Applied Epistemological mantra 'Everything you say must be original to you (or it isn't worth saying)'.
    To an extremist, and all AE-ists are extremists, if you say something completely original except that you said it last week, an orthodoxy has been formed, and you shouldn't say it. But this is a counsel of perfection and, so as long as you feel a little uncomfortable spouting something you said last week, that is usually enough since it will force the brain to put a slight spin (even a literary flourish) on such a hackneyed thought.
    Obviously you would rip your own tongue out rather than repeat what somebody else said last week. … As long as you get your brain used to constantly 'diving down' you will eventually bottom out ie actually start being compulsively original.

This is, of course, an ideology – a counter-orthodoxy, if you will – and where it takes you is, for instance, claiming (as Mr Harper implied on well-known alternative historian Graham Hancock’s website in 2003), that the Ancient Egyptians created Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika as reservoirs and the northern course of the Nile is due to artificial engineering. One might counter that this is explanation is a lot less ‘simple’ than the Nile not flowing into the Indian Ocean or west to the Atlantic because there are bloody great mountains in the way, or that Lake Victoria doesn’t look ‘squarish’ at all, but one suspects Mr Harper is just saying something plainly ludicrous for the sake of it. Should you be tempted to believe any of this, consider the 14 species of Mastacembelus spiny eels unique to Lake Tanganyika, which would have taken longer than 5000 years to develop.

No, the root of AEism, if such a thing can be said to exist, lies not in high-minded rationalistic principles, but rather in the belief that people are largely liars or fools, and those who expose them should consider themselves superior. You will recognise this as the same energies that drive conspiracy theories. It produces ideas that dissipate when actual data are applied to them, but you have to wonder how much their proponents actually believe in them: perhaps they just find reality a bit dull. It's hard to tell. In Harriet Vered’s interview on Adzcast, she insists that ‘we don’t have a single Anglo-Saxon church in this country’ (which will be news to the good parishioners of Wing, Brixworth, or St Peter’s Monkwearmouth), ‘you can’t date a stone cross’ (pity poor Rosemary Cramp, then, who devoted her entire life to dating Dark Age sculpture), and alleges that orthodox archaeologists force their unsubstantiated ideas on the general public. In fact, for instance, English Heritage who own Stonehenge are quite open in stating that nobody knows what it was for (though they speculate, quite reasonably). Is she ignorant, malicious, or mischievous?

My contrary experience is that people, no matter their degree of ignorance about facts, are generally neither liars nor fools, though they might be either on occasion. And this is probably where my unconscionable credulity arises.

What Is The Lord Trying To Tell Us?

Among the tasks we've set ourselves in our Church Development Plan is the aim 'To establish a group to regularly, deliberately and expectantly for the work of the church'. The idea behind this simple concept is that rather than going off in pursuit of grand schemes that sound good, from employing a musical director to installing a new audiovisual system, we ought first to try and pay attention to what God might have in mind. 'Absolutely right', the Archdeacon endorsed. I spoke to Gizel the lay reader who said she'd had exactly the same idea and she would be happy to run with it. Good, I thought, I wanted this to be something that drew on the spiritual life of the laypeople and got them listening to the voice of the Spirit in some sort of concerted way. We discussed some individuals we reckoned would be likely candidates, souls we could rely on to be thoughtful and reflective.

Gizel held a meeting of herself and the three people we'd identified. One said she prayed the Office daily as part of her obligations as a member of a dispersed religious community, so she didn't think she would have the time to take on anything new. Another stated that his hearing problems made it difficult for him to be involved. The third really wanted to take part in an ecumenical group that prayed for issues relating to the community at large, like the one that used to be run by Marion our curate. 'That really wasn't the point of the exercise', I told Gizel. 'I know', she replied, 'I was somewhat disappointed as well. We could begin with just you and me and take it from there'. We could, but part of the reasoning was to get me out of the way and let God speak to the creativity and thoughtfulness of the laypeople. Perhaps there are others he wants to speak to. Perhaps he doesn't want to speak at all. Surely not.

The Village Show

Before a retired clerical friend posted on Liber Faciorum a few weeks ago about receiving one from someone in his current village, I had no idea tromboncine even existed. Which end do you blow in, I thought. Now they suddenly seem to be everywhere; there was an entire (small) table of them at the Swanvale Halt Village Show yesterday, mostly apparently entered in the Show by children who must particularly enjoy watching their weird shapes developing.

The Show was a spectacular success; I can safely say this as I had nothing to do with it. For years it was organised by the Simpsons, a lovely couple from the congregation. Then last summer Jenny Simpson was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour and by November she was gone. Not surprisingly Andy, her husband, had little stomach for anything after that, and in fact has more or less left the village: he worships at Portsmouth Cathedral now, as they had a flat there, much to my relief as I've seen too many good souls lose their faith after a bereavement. It's a new team that put together the Show this year. Entries were up a third ('the highest since records began' - though records go no further back than 2014, admittedly) and the church made an unprecedented £700, not that we do it to raise money. Most importantly, people enjoyed themselves and we reminded ourselves how community is built up - especially important as our garage is to close and we may well lose our pharmacy before the end of the year, too.

Book Night

A little while ago I reported on Cathi Unsworth's fantastic epic on Goth In The Time Of Thatcher, Season of the Witch, and on Wednesday managed to catch a date in her tour promoting it. The Dublin Castle in Camden, along the road towards Regents Park, I discovered, doesn't serve wine, so I opted for a half of Camden Pale and took it through the swinging doors that led to the music area at the back of the pub. There were about thirty of us listening not just to Ms Unsworth but also to writer Richard Cabut, a gentleman more central to the historiography of Goth than I realised, reading from his novel Looking For A Kiss. Both painted a picture of this particular part of London as a psychogeography of the marginal and the uneasy, which Goth, or Positive Punk, or whatever you might want to call it, fitted into. The authors answered some questions from compere Travis Elborough and from the floor - always a hit-and-miss business, that, but it gave some opportunity to reflect on the debatable politics of Goth.

While I was waiting for the doors to open I wandered down to Gloucester Gate and came across this incredible fountain from 1878 in the form of a Coad-stone folly by the side of the road, looking like a grotto or tiny cave incongruously topped by a bronze milkmaid. I couldn't remember seeing mention of it before, but to my relief it's in Philip Davies's Troughs and Drinking Fountains. He rejoices that Camden Council has been persuaded to restore it. That was in 1989: it could do with a tidy-up again.