More Sourness!

I got this email yesterday from the Bishop's media officer.

"Dear XXXXX,

Bishop XXXXXX is aware that the Queen's speech at Lambeth Palace last night was very warmly received, and commends it to us as an affirmation of the part the Church of England plays in contemporary Britain:


"Your Grace, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Prince Philip and I are delighted to be with you today to pay tribute to the particular mission of Christianity and the general value of faith in this country.

This gathering is a reminder of how much we owe the nine major religious traditions represented here. They are sources of a rich cultural heritage and have given rise to beautiful sacred objects and holy texts, as we have seen today.

Yet these traditions are also contemporary families of faith. Our religions provide critical guidance for the way we live our lives, and for the way in which we treat each other. Many of the values and ideas we take for granted in this and other countries originate in the ancient wisdom of our traditions. Even the concept of a Jubilee is rooted in the Bible.

Here at Lambeth Palace we should remind ourselves of the significant position of the Church of England in our nation’s life. The concept of our established Church is occasionally misunderstood and, I believe, commonly under-appreciated. Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.

It certainly provides an identity and spiritual dimension for its own many adherents. But also, gently and assuredly, the Church of England has created an environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith to live freely. Woven into the fabric of this country, the Church has helped to build a better society – more and more in active co-operation for the common good with those of other faiths.

This occasion is thus an opportunity to reflect on the importance of faith in creating and sustaining communities all over the United Kingdom. Faith plays a key role in the identity of many millions of people, providing not only a system of belief but also a sense of belonging. It can act as a spur for social action. Indeed, religious groups have a proud track record of helping those in the greatest need, including the sick, the elderly, the lonely and the disadvantaged. They remind us of the responsibilities we have beyond ourselves.

Your Grace, the presence of your fellow distinguished religious leaders and the objects on display demonstrate how each of these traditions has contributed distinctively to the history and development of the United Kingdom. Prince Philip and I wish to send our good wishes, through you, to each of your communities, in the hope that – with the assurance of the protection of our established Church – you will continue to flourish and display strength and vision in your relations with each other and the rest of society."

Now, the Bishop is my Father in Christ to whom I owe due and canonical obedience, to say nothing of the Queen. Nevertheless, I'm afraid I sent a message back saying that, in so far as it describes the position of the Church of England now, Her Majesty may be speaking no more than the truth, but in historical terms, that "environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith" was not graciously granted by the Established Church, but carved out in the teeth of its occasionally violent opposition. I refrained from stating that the Supreme Governor was talking out of her (doubtless very nice) hat which was my first thought. The news that the Church of England has a duty to protect the free exercise of other faiths would have had every Archbishop of Canterbury until perhaps the great Michael Ramsey falling right off the Throne of St Augustine in shock.

Bothering God

It's not a surprise that Heresy Corner has been discussing the ban on saying prayers as part of the agenda of local authority meetings. Along with other local clergy, I've led the prayers at the start of Hornington Town Council meetings on a couple of occasions and couldn't actually remember whether they were part of the formal agenda or not. A congregation member who's an ex-councillor recently confirmed it for me: they aren't, but were quite intentionally put before the formal calling-to-order of the meeting when the practice of praying publicly was revived some years ago. It's a moot point, though: prayers only occur when the Mayor has been led in and the mace put in its place, even if attendance is only recorded from the end of the prayers onwards.

I feel conflicted about leading prayers on these occasions. I'm very aware that there is, let's say, a possibility that, even if none of the councillors positively objects to being present, their degrees of devotion may differ. I therefore find myself framing the petitions in such a way that, if you are serious about offering the business of the Council to God, you can use the time in that way, or if (the Lord forfend) you're indifferent about doing so, you can let the words wash over you. It's not exactly an intense demonstration of faith - not that I am very prone to intense demonstrations of faith. Would the prayers be more genuine, the faith more profound, if the Christian councillors were praying privately on their own without the formality of the meeting and the intervention of a professional?

The Hornington prayers were instituted by the Lib Dems on the Council. I wonder if Dr Evan Harris knows?

'Through the Narrow Gate', by Karen Armstrong

I've just finished reading Karen Armstrong's memoir of her time as a nun in a restrictive Roman Catholic order in the 1960s. A very good read indeed - though given Ms Armstrong's less than fastidious approach to religious history you must wonder, all allowances being made for the novelistic style, whether everything really did happen quite like that. The contrast between the etiolated emotional life of the convent and the warm, supportive community of women students the former nun has entered at the end of the book is a little too neat and tidy. What emerges most strongly is the bizarre attempt such orders made to live entirely in the head, to the extent of repeatedly ignoring what were clearly physical illnesses (not just Karen Armstrong's, though years later her fainting fits were traced to temporal lobe epilepsy) on the grounds that the sisters concerned were hysterical or not being tough enough. 'If seven years in the order taught me anything', Ms Armstrong states, 'it was the relative feebleness of the human will' - a lesson which should have been a fundamental assumption in any Christian spiritual venture. Vatican II got shot of a lot of things which would have been better retained, but the excessive and very unChristian Platonism of the religious orders is not one of them.

St Catherine Commission

I keep meaning to add things to this blog, but the mood keeps passing and I forget what I wanted to say.

This, however, should have up ages ago. My friend Cylene the Goth is an artist, and creates various things under the name of Zoe Monday. Her blog is locatable here.

I commissioned Cylene to produce an image of St Catherine. She settled for watercolour and, as it turned out, gold leaf on a heavy laid paper. I wasn't sure what she would come out with as part of the point of the exercise was leaving it entirely for her to work her imagination on without any specifications from me. I would not, to be honest, have been surprised by something a little bloody and extreme, but as it turned out the treatment Cylene gave Catherine was very 'straight' and classical. 'I just kept thinking of strength and grace', she said; so the only hint of martyrdom is the tiny line of blood around the saint's neck. The halo forms the wheel (which I like) and you also have the martyr's sword and palm. I haven't found a frame and a place to put it yet and must get on with it (perhaps when this year's chutney is out of the way ...).

Turkish Coffee

This is something nice. On Saturday I hosted a small get-together of the London Goths at the Bridge Coffee House in Shoreditch. It was visited by a friend of ours not so long ago, and the pictures on her blog were so enticing I decided to organise a little soirée on an official basis. There were ten of us in the end, and it was a lovely couple of hours spent talking, sipping coffee and nibbling on cake.

The Bridge has been open for a couple of years and the decor is quite astonishing, a mixture of vintage paraphernalia and Turkish harem chic - drapes at the windows, faux-Deco statues holding up faux-Tiffany lamps, gigantic vases, tables smothered in heavy brocade, gilded sofas and glittering mirrors. It was no great surprise to find there, as well as ourselves and the sort of good-looking if ill-dressed young people who tend to inhabit the area (if you're over 30 in Shoreditch you really stick out), a bewhiskered young gentleman in tweed and a victory-rolled forties girl in a dinnerplate hat, yet more proof if proof were needed that Goths and vintage-freaks are often strangely drawn to the same sort of things. 'Just a shame it's in Shoreditch', commented Ms Soomarah.

Sorts of Anger

God has had plenty of rage and frustration directed his way from Swanvale Halt lately. Just after Christmas a devout and lovely lady from the congregation, who's waited nearly two years for a knee operation which has been delayed and delayed owing to infections and problems, was rushed into hospital with what turned out to be a ruptured intestine. This was itself probably due to the painkillers she's been taking at terrifically high levels for months and months to cope with her knee and back. For a while it looked as though she was about to die and I spent four hours with her on New Year's Day in expectation of that happening. But she's still here, now tracheotomised and ileostomised and heaven knows what else, somehow keeping going. I had this in my mind when I preached on the Sunday before last about the injustice of things and the uselessness of some forms of comfort, which people seemed to appreciate. As St Teresa said, 'Lord, no wonder you have so many enemies, when this is the way you treat your friends'.

The other day I heard Mad Trevor ranting and shouting in the church while I was in the hall next door. There's no point intervening when he's like this, and I don't have anything to contribute anyway, so I let him get on with it: I suspect spiritually it's rather positive. What he was saying wasn't even especially mad. He has been somewhat persecuted by life, has had a rough time of things, and, it seems to me, has every right to be angry.

Over at Heresy Corner the Heresiarch's correspondents (including myself)have been commenting on philosopher Alain de Botton's idea for a 'Temple of Atheism' in the City and his theories as to why atheists of his generation are rather less angry and strident than their older fellows, such as Dr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens. As one pointed out, Dr Dawkins isn't even that angry, and pointed us towards this post by Greta Christina, who really is.

I could make niggling points about bits of it, but, in broad terms, I find it unanswerable. There is so very, very much for Christians to be ashamed of historically, and to guard against in the way they try to think now, and any sense of Christian entitlement to special treatment from a largely non-Christian polity is grotesque.

I sometimes wonder that I am not angry about the right things. All my moods of anger seem essentially selfish, arising from a sense of my own entitlement, of jealousy or wounded amour propre. I have discovered more and more of it thanks to the process of being a priest. But apart from that I'm almost excessively easygoing, very prone to making sympathetic noises to people in bad situations without being able to cut through the emotion and visualise the process that leads to the bad situation, the structure, the relationships of power and injustice. Christ was angry on occasion. Perhaps I need to work on it.

Times of Change

Nearly forty years ago, one of my illustrious predecessors at Swanvale Halt embarked on a reordering of the church, removing the chancel screen, bringing the altar forward, and moving some of the pews so that they faced inward towards it - the sort of thing that many churches at that time and subsequently did. The changes never went any further because Swanvale Halt has never had a lot of cash sloshing around, unlike Lamford, for instance.

Then, two years ago just before I arrived, a longstanding member of the church died and left the church her house, a one-bed 1920s bungalow she'd lived in since 1946. It was just a shell, but we sold it and raised a tidy sum of cash. Now we could begin thinking about the 'final' stage of those changes begun in the 1970s. The floor, the atrocious floor with its twelve different materials ranging from cracked Victorian tiles to battered timber boards stuck down with tape, to the beige carpet all Anglican churches are obliged to have some of, could go, along with the dreadful glaring lights which are so inaccessible we have to wait until more than half of them have blown to justify the cost of bringing in an electrician, and the tatty, viciously uncomfortable pews which were, so the story goes, secondhand when the church was built and which, the church clearers tell me, are 'of no commercial value'.

It's taken since then, but last Friday I put up the statutory notices inviting the good folk of the parish to make comments, objections and representations to the Diocesan Chancellor about the plans. Two years of sketches and diagrams, of berating the architect for being an idle git who spends most of his time in France, and of marvelling when you discover that 'Yes, we have all the information we need to make a decision' actually means, when used by the diocesan powers-that-be, 'No, we don't have the information'. Two years of thinking something is going to happen at a particular point, then having to reschedule not once but three times.

The notices remain up for four weeks, and then, presuming no serious objections are made, we apply to the Chancellor for a faculty for the work. He doesn't usually deny permission once the Diocesan authorities have recommended approval. Then, hopefully early in March, we begin, vacating the church to the gentle attentions of the builders before moving back in some time early in June.

It's terrifying. The vision of a clean-looking, more efficient, comfortable, aesthetically pleasing building is enticing, but once the first pews come out there's no going back. I know it will all be better, but a mere two years in to the job and I'm already more comfortable than I was with the existing structure, its quirks and difficulties.

I was in the office writing out the notices on Friday and one of the older members of the church was there, who remembers not just my predecessor who carried out the first reordering, but the rector before him, too. 'Thank goodness', she said, 'I was cleaning the other day and thought, This all looks so tatty. It's time it was done.'