Meeting in the Big House

At various points during the meeting at the house of our suffragan bishop, her cat positively launched itself at the arm of the chair occupied by the Diocesan Director of Training, and then, failing to gain purchase, slipped off back onto the floor, much to the Director's discomfiture. It then ran around the room chasing imaginary things. It would be unfair to suggest this was any kind of metaphor for the activity of the Church of England as a whole. 

We Local Vocations Advisers had been summoned after the departure of the diocesan Vocations Co-ordinator to - well, most of us didn't seem to have had the memo with the agenda, so I think it was mainly exchanging our experiences and outlining the diocese's general approach to the discernment of vocations. The diocese is keen:

• to broaden the body of Advisers to include laypeople and a wider range of people generally;
• to make sure the process isn't so sclerotic and controlled it stops people calling one of the Advisers for a chat and not being immediately channelled down the runnels of The System; 
• to emphasise that vocation includes what people do in their working lives - that the Church needs more Christian teachers, doctors, and so on.

This is of course all to the good, though the bishop also definitely felt that raising the numbers of people being ordained would also encourage people to consider other vocations too. 

'Thank you so much for coming', she said to me and Daniel, the Vicar of Throop at the top end of the diocese. 'It's so important that we do all we can to make sure people from the Catholic end of the Church are encouraged to come forward, it's not healthy if it's all one-way'. Oy, tell me about it. Ideas on a postcard. 

Somewhere downstairs in the house is a cuckoo clock. It cuckooed five times at one point: I checked my watch and discovered it was eight minutes past 8pm. There's another metaphor one should resist.

Come and Play

Before she entered the magical world of theme parks, Cylene the Goth talked to me about her devotion to a video game released in 2012 called Journey, whose adherents form a sort of subculture in themselves. In contrast to a lot of games, it’s neither violent nor competitive, but consists of – you may not be surprised to discover – a journey towards a mountain, glimpsed in the distance, which involves challenges and puzzles in which you may encounter other players, who can assist one another if they choose, but who cannot communicate with each other. Altruism is rewarded and as the player progresses (their ‘character’ is not a muscled hero or a heavy-chested girl with suspiciously revealing and impractical body-armour, but a sexless, abstract robed figure) the music shifts correspondingly. In the climax of the game, which may only take 90 minutes or so to reach, the player arrives at the mountain, ascends it by flight, and is extinguished in a suffusion of light. ‘I never reach the end without crying’, says Cylene, and you can see why: this is very clearly indeed a metaphor for the spiritual life; in fact even more than a metaphor, it’s a way of representing it in a non-religious form, a form so unspecific that players of any ideological tradition could get something out of it.

Not long ago another friend, Karla, who is also a determined gamer, drew attention to this article by Brie Code, a female games designer discussing why people don’t like video games and what her colleagues might do to change that. This is what Ms Code says in conclusion:

I'm not remotely interested in shockingly good graphics, in murder simulators, in guns and knives and swords. I'm not that interested in adrenaline. My own life is thrilling enough. There is enough fear and hatred in the world to get my heart pounding. My Facebook feed and Twitter feed are enough for that. Walking outside in summer clothing is enough for that. I'm interested in care, in characters, in creation, in finding a path forward inside games that helps me find my path forward in life. I am interested in compassion and understanding. I'm interested in connecting. … I want to make games that help other people understand life. ... We should be using this medium to help us adapt to our new, interactive lives. This is how we become relevant. … We want games that aren't gritty, toxic pseudo-realistic pseudo-masculine nonsense nor frustrating time wasters that leave you feeling dead inside. We want games about how each of us could be in the future, how the world could be in the future. We want games built on compassion and respect and fearlessness. This is so much more interesting.

I've never played a video game. I don't think I have any interest in doing so, either, because I don't have time to do all the things I want to as it is. I am, however, interested in the idea that gaming could provide a means for exploring and assimilating life. Via the magic of LiberFaciorum, I asked Karla:

How common do you reckon it is among games designers to think in these very idealistic terms rather than just in terms of supplying a market with entertainment?

To which she replied:

There are a fair number of indie developers who work with concepts like this …  My view of gaming was permanently marked by the game that really turned me into a lifelong devotee of the artform - Ultima VI: The False Prophet, which, although it used the standard structure of a computer role playing game of the time, revolved around themes of virtue ethics, unintended consequences of actions in the name of good, and justice in warfare. Other instalments in the same series looked at issues of racial prejudice, deception and religious intolerance, or demanded that the hero set the world to right not by slaying the Big Bad, but by becoming a moral examplar. They … really shaped my expectations of, interest in and hope for games as a medium to communicate something meaningful.

This all made me reflect that I, a non-gamer, engage in this business of representing life so it can be explored, assimilated and changed, partly through music and even gardening, but mainly through religion. Christian spirituality consists of an immersive, imaginative engagement, by a variety of means, in a story, reading your life and experiences through the lens of that story and adjusting the way you interact with the world as a result. Some time ago I said to a friend that the Church was a sort of Live-Action Role Play, and I only meant it part-facetiously. Apart from the assumption of Christianity that behind its key interpretative narrative lies something, and somebody, absolutely real, the mechanism is exactly the same. For people who have no faith, gaming could provide a means for doing the life-shaping job that religion does for those who have it. But saying that ‘gaming is like religion’ is a little obvious; it’s more interesting to posit that religion is a form of gaming. 

Embroidery and Entombment

Sunny though it was, Thursday turned out to be a day of Gothic concerns. I sped up to London on the train with Is This Desire? on the headphones (a good start) and by noon was at the V&A for ‘Opus Anglicanum’, its show of material from the time – the 14^th and 15^th centuries – when English needlework was the envy of Europe. Amid the dark of the V&A’s temporary exhibition space, islanded within pools of light were works of such sumptuous detail and grandeur that they made one gasp. Of course I’ve seen a lot of this before, illustrated, but to see it in the flesh, in the thread and the silk, is a different matter. I was caught out by how long the vestments are: the great Clare Chasuble would come down nearly to my feet, and your average medieval clergyman would have been a bit shorter than me. Catherine-spotting was rewarding: she was present quite a bit. The ‘Embroiderers’ Lantern’, a hanging table-top-sized lamp with the known names of craftspeople picked out in black fretwork, managed to move me rather: these were the people whose fingers made these beautiful things, whose minds planned them, whose hearts rejoiced to see them complete and ready to be used.

The only one of the ‘magnificent seven’ Victorian cemeteries ringing the capital I’d never visited was Abney Park, so from Kensington that was where I went. The great Egyptian piers of the entrance are rather grander than anything you find inside the rails: there are no big, elaborate monuments or characterful culturally-distinct sections such as you find at Highgate, Kensal Rise, or West Norwood. The cemetery’s status as a nature reserve (like its cousin at Tower Hamlets) means that much of it is even wilder than it would otherwise be, and straying off the main paths is a hazardous enterprise. The tree cover is such that even Abney Park’s grandiose centrepiece, the heroically unattractive Chapel, can easily be missed if you don’t know it’s there, no matter that it’s winter. The sun filters through somewhat reluctantly. There are many moving and pretty corners, though. The Chapel’s being renovated at the moment, hopefully rendering it a bit less dangerous than it is now: my Goth accountant friend Ms Death-and-Taxes was once photographed posing inside it for the cover of Accountancy News, and it looked as though the arches could collapse any moment. In the Visitor Centre I met the custodian, a middle-aged gentleman in a black leather coat and a pair of New-Rock boots who clearly has his ideal job. He was touchingly uncertain what to do when I requested to buy a guidebook and a handful of postcards, implying it was an unexpected eventuality. 

Blue or Not, and Who Might Care

Here’s a recondite little liturgical matter for you. I was mildly surprised to see photos of a couple of my clerical colleagues from deeper in the Anglo-Catholic world than my own location having celebrated mass on New Year’s Day resplendent in blue for the BVM, which would never had occurred to me: at Swanvale Halt we kept it as the Naming and Circumcision of Jesus and, as a Feast of Our Lord rather than Our Lady, in gold.

I hadn’t picked up on the fact that in 1969 Pope Paul VI reclassified January 1^st as ‘The Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God’, I suppose concentrating on the Virgin’s maternal role, which is all very well. However I do wonder whether this is less about her as such, and more about the slight squeamishness we moderns may feel in approaching the fact of Jesus’s, or rather his parents’, obedience to Jewish custom in this inescapable respect. The old Anglican Prayer Book collect is, as usual, brutally upfront about the whole business:

Almighty God, that madest thy blessed Son to be circumcised, and obedient to the law for man: Grant us the true circumcision of the Spirit; that, our hearts, and all our members, being mortified from all worldly and carnal lusts, we may in all things obey thy blessed will.

This is authentically medieval, reflecting the theology implicit in that wonderful New Year hymn ‘Hac in anni ianua’, that Christ’s circumcision is part of his perfect fulfilment of the Old Law and therefore the liberation of humankind from its curse – liberation to obey God’s will in the Spirit rather than by rule-following. The modern Common Worship collect is basically the same as the 1980s version which replaced the BCP, with a bit more inclusive language:

Almighty God, whose blessed Son was circumcised in obedience to the law for our sake, and given the Name that is above every name: give us grace faithfully to bear his Name, to worship him in the freedom of the Spirit, and to proclaim him as Saviour of the world.

You will note that, even though the circumcision of Jesus is mentioned, it’s no longer the major theme of the collect; it’s the element of Jesus being named which has taken over. It does seem very odd to be celebrating the genital mutilation of a small child, however culturally specific and theologically glossed. Perhaps the squeamishness, thinking about it, is less to do with taste so much as the prospect of small children in church (assuming there might be some) lisping innocently to a hapless parent, ‘Mummy, what does circumcised mean?’ However, our Lord’s de-foreskinification did happen (Luke 2.21), and at least the Anglican Church seems actually to be less reluctant to face the fact than our Roman brethren are, or were in 1969 anyway. 

Over on LiberFaciorum a friend-of-a-friend commented on this that ‘Our Lord must shake his head in bemusement at us all’. My question in reply of ‘What does he know about it?’ was only half-facetious. These feasts, fasts and seasons are all means by which we limited human beings encounter, understand and appropriate the unfolding mystery which is Him, and I imagine he is more than content to let us work out for ourselves what best achieves it. What we choose to do with this particular day depends entirely on what signals we might want to send about how we think of ourselves and the Christian communities we are part of. Now, I am no great Marian, and I think Our Lady is a retiring character anyway, surely as satisfied as I am without yet another feast day in addition to her Annunciation, her Dormition, Conception, Visitation, Nativity, Presentation, all those peculiar Roman Catholic ones, and, my personal favourite, Our Lady of the Snows on August 5^th (inconveniently for Anglicans, St Oswald’s Day as well). The inescapable carnality of the Circumcision positively forces people to face up to things about Jesus I think they may sooner not, and so is worth it for that.

Documents and Devotions

Driving down to the record office in Dorchester afforded me one new experience: having to pay for my parking space by phone as I forgot to bring any change. 'Download the app', the voice told me. Not on my phone, which still has a black-and-white licence. I was there to cross-check some well references against the Tithe Maps where they were supposed to appear (though curiously, as it turned out, not all did).  The Dorset History Centre now has most of the county's tithe maps copied and freely available, so I was able to whack through the whole process very swiftly and only had to call up one actual document. I now have a slew of 'new' wells to visit when I come actually to begin that process, such as Paddicks Well at Allington and Orchard Well at Bishop's Caundle, probably none of them very spectacular sites but important to check out.

From there I zoomed to Abbotsbury. My last visit in the summer found the village swaddled in mist but yesterday was beautiful with chilly sunshine, filtered through high, filmy cloud. St Catherine's Chapel is now free of its transitory pigeon residents and their attendant aroma, and, true to its word, English Heritage has repaired the west window which makes the building so much lighter and happier. Far from me being the only person who now leaves prayers there, I found two 'votive deposits' in the niches, mostly candles and tealights but one with the unfamiliar accessory of a glass of white wine next to the photo of a loved one. There were a couple of little Christmassy arrangements on the window ledge, and a big lit candle. 

I wasn't sure I would have enough time to take in the chapel before heading back to Bournemouth for tea with my mum, and then home. But while at the record office I stopped for tea and thumbed through the latest edition of Somerset & Dorset Notes & Queries which just happened to contain a little article on wishing traditions associated with St Catherine, so that was Definitely A Sign. 

Wanting to be terribly helpful, I tidied up all the spent tealights and broken bits of candle from around the chapel into a paper bag, and sat and ate my sandwich. And then left the bag there. 

Start As You Mean to Go On

'Times is 'ard, I'm takin' in laundry', my old vicar in High Wycombe would sometimes jest if you called round to find the utility room draped with drying smalls. It was in line with his instruction to his dog that you might occasionally be able to hear as he came to answer the door, 'Kill, Max! Kill!!'

This bag arrived in the church porch on Christmas Eve, deposited by an unseen person as we were tidying and cleaning ready for the festivities later in the day. The bag mostly contained children's clothes, with a smattering of adult items, a duvet cover, a towel and a couple of wiping-up cloths. Not only that, but they were all just-laundered, and not even dried out (the laundrette is just around the corner). 

I left the bag for a while to see whether anyone came to claim it, and then took it all home. At least the cold weather meant it didn't go mouldy. Days of moving items around between the airing cupboard and the boiler cupboard have finally dried it all out, and what an operation that's been. I could have taken it back to the laundrette and used the tumble-driers there but it would have taken at least two loads and an unknown amount of time, as well as costing a bit.

I've assumed the clothes were deposited at the church because the depositor had some notion we might distribute them to The Poor. A public-spirited if wrong-headed thought, perhaps, but they might have dried it all out first, or even left a note. It's possible that it's a very unkind prank on someone who is now looking for their laundry, and I will put a note in the window of the laundrette just to check, but otherwise I will have to find a charity shop to sort through it all, or take it to a textile bank. As I say, perhaps a charitable thought, but from my point of view entirely unhelpful ...

Swanvale Halt Ecouerée

There was once a Lebanese rapper who went by the name of Clotaire K: I am no fan generally of that genre but liked a couple of his tracks I heard John Peel playing in the early 2000s. French is an ideal language for rap, lending the fundamental daftness of the form a profundity by its unfamiliar distance: it may sound less impressive if you actually are French, of course. Clotaire K combined rap and the French tongue with a variety of (literally) Arabesque touches which added up to something quite beguiling. ‘Beyrouth Ecouerée’, one of the tracks was called, ‘Beirut made sick’, but literally ‘de-hearted’: a reminder of the days when that once-grand city and its long, gradual disintegration was at the centre of the world’s concerns, a time which seems a long way away now. It was a startling image.

As buses trundled out of East Aleppo evacuating those who wanted to leave I thought of ‘Beyrouth Ecouerée’ on my way down the hill to church, just before Christmas. The buildings of this parish are so familiar to me. It doesn’t take a leap of imagination to imagine mortar shells and bombs falling here, blowing them to bits, eviscerating a community and the familiar signs and marks by which it understands itself: there goes the butcher’s, the old cottage opposite the cul-de-sac, the railway station, the church. Or the children at the centre of it, not just general, abstract children but real ones, the ones I know from the Infants School and elsewhere, maimed and damaged by mines and bullets and rushed to the Royal Surrey Hospital, a hospital made chaotic and dangerous as bombs fall around it, too. The children here are not that much different from the ones there. Swanvale Halt with its heart cut out. Or anywhere, it could be.

Of course Beirut, once as much a byword for horror and destruction as Aleppo is now, is doing OK these days, a place where people flee to rather than away from. A heart refound. Happy New Year.