Malling Abbey in the Snow

After a weekend of trying pastoral encounters in which, eventually, I didn't acquit myself well at all, it was a relief to know that I was setting off for a couple of days at Malling Abbey. It didn't start that well: after pulling off the main road into West Malling High Street that is the first harbinger of the separate world you're entering, and finding my way to the guest room I would be using (it's all much easier now there's a code on the outer door so that you can get in without having to alert the attention of anyone inside), no sooner had I put down my bags than the church office called to say the alarms had gone off at the Rectory. I had to drive all the way back home again. Of course there was nothing identifiable wrong - no break-in, no fallen object that might have set the alarm off. 'It shouldn't have done that,' mused the engineer over the phone. No, it shouldn't. I returned to Kent and said the Office in my room having arrived too late to hear the Sisters sing Vespers. The reading was from the First Letter of St Peter and strangely apposite to the events of the previous few days, so I thought I would frame my reflections around verses from that text. There were several that made sense. 

The general otherworldliness of the Abbey was intensified by the snow that fell yesterday and overnight. I think it snowed during my second stay at Malling, a long while ago now, but that was little more than a dusting. This was quite a heavy blanket, accompanied, this morning, with beautiful lucid sunshine. 

"Designing for Growth"

Before that hard encounter by the roadside in Swanvale Halt I'd been at the new diocesan offices on the Research Park in Guildford. If I wanted to post about something more cheerful, they help: they aim at communicating a combination of professionalism and cuddliness: 'We're glossy and effective, but we're not going to scare you. Would you like a coffee?' I saw three coffee-consuming areas while I was there, two (as I said before) Shoreditch café-like arrangements of colourful plastic seats, one upstairs, one down, and a standing bar round the corner in the upstairs offices. I suppose coffee is the fuel that powers most social and professional interactions so it has to be present, and in fact omnipresent. This is what the main staircase looks like. It wouldn't look out of place in a recently-updated municipal museum:

I was there for a meeting of the local vocations advisors. We were informed that we have lots of ordination candidates going through to selection conferences, but also that an increasing proportion of them are being rejected, so it may be that the drive for more ordinands is resulting in people being passed up the system before they're ready. In the centre of the table was one of those multi-communication pods to allow conference calls, and I wondered how often the Diocese of Guildford needs to do that, or whether all this kit was just inherited from the University from which the Diocese is leasing the building. This new working environment will, at least for a while, make its inhabitants believe that they know what they're doing, though I wonder how long the illusion will last ...

From a View to a Death

[Warning: I didn’t like writing this post so you may not like reading it. There are unsettling elements.]

On the way back from a meeting at Diocesan House (of which more on another occasion) and visiting a couple of parishioners in the hospital, only yards uphill from my house I noticed a squirrel by the roadside and although I wanted to believe its tail was just flicking in the wake of passing cars I suspected it had been struck by a vehicle but was not quite dead. Inspection showed this to be the case. I have killed a squirrel before, an injured one which had been discovered in the church vestry a few years ago, and so, grimly, I fetched my shovel to do the same for this one. I couldn’t bring myself to do it with cars thundering past so had to wait until the road was quiet. The squirrel flinched backwards at my first strike, which – I think – hit the ground just by its snout. This made me very shaky. I want to think that the next blow killed it, although instead of hitting its neck, it struck across the middle. The third would definitely have done it. I calmed down, dug a hole in the bank, and buried the body, and went home and prayed.

The previous occasion was clean and precise, and the animal was dispatched with a single blow across the neck. I remember looking into its dead eyes and seeing into a sort of infinity, a very strange feeling of communion. This time, it was all panicked and grotesque. I hadn’t wanted to leave the squirrel either to die slowly or, worse, to be tormented by a cat which was surely what would have happened. I suppose I could have scooped it up and taken it to the vet, but I thought I could kill it quickly: I certainly wouldn’t have tackled anything bigger. Who knows what it was thinking, whether in fact I caused it more pain and terror than would otherwise have been. Perhaps I was misled by my own inflated sense of responsibility, imagining that I have to do something about everything.

We talk a lot of nonsense about death. I remember someone from the Catholic parish telling me how his father had died in a car accident. ‘They think he had a cardiac arrest at the wheel. They say he wouldn’t have known anything about it, but that’s just what people say, isn’t it? I can’t see how anyone can know.’ He’s right. We know nothing about it. Some deaths seem to be peaceful, and some don’t, but what’s happening in the mind of a person who is beyond communication, even when they are outwardly serene, is a mystery. The only two experiences common to human beings, birth and death, are completely unknown to us. Billions of us have undergone them and billions will, and we will never know what either are actually like. We can’t even agree entirely about what constitutes death. I have no idea whether appalling pain will usher me out of this life, or whether I won’t know anything about it. Even if I fall into a sleep which gradually becomes deeper and deeper, when I sleep now I am aware of dreaming, or not quite being asleep; what is it like to lose awareness, to be aware of losing awareness? Will I panic? Will I be afraid? Will faith be enough to help me across? Will someone do to me what I don't want, acting with the best intentions?

(I will aim at talking about something more cheerful next time.)

Uncovering a bit of Good

While searching online for landlords locally who might be willing to accept tenants claiming benefits on behalf of someone I've been working with for a long while, I came across the website of a company based in Hornington - let's call them Ariel Lettings. They were clearly at least partly a property management company but also had a section of the website for tenants and I couldn't quite work out their business model, so I decided to pop round and visit them. I hadn't phoned up first so they were very surprised anyone had made it along the lane off the High Street to their office, identified only by a sign next to the ground floor doorbell, but kindly spoke to me for a few minutes. They're a not-for-profit enterprise that offers private landlords a management service and also guarantees rents in order to make it easier to place tenants who are homeless, vulnerably housed, or on benefits. They have quite a wide portfolio of properties across ten local authority areas, including some shared houses in Woking, Guildford and elsewhere which are projects directly supported by the councils. Once tenants are in place, Ariel can offer other sorts of support, helping them achieve advances in their situation (such as getting a tenant onto a catering course). I mentioned the case that led me to discover them in the first place, but potential tenants have to be referred to Ariel by the local authority housing department, so it's up to them to decide whether a particular individual is a priority. I was encouraged that an organisation like this exists locally, but wary of the fact that, as so often, the Council is the gatekeeper to effective help.

Enter the Adversary

If you're going to talk to a group of children about Lent, I think you have to talk about the Temptations of Jesus because that's the whole point of Lent; and if you're going to talk about the Temptations you have to grapple with the fact that the narrative has the Devil in it. I note that the Lion Storyteller's Bible, which they use at the Infant School in Swanvale Halt, doesn't go anywhere near Jesus in the Wilderness, probably quite sensibly. Once having done Dante for six-year-olds, I, however, scorn such reasonable caution, and sail towards the rocks of controversy. 

You could retell the story and miss the Devil out completely but that seems a bit of a cop-out. It's not only unfaithful to Scripture, it poses certain dramatic problems. It's a bit like the Doctor Who story The Deadly Assassin which featured Tom Baker on his own without the usual companions to whom he could explain the plot, a situation which Baker quite liked but which forced the scriptwriter, the great Robert Holmes, to pen lots of scenes with the Doctor commenting on what was going on in a strangely absent-minded way. Take out the Devil and Jesus has to talk to himself a lot, and that's no less weird. But you don't want to give the Adversary an unwonted prominence, either.

The story of the Temptations tends to throw Christians into polarisation. Conservative believers like the Devil: they enjoy the sense of drama and challenge to modern modes of thought that the Enemy brings, and so they want to defend the idea that he was really, absolutely there in the Judaean wilderness, whispering in the Saviour's ear. Liberal Christians want to say, Well, that's how they understood things at that time, and now we know better. They want to interpret the story in internal, psychological terms, and recast the Devil not as the Tempter, but as the symbol of temptation. 

I made my peace with this when I realised that the Gospel writers themselves see Jesus's Temptations as a visionary experience. This is very clear from the way the story ends, either with Jesus on top of a mountain (Matthew) or even more dramatically the parapet of the Temple (Luke), whither the Devil has 'taken him', but from which he is not returned once the Devil disappears. It's as though, perhaps, Jesus shakes his head and the experience is over. It's not unreal - that is, it's more than just an internal debate in Jesus's own mind - but nor is it something which takes place in ordinary, physical reality. It's a vision, the kind of thing induced, and in many religious traditions deliberately induced, by long fasting and sensory deprivation. And there is no mountain from which you can see all the kingdoms of the world laid out, is there?

I sat with my folder of stories and told everyone how Jesus was weak and hungry and not sure what was happening to him, because I'm sure this is all true. He would have known the stories of the Devil and wondered whether this was who was talking to him. He rejects the ideas the Devil proposes to him, rebukes him, and finally goes to begin his work. I was happy with that solution to the problem. What the children made of it is another matter, of course.

Away Again with the PCC

It was two-and-a-bit years ago that the PCC of Swanvale Halt took an Away Day to consider the Mission Plan (we're not supposed to call them that now, apparently - they are Church Development Plans, not that it matters what you call them). Over that time my thinking about how to engage in this process has shifted, but it's still vital to bring the lay leadership of the church into the business of deciding its priorities, or it just won't work at all. We'd booked Peper Harow church, which is not far away from Swanvale Halt: a medieval church, decorated by the great Pugin, which dramatically caught fire on Christmas Eve 2007 and which underwent an incredibly expensive reconstruction resulting in an absolutely gorgeous fabric, like a medieval church but spanking new with pristine tiling and ceiling paintings. Half the pompous post-Reformation monuments were unsalvable, leaving only the odd bust and cherub, and a church which is strikingly clear of clutter. As the church is only occasionally used for services, it was always intended that it should be a 'diocesan resource' available for just such things as PCC Away Days.

One of the delights of Peper Harow's restoration, as well as its loo and kitchenette, is underfloor heating. I have felt this working, but it hasn't worked as reliably as one might hope. It wasn't working this Saturday; the churchwarden had helpfully put in heaters on Friday afternoon, but as I set out from my house the car thermometer dropped from 1 degree to freezing to minus-1. Oh dear.

In fact the chill outside made the environment within the building seem all the more palatable, and it's a beautiful setting, amid the Surrey fields. As the sun got going and the time came to 'break into small groups' various Swanvale Halt members decided they were more comfortable out in the churchyard in the increasingly warm late-winter sunshine than in the church itself.

Everyone expressed a great deal of satisfaction with the day. It was good that Rev Facilitator was able to be with us again as he was in 2015, guiding us with gentle encouragement (shame he's retiring). He thinks we've come quite a long way and seem more energised and forward-looking than in the past. I now have a sheaf of papers to batter into some kind of report so that we can take it forward. A job for tomorrow ...

Bright Winter from Corfe to Studland

Last year I passed through Corfe for the first time in many years, unreasonably moved by the grey Purbeck limestone of its cottages and the gaunt Castle looming above the village, but I hadn't gone on the road from there to Studland for a long, long while, and my Mum hadn't been out that way for longer than she could remember - possibly since my Dad was alive. We were there yesterday, for a bright, clear afternoon's drive through old haunts.

It's half-term week, so there were lots of families around though the village wasn't unbearably busy. I'd forgotten that the Museum in Corfe is just a single room!

On a whim we returned not via the way we came, through Wareham, but over the ferry that links Studland on the Purbeck side of Poole Harbour to Sandbanks on the northern side. I don't think I've ever actually taken my own car over the ferry, or at least I don't have a clear memory of having done so. The ferry was changed years ago from the exhilaratingly leaky, rusty vessel I remember from childhood journeys, with its great black spots on cables that shuttled up and down to indicate the direction the ferry was about to move in, but it's still fun. The chains clank and the engines grind into life to prepare you for the two-minute journey between the headlands, and there's still an exciting stink of fuel in the air.