A Nice Try

The young woman called on the church office phone: 'I'm following up the phone conversation we had in January. The books you agreed to sponsor as part of our anti-bullying campaign are ready for distribution to the schools of your choice: they have your organisation's details in the front and we just need to sort out where they're going to go and the payment.' I had no memory of any such conversation and said so. I asked whether they had paperwork describing this agreement we had supposedly had come to: they had, the woman said, and a recording of the conversation which she could forward to me. I could just about envisage I might have had some vague discussion on the phone in which an idea was run past me, and some over-enthusiastic person could have run with that idea, but had there been paperwork even I would surely have remembered. I would wait with interest, I said, for copies to be sent on to us.

A moment's Googling revealed that this scam has been going on for at least ten years. The scammers call charities, social organisations and sometimes even businesses (one case concerned a hairdressers' in Bournemouth) in the hope that, like me, they'll assume that someone somewhere in the organisation has agreed to this, or that they have themselves forgotten what they may have said six months before, and they'll cough up. For bigger companies or charities they send a letter and an invoice for a plausible but not huge amount of money, say £200 or less, assuming that a busy accounts department will simply pay it without asking any questions about it: a fraud that relies on the unreliability of human memory, and organisational un-curiosity. 

In the Cloud

It’s been a long time since I last had the experience of not wanting to get up for several mornings. I feel ashamed of it, because so many of my lovely friends battle illness and disability and my issues are petty in comparison: I know that, although it’s related to external circumstances, it’s not proportionate to them. I don’t justify the feeling, I just recognise it as a fact.

Metropolitan Anthony said that when he found himself in the cloud, he would open his letters and not even attempt to do anything more active (and, as his biographer Gillian Crow pointed out, that didn’t mean he actually read them); and that if he couldn’t face that, he would read; and that if he couldn’t even read, he would clean his room. I find at these times that even cleaning requires effort. At the moment I’m preparing for a party at the end of the month and want to clean the whole house more thoroughly than usual, and this afternoon intended to do one bit of my unrealistically vast kitchen: at several points in that process I had absolutely to force myself to carry on with it, the main impetus coming from the thought that I couldn’t leave it half-done. What I want to do is sleep, because sleep seems more rewarding than wakefulness.

It is of course a very quiet season in the life of Swanvale Halt parish at present and there have been times recently when I sit and think what I could usefully do next. Perhaps I ought to embrace this as an opportunity and not try to do anything in particular.

This morning would have been the annual open-air ecumenical service at Hornington, had the rain not forced a retreat into the Baptist Church. The worship songs were dull (even discounting for my disaffection, I think they genuinely were) and there was nothing to break through my mood. I did all I could to prevent my indifference hardening into cynicism. There was the opportunity to ‘receive prayer’ in a side room afterwards, and I thought I might do that: just tell whoever it was that I was bare and dry, and hope that it might be a means of God doing something with me. But when I looked through the door, the three Baptist Church members offering prayer were seated in a semicircle talking to each other. I didn’t think I could expose myself to that. I couldn’t walk all that way across the carpeted floor to that group of assessing faces (What’s he doing here?), so I went home instead. As an ordained person I’m used to brazening it out, and I couldn’t face it: what must anyone else feel like?

And so I remain in the cloud for now. It seems that when I have something liturgical to do I can pretend it’s not there – something else takes over, the Holy Spirit, perhaps. That’s a comfort. But I’m not pushing it, in case it breaks.

Dialogue

A few miles away at Steepmoor they are in interregnum at the moment, and likely to remain so until the New Year. They will soon be losing the curate, too, who is heading off to look after three churches in the central wilderness of the Guildford Diocese. She’s on holiday so leaving Marion to do what she could at Swanvale Halt with the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows I zoomed down the A3 to Steepmoor to take their 10am service.

Except I didn’t really. I knew they had a preacher, which was fine; more than fine, in fact. I didn’t know they had a ‘Service Leader’ as well. He introduced the service, read the Collect, led the intercessions, and in fact was down to do everything until the Peace apart from the Scripture readings. I levered myself into leading the Confession and Absolution although I did spot from the order of service that it was in the permissive form meaning that a layperson could lead it (but in the presence of a priest, technically shouldn’t). I should have let them do everything in the way they expected, really, but was caught out.

It’s an entirely different way of thinking about the Eucharist. In the Catholic tradition (followed by most Anglican liturgical advice) the Eucharist is a single action from beginning to end, and so should be led by the same person. The whole thing constitutes a sort of dialogue, a dance in which priest and laypeople have prescribed roles to play. The representative nature of the ordained person means that they are the ones who speak the words of the Church as a whole, which is why the priest should top-and-tail the service, pronounce the absolution and read the collect, and why the deacon should read the Gospel.

At Steepmoor, which has an ‘open evangelical’ tradition, they have a lower view of ordination and a higher view of lay ministry. This sees the Eucharist as a collection of tasks of which ‘doing the magic’ (the phrase they used) over the bread and wine is only one. Anything else can be done by laypeople – including, at Steepmoor, reading the Gospel, which the preacher did; preaching a sermon and reading the words of Jesus are naturally linked, in this view. I’ve experienced this model of worship only once before, at St Aldate’s in Oxford, and don’t know how widespread it is. 

The instruction that, unless given special dispensation by the bishop, a priest can’t celebrate the Eucharist alone but must have a layperson present, has always expressed to me our mutual dependence on one another to carry out the work of God. The specific roles of ordained people in the liturgy, it seems to me, mark a step further in emphasising the fact that we human beings are not interchangeable. If anyone can perform any liturgical act, ultimately that sort of absolute dependence ceases to be signalled formally. It seems like a liberal and egalitarian approach, but I’m not sure it is: it devolves responsibility on specialists no less surely than relying on ordained people, with the difference that those specialists are locally and informally determined and appointed. They appear to be interchangeable people, and yet signal the importance of skills and aptitudes rather than role, and so aren’t really exchangeable one for the other at all. I’m not at all convinced this is completely to the good.

Our Lady of the Snows

The appearance in the church calendar of the observance of Our Lady of the Snows over the weekend has caused both consternation and amusement at Swanvale Halt. It doesn’t feature even in the Roman Catholic calendar now, having been redesignated ‘The Dedication of the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore’ since 1969 when various dubious feasts were struck out in the same wave of rationalism that bore down such beloved saints as George and Catherine. I can’t see why the idea of a miraculous snowfall on the Esquiline Hill on August 5^th in mid-4^th century Rome determining the site of a new church is prima facie any less likely than a lot of what Jesus got up to. There’s always an illustration from Father Ted, and I’m put in mind of Fr Dougal boggling, ‘Ah come on, Ted. That’s almost as mad as that thing you told me about the loaves and the fishes.’

The point is that Our Lady of the Snows is the only Marian feast day this year which falls on a Sunday and so in the interest of varying the diet it would be fun to include it (and, as I told them at the 8am mass, if you can’t have fun with your religion it’s a mean and paltry thing). It also gave me a chance to bless, and use, the ‘new’ blue Marian altar hangings. These are only new in a sense. We used to have a Marian frontal, an all-over sheet of silvery material decorated with two blue orphreys of lilies on velvet, a set of silver-edged blue stars, and the Maria Regina monogram in the centre, but at some stage in the distant past it had had communion wine tipped over it and was unusable. A little while ago our churchwarden’s sister-in-law discovered a length of dramatic blue fabric in the basement of their house, a house which has a particular spiritual history you will have to take my word about. As this happened right at the time I was thinking about the Marian frontal I thought it might be A Sign. It was probably not A Sign that I should have attempted to make it all myself with my very limited sewing skills but once I’d begun I felt honour bound to carry on. The result is not entirely unsuccessful (especially when all the lights in the church are on, and from a distance) though there are a couple of amendments I want to make, even now. The velvet orphreys, lilies and monogram have been reused, and though I am far from being a Marian devotee God's Mum deserves her place. 

Inky Blackness

The bottle of ‘Registrar’s Ink Blue-Black’ sits on the desk in the vestry, and occasionally I’ve tried to use it. In theory, you’re supposed to use it to fill out legal documents such as the Marriage Registers as it makes the most permanent mark available. We don’t have many weddings in Swanvale Halt so, as others have before me when they’ve been feeling enthusiastic, now and again I’ve tried to use it for the service and baptism registers, which isn’t strictly necessary as these aren’t legal documents. When I arrived, I remember, the register entries were pale and ghostly, a sort of mucky grey-brown, and when we bought a new bottle of ink they went onto the page splendidly black and shiny – for a while. Then it got harder again.

Pen after pen got clogged up with ink. I washed them out but it didn’t seem to make writing any easier. I blamed buying cheap fountain pens and scaled up to a mid-range Parker (other brands are available). This Saturday morning as Marion got ready to marry a couple later on in the day I offered to write out the marriage registers and discovered that the pen was, once again, uselessly gunged up. I tried to pump ink through it and the nib popped off the end under the pressure.

It couldn’t be the pen at fault so it had to be the ink. What was special about ‘Registrar’s Ink’ that caused these problems? I decided at last to find out.

Old-fashioned black ink – old-fashioned enough to have been used across Europe for centuries – is made from iron sulphate and oak gall. It’s permanent because its corrosive qualities etch its marks into the writing surface, but that means it’s only suitable for dip-pens, and it plays havoc with capillary-action fountain pens. The modern versions of the ink which substitute the old substances with synthetic ones will still clog pens up, and the manufacturers advise that users flush pens out after each use. Even the bottled ink deteriorates over time, which is presumably why it starts looking nice and ‘inky’ and then goes pale and watery.

Why have I not learned this little, practical detail until thirteen years after my ordination and nine after becoming an incumbent? Sense declares itself at last. I’m afraid that on this occasion the registers had to be made out and signed in ordinary India Ink, which would I’m sure be much to the Registrars’ disgust were they to know about it. But then when I arrived to look after Goremead church back in 2008 I found some entries in their registers written in blue biro …

Selsey

Another hot and clear day on Thursday persuaded me to zoom down to the south coast again, this time to Selsey. It was quite a long way to go mainly to sit by the sea and eat lunch, but doing so is such a pleasure it was worth doing. The coastline curves round to Eastbourne and I and Ms Kittywitch waved at each other via text.

I hadn't known that the town of Selsey is relatively new, having grown up from the late 1800s on the site of a few fishermen's cottages (some of which you can still pick out) to cater for seaside visitors. The church was moved stone by stone to a new location, leaving just the stump of the chancel at the original site, forming the Chapel of St Wilfrid. The chapel has a variety of interesting modern glass, including this window appropriately depicting water birds, and a much-defaced Tudor tomb (that's St George in the angle):

Not far from the chapel is a footpath leading to the nature reserve of Pagham Harbour. Marshland is a kind of landscape which often has a strange, isolated feel even when it's close to civilisation, and this is true of Pagham Harbour, a long-silted-up lagoon which was once of some importance. The alternate stripes of blue water and green reeds, speckled with occasional far-off flurries of birds, were completely unexpected and made me thankful I went along that path on a whim.

Bacchinalia

My discovery of a pile of nice Bargate stone hidden at the side of my garden under a heap of leaves and earth led me to think that the 'Shrine of Bacchus' could be made to look like a proper Roman shrine, and so it now is. More or less, anyway. I would like to get a fountain flowing through Bacchus's mouth but the Shrine is in a very shady part of the garden and it'll need either a battery pump or a very highly-placed solar cell. I'd use water rather than wine, though come to think of it, it could be coloured ...