Sins of Omission

Being Bishop's Surrogate for Oaths often puts me in the position of sorting the situation out when churches fail to read banns for people who are getting married or, as quite often happens, people don't realise they need to have them read. That made it doubly embarrassing when, a couple of weeks ago, I realised I had failed to arrange the reading of a couple's banns in Swanvale Halt when I was away. Usually I copy the banns to be read into the register for the first Sunday each month, the month before the wedding concerned. In October my last Sunday before going away was so busy I forgot all about it, and by the time the mistake was discovered it was too late and the couple had to be married by licence instead. 

So the embarrassment was cubed this morning as I realised, on going to check whether there were banns to be read, that the mistake affected a second couple. A second mortifying phone call to explain what had happened and what we were going to do about it. 'If that's the worst thing that goes wrong I'll be pleased!' said the bride-to-be, all understanding. Still, apart from the fact that I will have to fork out to pay for their licence, and apart from the bureaucratic faff, it's the last thing you want as your wedding approaches. I recall one couple coming to see me last year to swear an oath in application for a marriage licence the day before their wedding as the mistake had only been discovered the previous day. They were shaking.

It is a sin because I have not paid attention and caused people upset as a result. But as it was the morning after the accident at the Woking Fireworks not far away from here, the sin was put into perspective. Nobody has died and it can be dealt with. I thought how it might be, not just to suffer from an accident for which someone else is responsible, but also to be that person: what might it take to face your culpability?

Dereliction of Sundry Kinds

After my episode of  'overwalking' on holiday, I finally did what I've been saying for years I should be doing and bought a pair of proper walking boots, which had their first outing yesterday. My friend Cylene often posts images of derelict or abandoned buildings on LiberFaciorum and one of these, not that far away from me, was the focus of my trip. In Nearer Sussex lies the hamlet of Bedham, and Bedham contains a surprise.

Bedham's surprise is a ruined church, sequestered in a steep-sided dell in the woods, surrounded by houses but invisible from them all. It was built in 1880 as a joint church and schoolroom. For several generations, the children of the charcoal-burners of this undeveloped woodland district came here to learn their ABC, and then on Sundays the Rector of Fittleworth held a service in the building. Education ceased in 1925 but the church, dedicated to St Michael & All Angels, kept going until being declared redundant in 1959. 

Keep Out! warn the signs, but provided you don't go clambering round the walls you will come to no harm. It's a haunting ruin, strangely beached in its hollow like a ship, but it doesn't take much to imagine pinafored Victorian children running down the slope on their way to lessons.

The line of the Wey & Arun Canal runs through this area. I hadn't realised until I set out that my route would take me across its course at a couple of places. This piece of industrial archaeology, as haunting in its way as Bedham Church, is Pallingham Quay Bridge, right at the southern end of the Canal. Not far beyond it, the navigable part of the River Arun began:

I wanted to see the Toat Monument, and so I did, although I discovered you can't approach that closely. Built in the 1820s as a memorial to a man who died falling off his horse, it seems almost a bit insensitive that the reason you can't approach the monument today is that the space is occupied by horse paddocks.

By the time I got back to the car it was so dark I could barely spot the sign indicating the little car-parking area among the trees. 

Halloween 2018

An easy, obvious, and lazy post of my pumpkin and turnip lanterns ready for this evening!

Restoration

It's good that Swanvale Halt church hosts music concerts (of different kinds) so regularly. We are particularly the venue for some of the events organised by John a local gentleman who left a City job years ago to work as a music promoter. As a result, many people come to the church who otherwise wouldn't find their way into it. The refurbished church building, where furniture can be moved conveniently (well, relatively so) into an endless variety of configurations, makes such events easy to accommodate.

John's team were in on Friday setting up for a Saturday concert this week, an especially large one which required extra work on their part. I got into church on Saturday morning to find that not only had the chairs and benches been shifted into the required layout, but the altar had been moved already into the chancel which during concerts becomes a dark recess, invisible behind the artists.

The church was going to remain open until about mid-day, and I had a meeting in an hour's time with a baptism family. Without its altar, hung with the green Victorian altar frontal which is the main point of colour in the building, it no longer looked like a church. The World is never absent from the Church: the two interpenetrate each other. But the whole point of having a church building at all is that what happens in it affects the world around it more than if it didn't exist. The constant sign of the sacred allows the presence and activity of God in the world beyond it to become open and visible. It is the mark of God's promise, and it's God's promise that makes the world sacred in so far as it is. I shifted the altar back into its proper position, at least for a few hours until the doors were closed.

I intended to tell John what I'd done and then forgot. Happily he is a tolerant cove.

Alternative Centre

Several years ago now the young Lord Declan and Lady Minster moved from cramped and unsatisfactory Morden to Leighton Buzzard, but I'd never been to see them there until last week. Their new(ish) house is still part of a terrace but of modern properties rather than 1930s ones and faces a park, and there is more room to breathe, they find.

What they also find is that at a greater distance from London there is more sense of community in the pubs and bars around the town. Most notably there is Ollie Vee's Tiki Bar, which sounds horrendous but as one of the founders has a background in stage design the decor is actually rather impressing in a cheesy and tongue-in-cheek kind of way. There are lots of skulls and threatening-looking faux-Polynesian art around, and, upstairs, a gaping shark's mouth, so there is plenty for the odd Goth to enjoy provided they have a broadminded enough attitude. 'That's so hipster', my god-daughter said when I described it to her but in fact it's anything but. Every Thursday Ollie Vee's has a Vinyl Night when patrons can bring in their own discs to spin on the turntables, and Declan and Minster have been doing this for some time, building up quite a rota with a group of other customers. They tend not to inflict anything that challenging on the bar (no Diamanda Galás) but find it amusing to construct short sets from a bit of 80s cheese and glam interspersed with pop-Goth which others might just about have heard of. 

This odd little place does seem to have become the focus of Leighton Buzzard's alternative scene in so far as there is one. My joke that Tiki Goth is the Next Thing is old enough to be wearing thin now, but here it is almost a reality: I wouldn't have believed it had I not seen it myself. 

The Effect of Familiar Words

Last year as my long holiday wore on I reflected how easy it would be to cease religious observance entirely, but this year it felt different; I felt quite excited at the prospect of returning to saying the Office properly and getting back into the full rhythm of prayer as opposed to the etiolated version I observe when not at work. Of course, that wore off. But it was different, anyway.

Being away from Swanvale Halt church for two Sundays found me first at an Episcopal church in the Borders - the only one for miles around that seemed to have an early service that day - and then at Guildford Cathedral for their 8am. In the Scottish church the very elderly priest made his way over to me before the service began with some effort and apologised a) for the fact that there weren't going to be many people there and b) that because he hadn't been expecting to take the service until very recently it would be 'a bit chaotic'. How chaotic could a said Scottish Prayer Book service get, I wondered? In the event I was unable to observe anything I could describe as 'chaos', although the priest did update the text at various points, which made me wonder what the point of using the old liturgy was. Conversely, I know you need to crack through the Book of Common Prayer at some pace or it runs the risk of getting bogged down, but at the Cathedral I did get the slight sense the celebrant would rather have been somewhere else, or perhaps saying something else.

The order in which the Prayer Book arranges the Eucharistic action puts the confession and absolution immediately before the Communion itself, with the intention of keeping sin and redemption firmly in the worshipper's mind before they approach the holy table, rather than at the beginning of the service where it is now. And it does so in intense and dramatic language: 'We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, in thought, word, and deed, against thy divine majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us'. We say those self-accusing words in the full knowledge that we are about to have forgiveness pronounced, and what are called the Comfortable Words spoken to us, assuring us of God's mercy. What's happening here is a rehearsal of the process of conversion. But whereas conversion is an extended business, as conviction of sin leads into the experience of forgiveness, in this liturgy the apparent jaggedness of the conflicting emotion is contained within a single action, moving in moments from one extreme to another, and the effect is a curious one: the sensations meld into one, a strangely detached state in which we hand both sin and forgiveness over to God in the knowledge that he knows more than we do. And that, I suppose, is joy.

Deep Places

My last holiday post (I think) describes encounters with three dramatic Northumberland locations which I found affecting me in unexpected ways. The first was St Cuthbert's Cave, supposedly where the monks carrying the body of Cuthbert from Lindisfarne to Durham in about 875 to escape Viking raids sheltered on their journey. It's really just an overhang of rock and would only have provided shelter if the wind was blowing in the right direction, but nevertheless as you approach up the footpath through the woods its long, low shape promises a numinous location, and that's what you find. I'd been blown to and fro by strong winds and stung by rain all the way up the hill, but at least I had the car and a flask of tea to go back to, unlike the walkers I encountered at the Cave who were clearly in it for the long haul.

Looking out from the calm sanctuary of the overhang down the hill, I re-experienced a sensation which goes back to my earliest memories. My mum often told me that as a baby I sat in my pram playing with the rain on the canvas top outside the hood. I surely can't remember that, because nobody remembers what happens to them as babies: and yet any experience which follows that pattern - being somewhere dark and looking out at the rain - seems to carry an echo of that memory. It's at the absolute root of my sense of who I am.

From there I went to Yeavering, a tiny hamlet right on the north of the National Park. This is the site of Ad Gefrin, the 7th-century palace complex of the Northumbrian kings where St Paulinus converted King Edwin to Christianity. Thirty years ago I read about Ad Gefrin and Brian Hope-Taylor's excavations there and for some reason the place has always stuck in my imagination. My intention was to climb the path to the hillfort of Yeavering Bell, which you can see in the background of the photograph, but one look at it convinced me that even had it not been raining and blowing a gale and my knee not been playing up I wouldn't have attempted it. In fact, the site of Ad Gefrin is on the flat area to the north of the road, now distinguished by a monument and these carved wooden fence-posts. You can wander around the field where the buildings stood, read the interpretation boards, and try to imagine what it might have been like. Rain or no rain, I was glad to have re-acquainted myself with Ad Gefrin, this haunting place.

Finally, I wanted to see Linhope Spout, said to be the most impressive waterfall in the National Park. On an afternoon of more rain and wind I parked up a mile and a half away, which is as close as you can get by vehicle, and took the footpath over the hills. The waterfall looked nothing like the photographs I'd seen online, showing a quite mild cascade and people bathing in the plunge pool into which the water falls. What I found was anything but calm. The stream was in full spate, swollen by rainwaters, and trying to get anywhere near the fall would probably have killed you. Thousands of gallons of water smashed over the fall and into the rocks, spraying, spouting and roaring. It was a mesmerising display of natural power - but one I found very unsettling as I imagined what it might do to me. I was dizzied and disoriented. When finally I managed to break the water's spell and leave, I found myself almost tearful with relief, a very strange reaction.