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... so it was just as well the Clergy Study Morning yesterday only went as far as lunch time before we were all released from Christ Church, Woking, to scarper in our various homeward directions. 'A study day like no other', the diocesan authorities had promised, apparently referring to the invitation we'd been asked to extend to laypeople to come along, because there was no other obvious difference from the usual format, and style. A pair of gentlemen from the musical team at Christ Church, armed with a guitar and a keyboard, assaulted 'Holy Holy Holy Lord God Almighty' until that noble hymn lay down and died, we had a sung version of the Creed that had me begging for it to end as one of said gentlemen led us in yet another repetition of part of it, and then we were ready for the speakers. A fellow called Nick spoke about how the Church of England had been issuing reports on how to integrate laypeople and clergy in evangelism, and working life and church life, since the 1940s and that 'if we're still talking about this in twenty years I shall scream'. I didn't think anything he came up with was particularly groundbreaking, though, but perhaps you can't after seventy years of Church of England reports. Then Paul Williams, the CEO of the Bible Society, outlined how the overarching narrative of the Scriptures could be used as 'a lens to interrogate the messages of contemporary culture': I quite liked this, but it was slightly depressing to hear him suggest that most Christians aren't aware there is an overarching narrative, as opposed to a succession of disconnected bits which they cherry-pick to justify their own ideological viewpoints. In between the two speakers, the Bishop pushed ahead of me (and several more people) in the queue for tea and asked me what I thought so far. I wasn't feeling all that well and couldn't help thinking of the scene in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the Vogon captain challenges the captive Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect, catching their breath after the psychic and physical pain of listening to some of his verses, 'either die in the vacuum of space; or [CHORD] tell me how good you thought my poem was'. As I waffled, the Bishop sort of became aware that he'd ended up halfway along the queue and insisted on handing me a paper cup in recognition of the fact.
The point arrived for breaking into groups, as it inevitably does. As we were sat in close-serried ranks of linked steel-framed chairs with very little room to manoeuvre round each other, this proved more logistically challenging than usual. I had forgotten we were supposed to bring along a layperson: Marion was there in her capacity as a chaplain at HMP Send, so the laypeople she usually deals with are not easily able to attend external events, and we agreed that clergy are laypeople underneath, as we are so often told. In our small group we concluded that the 'thing we would take away' was Nick's very touching anecdote of the hairdresser whose way of integrating church and work life was to pray for her customers as she massaged shampoo into their hair. This was a better suggestion than my statement that what I would take away was my cup, to put into the compost.
Finally we were shown a short video about the reorganisation at Church House. Little stylised graphics of happy clergy, laypeople and central staff, and even the odd dog, bounced across the screens to describe how the diocese was being restructured around meeting the real needs of parishes, although the Suffragan Bishop's hairstyle seemed to have changed in her translation into digital form. Wondrously, the presentation concluded without at any point using the phrase 'we've sacked a cartload of people because we can't pay for them anymore'.
Back in the far-off days of my holiday, I and Ms Brightshades went to Wisley Gardens. We were so suboptimal, we just wandered around taking photographs of pretty things and didn't note down the name of a single plant (I already know some trees, though). Many years ago while I was in Lamford some friends bought me a year's membership of Wisley as a birthday present so I could go there on my days off and relax by reading in the pagoda by the pool, that sort of thing; I think I managed two visits. Well, on this particular day I saw many bits of the garden I certainly hadn't before and the rain only made the landscape shine all the more.
A day going past without a phone call, or several, from Trevor would normally be a welcome bonus, but a run of such days started to arouse my suspicions. I tried to call him and heard the phone being picked up and then put down; a second call later in the day went entirely unanswered. The day after, I had a call from a social worker saying Trevor had refused to let in the mental health Home Treatment Team for nearly a week. In his only conversation with the doctors he'd claimed that God had cured him and that he no longer needed treatment, a belief somewhat belied by the complaints from his neighbours that he was shouting and screaming at night. He would probably be sectioned, she said.
This was indeed what happened, and Trevor was taken to the mental health inpatient unit at St Peter's Hospital in Chertsey, where I went to see him on Saturday. The wind and rain battered the buildings making the setting seem even more bleak than it would otherwise be. Trevor's brother was there, in the middle of cancelling one of Trevor's phones (he has had two, draining his limited resources along with the three TV sets and multiple pianos and keyboards, for a long time). I hadn't seen Trevor for over a month: he is unkempt and haggard, not looking at all like someone who has undergone a miraculous healing. He was calm enough, but is now completely lost within his paranoiac world: every sound was turned into someone making horrible accusations against him, he maintained that one of his longstanding enemies from years and years ago had come to the unit to have sex with one of the staff in the shower, that a well-known US TV evangelist had been there 'to break the spell', and that 'the witches' had 'murdered me by stabbing me six thousand times and God had to bring me back from the dead'. He couldn't talk about anything else.
You may remember that a couple of years ago I facilitated, against the rules, a series of encounters between Trevor and Martin, who believed he could help him. I would have been delighted had this actually resulted in anything, but in fact it went depressingly along the lines I had predicted to myself: a set of long, inconclusive meetings during which Trevor shook and shouted and tried to make himself sick as he knows that this is what demoniacs do, culminating in failure to achieve anything and the would-be exorcist blaming his patient. Martin conceded that all Trevor's manifestations were assumed rather than 'real', but his convoluted diagnosis was that 'he has a demon that makes it look as though he doesn't and is just pretending', and that 'he doesn't really want to be delivered ... Trevor and his demon are like a pair of elderly sisters who live together, always complaining about the other but never doing anything about it. As soon as anyone drives the spirit out of him, he invites it back in again'. In fact, buried within this nonsense is what I think is a truth, which is that Trevor has become so committed to aspects of his paranoid narrative - to the idea that God has made certain promises to him - that he can't escape it. But that's not quite the same as self-induced demonic possession.
Martin simply abandoned contact with Trevor and now doesn't refer to him; to be fair, he had some professional issues to deal with, but his neglect did involve absolutely not doing things he said he would do. It was the same story with the third Diocesan Deliverance Adviser I got to come and see Trevor: he'd discovered there was a new one and begged me to set up an encounter. We had one meeting; I and the priest agreed that there was nothing supernatural going on with Trevor's situation. The advisor said he would arrange another session with Trevor to go through things with him, but never did.
So we now have a soul who seems entirely trapped. 'He'll be here a long time', Trevor's brother told me, though the doctors were uncommunicative. I am not sure that I could have done much different over the last ten years, but it's been a learning experience. I only wish Trevor could have learned something, too.
Once upon a time, the relationship between All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day was clear. On the first, the Church remembered all those - including the nameless - whose sanctity had propelled them into the immediate post-mortem presence of God, especially those who were recognised publicly by the Church as souls whose intercession could be sought by ordinary worshippers, dwelling spiritually as they did in the curtilage of Divinity. All Souls was for the rest of us, who had first to pass through the fires of Purgatory before we attained the Sublime, and who, far from praying for the living, required their intercessions to speed our passage through. All neat and tidy.
At least in the fully-developed Western tradition: the East had never got that far, and didn't draw hard-and-fast lines between different categories of Christians. I've long come to the view that the wonderful side-by-side contrast of All Saints and All Souls on successive days in the Church calendar - the Gold and the Black - represent, in a way, our different attitudes to the dead, to perhaps conflicted feelings of thankfulness and joy mingled perhaps with fear, sorrow, regret and maybe even anger. But I hadn't thought this year about the two days embodying different feelings about death itself, even though this is really quite an obvious extension of the theme. If we are Christians, we know that Christ has won the victory over sin and death, and that we are part of it. But equally we know that we do not deserve to be part of it, that we remain sinners, in need of repentance; and the saints are the very first to kneel, and strike their breasts, and say, 'Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner'. Confidence and humility, hope and realism, all work together: together in the sight of God are woven the Gold and the Black.
Well, it is, with my usual three lanterns, one to go down to the churchyard - I couldn't locate any suitable turnips this year and had to use swedes, which aren't half hard to hollow out. But there is also pictured a bunch of grapes from the garden: this autumn the vine has actually produced a small crop of fruit which are capable of being eaten without grimacing, provided you avoid the ones which still have a bit of a greenish tinge to the them.
A small group of elderly ladies make their way from a midweek service at a not-very-remarkable Surrey church. They are all very happy, and not only because they have just met their Lord and Saviour in the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The thing that has made them happy is that for the first time in about three weeks they have been able to go in and out of the church's main door.
While I was on holiday, a pane of glass in the inner porch door was broken. Marion the curate took the photograph left, and thinks it wasn't smashed by a direct impact but by the door swinging to in a gust of wind (it was very windy indeed that day). The investigation revealed that the glass was ordinary plate glass rather than safety glass. 'I can't understand why it was done like that even if it was twenty-odd years ago', said the glazier. I can: it will have been a case of a PCC being told by someone, 'Oh, I know someone who'll do it cheaper than that'. Anyway, it's now all been replaced, and normal service is resumed.
Really, the ladies attending the midweek service shouldn't have been all that pleased about the restoration of Order. Going via the main door requires negotiating two steps rather than the gentle slope up from the hall door, which is the alternative access route, and that's a challenge to some of them. Years ago after a visit to a Sunday service, my friend Professor Abacus advised that we should switch permanently to using the hall door for just such reasons. But the mere restitution of how things should be is clearly enough to trump such minor concerns as convenience.
It was the annual Memorial Service today. Preparing for it I found myself reflecting on how I'd become aware while at Lamford that there was a little sub-group in the congregation of former oil men, all of whom seemed to have worked for Shell - no, silly, not as garage forecourt attendants, but as engineers and so on. I wasn't sure whether they were aware of one another's existence, or how they all ended up retiring to Lamford, but I took the funerals of at least three, I remember. Apart from being connected by their past work, they were of course different people and sometimes had had knocks along the course of life. One had received the Last Rites a total of six times and when I went to visit his wife to discuss the funeral service and asked how she was getting on, she answered 'Oh, it's such a relief!' which is more frank than most people are prepared to be.
I was reminded of the Lamford Oil Men when reading a recent report on the role of the fossil fuel companies in attempting to downplay and undermine the science of climate change over the last few decades. I doubt the perfectly decent gents whose funerals I took in Lamford had any knowledge of that policy or influence on it, but they were involved in it by being part of one of those companies. We're all implicated in the larger movements of history and society even when we play no active or conscious role at all: they move through us and shape us whether we choose or not. And when our awareness changes and a different perspective become the norm, what then? What seemed perfectly normal at the start of our lives may well beyond the pale of acceptability by their end: we start as lambs, and end as dinosaurs. The absolute impossibility of stepping back from our lives and assessing them objectively has to push us towards compassion and mutual forgiveness, and that perfect, objective view of who we have been and what we have done can only come from a place beyond us, a heavenly place.
