Not Entirely Following the Liturgical Manuals

Stumbling through the liturgy took on a very literal sense this morning, as managing the Rectory stairs with the Paschal Candle in one hand and my phone in the other proved slightly beyond my abilities. Originally I wasn’t going to do anything other than a missa solitaria but when Il Rettore told me that the ceremonies of the day would be broadcast from Lamford Rectory I thought I would try too. We usually get about twenty souls at the Dawn Mass and so this would give everyone at least a taste of what happens. The trouble is that Il Rettore has a second pair of hands available and I don’t. As well as tripping on the stairs, the first part of the video I managed to shoot consists of almost total darkness, the Service of Light is out of focus (though you do get the birdsong effect I was keen to capture), the incense grains managed to avoid the charcoal almost completely and so produced nothing more than a congealed mess in the thurible, and I repeatedly forgot where things were and had to move around in a less than ideally decisive way. I haven’t sung the Exsultet since I was curate at Lamford: it doesn’t half go on a long time but at least I didn’t choke.

Even if you have one other person available it makes doing this sort of thing a lot easier. Other churches, of course, are much better resourced and can produce professional-looking experiences by layering music and speech and film together and so on; I’m not going to be able to make anything of that kind. Canon Lucy Winkett of St James’ Piccadilly made the point on the wireless this morning that the current crisis hasn’t really brought out any new moral challenges, just cast sharper light on old ones, not least our human competitiveness: how ‘productive’ you can be during lockdown. This applies to everyone including clergy. Some people find it hard enough to get up in the morning while others stifle their uncertainties, if they feel any, under activity. (Was Abi, the terrifyingly competent, holy, and sympathetic curate who gets so far under Fr Adam Smallbone’s skin in the TV series Rev that he’s relieved when she’s moved, based on Canon Winkett as the rumour goes? No one has ever confirmed, or denied … ).

If it was just my own spiritual life I was concerned about, I’d be content to sit and say the Office and pray for the parish and its people for the duration of the lockdown. I’m not exposing my meagre efforts at technological engagement and mangled liturgy, or even celebrating services alone at all, because it’s fun. I’ve taken the view that what the congregation need most is something to maintain first their connection with God, and, second, their connection with the parish, the other human beings in relationship with whom they deepen their experience of God. Quite minimal material can do that: it doesn’t need to be a multimedia sound-and-light extravaganza, thankfully. I also have a sense that our instinct to try and reproduce our normal experience as much as we can should be resisted: you can’t learn the lessons of deprivation if you’re pushing the sign of deprivation away. In the garden on Maundy Thursday, bringing the Vigil to an end, I said as usual the Passiontide hymn from Malling Abbey:

God’s Israel, a remnant left,

Must die, to bring to life

New Israel.

And God only knows what that will look like.

One of the resources I’ve sent out to the good folk of Swanvale Halt included simple ‘table services’ for Holy Week, adapted from stuff prepared some years ago by the Anglican Franciscans in Australia, and I’ve been following them as it seems the least I can do. They are structured around mealtimes, and draw the connection between the table of the altar and the table at homes. Normally I would break my Lenten fast at breakfast after the Dawn Mass with champagne and pain-au-chocolat; this morning I had the drink, and a defrosted chocolate cupcake preserved from the last pre-lockdown Messy Church. When we get through that early service, and meet in the hall for breakfast, there are always a number of sensations feeding into it. There is the feeling that we’ve been through something ever-so-slightly testing together, in the sense of getting up early and doing something complicated that could easily collapse into a shambles, the tiniest, tiniest intimation of ordeal; there’s the sense that we’re grown-ups doing something slightly mad, silly and naughty; and the knowledge that we’re taking up rituals and customs that we set down six weeks before, things that tell us who we are in Christ. Those add up to a sort of slight hysteria, all defused and dissipated over breakfast: a release. You can’t do that the same way, on your own, no matter how you might strain to reproduce the customary patterns. Of course I should have had the Scriptures in my mind, but instead it was filled with the lyrics of PJ Harvey’s ‘Good Fortune’: ‘Threw my bad fortune off the top of a tall building/I’d rather have done it with you.’

A Wee Bit of History

Having listened to his mini-lecture on ancient house churches and their contested relevance to modern Christian experience, I said I would share Fr Thesis's thoughts and so I am (note: he appears here under his real name ...)!

As Fr Thesis points out, under our current circumstances there is a lot of 'loose talk' (you always get 'loose talk' when there's a war on) about how our current dispersed and scattered state is compelling us to return to the condition early Christians found themselves in when they worshipped in private dwellings, and how good this is for us. 'The church is the people, not the building', as though we might forget. And, as he further points out, this is very wide of any recognisable mark. His first argument is the most telling: the original house-churches were not all-family affairs, as we are forced to retreat to at the moment (if we have a family and are not just miserable singletons), but precisely allowed the expansion of that family unit into something more inclusive. That was the point. 'Who is my mother and my brothers?' said Our Lord, I recall.

Peter draws attention to the class-based nature of a lot of the early Christian groups we know about, such as the church in the household of Prisca and Aquila mentioned repeatedly in the Book of Acts, or the gatherings that go so awry in Corinth. These householders were wealthy enough to own nice big properties they could put at the disposal of the nascent Church, and he is right, this is the image we tend to have in our minds. But oddly most of the Christian meetings we get glimpses of in the Scriptures don't take place in those settings: those gatherings occur in upper rooms, the most famous of course being the one the disciples use in Jerusalem which may or may not be either the site now called the Cenacle or the rival one at the Syriac church of St Mark elsewhere in the city. When Dorcas dies in Joppa she's laid out in an 'upper room' and that's where the church meets to mourn her. I especially like the account of the raising of Eutychus who gets bored to sleep by St Paul in a church meeting in 'Troas' and falls from a window, is 'picked up dead' and then snatched back from death by Paul's prayers. The room, lit by many lamps, from which poor Eutychus falls is so far up it's on the third storey. Now, these buildings were not the domus of the wealthy, which were always laid out on one level apart from the odd office or bedroom: these are the structures inhabited by more humble classes, the insulae or apartment blocks which could go up pretty high. I don't know enough about the internal organisation of Roman dwellings to say much about this, but these accounts seem to hint at a pattern of a biggish room above others within the same apartment. Most of Roman literature focuses on life in the villa or domus, but this is obviously something different. (Incidentally, what the Bible calls 'Troas' is probably the small Roman city of Alexandria on the Aegean coast of what's now Turkey - Troas was a region rather than an actual place).

Another point that occurs to me is that although the development of the early house-church was at least partly driven by the need of Christian groups to have a place to meet unmolested, there was also a eucharistic impetus. Once the sharing of a symbolic meal becomes the central element in a Christian gathering, around which the believers' experience of Jesus is organised, there needs to be somewhere to do it - somewhere with a table, or at the very least, somewhere people can sit on the floor and pass bread around in a tolerably reverent atmosphere. You can't do that in the synagogue (even if you want to keep attending synagogue worship) and you can't do it very easily hanging round in places like Solomon's Portico (Acts 5.12). The bespoke church building is not a deviation from the ideal model of the primitive house church, it's a clear development from it propelled by the same motivations.

It's a truism of spoilsport historians like me that most of the time history exhibits development rather than exciting rupture. Development brings us to where we are now; and, as I've said, I can't see the physical dispersal of the Christian community as anything other than an impoverishment, a wounding, even if God will bring good things from it as he always does. Our situation in 2020 is nothing like that of our 1st-century forebears, and why should it be - any more than 1st-century medical practice should dictate the procedures of modern hospitals?

Open and Shut

Living a 'convenient' distance from Swanvale Halt church, there was never a question of me continuing to go there to hold any kind of service, even on my own, once public worship was suspended in Anglican churches, so it's not an issue in which I have any direct interest. I did note the diversity of practice. Once upon a time I and Dr Bones went to a dinner with two congregants in Lamford also attended by James Langstaff, who is currently Bishop of Rochester, and was then Suffragan Bishop of Kings Lynn. He seemed a modest and amusing soul. I wonder what's happened to him in the intervening fourteen years, because as soon as the ban came in he wrote to his priests saying that if they so much as went in their churches they'd be subject to the Clergy Discipline Measure. Why did he feel he had to state that? Meanwhile, in London, Bishop Sarah Mullally was allowing clergy to hold solitary services in churches provided they lived adjoining them, or didn't have to enter any public area to get to them, but last weekend she'd reversed that, clearly lent on by Archbishop Justin Welby for not toeing the line. The whole argument is mystifying, except that it presumably reflects prejudices on both sides. Clergy and bishops don't always trust each other, and in a relationship of mistrust any stress opens up the basic rift. Bishops expect to be defied by resentful clergy, and clergy expect to be ordered about by mean-minded bishops. Each provokes the behaviour they anticipate. But I do find it depressing that, given all the things he could have spoken about in these trying times, Justin Welby chooses to take to Youtube to denounce his priests for not doing as they're told. You don't find the Pope doing that; Pope Francis stands in an empty St Peter's and lifts a monstrance to bless the sorrowing World for which Jesus died. No wonder Lambeth Palace disabled the comments. 

I think some of my spiky colleagues have taken to the missa solitaria rather too readily (no pesky laypeople around!), but equally I don't like the sense that others (perhaps many bishops) are secretly enjoying the spurious sense of pioneer edginess that comes from holding services via Zoom and so forth, and allowing themselves to imagine that this is maybe superior to a collection of often elderly people meeting together in a draughty old building. It isn't. 'Church' involves real, embodied human beings, and when they can't meet, the Body of Christ is sundered. 

This morning I took part in the Chrism Mass which the Bishop of Dorking broadcast from her front room. All very well, and as I had the order of service on my screen and so could only hear the audio it was actually less distracting than having lots of other clergy around me. But it wasn't the real thing. Even though the Chrism Mass is one of my least favourite occasions in the year, and this morning I didn't have to make my way to the cathedral, find a seat or put up with my brethren for an hour and a half, I'd rather have done that. Moving worship by preference to the digital realm is a sort of capitulation to the age-old human fantasy of disposing of our inconvenient bodies, which is surfacing once again in the transhuman movement and with which Christianity should really not have anything to do.

I have felt very out of sorts the last day or two, but we'll leave that for another time. In fact a phone call to Dr Bones cheered me up. She has been attending virtual services at St Aldates in Oxford and finding it much more congenial than the days when she used to go there in person. 'Nobody trying to touch me, no having to look at anyone,' she enthused. 'Yes', I said, 'though there's a real service you can go to which is just like that, in most churches it's called the 8am'. 'Our local church has just got a new vicar, and I've found her online services,' went on the Dr, 'it's great, when she gets annoying I can just turn her off.' True, you can't do that at an 8am.

Is It All Worth It?

There is part of me that itches to reject anything that mainstream opinion endorses, but when someone I know posted on LiberFaciorum a link to an interview in which Peter Hitchens denounces hysteria over COVID19 I found my initial weary reaction justified. I knew what was coming: Mr Hitchens is an intelligent man, of course, but thinks that intelligence can replace actual knowledge. ‘You don’t have to be an epidemiologist to come to a conclusion’. No, you don’t, but it might affect how anyone else regards your opinion, and explains why you feel so ignored and marginalised.

That doesn't mean he isn't right. I know no more than anyone else does whether the policies followed by the UK, and so many other countries to different degrees, are the correct ones. At the moment it’s all more-or-less informed guesswork. Even at the end of this, we may be not much the wiser. If the policies work, and we manage to get away with a modest number of deaths, there will always be those who argue that there was never a problem at all. In a way, scorn will be a sign of success.

But that seductive question, ‘Is it worth it?’ sounds challenging but turns slippery when you try to get a conceptual grip on it. What does worth mean in this context? If every human life is unique, you could argue with some point that a single life weighs heavier in the balance than the entire global economy, but most of us would feel uneasy pushing it that far. You might contend, conversely, that putting the economy into a protective coma will cost more lives than the sickness (and Mr Hitchens and Lord Sumption do), but either side of that equation sits a nebulous and indeterminate number. Do nothing, said the Imperial College modellers, and half a million people will die. Shield the vulnerable, and you take that toll down to a quarter of a million (about the number of British people we think died in the flu epidemic of 1918); lockdown and social distancing stand some chance of reducing it to a tenth of that or less. Yet it’s not that simple, because what we’re trying to do is increase the ability of the health service to cope with the extremely ill people who come its way, and the number of people that increased capacity/decreased demand is likely to save – in the sense of deferring their deaths a reasonable time, and to a different cause – is very hard to calculate. On the other hand, working out how many people would be saved by allowing more economic activity to carry on, and not be killed by murders, suicides, unemployment, malnutrition, or lack of resources available to spend on health provision over the next two decades or so, is a completely impossible task for any human agency. And can a life be worth more, or less, than a particular quantifiable amount of distress or suffering short of death? You’re left with a value judgement, nothing more.

‘Life or economy is not a choice’, while ‘economies can be rebuilt, lives can’t’. I can’t say I disagree much with either of these contrasted rhetorical statements. Businesses aren’t just businesses, not just methods of producing money (as some of my left-er friends seem to think). They are the way a community is bound together: they provide context and value to human lives, as well as funnelling creativity, albeit sometimes of a pretty basic character. It’s not a matter of choosing between life or money. But equally we should not forget that despite its power, money is a fiction. It always fascinates me that something we all use every day, something which is fundamental to keeping society functioning, is also a thing whose historical origins are unclear and whose exact nature and workings nobody can convincingly define. Globally, we all agree this stuff exists and that it works in a particular way, because it suits us; we give it its power, by tacit consensus. Money’s laws are not like natural laws, not like gravity or oxidation ratios; we determine them, and we can rewrite the fiction (the chapter on debt, or the chapter on borrowing) if we choose. We need to remember that, provided we all work together, we are in charge and not it: we need not be dazzled by its glamour. But I think that's a harder job than dealing with the pandemic.

A Revelation

Cycling back home from delivering groceries to Trevor and a newsletter to George ('supporting vulnerable people', that was), I was pleased to see Sarah by the side of the road. Sarah's a regular at church but has never signed up for anything, including the Electoral Roll, so I had no contact for her and hadn't had any contact since worship in church ceased. This was an opportunity to get an email address so I could send a newsletter. I didn't have a consent form to sign: GDPR seems to be one of the things which has been somewhat elbowed aside by the Current Crisis.

I remembered that Sarah worked at one of the supermarkets. She was on her way to work, as it happened. Of course she is a 'key worker', I said. Had she been aware of that now-lauded status? 'Not until this week,' she replied, with point

Spring Colours

Yesterday was the first Spring mow of the garden; I think the grass is being restrained fairly successfully as there is quite a bit emerging which is neither grass nor moss, but stands some chance of developing into something more interesting. Meanwhile, though the camellias are in fact past their best (this photo was taken a couple of weeks ago), the celandines are still in full flood; I know many people regard them as pesky things, but I think they look like a field of stars. The frail-looking white blooms are wild strawberry, seen very close up. They used to grow in the beds at the front of the Rectory, but are now scattered across the lawn. I wonder if they will fruit?

Remote Access

Just a couple of weeks ago, there were certain areas of our computers where very few of us had ever been; under the stresses of the times intrepid souls have ventured into those unfamiliar hinterlands and have discovered - Microsoft Teams. From never having participated in anything of the kind before, yesterday I attended two meetings via Teams in the evening. I couldn't get the program to recognise my computer's camera, which seems thoroughly suspicious but appears to be due to a box not being ticked on the Teams website. The school governors' meeting was calm and orderly, marshalled by the school secretary who'd worked out how to manage the program and then tutored individually those of us who were a bit clueless; the ATC committee meeting, in contrast, was chaotic as nobody knew quite what to do and everybody kept playing with the format. It was a bit like watching attenders at the Toddler Group battling over a favoured toy.

I could have attended a third meeting had I had the will, of the management board of our local ecumenical Christian youth work charity. That wasn't carried out via Microsoft Teams but Zoom, another application people have only just discovered. Unfortunately - having just mentioned the Toddler Group - I can't get out of my head one of the songs we customarily sing, 'Zoom zoom zoom, we're going to the Moon.' And now, friends, if you are familiar with that lyric, neither can you.