Return to Mess

Messy Church in March 2020 was the last special event we staged before the first lockdown, going ahead only after a lot of indecision. We'd cut our activities down to Sunday services alone after that, I'd already decided before the decision was taken out of our hands. As anxiety and uncertainty swirled around, many people said how good it was to do something 'normal'; and they said that again on Saturday as Swanvale Halt Messy Church met for the first time since then. The team had decided on the theme of the Good Shepherd, which suited me as I'd done that four years ago and so could virtually recycle what I did then (none of the twenty children who came this time had been there in 2017). We asked people to confirm they were coming beforehand: only one did, meaning we set the bar of expectations comfortingly low, and the fact that we had a reasonable number of attenders goes to show how hard it is to expect families with small children to plan anything at all. Reasonable: but still on the low side compared with what we are used to. I wonder whether the Messy model will have to rebuild as much as any other aspect of our Church life. 

Anglo-Catholic Sources 1: The Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline of 1906

In 1904 the main evangelical Anglican pressure group, the Church Association, managed to get a Royal Commission established to examine Anglo-Catholic ritualist naughtiness, or, more technically, ‘breaches or neglect of the law relating to the conduct of divine service’. Over the two years before the Commission finally reported, it heard accounts of what was actually happening liturgically in nearly 560 churches across England and, for some reason, the diocese of Llandaff in Wales. It used to be claimed that all the witnesses were bigoted evangelicals with axes to grind who, occasionally, didn’t know what they were looking at when they attended a ritualist service. Opinion on this is starting to shift and certainly some of the reporters were perfectly au fait with the details of Anglo-Catholic worship of different brands and varieties, and just didn’t like it. Some ritualist incumbents replied to the enquiries of the Commission that they had not done the things, or some of the things, they were accused of, while others responded, in what was clearly an organised standard letter, that they did not dispute the accuracy of the reports but ‘the colour put upon the facts’.

The 560 churches whose worship was reported to the Commission (out of something under 15,000 across the country) were not the only ones who were worshipping in a ritualist way; many evaded the reporters’ attentions. But they were perhaps representative. In the whole of non-metropolitan Surrey, for instance, only two churches were deemed worthy of attention, Holy Trinity Bramley and St Nicolas Guildford.

At an 8am Sunday eucharist at Bramley in August 1904, the Revd Mr Green wore vestments (which, he later insisted, were of plain linen), absolutely denied the statement that he kissed the Gospel Book, and thought a ‘slight raising’ of the elements after consecration could not fairly be described as ‘elevation’. From Bramley the reporter went on the same day to a Choral Eucharist at St Nic’s where he saw the incumbent, Mr Dandridge, also vested, conduct what sounds like a relatively modest and low-key service, but one in which, in accordance with contemporary Roman and Anglo-Catholic rules on fasting, only four people took communion. In his reply the priest disputed some aspects of the report, the most serious, perhaps, being the accusation that he had made confession to the servers at the foot of the altar before the service began in the Roman fashion; the witness had clearly observed some interaction take place, but Mr Dandridge would not confirm exactly what it was if it was not the priest’s confession. Times for confession were also being advertised in the parish newsletter, but Mr Dandridge claimed this had been the practice at the church for some time preceding his arrival and rather than the ritual ‘steadily going up’ at St Nic’s as the witness averred, he was only following his predecessor’s lead.

These two services were hardly all that elaborate even for 1904 and that probably indicates that ritualism in Surrey had advanced only very modestly by that stage. I was a bit disappointed to see that there were only two reports relevant to my current work, but that itself tells you something. There must have been other Surrey churches worshipping in a similar way – Woodham, for instance, established specifically to do so – but not very many. In this, as in so many other aspects of its history, the county was a bit of a backwater.

Apples and Gravity

The old eating-apple tree in the garden hasn't been that heavily laden with fruit this year and normally I wouldn't take it off for a few weeks yet. But having noticed its southward branches nodding unusually low, I looked it over and found myself treading on a raised hump in the grass just at its base on the northern side. It was being pulled over! I hastily relieved it of all the fruit I could reach, and now I have wedged a post under it so it shouldn't move any further for a while, but come the winter I think a lot of it is going to have to be cut off, and I wonder what that will do to it, poor thing.

Love Divine

Actor Lena Headey was on the radio yesterday talking about her relationship with the Hindu god Ganesh.

[On a trip to India] I picked up a very ancient Ganesh and carried it in my backpack … I felt, this is just extremely peaceful to me, and it makes sense … I don’t sit and pray, but in my daily move around the world, I think about him. I love him. I love what he represents, I genuinely ask him to help me when I’m stuck … he’s my one constant.

Ms Headey is white, English and born in Bermuda. She doesn’t consider herself a Hindu by belief, but has what’s obviously an intense connection with the unlikely figure of the elephant-headed deity, who has a presence in Swanvale Halt in the form of a little statuette in the Post Office as the family who run it have a Hindu background. It makes me ponder what Christian love for God really means, in terms of its content.

Perhaps surprisingly, love for God isn’t that big a theme in the New Testament. St Paul mentions it in passing in a couple of places, but he is far keener to stress God’s love for us and ours for each other, flowing from God’s. Even the Blessed Apostle John whose first Letter is all about love is anxious to tell us that love consists in the fact ‘not that we loved God, but that he loved us’. The kind of intense personalised emotion we tend to find expressed in many modern worship songs isn’t really present in the Scriptures. There is adoration at what God is, and exultation at what he has done; there is a beneficent restfulness and gratitude that comes from knowing that ultimately everything is all right. It’s a philosophical sort of love, which is not to say it is not deep and powerful, but that it comes from applying a universal divine action to oneself. Another element that is missing is the intense focus on the humanity of Jesus which was so strong an element of medieval piety. Notoriously, St Paul says next to nothing about the earthly life of the Lord at all, and it took a thousand and more years before Christians began to meditate seriously on the features of that life which made him vulnerable, which brought the Godhead closest to the creation. If we’re talking about love in the way we normally understand it, that sense of Christ needing us (that is, human beings) for his protection, and his suffering, opens a different avenue towards it.

Unlike Ganesh, God is not one image. He is at once the glorious light to be adored, and the unfathomable abyss of ultimate being to be lost in. He is the baby held in a woman’s arms and the man crucified. He is historical and eternal. A parent looks at a child as they grow older, or a lover at their long-term love who they have grown along with, and can see all they were, and what they will be too, is present in what they are. We see God that way, and in that gaze is the tenderness of love, knowing that the beloved also loves us.  

Nunhead Revisited

My first Nunhead Cemetery Open Day was in 2008, although I claimed here it was a year earlier. Last year, of course, nothing happened, and even this time round it's been pushed back from its usual May date to this weekend. The chapel is fenced off, with no information as to whether this is due to Covid or general dilapidation; and I get the impression that the Friends of Nunhead (who are still restoring the East Lodge as they have been for several years now) would really rather you didn't put your life and their funds and perhaps liberty at risk by going wandering around the overgrown parts of the cemetery in search of picturesque monuments, so several entrances to the woods are blocked with brambles or stacks of wood. These are no serious barrier if you are properly equipped, but I wasn't. Still, I was surprised that I still managed to find things I hadn't seen before. Just behind the chapel is a house-like mausoleum with its pitched roof on pillars, surrounded by tumbledown tombstones; and a few yards from that is an area scattered with small monuments each about nine inches square, and clearly moved there in a group. You could, were you so disposed, abscond with one, which of course I wasn't. 

Individual Contributions

Commenters on the video were discussing the merits of PJ Harvey’s first album, Dry. Someone had stated that while the woman herself was a mighty creative power, the other members of the band, as it was then, could have been replaced by ‘any competent session musicians’ and it would have made no difference. As is the way of these things a ridiculous polarisation developed in which any defence of the other musicians involved was read by some as a denigration of Harvey’s own genius. I was pleased with myself for not chipping in.

Ian Olliver, Harvey’s original bassist, was a quarryman who worked for her dad, and when his wife insisted he couldn’t carry on a 7am-5pm working day and play in a band on top of it, he was replaced by Steve Vaughan, an engineer by trade. Bassists are mostly there to add sonic ballast, so perhaps their contribution wasn’t all that individual, but it would be certainly unfair to say the same about the drummer, Rob Ellis. Ellis was interested in 20^th-century classical music and irregular, unexpected rhythms; so was Harvey, she just didn’t know it at that stage. When Ellis mentioned Bartok and Stravinsky to her she looked at him blankly, but both Dry and Rid of Me are marked by the irregularity, dissonance, and extreme contrasts between quiet and loud passages which appealed to both of them. Ellis was modest enough to claim that Harvey had made use of him because he was the only available drummer around Yeovil at the time, but it counts as one of the great good fortunes of her life that he was perhaps the only one who stood a chance of understanding what she wanted to do. By her own admission Harvey finds it almost agonisingly difficult to express what she has in mind, and has always needed collaborators who get it without much prompting.

We’ve now heard the demos for Harvey’s early work, of course, and while they clarify the power and energy of her imagination, without the other musicians the end product would have been different. No creative artist is entirely alone; and, quite apart from the practicalities of art-making, each stands in a cloud of endeavour extending before they were born and beyond their individual lives. Ideally, to tell the story of an artist you would begin with their entire society.

But we still want the individual. After a mention on Radio 4 I recently read Jenny Uglow’s acclaimed 2012 ‘anti-biography’ of Sarah Losh, The Pinecone. Losh is a fascinating character, a landowner and amateur architect in mid-19^th century Cumbria whose politics had a radical tinge; the problem is that apart from one tiny essay about her building of the compelling and frankly Deist church at Wreay, and a I think a letter about travelling in Italy, she wrote nothing, nor did others say very much about her, either. Ms Uglow tries to get around this void at the heart of her enterprise by writing about everything else – Sarah Losh’s antecedents, the social and political life of Carlisle, the industrial and agricultural interests of the Loshes and the families linked with them, science, religion, and economics. But that void won’t go away. Time and again the writer guesses at Sarah Losh’s thoughts, opinions, reactions, and beliefs, but they remain guesses, and by the end I, certainly, felt I’d been wandering through mental mist. Even I, it seems, anti-individualist thought I may be, hunger to know a person, to touch a personality.

Needling

Valerie's mother frequents car-boot sales and other such events and a couple of years ago passed to her some items of ecclesiastical fabric. Now Valerie is a member of a Baptist congregation in Guildford which, with the best will in the world, has little use for such things so she in turn gave them to Marion our then curate. I was amazed to discover that one bit was in fact a complete black requiem altar frontal and that was soon pressed into use as we didn't have one - I'd been making do with a big bit of black cloth spread over the altar. But the other was a large piece of predominately red fabric, somewhat on the garish side but still rather splendid for that. We already have a nice red altar frontal so we thought this cloth could be used for a cope. Our in-house seamstress Pat felt hulking about large bits of fabric was beyond her and I found myself thinking, Well, a cope isn't a very complicated garment, so what was stopping me having a go at it? I used my own cope as a pattern and with a bit of amendment to work around the shape of the red, some red velvet from Hertfordshire, red cloth lining from the local craft shop, braid from the Ukraine and trim from Thailand (!), this was the result. My sewing is not up to much if you look carefully but from a distance it's OK: I made a few mistakes which had to be rectified and even after it was all done found a pin buried in the lining which somehow I'd missed and had to be wiggled carefully out, but overall I am pleased. I produced the cope in the odd half-hour here and there, and it has renewed my admiration for people like my friend Archangel Janet who do this for a living and often find - if they are freelance makers - that their clients have shockingly unrealistic expectations of how much they should pay for what is actually long, painstaking and hard work.

I must confess that in sixteen years of ministry I have only worn a red cope once, when we had a children's mass one Pentecost Day and Choral Evensong later on, and on that occasion I borrowed it. But it's good to have and makes use of something that might otherwise go to waste. Unless my stitching is worse than I realise and it falls apart!