Democratic Ventriloquy

Somebody – of course I can’t recall who – once remarked that one of former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’s great abilities was ventriloquy, the ability to speak in the voices of others. When he found himself, for instance, in the position of interlocutor between two opposed viewpoints, +Rowan would typically listen to one side, then say something like ‘So what I think you’re saying is …’ and the party would hear their position described back to them, but in a deeper, richer and more nuanced form than they would have thought of themselves. ‘Yes – yes, that is what I think’, they’d conclude, flattered, and, once this process had been repeated for their opponents, everyone would emerge from the conference having reached some sort of common position, but not sure quite how it had happened.

There was an echo of that in Dr Williams’s Reith Lecture on ‘Freedom of Worship’, delivered a couple of months ago but which I listened to last night. His case is that ‘freedom of worship’ can’t simply refer to ritual practice, but the ability to shape your life after the religious convictions that those practices imply – ‘the integrity of actual physical witness to belief’ – and this is where negotation is required with a secular society in which such practice is marginal and open to misunderstanding and perhaps hostility. Behind conflicts over particular demands by religious people to behave in a specific way, or to be exempted from acts which may be legal but which go against a conscience informed by a religious imperative (a doctor wanting not to be involved in abortions, for instance) – is, +Rowan insists, a reference to a rationale for moral action which is neither just individual choice nor the will of the majority, and it is only this sense of a transcendent value-judgement (whether based in religious belief or not) which has the power to challenge society and move it forward.

This is where the ventriloquy comes in. Dr Williams takes the viewpoint of stroppy believers, whether conservative or progressive, and translates it into a general form a secular world might understand:

when the religious believer says: “I claim the right to dissent because I claim the right to shape my life according to convictions that show me how things really are,” such a person is in effect saying to the majority or consensus view: “Give me some arguments to justify your view that go beyond the sheer weight of numbers and what most of you happen to feel.” The power of numbers and of shared feeling may guarantee that something becomes and remains technically lawful, but if lawfulness itself is no more than what the majority happens to be happy with, there will never be a rationale for criticism and resistance, there will never be a process of further learning.

Religious belief may very uncomfortable, and not progressive at all, but its existence and licensing by a society which does not, and arguably never has, lived by its deep convictions, ‘guards against absolutizing the status quo’. Even ‘mere’ worship, worship in its familiar sense, suggests Dr Williams, is of use precisely because it serves no obvious, rational purpose and opens the believer to possibility and imagination. ‘The freedom of the contemplative Carmelite nun to gaze in silence at the altar for an hour’ turns out to be the core of liberty itself – he argues.

Once the audience had shaken itself clear of the spell the wizard had cast, several members tried to tie him in to their agendas. They wanted more, something more specific, more concrete. An Evangelical Christian woman wanted a harder line on the ability of Christians to worship where they are a minority, not hearing Dr Williams say exactly that; a journalist argued that most of the world’s problems were ‘non-negotiable’ and wanted to know what the bishop thought we should actually do? You fight, basically, he answered: Ukraine is right to resist invasion. Evil should not be 'indulged, included, or yielded to'. No ambiuguity about that. For my part, I’m convinced the ability to ventriloquise, at least in the imagination, is central to democracy, if you see that form of social organisation as a conversation aiming at solving problems of communal management, and not just a battle that one side can win or lose. A little more talk and a little less action: then the action we take might be less damaging.

A Reward for Patience

My last two attempts to get to the Surrey History Centre in Woking were stymied by the fact that the heating there had broken down. I might be happy enough to sit in the cold in my William Hartnell fingerless gloves but I suppose it would be cruel to demand the staff turn up to supply me with documents. But I made it today.

My visits to record offices are another thing that's changed over the years. Once upon a time I would mainly be investigating maps looking for holy wells: I remember doing Leicestershire in the cramped old Leicester County Record Office and filling order slip after order slip which I placed into a little wooden tray in front of the member of staff on duty who sat on a high chair like a Victorian clerk. When I did the same for Surrey the number of documents I could order had gone down to three at a time and that was painfully slow. Now, at least, you can order up to ten documents in advance, and potentially call up more when you actually visit. It's the burden on the staff that has multiplied: documents aren't just handed over, they all seem to be signed in and out using multiple forms, and I noticed the archivist was weighing some folders of material before giving them to me, recording the weight of each one on the form. The only explanation was that it was to make sure I didn't pinch a leaflet for the St Augustine's Addlestone Garden Fete for 1963, and so it turned out. The poor staff must be nearly driven crazy.

This visit brought to light some interesting insights into the way St Augustine's Aldershot thought of itself; the interior arrangements and fixtures of the Addlestone churches; and some frankly disagreeable memories shared by a former pupil of the Song School of St Mary of the Angels ('I couldn't possibly have stood a second term under such a regime'). But I hadn't thought of the History Centre as a place to buy secondhand books. Yet I came away with three, and a map!

Enough Already!

Many years ago, the Church of England didn't make much provision for weekday worship on days when nothing very much was going on liturgically, and Anglo-Catholic churches got used to making use of the material provided for their Roman counterparts. Here at Swanvale Halt we've used the 1970 Roman Daily Missal for years (albeit in a post-1970 copy!). Of course I never use the Collects: they are almost always vapid variants on the theme of 'Jesus loves us so may we love him', which is all very well but gets you only so far. I am also used to making on-the-hoof amendments to the texts of the Jerusalem Bible which is what the Daily Missal uses, when those texts seem clunky and awkward.

This morning, though, I opened the Missal before the assembled masses in the Lady Chapel (all four souls) and found my eye and brain confronted by Hebrews 2.5:

He did not appoint angels to be rulers of the world to come, and that world is what we are talking about.

Now the J.B. tries to improve comprehension of the text by removing any doubt at all about what it might mean, which I suppose is a characteristically Roman approach. But this just reads horrendously. For a second I flailed as I tried to come up with an alternative that both kept the sense of Holy Writ and expressed it in a way which treated the ear less brutally, and failed, and apologised for my failure. By way of comparison, let us turn to The Message, which is the most extreme paraphrastic version of the Bible in general use, and which renders the same verse thus:

God didn't put angels in charge of this business of salvation that we're dealing with here. 

To me this is nowhere near as bad. It does scarcely more violence to the text than the J.B. and at least reads energetically and appealingly within its American idiom. The NRSV which we would use on Sundays says:

Now God did not subject the coming world, about which we are speaking, to angels. 

This is by no means the most elegant of sentences and some people may fight shy of the subordinate clause in the middle. But it is more stately and less banal, and the subordinate clause slows the phrase down, giving the listener the chance to digest what is being said: it comes to rest on the word 'angels' who are the point of the statement and the thought behind it. The verse leads into the discussion of the role of human beings, to whom creation has been subjected, based on the quotation of Psalm 8. It is better in every respect. From now on I think the Missal will remain on its shelf in the vestry.

Taking Aim

Here in Swanvale Halt Rectory, whatever regard we may necessarily have for the Supreme Governor, our interest in his family is slightly less than we have in, say, the historic rolling stock of the railways of New South Wales. However, in all the current controversy over the apparent declarations of the S.G.'s younger son - 'apparent' pending the actual emergence of the English text of his book, in which we will take no interest either - we were most surprised by the reaction to his statements about his service in Afghanistan. They were markedly less tasteless than the ones he made about the same matter a decade ago, and his point seems to be that it wasn't so much a case of him deliberately keeping count of the number of Taliban insurgents he despatched, as the Army Air Corps counting for him: something a person in that situation couldn't avoid knowing. 

Far more interesting than this, for someone who has worked with the military and is still linked to them in the form of the Air Cadets, is the vocal rage and apparent shock from senior military figures at the idea that soldiers might have a sense of detachment from the people they kill. 'That's not what we teach personnel' they insist; but, though they might not be taught, personnel are hazarding their mental health if that's not what they learn, because how can you conceivably kill someone while wondering about their family, their hobbies, or what they might have had for breakfast? To argue that such detachment isn't an absolutely necessary part of combat life is fastidious in the extreme, though there is another word for it. The question everyone wants to dare to ask a veteran of active service is 'Did you kill anyone?', and the inevitable followup is 'How do you feel about that?'  Well, here is one answer: uncomfortable, but not more. What do you expect? I doubt the Taliban put many of their servicemen through trauma counselling either.

I've not long since finished reading Angela Beleznay's Incident 48, an account of the worst bombing raid on my home town of Bournemouth during World War Two. In a little over a minute one May afternoon in 1943 - although it's hard even now to tally up a completely reliable figure - something over 200 people died, slightly more than a third of them civilians. The youngest was a toddler of 21 months. The attack on Bournemouth, where the Germans knew many Allied personnel were concentrated in the hotels awaiting deployment, was itself part of a retaliation for Allied bombing of industrial centres in the Ruhr which had killed hundreds of civilians, let alone military personnel. That's what war is like. It's monstrous, terrible, and that's why you don't engage in it unless you absolutely have to.

A few weeks ago we held the ceremony to swear in the new ATC recruits in the church. I told their parents that part of my role was to help the cadets think through their identity as cadets in a more reflective way than they might otherwise get a chance to do. I think we might be having a conversation at some point shaped around the statements of Citizen H Windsor and see where that takes us. 

Fuseli at the Courtauld

Although getting to London yesterday was more problematic than usual, requiring catching the train at Woking rather than anywhere further down the line, I made the journey so I could visit the Fuseli show at the Courtauld along with Ms Mauritia. Henry Fuseli has a relationship with the Gothic tradition especially via the various versions he painted of The Nightmare, but also his treatments of scenes from Shakespeare, and other fantasies - including his fantasy women, who are on display in this exhibition. In fact, they are not complete fantasies, but I'll come to that.

I was already familiar with most of the images, but hadn't seen them in the flesh before, and gathering them together creates a slight sense of oppression as Fuseli obsessively repeats poses and ideas, using swirly dress to experiment with form and movement. He hardly ever drew from life: the story went that he would mark a paper with four random dots and use them to dispose the limbs of his figures. Many of his subjects are (imagined) sex workers, but far more erotic and striking than the exposed breast or six is what seems to be the main object of the artist's obsessive interest, hair. During the earlier part of Fuseli's life, wealthy women did indeed have towering hairstyles, but he creates weird, geometric and elaborate shapes for his figures to wear, curls, fringes, sculptured structures, decorated with beads and papers, which must often, surely, be completely unreal. Ms Mauritia remembered the 20th-century fetish artist John Willie who drew women in impossible high heels - another way of simultaneously depicting women as powerful while defusing that power with disabling dress, shoes you can't walk in, or hairstyles you can't move without disarraying. 

But the ladies in this show aren't entirely unreal. Gazing from many drawings, the dramatic features of Fuseli's wife Sophia are unmistakable even when she's not acknowledged as the model. Her hair is the most fantastic of all, but she, the young English model who became the artist's spouse, is real enough, and there's something very odd going on psychologically in the way her husband depicts her: he adores her and fears the fact he does. He shows her next to a head of the Medusa; he draws her making the corna gesture that signals cuckoldry. What kind of a person was she? Of course you get no clues from this art: Fuseli wasn't interested in showing real people, just moments from his own imagination. She's supposed to have had quite a temper, but perhaps that was just from being married to him. 

Dorset in Winter

Taken shakily on my phone - I discovered I'd brought the camera bag with me but not the camera itself! - these photos are not spectacular, but I was glad to be back in Dorset for the day going out with my sister to Abbotsbury and then to West Bay. The former was very quiet - the only other visitors we saw were a group of walkers who came into the café where we had our Blue Vinney baguettes - but there was a surprising number of people making their way around the little harbour a mile south of Bridport. It's the first time in years that Chapel Hill has been deserted apart from the cows: but then it looks a little forbidding, the east window boarded up after the glass has clearly been cracked. People were clearly there around Christmas as there were the remains of decorations and some Christmas-contextual messages left in the prayer niches. 

Ambushed

One of the things occupying my attention during the few days I have off this week is the annual Great Prune of the garden. Later today this will mean, most specifically, cutting back the laurel and fir which occupy the area to the left of the steps leading to the upper part of the garden. It was to some horror a little while ago that I came across this photo of Dr Bones and the late Boots on their visit to Swanvale Halt Rectory just before I was inducted in 2009. That fir and the laurels beside it are about four feet high: now, they have managed to reach three times that height. Each year I have told myself, 'I'm really going to cut everything back this year' and somehow I chicken out. As far as this laurel is concerned, I've tried hacking back the tall stems a third at a time but somehow that hasn't reduced the overall height of the bushes at all and they are now massive. My ambition now is to take down at least three feet off the top of the bushes, which will reduce them to head height at the top of the steps, and about nine feet further down. 

There is a metaphor here. In the same way that the growth of the bushes has been imperceptible until I look back at some old photographs, so habits and patterns of thinking can overtake us without us being aware, and it takes some startling event to reveal the truth to us. The hacking-back of those is harder work as it can't be done with saws and secateurs. But I'm not at work so don't expect anything more profound than that!