A Sense of Purpose

Delving back into the history of the Church of England reminds me how we have always, it seems, believed that British society wanted less to do with us than we might wish, and how sour we felt about it. A little while ago I described poor Fr Francis Wheeler of Wheatley & Farnborough and his Primer of Pastoral Theology which assumed, even back in the 1940s, that the flock assigned to him by Our Holy Mother the Church would be mainly unresponsive, tempted by the fleshly pleasures of modernity to spend their Sunday mornings doing other things than following Mattins in their copies of the Prayer Book. Then, last week, I came across a small card given to new godparents, shoved into the pages of an old service register book from the 1920s. Hectoring and miserable, its tiny type demanded of its readers, ‘Do YOU mean the promises you have made? Or will you forget them like so many?’; it clearly assumed that most people would not want to observe their obligations, and would not in fact do so, that they would prove false and feckless. To encounter this kind of Church was to be plunged into the dank, chilly air of depression and condemnation, to be told right from the off that you had no right to be there and should be grateful for the opportunity. It was a form of religion that only stood a real chance of sweeping up the self-righteous and the neurotic.

And curiously I find few expressions of this discouraging outlook which really seem very spiritual. Instead the concerns of the clergy who voice it, like Francis Wheeler, seem more to do with moral decadence and the refusal of so many people around him to conform to his idea of what good citizenship should look like, rather than, for instance, the fate of their eternal souls. It seems to be very secular worries that really animate them. I remember speaking to Dr Bones’s father about his own dad, a priest in rural Devon in the 1950s, who, he said, ‘saw his role as making people good and useful members of society’ (Bones père became a fundamentalist Evangelical in contrast). No wonder the Church of England’s experience of the last century has been so disappointing, as it’s watched most people find perfectly serviceable ways of being good citizens without any reference to what it might do or say.

The myths Christians tell themselves are legion, if I may put it in those terms. One of my favourites is that ‘the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church’, a line which goes back to Tertullian. I am rather fond of quoting Tertullian’s credo quod absurdum est, but semen est sanguis Christianorum ignored the truth both in the third century and ever since. Christians were a tiny, disregarded minority until Constantine converted; and, across the centuries, from Roman North Africa overrun by the Umayyads to Moorish Spain to 17^th-century Japan, to crush Christianity out of existence by either bloody persecution or social pressure short of it has proved a matter of relative ease. Again, modern Christians tell themselves that the Church flourishes most when it is at its most counter-cultural, but Dame History tells us something different: that Christianity is at its most popular when it reflects, by and large, the values of the culture it inhabits, and especially those of the class in charge; if ‘popular’ is what we want to be, of course. We might well wonder what difference we really, truly make to the society around us.

If most of us have abandoned the belief that the people around us (in any uncomplicated or predictable way) are going to Hell unless they’re in our churches; and the lesser, etiolated idea that Britain (in any uncomplicated or predictable way) will go to Hell in a handcart unless people are in our churches; what, then, brethren, is left? Where can contemporary Anglicans find the impetus to get out of bed and go down to the steeple house to say Mattins in the morning?

I recall Dr Bones’s statement, when I was approaching my ordination, that ‘You’ll be spending your time helping people enjoy their lives’ which, considering her background, was a remarkable thing to say. It’s always remained with me: because a life lived in alignment with the cosmic truth must be more capable of enjoyment than the alternative – not in a superficial, consumerist way, but in the sense of deep fulfilment and peace. Sometimes as I prepare myself for the Eucharist I look out of the vestry windows on the souls going past on the path that runs alongside the churchyard, and think how sad it is that they aren’t hearing the words that tell them they are flawed but loved, that their joys and sorrows are heard, that they are capable of glory, and that glory wants to welcome them.

Is that enough? Is it too close to self-centredness and self-help? What else might there be, once threats, guilt, and utility are sent away?

Great Leap Forward

If you thought a post about mislaid water bottles was banal, here is something that might possibly rival it. It's the biggest event to befall Swanvale Halt church this week, unless someone has had a spiritual awakening that I don't yet know about. Our office manager suggested it would be a good idea to pave the area where the bins sit so that it doesn't become a quagmire in winter, and, thanks to Grant the churchwarden, it's been done.

The garden around the church was intended as its graveyard, but it's been closed since the 1880s and now only cremated remains are buried in one particular area. It was my predecessor who had the idea of tidying and reordering it as a Quiet Garden for the use of the community, and, although as we know it often gets used for activities that were not what she envisaged, I think it was her great lasting contribution. 

The garden is managed by a team of volunteers, partly from the congregation and partly the parish beyond. They have kindly paid for the paving work out of Quiet Garden funds. I am not sure, I must admit, exactly where these funds come from, but you don't turn down a gift, do you? The slabs look as though they've been Photoshopped on, but they haven't, promise.

A Piece of Time

My sweep around the centre of Ely a couple of weeks ago finished (as the rain began to fall) with a very rapid visit to an antiques centre by the Great Ouse, curtailed by it closing, I thought a bit too sharply. On one of the upstairs stalls was a nice ammonite. I've wanted an ammonite for ages, and there are very few things I want. But then I realised that what I wanted wasn't just any old ammonite, but a Dorset ammonite, so I came away not with a fossil but a 19th-century print of the Ruins of Hierapolis. I'll have to find a place for that somewhere. 

I'm not quite sure when South Dorset became 'The Jurassic Coast': it wasn't 185 million years ago, because it wasn't that when I was a child and actually lived a few miles away. Perhaps it was 2001, the year when the area became a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its geology, features, and natural beauty; since then the tag has become crucial in the marketing of Dorset to tourists, and even the bus which runs along the sea road is known as the Jurassic Coaster. And the central and most charismatic icon of that whole identity is the coil of the ammonite.

The ammonite appears everywhere in south Dorset, decorating shops, hotels, brochures and bus stops. It's set into the ground outside Lyme Regis Museum, and on the town's lampposts. It even lends its name to a movie, as a symbol of the woman who has become herself a symbol, Mary Anning - again, in my childhood she was just a curiosity, but now, recast as a brilliant, misunderstood gay scientist in a peak bonnet with a basket full of fossils, she strangely binds in her own person past and present, and makes a landscape of cliffs and crashing seas hold contemporary imaginings. In her new statue at Lyme, only unveiled last year, she both holds an ammonite, and they decorate the hem of her skirts.

So I conceded that an ammonite would cost about £10 per inch of Jurassic stone, and went about the not-very-difficult task of sourcing one on Ebay. Here it is: it came not from the coast, but from Bradford Abbas, a long way inland but at the bottom of the same sea as (say) Burton Bradstock would have been 170 million years ago when the rock that held it was laid down. That doesn't matter. Its coil moves inward and pastward to the lost ages that have made the holy land of Dorset, and all of us. I disentangled it from its packaging, held it, and felt unexpectedly tearful.

Only A Remnant Left

It's a definite, if probably inconsequential, sign of our times that the most numerous class of object currently adding to the church lost property box is not umbrellas or spectacles (though those still turn up), but small water bottles and flasks. We joke that we could put together an entire stall at the next Spring Fair with these artefacts alone. Nobody ever asks after them, even the pink ones with unicorns which are likely (I say no more than that) to belong to children. They are ubiquitous, and yet almost valueless.

Talking to the Rector

It was a large and somewhat chaotic baptism, for the younger sister of a boy who I baptised five years ago: about a third of the congregation was under 16 by my estimation. I knew a lot of them have been there for multiple baptisms, and it's reached the point on such occasions that I acknowledge that many people will have heard my spiel before but I'm going to say pretty much the same just in case they've forgotten. There were eleven godparents, several of whose names I recognised, a number being young fellows whose awkwardness in their unaccustomed suits was rivalled by their awkwardness in being in church at all. So far as young fellows are concerned, this discomfort often manifests itself in mild mucking about. There was one who fell under this temptation more than the others: when we were almost right at the end and I thanked everyone for being there to celebrate and acknowledging that they would be going 'to celebrate in a different way and a different place' he said very audibly 'right, off to the bar then, ho ho ho'. I was on the brink of saying something to him after it was all over, but restrained myself. The baby, in contrast, behaved impeccably.

The congregation bundled out of the church as quickly as they could manage without positively trampling one another, leaving about enough in the collection plate for a return bus ticket to Guildford (and we didn't notice anyone using the card reader). It was as I was tidying up that the joker in the pack of godparents came up to me. 'That was great, thank you', he said. 'You won't remember, but you baptised my daughter in 2010. Look, this is her now,' he went on, showing me a snap of a disgruntled looking fourteen-year-old on his phone. We had a very pleasing talk about what had happened to him since, and the passage of time more generally. There you are, do not rush to action, I thought to myself.

Earlier, our lay reader Gizel overheard me quoting Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes to the ladies serving coffee, which they'd clearly never heard of. My 'sermon' that morning had been an examination of the spiritual relationship between Anglicanism and Orthodoxy, with various audiovisual aids including a scary video of the Russian Military Cathedral built in 2020. 'You're a virtually inexhaustible source of nonsense', Gizel told me, which I think she meant kindly. Being German it's sometimes difficult to tell. I suppose it's positive that I cultivate such a warm and approachable working environment that she feels she can say something like that. 

Clerical Cavalcade

When I wandered into St Mark’s Farnborough South a little while ago, I wasn’t expecting the Anglo-Catholic adventure playground I discovered there. As I begin compiling lists of clergy I discover that those who’ve served St Mark’s are also more remarkable than you might expect for this unreported, uncelebrated suburban parish.

During my visit, the good folk of St Mark’s alleged that the church ‘had never been forgiven’ for going Anglo-Catholic at some point, but I’m not yet sure when that point was. Looking at the clergy I know about so far, L.G. Tugwell (1904-11) served curacies at St Saviour’s Battersea and Holy Trinity Guildford before becoming Anglican Chaplain at Frieburg, all appointments you might expect of a High Churchman. Basil Philips (1911-23) studied at Keble College and Wells Theological College and had done his curacy at Dorking before coming to Farnborough, and was briefly succeeded by the celebrated Bernard Keymer (1923-5). Now Keymer had been curate at the moderately Anglo-Catholic St Mary’s Portsea where future Archbishop Cosmo Lang was vicar (mind you, there were a dozen curates in the parish at that stage), before becoming Vicar of Eastleigh and then a military chaplain. His war service was heroic as he won the MC for rescuing soldiers trapped in barbed wire, and after the Armistice was appointed the first chaplain of the RAF college at Cranwell. Presumably it was St Mark’s connections with first the RFC and then RAF that led to him moving there.

Frs Tugwell, Philips and Keymer all have the stamp of moderate High Church clergy, but I think it was their successors who took St Mark’s to the top of the candle. The next vicar after Mr Keymer was – take a deep breath – the Revd the Viscount Mountmorres. William Geoffrey Bouchard de Montmorency came from Irish aristocracy, and succeeded to his title unexpectedly in 1880 at the age of eight, after his father, the 5^th Viscount and a magistrate, was assassinated in the midst of the Irish Land Wars. Unlike the rest of the family William went to England for his education, firstly at the Anglo-Catholic Radley School and then Balliol. After graduating he travelled and became an expert in ‘tropical economics’, the tropics in question being mainly in central Africa. In 1904 Montmorency took part in an expedition to the Congo with the journalist Maurice Dorman and both wrote up their experiences, his Lordship in The Congo Independent State: a report on a journey of enquiry, and Mr Dorman in A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State. The Viscount reported quite favourably of some at least of the people he met (the Bonjo and Dongo tribes, for instance, were ‘a splendid, intelligent, and fearless race’), but his journalist companion dedicated his book to the ruling Belgian authorities and devoted it to refuting reports of the Belgians’ ill-treatment of the natives – it is ‘distressing to read, showing a complete lack of sympathy with the Africans’, says the British Museum, to which Montmorency sold his collection of African artefacts in 1911. He’d also dabbled in politics, sitting as a Moderate Party (that is, Conservative) member of the London County Council for Tower Hamlets from 1894 to 1898, and finally in 1911 could be found lecturing in an Edinburgh cinema to accompany a film about the lives of the late Edward VII and George V: ‘he possesses the gift of vivid description’, reported The Scotsman, ‘and his running commentary on every depicted item … is not only happily phrased, but always interesting and instructive’. By then the Viscount had probably already decided to follow a clerical life: he went to Cuddesdon college and was ordained in 1913, serving his title at Ryde on the Isle of Wight, an advanced Catholic parish, before moving to Swinton in Lancashire as Rector in 1917 (he was also a Royal Navy Reserve chaplain). 1925 was the year he relocated to Farnborough, and remained for ten years, before leaving for St Paul’s, Wokingham, but he was only able to enjoy those grander surroundings for a year until he died. Despite two marriages Montmorency only had a single daughter, so on his death the titles passed to his cousin Arthur, the incumbent of St Modoc’s, Doune, in Scotland, who thus became the second ordained Viscount Mountmorres in a row. There’s an interesting character.

For William Montmorency’s last two years at St Mark’s, his curate was Cecil – or Charles, sometimes – de Lyons-Pike. Under normal Anglo-Catholic circumstances I would suspect him of having invented the double-barrelled name, but his father Charles, a Shropshire-born solicitor who practised in Bloomsbury, also used it so Cecil/Charles is not to blame. He began his professional life as a schoolmaster, eventually (after being rejected for military service) becoming head of Holland House School in Hove. One pupil at the time was the future author Patrick Hamilton who ‘remembered de Lyons-Pike as being a young, bespectacled man who was extremely High Church. On one occasion he shocked the school assembly by saying to a boy “You’re the one who called Walker’s cousin a damned bloody fool”. After he had doled out a thrashing, he commented “You didn’t expect me to repeat that, did you?”’ In 1922 de Lyons-Pike moved the school to Burgess Hill, renaming it St Peter’s Court, and left in 1927 apparently after deciding to be ordained. He attended the theological college at Ely and was deaconed in 1928. St Mark’s was his first appointment, where he moved smoothly from curate to vicar in 1935 after Fr Montmorency moved on. Fr de Lyons-Pike stayed until 1952 and I will tell you what happened to him next in a minute.

His successor was Francis Wheeler. Mr Wheeler was yet again a non-standard figure having been ordained in Accra in 1926, an outpost of the Anglican Church where anything other than Anglo-Catholics were thin on the ground. He was principal of St Augustine’s College at Kumasi, and served three English curacies at St Michael’s Shoreditch, Christ Church Woburn Square, and St Michael’s Paddington, before becoming priest in charge of Holy Trinity, Marlow, Vicar of East & West Hanney, and finally incumbent of Wheatley in 1944. Somewhat over 30 years before, Mr Wheeler’s predecessor there had been burned in effigy in his own garden after trying to introduce a Sung Eucharist to the parish church, so, for a priest who believed schoolchildren should be ‘taught to sing the Mass, starting with the Kyries and the Sanctus’, it might be wondered whether this Oxfordshire village was really the right place. According to the history of the Church in Wheatley (written in 2006, coincidentally, by John Prest who was my tutor at Balliol), Fr Wheeler certainly doesn’t seem to have been that happy. Having already written a book entitled Modernity (1929), which concluded that Modernity was generally to be regretted, his Primer of Pastoral Theology (1948) finds reason to denounce lipstick, the cinema, and jazz (‘negroid in origin’), and assumes that the modern clergyman’s work will largely be confined to a small and dwindling group of committed people: ‘the flock is far less biddable, far less disposed to listen obediently … The influence of the pulpit has waned until it has become practically negligible … You may stand at the door of the fold and call persuasively “The Bible says …”, “The Church teaches …”, but there will be little or no response from the majority. They have never been in the fold, they feel no need of its security, and as for the shepherd, he is superfluous’.

Mr Wheeler lists his pastoral, theological and devotional works in his entry in Crockford’s; he doesn’t mention his novels. These were a string of thrillers set before, during, and after the War with European conflict as the backdrop; the exception was the fourth, the supernatural chiller Unholy Alliance (1951), which included a depiction of a Black Mass so lurid the Vicar of Wheatley had to deny he’d actually been to one.

By 1952 Francis Wheeler had stuck it out in uncongenial Wheatley for eight years and decided on a move. He went to St Mark’s, and remained there for thirteen uneventful and, one hopes, less frustrating years. The good folk of the Oxfordshire parish found that their new priest was none other than Fr C.R. de Lyons-Pike, swapping livings with Mr Wheeler in what must have been one of the last arrangements of its kind. Perhaps Wheatley had become more accepting of Anglo-Catholics, or time had rubbed off some of Fr de Lyons-Pike’s sharp edges in the decades since Patrick Hamilton encountered him at Holland House School, but his six years there seemed rather happier than his predecessor’s time. At least, John Prest says, a widower when he arrived, he ‘lost no time in marrying his housekeeper’s daughter’.

Fr de Lyons-Pike is (I think) the figure on the left of this picture, and I suspect that’s Fr Montmorency in the middle – not sure of the chap on the right. That’s enough clergy!

Is There Anybody There?

My science-fiction enthusiasms are limited and lie elsewhere, so I never got into the BBC comedy series Red Dwarf. I did read one of the books, though (I can’t quite remember how I was in a position to do so) and was struck by the fact that in the story there are no aliens. Obnoxious former spaceship maintenance technician Rimmer, reduced to a virtual existence as a hologram, dreams of one day encountering aliens who will have the technology to restore his body, but he is doomed to disappointment as the somewhat bleak narrative insists that life was a one-off terrestrial accident, and all the races the Red Dwarf crew meet are evolved from Earth creatures. Gradually the truth becomes clear, even while Rimmer refuses to accept it.

I suspect that life is indeed unique to this planet, but I might be about to be proved wrong. On Sunday the BBC carried reports of the US Congress investigative sessions looking into Unidentified Aerial Phemonena, UAPs, as UFOs are now generally known having undergone a rebranding. The committee had been hearing from David Grusch, a former senior military intelligence officer who claims – while not having seen the evidence directly himself – that for some decades, according to many officials he had spoken to, the US military has been in possession of alien technology and ‘non-human biologics’. The congressmen and -women seemed to be trying deliberately to remain sober and unexcitable at this startling claim, The World This Weekend averred. Why should we believe Mr Grusch? Jim Naughtie asked US journalist and writer on UAPs Leslie Kean; ‘not only have I spoken to him about this’, she said, ‘but to others off the record, and they all told me exactly the same thing’. And there, somewhat frustratingly, the news show left it.

If any of this has substance, the question arises as to why everyone involved has kept quiet about it for so long. To all appearances, alien technology doesn’t seem to have made its way into US military hardware, so it doesn’t seem that there are secrets of that sort which have been guarded to keep them away from the States’ enemies. I’m also unconvinced by the picture we seem to have that cities will be full of people running around screaming the moment it becomes clear that there are aliens: ‘the government keeps it quiet to avoid panic’. In fact most people seem to accept the argument that the universe is so vast that there must logically be life out there somewhere, so it would seem bizarre to be thrown into hysteria by having this belief confirmed. If the aliens are technologically advanced enough to have reached Earth (and then crashed), presumably they could destroy us already if they wanted to, so that doesn’t seem worth worrying about either. In fact, the sheer unlikelihood of so big a secret being kept for decades is, for me, the strongest argument that there isn’t a secret at all.

The Christian religion is absolutely Earth-centric: ‘in the fullness of time you made us, the crown of all creation’, one of the Common Worship communion prayers goes, echoing the language of Psalm 8. It will take quite some readjustment to cope with a sudden expansion of the horizons of life beyond the bounds of this small globe, to shapes and forms that possibly won’t resemble us and our understandings at all. I have no doubt that we can do it, given flexibility and imagination, and come up with some explanation for the eternal and universal God choosing this one miniscule corner of the Milky Way to be incarnate that might, perhaps, make sense to a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri. Perhaps the time is approaching when we will have to.