Unbuttoning the Church

How do you read Caravaggio's The Calling of St Matthew? Which figure is the evangelist - the bearded man in the black hat, or the younger fellow keeping his gaze fixed on his cash rather than Christ on the right of the picture? Is the bearded man gesturing to himself, or to the other figure? I think the latter, while Canon Chris Russell, the Archbishop of Canterbury's Advisor on Evangelism and Witness, argues that it's the former, which radically changes your interpretation of the painting.

This is just one and not the most important point I disagree with in the online CofE 'Leadership for Evangelism' material I'm working through at the moment with a view to fulfilling the bit of our development plan which deals with 'faith sharing' (the overall significance of the painting is that it's an illustration of the way the encounter with Christ can take place in the midst of our everyday lives, which is fair enough). A more notable example is the episode in another passage where two commentators discuss what holds ordinary Christians back from sharing their faith. 'We've done extensive work across years in 18 countries,' says one, 'and what comes back consistently is that they're worried about rejection.' Hm. My mind goes back many years to a different context, to a Liberal Democrat meeting in Oxford where my late and lovely friend Sam was asked by the future MP for Oxford West why he didn't invite any of his friends to our meetings: 'Because I want to keep them, Evan', Sam answered reasonably, and I have always believed the situation is the same in matters religious. Nobody wants to think that their friendship is instrumental, that the relationship is actually about recruitment into an organisation, and what Christians are afraid of is not their friends or relatives saying No as such, but being thought to be fake, to be engaging in a relationship for the sake of something else. I'm not sure the Church's officials really want to think about that.

But there is a lot of useful material there, too, and it makes me reflect differently about some of our activities at Swanvale Halt. The things we’re doing at the moment to try to widen our diet of worship in ways that might provide different routes into faith for those on the edges of it – Forest Church, Compline online, and Sunday Space – are not on their own drawing in a single soul beyond the ones I could have predicted all along would take part in such things. I now doubt they will. What they might do is get some of the congregation acclimatised to the habit of being more than passive consumers of religion, but being more open and articulate about it, a little less controlled and buttoned-down. It’s not easy for me, frankly, because I rather prefer controlled and buttoned-down, but it’s absolutely necessary. So I carry on lowering my sights until they are almost level with the ground!

Move 'em On, Head 'em Up

This Saturday's Messy Church was the worst-attended we've ever had, even more than the one we forgot (all right, I forgot) to tell anyone about. Blame the hot weather, which meant that nobody much wanted to venture out of doors after a week of the children sweltering back at school: there were virtually tumbleweeds rolling across the village streets. 

Among those bold souls who did turn up, though only as we were packing everything away, were Andy our local beat constable and a colleague, just checking in to see how everything was going. In fact, as far as antisocial behaviour is concerned, everything has been quite quiet for the last few weeks. "Yes", agreed Andy, "we think we've managed to stir things up a bit. The older individual who hangs around with the kids and who we're most interested in knows we're trying to make his evenings a bit less comfortable. Of course", he went on, "that just means he now spends most of his time in Guildford. And Guildford will probably move him on to Woking eventually".

"Still", said his colleague as she looked across the church to where the Messy Church collage had just been put up, bearing the theme of the day, "Sharing is Caring".  

Where Coincidence Leads

‘There is no coincidence in this world, only inevitability’, insisted Yuuko Ichihara of xxxHolic, and the transdimensional witch’s words are apposite today. My god-daughter Katrin has just been on holiday in Japan; a card from her has arrived today showing one of her destinations, the Kinkakuji temple in Kyoto. Is that not, I thought, the building whose burning Yukio Mishima wrote about in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion? So it was - very oddly, as a stray reference somewhere today had made me think about Mishima an hour or so before I picked the card from the doormat. These days I am more and more inclined to agree with Yuuko-san, and see time as folded and coiled, touching on itself at points that produce resonances, echoes, and bleed-throughs, that we, encased in chronology as we are, call coincidence.

In my teens I was rather captivated by the melodramatic extremity of Yukio Mishima’s life, culminating in a ritual suicide that ended his derisory, doomed-to-fail would-be military coup on November 25^th 1970 (St Catherine’s Day, you may note). ‘The compromise climate of today, when one can neither live beautifully nor die horribly’, he wrote in On Hagakure, his paean to the old samurai ethic: now there’s a creed for an adolescent who’s done little living and has never seen anyone die. I bought all the books, at least the ones readily available in mid-to-late 1980s Bournemouth, of which The Temple of the Golden Pavilion was one.

But it was Mishima’s final work, The Sea of Fertility, I found myself thumbing through again today. This stretching novel – 800-odd pages in the Penguin – is four books bolted together like fate, and is the bleakest, bitterest thing you will ever read. Notwithstanding some readings, which glimpse in its conclusion what a Westerner might call redemption, I think that overarching title expresses nothing more, or less, than an irony so dark and hopeless that it becomes almost unbearable, like the fire consuming the Kinkakuji.

Apart from the climactic, disorientating and beautiful scene in the nunnery garden, I was always most drawn to the episode in the final part of The Sea of Fertility, The Decay of the Angel, where Keiko, the protagonist Honda’s oldest friend, dolls herself up to confront his adopted son Toru with the truth over Christmas dinner. She doesn’t believe, as Honda does, that Toru is the reincarnation of a doomed young lover from the 1910s; a right-wing idealist who killed himself between the wars after assassinating a banker; or a ludicrously beautiful Thai princess who died of a cobra bite. She’s convinced he’s just a nasty, clever, manipulative boy. He’s not pure enough, even pure evil enough, as he might imagine. Keiko is the murderer of all illusions: an ‘angel-killer’, Toru thinks. ‘We are two bored, cynical old people’, she tells him, ‘Can your pride really permit you to call us destiny? A nasty old man and woman? An old voyeur and an old lesbian?’ I rather wanted to be Keiko, telling horrible truths to horrible people. God forgive me, but part of me still does.

Forty years later or nearly, I look at Mishima’s life and I read a story of thorough falsehood, but even if his writing always centres on unbalanced, deluded, and unpleasant people, he almost could not help himself but be truthful there. In The Sea of Fertility’s second instalment, Runaway Horses, Isao Iinuma wants to restore the values of old Japan with a cathartic act of violence, but new Japan continues undisturbed, and that was the fate of Mishima himself. Both fictional revolutionary and real-life rebel sacrificed themselves to an ideal which was, like all political ideals enacted in any real context, compromised with money, desire, and power. Surely someone as clearsighted as Mishima couldn’t have believed in that nonsense? Was that final act not just a way of escaping the consequences of what he had written?

“And the Golden Temple grew until it consumed the entire world; it became sufficient to consume the entire meaning of the world”

Performance

A little while ago S.D. told me of the traumatic experience a group of friends had suffered when attempting to go to church the Christmas-before-last. Today we have an uncannily similar occurrence which makes me wonder how common they are. My brother-in-law works at a church school: there is a new incumbent at the parish church. The term starts with a service for the staff, something I'd been thinking of offering. In came the new vicar whose words of welcome were 'This is going to be an informal communion service. I've brought my guitar and I'm going to sing you a song'. 'It would have been rude if we'd all put our heads in our hands', my brother-in-law said.

This is an artist's impression of what it would be like if I was to try doing it. Ha-ruuuuu!

Tech Milestone

There was a baptism at Swanvale Halt church on Sunday, the younger daughter of a family whose older child was baptised a few years ago. She is already 3 and a bit, and missed out her original baptism date because of the pandemic. She took it all very seriously.

One of her godmothers gave a reading, as families occasionally do. 'Remind me what it is', I said to the little girl's parents before we started: 'ChatGPT wrote it', they told me. This is the first time this has happened here, at any rate. It was wordy and repetitious, though no worse than anything else a family might look up online and then adopt for their own use. Had it been me I would have cut it down a bit. What surprised me was that, in contrast to the absolutely vapid stuff I've read in various places that's very clearly AI-generated, it did have some content, talking about the 'limitless possibilities' ahead of little Amelia. Was that the brief they gave the system, or did it lift that from somewhere else? I can see that this might be very helpful for people who are not used to articulating their own thoughts and writing them down (and that means most of us) but ultimately it might be better if they did. 

Secrets of the Pharoahs

This is a propos of nothing, but it was where my mental travels took me yesterday. My fascination with Ancient Egypt goes back to my childhood where there was a half-shelf of books on the subject in our local library where (as a special privilege) I had an adult reader’s ticket from the age of about 9. I was captivated by them, even as I was slightly terrified by the photographs of mummies. The spell has never quite been broken.

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Dorothy Eady who fell down stairs at her home in about 1907 and was taken as dead before reviving, and thereafter increasingly identified with the Egypt of Seti I, the pharoah who came to visit her in her teenage dreams. It is worth saying that there was never any independent witness of any of these events so we will never know the truth of them. Dorothy became an entirely self-taught Egyptologist, and moved there in 1931, eventually living in a tiny adobe house in Abydos, worshipping the ancient gods, dreaming of encounters with Seti whose lover she was convinced she had been in a past life, and acting as a consultant to more orthodox students of the subject. She had a son who she insisted on calling Seti, hence her adopted name of Omm Sety, ‘Seti’s mother’. Despite being clearly quite odd, she had an unerring feel for Egyptian folkways and habits and her predictions of what features might be found in a particular place usually proved uncannily accurate when a dig was eventually carried out.

Omm Sety reserved an abiding hatred for the ‘heretic pharoah’ Akhenaten who had turned the kingdom away from the old gods she and her spectral lover revered. She claimed that she knew where Akhenaten's queen Nefertiti was buried, and that it was ‘in a very obvious place, yet where nobody would think of looking’. But why wouldn’t she reveal it? Although Omm Sety conceded that Nefertiti must have been ‘a very courageous woman’ for sticking to her principles, however misguided, she quoted what her beloved Seti had told her - ‘We don’t want anything more of that family known’. The location was near the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings, she maintained (against all opinion at the time, that no tombs remained to be found there), and that was the most she would give away: ‘you’d never believe it if I told you’, she chuckled to her collaborator Hanny el Zeini.

It was known since 1976 – when Omm Sety was still alive – that there were two anomalies, empty spaces, beyond the north wall of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber; a radar scan in 2000 suggested that these were rooms, and five years later an unrelated excavation broke into one, finding mummification equipment relating to the period, but no human remains. So what is the other void space?

Nicholas Reeves, late of the British Museum and many other places, adamantly holds that that space is the tomb of Nefertiti. In 2015 he wrote a paper arguing that newly-released high-resolution photographs of the north wall of the tomb suggested that it was at least partially not natural rock but a construct to close off whatever lay, and still lies, beyond it, and that the form of Tutankhamun’s tomb is one more associated with a queen than a king; he also argued that the most charismatic artefact we have from Ancient Egypt, Tutankhamun’s great gold burial mask, was in fact made for Nefertiti. Then there is the decoration of the tomb’s north wall. The traditional interpretation of the figures is that they show Ay, Tutankhamun’s successor, performing the ritual of the Opening of the Mouth on the boy king’s mummy; not surprisingly, because this is what the hieroglyphs on the wall say is going on. But it’s always been a bit funny. Ay was a man in later middle age when he succeeded, and this figure is very youthful: even by the stylised standards of Ancient Egyptian art, that’s odd. Dr Reeves points out that the subtle distinctive features of these figures suggest that what we think is Tutankhamun is in fact Nefertiti, in male garb as a female pharoah would be, and what we have taken to be Ay is Tutankhamun. The strongest argument against all this is that it requires we assume Nefertiti did reign, jointly with Akhenaten and then as pharoah in her own right, disguised beneath the name of the hazy Smenkhkare, a title in the king-lists and little else. That’s a plausible interpretation of what we know, but not the only one.

Of course, he may just be seeing things that aren’t there, convinced by his own conviction. A crack in a wall, a different sort of plaster here or there, the curve of the jawline of a painting, the shadowy hint of pictures beneath pictures: it’s not a watertight case, and never will be proved until that void space behind Tutankhamun’s north wall is opened. And you can only open it by burrowing down through the rock from behind. In 2018 another radar study reported there wasn't a space behind the wall at all. Despite conceding right from the start that he could well be wrong, Nicholas Reeves isn't ready to give up yet; late last year there was a bit of a flurry of media coverage when he announced that close examination of the names of the figures showed that they’d been repainted, confirming his identifications. We're all a little like this: we start out open-minded about our ideas, and gradually they become part of who we think we are.

Yet what a thing it would be if the heretic Queen is there, waiting beyond a few inches of wall, wrapped perhaps in her thirty-two-century-undisturbed splendour: as Omm Sety hinted, hidden in plain sight? I don’t think it’s just the glint of gold that’s so attractive in that idea, nor even the romance of what she was and stood for, but that suggestion that something very powerful is just a tiny distance out of reach. At any moment, we could break through a wall into a different reading of what is real.

To Bury Caesar

Fr Donald the ex-hospital chaplain was very exercised the other day about The Times's scraped-together survey of Anglican clergy who were, to a person it seemed or was made to seem, exhausted, despairing, and convinced the UK can no longer be described as a Christian country in any sense of the term. 'Just selling newspapers', he fumed, though why the paper should have thought what the Anglican clergy think about themselves or anything else is a matter anyone outside the Church of England should be interested in, I'm not sure. I don't feel particularly overworked and I suspect my moments of despair are to do with my deplorable character rather than my circumstances, but the state of the nation's faith is nothing more than obvious: unbelief triumphant, it seems.

In the Co-Op that evening I met Ella the Rainbows unit leader who runs an engineering business with her husband in town, who described a work event - and I can't recall the context, it must have been rather specific - in which it became apparent that 'our millennial junior staff' didn't know who Julius Caesar was. 'Wasn't he sort of a Roman?' was the closest any of them got. I tried the question on the young lads who I turfed out of the church porch when I locked up this afternoon, and they looked at me blankly. Clearly no point advancing any further into Classical history there. 

Now, lay to one side my feelings about my priestly ministry - as a historian I find the idea that young people don't know who Julius Caesar was deeply depressing. We live in a time in which vast areas of human knowledge and experience are there for the looking-up, easily available in almost everyone's home - in almost everyone's hand, for heaven's sake - and yet very, very basic things that frame the mental landscape of humanity are mysteries.

Could it be, then, that the advance of unbelief in the modern West is not due to increased human knowledge, but the lack of it? I was reluctant to accept it, but perhaps it's the case. Atheists might fondly imagine that millions are disconnecting from religion and religious awareness because they have taken conscious decisions to do so, analysing the claims of faith and finding them wanting, whereas in fact they're just falling into line with the people around them. A triumph, not of progress, but of ignorance.