A Scrap of Grass in East London

Not my boots - apart from being black, my footwear has always been decidedly un-Goth - but a sign of a modest venturing into a social world which has been impossible for a long while. A group of us gathered for a picnic in Greenwich on Saturday; I discovered I still feel quite cautious, and found myself automatically edging away from friends who might not see things the same way, though I only really felt particularly uncomfortable for a few minutes on a relatively crowded Jubilee Line. But this is only what we know, and if we didn't we should have done, that people are different.

Coming away, I realised the most pleasing thing about the picnic was having conversations, sometimes delving beneath the surface of ordinary social interactions to something more meaningful, which I could take notice of but which I wasn't expected to do anything with. It was taking an interest in people, but without being responsible for them in any way, and for me that's refreshing. I also realised how pleasant it is to have people bother to speak to oneself and that determines me to make a point of always doing so around Swanvale Halt. It's easy to see my own brief interactions with parishioners as superficial and not really achieving anything, but perhaps they do merely by the fact of happening, by making the point that the other person matters enough to speak to. I often forget that. 

The Very Hungry Caterpillars

At first I thought it was box blight, but then decided it wasn't: mind you, it took cutting out a chunk of the hedge to work out. It is, rather, damage caused by box-tree moth caterpillar and the tiny pests did their terrible work in no more than a week. I couldn't see any of the culprits themselves, but that's who they are. At the moment the more important box hedges, the ones that form 'The Maze' (not a very difficult maze) are not very affected and I do hope the chemical treatment will see the caterpillars off. By the winter they are all pupating so that may be a time for another blitz.

Conversely the oak tree which I am concerned about on an ongoing basis seems to have quite good leaf coverage this year after all. It's right beside the box hedges and offers a contrast to their current poorliness.

You Have A Choice Of Fabrics

On my church travels I always look to see whether the Blessed Sacrament is reserved in a particular church, and in doing so have come across an amazing variety of aumbries and tabernacles, from the Gothic sacramenthaus at Hascombe to a vast iron-bound oak door at West Byfleet. Ours here at Swanvale Halt is a humble affair dating from 1924 when we were given permission to reserve by Bishop Talbot.

Our former sacristan Mary was a saint, but she did have an unconscionable fondness for gold lamé. It appears on a number of items she made for the church including the curtain over the aumbry. At long last - eight years after Mary passed to her eternal reward - Penny who is also a dab hand with a needle and thread made us a new one in a less dramatic fabric. I do hope Mary understands!

Scrub-a-Dub

At the Museum our cleaner was Vin, who along with quite a chunk of the population of High Wycombe came from St Vincent, and who was laid-back to a stereotypically West Indian degree. Skimming a mop over the carpets was his speciality: perhaps the intention was to keep dust down, but we never questioned him about it. Spiders in corners had no fear of being badly disturbed. When you find a good cleaner, then, you do your best to retain them.

Pre-pandemic, our cleaner at church was Jenny who was efficient and obliging and would always try to come in for a special session if we needed it: her husband has health issues so she made herself scarce as soon as covid kicked off. Since then either I, Rick and Rob, or Sandra and Carrie in the office have done such cleaning as has been necessary but with some of our groups starting up again we need something a bit more systematic.

Our social media adverts for the position brought in four applications. Two were from young mums who were looking for a bit more flexible work; they were both married in the church (one by me, one by Marion) and both have had children baptised with us so I was disposed in their favour. One was a woman who had her own small cleaning company and was well set up with all the necessary requirements. The fourth was a girl who gave as her reference one of our local beat police officers. 'She's got her heart in the right place,' PC Terry told me, 'if I need to know what's going on on the estate I always ask her mum. She's 17 but looks about 12.' There was a fifth message from one company which just read 'We have contract cleaners for all your needs', and that was so lazy I just discarded it.

Sandra the office manager and I did a couple of interviews yesterday and as suspected Diana who has been doing this for years was clearly the best bet. She even told us how much she enjoys 'going into somewhere really dirty and leaving it clean', so we might have to get the Toddler Group, when there is a Toddler Group again, to be especially mucky just so she gets even more out of it. I felt it wasn't necessary to have someone who was 'passionate about cleaning' but Sandra pointed out that we've both had experience of cleaners who are not only not passionate but would observably rather be somewhere other than standing in a church hall with a bucket and a pair of marigolds. As for pastoral connections with the two young mums, it turns out I took Diana's mother's funeral eight years ago and baptised her granddaughter a couple of years after that!

The Dregs

Talking about spiritual disorder brings us to Mad Trevor. This afternoon I took him the third set of groceries in a week, and have said I won’t be doing it again until his benefits are paid next. I also paid off his phone bill. His current acute lack of money arose from two computer antivirus companies emptying his bank account: he accidentally took out subscriptions to them a year ago, when in fact he didn’t need either. He promises he will repay me: he is expecting up to £100K to be paid to him in the autumn by an insurance company who he has a funeral policy with. His social worker has warned him that no insurance company pays ‘loyalty bonuses’ of six figures to someone who’s had a £30-per-month policy for under a year, but he won’t be told. I tried to raise the subject today and he put the phone down. I don’t overly want to be repaid, even if I thought it was possible; what I want is not to be asked, though I know this is an instinct which reflects badly on me.

When I called round at the flat I knew Trevor was in as I could hear the keyboard (well, one of his keyboards) being played, but couldn’t make him hear: he had headphones on and I had to wait for a gap in the music. He was playing via the phone to a cousin who also plays the piano, someone who, the last time he was mentioned in conversation, Trevor characterised as a ‘fucking bastard’ and ‘a shit player, nothing compared to me’. But then I also found his crosses thrown outside on the gravel, presumably as a result of one of his at-least-weekly fallings-out with God.

Longstanding readers will be aware of my interactions with Trevor over the years. I am not sure my conclusion that nothing I can do, spiritually speaking, can help him, has improved our relationship, as such, though it has improved my sense of equilibrium. I strive not to argue, reason, cajole, or even comfort him, because ultimately his beliefs are so engrained that I can offer no comfort he will accept. When he is adamant that his dead Aunty Renee (mother of the forementioned cousin) is now an angel of such power that God is helpless to stop her attacking Trevor and taking away his musical abilities, there are no resources normal Christian belief can bring to bear even to make him feel better. If I tell him that's not how angels work, he insists that he is psychic, or a prophet, and knows I am wrong, so I end up limply remarking that I am sorry he has to put up with this. Seeing a soul so imprisoned is truly awful.

The consolation is that, however horrible the things he feels or experiences, he doesn’t feel them for long before moving on to something else; it’s taken me years to realise how childlike his responses are, flitting unreflectively from one thing to another, from rage to exultation to misery and back. There isn’t anything to be gained from engaging with any of them. How is it that I hadn't really cottoned onto this until so late in the day?

This means we’ve got very little now to talk about and our relationship is mainly reduced to him asking me for food. Today he included dishwasher tablets in the order which at least provided some variety. Given how resentful I get at his requests – a mirror-image of Trevor’s resentment aimed at God and the world in general – it was very uncomfortable when his social worker told me ‘I don’t know how he would manage without you helping him’. She is trying to arrange a legal guardianship for him so his finances will be dealt with and bills paid. In his more lucid times he knows he can’t manage, but she will have to catch him in one of those times to get him to sign the form. I hold onto that, as a possible light at the end of the tunnel.

The Fringes of the Weird

My spiritual director’s training incumbent had been a directee of Fr Reginald Somerset Ward (which takes us back quite a way as Fr Ward retired in 1958), and has pondered whether some of RSW’s attitudes have rubbed off on him as a result. He will sometimes solemnly inform me that ‘Fr Somerset Ward would have advised you to take up woodwork’ or the like. It was a surprise that, when we were once discussing a brush I’d had (at second hand, I hasten to stress) with some anomalous spiritual phenomena, he claimed that ‘Somerset Ward was sort of on the outer fringe of that kind of world’ – because there is no trace of it in Ward’s writings that I have ever found.

But – following on from some of my speculations about the Golden Dawn the other week – I discover that there is a certain family connection between that outré ritual magicking and Fr Ward’s sober English mysticism. I already knew that there were clergy involved in the Golden Dawn, most notably Revd William Ayton, who married the G.D.’s Supreme Magus Samuel MacGregor Mathers to his formidable wife Moina Bergson, and who, so WB Yeats alleged, lived in perpetual terror of his bishop discovering the alchemical laboratory in his cellar. However, I hadn’t quite twigged how one of the Golden Dawn’s offshoots, the Stella Matutina, was explicitly Christian in focus. Adherents of other religions could be members of the S.M., but whereas the parent order had thought of Christianity as one reflection of an overarching esoteric tradition, the Stella Matutina saw the occult work as an aspect of Christianity. As the head of the order, Robert Felkin, stated, the suggestion was that in addition to the open, exoteric doctrines of the Church, Jesus had communicated to the disciples secret techniques of spiritual working which the occult world had now rediscovered for the benefit of the human race. We now know that what various writers have hinted was indeed actually the case, that several brothers of the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield were members of the S.M., including Timothy Rees who eventually became Bishop of Llandaff and Frank Selwyn Bennett who was eventually Dean of Chester, as was – perhaps most surprisingly – the redoubtable Fr Alban Baverstock, twice Master of the Society of the Holy Cross. The old suggestion that there was a link between clergy who were members of the Stella Matutina and the founding of the Guild of St Raphael, which revived the healing ministry within the Anglican Church, seems to be true. When Felkin set up the branch of his Order in New Zealand – the Smaragdus-Thalasses Temple – not one bishop but several ended up as members, joining while they were bishops. That future mystical writer Evelyn Underhill was part of this was already well known, but the extent of clerical involvement is news.

We all know this because of a 2009 PhD Exeter PhD thesis by one Anthony Fuller, which traces particularly the links between Anglo-Catholics and these occult organisations. As Mr (I presume now Dr) Fuller points out, at the time the Community of the Resurrection wasn’t that large, and given that members of the Stella Matutina had to carry out a whole series of practical magical exercises and even take exams to advance in the order, its Superior, Fr Walter Frere – later Bishop of Truro – must have known what they were doing and, like them, seen no necessary contradiction between such occult antics and Christian orthodoxy, however weird we might find it now. Dr Fuller’s most striking claim is that some aspects of the original Golden Dawn’s ways of doing things were transferred from the Society of the Holy Cross – founded thirty years earlier – probably via CM Davies, an Anglican priest who had founded the SSC along with Fr Charles Lowder and others, but then renounced his orders. He wasn’t actually an adept of the G.D., but his wife was and he organised his own group for mystical Christian meditation, the Guild of the Holy Spirit. A bold and unprovable speculation; but not an unreasonable one.

So what of Fr Somerset Ward – neither, clearly, an occultist, nor even really an Anglo-Catholic (though definitely a Catholic Anglican)? His interest was in the English mystical tradition of the Middle Ages – the tradition of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and Mother Julian, all of whom were being rediscovered by Anglican Churchpeople in the later 1800s. Ordained in London in 1896 – at exactly the same time that MacGregor Mathers was at his height – Ward was part of a movement to develop a deeper, more serious spiritual life among Christians. He looked back to the Middle Ages for clues as how to do it, how to recover a tradition of spiritual working which was more than just Bible reading and creed-reciting and which was not a million miles from the sacramentalism championed by the first couple of generations of the Catholic Revival in the Church of England. Others, conversely, delved into more esoteric ways of doing things to achieve exactly the same. In a sardonic mood we might ascribe the occult’s appeal to some Anglo-Catholics to dressing-up and ritual complexity, but we could read it more generously as a reflection of a genuine religious instinct: a desire to go deeper into God, even (as in the Guild of St Raphael and the experiences of Agnes Sanford) to see the most altruistic and hopeful of one’s prayers answered, prayers for healing and reconciliation. Fr Somerset Ward appears in stone on the west front of Guildford Cathedral, and just feet away from him is Evelyn Underhill, who was definitely a member of the Stella Matutina and – so Golden Dawn writer Ithell Colquhoun wondered – whose vision that led to her conversion may have been sparked off by G.D. techniques.

AC Fuller states (though without any source) that an Anglican episcopal enquiry about the year 1939 resulted in an instruction that no ordained person should be a member of any occult society. This would have been five years after Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out was serialized in the Daily Mail and by then Middle England might have been very familiar with the motif of the clerical diabolist operating under the cover of collar and cassock. If this enquiry did actually happen (and I can’t uncover any actual evidence it did) the Anglican hierarchy would have realised, if they didn’t already know, that the picture wasn’t completely removed from the truth. In 1946 that odd figure Fr Lionel Smithett Lewis, vicar of Glastonbury, carried out the funeral service for Dion Fortune, who had always thought of herself as a Christian; by then, occultism wasn’t just a neutral spiritual technique. The ‘fringes’ of that world were far more clearly defined.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

After the midweek mass on Tuesday I went to the café opposite the church and sat in their 'garden room' to contemplate what I might say in the sermon for the recorded service this week. The cane chairs, basket in the centre, the bamboo growing up the wall and the rattan sunscreen all gave the space a vaguely colonial air, and I wondered whether I ought to have been wearing a sola topi rather than a panama. In the past I've been tempted to buy a sola topi but wasn't sure the number of occasions I might wear it would justify it. Strangely one of the congregation told me this week that he'd been at school with the explorer John Blashford-Snell who always wears a sola topi when he goes on expedition, which he still does in his eighties. I met him when I worked for the Royal Engineers which regiment he belonged to and where he was universally referred to as Blashers. 'That wasn't what we called him at school,' Francois told me, 'but I'd better not share that'.

As an elderly couple were leaving the café they came to speak to me, spotting my collar. They used to live in Swanvale Halt many years ago and were complimentary about the improvements since that time of which the café was one. Then the woman let on that she had predicted the arrival of the pandemic long before it happened. 'It's one of the Seven Plagues, you see'. Covid, unlike the first of the seven plagues of Revelation, isn't accompanied by sores and boils, but I thought it would be fruitless to get into that. Thankfully I had some coffee left.