Paying Your Way

There is precious little happening in the parish at the moment, so I will rest content with another example of the 'modern indulgence' concept we have noted in the past. I had a free evening before my day off tomorrow so I decided to do my shopping early, meaning I was in clericals rather than civvies as I would be on a Thursday. Emptying my trolley at the checkout I got out my debit card ready to pay, and then when the time came forgot which pocket I'd put it in, occasioning repeated checking, emptying and refilling every pocket in my clothing. A chap with a little girl in a pushchair waiting offered, 'if I pay for you, will I get into heaven?' This provoked a short, jocular, and I fear not very enlightening theological conversation along the lines that there are other requirements. Most morning I pray for the chance to talk to people about God and I am not sure this counted.

 

Baptismal Regeneration

‘What do we normally do?’ I and Rick the verger ran around the church after the mid-morning service getting ready for our first baptism since March 2020. I thought there might be time to set up the card reader for donations but when I opened the box found a note saying ‘App needs updating’ so I abandoned that and made a joke about it instead. The family asked if I could read ‘Footprints’, and I realised I’d left it at home. In between looking it up on my phone and then accidentally shutting the phone down I ran out of data so had to rush into the church office, turn on the computer and the printer (which had run out of toner, and only still working because I had cheated it into believing it still has some), and get another copy. I knew the family pretty well and there were a number of familiar faces among the congregation young and old, but I was struggling to remember what I normally say at baptisms – not the liturgy, which is all written down, but the various routines I have worked out over fifteen years to explain it and to make unaccustomed churchgoers feel as much at ease as possible – and Baby Tom was moderately vocal throughout the proceedings. At one point he made a horrendous noise not very different from the one generated by our misbehaving sound system earlier in the morning. It is of course lovely to have celebrated a baptism service again, and it was possibly even more lovely to get home and lie down.

'Milk, Meat, Forbidden'

My purchase of cheese on our recent trip to Castle Cary was a sort of temptation. I told myself I was supporting local suppliers, which I was, although the Calverley Mill Scorpion here pictured is local to Cheshire, not Somerset, but since discovering that soy milk and coconut-based cheese – vegetable fats – behave in pretty much the same culinary ways as, and produce not dissimilar results from, their animal equivalents, my dairy intake has been reduced to a splash of cow juice in tea and on cereal, as the vegetable milks are much less pleasing for those purposes. So I shouldn't really have done.

Generally, people seem to assume that you put a cow in a field of lush grass and it will automatically turn it into milk, which it won’t. The cow (or whatever) has to be pregnant or nursing, and in modern farming cows and calves are usually separated very early on, the calves being then fed artificially while their mothers’ natural milk is retained for human use. Modern cows are bred to maximise their periods of pregnancy, and very rarely get anywhere near a bull: insemination is usually artificial too. You don’t have to express this process in emotive and inappropriate human terms such as ‘theft’ and ‘rape’ to get the point that it isn’t a very natural life for an animal to be living; you can do it in a more natural way, but it’s very cost-inefficient and rarely happens.

The last time I bought any meat it was part of a cow I am pretty sure I would have met. Our Swanvale Halt butcher takes its Aberdeen Angus beef from a local herd which is sometimes pastured on the meadowlands around Hornington, so you can see the cows every time you walk along the main road during the season, or at a farm in Shintleham where I happen sometimes to go for meetings of a local charity. The butcher even tells you where the animals are slaughtered, a small, family-run slaughterhouse a few miles away. This is about as animal-friendly and environmentally-acceptable as modern meat production gets. When I bought it, I looked at my tiny, expensive steak and hoped I wouldn’t ruin it in the oven.

Most of our meat and dairy produce doesn’t come from farms like the one at Shintleham. It’s produced by vast agribusinesses, some of them international ones, the expression of an industrial farming system making cheap food out of specialised forms of animals designed to do one thing out of the many a given animal might do, at maximum efficiency. And, though I know that 1) an animal ending its life by becoming food is hardly an unnatural or unjust fate, and 2) you can’t have traditional, holistic, what is in modern parlance called regenerative farming without the poo of animals to fertilise the land where you grow your crops; despite all that, even the Shintleham cows are being bred so that I can eat them, when I really, really don’t need to. I can, with care, get my protein and vitamins elsewhere; and so, I have concluded, I should. My romantic attachment to the ideal of small-scale holistic farming, the sort my grandad would have been familiar with in the second quarter of the last century, is basically fed by delusion. That’s not what farming usually is in the first quarter of this one. I don’t like animals and wouldn’t share my home with one, apart from the insects I can do little about, but I can’t justify eating beings that have been created for me to eat by a colossal global industry, whose five biggest companies pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than Exxon, when it isn’t necessary.

The other evening The Moral Maze on Radio 4 was discussing proposals to enshrine the sentience of animals in law. Roman Catholic commentator Tim Stanley came out with the following extraordinary statement:

There is a practical consequence of an all-out war on abuses against animals, and that is the decimation of industries around which human beings have built their lives, leisure, food etc. … Imagine if we woke up tomorrow and really confronted what eating meat means. We would be appalled with ourselves, we would regard ourselves as genocidal maniacs. It has a huge impact on our moral view of ourselves, not just our treatment of animals but our entire moral identity. That’s why it’s right to be cautious, because there are huge consequences for doing something that seems so obviously benign.

Mr Stanley finds his way to reconcile knowing what happens to animals in the meat industry with his belief that they should be treated justly, through the Christian idea of dominion, a God-ordered structure of relationships which includes humans within a natural order of killing and eating. My question is whether what actually happens in the 2020s genuinely reflects that. Instead I have found myself (as Christian does in the Pilgrims Progress) living in the City of Destruction. ‘Arise, Peter, kill and eat’, it says in the Book of Acts; but now, it isn’t the animals that are unclean, it’s our human usage of them. 

(I didn't spoil the wee steak, but I didn't enjoy it that much either). 

Art Weird: The Watts Chapel

My canal holiday in 2006 with Dr Bones was moderately calamitous, at least after she broke her thumb and we found ourselves moored only yards from where we started, opposite a house owned by members of the Lamford congregation, and hiding whenever anyone came along the towpath in case we knew them. But we did visit the Watts Cemetery Chapel at Compton, and last Monday I had a return trip there, led round by a volunteer at the Watts Gallery who happens to belong to the Catholic congregation in Swanvale Halt.

Despite our guide's best efforts to convince us of the Christian orthodoxy of the building I am no better disposed towards it in that respect than I was before. The dense, elaborate symbolism does include an extremely disguised cross on the dramatic main door, but the rest of it renders abstract concepts and ideals in plaster, terracotta and paint, and has that sense of conceptual (and angelic) hierarchy you get with late 19th-century occult thought of different sorts. At least the weird and off-putting altarpiece, Watts's painting The All-Pervading, is away for restoration. To me it looks like the Emperor Palpatine in a relatively benign mood.

But there is no denying the specifically artistic achievement of the Chapel, the imagination behind it and the industry which produced it. The exterior is covered with terracotta panels, the inside with gesso laid on chicken wire with gesso panels bearing the artwork laid on top and then painted. What I hadn't realised was that Mary Watts, deeply committed all her life to the ideal of art education, had virtually the whole village involved in the Chapel's construction. Everyone in the pottery classes, from well-to-do ladies to farm hands, combined to produce the terracotta panels and you can see this if you look carefully: they've clearly been made by people of differing abilities. Whether the rougher ones were the work of the ladies or the labourers we will never know.

Future Prospect

I sat opposite our newer churchwarden, Grant, talking about a church property whose management has worried me for a long while. Grant very much sees his year as churchwarden – his first, I hope! – as concentrating on the church’s finances and properties and making sure we make the best of what we have as we emerge from the pandemic. He, and others who have talked about this to me, are right, and I am aware that there is a series of questions I’ve pushed to one side over the course of years that relate not just to this but to other organisations we are linked with, and which we either give money to or receive it from. They have niggled, but I have devoted my energy and mental bandwidth to other things. Now those questions must be brought out again and tackled.

Nothing comes to life except first it dies, the Apostle Paul reminds us, and over the last fifteen months like so many other churches (and organisations generally), while it has not died, Swanvale Halt church has been ground down close to it. In March and April 2020 we existed in no more substantial form than me saying the mass on my own in a bedroom and an invisible web of prayer across the parish. Now we face the task of rebuilding, reconstructing activities and relationships which have dwindled or been impossible. Decisions between priorities are forced on us by our remaining resources both financial and human: my plan for resuming worship supposes having a crucifer as well as a server, and eventually a full serving team, but we now have only three people who can act as crucifer at all. What’s best and more encouraging: for more people to remain in the congregation, or for them to see more souls participating in the liturgy? We will need a determined concentration on what does the mission of the church most good rather than what we are used to doing, and some things are already falling by the wayside as the people who used to run them decide that they no longer can. For us, as for so much else in society, the pandemic has accelerated developments which were already underway.

Yet there is a great deal to be encouraged by. Our curate may have left, but it looks as though over the course of a few months the church will have acquired two retired priests, a lay reader, and an occasional preacher, as well as a variety of souls whose experiences and abilities promise to be very useful. We will have a revamped and explicitly evangelistic non-eucharistic service to add to the mix, and I will be a better pastor to the organisers within the church and the souls on the edge. So I tell myself: and one has to cultivate hope!

Ashtead Churches

Ashtead is now an evangelical parish but I wonder when it became that. It has two churches, an old parish church and an Edwardian chapel-of-ease. St Giles's, the old one, is an awkward, odd building, with a long and narrow nave-and-chancel and a huge north transept. Physically not much has happened to it since the days of the Revd William Legge, incumbent for 57 years, who was responsible for an extensive rebuilding which left only the tower untouched, including an elaborate wooden roof Pevsner describes as 'preposterous'. I wonder whether he was able to inspect the picture now on display of what the church used to look like before Mr Legge's restoration, packed with pews and with a roof so elaborate it beggars belief. 

Nobody could say the reconstruction wasn't grand. The woodwork includes massively solid choir stalls, carvings of the four evangelists on the stall-ends, and a western gallery allowing access to the bell chamber. 

But grandeur aside, there is nothing that unequivocally points in a Catholic direction. Look at the reredos: it's a Gothic riot of pinnacles and hood-mouldings, but also houses Tables of the Commandments, the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, just like the unrestored churches the Ecclesiologists were so keen to change. A nice altar frontal, though: the cross is dated 1907.

And there, St Giles's has virtually frozen apart from the importation of a bit of tech here and there, and a few comfy chairs in what is clearly a 'prayer corner' in the gargantuan north transept.

This means the more modern St George's is in fact the more interesting of the two. A completely unpretentious redbrick building opened in 1906, which Pevsner is actually reasonably complimentary about, it's been adapted to the needs of an evangelical congregation: a baptismal pool with a nice cover, all sorts of tech, and movable altar furniture made by a local woodworker. There's a prayer corner with sofas and a stack of Bibles, and a dais installed in the 1980s. 

But there are hints of something else having gone on here. The east window, installed in the 1960s, was designed by Christopher Webb, that one-time pupil of Ninian Comper, and there's a very unusual one of St Joseph the Worker, of all things. The area north of the chancel, so the church website says, was converted to a Lady Chapel in 1950, which it certainly isn't now. 

Road Stress

It looked such an easy win. The vicar of Goremead phoned to tell me Canon John, retired priest there, had died, and that his funeral was tomorrow, and that was partly why she'd phoned, but also, and this was a big ask she knew, but she'd been covid-pinged and could I, possibly, possibly, take the funeral? She'd done all the work and all I needed to do was read the words and everyone in the church who remembered my stint there in 2008-9 would be delighted to see me. Well, I was planning to be out in that bit of Surrey anyway, so magnanimously I would donate a chunk of my day off for the sake of John who was so good to me while I was playing being incumbent of Goremead. It wouldn't take me long to look round the Ashtead churches, and if I was early at Goremead I could buy a sandwich and eat it in the churchyard.

Ashtead, indeed, did not delay me long, and more of that on another occasion, perhaps. I had seen the appalling state of the M25 so thought I'd be better off taking the A-roads to Goremead; an hour and a half to go 20 miles. A sandwich beckoned. 

Then the road between Leatherhead and Cobham was closed. I set off on a diversion to Oxshott, which was jammed with traffic for no readily apparent reason. Cobham was OK, so, a bit flustered but not yet discouraged, I was on my way again. Lunch could wait. Then I hit the roundabout on the A245/A3 junction; from there, thanks to roadworks, all the way to Byfleet, was solid, virtually stationary traffic. That must have taken half an hour, or more, to get through. By now it was necessary to make a frantic call to the undertakers. Janet the isolating vicar could be called in but that would obviate the whole point so I pressed on. 'Let us know if you're going to be more than 15 minutes late', the undertakers said soothingly. At least all the ceremony was going to take place in the church so there was no special time to make at the Crem.

Finally through the roadworks and it seemed as though we were moving. There was no tractor, horsebox, or caravan awaiting me, but all the way through Addlestone I followed an elderly man wearing a kaftan who insisted on cycling so nobody could pass him, painfully slowly and at intervals insouciantly freewheeling, or perhaps it was insolently. 

I arrived that fifteen minutes behind time, barely able to remember my own name, after a journey at an average speed of about 11 miles an hour, at over 30 degrees. Everyone was most understanding. I discovered from his daughter's eulogy that Canon John's wedding started late after the clergyman taking it failed to turn up; there was no indication his baptism had been late starting or that would have made the whole set. 'It happened to me once', Janet told me on the phone later, 'and I was filling in for someone else as well. It's a wonder I didn't have a stroke on the journey'. I suppose I should have more faith in the Lord that everything will be all right, but I am not sure how far to push that. I was reminded of a funeral I once did at Goremead, when I forgot the CDs for the music and had to drive back to Lamford to get them; the lights were in my favour all the way and I got back with a few minutes to spare before the service began. 'The angels were clearing the way', I mentioned to Vera, the sacristan. Vera, who has long since gone to her eternal reward, fixed me with her gimlet eye and stated definitively, 'If the angels had been doing their job you'd never have forgotten the CDs in the first place.'