That Doesn't Make Any Sense

Trevor has been quiet for quite some time: his delusions haven't been of the kind I can do anything about, and I have stopped arguing with him as there is no point. They are so deep-rooted and such a part of him that there is no dislodging them even as they upset him. But just over the last couple of weeks he has been complaining about the Adversary's activities again.

Trevor: I'm experiencing supernatural events. I keep levitating.

Me: When does this happen? Are you sitting watching the TV and then lift up out of your seat?

Trevor: It's when I'm lying on my bed. [clue: this means he's asleep].

Me: Has anyone ever seen this happen to you?

Trevor: Leeeet meee thiiiiink ....

Me: I think you'd probably remember if anyone else had been there.

- As indeed any potential observer would have done. Trevor wants to be exorcised, but I reminded him that I can't do that without referring to the Diocesan Advisor on Deliverance, and I have taken him to three of those over the years and none of them have deemed exorcism a necessary step to take. He accepted that without complaining, for now.

In the afternoon it was Church Club. The story was Gideon, and taking a cue from the episode of the fleece my theme was experiments. For some years when I've told this story I've taken a pair of tarnished copper coins into school and, during storytime, put one in a jar of vinegar until the end of the session to show how the vinegar cleans it. I sat down to do this yesterday and Disaster! found no bottle of vinegar in my bag|: I was convinced I'd brought it. I apologised to the children. 'There's some vinegar at the bottom of the toy box!' cried Bryony brightly. The toy box sits at the side of the hall, full of foam rubber balls and the like and the children had all been playing with them while we got ready for storytime; it seemed prima facie most unlikely that the school would be storing vinegar in it. I went to investigate, surrounded by a crowd of excited children, and, sure enough, right at the bottom, was a bottle of vinegar.

For a moment, I admit, I was bewildered. All my expectations, which seemed so reasonable, were confounded and I could not work out any reason why the school would want to have vinegar around other than in the canteen, let alone hide it in the hall under a mountain of foam rubber balls and rings. But this was only a moment: I realised it was my bottle of vinegar, which must have fallen out of my bag thanks to the children rummaging around, and found its way to the bottom. This was a relief, or I might have had to concede that perhaps Trevor had been levitating after all.

Upheavals Among the Dead

Undertaking is a very stable business: funeral fashions change, but dying itself never goes out of fashion. Families tend not to shop around for an undertaker when someone dies, as getting a good deal isn't usually the first thing on their minds; they will stick with a firm they've used before, unless their most recent experience was absolutely awful. This means that companies develop their own local fiefdoms and while there is rivalry there is not really that much competition: firms will share facilities and personnel if they have to. It is true that The Trade is now dominated by a few big providers who operate locally under the names of long-established and familiar companies, but the people who actually work in those local branches, whatever name they have, often stay for decades so the experience people have using them isn't very different from what it might be if they were genuinely independent.

We had a bit of a shock a little while ago in Swanvale Halt when our local branch of Co-Op Funerals closed after a car drove through the front window, accidentally one has to add, and the company decided not to reopen it. Shame really, as I remember blessing the chapel of rest when it started up. But our ancient and much-respected undertaking firm, Greengages, are now experiencing their own upset. A reorganisation at the overarching company who operate Greengages resulted in a demand that branch manager Phil re-apply for the job he has had for thirty years and more, and although this is now a common practice in our weird modern world it was quite understandable that he told them to take a jump and handed in his notice. He took with him his son who also worked for the firm, and all the local knowledge and experience they had built up over the years. Pastoral Assistant and local councillor Paula now tells me Phil and Arthur are setting up their own business on the road into Hornington and I think I ought to call by. It never does any harm to be nice to your undertakers, even though - or perhaps especially - because so many fewer funerals come clergy's way these days. 

Children Present and Absent

Messy Church at Swanvale Halt has been severely impacted by the pandemic, though we aren't entirely sure why this should be. Our numbers were steady right up to the very last gathering in March 2020, and now we are getting roughly half what we could expect before the Great Disruption. Some attending now are new, some are the families who were coming before, but there are just fewer of them. Saturday's theme of 'Holy Fire' chosen by the team was a bit of a challenge to try and illustrate in my worship time, but I gave it a go and I think everyone was happy even if I didn't end up actually lighting a fire. Today Poppy (rather appropriately) joined the serving team for Remembrance Sunday and her plus two children present with another family meant we had more minors present at an ordinary Sunday mass than for a long time.

We've long since given up trying to do any traditional Sunday-School-type children's work, having tried so many configurations over the years. On Wednesday my colleagues in the Deanery Chapter shared their woes in the same area. Even the big, well-organised evangelical Tophill finds that its numbers of children have halved since the pandemic, and its vacant children's and families worker position is one of thirty-seven across the diocese. At Caringfield Rector Rebecca can't find anyone to fill her similar job, despite offering to juggle it to fit applicants who won't work with primary school children, or secondary, or work this or that time. She's propping up all her groups herself by doing all the preparation and organisation: 'I have just enough to make these groups viable in the hope that eventually someone will take them on before I go under'. At Wormton they had a very flourishing Sunday School but now can't tell whether they will get a dozen children or two, and I didn't feel like warning them that's exactly what happened to us: after few weeks where the children themselves can't be sure any more than a couple will be there, they will stop wanting to come at all. It's no fun with just the two of you, or even three. Meanwhile what parents expect, my colleagues think, is the level of children's work they are used to from schools, and there are very, very few churches who can provide that. 'Our outreach has gone back by ten years', said the vicar of Wormton. I think we are moving into a new and very different world, and there will be no going back to the old one at all - but that nobody really knows what the new will be like.

Complete Rubbish

More inspiring insights into parish life: I was going to post about praying the Office, but will delay that in favour of discussing Bins. We are not quite sure how the church managed to acquire nine wheeliebins, nor how several of them lost their lids. We have been expecting the Council to come to collect the superfluous ones for some time, and lined them up along the church path like superannuated Daleks waiting for the knacker's van to turn up and cart them away. And there they have remained, for rather too long. We debated their ongoing presence at this week's staff meeting, and as a result I asked Sandra the office manager to try to find out what the Council's plans were. It turned out that the bin men wouldn't take the bins away because they were full of water. This is true, but invites the obvious response that the reason they are full of water is that THEY HAVEN'T BEEN TAKEN AWAY.

So after Morning Prayer today I did the only thing open to us, which was to tip the bins over, drain off the repulsive water, sort the resulting cascade of trash into the bins we're keeping, and then turn the spares upside down. In pity Fr Donald gave me a pair of the latex gloves he uses for refuelling his car, and I was grateful, as one pile of muck revealed a black bag not quite managing to restrain a sprawling dog turd. 'I thought your job was so full of glamour', commented Grant the churchwarden. He had come down to give me details of the damp in the gents' toilets.

In some relief I sat in front of the computer and found a message from a young mum asking whether she had to book into the Toddler Group. No, I said, but it's been really busy over the last few weeks so you might like to make sure you're here early. 'OK, I'll set off early,' she replied, 'I'm coming from Portsmouth'. Portsmouth? Gosh, I replied, did she have local connections? Thankfully she answered that she would indeed be visiting her sister-in-law in the parish and so they would both hope to come with their respective children. For a moment I thought that Swanvale Halt Toddler Group was being expected to serve the entire southeast of England.

'The Music of Gothic' at the Wallace Collection, 28th October

Oh dear, I should have posted about my trip to London on Friday 28th to attend this event: a combined lecture-cum-recital hosted by Dr Emma McEvoy at the Wallace Collection, discussing, and illustrating, 'The Music of Gothic'. Dr McEvoy's case is that Gothic literature is full of music, and stage adaptations of Gothic works are too - but at first such orchestration was quite lighthearted, drawing on the conventions of comic opera. It was only from about 1820 that melodrama took over and 'The Music of Gothic' started to turn into 'Gothic Music'. A chamber ensemble conducted by the organist of St Cuthbert's Philbeach Gardens played a variety of pieces by now-forgotten composers to make her point. Funnily enough I have been reading a book about Henry Purcell at the moment - I say 'reading', but there are quite a few bits which I have no greater chance of understanding than I would a programming manual, so I skipped over them - and that mentions a number of pieces from his theatre work that would seem to go against Dr McEvoy's case, but she is, of course, planning a book, which will doubtless deal with all of that. I can't promise I'll be prepared to take out the loan necessary to buy it!

Who Cares About What

'The aumbry light was on, but the churchwardens didn't know what it was for', the retired incumbent told me of a visit to a church as Area Dean, 'and when we opened it, it was clear the Sacrament had been in there for a long, long time'. I thought of visiting that very church a little while ago and noticing the light on but the door of the aumbry ajar, rather implying that there was nothing in it. What with the new united parish of Hornington and Tophill being handed into the care of the CPAS, it occurred to me to make another little effort to make sure the good people of Swanvale Halt do have some dim idea of what's distinct about the Catholic tradition within the Anglican Church, partly so they can use it spiritually, and partly so that they are on guard if anything happens to me. I began last Sunday with 'The Communion of Saints', to a congregation depleted by illness and torrential rain, but an appreciative one at least.

'Do people really care about this?' Giselle the lay reader asked me. It's a fair question and fair, too, coming from someone who has spent most of her ministry at Tophill but comes from a Roman Catholic background so does at least understand what it's about. If what we are dealing with is simply a set of markers of partisan identity, they probably shouldn't, but equally Swanvale Halt has to think about why it exists at all in these hard times. I think the fact is that a minority do care because they 'get it' and do indeed consciously understand and value what I've been talking about for twelve years. What most people in the church care about is comfort and familiarity, and in a world of hectic change, and a life of inevitable change, comfort and familiarity are not things to be treated automatically with contempt. On a spiritual level, the things they find comforting and familiar about their church life are the ways they have become accustomed to talk to God and to hear him talking to them. What I would say is that they may not realise the degree to which those things depend on the principles and ideas behind Catholic spiritual life. They may by the time I finish!

St Peter's, Ash

This church is a bit of an oddity. Gilbert Wall Heathcote was the incumbent between 1835 and 1884, a sound Tractarian who had been vicar of Hursley before John Keble, and paid for the rebuilding and extension of St Peter’s in 1863, but the church never advanced very far liturgically and didn’t feature in any of the Anglo-Catholic church directories. Yet it now has a number of features which you’d expect to find in those settings, and nowhere else.

The marble and mosaic reredos has the brutal vigour of the period before church architecture and fittings began to become correct and tasteful. There is a chancel screen which must be rather later than the 1863 rebuilding, but of a different date from the choir stalls as it’s in a different style. The old chancel became, eventually, a Lady Chapel which now has a couple of icons and a slender little statue. There’s a figure of the Christ Child installed in 1938 as a memorial to AM Lichfold – whoever they were – and a set of Stations of the Cross put in about 15 years ago at the cost of a parishioner. All of this points in quite a Catholic direction but there is no suggestion that here it’s seen as part of anything of that kind. I was allowed to look at the vestments and found a set exactly the same as one we use in Swanvale Halt, with the exception that the main colour of the orphreys is red on ours.