Disgusted Of

'Never read the comments' is of course sound advice in almost any corner of the Internet (not here as all the comments are informative and kind). So I can't recall what led me to take note of some letter to the Telegraph lately in which a gentleman in where else but Tunbridge Wells opined in the following terms:

SIR – Although there are social and demographic reasons for the Church of England’s decline, a major contributory factor must be finance. The wasteful pursuit of woke causes by both the central Church and dioceses, as well as the unnecessarily large number of bishops, are putting huge burdens on the parishes. ... It is not clear to me why there are nearly twice as many now as there were 200 years ago, and four times as many bishops, while the number of parish clergy has fallen by three quarters.

As soon as anyone denounces 'woke causes' their views should very largely be put carefully to one side, but apart from that I bring this up only to mention that I don't recognise any of this picture. I'm not sure about the decline in numbers of parish clergy, but there are about 13,000 ordained people in current ministerial roles (as opposed to retired priests still doing stuff) and just over 100 bishops, which doesn't seem all that top-heavy a structure. And bishops don't really cost all that much either, certainly not enough for cutting their numbers by, say, half to make any material difference to the funding of the Church of England. I have questions as to what bishops do - at least ours, who we barely see from one year to the next - but there's little reason to think that their existence is pulling the rest of the structure down. I also struggle to think of a single 'woke cause' that might be imposing any burden on the parish of Swanvale Halt. Race, sexuality and gender identity - no, there's absolutely nothing that our diocese has demanded we campaign on or develop a position about. I think the hearing aid clinic run by Sally our Pastoral Assistant is the closest I can come up with. Special treatment for the hard of hearing? It's political correctness gone mad!

Leave Miscellanea

Although I'm not really posting about things that don't relate to the church, my post-Easter leave this week did take me to Dorset and St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury, which I found still a bit forlorn as its west window remains boarded up awaiting repair by English Heritage. For the first time in about twenty years there was no votive deposit at all apart from a few candle stubs and a bundle of dry flowers and the prayer I left on a scrap of paper was the sole offering. 

On Tuesday I had a trip to Rochester having not seen the Cathedral since I left the area in 1997. Not a single image of St Catherine there: in fact there are very few female saints represented at all, and most of the holy figures are military, fitting in with the martial tone of much of the cathedral. I walked along the road to Chatham, checking the house where I used to live (which looks exactly the same) and St John's Church where I once worshipped. When I left the town the congregation was on the brink of decamping to Emmaus, the United Reform Church on the right side of the ring road which had left the poor Anglican church isolated from the town centre, and St John's spent a while derelict before the Diocese of Rochester decided they wanted to reopen it. Now apparently the congregation is moving out to Emmaus yet again - but only temporarily, while the church is refurbished.

Yesterday I was in London and found another tiny St Catherine hiding on some Netherlandish stained glass in Sir John Soane's Museum. I doubt anyone else has ever noticed her!

I was in town to see the Cult of Beauty exhibition at the Wellcome with Lady Wildwood before we both went to hear Bettany Hughes speak about the Seven Wonders of the World, but strangely what caught my interest most was her incidental remark about Karahan Tepe in Turkey, 'a city in a time and place where there shouldn't be one'. She's overstating slightly it being a 'city', but it certainly does seem to be a permanent settlement with sophisticated monuments (including a ritual chamber of gigantic penis pillars) dating back over 11,000 years and possibly more. The carvings show lots of people with six fingers on their hands, and the whole site was deliberately buried after a couple of millennia. I'm mortified I had never heard of this! 

More about Karahan Tepe here.

Easter 2024

Holy Week at Swanvale Halt was bookended by syncope. Lillian, our former Lay Reader, keeled over during the Palm Sunday mass, and at 8am on Easter Day a pregnant young woman who I’d never seen in church before but came accompanied by two older women one of whom I recognised from the streets of the village, also found standing up and sitting down in order too much, and passed out briefly. She was ever so embarrassed.

This was how it all worked. I decided to do a healing mass on Monday evening, Compline and Benediction on Tuesday, and Tenebrae on Wednesday, as ever, low-key services which brought the expected handful of faithful souls (not quite the same handful on each evening, but nearly). The bigger Triduum observances of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday had lower gates than the unusually high numbers of last year, but it wasn’t bad to get 23 at the dawn mass on the Sunday the clocks went forward (most of the conversation in the vestry beforehand orbited around how little we’d slept and how we couldn’t remember which of our timepieces would automatically update), 18 at 8am and 100 at 10am for the first time since 2018.

For the first time in some years I remembered to order a garland for the Paschal Candle from the local florists: if only I’d also remembered that I had to carry on watering it after the great excitement was past, the daisies would have survived longer than they did. 

Heathen Rights

Il Rettore is due to take the funeral of an old friend – but not as a clergyman, just as a friend, as the gentleman was a determined atheist. ‘We knew each other well enough to argue about it’, he told me over coffee.

I mentioned that a little while ago a couple I know well asked whether the funeral of their son, who’d died suddenly in his 30s, could be held in the church. They aren’t Christians, and for a few hours I didn’t realise they were asking for a funeral service in their own tradition. There is no chance of this happening: canon law says specifically that any act of worship in a church must not ‘be contrary to, nor indicative of any departure from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter’, and an act of non-Christian worship clearly is that. Thankfully I know the people well enough for them not to take my refusal personally, and they’d already been warned by a knowledgeable friend this would probably be the case.

At almost the same time someone I know posted on LiberFaciorum a link to the funeral of Stuart Brogan, who ran the Wyrdraven Viking shop in Glastonbury. This took place in Glastonbury parish church and was led jointly by Revd Diana Greenfield, the ‘Avalon Pioneer Minister’ who worked (she’s moved on very recently) with alternative communities in and around Glastonbury, and a pagan officiant. Revd Diana said at the start that the service would ‘reflect Stu’s respect for a variety of faiths’, but while the pagan officiant mentioned pagan deities and ideas, there was no specifically Christian content to the service at all as far as I could see or hear. Local media referred to the service as a ‘heathen funeral’, which didn’t seem unfair.

Without delving into the specifics of Mr Brogan’s funeral and why it came about in the way it did, I don’t think I could have taken part with any integrity. A church isn’t a neutral space as a crematorium properly is, and the presence of a Christian minister isn’t neutral either. I want to welcome everyone, but I also want to welcome them to something – to Christ’s presence, and to the place where he has promised to be. I don't think I can do that unless he is named. 

Extra Solemn

The annual task of veiling the church for Passiontide is something I normally look forward to as a sign that Lent is mostly past, even if the taxing time of Holy Week is yet to come. I especially like putting the panels that show the Instruments of the Passion onto the reredos, covering the mosaics that are usually visible; I don't know any other church that has anything quite the same, and ours are homemade, designed to slip beneath the canopies of the arches.

But without someone to assist me and foot the ladder, veiling two large paintings and one wall-mounted mosaic panel presents a disagreeable prospect to someone who gets vertiginous even standing on a chair to change a light bulb. So last Saturday I moved very carefully, shifting the ladder laboriously and sensibly (or what I thought was sensibly) and not overreaching. 

I realised I'd missed a Pollyday and hadn't listened to Let England Shake on its anniversary, February 14th, as I should, so did the veiling to the accompaniment of the maestra on headphones. Shimmering music of war and death, and the terrible destructiveness of human folly, alongside this act of preparation for the symbolic violence of the Passion. Neither alone has ever felt quite the same before. 

Sham Rock

Years and years ago I may have railed about the nonsense pedalled by pagans (and some Christians) about Easter, but I hadn't any idea that St Patrick's Day was the subject of similar balderdash until a friend of mine posted on LiberFaciorum yesterday. I should resist going down these kind of rabbit holes, but here's the original statement, with my own responses interposed.

"St Patrick's Day - a very very bizarre celebration indeed. A British and Roman priest

That’s the last accurate statement in the passage.

"who attempted to annihilate the Druids,

There’s no evidence of anything approaching this. All the evidence (as opposed to later mythologising) suggests that Patrick’s mission was relatively limited. His Confessio makes it clear that he was highly dependent on the goodwill of the powerful in Irish society, and instead (very, very rarely among Christian missionaries) he says ‘towards the pagan people too among whom I live, I have lived in good faith, and will continue to do so. God knows that I have not been devious with even one of them, nor do I think of doing so, for the sake of God and his church. I would not want to arouse persecution of them and of all of us’.

"conducted exorcisms to banish the great Irish faery deity Ainé, who told lies about the faery,

The only information we have about pre-Christian Irish deities come from later sources produced within a Christian context, such as the Book of Invasions. But Ainé doesn’t appear there: she occurs in the 11th-century The Fitness of Names. There, she isn’t treated as a goddess, and isn’t a supernatural personality, just a powerful woman. In Limerick folklore, she becomes ‘an old woman who was in with the Good People’, not ‘Queen of the Fairies’ as old-style mythologists such as Charles Squire in Celtic Myth and Legend (1919) claimed, or the ‘goddess of summer, wealth, and sovereignty’ as she is now described. There is nothing that links St Patrick with any supposed worship of Aine and his own writings do not mention her.

"who claimed he threw Pagan women who would not convert into the ocean

He doesn’t. We have all the words Patrick wrote about himself in his Confessio and Letter to Coroticus, and that story isn’t in them.

"and they became mermaids,

This statement sounds like it might have come from later hagiography of Patrick, but it seems to be derived from a garbled amalgam of folk stories. I tried to chase it down. In Legends and Superstitions of the Sea (1885), FS Bassett refers to a legend of people who dwelt under the sea (not strictly mermaids) in Wales because their ancestors had refused to believe St Patrick and so had sunk beneath the water, but that’s the closest I can get to any old source for this story. It’s not Irish, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the historical Patrick. I came across references to ‘old women being thrown into the sea on St Patrick’s Day and becoming mermaids’, but they’re all from modern sources.

"who "drove out the snakes" (the Pagan ways)

Indeed an older generation of writers accounted for this legend, which doesn’t date any earlier than the 11th century, by claiming it referred to Patrick exterminating paganism, and therefore by extension pagans themselves. You come across more elaborate versions such as the claims that the Druids had snake tattoos, or revered snakes because they represented the circle of life (that seems especially odd, as snakes don’t naturally curl into circles, and the Druids couldn't have revered animals that weren't around in the first place). There is no evidence for any of it. Today most commentators accept that it’s a ‘just-so’ story concocted to explain the fact that Ireland has no snakes, in the same way that by the 6th century there was a legend circulating that St Hilary had driven the snakes from the island of Gallinara in Italy. The snakes in the story aren’t druids, or even paganism more generally: they’re just snakes.

"and attempted to turn the great bright god Lugh into Lugh-chromain (Little stooping Lugh)

Apart from Lugh being a genuine deity who appears in the Book of Invasions and versions of whom are attested in Britain and Gaul, similar remarks apply to him as to Ainé. There’s no record of St Patrick having any dealings relating to him, and there’s no evidence that the holy mountain eventually called Croagh Patrick was a sanctuary of Lugh.

 "which would become "lephrecaun".

Etymologists now derive leprechaun from the pagan Roman feast of the Lupercalia, so this name for Irish fairy people dates from well into the Christian era of monkish writers who knew what Lupercalia was. It’s nothing to do with Lugh.

"I adore the Irish. I revere Ireland. I have that old blood singing within my veins. But this day is a day to celebrate the survival of the Old Ways despite what this "Saint" represented and the cruel action he took. Today, I wear the green, for the fae, for the Old Ways, for the shining ones and the deep love of the land. Blessings to you all my friends. A blessing on the survival of the old ways, and of the Truth emerging from the distortions of history."

One despairs at people's willingness to take garbled misunderstandings, utterly ahistorical garbage, and other guesses and falsehoods, which could all be corrected with a modicum of curiosity, and call them 'Truth'. At least thoughtful pagans aren't taken in.

Bottom Up (or another part of the anatomy)

The Deanery Chapter gathered yesterday to hear the head of the Mission Department at the Diocese talk about lay ministry. That's what the deanery secretary had told us, but he didn't, except in passing. Instead he said he was there to 'begin a bottom-up conversation about how we resource parish ministry in ten years' time'. 'I want to record these conversations', he went on, putting a small flashing device on the floor, 'and I'll feed it all into an AI processing program to pick out the details later'. That made sure most people didn't want to contribute anything at all. He outlined his impression of the pressures on parishes, particularly in terms of finding laypeople to fill important roles, and suggested that we were working within a structure designed for a time when 45% of the population was in church on a Sunday at a moment when that figure is more like 1.5%. The diocese would work with parishes to try to provide for the continued existence of worshipping communities into the future, 'developing creative solutions tailored for local circumstances', etc. etc. It would all have sounded more convincing did we not know that the parish of Manton, which fell vacant just before Christmas, has already been told there's no question of their previous full-time incumbent being replaced and instead they will have someone on house-for-duty. Bottom up? Certainly, if you'll excuse the vulgarity, the phrase 'my arse' comes into any response. 

Still, there's a serious question to be asked about the pattern of Anglican church life in a choppy and uncertain future. As some of my colleagues complained, worshippers simply will not willingly be relocated from one church to another, even for a Sunday, and the reason for this is not just cussed awkwardness but because their experience of Christian community, and therefore of Christian discipleship, is deeply linked to a particular place. 

The point is that we are called into community, and that community, the group of people with whom we journey and experience what it means to be Christians, has to have a degree of continuity over time. It has to be deep and committed, especially because, in the Catholic way of looking at it, it isn't something we fundamentally choose ourselves, and Christian churches are not primarily voluntary associations of people who come and go as they decide. We acquire obligations and those obligations shape who we are becoming. We enter into a something which existed before us and will exist after us. The primary way the life of the Christian community is shaped is the action of the Holy Spirit through the sacraments. Each community is eucharistic and baptismal; each community hallows time through the rhythm of its daily prayer. 

Signs of continuity are not absolutely necessary, but they are helpful. They include the buildings we worship in, which acquire their own personalities. We have a relationship with those physical surroundings and they come to shape our spiritual lives and imaginations. Ordained ministers are another sign of continuity because they are sent into the community from outside it, and occupy an office in a visible sequence unfolding across time. Bishops are the paramount mark of the continuity of the Christian community, linking together individual, local communities into an Apostolic lineage. You can imagine Christian communities persisting without historic buildings or ordained leadership, but their presence makes continuity easier to maintain. Without them, they may well drift in many directions, and the task would be all the harder.