Uxbridge clarity?

 

Our existential threat is from climate change.  This summer’s areas of extreme heat and of ice sheet melting make it feel as if we have already passed a tipping point.

But our Government does not see electoral advantage in carrying through truly radical policies.  Such policies are certainly not on the list of priorities it repeats ad nauseam.  Its most radical recent new legislation has been to suppress protests about this.  This week’s successful by-election campaign focussed on opposing a specific environmental policy. 

It is actually impossible really to quantify the last of these.  This is for the usual reason that reduced turnout and protest and tactical voting makes a distorting mirror of any by-election.  It is also for the unique reason that the last General Election was won by a showman with a single issue slogan which raised his party’s support to 29% of registered voters, and it was he who was elected here then. 

I suspect that the active opposition to the extension of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (as opposed to the wider spread passive resentment of it) wasn’t as large as all that. 

How many people actually voted Conservative in Uxbridge because they were already committed to supporting the Government?  How many more did so because they wanted to oppose the Zone extension?

The number of registered voters who voted Conservative was 21% (compared with 12% in Frome and 15% in Selby).  So, a wild guess would be, the core Conservative vote was about 10% and the extra anti-ULEZ vote was about 10% - whilst four-fifths of the registered voters didn’t vote Conservative at all.

But the 10% mattered – it mattered because the seat would have been lost without it – and it matters now as the source of the calls today to halt the Zone extension (despite the estimated 4000 London annual excess deaths attributed to air pollution) and row back on green policies generally (despite the evidence beneath our noses of the existential threat).

And, to be up front myself, I type here while conflicted about the approaching dates which will outlaw my gas boiler and petrol car. 

The thirty year old boiler failed here at the end of last year and my superficial effort to identify an affordable alternative to replacing it failed (although the installer of my new gas boiler reassured me that its much greater efficiency makes a significant difference).

I keep thinking about replacing or even doing without the twelve year old car but fail to act because I’m equally mesmerised by the cost and infrastructure problems of doing so (although I’ve sharply reduced my use of it by walking and taking public transport, and we did avoid flying when we went to Sicily in 2019).

St Andrew's, Little Steeping

 

Just two highlights from a hugely rewarding trip yesterday  to Little Steeping Church on the edge of a village near Spilsby not far from where Wold meets Fen.  The pictures seem to have gone up in the reverse order I intended; the memorial is just about readable if you click on it to bring it up bigger.

The Fourteeth Century effigy is of Thomas of Reading, the Rector who had the present church built.  It is in such good condition because at some point it was turned upside down and used as the chancel step.  A Victorian restoration discovered it free from the wear and vandalism it might otherwise have suffered in previous centuries.

Thomas is at the bottom right in the 1913 east window, a memorial to Edward Steere, the Rector who was initiator of that restoration, and later the Bishop of Zanzibar who personally supervised the building of the Anglican Cathedral there omn the site of the disused Slave Market.  It was his memorial I had gone to see.  His linguistic and printing skills in particular brought Swahili scripture into being.   

The detail at the bottom centre of the window is his ordaining John Swedi deacon (it says the first such Anglican ordination in Africa, but I think west Africa got in there first).  The striking choice is to have the Seventh Century Abbot Hadrian of Canterbury, an African scholar, pictured on the left as if watching the ordination.

Garway

 

The previous Bredwardine and Tintern pictures were not the result of a literary pilgrimage but part of a short tour aimed at taking in the Herefordshire border country from which my finally identified genetic ancestors came, a grandfather born in Pencoyd and his father and grandparents born in Garway.

I hadn’t realised the extent to which (in the same way that the Anglo-Scottish border has ‘debatable lands’) the Anglo-Welsh border was not fully defined.  The Welsh sounding name Pencoyd (and the neighbouring Llanwern) is one hint.  The history on the wall inside Garway church was another hint: the Bishop of Hereford received complaints in the Fourteenth Century that their parish priest could not be understood by the majority of his parishioners because he only spoke English.

The next bit of the border country to the north is the old March of Ewyas, parts of whose lands were allocated across both Welsh and English shires in the Sixteenth Century, and a number of whose parishes on the present English side were only transferred from the diocese of St David’s to that of Hereford in the Ninteenth Century.

Garway Church (among the 1000 best in the country according to Sir Simon Jenkins) here is a Templar foundation and the photo does not really catch how substantial their tower was, with a circular nave next to it since replaced by the present church.

Our Lady of Tintern

A label identified the modern statue as a creation based on the surviving part of an earlier statue now completed by reference to others contemporary with it.  

A very helpful member of staff in the ticket office then took me to a totally different part of the site to see the original statue.  

The clean cuts by which both the mother's head and the child were removed indicated, he suggested, someone like the last Abbot saving them rather than the dissolvers desecrating them. 

And then, having found Kilvert next to the Wye in Bredwardine, inevitably I found Wordsworth in the trees above the Wye at Tintern.

 

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame 

and even the motion of human blood

 almost suspended, we are laid asleep

in body and become a living soul, 

while, with an eye made quiet by the power 

of harmony and the deep power of joy, 

we see into the life of things. 

 

Hearing oftentimes 

the still sad music of humanity, 

nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

to chasten and subdue - and I have felt 

a presence that disturbs me with the joy 

of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime 

of something far more deeply interfused 

whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 

and the round ocean and the living air. 

 

Neither evil tongues, 

rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, 

nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all 

the dreary intercourse of daily life, 

shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 

our cheerful faith that all we behold 

is full of blessings.

Bredwardine Church

 

 

 

 

 

The Wye beneath the Rectory

The cross marks Kilvert's grave

The Rectory next to the church

Organ at All Saints', Greetwell

 

A nice little find to make up for recent lack of blogging inspiration, inclucing a rather fine set of Arma Christi at the top of the bottom picture.

Ready to be anointed

 

On Sunday, I re-visited the hymn ‘Ye that know the Lord is gracious’.  A passage of scripture being read was the one on which it is based. 

The line ‘kings and priest by God anointed’ looked as if it would connect us to the Coronation – but this turned out to me being ‘too clever’ as the phrase isn’t there in the scriptural text.

I’d newly discovered that the hymn writer (Cyril Alington, Dean of Durham from the 1930s into the 1950s) had Lincolnshire roots.  His parents were married in Spilsby, where his mother was from.  His father was brought up at Candlesby Rectory and went to school at King Edward’s, Louth.

Alington actually came from a more privileged set than this might imply.   He married a peer’s daughter, was Headmaster of Eton before going to Durham, and had a daughter who married the Earl who went on to be Prime Minister as Sir Alec Douglas Home.

The hymn runs like a thread through my ministry.  I picked it for my ordination as a deacon, and have gone on picking it for each parish welcome and farewell service since.

I still appreciate much of it.  It begins with grace before our own efforts to build on it.  It finishes evocatively with us finally being ‘in tune with heaven’.

But I’m not sure I’d pick it now for a major service or as a deliberate thread through ministry.  It is just that little bit too stridently confident, speaks of a process which feels too easy. 

Can we simply claim that building on God’s grace by proclaim our story will mean the weary earth hears and the whole creation finds itself in tune with heaven?  Perhaps that is how the privileged ruling elite saw religious and political progress at the time of the last Coronation?

At the time of this Coronation, the middle of the road parts of the church are not as good at attracting general population (let alone the young).  It is mired in conflict about how inclusive it can be.  This week, it has another abuse story emerge (a story which again includes the way it has been mishandled). 

Meanwhile, mainstream England is aware our prosperity has been at the cost of planet, and that we have less shared will to tackle it than we need.  We find war in Europe can still happen, and human exasperated famine elsewhere.

So I explored the other two readings instead as equally reliable guides to our call to discipleship in the sort of church and world we inhabit.

It was a little bit of a shock to think I’ve read the first part of the Gospel in public more often than any other.  I’ve taken over a thousand funerals.  The passage beginning ‘in my father’s house are many mansions’ will have been read at hundreds of them.

Thomas is told there is a lot of room, and that he knows the way there.  ‘No I don’t’, he responds.

My much repeated ninety second take on that is ‘even one of Jesus closest followers wasn’t instantly reassured and had to be encouraged to trust beyond what he could see – probably like most of us at an occasion like this’.

Sunday’s reading went on to have Philip respond in a similar way.  ‘Stop all this poetic speech - just show us the Father, that would be all we need’, he says to Jesus. 

Jesus’ response is ‘Have I been with you all this time and you still don’t get it?’.  I can hear a teacher in my ear ‘Mullins, we’ve gone over this for half a term, you really must concentrate’.

So perhaps a really great twenty first century hymn would need to capture something of that.  We haven’t fully grasped it.  We’re not possessors of the answers.  We’re pilgrims stumbling along behind Jesus’ promises, trying to keep up.  A bit like the first apostles.

The first reading was from Acts, a book which does explode with confidence and stories of the growing church.  Stephen is one of those recruited to cope with the extra workload.

Immediately before our passage, he is on trial and makes a long even provocative speech – telling the tidings of his new birth, of a new creation.  The result is that he is battered to death with rocks.

It feels for all the world like Vladimir Kara Murza.  Russian opposition leader influential in getting foreign sanctions against individuals in Putin’s government.  A Human Rights Prize winner who has somehow survived being repeatedly poisoned.

Three weeks ago he was sentenced to 25 years hard labour, something he is hardly expected to survive.  He too made a defiant and equally provocative speech at his trial.

Our country will open its eyes and shudder when it realises the crimes committed in its name... I know the day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate, when those who unleashed this war, rather than those who tried to stop it, will be recognised as criminals... This day will come inevitably as spring follows on from the coldest winter.

So perhaps a really great twenty first century hymn would need to capture something of that too.  Those who have been most conspicuous in articulating the challenge of Christian living have often paid the highest price for it.  A bit like the first martyr Stephen. 

And a bit like the ten twentieth century Christian martyrs whose statues stand above the west door of Westminster Abbey – the biggest change to the building since the last Coronation.

Perhaps it is simply a gift to me that we have all three readings lined up together, three quite distinct images of Christian discipleship.  Tentative and confident.  Confused and clear. Deeply compromised and with consistent integrity.  Disastrously persecuted and well rewarded.

And we can sing everything from eighteenth and nineteenth century doggerel which smuggles in inadequate theology and voice newly composed insight which echoes heaven itself.

As I Peter 2.5,9 and Cyril Alington almost say on a Coronation weekend:

We are all living building blocks, interlocking with Christ and each other, placed by God in a specific time and place.   We are all kings and queens, divested of any pretensions to receive God anointing.  Can we do anything other than try to explore and live out his grace, trusting him to deal with the messes and successes which result?

The picture is of the Roman memorial stone reused as the foundation stone of St Mary-le-Wigford in Lincoln.