Retreat words

Back from the annual three nights at Alton Abbey, the substantial home of six Anglican Benedictine monks in the Hampshire beech woods. A small group of us have been doing this for twenty years. We don’t have to plan our pattern of activity or worship because we know the rhythm of the Abbey’s life and prayer and we know which large chunks of the day we keep on our own and which we keep catching up with each other.

I thought I had learnt by now not to bring too much with me; the point for me is supposed to be paying attention to what (if anything) emerges in the silences and not to keep it at bay with a project or reading list however spiritual or worthwhile. But the one valued slim volume I did take with me turned out to have notes in it made on our visit four years ago. There was what seemed to me a depressingly up to date summary of all the character faults, ministerial distortions, and habits which get in the way of others, clearly set out without my needing to do any self examination at all. I’d rather thought the process was like the occasional wash round under the draining board to keep things clean; I discover it is more like puzzling away at what on earth to do about apparently permanent stain along the grouting behind it which no amount of scrubbing or bleach seems to have been able to shift.

The little book was Rowan Williams’ lectures on the spirituality of the Desert Fathers Silence and Honey Cakes and one of the many things he reminded me is the basic one:

The church is a community that exists because something has happened which makes the entire process of self-justification irrelevant. God's truth and God's mercy have appeared in concrete form in Jesus and, in his death and resurrection, has worked the transformation which only God can perform and only God can tell us: that he has already dealt with the dreaded consequences of our failure, so that we need not labour anxiously to save ourselves and put ourselves right with God. The church's aim is to be a community that demonstrates this decisive transformation as really experienceable. One of the chief sources of the anxiety from which the gospel delivers us is the need to protect my picture of myself as right and good.

Just as well. Still, it might be nice if it was a different set of faults to reflect on in four years time rather than just the same ones further ingrained.

More holiday heritage study

The Taliban are not the only ones to have destroyed religious statues through puritan zeal. There is evidence of such destruction all around us. One of our churches (St George’s, Bradley) actually has surviving Reformation records of the Churchwardens taking down and burning the rood screen there, and this mentions in particular the statues of Mary and John standing at the foot of the cross. The absence of almost all mediaeval glass and brasses in our Cathedral is a monument itself to the Commonwealth soldiers who trashed the place over one weekend a century later. So I was struck by this carving in Prague Cathedral (even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to capture a decent quality photograph of it) showing the seventeenth century destruction there: there is even a man at the top of a ladder cutting the rood beam down with the two statues beside the cross; notably others are carting off the loot.

More Prague

Welcome home

The work to create disabled access at the entrance to the churchyard at St Michael's, Little Coates was both completed and vandalised while we were away for four nights, but I'm trying to admire the work (including the rather fine reinstatement of the lantern above the entrance) rather than knock my head against the damaged wall.

Half Term in Prague

'The good that I would I do not do'

Why do I go on doing the job in a way I know it can’t or shouldn’t be done? A conclusion of my last post was that incumbents are mad to go on trying to run parishes rather than giving them creative oversight, but that is in fact what I try to do most of the time. That post referred back to an earlier one which identified the things we can settle for in place of real priesthood, and, yes, I settle for them a lot of the time as well. I can think of the beginning of at least four answers.

First, I don’t try to run the parish and settle for inferior priesthood all this time. Indeed, I’m aware of the way not meeting the expectations that I should do so creates dissatisfaction particularly in one of the three churches. The development of a Shared Ministry Team in the parish, and the times when we do actually work through it, is an indication of this. The rare moments of genuine ‘kingdom seeking’ in the church and community witness to it.

Secondly, an important part of the Bishop of Grimsby’s paper referred to in the last post is about ‘cognitive dissonance’ - the way in which the new ideas to which one gives intellectual assent crash against the way the old ideas have actually formed one’s character, habits and understanding. Particularly when under pressure, people revert to instinctive ways of behaving which probably don’t rely on their most recent thinking.

Thirdly, if there was to be a total change in behaviour there would need to be substantial changes in the requirements of the job. The legal framework of being an incumbent is quite demanding, and I spent some time yesterday fulfilling routine responsibilities as Rural Dean and a Surrogate for issuing Marriage Licences on top of these. We have even discussed whether if we are able to appoint a new colleague, the post should be as a ‘Priest Missioner’ rather than as a ‘Team Vicar’ to spare him or her this trap.

Finally, I enjoy a lot of it, including extraordinarily much of the care of the ancient buildings and their churchyards. The other day introducing some school children to the architecture and digging through my predecessors’ old registers to help someone identify a family grave felt more like a hobby than a displacement activity.

Models of ministry

Doing this job is a bit like trying to direct a pantomime. Thirteen years ago I was hawking round for fellow clergy an article from the journal Theology which used this image. Each new pantomime grows out of a specific shared tradition which is made new that once. The director has a role equal to the actors in enabling both the rootedness in the tradition and the creativity needed for them to pull this off.

I also hawked around an article from the same journal published eighteen month earlier which suggested the job was like being a midwife. The image is of someone with training and expertise who is alongside those bringing forth new life - being responsible for the environment in which birth happens but not taking credit for God’s creation itself.

At exactly the same time the then Bishop of Grantham gave me and others the images of ‘jobbing theologians and popular hermits’ in the hope that we would recognise that there is something about our talking and praying which are the distinctive things to which people might look to us as general practitioners even if not as expert specialists.

This week I’ve just read properly a new paper by the present Bishop of Grimsby in which he offers ideas about developing models of ministry which will be sustainable and worthwhile for incumbents in parishes in the future. I could hardly believe the coincidence of the four images he uses: the impresario, the catalyst, the community theologian and the missioner.

The images of the impresario is a slightly different take on the image of the director of the pantomime. We can’t go on running the show, but we can take every opportunity to make sure an attractive variety of shows go on.

The images of the catalyst (which I used in my Michaelmas post on 30th September) and the midwife are getting at very similar things. The extra thing present (an element or a person) is not changed by what goes on (the reaction and the birth) but has a distinctive role in facilitating what is waiting to happen (bringing it about and ensuring it happens safely).

The image of the community theologian or jobbing theologian is one image. You hope your plumber has kept up with the technology in your system and doesn’t drive a nail through a gas pipe, and you hope your incumbent can make the right connections without doing inadvertent damage to near by explosive parts of your life or the life of your church.

There isn’t an exact match between the images of the popular hermit and the missioner. One is paying attention to God in secret and others happen to notice this, use this and value this. The other is seeking ways in which to make the secret known.

The point thirteen years ago and now is that we shouldn’t ever have felt we were meant to be running parishes. We are mad going on trying to do so in places where the responsibility is for more and more parishes. And the sort of oversight to which incumbents are now called is close to what our priesthood should always have been anyway.

Meanwhile, the picture is of work continuing last week on disabled access at St Michael’s, Little Coates (which, ironically, is a project into which I've put a huge amount of time - and last night a Churchwarden told me we may have to tackle major roof repairs at St George’s, Bradley).