Ziegenhain, near Jena

Jena

Love in Cleethorpes

I was involved in issuing four marriage licences last week. It used to be only one or two a year. The other clergyman authorised to do this locally also reports the same new pattern of requests.

Most Church of England weddings don’t involve a licence at all. We retain the quaint sense that we all live in small communities and many people can’t read, so we go on giving notice by ‘publishing banns of marriage’ (reading out at worship on three Sundays the names of those to be married); it does have the nice side effect that we can invite those being married to worship with us in the church in which they are to be married. But applying for a licence is one of the possible alternatives. It is used especially where the banns process has been messed up, the couple want privacy, or the marriage involves a foreign national.

All four licences last week (and a good number over the last year) fall into this last category. The most common situation is the couple met soon after coming to work in the country a couple of years ago, live together in rented property in the terraces near the Football Ground on the edge of Cleethorpes, and work in catering somewhere in the resort, he being Egyptian or else eastern European and she being Lithuanian or else from a neighbouring country.

Those of us involved in these weddings one way or another have tried to understand the phenomenon. One wondered why so many Egyptian men are marrying eastern European women; my assumption is that few Egyptian women are working here and that couples from neighbouring countries and cultures are more likely to return home to be married. Another wondered whether we are being naive and in some cases visa manipulation might be a factor, but there doesn’t seem to be any advantage of this sort when marrying another foreign national, and we have no grounds to probe if the couples are legally entitled to be married.

I wondered myself how it is that some Moslems are willing to make vows in a Christian form; where one party is not Christian I do make clear to them that it is what the marriage would involve and they usually express surprise that I think it worth mentioning. Perhaps there is a phenomenon of cultural Islam as much as of cultural Christianity. In two cases in recent months the couple have already been through a form of Muslim marriage to meet the religious needs of one partner and now want a Christian form to meet the religious needs of the other quite as much as to establish a legal marriage.

The orchids are also on the Cleethorpes coast.

Celebrating humanity

When it was reported that Solzhenitsyn had died, I was asked whether I had read anything of his. ‘Only One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’, I replied, remembering his account of a typical prisoner’s day in one of Stalin’s labour camps, based on his own experience in the 1950s. ‘Ah, yes, at least the short book was available for those who couldn’t bring themselves to tackle the big ones’, discerned the totally accurate response.

What I took down from my shelf wasn’t Solzhenitsyn at all, but the poet Irina Ratushinskaya. I turn out not to have Grey is the Colour of Hope, her account of her own labour camp imprisonment in the 1980s, but only its prequel In the Beginning. Nevertheless, I remembered that in the earlier book she thanked Solzhenitsyn more than once for preparing her for this experience: above all Ivan Denisovich retained humanity by doing his forced labour tasks with care and by eating even the worst meals with manners; Ratushinskaya in turn refused all inducement to deny her own dignity and even regretted drafting a letter of complaint which included a slight distortion of the facts in her own favour.

Two other incidents stick in my mind. She wrote about clinging to the last hints of warmth in a heating pipe in the punishment cell knowing it would soon freeze, and somehow rejoicing in the beauty of frost on the window in the morning. She mentions someone queuing with her at the gate of a camp discovering she was a writer and asking whether she could write about where they were; I’m not clear why life is more livable when described, honoured and shared, but this person instinctively knew that it is as much as Solzhenitsyn and those who mourn him.

The poems she composed in the camp were written on soap and then memorised before being washed away. And magically I once very briefly handled one of the tiny scraps of writing which had then been smuggled out so that they could be published; she came to a national conference for Prison Chaplains in Lincoln, the organiser very kindly allowed me to attend the session, and she passed the examples round.

In Bradley churchyard

Awe and access

This weekend I’ve been gently taken to task for moving the chancel screen in St Michael’s. My kindly critic was someone who worshipped there forty years ago and who had only just visited the church again.

The top picture shows St Michael’s as it was when this part of the church was consecrated in 1915. The lower one was taken from the same spot earlier this year, and captures the way in which light can flood the chancel rather than the nave. They don’t capture the intermediate stages: the cross and gallery on top of the screen were lost in the 1970s and a nave altar was placed in front it about then; for a generation the screen hasn’t looked like the top picture nor has the chancel been used much at all.

I’m sure the heritage bodies which consented to the recent moving of the remainder of the screen wouldn’t have done so if the cross and gallery had still been in place. I’m also sure they appreciated one of the aims which was to eliminate the nave altar and bring the architecturally distinguished chancel back into use.

Eliminating the nave altar has also allowed us to move people forward in the nave, thus creating space for the font at the back of the nave, and thus creating space for kitchen and toilet facilities at the back of the older part of the church where the font had stood. The chancel screen has not been lost but has been relocated to divide off this area at the back of the older part of the church.

For me the most interesting part of this weekend’s criticism is that it didn’t simply come from a ‘I like it as it was’ point of view. Rather my sympathetic critic understood very clearly what the original architect was seeking to achieve: for him the act of going up to Communion was to enter a very different sacred space, which can often have felt like passing through a barrier into the light; he observed how much more casual people appeared to be as they went up to Communion today compared with his own day.

For what it is worth, I’ve thought for a long time that there is an unresolvable tension in how a church is set out. It is a tension between the otherness of God and the intimacy which God offers, between awe at God’s majesty and being welcomed by God’s accessibility. The mediaeval sense of the ‘sacred space beyond the screen’ (consciously recreated by the architect in 1915) was to speak of the otherness of God. The bringing forward of altars at the Reformation was partly to speak of the accessibility of God. The moves in the seventeenth century to place the altar back behind rails (solid enough, it was said, to keep a dog out) were to reassert the sense of the majesty of God. Moves in the twentieth century such as the introduction of the nave altar in St Michael’s were to reassert the possibilities of intimacy with God.

It is as if any arrangement which provokes a sense of awe will appear to under value the humanity of Christ, and any arrangement which provokes a sense of welcome will appear to under value the divinity of Christ. It is my hope that the new arrangement in St Michael’s at least attempts to hold the tension by having the altar in the pool of light in the centre of the chancel but nevertheless has the chancel totally open. But I don’t think any church building can actually get it right.

Redundant St Matthew's

The most prominent themes of this blog turn out to be closing churches and coping with a smaller numbers of people in too many open churches; this is the sixth of twenty-nine posts so far which focuses on them. So the discovery I make about myself is that 20% of my attention appears to be given to these themes.

The picture is of St Matthew’s, Fairfield which has just officially became redundant. In the end it was the need to spend substantial amounts on the roof which prompted the move. At Easter most of the members of the remaining congregation moved ‘back’ to the ancient Scartho Parish Church which had originally established St Matthew’s as a ‘daughter church’. Yesterday the formal Church Commissioners scheme came into force bringing what had become two separate parishes back into one.

I’m told that in the 1960s the new Fairfield estate was overflowing with young families, and it was some distance south of Scartho Parish Church which had quite an old fashioned pattern of worship anyway. The mission strategy to establish a separate church where Family Worship flourished made a lot of sense, and many people are thankful that it was pursued for a generation of fruitful ministry. Forty years later the resources of the Church of England are more limited, the age profile of the estate is much older, Scartho itself has grown to the north as well to the south, and Scartho Parish Church is more obviously welcoming to families. The mission strategy to seek to serve the larger community well from one strong ancient church at its centre makes a lot of sense.

The bigger picture is this. If I had come to the area now covered by urban Grimsby and Cleethorpes 150 years ago I would have found five ancient Parish Churches. They are still clearly identifiable at Great Coates, Little Coates, Grimsby, Clee and Scartho, and nearly three hundred people will worship at regular services in them next Sunday. From the opening of St Peter’s, Cleethorpes in the 1860s to the opening of St Matthew’s, Fairfield in the 1970s a Bishop then came to dedicate a church on a new site twenty times; it was felt that every new housing area required a local church building.

But the Church of England vastly over stretched itself in doing this, and now half the twenty new churches have been disused and, in most cases, demolished. A St Barnabas’ church shut as long ago as the 1950s and now St Matthew’s is the tenth of them to do so. Nevertheless, this all means that we still have fifteen open churches; we have one for every 8000 or so people, and we have more open Anglican churches than the thirteen churches the Baptists, Catholics, Methodists and United Reformed Church have open between them. Actually, with a range of small independent congregations as well, up to two thousand Christian people may be meeting for worship in nearly forty different buildings next Sunday.