The unforgivable sin?

It’s strange now looking back at the church of my teens, now that I know so much more about church types and history. Then it was a mostly rather disorganized and occasionally mystifying place in which I endured an hour of boredom now and again. My faith disappeared around the time one of the saner members of my family did.

Partway through my time there, my secondary school acquired a closer link with the CofE and we were subjected to compulsory communion services in the school hall. At around the same point the Alternative Service Book came out and the wording of the service was rearranged imperceptibly. At the time I had no idea why this was happening, and I can’t say which of several alternatives were being used. I do remember thinking there was something odd about using a random one of the stackable plastic tables off which we would eat our lunch in a couple of hours as a communion table/ altar. (I guess I was destined to turn into an Anglo-Catholic.)

The assemblies on non-communion days were also religious, of course. As a non-believer and non-singer I used to feel faint when squashed in the too-small hall with several hundred other kids on hot days as they all droned out some dirge-like hymn or other accompanied by thumping piano, occasionally varied by something very militaristic or awful seventies schlock.

There was usually an uplifting reading or story after the hymn, then a lot of administrative notices, occasionally a mini-prizegiving. One day the Bible reading was on the need to forgive our enemies seventy times seven, shortly followed by an announcement in the notices that Jane X had been “expelled for being unforgivably rude to a teacher.”

No one got it.

At the time I just assumed everyone in charge of that school was really, really dumb (I was a teenager). Now I wonder if one teacher thought there was something wrong with some of their values and put that reading forward for the day. (I’m not saying never exclude, just that your reasoning for the ratio of forgiveness to giving up on people needs to be up front and not contradictory.)

Children and church – the 70s.

My family went to church out of a sense of duty. There was no expectation that anyone would enjoy it, nor any perceptible spiritual growth, increase in charity, or any other fruits of the Spirit as a result. It was just what you "had to" do on Sundays. They were at the tail end of the demographic who went to church out of deference to social expectations. At the age when we tend to believe everything adults say is true, I was told about God, but didn’t have any direct experience of God.

The head of one of my first schools was a committed Christian who told us bible stories, and about the rules of the religion, the Ten Commandments and other things that came in handy lists we could memorise. Miss B also had a real faith herself and an absolute integrity. Her version of Christianity was very much like the icebox approach in the delivery of its beliefs and doctrine, but it was real, she did not go home and then behave very differently for the remaining 166 or so hours of the week like my family.

But when I went on to another school, and although the cracks in the family were obvious by then, there was a complete lack of pastoral support. Here there were some people of integrity like Miss B, but also a lot of opportunistic misuse of religious tools. Telling children about an eye in the sky bearing down upon you wherever you are has obvious applications if you want to enforce excessive school rules or any other kind of conformity. This was paired with a kind of saccharine babytalk in the school assemblies that completely cut God off from me when I most needed that connection.

We filed into the RS classroom past a series of framed cartoons of contorted figures in hell, based on the Psalms and Wisdom literature quotes on fools saying there is no God. When we were told the story of Abraham and Isaac, the teacher did nothing to explain it – another time and place, Abraham’s mistake, God’s knowledge that Abraham would do anything for him? Nothing.

I was going through major intra-family violence, emotional abuse and neglect, including refusal to get me medical help for a very painful and sometimes dangerous condition, someone very close to me was dying, I had been uprooted from a home and school where I had just about managed to hang on. I was not so much having a childhood as getting to be a four-foot high carer for some of the adults around me.

If your so-called children’s assemblies or services are alienating the very children most in need of this, it’s safe to say you’re Doing It Wrong.

The whitewashed Protestant icebox

When I was very small I attended the church of No Saints, not particularly near Little Dullsville, in a very isolated part of the West Country – extremely reluctantly, I might add. The church had originally been built as a private chapel near a manor house, the latter subsequently demolished. It had been miles from the nearest villages so now in the absence of the house it stood alone on the north side of a granite hill with a few sheep chewing at the scrubby grass.

The building was tiny, and the coldest place on earth, as far as I could tell, even though I lived in a freezing house and have never met anyone else in my generation who managed to get chilblains in winter. It was somehow more freezing inside than out even in February. I don’t think there was any heating at all. There was electric light in winter so there must have been some kind of generator but there was no kitchen, water supply etc. These people didn’t do after-service tea, coffee mornings or Sunday school.

The walls were plain white, the furnishings completely unadorned wooden pews, box pews down one side and open pews in the main body of the church. Everyone, the whole congregation of maybe fifteen, sat in the same pews decade after decade. (I thought they might go home between Sundays but with some of them you couldn’t prove it.) On the south wall was the only decoration in the place, a giant sculpted marble tomb to one of the defunct manor family's Stuart ancestors, dwarfing the plain pulpit and table.

This was in the days before Alternative Service Books and any other newfangled modern language, and the Parish Eucharist movement had not penetrated the wilds of the moors, so the main service was Morning Prayer three Sundays out of four with Communion on the remaining Sunday. Most of my memories of the service are of sitting on a kneeler on the floor, reading the hymn books or prayer books by myself when I had lost the thread of the preacher droning on. I can’t remember much about what he wore or where he stood or any of the other distinguishing features of different types of Protestantism. My best guess would be a cassock, surplice and stole, and I think he presided from the north end of a plain wooden table at the communion services, but I may be mixing up this “padre,” as he was called, with later ministers at the church school.

There was one other child present most weeks, but she was the organist’s daughter and sat near her mother on one of the benches that had once been choir stalls. The only music I heard anywhere until I started school was the sound of the hymns, taken from the inevitable Ancient and Modern book, modern apparently referring to 1869 not 1969.

The church was miles away, past about half a dozen other Church of England places, but the family had chosen this church when they lived in their previous home and it suited their purposes. They hadn’t lived any nearer before the move, but had decamped there from their previous village church after a dispute with a new rector who removed names from pews and insisted visitors should be allowed to sit where they liked. Somehow they found the remotest, coldest church in the middle of nowhere, and the fact that there was no real community there suited them just fine.

Any sense of God that I had came more from the reading on the church floor than anything that was explained to me. I can’t say, either, that I particularly connected the wet countryside with any sense of awe or natural theology. At home I had an Authorised Version of the Bible that I attempted to plough my way through. I more or less abandoned this attempt when I realised no one would answer my questions. In the line-up to shake the vicar’s hand after the service, one day I asked him where God came from, and he told me I was too young to be told that.

I also hated communion, having to kneel on the carpeted altar step next to my parents and watch them being given communion whilst I was only allowed a pat on the head. I think I'd say now that it made me feel like a second class citizen - I didn't really have that concept at four, but I could see it was yet another way in which children didn't count.

I know I am, but what are you?

People in churches seem to feel a great need to classify people. I get put in the Anglo-Catholic box. That’s the elegantly proportioned stone one with all the Gothic tracery, lined with slightly faded and shredded rose-coloured fiddleback chasubles.

Being in this box suits me in some ways. There is plenty to look at, some of it very engaging and most of it not too kitsch. In other ways it doesn’t – some people think women really don’t belong in this box, though others insist that the box has been updated, Anglo-Catholic 2.0, and so on. Others think I spend too much time reading the bible for a proper A-C, despite the fact that the founders of the Oxford Movement might be horrified by that statement. Compared to most of the others, I am about as musical as a brick. Allowances need to be made.

I don’t really use the bible the same way the open evangelicals over there do, though, and I couldn’t stay in their box with all its over-exuberant worship songs (especially not the ones with arm movements). I don’t really fit with the self-described liberals as I believe too much old-fashioned orthodox stuff, and can’t cope with lurex-threaded seventies fabrics or pottery chalices. In the far distance there are the fundies, and that’s the way I’d like them to stay.

Yeah, I’m stereotyping. That’s kind of the point.

But I am going to find out more about recent church history, for a church in which “recent” probably means nineteenth century.

spot the difference

For people who have been forced to attend "all-age" worship, a seventies nostalgia-fest, or anything that got just a little bit too syncretistic lately:

Q. How do you tell the difference between Sydney Carton and Sydney Carter?

A. Sydney Carton was guillotined and shouldn't have been.

So what, neither has Shakespeare

So I haven’t written much lately. (title from a postcard that all foreign visitors to London with any literary pretensions are statutorily required to purchase – ask my ex).

I’ve done a bit of editing on “The Rural Nietzsche Experiment,” but only a bit. My spiritual director suggested that I write something about one of my soon-to-be-ex churches, so I have done some of that. I might publish some of it on here, suitably anonymised. The church in question partakes of many of the classic annoyances when a bunch of variously reconstructed people get together and try and get all holy – this might be interesting and instructive to me in future years, and then again it might not. All unhappy families being different in their own ways, and all that.

It’s also an inexorable law of blogging that sooner or later you have to describe what you had for lunch, so I’ll just mention that I have developed a thing for cucumber sandwiches lately. What can it possibly mean?!

art project

Ingredients: take one eighteenth century church, some volunteers who have not painted before, fifty+ square metres of canvas, and a lot of paint.



Marinate over a couple of weekends in church halls and unused gallery areas, gradually adding layers of primer and then paint.






Sew on straps and attach to balcony railings.



Light candles (after applying flame retardant).




Why? It's for a new informal worship evening in a very traditional church - we wanted the place to look very different for the night.

Backed up with paperwork (the writing course finishes)

Late last night I submitted my second and final assignment for the OU course. This was a 1500-word story and an accompanying explanation - we were supposed to explain why we chose the narration method we did, ditto the tenses used, the place where we began, etc. For the story we had a list of words to pick from as inspiration, ranging from the more abstract to concrete stuff like "hair" or "prison". I used "abandonment" and "music" for my jumping-off points, writing a story about a young woman who was abandoned as a baby and then adopted into a family which was surprised by her musical talent. 

I found writing the explanatory text somewhat clunky. I knew exactly how I wanted to write my piece, so although I dutifully tried out a few alternatives in the way of tense and narration, this exercise pointed up how inferior they were. 

I was reminded of an art talk I attended a couple of months ago. The speaker was talking of her own very intuitive way of working, and one of the many fine arts undergraduates in the audience bemoaned the fact that her college insisted on tons of supporting documentation for any piece. It was not enough to plan and execute a painting/sculpture/installation, nor just to log what you did and keep early sketches, you also had to have a cogent game plan for how you had planned your work and what you hoped to achieve, and had to write this up formally. 

OK, to some extent, this is going to stop someone sitting in front of a tableau of roses/ elephant dung and just doing the same-old same-old term after term, but on the other hand, too much bureaucracy and paperwork seems to be deadening pretty much every area of life. The visual arts are likely to be full of people who communicate better with imagery than words, all of whom are required to submit long written reports. I think Edward Hopper had something to say about this, "If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint." 

If we are hearing complaints from so many areas of life about paperwork - as well as the ever-present statements of teachers, I have heard priests complain about management jargon working its way into the church, and I have experienced wildly excessive performance review procedures at a lot of large companies - probably something is up. Some areas cannot be measured purely on obviously quantifiable criteria, and when we try to use something measurable as a shorthand people will soon start to game the system. (NHS waiting times, anyone?) Then we react by changing the measure, probably by adding new stuff and increasing the admin burden, rather than replacement. Finally we wonder why our artists, scientists, technologists and engineers don't seem as "creative" as they used to be, and our public sector projects have massive overspends and overruns in spite of all the measurements taken. 

"Creative" vs "innovative" is a whole other can of worms - people attempting to excuse bad behaviour by explaining the person is "creative", for one thing. I am wondering, though, if there is really a type of person who simply cannot fit into corporate bureaucracies, and if such people aren't vital (in both senses). I read an interesting book last summer on Managing Creative People set in the ad industry, but with some useful things to say for other areas.

More church drawing

I went back to the church this week to take pictures for its website and do some more drawing. There is a lot of ornate carving in this church, and I am working on a set of pencil drawings of the finials to the choir stalls: saints, angels and evangelists all feature. I am getting to know the styles of one or two of the carvers: they carve feathers in noticeably different ways. Even if I sang in the choir, I would probably never know that, as I would be unlikely to look at other people's armrests even during the breaks in the music.

This drawing is of the lectern: not an unusual concept, an eagle holding up the book support. I think eagle == one of the four symbols for the Evangelists, in this case John, which in turn come from the book of Revelation - yes, here it is: Rev 4:7

Reading for comprehension

-- a ubiquitous insult on the web if someone thinks their crystal clear point is being misinterpreted by an opponent, which reminds me that I tend to read ultra-fast for "story" rather than to slow down and savour prose, or figure out how a writer is achieving their effects, including making me want to find out what happens. These days, I am reading a lot less fiction, and writing a lot more. I think what I need to do next is to spend more time figuring out these effects and constructions so that I can learn from them.

I took about ten days off writing - completely: OU activities and journals and everything prose-related - after handing in the first assignment. I've just re-started, and raced through a couple of weeks' worth of activities in a few days. The course so far: a little disappointing in its interactive component, in that very few of the people on the course list seem to participate at all in the online discussions (which are a bulletin board format, so can be accessed at any time).

I've learned a fair bit already and some of the suggestions trigger ideas immediately, others not so. I am lucky in that the second assignment is one piece of continuous prose, which suits those of us whose shopping lists tend to be longer than the OU standard word limit for single questions. The assignment is essentially to respond to a list of words - concrete items like "a comb" and abstract nouns like "abandonment". I read through the list, thought, "Hmm," went to bed, and couldn't sleep. About 3am I gave up and started writing about the ideas I had.

Abandonment, unlike the previous "child on a city street" assignment, gives me a lot to work with. I am choosing to write in the persona of a woman abandoned as a baby in the classical dramatic circumstances, on the steps of a city centre church. Although her subsequent adoption has gone well, she wonders about all the things most children take for granted: roots, looking like your parents, where her musical talent has come from.

Talking of churches, I was out photographing and drawing one midweek, for its website. The drawings were quite light pencil, and won't work online - they were for ideas and possible use elsewhere. The photos were designed to give me a set of background and incidental images to work with.



I am also learning Greek at the moment, and have an exam in a few weeks. If past history is anything to go by, I shall probably get increasingly nervous about it.

This is not with the OU, it's a real life evening class, and a very good one. We have been studying for nearly two terms. I did some Latin at school, and I've learned Spanish as an adult, so I am not completely new to the idea of complicated grammar. I also keep hearing that Greek is supposedly easier than Latin (not sure why?) and also that this form of Greek, Koine or New Testament Greek, is the easiest there is. There still seems to be rather a lot of it to take in.

On the plus side, although there are five or six thousand different words in the New Testament, ninety percent of the actual occurrences are of a much smaller core of six hundred words, so a lot of modern textbooks concentrate on making sure you are familiar with those.

Doing this has already proved illuminating. Greek, for example, has several different ways of giving an order or suggestion, all of which tend to get flattened into one form of imperative in English, as it can be hard to get across all the nuances in translation.