Last Rites the End of the Church of England

The June meeting of the Book Group looked at Michael Hampson's diagnosis of the state of the Church of England and predictions about its future - pessimistic, as the title of the book suggests!

Michael Hampson is an Anglican priest, who served as a parish priest in the Church of England for about thirteen years. After many years as vicar of a large parish he was offered the post of warden of a retreat house, a post he was glad to accept as it involved organising and conducting retreats and courses on theological issues. However, before he had moved there, an anonymous caller telephoned his future bishop, alleging that Fr Hampton was living in a gay relationship. The bishop asked Fr Hampson to deny this allegation and, when he refused either to deny or confirm it - in accordance with the then current Lambeth policy of 'don't ask, don't tell', and the bishop withdrew his offer of the post. Fr Hampson remained another three years in his parish, who were very supportive towards him and then left the ministry, working as a writer on religious issues.

Those of us who had read the book found it extremely readable. A lot of sympathy was expressed towards Fr Hampson and indignation at the way he had been treated by the bishop. It was pointed out that in no secular occupation could an offer of a job be withdrawn because of an anonymous allegation, neither could someone's sexuality bar them from employment. A discussion ensued about why sexual matters were given such importance by the church when personality defects like bullying might affect a vicar's ability to function pastorally much more seriously. It was suggested that, while a married vicar known to be in an adulterous relationship could seriously destabilise a parish, who would, presumably feel some loyalty to his or her spouse, relationships between unmarried people did not. There was an interesting discussion about, given that we all sin, what sins should render a priest liable to dismissal. Murder, grievous bodily harm and child abuse were agreed on and it was suggested that while the BNP was a legal party, the views it propagated were  unacceptable for Christians.

We moved on to discuss Fr Hampson's views on the current state of the Church of England. He claims that, while it used to be divided into three main wings, the Anglo Catholic, the Liberal and the Evangelical and that this three way division produced a fruitful kind of tension. but now that the Anglo Catholic wing has all but 'hived off' from the rest of the church, through Resolutions and Episcopal Visitors, the division is a two way one between the Liberals and the Evangelicals. This produces a more hostile kind of tension, centring on whether to interpret Scripture literally or in the context of its time and, according to Michael Hampson, the Evangelicals are bound to take over in the end as their churches are the wealthier. This is a pessimistic forecast for all but Evangelicals and it does tend to oversimplify things. There are, after all, Catholic Evangelicals, Liberal Evangelicals and Liberal Catholics.

Michael Hampton also paints a bleak picture of the financial situation in the church, suggesting that congregations of less than seventy are not viable and that without a huge increase in giving, the church won't survive. He suggests that, rather than parishes being grouped together under deaneries, there should be clusters of parishes who share the same churchmanship, though this might tend to increase division and hostility. He seems to reject the view that the C. of E. is there for everyone, saying that he found conducting baptisms, weddings and funerals for the 'unchurched' very frustrating. This provoked a lengthy discussion on whether time spent with people at such crucial times in their lives could be regarded as wasted and whether those asking for their child's baptism but without any intention of following this up might be directed towards other ways of celebrating the baby's birth without being made to feel rejected by the church.

One was left feeling that Michael Hampson's opinion of the church as an institution is not high. This is understandable in view of the way it has treated him and the lack of support he appears to have received from his fellow clergy.

Pat West

'In the Eye of the Storm'
This book is not, as most of us had assumed, Gene Robinson's autobiography: it is rather more a collection of sermons, dealing mainly with the attitude of the Anglican Church towards questions of gender, race, sexuality and social justice.

Most people will be aware that Gene Robinson is a bishop in the American Episcopal Church and, although almost certainly not the first gay bishop to be elected, most certainly the first to be open about his sexuality and the relationship with his same sex partner. We learn something of his story in the book's early chapters - how he was brought up in a strict Protestant sect feeling that he was unacceptable to God because he was gay, until he experienced God's voice saying to him, 'You are my son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.' There are disappointing gaps in the story - we don't hear why he married or when he met his present partner, with whom he is now in a civil partnership. We hear that his ex wife and daughters are supportive of both him and his election to the episcopacy, but, presumably out of respect for their privacy, we learn little of the emotional journeys of any of those involved.

One gets the impression that the Bishop is very much an extravert, who is not given to introspection. We do not hear, for example, whether he agonised or even hesitated before deciding to stand for election. What we do hear is that both he and his partner had to wear bullet proof vests at his consecration and it does seem strange that it was almost to have been taken for granted that a gay bishop's life was in danger from so called Christians, while that fact that he was gay caused a storm of outrage.

Despite some disappointment at the lack of personal details, the group felt there was much of value in the book. Bishop Robinson is clearly a man with great pastoral gifts, who relates easily to a wide variety of people and the chapter about his regular visits to a women's prison is very moving. He also has much to say about the church's neglect of many issues of social justice, particularly its tendency to 'inoculate' people by giving them a 'mild dose' of religion and social commitment, which prevents them from getting involved in any meaningful way.

The group compared the bishop's position with that of Jeffrey John, the English canon who was appointed Bishop of Reading and then asked to resign because of protests from leading Evangelicals. Jeffrey John, although openly gay is currently celibate. Was he more eligible to the episcopacy than a gay man in an active relationship, who had also been married? Given that there are now divorced heterosexual bishops, we failed to reach a united conclusion on this!

We also discussed the criticism levelled at the American church for 'doing its own thing', despite what other nations felt and whether this was ever justified in the cause of reform, which might be delayed indefinitely if someone didn't act unilaterally. Again, we failed to agree particularly when this was applied to the ordination of women. And we never got round to discussing the bishop's view that homophobia and misogyny are inextricably linked and .the implications of this in deciding who should be ordained.

The next book group will be on Monday June 15th, when we will discuss 'Last Rites' by Michael Hampson, an account of a priest's experience of the Church of England, his disillusion about recent developments and his suggestions for preventing further deterioration.

'Keeping Faith' by Jodi Picoult
The 'Faith' of the title is a young girl of about eight years old, who becomes the centre of a storm of media publicity. Living with her mother, who is depressed and preoccupied following the break up of her marriage, she begins to have conversations with an imaginary friend. She calls the friend, 'her guard' and describes her as a woman in a long brown dress with long hair, but later her mother and the child psychologist she's consulted realise she is saying, 'God'. (The book is set in America, so the two words sound the same!)

When her grandmother appears to die after a sudden admission to hospital, and then suddenly revives after Faith kisses her, she becomes a local celebrity and something of a problem for the religious authorities. Faith's mother is Jewish but not practicing and Faith has been brought up away from any religious influences. Two rabbis come to hear about her, one takes a sceptical view of miracles, though the other, in a different tradition is more credulous. Because 'miracles' usually occur in a Roman Catholic context, the local priest becomes involved and later, someone from the Vatican. The first priest has a problem about Faith's image of God being female until he decides she is seeing pictures of Jesus, with long hair and a long brown 'dress'. Meanwhile the 'miracles' increase along with the publicity and Faith's father, who has married his mistress, tries to get custody of her, claiming that her 'visions' are a product of her mother's disturbed personality and that she is being damaged by all the media attention. And, for good measure, an atheistic television journalist, a sort of American Richard Dawkins, tries to expose her as a fraud and begins to believe her miracles are genuine. The novel ends with Faith's mother winning the custody case and Faith's 'visions' disappearing.

Everyone in the group found the book 'unputdownable', even though a 'good read' is not necessarily the same as a good book. No one felt they could identify with any of the characters as they weren't fully developed and only served to move the plot along. Some of the group felt the book had nothing relevant or new to say about miracles or any other aspect of religion, others thought these topics were handled well and sensitively. Nevertheless 'Keeping Faith' did generate an interesting discussion about the nature of miracles, whether they exist and experiences that could be termed supernatural. It also raises the question of feminine aspects of God, although, like many other issues, it fails to develop it.

The next meeting of the Book Group is on Monday 2nd June at 7 30 pm at the Vicarage, when the book for discussion will be 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' by Lionel Shriver, recently broadcast on Radio 4 and available in paperback.

Pat West

Some Tame Gazelle
'The title of this book is a quotation from Thomas Haynes Bayly: 'Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove: Something to love, oh, something to love!' and the novel is about how people cope with the need to love someone or something. Or, rather, how women cope - the need of most of Barbara Pym's men is to be the object of some woman's devotion. Some of the group complained that there was a lack of theological themes in the book and I suppose that it is a moot point whether the need for love is a theological matter or a psychological one. Some Tame Gazelle' is Barbara Pym's first novel, one of her most popular but not her best. She wrote it in her early twenties, submitting it for publication in the mid 1930's. It was rejected and she rewrote it several times and it was eventually published in 1950. She wrote seven novels over the next decade, and was held in high repute until her publisher rejected one on the grounds that it wouldn't appeal to contemporary tastes. This was a severe blow to her self confidence and she stopped writing until 1977, when the 'Times Literary Supplement' published a list of 'the most underrated writers of the past 75years'. Barbara Pym was the only writer to be nominated by two major literary critics, Lord David Cecil and Philip Larkin and this led to a revival of interest in her work and renewed her self esteem sufficiently for her to write three more novels before she died of cancer in 1980.
Barbara Pym's novels invariably have an Anglican clerical setting - she is one of the few Anglican novelists of the latter half of the 20th century - and 'Some Tame Gazelle' is no exception. The protagonists are two unmarried sisters, Belinda and Harriet, based on Barbara herself and her sister, Hilary and Henry, an Archdeacon and his bossy wife Agatha, based on two people she knew in Oxford. Belinda is still in love with Henry, despite her better judgement telling her he is extremely lazy and selfish and despite his rejection of her many years ago to marry Agatha, w ho is a Bishop's daughter and a possible aid to promotion.
Harriet's capacity for devotion is directed indiscriminately towards any curate serving in the parish, with constant invitations to supper and gifts of food. Both sisters receive proposals, one from an objectionable bishop, the other from a man of 'inferior 'social status and both reject them, and the novel ends with the arrival of a new curate for Harriet to cosset while Belinda is peaceably resigned to a life of good works, hopeless love and the consolations of poetry. But both are happier than Henry and Agatha, whose marriage is patently devoid of affection., Agatha wishing she had married the bishop instead.
Although the minutiae and pettiness of much of church life is amusingly portrayed with a deadly accuracy - most members of most congregations will have experienced something similar to the squabble over the marrow at the church fete! - it is in many ways a sad book. Harriet and Belinda are both highly educated women but, like many women in the 1930's, had no means of putting their education to practical use, unlike the much younger Olivia, the Oxford don who marries the curate with a third class degree and who will probably write his sermons for him.
It may be an exaggeration to call Barbara Pym a feminist writer, but she certainly gave most of the men in her novels a hard time, perhaps in revenge for the way they had treated her. The character of the Archdeacon is based on a man who rejected her at Oxford and she went on to experience a series of rejections, once complaining that she 'was sick of being drearily splendid' about them.
The reading group's opinion of ' Some Tame Gazelle' was sharply divided, two members pronouncing it 'twee' and 'complete rubbish' and complaining that nothing happens, the others expressing various degrees of appreciation, one comparing it to 'Cranford' in its perceptive descriptions of the details of everyday life in an enclosed society.
Those who complained about the lack of plot may be happier with the book chosen for the next meeting (on 3rd March), Jodie Picoult's 'Keeping Faith', described by 'Glamour' magazine as 'a gut wrenching read.'
Pat West

Seminary Boy' by John Cornwell
John Cornwell is an award winning journalist, well known to readers of 'The Tablet', and author of, among other books, 'Hitler's Pope' (about Pius XlI) and 'Power to Harm' (about the Louisville Prozac trials.) He was born in 1939 to a poor and somewhat dysfunctional Catholic family in London. His father was mentally unstable and absented himself from the family home for long periods, while his mother, though very loyal to her children, was volatile and sometimes violent. Expelled from primary school for hitting a nun over the head, he became part of a local gang and was set fro a life of crime.
However, after his mother arranges for him to become an altar boy, he is so impressed by the music and Latin ritual and the selflessness of the elderly parish priest that he undergoes a radical change and decides he has a vocation for the priesthood. His mother manages to persuade the diocesan authorities to pay for her son to board at a junior seminary in the wilds of Staffordshire; it is a Spartan and punitive institution by today's standards but he eventually settles and enjoys periods of happiness. A city child, he comes to love the countryside, he enjoys the choir and the high standard of Liturgy and teaching.
But, although he does well academically and even becomes 'Public Man' - the equivalent of Head Boy, there are periods when he undergoes what can only be described as mental torture, mainly through extreme scrupulosity about adolescent development and a belief that he may be damned.
These scruples are encouraged by some of the priests in the seminary, though fortunately not by all, and one priest is very helpful to him. But in his final year his growing doubts about the authority of the priesthood crystalize, when he refuses to admit to a minor misdemeanour he has not committed and is unfairly punished. He spends a few months in an adult seminary , then decides he hasn't a vocation and goes to Oxford. For a time he lapses from the church altogether but makes a gradual return after he marries a Catholic and has children. After such a long absence he finds the church much changed. The Latin and the music he loved has disappeared and, at the first Christmas Mass he attends the choir sing 'Happy Birthday to You'!This is a book about a difficult early life but it's not of the 'miserable childhood genre', as it's written with an impressive honesty and a lack of self pity or self dramatisation. He is able to sympathise with his mother, who must sometimes have been very frightening, and he doesn't write his father off as she does. He depicts the junior seminary in all its awfulness but at the same time gives credit to those priests who were helpful, both in mitigating the dreadful sense of guilt the seminary induced and in introducing him to the liberating power of literature, art and music. In a sense it's a book about father figures - there are many in the book - his own absent one, with whom he is reunited half a century later, the parish priest whom he served at the altar and his various 'fathers' at the seminary, one of whom replaced to some extent the father he'd lost.
The book also presents a dilemma:- the church of the 1950s fired the imagination of the teenage John Cornwell in a way the present church probably wouldn't have and today he might have remained a delinquent. However, not all the boys survived the junior seminary as well as he did, some were psychologically scarred by the sense of guilt that was encouraged. John Cornwell has remained in the church since his return as a 'critical Catholic' and appears in favour of its liberalisation, though lamenting the loss of beauty and mystery. The baby, he implies, has been thrown out with the bathwater. Some may feel the same, though to a lesser extent, about the changes over the last fifty years in the Church of England.
I found this a most readable and moving book. 'Seminary Boy' by John Cornwell is published in paperback by Harper Perennial, priced at £7.99.Pat West

The Exorcism of Emily Rose
On 6th June the Film Club watched 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose', a film based on the true story of a young Catholic student in Northern Europe, who underwent a series of strange and terrifying experiences and, having first being diagnosed as epileptic, then psychotic, having undergone an exorcism. The film translates the situation to America, where the priest involved in the exorcism is prosecuted for negligent homicide - as he might have been under American law.
During the trial the defending counsel, an agnostic, is subject to strange experiences, which convince her that the student might really have been a victim of possession. Evidence emerges that the diagnoses of epilepsy and psychosis are not necessarily correct and that it was not the exorcism that killed her but her refusal to eat or take medication afterwards. The priest explains that she saw her suffering and death as a means of converting others. Tom Wilkinson gives a strong performance as the priest and the film was most absorbing, though it would probably have been better without the flashbacks to the eerie episodes and the actual exorcism - by the time wild cats had been succeeded by horses then by rats and finally by writhing snakes it became almost comic!
There was a lively discussion after the film in which various views about the effectiveness and dangers of exorcism were expressed. It was agreed that there was a clear distinction between the ministry of healing and exorcism and that the exorcism of a place thought to be haunted by 'troubled spirits' could be reassuring to the people concerned. But there was a divergence of views when the discussion turned to the exorcism of people. Was there such a thing as diabolic possession or were the people thought to be possessed merely psychiatrically disturbed or spiritually sick? Was there a danger of colluding with the 'victim' that their 'bad' thoughts and impulses came from outside them and could be taken away without they themselves having to understand them and control them? Those present thought that there is a distinction between exorcisms performed by authorised Anglican and Roman Catholic clergy under strict controls and those conducted by charismatic groups, but was exorcism ever safe? Were 'evil' people possessed or was there no such thing as an evil person, only someone who did evil things? And could the evil things people did always be understood in terms of their earlier damaging experiences? No firm conclusions were drawn but it was agreed that the film had raised issues that were both fascinating and important, particularly for Christians.
Pat West

Andre’s Mother
The Film club met at the Vicarage in early April to watch and to discuss the film ‘Andre’s Mother’, which had been recommended by Father Simon. We had a most interesting evening, with a thought provoking film and with resulting discussion which for me, at least, led to further reflection on the film itself and on wider issues raised.
The viewer does not meet Andre, for the film is set after his untimely death. Much of the action takes place at his memorial service and it is there that his mother makes her appearance, alongside Andre’s friends, few (if any) of whom she has met before. It soon becomes clear that Andre has been much loved and is much mourned. It is also clear that Andre’s mother, whilst genuinely grieving for her son, brings her own fixed views into a much wider picture. The film brings Andre to life through the eyes of those who have known and cared for him in different ways. We gain insight into the 'real Andre' and also come to see the rather sanitised and distant version of him which his mother seems desperate to preserve.
I am deliberately being a little vague on detail as I feel the film would best be viewed without too much prior knowledge. The viewer is challenged to consider diverse opinions and prejudices and will make his or her own relationship with Andre and with his mother.
The film is short but powerful, stirring a range of emotions. I cannot see how any viewer could fail to be deeply moved, whatever his/her background and experiences. Our own group certainly found much to discuss! The quality of the acting is excellent (allowing for the inevitable adjustment when one realises that a major character is played by 'John-Boy Walton'…….) Visual and acoustic details are effective.I would strongly recommend this film. Some of us may have known an Andre and indeed his mother. We all have much to learn from them. Anyone who has seen the film will think of Andre at Pentecost and be thankful for his spirit, which transcends human frailty.
Sue Gentle

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