John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Jesus plays the Fool - my Ken Dodd sermon

What a beautiful day, missus, what a beautiful day, for preaching on the subject of Jesus the holy fool, and drawing on lots of quotes from that great student of comedy, Kenneth Arthur Dodd, 'failed accountant'. Jesus plays the fool, today's talk, here.

City vicar settles into village life

As mentioned previously, the local press have featured me this week: see the article, 'City vicar settles into village life', here.

Jesus in a jam jar

Yesterday the photographer from the Okehampton Times called round and snapped me posing on a bench in Lydford churchyard. My interview with that esteemed local paper should be published this week. I've been mentioned in it virtually every week already - in the community reports which feature lengthy accounts of church activities, and in the funeral notices - again, the service reviewed. These are published anonymously: I'm not paranoid but I am beginning to imagine there's a Mystery Worshipper at every service.

I've started archiving the articles I'm writing for local parish magazines here, including one for February's issue of the Lydford Parish and Community Magazine, Home Made Jams (an expansion on my blog of 15 January), which, for eye-catching effect, I really wish I'd titled Jesus in a jam jar.

Beneath the peace, some things stir

I preached on Sharing The Peace today, which - in direct contrast to what I'd intended - caused upset in some quarters, as that subject sometimes, unfortunately, does. I invited folks to meditate therein on the peacefulness of Lydford today compared to the way things were here at the time of King Etheldred II - today a granite plinth opposite the Church gate (and outside our house) records the trauma of the raids of the Danish Army, 'burning, spoiling the people'. Terrifying events which happened on the ground where today tourists wander down to encounter the awesome and scary Lydford Gorge. And again in the Reformation years, 'where previously peaceable communities all over the land were riven by conflict over worship and taxation' or in the time when the castle, next to the church, and now a playground for local children, was a prison and worshippers would have had the cries of those in the dungeons interrupting their pious prayers

A recurring theme ... that beneath the beauty and calmness of Dartmoor's lovely villages, there are histories of unrest which maybe bubble under and reemerge in new ways from time to time. The other day we visited the picturesque village of  Widecombe-in-the-Moor, and discovered just why they call St Pancras' Church 'The Cathedral of the Moors'. It's lovely, airy, full of delightful features like a wood carving of the Widecombe Fair revellers (with Uncle Tom Cobley and all..) riding the grey mare, and the Green men and their companions carved into the roof. But what most astonishes the mind is the story of The Great Thunderstorm of 1638, when, (according to Wikipedia) 'the church of St Pancras was apparently struck by ball lightning during a severe thunderstorm. An afternoon service was taking place at the time, and the building was packed with approximately 300 worshippers. Four of them were killed, around 60 injured, and the building severely damaged.'

I was most taken with the boards displayed on the wall beneath the church tower, which record the eyewitness account of the event by the then village schoolmaster Roger Hill, in a rhyming testament which (like many things we are discovering about Dartmoor in these early days of exploration) is both delightful and quite shocking:

The wit of man could not cast down so much from off the steeple,
From off the church's roof, and not destroy much of the people:
But he who rules both air and fire and other forces all
Hath us preserv'd bless be his name in that most dreadful fall.

The DIY retreatant on the Welsh coast trail

I called it The DIY retreatant on the Welsh coast trail but the Church Times retitled my article Looking for rhyme, not reason. My account of various excursions into North Wales seeking the muse in the company of the likes of G. M. Hopkins and R. S. Thomas features in this week's  Church Times Travel and Retreats Supplement  (pages 4-5). Nice to be back in print again.

In preparation for the piece it was good to have a telphone chat with Jim Cotter, who I met on my excursion to Aberdaron back in 2008, on the R.S. Thomas trail [an event I blogged about here]. Back then he was two weeks into the post of vicar there. Since then he's reordered the north aisle of the windswept, ocean-lapped church to make it a place of prayer for tourists and other pilgrims, produced some leaflets to help those on a spiritual quest use the place to help them, and started work on a 'Through the year with R.S. Thomas' book, helping connect people with the places on the Lleyn Peninsular where the priest-poet composed some of his works.

Malcolm Doney neatly edited out some of the flab in my feature, which had unkindly quoted Hopkins' description of St Beuno's (where he studied theology for ministry), in a letter to his father in 1874, as ‘Gothic, like Lancing College done worse. The staircases, galleries, and bopeeps are inexpressible: it takes a fortnight to learn them. Pipes of affliction convey lukewarm water of affliction to some of the rooms, others more fortunate have fires.’ But also cut was a reference from the insightful writing of the late Canon A. M. (Donald) Allchin, who in the same week I was preparing this piece, and unknown to me, passed away: in Praise Above All, he wrote of the Welsh poetic tradition as ‘calling us to open our eyes to see and our ears to hear... to perceive the world in which we live and to perceive God in it’. Something I've always found myself doing in the books and on the ground in the coasts and valleys of that land.

He gave us a new name

He gave us a new name: my talk at Bratton Clovelly and Sourton churches today.

Home made jams

Home made jams. One of the first features of West Devon life which we noticed on our arrival here. Churches display them on tables prominently placed  for prospective purchasers, next to the hymn books and postcards of the ancient place of worship (where, presumably, for centuries locals have been producing preserves from their hand-picked apples and plums and selling them on for the church bell fund). Produce markets feature a multitude of tables creaking with marmalades and jellys, individually presented in jars of various shapes and sizes, sealed with clingfilm or the fancier cloth-and-rubber-band solution. Jam making. It seems that everyone is at it. Walk through Lydford on a winter's evening and it's easy to imagine that behind those curtains the cottage industries are hard at work: kitchens full of the sweet smell of cooking fruit, and at the living room table pieces of decorative muslin are cut into circles, jars are cleaned and with one ear to Eastenders the jam-maker prepares labels ready to stick onto the next batch out of the pan. Now I'm determined not to romanticise rural life and I'm sure that the reality is probably that in Lydford as elsewhere most people, most of the time are more likely to end their working day with two ears and two eyes on Eastenders and that jam-making is something for the weekend, or for the hobbyist next door. But there is some sort of cultural particularity here. It's why next time we visit Liverpool the gifts we give to family members and friends to demonstrate our new allegiances will more than likely be sticky sugary substances in glass jars. And it says something about the place that whilst the big old industries are long gone (in Lydford's case, tin mining and imprisonment) the small-scale is thriving.