John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

He told me everything I have ever done!

He told me everything I have ever done! - it's substantially Paul Neuchterlein's sermon (and if anything it's less imaginative than his original), but it did for me and hopefully for my listeners today. The woman at the well - a timeless classic.

We came to Lydford and all we got was this lousy bungalow

Bill Bryson lives in an old rectory, in 1851 home of Reverend Thomas Marsham. Funny, that. We spent most of last year noticing that in virtually every parish in England there is a large impressive-looking house in its own substantial grounds called The Old Rectory, and somewhere tucked away in the corner of a modern housing estate is a cheap and cheerful - and strangely laid out - new vicarage. And so, here in Lydford the Old Rectory sits on the slopes beneath us, massively extended by the Rev. W. K. Chafy Chafy, curate in charge of the parish 1875-76, and future Bishop of Southwark. Its gothic spires and turrets fit the Dartmoor scene in which it sits (that is, if your version of Dartmoor is of the brooding mysterious sort championed by another celebrated local Victorian cleric Sabine Baring Gould, known as the author of twisted ghost stories, odd werewolf theories and Onward Christian Soldiers). It looks impressive, certainly in size. And we came to Lydford and all we got was this lousy bungalow.

But there is another side to this little dose of status anxiety. It's notable that the rectors and curates who followed the monied Chafy Chafy struggled with the upkeep of his grand old place. It brings some solace to see in his book At Home, a Short History of Private Life that Bill Bryson describes his old rectory in Norfolk as creaky, draughty, horribly expensive to heat and very oddly designed. And this sounds very like all those cheap houses which the dioceses built in the 1960s with part of the proceeds of the sales of the big old homes like Thomas Marsham's and Chafy Chafy's. The C of E architects clearly never learned from the experiences of centuries of uncomfortable clerics. The mildly compensatory conclusion is that maybe the grass isn't that much greener (though there are a few acres more of it) in that big place over the hedge, after all.

Work is a curse - until you don't have any

Simon is the Rector of Bemerton and one of the people I most enjoyed spending two years with at theological college (see here for the parish website featuring a photo of Simon with a group of young children - Simon is short like me but even so I think he must be kneeling down in that picture). One thing he has to try doing is to follow in the footsteps of George Herbert, a previous rector, quite an awesome task; another thing is to help and encourage the work that is done in the church community centre.

One group which uses their centre is The Trussell Trust, pioneers of foodbanks in which people in dire need are provided with emergency food and support. Simon emailed me their latest e-newsletter because it contains a lot of coverage about the sudden rise of the Okehampton foodbank following some major job losses in our area. The unlikely phenomenon of large numbers of jobless people receiving emergency food parcels in a south west England market town has received a great deal of attention in the national press, and this is what the Trussel Trust say:

Following the closure of three local companies, Okehampton foodbank has seen numbers needing emergency food soar from 20 to 200 per week.  Unemployment in the Devon town has risen from 2% to nearly 12% leaving many former employees with no choice but to rely on food parcels from Okehampton foodbank until redundancy packages and benefit payments come through. 

The plight of the people in Okehampton and surge in numbers turning to the foodbank has been widely reported by the national media this week.  Whilst local people have rallied to provide extra food to meet the demand, the foodbank is still under pressure. Okehampton foodbank's Andrew Morgan told the Guardian, "We are still appealing for food, it is desperately needed: some staff made redundant hadn't been paid for weeks. There really are people with no money and they really can't afford to put food on the table."

Adrian and Kay Vernon were both made redundant from Polestar foods, Okehampton, and suddenly left with no money.  With a four-year-old daughter to feed, Adrian told the BBC that his foodbox was 'a lifesaver'.

Unemployment nationwide is at a 17-year high and foodbanks across the country are experiencing huge demand.  This year the UK foodbank network estimates it has fed 60,000 people; an increase of nearly 20,000 people from the previous year.

In Okehampton, a recent Christian Aid event was poorly attended, but the churches have seen  support for the foodbank grow massively. While it doesn't address the core of the problem (and who is qualified to fix the economy? I don't envy anyone in business at this time), the foodbank does offer much needed support to people in crisis. I did my little bit to encourage people's involvement by sharing the story of my experiences of unemployment with the readers of the magazine which networks all the churches in our area, the Northmoor News, this month, Work is a curse - until you don't have any.

 

See the Lydfords no-one else has found yet

See the Lydfords no-one else has found yet - a preview of my article in this month's Parish Magazine, for those who just can't wait. It didn't take long for some Mis-Guidance to find its way into my ministry here.

The serpent on the pole - and eternity for all

The serpent on the pole - and eternity for all - my latest attempt to find a fresh way of looking at John 3.16, involving a dialogue between Shinto ritual practice and Christian scripture as a way into thinking about the mental aftermath of Japan's tsunami.

On being evangelised in the country

It wasn't the visit to the livestock market which did it, jostling with the punters in the packed ringside as they competed for South Devon heifers and Charolais steers, listening in the canteen to tales of foot-and-mouth from two farmers, their faces carved deeply by a lifetime of outdoors graft and the cares of their vulnerable art.

It wasn't even the moment a nervous young bull slipped in the shit and showered me in muck, in the enclosure with forty bullocks as one by one our farmer friends jostled the agitated giants snorting, sliding, down a narrow metal corridor to where the vet was poised ready with measuring instruments and injector to give them their TB test.

No, the moment when it finally dawned on me that I was truly in the country among real country folk came when I naively asked an assembled school if any of them could relate to the story of David the shepherd-boy. By a show of hands over half of the children let me know that they were currently busy at home helping their parents deliver lambs; one six-year-old girl described to me how she had been bottle-feeding a new-born lamb that morning.

This is serious business, and it's family business and it's round-the-clock work; I'm listening intently and learning greatly about this way of life, and as ever the children are among the best teachers. I'm searching for the gospel here and as ever I find that it's the people at grassroots who are evangelising me.

Gary in Japan is ok

Thanks, those who have shown concern about my stepson Gary who is in Tokyo (on three year's missionary work, see blog here). After a seemingly long wait yesterday we heard from him by email. He wrote, 'I'm okay! I was with Naoko (his girlfriend) at the time of the quake. It was so scary. It felt like the ground was on water! Everyone was so scared and went into the streets. All the trains are stopped so we had to walk for hours.' He ended: 'Don't worry.' Can't help but do that, across the miles, but good to know he's safe.

Sacrificing Merry England

Just in time for Lent, I've finished reading The Rise and Fall of Merry England, Ronald Hutton's celebrated investigation into the decline of the people's popular festivals and rituals with the religious pressures of the Reformation and the political pressures of the turbulent times which followed. One of the many impressions this excellent survey leaves me with, is of the place of Ash Wednesday in the struggles which took place. Henry VII (who wasn't as tough on the traditions as is sometimes assumed) supported the blessing of the Ash Wednesday ashes, against Protestant criticism, but Edward toughened things up and outlawed this and three other major ceremonies of the religious year: the blessing of candles at Candlemas, foliage on Palm Sunday and 'Creeping to the Cross' on Good Friday. Edward's sister Mary, who succeeded him, brought these things back. And though it seems that England was never quite so merry after Edward, that's not really the point on a day like today, when we are nevertheless  still able to 'remember that we are but dust, and to dust we shall return'; to 'turn away from sin, and turn to Christ', in that ancient hallowed way.

My Lent reading is going to be S. Mark Heim's Saved from Sacrifice, A Theology of the Cross, whose title speaks for its intention, to unmask the sacrificial violence in the biblical witness - scripture's repetition of the deadly cycle of sacrifice present in all human societies and in all religious ritual and myth - and using the approach of Rene Girard, to offer a new theology of the cross. I've been preaching a lot on this perspective lately (see for instance, today's talk, on the woman caught in adultery, Why am I carrying a stone?). Heim's work  should help deepen my thinking on it all.

Transfiguration - breaking the myth of sacrifice

Transfiguration - breaking the myth of sacrifice - my talk at Sourton, Bratton Clovelly and Germansweek today.

 

Everyday icons in a new place

Roads and lanes twist abruptly in apparent confusion all over the landscape. Off the turnpike roads of 1809 run smaller branch-roads, making a close network in the intervening country; and off these smaller roads there run, every few hundred yards, yet narrower lanes that penetrate along remote combes or deep into the flanks of some massive hill, to end in a nameless farmyard, with the unpathed fields beyond and all around. So many farmsteads in Devon lie alone at the end of a deep-sunken lane thick with mud in winter, stony and rutted in summer. Every lane has its own history: it is not there by accident: and every twist it makes once had some historical meaning, which we can sometimes decipher today, but not often.

- W. G. Hoskins describing the 1809 Ordnance Survey map of Devon, in his Devon book. And very accurately portraying those little lanes which have rapidly become, for me, icons of this place. Reading Hoskins some years ago I already knew something of these lanes, though my only encounters with Devon back then were rapid landscape views through a  windscreen as I sped through the county on the A30 en-route to expensive holiday rental apartments in St Ives. Now I'm travelling these lanes each day I find them slowing me down and filling me up with visions connecting the deep past with the complex present. [See one here].

It was good to get a comment in the previous blog, from Joe Moran, with whom I've shared some very good conversations online and in person, on the subject of roads - the cultures which have shaped them and been shaped by them (Joe's On Roads is an excellent survey of the subject). Which reminds me of all the work I did a few years ago on exploring the everyday, another subject which Joe has helped me with so well.

Back then, steeped in the city, I identified a few urban everyday icons and played around with them in verse and prayer and radio broadcast, enjoying feedback from those who heard them: the classic one being my wheelie bin prayer [more on all that stuff here, among other places].
Now I'm here there are new everyday icons to explore, and the deep cut lanes edged with high banks topped by ancient hedgerows: they are everywhere and perhaps the most obvious ones to start contemplating. What else - heating oil tanks, log piles, roadside containers selling freshly laid eggs, and of course home made jams... a few more to conjure with too, as time goes on.