First, a bit of contextualization: last Sunday was the beginning of FLOURISH, a three-month season of encouraging growth at St Barnabas, especially growth in financial giving and volunteering. Jennie Allen offered a Reflection focused mainly on our financial situation, giving a clear and candid account of the fact that, despite good management of our halls as an income source, our bank accounts are not as healthy as they need to be to sustain us long-term. If you missed it, a digest of the facts and thoughts Jennie shared can be found in the flyer ‘Help St Barnabas Flourish!’, and on the white screens at the back of the church near the font. Please do take the time to read these materials. You may be surprised by what you learn. Did you know, for example, that there is no automatic trickle-down flow of resources from the national or diocesan levels of the Church of England to parishes like ours? To the contrary, we are expected to cover all our own expenses, including the cost of paying our vicar a decent wage for her truly invaluable work. This week, it falls to me to focus more on the kind of giving we call volunteering: the giving of our time and our talents.
I will warm to my subject with a brief account of some unusual goings on in the church last Sunday evening.
One of the many new growth sites Vanessa is busy cultivating here at St Barnabas is a fellowship group for older children who have already taken their first Communion or are preparing to do so. Just now, all the children in this age group happen to be girls; and so, the aptly named ‘Girls’ Group’ has been born. Currently, there are five members, and I don’t think anyone will mind if I name them. The girls of the Girls’ Group are: Rose Petter, Olivia Dunlop, Peg Fell, and Mary and Clara Dunlop, and they meet with Vanessa one Sunday evening a month for snacks, activities, and faith-related conversation.
Last Sunday, for their most recent meeting, Vanessa asked me if I would come along and help her teach the girls about some of the special objects we keep inside the sacristy and maybe even let them have a go at robing up and running through the choreography of a liturgical procession. So, after some refreshments in the vicarage kitchen, and an interesting discussion about the value of tradition, Vanessa and I led the girls into the church, admitted them past the imposing panel doors below the organ, whisked them through the choir vestry, and ushered them across the threshold of the inner sanctum, the sacristy itself.
We opened the safe so they could handle the chalice, the paten, and the ciborium and learn the words for these sacred communion vessels. We explained what each of the different altar linens is for and showed them the vestments. They found albs that fit them and put them on, and then everyone gathered around the thurible – the incense burner – to see how it works. We taught them how to light the little coals, and everyone had a good poke and sniff at the incense granules in the incense boat. Soon the fragrant smoke was billowing, and Mary boldly began working the chains that open and close the thurible and getting a bodily feel for how it swings. ‘Just like a pendulum’, she said. Olivia and Peg each claimed a lighted torch, Clara hefted the smaller brass cross, Rose took up the Gospel book, and off they all trooped, processing to the altar, just like on a Sunday.
They got to touch, and see, and smell holy things. They were able to grab hold of them, feel the weight and volume of them, and move with them through holy spaces. And they were genuinely – indeed, irrepressibly – eager and excited to approach holy things, keen to get familiar with the tangible means of worship, glimpse hidden things and probe the intimate recesses of this edifice, our church. They wanted to be initiated into its mysteries. ‘Show us the secrets!’ Clara exclaimed. ‘Show us the secrets!’ So I showed them the aumbry – the little niche in the south wall of the Lady Chapel – where we keep some reserve sacrament, and they were delighted to draw back the little velvet curtain, insert the magically ornate key into the keyhole – just like Alice in Wonderland – and behold the beautiful – the best – ciborium inside, and the phials of holy oil.
The girls’ sense of wonder – and that plea, ‘Show us the secrets!’ – reveal, I suggest, that these young worshippers already have a well-developed sense that holiness is a bit like a Russian doll. It has many layers, or nested scales. Yes, this whole church is a holy place, set apart to be a house of God, a dedicated site at which God approaches us and we approach God, on a holy day, for a holy meal. Yet, even within this holy place, there are spaces and things that are considered even more holy, more set apart. And the deeper you go into the smaller and smaller spaces, the holier those spaces, and the things inside them, are supposed to be.
Now, this exercise with the Girls’ Group was more than just good Christian education; it was also an invitation to the girls to develop an interest in serving at the altar. It was an effort to build our serving team and give it a future – maybe even nurture a future sacristan, if not for this church, then perhaps for other churches they may join when they are older. And, so far, things look promising. The girls were all willing and enthusiastic when Vanessa suggested we should plan a service for the near future at which they would all compose the serving team.
For many reasons, I found myself encouraged by the Girls’ Group. The girls of St Barnabas are growing into confident young women unafraid to be seen and heard and certainly not intimidated by the unknown. I was surprised and inspired to witness how they seem to be drawn to rather than put off by the Russian doll of holiness.
But, at the same time, our session in the sacristy made me contemplate – and not for the first time – how the Russian doll configuration of holiness can become an obstacle to the love of God, keeping some people at a distance from God and from their neighbours. I was reminded that, at St Barnabas, there are many invisible thresholds analogous to the ones that lead into the sacristy and the Lady Chapel aumbry and that these thresholds may be inhibiting people from going deeper into the life of St Barnabas.
As Vanessa explained to the girls, we call the long centre aisle of a church the nave because there is a long history of likening the church to a ship – a navis, in Latin. The pews seats are the main berths where most of us feel quite comfortable; we even have our favourite berths where we feel most at home. This home space of the nave lies mainly between the dais and the doors, and some of us may seldom venture further than the loos beyond its limits. As on a ship, in a church – even one’s home church – one can feel hemmed in by a lot of no-go areas: places restricted for crew or staff only, engine rooms for engineers who really know how things work and how to keep things running along smoothly, galleys for specialized crew who deal with the food, etc. Most of the machinery of the ship – and the cost of running it – remain a mystery to many on board.
In small but big ways, everyone in the pew seats is surrounded by multiple invisible lines: the line between the nave and each mysterious little cabinet around its periphery; the line between the nave and the technology that serves it (the sound system, the lighting system, the internet); between the nave and the organ loft; between the nave and the church offices; between the nave and the halls storage cupboards; between the nave and the garden; or between the nave and the kitchens. The mysteries that lie beyond those thresholds may seem utterly mundane compared to the consecrated communion vessels, the holy oils blessed by the Bishop, or the Blessed Sacrament itself, yet they can seem as untouchable as the holy of holies to those who feel uninitiated.
I wonder if any of you have ever wondered what’s on the other side of some of those lines but not known how to find out. Have you been curious but felt intimidated by those lines? Have you wanted to go deeper into these or other mysteries, to help out with something, but found no neighbour to guide you?
If so, if invisible thresholds are limiting the love of God for anyone at St Barnabas, Jesus wouldn’t like it. He was a critic of holiness gone wrong, of holiness missing the point of itself, which is to enable the love of God, in both senses of this wonderfully ambiguous phrase: our yearning after God and God’s loving compassion for us. The point of holiness is to let God dwell with us as our neighbour and to bring everyone into the neighbourhood of God.
If people at St Barnabas are not feeling enabled to volunteer because of invisible thresholds that inhibit them, I have to look to myself and ask what I should be doing to help usher them over those thresholds – as we sought to do with the Girls’ Group in the sacristy. I have spent a number of years now – since 2018 when I joined St Barnabas – trying to cross such lines myself, working to overcome a strong and abiding sense of always being an outsider. Have I been too preoccupied with my own progress across these thresholds and failed to notice and help others make the same transitions? Have I, in short, been like the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan – so focused on what I need to know and do in order to play a part in the life of God’s house that I have passed by opportunities to show compassion for others struggling to go down that same road? Perhaps, like the priest and the Levite, I have forgotten what the lawyer in Luke’s gospel knew and stated clearly to Jesus, in spite of himself: namely, that one indiscriminate act of compassion is enough to make even a Samaritan – a very byword for impurity – holy and fit to come into the presence of God. Indeed, I think the story should be called the parable of the ‘Holy Samaritan’, a phrase which would have been an even more shocking oxymoron to the Judeans of Jesus’ day than ‘Good Samaritan’.
It is clear to me, at any rate, that it won’t do for me simply to exhort people to join rotas or volunteer to contribute in some way to the staging of one-off events – as if individuals could just elect to be more active all by themselves, without hands-on encouragement – encouragement of the kind we tried to give to the Girls’ Group last Sunday. It seems to me that we would do well to develop and apply this model in many more of our volunteer areas. People shouldn’t have to put up their hands in isolation, not really knowing what they’re getting themselves into, without mentors and co-learners. Plans for such small groups are already brewing. The St Barnabas Singers would be one. A Holy Company of Greeters and Ushers would be another so that we could bring back the Offertory – a key moment in the liturgy and a channel of income we’ve bene missing for far too long now. Another might be a Holy Company for Hospitality – a real cohort of cooks for community meals. Another group might love the garden; another might be consecrated solely to the noble task of Table Erecting and Collapsing as necessary. Your suggestions are welcome. How you would like to love St Barnabas and keep it holy?
These things won’t grow up overnight, of course. We’ll need to plant and compost them. Meanwhile I do have a few tips you can implement on your own:
- Snoop: open those cupboards; find out where the loo roll is kept and the washing up liquid; poke around and be puzzled by what things are and why they’re there.
- Learn the name for something in the church: do you know what those high windows with the amber glass are called, for example? Or what we call the space between the high altar and the dais?
- Or better yet, learn the name of a fellow worshipper in the church. Tell them a bit of your story – even just a morsel of it – and ask them to tell you theirs. I think getting to no one another, forging these little bonds, creates the molecules needed to build bigger collective action and projects.
- Ask someone to show you the secrets.
Which brings me back to the Girls’ Group – the real source of any wisdom here about the joy of being church.
When the girls learned that there is a basement below the high altar, they insisted on going down to see it. Now, as anyone who’s been down there will know, there’s not much amongst all the clutter to inspire wonder, but they were especially drawn to the old safe in the wall – a real antique and that most delightful of enigmas: a sealed-up strong box the key to which has been lost. I told them I have tried every key I could find (and there are heaps of them around here), but, alas, no luck. This did not daunt them. “I’m going to find it,” Clara declared. So now, I assume, the search is on, impelled by visions of what truly awful things might lie inside that occult little vault. I hope that Clara does find the key. There may, in fact, be something interesting or important in there. But I expect that, if one day we were finally able to open it, we would find that, as with the tomb on Easter morning, the secret we are after, the holy and living God, would not be in there.
The secret of the Russian doll of holiness is that the dolls never end. You never get to an inner-most doll, a true doll that was hidden by all the others, a naked holiness tabernacled in a last inner sanctum. The love of God, in both senses, just keeps drawing you on, deeper and deeper into its irreducible, relational mystery.
May the love of God help us all to help each other help St Barnabas flourish!
