Animal kingdom
THE American actor and comedian W. C. Fields famously said that he would never work with children or animals — too unpredictable, and with a capacity for stealing a scene.
I did not follow his advice when accepting an invitation to the annual “service of blessing for animals” at Warleggan, a small parish on Bodmin Moor which guidebooks like to describe as “remote”. As you enter Warleggan, a Welcome sign proclaims that it is “twinned with Narnia”. I’m not surprised.
The church was full to overflowing. A horse stood outside, while inside we had three alpacas, a goat, a sheep, and numerous dogs. Small children with no pets brought their teddy bears. The liturgy was devised by the Reader, Liz Lane, whose idea it was to hold the service in a parish where animals are integral to the economy, as well as companions to the human population. An episode of The Vicar of Dibley also inspired her.
Liz accompanied me, with edible treats for the animals as I blessed them, helping to offset the likelihood of the bishop’s being bitten while in full blessing mode.
Pat on the head?
SOME people were clearly very moved when their pets were blessed — a sign of how deep our relationships with animals can become. The blessings were not a reward for good behaviour (on the part of either animals or humans), but more an expression of thanksgiving for God’s creation, and what we experience as God’s favour towards us. We conclude almost every service with an indiscriminate blessing of everyone present, in whatever relationship or state of grace they find themselves.
Throughout my ministry, I have frequently asked people “Would you like a blessing?” and I cannot recall a single refusal. “Would you like me to pray for you?”, by contrast, hasn’t always met with a universally positive response. I wonder why, in some areas of our Church’s life, we have equated blessing with approval of those being blessed? None of us qualifies for God’s blessing.
Love without measure
WITHIN a week of the Warleggan service, I was at Pleshey, near Chelmsford, leading a silent retreat for Franciscans of the Third Order. It was equally jolly, if in a rather quieter way.
I was told that the room at the House of Retreat in which I saw individual retreatants was used by Evelyn Underhill for spiritual direction. That made me feel spiritually inadequate, although she would have probably told me off for thinking such a thing.
I have been re-reading her works (her writing is still amazingly fresh) to see what she had to say about God’s blessing: at one level, not much, specifically, although everything she taught was about God’s desire to enfold us in his life — the greatest blessing of all. In The Fruits of the Spirit, she wrote that God “takes indiscriminate delight in others, just and unjust”.
I had forgotten how down-to-earth she was: she goes on to say, “God loves the horrid man at the fish shop, and the tiresome woman in the next flat, and the disappointing vicar. . . ”, before giving further examples of unworthy and irritating people. Then, drawing on the Johannine epistles, she declares “God loves, not tolerates, these wayward, half-grown, self-centred spirits and seeks without ceasing to draw them into His love.”
Surely a God who is so generous with his love is unlikely to withhold his blessing.
Seeing double
NEXT stop after Pleshey was the installation dinner for the Master of the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks, Colin Podmore.
Colin, like me, is Cornish, and this was reflected in the menu. We have known each other for more than 30 years. There are lots of worshipful companies in the City of London, but Colin emphasised that, while others specialise in a craft, it is worship itself that should distinguish the life of the parish clerks — a telling observation.
It reminded me of something else that Evelyn Underhill said: “If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.” That’s an insight to treasure.
At the Parish Clerks’ dinner, I was able to point out that a double sighting of two native Cornishmen was a rarity in the City of London, and undoubtedly a blessing.
Ministry of welcome
I CAME away from my visit to Warleggan not just pondering the theology of blessing, but also recalling a distant memory of my first visit to the village in the 1950s, when I was about eight years old.
My parents had bought a car, and, since Warleggan had been in the news, they wanted to see the church. It was all because of the Revd Frederick William Densham, the last resident rector, who died in office in 1953. He had completely emptied his church of people, and was said to erect cardboard cut-outs of his parishioners in the pews, to preach to them instead. This gained the attention of the Sunday newspapers, and various journalists turned up to report on the eccentric rector.
Densham served in Warleggan for more than 20 years, and must have been desperately lonely. He put up barbed wire around the rectory so that his dogs could not get out to worry the cattle and sheep. It scarcely made the parsonage house a symbol of hospitality.
Were we to see no value in a church building as a sacred space, St Bartholomew’s, Warleggan, would have been closed many years ago. Thank God it was not. In its own quiet way, it now thrives, and is truly a blessing to those who live there.
The Rt Revd Graham James is a former Bishop of Norwich and now an honorary assistant bishop in the diocese of Truro.