Fire power
I HADN’T done the five-second test before, but, in obedience to the news item, I rested my hand on the pavement outside my central-London flat. I counted to five, but it was too hot to keep my hand there. This meant that it was too hot for my dog’s paws, too. So no walk for him. Or me.
Anglican Twitter started suggesting that “Church is cool,” extolling the virtues of high ceilings and thick walls. And we, like many churches, had water available every day in the narthex for passers-by.
As a community currently involved in a planning application for the restoration of this Christopher Wren church, we can’t help thinking that perhaps the large, airy, historic public building might come into its own in a situation of increasing heat, especially in the middle of a city. Our new air-source heat pump, planned for the tower, might get used less than we think. Until the new ice age, that is.
Digging for victory
THE not-so-much-approaching-as-already-here climate cataclysm feels so overwhelming sometimes that some members of my congregation become full of existential angst, with good reason. We sometimes talk about the “God’s-eye” view that we now, as humans, have access to — but without the spiritual or emotional resources fully to handle it. Ours is the “human-eye” view, which is necessarily contingent, partial: no less responsible for what we can do, but matched to our mental and spiritual capacity to cope with it.
For me, alongside the personal attempts to reduce my own carbon footprint, and the communal theological reflection of a Christian church, the best way to address this anxiety is to pray, finding there the reassurance that — while I have a serious part to play — I am part of a much bigger and longer story.
Or, to put it another way, I know that faith can move mountains, but I shouldn’t be surprised if God hands me a shovel. It is a balance that St Augustine put well when he wrote: “Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not.”
Days of thunder
WHEN things get hot in the city, tempers fray. In a different way from the apocalyptic scenes during the silent-and-empty-city-centre days of the pandemic, when the heat is oppressive without a southern-hemisphere infrastructure to help people to cope, there can be a level of fractiousness that lowers tolerance and reduces city-dwellers’ willingness to cooperate.
Patience feels like a luxury when you’re queuing for fresh water and have no home, no tap of your own to turn on. And there is little escape from the relentless sun when you live outside.
Songs of protest
A GOOD place to go, I think, is an air-conditioned cinema. So I go to see Elvis. Baz Luhrman’s storytelling is thrilling and disturbing. How one human being (Colonel Parker) can manipulate another (Elvis Presley) so comprehensively, over so many years, is a lesson in sustained wickedness. Even Elvis says, in the end, that the cage he is in may be gilded, but it is a cage, none the less.
Arguably, though, if the story is being told accurately, both Parker and Presley were held captive by the manager’s gambling addiction, which kept this phenomenal singer on the same stage, singing the same songs, for five soul-destroying years.
I have always noticed news about Presley, as we share the same birthday, but this powerful film left me in tears, with a new appreciation of the music that he made — learned in church, joyously fusing rhythm-and-blues with spirituals and, in the process, systematically refusing explicit political and cultural pressure to segregate.
Music of the heart
SOMETIMES, it is the ability of music to help me to express my deepest hopes and face my deepest fears which is one of the few things, it seems, that keep me in church. That kind of music certainly nourishes and waters my often too fragile faith.
Over this summer, as one of our congregation was singing during the eucharist, I found myself at the altar not sure that I could go on. All the pandemic fear of sickness and sleeplessness about money, all the reassurance that I tried to give, and the un-anxious leadership that I attempted to exercise while feeling exactly the opposite and wanting half the time to run away — all this was somehow given expression in the “nevertheless” theology that I often find so helpful, hidden in the traditional words of the classic song that she sang.
Times are so hard for so many. Existential anxiety about overheating mixes with fuel poverty and fear of the coming cold. It is not difficult for a hopelessness and helplessness to settle, as the polarised and combative political discourse seems never to end, and promised solutions seem never to land.
But the life of a parish — curious, complex, challenging, and bemusing as it is — ensures that I must return through the fractiousness to the broken-hearted celebration at the altar, where all this horror and fear is seen and laid down . . . and hear again that song, as I heard it recently, not as any kind of saccharine fantasy, but as a truth told under fire: “Thou hast taught me to say, ‘It is well, it is well with my soul.’”
The Revd Lucy Winkett is Rector of St James’s, Piccadilly, in the diocese of London.
