About a year ago I made the rather (in retrospect) strange decision to put my name forward to become a local community councillor. It’s a long story, but I did it as a favour to a kind farmer neighbour who asked if I’d take over from him. He’d been doing it for 20 years and had had enough. He thought of me, he said, because of the huge fuss I had made over a road closure that was affecting me and my neighbours by writing lots of angry emails to the local MP. He thought community council work might be just the sort of thing I’d enjoy.
As no one else stood, I was instantly elected and have since spent the first Monday evening of every month in my local village hall listening to interminable exchanges (often over three hours long) about dog-waste bins and overflowing sewage. I tried to resign a few months ago, but discovered that this is almost impossible to do because in order to stand down you are expected, by some unwritten etiquette, to find someone to take over from you, and for some reason not that many people are keen. One woman did express interest briefly before discovering that the meetings clashed with her book club.
Anyway, one of the things about being a loc-al councillor is that you are expected to go to village events. I had managed to get out of the Remembrance Day service at the village Church in Wales church by explaining that I already had commitments at “my own church”, which was true. I have to admit that it was a conscious decision not to state which church my own church was as I didn’t feel ready to add “Catholic” to the list of reasons why they already think I am unsuited to the job, the main objections, I imagine, being that I am “from London” and, even worse, “not Welsh”.
But I was not able to get out of the carol service. I didn’t mind because I like a carol service and have always believed that you can never go to too many. A carol service like this one, however, I had never experienced. It was a most unusual event. On entering our tiny but beautiful and magnificently old local church, I felt as though I had just come into a very noisy and bustling restaurant or conference centre. No sign of God, just people standing around, chatting away, some laughing uproariously, children rushing around the altar.
This was a big moment in my marriage, too. We had come, for a change, to “his church” – as he always proudly refers to it despite never attending – and I could see that my husband was avoiding my gaze. The carol service was presided over by a woman vicar and a woman bishop, the latter of whom I later discovered on Wikipedia is in a same-sex civil partnership. Both were wearing Christmas jumpers and jeans, and bouncing around like children’s entertainers. It was like the Vicar of Dibley come to life, but somehow more absurd, perhaps because there were two of them.
If this wasn’t enough, on our seats were leaflets advertising something called “Fresh”, which the vicar explained would be an event in lieu of the usual Sunday service once a month. She said: “Church can be whatever you want it to be. If you want to say a prayer, we can say a prayer, if you just want to chat, that’s fine too.” Yes, she actually said this, seemingly with no irony intended.
Meanwhile, my children seemed bored and confused, whereas when we go to Mass they are generally in a happy if sometimes defiant mood. This confirmed my instinct that most children, although they complain, secretly love going to Mass, in large part because it is serious and grown up. They can sense, even at such a young age, that there is something important going on here. I certainly remember this from my own childhood as a pupil at a “high” Anglican Cathedral school. We moaned about going to Sunday services, but secretly we loved singing the Magnificat, the sacred silences and the thoughtful sermons where we were preached to as if we were adults. I am certain we would have moaned even more if we had had to sit through an hour and a half of being infantilised.
The carol singing had not even begun and I already had steam coming out of my ears. Despite my best intentions, I failed to control my need to comment on my way home and was branded a “religious snob” by my husband who seemed uncharacteristically defensive.
Perhaps I am a religious snob. But there is a reason why our Catholic Church is full of people every Sunday, while the neighbouring Protestant establishment “is lucky to have five people in the congregation” according to a friend who does go. I’m sure the lady vicars have the best intentions and no doubt do plenty of good work in the area, but as far as the Christian faith is concerned, it is clear that the Church in Wales is beyond rescue.
