“Church Going” is a poem by the late Philip Larkin, a person of robust views, not always in sympathy with the call of the Gospel. He famously described himself as “an agnostic, I suppose, but an Anglican agnostic, of course” . But he took his uncertainty about God seriously. In “Church Going”, he describes visiting an empty church, open for worship but with nobody inside. As he wanders, glancing at the open Bible with its “hectoring verses”, pretending to read a lesson, he ponders on the future of the building; perhaps unintentionally, on the future of the entire church itself in the face of apathy and unbelief. His conclusion is surprisingly upbeat and one I find myself agreeing with as I minister in the rural churches of this benefice and deanery. The church building is a “serious house”, there for when we need to be serious about our own life and death.

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

I recently did a wedding at one of our local churches. The couple had requested that the bells be rung as they left the church and this duly happened. At a wedding the couple get value for their money from the ringers; the peel lasts for a long time. And so it happened that the bells were still in full sound as I left the church, about 15 minutes after the service had finished. As I came to my car, I noticed a woman who lives close to the church, standing, listening to the bells. She was entranced by the sound, living simply in the moment as she heard them. She noticed me, dressed in my dog collar and obviously the vicar. She spoke; “I love the bells”. She explained she had always loved the bells since she was little. Then she embraced me and I blessed her.

The ringers, the wedding couple, had no idea that this was happening, that their actions and choices were bringing such pleasure to someone who was not even at the service. But God knew, the Holy Spirit, the comforter was working alongside the ringers, in and out of the church, to speak to those with ears to hear.

My attention this week was caught by some news from Florida, where there is a memorial to the Northern Ireland journalist, Lyra McKee. Lyra McKee was killed in 2019 when she was struck by a bullet as she covered a riot in Londonderry. The main story was the death of a journalist doing their work, but a sub-text emerged as Lyra was gay and appears to have faced hostility by some as a result of this. Two years before her murder, she visited Florida as part of a delegation to visit the place where a gunman had recently massacred 49 people at a gay nightclub. As part of the trip, her party were taken to a mosque. She was not keen on this, as she later admitted; “I hated myself for much of my life because of what religion taught me about people like me and when I stopped hating myself I started hating religion,” (BBC News website). However, she found reconciliation through the mosque, where she was welcomed and learnt how it had led condemnation of the massacre.

As I read this, I found myself thinking about Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan, where the love of God is not shown by a priest or a Levite (a temple helper), but by a Samaritan, a person who the injured man would consider to be of a different faith.

Some acts seem too horrible to contemplate; the crimes of Lucy Letby fall into this category. Our thoughts and prayers must firstly be with the parents of the babies she so cruelly killed. But what of the woman herself? I cannot think of any other word than “evil” to describe her and her deeds. Fortunately, crimes such as hers are very rare; most people have sufficient of a moral compass not to stray into her world. There are however two questions which I find myself pondering. Once, she was a child, an innocent; how did she end up as the author of evil? And what will become of her?

Christianity offers some thoughts on these questions, although some may find them deeply distasteful. They all start with Lucy’s humanity, something she shares with us all. It goes on to talk about the “fallen” nature of humanity, what some commentators have called “original sin”. Essentially this says that part of being human is the freedom to make decisions for good or bad; sometimes, in spite of ourselves, we will all chose the bad. Almost everyone will stop well before she did, but the urge to put self first is inbuilt in us all. Secondly, it states that the same common humanity that we share means we all have the possibility of redemption, forgiveness. If I were a parent of one of Lucy’s victims, I doubt whether I could ever truly forgive her; I find it hard to imagine that she will ever now have a life outside of prison. But she is not beyond the mercy of God if she but recognises this. And neither are we; we may all be fallen sinners, but we all may become forgiven sinners.

A few weeks ago, a friend from work shared with me a tip on how to calm students who are worried about how they have done in an exam. She tells them to imagine a box and then to put all their thoughts about the exam into it. They then seal up the box, with the intention of returning to it in a few days time when they are in a better place. Then they can unpack it and deal with whatever thoughts and emotions they find, but with the benefit of being calmer. I have subsequently been told that this a standard technique taught in mindfulness, the practice of improving our lives by taking control of our thoughts. A couple of days ago, I found myself talking about this to one of the chaplains at Aston University, where I work. She reminded me of words written nearly 2000 years ago by St Paul (or one of his followers) in the letter to the Philippians; “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things”. This comes shortly after a verse which pleads for peace between two women from the church who apparently do not see eye to eye. Paul here is doing exactly what contemporary mindfulness teachers do; encouraging his readers to reflect on the things that work for good, to help them to deal with the days when everything seems to be working for bad.

A friend has just emailed me to remind me that today is the “Glorious 12th”, the start of the grouse shooting season. A day that is no doubt glorious for the shooters and those whose livelihoods depend on shooting, perhaps less so for the grouse, although, like most game birds, they are reared specifically to be shot. More generally.mid-August for me at least is a time I still associate with annual family holidays; a week away at the seaside, hoping the weather would be dry, the car loaded with enough baggage to keep an army in the field for a month. It is also the time which I associate with the work of harvest going into overdrive and it is noticeable how our local farmers have taken advantage of marginally drier weather to get busy with the combines; clouds of dust rising from fields, with tractros working late into the evening. No holiday for some in the coming weeks.

Our lives are built around rhythms, still largely determined by the cycles of nature. In rural parishes we are probably more aware of these than city-dwellers and I am grateful for the patterns they impose on our lives. They help remind us that we are but parts of something larger; the seasons will come and go long after we are gone and were celebrated by our answers before we were born. The Christian Church has inherited a pattern of seasonal worship that has roots deep in the Hebrew Bible, to a time when the regularity of seasons of sun and rain were really a  matter of life and death and these were used to remind people of their dependence on God. Today, the changing seasons still help us to connect with that which is beyond us and to help us meet our spiritual needs.

It is a year since my father died. As many will know, Dad was a carpenter and working with wood was his joy. Just a few weeks before he died he was still in his workshop. At this point he was making small wooden crosses; though he was now very frail, it was a simple job that he could still manage. He made the crosses to give away to anyone who came to see him, including those who helped to care for him. A few weeks ago, I met one of those people. She had given a couple of the crosses to her parents. Her father had taken one of these and had recently inlaid it with a silver cross.

I found it fascinating and rather wonderful that a year after his death, one of the crosses made by Dad is speaking to its owner, calling out a new creative act from him. It is a wonderful example of how small acts that we do can have consequences, hopefully for the good, long after we have passed by. Wearing my vicar’s collar, I would call this an act of the Holy Spirit.

I am largely a stranger to Pop music, but even I was aware of Sinead O’Conner. She led a rumbustious life, scared by abuse, mental illness and trauma. Through this she produced music that people wanted to listen to, music which spoke to them. Largely an outsider, she was also a leader of popular culture.

One of the more intriguing features of Sinead’s life was the way that faith was central to it. She rejected the traditional Roman Catholicism of her native Ireland; a religion that, at least in some quarters, had become complacent and which had become used to deference. After various adventures on its fringes, including becoming ordained in a breakaway Roman Catholic group, she eventually converted to Islam. I have some doubts whether she was any more comfortable with the certainties of the Imans than she was with the preaching of priests. However, I do not doubt her belief in God; she spoke of how “living with the Devil”, I think a comment on her troubled life, made her more aware of God. She instead complained “that real God and religion are two different things and that religion is trying to obscure what God really is.”

At its best, religious practice works to point us towards the real God, the God who, I as a Christian, would say is revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. But I am aware that this is often far from the case; Sinead’s experience of religion is a common one. I have a feeling that her complaint is one that Jesus himself would agree with.