Tuesday 18 May 2010

Westminster Cathedral

Probably I should have gone to Westminster Abbey next. But I didn't want to. It seemed too historic and busy for me today. There are also a couple of small churches that are nearer too, but I have walked past them hundreds of times and they never seem to be open. I don't really know what to do about them - should I try and ring and make an appointment? What would I say? Anyhow, Westminster Cathedral is nearer to Sainsbury's and even nearer to Zara where I want to look at a dress I am obsessing about. I go and look at it for the fourth time. It is a navy blue sundress with big print flowers. I love it. But I don't have time to try it on. Don't have £35.90 either. I will probably keep going to look at it until it sells out. Then maybe try and track it down on e bay. Or move on to another obsession. Only when it has nearly gone or completely gone, will I know if I really, really want it. Sort of extreme sport imaginary shopping. It is an occasional hobby.

This morning is warm, blue skies, beautiful. I have taken my sons to their counsellor, and sat in a small room with them, watching them draw disturbing but fascinating pictures. My eldest son, in all the confusion of our lives started suffering massive violent rages, like x rated episodes of supernany which had me in the end, calling in some help. I felt so badly that I had failed, that despite my absolute love and what I believe to be my kindness and care I had failed. Since then, I have thought and thought and worked out some strategies to help us all, and now sitting laughing or playing a game, things we always did but sometimes on tiptoe, on eggshells, waiting and expecting another terrifying outburst, I feel very fully that we are all present, all participating, that I have turned it round. I almost hope that the woman is going to say, 'you three don't need to be here, be on your way' but then I sit and watch my youngest take a pen and say 'it feels like this', and do the most extraordinary map, with pages and pages turning into different levels, like a console game, that keeps going, (the pair of them work together, consulting each other, taking it in turns and it is the youngest taking the lead, which rarely happens, but here they are colouring together, adding arrows, sketching the structure almost oblivious of me and her in the room) and just as I think, after the initial recognition of the situation he has drawn, and the exact model of emotion he has precisely conveyed, I begin to think, he is pushing it now, just keeping us entertained, he has forgotten his purpose (not a criticism, he is a little kid, he has our attention) he announces the final level and adds a figure, putting the most excruciating exact and painful details of his emotional landscape to it that I am almost breathless with pride and winded with the pain and confusion he must feel. I am not certain about the ethics of reporting this, and have left the detail general to keep their privacy but I feel exhausted by what I witnessed.
Also this morning my mum friend from the school who is at present living in a refuge ( I know!? It is so awful I couldn't/wouldn't make this up) texted me to say that she has to go to hospital, she needs an operation. Could I collect her children this afternoon and take them home? Only this weekend I said to her 'Things can only get better from here.' And we laughed. But they just got a whole lot worse. I instinctively believe that hardship is finite, that there is a bag of it for everyone, and if you carry your load long enough then it will lift. But it isn't true. Here is some bleak truth. You can soldier your load bravely and stoically with humour and fortitude and only be given another huge bag to carry.
The cathedral though is like a fairy tale drawing. I can remember years ago, when I first moved to London as a student, seeing it from a bus, and craning back to try and make sense of it, 'what was that?' Stripey stone, multiple layered domes, a huge rapunzel tower, a large plaza at the front. It is the Catholic cathedral
Above the doorways the signs for alpha and omega in stone held by carved birds. The door opens to the musky, dirty, sweet smell of incense. I have been inside once before and loved it. I am looking forward to the experience, looking forward to describing it. It is a surprise then, the noise. It sounds like a lorry reversing, a lorry reversing in a huge echoey church, an incessant high pitched beeping, and the sound of mechanical levering. There is somewhat unexpectedly, just in the part of the church, where previously I got the first magnificent view, a yellow cherry picker crane, extending up and down, a man perched, doing high cleaning. The view is obliterated. The power of the church, the power I expected to feel is lost. I move to find it. This cathedral is absolutely massive, an amazing patchwork of different marbles and mosaics, and flowers and candles and wrought metalwork, all in dull snake colours, but, and this is the part I like, as the eye lifts above this, above the columns, above the normal eye-line, lifting higher and higher into the high domes of the cathedral ceiling there is only dusky, dense, ash black. I had never seen anything like it before. I believe it is normal in a church to lift your eyes to the heavens to find light and beauty and magnificence. This, is like looking into a void. The grey, gradually fading to the soot black of nothing. A kind of horror to the weight of darkness pressing down.

But the church below, is busy. Tourists, people praying, strangely a photographer taking a picture of a black man rocking in ecstatic prayer. Like an actor playing a part it looks a bit over the top, a little bit unnecessary. I see too a woman, a young woman, touching the stone of a small altar, her body slumped into it, as if in surrender. Another woman fills a plastic bottle from the tap of holy water, slowly and reverentially. A smart man in a suit with gold buttons on the sleeves, sits, eyes closed, completely still and devout, his face lifted to the dark ceiling, his whole body at peace. He looks like he has just left the office for a Pret a Manger sandwich not this total, absorbed prayer. Others are slumped on their knees, their supplications still and quiet. Here, ardent devotion is not private but public, expected.

Hanging, suspended from the volcanic ash of the ceiling there is an enormous red cross with Jesus on it, his arms, long, stretched wide to the pain of his hands attached by nails.
I sit. Eyes straight ahead. Interested and observing. It is almost like a prayer, my thoughts for my friend. I want her to have somewhere to live. I want her to be well. I attempt to fill the space with these wishes.

The church was opened in 1903 built on land that had originally been marshes, then had many uses, a market and fairground, a maze, a pleasure garden, a place for bull baiting, a prison, finally the catholic church bought the land and started building the cathedral in 1895. So close in date to the Methodist Great Hall I realise that I want to go back and date the chuches I forgot to. It seems fascinating, this area, with it's competitive church building. Also there are 14 stations of the cross by Eric Gill. I had seen a few and thought they looked like his work, but found everything else too fascinating to concentrate on them. I read that he called them 'a statement without adjectives'. 'The figures are impassive and are meant to be so, for the emotion must come from us.'

A small madonna and child statuette that I had liked best of everything turns out to be medieval. The most precious thing in the cathedral. I just thought there was something beautiful in the worn fragility and sensitivity of the pair and their gaze. A very old description made in alabaster of what we still feel.


Amen

Tuesday 11 May 2010

Westminster Methodist Great Hall

I can see one of the towers of the Houses of Parliament from our street and the helicopters overhead have been constant for days. It is still always a thrill however, the short walk, to Victoria Street and the sight of the London Eye squeezed between office blocks. Then the squash of the blank, concrete blocks giving way to Parliament Square. Big Ben's face familiar like a Dad's watch. The Houses of Parliament. Westminster Abbey. The peace camp tents. I live here. I always think. I live right here. With pride. Laughing at home on the night before the election that it would be possible to run out of the flat, round the block and wave to the tv cameras behind the political pundits and be back in time to watch it.

A week later, Nick Clegg twirling between the parties with the glee of Grayson Perry winning the Turner prize in a dress. Then the pair of them, school boys with men's pink, soap scrubbed faces. Our headboys. Gordon Brown a kind of left wing Coriolanus, his absolute honour and wilting strengths making tragedy inherent. I cried when he made his last speeches. He always seemed such a fundamentally good man. His son goes to my son's poor but beautifully behaved, high attaining, amazing school. Though presumably not for much longer.

Today I have been told I am no longer entitled to free dental care and glasses because I have taken on more work. I have been told that some of my childcare will not be paid because of an error. Most of my childcare isn't paid, it is just the little bit that might have been paid but won't be now. It has come as a bit of a blow. I don't think I have quite enough money to pay the rent this weekend. I don't know. I seem to fall a little bit between everything. I live in the heart of politics and just as we all are, I am it.

I had thought the Westminster Methodist Great Hall marginally nearer than Westminster Abbey, but as I get near I am not sure, they are so close to each other. Not much in it though and I decide to stick with my plan. It is a huge, white, wedding cake but though it is massive, it is somehow invisible, more like another government building than a church. But a sign says 'Whoever you are, wherever you are on life's journey. Welcome.' I walk in.

Inside I ask a man if I can just look at the church, and in the same moment see a poster for tours, 'do I have to take a tour?' I say. 'No.' he says 'you can just look'. He waves his arm around. The building is huge. 'Where do I go for the main bit?' I say. 'Upstairs.' He says.

Up the disney princess staircase, up and up, the curling, curving, ornate and marble stairs, to a sort of huge conference hotel corridor and then the doors into the ...........I don't know what the proper word is.......but I think assembly must be near. Like a parliament, I think. A god parliament. I didn't expect this, though I realise it is handy to be able to use parliament as a theme. There are chairs fanning out in neat rows, then a balcony with more chairs, all in the round. Except the focus at the middle is a low wooden stage and behind a wizard of oz organ. Absolutely massive. There are three cleaners staring at me as I enter, an industrial vacuum cleaner balanced on chairs. I bob and nod and smile at them. But they are busy. Cleaning and staring. The room has that funny brushed hush of corporate carpet. Above an enormous shallow dome, that should be beautiful and sort of is, but not quite enough. I don't stay.

Downstairs there is a table laid out with goody bags for some conference within the building. For a minute I think they say Prada. But they don't. A smaller more intimate chapel, at one side with book shelves just of the bible in the entrance. A statue of John Wesley, a short, energetic man, captured in wood. In a corner of the hallway, as if only stored, is a very plain cross. Again wood, but rough, visible brackets holding it together. I think I like this best.

I had read recently ' We secularists should forget the tedious fixation on belief, forget about being 'atheist' and concentrate on a conversation about the spiritual strategies for overcoming the common human resistance to living well.' Michael McGhee. Whatever parliament, I imagine this is the question. Perhaps my own question.

Later I read that the church was opened in 1912, built on the site of a music hall with £250,000 of the 'Million Guinea Fund' a fund where over a million Methodists gave a guinea. That the church was designed so that it did not look like a church, so that people from all walks of life would enter. That the suffragettes came here, and Ghandi.

Writing this at night. The helicopters still overhead. I hear Big Ben chime. I imagine David and Samantha Cameron listening too.


Amen.

Tuesday 4 May 2010

Emmanuel Church Marsham St

Another set back. I'm not sure what my own rules are and I am dithering whether to write this, but with a short week because of the bank holiday, today was really my only chance to sit in a church and think. And I want to try and write a post at least once a week so I decide that despite the outcome I have to report it.
Though I am already worrying that I haven't really followed my own brief anyhow. I forgot most of the historic details from St Stephen's - the fact that Charles Dickens advised the Coutts heiress to build it in recognition of her Dad, that there is a possible Burne Jones window, that the tall steeple was struck by lightening and later bombed and then replaced, but most of this I learnt from the internet after the visit. More rules you see - I am not allowed to check details before going. I am not allowed any expectation. Each trip should be the journey from the street into the church and then what I see there. So. Perhaps, in fact I have answered my own doubts. I want to sit in a church and think, so if it isn't possible or is denied then it still describes the church.
This is a huge slab of a building. A brick edifice with high towers and domes, and gold letters above the door and for a while I wasn't strictly sure it was a church but I kept walking past to check and became certain it was. Though it always seems busy being something else. I have seen queues of school children outside, and groups coming and going and once a long time ago I was invited by one of the muslim mums at school to a mums and toddlers group there. But I never went. Though I remember being very pleased to have been asked and then increasingly embarrassed that I hadn't been. I had only just moved to the area, my elder son had just started at the school and my husband either lay in bed or disappeared and drank. He could drink three bottles of wine in the time it took me to take the boys round the corner for a quick go on the swings. He would say he was just popping out to get the car and not return for five hours, so drunk he would fall flat through the door. I never expected my life to look or feel like that life: a trapdoor-opening, white-knuckle, scooby doo existence and for a while I tried really hard to pretend it wasn't happening. I walked and walked with the boys and I smiled and smiled. My smile had the shine of armour. I understood suddenly all those empty miniature bottles of spirits dropped in the street, all the beer cans left by benches, all the empties casually thrown aside as the debris of someone's ritual. The 'I'm just popping out for a minute'. The top up, the beginning or middle or end of a bender. Though I did go to other mums and toddler groups with people I didn't know, singing 'if you're happy and you know it clap your hands'. And smiling.

Today. I decide I want less whimsy to the report. Less, oooh it is so hard to walk into an unknown space. I would like to be less of a drip. So I see from the opposite side of the road that the door is open, I see a woman come out, and then a man, and I cross the road so purposefully that the man looks at me, quizzically, as our paths cross on the pavement, as if he recognises something about me, as if it is a moment in a film when the hero and heroine meet. Except of course we don't. We're not. I walk up the couple of steps into the atrium of the church, a large airy space with vaulted ceiling and a table with a flowers and a man sat.
'Is it possible to just look inside the church.' I say politely.
'No.' He says.
'Is there a time it would be possible?' I say politely.
'Sunday.' He says as if I am a fool.



Amen.

Sunday 2 May 2010

St Stephen's. Rochester Row

The sign always says 'Church Open'.  I have walked past it many times.  I think perhaps because of it's neutral invitation - it is open, you can just go in, there is no need to be 'welcome' I find it easier to walk through the door.  Welcome means guest status, open is just browsing, no contract/contact necessary.  If this blog project was planned because of walking past churches this has always been a favourite, a church I have observed.  The pets blessing service advertised, ( how brilliant even the idea of taking our hamster in a small cardboard travel box and getting a nod at eternal life for him/ or us?) and the have-a-go,-oh-do-come choir notices always reassuring.

The church porch is only just set back off the street, so the slight adrenalin of the decision to go in, the break away from my normal life, is just a quick dart, not a self conscious mounting of stairs or an observed grand entrance.
The building of the church is quite ordinairy (by which perhaps I only mean a bit like the parish church I went to as a child.)  I find it really pretty.  The light coming through mainly clear glass windows, with just touches of coloured glass in the top floret windows and a couple of stained glass story book windows. In the front chancel the ceiling is aquamarine with gold stars and a front window of washy water colours and a silver cross. The side chapel has mosaic and flickering candles. Everywhere nice wooden chairs. Of simple design, slightly worn..

But inside there is one .......two..... men moving about, with no real purpose but (and here is still the fear) my worry is that they will ask if they can help me.  Though perhaps, I think, as I bolt to a pew to sit and repel the question, it isn't something that is asked.   Perhaps it is them that have just murdered for the first time, seeking haven, forgiveness.  Perhaps the anxious woman rustling in with the shopping, is ordinary and soothing, like a Velasquesz painting of eggs cooking.

 I am on the way back from the supermarket, the greengrocer and the butcher and with three big bags of shopping I sit at the pew, worn wood, smoothed, and polished by bottoms, and these are my worries:, a baguette that might snap (why is that such a worry/disappointment when it does?) why have supermarkets not thought of a better way to carry one - the cashier today had said 'shall I just snap it for you?' sensible but defeatist I thought and I looked mildly mad in horror at foregoing the slim chance of getting it home in one piece. I said, 'I'd like to try.' and she looked bored by my optimism   Also I have a bottle of wine because I have a friend coming to dinner and it seems slightly wild on a tuesday morning to have wine in a bag, especially in a church ( for having lived with an alcoholic - all drinking, including and importantly my own becomes sniffed and measured and mildly miserable) but also a chicken.  It is a warm day and a butcher chicken though I hope to be fresher/better than a supermarket one, also seems nearer to a carcass than a product and I don't want it getting hot.
And then very clearly I think of this.  My youngest son had announced this morning at breakfast, a spoon half cheerioed into his mouth, that Dad, and he said Dad with the long aaa (of adore adore adore), and a hestitation that wasn't sure if he was going to get Daaad or himself into trouble, for he didn't want either but he knew it wasn't right, 'that when you are at work daaad made jokes pretending to be you and falling down the toilet and it is really funny.'  though slightly doubtfully. 'And pretending to shout at you?' I hazarded.  'Yes.' He said.  Pleased that I hadn't and I knew what he was talking about. Oh.  I say.  I think that sounds mean.  I say.  Yes.  he says.

Here, now, sat in the church, looking around ( I don't want to look like I am praying, I want to look like I am observing, merely interested,) I am shocked by this new meanness. There have been so many.   Then I see the small angel head poking out of the wall of the church, and flowers and birds carved at the top of the slim columns, then coats of arms some small gems of colour. These little details are high up, placed for wandering eye level, for wandering minds, boredom or dismay to attach again to delight, and each one confirm beauty, each one say keep looking you can discover more.

The white hush of the church, the cool, temperate conditions are peaceful.  I can hear children playing, a whole school playground full, it sounds like a long way a way.  As if the thick walls, some distance of place, keep everything muffled, cushioned.

Back outside, I walk and breathe well.