Ruminations about hermeneutics, theology, theory, politics, ecclesiastical life… and exercise.
I was excited when I saw Hermeneutics and honor: negotiating female “public” space in Islamic/ate societies (Asma Afsaruddin, ed.) on the Naval Academy’s list of books censored out of their library — maybe my work on hermeneutics could matter enough to draw fire from DOGMAGA! But alas, I’m stuck persumably in the ‘mostly harmless’ category.
It all goes back to Rolling Stone. When I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, the body copy of RS were set in Cloister, an exquisite Venetian Jenson-style face designed by Morris Fuller Benton. Its almost (but not quite) spiky eccentricity within the Garalde-Jenson type sphere appealed to me immensely, and it became the hallmark of RS’s typography to me, as vivid as Dennis Ortis-Lopez’s condensed slab-serif heads and Roger Parkinson’s definitive wordmark….
In the late 80s, when I depended on AOL for online connectivity, I happened on a digital version of Cloister made by a user who called himself ‘Uncle Goot’.* I used the daylights out of that slightly condensed digital Cloister, as I couldn’t afford the professional versions offered by URW or Elsner + Flake. (Cloister Black, the prevalent usage of ‘Cloister’ in the free font/bootleg font world, is a blackletter offshoot of the original Cloister family.)
After I acquired some professional typefaces and some good open-access type, I drifted away from Cloister — not out of lack of affection, but because it lacked some glyphs, and the kerning was a shade amateurish, and (if I recall correctly) Uncle Goot only released Roman, Italis, and Bold — a good basic family for many uses, but sometimes one just wants a bold italic, or some other offshoot, and in the Unicode OpenType era Cloister seemed… limited. I had acquired Monotype Centaur, a similar typeface that draws on Jenson’s Venetian type, and that was close enough as makes no difference to most users.
But a couple of months ago, I was reading Wikipedia pages on typefaces (as one does), and I clicked from Cloister to Centaur where I saw the sentence, ‘At least two open-source digital typefaces, Museum (by Raph Levien) and Coelacanth, are based on Centaur.’ I knew of Raph Levien’s Museum project, which the multifarious imagination of the estimable Mr Levien has left unfinished, but I had never heard of Coelacanth. You probably hadn’t; now you have. I perked up my… well, my eyes, both at the possibility of an open sourced iteration of a Jenson venetian, and because my childhood love of dinosaurs has never dwindled away.
Browse and be amazed. Where Centaur runs on the thin side, Coelacanth is sturdier (though its ExtraLight weight can supply all the undernourished look you might want). Vast character sets, including Hebrew and polytonic Greek (and yes, Kelvin, it has an ð), with several different optical weights depending on the work you want it to do. Rich, sweet, and amazing.
* Sadly, it appears that Uncle Goot has vanished without a searchable trace. If you are Uncle Goot, or know Uncle Goot, I want to thank you (or ‘him’) wholeheartedly. Feel encouraged to make yourself known!
My morning run was somewhat better than other recent runs, but it was still frustrating. It seems as though I don’t mind running if it’s just a relaxed pace with no striving, but that the pushing the pace or the distance onward ramps up the discomfort to a point that makes me reluctant to run at all. This perspective arrives as I look ahead toward the Bannister Mile Run in May; while I might be ‘training’ to attain a better time with greater physical preparedness, I’m seeing more clearly that using running as my main means of getting fit entangles me in a frustrating negative feedback loop.
Coffee and fruit, Morning Prayer at home, in a few minutes I’ll feed the dogs and make tea for Margaret, clean up and dress, give the Passion Sunday sermon (in which I think I don’t mention the Passion once — that happens when I have a last-minute obligation to write the weekly newsletter’s cover blurb for Passion Sunday) a once-over and then print, lead Mattins at St Nic’s, dash to the ADCM at St Helen’s (or as much of it as remains), then slouch over to the Parish Centre for the Faith Forum on ‘Redemption’. Then, home to crash into rest.
Later: Whoops! ‘Isn’t Mattins the same service as Morning Prayer?’
My morning run frustrated me, as my legs simply would not limber up — it felt, once again, as if I were running on telephone poles or fenceposts. On the other hand, I enjoyed a pleasant hot breakfast, conversation with Margaret about Severance<.cite> series 2, and thinking about birthday gifts for Nate.
Adequate (non-timed) run again this morning, coffee and fruit, shower and Morning Prayer, home for coffee and toast, parish email and work on the Holy Week service books. Really, that’s about the size of it, that and traipsing in to the parish centre to check for phone messages.
Not my feet, of course, though mny morning run was mostly all right. My groin muscles thought that having yesterday off meant that they would never have to work again, and I had some small wobbles in joints and muscles, but the run did me good. Coffee, fruit, cleaned up, Morning Prayer, a croissant and coffee at my in-public office, then back to St Helen’s to meet with our architect, DAC representative and the advisor from Historic England, and our lighting engineers. We’re not at the ‘Right, that’s the plan’ stage, but we’ve agreed some fairly narrow points that need clarification. If nothing else, this process has underscored how unfortunate our current lighting scheme is; I’ll be very disappointed if I don’t get to see the fruits of the project’s labours. St Helen’s is a gorgeous church, as the hundreds of visitors who stream through our doors can see, but we’ll be able see so very much more, so much more clearly, under the new scheme that it will mean seeing the church anew, as if for a second first time.
I didn’t run this morning, as Margaret and the dogs and I all felt an extra increment of gravity and sleepiness. I woke at 6:20 and read in bed till almost 7:00, then cooked hot breakfast and prepared for the morning. I had had word of a possible pastoral need, and that was on my heart also. After Morning Prayer, several of us put our heads together and agreed a plan.
Hold one another close, keep in touch, and God bless us, every one.
A good two miles this morning, at a forgiving pace but without pain or strain. Coffee and fruit, cleaned up, Morning Prayer, then walked the rest of the way into town to pick up a standing mirror we bought yesterday. Another cup of coffee and toast, and now about to dig in to my day’s responsibilities.
Good run this morning, despite a variety of transient pains and stiffnesses; fruit and coffee, then cleaned up and went to Morning Prayer, and now settled at R&R for public office hours.
Since the public isn’t flocking to consult me — can you imagine? — I’ll take a few minutes to vent and amplification of something from my post in response to Mark Clavier last week. At the end of that post, I noted that ‘[T]he single greatest impediment to clergy flourishing is the demand on their time. The church needs clergy who are not running at full speed fifty hours (plus) a week.’ That’s true and important, but I want to note that almost everyone in today’s neoliberal economy has been squeezed for productivity like a lemon wedge until there’s little left but macerated pulp and skin. You and I can identify a tranche of the population who haven’t been afflicted in this way — but even the privileged elite have swallowed the pernicious myth that unless work is exhausting you, making your life a woeful succession of frustration, desperation, and drudgery.
I wish I could turn up the volume on my shout of No! to this. Everyone ought to benefit from the leisure, the slack time, that insulates workers from the parching, fraying, abrasive effects of unrelenting demands to extract more from our lives, all to the profit of the unimaginably wealthy. Literally ‘unimaginable’: hardly anyone can imagine what it would mean to have at one’s disposal even one billion pounds, much less multiple billions. Yet the financial oligarchs crave more, and expect that it’s their prerogative to extract it from your nerve and sinew. If you’re not miserable, you’re not enriching them enough. Nowadays, the most obvious tactic for reclaiming this time comes from digital distraction on an employer’s time, but this is a pallid substitute for rich, deep, healing leisure.
Subsistence labourers have always known this, always felt this misery. As the regime of industrial and post-industrial capital has advanced and progressed, it has immiserated more and more of the populace. The once-secure middle class erodes day on day; home ownership (problematic as land ownership will always be) dwindles and disappears as one of the last bulwarks against predation from above gives way to the rentiers’ goal of eliminating the last trace of possible independence from their private taxation draws closer to realisation. ‘Wretched man that I am [ed: I’d say ‘Oh, the humanity I am!’] Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ Clue: it sure won’t be any of our current proliferation of self-interested billionaires.
Cory Doctorow constantly quotes Stein’s Law — “anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops” — perhaps hoping that by dint of repetition, the import of that maxim will at last sink in. Eventually, this ouroboros will be slain by government regulation (which is why the predators so dread regulation) or run out of tail to swallow (which is why they preach the false gospel of limitless growth, in the hope that the snake will provide a continuous diet of added length to consume).
To return to where I started: since the economic role of clergy is, to a great extent, symbolic (and I mean that in a very positive sense), one way we can push back on this matrix of extraction can involve recognising and encouraging a clerical vocation of leisure (for the benefit of our cures, not for self-interest, though some will of course abuse that opportunity). Unionise. Demand that real academic communities offer their teachers the time to ruminate, not just pump the human equivalent of AI slop into print month after month. Find ways to pay workers what their employers won’t. Unionise, again. Press for a diminished working week in the teeth of demands for greater productivity. Tax wealth. Tax surplus (as, for instance, vacant housing stock and vacant commercial property). Refuse to feel guilty for loafing. And for those who will, pray.
I woke this morning at a self-congratulatory 6:30, delighted that I had gotten some extra sleep in the morning hours, and only somewhat chagrined when Radio 4 reminded me that it’s now British Summer Time, and I had lost the hour of sleep I had imagined I’d harvested. Got up slowly and ran, a decent pace apart from several pauses to rest body parts that spontaneously decided they wanted not to cooperate.
I remembered that I needed to print the tones for the Preface, and to find and print the Collect, and I printed some prayer cards for the Wholeness & Healing service (though Susan found the ones we had missed last week in a second, separate folder from the one with the orders of service). I was heading up to shower and dress at 8:45 when Margaret stopped me and asked what time it was. I estimated ‘between 8:30 and 9:00’, right on target to leave for church at 9:30 to do some vestry errands before the service. Margaret, just awake herself, answered ‘Cos my phone says it’s 9:45. I must have set it ahead, or maybe it didn’t…’ She didn’t need to continue — I realised that I had been looking at the clock radio to watch the time, and the clock radio doesn’t ahve an auto-update for time changes. It really was 9:45, and I was already 15 minutes behind schedule.
In a whirlwind of activity, I completed my dressing, gathered up my Sunday bag of service books, cincture, and various other impedimenta, and got to church in good time. The service went well, Margaret and I returned exhausted, and now I’m doing odds and ends in preparation for tonight’s Sacred Concert. My job will be to welcome people, offer a wee prayer, and introduce our organist; then after the performance, to greet the audience again, remind them that we’ll host a concert of and for young organists Saturday evening. And return home, weary and hungry and ready to start over tomorrow morning.
I have indeed been running every morning; ‘running’, or going two miles at varying paces anyway. I haven’t taken a timed run in a long time, since that was both making me [more] miserable spiritually (the gains were a rush, but the experience of haunting competitive pressure was bitter) and was making my legs feel worse on subsequent days. That probably means added strength, but the sensation of stiffness, leadenness, knocked-back-ness following timed days was frustrating. Having written this out, I suppose I’ll begin taking intermittent timed runs again — especially since I registered and will be participating in the Bannister Community Mile, my first-ever ‘official’ timed running event. I estimated an 8:30 time, though I think it’s likely I’ll do better than that.
Parish work has been demanding for the past week or so, at or near full time. Preparing service sheets for Holy Week (and eventually, Easter) along with leading services and preaching, and working with wedding couples, staff meetings, and the accursed emails (not the ones from you, of course, but the cascades of emails…. But the PCC is making promising progress toward advertising our vacancy, and heaven permitting, we may have a Team Rector in a few months.
With a friendly mixture of applause and pushback, I want to flag up Fr Mark’s observations on burnout, and to add some complementary observations.
First and most importantly, whatever Mark and I agree or disagree about, we are on one page with regard to the desperately vital importance of supporting clergy in doing what they’re called to do — in most cases, that means providing spiritual and sacramental leadership for a given community. This is the sine qua non of the vocation, the thing that having a savvy churchwarden or a compassionate archdeacon or bishop can’t replace. This is what clergy [should be] [are] called and trained for. Not maintenance, bookkeeping, IT troubleshooting, or any of a platter of useful skills that other members of the community can help with.
Re: ‘decline’: I’d be interested to see a report on the correlation between ‘decline’ and the quality of the match between clergy and congregation. You can take a healthy, thriving tuna and put it on land, and it will decline — not cos it’s an unhealthy tuna nor because fresh air and earth are bad, but because they don’t belong to one another. Likewise some ‘failing’ or burned-out clergy are quite possibly misplaced, or given an impossible task (Mark’s two-congregation benefice separated by mountains and no public transport). I would wish that DDOs and bishops played a fuller role in match-making (and that DDOs and bishops were called to those roles with that in view, obvs; some are poor at this discernment, and they shouldn’t have that responsibility). A role for ecclesiastical headhunters.
It’s not the houses. Yes, they don’t always suit, and they should often be renovated for contemporary patterns of climatic and vocational needs, but living in the parish, in church housing, provides a deep sign of inhabiting the life of the vicar (or whatever other role). And plenty would envy clergy housing.
It’s not the buildings, either — or it shouldn’t be. PCCs and diocesan/national officers should be responsive to matters of upkeep and adequate renovation. If you don’t like a church, don’t take the call with a sledgehammer in your hand; these buildings are a precious gift from generations of the faithful, imbued with the hallowing prayers of thousands of parishioners over the years.
But yes, the parish system needs reinforcement and support. The relentless shuffle of clergy around a multi-point benefice, and Mother Agatha moving on and Fr Stavros arriving and Just Call Me Fred popping up once every six weeks does no good to a congregation that’s trying to pull itself together and grow.
Email. (I will say no more, except that it can take thirty minutes of scrolling and backtracking and reading follow-ups and new messages to figure out a problem that could have been resolved in five minutes of conversation.)
Isolation: as an introvert, isolation is not a big problem for me — but I combat the temptation to hunker down alone by spending as much time as I can in public, in clericals, greeting people and sipping coffee or a pint. The responsibilities of executive parish leadership are isolating (as is the role as repository for much non-public backstory for all the people); but there are other clergy and other professionals with similar roles. Your mileage, of course, will vary; horses for courses.
Families: Your fam didn’t fully volunteer for this, and few outside agencies will appreciate oddity of life in a clergy family or the stress that falls on spouses and (especially) children. The church needs to step up here as well.
There’s more. But I want to wind up, for now, by noting that the single greatest impediment to clergy flourishing is the demand on their time. The church needs clergy who are not running at full speed fifty hours (plus) a week. Spiritual leadership absolutely requires more leisure than neoliberal economic models will countenance. But that’s not the worst aspect of neoliberal policies; they bear down on most members of the congregation, too. If anyone wants a pastoral leader to help strengthen people out from political-economic immiseration, though, they will absolutely have to allow that leader slack time. With no carping.