I am not often to be found in churches, except as a tourist (Quaker places of worship are called meeting houses, and aren’t regarded as any more sacred than anywhere else). However, the season has twice in recent days led me into an Anglican church. The two experiences were so different; I’m not sure of the significance of the difference, if any, but maybe writing about what happened will make everything clear – or maybe not. So: experience number one. This begins on a cold November Saturday morning at 6am, in a queue outside York Minster. While others queued we snuggled under the duvet; but our kind friend Judy was there, to try to buy tickets for her and her husband, and us, to go to carols by candlelight in the beautiful Chapter House of the Minster. She succeeded, and we went, on an equally cold Friday evening. It began ethereally as the sound of the choir could be heard approaching from some distant part of the Minster – it was perhaps two or three minutes before they walked in, singing. By this time, the Chapter House lights had been dimmed and many candles lit. Except for the individual book lights held by the choir – there were 32 singers – that was all the illumination (or, it seemed, warmth) we had or needed. The choir sang beautifully, with the carols interspersed with hand bell ringing and organ solos (I gained worryingly disproportionate pleasure from a superb example of nominative determinism – the organist’s surname is Pipe). I am no music critic and cannot say more than that the whole experience was sublime.
Experience number two: two days later, on a Sunday afternoon, we sat in a village church just outside York for the annual Christingle service. We always go to this service, because some very good friends of ours go, and we are privileged to be invited afterwards, along with what seems like most of the village, to their home for drinks, mince pies, and Wensleydale cheese with fruit cake (a combination which those not fortunate enough to live in GOC may not realise is absolutely delicious). The service was conducted by an somewhat humourless vicar (f), who seemed not over endowed with warmth, though she tried hard; but Dawn French she wasn’t. Because, I guess of the straitened times in which C of E parishes live, where vicars are shared between a number of churches, the nativity scene lacked … well, rehearsal, really. While the vicar told the tale, each element in the story was illustrated by a small person walking up the aisle clutching, or sometimes carrying aloft, a wooden cut-out which, with the addition of not a little imagination, was to be taken as illustrating, for example, the three wise men, or Mary cradling the baby Jesus, and so on. Once delivered to the vicar, these were supposed to be placed by her in a stand, so that they could be seen by the congregation. Well, she tried, but they started to fall over quite soon. This might have passed, if not unnoticed, then at least unremarked, had it not been for one of our friends, a delightful young woman whose severe learning difficulties have left her without some of the usual social inhibition which would stop many of us from revealing our true feelings at such moments. But R roared with laughter when the first figure fell down. And in so doing, she gave the rest of us permission to do likewise. So we all roared with laughter. At this point the vicar might have redeemed herself somewhat had she joined in, but she didn’t. The general feeling afterwards was that R had saved the day. Truly, from the sublime to the ridiculous…
Everything that Counts 
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