Curate's Curios

2 January 2025

Dear Friends,

It feels somehow lonelier to write this email to you all. Mostly because if there was one person who would always mention and chat about what I had written it would be Fr Dennis, who died just after Christmas. He was a consistent encourager of me as both a priest and a Christian. It feels hard to know what to write knowing that I have lost one of my favourite conversation partners.

Coming back to Hornsey and beginning my life as a priest was as daunting as it was wonderful, and Fr Dennis was an amazing support through all of that. He was someone with whom I knew I could chat about anything and his response would always be filled with wisdom, but also a deep humanity. He knew how to tread lightly and journey with me, to encourage thought over opinions, and discussion over resolution. He knew his own mind and was not eager to make up mine to match, but seemed to take genuine delight in the variety of understandings that people and the world had to offer. Even when we did agree, which was often, he still liked to leave the door open for others to feel welcome to join the sharing of ideas.

To me, Fr Dennis embodied a desire to grow in wisdom, something many of us will be thinking about as we begin a new year. Whether this fosters itself in a reading goal, a film watch list or a subscription to a new daily email digest; many of us will be thinking about how we can grow in wisdom. I will not be exempt from this, having already thought about the books I might like to read over the year and classics that are still sat gathering dust on my shelves. The desire to grow is an innate part of our humanity, yet I believe even more so is the desire to grow as a community.

Very few of us will succeed in any form of growth if we lock ourselves away to do so alone. While books and articles might be of benefit, they offer us little without existing in a community to further our understanding of human relationships. Beliefs and emotions may exist with vivid realism in the pages of Tolstoy or Austen, but they have no grounding if we cannot seek to find those same feelings and reality in our fellow human beings.

As St Paul wrote to the Corinthians: If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

It is hard to lose someone we loved. It is hard to miss on the ways they would have continued to encourage our growth, to sit with us on our journey. But it is within our community that their wisdom and insight will continue to find a home. It is within our community that the love we had for them will continue to be shared.

Love and prayers,

Mthr Clemency

Dear Friends,

Last Sunday was joyful for a wide range of reasons, with it being the feast of Christ the King, but mostly due to the joy of having six people baptised as part of our Sunday morning worship. Since being ordained, it is one of my greatest privileges to baptise people, to welcome new Christians into our Church family and to be there at the beginning of their journey of faith.

There is a myriad of simple and complicated aspects of a baptism service which strike me differently each time I celebrate one. On this occasion, I was struck throughout the day by the way my hands still carried the smell of the chrism oil. Oil of chrism is one of the three oils are blessed by the bishop on Maundy Thursday for use throughout the year. Along with the oil of catechism, it is one of two oils used at baptism, with chrism placed on the candidate’s head after the water. Chrism is a perfumed oil with a smell that is hard to describe but lingers on the skin long after its use. For me, the smell over takes me back to being ordained priest when chrism oil was placed on the palms of my hands. In both these cases, baptism and ordination, there is something beautiful about the incarnational aspect of sacrament that not only exists in the moment it is conferred, but lingers on the skin, invisibly staining the recipient and celebrant.

As we approach advent, I believe it is a good time to reflect on the way in which our faith is not wholly spiritual but has bodily incarnation at its heart. We worship a God that is not distant from us but was born among us, and continues to be made present each time we come together in worship for the Holy Eucharist. And just as God does not exist wholly on the spiritual plane, neither does our worship, but instead utilises all our senses. The smell of incense, the warmth of candles, the beauty of the choir singing, the taste of Holy Communion; all these open our minds and hearts to a God made present in the manger, a God crucified on the cross. I hope that this advent will be a season filled with small moments of joy which enrich your senses and bring you closer to the God who breathed life into each of us.

With love and prayers,

Mthr Clemency

Previous Posts ...

frbruce

Dec 1, 2024

Safeguarding

(no. 38/2024) Dear friends, This Sunday we are marking Safeguarding Sunday, a time when we can reflect on the importance of...

Mthr Clemency joined Hornsey Parish Church as curate in July 2023, after training for the priesthood at Westcott House.

She grew up in Birmingham, and studied History at university and still has a passion for all things medieval (including her cat named Æthelflæd).

It was at university that Mthr Clemency cultivated her faith, and first felt a calling to the priesthood; it was also at this time when she developed her spirituality as focused on contemplation and the Eucharist.

Mthr Clemency is a lover of good books and bad TV and is always happy to be drawn into a conversation about tennis or hymns.