Candle power

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

Gang aft a-gley

– Robert Burns: To a mouse

IF you want to make God laugh, says Canon Philip Thomas, tell him your plans. The line has been used before. The churchwardens had asked him about his intentions when he became vicar of St Michael’s, Heighington, in 1984.

They hoped he might stay three years. Philip, who’d been a priest in Australia and New Zealand and chaplain to University College, Durham, thought that he’d give it four or five. “I never even thought I’d become a priest at all. I didn’t think I could keep it up. I was telling God that, too.”

There were jobs that he applied for and didn’t get, he concedes, others that were offered which he didn’t want. “This was somewhere that I thought I could do worthwhile things.”

Now, in his 70th year but looking at least 15 years younger, he has announced his retirement on the Sunday after Easter. There will doubtless be many fond farewells, much post-Lenten partying, though few valedictions may be more memorable – more a-gleyful, it might almost be said – than the Candlemas festival held in the lovely Norman church last weekend.

More than 200 candles have illumined the church. The pew sheet notes that there is an element of risk, vulnerability and impermanence about candlelight, and might also have mentioned the danger of a vested vicar setting himself alight.

Happily, all not only come through unscathed but raise about £750 for parish funds.

It’s wholly coincidental, of course, that I’m barely inside the wondrously lit church than someone reports a misfortune befallen my old friend Peter Holland, former vicar of Tudhoe and of New Seaham and now retired to Woodland, high in west Durham.

Whatever else his plans, Peter – walking the dog late at night – may never have anticipated breaking his leg and ankle after a fall on the ice two Wednesdays ago. There’s an awful lot of ice Woodland way. The best of men – though not, it is rumoured, the best of patients – he is to be wished a full and swift recovery.

Heighington, at any rate, is on a hill between Darlington and Bishop Auckland. A television programme a few years back named it Britain’s ideal village. If the claim to fame were subjective – “I don’t think the programme said all that much, but people made a fuss of it,” says Philip – the immediate impression on seeing a church lit by more than 200 candles is that something very special’s afoot, nonetheless.

“It smells like a camp fire,” says someone, approvingly, but it speaks of care and love and it looks absolutely fantastic.

Candlemas is more lengthily known as the Presentation of Christ, the legal requirement by which the baby Jesus was taken to the temple and the moment that the aged Simeon announced, in the familiar words of the Nunc Dimittis, that he could now depart in peace.

Were someone to conjure the headline “presentation skills”, they might capture this column in two words.

There are also balloons in the chancel, about which the suspicion simmers that the vicar isn’t altogether happy. “I fear the Graf Zeppelin effect,” he says afterwards.

ABOUT 100 are in church. The excellent, purple-robed choir has almost 20 members.

There are village churches which would be happy to have 20 in the nave, much less in the choir stalls.

Hymns and liturgy are also displayed on a big screen, hymn books and service sheets offered – belt and braces – to those who prefer them.

When some of us talk of not being able to see the screen, it’s meant almost literally. This time, it’s fine.

Rosemary, the vicar’s wife, sits alongside. If he looks 15 years younger than his age, she looks 25 years younger than he does. They’ve been married 40-odd years.

It’s a lovely, careful, thoughtful and joyful service, parish worship at its best. Preaching from the oldest pulpit in the Durham diocese and almost biffing a balloon with one arm, Canon Thomas recalls that John Cozen, the first Bishop of Durham after the Restoration in 1649, marked the Presentation by decorating the cathedral with about 300 candles.

“It caused something of an uprising among the new Puritan cathedral officials,” he says.

No such recriminations at Heighington.

“It’s about reminding people of the beauty of holiness but not just about decorating the church,” adds the vicar. “It’s important to see beyond the imagery.”

After so many centuries, it’s the last time that Heighington and the neighbouring hamlet of Bolam will have its own vicar. The likelihood is that the parish will share a priest with St Matthew’s, a large parish in the north of Darlington. It didn’t need 200 candles to see it coming.

They’ve anticipated it for years. The village Methodist church closed five years ago, the wayside chapel at Haughton-le-Side a few years earlier.

“We’re an Anglican-Methodist centre now. It’s so natural, we almost don’t think about it,” he says.

Philip accepts that things are changing. “I don’t think I’ve been an ideal vicar by any means, but I hope that people will have seen me as a fellow Christian who is travelling along with them. If I am proud of anything, it’s of encouraging people to have the vision to address what happens next.

There are a lot of opportunities.”

He and Rosemary will retire to Cirencester, closer to their family. He hopes, he says, to work as a “freelance”.

What his plans are, of course, it would be wholly unwise even to consider.