by Martin Sewell

The melancholy days of November are a perfect time for our nation’s traditional commemoration of our war dead. For centuries the country has been served by its soldiers and sailors, some were following tradition, some sought adventure, still others were pressed into service, whilst others were driven by economic necessity.

Despite historic heroism across the globe on land and sea, the ordinary man was not accorded the same recognition as Clive of India, the Duke of Marlborough, Horatio Nelson, Arthur Gordon of Khartoum etc.

That indifference to “Tommy Atkins” changed after the 11th November 1918. Between the first 1914 combat death of Pt J Parr and that of the tragic Pt GE Ellison who died immediately before the armistice hour, millions of ordinary men from across Britain and its Empire had enlisted and endured the unspeakable horrors of industrial warfare, for which few had had the slightest preparation. .

It is equally  hard for modern Britons to comprehend the depth of that sorrow and loss at the conclusion of hostilities. Out of a UK population of 39m some 900k had been killed; few of whom had had any expectation of military service.  Loss on such cataclysmic scale needed expression in multiple ways. A temporary wooden Cenotaph was erected in Whitehall as a focus for grief, for the first anniversary of peace; it was replaced by the now familiar stone edifice the following year.

 At the same time, the vision of the Revd David Railton MC came to fruition. As an Army Chaplain, sitting by a garden grave of an unknown British Soldier in Armentiéres in 1916,  he conceived idea that the families of such soldier needed and should have a tangible place to which to make a pilgrimage of grief. He shared the idea of a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with the Dean of Westminster who secured the support of the Prime Minister and eventually the King who had initially hesitated, lest it detract from the recently erected Cenotaph. Crucial support came from Chief of the General Staff Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, who told the King “ no words could tell how proud we officers and men would be to have one of our simple soldiers buried in Westminster Abbey”.

When that anonymous representative body had been gathered and randomly selected from four drawn from four Western Front battlefields, it was interred in the Abbey in the presence of 100 holders of the Victoria Cross and nearly 100 widows, each of whom had lost a husband and five sons to the service of their country. That representative “Everyman” might be anyone from anywhere; he could be the son of an English reader unionist, a gay under-age butcher’s boy from Limerick or a Quaker stretcher bearer.

In the week following week, a million grieving people filed past the grave. I wonder how many of us can generate a tenth of the empathy needed to grasp the depth of that emotional response of our forebears.

The traditional red poppy similarly arose from the needs of ordinary people and their egalitarian impulses. The Royal British Legion came into being in 1921 launching its first poppy appeal that year. It merged four associations of old comrades drawing them to focus upon the many needs of ex-servicemen three decades before the Welfare State came into existence.

The “Earl Haig Fund” may seem a curious choice of name to those educated in modern times; was he not the Commander whose orders sent so many to death and dreadful injury? In reality, his efforts to alleviate the suffering of his soldiery after the war was so appreciated that when he was buried, more people turned out to line the streets of London to honour and and mourn him, than responded to the death of Princess Diana.

His post-war legacy extended beyond its important charitable purpose . The Royal British Legion under his leadership channelled the mindset of military veterans into the support of old comrades with a focus on the pity of war. This may have contributed to a reluctance to re-arm as the threats of renewed war returned in the 1930s, however such a national ecology of remembrance of sacrifice meant that almost uniquely in Europe, Britain did not produce at scale the-old soldier cultures which evolved into the militaristic  fascist and communist movements across so much of Europe.

As the late Harold Macmillan famously reproved Sir Oswald Mosely for his un-British ways “When an Englishman goes marching,  he does not wear a black shirt- he puts on a tweed jacket and flannel trousers”.

Our expressions of Remembrance today need to remain anchored in those origins. The form may rightly embrace a proud recognition and appreciation for the precision and efficiency of the military, but the underpinning are rooted in our Christian heritage. The words of “ I vow to thee my country” penned by a deeply grieving father, are not jingoistic words extolling an Empire but expressions of hope founded upon sacrifice, pointing to a better, perfect  place, built upon idealism,  because otherwise, such sorrow is unbearable.

In Britain our Remembrance rituals are  infused with the Christian sentiment which framed it, but in France, with which I am proudly familiar, their ritual is secular but no less moving. In the tiny commune in which I have a house, the villages gather round the war memorial – always on the day of the Armistice. The military send a small contingent and the local school children read each of the names of the commune fallen – around 60 men from a commune of 600. As each name is spoke, a single voice intones “ Mort pour La France” That phrase sounds like bell  tolling and as it repeats and repeats the full impact of that community’s loss is brought home. I always drive home looking at the homes on the way reflecting on how the news arrived of a father, sons, friends and neighbour within those walls.

Outside another French commune, on the fringe of the wood where he died fighting with his resistance comrades, a rather unusual name will be claimed for France. Rudolph Pfandaur was an Austrian who, at the height of Nazi power in Europe deserted the German army. Especially remarkable is the fact that he joined the Resistance, who accepted him. His native German speaking and genuine Army uniform was a real asset. When the wood was surrounded in 1944, some of his group surrendered, survived and told his story in later years, but Rudolph knew that for him, surrender was not an option, and with others fought to the last.

How trust in him was ever engendered I will never know, but knowing a fragment of his story wins him a regular place in my Remembrance recollections during the 2 minutes silence. Perhaps for him we should intone “ Died for Humanity”.

In recent times, some have sought to import division and discord into our national day of remembrance; there are 364 days in which to debate controversy and satellite causes. It is right and proper that on one day each year we set other considerations temporarily aside and insist that the rituals thoughtfully assembled for us by the grieving of the Great War, should be respected.

Within that envelope of collective pity, there is room for everyone, man, woman, gay, Christian, Atheist, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh,  Jew, Empire Loyalist, Socialist, Conservative, Liberal, Anarchist; nobody is excluded from Remembrance, whether they be personally mourned within family and/or community recollection, or even forgotten; collectively as a nation “We will remember them”.

It is the most inclusive day of the year 

Film clip of the inauguration of the Cenotaph in 1920

The flowers of Remembrance. Hour after hour an unceasing pilgrimage of bereaved mothers, wives, daughters, and sweethearts lay floral offerings on the Cenotaph. Armistice Day, 1920. pic.twitter.com/W0dsACxp8b

— History Girl (@HistoryGirlBW) November 9, 2025

Followers of this blog will be getting used to the slower output of material to read and discuss on Surviving Church.   After over ten years and a million and half words of output, it was inevitable that your editor would find that ideas for reflection and comment would become less regular and routine.  In the past I found that there were sometimes several ideas inside my head at once, waiting for an opportunity to be articulated.  Now I have to be patient in waiting for something to strike my thinking.  Blog ideas are often inspired by something in the news or something we are made aware of by our participation in one of the seasons of the church’s year.   The regular rhythm of these different liturgical seasons commemorated by the church has always provided rich material to ponder.  The internet itself provides material for reflection as we travel with the help of our liturgy and its accompanying music from one Christian season to another.

As I write these words (on the Friday before Remembrance Sunday) I am acutely aware of the way that this time of year presents us with two very solemn moments for commemoration. The first is the feast of All Souls when many churches invite their congregations to come together to read out names of the departed in front of the altar.  Candles are lit and this simple physical act allows us to believe that those who have died and are seen no more, are in some sense alive in the presence of God.  The second commemoration on Remembrance Sunday extends our remembering beyond the circle of immediate family and friends.  It identifies with the nation’s grieving for all who sacrificed their lives in fighting and helping to preserve the nation in the face of threats to its identity.  The word that joins both these events is the simple word remember.  Remembering members of our families who have died and the young men and women who sacrificed everything to defend the nation are solemn acts and ones that we should never let go.   To do so would impoverish something very deep within us.

What does remembering a deceased person actually involve?  At the very least It means thinking about them and bringing them into our memories so that their existence as members of the human race is acknowledged.  We all hope to be remembered when we have left this earth, even if the only people who remember us for a time are the members of our families.  We do, of course, live in some sense through our genes but there is something important about being remembered by those who come after us.  It is important for us now to know that those who will think about us when we are gone will have memories suffused with affection and some degree of gratitude that we existed.   

In thinking about the act of remembering the dead, it is helpful to be reminded of the very different perspective contained in the Hebrew bible.  Here we are introduced to some different ideas about memory as well as a strikingly different attitude towards time.  We think of time as a continuing sequence of events.  When things happen, they then quickly become part of the past; they are never going to happen again in the same way.  The effects caused by past events may still linger on, but the actual event can never be fully retrieved. For the Hebrew/Jewish mind there are certain episodes in the past that are remembered in a special way.  These are pivotal and archetypal moments and they are those involved with the Jewish belief that God has actively intervened in particular historical events to save his people.  If God acted to save his people from the plagues in Egypt or at the crossing of the Red Sea, then the hope is that he can and will remember his people again in the present and in the future.  Much of Jewish prayer is the request to God to ‘remember’ his actions in the past so that he will accomplish the same saving acts in the context of a new historical crisis.  The Hebrew way of thinking believes that ‘reminding’ God of what he has already done is a legitimate part of prayer. 

A further dimension of memory which is present in Jewish prayer is found in the sacrificial system practised in biblical times.  It is hard for us to enter the mentality that believed killing animals was somehow part of what God required of his people, but there is an understandable logic at work in this practice.  Killing animals and either spreading their blood around or burning them whole has little to commend it today in the West.  But underlying the practice is the transactional idea that one can give to God so that he will look favourably on his people.  The idea that we are required to give of ‘ourselves, our souls and bodies’ as an offering to obtain favour from God is one that is found everywhere in the pages of Scripture.   For me the classic transactional idea in Scripture is clearly set out in Psalm 132.  The psalmist in the first verse pleads to Yahweh to remember David.    At this point David is not alive but his action in building the Temple, ‘a habitation for the mighty God of Jacob’, allows the psalmist to expect in return for what David did, Yahweh will maintain David’s line and the city of Jerusalem for ever under his protection.  Episodes from the past which demonstrate God’s power and protection for his people can always be liturgically remembered so that the same power can be experienced today.

I think I must have at some point in past blog posts spoken about the way that this way of thinking about remembering a past event, so that it can be re-experienced or re-played in the present, is important as we try to understand the meaning of ‘memorial’ in the context of the Eucharist.  To remember the death of Christ is, in this Jewish framework of understanding, to make that death and all that flows from it present and available to us today.  This highly enriched understanding of the word memory is not obvious to us today, but it becomes clear when we have allowed ourselves to share the Hebrew understanding of what it means to remember something in the past where God was unambiguously at work.  Our English word remember makes it less easy to glimpse the full dynamic of what is involved with Jews remembering the Passover, or Christians remembering the self-offering of Christ on the Cross.

To summarise these rich ideas about the way that time, for the Jewish thinker, is sometimes collapsed so that the past can be brought into close relationship with the present, helps to penetrate the deeper meaning of memory as we are thinking about this season of Remembrance.  Remembrance Sunday and All Souls Day are both acts of giving honour and respect to groups who are no longer with us.  To remember is to place the dead in the hands and mercy of God.  A summary of what we want and pray for them is that the departed are given life by being ‘remembered’ by God.  We do not know exactly what that might mean in practice, but clearly, we want to live in the mind of God as the departed live within our minds and affections. 

I imagine that there are few people who have escaped the news and speculation concerning the now ex-Prince Andrew and the wider Royal Family.  I have no intention here of looking at this extensive coverage of Andrew’s woes, but I would like to consider a single word which is the title of a book about the former Duke of York and his family.  The word I am referring to is ‘entitled’.  It describes an attitude to life which is a common by-product of having almost unlimited privilege and wealth granted to an individual.  The word normally carries a negative connotation.  It implies that the individual who is indulged and has access to privilege without limit in one area of life, expects somehow that they should awarded similar treatment everywhere else.   The toddler who never learns the meaning of restraint from his/her parents will often grow up to be insufferable as a child.  Such children are described as ‘spoilt’ and the damage to them is often carried right through to their adulthood.  The spoilt child becomes the spoilt and entitled adult, though the areas of early over-indulgence are not necessarily to do with material wealth and possessions.

 Many people might consider that to have access to unlimited wealth and privilege is something highly desirable.  Indeed, we can understand how the burdens of debt and poverty suffered by many people make them long to be rich.  Just a little of the great wealth of the privileged uber-rich would, they think, quickly solve all their financial problems.  Wealth, too much or too little, is indeed a problem for many people.  One group find they have insufficient to pay for what they need – food, shelter and adequate provision for families.  Another group have more than enough, and thus they come to take for granted lifestyles that most of us cannot imagine.   Serious problems exist for those at both ends of this spectrum.  The very rich and indulged group sometimes get so used to being pampered by others that they become poor at making relationships and the ordinary skills of life which we use to manage our homes.  In their small section of society, everyone seems to get by and enjoy life without expending any obvious effort.  The ‘set’ they belong to dictates a style of living which promotes holidays, smart parties, alcohol consumption and constant shopping.  This does not, of course describe all wealthy people but there is a solid core of rich entitled people in Britain and elsewhere who are firmly tied into a lifestyle which is determined to extract pleasure and complete self-indulgence at every turn.

The disadvantages of poverty are clear to all, but the drawbacks to wealth are less obvious.  The lifestyle which leads to an individual being described as ‘entitled’ is one where there has been a forgetfulness of who and what they are and how they are still part of humanity, whether poor or rich.  The entitled ones are those who have, in many cases, become disconnected from large swathes of fellow humans who struggle with massive deprivations – hunger, poverty, ill-health, mental illness or disability.  To ignore the needs of others because their existence makes us feel uncomfortable is a kind of self-mutilation.  We deny ourselves the sensitivity to other people’s needs in case we find that our full enjoyment of life is in some way compromised by this exposure.  To put it another way, we draw in our antennae, which are designed to make us aware of need and pain in the world, to protect us and our enjoyment of material things.  To be unaware of need in others or make a deliberate choice to ignore it completely is to make a kind of contract with a devil of indifference so that we hand over part of our humanity in return for a greater intensity of pleasure.

There is another word which is often associated with the word entitled and that is the word ‘deference’.  Our first word, entitled, comes with an inevitable flavour of disapproval but deference is not necessarily a bad thing.  At its best deference acts as a kind of social glue. In very subtle ways, it helps people to negotiate tricky areas of decorum in society so that they know what is expected of them in company.  People functioning in a hierarchical structure, like the British class system, need to know how to behave to preserve their place or position.  Unlike the negative ideas commonly associated with the word ‘entitled’, deference is something that can play a positive role in maintaining stability in social structures.  There are numerous conventions we adhere to which show our common identification with society’s values.  It is still the convention in a court of law to stand when the judge enters, and it is common practice to allow a woman to go through a door ahead of a man.  Problems arise when deference becomes a negative thing – when it is demanded by men and women in places of power and wealth.  In our minds we can distinguish between a valid deference which is earned by its recipients and one which is given or demanded without a proper cause.  When politicians or members of the Royal Family misbehave, the deference we have traditionally held for those in high office is challenged.  We allow ourselves to have the treacherous thought that people ‘set over us’ are not in fact special or morally superior.  While it has been a convenient myth to ascribe social and moral excellence to those who occupy the highest ranks of society, the realities of the past few weeks show this to be far from the true situation.

As I reflected on these two words, entitled and deference, I recognised that both ideas have played a part in the way we think about the Church and its hierarchy.  For good and ill we have inherited a highly complex layered organisation which allows those in the highest ranks to think of themselves as having something approaching a divine authority over others.  Many years ago, I found myself studying some of the mediaeval texts that were used in the so-called Investiture Controversy that preoccupied secular monarchs and church authorities in the early Middle Ages.  One particular piece of writing had enormous influence when it was brought to France in the early 9th century from Constantinople.  The anonymous Greek author, known as the Pseudo-Dionysius, saw the entire cosmos, spiritual and material, as emanating down from God.  In his book, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, the Church and its liturgies had a crucial role to play in making this downward manifestation of God visible through the act of worship.  Hierarchy, priesthood and sacraments were the given means of participating in the Divine reality.  Secular monarchs (even our British ones) looked to a sacramental authority to receive their kingly status.  Priesthood and kingship were closely aligned ideas and many of us remember the anointing of King Charles that took place behind a screen at the hands of the archbishop and others during the 2023 coronation.  This view of the world as a fixed spiritual/material reality made it easier for elites to exercise their control over societies across mediaeval Europe.  The idea that there might be another way of organising society other than through divinely ordained hierarchies took centuries to be realised.

 The former Archbishop of Canterbury spoke of his frustration at the way deference to authority in the church often detrimentally affected communication across the institution.  My historical observations about the influence of the work, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, may help us to understand how a form of deference reaching back centuries has been allowed to mark the way people still think about office and power within the Church.  This way of thinking about an institution is not going to be healthy. It allows the leaders (bishops and clergy) to think of themselves as having moral and social authority, whether or not these have not been earned.  Somehow, we have to find a way to banish the spectre of entitlement from the church.  In a complicated and sometimes confusing hierarchical system which allows promotion and ambition, we find an environment where self-inflation, narcissism and hubris are sometimes given free rein.  Historically we have these inherited patterns of authority which allow, in susceptible individuals, the worst forms of overbearing and bullying behaviour to be manifest.  To counteract these unchristian manifestations of power, we must allow ourselves to be constantly challenging those with rank or hierarchical status to pattern themselves after Jesus.  He, after all, had a great deal to say about power and rank and the way that, when they are properly exercised, the one exercising them deserves the honour, deference and respect due to them.  These are the themes we come back to again and again.  It is because the Church often gets things so wrong in these areas that we have allowed our reputation in the court of public opinion to slip dangerously low in recent years.

Dear Bishop Sarah
As editor and contributors to Letters to a Broken Church, we congratulate you on your recent appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury. You have our good wishes. You will be taking on impossibly heavy burdens, and too often amid hostility simply for being a woman. We have no wish to add to those burdens.
You will be aware of our conviction that safeguarding and the care of complainants should be at the top of the Church’s agenda – and therefore of your agenda – for two reasons:
1) caring for the vulnerable should be a priority for every church and charitable organisation;

2) we presume that as Archbishop of Canterbury you will wish the Church of England to continue in good health. But if it continues to mishandle safeguarding complaints as it has in the past, and too often does at present, abuse scandals have the potential to cripple or even to destroy the Church.

We would like to offer you our assistance. We are arranging for a copy of Letters to a Broken Church to be sent to you under separate cover. We offer, among us, experience and expertise as survivors, abuse lawyers, theologians, sociologists, liturgists, journalists, and campaigners. We are ready to put that expertise at your disposal. In addition, we can bring you up to date on progress, if any, on the cases we describe in our book. You have only to ask. We hope you will work with us, and with other survivors and survivor advocates, in our mission on behalf of survivors of church abuse everywhere.

With best wishes,
Yours very sincerely,
Rev Janet Fife
Natalie Collins
Dr. Andrew Graystone
Rev Rosie Harper
Jo Kind
Matthew Ineson
Rev Stephen Parsons, Surviving Church
Rev Prof Martyn Percy
Martin Sewell
Simon Barrow, Ekklesia (publisher)

Damon is an apprentice devil tasked with learning to undermine and weaken the Church of England and wider Anglicanism. Lucius is a senior devil mentoring apprentices overseeing the work on all denominations. Lucius refers to the Church of England as the ‘English Patient’. Lucius is particularly keen to encourage the Church of England’s peculiar ecclesionomics, bloated ecclesiocracy and unaccountable episcocrats. Lucius draws on C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, published in 1942. These letters are published by Lucius for the benefit of new apprentices. – Lucius. 

Graduation

Dear Lucius

Well, it looks like I might have passed all my modules with flying colours, and I am now ready to wing out on my own following the end of my apprenticeship. So let me say ‘thank you’ for all your support over these past few years.  This has been a steep learning curve, but I think what I have gained from your mentorship is that if the English Patient is digging a deep hole for themselves, it’s best to not say much, and let them carry on.

In actual fact, you have taught me that to intervene might distract the church leadership, so it is sometimes better to say nothing. They are so focused on digging themselves out of a hole, that they have lost any sense of the fact that the hole was started by them in the first place.

So, all being well I graduate in a few weeks, and I have been promised that I can move on from this rather minor denomination to a more mainstream one. Of course, the English Patient doesn’t see itself as ‘minor’ at all, and that kind of hubris has really helped us here.

The English Patient is fully inured to its VIABLE – Very Important and Awfully Big identity – and thinks it is the best-placed people to resolve crises of their own making. They believe and act as though they are a law unto themselves. You have taught me that the longer this continues, the faster they will decline.  It all seems to be moving in the right way. So, thank you for all your mentoring and oversight. It is truly appreciated.

Your Servant, Damon.

Dear Damon

Mentoring you has been my pleasure.  Sometimes the hardest lessons we have to learn in the art of subversion is that less is more. There is no point in coming up with new wheezes to defeat the English Patient if they are so obviously capable of doing it to themselves. As they do this in spades, it is best to let them get on with it.

I’ve been mulling this over on areas like safeguarding, equal marriage, gender and governance. To be frank, the English Patient will inflict more wounds on itself than we could possibly compete with.  That they show themselves unfit to be followed, and unworthy of trust and confidence is not even to our credit. They really do this to themselves!

I know you are graduating and moving on to bigger projects. But I did wonder if some final reflections might be of help as you go to your new role?

The first thing to note is that the enemy teaches it’s faithful that pride comes before a fall. So it is wise of us to invest in that sense of pride, and do all we can to inflate the sense of self-importance and hubris that the English Patient has. This denomination is so set on its pre-eminence that it cannot see the levels of contempt this conveys to other denominations and people. That means that few will be inclined to help when the fall eventually comes.

The second point I want to raise relates to this. The English Patient is gripped by spiritual smugness. It thinks it is the best of all worlds. Catholic and Protestant. Reformed and Traditional. Liturgical and Free. It revels in its hybridity, with little notion that this assemblage of ‘treasures’ it has amassed is more like a magpie’s nest. The English Patient just steals and borrows from other denominations, so it has no sense of coherence anymore. 

Third, and related to the other two points, being an Anglican can mean almost anything these days. That is a terminal weakness, not a strength. We keep putting out new shiny things for the proverbial magpies to take. Corporate strategies – the English Patient is a sucker for those! How about a shiny now vision statement, just like a global company has? A sucker for those too. What about some more management, comms and PR. The English Patient can’t get enough of the stuff. It is very telling.

It is ironic that vanity, insecurity, pride and avarice combine to produce the fatal blow to the English Patient, and that they do it to themselves. The want to be bigger, stronger, better, demonstrate growth, expand…so they’ll literally take anything that delivers those results, regardless of their core values and historic traditions. Of course, in pursuing this path, they just sound like a desperately obese corporation from the 1980s that is either about to go bust, or be taken over by a small group of venture-capitalists who will take on the debt, leverage the land and the buildings, sell off unwanted churches and vicarages, and then cash out by selling what’s left to a bargain chain-store-faith-expression.

Who knows where the English Patient will end up? Not in recovery, I think.  They have too much self-belief to get the right help, and still believe they know best.  If I have taught you anything, Damon, it is that when a denomination gets into this state, you need do little else other than watch.

Your Mentor, Lucius.

One of the hazards of using a computer is that occasionally documents disappear into cyberspace, never to be recovered.  With all the recent excitement of a nomination for the new Archbishop of Canterbury, and the pressing need to say something on the topic for this blog, I put to one side a post I was writing on the Durham University Study of the survivors of Mike Pilavachi.  Then I saw this earlier post disappear in a massive computer failure.  I am now up and running again with a new s/h computer but have had to start completely from scratch with my assessment of this important Durham document.  It is one which I commend to all my readers with some enthusiasm. 

What is the reason for my strong approval of this Durham document written by Nina and Jonas Kurlberg and Mike Higton? I am struck, first of all, by the fact that is a document that turns the normal approach to safeguarding topics completely upside down.  Most documents on abuse and safeguarding in the Church begin with an examination of the issue from the perspective of the institution.  What went wrong and how can we in the church institution do better in the future?  These are the typical questions faced by many reports over the last couple of decades.  This new report, Resetting the balance – Listening to testimonies of harm in the Mike Pilavachi Case, starts in another place, the experience and reflections of survivors of an abusive ministry.  The authors have interviewed a representative cohort of those who were harmed by Pilavachi and we, as readers, are allowed to glimpse the way these victims understood the dynamics and processes of these harmful events.  This story of these events mentions bishops and safeguarding officers, but they are nowhere at the centre of the narrative.  What is at the centre of the text is a vivid account of the experience of victims and their involvement and relationship with the chief actor, Mike Pilavachi.  He was at the centre of the Soul Survivor movement over a significantly long period and much of the harm recounted in this report is as the result of his behaviour and actions.

In reading the report, I am reminded of the numerous books and articles penned by cult survivors.  Cults (and this would apply to many ‘orthodox’ religious groups) seldom sell themselves to the outside public by promoting their teaching in a written form.  Few ever became a Moonie, a Scientologist or even a member of a church plant through picking up literature and deciding that this was the way forward for them. While there may be exceptions to such a generalisation, the groups that proselytise (good and bad) suggest that religious conversion is almost always a social event.  By this I mean to indicate the way that individuals, pre-conversion, may find themselves drawn to associate with a group of apparently congenial people.  This normally begins as a social encounter, an invitation to a meal or a meeting.   Over time those invited may be subjected to some social pressure or what is described in some cases as ‘love-bombing’.  At some point they may find themselves caught up in the ideology of the group, much of which may have been hidden at the start of the association.   Speaking generally, people are converted to cults successfully when one or both of two elements are in evidence.  The first is a quality of community involvement which is unavailable elsewhere.  The would-be convert is offered the chance to belong.  Most of us were afforded the experience of belonging by our families of origin but, by the time we reach student/university age, we are ready for a different kind of belonging.  The offer of belonging that all spiritual groups hold outto their young seekers is often compelling.  A second important ingredient is the presence of a leader who possesses qualities of attractiveness and charisma to the would-be convert. 

The ‘Pilavachi effect’, at the heart of the Durham report, meant that large numbers of young people were drawn into the orbit of Mike Pilavachi.  They had become fascinated by his apparent spiritual giftedness, insight and sheer overwhelming physical presence.  The dynamics that were in operation are well described in the report, and they give us a sense of how the control over individuals by a charismatic figure is experienced.  The report is strongly focussed on Pilavachi’s relationship with individuals who formed part of the close inner circle of devotees.  By being close to the leader, these ‘chosen’ individuals thought themselves to be highly privileged and special.  In fact, they were placing themselves in a place of danger.  Being close to Pilavachi meant that they risked being harmed by his habits of manipulation and fickleness shown to any he was close to.  We are left to speculate on the reasons for the harm that was a feature of so many of Pilavachi’s relationships with his closest followers.  These young people had to endure inconsistent pastoral care, ghosting and sudden inexplicable blanking or withdrawal from relationships built up over a period of time.  One possible explanation for what was cruel behaviour, is to suggest that Pilavachi saw his relationships with his devotees as a means of obtaining some kind of sexualised gratification and power.  To enhance his enjoyment of this kind of power, there had to be a constant supply of new and fresh relationships to be available.  Once a new follower had been found who met his gratification needs at that moment, another existing relationship could be let go or switched off in some way.  There was a significant sexual dimension to some of these close relationships, as suggested by the massages and wrestling with young male followers.  These physical encounters, although highly unconventional and questionable, did not stray into actual criminal behaviour, so they were accepted as an example of an eccentricity – Mike being Mike.  No one was sufficiently clear-eyed as to be able to see the pattern of a cultic system where a leader manipulates, for his own emotional ends, the feelings and affections of numbers of victims.  His personality and giftedness were just too dominating for anyone to understand, let alone challenge.  Years of ‘successful’ work with young people which the wider Church and the honours system wanted to recognise, gave Pilavachi a form of immunity from the demands of proper supervision or oversight.   The Church of England seems to behave like an innocent in refusing to question the skills of those operating with the techniques of charismatic leadership.  It also seems unwilling to accept the way that leaders and congregations can easily be corrupted by the power dynamics in such churches.  There are dozens of examples of these dynamics in operation within the posts of this blog.  The language of psychology and sociology helps us to recognise that styles of leadership are potentially dangerous and toxic.  So much more work needs to be done that our Church can be protected from destructive styles of leadership which are incubated in superficial theology-lite styles of church practice emerging every week right across the country.

The Durham report is an important one to be understood by church leaders across the board.  By reflecting on and learning from the examples of damaging and toxic relationships in a church setting, we may be helped to prevent such styles of ministry ever appearing in the first place.  Some churches, like that of Pilavachi, offer patterns of ministry and pastoral care that are damaging and abusive.  When this is the case, we can usually trace the problem back to the social and psychological needs of the leader.   As with cultic groups, we find gatherings of Christians meeting ostensibly to worship God.  When we go deeper, we find that the congregation is operating to provide for the needs, not of its members, but to serve the emotional and narcissistic appetite of leaders.  Such a dynamic must first be thoroughly understood and then be expelled from the Church, if it is to have a chance to meet the deeper spiritual needs of our nation.

https://www.durham.ac.uk/research/institutes-and-centres/michael-ramsey-centre/research/resetting-the-balance

Damon is an apprentice devil tasked with learning to undermine and weaken the Church of England and wider Anglicanism. Lucius is a senior devil mentoring apprentices, overseeing the work on all denominations. Lucius refers to the Church of England as the ‘English Patient’. Lucius is particularly keen to encourage the Church of England’s peculiar ecclesionomics, bloated ecclesiocracy and unaccountable episcocrats. Lucius draws on C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, published in 1942. These letters are published by Lucius for the benefit of new apprentices. – Lucius. 

Church Reports

Dear Lucius

You may have recently seen the news from Lambeth Palace that there will be more reports coming out on sexuality, safeguarding, female clergy and how to be nice to people who can’t accept women.  I am a bit frustrated that all these reports are delayed. I mean, they take years to come out. And when they do, they say very little, so it doesn’t give us much to work with in exploiting potential weakness and developing our strategies for further subversion.  There is also an annoying tendency for the reports to welcome responses, with similarly long, elastic-like times to make representations and submissions.

What can we do about this tactic of the enemy? The trouble with all their ‘jam tomorrow’ talk is that the punters in the pews – our English Patient – eventually forget what all the fuss and scandal was about in the first place. So, we are being robbed of our opportunity to make mischief. Do you have any thoughts on how to combat this? I worry that all the scandals just get swept under the carpet or forgotten.

It’s surely our job to bring these things into the light (if you know what I mean?!). But our English Patient seems to prefer the darkness to the light, and is very much at home there. Is there anything in The Hades Handbook for Harming Religion that could help me here? I sometimes think that the English Patient has its very own copy and is now implementing selected chapters. Perhaps that’s why I feel so powerless at the moment?

Your Servant, Damon

Dear Damon,

I share your frustration here, but am going to counsel patience once more. Yes, it is true that the Church of England is run by Comms and PR people these days. So, the whole life of the English Patient is geared towards creating a good impression. This means that anything negative that could undermine appearances has to be masked or eliminated. So all the bad news is swept under the carpet.

The Good News (our version) about their bad news is that it is good news for us. By being so besotted with image and brand, they lose all sight of truth and honesty. The church leadership quickly develops forked tongues and adopts a serpentine language that slithers through debates and all manner of difficulties. This gives the speaker a sense of mastery. And as it is initially effective, they are soon fluent in the kind of slippery rhetoric you might expect from some slimy snake-oil salesman.

Church leaders these days sound like politicians. Too many policies, but very few principles. Too many promises but almost none are delivered. Too many reports, but never any action.  Too many excuses, but never taking any responsibility.

From our point of view, this could hardly be better. The English Patient becomes exhausted with all the verbiage and disenchanted with what the church leaders say. The beauty of this is that we don’t have to do much. If the church leaders can no longer be believed or trusted by their faithful, we can think about retiring somewhere nice in due course.

The folk in the pews now know that bishops don’t speak truthfully. So we can afford to let them carry on brushing scandals under the carpet, delaying their reports, and in general acting against truth and justice wherever possible, because they don’t like how it might make them look.

A church that acts like this is doomed, because honesty is the casualty every time. And we seriously don’t have to do much more here than help and encourage church leaders, with their Comms and PR executives, to carry on with this strategy. They are doing a superlative job in undermining the English Patient. Trust and confidence in the leadership will continue to be eroded whilst appearances and vanity are prioritized over truth and justice. (Not that I want to see the latter triumph – don’t get me wrong!).

It’s just that church leadership tells many white lies daily, and quite a lot of dark grey ones every single week. And increasingly, some whopping big lies are told to justify the unjustifiable, or just to get the church out of another mess it got itself into, and some hypothetical media storm. Paradoxically, the media are so used to the lies the church tells every day that they’ve got bored with the whole charade. This is another victory for us – delivered through yet another own goal scored by the opposition.

Just keep calm and carry on. There is little more damage you can do to the English Patient than it isn’t already doing to itself.

Your Mentor, Lucius.

Trying to write something intelligent about the elevation of Bishop Sarah Mullally to the post of Archbishop of Canterbury is like attempting to stand still on a moving escalator.  The moment that you think you understand what might be happening is also the moment that you realise that the information you had latched on to is now out of date and does not reflect what is currently happening in the Anglican world.  What follows here is not an all-round commentary on the significant news coming out of Lambeth Palace.  It is merely a number of observations that can be made about the constantly changing scene that is appearing before us as we accustom ourselves to the new reality of a female Archbishop.

My regular readers will know that Surviving Church will not be affected by the fact that a woman has been nominated.   Several names of female candidates had been mentioned already, and most people have got used to the idea, indeed probability, that a female candidate would emerge as the one chosen for the post.  We could spend time reflecting on qualities needed for an Anglican leader and whether Mullally has these qualities.  As I do not know the new nominee, I have only the opinion and knowledge of others to make the judgement as to whether she has the requisite gifts of leadership, eloquence, pastoral skill and theological competence.   There are those who have raised queries in each of these areas over her suitability for the new post.  I note these criticisms but do not want to suggest that my opinion has anything to add to the discussion in these areas.

The one area where I may have something to say is in the area of safeguarding.  I am no expert in understanding in detail how safeguarding protocols operate in the Church, but I do bear witness to the agony of survivors as well as the falsely accused when they have fallen foul of the Church’s safeguarding juggernaut.  When things to do with safeguarding do go wrong in the Church of England, the amount of pain and suffering is considerable.  Speaking generally, the Diocese of London has been an arena for a variety of well publicised cases of safeguarding failure, including Father Alan Griffin and Survivor N. The common features of both these stories was a profound lack of pastoral sensitivity as well as the extensive use of reputational management firms and church lawyers in attempts to protect the institution of the Church of England.  Having looked again at the material which has appeared on this blog, which involved suicide and attempted suicide, one has to conclude that the Church is not good at protecting the victims of abuse and false accusation.  The culture of Mullally’s diocese under her watch seems to be strongly and consistently defensive of the privileges of the powerful.  Even if the heavy lifting of protecting the institution was done by firms of lawyers such as Winckworth Sherwood and crisis management firms like Luther Pendragon, there is no sense that any of the Church authorities, from the bishop downwards, were prepared to stick up for victims.  If we were looking for a prophetic voice, one seeking to ‘defend the poor and the fatherless’, in our new Archbishop-designate, we cannot expect to find it in Bishop Mullally.

The mention of church lawyers reminds us of the heavily protectionist culture of Lambeth Palace and Church House over the past few years.  Watching the performance of General Synod in recent years has been like witnessing a boxing match between two very unequal opponents.  Plucky individuals like Martin Sewell produce material and ask questions which are either not answered or drowned in procedural obfuscation.  For those who long to see the Church enter a period of real contrition for the pain of abuse survivors, we look for a prophet.  Somehow the lawyered up central administration of the Church has consistently thwarted this possibility.  The weight of institutional inertia weighs down and defeats any scattered voices of prophetic pleading.

I have no doubt that Sarah Mullally has many good personal qualities and the skills of management which are needed by the Church at this time.  She can only bring the qualities she has to the post, and we should not criticise her for not being something else.  But, from my personal perspective, I regret that the successful candidate lacks the much-needed quality, that of prophetic transparency, which would communicate with a public who long for human authenticity in a religious leader.  The suffocating control of church bureaucrats which create the current church climate will not be challenged in the Mullally regime. These officials have effectively in their choice of candidate decided what qualities the new Archbishop should have.  If the Mullally tenure is less than successful, it is those who chose her who must carry much of the responsibility for this failure.

Looking beyond Mullally’s time as Archbishop, I believe that what will be said is that in 2025 a great opportunity for the Church of England was missed.  The general public had begun to understand clearly that any organisation that obstructs justice and healing for some of its members was in urgent need of revolutionary reform.  Energetic change and honest speaking were required but what was delivered was the kind of safety that left the power brokers of the Church firmly in charge alongside a general culture of churchiness which had little appeal or attraction to the outsider.  In short, we have an Archbishop who is a creature of the system rather than one who will challenge it.  It was always going to be difficult or impossible for any leader to stand sufficiently on the outside of the institution to be able to challenge it, but many of us wanted that effort to be made.  The safeguarding cause may not be the only issue facing the new Archbishop, but it is one that most people understand.  It could have been the issue that allowed the Church to be seen as one that cares, that loves and consistently pursues justice. 

Damon is an apprentice devil tasked with learning to undermine and weaken the Church of England and wider Anglicanism. Lucius is a senior devil mentoring apprentices overseeing the work on all denominations. Lucius refers to the Church of England as the ‘English Patient’. Lucius is particularly keen to encourage the Church of England’s peculiar ecclesionomics, bloated ecclesiocracy and unaccountable episcocrats. Lucius draws on C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, published in 1942. These letters are published by Lucius for the benefit of new apprentices. – Lucius. 

Safeguarding the Church

Dear Lucius

After much success on the safeguarding front, there are signs of a fightback from the ecclesiocrats. They have recently advertised for some new Head Honcho who will apparently take the English Patient a few more steps towards independent scrutiny. We of course already know that this is another PR-trot around the Lambeth Palace paddock, and it will be business as usual, so I am not worried by the disingenuous policy announcements and spin that comes from the Archbishops’ Council. Had we recruited some crack team of double agents, we could have hardly done better.

No, what worries me is the appearance of action on safeguarding, and the possibility of the average worshipper being duped. I find myself in a double-bind here.  It is meant to be us misleading the faithful, not stopping the Church of England hierarchy doing this to their own people.  True, we are about slightly different things here. The hierarchy of the English Patient is trying to present a positive gloss on areas like safeguarding, and create the (false) impression of progress and the appearance of things improving. We know that is a lie, of course. So does the hierarchy of the English Patient.

So you can appreciate my dilemma here. Do I expose the lies? Or do try and come up with other falsities which add to overall strategy of misleading churchgoers? I’d be grateful for some help on this one, because deception is such a delicate art, and to be honest, I find the hierarchy of the Church of England to be really rather good at this game, and that is slightly irksome to say the least. Any advice?

Your Servant, Damon

Dear Damon

I rather agree that this is perplexing, and the issues you describe would usually be tackled in the post-apprentice training.  But as you have the cure of souls for the English Patient in your own right, it only seems proper that I offer some counsel for your edification and encouragement. Happily, a new safeguarding charter by the Church of England was sent to me the other day. It turns out to be a perfect recipe for the further destruction and implosion of congregations.

In fact, it is a veritable gold mine of undeliverable and incoherent policies, and once people try to follow the rubrics, they’ll quickly realize there is little point in going to church at all. So, here are three nuggets from the document.

First, anyone working with children and vulnerable adults has to be checked, processed and regulated.  Helpfully from our point of view, a ‘’vulnerable adult’’ is on the one hand someone unable to look after themselves. But more helpfully, it also includes anyone who seeks support from the church, either temporarily or permanently. So anyone with any needs at all that the church might help with is ‘’potentially vulnerable’’. Which means anyone trying to help or support anyone at all, pastorally, spiritually or otherwise, falls in the category of needing authorization, vetting, approval and regulating.

Second, the new regulations make it clear that anyone who does anything in church that has an interface with anyone else (who, let us not forget, could be ‘’potentially vulnerable’’) means they need regulating too.  Under the old regulations it was just licensed ministers, the choir master, Sunday School leaders and maybe the layperson who preached the odd sermon. Now, the new regulations say that anyone who has contact with a child or ‘’potentially vulnerable adult’’ must be vetted and approved. So that covers anyone involved in visual, verbal or written communication, or exercising any power or influence in church. Basically, that means almost everyone who goes to church.

Third, and you really cannot make up this good news, there is a sort of ‘’get out clause’’. If you are one of the helpers doing the post-church refreshments and someone approached you who was upset, you can only talk to them by making it clear that you cannot help at all, and then you must direct them to the designated person who is vetted and approved.  This is great, because in the meaning of the counsel offered, churchgoers will get into trouble if they attempt to help any child or ‘’potentially vulnerable adult’’ unless they have been licensed to do so, been trained, scrutinized and are now regulated.

All of the above has been passed through the ecclesiastical lawyers – arguably our greatest allies, along with the bishops and ecclesiocrats – and clergy and congregations are threatened with dire legal consequences if they default on the counsel. Naturally, clergy who might feel that they have just become ‘’potentially vulnerable adults’’ after they read the new regulations will be petrified when they learn that they carry all the responsibility for implementing this, but have no power to order around their laity and volunteers.

The conclusion that believers would draw from the document is that they must not get involved in helping others unless they have been vetted and licensed. And if they haven’t got the appropriate training and fulfilled the regulatory requirements, they must decline to help and find somebody who fulfils the criteria the ecclesiocrats have laid out.  Most people reading the document would conclude that church is an unsafe space to be, brimming with serious risks and potential hazards, but that if they were to try and respond to anyone in need, they might expose themselves and the English Patient to further risk. So, it is best to stay at home. If you do happen to go to church, make sure you don’t talk to anyone who needs help of any kind. Anyone, really.

To be honest, Damon, safeguarding is the gift that keeps on giving to us. And here we have not so much struck gold as found the most humungous gold mine that defied my wildest expectations.  Once worshippers realize what these new regulations actually mean, they’ll stop going to church, and tune into Sunday Worship on the BBC, or play some old Harry Secombe religious vinyl records. 

I know it is a bit naughty of me to confess this, but even I had a soft spot for his Welsh baritone voice singing gospel hymns. It’s funny how we learn to admire and respect the opposition after we have been fighting them for so long. And we really thought we could turn Harry Secombe to the Dark Side after some episodes of the Goon Show, but it turns out that he had a stubborn religious streak. Well, I suppose we can’t convert everyone.

Then again, we may not need to. These new safeguarding regulations are an entire pack of nails in the proverbial coffin of the English Patient. It makes the whole business of going to church almost impossible, and subjects every service and church event to a multi-faceted risk-register that must be managed – on pain of death. I find myself almost feeling sorry for churchgoers and clergy. But then I remind myself of our purpose. And then I come to my senses, and realize how blessed we are with such a clueless English Patient.

So, don’t worry about these new initiatives in safeguarding. This is another example of the English Patient pressing the self-destruct button. We hardly need to give them a helping hand at all here, save perhaps to encourage the ecclesiocrats in their bid to take over all responsibility for ministry, monitor the clergy, vet the laity, police the worship and all church events, and otherwise regulate congregations out of existence. And all in the name of safeguarding!

I just think it is wickedly funny how diabolical and dangerous safeguarding in the Church of England has now become. So, let your English Patient continue. This is another episode of ‘’Carry on Regardless’’, with extra farce and slapstick.  To be honest, this is all heading in the right direction from our perspective.

Your Mentor, Lucius

Damon is an apprentice devil tasked with learning to undermine and weaken the Church of England and wider Anglicanism. Lucius is a senior devil mentoring apprentices overseeing the work on all denominations. Lucius refers to the Church of England as the ‘English Patient’. Lucius is particularly keen to encourage the Church of England’s peculiar ecclesionomics, bloated ecclesiocracy and unaccountable episcocrats. Lucius draws on C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, published in 1942. These letters are published by Lucius for the benefit of new apprentices. – Lucius. 

Worship Workshop

Dear Lucius,

As you know, we have had a lot of success over the past fifty years with our long-term strategy of encouraging the churches to thin out the content of hymns, and replacing them with bland modern choruses that largely describe how the worshipper feels about G*d, and they would like G*d to feel about them. These choruses are often sung repetitively, have little core dogma, so from our point of view are very time-consuming and content-lite, which is ideal. The choruses are promoted by the churches under the banner of ‘relevance’’, which is also helpful, as the content increasingly has no relevance to core Christian teaching.

Admittedly we did not devise this strategy. But it is another one of these ‘bold initiatives’ of the church that we have been happy to support, as it has divided congregations whilst also gradually undermining shared Christian teachings and creating a vacuum where personal feelings and individualism can flourish.

Of course, I always worry that our PR team and Spin-Meisters go too far when they suggest novel projects like the Laodiciean Hymnal, with new hymns for the 21^st century changed slightly to get away from the stuffiness of the 19^th century. Some Christians might not notice the likes of ‘Take My Life and Let Me Be’, ‘O God Our Enabler in Ages Past’, and ‘All Hail the Influence of Jesus’ Name’ sneaking under the radar. But we still have some way to go before the likes of  ‘What an Acquaintance We Have in Jesus’, ‘Sit Up, Sit up for Jesus’, ‘Spirit of the Living God, Fall Somewhere Near Me’, and ‘Be Thou My Hobby’ feel normal.

We are also some distance from the kind of rendering of Oh Jesus I have Promised that we committed ourselves to at the last Apprentice Conference. You may remember Diablo proposed some new words before he graduated and went to work on American Methodism:

Oh Jesus I have tentatively committed

To serve thee for an agreed period of time, 

(subject to review)

Be thou ever near me, 

(but not too close, cause I need my space)

My colleague and my friend.

I do actually fear the battle

On grounds of health and safety

I and I will only wander from the pathway occasionally,

For some shopping and a coffee break

For which you can still be my guide.

I think as we agreed at the time, although these words are accurate in terms of where we want believers to land, the hymn doesn’t scan to any of the tunes Christians use. So I have been developing my thinking as part of my portfolio for assessment later this year, and specifically from the module on Worship Disruption, which has been superbly taught. Not only is the history of liturgical and hymnody conflict well presented, we have also been able to liaise with students studying Anti-Pastoral Theology and Deliturgical Studies.

Can I therefore run this by you for informal assessment? It is set to the tune and metre of Michael Saward’s ‘Ch***t Triumphant’ and I have rewritten this for our English Patient as ‘Church Triumphal’. I think this works well, but before I submit for formal assessment I wonder if you could take a look and comment? I’d be most grateful.  Your Servant, Damon

1. Church triumphal, ere’ mansplaining,

Ruling everything!

Just the greatest, Ever English

Hear us as we sing,

We’re the greatest show in town

Such high renown, with eternal fame.

2. Church of England, ever glorious

Super-Duper-Thing!

Best of churches, none our equal

Hear the others whinge!

We’re the greatest show…

3. We’ve got bishops and cathedrals

Lots of pretty bling

None can match us, we’re fantastic

See the others cringe!

We’re the greatest show…

4. We’re not Baptists, nor like Papists

All those others err

We are best and loved by God

His True Church on Earth!

We’re the greatest show…

5. Church Established, Truly Awesome!

Our Leader is the King! 

Nonconformists can’t do ritual

Incense! Censors! Swing! 

We’re the greatest show…

6. Church of England, slightly sexist

Soaring on our wings!

Pompous, classist, condescending 

Loves to do its thing.

We’re the greatest show…

7. Self-regarding, few Remaining

Slightly short of cash

Give us all your hard-won earnings

Help restore our stash.

We’re the greatest show…

8. Hopeless bishops, stuck for ever

Enthroned on High above

Sin and Faults and Hell shall never

Shut their PR up!

We’re the greatest show…

9. Hearts and voices ever-whingeing 

Through the aeons long

All is lost through steady phasing –

Still, we’re never wrong!

We’re the greatest show in town

Such high renown, with eternal fame.

Dear Damon

Your new hymn perfectly captures the essence – indeed, the very worshipping heart – of your English Patient. The patient is in love with themselves, and like Narcissus, just besotted with how they look to others and how they appear to themselves. So, well done on putting into a hymn such ignoble truths!  I can see that this portfolio of yours is going to be a rich and rewarding read. Naturally, I can’t see the English Patients ever singing your revised hymn collectively and out loud. But under their breath, smugly, they’ll be humming it all the time.

What I think you could usefully develop in your portfolio a little bit more is to explore how and why all the best ideas to undermine the church actually come from within the church itself. We really don’t need to do a lot, other than encourage every manoeuvre that the English Patient makes.

Perhaps your portfolio might want to reflect on this a little bit more? I mean, we obviously teach Anti-Pastoral Theology as an art.  But if you take a look at how an ordinary diocesan HQ works these days, the theory, art and practice are all areas we could hardly improve on.

Also, our Anti-Pastoral Theology is an optional module. But your English Patient has made this a compulsory subject and one that is permanently assessed, and inflicts all manner of box-ticking pointless bureaucratic nonsense on churches, and frightful organisational migraines on ordinary clergy and congregations. Hell would be sheer hell if it was run like that! Honestly, if we were devising a strategy from scratch to demoralise churches, I have to say the hierarchy of the English Patient beat us to it long ago, and we could hardly better their results.

I think the ‘Lessons Learned’ (pun intended) review of our module and your portfolio for assessment is already clear. Less is more? Your English Patient is the architect and expert of their own implosion. All you need do is encourage them to keep digging. As you can surely see, the holes just get deeper. Anyway, many thanks for the new hymn, which I will cheerfully hum in my lunchbreak.

Your Mentor, Lucius.