The surprising beauty of Mass in a burnt-out church

As I sat down on the folding chair at Sunday morning Parish Mass, it sank a little into the mud. We were in a tent with one side open, floored with bruised and quaggy grass, like an agricultural show on a chill bank holiday.

There were 13 of us and nine in the choir, who sang a brief setting by Monteverdi. The celebrant, the Revd Kate Harrison, in alb and stole, sat behind the wooden altar on a tall office chair. A server produced clouds of incense with a thurible. A homemade board hanging from the tent-poles gave the hymn numbers: 430, 234, 408, 440. A blackbird joined in after Communion.

We were in the fresh spring air because the church of St Mark, in St John’s Wood, had burnt down on 26 January, leaving nothing but empty windows, a shell of walls and a charred steeple.

The chalice was in the locked safe in the shell that could not be entered, the hymn books had turned to gases

When Mrs Harrison – Mother Kate to her Anglo-Catholic flock – looked out of the window next morning, having gone to bed at 3 a.m. in a room provided by a neighbour, it was the spire she saw. ‘Still pointing to heaven, it meant hope,’ she recalls. ‘Then through the empty doorway, I saw the font amid the charred bits of timber, and the eagle lectern standing there. It was a kind of defiance.’

Some suggested the congregation might join a nearby church, but from the first Mother Kate was decided: they would begin again here. The pews were ashes, the chalice was in the locked safe in the shell that could not be entered, the hymn books had turned to gases. (St Andrew’s, Clewer, by the Thames at Windsor, lent a stock of the familiar green-bound New English Hymnal.