Just for a moment, the vicar became the embodiment of that most useful of recently coined words: enshittification. This normally excellent woman, who runs her numerous parishes with passion and aplomb, had donned a squishy poo emoji hat. She stood within the nave of her 800 year-old church, next to the Advent candle, with a brown coiled fake turd on her head. The enshittified vicar explained to the congregation that the message of Christmas is that God visits us in our “poo-ey lives”. Like the Christ child in the “poo-ey stable”, God becomes manifest in our stinking world. The congregation looked ahead glassily. Perhaps somewhere deep in the recesses of the collective unconsciousness, they knew that sermons, the church, Christianity, vicars, hadn’t always been this way, that there had once been a reverent majesty to a Christmas carol service. Thankfully the sermon ended, she took off her scat hat, and everyone sang the remainder of the carols with gusto.
