Kingdom come

There’s something special about encountering a great work of art for the very first time. Until it was televised as part of the BBC Proms from the Royal Albert Hall I had never listened to Edward Elgar’s oratorio, The Kingdom.

The theme of this masterpiece is the birth of the Christian Church. Following Jesus’ return to the dimension he had come from, his followers wait, in hope; they receive the gift of the Holy Spirit with them and within them, a gift which enables them to heal people, and to preach fearlessly despite opposition; they find settled peace and security in knowing themselves God’s precious children.

Thousands of listeners in the Royal Albert Hall were joined by a prime-time television audience in hearing an exquisitely-crafted 100-minute exposition, using the words of the Bible, of the very heart of the Christian faith.

I’ve loved Elgar’s music since I was a teenager, beginning I suppose with his Pomp and Circumstance marches and the Enigma Variations. I remember many years ago being troubled by The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar’s setting of a poem about an old man facing death. The poem reflected the Roman Catholic beliefs shared by its author Cardinal Newman and Elgar himself.

Not comfortable with Catholic views on Purgatory, I was puzzled that such heart-meltingly beautiful music could be expressing something I deemed untrue. ‘Can’t you simply enjoy the loveliness of it?’ said a friend who was an atheist. But I didn’t think I could.

I wonder what folk in the Proms audience who were not Christians made of The Kingdom. Perhaps they were able to simply appreciate the splendour of it, while viewing it as a fable. But dramas resonate with us because they reflect something in us, some struggle, some goal missed or attained. And if you don’t believe in the God who was central to the first Christians’ thinking, the God through whom ordinary people do extraordinary things, what would the work have to say to you? But I’m convinced that some would have had their eyes opened for the first time to the wonder of the Christian good news.

The irony is that Elgar was losing his own faith at the time he wrote The Kingdom in 1906. Some have questioned if he was only ever a ‘cultural Catholic’ with no deep personal faith, but this seems unlikely. He said of Gerontius (1900) that it contained ‘the best of me’, expressing his ‘insidest inside.’ But six years later as he struggled to complete The Kingdom his faith was crumbling.

This is hard to believe, since he is still able to articulate the faith in music with such insight and apparent conviction.  It makes us question ourselves: do we find ourselves still articulating the faith with what looks like sincerity when we are actually questioning if it is true of us any more, or true at all?

Edward Elgar seems to have moved from faith to an up-beat humanism majoring on hope and love in the face of tragedy.  And still he wrote music of intense beauty – including the poignant Cello Concerto and the breathtaking loveliness of the First Symphony’s slow movement.

It seems to me that if God exists and God is good, then all beauty is in some way an expression of God, a pointer to God. I wonder if all of us who appreciate beauty, all of us who express beauty in our lives, our relationships and the things we create have glimpsed something of God, even though our understandings of truth might be widely divergent. Truth-seeking is important, but in beauty God gives all of us an insight into the divine.

We may be concerned about those who have once believed but have lost their faith. We can entrust them to the grace of a God who forever calls us home.

And what about ourselves, if we feel we’ve only ever been ‘cultural’ Christians, or that we’re singing the old song but no longer with conviction, or that we have simply walked away from God, or fear we no longer believe but lack the courage to admit this to ourselves let alone anyone else.

May we hear as if for the first time the story The Kingdom tells, a story of the bigness of God’s love, the God who speaks to us in a myriad of ways, including through Edward Elgar’s sublime scores.

The Church, as the last gentle pages of The Kingdom reminds us, is a gracious gathering together by God of those who have been separated – by geography, or ethnicity, or guilt, or unbelief.

‘As this broken bread was grain scattered upon the mountains and gathered together became one, so may Thy Church be gathered together from the bounds of the earth into Thy Kingdom.’

(Christian Viepoint column from the Highland News dated 31st July 2014)

The context of Christmas

One Saturday recently I was reading when I found myself no longer able to understand words and phrases. It was an odd sensation – I’d see a string of characters which I knew was a word, a symbol which would normally instantly deliver meaning to me, but on that occasion it was merely a shape on the page.

A few minutes later, I was reading normally again, but I went to the doctor and was referred to the neurovascular specialist at Raigmore Hospital. He concluded that I’d had what he called a ‘mini-stroke’ – a Transient Ischaemic Attack (TIA). Such TIAs are a sign of increased risk of full-blown strokes and heart issues, and so the doctor put me on medication to reduce this risk factor.

This was a very scary experience, which left me with a heightened consciousness of the fragility of life. This may not be a cheerful subject to reflect on the week before Christmas, but I suggest that any genuine Christmas celebration must take into account a context of darkness and pain as well as joy and light.

Following my mini-stroke, there were times when I felt very alone. My wife, family and friends, and NHS staff have been wonderfully loving and supportive – indeed at such times you realise how much you are loved – yet ultimately you are the one with the problem.

The experience left me empathising more deeply with those who suffer physically or mentally – young, dancing spirits constrained by frail bodies – and the many for whom each day is a parched desert of loneliness. This Christmas, may we embrace in love and compassion those who are hurting.

Having been told not to drive for a month, I found myself surprised by a stab of jealousy at those, clearly older than me, whom I saw driving around cheerfully. I wondered if they knew how blessed they were? Sometimes we need to see ourselves through someone else’s eyes to realise our own good fortune.  This Christmas, may we discern the ways in which we have been blessed, and be truly thankful.

And over the last weeks, I’ve been reminded of a lesson I am always learning, but never quite learning. The lesson that I don’t need always to be doing, filling my life with busyness, driven to achieve by some inner neediness. It is more than OK just to be, to love life, to make time for laughter, to have fun. And the message of Christmas is that we are loved by God and secure in God, a divine regard which sets us free to celebrate.

But there’s a question we ask in our darker moments. Do these comforting religious thoughts actually represent anything real? After my TIA, I felt under a shadow. I prayed and called out to God, but I had no sense of God and it seemed that the foundation was swept from under me. What does it mean to talk about Christ being light when you can see only darkness?

I interpreted people’s kindness to me as a whisper of grace, an evidence of God’s concern. But then I wondered if it were merely an expression of human grace.

I heard a sermon about Jesus’ words to one of the men who died with him ‘Today you will be with me in paradise.’ That, said the preacher, can be our daily experience – encounter with God in a spiritual dimension. But is this true, I wondered, or just words? I wanted a God who walks with us through dark places and does not leave us.

Then one day it was as if God were saying ‘You are reaching up, trying to find me. But you are looking in the wrong place. I am here, within you. I am the foundation, the ground of your being. You are secure in me.’

Often, anxiety blinds me to this sense of God as foundation. But I continue to believe. I have always held in a deep way to the principle ‘Don’t doubt in the darkness what you saw in the light.’ And I take my stand in a centuries-old tradition of faith alongside the many millions who believe that in Jesus Christ God walks with us through dark places.

‘Christmas’ is a symbol of that promise – light piercing darkness, God entering history. The symptom of my TIA was seeing a symbol yet not discerning its meaning. In the same way it’s possible to see the symbol of Christmas while remaining blind to its significance.

I believe that the more our eyes are opened to the meaning of Christmas, the more we can truly celebrate. We do not need to pretend for the duration that darkness doesn’t exist, for a light has come among us more powerful than deepest darkness. Happy Christmas!

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 19th December 2013)

A life in letters: Betjeman, Sir John (1906-1984)

One afternoon in the late 1960s, our English teacher Mr Mason put on a long-playing record for us to listen to. (He was the best English teacher we had – was his first name really ‘James’ or did we just call him that after the well-known actor?) Anyway, the record was of John Betjeman (poet, broadcaster, writer) reading his poem A subaltern’s love song, a paean of passion for tennis-playing Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

For the first time, I was hearing poetry which used what seemed to me to be contemporary language (although in fact already by the 1960s it was rather dated) and addressing everyday issues. Older poetry might deal with similar themes, but in their lines  experiences were expressed in complex language which I didn’t yet have the linguistic skills to penetrate. But Betjeman – this was visceral, powerful, real – I found in these lines an intense relevance which others of my age probably found in the Beatles’ songs.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn

How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won.

And that evening, as speaker and girl sat in the Hillman outside a Golf Club Ball which they never quite managed to enter, there was a (to me) satisfactory conclusion:

We sat in the car park till twenty to one

And now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn

After this introduction to Betjeman I explored his work, and came across some further lines (from Chapter VIII of the poet’s verse autobiography Summoned by Bells) which I was drawn to:

An only child, deliciously apart,

Misunderstood and not like other boys,

Deep, dark and pitiful I saw myself

In my mind’s mirror, every step I took

A fascinating study to the world.

The apartness and self-scrutiny of the only child described here resonated with me, although I don’t think I would have described the experience as ‘delicious’. I remember reading these lines to my mother, and her suspicion (unarticulated) that Betjeman was claiming to be gay. Perhaps as a teenager I was seeking to characterise myself as different, and somehow eccentric as a way of coping with, or making a virtue of the difficulties I found in relationships, and the poet’s words helped to authenticate the difference I aspired to.

(Incidentally, I distinctly recall seeing in print another version of the line ‘A fascinating study to the world’ – perhaps it was from a draft? – which read ‘An object of absorbing interest’ which seems to me to be more powerful and effective than the final version.)

The poignancy of another of Betjeman’s poems Five o’clock shadow has haunted me ever since I first read it. It describes terror experienced in the men’s ward. The doctors are playing a ‘foursome out on the links’ at the end of their shift; Sister ‘is putting her feet up’; the visiting relatives, having done their bit, are ‘making for home and a nice big tea and the telly.’ The patients (or at least one patient) are left to their visceral fear and sense of abandonment. ‘This is the time of day when we feel betrayed’ and (a line of aching sadness) ‘this is the time of day which is worse than night.’

I remember in the late 1980s staying overnight with friends in the north of England on a trip down to Wales. It was at a time when I was depressed and anxious, and overnight, unable to sleep because of heavy traffic on the road outside, I had decided I simply couldn’t cope with the planned holiday, and would (without telling my friends) head home in the morning rather than continuing south. Sitting on the edge of the bed waiting for it to be time to head downstairs for breakfast, I read the only interesting book in the room, a copy of John Betjeman’s picture book for children, Archie and the strict Baptists. It’s a fictionalised version of scenes from the life of Archie is the poet’s teddy to which (together with a toy elephant) he was attached throughout his life. In the book, Archie appears as a member of the Strict Baptist denomination – to which the folk I was staying belonged.

One Christmas in the 1970s, my mother pointed out in the Christmas issue of a women’s magazine the last three stanzas of Betjeman’s poem Christmas.

And is it true? and is it true?

This most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,

A Baby in an ox’s stall?

The Maker of the stars and sea

Become a Child on earth for me?

And is it true? For if it is,

No loving fingers tying strings

Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie so kindly meant.

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare -

That God was Man in Palestine

And lives to-day in Bread and Wine.

Could this man be a Christian, my mother wondered, considering the issue from her very polarised perspective on whether one was ‘in’ or ‘out’. Was he saying it was true, or wasn’t he, she mused.

Well, John Betjeman had a long-term commitment to the Anglican Church. He celebrated faith, but he also struggled with doubt, and I believe the tension between believing and doubting is reflected in these lines.  Betjeman wrote to his friend Evelyn Waugh in 1947 ‘I do know for certain that there is nothing else I want to believe but that Our Lord was the son of God and all He said is true.’

And seven years later he wrote in the Spectator ‘The only practical way to face the dreaded lonely journey into Eternity seems to me the Christian one. I therefore try to believe that Christ was God, made Man and gives Eternal Life, and that I may be confirmed in this belief by clinging to the sacraments and by prayer.’ *

Betjeman concludes his poem on The Conversion of St Paul with these moving lines which speak to all of us who ever find ourselves living, somewhere between faith and doubt:

What is conversion? Not at all

For me the experience of St Paul,

No blinding light, a fitful glow

Is all the light of faith I know

Which sometimes goes completely out

And leaves me plunging into doubt

Until I will myself to go

And worship in God's house below –

My parish church -and even there

I find distractions everywhere.

What is Conversion? Turning round

To gaze upon a love profound.

For some of us see Jesus plain

And never once look back again,

And some of us have seen and known

And turned and gone away alone,

But most of us turn slow to see

The figure hanging on a tree

And stumble on and blindly grope

Upheld by intermittent hope.

God grant before we die we all

May see the light as did St Paul.

*These quotations are from Faith and doubt of John Betjeman: An anthology of Betjeman’s religious verse, Edited and introduced by Kevin J. Gardner, London, 2005 p xv

Entrusting yourself to God

I had a ritual as a young child about to go somewhere scary like visiting the dentist. I’d close a door in the house, letting my fingers rest for a few seconds on the handle. ‘The next time I touch this,’ I’d tell myself, ‘all will be well.’  I guess I was grasping for assurance that I’d make it through the experience.

Just before Christmas, I had another of those scary visits to make – I had a small operation at the Day Case Unit at Raigmore Hospital. I was particularly apprehensive about this because a general anaesthetic was required. Much as I enjoy sleeping, the idea of being deprived of consciousness didn’t appeal.

What helped in the hours before the op was the thought that God was there, that I could entrust myself to God and was therefore utterly secure. With that knowledge I was able to walk calmly into the outer precincts of the operating theatre, and climb on a trolley. (Although I did catch myself thinking ‘The next time my feet touch the floor, all will be well.’)

The anaesthetists were gentle and reassuring. Before I knew it I was opening my eyes in the recovery area. I believe I was able to be calm not primarily because I trusted the medics – though I did, and they were brilliant – but because I was enabled to rely on God.

This sense of God’s reliability was not, I must emphasise, an obviously supernatural or spiritual experience. It was no more and no less that an awareness that God was present, and an instinctive sense that because God was present I need not fear.

It’s my guess that as Christians we should entrust ourselves to God in this way whatever we are doing, no matter whether mundane or life-changing. Even in the final act of feeling the fear and doing it anyway – the act of dying – we can entrust ourselves into the care of God:  in a sense all our lives are preparing us for that great entrusting.

Why do we find it so hard to entrust daily life to God?  Is it because in the routine we have confidence in our own abilities, in our social networks and the resources we can access, and feel perfectly capable of handling whatever the day throws at us?

Clearly it’s not appropriate for us to expect God to solve all our problems without our input, for God has given us intelligence, creativity and resources and expects us to use these constantly to make a success of our lives. But ultimately it’s God we are depending on, not our abilities and resources. God is with us in our wrestling with difficulties and emotions, in our problem-solving, in our creativity. The creative solutions are both our work and God’s gift.

Why was so aware of God’s presence that scary moment morning at Raigmore? Not because I had made a big decision to entrust myself to God. The sense of God’s reliable presence was there before the entrusting.  It came as a precious gift, perhaps an answer to people’s prayers for me.

What about times when we have no reassuring sense of God’s presence, times when we entrust ourselves to God and things go horribly wrong? Do we walk away sadly, convinced that all our experiences of grace have been illusions? Or do we remind ourselves of everything we have ever known of God’s love and in the light of those memories resolve to keep believing that our God-focussed trust has not been misplaced, even though for the moment the house of our security tumbles around us?

But come on, isn’t the story of God just another crutch, another ritual we grasp to reassure ourselves of our survival in an uncertain world? Isn’t buying into the story of God a failure to be brave, to leave the door-handle untouched and set off into the darkness alone?

Supposing we have been designed for constant dependence on God. If that were true relying on God would not be like leaning on a crutch. It would be as natural as breathing, eating, drinking.  It’s been said of the human race that ‘somewhere, somehow we began to live as though we were separate, alone and in danger.’

But our deepest conviction as Christians is that we are made for constant, on-line connectivity to God, that through entrusting ourselves to God we find security in this dimension and in the dimension to come whatever the danger. On this understanding, not to entrust ourselves to God is as mad as not eating, not breathing.

And so at the start of 2013 as Christians we commit ourselves, our families, our communities, and our nation to the God to whom we are learning to entrust each moment, each breath. 

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 3rd January 2013)