Tag: losing faith

You probably won’t have heard of Jabez Bunting

The River Wye – a bit polluted and clogged with weeds

This is not going to be a religious piece, I promise, but my early experience of Methodism was as a child in a “Prim” (Primitive Methodist) chapel and so – I suppose – my childlike view of being a grown up was inflected by men, (they were always men), shouting at us and going on a lot about fornication a decade before I needed to know. When I was eventually overcome by the hormones I also had to overcome the gift of embedded guilt – a trick that fortunately I learned pretty quickly.

Anyway, this pilgrim’s progress took me through the Wesleyan tradition because they had a brilliant youth club, run by the most patient people I ever met – although Mrs Round cracked once before a fancy dress party and said the expected I’d be ‘coming as the devil‘. After that I sank into the lukewarm waters of the Church of England where I was lost to the elect, as it were. God gave up on me about 100 yards above this stretch of the river Wye under a concrete bridge. It happened quite unexpectedly. I was a bit shocked but – like any failed relationship someone had to say something.

So to get back to Jabez Bunting, and I’d really rather not, but in my Wesleyan Days I really admired John Wesley. He had to manage with doubts and when he went to America he lost his faith altogether; fell out with the C of E because they stood in the way of his work of growing new leaders. He was a charismatic who must have had the loudest voice you ever heard and he made it all seem possible, even to the Cornish miners at Gwennap Pit and the now forgotten colliers of Kingswood and the North Somerset Coalfield. You might think he represented something of the enthusiasm and fire of Jeremy Corbyn (stop that hissing immediately! – they never asked you on to the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury). Wesley was succeeded by Jabez Bunting who grew the infant Methodist church into a powerful force by driving his steam roller over any charismatic or independent thinkers. Methodism became a monocultural institution which had some good bits but lost much of its founding enthusiasm.

Actually there seems to be a bit of a pattern here. When St Francis of Assisi died, having been pretty much driven out of the order he founded, he was succeeded by Giovanni Parenti who was – wait for it – a lawyer who tidied the order up, stomped on all that nonsense about not having possessions and grew the order into a mighty force using more force where necessary.

So now I come to Brother Keir Starmer who comes across as a worthy successor to Giovanni Parenti and Jabez Bunting; cheerlessly obliterating hope whilst imposing order and discipline on a much depleted congregation.

But there is always a point of light. Back in the day I took a funeral service as a favour for a family from the South East who had no church connections in Bristol. As I left the crematorium an elderly woman hurried up beside me and said “Hello David it’s lovely to see you, how’s Jenny”(My sister) I made the usual lame excuse about not recognising her and she said “I was your Sunday School teacher in Staple Hill” (The Prim chapel). I do remember a teenage girl from the Sunday School, but mostly I remember the shouting of the preachers and the noise of the cattle and sheep awaiting slaughter behind the butcher’s next door – a brilliant and inexpensive soundtrack to the hell and damnation we were being promised. It was so nice to make her acquaintance after all those decades and the nicest thing of all was that in spite of all that dark religious stuff she’d evidently lived a full life of ordinary, everyday goodness.

As I said once in the Cathedral to an ordinand standing in a long line waiting to process in to kneel in front of the bishop – “You know this is only alright as long as you don’t take it too seriously”. She looked terribly shocked, so I hope she figured it out before it was too late.

Searching for my lyrical voice

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that sometimes the lyrical voice comes to find me. Back in the day I wrote a couple of short stories for the radio, and the eagle eared producer said that the pieces of mine she liked best were the lyrical ones- we’d worked together on some religious and World Service programmes as well so she’d seen a range of my work . The problem was (and still is) that I can’t just turn my lyrical voice on and off at will. What usually happens is that an experience of some sort sticks in my mind – it might be anything from finding a new plant to an overheard remark – and when I write about it the voice just emerges, as if it came from behind a door with no handle. The echo with the Holman Hunt “Light of the World” painting is a fair way of describing what is always a kind of visitation.

Then, in one of those intense conversations that Madame and me have sometimes, we were discussing whether Tracey Emin could have been influenced by Edvard Munch’s work – there’s obviously a kind of affinity there – and I recalled that an influence isn’t always an intellectual thing at all. Sometimes a memory finds its way into your being in a more tactile way; through the eyes and fingers. The senses – like – Proust’s madeleine – have their own language and logic.

So I’ve been staring at this photograph for days now, wondering what it was trying to say to me; I knew it was significant, or should I say it had legs but I didn’t know why. The boring answer would be that it was a good shot of a powerful cold front bearing down from the north east, presaging wind and rain overnight. So the most obvious and least interesting inference was that tomorrow we’d be wearing raincoats for our walk. Then, an hour ago I noticed the Abbey in front of the approaching storm; in fact both the church and the surrounding city looked as if they were about to be engulfed by a rather malign darkness.

If I tried to explain how it came to be that these days I find it so difficult to enter a church after all the years of preaching and pastoral work I’d probably crash out in flames. I didn’t so much lose my faith as find a better one, and the most painful part of that process was the growing realization that the golden cockerel that tops so many spires and towers wasn’t so much about chanticleer greeting the sun but was a powerful symbol of betrayal; about denial and cowardice. “Come here” – it seemed to be saying – “and see Christianity betrayed; in the endless processions and minute doctrinal disputes, in the overweening ambition, ludicrous dressing up and the mediocre oratory of preachers with nothing to say“.

So possibly the impulse that flooded through my eyes and into my fingers as I spotted this shot which I took three versions of, and then chose this one – perhaps the sense of the Abbey and the city being overwhelmed was carrying some personal freight for me; enough for my finger to press the shutter without quite knowing why.

But then there are trees in the foreground as well; bare leafless, winter trees, with twilight rapidly approaching. A time for huddling into your collar and jamming your hands into pockets: and as I digest this little gift; revelation, visitation, I realize that the moment encapsulated almost exactly, a whole cats cradle of ideas, experiences, memories and above all fears. The single moment draws to a meniscus; like a shockwave, and disperses instantly. No wonder they call it a shot.

This wasn’t a photograph of Bath Abbey at dusk with an approaching storm. It was an unconscious and instantaneous self portrait, because I am prone to sadness and these last months have been like an endless winter, and – to use a prison phrase – we’ve been “doing our bird” – trying not to get sucked under by lament or longing and clinging fiercely to the daily routines of allotment, cooking, walking and writing.

And then with the announcement of the vaccine our parole hearing hove into view and I got the maps out, blew the tyres up on the bikes, took out the kayak and got the trolley ready again and felt just a bit more alive again. We’ve developed this curious habit of watching films in the evenings – not for their artistic merit at all but for their settings. We’ve watched all the series of Montalbano – many of them are complete stinkers but who’s listening? We’re just enjoying the Sicilian landscape. Maigret (three series) for a bit of Paris – although the Michael Gambon versions are certainly not stinkers but don’t ask me to remember the plots. The whole new aesthetic of the Potwell Inn has been centred around locations; mountains, hills and rivers get stars as long as the script doesn’t intrude -although we also watch hours of psychopathic murders, torture and betrayal as long as it’s got some decent landscapes in it to leaven the darkness.

So I see how my lyrical voice falters. If I were a plant I’d be chlorotic after months sitting in the endless winter, deprived of light and food. People are going crazy here, flooding into the shopping centre looking for the only kind of hope this etiolated culture can offer, even despite knowing that this will give the virus new and enticing opportunities. Greater love hath no man – than what? to lay down their life for an Xbox or some new trainers? Spare me, but I’m too busy clinging to the legs of my disappearing voice. When the music and poetry and song die that’s real death.

I say to myself a hundred times a day – this will end and we’ll be able to celebrate the sacramental simplicities of life once more. Hugging our children, kissing our grandchildren, eating with friends, not being scared of crowded places but enjoying being a part of the crowd, not misting over with hatred when we’re lied to and when journalism has betrayed its fundamental principles for the umteenth time in exchange for a backdoor pipeline into the machine.

And on the promise of that glorious day, we’ve bottled up last year’s damson vodka – although we still don’t drink alcohol ourselves. But that’s another story! Be safe.