‘A Babe is born, all of a maid…’

I hope all readers are enjoying a very merry Christmas!

Year after year I find my treasuring of Christmastide undiminished.  In this season we really are breathing different air.  Things quieten down; the music in the shops grows merrier and less aggressive, and the world becomes gentler and quieter.  Once the moment arrives, even the forces of commerce cannot touch us.  Britain returns to the common observance of a festival of light and sweetness.  The mainstream feels a little more like home, the great cultural headwind abates slightly, and, more importantly, there is good will and merriment about, and hearts are softened to peace and goodwill.  The season gives us an excuse to wish each other well, to mend differences, to make amends.

Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh has a good article here (published in the Irish magazine The Burkean), observing that the modern world, at Christmas, when it thinks nobody is looking, ‘indulges in a celebration of everything it usually disdains: family, nostalgia, tradition, sentimentality, innocence, festivity, ceremony, and even (albeit usually indirectly) religion’.  And why not?  These are natural things, and we mere mortals can only pretend to be cynical and individualistic for so long.  There was a time, not so long ago, when this sweet sensation of high day and holiday, that heady feeling of living in time outside time, came round several times a year: now only the one ‘festive period’ is left to us.  But even a single chink of light in the year is better than none.  It is better than nothing even if the world only half-remembers that the Creator of all things has taken flesh, lived in the knowledge of our frailty, brought forth warmth into the cold world, and thereby changed the very fabric of the universe, and changed it utterly.  That is no longer a void between our lonely souls, but Love.

Here is an exuberant setting by the Welsh composer William Mathias (1934-1992) of the fifteenth-century English carol ‘A babe is born all of a maid’, one of several preserved in the famous medieval Sloane manuscript 2593 (catalogue record here).  Eleanor Parker writes more about it on her wonderful ‘Clerk of Oxford’ blog: https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2012/01/babe-is-born-all-of-may.html.  The choir of King’s College, Cambridge, is led by the Director of Music, the late Sir Stephen Cleobury (who died on St Cecilia’s day last year; a great loss to the world of music).

Wishing all readers much continued Christmas merriment, and happiness in the New Year.

Merry Christmas!

Now at this time Caesar Augustus issued a decree for a census of the whole world to be taken.  This census — the first — took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone went to his own town to be registered.  So Joseph set out from the town of Nazareth in Galilee and travelled up to Judaea, to the town of David called Bethlehem, in order to be registered together with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.  While they were there the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to a son, her first-born.  She wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them at the inn.  In the countryside close by there were shepherds who lived in the fields and took it in turns to watch their flocks during the night.  The angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone round them.  They were terrified, but the angel said, “Do not be afraid.  Listen, I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people.  Today in the town of David a saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.”

Luke 2:1–11

Wishing all readers of this blog a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

   

Polling-Eve Ponderings

The eastern outskirts of the city of Worcester, seen from the top of the Cathedral tower, 30th November 2019.

And so an unhappy country braces itself to go to the polls, and I record my thoughts so that I will know how I felt before the result turns out to be whatever the result turns out to be.

In many ways, our present difficulties are simply the result of things working properly.  A government lacking a big majority, such as we have had ever since the European Union referendum, cannot do very much, even if it is not splintered by disagreement within its own ranks, as this one has been.  If it is frustrating for many that Britain’s departure from the European Union is proving less than graceful, not all the reasons for this are bad reasons.  Some are simply the results of the encumbrances we accept as the price of democracy.

This may also be the case with the strange episode of the Supreme Court which, as I understand it and record here for future reference, went like this.  At the end of August, Boris Johnson, faced with the challenge of persuading a pro-Remain Parliament to approve a Brexit Bill by a deadline of 31st October, sought to prorogue or suspend Parliament for a number of weeks.  By all appearances this was done for no reason other than to short-circuit the opposition: to scupper any stratagems of Remainers by simply pulling the plug on them.  A private individual (the pro-Remain businesswoman Gina Miller) then appealed to the courts in the hope that they would declare this tactic unlawful.  In response, the courts first had to work out whether or not they had any say in the matter at all: the Scottish High Court decided not, but the Supreme Court, to which Ms. Miller appealed next, took the opposite view.  The prorogation of Parliament was thus found indeed to be a matter for the courts, and the Government’s actions were indeed found to be unlawful.  Parliament was duly recalled and business resumed.

That was a moment at which everything felt too close and too momentous to gain a proper perspective and make up my mind what was going on; I couldn’t really tell how significant these developments were.  But was this, too, simply everything working properly? In some ways the ruling of the Supreme Court looked like a restraint on power, something I would be inclined to favour.  Certainly, there was the sensation of a system being put to the test by the impetuosity and imprudence of a bull in a china shop, and holding firm.  It seemed not unduly alarming that some sort of mechanism should swing into action and restrain the Prime Minister.  Yet I remain unsure of our reasons for having a Supreme Court in the first place, and worry that it is just as likely that such a body might equally have taken power for itself.  Some commentators have been of this opinion.  (But what do I, a mere peasant, know of such constitutional technicalities?!)

But really, our problems are far deeper than can be resolved by any mere general election.  Our crisis is not only political, but also spiritual.  What I hope for in Britain, a renewed culture, is simply not on offer at this election. Indeed, no political party alone could offer it.  Meanwhile,  as things stand, many people find themselves angry and unhappy without really knowing why.  The offerings on the menu at this election will hardly make them less so.  Can a serious churchgoer vote for any of these parties in good conscience?  Do any of them have at the forefront of their concerns the downtrodden, the marginalised, the unborn, the elderly, refugees? The security of families, the happiness of children? Do any of them seriously mean to serve the common good?  I know that there are many good and hard-working candidates sincerely hoping to do the best for their constituencies, but the top links of the parties, the forgers of policies, all seem to be in thrall to the dictatorship of relativism, and unfriendly to the Christian Church.  How can I vote for such parties?  I suppose we were told to expect nothing less.  But, just to take one example, it is disillusioning to see the Liberal Democrats and Labour Party, almost as a footnote but with a kind of forensic spite, pledge to abolish the Marriage Tax Allowance: a petty, partisan thing to do, to single out this particular policy for abolition, trampling on tradition just for the sake of it.  (The other parties are little better.)  And all while millions of people suffer the purposelessness and alienation that some sort of encouragement to marriage might just — who knows? — help to dispel.  A new survey has revealed that British teenagers are among the least likely to believe that their lives have meaning or purpose, marriage rates are collapsing, and so many people suffer from loneliness that a ministerial position has been created to deal with it.  (At least the need has been noticed).  But these problems present too great a portfolio for any minister.

I say that our problems are deeper than any General Election could solve, but not that they cannot be solved at all.  There are great numbers of ordinary people with sensible heads on their shoulders, keeping things going, quietly maintaining the social fabric of the world.  I realised recently that the cleaner of the office where I work, who is unfailingly cheery and good-humoured, never mentions politics or complains about politicians, in spite of the hardships of her job.  Even among my own generation, of which I am sometimes tempted to despair, it would do me good to remember that there are huge numbers of quiet people who think carefully and sensibly and wisely, and act accordingly.  The amazing thing is that many of them are my friends.  Heed not the words of the loud, but the deeds of the quiet.

But the surest answer to our problems, though rather drowned out this year by all this electoral flurry, is quietly hoped for all through Advent.  When tomorrow is all over, we will have perhaps a fortnight left of Advent’s sweet suspense.

No Disgust in Tunbridge Wells

Today it was an honour and a pleasure, after several years of correspondence, finally to meet up with my friend, the Irish writer Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh, author of the blog Irish Papist (irishpapist.blogspot.com) and of the book ‘Inspiration from the Saints’.  This historic and auspicious meeting took place in Tunbridge Wells, of all places, in weather that we both declared to be our favourite — cold and crisp, with the far sun throwing slanted light goldenly against façades, deep down the lengths of streets, and delicately through the last leaves of tangled trees, touching even cobwebs on the ground to brilliance.  First in a coffee-shop, over cups of hot chocolate that were things of beauty, then in a pub over a hearty sandwich, and finally out in the clear Wealden air — right up to the moment we began an unwonted dash to the railway station when I found it wasn’t where it was supposed to be and Maolsheachlann’s train was due in five minutes — we discussed the things that matter: poetry, music, railways, archives, libraries, Chesterton, Belloc, the state of Britain, the state of Ireland, the Fifties, the Sixties, the Middle Ages, the way of the world, the times we live in, the strange and unlovely religion of secular progressivism, the strange and wondrous religion of Christianity, and (by way of Kent and Kentish oast-houses) beer.  Yeats was recited on Tunbridge Wells High Street this afternoon, as was R. S. Thomas, in an act of resistance against banality, and of victory for poetry!  And I even managed to get Maolsheachlann onto his train, by a margin of about fifteen seconds…

Maolsheachlann’s blog is essential reading.  You do not have to be Irish, or a Papist, or even to agree with anything he says, to enjoy his writing.

Ruth Gipps: Symphony No. 3 to be broadcast

At the moment, it seems, every other post on this blog is an announcement of some new development in the unfolding revival of the music of Ruth Gipps.  The latest is a piece of particularly good news: a performance of her Third Symphony (1965) by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, on the 4th December in a concert starting at 13.55, and which will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.  Free tickets for the performance — at the BBC Philharmonic studios in Salford — can be applied for in the ballot here until 10 p.m. this evening.  But anyone else can tune in to Radio 3 just before 2 p.m. here — https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000bxgl — and hear this lyrical and luminous symphony given a long-overdue rendition.  The conductor will be Rumon Gamba, who was responsible for the recent Chandos ‘all-Gipps’ record.

I don’t know when this symphony was last performed, but this is certainly its first broadcast in half a century.  It last went over the airwaves the 29th October 1969, the composer conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.  The symphony’s only readily-available recording is of this performance: better than nothing, but it will be wonderful to hear it clearly and in stereo.

I would say that, for those unfamiliar with Ruth Gipps, this symphony is a particularly good introduction to her music.  It is full of tunes and sweet passages, and is suffused with her distinctive combination of wistfulness and good humour.  Many thanks to Rumon Gamba and the BBC for masterminding this.  I am looking forward to it very much.

Ruth Gipps: Symphony no. 3, second movement, Theme and Variations.

‘We will not break faith with ye’

At eleven o’clock this morning, there was a sound that is seldom heard in the crowded suburb of south London where I live.  Almost utter silence: the traffic banished, the sirens hushed.  Apart from an initial smattering of inevitable phone-bleeps, and the muttering of a far-off helicopter, there was only the whispering of leaves fluttering to earth in the crisp sunlight.   Normally, the cenotaph lies marooned in the turbulence of the one-way system on the London Road, but today the way was clear to the triangle of dewy grass where it stands.  There, in the presence of the Deputy Mayor of Merton, and the Chairman of the local branch of the British Legion, with Scouts (and Cubs and Rainbows and Beavers) and Sea, Air and Volunteer Police Cadets, the hymns had been sung, the unaccustomed words had been spoken, the bugle had sounded, and Mitcham for a moment lay in the quietness it knows only in these two November minutes of Remembrance.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Pastoral Symphony, 2nd movement, with its famous bugle-call

“The Legion of the living salutes the Legion of the dead,” announced the vicar of St. Mark’s church.  “We will not break faith with ye,” we said.  It is scarcely expressible how strange such solemn language sounds now, in Mitcham and in almost every part of modern Britain, so great is the chasm between the civilisation that first uttered this sentence and the civilisation in which we say it now.  Yet say it we did, and there was no reason to suppose that anyone present did not mean it.

Squadron 43F (Mitcham and Morden) of the RAF Air Cadets.

The wreaths were laid, and the National Anthem sung.  Then renewed music from the band was the signal for the procession to march out and round to salute the dignitaries, and away up the London Road.  I was moved and impressed.  It was a superbly turned-out procession, and I think it marked Remembrance Sunday solemnly and fittingly.

The Cenotaph at Mitcham, Greater London, 10 November 2019.

And then the Police re-opened the road and flung wide the flood-gates, the first cars came round the corner, heralding the return of the unreceding tide to cut off the Cenotaph once again.  Sooner than we supposed, our affirmation of faith and honour was put to the test.  Will we remember, as (American Air Force) Colonel Gail Halvorsen told the televised Festival of Remembrance last night, that ‘attitude, gratitude and service before self bring happiness and fulfilment in life,’ and that ‘without providing for someone in need, the soul dies’?  Will we remember the fallen, and the price of war: invariably its own Hell to pay?  Will we, in spite of troubles and distractions, live in gratitude for our peace and freedom?

The last seconds before the A217 road was re-opened to traffic.

Ruth Gipps’ Clarinet Concerto receives its World Première

Applause for Peter Cigleris and the London Repertoire Orchestra after the world première of Ruth Gipps’ clarinet concerto.

It was through an evening of wind and wet leaves that I made my way to the church of St. James’s on Piccadilly, where the world première of Ruth Gipps’ clarinet concerto (Op. 9, 1940) was given last night by the orchestra she founded, the London Repertoire Orchestra.  I had been looking forward to this concert for some time, this being the first opportunity I have had to hear Gipps’ music played live.  I was not disappointed.

I had known the concerto was an early work, but hadn’t worked out that Ruth Gipps wrote it when she was only nineteen.  In fact, the programme notes reveal that it was written as a present for her husband-to-be, Robert Baker, who was himself a professional clarinet player.*  It also lends significance to the duets between oboe — the composer’s own instrument — and clarinet soloist in the second movement.  (Clarinet and oboe solos also appear in the second movement of her piano concerto).  Yet, extraordinarily, the concerto was never performed in her lifetime, remaining unheard for seven decades until last night’s concert.

The long-neglected music was as beautiful as I had hoped.  Even from a first hearing its sound was distinctively Gipps’: misty harmonies for the strings, bright treble rivulets in the woodwind, a plain-hearted lyricism throughout.  There was cheerfulness in many passages, but also in others a homely wistfulness which is definitely my cup of tea.  The overall mood of her Song for Orchestra (Op. 33, 1948) is not dissimilar, I think.

Two thoughts struck me, one sobering, the other more cheering.  Firstly, a work’s beauty is no guarantee of its being heard, still less of being acclaimed; craft alone, however sound and sincere, will not save a piece from falling into obscurity.  But, on the other hand, it is a that very beauty that gives it its best chance of rescue from that obscurity.  This is what has happened here, it seems.  Beauty has won out in the end.

Many thanks to the London Repertoire Orchestra, Peter Cigleris (the soloist), David Cutts (the conductor) and all involved in this performance.  And then for turning around and playing Sibelius’ Second Symphony!  I will remember the evening for a long time to come.

*Coincidentally, the man from whose seventeenth-century trade in piccadills the street of Piccadilly got its name was also called Robert Baker.

Happy Feast of All Saints!

According to tradition, here is a brief Fanfare for Allhallowstide.  I had meant to expand it a bit before now — at some point I will get round to it.

Happy Feast of All Saints!

  As we must one day die they also died, 
  But live now as we hope we too shall live:
  O keep in prayer all souls; O gladly give
  Your saints your greeting at Allhallowstide!

(D. Newman, Feast of All Saints, 1 November 2017)

Ruth Gipps: Clarinet Concerto in London this Saturday

Another milestone in the unfolding Ruth Gipps revival is about to be reached!  This Saturday, 2nd November, her Clarinet Concerto (in G minor, Op. 4, 1940) will be performed in London.  The concert — at St James’ Church, 197 Piccadilly, and starting at 7.30 p.m. — will be given by the London Repertoire Orchestra, which Ruth Gipps herself founded in 1955.  David Cutts is the conductor.  According to the website — https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/lro-gipps-and-sibelius-tickets-53223710551 — this will be the première of a ‘new edition’ of the work which has been prepared by the soloist, Peter Cigleris.

All this is following swiftly on the heels of the rendition of Gipps’ Second Symphony by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) under Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla earlier this month, the news of the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra’s forthcoming United States première of the Fourth Symphony, and several fine new recordings.

Here is one small example of the sort of music that Ruth Gipps could write for solo clarinet and orchestra.  It is from the first movement of her Fifth Symphony, which was written almost fifty years after the Clarinet Concerto.  If the music that will be performed on Saturday is remotely as lyrical as this, then we are in for a treat.

Such a Solid Religion

The Christian religion is a warm and lively home for those who love ideas, for ideas both wonderful and beautiful it has in plenty; the greatest, the key that turns in the lock of life, being the idea that it is true.  Among the glades of its implications the mind can wander to its content, forever happening upon new avenues of sanity in which the human spirit is uplifted, dignified and redeemed where it might otherwise be diminished or discarded.  Yet it is not by ideas only that we believe.  It makes sense, if Christianity is the truth about the whole world and all reality, that it should express itself materially, as well as intellectually.  Lest we are ever tempted to distil it into a hygienic system of abstract thought, an ingenious or esoteric theory, or a cultural pose aloof from the world, then its solidity — its sheer physicality, both startling and reassuring — is there to bring us back down to earth with a bump.  For although it came from heaven, and back to heaven it beckons, it has put its roots deep down into earth.

This is a religion of fire and of water, of wheat and of wine; of olives and oil and ointment; of flesh and of blood.  It washes, it anoints; it smudges foreheads with ashes, it rings fingers in gold.  It smoulders, it sprinkles, it jingles; it paints, it carves, it casts in metal.  It touches, it kisses, it lays on hands.  It quickens the senses with sights and sounds, with touch and taste, with smells and bells.  Unabashedly it holds that Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe, first drew a baby’s earthly breath in an abject outhouse round the back of a provincial inn; that his craftsman’s hands were ‘skilled at the plane and the lathe’, and that he was not above getting down on his knees to scribble in the dust or to wash a fisherman’s feet.  Always he is touching and embracing those he meets, and telling parables of plain familiar things, salt and sheep and pigswill and mustard-seeds.  Then there is his Crucifixion, whose grisliness appals polite society to this day — and his Resurrection, whose earthiness Scripture positively revels in.  It was no mere wraith or ghost that sank teeth into grilled fish for breakfast on Lake Galilee’s shore, or into whose wounds doubting Thomas pressed his fingers to feel, in shock and wonder beyond reason or hope, life coursing through a body that had lain cold for three days in the grave.

This is a geographical religion, too, for it transfigures the earth it touches, moulding the shape and feel of nations and households and everything in between.  The spiritual journey of a pilgrimage is lent its structure by topographical realities, and by earthly distances over land and sea.  Christianity’s celebration of particularity and distinctiveness has given us the proliferation of saints or devotions to which our churches are dedicated: ‘all things counter, original, spare, strange’ find their home here.  This, too, goes right back to the beginning of it all.  Do we realise, for instance, how extraordinary it is that such a cosmic event as the Ascension should have occurred ‘on the outskirts of Bethany’?  This is like saying it happened just outside Swindon.  Anyone making this up would surely have arranged things so that the great dénouement would occur somewhere prominent or fitting, in Jerusalem or atop the Mount of Olives, but no: God chooses the fringes of a plain provincial town for His purposes (and yet often fulfils a prophecy in doing so).

And the Eucharist at the heart of the faith is as down-to-earth as it is heavenly.  It elevates and sanctifies an action so instinctive, so reflexive and so vital as swallowing.  We gulp down our very salvation.  And for many of us, knowing all too well that the Eucharist defies the senses and demands faith — a very high degree of faith — it is easy to miss the solidity, the trustworthiness that it has about it.  It is not arbitrary or coincidental or artistically neat: it is what was given to us.  That Host on the altar was consecrated by a priest who was ordained by a bishop who can trace Apostolic Succession all the way back to the twelve apostles who were called by Jesus Christ who took bread and said ‘This is my body’ and took wine and said ‘This is my blood’.  The staunchest atheist could not deny the historical reality of the Church’s faithfulness to the words ‘Do this in memory of me’.

This is the Incarnation at work, and it is quite a startling thing.  ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us’… we hear it said so often that we tend to forget how odd a thought it is.  Bishop Barron’s suggested synonym ‘enfleshment’ gives a sense of the disconcerting viscerality of God’s dealings with man.  Yet there really is not so great a cleft as we imagine between the material and the spiritual.  For minor incarnations are commonplace: words swiftly become flesh when it comes to keeping promises, for instance.  In fact, we spend much of our waking lives rushing about in order to fulfil vows and contracts, many perfectly mundane, but many, too, founded truly and purely on invisible love.

Christianity’s rootedness in earth helps us to trust its more abstract, less tangible aspects, the high doctrines and divine paradoxes.  The firmness of the masonry at the foot of the faith leads us to put trust in the high vaults that leap so dizzyingly beyond our reach.  And so we come to realise that those doctrines are not simply abstract assertions or formulae, but firm banisters helping us Heavenwards.  As Bishop Barron says, there are laws of ‘spiritual physics’ just as there are laws of material physics: both have their origin in the same law-giver.  We say that God is Love not merely because it is a nice idea, the conclusion that we would like to be true, but because we believe it is true, whether we like it or not.  That this truth is also glorious and wondrous is, to put it mildly, a bonus.  In the first place, God is Love in the same way that fire scorches and light dazzles, with the unwrestlable strength of the tides and a thunderstorm’s might.  Like a prevailing wind or a magnetic field, the divine essence defies isolation or capture, but we can run our fingers over the effects it has in time and space.  The same force that raised the spire of Grantham’s church of St. Wulfram in the fourteenth century now draws seven hundred thousand people to a worship concert at Lagos.  Faith moves mountains not least by its sublimation into visible and measurable phenomena, by its expression in solid earth.

And just as its solidity helps us to apprehend intangible things, it helps us to come to terms with our own incarnated nature, for I wonder if we are not as accustomed as we think to this muddy vesture of decay.  Having to eat, having to drink, having to sleep… do we ever get used to it?  Part of the mystery of incarnation is that we have to learn how to inhabit our own mortal clay.  Babies are bewildered by their own bodiliness, and not until after our teenage years do we shed our awkwardness and clumsiness — and sometimes not even then!  Yet in the sacraments and gestures of this religion in particular, it is precisely the ordinary necessary things in life that are chosen to give the spiritual realm outward form.  So it is that our bodies and the gritty realities of birth, death and sickness are comprehended and sanctified.

We can afford not to be shy about the solidity of our faith, and the handholds of the incarnational, sacramental religion by which the details and particularities of the world are made precious and holy, and by which God places himself within our grasp.  Heaven does not repudiate earth, but redeems it: therefore Deo gratias.

England’s Newest Saint

This morning at Mass the parish Youth Choir sang ‘Praise to the Holiest’ in honour of Britain’s newest saint, St. John Henry Newman — as we may now call him! — who was canonised this morning.  I think we may fairly feel a surge of joyful pride, not because we can take any credit for his holiness, but because he feels close to us: he is ‘one of ours’.  He is the first canonised English saint to have lived since the Reformation; he wrote the words of some of our best-loved hymns; he grappled with the pain of the fissure between the Catholic and Anglican churches.  He knew the English countryside, and the cities of London and Oxford and Birmingham (also Dublin), not quite as they are today, but, importantly, as they were becoming what they are today.  Certainly he lived and worked in a time when the forces that we now call relativism and secular progressivism were stirring and gathering strength, and these did not daunt him in his long and unrelenting search for objective truth.  As no less a person than the Prince of Wales says in yesterday’s Times, he ‘stood for the life of the spirit against the forces that would debase human dignity and human destiny.’ And his way of responding to these things, lucidly and serenely, with conviction but not belligerently, happens to serve as a very helpful example for us in our own day.

Of course, he is a saint not for his relevance to our cultural situation, nor simply because of his intelligence or his writings and achievements, but because of his person; because of the way in which he lived his life.  More than pride, perhaps it is confidence that we should take: here is a man whose example we can trust with a new certainty.  And here is a man who lived not so very long ago, in circumstances not altogether dissimilar from ours, who proved that sainthood is not a quaint idealism of other times and other places, but something alarmingly plausible.  Can British people in the modern world still become saints?  Could it even be that saints are what we are meant to become?

This blog takes its name from a phrase of Newman’s.  As I wrote in my first post, I treasure the gentle paradox of the words: there is a steady slow-burning encouragement in the idea that there is ‘some definite service’ that we are all called to do.  Evidently England’s newest saint did his!  Here is the passage in full:

God has created me to do Him some definite service.  He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another.  I have my mission.  I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.  I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.

He has not created me for naught.  I shall do good; I shall do His work.  I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments.  Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away.  If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him.  If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him.  He does nothing in vain.  He knows what He is about.  He may take away my friends.  He may throw me among strangers.  He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me.  Still, He knows what He is about.

Bl. John Henry Newman: Meditations on Christian Doctrine, Meditations and Devotions, March 7, 1848.

John Everett Millais’ portrait of John Henry Newman on display at Arundel Castle (W. Sussex), 13th September 2019.

Ruth Gipps returns to Seattle!

The long-unsung music of Ruth Gipps (1921–1999) really does seem to be undergoing a serious and sustained revival.  In the past few years, her works have featured in a glorious proliferation of concerts and recordings, of which several have been premières, along with YouTube clips, magazine features and blog articles.  It has all been thoroughly heartening for those who love her music, which has hopefully been brought to many new ears.  I imagine that a great number of those discovering her tuneful and deftly-crafted music will wonder in disbelief (as I did) how they could never have heard of her before.

Even in the past fortnight, two exciting developments have swelled the revival.  The first piece of news is that, on the 25th January 2020, Gipps’ Fourth Symphony is to receive its United States première.  It will be played by the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by Adam Stern, the orchestra’s director of music, who was kind enough to write into this blog with the news.  The symphony will be the finale of a concert starting at 2 p.m. (U.S. Pacific Time) in the Benaroya Hall in the orchestra’s home city in Washington State.  One première was evidently not enough, as the programme also includes the first performance of a piece by Mel Bonis, a name I have not heard before: ‘Le songe de Cléopâtre’.  (Further details here: http://seattlephil.org/concerts-and-tickets/legendary-women).

The name of the Seattle Philharmonic might sound familiar because it already has the U.S. premiere of Gipps’ Second Symphony under its belt (a recording of this performance, given in 2017, also under Adam Stern, was generously made available on YouTube).  That this enterprising orchestra is programming Gipps for a second time is, I feel, a further triumph and serious vindication of Ruth Gipps as a composer.  It is a clear proclamation that her name is worth knowing in its own right, and not only by one or two of her pieces.  It also shows the strength of support for Ruth Gipps that exists across the Atlantic.  (Most of the YouTube clips of her music I have found to date have been of American performances).  Many thanks to the Seattle Philharmonic for their determined promotion of her music, and I hope this première scores as great a success as the last!

The Fourth Symphony makes for very rewarding listening, though it is perhaps a little less immediately accessible than the Second and its four movements plumb moodier, more chromatic depths.  But don’t be afraid!  There are still Gipps’ characteristic memorable melodies, variations of textures and of light and shadow, cadences ‘swaying’ to and fro, tenderness complemented by a certain spikiness, and atmospheric interludes comprising imaginative pairings of instruments in duets, such as the cello and harp towards the end of the last movement.  My own favourite movement, the second, is a moonlit grove of wonders.

Dawn breaks at the beginning of the final movement of Gipps’ fourth symphony.

The other piece of news is yesterday’s release of a new recording of Gipps’ piano concerto and a small piece for orchestra, ‘Ambervalia’.  The piano concerto is a passionately melodious piece of music, and was one of the works that first drew me to find out about Ruth Gipps (the recording I first found was a 1972 radio broadcast with the BBC Northern Symphony orchestra, Eileen Broster as soloist, and the composer conducting).  Now it has been given its second commercial recording, with the pianist Murray McLachlan and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Charles Peebles.  The disc (released by SOMM records) is shared with two other works for piano and orchestra by Dora Bright (1862–1951) — another name that is new to me!  The recording samples sound tremendously rich and exciting.

Update: I have also just found out that Ruth Gipps’ Clarinet Concerto (Op. 9 1940) is in the programme for the London Repertoire Orchestra’s Autumn Concert in St. James’ Church, Piccadilly, London, on the 2nd November 2019, with Peter Cigleris as soloist.  It is described as the ‘first performance’ of a ‘new edition’.  Fantastic news!

Happy Feast of the Assumption!

Mass this morning had a deliciously conspiratorial feel about it.  One of London’s major rail termini was barely a hundred yards away, with its fifteen platforms heaving with thousands of humourless commuters, but inside the church there was a heavenly hush — there can hardly have been a quieter place in the whole capital — and half a dozen of us gathered in honour of the Mother of God.  The priest said in his homily that the Assumption of Mary is the really the last word in the defeat of death and sin and worldly powers, because if Mary, whose nature was entirely human, can be raised into heaven, then there is hope for the rest of us.  ‘She shares in the victory of her Son’.

These words of the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer struck me with their beauty and understated joy:

 It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation,

 always and everywhere to give you thanks,

 Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God,

 through Christ our Lord.

 For today the Virgin Mother of God

 was assumed into heaven

 as the beginning and image

 of your Church’s coming to perfection

 and a sign of sure hope and comfort to your pilgrim people;

 rightly you would not allow her

 to see the corruption of the tomb

 since from her own body she marvellously brought forth

 your incarnate Son, the Author of all life.

Happy Feast of the Assumption!  

40,000 gather for ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ 2019

The writers Joseph Pearce and K. V. Turley have observed that it is often quite ordinary, out-of-the-way places that God chooses for his purposes: Walsingham, Lourdes, even Nazareth and Bethlehem themselves.  I wonder whether something similar is true of Sybiraków Park in the suburbs of the Polish city of Rzeszów.  By all appearances this broad open space, with its municipal playing-fields overlooked by blocks of flats, is exemplary in its plainness, having its commonplace counterparts in every major town and city on earth.  But every year, in early summer, as dusk falls on the feast of Corpus Christi, this place is so transfigured that, in truth, it comes to resemble very little else on earth.  For one evening it becomes the setting of the ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ concerts of open-air hymn-singing, whose story I have tried to tell elsewhere in these pages.

This year, on the 20th June, after months of rehearsal, the big stage was set up for the seventeenth time, large enough to accommodate the choir, orchestra, soloists and other musicians.  There, according to Rzeszów News, they were joined by some forty thousand people, who raised their voices in prayerful song as dusk fell.  The claim to the title of ‘Europe’s largest concert of Christian music’ does not seem so unreasonable: the aerial photos speak for themselves.

These concerts have such an uplifting quality to them.  Partly that is because there is no compromise on musicianship: a great deal of time and trouble is taken for the preparations, both the performance and the arrangements, which are mainly the work of the musical director, the film composer and jazz musician Marcin Pospieszalski.  Maybe not all the music is to everyone’s taste, nor even to mine (I tend to prefer the orchestral arrangements, where the majesty and solemnity of the choir and orchestra are allowed to flourish): it is mainly the idea and the atmosphere that I am praising.  But the musical repertoire has been really carefully chosen so that most of the music will lift the spirits of most of the people there, and some of the numbers are irresistible.  The idea of giving favourite hymns uplifting and rich arrangements is, I think, thoroughly inspired — every little detail that Pospieszalski puts in adds to the overall spirit of beauty in truth, and to the dramatic, even ‘epic’, dimension of the faith.  The music comes from every age and corner of the Church: medieval plainsong, traditional hymns, translated versions of more recently-written songs from America, and some new music from Poland itself, all leavened and deepened by the forces of orchestra and choir.  You could take your girl friend or your grandmother to these concerts — in fact the idea is probably that you should take both.

This is because the concert’s foundation is spiritual, as well as musical.  Nobody is suggesting that this is a substitute for going to church and receiving the sacraments, but it is, I think, something semi-sacramental, popular piety for the twenty-first century, drawing people into real and authentic togetherness.  Something brings those forty thousand souls closer together than ordinary audiences or crowds.  The originator of the idea, Jan Budziaszek — who even in Poland could not find the resources to get his idea off the ground for twenty years — has an oft-repeated refrain which runs along these lines: ‘Do you want to hear good music?  Then make it yourself!  Because the heart of man is never truly happy unless he is giving to someone else’.  At a given point in the concert, the voice of St John Paul II is played over the speakers: this year the multitude (as JPII would have called them) heard words of encouragement to men and women to marry, to vow not to leave each other until death, and to keep that vow.  And the organisers add words of their own which would be unthinkable in sullener lands further west: ‘May our entire society be freed from this illusion of freedom, free love… Too much this illusion costs.  Too many children are made to lose trust in their parents, so that the indispensable ground on which they themselves have to build their future, and the future of society, gives way’.  The concert’s organisers are at pains to point out that it is not a performance or a show: it is a gathering, ‘nasza Rodzina JSJD’, ‘our JSJD Family’, in which thousands of people, unified in prayer and song, are made — according to the concert’s name — ‘of one heart and of one spirit’.

A sight like this may seem unbelievable to us in Western Europe, but it is a glorious reality in Poland, which I think has a jewel in this astonishing annual tradition of musicianship with its vital air of togetherness, which has no need to rely on an enemy or a scapegoat for its unity.  This is what, say, Ireland could easily have been — or even Britain, at a stretch.  Has the different path that we have chosen been worth it?  Well, in the choice between the dullness and ennui of self-centred secularism, and the joy of an occasion like this, the answer is clear enough to me.  This is the New Evangelisation in action.  Long may these concerts prosper.

‘Wykrzykujcie Bogu, wykrzykujcie Królowi’: an adaptation of the forty-seventh (forty-sixth) Psalm (‘Clap your hands, cry to God with shouts of joy’).  Music originally by Marcin Gajda, arranged by Marcin Pospieszalski.

Ruth Gipps in Cheltenham

There is more good news regarding Ruth Gipps, the hitherto unjustly-neglected British composer.  Her Second Symphony will be performed as part of the Cheltenham Festival on Saturday 6th July, 2019, at 7 p.m.  It will be conducted in the Town Hall there by Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and played by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra — a later incarnation of the same orchestra in which Ruth Gipps played the oboe early in her career.  More details here: https://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/music/whats-on/2019/cbso-and-alison-balsom/

It is wonderful that Ruth Gipps is now receiving the attention she deserves, and that her decision to stick to a traditional musical idiom, which cost her so much in her own lifetime, has now been vindicated, as a new generation of listeners discovers and delights in her music.  I am almost confident enough to start a wish list — a recording of the third and fifth symphonies, the première of her oboe and viola concertos, or a major London performance, such as her piano concerto at the Proms…

Here is the second symphony’s grand finale, from this year’s new recording of the symphony by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Rumon Gamba:

Update: Unfortunately Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla had to withdraw from the concert due to illness: Edward Gardner deputised, and Ruth Gipps’ symphony was replaced with Walton’s suite from ‘Troilus and Cressida’.  Never mind — another time!  Wishing Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla a swift recovery.

Update no. 2: Ruth Gipps’ second symphony is now due to be performed in  Birmingham’s Symphony Hall at 7.30 p.m. on Wednesday 2nd October (https://cbso.co.uk/event/alison-balsom-plays-musgrave).

Joaquín Sorolla: Spanish Sunlight in London

The Return from Fishing (from the Wikimedia Commons)

For the past few months there has been more sunlight in one room at the National Gallery than in the whole of the rest of London.  It is light that has to be squinted into: dazzling Mediterranean sunshine, undiminished for being more than a hundred years old.  It drenched the coast of Valencia at the turn of the last century, yet its intensity was captured again and again by the Spanish artist Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923).  This year, the National Gallery has housed the first major exhibition of his works in London for over a century: ‘Sorolla: Master of Light’.

Clotilde and Elena on the Rocks (from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bastida_clotilde-elena.jpg>)

I cannot remember when I was last so astonished by the works of a single painter.   I am only a layman, but it seems to me that Sorolla was extraordinarily gifted, and that he achieved the Impressionists’ ambition: to capture light and motion, at least as well as any other artist of that movement.  It is from Monet’s own estimation of Sorolla, as the ‘Master of Light’, that the exhibition’s title comes.  Indeed, he seemed to be able to depict everything that light does: ‘Never has a brush contained so much sun,’ declared the critic Henri Rochefort.  In a single picture he could record its punishingly blinding intensity on red cliffs, and then the gentler glare of its second- and third-hand reflections, which softly and bluishly appear in his wife’s and daughter’s white clothes in a shady foreground.  He could recreate its bold invasion of a raisin-packing warehouse with a slab of exactly the right shade of yellow-white; he could depict its delicate illumination of a woman’s eye-lashes; he could paint its pearly coolness in church.  In vain does the viewer try to see how it all works by getting right up close to the picture: everywhere there are dashes and patches of colour which seem audacious or even rash, but which turn out to be exactly right, unerringly true.  The brush-strokes are deft and instinctive and simply beyond technique or instruction. They are strokes of genius.

‘Sewing the Sail’ (from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cosiendo_la_vela.jpg>)

Yet, to my shame, Sorolla was completely unknown to me before I heard (via Westminster Cathedral’s magazine ‘Oremus’) about this exhibition.  He is well-known in Spain, but I cannot understand why he is not better known in Britain.  His paintings ache with reality.  As the curators put it, ‘his pictures radiate the dazzle of sunlight on water, the heat of a sultry afternoon and the force of a stiff sea breeze.’  Amid the glittering sunlight, you can almost hear the paintings: the violent smack and slap of a billowing sail, the shrieks of children playing, the slosh and roar of the sea.  In one of the most stunning tableaux, ‘Sewing the Sail’, depicting a family mending the sail by which they earn their livelihood, the stunningly realistic rendering of so mundane an object as a terracotta vase actually made me feel slightly dizzy, to say nothing of the effortlessly lush and generous tumble of the sail’s canvas.  His eye was almost journalistic — indeed, one of the pictures shows his wife holding a camera — and many of the pictures depict a split-second, an instant, the twinkling of an eye, as if they were photographs.  They are often in the gerund, with their titles like ‘Sewing the Sail’ and ‘Packing Raisins’.  And he painted in the field, even building wooden platforms out into the sea to stand on with his easel.  Some of the details that he chooses to pick out are almost heart-stopping.  In ‘Packing Raisins’ the ear-ring of a young woman in the foreground can just be glimpsed: on closer inspection it turns out to be a tiny but unmistakeable point of brilliant yellow.  Somehow he could see the tiny particulars that go to make a place, a person or even a single moment — an impression — distinctive.

‘Mother’: Sorolla’s wife Clotilde and youngest daughter Elena.
(from <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_Sorolla_-_00324_-_Madre.jpg>)

His paintings ache with a reality other than the visual, too.  Beauty runs through his paintings: human beauty, and human dignity.  All through his paintings Sorolla affirms the nobility of his subjects.  There is his affection for his family: he plainly loved his wife Clotilde deeply, and his portraits of her depict a woman of shocking beauty.  In ‘Mother’, showing his wife and his newborn daughter Elena swathed in soft bed-linen, he created a picture ‘overflowing with tenderness’.  He also loved the landscape and traditional costumes of his country: the Hispanic Society in America commissioned some enormous murals depicting Spanish culture, the ‘Vision of Spain’, and he spent many years travelling around and working on this project.  And some of his other subjects, too, have a journalistic element (perhaps, if he had been born in our age, he would have been a photojournalist).  His portraits of ordinary life and ordinary working folk, and even social commentary, such as a monumental depiction of a dying fisherman, as if he were Christ being taken down from the Cross,  entitled, searingly, ‘And they still say fish is expensive’.  Then there is ‘Sad Inheritance’, an enormous picture of crippled boys being taken by a monk to bathe in the sea.   The dignity of his subjects, even amid suffering, poverty and evildoing, runs through all his work.

It seems to me that he had all the gifts of the true artist: the eye that sees, the heart that senses, and the hand that creates.  This is what the art of the twentieth-century could have given itself to.  Observation, feeling, technique, in the service of truth and beauty.  I have needed two visits of over two hours each to feel I have done Sorolla’s works any kind of justice.  I know this is perhaps rather short notice, but if any readers are able to get there to see the exhibition before it closes on the 7th July, I would heartily recommend it.

‘Strolling along the Seashore’ (from <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joaquín_Sorolla_y_Bastida_-_Strolling_along_the_Seashore_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg>)

Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha 2019: a week today

‘Jezu miłości Twej, ukryty w Hostii tej’ (‘Jesus, your love, hidden in this host…’) — Rzeszów, 2018.

Last year I wrote an article about the open air hymn concerts held every year at the feast of Corpus Christi in the city of Rzeszów in south-eastern Poland.  The ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ gatherings (the name means ‘One Heart, One Spirit’) draw tens of thousands of people from all over Poland and beyond.  There is a large choir, soloists and full orchestra, the fruit of a rich and energetic musical culture, and they sing richly-arranged versions of traditional hymns as well as newer music.  There seems to be a heightened, clear-sighted, prayerful atmosphere, along with a real sense of togetherness and harmony.  Last year’s concert had more music of a charismatic and evangelical flavour than has been usual, but there really does seem to be something for everyone.

I think it is a very good thing that these events take place.

This year’s concert will take place as usual on the feast of Corpus Christi: a week today, Thursday 20th June, at 1900 local time (1800 British Summer Time), and I imagine it will be streamed over the Internet, most likely via the website, jednegoserca.pl, or its official YouTube channel.

Whitsuntide and Sanity

Happy Whitsun!  This is the feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit burst into the Upper Room, ambushing the disciples cowering there with tongues of fire and a rushing wind — and set the Church off on its great adventure.  We in Britain celebrate it rather feebly these days.  Eleanor Parker, author of one of the best blogs on the Internet, ‘A Clerk of Oxford’, has an article on the ‘lost holiday’ of Whitsuntide.  It was, as she puts it, ‘the time for fairs, Morris dancing, games, ale-drinking, school and church processions, weddings, wandering into the countryside, and generally having a good time’.  It is only very recently that this has faded away.  The Clerk gives a link to a newsreel film of Manchester’s grand Whit Monday procession in 1927.  It is almost unbearably evocative of that vanished solemn world of cast-iron, and trams, and Corporations.  The white clothes of thousands of children are startling amid the huge soot-blackened hulks of mighty civic buildings — a sight that is now impossible and even unthinkable, though, thankfully, the Mancunian Whit Walks continue to this day.   Even in the early 1950s, Philip Larkin could still observe, in one of his finest and best-known poems, the tradition of Whitsun weddings.  Did he guess how completely the sight he was recording was about to fade away?  Was it he, as much as anyone, who was ‘out on the end of an event / Waving goodbye / To something that survived it?’  For look at what has happened to Whitsun since then.  The holiday has had all its character and flavour rationalised and secularised out of it.  Where once, seven weeks after the moveable feast of Easter, we had Whitsuntide, with its fire and wind and its brass bands and ale, we now have merely a bureaucratically static day off, the ‘Late May Bank Holiday’ — yawn.  It is better than no holiday at all, I hasten to stress — but it seems so dull and flat, and it has lost us our bearings, the flavour of our season and our bond with the past.

It has occurred to me recently that the Thing, whatever it is we should call it — hardly a Spirit — the materialistic, individualistic, over-liberal, progressive secularism of our day, will founder in the end mainly because of its own sheer dullness.  We have done a pretty good job of disenchanting life.  What now?  The exhilaration of life lived only for the moment and for the self, day after day, with only earth-bound hopes and the vaguest beacons of transcendent meaning, can only last so long.  We cannot distract ourselves for ever from the question that never goes away: what will fill the chasm of longing within us?  We know that the world of the performance appraisal, and the retail park, and the ready meal, is ultimately an insult to the dignity and depth of the human being, a dignity and a depth which cannot be ignored or privatised without consequence.  We have lost the words and the gestures by which we once articulated the magnitude of birth or marriage or death, and compassed moments of particular joy or suffering.  Where are our feasts and seasons to illuminate the year, the occasions for majesty or solemnity, our resonant poetry and song, or a deep spirit of togetherness that does not rely on an opponent or scapegoat for its strength?  Where is our hope for eternal life?  We will soon recognise, with alarm, how truncated is our sense of history, how disenchanted our sense of place, how stifled our hunger after wonder, and how hollow the inheritance bequeathed to us by the spirit of secularism: boring art, boring ideas, bored lives.  Secularism will fail because it is boring.

And secularism will run out of steam, too, because of its fundamental pessimism about the human person.  This may seem a strange thing to say about a tide of thought with so much to say about self-esteem and self-fulfilment.  But I am sure it is true.  For instance, the idea that our lives can mean whatever we decide, though it sounds good at first, conceals a cold indifference, for it leaves us perfectly free to decide that it means little or nothing at all, and, since many of us sometimes need encouragement to find and pursue real meaning, it leaves huge numbers of people open to the clutches of nihilism.  And, more broadly, many currents of thought that have become prominent in Britain, especially since the 1960s, have relied on pessimistic, often cynical arguments.  We all know how they run: the answer to difficulties in marriage is divorce; the answer to crisis pregnancies is abortion; the answer to terminal illness is euthanasia.  The idea of quality of life is turned to ill-use, to the evaluation that some lives are not worth living.  St. John Paul II’s phrase ‘culture of death’ was not too strong an expression.  It can’t last for ever, and indeed it isn’t lasting.

Even in the last century, C.S. Lewis observed the difficulty that our culture has in aspiring to high ideals.  He lamented that people seem unable to recognise that ‘when B is better than C, A may be even better than B’, or that people prefer ‘thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better and best, or bad, worse and worst’ (‘Mere Christianity’, Collins, 2012, p.108).  So many people think that the Church, if it speaks against B, is condemning people to C, whereas it is really hoping for A for us all.  It is an irony that, even as it aspires to utopia, and even as it criticises the Christian doctrine of original sin, the secular world nevertheless seems to have resigned itself to the inevitability of certain evils.  The recent introduction of so-called ‘no-fault divorce’ into law has given us yet another chance to see this habit of thought at work.  The advocates of that idea argue that what they called ‘amicable divorce’ is preferable to an ‘acrimonious divorce’, as if anybody would suggest that conflict should be aggravated where it could be lessened.  But they take it entirely for granted that divorce is simply a fact of life, like illness or bad weather.  But what if — one might ask — what if we tried to avoid divorce as much as possible; indeed, altogether?  We have free will, and we can use it to keep promises just as much as to break them.  What if we encouraged husbands and wives to stick together in moments of difficulty?  Is this not why they once made their vows?  Should we not help them towards heroic reconciliation, with the help of family, friends or counsellors, anything that it takes?  Those in favour of the new law might scoff that this assertion is simply childish naïvety.  But is it rather childlike innocence, which is something quite different — and, what is more, since it is children who tend to suffer most from divorce, is it so misplaced?  Contrary to the egregious posters that appeared all over railway stations a few months ago, advertising a divorce app — with a phonily jolly message from a fictional Mr. and Mrs. Foster who have decided that ‘things really haven’t worked out and we’re calling it quits’ — ‘amicable divorce’ is a contradiction in terms.  The sundering of vows causes great suffering to all concerned; nobody arrives at that point unscathed by grief, and divorce carries no promise that things will not worsen (it is divorce, not marriage, that weaponises children).  By asserting that such things are commonplace, and should be the foundation of rights and laws, secularism belies its fundamental pessimism and hopelessness.  Meanwhile, though, the Church asks, quietly, and with that ingenuousness that will save the world: what if a vow actually means a vow?  What if chaos need not necessarily have the final word?

I say all this not to pass judgement on those who go through divorce, especially in today’s climate, but to give an example of the ways in which secularism abandons people in difficulty.  The Thing seems very adept at working out the lesser of evils, but pretty hopeless at aspiring to the greatest good.  It has worsened that startling lack of moral verticality that C. S. Lewis observed; a kind of Brutalist shoulder-shrugging style of ethics which lowers the ceiling of human love and self-giving, and which often assumes that heroism is unrealistic, that sainthood is fantastical, and that we can afford simply to give up too easily.  The result of all this is that we all settle for too little from ourselves and from each other.  So, one implication is that men don’t hold themselves to high enough standards of manners and speech; women therefore don’t believe men are capable of high standards and so don’t dare to expect them; and so both settle for less and less, and end up demoralised.  (Meanwhile, in the spheres of education or career, people often expect far too much of themselves, making all kinds of sacrifices for things which do not, in the end, determine their dignity).  And is there another reason why we settle for too little: that we do not believe in mercy?  Do we fear that to aspire to high standards in our lives is to set ourselves up for a fall from which we will never recover? How swiftly this idea leads to cynicism and nihilism — and again it is because there are questions which secularism doesn’t know how to begin to answer.

The Thing seems all-powerful just at the moment.  It has claimed the media, the mainstream and the momentum.  Worse, it holds considerable sway over the language, manners and customs of ordinary people.  But it will have to last another nineteen centuries if it is to outlast the Church and since, in the end, it is reductive, and boring, and it sells us short, and tells us that we are less than we are, that we are merely granules of egos, zooming about directionlessly until we are extinguished, I would not bet on its staying the course.  It is too cynical to understand heroism; too superficial to comprehend beauty; to shallow to nourish friendship.  Birth is beyond its understanding; death defeats it.  Our dignity cannot stand this for ever.  Ultimately, too, the culture of death must die.   

Secularism may not necessarily fail violently or dramatically, but when it does fail, as fail it will, the Church will still be there, with hope and pageantry intact, along with the year’s colourful wheel of feasts and seasons, the tongues of fire and the rushing wind.  We know that life matters beyond what we see, however hard we try to deny it; we know it has a meaning too deep for words and thought, and we sense the immortality of our souls.  Religion, properly practised, lends life the dignity that befits it, and the paradox is that this makes us joyful and light-hearted in spite of our suffering.  We will keep the feast of Whitsun as of old, and sanity will prevail.

Happy Ascension Day!

Happy Feast of the Ascension!

A fantasia on the 46th Psalm by  Edward Taylor (c.1646–1729), set to music by Gerald Finzi (1901–1956), and sung by the choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, under Andrew Nethsinga.

  God is gone up with a triumphant shout:
  The Lord with sounding trumpets’ melodies:
  Sing praise, sing praise, sing praise, sing praises out,
  Unto our King sing praise seraphic-wise!
  Lift up your heads, ye lasting doors, they sing,
  And let the King of Glory enter in.

  Methinks I see Heaven’s sparkling courtiers fly
  In flakes of glory down, him to attend,
  And hear heart-cramping notes of melody
  Surround his chariot as it did ascend:
  Mixing their music, making ev’ry string
  More to enravish, as they this tune sing.