God loves us, God loves you all, and evil will not prevail! All of us are in God’s hands. So, let us move forward, without fear, together, hand in hand with God and with one another!— from the new Pope’s first address, 8th May, 2025.
I suppose, in a way, it is appropriate: he was ever the Pope of the dramatic gesture, with a sense of the theatrical about him, and was always encouraging us to put our feet where our faith is. Perhaps, in his dying on Easter Monday, we might see a similar thing.
Yet I remember this aspect of him taking a little getting used to at first, especially after the careful manner of Pope Benedict. Pope Francis had less time for words, even a certain impatience with them, and perhaps the same went for formalities. He always gave the impression that there was no time to lose, and so it is characteristic that he should have had his foot on the accelerator to the very end. This was a man who in embraced a disfigured man without hesitation; who actually knelt to kiss the feet of the warring leaders of South Sudan, who amid evening rainfall calmly blessed the whole world in those vertiginous first weeks of the pandemic. A critic might call it a ‘PR papacy’, and indeed any photo-op carries the risk of playing to the camera; yet these images, which were challenging and conscience-pricking, were also a kind of riposte to the age of the age of airbrushing and virtue-signalling.
The media, of course, also put their own spin on him, as is their wont; to them he was simply the Pope who wanted to make the Church more ‘progressive’ and ‘forward-looking’, and apparently a change from previous Popes (which is of course a jab at Pope Benedict, something they can never resist). But as ever the media reveal their selective hearing, choosing to ignore the moments when he expressed himself with startling directness, capable of criticising liberal and conservative excesses with equal enthusiasm, while also pointing out that the Christian faith transcends either. He was perfectly willing to fire from both barrels, and indeed I have found him more chastening and challenging than I did the supposedly stricter (but actually very gentle) Pope Benedict.
Yet of course he did strike a particular tone of mercy. His description of the Church as a field-hospital has stayed with me, as with so many: the priority of getting people, in whatever condition or state of life, out of the rain and the cold of the world, and into the warm and dry of the Church. He is right this is a world that urgently needs the Church (the world’s largest provider of healthcare, and its largest educational institution, and perhaps the largest humanitarian organisation overall, even before we get onto spiritual matters…). He was right we cannot necessarily afford to wait until everything is neat and tidy before putting out into the deep. Similarly, his promotion of a ‘culture of encounter’ has encouraged me to overcome my reserved nature and speak (and, I hope, listen!) to more people. Finally, his extension of mercy above all – the unique priority of the Christian faith – was also absolutely urgent. So, may the Lord soon welcome him to his reward, and grant him the eternal life in which he taught us to hope.
Now, as we await his successor, here again is his final homily:
Christ is risen, alleluia!
Dear brothers and sisters, Happy Easter!
Today at last, the singing of the ‘alleluia’ is heard once more in the Church, passing from mouth to mouth, from heart to heart, and this makes the people of God throughout the world shed tears of joy.
From the empty tomb in Jerusalem, we hear unexpected good news: Jesus, who was crucified, ‘is not here, he has risen’. Jesus is not in the tomb, he is alive!
Love has triumphed over hatred, light over darkness and truth over falsehood. Forgiveness has triumphed over revenge. Evil has not disappeared from history; it will remain until the end, but it no longer has the upper hand; it no longer has power over those who accept the grace of this day.
Sisters and brothers, especially those of you experiencing pain and sorrow, your silent cry has been heard and your tears have been counted; not one of them has been lost!
In the passion and death of Jesus, God has taken upon himself all the evil in this world and in his infinite mercy has defeated it. He has uprooted the diabolical pride that poisons the human heart and wreaks violence and corruption on every side. The Lamb of God is victorious! That is why, today, we can joyfully cry out: ‘Christ, my hope, has risen!’ .
The resurrection of Jesus is indeed the basis of our hope. For in the light of this event, hope is no longer an illusion. Thanks to Christ — crucified and risen from the dead — hope does not disappoint! Spes non confundit! That hope is not an evasion, but a challenge; it does not delude, but empowers us.
All those who put their hope in God place their feeble hands in his strong and mighty hand; they let themselves be raised up and set out on a journey. Together with the risen Jesus, they become pilgrims of hope, witnesses of the victory of love and of the disarmed power of Life.
Christ is risen! These words capture the whole meaning of our existence, for we were not made for death but for life. Easter is the celebration of life! God created us for life and wants the human family to rise again! In his eyes, every life is precious! The life of a child in the mother’s womb, as well as the lives of the elderly and the sick, who in more and more countries are looked upon as people to be discarded.
What a great thirst for death, for killing, we witness each day in the many conflicts raging in different parts of our world! How much violence we see, often even within families, directed at women and children! How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalised, and migrants!
On this day, I would like all of us to hope anew and to revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas! For all of us are children of God!
I would like us to renew our hope that peace is possible! From the Holy Sepulchre, the Church of the Resurrection, where this year Easter is being celebrated by Catholics and Orthodox on the same day, may the light of peace radiate throughout the Holy Land and the entire world.
I express my closeness to the sufferings of Christians in Palestine and Israel, and to all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people. The growing climate of anti-Semitism throughout the world is worrisome. Yet at the same time, I think of the people of Gaza, and its Christian community in particular, where the terrible conflict continues to cause death and destruction and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation.
I appeal to the warring parties: call a ceasefire, release the hostages and come to the aid of a starving people that aspires to a future of peace!
Let us pray for the Christian communities in Lebanon and in Syria, presently experiencing a delicate transition in its history. They aspire to stability and to participation in the life of their respective nations. I urge the whole Church to keep the Christians of the beloved Middle East in its thoughts and prayers.
I also think in particular of the people of Yemen, who are experiencing one of the world’s most serious and prolonged humanitarian crises because of war, and I invite all to find solutions through a constructive dialogue.
May the risen Christ grant Ukraine, devastated by war, his Easter gift of peace, and encourage all parties involved to pursue efforts aimed at achieving a just and lasting peace.
On this festive day, let us remember the South Caucasus and pray that a final peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan will soon be signed and implemented, and lead to long-awaited reconciliation in the region.
May the light of Easter inspire efforts to promote harmony in the western Balkans and sustain political leaders in their efforts to allay tensions and crises, and, together with their partner countries in the region, to reject dangerous and destabilising actions.
May the risen Christ, our hope, grant peace and consolation to the African peoples who are victims of violence and conflict, especially in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in Sudan and South Sudan. May he sustain those suffering from the tensions in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes region, as well as those Christians who in many places are not able freely to profess their faith.
There can be no peace without freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of expression and respect for the views of others.
Nor is peace possible without true disarmament! The requirement that every people provide for its own defence must not turn into a race to rearmament.
The light of Easter impels us to break down the barriers that create division and are fraught with grave political and economic consequences. It impels us to care for one another, to increase our mutual solidarity, and to work for the integral development of each human person.
During this time, let us not fail to assist the people of Myanmar, plagued by long years of armed conflict, who, with courage and patience, are dealing with the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Sagaing, which caused the death of thousands and great suffering for the many survivors, including orphans and the elderly. We pray for the victims and their loved ones, and we heartily thank all the generous volunteers carrying out the relief operations.
The announcement of a ceasefire by various actors in the country is a sign of hope for the whole of Myanmar.
I appeal to all those in positions of political responsibility in our world not to yield to the logic of fear which only leads to isolation from others, but rather to use the resources available to help the needy, to fight hunger and to encourage initiatives that promote development. These are the ‘weapons’ of peace: weapons that build the future, instead of sowing seeds of death!
May the principle of humanity never fail to be the hallmark of our daily actions. In the face of the cruelty of conflicts that involve defenceless civilians and attack schools, hospitals and humanitarian workers, we cannot allow ourselves to forget that it is not targets that are struck, but persons, each possessed of a soul and human dignity.
In this Jubilee year, may Easter also be a fitting occasion for the liberation of prisoners of war and political prisoners!
Dear brothers and sisters,
In the Lord’s Paschal Mystery, death and life contended in a stupendous struggle, but the Lord now lives forever. He fills us with the certainty that we too are called to share in the life that knows no end, when the clash of arms and the rumble of death will be heard no more. Let us entrust ourselves to him, for he alone can make all things new!
Happy Easter to everyone!
An ‘Easter banger’ (to coin a phrase!) from OLEM, Our Lady of the English Martyrs in Cambridge, Easter Vigil, 24th April, 2025: Peter Latona’s setting of the antiphon for the Rite of Sprinkling: ‘I saw water flowing from the right side of the Temple’ (‘Vidi aquam’).
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| From the East Window of Worcester Cathedral |
‘I thirst’ from the setting by Sir James MacMillan (b. 1959) of the Seven Last Words from the Cross.
There was I preparing my usual Maundy Thursday jeremiad on the crises of our time, the evaporation of meaning from our language and culture — all the usual things — when, all of a sudden, from various different sources, I was ambushed by a fusillade of extraordinary statistics. In London’s largest Catholic diocese of Westminster, there has been a twenty-five per cent increase in adult baptisms in a single year; taking neighbouring Southwark into account, nearly a thousand adult Londoners will be baptised. Across all churches in Britain there has been a fifty-five per cent increase in numbers since 2018. Moreover, the growth is among young people: whereas in 2018 only 4% of 18–24-year-olds were regular church goers, that proportion has now risen to 16%, and of this number, 41% are Catholic. Meanwhile, in France, there has been a record number (17,800) of adult baptisms, a growth of forty-five per cent in a single year. Again, young people seem to be the driving force: an extraordinary 42% of those baptised are aged between 18–25.
Living in London, I have long had a sense of the vitality of the Church here, and it is remarkable to see now this hard evidence of a revival, of a New Evangelisation under way. It is my privilege to count several of these recent converts among my friends, and I can attest to their dedication and energy; also to their level-headedness and prudence. From them I draw the same conclusion as the statistics suggest: this is is no fad or emotional spasm, but the sum total of many careful decisions made after long thought and prayer, and a serious and genuine trend. ‘Something is happening out there,’ as the American social commentator Mary Eberstadt has said, and it is as true on this side of the pond as it is on hers.
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| Screenshot from Catherine Pepinster’s article in the Telegraph, 13 April 2025: ‘The extraordinary resurgence of the Catholic faith in Britain’. |
The situation has even piqued the interest of (largely secular) colleagues at (very secular) work, and on more than one occasion I have found myself fielding questions in, it seemed, an impromptu press conference. They were intrigued enough to hazard their own explanations, many I think accurate: the crises of our time, both visible and invisible (in the first category, pandemic, war, climate change and the economy; in the second, of meaning, relationships and of the human body). The degradation of our culture, the damage to the environment, the chaos of the online continent, the philosophical challenges posed by political upheavals and by the rise of the smartphone and by artificial intelligence… these are the crises that we all know about. And also playing their part are the crises that the Church has, however unfashionably, long been predicting, and which now even the secular world cannot avoid noticing: the collapse of trust and happiness between the sexes, the unsustainably low numbers of births, the decline of marriage and the prevalence of family breakdown. (Another astonishing statistic from Versailles diocese was that 80% of catechumens in their twenties come from broken homes).
But the reason for the conversions is not necessarily, and certainly should not be, entirely negative. It is not solely out of fear and uncertainty that we ‘turn to religion’ as my colleagues put it. The explanation might be far simpler: that our spirits crave more than the sugary junk of the moral and cultural menu that secular progressivism has been serving up for the last six decades, and that we long for more — that we hunger for beauty, truth and goodness — that we seek the face of God.
What is also inspiring is that many of these converts have found their way to the faith from quite a remote position: raised without a connection to the Church, they have set out and found their way home, in the face of all fashion, against all trends, and indeed, risking outright disapproval from all directions. And in their search for meaning and clarity they have fallen for none of the insane ideologies waiting to scam their souls — or at least have not fallen for them permanently. They have come to the Church that so many wrote off, mocked, dismissed, sought to smother.
But, this being Maundy Thursday, are we getting ahead of ourselves? Statistics are only statistics: after all, in the early 1960s the seminaries were full, and few foresaw the decline that is still the general trend. Professor Stephen Bullivant has said that, numerically, the Catholic Church is only doing the least badly of the Christian Churches; in 2023 Mass attendance in England and Wales was only 555,000, compared to pre-pandemic figure of 702,000. And if in bleaker years we have remembered rightly that the Church does not depend on numbers, that ‘Truth draws strength from itself, not from the number of votes in its favour’, or that ‘where two or three gather in my name, there am I among them’, then increased numbers now do not in themselves make the faith any more or less true. The disciples, arrived in Jerusalem for Passover, might have reckoned they had done a decent job over the previous three years, but events were imminently to render any performance appraisal utterly irrelevant, to leave their competencies as against agreed objectives quite beside the point.
Likewise we in the Church, soon to be blessed at the Easter Vigil with so many new brothers and sisters, know that this remarkable gift is not just the measure of mission statements and strategies — true though it is that a great deal of hard work and courage lies behind this new growth. It is again a sign that God’s ways are not our ways, that we are His instruments in the New Evangelisation, not He ours. And certainly, seeing things in this way, there is never a dull moment: it is at times like these that we see how dramatic the results can be.
And speaking of drama, now we follow the disciples into the Upper Room, as evening falls, and the lamps are lit, and the shadows play around the walls…
The setting by Maurice Duruflé (1902–1986) of the Tantum ergo, sung by the French ensemble La Cité de la Voix in the Basilica of Sainte-Madeleine de Vézelay, Yonne. ‘Therefore, so great a Sacrament / Let us venerate with heads bowed, / And let the old practice / Give way to the new rite; / Let faith provide a supplement / For the failure of the senses.’
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| Sunday morning Mass at the parish church of Saint Martin, Meudon, Île-de-France. |
For Lincolnshire Day (1st October), a third article in the ‘Lincolnshire Towers’ series.
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| St. James’ church, Louth, Lincolnshire, August 2021. |
They could not have known how poignant their triumph would prove. On 13th September 1515, the eve of the feast of the Holy Cross, the people of Louth in Lincolnshire gathered to see the new steeple of their parish church crowned with a magnificent weathercock:
William Ayleby, parish priest, with many of his brethren priests, there present, hallowed the said weathercock and the stone that it stands upon, and so conveyed upon the said broach [spire]; and then the said priests singing Te Deum Laudamus with organs, and the kirk-wardens garred ring all the bells, and caused all the people there being to have bread and ale, and all the loving of God, our Lady, and all saints. [1]
Theirs was an achievement resplendent with superlatives. Here, in the far north-east of their county, on the marshward and seaward side of the Wolds, and out on a limb from the central ‘limestone belt’ of England’s main spire-building regions, they had raised the highest tower of any parish church in the land, at 287 feet 6 inches, and one of the slenderest spires, with an apex angle of only 9 degrees 7 minutes. To this day the tower remains the third-highest extant medieval structure in Britain, after the cathedral towers of Salisbury (404') and Norwich (320') [2]. But the superlatives are not confined to facts and figures alone. The tower’s weightless loveliness has entranced the eye of all from Pugin to Betjeman. ‘It rises up stage after stage of impossible beauty,’ wrote Betjeman. [3] Julian Flannery, in Fifty English Steeples, his magisterial architectural survey of medieval church towers, writes lyrically of ‘this most beautiful of English steeples’, with its ‘sublime verticality and soaring silhouette’. For him it is ‘the apotheosis of English steeple-building’. [4]
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| St. James’ church seen from Westgate, August 2021. |
The townsfolk that Holy Rood Eve could hardly have known how brief would be the fullness of their triumph, hardly have imagined that their tower would prove a final great masterwork of the English Gothic architecture and the medieval age. ‘England was never more beautiful than in the two brief decades between the completion of Louth and the arrival of the English Reformation,’ says Flannery, ‘Within a generation […] medieval England had passed into history.’ [5] Two decades later it was at this very church of St. James, at the foot of this very tower, and in part precisely because of its beauty, that one of the most violent episodes of the early English Reformation was to unfold.
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| From Queen Street. |
There had been a church on this site since Saxon times but, as in so many parishes of many-towered Lincolnshire, the region’s great wool-wealth was put to repeated enlargements and embellishments. From the early fifteenth century the entire church was largely rebuilt, and in the middle of the century work began on the great tower. One remarkable aspect of the tale is that the start of construction can be dated almost at a glance: whereas the first few courses of stone are in white Yorkshire Magnesian limestone, only a few feet up there is a visible change, to the buff-grey Ancaster stone that constitutes the rest of the building. The generally-accepted explanation for this switch is that the supply from across the Humber was disrupted by the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses in 1455 [6]. The testimony of numerous elder townsfolk (‘Thomas Bradley, mercer… Agnes, the wife of Robert English Barker… with many more…’) who at the time of the tower’s completion claimed to remember the laying of the foundation stone, adds corroborative weight to this dating. [7]
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| The 86ft-high vault beneath the tower… ‘one of the most stupendous volumes found in any English church,’ says Flannery. The ceiling represents under a third of the tower’s total height: above it soar a further two hundred feet’s worth of belfry and spire. |
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| The ‘Wild Mare’ treadmill high in the tower. |
‘England was never more beautiful’… If some had witnessed the start of the building of the tower in 1455, how many more, watching its completion would live to see its fate in the next two turbulent decades? For in 1536 it was in this church and on this day, October 1st, that William Ayleby’s less fortunate successor, Thomas Kendall, was to preach a sermon with momentous consequences. At Vespers he spoke against the reforms of Henry VIII following the Act of Supremacy two years earlier, which were now encroaching even on Lincolnshire: and he warned the congregation, gathered now not in joy but in trepidation and anger, that there was soon to be a visitation of the church by the authorities.
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| From Upgate. |
His hearers had some idea of what might be coming. Only a month earlier Louth Abbey had been dissolved, the land given to a friend of King Henry’s and the treasures dispersed. Did a similar fate await their own church? Louth, as we know, was rich: there were chantries richly-endowed by the town guilds; there was plentiful church plate and silver. Local historian and verger Chris Marshall records that among much else the church possessed a shrine of enamelled silver weighing 435 ounces and three silver crosses perhaps as heavy as 237 ounces. The church as a whole was a thing of such beauty as they could hardly have borne to see defaced. As Marshall says, ‘The men of Louth were justly proud of their church and it was clear that St. James’ had much to lose.’ [10].
Father Kendall could hardly have wished for swifter action than what followed: there and then the commoners, led by the shoemaker Nicholas Melton (alias ‘Captain Cobbler’), seized the keys from the church-wardens, rang the bell to summon the townspeople, and set up a watch all night to guard the church’s treasures. Thus was sparked the Lincolnshire Rising, which, though brief, was to prove one of the most serious manifestations of popular opinion against Henry.
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From Eastgate. |
Events were to spiral rapidly out of control. The following day, Monday 2nd, was supposed to be the annual Michaelmas Court; John Heneage, the steward of the Bishop of Lincoln, was pre-emptively seized on arrival and made to swear an oath to the commoners. Dr. John Frankish, the Bishop's Registrar, was also seized, and as the crowd grew restive he thought it judicious to climb the market cross for safety, though some books and papers he dropped were snatched away and burned. Two Commissioners working for Thomas Cromwell were fetched from nearby Legbourne and put in the stocks. The unrest rapidly spread to neighbouring towns: Horncastle, Caistor, Spilsby were up in arms. They mustered at Orford: they were marching on Lincoln. The Rising had begun. Beacons were lit on the Wolds to alert the marshes to the east, and by the Humber to raise Yorkshire. And then things really turned ugly: Dr. John Raynes, the Bishop’s Chancellor, though ill, was dragged from his sick-bed at Old Bolingbroke, taken to Horncastle, and beaten to death.
By Friday 6th a sizeable rebel force were encamped at Newport on the edge of Lincoln, reinforced by a contingent from Boston and the southern towns twenty miles to the south. Chris Marshall suggests that a total of ten thousand men were involved. News came of trouble in Yorkshire — the beginning of the longer and ultimately more serious rebellions known as the Pilgrimage of Grace — and meanwhile, a list of grievances was prepared. This was sent to the King on Monday 9th.
King Henry did not tarry, replying two days later, not mincing his words:
Concerning choosing of counsellors, I never have read, heard nor known, that princes’ counsellors and prelates should be appointed by rude and ignorant common people; nor that they were persons meet or of ability to discern and choose meet and sufficient counsellors for a prince. How presumptuous then are ye, the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm and of least experience, to find fault with your prince for the electing of his counsellors and prelates, and to take upon you, contrary to God’s law and man’s law, to rule your prince whom ye are bound to obey and serve with both your lives, lands, and goods, and for no worldly cause to withstand. [11]
It is, I think, greatly to the credit of the people of Lincolnshire that they should be thought ‘brute and beastly’ by the likes of King Henry VIII. But the quarrels that subsequently broke out among the rebels were to prove the Rising’s undoing. The gentry decided to surrender; then on Thursday 12th the King’s men arrived, under the Duke of Suffolk, Henry’s brother-in-law, and five thousand strong. Lincoln was never to be sacked: the commoners were sent home — though not without first being ordered to leave their weapons behind.
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| From George Street to the south. |
Unfortunately for the rebels, the law was still to run its course. Having secured Lincoln and rounded up an initial batch, the Duke of Suffolk and his men were soon in Louth to deal out punishment. ‘Captain Cobbler’ was one of fifteen ring-leaders arrested; William Moreland, a former monk of the dissolved Louth Park Abbey, was another. Thomas Kendall had fled to Coventry, but his letters back home were intercepted, and he too was arrested. Of those sentenced to death, many were hanged in Louth in March 1537, but Kendall was among those taken to the Tower of London and hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 25th March 1537. [12]
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| Plaque opposite St. James’ Church marking the Lincolnshire Rising. |
The townspeople’s fears for their church were to be vindicated. The guilds and the chantries, the shrines and the ‘lights’ of the candles before the images, were all dissolved and removed. Yet when in 2006 a public vote was held to decide the date of the proposed Lincolnshire Day, it was today, October 1st, the anniversary of Thomas Kendall’s defiant sermon, that was chosen. Memories are long in this proud and spirited county, guardian of the last secrets of Deep England, and they have not faded yet.
This year I went to one of South London’s larger churches for the Easter Vigil Mass. It was the night before the clocks went forward, so there in the last dark evening we stood, numbering at least six hundred I should think, outside the unlit church — without temple or tabernacle, like the wandering tribes of Israel. Up from the foot of the hill drifted the grimy surf of traffic-noise; more distinct was the high whine of the trains on the main line and their percussion over points; while the Crystal Palace and Croydon transmitters glimmered silent and sentinel on their far hill. Before the west door of the church a brazier stood ready, like the one by which Peter had warmed himself and hotly denied his Lord, except that over this brazier quite different words were about to be said:
“Christ yesterday and today;the Beginning and the End;the Alpha and the Omega.All time belongs to him,and all the ages.To him be glory and powerThrough every age and for ever. Amen.”
So proclaimed Fr. David, his voice thinned but strangely clarified by the outside air, while into the Paschal Candle he carved the Cross, the letters Alpha and Omega, and the digits of the year of our (risen!) Lord 2024. Then from the brazier the candle was lit – the first light – and we heard the first call, the first music: “Lumen Christi”. “Deo Gratias,” we answered. No verb; only nouns and names – but indicative, subjunctive and imperative were all implicit in that single candle-flame. This was a good light — a light by which, if we drew near it, we should find our hope. This was our signal to follow the candle as it was carried into the cavernous church, and so, slowly, slowly, we shuffled back through the west door. Passing through the porch we were plunged into such complete darkness that I was reminded of the beginning of Genesis, of the words which in fact we would hear again shortly afterwards – of the formless void and the darkness covering the earth. But there, straight ahead at the east end of the church, the head of the procession had reached the altar: from the light from the Paschal candle a host of other waiting candles had been lit, so that the whole apse was now aglow. “Oh my goodness,” whispered a girl behind me, “This is so beautiful.” The first day — and God saw that it was good.
For at Easter the world really is recreated. As the Paschal flame is passed from pew to pew and candle to candle, as this most dramatic of all the Church’s liturgies unfolds, everything grows gradually richer and fuller and brighter. By the light spreading and strengthening through the church we saw, as in the first chapter of Genesis, new creations appearing verse by verse: the vaults above, the flowers proliferating where on Good Friday there had been only bare stone — and the human face, in six hundred lovingly-crafted permutations, illuminated and transfigured by the new fire. Then, at the Gloria, as if on the seventh day, came the loudest and most exuberant possible noise – all bells jangling, all pipes blasting. It was the steady but emphatic banishment of darkness and death.
“I sometimes think we Catholics are better at Lent than at Easter,” observed Fr. David in his homily. “We have had fasting; now it is time for feasting. This is the beginning of the season of guzzling!” But no shallow or self-deceiving merriment, this. It follows naturally from a conclusion drawn in the light of reasonable faith, albeit faith in an extraordinary, even outrageous proposition. If Christ is God made man, if He took human flesh, and if, having been put to death, He is now, somehow, unaccountably but incontrovertibly alive, then we too are completely changed. And nothing and nobody good and rightly cherished or pleasing to God has ever been, or ever will be, lost to Him. Even death is not the end of us.
We have not forgotten the desolation of Good Friday, nor the fears and hardships of our own lives. Evil and death and all its schemes and attempts at reinvention have not yet been driven out. But they have been dealt a mortal blow. A mortal blow if Christ, wearing our flesh and our nature, standing for us and in our place, can undergo the worst that evil and death can deal out, can indeed be annihilated, but can yet rise bodily from the dead and walk free from his own tomb. If it is possible for His human body, then it is possible (through Him) for our human bodies. The forces of death and of evil can flail as wildly as they please, for a season, but the final plug is already pulled on them; the clock is ticking for them. We, meanwhile, are homeward bound.
The choir of Hereford Cathedral sing ‘Good Christians all, Rejoice and Sing’ to Melchior Vulpius’s tune ‘Gelobet sei Gott’ (1609).
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| Elizabeth Jennings in the 1940s. Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence 3.0 from https://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk/image_viewer5039.html?img=portrait_7&gal=portraits |
We all know the cliché about studying poetry at school. You spend all your time learning ‘the classics’ by heart — or ‘by rote’ as some more pejoratively call it — a compulsory exercise in memory which drains all the life out of poetry, so that, by the age of sixteen, you are effectively inoculated against taking any joy whatsoever in it ever again. That is the cliché — but I think for many in our generation the experience was something like the opposite extreme. It was as if our GCSE English Literature examiners had fled in terror from daffodils and nightingales, and agreed that their chief priority in selecting poems for the syllabus was that they could never be learned by heart, even if anybody wanted to.
Accordingly, the examiners favoured free-verse poems on gritty, contemporary themes in a punchy, combative style: what a friend of mine calls ‘switchblades and asphalt’ poetry. For example:
Today I am going to kill something. Anything.I have had enough of being ignored and todayI am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets.— Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Education for Leisure’
Or the one about stealing a snowman for no reason, and kicking it to pieces:
Part of the thrill was knowingthat children would cry in the morning. Life’s tough.[…]Then I was standingalone among lumps of snow, sick of the world.Boredom. Mostly I’m so bored I could eat myself.— Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Stealing’
The idea, of course, was to try to make a point: that poetry could be ‘relevant’ (that crucial word) to the young people of early twenty-first-century Britain — that it could be as tough and unsentimental and ‘real’, so to speak, as an inner-city housing-estate. But the poems never transcended the hard realities they were portraying. There was no real meditation on the suffering or boredom of those lives; no engagement of heart and mind together; no introduction to that interplay of beauty and truth — the balance between form and sense — the marriage of music and meaning, that we recognise in the best and most valuable poetry.
So I finished my GCSEs aged sixteen rather grumpy with English Literature examiners in general. How different, then, to open a new anthology at the start of my A-level course and encounter a passage like this:
[…] Man’s a believerUntil corrupted. This huge trusted powerIs spirit. He moves in the muscle of the world,In continual creation. He burns the tides, he shinesFrom the matchless skies. He is the day’s surrender.[…]This spirit, this power, this holder together of spaceIs about, is aware, is working in your breathing.But most he is the need that shows in hungerAnd in the tears shed in the lonely fastness.And in sorrow after anger.
— ‘A Chorus’ (Moments of Grace, 1979; Collected Poems, p. 440.)
Notice how, even though the poem alludes to hardship and sorrow — to ‘cities with their factory darkness’, say, or by the way in which the lines ‘hopes fulfilled or forgotten’ and ‘promises kept’ (as opposed to just ‘hopes and promises’) acknowledge, implicitly, the possibility of hopes being dashed, or promises broken – the poem itself transcends these sorrows and hardships, and helps us to see them in the perspective of a greater reality, rather than just languishing in them.
This was my introduction to Elizabeth Jennings, and it is still one of my favourite poems. I have school examiners to thank for it! One of the many things I love about it is the wonderfully controlled diminuendo that extends over its course. It doesn’t go where you initially expect. It begins in a blaze of glory, with these dazzling panoramic views of Creation, but gradually softens, growing steadily more meditative and introspective. And the last line, ‘And in sorrow after anger’, even feels like a whispered afterthought — almost a confession. It is a poem that seems to travel from the pulpit to the pew, from the choir-loft to the confessional. In this it is rather like the Te Deum (which begins ‘We praise Thee, O God; we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord; All the earth doth worship thee, the Father everlasting’, but whose last line is the far more intimate ‘O Lord, in thee have I trusted; let me never be confounded’.)
So who is, as she has been called, ‘England’s best Catholic poet since Gerard Manley Hopkins’? Who is Elizabeth Jennings?
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| Elizabeth Jennings as a child Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence 3.0 from https://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk/image_viewerc424.html?img=portrait_5&gal=portraits |
Elizabeth Jennings was born in Boston in Lincolnshire, in dead-level Fen country, in 1926, and spent an idyllic early childhood there. ‘Six years of a flat land,’ she was to remember, ‘The sea […] Was more luminous even / Than the blazing tulips in formidable ranks’ – but in 1931 her father was appointed County Medical Officer for Oxfordshire, so to Oxford she, with her parents and older sister Aileen, accordingly moved. The city was to be her home for the rest of her life. In suburban North Oxford the Jennings family were neighbours and fellow parishioners of the Tolkiens, and Priscilla, the Professor’s daughter, was to become a lifelong friend. Jennings’ love of poetry began at school – they read G. K. Chesterton’s Lepanto (‘Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard […] Don John of Austria / Is riding to the sea […]’). ‘That was one of the key experiences of my life. It hit me’, she recalled years later.
In 1944 she went up to St. Anne’s College, Oxford, to study English Literature. Here she fell in with several up-and-coming writers and novelists: Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Thom Gunn. She was popular and apparently had many admirers. Kingsley Amis wrote that ‘she seemed on her bicycle and in her T-shirt very advanced for those days’, though she herself remembered being ‘agonisingly shy’. It was at this time that she found early success in poetry and was published for the first time.
Here is the beginning of an early poem, ‘Warning’:
Child do not tell your images, we kill themWith argument and I would wish you deafRather than hear the mad cries of our logicAiming at beauty, wounding it with grief.Be silent now and do not tell your magic.– from an early poem, ‘Warning’ (Collected Poems, p. 6)
She was briefly engaged to be married to a fellow student, but this was broken off. After graduating she ‘did eight years’ hard labour’, as she put it, in Oxford City Library, before joining the publishers Chatto and Windus as a reader. All the time she was writing poetry. Her first full-length collection, ‘Growing Points’, came out 1955. In 1957 she won the Somerset Maugham Award, the prize being three months in a foreign city of the winner’s choosing. Jennings chose Rome, and her time there was one of the happiest periods of her life. Her memories of Rome return time and time again in her poetry.
However, the 1960s were more difficult, bringing with them a several recurring periods of mental illness. It is not altogether clear what brought this on: possibly overwork, possibly heartbreak, but either way, she suffered a serious mental breakdown and spent three years in and out of hospital. Her distress was severe enough that she made several suicide attempts, and she also suffered from alcoholism. Yet she never stopped writing poetry, even if many were later to be suppressed.
The story of Jennings’ later life is, looked at in one way – and perhaps the wrong way – a sad one. She never attained the literary stardom of Larkin and Amis. Nor did she ever marry or have children, and although she claimed not to regret it, I am not entirely convinced of this. She said, for example, ‘I wouldn’t have been a good proposition for marriage. I jump out of bed to write poems. I don’t like housework. I think I like being independent. I am a romantic and I don’t think romance lasts. I can’t bear things ending.’ There’s a tinge of unwilling resignation about the last two remarks, I think. Still, perhaps she knew her own mind. In any case, having spent a number of years sharing quarters with a Czech refugee, in later years she lived alone in Oxford and gained a reputation more as an eccentric than as a poet. She used to take her papers in plastic carrier bags to a café, where she would sit and write and observe. Very few people knew who she really was. She collected trinkets, dolls’ houses and china ornaments, and attracted curiosity by never dressing up for formal occasions, even to receive the CBE in 1993 – her appearance in a duffel-coat resulted in the press rather cruelly calling her ‘bag-lady of the sonnets’. But again, all the time she was writing poetry, right up until her death in 2001 at the age of seventy-five.
I should say a little about her faith. Unlike many of our prominent Catholic poets like St. John Henry Newman, Chesterton and Hopkins, Jennings was a cradle Catholic, rather than a convert. As a small child she and her sister used to play Mass, with a toy oven for a tabernacle, and a wooden train as a thurible. As she grew up, though, she became less happy. She found she had questions to which nobody would give her adequate answers. There was also one particularly horrible incident in Confession where a priest seems to have told her, ‘All you think about is your ugly little self’ and, unbelievably, even though he had given her absolution, told her not to receive Communion with the other children on Sunday. This, she said, ‘did a great deal of damage’, though not to the extent that she lost her faith. In an unpublished poem, ‘Abuse of a Sacrament’, she wrote, ‘I have known priests who tore the soul apart […] O yes, I’ve known the dreadful penance move / All hope away. For this Christ knew the place / Of agony.’
The damage was only really repaired years later in Rome, where, she said, ‘I really found happiness’. She climbed the Holy Steps on her knees, even though a priest told her they were not authentic. ‘They have been hallowed by centuries of penitence’, she said. Her happiness is clearly mainly because, perhaps for the first time since childhood, she had recognised her faith as a source more of joy than of torment. And I think this is how it remained, giving her strength in the years of illness and suffering that followed.
All her life, as far as I know, she was a faithful and regular Mass-goer. In fact, it is nice that we are discussing her at St. Dominic’s Priory, as she was friends with many Dominican religious, dedicated poems to many of them, and, certainly late in her life, regularly attended Mass at Blackfriars in Oxford. (Last October I was chatting to a lady here at St. Dominic’s who was from Oxford and had been a parishioner at Blackfriars for long enough to remember Jennings as a small figure huddled in the front pew – though only found out after her death who she was).
Assessment
It is easy to underestimate Elizabeth Jennings. She tends to be thought not to have lived up to the potential of her poetic career. The American poet Dana Gioia acknowledges that she ‘had the peculiar fate of being in the right place at the right time in the wrong way’, in that she had the brilliant good fortune to coincide with the Oxford literary scene at a time when there was a reaction in poetry against the obscurity and deliberate ‘difficulty’ of Modernism, and a return to a more unadorned style (in something called ‘The Movement’, an unhelpfully vague name) — but, ultimately, her fellow poets at Oxford were cut from a different cloth to her. As well as being unornamented, the Movement poetry was deliberately unsentimental (even anti-sentimental), not just unpretentious but often curmudgeonly, pessimistic and ironic. Elizabeth Jennings’ style is more romantic, closer to nineteenth-century poets like Christina Rosetti and Emily Dickinson (though by ‘romantic’ I don’t mean ‘sentimental’). She was the only woman, and the only Catholic, associated with that movement. She also committed the cardinal literary sin of being too prolific – but more on that in a moment.
I actually think that some of the things that have led people to overlook her are precisely what make her worth reading and befriending today, and which make her in many ways a poet for our times.
Firstly, there is the directness and simplicity of her poetic voice. In contrast to many of her contemporaries, there is no irony in Jennings’ verse, no sarcasm, and though there can be anger or regret there is seldom outright bitterness. It is honest verse, sometimes painfully honest, but this honesty brings a clarity, a trustworthiness, which is refreshing in an era of switchblades and asphalt. Jennings takes ordinary, personal themes — friendship, childhood, bereavement — and very simply tells the truth about them. Here is the beginning of a well-known poem of hers, ‘Friendship’:
Such love I cannot analyse;It does not rest in lips or eyes,Neither in kisses nor caress.Partly, I know, it’s gentlenessAnd understanding in one wordOr in brief letters. […]– from ‘Friendship’ (Relationships, 1972)
There is also a great humility to her. It appears, for instance, in another favourite of mine, a poem called ‘Losing and Finding’ about a six-year-old child who had come to her house to look for her after getting lost and whom she had taken to a playground while waiting for the parents to turn up (which seems to have taken an entire afternoon! The Seventies were different times). It ends,
And it was you who rescued me, you know.Among the swings, the meadow and the river,You took me out of time, rubbed off on meWhat it feels like to care without restriction,To trust and never think of a betrayal.– ‘Losing and Finding’ (Growing Points, 1975; Collected Poems, p. 340)
A similar example of her humility and self-effacement is a poem she wrote about a visit to a school to meet some A-level students who were studying her work: the poem is all about them and their hopes and worries, not her; they clearly made as strong an impression on her as she might have expected to on them.
Yet this simplicity and humility is not sentimentalism or naivety. Her observations, whether interior or exterior, are always acute and perspicacious. She will say what needs to be said, will confront and dwell on evil if necessary – though always with the searching light of faith.
For example, here is a poem from a late collection (Times and Seasons, 1992) about the changed, post-Sixties attitudes to romantic love. Note that it is a sonnet, a form with a long association with love-poetry:
You take the whole of love. We lived by touchAnd doubt and by the purposes of chanceAnd yet I think our slow ways carried muchThat you have missed — the guess, the wish, the glance.– ‘The Way They Live Now’ (Times and Seasons, 1992; Collected Poems, p. 669)
I find it very interesting that Jennings was actually asked to read out this poem on Radio 4 when she was interviewed on Desert Island Discs in 1993. The presenter Sue Lawley called it ‘splendid’. I am not sure that this would happen on today’s BBC.
So you see the very Christian combination of truth and love that permeates Jennings’ verse. I think of her as a sort of ‘poetry Auntie’, someone with whom I could happily have spent an evening chatting, but who would certainly have spoken her mind frankly if she needed to.
And of course Jennings’ faith illuminates the whole of her verse, as well as her life and art. She was unashamed in taking sacred themes, in writing about feasts and seasons, the sacraments, the saints, the city of Rome. She returned again and again to Catholic subjects. There are three poems on Lazarus, for instance; she wrote sequences on the Seven Deadly Sins, the Easter Triduum, and the different kinds of love. ‘My Roman Catholic religion and my poems are the most important things in my life,’ she said.
Her faith informed not only her art but her whole attitude to her art, her whole understanding of poetry itself. I mentioned her prolific output. From a literary point of view, over-production is often looked down upon, as it suggests a lack of self-criticism, even a lack of self-discipline. Writing less is taken to imply higher quality. And look how thick her Collected Poems are! But reading through these poems – and there are a lot of them – I came to realise that this is not just a literary testament, but a spiritual one. Not all of her verses are great poems, but literary greatness is not primarily what she was striving for.
The editor of her Collected Poems, Emma Mason, has pointed out that Jennings recognises poetry as a kind of incarnation. Ours is, after all, a religion of the Word — Jesus Christ is the Word as well as the Son of God — and so His incarnation elevates not only our human flesh but our human language. So, in reading these poems, we come to realise that many of them are doing something else at the same time. As well as poems they are thoughts, or gestures, or feelings that have been incarnated, that have ‘taken flesh’ in the form of printed type or speech. They are personal reminiscences, memories, jottings, postcards, tributes, farewells, even apologies, meditations — and in one way or another they are almost always prayers. For her, poetry is always a kind of prayer, and perhaps any prayer is also a kind of poem. For those of us who love poetry (and who see the Mass, for instance, as a kind of poem) this is a pleasing blurring of boundaries.
Certainly this is how I think much of her work is best understood: as prayer-poems, so to speak. She sheepishly acknowledged that she wrote fast and revised little – sheepishly but unrepentantly, because for her, writing too much was only like praying too much — and we would hardly try to improve the quality of our prayer by praying less. So really, this book is a spiritual journal, a legacy of a life of prayer as much as of poetry – which is why she can say, with complete humility, ‘It is, I think, in my own poetry / I meet my God. He’s a familiar there.’ (from ‘A Way to a Creed’, A Dream of Spring, 1980).
Here is another of my favourite poems of hers, ‘At a Mass’, in which she meditates on the interplay between art and faith – on how, true as it is that beauty can and should lead us to God, our appreciation of beauty can get in the way, even in church. To those of us who are deeply sensitive to the beauty of the Mass, it offers food for thought:
[…]I struggle now with my own ideas of loveAnd wonder if art and religion mean dividing.Each has his way and mine perhaps is toSuffer the critical sense that cannot rest.If the air is cool, the colours right, the spokenWords dramatic enough, then I am pleased.But why must I ask a sense of style in the brokenBread and bring God down to my limited view? […]– ‘At a Mass’ (Song for a Birth or Death, 1961). Collected Poems p. 96.
Another interesting poem to read in this light is To a Friend with a Religious Vocation, which reveals her own sense of a poetic vocation, but also that it takes second place to a formal religious vocation – rightly, as she acknowledges, but not without pain:
Thinking of your vocation, I am filledWith thoughts of my own lack of one. I seeWithin myself no wish to breed or buildOr take the three vows ringed by poverty.And yet I have a sense,Vague and inchoate, with no symmetry,Of purpose.[…]You know what you must do,So that mere breathing is a way to bless.Dark nights, perhaps, but no grey days for you.— from ‘To a Friend with a Religious Vocation’ (Song for a Birth or Death, 1961; Collected Poems p. 105).
(‘Breed or build’ is a quotation from Hopkins’ poem about writer’s block, frustrated vocations and a sense of purposelessness: ‘birds build – but not I build; no, but strain, / Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.’)
So: simplicity, truth-telling, and faith: these are the main gifts that I think Jennings gives us.
Conclusion
When asked how she would like to be remembered, Jennings said simply, ‘As someone who wrote good poems’. I think we might add, ‘someone who wrote good prayers’. Perhaps this is why it is such a surprise to me, though certainly a welcome one, that she is still on A-level syllabuses. She is, I think, a poet for our times: she only died in 2001, so was more than familiar with the encroachment of secularism and the hidden sorrows of modern life – and certainly with the challenges of sticking to one’s faith even in a cultural headwind, or at professional cost. I feel that if she were here now she would understand us, sympathise with us – and then go home and write a poem about us.
In an age of switchblades and asphalt, and of sarcasm and irony, and of joylessness and hopelessness, her poetic voice is like a simple candle which, like the Christian faith itself, is easily dismissed by the world, but unobtrusively sheds consoling and truthgul light for us. In this way, she can help us to recover simpler, straightforward, unironic speech, and simpler, more straightforward faith.
To finish, here is one last poem: a late one (from 1998), and I think a very beautiful one, called ‘A Full Moon’.
[…] But look againThat Host-like moon shines whereAll can see him. Christ took on all painBeyond time’s arbiter.[…]That moon in silence canElevate us till we long to knowThe Trinity’s whole plan.Nature was fashioned for this purpose. SeeA moon reminds us of God’s ministry.– ‘A Full Moon’ (Praises, 1998; Collected Poems, p. 760)
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| Elizabeth Jennings, c. 1990 Reproduced under Creative Commons Licence 3.0 from https://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk/image_viewer3300.html?img=portrait_2&gal=portraits |
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Further reading & listening:
Elizabeth Jennings, Collected Poems, ed. Emma Mason (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012). ISBN 9781847770684.
Elizabeth Jennings, New Selected Poems, ed. Rebecca Watts (Manchester: Carcanet, 2019). ISBN 9781784108663.
Hear Jennings reading her own poems on the Poetry Archive website: https://poetryarchive.org/poet/elizabeth-jennings/.
Jennings’ interview on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, 8th January 1993: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0093x99 .
Dana Gioia, ‘Clarify Me, Please, God of the Galaxies: In Praise of the Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings’, in First Things (May 2018). Available online at: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/05/clarify-me-please-god-of-the-galaxies.
The Elizabeth Jennings Project at De Montfort University, web bibliography and resource. https://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk/home.html
Excerpts from poems are reproduced under the ‘fair dealing’ copyright exception for quotation. Images are reproduced under Creative Commons Licence 3.0 from the Elizabeth Jennings Project at De Montfort University (https://elizabethjennings.dmu.ac.uk), in accordance with their copyright notice.
And so we come once again to the fireside of the year, where the strange and lovely truth of Christmas draws us to homely things. As the years go by, and I find myself less and less at home in the time and place given to me, I cross the threshold of this feast with ever greater relief.
It is not easy to live in, this age of deceptive appearances. Behind the superficial glass and the liquid crystal screens our sorrows are undiminished. The Britain in which, for the first time in fifteen centuries, a minority of people now profess to be Christians, is no happier for its loss of faith. The old ways we tore to pieces are giving way not to the promised utopia, but to a new, sullen, disenchanted, resentful existence. Not only are things going wrong, but we struggle to agree about what has gone wrong, let alone how to make things better. Identity politics have captured many formerly trusted institutions and done great damage to their reputations, as well as confusing or upsetting many well-meaning people. And our response to the general economic strain is not, in general, an effort to build up solidarity and courage, or to provide an alternative to rapaciousness and greed, but renewed howling against our forebears and the foundations of our society. That old, gentle Britain to which we owe so much, and for which I still stand, has become our scapegoat.
This is now a Britain in which many shared things are no longer well-made or looked after; in which even those trying to do well seem unable to overcome the shoulder-shrugging culture around them. Wherever we go, any expectations of high standards seem to be frustrated. Thoroughfares and public spaces are tatty and uncared for; lifts and escalators are broken or vandalised. Or things will not be as they first appear. The Internet, for instance is full of false promises: websites will co-operate for a moment before the sentence you were reading disappears behind a salvo of pop-ups about cookie settings or newsletter subscriptions. A special offer will turn out to entail endless and spurious terms and conditions. Sorry, all our operatives are busy at the moment. Sorry, this desk is unstaffed. Sorry, this machine is out of order.
It is a Britain in which language itself is often used insincerely, too often more for the purposes of manipulation than anything else. Euphemisms and weasel words and empty slogans are so prevalent that it is a constant effort to pare speech of them, to speak or write plainly and truthfully. We often feel patronised and tricked and taken advantage of.
It is a Britain in which people of good will increasingly bear the brunt of the selfishness of those of ill-will; in which those in positions of responsibility are often unable to exercise their offices with principle and clarity; in which those who shout loudest tend to get their way. Only amongst a few is there even a sense of embarrassment at our irreverence, our arrogance, our squandering of our inheritance. It is a Britain which, I now see, is indeed mortal.
It is an old and noble nation forgetting her honour, and learning anew the barbarism that the old faith once kept at bay. There are grave misdeeds and acts of calculatedly barbaric violence at home and abroad, an ebbing away of civility and common decency, and the unabated undermining of marriage and the family and of the Christian vision of the dignity of the human person.
But amidst all this, even as the darkness presses in, another voice, another kind of language. And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the fields… Words which, strange as they are to the ear, are not evasive, do not deceive; which have that unmistakable ring of truth:
And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.
They are words which contradict all the smirking arrogance and squalid tragedies of our time, but not as we would have supposed or dared to have hoped. Something different is going on: something strange and also sweet… Something so strange and sweet as the call of our true and longed-for home.
The darkness presses in on us, often as intensely as it pressed in on the Roman province of Judaea and on Bethlehem; pressed right down on the stable-roof and sought entry. But from within that stable it was repelled and defied, as it is repelled and defied tonight, and for ever, by light — by the one Light which, as we have often been told, the darkness cannot overpower. And our liberation is both more cosmic and more intimate than instant deliverance from hard times or a faithless epoch could ever have been: we are freed from the very foes that blight us most: sin and death.
This year is the 110th anniversary of one of my favourite Christmas poems: Noel: Christmas Eve 1913, by Robert Bridges. Gerald Finzi set it to music in his Christmas cantata In Terra Pax (see above) though for the third stanza he substituted the verses quoted above, from the second chapter of Luke’s Gospel.
Noel: Christmas Eve, 1913Pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.A frosty Christmas Eve
when the stars were shining
Fared I forth alone
where westward falls the hill,
And from many a village
in the water’d valley
Distant music reach’d me
peals of bells a-ringing:
The constellated sounds
ran sprinking on earth’s floor
As the dark vault above
with stars was spangled o’er.
Then sped my thoughts to keep
that first Christmas of all
When the shepherds watching
by their folds ere the dawn
Heard music in the fields
and marvelling could not tell
Whether it were angels
or the bright stars singing.
Now blessed be the tow’rs
that crown England so fair
That stand up strong in prayer
unto God for our souls:
Blessed be their founders
(said I) an’ our country folk
Who are ringing for Christ
in the belfries to-night
With arms lifted to clutch
the rattling ropes that race
Into the dark above
and the mad romping din.
But to me heard afar
it was starry music
Angels’ song, comforting
as the comfort of Christ
When he spake tenderly
to his sorrowful flock:
The old words came to me
by the riches of time
Mellow’d and transfigured
as I stood on the hill
Heark’ning in the aspect
of th’ eternal silence.
Wishing all readers a very merry and restful Christmas.
