Vivat Carolus Rex

I must say, I thought the Coronation was marvellous.  The service in Westminster Abbey was a feast of uplifting splendour, rich in mystery and poetry, and shot through with that serious joy that characterises all the most meaningful occasions.  Careful thought had clearly gone into every aspect of the ceremony; the symbols were deep and rich, he prayers weighty and resonant and the music absolutely magnificent.  

Several things particularly moved me, often moments of simplicity: the chorister’s fearless opening greeting to the King, recalling the ‘boy bishops’ of the Middle Ages, and not without the hint of a challenge — “Your Majesty, as children of the the Kingdom of God, we welcome you in the name of the King of Kings” — and the King’s simple, correct reply, correct because it echoed Christ, “I come not to be served but to serve.”  Later, just before the anointing, there was the sight of His Majesty in a simple white shirt — for a moment visibly a man like any other.  Then the veiling by the embroidered screen, so as show that some things are still too sacred even for television’s eye.  There was also the Byzantine chanting which accompanied the presentation of the Sword of Offering and the Spurs and the Orb — a remarkable combination which opened up an especially startling glimpse into the depths of time. 

Some criticism of the service has been made even by sympathetic commentators, lamenting the absence of certain traditions, or finding the mystery diminished by the zoomed-in, high-definition television pictures.  But I must say I found myself decidedly heartened by it all, above all by its explicitly Christian nature.  I know that we in England are very good at pretending to say one thing and then actually doing something quite different, but in times like these, when so many ancient things are simply being openly jettisoned or reinterpreted to suit our modern whims, it means a great deal that such serious prayers were still said, that our country was still committed, at its heart, to God, and that an ancient covenant was sealed afresh.

Decorations in Cowley Street behind Westminster Abbey (whose towers are just visible in the background), 7th May, 2023.  The house in the foreground was formerly the residence of Lord John Reith, first Director General of the BBC.

Those of us who are in favour of all this — who believe in the quiet wisdom of constitutional monarchy, in its gentle ceremony and stateliness, and in the particular way of loving Britain that it gives us — are well aware that we are keeping a flame alight in an age when many people miss its purpose.  The Coronation gives strength to this flame.  It seems to me that it matters less whether we matched the full splendour of Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation in 1953 than that a moment of this kind should have happened at all.   The outward form of Coronations is bound to change over time; the important thing is to make sure it is done, to maintain the links in the chain, to keep faith with our forebears and hand on our society intact to our descendants.  That the Coronation was so resplendent, should have remained so untainted by plastic secular modernity, and been enjoyed by so many is, in some ways, secondary, though I did savour every minute.  Given the kinds of outrages against our culture that seem to have become a matter of course in public life, I think it was a moment of hope, and a great counter-witness to the irony and cynicism with which so many shut their hearts against the the sacred or mysterious.  It was also a highly intelligent blend of our ancient inheritance and the reality of modern Britain: for instance, I thought the contribution of the other Christian leaders (including our own Cardinal Vincent Nichols) and the leaders from other religions was handled with great dignity and respect.  All people of good will should have been able to find some encouragement in the Coronation: an opportunity for national unity and strength in troubling and confusing times, a chance to step outside our own age for a moment, and an affirmation of higher ideals.  The memory is a treasure to which I will return in the months and years to come.

And not only to the service itself but to everything that surrounded it: it was wonderful to see the flags on the Mall on Sunday, and also for our parish Youth Choir to sing at a special Mass on the Bank Holiday Monday, an occasion for which our auxiliary bishop joined us.  This is no coincidence, but part of the ripples of goodwill that radiate from events like this, quietly building up ‘bonds of connexion between persons’, as St. John Henry Newman put it.

The Mall looking splendid

“It is deep within our Catholic spirit to love our country and to pray for our Sovereign,” said my Archbishop John Wilson at a Solemn Mass at the Cathedral on Sunday. “King Charles and Queen Camilla have set themselves to be servants after the heart and mind and example of the Lord Jesus.  We seek to do the same and to pray for Their Majesties and for our lands.” There is a strong sense, expressed not least in Cardinal Vincent’s excellent loyal address, that the Church is behind the King; and that the King knows this.  There is a hard road ahead for our nation, and much cause for concern in the increasing violence and the sense of a weakening of civil society — but last weekend a clear sign of the attitude with which to overcome these problems, in both the short term and the long.

Forgive the repetition: I cannot resist posting Saturday’s rendition of William Walton’s Coronation Te Deum…  Andrew Nethsinga conducts choristers from Westminster Abbey, the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace, Truro Cathedral, and the Methodist College in Belfast, with Sir Antonio Pappano directing the orchestra in the organ-loft. 

Why (still) this blog?

A quick note to record that today, the 6th January 2020, this blog reaches its fifth birthday.  I’m very grateful for all who have read and commented in that time; I hope you have enjoyed the pieces I have written.  And happy feast of the Epiphany!

I must admit that my motivations in writing this blog remain much as I described them in my first post: mainly self-centred!  Really I think of it as a diary of my own thoughts and ideas, a record of people and books and places I find interesting, and an outlet for my obsessions: poetry, music, churches, landscapes and traditions.  I find it a good way of working out what I really think and feel about something, and also of honing my writing-craft.

Often, though, I also feel that I would like, in however small and hidden a way, to record and publish my celebration and defence of things dear to me.  There are things and people in this world, some of them in danger or decline, or dealt an unfair press, or simply deserving of a larger hearing, that I feel the urge to praise, or protect, or ponder.  The blog gives me a way to do this, allowing me, quietly and cautiously, to stand up and be counted, and to give encouragement to others who have similar interests and ideas.  This is why I make my writing public.  Whenever I have made the wonderful refreshing discovery of a like-minded and thoughtful writer, my first feeling is of gratitude, more than anything else, for their courage and generosity: it may be small recompense on my part to inflict this blog on the Internet in return, but, apart from spreading the word about the writers I encounter and mulling over their ideas or stories, it is all I have to give.  

I know, too, that my articles might be read by people who do not share my perspective on things — this is entirely welcome, and opens up an opportunity for dialogue.

Since 2015, various heartening developments have coincided with some of the ideas and interests that have featured here, and I have even made some new acquaintances; this turns out to be one of the joys of blog-writing.  For example, the recent revival of interest in the composer Ruth Gipps has brought me into conversation with other admirers of her music.  And even the blog’s title has taken on new meaning since last October, when the author of the prayer from which I took that mysterious, paradoxical phrase ‘Some Definite Service’ was canonised: he is now Saint John Henry Newman.  The year beforehand, the gist of that meditation had already received special attention in the Church, when the Synod on Youth asked how we can remind the world and our neighbours that we all have, every single one of us, however weak or inadequate we think ourselves, however uncertain the future seems, regardless of our past and irrespective of our station in life, a definite vocation, ‘some definite service’: we are not mere meaningless molecules, but have been created for a cosmic and glorious purpose.

I hope that this blog has been an encouragement to others, and offered the welcome of a virtual wayside sitting-room for netfarers.  If so, it has done its job and I mine.

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.

The New Evangelisation: ten thoughts

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?  The question asks itself now not in ancient Babylon but in our own country and our own day, and with growing urgency.  The Church’s answer is the New Evangelisation —  a great call to re-evangelise Christian cultures that have forgotten the faith — but it can be hard to see how we are to fit into it, or where to begin.  I am not a convert, still less an expert, but I thought it might be worth putting up this list of reflections, even if most of them might seem obvious.

1. Apathetic agnosticism is a greater, a subtler and a more widespread challenge than aggressive secularism.  Our country is awash with spiritual apathy (or acedia): a number of people are openly opposed to Christianity, but far more in modern Britain seem almost to sleepwalk through life, hurled by busy lives from distraction to distraction, not seeing what weighs them down.  There is a lot of unwise, stupid and wrong behaviour as well, but we should never confuse this, the result of sin to which believers are hardly immune, with the actual intelligence and goodness of non-churchgoers.   Easy though it might be to forget in a culture opposed to the Church in so many ways, people really do examine the human heart carefully without any particular grudge against Christianity.  We should remember that our faith does not make us, in ourselves, superior to them — see Galatians 6:14.  Another point is that people have different reasons for not going to church, and these cannot necessarily be bashed aside with a copy of the Catechism.  For instance, many young people, having been brought up without regular church attendance, might feel that to start practising would be a slight to their parents and their values; it would be wrong for us to ride rough-shod over that loyalty.  Many people stay away from church without resenting churchgoers; many pray without practising; many believe in God but lack faith in the visible institution of the Church; many people are of good will but spiritually unadventurous. There are also more people with misgivings about modern values than the media suggest: I know a number of (young!) people who reverence marriage, dislike bad language, seek beauty in poetry, and so on.  To be evangelised is to discover something that is not completely unfamiliar.
2. We should announce the Gospel by asking people questions.  This is an age, in thrall as it is to the doctrines of self-determination and relativism, in which people dislike being lectured to, and in any case, it is better to invite people to discover the faith for themselves and in their own time.   Proclamations, however resonant, can be taken as slogans and brushed off quite easily.  Even quietly-posed questions are less easy to ignore.  They are more likely to percolate unobtrusively through the mind, reappearing every so often, never really going away, gently nudging and pestering for an answer.  We could learn from our Evangelical brethren here:  the talks and discussions they organise often have a question as the title, such as ‘Is there more to life than this?’, ‘What if the Resurrection really happened?’, and so on.  Even rhetorical questions demand unspoken answers.  Do you believe that you have an absolute and irreducible dignity as a human being?  Would you prefer to be excused for your wrongs, or to be forgiven?  Do you remember that we believed because it is true?
3. We must evangelise the arts and culture.  We must have the courage to answer the cults of sarcasm and ugliness with works of art, literature and music that uphold human dignity and strive for beauty.  The right artistic intention is, I think, to be prized even more than accomplishment or execution.  A  sincere true utterance with some rough edges is better than a thousand polished works calculated to trample goodness and truth gratuitously (I think works of art or literature can be evil, as well as simply bad).  The ideals by which all art was once made have been so neglected that they now represent a niche in the market, and it is up to us to fill it.  We need writers, composers and architects whose subjects are not necessarily explicitly religious but whose faith can be seen to leaven their work.  We need audibly beautiful, even musical poetry.  Popular music must be prized out of the hands of the industry that has dragged it down into sordidness, and the airwaves filled with simple, unaffected, authentic and uplifting tunes.  Films, too, could explore the world and the soul far more deeply, and without sermonising (Inside Out, which I have already praised, is a case in point).  These things matter because art is not inanimate: it always acts upon us for better or worse.  If beauty is a reflection of God, and God is love and truth, beautiful art will lead us towards deeper understanding and purer love of each other and of God.  Such love is several orders of magnitude above a love of music or poetry, but both have the same essence and the same divine origin.
4. Our position should not be a merely anti-modern or reactionary one, even though we are right to mourn to much of what the past has taken with it.  Although we should cherish tradition, resist our culture’s chronological snobbery with energy and revive certain aspects of the old world, our aim is not simply to return to the past.  Likewise, given that much of what we say and believe might be called ‘conservative’, we should remember that we are so confident in its truth because it is Christian orthodoxy, not because it is conservative.  We should look for opportunities in the modern world; we should embrace new technology.  This is, for instance, the age of the image, and ours is the religion of the image: the modern ‘explosion of imagery’, Fr. Robert Barron has said, even makes this a ‘Catholic moment’.  Why should the Church not encourage the building of beautiful websites or beautiful graphic design?  I am probably guiltier than most of yearning for the past and raging against the present, but we should make the effort to receive the ‘sacrament of the present moment’ gratefully.
5. We must never tire of striving and praying for Christian unity.  Christians have inherited a difficult and a painful tangle and our divisions, though less raw than they once were, remain scandals and obstacles to faith.  We should make a greater effort to collaborate with Evangelical Christians who, like us, hold to Christian faith in the teeth of fashion, their concern for what is ‘Biblical’ corresponding to ours for what is ‘orthodox’.  We should make an effort to understand the Eastern Orthodox faith: last February’s meeting between Pope Francis and the Russian Patriarch Kirill, and good relations with the Patriarch of Constantinople, are valuable and significant.  (I have heard a priest say that fifty years might suffice for full communion to be restored between East and West.)  Even within the Catholic Church, we should overcome our differences by trying to keep them in perspective, avoiding airing them in public if possible, and also by keeping our minds and hearts fixed on Jesus Christ (see point 10). 
6. Marriage, the family and childhood matter.  It is on this front that the modern world has declared war most explicitly on the Church.  We need courage to defend it.  A preoccupation with the welfare of adults, though not unjustified, has contributed to the social and cultural neglect of children and the elderly, who in their own ways have become almost second-class citizens.  Children in particular are segregated from the world of adults: because the adult world believes itself entitled to violent and sordid entertainment, children must be given their own isolated culture.  This, among other things, means that the passage from childhood to adulthood is no longer a steady growth or slow mellowing but a series of disillusioning shocks and blows, the worst of which fall between the ages of eleven and fourteen.  Surely most of us have seen this happen: the descent of the grey veil of cynicism; the deliberate self-vandalism of the soul; the hideously thorough revolt against childhood.  The New Evangelisation reminds us of the importance of the family, in which all people have their place and by which all understand their own lives.  Somewhere (I wish I could remember where!) I have heard and heartily agreed with the statement that ‘all men are called to be fatherly and all women to be motherly’.  I think it would also be good rule to behave at all times as if children might overhear.  Unfashionably, I also believe that men can and should cultivate chivalry towards women and that women should demand excellent manners of men.  Both men and women, if they are called to do so, should steel themselves joyfully for the mission of marriage and parenthood.
7. There is a good deal of health in the Church’s youth.  I can report this from belonging to it!  In university chaplaincies, in diocesan ministries, in parishes, however small in number, there is plenty of energy, intelligence and good humour to be harnessed.  The Church has great strength in its youth, as World Youth Day has proved again and again, and will surely do again this coming July. 
8. A sense of vocation is the antidote to the myth of self-determination.  There is more strength to be gained from the feeling of being called to do something than from simply wanting to do something.  The current idea that we may do as we please as long as we think it harms nobody else will, I think, pall, since it leaves nobody but oneself to blame for plans going wrong or indeed for suffering.  As people tire of endless fruitless avenues, the Church should be there to propose a robuster way of life, something requiring service and devotion and even vows, which nevertheless brings far greater happiness than the path of self-absorption and quick gratification.  I never tire of quoting Cardinal Newman’s meditation about service and vocation, from which this blog’s name is taken: ‘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 never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next […] I have a part in this great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion 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 and serve Him in my calling.  Therefore I will trust Him’. One way of telling whether something is a real vocation, it has occurred to me, is to feel a strong desire to do something good, to be terrified of doing it, and to be determined, almost in spite of oneself, to do it all the same.
9. We are sharing a revealed faith, not advocating a philosophy or policy.  Our faith is not an idea that we came up with one afternoon in the pub and are rather pleased with.  It is not a theory to be evaluated, nor a strategy to be risk-assessed.  It is not our idea but God’s.  If we invite people to understand the Church, we do so because we believe they will be happier for knowing it, and we want happiness for them out of love: it is something that we can hardly help telling other people about, like the urge to share music or discuss favourite books. 
10. Who do we say that He is?  Our first task is to evangelise ourselves.  In a lecture that is well worth listening to, Bishop Philip Egan of Portsmouth says (here to be precise) that in the modern world we are to concentrate above all on the person of Jesus Christ.  Where, before the Council, the emphasis might have been too often on ‘The Church of the Lord’, we are invited now to found our lives more clearly upon ‘The Lord of the Church’.  The New Evangelisation may be a great task, but it begins here, and is a futile exercise without it.  It may also be a great task, but it is to be gone about in small, even unseen ways.  Whatever happens, we should not worry: we have already been told that it will all come right in the end.

Do readers have thoughts about these?  I would be interested to read any comments.

Why this blog and why its title?

The second question is the easier to answer!  The words are a favourite phrase of mine; they come from a prayer written by the writer, theologian, priest and cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–1890).  I think it is worth reproducing 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.

These are wise enough words in themselves, but I have another reason to cherish them.  I heard them repeated by one of my heroes, Pope Benedict XVI (now Pope Emeritus), at the vigil held in Hyde Park before Newman’s beatification.

Here I wish to say a special word to the many young people present.  Dear young friends: only Jesus knows what “definite service” he has in mind for you.  Be open to his voice resounding in the depths of your heart: even now his heart is speaking to your heart.  Christ has need of families to remind the world of the dignity of human love and the beauty of family life.  He needs men and women who devote their lives to the noble task of education, tending the young and forming them in the ways of the Gospel.  He needs those who will consecrate their lives to the pursuit of perfect charity, following him in chastity, poverty and obedience, and serving him in the least of our brothers and sisters.  He needs the powerful love of contemplative religious, who sustain the Church’s witness and activity through their constant prayer.  And he needs priests, good and holy priests, men who are willing to lay down their lives for their sheep.  Ask our Lord what he has in mind for you!  Ask him for the generosity to say “yes!”.  Do not be afraid to give yourself totally to Jesus.  He will give you the grace you need to fulfil your vocation.

 Benedict XVI to young people at Hyde Park, in London, 18th September, 2010.

If it is good enough an idea for these two men, it is good enough for me: that even the hardest and humblest deed can be done in ‘some definite service’ (a paradox in the best tradition of Christianity, as Chesterton might have pointed out), and is never in vain.

Now I may be misguided in believing that this could apply specifically to my writing a blog about (I imagine) all sorts of things like poetry, culture, music and so on, and I may very much doubt that anyone else’s ‘definite service’ extends to having to read it, but it ought to be good writing practice and a bit of fun.

‘I too shall something make,

And joy in the making…’