Bog Myrtle & Peat

I stopped for lunch, then I lay for a time on my back in the fields below the house. It was tempting to sleep, but the racket of birds and the swell of risen grass was too distracting. So I closed my eyes as the breeze bobbed at my hair, thinking it’s not so bad, this.

When the time came for me to move at last, I gulped at the day as if it were some hated medication. Opening my eyes, the landscape rushed onto me in a flare of brightness, and for a moment it seemed like the world was burning up. Even with a constriction of pupils and an automatic readjustment to the meadows around me, normality restored itself slowly. I couldn’t forget the sudden light; the crisply patterned details of the riverbank and the glare of stones.

Much later in the Cathedral, I dropped out of the service of Evensong and sat with my head in my hands. Time passed, and my eyes were closed. From a tremendous distance, I heard the Canon tell that Christ is risen; Christ is risen, and Death has met its Master, which cascaded through me to become And Death shall have no dominion. My thoughts raced away into a mess of associations, and I cheered them on. 

Prayer is more than the passive recital of words learned by children. If you need them at all, structured prayers serve to create an atmosphere of comfort and familiarity; they’re something we do together in readiness for actual prayer, which comes later in a form of silent meditation. Following this line, I was very far away when the congregation stood around me to sing. I lifted my head to open my eyes, and in that moment, the building was blown out with the most outrageous light. The sandstone’s usual, casual warmth was gone; the stained glass roared, and every small curve of tracery coiled uncannily like snakes in the dew. It was the same building I’ve come to love, but overhauled in a plunging of brightness like the first lunge of fresh air after a deep and dumbstruck dive. 

Christian rituals pay close attention to all aspects of human nature. A cynic would say that liturgies are designed to manipulate and exploit the weak or credulous masses, but there’s nothing sinister about the use of beauty, drama and spectacle in religion. These things were not imposed upon us – we made an institution to meet our needs, so it’s hardly fair to blame the Church for reading us like a book. When you open your mind to a church or a ceremony, you’re allowing yourself to be led by profoundly human traditions. When it comes to a wider engagement with prayer, there are no accidents; you don’t notice things – they’re shown to you. So it was foreseen that I’d look up and be dazzled as the congregation rose to sing at Evensong, because I am part of a pattern. We’re all foreseeable, and if it’s true that those stained glass windows are seven hundred years old, it’s the same light running through them to surprise us, time and again.