During September my wife and I spent a pleasant week in Suffolk, an east coast county with a population density of 503 per square mile. This compares with Gloucestershire’s 726. Herefordshire’s 222 but, to keep things in perspective Dodge City, Kansas 0.41.
On our way we had a day in Cambridge, before travelling to a cottage in Bruiseyard. This is inland of Aldeburgh and Snape, where seventy odd years ago Benjamin Britain and Peter Piers established an impressive musical and local commercial centre at the Maltings.
Most Suffolk folk live in cities or towns and so it was easy to travel the rural roads and to find restaurants with menus replete with fish and crustaceans. Yummy! To my surprise we did not see any Suffolk Sheep and, as the country side was about two weeks more into autumn than Newent, this caused us to speculate on the reasons. Coastal climate, less rain, sea level; ‘Who knows?’
The late Rev, John Evans used the phrase ‘who knows’ frequently, and so I am prompted to give readers a conundrum.
One day in Bury St Edmunds, I was standing in the narrow road directly between two buildings. On my right stood St James Cathedral. Started in AD1503 on the site of a Saxon, later Norman Abbey. It commemorates the 869 martyrdom of Edmund, King of the East Angles. To my left stood a building from around 1250 built to facilitate the nitty-gritty of trade and commerce, and as a place where active folk from the town and countryside could sort out important aspects of practical living.
So what was the conundrum making my brain buzz and whirr and run diagnostic tests on its own circuitry? Why was it testing the wiring to make sure it was hearing and seeing correctly? And why having done so, did it then make me chuckle to the extent that it attracted a puzzled frown from my ever watchful wife.
There I was: One ear tuned to the ethereal floating strains of the forty part motet by Thomas Tallis and a beautiful bride emerging onto the sunlit steps to warm applause from smiling guests. The other ear recoiling at the throbbing resonant backing noise to a jumble sale of fifteen tonnes of something called pre-loved clothing.
The conundrum arose because the Town Hall emanated the mellifluous airs of Thomas Tallis whereas the entire nave of the echoing Cathedral was taken up with the Jumble Sale and a booming assertive thumping Disco Beat.
I don’t know how readers would have responded to this juxtaposition of seemingly conflicting roles, but it has given me a lot laughter which, even as I write, I cannot restrain.
Laughter does not mean however that I have stopped thinking about the dichotomous images. Particularly, as other East Anglian Cathedrals also hired out their Naves for similar events. This past year Ely hosted a commercial trade fair, Norwich a fun fair with helter-skelter and, not to be out-done, the Victorian Cathedral of Southwark in London held a fashion show in which a minimum number of diaphanous veils were draped around very shapely models to display what avant-garde designers call haute couture. As for why I laugh: How else can the normal mind put a perspective on a matter which is irreconcilably both trivial and serious?
What is clear, is that the elites of both the secular and sacred have somehow concluded that the traditional roles they each play are too important to be left to the other. Or else, that lying behind their pecuniary activities, is a desire to maintain their own core function but they are short of money. Whatever their reason, I hope it is not a selfish impetus to preserve their own way of life, but a deep desire to save each individual soul in the case of one, and an urge to efficiently serve society in the case of the other
Some may say the church should focus on both. To which I say that, just as the eye can see a landscape it cannot see a landscape in focus. The eye is built to see life around us as shapely, beautiful, colourful but vague, it detects movement and change not detail. When we talk about focus, a decision must be made to bring all the resources of sight onto a single point. The church, indeed all life must do just that. It cannot be all things to all people at all times. It is true that the Church, like Government, can do many things by asking different people to spend time on different activities, but what neither can do is to ‘focus’ on both the individual and the masses. Both are vital to life but their roles are different. Not divergent, but different.
But back to laughter as being a response to the unexpected, the following extract from the book entitled Disorder in the Court” should warn us about two things, to choose our words carefully, and not to presume that the other person is, so to speak, ‘singing from the same hymn book as are we.’
Attorney: What is your date of birth?
Witness: July 18th.
Attorney: What year?
Witness: …… Every year.
View from the Pew 