The spiritless school

Posted on 27th May 2021 by Ian

It is more than twenty years since David Hay and Rebecca Nye published their book The Spirit of the School. The book argued that spirituality was something other than religion and was a matter too important to be left to those who were religious. Hay and Nye believed that being spiritual was about having a sense of realities bigger than oneself, realities beyond oneself.

The writers could not have anticipated the extent to which introversion and egocentrism  would come to define the opening decades of the Twenty-First Century. School students have shown progressively less awareness of any reality other than themselves and their wants. The advent of the smartphone and social media has centred their worlds upon themselves and upon their concerns.

Of course, the phenomenon is not universal. There are still some whose world is not centred upon online exchanges, there are still some with an awareness of the big realities, but they stand in contrast with the majority whose sense of empathy with those in the world beyond themselves has been stunted by constant messages about how special they themselves are.

The places where a sense of what might be called “spiritual” has not disappeared are the private schools, places with their own distinctive traditions and their own chapels. What was once called “public school Christianity” may never have been more than a vague deism and an awareness that public service was desirable, but it nevertheless gave those educated in such schools a sense of greater realities.

The loss of the spirit of many state schools has impoverished the lives of most of those who attend. Life has become a matter of playing online games and posting on social media video platforms. Few ever watch a news programme, fewer still ever see a newspaper. There is a lack of awareness of the outside world, an ignorance of the realities that directly affect their lives.

Spirit has been replaced by an arrogant sense of entitlement, people who insist they have rights to do what they want, when they want, and the right to receive assistance from the state to live the lives they choose. They must not be criticized, they must not be told they have done wrong. Telephone parents to discuss the behaviour of their children and many will be as rude as the children they have produced.

The response to the spiral of selfishness needs to be a recovery of spirit, a recovery of a sense of reality where individuals are not the centre of the world.

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Evensong on the M5

Posted on 26th May 2021 by Ian

The traffic was light and the sun was shining. The Gloucestershire countryside stretched away in both directions.

It seemed an afternoon for BBC Radio 3, something that would not jar. Choral Evensong from Westminster Abbey was just beginning – a sublime moment.

Well, it was sublime, and continued to be sublime, once the reconnection was re-established. Half of the Magnificat was lost, but the whole of the Nunc Dimittis and the Anthem was still to come.

Evening Prayer always had a different feeling about it. It is quieter, more reflective, it goes with the musty smell of old prayer books, the flickering light of candles. In some places one could almost imagine the elderly Simeon, standing and watching from the shadows beyond the nave as his ageless words are again repeated.

The English poet, John Betjeman, loved Evensong, a poem he wrote for Saint Katherine’s Church at Chiselhampton in Oxfordshire captures the feeling of reassurance, the mood that God is in His heaven and all is right with the world:

“Across the wet November night
The church is bright with candlelight
And waiting Evensong.
A single bell with plaintive strokes
Pleads louder than the stirring oaks
The leafless lanes along.

It calls the choirboys from their tea
And villagers, the two or three,
Damp down the kitchen fire,
Let out the cat, and up the lane
Go paddling through the gentle rain
Of misty Oxfordshire.”

The pictures that Betjeman brings to mind are of a world that is constant, a world where the old certainties remain, a world where the country priest celebrates the liturgy in honour of an unchanging God, this is the world of Evensong.

Stand in a great cathedral and listen to a boys’ choir sing the Song of Simeon and there is a sense of the God who is the same yesterday, today and forever.

Yet one can turn worship into an escape from the world. Simeon and Anna do not go to the Temple to escape from the world, they go there because they are seeking God’s presence in the world. Simeon looks for the consolation of Israel, Anna looks for the redemption of Jerusalem. It is a faith rooted in the realities of the world in which they lived.

By the time the closing organ voluntary was played, the Almondsbury interchange had been reached. The crossing of the M5 and the M4 was fluid, uncontested, a situation which will become rare as summer approaches.

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Harold Bennett’s van

Posted on 25th May 2021 by Ian

In latter years, Harold Bennett drove a Bedford van with sliding doors. Such vehicles seemed to be the workhorse of tradesmen in the 1960s. Yet that model of van cannot have been the one in which my mother and her family travelled to Filton aerodrome to watch the Bristol Brabazon make is maiden flight in September 1949.

“Harold Bennett had a long-nosed green Bedford van.”

Harold Bennett would not have had a new van. 1949 was a time of post-war austerity, so the most likely candidate to fulfil her memories seems to be a 5/6 Cwt van that was first produced in 1939 and sold for the sum of £140.

Scrolling through images, it must have been a tight squeeze for Harold and his wife and my grandfather to have sat on the bench seat in the front, and for my grandmother and her seven children to have sat four either side in the back.

The seats Harold Bennett put in the back were just wooden benches. Perhaps he had made them himself. The inhospitable nature of the back of the Bedford van arose from the fact that it was not designed to carry passengers, it was not meant to carry passengers.

A generation after the trip to Filton, during my final term at primary school, friends of my parents came to visit, a couple with two daughters, one of whom was called Melanie (a name I had not met before, such was the insularity of our village). They had a brown Ford Thames van (which I discovered online to be a Ford Thames 300).

They used the van for both travel and accommodation, there was a bench across the back for the girls to sit on. In the event of there being a police checkpoint, (which seemed a fairly unlikely occurrence), the girls were told they were to lie out of sight on the floor of the van.

It had seemed baffling to a boy of eleven that there would not be proper seats in a van, until it was explained that vans were cheaper to buy and to tax because they were meant for use by workmen. If the tax office knew that the van was being used as a passenger vehicle, it would impose a much higher level of tax.

Thinking about Harold Bennett’s van, I wondered if he had always driven a van because it made simple financial sense. The bench seat at the front was all he needed for his everyday life. Tax is a strange business.

 

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Pluck to the scientists

Posted on 24th May 2021 by Ian

No matter how good the news, there seems a scientist awaiting an opportunity to cast a dark shadow over the moment, to predict the imminent demise of the entire human race.

There are moments when it is tempting to turn to Irish writer Flann O’Brien’s character Sergeant Pluck for some surrealistic diversion.  In The Third Policeman, Pluck throws interesting light on conventional scientific wisdom:

The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.

All of which sounds complete nonsense, and it is, if you accept the rules of conventional scientific wisdom However, if you don’t accept that scientists know everything there is to be known, and that there are things that scientific method will never explain, then there is sense in the point that Flann O’Brien (real name Brian Nolan) made when he was writing  to a friend:

When you get to the end of this book you realize that my hero or main character (he’s a heel and a killer) has been dead throughout the book and that all the queer ghastly things which have been happening to him are happening in a sort of hell which he earned for the killing … It is made clear that this sort of thing goes on for ever … When you are writing about the world of the dead – and the damned – where none of the rules and laws (not even the law of gravity) holds good, there is any amount of scope for back-chat and funny crack.

Who says the rules and laws of science are infallible? Scientists now have put themselves in the place the Church occupied in medieval times, infallible authorities on the nature of the world.

Perhaps there is a call to be more like the absurd Flann O’Brien than the rational scientists. Perhaps our own definitions of reality might be a far remove from the atomic theory of Sergeant Pluck, though be as nonsensical as anything he might have suggested, but perhaps they might also challenge a culture which says that the only reality is that which is defined by a small self-perpetuating elite.

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White horses

Posted on 23rd May 2021 by Ian

There is a white horse in the field beyond my family home.

Of course, white horses aren’t called white, are they? They are greys. Except this one isn’t, it seems a brilliant white against the lush green of the field.

White horses are mythical creatures, recorded by great chalk carvings on English hillsides. Riding the train eastward from Taunton to Paddington, there is the great white horse at Westbury; its presence coming as a surprise, no matter how frequently the journey is made.

The white horse symbolised a London-bound journey, a move from the secure and the safe and the predictable to a world of uncertainty where anything might happen and where familiar rules were inapplicable.

Far removed from those days, familiar with parts of the world which would cast London as a place of safeness and predictability, it is odd that a white horse should still be evocative. The journey through Westbury would now seem as domestic as a drive to the supermarket, no longer would there be anything remotely threatening in that journey east.

What is there in a white horse that could prompt a mood of introspection?

Perhaps deep in the psyche there was a desire that it might be something mystical; something a startling as the great white horses seen for the first time. Perhaps the years since those Paddington journeys have thinned experiences to the extent that nothing and nowhere has now the capacity to startle.

Words of Tom Stoppard come to mind.  For his character, Guildernstern, a creature sighted by two different people is as alarming as it gets, after that nothing is startling.

‘A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until – “My God,” says the second man, “I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn.” At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but  only  spreads it thinner, and  a  fourth thinner  still,  and  the more witnesses  there are, the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience… “Look, look” recites the crowd. “A horse with an arrow in its forehead!  It must have been mistaken for a deer.’

A horse with an arrow in its forehead, not a unicorn. In the field, a grey, not a white horse.

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