Rhythm of life
I AM still excited: after almost two years, I went to a concert. With real people, not just on a screen. It was the amazing Shirley Collins with her band Lodestar, performing in the barn at Charleston Farmhouse, near Lewes. One of the folk-singing greats of the 1950s and ’60s, Miss Collins has recently made a spectacular comeback at the splendid age of 86, and, for a couple of hours, we listened to and sang with her. Hugely moving.
She started with the opening track of her 2016 album Awake, Awake, Sweet England, which was, the album notes told us, “a fascinating survival of the penitential song written in 1580 by ballad-writer Thomas Deloney, when the Great Earthquake in London toppled part of old St Paul’s Cathedral, Deloney taking it as a sign of God’s displeasure”.
More than 300 years later, Ralph Vaughan Williams noted down a version that (sung to a variant of the tune I know as “God rest ye merry, gentlemen”) includes the line “Repent, repent, sweet England, for dreadful days draw near.” Perhaps feeling that this might need some leavening, at some point an improbable verse about Maying was added. Celebrating the coming of spring and the hope of new life, it touched base with an even older tradition.
It was a fascinating example of something old and visceral, an energy that re-emerged over the centuries, bound up with the Church’s year (Easter and Whitsunday were later referred to in other songs). In our own “dreadful days”, when we need a sense of continuity and community, it felt like a significant and life-affirming experience.
Future proof
ANOTHER “first” was when six children and two adults were confirmed by the Bishop of Lewes, the Rt Revd William Hazlewood, in our little medieval church, St Michael and all Angels, Horsted Parva: we celebrated the end of lockdown with the first confirmation in that building and community for some 45 years.
I reflected on the eight confirmation certificates and two baptism certificates that I wrote out: the latest in the stream of all the hundreds of certificates that I have written out over the past 30-odd years. When I am long gone, a few of these little bits of card and paper may still be treasured: in 50 years’ time, someone may say “Look at this! It’s your great-grandfather’s confirmation certificate! Signed by someone called Fr John. I wonder who he was?”
In our somewhat meagre family archive is a letter, written by my great-grandfather Henry Jefferson, on 22 September 1852. He had just turned 13, and was writing to his parents from his school, Holloway Academy — in French, and in beautiful copper-plate script — to demonstrate the success of his expensive education. Almost 150 years later, it is all that remains of him. I don’t know where his grave is, or even if he has one: beyond his genetic legacy, this little letter is the only fragment that has survived the sea of time. I will look at my certificates with greater respect.
Living stones
WE CLERGY are surrounded, not just by the great “cloud of witnesses”, but by the personalities and reputations of our predecessors — not only the names on the “Previous Rectors” board, but, especially, the most recent incumbents whose shoes we try to fill.
Here, in Uckfield, there is, above all, the presence of Canon Bill Peters. A great sportsman with an army background, he was chaplain to Brighton College and then Rector of Uckfield for some 27 years. Famously, he was accompanied by his little pack of black Labradors, and addressed all comers as “my dears”. Hugely loved and respected, he finally retired here in his own parish, and died some nine years ago. His funeral cortège to the church (where he lay overnight) was accompanied by torchbearers from the Bonfire Society; people still speak of the memorial service the following day.
Even now, he is very much a living presence in the memory of the town — as is my immediate predecessor, Canon Martin Onions, who came to the plurality with enthusiasm, vision, and enormous energy, and got so much started. Within 18 months, he was gone, after a heart attack, a week before his curate was due to be priested. He was 51. The wound of his death is still felt, some six years later.
Apostolic legacy
SORTING out one of the clergy stalls during Covid lockdown, I came upon a copy of Common Worship: Pastoral Services with Martin’s name in the flyleaf. It is, like my copy, stuck together with black tape. Like mine, the pages for the “burial of ashes” are wrinkled by doing interments in the rain. Passages are marked, and favourite prayers. I found a piece by William Penn, cut out and used as a bookmark, which resonates with me. It’s like a gift to me from Martin, which I now use at the funerals that I take: “And Life is Eternal, and Love is immortal, and death is only an horizon, and an horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.”
The Revd John Wall is Rector of the Uckfield Plurality in East Sussex.