EARLIER this year, I had a conversation with the Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley, the new Dean of Southwark, whose installation sermon had touched me deeply. He spoke of his wish for everything in the cathedral to be founded on poetry — “a poetry which will deepen the mystery of God, not resolve it” — and present God “not as the object of our knowledge but the cause of our wonder”.
If it could be said that music is a foundation stone of most cathedrals, Dr Oakley appears to be promising that his cathedral is to be founded on poetry and music as collaborators. For those of us working — in Auden’s phrase — “at the coal face of poetry”, such an announcement by a senior churchman on the craft we practise is almost shocking. It sounds a trumpet call. What must we do?
The challenge is clear: poets and creators of the liturgy, we are to produce words which stir the soul, as so much music written for the Church does, whether the devotional intensity of Byrd’s Ave Verum or the crowd-rousing energy of Vaughan Williams’s Sine Nomine tune to “For all the saints”.
For words, the Anglican Church has Cranmer, and we need Cranmer as we need Byrd. But we also need words native to our age of genome and space travel, fit colleagues for Vaughan Williams and Rutter. Our problem as wordsmiths is that the words must belong to now; words of an earlier age — even those written by Cranmer — may reference out-of-date science or social circumstances, and risk turning people off.
COULD help come from children? What about “Hymns, minus the ‘awkward’ bits?” featured in the Church Times article of that name (Feature, 5 April)? It reminded me of working with primary schools. One of my poetry books, Rhymoceros, is for children; and I have performed hundreds of poetry shows in primary schools — a performance in the morning, followed by workshops with the children in the afternoon.
Most poets are overwhelmed by the creativity of ten-year-olds, and we certainly ought to be. I made up a soundbite for professionals confronted with children’s energy: “Half an hour, and you’ve only written three acts of Hamlet? Shame!”
Rhymoceros contains a sequence of riddles: mundane acts, like cleaning teeth or frying eggs, translated into fantasies of launching rockets, or executing ping-pong balls. One workshop exercise involves choosing a familiar, mundane activity and treating it as a film script for a series of actions: washing-up, for example, breaks down into lifting the plates, applying the detergent, whooshing in the water, taking out the dishes and drying them, etc. etc. Translating these boring actions into fantasy can be fun, and free the imagination.
Experience recommends “keeping the actions active”. The story will then translate more effectively into space travel, or fairytale. One day, a small, withdrawn girl chose for her theme “going to sleep”. I warned her that this would be difficult: going to sleep is passive — you are awake, then you are asleep; it lacks actions which can become fantasy.
She did, indeed, have trouble. The school had allotted the whole afternoon to the workshop. As the session was ending, I was reading the papers with the children’s riddles — some good, some interesting, some rubbish. The girl had covered sheets of foolscap with tightly-written scribbles. I glanced through them. “All rubbish,” she said.
I was about to agree, and console her by explaining she had set herself a difficult task. But, some words stood out in the middle of the scribbles, like a flower among thorns: “Climb on to a cushion of cloud.” Marvellous. Exact description; perfect riddle; a beautiful, seven-word poem about going to sleep. Any professional poet would have been proud to have pulled that phrase from their subconscious.
I have not been on a “Hymns, minus the ‘awkward’ bits” visit. But I can well imagine playing a catchy tune and telling the participating children to hum or la-la it. When it has been repeated until it is absorbed unconsciously, let everyone dream up words to sing with it. While they may not be suitable words for use in church, they might reveal valuable insights into the childrens’ attitudes towards church. It is even possible that some child’s subconscious might yield a fragment of vision like that “cushion of cloud”.
DR OAKLEY challenges those of us who are in the business of writing to create fragments of vision; challenges congregations to recognise them when they occur; and challenges priests to arrange services so they include the possibility of “cushions of cloud”. Is that too much to hope for, I wonder?
There is one moment in our otherwise dull liturgy which is, for me, on the way to being a “cushion of cloud” moment: one of the post-communion prayers, which a priest once told me she will ask to be read at her funeral:
Father of all,
we give you thanks and praise,
that when we were still far off
you met us in your Son and brought us home.
Dying and living, he declared your love,
gave us grace, and opened the gate of glory.
May we who share Christ’s body live his risen life;
we who drink his cup bring life to others;
we whom the Spirit lights give light to the world.
Keep us firm in the hope you have set before us,
so we and all your children shall be free,
and the whole earth live to praise your name;
through Christ our Lord. Amen.
We are asked to absorb the image of the gate being opened — an image with meaning for any and all of us: glory, glimpsed through the open gate. Glory. Perhaps the Zulus can help us to understand. The ceremonial of a Zulu eucharist is formal (“ritual to outdo the Vatican” is the soundbite). But there are two moments of improvisation: interludes of dance — at the Peace, and the Thanksgiving after Communion. Both are nearly always started by a gogo (one of the grandmothers) thump-stamping her feet on the earth floor like a drum, leading into 20 minutes or so of glory.
Every Zulu sings and dances spontaneously. We Europeans can follow only clumsily. But at least we have some words for it; and perhaps they provide a “cushion of cloud” moment. Let all of us — poets, priests, congregations — cherish it.
Leo Aylen is a poet, author, actor, director, broadcaster, and screenwriter. He was born in Zululand, where his father was bishop.