IT STARTED with some good old-fashioned advertising: “Would your son like to be a chorister at Southwark Cathedral?”
There were two reasons that the poster caught my eye, in March 2023. Our seven-year-old was constantly singing, for one: mostly TV theme tunes. Two, my cousin had been a chorister at King’s College, Cambridge, in the 1980s. I knew it was special even then. It had to be: he missed half of Christmas for it.
I was vague before the audition — “They’ve asked kids who like music to come and have a little sing” — but nothing gets past a seven-year-old. Having successfully negotiated the voice trial with the director of music, Ian Keatley, Gilbert asked whether he could phone home. “I did it, mum! I got in!”
After a term of rehearsing for one hour a week, he began doing services. It was glorious to see the smallest probationer processing through the nave and joining in the singing when he could, and borderline miraculous that he managed to stand still for 90 minutes.
The commitment ticked up to 15 hours a week, including Tube travel, but we were happy. Gilbert loved the choir camaraderie. And, although my wife and I saw ourselves as visitors, not worshippers, we enjoyed meeting people in a setting that was neither professional nor social. There is something uplifting about a friendly interaction with a fellow passenger on a bus; and being at the cathedral was a bigger, better version of that.
The problems started a few months in. “It’s all very well appreciating the music, the community, the engaging sermons, the architecture, the call to love, the comforting familiarity of the Lord’s Prayer,” I found myself thinking mid-service, “but that’s not the point, is it? The point is God. The point is Jesus being crucified and coming back to life. Everyone’s here to celebrate that. And I’m not.”
I didn’t believe in the supernatural elements of Christianity. I used to believe, at my C of E primary school. I used to pray in my bedroom. But thinking and learning gradually pushed the believing out. “If I had a time machine, and travelled back 2000 years, would I really see Jesus do miracles and rise from the dead?” I remember thinking in my teens.
If having faith meant believing that, I concluded that I was probably faithless. Later, I gathered that Jesus’s story had been retrofitted by men decades after his death. Historians doubted that he was even born in Bethlehem.
DID I feel foolish for having believed? or resentful for believing what I had been told? Not that I remember. My boyhood faith was a private thing. Privately, and gradually, I let it go. Decades later, tying myself in knots in the cathedral, I had to admit that it wasn’t that simple. I wanted to commit myself to the services, but was being hamstrung by my own sense of inauthenticity.
Sam AlexanderThe poster appealing for new choristers outside Southwark Cathedral
It is unpleasant, having those thoughts for company while listening to sermons, singing hymns, and trying to catch glimpses of your son. They jangled inside me, along with plenty of others: the uncharitable — “There’s something grand and hierarchical about all this; are some people only here because it’s the done thing?” — and the inevitable: “Why are we asking God to bring peace to Ukraine? Shouldn’t he have stepped in already?”
Gilbert — a full chorister by now — sang joyously while, not for the first time, his dad thought himself into a pickle.
But I kept coming, and sometimes it paid off, as when, at one quiet midweek evensong, listening to the lay clerks singing the psalmody, I found I had tears in my eyes. The music, the building itself, the thought of the same words’ being sung there for hundreds of years — it all made me reassuringly insignificant.
It was something like the sense of awe I have experienced walking in the mountains. Only this wasn’t nature’s beauty. It was people — Londoners across time — defying disorder in stone and word and song. It was something sacred, and something human. Waiting for Gilbert’s rehearsal to finish, I Googled “Is there such a thing as a Christian atheist?”
On the way home, I devoured Wikipedia articles about non-theism, post-theism, and radical Christian humanism, while Gilbert read the Beano. Before long, I was watching a 1984 BBC series on YouTube presented by Don Cupitt, and racing through theology titles as fast as the postman could deliver them. I sought out the Sea of Faith Network, and bought a ticket to their annual conference, “Exploring Religion as a Human Creation”. That I could sign up to.
I had been thrashing around in the undergrowth and stumbled on a well-trodden path. The revelation that some Anglican priests had walked it propelled me forwards. I had to know more. It was thrilling — and, again, not that simple.
When I plucked up courage to mention my “discoveries” to members of the clergy, I didn’t quite get the reaction I hoped for. Of Cupitt, one said, with a wry smile: “Yes, I knew a priest who didn’t believe in the Post Office either.” Another suggested, with great kindness, that I talk to God about it.
On the “What we believe” page of the Church of England website, I read: “The Christian faith is not a human invention.” It is not a controversial statement to most perhaps, but, in my ardent Church-curious state, it felt like a kick in the teeth: “We don’t want your sort here, thanks.”
Then, last summer, Ian Keatley died suddenly and unexpectedly, aged 42 (Obituary, 16 August 2024). Gilbert, who had never known grief or death, was devastated. We weren’t surprised when he said: “I don’t think I can be a chorister any more”.
But, amid the senselessness and pain, the idea took hold that Mr Keatley would want him to keep going. Gilbert returned to Southwark after the holidays. Singing and, yes, doing “the done thing” were the best responses we could find.
A SUMMER off had calmed me down, and reading theology had given me confidence. I could worship with a clear conscience, as other “non-realists” had before me, and appreciated how fortunate I was to have stumbled upon Southwark Cathedral, of all places. The Dean, the Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley, writes: “Religious faith is poetry plus, not science minus.” Being at the cathedral, I realised, was an invitation to explore something I definitely did believe in: the power of storytelling.
All my adult life, when it came to my faith, I had been asking spiritual questions to compete with rational answers. That was a category error, like asking “Which is more real: love or Newton’s law of gravity?” when the two ought not to be compared. If I wanted religion to make sense, it was time to stop thinking literally and start thinking creatively.
Sam Alexander
This revelation totally changed my approach to worship. It freed me to draw on my own imaginative capacities, and, crucially, centuries’ worth of other people’s.
I still had my atheist days, but on others I did, indeed, talk to God, the way I used to as a boy. It was just as comforting, too, without that critical inner voice. I found the gap between “believing” and “make-believing” to be astonishingly small.
An email arrived, asking the younger choristers whether they wanted to be admitted to communion. “Yes, definitely!” Gilbert said. There was the small matter of his not being christened, but the Precentor, Canon Kathryn Fleming, took this in her stride. He was baptised one Sunday, and had his first communion the next. Someone asked if he was going to be ordained the following week.
Here was uncomplicated love: Gilbert wanted to come in, and the Church flung wide its arms to welcome him. Could I — should I — follow?
For the umpteenth time, I picked up Tony Windross’s The Thoughtful Guide To Faith. He explains that the sharing of “life-giving bread” can be understood as the high point of a great drama: “People are invited, not to watch, but to be part of it.” Staying in my chair, or just going up for a blessing, was, in some ways, the very definition of an anti-climax.
At November’s sleep-out for the homelessness charity Robes, I got talking to the Sub-Dean, Canon Michael Rawson. He suggested that I do the confirmation course and see.
I was nervous before the first session. Was it all going to stop? Would I be rejected — or reject myself — for indulging in dodgy doctrine? No. The Pilgrim Course was a gateway to honest and touching conversations with four other candidates who, like me, wanted to join in. The last thing Michael tried to do was catch anyone out. Rather, wisely and gently, he helped us to understand that there are many ways to God.
I was confirmed on Holy Saturday. The boys had a rare day off, but Gilbert was there. During the service, I kept glancing round, and he beamed back. Afterwards, Bishop Chessun said to him: “Your dad wouldn’t have done this without you.”
A few weeks ago, on Radio 4, I heard Kenneth Williams’s distinctive voice say: “Christianity is a challenge to you to become bigger than you are at the present moment” (Feature, 11 April). Most people I know are ready for such a challenge: they look for it in music, theatre, novels, poetry, and so on. Hardly any would think to take it up in a religious setting.
Four decades on from the Sea of Faith polemic, I hope that the Church understands that Cupitt’s approach continues to be transformative for some people. He, and many others — Gilbert chief among them — have helped me to step away from my private literalism and into the fellowship of Christ.
Sam Alexander is an actor and writer.