PEACE WHICH THE WORLD CANNOT GIVE

Charles Moore meditates upon

the unusual magic of English churches

IT IS OBVIOUS, but no less important for being obvious, that people visit old church- es for a thousand different reasons. Some will be there because they know, or wish to know, the difference between a trefoil and a triforium, and get a collector's pleasure in seeing good examples of architectural styles. Some will be there to trace ances- tors, or mourn those they loved, or return, after wandering, to the place from which they sprang. If you look at the visitors' books in country churches, you will see the comments and addresses of people all over the world pursuing some association with their own lives.

Some, again, will be interested in the history of England, some in search of examples of a particular churchmanship. Some will be like those visitors to great houses open to the public who stare blankly at the Rubens but gaze intently at the photograph of the recent wedding of the daughter of the house. They will ignore the history and look at once for the signs of present life. How good are the flowers? How good are the Sunday school books or the Mothers' Union banners? Are the has- socks well stitched? Is the vicar High or Low? For myself, I always like to see the names of those on the flower rota, and guess at their age and background and see how much these names, like those on the war memorial, are indigenous to the coun- ty in which they live. Round us in Sussex, where my family lives, generation after generation of Selmeses and Douches, Crouchers and Fullers, Lavenders and Honeysetts are recorded. I should be inter- ested to know what the Lincolnshire equiv- alents might be.

Or I like to look at recent memorials and gravestones to gather some idea of the character of the parish and the occupa- tions and preoccupations of its inhabitants, not necessarily less interesting if those memorials are very ugly or rather peculiar. A few years ago in a parish near us in Sus- sex, the squire died and an east window was erected in his memory with a vast and unattractive figure of Our Lady and very small panels of the man in question and his house and land. The local paper reported: 'The window depicts Comman- der Egerton and his dog. Also featuring is the Virgin Mary.'

Again, some people visit old churches because they are the best places to be quiet and at peace. There could be nowhere better if one needs to set one's thoughts in order or to get the measure of some turning point, some joy or sorrow in one's life. From which it follows, of course, that old churches are the best places to pray. 'You are here to kneel,' says T.S. Eliot in his poem 'Little Old- ding', 'where prayer has been valid', and some of that validity comes from the sheer length of time that this has been a holy place.

But by no means the worst reason for visiting an old church is to go with no proper reason at all, which is why one of the most important things we should be helping to do is to keep old churches open wherever possible. All of us will remember better than planned visits the uncovenant- ed blessings of a chance one. Once my wife and I found ourselves caught by tor- rential rain in a church in Dorset, pretty, but of no outstanding artistic or historical interest. Held captive there, we found the usual pressure of time and the slightly wearisome duty of guidebook study fade away and a sense of being at home super- vene. Some of the time we played a silly game of one reading out a line or two from the hymn-book and the other trying to identify the hymn, and some of the time we just sat silent. We experienced one of the most curious and magical effects of an old church, that the longer you sit in it the less possible it is to feel bored.

And the longer you do sit, the more interestingly odd does any old church become. It is virtually impossible in Eng- land to live more than ten miles from a beautiful piece of ecclesiastical architec- ture. This is an immense privilege, true of perhaps no other country, but it sometimes causes us to forget how utterly amazing these building are. In their shapes, they can resemble forest glades, or ancient burial barrows, or ships, or Georgian houses, or, as Ruskin said of King's Chapel, a sow on her back. Just to leaf through Henry Thorold's book Lincolnshire Churches Revisted is to find buildings in Lincolnshire with scarcely any external similarities to one another whatever. What does Well share with Stow, say, or Theddlethorpe All Saints with the church in Gainsborough of the same name? Yet all are recognisably, successfully, beautifully, churches — physi- cal illustrations of the text that in my Father's house are many mansions.

So many churches are amazing, too, in their defiance of poverty or geographical remoteness or even, in the case of some spires or towers, of gravity. We tend vague- ly to think that it is in the natural order of things that men piled stone scores of feet into the sky and worked it into intricate patterns and grotesque or noble represen- tations, that they hewed those stones from quarries and carried them down rivers and across seas, that in many cases they lived doing little else, or died with their work unfinished. But it was not natural: it is more like a miracle. Those buildings rose because those men believed and so, if ever men cease to believe, they will fall. Just as television masts stand on high hills to beam that medium's message clearly to the fur- thest households, so the spires and towers rise out of the fens and fields of this county to communicate far more important news, though unfortunately to a less receptive audience. No one should imagine that such communication could be unimpaired if those spires and towers were to tumble down, which is why preservative work is as much a work of faith as was the original construction. Indeed, at a time when Chris- tianity in the form of the Word is so very faintly proclaimed, the 'sermons in stones' speak louder than ever.

You probably know the poem by Philip Larkin called 'Church Going'. Its narrator, who closely resembles Larkin himself, is an unbeliever, and he always feels awkward in old churches, and yet he always visits them and stands in what he calls the 'tense, musty, unignorable silence/Brewed God knows how long'. He does so, he says, because he recognises the character of the church:

A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie around.

I'm glad an agnostic recognises all that, and I'm extremely sorry that so many diocesan and synodical authorities do not. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that, if the work of charitable bodies and preser- vation societies ceased, future Philip Larkins would be unable to have such experiences and write such poems. Indeed, there is a real danger that Larkin's will prove to be the last generation which can use English churches for its inspiration as poets have done since English first became a language. What he is saying in his mod- ern, doubting way stands in the same tradi- tion as the most famous of all poems arising from English churches, Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'. In any culture, a written aesthetic tradition depends upon an architectural and reli- gious one. Break one and you break the other.

But I also quote Larkin because his poem expresses succinctly what I have been doing more long-windedly, and draws together the common thread in all those multifarious reasons why we visit old churches. It lies in that phrase, 'In whose blent air all our compulsions meet/Are recognised, and robed as destinies.' He is speaking of the capacity of the old church to elevate what is ordinary and reduce what is puffed up, to restore the true pro- portion of things. Gray's 'Elegy' dwells on a similar theme. His is an extraordinary poem because most of the thoughts in it are about what did not happen. The poet imagines the villagers now lying under the turf who might have been Milton or Ham- pden or Cromwell, but weren't. They did not 'scatter plenty o'er a smiling land', did not command 'the applause of listening senates', did not 'wade through slaughter to a throne'.

Nothing really happened in their lives, and yet the country churchyard makes it possible to imagine that it might have. And although there is a pervading sadness that 'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/And waste its sweetness on the desert air', there is no anger or bitterness, nothing scratchy or unsettled. The 'com- pulsions' of ordinary people are 'robed as destinies', and once that has happened it is possible to find peace. The peace of an old English church is not merely an absence of noise: it is the intimation of a Christian theological concept — 'that peace which the world cannot give'. Nothing is more important in this inti- mation than the presence of death in a form which makes it possible to be recon- ciled to death, which is why Larkin refers to so many dead lying round. English churches are exceptional, and exceptional- ly lucky, in being surrounded by church- yards full of gravestones. Far from stirring fear of mortality, they make it seem expli- cable or at least acceptable.

Why is this? Why does an old church reconcile us to the life we live and the death we shall suffer? Larkin, again, hints at an answer when he describes a church as 'a serious house'. That word 'house' is interesting and crucial. In the full edition of the Oxford English Dictionary the edi- tors spend a long time debating the origin of the word 'church', hunting it through a score of languages. They conclude that it comes from the Greek word xtptarcbg, meaning 'of the Lord' and, from the third century, 'house of the Lord'. It is signifi- cant that, in our religion, the word for the physical building has become in so many languages the word for the divine institu- tion itself. Islam is not called the mosque' nor Judaism the synagogue', but organ- ised Christianity is called 'the Church'. The development of our language seems to be telling us something important. The thing before your eyes cannot be wholly separate from the thing before your mind. This points to the human way of under- standing religious truth; we cannot grasp its fullness, we can only reach it by analogy and through imagination. The analogy of the house works for everyone. Our house is where we live and where we are at home, and where, unless we are unfortu- nate, we experience the best of human love.

The house of the Lord offers the same thing, but divinely, not subject to demoli- tion or repossession, death or divorce. Old churches are constant reminders and embodiments of this analogy. Whenever a particular church's roof is kept on or its door open or its window unblocked we are doing honour to that universal Church which none of us has ever seen.

If this were a sermon it would have a text with which to begin. Instead I shall give it a text with which to end. 'I was glad,' says the Book of Common Prayer in 'Coming from London, I find it a rather pleasant dry heat.' its version of Psalm 122, 'I was glad when they said unto me: We will go into the house of the Lord. Our feet shall stand in the gates: 0 Jerusalem.'

The Jews of the Old Testament knew that their own city could be taken to repre- sent the celestial city and their own temple the home of their God. Christianity has spread the notion to all places of the earth where God is worshipped. So we are autho- rised to invest with holiness the names and places you know and care about — Burgh- le-Marsh or Stragglethorpe or Boothby Pagnell almost as much as Hebron or Emmaus or Jericho.

This article is adapted from a speech to the Lincolnshire Old Churches Trust.