Sermons from Heart and Head
By JOHN BETJEMAN rrHE author of these twenty sermons* is Dean 1 of Trinity College, Cambridge, in whose chapel he preached most of them. He was a scholar of that college before obtaining a First in Theology, and, after parish experience in London, became a Fellow of Trinity. As he says in his preface, the academic study of basic Christian writings is an essential to the under- standing of Christian truth. He likens this know- ledge, when it remains external to the self, to 'a house one owns and inspects regularly and the details of which one can draw up accurately for an estate agent but which one has never lived in nor made into a home.' He therefore decided that 'I would not preach about any aspect of Christian belief unless it had become part of my own life-blood.' The sermons, therefore, rep- resent no particular theological school and are distinctly personal.
For these reasons, as someone unversed in theology, bored by much of the Old Testament, puzzled by most of the New, and delighting in High Church ritual with plenty of incense and song, I feel qualified and privileged to write about his book. I am one of the many who find belief in the Incarnation difficult, despite the winged aid of attractive worship. The Bishop of Woolwich's Honest to Cod can be recognised as a brave attempt to reconcile Christ with twentieth-century needs, but for many its approach is too cerebral. Many, too, will find Teilhard de Chardin too learned for complete comprehension. Neither the Bishop of Woolwich nor Teilhard de Chardin can be called an easy writer. Trinity's Dean of Chapel most cer- tainly can. He writes simply, clearly and start- lingly, so that each of his sermons is like an exciting and amusing short story, holding one to the last sentence. He writes from the heart as well as the head, and it is the mixture of these two which makes his book so remarkable and takes one back to the great Tractarian writers like Father Congreve of Cowley.
The True -Wilderness is written by someone who has known what it is to feel rejected, dis- illusioned, insecure, fearful and desperate and who has also thoroughly enjoyed, and not puri- tanically despised, 'worldly pleasures.' Here, too, is someone who is not easily shocked even by hypocrisy, because he enables his readers to understand it. His True Wilderness is •the inner isolation we all of us feel when we are 'boringly alone, or saddeningly alone, or terrifyingly alone. Often we try to relieve it—understandably enough, God knows—by chatter, or gin, or re- ligion, or sex, or possibly an accumulation of all four. The trouble is that these purple hearts can work their magic only for a very limited time, leaving us in one short hour or two exactly where we were before.' Being human,' he explains, in an enlightening sermon which simplifies the sub- ject of the Trinity, means being 'poised between two anxieties.' They are the threats of isolation and absorption. Each is felt as capable of ex- terminating us.
'It's a tragic disaster,' he says, in the brillidnt opening to the title sermon of this book, that we think of Lent 'as a time to indulge in the
secret and destructive pleasure of doing a good orthodox grovel to a pseudo-Lord. the pharisee in each of us we call God and who despises the rest of what we are.' He points out that riches are not necessarily cash. The riches which keep us from God in us, are more probably some reputation we are building up for ourselves, as a good sort, an able administrator, a practised lover, a first-class athlete, a first-class brain, a religious and conscientious person. given to good works. 'What I believe happens is that we slowly become aware of the game we are play- ing, and as slowly become convinced that it isn't worth the candle. What therefore we need is not a stronger will, but a deeper insight. not more strength, but more light. When, with our total being, we begin to realise that riches are the only things which prevent us from being rich, we shall no longer hanker after them. Such insight we must trust living to bring us, and that not in a day, nor without bewilderment and pain. For it is the whole Gospel of gaining our life by losing it, of death and resurrection' There are, of course, the heights, the moments of exaltation, when all seems right with the world, and God is in His Heaven. This book, while acknowledging them, plunges without any gloom to the depths. 'Christ lived in no ivory tower. He took. upon Himself, He felt to the full as His very own, the horrifyingly destructive. forces which lie latent in us all, so much so, we, are told, that at one time His sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground. When some small 'element of that tur- bulent agony becomes your own, then, more than at any other time, you are with Christ and He is in you. You are closest to Him when you feel furthest from Him, just as He was closest to His Father's heart when He cried, "My God, why has thou forsaken me?" Our redemption is a mystery. It can only be lived. It'cannot be explained.' It is a confident inner assurance in H. A. Williams's explorations of the wilderness of our post-Freudian time which helps to make his book consoling while it probes.
Finally, the delicious humour of the author must be mentioned. He is never jocose or jolly, but often deeply funny. Take, for example, his,
last sermon in the book, that on the Saints. He• shows the sort of people we meet in our lives
who we decide are saints—the vicar who spoke so naturally on prayer, the serene nun who showed us round the convent, the man who did wonderful work among down-and-outs. And then he suggests that if we had to share a small house with them and a common bathroom, would they really seem so saintly? Probably not. He chooses two top saints, St. Peter and St. Paul. They both died for their faith, but there's no doubt from the evidence we have about them that they had their faults. St. Peter was weak when he denied Christ in the Hall of the High Priest, and again, many years after the Resurrection, when he withdrew himself from eating with Gentiles because he incurred the censure of visiting Christian Jews from Jerusalem. That St. Paul was quarrelsome, boastful and touchy, we can de- duce from Acts and from his writings. Saints stand for one aspect only of Christ—courage or patience or love of other people. They do not stand for all his aspects. They cannot because they are human.
It is hard to see how anyone, whatever his be- lief or lack of it, can fail to increase his tolerance as a result of reading these tender, witty and sparkling sermons. Christ appears as fully man. Unfortunately, there are many who are afraid to look and see.
* THE TRW; Wn MANESS. By H. A. Williams. (Constable. 16s.)
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