A song of praise to England’s vanishing Church
Morris tells us that fewer than two per cent of the population attend church services
336pp, W&N, £25, ebook £12.99
★★★★★
Evensong is an apt title for this beautifully written and moving meditation on the history and current state of the Church of England, partly because it names the service which, more than any other, incarnates the patient, meditative, undogmatic nature of the faith. As Richard Morris puts it, “Anglican evensong has been described as a home for the hesitant, a service for those who put store by doubt as well as belief.”
And, as he points out, it uses such evocative language. The evening Collects are what stick in my mind from singing in a church choir half a century ago. “Lighten our darkness we beseech thee O Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night.” I never really understood what the perils were but I was very glad to be protected from them. Then there are those lovely lines that Morris likes so much he actually quotes them twice: “Minister: keep me as the apple of an eye. Us: Hide me under the shadow of thy wings.”
But there’s another more melancholy reason for the aptness of the title. The Church of England is approaching its own evening. Morris tells us that fewer than two per cent of the population attend church services, and many churches are entirely redundant, “outwardly, part of the scene but functionally, meaningless husks”.
This is a cause of both sorrow and exasperation for the author, whose own life has been entwined with the Church since boyhood. He has a deep feeling for the continuities embodied in the rituals, language and even the stones of the church.
These were imbued in him from an early age, thanks to a childhood spent in various parsonages, where his father, an energetic and strong-willed parish priest – whose obituary appeared in this newspaper – was the incumbent (and if you’re not sure what an “incumbent” is, or why the author grew up in parsonages rather than vicarages, the glossary of Anglican terms at the beginning will put you right).
Later in life, he approached the history and deep communal roots of the Church from the completely different point of view of a university archaeologist with a specialism in church history. He was charged with – among many other things – overseeing vital works while the tower of York Minster was being strengthened, and chairing a Lottery-funded heritage centre devoted to the Venerable Bede (which eventually folded).
All this would have been material enough for a rich book, but Morris considerably complicates his task by introducing a third strand: a search into what drew his father and other idealistic and mostly Left-leaning young men to become ordained after they came home from active service in the Second World War. We learn how these people, men who were literally battle-hardened, including Robert Runcie, a future archbishop of Canterbury, and Simon Phipps, a recipient of the Military Cross, led a movement to reinvigorate the Anglican church in the 1950s and 1960s. Phipps’s father was another scion of the “born-to-rule” upperclass families who were so prominent in that generation of priests, and who pop up quite often in this book. We discover how Anglicanism intersected with the rising pacifist movement – Morris’s father actually travelled to Moscow to take part in a World Peace Council.
Morris is a man of extraordinary learning, who can’t help digressing from the story of, say, the reorganisation of a parish structure in the 1950s to tell us about a littleknown Celtic saint born nearby (Morris shares his father’s romantic attachment to the Celtic roots of Anglicanism), or how recent archaeology has proved that a “dark cloud” mentioned in an Anglo-Saxon history was actually caused by two volcanic eruptions.
The result is something extraordinarily rich, which interweaves past and present and illuminates many aspects of post-war Britain, including shifting class relations, housing and industrial policy, and the cultural tensions between conservationists and gung-ho modernisers – the latter especially important for the Church, which was torn between the two. Instead of finding a principled way forward, it often resorted to intellectually dubious fudges, which arouse Morris’s anger – at one point he describes the Church of England as “pre-eminent in faith and fraud”.
But, though the recent reforms of the Church rarely win his admiration, he loves the wisdom of the institution over time, revealed in such symbolic details as burying the dead near or under the porch of churches, so that the living and the dead were joined together in worship. They bear out his deep conviction that cherishing traditions, and in particular medieval churches (of which there’s a greater abundance in Britain than in the rest of Europe put together), is “not devotion to ashes but the transfer of fire”. One feels the heat of that fire in this wonderful book.