SAVING US ALL, ONE PRAYER AT A TIME...
Evensong
Richard Morris
W&N £25
★★★★★
When a handsome young RAF navigator met two fashionable young women from the British Embassy in Rome in 1945, he told them he was planning to become a vicar.
They reacted first with disbelief and then with a sort of scorn. He wrote in a letter to his fiancee: ‘I thought it so funny – and pathetic too – that the vocation of an Anglican priest should have earned for itself this widespread contempt, amusement, suspicion and mistrust.’
Yet so it is. The standard view of the Church of England and its clergy – if anyone cares about them at all – is of a shambling organisation staffed by weak and doddering figures of fun.
This extraordinary book shows how wrong this is, in exploring the life of one man who decided to devote his life to the Christian gospel. Its author, Richard Morris, is an archaeologist, but the book, largely about his father John, is more like an attic explored after the death of its owner than a dig. Again and again he picks something up and it causes his mind to roam in a new direction, so the number of subjects covered, from steam engines to an unsolved murder in Zimbabwe, is impossible to list or put into any real order.
At the heart of it are the wartime letters that John Morris wrote to his wife-to-be Elise, at the time thousands of miles away in Canada. In them we find people of great courage, resolve and faith trying to bring some sort of comfort and consolation to a post-war England that is cold, squalid and terribly bruised by six years of ultra-violent war.
Did they achieve anything? Who can tell? Perhaps we may only guess how much worse it would all have been without the astonishing fact that everyone in England belongs to an Anglican parish, and that men and women of startling dedication still give up affluent careers to live and serve in the toughest places in the country, where hope is pretty hard to find.
Morris delves archaeologically deep into the foundations of Christian belief in England and explains the survival into today of ideas and rhythms that are almost impossibly old. There is a lovely passage revealing when and where you may still hear church bells exactly as you would have heard them in the reign of Henry VIII. And there is a haunting explanation of why skeletons unearthed during the restoration of a thousandyear-old church were found to be holding white quartz pebbles in their right hands.
We know so little of what our ancestors really thought. Yet in one place we still do much as they did.
When the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, those who slip into an Anglican church may still find themselves intoning the words of Evensong, part of an ancient monastic cycle otherwise forgotten, or better still, the opening words of the service of Compline that ends the day: ‘The Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end.’
Amen to that.