What, where and why . . .

          It's no simple matter. But I haven't got as far as the age of seventy-seven without learning something. For the last ten years since my retirement, I have been trying to write about it. 
          But what kind of a book? A treatise in theology? People like me did that with the invention of printing. Theology was published in vast quantities, most of it unmitigated drivel. There were gems though. Dr Sibs, master of St Katherine's Hall, Cambridge, published his BOWELS OPENED in 1687, a commentary on the Song of Songs commending the erotic love poems as a palliative for constipation. (It's listed in the medical library at Yale!) 
          People nevertheless took such dilations seriously. Sir Thomas Bodley stocked them by the ton for his library at Oxford, whilst discarding the more frivolous folio editions of Mr. William Shakespeare. Well he would, wouldn't he? But would anybody want to read such a theology today?

So what else? An autobiography? It's about ideas evolved over a lifetime. But an autobiography? I was never a bishop or a dignitary, not wanted to be. So who would be interested in me?

A novel? It sounds stupid but there are advantages to it. The principal character can think and say what he likes, can avoid nit-picking theological argument and set ideas the one against the other. And most importantly, in a world divided between vociferous disbelievers and happy bands of myopic devotees, he can develop a reasonably coherent approach to religion.

That is crucial. On one hand people cling to ideas so strange that you can see why religion is abolished in John Lennon's utopia. On the other, it would be a mistake to deny the existence of an inherently human instinct. Nobody questions the existence of sex. But is religion as compelling as sex? I'll say it's compelling. Ideas, at root religious, underlie the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. They propelled the catastrophe of 9/11. The Taliban remind me of Cromwell's roundheads. Of course it's important.

So a novel affords me the freedom to examine the matter. My protagonist can do much the same things that I did. But he will be far cleverer than me because he has my hindsight. Also he can do things I didn't do.  

          But he will meet the kind of people I met. Why is there such a fuss about homosexual clergy? They're not exactly a rarity. So why is the issue threatening to eviscerate the anglican communion? There's a curious lack of realism when it comes to the clergy. People can't imagine that a man of the cloth would know the meaning of the word 'fuck'.

But where do I start?

         So . . . I should write a novel. But what are the ground rules?
          Witness Sir Thomas Bodley, people are subject to preconceptions. There are all kinds of reasons for them - religious, moral, practical. In the recent British election nobody asked why we should accept the will of the majority. The electorate has spoken. So be it. It's practical certainly. But it's flawed. There's no particular reason why we should believe that the majority is always right. 

          And in the protracted history of Christianity, the preconceptions have been questioned time and again. 'You shall not need startle, when you heare the word Magi,' Lancelot Andrewes said in his Christmas sermon before James 1 in 1620. 'Of latter times it sounds not well (this name).' Astrology was respectable in biblical times. It remained respectable in the middle ages. But it had fallen into disrepute with the rise of the new science. So . . . in the Authorised Version (1611) 'magi' was bowdlerised to 'wise men', corrupting holy writ and making a nonsense of the text. 

          But Andrewes was ambivalent about the new thinking. Among the books of his private library were copies of Copernicus' De reuolutionibus orbium coelestium' (1543) and Johann Schoener's Opera Mathematica (1561), the latter a work of systematic astrology. The science of the stars may have been out of date. But Andrewes was not prepared to be 'startled' by it. Nor, he thought, should his congregation be startled.
          It illustrates the problem of preconceptions in a long history. The law courts continue to use the Bible to allow witnesses to take the oath. Yet already when I was a student in the late 1950s, a century of painstaking critical analysis primarily by German evangelical theologians had blown great holes in the traditional understanding of the Bible. There is not one scrap of external evidence for the existence of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, David and Solomon. Nor can the New Testament any more be taken at face value.
          Perhaps we should not be surprised. It should have been evident from the start. Any cursory examination of the Bible goes to prove it an amorphous collection of materials of uneven quality and character. The book of Esther, for instance, preposterously fails to mention God.
          Yet not for a moment did the contemporary iconoclasm go to 'startle' the members of my theological college. Not for a moment, like Andrewes, did they allow new knowledge to interfere with the tenets of the faith.
          So why am I 'the naked heretic'? Because I will not follow the flock. I will not disregard the facts. Nor do I believe it right to apply biblical solutions to twenty-first century problems.

So what about me?

          So the protagonist of my novel is not me. He must nevertheless, I think, start where I started. That means in Wales. 

         I live in a small French village these days. I read French at university and spent time in Paris when I was seventeen. So I have something of the background. But no matter how well I speak the language and fit in with the social calendar I will never be French. 

          Nor could I ever belong to an authoritarian church. I attend the mass whenever it is celebrated in the village. It's a crying shame. St Antoine grew up about nine hundred years ago under the patronage of a monastic order called the Antonins (dedicated to the care of people suffering from ergotism, the hallucinatory effects of eating contaminated rye. They were also devoted to the emancipation of pigs!) Yet nowadays the local priests run multiple parishes and there's a mass at the village no more than once every two months.

          The building is fantastic nevertheless. Most French churches are large sombre affairs. But this is a respendent collage of patterns embracing many styles in cobalt blues, salmon pinks and golds. Some original frescoes from the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were discovered a couple of years ago. Strikingly, the inscriptions with them are not in Latin but Occitane, placing the building firmly within the local culture. 

          Also they're a lovely people. There's a warmth and a spirit to them. I do not belong nevertheless. They're nor what Ruth would call 'my people'. In broad terms they're Christian just as I am Christian. But my Christianity and theirs is inextricably identified with the roots in which we were brought up. I can only approximate to them and them to me. 

           So I must begin in Wales. Nowhere else will do if I am explain both me and my protagonist. I have been trying to decide what to call him. I had an uncle I never met called John Henry, killed in Mametz Wood on the Somme in 1916. I know John Henry is a 'steel driving man'. But somehow I can't get away from the name. Perhaps my novel can give back a long dead much loved young Welsh soldier the life stolen from him in the trenches of human stupidity. Certainly, he has haunted the family ever since. 

          So I must begin in Wales. But that doesn't mean I am Welsh Welsh. My mother was a Scot. So I didn't pick up any of the language until I went to primary school at the age of five. Also the latter part of my formative years were spent in an anglicised part of Wales. It wasn't true of the original John Henry. But it is true of me and it will it be true of my protagonist. The discovery of Welsh Wales and what that means is an important part of his education.  

    
Education, education, education . . .

          So . . . it's a novel, which means it reflects an aspect of life. It cannot deal with everything that happened to me nor everything that might have happened to John Henry. Some things must remain unsaid, implicit to the background from whence he and I came.

          When I was very young I accepted the beliefs endemic to the country vicarage in which I was brought up. Every word of the Bible was gospel truth no matter how ridiculous. How long was the iron bedstead of Og, the king of Bashan? About twenty-seven feet!. He was a big lad. The shepherds were little buggers at the Nativity Play. Then, in stately procession, the wise men followed their star. But nobody pointed out that the nativity narratives of Matthew and Luke contradict each other. Did Mary and Joseph live in Nazareth or were they were inhabitants of Bethlehem? Nobody will ever know. Nor did we ask.

          All that might seem innocent enough. But the traditional mindset was not easy to discard, the preconceptions too strong. 'The friend for little children', despite Kepler and Copernicus, remained firmly above the bright blue sky. And there was an otherworldliness to it, anti-life, that 'we so pass through things temporal that we finally loose not the things eternal'. I could not imagine Jesus of Nazareth saying that.  

          It's an important point. Who was this Jesus? What was he really like? I saw a TV programme the other night, brimming with scholars from Jerusalem discussing the possibility that a number of contemporary ossuaries discovered within a rock-cut tomb contain the remains of Jesus and his family. They insisted that he was an obscure Jewish teacher from Galilee . . . had no idea of the Christianity which grew up in his name. That, I think, is vastly underestimating him. He remains a shadowy figure nonetheless,  

          It explains why I went up to university agnostic. Fed up with the half truths and uncertainties, I wanted nothing to do with any church. But I wrote poetry . . . not necessarily good poetry, but poetry nonetheless. In the event it was the weakness of the argument. 

          In my experience, the minute you stretch beyond the here and now, reaching out for not easily apprehensible perceptions, you are back with religion in some form or another. It is conventional to associate religion with morality. It's a nonsense. Religion begins with a poet - a Jesus or a Budda - only at worst does it culminate with a policeman, an inquisition, a Savaranola or John Knox. 

          But love is the real thing, not morality. You might think it right to be good because God is good. But that's the point. The goodness is a by-product, not the thing itself. I was re-taught religion by a promiscuous, witty, vastly entertaining homosexual priest and it has never left me. 

          But it must be seen against the background of the radical reshaping of my ideas during my time at the University College of North Wales, Bangor - in particular the way in which I became conscious of Wales' peculiar history, a siege mentality, a culture under attack from the English legislators which wished to abolish it and its language. So, John Henry springs from the tight little world of a Welsh parish run by his father. But he is educated into a much bigger Wales, indigenous yet linked to a pan-european vision as the Welsh attempted to ignore the Anglo-Saxon big brother over the border and looked for inspiration to the troubadours and heretic cathars of the big world outside.

                       

     

The red and the white dragon           So . . . largely by accident, John Henry begins to discover the cultural context within which his religion can grow. A chance encounter with an enthusiastic Welshman places the indigenous Christianity of Wales into context, beginning long before Augustine was sent by the pope to convert the Anglo-Saxons (non angli sed angeli remember). The Irish St David of Wales and the Welsh St Patrick of Ireland were already dead when the pope's emissary arrived on the isle of Thanet. Nor, as Bede records, was he greeted with enthusiasm by the Celts. They were more like poets, he a definite  legislator. 

          In his eleventh century Historia Regum Britanniae (history of the British kings) Geoffrey of Monmouth characterises the conflict between the two cultures as the struggle between the red dragon of Wales and the white dragon of England. (The red dragon, at least, survives. Also I think a white dragon may by a better emblem for England that the mythical St George . . . slayer of dragons and all other illuminating fantasies.) 

          But the Welsh were different. How did they express their resistance? Since they could not win  by force of arms, they wrote poetry . . . brilliant poetry, in quality not matched by the English until the age of Elizabeth.      

          And when they ran out of poetry they used religion, sustaining the culture when its abolition was planned by Henry VIII. That the Welsh should become English would never happen after the appearance of a translation of the Bible into Welsh, earlier than and of a quality to match the best of the Authorised Version. 

          To write, to say words, to speak, to retain a minority language because it comes from the soul, that's Wales, that's what I learnt, that's why I cannot be French. 

          But John Henry was not going to get away simply with that. The plot thickens. Now he has become obsessed with a girl. Nobody else will ever be quite to important as Jane, a scintillating and thoroughly sexy mathematician, a convinced atheist at every juncture slayer of his convictions. 

          So there's the rub. All you need is love? Of course. But what kind of love? And are they incompatible? The girl is about love. Religion is about love . . . eros and agape, human and divine, so far as John Henry is concerned in both instances never to be let go. That's why this is a novel, not some dry treatise. 

          It happened to me. It happens to him. He begins to suspect divine love. Was it not the invention of sex divine? So much for the anodyne religion of his youth. Jane he describes 'in equal measure his pure and impure love'. 

          Which brings me back to my friend the delightfully priapic homosexual priest. I could not share his proclivities, but he and I were at one when it come to the power of the sex drive. So John Henry is no less obsessed with the girl than he is with his God. 

The old order changeth

              So it was an odd context in which John Henry (and I) began a course of study at the St Michael and All Angels theological college, Llandaff (on the outskirts of Cardiff). To all intents the old order had already collapsed, the authority of the Bible undermined. But as I have explained the preconceptions remained. Like Andrewes in the 1620s. the academic establishment was unstartled. 

          Nor, I think, have things changed since. I watched David Starkey on television the other night, discussing the present royal family at the culmination of his series about the Monarchy. The Church of England is weak and divided, he said, irrelevant. How then will Charles be crowned when the time comes? Not, he thought in Westminster Abbey at the hand of the present Welsh archbishop. Who is he kidding? The show must go on. People know when they're on to a good thing. A weak and divided church won't stop it. It started with the coronation of William the Conqueror. It won't stop with Charles the third. 

            Yes, the Church of England is weak under threat from bible-toting evangelicals capable of blaming homosexuals for being what they are . . . as though they could change it. It's idiotic. You might just as well blame a man, as people did, for being black. Heaven knows what they would say if they met a gang of god-created hermaphrodite martians. But we cannot blame the lunatic fringe. The Church of England . . . indeed all the establishment churches are weak . . . because they have not faced the realities of the modern world. The preconceptions are too strong. What did Cowper say? "But shivering mortals start and shrink and fear to cast away.'