FROM CATS TO SLAVES: WARMTH AND WISDOM

One of the great joys this year has brought me is a small book written by a nonagenarian: Ronald Blythe's The Circling Year: Perspectives from a Country Parish (Norwich: the Canterbury Press, 2001, repr. 2006). Blythe, a writer and essayist who will be 94 on November 6, made a name for himself with Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village in 1969. Apart from a number of delightful books, he has for many years written a column in the English Church Times, titled 'Word from Wormingford'; he is a Reader in the Church of England and a lay Canon of St Edmundsbury Cathedral.

The Circling Year loosely follows the liturgical year from Advent to Advent in a series of brief chapters that could almost be (and may in fact have been) homilies at Matins or Evensong. Some of the titles: 'The Women in the Lord's Life', 'The Passport to the Kingdom' (on childhood), 'The Brother Slave' (on Philemon), 'The Frightened Walkers' (on the road to Emmaus), 'Holy Cats' (on the parish cat, Christopher Smart, and Julian of Norwich's cat), and 'The Singer of Sad Songs' (on Jeremiah). Blythe writes with complete and unostentatious charm, not only about faith but about Suffolk and its flat, windy and watery countryside where he has spent most of his life and where he still lives in an Elizabethan farmhouse left to him by the painter John Nash whom he had nursed through his final illness.

From 'About Not Forgetting' (at Epiphany): "It is the common experience to have running together side by side religious conventions and personal religious beliefs which are far from conventional, and it is the mixing of the two which makes each of us what we are. An honest memory is the only asset we have which can show us the self that God recognizes. It is the Epiphany when Christ is shown to us in a full light and when we approach him feeling rather exposed by the pure illumination of these winter days. The collect asks God to look upon our infirmities -- and how unhidable they are!" And later, when the leper presents himself, "Christ touches him and says, 'Be clean.' The one-time leper would never forget what he had been, so ill, so outcast. And in Christ's memory too there would have remained a sight of an unhealed and healed man.
     A popular inscription for a sundial is, 'I tell only the sunny hours'. Being a sundial, that is all it can do. Given half a chance our memory would do the same, for it is human to seek oblivion for some of the happenings in our lives. But at the altar we remember our wickedness before we remember our goodness in Christ."

This, as one review put it, "is a book to be given to a friend who has a discriminating ear and an affection for things local." It accompanies you through the year like a wise and unpretentious acquaintance whom it is a privilege to know.