This year, everything has been different. Christmas; birthdays; festivities and the daily humdrumlies; and now Easter. No need to go into reasons, some of which are medical, some family-related; but what interests me is what it tells me about our relation to ritual. I was brought up mostly without it: liberal Protestantism was a sober if kindly religion, and such rites as we had were intimate family ones, relating to birthdays, holidays and the Eve of St Nicholas (Dec. 5), which for children resembles the Father Christmas/Santa Claus feast of rewards for good behaviour in the form of presents, and for adults becomes increasingly hilarious.
When, as an Oxford undergraduate, I became an Anglican, I embraced that church’s newfound ritual with the enthusiasm of a convert. Vestments, incense, liturgy and the inimitable choral music: it was heavenly, in the strict as well as in the figurative sense. And the rich sound of Cranmer’s English, our version of Latin or Church Slavic, meshed gratefully with the Elizabethan poetry that it was my trade and my pleasure to teach.
Such elevated joys could not, of course, last. First, I moved to France where liturgy was the local version of Vatican II Catholicism: cheerful, appreciated by the country folk, but without beauty or reverence of any kind. Then, on the occasions when I was back in the Anglican communion, I discovered the woes of Common Worship which insisted on addressing the Creator in the language of daily commerce or afternoon tea. Apart from not-very-assiduous attendance at local Mass, I reacted with an increasingly private faith, the more since in France one is surrounded by more or less righteously secular atheists. I read the Carthusians, plunged into St Francis de Sales, was encouraged by St Augustine, and found a mercifully reliable, intelligent and kindly guide in Josef Ratzinger, alias Benedict XVI.
And now, for many months, much of the remaining ritual has had to be simplified or suspended, and I find myself, Catholic-of-the-heart as I now am, back in a life much more like the liberal Protestantism of my childhood. And to my considerable surprise, I do not feel deprived or resentful. On the contrary, the change seems to be affording me a livelier and more intimate relation to the Deity. Daily prayer – the one ritual remaining changeless – is more heartfelt; Lent and Holy Week, kept raggedly and without consistency, nevertheless are more deeply felt than formerly.
I can’t explain this, yet. But I have had a hint in exploring novelist/playwright Charles Morgan’s concept of the imagination. Contrary to the dictionary meanings, which always link this term to a reality that is absent, Morgan used it to describe his – or any artist’s – relation to something, or someone, present. A place, a person, an event, was to him merely a part of the surrounding landscape unless and until he imagined it. By this, I think, he meant something close to Keats’s remark in his letter to Benjamin Bailey: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination . . . the imagination may be likened to Adam’s dream: he awoke and found it truth.” I believe it also has to do with something else Keats wrote: “The excellence of every art lies in its intensity.” What Morgan calls “imagining” involves a fresh look at something, or someone, previously known without remark: a look that seems to re-create the object, charging it with an intensity partly emitted, partly received. Such “imagination” is lawless: one does not control it though one may co-operate with it. Great photography is perhaps one of its more comprehensible examples. In art it is best, and necessarily, complemented by a mastery of technique; in human and/or divine relations it needs to be accompanied by care and reverence, by a sense of angels’ fearing to tread other than lightly. But it is a mighty gift that merits immense gratitude and thanksgiving (when the initial surprise settles down). And one lives newly messy and turbulent seasons with real joy.
