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.

IN A NEW YEAR

Last Sunday, we were reminded that the Last Sunday After Trinity, now known as the Sunday Before Advent, and known in Catholic circles as Christ the King, is in fact the last Sunday of the liturgical year. So tomorrow, the First Sunday in Advent, begins a new year. And it begins so quietly. One little candle in the darkness, in the storms, in the long nights of snow, in all the depths of the world. About that we can talk tomorrow --  but what about this new year, then? There should at least be a little celebration, a sense that renewal is not doomed but possible, a consciousness that, as someone put it, we fall down ten times; but when we get up the eleventh time, that’s faith. And hope.

   Many years ago, in early January, Schultz published a Peanuts cartoon featuring Lucy looking crossly at the sky and saying, “We’ve been cheated! It’s not a new year! They’ve given us a used year!” Sometimes January’s new year can feel like that. But the new year of Advent should not. No matter where we are, how we are, in that new year the year can be new. In our hearts, in our minds, and – let’s bring back that entity the Enlightenment downplayed – in our souls, a spring is possible. Somebody wrote that the fig tree is such a beloved symbol in the Bible because it burgeons, it gets leaf-buds, very early, yet its fruit ripen late. So if in the spring of this new year we bud early but then not much seems to happen, let us not be sad or discouraged: there will be a summer, and there will be fruit.

   And a final word about “the season” – “the holiday season”, “the shopping season” and all those things we love to get angry at even as we are part of them. A new year suggests a few good resolutions. Could we perhaps begin with the resolution not to be defensive about Christmas, not to bitch at bad music in shopping centres, not to grouch and grinch and complain? A resolution to live this season – which is as much happily pagan as it is, for us, also happily religious – with confidence and pleasure, on whatever scale pleases us and those we love? Such a resolution would help increase the joy of the world in expectation of the dies Natalis, would allow us to smile at our families, our neighbours, and strangers, and to pass on whatever help we can spare to those whose new year begins in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity. In newness of life.