Heaven and Home

I lay for a time on my back in the fields below the house. Grass grew around me, and birds sang down upon my closed eyes. Half an hour passed, and I knew it would be hard to reenter the world from a period of total peace. My eyelids aren’t thick enough to conceal a bright sun; the best they can do is dampen it down to the redness of twilight. So when the time came for me to move, I opened my eyes and gulped at the day as if it were some hated medication. The landscape was impossibly bright then; the smallest details were crazily acute, and for a moment it seemed like the world was burning up. But even with a dilation of pupils and an automatic readjustment to the meadows around me, normality was only partially restored. I couldn’t forget the brightness, and the crisply patterned details of the riverbank and the trembling glare of stones.

Much later in the cathedral, I dropped out of the service of Evensong and sat with my head in my hands. Time passed, and my eyes were closed. From a tremendous distance, I heard the Canon tell that Christ is risen; Christ is risen, and Death has met its Master, which cascaded through me to become And Death shall have no dominion. My thoughts raced away into a confusion of associations, and I allowed it. 

Prayer is more than the passive recital of words learned by children. If you need them at all, structured prayers serve to create an atmosphere of comfort and familiarity; they are something we do together in readiness for actual prayer, which comes later in a form of silent meditation. Following this line, I was very far away when the congregation stood around me to sing. I lifted my head to open my eyes, and in that moment, the building was blown out with the most outrageous light. The sandstone’s usual, casual warmth was gone. The stained glass roared, and every small curve of tracery coiled uncannily like snakes in the dew. It was the same building I’ve come to love, but overhauled in a plunging of new light, like the first lunge of fresh air after a deep and dumbstruck dive. 

Christian rituals pay close attention to all aspects of human nature. A cynic would say that liturgies are designed to manipulate and exploit the weak or credulous masses, but there’s nothing sinister about the use of beauty, drama and spectacle in religion. These things were not imposed upon us – we made an institution to meet our needs, so it’s hardly fair to blame the Church for reading us like a book. 

When you open your mind to a church or a ceremony, you’re allowing yourself to be led by profoundly human traditions. There are no accidents in prayer, just as Cathedrals are not thrown up in a random fit of enthusiasm. It was foreseen that you’d look up and be dazzled as the congregation rose to sing, because you are not an isolated entirety. You are foreseeable, and if those brilliant windows are really nine hundred years old, we are unchanged after all.