Sacra Converzione - For Matthew

We talked into the night. ‘Denial’, you said,
‘repudiating self, remains the only
way to God.’ Ah yes, I thought, the lonely,
briar-choked road that half-starved pilgrims tread -
‘But what of beauty and desire, the garden
of delights.’ I poured another glass of red;
'pleasure is my path to heaven instead,
I feel no need to plead for special pardon.'

But when, like figures etched on glass, the saint
and seraphim stand at my side, I sense
their shadows mirroring my own, a faint
reflection of the almost known. Intense -
faith’s fickle rush; and then the aftermath,
a Godless world, the bleak, monotonous path.

From time to time Matthew when suffered from bouts of insomnia and disturbed sleep patterns he would be awake all night and asleep most of the day. When he was living at home often he would arrive downstairs ready to have a philosophical debate just as the rest of us were ready to 'hit the sack'.  We would end up talking to about all kinds of things well into the night. This sonnet recalls a conversation about faith, belief and the pleasures and perils inherent both in asceticism and hedonism. Why pick this topic to commemorate our nocturnal conversations? Equally interesting were the many others which ranged from a reassessment Concrete Brutalism, the importance of Jimmy Reid as a figure in Labour history or the the development of differing formations in world football post 1945.

I think questions of faith and the lack of it have troubled me all of my life. These questions stem from how I was brought up. My mother, a quick witted and savvy individual, would have no truck with religion at all. My father had been raised in a conventional Scottish Presbyterian family so, although he was not a regular church-goer himself, he was keen that his off-spring went to Sunday School; later I joined the junior choir and various church based youth groups mainly for social reasons. My older sister, however, became part of a  fundamentalist evangelical christian group in her mid-teens and went off for various retreats at Capenray Hall in Cumbria. She seemed to regard her younger brother as some kind of on-going project for conversion. The upside of this was when I started to think more clearly as a young teenager I found myself drawn to reading all kinds of different religious texts - Poems of Heaven and Hell from ancient Mesopotamia and the Upanishads; later this branched out into an interest in Jungian psychology discovered through reading Aldous Huxley. So my sister's misguided attempts at evangelism fuelled a broader interest in ideas and philosophy. The downside were interventions from various of Carol's compatriots discouraging me from this wider reading. The most irritating I remember was an attempt at an earnest conversation on these lines with a chap called Stuart Brock, the son of the United Reform Church minister at Whitby where my sister was living at the time. By this time I was about about to head off to University; I remained polite, but treated the advice with the derision it deserved.

These experiences have had consequences in adulthood. I am not 'a believer'. Science, particularly Biology, Cosmology and Quantum Physics, seems to offer a more marvellous explanation of the Universe than anything religion could envisage. However, I am not immune to spiritual experience. When people talk about 'feeling the presence of God' then I can understand that, I too have sensed at times a powerful spiritual presence. I just don't believe that it exists outside of the human imagination, and many fabulous beasts, fables, utopias and infernos have been dreamt up in our minds;  we don't, however, decide that Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs provides a holistic and comforting theory of 'life, the universe and everything'.

Given my position, why do I characterise a 'Godless' world as a 'bleak, monotonous path'? Well, if all we have is our here and now, then the logic of that would be to live life on some kind of Epicurean pleasure principle, a joyous engagement with whatever life throws at us. Sadly, most of us have to earn our crust; no-one will ever convince me that developing an Ofsted post inspection action plan is anything but 'a bleak monotonous  path'. One suspects that the invention of god in the minds of hunter gatherers and subsistence farmers only partly stemmed from ontological terror at being the only seemingly sentient being in the universe, religion experience and ritual probably also helped give solace and meaning to our ancestor's humdrum, boring and repetitive existence, as for many it still does today.

Back to the poem, the images in the sestet were influenced by two photographs I took around the time. The first shows the family dwarfed by the etched glass windows of Coventry Cathedral which we visited when reconnoitring Warwickshire just after Sarah accepted a university place there.



 

The second photograph was taken one misty morning on the path leading from Pym's Chair towards Shining Torr above the Goyt Valley. The way Matthew is silhouetted against the wet stone path which snakes off into the distance does give the picture a bit of a 'Pilgrims Progress' aspect.

 

a Godless world, the bleak, monotonous path.....