A sermon preached at a Requiem Mass for the repose of the soul of John Betjeman
16 May 2009
“I take a last look at St Endellion standing on a cliff top of this Atlantic coast. The sun turns the water into moving green. In November weather, if the day is bright, the cliffs here are in shadow. The sun cannot rise high enough to strike them. The bracken is dead and brown, the grassy cliff tops vivid green; red berries glow in bushes. Ice-cream cartons and cigarette packets left by summer visitors have been blown into crevices and soaked to pulp. The visitors are there for a season. Man’s life on earth will last for seventy years perhaps. But this sea will go on swirling against these green and purple rocks for centuries. Long after we are dead it will rush up in waterfalls of whiteness that seem to hang half-way up the cliff face and then come pouring down with tons of ginger-beery foam. Yet compared with the age of these rocks, the sea’s life is nothing. And even the age of rocks is nothing compared with the eternal life of man. And up there on the hill in St Endellion church, eternal man comes week by week in the Eucharist. That is the supreme mystery of all the mysteries of St Endellion.”
John Betjeman’s prose is as resonant as his poetry in its evocation of place, its particularity of observation and, not least, in its expression of a deeply-rooted Christian faith. All those characteristic virtues are seen in this extract in its description of seascape and landscape, the human and domestic detail of ice-cream cartons and cigarette packets and these sit easily and naturally alongside those moving and profound words “the age of rocks is nothing compared with the eternal life of man. And up there on the hill in St Endellion Church, eternal man comes week by week in the Eucharist. That is the supreme mystery of all the mysteries of St Endellion.” As so often, he has the gift of expressing the highest theological truths in direct, simple and memorable terms:
“God was Man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.”
At Pusey House we have a proprietorial interest in Betjeman’s faith. You will well remember those lines in “Summoned by Bells”:
“Those were the days when that divine baroque
Transformed our English altars and our ways.
Fiddle-back chasubles and mid-Lent pink
Scandalized Rome and Protestants alike …
Despite my frequent lapses into lust,
Despite hypocrisy, revenge and hate,
I learned at Pusey House the Catholic faith.”
Auberon Waugh, his friend, whose father, Evelyn, persistently sought his conversion to Rome, maintained that he was “almost certain that Betjeman decided to effect a cosy certainty in religion which he was never within miles of feeling.” It is not for us to look into other men’s souls but there is evidence enough in his work to undermine Waugh’s view. Like many Anglo-Catholics, he may have worn his faith lightly but believed it profoundly. That is not to say that he was without doubts and uncertainties and anxieties. He had an avowed terror of death, “a malaise of the soul against which his religious beliefs, strongly held, appear to offer no adequate shield” but he had a powerfully expressed belief in the presence of Christ in the Bread and the Wine of the Eucharist which are his Body and his Blood:
“Wonder beyond Time’s wonders, that Bread so white and small
Veiled in golden curtains, too mighty for men to see.”
Awe and passionate intensity characterized that sacramental belief, not cosiness or sentimentality:
“Wait, restive heart, wait rounded lips to pray,
Mid beaten copper interset with gems
Behold! Behold! Your King!”
Although committed to its Catholic profession, Betjeman was also fascinated by and fond of the Church of England in its comprehensive idiosyncracies and there he could eulogise and gently mock a comfortable, unthreatening, charming idyll of high, low and broad: Mass to Matins, country and town, village and city, spacious suburban developments, teeming slums: from the Romanesque to the polychromatic, gothic to baroque: and the bells, not least of Wantage, that summoned the faithful to prayer and fired Betjeman’s sympathies and imagination.
Betjeman’s faith was deeply set but that did not mean it was easy. For all Christians there is a struggle between fallen humanity and the perfection in Christ to which they are called which expresses itself in each individual life. Asked once about the three theological virtues Faith, steadfastness in belief, Hope, expectation and desire of receiving; refraining from despair, the capability of not giving up, and Charity, selfless, unconditional, voluntary kindness and love, he replied that he was not very good at faith, dreadful at charity, but, by God, did he hope.
It was not easy for him and it is not easy for any of us to live out our faith, where we have it at all, nowadays: it was never easy. Faith is not an easy answer to human problems, vanities and weaknesses: it is the answer but it is not the easy answer. It is always a challenge and always a risk. The riskiest thing that we ever do is to love. The search for certainties can find its expression in nostalgia and some have identified that in Betjeman:
“Under the Travers baroque, in a limewashed whiteness
The fiddle-back vestments a-glitter with morning rays,
Our Lady’s image, in multiple-candled brightness,
The bells and banners – those were the waking days
When Faith was taught and fanned to a golden blaze.”
Shaped by a post-Vatican II modernity, those sentiments may seem to strike an unrealistically nostalgic, even reactionary note: hopsack and ashes seem the only touchstones of authenticity that we are allowed in a more skeptical and ruthlessly secular age. But we do not have to succumb to the vulgarity of the times. That was the last thing that Betjeman ever did. His poetic Christian apologetic is a rebuke to the times and an assertion of values and truths that transcend the transient fashions and fancies and impermanence of a contemporary aesthetic. He was not ignorant of the reality of the times but he knew that however far from God man had moved, God had not moved from man and there was a way back for man:
“God who created the present, the chain-smoking millions and me
…
Christ, at this Highbury altar, I offer myself To Thee.”
And others could offer themselves too. He said, “my view of the world is that man is born to fulfill the purposes of his Creator, to praise his Creator, to stand in awe of Him and to dread Him. In this way I differ from most modern poets, who are agnostic and have an idea that Man is centre of the Universe or is a helpless bubble blown about by uncontrolled forces.”
Sentimentality and an aura of nostalgia can, of course, be found in Betjeman’s work, but surely there is found more often chiseled, hard-edged, utterly unsentimental irony, sometimes savage, sometimes affectionate. And there is found passion: passion for buildings, for friends (who can read his poetic eulogy and lament for his friend Basil, Marquess of Dufferin and Ava without knowing that?), passion for faith and worship and churches: passion for God in Christ Jesus: passion to be better: passionate disdain for mammon and hypocrisy. He chronicles the difficulties and dangers of faith and belief; he charts the waters between sin and salvation, between the reprobate and the redeemed, between lust and love:
“Swing the warm censer round my bruised heart
Drop dove-grey eyes, your penitential showers.”
Perhaps not the best or the greatest of English poets but perhaps the most human and the most loved and, perhaps because the most loved, the most read: “a mind of extraordinary originality.” A man of faults and frailties, of failings and fallibility: so much like the rest of us. His self-knowledge makes his poetry, especially the verse which touches the more directly on his faith and religion and the practice of it, makes it all the more accessible and appealing.
His hope in his Redeemer and Risen Saviour was profoundly felt. Hope in the transforming and transfiguring love of the Crucified and Risen Christ is the sustaining fact of the Christian life, when all else is stripped away. That is the pulse that beats through the rhythms of this Mass of Requiem that we offer on behalf of our departed brother. We offer the perfect sacrifice: the best that man can do. Christ offered us the sure and certain hope of eternal life with him and he offered it with the specificity and particularity, even the physicality, of the bread of life which is his sacramental presence with us: the mystery of his abiding presence given reality in the bread and the wine of the Eucharist which are his Body and his Blood. “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst … I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up at the last day … everyone who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life: and I will raise him up on the last day.” It is in the sure hope of that promise, in the certain expectation of its fulfillment and that Christ will not fail us that we dare to offer the Divine Victim and to plead in this Mass for the repose of the soul in the eternal felicity and companionship of Christ of our brother John whom we commend to the mercy, pity and love of God to whom be all honour, might, majesty, power and glory both now and for all the ages.
Father William Davage