Such a good day
I don't have a drop of spirituality in me. Rejecting Christianity at age fourteen was more a casual acknowledgement that I hadn't believed that stuff for years than any sort of wrench. Indeed, I wouldn't know the date if it hadn't been that my parents and grandparents expected me to be Confirmed, and I told them to forget it. I never expected prayers to be answered because I never had the sense that God was listening, or even that anyone was. Even as a seven year old, I knew it was just 'form'. I've never had the sense of a ghost, either, even in supposedly haunted rooms. I've never felt 'cold' when I was meant to. I sing along with hymns in the same way I sing along with other people's patriotic songs - "And here's to Washington and all his gallant men, and here's to the girl who once was mine..." - because the tune is good and the words can sometimes be decent verse or even poetry. For that matter, though I list John Donne's Holy Sonnets as some of my favourite poems, it is because of their humanity and imagery - I have no empathy for Donne's struggle with his God. Some places move me, but often because of their particular kind of beauty and their connection with a remote past - I feel menace at Avebury, for instance, and joy at Delphi. Come to think of it, any connection with great age moves me, and I will sit with a trilobite fossil or a Roman oil lamp in my hand and feel shivers down my spine thinking about the trib swimming in ancient seas or a slave lighting the lamps in a town house or villa. The closest I get to knowing what people mean by religious or spiritual feeling is watching the pieces fall into place in a scientific theory - I got that feeling when I first learned about plate tectonics, and when I first made that little mental adjustment that some people never seem to manage, and really understood how evolution by natural selection works. Maybe it isn't the same, but it is still immensely exhilarating, and there is no ancient and creaking moral code attached.
Last week, our friend Pamela came down on a visit, and I took a few days off work so that we could take advantage to drive to some of the local historic buildings. So it was that within three days we visited two of the most ancient and beautiful local churches; the Cathedral at St Albans and the Abbey at Waltham. These are places where people have worshipped, one way and another, for over a thousand years. The wall paintings and the shrine of St Alban at the Cathedral are a wonder, while the early Norman pillars at Waltham recall Durham (my favourite of all Cathedrals - yes, even more than Salisbury and York), the Doom is a knockout example and easy to interpret, the Victorian restoration actually was just that (i.e. not done by Gilbert Scott who is unforgiven in this household for vandalising Dover's Saxon church), and gave the Abbey its stunning Burne-Jones rose window.
I was interested and deeply appreciative, but on an intellectual and not an emotional level.
Yet on Wednesday morning I stood in an ugly, cluttered and comfortable Victorian study, in a home where a family had lived in a very ordinary happiness for many years, visited by loving friends and relations, and fought back tears. A Panama hat and a miniature telescope set me calling for inamac to "Come and see!" in greatest excitement. I walked through a kitchen garden and along a track through an ordinary English wood on a grey and overcast day, and felt so elated that I had no words then or now to express my joy.
Those who know me very well might have guessed at this point that I was visiting Down House, where Charles Darwin lived so happily for so many years with his wife and family, writing the Origin - and other deeply influential books - and researching the growth of plants, the breeding of pigeons and the activities of earthworms.
I knew I would be moved by Down - but this much?
Last week, our friend Pamela came down on a visit, and I took a few days off work so that we could take advantage to drive to some of the local historic buildings. So it was that within three days we visited two of the most ancient and beautiful local churches; the Cathedral at St Albans and the Abbey at Waltham. These are places where people have worshipped, one way and another, for over a thousand years. The wall paintings and the shrine of St Alban at the Cathedral are a wonder, while the early Norman pillars at Waltham recall Durham (my favourite of all Cathedrals - yes, even more than Salisbury and York), the Doom is a knockout example and easy to interpret, the Victorian restoration actually was just that (i.e. not done by Gilbert Scott who is unforgiven in this household for vandalising Dover's Saxon church), and gave the Abbey its stunning Burne-Jones rose window.
I was interested and deeply appreciative, but on an intellectual and not an emotional level.
Yet on Wednesday morning I stood in an ugly, cluttered and comfortable Victorian study, in a home where a family had lived in a very ordinary happiness for many years, visited by loving friends and relations, and fought back tears. A Panama hat and a miniature telescope set me calling for inamac to "Come and see!" in greatest excitement. I walked through a kitchen garden and along a track through an ordinary English wood on a grey and overcast day, and felt so elated that I had no words then or now to express my joy.
Those who know me very well might have guessed at this point that I was visiting Down House, where Charles Darwin lived so happily for so many years with his wife and family, writing the Origin - and other deeply influential books - and researching the growth of plants, the breeding of pigeons and the activities of earthworms.
I knew I would be moved by Down - but this much?