A WALK ON THE WOLD SIDE

 

Waiting for the rain to clear, I sit in Grantham’s Costa and look across the square at Isaac Newton.  The shopping centre itself is named after him, and so is a pub and a primary school. Quite right too.  He was a pupil at the King’s School before he went up to Trinity Cambridge. His home was at Woolsthorpe Manor, not so very far away. Woolsthorpe is now a National Trust property, complete with an apple tree which may or may not have inspired the notion of ‘gravity’. There’s a contemporary-sounding twist to Newton’s experience. He returned to Woolsthorpe in 1665, interrupting his Cambridge studies. It was the plague year, so one can imagine he was entering a kind of self-imposed lockdown, away from coffee houses and the communal life.

I suppose each Christian, perhaps each person, could be placed on some kind of x-y grid in terms of their beliefs about the relationship between religion and science. Do the two fields of activity occupy the same space for us? Or in an age of extreme scepticism, do we keep them apart, as if perpetually worried some new discovery may come along and ‘that about wraps it up for God…’? (and that’s the second post in succession I’ve quoted from ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’!) 

For Newton, palpable breathless excitement about the world made the two one. Revelling in the perfection of mathematics and positing fundamental ideas about how the universe worked was all of a piece with his exploration of faith.  Some 20^th century philosophers in the British tradition have wanted to draw attention to the fact that religion and science use different kinds of language – and at times have implied, subtlely or otherwise, that scientific language = OK: religious language = nonsense.  Or at least that the latter only has a purpose in keeping happy those weaker mortals who need religion, without disturbing the greater proportion of the population who just want to get on with their comfortably rational lives.  A one-time teacher of mine, the uber-brainy Professor Susan Haack, has argued that religion and science do indeed occupy the same intellectual space, and we just have to kind of get on with that awkward fact - though I don’t think she herself is a believer. Reason is important, but doubt exists. Relentless scepticism is unhelpful. Life is complicated.

St. Nicholas' Barkston

I retrieve the car and drive up the Lincoln road to Belton, then use the roadside path to the nearby villages of Syston and Barkston. It’s a day of dreakh, with dampness continuing in the air all day until a brief, fragile clearance mid-afternoon.  The Roman writer Tacitus, writing about Agricola’s first century British military campaigns puts fascinating words into the general’s mouth. Britain, he says, has a miserable climate, with frequent rains and mists.

How did the meteorology experienced by the Roman incomers compare with today’s?  We can’t know with exactitude, although clever archaeologists can provide hints from the analysis of soil samples. At one point Caesar remarks of his earlier invasions that Britain’s a warmer place than elsewhere in Gaul, but then, he’s not a man much to be trusted.  He might have been comparing a winter ‘continental’ climate in Dijon with a spring day in Rochester. By the way, Agricola’s name, as you’ll very likely know, means ‘farmer’.  Perhaps he was more than averagely sensitive to the weather. 

After a Good Friday service into which we inserted excerpts from Faure's Requiem, I’m singing the Libera me to myself while I walk. I can’t get the tune out of my head. Cheekily, I added a make-believe saxophone, Jan Garbarek-like, to my own recorded version. A friend afterwards sent me a whimsical note to say after so long he was fascinated to learn Fauré had come up with such an idea and wondered how this innovation had been born. 

The bar of the 'Le canard tordu', Rue St. Honoré, Paris, August 1914. Three composers are sharing a pre-dinner drink....

Claude  Gabby, mon petit doudou, you are, ow zey say, un peu plus uptight.  If you want ze big money, it is necessary for you to hang the more loose. Your tunes, c'est vrai, zey 'ave ze good notes. But zey do not swing. 

Gabriel  Que veut-tu dire?  What is zis swing?

Claude  Ah!  Since I was to visiting l'autre Orléans, (ze one hèlas no more Francais), I see ze future, and it is not ze string quartet. From now it is always boom-boom and quatre sur le plancher. 

Maurice Je n'aime pas cela! Ce n'est pas Européen, ni amoureux, ni triste.  Where to find the soul? 

Claude  Au contraire, jeune homme. Zey call it 'Ze Blues' and you would dig it bigtime. Ah, zose majeur sept flattened cinqs. Si raffinées, si intelligents...

Gabriel I wish so much être modern.  Mon last royalty statement...it is merde!  Ow can I be groovy flavour du mois encore une fois? 

Claude  Courage, et écoute, mon ancien serpent! I will you take vers ze Hot Club de Belleville mardi prochain and meet you some hep cats qui strut leurs funky stuff alors avec le saxophone et le scooby-doo scat. Peut-être tu en trouve ton mojo?  Et puis, sans doute tu regagne le top spot...

Both St. Peter and St. Paul’s in Syston and St. Nicholas in Barkston are locked. Both are ‘Community’ churches, looking east to Ancaster which is their ‘Hub’ place of worship. A clergy friend recently remarked to Sue that managing decline is much harder than managing growth.  I think to myself that we may be accelerating our church death spiral because we’re unable to utilise the ‘halo effect’ of which many teachers will be aware (Rosenthal and Jacobsen). These researchers observed how teacher expectations were an important determinant of behaviour. Applying it to the church situation, if you expect decline, then that’s what you’ll get. Alternatively, if you hope for and expect growth, it’s more likely to occur.  

This is easy to say, but very hard to do in a media climate where my Bing clickbait for today asked me to read an article giving fifteen reasons why church attendance is weakening. As I look around these tiny villages, of course I recognise that if there are ten Christian souls prepared to gather regularly, then that might be above average as a percentage of the overall population.  But will they really choose to go the few miles to Ancaster on a Sunday morning? Whether we like it or not, parish churches are partly about identity, expressed on a number of dimensions. A very important one is the village identity. We may privately think it should be trumped by a greater Christian calling.  But if, being good evangelicals, we reference Acts Chapters 2-4 as our model of the early Church, surely that ancient account describes a very ‘local’ group?    

Am I boring you, by my repetitions of the same problem post after post, just phrased slightly differently?  I hope not. IMO the situation is intellectually absorbing as well as occasionally depressing. And God is bigger than our current obsessions.

Honington hill-fort. It might look like a heap of earth to you, but it was home once...

I wait at a level crossing while the Sleaford to Grantham DMU trundles past, and then climb the rise which takes me to a cross-lane where I walk on to Honington. There are some super-posh houses here. The former rectory is being refurbished and will become one of them. The church of St. Wilfrid’s is also locked. I shelter in the porch as the weather closes in again: a dramatic mist of rain sweeps from the south west, relents briefly and then renews in vigour as I climb the scarp onto the wold which runs beside the Sleaford road. My little umbrella struggles to cope with the wind as I zig zag across the muddy fields, passing the rectangular ditches of a pre-Roman hill fort.  The onward route takes me close to the margins of Barkston Heath airfield where the Navy’s baby pilots learn their first chops in the RAF’s fleet of Grob trainers. No one’s flying right now because of the adverse weather.  Somehow, the field glasses of the airfield security team spot me at what must be a mile or so’s distance, and as at Cottesmore last year, orange light flashing, a pick-up truck takes up station on the perimeter road to watch me as I turn south away from the airfield, a diminutive and diminishing threat.

The green lane in Syston Park is an attractive way back down to the main road. In times past hill-climbs and motor-races have taken place here, but now all is quiet amid the budding trees. The sun comes out to mock me as I walk the last half-mile back to the car. He is unsuccessful in his bid to make me feel bad, not understanding the elation humans feel when surviving an encounter with a little bad weather.

Belton – Syston – Barkston – Honington – Barkston Heath – Syston – Belton

15 km.  4 hrs.  Rain, cloud, and then finally sunshine.  14 deg. C.

There’s not much new under Mr. Sun. ‘Walk on the wild side’ is a song from Lou Reed’s 1972 famous album ‘Transformer’. Both Reed and David Bowie, who co-produced, were playing with notions of gender identity and sexual orientation.  They didn’t invent these ideas of course, but helped bring them out of the closet. It sometimes feels as if today’s New Libertarians think they have copyright over matters of gender confusion.  I want to say. ‘Oh, get over it!’

In some ways the Church can afford to say ‘so what’, and concentrate on the needy people underneath whatever clothes they happen to be wearing, while remaining aware that (almost as a footnote) St. Paul’s writing takes a dim view of laissez-vous attitudes to ‘girls who are boys and boys who are girls’. But Paul 'was just a guy, y'know' (rule-of-three reference to 'Hitch-hiker' - enough and no more already). Jesus seemed pretty keen on making people whole - the best version of what God originally made them each to be - rather than changing them beyond recognition. Food for thought there for both evangelicals and neo-liberals, I reckon.  In the meanwhile, walk on your own wild side, and enjoy the cool music (and the even cooler weather). Or in Lincolnshire, on your own ‘Wold Side’. Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-de-doo…

Avoiding a bunker mentality in Syston Park