‘The Road Not Taken’: a poem for our times

Radio 4’s Today programme has taken to poetry. Each day during the Coronavirus emergency, a presenter or reporter reads a poem of their choice and tells us why it’s become important to them. It’s a much-needed moment of respite from the relentless news of suffering that dominates the news just now. 

Today Justin Webb read Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’. Here it is, for any of you who don’t know it off by heart. (Note to self: memorise it for your personal knapsack of well-tried resources to bring out when you need them.)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

I was touched as I listened this morning. I knew the poem so well, but because my emotions were sensitised in this time of crisis and palpable fear, it seemed as if I was hearing it for the first time. In fact, I had discovered it when like the rest of the world, I read Scott Peck’s best seller The Road Less Travelled in the 1980s. Robert Frost I knew a little about, having read the biography of his friend Edward Thomas, the English poet who was killed in the Great War and whose story was told by his widow in two of the most moving books I’ve ever read, As It Was and World Without End. But the poem itself was a revelation. Not for the first time, I wondered today what it is that gives it such enduring appeal.

I tweeted my appreciation and voiced my question aloud. Justin Webb replied that it seemed Frost had written it to tease a friend, only to realise its power later (which happens sometimes - we speak beyond what we know or are conscious of, like Caiaphas in St John’s Gospel). That prompted another comment linking to an intriguing article about the poem by David Orr in the Paris Review, The Most Misread Poem in America. He castigates the view, typically American, that it’s ‘a paean to triumphant self-assertion’ and the power of individual agency in gaining mastery over our lives: ‘I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’ 

No doubt many people have read the poem in that way, though it’s a reading that’s never occurred to me. Maybe I have too much British self-doubt. For me, it’s a highly nuanced reflection on just how contingent our myriad life-choices are, how they hang on fragile threads of opportunity and chance. Every decision we make in life, big or small, could have gone another way. Every fork in the road presents us with a choice. Thousands and thousands of times. And because ‘way leads on to way’, the number of possible routes we could taken through life is almost infinite. Each time, we could have gone along a different track. But we happened to go this way, for whatever reason. Each time, or ‘ages and ages hence’, we had to recognise that it was what it was without regret and without self-justification. The cumulative effect has made us what we are today. That act of acceptance is what’s made ‘all the difference’. 

The poem reads as though it was casually dashed off on the back of an envelope, so artless is it, so unselfconscious. It may have started out that way: I don’t know. However, I have a hunch that in its final form it’s been worked up with great care. Frost’s internal dialogue with himself, the dilemma as to which path has the better claim (not much in it, really), whether he will ever return to this bifurcation (almost certainly not, and in any case he can’t step into the same river twice), what the consequences will be of making this decision rather than that (who can know, yet he has to choose one of them): this all makes acute psychological sense. It’s so well observed, rings true to the choices we have to make where the criteria are finely balanced, sometimes impossibly so, where either decision would make sense, be honourable and have integrity. 

As Kierkegaard famously said, ‘life must be lived forwards and understood backwards’. It’s only with hindsight that we can begin to see (if we ever can) the consequences of the choices we made, conjecture what our other lives might have been like if those decisions had been different. I think this becomes increasingly important as we grow older and are able to reflect on our life’s story and its possible meanings. As I’ve recently reached seventy, this is a key matter for me, not to indulge in regrets, still less self-defence, but to cultivate thankfulness for all that’s been life-giving and good.

It made me wonder whether this was an old man’s poem. The ‘yellow wood’ and fallen leaves suggest an autumnal take on life, the ‘ages and ages hence’ hinting at some kind of eternal perspective. I found out that in fact Robert Frost wrote it in 1916, almost exactly half way through his life. This image of a mid-life traveller brought to a halt in a wood because he doesn’t know which way to go immediately recalls the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy. There, the pilgrim’s journey comes to involve a panoramic perspective on hell, purgatory and heaven, and - for surely this is the spiritual point of the work - a reorientation of his life in the light of what he has been shown. It’s fanciful to think that Frost was recapitulating in twenty lines Dante’s epic voyage, and yet the themes seem to resonate, at least to me. 

Jenny and I have been watching the new drama Devs that’s recently been shown on BBC2. Alex Garland has created a smart, intelligent story about the flow of time in a quantum universe. I don’t pretend to understand it all. But a central theme is the age-old dilemma of determinism-through-causality versus the freedom of the will. Are events, including our own decisions and actions, predestined through processes of causation which, could they be mapped, understood and analysed, would turn out to lead to inevitable outcomes? Does this mean that in principle the future is as fixed as the past and can therefore be predicted? And what about the possibility of other universes diverging from our own in which different choices are acted out and different stories told? 

‘The Road Not Taken’ doesn’t engage with these questions. But it seems to point to the paradox that whatever the metaphysics, our subjective experience is that the choices we make are real and that they matter precisely because they could have gone another way. Its relativistic world view (either path has its own validity as a frame of reference; neither ultimately has the ‘better claim’) seems to echo Einsteinian relativity theory that was taking definitive shape at the time it was written, just as the uncertain choice that faces the traveller reflects the parallel development of quantum theory. It’s very much a poem of the twentieth century, a poem for all of us who can feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the world in which we live and have to trace a path safely through its tangled ‘undergrowth’. But it’s also a deeply life-affirming poem that celebrates our participation in the adventure of living, the reality that is ‘now’. 

So as I read the poem, I’m prompted to pay renewed attention to the ‘sacrament of the present moment’. It’s both the place I inhabit (‘Where can we live but days?’ asks Philip Larkin) and the locus of every decision I make, big or small, of little consequence or of momentous import. Faith affirms that however alone we may seem to be in the face of the choices we make, there is nevertheless a deep magic, a Presence, a Spirit, a Providence that moves in mysterious ways through the changes and chances of this fleeting world. That’s not a metaphysical statement but a faith-based one that rests on the conviction that God is always with us. It may be wishful thinking to read that assumption back into Frost’s poem. Yet its heart speaks to mine in a way that’s reassuring. It may not strictly qualify as ‘religious poetry’. But I experience it that way. 

This is important when we try to ‘ understand life backwards’.  When we construct the story of our lives, we should look for hints of golden thread we can discern that makes connections and traces meaning and value in them. To do this ‘heart-work’ may be especially significant at times like these when we are learning that the days where we live will run out sooner or later. I’d like to think that when that time comes, I shall (God willing) be able to say, ‘For all that has been, thanks! To all that shall be, yes!’ 

And that will make ‘all the difference’. 

Ride on to Die!

Ride on, ride on in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die.

It is strange not to be singing those words in the Palm Sunday procession this year. Strange and dislocating when for my entire adult life the great ceremonies of Holy Week and Easter have been the pivot round which the year turns. It will no doubt feel more and more uncomfortable as the week goes on. Not to gather with others in the Upper Room and Gethsemane, at Golgotha and by the empty tomb. We understand why this is necessary. But it hurts, the locked door of the parish church across the road, its emptiness, its silent organ, its lonely altar. It hurts very much for it feels like a kind of abandonment, a death even. It's as if a great stone has been rolled across the entrance.

Which is why this Holy Week will require a great act of the imagination on the part of all of us for whom it matters. It always does call for imagination, of course. We are not literally actors in the drama of the Passion. When we tell its story, we are not rehearsing history but proclaiming this story as a life-changing narrative that is of ultimate significance for us. This is what the liturgy does through its words and images, its rituals and symbols. It's anamnesis, invoking the dynamic of memory that brings past, present and future into a single whole and says: this is the reality that has formed and shaped us, makes us what we are, that lies at the heart of what it means to be human.

I was due to give Holy Week addresses in a southern cathedral this week. The theme was to have been St John's passion narrative, and on Good Friday, the three last words from the cross in that gospel. For St John, Golgotha is a place of achievement, of glory. 'It is accomplished!' I had drafted the sermons before it became clear that there would be no public liturgy anywhere this year. Looking back on them now, they seem to come out of another world when things were normal and we felt safer, less afraid than we do now. Such first world illusions, when so much of the human race lives in fear and insecurity all the time. But this was life back then. And sermons written in one context won't travel when everything has changed.

In the last few days, Covid19 has begun to touch me personally. I don't mean foregoing so much I took for granted and practising social isolation: for us the sacrifices have not cost very much, not compared to others. No, I mean that someone I used to know (and like and admire - but that isn't the point) has died of the virus. I mean that family and close friends are now reporting deaths of people they knew. It has suddenly become a whole lot more real. And even that is a more distant kind of reality for me compared to what is being faced by people who have lost those they loved or who are seriously ill and afraid for their lives. And so many others who are taking great risks every day to care for them, or to maintain the fabric of our common life. These are cruel times. We wouldn't be human if our hearts weren't being broken more than perhaps we can ever remember.

So I find that for now, I'm living more in St Matthew than St John. In this Year of St Matthew, his is the passion story we would have read at the Palm Sunday service. It perfectly fits the experience of this Holy Week 2020. This is the gospel in which there is a great darkness 'across the whole earth' says the evangelist. And Jesus dies with the agonised words of the psalm on his lips, 'My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?' How many people 'across the whole earth' find themselves in just such a darkness uttering just such words right now? I tried to write about some of this in last week's blog when I reflected on a crucifixion altarpiece specifically painted for a convent where the sick and dying were cared for.

St Matthew is clear early on in his gospel that Jesus' death was inevitable, that he 'must go to
Jerusalem and undergo great suffering' (16.21). On Palm Sunday he enters the city as its humble anointed one. No-one gets the irony of the donkey bearing the messianic king. There are shouts of hosanna and victory palms. Who else guesses that he has come to die? Not even his disciples seem to have been paying attention. I wonder what this felt like to the Son of Man who when he arrived at the city he had wept over from afar, how illusory the acclamations and palm branches must have seemed when he looked beyond them to what must inevitably follow. 'Ride on to die.'

This is the first time I've consciously thought, I too must 'ride on to die'. We all must. Not with any messianic pretentions of course, but in the sense that what's true for Jesus is true for all of us. His mortality is ours and ours is his if he is truly 'bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh'. This is the solidarity I wrote about last time, God’s life with ours. We mortals move from one scene to the next in the drama of life that's 'but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more'. That's not to say that the play (let’s not name it out of respect for those in the acting profession) is right to sum it up as a 'tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. On the contrary. Every human life holds an infinity of meaning and value, if only we could see it and know it. But as to mortality, who is going to argue with Shakespeare, least of all when we face the threat of a disease that could bring the life of any of us to an unexpected end? We all ride on to die, if not soon, then one day.

********

This means me. I can't escape that fact. 'Most things may never happen: this one will' writes Philip Larkin as he lies awake at night and imagines what it will be like to die. Philip Larkin’s greatest and bleakest poem ‘Aubade’ won’t bring any comfort to us during this testing time or any other. ‘Not to be here / Not to be anywhere, / And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.’ Fear of death is real. It calls for courage, and yet ‘being brave / Lets no-one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than understood.’ The poet accuses religion of being implicated in denial: ‘That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.’ Who is to say that he’s not at least partly right about that? It’s easy for preachers like me to present the resurrection as the ‘happy ending’ to the story of suffering and death rather than the great mystery about which we can only say that it is the heart of our faith, it keeps our hope alive, yet we cannot know this side of the grave what it really means. And meanwhile, the ‘work’ of dying is inescapable, whether we have faith or not.

What Larkin’s poem teaches me is that paradoxically, it’s calming and empowering, if not immediately then in time, to stop pretending, face the truth and live in the light of it. This is the theme of Kathryn Mannix’ outstanding book With the End in Mind: dying, death and wisdom in an age of denial. I read it before I’d ever heard of Coronavirus (but knowing that I would soon reach my allotted three score years and ten). She is a consultant in palliative care who has found in her work with the terminally ill, dying and bereaved that when we acknowledge our mortality and are able to speak about death, we not only prepare ourselves to die well, but also find that we live more fulfilled lives as a result. This is precisely the theme of the great classics of seventeenth century Anglican spirituality, Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying. Perhaps one of the positives to come out of this crisis is that we are being urged to think realistically about dying, name it and talk about it with those who are closest to us. This means that if we were to succumb to the virus, we would die having said what we needed to say and made what practical arrangements were necessary. (To their credit, William Collins, publisher of Dr Mannix’ book, has made it available as a free e-book for the next few days. Follow the link.)

Of course Holy Week is about a lot more than our own mortality. These coming ‘days of awe’ celebrate nothing less than the redemption of the world through the cross and resurrection of Jesus. This Great Week transforms everything. This includes our own personal view of life, what we value, what we aspire to, how we are going to live. And how we hope to die. This year, as we observe Holy Week in isolation from one another and in anxiety about what the future may hold, it would be strange if we did not see in the lonely vulnerable Sufferer on his Via Dolorosa an image of us all, strange if we did not hear his cry ‘let this cup pass from me’ as ours, not only for ourselves but for these we love and for all who are suffering in these terrible  days. And yes, even his ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

The days of Holy Week were terrible for Jesus too. Which is why, paradoxically, they can bring reassurance, comfort and hope. Where we are travelling in fear, desolation and sorrow he has been, and in an important sense, still walks and always will. Could it be that this year, because of the unique context we find ourselves in, we hear these familiar stories as if for the first time? Could they come alive for us in new ways in our aloneness, our fear, our loss? Could they help us to live better and trust that we shall die better when the time comes? In the last few days Sister Catherine Wybourne, the ‘Digital Nun’, has written a blog that I find profoundly moving. She has decided not to undergo a course of chemotherapy for her terminal cancer, which would now be ‘treatment of last resort’. She asks what it might mean to die at a time like this.

But what about dying itself? We all have our own views on that. The chances are that, in common with many others, if I die in the next few months, I shall die without the sacraments. I cannot easily express what that means to me, but if that should be my lot, I know that it is one I will share with many others, including many great saints. Can it really be so lonely to tread a path many have travelled before? I don’t know. What I do know is that whether I die alone or with someone watching at my bedside, with the sacraments or without, I shall be surrounded by the prayers of the great cloud of witnesses, living and dead, who make up the communion of saints. So, surely, it will not be so lonely after all.

Sister Catherine inspires me this Palm Sunday as I begin the Holy Week journey towards Easter. We can’t know what lies on the other side. It’s a case of ‘one step enough for me’. It always is. But as we take up the cross today we may perhaps find to our surprise that its yoke is easy and its burden light - or at least, a little lighter and a little easier than we had imagined. The Palm Sunday hymn sets the tone in which we must ride on ‘with the end in mind’ - both to die and to live:

Bow thy meek head to mortal pain,
Then take, O God, thy power, and reign!

Half-Term at Haydon: Isaac comes to stay

In other news, our 6 year old grandson Isaac has spent half-term with his grandparents here in Haydon Bridge. You’ll forgive me for laying aside the serious stuff I usually blog about. He has gone home today and we are missing him. The house is suddenly very quiet again.

It was an important week for him and for us. These were his first ever nights away from his parents. Would he lose his nerve about it at the last minute? Would he be overcome with homesickness while he was here? Would he cope with Halloween without his friends and neighbours to trick or treat? Would he sleep and eat properly? How would we fill the time? These were grown-up anxieties of course, not his. But they made us realise how out of practice we were at caring full-time for a youngster. It was as much a rite of passage for us as for him.

When I went to Leeds to pick him up, I knew I needn’t have worried. He was up for this great adventure. We spent most of the train journey talking about railways. He has obsessed about railways ever since he was a toddler. We looked at images of Mallard and Flying Scotsman in his steam loco magazine. We looked out for “Opa’s Train” on the East Coast Main Line (i.e. the Class 91 electric loco 91114 named Durham Cathedral which has my name on the cab door). He was quiet for a bit while he ate his sandwiches. I wondered what he was thinking about? The memory of saying goodbye to his parents and little sister perhaps? Or the prospect of being special for the week, having the undivided attention of his Nana and Opa?

We’ve had a great week. There was Shaun of the Sheep - Farmageddon at the Forum Cinema. The Tullie House Museum in Carlisle provided interactive Roman history and railwayana. We visited no fewer than three soft play centres - at Carlisle, Haltwhistle and Hexham. Isaac is confident and good at socialising, so he quickly finds friends to play with at these places. And it’s reading time for us adults. He came to the Oxfam book shop where I volunteer and enjoyed the novel sight of my struggling with the till to process his purchases (which included DVDs chosen for his sister and cousin: I was touched by his kindness, even if he looked expectantly at us to find the cash).

What else? We watched You Tube movies of Thomas and Friends and of sophisticated trains created out of Lego - another favourite activity of his). I read him Ronald Dahl’s Witches at bedtime, suitable literature for Halloween week (a funny, intriguing book - but a bit on the misogynistic side, I thought). He has a wicked sense of humour. Irony is going to be his forte one day, I think. He dressed up for Halloween, put a pumpkin in the window and enjoyed the comings and goings on the street. The level crossing in sight of our house was a reliable source of pleasure (thank you, Northern Rail and the RealTime Trains app). He was out of bed by dawn each morning, but we set him up with croissants and juice, and he was fine. We asked him for feedback on the week (quality of accommodation, meals, entertainment etc., with the options “good”, “very good” and “fantastic”). We did all right on the whole.

One of the nicest moments was at a soft play. A young parent came up to us and said, “That’s such a lovely polite boy you have there. You don’t often see behaviour like that these days.” This took us by surprise, not because it isn’t true (it is) but because it was unsolicited. That’s a big tribute to his own parents, of course, our daughter and her husband. And it made me realise how respectful Isaac was being during his time with us. He is no goody two-shoes, thank God, but he does say please and thank you, and at 6 o’clock in the morning bothers to knock on the bedroom door with “I’m sorry to wake you up but...”. Winsome. Endearing. Delightful.

We are lucky enough to be enjoying a retirement in which we have time to give our three colourful, talented, much-loved grandchildren Gabriel, Maddy and Isaac. As most grandparents discover, this is somewhat different from the memory of caring for our own children when they were at that age. The responsibility is bounded for one thing: there comes a time when you have to give your grandchildren back to their parents, and this affects the quality of the time we spend with them. Then there’s the fact that grandparents are at an altogether different life-stage from where we were when our children were young.

Then (and I’m aware this is a middle-class-professional’s perception), family time was heavily contested by the demands of the day job. My children are candid about how difficult I found it to be truly present to them when they were growing up. I wish I had been better at it. I really do. Grandchildren are not given to us as a second chance to make a better job of it - they are human beings in their own right who are growing up in a world in many respects very different from the one in which we tried to be good enough parents thirty or forty years ago. Our children have to bear the consequences of the mistakes we made in our parenting, and we have to live with the memory. The miracle is that mostly, they survive and flourish, despite as well as because of us. And that they seem able to forgive us.

But grandchildren do offer us the opportunity to reprise what should have been among the best experiences of our lives if we have been entrusted with the gift of children. For now, with the wisdom of years, we can try to give back something of what we have so abundantly received, and continue to receive, from those who love us. This came home to me not so much when we were enjoying outings or engaging in projects but in the quotidian uneventfulness of ordinary time: moments when we were content simply to be together whether it was at mealtimes, walking along to the village shops or reading to him at bedtime. Gone was that feeling I remembered so well that there was always something else I ought to be doing: a list of admin jobs to be tackled, a meeting to get to, parishioners to visit, sermons to write.

“What are days for?” asks Philip Larkin in his enigmatic poem. “They are to be happy in. Where we live but days?” It would be easy to project on to our grandchildren a kind of prelapsarian innocence and happiness that in adulthood we realise is lost to us. Was it ever like that? Even the best childhood is not without its shadows and its pain. Maybe our grandchildren can help us reconnect with our own childhood, not the rhapsodic dreamlike fantasy but the more ambivalent reality where the troubles of growing up are as keenly felt as the joy of being alive?

Our grandchildren are not there to heal our memories. But to be truly present to them, cherish them for the human beings they already are, love them as bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, learn how to listen and laugh and cry with them - all this is profoundly healing. It would be wrong to indulge the purple prose. It’s fatally easy to sentimentalise when writing about children. So I won’t pretend we haven’t worked hard this half-term, that there weren’t challenges we had to face. But I think I’ve glimpsed in a new way how life is pure gift. Growing old and becoming grandparents has a lot to commend it. “I love you so much” Isaac whispered when the time came to say goodbye. Heart speaking to heart when the words ran out.

It meant a lot that his parents entrusted him to us for these days away. God willing there will be many more weeks like this one for Isaac, and in time, for Maddy and Gabe. Meanwhile, we shall get used to the quiet once again. And look forward to catching up on our sleep.

On Reading "The Diary of a Country Priest"

I've just finished reading this remarkable book. I've been deeply struck by it. I imagined I'd read it before, decades ago, but I now don't think I can have done.

For instance, I'd long imagined it was the real diary of a real country priest living in nineteenth century France. In fact it's a novel by the twentieth century writer Georges Bernanos who died seventy years ago this year. Its imagined depiction of parish life in the north of France between the wars won him the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française. In 1950 it was named one of the twelve best novels in French published between 1900 and 1950.

I guess the reason it's so famous is the sheer vividness with which the author enters into the life of an impoverished catholic priest. You would have to have been a fervent believer to have written it. Not so much for the passages of theological and philosophical speculation about, say, heaven and hell, or social hierarchy in the countryside, or the nature of sin, but for the light Bernanos shines on the everyday dealings of a priest with his parishioners, his parish and his fellow clergy. And for the inspired guesswork (or maybe I mean detective work?) with which he tries to get inside the mind and soul of a character you speculate he has become intensely fond of. Does the novel represent a vocation Bernanos might once have had? 

What I love about the book is its sense of parish. Early on, the country priest muses on the importance of loving your parish. Just three months today since my appointment to this parish. This morning I prayed hard for my parish, my poor parish, my first and perhaps my last. My parish! The words can't even be spoken without a kind of soaring love....I know that my parish is a reality, that we belong to each other for all eternity; it is not a mere administrative fiction but a living cell of the everlasting church. But if only the good God would open my eyes and unseal my ears so that I might behold the face of my parish and hear its voice....The look in its eyes would be the eyes of all Christianity, of all parishes - perhaps of the poor human race itself.

I found that an arresting passage, given our current preoccupations about the future of the parish system in the Church of England. The words seem chosen carefully. Bernanos could have said congregation or the faithful or the baptised. And maybe he's making all sorts of assumptions about his parish population (what Anglicans used to call "the charitable assumption" that presumes faith and principled motive on the part of those who seek the offices of the church). But I don't think he elides parish and the faithful. There's such a strong sense of sacred geography in the Diary, what Andrew Rumsey in his fine recent study Parish - an Anglican Theology of Place recognises as deeply embedded in our native traditions of public ministry.

Reading it, I was frequently reminded of a book I read in the 1980s while I was a parish priest in a rural market town. It's by Alan Ecclestone, A Staircase to Silence. A priest formed in the gritty realities of urban ministry, his remarkable books, all written in retirement, were the fruit of a rich lifelong experience of “parish” in just such worlds that Bernanos’ curé inhabited. It's not too much to say that Staircase turned round my entire attitude to parish ministry with the idea of which - I freely acknowledge - I was struggling at the time. His book is a study of another Frenchman and older contemporary of Bernanos, the poet and man of letters Charles Péguy. A chapter I recall being much influenced by was one entitled Mes Vieilles Paroisses Francaises. I need to read it again (was it there that I read about how, on a French parish festival, Péguy playfully imagined that Joan of Arc or Theresa of Lisieux had only just left the party a moment ago?). Péguy was writing about the corn fields of the Beauce across which you see the distant spires of Chartres Cathedral - but his spirit pervades Bernanos' world too. New bishops and incumbents could not do better than read all these books (Bernanos, Rumsey and Ecclestone) and ponder them at a time when the Church of England is putting every egg in the basket of growing congregations through project-based evangelism and at risk of starving traditional parochial ministry of sorely-needed funds in the process.

Back to the Diary. The central section focuses on a long and difficult pastoral encounter the priest has with an influential female parishioner. You feel for him as he tries to uncover the truth of her complex life, the courage it takes to "speak truth to power" in circumstances such as this. Most of us in public ministry have been there at one time or another. In the end, after what feels like a Herculean feat of theological and spiritual candour, he gets to an unexpected place of resolution. Here's how the diarist records the outcome. "Be at peace" I told her. And she had knelt to receive this peace. Oh miracle - thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands! Hope which was shrivelling in my heart flowered again in hers; the spirit of prayer which I thought lost in me for ever, was given back to her by God and  - who can tell - perhaps in my name! Poor as I am, an insignificant little priest, looking upon this woman only yesterday so far my superior in age, birth, fortune, intellect, I still knew - yes I knew - what fatherhood means.

That remarkable passage, almost worthy of Dostoyesvsky, shows, I think, profound insight into the paradoxes of public ministry. But how many of us clergy are capable of scrutinising our ministry and ourselves with that degree of honesty? How many of us have sufficient self-knowledge even to understand the questions with which we need to interrogate ourselves? Bernanos writes elsewhere in the book, When writing of oneself one should show no mercy. Yet why at the first attempt to discover one's own truth does all inner strength seem to melt away in floods of self-pity and tenderness and rising tears? Diarists and bloggers, beware of being too kind to ourselves! Not to agonise in front of others necessarily, but to "tell all the truth", as far as we ever can, at least in private before God and ourselves. And even in a more public register, we need surely to be constant seekers after truth, even if we often have to "tell it slant".

I've often spoken to at ordinands' retreats on the importance of self-knowledge and self-awareness in any public role. I've found Bernanos to be a powerful impetus to try to practise better what I have been preaching for so long. Perhaps it's about the recovery of the joy and openness of our childhood, the kind of rapturous vision captured in William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Thomas Traherne's Centuries of Meditations. Bernanos says: God has entrusted the Church to keep [the soul of childhood] alive, to safeguard our candour and freshness... Joy is the gift of the Church, whatever joy is possible for this sad world to share... What would it profit you even to create life itself, when you have lost all sense of what life really is?” There have been times in my own ministry as a priest when I've needed to try to recapture what relentless public exposure had corroded. Bernanos understood that.

One last passage from the Diary. It concerns the prayer and spirituality, a matter of recurring concern in the book as we would expect. Again, the author writes with a keen sense of how paradoxical the spiritual life so often is. The usual notion of prayer is so absurd. How can those who know nothing about it, who pray little or not at all, dare speak so frivolously of prayer? A Carthusian, a Trappist will work for years to make of himself a man of prayer, and then any fool who comes along sets himself up as judge of this lifelong effort. If it were really what they suppose, a kind of chatter, the dialogue of a madman with his shadow, or even less—a vain and superstitious sort of petition to be given the good things of this world, how could innumerable people find until their dying day, I won't even say such great 'comfort'—since they put no faith in the solace of the senses—but sheer, robust, vigorous, abundant joy in prayer? Oh, of course—suggestion, say the scientists. Certainly they can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgement, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!
 
If you haven't read the book, you won't know how it ends. No spoilers from me! But Bernanos gives us a profoundly moving and satisfying conclusion to the Diary. I won't say that it's a tidy ending - you wouldn't expect it to be from an author who understands better than many both the "mess" of the parish (his phrase, not mine) and the complexity of human life, not least his own. How could any ending be tidy? Having not long retired from a lifetime of public ministry as a priest, I know how untidy my laying aside that role was at the time, and even more in my subsequent memory of it. This is only one of many insights in The Diary of a Country Priest that I recognise from my own experience of ministry, that I dare to say we all recognise if we are sufficiently curious about God, humanity and our own selves to frame the questions he asks so bravely and follow them wherever they lead, however uncomfortable that may be. 

In the end, after a lot of pain and hardship, the Diary ends on a note of thankfulness. Tout est grâce is the conclusion, "everything is grace". That's the spirit that pervades the entire book. Despite everything, Bernanos' struggling, pain-ridden priest has emerged victorious. Which I think makes this marvellous book an inspiration for today's ministers, especially those travelling through dark times. "What will survive of us is love" says Philip Larkin in a famous poem. It could be the epigraph of this book. For everything is grace, and grace is everything.  

1968: The Year I Came of Age

It's fifty years ago this week that the second French Revolution didn't quite happen. May 1968 is remembered as the month when students brought France to a standstill. Their protests caught on across the nation and beyond. That month felt as though it could be a watershed in the political and social life of Europe.

Those caught up in the événements came to be called soixante-huitards, 1968-ers. Perhaps I can just about lay claim to that title. I was in France in the first half of 1968 between leaving school and going to university. It was a long way from Paris to the orphanage where I was working in southern France. In the rural uplands of the Ardèche, beautiful but impoverished, what went on in the capital felt like another world. It was only when working people started striking in solidarity that it began to feel real. I recall cycling over the main line from Paris to Marseille. With no trains running, the tracks were already rusting over. That's when it hit me that it doesn't take much to bring normal life to a halt.

I was born in 1950, and had my eighteenth birthday in France (a big rite of passage, your first birthday alone in a strange land). I was not quite an adult because the age of legal majority in the UK was only reduced to eighteen on 1 January 1970. Technically I became a grown up at an Adrian Mole kind of age, nineteen and three quarters. Nevertheless, looking back fifty years I see how formative those months in France were, this threshold between childhood and adulthood. It was the first time I had lived away from home. I had left school. I was financially independent (earning the princely sum of ten new francs a week - but with full board and lodging, there was not a lot to spend your money on in this deep countryside). I was speaking a foreign language. I was walking tall. Not yet legally adult, but then not not-adult either.

In that liminal place, I obscurely admired the students at Nanterre who, protesting against being policed by the university authorities, claimed the right to have sex with their partners in their own bedrooms. To me as a devout evangelical Christian, this seemed not so much to be about sex (God forbid!) as taking responsibility for their own lives as grown-up human beings. This was precisely the personal path I was navigating myself. I now know of course, how the events of May 1968 were a confused concatenation of ideals and causes, some ideals more noble than others, some causes lost from the outset. Historians will argue about that for decades. But that they coalesced around a generalised dis-ease with hierarchical rule and authoritarian control is a plausible reading of that spring. The Fifth Republic certainly felt the shock-waves: it was never closer to the brink of collapse than it was in May and June 1968. And maybe postwar France came of age - or thought it did - as a result.

I was a late developer when it came to political awareness. The "never had it so good" days of the late 50s and early 60s didn't encourage radical questioning among most middle-class baby-boomer kids. I'd briefly woken up to the reality of world events in 1962 with the Cuba Missile Crisis. But in my teenage years, my conversion to conservative evangelical Christianity took over my life. Politics took a back seat and never got anywhere near the front of my consciousness. (When I was visiting schools in connection with the EU Referendum campaign two years ago, I was heartened to find how politically engaged so many teenage students are today compared with then.).

But in France in the spring of 1968, politics was impossible to ignore. Which was important at that stage of my personal development. A few months later I went up to Oxford. The spirit of Nanterre was alive and well that first academic year. The Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students (ORSS) famously besieged All Souls College in protest against the privileged academic life symbolised by its emblematic plum pudding. In my college (Balliol), ORSS students daubed the senior common room with revolutionary slogans in red paint to mark a visit by Ted Heath. They marched along Broad Street carrying placards demanding "Prove there are no files!" which provided the agenda for a tutorial on linguistic philosophy I was having with Anthony Kenny at the time.

It was a long time ago. But in important ways that era influenced me. I was not altogether conscious of it at the time - far from it. But more and more as I look back, I realise how formative the late 1960s were when "revolution" was the metaphor being claimed in so many areas of life and endeavour: politics, theology, education, art and culture. It wasn't so much a case of "bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" as Wordsworth said of his own revolutionary times. But I couldn't fail to warm to the soixante-huitard mantra, "Be realistic. Ask for the impossible!" with its blend of radical questioning and witty sense of paradox. 1968 in France had its ugly side. But in its best moments it had a lightness of touch as well.

For Philip Larkin, 1963 was the year (when "life was never better than...."). For me it was 1968 that was the watershed in my journey towards adulthood. To be in France and be a back-row witness of what happened there that year gave me insights that have, I think, been profoundly important for the rest of my life. It taught me (or began to) not to accept the status quo but critically to test assumptions, ask questions of people who have (or claim) authority, not be afraid of argument, go back to the sources of established political, intellectual or theological standpoints. It made me into a liberal - even if it has taken a lifetime to understand what thaword means. But I believe I glimpsed, even then, that Christian faith is fundamentally liberal in the sense of being generous, inclusive and exploratory. For it calls us not to be enslaved to entrenched positions but to become questioners of the environment we live in, as Jesus himself abundantly demonstrated. That's the kind of Christianity I've tried to practise as a disciple and as a preacher.

Which is why I'm glad - proud even - to be a Soixante-Huitard. I now recognise how much I was shaped by that liminal year. The fact that we are still talking about what happened fifty years later shows that its historical importance continues to be felt. And if I am typical, then it's not just societies that have been influenced by it, but individuals too.

Up in the Attic

I've been in London this week going through my late mother's things. Readers of this blog will know that she died in July at the great age of nearly 94. 

 

You might think it was dispiriting to spend several days in your parents' house where only their memories are left behind, especially when it's the home you were brought up in. Not at all dispiriting, though it was thought-provoking. My sister lives not far away and we had many hours together sorting their stuff out, going through a vast number of books, unearthing unsuspected papers in the attic and reminiscing about our childhood in North London in the 1950s and 60s.

 

The trapdoor to the attic was hardly ever opened. So I had never clambered inside it before this week (unless the memory has been wiped). How strange, this late in life, to find an undiscovered country in your own childhood home! Once, when my father was busy up there archiving his papers (or something), I dared to climb a few rungs of the ladder he had positioned against the skirting board. It was queasy perching there as the ladder flexed and swayed above the stairs that descended into the abyss below my feet. I did not want to go any further. I could not go any further. (Later in life I replayed that experience when I followed a false trail high up on the Langdale Pikes. The friend I had got separated from said he spent an uncomfortable hour rehearsing the speech he would need to make to my wife when he came back from that Lake District expedition alone.)

 

We found a lot of papers that my father had obsessively kept: decades of bank statements and cheque-book stubs, invoices, receipts, business letters and utility bills. But this was not all there was. We came across a large musty bag containing my grandmother's personal archive. (This was my mother's Jewish mother, "Omummy" who with my grandfather whom I never knew was hidden underground in occupied Holland following the German invasion.) Letters from her children, her parents and her friends were carefully bundled together - by year I think. There was correspondence from the German front during the Great War with postage stamps bearing the Kaiser's image. 

Most poignantly, and chillingly, I unearthed my grandmother's Verzeichnis über das Vermögen von Juden, the Third Reich's valuation of my grandmother's assets as a Jew, signed on 29 June 1938. She had pathetically little to declare: by then, not long before Kristallnacht, regular income for Jews who had been in business had dried up. It was a case of Things My Mother Never Told Me to quote the title of Blake Morrison's memoir. I was both moved and excited by this find that I hadn't expected. It will take time to assess how important it may be in contributing to our knowledge of family life during the Great War, the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era.

 

Taking breaks in the fresher air downstairs, I was happily poring over my parents' immense collection of books. I remember from childhood how some of the titles stood out on the choked bookcases: Bannister Fletcher's History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, G.M. Trevelyan's four volume English Social History, Plato's Republic (Benjamin Jowett's version, the famous nineteenth century Master of what would be my Oxford college, Balliol), Lancelot Hogben's Mathematics for the Million, Spinoza's Ethics, the Knox translation of the New Testament that a Catholic boyfriend of my mother had given her during the war in a vain attempt to convert her to Christianity.

 

But most of all I relished what was on the top-shelf. These books, far above my head, were strictly not for children to take down and look at. I know what you're thinking. But you're wrong. These were the leather-bound volumes of German poets: Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Rellstab, Hölderlin, Rilke and others. They were beautiful books, a joy to look at especially when the sun was setting in summer and lit up the fine bindings in a golden light. They had belonged to my grandmother (or her parents) and been passed on to my mother. They were never opened, and a day came when my parents decided that they should go into stack to make room for newer books that needed accommodation. So they were banished to the attic in a big mouldy suitcase where they remained for years until I rescued them from their long dusty exile and brought them back downstairs this week. 

 

Heinrich Heine was one of the greatest European Romantic poets. He was from Düsseldorf where my mother was born and grew up until 1937 when as a teenager she was sent to England. While browsing through her bedside books, I'd come across a paperback anthology of German poetry. On the flyleaf was written in my grandmother's careful script: "for Michael" - so it should have come to me when she died in 1987. She had also referenced her favourite poem. It is by Heine, so in my imagination it belongs to that nineteenth century leather-bound set on the top shelf. Here is a translation by Sibylle Luise Binder of that poem, Wo?

Where will the tired wanderer last resting place be?

Under palms in the South? Under lime trees by the Rhine?

Will I be hastily buried by strangers’ hands in a desert?

Or will I rest in the sand on a sea’s strand?

At least, here like there I’ll be surrounded by God’s heaven. 

And at night as lamps of death the stars will hover over me.

 

I didn't know the poem before this week, but I think it will come to symbolise these winter days spent in my parents' home. It's typical of the Romantics' love-affair with death, and with the metaphor of life as the journey of an exhausted wanderer yearning for home. (To get the idea, listen to that seasonal song cycle Winterreise by Schubert, a profound setting of poems by another Romantic poet Wilhelm Müller in which a rejected lover finds his whole life under review as he makes his winter's journey away from all that is familiar and homely. Or look at the pictures of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.)

 

As I thought about the Heine poem, and the death of my parents and grandparents, I recalled that it was Advent. It's the season when we reflect on the Last Things: death, judgment, hell and heaven in the light of Christian faith. In later life our thoughts inevitably turn towards mortality: the loss of those we have known and loved, the prospect of our own death, "one whole day nearer now" as Philip Larkin put it (on whom see my last blog). Heine's poem is about death as a homecoming. I found it comforting to read in this house of truth where death could not be evaded, this place that was once home and that is so full of childhood memories. And in this Advent time, it was good to be reminded that we live by the promise of the One who is to come, that in our Father's house are many mansions.

Philip Larkin, Poets' Corner and Haydon Bridge

Tomorrow, a memorial to Philip Larkin will be unveiled in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey on the anniversary of his death on 2 December 1985. 

I can't let this occasion pass without offering a congratulatory salute from Haydon Bridge, the village in Northumberland where we have retired. For this was where Monica Jones, the companion and longest love of Larkin's life had come to live. He came here frequently to be with her from 1961 to 1984. In a sense he made his home here, no doubt a welcome change from the urban campus realities of his life in Hull where he was University Librarian.

Monica had a flat at 1a Ratcliffe Road, the house on the end of the Victorian terrace just by the eponymous bridge. This is the heart of the village where the road that drops steeply off the ridge carrying the Roman Wall meets the old road along the valley from Newcastle to Carlisle. In their day, traffic hurtled relentlessly past the house along the A69. Now there is a bypass and the villagers have reclaimed their streets and pavements. Outside the Co-Op on the corner opposite there is usually a huddle of people meeting and greeting one another, and dogs tethered to the lamp post while their owners are shopping. There are two pubs a stone's throw away, and a third just across the bridge. The pagoda tower of the late Georgian St Cuthbert's Church tops the townscape. Did Larkin ever darken its doors, if only as the curious but uncommitted visitor described in his famous poem Church Going who finds in this "serious house on serious earth" a place to grow wise in?

There is a blue plaque on the wall of Monica's house with a louche reference to a "secret love nest" - hardly a Larkinesque epithet, unless someone can tell me that he himself parodied the place in that way (which is not impossible). The plaque quotes him: "I thought your little house seemed...distinguished and exciting and beautiful...it looks splendid, and it can never be ordinary with the Tyne going by outside, a great English river drifting under your window, brown and muscled with currents!" It takes a poet to capture the sense of a place so succinctly. Though I doubt Larkin ever saw the Tyne surge free of its bounds, inundate the garden and knock at the front door as it did thanks to Storm Desmond a year ago on 5 December.

Andrew Motion's biography says that here the two of them "lazed, drank, read, pottered round the village and amused themselves with private games. The place always cheered them up" - "worked its spell" said Larkin. It's good to know that this little place wove a good magic on the poet. He was not the only one to find in these northern hills a source of joy and inspiration. W. H. Auden also loved the North Pennines that begin their steady rise up towards the high fells on the right bank of the river opposite 1a. Monica's house would lie in their shadow when the sun was low on winter afternoons.

I have long admired Philip Larkin. He had a marvellous ear for the sound of words, the sheer music of human language. On the day he died in 1985, we had a meeting of the Parochial Church Council at Alnwick where I was Vicar at the time. To introduce the meeting, I read aloud his enigmatic poem "Days".

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

I said I thought it was the job of a PCC on behalf of the local church to address this very question. It wasn't just for priests and doctors but for everyone since this universal question of what our days are for is faced by the entire human race. This was met with a certain bemusement. I went on to pray the Advent Collect with its reference to Christ coming among us in great humility, and coming again on the last Day (I emphasised that word in the light of the poem) to judge both the living and the dead. What are days for but to look forward to that Day, I suggested a trifle rhetorically. I'm not sure Larkin would have approved. But I wanted in a small way to pay tribute to the passing of a great poet. Soon after that, I went to work in Coventry, the city of his birth. I was amazed that Coventry had not taken the trouble to honour him in the way that Hull has done, and in a more modest fashion, Haydon Bridge.

The writer Blake Morrison will give the eulogy at tomorrow's unveiling in Westminster Abbey. He has his own way with words as anyone who has read his books, among them the brilliant memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father? knows. You don't need me to add to all that has been said about Larkin since his death, how he has been celebrated as one of the twentieth century's finest poets writing in English. And although he was hostile to organised religion, he seems to have had a feeling, an artist's instinct for the inward - might we call it spiritual? - dimension of life. "I may be an agnostic, but I'm an Anglican agnostic." I wouldn't hesitate to place him in the forefront of those poetic voices who have shone a light on the doubting, faltering and believing of Christians like me. With T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden in the previous generation and R.S. Thomas, Elizabeth Jennings and a few others of his own, he deserves to be recognised as one of those who have unflinchingly gazed into the human condition and helped us to come to terms with what it means to be a man or woman of faith.

If you want a sense of his deep seriousness, read one of his last poems, Aubade. It's a profoundly discomforting piece, honest to the point of painfulness. In it, he faces unflinchingly the night demons of the insomniac, which for him mean the grim reality of death. He is shaken to the core of his being. Morning light brings no relief, only the bleak awareness of the one fact that is incontrovertibly certain in life, that we must die one day. Advent is a good time to read it, this season when we meditate on the four Last Things: death, judgment, hell and heaven. Was the poem inspired by a memory of Haydon Bridge in winter on one of those days the North East does so well, when the bare hillsides crouch under the weight of lowering gunmetal skies and a mist hangs over the Tyne as it runs cold as the Styx between the stones of the bridge?

For people of faith, "Aubade" it is not the last word. Religion is - isn't it? - more than just a "vast, moth-eaten musical brocade / invented to pretend we never die". So we need other voices than Larkin's alone: John Donne's or George Herbert's perhaps, or a Bach Passion, or a painting like Grünewald's Crucifixion where we can glimpse how dying is the supreme act of faith because the crucified and risen Lord has walked this way before us. But we mustn't indulge our own pretence that death is not an awesome and an awful mystery. If the poets can give us the words and the courage to look into our own mortality, we must thank them for their gift, even if it's not a comfortable one.

If you're in our village and admire the Tyne "muscled with currents" as you stand on Haydon's Bridge, don't forget to nod in the direction of 1a Ratcliffe Road and the memory of a poet who pursued his truth and spoke it. And remember his words now immortalised in Poets' Corner: "What will survive of us is love". 

The Rain it Raineth Every Day

'Hey ho, the wind and the rain' said Shakespeare in a jolly mood. But no one is jolly in Haydon Bridge today, nor up and down the Tyne Valley. And over in Cumbria and southern Scotland it is worse still. We are living under red flood warnings which means there is a real threat to life.  All night, and all day, the rain has beat down ferociously on this part of the country on the back of a westerly gale. Storm Desmond is truly vicious. 

These old houses let in the water all over the place, and I suppose we should have been prepared for that. But what I was not prepared for was to find water in the cellar, creeping silent and sinister up the steps into the house. This morning there were 4 or 5 inches. Now it is nearer 2 feet. I have been in shorts for much of the day doing what I can to salvage things below. Not that I can do anything about the deep freeze and the biomass boiler. I've taken some photographs standing in freezing water up to my thighs. Not out of my love of photography, not even to record in the house log book. It's for insurance purposes. There will be a lot of claims from the North of England and Scotland next week, I fear. 

Even though this is a serious situation, these domestic concerns are but a little local difficulty compared with what I've seen nearer the river, and learned about from across the watershed in the North West. On the eponymous Bridge of Haydon, a large crowd of onlookers stood in the teeth of the gale to watch the river. Most, I suspect, were not directly affected - the people whose houses line the Tyne in Ratcliffe Road are too busy dealing with a real emergency. The river was (is still) rushing under the elegant arches of the bridge with a fury villagers say they have never seen. It's frightening to be so close to violent water, grasp the risks it poses not just to property but to human lives. Philip Larkin paid tribute to the Tyne at the bottom of Monica's garden by the bridge. He said it was 'muscled with currents', but I doubt she or he ever saw the river like this. 

If you have never lived near a river, as I hadn't before now, you don't appreciate how its quotidian rises and falls affect the mood of a community. There is an excellent village Face Book group where people have been sharing their experiences, asking for help, offering it, and not least, passing on the latest Environment Agency river gauge levels (there is a Twitter feed I now visit obsessively that charts the level at which the South Tyne is flowing, and plots the readings on a graph). Today, our callers have included a neighbour (if there's anything we can do, you only have to ask), the Vicar (ditto), our builder (why is the water coming in at all?), our electrician (is it safe to leave the power on while the water goes on rising?), and our heating consultant (obviously the boiler is off, but will it recover from this emergency?). There is so much good will in this village, so many generous offers of help. I reckon every village can tell the same story in adversity, and we have found it to be true in good times too. 

Meanwhile, we now have a pump in the cellar which is doing its best against long odds. Later in the night the deluge will stop, we're told. 'The rains came down and the floods came up', as the old chorus says. It is referring to Jesus' words about building your house on the rock, not on sand. There is a rock that can withstand even this assault. It is the native goodness and kindness of a village community. We are glad to be living in Haydon Bridge....with all its river's moods and vicissitudes. 

My wife is away helping to look after our 4 day old granddaughter who is, for now, innocent of these things. How blissful for her. As for me, I shall stay up all night if need be, so that I can judge whether I need to take further action like moving the furniture upstairs if the water continues to rise. I shall feel a lot less fearful when the rain stops, even though the risk of flooding will not be over just yet. I shall drink a lot of black coffee, be on call in case I am needed in the village, and wait to see what the morning brings. There isn't much else I can do. Except say my prayers. 

Sunday Morning

Last night the water rose 4 feet to the height of the power sockets in the cellar and was clearly going to get a lot higher. I had no option but to turn off the electricity and abandon Burswell House. Kind neighbours took me in. Meanwhile the street outside was flooding badly. We sandbagged our front doors as best we could. The fire service was out all night keeping the water from our houses. By 5am it began to recede. This morning, to my intense relief, the water in the cellar had reached its maximum, two steps from the top, inches below the point where it would have invaded the ground floor. The fire service are pumping out the cellar as I write. The volume of water is hard to believe. They have been magnificent. The police have toured the area checking that we are ok. Everyone is out to help each another. 

Many people in the village have stories to tell of how an unprecedented Advent flood has shaken this community. They will be echoed by many more up and down the Pennine valleys, in Lancashire, the Lake District, West Cumberland, and the Scottish Borders. There will be a lot of work to do to help one another clear up, try to understand why this disaster happened, and what we need to learn from it. But the important thing this morning is that we are all safe, and glad to see the sunshine once more. Life can begin again. 

Thanks to all of you who have offered prayers, sent thoughts and written kind supportive messages on social media. They mean more than we can say, believe me. 

Sunday Night

No rain has fallen today. The blue sky has felt like a miracle. Fire officers have been at Burswell House all day with pumps, flood-related conversation & endless good humour. I can't praise them enough for the committed way they have risen to yesterday's crisis across the village. If ever I took the Fire Service for granted, I shall never do so again. We must secure the future of the Haydon Bridge Fire Station for the benefit of the whole of West Tynedale.

At dusk we gather on the bridge for the annual ceremony of the lighting of the Christmas Trees. There is a large crowd of children and adults gathered above the river that showed its fury yesterday and wielded such destructive power. It's early to be singing 'O little town of Bethlehem' and 'Away in a manger', but I don't think I have ever found these carols more moving, speaking of divine Love to one another and to the dark chaotic forces directly beneath our feet. Later, outside the church, the Vicar pays tribute to the Fire Service for which a boisterous three cheers are shouted. In his prayer he remembers the victims of the floods. Homely togetherness to lift the spirits. Village religion at its best.

Our neighbours offer us wonderful hospitality again, a Sunday roast and a warm bed for the night. I am learning how kindness fosters not only real community but true friendship. To my surprise, despite everything, or rather because of it, it has been a good day.