Evening Prayer

It’s interesting that I feel more at peace listening to church services from the outside than the inside these days (well at least on warmer, sunnier days!).

With my recorder balancing on top of a gravestone, I don headphones, find a patch of dry grass to sit on and tune in to the subdued sounds emanating from the church. My listening begins with the sermon, muted and unintelligible. I feel glad that its meaning is held captive by the church’s thick flint walls. For many years, I have found listening to and engaging with the words and beliefs of Christianity a disruption from any felt sense of the spiritual, and I use the word ‘spiritual’ in a necessarily vague sense. Yet, the vicar’s slow, even tone, punctuated by ceremonially exaggerated silences, provides a constancy in the soundscape that feels reassuring. With the sermon’s intent buried, stifled and set amongst the birdsong, psithurism and transport noise, I can appreciate its preordained intonation and predictable envelope as just one element of a Sunday afternoon soundscape.

After a few minutes, reflective choral music soars from a Bluetooth speaker, perhaps masking slow ritual footsteps, whispered blessings and the soft swish of the vicar’s cotta. From my vantage point amid the gravestones, the music, drifting from an armature in the stained glass, becomes naturally embedded within the flow of the service. The booming of a jet overhead and the grassy strides of a young couple circumventing the church grounds masks the transition into the recognisable pattern of the Lord’s Prayer and ensuing blessing. Then, with an eight-bar piano introduction that feels as if it could proceed any hymn ever, the congregation sings in solidarity until broken in the second verse by a bold, solitary tenor harmony. End rhymes seem to be carried more clearly on the breeze; “story,” “glory,” “wondrous story.” I hear them and their jumbled associations, but have no inclination to assemble meaning from them. I am, instead, enjoying the late summer sun on my back and the archetypal ‘English village’ scene they conjure. A short benediction prompts the gradual crescendo of babbled speech that surfaces from the silence, followed swiftly by the clanging church gate of people with somewhere else to be. A slight awkwardness about my covert surveillance from behind the church prompts me to head around to the porch and introduce myself to those remaining. Amidst the conversation and interest in my presence and purpose, I am invited to attend the next service marking the beginning of Advent. The thought of candles, familiar ritual and the relative warmth of the church make this inviting, but the tension between belonging and needing to self-ostracise from church life will likely mean another recording from the graveyard.

Thanks for sharing this listening with me,

Richard.

p.s. I was talking to my daughter, Ellen, about this feeling of estrangement from the church and Christian belief and she pointed me to this poem, 'Church Going' by Philip Larkin.