Ordinary Glory, again



In Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (its plot a fine indictment of the potential toxicity of the written word), the Bishop and Precentor have a game whereby they have conversations made up of quotations until one or other, in reference to the words of Ecclesiastes 1:2, asks ‘What saith the Preacher?’. The answer is ‘vanity of vanities; all is vanity’. They- the Bishop, the Precentor, the Preacher- are right of course, and in taking up writing again I am sure I am proving them so. The temptation that arises from people saying nice things about an effort is to produce a sequel, normally with disastrous results: vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher. I am glad these former essays were enjoyed- but continuing them in purely the same vein felt to be too lazy, too much of a rehash, too vain, in the light of the particularities of the present. And so I have, I hope, changed key- if not tone.

The purpose of these essays that follow is to celebrate place. Or, specifically, places. To remind myself of the joy found in those particular parts of the world that I have loved, and, I hope, to evoke similar such memories of places far removed in any reader. Unlike my Lenten discipline of finding glory in ordinary things, this is not a theological exercise- too much venom has flecked keyboards in attempts at such already. My views are clear- a God who is divorced from the specificities of time and space is one whose Incarnation must needs be played down; whose particular presence with us for the last 2000 years finds itself backed into the corner of comforting myth. That is not the God I believe in. But there- we are done with it; let us talk about place and people over here, away from the clamour of digital pamphleteering, on a bench (distanced appropriately of course) where we might not hear even the echo of Speaker’s Corner. You, kind soul that you are, shall not raise it again, and neither, I promise, shall I.

These essays then are not the private correctives to my own self-assuredness and cynicism of before, though I hope they might serve that purpose; there is still as much work to be done after Easter as there was in Lent. They do, however, share with my attempts to delight in ordinary glory, a spirit of thankfulness. Now, of course, the places described here are distanced not just by the cold hard facts of geography but by something more sinister- these are attempts to martial memories of places into scribbled units of thanks for what has been, in the hope that they, in turn, might lighten what is now. They are for the most part, both in style and content, quite desultory in their ordinariness, but if that might speak, in some small way, of Glory then they shall be worth more than the sum of the places that make up their parts.

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