Easter

A quiet time here. Easter Sunday always seems to start quietly, faintly, with the simple story of veiled women hurrying through the early sunlight to the tomb in the garden; the story is so immediate I can almost hear the birds and the city waking up around them. A Biblical story set at a particular time of day seems to have more immediacy, a further linking of calendar to theology. A peculiar Easter pleasure is lying awake on Easter Sunday before the house has woken and thinking about the women on their ordinary, colossal journey. And Mary Magdalene not recognising Jesus through her tears and mistaking him for the gardener; superb writing! And then this gentle, quiet story fades into the ordinariness of a Sunday, even one at Easter, much as the quietness of the garden fades as the women run back into the city. There is a theme in early resurrection stories of followers not knowing who Jesus was; the unnamed disciples walking from Jerusalem to Emmaus walked alongside him without recognising him and only when he broke bread with them did they see him properly. Oscar Wilde said that at least once in his life every man walks with Christ to Emmaus.

In the afternoon we went to Dilwyn for a walk. Dilwyn is a quiet black and white village with an old pub and a village green and an ancient church. The history in the church was layered, with old walls being reused, the footprint of the building shifting over centuries, arches being half-bricked up, doors left to a rood screen cleared five centuries ago. It was quiet and peaceful. Much of the church history here is like this; mediaeval buildings with roots in Norman or Saxon churches which are open all the time but have services twice a month.

There will be less spiritual pondering from now on in this Journal; I suspect like a lot of people I get so far thinking about religious truth and no further; and when I think about it again I have to start again. But this is one of life's great thoughts, the relationship we have with our souls and the universe and the world around us; it is a spiritual journey in its own right. Too many people these days do not think about it at all - or maybe just do not think at all.

Tenebrae

We have been burning cherry wood, dried garden off cuts, a gift from my in-laws. It burns solid and leaves the shapes of branches and twigs of ash in the stove, fragile ash-twigs that dissolve with a breath of wind. Cherry become ash.

It has been a cold day, a day of sudden cold storms, sleets and clouds and unexpected sunshine, darkness, squalls of rain. Dramatic weather for Good Friday. On Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Saturday the church service of Matins was closed by an event called Tenebrae, which means darkness. As the service progressed the lights would be extinguished, leaving only the Easter candle lit; hidden behind the altar, symbolic of Christ's light hidden in the tomb. A gentle, quiet, melancholy act of filling the church with gloom, which (coincidentally, this year)echoes in church mystery and theatre the greater earth and sun drama of equinox. Tenebrae is only beautiful if you have faith that the light will be reborn, that Christ will rise, that the sun will climb higher in the sky and the warmth will return. (Otherwise it would be a death-ritual, a Gothic celebration of non-existence.) The connection with the equinox this year is a magical, poetic coincidence. The priest at St Teresa's, Father John, said that when he came to the church 30 years ago there was a large iron frame for 30 or 40 candles, that during the end of Holy Week was wheeled into the church for Tenebrae. The gradual softening and fading of light in a church must be very beautiful. I wrestle with conventional faith, but I find the poetry of the church very moving, never more so than at Easter.

Vernal Equinox

Yesterday was the vernal equinox, one of the two times in the year when the day and night are of equal length. A gentle reminder that no two days are ever the same length, that the year is made up of days which are lengthening or shortening depending on the phase of the relationship with the sun, the relationship between light and darkness. Six months of days shortening, six months of days lengthening, with no finish, no stasis beyound the endless round of lengthening and shortening and these two turning points, the equinoxes, and their dark halves, the solstices, the shortest and longest days and nights. Seen in these terms the nights are just dark days, halves of time, unobserved and overlooked, like a watch ticking in a coat pocket. It is almost a romance, this long-term and tender agreement between earth and sun, a romance made up of moods and phases, perhaps good days and bad days, calm days and angry days. The whole of a spring journal should revolve around the equinox, but living in a world of electric light and time I am so out of touch with the passing of days and nights that it has become an academic enquiry, not a conscious awareness. How many of us live an awareness of moon-phases, sun-journeys? And this equinox is marked by fierce winds, rains, skies sharpened by the wind; a fine moon last night, a skyful of bright stars and fast clouds.

A Hundred New Rivers

We have had a dry year so far; January was mild and relatively dry and February was cold and dry, but we have had very little rain. Then at the end of last week, we had two or three days of heavy rain, connected perhaps with the 'Canadian' storms. The river below us burst its banks, and the Moor was flooded. The valley is wide and shallow, and the very bottom of it has extensive low-lying fields and rough pasture alongside the river channel, the very boggy common/wild land called the Moor, a place of reeds and spongy ground, self-sown trees and saplings. Mick the Flower says that they get teal and snipe nesting there, as well as occasional otters. There is a clear fence line which separates this land from the grass lands for the animals, at which point the land begins gently to rise. Over the centuries this has been a managed landscape, and the Moor is left to take the occasional floodings of the Lugg. This happened last week. We could see thin strands of silver through the reeds, pools of water under the trees reflecting the heavy sky. Further up the valley, the Hindwell brook had burst its banks at the Combe bridge (the only crossing point) and was filling the neighbouring field with turbulent dirty water. New streams were running through old stream beds under the bridge and rushing through the snowdrops in the woods. The flooding is expected and controlled at this point in these young rivers' lives, but elsewhere in the county they have had a lot of problems over the last six months or so. Although they'd be short-lived, one expert calculated after heavy flooding last year that Herefordshire had a hundred new rivers.

St Patrick's Day

'Are you out for St Pat's?' they used to say. In Liverpool twenty years ago this was an important day. A breakfast in the Irish Centre, the old Georgian Irish Centre near where the Irish used to live by the Catholic cathedral, a real Irish rib-sticker of eggs, potatoes, mushrooms, toast etc and bacon for those who indulge. The little shop there used to sell shamrocks on St Patrick's day and wearing them as buttonholes we would saunter out onto the streets. I carefully put mine in water one year and wore it the following year as well. Nothing was made of St Pat's in the city in those days and only occasionally would we see other shamrocks, other gentle celebrants. From late morning we would make a long slow pub crawl through the lower end of the city's pubs; for famously Liverpool has no real Irish pubs. Gentle pub crawls have a magnetism and we would collect people who stopped for one, or two, or the whole afternoon, people out for different reasons, work, shopping, on the way to the bank. A motley crew of suits and office frocks and shopping bags, out for the moveable drinking feast that was St Pat's. The slow gentle drinking would go on all day and break up as the pubs filled with ordinary drinkers in the early evening. The talk was general and specific, but always seemed to come round to family and links with Ireland, forgotten stories, old villages and lost relatives.

My father's mother's family the Downeys were originally from Co Kerry, and the stories have it that they left Kerry because of the Famine and went to Cork, and then to Liverpool. I have always half-thought that the family were Catholic and lost their faith in the robust secular energy of England. My grandmother was married in the Anglican St Cleopas' in Toxteth, but had a hologram of the Last Supper and called her only daughter Patricia because she was born on 17th March; scant evidence but not very Protestant things to do. I am not Irish, just as I am not Welsh, nor Scottish because of a Scots grandmother; these are threads in my heritage, not the heritage itself. But Kerry is a stronghold of Gaelic and I often wonder if this too is a lost language in my heritage, a linguistic glass ceiling beyond which I cannot travel. So tonight I will remember old Irish drinking days and the shop that sold shamrock, and raise a glass to my Auntie Pat on her birthday.

Palm Sunday

A marker for Spring, an event in the Christian year. I am a vague and uncertain believer but I love and (I suppose) partially revere the natural world, so I love the connections between the natural cycle of the year and the Church calendar. Rooting the needs and dates of the Church in ancient rites and festivals was political - but also poetic and beautiful. The old rites have surfaced through centuries of Christianity in this country, as if rubbing it away, so that many people who are in no way Christian 'celebrate' Christmas with a tree, family parties, presents; more a celebration of Yule, a festival of lights at the darkest time of the year, than a commemoration of the birth of Christ. And now we approach Easter, the age-old celebration of the return of the sun and the arrival of Spring. I must admit I love the dark austere beauty of Holy Week with its staged violence and its despair; and the connections between Resurrection and sun-return - and the anxiety, the uncertainty of it - are haunting and magical. The hedge-rows here are full of daffodils and the bank on the old toll road has careful lines of them, planted methodically but strangely; why straight lines? I have seen primroses in the verges as well, and small crocuses pushing aside the dead grass. And we have the daylight for longer and longer each day.

A Rain Day

It has rained all day. We were woken by rain on the roof in the night and the skies were grey and clouded all day. The hills here are crowned with pines and the misty rain makes them look like Alpine foothills, as if when the clouds lift great mountains will be revealed. I like the variability of a landscape like that, its sense of potential; Alpine mountain, Welsh hills, English fields.

It is my son's birthday and we have been doing gentle party things; cake, candles, presents. When he was born it was bitterly cold for weeks and I remember snow in the ditches as I drove to the hospital, frosty skies and hard bright stars. He was born in the early evening and I also remember pulling the curtains aside in the delivery room at dawn of that day and thinking 'Today I will become a father.' An astonishing thought, which fixed the view of grey-golden clouds in my mind's eye. And he was born on a rare double moon, which I hope is a good omen. I nearly called this post 'fatherland', suggesting the new place I live, my new perspective since becoming a parent; but it seemed too flippant. Instead I will raise a glass to his future, and simply wish him all my love and all best wishes.