Our Rector has written articles over the years for The Church Times Diaries.  We reflect this month, at looking back at the article written in March 2022.

It was the sounding of the ancient horns that moved me most. I’d gone to the British Museum exhibition “the World of Stonehenge” through a sense of duty (a former Lay Reader of mine would have called it the hardening of the “oughteries”) & through loyalty to an Institution I’ve been visiting for over 50 years. My Father (born in 1910) had wandered its halls in the 1920’s, shown round the Egyptian Galleries by an old man who sounded uncannily like Flinders Petrie: but I digress. I must admit that up to this, whenever I have wandered around provincial museums, I generally bypass the cases full of Stone Age arrows & axe heads until I hit the more relatable Roman bits: but after this show I’ll never do that again.

            The exhibition is mesmerising.  The context of the objects conjures up a real sense of ancient communities, their spirituality and of what it means to be human in that, this and any age. Beginning some ten thousand years ago when we were still attached to continental Europe by the lost territory of Doggerland, we follow six and a half thousand years of history from Ireland in the West to the Alps in the East, until we meet the increasing violence of the Iron Age of 1500 B.C., when the ancient ways of life seem to have unravelled.  We trace the trajectories of hunter gatherers, then farming communities and of individuals whose lives - through modern genetics - can be charted and movingly offered up to us. There is a burial with three children, the two youngest holding hands; there is an archer born in the French Alps buried with his weapons next to his great-grandson at Stonehenge itself; there are axe heads from the Italian Alps, treasured and already two millennia old when buried as grave goods c2500 B.C. Running all through it is the sense of human minds and souls reaching out to the Universe, most often through the cycles of birth & death, of sowing and harvesting, of the solstices of Winter and Summer. A constant is the sun, seen as source of life and of hope. Some of the most resonant objects, for me, are the little gold sun discs, found all over France, Spain, Ireland and England: as crisp and bright as when they were beaten out; each incised with a cross - representing the sun’s rays or the wheel of the celestial cart carrying the sun across the sky. If I’d seen them without context, I’d have guessed Saxon Christian pieces, or maybe jewellery from Byzantium: but these date, in some cases, to four thousand five hundred years before the Crucifixion. Maybe it all links into some Jungian archetype?

            And then there were the horns. Mostly found in bogs and marshes, lost or presented as offerings in the liminal places between land and water, they moved me. Their sound had been recorded and was playing next to them, high and low drones that made these ancient lives accessible and within touching distance. It reminded me of the trumpets of Tutankhamen played and recorded in the same museum, haunting but - as a modern mouthpiece was used - not really authentic. These horns, as they droned, were the sound of a lost world, but one that still resonates with power.

            Next day was Francis Bacon at the Royal Academy. (I was, by the way, on my first extended annual leave in two years: the concept of “abroad” being still somewhat daunting, I stayed up in London, easing back into life like a mollusc gently peering out of its shell.) I have long been intrigued by the Soho artists of the 50’s & 60’s, primarily Keith Vaughn, Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon. I have a little drawing by Vaughn entitled “nude with contraption“ which I realised after looking at it for a few months was actually a sketch of a man trying to put up a deckchair. As a child, I was shouted at by Freud’s muse Lorna Garman in the woods near home, as my boxer dog had scared her little dogs: she did apologise. Despite this trauma, I hugely admire Freud, his combination of cruel objectivity and humanity. Bacon, though, has always been more of a challenge: almost the next stage on from Freud, he eviscerates and torments his subjects, both human and animal. In contrast to Bronze Age use of Christian symbols millennia before their time, Bacon takes Christian tropes - crucifixions, triptychs - and empties them of any transcendence, filling them instead with visceral “flesh, fur, faeces” as T. S. Eliot put it. Together with a couple of screaming popes thrown in, it’s a nihilistic world view rather different from my own. I recognise the power, but will leave him be. It did, though, amuse me that some of these exercises in anger and disgust were produced when he was cheerfully living and gambling in Monte Carlo alongside his partner, George Dyer.

            Ancient images of hope and the divine: modern images of brutality and loathing. I know which, as a priest, resonate more.

With thanks to The Church Times to allow us to publish this.