18. Intimations of the Divine.

Dearly Beloved,

I moved to Cambridge three years ago and the greatest rewards of that move have come through musical experience, especially those provided by church music. On Wednesday evening I wrote this comment to my family on WhatsApp:

“Wonderful evensong at St John's College which was broadcast live on Radio 3. The choir is normally good but every member came into the chapel bright eyed with anticipation and when they started to sing it was if they had just awakened from a deep sleep to life itself. I have rarely seen a choir so riveted on the conductor and determined to get every aspect of their singing just right – from forte fortissimo to pianissimo, to perfect intonation, timing and clarity of diction.”

The texts of the service were exceptionally rich too, including the entire, lengthy desolation of Psalm 22 “My God, my God look upon me; why hast thou forsaken me and art so far from my health and the words of my complaint?...” to a resolution and the peace of Psalm 23 “The Lord is my Shepherd”. The two lessons moved from an Angry God confronting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to the theological knots tied and untied by St Paul in 1 Corintians 15 as he considers the reality of the resurrection of Christ.

Huge energy was manifest in the rousing and joyous settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis by Herbert Howells. The service started and ended with tributes to the natural world from the introit, Patrick Hadley's setting of The Song of Solomon “… for lo, the winter is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of the birds is come...” and ending with the anthem, Judith Weir's setting of Christina Rossetti's poem “Leaf from leaf Christ knows; Himself the Lily and the Rose...“

I have continued to read Robin Dunbar's Book, How Religion Evolved and Why it Endures. He describes the great complexity of how the construction of the human brain contribute to religious experience at every level from the hormonal to our ability to mentalise (ie think sympathetically of what is in the mind of our fellows) and to use all our intellectual capacity too.

His book fills the huge gap left by Richard Dawkin's book The God Delusion. Dawkins's failed to appreciate the ubiquity and importance of religion and religious experience to us humans. Instead he launched an extraordinary, contemptuous and patronising attack on religion. Dawkins consequently made no attempt to ask the questions “why” and “how”. Specifically if religion is so ubiquitous what role does it have in the evolution of humanity? Robin Dunbar fills in the gap, and although his description of human experience of the divine may be too mechanistic in form to evoke total sympathy, he never expresses a negative view of religion or denies its importance to human beings. Indeed he emphasises its centrality to human experience and its contribution to the richness and diversity of our human lives and indeed, to our survival.

The evensong at St John's College Chapel was a wonderful manifestation of the magnificence of the Christian religion in particular, and religious experience in general, as the music expressed everything from failure, despair and bemusement to the highest ecstasy and invocations of The Divine. Finally the ordinary mortals in the Chapel's congregation were allowed to sing the Easter hymn “Good Christian men, rejoice and sing!” Indeed so. I could only conclude that those human beings with no religious belief are missing a major dimension of human existence.

Peace, 

Paul.

Completed 6 May 2022

Photo: Paul Munton.
Mary Magdalene mistaking Christ for the Gardener after his Resurrection.
King's College Cambridge.


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