Column

Awe and wonder

Belief

Creed

27 December 2024

4 min read

What brings us into bulwark cathedrals?

A band’s tribe trek to a cathedral that’s defied the dark for centuries.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A view from a floodlight footbridge towards a gap between office buildings which reveal a cathedral and its illuminated dome.

I went along to read some Genesis at a local Nine Lessons & Carols service, wearing the coat I’d worn the week before on my annual cathedral benefit tour with the evergreen folk-rock band Jethro Tull.

The coat still bore the stick-on backstage pass, ‘access all areas’, that acts as some form of security for band, crew and instruments. I hadn’t had time, or the skill to be honest, to soak it off gently to avoid damaging the fabric.

A number of congregants, both men and women – I hesitate, for contemporaneous reasons, to add “of a certain age” – noticed it. “Does Ian Anderson still stand on one leg when he plays the flute?” asked one. “I’ve still got some Tull albums from the Seventies,” added another. “Great band,” affirmed a third.

It strikes me that more church congregants recognise Tull than Tull fans recognise the Church of England. That’s to be expected, given that this is a tribe that grew up with a prevalent post-modern atheism. I remember in the early days following a pair of increasingly hairless old hippies into one of these gigs. “Looks like a flippin’ church,” said one. “That’s because it is a flippin’ church,” replied the other (though naturally they didn’t say “flippin’”).

These cathedral shows, of which there have been about 30 now, sell out easily and very soon after tickets go on sale in the summer. We played Bristol and Salisbury (again) last week. The larger cathedrals benefit to the tune of upwards of £25,000 for a couple of hours of Christmassy rock ‘n’ roll. They come because they like the sound of Jethro Tull and Anderson’s songwriting canon.

But there’s something else going on. They come, these predominantly unchurched people, to take ownership of their cathedral. They may come because it’s Christmas and it’s the right place to be. They come to be together, if not as the Body of Christ then at least in some sort of communion, which is true of any rock concert gathering in a corporate way, but which is lent something transcendent in a gothic cathedral.

This raises questions for me. The first is this: Come Christmas, what is it that they and we have all been waiting for, this crowd of people who seem strangely anticipative, not just to hear one of their favourite bands, but to hear something else in the air in a sacred, ancient place?

I have a theatrical role, somewhere between master of ceremonies, band confessor and rocking retainer. Top hat, tails, leggings, codpiece, pixie boots and a knobbed cane. Oh yes, and my clerical collar. It’s the dog collar that connects me to a reality beyond the show business.

In addition to cavorting, I deliver a Christmas blessing during the intro to the last number of the night (usually “May the joy of the angels, the wonder of the shepherds…” etc.). I’m struck by how moved many people are and remark on it afterwards in the crowd. There’s a real hunger for peace and goodwill in a broken world, not just an appetite for a thumping bass line to swing hips to, as they raise their eyes to a vaulted, lit ceiling far away, sometimes a thousand years old.

My second question is relatedly this: What does a merry Christmas mean in this context? Quite often, Tull’s Christmas song from 1977 will be on the setlist, Ring Out, Solstice Bells. It’s pagan in theme (“seven druids dance in seven time”) but it engenders in this setting a strong folk memory of light and cheer in the darkness. There’s a defiance of the dark here and the cathedral stands as a bulwark against it down the centuries. Be of good cheer because all will be well – that’s what it means to wish a merry Christmas.

A final question: Why do they come back every year, this motley band of ageing rockers (though there are youngsters too)? Part of the answer to that is the comfort of the familiar and eternal – and I don’t mean only songs that are up to half a century old. It’s a truth among other truths that religious observance is growing in some societal pockets, among Gen Z men for example.

Cathedrals aren’t like parish churches, where you may feel part of a small community. Cathedrals are a part of the world, in all its harsh reality. Katherine Amphlett LINK has written here of Coventry cathedral (where Tull has played) and a feeling of how Christmas is far from twee in these settings – the Christmas story is hard and subversive. To my mind, it’s a story about persecution, homelessness, displacement, oppression, refugees and misogyny.

A cathedral is big and strong enough to bring all that to. It always has been. We see some of that recognised in the audiences for these Christmas shows. Perhaps you’ll join us at a cathedral near you next year? Meanwhile, merry Christmas.

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Explainer

Belief

Creed

Easter

2 April 2024

5 min read

Why the anthropologists miss the point of Easter

Graham Tomlin unpacks why Easter is more than an illustration of new life.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

the first signs of Spring breaking through

Bunnies, chocolate eggs, crocuses. It’s that time of year again. The dark bleakness of winter is giving way to life and colour as the soil warms. We finally feel sun on the skin, wake up to early dawns and longer days.

Across the world, festivals celebrate the coming of Spring. The Qingming Festival is a traditional Chinese carnival, also known as Tomb-Sweeping Day, observed by ethnic Chinese people across the world as a celebration of the new season. In the festival of Holi, Hindus across the world douse each other in brightly coloured powder or water, as a celebration of burgeoning love, and a prayer for a good harvest from the new growth in the land. The turning of the year, bringing new life, seems one of the most elemental forces in the universe.

In 1890, the Scottish anthropologist James Frazer published a book that was to become famous: The Golden Bough. It was one of the first works of comparative religion in an age which was gradually becoming more knowledgeable about the religions of the world. In it, he identified a motif in many of the world’s religions: the concept of a dying-and-rising god. He saw the pattern repeated in fertility rites connected to the annual renewal of nature from the ‘death’ of winter. Gods like Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis, Dionysus - and Jesus - were examples of the same pattern.

The turning of the year, bringing new life, seems to be one of the most elemental forces in the universe.

These days, you often hear a similar version of this account. Christianity, we are told, is another form of the same story found in so many religions. Christians just took over and erased the earlier annual celebrations with their own version. Christmas was just a replacement for Yule, the ancient pagan winter festival. Easter recalls Eostre, a spring goddess from western Germanic lands, whose festival took place in April, connected to the spring equinox.

Today, we have lambs, daffodils, young rabbits and eggs. All of them emerge at this time of year and are, for us, signs of the rebirth of nature. It always seems miraculous, that from the deadness of winter, life is reborn. No wonder the ancient pagans, and religions all over the world, for that matter, found ways to celebrate new life, and to endue this season with mythical wonder.

It was tempting for James Frazer to bracket Jesus as just another of these myths of the death and rebirth of nature, the dying and rising god. Bunnies, eggs, Osiris and Jesus were all symbols, pointing to the same thing – the annually repeated miracle of new life in the Spring.

Yet this misses the point of what the early Christians said about the Resurrection. St Paul wrote: “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” His point was precisely not that this event was another illustration of the annual renewal of nature, the cycle of death & rebirth. It was something new altogether. It was the once and for all breaking of the cycle, spelling the end of death and its repeated power over us. Christ breaks through the dark wall of death so that millions of other can follow him through the breach into the light beyond it.

It was not another annual temporary suspension of the inevitability of death, it was the breaking of the power of death once and for all, pointing to its final defeat one day.

The Resurrection of Jesus was the ‘firstfruits’, like the very first crocus of spring, the first apple on the tree. It was like a man breaking the four minute mile, a human being walking on the moon. A barrier had been broken that had always seemed impregnable and nothing would ever be the same again. It was the beginning of an entirely new creation that will one day come into fullness. It was not another annual temporary suspension of the inevitability of death, it was the breaking of the power of death once and for all, pointing to its final defeat one day. The endless cycle of rebirth is suddenly folded out into a linear trajectory, pointing forward to the day when all shall be made new.

CS Lewis attributed his conversion at least in part to a conversation with JRR Tolkien which persuaded him that the story of Jesus – his incarnation, descent into death and resurrection to new life - was not just another example of the ancient myth of the renewal of the world, but was the thing towards which all the myths pointed – it was, as he called it in a famous essay, ‘myth become fact’. It’s worth quoting him to get the point:

Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate.

Of course, there will be echoes of resurrection in the other faiths of the world. Of course there will be pagan figures who look like Christ. Rabbits and eggs are to be enjoyed not frowned on as they point to the one great miracle. They are to be welcomed, not disowned. Lewis’ point is that the Resurrection is both myth and fact – myth become fact. The Resurrection doesn’t just point to the rebirth of the world. It is the rebirth of the world.

Now of course, Christians can’t prove it. They can, to be sure, point to evidence that the tomb was empty, that the profound, world-shattering effect on the disciples and even the rest of human history can only be explained by something truly extraordinary. But you can’t prove an event that by its very nature breaks the normal cycle of cause and event, death and rebirth, proof and disproof. You can only believe it and then re-build your whole view of the world around it. As theologian Lesslie Newbigin put it:

“At the heart of the Christian message was a new fact: God had acted in a way that, if believed, must henceforth determine all our ways of thinking. It could not merely fit into existing ways of understanding the world without fundamentally changing them. It provided a new arche, a new starting point for all human understanding of the world. It could not form part of any worldview except one of which it was the basis.”

So, no, we can’t prove it. But we can at least do the early Christians the justice of acknowledging what they were saying and what they weren’t.

Because this is the central Christian claim – that the Resurrection is not a metaphor for something else – for the rebirth of nature in the spring, or for the fertility of nature. In fact, it’s the other way round. The rebirth of nature is a metaphor for the Resurrection. The Resurrection of Jesus is not an illustration of something else. It is the one thing of which everything else is an illustration. In the light of the Resurrection, the renewal of nature in spring is not yet another round in the endlessly repeated cycle of death, rebirth and death again, but it points forward to the day when “the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will all be changed.”