It is in this struggle, and the willingness to undertake it, that faith is understood. As there is no appreciation of light without the knowledge of darkness, joy without knowledge of despair, or love without knowledge of hatred, so there is no faith that knows not doubt. I do not, however, posit doubt as a kind of dialectical contrary of faith – its opposite – but as inextricably integral to it. We all know the Doubting Castle of John Bunyan’s pilgrim (whose festival, by the by, was on Wednesday), as we have all, even if only momentarily, stumbled in the choaking smog of nihilism. Plausibly, the opposite of faith, as we might infer from the Epistle of James, is inaction: faith requires labour and toil, and not only physical toil, but psychological toil. We are subject to the needs of the flesh: we hunger or sicken; we fear, wince, and shudder. We cannot divide our souls from our minds and bodies whilst we go our earthly way and unless we gain utter mastery of ourselves, a thing impossible in the mêlée of the city, we needs must fight for a precarious and relative harmony between mind, body, and soul.

So, what does this entail for me, a professed and loyal Anglican, who stand before you? How do I focus my faith when I must, perforce, plunge into the welter of the physical and psychological world where there is “change and decay in all around I see”? The complexity of this subject means that I will talk of only one aspect of my struggle and the remedy I apply.

The seed of love and faith was sown upon the fertile ground – which fertility I unequivocally believe to be the condition of all who come into this world – of my soul when I was younger than my own dear son is now. Yea, it was the Church that made its indelible impression upon me when I was exposed to it, for which I owe an untold debt to my mother and my father. Yet I can only confess that I took the teachings of the scriptures for granted and never remember contemplating holiness: thus, the seed germinates unseen beneath the soil. This seed – and I shall persist in the rather hackneyed figure – was, crucially, watered and nourished by the rites and ceremonial of the Church of England. Things were, at Church, anathemata, things set apart from the increasingly insignificant and vacuous culture of modernity where beneath all its signs may be detected nothing but the reek of capital and materialism, of possessive individualism. The bells at the elevation of the host, the waft of incense caught by the shaft of sunlight coming in at the clerestory, the lambent light of the acolytes’ candles, the chanting of the gospels, the genuflection, the incantatory quality of the doxologies: all was a great communal dance around the supreme maypole of the cross. The senses were utterly ravished and disarmed, and even I, a rollicking six- or seven-year-old boy, felt the impress of these Holy signs upon my spirit.

Between the age of, say, thirteen and twenty, my attendance was irregular and, in the latter years of adolescence I might fairly have been accused of apostasy: I never profoundly renounced my faith but I certainly talked against it. As has been said – by Doctor Johnson, I think – there are many who can talk against religion but few who can think against it. My faith was altogether in abeyance: a mere inconvenience for Youth’s reckless immortality. This notwithstanding, however, when I lived in Winchester, Hampshire, for some years as an undergraduate student I regularly – and in a kind of secrecy, for I ever went alone – went to the precincts of the great cathedral, not for services: indeed, I sought the very quietest hours – but for to wander and speculate in the endless variety of its Gothick glory, and, as Eliot so cogently had it: “to kneel where prayer has been valid”. Here was sanctuary indeed from the rough-and-tumble of young manhood. Within a few years I had returned to the Anglican fold, almost unthinkingly at first, not having appraised the condition of my faith, locked away as it was, in the fusty chambers of my heart. I attended Mass occasionally as a student in London, at the

remarkable chapel at King’s College – drawn thither by the spice of incense and sweet hymnody, but regularity was difficult for one who necessarily was ensconced in a library from Sunday to Sunday all through the year. The decisive event, for me, was the birth of my beloved son Arthur for, firstly, I finally and profoundly understood the lesson of love, but more pertinently for what I talk of today, I sought to offer my son the aesthetic fulsomeness and significance of the Church as an antidote to the market aesthetics of mass culture. I sought to offer something set apart from the mechanical fury of our age, a sanctuary where the soul might seek to tarry. The signs in the Church were not only replete with meaning – indeed, they are brimful of Truth – but in such a way that has delighted the senses of Christ’s followers since the first Pentecost.

Ostensibly I am elevating the Church as something separate from society, a place in which – during Mass or Morning Prayer, or Evensong – the world without might utterly dissolve for the communicant or worshipper but this is not entirely accurate, for we bring the world without into the Church at the intercessory prayers, for instance, and our lives within and without the Church are ever in dialogue whilst we worship. I do, however, wish to exalt the Church as a Holy Temple; it is the House of God where the struggle of faith might find temporary cessation, as it certainly does for me. The ritual and textures of the liturgy, the surpassing poetry of the psalms, the vestments, the rhythmical swinging of the censer, the deference at the altar, all these things are profoundly resonant with meaning as well as being utterly exhilarating for the mind and the body. Howsoever I fare when entering at the west door, the Church is ever a refuge where a Truce prevails between the physical, psychological, and metaphysical. In Church the senses are lulled or, better, enthralled by beauty: what raptures I experience when meditating upon the magnificent west window in this Church, for instance. Or the very stones, hewn for God’s Glory, where I might seek “the touch of a vanished hand”; another who came, who prayed, who loved God. These things act upon mind and body and, when the physical and psychological are so directed, and Holiness crowds upon and whelms the Self by repetition and exposure, the soul is allowed a moment of ascendancy, of supremacy, even.