Sometimes
Art and Life can collide in the most extraordinary way, where each informs and
enlightens the other.
Richard
Suart is one of my oldest and closest friends. Two weeks ago his 26 year-old
son Christopher died after a battle with cancer that first struck him as infant
leukaemia, which was beaten back by chemotherapy, and which then re-emerged two
years ago as tumours in his brain. I didn't know him much as an adult but I
still remember him as a newborn, before he first became ill.
Yesterday
was his memorial service and the church was full of Christopher's friends, all
in their 20s. In fact I'd say I lost it as soon as I saw the first group of
them, smartly dressed but not in mourning, waiting for the service to begin. So
much for the "me-me" generation who think of no-one but themselves.
Here were well over a hundred young adults who had come to share the pain of
losing of a friend in a way I don’t think my generation would ever had done.
The
service was extraordinary. Richard spoke, brilliantly, and two of Christopher’s
friends too, their tributes full of funny stories about him, his humour, his
kindness and his lust for life. As a child Christopher had struggled to make
friends - a symptom of his combat with his disease and his long periods of
hospitalisation - but he'd later flowered at a local theatre club and then at
university.
And
of friends he clearly had no shortage. Someone wrote and played a song. Tears
were shed by the gallon. But there was no anger, no sense of outrage at
Christopher's too-short life; just wonderful memories, deep gratitude to have
known him and lots and lots of love.
And
then the vicar spoke.
Earlier
in the week I could think about nothing but vicars.
There's
going to be a memorial service for Bob Tear in King's Chapel, Cambridge
in November (as well as the one planned in London in September) and I'm very touched
that Philip Ledger has asked me to sing a few songs with him in tribute to Bob.
We've been figuring out what to do and there was no doubt that we must perform
Britten's The Choirmaster's Burial from "Winter Words", his cycle of
Thomas Hardy settings. The poem, related by "the tenorman", tells
what happens when the choirmaster
dies - "choir" relating
not to singers but to a choir of
viols or "lutes", commonplace in the West Country before churches
installed organs. Hardy's novel "Under The Greenwood Tree" is all
about this. The choirmaster has
asked his players that when he dies, they'll play his favourite psalm, Mount Ephraim,
at his burial but the new-school vicar poo-poos the idea as old-fashioned and
he is buried in silence. That night the vicar is awoken by the sound of the choir, dressed in white, playing and singing Mount Ephraim
at the grave of their friend.
It's
a wonderful song and you can see how it just has to be sung for Bob.
Bob
wrote a set of poems as a response to Winter Words which became a song cycle by
Jonathan Dove called "Out Of Winter" and they performed the cycle
together a few times. I'd hoped I could do their song about the vicar at Bob's
memorial. It describes how the moment the vicar said "no" his soul
turned to a husk. Bob's poem is very "Bob" in that it can seem like a
coruscating attack on the priest and his kin, whereas, if I had to offer my
take on it (which I suppose I do as I'm the one writing this blog) I'd say his
point was that you don't have to wear a dog collar to understand the true
nature of God. Far from it.
Philip
Ledger and I discussed long and hard whether we should do the song, the worry
being that people might miss the point Bob was making and they'd feel that his
own memorial service wasn't the place to be having a vicious dig at the clergy.
So, sadly, we decided against it.
We
want to celebrate Bob's deeply-held spirituality and the best way we can find
to do that is by singing Salutation from Finzi's "Die Natalis", his
settings of Thomas Traherne. And we'll do a song from Schubert's "Die
Schöne Müllerin". When Bob taught me, these were both pieces that I took to him
for lessons.
Just
as the vicar who appears in Hardy’s poem (and later in Bob’s) is spiritually
disconnected from his flock so, it seemed, was the vicar at Christopher’s
funeral. He launched into a sermon that sounded as if it had been pulled from a
file marked “for funerals of people who die too young”. In his third sentence
he said “death often strikes me as being at odds with nature” at which point
the entire congregation collectively thought “what the hell are you talking
about?” I don’t think one person there
thought that death was at odds with nature. Death is entirely natural. He went
on in a vein that presumed we were all angry with his god for snatching
Christopher from us too young. And his solution to this was to ask his god into
our lives.
Hadn’t
he been listening? Hadn’t he heard the tributes of gratitude for Christopher?
Didn’t he hear how joyous these young people had been to have known
Christopher? Had anyone manifested any sort of anger? Er, no. The only anger I
was now feeling was that he seemed to be turning the death of my friend’s son
into a campaign to drag a large number of young adults back into his fold.
God
had already been in the church, in the hearts of Christopher’s friends, but the
vicar was so locked into his dogma and his own job description that he couldn’t
hear him/her.
Luckily
the vicar shut up after ten minutes, by which time no-one was listening, and we
could all lustily sing the final hymn, leave his church and hug Christopher’s
family.