John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

Searching for James Hudson Atkinson

For years, from childhood through young adulthood, I sat in the polished pews of Waterloo Baptist Church gazing, at some point in each service, at the two matching marbled plaques set in the wall either side of the pulpit. Today I was there again, reunited with family and valued friends to share in the church's centenary celebrations, and found myself looking more intently at these memorials. One remembers the servicemen lost in the 1914-18 War. The other held my attention today. It recalls a man whose name wasn't mentioned in today's sermons but whose contribution to the life of that congregation was vital:

DEDICATED TO THE BELOVED MEMORY OF JAMES HUDSON ATKINSON
WHO MINISTERED TO THIS CHURCH 1911-1919.
HE INSPIRED AND GENEROUSLY HELPED HIS PEOPLE TO BUILD THIS CHURCH AND HALL, TO BE A SHRINE OF THEIR WORSHIP AND A SCHOOL OF CHRISTIAN VIRTUE AND KNOWLEDGE. HIS BEST MONUMENT IS IN LIVES MADE BETTER BY HIS PRESENCE. HE LIVED IN THE PRESENCE OF GOD HERE, AND PASSING THROUGH THE GRAVE AND GATE OF DEATH, NOW LIVETH UNTO GOD FOR EVERMORE.

I left today's service keen to find out more about the man whose life was such that his bereaved congregation of 1919 felt moved to describe him in that way, whose character penetrated the culture of the place just as his memorial stone became a mark of permanence on its walls. The ecclesiology; the exemplary leadership; the fashioner of lives: maybe there will be more to discover in the 1920 collection (by a J. O. Atkinson) of James Hudson Atkinson's sermons and addresses held in Liverpool Record Office. But if not, the people's plaque on the sanctuary wall is actually a biography in itself, a lesson in how to live and lead, which for the first twenty-plus years of my life I soaked in, Sunday after Sunday.

The reverse Magificat and the elemental Jesus

A couple of new talks this weekend: one for the patronal celebrations of St Thomas a Becket, Northlew, Thomas the Martyr and the Magnificat in Reverse, and the other for Sea Sunday, The Elemental Jesus.

The cross in the Edgelands

Somewhere in the hollows and spaces between our carefully managed wilderness areas and the creeping, flattening effects of global capitalism, there are still places where an overlooked England truly exists, places where ruderals familiar here since the last ice sheets retreated have found a way to live with each successive wave of new arrivals, places where the city's dirty secrets are laid bare, and successive human utilities scar the earth or stand cheek by jowl with one another; complicated, unexamined places that thrive on disregard, if we could only put aside our nostalgia for places we've never really known and see them afresh.

I've just finished reading Edgelands, a wondrous contemplation of England's peripheral places by poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts. Given that the territory of these two writers is the same arena through which I have done so much wandering in my life -  the  edgelands between Liverpool and  Manchester, the post-industrial wastes  beside the East Lancs Road, Manchester Ship Canal, M62 - I was bound to enjoy it. It's a lovely book, its brief chapters each meditating on a particular edgelands theme: among them cars, paths, dens, containers, power, pallets, hotels, retail.

I was taken by the story of the young man they saw carrying a full-sized cross in the outskirts of Manchester, an act of Easter witness but with no one there to see it, now 'an act of unobserved endurance':

What keeps them going through the edgelands? The lure of their destination? It should be more than that, because the Crucifixion was essentially an edgelands story. The Bible suggests that the site of the Crucifixion was 'outside the city wall', and historians now believe that the Romans favoured such edgelands as their place of execution. Golgotha, it seems, was more than likely a place with two uses - working quarry and city rubbish dump. The Via Doloroa is an edgelands path.

The young Mancunian was (knowingly or unknowingly) following a path well-worn by the American evangelist Arthur Blessitt, whose forty-plus-year cross-bearing journey around the world is outlined by the authors: 'He has carried his Cross through warzone, wasteland and wilderness.' They quote him as saying,

'The Cross has been turned away from being left overnight at more than half the churches requested, but has never been turned away from spending the night at a bar or nightclub in forty years around the world.'

The publishers say, 'England, the first country to industrialise, now offers the world's most mature post-industrial terrain, and is still in a state of flux: "Edgelands" takes the reader on a journey through its forgotten spaces so that we can marvel at this richly mysterious, cheek-by-jowl region in our midst.' More than that, it's a wonderful resource for helping begin to make imaginative sense of it all.

Jesus - a funny sort of king

A poem wot I wrote for the children of Lydford and Boasley Cross Primary Schools, after lengthy and fascinating conversations on the subject this month....

He was born nowhere near a palace
With nurses and soft white sheets;
He was born in a barn in the cold of the night
While people passed by in the streets.

His parents were not at all noble,
His mother was really a girl;
His father, a carpenter, made things in wood:
Theirs was an ordinary world.

Of what he did in his schooldays
All we know is this one fact:
He spent lots of time in the temple,
A strange way for a young boy to act.

You’d expect a young ruler to go training
With the army to learn how to lead;
But this young king went around healing
And comforting all those in need.

He was an unnoticed guest at a wedding
In Cana most of the time
But at the end of the night they all knew him:
He’d turned lots of water to wine.

The friends of this young king were normal,
Not famous or gifted or rich.
Some spent their days catching fishes,
And others just lived in a ditch.

His kingdom, he would tell the people,
Is free of all fighting and crime.
It is one you can’t see, but can grow in your heart
And is everywhere all of the time.

He didn’t come into the city
In a carriage horse-drawn and gold
He came on a donkey he’d borrowed
And people waved palms in the road.

But the people soon turned on this young king;
He wasn’t the fighter they sought
One to smash all their foes and bloody the nose
Of the emperor and all of his court.

This king became the victim
Of the worst crime in all history:
The innocent king who loved everyone
Was killed on a cross-shaped tree.

But this king was someone so special
That his story didn’t end that dark day.
He came back alive and forgave all those
Who had murdered and put him away.

A king full of love and forgiveness:
It’s wierd how the world could reject him.
He went up to heaven but his spirit’s on earth
In the hearts of all who accept him.

His kingdom has no anthem
But still the people sing: hallelujah,
Hello, hail, to Jesus,
A funny sort of king.

Walker's feet, writer's hands

The hiking urban vicar, a compact man, close-cropped, thin-spectacled, smiling, met me on the steps of the Anglican Cathedral. He wore a worker-priest's uniform of black shirt and dark anorak, but he had a writer's hands.

That's how Iain Sinclair describes me in his newly published Ghost Milk, in the few pages he devotes to describing our 2009 (ad)ventures together: a conversation onstage at Greenbelt ('My problem, when confronted by an expectant audience, sitting on the grass, was being carried away by the tent-show-revivalist aspect. My pitch was too spiritual. I kept banging on about the pilgrimage, the quest, the journey of the soul. The believers were much more down to earth.') and the October walk around the Toxteth which Bill Griffiths had depicted in his epic poem Mr Tapscott; a walk which ended in a cafe on Lodge Lane, MT BELLYS, where 'the man in the cafe, launching a business, fresh paint, overloaded sandwiches, topped up mugs, hovered over our discussion' of my two months on foot beside the M62, blogging as I went. From his transcript of that conversation Iain records me as having said (among other things), 'I realised that what was important to me, reflecting back, was the writing. The writing was as important as the walk. You construct the world as you go'. (See previous blogs here and here).

Ghost Milk sees Iain Sinclair circling the outlands of East London on a mission of archaeology in reverse,  documenting the period when the Lea Valley industrial-chemical wastes were being transformed by the processes of capital into the sterile, ring-fenced London Olympic site. As is his wont, Sinclair then spirals out from there on other peripheral trajectories, including to and fro along the M62... Which is where I came in. I've only read pages 309 to 313 so far (from vanity). The rest looks like it will be very good too.