John’s Notes: Clapham & District Newsletter, Oct-Nov 2023
A plaque on the wall inside the Church of Saint John the Evangelist on New Briggate, Leeds, reads: SIC DEUS DILEXIT MUNDUM. Dick Bonham translates this as GOD IS SICK OF US NOT LEAVING THE MUNDANE. Dick was a theatrical producer of ‘ghost nights’ inside St John’s when he guided me around the ‘redundant’ church some years ago, and he was being playful. I was amused to discover that the Latin dictionary translation is GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD, which struck me as meaning almost the opposite.
I’ve been revisiting that day, in preparation for a talk I’m giving to Clapham’s Age UK group on 4th October. It was 19th September 2007, during a two-month-long deliberately slow walk I made from Hull to Liverpool, loosely following the motorway which connects them, which I called ‘Walking the M62’, and is the topic of my talk.
My Leeds city tour was hosted by Dick and others from his theatre company, whose particular schtick was to create activities and events encouraging the general public to take a fresh and creative look at the world immediately around them, whether in Leeds city streets, or the hamlets of England along The Great North Road, or Cornish coastal towns.*
We connected on my M62 walk because our intentions were similar: to discover and celebrate the awe and wonder latent beneath the surface of everyday life. I was then living in a housing estate parish, one of those places which suffer from the lazy assumption that all these ‘little boxes’ thrown up in the 1930s, ‘all made out of ticky-tacky’, ‘all look just the same’ and must be therefore the location of very humdrum lives. A mere scratch beneath the surface gave the lie to that, of course, and this was confirmed in a series of ‘Parish Walks’ I did with locals and visitors, where conversation and observation brought the place to life in rich and unexpected ways.
You don’t have to Latinise or spiritualise this observation: that the minutiae of everyday life has significance and value, wherever we are; and intentionally exploring the life under our very noses is so unexpectedly enriching, we miss out if we don’t do it.
* See these blog posts for more on this: God is sick of us not leaving the mundane, September 19, 2007; To the edges and back, November 20, 2006.
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