Betjeman: Writing the Public Life

3. In the Vapory Incense Veil: Nature, Eros, and Spiritual Mystery

85 s Nature, Eros, and Spiritual Mystery In the Vapory Incense Veil 3 So when we walk down a green lane like an ancient cart track towards the ringing church-bells, we can see the power of God in the blossom and trees, remember legends of the saints about birds and stones, and recall miracles that happened in the parish at this or that spot. . . . Chiefly in the figure of Our Lady do we see the tenderness and sweetness of this late religion.1 John Betjeman’s short but exquisite poem “Uffington” (1966) is a tribute to the stunning medieval Church of St. Mary, Uffington, where Betjeman was a member from 1934 to 1945. It begins with an ambiguous couplet that describes the tension of village church bells: “Tonight we feel the muffled peal / Hang on the village like a pall.” The marvelous consonance of “peal” and “pall” symbolizes the crux of the poem, the fearful and majestic power of divine mystery. This eerie sound effect creates an unsettled feeling that is reinforced by the image of a pealing bell accompanied by death’s pall.This spiritual ambiguity is heightened furthermore by the metrical antithesis that initiates the first two lines, as the regular iamb of “Tonight” is disrupted with an irregular trochee in “Hang on.” Paradox continues to characterize this poem. The bell serves as a “death-reminding dying fall,” yet it seems to summon the presence of God: “The very sky no longer high / Comes down within the reach of all.” Of church bells Betjeman wrote, “Who has heard a muffled peal and remained unmoved? . . . Some may hate them for 86 Betjeman: Writing the Public Life s their melancholy, but they dislike them chiefly, I think, because they are reminders of Eternity. In an age of faith they were messengers of consolation.”2 The resonating church bells at Uffington paradoxically signify both death and life, a duality that captures the speaker’s uncertainty about the nature of the divine and the necessity of embracing ambiguity.The poem’s final line consciously eschews metaphor for prosaic simplicity: “Even the trivial seems profound.” This ending suggests the power of God to endow with spiritual mystery even the mundane bits of human existence. Betjeman’s belief is that we always live in the presence of this divine mystery; he cannot explain it, but he does not doubt that his feeling is based in genuine truth (CP 264). Accepting the spiritual mystery of life, though an intellectual challenge , is essential to Anglican thinking and vital to an appreciation of the achievement of John Betjeman, whose thinking and writing is constructed with the stuff of Anglicanism in all its diverse nature. Characteristic of a large number of his poems is a deeply felt undercurrent of spirituality that embraces divine mystery. These range from celebrations of the birth of Christ to discoveries of God’s presence in nature to the nearly divine delights of human sexuality. Betjeman’s description of the Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, “Here in this warm, mysterious , holy house,” captures the complex and contradictory sense of spiritual mystery: Or do you think that forces are around, Strong, frightening, loving and just out of reach But waiting, waiting, somewhere to be asked? And is that somewhere here at Walsingham?3 Betjeman wonders whether the divine is a threatening power or a lover who must be coaxed and wooed, and in the end he allows the paradox to go unresolved. Living in the presence of mystery necessitates what Bishop Stephen Neill describes as a “conviction that truth is larger and more beautiful than our imperfect minds are able to apprehend or to conceive.”4 Betjeman was skeptical of absolutist theologies and resistant to rigid truth claims. He had, like many Anglicans, a “humility of awe before the divine mysteries of faith and a recognition of the incompetence of language to define the ultimate paradox of existence .”5 To accommodate himself to mystery meant accepting that s In the V apory Incense Veil 87 truth could only be approached, that it could never be possessed or controlled. The sense of mystery that typifies Anglican spirituality is partially explained by a deeply held incarnational faith. Certainly the key to Betjeman’s own spiritual life was the mystery surrounding the doctrine of the incarnation. Among the clearest theological utterances Betjeman ever made is this straightforward assertion of an incarnational faith: “The one...