Written in November 2018, never before published on Wayfarer’s Notes
Natalie was asking readers if they could identify the old-master original of one of the drawings she found in her papers from years ago:
I spent an hour or two on this quest without success. At some point, I stumbled upon the piece by Tchaikovsky, and the special poignancy of its being sung in a church by an officially atheist choir, trapped in the ideology of the Soviet Union.
I like some of the comments it attracted on YouTube:
As a Westerner, as an American…this strikes me to the core, only an introspective people with a deep sense of humility and raw experience of life could produce such stark and beautiful music…may America and Russia find peace for we share the essence of this music between our peoples…
Rich, deep, And holy. Music. This is beyond language. It’s a sense of belonging
Especially because I have been trying to write about an idea which came to me long ago, before I had the insight or language to express it.
My second or third attempt remains as a password-protected draft, “What Looks After Us?”§. There’s more “raw experience of life” in it than I’m prepared to share, even in this Retreat.
It’s strange how the occasion of that idea—the approximate date and place—has been archived in deep memory for nearly fifty years, only to surface suddenly now. It was a single flash of intuition in the turmoil of my adult life. I was 28. Briefly it lit up the dark & wreck of my days, like “a still small voice”:
a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks…and after the wind an earthquake…and after the earthquake a fire …
… and after the fire a still small voice. (1 Kings 19:11)
And in this moment of calm I wandered at midday, in my office lunchtime break, among the streets where ordinary people lived, and saw they had roofs over their heads, with settled jobs, lives & families. And I felt that we are all helped somehow through life’s zigzag journey. Not by a god that requires praying to, but something more intricate and personal. I’d never thought about angels as other than myth, and didn’t make the association then. I just felt how life, lives, certainly human lives, perhaps everything in nature, generally meshes together in ways that we don’t have the skill, wisdom or foresight to manage on our own. A mystery and a miracle.
I imagine that people today are passionate about politics, economics, administration, justice, social services, ecology, longevity, medicine, precisely because they haven’t connected to what I would call an inbuilt religious sense. Of course these things matter, and I’m heartily grateful to those who have struggled to better the world we find ourselves in.
I wasn’t conscious of such things then, only that those “ordinary people”, with accents and dialect so strange to my southern ears, drew on a special rugged strength. Their forebears had gone down the coalmines, emerged into daylight in grime and sweat unrelieved till they walked home.* Father and son followed the same livelihood, there was mostly no other choice.†
But it happened, and I think it’s important. It may take me a while to find good words of my own to say what it means to me. Till then I can only offer second-hand ones. Perhaps they will serve to show that what I want to say is not unique to me:
From Eternal Echoes: exploring our hunger to belong, by John O’Donohue (1998), pp199-200.
* It wasn’t till 1947 that the National Coal Board was formed and legally obliged to provide pithead baths.
† When we first arrived in Nottingham & found squalid accommodation, my wife and I had taken a bus on Sunday to Eastwood, to see the birthplace of DH Lawrence, whose father was a miner.
§ Now published here
a wayfarer’s notes 