Incense in the Air

As some of you know, I used to be a candidate for ordination in the Scottish Episcopal Church. Sometime around 1979, I shifted my ground and completed my first degree (Divinity) as an academic subject. Since then have put quite some distance between the church and me. I retain an interest in what you might broadly call spiritual and religious matters, but do not profess any faith. I have at times called myself an atheist but that isn’t something that I do any more, not because of any belief but because I distrust dogmatism in all its forms.

Religious themes run through the fiction that I write in one way or another, from the protagonist of The Raven and the Hart who is a priest questioning her vocation, to Ba Ren the Buddhist monk alone in a wasteland in Soft Sings the River, a story in Coyote in the Corner.)

Last weekend, I dropped into Old St Paul’s Episcopal Church here in Edinburgh for a short time. This was partly because it crops up as a location in a draft novel that I’ve been working on for too long and I wanted to check some details, but also because I remember it from long ago as a space I enjoyed being in. Walking in, I was immediately embraced by the heavy scent of that morning’s incense and the quietness of the church even though it is in the heart of Edinburgh; I was happy to sit for a while and take it in.

South window, Old St Paul’s

I’ve done this before. When researching elements of Raven I spent some time sitting in St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral on Palmerston Place, a Victorian edifice that dominates the west of the city. Long ago, I went up as far as you can get in the bell tower where I should have had a fine view of the city, although in my memory it was raining. That visit gave me some elements of  the setting for Canty’s final sermon, but it was also evocative of a sense of scale and something implicit in places given over to devotions. I felt something similar in some Buddhist temples in China.

Unsurprisingly, my short time in Old St Paul’s led me to reflect on why I liked being there and the possibilities of returning, albeit to enjoy the atmosphere rather than as a member of the congregation. I came away with a certainty that, should I ever return to the church, unlikely as that might be, it is to the High Anglican tradition that I would turn.

In another story in Coyote – Lighten Our Darkness – the vampire Margaret muses on her liking for High Church Anglicanism, musings that, if not exactly autobiographical, do represent something of my own instincts. She says,

I’m attracted to the High Church – none of that primacy of the Word nonsense beloved by those dour Reformers with their endless exegesis of minutiae. There is a splendour in ritual, in the old liturgical soft-shoe shuffle, a splendour that transports. I think it’s to do with the use of all five primary senses to produce something greater than the sum of the parts, that ineffable sixth sense of apprehension of the numinous, of the immanent, the encounter with the divine.

 

Does it surprise you that I speak of the divine? I don’t know why it should. We have been on this earth a long time and have long memories. We have seen many things that are difficult to explain without invoking the idea of other realms, other realities. That’s another reason I like ritual, treading the boards to play my walk-on part in the Divine comedy. It’s why I like the flummeries and fripperies of the high churches, the scripted choreography of the costumed pierrots in their sanctuaries, chasing the spectrum of the liturgical seasons, mining silver at the rainbow’s end for their chalices and patens, and gold for the embroidery on their chasubles.

I took this a bit further in Raven and again had Canty say something that is close to my own view both as a matter of principle but also as a matter of inclination. Canty comments in passing on the difference between ritual as participation and ritual as performance.

My liking for High Church ritual at its best (and it was the tradition in which I was brought up) is precisely because of the participatory element, of interacting with symbol and myth and community. I decline to participate now because I am not a believer in the core myths of Christianity or any other religion, but it’s where I would find a home if my views changed.

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UK Hardback 1st edition

In the late 1970s/ early 1980s, Doris Lessing wrote five science fiction novels – or at least they were marketed as such – under the overarching title of Canopus in Argos: Archives. This drew murmurings from the literary establishment about why she had lowered herself into genre, and mutterings from the SF crowd about this literary interloper. Ursula K LeGuin wrote a snippy review of the first of the novels, Shikasta.

I read all of the novels as they came out in paperback and rather enjoyed them, albeit that my clear favourites were the fifth in the series (Documents Relating to The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire, 1983) which is very funny, and the second – The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980). The latter was by far the best of the series, in my opinion, but in the 40 years since I first read it I have never revisited it. Until now.

I’m delighted to say that it holds up wonderfully and I’m more than happy to be immersed in its charms again. I won’t try to retell the plot as it makes no sense outside the context of the book (and for goodness sake don’t rely on the po-faced nonsenses of Wikipedia to get a head start.)

I have a huge to be read pile by my bed and do not need any more, but a reread of the rest of the Canopus in Argos sequence is now on my list.