The rain forms rivulets on the glass doors; blackbirds and thrushes scamper opportunistically on the sodden turf; the numbing greyness of the sky is like a tombstone too heavy to roll away. Here it is more often Good Friday than Easter Sunday.
An interlude between dreams of Greece brings August damp and chill: autumn is never more proximate than when summer has so precipitously left itself behind.
Sleepy afternoons with Schubert and Bach; the rain drops its humid carapace and no stone is left un-drenched.
On the coast the crows and the ravens and the heads of bluebells sway and swoop in the westerly wind. The hedgerows and ditches, pregnant with verdure, swallow up their defenceless hinterlands with voracious appetite. Buzzards drift in and out of sight, plaintively calling as if speaking to the mists that glide across their wings.
A little way back from the cliff a graveyard emerges. I have never seen a soul stir there. Simple headstones and tufts of dewy grass congregate upon the bare slope. Concrete gateposts and a rudimentary farmer’s fence, austere and metallic, stand coldly by the way. A via dolorosa, it seems to me.
A little further on again, the way winds damp and solitary, shadows overcoming daring honeysuckle and cowslip. Branches stretch entangled fingers of green across enchanted thickets of bracken and moss, wistfully waving waning wands in the sheaves of air that dolefully settle there.
What pilgrims and warriors passed by this way? What do the oaks and the old stones have written on their wrinkled garments? Do their souls stir in the dead of night, when the badgers chug along the road with weighty malice, and the bats interrogate the particles of the air for signs of life?
Perhaps the answers lie in the little church that stands here, next to the old school and rectory. If all that remained in this place was stone and cross, that would be something, at least.
The past is a cistern whose arches hold the weight of the present upon their stony shoulders. When rivers of tears fill the cistern to overflowing, the arches crumble and a part of the present collapses into its own past. Such is the case of the village of Nolton in Pembrokeshire.
When the old rectory was sold by the Church an arch failed and the present was sent crashing into the realm of the past. Only in memories did the rectory now exist, and another chunk of ground was removed from under the feet of the community. The incumbent of that happy place (its cherry trees sending reams of confetti-like blossom drifting down the path of the church as if to greet gleeful newly-weds on crystalline spring mornings) would whistle Bach on the gravel and through the gate and down that same path, his lopsided grin and twinkling eyes the keenest sign of an intelligence that knows it’s good to live that you’ll find.
When my father shed tears the day that the Reverend Alan Craven departed his last service with that undamped glint of joie de vivre reflecting a life well lived, it wasn’t with an eye to a future where death would be un-lived so poorly, so unfairly. Like the slow but seismic collapse of cliffs too long assaulted by winter gales of surf, salt and sediment, the final years of Alan’s life fragmented and broke into pieces the sum of which bore no resemblance to the erstwhile whole.
In Dostoevsky we find redemption, but perhaps not renewal. In Nolton, and so many similar communities in Wales, redemption is not asked for, nor required. A humble, pure, autochthonous thread ties lives together and to the land; a quiet nobility echoes in the valleys and hills. But what of renewal? This, I fear, is absent. The well of tears rises up and as the present subsides quietly, the rain continues to form rivulets on the glass doors.
A stoic community goes on living the hope immanent in the Resurrection. But it does so tentatively; there is doubt, as in all healthy Anglican communities. The hermeneutical exercises required to regenerate and revivify an experiential faith are paradoxically the very processes that would ensure its demise. For only if we really study the Bible do we properly understand how unsustainable our faith is. This is the faithful, unchanging paradox of Anglicanism: we believe through our own unbelief. And we sustain this belief through a ritualism that avails itself of the power of timelessness. Inoculated against the dangerous antinomies of our lived experience – the negative dialectics of the postmodern rural community – we intone words as familiar to us as the misty dampness of an October morning:
‘They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment;
And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail’.
(Hebrews 1:11-12)
Indeed it is true that all shall fail and fold, that Denn alles Fleisch ist wie Gras, and that all that is present shall be reunited with the past without which it cannot be whole. The Reverend Craven sometimes speculated in his sermons on the direction in which time travelled. The slippage into the past, like the pull of the retreating tide, is the inexorable confirmation that here the future dares not hypothesise its own existence.
But what of that which shall not fail? Is this the hope of the eternal? There are things that seem eternal here. This is, though, a stultifying quality. The same is a sonorous proposition as against the propitiation to an ever-changing outside world that is demanded, the community sacrificed on the altar of orgiastic globalism.
As the Church pulls back its forces the high point of the spiritual battle is ceded to the nihilistic armies of postmodern dislocation. First the rectory… What of the old schoolroom? And St. Madoc’s itself? At what point exactly will it become the plaything of a wealthy London architect, an Instagram reliquary?
The years of St. Madoc’s may never fail. Only they will not live on in the stone and cross of the present; time will prevail in the past, an oratory filled with the wood of the pews and the stone of the walls. The hymns marked out on the wall and the books open at the psalm, the lectern and the altar railing – all shalt remain on the tableau of time past.
And is I walk back to the coast, past the mossy banks and the cemetery, over the crest of the hill and on towards the cliff, I see the landscape as a vesture that is folded up in slowly ebbing time. The arch cannot hold, the cistern calls its siren song; the everlasting past embraces us with an omniscient force. Memorialised, finally we are at home, where the text of the book of life never changes.
I look at garments and hands,
traces of the water in the sounding cracks,
walls smoothed by the touch of a face
that watched terrestrial torches with my eyes,
that oiled with my hands the long lost
wooden beams: for everything—clothing, skin, pots,
words, wine, loaves of bread—
all of it has left, has fallen to the earth.
Pablo Neruda, The Heights of Macchu Picchu
“That little word ‘why’ has run through all universe from the first day of creation, and all nature cries every minute to its creator: “Why?” And for seven thousand years it has had no answer”.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Devils
Just another philhellene 