1942 : the church of st peter in fulham

1942

st peter’s church, fulham

I suppose my problem with telling you about St Peter’s Church in Fulham is : I don’t really know where to begin. I went there because I was directed to be there. Why that was, I never knew. I never questioned. And now those who might have enlightened me are no longer with us in this life. I did what was expected of me. A door was pushed open onto a physical representation of a parallel universe.

My fingers move over the keys. I write ‘St Peter’s was suffused with belief .. ‘ and I am aware this is my old self, the self of 2012, speaking. I see and hear by projection through the senses of my young self of 1942. My commentary comes from the far regions of old self. Almost seventy years of living cannot be denied. They make their contribution. Their gloss on a distant recall.

It is Sunday morning. I arrive in good time. As I always do. Time to go line by line through that checklist pinned up in front of me. Make sure all my pieces of music are there. Ready and in right order. It is the first time I have needed an order of service to follow in detail. As the events proceed inexorably on ground level beneath me, I must look and listen. Follow my prompt sheet. Pick up my cues. Play what and when I am required to play. Otherwise to keep silent. To look. To listen.

Such sounds as there are, are the sounds of preparation. Down below me, under the watchful eyes of the Master of Ceremonies, the servers, already robed, go about their duties. Books vessels and cruet are precisely in their appointed places. Candles are lit. Candles in profusion. fiat lux.

So it is as it has been for countless ages. Sacred space is lovingly and reverently prepared. Here was, many times, the birth of sacred drama. Theatre. Opera. Oratorio. The house swept clean. Pure and sanctified for the presence of The One.

The murmurations of assembling congregation dwindle and fade into silence. My overture of introductory mood music is over and done. Expectancy is tangible.

With a single ting of the sacristy bell we are all alert. Curtain up. The ritual surrounding the re-enactment is begun. Old Self begins introibo ad altare dei. Young Self plays the hymn for the Introit. The congregation rises. Takes up its books of words. Gives forth in full voice.

The procession of priests and attendants moves with dignity along its accustomed path. Thurible and boat boy are ready. Charcoal glows fierce red. Incense is offered up. This is both sacrifice and purification. Smoke rises to fill the building with its sweet scent. The Presence hovers. Acknowledging oblation. Present becomes glimpses of eternity.

dominus vobiscum. The Lord be with you.  et cum spiritu tuo. And with thy spirit. Priest and people. Bidding and response. oremus. The Celebrant intones the collect proper for the day. Amen. So mote it be.

The Epistle is read from the Epistle Side. More incense rises heavenward. The hymn for the Gradual. The little procession to the ambo on the Gospel Side. The intonation of the written word. Sacred scripture. Treated with great reverence. As though the book by association becomes holy.

credo. ‘We all have faith in our one and only true God. And in his Son and the Spirit which together make up the Holy Trinity. Three-in-One and One-in-Three.’ I’ve never yet heard a sermon which even attempts to explain this central facet of belief. And on that one Sunday in the year when it is ordered for the Athanasian Creed to be said or sung, the symbols on the printed page are conjured into sound. quicumque vult –  ‘Whosoever will be savèd, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith.’ When, on the extremely rare occasions I have heard the preacher in the pulpit feel an obligation to attempt an explanation, the explanation offered was that the mystery was so far beyond human comprehension, there was no point in trying to offer one.

Pausa! Like the interval in a theatrical performance, the action goes into unheeded suspense. It is time for the sermon. Time for Young Self in the organ loft to turn off the blower and wait for signs of the sermon’s coming to its end before switching on the engine once again.

The hymn for the Offertorium. Then the great solemnity. The celebrant the deacon and the sub-deacon stand in single file facing the altar in the East. (We all faced East in those days though we had long forgotten the old traditional way of celebrating the Divine Sacrifice so that the elevation of the consecrated host coincided with the first shining of the dawning sun through the great east window.) For this is the heart of the mysterium. The words of the Secret are articulated in silence by the priest. The sanctus bell rings. Signals us to raise our eyes to the revivified host. To the Real Presence. Christianity notwithstanding, the old ones are present here and in every sanctuary before whose altar the myth is re-enacted. ‘This is my body .. ‘ And the Great Mother smiles upon us as, to half-glazed eyes, she manifests. The bread of communion. ‘This is my body .. ‘ The wine in the chalice : ‘I am the true vine.’ Diónysos. The fertility of the earth and all that therein is. per omnia saecula saeculorum. And all reply : ‘World without end. Amen’ 

The climax is past. We sing Communio as the faithful come to communicate with their God. Somewhere – but not in Advent or Lent – gloria in excelsis has been sung.

The Last Gospel is read. Loud and clear. ‘In the beginning was the word.’ Oh shameful shameful sad and vulgar in principio erat verbum from the pen of Jerome sitting at his translator’s post in Bethlehem while Anno Domini CCCCC draws nearer every day. The second century composer of KATA IOANNEN confirmed in his koiné Greek that there, before the beginning of anything, was the LOGOS. Maybe, as I have heard, Jerome really did consider the understanding of Logos to be far beyond the capacity of the ordinary men and women who formed the Christian communities of his Latin speaking West. Some of us feel he unwittingly and at a distance triggered the Reformation with his verbum which came to be interpreted as the word written upon the codex folio. It is so easy for thoughts to be dominated by the implications of that verbum.

ite missa est. It is the final curtain. Young Self explodes into a grand postludium. The play is ended. Come down to earth. Go in peace.

Old Self is redolent with Latin. Young Self never even considers it. So why is it important?

The Church of St Peter in Fulham is part of the worldwide Anglican communion. Father Eric Bates is, in his own words, a ‘clerk in holy orders’. An ordained minister of the established Church of England. Yet he speaks as a believer in  ‘One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church’. Once I heard him deny the existence of the word ‘Protestant’ in the Book of Common Prayer. (He was right. But it is there – crucially – in the Coronation Service when the monarch promises to defend – or is it ‘uphold’? - the Protestant Religion.)

Gradually, during my time as his organist, I began to hear from this parish priest about the High Church revival of the 19th century. How there had been a great desire to return to the practices of the universal Catholic church as it had existed in England before King Henry’s break away from the authority of the Pope in Rome. The various regional Uses, as contained in such preReformation service books as survived, had been examined and an English liturgy been constituted to reawaken an observance centred on the celebration of the Mass as the main instrument of devotion on each day in its due season.

The rhythm of a fixed part of the year beginning on the First Sunday of Advent in preparation for the unfettered joys of the Nativity on December 25th - and the days and weeks following - merged, though never quite seamlessly, into the rhythm of a complementary part of the liturgical year beginning on Ash Wednesday whose calendrical date varied with reference to the phases of the full moon next after the Spring Equinox. Equinox. Day and Night balanced in equal duration. The rhythm of the Sun and the Moon dancing together created, as it were, the setting for the great festival of Resurrection beginning, as in ancient custom, on the Eve of Easter Sunday. This, then, was the high point the climax the very lynchpin of Christianity.

* * * * * * *

I switch off the blower. Turn off the lights. Pick up my books of words and music. Go down the narrow stone steps to ground level. And out to the exterior world. It feels somehow different. Old Self smiles indulgently. Young Self has emerged from the womb of the sacred enclosure with its walls and ceiling enwrapping space both broad and high. Particles of incense are still held in that space. Sparkling in the beams of exterior light shining through the opened doors. (The windows have been ‘blacked-out’ to comply with wartime regulations.) The world outside is dwarfed by comparison.

A few steps along Rosaville Road. I am with my uncle Harry Hunt and his wife Lil. Lil Simpson as was. After lunch I go to their front room. Sit at the upright piano. Rehearse my part in the coming evening service. The pointed text of the psalm in one book. The musical notation in another. I learn to hold the printed score of the chant in short term memory as I sing the words. My fingers move from chord to chord as each half line dictates.

* * * * * * *

Evensong is much as I remember it from my days on the Decani or South side of the choir in St Mary’s Church at the head of Bryanston Square. Except. Except. Now there are more candles and incense. And an office hymn. Bearing its niggling sense of intrusion. The disjunction of Benediction. The monstrance with its consecrated host held aloft. Blessing the people. Let us adore .. Young Self is focussed on fitting his fingers to the rhythms of the delicate choreography played out down below in the Sanctuary. Old Self wonders if perhaps it was here – subliminally - that a sense of the Real Presence began to make itself felt to the adolescent on his isolated perch.

Here in this sacred space he was surrounded by priests and people observing ritual obligations. Genuflections towards the Real Presence. The little red lamp signalling the reality within the tabernacle. The obeisance towards the High Altar. The centre of the creation of dynamic spiritual energy. Always there. Though not yet, for Young Self, as tangible as the powerful magnetic currents he’d experienced among the Spiritualists.

Yes. ‘St Peter’s was suffused with belief .. ‘ That was manifest beyond doubt.

francis cameron, oxford, 16 march 2012

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