EMMANUEL

By Paul Sutton on

sks
Image by Alpha India

 

It was the Cambridge college my school favoured –

so I applied to Oxford, that hard December, 1981 –

my face like the plague, the college his other name.

I’ve never written of faith before – how on earth to –

it seems impossible, though I love the cold stone,

bleakness, Ely or Salisbury in a gale, battered and

light inside. So I’m sad I didn’t live early enough

to have it, but I couldn’t pretend now, that would

be betrayal – of what I don’t know. Any child then

could go to church and not believe a thing – I sang

as a choirboy, bored or enchanted, sometimes afraid.

But I’m proud of English Christianity (though not

its weaker politicians) the sadness and the decline,

the quiet loss, unoccupied buildings, embarrassing

comparisons with this faith of fanatics. What works,

maybe that’s the point. Oh how heart-breaking from

a tailback to see some old church – I couldn’t bear

to see Salisbury, the spire so pure in any light and

there for any generations, carved in Autumn mist.

To cry in the snow and find no one in The Close,

not a hurrying clergyman straight from Trollope –

back to what was often poverty, but faith I guess.