Alphabeticon: Concerning Christianity
DEDICATION: for John Howard Griffin
man of profound faith
contemplative, activist
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
Most books, in the Alphabeticon series, focus on paying tribute to men and women, past and present, who have been important in some particular field of human endeavour. That is true of this volume, but only partly. There are portraits, as usual, of several individuals who have contributed significantly to the life of faith in the various branches of Christendom: Roman Catholics like Thomas a Becket and Anastasz Opasek; Protestants like Billy Graham and John Knox; oddballs like Christopher Smart and Brigham Young. But in addition, many chapters in this volume address a theme rather than a person. Not all such chapters are complimentary: it is hard to write charitably about the Inquisition; and the chapter on Doggerel deals, I must admit rather sardonically, with the pious banality characteristic of many hymns. For the most part, however, the thematic chapters are respectful: for example, there are chapters on respectively the Passion and the Resurrection.
Some readers may ask what are my qualifications to write about Christendom, with its wide embrace and its chequered history. In answer, I can only claim to have striven for a sort of detachment and objectivity, but not to the point where I render myself a marginal eunuch: there is much to admire in the Church’s record of living up to its founding ideals, though much to deplore in the Church’s failure intermittently to do so. If, on either count, any attitudes of mine in this book display some trace of favourable or unfavourable bias, I owe full disclosure to readers, as all writers do at all times on all topics.
Accordingly, readers should know that I was raised Anglo-Catholic, but have not been observant for many years: that I nevertheless continue to hold in high regard the Anglo-Catholic mission to the poor and the superb Anglo-Catholic liturgy, with its masterful language and its inspiring juxtaposition of Gregorian chant to Renaissance polyphony. Equally I have great respect for other denominations: naturally, I cannot support the Vatican’s views on contraception or the ordination of women, but surely no sane mind can do otherwise than revere the goodness of Saint Francis or of his modern namesake; similarly, in the Protestant milieu, I abhor the Dutch Reformed acquiescence in Apartheid, but I applaud the stubborn resistance of the Lutherans in East Germany to the virulence of their Stalinist oppressors. Moreover, lest this book seem to be exclusionary, let me add that I have a parallel reverence for all that is best in Judaism; and that I am currently writing, from that standpoint, another volume of Alphabeticon, which is not yet completed.
EDITOR’S FOOTNOTE
John Reeves has written or edited, and sometimes composed, many radio programs on Christianity. Salient among them have been: an adaptation of Langland’s epic “Piers Plowman”; “The Play of Jesus”, derived from the mediaeval mystery cycles; a surround-sound production of “The Play of Noah”, complete with horsedrawn wagon; “A Meditation on the Passion” by Richard Rolle de Hampole, and a reconstruction of the convent liturgy of Rolle, recorded on the site of his hermitage in Hampole; an hour-long anthology of Christina Rosseti’s prose and verse; the text and music of an Ecumenical Evening Service: “Triptych”, religious holidays as once observed in the Ages of Faith and as now traduced in the Age of Greed; “The Holy Rule”, life in Benedictine history and in three Canadian abbeys; “Ephrata”, a documentary about a Pennsylvania community of eighteenth-century Pietist refugees from Germany; “Gregorian Forum”, a panel discussion of plainsong in English; “Naught for your comfort”, the outcry of a slum priest in Johannesburg; the libretto for “Veni Creator Spiritus”, his own cantata for multiple choirs.
