Column
Awe and wonder
Belief
Creed
4 min read

What brings us into bulwark cathedrals?

A band’s tribe trek to a cathedral that’s defied the dark for centuries.

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A view from a floodlight footbridge towards a gap between office buildings which reveal a cathedral and its illuminated dome.

I went along to read some Genesis at a local Nine Lessons & Carols service, wearing the coat I’d worn the week before on my annual cathedral benefit tour with the evergreen folk-rock band Jethro Tull. 

The coat still bore the stick-on backstage pass, ‘access all areas’, that acts as some form of security for band, crew and instruments. I hadn’t had time, or the skill to be honest, to soak it off gently to avoid damaging the fabric. 

A number of congregants, both men and women – I hesitate, for contemporaneous reasons, to add “of a certain age” – noticed it. “Does Ian Anderson still stand on one leg when he plays the flute?” asked one. “I’ve still got some Tull albums from the Seventies,” added another. “Great band,” affirmed a third. 

It strikes me that more church congregants recognise Tull than Tull fans recognise the Church of England. That’s to be expected, given that this is a tribe that grew up with a prevalent post-modern atheism. I remember in the early days following a pair of increasingly hairless old hippies into one of these gigs. “Looks like a flippin’ church,” said one. “That’s because it is a flippin’ church,” replied the other (though naturally they didn’t say “flippin’”). 

These cathedral shows, of which there have been about 30 now, sell out easily and very soon after tickets go on sale in the summer. We played Bristol and Salisbury (again) last week. The larger cathedrals benefit to the tune of upwards of £25,000 for a couple of hours of Christmassy rock ‘n’ roll. They come because they like the sound of Jethro Tull and Anderson’s songwriting canon. 

But there’s something else going on. They come, these predominantly unchurched people, to take ownership of their cathedral. They may come because it’s Christmas and it’s the right place to be. They come to be together, if not as the Body of Christ then at least in some sort of communion, which is true of any rock concert gathering in a corporate way, but which is lent something transcendent in a gothic cathedral. 

This raises questions for me. The first is this: Come Christmas, what is it that they and we have all been waiting for, this crowd of people who seem strangely anticipative, not just to hear one of their favourite bands, but to hear something else in the air in a sacred, ancient place? 

I have a theatrical role, somewhere between master of ceremonies, band confessor and rocking retainer. Top hat, tails, leggings, codpiece, pixie boots and a knobbed cane. Oh yes, and my clerical collar. It’s the dog collar that connects me to a reality beyond the show business.  

In addition to cavorting, I deliver a Christmas blessing during the intro to the last number of the night (usually “May the joy of the angels, the wonder of the shepherds…” etc.). I’m struck by how moved many people are and remark on it afterwards in the crowd. There’s a real hunger for peace and goodwill in a broken world, not just an appetite for a thumping bass line to swing hips to, as they raise their eyes to a vaulted, lit ceiling far away, sometimes a thousand years old. 

My second question is relatedly this: What does a merry Christmas mean in this context? Quite often, Tull’s Christmas song from 1977 will be on the setlist, Ring Out, Solstice Bells. It’s pagan in theme (“seven druids dance in seven time”) but it engenders in this setting a strong folk memory of light and cheer in the darkness. There’s a defiance of the dark here and the cathedral stands as a bulwark against it down the centuries. Be of good cheer because all will be well – that’s what it means to wish a merry Christmas. 

A final question: Why do they come back every year, this motley band of ageing rockers (though there are youngsters too)? Part of the answer to that is the comfort of the familiar and eternal – and I don’t mean only songs that are up to half a century old. It’s a truth among other truths that religious observance is growing in some societal pockets, among Gen Z men for example.  

Cathedrals aren’t like parish churches, where you may feel part of a small community. Cathedrals are a part of the world, in all its harsh reality. Katherine Amphlett LINK has written here of Coventry cathedral (where Tull has played) and a feeling of how Christmas is far from twee in these settings – the Christmas story is hard and subversive. To my mind, it’s a story about persecution, homelessness, displacement, oppression, refugees and misogyny. 

A cathedral is big and strong enough to bring all that to. It always has been. We see some of that recognised in the audiences for these Christmas shows. Perhaps you’ll join us at a cathedral near you next year? Meanwhile, merry Christmas. 

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Article
Belief
Creed
Weirdness
4 min read

The angels called Melanie or Dave that dwell among us

The metaphysical is very much present in our mundane

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A station concourse with a light well above.
Waiting for an angel at London Bridge station.
Network Rail.

There’s either too much or too little written about angels. There’s the serious hermeneutical stuff of divine messengers from scripture. Then there’s the Hallmark sentimentality about guardians, watching over us as nannies may watch their children playing in the park, picking up and comforting them when knees are grazed. 

They’re supernatural, but appear in human form. It’s incarnational in its way. But there’s plenty to notice of angelic manifestation in regular human beings – that nurses are routinely dubbed angels is both exasperating and earned. 

This is the via media, a third way, for angels: They’re called Melanie or Dave, have mortgages, and dwell among us. It’s just that sometimes they’re angels. These thoughts come after an incident I just experienced at London Bridge station. 

We’d just returned from an extended train tour of southern Europe, celebrating a fortieth wedding anniversary and my seventieth birthday. We’d stopped for a bit of lunch between St Pancras and London Bridge and ran late for our Sussex connection. For the first time in three weeks a huge station elevator was out, with no lift in sight. 

A young woman, maybe 23, appeared from nowhere and offered to take the larger-but-lighter case, striding up with it in her glorious white trousers with gold stripes. Then, a second and a half later, a young man of similar age grabbed my smaller-but-heavier bag and carried it up like a small briefcase. 

“Are you two together?” I gasped in his wake. “No,” he said. “You will be at the top,” I replied. It was a crass thing to say. In the movie they would have been. But this was real life. Two commuters offering random acts of kindness, leaving me marvelling at how wonderful young people are. 

And we can leave it there. Two fit (in both senses) strangers noticing a couple, more than old enough to be their parents, struggling. It’s a facet of ageing to which I’m adjusting; I was shocked and surprised a couple of years ago when a young woman offered me her seat on the Underground. It seems so little time since it was the other way around. 

But there it is again. Ordinary people, transcendent behaviour. And, in a metaphysical sense, our young friends at London Bridge really would be together at the top, supported on angels’ wings, though they would laugh that off and the moment would be quickly forgotten. 

These are trivial moments of angelic intervention in ordinary life. But they can be scaled up. When Martine Wright lay mortally wounded with her legs beyond rescue in a bombed carriage of a tube train under Aldgate on 7th July 2005, in her trance of trauma she saw off-duty policewoman Elizabeth Kenworthy picking her way through the wreckage towards her, unquestionably saving her life. She has since described it as like an angel coming to collect her. And who would gainsay that? 

Again, these are flesh-and-blood people, not winged and shining-white seraphs. But they are possessed of the spirit of angels. Who can doubt the presence of angels in the darkest hell that was 7/7? Clearly not Ms Wright. 

These are instances of the human agency of angels. They possess their own reality. But then there are those who experience, as it were, the real thing. I recently encountered a woman and her son after a church service, who described her very recent conversion experience. 

In a moment of darkest despair (which I’m unable to relate), she called out for someone, anything. A figure appeared at her side and she fell into his/her arms. A dream, maybe? But so what if it was? Her life is renewed, as her affirms. 

For my own part, when my father died in 2000, I went to St Bride’s Church, nearby my office in London’s Fleet Street, and asked my friend there if he’d join me in lighting a candle and saying a prayer. Afterwards, as we stood at the little side altar, the figure of a homeless man strode purposefully up the narrow aisle, matted hair and beard, ragged clothes. 

He deliberately walked between us, lit another candle and placed it in the stand next to ours and stood for a moment looking at it. Then he simply walked out again. We knew the local homeless well – we ministered to them. But we’d never seen him before nor seen him since. And here’s another thing: we were intimately familiar with homeless hygiene, but this one had no smell. 

Are there angels? Yes, absolutely. They have no hierarchy. They’re just ever-present servants, from the company of heaven. As apparent to a young woman called Mary, who stuck her head into an empty tomb some time ago and was told the person she sought had gone before her, as to me just a day or two ago as white and gold trousers went before me, taking two steps at a time. 

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