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Evensong: People, Discoveries and Reflections on the Church in England
Parish churches have been at the heart of communities for more than a thousand years. But now, fewer than two in one hundred people regularly attend services in an Anglican church, and many have never been inside one. Since the idea of 'church' is its people, the buildings are becoming husks - staples of our landscapes, but without meaning or purpose. Some churches are finding vigorous community roles with which to carry on, but the institutional decline is widely seen as terminal.
Yet for Richard Morris, post-war parsonages were the happy backdrop of his childhood. In Evensong he searches for what it was that drew his father and hundreds like him towards ordination as they came home from war in 1945. Along the way we meet all kinds of people - archbishops, chaplains, campaigners, bell-ringers, bureaucrats, archaeologists, gravediggers, architects, scroungers - and follow some of them to dark places.
Part personal odyssey, part lyrical history, Evensong asks what churches stand for and what they can tell us; it explores why Anglicanism has often been fractious, and why it has become so diffuse. Spanning over two thousand years, it draws on new discoveries, reflects on the current state of the Church in England and ends amid the messy legacies of colonialism and empire.
Yet for Richard Morris, post-war parsonages were the happy backdrop of his childhood. In Evensong he searches for what it was that drew his father and hundreds like him towards ordination as they came home from war in 1945. Along the way we meet all kinds of people - archbishops, chaplains, campaigners, bell-ringers, bureaucrats, archaeologists, gravediggers, architects, scroungers - and follow some of them to dark places.
Part personal odyssey, part lyrical history, Evensong asks what churches stand for and what they can tell us; it explores why Anglicanism has often been fractious, and why it has become so diffuse. Spanning over two thousand years, it draws on new discoveries, reflects on the current state of the Church in England and ends amid the messy legacies of colonialism and empire.
- GenresHistory
336 pages, Hardcover
Published June 14, 2022
6 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
About the author
Richard Morris
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There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 3, 2024
I came across this book on display in the front of a bookshop. The title and subtitle caught my eye; the blurb on the back reinforced the impression that it would interest me. It was a false impression and I found it a struggle to keep reading it at times, though some passages and even some whole chapters did hold my interest and attention.
I thought that Evensong would reflect, from the point of view of a son of the vicarage, on the apparent slow decline of the Church in England. I was wrong. The Church referred to in the book is almost exclusively the Church of England as an institution, not the Church in England, and it rarely goes beyond external and peripheral matters. Also, the book consists more of rambling observation than reflection, detailed and sometimes fascinating though it is.
The first thing you meet in the book is a four-page ‘Glossary of Terms’, which includes Angel, Bishop, Monastery, Saint, etc, as well as lesser-known words like Antiphon, Glebe and Versicle. This suggests that the author wrote with people who have little knowledge of Christianity or the institution of the Church of England in mind.
If I had flipped past the glossary and read the ‘Preface’, I would have read: “Evensong contains three overlapping groups of memoirs … life in post-war parsonages … discoveries in and about churches … a search for what it was that drew my father and others towards ordination as they came home from war in 1945.” The book is a disjointed ramble through those three. No rabbit hole or side track is left unexplored, often in the sort of impressive detail that could only have been achieved with the aid of that great research assistant, Google. Such detail often left me asking, why are you telling us this? Why, for instance, does the author give us details like this of his father’s RAF training in Canada?
”The syllabus was divided into 446 periods which varied in length according to the subject. Straight lectures on subjects such as navigation, principles of flight, and meteorology (fifty-six, twenty-eight, and twenty-two periods, respectively) were of forty-five to fifty minutes.”
Act 1, growing up in the vicarage (Longbridge, Sanderstead, Battersea), I found interesting on a personal level, as I compared the author’s nomadic upbringing with mine as a missionary child. It was, however, not very personal and more about the peripherals of such a life (the state and layout of the vicarage, the parish magazine, etc.) than matters of faith and church life. We pick up almost nothing of what the author thought of his father’s faith and calling. The picture that emerges is of a vicar who is neither high nor low, neither Anglo-Catholic nor Evangelical but socially and politically active and for whom the details of faith and facts of the Bible are not so important.
In Act 2, we move abruptly on to the author’s work as Secretary to the Churches Committee of the Council for British Archaeology. Via rabbit holes on, amongst other things, church bells and controversial clergy, we reach the total dismantling and rebuilding of a country church, done to enable remedial safety work on old mine workings and described in diary detail. We also visit metal detectorist findings, Celtic inscriptions, the Jarrow Crusades, excavations at Monkwearmouth and the opening and failure of a museum called Bede’s World.
Suddenly we are transported to intensive care and the death of the author’s father, poignantly described. Thus, we find ourselves in Act 3. There, with the benefit of his father’s letters and records, the author reconstructs his early life and friendships, RAF training and war service, long courtship and marriage to the author’s mother. The most memorable and engaging chapter of the book is in this section. It describes, reconstructed from his letters, the author’s father’s intimate, long-distance relationship with his fiancée in Canada. Here we have the clearest glimpse of what their religious faith meant to them. They agree to pray at the same time across the time zones and go through the Compline (Night Prayer) liturgy together. Most gripping is the description of the father’s brief but intense flirtation with an attractive Italian chamber maid, while on leave in an Italian hotel. He confesses it all to his fiancée.
In all the description of how the author’s father proceeded from service life to ordination after the war—and gave his life to working in the Church of England—we get no hint of what set him on this path and what kept him pursuing it for fifty years. Nor do the author’s rather detached observations give us much clue as to his own faith position—except that he is neither high nor low church. The book ends in a very downbeat manner (in another rabbit hole), with the murder in a church in Zimbabwe of a clergyman the author knew when he was his father’s curate at Longbridge. The final words are somewhat sadly agnostic:
Peter, by now, will know what we cannot know, if there is anything to be known. For the rest of us it can only be a matter of faith.
I thought that Evensong would reflect, from the point of view of a son of the vicarage, on the apparent slow decline of the Church in England. I was wrong. The Church referred to in the book is almost exclusively the Church of England as an institution, not the Church in England, and it rarely goes beyond external and peripheral matters. Also, the book consists more of rambling observation than reflection, detailed and sometimes fascinating though it is.
The first thing you meet in the book is a four-page ‘Glossary of Terms’, which includes Angel, Bishop, Monastery, Saint, etc, as well as lesser-known words like Antiphon, Glebe and Versicle. This suggests that the author wrote with people who have little knowledge of Christianity or the institution of the Church of England in mind.
If I had flipped past the glossary and read the ‘Preface’, I would have read: “Evensong contains three overlapping groups of memoirs … life in post-war parsonages … discoveries in and about churches … a search for what it was that drew my father and others towards ordination as they came home from war in 1945.” The book is a disjointed ramble through those three. No rabbit hole or side track is left unexplored, often in the sort of impressive detail that could only have been achieved with the aid of that great research assistant, Google. Such detail often left me asking, why are you telling us this? Why, for instance, does the author give us details like this of his father’s RAF training in Canada?
”The syllabus was divided into 446 periods which varied in length according to the subject. Straight lectures on subjects such as navigation, principles of flight, and meteorology (fifty-six, twenty-eight, and twenty-two periods, respectively) were of forty-five to fifty minutes.”
Act 1, growing up in the vicarage (Longbridge, Sanderstead, Battersea), I found interesting on a personal level, as I compared the author’s nomadic upbringing with mine as a missionary child. It was, however, not very personal and more about the peripherals of such a life (the state and layout of the vicarage, the parish magazine, etc.) than matters of faith and church life. We pick up almost nothing of what the author thought of his father’s faith and calling. The picture that emerges is of a vicar who is neither high nor low, neither Anglo-Catholic nor Evangelical but socially and politically active and for whom the details of faith and facts of the Bible are not so important.
In Act 2, we move abruptly on to the author’s work as Secretary to the Churches Committee of the Council for British Archaeology. Via rabbit holes on, amongst other things, church bells and controversial clergy, we reach the total dismantling and rebuilding of a country church, done to enable remedial safety work on old mine workings and described in diary detail. We also visit metal detectorist findings, Celtic inscriptions, the Jarrow Crusades, excavations at Monkwearmouth and the opening and failure of a museum called Bede’s World.
Suddenly we are transported to intensive care and the death of the author’s father, poignantly described. Thus, we find ourselves in Act 3. There, with the benefit of his father’s letters and records, the author reconstructs his early life and friendships, RAF training and war service, long courtship and marriage to the author’s mother. The most memorable and engaging chapter of the book is in this section. It describes, reconstructed from his letters, the author’s father’s intimate, long-distance relationship with his fiancée in Canada. Here we have the clearest glimpse of what their religious faith meant to them. They agree to pray at the same time across the time zones and go through the Compline (Night Prayer) liturgy together. Most gripping is the description of the father’s brief but intense flirtation with an attractive Italian chamber maid, while on leave in an Italian hotel. He confesses it all to his fiancée.
In all the description of how the author’s father proceeded from service life to ordination after the war—and gave his life to working in the Church of England—we get no hint of what set him on this path and what kept him pursuing it for fifty years. Nor do the author’s rather detached observations give us much clue as to his own faith position—except that he is neither high nor low church. The book ends in a very downbeat manner (in another rabbit hole), with the murder in a church in Zimbabwe of a clergyman the author knew when he was his father’s curate at Longbridge. The final words are somewhat sadly agnostic:
Peter, by now, will know what we cannot know, if there is anything to be known. For the rest of us it can only be a matter of faith.
July 23, 2024
A very personal perspective on the Church of England by Church historian Richard Morris, son of a Parish Priest, and expert on church architecture and archaeology. It covers some history of the national church and a little detail on liturgy and custom, but mostly uses Morris's family history to illustrate how the Anglican church has evolved over the past eighty years. His father became a priest after the war, and Morris grew up in parsonages. We get some biographical information on his father's war time experiences as an RAF navigator, his long distance courtship with his Canadian mother, his journey to faith, and how the church changed during his multiple placements in parishes across the country. Well written and very accessible.
April 17, 2022
An enjoyable and entertaining rambling read.
September 18, 2024
An evocative but very rambling collection of things the author is interested in and/or has a personal connection to that are somewhat connected to the Church of England
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews