Wordwatch: Lenten
This edition of Wordwatch ought to be celebrating John Keats, who died at the age of 25 in Rome two hundred years ago, on the 23 February. It wasn’t Covid that got him, of course, but the scourge of those times, tuberculosis, or consumption. Afflictions almost more terrifying as there was no treatment for them – except the warmer Italian air, which did poor Keats no good at all. And some people thought colder air was the answer: hospitals were built in the mountains, as vividly described in Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain. Thankfully, we seem to be on a more promising track with Covid now, and we must hope as we begin Lent that Easter this year will indeed realise the “crocus of hope pushing up through the frost” which the Prime Minister so memorably evoked for us the other day.
Talking of Lent, my local parish church has been spreading the love by distributing “Lent bags”, which we’ve been invited to make use of during the season of reflection and self-assessment that remembers Christ’s forty days in the wilderness. I’ve been investigating the contents of those Lent bags; a palm cross, a small stone, a tiny roundel of glass mirror, and a sheet of paper calling itself “a Take a Compliment poster” for duplication and passing on to neighbours. Here is some of it: “dear you, yes … YOU are AMAZING! Have a beautiful day!” There are tearable strips with sentiments such as: “you are worth it”, “you are talented”, “your smile is beautiful”, “you are treasured”, “you can make it happen”, “you are unique”.
These are the ideas one might find on a cornflakes packet, or in the aisles of a supermarket. The little stone and bit of mirror seem to be either Voodoo or Wicca – does the Church recognise those associations? Perhaps it thinks they demonstrate the ‘cultural inclusiveness’ that has become a new government worry.
This is how the Biblical injunction to “love one another” is translated into contemporary language. It’s a step further than the twentieth-century translations of the King James Bible and Cranmer’s Prayer Book that a great linguistic scholar and historian of the English language, Robert Burchfield, has described as “grievous beyond all knowing”. While those unsurpassed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts have embedded themselves deep in our everyday language, Burchfield couldn’t envisage any long-term future for the “cloth-eared” banalities and uglinesses the Church has now adopted for regular use in its liturgy.
Keats was in love not only with “easeful death” but also with the ancient gods and spirits that people the landscapes of his long poems and his Odes. He had very little time for modern religion, which he considered “vulgar superstition”. He famously said: “Love is my religion. I could die for that”, and he used language wonderfully in the service of that creed. It’s a fantasy of mine: what sort of a liturgy would the Church of England have today if Keats had lived, like Wordsworth, to become a conservative and to compose a new Book of Common Prayer?