Kaleidoscope III 
The Beauty of Holiness
I grew up in a Baptist church, and in a fundamentalist faith. The church building was extremely plain but on the front wall behind the pastor’s pulpit there was a fresco - a light blue vista with the words ‘Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.’ I spent long parts of my childhood and teenage years looking at those words. I often wondered what the beauty of holiness looked like.
My parents were church members all their life – it was where they were married and where their burial services took place. Although they observed Baptist theology they weren’t harsh or punitive. We just didn’t do certain things – it probably sounds like a long list – no smoking, drinking, dancing, no going to the cinema, observing the Sabbath, attending church etc etc but when I was young I knew no different way of living.
So I grew up with the language and cadences of the Bible. These were the first stories I heard. That language and those stories are an enduring part of who I am even though I now adhere to no religious faith. I was fond of the miracles – feeding the five thousand, stilling the storm, bringing the dead back to life, making the blind see, turning water into wine. Although I don’t necessarily believe them now in any literal sense I still find they have a powerful resonance. I think it’s the power of possibility, that somehow, even the most deadening restrictions and realities of life can be transcended, wrought in a new way through the imagination or the unexpected blossoming of love.
There is also an Old Testament story where the Children of Israel are in the wilderness and bitten by snakes. God tells Moses to raise up a pole with a bronze serpent and anyone who looks up at it in faith will be healed. I am conscious of this recurring image in my work – the act of raising the eyes to something beyond ourselves to find some form of healing. A bit like Tom in Travelling in a Strange Land when he encounters the Angel of the North. But this imagery was present right from the start of my writing career. My first collection of short stories, Oranges from Spain, had a story called The Red Kite about an unsuccessful trip to the seaside that is marred by a not fully understood coldness between the boy narrator’s parents and which ends, ‘Silently crouching down in the sand, he thought of his mother and father sitting in the car, and wished they would look up, if only people would look up at this red kite, everyone would be cured and everything would be well.’
In my later teenage years when I stumbled into a discovery of literature it was mostly through American writers. And suddenly I discovered a different set of miracles and different worlds– an old man who struggles to bring ashore his catch, Rose of Sharon suckling a dying man, Holden Caulfield standing in the rain mesmerised by a memory of his sister as he watches a child going round and round on a carousel.
As a writer I think I frequently search for spiritual emblems or symbols in a secular world – something that lifts the soul from earthly restraints. From the weakness of the flesh. From despair. Finding salvation in the beauty of art, in the love of a child, in the natural world. In my favourite film, Babette’s Feast, Babette spends all she owns to create a sensual meal of delight for the religious community who have given her shelter. They are a plain living people who associate pleasure with sin but gradually they understand the holiness of the art offered to them and feel it bring a barely understood vision of a different world, one which reaches deeply into their souls.
I am also interested in the Biblical image of transfiguration, of light suddenly illuminating human existence. I went to the Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam in 2023. Somehow without fully understanding how it happened we were the first admissions on the first day. It was a powerful experience to see many of the paintings in the flesh that I only knew from reproductions. I love the way Vermeer can illuminate lived experience – a woman in a kitchen pouring milk, a woman reading a letter. The way a seemingly ordinary moment is plucked from the relentless flow of life and imbued with a luminous beauty. I referenced A Woman Reading a Letter (1663) in The Light of Amsterdam and it is a painting I turn to often. There is the beauty of the image, the way light falls on her face, the iridescent blue of her costume, the supreme sense of stillness and of course the mystery of the letter. What does it contain that she holds it so tightly, reads so intently? The image speaks of the power of narrative, our need to know how a story ends, even though this one holds itself outside our grasp through the passing centuries.
I find great inspiration in art, take great pleasure from it. There are also lessons to be learned. In my study close to where I write I have a postcard image of one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits. It must surely have been a temptation to leave an enhanced image of himself for posterity. But what he gives us is his face aged and unmasked, riven with the sufferings of life and to one side of the painting there is a darkness that seems to be seeping towards him. And why Rembrandt’s self-portrait is important to me is because it reminds me that whatever falsities and deceptions might exist in my personal life, in my art I must above all things aspire to be true. And art that is true is never about the promotion of self, never about giving what will easily please, never presenting life as how you’d like it to be as opposed to how it really is. It’s sadly not about ageing beautifully but ageing truthfully and as I look up at that image of Rembrandt what I understand is how when the shadows creep slowly but inexorably towards him, there is some impulse, potentially even stronger that compels him to create, to try and shape something that might endure, endure by lodging deep in the viewer’s heart and in so doing step outside the confinement of time itself.
I understand now that my novel Travelling in a Strange Land has many religious images, sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious – the Christmas lights; the Angel of the North and the little tent that Tom leaves under the Angel’s wings; the idea of a pilgrimage or holy journey. Tom’s photos become like holy objects or icons. I like the child’s tent a lot. I saw it in the shop window of a toy shop once when I was stopped at traffic lights and in the story put it in the boot of Tom’s car as he sets out on his journey but had no inkling of how important a part it would play in the story. It becomes an offering of love and perhaps most importantly an act of love to a stranger, someone Tom will never see. A shelter from the storm of life. I think at its very best a book can offer a reader a place to shelter, to take stock in the face of life’s chaos. And the best books are themselves written out of love.
As I reach the end of my writing career I have experienced my own miracle – a child born in old age. So now I have a granddaughter just turned four years old. A red-haired, blue-eyed child who loves to sing and dance, who is excited by and curious about the world. A child who somehow has quickened me into a newness of life even now in my seventies. She loves to make things work and when she comes into my study she presses the switch on my desk lamp while she tells me, ‘I’ll turn the light on for you.’ The miraculous light falls across my keyboard and all my future days.
When my father died there were accepted rituals followed by the church members. I knew it would be personally difficult to return once more to my parents’ church and the place where I had spent so much of my childhood. I knew too that I would look up once more at that blue vista exhorting me to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. In my mother’s faith women didn’t attend the grave burial. But in the moment before I left to walk with my father’s coffin she handed me two envelopes. ‘For the gravediggers,’ she said and urged me with obvious concern not to forget. Even at this time of loss she was possessed of a desire to do a kindness, to do the right thing by others. To people she would never see.
I loved my mother dearly – she had a deep compassion for people and on the day we buried her I finally understood what the beauty of holiness was. It was what she displayed throughout her life – an enduring sense of kindness to every living soul who crossed her path. And on the occasions when I have failed to reach that same holiness I feel the shame of coming short.
When she was being buried snow was falling. The two grave diggers stood at a respectful distance, leaning on their long-handled shovels, their shoulders slowly dressed in white. And when the minister’s words finally fell silent and people started to turn towards shelter, it seemed as important as anything in those final moments that I should thank them in the truest tribute to her memory. That I should hand them two envelopes.
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Kaleidoscope III