The Enduring Melody

Yesterday I received a letter which began:

"Dear Michael

As you have said on 'Room With A View' that you are going to be buying books, may I take the liberty of telling you about 2 more?

If I had to choose something to take with me to a Desert Island, after the Bible, I would choose The Enduring Melody. It is full of wisdom, courage, humour, culture, huge spiritual stature, a truly grace filled book. I’d also like a PC to look up all the wonderful references."

The other book Ann recommended was Learning to Dance. I ought really to have both books as they were written by Michael Mayne, who was Dean of Westminster Abbey when I was appointed to be vicar at Stanford in the Vale. I was interviewed for the job in the Jerusalem Chamber in the Abbey, as the Dean and Chapter had their turn as patrons, and in those days patrons really did the appointing. I don't think it was the Dean who interviewed me, but two of the Canons.

Michael Mayne had two bouts of debilitating ME, but The Enduring Melody was written at the time when he had terminal cancer of the jaw.

Here are three extracts from the attachments that Ann sent to whet my appetite.

"From that icy moment of diagnosis, when you know that everything has changed, I recognised two things. First that this would prove an unwanted but important test of the integrity of what I most deeply believed, both as a human being and as a priest: a kind of inquest on all those words spilled out of pulpits or in counselling others or at hospital bedsides. A few months earlier I had attempted to tease out what I had come to think of as ‘the enduring melody' of my life. This was the time to see how well it would stand up to the fiercest scrutiny.
"Secondly I felt the need in whatever lay ahead not to waste the experience, but to write about it as honestly and as I could day by day, both as a form of therapy and (hopefully) to bring something creative and redemptive out of an inevitably dark time."

"No-one has ever claimed that praying is easy. I may try to carve a few moments out of the day, or I may join others in worship, but very often my attention level is low and at once the distractions come: all kinds of trivia are washing round at the surface level of my mind and one thought leads to another, and I come to with a guilty jolt. It doesn’t improve with age. I take comfort from the fact that in our prayer life what matters is that a bit of me knows that there is deep within, deeper than all the occasional doubts and constant distractions, a Cantus Firmus, an awareness of and longing for the love of God as I have glimpsed it in those rare life affirming moments ( and will again). I guess that’s how it will continue to be, and that’s alright, for my desire is to recall the melody, knowing at the deepest level, that I am His, loved beyond my imagining and held by His grace."

 He reflects on the figure of Christ, standing out luminous against the prevailing night,

"That solitary figure stands at the heart of my own cantus firmus. If the atheists are proved right and I am proved wrong, if my deepest beliefs are what many dismiss as mere fairy tales; if there is nothing at the end but Prospero's 'such stuff / as dreams are made on, and our little life / is rounded with a sleep'; then I shall still not wish to have based this one precious life on other facts and allowed them to define and motivate all I have done. For, despite all the darkness, they have not only brought much persisting joy, but I can think of nothing that would have so satisfied my deepest and most haunting human desires, convictions and hopes."

And finally this comment from a piece written a few days after his death, which appealed to me for obvious reasons! His wife was Michael’s angel in human form. “What transforms such a time”, he writes, “is having someone beside you with whom you can share the journey, but it’s easy to downplay the cost to them. Theirs is a more difficult role, demanding patience and courage."

Thank you so much, Ann. You have succeeded in provoking me to read them!