Turning Up The Dimmer Switch

As I've been (mainly) off this week, I was able to catch bits of Tuesday's edition of the Today programme on Radio 4, guest-edited by historian Tom Holland. Mr Holland's biggest work so far has been Dominion, in which he traces the influence of Christianity on the culture of the West. Maybe he told part of his own story when interviewed for UnHerd alongside Nick Cave earlier this year; but if so, I hadn't heard it, so here are his words to Amol Rajan a couple of days ago. He'd been given a cancer diagnosis:

They said, this looks terrible. It’s probably spread to your lymph nodes, we’ll let you know the results of all the scans we’re going to give you before Christmas so you don’t have it hanging over you. And Christmas Eve came, and there was nothing. And I went to Midnight Mass at St Bartholomew the Great. And so I sat there and thought, I might as well give it a go. So I made a wholehearted prayer for the first time since I was about ten, I should think. This church is very distinctive because it’s part of a medieval priory and the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared there, it’s the only recorded appearance of the Virgin Mary in London. I went to the place where the Virgin is supposed to have appeared, and I said Come on, please help me out here, because I was that desperate! And my brother James turned out to have been at university with and shared a flat with the daughter of the surgeon, this great man called Bill Hill, who developed this technique where you cut out the infected section of the bowel, and he said, I’ll get in touch with him … And he managed to see the scans and they weren’t nearly as bad as had been thought … I really felt as though I’d massively dodged a bullet there. My rational side says, It’s a reflection of luck, or of privilege … But another part of me did think, Goodness, I’ve been a participant in a medieval miracle. I was a Protestant atheist, and then a Protestant agnostic, and I like the idea that if there’s a God he has such a sense of humour that it was the Virgin Mary who intervened … maybe this is a way I can believe in it, and it makes life much more interesting. … The dimmer switch has definitely gone back up. When I read about medieval people who had a personal devotion to the Virgin, I can now nurture that possibility of a personal devotion to the Virgin in a way that would have seemed – well, I might as well have been sacrificing animals to Athena or something. It’s like a fire I can warm my hands by, and I make sure I keep that fire alight.

I thought this was great - sceptical and yet leading, very gently and very indeterminately, in the direction, not just of Christian spirituality, but of this kind of Christian spirituality. And perhaps the nicest point is that Mr Holland comments with a historian's fastidiousness that the Virgin's manifestation at St Bartholomew's, Smithfield, is her only recorded appearance in London, because of course she may have been around without it being committed to the record.

Picture is another St Bartholomew's, Brighton's, where I was this afternoon. Happy New Year everyone!