The world is my parish
Every Friday since the start of the year I’ve walked the few miles from my home in Hackney into central London to visit my therapist. Recently, I’ve felt as though I’ve finally begun to get used to the strange process of opening myself up, both to myself and to him—although it remains difficult to work out what to do, what to say, how to process or not. I don’t think that will ever change, maybe it’s not meant to. Walking there this past Friday though, with the sun crackling on the bare skin of my neck and the first signs of spring all around, I realised that part of the process is that walk itself. When the grey months of late winter were at their worst, i thought often of taking public transport to the office, yet there’s something in that act of walking that I currently need.
From Hackney Road, I cut up through Columbia Road, past its bougie coffee shops, and head on out through Shoreditch. The first half of the walk is part I enjoy the least. It’s probably the familiarity of the area as much as anything else. I’ve lived in Hackney now for about a year, all of which has been in some form of lockdown, so I’ve got to know these streets as well as any in London. That sense starts to change when I cross the threshold of Old Street. Here the buildings get larger, the windows begin to gleam their opaque iridescence, signifying London’s particular form of commercial hub.
On the cusp of this transition, the walk takes me along Tabernacle Street. From here you can the rear of John Wesley’s chapel and, just poking through the dark iron gates, Wesley’s grave in the chapel’s rear yard. Here I stop for a moment or two and peer through the railings. The yard itself is wonderfully peaceful. It’s perennially green, with its open courtyard contrasting sharply with the narrow roads and looming yellow-brick buildings of this part of the East End. I’ve known about the chapel for a few years, but until about two years ago I’d never ventured inside. When I did, it was about as disappointing an experience as you’d imagine. Doubly so as I was expecting, ridiculously, for an epiphany. Perhaps not religious, but I wanted, needed even, something to open out for me, a revelation, an unfolding of the intimate past into the personal present. I could only have been disappointed.
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John Wesley was born in Epworth, Lincolnshire in 1703. Although both of his grandfathers were dissenters, both having given up their comforts on St. Bartholomew’s day in 1662 rather than sign the Act of Uniformity, his childhood gave little sign of his own later dissent. Both his parents had returned to the Church, and his father was an Anglican clergyman, yet there was in such familial atmosphere an emphasis on trusting one’s own particular faith, a desire to remain true to one’s own convictions.
By 1720, John had entered Christ Church, Oxford, as a commoner, and it was at Oxford that the root of much of his later religious evangelism can be seen. There, he came under the influence of the Cambridge Platonists, notably John Smith and Ralph Cudworth, two philosophical titans of Early Modern England. Much of this particular brand of Platonism was based on an insistence upon an inner mystical experience, and although Wesley rejected parts of this mysticism, the emphasis on inner experience was to remain throughout his life. It was also at Oxford that he was to form the Holy Club.
After two years away from university life attending to his father’s parish at Wroot as a curate, on his return in 1729 we joined a small informal society that had been founded by his brother Charles, along with Robert Kirkham and William Morgan, some years before. The aim of the club was to deepen their own faith by collective reading of scripture and long discussions. John soon became the leading figure, and the Holy Club expanded, bringing in several of the notable figures of early Methodism like George Whitefield and James Hervey. This club was soon known as Methodists, a name John accepted, saying that “A Methodist is one who lives according to the method laid down in the Bible.”
After several years missionary work in the colony of Georgia, an experience that was for Wesley intensely disillusioning and which ended with a civil charge against him after a failed engagement, he fled back to England. This American journey was to prove a pivotal experience however, as he later reflected:
“I went to America to covert the Indian: but O! who shall convert me? who, what is he that will deliver me from the evil heart of unbelief.”
Wesley was often to wrestle with such unbelief, both in himself and in others. It was, in many ways, at the root of his evangelical crusade. In his later years, at the age of 67 as he journeyed between Staffordshire and Manchester, he calculated just how far his labours of faith had taken him. Following his first trip to Bristol in 1739, where he heard Whitefield preach in the open air, he estimated that he had ridden some hundred thousand miles across much of England and Wales, everywhere he travelled he would sit with an open book resting upon the horses’ saddle, the reins slack in front of him, trusting his horse not to stumble and send him and his reading flying across the road.
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When people cease to believe in God, remarked G.K. Chesterton, they don’t believe in nothing but in anything. Perhaps so, but most would want to believe themselves less credulous than this. My own unbelief is one that I wish I could so easily wish away. I wish I could believe in Chesterton’s anything, even Chesterton’s God. It’s not for lack of trying either. I feel an incompleteness that feels God-shaped, even if I have no idea what shape that Deity might be.
A lot of what I’ve discussed in therapy over these three months has been the idea of home, the need for roots and family, the deeply felt urge for community. We may, on the left as well as the right, think that there is no longer any such thing as society, that we are all autonomous and atomised individuals bowling alone, but that is far from the truth. The pandemic has, if little else, brought home just how tangled up in society’s web, from the key workers who silently make our lives possible, to those friends and family members we’ve often longed for, the connections made dull by Zoom calls that we want made real once more.
There’s another part of the yearning for roots, and that’s a need I have to feel connected to my family. I had little of this as a child. My parents worked long hours, leaving my sister and I alone for long stretches. Around the time I was coming to maturity, my grandparents died and the broader family network that they’d held together splintered, forming another abyss between myself and the past to open up.
From childhood, I remember spending the occasional Sunday at a chapel with my maternal grandparents. I remember little of the service, other than that it was conducted by a local pig farmer whose huge booming singing voice caused much mirth for the children in attendance. I do remember though, mainly from the disparaging way that my other set of grandparents (staunchly proper CoE that they were) would refer to them, that my mother’s family was Methodist.
If there’s one thing that people on the left will know Wesleyanism for, it’s E.P. Thompson’s dismissal of it as "psychic masturbation", and Wesley as a "promiscuous" opportunist. The argument, taken from the early pages of The Making of The English Working Class, runs something like: even though from Methodist meetings and organising many radicals emerged and many others learnt their organisational skills, its “inhibition of all spontaneity” and intense inwardness was to prove a huge burden upon revolutionary organisation in Britain. Thompson himself would surely have been aware of some of the issues of Methodism, raised as he was in the chapels of Oxford like many others on the New Left, not least that other great historian Christopher Hill, yet his contempt for the influence of the faith was undimmed even nearly 20 years later. In the introduction to the 1980 edition of the book he remarked that he “remain[ed] unrepentant as to my treatment of Methodism.”
And yet, knowing all of this, I still wanted to feel some connection to the faith of my grandparents. The chapel building was constructed in the late 1770s under the direction of Wesley, and architecturally the exterior is a fine example of Georgian church construction. The inside was refurbished after a fire in the late 1800s, and as I entered it, I was running late for the tour. I arrived into the group just as the tour guide was extolling the wonders of that great daughter of Methodism Margaret Thatcher, marvelling as she was at the wonderful spectacle of Maggie and Denis tying the knot under their chapel’s gleaming white and gold ceiling.
Thatcher is, in many ways, the perfect embodiment of the Methodist spirit. The daughter of shopkeepers in Grantham, her constant emphasis on self-reliance and respectability conforms with much of the church’s teachings. There were however rifts within the congregation. Another branch emerged in the early 1800s on Mow Cop, just a few miles from my hometown of Crewe. There, under the influence of an American evangelical, camp meetings formed lead by local labourers Hugh Bourne and William Clowes in an attempt to resurrect some of Wesley’s evangelical zeal, and return Methodism to the people. From these meetings was born the Primitive Methodists, the branch of the church that my grandparents were a part.
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Last time I went to see my mother, I wanted to hear more about her religious upbringing. When I asked her about it, however, she was confused. Why would anyone care about that? After some nudging and prompting, she described the church, but it was, according to her, only ever a few inches deep. My grandparents only went infrequently, and then mainly to see their friends and neighbours. I could only have been disappointed. Perhaps we can never go home.