Learning to Dance
Michael MayneDLT £9.95 (0-232-52434-3)
It is Lent and so a confession is appropriate. I know a book reviewer who does not always read every word of the book he reviews. But I did read every word of this book. And kept thinking of people to whom I must give a copy. It is Mayne at his best, reflecting in retirement on life, science, literature, music, art, heaven and everything. His rich life as a priest, Head of BBC Radio’s Religious Broadcasting, Dean of Westminster, Vicar of Great St Mary’s Cambridge, all feed into a book that is both an apologetic for the reasonableness of Christianity, and an autobiography of the interior life.
The twelve chapters follow the months of the year and themes reflected in the medieval Books of Hours. So April moves from gardening to explore the vastness of the cosmos and is an excellent explanation of contemporary cosmology in ordinary language. (There are a couple of terminological and mathematical slips here to keep pedants on their toes.) June takes us romping through hay-making and thence through the startling wonders of DNA, including an investigation of ‘consciousness’.
“I wept when I was born, and every day shows why.” These words of George Herbert’s open August and from the Book of Hours’ depictions of ‘threshing’ we ‘dance in the dark’, contemplating the awful pain of our world and the problem of evil. September follows on with a movingly illustrated chapter on forgiveness, viewed both theologically and politically. The author has the ability to discuss these issues without sounding glib and yet making a real contribution to our understanding of the complexities and tensions of our faith.
Underlying everything is Mayne’s conviction of the worthwhileness of being human; his conviction that our universal sense of wonder points us relentlessly to God; his expectation that ‘the perpetual present tense of living’ (John Updike) will eventually embrace all that we have been and bring us to completion in eternity. Thus December leads us to Easter and to heaven and to the hope of the Gospel.
Of course not everybody likes Mayne’s style. He has an encyclopaedic mind and at times you feel you have wandered into a book of quotations, with gems like Derek Jarman’s “The Word made goose flesh” and Samuel Butler’s assertion that the true test of our imagination is the ability to name a cat. But I agree with Dame Cicely Saunders’ foreword: ‘This is an enchanted and enchanting book.’
Church Times
