Alicia floated in a moment where everything made sense, and her own and others thoughts were all part of one great whole that contained all of humanity, the world, its knowledge, and the reality of everything seen and unseen. She had experienced this moment only once or twice before in her life, and she knew it for what it was; that unique instance when time stood still, the moment that sportsmen described everything had slowed, and they knew they had scored the goal before their foot even struck the ball; a moment when anything was possible. It may last seconds, or minutes, or perhaps even an hour, but then it would be gone, almost as if it had never been there at all. Except that it had been, and Alicia sat within it as long as it would last. For in this particular moment, she understood the truth as well as the power of Nigel’s words, and of Loraine’s, and others.
‘For me,’ she continued, ‘I want to continue to find the unseen, to describe it, and to understand that meeting point of science with the spiritual. Because I do believe there is one. I’d probably go as far as saying that they’re one and the same if it wasn’t for the possibility that my colleagues would then believe I’m completely crazy.’
Alicia felt the moment receding and savoured its last touch. ‘But it’s a cause of great happiness for any scientist – any person at all I think – when they discover some part of the meaning for our existence. There’s a euphoria comes from knowing. All scientists, whether or not they would admit it, are searching for some part of the equation that is meaning. It’s what we all do. It’s the thing that gives any one of us the greatest happiness – knowledge. Despite that, as you say, we can’t know that much.’
‘Ready to leave us now, Maitland?’ Rose teased.
‘Yes, indeed, that was perfect thank you. Should I do so, my sweet’ – he turned to Rose – ‘then I should surely enter heaven,’ joked Maitland. ‘Thank you so much,’ he said to Alicia. ‘You have given us so much this evening. I’m overjoyed. I cannot describe my elation at the confluence of both your contributions,’ he acknowledged Nigel.
‘Well, I’m very pleased to be here, thank you,’ replied Alicia. ‘And that’s exactly it, Maitland, I agree – a confluence.’
‘A unity even,’ he added, turning to Loraine, beaming.
‘It is,’ Loraine responded, ‘a unity of science and religion.’
‘But this idea of time,’ Pete returned to an earlier point, addressing Nigel, ‘and to …’ Pete struggled with his thoughts, ‘to … influence the past. It’s not possible.’
‘Yes, it is,’ replied Alicia, and the two, husband and wife, looked at each other..
‘At least in theory,’ Alicia continued. ‘It’s complicated.’
‘And does it matter, Peter,’ Nigel added, ‘in which direction your influence spreads?’
‘No, I suppose not,’ replied Pete.
Pete sat back, unsure what he had gained from the evening, knowing there was some truth spinning around him that he’d not grasped hold of yet. He looked across to his wife and noted that she had definitely embedded herself among those present. She shone just a little, he thought.
Maitland reached across the table to shake Nigel’s hand, as conversation split into twos and threes; Maitland pursued the nature of belief with Nigel, and Rose moved around to Alicia to talk. Pete smiled at Loraine, who gestured him to follow her; apparently it was time to bring in food and drink. Pete circled the table, brushing his hand across Alicia’s shoulder as he passed her. She smiled, obviously content to be here after all her protestations, and resumed her chat with Rose.
Loraine pointed Pete at a collection of glasses and cups, along with various bottles to be unscrewed or corked, and disappeared through to the kitchen, returning with already made-up plates of lamingtons and sandwiches.
As he passed glasses and cups out, Pete felt oddly detached from the group, although that did not bother him and his head was spinning from the discussion and the uncertainties it held for him. He was thrilled that Alicia had apparently taken a lot of pleasure from the evening, and he looked forward to exploring some of the ideas with her more. She had changed in recent weeks, to so great an extent he felt almost at sea trying to understand her state of mind. She was paying more attention to him, as well as to their children, and less to her work. It was as though she’d woken up, realised there was a life she was a party to.
He looked over to Maitland, engaged in mirthful discussion. Pete saw a man deeply loyal to his Faith, with an unshakeable love for humanity, and a heart ready and waiting for a kind act to pursue.
Next to him another stranger-become-friend arriving from who-knows-where to provide a compelling reality for stretching the dimensions of thought and spirit.
Pete poured himself a cup of tea and sat down again, not yet participating, continuing his scan. Rose and Loraine’s generosity and influence seemed unmatched. They had an uncanny knack for finding the intelligent and gracious, always welcomed and never judged. Their good humour, and acceptable level of – at least in Pete’s mind – of irreverence, drew others to them and provided an unlikely opportunity for the growth of a small, caring community of enquiry.
Pete loved these people. Theirs was not a company that desired more of him than he had to give, nor anything other than his willing presence and his deepest thoughts: both of which it was his pleasure to give. On this night though, and for a while yet, he would keep his and his family’s changing destiny to himself. He had come here to find meaning in the otherwise apparent emptiness of a small child’s life, his son. Along the way he had found greater definition of his own life, and evidently now he witnessed Alicia’s renewal as well.
Was it simply that he took pleasure in an ongoing debate of sorts, with people he liked, or had there become more to his engagement with this world, as indeed he believed? He had few or adequate words for what he now believed to be an unseen world inhabited by more than what his five senses told him. Nonetheless, his senses would on occasion remind him that potentially there was no meaning but that which his imagination alone conjured. These thoughts though gave him little pleasure; indeed, none at all. And that his scientist wife now weighed in on the deliberations gave him enormous satisfaction. The future held appeal, but it was the present that was the origin of that future, and by far the greatest investment he knew he could make in the now was the creation of happiness, and helping provide that for others was increasingly a key to his own contentment.
Alicia caught Pete’s eye and tapped her watch. He was sorry to have to go, but he also wanted to spend time alone with Alicia. Saying goodbye could take a while as well when some farewells became the start of new conversations.
‘I’m sorry I’ve just met you and now I’m leaving,’ Nigel declared, standing to shake both their hands. ‘I’m returning to Syria tomorrow,’ he continued.
‘Syria? My!’ Alicia exclaimed.
‘Oh, family business.’ Nigel smiled. ‘We will try to meet again,’ he assured them. ‘But really I don’t think you need me now.’
There were smiles and gestures all around, with kisses on cheeks and pats on backs, and arrangements were made for other gatherings, as a real family would do at someone’s departure. Alicia revealed her genuine pleasure at the evening, and Pete was reminded of a pride he’d once taken in having a wife of charm and beauty and intelligence. The memory descended into his present reality such that a period of several intervening years all but disappeared into a catch-all of distant remembrances that were no longer quite real.
Pete took Alicia’s hand, eager to steer her out faster. Finding their way into the hall he took her coat and scarf from the stand by the door, holding the one for her and wrapping the other about her neck gently. He quickly wrapped his own coat around him, opening the door for Alicia. On the pavement he took her arm through his and hurried off towards the Exchequer Gate.
‘What’s the hurry?’ Alicia whistled against the cold wind.
‘Just keeping warm.’ He grinned back.
Circling around and under
the arch, Pete stopped and pulled Alicia to him, wrapping his arms around her and burying his nose into her neck. Rubbing his cheek against hers, he turned his face to his wife and kissed her.
There was no surprise for Alicia as she sunk into her husband’s embrace and kiss. A dim light crackled inside the arch and Alicia drew back with a giggle.
‘What’s happening in your world?’ She grinned at her husband.
‘I don’t know. But I like it.’ He grinned back, and then kissed her again.
22
Wednesday, 12 September 2001, New York City
Tim begins his Masters programme at Columbia today. It’s been difficult to find the right supervisor – Lissy would be ideal but it’s not a good look, and anyway she is overrun with exciting graduates. America has been such a wonderful academic environment for her – so imaginative.
Tim is very focused – as only he can be – and his quirky ways have sat comfortably in this setting – it’s New York after all.
A postcard from Jillie – she’s arrived in the Sudan with Medicin sans Frontieres. She misses us already.
Email from Rose and Loraine – thinking of hanging up their cassocks and moving to warmer climes. Not sure they could be too far from their adored Cathedral though. Apparently Little St Hugh has been cordoned off – too many children sitting on his tomb thinking it’s a seat. How Tim loved that spot. I must ask him if he remembers it.
Maitland passed on last week. So sad. He’d become a stalwart of the interfaith movement in Lincoln, and much loved. The girls would have given him a superb send-off I’m sure. Would have packed the Magna Carta, no doubt.
Sadat has won a second Nobel – unprecedented. The Middle East continues to avoid disaster – precarious nonetheless but a great care is given continuously from all the West’s leaders. There are oddball crazies everywhere but some sanity prevails among a united world leadership. Perhaps this new millennium may bring a new peace after all.
A small note: a National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Iran was elected in Teheran, after a twenty-year ban. Maitland would have liked that. Who knows – maybe he had something to do with it!
It’s been a stunning autumn day – leaves turning in the Park.
New York is very chilled out. Well, it is New York.
Fact or Fiction
All characters are fictitious accepting obvious and real historical characters, and others, perhaps less well known, as noted below.
Torksey and Nocton Fen are towns in Lincolnshire with roughly the geographic relationship to Lincoln as the story describes.
The Foss Dyke is the oldest canal in England constructed by the Romans around ad 120 and still in use. It connects the Trent at Torksey to the Witham at Lincoln, and is about 18 km (11 mi) long.
Brayford Pool in Lincoln is where the Foss Dyke meets the river Witham.
The 1185 earthquake destroyed most of Lincoln Cathedral; it is not known what effect it had on the Foss Dyke. Most of the West Front of the cathedral was left standing, and rather than being pulled down and rebuilt, it was incorporated into the new building. Probably this was for financial reasons. At any rate there is a mismatch in parts of the Nave where the ‘old’ and ‘new’ were joined up, creating very noticeable, but interesting, irregularities and asymmetries, in the vaulting in particular. The Great Transept and the Nave were completed in 1240, although the central tower collapsed just prior to this, and its rebuilding was not completed until 1256.
The Brayford Pool is known for its large population of Mute Swans (Cygnus olor). The swans made the news headlines in 2004 over concerns about the animals’ diet and overall health.
There is no Physics Department at Lincoln University..
The Bell Test experiments were conducted by Alain Aspect in Paris in 1981. These showed that Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen’s reductio ad absurdum of quantum mechanics appeared to be realised when two particles were separated by an arbitrarily large distance. A correlation between their wave functions remained, as they were once part of the same wave function that was not disturbed before one of the child particles was measured. Aspect’s experiments were considered to provide support to the thesis that Bell’s inequalities were violated. Bell’s theorem states: No physical theory of local hidden variables can ever reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, a local hidden variable theory is one in which distant events are assumed to have no instantaneous effect on local ones.
A personal family friend, bearing little resemblance to the Loraine of this story, did in fact see a ‘falling star’, and did make the prediction about a world leader’s attempted assassination, precisely the evening before the attempt made on Ronald Reagan’s life by John Hinckley.
All references to the inside of Lincoln Cathedral stem from fact.
The Shrine of Little Hugh is real, but it in fact dates from 1255. It is indeed the shrine of a small boy supposedly killed and mutilated by the Jews in Lincoln. In the few years prior to this, anti-Semitic feeling in England had led to many murder charges being brought against Jews. The story goes that the young boy was ritually murdered and his body discovered at the bottom of a well. A local Jew was found who ‘confessed’ that the Jews did this annually as a ritual act; he was tried and executed. The boy’s body was placed in the Cathedral, and he was venerated as a saint and martyr, although he was never canonised. Six months earlier, Henry III had sold his rights to tax the Jews to his brother, Richard, Earl of Cornwall. Having lost this source of income, he decided that he was eligible for the Jews’ money if they were convicted of crimes. Ninety-two Jews were arrested and held in the Tower of London and were charged with involvement in the ritual murder. Eighteen of them were hanged, and Henry was able to take over their property. The remainder were pardoned and set free, most likely because Richard, who saw a potential threat to his own source of income, intervened on their behalf with his brother. Anti-Semitic feeling was also high during Bishop Hugh’s time, and the Bishop was one of their noted defenders. When the tomb was opened in 1791, the child’s body was found intact, bearing no evidence of the mutilation alleged to have taken place. In 2009, an interfaith project between the Lincolnshire Jewish Community and Lincoln Cathedral developed the wording for a sign that now rests on the wall above and to the right of the Shrine of Little Hugh. It tells the story of Little Hugh and concludes: This libel against the Jews is a shameful example of religious and racial hatred which continuing down through the ages violently divides many people in the present day. Let us unite here in a prayer for an end to bigotry, prejudice and persecution. Peace be with you. Shalom.
Towards the south-east of the cathedral, more or less opposite the Shrine of Little Hugh, there is a fairly innocuous carved wall known as the Stonemason’s practice wall. The blocks are those of apprentice stonemasons who carved these practice shapes to perfect their skills before embarking on more important carvings elsewhere in the Cathedral.
The Harvard experiment in prayer, described by the character Maitland, was conducted in 2006 by Dr Herbert Benson of the Harvard Medical School and measured the therapeutic effect of intercessory prayer in cardiac bypass patients.
The Wig & Mitre and Magna Carta are real pubs, the former on Steep Street at the top of Lincoln Hill, a short (steep) stroll from the Cathedral, the latter at the top of Steep Street, in the square.
The Stowe parish church is commonly known as Stowe Minster and sometimes referred to as the Mother Church of Lincolnshire. Its full name is the Minster Church of St Mary, Stowe in Lindsey. It was built in 1040 on the ruins of a church predating the arrival of the Danes in 870. Bishop Remigius refounded it as an abbey in 1091 and brought monks there from Eynsham in Oxfordshire. However, these monks were well gone by the time of Bishop Hugh, having been returned to Eynsham about five years after they arrived, by Bishop Remigius’ successor.
Hugh of Avalon was Bishop of Lincoln. A Frenchman, and procurator of the monastery at Saint-Maximin, Hugh was a
ppointed prior at Witham in Somerset at the request of Henry II in 1179. Hugh was not elected Bishop of Lincoln until 25 May 1186, being consecrated on 21 September that same year; That is to say, a year following the earthquake in 1185 that destroyed much of the cathedral. For the purpose of this fiction, Hugh is placed in the Diocese as Bishop prior to the earthquake. He died in November 1200 and was canonised by Pope Honorius III in 1220. He is the Patron Saint of sick children, sick people, and swans.
Hugh’s primary emblem is a white swan, in reference to the story of the swan of Stowe which had a deep and lasting friendship for the Saint, even guarding him while he slept. The swan would follow him about and was his constant companion.
Hugh did stand up to King Henry over taxes, among other things.
Henry II had either commissioned the assassination of Thomas Becket himself or else a handful of his loyal knights had taken it upon themselves; either way Henry suffered considerable penance, including having to establish the Witham monastery, and even, in 1172, being flogged in public, naked, before the door of the cathedral at Avranches, which was his capital city in Normandy. He did also promise to go on Crusade. There is no evidence to suggest that Hugh of Avalon witnessed Henry’s public flogging at Avranches in 1172.
Pope Lucius III was pope from 1181 until his death in November 1185. He spent most of his short pontificate in exile, at monasteries around Rome, and in Verona in northern Italy. History occasionally records that it was Lucius who began the Inquisition, but this in fact began in the reign of Gregory IX in 1234. Lucius began preparations for the Third Crusade to the Holy Land in 1185.
Hugh is the namesake of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, where a 1920s statue of the saint stands on the stairs of the Howard Piper Library. In his right hand, he holds an effigy of Lincoln Cathedral, and his left hand rests on the head of a swan. Notable former students of St Hugh’s College have included Kate Adie, one of the BBC’s most renowned news reporters, having covered on the ground from the London Iranian Embassy siege in 1980, the American bombing of Tripoli in 1986, the Lockerbie bombing in 1988, the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, the first Gulf War, the war in Yugoslavia, and the Rwandan genocide. It is not known whether Kate Adie reported from the Brixton Riots. The Burmese Nobel laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, is another notable graduate of St Hugh’s College.
Angels in the Architecture Page 31