Orton Methodist Church is a place I visited many times in my childhood, but my trip there on 7th June was, I believe, my first this century. This was a place I sat in fairly regularly as a child because it was the church in which my dad grew up and one set of grandparents were stalwarts there. As I sat in a pew towards the back on that warm night in June, I recalled my grandparents sitting near the front nearly half a century earlier, my grandad pelting out all hymns at full volume, which made it much more of a noticeable statement when he skipped a line to register his disapproval of words he did not agree with. For him a chief offender was Yes God is good, which includes the line ‘Yes God is good all nature says,’ something he didn’t agree with because he would argue you don’t have to look very hard at the world of nature to see violence and suffering. The hymn was written by John Hampden Gurney, who was from London and educated at Cambridge, but probably didn’t strike my grandad as someone educated in country ways and maybe that was why the hymn romanticised nature to the extent that it did. 

I have tried to keep the opinionated family tradition of not singing particular lines of hymns going most noticeably by abstaining from singing the third line of the following verse in One more step along the world I go (the line is in bold below):

Give me courage when the world is rough

Keep me loving though the world is tough

Leap and sing in all I do

Keep me traveling along with you

To leap and sing in all we do would not be a good thing in my opinion. Is the job of a window cleaner not hazardous enough without introducing this new expectation? As someone who has had a lot of dental surgery this year, I’m not keen on dentists doing this either, and clearly if undertakers lived by this philosophy they would go out of business because you need a certain level of decorum in that profession. Leaping and singing undertakers is generally not a thing people are looking for. For me, leaping and singing have their place, but rarely on Mondays or before morning coffee. Of course this is a hymn designed for children and I don’t really object that strongly to its over-simplification, but every time I’m in a congregation singing it, I skip the line as tribute to the late George Watson, who regularly stopped singing for a line and meant it.

I was back in Orton Methodist Church for a celebration of Orton Male Voice Choir, of which my father is the only surviving founding member and he had come out of retirement for the night to share stories of the early days interspersed with the choir singing some of the hymns and songs that were meaningful to them. He did a really good job and was as relaxed speaking in public as I had ever seen him largely because for him this was very much coming home. My mother was also there and my brother, Nigel and I wondered if, like me in his mind Nigel wandered back to days of childhood when we sat through services that were rarely designed for children but gave a young mind some space and time to aimlessly wander. I usually started in those days by reading the names on the war memorial on the wall, which I always found interesting even before I knew what they were. Years later I encountered in the American Primitive Methodist Journal a story of a young boy talking to his grandfather and asking what the war memorial at the back of a church was all about and the grandfather, trying to choose his words carefully, said, “Well, this is a tribute to all the men in our congregation who died in service,” and the little boy nodded and then asked, thoughtfully, “Was that the 10.30 or the 6 o’clock?”

I suppose all those years ago I was a bit like that little boy. I wasn’t sure what I was reading but the names became familiar and the dates seemed like an impossibly long time ago. I would read them several times like we used to read cereal packets repeatedly because in those days that was the only entertainment available at breakfast time. If you were a child in the seventies you might recall this kind of conversation:

 “Do you want this box of Shreddies?”

“No, I’ve read it already.”

So I would read the war memorial with a certain reverence for times past and we would sing hymns, then in between hymns my mind would wander and then sometimes, if you were in chapel for a ‘do’ (always referred to in letters by my grandmother as a ‘doo’ which is a spelling that seemed to have a little bit of traction locally a few decades ago) there would be tea and sandwiches and cakes afterwards. A strong memory of a ‘do’ was that at Orton they always insisted on bringing the tea out to the congregation who were instructed to remain in the pews. This made being a tea drinker a real act of faith because the hosts would come out with enormous metal teapots, and lean over several people to pour boiling hot water into the teacup you proffered above your lap. I was astonished in June to see that they are still doing that, as far as I know with no injuries to date. One miss though and to coin a phrase of Mark Twain, it might inspire some words that “aren’t Sunday School words.”

Tea anxiety aside, it was a very pleasant evening and I learned quite a lot about my dad’s early Methodist experiences that I hadn’t heard before. I also met some new people and some people I had not seen in years. There is, however,  a strange thing that happens at a certain age when your waist has expanded and you have parted company with your hair and you meet someone you haven’t seen in decades whose reaction to seeing you  is a look of puzzlement at the extent to which you have changed. When they say “hello” it might loosely be translated as “What happened?”  

What happened I suppose is life. The people we meet, experiences we have, and second portions we fail to resist turn us into different people and there is a need to love the moments we are in and not cling too tightly to the past.  Still, it meant something to read that war memorial again, to see people and think back to long gone days in this place when time seemed to stand still, an experience that even as a child was more comforting than boring. Always in the chapel people made a fuss and were pleased to see you and they still do, something I tend to think matters above most other things. 

At the end of the night, the congregation sang Rock of Ages, which turns out to be a favourite of my dad’s but one I am theologically a long way removed from. I could have stood there and not sung, or missed out the lines I didn’t particularly like but there is a time for that and there is also a time when it’s less about the words you sing and more about being a part of the choir.

So whenever you next can, make a joyful noise by singing with others. Leaping, however, is optional, especially if you are driving a teapot.