HOLY HARLEQUIN .....

In the early 1970s my School Chapel, in rare radicalism, bought a new hymn book - aptly titled “One Hundred Hymns for Today”. Some of the hymns in it were from a radical Christian, the Quaker Sydney Carter, who died last month at the age of 89 years.

It seemed a little odd that a Quaker, used to silent worship, should write songs like “Lord of the Dance”, but Carter was also an accomplished folk musician, and like his great hero St Francis, believed in the role of the troubadour. the “holy harlequin”, as he called it, singing “spiritual songs” in the idiom of an unchurchy culture.

In daily Chapel we belted out “Lord of the Dance” (as generations have done in School Assemblies), which spoke to us of a God of passion and exuberance, and we felt the challenge of “Every Star shall sing a Carol”, which made us think, in a way that Christians have all too rarely thought, about how our faith relates to a Universe at which the earth is not the centre, and in which we are just one part of God’s creation. We felt uncomfortable singing “When I needed a neighbour ?”, with its reworking of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, and struggled with the ironies of “No use knocking on the Window” and its indictment of Christian complacency. We began to see that this Sydney Carter was a gadfly, an irritant to comfortable believing.

Later on I discovered several collections of Carter songs, and even became proud possessor of a recording of Carter classics, on which well known folk musicians guested, and which, liberated from the organ and choral singing, were surely close to the sound the composer envisaged. It was with excitement that I purchased a slim hardback of Carter’s poetry, “The Two-Way Clock” - unbalanced at times, sometimes quirky, often awkward and challenging, and with rich imagery that made me think hard about the implications of my faith and following of Jesus. Carter’s reflections on the meaning of the Cross have helped me to uncover again and again the truth of one who is Emmanuel, “God with us” Later on, I would find the same thing, put more profoundly in the poetry of R.S.Thomas, but Carter had the exuberance and lightness of touch - dancing his way to God through the light and shade of human experience.

The poems and songs of Sydney Carter were and remain important for me and for many others too. He was impatient with the Church as an institution (as we all can be, even when we are officers of it), yet fascinated by Jesus and the God he revealed - the beckoning God who calls and leads us in the dance of his love.

May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

Roger Clarke

March 2004