#adam nicholson

[nomorevictims]

Adam Nicholson

[vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text] Literary Artist, Activist for the Arts, and Emcee (among many other things), Adam Nicholson has been a huge source of help and support to No More Victims 2 and Myself over the course of the last year… not to mention the inspiration behind the name of the new project here, #SaveTheHumans! [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column…

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[nomorevictims]

Adam Nicholson

[vc_row][vc_column width=”2/3″][vc_column_text] Literary Artist, Activist for the Arts, and Emcee (among many other things), Adam Nicholson has been a huge source of help and support to No More Victims 2 and Myself over the course of the last year… not to mention the inspiration behind the name of the new project here, #SaveTheHumans! [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column…

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[bonewoodandstone]

When Archbishop Laud finally fell, was arrested and tried in 1643-44, mounds of papers were produced by parliamentarians who had searched his rooms for evidence that he had been leading the Church of England on the path to Rome. Among them, to Puritan horror-cum-delight, was a description of the chapel that had been furnished by Bishop [Lancelot] Andrewes, then long dead. It is a measure, in secret, of the kind of religion to which Andrewes felt most deeply drawn. It is richness and heaviness itself, an embroidered, brocaded, gilt-thickened and hidden world. You must imagine it in an England of stark wooden clothless tables placed in the clear-lit naves of English churches, the ten commandments on the wall, no images, no crucifixes, no atmosphere beyond the proclaimed word. It is as if Andrewes's chapel was the only place in colour. On the altar were two large candlesticks, a dish for alms and a cushion on which the prayer book rested. There was a silver canister for the communion wafers, a 'tonne' or little barrel for the wine, a round basin with spouts for the water, two patens or plates on which the bread was put during the Eucharist, and a chalice 'having on the outside of the bowl Christ with the lost sheep on his shoulders, on the top of the cover, the wise man's star'. There was a basin, ewer and towel for the priest to wash his hands, and five copes, two altar cloths and 'a cloth to lay over the chalice, wrought with coloured silk'. Most remarkable of all, the furniture of this gilded shrine included a three-sided 'censer, wherein the clerk putteth frankincense at the reading of the first lesson'.

Adam Nicolson, God's Secretaries, 188.

I visited an Anglo-Catholic church recently, and it was very, very much along these lines. Beautiful, but even though I have been to several Orthodox and Catholic services, and a few Episcopalian services, it was very different for someone like me who has spent their life in evangelical churches. 

[optimistsdaughter]

[beyond-eden-rock]

The people who appear in this book wrote in private and the experience of their words on the written page remains mysteriously private. When you sit at a desk in Exeter or Newport, in Norwich or Bangor, with their words in front of you, there is no discreet mulberry-coloured rope holding you away from them, there is no glass over the paper, no Please Don't Touch. The young men and women, the paterfamilias and the desperate nephew, the estate steward and the indigent younger brother, they are all there with you in the room. Each letter or journal entry articulates its moment, not only in words but in its physical form, the hurry or care with which it is written, the sense of politeness, or intimact, or rage. The unfolding of a letter from an envelope always seem to me like the opening of time itself. Nearly always they wrote on beautiful handmade paper, in now fading ink, occasionally in blood, sometimes with a lock of hair folded up in a twist of the paper, once in these stories with the hair glued to the paper with a blob of sealing wax, sometimes in tears, when big blurring puddles have fallen on the ink. In one passage in this book, a father wrote with his own tears, his silvery grey words now scarcely legible on the page. From the introduction to 'The Gentry' by Adam Nicholson