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· What’s at the end of the night stair, pray tell?

By MELVYN BRAGG [In Our Time] – I first went to Hexham Abbey when I was seventeen and was then most struck by the Night Stair in the south transept.  This wonderful staircase, down which the monks came for their night prayers, has such worn treads that you can almost hear the sandals still slapping down the stones.  The abbey was originally built by Wilfrid, an enormously powerful figure up here in Christianity in the 7th century.  There is still some of the 7th century church remaining – the crypt.

It was strange to be talking in that abbey about the 400 years’ airbrushed history of the effect of the King James Bible, because here was a place where Christianity had been assiduously practised for hundreds of years, with no questions asked.  One thing I find intolerable is that people simply dismiss Christianity.  Atheism, agnosticism, secularism and even indifference are to be given equal respect with other religions and no religions.  But to call foolish or to sneer lightly at what people like us, but in a different context, with different intellectual means, did is not only mean, it’s unimaginative and sterile.

And yet the idea of night prayers, the idea of intelligent men and women devoting entire lives to prayer and seeking the merest glint of response as proof of providence is extremely difficult to grasp.  It happened across what we might now call Europe at a time when the most magnificent artefacts were being made, laws were being formed, languages being developed, sciences being translated out of Greek into Arabic and then into Latin and later into national tongues.  To ignore those who devoted themselves to the churches is not anything like as interesting as to wonder why they did it.  Just as the attack on, say, the Aborigines’ culture by some current atheists as being mere “clutter” is to miss the point entirely.  Human beings work with what they have and the extraordinary thing about successive civilisations is that they are working to the same ends, often in poetic ways and increasingly in scientific ways, but do we think that our current ways are the final definition of four and a half billion years of struggle?

Continued at In Our Time – BBC | More Chronicle & Notices.

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