Playing with Icons by John Pridmore

Can be found on Amazon 

Through this exploration of various memoirs, John Pridmore offers insights into the spirituality of children, and indeed the spirituality of the adults we grow up to be.

Part of this is to draw attention to the ways in which children tend to be more focused on the present while adults fill their heads with nostalgia or worries about tomorrow. Pridmore quotes Philip Simmons that “...the present moment, entered into fully, is out gateway to eternal life” - the more we are able to inhabit the present the more we are in fact inhabiting eternity.

The world children live in can be full of myths and imagining – but as Picasso said “Everything that can be imagined is real” - the richness of their world is not one to be dismissed as fantasy.

Reflecting on the encounters with “church” that are recalled, he writes “If as a young child I am given to understand that I am not yet fully one of the Christian family, then, however much I am entertained in church by kindly and well-meaning people, I will know in my heart that I am not really wanted.” This is usually deployed as an argument for including children in Communion, and while I agree with that, I worry that it is seen as a quick fix – you can receive Communion and yet still be alienated from the community – there is a need for a more all embracing response...

But he goes on “Adults, who are on the whole free to avoid the company of the egregiously unpleasant, forget what it once was to have been at their mercy.” but I am not sure how many adults are really that free? In lots of ways the choices of adults can be curtailed – by education, mobility, economic power etc. and when they are, often it will be without the hope that can sustain the child – the child can look forward to growing up and escape – adults may feel the limits of life have become fixed.

Pridmore uses the memoirs to construct a world of enchantment – a power for spirituality and religion that is not rooted in the rational. He is also, possibly accidentally, providing a case for the defence of the Prayer Book.

For example, when he quotes Anne Treneer “Yet though not a naturally religious child, I am glad I was taken to church regularly, initiated into the Christian faith, and helped to participate in the profound poetry of the Christian year. Though inattentive, I came insensibly to know the liturgy word for word, and to live in the double rhythm of the earthly seasons and of man's noblest imagining”

In another place he has Francesca Allinson recalling a friends account of Adam and Eve “She described the Fall as a lovers' parting: there was God, great and yet aching, impotent for all his Godhead to beget love except on the same terms as mortals, buying it as dearly as they... The story whether its events had actually taken place or not, bore within it its own truth of existence”.

And so he reflects “The stories are thrilling but so too was the language in which they were once told. In our contemporary anxiety to render the text of the Bible into a language which is readily intelligible – an anxiety amounting to paranoia, so addictive is the compulsion to produce ever more translations – we have forgotten that the intelligibility of sacred texts is not all that matters about them, certainly not to small children. We have seen [from examples of encounters with big old family Bibles etc] how important the feel of a Bible was to children we have met. So too, as we have now seen, was the sound of it. Sense is not served by disregard of the senses.”

Pridmore is yet another person questioning the current liturgical practice of the Church of England, on two fronts, first that our contemporary liturgy in attempting to use accessible language has lost its poetry and therefore lost its appeal, and second that endless variation of texts prevent them becoming familiar and inhabited – or as the collect puts it “hear them, read, mark, learn” and, perhaps most importantly, “inwardly digest them”. I have made this point before and will undoubtedly make it again. But Pridmore himself notes that his sources, those that when on to write, might be a bias source group – as group they are firstly likely to be disproportionally literate, but even among the literate they are likely to be attracted to richness of language.