Letter from the Rectory - December 2025

Dear Friends,

‘And is it true? And is it true, this most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue, a baby in an ox’s stall?

The maker of the stars and sea, become a child on earth for me?’

The more mature readers may know that these lines come from John Betjeman’s poem ‘Christmas’.  The one-time Poet Laureate, knighted in 1969, campaigner and TV personality died in 1984.  He grew up attending church but lost his faith at boarding school and refused to be confirmed.  He came back to faith whilst at university being particularly drawn to the Anglo-Catholic High Church end of the C of E.

Betjeman once said, “The one fundamental thing is that Christ was God … Really I don’t think life would be worth living if it weren’t true.” This emphasis on Jesus living as a man who came earth runs through all his religious poetry and appears at the climax of  ‘Christmas’ which ends, ‘That God was man in Palestine and lives today in bread and wine.’

John Betjeman believed that the presence of God could be revealed in the whole of life.  He wrestled with the conflicts between his Christian beliefs and his doubts.  He had a lifelong fear of death but used to sit with dying patients at St. Barts Hospital holding their hands.  Those visits helped him come to terms issues in his own life and strengthened his belief that God can be experienced in the unlikeliest of places.

He once wrote to his friend, John Sparrow, “My view of the world is that man is born to fulfil the purposes of his Creator, to stand in awe of him and to dread him.’  He added that in this way he differed from most poets of his generation who were agnostics and had the idea that humans are either ‘the centre of the Universe or a helpless bubble blown about by uncontrolled forces’.

John Betjeman constantly celebrated God’s presence in the natural world, in ancient church buildings which he so enjoyed visiting, and in the hearts and minds of believers and doubters everywhere. In his writing he profoundly influenced a generation in the way people looked at their surroundings, and by his sharing of his own beliefs hopes and fears, encouraging his readers to look afresh at their own attitudes and beliefs.  He can still speak today to a younger generation who ask, “And is it true? And is it true, this most tremendous tale of all…’

Happy Christmas … when it comes.                             

James Campbell