First a confession. I’d never heard of Michael Mayne until I read this wonderful book. When I Googled his name I discovered a couple of obituaries and learned enough about this erudite scholar-priest to rebuke my ignorance. [1]

The Very Rev. Michael Mayne was an English Anglican priest (he died in 2006) who served with distinction as chaplain to the enigmatic Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockwood, was head of BBC’s religious programmes, vicar of the University Church at Cambridge, and after a breakdown (suffering from ME – Myalgic Encephalopathy or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome – described in his best-seller A Year Lost and Found) became Dean of Westminster Abbey.

This Sunrise of Wonder is a page-turner, if you’re not addicted to rationalism but yearn to be a little more at home where mystics reside, and don’t mind half-a-dozen quotes from scholars/writers on each page (I love ’em). The author’s wide-ranging knowledge and appreciation of just about every area of Literature and the Arts makes me wonder how he kept up his reading while serving in busy parishes. (The Independent’s obituary offers a little clue: ‘Colleagues at meetings of Chapter or committees would be startled to be given his own strongly expressed opinion before the discussion had even begun…’ Well, that might be one way to abbreviate committee meetings! [2]).

Mayne here summarizes what he has seen and heard and read, purportedly in letters to his grandchildren from a holiday-cottage in the Swiss Alps. Although a professional homilist, he is not preachy or didactic. (He almost certainly knew he did not have long to live while writing all this, somewhere quoting Annie Dillard: ‘Write as if you were dying… [and] assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients’). Mayne simply and powerfully describes with wonder the magic of the natural world, the wisdom he has imbibed in the works of great writers and poets, the delight when one sees beyond the superficial and the obvious in great works of art, and the spiritual/emotional power of great music. He finds truth and grace and wonder everywhere. I’d love to have heard/read how he translated all this wisdom into his sermons.

Why bother writing a book like this? He quotes G K Chesterton with approval: ‘At the back of our brains… there is a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder.’

Some excerpts to whet your appetite:

‘Plato suggests that our appreciation of beauty is dependent on our sense of order, which we need to feel secure in the world. Yet what makes an object beautiful is a combination of order and disorder: the fact that the simple geometry of the perfect shape is subtly disrupted. The oak leaf is not quite symmetrical… [the infinite variety of]

mountains’ etc…

‘It has been estimated that six trillion chemical reactions take place in the (human) body every second.’ ‘When middle C is struck on the piano the piston of bones in your inner ear vibrates exactly 256 times a second.’ ‘If you could empty the space out of an elephant, it would shrink to the size of a mouse – though it would still weigh about the same owing to the weight of all the nuclei.’

‘Unless you become as a little child, or have not ceased to be one, the best that there is to be had will not come your way… The lucky ones – many of them artists and poets – seem to be always as if they had just come into the world, and were going over this or that remarkable find, in a delectable state of wonder and amazement’ (C E Montagne).

‘Love all God’s creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things’ (Dostoevsky).

In the last few chapters Mayne offers us his rationale for being a Christian. Here’s a telling paragraph near the beginning of that section:

‘I have had no sudden conversion, no moment when the earth moved and the scales fell from my eyes. When the Damascus Road brigade make their bids for such blinding (or rather *un*blinding) experiences, holding no such dazzling trumps in my hand, I have to pass. God has never shown himself in such a knockdown kind of way as to leave no room for doubt; and, as a naturally somewhat guarded soul, what attracts me is this very reticence: he invites, and he waits, he never commands.’

Buy it for a friend who needs the light touch of a gentle wonder-filled apologist (and from whom you can borrow it for a couple of readings yourself).

[1] e.g. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/ article611860.ece

[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/the-very-rev- michael-mayne-421926.html

Rowland Croucher July 2009