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As One Door Closes, Another Shuts

Who says Humanists wouldn't be caught dead in a church? Recently in a single day I set foot in umpteen such establishments. The occasion was our city's contribution to the annual European Heritage Week: Doors Open Day. Every year the hours between 10 am and 4 pm one Saturday are set aside for what the Council calls "an invitation to investigate Bristol's fascinating heritage". Bristol has little or nothing in the way of Humanist heritage, having specialised more in monuments to man's inhumanity to man, for example through its slave trade connections. Nevertheless, it's 55 buildings and other places of interest in the six hours if you can get round them all quick enough, and it's free. With niece (13) in tow, I joined the queue at 9:45 outside venue number one: Redcliff "Caves". We'd stopped off to purchase two one pound torches in the market for the occasion. Mine gave out after a minute inside this worked-out red sandstone mine, leaving me stumbling after niece in the near pitch dark. Disappointingly - at least as far as I could tell - there were no bats in the caves. Nor, for all I know, were they to be found in the belfry of stop number two (place of worship number one), St. Mary Redcliff Church. Not that we had a chance to find out. "You can't go up there for another half an hour" ordered a Dad's Army look-alike verger in this "goodliest, fairest and most famous parish church in England", as Queen Elizabeth I had it on a visit in 1574.

We settled for a less testing climb up the steps to the pulpit instead. "Are you ready to testify?" I felt myself preparing to boom, striking an appropriate hell fire and damnation pose. A baleful gaze from a dog-collared source brought me down to earth before I was properly into role. We went on to the nave, my by now embarrassed niece doing a he's-not-with-me act. Here we found a scientific exhibit taking the form of a recycling water-driven pendulum affair which, the explanatory plaque informed, showed the effect of chaos theory in action. The direction of the pendulum from one moment to the next is practically impossible to predict. This is meant to show that science cannot explain everything (and therefore of course God must be real). What it actually shows is that cause and effect relationships can be complicated: not quite the same thing in my book but you can see what the designer was getting at. The following few buildings were decidedly secular in nature, including the Library, the Council House and a brewery. "Religious Education's alright," chatted niece as we entered Bristol Cathedral. "We don't hardly do nothing." Like St. Mary Redcliffe, the Cathedral was an impressively large building. A choir started up soon after we arrived so we didn't stay there long. Next it was a stroll across College Green to another church, the Lord Mayor's Chapel. Of interest here were something called misericords. No, really. Misericords, we learned, are a bit like gargoyles, only they're on the under-sides of the seats in the choir stalls. The chorister could be going for that high C, blissfully unaware that there was a grinning monkey's face underneath their clenched buttocks. An officially redundant church was next on the agenda, in the form of St. John the Baptist, set into the city wall. Redundant churches are no longer needed for regular worship, but according to the leaflet provided in this church, are preserved by income provided by Church and State. Altogether now: What a Waste of Money, What a Waste of Money....

Then there was St. Nicholas Church (now the Tourist Information Centre), Christ Church in Broad Street with its brightly coloured figures outside chiming the hours, and set back between the bus station and a pub we discovered St. James' Priory, the oldest church in Bristol. It's occupied by a bundle-of-laughs crew called the Little Brothers of Nazareth, who have a rule of absolute silence in their church. None of them seemed to be around for a chat anyway, so we went round the corner to the New Room, the world's first Methodist building, constructed in 1739 for John Wesley himself. I'm told there are now more Buddhist centres than Methodist churches in Bristol, where Methodism began. By four o'clock we had been round nineteen buildings all told, eight of them churches. We also skirted by Quakers Friars (now the Register Office: won't catch me in one of those places), and the former Unitarian Meeting House. What do you get if you cross a Jehova's Witness with a Unitarian? Someone who rings your doorbell but doesn't know what to say. Exhausted, niece and I repaired to the inevitable McDonald's. To my surprise I noticed that my previously dead torch had spontaneously recovered at some point since we left the caves. "Well...," said niece waggishly over her chicken nuggets, "...we've been in a lot of holy places today - maybe miracles do happen."

The above article was first published in Humanity magazine. You can email Hugh Thomas at hugh.thomas@lineone.net

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