Plinth Hermit

 

I don’t get out much, so my trip to London to take part in Anthony Gormley’s One & Other project on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar square had been looming increasingly large ever since I received my invitation in early September.   I had overcome my initial terror, canvassed my “wise friends” to explore motive and integrity of vision, and now armed with my bishop’s approval in one pocket and my photo id in another, I was trundling my plinth-kit through the parks from Kensington on a beautiful autumnal morning feeling altogether Christopher Robin.  It was a good day to be in London. 

 

Why would a professed hermit of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Nottingham, vowed to simplicity, solitude and silence, even consider spending an hour sitting atop a plinth in the middle of one of the world’s busiest and noisiest cities?  The precedents are ancient.  In the fourth to sixth centuries a brand of Christian hermits called the stylites (from the Greek stylos, meaning pillar) began mounting ever loftier pillars in the Syrian deserts and living out their solitary vocations on top of them.   It was an extreme and novel form of asceticism.   The best known were probably St Simeon the elder and the younger who spent 36 and 68 years respectively up there. They lived and slept open to the elements, separated from human comfort yet reliant on human contact for their sustenance via baskets on ropes.  The pillar was a place to be with God alone, and a lifelong sermon to both disciple and passer-by:  a witness to their Christian faith.

 

For me, it was also to be a means of Christian witness.  A longstanding principle of the hermitage is hospitality.  For the desert fathers of early Christendom this was a life-preserving essential, a fundamental rule of the desert:  to turn a traveller away from your hut was to send him to his death.  The East Midlands is not quite so arid a desert as Syria, in geophysical terms at least, but there is a thirst which is not readily quenched.  My solitary existence does not have much to offer by way of relief, and I am acutely aware that it is not the oasis of tranquillity and holiness which some seem to imagine, but the hint of its possibility, its liminality, might be just the drop of water which will revive a weary traveller.   It is not about me, but the life which I profess, the grace which sustains me.

 

Benedictine Raphael  Vernay wrote The hermit is simply a pioneer … in the way of the desert which the whole of humanity must follow of necessity one day, each one according to his measure and his desire.  This eremitical vocation, at least embryonically, is to be found in every Christian vocation …  it is necessary that the Church and society do something so that this may be realizable,  so that each may at least touch it, be it only with the tip of his little finger.  (On the Desert Place of the Inner Sanctuary, 1974)

 

I do not imagine that Fr Vernay envisaged anything quite so bizarre as plinth-standing, but that was the invitation that had come my way.  Providence perhaps?

 

Registration, interview & mugs of hot tea:  the welcome by the One & Other team was designed to reassure.  It worked very well until, all too suddenly, it was my turn.   As a spectator the rhythmic to-ing and fro-ing of the much fêted cherry-picker had appeared like a profound municipal breathing, gently belching out and drawing back the participants on the plinth.  As a weak-kneed, stomach-churned victim-of-fate it felt more like the belly of Jonah’s Whale as I was spewed up onto the rocky outcrop.  If the first few moments were unsteady, breathless, scary (it was for good reason I clung onto the hand post!), then the thought of letting go to set up my cross was utterly terrifying.  Bad place to discover that I suffer from vertigo!  It was with considerable relief then, that I was finally able to sink onto my prayer mat, and gently, into prayer.  This was familiar territory, removed from the din and the thoroughfare, this is what I do, listening, absorbing and trying to hold on particularly to the broken ones. Early in the project I had been struck by the plinth as a metaphorical altar – the ordinary and the bizarre, the ragtag of humanity, made extraordinary, sanctified almost, by the public view.  An exposition of the Christ in each of us.  I dedicated my prayer to prisoners, aspiring to be their representative, to give each a worthy place on the plinth with the rest of us.  That was a good focus and deepened my appreciation of the novel sensual experiences - the warmth and brilliance of the setting sun, the abstracted sounds of the common life, Elijah’s breeze gently refreshing me with the fountain’s mist.  I have been a prison visitor.  You do not get these things in there. 

 

There is a hand post on the plinth, a point of stability in case of high winds or nerves.  I used this as the upright for my cross, with my walking stick tied to it as the cross beam.  It was a way of consecrating the plinth and everything and everyone that had been represented on it.   I was aware of people stopping to look up.  Different expressions: query, respect, incomprehension, laughter.    At the end of my hour as the waves closed over me once more, the upright support of a cross was left up there.  That is a good thing to hold onto.

 

It was an exhilarating experience until my knees finally gave out halfway down again.  The cabin crew clearly accustomed to post-plinth syndrome soon had me sitting down with more tea.  As I left the square walking under the plinth with its new incumbent,  I didn’t look up.  I might have wanted to stay.