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Hymn CD's can either inspire or depress, draw or shove me towards worship or kill devotional intent stone dead, shake up my tired ideas or bore me with cliches, and therefore be a means of grace or a source of annoyance. But now and again we come across a sound and expression of faith that touches most of the positive chords in our particular and personal spirituality – such as it is, and such as I am, at the moment, this music resonates with the deep places of the soul.

Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band have been my equivalent of a devotional companion for years. Their album, Sing Lustily and with Good Courage, was so played, scratched and enjoyed I've bought it again. The combination of Maddy Prior's clear and liquid voice, the authentic 18th Century instruments, and the repristination of hymns by Watts, Wesley, Montgomery and others, have made this for me a regularly taken spiritual tonic. And their much more recent album, Paradise Found, commemorating the tercentenary of the birth of Charles Wesley has for me the same tonic quality. The tunes for some of the better known Wesley masterpieces are different, and if at times I was disappointed and at least uncertain, several listenings have persuaded me that there's more than one way to sing a hymn, even the same hymn!

We listened to Paradise Found driving to Gwennap, with ruined tin mine workings around us, rolling Cornwall countryside, nearly every village with a Methodist meeting place (some of them now converted (ironic word) into lovely houses, or business premises). Take for example, Come O Thou Traveller Unknown, the beautifully spiritualised story of Jacob wrestling, which Wesley transformed into a hymn about the longing soul refusing to let the unknown Saviour go until he tells his name:

….

Wrestling I will not let thee go

Till I Thy name, Thy nature know!

 

Tis Love!, 'tis Love! Thou diedst for me,

I hear Thy whisper in my heart,

The morning breaks, the shadows flee,

Pure Universal Love Thou art!

And the utterly hilarious (I use the word in its true meaning of joyful laughter as the inner dance of the spirit) My God I am Thine. Listening to this as we travelled from Trewint Cottage where Wesley was given hospitality on his first pioneering preaching visits to Cornwall, then down to Truro, was like a step back in time. The sun was shining, the trees were early autumn colours, and the lightness of the music, the sheer exuberance of unembarrassed joy, and the combination of music, colour and historical significance of place, was one of those epiphany episodes you don't plan, and you can only enjoy.

I really would love to hear a modern praise band, bass guitar, drums, some brass, woodwind and strings, and as many other guitars as you like, romping through the theological and spiritual merriment of this hymn:

My God, I am Thine, what a comfort divine,
What a blessing to know that my Jesus is mine!
In the heavenly Lamb thrice happy I am,
And my heart it doth dance at the sound of His Name.

True pleasures abound in the rapturous sound;
And whoever hath found it hath paradise found:
My Jesus to know, and feel His blood flow,
’Tis life everlasting, ’tis Heaven below.

Yet onward I haste to the heavenly feast:
That, that is the fulness; but this is the taste!
And this I shall prove, till with joy I remove
To the heaven of heavens in Jesus’s love.

And so on. I'm well aware of the difficulty post-modern pilgrims like us have with such explicit spiritual experience, distilled into biblical metaphors, and imbibed in a state of uncrtical devotional intoxication, innocent of any hermeneutic of suspicion, and founded as the whole thing is in the biblical metanarrative of redemption, itself cause for much post-modern trembling. But by jings, you just need to have stood in Gwennap Pit, used your imagination, remembered what it is to pray, and then listened to the lilting music of authentic 18th Century instruments accompanying Maddy Prior as as she sings of the 'heaven of heavens in Jesus's love' – there's something about song linked to the deep encounters of the soul, that touches those even deeper realities, and transforms the way we see the world, ourselves and each other – and brings us within reach of the Mystery that is redeeming love.

Or as Charles describes it:

Thy love I soon expect to find

In all its depth and height:

To comprehend the Eternal Mind

And grasp the Infinite.

Amongst the fascinating questions surrounding John Wesley is the difficulty of honouring a remarkable Christian without devaluing him by well-meaning but unnecessary hagiography. His faults, like his virtues, were reassuringly human with the usual complications of his own mixed motives, the distortions of other people's partisan opinions and prejudices imposed on an already complex personality, and the flow of a narrative that has to weigh the changing continuities of an unusually long, energetic and mutli-faceted life.

Wesley's Journal is a case in point. Is it accurate reporting of facts or revival propaganda? Is it a field-preacher's travelogue or a vindication of his divine calling? Does it present the real Wesley, or construct a presented Wesley? Should the reader hear Wesley's voice, and if so which voice – the personal voice of religious devotion, the formal voice of a religious leader, the informative voice of an organisational strategist, the combative voice of an innovator under pressure, the self-justifying voice of a controverisal figure? Well, all of them, and at different times in his life these varying voices were more or less dominant. Compared to many religious journals, Wesley's Journal is less an account of inner spiritual states, and more a record of evangelical activism expressed in one long continuous narrative, written like (and often reading like) an audit trail of activity, achievement and strategic planning intended ultimately as a statement of life purpose pursued with persistent faithfulness and relentless attention to detail. The 7 Volumes of the Bicentennial Edition of The Journal and Diaries of John Wesley, are a marvel of scholarly detail, providing in the critical notes the kind of information needed to understand Wesley in the context of his own life experience, against the background of his times, and providing persepctives and correctives that do justice to his position as leader of a movement that changed the religious landscape of Christian Britain, America and beyond.

Richard Heitzenrater is one of the remarkable Wesleyan scholars whose work underlies the editing of the Bicentennial Edition of Wesley's Works. He was one of the supervising Editors for the Journal, and the author of one of the best resources in trying to understand John Wesley, his aptly named book, The Elusive Mr Wesley. For years now I've been a student of Wesleyan theology and spirituality – (and, as a matter of balance, a student of Jonathan Edwards 's thought and spirituality). What intrigues me about Wesley is precisely the word Heitzenrater used, "elusive". There is something comfortingly frustrating about a Christian leader who fits no neat categories, who inspires loyalty and opposition, who claimed lifelong allegiance to his Church, but shaped a dissenting movement, whose written sermons read like treatises and whose preaching while not electrifying like Whitefield's nevertheless carried a potently persuasive voice.

So wherever I go in my travels, I'm looking for Wesley's footprints. And I found a huge one at Gwennap Pit. Methodism made a deep and lasting impact on Cornwall, in the villages, amongst the tin mining communities,and in the main towns. usually liability to subsidence makes a piece of real estate a dodgy deal – but this piece of sunken ground, probably caused by settling over underground mine workings, provided what Wesley later called his amphitheatre. You can read about it here. (http://www.methodistrecorder.co.uk/cornwall.htm)

For myself, I was happy to be in a place so steeped in early Evangelical experience. It's far too easy to dismiss the importance of place, as if there was no such thing as sacred geography. What makes a place like Gwennap Pit special is the story of what happened there, its significance in the story of thousands of hearers, many of whom heard the Gospel, met God, wrestled with their own angels. Indeed that story of Jacob at Peniel, told in one of Charles Wesley's greatest hymns, is a story about an encounter with God that made the place special. Sacred geography, remembered place, where the ground is holy because God was found there, and found to be worth finding.

A couple of extracts from John Wesley's Journal show how Wesley, ever the pragmatist, saw both the practical use, and the sacred purpose, of a hole in the ground!

Sun. Sep 11, 1768 "At five I took my old stand at Gwennap, in the amphitheatre. I suppose no human voice could have commanded such an audience on plain ground; but the ground rising all round gave me such an advantage that I believe all could hear distinctly."

Sun Sep 3 1775 "At five in the evening I preached in the amphitheatre at Gwennap. I think this is the most magnificent spectacle which is to be seen on this side of heaven. And no music is to be heard upon earth comparable to the sound of many thousand voices, when they are all harmoniously joined together singing praises to God and the lamb".

Wish I'd been there, then! 

Visited here yesterday – will say why later.