The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

People often comment on how pleasant a place our church yard is and rightly so – it is a kind of quiet sanctuary – a place for a green thought in a green shade – and yet it also bears witness to the eccentricity of interment where the most unlikely people find themselves shoulder to shoulder: Peter Pan next to the mother of the actress everyone loved to hate in Dynasty; the producer of the ‘Importance of Being Earnest’ next to the greatest leader of the Labour party who was never Prime Minister. But there is one grave way towards the back of the Additional Burial Ground which is often overlooked and rarely visited and yet it marks the resting place of perhaps the nearest thing to a saint Hampstead ever witnessed. Ostensibly the grave belongs to Hubert and Evelyn Stuart Moore, but under their names it says, in brackets, that Evelyn was the daughter of Sir Arthur Underhill. In other words this is Evelyn Underhill who died 68 years ago last Monday, and who is commemorated in the Anglican Calendar.
Born in 1875, she was the daughter of a distinguished barrister and married the son of a childhood neighbour who also became a barrister. She enjoyed history and botany, sailing, walking in the mountains and travelling in Europe. She had a passion for efficiency. She wrote three novels and some comic verse. She lived most of her married life in Campden Hill Square in Kensington, spent the war years in Sussex and only came to Hampstead for the last year of her life, though one of the most influential people in her life had lived here for many years. She cared for her husband, entertained their guests and mixed in some of the literary circles of her age. By all appearance a fairly conventional upper middle class life. And yet she was also one of the most influential spiritual directors, retreat guides, and writers on mysticism of her day and some of her books are still in print. And though some of the people she writes about might seem distinctly recherché and her style can seem a bit dated, her mind and heart are close to God in a timeless and often unexpected way teaching us things that are always central to the life of the church in any age.
Perhaps one of our difficulties with her stems from her starting point, which was so different to the circumstances of today’s church. We experience a church often marginalised and said to be in crisis, yet awash with spirituality and books about the great spiritual thinkers of the past. Evelyn Underhill was conventionally baptised and confirmed as a member of the clearly Established church in an age when people of her class were largely agnostic and the Christian spiritual past was entirely neglected. She somehow caught mysticism and pursued it intellectually and hungrily, thinking she might become a Roman Catholic but being put off by the Church’s rejection of historical criticism of Scripture. It took her sometime to accept Anglicanism as the place she was meant to be, just as it took her some time to balance the intellectual and mystical side of her nature with ordinary everyday life. The key figure in helping her achieve that balance was a resident of Holford Road, Baron von Hugel but he deserves another sermon to himself.
What she learnt from him was the importance of keeping in balance within the church the three strands essential to its life: the transcendent, the incarnational and the institutional. What in practice that meant for Evelyn was learning to move out of her philosophically inclined and efficiently codified mind into the realities of church life and the impoverished conditions of many of her North Kensington neighbours. She learnt to take seriously the meaning of the incarnation and the actual life of Jesus Christ. She had been I think inclined to despise the un-intellectual and Jesus centred piety of Evangelicalism. She discovered Jesus and the need for simple prayers addressed to Jesus, through her greater involvement in the social needs of the slums. So she could write with some passion, ‘We are sewing the miserable little patches we call charity and social service into the rotten garment of our corporate life… Thousands of us are eating what we suppose to be the bread of eternal life at our brothers’ expense.’ She called such behaviour ‘Adoring Christ’s head while neglecting his feet.’
She had a natural inclination to self analysis and that had the positive effect of her becoming interested in psychology in a period when people were still deeply suspicious of it and saw it as a threat to faith. By contrast she saw psychological research as likely to have ‘a transforming influence on the study of spiritual experience.’ Such interests, however, tended to side with her more subjective self and it was von Hugel who encouraged her to look outwards, to get involved, even to take life sometimes a little less seriously. So she, herself, could eventually write to someone she gave spiritual direction to, ‘Hot milk and a thoroughly foolish novel are better things for you to go to bed on just now than St Teresa.’
Besides this interest in psychology, the things which can still feel peculiarly relevant in her writings are the things which she criticised in the church of her own time, ‘lack of quietude and failure to apply religion to social life.’ Perhaps most remarkable is the fact that her faith and her mysticism led her to become a pacifist in the 2nd World War and to write a pamphlet about the Church and the War, not long before she died.
So far I have spoken about her without letting her speak for herself. So I will end with some quotations. First this question of balance between the quest for transcendence and commitment to the world.’ The Christian mystic tries to continue in his own life Christ’s balanced life of ceaseless communion with the Father and homely service to the crowd. His love of God and thirst for God have been cleansed by long discipline from all self interest; and the more profound his contemplation of God the more he loves the world and tries to serve it as a tool of the divine creative love.’
This interconnectedness between the spiritual and the material is seen again in her writings about liturgy and the sacraments. The music, the symbolism and ritual in liturgy – all that appeals to the senses, help to carry the sense of God’s presence in the world into every part of our lives. The sacramental principle as she calls it rests in the spiritual significance of visible deeds and things. In bread and wine the ordinary stuff of life is raised to the plane of sacrifice and having been blessed and transformed by the action of the spirit they are made food and salvation for the soul. Nature gets us ready for super-nature.
She wrote many letters of simple spiritual advice and I want to give as a final example of her practical wisdom her description of the problem of anger. She divides this into two categories; anger with our circumstances and anger with ourselves. The latter she describes as being on occasion ‘high minded sulkings about life, a hostile exasperated attitude to existence, a brooding anger over our grievances and disappointments.’ She then says that we waste a lot of energy being angry with ourselves, because our prayer, our character our life is not what we think it ought to be. And the answer to such anger cannot be found other than by trying patiently and slowly to sink deeper and deeper into the ocean of God’s reality. And we do that by gently, steadily and faithfully doing what we can do and leaving the rest to God. It is entirely appropriate that the plaque recording her many visits to the retreat house at Pleshey in Essex, contains John Donne’s words, ‘Blessed be God that he is God only and divinely like himself.’ That is what simple mysticism teaches us to accept.
She compares this easiness with self when anger is conquered to the actions of the perfect waitress who has forgotten herself in her work. She is not strung up, or tense she does not scuttle because she had forgotten something, she is not anxiously preoccupied with her own short comings; those are the kind who spill the sauce and break the vegetable dish.’ We might smile at this and dismiss such imagery as being too class laden to be relevant, but the image of ‘the good and faithful servant’ has Biblical precedent.
And so to end with one of Evelyn’s prayers; ‘O blessed Jesu Christ who didst bid all who carry heavy burdens to come to thee, refresh us with thy presence and thy power. Quiet our understandings and give ease to our hearts, by bringing us closer to things infinite and eternal. Open to us the mind of God that in his light we may see light. And crown thy choice of us to be thy servants by making us springs of strength and joy to all whom we serve. Amen.