One of the joys of being involved with an auction is the way in which it can transport you to a moment of the past. A few months ago Bloomfield Auctions Belfast sold CS Lewis’s bath. I have walked down his road hundreds of times, I’ve often worshipped in St Mark’s Dundela where he was baptised and had a few pints in the Eagle and Child in Oxford where he would meet with JRR Tolkien and Charles Williams. Most of all I think of everything he taught me through his works on theology, his sci-fi novels and his Narnia stories. Somehow I overlooked the fact that he must have taken a bath.
In the first Mirfield auction Napoleon Bonaparte’s will turned up in a garage in Barnsley! I spent weeks over it. It couldn’t be the real thing but neither could it be a fraud. It was about 20 pages hand written on legal will paper with an 1803 watermark. I imaged the gloomy figure wandering around the Atlantic island of St Helena muttering to himself ‘to whom will I leave mon Grande mere’s hot-waterbottle’ It wasn’t the original will but it sold for£80 and the buyer explained that when Boney’s will came to England. It became the model for apprentice legal scriveners throughout Britain and one gets the picture of all these young clerks sweating to reproduce about 50,000 words describing the disposition of the Emperor’s domestic possessions in French.
The most exotic and beautiful item we have ever sold was as casket of jewellery given by George IV to a lady in waiting requesting her to wear them at his daughter princess Charlotte’s wedding to Prince Leopold 1816. The Princess, heir to the throne, died a year later giving birth to a still-born boy. There might not have a Queen Victoria or and Elizabeth II but for that event.
In almost every auction there is something of special interest – the one that is likely to make the most money or the most beautiful or the most intriguing. In the next Mirfield Auction – oh! Have I mentioned that there is going to be another one? Well anyway, the item that most attracts me most is not going to raise a lot but it has locked me into its story. It is this little prayer book. The gold lettering on the green cover proclaims My Prayer Book –with prefatory notes by Two Archbishops of Canterbury.
There are two reasons why it attracts me. The less important is that I owned a copy in my early teenage. It was the first pointer that I could that I could find the Catholic heritage in the Church of Ireland and it pointed out the availability of Confession to Anglicans.
The most important attraction of this item is because of the certificate pasted to the flyleaf that records the Confirmation of Charles Henry Palmer by the Bishop of Norwich in the school chapel March 19th 1942 and received his first Communion on Low Sunday 1942.
The school chapel mentioned was the chapel of Watts Navel Training School which was a Barnardo’s school for older boys – helping them to a career in the Navy. Surely there is a storey here? Apart from the lad’s name the clues are the event the date and the institution. The institution indicates that Charles was an orphan or separated from parents and homeless and also that he was between 14 and 16 years old. The date tells us that it is in the middle of the Second World War. So here is a lad, almost a child, whose hope and expectation is to serve in the navy during one of the most bloody wars in history.
I have tried to find out more about him but can find no trace after the date of his first Communion. In my search I found Charles Henry Palmer RAF killed in action and Charles Palmer in the army died in Japanese prison camp bur their ages are not compatible with dating of this Confirmation.
As I think of these three young men the horror of war hangs heavy around me. There is no glory in war but a man or a woman fully alive is the glory of God. Those who died in war took that glory with them and we are diminished by their absence. Yesterday and the day before we were commemorating saints, martyrs and our own loved ones who have gone from this world. I grieve for the loss of several good friend who have died in the past year. I still yearn for the company of those whose love sustained me through many years of my life. Looked at through an eye only trained on human history it would be easy to become cynical or despairing, to say ‘this is all vanity, there is no God!’
Is this so? Is there no balm in Gilead? No consolation?
The psalmist says ‘the heavens declare the Glory of God and the firmament shows his handwork’ whatever that means I believe that it carries the message ‘your God is too small’ We need to look beyond the meanness and pettiness of human history. The heavens as we can see them now are awe-inspiring, overwhelming in beauty incomprehensible in complexity and power incalculable in age. The heavens don’t prove God’s existence but they make us aware of wisdom, love might and we hear a rumour of him in these.
On the earthly scale Jesus declares the glory of God in his humility and submission to God’s will and purpose. Jesus says I have not lost one of those you have given to me. That means not only the disciples but you and me and all those that we commemorated on All Saints and All Souls Days and each loved one who has gone before us and for whom we continue to pray.
We can’t know what comes after death and I’m not altogether looking forward to my passage from this life but I am sustained by the knowledge that my Saviour has gone that way before me. The Resurrection is a great bonus but the work was already done on Calvary – you will be with me in paradise.