Paper 9

John Oman was born in 1860 in the Orkneys, studied at Edinburgh and continental universities, was Presbyterian minister at Ainwick for 19 years, and thereafter Professor and latterly Principal of Westminster College, Cambridge . Orkney and Ainwick gave him the common touch, Edinburgh solid grounding, and Cambridge wide intellectual space. These combined to make him an outstanding liberal theologian.

Died Cambridge 1939

As a newcomer to John Oman, I have found two general and three specific topics that draw me into dialogue, into conversation, with him in a way that I hope he would see as ‘reasoning together with God’ (Oman 1941:144)

First, through Bevans, I was drawn to his seeing work as part of:

a personal authenticity in the way one faces life. The way one thinks, the way one critically appropriates one’s culture and history, the way one relates to other people, the way one does one’s job and chooses one’s politics – all these things equip a person for the way the world is perceived in general, and people and events are perceived in particular (Bevans 2007:58).

Second, in Grace and Personality Oman unequivocally affirms the secular dimensions of life:

The Fatherhood of God, as manifested by Jesus Christ, has nothing to do with operations of grace confined to special channels and efficacious in special directions and undiscoverable elsewhere, but manifests itself in a gracious personal relation, which embodies all secularities (Oman 1919:76)

Third, and more specifically, as someone from the east of England, I am drawn to the tour Oman took ‘one perfect day’ around the County of Suffolk, arriving finally at Flatford Mill, John Constable’s early home (English landscape painter 1776-1837) (Oman 1941:194).

Fourth, as a construction and built environment professional, I am drawn to Oman ’s sharp metaphorical distinction between the ways rivers and canals are made (Oman 1919:12)

Finally, in Honest Religion I was intrigued to discover the parable of the spade (Oman 1941:44)

In what follows, I am going to take the three scenarios, Flatford, canals/rivers, and spades, and start the process of considering them in relation to Oman’s use of them, what is revealed about them by Constable, and what questions they pose and insights they give us about personal authenticity, people and work in the secular context of building, civil engineering and the built environment.

My method, I would say, is seeking dialogue and then weaving or picture-making. I hope this meets Oman ’s criterion of good theology, namely that it should not be ‘merely for professional theologians’ (Oman 1923:82).

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VISIT TO Flatford MILL

Building and architecture are in part about making and maintaining places in landscapes composed of natural features and buildings or other structures. A key question is often, ‘What is it like to be there, what kinds of experience are unlocked by working there or living there?’ Does a place, however minutely, help to make us authentic people living in relationship with God?

At the end of Honest Religion Oman says:

One day I had been driven across the whole county of Suffolk . The spring was at the full, the variety of greens and browns infinite, the light of an unearthly perfection, under the splendour of the sky, the farmhouses and old world villages a changing panorama of varied beauty. Then we came to Flatford Mill, and I went in to see where Constable had first earned his bread by grinding flour for its making. I looked out of the unglazed window as he might have done any time he lifted his head from his work, and there, framed in it, what, after all I had seen, seemed rather common place. But it was the scene of The Haywain; and Constable had done nothing to it except see it with an artist’s eyes, which, however, had transformed it into perfect beauty and inspired meaning (Oman 1941:194).

And he adds:

Perhaps all we need for blessedness is for life’s meaning to unveil itself.

Last month I made a similar visit to Flatford in a group led by an East Anglian art historian and a local National Trust guide - who told us he is a Buddhist.

Reflecting on Oman and following him to Flatford gives rise to various observations:

First Oman himself works authentically by using for a theological illustration a place that he has actually visited and experienced.

Second, there is an authentic connection between John Constable’s early work as a miller’s son at Flatford Mill and later as an artist. His brother Abram who actually took over the running of the business from their father, said that the mills John painted would always work. Oman mentions the wide East Anglian skies. Constable’s skies were artistically good in part because it was one of his duties to assess coming day’s weather conditions, so that the milling programme could be appropriately organised.

Third, I myself noted that The Haywain picture depicts agricultural work, including that of the wheelwright, the cart maker and the hay harvesters. The picture also shows Willy Lott’s Cottage embodying, if we think about it, the visible building work of the tiler, the bricklayer, the plasterer and the joiner, and as I looked at the actual cottage, the hidden work of the roof carpenter. We must be careful not to romanticise what were for some very hard working lives.

Fourth, work is currently being done by the National Trust on the 15^th century dwelling which Constable would have had at his back when painting The Haywain. In this house the original staircase has recently been discovered by chance and is to be retained; a traditional primrose coloured lime-based preservative has been applied to the whole exterior in place of an inauthentic material; and a simple but completely new bathroom has been installed by a plumber. The question of authenticity turns on what one chooses to keep, what one re-instates, and what one introduces for the first time. The question of authenticity applies to both the artefact and to the artificer.

There is an interesting range of experiences here. Oman the theologian, Constable the painter, and perhaps conservation architects are individually identifiable, and we can see how the work they do can contribute directly to meaning and authenticity in their lives. But agricultural workers and building workers are unnamed, easily replaced, given relatively prescribed tasks - can they discover a real meaning and a personal authenticity in and through their work; and even if they could in Constable’s time, or in Oman’s, can they in ours? I think the answer is affirmative but a great deal of sensitivity and care is needed in the working out of it.

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CanalS AND RIVERS

Moving on to canals and rivers, I want to look first some words from Grace and Personality:

God does not conduct his rivers, like arrows, to the sea. The ruler and compass are only for finite mortals who labour, by taking thought, to overcome their limitations, and are not for the infinite mind. The expedition demanded by man’s small power and short day produces the canal, but nature, with a beneficent and picturesque circum-ambulancy, the work of a more spacious and less precipitate mind, produces the river... The defence of the infallible is the defence of the canal against the river, of the channel blasted through the rock against the basin dug by an element which swerves at a pebble or firmer clay (Oman 1919:12)

Oman goes on to ask:

....whether God does ever override the human spirit in that direct way, and whether we ought to conceive of either his spirit or ours after a fashion that could make it possible. Would such irresistible might as would save us from all error and compel us into right action be in accord with either God’s personality or ours? (Oman 1919:13)

If in making this metaphorical distinction Oman had in mind major industrial canal projects I can see the basis of his thinking. Matthew Parker writing about the Panama Canal opened in 1914 says, ‘Although the hardships of the construction period were shared in part by all the numerous nationalities who built the canal ... the West Indian workers were three times as likely as the others to die from disease or accidents.’ Some of the costs of construction were to be seen in the hospital wards for the black men (Parker 2007:xvi). This is ruthless, straight line construction, not revelatory of a God we would want to commend.

But as I walked along the towpath at Flatford I realised that the Suffolk Stour is neither a pure, natural river nor a wholly man-engineered canal. It is a ‘canalised’ river, a river straightened out and given locks and other structures to make it a practical means of travel and transport.

Walking beside it, aware of its particular type of authenticity, I find myself facing one of those paradoxes that figure in Oman ’s sermons.

On one hand I want to say that an authentic facet of many kinds of building and civil engineering work is to go the slow way, to respect the past, to have in mind the long term future, to work around problems one by one, whether they are the physical problems of construction or those of people and personalities. As a teacher I want students and young practitioners to sense enduring values in the professional and craft traditions they are joining. I want them to both see rivers, and become river-like, in Oman ’s sense, realising that some will be like Suffolk streams and others more like mountain torrents.

On the other hand I am unhappy about where Oman ’s metaphor might take us. With Constable’s pictures of the Stour in my hand I look at the course of the canal from the Mill to Bridge Cottage. The surveyor’s line is straight, and straight has its own form of good aesthetic. The canal works because of locks. Both my personal observation of the lock and Constable’s careful painting of it suggest that it is technologically good for its purpose, and good to see. I hope that the men who originally constructed it and those who today maintain it, experience personal satisfaction in their work and the sense of doing the right thing in the right place for the right purpose.

The structure of the canal is inseparable from the structure of the boats that use it. Again, as I stand beside the boat-builder’s dry dock and hold Constable’s painting of it, I myself sense and accept the expert view that it is authentic in its detail.

I wonder whether in his emphasis on the slow river, Oman is denying a vocational and spiritual authenticity, a closeness and likeness to God, to those whose work is with straight lines and bulldozers. It is not a practical question for him because he was simply using a metaphor and not talking about canal building, railway building and road building as such. But it is a question for us. How do we discern and speak of a gracious, gentle and personal God in relation to, for example, today’s most poignant project in the UK, the London Olympic developments and all that is associated with them?

In his sermon on ‘the time of figs is not yet’ Oman does provide a theological touching point from which we might develop a practical approach. He advises his congregation: ‘...not to undervalue the times of more limited blessing and the less obvious working of God, and, especially, not to neglect the present with such opportunity as is offered and such success as is accorded.’ (Oman 1921:185)

My Suffolk day out says a very guarded ‘maybe’ to that. But I say a definite ‘yes’ to the reality beside me. When skilful engineering and sensitive architecture are brought into an appropriate relationship with the natural for good purpose, then a good situation comes about. It is not second best, not a limited blessing. It is not penultimate. It is what for this place and this time is right. Therein lies its authenticity which enables it to contribute to blessedness for those who work to make, maintain and use it.

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PARABLE OF THE Spade

I am attracted to Oman ’s parable of the spade; Calling a Spade a Spade (Oman 1941:44) is the title of chapter 5 in Honest Religion.

He looks at the spade in various ways:

1. It is an essential tool, whereby man has dug out earth’s possibilities from his patch of grain to the pinnacles of his cathedrals. The spade dealt with the chalk and gravel and clay as they presented themselves, they whose ways we must learn, whose promise we must await.

2. There is a science of the spade, harnessing energy with the principle of the lever.

3. There is a philosophy of the spade which arises from its place near the beginning of man’s development as an intelligent, tool-using animal

4. And he says we might have a song of the spade as it grows sharp and bright by use and gives the satisfaction of something profitable actually done.

5. His greatest point concerns the religion of the spade, by which he means the temper with which we use it, whether slavishly, brutally and in a domineering way, or merely sentimentally, or whether we dig into life for good purposes and with total honesty:

Yet through all the ages and in all religions, there have been the honest people, who, in their hearts, and with their hands as well as their tongues, faced reality as it met them, and dug in it to discover what ore is hid in its veins or what harvest it is fitted to produce, or what material it has for structures of utility and beauty. They did honest digging... [and] discovered the ore of noble character, the harvest of kindly and self-forgetting service and have reared sublimer temples of beauty and reverence than the cathedrals. And this they have done as they called a spade a spade, working with joy and hope and patience... Thus they discovered that the real, deep and hidden possibilities of what is, what ought to be, and learned better what truly ought to be (Oman 1941:47).

I think the iconic spade is a tool for us in the built environment world. We can take it to places such as Flatford where our work is principally of a conservation nature, and to the latest canal and Olympic projects and ask questions:

What are we doing in and above and with the earth?

What science and technologies are we using?

What are the profits and rewards?

What are the personal joys and hopes?

What hidden possibilities are being revealed?

What is coming nearer to what ought to be?

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CONCLUDING COMMENTS

Two things stand out from this exploration.

First, while Built Environment is not what Oman was principally about, I feel confident that his visits and metaphors are evidence that it can be authentically included in what he is about. He helps us see that the secular matters, and that our work can at least contribute to our discovery of our personal authenticity. This applies to people in building, in agriculture, in art and in theology. But we do have to be very careful how we bring that about for unnamed people.

Second, although enormously enriched and encouraged by Oman , he leaves me with as many questions as I started with. I think he’s done something better than give me answers, or at least something more authentic for a theologian. He has said, ‘Go and visit a Mill, look at it through the eyes of an artist; walk slowly along a canal towpath and reflect on the straightness and the goodness of the structures; and look for a spade, and when you’ve found it, start digging’.

David Cornick has said recently: ‘Reformed spirituality is... about the “theatre” of God’s glory, the world. It is about building a city of the saints, creating an Academy of Vocations ’ (Cornick 2008:110). I have been wondering what a built environment department in such an academy might be like and how it might work. Oman , I think, has given us some suggestions and starting points.

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REFERENCES

Bevans, Stephen (digital version 2007) John Oman and his Doctrine of God Cambridge University Press

Cornick, David (2008) Letting God be God :The Reformed Tradition London : Darton, Longman and Todd

Oman , John (1919) Grace and Personality Cambridge University Press

Oman , John (1921) The Paradox of the World Cambridge University Press

Oman , John (1923) Method in Theology: An Inaugural Lecture Expositor Vol XXVI Eighth series

Oman , John (1941) Honest Religion Cambridge University Press

Parker, Matthew (2007) Panama Fever: The Battle to Build the Canal London Hutchinson

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