My name is Maureen Sharples and I have been a member of All Souls Church for nineteen years since I took up a post at a local primary school. At the prompting of our vicar, Reverend Douglas Merryweather, I have undertaken to write an account of the tragic event that took place at our church on August 20th 2023. It is to be deposited in the church archive so that present and future generations may be properly acquainted with the facts as they transpired and draw their own conclusions about the causes. During these subsequent months gossip and speculation, much of it superstitious in nature, have been rife and our church committee are now adamant that the truth is not distorted into a myth which continually casts a shadow over our faith community.

Many of you will also know me as a neighbour and the sometime or present teacher of your children. I sing in the church choir and organise evangelical activities such as the Women’s Breakfast and The Alpha Group. I apologise if you find my writing stilted. This paper is conceived as a factual account and not a work of descriptive art. Fortunately the main body of my text is Dr Walker’s sermon which was recovered virtually intact from the rubble and I have quoted it verbatim.

Dr Giles Meredith Walker came to us on the recommendation of the suffragan bishop at very short notice to take the 10.30am Sunday service due to the absences of our vicar on sabbatical leave and our senior curate, Amelia Tasso, who had been suffering from food poisoning. He introduced himself as a retired English master who had a doctorate in Applied Theology obtained from Durham University. A distinguished looking man with a full head of hair who might well have been assumed younger than his age. He spoke with a northern accent. The service commenced with readings from Corinthians 1, Mathew’s Gospel, and Romans 2. Two hymns were sung and a blessing received. I would judge the pews to have been somewhere between half to two thirds full. I had expected the ritual of the Eucharist to follow at this point but instead Dr Walker launched into a sermon as follows:

“Today I wish to speak about creativity and to remind you of those wise words we find in the apostle Paul’s second letter to the church community in Rome, ‘Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.’ However, before I get going I need to confess to you that I have always been a slow learner. If I change my mind about something it happens at a snail’s pace. For instance I used to believe that reading was not a creative activity. Stupid or what?! In fact I used to argue with my friend Tim about this all the time. Tim counted reading as his paramount creative activity, coming marginally ahead of supporting Manchester City and conversation in his top three leisure activities. How come I’d concede to him Manchester City and conversation but not reading? Well for one thing way back then I considered myself a budding writer, probably just a few years away from a major literary prize. I believed in the idea of the writer as a daring adventurer, a creative sage plunging his hands up to the elbows into the toxic mire of human experience, while the reader remained a passive spectator of reality, living his life and dreams at second hand.

Of course such a binary concept is nonsense. We are all creative in our own ways. We wouldn’t survive for a day if we weren’t. Even that infamous nurse who murdered newborn babies displayed creativity in the cunning she exercised to avoid detection. Even the hospital senior managers who forced seven paediatricians to apologise to her for defamation behaved creatively – at least they will have to do so now if they are to avoid serious retribution. Some oracles like Osho proclaim that creativity always serves to beautify life. But that is naive. Creativity also serves wickedness and ignorance. When the pope’s henchmen showed that scientific genius Gallileo the inquisition’s instruments of torture the bloke didn’t half back down fast! Creativity is a double-edged sword. If we were not creative by nature we would not have scientific ideas or social progress; but neither would we have over-population, a climate crisis and our western democratic institutions in a state of near chaos. To be creative is always to risk standing on the edge of error. The apostle Paul understood this, I am sure, which is why he urged the Roman Christians to test whatever they discerned and thereby to renew their minds constantly. Oscar Wilde said, ‘An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all’. Picasso deemed that his own voracious creativity stemmed directly from a profound sense of boredom. How is it for you?

Anyway, I recall exactly where I was when the penny finally dropped for me that reading was indeed a creative activity. But first a few more words about my friend Tim. He read voraciously and argued with passion. He also drank quite a lot while doing this. Certain things he never seemed to do, however. He never wrote anything down. Like Socrates and, dare I suggest, Jesus, all Tim’s brilliant insights survived only in the memory of his friends. He never did any housework or DIY stuff. He never learnt to drive a car. The mere thought of sitting behind a steering wheel scared him. And most significantly, at least to me six years after his death, Tim never spoke about God. Imagine my surprise therefore when asked by his widow to deliver the funeral eulogy prior to his burial in their local church cemetery and wondering aloud how appropriate it would be to mention the God word. “Well, Tim was always a convicted believer,” she smiled.

Tim’s silence on the subject still puzzles me today. I can only figure it like this. Tim by academic training was a philosopher. He could argue the pants off any issue that had social, moral, political or otherwise practical value but the question of the existence of a deity – a source, a controlling power – lay outside the ambit of reason or rhetoric, however cleverly utilised. You don’t reach God, touch God, know the quiddity of God by logical deduction. It’s the equivalent of trying to reach the horizon by boat or to arrive at infinity by counting. One of Tim’s favourite thinkers, Wittgenstein, once wrote ‘What we cannot speak about let us pass over in silence.’ So that’s what he did and Tim’s silences were extremely compassionate and loaded with meaning.

So how then does one reach God? Well that’s a question I’ll return to once I’ve finished my riff about Tim and his insistence that reading is a creative activity. A few months after the funeral I drove the thirty odd miles to see how his widow was coping and discovered she had disposed of the vast altar of Tim’s books and given them to charity. She did not read much herself. Each to her own I suppose. It was during that visit we reminisced how Tim was forever lending out books then phoning around his friends accusing them of forgetting to return them. I frequently copped his neurotic irritation, never taking ‘But you didn’t lend it me, Tim!’ for an answer. ‘Look under your bed,’ he’d nag. ‘And in that downstairs toilet of yours.’ Books were his friends, playmates and lovers and he shared them generously, the A to Z of culture from Aesop and Aristotle to Zizak and Zeffirelli. Actually speaking of Zizac, I met the man once after an LSE lecture, a pugilistic East European philosopher with a forensically original critique of all apologias for late repressive capitalism and its beneficial trickledown fantasy agenda. I bought his latest book as a present for Tim, autograph and all. “And please don’t ever ring me up and accuse me of nicking it,” I told Tim as I handed it over to him. “This thesis is impenetrable.”

“Maybe you need to try a bit harder?” he laughed beck

Certainly I merited that slap on the wrist. Frequently when reading I find my mind drifting. I can feel as if I’m trapped inside a prison cell with a garrulous cell mate who can’t shut up. Is logorrhea a precondition for being a professional writer? I sometimes wonder. Certainly novelists like Will Self and Salman Rushdie are capable of inflicting avalanches of polysyllabic verbal incontinence on their readers. You may easily think of others. Surely one of the skills an author has to acquire is the ability to hold back and censor the tsunami of words in his head, sentences driven by pure intellectual adrenalin to an often nauseating extent. Within the literary trade the exercise of radical downsizing is known as ‘killing your darlings’. Less in very often more. Just one of the disciplines a good creative writer has to learn and by transference a good creative reader.

In his preface to the novel Mister Johnson, a deceptively clever satire about British colonial misrule in Africa, Joyce Cary warns, ‘Just as the writer must learn to write, so too the reader must learn to read.’ I once overheard the head of an English department denounce the GCSE A level board for putting the novel on the syllabus. ‘It’s so banal and simplistic,’ he cooed. ‘There’s virtually nothing to say about it.’ That was the moment the penny dropped and I finally realised reading is indeed a creative activity and that some English teachers, let alone Joe and Mable public, have not yet got round to mastering it.

Certainly textual interpretation can be a complex and tricky business. One person’s epiphany can be another’s blindspot. I occasionally wonder exactly how Tim would have read The New Testament. How would he have brought his creativity to bear on the sacred scriptures? How in the Pauline sense would he have set about ‘testing’ their meanings which especially in regard to Jesus’s parables are often obscure?

Firstly there can be no question he would have placed the book in its precise historical context, that is as a selection of memoirs and letters written by Jesus’s followers decades after his death and thereby noted that none of them represent eye witness accounts of the man’s life. Tim would have become aware that the 27 texts were collated and canonised sometime between 393 and 397 CE by the church councils of Hippo and Carthage, and that many other similar texts that portrayed a jarring or off message account of Jesus’s life, such as The Thomas Gospel, were omitted from the final document. My friend would have concluded, I’m sure, that there was a distinctly political and ideological motive underlying the formulation of The New Testament and the actual Jesus may well have been somewhat different in character than the person the church institution has persuaded us to believe in.

Tim would have pondered long and hard about why Jesus refers to God as his father and why he spoke in riddles known to us as parables rather than in plain factual language that even illiterate peasants could understand. He would have wondered how the miracles were achieved and speculated that perhaps Jesus performed conjuring tricks or hypnotised the spectators. Did this hypnotic trance state abide with the disciples after Jesus’s death and therefore account for their resurrection stories? And what about Jesus’s final words on the cross, ‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’ Would Tim have read these as a last second statement of renunciation, a recognition of being self-deceived?

Certainly Tim would have undertaken the scholarship, examined all the extant evidence and the historical theories – both sacred and secular – and he would have concluded – what? Well, it’s impossible to be completely sure, of course, but I doubt he would have agreed with the papal collators in their assertion that Jesus was ‘the only begotten son of god’. Jesus nowhere makes that claim for himself. In saying, ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ Jesus surely is claiming to have achieved a degree of spiritual development that unites him with God and is equally achievable by all of us? Using today’s parlance Tim would therefore have described Jesus as a shaman and leftist insurrectionary, a visionary who by his own disciplined habits of spiritual attentiveness and inner knowing had moved into an intimate understanding of the life force he apostrophised as Abba or Father. He would not have wanted his followers to come to a similar understanding simply by an act of faith, by sheep-like obedience to the authority of a church. Jesus would have insisted that to come into the realm of the godhead, as he had, required them doing sustained work on their inner nature. ‘The kingdom of God is within you,’ Jesus implores us to realise. It is not situated beyond the universe, nor inscribed in a sacred book, nor can it be found in any mere church institution. That’s the conclusion I believe my friend Tim would have reached and I’m happy because in recent years I have reached it too.”

During Dr Walker’s final sentences I began to discern a sound like distant thunder. It came from above us and perhaps far outside the church. Then very quickly the noise intensified and changed to a splitting and creaking discordance that clearly bore no relationship to external meteorological conditions. I looked upwards and saw a shower of dust particles and plaster descend in a cloud right over the section of the platform where our preacher had positioned himself then chunks of masonry and slate tiles. It all happened so quickly my memory even now baulks at the horror I felt, the numbing sensation of impotence and disbelief as the roof collapsed. I recall shouting and screaming, a general panic and rushing for the exit door. Then a hand gripped my arm pulling me forcibly out of the pews. But most of all I recall the solitary figure of Dr Walker, a bewildered and forlorn expression on his face, his arms raised as if in supplication, when suddenly a huge timber beam dropping vertically like a missile crushed him into the floor. Twenty-three people who attended the service suffered injuries, most of them – praise be to the Lord – of a non serious nature and our visiting preacher was the only fatality.

Now that the roof has been replaced and extensive engineering checks conducted it would be wrong of me to deny the extensive speculation that has taken place relating to the cause of the disaster. The church office subsequently received numerous written complaints about the substance of the sermon Dr Walker gave. Who was he? Who took responsibility for inviting him? Phrases such as ‘divine retribution’ and ‘the wrath of God’ became commonplace but were deemed entirely inappropriate by our vicar. Other members have asked whether structural defects in the building had ever been registered and, if they had, why had nothing been done to remedy them? Let me deal with that latter question first. Records show that extensive rebuilding of the roof structure took place in 1965. However we now know that the operatives used reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete in the reconstruction process, a material which is susceptible to deterioration over a period of time, approximately thirty years or so. A survey is conducted on the entire building every ten years and the last one, six years ago, declared the roof to be secure and in need of no remedial attention apart from the replacement of a few dislodged slates. Our lawyer is currently considering whether the surveyor’s apparent negligence justifies legal action. As for Dr Walker we have been informed by the diocesan bishop’s office that he had over thirty years of exemplary service as an Anglican lay preacher and excellent references from senior members of the Church, including a former archbishop of Canterbury. It was not felt, therefore, that any vetting of the sermon needed to be undertaken prior to Dr Walker’s visit. We have additionally been advised by the same office that the Right Reverend suffragan bishop, Sebastian Beavis, has resigned his position and taken early retirement.