Monday 25 March 2013

Weak enough

God cloth’d himself in vile man’s flesh that so he might be weak enough to suffer woe.  This is another quotation from John Donne.  I didn’t use it in either of my recent presentations of his work, but I became familiar with it when preparing them, and I take it into Holy Week with me.  I particularly like God’s need to be ‘weak enough’.  Meanwhile, I took these photographs in St Nicolas’ churchyard this morning. 
This one is of Herbert Rollett's gravestone which has fallen, which may not be that surprising after eighty years since it doesn’t look as if it ever had much depth or fixing to anchor itself to the ground.  We are trying to develop an Awards for All bid to do work in the churchyard and print a guide to it, and  one page of the guide was intended to point to this grave, so (although strictly the gravestone belongs to whoever is his surviving next-of-kin) I wonder whether we could have both it and another much older fallen stone elsewhere safely and securely re-erected next year as part of the same project. 
But more interesting than that, the fall reveals the fact that the base of the memorial had been  formed by re-use of an earlier gravestone.  I wonder whose it was, and how the memorial mason felt he was free to cut it up in this way.

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