Review: On Voice. Speech, Song, Silence: Human and Divine

This review appeared in Sofia magazine issue 152, ‘Resistance’.

On Voice. Speech, Song, Silence: Human and Divine by Victoria Johnson Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd (Croydon 2024) Pbk. 189 pages.

On Voice explores and promotes Christian worship, theology and culture by looking at voices in the church today and throughout history. The author, Reverend Canon Victoria Johnson, previously responsible for worship at York Minister and now Dean at the Chapel of St John’s College Cambridge, can also draw on her own experience. Her voice, as an ordained woman, remains controversial or even unacceptable in some places.

The voice of this book is one full of lyrical praise and worship. It gets as close to being a song as printed text can get. At times, I felt it was gushing. For example, the author doesn’t just wonder how the historical Jesus might have sounded, but exclaims ‘Oh to have heard that voice!’

While praise dominates the tone, there is an undercurrent of simmering anger. This bubbles up when the book addresses the unfairness of a government which banned singing and worship while it partied in Downing Street. It was probably meant as an aside, but the litany of the ‘meaner and harsher reality’ in recent years is one of the most powerful pages I’ve read recently. The author describes how the bells of a Church should be ‘a sign and symbol of the church’s vocation to name those things which comfortable society may wish to ignore, to sound out against injustice and warn against complacency.’

Diversity runs through the book as a theme. The author reads the story of the Tower of Babel as God acting against a desire for uniformity and conformity by creating new diversity of languages. The author’s own voice brings diversity to worship. When she delivers the liturgy it may be the first time some are hearing the words of Christ or God from a female rather than male voice. This diversity reminds people that God is not necessarily an old man, and that ‘we cannot control God or indeed dictate how or when God speaks nor to whom God speaks.’

On Voice tells the stories of women from past centuries: the noisy and course but authoritative Margery Kempe; the withdrawn but visionary voice of Julian of Norwich. These voices were, of course, not always welcome: ‘For now, as then, the church still looks with suspicion and caution upon those who profess their own reality of a God who is able to speak directly to them.’

The array of topics covered range from the sad tale of eunuchs to the mysterious voices of bird and whale song, and a fascinating reflection on how the timeless synthesised voice of Stephen Hawkings defied his debilitated body and captured his youthfulness.

One chapter breathlessly conveys the excitement of a multi-million-pound organ restoration at York Minster. A loud new voice for the church after the silence of lockdown. On Voice argues that worship serves a purpose ‘perhaps beyond utility, beyond strategy, beyond economics and ultimately beyond price’. An agreeable ideal, but a world away from my experience of the Church of England. My local parish can’t even afford a regular organist, and the Diocese has set a price on our continued existence of £90,000 per year, unrealistic in one of the poorest areas of the country.

The author says that she struggles to sing what she doesn’t believe, ‘how can you sing something that you don’t quite believe or know to be true?’ and observes, with sadness, the decline of congregational singing in many places. ‘If singing is an expression or sign of belief, if it is a sign and symbol of the church itself, which I want to say it is, Christianity in this country, both the knowledge of it and adherence to it, is no longer something that the general population are willing or often able, to sing in support of.’

In contrast to Johnson, as a Christian Atheist, I’m more comfortable singing a hymn than saying the creed. When I sang in chapel choir, half the words were in Latin anyway, and the rest could be understood as poetic. The book notes that singing at Christmas or sports events endures. Last Christmas, the street carolling at Columbia Road became so popular that the police had to shut it down due to overcrowding.

How would we describe the voice of the Network? Certainly quieter than the clanging bells or booming organ of the church. Perhaps ours is a diverse, at times discordant, but certainly unique, chorus.