Evensong ~ The Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers

Dimension

EVENSONG

2011 ~ 2026

Review

The Dust Diaries

by

Professor Owen Sheers

EVENSONG

Dimension is simply reflection, often jotted onto paper to hand or my smartphone capturing a moment before meaning and purpose vanish.

Being ‘outside-the-box’, standing back from organised religion, enabling faith to move, to breathe, to give, to become malleable.

The Bible is a central plank to my upbringing, I’m fine to acknolwedge that. These days I’m more likely to write in lowercase, similarly so any deity, that subtle hint at this ‘pilgrim’s progress!’.

A long time ago I used to ride horses, and removing the blinkers and letting the horse gallop free in the field, I always thrilled to watch these magnificent animals leaping for joy, aware of their wider perspective and unfettered vision. Then there is the other view. Horses drawing a carriage relax more easily the moment the coachman places the blinkers on them, soothing as they do so; the horse feels safe again when moving through traffic. I sense this only because my father’s father was a coachman-chauffeur, that gentle distinction reminding the world at large that we were shifting from horse drawn to mechanical, that reminder that things do not happen overnight. Revolution begets revolution, and always there is the interim moment. We cannot sidestep this. When we do, we dare to challenge Nature and Evolution, fixin g our ‘five-year-plans’ and creating chaos and horror in the process.

I’m not a fifth-columnist or an enemy at the gate if attending a church service.

In 2022, I wrote…

Last evening, reading Dust Diaries ~ An African Story by Owen Sheers, I found I had marked a paragraph on page 66. I must have done this in either 2011 or 2018 according to my annotated note which reads:

Dust Diaries by Owen Sheers

I must have marked this in either 2011 or 2018. But only now, on 4 October 2021, on finding it fresh just two hours after I've revamped Dimension Fables ~ do I grasp the meaning.

In Tewkesbury Abbey, Gloucester Cathedral, Liverpool Cathedral and Worcester Cathedral did I find this in Evensong, but it is Oliver Sheers who has given me the beatific description.

Owen Sheers writes into The Dust Diaries a most wonderful description into the mind of the character … one of his ancestors, an ordained missionary in the Anglican Church in the newly developing British colony of Rhodesia as it then was, that we, of course, rightly know as the fully independent and sovereign Nation state ~ Zimbabwe.

Sheers writes thus …

“I don’t think I will ever have a relationship with a god in the way you did. Perhaps the modern imagination will not allow such a thing, or perhaps I know of too much harm done in the name of gods. As I sat there, however, with that singing uncoiling into the air, something happened: a tuning in of the mind, a spiritual awareness, a consequence of sound and place – call it what you will, but there, in that evensong, I felt a connection with a presence larger and greater than the present and the self. Perhaps it was the clarity of the notes clearing my consciousness, but I was aware of it, whatever it was, out there, beyond the thick stone walls, past Epstein’s pale Lazarus, outside the hushed cloisters. History, the collective soul, I still have no name for it, and I didn’t then either. I just knew I wanted to be part of it, always pitched at a higher note, and I knew that would be impossible, and that is why I wanted it.”

— Owen Sheers (© Owen Sheers)

I completed The Dust Diaries, I learned a great deal about the mindset of British colonial rule, the attitude of the Church within that rule, and indeed the role, even, that it is happy to engage in. Owen Sheers gives us in this superb title an extraordinary and uplifting study, a balancing of the scales, enabling me to examine the reality of colonial rule and the narrowness of mindset within the Church that he and his ancestor confronted.

This, for the moment, is a pen note; my chief concern is to highlight the crucial importance of descriptive writing.

At School in the 1950s-1960s, so often in history lessons we were reminded of the Dark Continent. There is anything but dark about the Continent of Africa. What is dark is that which outsiders have brought to it over the centuries, and which teachers used to emphasise at school right through from Infant, Primary and Secondary.

I want to say to my excellent teachers…

“Why did you emphasise darkness as dangerous, backward, malignant? You have done much damage. You have unwittingly belittled millions of people who are no different to me and you and, moreover, often surpassing us both.”

— KTW

We often move within and without (outside) denominations. This does not in any way undermine our stance, and as His Majesty the King demonstrated last week when he broke the back of 500 years of history as powerfully as when the rod is ceremonially snapped in two over the coffin before being laid to rest.

As I gaze upon the Sixteenth Century Reformation and the Seventeenth Century tide of Puritanism, I reflect upon the deeds of apparently righteous men and righeous women ~ on all sides.

I think of my anger and perplexity when ISIS laid waste to Palymra and beheaded the Curator. I compare the three events.

My God. The curse and blight of Iconoclasm.

This morning my eye fell upon a book in the hall... The extraordinary life of the American First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a Lady I have always admired, as too her husband, FDR.

My God, I pondered again.

The East Wing has gone. The Rose garden that I always link to the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, too.

My God, I uttered aloud.

Do the American people realise what is being done apparently in their name? The total destruction of their history.

I walked into the study and sat still. Rather crumpled.

“My God. My God. Why ... ... ... ... ... ?! (in the old English).”

— Psalm 22 : 1 KJV

The Dust Diaries recalibrated my mindset.

Professor Owen Sheers, one of our greatest contemporary poets and playwrights has given us all this Gem.

I will go a step further. I see no reason why Owen Sheers will not one day be Poet Laureate.

1 November 2025
All Right Reserved


Liverpool


© 2022 Kenneth Thomas Webb

First written 24 November 2022 and reviewed and updated on 31 October 2025