A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on 16 March 2022 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: Psalm 1
When I think of Dudley Green, I keep coming back to the same word. It’s an old-fashioned word, that comes from a family of similar words, all of which mean strong, formidable or thorough. The word is doughty. It’s the kind of word you find in accounts of the Second World War, used about infantrymen who hold out in a besieged house for a long time until reinforcements arrive, and do such things time and time again.
Dudley Green was doughty. As I think about the connotations of the word doughty, I think about a similar adjective, redoubtable, and a similar noun, redoubt. A redoubt is a defensive fort placed outside a bigger fort or castle, a particular feature of the network of forts Sébastien Vauban built all over France in the seventeenth century. Redoubtable means strong and worthy of respect.
This constellation of meanings is the kind of thing that would especially appeal to Dudley. But I know that if I started to describe it, he would quickly pull me up and say something like, ‘Sam, I think you may have missed that “doughty” is a word of Old German origin, whereas “redoubtable” is a French word. Whether they have a common root among the Indo-European languages I actually couldn’t say.’ And you’d look up and Dudley would have a glint in his eye, and that default smile he always kept, and you’d realise what was saying was, ‘Young man, you have no idea what you’re talking about,’ but in the nicest possible way. And then you’d return to watching the cricket and he’d say, ‘I feel a wicket coming,’ or, ‘I think they should put the spinner on,’ and you realised Dudley brough the same powers of analysis and attention to detail to every part of his life. He was a scholar and a teacher. He was a lover of sport but always in the sense that sport is a way of judging character. He was a believer but always a scrutiniser.
The first of the Psalms is a celebration of the one whose delight is in the law of the Lord. To the modern ear that’s a curious phrase. We tend to think delight is for beauty, whether human or in creation or in art. We furrow our brow at the idea that a person could take delight in the law, especially a law like Israel’s law, with all those injunctions about sacrifices and which animals you can’t eat. But that’s to miss one important thing. We tend to hope that God is forgetful, busy and big picture, and we tend to put our trust in God’s forgiveness as a kind of absent-minded thing, where God is too distracted to notice our failures and cruelties. But delight in the law isn’t about a sweeping benevolence. It’s about a fierce attention to detail. To understand all is to forgive all. God forgives all because God understands all. God’s love is a detailed love, that understands our actions and thoughts better than we do.
Dudley was a man of detail. Detail in memory, detail in judgement, detail in scrutiny, detail in research, detail in preparation. For Dudley, detail was a form of love. Detail is a form of close attention, and close attention is the way Dudley expressed love. After all, to write a meticulous biography of Patrick Bronte is to devote yourself to a level of detailed attention few of us could rise to.
So when I think of Dudley as doughty, it’s not because he was a physically strong man, but because he found strength in close attention, in memory, in dedicated service. When we meet in heaven Dudley will say to me, ‘Sam I’ve been waiting to tell you. The German doughty and the French redoubtable both have their origin in the safe stronghold in the words ‘God is our strength and refuge’ at the beginning of Psalm 46. I could listen to the angels sing those words forever. I thought you’d want to know.’ And he’ll have a glint in his eye.
For Dudley’s strength was that he put his destiny in the hands of one who paid detailed attention to him. And to all of us. Now, and forever.
