What Is
The Traherne Association?
The Traherne Association (Registered Charity No. 1053124)
The Intentions of the Association
1) To advance the Christian religion..
2) To encourage the study of Traherne's life and writings in their 17th Century context. 3) To explore the relevance of Traherne’s ideas today.
4) To encourage the publication of more of his unpublished work.
5) To arrange an annual service at St Mary’s Church Credenhill on Trinity Sunday.
We seek to bring together those who have come to Traherne in their search for true purpose in their lives, together with those who are engaged internationally in the continuing discovery, research and publication of his works.
If you wish to apply for membership or membership renewal please access a Microsoft Word Application for Membership or Renewal Form
In memoriam Donald Allchin
In the summer of 1990 I noticed in the Church Times an advertisement for a conference at Ammerdown near Bristol. That it was to be led by Donald Allchin got me thinking.
In 1942 when my Mother was bearing me, Donald heard about me from his Aunt, who lived two doors away from us in Ealing, London. Twenty years on I was clearly following in his footsteps, having been to the same schools and the same Oxford College, Christ Church. And at Oxford from 1962-6 he invited me to lunch at Pusey House where he was Librarian. And then our paths parted. Until we met again nearly 25 years later. And his Ammerdown conference was entitled ‘Thomas Traherne’.
That weekend changed my life. I had come across Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations not at Oxford (there I had never even heard of him) but in the SPCK shop in Nottingham in 1979. I had been consumed by it and sometimes used to quote it in my south Cambridgeshire parishes. But to hear Donald talking about the wideness of Traherne’s thinking was mind-blowing. If only all the Archbishops and Bishops of the Church of England had been there. Towards the end Donald came up to me and said: ‘Richard, we must do something to bring Traherne properly to the surface.’ Out of our conversation was born Traherne’s first Festival based at his parish of Credenhill. I asked Donald when it ought to be. And he replied ‘it must be on Trinity Sunday. God’s Trinity is the heart of his writing.’ And there he was, on Trinity Sunday 1991, in Credenhill Church, Herefordshire. And on Trinity Sundays over nearly 20 years. His guidance for the programmes was unforgettable.
He was for me the heart of kindness. I close with a passage from his chapter in ‘Profitable Wonders: Aspects of Traherne, by A. M. Allchin, Anne Ridler and Julia Smith, The Amate Press, 1989.’ I still regard this as an unrivalled study of Traherne.
Richard Birt
I have tried to show in this essay how Traherne the poet, the man of a piercing and singular vision, is also Traherne the priest, the celebrant of the Church’s liturgy, who offers up with all God’s people, ‘the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving’. Thomas Merton in his tantalisingly brief comments on Traherne speaks of how when reading him ‘we must penetrate immediately to the central intuition, a basic Eucharistic and primitive Christian theology of praise’. He goes on to quote some sentences from the 76th of the Second Century of Meditations. ‘We infinitly wrong ourselves by Lazines and Confinement. All Creatures in all Nations and Tongues and Peoples Prais God infinitly; and the more for being your Sole and Perfect Treasures. You are never what you ought till you go out of yourself and walk among them.’ For Traherne this ‘walking’ among God’s creatures was primarily a matter of thought and prayer, but it included actual, physical walking around the fields of his parish and the cities which he knew. This calling to praise which can unite us in ourselves and with one another in the human family, is a movement of appreciation and enjoyment which is surely vitally necessary to us if we are to learn how to cease from abusing and destroying the very fabric of the world in which God has placed us.
Donald Allchin
DONALD spoke many times at our Festival including the first in 1991
at St Peter and St Paul, Weobley, his lecture being entitled, The Gift of Friendship. He went on to make us aware of the unpublished works of Traherene. In his introduction to Landscapes of Glory, he quotes one of his most favourite passages: We find one of the most beautiful of his meditations, a kind of extended rumination on the quality of love as a gift of the Spirit.
Donald is very much missed.
INTRODUCING OUR CHAIRMAN
Richard Willmott read English at Cambridge and studied French Renaissance drama at the University of East Anglia for a second degree while he was teaching in Norwich, where he also sang in the cathedral choir. He subsequently taught at Manchester Grammar School and Brighton College, before becoming head of the Dixie Grammar School.
He has written various A-level textbooks, including two on metaphysical poetry, and has just finished revising a second edition of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, which is due to be published next March.
Since retiring to Hereford he has become an enthusiastic member of the Association. He is also a volunteer at the cathedral and sings in various choirs, including the Three Choirs Festival Chorus.
Officers of The Association
President:
The Bishop of Hereford,
The Right Revd Anthony Priddis.
Patrons:
Dr Ronald Blythe
Revd Prebd Roy Davies
Mr Anthony Weston
Founding Chairman
Revd Richard Birt
Chairman:
Mr Richard Willmott
Secretary:
Mr Jerzy Rosankiewicz
"Buttermere" Moreton on Lugg, HR4 8DB, Herefordshire
Treasurer:
Mr Lionel Meredith.
E V E N T S.........................
The Traherne Festival is held each summer in Credenhill (5 miles NW of Hereford), and in Hereford.
2012 Festival: June 9th - 10th.
Further details later from janeacox@btinternet.com
OCTOBER 10
Thomas Traherne, Hereford’s poet priest, was buried on OCTOBER 10 in 1674, and is celebrated in the Church calendar.
------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------
=================================
THESE ALSO MAY INTEREST YOU:........................
January 13: Birmingham Midland Institue
Study day on Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
0121 236 3591
January 17: Blake society AGM + talk The Vision in Practice
Contact Blake Society
February 24th, 2012: Birmingham Midland Institue
Re-assessment of Mary Webb
Contact: 0121 236 35 91
March 10th, 2012: Minterne Magna A Woodlanders Walk
www.hardysociety.org
March 24th, 2012: SPRING DAY A botanist loooks at daffodils
by Ray Woods. Contact - Friends of Dymyck Poets
April 19, 2012: Ludlow Conference Centre
Bishop John Saxbee. Info 01746 853 314
23 -28 JULY, 2012: Friends of Coleridge Summer conference
www.friendsofcoleridge.com
RECENT LECTURES
The following lectures were given by Denise Inge recently.
HAY FESTIVAL 2010 - "Happiness from Aristotle to Thomas Traherne" -
"An erudite appreciation of a long-lost poet"
See article by Mark Vernon =
www.guardian.co.uk (go to HAY FESTIVAL and search "talking happiness")
2009LEDBURY POETRY FESTIVAL
"The lost Manuscripts of Thomas Traherne"
"A brilliant exposition of the emergence of Traherne's manuscripts from Denise Inge"
2009 HEREFORD THREE CHOIRS FESTIVAL - "These Little Limbs" - Fascination with new life in Gerald Finzi and Thomas Traherne.
Traherne Newsletters
are issued three or four times a year. (next JANUARY 2012 )
SEPTEMBER 2011 ISSUE INCLUDES:
Anne Ridler's Visible Silence";
All the Business of Religion is Graditude - by Roy Davies;
Thomas Traherne and the Reality of Things -Kathryn Murphy;
On being drawn to Deity -Alan Munn;
Hereford Cathedral's Chained Library in Traherne's Time -
Philp Weaver;
Traherne, Church Fathers and Tradition - Sister Mary Pia.
Editor: janeacox@btinternet.com