One of the Christian notions that has been offered a new lease of life as a result of the twentieth-century renewal of ecclesiology has been that of vocation. It no longer ought to be possible to write an article entitled ‘vocation’ in a Catholic encyclopedia and go on to deal exclusively with the call to the priesthood or the religious life. Even when an author has the intention of dealing with these topics, he should nowadays feel obliged to begin with remarks to the effect that all Christians—and, indeed, all men—share in the same vocation to the kingdom of God. It is the sacrament of baptism that is the seal of a vocation before ever there is a question of an ordination or a religious profession. Just as the notion of the ‘Church’, once confiscated by the clergy, has had to be handed back to the baptized, who all begin and mostly remain as lay people, so has the notion of ‘vocation’. A vocation from God is something which every Christian must learn to detect and act upon, whether or not he remains a layman all his life. One hopes that children in Catholic schools run by religious orders are no longer led to believe that there are just two major possibilities in their lives: either that of having a vocation or, if they do not have this, of getting married. (Not that I am going to spend time in this article in setting up marriage as an alternative vocation; rather the reverse, as we shall see.)

There are two fairly commonplace facts about games which seem relevant to a discussion of Alice in Wonderland. First, games are rule-governed, and so orderly; but playing a game involves a creative application of the rules, as Wittgenstein reminds us in Philosophical Investigations, and thus allows for freedom: rules are fixed, but moves are to some extent unpredictable. Seen in this way, a game might appear as a paradigmatic fusion of order and liberty—one, perhaps, of some relevance to society. Second, games involve a means/ends rationality, but aren’t in themselves functional: they are played as ends in themselves and in that sense transcend considerations of sheer utility. From this viewpoint, games raise interesting questions about the relations between rational and ‘irrational’ for msof activity, and indeed this issue is touched on at the very beginning of Alice: the White Rabbit appears just as Alice is wondering ‘whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies’, pondering the relations between utilitarian effort and creative play. This, too, has a wider social application which the book brings out.

Alice in Wonderland abounds in games; indeed, most of the central scenes—the Caucus Race, the tea-party, the croquet match, the lobster quadrille, even the trial—are games of a more or less direct kind. But, of course, these games are, by normal standards, very peculiar. The croquet game, for instance, is completely chaotic, since the players ignore the rules and the equipment won’t stay in place. Alice has to hit a rolled-up hedgehog through the arch of a doubled-up soldier with a flamingo, but the hedgehog keeps unfurling, the flamingo won’t keep still and the soldiers continually get up and stroll away at the crucial moment.

When I was a youth in England, a favourite anti-Protestant argument ran: ‘We were here first.’ ‘We’ meant St Augustine of Canterbury. When I came to Wales, this would not do, for as Bede tells us, there were Christians here before St Augustine, and, when he met them, they rejected his authority. To the argument that these Christians were obviously not Roman Catholics, we used to reply: ‘Yes, they were, but cut off by barbarian Saxon invaders of England, they were unaware of Roman liturgical changes and were so attached to old Roman ways that they quarrelled with Augustine.’

I began to study the validity of this reply and hence, twenty years later, this article. My amateur thesis is based on the work of the late Rev. A. W. Wade-Evans, complemented by that of three Blackfriars contributors: Mr Donald Nicholl, Professor Finberg and, especially, Mr Eric John.

That barbarian Saxon invaders cut off Wales from the Continent rests entirely on the story of the Loss of Britain, which forms part of a work ascribed to the Welshman Gildas. Bede made important changes in this story and also wove into it independent traditions of a Saxon advent in Kent. He interpreted the whole in the light of his knowledge that the Saxons were of Germanic stock.

A wise Dublin theologian recently reminded me of Whitehead’s doubts about the unity of creation. Whitehead noted that on a fine blue day he could wake up conscious that all nature was harmonious and one. But when, stepping into the street, he was attacked by a large nasty dog, nature became suddenly at least two.

Joyce hated and feared dogs, yet in Ulysses, a cur—the one which bounds like a hare, trots like a pony, trips like a buck, rears up like a bear, lopes like a calf, roots like a pig, claws like a panther, sniffs like a dog—becomes Joyce’s symbol of protean interconnections among disparate species. Simple changes of verb link animals together.

Joyce, whose word-play was sometimes unashamedly childish, chose a dog for his symbol because of what dog spells backwards. When we speak of Joyce’s sense of unity we speak of his sense of God. This is not to force Joyce back into the Church—though we should remember that, asked when exactly it was he had left the Church, Joyce replied, ‘That is for the Church to decide’. Joyce’s faith was peculiar and its motives may have been more literary than religious, but I am concerned here not with his salvation but with the idea of unity which his later works, especially Finnegans Wake, express.

Thomas Merton wrote in the letter in which he accepted the invitation to speak at the Congress in Bangkok where he was to die: ‘... the great problem for monasticism today is not survival but prophecy’. There are good reasons for thinking he was right. In the last few years most religious orders and congregations have been busily working on new rules and constitutions which are usually heavily loaded with quotable quotes from conciliar and postconciliar documents, carefully worded resumes of current theological writing, and skilfully framed paragraphs of compromise intended to satisfy the demands of as many pressure groups as possible. In practice these new documents are often ignored, apart from a little tightening up here and loosening up there and the inevitable litter of commissions that will in due course produce more painfully contrived documents that will also be as much ignored as implemented! This may appear to be a cynical assessment of what is going on in religious life today. In fairness it must be pointed out that the Church ordered the search for new rules and constitutions, they are provisional and experimental, and the discussions that took place at every level prior to their formulation have initiated a long overdue rethinking of religious life. Nevertheless, there continue to be more departures and fewer arrivals to religious life. There is no shortage of new laws but an obvious dearth of true prophets. From his new book Thomas Merton emerges as one of the major prophets in contemporary religious life. It would be a pity if he goes unheard because of the din created by the staggering volume of second-rate writing on religious life.