Written by Monsignor Kevin Francis Nichols, Priest and Poet
St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral, Newcastle upon Tyne
17 January 2024
Twenty years ago, in his homily at the dedication of the Adam Wakenshaw memorial window in this Cathedral, Kevin Nichols said: ‘We need memorials in glass and stone because of the passage of time and because of human forgetfulness.’ It’s now almost eighteen years to the day since Kevin died so after all this time, perhaps our first question must be: who is the Kevin Nichols we celebrate here today, in dedicating this fine window in memory of him?
A priest of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle for more than 50 years, Kevin is, perhaps, best remembered for one the most popular modern hymns in the Catholic Church, In Bread We Bring You. On the public stage: he gained an international reputation as the first National Adviser for Religious Education in England and Wales, from 1973 to 1980; in the ten years prior to that he was one of the pioneering group of lecturers at Christ College (now Liverpool Hope University), which opened in 1964 with the mission to become the first Catholic university in Great Britain. During 1983-1984 he was visiting professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. Widely recognised for his intellectual ability and for his important work in education, he was given the status of ‘domestic prelate’ in the Church by Pope Paul VI, which carries the Italian title of Monsignor. Author of, or contributor to, some twenty publications, he was also a regular contributor to the leading Catholic journals. Popular with clergy and laity alike, he was renowned for his teaching and writing – including his five collections of poetry, two of which were published here at St Mary’s under Howard Baker’s Sursum Corda Publications. (Incidentally, you may have already noticed the letter ‘H’ in the bottom right of the window, acknowledging Howard’s vital role, along with Simon Barker, in bringing Kevin’s poems back into the public domain—and, indeed, contributing so much to the artistic transformation of this Cathedral.)
Kevin’s pilgrimage of faith began on the banks of the Tyne, in Wallsend, on 3 December 1929. As a young boy he came to Newcastle by train every morning to then catch a tram from Central Station, up Pink Lane and all the way to St Cuthbert’s Grammar School out on the West Road. From St Cuthbert’s, and then a short spell at the Jesuit public school at Mount St Mary’s in Derby, Kevin went to Ushaw in 1947 to study for the priesthood. After six years he was ordained in this Cathedral, in 1953, along with Bishop Hugh Lindsay and Fr Peter Smith.
He then went away to study for a degree at Cambridge University and he loved his time there, where he thrived, he said, in its more intellectual and ‘liberating’ environment. His tutor was C S Lewis, medieval scholar and author of the Narnia chronicles. After three years there and gaining a double first in English, Kevin returned to the diocese to teach at St Cuthbert’s Grammar School, his alma mater. After seven years at St Cuthbert’s, Kevin went to Liverpool.
The 1960s and 70s were a time of great change in the Catholic Church. Of that time, which some of us can remember, Kevin has written: ‘I was brought up on the Latin liturgy. It has been a cause of much sadness to me that when the English texts appeared their language should seem, at least in the early days, so anaemic and sterilised. I have tried to find some way of releasing into the liturgy and the idiom of prayer some of the vitality of our rich and beautiful language.’ Hence the hymns by which we know him; he produced bold translations of the psalms; at St Mary’s he wrote several hymns and was prolific in writing new liturgical texts.
When asked about his best-known hymn, he said that one weekend when he was driving up to Newcastle on the M1, he said a ‘snatch of verse’ — with the phrases ‘our body’s labour … our spirit’s grief’ — came to him and he set them to the rhythm of the car wheels. Now if you knew Kevin’s driving you will understand why this hymn has an irregular beat! Thus began the hymn now known and sung all over the world today as In Bread We Bring You, Lord.
It is a deceptively simple hymn. But where else will you find such a poetic and heartfelt prayer at the heart of it that is at the same time such an eloquent expression of what we do when we celebrate the Eucharist? Good poets make it easy for us to understand profound truths: are there any better four lines in modern hymnology than the prayer:
Take all that daily toil plants in our hearts’ poor soil,
take all we start and spoil, each hopeful dream,
the chances we have missed, the graces we resist
Lord, in thy Eucharist, take and redeem …?
With other phrases such as ‘our selfish hearts’ and ‘our failing faith’, this is a hymn for the struggling sinner as well as for the saint. It allows us to offer up to God what Kevin used to call our ‘broken and fragmented lives’. It asks a ‘gracious God’ [one of his favourite ways of addressing God] to take the ‘mess we make of our lives’ and to redeem them. You have to look up hard to see it but in the tracery of Joseph Nuttgens’ Tyneside Industrial Window are two phrases from the hymn: ‘our bodies labour’ on the left, ‘each hopeful dream’ on the right.
In commemorating Kevin today, we are honouring him as a poet as well as a priest. He was a wordsmith with a mastery of the English language, writing with an economy of words that spoke of the depth of human experience. His words are carefully chosen, pared down and fused into compact verse.
Kevin returned to the diocese in 1981 to become a parish priest, first in St Mary’s in Barnard Castle, then in the Holy Family parish in Darlington with St Osmund’s in Gainford and lastly for a few years in Hutton House when he also was Director of the Diocesan Religious Education Service. I became his curate in Darlington in late 1988 at a time when he was working on the new Catechism of the Catholic Church. He was fluent in French and he loved attending the Catechism meetings in France. He threw himself into it despite criticism at the time about the need for such a Catechism, and his confidence in it was eventually justified.
When he retired from formal parish and diocesan responsibilities in 1988, Kevin joined Fr Robert Kinlen and me as an assistant priest here at the Cathedral. He had some of the happiest and most creative years of his life here. He loved living in Newcastle and here also he had the love of a congregation that valued and stirred his intellectual abilities. It was here that he could express his commitment to public poetry.
A parishioner here, whom Kevin also taught at St Cuthbert’s, described Kevin’s time with us at the Cathedral: On a personal level, he was what everyone perceived as a gentle and humble Christian man. His stories were fascinating but never self-aggrandising. He mixed with all types of people with the same kind, caring manner no matter who they were. That respect he had for other people made a big impression on me. Here was a great and famous man who had time for anyone.
Kevin was a man with a very unusual combination of gifts—of intellect and deep learning; a creative mind; and a thorough gentleman. Some people can manage one or other of these — but all three? And all were worn extraordinarily lightly, without the slightest edge: humble, gentle, modest, totally self-effacing and with a wonderful sense of humour. It was only when people got to know him that they realised he had so many gifts and that he was willing to share them generously.
An example of a devastating simplicity in his poetry is the poem we have in the window here before us, which he published with the title ‘Prayer’:
Master
let your grace
lightsome
as a snowflake
settle on us.
The poet W B Yeats wrote, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;/ Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught’. We’ll never know how much time of ‘stitching and unstitching’ went into creating the purity and softness of this poem but it is as delicate as the snowflake it uses as a comparison. The very spareness of language emphasises the only adjective in the poem ‘lightsome’—easy enough to work out, but also a word with an ancient pedigree. I’m told [by Simon Barker] it was first used by John Wycliffe in the earliest English translation of the Bible in 1382 to mean light-giving, radiant, luminous; Chaucer, also used it when referring to ‘ladies’ and ‘bacheleres’ as ‘Ful lightsom’, to mean light-hearted, cheerful, happy—as the Oxford English dictionary puts it: ‘not weighed down by care, pain, or sorrow. Also: enlivening’.
The poem first appeared in The Tablet periodical as far back as 1974. They are words of complete simplicity but at the same time disguise the wordsmith and literary scholar who penned them. The window’s design beautifully captures the snowflake as it gently falls, transfigured, it seems, into the host of the Eucharist: Lord in thy Eucharist, take and redeem. Appropriately, Kevin chose these words for his own headstone at his beloved Minsteracres. There, for over 40 years, he spent many happy times at North Lodge with Ted and Anne Dillon and their family, a friendship that began in Liverpool and one that brought him much love and support over those years.
In his final months, as his health deteriorated, Kevin was cared for at the Home of the Little Sisters of the Poor at St Joseph’s in Newcastle and he died there on 15th January 2006. Throughout his life Kevin liked to quote the words of Mother Julian of Norwich, the 14th century mystic: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’ According to Kevin, they expressed a ‘radical optimism’. Shortly before he drew his last breath, these were the last words I spoke to him and as I did so he opened his eyes and smiled.
To borrow from the end of Kevin’s Wakenshaw window homily: ‘We ask God’s grace that we may keep his memory alive’; not only in the beauty of this window, but also in the ‘radical hope’ in this window’s prayer:
Master
let your grace
lightsome
as a snowflake
settle on us.
Michael Campion
Sunday Mass: Saturday 4pm, Sunday 10am 