In ‘Summoned by Bells’ Betjeman wrote of how he would “ride for miles / To far-off churches” and, of how one of them so worked on him that his life was changed so that he was inspired to cycle around Cornwall in “quest of mystical experience.” In ‘Before the Anaesthetic’, Betjeman puts us inside the mind of a man waiting for an operation while hearing the bells of St Giles Church ring. The man realizes that, although he has attended church, he has not really known God and, therefore, prays, “Now, lest this ‘I’ should cease to be, / Come, real Lord, come quick to me.”
Betjeman himself wrote: “I have no memory of a blinding light striking me at the corner of a street, or of a fit of the shudders while people knelt around me in prayer. I cannot point to a date, time and place and say, ‘That was when I was converted’. I cling to the sacraments and live for the day, have many moments of doubt when the only thing that buoys me up is the thought that I would sooner the Incarnation were true than that it were not. This, at its lowest ebb, is my faith; but frequent confession and communion have proved to me, unwilling though I sometimes am to believe, that prayer works, that Christ is God, and that He is present in the Sacraments.”
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John Betjeman - Christmas.
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