Seeing, Searching, And Seeking To Serve | Wykeham Journal

Wykeham Journal2024 edition

The reverend is stood inside his church looking thoughtful, with stained glass windows in the background.

During the photoshoot for this article, there was a period of five minutes or so when I had to stand completely still, staring at a candle-flame.

We were in the small, village church where I am parish priest – a building I enter most days, and know well. Despite this, it was perhaps the first time I had ever stood so stationary within it, for such a time, without doing anything else. The flame flickered, my focus drawn to its colours, to the way it lit the wall and the stained-glass windows below where I pray so often, but at which I had so rarely looked with intent.

Roald Dahl fans will recall a similar scene from The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, in which the title character trains himself to focus on a flame for several minutes, without a single other thought entering his head. There is no indication, in that charming story, that the fictional Sugar was an Old Wykehamist, but for me it was Winchester that taught the contradictory skills of, on the one hand, focusing our gaze fully on a single topic, and on the other, enjoying a life so rich and busy that we too rarely do so. At the heart of both experiences, I suspect, is Div – although I probably didn’t appreciate or register that as a schoolboy. It strikes me now, as extraordinary, and extraordinarily brave, to focus the entire curriculum around a subject which (at least in my day) was unstructured, undefined, and largely at the whim of the don teaching it. Across five years of Div, I studied graphic novels and ancient architecture, Romantic poetry and Baroque opera, the histories of medicine and botany and art. Some of these passions have stayed with me; to others I bid a grateful farewell after a few lessons. Onto all of them, though, we were all required to turn our self-centred teenage eyes for a week or two, never more so than each Saturday night, as we settled down to write our Div Task, often on a topic with which we were entirely unfamiliar until days before.

The Reverend is stood outside the church, amongst trees and grass, with the church door in the background. — The Reverend Ben Cahill-Nicholls outside All Saints Church, Tilford.

To that discipline, with the benefit of hindsight, I owe much of my life since. Slightly shamefacedly, I cannot admit to anything resembling a ‘career’ – I have skipped from field to field with more agility than I ever showed in that appalling Jun steeplechase, but finding in each move new delights and challenges, just as in Div we shifted from Shelley to Schutz. In a world where I, at least, am guilty of spending so much time scrolling and swiping from one image or opinion to the next without pausing to consider, I recall with fondness and gratitude an education which taught me both to stand still and see, and simultaneously to search constantly for the stimulating and the new.

But Henry Sugar is clear, when learning to see and to search, that there must be a purpose to such discipline. For him, it begins entirely selfishly: the candle-flame is part of his training to read through playing-cards, in order to beat the casinos and become rich(er). Ultimately, he sees the error of his ways, and uses the funds he gains to establish orphanages around the world. My Winchester journey began, perhaps, with similar self-interest.

I recall with fondness and gratitude an education which taught me both to stand still and see, and simultaneously to search constantly for the stimulating and the new.

Looking over the shoulder of the reverend in the foreground, the camera focusses on the coloured stained glass windows of the church. — The stained glass windows at All Saints Church, Tilford.

After all, it is easy, in such a school, to imagine oneself important, entitled, grandiose, different – and, by extension, to become those things. Winchester, in my experience, did not allow this. Quite how it emphasised that we were there because of others’ gifts, and thus called to dedicate ourselves to others’ service, I am not sure. Perhaps it was the routine of Chapel, which led for me to faith and vocation, or the example of extraordinary people before us who had left that monastic, heavenly environment determined to contribute positively to the wider world. Perhaps it was something as simple as the lack of uniform, a daily reminder that we were not – as some uniforms shout aloud – set aside from others, but part of the flock. Whatever the means, I left convinced that a Winchester education was a privilege and that, like Henry Sugar, my job now was to put the wonderful blessings of my experience to some wider value. So it was that I joined the civil service, from which I was seconded to Parliament, for which I then decided to stand (I lost hideously). Through all that, the call of the God I had grown to believe in during school Choral Evensongs became stronger, and I trained for the priesthood while overseeing educational partnerships and community service at Charterhouse. Now, I am hugely fortunate to combine a rural, parish ministry with a national role, as chief executive of Clergy Support Trust, which last year helped over a fifth of the Church of England’s priests with their financial, mental and physical health. My story is no more, and far less, interesting than many others’ – but that it was shaped by Winchester, and the values of that school we love and share, I have no doubt.

What are we left with, when we depart one place in our lives and head for another? A legacy of some kind – and, for me at least, the Winchester legacy was one of service. The perspective which schooldays gave me was not complete: of course there is much of the world’s diversity we have all seen since, and even more, which each of us has yet to see. But the perspective it did give me was, perhaps, of knowing that my perspective was no better than anyone else’s – that I was part of a humming, spinning, inter-connected web of people and places and ideas and ideals in which I, like everyone else, was simply called to try and play a little part. In a world obsessed with titles and labels, it was Winchester that taught me the one title we all share and that truly matters: beloved child of God. In that sense of relationship and responsibility, in the values of effort and equality which reverberated through my time there, Winchester gave me the foundations for a life of trying to focus, deliberately and intently, on the extraordinary riches of the world around me, and of trying, in some small and often invisible way, to leave it a tiny bit better than I found it.

Two older Winchester College pupils are working on music for a production, one is stood up looking at music and the other sat playing the piano. — The directors at work: Published within the Wykehamist in 2004. Ben on the right with Ashley Riches (Coll, 2000 - 05). They are working on Guys and Dolls, one of RicNic's early productions, the theatre charity they founded in VIth Book.

A class photo of Winchester College students outside with the school building in the background. — Freddie's house photo 2005. Ben is seated on the second row, four from the right.

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