The question is: who or what was a gryllus? The answer, for those of you who enjoy useless, esoteric information, is that a gryllus is a figure found in the margins of medieval prayer books and psalters, a creature which has no body but is simply a head on legs, a bizarre and fantastical creature. If you get the opportunity to look at the margins of these books, you will discover other astonishing creatures: a sciapod, for example, who used his single foot to shelter himself from the sun's rays; a cat wearing a nightcap, with a tail like that of a dragon; a snail's shell with a human head peeping out from it; and everywhere, everywhere - apes and baboons, monkeying about, mimicking human activities in ribald and bawdy fashion.

This mayhem of characters in the margins of medieval manuscripts erupted onto the scene in the middle part of the thirteenth century and for about one hundred years they were all the rage. No illuminated manuscript, no book of hours, no psalter, was complete without a riot of strange creatures crawling, hopping or writhing up and down the margins.

The question of why they were there has puzzled scholars for a long time. Some say that they were the visual equivalent of the exempla, the fables that the friars used to attract the attention of their audiences. Others claim that they represent the ejected, those who are, literally, on the margins of civilisation. Others say that they are in psalters and prayer books to provide diversion and entertainment during long and tedious services. Others say that they are a moral warning: if you don't behave, look how you will end up. Of course, these odd and freakish creatures were not confined to books, you can find them on misericords - those tip-up seats which enabled monks and clergy to stand for long periods of time - sacred forerunners of the shooting stick. You can find them in gargoyles spewing water (and sin?) out of their gaping mouths; you can find them around doorways of churches or high up under the eaves. If your church dates from the late thirteenth or fourteenth century, the chances are that somewhere you will find them.

They reigned supreme for about one hundred years and then, no one quite knows why, they seemed to die out. Fashion changed, they lost their inventive vigour - though there was one great and strange outburst on a large scale, in the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, in the fifteenth century. Now they are the subject of scholarly studies, with much learned discussion about what their function and purpose might have been. Were they subversive of the powers that be? Were they of theological consequence? The arguments rage - and in a tiny corner of the academic vineyard, they continue to provoke argument and counter-argument.

And there they might remain ... except that in my view, they have never really gone away. In the eighteenth century it was fashionable to go to watch the poor souls, the mentally ill, suffering in Bedlam. In the nineteenth century Dickens created some amazingly fascinating caricatures who could have stepped straight from the pages of a medieval psalter. Uriah Heep would not have been out of place in a book of hours.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, circuses and fairgrounds had their freak shows and in the twenty-first century we have television. Listen to this, for one evening's viewing (31 May 2006):

BBC 1: A Life of Grimes - homeless people are evicted from Edinburgh's tombs

BBC 2: Room 101 - Sara Cox talks about her pet hates, including nineteen year old girls

ITV 1: Emmerdale - Andy gets drunk at the barbeque

Channel 4: Ten Years Younger - bikini special.

The medieval art historians who think that weirdness stopped in approximately 1350, need to think again.

In the fourteenth century the abnormal, the scatological, the absurd, the bizarre, were embraced within a colour-based medium - high-status books - and because those books were religious, that is where human imagination was given full rein. In the twenty-first century there is a distinct and clear separation between our prayer books and churches, and the more outrageous parts of our imaginations. Let me put it like this, if Common Worship had been littered with grotesques and cartoons, with apes dressed up as humans, imagine the consternation. Or if our most recent churches had hidden away within them, or paraded on the doors for all to see, hideous creatures and erotic couplings, again it is not difficult to imagine what the postbag of the Bishop and the Chairman of the Diocesan Advisory Council might be.

I am not suggesting that our prayer books should be swathed with medieval oddities, nor that our churches should be covered in gargoyles - not at all. Neither am I arguing that if our prayer books and churches were vibrant with grotesque and macabre images, it would show that our faith could live with and redeem even the most scaly horrors that our imaginations could conjure up; if I did that I should be guilty of psychobabble and an adolescent desire to shock. What I am arguing for is that in our world, our twenty-first world, we have to find a way of communicating our faith which has its own twenty-first-century integrity - and which has the kind of vitality and richness which will capture people's hearts and minds. I do not think we shall do this by aping (note the word) what television at its most frivolous and decadent already does, nor shall we do it by imitating everything that is ephemeral and trite. Our communication of the faith must have as much integrity as we can muster.

Put it like this, we are trying to communicate God and God's love for all of us in Christ. And that requires, obviously, a profound awareness of our own limitations. It requires grace and a kind of holy lightness of touch. The holy, the good, the beautiful, the true, our Lord Jesus Christ himself, are so beyond our capacity to express adequately and effectively, that we have to set out on our task as sharers of the good news with brave hearts (sure) but also with a longing, a deep longing, for simplicity of soul.

Let me give an example of that bravery and simplicity from the world of poetry; it's a poem written by May Badman, a very remarkable St Albans poet, called Finding the Curve:

The poem hit me, and it sprang

Into the curve as a rainbow does

When sunbeams leap through the drenched air.

It has no reality yet, its life

No cogency, its purpose

Hidden in that place where rainbows are

Before they come. I am to hold it

Keep it in balance, tense, as a bow

Holds the arrow before it flies.

So it is a matter of fingers, and the pen,

And my heart which have the knowledge

That I, earthbound, must find and trust

Then let the arrow go,

Watch the rainbow curve as it becomes

A leaping horse, or the seagulls I saw,

Flying stars on a black sky. [M Badman: A Life in Poetry, Quetzal Press, 2006, p.33]

That kind of poetry is both a gift and a hard-won craft. It is born of a love of language and yet is self-forgetful. It is deft, eager, precise and as objective and disciplined as good writing always is. Amongst all the babble and noise, and freak-show histrionics of our age, it is a pearl of great price. You will recognise the same kind of self-forgetful, tensile beauty and simplicity in the poetry of our Bible - and it is this that I long for us all to emulate when we try to communicate the truths and beauties of our faith to our world.

It is, I am aware, a lifetime's discipline, born out of prayer, waiting in stillness upon God, so that we may give voice to those eternal truths which have been revealed to us in Jesus Christ. You and I, as followers of Christ, have to be as vivacious as artists, as disciplined as poets, and utterly forgetful of self; and out of that self-emptying and self-offering we must pray that God, in His mercy and loving kindness, will use each one of us and His Church for His glory, and for the proclamation of His kingdom in our generation.

© Christopher William Herbert, 2006