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Good morning. Yesterday was the centenary of the birth of Philip Larkin, whose writing touched upon longing, dead hedgehogs and bad parenting. His posthumous reputation has taken a battering because of his many terrible prejudices, but he remains a favourite with the public. He’s bleakly ironic; he’s capable of great beauty. And as a Christian reader, I’ve always found him compelling. Late in life, Larkin bought a Bible and set it up on a lectern in his bedroom, reading it every day while shaving. What did he think of it, a friend asked? Oh, “it’s absolute balls,” he answered. “Beautiful, of course. But balls.” Larkin called himself an atheist, though he added “an anglican atheist”, which is to say part of a sceptical generation haunted by its religious heritage. In the poem "Church Going", he visits an empty church, with its “tense, musty, unignorable silence”. He can't say what draws him here, and he imagines future generations being completely nonplussed. But he finds it to be a “serious house on serious earth”. In another work, Arundel Tomb, Larkin observes an effigy of a long-dead couple, a man and a woman, holding hands, and delivers one of his best quoted lines: “What will survive of us is love”. But nothing's that simple. The pair's relationship is a mystery to us, says Larkin, and their gesture only means what we read into it. “Time has transfigured them into Untruth”, and the triumph of love, though a nice idea, is an “almost instinct” made “almost true”. Larkin has an uncanny ability to express how inexpressible much of life is - full of doubt and unease. He does it best when he’s at his most gloomy. Some might wonder why it is that religious people dwell upon images of suffering and death, such as the crucifixion. Well, one psychological explanation is that it is comforting to know that someone has suffered the way you have, or even worse. Religion and art accompany us through life; they tell us that we're not alone. Larkin completed Aubade, which is sometimes called his masterpiece, after the death of his mother; in it, the poet lies on his bed at dawn contemplating the dread of mortality. It is, he says, “a special way of being afraid,” that “no trick dispels"- including, he adds, religion. But as the light creeps in, Larkin accepts that even as one's own life must end, the rest of the world continues - and the universality of his pain, and the fact that the world keeps turning, is a kind of comfort. “The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done.”