Lent talks, 2008

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Transforming Cathedrals
Lent Lecture in Wakefield Cathedral
20 February 2008
given by Canon Chris Chivers
Canon Chancellor, Blackburn Cathedral

When I received this kind invitation to speak in a series on transformation, and to focus on cathedrals in particular, I couldn’t help recalling that I’d once brought these two components together myself in a Lenten series of sermons when I was on the staff of the cathedral in Cape Town.

The series was entitled Self and society in transformation and it was designed to recognise, just a few years on from South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994 that transformation – both at a personal and on a societal level – was still very much of the essence for all South Africans. Indeed, because the word had become somewhat of a politically-correct football in the national discourse – and one about which there was already much cynicism – we decided to spend some of the considerable physical and moral capital at the disposal of St George’s Cathedral – it was situated right next to the South African parliament where, as a venue for so much anti-apartheid struggle, it had won widespread and affectionate recognition as ‘the people’s cathedral’ – and to use the interest on this capital for the good of all.

Why not take some of this, we thought, and initiate or reinvigorate a dialogue between church and nation around an ongoing process of transformation whose object was nation-building, the re-creation of a multi-racial democracy for all?

It sounds innocuous enough at one level. Surely, objectively, just the kind of thing that any cathedral worth its salt – and, more to the point, attuned to its context – would do? But it provoked quite a degree of controversy.

As much of this was directed at me, the originator of the series, I recognise that I’m not perhaps the most objective person to interpret the concerns that people voiced. But looking back on them at some distance they seemed to swirl around one issue, which we might focus in a question: How could non-Christians (people of other faiths or no faiths, even some people not that sympathetic to faith) be invited to give addresses in the context of cathedral worship, indeed in the cathedral per se?

For I’d invited a well-known freedom fighter, then Speaker of the Cape Provincial Government, several Jews – including the founder of the nearby Cape Town Holocaust Centre – the director of the South African National Gallery – by her own description only ‘a nominal Christian’ – several politicians and educationalists, a musician, a journalist, a local imam and South Africa’s leading comic artist, who described himself as a member of both the chosen people – the chosen people for the northern hemisphere, the Jews, and the chosen people for the southern hemisphere, the Afrikaners.

Framing this mix were a Dean, an Archbishop and several other Christian ministers. But a lot of people seemed to forget them as the letters of protest arrived and phone calls jammed the cathedral switch board.

By way of context, it needs to be remembered that this was the cathedral where for at least twenty five years prior to 1994, if not for much longer, people of all faiths and none had met to worship and to protest, and sometimes to do both together. It was the place where the African National Congress and other banned political parties un-banned themselves in the late 1980s, the place where riot police had – as early as 1972 – entered the building to tear-gas and baton-charge protesting students, the place where one Holy Week a hundred people forcibly-evicted from their homes had sought sanctuary in the south aisle, from which the screams of nappy-changing for new-born babies mixed – on Easter morning – with the strings an d trumpets, the horns and oboes of Gounod’s Mass – as the smell of soup cooked by parishioners mingled with clouds of incense.

So it wasn’t exactly a place un-used to accepting the idea that the sacred and the secular are all of one piece, and that religion and politics were fundamentally intertwined. Indeed, many would have seen the people’s cathedral as an icon of the Christian Church as it should be, in creative and transformative relationship with the world.

So what was going on? Why were people now reacting against a sermon series which was doing what the cathedral had always done?

Before I answer that question let me share with you the following brief telephone conversation between an irate clergy spouse and the Archbishop of Cape Town.

Clergy Spouse: Father, why has that terrible new Canon Precentor invited an infidel, the Imam of Claremont, to preach at the cathedral next Sunday evening?

Archbishop’s immediate response: I shouldn’t worry my dear, he’s invited the Jewish drag-Queen the next week!

It was one of the best one liners I‘ve ever heard from anyone, let alone an Archbishop. But it was also true, Pieter-Dirk Uys, otherwise known as the character Evita Bezuidenhout, your archetypal Jewish Afrikaner from Pretoria, dripping with jewels and dripping with prejudice was, as I mentioned earlier, one of those invited to contribute to the series. Indeed, apart from Wilhelm Verwoerd, the grandson of Hendrick, the architect of hard-line apartheid – who preached a very courageous sermon in front of his mother about the Afrikaner, apartheid untruths he’d been taught as a child by her and by his father, Pieter-Dirk Uys’s sermon was the best of the lot.

1000 people came to Evensong to hear him speak on ‘Laughter as an agent of transformation’, with the title: No-one died laughing. It was a wonderful sermon based on a text from the psalms about the God who laughs with and even at us. It ended with the wonderful line: “How do I amuse God? I tell him my plans.” And it was an object lesson in preaching because it conveyed its message – it did it’s transforming work – by making the congregation of black, coloured, Indian and white South Africans laugh at themselves. It was probably the most transforming sermon I’ve ever heard.

So why all the fuss?

There are lots of contextual answers to that question – South African answers – which need not detain us overly much. They relate to questions of identity and to the way in which, after a very long period of time when people of very different faiths, cultures and ethnicities have been bound together in protest at an evil like apartheid they inevitably, perhaps, need to spend time rediscovering, recovering their particular community’s own innate, distinctive identity. Certainly, there was something understandable about the way in this involved what we would call ‘regression’ – a return, if you like to the turbulence and the illusory freedom of adolescence, a return to a time when a heady mix of independence, diffidence, dependence and defensive stridence sees forthright views, half-truths and prejudices endlessly teased and tested out. Hence, perhaps the vehemence of that clergy spouse.

During the years of protest, people had discovered a deep connection with one another, which crossed all sorts of boundaries, ethnic, religious, political, philosophical and cultural. In transcending all these ‘differences’ they’d in fact been utterly transformed as human beings quite without knowing it. But with this transformation came an insecurity. For whilst they’d actually discovered what it meant to be Christian in the most profound and outward-looking way, they doubted this and were therefore busy trying to create a protective ring-fence, a womb-like cocoon around the Christian faith. In the many letters that I received, protecting the cathedral, marking off its territory and preventing outside influence ran through the mail like a ringing refrain. Quite what was being said about all the people the writers had been so happy to embrace within their sacred space just a few years before, I don’t know.

Of course, moving to our own context, something very similar has happened recently in relation to the lecture that the Archbishop of Canterbury gave on the relationship of religious communities to the Law. For whatever the merits of the lecture itself, what we’ve seen – in the vehemence of the many negative and improperly personal reactions from people claiming to be Christians, as much, frankly, as from so-called secularists – has exposed deep insecurities both in relation to issues of Christian as also of national identity. And this insecurity has expressed itself in an all-too-eager rise in nimby-ism – in ‘not in my back yard’ syndrome – and in an attempt to ring-fence both the Christian and the national narratives by saying, this is where we are, this is what we’re like, we’re not going to deal with this narrative called Islam. It’s other, outside, beyond. Finish and klaar, as they say in Afrikaans.

We know – at least we ought to know from our recent history – that such protectionism is of little more than very illusory use to us. In reality, we can’t pull up the draw-bridge. We have to get into dialogue. We know this from our post-Second World War experience of European and post-Colonial relationships, even – to be narrowly churchy for a moment – from our experience of ecumenical relationships. All of which have taught us that the arrogance of going it alone is but a rather crude form of adolescence. But, choosing to forswear maturity and to return to adolescence, many have opted to neglect, indeed, to forget all this.

Which is where cathedrals come in so strongly.

In the example of transforming ministry from Cape Town which I’ve outlined in some detail – perhaps, you may feel, too much reflective detail – one of the crucial aspects of the story was the way in which the retreat from the reality of an already transformed community – a community bound together in adversity and then able to celebrate together the fruits of apartheid’s defeat, but choosing instead to fight over who owned which orchard – this retreat exposed not just an adolescent fault-line for the Church but for the whole of society. Which is precisely why St George’s Cathedral – pressing physically and morally towards Parliament and nestled at the heart of city and nation – had to be the place which restored some perspective.

This sounds dangerously grand of course, even presumptuous. But when George Bizos, the leading South African human-rights lawyer stops you in the street to say, “Don’t give up… the cathedral has to remind us of what we could lose if we retreat into ourselves. There may be no-one else doing this” And when Adelaide Tambo, wife of Oliver, and other leading South Africans send you notes to say much the same, you know that whatever else you’re doing, you’re responding to a deep societal need.

I believe it’s very easy for cathedrals to underestimate their transformative potential in this regard. They tend to have quite a good sense of it in the following terms. They can all trot out the narrative about how the stained glass, and the soaring roof, and the glorious music offer an oasis of healing, and a transforming space for personal change. And I don’t deny any of it: it’s true, it’s important, it’s to be celebrated. But it can also be used as an excuse for avoiding more demanding – and ultimately transforming – ministries that they’re called to offer.

The Archbishop of Canterbury recently said that leadership consists in working out who should answer which question. That’s a brilliant way of putting it. But much of the Church of England – to be very narrow in ecclesiastical terms for a moment and to judge by the reaction of many to what the Archbishop recently said in his lecture – seems frankly more obsessed with answering the questions that people aren’t asking.

In a centralised, and centralising Church which places far too much leadership responsibility on a few individuals – called bishops – cathedrals, with their corporate structures, can offer corrective leadership here because they are better placed to discern the questions – especially the ones that other people are avoiding – and to use a plurality of people to begin to frame answers to them.

When Subir Biswas, the famous Dean of Calcutta – described by Mrs Indira Gandhi as the greatest Christian in India apart from Mother Teresa – when he took over St Paul’s Cathedral, Calcutta – which is a carbon-copy of Canterbury Cathedral on the outside, and like a hundred other cathedrals of the empire on the inside – he took over a building of monumental irrelevance to its context. A building, in which a few ex-patriots assembled to remind themselves of ‘home’ before the really important Sunday morning business which was sherry followed by lunch at the Tollygunge Club! Soon after he arrived, terrible floods in Bangladesh brought hundreds of thousands of people into Calcutta. In the past when they’d arrived, the Marxists of Bengal had shunned them and the cathedral had prayed for them. But no-one had helped them. Dean Biswas immediately assembled his friends and asked them for clothes and food, and he asked that they be brought to the cathedral. So when the retired majors and brigadiers arrived on Sunday for Matins, they were greeted by piles of clothes, sacks of grain and rice, all neatly filling the nave, which the Dean had turned into a feeding and clothing station with a staff of volunteers. A steady stream of refugees was already beginning to arrive.

How would the majors and brigadiers react? Would they fight the change? Ignore it? Abandon Matins and take earlier flight into the Tollygunge Club? Would they, in short, insist that the cathedral remain a place of monumental irrelevance? John V Taylor, then General Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, and later Bishop of Winchester, always recalled this extraordinary moment of challenge and transformation. For in so organised a response, of course, the Dean had strategised not just for the possibility but for the certainty that these majors and brigadiers would find a way to come on board. For they could organise a supply chain. They knew all about chains of command and delivery, so they got stuck in. And in the process they rediscovered the power of the Gospel in a cathedral that remains one of the cathedrals of the world most engaged with its surrounding context.

The neediness may not always be so physical of course. But it’s there all the same.

When I arrived at Blackburn, I noticed immediately that one half of the painted west doors was always shut. If you got through the half that was open, above the next door you read ‘This is the House of God and the gate of heaven’, only to notice that a rope wound tightly round the central door meant you couldn’t open heaven’s gate. And that was not to mention the notices plastered beneath the scriptural text saying: please use the side door. Manage to open this door, and then you discovered that it banged so fiercely behind you that you jumped out of your skin as you entered the building. The cathedral said welcome at one level. But at another – indeed, at every step along the way – it was really saying: this is our space, keep out. We had to open a few doors – and decide that we were in the business of being a place that wanted to hear people’s questions – before we started to answer any of them!

But what, for instance, are we going to do in our cathedrals – and with our cathedrals – to engage in the conversation that lay behind the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lecture? He wanted us to think again about the fractured and fractious relationship between people of faith and an increasingly secular state. How are we going to become the space within which that conversation between faith and secularism is carried forward? Because if our cathedrals don’t articulate and attempt to answer those questions, if we don’t use our authority, our credibility, the social capital and, yes, even the cache we possess – the unique giftedness of our presence at the heart of so much – through lectures, seminars, dialogues and a hundred other means, if we don’t – this is crucial – model the manner and tone of the conversation itself, who else will play what is a pivotal and utterly transforming role in the life of our human communities?

In his wonderful book, The beginning and the end of religion, Nicholas Lash, the former Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, argues that we’ve tended to turn a faith relating to every aspect of human living, indeed to the whole of creation, into a privatised series of religions, largely concerned with their own existence, often over-against one another. As he reaches the close of a very powerful critique of what is a rather-too-familiar, increasingly pervasive and creeping narrow-mindedness, he’s clearly searching for an image that might point to a more hopeful way forward. Where does he find it? In a cathedral of course; in the wonderful public square in front of St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice. The place, he says, where the most important conversations of the day happened between the movers and shakers of sacred and secular life, as also between every responsible citizen of goodwill.

It’s no co-incidence that most cathedral’s are built in such a position, and even if they aren’t blessed with a piazza a tenth the size of St Mark’s, most have naves which are public squares. For a faith whose central narrative and doctrines concern the transforming of the world through the conversation between God and humanity in Jesus Christ, there can surely be no higher calling than that we open up those very spaces for what will no doubt be challenging, but also transforming and, who knows, hopefully life-giving conversations.

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The transformation of suffering
Lent Lecture in Wakefield Cathedral
27 February 2008
given by Martin Parrott

Around the turn of the thirteenth Century in the hilltop town of Assisi in Italy, a young man was out with his friends one evening in much the same way as you might see a group of youngsters out on the town here in Wakefield on a Friday or Saturday night.

The young man was in his early twenties, his name Francesco Bernadone. He was a natural leader, charismatic, attractive, witty and full of life.

He was beginning a journey into the heart of Christ. His conversion came in stages and he was about to have a moment of disclosure. He was about to take another step nearer God.

When the moment came, it was a realisation, an experience of the presence of God which literally stopped him in his tracks and he stood still.

His companions did not know what to make of this strange behaviour and one is believed to have joked with him, “What’s the matter Francis, are you in love?”

He reply was “I am in love with someone more beautiful than you could ever imagine”

I will return to the object of Francis’ love in a little while, but first I want to thank John for inviting me here, this lunchtime, to speak on the subject of the transformation of suffering.

I must confess when I got the invitation there was a fleeting temptation to be unavailable, as this subject is not an easy one, but I am glad to be here.

It is a difficult subject for several reasons, not least because its scope is extremely wide.

Carlo Caretto, an Italian monk who died fairly recently wrote:

I am certain that the mighty mountain of universal suffering afflicting us on earth is due first and foremost to human sin, to our violence, pride, lust, selfishness and greed.
Let me be plain: the immense catastrophes of war, social struggle, tribal clashes, famine, ecological imbalance, and so on are due to our disobeying the clear and simple laws of God, nature and life.

In those words there are quite a few talks!

In this talk, I want to address the suffering which is more interior, more personal, and probably far more widespread than we care to acknowledge.

In the early nineties a Franciscan nun Frances Teresa, wrote a book on the spirituality of St Francis of Assisi called, “Living the Incarnation”. It is lovely book and she received many letters of appreciation which she acknowledged in the introduction to the sequel, “The living mirror” which is about St Clare. The letters caused her to be moved (and I quote):

by the incontrovertible evidence of the pain in which many people live much of their lives. This (she continues) cannot be glossed over. Instead, we need urgently to learn how pain can become redemptive, so that it can cease to be bitter and destructive and
take its rightful place in God’s work of creation, redemption and re-creation.

The French priest and founder of the L’Arche community Jean Vanier, writes very beautifully on this form of pain and suffering. He calls it ‘the wounded heart’. He believes we all suffer from a wounded heart to some degree:

Every human being is a mixture of light and darkness, trust and fear, love and hate. None of us can escape this fact.  All human growth is about learning to let the light penetrate more deeply into the shadow areas of our being; it is allowing trust and love to conquer fear, prejudice and hate; it is finding the inner strength to accept our past as it is with its wounds, without escaping into a world of illusions or dreams. In each one of us, even though we do not want to acknowledge it, there are these shadow areas, this sadness and depression ready to emerge at some level of intensity.

The question then is how can this suffering be transformed? How can we stop it being bitter and destructive, and allow God to make it redemptive and creative?

One way which is not helpful is to understand our suffering as punishment. It is understandable to interpret our pain and suffering in this way, but what sort of God punishes? What is the image of that God?
In the New Testament,  Jesus taught us to turn the other cheek when someone strikes us, so God is hardly likely to act differently when we offend him with our sin.

It is much more helpful to understand our suffering as a school, a place of learning, a school of love. In one of the great traditions of theodicy, that is the study of how we can speak of God in a world of evil, St Iranaeus talks of life as being the “valley of the soul maker”.

Suffering is transformative if it can help us to become more loving.

To understand how this might be so, it helpful to reflect on the difference between a maze and a labyrinth. A maze is a puzzle with only one right answer. There are many humiliating and depressing dead ends in a maze. A labyrinth is a difficult and long path which leads to a goal. Our faith is that life is not a maze, but a labyrinth. Everything has its place, including our suffering which can be understood as a time of pruning, to prepare us for more life.

On this subject of the school of love, Carlo Coretto has a little trick to teach, “just the thing for someone afraid of suffering – or better still for someone trying to suffer less.”
The trick is this: LOVE MORE TO SUFFER LESS
What Carlo Coretto would do when he felt sorrowful was to light a candle in his cell for two reasons: firstly, to remind him to love in the face of suffering and secondly to rest in Jesus who gives light to the world by the gift of himself in love as a candle gives of itself and is consumed.

Loving in the face of suffering is redemptive. It is a profound “yes” to life.

Jean Vanier speaks of this “yes” to life which can rise out of our suffering. He says it is a:

“‘yes of openness, of acceptance, a ‘yes’ of joy.
This ‘yes’ to life which springs from the deepest part of us
…is a ‘yes’ to our past, to our body, to our family, a ‘yes’ to our inner storms, our winters, our pain;
A ‘yes’ also to the beauty of life”

And so we return to the young man paralysed by joy all those years ago in Assisi. One way of understanding what happened to Francis is to see it as moment when he said “yes” to life.

This “yes” to life cannot be made without a certain poverty of spirit, a letting go, a foolishness even!
Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the Kingdom of heaven is theirs”

 Poverty, or Lady Poverty as Francis called it, was the spiritual value that the early Franciscans prized above all.
It was the value that St Clare fought for and preserved all her life.

Clare joined Francis at 17 when there were a handful of brothers most of whom were in their early twenties, and she lived 40 years longer than Francis.

On her deathbed the Pope agreed that her community could live in poverty, a permission that she had sought all her life.

But Poverty is not primarily concerned with economics;
Franciscan Poverty is concerned with the heart.

So Poverty, as Sister Francis Teresa point out, can be understood as freedom from the treadmill of self-centredness. A letting go which is transformative because:

Much of our suffering arises out of our self-centredness.

Of course a comment like that needs qualification.
  
As a hospital chaplain I do not regard the suffering of others as self-centredness!

However, it is also true to our experience to say that a letting go of our self-centredness, draws from us a purity of heart, an emptiness, where our hearts can be enlarged.

Francis and Clare are so attractive to us, because instinctively we know that they found this route to human living and human loving at its most profound.

I started by saying I wanted to focus on the ‘suffering which is more interior, more personal, and probably far more widespread than we care to acknowledge’ I have talked about how this might be transformed and would like to further share HOW this might be done.

For many Christians, the choice to take the difficult road through suffering to peace and joy is expressed first and foremost in the decision to pray.

Prayer is ‘the raising of the heart and the mind to God’
The prayer of the mind we are taught as children eg lords prayer
The prayer of the heart, meditation, ….teaches us to not think about God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit or indeed our suffering or the suffering of others instead we seek to do something immeasurably greater, we seek to BE WITH GOD, TO BE WITH JESUS, TO BE WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT not to think about them. We experience God by placing ourselves in the present moment in silence

A Benedictine monk John Main who died in 1982 is someone who has made this ancient form of prayer available and contemporary through his ministry by reciting the mantra Maranatha ‘come lord Jesus’.

What John Main discovered in the writing of John Cassian, the 5th century monk who studied and recorded the spiritual vision of the early desert fathers and mothers, was the discipline of repeating over and over a formula, a sentence of scripture or a holy word as a way of remaining in the presence of God, and of avoiding the distractions of the mind.

John Cassian spoke of the “grand poverty” of this formula or mantra, as it was the way to the richness of the fruit of the Spirit through the simple faithfulness of the practice and the renunciation of all thought. I will gladly come back and speak of Christian meditation another time!

To finish, what I would like to do now is sing a song. Last year I wrote and recorded a set of songs. The song of which I am most proud is one I wrote for my 11 year-old daughter. It is called Daddy’s girl. Hopefully, it speaks for itself in the context of what I have said this lunchtime. I will then finish with a prayer.

2. Daddy’s Girl

I saw you come into the world I saw you pulled from your mother’s soul;
I thought you were a boy at first Until they said you were a little girl.
In your plastic manger You slept hard in your swaddling band;
I kissed you for the first time there And held you by your little hand.

Chorus:       And when I say, “I love you”
                   You say, “I love you more”
                   How can you, how can you,
                   Daddy’s girl.

We kept you warm, we kept you clean We fed you and you slept so well;
“Da da” were the words you said Standing at the cot-side rail
On the T.V. you watched for teddy As he played with Andy his best friend;
And, ‘Spot’ was the first book I read And at the end you said, ‘Again’

Chorus:

One day you fell into my arms As you walked for the first time on your own;
It all seems such along time now You’ve got your fashion sense and your mobile ‘phone.
One day you had to leave You were three years old just started school;
I stayed close, the years passed by Soon everything you liked was, ‘cool’

Chorus:

You are living in another world Your roots are deep, you’ve settled down;
I cannot say I’ve done the same But I think it’s best I’m still around.
I want to live my life with joy And you are free to live yours as well;
But if loving is letting go Then loving is sometimes hell.

Chorus:

Collect for 2nd Sunday of Epiphany

Almighty God
In Christ you make all things new
Transform the poverty of our nature
By the riches of your grace,
And in the renewal of our lives
Make known your heavenly glory
Through Jesus Christ our Lord
Who is alive and reigns with you,
In the unity of the Holy Spirit
One God,  now and for ever. Amen.

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Transforming God
Lent Lecture in Wakefield Cathedral
given by Esther Elliott, Church Army

Church Army is a society of evangelists linked to the Anglican church committed to sharing faith in word and action. The founder of Church Army, Wilson Carlile was once accused by the Archbishop of the day of wanting to turn the church upside down. Carlile famously replied ‘no your grace, inside out’.  Wilson Carlile saw a Church turning in on itself, a Church that seemed more interested in itself than the millions of people in the land who had real needs- spiritual needs, emotional needs, and often physical needs. They were hungry, homeless and desolate. Carlile saw a Church that was disengaged with many people, and was out of touch. He wanted the church to do more to share faith through words and action by mobilizing ordinary people to share the good news of the gospel.

That is what Church Army is all about- getting people to meet Jesus.  We go out beyond church walls to meet people who are way beyond the church’s reach to tell them about Jesus, to show them Jesus. Reaching out to people where they are and sharing faith with them at the point they’d like the conversation to begin.

My specific job for Church Army is to design and deliver training for these evangelists which is fit for purpose in contemporary society. So you could say my world is all about working out how to give people the space and opportunities to transform through learning and training so that they can go enable transformation in others.

“Transforming God” is a big scary title to be given to talk about. When I first knew that this was what I had agreed to do I emailed a friend who very unhelpfully suggested that I either lead us in a rendition of the song ‘Faithful One, so unchanging’ and then move swiftly to lunch or that I call Trinny and Susannah. When I expressed further angst that the series had been building up to a crescendo and my thoughts on transformation and God apparently were right at the end she very cynically suggested that it was typical church life to transform everything to how we want it to be and then transform God to match what we want.

Obviously the phrase “Transforming God” can be taken in a number of different ways. It can refer to the God who transforms people’s lives. It can also refer to changing a picture or understanding of God. And it can refer to God changing in God’s self and very being. I want to talk about all of these things but most of all to suggest that actually, they are all interconnected because they are all about what happens in the relationship between God and humanity.

Working for Church Army means that you are in the privileged position of getting to hear stories of how God is changing lives and communities on a daily basis. In my experience these are not usually wham, bam stories but stories of hard graft, step by step change and humanity. One such story comes from a resident in Elgood Hostel, part of the Church Army run Marylebone Project, the largest centre for homeless women in London. Its important to me that I give people the power to speak for themselves so I’m going to read her account of her story to you.

…………………………………………….


This is a real account of humanity; of things going right and things going wrong in relationships, of the basics of life like food and shelter and of emotions. But it is also a story of hope and transformation. One Christmas Eve about five years ago at a carol service someone read a poem right in the middle of the description of Christ’s birth that has continued to haunt me because it talks about Gods involvement with humanity. It’s called The Incarnate One and is by the Scottish poet Edwin Muir. The first two stanzas read like this:

The windless northern surge, the sea-gull's scream,
And Calvin's kirk crowning the barren brae.
I think of Giotto the Tuscan shepherd's dream,
Christ, man and creature in their inner day.
How could our race betray
The Image, and the Incarnate One unmake
Who chose this form and fashion for our sake?

The Word made flesh here is made word again
A word made word in flourish and arrogant crook.
See there King Calvin with his iron pen,
And God three angry letters in a book,
And there the logical hook
On which the Mystery is impaled and bent
Into an ideological argument.

Later on there is a line which is an incredibly powerful statement: The fleshless word, growing, will bring us down. Whatever you think of Muir’s pop at Calvinism this poem is a powerful reminder that the greatest transformational act was the word becoming flesh, God becoming human. This signified in a unique way the relationship between the divine and humanity, how the divine has a place in everything human, indeed in everything of this world, every interaction, every cry of need and of hope, even every scream of the seagull. As Carl Jung said bidden or not bidden, God is present.
And yet there is the other side too in this dynamic relationship. The word became flesh so that humanity could be drawn into the life of the divine. That was the purpose and the reason. Nowhere is this better symbolised that Rublev’s icon of the Trinity. The Trinity is depicted as sitting at a table inclining their heads to each other and yet there is no self-sufficiency in their mutual love because one side of the table, the side nearest the viewer is unoccupied and the figure depicting the Spirit points towards it, reaches out to it. We are invited, as individuals and as church to take our place at the table, to participate in the life of the divine, to be involved in a deep relationship where we are loved, liberated, awakened and made whole beyond measure, where we are transformed and yet where we too are asked to turn outwards and invite others to participate.
Muir was right; the fleshless word, growing, will bring us down. You can read that sentence at a very superficial level to refer to preaching that is not based on practice, people who say one thing and do another, or a church with all words and no action, will be our downfall. You could, to refer back to my business, claim that it refers to a type of evangelism or faith sharing which shouts at people, provides them with a picture of God the judge of their sin and leaves their material needs unmet. Or as a friend of mine described it to talk about “the exalted, tattooed King of Kings coming with fire blazing in his eyes and a sword launching from his mouth...we are not merely to relate to people but also to command them to repent of their sin and bend their knee to the king before they are grapes crushed under his foot”.

But I think the truth of that sentence lies at a deeper level. It pushes us to confront that inbuilt suspicion that without participation in the life of the divine, without taking our seat at the table as we are invited to do, we, as individuals and communities, will be brought down, will be brought low, will be struggling without that spark of hope and love that makes life, life. I think it’s fair to say that Mary had a pretty unique appreciation of the potential consequences of the word becoming flesh. Her response was that most revolutionary word of all ‘rejoice’. She cried out in joy at surprise; surprise in understanding God more, surprise in believing in change, surprise in love and possibility.

To be drawn into the life of the divine and to respond to that by inviting others to participate too is a revolutionary act of rejoicing that is shot through with constant change and transformation. It can be nothing else because it is fundamentally about relationships and at the heart of true, wonderful relationships lies a dynamic of openness. We change in the space in-between us. We change ourselves, we change the other and we change our images of ourselves and the other. In the act of inviting others to participate in the life of the divine we are transformed and our understanding and images of God are transformed over and over again. Take, for example the story of Peter’s call to talk about faith with Cornelius. Peter was challenged through that to change his thinking about non-Jewish people.

To recognise that relationships change people is to recognise that real life is lived in a space of vulnerability. In our liturgy a couple of weeks ago we read the very lengthy story of the woman at the well. That story begins with Jesus in a vulnerable place, tired and thirsty and he names his vulnerability to the person he is reaching out to ‘give me a drink’. I’m a workplace chaplain in Nottingham City Centre and there is nothing like walking into a busy call centre with a big chaplains badge and being asked to loiter while everyone around you is frantically busy to convince you of your vulnerability. To truly share faith is to open yourself up and be who you really are with another. My greatest friendship became a place of real faith and transformation for both of us when I sat down one night on the sofa I’d sat on hundreds of times before and admitted I had been unhappy for some time and why and my best friend, who is predisposed to a spot of rescuing, admitted there was little she could do to help and that was incredibly hard for her.  

I think as we have stopped shouting words at people and have begun to understand evangelism in this sense of being drawn into the life of the divine we have realised that the work of an evangelist is as much to reflect and self-question as it is to provide answers to others and is as much to build vulnerable and risky Christian communities as it is to get people into the safe haven of an institution that doesn’t change. I always think the words carved into the choir screen of the church I go to are very droll on the First Sunday of the month when we have choral matins – Jesus Christ the same, yesterday, today and forever.  

I want to finish with a question – does God change? Is God transformed by being in relationship with us and with the world, by us accepting that invitation and sitting down at the table? Is God ever surprised by us? Does God ever shout out with joy and love at our spontaneity and life? I would want to say yes, absolutely yes. That is faithful, redeeming, transforming, real, real love. That is the real love which initiates, participates in and completes the great Easter cry ‘Christ is risen alleluia’.  

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Prayer: the Heartbeat of the City
Lent Lecture in Wakefield Cathedral
20 April 2008

People are good at knocking Wakefield, that it’s only famous for the Westgate ‘wobble’ on a Friday night and it’s a mere shadow of its former self, but it seems to me that now is an exciting time to be living and working in the city. There’s a real sense of expectation which will hopefully foster a greater sense of pride for the place.  It won’t be too long before the snazzy new market hall is opened and work has already begun on constructing the so-called emerald ring of trees and greenery around the city. (That will be a welcome addition once the traffic jams and queues have disappeared). Work on the Bullring, the Springs and Trinity Walk are soon to get underway. Our city is undergoing something much more radical than a mere facelift – this is radical surgery. The regeneration of Wakefield is providing us with a new cityscape – a renewed physical, built environment with new places to shop, to work and to enjoy cultural activities. There’s that small but perfectly formed little courtyard at the back of the museum which once the weather warms up will provide a wonderful haven of peace in the busyness of the city – somewhere to relax, eat your lunch and watch the world go by.

So there’s lots going on around us to empty our wallets and expand and feed our minds.

But what, I wonder, is being done about the ‘soul of the city’? How are people’s spiritual lives being nurtured and developed?

There’s a lot of advertising these days about keeping your heart healthy – drink Benecol and Flora Pro-active and you’ll be doing your heart some good, or so the advertisers tell us. What makes the heart of our city and region healthy? How can we as a cathedral become the healthy heartbeat of this city and region – as we say we are on the noticeboard?

Last week Jonathan took us to the wonderful Abbey of Mary Magdalene at Vezelay in the Burgundy region of France. I’m afraid I’m only going to take you to Oxford this week – not so grand or historical, but equally transforming and soaked in prayer.  For a number of years after I was ordained I went on retreat to the Sisters of the Love of God at Fairacres. They are an enclosed Anglican order who devote their austere lives to scholarship and prayer. Their simple meals are eaten without the chatter of conversation – I love silent meals.  Instead at the beginning they enact a short liturgy with the reading of that day’s gospel passage followed by a blessing and then the food is brought out and served. During the meal music is played or one of the sisters reads to everyone from a book. At the far end of the refectory is a crucifix with the Latin inscription underneath – ‘Sitio’, meaning, I thirst. There are many layers of meaning for that, especially when juxtaposed with the image of Christ on the cross. They are words used by Jesus on Good Friday; they refer to a longing for God; in the context of eating in a refectory they remind us of our bodily needs. I think that they also have something to say about the community and world in which we are set here in Wakefield. Although many would argue that organised religion is in decline, interest in the spiritual and in spirituality has never been greater. So how can we connect with that longing and desire for something beyond the mundane and ordinary?

At a training day for members of cathedral chapters I attended this week, one thing above all else was underlined and that was the importance of the daily offering of prayer at morning and evening. Each morning we gather for a liturgy of praise and thanksgiving to God, followed by the Eucharist. Over the past few months this has grown from twos and threes to almost double figures. The Transforming Lives project has in part helped with this growth, as well as people coming to pray as part of their Lenten discipline. I hope that now that we are in the midst of the Easter season that people will continue to come along. And of course we always welcome new people, so if you have never been and you are able to join us – then I would urge you to seriously think about it and act upon it. This is not simply something for the clergy to do – we are all in this together and we need each other to offer prayer each day.

And then again at the end of the day, there are opportunities both said and choral to offer the prayer of the Church to God at Evensong. We have a wonderful choral tradition here at Wakefield and frankly it’s a great sadness that the choir offer prayer and worship with so few in the congregation. So please come along – many an evening you will find yourself transported to the foothills of heaven!

Well, that’s all very well for those who are able to come into town for prayer here in the cathedral. But for those of you who can’t – how about using the simple prayer framework of the Transforming Lives daily office? If you don’t have a copy, then please ask me. The clergy are always very happy to explore with anyone how to try and integrate prayer in to their busy, daily lives. So please do ask us.

I never cease to be bowled over by all the prayer that goes on in the cathedral day by day. The prayer tree is seldom unlit, and most of the time is covered in the offering of prayer through the candles. From early morning until closing, people come into this holy place and encounter the living God, however they express themselves. But I do often wonder how we can help people to pray, other than simply giving them the space and the opportunity to light a candle? Perhaps we could develop some simple literature and suggestions of prayer which might aid their spiritual journey and help to lead them to a new place in their encounter with God? Many have said that this place is soaked and steeped in the prayers of many generations - an atmosphere which is almost tangible. Perhaps by preparing some areas or stations with materials and aids to prayer we might help those who come to visit to become pilgrims? To return to the image from the refectory in Oxford – there are many people who are thirsty for God, for his unconditional love and peace and hope. How are we responding to that desire and helping to fulfil those needs?

One final thing about prayer. Those for whom prayer is impt are often caricatured as being other worldly and having their head in the clouds. Those Sisters I stayed with in Oxford had a much better grasp on the world situation and politics than I could ever hope to have. And during the first Gulf War in the early 1990s they delayed the start of Vespers to 6.10 pm so that they could hear the news headlines in order to inform their prayer that evening. You only have to read the prayers of those left by the candle tree to know that these prayers are grounded in the brokenness of our local community.

Making our cathedral into the healthy heartbeat of the city is something that cannot simply be done by a few – it needs the efforts and discipline of us all. For in prayer we bring our city and the world before God and at the same time find God in that same city and world, in the faces of those around us.