Thursday mornings are one of the high points of my week. Together with my partner Jim, I cycle down alongside the Taff to Cardiff University to our Welsh class. One of the things I love about it is its diversity. Twenty year olds to pensioners. A Muslim man, and the Dean of Landaff.
Welsh identity is fascinating. I have no Welsh genes, if such a thing exists. But I have been connected with Wales for over 20 years. One Welsh friend said “You’ve been Welsh for a long time.” It’s interesting, isn’t it, that Welshness is not based on genes? Which, in any case are a more messed up picture than we might like to imagine.
My former colleague and fellow Canon at Christ Church, Oxford, Nigel Biggar, has recently published a book, Colonialism. He had trouble getting a publisher. It is a good book. I don’t agree with everything he says and I don’t think he takes the actual experience of racism seriously. In my first sermon at Christ Church I preached about my time as Head of an almost all black school in Lewisham. He was puzzled by that. Racism is real.
However, Nigel has important points to make. I believe it is not a binary situation. This is the fundamental Christian position. The British Empire did terrible things. The British Empire did wonderful, liberating things. Both are true. I believe, as Nigel does, that liberal culture emerges from that Christian but imperialist world.
I don’t agree with Nigel’s phrase “Western Values”, I would prefer “Christian values”. My first degree is in world Religions. I love my fellow human beings who follow other religions, but I believe that Christianity is the truth, God is real; Jesus saves us. I would not expect them to think other of me.
Nigel says important things. He should be listened to even when I think he is wrong.
UPDATE 23 01 23. A second version with some corrections (mainly formatting) and two bits of additional Welsh text. Many thanks to those who have helped with this.
UPDATE 25 01 23 Several people have asked why I haven’t set Gweddi Ewcharistaidd 1 (GE 1) to music as I did Common Worship Eucharistic Prayer H (EP H). The simple answer is that I tried and failed. GE 1 is about 500 words while EP H is about 350. This makes the repetition of the simple four meausre tone more tiresome in a longer text. Welsh generally has more words to say the same thing than English which also makes for long sections on a reciting note, or breaking up the phrasing more which, with my very little Welsh, is hard for me to do. EP H is written in almost psalmic form with parallelisms in the lines which makes it an easy text to set. GE 1 is more complex. I will come back to it but probably no time soon.
In the cellar of the Deanery at Llandaff I have been able to create the next sacro speco, holy cave, the Capel y Galon Sanctaidd, for prayer and meditation. It is a beautiful space that immediately had an atmosphere of prayer. It is the first place I go to in the morning to sing the Office of Vigils before the day begins. It is the last place I visit before bed, to pray Compline. I call in during the day for the Little Hours. I find it a wonderful space for meditation. Guests and visitors have found it a good place to pray.
I am using as much Welsh as I can in my prayer so that it enters deep within me and, eventually, am able to use as much as possible confidently in church.
We have reintroduced (post-Covid) the daily Eucharist in the Cathedral, but it is good to have a place to celebrate with Jim on my days off and when we have guests.
Here is the rite I have put together for this, as much Welsh as I can manage, and some musical settings of Welsh texts. I am deeply grateful to God for the privilege of this space and to those who visit for the chance to pray together.
At a recent meeting I stated that “I love Citizen Church” (the HTB church plant in the student district of Cardiff). I have only been to Citizen for two Sunday services and met some of the team on another occasion. But it is true. I do love it. The quality of the music, the welcome, being surrounded by hundreds of young people. I would go more often it were not for the full programme of services here at Llandaff Cathedral (four or five on a normal Sunday).
This blog post started as a review of a new book by Tyler Staton, an evangelical Pastor in the US, Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools (Hodder and Stoughton 2022).
It is an excellent book. I struggle to find books on prayer to recommend to people who tell me that they find praying hard. Many people come to me telling me that prayer is difficult. That they are in a ‘dark night of the soul’, that they have reached a desert in their prayer. This is a book I will recommend to them. Probably not a starter book for a new Christian, this is a book with a narrative style and North American vocabulary that will put some people off. But it is a book of deep spirituality and richness.
Staton’s take on prayer immediately appeals to me, he recognises the need to establish a rhythm of prayer in the early morning, which he did while still at High School. As much as anyone protests to me that they are not an early morning person I have yet to meet anyone that has established a fruitful, daily, pattern of prayer at any other time of day.
Staton is clear that the need for prayer is a need for solitude. He quotes Henri Nouwen on this which leads in to his quoting for me the greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, Hans Urs von Balthasar. He quotes the Russian tradition of the poustinia. He recognises that we don’t seek outcomes in prayer.
The sections on the Lord’s Prayer are excellent and root this in Jesus’ response to the request from the disciples for him to teach them how to pray. His answer is, to pray.
The section of the book on ‘searching and naming’ sin would be good preparation for anyone making their confession. And the Chapter on the intercession of Christ could have been written by St Augustine in his commentaries on the psalms.
Two areas for me are lacking, unsurprisingly. I have come to the view that the only essentials of Christian prayer are psalmody and eucharist. Staton quotes the psalms frequently, but there is no mention of the Eucharist. There is virtually no mention of the church, it is ecclesially weak. But no book can cover everything. Simply by quoting the spiritual greats that he does he is being ecclesial.
One of the best features of this book is the real stories of people seeking to live Christianity seriously. That is the ‘Praying Like Monks’ of the title. This is a book for those who want their Christian lives to be ‘seven whole days not one in seven’.
Back to Citizen Church. There is much anxiety among those of us who have given our lives to more traditional patterns of ministry. ‘It’s a take over’. I have sought to find ways of understanding how the Spirit is at work in our time by looking at the church across the centuries. One of the ways I understand Citizen church and the evangelical churches (although that is not altogether a helpful label) is as the mendicant orders of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Franciscan movement was much opposed by the established church of the time. They caused fear and anxiety, sometimes forbidden licenses to preach. They were popular and ‘successful’. Our response, as in all ministry needs to be generous. We have rich and deep veins of prayer to share. Traditional patterns of ministry are deeply embedded in the local community, in context. There is a story to be told, not fearfully but joyfully.
Catholic and Evangelical are not mutually opposed. It is trite to talk about a spectrum, but surely true. I love our worship here at Llandaff Cathedral, the utterly superb music, the sublime building. I would love our preaching to be more evangelical. To be Jesus focussed, confident on the converting power of Scripture, and the presence of the Holy Spirit giving profound spiritual experience.
I also love Citizen Church. I love the exploration into contemplative prayer that evangelical friends are making. More evangelicals approach me for spiritual direction now than catholics. “Prayer doesn’t begin with us, it begins with God.” Staton says. How right he is. It has always been the teaching of the church and the spiritual teachers that contemplation is a gift from God. I believe that we have nothing to fear. That God continues to be at work in His world and in His church. Prayer is His gift. And thank God for that.
In 1969 the Roman Catholic church approved the Sunday and weekday Mass lectionaries that were the result of experimentation that had begun in the 1950s. They were the fruit of the Second Vatican Council and the Consilium that worked from 1964 – 1969 on the lectionaries. In 1979 The Church of England authorised the weekday Mass lectionary which then appeared in the Alternative Service Book of 1980. Later the three year Sunday cycle in the form of the Revised Common Lectionary was adopted as the Sunday Lectionary for Anglicans in England and at different times in much of the world.
Paul Turner has done a great service in producing this aptly named ‘biography’ of these lectionaries by examining the work of Study Group 11, the sub group of the Consilium entrusted with the work of liturgical reform after the Second Vatican Council.
There had been, in fact, only a single sentence in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy (1963) mandating reform of the lectionaries for Mass:
“In liturgical celebrations, a more ample, more varied, and more suitable selection of readings from sacred Scripture should be restored.” (35)
Turner has examined the official record of the work of Sub Group 11 and created a history of their work; it is in that sense that it is a biography. This is not a commentary on the readings and it does not provide devotional material on them.
Several things stand out for me from Turner’s work:
Sub Group 11 was deeply ecumenical in its regard to the lectionaries of other churches; they were very aware of liturgical history and developments in the reformed and Anglican churches.
I am constantly surprised to be reminded of the deeply experimental work that was the fruit of the liturgical movement in the 1950’s. Sub Group 11 was not starting from scratch.
There was a deep regard to work with and from Tradition in the work of the members of the sub-group. The final section of Turner’s book is a Dossier documenting the work that the members of the sub group had published on liturgical lectionaries before being invited to join and form the group.
The emphasis of Vatican 2 to make the liturgy a participation in the paschal mystery is the fundamental drive of those compiling the lectionaries.
A real pastoral concern for what is suitable for parishes comes through at very turn.
Much thought was given to ways in which the lectionary of the previous Missal (largely the same as that used by Anglicans in the Book of Common Prayer) could be preserved in the new lectionary. There was for a time the idea that the older lectionary be one year of a three or four year cycle. In the end although many pericopes were preserved on their original days – notably in Lent – in general the new lectionaries were just new.
To give you a sample of the style of Turner’s work and the content it holds here is a random section from page 256 dealing with the use of the Gospel of Matthew on the weekdays of Ordinary Time (here in the 20th week):
The gospel for Monday of the twentieth week (19:16-22) appeared in none of the drafts. Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s (19: 23-30 and 20: 1-16) were in all but the first, which moved several verses (19:27-29) to the eschatalogical weeks. Thursday’s (22:1-14) was in the last two drafts. The first draft assigned some verses 22:2-3,8-14) to an eschatalogical week, but the second and third drafts puts them in semi-continuous order. The first draft called for similar verses in the last of its escahatological weeks (22:1-10). This passage skips several that the drafts proposed (21:28-31 and 21:33-43 in the first; and 20: 17-19; 20:29-34; 21:18-22; and 21:28-32 in the others).
This is only part of a single paragraph. It is, as you can see, detailed stuff.
At first I had thought that I would only recommend this book to liturgical geeks. But I think it has a wider value than that. The introductory section on the Conception of the new lectionaries and the Concluding Observations provide profound insight on the use of Scripture in liturgy. But more than that this detailed analysis of why passages of Scripture ended up being used on certain days provides new insights into the texts themselves and how they are being read christologically, as our participation in the paschal mystery, and ecclesiologically, as our sharing in the life of the church.
I have written before on lectionaries.There is, of course, no such thing as a perfect lectionary. I particularly like the two year cycle of readings for the Office of Readings which I think ideally needs to be used alongside the lectionary at Mass to provide longer passages, and in particular material from the histoical books of the Old Testament which are largely omitted from the Mass lectionaries.
Here, at Llandaff Cathedral, we have recently started using the Daily Eucharistic Lectionary at both Morning Prayer (which is combined with the Eucharist) and Evensong. So those of us who attend both hear the same readings twice. I find it really helpful to have this element of repetition which is an important pedagogical principle. The readings are of a digestible length both for the children in our choir and for those of us who gather in the mornings for whom I hope that the liturgy can be contained to thirty minutes. We also try and preach briefly on the Scripture readings. Because the gospel readings are in a one year cycle and for the seasons of the year outside of Ordinary Time so are the first readings, the principle of repetition is largely met. It also ensures that those who attend only Evensong (choristers, choir parents, clerks, many visitors) hear a portion of the gospel every day. For the clergy I would recommend using the two year cycle of the Office of Readings at a Daytime Office or an Office of Readings before Morning Prayer, more about lectionaries can be found on my blog here. I remain concerned about the three year cycle of the Sunday Mass lectionary and would consider moving to the traditional one year cycle with Old Testament readings (see the 1984 Book of Common Prayerof the Church in Wales, which Bangor Cathedral have already returned to).
I firmly recommend Turner’s book to everyone interested in lectionaries and to those fascinated by the liturgical reforms of the twentieth century. It needs to be read in conjunction with Annibale Bugnini’s The Reform of the Liturgy 1948-1975, which is essential reading.
I also recommend Turner’s work to those of us who simply use this lectionary. I will be keeping it in my stall and reading the section on the relevant weeks of the church’s year. Understanding why and how choices were made is deeply informative and enriching of our understanding of the liturgy and its effect on us as participants in the life of the church .
A further review of this book may be found on the Pray Tell Blog here.
Source: Llyfr Gweddi Bach, A Simple Prayer Book, the Catholic Truth Society
The repetition of the Rosary is great for learning Welsh prayers by heart. Here are the headings and prayers. I would like to produce a version with short Scripture texts in Welsh for each mystery and will work on that. Meanwhile please let me know any typos/mistakes, and, indeed, if you find this useful say a prayer for me.
It is based, of course on the collection of poems by T.S.Eliot: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
I love Eliot’s poems and especially Macavity the Mystery Cat:
“Macavity, Macavity, there’s no one like Macavity, For he’s a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity. You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square— But when a crime’s discovered, then Macavity’s not there!”
But my favourite poem in the collection doesn’t get mentioned in the Lloyd-Webber versions, it is the Naming of Cats
“The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games.”
Today we celebrate the naming of Jesus, more properly the day on which, in accordance with Jewish law he was circumcised and formally given the name Jesus.
Names are significant in each of the readings chosen for today.
In the first reading the people of Israel are on their way from Egypt, they have left slavery behind but not yet reached the promised land. God gives Moses the form of blessing that is to be used by the Jewish people.
It is very beautiful indeed:
The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you
and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you
and give you peace.
Moses is instructed to give this blessing to his brother Aaron, so it is sometimes called the Aaronic blessing. In traditional Judaism the blessing is given in the synagogue by those descended from the temple priesthood and so is called the priestly blessing.
It is said that the Star Trek actor Leonard Nimoy was brought up Jewish and he adapted the gesture used by the cohens, the priests to become the vulcan hand salute to accompany the greeting: Live Long and Prosper.
The blessing is the way today’s reading from Numbers tells us that the people of Israel receive the name of the Lord.
In the second reading St Paul, writing to the church in Galatia gives us a simple name for God who we are to call: Abba, Father. And in the Gospel reading we have just heard we are reminded that the name Jesus is given to him by the angel.
For the Hebrew people, and for many ancient peoples, names are hugely significant. Adam’s first act after the creation is to name all living things.
The name of God is powerful and unpronounceable. Even now Jews when they worship do not pronounce the name of God which is spelled in prayerbooks with the four syllables yod-hey-vav-hey but instead replace it with the Greek word Adonai, Lord.
But we Christians are given a name, we do have a name for God. We have the name that was given by the angel to Mary.
We have the name Jesus. Jesus who is God really dwelling on earth.
As this new year begins the Vulcan greeting: Live long and prosper, might seem ironic. There is much to be anxious about. There is much for Christians to be anxious about and for the church to be anxious about.
There is much we can do, of course, but the best cure for anxiety is not action but stillness. We are called to be a holy people. Each one of us is called to holiness.
The way of prayer that has stuck with me best over all my adult life is a prayer of the holy name of Jesus. Often just called the Jesus Prayer. It is a form of prayer that has its origins among eastern orthodox Christians. In its simplest form it involves simply repeating two phrases:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God; have mercy on me a sinner.
Like many people who pray this prayer I carry a rope, a series of knots made out of wool. I slip my fingers around each know and pray the prayer. The combination of this simple action and the words that accompany it is powerful. Sometimes when I am most anxious or utterly exhausted just slipping my fingers over the knots is enough and the prayer prays itself.
The trick is to repeat this prayer over and over again, hundreds, thousands of times:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God; have mercy on me a sinner.
Repeat it over and over again. Sometimes, if you can and especially when you start, do it out loud.
But also learn to repeat it in your head; attach one phrase to your in-breath and the other to the out-breath.
Breathing in: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God.
Breathing out: Have mercy on me.
If you do this for long enough, often enough the prayer will sink deep into your heart.
You will find that it becomes a part of you; a part of your breathing.
You will find yourself breathing this prayer as you go to sleep and as you wake up. It will be in your footsteps on the way to work or as you do the hoovering or cut the grass.
This prayer has sustained me as I have sat with people as they die; in moments of the greatest stress in my life; when I have felt most alone and in darkest despair.
It is not magic. The name of Jesus is powerful because of our faith in it. It is uttering the name of Jesus in faith that brings us comfort and knowledge of the sacred presence.
When I was brought up I was taught to bow my head at the sacred name. It is a wonderful custom that I would encourage among us. To recognise that when we speak this sacred name we are invoking the presence of the one who saves us, who has saved us.
“How sweet the name of Jesus sounds, in a believer’s ear” the old hymn says.
We are the temples of the spirit; we are the places of which God says
“My name shall be there”.
“Will God really dwell on earth?” prayed Solomon when he dedicated his Temple.
Does God really dwell in this beautiful cathedral, here along the banks of the Taff?
Yes, if we carry Jesus with us in our hearts and minds; if we become holy, living temples dedicated to the presence of God.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God; have mercy on me a sinner.
At the end of his poem about the naming of cats T S Eliot writes:
“When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.”
Dear friends, at this beginning of the year may I offer you the blessing that God gave his people in its original beautiful Hebrew and in English:
[Photo: lighting the first Advent candle in the Deanery]
Yn enw’r Tad,
a’r Mab,
a’r Ysbrd Glân.
Amen.
One of the many advantages of having spent much of my life working in schools has been the excuse to read children and young adult literature. In my opinion some of the best novels of the last fifty years have, ostensibly, been written for children and bear re-reading whether you are an adult or a child:
Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials
Almost anything by Malorie Blackman
The surprisingly disturbing Hunger Games
And even Harry Potter.
I’m tempted to say that Pullman is my favourite but then remember a sequence of five books published during my own teenage years and which I have read and re-read many times.
A poem unites all five books in the sequence and ends with this verse:
Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold. Played to wake the sleepers, oldest of the old; Power from the green witch, lost beneath the sea; All shall find the light at last, silver on the tree.
It is, of course Susanne Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence.
There are good Welsh connections in much of the mythology of Cooper’s work, and the books won several Welsh literature prizes.
Watching the news, listening to the radio, following current events it is not hard to believe that the dark is rising. Satellite pictures of Ukraine show that the lights have gone out, the darkness is not just rising but has risen.
In August 1914 British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey remarked to a friend:
“The lamps are going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
We may well pray that such a sentence does not become true in our lifetimes.
Darkness rising is the theme of Advent.
For those of us in the northern hemisphere the days get shorter the nights longer. On December 21st we will get less than 8 hours of daylight. Two thirds of that Wednesday will be in darkness. It is no wonder that this is the season when pubs and restaurants are busiest. On the longest, coldest, darkest nights we need bright lights and the noise of human chatter.
But I love the dark.
Not the dark of the evening, but the dark that precedes the dawn. I came down to the cathedral in the last hours of the night today just to experience it in the dark, to be near the shrine of St Teilo, to feel the centuries of prayer that saturate this place.
I have always loved the dark that comes before dawn.
As I told new colleagues this week they will never get an email from me after 9pm, but as for 4am …
My parents used to ask why I couldn’t be like a normal teenager and stay in bed all morning.
The darkness before dawn is full of expectation, the day lies ahead. It is the best time to pray. The phone never rings, most people don’t send emails, the sounds are, mainly, the sounds of nature.
Darkness, expectation and the battle for the light are the themes of Advent.
Look at today’s magnificent readings:
In Isaiah:
the beating of swords into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks must seem a laughable expectation to the people of Ukraine. But still, says the prophet, Come: let us walk in the light of the Lord.
St Paul tells us to lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armour of light.
Jesus in today’s gospel instructs us to stay awake.
We here are fortunate. We don’t have to put on body armour. the armour we need is the armour of light.
In this cathedral dedicated to five saints we live with the constant reminder that we are called to holiness.
A member of this congregation came to the Deanery for tea on Friday, and I hope that all of you will come and visit our home in due course. This member of the congregation asked me: What are you going to change?
I wasn’t quick enough to think of the real answer:
What I want to change, most of all, more than anything, is myself.
To become the holy person that God wants me to be.
To be more deeply converted, to be free from sin, to walk in the light.
Yes, I want our congregations to grow, for more people to come to faith, to know Jesus and the freedom he brings, to experience the stillness of prayer, the presence of God, the happiness, the technicolor that is living a Christian life.
Yes, I want us to have more visitors and tourists who become pilgrims.
Yes, I want the city and its politicians and artists and business people to know that this is their cathedral, to feel at home here.
Yes, I want people of all faiths and none to belong here in this sacred place.
But we will only achieve any of those things if we together,
every one, you and me, walk more closely with Jesus, put on the armour of light, deepen our prayer, read our bibles, work for justice and make this a place of welcome not on our terms but on God’s terms.
In the sermon at my installation last Sunday I presented four words for us to think about:
the first I have already used, together. I hope and pray that we will come to love one another, that is my job and my joy as your Dean.
We will do that by prayingtogether, revelling in the beauty of this building, in the music that our musicians create, by making this a space in which the people of our city, our diocese, our nation can be at home.
Together
Prayer
Beauty
Space
From tomorrow Father Mark, Mother Jan and I will be praying Morning Prayer and Eucharist every day, Monday to Saturday here in this church.
Starting the day with God.
Join us for 30 minutes of prayer.
Perhaps you can commit to a day a month, or a day a week, or maybe God is calling you to pray with us every day?
Llandaff Cathedral – Evensong – Installation as Dean
Fr Richard Peers SMMS
Mother Jan, Canon Chancellor, Fr Richard, Dean, Fr Mark Preece, Canon Precentor (Sub Dean nominate)
Yn enw’r Tad,
a’r Mab,
a’r Ysbrd Glân.
Amen.
“Together we tell a joyful story, grow the kingdom of God and build our capacity for good.”
(Diocese of Llandaff vision, words from te introduction to the installation)
It was late summer 1993. John Major was Prime Minister. I had been ordained deacon just a few weeks and was serving as a curate in Middlesbrough, about as far east as it’s possible to go in the north of England.
I can’t remember when I first heard it but some time that September the Pet Shop Boys released their single Go West.
Well, it has taken me nearly three decades but finally I have come west. And I am very glad to be here.
Go West is a happy song. It is just one word from it that I want to begin with today. If you remember, as well as the lyrics of the verses there is a refrain leading into each line, one simple but profound word: Together.
Pause
This is a sermon of four words and three songs.
I’ve been a teacher all my life so I shall be testing you afterwards.
Together.
It is not good for us to be alone. Right at the beginning of the bible (hold up bible) in Genesis God makes this clear.
The Bible is the story of our not alone-ness. God wants us, you and me, every one of us here to belong.
To be together.
Over the coming years you will hear me use two words a lot:
Your Cathedral.
And the most important word is Your.
Yours if you are a regular worshipper here.
Yours if you are part of the diocese of Llandaff.
Yours if you live in this city, this diocese.
Yours if you live in Wales and this is your national cathedral.
Yours to the people who are, perhaps, mostly not here today. Our politicians and business leaders. Our artists and poets. Christians in other churches. Members of other faiths. People of no religious faith.
Together.
Together I hope for three things for Llandaff Cathedral.
First of all, and underlying everything we do is that this is a place of prayer.
On this site where prayer has been lived for almost 1500 years.
Prayer is my second word for us today.
This beautiful building is here for prayer.
Friends, in this diocese, we will pray for you.
Yes, the cycle of prayer, but please tell us when you have something you want us to pray about.
There is no amount of communication that is too much. Please keep in touch with us.
From Monday next week, the 28th November Fr Mark, Mother Jan and I will be celebrating Morning Prayer and Eucharist Monday to Saturday at 8am. We will be glad to see you. Pop in on your way into the city; make a commitment to come on a day each month or join us regularly as we pray for the city, the diocese, the nation.
A special word to my sister and brother priests in this diocese, there is a strange phrase that goes around about Deans as ‘Senior Priests’ of the diocese.
Given today’s second reading that is not a phrase I am particularly fond of. But I think the role of a Dean is clear. It is my job to love you;
not just my job
but my joy.
In our prayer here we are holding you up in your ministries, the ministry of all the baptised.
My favourite definition of love is Simone Weil’s:
to love is to pay attention to.
Dear sisters and brothers I will pay attention to you.
Come and join us at our prayers here, at your Cathedral, come and have a coffee with us afterwards.
You have a home here.
Prayer is a churchy word for a simple thing, to be in relationship with Jesus.
The first reading we have just heard is my favourite in the Bible. Isaac is walking in the cool of the evening, the RSV translation has it that he is meditating in the cool of the evening. He is praying.
This passage is the only place in the Bible where someone falls in love.
To pray is to be in love with Jesus.
To see him and know him.
To pray is not difficult or strange, it is normal life, it is all of the most intense moments of our life, to fall in love, to give birth, to make friends, to do anything that is more than we are.
To be bigger than ourselves.
To pray is to recognise that it is in all our loving, as husbands, wives, friends, parents, brothers, sisters, that God makes himself known to us.
My next word is beauty.
When I was a Head teacher in Lewisham we adapted words of St Augustine of Hippo as our school motto.
– God is beauty. Deus Pulchritudinis.
This is a beautiful building. The music is beautiful, the worship here is beautiful. I watched every moment of the recent royal visit here. It was breathtaking and flawless.
When we see beauty we see God.
My hope, my prayer is that this cathedral will be a place where the visual arts will find a home. Not the art of the past, as important as that is, but the art of now. The ways in which we make sense of the present.
My final word for the ministry of this cathedral is space.
Life is busy. The world is busy.
We need space, we need spaciousness.
A cathedral is not just a bigger church.
A cathedral is a public space.
My ministry as Dean will be to create a space for all faiths, a space for politicians, a space where we meet, where we talk, where we listen.
This is not the first time I have spoken in this Cathedral.
In 2019 I spoke here about the hymn we will sing in a few moments.
The hymn known as Gwahoddiad. The welcome. The invitation.
It is a wonderful hymn because it is Jesus-centred and utterly evangelical.
Yr Jesu, to Jesus, Jesus welcomes, Jesus invites.
Mi glywaf dyner lais,
Yn galw arnaf vi.
I love those lines. We are the ones who have heard the tender voice, calling us to baptism, to ordination, to christian living.
And we are called to enable others to hear that tender voice. They will do so when we talk about Jesus without embarrassment.
When we model for all believers a natural, unforced evangelism to the 97% who don’t go to church, who have not heard that voice.
Four words and three songs.
Together
Prayer
Beauty
Space
Go West
Gwahoddiad
My final song, the B side – do you remember those – of Go West. A song called Shameless.
As your Dean, I will be shameless.
May we all be shameless in talking about our friend Jesus, may we be shameless in gwahoddiad, inviting our sisters and brothers to a space where justice reigns, where we meet in peace, where we share in prayer, beauty and space.
If you were here last Sunday you will have heard Canon Graham begin his sermon with some words from Leonard Cohen:
And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them.
This week we have three wonderful readings from Scripture to think about. As you know the second reading and the Gospel each Sunday follow in course the biblical books, this year Luke’s gospel and at the moment the second letter of St Paul to Timothy. But the first reading is chosen from anywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, to shed some light on the the day’s reading from the gospel.
Today’s Old Testament passage is the famous one where Jacob wrestles with a stranger at the ford of the Jabbok.
It is a powerful and extraordinary account ending with Jacob limping away, having asked the stranger’s name, and receiving only a question in return.
It is a passage that has figured highly in Christian imaginations and mystical interpretation. The stranger seen as an angel or God himself; the wrestling the spiritual struggle, the life of faith, in modern times the limp seen as a sign of the christian minister as ‘wounded healer’. And so on.
The story has inspired art, music and poetry.
I am going to reflect on the fact the fact that Jacob wants to know the name of the stranger, but is not given it.
Names, as we know are important. At the beginning of creation Adam names the creatures. When Moses meets God at the burning bush God tells Moses that God’s name is I AM WHO AM.
We all like to be remembered by name and feel valued when we are.
In Jewish tradition God’s name is so sacred that it is not to be uttered, and when it is read or spoken outside of worship is replaced with the Hebrew word for ‘the name’ – haShem.
God’s name is elusive because God is too complex too big to be encompassed by a simple name.
Jesus, as you probably know is never called a Sailor in the Bible. But in Cohen’s song it is a powerful image. Picking up, perhaps, as it does the idea of the church as a boat on the rough seas of the world.
It is this enriching of our language and imagery for God that I think of as our wrestling with God, our efforts to define God and God’s slipping away from us.
In recent decades Christians have thought a lot about the language we use in our worship. Firstly, to be inclusive of men and women. This reflects the changing nature of language so that we cannot assume that mankind refers to all human beings. This is now largely accepted and our Common Worship texts are written in such a way as to reflect this change.
This is not altogether unproblematic of course. Many questions remain: should we change historic texts such as hymns to be more inclusive? Should Scripture translations reflect these changes?
I am not going into that today. I would rather think about the ways in which our language about God might expand to richer imagery.
I was really taken with the idea of Jesus as a sailor. The metaphor can go in many directions.
At Evensong when I am in Canon in Residence it is my task to pray the prayers at the end of the Office, just before the blessing. Here at Christ Church we keep to the traditional form of a bidding followed by a prayer in the form of the Collect. The Collect is a simple form of prayer in the Latin, western Christian tradition with a straightforward structure:
1 an address to God
2 a mention of something that God has done for us
3 a request that God do something
4 a kind of statement of purpose, why we want this thing we have asked for
5 a conclusion
The Common Worship Collect for this week is a pretty good example of this:
1 Almighty and everlasting God,
3 increase in us your gift of faith
4 that, forsaking what lies behind
and reaching out to that which is before,
we may run the way of your commandments
and win the crown of everlasting joy;
5 through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Although it misses out the second statement, probably because that would make it too long. It was written by the liturgist David Frost for the Alternative Service Book 1980.
Form like this in liturgy or the classical forms of poetry might at first seem constraining. But in fact form is what allows us freedom without chaos. The poet Malcolm Guite writes about the importance of form in last week’s Church Times, he ends by saying:
“The priest who serves the liturgy, the pastor serving their flck, the teacher working within the constraints of classroom and curriculum – all of them submit to constraints that sometimes seem impossible and yet, ‘meeting with wit and industry’, produce something ‘greater and worthier’ than unconstrained and possibly self-indulgent self-expression could ever do.”
There is a great treasury of prayers in the Collect form and many of my colleagues mine this treasury for the prayers that end Evensong.
In a small act of subversion in my time here I always use the Collect form in those prayers but always use modern collects written by others that expand our language, expand our images of God.
There are many people wrestling with language in our times in this way. Three writers whose Collects I frequently use are great wrestlers with language.
Jim Cotter, now dead, was a great wordsmith and poet and wrote many liturgical texts unfolded, as he used to say, from the traditional words. His form of Compline, Night Prayer, made its way almost entirely in to the official Prayer Book of the Anglican church in New Zealand.
Janet Morley, a writer, liturgist and social justice campaigner.
Finally a dear friend of mine, Fr Steven Shakespeare, a priest who is now Professor of Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University.
So here are three Collects for today one by each of these wrestlers with words. Notice the way they use the Collect form to contain their language and imagery:
First of all Jim Cotter’s:
1 Living Presence of justice,
2 inspiring us with passion and endurance
to embody your ways on earth,
3 that oppression and injustice may vanish from our lives.
5 We pray this after the pattern of Jesus
and in the power of the Spirit.
Unfolding the Living Word, Jim Cotter, Canterbury Press 2012
Now Janet Morley’s:
1 O God,
2 with whom we wrestle
until the break of day,
3 make us long to seek your face
beyond the limits of our strength:
4 that in our wounds we remember you,
and in your blessing
we may find ourselves,
through Jesus Christ. Amen
And finally Steven Shakespeare’s:
1 God of the dispossessed
2 you teach us to hunger for justice
even when the weak are shut out
and the powerful turn in their beds:
3 (4?) in the heat of our anger
and the bitterness of our complaints,
give us the courage to protest,
the persistence to pray
and the heart to love;
5 through Jesus Christ, the true judge. Amen.
Prayers for an Inclusive Church, Steven Shakespeare, Canterbury Press, 2008
I hope you will notice how these writers have used the form of the Collect in creative and playful ways, not always abiding exactly to it but never leaving it too far behind. Take these Collects home with you and reflect on them and the way in which they pick up on the theme of today’s readings: persistence, justice and woundedness,
Today is, if I have read the rota correctly, the last time I will preach as Sub Dean at Christ Church.
I am delighted that the exhibition for Black History Month is here.
Those of you who were here for my first sermon at Christ Church 26 months ago may remember that I had a visual aid with me.
In an attempt at homiletical parenthesis or even hermeneutical inclusio I am going to share that same icon with you again today.
It is an icon of Our Lady of Lewisham. Designed by the pupils at the school where I was Head and painted by Helen McIldowie-Jenkins. It illustrates perfectly I think the balance between form and freedom that the Collects we have looked at demonstrate. The form of this icon is a traditional Orthodox icon. But the black children who designed it ensured that not only is the skin of Mary and Jesus black, but so are their features, and hair; the fabric on Mary’s clothing is west African kente fabric.
The call for justice in church and society is like this. It is using the forms we have inherited in ways that include more people and lead to more justice.
Whether it is the inclusion of black and minority ethnic people, the ordination of women or same-sex marriage, it is finding the freedom which the form gives us and will build God’s kingdom of justice and peace.
Women, black people, LGBT people have all had to be like the woman in today’s gospel, persistent in the call for justice and more persistence is needed.
In today’s second reading from St Paul, he encourages us to be strong:
“be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable.”
Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, 18 September, 2022
We are an Easter people. St Augustine wrote, and Alleluia is our song.
Much has been made in recent days of the faith of our late Queen.
She was a believer.
A faithful churchgoer and unafraid to mention Jesus Christ and her faith in him.
Because she was a believer Jesus was not for her, as some of the media suggest simply an inspiration, an example to follow, though yes those things too. But he was above all the one who came that we might have eternal life.
Jesus came and did something, he died, descended to hell and rose again. He defeated death.
We say this here in this church each day as we pray the Apostles creed at Evensong and the Nicene creed at our Sunday Eucharist. You and I will say this today in just a moment. These Creeds have been prayed in this building for eight centuries and on this site for thirteen hundred years.
They are the heart of our Christian faith, the faith that the Queen shared and believed.
It is a while since I’ve brought a visual aid to church for my sermon but I do have one today.
It is an icon, Russian, I think, that is often called an icon of the resurrection but is really an icon of the harrowing of hell.
Jesus standing on the cross descends to the place of the dead, not really hell at all, but the place where the dead, righteous and unrighteous have been awaiting him.
It is worth spending some time with an icon like this, noticing the detail, the people standing around Jesus. The cross as his vehicle, it is the means by which, his death, that redeems the world.
This week each day in this church a Requiem Eucharist has been offered. But in a way every Eucharist is a Requiem, every time we break bread and drink this cup we are participating the death and resurrection of Jesus just as all the sacraments are a participation in that death and resurrection.
It is much easier to think about the resurrection of course. We all like a happy ending.
But the cross as the symbol of our faith is a reminder that we will all die. That death is inevitable and certain.
As we mourn the death of our Queen as we reflect on her dying. We also reflect on the arc of her life. We have seen pictures of her childhood, of her growing up, her teenage years, and her driving in uniform in the war. We have seen her on her wedding day and with her children, we have watched as she has got old and as she approached death.
Those final photographs as she met the new Prime Minister just a few days ago revealed a woman close to the end of her life.
A monarch symbolises a nation, a people, a monarch represents power, government and authority but also humanity.
This public life is lived so that we can all see what it is to be human. To be a person who will die. And to accept that fact and the fact of the resurrection of the dead which Jesus has won for us.
There are over three hundred and seventy tombs and memorials in this cathedral. We walk on the dead. The dead surround us.
I have been thinking a lot about the dead this week.
I come into church each day to say my prayers before anyone else gets here and I enjoy the presence of the dead.
If you don’t know it I would especially recommend that you visit and spend time with the tomb of Lady Elizabeth Montacute. It is one of the tombs that separates the shrine of St Frideswide from the Lady Chapel. It may have originally stood under the ceiling there which seems to have been painted with the same colours.
It is a remarkably detailed tomb. The pattern on her dress is visible and the shape of her headdress is is clear. Around the sides of the tomb are small statues of eight of her children. Two were Abbesses of the Benedictine convent at Barking in Essex, one was bishop of Ely. Their clothes too are clear. Sadly at some point the heads of the statues were knocked off, probably by Oliver Cromwells thugs who were too dim to realise that these were not canonised saints but the children of this benefactress who gave so much to the building of this cathedral.
I often feel the strong presence of our foundress at the shrine, but this week I have felt strongly the presence of this other Elizabeth. Lady Elizabeth Montacute, who lived seven centuries ago.
These two strong women remind me of the strong women in my life. My grandmother and mother and so many others.
They remind me that we all die but that in Jesus death is never the end.
And so we pray for Elizabeth our Queen, that her participation in the death of Jesus which was so much a part of her life will bring her a joyful resurrection.
She was an Easter person and Alleluia was her song.
Today at Christ Church we are saying goodbye to Canon Nigel Biggar. He has been a canon of Christ Church since 2007, not quite the eighteen years of bondage that the woman in today’s gospel had experienced. It has not been an easy time, particularly in the last six years, for anyone at Christ Church, but I hope that it has not felt like bondage – although he has been rather cheerful as the end approaches.
I asked Nigel whether he would rather preside or preach today and he passed the short straw to me. But when I looked at today’s readings and particularly at today’s gospel it seemed appropriate for wishing Nigel well in his continuing work.
The gospel we have just heard is about freedom.
The freedom to live that is at the heart of Jesus’ teaching.
I have come, Jesus said, in John 10:10, that you may have life, life in fullness, life in abundance, life in completeness.
And it is that abundant life that the woman has not had.
Her life has been constrained, contained, restricted.
Jesus gives her permission to be free.
So one point of this story is the freedom that Jesus brings, that he offers to each one of us to be free.
But the story is also about the misuse of religion to constrain God. Jesus heals this woman on the Sabbath.
The biblical sabbath is a wonderful gift to the people of God of freedom. Freedom from work. A day of rest, of joy and celebration.
The glory of the sabbath is well described by the prophet Isaiah in today’s first reading. If we observe the rest that God gives us in creation we will ‘ride on the heights of the earth’.
But take a look at what else the sabbath consists of in Isaiah:
offering food to the hungry
satisfying the needs of the afflicted
The sabbath is not about us, me, ourselves, it is precisely about not ‘pursuing our own interests’, not exploiting others, bringing freedom to those who are oppressed by hunger and afflictions.
Our second reading today doesn’t mention the sabbath.
In our second readings we work our way through a new testament book and we are now almost at the end of the letter to the Hebrews. It is a good commentary on today’s gospel reading. It tells us that the fullness of life that Jesus gives to the woman, that he promises us, that is justice for the hungry and afflicted is a dangerous thing. A consuming fire.
Freedom is dangerous. Fullness of life is dangerous.
We saw the cost of freedom last week in the attack on Salman Rushdie.
Not, thank God, physically, but Nigel has also carried the cost of daring to write and say things which are unpopular, unfashionable in some circles.
We live in an age of high anxiety, perhaps not surprising given the destruction of the planet and the economic and political uncertainties in which we live.
In this anxiety it is easy to imagine that things would be better if we limited freedoms. It’s the illusion of control.
Freedom can be frightening and disturbing, better the prison we know than the freedom we don’t.
The woman in the gospel is free after eighteen years.
We can only imagine the excitement, the fear, the shock, that she begins her new life with.
As many of you know I was a headteacher in south east London for some years. Rather than have a punishment system to ensure good behaviour we introduced practices of Restorative Justice. It was a powerful tool for changing behaviour permanently, for enabling young people to see the consequences of their actions for other people and not just for themselves.
One of the aspects that fascinated me about Restorative Justice was that it concentrates on actions not motives. Often when we deal with children we ask them why they did something. Usually they don’t know, they can’t answer that question. As human beings our motives are too complex, too irrational to be easily explained,
I think Jesus would understand that.
When he sees the woman in today’s gospel he is not interested in her psychology, nor that of those who want to preserve the sabbath and are cross with him for healing on the sabbath. There is a straightforwardness about Jesus that is deeply attractive.
Just look at the gospel we’ve heard today. He sees the woman and the gospel says “When he saw her he called her over.” He doesn’t interrogate her. He simply says “Woman, you are set free.”
This is the freedom that Jesus offers every one of us. The simple freedom of being fully alive.
The task for each of us, for you and for me is to notice the things that make us unfree, the things that bind us.
Many of us will think of all the psychological factors, the experiences of our lives that bind us, that limit our freedom. These are, no doubt, important, but perhaps the task is simpler, more straightforward than that.
Perhaps there are simple choices that we can make not to be bound in life but to live the freedom that Jesus gives.
We human beings like to complicate things. To put up barriers, to turn the joy of the sabbath into the rules that must be kept. To limit the sharing of bread and wine in the Eucharist to those who fit, who tick the right boxes.
When Nigel takes bread and wine and says the prayers in a few moments, he is celebrating the feast of freedom.
This feast is food to sustain us in living freely for the rest of the week. To see what we are bound by and to let it go and walk away from it.
The justice of God is restorative, it restores us to the freedom that God wanted for us when he made us. That freedom that unbinds us from the narratives of our lives, of resentment and cynicism and self-obsession. It is the freedom of Jesus who does not ask ‘why’, but simply says ‘you are set free’.
We walk freely as we ascend to the altar because we have “come to Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus …”
For many people of my age the BBC series Its a Sin was immensely triggering. It brought back half-submerged memories of that time in the 1980s. HIV, family rejection, friendship. The shared house even reminded me of the eclectic and diverse collection of people I shared a house with on Andover Road in Winchester (you know who you are).
The recent Lambeth Conference has felt a bit like that. A roller-coaster of emotion.
I hate the victimology of much of our culture and in so many ways I lead an immensely privileged life, the total joy of entering the 38th year of life with an utterly beautiful man (I am 57 for the avoidance of doubt), a career protected by equalities legislation in schools and now in a university, simply to be born as a gay person in this time and this place, to work in a friendly, welcoming and inclusive community.
However, I do know what it is like to be rejected by family, to have an actual door slammed in my face, to have to leave a New Year’s lunch and have to search for a place for the night because someone could not face seeing my partner and I together, to not to be invited to family events, to have things said by my closest relatives that should never be said by one human being to another. To be required by the church, by my bishops, for the first years of my ordained life to live apart from my partner, “Well, at least have separate postal addresses.” as one Archdeacon put it. Or, “It’s for your own safety.” as a bishop described it – so much easier to blame other people. I know the effect this all had on my partner and I am ashamed that I put him through it.
So, yes, I was triggered when the partners of same-sex partnered bishops weren’t invited to the Lambeth Conference, when it was the University of Kent that offered them hospitality, when they had to stay long-distances away from their partners, when a friend driving one partner on part of the journey to Lambeth described the anxiety.
And yes when the first version of the Call to Human Dignity was published it was a kick in the stomach; I felt it viscerally. Lambeth 1:10, despite some subtlety in the actual text is a baseline of prejudice; like Section 28 it has a sign value to LGBTQ+ people that is profoundly negative. Whoever put it in the text can have no empathy or understanding for that sign value for us.
But things got better.
I am cautious about this, I want to see what happens next and I still have some problems with what was said.
It does feel that the Holy Spirit was at work, it does seem that we have reached a point where we accept the diversity of our churches. That we are not a church but a fellowship of churches has been firmly stated, that there are no sanctions available or desired by the Archbishop of Canterbury has been clearly said. It does seem that the presence of same-sex partnered bishops and their spouses made a difference, that there has been real encounter.
It is early days and I am nervous and cautious.
So, my concerns:
The claim for ‘validity’ for Lambeth 1:10 and the failure to note its iconic value for LGBTQ+ people. I simply don’t understand what validity means in this context. And in my privileged life I worry for LGBTQ+ siblings in places where their lives are in danger.
My second concern is the affirming bishops statement organised by Jayne Ozanne and which has had more than 170 signatures. What it says is really rather mild. Only two bishops of the Church of England signed, Bishop David Hamid in Europe and Bishop Alan Wilson in this diocese. I wonder if those English bishops, that is to say all of the rest of them, but mostly those I know personally and like and have much respect for, realise how triggering it is for me to see that they have not signed. It hurts. Of course, the politics is complicated. But it feels like the willingness to accept diversity in the Communion does not extend to accepting diversity in the College of Bishops. I think they, you, if you read this, need to explain themselves / yourselves.
“We apologize for any sense of rejection that has occurred”.
It feels that in England at least we have gone backwards and that bizarrely the Living in Love and Faith process has stifled not encouraged debate.
When I was sent away, not invited, spoken to in humiliating ways by those I loved in my family I was certain they would get over it, I couldn’t believe that they couldn’t. God is good, and they did get over it in just a few years, and came to love my partner Jim and to cherish us. I was barely in my mid twenties for my family to make this journey.
A church, a worldwide communion is a bigger and more, complex thing, of course, than one family, but it is still my family and I have waited for the rest of my working life for the church to make progress.
Is this Lambeth Conference progress? I hope and pray that it is. But I also hope that you understand why I am not quite rejoicing.
I don’t know about you but my friends are a pretty rum bunch.
Sometimes I wonder how I know them, what attracted us to each other.
Some of them I have quite a lot in common with, some of them nothing in common at all.
I like the hymn What a friend we have in Jesus a lot.
But often I like to imagine that first line with an exclamation mark at the end of it:
What a friend we have in Jesus!
What an extraordinary, exasperating, irritating, challenging friend Jesus must have been.
In our year long reading of Luke’s gospel we are about half way through and today’s gospel reading contains a set of statements by Jesus, some of which St Luke shares with St Matthew some of which come from another source, that Luke has woven together.
There isn’t really a single theme to the passage and in some ways the reading cuts the flow of Luke’s narrative by choosing these particular verses. As so often with the gospels the phrases can seem so familiar to us that we ignore or just don’t notice their force. We don’t notice what an extraordinary, exasperating, irritating, challenging friend Jesus is.
Many of you will be in church today to see this wonderful historic, sacred building. For many of you this may be the only time you worship at Christ Church. Some of you will worship at your own churches when you get home, for others this may be the only Christian worship you attend this year or this month.
Wherever you come from, how ever often you find yourself in church I’d like us to look together at this remarkable collection of sayings and think about our friend Jesus. What state is our friendship with him in? How does this collection of sayings help us to think again about Jesus?
What a friend we have in Jesus: he doesn’t want us to be afraid, that’s how the passage begins. It might seem quite consoling and comforting; but I wonder if actually it is to help us face the really quite frightening and challenging journey of friendship with Jesus that he is about to describe.
I am certainly challenged by the next statement. Sell your possessions and give alms.
I expect most of us contribute something to charity from our spare income. But I certainly don’t envisage selling any of my possessions any time soon to be able to give more to charity. Filling out my tax form this week I had to add up how much I spent on books in the last financial year. If I had given all that money to charity it could have changed lives. Why do I need to buy all those books when I have access in Oxford to one of the best libraries in the world?
And this passage about possessions goes on:
Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.
For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
I spend quite a bit of my time seeing people for Spiritual Direction. Everyone loves to talk about their prayer lives. The spiritual experiences they may or may not be having. But Jesus, our extraordinary, exasperating, irritating, challenging friend is much wiser than that. He knows that the real test of what we value of where our hearts are is how we spend our money.
If you want a spiritual practice this week take a look at your bank statement and see what you value. Jesus is much more interested in how we spend our money, what possessions we have than in spiritual experiences.
Then the passage changes tack.
Now we are the servants waiting for our master to come back from a wedding party, no doubt late, no doubt in the middle of the night.
We can’t afford to put our pyjamas on and go to bed or to turn the lights out.
In fact we can’t sleep at all.
This following Jesus is no easy life. We can’t coast through it.
But then look at what happens.
The Master comes home. But he doesn’t expect to be waited on, he becomes the servant, serving the servants.
Jesus is never predictable. This turn in the passage is revolutionary, it changes the world. Masters become servants, slaves get waited on.
What a friend we have in Jesus!
And then the passage turns again. No longer are we thinking about servants waiting for their Master to get back late at night or early in the morning. Now suddenly Jesus is thinking about a house being broken into.
There is a thief about.
Jesus shows us that there is a conflict. This might even be called the real spiritual conflict.
What or who has stolen our hearts? If we are not waiting to welcome Jesus what are we waiting for, who breaks into the house of our lives?
You must be ready, Jesus says, for he is coming at an unexpected hour.
What a friend we have in Jesus! Because he comes when we don’’t expect him.
We all like to see our friends, we make arrangements to see them, we invite them over at certain times. But Jesus is not that sort of friend. He turns up when we don’t expect him, perhaps even when we are busy doing something else, perhaps even in the middle of the night.
These sort of passages are sometimes interpreted as referring to the end of the world when Jesus will come again.
Others interpret them as being ready to meet Jesus in our worship, in the words of Scripture or in his body and blood received in the Eucharist as we will in just a few minutes time.
All those interpretations may be true. But I want to end by thinking of a slightly different way of understanding this.
This service, this act of worship is not the unexpected time. Quite the opposite we are here because we knew the time of the service. We expect perhaps some of us to have a spiritual experience.
But what about this time tomorrow? 11am on Monday.
Perhaps we will meet Jesus then? perhaps we will see where our treasure is, what we really value in the way we answer an email, speak to a colleague spend our money when we go shopping or online.
What a friend we have in Jesus,
all our sins and griefs to bear!
What a privilege to carry
everything to God in prayer!
O what peace we often forfeit,
O what needless pain we bear,
all because we do not carry
everything to God in prayer!
If Jesus is not our friend in every moment, everything of our lives he is no friend at all, we are no friend to him.
If you are serious about friendship with Jesus carry everything to God in prayer, your work, your social life, your spending, your eating, your intimate relationships.
Whether we choose friendship with Jesus or not, and the choice is entirely ours don’t do it without noticing what an extraordinary, exasperating, irritating, challenging friend Jesus is.
Did you manage to listen carefully all the way through?
Or did you think, ‘Oh yes, the parable of the Good Samaritan’ and stop listening.
It must be the most famous of Jesus’ parables. It’s given its name to multiple organisations not least the Samaritans who help those in despair or pondering suicide and who have saved so many lives.
Phrases from the story have entered the English language. We talk about those who ‘pass by on the other side’ and we thank people who have acted as ‘Good Samaritans’.
My favourite film is Wim Wenders 1987 film Wings of Desire. I must have watched it dozens of times, but its only when I can persuade somebody else to watch it with me, usually for them the first time (it’s a niche sort of film) that I notice new things about it.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a bit like that. I, we, need someone to help us look at it afresh. What I want to say about the parable has benefited enormously from the blog of Scripture Scholar and priest Ian Paul, he writes a commentary on the readings each week. I throughly recommend it.
There are three things I want to do. Firstly, look at the context of this passage, then think about two ways of reading this story prayerfully. I hope you will take your service sheets with you or look up Luke Chapter 10 in your bibles at home and spend some time with this scripture during the week ahead.
It is worth noting that this story occurs in only one of the gospels. St Luke.
There has, of course, been much scholarly activity around the relationship of the four gospels to each other and the knowledge they may or may not have had of the other texts. But it is not surprising that after preaching publicly for three years (as the Fourth Gospel suggests) Jesus would have used similar material on more than one occasion but in slightly different ways. I never preach a sermon more than once, but the stories and images I preach are repeated many times. I must have mentioned Wim Wenders’ film at least a dozen times over the years.
Nor is it surprising that gospel writers wouldn’t try to include every story, saying or variant on a saying in their gospels.
So although the story of the Good Samaritan occurs only in Luke, the passage that introduces the story, the account of a lawyer questioning Jesus occurs in Matthew 22 and Mark 12 as well as Luke 10.
Jesus’ answer to the lawyer is very important because he quotes from Deuteronomy 6, the sh’ma, the great Jewish declaration of faith that begins (and only Mark’s gospel includes this) “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God the Lord is One.”
So Jesus is doing exactly what those who questioned him are doing. I often point out that Jesus is quite good at not answering questions head-on, he comes at a tangent, but in this passage he is involved in the same task as his questioners.
This is important in challenging what can sometimes be an underlying anti-semitism in Christian readings of Scripture. Jesus is a Jew engaged in dialogue with his fellow Jews. This is an internal discussion. We should remember this in our reading of the parable too. The mention of the priest passing by on the other side of the road can too easily be read as a criticism of Judaism.
So Jesus’ reaction to the questioning from the lawyer is to direct his listeners to their Judaism, to the Hebrew Scriptures and to one of the most important passages in the Torah, the law. This is not Jesus contrasting legalism with compassion, but Jesus telling his hearers that the basis of the Torah is love of God and love of neighbour. It’s a bit unhelpful that our word law is used to translate Torah. ‘Law’ make us think of rules and regulations but Torah is much richer and broader.
So that is, partly, the context in which Jesus tells the story. How can we read it in a way that helps us hear it again and understand what Jesus is trying to say.
The first method of doing which I am suggesting this is imaginative. The sort of thing suggested by Saint Ignatius of Loyola.
I get rather cross when I am looking for a novel to read and I open the first few pages and the author gives a list of the characters with little descriptions of who each character is. I know I am probably being unreasonable but it makes me feel that the author hasn’t done his or her job properly. That if the book was well written such a dramatis personae would be unnecessary.
Jesus’ stories are generally very short and don’t contain too many people. But I actually think writing a list of characters for this story might be quite helpful.
Try it at home make a list:
the man on a journey
the robbers (number unknown)
a priest
a Levite
a Samaritan
the innkeeper
You might want to try and imagine those people in a bit more detail.
then take each of those people in turn and imagine yourself as them.
Perhaps because we are so used to interpreting this story as Jesus telling us to be like the Samaritan and not pass by, it is probably easier to imagine ourselves as him, all be it beating ourselves up for not being like him in much of our lives.
So why not start off by imagining yourself as one of the robbers. then each of the other characters. Really use your visual imagination to do this and your empathy to imagine what they were thinking and feeling. Look at the details, in your imagination smell the olive oil and the wine poured on the man’s wounds. Hear the clink of the coins as they are handed over to the innkeeper. To be honest I would leave the Samaritan til last. I think you will get much more out of it that way.
You’ll probably need more than one sitting to do this. There are conveniently six characters in our story so you could do one each day of the week ahead.
There’s a second way you could think about the story. That is allegorically. Many writers in the first centuries of the church did this. Often pushing it quite a long way. The man is Adam, the first man, Jerusalem is Paradise where he is heading and so on.
The church has always read Scripture allegorically and it is clear that Jesus meant his stories to be understood that way.
Luke when he wrote his gospel did so with much precision. Look closely at the text and you’ll see that the turning point comes when the Samaritan sees the man and is ‘moved with pity’. The Greek means literally that ‘his bowels were moved’, its is visceral,
]tf m`acompassion is felt in our very depths. This is the key to the story, St Luke arranged his text so that this verb is at the very centre, numerically. There are the same number of words before as afterwards in this story.
It’s a word that only occurs in three places in Luke’s gospel, chapter 7 – the raising of the widow’s son, chapter 15 the parable of the Prodigal son, and today’s passage. In each case this verb is at the numerical centre.
In each of the other two cases it is clear that it is Jesus himself who is moved to compassion. So it seems likely that Jesus intends that we see the Samaritan as the Jesus figure in the story.
We are bruised and beaten, by life, by sin, and Jesus saves us.
The story has moral purpose, of course. But we should not lose sight of the fact that put simply Jesus saves us.
We don’t share from our wealth, we share from our poverty.
As St John says “ We love because he first loved us.”
The parable we know as the Good Samaritan is not about what WE do, it’s about what GOD does.
St Luke teaches us in this parable and throughout his gospel that we are those in need of a Saviour.
Jesus doesn’t teach morality tales, although they may be moral.
Jesus us shows us that we need a Saviour, that we need salvation, that we need him.
At the very heart of the good news is Jesus Christ our the only true Good Samaritan.
If you haven’t see it yet I thoroughly recommend the film Don’t Look Up, a metaphor for our approach to climate change, the film brilliantly and satirically portrays the response of the world to the imminent arrival of a comet which will destroy life on the planet. I was forcefully struck by the experience of the scientists in the film. Their powerlessness, anguish and anger at their inability to penetrate the false narratives spoke to me deeply.
“It must be awful”, a senior priest of the Church of England said to me recently on the phone, “to walk through Tom Quad and know that the Dons have their knives at the ready.” His language was particularly colourful but people say this sort of thing to me all the time. Sometimes they write or email, leave phone messages, or just feel free to say it when they bump into me in the street or at church events.
One of the existential questions I deal with in the face of this barrage is how to respond. I have tried a number of techniques and quite frequently end up saying “I am walking away now.” And do so. That seems to drive the individuals concerned to particular anger. But what am I to do?
Sometimes I hear people talk about theological college as a place of breaking, falling apart, destruction. That was not my experience. I loved my three years at Chichester Theological College. It wasn’t always easy, but it was, until now, the most intense experience of Christian community I have had. Made significant, not least, by the staff who were thoughtful, kind and challenging. I am glad to keep in touch with several of them.
When I was asked to consider applying to be Sub Dean at Christ Church it was with my eyes open. But also with some amusement. There are so many priests in the Church of England so much better equipped for cathedral ministry in Oxford. I have no previous Oxbridge connections. My academic career is professional rather than intellectual. I don’t even know very much about choral music. The fact that my excellent Precentor colleague gave me A History of Church Music as a Christmas present tells you a great deal.
Priests are called to be many things. It is definitely a role for generalists. Among the many things we are called to be, is, I believe to be scientists. Science with its etymology of knowledge, knowing. In education my own views have moved from progressive discovery methods to recognising the importance, the fundamental significance of knowledge. Of truth. This is just as true in priestly ministry. Jesus described himself as the way, the truth and the life. There is truth and the priest, like all Christians must preach it and above all demonstrate it in our own lives. This commitment to truth is the prophetic ministry. Reading the signs of the times and speaking the truth of them. Challenging a community and individuals to see the truth. This is the work of Spiritual Direction.
When I began my ministry at Christ Church in September 2020 I wondered what it would be like here. I had heard many of the myths about the ‘evil dons’. I had read the blogs. I was not immune to the common myths of privilege and elitism that surround Oxbridge and Christ Church more than most.
The science, the truth of what I have experienced over the last 18 months is far different. My academic colleagues are the same wonderful, bewildering, fascinating mix of good and evil as any collection of human beings with whom I have ever worked, and as I am myself. I was worried I would be patronised but am in fact treated with utmost respect for my own professional career and experience. Every meal, every encounter with academics is interesting and rewarding.
Probably because of the difficulties we are in this is the most intense experience of Christian community I have had since theological college. There is great blessing in this and great opportunities for encounters of significance.
Although my job is mainly (80%) directed to the life of the Cathedral and we have a superb College Chaplain, I do share pastoral responsibility with all the clergy of the Foundation for all members of the community. In light of the relentless attacks on my colleagues such as the phone call mentioned above, how am I to minister, to pastor to them? How do I share the good news of Jesus, of being a Christian with people who are constantly attacked by Christians? In Don’t look Up the scientists experience anger and bewilderment at the power of fake news. My own experience is of anger and shame.
Knowledge is at the heart of what I have come to believe about education. Most of the people who tell me what is happening at Christ Church have very little knowledge, or knowledge that is gained from partisan and limited sources. Or simple untruths.
The truth I experience in this community is of kind, generous, fascinating people trying their best. This is an inclusive community that has welcomed my partner and I in ways that put the church to shame. The truth I experience is of people bewildered by false narratives that seem unrelated to day to day life. The truth I experience in the Cathedral is of a community that is faithful to prayer and the search for truth.
Whatever the future holds I am grateful to have been called to this place for this time.
If you are reading this I hope that you will do so with an open mind. A mind willing to admit that what is happening at Christ Church might be other than it is often portrayed as. Most of all, I hope that you will pray for us, and assure us of your prayers without judgement.
In mid-June Jim and I will welcome three Ukrainians to the Sub Deanery, Gran, Mum and 3 year old son. We would very much appreciate any help at all in setting up the top floor to be suitable for them, we need the following items (so far):
stair gate
3 smallish arm chairs
small kitchen table and chairs for 3
TV
laptop and / or iPad
2 ring cooker
crockery and cutlery etc for 3
books and toys for a nearly 4 year old boy
We live on a clergy stipend (£29 000) plus occasional earnings from journalism for Jim, which is tight at the best of times. Any ongoing help that could be provided would be very helpful.
Quaker poet Clive Sansom in his 1956 collection The Witnesses tells the life of Jesus in the words of those who knew him. Here his mother, Mary.
In this poem four images lead us to God. Like stepping stones crossing a river we trip lightly in this beautifully constructed poem from one side of the river to the other.
there is something perfectly formed, and perfectly structured about this poem.
It’s brevity adds to that perfection. Utterly simple and utterly profound. The Annunciation described in the simplest possible language with the ultimate mention of God as the only religious language used.
People often ask me how to pray, or tell me that prayer is difficult.
I am very fortunate because I was taught to pray as soon as I was taught to speak. It was my gran that taught me. An Irish Catholic she only had two types of prayer. Going to Mass and praying the Rosary. And since she prayed the Rosary through most of the Mass, perhaps really the Rosary was her only way of praying.
It is easy to be dismissive of such simple prayer. the lifelong repetition of the prayers of the Rosary. In the Sub Deanery I have thousands of books on prayer, or spiritualities, Benedictine, Carmelite, Ignatian and many more. But I wonder if they have really brought me any greater wisdom or faithfulness than my gran had.
I was delighted to hear that the Rosary is prayed publicly here at Bourne Street once a week during Our Lady’s Month of May. If this is something you haven’t done before I really encourage you to join in and try it out.
The Rosary works on many levels and each of these contribute to its richness. It is physical, Scriptural, Doctrinal and Sentimental. And all of those are important and vital to the Christin life.
PHYSICAL – Mindfulness
Occasionally, praying the Rosary with a group I’ve lent my beads to someone else who doesn’t have any with them. It is terrible. The physical touch of the beads, the movement of them through the fingers is vital to praying the Rosary.
When our brains associate objects, movements with particular emotional states it can help trigger those states. Just touching my Rosary beads in my pocket can help me feel steadier in moments of stress. It brings me back to the heart of who I am as a person. I can’t imagine going into a difficult meeting or starting a hard conversation without my beads in my pocket.
the Rosary also works physically through the repetition of the prayers. I really recommend praying the prayers aloud when you can. we know that the movement of the lips and the sound produced by the voice has a stronger effect than thinking the words in our heads.
Its why we speak texts out loud when we want to learn them off by heart.
SCRIPTURAL
the Rosary is deeply Scriptural. It is a series of meditations on Scriptural texts, moments known as Mysteries. It is quite good in the early days of praying the Rosary to have a book in front of us with those texts set out for us to meditate on, when ether is time to read those texts out loud as part of praying each mystery.
DOCTRINAL
the Rosary is a great vehicle for orthodox doctrine. We repeat the words of the Apostles Creed at the start of every Rosary. The mysteries themselves teach us the fundamentals of the Christian faith. It would be impossible to pray the Rosary regularly and not be clear what it is we are to believe as Christians.
Because the Rosary is Scriptural and Doctrinal it protcets us from straying beyond orthodox teaching As St Louis de Montfort wrote:
“Never will anyone who says his Rosary every day be led astray. This is a statement that I would gladly sign with my blood.”
SENTIMENTAL
Clive Sansom’s poem Mary of Nazareth captures for me something that is so important for those of us who are Anglo-Catholics to recover. A proper place for sentiment in our Christian lives.
It was like God:
A presence of blinding light,
Ravishing body and soul
In the Spring night.
To be ravished, is to be embraced by something other, to be held in the arms of one who is not us. To be properly sentimental is to bring our Christian faith down from our heads deep into our hearts.
In the west we human beings tend to function as if our very existence is in our brains – there are even science fiction stories about preserving brains, or downloading personalities from a brain. But we are really highly embodied being, we exist in the totality of our physical existence – which is why the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is so significant for Christians.
for the eastern Orthodox tradition the uniting of mind and heart, the descent of the mind into the heart is the aim of the spiritual life. In the west St Augustine talks of the expanding of the heart.
The praying of the Rosary involves little intellectual effort. It requires the assent of faith, but more than that it depends on us being rooted in our bodies and centred in our hearts.
Finally, the Rosary is CHRIST CENTRED.
As St John Paul II said in his marvellous Apostolic Letter: Rosarium Virginis Mariae.
In the Rosary we remember Christ with Mary.
We learn Christ from Mary.
We are conformed to Christ with Mary
We pray to Christ with Mary
And we proclaim Christ with Mary.
If you have not tried the Rosary before, come along to the praying of the Rosary here at Bourne Street. Praying with others is the best way to learn it. But there are also apps, YouTube films and hundreds of books on how to pray the Rosary.
I learnt the Rosary with my gran. But it was with my mum that I discovered how vital, how life giving this prayer can be in the face of death.
Mum died just over two years ago having spent the last six weeks of her life in a beautiful hospice, St Gemma’s in Leeds.
Throughout those six weeks I was able to pray with her, almost daily. Occasionally celebrating Mass at her bedside but mostly praying the Rosary.
In my memory I now measure those six weeks, that ebbing away of her life, in her praying of the Rosary. Initially able to answer the prayers with me, each of us prayer half of the Our Father or Hail Mary; soon she just joined with me in saying the prayers. Eventually she just moved her lips as I prayed. In her last hours she cvould barely move her hand t ross herself and her lips moved just for the Amen at the end of each prayer. As the end came even that faded. She slipped away soon after I had prayed the prayer “Go forth from the world Christian soul.”
It was as beautiful a death as anyone could wish for, my brother and sister and I together with her, praying with her as she left.
Neither my mum or gran ever thought praying was hard or difficult. They never expected any mystical experiences, or the dark night the soul. Probably neither of them ever read a book about prayer. But they proved to me that as St Francis de Sales wrote “the Rosary is the greatest method of prayer.”
What I learned from them is that Rosary is truly contemplative. Not as a technique for prayer, a forcing of contemplation, but as an opening up to that contemplation that is only ever a gift from God. resting in the divine presence without seeking or expectation.
Clive Ransom’s poem is both simple and dense. Like the Rosary it is beautifully structured.
like the Rosary it leads us from the very ordinary to the divine. And like the Rosary it is a model of true pious sentiment.
It was like music:
Hovering and floating there
With the sound of lutes and timbrels
In the night air.
It was like waves,
Beating upon the shore:
Insistent with a rhythm, a pulsing
Unfelt before.
It was like wind:
Blowing from off the seas
Of other, far other
Lands than these.
It was like wings,
Like whirring wings that fly
The song of an army of swans
On the dark sky.
It was like God:
A presence of blinding light,
Ravishing body and soul
In the Spring night.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen wrote of the Rosary:
that it
“is the book of the blind, where souls see and there enact the greatest drama of love the world has ever known;
it is the book of the simple, which initiates them into mysteries and knowledge more satisfying than the education of other men;
it is the book of the aged, whose eyes close upon the shadow of this world, and open on the substance of the next.
I have reached that stage in life that when I look in the mirror I see my dad. The grey hair, the wrinkles, the smile. I am told I have the same mannerisms.
I just hope that I am not guilty of the same jokes …
My dad was not a church going sort of person, he had been brought up in an austere religious household which rather put him off . But he was deeply, what we would now call spiritual. He felt things profoundly, and he had an unshakable moral compass, he taught me that doing the right thing was all that mattered, whatever the cost.
And he loved graveyards.
Many an hour was spent on holidays walking around church yards picking out the interesting tombs, the poetic verses, the humorous epitaphs.
A few weeks ago I called in at Boythorpe Cemetery in Chesterfield where dad is buried, in a grave with my mum and my brother David who died when he was a child. A few graves along are my grandparents, a couple of great aunts and a little way down the hill my great-grandparents, and several other members of the family.
After my brother died we went to the grave every Saturday to place flowers and keep it clean. Some of my happiest memories are from those times playing with my brother and sister. The ice-cream van that would stand at the cemetery gates. Trying to get my dad away from mum so that he would say yes to ice-creams. The oak tree and acorns, the horse chestnut and collecting the best conkers. The sense that the dead are family too. Seeing adults cry and knowing that it was OK for them to do so.
In a time when we are seeing the dead unburied, lying on the ground in Ukraine. Corpses decaying. Sons buried in back gardens: it might seem that I am just adding to the gloom by dwelling on graveyards.
But that is what our gospel tells us the women did. They went to the grave.
This is the Christian life. Not an avoidance of evil and death but a facing up to it. A recognition of it for what it is. An acknowledgement of reality.
There is a self-help book with the great title “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway”.
I like that.
Scripture tells us over and over again not to fear “Do not be afraid.” And that is the right aspiration. But the reality is that evil and death are frightening. Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane is real. His cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”, is heartfelt.
There are two reactions to the grimness of the world that Christians take that don’t seem to me be entirely satisfactory.
We could adopt a Polyanna attitude that everything is all right really. celebrating the good and ignoring the bad. I have met people who tried to do that. It is rarely sustainable. Pain and grief and loss must be expressed in the end.
The other is to try and grieve Jesus’ death as if we didn’t know he had risen. There are some dangers in Holy Week and its liturgies for us here. As if play-acting being in Jerusalem in the year 33 would somehow help us to come closer to Jesus.
Some of you might have seen the recent film Don’t Look Up. Whether it’s the destruction of the planet or sending refugees to Rwanda there are many who would rather not see, not look up. But we who are Christian look death in the face every day.
We look up to the cross.2~
We don’t run away from the tomb, we run to it.
As I watch the news from Ukraine, as we have always watched wars and famine, and even, in a small way, as we have faced the difficulties here at Christ Church a great spiritual writer helps me to live this experience.
In my chapel in the cellar of the Sub Deanery is this icon. It shows St Silouan the Athonite. A Russian – and how important it is in these times to remember all that is good and wonderful in Russian history and experience – he became a monk on Mount Athos where he died in 1933.
His writings are full of spiritual depth and wisdom. But it is one of his most well known phrases that sustains me: “Keep your heart in hell and despair not.”
Jesus did not run away. He stayed. He remained faithful.
In the face of death we are to remain faithful.
This Holy Week we have heard sermons from Sanjee Perera reflecting on justice. They are available on our YouTube channel and the texts will soon be available on the website. I hope that you will take time to reflect on them.
Injustice is a kind of death. A destroying of how things should be. A diminishment of the human person.
Injustice permeates the universe, the world as it is.
The kingdom of God, said St Paul, is justice and peace, and joy in the holy spirit.
Some days it feels like there is no justice, some days it feels like there is no peace.
In the Lord’s Prayer we pray that God’s kingdom will come. Fervently. We pray for God’s justice and peace, in the Ukraine, for refugees, in our own lives. And we keep our hearts in hell and despair not.
In this church there are over 370 memorials to the dead. We are surrounded by them, we walk over them, lean on them, place our vestments and service books on them.
They are a reminder to us that the final resurrection of the dead has not come. That justice has not come, that peace has not come.
And we despair not.
We do not despair because the joy of the Holy Spirit is given us.
Because we connect with the living and the dead. Because we belong.
Every single memorial is a reminder of this ‘one precious life’.
Jesus, is the first born from the dead, the pioneer of our salvation.
When I was a child and I visited Boythorpe Cemetery I knew that I belonged, that I was part of something so much more than myself. Those childhood visits taught me, without anyone saying a word, that life is so much bigger than we can imagine. That the dead are close. Sometimes my colleague Philippa brings her son Gregory to Morning Prayer. As we sit around the shrine and say our prayers I love to see five year old Gregory climbing on the tombs. I like to think that Lady Montacute, Prior Sutton and even warrior like Sir George would be pleased were the resurrection to occur and as they sat up to find a little boy treating their graves as a playground.
As we, the living, pray day by day, here among the dead and the memorials to the dead, we find joy.
Joy in the greatness of life. Joy in Jesus who takes us by the hand walks into hell with us and stays with us, he never runs away and in him therefore we do not, cannot despair.
Keep your hearts in hell and despair not for the kingdom of God is joy in the Holy Spirit.
Well, I thought I’d start with three volunteers. Just to make sure that it’s not too much of a shock.
Henry, Beni and Pascahl are going to help me out.
[Choristers: look in the box one at a time]
Are you surprised. Don’t tell anyone until the end of the sermon.
One more test for you:
“I’m late, I’m late! For a very important date! No time to say ‘hello, goodbye,’ I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!”
Who said that?
The White Rabbit in Alice is late for his own life. he has no time.
In the gospel we have just heard Jesus uses three words for time. Today, tomorrow and the next day.
In my imagination Jesus has a rather wry sense of humour which is well demonstrated here. I can just picture a half smile on his lips. he is not going to hurry for anyone. he has all the time in the world. Which, of course, quite literally, he does.
As we know this church was for 400 years or so the home of a community of Augustinian Canons. As well as the Rule of St Augustine of Hippo who lived in Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries – which they would have read daily they would have been familiar with the other writings of Augustine. We can be sure that they would have known well his most famous book, the Confessions.
Sometimes the Confessions is described as an autobiography, even, perhaps, the world’s first autobiography. Although it does include much autobiographical detail it is very much more than just that. The second part of the book is a theological treatise. In it Augustine is concerned in particular with memory and time.
It is time I want us to think about today.
Time passes. Sometimes it passes slowly, sometimes it runs away with us.
The time from the writing of the book of Genesis to the the writing of the letter to the Philippians, mere centuries, a tint moment in the history of the universe. The time since the writing of the Gospel of Luke to our time now two millennia. the time since the Augustinian canons left here til now half a millennia.
But it’s not these great arcs of time I want to think about but the time of our own lives. the moments that make up our days and months and years and how we use them.
Centuries after Augustine at the time when there were Augustinian canons here at St Frideswide’s Priory, there was a great flourishing of spirituality here in England, particularly in the English Midlands and East Anglia. I’m thinking, of course, of Julian of Norwich, Marjory Kemp of Lynne and the unknown author of a little book The Cloud of Unknowing.
In their own way each of these fourteenth century writers was deeply influenced by Augustine of Hippo. But it is particularly the author of the Cloud and his understanding of time that I think is so fascinating.
The Cloud describe how there is a sort of cloud obscuring our view of God, stopping us seeing God. he (most people think it was a man) writes:
“Beat with a sharp dart of longing love upon this cloud of unknowing which is between you and your God.”
And he describes a technique of prayer for doing just that. Beating again and again at that cloud.
The way he suggests is choosing a word to repeat over and over again in our prayers. Most writers and commenters have misunderstood what the author of the Cloud is suggesting. This is not a phrase, it is not like an Eastern mantra, it is not like the Jesus Prayer. He is insistent that the prayer word should be a single syllable. he hives some examples God or Love, or even, and here I think he has the same wry smile on his face as Jesus in the Gospel, even the word ‘sin’.
The point is that the meaning of the word is completely irrelevant. It is the length of the word that is significant. I think that the Cloud is trying to help us reach awareness of the very shortest possible length of time, the moment in which we can wake up and experience the whole of that moment. To switch analogies it is a bit like the subtle knife in Philp Pullman’s book that can cut into time and experience something more.
I first started practising this ay of prayer just a few years ago, I use the word God and repeat it out loud over and over again. I sometimes start by doing this quite quickly but soon get into a rhythm that matches my breath.
Last week two small groups of people gathered in my dining room to meditate together. I’ve been teaching meditation for over 30 years.
Two things strike me about what happens when people meditate. Over and over again when I’ve taught meditation to children I child will say “It’s like there’s somebody there.” Yes!
And whatever state of anger of resentment people live in when they meditate they experience a sense of kindness. I was Head teacher of a tough inner city school in Lewisham and taught meditation to the whole school. even the toughest, most streetwise pupil experienced this sense of kindness in meditation.
Augustine knew what God is like. Augustine took seriously the beginning of the book Genesis just a few Chapters earlier than the reading we heard today.
God created us, Genesis tells us, in his image and likeness.
[Get the choristers out again: what is in the box? a mirror]
God’s first revelation of Himself is ourselves.
Augustine famously described elements of the human personality as reflecting the nature of god as Trinity, sometimes referring to the three elements of memory, understanding and will in this way. I don’t think we have to worry too much about labelling those elements. What Augustine knows is that when we examine ourselves, reflect on ourselves, we will find God.
This is why he is so obsessed with time, like the White rabbit we lose ourselves in our busy-ness in the endless flow of events. When we stop and experience just now fully and completely then we can see God.
Augustine would have known the Delphic aphorism ‘Know thyself’ through the writings of Plato. In his Confessions he is not interested in the details of his own life for their own sake but only in so far as God reveals himself in them.
Today, tomorrow and the next day Jesus says coolly in today’s Gospel.
There is far less biography of Jesus than we would wish in the gospels. Even less an examination of his personality. We have to glimpse this as we do here in his coolness in the face of those who will lead him to his death. In his sense of being completely at home in his own skin. Nothing is going to deter him.
The final editors of the book of psalms chose a very beautiful text to begin the psalter. Psalm, it is a reflection on the Torah God’s law which as Augustine would say is imprinted in the very fabric of the universe and of our human nature. When we meditate on that law day and night as Jesus did we will be like a tree that is planted by flowing waters, that yields its fruit in due season and whose leaves shall never fade.
Dear friend, we are exhausted by plague and war. the world is weary.
I promise you that if you practice this way of prayer you will be deeply refreshed.
Please indulge me this morning and let’s spend some moments in prayer. I am often amused in church that those of us who lead worship ask for a few moments silence and then start talking straight away. When I pray I often use a sand timer to measure the silence in my prayer.
One minute, two minutes, three, five or ten … !
Well, I will be kind this morning! Just two minutes.
Will it go slowly or quickly for you? In the silence what ill you find? The psalmist says: Be still and know that I am God.
“Now concerning spiritual gifts … I do not want you to be uninformed.”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Do you believe in the miracle of the wedding at Cana?
It might not seem like a very important question. Some people suggest that there is a hierarchy of Christian beliefs. On such a list I suppose the miracle at Cana would not register very high. Few people would claim that not believing in this miracle would endanger your immortal soul.
I am not so sure.
In a few minutes time, when I have stopped speaking we will declare that we believe in the most extraordinary series of things.
That there is a God, that he is the origin of everything that exists. That this God chose to be born a human being, that a woman called Mary was his mother. That he died, and wait for this rose again. The, as if that wasn’t outrageous enough ascended to heaven.
And so on.
So, are we prepared to say we believe in all those outrageous things and not in the wedding at Cana?
Or to put it the other way around. If we are sceptical about the wedding at Cana is it really likely that we believe in all the assertions of the Creed?
It would be quite possible for me to preach on the wedding at Cana in an allegorical way. And indeed I have preached in this very church in the recent past on the importance of allegory for understanding Scripture.
But today’s second reading should powerfully inform our reading of the Gospel.
It comes from St Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth. It is the beginning of the rightly famous chapter 12 which includes the beautiful reading so often used at weddings: Love is patient, love is kind.
It is worth reading Chapters 12 – 14 of this letter in one go. I would really recommend going home and doing so some time this week.
The whole section of the letter is about the spiritual gifts, the charisma that come with being a Christian.
To summarise. It is about what difference being a Christian will make to our lives. Quite simply it is that the unexpected will happen. That there will be miracles, that we will be given gifts of the Spirit.
There is a pernicious rumour among certain christians that prayer should be difficult. That we will experience dark nights of the soul, that a sign of spiritual maturity is that we will feel abandoned, as if in a spiritual desert.
I have to say that I can’t find anything about that in the New Testament. If I am missing something I would be delighted to be corrected.
I also have to say that the very idea of spiritual maturity seems to me something rather odd. As if we make some sort of progress in the spiritual life.
I’m not speaking entirely from ignorance here. For mm teaching degree thirty something years ago I wrote a dissertation on ideas of spiritual development, as if it was some sort of ladder to be climbed.
I just don’t believe in that any more.
St Paul is very clear, just in today’s reading that it is quite normal for a Christian to experience spiritual gifts, the ones he names in this reading are:
wisdom
utterance of knowledge
faith
healing
working of miracles
prophecy
discernment of spirits
tongues
interpretation of tongues
That’s quite a list. Nine overt manifestations of the Spirit.
How many are you experiencing in your life at the moment?
Elsewhere in the New Testament those gifts of the Spirit are extended further. I would particularly draw your attention to the gift of tears.
It seems to me that in our society we hold so much on to grief and don’t allow ourselves to cry.
So much of life is loss. The failure to get what we want, for the world to be the way we want it to be. Life is a journey from birth into the ultimate loss, death.
Tears are a gift of the Spirit that liberates us, helps us to let go. To admit that we are not in control. That we will die.
There is only one way to experience the gifts of the Spirit. Ask for them.
If you are not praying other than at church find a time every day to pray. For most people early in the morning is the best time. Just after brushing your teeth. And talk to God.
Ask God to send you the gifts of the Spirit. Believe that he will send you these gifts, just as we claim to believe in Jesus, in his resurrection.
Dearest friends, belief is never the same as certainty. I am certain that my dog Teilo exists. I could go and get him and show him to you. You could touch him and stroke him. He would love it.
Belief is not certainty, it is an act of the will, a choice. Like love. It is no surprise that the beautiful passages in 1 Corinthians about love are part of today’s passage about the gifts of the Spirit. Because love too is a gift.
To be open to these gifts we need to open our hearts and allow them to be softened, to expand.
Rational learning, theological knowledge are hugely important. But they need to be matched by the movement of the heart.
There are no gifts better for this than the gifts of tears and tongues. When we are willing to weep, we are willing to be open, to be vulnerable. When we allow our lips, our words to be led by the Spirit we have let go of control.
The gifts of the Spirit are essential if we are to free ourselves from our bondage to sin. The trouble with sin is that we tend to think of it as something extreme. Well, in the cathedral today there will be people who have committed extreme sins.
But for the most part we commit small sins quite often.
I think that the gifts of the Spirit are particularly liberating of the sin of irritation.
I defy anyone here today to tell me that they are not frequently irritated, several times a day, by our fellow human beings. I am irritated minute by minute by the things people say, the way they act, sometimes even by the way they eat, or even walk.
Here’s the good news: I am not in control of the things they say, the way they act, their eating habits or even the way they walk.
The things that irritate us, the people that irritate us don’t tell us anything about other people, but they teach us a great deal about ourselves. And we can be changed. This week try noticing who or what irritates you and take that to your prayer time. Ask God to send his Spirit of love to you that you may lean to love that person and their irritating habits.
It might not seem like a big miracle compared to resurrection from the dead, or even turning water into wine but it is these everyday miracles that St Paul calls us not just to believe in but to experience. To see for ourselves.
The gifts of the Spirit are God’s promise to every Christian. Prayer not as a barren desert but as a fruitful, blossom filled garden.
Weeping in prayer, praying in tongues are all ways for me to embrace, to practice not being in control. To let God be in control.
The Spirit sets us free.
I believe in miracles. I believe Jesus turned water into wine.
I believe that Jesus changes our lives.
About that I will not keep silent.
Our sinfulness, our irritability, reveal to us our poverty.
All of this is in today’s Collect, have a look at it on page 6 of today’s booklet:
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;
Three readings. Three sentences, one from each reading:
‘The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the Lord sends rain on the land.’
the fire will test the quality of each person’s work.
“a servant does not know his master’s business”
In the name of the Father …
Reading the Gospel we have just heard. Full of beautiful phrases that leap out of the page I was struck by the words I’ve just quoted:
A servant does not know his master’s business.
We are called not to be servants, but friends. Friends of God, of Jesus and friends of each other.
If we were servants we wouldn’t know the father’s business. But because we are friends we do know. Or should know.
It would be very easy to concentrate on the love in today’s gospel. And that is important. But I want to think about this aspect of knowing the father’s business and what that means for our Christian, our spiritual lives.
In the 1980s, it seems so long ago now.
I trained as a teacher. Back in those heady days we believed in progressive methods of education. Children would learn by discovery. we wouldn’t make them learn things off by heart, there would be no tedious rote learning.
I have to say that over the 35 years I worked in schools my ideas changed somewhat as they have for many (although not all by any means) in education.
Knowledge based learning is at the heart of what human learning is. memorising is at the heart of acquiring knowledge.
This shouldn’t surprise us as Christians. When Jesus wanted to leave his followers the most sacred and important way that he would be present to them after his death he said as I shall say at the altar in just a moment
“Do this, in memory of me.”
We are what we remember.
So I want this morning on this Founder’s Day of your beloved community that has been so committed to education, to reflect on one of the disciplines of the spiritual life, indeed of the religious life: the discipline of study.
Study has always been linked closely to religious life. The Rule of St Benedict with it Lent books; the link between Benedictine monasteries and education. In Oxford the close link between religious life in all its variety on the Christ Church site alone Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans and, of course St Frideswide’s original community.
Christ Church has also produced the Wesleys whose ‘method’ was simply an ordered, systematic approach to the spiritual. Father Benson of Cowley, another Christ Church student and of course your own William John Butler (an Honorary Canon of Christ Church) both of whom died on this day. In some ways the religious life is itself just a systematisation of the spiritual life, the baptised life.
Religious life needs study: study for the proper and meaningful celebration of the Divine Office. The psalms are difficult. If they weren’t they would hardly bear singing for a whole lifetime, we would become bored and tired of them.
So what might the discipline of study look like for us in our time?
A book that I return to over and over again and have been recommeding to people for thirty years is Richard Foster’s book, Celebration of Discipline. It is a simple book for simple people. It has fed me in so many ways. I hope you will forgive me for reading a whole paragraph to you that begins the Chapter on the discipline of study:
“The purpose of the Spiritual Disciplines is the total transformation of the person. They aim at replacing old destructive habits of thought with new life-giving habits. Nowhere is this purpose more clearly seen than in the Discipline of study. The apostle Paul tells us that we are transformed through the renewal of the mind (Rom. 12:2). The mind is renewed by applying it to those things that will transform it. ‘Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things’ (Phil. 4:8). The Discipline of study is the primary vehicle to bring us to ‘think about these things.’ Therefore, we should rejoice that we are not left to our own devices but have been given this means of God’s grace for the changing of our inner spirit.”
I would like to suggest three ways in which the discipline of study can be integrated into our lives.
Firstly, in our spiritual reading. It is always good, I find, to have some spiritual reading on the go. I think this is best something that we know fairly well. I return again and again to Julian. You will have your own favourites. Spiritual reading time is not time for novelty, or for innovation.
Secondly, in lectio divina, in light of today’s gospel on friendship with Jesus I have always thought of the four classic stages of lectio as stages in a relationship with a text.
Acquaintance
Friendship
Intimacy
Union
Thirdly, formal study. And we need to be systematic about this. To have. a plan. What is my study going to be this year.
The best way I have found of managing this is around my annual retreat. For a number of years I have chosen a book of the Bible to use for me retreat. In the year beforehand I collect together books and articles on the book, spend six months or so reading them, and then, on retreat use lectio as my main study tool but with the reading I’ve done informing and enriching it.
It works for me, other techniques may work for you.
But the most important thing is to learn texts by heart. Yes, of course, poetry and literature and spiritual writing. But fundamentally we should fill our minds and hearts with the words of Scripture.
Eighteen months ago my mum died. It was one of the most beautiful deaths I have ever been privileged to witness. A faithful catholic her whole life my brother and sister and I prayed the Rosary with her in her last hours. She began being able to join in and then just her lips moved, finally there was just a movement of her lips at each Amen.
It was beautiful because these prayers, mostly words of Scripture were so embedded in her heart.
As we build the discipline of study into our lives may we embed the words of the Lord deep in our hearts so that we know the father’s business, but also so that we may fulfil in our lives those other two sentences of Scripture I began with.
If we have memorised Scripture so that it is part of the fabric of our being it will be the case that
‘The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the Lord sends rain on the land.’
And that even in the darkest times when fire tests the quality of our work, the Spirit in us will endure.
Perhaps you think of a well known Fair Trade brand of chocolate?
Perhaps you are as old and outrageous as me and remember the 1980s drag act: Divine.
Or it might be that you think more of the verb, to divine the meaning of a thing.
The Victorian poet Christina Rossetti’s wonderful poem, Christmastide, which you should have been given on a card as you entered the cathedral today perfectly describes what we are celebrating in this Eucharist and throughout the day in our homes and families.
We know what love is. Most of us know how to love, most of us know what it feels like when we feel loved. Most of us know what it is to want to be loved.
But we also know that our love, our loving, our loves, are a mixture.
Of course, we all want to have a fantastic Christmas which is perfect from start to finish. But we know that we will irritate one another, there will be moments when things don’t go right, or to plan, or we find we have made a hopeless present choice. We will disagree about what to have on the TV or what time to go for a walk.
We know that our world is a mixture. Perhaps feeling like it is balanced too much to what is not good at the moment. Endless bad news about Covid, the economy, troop movements on the border of the Ukraine, or even our own problems here at Christ Church or in each of our on lives.
It can seem that love, loveliness and the divine are very far away.
There is a small ceremony in the Eucharist that you probably don’t even notice. After putting wine into the chalice we add a few drops of water.
This may have its origins in the Roman custom of adding water to wine, and therefore may have been done by Jesus at the last supper.
For Christians too it is a sign of the water and blood that flowed from the side of Christ in John’s account of the crucifixion.
As such it is a sign of the sacraments of Christian initiation, baptism in water and Eucharist in blood.
In the three Eucharists of Christmas Day two contain short readings from the letter to Titus in the New Testament . The one we have just heard and the one that we heard at the Midnight Eucharist that I’ve printed on the cards with Rossetti’s poem. I hope you will take the cards home and pray with these texts this week. The whole letter to Titus is very short, just two chapters, it would be a good text to read in this Christmas week to feed your prayers. In the text on your cards St Paul writes of the “cleansing water of rebirth … and the renewing … with the Holy Spirit”.
As the water is added to the wine in the chalice there is a very ancient and very beautiful prayer that many of us use:
hyn“By the mystery of this water and wine,
may we come to share in the divinity of Christ,
who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”
What we are celebrating today is a great mystery.
It is God becoming human. But there is a far greater mystery that we often forget, the mystery of our sharing in his divinity.
Our becoming like God as we were created to be in God’s image and likeness.
The Latin word (particeps) that is often translated ‘share’ in the little prayer, is actually much stronger than that.
We are not called to receive a portion, a share, of divinity
but to participate in divinity.
When the water is poured into the wine it is utterly mixed the water becomes wine just as Jesus turned water into wine at the wedding at Cana. When we pour ourselves into the divine, we lose ourselves and become divine. When I pour those drops of water into the chalice I try to think about those parts of myself, that I would like to be taken up by God’s divinity and transformed into something better, something selfless and God-like. Something Divine.
Christina Rossetti tells us what this divinity is that we are called to participate in,
it is Love.
God is Love.
St Paul wrote in the letter to Titus:
“When the kindness and love of God our saviour for humanity were revealed
…
it was for no reason except his own compassion” (JB)
Love, lovely, divine.
Sadly we can’t share the Eucharistic cup in these Covid times but the Eucharist, and the mixing of the water and wine in the chalice show us what the shape of love is.
The shape of love is the mixing of the divine and the human in Jesus.
the shape of love is the mixing of the divine and human in me, in you.
The shape of love is the mixture of joy and sorrow that is every life.
The shape of love is the irritations and frustrations, the joys and delights of living with other human beings.
The shape of love is the gift of marriage in which we mix two lives that they become one.
The shape of love is the welcoming of migrants and refugees because the water of our lives is enriched by the wine of other cultures.
The shape of love is the living of our lives not for ourselves alone but for others.
The shape of love is God in Jesus.
By receiving the Eucharist today and any day we are giving assent to the participation in God that is our birthright by baptism.
We are saying yes.
Yes I want to Love
saying I want to live by love and shape my life by love in the way that Jesus did.
Love came down at Christmas, Love all lovely, Love divine; Love was born at Christmas, Star and angels gave the sign.
Love shall be our token, Love be yours and love be mine, Love to God and all men, Love for plea and gift and sign.
Whether you are drinking water or wine today, whether you are alone or with others
may you taste the kindness and love of God.
Dear friends, in this love is all the ahppiness of Christmas. Happy Christmas.
Hopefully, the Precentor and my fellow canons will forgive me for being a little controversial this morning.
Controversy entirely driven, I should say, by the gospel we have just heard.
I am thinking of establishing a new campaign group in the Church of England:
The Movement for the Abolition of the Feast of Christ the King.
Actually, the Church of England really doesn’t need any more campaign groups, and this one might be a rather niche, one member group, also MAFCK isn’t an altogether memorable acronym.
However, to say I have reservations about today’s feast would be something of an understatement. It is, in my view, a mistake. It is problematic and should be abolished.
Even the Roman Catholic Church only invented this feast of Christ the King in1925. It was added to the Church of England’s calendar in the 1990s.
I can see how it happened. Today is the last Sunday of the liturgical year. Making this a grand festival has a theatrical neatness about it; this is the finale, the show stopper! Better a bang than a whimper.
But actually I think a whimper is exactly how we should end the liturgical year to be ready for the great longing of Advent that is to begin next Sunday.
The Church of England has also tried to tie together the whole of November, All Saints, the dead, and Remembrance. Kingdom is a convenient tie for that.
Although I think there is a good deal of difference between the kingdom of justice love and peace and this glorification of Christ as king.
The Book of Common Prayer has the beautiful ‘stir up’ Collect for the Sunday before Advent, in place of an epistle Jeremiah reminding his hearers that ‘the days come’ and John’s account of the feeding of the five thousand – all of which segues much more neatly into Advent than our current grandeur.
The fundamental problem as I see it is really that the Bible is actually just so much more ambiguous about kingship than today’s feast would suggest.
As is Jesus.
Just look at today’s gospel. Jesus certainly doesn’t call himself a ‘king’. The furthest he will go is “You say that I am a king”. When we make such a deal out of Jesus as King we are much more like Pontius Pilate than we really might like to be.
St John in his gospel has carefully woven together a complex picture of who Jesus is. So it seems a shame to mis-use his gospel to claim a title for Jesus that neither St John nor Jesus himself actually claims.
Seven times in his gospel Jesus uses the powerful phrase I am. Ego eimi. Claiming for himself that revelation of God at the burning bush in Exodus: I Am Who I Am.
These are seven mighty statements in which Jesus edges right up to claiming his own divinity. And being a king is not among them.
These are the sayings, and we would do well to know them off by heart.
I Am, Jesus says:
the bread of life
the light of the world
the door
the Good Shepherd
the resurrection
the way the truth and the life
the true vine.
This is how Jesus wants us to understand him and know him.
Jesus does of course talk about the kingdom of God (in Luke) and the kingdom of heaven (in Matthew). I wonder if there is some Trinitarian confusion here, if Jesus is the king of this kingdom who or what is God the Father?
When this feast was invented liturgical texts had to be found. The feast of the Ascension was heavily mined as you can see in the Collect chosen for today by the compilers of our own Common Worship.
But, it seems to me, this entirely undermines the meaning of the Ascension.
The Ascension is an historical fact for Christians, in which Jesus does not get levitated to some heavenly throne room and crowned king of heaven. Rather it fundamentally illustrates that our human flesh, our very bodies are incorporated into the divine nature. Essential if we are also to believe and understand the resurrection of the dead, not as disembodied souls dwelling in eternity but a real resurrection of real bodies.
Perhaps this is what is wrong with today’s feast: it is an abstract concept, not a moment or person in history. It is the only abstract concept celebrated in our Anglican Calendars. As such it is clearly an alien intrusion.
Let me be clear that I do not object to the feast on the basis of some Guardian reading dislike of monarchy. Far from it. I am devoted to our Queen and can’t see any system of leadership for a nation that would improve on what we have.
Nor do I think that we are called to any less than obedience and submission to God and to recognise Jesus as the ultimate authority in our lives. But this is Jesus who is glorified on the cross, who calls us his friends not servants (John 15:15). We are called not to be subjects in the Kingdom of God but fellow citizens with the saints (Ephesians 2:19).
Let’s look at the biblical evidence. Jesus is not called the king or a king directly in any places other than in front of Pilate by him, and, ironically, on the sign Pilate directs to be placed on the cross.
In the remainder of the New Testament there are a mere three other possible direct references at 1 Timothy 6:15 where Jesus is called the king of those who are kings and in Revelation 17:14 and 19:16 . So a mere three examples. Compare that to the number of occasions when Jesus is called ‘Teacher’ in the gospels, 45 times.
let’s have a feast of Christ the Teacher … no, I’m not serious.
We have to admit that the Bible is very ambiguous about monarchs.
Most of Hebrew Scripture was written or compiled when there were no kings in Israel. And it certainly appears to be the case that allowing Israel to have kings rather than judges was a grudging concession of a kind God. God had rejected Moses’ call for a monarch and it is only Samuel who anoints Saul and then David as king.
Even the ideal king, David, is a somewhat ambiguous figure, to say the least. Just ask Bathsheba or even more her husband (cf 2 Sam 11).
As so often I think the psalms can help us understand the problem with today’s feast and set it into a larger context.
The compilers of the book of psalms took great care when they put together the texts they had in front of them. Many of them are what contemporary scholars call Royal Psalms, some of them seem to be ancient Hymns for the Enthronement of a King. But the editors choose to always balance the royal psalms with wisdom and Torah psalms and they begin the psalter not with a great clang of monarchy but with a quiet, reflective psalm on the Torah. Like the editors of any book they set their stall out right at the start.
While I am more than happy to accept, as an article of faith, that the messianic psalms refer to Jesus, it is clear that the Enthronment, many of the royal and the great creation psalms which refer to a king are talking about God the Creator and Sovereign of the universe. God the Father, or God the holy Trinity, not Jesus alone.
And when Jesus describes himself as ‘the way the truth and the life’ he is directly referring to the longest psalm in the psalter, Psalm 119 where these are recurring images for Torah, the law, or better the way of life that God wants for us.
Jesus is in fact saying not that he is a crowned king, but a personification of the Torah, a living Torah. Far more revolutionary.
Outside of the gospels the New Testament does link Jesus to the royal psalms, notably Psalms 2 and 110. And we are, famously, made by baptism into a royal priesthood, a holy nation (1 Peter). But it seems to me that this is much more about each of us being made ‘little christs’ by baptism and therefore being of great, royal dignity by virtue of that.
The most carefully worked out spirituality of royal imagery is in Francis of Assisi. However, there it is really chivalry rather than royalty that captures his imagination, Francis is indeed the ‘herald of the great king’, but that king is God the Father. Jesus is more like the leader of the chivalric knights.
Jesus’ kingship is profoundly a shared kingship. His kingship is never unqualified. Preachers around the world will be making that exact point today and talking about the servant king, the cross as a throne and so on. But I would rather we avoided that necessity.
In my (slightly teasing) antipathy to this particular day in the liturgical calendar I suggest it should empower us to do two things:
Firstly, to read our bibles. It is part of our Reformation heritage as Anglicans that we all of us do that for ourselves. Read them and work out what God is actually saying about his kingdom; read them and see what Jesus himself says about who he is.
Secondly, when we have worked out who Jesus is let’s spend time with him, with the images that he uses to describe himself.
For the Prayer Book this is Stir Up Sunday. When we stir up the rich fruit and ingredients that will make our Christmas puddings. How about this week we spend some time in our prayer stirring up the rich multitude of images that Jesus uses to describe himself.
I may be over extending my metaphors somewhat but images of royalty, the royal priesthood we all belong to, should be like the brandy in the cake not the main ingredient.
What does it mean to you and to me to stir up in prayer Jesus who is
the bread of life
the light of the world
the door
the Good Shepherd
the resurrection
the way the truth and the life
the true vine?
Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
Sermon St Frideswide, Patronal Eucharist 21st October 2021
Fr Richard Peers SMMS
God of peace and strength,
whose abbess Frideswide
built a community of love and learning
with the gifts of the Spirit
and in the strong peace that comes from you:
renew us with healing waters of salvation,
increase in us courage and resolve
and inspire us, like Frideswide, to teach your truth
and bring hope to your world;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
If you have a small black Book of Common Prayer in reach, you may want to turn to page 87. You will see there that this is where the ‘Collects, Epistles and Gospels’ begin. They continue to page 292, making this the biggest section of our Prayer Book alongside the psalter. There is much that could be said about the arrangement of Scripture, the Epistles and Gospels, in this section, but this evening I want to reflect on the Collects.
The Collects are the short prayers that we use at Morning and Evening Prayer and at the Eucharist. No one is entirely certain why they are called ‘collects’, but the most convincing explanation I have read is that they are called this because they are the prayer that is prayed once the people have gathered, collected together.
Collects of this short style and form are unique to Latin Christianity, the church and churches of the West. Eastern churches have much longer prayers of a completely different style.
In Latin the Collects have a sparseness of language, a spareness of phrase and a density of meaning that is really quite extraordinary, this is very much the ‘genius’ of the Latin rite. A ‘noble simplicity’. Many of these prayers are very old indeed almost certainly dating to the seventh century.
The Church of England has long treasured the Collect form of prayer, Thomas Cranmer’s translations and his new Collects in the Prayer Book rightly seen as a unique treasure handed on to us. In times past Anglicans would learn these prayers by heart to win prizes at Sunday school but also we hope to deepen their prayer.
The Collect has a particular form, although with considerable flexibility. A good example is the one for the current week in the Prayer Book, on page 241:
First of all God is addressed “O Almighty God”, quite a lot of the traditional Collects begin with this phrase for this week, Trinity 20, additional information is given about God, he is described as “most merciful”.
A request is then made “keep us we beseech thee, from all things that may hurt us” and then the consequence, the benefit of that petition being granted is explained “that we, being ready, both in body and soul, may cheerfully accomplish those things that thou wouldest have done.”
It is a delightfully simple formula. I have often taught it in schools and even Primary age children can enjoy writing their own Collects.
I should point out that liturgical scholars would wince at my simplified version of the Collect form. Daniel McCarthy, for example, suggests that the simple fourfold shape I have described should really be seen as 8 elements:
Invocation
Amplification
Petition
Purpose
Cause or motive
and Premise.
Well liturgical scholars have to justify their existence somehow!
In modern times many new Collects have been written. very often this is to expand the language to be both more inclusive and also richer and more poetic.
There is no ancient Collect for St Frideswide, a ‘common’ collect, for abbesses was used. Several modern Collects have been written for her. The latest appears in today’s booklet for this Eucharist, it was written by our Precentor, Philippa, and is rather lovely I think. A few of us stuck an oar or two in at various draft stages. There are many dangers to writing liturgy by committee but I hope you will take your booklet home and pray this prayer. We need much prayer here at Christ Church and it would be good to think of you praying for us using these words.
So to turn to our Collect.
God of peace and strength,
The first line addresses God very simply and offers a description of his attributes, peace and strength. This is of course the meaning of Frideswide’s name. For the bible peace is an important attribute of a life lived in harmony with God. God’s shalom, in the Hebrew Scriptures is fundamental to his intention for the world. Shalom is not simply the absence of conflict but a sign of God’s wholeness, of completion.
For Muslims and Jews shalom is a common greeting, shalom aleichem / aleichem shalom. Last week after the Court Service here the High Sheriff Imam Monawar Hussain took many of us out for a curry. After dinner he invited various people of different faiths to speak. A Jewish man present sang one of my favourite pieces from Jewish worship: Oseh shalom … “may he who makes peace in high places, make peace for us “
Few of us would argue that peace was not a key concept for the Bible and for Christians. Strength is more complex though. We can be nervous about strength, we even talk about ‘brute strength’. The key is, I think, where the strength comes from. If it comes simply from muscle power, or position, it means little.
But the psalmist says: “the Lord is my strength and my shield” (Ps. 28:7 ) when the strength we rely on is God’s it is utterly reliable. Be strong and courageous says Deuteronomy (31:6)
and “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” writes St Paul (Phil. 4:13)
We yearn for peace but we need strength to endure the lack of peace which is part of the reality of our lives. So,
God of peace and strength,
our prayer begins.
whose abbess Frideswide
built a community of love and learning
Community too is fundamental to Christian living. Right at the beginning of the church we are told in the Acts of the Apostles (4:32) that the early Christians shared all their goods in common and were ‘of one heart and mind’. Christians have always gathered, collected, together to practice our faith; we gather for worship; church, from ecclesia means those called out to be together.
Love hardly needs any comment at all. God so loved the world. (Jn 3:16). Love is the motivation for the incarnation, for Jesus who saves us and died for us. Love in all its facets is the test of the Christian life. The famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13 is a challenging read at the end of any day if we ask ourselves:
Have I been patient?
Have I been kind?
Am I envious?
Do I boast?
Am I proud?
Do I dishonour others?
Am I self -seeking, easily angered?
Do I let go of wrongs, delight in evil, rejoice in the truth?
Do I always protect, trust, hope and persevere?
A community of love is demanding indeed.
But Frideswide’s community was also a community of learning. Of scholarly activity.
This is hugely significant. Love is wonderful. But we can all too easily – perhaps in our times more than any other – regard love as a feeling, an emotion. This is not how Christians have classically understood it. For Augustine love is an act of the will.
It is only by learning, by studying theology. By knowing the Bible that we can experience the fullness of faith and challenge the misconceptions of the world.
The next two lines of the Collect make it clear where that fullness comes from;
with the gifts of the Spirit
The ‘gifts of the Spirit’ can, of course, relate to a sort of generalised sense of the presence of God imparting grace to us, but in Christian history it has been used to identify seven gifts, referred to first of all in Isaiah 11. This is a passage about God’s kingdom of peace, shalom and the longed for Messiah who will come with
wisdom
understanding
counsel
strength
knowledge
delight or piety
and
fear of the Lord
Augustine linked these to the Beatitudes and they are traditionally said to be the gifts received in Baptism and Confirmation.
Next in our Collect we have the line:
and in the strong peace that comes from you:
Clearly, this is an echo of the opening line reflecting on the meaning of Frideswide’s name. It makes clear that this peace and strength is the fruit of faith, and that it comes from God not from our own power. This is the gift of salvation we receive in baptism, our participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus. That death when water and blood flowed from his side. Which we enter into in baptism and renew our selves in in the Eucharist, water and blood. These are the healing waters of salvation that the Collect refers to next:
renew us with healing waters of salvation,
increase in us courage and resolve
But it is also the water associated with Frideswide, the well at Binsey that so many of us value visiting, to which students in our chaplaincy will be walking on Sunday afternoon.
I like the mention of ‘courage and resolve’. Frideswide had courage, she refused the way of life that was to be imposed on her and was determined, resolved to live a life in Christian community. A resolve which is a reminder once again that Christian living is not just feelings, however fine, not some spirituality but a decision, resolve, a determination, an act of the will. As we say to the candidates in baptism who are old enough to respond, after we’ve recited the Creed. Is this your faith? And they answer, we hope with courage and resolve: “This is my faith.”
And so we come to the end of the prayer:
and inspire us, like Frideswide, to teach your truth
and bring hope to your world;
The gift of faith is never for ourselves alone. We are all, every baptised person called to teach the faith. It is not possible to watch the news, it is not possible to listen to the needs of those who come to us, it is not possible to look at our own lives and not realise that we need a Saviour, we need Jesus. And that is why this prayer, every Collect ends with five simple words.
through Jesus Christ our Lord …
We pray only through Jesus, we know him as the Christ, the anointed One, the one chosen by God to do this for us and we name him, we acknowledge him as Lord.
In the end it is all, St Frideswide, the well at Binsey, this cathedral church, the Augustinian canons, the life of Chapter for five centuries, even our beautiful music. It is all pointless, if it does not bring us to him, to Jesus.
God of peace and strength,
whose abbess Frideswide
built a community of love and learning
with the gifts of the Spirit
and in the strong peace that comes from you:
renew us with healing waters of salvation,
increase in us courage and resolve
and inspire us, like Frideswide, to teach your truth
A recurring irritation for Anglicans is the accusation that our church was founded by Henry VIII. Most of us would prefer to think of our founder as Jesus Christ. And if one were to choose a monarch Elizabeth the first probably has as much claim on foundation as her father; not to say Charles the second making a not insubstantial claim after the interruptions of the Commonwealth.
If the question turns to Who founded Christ Church? at least frees us from looking back to our Lord and Saviour. Henry’s claim here is stronger, but of course Thomas Wolsey is a very close second. Dean Fell after the Protectorate can surely place a stake for re-foundation. And we must not forget Prior Sutton Augustinian builder of this church whose tomb lies at the edge of the Latin chapel, and probably none of us would be here, of course, without Frideswide before even him.
Like the Church of England it is easy to characterise Christ Church as an anomaly, a random historical accident, an English eccentricity. All of that may well be true, but the gospel we have just heard includes two words that make that historical accident, that random eccentricity important for those of us here who are Christians.
Fourteen months ago when I arrived at Christ Church I could have had no idea of the year ahead. What a year it has been. That long year ago I had no experience of Oxford, the university or even of working full-time in a cathedral. But I am now convinced in a way I could not have been then of the blessing that our joint foundation can be to the church and the importance for the academy of this meeting of higher education and a faith community.
Good teacher, Jesus is called in today’s gospel. It is good to have some of our academic staff here with us this morning. I am not in any position to judge whether they are, like Jesus, ‘good teachers’, but the fact that they are teachers is important to us.
Jesus is addressed directly as teacher 45 times in the gospels, 12 times each in Matthew and Mark, fifteen in Luke and six times in John.
As someone who has spent most of my life as a teacher it puzzles me that this designation of Jesus as teacher has been so neglected.
Puzzling too because it ignores Jesus own command to bring the children to him, or the Deuteronomic imperative, prayed three times daily by Jews in the Sh’ma to teach the Torah to children and write it on our hearts.
I have been observing teaching for over twenty years. Judging the quality of lessons and the progress that children make. I am fascinated by pedagogy, the art of teaching, how we learn. And I am fascinated by pedagogy in this university, by the tutorial system, lectures and the work expected of graduates and undergraduates. The requirements to teach and supervise others that comes so early in academic careers. Fascinated too by the limited interest shown in pedagogy and relative lack of reflection on the very systems of teaching being used.
On holiday last month one of the books I read was Amartya Sen’s memoir Home In The World. An economist and mathematician, but really a polymath he reflects on his childhood in what is now Bangladesh and the interaction there of religious communities Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian and Buddhist. Sen takes the title of his book from Rabindranath Tagore’s Home and the World. The fundamental question for Sen, for Tagore and, surely for all of us is how we can be at home in this world. We can try and force ourselves to be at home by creating what is comfortable for us or we can be at home by valuing the diversity and difference of the world.
This week has been my first real Freshers’ Week. It has been good to see – because of Covid spacing reasons – all our freshers here in the Cathedral for many of their induction talks. Becoming ‘at home’ here in the House.
It will be good this coming week to welcome Oxford’s High Sheriff and his team, a first, of chaplains from many faiths. And after Evensong is finished to hear each of them read a short text from their own tradition.
On this Safeguarding Sunday we all know that religions can be forces for bad as well as for good. Fundamentalisms exist when there is a failure to bring academic scrutiny to claims to truth. The church, all religions need to be examined by the academy. We need the rigour of departments of theology, academic scrutiny from the inside; and the challenge of knowledge in all academic fields.
The academy too needs its practitioners to include people of many faiths, to bring the experience and practice of faith into its life, which is, of course, anyway unavoidable.
Jesus the Good Teacher. He is a good teacher because his method, his pedagogy is rarely to tell. His method is so much more like a good tutorial, he asks questions, he causes his hearers to think and to reflect.
Amartya Sen describes a world in which religious traditions mingled with mutual interest and mutual enrichment.
Our joint foundation means nothing if it is simply a sharing of a building, a parallel existence for this building as college chapel one minute and cathedral the next.
It has been a very beautiful thing to see the Freshers in this building this last week not just at the induction events but also in the evenings when the chaplaincy team opened it up with candles and lights and music. To see our undergraduates coming to be at home here in their chapel, their cathedral.
Over the next few weeks I hope that all of you who are regulars here will visit the restored Chapter House. It too is a beautiful building. A Chapter House is, of course, a place for discussion, conversation. A space for encountering others.
One of my hopes is that it will allow us to be even more a place where people of many faiths and of no religious faith encounter one another and can feel at home together.
The encounter of the world’s religions is still in its infancy. I can think of only one living systematic theologian who takes this encounter seriously in every area of his theology.
Christopher Lewis, the last Dean of Christ Church edited a book on Inter Faith Worship and Prayer with the subtitle “We Must Pray Together”, one of its contributors is the Muslim Imam who is now the High Sheriff of Oxford.
The joint foundation is an opportunity not just for the academy or for us as a Chapter, a congregation; but an opportunity to encounter good teachers and to demonstrate that we can be good learners.
In the Preface to his memoir Amartya Sen writes:
“From the Crusades in the Middle Ages to the Nazi invasions in the last century, from communal clashes to battles between religious politics, there have been tussles between varying convictions, and yet there have also been forces for unity working against the clashes. We can see, if we look, how understanding can spread from one group to another and from one country to the next. As we move around we cannot escape clues to broader and more integrative stories. Our ability to learn from each other must not be underestimated.”
Dear Christ Church freshers here we are at one of the world’s leading universities. You will be taught by great people, you will have many good teachers, but you will learn much from your friends too. We hope that you will be at home here in Christ Church, at home in this your cathedral your chapel and most of all that you will never underestimate the ability we human beings have to learn from each other.
NOTE: I have had only a few days to look at DWDO if there are any factual errors in this review I would be delighted to correct them.
“To its great merit the Anglican Communion alone of all Western Christian Churches has preserved to some extent at least the daily services of morning prayer and evensong as a living part of parish worship.”
Jesuit scholar Robert Taft writes this ecumenical compliment in his seminal workThe Liturgy of the Hours East and West. The idea that there was a ‘people’s office’ (properly a ‘cathedral’ as distinct from ‘monastic’ office) was a persuasive part of liturgical renewal in the second half of the twentieth century. I wrote my dissertation at theological college (Chichester) on this in the early 90s and visited communities in France, Germany and the States to see what was being done. Often the use of liturgical action, candles, holy water, incense was encouraged. Elements of this are described, for example in Celebrating Common Prayer. Later in the parishes and schools in which I served I always promoted a Daily Office like this. Simple sung texts with liturgical action.
Like many ideas I have had in my life I now think I was wrong. Taft is right, alone among liturgies it is the absolute simplicity of the Prayer Book Office that has proved an enduring ‘people’s Office’. A simplicity that continues to draw people day by day to our Cathedrals and other churches.
Yet since very early on there have been those who seek a richer provision for the Office, notably Hours at other times of day. Perhaps the first was John Cosins’, A Collection of Private Devotions for the Hours of Prayer of 1627. The nineteenth century Catholic revival saw a multiplication of collections of prayer to enhance the Prayer Book Office orreplace it with translations of the traditional Western liturgy using the language and texts of the Book of Common Prayer. In the mid twentieth century two books represent the zenith of this tradition. The English Office and the Office Book of the Community of the Resurrection (produced for use of the community only).
Divine Worship: Daily Office draws heavily on The English Office. Like that book it adds much seasonal material, updated here for the current Roman Calendar. Hymn number references to the English Hymnal appear in both books. The English Office came in two editions with or without readings which (in the Authorised Version) were from the 1922 lectionary. In my view this is the best of the Anglican lectionaries and I am delighted to see it given new life in this book. I922 arranged Gospel readings in Ordinary Time in a sort of harmonised version. This was revised in 1961 to remove the harmonisation and replace it with lectio continua of the gospels, and it’s that form that appears in DWDO. Strangely the RSV second Catholic Edition is used rather than the English Standard Version which has been selected for future Roman Catholic liturgical books in English.
An addition to The English Office is the inclusion of the Little hours, Prime, Terce, Sext, None and Compline. I was delighted to hear this. The daily recitation of Psalm 119 – the norm in Latin Christianity until the 1910 reform of the Breviary – is dear to my heart and very much preserved by Anglican Religious communities. Disappointingly, rather than the very popular Prime and Hours being used as the source of these, which includes full seasonal Propers, the 1928 deposited book which included just Prime was used as the model. This has no seasonal material for these Hours. Much has been made of DWDO being an ‘all in one’ book but for me this lack makes it a book I would not want to use. I can’t imagine praying Terce on Christmas Day without Proper material.
There are two further disappointments for me, and one reservation. I am sad that no ferial antiphons are included for the psalter, a minor point. My other disappointment is in the arrangement of material, separating Collects from other Propres (put into a Supplement) it is easy to see why this has been done but it does make the book even more complicated to use. My reservation is that the lectionary, excellent as it is, was designed for use with the one-year Prayer Book Eucharistic lectionary (the use of which I much favour, but that’s another story). I haven’t had the chance to check but I wonder how much overlap there will be between this Office lectionary and the current two year Daily Eucharistic Lectionary and indeed, the three year Sunday cycle. Finally, I just don’t think I could cope with four substantial office readings in addition to the daily Mass cycle: six readings a day. A much better provision is the DEL with the Office of Readings’ two year cycle.
Not only is the lectionary designed to be used with the one-year lectionary for Mass, so are the proper antiphons. Thus on Epiphany 4 (Gospel of the day Matthew 8:23) the Gospel canticle antiphons all come from Matthew 8. The antiphons on the Magnificat at First Vespers of Sundays were traditionally drawn from the Vigils reading of the following day and The English Office does this from the 1922 lectionary, as does this book.
DWDO is designed to look like a liturgical book of a past era. The sense lines and spacious pages of post-Vatican 2 books have gone and the double columns, and small print of earlier books return. It will be a matter of taste if this appeals to you. For a certain generation (younger than me) the ‘return to tradition’ will make this attractive, but it remains to be seen if that is a niche audience based on a nostalgia for an era that has disappeared, or that perhaps never really existed.
From The English Office, 1956From Divine Worship Daily Office, 2021Music from Benedictus Antiphons, CSMV Wantage
DWDO includes a weekly cycle of Old Testament Canticles (from the old Roman Rite Lauds) to replace Te Deum/Benedicite at Mattins. This is helpful. The CR Office Book used these over Mattins and Evensong to replace Psalm 119 in the monthly course since that was prayed daily at the Little Hours.
DWDO is a thing of beauty. CTS, the publisher, have done a wonderful job. For those who want a traditional language Office for Matins and Evensong this is a superb book. I hope that Prime might, like Compline, become a popular household Office. That would be a very good thing indeed. However, it didn’t happen after 1928. I don’t think this complex book will make that happen, I hope the Ordinariate will publish equally beautiful but small books of just these Offices.
DWDO is an ecumenical gift and compliment to the Anglican Communion. The Prayer Book Office has been the principle means of grace for Anglican Christians since the break with Rome. That Rome now not only acknowledges this but encourages this prayer is a celebration of the Anglican gift to the church catholic. Anglicanism is a means to holiness, a gift of grace. The Ordinariate, eccentric as it is, as is, surely, all of Anglicanism, is welcomed within an authentically Vatican 2 ecclesiology. The ecumenical spring may seem like a distant memory, but we are still a long way from winter.
SINGING DWDO
A Manual of Plainsong provides the basics. For the Gospel Canticle antiphons the Wantage, CSMV books provide the texts set to traditional Plainsong. The St Dunstan Plainsong Psalter is also a useful reource including the OT Canticles set to plainsong tones.
See my blog post here with links to plainsong for the BCP Office:
Discerning the Mystery, Andrew Louth, Clarendon Press 1983
Praise Seeking Understanding, Jason Byassee, Eerdmans, 2007
I will make your name to be remembered
through all generations :
therefore shall the peoples praise you for ever and ever.
Psalm 45
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In just over two weeks time I will, God willing, be staying in Burgundy just a few miles from the Taizé Community in France. Taizé is a community of brothers, monks, founded in the second world war, drawn from both Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. There are now dozens of brothers in the community and every year, Covid notwithstanding, thousands of young people gather to pray, live and work with the brothers.
It is an extraordinary, life-changing place.
I have visited almost every year of my adult life. As a Headteacher in Lewisham we always took a group of Year 10 pupils, fourteen and fifteen year olds, for a week’s pilgrimage to Taizé.
In the community church there are many large icons. In 2012 the pupils I had taken asked me if we could commission an artist to paint an icon for our school. When the new school year began we consulted with the School Council and Governing Body and a small group of pupils was selected to oversee the project.
We found a well known iconographer, Helen McIldowie-Jenkins, and invited her to come and visit us. The pupils liked her at once and she set about showing them many icons and talking about what they wanted. The school was a majority black school and Helen showed the pupils pictures of some of the world’s famous black Madonna statues and images, they immediately noticed something about these figures. Most of them may have dark skin but the features were European not African. Occasionally a Madonna with dark skin would be accompanied by a distinctly Caucasian looking Jesus.
The pupils were determined that both Mary and Jesus should be properly African, in shape of face, skin colour and hair.
This is a reproduction of the original icon which is about twice as big and covered in much gold leaf. I think it is very beautiful.
Jesus’ afro hair is clear, as are Mary’s braids emerging from her head covering. The cloth of Mary’s clothing reproduces west African Kente fabric but using the school logo. The four medallions at the top represent the four archangels the school’s Houses were named after. Mary is seated on the throne of wisdom, the teacher’s seat, and points to Jesus. At the foot of the icon are two rivers representing the two rivers running through Lewisham, the Quaggy and the Ravensbourne. At the centre of the foot is a well, illustrating the holy well that had been a feature of medieval devotion to Mary, Our Lady, in Lewisham and giving its name to the area known as Ladywell to this day.
In today’s gospel Mary in her great hymn of praise sings of overthrowing powers, of the lowly being lifted up.
I don’t want to reflect this morning on the significance of the Magnificat in issues relating to race.
Rather I want to apply this overthrowing of the powerful to the academic world of biblical studies which has so dominated the way Christians read our Scriptures.
I suggest, quite strongly, that we need to overthrow the model of biblical studies that has been dominant for over a century and a half and raise up the church’s traditional way of reading Scripture that has been treated as the lowly cousin of true academic study for too long.
Historical-critical methods of reading Scripture have dominated not only the academic community but clergy training and seminaries, bible studies and popular reading on Scripture. Our life, the life of the church has been diminished by this dominance, we have been starved of our connection to the christians of the early centuries, our imaginations have been blighted, our connection to Jesus in the Old Testament severed and our understanding of the way that the biblical writers themselves read Scripture left rudderless.
Look at the icon of Our Lady of Lewisham. Of course Mary, the woman of Nazareth, Miriam married to Joseph, was not a black African, she didn’t have braided hair or wear Kente cloth, Jesus did not have Afro hair.
But that is to miss the point entirely.
When you look at the icon of our Lady of Lewisham you are looking at an allegory in picture form. Mary, the first believer shows us all the way of faith in Jesus. Her ‘yes’ is the ‘yes’ that every human being, black women, black men, white women, whoever we are we can say ‘yes’ to Jesus.
We all have human biology, it is not that which makes Mary the one, who as Psalm 45 put it, will be “remembered through all generations”.
And of course, whoever wrote Psalm 45, however many centuries ago could not possibly have any idea that these verses would be sung, in a twenty first century cathedral in Oxford about a first century woman in Nazareth. Thank you to Amici Coro for singing this psalm so beautifully this morning.
To put it bluntly and, no doubt simplistically, the historical critical method of reading Scripture asks only one question: “What was the original author’s intended meaning?”
This is not an unimportant question, and the answer for the various genres of Scripture is certainly not in itself uninteresting or unhelpful, but it is not enough. Not nearly enough to sustain our Christian lives, to enable us to meet Jesus in all of Scripture, not enough to deepen our prayer, to convert us ever more to the holy living that is God’s intention for each of us.
It would not be enough if we were talking about literature of any place or time. Yes, it is great to see productions of Shakespeare that seek to reproduce how a play might have been originally performed. But how much more wonderful to see as I did in the Cathedral Garden two weeks ago a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 70’s disco gear and woven in with ABBA hits.
Now just in case you are worried that the Sub Dean has taken leave of his senses, which, after all might be perfectly understandable, what I am calling for is nothing original to me. I think that the theologian Andrew Louth is responsible for the phrase, back in 1983. It is nothing less than a “return to allegory”.
Louth describes allegory “as a way of entering the ‘margin of silence’ that surrounds the articulate message of the scriptures”.
A recent writer, Jason Byasee, goes so far as to say that “Christianity is an inherently allegorical faith”.
It is when we abandon allegory that we end up with fundamentalisms of all kinds. It is simply a myth that there is any such thing as “the plain meaning of Scripture”, or that it would desirable that there were.
Life is complex. The world is complex. Simplistic explanations are the fake narratives that lead to Donald Trump being elected President of the United States.
For the complexity of Scripture let’s think for a moment about the psalms. the psalms are the essential element of Christian prayer. Psalm 45 which we have just heard is a good example. Historical criticism tells us that it is a “royal psalm” possibly used as a wedding song for the marriage of a king of Judah. Some think that it may date to the time of Solomon.
All of that is good to know. But for us as Christians, this psalm is chosen for this feast of Mary, we read it in relation to her, think of her a syou hear these words:
Psalm 45:10–end
10 Hear, O daughter; consider and incline your ear :
forget your own people and your father’s house.
11 So shall the king have pleasure in your beauty :
he is your lord, so do him honour.
12 The people of Tyre shall bring you gifts :
the richest of the people shall seek your favour.
13 The king’s daughter is all glorious within :
her clothing is embroidered cloth of gold.
14 She shall be brought to the king in raiment of needlework :
after her the virgins that are her companions.
15 With joy and gladness shall they be brought :
and enter into the palace of the king.
16 ‘Instead of your fathers you shall have sons :
whom you shall make princes over all the land.
17 ‘I will make your name to be remembered
through all generations :
therefore shall the peoples praise you for ever and ever.’
To return to Jason Byasee, he places Scripture and Creed at the heart of our Christian faith, indeed we shall recite the Nicene Creed in just a moment, that Creed is from the heart of the Patristic faith, faith of our fathers and mothers, the faith hammered out in the early centuries of the church.
Byassee states “You cannot have patristic dogma without patristic exegesis; you cannot have creed without allegory … the theological heritage treasured in common by Protestants and Catholics alike rests upon a “foundation” of allegory.”.
So my plea on this feast of Mary, is that we embrace complexity and reject simple falsehoods. That we use our imaginations to read Scripture multi-vocally, to hear many voices. To allow the Word of God to speak to our own complex selves. To meet Jesus in the psalms, to recognise him as the living Word at the very beginning of creation.
As I think of Mary, I have never, even as a child, been able to imagine her as a demure and obedient maiden. That didn’t match any actual girl or woman I knew.
Now, in later life I imagine her rather like those older women you see in Malta, or Greece or southern Italy. Women dried out by the sun and by life, but with eyes as sharp as ravens. Women about whom it could so easily be said ‘takes no prisoners’. I love those women. I love Mary and I love having her in my life.
When we commissioned the icon of Our Lady of Lewisham the school chaplain, Mother Juliet wrote a prayer for her.
Generous God,
source and fountain of life,
in Mary, Mother of us all,
we see courage, boldness and strength
risking all to welcome your Son Jesus.
As we celebrate our diversity
grant that her ferocious love may well up with us
to bring justice and establish your peace.
May Our Lady of Lewisham, pray for us, may we know her in all her complexity, may we experience her ferocious love.
UPDATE 13 08 21 here is the booklet I use for the Ordinary Time Office to provide Common refrains, musical setting of the Magnificat and Benedictus refrains in Comon Worship and Hymns:
On working days I arrive in the Cathedral just before 6:30am, turn the lights on, pay a short visit to the Blessed Sacrament in the memorial Chapel and then pray at the shrine of St Frideswide. It is a beautiful time and a beautiful way to start the day. At 6:45 the duty verger arrives. I can tell which of our verging team it is by the sounds they make. At 7 I move to my stall in choir. I know the order my sister and brother canons and clergy will arrive in and recognise the sounds of them entering the building. I love this sense of our community gathering for prayer. The sadness of the Dean’s empty stall a reminder of the difficulties of our community but also of the steadfastness of the prayer in this place, faithfully fulfilled for over 1300 years despite the turbulence of each age.
Like many Anglo-Catholics I have a well developed inner monastic and thought, as a teenager, that I would join a monastic community. That romanticism has never left me and my romantic spirit is well fed as we gather for prayer in Christ Church day by day. Even on my days off I think of the gathering in my absence and often sneak into the building to say hello to St Frideswide at some point in the day.
We say a fairly straightforward Common Worship Daily Prayer Morning Office. In the evening we pray Prayer Book Evensong, usually sung by one of our choirs and in normal times by visiting choirs in the vacations. Despite not having a great voice I love to sing. My first experience of the Office was at Douai Abbey in my early teens and the sung Office always seems normative to me. I have written often on my blogs about singing the Office, the joy of punctuating the day with the traditional Little Hours, of praying Psalm 119 daily and rising early on working days to vigil the Lord. I love the Grail translation of the psalms but using three different translations (CW, Grail and BCP) proved tiresome, so a few months ago I began using CW texts at all Hours. This post is simply a place to provide the Ordinary booklet for those who might want it for their own personal use. So here it is in PDF format. If you would like it in Pages format please email me and I will send it. I use Pages rather than Word. The Vigils booklet is also provided for those who want it, the cover is provided first.
Song of Songs 3.1-4, 2 Corinthians 5.14-17, John 20, 1-2, 11-18
Fr Richard Peers SMMS
As you probably know services at Christ Church begin five minutes later than official UK time would suggest. This is to take account of our position west of Greenwich and the meridian there. Scholars of Lewis Carrol, otherwise known as Charles Dodgson believe the White Rabbit’s lack of punctuality is a nod to this eccentricity at Christ Church. Whether you regard it as a pleasant eccentricity or an irritating sense of entitlement will depend on your wider view of things.
For me it is a good reminder of the crucial religious significance of time and its relationship to physical existence, to the reality of living on this planet with its rotation and its turning around the sun. Realities which we ignore at great peril, as the climate crisis shows only too clearly.
Time is at the heart of the incarnation. It was only “when the fullness of time had come” as St Paul puts it in Galatians 4, that Jesus could be born. The times of the passion of Our Lord are carefully recorded by the evangelists – and disputed in academic papers – starting with the dawn cock crow when Peter denies his friendship with Jesus, and contrasting beautifully with Mary Magdalen’s faithful arrival at the tomb “Very early on a Sunday morning” as we have just heard in today’s Gospel.
The Holy Spirit comes to the disciples at the third hour; nine o’clock in the morning. In the Acts of the apostles Peter goes up to the housetop to pray at noon, the sixth hour; at the ninth hour, the time of Jesus’ death when the world was plunged into darkness and the veil of the temple torn into two, Cornelius sees a vision of an angel of God.
Scripture is full of references to time. It is an account, a sacred, theological account of redemption which takes place in the actual history of the world.
From those very first days of the church Christians have gathered daily at certain times to pray, what we now call the Daily Office, the Liturgy of the Hours.
Time is essential to all three of today’s readings. For St Paul it is significant because old and new can only exist because of time.
For St John that early morning in which the women come to the tomb is not an accident, and for the author of the Song of Songs the whole passage depends on the timing, in the dark, at night. Easy in the heat of last week to imagine sleepless nights, nights of yearning and longing; seeking.
In the Old Testament he psalmist implores the people of Israel to listen to God’s voice ‘Today”.
In the New Testament two words are famously used for ‘time’, chronos, linear, measurable time, and kairos, the right moment for decisions, for choice, for faith.
On the great days of the christian year the church sings Hodie! Today. Today he is born, today he is risen. Now is the moment.
St Augustine in his Confessions spends a whole book of his work discussing the nature of time. And the the whole of the Confessions is a personal salvation history, an account of God working, in time, in the life of an individual.
The author of the fourteenth century Cloud of Unknowing is determined that our prayer should penetrate time, cutting into it like Lyra’s knife in His Dark Materials, by using the smallest word possible, repeating again and again a single syllable, so that our minds might be attached to a single moment in all its butterfly slitheriness and impossibility to grasp. The Cloud’s teaching is often misinterpreted as suggesting a Christian use of a multi word or multi syllable mantra. It does not. Deeply Augustinian its purpose is to separate us from all that distracts us to past or future, it is the precursor of the sacrament of the present moment.
And yet in our culture we hide from the reality of time, of the turning of the planet; of the reality of sun and moon and stars of the changing length of the day. With clocks and lights, with television and internet, we treat each moment as if it was the same; a commodity to be used and filled.
I wonder how many of us here today know what time the sun rises at the moment? When dawn, the fore-lightening of the sky is noticeable?
Sunrise in Oxford this morning was at 5:14 am.
It was glorious in Christ Church Meadow as the light hit the mown hay.
Dawn, comes an hour or so sooner than sunrise at this time of year. A foretaste of the full light of the day that is to come.
Sunrise will be an hour and 7 minutes later on the last day of July than it was on the first. It makes a huge difference, the days are getting shorter and the nights longer already.
In April in Jerusalem the sun rises around 6:30 am, dawn will have been earlier than that so Mary Magdalen and the other women must have got to the tomb about 5 or 5:30am, St John tells us it was still dark.
Mary Magdalen used her time well, like the wise virgins of Jesus’ parable she was there, ready and awake.
Time is a sacred gift; only in time will we meet the risen Jesus, only if we are ready, awake, waiting will we find the one who comes to us unexpectedly, who we mistake for the gardener but who knows us by name. Only if we use the time that is given to us wisely will we hear him speak our name so that we can hold him and never let him go.
So our use of time; the way in which we inhabit time is at the heart of our spiritual lives.
It is a good exercise to write down how we think we spend our time. How much time we think we spend eating; travelling; watching television; listening to the radio; relaxing.
And then do it, for one, fairly typical week record how you actually use your time.
I have never done this exercise with an individual and not seen a huge difference between how they think they use time and how they actually do.
Time is too precious for that!
Don’t let it slip through your fingers.
How we use the whole of any day is of enormous importance. But I want to offer a challenge, about one small element of time, but one that is deeply sensitive to people.
It’s a challenge about the time that you get up.
It is one that I have offered in other situations and I am not yet convinced that I am wrong, although some people quite strongly want me to be.
Simply put I believe that those words we have just heard are so important: On the first day of the week Mary the Magdalene comes early while yet it was dark.
If we are serious about our spiritual lives, if we are serious about developing a life of prayer there is as far as I can see no alternative to getting up very early in the morning; for most of the year, while it is still dark.
It is graced time. It is a liminal time when the day moves from darkness to light. There is an energy in waking at this beautiful turning point of the day, sitting in the darkness, expectant and hopeful. And always, always, always being gifted with light, a new day, a new series of moments, a new time in which to meet the risen Lord.
I know that some people will say that they are night-owls not early birds. I just don’t believe that the human race is divided in some genetic way like that. Our sleep patterns are deeply habitual but habits can be broken and new ones created. I am told that it can take about 90 days to create new habits, so don’t try this for a week and then tell me that it doesn’t work for you. Try it for three months and then tell me.
I am not for a moment suggesting that you reduce the amount of sleep you have, simply go to bed earlier, turn the television or the emails off. Drink less so you get quality sleep, at least 7 hours for most people, and set the alarm.
Then wallow in the joyfulness of vigiling the Lord.
This may seem a small matter that I am making too much of, but years of talking to people about their prayer and their lives convinces me that it is very significant. Obviously, it will be affected by having small children, particular jobs and the patterns of partners and family but I do not know anyone that has a serious life of prayer who does not find the time for that in the early hours. I have not yet met or know anyone who stays up late in the evening and spends that time in prayer, lectio or meditation. At the end of the day the energy is all wrong for that.
The great Paschal vigil is the model on which we can base our daily lives. Not the lazy celebrations on Holy Saturday evening ending with everyone going to bed, but getting up in the night and vigiling the light. Greeting tea dawn from on high that breaks upon us each day and welcoming which fills us with energy, enthusiasm and passion
What we actually do with our time, just as what we eat and drink, how we spend our money is the real subject matter of our spirituality; not what experiences we have or how we feel.
Upon my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer. “I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I will seek him whom my soul loves.” I sought him, but found him not. The watchmen found me, as they went about in the city. “Have you seen him whom my soul loves?”
Scarcely had I passed them, when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him, and would not let him go …
The writer of the Song of Songs finds the beloved by doing one simple thing. Getting up.
The love of Christ controls us, says St Paul. A better translation is compelled. We are never controlled by God but the love of Christ, our love, compels us. The disciplines of the Christian life are never obligations imposed on us; we feel freely a compulsion to fast, to keep vigil, to pray, to get up early. Compulsions that replace the compulsions, the addictions of the world.
Our Christian freedom is shown when we are not controlled by staying up late, but when we behave differently to those around us. When the patterns of our life, the habits of our use of time are set by the gospel.
“Suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by [Alice].
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” (when she thought about it afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but, when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and, burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it …”
Are you curious to know the risen Jesus, to hear him speak your name?
Don’t be like the White Rabbit, always late, wake up, and very early in the morning, while it is still dark you will meet him.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Please sit down.
Wow, bishop Paul/Bev.
Wow, diocese of Liverpool,
Wow, everyone watching on livestream.
22 amazing people to be ordained priest here today. 22 amazing priests.
22 people who are sincere, serious, prayerful, big-hearted.
X …
It was a deep joy for me to spend even just a few hours with you this week. A privilege to be at this service with you today, to pray for you and to to talk to you, your colleagues, your families and friends, about our friend Jesus.
1967, the summer of love.
The Beatles had released their album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band at the end of May that year. Brian Epstein signed them up for a TV Deal for one song, to be broadcast live on June 25th.
The instruction was clear: the song was to be broadcast simultaneously around the world, the lyrics had to be simple enough to be understood anywhere, in any language.
John Lennon set about it and in the broadcast 400 million people heard for the first time: All You Need Is Love.
That television broadcast was a programme called One World. In 1967 One World experiencing the same music, One World aspiring to love.
In 2021 One World is frighteningly real. One World in which a virus can spread to every corner of the globe in just a few months, in which variants come to dominate within weeks of emerging.
All you need is love?
All of us here in the cathedral, all of you watching at home, what do you need, what do we need, this morning/afternoon?
Possibly you need the preacher not to go on too long.
If you are X …. you need to be ordained priest.
To get to this day the women and men to be ordained priest needed to discern a call to priesthood with the Church and their bishops. They needed to absorb and regurgitate in essays knowledge of Scripture and theology. They needed to confirm that call to priesthood with their Training Incumbents and title parishes in this deacons’ year.
All You Need Is Love.
To love is to be people of heart. St Benedict in his Rule writes about enlarging the heart, expanding the heart.
X … this is the thing you need most for this ministry,
to be big-hearted people.
In my conversations with you over the last two days, short as that has been, that is what has encouraged me most – to see the bigness of your hearts.
To be a big-hearted person is not to absorb all the pain that you will meet in your ministry; it is not to take into yourself and hold there the brokenness of the world.
It is not to solve all the problems the loveless; the lonely; the desperate by your own actions, your own love.
If you try and do all that you will quickly burn out.
If you try and do all that your heart will soon whither.
To be big hearted is to be spacious.
To have enough room in your heart not for your love, but for God’s love.
To be empty enough of yourself and your own preoccupations for the love of God to dwell in you.
The opposite of a big heart is a hardened heart.
A heart that holds on tightly, a heart that is too full of its own hurts and injuries and in which there is no breathing space.
As I spoke with you this week some of you shared the pains, the sorrows, the brokenness of your own lives.
And this is the best news yet.
This is how God tenderises our hearts. How God softens us.
How we are opened up to recognise in our own suffering the suffering of others.
To see that life can be tough and painful and sad, and that’s OK.
All you need is love.
There are various stories about how and when Lennon wrote the song. Perhaps it was quickly in just the few weeks leading up to the One World broadcast.
He wrote a song in simple words to say profound things.
That is the task ahead of you dear friends being ordained today.
There’s no hurry, you can spend the rest of your life doing it.
From the spaciousness of your hearts, from your tenderised hearts, can you speak in simple words, as simple as the words Jesus uses:
love each other?
From the spaciousness of your hearts from your tenderised hearts, can you demonstrate in simple actions that glorious freedom that being loved by God gives us?
The freedom from our own histories and narratives.
Freedom from our own internalised images of ministry; freedom from the projections of our society on us of ministry.
Only one thing can give us that freedom, only one thing can fuel our ministry.
All you need is love.
One of my favourite spiritual writers talks of the need we have for ‘beginner’s mind’.
In the beginner’s mind there are endless possibilities.
A beginner doesn’t mind failing, is happy to laugh at themselves,
is serious about the task but doesn’t take themselves too seriously.
A priest is never an expert.
A priest is always a beginner.
Always open to new possibilities, always a learner.
For a priest there are always endless opportunities.
Bread and wine that can become the Body and Blood of Christ. Sins that can be forgiven. Lives that can be healed and blessed.
One of the things I loved over the last two days as I spent time with our wonderful priest candidates was that there was no sense of entitlement.
None of you thought you had it sussed, that you had arrived.
You talked of being completely surprised by this call; of wanting to go deeper.
The church of God, the Diocese of Liverpool, the communities you serve are blessed by your beginner’s minds.
Christian writers in the east speak of the mind descending into the heart, so that all your knowledge and experience dwells in the centre of your being in a spacious heart. A heart where love is not simply an emotion but a decision, a choice, as you are making a choice for your lives today.
A choice for love and freedom.
Only one thing can give us that freedom, only one thing can fuel our ministry.
All you need is love.
And that love is what we find in the gospel we have just heard.
It is friendship with Jesus.
X … never forget that above all else, above all the things that you will do and will fill your diaries and lives with, you are called to friendship with Jesus.
You will have to guard time to sustain that friendship by reading and studying Scripture, by praying, by having a friendship with Jesus that you can talk to other people about in the same simple language that Jesus uses.
You may not be John Lennon, but you do need to talk about Jesus from your own knowledge and experience.
And that’s the question posed to all of us who are Christians in this building today or watching on livestream:
how is our friendship with Jesus doing,
how is my friendship with Jesus, how is yours?
And to those of you who don’t know Jesus who are here perhaps to support a relative or friend, what does Jesus mean to you?
Perhaps you didn’t come to the cathedral this morning/afternoon expecting to discover love but that is what Jesus is offering you.
If you want to know more about this amazing friendship that he offers speak to one of these newly ordained priests, or give them a break and speak to one of the rest of us after the service.
Ask us about Jesus, test us out and see if we speak truthfully, authentically about this friend we have.
One of my favourite poems is W.B. Yeats’ ‘The Lake Isle of Innesfree’.
It is just twelve lines in three verses, here’s the first:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
What a lovely thought.
A life of simplicity.
From the romanticism of Thoreau’s ‘Walden’, to the island idyll of Robinson Crusoe the simple life appeals.
Jesus is sometimes portrayed as living the simple life. An itinerant preacher wandering around Palestine from place to place with a band of friends.
But I don’t think there is anything simple about Jesus at all. He is one of the most complex, interesting, fascinating people I know. I never tire of talking to Jesus when I pray; I never get bored of reading the things he said, the stories he told..
I don’t imagine that Nicodemus thought Jesus was simple either. Quite the opposite.
If you want to see Jesus’ complexity read the gospel we have just heard, the encounter between Nicodemus and Jesus. It is wonderfully complex.
Light, darkness, world, flesh, spirit, born again, testimony, earthly and heavenly things; Moses and serpents.
Almost any sentence of this gospel could fuel a lifetime of research.
Poor Nicodemus comes off none too well. He is the foil to Jesus; to those who do understand, the believers.
His ignorance, his not-knowing and not understanding is typical of what is often called John’s irony.
But we should not be too pleased with ourselves if we place ourselves among those who do understand .
For those who compiled the lectionary, the series of readings from Scripture that we use week by week and day by day, Trinity Sunday must have posed a bit of a challenge. The Trinity is present implicitly in Scripture, of course, but nowhere explicitly.
I don’t know if the compilers chose today’s Gospel ironically, but there is definitely a sardonic quality in reading this passage about not understanding on a day when we celebrate a doctrine that is, to put it mildly, difficult to understand.
Well, I hope you won’t be disappointed in me if I tell you that I won’t be explaining the Trinity to you this morning. You are not going to leave Christ Church cathedral with a two sentence definition of the nature of God. I will leave that sort of thing to my canon professorial colleagues.
Quite the opposite. I don’t want to give you any explanations or definitions. I want you, us, to live with not knowing, not understanding.
It may be somewhat radical to say this from the heart of an Oxford college but it seems to me that living with not knowing, living with the questions is as important as getting the answers right.
This is at the heart of the spiritual life. To acknowledge that we are not in control, that we cannot know everything.
Simplicity can be attractive just as all fundamentalisms are attractive. They remove complication, ambiguity and complexity. They reduce the complex to standard answers and easy formulas.
We see this over and over again in politics and history. The simple lies that some politicians tell attract votes and supporters.
We see it too in our labelling of people. People are either saints or sinners, good or bad, heroes or villains. yet in my 56 years I have never met anyone who was only one of those things. I have never met anyone who is not a sinner, is not capable of doing bad things, of appalling indifference or failings of judgement. I know I am.
Yet we are deeply understanding of our own complexity and deeply unforgiving of anyone else’s.
I think it is better sometimes to stop trying to explain the Trinity but to examine what we can learn from the complexity of God.
There is (inevitably) a theory of complexity. One definition of this complexity that I found describes it in six ways.
Complex things:
are dynamic, they are continuously changing
are far from equilibrium, have the potential to change and take alternative paths
are open systems, that interchange energy and information
involve feedback. What happens next depends on what happened previously
are systems where the whole is more than the sum of the parts
are causaland yet indeterminate
I like these as ways of thinking about how we as Christians can be, if we allow our lives to mirror the life of the Trinity. If we live with complexity. If we become more God-like, more divine.
Having the right answer all the time is deadening. Asking the questions is dynamic.
The Christian life is a life of constant conversion, of changing, of admitting that we got it wrong and need to do something differently.
The church needs to be the least closed system, it must interpret the world to itself and to the world.
The church needs to be receptive to feedback; self reflective.
The church is always more than any one of us.
The church needs to create change, not simply reacting to the world but proactively creating God’s kingdom of justice, love and peace.
And each of these can be applied to us as individuals too.
Are we dynamic, continually being converted? Are we able to change? Are we open to new information, new energy? Do we receive feedback from others, and reflect on our lives?
Are we able to collaborate effectively with others to bring more justice in the world?
My reading of the gospels makes me think that Jesus was like that. Despite our images of him as somehow simple and straightforward, he is very far from that. Like every other human being he is complex, complicated and fascinating. Over and over again in the gospels he refuses the simple answers. Rather he comes at things at a tangent, unexpectedly.
He refuses Nicodemus simplistic answers and presents him with a range of ambiguous words:
Light, darkness, world, flesh, spirit, born again, testimony, earthly and heavenly things; Moses and serpents.
So as followers of Jesus, as friends of Jesus, let’s live with complexity. Let’s embrace complex truth and reject the simplistic lie.
And the church gives us a way to rehearse complex living; to practise living with ambiguity, in our life of prayer.
It is infinitely practical, infinitely doable. And it is my challenge to you today to take up this practice if you are serious about Christianity, serious about praying, if you seriously want to embrace complexity.
It is the daily, day by day, praying of the psalms.
Rowan Williams in his book ‘On Augustine’ says this:
“The church’s worship … is not accidental or marginal to the church’s very being. … the singing of the Psalms becomes the most immediate routine means of identifying with the voice of Christ.”
This is so important. If you want an immediate, routine way of becoming more Christlike it is to take your bible, or your prayer book and open it at the psalms and pray them. If you have a Book of Common Prayer it gives you a way of doing that over a month. Praying them over and over again until they become part of the fabric of who you are. This is not one pious practice among others, one among a range of ‘spiritualities’, it is the normative way for Christians to pray. The routine way of Christian prayer.
The psalms are wonderfully, deliciously complex and ambiguous. They are never tiring, never dull, you will never be bored by them. Praying them day after day they become good friends, companions on our journey through life with all its ambiguities and complexity.
I love the image from our first reading in Isaiah of the hot coal touched to the prophet’s lips. Nothing could be more complex than coal, formed in the planet’s depths over millenia, the residue of living organisms.
If you pray the psalms daily, get to know and love them, you will see that they are hot coals, burning with divine energy, the result of centuries of formation and reformation. They will touch your lips and you will be burnt.
It is no surprise to me that our complex and ambiguous God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity should give us such complex and ambiguous texts to pray with.
The psalms contain everything. Anger. love, friendship, repentance, light, darkness, war, enemies, violence, depression, despair, delight, ecstasy.
When Frideswide and her community prayed here on this site in the seventh century, they prayed the psalms, when the Augustinian canons prayed, they prayed the psalms, the canons of Christ Church have prayed the psalms for nearly five hundred years as we do day by day now.
For Christians, the psalms, because of their complexity, because they are difficult, contain, as Augustine puts it the whole Christ, the totus Christus. And therefore they contain the whole Trinity. The Creator of the universe in all his majesty, the Messiah-Son who is anointed king and the Spirit, the voice that thunders on the waters and which is the abyss, speaking to abyss.
This is why each time we as Christians, pray the psalms, as we do here at Christ Church, day by day, we end each psalm with the doxology. We embrace and immerse ourselves in the complex, life of God who is Trinity. God who defies all simplistic explanations and all fundamentalisms. God who is so gloriously impossible to explain.
And if you only read one psalm when you get home today or some time this week. Here is a psalm for the Trinity, Psalm 29, God’s threefold voice echoing the Holy, Holy, Holy of Isaiah.
In Hebrew the Lord’s voice is Kol Adonai, I will never forget singing this in synagogue with Jewish friends, the Lord’;s voice Kol Adonai, repeated as we sang”
3 The Lord’s voice resounding on the waters,
the Lord on the immensity of waters;
4 the voice of the Lord, full of power,
the voice of the Lord, full of splendour.
5 The Lord’s voice shattering the cedars,
the Lord shatters the cedars of Lebanon;
6 he makes Lebanon leap like a calf
and Sirion like a young wild ox.
7 (The Lord’s voice flashes flames of fire.)
8 The Lord’s voice shaking the wilderness,
the Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh;
9 the Lord’s voice rending the oak tree
and stripping the forest bare.
3b The God of glory thunders.
10 In his temple they all cry: “Glory!” [Grail Psalms]
My dad died. I don’t know quite what to do with that.
When I was thirteen we moved from Brixworth, a village in Northamptonshire where we had been living, to just outside of Reading. For years my very sporty family had tried to discover the sport at which I would excel. Tennis. Table tennis. Snooker. Cricket lessons. Sailing. Finally, they got the message. Poetry, drama. Inevitably, as sports obsessives, they got it wrong and it had to become competitive. Poetry, plays, acting. Eisteddfods, certificates, competitions. I didn’t need the competition but I loved the people, the words, the reading.
When we moved to Reading dad realised how much those Friday nights meant to me. Rather than end them he drove me, at the end of his working week, every other Friday for four years. He sat in a car park somewhere while I attended my drama classes. And he drove me home. I loved those classes. But I wonder if he ever knew that the journey was much more important to me? Four hours alone with my dad. Four hours in the car. Talking, listening. I always read him the poems and the plays from my class. All the classics of the ‘western canon’.
It was an unlikely scene. Father and son reciting poetry and plays and listening to music. Dad’s favourite operas. The symphonies that he loved. The horn in the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s fifth.
Dad only ever gave me two books. The Music Lovers, Catherine Bowen’s account of Tchaikovsky’s life and Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape. We never talked about either of them but they were inspired gifts. He knew me through and through.
I didn’t see much of dad in his last year. Covid would not allow that. But I did see him a week before he died. In St James’ Hospital in Leeds. I played him his favourite scene from La Bohème. Che Gelida manina. I told him I loved him. He couldn’t speak. I fed him liquid food. Just as he must have fed me. In our beginning is our end.
The narrative in our family is that dad couldn’t express his emotions. He left the room when soppy stuff was on the television. He left the room when anyone mentioned David, my brother, who died when he was five.
Those years of driving, Reading to Northampton and back, that time was the most important imaginable for a father and son. My adolescence was formed by them, shaped by them, they are the rich seam, the deep mine that sustains me. A father’s love. I never doubted that love. Unconditional.
Dad loved romantic poets. The obvious, and the not so obvious. The Lake Isle of Innisfree. Then for one competition I had to recite Miroslav Holub’s The Door.
My dad was in touch with sadness. My brother dying. His own dad leaving the family when dad was a small child. Sadness, but freedom in that sadness. No shade of resentment.
My dad died.
Go and open the door, even if there’s nothing there.
Much of this material formed my talk to the Prayer Book Society this Lent and the material on Psalm 119 has appeared in several places on blogs previously.
Towards the mercy-seat: the psalms in Christian life
Two years ago my mother died.
It was wonderful to be able to be around her bed as she breathed her last breath.
I am even more conscious of that privilege now that most people are not able to have their loved with them as they die. This is very real for you and also for my family, news of my dad dying coming on Palm Sunday afternoon.
As my mother died my brother and sister and I prayed the Rosary together and it was very beautiful to see her lips move with the prayers, so familiar to her, even though she could not make any sound.
Last words are rightly important. Jesus’s final words, the famous ‘seven last words’ are rightly treasured and meditated on by Christians. the fact that he chose words from the psalms My God, my God why have you forsaken me. is not insignificant.
Jesus in his dying breath gifts us the book of psalms as the very foundation of Christian prayer.
The apostolic church when it met together prayed with ‘hymns and psalms’.
Christians at all times and in all places have prayed the psalms, sanctifying time with the daily round of psalmody.
Psalms are, of course, the bread and butter of all Christian prayer but especially of the monastic life which is, after all. just an intensification, a living out of the Christian, the baptised life.
In my three talks this week I am going to reflect on the psalms. Today on praying Jesus in the psalms, tomorrow on the place of mercy in the psalms and on Wednesday a close reading of one psalm, psalm 28, from which, in the Coverdale, Book of Common Prayer version we get this lovely phrase: “towards the mercy seat” which is the overall title for my talks.
I love the psalms. I hope that i communicate something to you of how rich, delightful and lasting the psalms are for prayer; how much they delight me every single day with their complexity and density. I have been praying the psalms seriously for over 40 years and I never tire of them; I endlessly find new things in them; they constantly speak in me and for me in new ways. Most of all, I find Jesus in them. Over and over again I hear him speaking; over and over again they speak of Jesus.
Of course, that might seem odd. The psalms were written some many centuries before Jesus.
Finding Jesus in the psalms , praying Jesus in the psalms is essential to our Christian praying of the psalms. these are not simply ancient texts hallowed by use over the centuries. they are living prayers which give us the words to pray; which pray in Jesus, of Jesus and to Jesus.
The psalms are not simple. If they were they would become dull very quickly. We need to work at them. they are serious stuff. I always have a commentary by my prayer stall. John Eaton on the psalms is excellent. But if I could recommend one thing to read on the psalms it is Rowan Williams book ‘On Augustine’ and only one Chapter in that book, the second chapter on Augustin’;e reading of the psalms. I have sent M. Katherine a series of extracts from that chapter which pick up the key themes.
Here are two of the most significant things that Rowan has to say about Augustine’s reading of the psalms:
“Singing the Psalms … becomes a means of learning what it is to inhabit the Body of Christ and to be caught up in Christ’s prayer. Just as Christ makes his own our lament, our penitence and our fear by adopting the human condition in all its tragic fullness as the material of his Body, so we are inevitably identified with what he says to his Father as God (e.g. en.Ps. 30 (ii) 3–4; 74.4; 142.3). Our relation to Christ is manifested as multi-layered: ‘He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our Head, he is prayed to by us as our God’ (en.Ps. 85.1). The meaning of our salvation is that we are included in his life, given the right to speak with his divine voice, reassured that what our human voices say out of darkness and suffering has been owned by him as his voice, so that it may in some way be opened to the life of God for healing or forgiveness.”
Listen to that key sentence again:
‘He prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our Head, he is prayed to by us as our God.’
When we pray as Christians we pray as Christ. We are the body of Christ, every baptised person prays in persona Christi.
And Rowan goes on:
“The church’s worship … is not accidental or marginal to the church’s very being. Obviously Augustine has much to say about the Eucharist as the prime locus for discovering ourselves as the Body; nevertheless, the singing of the Psalms becomes the most immediate routine means of identifying with the voice of Christ.”
Listen to that final sentence again:
“the singing of the Psalms becomes the most immediate routine means of identifying with the voice of Christ.”
Our praying of the psalms is the most immediate routine means. Our daily bread.
So, let’s look at one psalm together now. If you have your Office book or a Bible in front of you turn to the book of psalms and find Psalm 119.
Until a reform of the liturgy in 1910 Psalm 119 was prayed in its entirety every day at the Little Hours of the Office: prime, terce, Sext and None. by all who used the Roman Breviary. Many Anglican religious communities did this and continued to do so in to the 1960s and beyond. In the Rule of St Benedict this was the pattern on Sundays but on other days the psalms of Ascent were used.
Psalm 119 is the longest psalm with 176 verses. It is an alphabet acrostic with every verse of each section beginning with the same letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
Evert verse except one (122) also contains a synonym for the Torah, the law.
But we should not think of the ;aw as a set of regulations. Torah is a much richer word than that. If you have ever seen Jews dancing with the Torah scrolls in the synagogue or reaching out to touch and kiss the scrolls you will know the passionate devotion and love felt for Torah.
And this is key to a Christian praying of the psalms.
Jesus said I am the way the truth and the life John 14:16.
In Psalm 119 Torah is described as the Way: nine times; the truth 7 times and as life 12 times.
When Jesus says this he is saying that he is the living Torah; Torah made flesh if you like.
And this is how we can pray this psalm. Richard Meux Benson reviver of the religious life in the Church of England and former student of Christ Church where I am writing from now suggests that a form of devotion we could use is pray this psalm replacing the synonyms for Torah with the holy Name of Jesus.
Here is an example secion:
153Under affliction see me and rescue me,
for I have not forgotten Jesus.
154Uphold my cause, and deliver me;
true to Jesus, grant me life.
155Unknown your mercy to the sinner
who do not study Jesus.
156Unnumbered, Lord, are your blessings;
according to Jesus grant me life.
157Under all the assaults of my oppressors,
I keep true to Jesus.
158Unhappy I looked at the faithless
because they did not keep Jesus.
159Up, Lord, and witness the love I bear Jesus;
in your kindness preserve my life.
160Unchanging truth is your Word’s fountain-head,
Jesus is just.
One of my favourite short commentaries on Psalm 119 is by Jonathan Graham who was a monk at Mirfield.
In this quotation he captures something profoundly special for me about the praying of this psalm.
“Psalm 119 is a love song.
Not a passionate love song; certainly not.
It is not the song of love at first sight,
nor of the bitter sweet of emotion and desire.
It is the song of happy married life.
That is not to say that it is, literally, the song of a poet happily wedded; but it breathes all the way through
the charmed monotony of a life vowed to another;
it repeats with endless variety and sweet restraint
the simple inexpressible truth that can never grow weary or stale
– I love thee. Thou, thee, thine;
every verse of the poem, except the three which introduce it,
contains thou, thee or thine.
And a very large number of them echo: I, me, mine.
Well might its author find the sum total of his song in the high priestly prayer of Jesus:
All mine are thine and thine are mine.”
May the praying of the psalms teach us this charmed monotony of a life vowed to Jesus in the vows of baptism, in the vows of religious life.
Talk 2
hesed
As we know well, the psalms contain the whole of human experience: lament and praise; passion and longing; victory and defeat; depression and ecstasy. An even, as we say in yesterday’s talk, in Psalm 119 the gentle and charmed monotony of daily life.
The psalms are compendium of human experience; an encyclopedia of our human-ness. By praying the psalms day by day we are giving prayerful voice to the sentiment that “nothing human is alien to me”.
In the proclamation of the Christian faith in our time we face an enormous hurdle in what I like to think of as the existentialist fallacy; the myth that we are merely accidental organisms existing in isolation from one another. Christianity relies on our having a shared, common humanity; that the stuff, the material of which we are made is something that we have in common with every human being that has ever and will ver exist. This is important because without it the incarnation is unnecessary and the redemption wrought by the cross and resurrection can have no possible effect on us.
We are saved only because our common human-ness is saved.
That human-ness has its roots in the biblical account of creation where God creates us in our own image and likeness. Again, this is really important because it both means that God’s first revelation of God-ness is in our own being but also that when God became man in Jesus the gulf is at the same time immense and yet not impossible. God could become human because it was always going to be a good fit, to use clumsy language. When mystical theology speaks of our becoming divine, our divinisation, the gulf is not impossible to bridge because we are already God shaped.
So when we recite the psalms they both help us to realise our human-ness and remind us that there is something in that which correlates closely to divine nature.
For many years i have taught mindfulness meditation to children and adults. Simple mindfulness of breathing and occasional loving-kindness visualisations. Adults are always rather self-conscious about describing their experience but children speak very powerfully about it. Over and over again i have heard children say two things: It is like there is someone there.” and “Its’s like coming home, like I belong.”.
This is exactly right, our busy-ness the many things which we pass the time and fill our days all too easily alienate us from ourselves. So that we experience the nausea that the existentialists identify.
Yet when we sit in stillness we can ‘come home’ to our basic humanity. And we can find that there is someone there.
The psalms function like that too. By repeating them over and over again we come home to being human and we find in their narration that Someone who is the constant in the story: God.
That recitation of the psalms either in order, as in the Prayer Book Office, or in some other arrangement has an objectivity to it that is important. Our common human-ness is not based on any individual’s ability to empathise with others. Nor is based on feeling that feelings that are expressed. The psalms simply reflect a human experience that is real, that exists, that is.
So I have described how the events that we are celebrating in this Holy Week rely on our common humanity to be efficacious, to have any effect. They also rely on another aspect of our human nature that is essential to make redemption not only possible, that is, of course, sin.
Sin is why we need saving. It is what makes salvation necessary.
In our world sin is not very fashionable. We prefer a more therapeutic understanding human nature. I believe therapies of many kinds are important and helpful, but if we don’t recognise sin in ourselves we will find it impossible to understand the Christian faith let alone participate in salvation.
The psalms of course are full of sins. The psalms of repentance; the penitential psalms; psalms that express anger and hatred and wish destruction on our enemies. I very much recommend that you pray those psalms too and don’t omit them as many modern arrangements of psalms for worship do. If we whitewash over human nature we are missing out on a crucial part of the picture.
When we think of sin we have a tendency to think of it in a legalistic kind of ways; as lists of rule-breaking; particular individual things that we wrong. This is, of course, true. We all commit sins; we all do break the rules.
But sin is more like the fundamental orientation of our lives. A picture that I find helpful is of a bicycle on which the front wheel is not properly aligned with the handle-bar. If you have ever tried to ride a bike in that state you will know how difficult it is. It is impossible to cycle in a straight line no matter how hard we try.
We are sinners.
That is who we are and who we will remain as long as we live.
The psalms show us how God reacts to the fact our sinfulness. It is in a simple Hebrew word, hesed (pronounced with a soft ‘ch’ at the start like Scottish loch).
It occurs an amazing 127 times in the book of Psalms in contrast to the next books where it occurs most often 1 Samuel and Genesis where it occurs a mere 11 times each.
hesed is translated a variety of ways. Most often in the Prayer Book-Coverdale psalms, as loving-kindness, but sometimes just as kindness, or mercy or goodness.
The problem with mercy is that it can all too easily sound like God’s reaction to that list of sins, a ticking off in the sense not of telling off but of forgiving each sin individually.
In fact God’s loving-kindness is much deeper and more significant than that. It embraces the whole of us, it embraces us as sinners.
Because of our culture people often come to the Confessional with deep seated self hatred. shame and loathing. I occasionally as a penance propose using a praise psalm for the sin. Praising God for the fact of sin which has brought us to the means of grace; brought us to repentance and which reveals our need for God, our need for Jesus.
I love the Jesus prayer:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.
It contains that hesed, that mercy which is God’s reaction to us.
It acknowledges that I am a sinner, and I find that tremendously liberating.
I am a sinner, I always will be a sinner, I will always need Jesus.
I don’t know if you have been able to make your confession this Lent, this Holy Week.
Allow me to set you a penance.
Read Psalm 135.
It is a great litany of hesed.
The refrain Great is his love, love without end.
His mercy endures for ever.
His hesed will never end.
Talk 3
Towards the mercy-seat
Read psalm 28 in the Coverdale/BCP version:
[28]. PSALM XXVIII. Ad te, Domine.
1 Unto thee will I cry, O Lord my strength :
think no scorn of me; lest, if thou make as though thou hearest not,
I become like them that go down into the pit.
2 Hear the voice of my humble petitions, when I cry unto thee :
when I hold up my hands towards the mercy-seat of thy holy temple.
3. O pluck me not away, neither destroy me with the ungodly and wicked doers :
which speak friendly to their neighbours, but imagine mischief in their hearts.
4. Reward them according to their deeds :
and according to the wickedness of their own inventions.
5. Recompense them after the work of their hands :
pay them that they have deserved.
6. For they regard not in their mind the works of the Lord, nor the operation of his hands :
therefore shall he break them down, and not build them up.
7. Praised be the Lord :
for he hath heard the voice of my humble petitions.
8. The Lord is my strength, and my shield; my heart hath trusted in him, and I am helped :
therefore my heart danceth for joy, and in my song will I praise him.
9. The Lord is my strength :
and he is the wholesome defence of his Anointed.
10. O save thy people, and give thy blessing unto thine inheritance :
feed them, and set them up for ever.
Biblical scholars on the psalms have spent much energy identifying different types or genres of psalm. Psalm 28 is agreed by all scholars to be a lament of an individual. There may also be a royal element to this with the voice of the speaker being identified with that of the king; we know that the psalms are traditionally ascribed to David and this one even includes the word Anointed in verse 9. As Christians we know that Jesus is the descendant of David and the anointed messiah, so we should always sit up when we notice the word in Scripture.
It is in fact a rather nicely constructed psalm and typical of psalms of lament that move from woe to praise. This is, of course true of Psalm 22 which Jesus prayed from the cross and moves from the desolation in the opening to praise at the end, a movement frequently commented on in devotional writing about the crucifixion.
I am going to comment on two features of the psalm.
The first is the passage that forms verses 4 – 6 (read them again). In the current form of the Roman Catholic Daily Office these verses are omitted as being unsuitable for public worship. I imagine this entire psalm does not appear in Common Worship provision either.
As I said earlier in the week I think it is a shame to omit this important part of human life.
One of my favourite psalms is psalm 93. It is a psalm I have often used in school assemblies.
When I was Headteacher of a rage comprehensive school in south London almost all of the children were black. The older boys would quite often be stopped by the police and sometimes searched, the controversial stop and search policy; if the young men reacted badly they might find themselves taken done to the local police station. On one occasion our Head Boy thus found himself under arrest and his mother rang me to meet her there to take him home. I had often spoken to the school about the importance of good manners and how we are more likely to get what we want by speaking politely. By the time his mum and I got there he had calmed down and was being extremely polite. He was soon released and we were on our way out.
As we walked out of the station this young man bent down (he is very tall) and whispered to me the opening lines of Psalm 93. Do you know them?
Here is the Grail version:
O Lord, avengingGod, avenging God draw near.
I was thrilled. He understood that his anger was appropriate, but he also understood that there was an appropriate time and place and means of expressing it.
These psalms, these verses are important. We might like to think ourselves incapable of wanting revenge, or even victory, or even of having enemies. But that is probably unlikely. What is certain is that these are common human feelings. Acknowledging the reality of them is essential if we are to be fully human and if we are to allow that full humanity to be redeemed.
The second element in this psalm that I want to draw your attention to is in the second half verse 2 when the psalmist talks of the mercy-seat.
Mercy-seat has now become an established part of the English language. Even some modern translations use it.
When Miles Coverdale was translating the psalms in the early sixteenth century he consulted the German translation of the Bible that Martin Luther had produced. In that text this word gnadenstuhl appears. Mercy-seat, is a translation of the Hebrew word kaporet. It doesn’t really mean seat at all. It refers to the lid on the box or container in which the tablets of the law were stored. The lid, the kaporet had a statue of an angel, a cherubim at each side. If you google this you will find some images. On the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur – kippur having the same root as kaporet) the High Priest would sprinkle the blood of the sacrificed ram on the kaporet.
I like the translation mercy-seat because it captures the sense of something concrete, is not an abstract concept or even a place it is a thing. I haven’t found any modern translation that does better; most do worse by turning it into something abstract.
In my first two talks I have reflected on the Christian use of the psalms, this word kaporet is a good example of that.
In the century before Jesus the Hebrew bible was translated, allegedly by 70 scholars, into Greek. These seventy led to the translation being called the Septuagint, often in books indicated by the Roman numerals for 70, LXX. It is this version of the Hebrew Bible that St Paul quotes from.
The Septuagint translates our word kaporet by the Greek word Hilasterion. This word occurs just twice in the New Testament, both in St Paul’s writing at Romans 3:25 and Hebrews 9:5.
In Romans this verse is key to understanding what Jesus does.
[Christ] whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. [ESV]
I have already spoken about the importance of sin in Christian life and the necessity of our common humanity for Jesus’ saving work to be possible, to be effective.
the hilasterion, the kaporet, the mercy seat is the propitation, the offering of Jesus himself.
Reading the psalms, reciting them day by day as Christians takes us to the heart of our biblical, Christian faith. The Old and New Testaments as we call them are not in any way separate. They are a continuum; the new is foreshadowed in the old because they are simply the single story of salvation history; of God’s plan for humanity. Just as our very humanity, our own beings reveals God to us because we are created in his image and likeness.
This Holy Week, we are on pilgrimage to the mercy-seat. Not to the container of the tablets of the Law but to the living Torah, Jesus himself who is the way, the truth and the life.
Sacred, Christ Church Cathedra, Oxford 21st March, 2021
Sub Dean, Fr Richard Peers and his partner Jim Cable, horticultural writer
Trinity After Rublev, Meg Wroe
RICHARD
When I learnt my catechism as a child I learnt the first question by heart:
Why did God make me? He made me to know him, to love him and serve him.
God wants us to know him. One way I have come to know God better is in gardens.
I’ve been examining the Church of England’s calendar of saints recently. Those people we remember as we celebrate the Eucharist and Morning and Evening Prayer each day.
Someone not me has done the maths and worked out that 80% of those commemorated are men. Just 20%, a fifth are women. And just as strange is that only 5% were married. Part of the vocation of LGBT+ people in the church is not to have the conversation about homo-sexuality but to embrace the conversation about sexuality.
This is particularly strange to me because after my baptism as a Christian, my 35 year relationship – so far- with Jim is the principal means of grace in my life. It is this relationship that most converts me, most turns me from self-centredness and sin, and most engages me in the universe. It is my relationship with Jim that is my principal call to holiness, even though I constantly fail.
When I marry couples, I always give them a present, and the present I always give is a crucifix, that sign of Jesus dying to self, dying for us.
Christian marriage is a way God gives us of growing in holiness. Of dying to self. Jim constantly makes me, has to work making me less self-centred.
I am often amused at the etymology of the word homosexual. It means same, of course in the Greek. In what Jim and I are going to say tonight I hope that you will see that apart from gender, we are incredibly different. I feel more hetero than homo to him. It is that difference, his love of gardening; his physical work; his finding Jesus in the garden, through gardening that enriches my life and draws me a little closer to holiness.
JIM
When I was a child my parents were restless and their marriage not altogether happy. We moved house several times and my way of coping with the upheaval was to create my own little gardening space each time. It helped root me in the new place.
Gardening is a skilled practical task. It cannot be rushed. Many jobs require a high level of concentration. So when I am pruning, for instance, I am looking closely at where the buds are that will produce new branches and imagining the shape of the pruned tree or shrub that will result from my actions. There is a rhythm to it. At the same time, it is not that difficult – once you know what you are doing – so the mind, lightly tethered, can drift to some extent. …And that is where God creeps in.
Psychologists refer to a state of flow. We might say we are in the zone. In any case we are deeply absorbed but also receptive. It is one reason why time flies in the garden.
I guess you could call this informal prayer and it comes naturally to me but Richard taught me by example early on in our relationship how to take what is on my mind to God in more ritualised ways. I was baptised and confirmed as an adult during the time Richard was at theological college.
RICHARD
Part of the difference between us is that I am a very religious person. I love going to church, worshipping, being with other Christians. I enjoy almost every kind of worship I have ever attended. From Pentecostal to Greek Orthodox.
Jim came to faith while I was at theological college in the 1990s but his experience of prayer is very different to mine.
JIM
As well as the mindful craft work I described a garden can be a place for more defined prayerful practice.
I have been involved in two projects where a labyrinth has been central to the design – one outside a church in London and one in a historic walled garden open to the public. Lose yourself in a maze, find yourself in a labyrinth goes the phrase. And while trite it does hold some truth.
At Minsteracres retreat centre, near Consett, in County Durham there is a grass labyrinth near the main housedesigned by Michael Grogan. It is used spontaneously by visitors but also as a teaching aid for groups on retreat. Gardener and lay member of the community Lya Vollering explained to me that for people who find formal ‘religion’ difficult the labyrinth helps them get in touch with themselves, nature and a ‘higher power’. The journey to the centre of a labyrinth reflects the inner journey we all face, that of letting go of all that blocks our way to God. The Minsteracres labyrinth has a shiny stainless steel gateway at its centre. You see see yourself in the mirrored surface but in the context of the utterly beautiful County Durham landscape. God’s creation – the trees, the sky, sheep and wildlife. The centre offers a moment to give thanks before you begin your outward journey back into the world. Lya has used it many times with family and friends of substance misusers. Weather permitting, she encourages them to walk barefoot… “to feel the earth, the grass, to be grounded”.
RICHARD
One of my favourite Christian writers is St Augustine. Augustine describes God as beauty. When we experience beauty we experience God. When I was a Head teacher we chose a new motto for the school and we came up with Deus pulchritudinis. God is beauty.
I love many human made works of art, poetry, music, art. But there is something about the beauty of nature that involves no effort. We human beings can end up trying too hard. It is all about succeeding and even competing. But But nature is unselfconscious. Natural things are at ease with themselves.
JIM
When we garden it is almost impossible not to marvel at God’s creation.
Perhaps the obvious thing we look for in a garden is flowers. We enjoy their colour, scent and intricate arrangements.
Flowers have evolved to aid pollination and perpetuate a species. They are not for us human beings so why do we respond so positively towards them – that miniscule leap deep inside when we stumble upon a perfectly formed bloom. We don’t often eat flowers; they serve no practical function and yet they speak to us.
As the poet, Louis Hemmings, puts it:
How do flowers bring hope?
How do their silent lips speak?
What dreams their sweet scents evoke?
Flowers give strength to the weak.
It is a bit of mystery. Colour may be significant. The ability to spot ripe fruit amongst vegetation would have been a useful and rewarding skill to our ancestors. I feel symmetry has something to do with it. As Professor Jonathan Edwards, of University College, London puts it “The beauty of the delicate flower is in the sexy invisibility of an unbelievably intricate act of creation and our attraction to it is likely to be an exaptation – of no usefulness in itself but a sign of a useful attraction to things that show ordered complexity.”
RICHARD
I do a lot of work with individuals as they reflect on their spiritual lives. I have worked on my own spiritual life with directors since I was a teenager. I have hundreds, thousands of books about prayer and spirituality. But if I had to sum up spirituality in a single phrase it would be remarkably simple.
The whole of the spiritual life, consists, I believe in doing one thing: letting go.
When Jesus died he was letting go.
Letting go of control, letting go of life itself, letting go of holding on.
JIM
Gardening is a creative interaction with Nature. It is a form of control made most manifest in the grand formal gardens of the 17th century but, try as we might, the results are never perfect. While formal gardens are impressive, I prefer a lighter touch. I love the wilder areas of my garden but in a sense, they work in contrast to the imposed neatness of the more ‘gardened’ areas. Letting go is an important counterbalance to discipline and that juxtaposition makes a garden. Thankfully we are learning that since it is futile to attempt to control what is a living eco system there is no place for chemicals in our gardens.
W creating a new garden I like to recycle what is on site rather than filling a skip and buying new.
RICHARD
If you come and visit us at the Sub Deanery here at Christ Church you will see lots of versions of this famous icon of the Trinity by Andrei Rublev. The Trinity is what we as Christians think God is like.
For me one of the most powerful lessons of the doctrine is existence of difference at the heart of God’s own being, God’s own life.
LGBT+ have an important vocation in the human family because we will always be different; always be the minority and that’s good.
I believe profoundly that when we are most ourselves we allow other people to be themselves.
JIM
Over my career working with volunteers in a garden setting has been a great joy. The two places where I have encountered the most diversity in the people I engage with have been within the Church and in the sphere of Horticulture. Gardening seems to be a great leveller. And of course, as a physical space a garden can be a great place to meet others. We are blessed here at Christ Church with a garden in the centre of a city. Now the grip of the pandemic seems to be loosening we are looking forward to entertaining in the garden and hearing people share their unique stories. There is something about being in the safe living embrace of a garden that helps us relax and be honest with one another just as walking in the countryside or even going on a long drive together can help us speak the truth. Perhaps one day we can hold an open-air Sacred in the Sub-Deanery garden?
RICHARD
One of the things I am enjoying most about being here at Christ Church is the opportunity to meet and form friendships with our academic colleagues in the college and university. This Lent I have been interviewing some of those colleagues as part of what we are calling Open House which is a conversation we live stream on Monday evenings.
In my preparation for one of those I had a great discussion with Mishtooni Bose, a professor of literature about suffering. How we cope with suffering she said is the fundamental question of human life.
In this pandemic the whole human race has been confronted with the reality of suffering.
It is no accident that the principal sign of Christianity is a cross or crucifix.
Suffering, and how we deal with it is who we are.
JIM
The Church year has a definite structure and overlays the natural cycle of the seasons. A true gardener loves winter as much as high summer. It is a time for work as well as waiting. The death of winter is merely a transition time with life slowed to an almost silent tick within the dormant plants, bulbs and seeds.
At this time of year, during Lent, gardeners are acutely aware of the lengthening days of spring. Easter is a time to sow and nurture and marvel at the reburgeoning of the garden that will lead to an abundance of food and flowers for the summer feast days.
RICHARD
Jim and I met 35 years ago. We knew pretty early on that we wanted the same thing.
We wanted a shared life, a life together.
As the Song of Songs in the bible says love is a strong as death, fierce
But I am also with St Augustine once again. Love is an act of the will, it is a decision.
To commit is to make an irrevocable decision. It’s a bit counter cultural. We like to think that we have a choice, choices all the time.
Although I had been brought up in a Christian family it was as a teenager that I committed my life to Jesus. I had an experience of God, of the Holy Spirit that was so powerful that I knew there could be no going back.
My commitment to Jesus, my commitment to Jim are both part of the same thing.
They are choices I have made as I craft my life.
Gardening is a craft.
I have spent most of my life as a teacher in schools as well as a priest.
The thing I most want children and young people to know is that we are the craftspeople of our lives.
JIM
I think it is safe to say Richard is better at prayer and me at gardening but maintaining a prayer life or a garden each demand discipline and commitment. I know that gardening can be a solace in the hard times.
I am reminded of Kipling’s famous poem The Glory of The Garden –
Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him seesThat half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!
Schoeps, Hans Joachim. “The Sacrifice of Isaac in Paul’s Theology.” Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 65, no. 4, 1946, pp. 385–392. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3262158. Accessed 27 Feb. 2021.
Paul and the Patriarch: The Role of Abraham in Romans 4
N.T. Wright
Journal for the Study of the New Testament 35(3) 207–241
Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, Beale, G.K. and Carson, D.A; Baker Academic 2007
Well, we now know the road map. there is light at the end of the tunnel. If all goes well by June 21st we will be out of lockdowns.
I expect there are things you are yearning to do.
I am yearning to see my dad in his care home.
To go for a long walk that ends up with a pub lunch.
To invite people for dinner and sit at a table with friends.
I’ve never really thought of myself as particularly a travel addict but I am also yearning to go abroad, to hear people chatting in other languages, to see places I’ve never been before.
And I am yearning to worship in other languages. I love to go to church in France and pray in French.
One of the places I am missing most is the little Burgundy village of Taizé perched on a hill a few miles east of Cluny. I first went there when I was 17 and I have been most of not quite every year since. It’s the home of an ecumenical monastic community where thousands of young people gather over the summer months. I am excited that Clare, our college Chaplain, and Dirk an academic in chemistry and next year’s senior academic (Senior Censor) at Christ Church have agreed to come with me and a group of of students on a chaplaincy pilgrimage in June 2022.
When I am Taizé I maintain my discipline of celebrating Mass, the Eucharist every day by concelebrating with one of the monks in the little crypt chapel under the main community church. the chapel is full of icons and very beautiful. In the corridor outside there is a stunning stained glass window. It is tall and narrow and this canvas is a photo of just the lower half of it. It’s an image of a boy, perhaps seven or eight years old and you can just see adult hands , one on each shoulder. In the whole window you can see that the hands belong to the man stood behind him, a man with a long beard.
The window, made by one of the brothers of the community at Taizé portrays a story from Genesis 22. It’s a searing and heart breaking story. And even though I have this canvas on the wall in my cellar chapel here at Christ Church I can hardly bear to look at it. The boy is Isaac and the man is his father Abraham. The story in Genesis 22 is the account of God asking Abraham to take his son, his first and most beloved son up a mountain and slaughter him, to kill him as a sacrifice.
Looking at this picture, this stained glass, the trust on Isaac’s face for his father is total. His faith in him is total. His eyes look up secure in the knowledge that his father will care for him.
Genesis 22 is one of the most powerful passages, among many, in the Hebrew Scriptures. Jews today read this account on the High Holy Day, the Days of Awe, the Day of Atonement and the Jewish New Year each Autumn.
In our first reading today St Paul reflects on the Abraham cycle of stories. The letter to the Romans where our first reading comes from is notoriously complex and Paul’s argument is difficult to understand. It is particularly hard for us to follow when we get snippets to read like today’s passage which really make no sense without the larger context, the whole argument. It is even harder to understand because our minds are full of the arguments of history. Our reading of St Paul is overlaid with thoughts about faith and works that owe more to the sixteenth century Reformation than to first century Judaism. Finally, it is hard for us to lay aside centuries of Christian anti-semitism that makes us think of the ‘superior’; Christian grace taking over from the supposed ‘inferior’ Jewish law.
Romans 4 is a key passage in Paul’s letter. Almost all of the commentaries will point you to Genesis 15 as the key text on which Paul is commenting. They do so because Paul is clearly reflecting on the promise made to Avram – who has not yet been renamed Abraham – that his seed would many. That Abraham would be the father of many nations.
However, I want you to think of this picture of Isaac as vital to understanding Paul’s viewpoint. Paul was clearly familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures, almost certainly in the popular Greek translation made at Alexandria. he would certainly have been familiar with what we know as chapter 15 of Genesis. The covenant God makes with Abram. But chapter 15 is hardly the most memorable , the most colourful, the most dramatic of the stories of Abraham.
The covenant is in some ways an important turning point in the story but it is not the heart of who Abraham is. It tells us very little about Abraham’s character or history.
The whole of that character, all of that history would have been in Paul’s mind as he wrote his letter and as he reflects on Abraham here.
Abraham is fascinating because (in Genesis 12) he leaves his homeland, his family and community behind. He leaves everything. In his travels he meets Melchisdech, an otherwise unknown king and priest; a priest without lineage. God makes this covenant with Avram that his descendants will be as many as the stars of heaven and then he is asked to sacrifice his son, presumably necessary to make that happen on the mountain of Moriah. And Abraham obeys. he takes a knife, would to burn the body of his on on and goes up the mountain.
Only at the last minute does God intervene and halt the sacrifice.
Puzzlingly St Paul doesn’t make much of the obvious parallels between Isaac and Jesus, later Christians have often done this. I think that’s because Paul is much more concerned with Abraham as the image of the true believer whose faith is absolute trust in God.
Paul must surely have known what we call the Lord’s Prayer. The remarkably simple, seven clause prayer that Jesus taught his disciples when they asked him to teach them how to pray. Again it is so familiar to us that it is hard for us to read it as if for the first time. It is the fourth clause that stands out for me every time I pray it. “Thy will be done”.
Just think about how extraordinary this is. We spend our whole lives making plans, making sure we are in control of things, and then we pray Thy will be done.
We pray it but we don’t mean it. We get ourselves worked up for job interviews, we pray Thy will be done: but mean: God, make sure I get this job.
Abraham really meant it. If God’s will meant leaving home and everything he knew he would do it. If it meant killing his beloved son, he would do it.
As I’ve already said I miss worshipping in French. So I ahve been using some French in my prayers lately. One of my favourite French prayers is by Blessed Charles de Foulcauld, a hermit priest who died early in teh twentieth century and will soon be formally named as a saint:
The paryer begins Mon Père, Je m’abandonne à toi. My Father, I abandon myself to you.
It’s an impossibly hard paryer to really mean.
Father, I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you: I am ready for all, I accept all.
Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures – I wish no more than this, O Lord.
Into your hands I commend my soul: I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands without reserve, and with boundless confidence, for you are my Father.
An impossibly hard prayer to mean. But really all it does is extend that clause of the Lord’s Prayer: Thy will be done.
That is Paul’s faith, that is Abraham’s faith. Total abandonment to the divine will.
This picture of Issac reminds us of nothing ore, but nothing less than all the crosses and crucifixes in this building. It is the sign of abandonment. The sign of giving ourselves totally and utterly to God.
This is the heart of the Christian faith. This is what Paul understands: It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.
Forget sterile arguments about faith versus works. Pauls’ understanding of Abraham is utterly simple. As simple as the faith of a child. Into your hands I commend my spirit, my life my all. Je m’abandonne à toi.
This talk used to be available elsewhere and several people have asked me for it recently. In the Sodality we are in a review period as we prepare for a new Superior and for the first cohort of life commitments (which will new in 2022). It seems appropriate therefore to post this here for reference. I put this talk on my then blog, there was. amigo response which led to organising the first gathering at St Saviour’s, Pimlico and after that the creation of. aFormation Group who wrote the Manual together. And thus began the Sodality …
A talk to the Southwark Chapter at Trinity All Through School, Lewisham on Wednesday 14th January, 2015 Fr Richard Peers SCP UIOGD
Father David (our co-Rector) has suggested that we reflect on our Rule and life as a Society. I hope you will forgive me for doing so in my usual forthright, headmasterly manner; even though I do feel a little trepidation in the presence of some of our founders. I suggested a ten minute talk which he thought wasn’t quite long enough; so blame him when you look at your watches.
It is not good, the accepted wisdom has it, to label people. Clergy don’t like to be labelled. Or they claim so many labels that they become meaningless, everyone seems to be a ‘liberal catholic with charismatic tendencies and an evangelical love of the bible’ or a ‘liturgy loving evangelical with a celtic hinterland’.
So let me be clear: I like labels, I am happy to claim a few for myself and when it come to ‘churchpersonship’ mine is pretty clear, I am an Anglo-Catholic. That is to say I am an Anglican who looks to the great heroes of our faith in the Oxford movement and the ritualist pioneers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I delighted in being a parish priest and then school chaplain in the same patch of Portsmouth where Father Dolling had ministered. Where he built the magnificent mini-basilica that was St Agatha’s (now a church of the Ordinariate) and from which he fled when his bishop opposed the erection of a requiem altar. I delighted in serving my title in the biretta belt along the south bank of the Tees, where the Catholic faith was strong and a minibus collected the clergy for all the deanery patronal festivals and delivered us home gin-soaked, following the after-party.
Back in those heady days of the early 90s I fully expected to become a member of the Society of the Holy Cross following in the footsteps of my hero priests. We used the Roman Rite, we prayed the Divine Office from the Breviary and we considered ourselves priests of the latin rite hoping one day to be re-united with the successor of Peter. In addition to daily Office and Mass; daily Rosary and meditation were part of the priestly life we were signed up for. Deep devotion to Our Lady and to the saints were the backbone of who we were.
The ordination of women has forced many of us to take positions. But the positioning of the catholic organisations since then has followed a division in the catholic movement that dates to an earlier period and perhaps has always been present. The division between the Sarum and Roman forms; the division between the Percy Dearmers and the Father Tooths.
For those of us who feel most comfortable with, for want of a better word, the ‘Romanisers’, but who believe profoundly in the ordination of women and equal marriage, there is a key question: Where is home?
SCP has clearly inherited the Dearmer style of Catholicism. All organisations are coalitions; span spectrums of belief and practice; but is this Society wide enough to include people like me? Many of my friends, many members of the Society have said to me in one form or another over the years ‘it’s not catholic enough for me’. I have had a few conversations about forming another grouping of Catholic clergy, a more devotionally minded sodality. Perhaps there is room within the Society for some such sodality? Or perhaps the Society itself can change and grow to provide enough for the needs of those like me who look to a more Anglo-Catholic, even Anglo-Papalist position.
It is well known that in education there has been, certainly since the 1970s, a predominant mind-set that was hugely committed to multiculturalism among other things. Superb work was done that challenged prejudice and ignorance and gave many children experiences of other cultures and faiths that they would never otherwise have had. However, the shadow side of this was a watering down, a secularist led agenda that sought to create a neutral, religionless space. To make everyone the same. I’m afraid that many church schools took a similar route, one book about church schools describing them, in its title, as “An Uncertain Trumpet”.
As many of you know we have taken the very opposite path here at Trinity. My great mentor and time of apprenticeship at this was at St Luke’s school in inner city Portsmouth at the turn of the century where I was Chaplain to an amazing Headteacher, Krysia Butwilowska.
All theology is, of course, contextual, and specific. Anglo-Catholicism is tied inexorably, I believe, to the margins; it is an option for the poor and has always been practised, at its best, among and by those on the edge. St Luke’s was very much on the edge, serving the same area as Fr Dolling had served a century earlier. In the same way I am aware that what we do here at Trinity works because we are a black majority school in Lewisham. It works because of the overwhelming influence of Pentecostal christianity on our families and children.
So I would characterise the form of Anglo-Catholicism practised here in a number of ways:
it is pious and sentimental
unapologetic
maximalist
The Mass is at its heart and priestly ministry and vocation are unashamedly a key ingredient – as they must be if we are to be properly ecclesial – the church being an ordered, hierarchical society.
Brother Alois the current Prior of Taizé says that “God wants nothing but that we live intensely.” It is a strong catholicism, an intense catholicism that we seek to live out in the school.
Inclusion has taken, I believe, a wrong turn when it becomes a watering down; a lowest common denominator. Inclusion works best when everyone can most be themselves. The more we are ourselves the more we give others the permission to be themselves. Inclusion does not diminish difference but celebrates it.
At Trinity our Muslim and Hindu families have no problem with what we do. We have an Arabic school for Muslim families that meets here every Saturday. When our Muslim children want a prayer room we provide it. The current Head girl is a Muslim – one with a great devotion, as it happens, to Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta – and Muslim pupils have travelled with us regularly to Taizé where we provide a tent for them to use for prayer, although they are also expected to join in the community prayer as well – so a mere 8 prayer sessions a day for them.
I am second to no one in my affection and respect for our former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, but like all of us he is a man of his time and I think he has been unduly influenced by the multiculturalism of the last part of the twentieth century. In an introduction he once wrote for the Society of Catholic Priests he said:
“Anglican clergy identifying themselves as within the Catholic tradition used to have all sorts of ‘tribal’ habits, in dress, speech and style of life, to set them apart from those they thought of as less enlightened. No-one is going to regret that we have begun to grow up a bit in that respect.”
Well, perhaps I haven’t grown up, but I do regret that passing and I think it is to our detriment. The human need to belong is profound and deep. Gangs attract teenagers precisely because they give a sense of belonging. A place to belong is nothing more than a home, a family in which we can genuinely grow and flourish. It is a mark of the Incarnation that all human existence is specific, it belongs to a time and a place, it owns its culture and community.
This is really the heart of inclusion, that we accept and celebrate difference and diversity; we do belong to different groups and clubs; to some extent these are exclusive; but we are richer for that. Inclusion would mean nothing at all if it didn’t involve difference. We might even consider the possibility that the arrangements required to pass the legislation on the ordination of women is itself God’s will, an opportunity to test our inclusiveness.
Perhaps part of the problem – if there is one – is that our Society is just too establishment. One of my favourite and one of the most influential books for me as an educator is Teaching As a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner. Anglo-Catholics were always subversive, perhaps we have become too comfortable, too used to promotion and acceptability. Perhaps we need to fight a few battles?
I think we do need to because I don’t think the key battles have been won. In fact I think we have capitulated on some of the victories that our forebears in the Catholic movement won at such a price.
So let me try to be a little more specific in thinking about what would make our Society or some sort of sodality within it a place where I felt more at home:
First and foremost a recognition that Anglicanism is a current that flows within western, catholic, Latin-rite Christianity. We’re not ‘a church’; the Archbishop is not a Patriarch. Lets look forward hopefully to the day when he or she will once again receive the pallium (displayed on the archiepiscopal coat of arms) from the Bishop of Rome.
This fundamental orientation is one shared by the ecumenical community at Taizé who look to the proper exercise of the universal ministry of Peter.
Our liturgy is a liturgy of the Latin rite. Even Cramer’s Communion service is clearly such. So let’s not be afraid of that rite. Like our forbears in the Catholic movement lets use as much of that rite in its current, ordinary form, as we can. The Divine Office is not only a much more convenient way of praying time it also unites us with the whole western catholic church and provides a lifetime of reflection on the catholic faith.
Lets acknowledge that our liturgy is deficient in some ways: all those collects for saints days that treat the saints as mere examples and not as friends in heaven interceding for us constantly. The lack of intercession in the Eucharistic Prayers; the weak sacrificial language.
Lets not be afraid of piety, sentiment and devotion.
Lets not give up our birthright: the daily Mass, sacramental confession, reservation, exposition and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Lets fight for an increase in devotion to the Mother of God.
Lets be radical in our politics.
Lets explore what a healthy priestly spirituality would look like. A truly sacrificial life for ourselves and our families. Here, as in other areas we can learn much from our evangelical brothers and sisters who are not embarrassed to make their homes and families part of their Christian, public ministry.
Lets not be afraid to be teachers of the faith; again, this is another area where I think we can learn from Evangelicals. If we believe that the Catholic faith is the best possible manifestation of Christianity we need to teach people how to be Catholics. The technology of prayer and liturgy: genuflection, the sign of the cross, prayers to be learnt by heart. Catholic teaching on the sacraments and the moral life. We should not be content to leave people as they were but to change their lives and behaviour. I am a great believer in the Religious life and in the vocation to celibacy; but we need to teach that Marriage is the normative and best way to live a life. That marriage is sacrificial and hard, that love is about choices. We can’t be inclusive of every lifestyle. The mis-use of sex damages lives and with money, food and power are the areas where we are most flawed and subject to sin.
A recognition that we are called to leadership and must negotiate the difficult art of exercising power without being embarrassed or ashamed.
I suppose what I am saying is that we do the ‘liberal’ bit quite well. Although I would argue that I am not a liberal and that the ordination of women and equal marriage are highly traditional. I am by nature a conservative and it is that part of what we do as a society, our catholic life, that I am concerned about. All sorts of attempts at renewing the catholic movement have been attempted, Anglican Catholic Future being the latest but none of them have captured hearts and minds, none of them have gained traction because they are simply not devout enough. It is our life of piety that needs renewing so that our public life of radical politics can bear fruit.
In retrospect I suspect that the pontificates of Benedict and Francis will need to be seen together:
– From Benedict we need to take some elements of the reform of the reform. The Roman Canon was of utmost importance for many Anglicans in the Catholic movement, I have often celebrated Mass from Missals designed to interpolate the Prayer Book Mass and the Roman Canon. With its deep chiastic structure in which intercession, sacrifice and the communion of saints draw us into the Eucharistic mystery; we are impoverished if we forget it. The Roman Canon is the prayer of Augustine the first Archbishop of Canterbury, and – although the trendy faux liturgy books would hardly suggest it – the Prayer of the ‘Celtic’ christians.
– Eastward celebration another key aim of the Catholic movement dating back to the 17th century is also something we should not forget as it is re-discovered by many Roman Catholic Christians. A Vatican II Catholic, I didn’t discover it until I was a school chaplain in Portsmouth and had to use the parish church for Mass for a while, that Evangelical Parish only had one altar, pushed against a wall. What amazed me is that children preferred it, particularly the boys. All that eye contact and performance is not what they wanted. I now find it suits my introvert nature and is a calmer and more contemplative way of presiding at the liturgy.
– From Francis we need to be reminded of the political vision of the Catholic movement in the Church of England. We must seek an alternative to the un-restricted capitalism of our time if the planet, let alone the human race are to survive. Francis will soon make protection of the planet a key element of his papacy. We should do the same.
– But also we could learn from Francis a deep, traditional Catholicism full of Latin American piety and devotion. His devotion to Our Lady Untier of Knots is one that we Anglicans who tie ourselves in so many knots could well emulate. I have a prayer card and leaflet for each of you on this important devotion.
The founders of our Society were largely priests who had been formed in the Society of the Holy Cross. I have copied for you the Rule of that Society, many who have joined later may not be familiar with it. I wonder if we could learn a little from its emphasis on personal sanctification and the Mass? Perhaps we could even share with them further development of what it means to be a holy priest. How we seek to convert our own individual sinfulness. Perhaps we could invite one of the brethren of that Society to address us on just that subject; share in the things we can share: Rosary, Stations of the Cross, Office, perhaps even Benediction.
Looking at the Rule of SSC I am conscious of the heavenly patronage it claims for itself: St. Mary at the Cross; St. Vincent de Paul; St. John Mary Vianney, the Cure d’Ars; and Charles Lowder. Yet for us in the Society of Catholic Priests who are our heavenly patrons, who intercedes for us daily at the throne of grace?
One of the phrases I like most from Teaching As A Subversive Activity is that we should teach children to develop an inner ‘crap detector’. I have now spent most of my adult life working with teenagers. It is a total joy and delight. They have so much energy; they cut through so much crap; they have such an instinctive sense of justice and injustice. Before I began work here as Head Master I visited many Pentecostal churches, I saw at once that Anglo-Catholicism and Pentecostalism feed from the same spring. They really believe it. They really feel it. They are unapologetic. They are also intensely ordered and visual communities. I hadn’t seen a figure of 8 procession in church for years until I visited one of our local African churches.
Working with teenagers, vocation is a huge part of what we do. Abbot Christopher Jamison former Head Master and Abbot at Worth once said that enabling children to discern their vocation was the key task of schools.
I worry that the key public models for priesthood are so dire. Which aspirational teenager, let alone which black aspirational teenager, would want to be like the Vicar of Dibley or The Reverend Adam Smallbone?
I think these two dire characters are indicative of a deeper problem with our spirituality of priesthood, and perhaps of the Christian life. It is a spirituality of woundedness or brokeness. I’m afraid the writings of Henri Nouwen are saturated in this. It is ‘victim’ like obsession with the wound and very far from a fully adult acknowledgement of sin; our flaws and guilt; or an adult recognition that suffering, pain and unsatisfactoriness are part of every life, every day. Here we need to turn to Saint Paul, especially 2 Cor 12:9, he makes it clear that in our weakness God is strong, God actually says to him “My power is made perfect in weakness.” The point is not the weakness but the power, and that it is God’s, not ours. Again I think we could learn much about powerful leadership from evangelicals. At Trinity we attempt to teach our young people to be powerful men and women; but never to rely on themselves. I hope one day we will produce powerful catholic priests and Religious.
Many of these problems have their origins in person-centred, Rogerian counselling. One of the things that is at the heart of what we do here at Trinity is to reject ‘child centred’ education. We are a God centred community. This is a totally orthodox theology: human beings only make sense when we are oriented towards God and not to ourselves.
Having suggested some areas which I think we, as a Society, could reflect on, I would like to conclude with three of the things I think we do best:
the monthly prayer list of this Chapter is hugely significant; to pray for one another
concelebration: this really is one of the fruits of Vatican 2; it teaches us that our priesthood is never our own; always derived from our bishop and ultimately from Christ our High Priest
hospitality: our fellowship over lunch or supper is warm and genuine; our fellowship and friendship to one another in the Society is a strength to build on
I am in no way disheartened. In the ebb and flow of the various parts of the Anglican tradition our Catholic movement has been ebbing for some time, but God, as we know, is never unfaithful, in his good time, if we are faithful, there will be renewal. May we as a Society be renewed in priestly holiness; may Our Lady Untier of Knots help us to deal with the complexities of life in our church and in our world with great humility, simplicity and love.
We are an Easter people and alleluia is our song. The Resurrection is at the heart of the Christian faith. Baptism is our entrance into Resurrection living. Eucharist is our renewal of Resurrection in our daily lives, our food for the Resurrection journey. Yet for many Christians the Cross has become a fixation, not a tree of life but a permanently occupied place for the victim. One of my issues with the popular phrase ‘wounded healer’ is that it emphasises the wound, which is not a scab to be picked over, but like the scars of the crucifixion on the Risen Christ a sign of victory.
Livestreaming on Facebook during the first lockdown from my little lean-to chapel I was fascinated by the numbers of people watching or at least popping in. One of the most popular liturgies was a Resurrection Vigil which I celebrate each Saturday evening in Ordinary Time and Easter in place of the Night Prayer of Compline. I had been doing this for some years. Livestreaming gave the opportunity to think about this liturgy and I write briefly about it here and here. This post is a reworking of that material with the current update of the Resurrection Vigil booklet,
My first experience of a Resurrection Vigil was on a Saturday night at a camp site in the Brecon Beacons. I was on a week’s walking holiday along with other young people from parishes belonging to Douai Abbey, I must have been fifteen or sixteen. We had prayed Compline together (and Mass each morning) all week and on Saturday evening sat around the camp fire and sang songs from the Charismatic song book ‘Songs of the Spirit’, read a resurrection narrative, chanted a psalm or two and were sprinkled with water which one of the priests present had blessed. I was entranced. Not least by the marshmallows and hot chocolate that we enjoyed afterwards.
I have never been able to pray Compline on a Saturday night in the same way since. It seems totally inadequate as a way of preparing for Sunday.
A year or so later I was at Taizé in France for the first time and was equally entranced by the Saturday evening prayer there, repeating alleluias, the lighting of candles by everyone present. Having stayed up much of the previous night in prayer ‘around the cross’ I was transfixed by this celebration of the Risen Jesus and felt his presence very strongly.
Since those years I have experienced Resurrection vigils with numerous communities, tried various forms of it at home – sometimes in the garden around a fire, or at the dining table – and shared simple liturgies of Resurrection in many parishes and with groups of pilgrims and young people in a variety of contexts.
I have added below a form of Resurrection Vigil that I am currently using in my little Oratory in the basement, the sacro speco at home in the Sub Deanery. It works for me, you might want to do something else. As usual I stopped doing this during the Advent and Christmas season but for various reasons really missed it this year. In fact I have decided to continue celebrating it during Lent this year. Perhaps all the gloom of lockdown is just too much. We certainly need Resurrection. So the new booklet includes chants for use in Lent without the Alleluia.
One of the problems with the liturgical year can be an over literalism around a sort of ‘play acting’ of the mysteries which the liturgy celebrates. As if Jesus is not born until 25th December, as if he is not Risen until the final night of Holy Week. Fr Aelred Arnesen formerly of the now closed Anglican Cistercian Ewell Monastery in West Malling writes very strongly of this. He wouldn’t even approve of my removing the Alleluia in Lent:
“The recent trend in liturgical reform is backwards. The Christian life is to be seen as a journey towards God in the course of which we devote a portion of each year to what has been called ‘liturgical realism’, emptying out the sense of the real presence of Christ with us until we reach Easter. According to the tradition one must not sing alleluia during Lent! This has stood gospel on its head.”
The Resurrection is the central fact of the Christian faith, celebrating it, being familiar with the gospel accounts, reflecting on the Patristic commentaries on the Resurrection is a wonderful way to keep this central fact central to our lives. Celebrating a Resurrection Vigil also gives shape to the week, along with memorialising the Crucifixion each Friday and observing fasting and abstinence on Fridays. Doing this has been a blessing to me, I hope this will bless you.
Let me end with more strong words from Fr Aelred in another of his essays (do take time to visit the Ewell website where you can read a number of Allred’s papers and also see and download the beautifully simple liturgy used by the community there:
“First of all, taking our cue from the early beginnings of the calendar when the annual Easter celebration and every Sunday were the only commemorations, it is essential to return to Easter as the single focus of our worship in the year. While the pre-reformation understanding that the ritual of the various seasons had to be performed correctly so that we may arrive eventually at the celebration of the resurrection at Easter and the gift of the Spirit at Pentecost, in our alternative understanding, every season and every commemoration is irradiated and is given meaning through the glory of Easter. Christmas and Epiphany and the commemorations dependent on those days; the later feasts of the Transfiguration and the apostles and martyrs – all have meaning only in relation to the living Lord who is always dynamically present to the whole church. With Easter as the single focus of the Calendar, Christmas finds its proper level as just one of the events of Jesus’ life, even if one of the most important.”
There is a really excellent essay on time and our relationship to it from Father Hildebrand Garceau, O.Praem here.
“Christ told us ‘about the need to pray continually and never lose heart’ (Luke 18:1).The Church has faithfully heeded this exhortation by never ceasing in her prayer and by urging us to pray:‘Through him (Jesus), let us offer God an unending sacrifice of praise’ (Hebrews 13:15).The Church not only satisfies this precept by celebrating the Eucharist, but also in other different ways, especially by the Liturgy of the Hours. Compared with other liturgi- cal actions, the particular characteristic which ancient tradition has attached to the Liturgy of the Hours is that it should consecrate the course of day and night.“
General Instruction on the Liturgy of the Hours 10
It always saddens me when I hear clergy criticise ‘management culture’. There is a tone to that criticism, and often it is explicitly stated, that ‘we need more theology and less management’. I beg to disagree. I was appointed to my first deputy headship 23 years ago and have worked as a senior leader in schools ever since. My life has straddled the worlds of the church and education ever since. My current post as Sub Dean at Christ Church, Oxford, where we have a school and are, of course, a college of the university, is a wonderful and exciting natural development. However, while I believe that education, and church schools in particular, would benefit from a good deal more theology; the church would benefit from a good deal more good management. I welcome the efforts made to move in that direction.
Essential to all good management is management of time, After my post recently about my pattern of prayer quite a few people asked “how do you fit it in?”, so I thought a little post about time management might be helpful. The first thing to say is that I do not attempt to fit prayer into the day. Instead for me prayer is part of the essential scaffolding of my well-being as important as sleeping, eating, washing, exercise, social time, study and work. I have a particular devotion to St Joseph the Worker, the image of ‘crafting a life’ is important to me; fitting the elements of my life together in a wise, skilful and craftsmanlike way is part of my self-reflection and work with my spiritual director.
Maintaining an accurate and effective diary is the only way I am able to manage my time and maintain any control over it. Looking ahead a couple of years I put holidays, retreats, reading days / weeks and Quiet Days in first. I prefer one long holiday to frequent short ones. It takes me time to wind down. When I was a Head and also when I was Director of Education in Liverpool and given the importance of prayer to well-being, the next thing that went in my diary were prayer times, Vigils, Lauds, Mass, Sext, and Vespers. This was a really good discipline to stop other events taking over. It was particularly important for Sext and Vespers in ensuring that there were gaps between meetings.
I also pray Terce and None each working day. I’ve written before about the significance of the Little Hours (here and here). However, praying these is not in my Rule of Life as ‘of obligation’ so if I have to miss them I don’t beat myself up about that. This is an important point and one I often make in line management of colleagues. We can all do only what we can do in the time available. Committing time to prayer means that time is not available for other things. That is is the opportunity cost and it is a choice I have made. I think I work more effectively and to a better quality because of my prayer.
Another significant point is to remember that we are all sinners. In other words we will all fail. When we establish a Rule of Life for ourselves it is important not to set impossible targets but it is equally important to set aspirational goals. To aim for just a bit more than is easy to achieve. This is a sign of our seriousness.
Seeing our diary as a friend, as a way to plan our time can be helped by using it in our prayer. At my morning intercessions I open my diary and pray through the events of the day. This also helps me reflect on when I will pray the Little Hours and where the gaps are likely to be, just as I will plan when to eat.
The final point I want to make is about the balance of the day. This seems to be the most controversial of my views on time! In modern societies many people get up and start the day relatively late and stay up into the night. However, there is something about the late night / early morning hours that makes them especially privileged as a time of prayer. It may be that it is just to do with not being interrupted by other people, it may even be that we just pray better when we are rested. However, it seems to me that there is also something about those last hours of darkness as they move into the light – a fundamental journey for Christians. In popular speech people often claim to be either a night-owl or a morning-lark. I am not at all convinced that human beings are divided in such ways. It takes some 90 days or so to create a new habit. My own suspicion is that anyone can change their pattern of sleeping and rising. This is important because I don’t know anybody that has a substantial daily habit of prayer late in the evening. So establishing a pattern of early rising is a way of guaranteeing time for prayer. I am not suggesting sleep deprivation but that it would be good to consider shifting the day to get up early and go to bed early.
Clearly, the pattern of our days depends on negotiation with anyone we live with. I don’t have children. One of the things I am often trying to do is get clergy with young children to write about how to weave early parenthood with prayer. There is remarkably little literature on this. I am very aware that for some couples with or without children, finding time for prayer can be a significant cause of unhappiness and resentment. The negotiation around this will need to be approached in the same spirit as any other area of life. Prayer is important but it can’t be privileged against all the other demands of life but needs to be balanced with them. My own partner has seen the importance of prayer not just for me and my work but for us as a couple. He will often remind me to pray and comment on my looking better afterwards! I think unselfconsciousness about prayer helps. Jim is used to me praying aloud, in the car as he drives, in the house and on holiday. It is woven into the fabric of our lives.
I have a regular pattern to my working days and days off that it might be helpful to describe in some detail for anyone interested:
4am My alarm goes off Monday to Friday. I shower, make two cups of black tea and empty the dishwasher before heading into the cellar (the sacro speco). I will briefly check emails and Twitter and as I prepare the books for Vigils may Tweet some of the texts.
4:30am Vigils: 45 – 60 minutes
c 5:15 two more cups of black tea made to be drunk after Mass
c 5:40 Mass
c 6:00 lectio on the day’s gospel
6:30 to the Cathedral for intercession and Silence at the shrine
7:15 Morning Prayer
7:30 Mass in the Cathedral
8:00 Prime
The desk day starts with emails, reading for the day etc, I will normally have looked ahead in the day to when I will pray Terce, Sext and None, aiming for 9:45, 12 and 13:45 for these but fitting them around the meetings of the day, allowing 10 minutes for each of these.
18:00 Evensong in the Cathedral
Compline: sometimes I will pray this straight after dinner, or even, if we are going out and likely to be late back before dinner. I normally end Compline by reading the Gospel of the following day and doing the first two stages of the traditional four of lectio divina. In particular I may look up commentaries etc. I find this helps distract me and to relax from the stresses of the day! I aim to be asleep before ten and achieve that on most days.
Rest Days and Holidays: No alarm and usually sleep for 8-9 hours (rather than the 6-7 on other nights). Morning Prayer prayed whenever the morning reaches that point. Mid-Day Prayer and Mass normally celebrated before lunch and Office of Readings after lunch, Vespers and Compline when they fit with other activities.
Sundays: alarm at 6am and the remainder of the day pretty much as on other working days.
“By tradition going back to early Christian times, the divine office is devised so that the whole course of the day and night is made holy by the praises of God. Therefore, when this wonderful song of praise is rightly performed by priests and others who are deputed for this purpose by the Church’s ordinance, or by the faithful praying together with the priest in the approved form, then it is truly the voice of the bride addressed to her bridegroom; It is the very prayer which Christ Himself, together with His body, addresses to the Father.”
Wednesday was Cathedral Evensong when I was at Theological College. The day there was no Office in the college chapel in the evening and we all attended Evensong at Chichester Cathedral. With the arrogance of youth I often didn’t take the opportunity to learn about the Anglican choral tradition and bunked off Evensong to pray Evening Prayer in my room with friends. Being an audience to the choir was not worship in my naïve view.
There’s an irony, therefore, in finding myself Sub Dean at Christ Church in Oxford. Although I should point out in fairness that I was substantially converted to the joys of the Cathedral tradition by a couple of years as Chaplain at Portsmouth Cathedral and St Luke’s School. The Precentor at Portsmouth provided me with the music for all the anthems sung and gently introduced me to the repertoire.
Adjusting to praying as a member of a Cathedral Chapter has been less difficult than I expected. Far from it, it is one of the greatest joys of being here. I love being part of this praying community. We pray Morning Prayer using Common Worship Daily Prayer and the usual lectionary. Evensong is prayed with BCP texts, the ‘pillar’ lectionary, and a single psalm or part of a psalm. It is a rich experience and the music is simply stunning. However, the jumping around Scripture of the Additional Lectionary (designed to suit those for whom any Office might be completely stand alone) and the relatively small amount of psalmody is frustrating. I knew that I would need to supplement this and create a more constant track to accompany it.
I pray the Little Hours each day, using Psalm 119, Compline and a Vigil Office. Vigils is an opportunity to build a little more consistency and quantity into my praying of the psalms and reading of Scripture. I began by trying to use Common Worship Daily Prayer for Vigils so that I would at least be using only two translations of the psalms but as I have written elsewhere on this site the CW psalms are a very wordy translation. I experimented with the 1997 ICEL version (see here), but, as always, I came back to the original Grail version as found in The Divine Office. And quite quickly a form of Vigils has emerged that works for me in covering the whole psalter in no more than four weeks, providing all the richness of the Office found in the Breviary and sufficient flexibility for days off, while also giving consistency.
The booklet I’ve created (see above) indicates what I use for each of the Hours of the day and has the music of the Ordinary. The fundamental arrangement is to pray all the psalms of the day (but not the Canticles) from The Divine Office as three nocturns of a Vigil (Office of Readings, Mid-day without Ps119, and Vespers psalms together then Lauds psalms) with the Lauds psalms coming last and heralding the Gospel of the Day. A Gospel Canticle (John 1, Beatitudes or I Am sayings) with the Benedictus antiphon in seasons and on feasts precedes intercession. This means that on rest days or holidays praying The Divine Office with the Office of Readings after lunch, works really well and doesn’t disturb the completeness of the psalter. I am using the one year cycle of Scripture at Vigils as printed in the three volumes of the Breviary but with a somewhat wider range of Patristic readings (from the various collections available for the two-year cycle and matched to the same Scripture reading). There’s a certain lack of consistency in Cathedral worship and this praying of The Divine Office makes up for that, I base my bible study and lectio, as well as study of the psalms on these texts and on the Mass readings (Daily Eucharistic Lectionary) each day. It is very satisfying.
Having a place to pray has always been important to me. It is a great blessing that there are cellars under the house here, the remains of the foundations to what was going to be Cardinal Wolsey’s great chapel which was never built. In one of these rooms I have been able to make a little ‘sacro speco’ for my prayer. The other place I love to pray is the shrine of St Frideswide and I try to get 30 minutes of silent prayer and intercession there each morning. It is not for me as the popular phrase has it a ‘thin place’, quite the opposite, it is thick with the prayers of the centuries, and for me, an almost tangible sense of her presence, this woman whose name means ‘strong peace’ is very strong indeed, and very present.
It is dreary. The same, few places, the same few people – no matter how much we love them.
The endless Zoom calls and tedious Teams meetings.
In 1902 the central European poet Rainer Maria Rilke visited the small zoo in the botanic garden, Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
One of the animals pacing in the cages there was a Panther.
It inspired one of Rilke’s most famous poems. Here is the translation by Stephen Mitchell:
The Panther
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a centre
in which a mighty will stands paralysed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly —. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
We are not caged by bars. But our lives are caged. The same, few, places, the same few people – no matter how much we love them. The endless Zoom calls and tedious Teams meetings.
But there is hope. Images can enter between the bars. there can be moments of revelation.
Moments of revelation like those experienced by the prophets, like Malachi in the first reading; like the prophet Anna in the Gospel.
By our baptism we are all called to be prophets, priests and kings. You and I are called to be prophets just as much as Malachi or Anna or Simeon.
Malachi is the last of the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures. The final book of the Old Testament in Christian bibles. But he is firmly in Israel’s prophetic tradition. He is the successor of Isaiah and Jeremiah, of Ezekiel and Haggai.
Lots of Christians are disappointed in their prayer lives because they think there is something extraordinary about mystical experiences, about the spiritual gifts, including prophecy. As if these gifts were something strange, something reserved to the famous prophets, to times past.
But just look at what the prophets do. Like the Panther pacing in his cage they get a glimpse of what lies between the bars. They see the world, the actual world, and they read it theologically. They understand it in the context of faith and speak of it with the language of believing.
For Jeremiah it is the boiling pot, for Hosea it is his failing marriage his unfaithful wife (who some of us have been hearing about at Morning Prayer this week). For Malachi it is the refiner purifying gold and silver.
To be the prophets of our own lives is to take the ordinary stuff of our day to day existence and to understand it theologically, to describe it in the language of faith.
So what is the stuff of your life?
How do you spend money?
Who have you fallen out with?
What do you resent?
Who annoys you?
What are the unexpected things in your life?
I heard the Archbishop of York say to a group of priests earlier this year that the most useful thing our Spiritual Directors could see was our bank statements.
Don’t ask God to appear in a blaze of light, ask God what he is telling you in your diary, your emails, how you spend your money.
Over the last few months I have been re-reading Susan Howatch’s novels about the Church of England. They are not especially fashionable at the moment but I recommend looking at them again or for the first time if you don’t know them. They are written in blockbuster novel style and are an easy read, and they are significant.
Howatch is brilliant at showing how impossible it is to understand the reality and complexity of human life in only one way, only one dimension. We need a variety of narratives if we are to avoid self delusion and grow in maturity.
Howatch shows how our personal narratives can be unpeeled like an onion, how our own accounts of ourselves need balancing with other people’s realities. She is superb at illustrating how psychological narratives are profoundly helpful in dissecting our self-delusions and self-centredness. But she also shows the limits of our ability to understand things only rationally and the necessity for religious language and experience. She never says this narrative is true and the other isn’t. For her spiritual realities are deeply true, and so are other narratives. And she is brilliant at exposing power and the shadow that lies behind glamour. For her there are many powers, not all of them good.
On Friday I was the speaker at the school assembly for our Cathedral school – on Zoom, inevitably – and I showed the pupils this statue which I have in the Oratory in the cellar of the Sub Deanery. The Oratory is dedicated to St Joseph and this is a statue of a Sleeping St Joseph. Clearly it is St Joseph asleep, but I prefer to call it the Dreaming St Joseph. In the first two chapters of Matthew’s gospel Joseph has four dreams, take a look, most people can’t list all four.
I encouraged our pupils to enjoy their dreams and pay attention to them.
Anna and Simeon were dreamers. They had dreamed the dream of a Messiah.
Like all dreamers they were ready for the unexpected. They had eyes that could see when Jesus was brought into the temple. They had beginner’s mind. They were open to possibilities.
To be a dreamer is to be open to our imaginations, to be those who trust the many layered nature of reality, the multiple narratives we need to make sense of our lives; to allow ourselves to be changed and transformed.
To be a dreamer is also to be open to the horror of life. When Simeon looks through the bars he sees the sword that will pierce Mary’s heart.
If your prayer seems dry, if you are not glimpsing the world beyond the bars; use your imagination. Don’t worry so much about whether it is just your imagination; ‘just’ is such a poisonous word; allow God to speak to you through that imagination. Imagine God speaking to you.
Like Susan Howatch allow yourself the possibility that there are many ways of describing the reality of your life. reflect on your life prophetically. Abandon the lie that events are random and meaningless and imagine that all the events of your life reflect spiritual realities.
Anna and Simeon were ready and prepared. It can’t simply be that they had not thought of the presence of God in their lives until this day in their old age when ker-pow the messiah appears. They were ready for the Messiah, ready to meet Jesus, ready to recognise him immediately because they had been looking for God in every event of their lives. Every encounter, looking for him, finding him and seeing him.
To live without this spiritual muscle, is to see only the bars of our cages. Not just the cages of lockdown but the cages that diminish and hinder our lives at all times. It is as if our mighty wills are paralysed. Our powers bound.
Dear friends, my prayer for you this week, for all of us is that we will dream dreams; that in our prayer our imaginations will run wild. And that in the cage of this lockdown the images you see between the bars will plunge into your hearts.
St John writes: We declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Christmas in a time of pandemic. Christmas when the world seems dark and the news full of shadow. Christmas when we hear as we did in this church just two days ago the great prologue to John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word …” and the good news that the darkness does not overcome the light.
And the first Chapter of the first letter of John deliberately echoes that prologue, with its themes of light and dark. Its mention of the beginning.
This Christmas I’ve been re-reading Lord of the Rings where the themes of light and darkness, and the struggle between good and evil is so strong.
It is, of course, a deeply consoling book. Good does triumph, the One Ring is destroyed, Sauron is vanquished.
There is consolation in the elves, the ancient ones, even in the Ents, those slow moving trees. And homely wisdom in the Hobbits. Not least in the grounded Samwise Gamgee, Frodo’s friend. Describing the darkness of their time Samwise says:
“In the end it’s only a passing thing, this shadow; even darkness must pass.”
But I want to think about another theme in 1 John 1 which we have just heard and which finds a strong echo in the title of the first volume of Tolkien’s story: “The Fellowship of the Ring”.
We know the word fellowship well. We use it here in this church every day at the end of Evensong when we pray the grace: the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
It has a more technical meaning in this House and in academic life generally. But in the New Testament this is one of those occasions when we have to go back to the Greek to really understand how crucial, how significant this word is.
It translates, of course, the Greek KOINONIA.
It’s not a word that appears much in the Gospels, just a cognate once each in Matthew, Luke and Acts. But Paul uses it extensively and intensely to describe the relationship between Christians and between Christian churches.
Here in 1 John there is something really quite extraordinary. The use of koinonia to describe the internal relationships of the Trinity. That of the Father and of the Son and the participation of the author and his readers in that koinonia.
The word can be translated in many ways. The Latin communio is often used, and in the current translation of the Roman Catholic Mass where the Grace may be used as a greeting at the beginning of Mass it is that Latinisation which is given. koinonia means a sharing in, participation, a partnership.
Nicholas King a Jesuit across the road at Campion House uses communion in his excellent translation of the New Testament, but suggests in his notes that it can also be translated as fellowship, union, partnership, community and solidarity.
I’ve been struck by the number of people who were deeply moved by the Queen’s speech this Christmas day. One phrase has been much quoted on Twitter: you are not alone.
This is the heart of the meaning of the word koinonia. By our baptism we participate in the life of the Trinity; we have a share in the divine life. And our relationships with each other as Christians are made of the same stuff as the relationship between the Divine persons.
Think about how radical that is. When I chat with members of the congregation here on Zoom, or talk outside the porch on Tom Quad, when I meet with my fellow Chapter members, the nature of the relationship is the same as the nature of my relationship with God, and even more startlingly the same as the relationship between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Now this presents us with two problems. The first is that we human beings are difficult; we fall out with each other; we irritate one another; we fall out and disagree. That’s not how we want to relate to God and not, surely, what the life of the Trinity is like.
But there is a second problem that I think is even more fundamental, more serious for us in our mission to the world, our ability to tell people the good news of Jesus Christ. It is the existentialist lie. The untruth that we are somehow individuals, that we are alone. This untruth undermines all Christian doctrine, most fundamentally the incarnation and redemption. Which simply lose all meaning if we are not all intimately connected by our common human-ness which God in Jesus has come to share in. His death and resurrection have an effect on me because we share in common humanity.
And this common stuff, this human-ness of which we are made precedes, of course, the incarnation. It exists because of creation, “In the beginning” as St John says, “without him, was nothing made that was made”.
I have been teaching the practice of Mindfulness meditation to children for over 20 years. Over and over again children report common experiences: a feeling of kindness; a feeling of connectedness, of belonging, at-homeness, and a feeling of Presence, that there ‘is somebody there’.
None of that should surprise us Christians. We are created in the image and likeness of God. We are hard-wired for God and the pattern of his being is reproduced in ours.
At the Eucharist when a little water is poured into the chalice with the wine many priests pray:
“By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.”
Just as Jesus shares in our human-ness, so do we share in his God-ness. And remember that koinonia has that meaning of sharing, participating in.
In the Queen’s speech she powerfully states a simple truth, we are not alone, we can never be alone; we are always part of something more than ourselves.
This is just as true of Jesus as it is of each one of us. Yes, in his divinity, but also in his, in our humanity. That is why it is so important that John who we celebrate today is loved by Jesus. It is Jesus that is doing the loving. Our ability to love is part of the God-given pattern in our very beings that draws us out of ourselves. It is why the church in these days after Christmas celebrates the saints: St Stephen yesterday, St John today, the Holy Innocents tomorrow. These are the comites Christi, the companions of Christ. When we celebrate the incarnation we are celebrating connectedness and Jesus is the ultimate connected one.
This connectedness is not just an abstract concept. I’ve been thinking about that connectedness a lot in my first four months here at Christ Church. In this building I have felt deeply connected with those whose memorials surround us. The dead who live in Christ.
Deeply connected to those living and working on this site in a time of pandemic.
And deeply connected to the hundreds of people who are part of the Cathedral’s community but who can’t be here. In some ways the grief at not being able to be here makes that connection all the more real. Absence, strangely, can be as much a presence as presence itself.
On Christmas Day Canon Graham organised Mulled Wine and members of Chapter made cakes for some of the international students who have been stranded here at Christ Church this Christmas. The gathering in the marquee in the Master’s Garden covered Egypt, New Zealand, France, Italy, Germany, Poland and probably more. It was a reminder to me of the profound significance of this joint foundation, our being both cathedral and college; and the gratitude of the students a reminder that simple gestures can reflect profound truths. “Micro-ecologies of kindness.” As Canon Graham put it just before the service today.
We don’t know how much longer lockdowns are going to continue, what it is going to be like living with this virus as part of our world. There are certainly going to be many weeks, months in which absence continues to be a reality. But that absence is not disconnection. As our Queen said: we are not alone.
UPDATE 12 noon 11 December – Please see the second version of the booklet above; this includes a very beautiful poem for each mystery by Fr Steven Shakespeare SMMS. I am very grateful to Fr Steven for writing these and to Fr Nevsky for updating the booklet with these and other material.
When I was appointed Head teacher in 2008 I immediately dedicated my work to the patronage of St Joseph the Worker. The ‘worker priest’ movement had always appealed to me. There is also something appealing about St Jospeh as the silent one, the one who dreams dreams but does not speak. Perhaps, for someone like me who uses a lot of words there is a strong element of ‘opposites attract’. The popularisation of the statues of St Joseph the Sleeper also speak powerfully to me. Although I like to think of them more as St Jospeh the Dreamer. Sleep has always been important to me, but as much because I dream vividly as because of the need for rest. Dreams are a way I process things and in which I often hear God speaking – although rarely in ways in which it is easy to understand at the time. The Sleeping Buddha statues of the Thai tradition have also been significant to me in prayer life – at Amaravati in north London behind the main shrine particularly.
Appointed as Sub Dean at Christ Church, Oxford earlier this year I consecrated my work here too to the patronage of St Joseph. This was a community, I knew, that had suffered much over recent years and the still, contemplative, dreaming presence of St Joseph, as well as the craftsman taking great care in his work seemed significant to me. This was re-inforced when a friend said he had rescued a large statue of St Jospeh from a night club in Blackburn and did I want it? Another friend, a sister in the Sodality and priest who lives near Taizé offered to buy me a beautiful icon of St Joseph to be the principle image of the saint above the altar in my domestic Oratory.
When I was offered the job I hadn’t seen the house (all the interviews were Zoomed). A few months later as my predecessor showed me around the Sub Dean’s Lodgings I felt slight apprehension that I would have to use one of the bedrooms as an Oratory – complete with carpet, fireplace and wash-basin! But then he took me down to see the (extensive) cellars and I knew at once this was meant to be. The niches, many rooms and ancient walls – possibly the foundations to the huge chapel Cardinal Wolsey intended to, but never did, build -resonated immediately. On the day we moved in I celebrated Mass for the first time below the house (itself built in about 1670). The presence of Our Lord ever since has had a profound spiritual effect on the house and my work. The chapel is full of heating pipes, electric cables, remains of the internal workings of the house in other ages. Post-industrial chic barely does justice to it. The large (and expensive to run!) boiler keeps the whole space warm and cosy even in these December nights. Th staff here have kindly added additional sockets, sorted out sticking doors and even added a wi-fi point.
Although I call the whole space the Sacro Speco – named after St Benedict’s sacred cave; the Oratory itself is dedicated to St Joseph the Worker. Each day I pray a Vigils office here in the early hours as the dark of night prepares for dawn and at the end I sing the Daily Commemoration of St Jospeh found below. Each Wednesday I offer a Votive Mass of St Joseph and pray the Joseph Mysteries of the Rosary which I conceived of a few year ago.
I am delighted that my friend and brother Sodalist Fr Nevsky, chaplain up the road at Keble College, has extended the brief work I did, and his extended text is posted above as a PDF.
In this year of St Joseph may we all be blessed in our work. May those without work be blessed with work. May those whose work makes them miserable be liberated from their unhappiness. May we all see the spiritual life, our progress towards holiness as the greatest work of our lives and may St Joseph help us to dream dreams, sleep well, and imagine the impossible. May the holy craftsman pray for us as we craft our lives.
My post of a few years ago about the Jospeh mysteries together with the daily commemoration is re-produced below and is available here as a PDF.
Meanwhile here are photos of St Joseph in the sacro speco in Oxford.
Here’s a set of Joseph mysteries that I use and find helpful. I use them with the traditional prayers of the Rosary, but others could be prayed instead. One of the reasons for my own devotion to St Joseph is that we have such a negative attitude to work in our culture and to ‘craftsmanship’; I don’t think we can really educate children if they don’t believe that work is a good thing and that happiness in life might consist of more than winning Pop Idol, the Lottery or becoming a footballer. Joseph’s ‘hiddeness’ is a good counter-cultural symbol. As is his chastity in a society where being ‘a man’ is so coarsely associated with ‘having sex’. Joseph is also a good patron for those who, as teachers or in other roles, look after children who are not their own. Finally, just using the word husband – and I always commemorate ‘Joseph, husband of Mary’ in the Eucharistic Prayer – is good in raising the profile of marriage.
Mysteries of Saint Joseph
1 Joseph descended from David 2 Joseph the Just Man 3 Joseph following a dream takes Mary as his wife 4 Joseph warned in a dream takes Mary and Jesus into Egypt 5 Joseph the Carpenter
Here is a daily commemoration of Saint Joseph that can be prayed after the Office each working day:
Hymn to Saint Joseph Joseph true servant, trusted by the Father, from whom Christ learnt a human Father’s kindness, pray we may know and reverence God at all times in the defenceless. Joseph, true workman, teaching Word incarnate patience and pride in honest labour finished, show us who work, God’s plan for skill and service in every calling
Joseph true saint, your Sanctity unsought for won in you doubt and suffering and struggle, pray we keep faith in every tribulation till God shines clearly.
V. This is a wise and faithful servant. R. Whom the master placed in charge of his household.
God our Father, you willed that your Son, under Joseph’s authority, should experience daily life and human work. By the prayers of Saint Joseph, help us to sanctify the present moment, to be concerned for our neighbour and be faithful to the tasks of every day. hear us, through Christ our Lord.
Saint Joseph, husband of Mary: Pray for us. Saint Joseph, patron of workers: Pray for us. Saint Joseph, the craftsman: Pray for us.
Alternative hymns of Saint Joseph from New Camaldoli, Lauds and Vespers: – A – O hidden saint of silent ways, we do not know a word you spoke; but deeds not words were all your strength when to your calling you awoke.
Come as it might, you heard God’s word and never stopped to count the cost content to be his instrument, and count your reputation lost.
Incarnate Lord, who came to save, show us by Joseph’s prayer anew the secrets of your darker ways; keep us in life and dying true.
-B- We have so little word of you; how hidden, Joseph was your life. yet what you chose to do speaks much, in taking Mary as your wife.
The dreams you honoured led your soul; you never stopped to count the cost, content to listen and to act than fear your reputation lost.
How often had you thought you’d failed the flight by night, the life-long fears? Yet quietly you stood your ground, and, faithful, laboured through the years.
Lord Jesus, formed and fathered well by one so faithful and so free; may we not flee life’s darker days, but live them fully, trustingly.
Last summer, my brother, sister and I sat around the bed in St Gemma’s Hospice in Leeds where our mum was dying. Over the weeks she had been there we had the great gift of being able to visit her daily, and for me the great gift of praying the Rosary with her. No matter how tired or exhausted she became she would push at the beads on the hospital table and I would pray a set of mysteries. Initially praying strongly with me, as she weakened I would hardly be able to hear her say the second half of each prayer until I needed to say the whole prayer for her. Summoned by the staff early on a Friday as we gathered for her last few hours I started on the Rosary. There was no sound, her lips moved to the prayers and Brideshead-like she raised her hand slightly from the sheets as I made the sign of the cross at the start. A couple of hours later her lips stopped moving and soon we noticed that she had stopped breathing. The Rosary was deeply embedded in Mum’s consciousness and, as it became clear her sub-conscious too. When so much else in her memory had fallen away the Rosary remained.
The Rosary has always been part of my life. I remember my grandmother – who I lived with for part of my childhood – praying the Rosary each evening. Sometimes tuning in to Vatican Radio to pray it in Latin. Rosary with her before weekday Masses in her church in Bolsover. Rosary at home with mum. Rosary on camps as a teenager, Rosary at theological College in the chapel and with friends in our rooms; Rosary in the parishes I’ve served in. Rosary with the brothers of the Jerusalem Community in the car driving through the French countryside back to the centre of Paris after their retreat day. Rosary at Lourdes, and Rosary at Walsingham, in the Holy House, and, of course, through the loud speakers at the national pilgrimage.
I’m only going to speak briefly today but I want to do so with some intensity, some considerable conviction because as I get older I find the Rosary is becoming increasingly important as part of my prayer life. Not least because like many others of us it is almost the only form of prayer (with microphone and camera switched off) that I can bear on Zoom and really feel enriched not drained by.
Like many others I probably read too much mystical literature as an adolescent and young man. I imagined that I would attain to the height of Mount Carmel, pass through the Mansions of prayer and by the time I got to my age now be a master of the contemplative life!
Well, it ain’t like that. I am content now to paddle in the shallows of the spiritual life; to enjoy the playful waves not of a crashing sea but of a quiet day on the beach. My prayer life is definitely of the bucket and spade variety with an occasional ice-cream. I am more than happy to leave the depths to others or until such a time that God calls me.
I want to do two things today. To make some simple suggestions for the way we pray the Rosary as a community and as individuals and to do so by recommending we all read a short text, an Apostolic Letter of Pope St John Paul II: Rosarium Virginis Mariae. I have put a PDF version of the whole text in the files on our Facebook group and also a shortened version with some key phrases highlighted by me.
My Twitter profile at the moment includes three two word phrases that have appealed to me for some time as I consider my Christian life and seek to be:
Jesus- centred
Spirit-filled
Bible-based
I believe the Rosary is all these things.
Near the end of his letter John Paul II writes:
“The centre of gravity in the Hail Mary, the hinge as it were which joins its two parts, is the name of Jesus.”
The Rosary is hinged on Jesus, centred on Jesus. The opening prayers and each Mystery include the prayer that Jesus taught. And to be Jesus-centred is to be profoundly a person of the church,
“The Our Father,” Pope John Paul writes, “makes meditation upon the mystery, even when carried out in solitude, an ecclesial experience.”
And, beautifully, he describes the beads themselves, as physical objects that illustrate this Jesus-centred, ecclesial spirituality. “the beads converge on the Crucifix”.
And “the beads remind us of our many relationships, of the bond of communion and fraternity which unites us all in Christ.”
This is such a beautiful thing for us in the Sodality. Our bonds are in many ways not very substantial, but we are a chain of relationships, now across the world, that I hold on to day in day out as I pray my beads.
The Rosary is Jesus Centred.
The Rosary is Spirit filled because it is contemplative prayer. In it we follow the example of Mary who “pondered these things in her heart”. As we ponder the mysteries of the Rosary it becomes a “way of assimilating the mystery”. It is an act of remembering that creates us as people who are formed in the likeness of Christ because we are what we remember. This is why we can’t pray the Rosary too often. It is a constant work of conversion as it shapes our minds and identities. As its “quiet rhythm and lingering pace” become a “training in holiness”, that phrase alone make sit a suitable prayer for us as Sodalists with our single aim of “growing in holiness because the world needs holy priests.”
As you know charismatic renewal is an important part of my life. The gifts of the Spirit are real and necessary for me. But the Spirit’s gifts are not all fireworks, they include the gift of contemplation, of stillness, of “attentive listening”.
By its rhythms and its concreteness I find the Rosary can bring me to a place of stillness even in times of great stress and anxiety.
The Rosary is Spirit-filled.
The Rosary is bible-based because it feeds into our memories, our identities the great mysteries of the Christian faith, beginning with the creed and extending into meditation on the individual mysteries. The prayers of the Rosary are the “warp into which is woven contemplation of the mysteries.” I really like this image from the Apostolic letter because sometimes, especially when people start praying the Rosary, it can feel like there is too much to do, too much going on. But if we imagine ourselves weaving a strong, and beautiful, fabric using the warp and weft of prayer and contemplation it may help us to see what we are doing. Pope John Paul also addresses the use of the imagination, specifically mentioning the Ignation method of ‘composing the scene’, picturing in as much detail as possible the scene of the Mystery. We can become very words in our prayer and should not be afraid of using our visual memories as much as our verbal minds.
The Rosary is bible-based.
So from these reflections based on Rosarium Virginis Mariae, I want to make some practical suggestions for the way we pray the Rosary together.
In particular I want to reflect on the place of specific intercession – which is so important. Those of us who are familiar with praying the Rosary at Walsingham stood or sat around the Holy House will know what a major part intercession and the lists of those to be prayed for plays in that devotion. But as I hope I have shown intercession needs to be balanced with the biblical-contemplative dimension of the gospel. “No other words can ever match the efficacy of the inspired word.” Pope John Paul II writes of the Rosary.
I also notice that in our Zoom Rosaries we can have a good deal of intercession at each mystery and then requests for prayer at the end of the meeting which means both a good deal of intercessory material and also that we end with material without being able to process it or talk around it. So I suggest that we remove requests for intercession from the end of our meetings entirely and we end with the Hail Mary and Sodality Prayer. At the beginning of the Rosary having made the sign of the cross and recited the creed the leader then ask for any prayer requests.
We hold these in silence before moving to the mysteries.Individual intentions for each decade are still possible on occasion thus combining the specific intercessions of our community and the intentions offered by the leader of the Rosary. But while there may not always be intercession for each mystery there ought always to be Scripture and silence.
It may also be appropriate at the end of the Salve Regina before the versicle (Pray for us Holy Mother of God etc) that a time of silence be punctuated by anyone calling out names of those to be prayed for as they wish. I think this can work quite powerfully on Zoom. That way the time after the Rosary is for conversation and news and does not end on too undigested a heavy note.
There are other elements that John Paul II suggests which used judiciously might enhance our praying of the Rosary:
Scripture
Every praying of the Rosary should involve some reading of Scripture; there are lots of Rosary books around with shorter and longer suggestions, and these can be found online as well and can be used before each mystery.
Silence
Each of these Scripture readings could profitably be followed by a period of silence, not just a moment but a minute or two.
Prayers
Additional prayers often in Collect format can enrich our understanding of the mystery and usefully follow the Glory be …
There are also many other short meditations that can be used without adding huge amounts of time to the Rosary. Fr Steven Shakespeare and I are hoping to work on some of these, he is writing poems and I am compiling other material – I hope that now the first few months of the new job are done I can find time to work on that. I often mention Bishop David Konstant’s Mysteries of the Rosary as a great source of material.
I don’t want to suggest overwhelming the Rosary or extending our time too long but I think some light tweaking of our prayer would be helpful. Pope John Paul II talks of the ‘sobriety’ of the Rosary and the ‘noble simplicity’ of Latin Christianity should be respected. But I do want to encourage some light creativity!
Most of all I want to thank the 20 or so new members admitted today and next week (in Australia and New Zealand) and all Sodalists for committing to this community in which the Rosary has found such a natural home, or rather in which we as a community have found our natural home.
“If ever I come to the end of a day without having said the Rosary,” Blessed Columba Marmion declared, “I confess that I feel disappointed.”
I hope that each of us will find deep joy and satisfaction in being faithful pray-ers of the Rosary.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
A poem, by the British Australian poet Kevin Hart:
It’s not too late, Dark One,
For you to come
And have me close
And stay an hour or two,
It’s not too late at all
For you to slip
Past fossil light
And quickly touch my hand.
It’s deepest night, Dark One,
I look straight up
And won’t be born
Another billion years
If you’re so far away;
Come closer now
So that I taste
Your breath: I have been here
On tiptoe all the night,
And I shall wait
For you, Dark One,
Till all those years are done.
Christmas will soon be here.
We know that the days are still getting shorter, that the darkness appears victorious but we light the candles. The light grows stronger as we light more candles each week of Advent, as we deck our trees with lights. Our homes with Christmas decorations and strings of light.
And yet the darkness grows stronger.
There is light at the end of the tunnel, this terrible year of plague draws to a close with vaccines within our reach; multiple ways of defeating the virus seem possible. We can almost begin to think think that life will be normal again, one day.
And yet the darkness grows stronger, we are told that it will be a hard winter, there will be many deaths. We can’t visit the elderly; we are encouraged not to see family and friends at Christmas.
We’ve just heard from the final chapters of Isaiah of the frustration the people feel. It is sixth century Jerusalem. The rebuilding of the city, the restoration of the temple and its worship are possible. But they have not happened yet. The people are still walking in darkness and even worse God appears to do nothing. “O that you would …” the prophet cries. He cries it because God doesn’t. God does not tear open the heavens, the mountains do not quake, fire is not kindled, the water does not boil.
These are the things the people expected. Wanted. Hoped for.
And they do not happen.
*
What do you expect, want, hope for from God?
How does God disappoint frustrate you? Refuse to answer prayer?
Why doesn’t God act as you would like him to?
God is the one who acts in ways that we did not expect. He acts today, in my life, in yours, in the world, in ways that we did not expect. And do not recognise.
Our great expectations will never be met. God of surprises he has been called.
The unexpected God.
The unknown God St Paul identified at Athens.
Jesus is unexpected. Christmas is unexpected. It’s not the story we would tell of God coming; of God made known. And Jesus tells us how we should live our lives ready for the unknown God, the unexpected God:
keep alert
keep awake.
Jesus is unexpected; he doesn’t give the answers people want; he is not the Messiah they were hoping for; he did “awesome deeds we did not expect”.
To be alert, to be awake is to have beginner’s mind; to be open to possibility; to refuse to be the expert; to swim in uncertainty and to delight in the provisional.
This is where the dynamism of Christian living comes, where the energy of prayer is to be found. This is why God always reveals himself to us when we are waiting; when we are in-between; when things are not turning out the way we planned them; when the paper is blank, the road ahead unknown. When we remember that we are always beginners and never experts.
Is there room for the unexpected in your life as you prepare for Christmas?
As we emerge from lockdown what will you change? What will be different?
This will be an Advent like no other. There won’t be the office parties; the family get togethers; the queuing in shops; the meals out.
It is an Advent we did not expect.
The question is can we allow ourselves to be alert, awake, can we allow ourselves to meet the unexpected God?
Friends, I suggest something quite simple. That you change something about the way you pray.
Perhaps you only pray when things get really bad; or only when you come to church; or even every day just before you go to bed. Whatever you do break those habits and try something different. Make a regular time every day to pray. Pray without expecting anything other than the unexpected. Put it in your diary. An hour before lunch, or in the afternoon or best of all get up an hour earlier, when the world is dark. That special darkness that is giving way to dawn.
I don’t know anyone who has a solid practice of daily prayer, who is growing in holiness who does not spend time early in the morning to pray. Whatever you tell yourself there will be interruptions, appointments, phone calls, emails at every other time of the day.
We say that God is light, but we find him in darkness. He will be born in the middle of the night.
It’s not too late, Dark One,
For you to come
And have me close
And stay an hour or two,
Darkness is a nurturing place; it is the place to escape the overstimulation we subject ourselves to.
It’s not too late at all
For you to slip
Past fossil light
And quickly touch my hand.
This Advent we have a better chance than ever of feeling the touch of God’s hand. Of finding him in the unresolved situations of our life; the time we would have spent at parties; or meals; or preparing for friends and relations.
Keep alert Jesus says,
keep awake Jesus says.
As he did to his friends on that night in Gethsemane when they fell asleep. Keep awake, stay on tiptoe. Be ready.
Dear Mothers, Fathers, Aspirants and friends of the Sodality,
What a year it has been for us as a community. The lockdown has seen extraordinary growth for us in numbers and particularly remarkably our growth internationally. I have always described our charisms as being about joy, friendship, seriousness and diocesan priesthood as fruits of the goal of holiness. It seems to me now that the Lord is leading us to deepen those bonds of friendship that are the Anglican Communion. The friendships that many of us are forging with sisters and brothers around the world will remain one of the many blessings of 2020 for me.
An equally significant blessing for us is Archbishop Stephen becoming our patron. As priests we are servants of the church and called to love the church. We each exercise our priesthood on behalf of our bishop; we are called to belong to a presbytery around him or her. This is a wonderful antidote to the individualism of our times. This link with the Archbishop of York is an important signal of our ecclesial identity; our joy in belonging to this part of the Catholic church. Archbishop Stephen’s personal gifts of joy in his vocation as priest and bishop and confident evangelism further indicate the Spirit’s life in our community.
2019 – 2020 was always going to be a significant year for us because it marks five years since the first members made a commitment to be a community. I am grateful to Liz Jones and Frankie Ward for conducting our review to help us discern the next steps for us.
This will also be the last Foreword to an Ordo that I write. I have always said that I would do just one term as Superior. Moving on to the next Superior will be an important step in the community’s life. I am immensely grateful to the support given me by members of Council, not least Mother Imogen as assistant Superior and Fr Simon as Clerk this year. Thank you too to Fr Sam for his work, significantly on this Ordo which is no small task. Bishop Gregory our Episcopal Visitor has been a great gift to us and to me. His gentle friendship is a source of much joy.
It is impossible for me to state how strongly I believe the Holy Spirit has been leading us in this way we are following and how much joy it brings me. My love of the Rosary and sense of the closeness of Our Lady to me in my priestly ministry have never been deeper. I feel her presence daily at the altar with me just as she stood with St John at the cross. His presence as the beloved disciple is deeply significant for us as priests. Jesus calls each of us his beloved friend and he entrusts each of us to the care of Mary, and Mary into ours. This gift brings tears to my eyes. As we celebrate Mass here in Christ Church Cathedral at the High Altar we do so under the reredos showing Our Lady with St John at the cross. I find it almost unbearable to look at and have to stop myself weeping when I do so. Each of us as priests, each of our dear aspirants in formation for priesthood is stood there gazing on Jesus.
For our year of review Fr Steven Shakespeare wrote these prayers I hope as we prepare for our general chapter next year we will all continue to use them to pray for God’s continual blessing on us.
A Facebook post to members of the Sodality of Mary, Mother of priests, 28th November 2020:
Dear Mothers, Fathers, friends, The final day of an extraordinary liturgical year in which so many of God’s faithful have been deprived of the sacraments. Much is made of the deprivation from communion, but I think also of those who have been deprived of the comfort of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, especially at the point of death; and those who have not received viaticum, food for the journey, as they make the journey to eternal life. I think it is an appropriate time to offer Masses for the Dead more frequently and especially as we can celebrate in public once again. The beginning of a new liturgical year is also a good time to refresh our own liturgical practice and a good point to re-read the two fundamental documents of western liturgy, the General Instruction on the Liturgy of the Hours and the General instruction on the Roman Missal.
Msgr Elliott’s book: “Ceremonies of the Modern Roman Rite” is also essential reading. If these three texts are our common liturgical literature they will help us to celebrate in a standard way when we are together again, God willing, one day. Working on the Liturgy of the Hours it occurred to me to put together the imprecatory or cursing verses that are omitted from the psalter of the Divine Office / Breviary/ LOTH in a little booklet which is available below. It could be used to add them back in or just to reflect on. I often talk of teaching the beginning of Psalm 93/94 to children and of one young man leaving a police station having been stopped and searched and whispering its opening verse to me as we left: “O Lord, avenging God, avenging God appear.” We need to be able to express our anger when we feel we have been treated unjustly. It is human. May the praying of the liturgy bring you deep consolation and the the experience of your soul in communion with God: Abyssus abyssum invocat. (Psalm 41:8) With my love, as always, in the Two Hearts,and every possible blessing for a joyful and consoling Advent, Richard
During the first lockdown I took rather a lot of funerals. Many of the clergy around where we lived were elderly or had health conditions and were shielding. It is always a privilege to be the officiant at a funeral. To seek to pay attention to family and friends, and to the person who died. To weave together a liturgy that reflects that person, that is true to them, that is true to our uncertainties and doubts, our existential questions.
At every funeral that I led in those weeks I was asked to pray one particular text. What interested me was that as I visited the various crematoria where the funerals were held there were a lot of civil celebrants offering not so much humanist or secular funerals but just non-church funerals. the same text that I was using at every funeral, they were using as well. Psalm 23.
When everything else is peeled away this beautiful psalm remains part of our culture, our heritage. It speaks to people. It is a very appropriate psalm for funerals. The image of passing through the valley of the shadow of death speaks profoundly of the need for lament in the face of death and destruction but also offers hope. Death too is a passing over, a journey to something else.
It is also a very suitable psalm for today’s feast of Christ the King when it is set as the psalm for the Eucharist although for Covid reasons we are not having a psalm in our liturgy at the moment. Suitable at the end of this month of November when we have been praying and remembering as we do every year in November, those who have already passed through death’s dark valley.
It is a psalm that I pray daily as part of my thanksgiving after I have celebrated the Eucharist. It is a deeply sacramental psalm. The Eucharist is itself foretold in the banquet that is laid and the cup that overflows; but other sacraments are also present: the still waters of baptism in which we have been incorporated into Jesus, the anointing of confirmation in which we acknowledge the gifts of the spirit, and the anointing of ordination for those of us ordained to ministerial priesthood.
It is of course, a suitable psalm for the feast of Christ the King because it shows us what sort of King Jesus is. Like his ancestor David he is a shepherd-king. A king leading his flock. A shepherd, as Ezekiel tells us in today’s first reading who will rescue his sheep from all the places to which they have been scattered.
And just as the sacramental journey of each Christian rehearses the ministry of Jesus so this psalm shows us Jesus baptised, anointed, gifting us himself in the Eucharist and passing through the dark valley of the shadow of death.
Psalm 23 is a profoundly Jesus psalm. In it we walk the path of redemption, the salvation he has won, the basic doctrines of the christian faith, the thing he has done for us.
As I have prayed this psalm over the years. At funerals, in the daily Office, after Mass there is one line that constantly calls to me. It’s a line that doesn’t normally attract much attention, certainly doesn’t conjure romantic images of fields and ponds and placid sheep idly grazing.
It’s the second line that speak: ‘there is nothing I shall want.’
The hebrew is two simple words: lo ech-sar.
I know how far I am from wanting nothing. My Amazon wish list currently has 62 books on it. I want the house to be warm, good food on the table. I want to be able to go to France again soon. To visit friends in New Zealand. Well, you get the picture. I am a bundle of wants. Like so many prayers I can only pray this line hoping that one day I might be able to mean it just a little bit.
I have been reading the Rule of Saint Augustine over the last few weeks, and I invited you as a cathedral community to join me in doing so. I’ve been commenting on the daily portions on our cathedral blog.
Augustine understands our wanting, our desiring. He might easily be called (dare I suggest in the presence of Canon Harrison) the theologian of desire. Augustine recognises that desire is what leads us to God. Without desire we would not be searchers. But he also understands that we are at our most vulnerable when we follow our desires. God alone can satisfy our desire, our longing. Everything else will leave us desiring more, wanting more needing more. We are like addicts seeking the next fix.
Even if I were to buy every one of those 62 books, do you, do I, think I would be satisfied …?
Today’s gospel paints the inverse picture. The things we don’t want. We don’t want to be hungry, to thirst, to be strangers, without clothing, sick or in prison. Being a Christian is always about facing the truth of these things we don’t want, leaning into them and not running away from them.
And this leads me to another way that helps me understand the second line of the psalm: There is nothing I shall want. How do we lean into the nothing. Not to embrace some fatalist nihilism (the Latin version of this line is, after all nihil mihi deerit) but to find the freedom that is the goal of the Christian life.
John of the Cross the sixteenth century Spanish master of prayer drew a picture of a mountain to illustrate the spiritual life. At the top he repeats the Spanish nada, nothing, over and over again:
“Nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, nada, and even on the mountain, nada.”
The spiritual life has nothing, nada, as its goal.
John writes:
“To reach satisfaction in everything,
desire satisfaction in nothing.
To come to possession of everything,
desire the possession of nothing.
To arrive at being all,
desire to be nothing.
To come to the knowledge of everything,
desire the knowledge of nothing.”
Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book One, Chapter 13
This is what Jesus shows us on the cross. Giving up his God-ness, his divinity, was not enough, becoming human was not enough, even death was not enough, it had to be a shameful death, ‘even death on a cross’.
And in his dying he too discovered that God is nada: “My God, my God why have you forsaken me.”
All my desires, all my wants are for some-thing. But God is not a thing, he is literally no-thing.
Quite often when people speak to me about prayer they say how hard it is, how they struggle with prayer.
As long as we continue our wanting in our prayer, our desiring this or that spiritual experience, we are wanting a thing. When we let go, when we stop struggling, when we embrace the no-thing we will have found nada. God. And that nothing is to be totally free, it is as Augustine knew total grace, total gift.
In your praying today, in your praying this week my prayer for each of us is that we find the true freedom of nada, we find no-thing, we find God.
This is a repost from my old blog. I am still working on version with corrections and improvements but this is what is available so far:
NOTE: I will do a separate blog post about my current use which has more material for an Office of Vigils than in this ‘edition’.
Here is the latest set of music I’ve put together for singing the Office, either Common Worship: Daily Prayer or The Divine Office. It is now a pretty complete collection of music enabling the singing of the whole Office on every day of the liturgical year, allowing for, usually, just three antiphons/refrains for specific days to be used morning and evening and four sets of antiphons for Ordinary time weekdays and Sundays. Apart from the Invitatory, Te Deum and a generic tone for the responsories no provision is made for the Office of Readings. A simple set of antiphons is provided for Prayer During the Day, a complete setting of Compline is given (Worth Abbey except the hymns), the English Anthems to the BVM and many office hymns are by Brother Aelred Seton-Shanley Obl. OSB Cam.
The music mainly comes from:
Worth Abbey, Dom Philip Gaisford
Belmont Abbey, Abbot Alan Rees
Conception Abbey
Laurence Bevénot, in the form provided for the Canonesses Regular of the Holy Sepulchre
With smaller contributions from the Office of the Community of the Servants of the Will of God at Crawley Down, by Fr Colin, and the Society of Saint Francis, by Brother Reginald Box.
There may be other elements I have collected over the years but can’t remember where.
Mostly I have been given permission for strictly private duplication/use so if you want to do more than that please let me know which parts and I will send you contact details.
Many of the CWDP texts are set by me, and, therefore, not as good as the other material! I have set all the short refrains to the psalms from CW but to be honest I think the set in the Mayhew publication Sunday Psalms and edited by Andrew Moore is better, although the texts are not the very short ones in the final version of CWDP. Setting extremely short texts is actually quite difficult, Fr Mark Hartley OCSO of Mount Saint Bernard Abbey produced an excellent set for his community to use as responsorial psalms at Mass. One day – when I retire from full time work – I would like to do more work on this.
There are still more errors than I would like and I hope to do some more work on this in the future but it seems to work.
Do let me know if you use this material and find it helpful and also, of course, if you spot errors/typos/areas for improvement. I am grateful to all those who have proofread this material and particularly Fr Colin CSWG for very helpful comments on earlier editions, I only wish my knowledge and skill with the plainsong modes had made more progress.
In Word format (you will need to install the St Meinrad fonts, which are available for free here): DP 300716
There are likely to be formatting issues if you use the Word format.
The ‘O’ Antiphons from the 17th to the 23rd December for the Magnificat are rightly famous. With their haunting mode ii melody they are a distillation of the longing that is characteristic of Advent. In the Book of Common Prayer calendar they remain as the names of the day even if not in their text.
I really recommend that you make the effort to sing the texts to their original chant. Brother Reginald of the Society of Saint Francis has provided an English version available here. Once you get the melody in your head they are not difficult to sing.
Fr Alan Griffiths a Roman Catholic priest of the diocese of Portsmouth is the compiler of the superb three volume set Celebrating the Christian Year. I highly recommend them. In the Advent – Epiphany volume he provides metrical versions of the traditional texts to be sung to the well known hymn tune “O come, O come, Emmanuel”. He also suggests a tone to sing the verses of the Magnificat to and the singing of the chorus between the verses (see below).
Anglican priest and liturgist the late Jim Cotter, produced a beautiful set of Advent verses that can be sung to the same tune, one for each day from 1st – 24th December. The book form was stunning:
They were also printed as separate cards. Sadly I have sent all my copies as postcards.
I have created a document with all these verses in and the texts of the Benedictus and Magnificat in the Common Worship and BCP (Fr Alan’s suggestion): Cotter O Antiphons.
They are also shown below.
I suggest singing Jim Cotter’s version at Matins with the Benedictus throughout Advent and the traditional forms or Fr Alan’s version from 17 – 23rd December at the Magnificat.
These are profound texts that warrant prayer and reflection.
Expectant: verses for Advent
Jim Cotter
Cairns Publications 2002
‘O Antiphons’ for all the days of December
*
1
O come, O come, thou living word,
and pierce our hearts with healing sword,
from God’s own mouth proceeding far
to lance the festering wounds of war.
Rejoice! Rejoice! To mend our strife
shall come in flesh the God of Life.
2
O come, O come, thou wisdom strange
from deep within God’s womb to range
the earth at midnight’s hour of fears
to make us wise beyond our years.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Our God shall leap
with light that rouses us from sleep.
3
O come, O come, Adonai
in burning bush on Sinai,
the flame that holds us still in awe,
to etch in flesh the living law.
Rejoice! Rejoice! The marks of pain
shall show the law of love most plain.
4
O come, O come, thou Jesse’s tree,
a lifted sign for all to see,
where words of worldly force shall fail,
and earthly glory’s faces pale.
Rejoice! Rejoice! The power of love,
through death shall shine in flesh and blood.
5
O come, O come, thou David’ key,
unlock the gates and set us free.
Descendant of the king of old,
release us from oppression’s hold.
Rejoice! Rejoice! In words that sing
true liberty shall soon take wing.
6
O come, O come, thou living flame
of justice, calling out our name,
in fire our thoughts to clarify,
our wills to sear and purify.
Rejoice! Rejoice! The judge our sore
shall heal, our dignity restore.
7
O come, O come, thou lion brace,
and call the cowering from their cave,
course through our veins with thrilling roar,
inspire with courage, strength and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Together we
the lion, lamb, and child shall see.
8
O come, O come, thou swallow small,
responding to your infants’ call,
fly far and wide across the earth
and end with hope our winter’s dearth.
Rejoice! Rejoice! A tiny bird,
shall show a truth that seems absurd.
9
O come, O come, come, thou cornerstone,
and hold the tensions of your own,
thou keystone of community,
the bearer of humanity.
Rejoice! Rejoice! With arms and face,
the crucified shall all embrace.
10
O come, O come, thou wounded stag,
at home on rugged ridge and crag,
guide us who cut our feet on stone,
and bring us hope, whose bodies groan.
Rejoice! Rejoice! A tender cry
shall smooth our pain and lift us high.
11
O come, O come, thou salmon swift
to leap the ladder ‘gainst our drift,
to bear our sorrows to the source
and find in Love the one true force.
Rejoice! Rejoice! From purest spring
new life the loving one bring.
12
O come, O come, come, thou hidden king
with lightest touch our peace to bring,
with gentle power to reconcile,
and melt away our hate and guile.
Rejoice! Rejoice! The mountain dew
our common clay shall shape anew.
13
O come, O come, thou eagle’s eye,
who from an eyrie does espy
a people choking far below
from heat and fumes of lava flow.
Rejoice! Rejoice! the wings shall gyre
to scoop the desp’rate from the fire.
14
O come, O come, thou haunting sound
that makes the silenced underground,
that gives the dungeoned words hard won
to claim their place beneath the sun.
Rejoice! Rejoice! The voice enfleshed
in word and deed shall free h’oppressed.
15
O come, O come, thou healing host
around whose table none can boast,
who welcomes home the stigmatised,
their rightful place now realised.
Rejoice! Rejoice! By touching hand
together all in God shall stand.
16
O come, O come, thou morning star,
a point of light so singular,
an unexpected hope so bright
that puts our grey despair to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! The radiant dawn
shall soon console the hearts that mourn.
17
O come, O come, thou lover bold,
with warm embrace our flesh enfold;
to love our passion consecrate
that we with you may new create.
Rejoice! Rejoice! the chastener
shall pierce with truth yet melt our fear.
18
O come, O come, appointed one,
to be God’s love for everyone,
to speak on God’s behalf and show
as much of God as we need to know.
Rejoice! Rejoice! A fragrant oil
shall soon anoint for blessed toil.
19
O come, O come, Emmanuel,
God-with-us here and now to dwell,
at one with our humanity,
in whom we find our destiny.
Rejoice! Rejoice! The human face
of God with us shall interlace.
20
O come, O come, thou silent song,
the music of the spheres prolong,
that in our time soon disappears,
yet resonates in listening ears.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Through noises shrill
shall clearly sound a voice so still.
21
O come, O come, thou shaft of fire,
to lead us on through dark and more;
through desert bare thou moving cloud
protect and guide, fulfil what’s vowed.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Our God afresh
the covenant shall soon enflesh.
22
O come, O come, thou child of years,
with laughter to allay our fears,
sound the cosmos dancing light
to give the demons such a fright.
Rejoice! Rejoice! A girl, a boy,
shall leap into our hearts with joy.
23
O come, O come, thou calling child:
the creatures, those both tame and wild,
the weak and powerful, coax along
and change their trembling into song.
Rejoice! Rejoice! The vulnerable
shall make us all insep’rable.
23
O come, O come, thou unicorn,
appearing in our dreams, lovelorn,
expectant, quiv’ring, innocent,
wild messenger with God’s intent.
Rejoice! Rejoice! The Spirit shy
shall come this night with new-born cry.
Verses based on the traditional texts by Fr Alan Griffiths
Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford 1st November, 2020 Eucharist
Fr Richard Peers SMMS
Revelation 7:14:
These are they who have come through the great ordeal.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
How is the new job going?
The question I have been asked most often in the last 8 weeks.
So how is the new job going?
Well, there are a lot of rules, I say.
There is the Blue Book, that is the lengthy document that sets out the rules for those of who live in here at Christ Church.
Then there are the rules for our worship in the Cathedral.
As Sub Dean I read the second lesson at Matins when the Dean is not present, unless I am Canon in Residence in which case I read the first lesson, and the second only if the Dean is not present but I can give away the first lesson to someone else, which is usual, and when I am also Officiant I give away both lessons.
Well, you can see what I mean: there are a lot of rules.
Rules can seem stifling, imprisoning, trapping. It can fee like they asphyxiate the Spirit, the very breath in us, the very breath of God.
I haven’t even mentioned the rules that the Pandemic has caused. Rules which we have struggled to keep up with. How many people are allowed in any house? How many in a bubble? How long should I wash my hands for? Where and when do I need to wear a mask.
We can feel trapped, stifled. We are almost literally asphyxiated, our breathing hampered by these horrible bits of material on our faces. I yearn to tear mine off in church, to speak clearly, to hear clearly.
Rules, can, of course, be oppressive, tyrannical. They can be motivated by a desire to control, to dominate.
But I like rules. We need them, we can’t live without them. We need the rules of the game, of sports and board games to be fair, to enable the game to be played. To keep us safe. We needed the rules of Rugby yesterday when England won, but needed them just as much if we had lost. We need the rules of the American election to ensure a safe transfer of power if Biden wins.
We need rules.
I suppose, it will be no surprise to you that as a former Headteacher I like rules, I enjoy the rules of this House, of this Cathedral.
I am glad to be part of a team of wonderful people who are teaching me the rules.
I love receiving Mother Philippa’s Rubric copies of our worship booklets with the rules in Red.
I loved being able to text her yesterday to remind me if I was doing the intercessions at Evensong and I loved getting her one word answer: Yes.
Rules keep us safe. They keep the chaos at bay. Sitting in the comforting stillness of my stall before Matins begins as my colleagues arrive and take their places I am not panicking, wondering what’s going to come, whether I need to read this lesson or that. Like a smooth, well-oiled mechanism the prayer flows and the Spirit is present.
It is that daily unfolding of prayer that is the real answer when I am asked how the new job is going.
It has been the greatest of joy for me.
The most exquisite experience of rightness, the joy of tumbling into this bubbling stream that has bubbled in this place since Frideswide lived here and which bubbles still.
These eight weeks have been among the most prayerful of my life. This is the easiest building I have ever known to pray in. Kneeling in the Latin chapel I physically feel Frideswide’s presence tangibly next to me.
Places like this are sometimes called thin places, Places where the barrier between the natural and the more than natural is barely there. Thin places is a good phrase. But this is also a place that is thick with the prayers of the centuries, thick with the memories of goodness, thick with the known and unknown, thick with those who will come after us, the centuries ahead when the pandemics of 2020 will be carved into monuments and stones and you and I are long gone.
Rules are important. After Frideswide’s community it was Augustinian canons who lived and prayed in this place; built our oldest buildings; the buildings that are the heart, the core of this place, this cathedral, the Chapter House and the Prior’s House. Preparing to move here and since I have been here I have been praying the Rule of Saint Augustine that was the rule of life of those canons who lived here. It is a beautiful document. Very short, I’ve arranged it so a short paragraph can be read each day over a month. Barely 3000 words in English. Just a hundred or so words a day.
Today we face new rules for the month ahead and perhaps even longer. Rules that are devastating to those of us who love to gather for worship. Rules the like of which we would never have imagined when this year began. Rules designed to keep us safe, to protect us.
Whatever those rules turn out to be in the next few days as bishops and lawyers send us, no doubt, many pages of guidance. Whatever those rules, the stream of prayer in this place will continue. Whether we can gather together in this building, or whether the saints will have to murmur the prayers in here for us while we pray in our homes. Whether it is online daily or weekly. Please in your own homes know that we, you, I, all of us, are praying together. The communion of all the saints is the water we swim in, the air we breathe.
When I meet with my sister and brother Chapter colleagues (on Zoom) in the next few days I am going to suggest to them that we commit to praying two texts in the weeks ahead.
Firstly the Rule of St Augustine. It is a document of its time, it has some wonderfully quirky sections. But it is very beautiful and simple. Please watch out on our website and elsewhere for posts about our praying this or some other text (they may not agree!)
The other text I would like us to pray together is the key section of today’s Gospel, the Beatitudes.
It is one of the most profound and complex texts in the gospels, yet deceptively simple.
Most scholars believe that there were originally just the central eight invocations of the blessed, omitting the final one. It is these eight which form a perfect poem, a canticle to blessedness.
I’ve been praying the Beatitudes at mid-prayer each day for all my adult life. I learnt the habit from the prayer book of the Taizé community in France which I first visited as a 17 year old.
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
for they shall be comforted!
Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake,
for theirs is the kingdom of heav’n.
The Beatitudes are a wonderful rule of life. As we pray them together or at home as we dwell in them, we will be formed and shaped by them. They are a complex rule, they don’t tell us who is to read the second lesson, or how often to sanitise our hands. But they are a rule nevertheless.
A rule can be a tool for measuring. They help us to judge our lives and ourselves.
A rule keeps us accountable to each other and to God.
To what extent am I poor in spirit and meek? Am I really hungering, yearning or justice? Am I always merciful? Am I known as a peace-maker?
Is the kingdom of heaven the start and end of my life, of my day, as it is the start and end of this poem that is the Beatitudes?
Brother Roger who founded the Taizé Community distilled the Beatitudes into a simple statement:
‘Every day let your work and rest be quickened by the Word of God; keep inner silence in all things and you will dwell in Christ; be filled with the spirit of the beatitudes: joy, simplicity and mercy.’
So, this is my suggestion, that as the Christ Church community in the lockdown ahead we think about our common life by praying these texts every day. Whether you are a long standing member of the congregation, one of our wonderful sidespeople, guides, choristers, organists, employees or a member of Chapter. Whether you have just dropped in on YouTube or Twitter, whether you have been here for thirty years or like me just arrived
Dwelling in these words and allowing them to dwell in us.
The limpid simplicity of the Beatitudes, their complex depth, will help us bear the grief of these times, we will be those who mourn the many losses of lockdown and plague. Enduring this we will be those who have come through the great ordeal for Jesus is at the centre of the throne, he is our shepherd and he “leads us to springs of the water of life.”
In this pandemic may Jesus keep us all in the spirit of the Beatitudes, joyful, simple, merciful.
‘Amen!
Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honour and power and might be to our God for ever and ever! Amen.’
19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” Jn 19: 19 – 23
In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Wow.
Wow, Bishop Gregory.
Wow, friends and family watching at home.
Wow whoever you are.
Wow because God is doing amazing things here in the diocese of St Asaph.
Gareth, Sally, Andy, Rachel, Simon, Chris, Susan, Carol, James
It has been so good to spend these three days with you. To see the remarkable people God is calling to priesthood in his church, in this place, at this time.
Jesus died and descended to the dead.
Jesus spent three days in the tomb.
Well, I hope our three days together hasn’t felt quite like that. But I do hope you are feeling resurrection joy now.
As Christians, as priests we are called to be resurrection people.
Ministers, messengers, heralds of the resurrection.
Here we are in this most extraordinary of ordinations, in, I hope, contemplative intimacy; there is a stillness, in this place as if it was evening; there is space around each of us. For this hour you don’t have to be concerned about whether your family and friends made it on time, found somewhere to park or managed to get breakfast before they set off. It is just us, resurrection people, gathered around a table, listening to our resurrection story.
The disciples didn’t know on that evening when Jesus came into the room just what it was to be a resurrection person. It was new to them. New to the world. But we know, every one of you knows. In little ways you have told and shown over the last few days how the resurrection has touched your life; made a difference; changed things.
The doors are not quite locked this morning. But they might as well be, because we are afraid. Afraid of plague, and virus, afraid of infection.
Let’s name it as the poet Gwenallt did in that stunning poem we looked at last night: there is terror in the air.
The winter ahead is going to be hard; the economic effects of this pandemic will make the Great Depression look easy. The person holding the role – as we used to call it – of leader of the free world is in hospital. We are in local lockdown and can’t even visit each other’s houses.
There is terror in the air.
But the pandemic is not really anything new.
It is like dye thrown into water. It reveals what is always there.
It is the human condition to live with terror. We have fooled ourselves for seventy years. That we would be the generations without world war; the generations in which everyone would get just get richer and that economies would just do one thing: grow.
We had a warning in the financial crisis of 2008. And now we have the big one.
But to be human is to live with terror: to know that death is always a possibility.
To know that whenever we make a choice we might be making the wrong one; to know that the good we want to do we do not do; and those things we don’t want to do: we do.
This is the human condition.
And in these strange times look at the gospel we have just read and notice how shocking it is.
He breathed on them.
When you are ordained this morning we will have made every possible effort to make sure that Bishop Gregory doesn’t, can’t breathe on you.
Out there the police have powers to make sure that we don’t do what Jesus did and make our way into peoples homes despite their locked doors.
But, even so, we are resurrection people.
The church has been in terror for decades. Terror as our numbers decline, as we worry about what the future will hold, terror that we will have to close our buildings, that there is no future.
And yet God works. He is working in every place where people are gathering on Zoom, or phoning round, working in Hope Street as Rachel and Andy and the team do a new thing there. Working in the Mission Areas of this diocese as resurrections shatters the traditional structures of the church and makes something new.
And God works in the terror of my life; the terror of all our lives: that we won’t be good enough; that our relationships won’t work out; that we will lose our job; that our children will not be happy and successful.
We are all afraid.
And into that. Jesus does come.
Jesus comes to us, he has come to me, he has come to you and we know him.
We know that Jesus makes a difference.
Last night together at St Beuno’s we looked at those two things that only a priest can do, that soon you will be able to do: to set people free from sin and to take bread and wine and reveal the presence of the risen Jesus.
To be a priest, to be a minister of the resurrection is to be someone who makes a difference, to be someone who changes things.
We know that the world can’t just go back after this pandemic. We are changed for ever.
We know that the world will never be as it was because of the ecological damage we, the human race, have done.
Our task is to speak resurrection into that. To make a difference.
Where there is terror: to bring peace.
To say to people as Jesus did, as Jesus does: Peace be with you.
And to show them as Jesus did the wounds.
To speak to them of Jesus and the difference he has made in your life.
Friends at home. Ask these people; get them to tell you the difference that Jesus has made to them, in their lives. If you are feeling the terror right now ask them to pray with you and to help you hear Jesus say: peace be with you.
And to do that, to be a resurrection person, to be a minister of the resurrection on our retreat we’ve shared five ways, five steps of sustainable ministry; ministry that will continue for the rest of your lives:
Read your bible: keep it close to you. Never go many hours without touching base with Scripture. Especially the psalms; pray them every day as Christians have always done, learn them off by heart. The psalms are a powerful weapon against the terror, because they are full of terror, and full of resurrection which is stronger.
Most of all they are full of Jesus.
Use his powerful name over and over again in your life. When the terror seems strong in you and around you: speak his name. Say it out loud; the name above every name; the name that makes demons fly; the name that speaks peace.
Love the church: this is the body of Christ; this is where a difference is made; wounded, bloody, crucified, holes in our side. We are resurrection people. Love it deeply as we love our family and friends with all their wounds.
Know that you are never alone because you belong to this body the church and because you are ordained to the priesthood of the church. You will not own it, possess it, you simply share in it. Priesthood is something you participate in. Don’t hold on to it. Swim in it, revel in it and enjoy it.
And in the steps of our journey over the last few days we headed to one thing: the Eucharist.
In your priesthood love this banquet,
our cup overflows,
God himself has set the table for us,
there beside restful waters he leads us,
even through the dark valley of plague and terror.
This is what your hands will be anointed for:
to take bread and wine and make it different.
Do it as often as you can. Love to do it, seek out places to do it and people to do it with.
Whether it’s an old Burton’s store in Wrexham, a medieval church or your dining table with your family or friends.
Do these five things:
Read the bible;
Call on the name of Jesus
Love the Church
Celebrate your inter-being in the body of Christ in resurrection ministry
and celebrate the Eucharist
Do these five things and you will be resurrection people.
God has called you to joy. To en-joy the priesthood.
Gareth, Sally, Andy, Rachel, Simon, Chris, Susan, Carol, James
Sermon pre-recorded and broadcast at and from St Asaph Cathedral
13th September 2020
Masks are disconcerting to those who see us wearing them. They conceal. I have failed to recognise people I know quite well. They make it hard to intuit mood, to hear – how much more lip-reading I must do than I ever realised. But they are also hard to wear.
I still haven’t learnt how to wear glasses with a mask and not steam up.
the first time I had to wear a mask for several hours I felt dizzy – perhaps I wasn’t getting enough oxygen.
I have spent much of my adult life teaching people how to breathe. To have good posture, to show them the science lab lungs and explain that its the diaphragm that does the work not the lungs. I have urged people to raise their chins so as not to hamper their breathing, to open their chests out, shoulders back.
And now we do this thing of putting a mask on; deliberately hindering our breathing.
Musicians, and especially singers, know all about breathing and its importance.
For most of us we are usually unaware of our breathing until we have difficulties, a cold, asthma, or find ourselves in a room full of smoke.
But one of my earliest memories is of breathing.
My favourite hymn is Breathe on me breath of God. Since this is a music festival perhaps I will upset a good proportion of you if I tell you my preferred tune. And it is a hymn text set to a remarkable number of different tunes. But for me I will always associate the words with Charles Lockhart’s Carlisle.
I love this text because it reminds me of being a small child. I had fallen in the garden and my knee was bleeding. Running into the house my mother scooped me up and sat down with my on the sofa. As I sobbed my heart out I felt her breathing. Her warm breath on my head and her chest rising and falling. That moment has stayed with me for the whole of my life. Breathe on me breath of God. The breath that mothers me. The breath that brings me back to my true self. The breath that weathers storms external and internal.
Musicians know the importance of breathing.
But breathing is important to us all. It is important because it is literally life-giving. In the book Genesis God breathes into the dust, the earth, to give it life. In Hebrew the ruach the spirit is the wind and breath that bring life to dry bones. In the Greek of the new testament the spirit is pnuema, the breath, the air and for Christians the hagia pneuma the Holy Spirit is God. God who gives life and gifts.
Last summer my mother died and my brother and sister and I sat around her bed in the hospice where she died. Over her final hours we followed her every breath as they became shallower and shallower until finally she just stopped breathing.
Breathe on me breath of God.
learning how to breathe might sound like something we don’t need to do.
I teach breathing as part of teaching Mindfulness or meditation. Mindfulness is very much in fashion these days. But Christians have been practising mindfulness throughout Christian history. One collection of texts in the Russian and Greek Orthodox tradition, the Philokalia teaches the combination of careful breathing with the word of the Jesus Prayer; Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.
But words are not necessary. Mindfulness of breathing, just being aware of our breathing wakes us up to awareness of so much more. We live in shadow, in twilight for much of our lives not noticing the miracles that surround us; that are us.
Noticing our breathing. Breathing in and knowing that I am breathing in. Breathing out and knowing that I am breathing out.
Music too can be like that. Taking the very ordinary, sounds. And arranging it in a way that helps us notice them.
I am a great fan of the jazz musician John Coltrane and I love this icon of him that has been painted. Carrying the saxophone with the fire of the Spirit showing in it the words on the scroll are a quote from him:
“God breathes through us so completely so gently we hardly feel it. yet it is our everything.”
Breathing is not just about what we do any more than music is just about what any of us does. Breathing connects us to something larger, something greater than just me.
The poet Don Paterson captures this beautifully in his series of sonnets on Orpheus. here is one called, simply Breath.
Breath
Breath, you invisible poem –
pure exchange, sister to silence,
being and its counterbalance,
rhythm wherein I become,
ocean I accumulate
by stealth, by the same slow wave;
thriftiest of seas … Thief
of the whole cosmos! What estates,
what vast space have already poured
through my lungs? The four winds
are like daughters to me.
So do you know me, air, that once sailed
through me?
You, that were once the lead and rind
of my every word?
When we breathe we breathe in something that is not us and can recognise that we are dust that breathes. That this little breath that I breathe now is part of the air that inhabits the planet.
It is a sign that we are connected to everything that is.
This is why our pollution of the air is so frightening. We are polluting the stuff of our own lives. We are polluting ourselves.
It is a spiritual issue.
There is a wonderful book by Donald Miller the subtitle is “Non religious thoughts on Christian Spirituality” The book’s title is Blue Like Jazz and some of you may know the famous album by Miles Davis A Kind of Blue. That would probably be the album I would save if the waves took the remainder of my Desert Island choices.
In his introduction to his book Miller writes:
“I NEVER LIKED JAZZ MUSIC BECAUSE JAZZ MUSIC doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes. After that I liked jazz music. Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way. I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve.”
We live in an unresolved world. We live in unresolved times.
None of us can se ethe way ahead in this pandemic, or even know with certainty that we will be able to gather for this music festival in person next year or the year after.
Living with that unresolvedness is hard. It is stressful and creates anxiety.
But when we breathe we are always letting go. Our out breath matches our in breath. We might be able to hold our breath for a few seconds or even minutes but we can never hold on to our breath.
And as we let the breath go; if we wake up and recognise that God breathes through us, in us, that it it is the breath of God we will find a peace deeper and richer than we have ever guessed, we will breathe the breath of God.
Christ Church Cathedral and Church At Home, Diocese of Oxford (on-line service)
Having worked in schools for much of my adult life I’ve heard the line “That’s not fair.” on multiple occasions.
Children and young people have a heightened awareness of fairness. At its best this can lead to the wonderful idealism that the young have and heroic works for justice in the way that Greta Thunberg has been doing.
At its worst an unrealistic expectation of fairness can lead to resentment.
Fairness is not a reward for good behaviour and is in short supply in the random-ness of disease, accidents and tragedies.
The two readings we have just heard are wonderful, but quite complicated.
The key to understanding them, it seems to me, is to remember that both Jesus and St Paul were not so much in the business of converting individuals as in creating a community.
A community of the converted.
A community of disciples.
Paul’s letters to the first Christianity communities are almost all about that community-building and how those communities deal with the real, practical questions.
In today’s first reading what it’s ok or not ok for Christians to eat and what christians should do, if anything, about keeping holy days.
Jesus’ public ministry was relatively short, probably just three years. But that is still quite a long time to be travelling with a group of people.
The disciples were a very intense form of community. It’s not surprising therefore that a lot of what Jesus teaches us about is how to be community, and particularly how to deal with the intense feelings that arise when human beings live and work together.
One of the key themes of many of the sayings and stories of Jesus is resentment. Fairness and unfairness.
I think Jesus profoundly understands the corrosive nature of resentment as one of the key poisons that can destroy communities and individuals.
Over and over again there is a clear reflection on the causes of resentment:
The labourers who work an hour at the end of the day and get paid the same a those who have worked all day;
the older son who has stayed faithfully at home but then has to watch while a party is laid on for his younger brother who has just squandered half the family assets; resentment about who is the greatest, the favourite, among the disciples.
Today’s story is also about fairness and therefore about resentment.
And it refers to a pattern of resentment that I see over and over again, with colleagues, church communities and across human societies.
When someone is treated generously – like the servant in today’s gospel – they resent it and go on to treat others badly.
Now there are, no doubt, in-depth psychological reasons for this way in which we human beings sometimes react to generosity.
But I want to think very practically about an issue of our own time and how we react to it.
In the twenty first century Christians, for the most part don’t worry too much about what food we are permitted to eat, although the climate crisis might raise more questions than most of us face on this.
And most Christians are pretty settled about how we observe Sunday as the Lord’s Day and when we are most likely to worship. Although changing work and leisure patterns might suggest that we need to question that more than we do.
But we can’t get away from facing up to the crucial justice issues of our own day. I am fascinated by reactions to the Black Lives Matter movement that has swept across not only American cities but around the world and very strongly here in the UK.
It’s a matter of justice that resonates deeply in my heart. Not only because we good Anglicans, are, of course, opposed to racism. But also because of my experience as a Head teacher in south east London where my school was a majority black school, and as a priest there at a church where the congregation was also majority black. Hearing the accounts that my friends, colleagues, pupils and their families shared about everyday racism shook me to the core.
And noticing racism in action myself.
When I was a school chaplain to a black Headteacher, if she and I were stood together or alone in a room when a visitor came in the assumption that I was the Head. This happened almost every week.
Or taking a group of pupils on a school visit and people walking passed black colleagues to talk to me, the white man at the back of the line. This happened on almost every school visit I went on.
And these are minor examples. Casual racism. Every black person I know can tell much more horrifying stories, but those accounts belong to them not to me.
Of course as good Anglicans we are opposed to racism.
But are we really?
In so many of the conversations I’ve heard about Black Lives Matter someone says, usually not very far into the conversation:
‘But what we need to teach is that every life matters.’
That is a classic resentful response. Noticing someone else’s need and then switching to universalise it.
As if there is some kind of shortage of mattering. As if there is something unfair in noticing someone else’s suffering.
An answer, a solution to this can be found in the passage from Paul’s letter to the Romans that we had as our first reading. It comes towards the end of the reading after Paul has laid out the presenting issues, and then he comes in with a typical major statement:
“We do not live to ourselves,
and we do not die to ourselves.”
It’s the sort of sentence from Paul that we are so used to hearing that we hardly notice it.
And yet it’s the heart of the gospel.
It’s the revolution that is fundamental to conversion.
We are no longer the centre of our universe.
Jesus is.
When we are resentful it is from a position of self-centredness; it is claiming I deserve that; that’s mine; don’t take it from me.
When we don’t live to ourselves; when Jesus is the centre of our universe we realise that we are connected in him with everyone; Black lives matter because there is no longer me and them; there is simply us.
So how do you feel about Black Lives Matter?
I want to suggest a practical thing that we could all do to demonstrate that Black Lives Matter in our churches. It isn’t a revolution; it may appear at first to be a very shallow thing. But doing it can have a powerful effect on us.
So in my sermon available to the whole diocese today online in the Church At Home material I am suggesting that we go into all our churches including this cathedral church
and list all the pictures of all the people that you can see.
Perhaps its the clergy team photos, or the PCC members, list them;
then go on to the pictures, in the stained glass windows, banners and other pictures. Then do the same for church websites.
Now add up the people of colour we can see.
***
Because of my time working with so many black people I have a large number of pictures of black saints, black heroes, and images of Jesus, Mary and others as black people. here are two of my favourites. The first is based on a famous icon of the story of Genesis where Abraham meets three angels or lords. It is often called the Trinity and seen as an image of the way Christians understand God to be. here the artist Meg Wroe has painted a version with the faces of three people from the diocese of Southwark on it. The original is in Southwark Cathedral and is, I think rather beautiful.
The other two are by Yvonne Bell an artist who worships in our diocese at Winslow in Buckinghamshire. Christ of the Flowers, and Mother of God of Clemency.
When I moved here to Christ Church a few weeks ago
among the removal team were two young black men.
As they packed my collection of pictures and icons they were beside themselves at all the black images. It sparked long conversations with them as we worked about race, Black Lives Matter, faith and their own experiences of racism and church. It was a very beautiful conversation.
For Christians, working for justice is not about fairness. It is about God revealing himself.
Right at the start of revelation in Genesis we are told that human beings are created in the image and likeness of God. Every human being is a revelation to us of God. Our reaction to every human being needs to be awe, wonder and reverence.
We can depict Jesus as black, not because he was of African origin but because God reveals himself to us in every person.
Imagine if every church in our diocese had images of black and minority ethnic people in it. If every website included images of non-white people.
this is especially important in areas (like rural Staffordshire where I’ve been living for the last few years)
where no black people live.
I have been talking often in my first week about that little carving of the listener above the Sub Dean’s stall.
Paying attention to Black Lives Matter, to the young in their yearning for justice is to show our love for them, show that we receive the image of God in them.
To make this building a home for all people is to make it a place where everyone can walk in and find themselves here, see themselves in the images, experience the divine in the holy women and holy men of the past, women and men of all races and nations.
Once we live God-centred lives we realise our true equality. As St Paul says at the very end of the first reading “We will all stand before the judgement seat of God.”
Thank fully God’s judgement is merciful and for that mercy “every tongue shall give praise to God.”
Because
“We do not live to ourselves,
and we do not die to ourselves.”
Canvas prints, commissions and cards of icons by Yvonne Bell cans be purchased via her website here.
“As we move from late antiquity toward the Middle Ages, more complex Latin syntheses of these originally Eastern elements emerge. The simplest of these can be found in Irish monastic sources, which reached their most developed form in the traditions and texts of the Céli Dé or Culdees. While the Apophthegmata include stories of monks heroically reciting all 150 psalms, the Irish texts seem to make this the daily responsibility of every monk, to be completed in “three fifties” along with other texts, such as the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:3–12). One finds Irish liturgical offices in which the three fifties form part of an even larger course of daily psalmody, but more often the recita- tion seems more like an expiatory exercise for the individual monk, to be combined with other ascetic practices such as holding up the hands for long periods, numerous genuflections or prostrations, repeated blows with a scourge, fasting, exposure to harsh weather conditions, and so on. Similar practices are prescribed in some of the Irish penitentials.”31
Jeffery, P. (2020). Psalmody and Prayer in Early Monasticism. In A. Beach & I. Cochelin (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Monasticism in the Latin West (pp. 112-127). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“A reform movement influential from 750 – 900 required even a secular cleric to recite all the psalms every day”
van Heusen, Nancy. The Place of the Psalms in the Intellectual Culture of the Middle Ages (p60)
Keeping a journal has never been part of my life except on retreat and I now have quite a set of these notebooks recording most of the retreats I have made in my adult life. I usually bring all or some of my previous journals with me. In 1997 I was not far from where I am now in north Wales. Also in a borrowed cottage, on the Llyn Peninsula. RS Thomas and Jim Cotter country. On one day then I wrote in my journal: “150 psalms prayed, 3 hours 55 minutes”.
The psalms are extraordinary. There is never a day when I not only pray a substantial portion of psalmody but also spend a little time reading commentaries or devotional guides or expositions of the psalms. Most importantly the expositions on the psalms of Saint Augustine of Hippo.
The Celtic saints are renowned for their ascetic practices and the recitation of the psalter is often among those quoted. A Facebook request brought fascinating material on the idea of reciting the whole psalter daily. St Benedict refers to this (Chapter 18) in his Rule:
“We read, after all, that our holy Fathers, energetic as they were, did all this in a single day. Let us hope that we, lukewarm as we are, can achieve it in a whole week.”
Beginning a new ministry at Christ Church, Oxford I am drawn to St Frideswide, patron of Oxford whose shrine is in the Cathedral and where, soon I shall be praying daily. The loan of a stunning icon of her for me to bring with me on retreat (see above) has reinforced that sense of connection. She may well be a link to those Celtic saints not just in time but possibly in her own origins.
There is something extreme about the effort to pray the whole psalter in a day that appeals to me. The effort to do something heroic even if only in a minor way. So I had been planning on doing this for a while. I had, in fact decided to divide the psalms across 15 hours starting at 4:30am and reciting a group of psalms beginning at each half hour throughout the day. However, when I read about the Céli Dé and their practice of three-fifties I changed my mind.
The length of the entire psalter is interesting. It is best measured in words rather than verses or psalms. In the Hebrew there are just 30,147 words. In English the BCP/Coverdale psalter has 48, 417 words. Common Worship comes in at 45,375 and my favourite translation of the psalms, the Grail version, at 42,621. I would love to know how many are in the defunct ICEL translation of the late 1990s which deliberately tried a sparser vocabulary to be closer to the Hebrew. But I haven’t been able to find an electronic version (do let me know if you have one). It is a beautiful translation which I use occasionally, although it lacks the lovely rhythmic patterns of the Grail.
Singing is an essential part of prayer for me. So I decided to use the Conception psalm tones which are designed to be sung with stanzas of varying lengths. I had thought about use a setting of the Grail psalter to the traditional plainsong tones but I would need to play those over on my recorder to get them anywhere near right and that would have added time. They are also rather slower to sing than the Conception tones which really draw out the sprung rhythm that the translators deliberately sought.
Beginning the three fifties at 4:30am, 1:30pm and 6:30pm I was surprised that they are remarkably similar in length (14,126; 14,480; and 14,015 words respectively). They also took a remarkably similar length of time to sing, between one hour and fifty and one hour and fifty-five minutes. A lot longer than my younger self; perhaps I hurried then, I certainly must have recited not sung the psalms to have done it in such a time. This time I didn’t hurry but I went at a good pace and there were no pauses or silences. I prayed Mass and Compline but otherwise didn’t pray any other Offices or texts.
Praying the psalms daily I know them well and so I was not expecting the powerful effect that praying them all in one go would have on me. I am particularly taken with a scholarly approach to studying the psalms that takes the canonical form of the psalter seriously. At one time genre criticism concentrated on what category each psalm belongs in (lament, royal etc). More recently reception criticism particularly in the work of Sue Gillingham has looked at their use and reception in different communities and contexts. Canonical criticism takes the work of the final editors very seriously. Why did they place the psalms in this order and in these relationships to one another. Although I knew much of that intellectually, the praying of them all in one day makes those patterns very interesting indeed. Psalm 119 in the final of the fifties both referred back to where I had begun with its wisdom and torah; and feels like an assimilation of the surge of varied experiences, emotions depths and heights described in the preceding psalms. The royal psalms, if anything, diminish by their relationship to the wisdom tradition; it is royalty firmly in its place. The psalms of ascent are truly an ascent; like the last leg of climbing mountain after a long preceding climb. I was tired, my voice was tired. And then the view at the top of the mountain. The wonderful psalms of praise the climax, the big sky moment. These psalms are normally associated with the morning so praying them in the dark increased the disorientation.
Throughout the singing I was struck by Brueggeman’s description of the process of orientation – disorientation- reorientation. Singing the psalms in this unfamiliar way, in an unfamiliar place, at unfamiliar times. At times it felt like I was losing my footing.The experience to which I can most easily compare it is the one occasion when, as a teenager on some outward bounds type week, I went white water rafting (coincidentally also here in Wales on the Wye). It was probably pretty tame really but I remember that sense of being almost out of control; the river carrying me; not being able to stop. And the exhilaration.
Extreme acts of piety do appeal to me. But I am not insane. I am not suggesting that any of us could adopt this as a regular practice. But I would like to think that I might make this an annual practice. Often people say to me that they don’t really know what to do on retreat. Spending one day doing this would be a fascinating process. I hope as exhilarating and spiritually enervating as it has been for me.
It has made me wonder about moving to more frequent recitation of the psalms in my prayer. I have always suggested that a month / four weeks (as in the BCP and in the Roman Divine Office) is the longest appropriate period for praying the psalms. I am now wondering if I could develop a weekly cycle for the whole psalter at Vigils. Many of my friends use the weekly cycle of the Anglican Breviary for their prayers and find it deeply satisfying.
Today, I went to the beach. With mountains around me and the waves crashing in a psalm is the only possible response:
God longs to speak to us, with us, god longs for us to hear his voice.
And the first way in which he speaks to us, the fundamental place for us to go to hear him is in the words of Scripture. Which is why faithful, day by day reading of the bible is fundamental to Christian living. So perhaps this week you might want to spend time with the three beautiful Scriptures gifted to us on this feast of St Bartholomew apostle and martyr.
It is in three single verses, one from each reading that I believe the Lord spoke to me as I prepared to preach this evening.
You are my witnesses. The Lord say in Isaiah 43:10.
We are all of us, by virtue of, that is the strength given us in baptism called to be witnesses. But we are not all called to be preachers and evangelists, this is what St Paul says in Ephesians 4 (11 ff) only some are called to evangelise.
For the writers of the New Testament the word for witnesses is the Greek word, martures; from which we get our word martyr. It was this word that the Greek version of the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures that the the new testament writers knew, was used here in Isaiah.
God calls all of us, you and me, each of us here; every baptised person to be his martyrs. Now in a strange way I find that quite liberating.
If witnessing simply meant talking about Jesus, telling people about our faith and encouraging people to come to church; well, it is all a bit one -dimensional. In some of the literature on mission it can all be made to seem a bit too easy. “Bring a friend Sunday and we can double our congregations.”!
“You are my martyrs”; is a whole other ball-game. We are all called to die for Christ. Well, at one level, of course, that is true. We are certainly all going to die one day. But this call is a call to be martyrs to die for a purpose and that purpose is made clear by Isaiah, it is so that “you may know and believe me.” Not so that others may know God, but so that we may know God; when we are martyrs; when we die; we know God better. This is important.
It is in today’s Gospel that we move to doing things for others. “I am among you” Jesus says, “as one who serves”. And then he immediately describes the service the disciples have given him, “you have stood by me in my trials.”
I think the teaching given in these two readings is profound and important. The martyrdom we are called to; which I have come to believe is the only, the single aim of the spiritual life is what Christian writers call abandonment; what the new testament describes as dying to self. The possible New Testament references I could give here would take most of the night, so you will be pleased to know that I am not going to suggest more than a few. “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20) Jesus said “”If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself …” (Lk 9:23), “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies” (Jn 12:24 “whoever loses his life for my sake” (Mark 8:35) and so on.
This is the very heart of the gospel, and it is gospel, it is good news because it is profoundly liberating.
When we are seeking to shore up our sense of self; when we are constantly seeking to affirm ourselves, even our identities; when we need possessions, or status, or qualifications, or power; or whatever it is that to make us feel like we exist; that we are real; the pursuit of all that is relentless; it is exhausting; and like any drug the more often we get it the weaker the effect and the more of it we need.
The alternative; letting go of whatever props us up may seem scary at first, perhaps even impossible to do but it sets us free. It releases us and allows us to see what is really important. Perhaps, in these Covid days of lockdown and strangeness you have seen how you can live without something that you once thought was vital to your life and well-being? Perhaps, you have found this in standing with someone in their trials?
I suggest one way in which we can both work on our dying to self, our martyrdom and in which we can measure our progress on this journey which is really, of course, a lifetime’s journey.
It is the extent of our capacity to pay attention to another person; to another human being. To be truly present to them.
To encounter them in a way which honours them, which recognises them as a revelation of the image and likeness of God.
There are some people who seem to have this gift naturally. Who, to meet is a pleasure and joy because they are not constantly thinking of the next thing to say, of what their response is going to be or even of somewhere else they would rather be; or someone else they would rather be talking to.
These people have the gift of being really present to us. Giving us their full attention.
My suggestion is that the scandal of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is not that God is present; but that we are not.
This is captured beautifully by one of my favourite poets, Denise Levertov in her poem Flickering Mind. I will read it and it is also on the cards I have handed out.
Lord, not you,
it is I who am absent.
At first
belief was a joy I kept in secret,
stealing alone
into sacred places;
a quick glance, and away – and back,
circling.
I have long since uttered your name
but now
I elude your presence.
I stop
to think about you, and my mind
at once
like a minnow darts away,
darts
into the shadows, into gleams that fret
unceasing over
the river’s purling and passing.
Not for one second
will my self hold still, but wanders
anywhere,
everywhere it can turn. Not you,
it is I am absent.
You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadow,
you the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain’s heart
the sapphire I know is there?
In our second reading tonight, from the Acts of the Apostles, we are told of the signs and wonders that were done among the people. It was this; not talking about the faith, not bring a friend Sunday that, grew the church; it was the power of faith acting in the lives of the disciples that so struck those they met that they wanted to be a part of it.
When we meet someone who pays attention to us it is compelling. The poet Rilke says that to pay attention to is the best definition of love. I would call it holiness.
And we can learn to do it by spending time with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. By bringing even our absence; even our flickering mind, to be present with Jesus. Just sitting there without expecting a spiritual experience, a revelation, without thinking about what to say. Just our own, ordinary, simple, straightforward presence. To be with Jesus in the way that Bartholomew was who he described as being without guile. To be guilelessly present to Jesus just as he is guilelessly present to us.
When we do that, rather than something for ourselves; when we do that, rather than accumulate something that builds up our ego. Then we are entering into abandonment; then we are becoming present to the Real Presence and then we will do signs and wonders; then we will stand by others in their trials; then we shall be martyrs, witnesses, that God is real; that God is true.
10th July, 2020: This is an old post from my previous blog. I re-post it because it is one of the most popular and one that I regularly refer people to. Often in life we feel the effects of the spiritual conflict between good and evil, we feel and sometimes are, attacked, and we need a prayer for protection. Of course it is always important to recognise that the conflict is as much within us as outside. Our own selfishness and sinfulness attacks us. It is important that we never think of those who attack us as ‘evil’ and ourselves as ‘good’. With the addition of readings this prayer makes a good little liturgy, almost a ‘little Office’. I have used it with both adults and teenagers. It works really well prayed outdoors, especially early in the morning at sunrise; with hot chocolate and marshmallows around a fire at night; or on a stormy day on a mountain-top …
My great grandparents came from the west of Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century and ended up in Chesterfield in Derbyshire. The family story is that they lived, along with many other Irish immigrants, in Brown’s Yard and that great-gran was a laundry woman. Although she was born in England my grandmother considered herself Irish and it was from her I learnt the faith.
My Irish forebears were reversing the journey made by St Patrick. I have always loved the Lorica, St Patrick’s breastplate, in its full version (as found in the English Hymnal). The strong sense of the spiritual combat permeates the whole prayer but also the wonderful, dynamic relationship of the Trinity which is alive and powerful.
The Lorica makes a lovely little liturgy all by itself. The addition of readings – in the booklet below I suggest either Ephesians 6 (the breastplate of righteousness) or Deuteronomy 6 (the Sh’ma) and that lovely verse from Hosea “I will betroth me unto thee for ever” seem to work really well.
I have used this booklet of the Lorica as a morning liturgy on retreat with parishioners and have strong memories of standing in the grounds of Llangasty Retreat House with friends from St Andrew’s, Earlsfield singing it in the morning sun. My other memory of it is on a blustery, rainy day on Dartmoor with a group of pupils from Trinity, singing it with rain blowing into my face and the booklet disintegrating in my hands. It is a bracing outdoor prayer for a stormy day.
Most hymn books omit sections of the Lorica which is a shame. For those of us who live the spiritual conflict on a daily basis (isn’t that everyone?) – it’s a powerful prayer.
From Cyberhymnal: “The lyrics are a translation of a Gaelic poem called “St. Patrick’s Lorica,” or breastplate. (A “lorica” was a mystical garment that was supposed to protect the wearer from danger and illness, and guarantee entry into Heaven.) Cecil Alexander penned these words at the request of H. H. Dickinson, Dean of the Chapel Royal at Dublin Castle. I wrote to her suggesting that she should fill a gap in our Irish Church Hymnal by giving us a metrical version of St. Patrick’s “Lorica” and I sent her a carefully collated copy of the best prose translations of it. Within a week she sent me that exquisitely beautiful as well as faithful version which appears in the appendix to our Church Hymnal. This hymn can be a challenge to sing without seeing the words matched to the notes, but it is a masterpiece nevertheless.”
The text:
I bind unto myself today
The strong Name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same
The Three in One and One in Three.
I bind this today to me forever
By power of faith,
Christ’s incarnation;
His baptism in Jordan river,
His death on Cross for my salvation;
His bursting from the spicèd tomb,
His riding up the heavenly way,
His coming at the day of doom
I bind unto myself today.
I bind unto myself the power
Of the great love of cherubim;
The sweet ‘Well done’ in judgment hour,
The service of the seraphim,
Confessors’ faith, Apostles’ word,
The Patriarchs’ prayers, the prophets’ scrolls,
All good deeds done unto the Lord
And purity of virgin souls.
I bind unto myself today
The virtues of the star lit heaven,
The glorious sun’s life giving ray,
The whiteness of the moon at even,
The flashing of the lightning free,
The whirling wind’s tempestuous shocks,
The stable earth, the deep salt sea
Around the old eternal rocks.
I bind unto myself today
The power of God to hold and lead,
His eye to watch,
His might to stay,
His ear to hearken to my need.
The wisdom of my God to teach,
His hand to guide,
His shield to ward;
The word of God to give me speech,
His heavenly host to be my guard.
Against the demon snares of sin,
The vice that gives temptation force,
The natural lusts that war within,
The hostile men that mar my course;
Or few or many, far or nigh,
In every place and in all hours,
Against their fierce hostility
I bind to me these holy powers.
Against all Satan’s spells and wiles,
Against false words of heresy,
Against the knowledge that defiles,
Against the heart’s idolatry,
Against the wizard’s evil craft,
Against the death wound and the burning,
The choking wave, the poisoned shaft,
Protect me, Christ, till Thy returning.
Scripture Reading:
Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints.
Eph. 6:10-18
Or:
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates. Dt. 6: 4-9
Christ be with me,Christ within me,
Christ behind me,
Christ before me,
Christ beside me,
Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me.
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ in quiet,
Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Scripture Reading:
I will betroth thee unto me for ever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in loving kindness, and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness: and thou shalt know the LORD.
Hosea 2:19
I bind unto myself the Name,
The strong Name of the Trinity,
By invocation of the same,
The Three in One and One in Three.
By Whom all nature hath creation,
Eternal Father, Spirit, Word:
Praise to the Lord of my salvation,
Salvation is of Christ the Lord.
When I first began learning to sing plainsong to English words it was at Holy Trinity, Winchester with Julien Chilcott-Monk, who was Churchwarden there at the time (please note this correction, I had previously written Dircetor of Music). The book he put into my hands was the green Proctor and Frere ‘Manual of Plainsong‘. Generations of Anglo-Catholics were raised on this book. It had numerous editions and it, and other versions of the Coverdale psalms set to the traditional tones were used in churches across the country from the middle of the nineteenth-century onwards.
St Stephen’s House in Oxford recently published their own Office book (which I reviewed here) which contains a version of the Manual of Plainsong in a late edition containing the Revised Psalter, it is very well pointed and a great achievement. It is good to think that those being formed for the priesthood there are doing so using this.
I am enormously grateful to Fr Daniel Trott for providing the version of a pointed text, with chants for each psalm, of the psalms in Common Worship. The CW psalms are intended to be in the tradition of the Coverdale translation. I think they work surprisingly well to the traditional tones. I have always been sceptical of setting contemporary texts to the tones because what ends up happening is that the complex music dominates the words rather than, as should be the case, the music serving the text. Brother Reginald Box’s book Make Music to Our God explains this very well.
However, although I have only had a few days using these psalms I am surprisingly comfortable doing so. See what you think.
Fr Daniel writes “it’s very much according to the principles of the revised and enlarged edition of A Manual of Plainsong (1951), which in my opinion is much superior to the first edition. What I wouldn’t stand by is replacing ‘Alleluia’ with ‘Praise the Lord’ in Lent. I copied that from John Harper’s RSCM Anglican Chant Psalter, but I think the word should just be removed. It would still involve repointing the end of quite a lot of psalms, but in a different way.”
If you use these texts and the pointing please acknowledge Fr Daniel’s work, which is excellent, and please use the normal copyright notice for CW texts:
Anyone who reads this blog will know how fervently I believe in singing the daily Office. It is a source of joy and sustenance in the spiritual life. It refreshes parts of the soul that recitation cannot reach.
I am often asked about simple music for singing Common Worship Daily Prayer, so this week I am going to publish morning prayer each day with very simple music. You can even watch and listen to me sing it on Facebook at 6:30am each day and the video will remain on my FB page.
Because I sing Vigils earlier in the morning I use the Invitatory / Opening palm at that, so at MP I will use the songs of creation which I have written about before here, and which I think are important in keeping us rooted in creation. They come from the music of Fr André Gouzes, a French Dominican based at the Abbaye de Sylvanes in France. They are used at the Jerusalem Community in Pais where the English translations were made. This is one of only two adaptations I make to CWDP in this Office. The hymns will be by Aelred Seton Shanley Obl.OSB Cam, a British born American hermit who died some years ago. The psalm antiphons are ‘common’ rather than specific to the psalm, the tone for the singing of the psalms incredibly simple ones from Conception Abbey in the US and available to buy from GIA. They need the psalter arranging into stanzas. For the CW psalter in that form see my latest version here:
The tones for the canticles are from St Meinrad Archabbey and the refrains are possibly by me or by Fr Colin CSWG, at the monastery of the Holy Trinity, Crawley Down.
To follow the Office you will need a bible and your copy of CWDP or the app.
There are not many feasts this week and I will politely ignore the saints days so that it is the ferial/ordinary Office every day.
The only other adaptation I make to CWDP is to conclude the short intercessions with the Lord’s Prayer and pray the Collect after that. CWDP suggests the other way around which is an innovation, and not a very helpful one in my view.
I am not a very good singer. I use my tenor recorder to play over the music. You don’t need to sing well. Singing in any way is the important thing.
Let me know what you think and if you have a go at singing Morning Prayer.
And as they dance they shall sing, ‘All my fresh springs are in you.’
Psalm 87
Singing is like a fresh spring, I hope it makes you want to ‘dance as David danced’. It does me.
Several people have asked for an example of a CW Office set to simple plainchant. here it is for Evening Prayer of Trinity 3, 2020. The full text including readings is given here and I will Live-stream singing it on Facebook.
Plainchant is based on eight modes and these chants are in that sense modal and traditional. The exact form of the traditional plainchant psalm tones does not work well with English and rather than serving the text tends to dominate the words and rather butcher natural English rhythm. This doesn’t seem to matter so much with, for example, the Coverdale psalms, where it is not our natural idiom anyway. However, with texts in contemporary English is is very obvious.
After Vatican 2 Roman Catholic monastic and religious communities quickly gave up trying to squeeze English words into the exact pattern of the traditional tomes and adapted the tones into the sort of patterns in these texts given here. They work very well and have a gentle rhythm.
Despite singing the Office daily since I was in my mid-teens I don’t have a very good singing voice and can’t pitch a note without help. I use a tenor recorder to play over the tones and chants. It works for me. It may not be the most beautiful noise but it engages parts of my brain that simply reciting the texts does not. I really recommend that you try singing every Office. The liturgy is song!
For more on the use of chant with English texts see Reginald Box SSF Make Music to Our God. the New English Hymnal contains some chant settings of the psalms in this style of psalm tone, as do most Roman Catholic Hymnals (Celebration Hymnal, Laudate) and books of settings of the psalms for responsorial use.
I am currently using the Authorised Version of the Bible for Office readings. I think mixing ‘traditional’ and contemporary language works well and don’t understand why it is not done more often. Most churches already do it with hymns. The AV txts of the readings are in the booklet above.
It is interesting how the experience of Live-streaming some of the worship in my little Oratory has changed what I do. Some of it is due to helpful feedback (I am grateful for critical and encouraging friends). Some of it has needed to change pretty quickly because even to me it just doesn’t feel right.
The most obvious change has been the music I use at the Eucharist where Taizé chants just didn’t work for singing every day. One voice Taizé chants never really work, the chants need harmonies and, ideally, instruments as well. They work for the peripatetic Eucharists I was doing previously because they are well known and easy to pick up when celebrating with different people each time. More traditional chants for the Mass settings as well as Introit and Post-communion psalms are the fruit of centuries of use and developed specifically for daily use. They are not stimulating but are conducive to contemplative prayer. I adopted them pretty quickly.
I have been using the Resurrection Vigil with the music in the first version I posted (here) for nearly a decade, but after only two weeks it was clear that it didn’t work. Reading poetry doesn’t really work unless listeners have the text. Some of the music was not easy either, and on my own that didn’t matter so much. When others are listening that stands out. Some of the texts (Psalm 104 for instance) were too long to be listened to.
Well, the new version with new music is above and I will use it next Saturday for the first time. I will also set the camera at an angle more like that for Mass and have the vessel of water on the altar to bless. Giving the whole thing a more visual appearance and liturgical action. I may wear an alb and stole too.
I’ve also been asked about a ‘Prayer at the Cross’ in place of Friday evening Compline. I may well have a go at that this week …
If you tune in on Facebook, do let me know how it works.
Therese of Lisieux chose it all. I have always admired that approach. It might sum up the little Odyssey I have been on in the last couple of years in the praying of the Daily Office. As documented on here (and music compiled or written by me here) I’ve experimented with Common Worship and the Book of Common Prayer, two lectionaries for the latter, but never quite been able to give up The Divine Office, with the Grail Psalms which are so ingrained in me and whose sprung rhythm and sparser language I love.
In the Autumn I shall begin praying daily in Christ Church Cathedral. I am looking forward immensely to having a place and a community for daily prayer. There the Morning Office is Common Worship and Evensong on most days is Book of Common Prayer. Both using the selective CW choice of psalms.
On Holy Saturday this year, having used the BCP for the Office for a few months I felt a yearning for the beautiful second reading from the Office of Readings in The Divine Office, which I know so well. I was tempted, and picked up and returned to my Breviary.
With Christ Church in mind I have tried since then to establish a pattern that would be manageable for my new life as well. Combining Anglican forms for Morning and Evening Prayer with use of The Divine Office for all the other Hours. The simplest way to do this is to use the psalms of Lauds at Terce and the psalms of Vespers at None. This gives coverage of the psalter in the monthly cycle of the Divine Office and works surprisingly well. However, I like to pray Psalm 119 daily at the Little Hours in accord with Anglican and indeed western Catholic tradition (see here and here). Although not the case in lockdown, the reality is likely to be that the Little Hours are the ones I am going to have to miss on occasions, so using the same psalm daily means I don’t miss out on any psalms in the monthly cycle.
Since Holy Week (so on to the third turn or so through the psalter now in June) I have prayed a three Nocturn Vigil / Office of Readings: first Nocturn the psalmody of the Office of Readings and the mid-day hour (omitting the sections of psalm 118/9) – followed by the Scripture Reading in the two-year cycle for the Office of Readings; second Nocturn the psalmody (but not the canticle) of Vespers and the non Scriptural reading. The third Nocturn, psalms (but not the canticle) and antiphons of Lauds, the Gospel reading for the day, followed by a Gospel canticle, the Beatitudes with proper or Common antiphons normally used at the Benedictus, Litany and conclusions. This gives a good shape to to the Vigil climaxing with the day’s gospel which is itself a traditional form of Vigils. It means I get to sing the proper antiphons too. It takes, done in quite leisurely way, just under 45 minutes. The additional material is from Crawley Down and New Skete, some Orthodox patterns creating a more doxological feel.
The booklet for the music and shape at Vigils is here:
For Morning Prayer I am using Common Worship Daily Prayer and the accompanying lectionary but with just one psalm, the highlighted psalm in the lectionary and an Office hymn rather than Opening psalm. At Evening Prayer BCP Evensong with a single psalm. Using AV for the readings at Morning and Evening Prayer, traditional plainsong at EP and modern, modal chants at MP. I attach the CW Psalter arranged in stanzas for singing to modern chants here, along with refrains set by me to simple modal melodies. These, I keep saying, are not really very good at all. But I keep using them and just haven’t found time to do anything else:
On my rest day I pray Divine Office Lauds late Saturday morning after a long lie-in and cooked breakfast, a single daytime Office combining Office of Readings with the Daytime Hour after lunch usually and Vespers at the usual time. Saturday normally ends with a Resurrection Vigil.
I consider The Divine Office and readings of the Daily Eucharistic Lectionary as my ‘core Office’, this provide the monthly repetition of the psalms (the maximum length of time useful to learn texts in my view). The single long Scripture reading with the Patristic commentaries in the two year cycle (see here) provide the ecclesial/patristic way reading of Scripture. I use these three readings for study and lectio. The additional material at the other Offices is a sort of bonus. But if I need to travel (and I am hoping not to very much, having spent the last four years travelling a good deal) I can use the Breviary or Universalis without disruption to my ‘core Office’.
I often read a patristic commentary on the Gospel of the day at Vigils if the reading in the two-year cycle is only vaguely, or not at all, linked to the Scripture reading – probably twice a week. Using Journey To the Fathers, Augustine on the Gospels and Meditations on the Gospels as the source.
All the rest is a wonderful extra, giving full observance of the Canon to say Morning and Evening Prayer and use of the Prayer Book. Using three translations of the psalm texts etc day is interesting. Grail I think stands up very well, as do the Coverdale psalms, the CW psalms are the weakest. Too wordy, quite clumsy construction some times, too obviously trying to be Coverdale-esque but with none of the beauty.
The element I am missing in this pattern from my little Odyssey is the one year lectionary of 1922 and the basis of the one year traditional western Sunday Eucharistic lectionary. I remain convinced that these are preferable to the the three-year and two-year cycles but as a visiting Zoom preacher Sunday by Sunday I am not in a position to determine the lectionary; any more than I will be as Sub-Dean.
Packing my books I have filled two crates with various editions of Anglo-Catholic altar missals dating from the last quarter of the 19th century right up to the present day (the hand -made New English Missal by Fr Rod Cush and Prior Andrew from Alton). It is wonderful to see the hybrid rites of varying degrees of mixing. I think our Anglo-Catholic forebears, who I so often look to for inspiration, would understand the hybrid nature of what I am doing. Anglicanism is itself a wonderful hybrid creature. One of the things I am looking forward to in Oxford is having St Aldate’s across the road and being as happy worshipping and receiving teaching there as at Cathedral Evensong with the superb music of the choir.
“Je choisi tout.”
St Therese de Lisieux
For completeness here is the Ordinary of the Hours for The Divine Office for rest days and for the Little Hours and Compline on all days:
Apologies for not having much time for explanation, here is the current use. A number of Mass settings (all Latin) all but three from the Graduale Romanum, one from Dom Gregory Murray his 1957 People’s Mass, and two simple Latin settings (Mass XIX and Mass XX) from Dom Alan Rees which may be found in the Belmont Abbet An English Gradual, from which the Introit and Pots-Communion chants are taken each day.
CW Eucharistic Prayers A, B, C, D, E, F and G and H are included along with the Canon Romanus (for Solemnities). Extended Prefaces on separate cards. Entire musical settings of CR, B and H.
Music from Gelineau, Crawley Down (CSWG) or Tamié at the Offertory and more more CSWG at the Communion rite.
All prepared for the new Oratory (of St Joseph ready for the move to Oxford, hence OSJ).
UPDATED 22 June: Feedback from faithful viewers/prayers was that there was not enough silence and space this morning (while still wanting to keep to 30 minutes). So, I have removed some elements of the devotions and simplified the chant on the Canticle. See version 2 posted above. This should have cut around 5 minutes of singing out which I will use for silence tomorrow. I suspect of to still needs trimming I will need to reduce the repetitions in each section. Thank you so much for praying with me.
As part of the transition to post-lockdown and open churches, I am moving the daily intercessions I have been offering out of the Eucharist and praying them with the Jesus Prayer. To frame that I am adding a few devotions and some structure. The music and texts for the most part come from the Monastery of the Holy Trinity (Community of the Servants of the Will of God) at Crawley Down. They were inspired by the renewal of monastic life in France after Vatican II and particular in the Francisan hermit tradition so the use of these texts in a way like this has good pedigree.
It is also from Crawley Down and via them from the Orthodox monastery at Tolleshunt Knights, that the public use of the Jesus Prayer comes. I am going to limit myself to 30 minutes and think that with the devotions, no hurry, some silence and the intercessions I can pray three lots of 25 repetitions of the prayer. I normally use this form:
Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, take pity on me a sinner.
Occasionally I may use a, shorter, Greek form:
Kyrie Jesou Christe, eleison me.
Kaliistos Ware in his marvellous little booklet on the Jesus Prayer for the CTS suggests we might also use a plural form in communal and intercessory use, so I may try that at times:
Lord Jesus, Christ, Son of God: have mercy on us.
I have tried playing around with my morning schedule to have these a little later but it doesn’t really work for me, so this will be live-streamed each weekday at 5:30am and available afterwards on Face Book. I know that some people value hearing their intercessions prayed aloud (first names only) so that continues. There isn’t much to see and I am experimenting with the camera angle. Again some people like to see who is talking rather than just an icon or candle. I also hope to demonstrate the use of prostrations which I find enormously helpful.
Until churches re-open for public worship or until I move to Oxford, but almost certainly until mid-July, I shall continue to live-stream the Eucharist at 6:30am, but without the intercessions.
I shall be adding to the text above a short reading each day from Scripture which highlights the power of the divine name. This will give me the chance to build up an anthology of those texts.
It has been a wonderful and joyful ministry to bring names for prayer to the Lord each day at the altar and I shall continue to do so in this way. Please keep messaging me with them. It is a privilege, thank you. And please pray for me, a sinner.
My first experience of a Resurrection Vigil was on a Saturday night at a camp site in the Brecon Beacons. I was on a week’s walking holiday along with other young people from parishes belonging to Douai Abbey, I must have been fifteen or sixteen. We had prayed Compline together (and Mass each morning) all week and on Saturday evening sat around the camp fire and sang songs from the Charismatic song book ‘Songs of the Spirit’, read a resurrection narrative, chanted a psalm or two and were sprinkled with water which one of the priests present had blessed. I was entranced. Not least by the marshmallows and hot chocolate that we enjoyed afterwards.
I have never been able to pray Compline on a Saturday night since. It seems totally inadequate as a way of preparing for Sunday.
A year or so later I was at Taizé in France for the first time and was equally entranced by the Saturday evening prayer there, repeating alleluias, the lighting of candles by everyone present. Having stayed up much of the previous night in prayer ‘around the cross’ I was transfixed by this celebration of the Risen Jesus and felt his presence very strongly.
Since those years I have experienced Resurrection vigils with numerous communities, tried various forms of it at home – sometimes in the garden around a fire, or at the dining table – and shared simple liturgies of Resurrection in many parishes and with groups of pilgrims and young people in a variety of contexts.
I have added above a form of Resurrection Vigil that I am currently using in my little Oratory at home. It works for me, you might want to do something else.
The Resurrection is the central fact of the Christian faith, celebrating it, being familiar with the gospel accounts, reflecting on the Patristic commentaries on the Resurrection is a wonderful way to keep this central fact central to our lives. Celebrating a Resurrection Vigil also gives shape to the week, along with memorialising the Crucifixion each Friday and observing fasting and abstinence on Fridays. Doing this has been a blessing to me, I hope this will bless you.
Practical notes:
The text is littered with Alleluias, and because it doesn’t seem appropriate in any case, I don’t celebrate this during Lent. I do celebrate it in place of Compline whatever the Solemnity or Feast of Our Lord being celebrated on the Sunday.
I celebrate with an icon of the Resurrection, a candle next to it which I light as I sing the Phos Hilaron, and a small bowl of water which I use as Holy Water for the remainder of the week.
It has been a fascinating experience live-streaming the Eucharist and other liturgies from the little Oratory at home. I am enormously grateful to the faithful who have remained constant companions in prayer, to those who have dipped in and said something warm, to those who have dipped in and have not pointed out the sad state of my singing voice. Most of all I am grateful to those of you who have entrusted to me your loved ones, relatives, friends and others known to you for prayer. To pray for people is at the heart of priestly ministry. Thank you for helping me feel so fulfilled as a priest during this lockdown.
In August we will be moving to Oxford which is going to disrupt things. From September I shall have the enormous privilege of worshipping daily in Christ Church Cathedral. Before either of those events it is possible that the Government will allow public worship in churches.
The bishops’ permission to celebrate the Eucharist with no other person present was a gracious and well received gift for this lockdown only. I will cease live-streaming the Eucharist on Saturday 11th July (the Feast of St Benedict).
Many people have asked me to continue to Livestream something, especially elements of Common Worship Daily Prayer sung to simple modal chant. I would also like to continue the ministry of intercession.
So, from 11th July I am going to Livestream about 25 minutes of Jesus Prayer, with Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and prostrations, as I have done once or twice already. In between every 25 petitions of the Jesus Prayer I will pray the names of those for whom prayer has been requested. I will begin and end with simple chants (see below). Monday to Friday this will normally be at 6:30am which seems to work for many people. I know that some of those who have asked for prayer like to hear the name prayed out loud and this will allow that.
I will also Live-stream simple services of Morning and Evening Prayer, Compline and on Saturdays a Resurrection Vigil. These may be more intermittent and (apparently random) although I hope to be able to commit to Morning Prayer at 7:00am each day at the end of the Jesus Prayer. Evening Prayer is likely to be at 5:30pm and Compline at 8:30pm, perhaps just Monday to Thursday. Each of these will take about 15 minutes. At Morning and Evening Prayer there will be one psalm or selection from a psalm and one reading from the lectionary. Occasionally I may also Livestream Mid-Day Prayer, also from CWDP.
To follow the liturgy at home Compline is straightforwardly from the booklet below, as also the Resurrection Vigil. Morning and Evening Prayer will need the booklet for the Ordinary of the Office, the booklet for Ordinary Time (Hymn and Benedictus and Magnificat Refrains). But you will be able to follow using CWDP in the book or app. On saints days it may get more complicated but hopefully not too much so.
I will continue to post a request for prayer each afternoon or evening for the next day and, as at present, keep the list going for a fortnight before starting again. Please feel free to add the same names every time.
At some point I will be packing the Oratory up and finding a corner (no doubt surrounded by boxes) to pray in. It will be good to demonstrate that a simple corner is enough for our sacred space and if that happens before 11th July to celebrate Mass more simply.
UPDATE: Many thanks to a correspondent for highlighting this link to an interview with Kallistos Ware, starts at c 7 minutes, here.
Orthodox Spirituality
– Some resources for Spiritual Directors
Diocese of Liverpool Spiritual Directors Course, 14th May 2020
Introduction:
Orthodox prayer (not ‘spirituality’ which is modern western term) may be characterised as:
ecclesial
visual/incarnate/physical
liturgical
theological
disciplined
monastic
For a basic introduction to the Orthodox Churc, the book of that name by Timothy Ware (now Bishop Kallistos Ware) hasn’t been matched.
General Theology and Spirituality
If I had to recommend one book on Orthodox spirituality it would be this, an anthology with commentary it is profoundly ecclesial and theological, it is not outwardly abut ‘spirituality’ which is, in any case a modern, western, individualistic, way of thinking. For any directee moving them towards a fuller and deeper immersion on Christian orthodoxy (as distinct from Orthodoxy) is vital. This is a really helpful book for that. Part Three on Contemplation is an essential guide to an orthodox and Orthodox understanding of prayer and what we now call the ‘spiritual life’.:
The Roots of Christian Mysticism: Texts from the Patristic Era with Commentary
Oliver Clément
New City1993
This is the best, encyclopaedic scholarly guide available. Paints the whole picture, ecclesial and theological. Not for the faint-hearted but brilliant:
Orthodox Spirituality
Dumitroe Staniloae
St Tikhon’s Seminary Press 2003
Lossky is really excellent, this is very accessible and readable:
The Vision of God
Vladimir Lossky
ST Vladimir’s Seminary Press 1983
Orthodox theology is not a thing of the past, it is a vibrant living tradition, anything by Andrew Louth is worth reading, this is especially helpful. There isa very helpful chapter on the ‘English assimilation of Orthodoxy’ with material on St Silouan and Fr Sophrony. Louth’s starting point is the Philokalic tradition and so locates that at the start of the ‘modern’ period.
Modern Orthodox Thinkers – From the Philokalia to the present
Andrew Louth
SPCK 2015
This is a really excellent anthology, one for the prayer-desk, or side of the bath! Bite-sized and readable chunks of great spiritual writers within the tradition:
The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology
Tr E Kadloubovsky and EM Palmer
Matthew the Poor is. a monk and spiritual father of the Monastery of Macarius the Great in Egypt He has been the centre of a remarkable renewal of monastic life in the Coptic Church, this is a very accessible book:
Orthodox Prayer Life: The Interior Way
Matthew the Poor
St Vladimir’s Seminary Press 2003
Fasting
It is impossible to understand Orthodox spirituality without recognising the importance of fasting and our neglect of it in the western church, just search for ‘prayer’ in the Bible and you will see its intimate relationship to prayer for Scripture. There are some of my thoughts on fasting my blog:
Just as it is impossible to imagine Orthodox spirituality without fasting, so it is impossible to imagine Orthodoxy without icons. the literature on icons is vast. Much of it really superb, so just two books in my hight recommended category as a starter:
***** If you only read on ebook on this ison or on icpns on general this ought to be it. It will touch your soul deeply:
The Rublev Trinity
Gabriel Buge
St Vladimir’s Seminary Press 2007
A beautiful book to look at, full of deep theology and spirituality:
***** The Meaning of Icons
Vladimir Lossky
St Vladimir’s Seminary Press 1982
The Silouan / Athonite Tradition
The monasteries and hermitages on Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain, are hugely influential on Orthodox spirituality, we are fortunate in the UK in having a monastery in that tradition here at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex – well worth a visit. Founded by Archimandrite Sophrony it is is now led by Achimandrite Zacharias and the following books will be helpful in accessing that:
Arch Sophrony had been taught by Staretz Silouan (1866-1938) . This is a must read. Very recommendable to directees. The source books on now Saint Silouan are:
Wisdom from Mount Athos: The Writings of Staretz Silouan
St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (1974)
Monk of Mount Athos
St Vladimir’s Seminary Press (1974)
For a general view of Mount Athos this account of renewal of the monastic tradition on the Holy Mountain is very good indeed:
Mount Athos: Renewal in Paradise
Graham Speake
Yale University Press 2002
For Sophrony himself (all very readable and accessible):
His Life is Mine
Archimandrite Sophrony
Mowbray 1977. (now St Vladimir’s Seminary Press
On Prayer
Archimandrite Sophrony
St Vladimir’s Seminary Press 1998
We Shall See Him As He Is
Archimandrite Sophrony
Saint Herman Press1988
Archimandrite Zacharias is, I think, a little denser and less readable but worth persevering with:
The Hidden Man of the Heart: The Cultivation of the Heart in Orthodox Spiritual Anthroplogy
Archimandrite Zacaharias
Mount Thabor Publishing 2008
The Enlargement of the Heart: ‘Be ye also enlarged’ 2 Cor 6:13 in the Theology of St Silouan the Athonite and Elder Sophrony of Essex
Archimandrite Zacharaias
Mount Thabor Publishing 2006
Remember Thy First Love: the three stages of the spiritual life in the theology of Elder Sophrony
Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist Essex 2011
Books abut Archimandrite Sophrony’s teaching:
I Love Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony
Nicholas V Sakarov
St Vladimir’s Seminar Press 2002
Christ, Our Way And Our Life: A Presentation of the Theology of Archimandrite Sophrony
Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist Essex 2012
Other useful Texts
Surprisingly readable, this is very accessible, definitely one to recommend to Directees:
From Glory to Glory: Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings
Ed Jean Daniélou
St Valdimir’s Seminary Press 2001
One of the classic texts of the monastic tradition eastern and western, very readable, highly recommended:
The Ladder of Divine Ascent
John Climacus
Classics in Western Spirituality Paulist Press1982
This is useful to give a picture of the reception of Orthodoxy in the West (particularly in Paris) in the period following the Russian revolution and the Second Word War, it helps to understand the competing jurisdictions and the complications of ecclesiastical politics as well as the culture, all within a biography of one, person. Not an easy read but good:
Lev Gillett: A Monk of the Eastern Church
Elizabeth Behr-Sigel
Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius 1999
Rowan Williams can sometimes be a hard read, Dostoevsky can be equally difficult, so this may not encourage to look at this book, but it actually locates Dostoevsky within the Orthodox tradition and is just brilliant:
Dostoevsky: Language Faith and Fiction
Rowan Williams
Baylor University Press 2008
Likewise Sergei Bulgakov is probably (in my view) the greatest Orthodox theologian of the 20th century. he is really excellent on the place of the holy Spirit in the Christian life. A little more dense than the Dostoevsky book this is worth persevering with especially a sit shows an Orthodox engagement with political realities.
Sergei Bulgakov: Towards a Russian Political Theology
Ed with commentary by Rowan Williams
T and T Clark 1999
Liturgy
Orthodox worship has to be experienced. It is a rich tapestry of icons, movement, vesture, music, texts. Looking at any written text of Orthodox worship is totally inadequate. They are deeply doxological and the communion of saints is tangible. It may be worth looking at some to get that sense, or tor reflect on, but the best thing is to find an Orthodox church and go.
There is no single Orthodox ‘service book’, each language tradition ha sits own books which for any one service will be many. Some western or uniate groups have produced service type books (eg Byzantine Daily Worship or Isabel Hapgood’s Orthodox Service Book) but they are totally inadequate to appreciate Orthodox liturgy. Two publications that provide some indication of the richness may be worth flicking through but I don’t particularly urge you to get them:
The Festal Menaion
Faber and Faber 1969 now from St Tikhon’s Seminary Press
The Lenten Triodion
Faber and Faber 1978 now from St Tikhon’s Seminary Press
The Pilgrim
The Jesus Prayer has become popular and known in the West mainly via two texts, ‘The Way of A Pilgrim’ and ‘The Pilgrim Continues His Way’. The texts are Russian and probably 19th century. They are a short and easy read and really the foundation text for us, well worth recommending. The easiest and most accessible translations are by R.M. French. It’s the first version I read as teenager and I was deeply moved by then. They also give some indications to Directors in working with individuals, the balance of the Jesus Prayer with the reading of the Gospels is hugely significant. It is available on Kindle and now in one volume, slightly dated and sometimes criticised for romanticising the translation:
The best scholarly edition with really important essays on the origins of the text and its various versions is in the Classics in Western Spirituality series:
The Pilgrim’s Tale
Ed. Aleksie Pentkovsky
Paulist Press1999
There are other editions which are new translations:
The Way of A Pilgrim and the Pilgrim Continues His Way
Tr Helen Bacovin
Doubelday 1978
This is useful for a close reading of the text with some helpful notes, I would recommend French or Bacovin for a first unadulterated read which I think is the best way to read it to start with, the story, the narrative is compelling without any notes, this might be useful for a later read:
The Way of A Pilgrim: Annotated and Explained
Tr and annotated: Gleb Pokrovsky
DLT 2001/2003
The Philokalia
The Philokalia: The Complete Text (four volumes, a fifth is promised)
This is probably the best academic study of the Philokalia available. Excellent. A good read, ecumenical and very useful for those offering Spiritual Direction.
***** Written by a recently deceased Anglican bishop this is one of the most accessible books on the JP, and is HIGHLY recommended, very good as a first suggestion to directees:
The Jesus Prayer: A Way to Contemplation
Simon-Barrinton Ward
***** Also by SBW this one with Brother Ramon is another highly recommended. Ramon is a slightly neglected author at the moment well worth reading:
Praying the Jesus Prayer Together
Simon Barrington-Ward and Brother Ramon SSF
Adapted from previous year’s notes for this session:
The Jesus Prayer
The words:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner. (full version)
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. (shorter version).
Greek: Kyrie Iesou Christe: eleison me
The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax-collector: Luke 18:9-14
9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: 10 ‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax-collector. 11 The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector. 12 I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.”13 But the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” 14 I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other; for all who exalt themselves will be humbled.
Useful definitions:
Hesychasm (ἡσυχασμός): “stillness, rest, quiet, silence”): mystical tradition of prayer the Eastern Orthodox Church and Eastern Catholic Churches of the Byzantine Rite. Based on Christ’s injunction in the Gospel of Matthew: “when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray”. Hesychasm in the tradition has been the process of retiring inward by ceasing to register the senses, in order to achieve an experiential knowledge of God (theoria).
Some quotes from the Philokalia (an ancient collection of teachings of the eastern monastic fathers which has passed from Greek to Russian to an English translation in two volumes by Kadloubovsky and Palmer, Faber and Faber 1951).
St Isaac of Syria (7th century):
Try to enter your inner treasure-house and you will see the treasure-house of heaven. For both the one and the other are the same, and the one and the same entrance reveals them both. The ladder leading to the kingdom is concealed within you, that is, in your soul. Wash yourselves from sin and you will see the rungs of the ladder by which you can ascend thither.
St Gregory of Sinai (14th century)
In the morning force you mind to descend from the head to the heart and hold it there, calling ceaselessly in mind and soul: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me!’ until you are tired. Transfer you mind to the second half, and say, ‘Jesus, Son of God, have mercy upon me!’ Having many times repeated this appeal, pass once more to the first half. But you should not alternate these appeals too often through laziness; for just as plants do not take root if transplanted too frequently, neither do the movements of prayer in the heart if the words are changed frequently.
When you notice thoughts arising and accosting you, do not look at them, even if they are not bad; but keeping the mind firmly in the heart, call to Lord Jesus and you will soon sweep away the thoughts and drive out the instigators – the demons – invisibly scorching and flogging them with this Divine Name. Thus teaches John of the Ladder. saying: with the name of Jesus flog the foes, for there is no surer weapon against them, either on earth or in heaven.
The Monks Callistus and Ignatius (14th century)
Prayer practised within the heart, with attention and sobriety, with no other thought and imagining, by repeating the words ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,’ silently and immaterially leads the mind to our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. By the words ‘have mercy on me,’ it turns it back and moves it towards him who prays, since he cannot as yet not pray about himself. But when he gains the experience of perfect love, he stretches out wholly to our Lord Jesus Christ alone, having received actual proof of the second part (that is, of mercy). Therefore, as someone has said, a man calls only: ‘Lord Jesus Christ!’ his heart overflowing with love.
“Don Cupitt,” said Bishop Paul in a conversation, “asks the right questions, but comes up with the wrong answers.” It was one of the many wise things that the Bishop of Liverpool has said to me, and one of several that I have gone away and written down. It’s spot on. I love reading Cupitt. He writes beautifully and he does ask the right questions.
Cupitt is interested in what language we use for the ultimate. Which idioms describe what is meaningful. He spends much time examining idioms including the word ‘life’, but is also interested in the way in which ‘it‘ carries meaning:
“A particularly interesting family of terms is the group It, It all, Things and Everything, which enter into dozens – perhaps hundreds – of idioms . In these idioms it seems to indicate the whole of a person’s circumstances, considered from a finalising point of view … it is evident that the It-group of terms could be shown to figure in a large number of idioms that have a markedly theological flavour … For when we say: ‘This is it, the real thing!‘ we posit a kind of divine completeness, a totality, an unsurpassable finality, more clearly than we ever do with the life-idioms. In its flowing contingency, life is closer to Being; whereas it is perhaps closer to the traditional God,”
The New Religion of Life SCM 1999, pp 104-105
I’ve been re-reading these books during the lockdown and they have worn well. What drove me back to them was a ministry of funerals that I have been exercising, in the area where I live, to help out the local clergy and friends and acquaintances who are vulnerable in some way and have been self-isolating.
When I was first ordained I took plenty of funerals in my two curacies. Since then I have been working full-time in education and I have tried to do one or two funerals during the school holidays to keep my hand in. But most of the funerals I have taken have been relatives, friends or, in tragic circumstances, members of staff, and even, children.
Observing regular funeral ministry from the outside has enabled me to notice two major developments. The rise of civil celebrants. Not just radical humanists and secularists opposed to religion in general, but non-clergy and sometimes ‘inter-faith’ celebrants who will perform ceremonies which are distinctly spiritual and often include elements of Christian liturgy. Most commonly Psalm 23 and theLord’s Prayer. Many clergy are deeply scathing of these services. To those of us who are committed, believing, Christians, there clearly is something missing. But many people I meet speak very highly indeed of the service provided by Civil Celebrants. Many of the Funeral Directors I have spoken to rate them highly. Yes, it can be more convenient to Funeral Directors to have people who are not doing other work and are easily available or who can even commit to certain periods of time a crematorium. However, what is always mentioned to me is the flexibility that Civil Celebrants show in crafting the service and the care they take to provide what the bereaved want. Many of them have clearly developed very high skills in pastoral care. A good number also offer continuing pastoral care, links to counselling, work with Undertakers to invite families to an annual memorial service.
The second factor I have noticed is the number of clergy who tell me that funeral ministry is a waste of time. Using exactly that language. In particular a sense in which funerals for very elderly non-churchgoers where there are no living family and friends are dismissed.
My, negative, reaction to these comments is based, I think on four things:
a) a catholic belief in praying for the dead and the importance of that
b) a strongly Anglican commitment to the Parish, although the parish system as a comprehensive totality was probably always somewhat mythological, recent decades and the events of the Corona Virus are seeing it moving from life-support to palliative care, I think we need to hold on to a theology of parochial-community life in which we genuinely serve the whole population
c) the pastoral instinct to provide care and nurture for those who mourn. In the Beatitudes Jesus, does, after all, declare those who mourn to be blessed.
c) my own experience that funerals are a profoundly missional opportunity. Some of the individuals who it has been my privilege to accompany on a journey to faith have been though funeral ministry. Some of them still keep in touch with me many years later and one is now a priest.
For the Church of England reduction in fee income from funerals (and weddings) is a very significant issue, particularly in a diocese, like my own in Liverpool where there are virtually no historic assets. Earning income should never be the purpose of pastoral ministry but good stewardship demands that we address this issue. As good stewards if clergy are not conducting funerals we need to suggest ways to replace this income.
An innovative approach taken in Liverpool has been the creation of the Good Funeral Company and the recruitment of a remarkable and gifted, priest, Mother Juliet Stephenson to run it (if you ever need clergy training on funeral ministry she is your woman!). You can read more about the GFC here. The mission statement is wonderfully simple and jargon free:
Making good Christian-based funeral services available, personalised, accessible, and affordable for anyone in the Diocese of Liverpool who wants to mark a loved one’s death through prayer.
As soon as it became apparent that I would have some funeral ministry in this crisis I emailed Mother Juliet to ask what she would recommend. Her email reply was enormously helpful, I reproduce it almost in full:
“I attach the service that I am doing in an hour. (it is not what we did as curates…because what we did as curates is not wanted by anyone who is fringe…and on the edge) …
Some bits from Iona / celtic stuff and reworked prayers from over the years.
AND…I do not cut and paste, I have several hundred ways of saying the Godloves everyone…
He forgives us all, because of JC…
I usually get a bible reading in there…but can be amazingly creative with lyrics from Eric Clapton songs too!
You will see the poems and reading and tribute, that the family have provided…
And I welcomed it all…that’s amazing, that’s wonderful…because this is what THEY want.
I am the MC…and the one who will bless.
I was asked, to do this…because the FD’s know that I do a celebration of life with prayers, and I am good.
The woman used to go to church, but the family have no connection at all….
If I couldn’t do it, they would have had a celebrant, and NOT a vicar …
Like I say, I think the success of the GFC, is that we are being offered as celebrants that pray…celebrants that pray and bless…and are authorised todo so.
This is what the FD’s like about what we do.
I get asked to do ‘celebrations of life’…because the perception of vicars is that we can only recite pre-prepared words from the book, and say very little about the woman in the box…
This is why we lose out, over and over again.
You will see very little of the purple book…
And yet,
– we still gather, we reflect, we offer tributes, a bible reading and short ‘popular religion’ reflection and prayer.
We are (at least I operate now) in a world where people want white feathers as signs, robins for comfort, shooting stars across the sky to wishupon.
– rather than words from scripture about men they have never heard of…’Lazarus’
We are amidst folk who want Whitney Houston, YNWA, Perry Como and Monty Python.
– rather than hymns, psalms and symphonies…
And if we can’t connect with this world, with the grace of God, and stop being precious about ‘Lazarus’ or ‘penitential prayers’…we lose it.
We can still talk of hope, forgiveness, resurrection.
We can still offer formal prayers, encourage the corporate saying of the Lord’s prayer
And commend and commit and bless.
If we use comforting, and familiar phrases…like the words to enter into thechapel ‘Jesus said I am…’ that’s good.
If we say with conviction ‘in sure and certain hope…’ that’s good.
If we listen to their heartache, and connect where they are, and see how they gain comfort and assurance that God is real, and heaven is worth believing in…because a white feather drifted onto the windscreen of their car…then that also is very good.
This is what the civil celebrants can’t do effectively…they have to relywholly on the ‘universe’ and ‘stars’…
We have Jesus…
And we have Easter…
Amen brother!
This may never be the way you would ever choose to do services…it works, and people pray at them.
I also asked members of the Sodality, the community of priests I belong to to send me their compiled texts and had a number of conversations with them. This was really helpful. As was a conversation with Fr Daniel Ackerley, a deacon-aspirant to the Sodality who is an experienced Funeral Director. Among many other things he said:
Somebody once said that a funeral service should be like a cup of hot chocolate on a cold winters day. Every word should be soothing.
There is a bit of me that baulked at this. No! We are here to admit that we are sinners, in need of a Saviour and to pray that the dead may have forgiveness! But then I got real.
Famously, a principle of mission for the Jesuits is to go in and learn a language, a culture to be able to speak to it and understand it. Fr Daniel knows well that what people are wanting in a funeral is that cup of hot chocolate. If we stand on our liturgical, theological preciousness and do no translation we will not be understood.
Having been taught early on never to throw anything away in ministry I also had the funeral service I developed in my second full-time parish (St Mary, Portsea). This drew on what must have then been ASB, but I had looked at books more widely, I can’t now remember which. There may have been some Iona, and possibly the Uniting Church in Australia. I had become a correspondent of Jim Cotter and he offered some helpful advice too.
The service I have developed is posted at the top and bottom of this post. I shared the original version with members of the Sodality and also with one or two others. One or two of the local Funeral Directors have also commented positively and with helpful suggestions. Last week I took a funeral for the partner of a woman who was a published poet and is a poet herself. She worked in great detail on the text we agreed and this was really helpful in improving the English. Finally, Fr Steven Shakespeare, an aspirant to our Sodality, and a well-known, published liturgist has published a book of liturgies TheEarth Cries Glory. I have used elements from this woven into the service (and one complete set of intercessions), these are marked SS. I am trying to persuade Fr Steven to produce a book of pastoral liturgies.
I am not making any great claims for my liturgy. It is a ‘work in progress’ and offered for discussion more than anything else. I would welcome any comments. I hope that you can see that I have taken Cupitt’s questions seriously particularly in using the word ‘life’, but also and perhaps less surprisingly ‘love’. ‘It’ is more complex but I do find myself using that sort of language in my more informal words. Using the language of everyday life is, of course, exactly what Jesus did, always talking about himself in this way and avoiding institutionally religious language: way, truth life, gate, bread, shepherd …
Don Cupitt perfectly captures the language that our culture uses around what is meaningful, how to describe the ultimate, the significant. However, he comes up with the wrong answers, a non-realist interpretation of God. Civil Celebrants are doing the same thing. The question is the right one, what language (not just words, but music, images actions) speaks to people where they are? As a Christian I know that their answer is not enough. The world does need a Saviour, but it is our task to speak of Jesus in ways that our culture understands, because Jesus is, yes, so much more than a cup of hot chocolate on a cold winter’s night, but he is that too and what more important time than now to need that. Each day as I kneel before the Blessed Sacrament I pray “Sweet Sacrament Divine”:
Sweet Sacrament of rest, Ark from the ocean’s roar, Within thy shelter blest Soon may we reach the shore; Save us, for still the tempest raves, Save, lest we sink beneath the waves: Sweet Sacrament of rest.
Sweetness indeed, sweetness on a cold winter’s night, sweetness in a time of death and pandemic.
When we wrote The Manual, the way of life of the Sodality, the community of priests I belong to, we included this important paragraph:
Sodalists will be at the forefront of those seeking to understand what it means to ordain men and women to all orders of ministry; we will particularly celebrate women saints and integrate the writings of women and men into our experience and understanding of priesthood.
Slightly tongue-in-cheek, in the early days of the Sodality I described us as ‘Extreme Anglo-Catholics in favour of the ordination of women.’ Tongue-in-cheek as it was ( and far too limiting of the breadth of the vision God was calling us to) there was some truth in it. I quite liked it when the bishop of Croydon described us as the Trappists of the catholic stream of Anglicanism “of the Strict Observance.”
Rigour and high demands are important, and were what led to the flourishing of Anglo-Catholicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They enabled the ministry to the poor and the work for social justice that was the essential outworking of that spirituality. Without outward facing work for justice, spirituality simply strokes the ego and enhances rather than crucifies the ego. Rigour and high demands are not rules to be kept or hoops to be jumped through. Better to think of them as a balloon flying freely into the sky, or a kite carried by the wind.
The Great Tradition (see footnote below) is ‘ever ancient, ever new’ (St Augustine). Drawing deeply from the tradition is vital, and it must bear fruit in the new. My great mantra for the Christian life is : Jesus centred – Spirit filled – bible based.
There is great flowering of creativity in the Sodality: blogs, litanies, such as the one above written by Mother Ayla, Mother Berni, Father Angela, Mother Sally and Father Steven.
The Litany is a great example of ‘ever ancient, ever new’. It is deeply rooted in the tradition and also creative and responsive to the needs of our time. I am deeply grateful for this gift.
Another example of this is the book Prayers for An Inclusive Church. by Fr Steven Shakespeare an aspirant to our Sodality. The title doesn’t quite reflect the content. It is a deeply traditional collection of Collects for the three year cycle of readings in the Revised Common Lectionary. Traditional in that each Collect is constructed with the ‘noble simplicity’ of the western Collect form, at which Cranmer was so gifted. Creative and new in the images used, which are truly Jesus-centred and Spirit filled, drawing on the Scriptures in the lectionary it is bible-based.
There is much in the tradition to help us pray this current pandemic. Christians have lived with plague in many circumstances and many times. I often find myself at the moment re-reading Julian of Norwich who experienced plague more destructive than our current afflictions and who saw in the cross a life-giving tree. Ever ancient, ever new.
The Great Tradition
This description of the spiritual life of the church is one I first came across as a teenager at the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, Crawley Down in West Sussex, I would recommend Fr Steven Underdown’s book Living in the Eighth Day: The Christian Week and the Paschal Mystery as a further explanation of this. He writes in that book:
“Three men, whom CSWG now accounts its joint-founders, not only shared a common experience of ministry among the disadvantaged and marginalised, they also shared the conviction that is was the specifically spiritual dimension in Christian life that was most in need of renewal. A saying attributed to Fr [William] Sirr has been seen as encapsulating their common belief:
“The mission of the church is weak because its prayer is weak.” Only though the renewal of the Church’s mystical and ascetic traditions – that is its vision of God and its tradition of conversion of life – could the life and witness of the the Church be renewed.”
We are a few weeks into the live-streaming now. I am deeply grateful to those who join me or watch later in the day and am much encouraged by your gratitude. It is nothing other than a privilege to offer intercession at the altar for the many names received.
Regular visitors will see that I have been experimenting with the chant a little, using more traditional plainsong (with English texts) as well as the material from the English Gradual. I have also added in a chanted version of Psalm 42 (43) as a transition from the Liturgy of the Word to the Liturgy of the Sacrament), almost a ‘prayers at the foot of the altar’. The experiment with seasonal insertions to Prayer H didn’t really work, getting the grammar right to lead into “on the nigh he was …’ is too complicated and needed insertions in two different places. With the new chant at the Offertory – using a Gelineau tone which I like to do – may mean that I omit a seasonal chant after the post-communion prayer and just use the Sodality Anthem to Mary, Mother of Priests.
Apart from that the rite, and especially the way in which I have tried to include those watching and unable to receive Communion seems to work. The changes and a couple of typos corrected are in this version of the booklet:
Eucharist: no change except that I trying out using seasonal inserts into Eucharistic Prayer H, based on the Short Prefaces in Common Worship and inserted before the institution narrative.
It has been really good to experiment with live-streaming worship in Holy Week and the Octave of Easter.
During the continuing lockdown I shall live stream the Eucharist at 6:30am BST each day and Compline at 7pm. After the opening verse I will read a poem. I probably won’t choose this until just before the Office but will try and Tweet it when I have done so.
I have been experimenting with the way to livestream through one fixed camera in a very small space. The layout of the Oratory has changed a little and I have tried to include those watching in a meaningful and non-trite way without intruding myself too much, I hope.
Here are the forms I shall be using for the time being:
It is pretty much as before although the introduction I have devised for those watching just didn’t work and I have removed it, as also the post-Communion prayer. I have extended the Prayer over the Gifts to include mention of ‘lockdown’ and extended the intercessions with more material on the pandemic. There is a ‘statement’ (not really a prayer) before receiving communion to include those watching and not receiving communion. I am not sure about it but will give it a go.
In communion with those who cannot receive communion,
with all who watch this Eucharist
and with all the faithful in every time and place, in heaven and on earth:
The bread of heaven in Christ Jesus. Amen.
The cup of life in Christ Jesus. Amen.
The readings are from the Daily Eucharistic Lectionary – I read them in the Jerusalem Bible version mainly because that means I can use the monthly Magnificat booklet which is easier to juggle with everything else on the legilium.
For the Introit and Concluding Chants I am using Abbot Alan Rees’s music published by Belmont Abbey in An English Gradual, it is really good. I will use one chant at each point for a whole week (except on feasts). It is only £7:50. A real ‘must-buy’. Which you can do here). Each refrain is provided with verses from the psalms (Grail psalter),
The responsorial psalmody is by Fr Anthony Ruff OSB (St John’s, Collegeville) Responsorial Psalms for Weekday Mass in the Seasons. They are very simple modal chants and work really well. All the texts are those set in the lectionary but it should be noted that they are the ICEL texts not those in British liturgical books.
I have also added the texts and music from the monastery at Crawley Down (Community of the Servants of the Will of God) to greet and give thanks for the Gospel. It just seems a bit ‘naked’ without something.
I aim to have longer silences after the gospel and after Communion. I have been a bit cautious so far when live-streaming given that many people just ‘dip in’. But now that we are out of the high seasons will go for it.
Again this is pretty straightforward. The English Anthem to the BVM is a version by Aelred Seton Shanley Obl. OSB Cam. an English hermit who lived in the Unites States for many years and died in the mid 1990s. I very much like his material, including Office hymns and these anthems to Our Lady. A few of the hymns have been published here. I am grateful to have been given a copy of the whole Office. The Antiphon on the psalms at Compline is the 8-fold alleluia that was popular when I was a teenager and will make many groan. I don’t know whether it will wear singing every night but thought I would try it.
On Saturdays and Sundays I will sing Compline in Latin.
It is such a joy to have people praying with me even though remotely, I am profoundly grateful for the prayerful support that offers and it is wonderful to be able to pray so many prayer intentions. There is a very real sense of communion and ‘inter-being’. I could not be more grateful.
Compline in Latin with the response for the Easter Octave: “This is the day the Lord has made …”. I shall decide eon poetry to read when the moment arrives!
“Pray constantly”, said St Paul (1 These 5:17), using two simple words to describe something that would exercise the minds of many, and thousands of volumes of books by Christians, through the centuries. Almost all modes of spirituality and Christian practice (Jesus Prayer, Divine Office, Little Hours especially, Practice of the Presence of God) aim to help us remember God and that we are in the Divine Presence always. To pray constantly.
I have been doing a bit of live-streaming of the liturgy during the lockdown as I celebrate it each day in the little Oratory at home (which is how I use an old lean to on the house). It’s been good to have a few old and new friends join me for that. Several have asked for more. I am something of an introvert and although I arrange the live-streaming in such a way so as not to focus on me (I hope) it does feel a little intrusive and less relaxed so I won’t be doing this all the time (you will be relieved to know) but as a one off on Friday 17th April I am going to live stream all the set prayers for a day.
My first experience of the Office was at Douai Abbey and of the monks singing the whole of the Office. That experience marked me indelibly and even though I am not a good singer (as you will find if you tune in at all), I love to sing and find it relaxes me in ways that simply reciting the Office does not. Somehow it engages different parts of my brain. When (in another life) I was doing a lot of driving, if I stopped and sang an Office it felt far more refreshing when I started driving again than if I had simply recited it, and reading to myself in my head never seems like praying the liturgy at all, but on trains, buses and planes is usually necessary.
Since Holy Saturday, and partly because for live-streaming the text is more accessible, I have been singing the Divine Office, the texts are in the Universalisapp which does charge but only a very small amount. The Universaliswebsite sadly uses a different translation of the psalms. The antiphons and hymns I use are in the setting of the music for the Office that I have done and is available here (a revised edition should be available in the not too distant future and will be posted on this blog very soon). The booklet below this post puts them together in order with the usual texts and music for this single day of live-streaming, you will need the booklet together with the psalms, readings and prayers from Universalis to be able to follow everything. Please note I use a different set of Collects – translated from a French Cistercian source (from Proclaiming All Your Wonders, Dominican Publications).
I wrote yesterday about the joy of coffee, tea and lunch breaks in our Zoom driven working days. I have always maintained little spaces to pray at least one daytime Office and that has kept me going through many hard times in my working life. If you haven’t discovered it yet do give it a go.
So, the timetable for the day:
5:30 am Office of Readings/Vigils (two nocturns the Mid-Day prayer psalms as in Universalis – but omitting sections of psalm 119 – providing the second group of psalms) a triple alleluia antiphon for all psalms. The psalms at Vigils are sung to traditional plainsong tones.
I will switch off live streaming between each Office/devotion – a chance for me to get a cup of tea or check the dog doesn’t need to go out …
6:15 am Rosary the Luminous Mysteries
I would normally celebrate Mass at 6:30 but am doing that later in the day, at 12:15, in the Octave.
7am Lauds (Morning Prayer)
Jesus Prayer
About 7:45am Prime with Martyrology – Psalm 119 (118) shared across the Little Hours in a day – see the booklet for the text.
I should point out that this is a rather luxurious lockdown schedule. On normal working days I would tart at 5:20 combine Vigils and Lauds (or Sing Mattins/Morning Prayer when praying BCP or CWDP), go straight into Mass, then Prime. Rosary and Jesus Prayer prayed as I drive.
10am Terce
12 noon Sext and Eucharist
2:00 None
4:30pm Vespers
6:30 Devotions on Hebrew Heroes – Deborah –
and Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament
7pm Compline
Again normally on a working day Vespers would be either stopping on the way home or as soon as I get home, often quite late, and Compline much later, ideally just after dinner but sometimes just before bed, ideally at 9 to 9:30.
The first Spiritual Director I had, when I was fifteen or sixteen was in many ways an impatient man. In one meeting with him I explained some injustice or bad deed I thought I had suffered. “Well, there’s no point whining,” he said, “What have you learnt from it?”.
I don’t recommend this as good practice on all occasions in spiritual direction. However, it is an ill-wind and all that. I’ve been thinking about what I am learning during the lockdown. Apart, that is, from the necessary skills of using Zoom (I can do break out rooms and everything); Go To Meeting, FaceTime, Microsoft Teams and more.
Yesterday, in a messaging conversation with my dear friend the Assistant Diocesan Secretary in the Diocese of Liverpool, I suggested we have a Zoom conversation, “How about one’o’clock?”, he returned. “Sorry, that’s lunchtime,” was my response, before we settled on a time later in the week.
It was only afterwards that I realised how extraordinary my response had been. Not because Stuart minded in the least. But because I haven’t taken lunch breaks for over twenty years, since I was appointed Acting Deputy Head at Emsworth Primary School in 1998.
I remember lunch breaks in school staffrooms before that as rather good times, friendly banter, much of it with colleagues who remain friends to this day. Birthday celebrations, cakes, those piles of books and odd objects that companies sold in staff rooms. Even my friend Becca introducing us to the Physalis in her lunch box one day. Exotic stuff indeed.
Since then, however, lunch has been always on duty, walking the corridors and playground, chatting to pupils or seeking out colleagues for whom this is a chance to have a quick ‘meeting’. School leaders are, and I am one of them, proud of this. Whenever Heads are together on a conference or residential training and have a sit down lunch somebody will soon comment on never sitting down to eat usually.
When I moved to the role of Director of Education here in Liverpool I brought these working habits with me. Like my colleagues in the team I am often driving around. So there are breaks between schools. I have learnt what food I can eat in the car as I drive without making too much mess. Sandwiches are hopeless. Thank goodness for Samosas and Baby Bel cheeses.
In the first week of the lockdown, like many other people I was introduced to Zoom. I think it is wonderful. I hope never again to ask people to drive to attend a meeting that takes a fraction of the time they were travelling. I have renewed old friendships and given real life to existing networks. It is a good thing. But that week I was frazzled. I learned how much I needed those driving times between meetings. Zoom meetings came thick and fast with barely time to pop to the toilet or make a cup of tea. Texting for a cup of tea to be brought to me during one meeting really made me realise how bad it had got. It was utterly unsustainable.
So I made some rules. Coffee at 10 every day, away from the desk, not a long break but time enough to make and drink a coffee; lunch for an hour from 1 to 2, tea at 4 – again just time to make and drink a cuppa, and not drunk at the lap-top or even on the phone. No Zoom meetings for work after 6. I still do early meetings when people want them, often early phone calls; so I don’t think I am being lazy in any way. Of course I have to be a little flexible, there awesome meetings I can’t control the times of, but then I move the break time.
This is the learning. Aren’t lunch breaks wonderful. It’s been helped, of course, by being able to sit in the garden most days. But taking time to make a proper meal (no more Samosas or sausage rolls), sitting down and eating it, conversation about something different to work, eyes off a screen.
Is this a lesson I can put into practice once this is over? I don’t know. Is it possible to do this as a Headteacher – perhaps some of my colleagues will tell me that they do? And, even as I write, I realise that in this crisis I am immensely privileged (not just in having a garden to sit in), most of our schools are open, most of our Heads are in school every day (I keep telling them not to be) and as for NHS staff and other Carers the idea of a lunch break must seem like a distant prospect.
In our Anglo-Saxon world we have always looked jealously at cultures where proper meals are part of working life – my dad used to drive five miles home and back to have lunch with mum and us during the school holidays. Even in the little village where I live the farm workers pass by as they walk home each day for lunch.
Corona Virus 19 is going to change our world. So many of those changes will be devastating and awful, but perhaps a few of them could be for good.
“Sorry, that’s my lunch break.” I’ll ask Stuart if he noticed. I am slightly proud of myself.
‘Village religion’ is how one priest-friend describes the worship in the village where I live. It’s true, it is common to many village churches I visit to preach or preside in. It doesn’t just describe the liturgy or the rite, or the way it is performed but also the relationships, the community, the sense of being together in a particular way. A church that belongs to everybody even those who don’t attend very often. A place full of collective memory and simple welcome. Our village churches are ‘inclusive’ in ways that many city churches can only dream of. There is certainly no room for ‘churchmanship’ or partisanship in any way. It is a very beautiful way of being Anglican. A Sunday when I am presiding and preaching in our 14th century church, visible from the garden is a total joy.
For the last two weeks in this village and the villages around, all part of the same benefice, have been worshipping together on Zoom. I was sceptical about how it would work, and how many people would be able to access this strange new technology. In fact on Easter Day 41 computers were logged in and most had more than one person viewing them. I put together and led the liturgy, a simple liturgy of the word (see below). Our vicar preached a short and powerful sermon, a house for duty priest in the parish led the intercessions. We will swap those roles around over the coming weeks. The liturgy was designed to be familiar. Hymns we know well (played via Spotify playlist) and familiar texts. The most daring liturgical creativity is an ee cummings poem I put at the start.
There was nothing remarkable about what was happening other than that these times are entirely remarkable. For me it had a lovely ‘village religion’ feel to it. It was wonderful to see so many familiar faces, not people I know well, but people who belong, have belonged here longer than I have. In ‘unprecedented’ times, when all seems made strange, familiarity was just what we all needed. I’ll take ‘village religion’ any time.
There is such intensity about Lenten observance and particularly about Holy Week and the Triduum that it is possible to mis the great eight days, the Easter Octave that follows. The liturgy which has seen such variety for three days suddenly becomes very repetitive. Partly that’s necessary, and the first simple celebration of the Eucharist on Easter Monday is a necessary tonic after the rich diet of the preceding week.
This year in our isolation I am going to be meditating on some of my ‘heroes and heroines’ in the Hebrew Scriptures. For the first time on Sunday morning before dawn I was able to read all nine readings at the Paschal Vigil, slowly and with plenty of time for reflection between them, I did this by a fire in the garden as pictured. I found it profoundly moving. From Common Worship: Times and Seasons I chose the ‘Women in Salvation’ series. Given that women are under-represented in our lectionaries I would value doing that every year. I used the Anselm canticle (from Common Worship Daily Prayer) with the ‘mother reading’ from Isaiah 66 and found that especially moving.
I am not going to reflect simply on women this Easter week but on a variety of figures:
Monday – Isaac
Tuesday – Sarah
Wednesday – Ruth
Thursday – Nehemiah
Friday – Deborah
I will Livestream these meditations each day 6:30 – 7pm BST and they will consist of poems and prayers with short reflections in the way of a monologue with the character by me, one sung responsorial text and silence. At 7pm I will sing Compline, in English in this version:
Here is the slightly revised liturgy for the Vigil. The two differences to the earlier version is that the whole of the text of the Exultet is used. I just couldn’t bear to omit it. I have put it in as a responsorial text with an offering of incense refrain, this is slightly odd but I know the refrains nd tone well so will be able to sing it while censing the candle and the icons. I have also added a tone and refrain for the Collects after each of the nine readings and psalms/canticles of the Vigil.
What is very obvious from live streaming liturgies in a small space and using a fixed camera is the difficulty of liturgical action. Without any action it is really just audio, but the action is difficult to capture without camera movement.
Anyway, here is my attempt at a liturgy for Good Friday in this strange year. In the absence of the action of the veneration of the cross I am using the poem After the Seven Last Words by poet Mark Strand. I think it is a rather stunning meditation. I shall intersperse the readings with Responsorial psalms and end with the Beatitudes. I will be interested to see how it works. It may be a bit rich for Good Friday – losing the starkness of the liturgy.
I shall use the Grail Psalms for all but the final Psalm (Ps 22) which will be from the BCP and sung to a traditional plainsong tone.
I would have liked to use some recorded music. I thought Hania Rani‘s Esja would work really well. But then I would be adding the action of turning on the music etc which would spoil my own engagement with the worship and also probably break Facebook’s copyright rules.
Monday in Holy Week is the day when the Diocese of Liverpool gathers at the Cathedral for the blessing of oils and the Renewal of Commitment to Ministry. In this time of pandemic the diocesan communications team prepared a video service. The Bishop of Warrington, The Rt. Rev’d. Bev Mason, offered a reflection on the powerful gospel reading John 12:1-11. It is a profound and deep meditation that moved me greatly. I am grateful to Bishop Bev for allowing me to post her words below. You can watch the service here:
In our reading, Jesus is back in Bethany. It’s after the raising of Lazarus so you can imagine his celebrity status there, and the cult following he’s attracting. It’s also just 6 days before the crucifixion, and he’s having dinner with Lazarus and his friends.
Wouldn’t you have just loved to have been there, listening and participating in the conversations. Undoubtedly, he was preparing them, as well as himself, for his formal entry into Jerusalem as the Messiah. (We’d have celebrated this, from our places of confinement, yesterday on Palm Sunday).
Well! Suddenly the conversations are interrupted by Mary – she’ the one, remember, who would sit with the disciples at Jesus’ feet as they’re being apprenticed. I don’t know that anyone would’ve noticed her getting up …. But they’d certainly have noticed what happened next! She quietly fetches some nard oil … she goes back to Jesus, she kneels down and she pours the oil over His feet.
Now Nard was an exotic oil – it comes from the Himalayas and so imagine how costly this was. And she doesn’t just take a few drops – she takes a pound of Nard. She gently massages it into his feet. And then letting down her hair, she wipes his feet with it.
It’s so intimate, that it almost feels intrusive that anyone else should be present: In this most tender and beautiful expression of love, the oil is soaked up from one body to the other … and the aroma of love, fills the room.
Usually when hear of incense and aroma in the Bible, they’re associated with priestly offerings and sacrifice. Mary would have known this – as I’m sure, she’d have known the teaching from Hosea, where God says,
“I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. ESV Hos 6.6
In this ritual Mary is participating in Jesus’ death.
I wonder if she knows that in doing so, she’s participating, too, in his risen life.
Mary was a disciple of Jesus. She’d listened and watched and prayed and learned from Him.
She knew that had Jesus been present when her brother was ill, he would’t have died.
She saw him raise her brother from the grave.
Through Jesus’ proximity to her and her, what we call, teachable spirit, her asking and searching …. and desire to learn, Mary grew in the knowledge of God.
Did she know she was in the presence of God?
At Jesus’ trial, just a week later, the Chief Priest will ask Jesus outright: “Are you the Messiah? Are you the Son of God’… . News that Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead had spread and this was clearly what people were claiming on the streets of Bethany and in Jerusalem.
Is this what Mary believed?
I suspect so! And I suspect it’s the knowledge of this and the fear of how this was all going to unfold, that brought her to her knees before him.
This is a woman before the Messiah, the Son of God, giving herself to him.
Today in this (Not the Chrism Mass!), from our places of isolation, we recall and we shall renew our commitment to God’s call upon our lives … and the promises we’ve made to :
give ourselves to Him;
and to follow and to serve him ….. in the good times and in the challenging times.
We are each called in different, yet life-changing ways
and each tasked with particular vocations and responsibilities.
Friends, I believe Mary teaches us so much about the Christian vocation.
She sets before us a model of humility and service …
She dares to buck stereotyping;
In a room of men, she lets down her hair and exposes herself to rebuke – even though she’s about the service of Christ.
She pre-figures the footwashing by Jesus of his disciples, in the Upper Room. (I wonder if Jesus recalled this moment, as he washed his disciples’ feet!
Mary embraces the drama of the anointing …. without explanation or commentary … and in no small measure she pours out the costly oil, which speaks of the immeasurable love Christ pours upon us; and WE, in turn are to pour out upon others.
One of the immense challenges for each of us in these days of Coronavirus, is understanding what vocation means when things are unfamiliar. When we can’t minister in the tried and tested ways and when we mustbe distanced from people. Mary draws us back to LOVE which is the essence of our being, our thinking, our actions, our service. I think it’s this that Jesus was driving at, when he said, ‘I no longer call you servants. You are my friends.’
God calls us friends as he calls us to minister to him, and through him, to the world.
And at the heart of calling and service is love.
This is exactly what we’ve been seeing in these present trials:
Friends, Bishop Paul and I are so very deeply touched and profoundly humbled by the faithful, creative and imaginative ways colleagues have adapted to the Corona crisis and how you’ve endeavoured to support, encourage, pray, lead praise, and provide pastoral care and bereavement support. This is happening in parishes, hospitals, schools, prisons and very many other work places. Each in your way, and under very challenging circumstances, are pouring out the NARD of blessing of your calling – we want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your inspirational ministries!
For some Colleagues, confinement is something of a gift of time to pray and read and learn. I encourage you all to make time to attend to and build up your inner life.
And as we journey, each in our way, through Holy Week, to the Cross and the Empty Tomb,
may the life and joy of the resurrection touch and bless each of us, making us ready for the new morning – and the world beyond isolation.
God fill your heart with love. God keep you safe and bless you. Amen
For Compline in the Sacred Triduum, Thursday, Friday and Saturday I will be using Latin for all but the poem. Here’s the booklet for Holy Thursday. Compline will be live streamed at midnight on Holy Thursday, and at 7pm on Good Friday and Holy Saturday.
At one level our communion with one another is always invisible, or at least largely invisible The people we gather with in church Sunday by Sunday, however large the congregation, are just a fragment of the many millions we are in communion with in heaven and on earth in the Body of Christ. We also share a deep, consubstantial, inter-being with all human beings in every time and place, and indeed with everything that exists, through our creation from the matter of the earth.
The current crisis has made some of that invisibility visible. I am really grateful for those who have joined me at Mass in my little Oratory and sent messages of appreciation. Several have asked for more of the Office to be streamed. So I thought I would add Compline for this Holy Week.
You will find the text and music I will use in the booklet above. I will do a new booklet each day with a different poem that I will read between the opening verses and the Prayers of Penitence.
As there is no movement or action I will focus the camera on one of the icons rather than on me. Which should improve the experience! I have indicated in the text where I will pause for silences, hopefully it’s not because I have fallen asleep.
I normally sing Compline rather early in the evening if I can, I will try for a consistent 7pm. It’s nice to feel the Office is complete before having family time and early to bed.
SOURCES
The Divine Office as used at Worth Abbey, music by Dom Philip Gaisford OSB:
music for the Introductory verses, the hymn, Responsory and the Refrain to the Nunc Dimittis
Hymn: Text Patrick Lee (Hymns for Prayer and Praise rev. Ed 265)
Samuel Weber OSB: refrains for the psalms
Aelred Seton Shanley Obl. OSN New Camaldoli: the anthem to Our Lady
Common Worship Daily Prayer: texts of the psalms and the Nunc Dimittis
For the timetable for the week and more thoughts on these strange times seehere.
Here (above) is the booklet of how I shall celebrate the liturgies this week in the Oratory. It is not a complete script, but I have included as much as possible, including music, so that I am not juggling with too many books. It does still require Common Worship: Times and Seasons, a separate booklet of readings (above), a psalter (I shall use the Grail) and the Belmont Abbey English Gradual. Sadly, this is not available online, but the wonderful music of Abbot Alan is very singable, modal and simple. The Eucharistic liturgy is the one I have written about here and here. There is not much seasonal variation to it (no proper Prefaces etc) but the simplicity works, I think.
The Gospel of the Entrance into Jerusalem will begin Palm Sunday’s Eucharist, but without blessing of palms or procession.
For the liturgy on Good Friday I have added the insert prepared by the Vatican for the Solemn Intercessions in this time of pandemic, adapting it slightly to match the language of Times and Seasons, I think it works best in that text between the second and third intercession. In the Roman Rite it is suggested for rather later. The Proclamation of the Cross will be fairly informal with readings and poems from outside of Scripture.
At the Paschal Vigil I have followed the suggestion of Times and Seasons for Pattern B with an extended vigil of readings and psalms ending with the lighting of the Paschal candle. I think this makes much more sense than the usual pattern proclaiming the resurrection with the Easter fire and then settling down for the Vigil. As T&S suggests I shall do this by a fire (either in the garden or the fireplace, depending on the weather), but more like a camp fire for story-telling than the Easter light itself.
The only issue with the Pattern B structure is the proximity of the Exultet and the Gloria. Because I am just going to use the very short metrical Exultet that T&S gives and then a refrain to a simple chant Gloria I don’t think that will matter, but if the Exultet was sung solemnly I think it might seem odd to follow it immediately with the Gloria.
I am using the Women in Salvation readings from T&S but have replaced Psalm 113 after the Isaiah 66 reading with the Canticle in Common Worship Daily Prayer from Julian of Norwich which beautifully picks up the image of motherhood.
This is not a polished service booklet but a script for me to use in these strange times. I will, no doubt be adapting it as the week goes on and will post updates. Unless otherwise indicated the music in the booklet is my own adaptation of plainsong chants.
UPDATE Saturday 15:30 – The introductory chant on Palm Sunday is surprisingly underrepresented in my collection of liturgical music. A simple plainsong setting by Br Reginald SSF seemed to be the best I could do. There is a version in the Hymn-Tune Psalter which I have recently acquired, also the ‘Hosanna’ Jacques Berthier / Taizé chant but this is really a canon and seems very weak sung by a single voice. I then remembered the collection by Paul F Ford, By Flowing Waters, which is an English version of the Graduale Simplex. His setting of one of the palm procession chants to mode 1 works well I think. He sets the psalm verses to the traditional plainsong tone; I will use that with a text pointed in the Sarum Psalter or the Grail version with the Conception mode 1 tone as shown below. Or I may even use it twice, before and after the Palm Gospel, with verses from psalm 118 before and psalm 24 afterwards.
Here is the booklet of complete texts for all the liturgies of Holy Week except the daily Office. Authorised Version, the traditional Western lectionary (English Missal, 1958) which allows Patristic commentaries, Guéranger, Parsch etc to be consulted easily. Paschal Vigil readings in the Times and Seasons lectionary, ‘Women in Salvation’.
Common Worship: Times and Seasons includes a number of alternative, themed, patterns of readings for the Easter (Paschal) Vigil:
Baptismal
Women in Salvation
Salvation
Renewal
Freedom
All of them require the use of Exodus 14 (rightly !) and there are 22 readings used over the 5 themes. One Easter night I would love to use all of them over the course of the night!
Given that I think that repetition is the key to good liturgy and that women are seriously under represented in both Scripture and lectionaries I would argue for using ‘Women in Salvation’ every year.
So here is a booklet of those readings (in the Authorised Version) in the hope that it might be helpful to some. I shall be using these on my own this pandemic year. T&S includes psalm references and Collects for each reading which are excellent. I may get round to adding those to the booklet, but, for now, the readings:
UPDATE Good Friday – I tried rehearsing Stations of the Cross live in the garden; sadly it just didn’t work, there was no way of moving the camera (iPhone on a tripod) in a way that wouldn’t have made anyone watching seasick. So no lies team of Stations but I will livestream Compline each night at 7pm Friday and Saturday.
UPDATE 6 April, 15:30 – please note there will now be no Eucharist of the Day in the Oratory, I am leading worship for the parish on Zoom at that time. In addition to the liturgies below I will livestream Compline each day at 7pm BST except for Maundy Thursday when Compline will complete the Watch at midnight.
Several people have asked what I intend to do for the liturgical services of Holy Week. I had been due to preach at St George’s, Paris and am sad not now to be with Fr Mark and the people there. I normally ‘preach’ Holy Week as a guest preacher so I rarely have to organise the liturgies of the week or the Triduum, although I have done a few vacancies over the years and when I was a parish priest always enjoyed working out what would work and what wouldn’t. here’s a picture of the booklet from the last time I had sole responsibility which was at St Faith’s, Landport in 1997:
I have been live-streaming the Eucharist each day from my little Oratory in the garden over the last few days. I am so deeply moved to be joined by people, some I know and am fond of, some strangers to me. I shall continue doing this during Holy Week at the following times:
Palm Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday: Eucharist at 6:30am BST (GMT+1)
Maundy Thursday: Eucharist of the Lord’s Supper 8pm, I will keep a Watch until midnight and sing Compline at midnight. Eucharist and Compline but not the Watch streamed.
Good Friday – Stations of the Cross 10am
Good Friday: Liturgy of the Day at 2pm
Easter Day: Paschal Vigil and First Eucharist of Easter: 3:30am;
In terms of what I will do, those who tune in to the stream from the Oratory seem to appreciate the simplicity and silence. Others will be looking for something very different and there are many places offering sophisticated audio-visual material, and grander liturgies. Which is excellent. For this domestic Oratory as simple as possible seems to be best. For the Eucharistic liturgy the rite will be just as I have been doing and as described here.
Normally for a weekday Eucharist in the Oratory I just wear a stole over my usual clothes; to mark the solemnity of this week I will wear the usual vestments on Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and at the Easter Eucharists and an Alb and stole on Good Friday at the Liturgy.
As you can see there is no blessing of the palms or procession, no Easter fire, no veneration of the Cross. Times and Seasons (T&S) gives different sets of readings for the Vigil with themes. I have chosen ‘Women in Salvation’. I will sort out what I am going to do at the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday morning in due course and post here when that is done. It will be very simple indeed. The Vigil will start early and be very leisurely which I have done before and works really well, with a rather informal feel. I’m hoping I can do this in the garden at a little bonfire. Vestments put on only at the move into the Oratory for the first Eucharist of Easter.
Music
I love to sing and I love the psalms. So alongside a few simple chants from Taizé and the Iona Community there will be psalms with sung refrains, from Belmont Abbey (An English Gradual, Fr Alan Rees OSB), Br Reginald SSF (Lent, Holy Week and Easter – Services and Prayers). I won’t sing any hymns. I am not a great singer and singing hymns unaccompanied is pretty tough going. On Monday to Wednesday the Chants (sung with verses of psalmody) will be (Mon – Wed Introit Belmont 35, Psalm Belmont 44, Concluding Chant Belmont 42). Other music see below:
Palm Sunday
Introit Reginald 9
Commemoration of the Lord’s Entry Into Jerusalem (T&S 269 – 271 omitting prayer over the palms and procession
Liturgy of the Word – Psalm Belmont 35
Intercession T&S 272-273
Eucharistic liturgy continues as usual Concluding Chant Belmont 30
Maundy Thursday
Introit Belmont 52
Penitential verses T&S 294
Psalm Belmont 111
Intercessions T&S 299
Preparation of the Gifts T&S 300
Eucharistic liturgy continues as usual
Concluding Chant Lamentations (traditional)
John 17
Watch until midnight before the Blessed Sacrament
Midnight Compline: traditional plainsong
Good Friday Stations of the Cross (10am) more detail later.
Good Friday – Liturgy of the Day
No Introit
Gathering and Liturgy of the Word T&S 307 – 308 Psalm Belmont 181 (The Passion ends at Jn 19: 37)
Prayer around the Cross – Jesus remember me, (Taizé), Belmont 178 verses from psalm 26, poetry and silence
The Solemn Intercession at the Cross
T&S 316 -318
Holy Communion T&S 319 – 320 Gospel of the Burial of Christ (Jn 19: 38-42
The Paschal Vigil – Times & Seasons Pattern B ( 3:30 am – 5:30 am)
T&S Pattern B – outside (if not raining, or by the fireplace), at a fire
Introduction T&S 354 –
Readings T&S 373 (Theme ‘Women in Salvation’) Refrains for psalms, selected verses, from Sunday Psalms, Kevin Mayhew
1 Genesis 1 Psalm 104
2 Genesis 3 Psalm 51
3 Exodus 12 Psalm 77
4 Exodus 14 Canticle
5 Ruth 1 Psalm 61
6 1 Samuel 1 Canticle CWDP p 572
7 Proverbs 8 Canticle CWDP p 599
8 Isaiah 66 Psalm 113
9 Daniel 3 canticle Benedicite
The Paschal Candle is blessed and lit T&S 355
Move to the Oratory (5:30am)
Metrical Exultet T&S 358 Tune: Woodlands
Gloria mode viii
Collect
Liturgy of the Word Psalm Belmont 60
Blessing of Water Chant: Water of Life …
Apostles’ Creed
The Eucharistic Liturgy continues as usual
Concluding chant: Belmont 67
Eucharist of Easter Day
Usual Eucharistic Liturgy with Gloria and Creed, chants:
My friend and colleague in the Diocese of Liverpool, Mother Hannah Lewis has recently moved her prayer corner / Oratory from a bay window to the attic. Having prayed in the former space for some years she wanted to mark her farewelling of that space liturgically and has produced this rather lovely liturgy for doing so.
The prayer for taking leave is adapted from “A liturgy for leave-taking a house” in Human Rites compiled by Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wild
Before Coronavirus (BC) when I was travelling a good deal and staying overnight in hotels and conference centres I always said a little prayer of blessing for the corner of the room I set up for my prayer. I often thought that I needed a farewell prayer as well. I may just work on that at some point …
“A marathon not a sprint.” That’s a phrase government ministers and medical advisers are using for the the pandemic. For those on the frontline of hospital care pacing yourself must seem like a luxury. But for those of us locked down at home it is rather different. It is a fortnight since what I think of as week zero began and my diary started to empty, actual cancellation emails or just the reality that these things are not going to happen. I have Holy Week Sermons prepared on Augustine for Paris. Conference talks on renewal of the church planned for Australia and New Zealand, parish days on Julian of Norwich, an ordination retreat on the poet Gwenallt. When that material will see the light of day I don’t know.
It was in the middle of week zero that the platforms allowing face to face meetings online began to impact. Added to Skype and FaceTime, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams and the now ubiquitous, among clergy, Zoom.
My short term diary filled again quickly. National and diocesan meetings. Conversations with Headteachers, MAT CEOs, Local Authority Officers. I have ‘seen’ my diocesan education team colleagues more in a week than I normally see them in a month. There is spiritual direction to be done on Zoom as well as ‘meetings’ with family and friends. In the village I live in caring for the elderly and housebound is being done on a What’s App group and together with that communication have been additional shopping trips for them. The community of priests I belong to (the Sodality) is also meeting three times a week on Zoom.
At the end of Week One of Zoom working I was shattered. So I decided to take 24 hours off all digital communication. It gave me chance to think about why the digital life has been so tiring when I normally have a significant online presence (Twitter, Facebook and my blog) which does not tire me.
Before thinking about the difference between my normal online activity and the new circumstances we are all in it’s important to acknowledge the exhaustion caused by trauma and anxiety. Almost the whole human population is experiencing a significant trauma. My observation of people and my own experience, is that there is a combination of shock, and from some, still, denial. There is a permanent sense of anxiety that never goes away. Several people have spoken to me about dystopian dreams. I may be wrong but this particularly seems to be so for those living in cities who are seeing places they know well, and which are normally busy, bustling places, suddenly bereft of people. Couples, families, households are spending enforced time together, our normal routines are broken, Many people are being furloughed or can’t get the work done that they normally do. This sense of being out of control causes stress.
Add to that our worries and concerns for those we love. My elderly dad in a nursing home. My nephew in China. A friend’s son with pneumonia.
Given all of this it is not surprising that we feel more tired than usual, or express our anxiety in other ways. For headteachers there is the additional task of organising child-care and exposure to children who might well be bringing the virus into school from healthcare parents. This real danger and the fear of it will only increase.
For clergy there is a strong sense of wanting to do something, added to not being able to do the things we normally do. The resentment about closing church buildings and the large number of live streamed services is, I think, a relatively healthy expression of all this. There is also, it seems to me, a fear among clergy that this will hasten the end of many elements of our inherited church life. With collection-plate giving no longer possible everyone realises that the financial consequences for parishes and dioceses are going to be enormous.
So, to get to online working, why is that making us more tired? I don’t want to universalise my own experience but I am hearing this from many other colleagues too. It ought to be better, we might think, none of the driving and travelling that I normally do, I ought to be less exhausted! But in fact, for someone like me who is strongly introverted I have lost all my ‘down time’. Time in the car is time alone. I miss audible books and Radio 4 when I am thinking about something different, or times when I am processing the meeting I have just had and preparing for the meeting ahead. All of that is gone.
Another factor that is unusual in online meetings is that there are few transition points, arriving somewhere, getting settled, packing up at the end of a meeting; all this creates a sense of transition. I find that I am now often going from one meeting to another without any transition. Often there are literally no gaps. Zoom in its free version is limited to 40 minutes. I think there is a wisdom in that. My best meetings online have lasted 40 – 50 minutes. After that I am tired. Online meetings require a level of concentration and attention that is different to being in a room with people. There are less non-verbal signals to read. There is also less opportunity for humour to relive tension, or give a moment’s breather. We may get better at that as we get more used to using these media. We may also need to get better at controlling our use of some of these platforms. On Microsoft Teams my colleagues can see if I am available (it may be possible to stop this but I haven’t found that yet). There have been times when as soon as I have finished one call a colleague has seen that I am available, and called straight away.
My own personal use of Twitter and Facebook has tended to be much more of a broadcast than conversation. That has been harder to maintain in the past week and is very different from Zoom and the video meetings.
So this coming week I am looking to change some of the ways I have been working to give myself more reflective space. Times to reflect and to prepare. Times when I won’t take calls. But also building into my weeks and months some ‘desert time’.
I must have first read Catherine de Heck Doherty’s book Poustinia some time in the mid 1980s. It is well worth re-reading. Posutinia is simply the Russian word for ‘desert’, but it also refers to the spiritual desert of those, poustiniks, who live in the desert of solitude. For a few years Poustinias were popular among the spiritually minded. Huts in gardens or rooms set apart at retreat centres were named Poustinia. Traditionally a Poustinia contained nothing except simple furniture, a cross and a Bible.
Worn out by my week on Zoom (and other platforms) I set aside Sunday as a Poustinia day. Using the little Oratory which I have made out of a lean-to on the side of the house. (It was probably built for laundry, perhaps as a laundry for the village.) The many icons and quite a number of books are rather more than a Poustinia would provide, but it is a sacred space. The Eucharist has been much celebrated there, with many people; sins absolved; oil applied for healing and psalms sung.
Other than celebrating the Eucharist I decided to make it a non-liturgical day. Not singing the Office but simply chanting the psalms through in order and reading the book of Genesis. My two favourite books of the Bible. Prostrations with the Jesus Prayer (see here) and the simple prayer of the Cloud of Unknowing (see here) completed the day.
Poustinia is available on Kindle. Most of us can’t live as poustiniks in our daily life but Catherine encourages us to find “small solitudes, little deserts”.
In these crazy times we need little deserts more than ever. It may be just a corner of a bedroom or a spare room, the attic or even space in the garage or garden shed. Perhaps the only place is a time, a walk round the garden or local park.
We all know that there are dark days ahead. In these days caring for ourselves is vital. That can only begin with self-knowledge. A knowledge learned in silence and solitude.
I have always needed time alone. More important even than sleep. Which is why I have always love the last hours of the night and first hours of the day.
As we renegotiate our lives with technology and lockdown we will all need to look at the way we spend our time. For me, social isolation and lockdown that is full of e-communication means I need more solitude. I don’t have a parish, and in any case there are now many online forms of worship, so Sunday is a good day for me to have a desert day. It may be that another day or time will work for you. Jesus needed solitude (Lk 4:1-2,141-5; Mk 6:30-32; Mt 14: 1-13; Lk 6:12-13; Lk 22:39-44; Lk 5:16). It is not surprising that we do too.
“The essence of the poustinia is that it is a place within oneself, a result of Baptism, where each of us contemplates the Trinity … The is another way of saying that I live in a garden enclosed, where I walk and talk with God – though a Russian would say, “where all in me is silent and where I am immersed in the silence of God”.
Catherine de Hueck Doherty, Poustinia AMP 1975 p.212
“He showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered thus, ‘It is all that is made.’”
Julian of Norwich
Julian scholars seem to cluster into two groups, those who believe her to have been an unlettered peasant with no theological training, and those who perceive in her a rich stream of theological thought whether accessed directly from books, or learnt from others, perhaps taught by Augustinians or Benedictines.
My reading of Julian is of someone with deeply sophisticated theological thought. Her writing on the atonement and on the Trinity show such depth and so carefully avoid heresy that it is impossible to believe that she had not received considerable theological education in some way.
I am particularly interested in the influence of Augustine of Hippo on her. A comparison of her work and that of Augustine (see, for example Soskice) reveals influence and difference. For me, a particular interest not examined by any of the scholarship I have found so far (please feel free to send me any!) is the connection between the hazel not metaphor and Augustine’s conception of time. The post below is an old one of mine examining the Cloud of Unknowing as the source of a technique of prayer, based on this Augustinian concept of time. The Cloud is often mi-read as if it suggests that any prayer phrase is fine. In fact, the Cloud author is determined that the prayer word must be one syllable.
It is almost certain that Julian knew the Cloud. Her reference to the hazel nut, or rather the hazel nut sized ball is tantalisingly brief but matches perfectly the single-pointedness that the author of the Cloud is aiming for.
I continue to teach this single syllable prayer to individuals. ‘Teach’ is probably too strong a word. There is nothing to teach really, just a suggestion of this form of prayer and some people take that up and some don’t. Those who do continue to report its helpfulness. It is the technique I use most often when driving. Starting with a hymn to the Holy Spirit, a Taizé Veni, Sancte Spiritus …, a period of the Jesus Prayer and then the single syllable ‘God’. Interestingly driving is the closest I come to the physical labour that was always a part of the contemplative life. My body and part of my mind is occupied, concentrated even, leaving me free to pray. The desert monks wove baskets. Modern contemplative communities make cheese, bread or beer. Many of the women solitaries I know practise some form of simple craftwork in a similar way.
This famous quote from Julian provides further suggestions for the single syllable:
“The Trinity is our maker,” writes Julian,
“the Trinity is our keeper,
the Trinity is our everlasting lover,
the Trinity is our endless joy and our bliss”
*
Joy
Bliss
***
This post is a combination of three previous posts on The Cloud of Unknowing and some additional sections (marked as Updates) on my experience of practising and teaching the technique of prayer proposed by The Cloud.
3/10/18
UPDATE:
A common reaction to my posts and talks on The Cloud’s method of prayer, is that ‘I do that already’, or ‘It’s just what I do’ and the speaker goes on to say that they use a prayer phrase or the Jesus Prayer. Those form of phrase prayers are powerful means for praying, however, the author of The Cloud is proposing something DIFFERENT. My personal experience and my experience in teaching this ‘one-syllable’ method is that it leads to a DIFFERENT kind of experience. I am not saying better or worse.
I will continue to teach the Jesus Prayer and use of a phrase of Scripture as part of lectio and other ways of prayer, but I would like to see where this one-syllable prayer leads. It may not (certainly won’t!) work for everyone. But it is not the same as other methods of prayer and I think we should take The Cloudseriously.
The one-syllable is the essential matter of this prayer.
***
“The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity …”
Kierkegaard
You will be able to picture, no doubt, the orange robes of the Krishna consciousness devotees who have been a feature of life on London’s Oxford Street and in other cities since the 1960s:
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rame
Rama Rama Hare Hare
The George Harrison version of the mantra captures the zeitgeist of the time perfectly.
At the same time, Christians began to look at our own spiritual traditions to discover mantras and other methods of prayer. Some people saw the Orthodox Jesus Prayer as a sort of mantra. Others developed Centering Prayer, and other techniques, suggesting adopting a sacred word or phrase.
John Main founded the World Community for Christian Meditation and proposed using the Aramaic word from the end of the book of Revelation, Maranatha, Come Lord!
John Main like many others picked on what had been a somewhat neglected English book of the fourteenth century which seemed to suggest something similar: The Cloud of Unknowing.
We don’t know who wrote The Cloud but most scholars agree it was probably a Carthusian hermit-monk, who was also a priest, and most likely – because of the English he used – lived in the East Midlands, a form of English very similar to Chaucer. Those of us who studied Chaucer at school will well remember:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
The Cloud author, however, does not suggest a multi word mantra or poly-syllabic word like Maranatha. He repeatedly insists on praying with one single, mono-syllabic word. He suggests ‘God’ or ‘Love’ and using that repeatedly to batter the cloud that separates us from God. He suggests that the word be a ‘dart of longing love’, an arrow piercing the cloud. Later he says that it doesn’t really matter what word we choose – ‘sin’ or ‘out’ would do. The most important thing is that the word must be only one syllable.
That is interesting. I think some of those who have referred to The Cloud to support use of a Christian mantra have missed the author’s point about this. The word itself does not matter; that it must be of only one syllable is not optional.
The text of The Cloud also reinforces this, using simple monosyllabic words whenever possible and avoiding complex latinisms and polysyllabic words. I recommend the version by Fr John-Julian recently published by Paraclete Press. But the original Middle English is not difficult and worth persevering with.
Here is the author of The Cloud explaining his technique for the first time:
When you apply yourself to this work, and feel by grace that you are called by God, lift up your heart to God with a humble stirring of love. And mean God who created you, and redeemed you, and who has graciously called you to this work: and admit no other thought of God. And yet not all of these, but only as it pleases you; for a bare intent directed to God is sufficient, without any other object besides himself. And if it pleases you to have this intent wrapped up and folded in a word, so that you might have a better hold on it, take just a little word of one syllable; for such a word is better than one of two syllables, for the shorter it is, the more fitting it is to the work of the spirit. And such a word is this word GOD or this word LOVE. Choose whichever of these two you wish, or another as it pleases you: whichever word you like best that is of one syllable. And fasten this word to your heart, so that it is never separated from it, no matter what happens.
Jordan Kirk is clear that readers have not read The Cloud carefully enough:
“Although readers of the Cloud have regularly (and, to my mind, inexplicably) referred to the “litil worde” as “preferably” or “ideally” monosyllabic, in fact the Cloud-author admits no compromise on this point.
He has only one stipulation: you can choose whatever word you like, as long as it be monosyllabic. To use a multisyllabic word is not to perform the work of unknowing in a less than ideal manner; it is not to perform it at all.”
In another helpful passage Jordan writes:
“The purpose of the Cloud’s technique is to do away with all the thoughts in your mind in order that the intellect may encounter the very absence of thought, the so-called cloud of unknowing. This encounter will be accomplished by means of the “litil worde,” which, according to an improbable figure, you use simultaneously to bludgeon your thoughts and to pound against the cloud. The double operation of unknowing consists in this blow — to which the Cloud-author gives the name “loue put” (love-thrust) — which takes place when you turn the word into an accouterment of battle, at once a sword you bash against the cloud of unknowing and a shield to keep your thoughts at bay. In being wielded in this manner, the word produces “þis lityl blynde loue put, when it is betyng upon þis derke cloude of unknowing, alle oþer þinges put doun and forзeten” (this little blind love-thrust, when it is beating upon this dark cloud of unknowing, all other things having been put down and forgotten; 58).
If the word of one syllable lends itself to this operation, it is because it can be kept whole. The Cloud-author explains that your importunate thoughts will constantly attempt to get you to explain the word, analyze it, that is, break it up into its parts, but this is what you must not do.
зif any þouзt prees apon þee to aske þee what þou woldest haue, answere him wiþ no mo wordes bot wiþ þis o worde. And зif he profre þee of his grete clergie to expoune þee þat worde and to telle þee þe condicions of þat worde, sey him þat þou wilt haue it al hole, and not broken ne undon. (28–9)
If any thought presses upon you to ask you what you are seeking, answer him with no more words than this one word. And if he offers to explicate that word for you, using his impressive learning, and to tell you about its various aspects, tell him that you want to have it entirely whole, and not broken or undone.”
I have been using the Jesus Prayer for over 35 years, since my mid-teens. It is as much a part of me as breathing. But just before Christmas in 2017 I thought I would take the author of The Cloud at his word (so to speak) and use just one word. I didn’t feel quite ready to adopt ‘sin’. ‘Love’ seemed a bit too emotion-laden. I went for ‘God’.
Since then I have been using the word ‘God’, aloud whenever I can (driving, walking, in the bath etc) and silently dropping it into my consciousness at the end of each in and out breath when I can’t. The rhythm, the pace is slow. When I first started I happened to be somewhere where a neighbouring farmer was installing some fence posts. Hammering them deep into the ground with a sledge hammer. The pace is similar to that and it’s an image that has stuck with me, driving the word deep into my heart, the slow swing of the breath, the drawing back of the hammer and the next blow, repeating the cycle over and over again.
I‘ve been amazed at the effect it has had on me and the significance it feels to have had in my prayer life. I still use the Jesus Prayer formally for two or three periods of 15 minutes a day but the remainder of the time it is the word ‘God’ that I use.
The inner experience of this is hard to describe and I am conscious that talking about one’s own prayer life isn’t quite the done thing.
The author of The Cloud writes about ‘naked intent’ repeatedly. How can we have only one intention, closeness to God, piercing the cloud of unknowing and not the multiple, mixed motives that characterise us most of the time?
I don’t want to make any great claims, but using this one word I have experienced something closer to ‘naked intent’ than I have ever experienced before. There are three reasons I think, for this:
1 Firstly, and strangely, because it is deeply unsatisfying. The Jesus Prayer is complete in itself, it names our Saviour and makes a request of him. Job done. The single word leaves me wanting more. The constant repetition renders the word almost meaningless. Yet that emptiness, that nothingness, nonsense-ness also makes it transparent, so that when I come to pray the Office or Mass the liturgy seems to complete the word, and the word seems to continue in and through the liturgy in a way not possible with a more complex phrase. The word can repeat itself throughout the worship in a way that the Jesus Prayer can’t.
2 Secondly, one of the best ways I can think of describing the experience is physical nakedness. Unless we are naturists we so rarely find ourselves naked in another’s presence other than with a marital partner. Even the doctor normally sees only a part of us. The nakedness of the single word of prayer locking each utterance to the present moment is like the nakedness of the first sexual encounter, not the consummation, but preceding it, the exposure. The moment of utter vulnerability, of utter surprise and unknowing, mixed with delight and anticipation. We often think of sexual passion as a metaphor for our relationship with God, we all know that the Song of Songs and other biblical texts point us to that. But I wonder if, in our sex-obsessed culture we make enough of chastity? Desire examined for its own sake, enjoyed and appreciated without the need for consummation. And not just sexual desire. How about allowing ourselves the time to linger in that liminal moment of hunger without eating, or not getting or knowing what the next job will be, of not being in control.
3 Thirdly, another image for how this works is the reason, I think, the author is so insistent on the word being just one syllable. If our prayer is to enable us to experience the eternity of God’s existence/presence, if the opposite of that eternal ‘moment’ is time passing, perhaps one way of experiencing eternity is to be totally present in just one moment, the smallest possible unit of time, the present moment, so our prayer word needs to be the shortest possible duration, one syllable, one moment. If we can focus all our attentiveness, all our own presence in that spilt moment we will experience, we are experiencing eternity. Time splits and opens us to eternity.
This last idea relates particularly to an Augustinian understanding of time and eternity. Two articles have pointed me in this direction and encouraged me to use this technique in praying:
This essay by Jordan D Kirk, has resonated deeply with the effect my reading of The Cloud has had on my own prayer life in recent weeks. Jordan is working on a book length study of mysticism and has re-worked his paper into a chapter which is very good indeed and fills out the paper somewhat. I am grateful for an advance read of the chapter and look forward to the book being published.
Another essay, by Eleanor Johnson, is also important in understanding the prayer method proposed by the author of The Cloud:
The quote from Kierkegaard at the start of this post seems to suggest something similar to Johnson’s ideas on the monosyllabic word as the shortest possible unit of time and therefore as closest to eternity. There is an interesting article on time here, also see here. I am working on this concept and on Augustine’s view of this and hope to write more in the future.
It is early days yet. But this practice does seem to create a softening or expanding of the heart. I have found myself experiencing the gift of tears in prayer and accessing an outpouring of poetry in my writing. I don’t know how these relate to each other. It is not about emotion or angst, quite the opposite, almost the simplest experience I have known. I would be interested in the experience of others. Monastic authors talk of purity of heart / single heartedness – the single syllable can be a way of getting close to that. It is a technique that seems to make living in the present moment possible.
UPDATE:
Over this last few months I have used opportunities to introduce this prayer to individuals and groups. I don’t think I have found exactly the right way of teaching the method yet but several individuals have reported extensively on the profound effect this prayer has had on them, here are two extracts quoted with permission:
“When X left me and I was on my own I didn’t think I’d ever be able to pray again. All those words seemed too much, choking and just made me angry. Just using one word has been sort of liberating. I couldn’t use ‘Love’, that word has been ruined for me. But ‘God’ works. I don’t know what it is, but that’s OK.”
*
“I only came to the Mindfulness course because someone said it would help me deal with stress. The breathing works really well, and it does help. But it’s the use of one word over and over that has, well, sort of changed my life. I use the word ‘Love’, it kind of means all the best moments of my life. When I do this I feel part of something much bigger than me, like I belong, that I’m not one my own. Almost like there’s ‘someone’ there. You’ll be pleased to hear this: I’ve started going to church. Well, the cathedral actually. I just sit at the back on Sunday afternoon while the choir are singing. It’s the best place I know to do this. You haven’t made me a Christian yet, but I certainly want more of this.”
*
The ‘cloud of unknowing’ is not a cloud that will part in this life, if it did we would be destroyed by the reality of God. The cloud protects us. When RS Thomas writes of the presence of God as the presence that has just left the room, he is describing how we can only cope with seeing God out of the corner of an eye. Like Moses who could only see the backside of God on the mountain and whose face still had to be covered afterwards it shone so brightly.
Thomas in his famous poem The Absence writes:
…
It is a room I enter
from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.
I modernise the anachronism
of my language, but he is no more here
than before. Genes and molecules
have no more power to call
him up than the incense of the Hebrews
at their altars. My equations fail
as my words do. What resources have I
other than the emptiness without him of my whole
being, a vacuum he may not abhor?
Two other poems can help us here, I think. One The Panther by the poet Rilke, and the other The White Tiger by R S Thomas.
They are about the cloud of unknowing. For Rilke the bars of the panther’s cage only occasionally allow him to see through the bars:
“an image, [that] enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.”
For Thomas, the Tiger:
“beautiful
as God must be beautiful …
It was the colour of moonlight
on snow
and as quiet
as moonlight, but breathing
as you can imagine that
God breathes within the confines
of our definition of him, agonising
over immensities that will not return.”
The colour of moonlight on snow. No colour at all. But totally present, totally real.
***
What is clear from the communications I am receiving from people who trybthis is that there are many people who have found praying with a one syllable word helpful. Some have mentioned contact with Indian Christians through the teaching of Bede Griffiths, Shantinavam and Abhishiktananda (who I will quote from extensively later), most have come to this by their own intuition. A few mention the gift of tongues leading into this, one sound from that forming their word.
Three questions stand out:
– How does this experience relate to praying in tongues?
– How does it relate to Jesus?
– Are there any other places where praying with a monosyllabic word are suggested?
*
In Relation to Praying in Tongues
In the article cited below, Eleanor Johnson writes about the place of ‘nonsense’ in the technique suggested by the author of The Cloud. This fits with his suggestions that any word of one syllable will do and that the meaning is irrelevant. We all know that when you think about any word too much it becomes nonsense. As children acquire language and particularly young teenagers they find this nonsense quality of words particularly amusing. It seems to be a phase they often go through.
I have my doubts about the usefulness of the nonsense image. Just as children are now taught artificial phonics through made up, but phonetically correct, words, but the author doesn’t suggest that. In fact he chooses two powerful words God and Love to start with. I suspect that most of us need the positive connotations of words like that to sustain us in this sort of prayer. I have only been practising like this for a few months so can’t claim any great expertise but I certainly don’t feel drawn to ‘sin’ one of the author’s other suggestions. I wonder whether for a new-comer the author would always have suggested positive words? Or even how serious he was about the use of the word sin …
Among the words that some of you who have been in touch use are:
Heart
Home
Lord
Come
Dance
Depth
This is a good list. I suspect that most of us need a word with a positive vibe. We come to prayer in various states, sometimes tired and weary, sometimes in an even darker place than that, even after appropriate introductory prayers a positive mental state is needed.
Praying in tongues has been a part of my experience since I experienced baptism in the Spirit as a fourteen year old. However, it is not a form of prayer that is, for me, sustained for a long period of time. Using the word ‘God’ in the Cloud’s way of prayer does often lead into or from a time of praying in tongues but the mono-syllable is one way to maintain this prayer in my daily life.
In terms of the inner feeling or sensation I think there is much in common between the way of The Cloud and the gift of tongues; it is a suspension of the rational mind, a stepping out of mind-consciousness into another place and there is a liminal quality to it.
A common experience when I meet and talk to Pentecostal and charismatic Christians is conversation about how the practices of the spiritual life often associated with the Catholic stream of Christianity can enable them to sustain prayer on a daily basis. One danger of charismatic spirituality is the need for a ‘high’ every now and again to top up the spiritual feeling. Allowing these intense experiences to lead into contemplative ones can build resilience and sustainability.
*
The place of Jesus in the Way of the Cloud and another source for the one-syllable prayer
The Jesus Prayer is clearly a Jesus-centred prayer. The way of the monosyllable is less obviously so. I always begin prayer with an invocation of the Trinity and prayer to the Holy Spirit – normally the Orthodox prayer “Heavenly King …” and then a time of singing “Veni Sancte Spiritus.” It is important to remember that The Cloud, like Julian’s Showings assume a normal liturgical and sacramental life within a Bible-based, orthodox, Christian community.
However, the experience of the Way of the Cloud seems to – as it should – relate to Jesus at a more fundamental level. I happened to dip into the writings of Abhishiktananda as I was thinking about this and came across some remarkable passages. Abhishiktananda was a French Christian monk (Henri le Saux) who travelled to India and lived the life of a Hindu renunciate while remaining faithful to his Christian faith and monastic and priestly vocation.
Abhishiktananda stresses that the point of all we do is to enter into the inner silence which …
“Can be summed up in one Hebrew phrase of Psalm 65, which Jerome translates: silentium tibi laus. Silence is praise for you. Silence in prayer, silence in thanksgiving, prayer and adoration, silence in meditation, silence inside and outside as the most essential preparation for this stillness of the soul in which alone the Spirit can work at his pleasure.
In the old tradition of Vedic yajna (sacrifice) four priests had to sit around the Vedi (altar). One of them had the function of performing the rite and meanwhile repeating the mantras … Another was in charge of chanting the hymns … The third invoked the devas … But the fourth one, the brahmana priest par excellence, was to remain silent, whispering as it were without any interruption an almost inarticulate OM. Yet it was that silent OM which was considered as the thread uniting all the different parts of yajna and giving to the whole its definitive value.”
Further Shore, pp 117-118
Om is a meaningless syllable, but it is also the sacred sound, sometimes called the seed syllable. Two more passages stand out for me in Abhishiktananda’s writing, the first:
“God is outside all time. And eternity is present in each moment of time.
‘The smallest abyss.’
*
We must leap just the right distance,
or else we shall miss our aim and find ourselves further off than ever,
on a ‘further shore’ which is not the true one.
*
God is too close to us. That is why we constantly fail to find him.
We turn God into an object – and God escapes our grasp.
We turn him into an idea – but ideas pass him by.
So Mary Magdalene was too much taken up with her thoughts about Jesus
to be able to recognise him in the gardener …”
The Further Shore p. 121
This theology of time and eternity is utterly Augustinian and surely that held by the author of The Cloudwhich explains his reliance on the shortest possible prayer? I don’t know where the phrase ‘the smallest abyss’ comes from, it is perfect. As is the description of God being too close to us for us to see him. This is exactly R S Thomas’s presence that has just left the room, or the movement that we can never quite catch, no matter how quickly we turn our heads.
Abhishiktananda embraced the Hindu devotion to the word ‘Om’. I am not advocating that western Christians adopt this practice wholesale. I have only once experienced the use of this word in Christian circles. It was at Park Place, the Pastoral Centre of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portsmouth and must have been some time in the late 1990s. Staying there for a conference I happened to wander into the chapel when the sisters, who at that time ran the centre, were praying. They were mostly Indian (I think a Franciscan community) and used many Christian mantras in their prayers, often including the word ‘Om’. I was very interested in this and spoke at length to some of the sisters about it.
The second passage from Abhishiktananda is even more profound and describes, I believe, exactly how Jesus relates to the mono-syllable, the Way of the Cloud:
The OM which our rishis heard resounding in their souls,
when they descended to the greatest depths in themselves,
deeper than their thoughts and deeper than all their desires,
in the existential solitude of being,
the OM which sounds in the rustling leaves shaken by the wind,
the OM which howls in the storm
and murmurs in the gentle breeze,
the OM which roars in the rushing torment
and the gentle murmur of the river flowing peacefully down to the sea,
the OM of the spheres making their way across the sky,
and the OM that throbs at the core of the atom.
*
That which sings in the song of birds,
that which is heard in the call of beasts in the jungle,
the OM of people laughing and the OM of their sighs,
the OM that vibrates in their thoughts and in all their desires,
the OM of their words of warfare, of love, or trade,
the OM that Time and History utter on their way,
the OM uttered by Space when entering into Time.
*
This OM suddenly burst out, whole and entire,
in a corner of space and at a point of time,
in its indivisible fullness,
when in Mary’s womb was born as Son of man,
the Word, the Son of God.
Diary pp 189-190
*
The Word that God uttered in the beginning, the divine logos, the Word that is Jesus. This is the “deep calling to deep” abyssus abyssum invocat, of the soul meeting God. The Spirit groaning within us. The blade slicing into the thinnest fragment of time to open eternity.
***
READING
When the new edition of the complete works of John of the Cross came out last year (review/note from me here) I began re-reading the prose works (I have read his poetry pretty much constantly over the years) and a number of commentaries and books about his writing. That reading led me back to David Knowles’ The English Mystical Tradition. The chapter in that on The Cloud of Unknowing is particularly strong and makes an excellent comparison between the teaching of The Cloud and that of John of the Cross. It is well worth reading.
This essay by Jordan D Kirk, has resonated deeply with the effect my reading of The Cloud. the prayer method proposed by the author of The Cloud:
The Cloud has been much favoured by the ‘spiritual but not religious’ and given that ‘all translation is treachery’ has not been well served by all its translators. Maggie Ross has written a splendidly frank view of the various versions of The Cloud:
Ross is an Anglican solitary and lives the life, her recent Silence: A User’s Guide (in two volumes) is fundamental reading on the contemplative/solitary life. I preached this sermon recently which picks up on some of the themes in The Cloud, notably the word ‘behold’, and was profoundly influenced by Ross and her earlier books.
TEXT
The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counselling, Ed Hodgson, Phyllis, Early English Text Society/OUP 1944 (the 1982 edition is the most recent and the one usually used as a reference text. Eg by Gallacher – below).
This is the ‘base text’ for study of The Cloud. reproducing the best available reading of the Middle English text with extensive notes. Given Maggie Ross’s comments and my own experience of the various dodgy translations that are around I am making increased use of this, the Middle English (I studied Chaucer at A’ Level) is not as difficult as it looks at first glance. I also find that the more familiar I become with sections of the original the more dissatisfied I am with the translations available. I wish I could find a recording of the Middle English text being read, let me know if you find one.
The TEAMS Middle English Texts version ed by Patrick Gallacher, it is a version of the ME text using modern orthography which makes reading a little easier. It is also more readily available. Maggie Ross is not keen on the introduction and it certainly is not particularly incisive on the practice of prayer but it is a good overview of the Tradition. The notes are very good and update Hodgson often referring to other modern translations. More importantly it is available online and is interactive which makes looking up notes etc very easy. HERE
**
Translations
The Complete Cloud of Unknowing with the Letter of Privy Counsel, Fr John-Julian OJN, Paraclete Press 2015
This has become my go-to translation. I like the style used and most of all the notes, a facing page for every page of text from The Cloud, are extremely detailed. Even when the reader might disagree with a choice made there is always either an explanation or pointing out of alternatives. The introduction is also very helpful and there is some useful material in appendices.
*
The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Writings by an English Mystic of the Fourteenth Century with a Commentary on the Cloud by Fr Augustine Baker OSB, Ed. McCann, Justin, Abbot, Burns and Oates 1924 (1960 edition)
See Maggie Ross’s comments on this, which are right:
“Oh dear, there are a number of problems here. First, while he claims to have used an assortment of mss, his version differs from Gallacher/Underhill enough so that one suspects he is privileging the Ampleforth manuscript, which he calls the ‘second recension’, and which is very different from the Hodgson text. Next, he has paraphrased, often quite patronizingly. His filter seems to be an effort to make this radical manuscript acceptable to a highly conservative, anti- ‘modernist’ pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic church. He has kept ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and the -eth endings but there is something deliberately antiquated, a bit kitsch olde worlde about his paraphrases for reasons I haven’t been able to put my finger on—yet. He also censors phrases such as that in chapter 12 about private parts—but we have to cut Underhill and McCann a little slack in this regard as they were working in the 1930s. McCann somehow makes the Cloud author sound precious, which he most certainly is not.”
Pocket and nicely bound versions are regularly available second-hand but I find it so difficult to read that I don’t use them.
*
A Book of Contemplation the which is called the Cloud of Unknowing, in the which a soul is oned with God, Underhill, Evelyn, Watkins, 1912 (1956 ed.)
Pocket versions of this turn up second-hand regularly and I have one that I carry with me so refer to quite often.
Maggie Ross: “This is the closest of the modernized versions to the Hodgson benchmark but has some curious interpolations about spiritual direction, possibly due to her contact with von Hugel. She has not changed many words and for the modern reader may have not changed enough, but her version hast the advantage of clarity without intruding too many anachronisms. She has kept thee and thou and the -eth endings but somehow these are not intrusive as with McCann. This version is published online at several sites including the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Type ‘Cloud of Unknowing Underhill’ into your search engine. She omits the author’s hyperbolic phrases that would offend genteel sensibilities, such as the mention of cutting off of private parts in chapter 12.”
*
The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, Wolters, Clifton, Penguin, 1961 (1978)
This is disappointing given that it is the Penguin version. Not a book I refer to.
Maggie Ross: “Wolters’ is an outright translation and he has the same concerns as McCann to make this work acceptable to a very conservative Roman Catholic audience on the cusp of Vatican II. His version has the advantage that he has dropped the ‘thee’, ‘thou’, and ‘-eth’, but sometimes his paraphrases amount to Counter-Reformation glosses, and he seems to leave out or condense sections. He claims to be using Hodgson, but he also says he has consulted McCann, and, like McCann, he leans towards Ampleforth and the Latin (the original text is in English). As I create a parallel text of these versions, there are often times when I wonder if Wolters and McCann are using the same Middle English text as I and some of the others are.”
*
The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Walsh, James, Paulist Press 1981 (Classics of Western Spirituality)
Maggie Ross is, in my view, unnecessarily harsh. The introductions are good and the notes helpful. I use this volume a lot as a check. It is, as Maggie suggests, clearly written with an orthodox Catholic standpoint, but that is helpful as an antidote to some less than orthodox perspectives that are common.
Maggie Ross: “Walsh tries to make the Cloud-author into a neo-scholastic, which he most certainly is not. His translation is prolix and full of the ‘experience’ problem. He is prone to making absurd and completely unsupportable claims such as: the practice the Cloud teaches cannot be undertaken by non-Christians. His scriptural and other citations are often wildly scattershot, not really seeming to relate to the text properly, as if he had a lot of references on slips of paper and threw them all up in the air and then wrote down whatever came to hand. He did the same with Julian’s texts. However, his text has the advantage that it includes Richard Methley’s comments in the footnotes. To my ear (but maybe this is due to the fact that I dislike his translation so much) he sometimes sounds fatuous.”
*
The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counselling, Ed, Johnston, William, Doubleday, 1973
Maggie Ross really doesn’t like this version. She is right in what she says. However, it is a useful reference book in terms of understanding the reception and use of The Cloud. It also reads well. I like Johnston and find his drawing on the Eastern/Buddhist tradition very illuminating and helpful, particularly at the level of experience.
Maggie Ross:“This purported translation—only in part; it is really more a platform for Johnston himself—is so strange and has so many modern interpolations that I often wonder if he is using the same text as the rest of this group as a basis for what he is writing. Johnston comes from a humanistic psychology and human potential movement background, and is anachronistically continually looking at the Cloudthrough the lens of the much later John of the Cross. Johnston feels free to move paragraphs around or omit them altogether, to interpolate material that simply isn’t there or even implicit. I’m not quite sure what this book is, but it doesn’t have a lot to do with The Cloud of Unknowing.”
*
The Cloud of Unknowing With the Book of Privy Counsel, Butcher, Carmen Avecedo, Shambhala, 2009.
Not mentioned by Ross. She wouldn’t like it! This is definitely one for the ‘spiritual but not religious’. It reads well. I have been listening to the Audible version which is very easy to hear. But it is more like using The Message version of the Bible, not a translation but a meditation, Jim Cotter would call it an ‘unfolding’ of the text. Good for lectio, but needing to refer to the original.
*
Paraphrase
The Cloud of Unknowing for Everyone, Obbard, Elizabeth Ruth
Again, not a translation, and it doesn’t pretend to be. A useful book for lectio and prayer. Obbard’s books are deceptively simple, with charming (perhaps rather too charming) cartoon like sketches – think, Good News Bible. In fact the text is rather profound and very helpful, Obbard is always orthodox and accessible.
**
Commentaries and Notes
The Cloud of Unknowing: An Introduction
John P.H. Clark
Vol 1: Introduction, 1995
Vol 2 Notes on the Cloud, 1996
Vol 3: Notes on the Book of Privy Counselling, 1995
These three slim volumes, if you can get hold of them, are, again, essential reading for anyone studying The Cloud, especially for engaging with Hodgson’s Middle English text. Immensely detailed, wise and sensible I use these all the time.
This series will lead the reader to the Augustine Baker tradition of the English Benedictine Congregation which is such an important part of the reception of The Cloud.
*
The English Mystical Tradition, Knowles, David, Harper 1961
As already mentioned Knowles’ chapter on The Cloud is excellent. The whole book is important to read and has worn remarkably well given when it was written.
*
English Spirituality, Mursell, Gordon, SPCK, 2001 (2 volumes).
A brilliant overview of spirituality. Mursell has a superb writing style and makes excellent connections across spirituality, literature, theology and the different spiritualities described. The section on The Cloud is relatively short but a must read. Another for the essential reading list.
**
UPDATED CONCLUSION 3/10/18
Teaching Mindfulness it is clear to me that this is a pathway for faith, a way that doesn’t do violence to people and allows them, very gently, to experience the presence of God as the Other who is as close to us as our breathing. Use of the one-syllable method is a helpful next step. There is a tenderising, softening effect that cuts through negative attitudes to religion as well as the hardened crust that life creates on our hearts. The suspension of the intellect, the rational mind is especially important in inoculating the mind against the poison that so much of our anti-religion, anti-mystical training plants there.
4 Comments
fabfininbarEditMaggie Ross is pretty brutal! Any thoughts on the new Penguin Translation by AC Spearing? I like the Carmen Butcher translation, it reads really well. I have the TEAMS but I haven’t ventured to try yet! Just found this site yesterday looking for articles on the Cloud, thanks for this all the best.LikeReply
Father Richard PeersEditShe certainly doesn’t mince her words! Butcher is a paraphrase not a translation in my view, good read and the Audible version is easy to listen to, Penguin not at all bad … Thanks for the Feedback! Blessings.Liked by 1 personReply
Neil WorkEditThank you so much for this blog, Ive only just come across it. The Cloud writer’s insistence on one syllable has interested me for years. I once came across Fr. Augustine Baker’s commentary on the Cloud. It may have been the Underhill version,(it was in a relative’s library). I looked up what he said about the single syllable. If I remember correctly, he appeared to say this was not to be taken too literally, that, for example, a phrase was o.k. or something else short. He gives the example of one of St. Francis’ brothers, whose prayer was to simply run. (I had to think of Forest Gump running across America!) . I once put this apparent puzzle to an Augustinian monk. He said continuous prayer will start off with many words (like this, he said, praying quickly ) which over time will distill & concentrate until there are no words. I notice that in ‘Privy Counsel’ the author emphasises that everything we can think about God is contained in the word ‘ is’. I feel very cautious about the ‘Centering Prayer’ movement, not least because the CDF letter from then Cardinal Ratzinger in the 1990’s so obviously referred to some of what it was doing. The introduction to the Cloud is so clear about the need to be orthodox, not to pick bits & leave others. In this vein , I like what the writer says later about people who do not submit to church teaching – they have some vice they want to continue with.. There aint no short cuts.LikeReply
Father Richard PeersEditInteresting, lots of people say one syllable or a few it doesn’t matter, that may be true but that is not what the Cloud says. I am not do cautious about the CP stuff, they at least try and address what original sin/falleness might be instead of just ignoring it. I don’t think I was ready for The Cloud 30 years ago. CP really helped me then.LikeReply
Please let me know your experience of this prayer, I am keen to develop ways of introducing and teaching it.Advertisements
“Do not neglect prostration. It provides an image of humanity’s fall into sin and expresses the confession of our sinfulness. Getting up, on the other hand, signifies repentance and the promise to lead a life of virtue. Let each prostration be accompanied by a noetic invocation of Christ, so that by falling before the Lord in soul and body you may gain the grace of the God of souls and bodies.”
Theoliptos, Metropolitan of Philadelphia
in The Philokalia, Volume, 4 p. 185 (Palmer, Sherrard and Ware, Faber 1995)
“So: the regular ritual to begin the day when I’m in the house is a matter of an early rise and a brief walking meditation or sometimes a few slow prostrations, before squatting for 30 or 40 minutes (a low stool to support the thighs and reduce the weight on the lower legs) with the “Jesus Prayer”: repeating (usually silently) the words as I breathe out, leaving a moment between repetitions to notice the beating of the heart, which will slow down steadily over the period.”
I have been practising the Jesus Prayer (the Prayer) since I first learnt it as a teenager. I have taught it, in sermons, on retreats and quiet days and in prayer accompaniment to many others. Although I have been practising prostrations and walking meditation with the Prayer for many years I haven’t so far taught these, or talked about them much to others. The former Archbishop’s piece has encouraged me to write this little blog about how I use these physical postures and movements in the hope that it will encourage others to explore this side of the use of the Prayer.
“Glorify God in your body.” Is St Paul’s clear exhortation to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 6:19) but, probably like many other pious Christians I am very much a ‘head’ person. As a child when my siblings were playing in the garden I would much rather have my head buried in a book. I have had to work at and enable others to liberate me from this.
It was experience of Catholic charismatic renewal, ‘baptism in the Holy Spirit’ and praying in tongues when I was fourteen that freed me to be more physical in my prayer (and in life generally). Although I had read The Way of A Pilgrim in my mid-teens it was as a late teenager that I discovered the prayer more thoroughly from the Anglican monks at Crawley Down (Community of the Servants of the Will of God). My, then, Spiritual Director and Superior of the community, Fr Gregory, had a strong friendship with Archimandrite Sophrony at the orthodox community at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex. At Crawley Down the only prostrations associated with the prayer was a deep bow, touching of the floor and sign of the cross at intervals during the communal recitation of the prayer which replaces Compline.
Communal recitation was itself an innovation at Tolleshunt Knights but one that works well and I have used with many retreat and prayer groups. Single voices, reciting the prayer in turn, 50 or 100 times each, praying the short doxology after each set of recitations.
Prostrations, often over a prayer stool, had also been a form of prayer that I had learnt at Taizé which I’d first visited as a seventeen year old. At the Friday prayer around the cross there individuals also place their foreheads on the icon of the cross lying on the ground, a powerful form of prayer.
Retreats with the Buddhist monks at Chithurst Forest Monastery in the south downs and at Amaravati north of London (both in the Thai Forest tradition) also taught me the art of bowing the forehead to the ground.
Sometime in my late twenties I began to practice prostrations with the Jesus Prayer. Both types of prostration from the standing position (I have never felt comfortable praying sat in a chair and usually use a Taizé style prayer stool or a Buddhist meditation cushion.) For the basic prostration, with each repetition of the Jesus Prayer, I bow deeply at the waist, making the sign of the cross and touching the floor with my fingers, I do this for each of 50 or 100 recitations of the prayer (using a prayer rope to count) and then pray either the lesser doxology or the Lord’s Prayer dropping to my knees and placing my forehead on the ground.
I find this level of physicality in prayer very helpful especially immediately after getting up in the morning and before praying the morning Office, or in the middle of the day. Sometimes if I am tired it is a helpful way of preparing for Vespers. I rarely use this form of prostration before Compline as I find it overstimulating at a time when I want to relax. If I am sleepless because of an over busy mind it can be a good way to switch off thoughts before a cup of camomile tea and a return to bed.
On occasions, for a change, I use the short Greek form of the Jesus Prayer:
Kyrie Jesu Christe, eleison me.
Other times I seek to remind myself of the faith dimension of the words by speaking aloud an extended meditation/ prayer on the meaning of Lord/Jesus/Christ etc. I think this is important so that the Prayer is always an exercise of faith, trust in Jesus and never perceived as some sort of mantra or invocation.
There is a good piece by Saint Ignaty Brianchaninov here. He describes how:
“The bows warm up the body and somewhat exhaust it, and this condition facilitates attention and compunction.”
Of course, this sort of prayer is only for private use. On retreat or holiday I have occasionally practised prostrations for extended periods of several hours at a time; I find the sense of exercise very helpful. It is also a good practise for outside facing the rising sun in a chilly autumn dawn.
I haven’t said much here about uniting the Prayer with the breathing; I would very much encourage this and find it an essential way of using the prayer and extending the prayer into my daily activities.
There is a very good essay about uniting the Prayer with the breath here.
Walking meditation is another way of using the Prayer physically. Again this was something I learnt from the Forest monks. The best way I find is to alternate prostrations with walking meditation. Find a flat area where you can walk up and down a line for about 20 feet and just walk very slowly along the line and back again. Outside in a private area and focusing the eyes simply on the steps ahead. I find it is best not to be too artificial about the pace of walking; just as slow as is possible without being theatrical. I have never been able to combine the rhythm of walking with the breathing although I am told that some people do this; I breathe in the first part of the prayer and breathe out the second part and let the walking look after itself. I find it easier to combine the breathing with the prayer when praying silently in my head but sometimes, and usually with the prostrations, pray the prayer aloud, again only in private.
The Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh who met Thomas Merton, practises a much freer form of Walking Meditation that is much more just mindful walking. I sometimes use this with a mindful verse that he suggests:
With every step / a flower blooms.
There are plenty of YouTube films of Thich Naht Hanh teaching this kind of prayer:
I have used this form of group walking meditation, silent walking, with retreat groups, it has a strong bonding quality for a group and can be a good break from sitting and listening in a retreat centre!
Bowing to the ground with the forehead is normally referred to as the Great Prostration and touching the ground with the fingers while bowing at the waist a Small Prostration.
There is a very helpful page about the use of the Jesus Prayer on the St Vladimir’s seminary website here.
I thoroughly recommend using physical posture with the Jesus Prayer and exploring posture in all our prayer (bowing at the doxology at the end of the psalms in the Office, for example) but there is no ‘right’ way to pray. As St Teresa of Avila wrote,
“mental prayer is none other … than an association of friendship, frequently practised on an intimate basis, with the one we know loves us.”
The important thing with prayer, as Dom John Chapman wrote, is that we pray as we can, not as we can’t (Spiritual Letters 109).
There is a lovely sentence in Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle (1.28):
“It is very important for any soul that prays, whether little or much, that it doesn’t tighten up or squeeze itself into a corner” (tr Peter Tyler).
Posture helps me to pray because it loosens me up; it frees me from my head space and allows me to descend to the heart. It works for me because I am a naturally fidgety person. Other things will work for other people.
Prayer is friendship with God, just as we each find our own ways of friendship we all need to experiment and try things out to find our way of being friends with God. Posture is a form of touch, a making physical our prayer, our friendship. Just as touch is important in friendship, so it can be important in prayer.
So I did it. After many requests. And after seeing the wonderful efforts so many others have made to provide Christian worship in this time of pandemic. I live streamed the Eucharist in the little Oratory which I’ve turned a lean-to on the side of the house into.
Some rooky errors: apparently FaceBook live stream won’t film in landscape on my iPhone so the whole thing was at right angles; despite Kate Bottley’s very helpful advice I didn’t place the phone high enough up which gives the whole thing a rather odd look. I shall improve on both of those tomorrow
It was my friend and brother Sodalist Fr John-Francis Friendship who made the point to me (on the phone) and publicly on Facebook that perhaps we need to make some greater acknowledgement of the viewer in these online broadcasts. I think he is right.
At the beginning of the liturgy I will say:
Wherever we are we meet in the name of Christ who is present in every time and place as our friend and brother:
The Lord be with you: And also with you.
At the offertory I will pray this prayer adapted from Common Worship:
Be present, be present, Lord Jesus Christ, our risen high priest, make yourself known to us; though we are separated unite us in faith; though we are apart grant us the communion of the Holy Spirit. Amen
At the intercessions I will add:
Remember us, separated by pandemic, but united by faith in the body of Christ; may all who see this celebration of the Eucharist know the presence of Christ in their hearts and in their lives. Strengthen our communion that we may be strengthened in the service of others.
At the moment of Communion I will turn towards the camera holding the consecrated hosts nd chalice and say:
Christ is in or midst. He is and always will be.
I will make the sign of the cross with the host before turning back to receive communion.
I am working on a suitable post communion prayer. I would appreciate any help on this:
Almighty God, we thank you for feeding us by your holy Word and by our fellowship in the body of Christ. United with him and with all the baptised in every time and place we offer you our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice. Sustain us in our isolation by the power of your Spirit, that we may live in peace, and free from all anxiety, to your praise and glory.
Finally, I love singing. Praying by singing has a whole different effect on me. It used parts of my brain I don’t use when reciting prayers. Sadly I am not the great singer I would love to be. I thought about not singing in the live streamed liturgies but I am going to carry on. Sorry!
The form of the Eucharistic liturgy I use is adapted slightly from Common Worship and I use Eucharistic Prayer H with intercession inserted. Here it is with the prayers above added for live streaming.
Please do continue to send me names of people you would like to be prayed for. I will pray aloud for everyone by first name only. I don’t mind if it takes me half an hour or more!
NOTE: I have come in recent years through my educational/pedagogical work to believe that repetition is more important in learning than novelty and total coverage. Applying that to the liturgy I suspect that one year lectionaries are better than the multi-year cycles that have been developed in the last 60 years or so. Thus, I am using the BCP Sunday lectionary, repeating those readings on weekdays unless there is a saint’s day. On saints’ days and in seasons – such as Lent – where there is daily provision the readings from the old western rite are used as found in the 1958 edition of the English Missal. These are taken from the Authorised Version.
As we come nearer Easter, anxiety is growing across the world in the face of the spread of the coronavirus. At Taizé, it seems that for the first time we will probably spending Holy Week and the Easter celebration without visitors. We have had to ask the people who had registered for the meetings to put off their stay, and the Church of Reconciliation is closed. We continue with our life of prayer and work “separated from all but united to all.” We are very conscious that intercession keeps us united with so many other people throughout the world.
By phone or internet, we receive a lot of news from people facing similar challenges in different parts of the world. Some of our brothers are living or travelling in Korea, Italy and elsewhere. Our Chinese brothers, in contact with their families there, have been following with attention and deep concern the developments of the epidemic since its beginnings.
Quite apart from the question of the precautions and changes to our way of life that are necessary, this quite unexpected and exceptional health crisis touches us in a deeper way. First of all, we are led to feel for the suffering and anguish of the victims, the sick, their families and all those who are severely affected by its economic consequences. We bear them in prayer.
We would also like to give thanks and express our admiration for those who are committed with all their strength to helping the victims and, more generally, in reorganizing public services. There are so many testimonies of creative generosity, of solidarity, and of people resisting passivity and discouragement.
In this difficult period, how can we not ask ourselves: What does Christ expect of us? What does the Risen One, who came to be with his discouraged disciples in spite of the closed doors, offer us? And to what is he calling us today? In the difficulties of the present, in Brother Roger’s words, “Not simply to endure events but, in God, to build with them.”
Following Christ leads us to an experience of conversion, of turning away from darkness and towards the light of the Risen One. Day by day, let us not be diverted by fears, anger, regrets, confusion, and the darkness that often claims to cover the whole world and to monopolise our attention… But let us remain united, deep within our hearts, to the source of peace that remains always beyond everything.
As containment measures and health precautions are increased to prevent contagion, let us take great care of the treasure of human relations. Let us keep in touch – through telephone calls and messages of friendship – with those who are isolated, and first and foremost the oldest, the most fragile and those already affected by another illness or hardship.
Over the coming days, we would like to take and transmit some concrete initiatives to express our solidarity spiritually. Every evening, a prayer with a small group of brothers will be broadcast from our house on social networks(at 8.30 pm, Western European time). And those who wish to do so can also send us prayer intentions.
As Saint Paul said to the Romans: “Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can trouble, or anguish, or persecution, or hunger, or deprivation, or danger, or death? (…) I am certain that nothing will be able to separate us from the love that God has shown us in Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 8:35, 38-39)
Christians and other religious groups are not gathering together for prayer during the current pandemic. This is a really good time to remember that every Christian home is a ‘domestic church’ and can be a place of prayer. Whether you live alone or with others, whether you have children at home or not, having a prayer space at home is a good way of blessing our homes and lives.
One of the things I love when I visit schools is to see the prayer spaces that many schools have in each classroom or in an area of the corridors or shared spaces. Huge imagination goes into making these spaces interesting, calming and places of beauty. Children also love them. In every school I visit it is clear that children use these spaces for prayer and mindfulness.
When I was growing up my gran had a prayer corner. In the back room a statue of Our Lady, her bible, prayer books and Rosary. It was a special place that fills me with peace and joy just thinking about it. Prayer Spaces can work for all families and households as places that trigger positive emotions when we go to them, especially if we light a candle, an incense stick and make it a place of peace and calm.
Whenever I teach Mindfulness I talk about how to build a habit of Mindfulness. Just five minutes every day is better than a splurge one day and nothing then for weeks. A Prayer Space is a great place to go and practice mindfulness and silence. It is amazing how quickly the space will become associated with positive feelings and trigger them even when bad things are happening in our lives.
At first you may feel self-conscious or embarrassed praying aloud with others. It’s Ok to laugh about that. Remember when you are praying you are talking to God just as you would talk to anyone. You don’t have to put on a special voice!
I have written a little prayer and made a card about prayer spaces. It is pictured above and the PDF is available below. Let me know if this works for you. Why not send me a picture? Whether your Prayer Space is Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or completely secular I will be glad to see it.
A ministry of the Irish Jesuits. The pages guide you through sessions of prayer in six stages culminating in reflection on a scripture passage for the day.
Update 1: Thank you to Mary Hawes for this set of resources for worship at home: here.
17 March 2020 Thank you to Facebook friends for providing links to some of these. This is not a polished response but a quick list, please send me any other links to add or resources you have made. I will keep updating at the top of this post. Our Archbishops urge us to maintain the disciple of daily prayer and Eucharist. This is more important than ever. Reducing stress and anxiety will come when we have solid patterns of praying in our lives and model that for others. For all of us this is an opportunity to deepen our prayer and pray in new and old ways. As the Bishop of Liverpool writes to the diocese:
You will see that [the Archbishops] encourage us all to find new ways of being the Church in these days. As they say: “Public worship will have to stop for a season. Our usual pattern of Sunday services and other mid week gatherings must be put on hold. But this does not mean that the Church of England has shut up shop. Far from it.” Church is changing, and we all need to be part of that change.
I particularly urge us to explore the serious Christian tradition of praying 7 times a day; even if only briefly. The use of Psalm 119 divided over the day is very powerful with its gentle rhythm and constancy. Nothing dramatic just the simple love of the Lord who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
As well as the usual Church of England apps these are good resources:
Reimagining the Examen
Examen Prayer
JesuitPrayer
Pray As You Go
***
Litany in a Time of Pandemic Fr Rick Morley
God the Father,
Have mercy upon us.
God the Son,
Have mercy upon us.
God the Holy Spirit,
Have mercy upon us.
Holy Trinity, One God,
Have mercy upon us.
Spare us, good Lord, spare your people, who you have redeemed with your most precious blood, and by your mercy preserve us through this crisis, and for ever.
Spare us, good Lord.
From all evil and wickedness, from disease and illness, especially this coronavirus,
Good Lord, deliver us.
From all ignorance and apathy, and from all willingness to engage in activities that could harm others,
Good Lord, deliver us.
From all refusal to understand, from pride and a sense of invincibility,
Good Lord, deliver us.
We your children beseech you to hear us, O Lord God, to look upon this world struck by pandemic, and drive from us this disease,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.
That it may please you to strengthen the weak, the elderly, and those with compromised immune systems,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.
That is may please you to give health and comfort to all who are already stricken with illness,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.
That it may please you to give patience and grace to all those who are in quarantine or who fear that they have already contracted the virus,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.
That it may please you to surround those who are scared and fearful, those who are overcome with anxiety and worry,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.
That it may please you to give wisdom and stamina to all scientists, biologists, doctors, and all who are working on tests, vaccines, and treatments,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.
That it may please you to uphold all those who are treating and ministering to the sick,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.
That it may please you to give to your people a heart to love their neighbour through this time, and to look after those who are most vulnerable.
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.
That it may please you to support, help, and comfort those who are worried about getting through this time financially, and whether they will have employment when this passes,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.
That it may please you to help our young people grow in wisdom and knowledge even as schools and universities are closed,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.
That it may please you to heal the sick, lift up the stricken, and open the airways of those who have difficulty breathing,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.
That it may please you to receive into your bosom those who have died from this disease, and to gather into your arms those who grieve,
We beseech you to hear us, good Lord.
Son of God, we beseech you to hear us.
Son of God, we beseech you to hear us.
O Lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world,
Have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world,
Have mercy upon us.
O Lamb of God, that takes away the sins of the world,
I am profoundly grateful to my friend and fellow priest in the diocese of Liverpool. Mother Hannah Lewis, for this first blog on spirituality as a single mum. I would be deeply grateful to anyone else who would like to contribute to this series from the perspective of their own family life:
Called to a life of prayer (while following vocations as a religious, single mum and priest)
Benedict instructs his communities, during the day, to recite brief, simple, scriptural prayers at regular intervals, easy enough to be recited and prayed even in the workplace, to wrench their minds from the mundane to the mystical, away from concentration on life’s petty particulars to attention on its transcendent meaning. (Joan Chittister: commentary on the Rule of Benedict, chapter 16 18th February http://www.eriebenedictines.org/daily-rule)
What is prayer for me?
I first remember trying to pray when I was a young child, although all I can remember is a vague desire without any detail. Almost 50 years later, I’m still aware of a desire to pray, an itch that has nagged at me for most of the intervening period of time, and which sometimes I feel like I’ve almost succeeded in scratching. As I’m currently going through one of those phases when I feel like I am praying more or less as I’d like to be, Richard suggested it might be good to share some of my experience of what helps (and what hinders) my prayer life with others. I also thought I’d write about some of the development and the ups and downs of my prayer life as its all part of me learning what helps and hinders. If some of this reads as self-indulgence, forgive me; likewise if some of it makes no sense. Prayer is possibly the most intimate thing to talk about; a communion with my nearest and dearest (Jesus) with its share of mysteries beyond words (and silly moments you had to be there for, and magical unspoken moments of connection as well as a lot of banal, trivial, everyday encounters hugely meaningful to me but perhaps not to anyone else).
Perhaps a first step for me was the discovery of the concept of a Daily Office – set written order of service for different times of day, based around the reciting of the psalms. In particular, it was my first encounter with compline or night prayer (in the candlelit crypt of a retreat house) that really gripped me – the office putting into words what I felt and wanted to say but didn’t know how to. Or it might have been a few years earlier, during choral evensong in my college chapel when I discovered the words of evensong could carry me somewhere beyond myself even when I was exhausted (coping as a Deaf person with undiagnosed underactive thyroid in a busy hearing world), stressed out of my mind with essay writing or revision and/or too busy partying to stop and pray for myself. With hindsight – and a lesson that has needed to be reinforced on a regular basis as I tend to forget – these experiences enabled me to learn that prayer isn’t all about me, what I do and don’t do, and do and don’t feel, and in fact it does not start with me. It’s no accident that the first words of the first morning office are ‘O Lord, open our lips’ – until the Lord opens our mouths and hearts and minds we can’t begin to pray.
Twice, in particular this lesson has been reinforced. The first time while training for ministry was by a spiritual director when I was bewailing the lack of time to pray – when she suggested I could pray for the time to pray as a first step. A prayer that was answered as I found myself not so much with time magically increasing so that I could pray, but the desire stirring in me to make prayer a higher priority and therefore pushing aside other things so that I could find time to pray. The second was much more recently – last year in fact – well established in my current pattern of prayer, I began to wonder (and worry) if it was all ‘just words’ because I was too tired, stressed, mind racing on a million other things to ‘mean it’ and think about what I was doing. But I was drawn to read Ruth Burrows “The essence of prayer” and she gently, but firmly, repeats in different ways that prayer is about what the Spirit is doing in us, we don’t need to ‘feel’ anything for it to ‘work’ and all we need to do is ‘turn up’, be present in all our distracted busyness. And so I became aware that while, all too often, it was a poor offering on my part, every now and then the clouds would clear and I would suddenly realise that this regular ‘turning up’ kept me plugged into the deep running stream of God’s love and that when I needed it, it was there.
The other part of the ‘prayer starts with the Spirit and not with us’ is the reminder I need that it’s a two way thing. I want to talk to Jesus and Jesus wants to talk to me. One little step on my part is so often met by a great, open armed stride on his part. If I give a little bit of time and attention – yet as much as I am able to give at that moment – like the widow’s mite – it will be accepted and welcomed and celebrated.
Journey to where I am now
Morning has always been my best time for prayer. Obviously it’s also the best time for sleep and the two desires are often in conflict. Before Child (and before iPhone) it was slightly easier, it was a matter of a morning routine of alarm, snooze, snooze, tea, shower, breakfast and prayer (from Celebrating Common Prayer which I first prayed regularly and learned to love when I was a youth worker with a large Anglo Catholic ministry team). Having a ‘prayer space’ (an armchair and a coffee table with candles/icons/bits of natural objects/ nice coloured cloths for the season as well as somewhere to keep the necessary pile of books) has always helped me. Sometimes it’s been in the corner of my study, sometimes in a corner of the bedroom – it’s a space that becomes a visual prompt and a necessary part of the day. Days that don’t start there somehow feel wrong. Night prayer back then was last thing before sleep, compline from memory (with only the short psalm 134) – one of the bonuses for me from praying evensong and compline regularly in my early 20s was that so many of the words stuck in my memory and only needed a prompt to recall. It’s much harder to memorise things now I’m in my late 40s.
Pregnancy was a major shock to my prayer life – severe pregnancy sickness made morning prayer impossible and exhaustion meant I usually fell asleep while reflecting on the day during the first part of compline. During these months, a single verse stuck on repeat was the sum of my articulated prayer: Isaiah 40.31 “Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” It didn’t feel like things got any better either as I disappeared into the thick fog of motherhood with a baby and then a toddler. But again with the benefit of hindsight there is one thing I’ve realised about my prayer life during those years, and one thing I wish I’d thought of then.
The thing I’ve realised is that the maternal habit of ‘pondering’ and ‘treasuring’ and ‘brooding’ over our children (otherwise known as ‘baby brain’ ) can be understood as prayer if we accept that prayer starts with the Spirit and not with us. I look back and in amongst the struggles I remember quiet moments breastfeeding at all hours of day or night and other moments when I sat dozing with a sleeping child on my shoulder because they had a cold and couldn’t sleep lying down and the odd times when playing the repetitive toddler games wasn’t boring but a fun moment of connection and I am deeply, deeply thankful that smartphones weren’t a thing in the early 2000s so I wasn’t distracted at these moments but fully, if sleepily, present. Reflecting on these moments now, I am reminded of the number of times we are told in Luke’s gospel account of the birth and childhood of Jesus that ‘Mary pondered these things in her heart’.
In the absence of being able to keep the office, I might not have felt like I was praying but looking back I realise that the Spirit was praying within me.
The thing I wish I’d thought of then was expanding my use of relevant scripture verses beyond that one I could remember by sticking bits up around the house. Psalm 63 for example – “O God, you are my God, eagerly I seek you, my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you as in a barren and dry land where there is no water” would sit nicely near the kettle and teabags and cups as a prompt to pray when I made a cuppa. Not the full office, or even formal morning prayer, but a means of staying connected while those years of alternating full on child care and sleep passed.
The next step for me, still with a pre-school child in tow, but with brain fog/ baby brain receding a little and in response to a desire to re-find my prayer life was in reading Angela Ashwin (Heaven in Ordinary) and Norvene Vest (Friend of the Soul). Ashwin reminded me about making decisions how we use time (and decide our priorities), which for me meant (and has continued to mean) that time for prayer is up there along with cooking a meal and making sure clothes are clean, above other things like tidying or hoovering. This decision has also meant learning not to care what other people might think of the state of my house, which has been a spiritual journey in itself.
Vest was my introduction to Benedictine spirituality, and the aim of a balanced life where prayer, work and study are integrated in pragmatic ways. At the time it was chapter 31 (on the work of the cellarer) that really caught my attention. Handling everything as if it were ‘sacred vessels of the altar’ meant that folding clothes, and washing up, could become prayer prompts – sometimes consciously interceding for others, sometimes doing them with love and attention as a way of offering prayer.
Life then took an unexpected turn with the agony of my marriage break up – and many sleepless nights when I started praying vigils (from the Benedictine Daily Prayer: A shorter breviary – the first, 2005 edition) out of a desperate need to find a way to cope. I also memorised the Venite (Psalm 95) to pray in the shower as that was the only place I could find space for prayer and I needed to use someone else’s words because I had none of my own.
It has been a slow rebuilding of both my emotional life and my prayer life from the ruins of that time – it has taken years not months. Along the way, I did an Ignatian retreat in daily life (otherwise known as the 19th annotation version of the 30 days retreat). This meant 9 months (more than 30 weeks) of sitting with God and scripture for 45 mins a day and meeting with my spiritual director once a week. This enabled me to reconnect with Jesus in a new way, and realise for the first time at heart level that I was truly and unconditionally loved by God. But it also re-established the habit of a more formal daily prayer time first thing in the morning (alarm set an hour early, which often meant earlier bedtime for me – part of my call to prioritise prayer). If my daughter (then aged 7-8) came in during that time I gave her my phone to watch YouTube and asked her to respect my prayer time (which she usually did, occasionally she came to join me in the corner and sat on my lap and said she was praying too)
My current pattern of prayer
Following on from this morning prayer time became a necessity and after trying a number of options I’ve settled back on Celebrating Common Prayer and its echoes of the time I spent praying it regularly with others. I continued the habit of setting an alarm earlier than I need to, making a cup of tea and getting stuck in. As I was drawn to pray more and more I started exploring the idea of praying throughout the day, first through memorising the Angelus as midday prayer and then came across Richards’s blog as an eye opener that you could work full time and pray Terce, Sext and None. I pray a shortened version of the classic little hours: 8 verses of psalm 119 (apart from Sunday when I pray the first 32 verses in a single midday office), opening and closing responses, hymn, short verse, response and collect.
I made my own small portable prayer book by sticking pages into an old pocket diary, with bookmarks to provide seasonal variations (I do love seasons). This helped to make the prayer work within what I could do – it’s easy to carry everywhere so I’m praying on the train, praying in the car (while parked!), at my desk, everywhere I am – I have tried to get into the habit of always carrying my midday prayer book so I always have the means to say the office when I can. The days when I miss one of the hours, I add the portions of psalm 119 to the hours I do keep.
Evening prayer has always been difficult for me to pray alone and for years I only said it when I was able to attend the office in church somewhere. It’s such a challenging time of day – both low energy and busy – with offspring home from school, cooking dinner, juggling all sorts of things. But again I felt a desire to fill that gap, particularly as things at home changed with a growing child and getting to evensong/ evening prayer even once a week became almost impossible. Reflecting on what was working for me, prayer wise, made me realise that what I needed was a daily thing I could link in with evening prayer so it became a habit. And the one thing I do on a daily basis in the evening is cooking tea. So I now use BCP evening prayer as my basis as I can remember everything except for the psalm and the single reading I use (the gospel for the day). I keep a prayer book on the dining room table (no kitchen table), start tea, pop next door to say the psalm and gospel and continue with the magnificat and preces while cooking (omitting the creed), pop back for collect if possible, but if not use the other two collects, and finish. It works for me, and following Burrows, its still prayer – making myself present and available and pondering even though it’s a multi-tasking kind of prayer.
The day finishes with compline, usually in bed from memory supplemented with a (self-printed from CW online) booklet for psalms 4 and 91, which, despite saying almost every day for several years in a row now I have still failed to memorise. If I am very tired I might use the Dominican Compline app and listen to them chanting compline (listening for me involves reading as well as hearing, so I can’t do it with eyes shut, sadly). If I am very, very tired, I will start saying it from memory and fall asleep while ‘reflecting on the day’. Either way the day ends, as it began, consciously being present to God.
Other thoughts.
My prayer is always evolving; I build in regular reflection on practice as part of my rule of life. If I notice that I am missing one or more office on a regular basis I look at why. Sometimes it’s a question of carry on trying, and whatever was blocking it (health, energy levels, extra busy, extra teenage demands) passes naturally. Sometimes there’s something I need to change for a season, either in my expectations or in the details of what I do.
The most recent development, in Lent 2019, was the reintroduction of a daily period of silence as it was something I felt the need of. I use Thomas Keating’s lovely gentle method of what he calls Centering prayer (as described in Open mind, open heart which, again, is about being present and trusting the Spirit to do her thing (whether you feel it or not). With the constant ‘mental load’ of a mum (sit quiet and every little thing you are trying to remember about shopping and cooking and appointment booking comes up in your head) it has been a challenge, but what this method taught me was to drop everything into the river of God’s love, trusting that it will come back up in due course.
Summary of key things I’ve learned:
Prayer starts with God and the Holy Spirit and not with me. If I begin by trying to listen and be open to God in my daily life, then I find myself drawn to develop a pattern of prayer that is right for me at this stage of life. If I start with a pattern of prayer I think I ‘ought’ to follow, it doesn’t work.
I need to make the pattern of prayer into a habit so it (mostly) happens whether I feel like it or not. This means tying it to things that happen anyway (getting out of bed, break and meal times, bed time) and doing whatever is needed to ensure I can keep that pattern. In my case means prayer books and bibles and booklets all over the place so I can pray where I find myself without having to gather materials (I dislike praying from an app as I am too easily distracted into responding to messages or ‘just checking twitter one more time’).
I adapt, adapt, adapt as needed to make the office work for me (and the lectionary – there is a limit to how much scripture my brain can cope with in any one day). It was liberating and affirming to discover that there is no single ‘Benedictine prayer book’ because all Benedictine communities adapt the office and the pattern of psalms to their own circumstances.
I need to accept that some of the times in my life formal prayer is harder than others. I found it helped to know that I was being prayed (by God) in that time, and making the most of the moments of ‘pondering’ to try and be present in some way.
I need to be prepared to push other things aside to make room for prayer. At the moment I am aware that my iPhone doesn’t help me focus on prayer so I am trying to put it down away from me when I pray. With varying success.
Visual prompts and set aside prayer spaces help me a lot, so however we change rooms around, and if/ when we move to another house I know I need to create that space when thinking about using the rooms.
I have found patience and persistence as well as flexibility helps – my pattern of prayer has taken years, not weeks or months to develop into something sustainable in the busy-ness and it is still evolving as job and teenager change and evolve.
Despite the challenges, I have loved the journey of being called to a life of prayer in this way and look forward to where it takes me next.
Monasticism is in. It is fashionable. Or at least the spirituality of it is. Not the reality of the commitment of lifelong vows. ‘New monastic communities’ are a great blessing to the church. But we need to see the difference to the sacrificial lives of those vowed monastics who have been at the heart of the renewal of the church through the centuries.
Sometimes ‘monastic’ is used as a way of distancing ourselves from the disciplines of the spiritual life. Ordinary, everyday, diocesan priests, for most of Christian history have prayed an eight-fold Office, fasted, meditated, celebrated Eucharist daily. Yet when we do this in our time it is described as ‘monastic’. I don’t believe it is. This is one reason why in the Sodality I have always resisted the definition of us as a ‘new monastic community’. The serious Christianity we aspire to is normal for diocesan priests, it is not ‘monastic’.
Most of the people I direct, accompany, in the spiritual life are married, most have children. What is an appropriate non-monastic spiritual life for them?
I don’t have children. But I don’t believe that my own practice is monastic. I am a diocesan priest, a householder. I want to hear from my married, parent friends how they create a space for serious Christianity in their lives. I certainly don’t want to impose anything on them.
This new series (I hope) will give some of my friends the opportunity to reflect on that.
One of my brothers in the Sodality has recently become the father of a second set of twins. Four children under five. I am privileged to have been asked to be godfather to one of the new-born. What is an appropriate, serious, spirituality for that family, for him as a priest? I hope that we can begin to explore that.
In the form of Mindfulness of Breathing that I was taught thirty or more years ago, and still teach myself, there is a shift in stages between noticing the in-breath and noticing the out-breath. It’s a subtle shift but most people sense a change of energy and perception. I feel the same way about changing my practice of praying the Daily Office. Having used the Divine Office for many years and then Common Worship Daily Prayer I have now moved to the Book of Common Prayer. (Originally described here). The shift is subtle. It is still, after all, just an arrangement for daily praying of Scripture but there is a different energy, the shape is different. I like it. Now I have started singing the Office hymns at the traditional place (before the gospel canticles) the front-loading of lengthy psalmody gives the whole thing a still, contemplative feel. The lack of variety adds to this. Novelty is stimulating, the very opposite of contemplative.
Several readers and friends have asked how I am getting on with my use of the BCP Office (and 1928 lectionary) this liturgical year. The changes since my first version of the booklet will show some of the ways in which I am adjusting to this.
I began using antiphons for the psalms but actually the Office is rich enough without those so I just sing them to plainsong tones without antiphons.
The 1928 lectionary is a joy. Just one OT book across Morning and Evening Prayer makes use of commentaries much more feasible alongside the gospel and other NT reading. The monthly BCP cycle of psalms makes following commentaries through with the psalter so much easier.
This is the second time in my life I have made long term use of the BCP (the other when Mother Victoria and I prayed the Office at St Andrew, Earlsfield). So nothing is unfamiliar. And, of course, a lifetime of cathedral Evensongs.
I am using the Mirfield 1949 Office Book (as rare as hen’s teeth on Abebooks etc) which provides all the Office hymns, responses and Mag and Ben antiphons as well as the lectionary readings set out. This is very helpful. It also includes Compline and the Little Hours. Since I travel so much having all this in one book is very useful.
I am just beginning trying the Office hymns (melodies in the English Hymnal) in the place traditionally assigned them before the gospel canticles which seems less strange than I thought it would. At Compline the hymn after the psalms. The CR book suggests Psalm 51 daily in Lent as the first Canticle at Matins and this works well. I use that with modern four part tones as I often do for the Gospel and other canticles, so traditional plainsong tones always for the psalms, including Venite. This gives the psalmody a different flavour too. Not sure I can describe it but I am not missing the slightly over rhythmic quality of modern psalm tones on all the psalms and canticles.
Four substantial readings is enough in a day so I am using the traditional one-year cycle of readings at Mass daily, repeated on ferias unless there is daily provision (Series 1 lectionary) and alternating the additional OT readings with the Epistle. The repetition is really sustaining and the range of patristic and later commentaries enormously enriching.
People occasionally join me for Morning or Evening Prayer or for Mass, especially at weekends, and this has worked well. I use an NEB lectionary at Mass with a CW Order of Mass (described here), and an RSV Bible for the readings when praying with others. There is a familiarity with the shape and texts that seems to make this very accessible for visitors.
This form of Office is very manageable, accessible and, also, very Anglican. A good place to feel at home in.
Underneath the large church at Taizé is the crypt. A door from there leads to a corridor and the Orthodox chapel. Every day, before Morning Prayer, Brother Pierre-Yves Emery of the community celebrates the Eucharist with the one or two people who turn up.
It is the simplest possible form of Eucharist but one of the richest experiences in my life of celebrating Mass. When I am at Taizé I am privileged to concelebrate this Eucharist. When I first did so I was terrified. Pierre-Yves, a Reformed pastor, does not use any books but extemporises the Collect and the Eucharistic Prayer (using the typical Hyppolitan structure of contemporary liturgies). He speaks no English and we communicate in liturgical latin and my weak French. Pierre Yves divides the Eucharistic Prayer up and I pray my bits in English, always dividing the consecration of the bread or wine between us, one of us getting the anamnesis, the intercessions, the epiclesis and so on. Praying, as an international ecumenical community not for a local bishop but for the Archbishop of Canterbury, the ecumenical Patriarch, the bishop of Rome, the Secretary General of the World Council of Churches, and the leaders and pastors of all the churches.
Beginning in silence, in the dark, after greeting the assembly we sing a three fold Kyrie before Pierre-Yves extemporises a Collect, often on some theme from the gospel of the day. The Liturgy of the Word is read, with a psalm chanted simply and three Alleluias before and after the gospel. After a long period of silence we all go and stand around the altar in the small sanctuary area beyond the iconsostasis. The chalice and paten already have the bread and wine in them. After the Eucharistic Prayer we pray the Lord’s Prayer, sing a simple Agnus and are invited to receive. The paten and then the chalice are passed around the small circle. An extemporised prayer follows communion before a dismissal. It is very beautiful indeed.
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In the Lord’s Prayer we pray that God will give us ‘our daily bread’. For many Christians this has been read as an invitation to celebrate the Eucharist daily. For Anglo-Catholics the daily celebration of Mass was an essential part of the tradition for many. The spiritual writer Henri Nouwen made a point of celebrating Mass each day wherever he was, always carrying a supply of hosts with him.
I think the diminution of the daily Mass in many Anglo-Catholic parishes is one of the signs and causes of our diminishment as a movement, and I do everything I can to encourage my sister and brother priests to restore daily celebration.
It is my great joy to celebrate every day. I carry a travelling kit with me and when staying with friends and colleagues will often celebrate simply at a coffee or dining table. I love to celebrate with family and friends at the dinner table using a little of the wine and bread that will be eaten as part of the meal afterwards. I also, at home, have the joy of a little Oratory in an old tool shed attached to the house, the altar consecrated by the diocesan bishop.
The following two attachments are my current practice for celebrating the Eucharist daily. The longer document printed and in an A5 folder on the altar and the other a people’s card for those who join me.
If I am joined by someone who sings I like to use the very simple musical setting of EP H. On days when there is a Proper Preface I tend to use one of the other Eucharistic Prayers. The collection of Eucharistic Prefaces translated by Fr Alan Griffiths for the Ambrosian rite is a rich resource (We Give you Thanks And Praise). The prayers are enriched with intercession as suggested here. I normally begin and end with a Taizé chant. In this Kingdom season “The Kingdom of God is justice and peace…” is especially suitable.
For a while now I have been saying that the essential elements of Christian prayer are Psalmody and Eucharist. Not claiming any particular arrangement, frequency or style of doing either of those two things (well, psalmody almost certainly needs to be daily at least) but the universality of them among those of deep prayer and spirituality in Christian history.
Alongside them, the practice of silence, sitting still, simple awareness of the presence of God seems almost as universally important.
So why not put all three together?
I am not suggesting that the form of celebration of the Eucharist suggested here would be appropriate as the normal Sunday diet for a worshipping community. I have used this form on a number of retreats, Quiet Days and parish weekends, where it has always seemed to go down well. I also tried it at a staff meeting where it didn’t work so well. It probably needs to be in the context of teaching about all three elements, particularly mindfulness, and in a situation where people are able to let go of their discursive-critical mind. Perhaps, too, my ‘persona/role’ in the meeting context did not fit quite so well as when I am ‘retreat leader’.
Three forms are proposed here each with a different psalm. They are linked above in PDF format, I create them in Pages and am happy to send Pages or Word exports from Pages (which may lose formatting) if you email me but WordPress will not link to these files.
The versions for Psalm 23 and 119 are for sung/metrical settings. The Lord’s My Shepherd is the popular setting usually sung to Crimond but I have only ever used it at these mindful Eucharists with the tune usually used for Amazing Grace – New Britain -which has, I think, a bit more energy. The same tune is used for the metrical version of Psalm 119 which is from Adam Carlill’s brilliant metrical version Psalms for the Common Era, where he provides this extraordinary alphabetic translation of the psalm. In both cases the text is sung in full at the beginning and end, and various verses are then interpolated into the Eucharistic liturgy.
I have always used this format sitting in a circle around an altar; I just place a stole over my clothes. I extemporise the Collect and post-Communion prayer; the readings are read without announcement or conclusion. Standing for everything except the homily and first reading.
During the Eucharistic Prayer I use manual acts, raising the host (I prefer a single host big enough for everyone, usually a ‘concelebration host’ and cup at appropriate points and holding them aloft throughout the bell that follows the words of Jesus. I genuflect after these elevations, and hold my hands over the gifts at the epiclesis. The Eucharistic Prayer is a slightly adapted form of Prayer H in Common Worship. Another voice for the intercessions (within the EP) works best.
Communion is passed around the circle, concluding with the celebrant. On some occasions the host is passed around the circle and everyone holds it in their hand and consume together with the celebrant. I rather like this, that moment of holding the host is deeply intimate with the Lord and one of my favourite moments when concelebrating.
I would guess that 30 or so people would be the maximum this form of celebration could work with. As the last communicant I consume anything that is left and place the vessels at the side of the altar to be cleansed later. At the start of the celebration the hosts are ready and the chalice pre-charged.
I originally included a sign of peace but find that is disruptive so have removed it. The tropes at the kyries are either from the psalm chosen or a suitably linked text.
The bell/gong ringer needs a practice before hand and the gong should be allowed to ring its full length before any further action or words.
Repetition is key to learning and a key element of this form of Eucharist; at a recent retreat I gave people white cards now which to write a phrase which stood out for them at the end of the celebration and to use that phrase as prayer throughout the day, several participants commented on how useful this was.
I quite often celebrate the Eucharist in informal situations, Headteachers’ offices, school staff rooms, friends dining rooms, and so forth. That form of celebration is described here. I will usually use a small gong before and after that but not during the celebration.
I am not making any great claims for this form of the Eucharist. It has proved fruitful partly because it is both unfamiliar to people and repetitive so they feel safe, I normally do some explanation in advance, ideally not immediately before hand. Let me know if you try this at all and how it goes.
Sermon at St John’s, Fulham for the meeting of the Sodality of Mary, Mother of Priests on 13 February 2020
My dearest friends, Mothers and Fathers. One of the the many things I love about our very own Church Of England is the variety of streams of tradition within it. While I think it best to drink deeply from a single stream. To be formed in one tradition. To know who we are so that we can be fully ourselves with others who are different to us is vitally important.
It is no less vitally important that we drink at other wells and learn from others. To realise that our differences never negate our common humanity, let alone our common baptism.
One of the elements of the evangelical tradition that I have come to love is the preaching of a series of sermons. If you look at well known evangelical parish websites you will find many sermons to listen to and even, sometimes watch.
On many occasions these will be based on individuals in the Old Testament. Nehemiah often comes up – and indeed I have led a number of study sessions on Nehemiah myself, including last October, for the Conference of Leaders of Anglican Religious Communities, our traditional, vowed monastic communities. Nehemiah is a great role model for Christian leadership, especially in a time when institutions seem to be in decline and some rebuilding of the walls is needed.
I imagine, perhaps I am guilty of stereotyping us! But I imagine that we are perhaps not as familiar with the liturgical book New Patterns for Worship, as we might be of certain other official liturgical publications.
Perhaps I am wrong, I hope so, because NPW includes some really excellent material. Not least among these are a series of modules of readings that can be used outside the seasons of the church’s year in place of the official lectionary. I recommend you get to know them and make use of them. Many feature significant individuals from the Old Testament such as Noah.
If you read my blog you will know that for pedagogical, educational reasons, I have become something of a fan of the traditional one year lectionary. I can imagine Sunday worship in which the ante-communion, the liturgy of the Word makes use of one of these series of readings for a first reading, followed by a sermon and then continues with the two short readings of the historic lectionary and on into the Eucharistic rite. In one church where I served we even broke for coffee after the liturgy of the Word so that some people could leave at that point and those who wanted to remained for the rest. It was very effective and worked well.
That is a somewhat long, and homiletically poor, introduction to looking at today’s first reading.
There is no series of readings in NPW on Solomon, which is a shame.
Solomon is best known, of course for being wise. But if that is all we know about him we have a rather weak and uninteresting character. Today’s reading fills that out a bit. We have to be a little careful that there is not some gender bias going on, the wise man led astray by his wives. But the important thing is not who leads who astray, but that Solomon exhibits some considerable foolishness.
Personally I find that quite helpful. We all, yes we do, all of us, do foolish things. We are all, yes all of us, unwise at times, perhaps very often. Tragedy appeals to us because deep down we know that at any point our foolishness might undo our lives.
I am glad to say that I do not have a number of pagan wives leading me astray. But I do know that I do not love the Lord wholeheartedly. I love God very much. Jesus is the centre of my life. But I know that I also am very attached to my nice middle class lifestyle. When I pray “do with me what you will”, when I say multiple times a day in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done.” I really don’t mean it wholeheartedly …
We Anglo Catholics like to remind ourselves of our glorious past.
Father Richard Peers
Neil Work
