Christmas 2012

"And she gave birth to her first born son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn"

Perhaps it's strange that, among all the extraordinary sights and sounds of that far-off night, the new baby's first clothes are remembered. He is wrapped in bands of cloth, in swaddling clothes. It's rather quaint and romantic-sounding: in fact it means that he is trussed up like a Christmas turkey, a practice which has gone in and out of fashion over the years. When it's been in fashion it's been said to protect the child by ensuring that its limbs grow straight and strong. Swaddling exerts a measure of control over the changes that growth will bring.

Perhaps it's strange that his first clothes are remembered - but then perhaps it's strange that the clothes that were intended to be his last are also remembered. The lifeless adult body is taken from the wooden cross, just as the lively infant body was once taken from the wooden feeding trough. It is wrapped in cloth again: a final swaddling. It's intended, like the first swaddling, to protect the body and shield it from harm, to exert a measure of control over the changes that decay will bring.

Yet the babe of Bethlehem does not remained swaddled for very long. The bound limbs are flexed. The swaddling clothes are abandoned. He learns to roll over and crawl, to walk and run, to climb and sail.  The lifeless body does not remain swaddled for long, either. When his friends come to the rock-hewn tomb to honour him they find him gone. The sign that he has gone is that the cloths have been abandoned and are lying on the floor.  He has outgrown them, just as he has outgrown the swaddling bands. The layers of protection have been cast aside. He has been set free.

A brief look at the Mothercare catalogue suggests that swaddling is currently out of fashion: mercifully, the urge to protect children is not, and after the horror of Newtown Connecticut it's to be hoped that it will climb the political agenda, in the United States at least. Yet the urge to swaddle is not just something we experience in relation to children. We experience it in relation to ourselves too, from the airbags in our cars via the intruder alarms in our homes to the precisely drafted phrases of our prenuptial agreements. We swaddle our lives in protective wrapping as surely as Mary swaddles the child who lies in the manger.  And while airbags and alarms and agreements may be entirely sensible and healthy there is other swaddling that is not. The brief authority that we borrow from the job we do or the income we enjoy; the demands that we convince ourselves are made upon us by dependent families or needy friends; the personal tragedies that we constantly deny; the self-medication in which we we indulge as we reach for the wine glass or secure the adrenaline rush: all these swaddle us and suffocate us, with layer upon layer of deceit and obfuscation. All these conceal our true identities.

Christ may come to us swaddled, but Christ does not come to swaddle us. He does not come to offer us protection from the bumps, bruises, crises and conflicts that our lives will bring. He does not come to control the change that will befall us. He does not come to give us layers of clothing or layers of make-up, layers that disguise our reality. Christ does not come so that we might appear to be something other than we are. He comes so that we might fully be what we most truly are.

The bands of cloth are a warning. They show us the lengths to which we will go to cover ourselves up, to hide ourselves from ourselves, to control our surroundings and manage our futures. But for the child to grow and flourish the swaddling must be abandoned; for the risen Christ to walk free the grave clothes must be discarded. So what swaddles you? What keeps you from being the person you really are, the person God would have you be? Tonight God sends you a child to remind you that you are a child.

We are not the layers of protection we have accumulated. Life lived well compels us to strip these layers away, the layers we treasure, the layers we cling to so tightly, the layers that we think make us more intelligent, more interesting, more successful, more attractive. Life lived well compels us to peel away the identities we have constructed and the defences we have built. Life lived well compels us to abandon the habits to which we are addicted and the thought patterns into which we slip so easily. To live well is to know ourselves as God knows us, and to know ourselves as beloved of God as surely as is the child in the manger.  Life lived well begins tonight, as we gaze upon the swaddled Christ.

You are already the child of God. You do not have to be anything else. You have only to be who you already are. Amen.

Christ the King,25 November 2012

"There are female bishops in heaven, where God's really in charge. It's slower than it should be, but it'll come". A Facebook post by Frances, a Roman Catholic teenager whose mother is training to be an Anglican priest, offers us a richly textured reflection for the last week of the church's year.

According to the infamous atheist bus that can still be seen on our streets it's all much simpler than Frances would allow. 'There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life'. In his recent book Unapologetic (of which I'm an unapologetic fan) another Francis, Spufford, reserves some of his very considerable appetite for scorn for that bus and for its message. Paraphrasing him, to suggest that human life is something to be enjoyed is to turn human life into a tub of Ben & Jerry's or an episode of The Archers. Those are things to be enjoyed. But life has rather more flavours than a scoop of Caramel Choo  Choo and rather more depth than thirteen minutes of the nation's favourite radio soap.

For example, I spent last week in a Benedictine monastery. The chief work of monks and nuns is the worship of God. The divine Offices are sung with beauty and reverence from before the sun has risen until after it has set. It is a place of profound peace. But not just of peace. New doors have been fitted to the buildings, and the storms of last week revealed that they have not been fitted terribly well. So no sooner is the divine Office finished than members of the community roll up the sleeves of their habits, climb stepladders, and wield Stanley knives in an attempt to ease the hinges. I hope they enjoy their work and I hope they enjoy their prayer, but the one verb scarcely does justice to both. More is asked of them, and more is asked of us.

Various verbs are likewise needed to describe our membership of the Church of England. We know that, locally, church works. Here at St Peter's prayers are said, worship is offered and on the portico and in the playground community is built in a fashion that we are proud to call inclusive. Yet we also know that, nationally, church looks a bit different. At the end of a week like this week, it looks absurd. Even if we rejoice that our ecclesiology allows a handful of lay people to thwart the avowed wishes of their bishops (and I do rejoice in that - there are other ecclesiologies and other churches in which it could not even begin to be possible); even if we rejoice that the Church of England still manages to form Christians who are capable of thinking and voting counter-culturally (and I rejoice in that too - on the whole we're not brilliant at it, particularly when it comes to issues of wealth creation and redistribution); even if we rejoice in these things we are left with a episcopate which is theologically incoherent and a public profile which is utterly discredited. We still belong to St Peter's Eaton Square, and we still belong to the national Church. Yet our belonging to each is of a different order. It requires different things of us and makes different claims upon us.

And today's feast reinforces what Frances identifies, our need to live at different speeds and to face in different directions. Our year ends with the proclamation that Christ is King. He is risen from the dead; he has ascended into heaven; he reigns supreme over all things and in him will all things be made new. Yet we who proclaim his kingship know at the same time that evidence in support of our proclamation is often hard to find. The planet is disfigured by war, poverty and injustice. The king appears sadly negligent of his kingdom. Enjoy your life? We need a better formula.

It is provided by our understanding of who we are. We are dust, made of the same elements that make the world we inhabit. We share with our fellow creatures a capacity for enjoyment and for its opposite. Yet we are more than dust, too. We bear within us a spark of divine life that is heaven-sent; it is this that we will kindle in Thomas and in Sofia today. Christ's kingdom is not of this world. So we are made to fix the door hinges - and we are made to sing God's praises. We are made to share the common life of St Peter's - and we are made to pray for, live alongside and love our brothers and sisters who conceive of God's church rather differently. We are made to be citizens of Westminster - and we are made to be citizens of Christ's kingdom. We are called to tend the spark within us until it burns so brightly that when our neighbours see us they see heaven's fire.

So I want Thomas and Sofia to enjoy their lives; I want all of us to enjoy the year before us; and I want to see women bishops as soon as possible. But I want more than that. I want God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven; I want us to attend to the truth that comes from Christ; I want us to allow it to shape us, mould us and ultimately engulf us. "The Son of God became the son of man"

writes Irenaeus "that man might become the son of God". It's a rather more ambitious proposal than the atheist bus allows. Amen.

Second Sunday before Advent, 18 November 2012

 Is 'Skyfall' a serious contender for the title of 'best Bond film ever'? I think it is. The performances are excellent. The chases are fast. The fight scenes are thrilling. There are Komodo dragons, a blissfully limited amount of passionate slush, and one perfectly timed but utterly unacknowledged dry Martini. But there is also a story of two men who have been betrayed.

One of the two is Silva, a languidly creepy villain, portrayed without any trace of a white pussy cat. He is one of Britain's top agents stationed in Hong Kong. M, played again by Judi Dench, hands him over to the Chinese before the territory reverts. Silva is part of the price she's willing to pay for a trouble-free transition. The other is Bond, James Bond. At the beginning of the film he wrestles with a terrorist on the roof of a moving train. Another British agent has the chance to take one shot. But the sightline is not clear. Bond's writhing form flits in and out of the crosshairs. 'Take the shot' says M. She betrays him, just as she betrays Silva. Adamantine certainty crumbles.

The mighty stones of Jerusalem's Temple must have looked like a certainty far more reliable and far less fickle than M's loyalty. Their massive weight betokened God's commitment to his people Israel. This was the place where he had elected to dwell, at the very heart of his chosen people. "What large stones and what large buildings!" exclaim the fishermen from Galilee who have come up to the big city. Jesus's response must shock them to the core. "Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down". Jesus predicts the inversion of all certainties. He predicts the overthrow of everything that the disciples - everything that the Israelites - believe and trust. "Take the shot" says M. Jesus takes aim at what is dearest to his people, and squeezes the trigger.

Jada and Lorian are being baptized in a landscape that bears an eerie resemblance to that inhabited by Silva and Bond. Just as betrayed secret agents must learn to live without the biggest certainty of their professional lives, so Jada and Lorian, and all of us are learning to live without the certainties with which we have long lived. A global  geopolitical settlement that prevailed for decades has collapsed. Religion has re-acquired its medieval potential for terror. The fragile planet creaks under the burden of unlimited growth. The Internet has revolutionized our communication. Like Silva and like Bond we live on the other side of certainty, in a place where the stones of the temple have been thrown down.

So how do they cope? I don't think I'm giving anything away if I tell you that Bond survives. The future of the franchise is assured. Silva longs for revenge. With fiendish ingenuity he plots M's destruction from his island hideaway. The only agent capable of thwarting him is, of course, 007. And Bond cannot resist the call. After the railway shooting he embarks on a lengthy binge in a tropical paradise, but when England is threatened he cannot but return.

Silva's response is nihilistic despair; Bond's is unquestioning patriotism. But what is ours? The Gospel does not offer a plan for our uncertain times. It has much to say about many of the crises that affect us: about the destructive power of greed; about the centrality of forgiveness; about the virtue of self-giving in place of self-serving. But it does not offer one comprehensive route-map out of them. The prophet Daniel foresees a time of anguish. The prophet Jesus foresees wars and rumours of wars. The prophets of political and economic punditry foresee protracted recession, global warming and intractable strife in the Middle East. And what God offers is not the sort of neat solution that Q Division is tasked with dreaming up. Baptism is not the sacramental equivalent of a bio-hazard suit that can be concealed inside a cigarette lighter. It will not shield its wearers against everything that they encounter. What God offers is far more intuitive than that. It is the deadliest secret weapon of all. What God offers is companionship.

Secret agents are probably the loneliest people on the planet. I can't help wondering if that accounts for the success and the longevity of the Bond series. I wonder if in Bond's aloneness we see our own aloneness: a far more exotic version of it, obviously, one that is full of beautiful women, gorgeous locations and world-saving secrets. But Silva and Bond are fundamentally alone. In their possession of state secrets, in the small hours of the morning, or as they confront death, they have only their hatred of England and their pride in England for company. They are like us. No matter how strong our relationships are we ultimately face the perils of the post-certain world by ourselves. Which is why God offers what God offers in baptism. God offers it because only God can offer it, and what God offers is what we need above all else. The only one who can be with us in our aloneness is the one who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, the one who promises to be with us to skyfall and beyond. Amen.

  

All Saints Sunday, 4 November 2012

When we were children my sister possessed a good singing voice and enough confidence to use it when the occasion demanded. In church she sang lustily. The problem was that the only hymn she knew was 'We plough the fields and scatter'. Whatever the season and whatever the hymn chosen for it, that is what she would sing. Loudly.

What we sing in church matters, and the day on which we sing it matters too. On one Sunday of the year my sister's choice could not be faulted. On every other Sunday it would have jarred horribly had she not been three years old. Some hymns simply belong on some days. It's impossible to conceive of Palm Sunday without 'Ride on, ride on' or of Pentecost without 'Come down, O love divine'. And, for me at least, it's impossible to conceive of All Saints without 'For all the saints'.

Why is that? It part it's sentiment, of course. That hymn has ushered in every All Saintstide that I can remember and is as much a part of this time of year as fireworks, poppies, and the church heating not working. In part it's that it's dear to any priest who has ever worked as a bishop's chaplain. Our motto is 'We feebly struggle, they in glory shine'. But it's the combination of William Walsham How's words and Vaughan Williams's tune which have assured the hymn its place in the pantheon of classics. It will surely be sung for as long as hymns are sung. 

The words. How was a nineteenth century Shropshire parish priest and a rather reluctant bishop, and in 'For all the saints' he sketches out for the church he served the essence of saintliness. The saints are not principally those who have done great things or thought great thoughts. The saints are, first, those who have confessed the name of Jesus before the world. They are those whose witness to the name of Jesus has been costly. How characterizes saintliness in bellicose terms. Saintliness is a well-fought fight; there is fierce strife and warfare long.  He published the hymn in 1864, when the American Civil War was at its height and the forces of the British Empire were engaged against the Ashanti. Today it is almost always sung a week before Remembrance Sunday, when images of men huddled in their trenches are fresh in our minds. Then and now the image of saintliness as struggle resonates deeply with those who sing the hymn.

Yet, secondly, this struggle, the struggle of saintliness, is not a struggle fought in vain, for the saints are rewarded with rest. After the noble fight comes the golden evening and the sweet calm of Paradise. But if this sounds like a rather individualistic account of the Christian life - sainthood as a tough job well done with an an appropriate recompense attached - then How envisages more.

Thirdly 'But lo! There breaks a yet more glorious day; the saints triumphant rise in bright array...' Beyond the struggles of the saints, beyond their costly witness and beyond the martyrdoms of centuries there comes a day when the King of Glory makes all things new, gathering the faithful from earth's wide bounds and ocean's farthest coast. So How sets before the church the vocation of the saints, the consolation of the saints, and the hope of the saints: the vocation of the church, the consolation of the church, and the hope of the church.

The music. Vaughan Williams entitled his tune 'Sine Nomine', as it was destined for the feast when all the saints are honoured but none are named. I know I'll be corrected if I'm wrong but it's written in four-four time and so could - I think - be played as a march. It was certainly intended as a processional, and the adjective 'rousing' could have been invented to describe it. It's not just soldiers who march, of course. Civil rights campaigners march; ban-the-bomb protestors march; anti-poverty agitators march. People march with a common purpose. They may be diverse in almost every respect, they may be a countless host, but the cause unites them and makes them one. And a march - any sort of march -  is a good metaphor for the life of a saint: never static, but always advancing, in the company of others, in knowledge of God and obedience to his call.

And perhaps it is this that accounts for the status of 'For all the saints'. The words are theologically coherent (which cannot be said of every hymn), and the tune is a good sing (ditto). But, more important than either is that 'For all the saints' enables the church to become a part of the reality that it's singing about. When the struggle of sainthood is at its darkest, writes How, the distant triumph song can already be heard. The times may seem bleak and hope may seem impossible, but the embattled saints are already on the side of the victors. Desmond Tutu says 'We used to say to the apartheid government "you may have all the guns, you may have all this power, but you have already lost. Come, join the winning side!"' The same is true of the saints, and the same is true of us. When we sing Alleluia to Father, Son and Holy Ghost we are not just exercising our lungs, or politely doing what custom expects of us at this time of year. We are adding our voices to those of the blest communion. We are claiming our place among the fellowship divine. We are singing because they are singing, and they are singing because they know they've won. '...All are one in thee, for all are thine'. They are singing us home - in a song that will never end. Amen.

  

Sunday 14 October 2012, 19th after Trinity

"Hate evil and love good, and establish justice..."

 

Delegates to the Conservative Party conference, which met in Birmingham last week, listened to two proposals from the platform aimed at establishing justice. Chris Grayling wants to change the law on self-defence to allow individuals to defend their property instinctively and honestly, even if the force they use is disproportionate to the threat they face. Theresa May wants to change the law on sentencing to allow individuals who are victims of anti-social behaviour to choose the penalty that those convicted receive.

 

We should be under no illusions: both proposals represent a change in the way we conceive of society. Both represent substantial shifts in the balance that we have historically struck between the individual and the community. The first will, if passed into law, allow an individual to use inappropriate force upon another as long as he judges that his act is reasonable. The community will hand that judgement over to the individual and, as long as the individual judges that his act is reasonable, the community will not question his exercise of it. The second will, if passed into law, hand to the individual who has been wronged the authority to select the wrong-doer's punishment. No longer will this function be exercised by the Crown, acting on behalf of the wronged individual and on behalf of the whole community out of the deeply-held belief that a wrong against an individual is a wrong against the whole community. The wrong suffered by the individual, and the individual's response to it, will be what determines the wrong-doer's fate.

 

As I have said, the proposals represent a change in the way we conceive of society.

 

In his lecture to the Theos think-tank, delivered not far from here the week before last, Rowan Williams spoke eloquently about how we conceive of society - how we will miss him. He suggested that to conceive of society as a balance between the individual and the community, a balance exaggerated by these two proposals, is to conceive of  it wrongly. The real balance is the balance between the individual and the person. Williams reminded his audience of Saint Augustine's observation that a person is in relationship with God before he is anything else, or before he is in relationship with anything else. None of us is on our own, and none of us cannot pretend to be - or, at least, we can pretend to be. We can pretend that human society is a matter of managing the relationship between a collection of individuals, each of whom has a stockpiled birthright of liberties and dignities. But for people of faith human society is a matter of ordering the relationship between a collection of persons, each of whom is the object of unconditional divine love.

 

In his encounter with the rich young man and in the exchanges that follow it Jesus has a lot to say about how we conceive of society. He has a lot to say about how wealth, property and family all conspire to distort the loyalty that our primary relationship should command. The young man is good-hearted and eager to please, but the possessions that he loves mean that God's claim on him will always have to compete with the business affairs and commercial anxieties that fill his head. He sees himself as an individual in a matrix of relationships which he has chosen, just one of which is with God. Jesus addresses the complexity directly.  "Sell what you own" he advises. In other words, stop trying to amass an identity for yourself; stop relying on what you own to create your conception of who you are; stop building yourself up as one individual among many. Remember instead who you really are: God's beloved. Rely  instead on who you really are: God's beloved. Give away everything else. Don't build up, and you will discover the treasure of heaven.

 

The rich young man goes away grieving and we do not hear of him again. Yet all who respond to the call to follow Jesus are asked to do what the young man was asked to do. They are asked to give up everything that they cling to, everything that distorts their loyalty to their primary relationship. This is what we call Baptism, in which God washes away every trace of present sin and through which God offers a sure route home from all future sin. Try hanging on to wealth or position; try hanging onto brothers or sisters, aunts or uncles when you are plunged into the healing and cleansing water. Baptism is an assertion of our primary relationship with God; it reminds us of our duty to it; and it underlines its fundamental significance for everything we are.

 

So where does this leave last week's proposals? Perpetrators of anti-social crime offend against the primary relationship, against the truth of God's eternal regard for every one of us. But a system of justice that panders to us as individuals, a system of justice that neglects our common origin in God, in a God who gives each of us equal eternal worth, offends against that truth as well. We of all people have an interest in the treatment meted out to alleged offenders. After all, we worship one. Faith compels us to see ourselves in them, and them in us, too. Amen.

 

 

Sunday 7 October 2012: Harvest Thanksgiving-The Screwtape Emails

My dear Wormwood,

 

Seventy years have passed since your uncle Screwtape picked up his pen to send you words of counsel. I suppose I ought to say that it feels like an eternity, but demons who inhabit everlasting fire know what eternity feels like, and it feels a good bit longer than seventy years. And now that I have picked up my pen I find that pens have largely been replaced by keyboards and letters by electronic communications. 'The Screwtape Emails'. It doesn't have quite the same ring.

 

I am writing in response to your difficulties with the tiresome people of St Peter's Eaton Square: the shiny, happy central Londoners who are so smugly pleased to describe themselves as a growing community, a vibrant community, and an inclusive community. I know, nephew Wormwood, I know. It makes my horns droop, too. What is to be done with a collection of people who are so confident and so competent, and who have rarely ever been more so than now? This year alone they have staged a blockbuster Jubilee Fete and hosted the mother of all pig roasts. They have run a cafe on their portico and launched a new Mission Action Plan.   They have begun the rebuilding of their school and hosted their bishop, their Lord Mayor, and a celebrated Paralympian. Now they are planning a gala autumn party, a parish pantomime, and a four-week exploration of Luke's Gospel. There is no end to what they are willing to do. They seem utterly formidable, utterly beyond our reach. Our Enemy once urged his scatter-brained companions to consider the lilies in the sublime effortlessness of their beauty. St Peter's Eaton Square looks like a field full of them: gorgeous, exotic, unique.

 

But do not despair, Wormwood, do not despair, for their moment of triumph can yet be our moment of triumph. Today at St Peter's they celebrate Harvest Thanksgiving. They will bring to church tins of baked beans, boxes of tea bags and, because their postcode is what it is, bottles of extra virgin olive oil. These will be given to the poor. It is all part of the same tiresome pattern. People at St Peter's are ceaselessly active. They do things. But you and I have something in common with the Enemy. And that is that we see them as they really are. Confident, of course; competent, definitely; active, certainly. The sun shines in SW1. But the sun always casts shadows. So they are also ridden with anxiety, crushed by fatigue, bruised by their relationships, disappointed in their hopes, and hurting bitterly. And all that, my dear nephew, gives us plenty to work with.

 

The more successful they seem the harder it is for them to acknowledge the shadows. They can raise £20,000 from a church fete, cook canapés to die for and plot strategies for their children's schooling that would shame Napoleon Bonaparte. How can they also be exhausted, stressed, and angry? The Enemy knows that they are, of course, and he loves them for it. That's the whole dreary point of the Enemy. He wants the disposable razors and the instant coffee. He wants their home-baked cakes, he wants their committee membership, he wants them to erect marquees and hand out hymn-books in church. But he also wants their weariness and their pain, their dysfunction and their dis-ease, their depression and their despair. The Enemy knows that lilies flower only briefly. He knows that for every luxuriously extravagant bloom, wondrous to gaze upon, there is a brown and shrivelled-up stick, excruciating to gaze upon. Being the Enemy he gazes upon both, knows them to be one and the same, and loves them nonetheless. And if he gets his way he will go on loving them until the dryness and the deadness and the lifelessness have been pruned away and glorious, abundant, eternal life springs up in its place.

 

It's a frankly appalling prospect, but, luckily for us, the people at St Peter's don't get it. They still believe that the only harvest that matters is the harvest of their success. They still believe that everything else is to be hidden away. I hope you'll understand the opportunity that this creates for us. Let them believe in the myth of their confidence and their competence. Let them believe that they are world-beaters. Let them believe that it's what they do rather than what they are that ultimately counts. Let them believe all that, and the poor fools have purchased a one-way ticket to destruction. How wonderful.

 

They must never know that it could be different. They must never know that the Enemy longs for it to be different. They must never know that they could do more than nod at him with a 'sorry God', 'please God', 'thank you God'. They must never know that they could stop, that they could be still. They must never know that they could look at themselves in the light that shines so blindingly from the Enemy's face. They must never know that if they did they would begin to discover who they really are - the cherished objects of unmerited, unconditional, everlasting love. But I'm not going to tell them that and neither - I am quite sure - are you.

 

With my most infernal regards, as ever,

 

Your affectionate uncle,

 

Screwtape.

St John's, Higham, Kent: 150th Anniversary of the Consecration

His most recent biographer does not record whether Higham's most illustrious resident was present at the consecration of its new parish church, but then 1862 was a difficult year for Charles Dickens. He turned fifty and he wrote little more than a largely-forgotten short story, 'His Boots'. His brother Fred was locked up in the Queen's Bench Prison and his son Alfred failed the Army exams. Closer to home he was forced to exchange his beloved Gad's Hill for what he called 'the nastiest little house in London' in order that his daughters might enjoy the metropolitan season - and the historical detectives suspect that the actress Nelly Ternan may have born him a child, in exile in France. Perhaps it's no wonder that he didn't play country squire when the altar and walls of St John's were anointed with holy oil and God's praises were sung for the first time within these walls. They had been sung here for well over a year before things began to look up and he began work on the novel that would become Our Mutual Friend.

 

Dickens, that great teller of tales, loved to tease visitors to his study at Gad's Hill. They would enter and close the door behind them. Then they would look around and be amazed to discover that the door had disappeared. Instead all around them, all around the walls, were book-lined shelves. On close examination, some of these had extraordinary titles. There was Cat's Lives, in nine volumes, and A Short History of a Chancery Suit, in twenty-one volumes. His suspicions raised, the visitor might subject these books to an even closer examination, and would then discover that they were false. Dummy books had been built onto the back of the door. Their titles amused the great novelist. They couldn't be taken down and read, but they could be swung open, allowing the visitor to walk through and leave the study. The painted books were a doorway, a means of access to another place.

 

One hundred and fifty years after the consecration - and two hundred years after Dickens's birth - St John's is lit up by one hundred and fifty icons. Icons are pictures. Not landscapes or sea views, of course, but formal, stylized pictures of saints and Biblical scenes. But those who pray with icons believe that they have something in common with the study door at Gad's Hill. The visitor to Dickens's study might enjoy poring over the fictitious titles painted on the spines, just as a visitor to your exhibition might enjoy poring over the technical skill of the iconographers. But unless the visitor to Gad's was willing to look beyond the dummy books he would remain forever stuck in the study, looking at the surface of the door. And unless the visitor to St John's is willing to look beyond the gold leaf and the egg tempera he will remain every bit as stuck. For just like Dickens's practical joke the icons'  painted panels are a doorway, a means of access to another place.

 

Those who pray with icons believe that they are one of the means that God has chosen to reveal himself to the world. When a faithful person looks upon an icon he or she does not just look upon painted wood; he or she looks upon the one whose image is painted upon the wood, and the one whose image is painted upon the wood looks upon the faithful person. A computer-literate generation will not find this difficult to grasp. When we open up our computer screens we are confronted by an array of little images. When we click on one of them - Word, for example, or PowerPoint - we are taken to the programme that we want to use. The point of the little images is that they take us somewhere else. And we call the little images 'icons'. 

 

Most pictures hang on the walls gathering dust. They may entertain us and they may educate us. If the walls they hang on are the walls of Hogwarts they may even move about and speak to us. But most pictures do not allow us to gaze upon the face of God. Even to suggest that this is what icons allow should raise some questions for us - questions about the pictures, certainly, but also questions about God. We don't have to listen very hard to hear the scoffing of the cultured despisers of religion. What sort of God allows his creation to peer at him through wood and paint?

 

Our sort of God is the answer; our sort of God. For our sort of God is the God revealed in Jesus Christ; the God who sits down in a house in Capernaum and takes a child his arms. Our sort of God says 'Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me'. This is the God  who has not held anything back; the God who has come to us in person; the God who identifies himself absolutely with the small and the weak.

 

Charles Dickens wrote books. When we read his collected works we learn something about him. Our God did not write books. We do not have to read his collected works in order to learn something about him. For our God turned up. As Saint James puts it, Wisdom came from above, pure, peaceable, gentle and merciful, in the flesh and blood of Jesus. Wisdom came from above, and Wisdom comes from above. Wisdom's coming is an annoyance, as ancient Solomon said it would be, for Wisdom's coming illuminates all our faults, fragilities and failings. Yet still Wisdom comes, and Wisdom is not ashamed of us: not ashamed of the flesh and blood that Jesus shares; not ashamed of the works of our hands; not ashamed of the things of the earth that we work with our hands. Wisdom takes these and makes them holy. Wisdom comes and through the love we have for one another; through the holy icons; and above all through the bread and wine of the Eucharist Wisdom makes us welcome. Amen.

Sunday 16 September, 15 after Trinity

"Most young people in Britain think that morality means looking after your family or putting others first". So says a BBC poll published this week. Almost 600 young people aged between 16 and 24 were asked to choose which they thought was the most important moral issue from among eight alternatives. 59% opted for caring for the family: only 4% thought that having religious faith or beliefs was the most important.  A British Social Attitudes survey published simultaneously suggests that less than a quarter of young people now consider themselves to be religious.

 

Such figures must be read sceptically. The questions devised by the pollster determine to some extent the answers he is given. But if the figures give us a broadly reliable snapshot then perhaps it's worth asking whether what they suggest - that religion is barely esteemed among the young - actually matters. So long as the young care about something other than themselves - and it appears that they do - then does religion matter?

 

Unsurprisingly I think it does, and I hope that my reasons for thinking that it does amount to more than either professional self-interest or middle-aged reaction. I think that religion does matter. It's not that religion is something that the young should take a respectful interest in whether they like it or not, like they should maths lessons or piano practice. It's not that I adhere to a species of religion that holds that they are at risk of the eternal flames if they don't take such an interest. Put bluntly, it's that I actually believe that, like eating undressed salad and taking strenuous and regular exercise, religion is good for you, even if it's often considerably less fun.   

 

Why is it good for you? What is its purpose? Most people would agree that living in denial of something is unhealthy. Successive British Governments denied for twenty-three years that the blame for the Hillsborough tragedy could be laid anywhere but at the feet of the Liverpool fans. The consequences for us all of that denial will be laid bare in the months ahead: in the anguish suffered by the families; in the eroded trust between communities and police; in the dented confidence in our system of justice.

 

Yes, denial damages, and the purpose of religion is help those who practise it to live free from  denial. For the purpose of religion is to help its practitioners to understand who they really are. When Peter acclaims Jesus as the Messiah he is making a claim about himself as well as a claim about Jesus. He is acknowledging that God is God, that Jesus is God's Anointed One, and that he, Peter, is one of those to whom God's Anointed One has come. He is acknowledging his dependence upon God; he is acknowledging his need of God's Messiah; and he is acknowledging his solidarity with the people to whom God's Messiah has come. Those who live without religion are living, whether consciously or not, with denial. They are living without acknowledging this dependence, this need, or this solidarity.

 

So we're all right then? This is not a moment for complacency. It is emphatically not the case that the practitioners of religion have got everything sorted. Far from it. Peter himself illustrates this perfectly in his very next utterance. He has, as it were, taken the first tentative steps into religion. He acknowledges God. But he also presumes to know God, and to know that God's Messiah cannot suffer and die. In his confession of Jesus as Christ, Peter has begun the journey, but he has only begun it. He will have to follow Jesus to the cross and beyond before he fully knows what his confession means. He will have to set aside the notions of Messiah-ship that he has long held and treasured. He will have to be led into a wholly new understanding. He will have to grow up.

 

If the purpose of religion is to help those who practise it to live free from denial then one of the most pernicious forms of denial is self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is a denial of the passing years; it is a denial of our inevitable ageing; and it is a denial of the irrefutable evidence of our eyes, minds and hearts. If the purpose of religion is to help those who practise it to live free from denial then it is also its purpose to help them towards maturity. Those who live in denial of their dependence upon God or in denial of their need of God often find other gods to be dependent on or to need. But practitioners of religion often depend upon the God of their childhood, or need the God of their adolescence. And this is as unhealthy as living in denial of God. Like Peter, who cannot cope with a Messiah who suffers, we cling to a God who is in reality the tyrannical Headmistress who once terrified us, or the benevolent commanding officer who we once respected. We long for a God who punishes us (or, sometimes, for a God who punishes others); we long for a God who barks orders at us; we long for the God we've always longed for, the teddy-bear God or the Darth Vader God, the God who, whether he's an object of adoration or an object of fear, is the God who has never left the corner of the nursery of our lives.

 

Religion requires of us a mature understanding of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, a mature knowledge of the God disclosed most clearly in the crucified prophet of Nazareth. Hand-in-hand it also requires of us a mature understanding, a mature knowledge, of ourselves. Religion won't let us be toddlers or teenagers once we've left those years behind. Following God, journeying into God's mystery, means journeying into our mystery. The purpose of religion is to help those who practise it to live free from denial, and our greatest denial is our denial of our fractured, fragile selves. Spend any time at all in the company of the living God and the blind rage, the naked fear, the frustrated ambition and the visceral pain that we all hold within ourselves become all-too visible. It's far easier to stay in the nursery with teddy. It's far easier to deny it - but religion won't let us. That's why the polls' findings alarm me. Religion is good for us. What will take its place? Amen.

 

 

 

This Scepter'd Isle 6: Michael Ramsey: 12 August 2012

In 1966 the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury became the first Archbishop to be received in the Sistine Chapel in modern times. At the end of the visit Pope Paul VI took off the episcopal ring that had been presented to him by the people of Milan, and gave it to him. It was a remarkable gesture. Since the papal bull Apostolicae Curae of 1896 the official stance of the Bishop of Rome had been that Anglican holy orders were null and void. The occupant of Lambeth Palace was but a layman got up in the fancy dress of an Archbishop. Yet what was given that evening was the personal gift of one bishop to another. It was a testament to the winds of change that the Second Vatican Council had blown through the Church (it had ended one year earlier). Yet it was also surely a testament to the stature of Michael Ramsey.

His little book The Christian Priest Today is another such testament. It was first published forty years ago, and is still in print. A collection of his charges to candidates  in the Dioceses of Durham, York and Canterbury on the eve of their ordination, it is still the only book that, in this Diocese at least, candidates who are exploring their vocations to priesthood are required to read. In the first charge Ramsey asks 'Why' in the modern era 'the priest?'. He finds a number of answers. Why the priest? Because the priest is a minister of reconciliation; because the priest is a man of theology; because the priest is a man of prayer (we must excuse the gender-specific language - in this particular only is The Christian Priest Today a product of its era). Ramsey had the stature he did when Archbishop and has the stature he has today because he was what he taught his ordinands to be. In his visit to Rome and in his dogged but ultimately disappointing pursuit of Anglican-Methodist unity he was a minister of reconciliation.  And he was a man of theology and a man of prayer.

A man of theology.  In his first book, The Gospel and the Catholic Church, published in 1936 as the storm clouds gathered in Europe, Ramsey prefigures the charge he was later to give to his ordinands and addresses the question 'What is this strange thing, the Christian Church?'  What is its relevance? What relation do its hierarchy, its doctrine, its worship have to the all-too-evident troubles of humankind? Many in that era answered that question by forswearing the supernatural and calling on the Church to take a lead in social and global affairs. But Ramsey reminds his readers that relevance has never been the Church's primary business. Her Lord gives up a relevant ministry in Galilee in order to die upon the cross. His life ends irrelevantly, with the cry 'why hast thou forsaken me?' The relevance of the Church of the Apostles is not that it speaks out on social and global affairs but that it points to this death, and to the deeper issues of human sin and God's judgement that this death discloses. 'In all this' writes Ramsey 'the Church was scandalous and unintelligible to men, but by all this and by nothing else it was relevant to their deepest needs'. Was, and is. 'Looking at the Church now' writes Ramsey 'with its inconsistencies and perversions and its want of perfection, we must ask what is the real meaning of it just as it is'. This real meaning is not to perpetuate the teachings of Christ or even to facilitate the worship of Christ. No, 'As the eye gazes upon it' writes Ramsey 'it sees - the Passion of Jesus Christ. And the eye of faith sees further - the power of Almighty God'. The Church gives expression to Christ's death and resurrection. Put bluntly, we are here because of Christ's Passion; we embody Christ's Passion; the betrayal, torture and death that our forebears witnessed; the resurrection that brought them new hope. Social and global affairs point to the problems of men's lives, writes Ramsey: the Church points to the deeper problem of man himself. It has a foundation which is at the same time historical and mystical: evangelical in its rootedness in the Gospel; Catholic in the universal claim that such rootedness allows it to make. It remains a powerful claim for Anglican authenticity.

A man of prayer. 'The authentic knowledge of God comes through prayer alone' Ramsey enjoins those he is about to ordain. He was never pious about prayer. He was once asked how long he prayed for every day. 'Two minutes' he replied 'but it takes me about twenty-eight to get there', a great comfort to those of us who struggle through the Silent Hour. Be Still and Know, published in his retirement in 1982, has the subtitle A Study in the Life of Prayer. In it he warns against drawing too sharp a distinction between life and prayer. God reveals himself to us through the beauty of nature, the stirrings of conscience, the example of the saints, inspired texts, and through Jesus Christ. We respond to God through gratitude and trust and awe, through love, through contrition, through service. Through all these aspects of everyday life our hearts and minds and wills move Godwards, a move that is expressed partly, but not wholly, through words. Our Godwards move is in word and in silence, in passivity and in action.  Prayer is thus, he writes, 'an aspect of a many-sided converse between human beings and their Creator'. And having given prayer a context Ramsey goes on to consider what it is in its specifics. His approach is alarmingly simple. 'May we think of our prayer as being for a while consciously with the Father, no more and no less than that? It is the keeping of a little time in the conscious awareness of one who is friend as well as creator and saviour'. Hence the twenty-eight minutes spent waiting for the two minutes, a ratio that perhaps challenges us to review the time we give to prayer. This friendship, like any friendship, needs our investment.

There is a story that when Ramsey was teaching in Durham a young undergraduate rushed into him, knocking all his papers to the ground. 'Oh my God' said the undergraduate. 'No' replied Ramsey 'just his representative on earth'. That gift for self-deprecation; that numinous understanding of the Church; above all, those long minutes spent in the conscious awareness of his creator, his saviour, and his friend - all these allowed and allow many truly to see in Michael Ramsey a representative of his God.  Amen.

This Scepter'd Isle 5: Evelyn Underhill: Sunday 5 August 2012

"The mystics are the pioneers of the spiritual world, and we have no right to deny validity to their discoveries, merely because we lack the opportunity or courage necessary to those who would prosecute such explorations for themselves".

So writes Evelyn Underhill, writer, spiritual director and restless Anglican mystic, whose work offers opportunity to her readers and whose life inspires courage in her followers. The opportunity is to journey close to absolute truth, to the very heart of God: the courage is inspired by the journey this extraordinary woman made.

"Pioneers of the spiritual world". Such a title could well be ascribed to Underhill herself, who used it in the opening lines of her book Mysticism, published in 1911. Born in 1875, the daughter of a barrister, Underhill was educated variously at home, at a private school in Folkestone, and at King's College for Women in London, where in later life she was elected a Fellow. Her embrace of the  Christian faith came in 1907, the same year as her marriage, to another barrister. It was not to the Church of England but to the mystery of Roman Catholicism that she was drawn in her early thirties, although Rome's anti-intellectual condemnation of Modernism, with which her conversion was contemporaneous, meant that in conscience she could never quite bring herself to join that Church.

It was the pull of mystery and the desire for intellectual rigour that led her to her study of mysticism, and her book remains a classic. She defines the mystics she studies in it as people whose "one passion appears to be the prosecution of a certain spiritual quest: the finding of a 'way out' or a 'way back' to some desirable state in which alone they can satisfy their craving for absolute truth". They exist in the east and in the west; in the ancient, medieval and modern worlds and, she notes, whether they are Richard Rolle in fourteenth century England or Teresa of Avila in sixteenth century Spain, their aims, doctrines and methods have been substantially the same. In her book she sets out to record and synthesize these aims, doctrines and methods, and the result is nothing less than a map of the human soul. Underhill charts the interior terrain explored by practitioners and writers from the very earliest Christian centuries, through the vast sweep of the Middle Ages, to her own day.

The terrain she charts is that of an arduous journey, but a journey with clearly defined stages. These, writes Underhill, are stages through which any soul intent on seeking truth - on seeking God - will pass. The journey begins with an awakening to the possibility of truth. There follows purgation, in which the awakened soul's conscious and sub-conscious wrestles with the passions and impulses which threaten to distract it. Purgation is complete when the passions are stilled and the soul is filled with inner light. Now the soul may rest awhile, free from the tyranny of the senses and the passions, before being plunged into a dark night. In this stage all that sustains is a patient waiting in faith and trust for the final goal of unity with the truth, of unity with God.

This may sound unfeasibly neat, a Delia-Smith-style recipe for a mystery which by definition ought to be beyond such categorization. But Underhill thought not: her comprehensive study of mystical writing led her to the conclusion that this was the path trodden by those who sought the truth. It may sound like a high-brow endeavour for the spiritual elite, the fantasy of the deranged, or, as Underhill herself puts it "the eccentric performance of a rare psychic type". Again, she thought not: "we each have a little buried talent" she writes, and "everyone who awakens to consciousness of a Reality which transcends the normal world of sense...is put upon a road which follows at low levels the path which the mystic treads at high levels".

Her own journey was far from over. A charge that can be levelled at Mysticism is that it is not Christocentric: comprehensive, yes; profound, certainly; but dependent on and witnessing to the risen Christ? Not exclusively. Yet through the success of her book she met  Friedrich von Hugel, who became her hugely influential spiritual director, and she was received into the Church for England in 1921. Thus began a substantial lay ministry in the Anglo-Catholic tradition, a ministry of retreat-conducting and spiritual direction , which lasted the rest of her life.

In 1936 she published her book Worship, in its way as comprehensive as Mysticism had been twenty-five years earlier. It too is split into two parts, the first treating of the principles of worship, the second of the worshipping customs of the world's great traditions. The contours of the journey she has taken are evident when it is read alongside the earlier work. Christ now takes centre stage. Christian worship, she writes, is a distinct response to a distinct revelation, to God's self-disclosure in Christ. This response is a continuous stream Godwards of adoration, supplication and sacrificial love, a continuous stream Godwards which must swell and spread until it includes all loving acts and all sacrificial inclinations. For worship shows forth "under tokens" the ultimate reality of humankind's Godward call - it sets before us the pattern around which God would have us shape the whole of life. This is supremely true of the Eucharist, in which natural life, represented by bread and wind, is freely offered to God and consecrated by God, so that it may become the vehicle of God's life in the world.

Evelyn Underhill's life and work offers an opportunity to her readers and inspires courage in her followers, as I said when I began. In prayer and in worship she asks us to review our habits and our expectations. Perhaps we are stuck with a routine of prayer that has grown stale without our noticing. Perhaps we hang onto an idea of God that we ought long have outgrown. There is a little talent buried within each of us. How are we using it to grow closer to truth and to God? And when we leave this place today, how will our growth add to the continuous Godward stream of love and self-giving that our Baptism has made us a part of? Amen.

This Scepter'd Isle 4: George Herbert: Sunday 29 July 2012

George Herbert died, aged forty, in 1633. He had been parish priest of Bemerton near Salisbury for barely three years. Revered for nearly four centuries as the archetypal English country parson, his ministry was brief - and he appears to have been curiously reluctant to begin it. Educated at Westminster, Herbert shone at Cambridge, reading Divinity, lecturing in rhetoric and proceeding to a role as the University's Public Orator, before being elected as Member for Montgomeryshire in James I's Parliament of1624.

 That Parliamentary session is remembered for the bellicose  campaign waged by Prince Charles in favour of war with Spain. The King eventually capitulated and tore up the peace treaty that existed between the two countries. Herbert had a horror of war: two of his brothers had lost their lives in conflict, and in his Cambridge orations he had spoken against its costly ravages. With England now set on this course he obtained leave of absence from his University duties, and sought ordination as a deacon, probably at Advent 1624.

 How might we understand this change? Herbert's immersion in the prayer of the Church, begun at Westminster and continued in Cambridge, combined with his theological studies, seem first to have persuaded him to attempt to serve God through the legislative agencies of a Godly monarch - an unimpeachably Reformed intent. When that service was frustrated through the declaration of war he turned to the Church as a preferable forum for such service. Yet even now his progress towards priesthood was remarkably slow. He served as a canon of Lincoln Cathedral for a number of years, and was only ordained priest when, eventually, he accepted the living of Bemerton in 1630. He devoted the last three years of his life to the service of that small rural community, living with his family in the rectory opposite St Andrew's Church, and accompanying them there for twice-daily prayer.

Priesthood was thus for Herbert the culmination of his life and career, the culmination of a lifetime of searching and exploration of how he might best fulfil God's purposes. The searching and exploration were not always easy. We caricature Herbert as blissfully happy among the Wiltshire shepherds with his God, and in these struggles his voice speaks to us as clearly as it did to his Stuart contemporaries. The scholars assume that his two literary works, the clerical manual The Country Parson, and the collection of poetry The Temple, were largely written before his Bemerton years. In the poems we hear him rebelling against the inexorable claim that God appears to have on his life:

I struck the board, and cried, No more.

   I will abroad.

What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?

My lines and life are free; free as the rode...

   Shall I still be in suit?

The frustration is palpable and resonates deeply with anyone who has ever contemplated doing the thing that is right but deeply unattractive. But Herbert discovers God to be patient even if he is not:

But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wild

   At every word,

Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child:

   And I replied, My Lord.

Herbert's Church had emerged from the long years of Elizabeth's reign with its Protestantism re-established but also with its liturgy and holy order intact. It was a Church both Catholic and Reformed. One consequence of this is the very high view that Herbert takes of the sacraments. He writes poems on Holy Communion, Holy Baptism and Priesthood. It is in one of these that he writes:

But th' holy men of God such vessels are,

As serve him up, who all the world commands:

When God vouchsafeth to become our fare,

Their hands convey him, who conveys their hands.

Oh what pure things, most pure must those things be,

               Who bring my God to me!

Herbert understands that in  the consecrated elements of Holy Communion God himself visits the faithful, and this divine use of commonplace things becomes for him a complete way of looking at the world. In the poem that we will sing as our final hymn this morning he asks:

Teach me, my God and King,

In all things thee to see...

Sacramental presence is not confined to the altar. With instruction and assistance the divine is visible in any- and everything. Recalling an image from St Paul he continues:

  A man that looks on glass,

  On it may stay his eye;

Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,

  And then the heav'n espy.

If we choose we can discern the hand of God wherever we look.

Yet this profoundly incarnational theology is balanced by Herbert's Reformed inheritance. It's not just that the poems are saturated with Biblical references, whether explicitly cited or implicitly relied upon. It's not just that the poems assume a regular diet of worship founded upon Cranmer's Prayer Book. It's that they also constantly emphasize the individual's responsibility before God. The first person predominates: I struck the board; Teach me, my God and King - as we have already seen. Yet this individual responsibility is never full of terror because of the nature of the God to whom it is owed. The Temple reaches its climax in the third of three poems to bear the name 'Love'. Herbert writes of the soul's encounter with the divine and fro that encounter offers his reader the hope of acceptance and the assurance of salvation. The scene is not a law-court or a battlefield but a hospitable dining-table at which Love invites the soul to sit and eat. Conscious of its sin, the soul shies away. But Love, the soul's maker and the bearer of the blame that attaches to its sin, insists:

You must sit down...and taste my meat:

       So I did sit and eat.

Herbert is more than the unworldly priest of popular imagination. His history is  the history of the age in which the English Church was beginning to understand itself anew, and he both reflects and forms that understanding. Rooted in the transience of the world, rooted in God's word, and rooted in the sacraments; convinced of God's immanence in all things, and convinced of our personal responsibility before God; and, above all, fed by constant prayer, Herbert's words still enjoin all the world, in every corner, to sing 'My God and King'.

Prayer the Church's banquet, Angels' age,

  God's breath in man returning to his birth,

  The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth.

Engine against th'Almighty, sinners' tower,

  Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

  The six-days world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear.

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

  Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,

  Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

  Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,

  The land of spices; something understood.

Something understood. Amen.

This Scepter'd Isle 1: Julian of Norwich: Sunday 8 July 2012

The approach of the first anniversary of last summer's riots has been marked by the completion of the tallest building in Europe. It is a considerable irony that one year after events which testified powerfully to the fractures which disfigure our splintered city we have unveiled a mighty tower whose very name is synonymous with fractures and splinters.

There is a lazy way of preaching history traditionally favoured by High Churchmen which treats the Reformation as the first great splintering of English life and which treats everything which precedes it as a fracture-free, unified, and harmonious whole. Yet the quickest glance at the late fourteenth century exposes the shortcomings of this ideal. In those fifty years the Black Death and the successive pandemics of plague that it spawned killed up to one half of the population of this scepter'd isle. Fearful of the economic power that the consequent shortage of labour handed to the rural poor the landowning barons clamped down on their tenants' new aspirations, and clamped down hard. In response the peasants marched on London. Their target was not trainers and iPods but visible symbols of oppression and authority. The Savoy Palace was burned, the Tower of London was attacked, and the Archbishop of Canterbury was murdered.

Such was the splintered world which gave birth to a golden age for English mysticism. Death and unrest stalked the realm, but Margery Kempe and Richard Rolle recorded their visions of God and their direct experience of the divine in the newly-confident English tongue. So too did a woman who lived in an East Anglian town grown prosperous through the wool trade. This woman was not ordained; she belonged to no religious order; and she has never been declared a saint; yet her book, the first to be written in English by a woman, has informed the theology and prayer of the Church for six hundred  years.

She was an anchoress. She lived, bricked into a small cell built onto the wall of the parish church. She is unnamed. Margery Kempe visited her and calls her the Lady Julian, but Julian was the saint to which the parish church was dedicated. Her identity has become indistinguishable from his. She suffered grave ill health. It was while she believed she was dying that she received the visions that were to determine the course of her life. She gave herself to prayer, contemplation and spiritual counsel for over forty years. In response to the fractures of her age she gave her life to her God; she surrendered her identity; she experienced ill health as a point of visionary departure; and she was faithful for decade after decade. Those scant biographical facts might themselves be instructive for a generation that is manifestly confused by the contemporary spectacle of societal splintering.

Julian's visions are of the Passion of Jesus Christ, described with a gory frankness that is quite shocking to modern readers. Yet these visions, soaked as they are in Christ's blood, reveal for Julian not God's judgement or God's victory, but only God's love. In a famous passage she is shown something as tiny as a hazelnut lying in the palm of her hand. 'This is all that is made' God tells her, and she discerns that all that is made has three properties: 'First, God had made it: second, God loves it; and third, God keeps it'. This discernment, that God has made all things, and that God loves all things, is the foundation of her convictions.

She sees clearly that there is no anger in God. 'It is utterly impossible that God should be wroth' she writes 'For wrath and friendship are two opposites. He who wastes and destroys our wrath, making us meek and mild, must accordingly ever be in the same love, meek and mild, which is contrary to wrath. For I saw very clearly that where our Lord appears, there peace is established so that wrath has no more place'.

And these observations lead her to a very particular view of human sin. 'It has neither manner of substance nor part of being' she writes 'and it would not even be known save for the pain it causes'. Sin is not a foe to be vanquished and driven from the world. Its reality consists only in its effects, perceived by Julian as human pain. Sin has a purpose. It is not to catch human beings out, trip them up or condemn them everlastingly. Sin hurts us, and these hurts purge us and heal us. They make us know ourselves. And they are the cause of the compassion Christ lavishes upon us, a compassion so overwhelming that Julian is obliged to write of its origin in Christ our Mother. 'Our Saviour is our true Mother, in whom we are endlessly born, yet we will never come out of him'.

It is this image of an eternally hospitable God that is Julian's gift to her readers. It is perhaps no wonder that CS Lewis described her book as 'dangerous'. 'I'm glad I didn't read it much earlier' he wrote to his former pupil Bede Griffith. If God is not to be compared to a double-crossing earthly monarch such as Richard II, who betrayed his promises to Wat Tyler; if human beings facing God are not in the same dire straits as human beings facing the bubonic plague; then can any person can ever be safe from the divine love revealed to Julian? The scandal of universal salvation beckons. It is this theme that TS Eliot picks up as he quotes her best-remembered words:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

God 'the ground of our beseeching'. London's newest landmark points proudly heavenwards from the ground on which it is built. Julian reminds us that the ground upon which we are built is the eternal love of God. That is a vision that may yet draw together even a generation that clusters in the shadow of a Shard. Amen.