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.