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.
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