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 And now that I have picked up my pen I find that pens have largely been replaced by keyboards and letters by electronic communications.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.