In Defence of Wilfrid

Tomorrow is the feast of St Wilfrid, the 1300^th anniversary of his death in 709.  Hexham would not be here if it weren’t for him.  Wilfrid built the first church here in the 7^th century on such a grand scale, says his biographer Eddius, that no other church north of the Alps could compare with it.  Your marvellous crypt, all that is left of Wilfrid’s church, is one of the holy places of the north for it links us directly to the saints of Northumbria’s golden age, like his other crypt at Ripon; and like Wearmouth, Jarrow and Escomb whose stones still stand as a record of the Saxon church.  And even where those layers of primitive faith have been overlaid with the centuries, as at Bamburgh and Whitby, Lastingham and Hartlepool, Coldingham, the island of the Inner Farne, and Lindisfarne itself the fountainhead of them all, the memory of the saints is still powerful.  These numinous places have a power to move us that is all their own.  Their testimony is undimmed with the passing of time, for you feel as perhaps nowhere else the fervour of holy men and women who prayed here.  Coming from Durham, I include in that list the shrines of Cuthbert and Bede in our cathedral, for though buried beneath the grandest of romanesque canopies, it is the simplicity of their faith that touches and inspires us today.

 

Nowhere else in England has such a concentration of ancient Christian sites, and nowhere has such a constellation of saints whose lives have so affected the course of English history.  Of these, Wilfrid was without doubt one of the most able and most influential.  He was one of Aidan’s boys like Chad and Cedd, a native Northumbrian who was sent to Holy Island to be educated at the monastery there.  From there his studies took him to Canterbury, Gaul and Rome, an experience that gave him an understanding of the wider continental church few others of his generation had, and which gives us the clue to his life.   Here of all places, I do not need to rehearse his colourful career as ecclesiastical statesman and politician par excellence, striding out across Europe like some new Joshua to conquer lands for God.  From the beginning, as abbot of Ripon and bishop of York, and as apologist for the Roman way at the Synod of Whitby, he courted controversy.  Combative and pugnacious, he fell out with practically every Saxon king and prelate in the land, first imprisoned and then exiled, and making not one but two long journeys to Rome to appeal to the pope.  Finally, and not without controversy, he returned to Northumbria where his church at Hexham became a centre of his see.

 

Of all the saints of his era, Wilfrid is usually presented as an unattractive image of worldly ambition and self-interest, corrupted by the power he craved.  He was said to be carried to his consecration on a throne supported by nine bishops, not exactly an icon of servant leadership.  While his teacher Aidan had preferred to walk rather than ride, Wilfrid never had a conscience about his fine horses and retinue of servants and warriors.  His reforms of Irish customs at Ripon led to the rough expulsion of Cuthbert who was guest master there, an event Durham finds it hard to forgive.  And so it goes on.  He looks like the antithesis of the gospel simplicity we associate with Lindisfarne which Jesus speaks of in tonight’s reading: ‘I thank you, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants.’  This is how we like our saints to be: childlike, humble, innocent.  Wilfrid, worldly-wise, power-hungry, clever, and not a little ruthless, puzzles us. 

 

So, at your Rector’s specific prompting, let me attempt the difficult but important task of defending Wilfrid.  I am not going to paint over his faults, though he is not the only saint to have them.  But it seems to me that we can make the case for his being one of the Saxon church’s most far-sighted, dedicated and courageous leaders.  Let me try. 

 

First let me say something about the collision of Irish and Roman customs at the Synod of Whitby in 664.  By then, the date of Easter was already celebrated on the same date both across continental Europe and also in much of Ireland as well.  The Columban communities of Iona and Lindisfarne were a tiny minority.  Wilfrid understood where the future lay: not because it was ‘Roman’ rather than Irish, but because he was committed to the unity of the church and believed that the bishop was the visible focus her teaching and her sacramental life.  His passion was for a church that was one, holy, catholic and apostolic, extending across the known world.  This explains much in him that otherwise seems like a puzzling denial of his own Northumbrian traditions.  If we love the church because we love God, then a larger vision of the church, and in particular, the pursuit of unity among Christians is given in the gospel.  The church exists as an institution with a catholic shape and structure in order that it may have continuity in time as well as place through the preservation of what is handed on across the generations.  Wilfrid understood how the tides of history as well as theology were flowing, which is why he threw his weight behind Europe and Rome.  It is a fantasy to think that the outcome could have been different, even if ‘Celtic Christians’ with more romance than historical sense continue to argue that it should.

 

Secondly, we should celebrate in Wilfrid one of the most energetic of evangelists and founders of monasteries of his day.  To establish religious communities, build churches, nurture their faithful, establish schools for the education of the young and proclaim the gospel all belonged together as ‘mission’.  This is precisely what Aidan had done at Lindisfarne.  In this Wilfrid was the loyal imitator of his teacher, planting Christianity as far afield as Sussex and the Isle of Wight as well as in Mercia and possibly in Frisia, another instance of the extraordinary confidence and flair of the Lindisfarne mission.  And the evidence is that Wifrid was conscientious in the pastoral care of his people as missioner, teacher and bishop.  We do him a disservice if we somehow imagine that he was interested only in the institution of the church and its power relations with the state, rather that in its community of disciples.  His great church here at Hexham testified, no doubt, to human power as much as to the glory of God.  Yet the crypt that remains, its layout designed to give the faithful access to the relics of the saints, seems to speak more of the power of holiness, the spiritual quest to re-connect with what truly belongs to the foundation of a life lived before God. 

 

Finally, we should honour Wilfrid as one of the two men who first introduced into England the Rule of St Benedict.  (We don’t know whether he or Benedict Biscop was the pioneer, but we can honour them both for it.)  This is more important than it sounds.  As a matter of history, it paved the way for the upsurge of Benedictine monasticism in the late Saxon period, itself the soil in which the great monasteries of the high middle-ages were planted.  The influence of the Benedictine life in English history is incalculable, not only in the great libraries that flourished in monasteries such as Durham, or the economic impact of the religious houses that controlled estates in every corner of the land, but in the spiritual legacy it bequeathed to the English church.   It can be argued that the liturgy and spirituality we love the Church of England for, particularly in the Book of Common Prayer, is a direct legacy of its Benedictine past with its instinct for order, balance and seriousness, pattern and rhythm, for the reticence that prefers to listen before speaking, for its profound care for human beings individually and in community.  We owe Wilfrid more than we know for his commitment to this wise and humane rule.  It took a well-travelled man to grasp why it mattered. 

 

Jesus says in our reading tonight: ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.’  Benedict’s rule makes humility its principal virtue.  He likens it to Jacob’s ladder, each of the twelve degrees of humility bringing us nearer to heaven; only the steps lead downwards rather than up, for the lower we go, the closer we are to God.  In Wilfrid’s quieter final years, the years of peace as Bede calls them, could it be that politics and power lost their appeal, and instead it was the call to be gentle and humble in heart like his Master that he heard again as in his boyhood he had heard it on Lindisfarne where sky and sand and sea spoke of simple things, and the Lord called as once he had called disciples by the lakeside and had said, ‘follow me’? 

 

Hexham Abbey, 11 October 2009

On the eve of the 1300^th anniversary of the death of St Wilfrid

Matthew 11.20-end

With a Twist of French: a sermon at a music festival

Today this Hexham Abbey festival “with a French twist” reaches its climax. I’d better own up at once to being an ardent Francophile. My love of France and its people, their rich legacy of art, literature and intellectual life, their heritage and landscapes has if anything been strengthened through the torturous Brexit we are inflicting upon ourselves.

At the end of this service we shall hear the Final of Louis Vierne’s first Organ Symphony. After that we are going to enjoy César Franck’s Violin Sonata, one of the greatest ever written. Franck was a Belgian by birth, but he lived and worked in Paris and thought of himself as entirely French. His final church post was as Titulaire and Maitre de Chapelle at Saint Clotilde with its Cavaillé-Coll organ that was the love of Franck’s life and the inspiration for much of his music. Vierne was his pupil and later Organist Titulaire at Notre Dame. I tell you all this because of something Vierne said about his teacher. He wrote in his memoirs that Franck had “a constant concern for the dignity of his art, the nobility of his mission, and the fervent sincerity of his sermon in sound….Joyous or melancholy, solemn or mystic, powerful or ethereal: Franck was all these.”

That phrase sermon in sound is striking. A sermon, literally, means a word or a speech, a conversation, a discourse. What we intuit about music is that it’s just that, a form of speech that communicates in ways that ordinary words can’t do. I want to be careful here. The crafted words of literature and liturgy, of drama and poetry do have that capacity, and the way they touch us can feel like our experience of music. For great art somehow knows us and reaches into our deepest selves taking us far beyond the power of ordinary speech. It awakens our imaginations, stretches our horizons, kindles our spirits. And if we have ears to hear, music it speaks to us of life in all its tragedy and glory. It speaks to us about ourselves. It speaks to us of God. “Joyous or melancholy, solemn or mystic, powerful or ethereal” said Vierne. Beyond the earthquake, wind and fire, or through them, or in them, we hear the still small voice of God’s Spirit.

What we listen to and how is something the scriptures take seriously. In the ancient world and still today, the body's orifices are regarded as needing scrupulous attention because they are the channels by which we are connected to the outside world. In particular, what we see and hear has the potential to uplift us or corrupt, and everything in between, because it allows the world beyond the boundaries of our bodies to penetrate. Seeing well, and even more gearing well, are highly significant. When Israel made a covenant with God, it was couched in the language of listening. “Tell us everything that the Lord tells you,” they say to Moses “and we will listen and do it.” In Proverbs there is a repeated call to find wisdom by paying attention: “My children, listen to me and be attentive to the words of my mouth”. When Jesus says “I am the good shepherd” the test of his authority and his integrity comes down to listening: “the sheep hear his voice…they follow him because they know his voice”.

When St Wilfrid founded this great abbey in 674, it was as a Benedictine community. (Yes, it was rebuilt as an Augustinian priory in the twelfth century, but let’s not forget its Benedictine origins.) The Rule of St Benedict is one of the classics of Christian writing. One of its great themes is obedience: to the scriptures, to the Rule, to the abbot, to the voice of the community, and most of all, to God. The word obedience is derived from the Latin obaudire whose root audire means to listen. The very first word of the Rule underlines that idea of serious listening. “Hearken to the voice of the Master and incline the ear of your heart.” Listen! Pay attention! Train your ears to respond. And when you hear, try to discern the prompting of the Spirit and let your open ears be a symbol of open hearts and open minds – open to God, and open to the wisdom of the inner voice of truth and conscience.

The capacity to listen well is basic to the good life. We know what it is like to be talking to someone who is looking away from us, only half paying attention, not caring enough to lend us their ears. Often it’s the distraction of some other voice, some more important person glimpsed over the shoulder, some better song than ours that's more worth listening to. And if our attention spans in modern life have never been generous, the worldwide web and social media have tended to shortened them still further. Four minutes, some say, is the limit. I’ve already been preaching longer. Who has the patience any more to sit through a Bach passion or a Beethoven symphony let alone a Wagner music-drama?

And that’s our challenge in these times. To let ourselves become overstimulated, incapable of investing time and effort in what is worthwhile is a besetting sin of our age; a craving for what belongs to the instantaneous, the immediate here and now, while we lose the judgment to decide what we should and shouldn’t pay attention to. Here is where music can teach us. There is no quick gratification in great art. You have to invest in it, take the time it takes, surrender to it. Music you give yourself to rather than merely play in the background is an opportunity not only to learn how to listen well, but to grow in the attentiveness that takes the larger and longer view and allows us to see our "instants" in a larger setting. It's how we become open to what the eighteenth century French spiritual writer De Caussade called, in a wonderful phrase, “the sacrament of the present moment”. It’s a gift, but we have to listen out for it, be attentive and open. Then, listening can be a life-changing event. For whenever life is touched and transformed, we can be sure that God is among us.

Back to Vierne and Franck and the phrase a sermon in sound. Cathedrals and abbeys like this one are sometimes spoken about as “sermons in stone”. You look around you as you sit a great building listening to great music. And aren’t you drawn, if you have any feeling, to think to yourself, there is something here that is bigger than me, older and wiser than me, something that touches me, speaks to me, compels me to pay attention? Maybe the music we have been enjoying in this festival has spoken to us, moved us in some way, opened once more the doors of our perception? If so, I call that an experience of God’s presence and his very self. And I think of Jesus walking the shores of Galilee, calling to anyone who would listen, inviting them to hear his words and find their lives changed. Can music call us to new ways of being alive in God’s world, new depths of wisdom and insight, new treasures of human experience to enrich our lives and share with others?

Music preaches the best of sermons if we will sit and listen. Of such is the kingdom of God.

Hexham Abbey Festival, 24 September 2017

Retreat Address on the Psalms 1 - Prayer and the Praises of God (Psalm 65)

I want this week to reflect with you on the psalms. You don’t need me to tell you that the psalms are at the heart of the Opus Dei as St Benedict conceived it in his Rule. In the medieval cathedrals like Durham where I served until recently, we tried to be faithful to the way the Rule has influenced and shaped Anglican liturgy by reciting in full the monthly cycle of psalms in the Book of Common Prayer, said in the morning, sung in the evening. It was not a burden but a joy to do this. It's what I miss most in retirement. I used to tell choristers that as a matter of musicianship, if they could sing the psalms, they could sing anything. 

Well, if you can pray the psalms, you can pray anything, anytime, anywhere. The value to us at Durham was not only to restore the balance of the divine office by giving proper honour to the psalms. It also exposed us to their vast emotional and spiritual range, from despair to thankfulness, from sorrow to hope, and from resignation to acceptance, confidence and joy. And it incorporated us into the story of a faith community that has called on the God of Israel since he first called Abraham to make his journey of faith so that all the world might find blessing. 

What I intend to offer is a series of meditations on one of each day’s morning psalms in a way that I hope explores their potential to touch the experience of all of us. The morning psalm cycle of Week 3 includes representatives of most of the types of psalm that form critics have recognised. But my concern is not so much the study of the psalms as the way we pray them. And in this, I am not only thinking of the church’s prayer but the experience of communities and individuals more widely. And I also want to remind us from time to time that a very ancient way of construing them is to imagine them placed on the lips of Jesus as his own vade mecum in prayer, as I am sure we can confidently say they were throughout his life. 

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So let me begin with one of those set for today, Psalm 65. The theme is prayer and doxology, prayer and the praise of God. 

The psalm is a glowing song of harvest: the good earth and the fecundity of the land. It seems to belong to the annual festival that was probably celebrated in the autumn. It would have embraced the renewal of the seasonal cycle, the renewal of the covenant and the renewal of the people. All of Israel’s life is gathered up in psalms like this: life celebrated and offered, and the author of life worshiped and adored. 

This is why the psalm begins, not with the land and its harvest but with the temple. For it was seen as the focus of the people’s prayer for wellbeing.  Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the temple specifically mentions threats to the land’s fertility as one of the reasons why Israel would pray ‘towards this place’. In that prayer, threats such as famine, blight or the failure of the rains are seen as grounds for which the people should acknowledge their sin and seek forgiveness.  In the psalm, the themes of God’s goodness and a penitent people’s forgiveness are once again linked together: when deeds of iniquity overwhelm us, you forgive our transgressions …Happy are those whom you choose and bring near to live in your courts (3-4). Perhaps Solomon’s prayer is specifically being recalled here.  

The emphasis on Zion must not mislead us as to the true scope of this Psalm. Here, Zion is seen not only as the focus of the nation’s prayer, but as the symbolic centre of the whole world.  To you all flesh shall come (2).  Like the prophets of the exile and afterwards, this psalmist believes that Zion is where “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together”.  This universal vision is carried through the next section where the addresses God as the hope of all the ends of the earth and of the farthest seas (5), for this is the Creator who established the world on its foundations and put the chaotic waters in their place (6-7).  So it is not only Israel but those who live at earth’s farthest bounds who are awed by your signs (8).  

All this prepares the way for the concluding section in which harvest is celebrated as the abundant proof of God’s everlasting care for the human race (9ff.).  The logic of this Psalm is simple: if God demonstrated his power and goodness by creating the world, the harvest demonstrates how his work of creation continues into the present.  Thou visitest the earth and blessest it; thou makest it very plenteous… Thou crownest the year with thy goodness: and thy clouds drop fatness (9, 11 BCP).  I’ve quoted the Prayer Book version because I have fond memories of singing those words as a chorister in the anthem by Maurice Green. And while there is no doubt a special blessing implied here for the Israelites who saw their land as a divinely given inheritance, the invitation to praise God is not limited to the covenant people.  Nothing less than the whole of creation is the recipient of God’s overflowing goodness, so much so that even the natural world finds itself joining in the psalmist’s song of praise: the valleys also stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing (13 BCP).

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Let me offer some reflections on the spirituality of this bright, cheerful psalm. 

First, there is the insight that all of life must be lived out of gratitude and praise. Earlier this month I was conducting the ordinands’ retreat in Lincoln Diocese. We reflected together on each of the five stanzas of Bishop John Cosin’s version of the medieval hymn Veni Creator Spiritus, “Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire”. The fifth verse is the doxology: praise to thy eternal merit, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So I gave an address on how we need to live doxologically in life and in ministry, how we need to construe our entire existence as the offering of praise to the Holy Trinity, how all of life is, in the most profound sense, eucharistic. 

Te decet hymnus, Praise is due to you, O God, in Zion. The key word is the first one, praise. In Hebrew it’s tehillah. I mention that because the entire book of psalms has that same word as its title in the Hebrew Canon where it is called the book of “Praises”, tehillim. That is highly significant when we consider that the majority of psalms are not hymns or praises so much as laments. Nevertheless, the canonists seem to be saying, in lament as in celebration, in longing as in thankfulness, praise must be the ground of our prayer. All of life, whether it is lived in a major or minor key or somewhere in between, must be doxology. “I will bless the Lord at all times.” 

And the praise of God is the source of good order in our lives as communities and as people. Happy are those whom you choose and bring near to live in your courts. We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, your holy temple. I want to come back to the “happiness” sayings in the Psalms later in the week. But here, we see how happiness is linked to being near the sanctuary, close to its rhythms of prayer, participating in its common discipline of life together. We shouldn’t imagine that the Jerusalem temple was altogether like this chapel of the Community of the Resurrection. But in terms of the golden spiritual thread that runs through our tradition from antiquity to modernity, I am sure we should make this link. 

What is worth noticing is how the psalm suddenly switches – lurches you could say - from the goodness of your house, your holy temple to the awesome acts of God. What is striking is how this central section is dominated by the images of power subduing a violent, chaotic universe. God established the mountains out of the tumultuous convulsions of rock and fire. He silenced the roaring of the seas, the roaring of the waves, that ancient symbol of demonic chaos that God needed to subdue at creation and constrain within their proper bounds. Even the tumult of the peoples “furiously raging together” as Psalm 2 puts it, is subject to God’s control. When he acts, the consequence is that order. Time is given back its proper shape. You make the gateways of the morning and evening shout for joy. 

I’m saying that when we praise God and learn to live doxologically, it orders our existence, gives shape to our wayward lives, creates disciplines and boundaries for the chaotic waters that represent our human chaos and disorder. In particular, this psalm, beginning and ending with praise and thanksgiving in such a way as to “contain” the confusion in between, illustrates how God’s praise needs to envelop life like a literary inclusio. Rightly to order our lives is not so much a matter of strenuous effort (which would be Pelagianism) but of giving ourselves up to the praise and worship of our Creator. The eucharistic life, I believe, is the well-shaped, properly-ordered life because it knows and acknowledges the ground of its own being. In a psalm later this week, I’m going to mention the sin of envy and how we should deal with it. My answer will be: by learning how to be thankful, how to praise God. Doxology is the only way. 

Who am I to tell you this as a community living the religious life? You of all people know how the daily rhythms of holy eucharist and divine office express your commitment to a rule that is designed to preserve good spiritual order and keeps chaos in its place. You recite the Gloria a score of times each day at the opening of each office and at the end of the psalms and canticles. The symbolism of this simple act speaks powerfully to me as a secular priest for whom the divine office has always been at the centre of my spiritual life as an adult. Pascal said: if we can only keep on walking, everything will be all right. Let me nuance that by saying “walking doxologically”, walking in the praise of God, walking eucharistically, walking for his glory. That is our vocation in both religious and secular life. And if we follow it as best we can, we are protected from spiritual chaos and harm, and everything will be all right. 

And then, reverence for God must inevitably be connected to reverence for life. The connection between the sanctuary and the world is fundamental to authentic spirituality. We’ve seen how the psalm moves seamlessly between the temple and the earth, between the sacred space of the cult and the sacred space of all creation. There is a beautiful spiritual transparency in this psalm, how it progresses from the praise that is offered in the holy place to the memory of God’s mighty acts in creating the heavens and the earth; and then to his sustaining of the created world into the present experience of the worshipper. In other words, as he was in the beginning, so he is now, abundantly demonstrated in a good harvest: the watered earth, the fields and meadows dancing with joy, the year crowned with God’s bounty.

This is to say, that when worship and life are connected as doxology, they will also be connected as ecology. There is an ecology of the spirit, an ecology of human society, and an ecology of nature. The Hebrew and Christian scriptures have always had a healthy understanding of the sacred-and-secular distinction: not that it is wrong in itself (as some claim rather too hastily) but that it is provisional. It must always be understood in the larger context of affirming that “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it” as the opening verse of Psalm 24 puts it, a rite of entry into the sanctuary that makes the same connection as today’s psalm between liturgy and the created order. 

So whether the psalm is meant as an affirmation or a prayer, we are meant to grasp the complete commitment God has to the welfare and flourishing of the world he has made. You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it. His involvement with the earth is no less than humanity’s: the harvest is both God’s and ours. There is therefore a deep collaboration implied in these concluding verses, a divine and human synergy that enables the land to realise its potential and give of its best, not just so that living things can enjoy them but as an end in itself, realising the purpose for which it was made, to be both “beautiful and useful” as William Morris might have said. 

Jewish and Christian spirituality have always emphasised the goodness of creation. But in our own times this has become not only an honouring of the Creator but an urgent imperative to this generation and those who follow us. As we know, the natural world and the human family as part of it are more fragile than our predecessors had imagined. The threats we ourselves pose to our planet are more obvious today than ever before as we are beginning to see how climate change will inevitably have far-reaching consequences for the delicate ecology of our island home. The imperative is both to live more ethically and to conserve what we have inherited so that our children and grandchildren can enjoy the fruits of the earth as well as us.

I confess to being pessimistic about our ability as nations and peoples to turn round our selfish propensity to exploit nature while there is still time. I read a report in the paper last week that drew attention to how many environmental activists are murdered in Latin America because they get in the way of making lucrative gains out of rivers and rainforests. It's not just the environment but human life itself that is written off as cheap or of no value. And I fear for a future when the habitable world contracts to the point where major conflict becomes almost inevitable. Here is where we people of faith need to see the world in the context of what is even larger, God’s creative love and providential care. Our psalm ought to provoke us into getting our perspectives adjusted so that we see clearly not only how precious our world is, but how much it is at risk, how we must urgently change our ways and encourage others to change theirs so that we place at the heart of our human ecology a true and lasting reverence for life.

For us as disciples, that would be to put hope and imagination back into the centre of our prayer in such a way as to banish despair by committing us to act for the good of the planet and the glory of God. I imagine Jesus would have had psalms of blessing like this on his lips each day, for in him, we might say, we see doxology made flesh, articulating with and on behalf of the world its instinct to be true to itself and respond to God’s goodness. So like him, in the spirit of our psalm, we want to align ourselves with God’s wise and loving purposes for the creation. We do this, says the psalm, by keeping alive in ourselves our capacity to be thankful for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life, but above all (Christians go on to say) for the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ.

So in our meditations today, I invite us to reflect on living eucharistically to the praise of God, and on how doxology at the centre of life transforms our prayer, our living, and our endeavours to work for a more just, more sustainable, more Christ-like world.

Ministry for the Long Haul 2: Inhabiting the Stories of Ourselves

Yesterday I spoke about how we are constructed as ministers by the stories of our faith, our churches and the communities we are embedded in. I focused on how, after feeding the crowd, Jesus orders his disciples to “gather up the fragments so that nothing is lost” and linked this to the harvest festival of Sukkoth or Booths with its five themes of thankfulness to and dependence on God, living close to the earth, remembering where we come from and solidarity with the poor. I see these as five marks of ministry for the long haul in terms of both our collective and our personal stories.

Gathering the fragments is a task we all have to do for ourselves as well as one another. In post-modern speak, our human stories are put together through bricolage which is French for DIY – pottering around with bricks and mortar so as to make something that is beautiful or useful or both. I thought of that when we embarked on building the now legendary Lego Cathedral at Durham. It took 300,000 bricks. People were invited to pay £1 per brick. At one time we thought it would take longer to build than the real thing. It proved to be a marvellous tool for interpretation and outreach. Children and adults felt they were part of creating something special. For a long time all you could see was a footprint. Walls, arcades, piers, doors, windows began to reach up uncertainly like plants in early spring – painfully slowly it seemed. But after a while, the building began to take recognisable shape. It started to resemble the cathedral so many people loved and admired, even if it was only in outline, a ghost that would still need tens of thousands of bricks were still needed to complete it. Like the Romanesque cathedral itself, this building project required much time and patience, real commitment and perseverance.

Lego Cathedral was a great conversation-starter. We did real evangelism by helping guests articulate what they thought they were doing by helping to construct a building of faith. Each brick was itself an act of faith, of belief and hope in the finished work of art. But it was intriguing to hear a number of people talk about it as a metaphor, as if they were laying another brick on the edifice of their own life. And this does seem to me how our stories are built up over a lifetime. I spoke yesterday about being artists of our own lives, collaborating with God in shaping our stories, framing our lives. Brick by brick, you could say, event by event, encounter by encounter, experience by experience. The footprint may already be there laid out for us to glimpse – or it may not. But somehow, in the providence of God, it happens. And as we grow older and can look back, as I am now doing in retirement, we can see more of it for what it truly is, and – despite the mistakes, despite the false starts, despite so much to regret and repent of, still be thankful. As I said yesterday, eucharistia, thankfulness, does seem to me to be right at the heart of a good journey, be it a long haul or a short one.

There are some episodes in life that you know you’ll never forget because they seem to shift your way of seeing things in some decisive way. One of these happened just as we moved into the vicarage when I became an incumbent. At the age of 32, even I could see that I had a lot to learn, though it’s only now that I realise how much. My predecessor in the parish had died suddenly of a brain tumour in his mid-fifties. He had only been inducted six months earlier so it was a terrible shock to his family and to the parish. His widow was still in the vicarage when we arrived to look around. She spoke about John’s life and ministry, how happy they had been as a family, how much they were looking forward to getting to know the parish and serving there. I asked how she thought she would carry on in the coming weeks and months. She said: “the one thing John kept on preaching, and living out, was the importance of gratitude. If we can be thank-you people, he said, even in the darkest times life can begin again as something wholesome and beautiful and good. I’m now trying very hard to learn that lesson. Time will tell how well I learn it.”

That could come straight out of Thomas à Kempis. In his Imitation of Christ he says: “Be thankful for the least gift, so shall you be ready to receive greater. Let the least be to you even as the greatest, even the most contemptible gift as something of special value. If you consider the worth of the Giver, no gift will seem little, or of too mean esteem. For that cannot be little which is given by the Most High God.” Translating the Imitation for Penguin Classics was the last project my training incumbent undertook in old age. I think that without knowing it, he taught me good habits of reflection that foster a thankful attitude. He still is. I’ve just finished reading a biography of Edith Cavell, the English nurse (daughter of the vicarage) who was executed by the Germans in 1915 for helping allied prisoners escape occupied Belgium. She had the Imitation with her in prison and wrote in it on the night before her execution, as if to say: my life has been offered to God. To have done my duty is all I could have asked. I am thankful for that privilege. 

I believe this is one of the most important lessons life has been trying to teach me. Gratitude seems to me to have an absolutely vital role, if not in directing our stories (for so much is beyond our control), then at least in framing the way we tell them. I’ve found this to be essential to the long haul. Embedding my personal story in the big Christian story is a vital part of that, as I said yesterday: through sacrament and scripture and the life of the church, learning that eucharistia is the foundation of everything we are as the people of God. 

You would expect me to say that at the core of my career as a priest has been daily prayer and worship. Of course that is right: my priestly identity and story are very largely shaped by it. It’s a truism to say that a stipendiary minister is “paid to pray” but it’s an accurate perception all the same. I wasn’t schooled in it during training, so when I discovered this habitus in my first years as a priest, I found in it the church’s answer to my daily struggle to pray. I suppose I was an intuitive Benedictine who, long before I got to know the Rule of St Benedict, instinctively recognised in the office the celebration of the praise of God. For most of my ministry I’ve enjoyed the wonderful privilege of celebrating the divine office in incomparable surroundings and to beautiful music. In particular, the psalms of the day, sung or said, have been an irreplaceable source of strength in good times and bad. In the psalms you witness a community of faith living, praying, celebrating, praising, struggling, lamenting, trying to make sense of life as it is lived under God, asking just such questions about their story as we’ve been looking at. 

But as I look back, I’m clear that the rhythm of what Benedict calls the Opus Dei, the “work of God”, was formed not in cathedrals but in the parish. Here is where the shaping of each day by morning and evening prayer seemed to me to be adding brick by brick to the edifice. Each morning my colleagues and I would go across to church, ring the bell, and say the office with whoever turned up to join us. Next door to the church there was a sheltered housing complex. Elderly women would sit in their rooms looking out over the churchyard. Once I was in the town and someone came up to me to ask me if I’d been unwell. “No, why do you ask?” I replied. “O, my aunt said she hadn’t seen you going over to church for prayers the other day.” I reassured her and said I’d had a few days’ holiday. But it taught me about how public is the priest’s role, and how parishioners take a deep interest in the spiritual habits of the clergy. “Say one for me” isn’t always a jokey aside from those who know little and care less about God. I realised that daily prayer was a duty, not just a privilege. It was part of my job. I only glimpsed then what I know more clearly now, which is that these habit-forming spiritual disciplines are very much an aspect of the long haul. And duty can keep us going even when inclination or desire have given up.

But what the Imitation says is that even lesser gifts are of estimable value and call for gratitude. How do you compare the greater and the lesser? - a gift is a gift. And that is precisely Thomas’s point. If I’ve even begun to learn this, it’s been the hard way. I’m thinking of the gifts that have sustained me particularly during the dark phases of the journey, the arid stretches, the tears. The point about the so-called lesser gifts is that they are very specific. They are unique to each of us. I’m thinking of the people who love us and the intimate relationships that sustain us; the books we have read; the music we have enjoyed; the pursuits that bring us joy, the landscapes on God’s good earth that give renewal and lift our spirits. The longer the haul, the more important these gifts become.

I believe that attention to the details that give texture to our stories is more significant as a sustaining spiritual discipline than we often realise. I’m of the personality type that loves the big picture, the grand narrative, symbols, images, stories, poetry, metaphors, the imagination. I happen to think that this is the world Christian theology inhabits, so they are prized gifts in our proclamation and our life as ministers. Everything is bigger than it seems, more mysterious, more wonderful, more bursting with possibilities, more charged with the grandeur of God than what we can see and touch and handle. But the danger for us INFJs, type 4 on the enneagram, is that we sit loose to precisely those things, the ordinary stuff of life. Detail matters if we take Incarnation seriously, for Jesus was born as a specific human being at a specific time in a specific place. We need to notice it, pay attention to it. We need to feed our curiosity. When Dr Johnson said: “bury yourself in a dictionary and come up in the presence of God” he was on to something profound. 

In my long haul, I’ve found this to be more and more important. In the parish, as I said yesterday, I began to be absorbed by the specifics of the place in which I was a parish priest: the history and fabric of the church building, the town it had served for so many centuries, the physical and cultural environment of its locality, and beyond it, life in North East of England, one of this country’s most characterful and fascinating regions. This belongs to what I was saying yesterday about knowing the story of the place and understanding its grain. But I also found it to be enriching personally to peer beneath the surface, try to grasp what made it what it is. I felt I wanted to become more indigenised, inhabit this strange and beautiful place, become part of its story. I was oddly proud when my children quickly acquired Northumberland accents, started speaking in the patois of the school playground. When we moved south again, they just as swiftly shed the evidence of having been northern for a while but then there was another story to discover and become part of and that was good too. 

When later on I read George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda a paragraph leapt out at me. She says: “A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widenings of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours....may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood.” It’s related to what I said at my farewell sermon about living close to the earth. I’m certain we can’t be effective ministers unless we cherish and love the places where we serve. I’m saying that for me, developing a sense of place, discovering, getting to know, belonging to that “spot of a native land” has been more significant as I look back than I realised at the time. Each place to which I have belonged has become part of who I am, like the soldier looking ahead to death in Rupert Brooke’s poem, “A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, / Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, / A body of England's, breathing English air, / Washed by the rivers, blest by the suns of home.” 

Let me go on to say something about human relationships and intimacy. Why do I speak about people only after I’ve spoken about place, you ask? For the simple reason that first among the gifts of place are the people who become central characters of our stories, either for a while or forever. My family, my close friends, colleagues past and present, teachers, mentors and guides, all belong to particular times and places in my story. And while we must live and love in the present, they all have the capacity to evoke the past. Kierkegaard said in words beloved of analysts and psychotherapists, “life must be lived forwards but understood backwards”. I think this is especially true of how through shared memory our relationships inform the way we look back and how we tell our personal stories. In these recent weeks following my mother’s death, I’m particularly aware of the importance of this. 

(Perhaps this is why I find the notion of virtual friendship through social media somewhat suspect. It lives in an eternal present that sits loose to time past and time future. It doesn’t seem to be rooted in the specifics of place and time in the way that enduring relationships do. Of course, the virtual can lead to the embodied, and embodied relationships can be and are expressed in the digital world, so I’m only asking a question about the Facebook language of “friendship” and what this can really mean if you have hundreds or thousands of them. As an avid Tweeter, I find the concept of “following” one another more honest to the flickering character of cyberspace; but I recognise that we are all learning to find our way around social media and in particular how to bring wisdom to bear on these fascinating but seductive worlds. For even if social media is “of the moment”, the eighteenth century spiritual writer de Caussade reminds us that the present moment is itself a sacrament where we should expect to encounter God. So the question is, how do we humanise, indeed divinise, the worlds we inhabit in cyberspace? How do we follow à Kempis and imitate Christ there? For another day, I think.) 

I have found the cultivation of intimacy as a basic need in the long haul. It has sustained me in ways that nothing else could. I’ve glimpsed the passion at the heart of God’s way of loving by being loved that way myself.  Especially has this been true at times when I have felt lonely or desperate, where I’ve messed up, where I’ve caused hurt or damage, where I’ve needed to be forgiven and reconciled – and sometimes, though less often, when I’ve needed to forgive. You don’t need me to elaborate on this point because it’s a basic part our flourishing as men and women. “It is not good for us to be alone” is a basic fact of human living. But it’s a central aspect of our priestly formation too. It’s not only a question of how our intimate relationships nurture and sustain us, how we are perhaps never closer to life as sheer gift than we are in the presence of people who truly love us. I believe it’s about living the reality of priesthood in the circles of intimacy we belong to and discovering that we have not lost hold of our capacity to be human. risks to our stability and integrity as ministers and as men and women. 

I have found that being in the role of a public representative of God’s grace and love can pose risks to my capacity for personal intimacy. As with anyone in a caring role, how we express care and compassion can become professionalised. We show love and care because it is our job to, R. S. Thomas’s “willed gentleness” that I mentioned yesterday. I don’t disparage that. We cannot be everyone’s intimate friend even if we sign off our parish letters “with love” or “your sincere friend and vicar”. But we can find ourselves to be seriously lonely even when at the core of elaborate networks of ministerial relationships. So I want to follow the hunch that it’s the richness of our personal intimate relationships that sustains warmth, humaneness and joy in the way we are with everyone else. During the long haul, intimacy has not only enriched me and held me personally, but has been crucial in enabling me to do what we are all invited to do as we collaborate with God in reaching out to his world: to inhabit and model being as fully human as I can be. It’s trying to be an exemplary disciple, or perhaps I mean human being, before the world, not only in virtue of public office but because of what we are in our deepest selves. I use that word crucial deliberately. It takes me back to the crux, the cross where we see self-giving love demonstrated in all its precariousness, fragility, vulnerability and infinite generosity. In this theological sense, passion is always an aspect of love. 

So what has sustained me personally over the long haul? As I’ve prepared this, I realise that I’ve fallen into unwitting alliteration in my answers: prayer, place, and people. And I only have to state in this way to see how obvious it all is. I am speaking to you as peers in ministry. My only possible qualification for standing here on these days is that I have been practising it a little longer than some of you. Let me conclude with a fourth ‘P’ that sums up some of what I’ve been trying to say. I am thinking of our capacity to stand back and take in our story, reflect on where we have come from and what it means. It’s the word perspective. 

The longer the haul, the larger your perspective – at least, if you bother to take in the view. In the early years of ministry, everything is in the foreground, inevitably: vivid, sharply focused. The beginnings of any new aspect of life ought to be like that: etched on our consciousness and engraved in the memory because they are so alive, so intensely lived. When there is ecstasy it is fierce and joyful; when there is agony it is desperate beyond words. With every privileged success you feel you could fly; with every mistake you wish the earth would swallow you up. It’s like William Blake looking into the sun and seeing angels of every hue in the universe, both dark and light. It’s true of the first stirrings of love and friendship; of faith coming to life; of the leap of insight as we grasp some truth or wisdom for the first time. And it’s true of being ordained. I can remember the first fine careless rapture as if it were yesterday. 

“If only it could last” said Augustine as he gazed out of the window in a rapturous moment with his mother Monica one day. But it’s a mercy that it doesn’t, I think. It’s not just a truth for photographers that while foregrounds matter a great deal, they are not the whole picture. With the years comes depth of field, to stay with the analogy of photography: things lie both in front of and beyond the plane where once we saw everything in just two dimensions. The long haul brings perspective, the capacity to see the landscape in a larger way, and as part of it, the path we ourselves have trodden in our journey thus far. The foreground isn’t everything. Someone once said, don’t trust foregrounds: they flash by so quickly when you are on the move. 

I’m thinking particularly of our experiences of disappointment or failure in ministry. For yes, there are tears in things. How have they not broken me over four decades? I spoke yesterday about being men and women who are ourselves formed by the mercy and grace that we hold out for others to discover. In one of his ordination addresses Michael Ramsey speaks about the need for grace to wash our motives, aspirations and ambitions in ministry as well as our words and actions. In the harvest feast of Succoth as we’ve seen, the Israelites were taught to learn the lessons of dependence on God, which is the other side of gratitude. 

I clearly recall what my bishop said to me in our personal interview on the night before I was ordained deacon. “Michael” he said, “you will make mistakes in the years that lie ahead. Many will be short-lived in their consequences; some may be serious. When you stumble or fall flat, there’s no point in wishing you hadn’t. Seek God’s mercy, get up if you can, dust yourself down and carry on. If you are seriously injured by your fall, make sure you find the help you need and take the time it takes to stand upright again and start walking.” I have recalled that advice gratefully times without number. But I would have added: in the early years of ministry, every mistake feels huge, possibly irrecoverable from. They squat there in the foreground, loud and ugly, mocking everything you hoped for, everything you pledged. It’s having travelled a certain distance that puts them in perspective. Mostly they are the result of simply being human. 

Let me remind you of what I said yesterday about the necessity of having spiritual guides, mentors, confessors who know us and can read us, who are there to hold up a mirror to ourselves and help us deal with the shame and the failure, the envy and the guilt, all that poses threats to our ministry and our humanity. They help us to make connections, see our narratives in new ways, and lend perspective. The decades undoubtedly bring the comfort of a longer view, the kind of wisdom that enables us better to see things as they are. There is something necessary and strangely reassuring about being in a role or a place long enough to have to live with your mistakes. Cultivating depth of field has had a stabilising effect on my journey through ministry. I think I am more trustful and less anxious than I was when I started out. The tears never go away as long as we truly care about what we are doing. But their effect, especially when penitence is involved, is to heal rather than to destroy. Is this why the desert fathers used to speak about “the gift of tears” as a kind of baptism?

What gives us this depth of field, this perspective? Is it just that we have travelled? I think it has to be more than mere distances clocked up on the milometer. It comes back to something I said earlier about “noticing”. The foregrounds we journey through inevitably leave their mark on us. They change us. We would not be what we are if we had not walked that particular way. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference” says Robert Frost in his endlessly quoted poem but it is not any less wise for that. So the capacity to pay attention to the roads we travel, notice the landmarks, learn how to read the landscape, all these play a part in shaping the stories we tell about ourselves as our way of remembering where we have been and what we have been given. As reflective practitioners for whom this kind of attention is a life habit, we not only become emotionally and spiritually intelligent but are given degrees of insight that equip us to be good, wise guides and pastors of others.   

Let me go back to the idea of being artists of our own lives in collaboration with God our maker and redeemer. So much in our story was unforeseeable at the outset. I don’t so much mean the big narrative about the privileged lives we lead, being affluent by any standards, well educated, giving our lives to do something we love. Nor do I mean the greater wealth of loving and being loved by others, or knowing and loving God, though there is nothing inevitable about any of these things in an uncertain world. I mean the contingencies of life, how we find ourselves in this place rather than that, in this particular role carrying these particular responsibilities. The twists and turns of the journey can baffle us sometimes. We may wish that things had turned out otherwise. We may have discovered that what we thought we would be giving most of our time to in ministry has turned out to be very different. 

For example, I became a dean twenty years ago believing that my primary task was to be a spiritual leader working closely with the bishop, the head of a religious foundation and faith community called a cathedral. The reality was more like being the CEO of a medium-sized business. Looking back, I can see that dilemma foreshadowed in my incumbency when “running a parish” felt not altogether to be the same as reaching out to the community, caring for people in their need, proclaiming the gospel, pursuing social justice, and offering spiritual accompaniment to the faithful. I have had to make friends with an institution as well as undertake a mission and practise a way of life.

So the narrative of our journeys has had to incorporate a great deal of nimble footwork on the way. You could call it improvisation, not in the sense of an organist meandering across the keyboard while the collection is taken, but as jazz musicians know it, that essential ability to seize the moment and do something creative and beautiful with it within the setting of a musical line that has its own direction of travel. When you travel, you develop an instinct for good spontaneity, what will enhance and enrich the journey, when it is good to turn aside to eat, drink or sleep or follow your curiosity, or where there is a need to attend to, even if it was not planned in advance. I think of Moses turning aside to see the burning bush, and the Good Samaritan not passing by on the other side when a wounded man needed his help, and the risen Jesus accepting hospitality on the Emmaus Road when he was making as if to travel on. Sometimes to “turn aside” is for the moment only, and we soon find ourselves back on the road we had taken. Sometimes the change of direction is permanent: but for that fork in the track, we would by now be in another place entirely. I said that jazz has its direction of travel, but who ever knows precisely where this musical adventure will end up? And not only is the journey different from what we imagined, and the story we tell about it, but we are different too because of it. You never know what the long haul of ministry is going to entail. As John Henry Newman said, “to live is to change, and to live long is to have changed much”.

I wanted to end on this note of seeing in perspective, having depth of field. Where is the long haul taking us? The other night we watched a beautiful film called A Late Quartet. I had seen it before but it was on TV and I said to my wife that it was not to be missed. It’s about a string quartet one of whose players, the cellist, is diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. The fallout among his colleagues threatens to break up this group of musicians who have invested their entire lives in making music together. The piece they are working on is one of Beethoven’s late quartets, the Opus 131 in C sharp minor. The film explores how the music is a metaphor of the human relationships and vice versa. But it also showed me how, as the totally deaf composer comes to the end of his life, Beethoven is striving for a new depth, a new purity and simplicity, not composing to please the crowd but for the sake of achieving perfection in the art itself. You find this is true of the late works of so many of the greatest artists. While I was watching, I thought of you the Stepney clergy and what I might bring to you in this conference.

I think it’s this. Thomas à Kempis says in the Imitation: “Purity and simplicity are the two wings with which we soar above the earth and all that is temporary in nature.” By purity he means the virtue Jesus is speaking about in the Sermon on the Mount, “blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” That’s not just resisting temptation, keeping ourselves uncontaminated. I doubt if that’s it at all. It’s something altogether more profound and more demanding, to practise singleness of mind, heart and purpose so that we are intent only on one thing, which is to do the will of God. Simplicity means the same thing, being stripped of all extraneous distractions so that we are focused on God and what he desires for us and of us.  

So late in life, I am trying to learn this lesson. I am not very good at it, though having to downsize in retirement, shed a lot of things that once mattered, lay aside the roles that have defined me for so long and live like everyone else behind an ordinary untitled front door are important as outward signs of an inward development that I hope may be to grow old gracefully. The narrowing of our horizons in later life can help us focus on what we really need to see, what ultimately matters for all our living and dying. Purity and simplicity are two words that sum it up for me. And if I have a regret, it is that I didn’t cotton on to the importance of those words a lot earlier on in my life. If I had, they would have helped me to come to terms more realistically with the failures and disappointments, with the unexpected and not always welcome surprises that are part of what it means to be on the road. 

But although I have retired, there’s an important sense that the long haul is not over yet. Ministry goes on in new ways. Life goes on in new ways. There will be surprises, ordeals maybe that will test faith in ways that can’t be foreseen. But retirement is like every other stage of the journey: filled with the promise and hope that whatever it brings, God will be there, even in the shadows. There is still time to learn, try to be a better disciple and a better person, aspire to a greater simplicity and purity of heart, a wiser, more generous way of being human and being Christian. What St Luke says of the youthful Jesus should be true at every stage of life, that we grow “in wisdom and stature and in the favour of the Lord and of human beings.” Matthew Arnold has a poem where he pictures life as a river flowing from the mountains to the ocean. He says that we are fortunate when there comes a moment of insight about what it was all for. “And then he thinks he knows / The hills where his life rose / And the sea where it goes.” The imitation of Christ is the clue, to attain to our full humanity which is “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” – this is the long haul as it reaches its God-given destination. 



September 2016

Cathedrals, Sacred Space and the Theatre of the Soul: an address to the Cathedral Precentors

In this anniversary year, your conference is paying homage to Shakespeare. How could it not? The last play I went to see was The Winter's Tale. It's one of his last dramas and it’s far from easy to classify, as if in his maturity Shakespeare is reaching beyond the straightforward categories of comedy, tragedy, history and so on. It starts out as a classical tragedy where, like Othello, the tragic flaw is jealousy. Leontes imagines that his old friend Polixenes is having an affair with his wife Hermione. Shakespeare vividly depicts a man eaten up by obsessional jealousy, his mental disintegration bringing about the collapse of a family's whole world with the deaths of his wife and his young son.

But then comedy seems to break in on the hopelessness. The famous stage direction “exit, pursued by a bear” seems to introduce a note of parody, hinting that nothing is quite what it seems. There is a clown and lots of flirtatious dancing, and all is set for a happy ending with paradise restored and broken relationships mended. But Shakespeare gets there by using a device that has puzzled critics because it seems as if it resorts to trickery. At the climax of the play Paulina brings the statue of lost Hermione back to life. It's a tease, for we don't know whether she was ever really dead or had simply been hidden away and looked after by Paulina. Anyway, in a beautiful recognition scene she and Leontes are reunited and the drama achieves its resolution.

Does the play itself 'lose its mind', so to speak, does the text forget itself as it disperses the high art of tragedy into what at times feels close to farce? Does the comedy, following hard on the heels of so much grimness, mock what went before as if to say, don't take any of this too seriously: it's just illusion, a ceremony to mark the passage of the seasons? Perhaps it's a parody on both tragedy and comedy: the scarcely believable speed at which things go wrong at the beginning, the sudden lurch into an apparently careless comedy complete with songs, ballet and pick-pocketing slapstick and a miracle (if that's what it is) to end with and give us the closure we want, the happy ending? Or is Shakespeare, far from being careless, showing his mastery of dramatic form by merging the two genres in one art-work and making what is unbelievable at one level credible at another?

As a theologian and one-time liturgist, I am fascinated by the resonances in The Winter's Tale of both the central Christian story of the passion and resurrection of Christ, and its ritual “showing forth” in the eucharist.  It's not that any particular figure is an image of Jesus (unless it is Paulina whose action in the drama is to bring about both judgment and redemption). It is the drama itself that feels irresistibly Christological, taking us through a passion-like experience of suffering and pain into a realm of laughter, reconciliation and dancing that suggest resurrection and the kingdom of God. So like the liturgy, the play becomes “play” in the sense of a game that imagines us to be living in the redeemed state we call the kingdom of God. The great transformation scene leads us out of winter into spring and summer, bringing colour into the sombre monochromes with which it began. This is one way in which the movement of “enchantment” from tragedy to comedy is not just credible but ultimately necessary.

There’s a particularly telling line when Paulina says near the end: “it is required you do awake your faith”. Which is why, when the statue comes to life (and who envies the actor who has to stand there so still for so long?), you can smile at the ludicrousness of what is happening, or else find yourself believing in it and being deeply moved. Theatre is always an act of faith for playwright, actors and above all, audience. In The Winter's Tale, we seem to be summoned into an act of faith that draws us into the life of things, into God. Either parody or gospel - or maybe both, because in an important way the gospel parodies the silliness of self-important human lives and says: look beyond this and see something that is not transient but eternal. Shakespeare is always big enough for there to be endless possibilities in the way we respond. And by keeping us guessing, he always has the last laugh.

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In 1968, Peter Brook, the great Shakespeare director, wrote a little book that has become a classic for all who love theatre, The Empty Space. It’s a book every liturgist should read often, alongside that other slim but equally treasured volume, Aidan Kavanagh’s Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style published in 1982. Brook taught us to think about what takes place on a stage when something real is happening, as “holy theatre”. (He also coined the phrases deadly theatre, rough theatre and immediate theatre, all bursting with liturgical insight. I don’t know if Kavanagh knew the book but he writes as if he did.)

It’s “holy theatre”, indeed “the idea of the holy” that I intend to focus on today. I want to draw on my experience in the four cathedrals where I have served most of my public ministry. And I want to speak about the “holy” in a bigger sense than simply the liturgy, what that holy theatre is itself “about”, the theatre of human life as it is lived before God in the face of his fierce and wonderful love for the world.

My phrase “the theatre of the soul” is a conscious nod in the direction of two other books I’ve valued. They are by the psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall, Theatres of the Body and Theatres of the Mind. The first is about how the body acts out the scripts of our lives, especially those stories that are hurtful and destructive to us. The second focuses on illusion and truth as our stories get told and explored in the psychoanalytic process. It was a moment of insight for me when, thanks to the literature my psychotherapist wife was putting in front of me, I learned that the analytic space is often referred to by practitioners as “holy” or “sacred”. These connections say to me that like patriotism, liturgy is not enough. Sacred space is indeed very much to do with the holy theatre of the liturgy that is performed in it, and for which it exists at all.

But if we see the liturgy merely as an end in itself, rather than as a vehicle for transformation both collectively and personally, if we don’t recognise that the whole point of theatre is to challenge us, judge us, console us, mend our broken lives, help us to glimpse new possibilities, strengthen us to go on living, give us back our hope, we haven’t grasped its essential theological, pastoral and spiritual meaning. The theatre, the cathedral, the church, whatever is our ritual arena, they define the spaces in which human dramas get acted out and life is changed. Shakespeare understood it in ways that always surprise, amaze and delight us.

You need to know where I am coming from. Of my forty years of ordained life, nearly thirty have been in full-time ministry in three cathedrals, and in six of the other ten I was an honorary vicar choral of a fourth and as well as singing services, sang for a year in the back row of its choir when there was a lay clerk vacancy. That was Salisbury in the 1970s and early 80s. After an incumbency in Northumberland, I became Canon Precentor at Coventry, then Provost of Sheffield, then Dean of Durham from where I retired last year after nearly 13 years. You’ll understand that as a newly retired priest, I’ve been trying in the past year to gather the fragments, make sense of what my part in the public ministry of the church has been about, maybe – if I’m lucky – uncover meanings that I have not seen for what they are amid the demands of ordained life.

Now that my wife and I worship at the parish church across the road in our village, we are rediscovering what sacred space and liturgy mean on a more intimate level. After so long in cathedrals, attending a Georgian village church (Victorianised) for the Sunday eucharist and daily morning prayer concentrates the mind as to what really matters: God, humanity, community, relationships, mercy, grace, the kingdom of God. Every sacred space, even undistinguished ones like our parish church, represents and catalyses that divine-human encounter. My Christian experience started out in a Georgian church where I was a chorister. It looks like it may end in one too when singing days are done. It’s a very different kind of theatre from those I ministered in during my working life. But whatever the style, we know, as Aidan Kavanagh says, that a church is there for us to transact the business of God. It should be a tough, bracing space (very much a Peter Brook insight, that). It is not meant to imitate the soft, reassuring comforts of our drawing room. Cue memories of long DAC debates about over-carpeted churches. I wonder if the Chancellor of Coventry Diocese had read his book when he ruled against padded chairs in the church at Long Itchington?

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So what have I learned about sacred space in the cathedrals I’ve known best?

It’s obvious to you as liturgists, though not always to your colleagues, that the “sacred” is the defining category when it comes to what a cathedral or church is for. Not all cathedrals are shrines to saints, but in a looser sense, sacred spaces are always “shrines” that draw seekers after truth into the world of the holy. What we mean by this theologically is not that therefore the space outside the shrine is somehow unholy, not quite belonging to God in the same way. On the contrary: all things, all people, all spaces belong to him and what we call the “profane” is simply that which is pro-fanum, lying beyond the sacred space but still in symbolic view of it and indeed defined by it. In medieval cities like Salisbury and Durham, the cathedral was historically the very reason their cities came into being. The monks of Durham likened their city to Jerusalem, a holy community defined, we could say sacralised by, the great temple from which it derived its meaning. So sacred geography is simply a way of focusing a universal awareness of divine presence. You only have to explore Wiltshire, as we did this summer, to see how so much of that county is a ritual landscape, a sacred geography whose focal points are its stone circles like Stonehenge and Avebury, its ceremonial burial places and, most important, the liturgical pathways that connected them. Having lived among that landscape, I recognised it again when we made the journey to Compostela and began to understand how geography has been assigned ritual and spiritual meanings by the chain of sacred spaces and the Camino between them.

I spoke about meanings in the plural. We could easily think that the “sacred” carries a single, unambiguous meaning. If you read books like Edmund Duby’s La Symbolique Romane on Romanesque symbolism, or Emile Mâle’s The Gothic Image, you might think that medieval cathedral expressed a single “idea” or vision of the sacred. Of course, that is true in terms of the central tenets of the creed. A cathedral is a public space whose liturgy and spirituality evokes a vision of the transcendent breaking into ordinary time. In the “winter’s tale” that described the lives of the vast majority of medieval people, the cathedral was where life took on a new and glorious aspect, where redemptive dramas were acted out and transformation scenes embodied, where tragedy and comedy mingled and illuminated each other in the light of Christian faith. Vaults and arcades, ceremonial doorways, colour, light, incense, chanting, processional journeys from one space to another across ritual thresholds – all these contributed to a powerful sense of the numinous, precisely what Rudolph Otto called in his great book whose title I’ve already borrowed, The Idea of the Holy. And in Christian sacred space, that idea focuses on the God who comes among us as the Incarnate Lord, who is crucified and raised from death.

But within that medieval “idea” lay quite distinct notions of what sacred space actually represented. In the Romanesque era, it was a fortified, defended space that reflected the precariousness of life by holding fragile human beings safe from the assaults of demonic powers. You see this most clearly at eleventh and twelfth century Durham, perched on its acropolis next to William the Conqueror’s castle, appearing for all the world to be one great defensive structure to keep the enemy at bay (in this case, not only demons, but those wayward Northumbrian Saxons as well. I often used to say to visitors that Durham was as much a statement of brutal Norman military might as it was a temple to the Almighty. Despite its celebrated beauty, Durham speaks volumes about political hegemony and the uses and abuses of power. Sacred space has its shadow side and we must tell the truth about that too.

In the high middle ages, however, the mighty solidity of Romanesque gave way to the airy soaring of the gothic vision. Thirteenth century Salisbury was one of its earliest expressions in England, its pure Early English creating a light-filled interior in which you could imagine that you had been transported into a vision of the new heaven and the new earth – that, at least, was the Abbé Suger’s intention in creating the first true gothic church in Europe, the Abbey of St Denis near Paris. A casket of light is a very different understanding of the sacred from an impregnable fortress. And you can see, in cathedrals like Winchester, Norwich, Ely, Gloucester and Durham how the building reflects a developing history of how the sacred is understood in new ways as the architecture moves from Romanesque to Gothic, from being, if you like, earth-bound and protected in a solid, rocklike way towards reaching up to touch heaven itself.

I’ve wondered, as I’ve presided at the eucharist in medieval cathedrals, whether the architecture, Romanesque or Gothic, makes a different to the ways we perform liturgically in these different kinds of space, and even affects the way we construe the sacrament itself. It’s a question of emphasis, not of essence. When Gothic was new to Christian architecture, did its vast open spaces and sense of exposure feel different to an assembly of worshippers from the enclosed, protected feel of Romanesque? Did it call for a different kind of theatre, maybe a new take on Christian faith and experience?

I began to ponder this when I went to Coventry as Precentor. As I first experienced it, the Cathedral felt utterly different in every conceivable way from Salisbury or from the more developed gothic of the big medieval town church of Alnwick where I had been incumbent. The architectural forms of the 1950s and 60s, Graham Sutherland’s great tapestry of Christ in Glory, the John Hutton west screen, a great wall of glass opening on to the ruins of the bombed out medieval church of St Michael, the liturgical spaces in the round in the Chapels of Unity and of Christ the Servant… how did you begin to create a liturgical performance worthy of that building? (This very question is posed explicitly by Peter Brook in a fascinating section about Coventry in The Empty Space.) As always, the building wins in the end as we all know: you have to start with the grain of the building and let it suggest the kind of ceremony it needs.

To help us do this, I invited some members of the Department of Theatre Studies at Warwick University to help us understand both the sacred space itself and the dynamics of architecture, audience and performer that was taking place within it. They were mostly not habitual church attenders but they knew about theatre, and were intrigued that we had approached them with our rather unusual request. They attended services and offered some sessions with our liturgical ministers. The principal outcomes were these. First, there is no substitute for paying a lot of attention to performance skills, whatever the environment we are working in. They thought there was work to do on our posture, our way of moving around the space, and our relationship with the words we spoke (a particular challenge, that, in a cathedral that had more difficult acoustics than any other I’ve worked in). They tried to instil in us the importance of embodiment, inhabiting a role and living and breathing it stage. It was not enough to utter words by themselves. They must be “made flesh” through our bodies in a profoundly incarnational way. They thought we had a lot of work to do, and so we did.

But the more surprising insight was to do with the nature of the space itself. They looked carefully at the cathedral from a performance point of view. They took in the great gaunt slab of the high altar below the tapestry, and the John Piper vestments created for the building that are more elaborately decorated behind than in front. And they said to us: you may think of your church as the first of the modern cathedrals because the finish makes it look that way. But we are saying to you that it is entirely medieval in orientation and attitude. The west-east axis culminating in an elevated high altar below the image of Christ in Glory – it is unambiguous that this is the last of the old cathedrals not the first of the new. So you should learn from the ceremonies of the middle ages and, while you will want to reinterpret them for the twentieth century, don’t dismiss the way they had evolved over many centuries in just such grand spaces as this.

What’s more (and here was the coup de grâce), the altar and the vestments tell us plainly that you would be better to have the three sacred ministers facing east at the sacrament rather than west. For then you would all be being true to the grain of the cathedral, the strong orientation of building and people towards the face of Christ on the tapestry. Moreover, as performers you would find that the your eastward-facing posture and the vestments, by concealing so much of you, would act as a kind of theatrical mask that frees you up to inhabit the rite in ways you are finding more difficult when you stand behind a grand granite counter and face the people. (I thought of that unexpected advice apropos of the recent injunctions in the Roman Catholic Church about ad orientem mass celebrations. Once again, it all comes down to sacred space and how we construe it.)

Well, we didn’t go back to the eastward position because it would have been unthinkable in those post Liturgical Movement days. But then I went to Sheffield where there were several immovable eastward-facing altars  though the high altar itself had been moved away from the east wall. I found a new kind of freedom, particularly (but not only) in Prayer Book celebrations, in facing east, something that continued in Durham where, at high altar celebrations, there is no choice about it. I don’t think there can be a doctrine about this either way (so to speak), and I have hardly ever found lay people to be as exercised about it as clergy; but I do believe that the characteristics of the building as a whole, the way that community has chosen to inhabit its sacred space, the theological and spiritual messages we want the liturgy to convey must all play a part in informing any church’s liturgical style.  

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I spoke earlier about clergy being “guardians” of sacred space. I like the analogy and have always believed that guardianship is a very key task for cathedral clergy in particular. This is about much more than the liturgy. And the secularising tendencies of our age both inside and outside the church have greatly increased the pressures on the very idea of “sacred space”, let alone what it means to guard it against violation or abuse. Let me give a few examples from my experience.

Sheffield Cathedral has been praised for some decades for its ministry among homeless and vulnerable people. Liturgically, its worship was never given to that kind of racy pursuit of “relevance” that some seem to think is called for in the heart of a great city. But because the focus of our daily outreach in those days was the Cathedral hall, it was literally the case that the poor were always with us. As soon as the doors were opened for weekday matins at 0730, some homeless people would come straight in, sometimes with their dogs, find a bench, stretch out on it and go to sleep for the day. The early eucharist of the day was often enriched by the smells of a full English breakfast being prepared for our guests in the hall. The social context of need and deprivation in which we celebrated the liturgy could not have been clearer. No-one questioned that the nave was a perfectly proper place for homeless people to sit or lie. There were rules about smoking, alcohol and drugs which were strictly but good-humouredly enforced. The sanctuaries and altars were always regarded as “separate” (the root meaning in Hebrew of qadosh, “holy”, i.e. set apart).

But here’s what I learned about sacred space at Sheffield. It was clear to me that the public space of the nave was heavily contested. The poor reckoned they had as valid a claim on it as “their” place as anyone else. Rather wonderfully, the Cathedral community accepted this graciously; the few who were uncomfortable about it tended to gravitate to the highlands of west Sheffield and their big suburban churches. We all know from our experience of church life that sacred space, because it is usually public in character, is always heavily contested. People’s good sense of “belonging” in it, “inhabiting” it, “possessing” it can become adversarial. And when disputes about what is and isn’t “right” in the space are freighted with theological meanings, as they often are, it can become toxic. But in Sheffield, the homeless who sometimes thought they had “rights” in the nave were also its most passionate defenders. They would police it themselves. If somebody was drunk or abusive, they would show them to the door, sometimes a trifle roughly. At night, if anyone was tempted to break in or cause damage to the building, there was a loyal tribe of Cathedral irregulars who would see them off – vandalism rates in that Cathedral were remarkably low, given its setting. I’m saying that the “sacred” draws people of all sorts and conditions into the guardianship role that we might have thought belonged only to the authorised officers of the cathedral.

It seems to me that Cathedral chapters don’t give enough thought to their role as guardians of sacred space. As we know, the space itself communicates a message about its own purpose and meaning. That too is part of the “grain” of a cathedral, in this case a theological, spiritual and ethical grain. So here is where chapters, advised I suggest by precentors, should be crystal clear about the aims and values their cathedrals stand for, and make sure that their policies and liturgical plans reflect them unambiguously.

For example. In Coventry, we began the annual service during November for the commemoration of the victims of road accidents. When I wrote that first liturgy, I little thought it would be taken up nationally. We called that first service We are all Victims. It did not carry any subtext that was hostile to the automobile – least of all in Coventry with its long motor manufacturing industry. But all good things carry risk. It was a profoundly moving service at which the liturgy did what it was meant to: care for broken human beings, honour painful memories, try to bring healing and even hope.

Later, Coventry celebrated the centenary of the first motor car. This was to be a celebration of all things internally combustible. I was instructed by the Provost that there was to be a Coventry-manufactured car driven up the centre aisle and parked at the chancel step for the duration of the service. Then it was to be solemnly blessed, and driven out again. As a man under obedience, I duly complied, despite the very complex operational issues involved (how do you get a car into the nave of Coventry Cathedral where there is no great west door?). But to me, the memories of hundreds of people bereaved by road accidents sitting in that same nave at the annual service a few months before sat uneasily alongside this celebration. Somehow, the sacredness of the human stories told then seemed subverted by what we were doing. It’s an example not of what is right or wrong, good or bad; rather, the way in which sacred space, which is a world of symbols and images, magnifies the significance of every object that is brought into it, for good or ill. When I went into Ripon Cathedral a few years ago and saw a large field-gun, a 25-pounder I think, installed in the crossing as part of their Remembrance Sunday observance, I felt the same disquiet. But then I remembered how in Sheffield Cathedral, the screen surrounding the military chapel of St George and defining its space, was made of actual swords and bayonets from the Great War. Awkward.

Durham Cathedral, because it is loved by people across the world, is the most heavily contested space I have worked in. It is one of those universal masterpieces that really does belong to everyone. There, what I’ve called guardianship of the sacred space occupied a good deal of our time. When I went there, I found that the Chapter had engaged in long, careful debates about how to exercise this role, though they might not perhaps have thought of it in this way. But three policies in particular clearly enunciated a theological view about the church. First, because sacred space is God’s space, and God’s hospitality is unconditional, there were no admission charges for visitors. Second, photography was not allowed in the church because of the intrusive effect, especially of flash, on the spiritual environment in which people should be helped to be quiet, reflect, pray. And third, there was no eating or drinking other than at the eucharist, even in the nave or transepts (when we were planning my installation the Chapter Clerk made this very clear to me – I recall he seemed puzzled that I was even asking the question).

I need to be careful here. I am not saying that one set of policies can apply everywhere. Each cathedral has to do its thinking for itself. Sacredness belongs to place and will be differently understood and handled from one cathedral to another. I am only telling you about Durham. I wondered where Durham’s understanding of its guardianship role came from. It had of course been a monastic cathedral in the middle ages when the Rule of St Benedict had governed its entire life. I think that for the Chapter, the question “how do our decisions reflect that Benedictine inheritance” has always been present, usually implicitly as a kind of corporate memory, but also explicitly at times. For example, the Rule states unambiguously that nothing must ever be done in the oratory that might prevent a brother or sister from going there to say their prayers. The church, that is to say, is set apart for sacred liturgical and spiritual functions. You go to the refectory to eat, to the cloister to study or work, to the dormitory to rest. You go into the church to pray.

Now, that doctrine has never been applied uncritically in any cathedral since the middle ages and possibly not even then. In the nineteenth century at Durham, if you wanted to visit the Cathedral you knocked at the barred and bolted north door. If you were lucky, a verger would open up and charge you sixpence to look around. Admission charges are not new. But they do raise questions about the contract that is set up between visitors, worshippers and pilgrims on the one hand, and the space on the other. When you pay, you have different expectations of the place and its resources and facilities, possibly even of God too. It’s a tricky marriage of idealism and pragmatism that charging cathedrals have to manage if they take their sacred space seriously and guard it from the corrosive effects of monetisation. The same is true of the other dilemmas I mentioned.

Here’s another example. Not long ago the Cathedral was approached about holding a fashion show in the nave. It would bring lots of people into the church who had never been inside before. There would be a facility fee, a splash of good publicity, media headlines, and opportunities for us to promote our “product” (or “visitor offer” as they put it). So it would be mission. Why did we say no? Not because we were averse to the fee – the bottom line concentrates minds like nothing else can. Nor was it because we did not host a vast variety of non-liturgical events in the nave – concerts, exhibitions, lectures, drama, all the things cathedrals do. The reason was twofold. One was that we were not persuaded that this focus on wealth, celebrity and body image sat easily alongside the Cathedral’s purpose statement and values. The other was that we drew a distinction between being a venue and offering hospitality. It seemed to us that church can merely be a rather grand and beautiful venue to be hired out for others to take possession of. It would be a dereliction of guardianship. The Cathedral’s own involvement in and ownership of what went on within its walls was very much to do with the “sacred” and the trust placed in a faith community to look after it. If we had believed that a fashion show could be a kind of fresh expression that would “promote our product” (the gospel), then we would have shared the responsibility for it. Because whether we like it or not, a cathedral is perceived to carry responsibility for all that takes place within it. I found that out in a rather sharp way when we allowed an episode of the TV series Inspector George Gently to be filmed in the cathedral. Here, Durham was acting itself, not pretending to be somewhere else as it had done in Elizabeth or Harry Potter. But shots were fired in the nave and the good inspector was badly injured. There were predictable letters of outrage, though interestingly none from North East England, only from other parts of the country. Maybe north-easterners were proud to see their cathedral on television, but I could understand why others felt discomfort at this apparent, even if entirely fictional, violation of the sacred space.

But my most enduring insight into the ownership of Durham's sacred space came just after I arrived there. A retired bishop who worshipped with us took me on one side and told me about the Durham Miners' Gala which would soon be taking place in the city. As part of it. there is a huge service in the Cathedral with processions of miners' banners and colliery bands. It brings people together from across the North East: every pit village seems to be represented in an act of worship that is at once a powerful memory of Durham's great mining traditions, poignant because of the demise of that once proud industry, sad because of the memory of those killed and injured in mining disasters, and a celebration of the lives and aspirations of working people of the region. I did not know this at the time because I had not yet attended the event. But the bishop said to me: "Michael, the Miners will soon be crowding into this great space. They will claim it as their own. You will never understand Durham Cathedral until you have witnessed it and seen for yourself how deeply attached the people of this region are to their cathedral." He was right.

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So let me end by suggesting how we should relate to sacred space in our cathedrals today. Here are four principles that could help us be good guardians of our spaces and manage the problematic boundaries between sacred and profane in today’s highly complex environment.

First, we must love our sacred spaces. It’s self-evident that we who work and worship in cathedrals love them, but for some parish clergy, the church fabric, which contains our sacred spaces, is seen as a burden, not a privilege. What’s more, after a lifetime of involvement with the sacred which is what ordained ministry amounts to, I’ve seen how careless familiarity with holy things can set in and compromise the reverence that is due to them. If we are caring for numinous spaces, presiding over numinous ceremonies and handling numinous objects, we need to be careful. Scholars of ritual remind us that the holy is not to be trifled with. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” says Hebrews about not being on our guard when we encounter the sacred. I’ve found that the habitus of reverence speaks volumes to people for whom the idea of the sacred is strange, even alien. To place love at the heart of our ministry in sacred spaces, especially in the liturgy, is to invest them with the central virtue of Christian character. It’s also to deliver us professional religious types from the affliction Ritual Notes is a symptom of, what Sydney Evans, when he was Dean of Salisbury called memorably, “sanctuary-mindedness, narcissism and lace”. 

Secondly, we need to base our attitude to sacred space on a rigorous biblical and catholic theology. We can bring to our handling of the sacred over scrupulous attitudes that don’t bear close examination theologically. Lurking not far beneath the surface can be all kinds of assumptions about ritual holiness, the issues Mary Douglas the anthropologist and Old Testament writer describes in her book Purity and Danger. It’s not that policies about sacred space and rubrics governing ceremonial correctness are necessarily “primitive” or arcane, for as she points out, it’s an ingrained habit of all societies to regulate and control behaviours at symbolic places and rituals. Remembrance Day ceremonies show us how the sacred can foster attitudes of high anxiety precisely because we invest so heavily in the memories they hold. I am simply saying that as a matter of good theology, we need to know what we are doing and why when we guard our sacred spaces, beginning with the psalmist’s affirmation that “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it”. Psalm 24 is particularly important to liturgists because as a ritual of entry into the holy sanctuary, its theme is precisely how we should understand the sacred in the setting of a creation that God has already owned, hallowed and blessed.

Thirdly, we need to remember that the “sacred” does not simply belong to places, ceremonies and objects but to people and communities whose memories they hold, whose stories they tell, and who, because of their encounter with God, invest spiritual significance in them. So how we develop the building and make changes to the liturgy is always a matter of sensitivity because of their sacredness to a community. So we always need to recognise the image of God in all who cross our thresholds, and regard all of them as guests, pilgrims and worshippers rather than (God forbid) mere sightseers and tourists. If sacred space is essentially humane hospitable and generous, then access and welcome, interpretation and development become pastoral and spiritual tasks. Sacred space is for God’s people to use and find joy in. The space and its liturgy should both care for us. It’s our privilege as guardians to enable them to do that.

Finally, sacredness of space and place can only flourish in so far as they reflect our own integrity as guardians. That is to say, “this sanctuary of my soul” as the famous anthem text calls it, is as crucial as the sanctuary of the space itself. Sacred space has pastoral and ethical aspects as well as liturgical and ceremonial. I am speaking both collectively and individually. The “soul” of a cathedral chapter and community is as significant here as that of the individual. The decisions cathedrals need to make, so often driven by financial stringencies, the call to monetise everything, and the pressures of a public with their own ideas about what should happen in cathedrals, call, I think, for real “purity of heart”.

How do we undertake this in practice? It begins with the aims and values of the cathedral itself – not cathedrals generically but of our particular place: what we believe we are for, and what values we have agreed to work to. Aims and values need of course to be well calibrated by good theology and good ecclesiology, but if we have done our theological work well (and it takes a great deal of Chapter, staff and community time), our official statements will inform policy decisions about sacred space in an intelligent way.  This is what integrity means in practice, I think. And it helps us to act not out of reckless opportunism, nor out of worries about money and resources, nor out of the lazy conservatism that does not want to wrestle with issues but simply says “this is how we do things here”. Here is the secret of this “purity of heart”. It guards our integrity, ensures good process for decision-making, and above all protects us against gaining the whole world but losing our collective soul.

Cathedrals are among the most visible guardians of “soul” in our secularising western society today. Yet that same society seems ever more hungry for what cathedrals can bring to them by way of being spaces whose sacredness challenges our easy materialist assumptions, offers new opportunities for re-connecting with our humanity, invites us into the vision of God. This is why sacred space is the greatest resource for mission that we have, and why our investment in it will always be supremely worthwhile. For as the Bard is always showing us in his inimitably inventive way, the theatre of the soul is about nothing less than the re-enchantment of all life, the transfiguration of our bleak and hopeless winter’s tale by the happiness and hope of God’s glorious summer.

The Precentors’ Conference September 2016, Southwark Cathedral