Saints on the Borderlands

I feel a strong kinship with Herefordshire. In Northumberland where I live, the borderland of the English Middle and East March is part of our identity. Marcher lands are of a piece, whether they are on the margins of Scotland or Wales. But my links with this county are more personal. My wife grew up in Ledbury, so this is historically her cathedral. Before that, my mother, a Jewish war refugee from Germany, found refuge in England and was sent to be looked after in the same town, in Ledbury not many doors down from the black and white house my wife’s parents would buy a few years later. It’s a coincidence that’s beyond curious.

And your native saint Thomas Cantilupe offers another connection. Not every cathedral is lucky enough to hold the shrine of a saint, but Hereford and Durham, where I was dean have that in common. The original Diocese of Durham reached up to the Scottish border where most of our northern saints came from, especially our beloved Cuthbert. Cantilupe, too, belongs to the borderlands, as the title of your Dean’s fine book Saints and Sinners of the Marches suggests. Maybe there is something about borderlands that fosters sainthood, and grows holy lives that we can admire, learn from and emulate.

Why do I suggest that? 

In Cuthbert’s and Cantilupe’s times, border regions were not safe places. You only have to see how the marches are peppered with castles and fortifications to see that. In these lands, fought-over for so long, life took on an uncertain, provisional character. Identity was less settled, institutions less permanent. Perhaps only the church provided a bigger perspective, a longer view, stood for stability, offered hope. In a debateable land, who can say what reassurance and safety this Cathedral that Cantilupe knew so well offered to people whose loyalties and allegiances were blown this way and that with the changing winds of history?

Our epistle reading from the Letter to the Hebrews offers, I think, a perspective on life in the borderlands and how it can grow saints. Abraham, says the text, “was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land.” And this sense of being on a journey in a strange land, never quite belonging, walking the borders of another country, is echoed in what follows. “They (these people of faith in the Old Testament) confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland;…they desire a better country, that is a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them.”

“What’s a saint?” yell the demons scornfully in Newman’s poem The Dream of Gerontius. We could answer that question in a thousand ways: “a bundle of bones / which fools adore / when life is o’er. / Ha! Ha!” Who doesn’t love belting it out in Elgar’s great oratorio? But here’s an answer I like, from Graham Greene in his novel The End of the Affair. “For if this God exists…if even you with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all… It’s something He can demand of any of us: leap.” The idea is that you only have to give yourself a little height by leaping, stretching, craning your neck even, in order to see beyond yourself and your little world. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” asks Robert Browning. To glimpse heaven and then to find your life is changed because of what you have glimpsed – maybe that’s the essence of sainthood. And the reason we love our saints is precisely because they have seen what we long to see, touched heaven, and point us to the way in which we can do the same. 

This is what the writer to the Hebrews is getting at. He says that those who lived and died in faith were, in a sense, living on the borderland of two worlds. Their feet were firmly planted in one world, but they could gaze across to the other, as Moses on the brink of the promised land took in the landscape before him. “As it is they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one” he says. That’s the language of the border where two landscapes meet, two countries, two realms. In the marches of the spiritual life, on one side there is this world where we are called to live as good citizens and faithful followers of Jesus, where we must be loyal to the Lord who is the way, the truth and the life, and through his death and resurrection embrace and embody the living hope that is the gift of the gospel. On the other side there is the new heaven and the new earth that we look forward to when we confess our faith “in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come”. 

You could call it the city of God as Augustine did, or the kingdom of heaven, or the new creation. The point is that it is not far from each one of us; it is within our reach if only we will feel after him and find him in whom we live and move and have our being. In the north we sometimes speak of holy sites like Lindisfarne as “thin places” where the borderlands of earth and heaven seem almost to merge. And perhaps the saints like Thomas of Hereford and Cuthbert of Lindisfarne are thin people for the same reason that they have had the courage to leap, in Graham Greene’s image, and glimpse for themselves the glory of a world transformed, Jerusalem the golden, “blessed city, heavenly Salem, vision dear whence peace doth spring”. 

Isn't that an answer to the question, what's a saint? The saints belong to these borderlands because they look into both worlds of our human experience – the world we know because we live here, and the new heavens and the new earth that for now we only long for and on our best days, glimpse a little. The shrine of St Thomas Cantilupe is an ever-present sign in this cathedral of a life lived on the borderlands, this man who in purity of heart, in suffering and in healing looked into the world to come and embraced it. Thomas can help us be borderlanders too, people of the spiritual marches who know “we have here no abiding city, but seek that which is to come”. We can pray “thy kingdom come”, not as a wishful thought or a beautiful dream  but as a sure and certain hope, because of the saints who have already leaped towards it and who stretch out their hands to us to help us reach for it too. 

Hereford Cathedral, The Feast of St Thomas Cantilupe, 1 October 2017
Hebrews 11.7-10. 13-16; Matthew 24.42-46

At the Dangerous Edge of Things

Robert Browning spoke about ‘the dangerous edge of things’. Today’s New Testament lesson speaks about events that take people to the extremes of their experience, and it does indeed feel edgy and dangerous.  The disciples in their boat on Galilee struggle against the storm.  The waves crash over the flimsy craft and it threatens to capsize. The Lord, asleep in the hold, is woken by terrified cries of panic: ‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ He rebukes the chaotic wind and waves and there is a great calm. Safely on dry land, it’s the same story in another guise. Jesus takes on the chaos in human life: the Gadarene man and other victims whose lives are being possessed by demons, or by disease and disability that reduce their victims to chaos. As on the lake, mortals clamour desperately for help, beg to touch even the hem of his garment.  Who is this, that he commands even the winds and the water, demons, sickness and death and they obey him?

 

Just before the reading from Genesis, at the very beginning of the Bible, we learned how ‘the earth was a ‘formless void’: tohu wavohu, a rare moment of Hebrew rhyme.  That first creation story in Genesis 1 tells how shape and order emerge out of the chaotic deep: light and dark, sea and dry land, vegetation, the different orders of life in earth, air and water; and humanity as the crown of God’s achievement.  This patterning of time, space and the material world is fundamental to a cosmos that is stable and trustworthy.  In this universe that is ‘very good’, chaos has no place. And although the lesson we heard from Genesis offered us a much earlier story of creation, what scholars call the Jahwist’s version, with the Bible as it now is we can’t help but read the second story in the light of the first. When we do, it echoes the same primordial pattern. God is at work to shape a world like an artist or craftsman. When Michaelangelo forged a sculpture, he said that the shape was already there in the stone; it was simply a matter of revealing it. I like the idea of God chipping away with infinite skill to bring out the fundamental shape and structure of reality from the undifferentiated chaos of matter.

 

In the ancient world, order was experienced as precarious. There was an ever-present fear that the chaos might return to overwhelm hard-won civilisation.  In the psalms, Yhwh is king over cataract and flood who has crushed the heads of the monsters of the deep; in today’s, he ‘stilleth the raging of the sea: and the noise of the waves and the madness of the people.  And that madness tells that the threat is not only natural but human.  The raging of the enemy is personified as an overwhelming force which only the mighty power of Yhwh can subdue: ‘why do the nations rage so furiously together?’  In a bleak vision of Jeremiah, the formless void appears again:  ‘I looked on the earth and lo, it was tohu wavohu, waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light.  I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro.  I looked, and lo, there was no-one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled.  I looked and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger’.  This is Genesis wound backwards from cosmos to chaos, its artistry unravelling to a terrible, anarchic collapse. 

 

If once, people doubted that atavistic fears like these had been banished by the onward and upward march of progress, this last century surely dispelled the fantasy. Tohu wavohu does not only belong to the ancients.  A century ago, an unsuspecting world sleep-walked into a Great War. Seventy years ago, the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau were opened to reveal the unspeakable horror of what had gone on under the Nazis. I was brought up under the shadow of the Bomb: the Cuban Missile Crisis taught me how deeply untrustworthy the world is. I learned to be afraid. Now we have Al Qaida and Boko Haram and Isis, not to mention climate change, human trafficking, the abuses that drive asylum seekers to our shores. They all point to tohu wavohu as a present reality for us, both as nameless fear and felt reality, consequences most of them of what the Prayer Book collect calls ‘the unruly wills and affections of sinful men’. 

 

The history of this Benedictine cathedral reminds us how in the 6^th century St Benedict set about creating communities of stability and order when the Roman Empire was in its final descent into anarchy.  Perhaps his Rule saved Christian Europe from the dark ages.  His enterprise could be a model for mission today: intelligent religion marked not by easy successes or showy drama but by the sustained spiritual imagination and commitment to live with complexity.  In his book A Staircase for Silence Alan Ecclestone offers clues as to how we might set about this.  He says that only a radical deepening and broadening of our vision is equal to the task of bringing to birth and nourishing a spirituality strong, generous and inspiring enough to help men and women…. grow up as truly human beings in the immensely complicated world that lies ahead. That spiri­tuality must provide a disciplined way of living in which growth to the fullest possible stature of each is made the concern of all. It requires a spirituality [that] relates the creativity, the humanising and the unification of mankind in one growing experience of mutual love. The world may well be entering a yet darker age than any known before. The demands laid on the spirituality needed during such time will be correspondingly greater.

So we must not be paralysed by the storm, hide in the bowels of our ship, never venturing on deck to get the measure of the tempests that rage outside and within. At those times when we stand on some dangerous edge of things – in personal life, in world crises, the first thing is to imitate the mariners at the start of the Tempest and cry out, ‘to prayers, to prayers!’: like the disciples, the vessel we are sailing is so tiny and the sea is so terrifying and big. But as we face our fear, assess the danger, say our prayers and help one another to find strength, we find that Christ was hidden in the darkness all along, and is there beside us, rebuking but also cheering us: ‘where is your faith?’

The tornados and tsunamis of life put hard choices to us that call for hard decisions. When the crisis comes, do we have the spiritual resources to respond?  Even in the storm, especially then, we need to keep the doors of perception open so that God can come anew to us, as he did to the possessed man by the lake and to the disciples in the boat. The Lord’s Prayer that we utter every day has as its focus how we fare in the time of trial, how we endure Gethsemane when we cry in despair, ‘let this cup pass from me’. When it comes to our great ordeals, what would we do? What shall we do?

This is where Christian character is tested. And I wonder, as I hear the news day by day and feel profoundly despondent about it, whether my Christianity is being called to some test of resilience and maturity it has never had to undergo before. This is no time for easy religion, play-acting our Christian profession. Our faith needs to go to the heart and change us. This is why we need those Benedictine virtues of stability, obedience and conversion of life in our churches and our personal lives.  They shape us to live by the values of the gospel, so that life is transformed and we begin to make a difference in the world: as Benedict did, holding on for dear life as the world fell apart around him, yet never despairing of the mercy of God. Which is why, when big storms break against the shores of our complacency, and we are shaken by earthquake, wind and fire, we need to hear the voice that calls out to us, ‘where is your faith?’, the still small voice that gives us the strength not to be afraid. And then, God willing, we shall live to praise his name, and tell how much he has done for us.

Durham Cathedral, 8 February 2015, Genesis 2.4a-end, Luke 8: 22-39