Sacred Space and Community in a North Pennine Village

During Easter time 1930, a couple of young men came down off the fells south of the village and walked over the Derwent into Blanchland. They had roamed over the top from Stanhope and crossed the watershed between the Wear and the Derwent. They stayed the night at the Lord Crewe Arms. “No other spot brings me sweeter memories” said the one who felt so much at home in this landscape. He ordered champagne at the bar and played Brahms on an ancient piano. He was of course the poet W. H. Auden.[1]

Writing for the American Vogue magazine in 1954, Auden poses the question: where do we place our own Eden, that “Innocent Place where no contradiction has yet arisen between the demands of Pleasure and the demands of Duty. What is its landscape, the ethnic origin of its inhabitants, its religion, its form of state, its architecture, its system of weights and measures, et cetera?” For that child of the Midlands, his compass always pointed north.[2] His favourite landscapes were not the olive groves and classical ruins of the Mediterranean but the sombre Pennine Fells, whale-backed and lonely under the grim grey lowering sky that the North does so well. And best of all, what he called his “great good place, the part of the Pennines bounded on the south by Swaledale, on the North by the Roman Wall and on the West by the Eden Valley”.[3] Precisely where we find ourselves today, indeed, what he called “the Never-Never Land of my dreams”.[4]

To Auden, I think we can say, the North Pennines were a sacred landscape. It wasn’t only the natural beauty of the area that loved for its own sake, but for the way it had been worked and reworked since prehistoric times, through antiquity and the middle ages into the industrial era of modernity. Especially the industrial relics of its lead mines. Alan Myers and Robert Forsythe have painstakingly documented Auden’s knowledge of the North Pennine’s mine workings in their study W. H. Auden: Pennine Poet from which I have already quoted. He reckoned the loneliest Pennine Dale of all, Rookhope, where we once owned a lead-miner’s cottage, to be the best. Specifically, the watershed between that dale and this. A poem of 1940 tells us why.

Always my boy of wish returns
To those peat-stained deserted burns
That feed the WEAR and TYNE and TEES,
And, turning states to strata, sees
How basalt long oppressed broke out
In wild revolt at CAULDRON SNOUT….

The derelict lead-smelting mill,
Flued to its chimney up the hill,
That smokes no answer any more
But points, a landmark on BOLT’S LAW
The finger of all questions. There
In ROOKHOPE I was first aware
Of self and not-self, Death and Dread….
There I dropped pebbles, listened, heard
The reservoir of darkness stirred.[5]

What he tells us is that it was here among these landscapes that Auden found his poetic voice, where juvenilia metamorphosed into a maturing poet. The first poem he admitted to his adult canon was a poem called “The Watershed”.

Who stands, the crux left of the watershed,
On the wet road between the chafing grass
Below him sees dismantled washing-floors,
Snatches of tramline running to a wood.
An industry already comatose…

He sees an almost mystical significance in the relics of an obsolete industry, as numinous to him as the monuments that we admire that have come down to us from the ancient world or the middle ages. Numinous may seem a strong word in that context. Not when a place has become charged with meaning because you became a poet there, where you saw “into the life of things” for the first time, to quote Wordsworth. Auden ventures up to a derelict mine working somewhere on the fells above this village and drops a pebble down the shaft, and, he says, listens and hears, senses the reservoir of darkness stirring, becomes aware of self and not-self, Death and Dread. The language is redolent of religious experience, the kind of primal awe described by Rudolph Otto in his great book The Idea of the Holy. For him the reservoir of darkness doesn’t mean what is sinister and frightening, rather, the hidden depths of the land, of life, of the soul, of God even, which it is the vocation of every human being to uncover and explore if we want not to live in the shallows all our lives. The experience may be raw and disorientating. But that is the whole point. That’s where watersheds in human life are crossed and our human existence becomes significant in new way. To encounter the native spirit of a place in this visceral, life-changing way is, I think, how we become more truly alive, and therefore more truly ourselves.

I find Auden’s discovery of the sacred within the landscape intriguing. I think he can help us reflect on our theme today, Sacred Space and Community. What he suggests is that “sacredness” is a bigger concept than simply marking a site where people of faith have gathered and done religious things, where “prayer has been valid” to quote T. S. Eliot. The sacred is about finding meaning in a place, recognising in it that which evokes responses like attachment and belonging, reverence and awe. Sacred literally means “set apart”, so it defines space marked by thresholds that we cross where we behave in particular ways. The classic instance is Moses at the burning bush where he is told to “take off your shoes, for the place where you are standing is holy ground”.[6] It’s to recognise the rich, coalescence of myth, memory and story, symbols, images and human community past and present – clusters of associations that compel us to stop like Moses, to consider and reflect, discover who we are under God. I think it works like that for people of faith who want to enter into the cultural, historical, and theological meaning of religious sites and artefacts, what we call our spiritual heritage.

Let me offer you three theses about sacred space that I hope will help us understand what we are talking about here in Blanchland.

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My first thesis is: Sacred Space is an Aspect of Landscape.

Two weeks ago, my wife and I were in Greece visiting classical sites. It was our first visit. We landed at the same time as the mini-cyclone Zorba that you may have read about. There was torrential rain in Athens. So we experienced what many visitors never do, the sight of the Parthenon sailing above a sea of umbrellas. After that we went to Delphi. The rain had moderated but the skies were leaden, dark clouds sitting over Mount Parnassus and that cleft in the hills where without warning you come across that extraordinary site. Having never been there, the effect was overwhelming, walking up the via sancta or pilgrim’s path along which temples and treasuries, theatre and stadium and the seat of the oracle itself perched on a cliff-edge beneath crags that soared up into the cloud-cover.

When we were back, I talked about Delphi with a retired school teacher who was also a reader in her cathedral. She had taken A-level student groups there to perform classical drama in the theatre. “Of course, what you sense when you’re there is that this is a holy site” she said. “And that’s something to do with the landscape setting itself. It’s not simply the centuries during which people went there to seek wisdom and worship at the shrines. Something about the place itself suggested the numinous, the sacred.” I dare say it might not have struck us so powerfully on a hot sunny day, for the weather seemed so much part of our experience of Delphi – but then again, who knows?

Haydon Bridge on the South Tyne, where I live, is best known as the birthplace of the early nineteenth century painter John Martin. You will know him for the vast canvasses he painted such as The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle or The Plains of Heaven at Tait Britain, said to be modelled on his native Tynedale. His art tried to capture what people of that time called “the sublime” in landscape that cuts us down to size and inculcates a response of awe in the presence of the divine, what Freud called that “oceanic” feeling that overwhelms us at times and that we often associate with religion. As far as I know he didn’t paint Delphi but I couldn’t help thinking about him as we clambered up the Pilgrims’ Way to the top of the site and looked across the valley.

Landscapes don’t have to be overwhelming or sublime to speak to us. They can be beautiful in quieter, more intimate ways. Perhaps this is true of Blanchland “nestling” (as the usual travel-writer’s cliché has it) in its remote but sheltered valley beneath the Pennine fells. When we observe where our ancient or medieval forebears established sacred sites, we often comment on the appropriateness of the chosen place – not, or not only because of some ancient pre-existing religious history (which it may or may not possess) but because somehow the landscape setting almost seems to require it. Blanchland is not Delphi but who is to say that this tranquil valley didn’t entice the Premonstratensians to found their new Abbey here? (Though some historians of a more pragmatic hue suggest that it was the lead mines that drew them here.)

I think it’s important to underline the landscape context in which we are sitting. You often hear it said that “church” is not a place or a building but is people. There is a truth in that, as I’ll go on to say, but that cliché is as much false as it is true. It’s false because it implies that sacred space is only ever configured by what human beings have historically done and continue to do at particular sites and buildings. But a more robust theology of creation would at once challenge that assumption. If the created order was declared “very good” when God finished his work on the sixth day,[7] then we should expect that the Creator continues to disclose his presence in and through the natural world as the Psalmist affirms: “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims hs handiwork.[8] Or again, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established, what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”[9] Discerning the holy in the created world, however flawed or broken it is and we are, is a primary God-given instinct.

Natural theology claims that this is a fundamental aspect of our creaturehood. My former colleague David Brown has stoutly defended it in a magisterial book that calls for a sacramental reading of nature and the re-enchantment of place. This, he believes, is what the arts have always responded to in the natural environment, even if religious believers have sometimes been more ambivalent about it. He concludes a long chapter on theology, spirituality, art and the natural world by saying: “The excitement of place, as with the natural world, is of a God valuing more than the simply human, and instead using the material. Even where decisively shaped by human beings, to tell us something of himself and thereby draw us more deeply into his presence”.[10] Which is to say that the “sacred” is, and always needs to be, more elusive than we think. It should take us by surprise, open our eyes and ears in new ways, challenge our assumptions and yes – overwhelm us at times, disturb or alarm us as well as inspire us. “Sacred geography” is about landscapes before it is about humans inhabiting them.

 

Here at Blanchland, then, we should not be too quick to assume that “sacred space” only means the Abbey and its surroundings. Residents in this village may tell different stories about sacredness that may not wholly align to the church’s preferred narrative. When people talk about communing with God in nature, we shouldn’t dismiss the importance of such spiritual experience. When Jacob exclaims at Bethel, “Surely God was in this place and I did not know it!”[11] he was speaking not of a formally-established place of worship but of a numinous experience in the open air where he had a dream about heaven and earth that shook him to the core. The shrine followed the experience, not the other way round. And I did not know it is the crucial point. It may be precisely where we do not know God, or expect to find him, that he discloses himself. Beth-El means “house of God”. God has many mansions. Most of them are not churches.

********

My second thesis is: Sacred Space Tells Stories.

I said that Auden’s experience of this part of his beloved North was of a highly-textured landscape. Geomorphology and natural history are a big part of the story of the North Pennines: this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty was designated as a UNESCO geo-park, one of only seven in the UK. The focus is “on using Earth Heritage to support sustainable economic development of the area, primarily through geological and responsible tourism”.[12] This has included “geology events, developing trails across the landscape, creating displays in local museums and visitor centres, producing educational resources, working in local schools and more”. So the story of this particular sacred space predates any human story by hundreds of millions of years. In Durham Cathedral I always pointed out to visitors the fossils embedded in the black Frosterley Marble piers. These are the oldest living things whose traces can be read in the fabric of this building. Every building, every site, tells such a story.

Blanchland’s narrative is especially rich. It is told in the church guidebook[13] first issued in 1951, originally privately printed, we are told, for Vaux and Associated Breweries Limited, Sunderland, and reprinted in the 1990s for the Lord Crewe Arms, Blanchland Post Office and Blanchland Stores. There can be a whole story in the obverse of a title page! It’s an invaluable guide, and is now available on the village website[14].

There are key historical layers of this story. The foundation story is of the establishment of the Abbey in the twelfth century. Despite its remoteness, this site was not far from Dere Street, the Roman road that crossed the Tyne at the town of Coria, Corbridge as it headed north to the Stanegate and the Roman Wall just beyond. In Saxon times, it was on the edge of the Shire, the land given by Queen Etheldreda to Wilfrid to endow his great church at Hexham which he began in 674. Later, as we know because the stories are documented, the valley found itself in the English Middle March, a frontier land where Scots raiders and reivers would sweep down and plunder. Northumberland has a long history of being fought over, and as I said in a recent lecture[15], this sense of liminality has coloured much of the county’s history, even on its southernmost flank as we are here. The Palatinate County of Durham, just across the river where the king’s writ did not run, was established precisely as a buffer-state to protect England from invasion out of the North.

Blanchland would not exist but for the Abbey. Its very name tells us that its origins belong to a religious story, Blanch-Land, meaning, probably, the land of the White Canons as the Premonstratensians were known. In this, its foundation story has many parallels in medieval Europe, like Durham, the city that grew up around the shrine of St Cuthbert, or Salisbury, the city of New Sarum that established itself in the same way when the Romanesque cathedral of Old Sarum was abandoned on its hilltop and a new Gothic cathedral begun down in the valley. In both cases, you can draw concentric circles round the formal sacred space of the church itself: its conventual or college buildings, the enclosure of the precinct, the city that sat on the far side of the precinct wall, and the hinterland beyond. As in Greek or Roman cities, the pro-fanum was not some barbarous place where the holy did not penetrate; rather, it was the space before the temple in which holiness took a civic, rather than cultic, form. “Ordinary space” as compared with sacred space. So sacred and profane co-exist in the localities that are within the orbit of holy sites. In this locality, for instance, life in the upper Derwent Valley would not only fall within the cultural and spiritual “reach” of the Abbey, but, all-importantly, it would be wholly under its economic power as well.

This is easier to understand in Durham, where so much has survived of the medieval Priory, than in Blanchland where the dissolution of the Abbey resulted in the creation of an altogether new townscape. We know that Abbey buildings were despoiled for stone with the village began to be re-imagined as we currently have it. The Abbey Church was severely truncated, losing its nave, south transept and pretty well all its conventual buildings – cloister, refectory, chapter house, dormitory, abbot’s lodging and infirmary. Unless you know what you are looking at, reading the layout of the conventual site from the present-day village can be difficult.

So when I say that the village would not exist but for the Abbey, it would be more accurate to say, but for the despoiled Abbey out of which it was created. This means that the townscape we look at and admire is the legacy of the bitter religious upheavals of the sixteenth century when so much of the legacy of the middle ages was swept away across England. It isn’t correct to say, as some of the promotional material does, that Blanchland is an unspoiled medieval village. Far from being unspoiled, the canons of Blanchland would certainly have said that their holy and beautiful house had been spoiled beyond recognition by Henry VIII and his commissioners. It is true that its stones are (largely) medieval, and a few of its buildings, those that preserve the Abbey’s footprint. But the fabric of medieval Blanchland with its severed limb of a church refashioned in the eighteenth century, like its village, is paradoxically both familiar and remote.

It doesn’t stop there. The Abbey estates passed to the Derwentwaters of Dilston Castle and became part of Jacobite history for a while until the sympathisers James and his younger brother Charles Radcliffe were executed following the abortive 1715 and 1745 Jacobite rebellions. You need to read Walter Besant’s novel of 1884, Dorothy Forster to get the feel of those times, or more recently (and accessibly), Devil Water by Anya Seton, both of which are set in this locality. From then, the key player in the story of Blanchland is Nathaniel Lord Crewe, the Bishop of Durham who cherished this village and created the model village as it is today. The Lord Crewe Trust has managed it ever since. You see how densely textured the story of this place turns out to be. The brand may say unspoilt medieval village. The story tells us that the reality is a lot more complex than that, but Lord Crewe’s village may be closer to what visitors actually see.  

My point is that the story of Blanchland’s concentric circles of sacred space is ambiguous. It preserves the memory of centuries of worship and piety on the part of the white canons, the goodness and purity of heart that flowed out of the Premonstratensian vision of life lived in the service of God and neighbour. Yet it’s an ambiguous history like the story of the landscape here in the North Pennines. You could say that the natural beauty of our Pennine landscape carries a shadow side, the evidence of how it was despoiled by the raids on it of centuries of lead-mining. Now, the mines have gone too, and with them the livelihood of many a Pennine village and family. In the same way, the Abbey was done violence to by a Reformation that some welcomed as the work of God, but many, particularly in the North, saw nothing but disaster in the abandonment of the old faith. Loss is written into this place. I tried to capture the spirit of the place in my book of 2013, Landscapes of Faith. Having described the village and the Abbey, I wrote, a trifle nostalgically, “It offers an emotive, living memorial to a lost way of life, with the remoteness of the village’s beautiful setting and its still obvious monastic layout a powerful memorial to those long-dead white canons”.[16] The story of sacred space is always ambivalent, carries a shadow, or at the very least can be read in different ways.

In the Ignatian spiritual tradition, the words consolation and desolation stand for different states of the soul in the discernment of God’s Spirit at work in human life. Consolation means the comfort and strength that comes from the Spirit’s presence as Comforter or Advocate, while desolation is the darkness and disturbance of the soul through sorrow, hopelessness or anxiety when God is, or appears to be, far off or altogether absent. Is it fanciful to ask whether some aspects of the story of a place’s speak of consolation while others testify to its opposite, desolation? If so, then Blanchland with its noble but troubled history could be a case-study of how to read a story and, importantly, learn how to place ourselves within it.

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Which brings me to my final thesis. Sacred Space Must Be Inhabited and Reimagined.

I come back to the point I made earlier about landscape, that it is just not the case that “the church is people, not a place or a building”. When people speak about churchgoing, as Philip Larkin did in his famous poem of that name, that’s precisely what they mean. And if sacred geography and our theology of place[17] are well grounded (to coin a phrase), they are right to speak as they do.

However, places, landscapes, buildings are for populating. People do not by themselves necessarily create sacred spaces (though they can do), but by inhabiting them they add to their textures and assign new layers of meaning to them. I learned this when I wrote a new guide book to Durham Cathedral in 2003. In it I suggested that there were three emblems of North East England (I believe I called them icons, but I use that word much more sparingly now) that were instantly recognisable by everybody who lives in the region or has the slightest acquaintance with it. They were the Roman Wall, Durham Cathedral, and the Angel of the North. I was taken to task by a professor of history from eastern Europe who remarked that I wasn’t comparing objects of the same type. The Roman Wall had once been populated by a community (the army that served along it and the communities that lived in its hinterland) but whose people were now simply a memory. The Angel of the North was an artefact pure and simple and was not inhabited by anyone other than in the most attenuated sense. But Durham Cathedral was home to a living, worshipping community and continued to be the goal of pilgrims as it had always been. The textures of these emblems were entirely different.

I now see that it is not as simple as the professor thought. The Wall is the focus of a community of guardians, conservators and volunteers to whom its destiny is a matter of almost mystical significance. The Angel, intriguingly, draws to it people who want to mark rites of passage at its foot: birthdays, renewing wedding vows, scattering the ashes of loved ones. All of these are temporary communities brought into being by a sculpture created out of cold steel on the site of a former mine working. And all three attract big crowds of visitors (who may well describe themselves as pilgrims, in which group I include people walking along the Wall) who, for the time they are in relationship with the object of their visit, can be said to form another kind of temporary community. 

When we come to Blanchland, we realise how the textures of the place involve the different communities that have populated it in its history, from the White Canons and lay brothers to the Anglican congregation that worshipped there after the dissolution, and the villagers who lived and continue to live around their church. (The literal meaning of parish, paroikia, is the locality that lies around, and by extension, the people who live in it.) So a key question for the village and the Abbey community now is, how are we inhabiting our place today, the church itself and its pro-fanum, that which lies before, i.e. the physical and human setting of village and valley? How do we honour its sacredness and the sanctity of life in the wider community? And how are we thinking about its development into the future as a sacred space that will serve its resident and temporary communities in new ways? And how shall we embrace the heritage and tourism activity that is so central to the economy of the North Pennines without sacrificing the integrity whether of our “sacred space” and its landscape setting, or of the local community that inhabits it?

I don’t know Blanchland well enough to suggest specific responses to these questions. But if I am right about the landscape and narrative dimensions of sacred space, then the way we inhabit and reimagine it must honour the setting and story if it is to continue to be a source of inspiration and renewal. That has always been the task, to make sure that sacred space doesn’t remain fixed in a past that is daily becoming more and more remote from the present. What matters is the kind of dynamic remembering that both respects the pastness of the past, but also its capacity to speak into the present and help shape the future. Christian theologians call this kind of memory anamnesis. It’s what we do at the eucharist as the sacred space and its story gather us together to tell of God’s mighty acts in the past, so that they come alive in the present and transform us with a vision of what we could become under God.

Heritage is a difficult concept. Like it or not, all of us who are responsible for sacred spaces with long histories, beautiful settings and noble architecture are caught up in the heritage industry. Funding bids have to demonstrate access to heritage and activity plans that encourage people to discover, learn about and enjoy it. The risk is that we package our spiritual heritage, subtly (or not so subtly) through literature, signage, guided tours or the visitor centre, condition people to experience it in approved ways. What this can do is to rob them of the raw experience of encountering the place on its own terms with all the surprise, delight, awe or even shock that this can bring. Most of us can tell stories of childhood visits to heritage sites that laid down memories for a lifetime. When we went back as adults with our own children, we found we had to negotiate a barrage of information, officialdom and retail opportunity before we were allowed anywhere near what we had come to see. The effect of this is to distance us intellectually, spiritually and emotionally from our heritage by over-managing it, and controlling our encounter with it by keeping in its place. An influential book warns against “othering” the past and thereby exoticising it “as a place for tourists and schoolchildren to visit, or as a site of lost romance and betrayed glory”.[18] Either is a failure to honour the integrity both of the heritage itself, and of the people who have come to see it.

I’m not in the least decrying the heritage industry and church heritage in particular: I’ve spent three decades of my working life trying to open up the heritage of three very different cathedrals and encouraging people with little or no church background to cross the threshold and come inside. The growing awareness of our heritage “offer” as sacred spaces is not only a key aspect of outreach, but it also professionalises our practice and humanises our welcome to guests as we help them orientate themselves in our buildings, understand something of what they see and respond. You’ll note the word: not tourists who only come to observe, but guests with the potential to become pilgrims who, however tentatively, are encouraged to participate, become part of the temporary community that the sacred space calls into being. Benedict’s Rule says that we should receive guests as if they were Christ himself. Generous hospitality and intelligent interpretation are, I think, among the gospel values that should shape how we inhabit our sacred spaces. We could put it another way and say that sacred space is “shaped” by vocation, as the Hebrew Bible speaks about the land of promise, a call that affirms a particular geography not only for its physical aspects but for the spiritual, ethical and personal values it represents.[19]

What’s clear is that here at Blanchland, inhabiting and reimagining sacred space are not tasks for the church alone. I’ve pointed out how in this place, church and community are historically deeply intertwined. That gives the village and the valley a vital interest in what happens inside and around the Abbey. It’s partnerships in the community that are going to enable the Abbey’s vision of its future to be achieved and flourish. That’s necessarily true of how every church needs to reimagine itself, for the natural population of a sacred space is the paroikia, “the people who live around”. But this sacred space and this community, because of their story, are woven fine into an entity that cannot be divided into churchgoers and everyone else. One of the hazards of our secularising times is the tendency church people, clergy among them, to think that a congregation and its priests somehow own the building they worship in. They don’t. Sacred space is public space that belongs to all and is open to all because it is God’s space, and God offers hospitality and welcome to all humanity. “My house shall be a house of prayer for all people.”[20]

Perhaps that’s the most important insight for today. Allow it to shape our thinking about “sacred space and community” and it will make all the difference. Create a place where all can come, as Auden did, and drop pebbles down metaphorical shafts that plumb the depths of place and life and God, and listen in case something stirs.

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[1] Myers, Alan & Forsythe, Robert (1999), W.H. Auden: Pennine Poet, 55ff.

[2] Davison, Peter (2007), The Idea of North

[3] Myers & Forsythe (1999), 8.

[4] Sadgrove, Michael, “Durham: A Northern Cathedral” in Wakefield, Gavin & Rooms, Nigel, eds., (2016), Northern Gospel, Northern Church, 183.

[5] Quoted by Myers & Forsythe (1999), 24.

[6] Exodus 3.5.

[7] Genesis 1.31.

[8] Psalm 19.1.

[9] Psalm 8.3-4.

[10] Brown, David (2004), God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience, 152.

[11] Genesis 29.17.

[12] www.northpennines.org.uk, accessed on 23 October 2018.

[13] Addleshaw, G.W.O. (1951), Blanchland: A Short History.

[14] www.blanchlandhistory.org.uk/docs/BLANCHLAND%20A%20short%20history%20G.W.O.%20Addleshaw.pdf

[15] https://northernambo.blogspot.com/2018/10/christianity-with-north-east-accent.html?spref=tw

[16] Sadgrove, Michael (2013), Landscapes of Faith: the Christian Heritage of the North East, 129.

[17] Rumsey, Andrew (2017), Parish: an Anglican Theology of Place.

[18] Wright, Patrick (2009), On Living in an Old Country, 137.

[19] Rumsey (2017), 79, citing the work of Walter Brueggemann.

[20] Mark 11.17.

A New Cohort of Chadsians: Welcome!

First of all, I want to welcome you all tonight. Welcome to the UK if you are from overseas. Welcome to North East England if you are from another part of the country. Welcome to Durham, this precious little city with its wonderful cathedral that is loved by people across the world. 

And welcome to Durham University, so much a part of this ancient place, shaped by a long history of scholarship and learning in the city yet a hugely successful and forward-looking institution. You have done well to get into Durham: its standing among world universities has never been higher. You are among the privileged few and you will have had to beat off a lot of competition. So you're allowed to feel proud of yourselves. You have arrived. You are here, on the threshold of what may be the most important and formative time of your life. You are now Durham people.

And most of all, welcome to St Chad's. I'm proud to be the Rector of this college, and I want to say to you tonight that you could not have chosen a better Durham College. Chads is famous for its achievements academically, in sport, music, the arts, and for creating a wonderfully warm and generous community of students and staff. I hope you've already begun to feel that as you've been welcomed in the last few days. 

Perhaps you are wondering who our college is named after. St Chad was one of the Christian saints of seventh century England. He began his career up here in the North East where he was educated by the great St Aidan on Holy Island. He soon travelled across the country with the gospel he had given his life to, bearing witness to his faith in words and actions. He founded Lichfield Cathedral in Staffordshire, so if you are from the Midlands, then you'll feel especially at home at St Chads.

Not everyone in this college comes from a Christian background. We pride ourselves in being an inclusive college for people of every faith or of no faith. Whatever your beliefs, they will be honoured and respected. But it's good to debate and learn from one another. That's one of the primary values of this college: listening, reflecting, intellectual curiosity, being open to new insights. So is the awareness that life is about more than simply achievement or success - though I am sure you'll enjoy lots of that. I mean the softer values of being human: integrity, awareness, sensitivity, kindness, and a real passion for social justice in our community and in our world. All these things would have mattered to St Chad, I think. As our college motto puts it, it's not what we have but what we are that matters. Non vestra sed vos.

The Rector is the titular head of St Chad's (we are the only Durham College to have one, so there's a unique selling point already!). It's the Principal Dr Masson and her colleagues who lead the life of the College, and the Council that sets its direction. I'm simply an honorary senior member. But as a friend and champion of the college, I'm here to wish you all well from my heart as you set out on this great adventure. 

So let me end by assuring you that you will be in the best possible hands during your time at St Chads. Seize the day. Make the most of the opportunities you will have here. I hope you flourish here and enjoy every minute of your time in Durham. It will change your life - be sure of it. And when you leave (and how soon that time will come, believe me!), you will be ready as tomorrow's leaders to make a difference in a world that so much needs the gifts and expertise and skills you will bring. 

God bless you. 

The Rector's Address at St Chad's College Matriculation Ceremony, 2 October 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