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.

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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.

Holy Week in Chester 8: “I AM: The Burning Bush, Ends and Beginnings”

“It is accomplished” cries Jesus from the cross, his final word in St John’s passion story. It’s natural to think of Good Friday as a day of despair or resignation as the other gospel writers do. St John stands out for his sense of completion, something accomplished, brought to its proper conclusion. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work” Jesus has said near the beginning of the gospel. As he turns his face towards the cross he prays, “I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do”. Tetelestai! It is done.

Endings and beginnings seem to meet at Golgotha as we hear John’s great narrative. The cross feels like a great full stop, a closure, an end. We hear in Jesus’ words an unmissable tone of finality, even triumph. Perhaps that takes us by surprise? Not if we’ve been paying attention to the way St John has told his story. This end is not, for him, the petering out of a life that began so well. It is not the tragedy of a career that has been wasted, brought to nothing. It is not the extinguishing of a guttering candle flame finally overcome by the darkness. Rather, it’s that this great light has never shone more steadily, more brightly than at Golgotha. Far from representing the waste of a man’s career, this is its moment of culmination. His life, said Jesus speaking of himself as the good shepherd, was not taken from him. He laid it down of his own accord.  On the cross he draws all humanity to himself. On the cross there is vindication of all that he came among us to be and to do. On the cross his work of love is accomplished. What binds him to the cross is not nails but love. He reigns over us as the king of love, a kingship that is not from here but from another place  entirely. This is where we recognise glory, full of grace and truth, love’s endeavour, love’s expense, love to the very end.

Therefore, this finished work, this end is also a beginning. It’s a threshold across which a new horizon is glimpsed. It’s the door "held open to us that no-one can shut, the gateway to possibilities we only dared to dream about. The story of the crucifixion ends with Jesus’ body being laid in a tomb by those who loved him – in a garden, precisely where the resurrection story begins, at the break of day, on the first day of the week, like the garden that God planted at the beginning of time when he created this good earth and placed our first parents in it. Beyond the full stop of today’s “it is finished”, another sentence is launched, a new one whose words open up for all humanity a paradise of promise, healing and reconciliation. 

“In my end is my beginning” was the motto of Mary Queen of Scots which she embroidered on a cloth just before her execution. Perhaps she was inspired by the salamander, the symbol of her grandfather-in-law Francis I, the creature that in myth was supposed to self-ignite at death in order to be reborn out of the ashes, young and new and strong. T. S Eliot plays with that motto in his great poem East Coker. It starts out as a pessimistic reversal of Queen Mary, “In my beginning is my end”, an echo perhaps of the Prayer Book funeral sentence, “In the midst of life we are in death”. Yet from there Eliot finds his way to a place of expectation and hope, as if to affirm: in the midst of death, we are in life. St John would recognise it that way round. “In my end is my beginning.” If Good Friday is an end, then it is pregnant with hope and possibility. For love is not eclipsed by suffering, nor its glory by death. And if Jesus’ death is both the end but not the end, then the grave has lost its victory and death its sting. 

This Holy Week in the Cathedral, we have been looking at the seven sayings of Jesus in St John that begin with the words I AM: “the door”, “the resurrection and the life”, “the light of the world”, “the bread of life”, “the true vine”, “the way, the truth and the life” and “the good shepherd”. Those words “I am”, so emphatic in the Greek, take us back to the book Exodus. There Moses is confronted by the sight of a bush that burns but is not consumed. He is overawed. Then he hears a voice addressing him out of the fire. “I am that I am” it says mysteriously. It’s nothing less than the sacred name of God whose nature can only be explained in terms of itself, for God will not be likened to anything we can see or handle. “I am”, that is, the ground of all existence, all life, all consciousness, all thought. And this is the divine name with which Jesus associates himself in St John. “Before Abraham was, I am” he declares, the eternal One who is in the world yet beyond it, the great I AM who is the source and end of all that has been, and is, and ever shall be. So the risen Christ says of himself in the book of Revelation, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end”.

This is how St John portrays the majestic figure who is enthroned in the cross at Golgotha. How can God suffer and die? we ask ourselves. Other faith communities find this the most baffling question Christianity poses. If you want to see a display of naked power, a crucified God makes no sense. If you want to hear fine wisdom, a messiah nailed to a cross is not for you. There are many for whom Good Friday is a real stumbling-block. And yet... there is power and there is wisdom at the cross, a divine wisdom and a divine power that change lives, heal brokenness and bring great hope. Faith takes us to a place where we see how love drives God to embrace the cross and in doing so, embrace his whole creation in a supreme act of self-giving, what Jesus calls laying down his life. If God is not crucified, there is no God as Christians understand him and no Christianity worth following.

I imagine the cross as St John’s burning bush. It’s the place of transfiguration where we take off our shoes because we are on holy ground. We turn aside today to look into this sacred fire, and open our ears so that we can hear the divine voice that speaks to us. What do we see? The flame of love, its glory and its light blazing with divine passion for the world, for the human race, for each of us. And what do we hear? The word that says: here is the essence of all that it means to be God. Here at Golgotha we see his nature and his name. I AM utters that voice, I am all that love means, all that meets our hungers and hopes, that than which nothing greater, nothing more glorious can be dreamed or conceived, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the origin and destiny of all that is, our light, our life, our love. 

“It is accomplished.” In my end is my beginning. We gaze on the burning heart of God. We sense that in these holy days of the paschal season, the sun is rising upon us. There is a new creation. The day breaks and the shadows flee away. After a long and gloomy winter, spring has come at last. 

Holy Week in Hymns 6 (Maundy Thursday): "Soul of my Saviour"

On this night of Maundy Thursday, we gather at the table of the Lord to do what he has commanded in memory of him. In bread and wine, we enter into the movement of God’s tender love for the world with which he loves us to the end. And because the upper room has taught us that love is his meaning, we act out at the Maundy eucharist love’s visible signs, the washing of feet, the kiss of peace and the breaking of bread. For the God who comes to us in Jesus, the God who pours out his very life for us, is the God who is both among us as one who serves and at the same time counts us his intimate friends. He bids us love one another as he has loved us.

Our hymn tonight breathes this spirit of intimate tenderness. “Soul of my Saviour” is a version of a famous fourteenth century prayer known as Anima Christi. Here it is in a translation by last night’s hymn writer, John Henry Newman who treasured this prayer:

Soul of Christ, be my sanctification; Body of Christ, be my salvation;
Blood of Christ, fill all my veins; Water of Christ's side, wash out my stains;
Passion of Christ, my comfort be; O good Jesu, listen to me;
In Thy wounds I fain would hide; Ne'er to be parted from Thy side;
Guard me, should the foe assail me; Call me when my life shall fail me;
Bid me come to Thee above, With thy saints to sing thy love, World without end. Amen.

What is it about this prayer that is so lovable, that draws us to make it our own especially in Passiontide? I think it is what T. S. Eliot called the “condition of complete simplicity”. It is utterly artless, unpretentious, childlike, without any sense of self-importance. It does not set out to make grand statements. It does not fall into the trap of flattering God in elaborate, courtly language. It is the naked, unadorned plea of a human soul kneeling before the crucified Jesus. It is written out of a deep personal realisation of our dependence on God's love. You feel it would be wonderful to pray like this, honestly, directly, wonderful to find it in us to cling to the cross with our hearts overflowing with love.

And this is why we observe Holy Week with such devotion. To walk with Jesus in the way of the cross is not meant to be an act of self-flagellation. The via dolorosa should deepen our love. It’s as simple as that. To contemplate the Passion is to be drawn ever deeper into the Soul of our Saviour first and foremost in thankful recognition of Christ’s work of redemption and grace, and then to offer ourselves to him as people who love him in return, who find safety and protection in the cross for this life and the next.

The themes of the first verse suggest the spirit of Maundy Thursday in the intimacy of its images. The soul of the worshipper comes face to face with the soul of the Saviour as if the author were present in the upper room, as close to Jesus as it is possible to be as words of love are spoken, and feet are washed, and bread is broken and wine is poured and hearts are sanctified and strengthened for the ordeals that lie ahead. Always the cross is in view, even as Jesus gathers with his followers and friends to celebrate a joyful Passover feast. The theme of this stanza is simply stated: that the love we glimpse in the Passion should embrace us, overcome us, purge out of us all that would pull us away from the Crucified One who is our life and our salvation. This highly physical, sacramental, almost erotic language may not be our usual register as Church of England people but the mystics of every age recognise it. They tell us that in the face of an overpowering vision of grace and truth, ordinary words run out.

The second verse introduces the idea of the cross as the source of strength and protection. Here the prayer becomes needier, as if the writer were trembling before some awful threat. “Strength and protection” - from what? We don’t know, but we can sense the fragility of life in the middle ages, ambushed by ever-present threats of war, famine, disease and death. Maundy Thursday is just such a day when we sit and eat under the awful shadow of the coming cruelty, suffering, darkness and death. You can hear the desperation in the cry for help: O blessed Jesu, hear and answer me. And then the lovely paradoxical image of the gaping wound as a good place because it offers shelter and safety. From a terrible injury that breaks open a precious body, life-giving blood and water flow. Deliverance brings healing, and healing a perfect union of heart and soul. So shall I never, never part from thee. As Peter said to Jesus when others forsook him and fled, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life”.

Guard and defend me from the foe malign enlarges this sense of threat. The dangers we sense in this prayer are not only physical, but spiritual. Eternity is at stake here, not just the moments of each day we are alive. And so the prayer turns to the last things we must all face one day. In death’s dread moments make me only thine. Death hangs over this Last Supper of the Lord as I’ve said. So we could read the prayer as asking that we may die as we have tried to live, in imitation of Jesus in his living and dying, knowing his tender love, never never parted from thee. And it ends on a truly eucharistic note, that is, in thankfulness and praise with the whole company of heaven: Call me and bid me come to thee on high, where I may praise thee with thy saints for ay. Even in Holy Week, in this Maundy eucharist, we do not lose sight of the saints triumphant who are with us as we sing the praise of him who died.

I’ve spoken about the Anima Christi in personal way because that reflects how it was written all those centuries ago. But I want to end by suggesting another way of praying it and of singing the hymn that’s based on it. Tonight we recall how, after supper, Jesus and his disciples went out to Gethsemane to watch and pray. St John depicts that high-priestly prayer as a majestic act of intercession for people of all times and places who trusted and hoped in God. I think that on this day, and the next, we should place the world and all its peoples under the strength and protection of Christ and his Passion. In our imagination, could we, so to speak, shelter this broken world in the broken side of Christ where the eternal source of its help and healing lie?

We come to this altar keenly aware of the tears that are being shed in many places through suffering and pain of different kinds. God’s tears, I am sure, mingle with ours as we break the bread and share the cup. What better than to offer this mass for a hurting world with the intention that all the human family should be guarded and defended from its foes? In the fervent hope, and longing, and prayer for the day when it will never, never be parted from the Friend of all humanity who loves us to the end.

Wakefield Cathedral, Maundy Thursday 2017

 

Soul of my Saviour sanctify my breast,
Body of Christ, be thou my saving guest,
Blood of my Saviour, bathe me in thy tide,
wash me with waters gushing from thy side.

Strength and protection may thy passion be,
O blessèd Jesus, hear and answer me;
deep in thy wounds, Lord, hide and shelter me,
so shall I never, never part from thee.

Guard and defend me from the foe malign,
in death's dread moments make me only thine;
call me and bid me come to thee on high
where I may praise thee with thy saints for ay.

Latin, 14^th century