Farewell at Durham: the Dean responds

First, and most important of all, a big thank you from Jenny and me for so much kindness and generosity: not just gifts to treasure, but for being at this service today. There are people here from all the places where we have lived and I have served in ministry, going back even to student and school days. I want tonight to pay tribute to all the places I have served as a priest: Oxford, Salisbury, Alnwick, Coventry, Sheffield and Durham. You have given so much friendship and encouragement and when I have needed it, forgiveness.

 

When you retire you hear a lot about ‘legacy’. ‘What are you most proud of from your time in Durham?’ I’m asked. I am proud of many things, but not for myself: it’s all the colleagues past and present who have brought energy and flair for us to do so much together. It’s not ‘I’ but ‘we’ in the plural.

 

For example. I am proud that we have nearly completed our great project ‘Open Treasure’ which will open next year. The exhibitions are a celebration of our North East Christian heritage, but they’re much more. By opening our doors to more visitors, and by telling our story, we are doing a serious piece of Christian mission and outreach. I am very proud that we admitted girls to the Cathedral choir in 2009. I am proud of arts projects like the Transfiguration Window which, like the music, enrich our spirituality so profoundly. I am proud that with the University and the County, we brought the Lindisfarne Gospels back to Durham in 2013. I am proud of Lumière, Durham’s great winter light festival in which the Cathedral plays a large part. I’m proud of the day to day ministry of this Cathedral in its worship, music and preaching, this community and its welcome to guests, its intellectual and spiritual contribution to this region.

 

I’ve also been asked: ‘what will you miss most?’ How do I begin to answer that in this place of gifts? This amazing building, our Deanery that has been such a happy home, the saints both living and departed who have been companions in faith and prayer. County Durham people are so warm, genuine and hospitable. And at the heart of it all is the Benedictine rhythm of prayer day in, day out. How shall I live without evensong, the psalms of the day, the evening canticles, the rhythms and cadences of the liturgy?

 

I have some particular thanks tonight:

the four diocesan Bishops I have worked with, two suffragans, their senior colleagues and to clergy and lay people across the diocese for their generous invitation to contribute to the life of this great diocese;

the Cathedral Chapter who have held to the highest standards in the oversight and leadership of this Cathedral and have been wonderful travelling companions;

our magnificent staff, committee members, volunteers and the Cathedral community itself who all love this place and give so much to it;

colleagues in the University and at St Chad’s where it has been a privilege to contribute to the academic life and governance of this great institution;

the Lords Lieutenant of our two counties (and for the honour of serving as a DL in this one), to civic leaders, and those in all sectors for so much friendship, encouragement and support;

those who support us through their financial giving;  without you we could never undertake what we aspire to do and to become;

the Chorister School where I’ve chaired the governors and have always been warmly welcome in that lovely community;

those who in personal and intimate ways have been there for us. You have enriched our lives and added to our happiness more that you know;

and my family. Jenny has travelled the whole journey with me; our children joined us on the way. I couldn’t have got to today without them.

Someone once said that cathedrals are ‘asylums for amiable gentlemen with indistinct convictions’. If that was ever true, it isn’t now. They stand for lively Christian faith in its profoundest aspects, lived out on the thresholds of church and world where disciples are made. These great places are flagships of worship and mission. You feel the force of religion here. I’ve learned in three cathedrals how vital it is that Cathedral and Diocese are in partnership as we bear witness to the kingdom of God. When the synergy is good, the opportunities are endless.   

 

Hensley Henson was Dean here one hundred years ago during the Great War. When he arrived at the station to leave Durham, as he thought for good, the station master recognised him and said goodbye ‘with much feeling’, says his diary. That Dean, a complex man beset by self-doubt, was moved by this show of affection and wondered if it was sincere. This Dean, not a stranger to self-doubt, is in no doubt at all about the love and affection we have found here. It has been outstanding, unforgettable. Thank you to Isaac, Lilian, Margaret and the Bishop for putting it into words that have touched us.

 

So: you are in our hearts as we cross the Tyne and go back to Northumberland. We’re still in North East England: far enough not to haunt the Cathedral; near enough to stay in touch. If you can’t stay in a medieval Deanery, the next best place to live is within sight of a level crossing with its comforting sound of trains. You know where we are. Thank you again. God be with you.

An Unimaginable Disaster

I wonder what we think we are doing, commemorating the outbreak of the Great War a century ago? Many things. Some are obvious, but no less important for that: remembering all who would fall in the war, trying to understand why Europe slept-walked into war in the first place, maybe draw tentative lessons about conflict, patriotism, national politics and how we construct a better world order than the one that crashed to the ground in August 1914. But it is just as important to try to reflect spiritually on our history, offer it to God, hold in our hearts peoples broken by the conflicts of today, pray for peace in our world. Let me offer these thoughts today.

My first reflection is about history. My predecessor Hensley Henson was dean of Durham a century ago. His sermons and writings give us a glimpse of both how well and how badly the Church of England responded to the unexpected crisis of summer 1914. ‘When the stroke actually fell’ he wrote, ‘it seemed to have the benumbing shock of an almost unimaginable disaster. The nation… was reluctant to admit the possibility of war between nations so closely linked by ties of interest, culture and tradition’. He did not fall for the easy recruiting slogans of some of the war’s more fervent supporters; yet he never wavered in his belief that England had a duty to engage with the war. Its causes were unbelievably complex, the ambitions of European empires, their unstable alliances, the vicissitudes of trade, the hubris of flawed leaders, and the simmering tensions in the unruly but far-off Balkans (about which people in England knew little and cared even less). Even now it isn’t easy to unravel an intricate history, but aspects of it may look clearer a century later than historians of the last generation found it to be. In some ways the events of June 1914 strike us as surprisingly modern: the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo was a familiar mix of radicalised young men wielding the terrorists’ guns and grenades, and all in a city-centre with heavy traffic and a baffling one-way system.

What brought Britain into the war was the German invasion of neutral Belgium. It was this that appalled the nation, precipitated the declaration of war and galvanised most of the church into supporting the war effort. To stand in solidarity with the victim is honourable for people and for nations, and it’s important to remember this when we might easily conclude, viewing it through the lens of the disastrous Battle of the Somme, that this conflict was avoidable. I doubt it was more avoidable than the Second World War once Germany had decided on its course of action. I dwell on this because it is important, in remembering those who went to war on both sides, that most were not starry-eyed dupes dazzled by the rhetoric of dulce et decorum est. Thoughtful people believed it was the right thing to do to defend a downtrodden nation. They asked what Christian obligation should be amid the messiness of actual historical circumstances. Ethics is never straightforward in extreme situations like war. But we should pay tribute to those who went to war a hundred years ago believing it was their moral and spiritual duty. We must try to read the history with a critical yet sympathetic insight.

My second reflection is about memory. It was the Great War that bequeathed to every church, town centre and village green a war memorial. They existed earlier: both Sheffield and Durham have memorials from before the First World War. In Durham Cathedral, the Durham Light Infantry (pals as well as officers) is commemorated for campaigns going back to Crimea, the Sudan and the Boer War. But it was the terrible attrition of the First World War that brought loss to every community and almost every family in the land that gave nationwide impetus to the need to remember. If anything, this instinct has accelerated in our own lifetimes and spread out from war memorials to roadside shrines in memory of accident victims and other symbols that record loss and grief. The Great War also gave us rituals to remember with: the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and local observances of Armistice Day around every war memorial look back to the same watershed. And again, if Durham is anything to go by, we have seen a huge increase in attendance at these commemorations in the past decade especially – and this interests me in particular - among the young. Perhaps this is because war and the pity of war is relentlessly on public view nowadays through television and social media; but perhaps it is also that the public has a better awareness of the covenant between the armed forces and the nation than it did in past generations. 

How we remember is a rich theme in the scriptures. It lies at the heart of this eucharist as we remember in bread and wine the one whose body was broken and blood shed through an act of cruel violence. We do this in memory of him for many other reasons, but his victimhood is not the least of them. I believe that the eucharist gives us important clues about how we should remember before God. One of them is good remembering is always an occasion for thanksgiving. It’s what eucharist means. These next four years will present opportunities for us all to remember thankfully those who fought and fell not just in the Great War but all the conflicts of more recent times. Another is that we must remember in ways that connect the past to our own day. Anamnesis means allowing the past to become actual to us, telling the story so that we can inhabit it and let it shape our lives now and in the future. If we don’t do this, we shall not only fail to emulate all that ennobled so many who served, but we shall also risk falling into the half-truths, brutalised rhetoric and cant that war so easily fosters. And then, remembering at the eucharist is linked to offering: Christ’s offering for us, our own self-offering in him and, I want to say, bringing all humanity, all the world into the offering of the eucharistic prayer to God, pleading in Christ that like the bread and the wine, our broken, spilt lives, wrecked by conflict and hatred, may be transformed and the new creation heralded.

My final reflection is about where understanding, memory and prayer might lead us. Alan Ecclestone, a much-admired priest in Sheffield in the 1960s said: ‘what matters for prayer is what we do next’. That is to say, to give ourselves to reflection in the ways I’ve suggested must always lead to action of some kind, something we do. This ‘doing’ is about expressing Christian discipleship in ordinary life, making some difference to the world in which we live, to others whose lives we share, to ourselves. So we need to be changed by how we think, how we remember, how we pray. The key word here is ‘we’ as the church that celebrates this eucharist. It may sound grand to speak about being the conscience of the nation, though together, the faith communities can wield inestimable influence in the shaping of a better order in our society and in the wider world. They can bring people together, create dialogue, help bring about reconciliation. In a world so divided by radicalised dysfunctional religion, we shouldn’t underestimate how people of healthy faith can bring understanding and wisdom.

In one way especially, the church has a special vocation. This is to be a witness in every generation that the church is a worldwide society that transcends the divisions between peoples, nations and continents. Christianity, said Hensley Henson, ‘is not a national religion and can never tolerate any national limits to its message’. Peace-making is inspired by a larger vision of human beings living together in the spirit of reconciliation and friendship, which in the gospels is how the kingdom of God is depicted. When Jesus fed the crowd in our gospel reading today, he meant it as a powerful enacted symbol of how we were created to be one people, sitting down as one human company, literally, ‘bread-sharers’ who distribute to all the resources that God out of his abundant generosity has endowed us with. War is always a terrible denial of that fundamental truth about humanity. So a worldwide fellowship of faith, the church, can help recover the vision by living out what it means to be a human family of grace and justice, truth, peace and freedom.

We should use the commemorations of these four coming years to ask ourselves what this means in practice, and commit ourselves not only to praying for it but to helping bring it about. It is one way of both praying and living the petition we say at every act of worship: ‘give us this day our daily bread’, our bread for today, our bread for tomorrow, the bread that the victims of war and conflict hunger for. What matters for prayer is what we do next. As we reflect, as we remember, as we pray, we do not forget what we could do to make a difference in our own time. And maybe, just maybe, this unique centenary that has fallen in our lifetime will give us a new resolve to do it.

Sheffield Cathedral, 3 August 2014.
To commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, August 1914
Matthew 14.14-21

'Unimportant'? A brief life of Hensley Henson, Dean & Bishop of Durham

Among my predecessors, Hensley Henson was one of the most waspish of all the Deans of Durham.  He became Dean in 1912, left the Deanery in 1917 to go to the See of Hereford, and returned to Durham in 1920 as its Bishop, retiring just a few months before the outbreak of the second world war.  He wanted to be a scholar-dean: ‘I would endeavour to associate my tenure of the Deanery with some literary achievement which would renew the tradition of Dean Waddington… and finally emancipate me from the humiliating excitements of ecclesiastical conflict’.[1]  He relates that unfortunately for him and for us, it did not turn out as he had hoped. Most of his writings that had impact in their day, and that are still remembered, belong to his later life. And it is probably true to say that it was not for their intellectual substance that they were valued so much as their fearless engagement with so many central issues of global, national and church life. These include church and state, Christian moral thought, the practice of ministry and of course, his autobiographical writings[2].

‘HHH’ as he was often known was born in 1863. A Londoner, his childhood was unhappy, and left him with a lifelong sense of being an outsider. He went to Oxford as an unattached undergraduate: his father who was badly in debt could not afford to support him at one of the colleges. This strongly reinforced the awareness that he did not belong to the mainstream of the talented and intelligent, for all his intellectual ability. He took a first in modern history and was soon elected a fellow of All Souls. Having discerned early on a vocation to priesthood, he was ordained in 1887 and appointed Vicar of Barking the following year. Here his talents made him one of London’s most popular clergy, increasing the congregation, it is said, from 250 to over a thousand. In 1895 he became chaplain of an Ilford hospital, and in 1900, a canon of Westminster and Vicar of St Margaret’s. This great public platform gained him widespread admiration for the brilliance of his preaching. He was noticed in high places. Asquith had planned to make him Dean of Lincoln, but Henson’s wayward behaviour led to a change of mind: he said it would be ‘like sending a destroyer into a landlocked pool’.[3]  The issue concerned his advocacy of union with non-conformists. He had defied his old friend Bishop Charles Gore in preaching in a congregational church in Birmingham. So Henson became Dean of Durham instead. 

His arrival in Durham was heralded by a dramatic development in the Deanery.  Like Spencer Cowper before him, Henson, or rather Ella his wife whom he had married in 1902, took a dislike to the great house which she thought gloomy and colourless.  Her opinion was perhaps not altogether without ground.  The photographs in his predecessor Dean Kitchin’s history of the Deanery[4], an incomparable record not only of its past, but also how it was inhabited in Edwardian times, show that the house was decorated and furnished in a heavy Victorian style that did not do justice to its elegant 17^th and 18^th century architecture.  So Ella set about putting colour back into Spencer Cowper’s solarium, and the Chinese silk wallpapers, as brilliant now as they were in 1912, show how well she succeeded.  It was a metaphor of a new era in the Deanery, both the house and the office.  The 20^th century had arrived.

As I have said, Henson had already gained a reputation as a brilliant preacher and controversialist before he arrived at Durham.  He was a passionate defender of the establishment of the Church of England but had moved away from the high church position he had occupied as a younger man. In the year of his appointment, he published a book arguing that clergy should be free to air their doubts about the virgin birth and bodily resurrection in the pulpit. This led to the legendary controversy surrounding his preferment to Hereford in 1917.  He was appointed by Lloyd-George against the advice of Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury. A number of bishops refused to attend his consecration, an act that wounded Henson deeply. In 1920, he was appointed Bishop of Durham. This time, his reception in his diocese where of course he was already well-known was uncontroversial and warm.  

Back in Durham, it was not long before he ran into trouble. The Durham coalfield was seething with discontent and unrest under the economic and industrial strains all England was experiencing, and the recalcitrant attitudes of local pit owners. Conflict was rife, with both miners’ and employers’ attitudes coloured by the Russian Revolution four years earlier. On Labour Day, 1 May 1921, Henson was invited to speak to a gathering of mine workers and employers at Hartlepool to try to achieve understanding and avert a damaging strike. The memory of an earlier episcopal intervention in a mining dispute in County Durham was still green: the great Bishop Westcott had been widely admired during the coal strike of 1892 for bringing miners and employers to Auckland Castle and successfully mediating between the two groups. It was not that Henson misjudged the occasion. He praised the miners, and pleaded to everyone’s better nature for an end to class war. But he unwisely included as a throwaway remark, a reference to the few, not the many, who were ‘shirkers’. This was mistaken to be a denigration of them all. For a while, the mood that year was ugly. Henson was able to redeem it by never failing in his conscientious care for miners and their families and his often generous financial provision for them, despite his dislike of organised labour and the trade unions.

But things soon turned sour again. This time, it came down to a difference of opinion between the Bishop and the Dean and it tells us quite a lot about Henson. Welldon took an exalted view of the office of Dean. Once, he was speaking to a meeting of railwaymen at Stockton and one of them asked, ‘Who is worth more to the country – a Dean or an engine-driver?  He replied: ‘A Dean is worth more than an engine-driver, if only because the engine-driver would take people from Stockton to Newcastle, but a Dean would take them from Stockton to heaven’.[5] 

His relations with Henson were notoriously bad, and the Bishop found in him exactly the right target for his acid wit. When preaching at Court and lunching afterwards at Buckingham Palace, King George V happened to ask his granddaughter Princess Elizabeth what she had liked best at the zoo on their visit the previous day.  ‘The rhinobottomus’ she replied.  Henson at once said: ‘Thank you, my dear Princess, for giving me a word which so adequately describes my Dean’.  When a lady asked him at a dinner-party if he had seen the play Pigs in Clover, he replied: ‘No, but I have seen the Dean of Durham in bed’.  Welldon was suspicious of the telephone, and would only allow a single appliance to be installed in the Porters’ Lodge to serve the entire College.  (That however was more advanced than Henson, who refused to have a telephone at Auckland Castle at all, so his chaplain had to make daily trips to a public phone in the market place in order to transact the business of the diocese)[6]. 

Relations came to a head. This time, it was another matter entirely that proved the trigger. Welldon was a leader of the temperance movement while Henson thought the whole idea of prohibition both absurd in itself and damaging (as he looked across the Atlantic) politically and socially. The brewers regarded Henson as their champion and liked the implication that the ‘liquor bishop’ would ‘rather see England free than England sober’.[7] The Dean decided to brief against his Bishop. He addressed the annual Miners’ Gala in July 1825 appealing to the Labour Party to ‘solve the nation’s drink problem’ and dissenting from Henson’s well-known views. Unfortunately, Henson had written a newspaper article a few days earlier on ‘The Coal Crisis: an explanation and a warning’. The topic was the miners’ demand to be paid a ‘living wage’.

Henson argued that this act of folly would put their very industry at risk. They were furious. A banner was processed on the racecourse proclaiming ‘to hell with bishops and deans! We want a living wage!’ There were mutterings about the vast stipends enjoyed by church dignitaries, and the Cathedral’s ownership of a well-known colliery, the Dean and Chapter pit at Ferryhill. Then a large man attired in an episcopal habit was seen amid the throng. This was not the Bishop but the Dean who had been a colonial bishop in East India. ‘Here he comes’ the crowd shouted, ‘throw him in the river!’. After a beating, they almost succeeded but for the intervention of the police. Who knows if the miners were intent on throwing a church dignitary into the river, not caring whom, or whether they mistook Welldon for Henson? But from then on, Henson paid attention to his personal security.

In the national church, the issue that long preoccupied him was that of disestablishment. I have said that he began as a fervent advocate of the established church. This was to change dramatically with the debacle over Parliament’s refusal to endorse the revised Book of Common Prayer twice over, first in 1927 and then again in 1928. This requires a lecture in itself, but briefly, the reasons for Parliament’s dislike of the draft text were based on a lingering protestant suspicion, fanned by a successful public campaign headed by well-known evangelicals, that the book conceded the historic Reformation position of the Church of England by countenancing such practices as eucharistic sacrifice and prayers for the dead. It is salutary to be reminded that what was called anti-Romanism was in some circles a live issue well into the 20^th century, and is still not yet put to rest.

Because the revised Prayer Book had been unambiguously endorsed by the bishops, clergy and laity of the Church Assembly acting under its legal mandate of 1919, Henson regarded Parliament’s rejection as an unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of the church. He now began to clamour loudly for disestablishment to which he gave the title of a notorious book he published in 1929. In it, he argued (presciently, many think today), that as the nation could no longer be said to profess the Christian faith, the church should be given the freedom to govern itself. His cry fell on deaf ears and made him more enemies. However, his public role in the coronation of 1937 seems to have moderated his position. He began to talk about the ‘residual’ Christianity held by the English as compared with the outright paganism that was sweeping across Nazi Germany.

And this observation of what was happening across the North Sea brought out what some consider as the very best in Henson. His stepmother, whom his father had met late in Henson’s adolescence, was a German widow. Henson always retained his affection for her, and her memory probably influenced him when, late in life, he observed the capitulation of a nation he admired to the forces of totalitarianism. He was one of only a few in public life vocally to criticise Nazi anti-Semitism, and support the German Confessing Church and its imprisoned pastor Martin Niemöller. When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia in 1936, he was quick to condemn Britain’s lack of concern, and when it came to the Munich crisis of 1938, he was forthright in speaking against an act of appeasement that he regarded as a ‘grievous injury’to the Czechs and a shameful capitulation to Germany’.[8] He had opposed spending on re-armament as he believed it promoted war. But he saw in 1938 that war was inevitable, a ‘holy war against pagan barbarism’ to end which there must be unambiguous victory, not a ‘compromise or patched-up peace’.[9]

This pleased Churchill who in 1940 invited Henson to forsake retirement and return to Westminster as a canon who would preach fervently in support of the war. It was not a success because of his failing health, and he resigned in 1941. He died in Suffolk on 27 September 1947. His ashes are buried in this Cathedral in the Chapel of the Nine Altars, near Bishop Anthony Bek and the memorial to the last of the prince-bishops, William van Mildert. Ella lived on for two more years.

Short men are often pugnacious, and this is true of Hensley Henson. This is evident from the best of his huge literary output, his letters and his long memoirs entitled Retrospect of an Unimportant Life. It is hard to tell whether there is an intended irony in the title, or whether he believed, as an outsider who had never attended public school and had been an impoverished ‘unattached’ student at Oxford, that he was a nobody like the famous diarist whose title he was perhaps echoing.  One writer thinks the book is ‘by turns snobbish, self-regarding, and self-dramatizing’[10].  But Owen Chadwick’s enjoyable biography[11] takes a more sympathetic view of this conflicted, inconsistent and troublesome man.  It demonstrates his far-sightedness, his passion for justice, his hatred of hypocrisy and cant.  He was perhaps one of the few prophets to occupy the Deanery.  His tenure as a wartime dean here in Durham came before he had made his lasting mark on the Church of England.  Yet I like to think that some of his enduring insights about church and society were nurtured in the room he and Ella made so beautiful for future Deans and their families to enjoy.  

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[1] Henson, Herbert Hensley, Retrospect of an Unimportant Life, London, 1942, I, 147.

[2] Complete list of books and papers in Peart-Binns, J. S., Herbert Hensley Henson, Cambridge, 2013, 192ff.

[3] Grimley, Matthew in ODNB, online source, citing The Times.

[4] Kitchin, G. W., The Story of the Deanery, Durham, 1070-1912, Durham, 1912.

[5] Beeson, op cit.

[6] Gibby, C. W., ‘Some Deans and Canons of Durham’, unpublished reminiscences, 1979.

[7] Chadwick, Owen, Hensley Henson: a study in the friction between Church and State, Norwich 1983, 165.

[8] DNB, Grimley, Matthew on ‘Henson, Herbert Hensley’, 2004-5

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Chadwick, ibid.