Learning from St Wilfrid

Today in Rome, an Englishman is being proclaimed a saint: John Henry Newman, the famous Cardinal of the nineteenth century who, we must never forget, was initially formed not as a Roman Catholic but as a child of the Church of England. He is the first English person born since the seventeenth century to be canonised. 

But here in Tynedale we celebrate today an English saint of thirteen hundred years ago. We owe a big debt to St Wilfrid. Everyone knows about Hexham Abbey which he founded, and the Saxon crypt and Frith Stool that survive. Fewer people associate him with this church a few miles downstream, yet he founded it too, maybe before Hexham. They are links in a chain of Saxon churches dedicated to St Andrew that marches east along the line of the Roman Wall as far as Newcastle. Wilfrid almost certainly built his crypt at Hexham as a shrine for the relics of St Andrew that he brought back from Rome. He had a particular devotion to Andrew, one that is shared by your incumbent whose first anniversary as Vicar of Corbridge this is. So a lot of themes coalesce happily today as we celebrate this festival. 

It’s lazy to say that the church isn’t a building, it’s people. There is a truth in it of course: the church is a community, “the household of God, built upon the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ himself as the cornerstone”. It’s an organism that grows, says our reading from Ephesians, “into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are built together in the Spirit into a dwelling-place for God”. But if you’d asked Wilfrid why he built these great churches in worked stone, and on such a scale, furnished so lavishly and adorned with treasures, he would have said something like: if this people is to be a casket of holiness, goodness and truth, then everything that makes it visible – its buildings and its ceremonies – should bear witness to all that is to be valued most: the glory and beauty and love of God as we know him in Jesus Christ. A church building is a sacrament of the One who is among us as Immanuel. It should bring us to our knees, make worshippers and disciples out of us. It’s not either-or. People and building belong together in a God-given both-and. This is what we celebrate on our festival of dedication.

But let’s speak about Wilfrid. The are plenty of people who revere the northern saints like Oswald, Aidan, Cuthbert and Hild, but who have little good to say about Wilfrid. Proud, pompous and prelatical would sum up the popular view, more like a Saxon prince than a servant of the humble Man of Nazareth. It’s true that he was not like gentle Aidan as we call him, who had been his teacher on Lindisfarne. Wilfrid – fervent, combative, self-regarding, complex - could never have been accused of the virtue of simplicity. Nevertheless, Bede goes out of his way to mention the obedience, thoughtfulness and humility he learned as a child. He speaks of his devotion and purity meaning, I think, his unwavering commitment to his vocation as a monk, evangelist and bishop. The call to lead boldly burned hot within him. 

But what especially mattered to Bede was Wilfrid’s vision for the English church. Although schooled in the Irish tradition of faith he had learned from Aidan, his travels on the continent, good European that he was, gave him a larger perspective on what we call catholic Christianity. As Bishop of Hexham, he brought back to Tynedale customs he had come to admire in Rome: great churches built of stone, splendid liturgy and ceremonial, fine music, the Rule of St Benedict for his monks, a love of learning embodied in books and manuscripts, devotion to the saints and not least, high ideals for the status and authority of bishops.

It was conflict over the date of Easter that brought about a crisis for the English church. It could not be right for Christendom to be divided on the celebration of the greatest festival of the liturgical year. King Oswiu, a Northumbrian, and his Queen Eanflaed who was from Kent, followed different traditions, so that in some years, one would still be fasting in Lent while the other was feasting in Eastertide. The Synod of Whitby was convened in 664 to resolve these differences, and it was Wilfrid whose advocacy for catholic custom won the day. His argument came down to being obedient to the apostles Peter and Paul and the undivided church they had bequeathed. To Bede, who knew how mathematics and astronomy come into the complex calculations of the date of Easter, bringing the northern church into unity with the rest of Christendom was of profound importance. It still is, whatever those who want to fix the date of Easter may say.

Arguably it was Wilfrid who helped pave the way for what we call Northumbria’s Golden Age. The kingdom now saw itself as connected to European civilization in a new way that brought inspiration and energy to its leadership. It was open to influences from across the continent, not just from Ireland. In art, literature and politics, the flourishing of the kingdom was envied across Europe. Our fine Saxon churches here in the North East, like Corbridge, bear witness to it. Think of the Durham and Lindisfarne Gospels, the Saxon crosses at Bewcastle and Ruthwell, the Franks Casket that may owe its origins directly to Wilfrid, Bede’s biblical, poetic, astronomical and historical writings. Where do I stop?

But it was religion that was the golden thread. In the middle ages, sacred and secular belonged together. Church and world, politics and faith, all of life belonged to God and was subject to his rule. Perhaps we can see the colossal Roman arch under the tower as a symbol of that. Probably it was brought here from the Roman town at Corbridge: why go to the trouble of dressing newly-quarried stone when there was so much of it left behind by the departing legions a couple of centuries before? Here in this church is an emblem of the might and panoply and culture of antiquity, the people who once lived and died along the edge of empire, and of the alien gods they worshipped. Wilfrid’s Christianity was big enough to embrace even these, to ennoble and put to a higher service the relics of the civilization that once held sway in these lands.

For me, this is the significance as the founder we celebrate today. For all that we may not want to endorse every aspect of his way of leading, I think we are bound to find ourselves honouring the breadth of his vision. If he was ever prone to imagine there was nothing he could not do as a bishop, he was right to recognize that there was nothing God did not care about, did not own as his. This is what it means to be catholic. It’s not simply to care about the formal sacramental unity of the church (though that matters, and we should pursue it by all the means we can). It’s to affirm the catholicon, the wholeness of all things, how everything is knit together and gathered up in the Christ who is Lord of all. “All that is in the heavens and on the earth is yours; yours is the kingdom O Lord, and you are exalted as head over all. And now our God, we give thanks and praise your glorious name.” Wilfrid would say a heartfelt amen to that. As we do on this festival day.

St Andrew’s, Corbridge, 13 October 2019

1 Chronicles 29.6-19, Ephesians 2.19-22, John 2.13-22 

Saints on the Borderlands

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

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

Why do I suggest that? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holy Week in Hymns 5: "Praise to the Holiest in the height"

Tonight’s hymn is one of the best-known and best-loved in the English language. It’s by John Henry Newman whose long life stretched across almost the whole of the nineteenth century. He was a brilliant Church of England priest who, with John Keble and Edmund Bouverie Pusey played a formative part in the Oxford Movement that was launched in 1833. They were called Tractarians because they published their ideas in a series of ninety tracts which, circulated, read and discussed in every corner of the land, you could think of the equivalent of social media today.

The Tracts called for the return of the Church of England to the historic catholic Anglican position that stood “’gainst popery and dissent”. They believed these ideals had been upheld by the Christian fathers and by those we now call the high churchmen of the 17^th century in England. To them, both medieval catholicism and Reformation protestantism had departed from an ideal of Christian faith and life that the church urgently needed to rediscover. The Oxford Movement only lasted a dozen years in its original flowering. By the 1840s Newman was coming to the conclusion that the Church of England could never have the marks of what he held to be a truly catholic church. In 1845 he was received into the Church of Rome. He died as Cardinal Newman in 1890.

Praise to the Holiest is one of three familiar hymns by Newman, along with the endearing “Lead, kindly Light” written when he was still an Anglican, and “Firmly I believe, and truly” from the same source as tonight's hymn. That source is the celebrated poem Newman wrote in the 1860s, The Dream of Gerontius. The name, at least, will be familiar to many of you from Edward Elgar’s musical setting of it. It depicts the journey of a soul, an idea that at once gives it universal significance, for Gerontius, the dying man, is any of us and all of us. Memento mori, he is saying: remember you must die. None of us is exempt. As Jesus had to face death, so must we. Try not to be afraid of it. Learn what it means to die as a Christian. Let the example of Jesus on the cross inspire, comfort and sustain you.

The name Gerontius simply tells us that he is old: he has lived long and seen much. But age isn’t the point here: he stands for all of us. The Dream of Gerontius imagines his last journey. We meet him on his death bed praying to Jesus and Mary and being prayed for by his friends. Once he has died, his soul awakens to meet his guardian angel who will be with him on the path that lies before him. This takes him through the judgment court where the demons are assembling to “gather souls for hell”. But the hellish cacophony is dispelled by the choirs of angelicals whose unceasing praise of God Gerontius will one day join in. But not yet, not before he has been presented at the very throne of God. “Take me away” he cries, not because the vision isn’t unutterably beautiful, but because the holiness of God is too much for him. It is like looking into the sun. Overwhelmed, he realises that he is not yet ready for the beatific vision. So, filled with love for God, he is led gently into purgatory where God’s work of grace will be completed, so that when the time has come, his angel can return and lead him into heaven. “Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here, and I will come and wake thee on the morrow.”

Praise to the Holiest is the hymn of praise sung by the angelicals as Gerontius nears the throne of God. And when you realise this, you see how beautifully it belongs in its context. For its theme is redemption through suffering, the pain that the dying man went through in his lifetime, and the coming pain his soul must courageously endure as it is perfected and made ready for his meeting with his holy God. But its focus is not Gerontius, not any of us mortals. Its gaze is firmly set on the crucified Christ who has both come to our rescue and has shown us in his example what it means to suffer for love’s sake, for the sake of the Almighty, the Wise and Loving God, the Holiest in the height.

The opening stanza captures the height and depth of God’s concerns: there must be praise not only to the Holiest in the height, but also in the depth be praise. This is because God’s words and works have demonstrated that he is both marvellous and trustworthy: In all his words most wonderful, Most sure in all his ways.

Newman goes on by pointing to where these words most wonderful and ways most sure are seen in their fulness. It is, he says, out of the loving wisdom of our God. In most of our passion hymns it’s God’s mercy and kindness that are emphasised. At this point in Newman’s hymn it is loving wisdom. That phrase says to me that the redemption of the world was the choice of a God who needed to put right a disordered world, restore what was lost at the beginning when a noble, beautiful creation was corrupted and broken by sin and shame. And so he sent a Redeemer to rescue the human race. Here we are close to last night’s Bishop Fortunatus and the heroic rescue that the Son of God has brought about. For he, the second Adam has come as flesh and blood to struggle with the adversary who caused that same flesh and blood to fail in Adam and his children. But now, in Jesus, flesh and blood should strive and should prevail -should, and can, and has done. So the word prevail hangs in the air at the end of the verse as if to say, here is a prevailing that will last for ever. You can trust it, for this second Adam will never fail, will never let you down.

The next verse explains why. Newman speaks about a higher gift than grace given to refine, to cleanse and purify our soiled flesh and blood. What is that gift? God’s presence and his very self, and essence all divine. This is often taken to mean the gift of the Holy Sacrament, the everlasting sign of God’s presence here among us. I prefer to think of it as referring to the Incarnation, for the coming of Jesus imparts to our world nothing less than God’s very self, all that he is, all that he can ever be, now among us as flesh and blood to be broken, to be poured out for all humanity. What higher gift of grace could there be than the full incarnate reality that grace points to? This holy sacrament is precisely the divine gift for all of time that opens us up once more to the presence of the one who is the true Sacrament of God’s presence and his very self, the very Word incarnate.  

It’s the next two stanzas that point to what this higher gift than grace. They look back to the story of the Passion and make explicit what Newman had meant when he spoke about the second Adam coming to strive afresh against the foe. There, it was O wisest love! That is, I think, the resolve, the decision God has made to rescue lost humanity. But now it becomes O generous love! And this tells us what it was that prompted that decision. Grace, as theology understands it, is the choice God makes to act mercifully and kindly towards us, not holding our sins against us but seeing us as we are in Christ.

And, says the hymn, generous love entails that the second Adam, this immortal Man, can prevail only by being smitten himself, undergoing in his own self for mortals what every mortal knows he or she must undergo: this double agony of body and soul that The Dream of Gerontius lays bare so movingly. And like the height and the depth in the opening lines, Jesus models what it means to lay down his life, to suffer and to die in this heroic drama of redemption: And in the garden secretly, and on the Cross on high. In the secret agony of Gethsemane, Jesus prays that the cup may pass from him. It does not. He was born for this destiny. The Son of Man must suffer many things, says the gospel. And so, alone because his disciples have abandoned him, he goes out to Golgotha, to be nailed on the Cross on high.

But the hymn has one further insight to help us make sense of the Passion. What the crucified Lord does, says Newman, is to teach his brethren, and inspire to suffer and to die. Here is the poet taking up another aspect of the cross which is this. When you have recognised how God’s grace has reached out to you at such cost, when you have seen what kind of conflict it took to ransom and reconcile you and make you the human being you were destined to be, ponder the example and live it out yourself.

So Newman ends by inviting us to contemplate the example of Jesus on the cross. Given the setting in Gerontius, he is certainly telling us what makes for “holy dying” as the seventeenth century Bishop Jeremy Taylor put it. To die well is to accept the reality of death, prepare for it, focus on faith, hope and love, go thankfully and gently into that good night if we can. But to die well can have a redemptive effect on other people. I think Newman is telling us that we can be inspired to live, to suffer and to die as friends and companions to God and our fellow human beings, to be at peace with them, to be in a state of love like Jesus loved who, says the gospel, loved us to the end. Our own good deaths can be a gift to those who love us, just as Jesus’s has been.

It seems to me that two New Testament sayings are enfolded in these lines of Newman’s hymn. Jesus says that greater love means to lay down our lives “for our friends”. He also says that that to serve means imitating him who gave up his life “as a ransom for many”. Don’t these embody the redemptive power of goodness in the world when ordinary men and women like us want to try to make a difference to the lives of others? In such ways, in the strength God gives us when we most need it, we participate in striving afresh against the foe. We strive and we prevail, because of the double agony Jesus underwent for us - and because he prevailed. We are “more than conquerors through him who loved us.”

And in the paschal song of triumph we sing in this Great Week of our salvation, this marvellous hymn gives us the words to celebrate this wisest love, this generous love that brought into our very midst God’s presence and his very self. With the angels we praise the Holy One in the height and depth of creation and in the length and breadth of the story of our redemption: in all his words most wonderful, most sure in all his ways!

Wakefield Cathedral, Wednesday in Holy Week 2017

 

********

Praise to the Holiest in the height,
and in the depth be praise;
in all his words most wonderful,
most sure in all his ways!

O loving wisdom of our God!
When all was sin and shame,
a second Adam to the fight
and to the rescue came.

O wisest love! that flesh and blood,
which did in Adam fail,
should strive afresh against the foe,
should strive, and should prevail;

and that the highest gift of grace
should flesh and blood refine:
God's presence and his very self,
and essence all-divine.

O generous love! that he who smote
in man for man the foe,
the double agony in Man
for man should undergo.

And in the garden secretly,
and on the cross on high,
should teach his brethren, and inspire
to suffer and to die.

Praise to the Holiest in the height,
and in the depth be praise;
in all his words most wonderful,
most sure in all his ways!

John Henry Newman, 1801-1890

 

 

Durham Cathedral: Foundation Sermon

On 11 August 1093, a momentous event took place here on this peninsula. On that day the foundation stone of this Cathedral was laid amid much pomp and ceremony and in the presence of royalty. We are celebrating it at services today, the Sunday nearest.

It was a watershed spiritually, historically, politically and architecturally. As we know, we have the Norman bishop William of Saint-Calais to thank for it. It was he who embarked on the enormous project of replacing the Saxon ‘white’ church with a great new cathedral in the Romanesque style that by the late 11th century had become familiar across France and after the Norman Conquest, England too. No doubt he was motivated by many aspirations. We can take it that he wished to build to the glory of God. But he also wanted to honour St Cuthbert, whom the Normans adopted as the North’s patron saint not least to win the Saxons’ allegiance. Then he intended to express visibly the ideal of the great monastic church of a religious community following the introduction of Benedictine monks to Durham a decade earlier. Finally, and perhaps not least, because human motivation always comes into things, he wanted to build big and grand to demonstrate that the Normans now held power in the land, and to signal to Saxons and Scots alike that this peninsula was the seat not only of spiritual but of secular authority.

William of Saint-Calais did not live to see his cathedral finished, nor even the placing (or ‘translation’) of Cuthbert’s body into its final resting place behind the high altar when the shrine had been completed in 1104. But I always tread lightly near his grave in the Chapter House: the monks had wanted to bury him near Cuthbert but he insisted that he was not worthy of it. (When my wife and I went to Saint-Calais, a little town in the Loire region of France, we found an elderly woman cleaning the church and asked about the great Norman bishop of Durham who was baptised there. She had never heard of him, and realising that we were Anglais, told us that we had evidently confused Saint-Calais with the better known ferry-port just across the Channel.)

You do not need me to tell you what we owe to him. This Cathedral is consistently regarded Britain’s best-loved building and praised as a masterpiece the world over. That is a tribute to his vision and his eye for architecture. If you wanted to imagine a church that would be an embodiment of the Benedictine virtues of stability, balance and the beauty of good order, you would not do better than Durham. Here is a building to lift the spirits, point you to the skies, drive you to your knees, enlarge the imagination, guide you to contemplate the vision of God and dream about a world in which his will is done on earth as in heaven. But it is also a building that affirms our humanity, holds us in a safe place, protects us from threat, a church that doesn’t crush us with its awesomeness but upholds our human dignity, makes us feel honoured and valued. The laying of the foundation stone in 1093 inaugurated an era that despite the changes and chances of centuries, still goes on in our day, drawing admirers, guests and pilgrims in their millions. We who worship here, live here, volunteer here, work here are privileged to be a part of this history of a place of awesome majesty and beauty.

But the word ‘foundation’ is perhaps misleading. For what took place in 1093 was not of course the founding of the Cathedral itself. That had existed on this site since the Saxon community of St Cuthbert with their bishop, the relics of their saints and the Lindisfarne Gospel Book arrived here at the end of their long journey round the north a century earlier and recognised that this was where the body of their saint would lie. Their cathedral had been lovingly built around Cuthbert’s shrine. No doubt those who had known it shed tears when they saw it being torn down, just as some of the Jews returning from exile wept at the dedication of the new temple because they had not forgotten the old. So when we speak the language of ‘foundation’, we should not forget an earlier history so deeply embedded in the founding story of this place: how (says a later legend) the community were first guided on to this peninsula by a lost dun-cow and the milkmaids looking for her. This ‘foundation’ of 995 is important too, for it marked the transition from being a wandering community of Lindisfarne exiles to establishing themselves as settled in one place, like the Hebrews entering into the promised land. It was another threshold that needed to be crossed with awareness of untested demands of a new, unknown environment.

But even this is not all we need to say today. If you look at the list of Bishops of Durham in Crockford’s Clerical Directory, you will see that it begins, not with the Saxon bishops who arrived here in the 10th century, nor the Normans who succeeded them. It begins with the See of Lindisfarne founded by St Aidan himself at the instigation of King Oswald in 635. St Oswald’s head is interred in the shrine along with Cuthbert, and we celebrated his feast last Tuesday with a procession to the feretory in which we remembered how he was the founder of the mission to Christianise Northumbria. So the true foundation of the See of Durham and its Cathedral lies not here at all but 80 miles to the north, on the Holy Island where Aidan first gathered around him as bishop a community of prayer, study, evangelisation and the service of the poor. This is where the story of our Cathedral begins. This is where the word ‘foundation’ ultimately points.

It matters that we are accurate about our history: the monks of Durham were always clear that as the shrine of St Cuthbert, this Cathedral looked back across an honoured era of Christian life and witness that preceded the Durham years by centuries. It also matters that we recognise that this cathedral has been through many different incarnations and they are all part of the story of our ‘foundation’. You could say that the Lindisfarne era was our apostolic age when saints like Aidan and Cuthbert, Hild and Bede, Wilfred, Chad and Cedd walked the landscapes of Northumbria and bore witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ with such power. You could also say that what followed it was just as significant: the century of exile after the Vikings had driven us from our Holy Island and forced us to travel around the north ending up at Chester-le-Street where the Cathedral was resident for more than a century. We learned through that experience to be a roving cathedral, a community that was discovering how to travel light, adjust to ever-changing circumstances, realise that there is something deeply ingrained in Christian faith about being readily responsive to God’s call. There is something attractive to me about being a Cathedral on the move. In a metaphorical and spiritual sense, this is how we must always be as we are led by God into futures that glow with possibility and promise. ‘To live is to change; to live long is to have changed much’ said John Henry Newman.

So ‘foundation’ is not finally about great stones and magnificent buildings. The fabric of a sacred space is there to demonstrate the deeper truth of our New Testament lesson. St Peter refers to ‘living stones’, people like us from St Oswald and St Aidan to the present day whose life in this community is founded upon Christ the Living Stone. And he says, while we are aliens and exiles like our Hebrew forebears, nevertheless we carry the mark of Jesus’ cross and resurrection and are always ready to give a reason for the hope that is within us. That is why Durham Cathedral is here. And that is why it is good to celebrate its foundation today.

Durham Cathedral, 10 August 2014 (1 Peter 2.1-12)