Every Family: a baptism sermon

Today we baptise Evelyn Eleanor Mary. It’s a day of happiness for all who love her. For them, for all of us, she is and always will be, a gift beyond price.

There’s a big word for today in our first reading from Ephesians. The author speaks about ‘the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name’. In the original, it’s ‘every fatherhood in heaven and on earth’, every patria. It’s what Horace said it was right and proper to die for, pro patria mori. ‘That great lie’ exclaimed Wilfred Owen in his famous war poem, meaning not that you wouldn’t lay down your life for your friends, those you love, but the narrowing of patria to mean no more than your national tribe. So what does Ephesians mean by this patria that takes its name from the Father?

I think we can allow it to include our human families, those communities of love and goodness where we first glimpse how the kingdom of God becomes real and tangible to us. But I doubt whether the author has the modern western nuclear family in mind. Much more likely it means the extended family of kinship and affinity into which our infants are conceived and born, and over the years are drawn into ever larger circles of human nurture and care. All this is patria because its loving shape and character reflect nothing less than God’s own infinite love and care for all his creatures.

But in Ephesians, the word takes on a far broader aspect. If we read on it becomes clear what the author is getting at. He prays that ‘you may be strengthened with power through his Spirit, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you may know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge’.  It’s true that this is our longing and our prayer for every human association and society. But there is one community that the author has particularly in mind, and that is the church of God, whose flourishing and blessing is the great theme of this epistle.

Baptism is Christening, en-Christ-ing, incorporating a human being into the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. (Why do people take against that beautiful word Christening?) In baptism, we die to the old life and are born again to the new, ‘by water and the Spirit’ as St John says. Evelyn’s baptismal names are not just forenames or first names. They are her Christian names imparted in this holy sacrament. As the old Prayer Book catechism reminds us, every time we are asked ‘What is your name’ we recall our baptism when our names were given. And because we the church are the community of the baptised, we should rejoice to speak to one another by our baptismal names. I may be Mr Dean in the formality of a Chapter meeting, but my God-given name is Michael and it’s how I want to be known.

And this is the family Ephesians has in mind, the patria that takes its name from God. The author isn’t thinking of a cathedral or even a parish church. He has in mind the household Christian communities that met in Ephesus and in every great city of antiquity, each of them a ‘family’ beloved by God. In the New Testament, every such family is part of a worldwide household, united in Jesus as his body dispersed across the world.

Evie’s baptism is at one level such an intimate act. What could be more tender than parents presenting an infant at the font, just as Joseph and Mary presented their Child in the temple so that Simeon could take him up in his arms and bless him? But at the same time, baptism is something global. Today, Evie becomes a member of a universal family, a catholic community of believers that is not limited by the constraints of city or tribe or nation. In an age when angry nationalisms and bitter tribal dogmas threaten the peace and wellbeing of our entire planet, the church remains one of the few worldwide that transcends nationhood and all the other limits we place on our belonging. The universal church stretches the narrow boundaries of our perspective and imagines a humanity that is reconciled with itself and at peace. There is no such thing as a national church, only a catholic church that is the sign of a new humanity. The Christian denominations and territorially organised churches are expressions of this in particular places and times. But baptism points to the largest and most noble vision of humanity and summons each of us to play our part in building it. This is Evie’s vocation as a citizen of earth and of the church of God.

There is more. The phrase ‘every family in heaven and on earth’ suggests to me that the author has the departed as much in mind as the living, for to God, all are forever alive through Jesus’ resurrection. Each local family takes its name from a family that transcends all the boundaries of time and space. So once again, the consequences of baptism are momentous. Today, by participating in the resurrection life of Jesus, Evelyn becomes a member of a community that inhabits eternity, ‘that multitude which no-one can number’ says the Book of Revelation. She is marked with the sign of the cross, not only the symbol of obedience and suffering, but also of a kingdom that is coming, nothing less than a new heaven and a new earth.

This is the faith we confess with her in this service. It’s the Apostles’ Creed we use at baptism, but had we sung the Nicene Creed as we usually do at this service we would not only affirm our faith in ‘one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’ but would also acknowledge ‘one baptism for the remission of sins’ and ‘look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come’. These clauses are inseparable. They tell us what family Evie is baptised into this morning. They remind us, as John Cosin’s huge canopy above the Cathedral font does, that baptism is a truly momentous event in the life of a human being. Nothing greater can ever happen to Evie until the day she dies. For today she inherits all that is worth possessing as she takes on the faith of this heavenly and worldwide family, this patria that bears the very name of God, her Father and our Father.  All things are hers, ‘whether the world or life or death or the present or the future’: all belong to her; and she ‘belongs to Christ, and Christ belongs to God.’

What better prayer could we make for her today than the words of the Ephesian letter: that she ‘may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,’ that she ‘may be filled with all the fullness of God.’  It’s our prayer for all of us on this happy day, and all our lives.

Durham Cathedral 26 July 2015
At the Baptism of Evelyn Eleanor Mary Crawford
Ephesians 3.14-21

St Paul: a tribute

Today, the 25 January, we celebrate the conversion of St Paul.  Caravaggio painted the scene and caught its sound and fury.  Paul is spread eagled on the ground, as if toppled by a seismic cataclysm, staring upwards out of his blinded eyes.  Above him rears a vast horse, rider-less, the one he has just fallen from.  Somehow that enormous horse overshadowing the man symbolises the immensity of what has trampled on his world, like the stage play Equus for the 1^st century: it’s as if only heaven itself can tame Saul’s huge animal energies.  Caravaggio’s biographer Helen Langdon says of this painting, ‘with its jagged shapes and irrational light which licks out details for their dramatic impact, it creates a sense of crisis and dislocation [in which] Christ disrupts the mundane world’. Such a man, if he ever recovered from this epiphany, would not be a comfortable conversation-partner or bed-fellow.  ‘Great men are meteors that consume themselves to light the earth’ said Thomas Hardy.  Struck by a thunderbolt from Jesus, Saul of Tarsus had no choice but to become one himself. 

 

Perhaps I was over-exposed to Paul in adolescence.  The Christianity that retrieved me from my lazy teenage agnosticism was thoroughly Pauline – or thought it was.  Paul was regarded as the early church’s theological organiser who laid down the definitive systematic template over the New Testament.  If you wanted to know what Christianity taught about sin, grace, atonement, faith, money, sex or power, you went first to Paul.  There is a logic to this, though not the one I was taught.  It is that the earliest documents of the New Testament are not the four gospels but Paul’s letters.  There is a case for reading the New Testament in the order in which it was written, overhearing how the early church evolved over the first two generations.  But this was not how I learned Paul.  To us students the Bible was more like a jigsaw puzzle whose disparate texts in the Old Testament, gospels and Acts had to be sorted and fitted into their allotted places so that a coherent picture emerged.  The bits you began with, the ones with straight edges that framed the image and determined where the others would go were the Pauline pieces.  

 

If I came fresh to St Paul now, what would I make of him?  Here are three aspects of his career that would strike me as reasons to celebrate Paul’s conversion today. 

 

First, there is St Paul the evangelist.  He was one of the great travellers of the ancient world bringing the Christian gospel to the known world. You know the roll-call of places from Sunday School when you learned to trace Paul’s missionary journeys: Asia Minor, Cyprus, Crete, Greece, Malta, Rome.  He would have gone to Gaul and Spain if he could, and who knows, even to this cold, rainy far-flung corner of the Roman Empire.  It required energy and courage, for he endured all kinds of hardship and opposition.  But his real achievement lay in the sense of purpose with which he set about his travels.  He preached in the towns and cities where influence mattered, along the great trade routes that were the communication lines of his age.  He stayed long enough in each place both to make sure that people were able to absorb the message and also to ‘grow’ local indigenous Christian leaders who would settle his young churches securely.  We should learn from this.  A book written a century ago by Roland Allen, Missionary Methods – St Paul’s or Ours? would help purge us of some of the nonsense that goes by the name of evangelism.  Paul can help us establish sound principles of faith-sharing and the nurture of Christian communities even in an era so different from his. Our church plants and ‘fresh expressions’ need to pay attention to the sound mission principles St Paul worked to. They have never been bettered.

 

Then there is Paul the theologian.  One of greatest minds in antiquity, for him risk-taking was not only a matter of persecution or physical danger but also of the intellect.  Conversion was not just a matter of heart and soul and strength, but also of the mind. In the ancient world of mystery religion, pagan cults and moralism, Christianity came like those shafts of sunshine in the painting, as enlightenment, an invitation to intellectual freedom, to think in wholly new ways about God, the world and our human lives. I mean proclaiming the gospel in a way that could be heard by the cultured Greek and Roman world beyond Judea, promoting ‘intelligent’ and ‘intelligible’ Christianity, we could say.  This meant, courageously, doing away with the age-old divisions of the human race and stating unequivocally that Christ was for all humanity and all creation. The idea that the gospel embraced gentiles was deeply subversive and large parts of the New Testament show how fiercely it was contested.  Paul’s greatness lies in that he understood how Christianity is truly universal.  The grace of God through faith in Christ is offered without condition to all people, whatever their race, gender, status or culture.  This lies at the heart of his truly radical vision of the church – and Paul is the New Testament’s great theologian of the church.  Our unity in Christ underlies this Week of Prayer for Christian unity. 

 

And thirdly, there is Paul the writer.  The letters of Paul are among the most cherished pieces of writing from the first days of the Church: 1 Thessalonians is probably the earliest New Testament document of all.  The Letters to the Romans and Galatians, setting out the meaning of faith in Christ; the Letters to the Corinthians cajoling a wayward church into living together as a community, the Letter to the Philippians with Paul’s acknowledgment of what the Christian journey has meant to him personally – what would the New Testament be without them?  These are remarkable documents with their skilful blend of theology, spiritual insight, pastoral sensitivity, honesty, humour (yes! or at least heavy irony), passion and well-grounded common sense.  They give us an unrivalled picture of the life of the early church and, as I have said, suggest principles by which we may order our own lives and that of our churches.  How impoverished we would be without these beautiful letters. In them, we hear the early church celebrating the joys and wrestling with the struggles of living together in these small fragile human communities that the gospel had given birth to. They are like a mirror held up to us as we try to live authentic Christian lives today. What we see is our own selves, in the complexity and mess of our unredeemed state, but also in the beauty of lives that Jesus Christ has touched and re-fashioned through his grace. We hear Paul challenging us to look at how we understand what it means to be human, inviting us to judge ourselves against the virtues that are his touchstone of authentic Christianity as he lists them in one of his letters: faith, hope and love.  

 

What do we do with St Paul today?  We need to recognise that he lived in his own times and spoke to his own contemporaries in the places he wrote to. But that voice from a distant past speaks eloquently into the present, our present. We should learn from the way he set about the vocation to Christian life that without warning confronted him on the Damascus Road, knocked him off that horse, pinned him to the ground, shut his eyes to the pain and persecution he had instigated and opened them to the gospel life that would shape his life from that day onward and launch him his extraordinary career as an apostle.  If only we could be as courageous and hope-filled! 

 

And our vision of the church should not be less universal than his, embracing people of all races, cultures and backgrounds. Today marks the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. I do not myself think that trying to achieve a structural convergence between the historic denominations is at the heart of this nowadays, though we should welcome it when it happens. I think we are far better at recognising the heritage each of our Christian traditions brings to the whole church as gifts to enrich it. What is harder is to create churches that are genuinely united communities of faith and hope and love. When St Paul writes in the Letter to the Galatians, that passionate, powerful statement of the non-negotiable values that lie at the heart of his gospel, he says: that in Christ there is neither male nor female, Jew nor gentile, slave nor free, but we are all one in Christ Jesus. My own community of Anglicans in this country has only just got round to opening up an equal space for women alongside men in the senior leadership of the Church of England, though it has been on this journey for the entire 40 years of my ministry. You were there decades before us; others are not even close to it. 

 

And that is only one of his criteria for a genuinely inclusive community of faith. We can add to his some of our own which are surely in the spirit of his letter: young and old, gay and straight, wealthy and disadvantaged, indigenous and incomer, conservative and liberal…. You see what a mountain we still have to climb. But it matters. It matters hugely. The human family is as bitterly divided in our day as it has ever been. We are in despair about the cruelties and hatreds inflicted by one group of human beings on another, and it is always the weak, the voiceless, those with no power or influence who are the victims. Radicalised Islamists behind massacres in Pakistan, Nigeria and Paris are in all our minds; yet they are only the latest symptoms of the cancers that eat away at the human soul. On Holocaust Memorial Day this week, we shall keep the memory of genocide alive and hold its victims in our prayers. In the light of man’s inhumanity to men, it is vital that we create communities of openness and trust, of friendship and care, communities that work away at the patient task of healing us of these fatal diseases.  This is the vision that lies behind the way St Paul speaks about the church. For him it’s a new creation, a new humanity in Christ, his cherished body, a place of reconciliation and wholeness and peace. Because of this, the church is something beautiful, good and even glorious. 

 

It will be costly to bear witness to the gospel as he did, having the courage to do away with discrimination and division; being communities of graciousness and generosity that show the love of God poured into our hearts.  But this is how we shall become churches of whom Paul would say, as he does in his letters, that he gives thanks constantly for us, rejoices in our faithfulness and bears us on his heart.  And in that, flawed yet always mighty, his heart will have spoken to ours. 

 

Waddington Street United Reformed Church, Durham

25 January 2015

For the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul

Acts 9.1-22

On the Next Bishop of Durham

Tomorrow is St John the Baptist’s Day, the forerunner of Jesus. He did not know the name of the one who would be revealed as the saviour of the world.  But he was to look for the man ‘on whom you see the Spirit descend’.  This is what he recognised in Jesus. He spoke of him as the promised Lamb of God and people began to follow him.  They called him Rabbi, ‘teacher’.  St John the Evangelist who tells us this seems to be saying that four things mark Jesus out: his spiritual charism, his sacrificial vocation, his teaching, and his insight into human nature.  Four marks of messiahship.
 
And perhaps they are four marks of leadership in the church in any age, although we do not look for or need little messiahs. Next Saturday we shall ordain new priests here at the Cathedral. So what do we look for in the church’s leadership as we pray for them?  We also await the announcement of our next bishop.  The Commission which recommends the appointment has finished its work. We can expect a name within a few weeks. Whoever he will be (and I wish I could say that it might be a ‘she’), we have been praying for him long before he himself has realised that this is his destiny. But perhaps it will help our prayers if we think about those qualities John the Baptist saw in the Christ who was to come.  What kind of person should occupy the See of Cuthbert? What kind of men and women does the church need in its priests? Obviously, people who put the imitation of Christ above all, who will do what Jesus tells the healed demoniac in our gospel reading: tell everyone what great things God has done.
 
I don’t suppose our new bishop needs me to tell him what bishopping is about. But it may help us as we prepare to welcome him, we hope this time for a period of many years, to think about these marks of anointing that a spiritual leader should emulate.
 
First, charism.  ‘The one on whom you see the Spirit descend and rest.’  It goes without saying that we need a man of prayer, reflection and inwardness, whose vision is shaped by a deeply nurtured relationship with God.  Yet it needs affirming that this is fundamental to spiritual leadership.  There are plenty of good theologians, people who are well read, tough, financially shrewd, articulate, kind and caring, expert strategists, and passionate for justice.  These qualities are all important in a bishop.  But like patriotism, they are not enough.  What is remembered in great church leaders is the charism of spiritual wisdom born of a deep and rich inward life.  I wonder if it is becoming harder for senior appointments in the church to be made with regard to this sine qua non. We don’t know if the next bishop will be a well-known figure with a large following, or whether he comes to us as one unknown, not yet burdened by high office.  Whichever it is, we pray for this charism in him, for under the constant scrutiny of public gaze, only the Spirit of God will set his priorities in order, stop him from thinking of himself more highly than he ought to think, save him from burning out.  Only the Spirit will be his safeguard against the cult of celebrity that bedevils public life today. Only the Spirit can save him from himself. And this goes for priests too.
 
Secondly, vocation. John says: ‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.’  There is a kind of dying to oneself in leadership that is part of its vocation.  Priests and bishops know what it costs to bear public office in the church.  Sydney Smith, that sharpest of clerical wits two centuries ago, said that what bishops loved most about their role was a dropping-down deadness of manner in other people because bishops had favours to bestow.  I hope we shall have a bishop who is free of the need to receive deference or to give it. The truth about a privileged position is to that it can often mean being laid on the altar of relentless demand.  The new bishop will need to see through the glamour of the job to be a servant of the servants of God.  He will need to model to an often demoralised and discouraged church the real nature of vocation, how it is self-offering for the building up of Christ’s body and the service of the world.  He will be blamed for many of the church’s ills: its decline both in numbers and influence, its waning finances, its fragile morale. It would be unfair to blame anyone personally for these realities whose causes are complex and not always well-understood.  But leaders often find themselves cast into the role of sacrificial victims.  That requires patience and humility when a bishop’s leadership is strange and baffling to some, and marginal to almost everyone else. A strong sense of calling is necessary.  
 
Thirdly, what I want to call  intelligence. When Jesus comes, he puts a question to those waiting for him: ‘What are you looking for?’  They say to him, Rabbi which means teacher.’  I don’t hesitate to say that the next bishop must be a good rabbi, literally in Hebrew a ‘great one’, like a guru, literally a ‘heavy one’, or as we might say, someone with gravitas. This means he must be a good theologian, that is, someone who constantly asks the question: how do we speak of God in the modern era?  How do we read the signs of his presence and activity?  What account do we give of Christian faith in a complex world of many faiths and meanings, and in particular, this secularised western society of ours?  What does God want for North East England and for this diocese? How can religion be offered as a credible and attractive path for scientists, philosophers, economists, historians, artists, politicians, thinking people in all walks of life?  It seems to me that these are inescapable tasks for a bishop today, and no less importantly, for priests in parishes too.  How the church engages in apologetics and evangelism in this climate will have far-reaching consequences for the intellectual survival of Christianity as public faith in this century.  Our leaders need finely nurtured Christian minds, be immersed in the Bible and Christian tradition yet also wear their learning lightly.  There must be simplicity in their depth.  That calls for real religious intelligence. It’s what it means to be a rabbi. 
 
Finally, insight.  St John says that one of Jesus’ first acts is to look at Simon and say, You are to be called Cephas: Peter, the Rock. Later in the gospel he records that Jesus ‘knew what was in the heart of everyone’. The gifts of insight, perceptiveness, discernment cannot be overrated in public life.  A bishop has to move among the great and powerful of the land without losing his integrity.  He sits at the apex of a complex, disparate institution and has to understand why it is what it is.  At times he must speak for a wider public, even the nation, if not in Durham, then in the House of Lords.  He will face difficult issues to do with the future of the establishment, relations with other faith communities, women bishops, gay marriage and human sexuality where he must hold the ring amid fractious disputes.  More intractably, he will be a senior public representative of religion at a time when many people see no place for faith, as I’ve said.  He will not be able to arrest the devastating slide in church attendance, but he may perhaps help the church not to despair.  He needs to be a ‘dealer in hope’ as Napoleon said about leaders. He will need to be a shrewd politician, know the art of the possible, temper vision with reality.  But he will also need not to be afraid of change, of taking risks, of thinking the unthinkable, of being a prophet for our times. And more intimately, he will need to have insight into the daily lives of parish clergy and the communities they serve, and this of course is the special task of our parish priests. To do this pastoral task priests and bishops must listen carefully to many disparate voices, be present to them, commit themselves to them without reserve. 
 
‘Who is sufficient for these things?’ asks Paul in one of his letters.  Who is sufficient to lead the church in telling what God has done, becoming the kind of society he speaks about in today’s epistle, living the transforming and transformed life where there is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus. It is an impossible job, of course. Anyone offered it would surely respond instantly by saying, as bishops of old used to when they were dragged off to be consecrated, nolo episcopari:: I do not want this. Only a fool would want it.  But to be a fool for Christ is also at the core of the job-description.  For our next bishop, and for our new priests, this may be food for thought and prayer in the days that lie ahead.
 
23 June 2013 (Trinity IV, the day before St John Baptist's Day)
Galatians 3.23-end; Luke 8.26-39
 

 

FIRE AT WHITSUN

Note: this sermon draws extensively on T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘Little Gidding’. However, copyright permission is needed to cite the 22 lines of poetry that are integral to this sermon (I am seeking it from the publishers, Faber & Faber, who I hope, given that this is a liturgical sermon, will agree to my including them without charge). You will therefore need a copy of the poem by you to make the best sense of this address. The omissions are indicated by ellipses (…).

If you come this way…

May is a white time in T. S. Eliot’s poem from the Four Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’.  His welcome to the whiteness of spring time draws on the memory of snow and the longing for release from winter’s captivity. This leads him to reflect on the four elements, earth, air, water and fire. It is the last, fire, the primal and ultimate element that is the theme of this great poem.

It was prompted by the searing experience of the Luftwaffe raids on London whose hellish wild fires costing so much in human life and property he saw as a symbol of sin and destructiveness. But as he scans the Christian memory for other fiery associations, he begins to enlarge his understanding. There is the fire of purgation that leads to repentance and a new vision of life that purifies humanity of base corruption and its propensity to embrace evil. And there is the fire of healing and redemption, the Pentecostal fire that renews and makes it possible for life to begin again. But the human race must choose between the fire of the Holy Spirit or Dante’s inferno which the bombing of London symbolises. It is the choice between being redeemed or being destroyed. God, says the poem, invites humanity to be redeemed, consumed by the fire of love and escape the living hell through purgation by the ordeal of fire. As Eliot says in the famous fourth stanza:

The dove descending…

The story of Whitsun in the Acts of the Apostles is rich in themes. One of them is how it marks the passage of time. In one way it is the end of an epoch: the last day of the Passover season when the firstfruits of God’s harvest were gathered up and offered (in the Jewish calendar, the Feast of Weeks celebrated the first cutting of wheat). Hence the apocalyptic imagery in Peter’s Pentecost speech about the sun being darkened and the moon turned to blood, familiar language about the last days which in Joel’s prophecy are linked to the outpouring of the Spirit upon all flesh. But in another way, today marks the beginning of a new epoch. In Luke’s story, so carefully constructed around the times and seasons of the year, it is placed not at the end of his gospel, part 1, but at the beginning of his part 2, the Book of Acts. He believes that Pentecost marks the birthday of the church, the inauguration of its mission to bring salvation to the world. So the tongues of fire that hovered over the apostles symbolise the launch of the acts of the Holy Spirit, the era in which Luke lived and we his readers still live.

But with fire, you can’t separate ends from beginnings. The very destructiveness of fire is also a purgation that leads to a new start. Many of the world’s primitive creation myths begin with fire: Prometheus who stole fire from the gods is but one. Eliot’s poem speaks about beginnings and endings, and how they merge in our experience of them:

 

What we call the beginning…

And this I think is at the heart of what Pentecost should mean for us as we celebrate it today. Eliot called his poem ‘Little Gidding’. This was the place where in the 17^th century a small Anglican community was founded by Nicholas Ferrar. His wish was to live with his family in simplicity, inspired by the spirituality of the Book of Common Prayer. The liturgy would be offered in the high church tradition espoused by King Charles I and the so-called Caroline divines, like our own John Cosin, Canon of Durham at this time, author of the Pentecost hymn we shall sing shortly: ‘Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire’.  The turbulent times of the English civil war seemed to Eliot to echo the London blitz and to underline how humanity’s flawed understanding of life and turning away from God leads to the relentless cycle of warfare. So this small community living a common life of Christian prayer and service symbolised how the human race needed to repair itself, to purify its vision of life if it was to survive.  This meant understanding an ambivalent, conflicted, shameful past and embracing a renewed, God-given present and future. All this will be in the name of the ‘broken King’ whose coming is our healing and whose just and gentle rule, lived out through the Holy Spirit, is our salvation and our joy.

I see the church as just such a community. Our church in the west is not grand and powerful anymore, not visibly triumphant or successful if the recent statistics on membership are anything to go by. It is small, and fragile, and declining, and vulnerable.  Yet it is not the less beautiful for that, and no less beloved. Faithful unto death, its beauty is of the Spirit whose fiery presence purges it of what is corrupt, heals its sicknesses, repairs its breaches and mends its brokenness. She animates it to become inflamed, impassioned with all the energies of God at work in our world. Its mission is what it always was in the Acts of the Apostles and throughout Christian history: to bear witness to a God whose love declares that ‘all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well’ (Eliot twice quotes Mother Julian of Norwich’s great saying in his poem.)  For then, enlightened with Cosin’s celestial fire, and in that ‘condition of complete simplicity….’, the fiery tongues will be in-folded

                                    Into the crowned knot …

Durham Cathedral, Whit Sunday 2013

Acts 2