The Good-Enough Parent: a sermon on Mothering Sunday

I find the parable of the Prodigal Son the most beautiful and the most moving in the gospels, this story of the wayward child in a far country making the long journey home and his father running to meet him. I once wrote a book about the “lost children” of the Bible. I found it hard to get my mind round these painful stories of children who had died, been betrayed, murdered, abused, exiled, neglected - or who had taken themselves off to some distant place like the Prodigal. The faces of my own children kept coming into my mind, and what it would be like to lose them. It would be unbearable. And as we approach Passiontide, we imagine that God must have felt that way as he watched his Son taken away to die. God who is both our father and our mother, as the medieval writer Julian of Norwich said. “Can a mother forget the child she bore?” asks the prophet.

But on this Mothering Sunday, we’re bound to ask a question of our gospel reading.  All these men – the two sons and their father: where is the woman in this story – the wife, the mother, the homemaker?  Is she present but assumed, the silent onlooker to this drama being played out among the men in her life?  Or is she absent – dead maybe, or like the perfect wife in the Book of Proverbs, away on business, or, a darker possibility perhaps, in a far country of her own?

There are so many layers to this story.  It is about the father who waits for his son to return and runs to meet him when he glimpses him far off.  It is about the son who realises that he must begin again, and makes the long, difficult journey towards his waiting father.  It is about the elder son and how he cannot find it in his heart to welcome his wayward brother home.  It is about all these things.  But I want to suggest to you that it is also about the place where all these things happen, the place that is home to all three of the characters in our story, the father and his two sons.  This home is not just the stage-set on which the human drama is acted out.  It is a participant in its own right.  For the story is supremely about homecoming.

Home is where the heart is, says the strap-line: trite, but true, for it is precisely heart calling to heart, a lost man’s heart longing for home that drives him to risk returning to his family hearth.  Heart and hearth – so close in sound, and close in meaning: we all long for somewhere to be welcomed home to, somewhere to belong, feel safe in, somewhere we are held and cherished and loved.  We mustn’t be sentimental about this. Foyer as a picture of home is not just about firesides, armchairs, comfy slippers and sipping cocoa in mugs.  Foyer is a wonderfully humane word.  It means intimacy, connection, sanctuary. It means shelter, warmth, safety, friendship, love.  But it also stands for the tough challenge of living together in community.  It is where we learn about integrity and trust, how to resolve conflict, be reconciled, forgive, how love is a matter not just of words but of will. It is the school where  we learn how to be human.

In his far country, the prodigal was free of all this.  He had no duties, no cares, no-one to please but himself.  Yet in Luke’s picture of this young man’s life, this self-indulgent isolation could never satisfy, for he was oppressed by pleasure and wealth.  He knew emptiness and despair, I think, long before he was spent, began to go hungry and subsisted beside the swine he was paid to feed.  So he began the long climb back, recognising in his heart before he could bring himself to say the words that he must turn round, return to his father, make his way home again.  And home meant re-entering this privileged yet costly place where loving and being loved are the only things that ultimately matter, where he could re-learn the first lesson of childhood, how to be held, embraced and kept safe, how to love and to give and to be happy in the intimacy of the family.

Homecoming and family mean the joy and the cost of human relationships and our life together. In the parable, the loving father proved himself to be a mother to his wayward child – not just a “good enough” parent but an excellent one. Today we remember and give thanks for those who have mothered us and loved us into life, and continue to surround us with wholesome care that far exceeds whatever we see as our duty. It’s a happy thing when our biological mothers have loved us in this way, though today can be difficult for people who know all too well the misery of conflicted family life, where a parent is not to be trusted and home is not the safe place we need it to be and where the God-given gifts of intimacy, trust and mutual service can flourish. Today is a day to give thanks for all that is lovely in family life, but also to feel for those who find themselves, even behind their own front doors, in a far country, alone, uncertain, lost.

I believe it’s the task of us all in our churches and communities as well as our families to create this sense of welcome and homecoming. Durham Cathedral, where I used to be Dean, was a Benedictine foundation in the middle ages. I learned a lot about St Benedict’s Rule for Monks, written fifteen hundred years ago but still an inspiration for all who want to be better disciples in our own times. In the Rule, it says that welcome, hospitality and care are a sacred duty.  The brothers and sisters were told to receive the stranger ‘as if they were Christ himself’, to honour and serve him in everyone who looked for a place in which to find a home in which to be cared for. So foyer isn’t an end in itself.  It is a sign of how God welcomes us home, comes running to meet us, embraces us in Christ, accepts us in love, invites us to feast at his table.  It’s a picture of how we become fully human as we learn that
we are loved.

This is the gospel in its purest and simplest form, the good news that God loves us unreservedly in Jesus, whoever we are, whatever the far country we have come from, and however we got there.  To be a disciple means being a living, walking sign of this welcoming love and care that God has for us all.  Sometimes love has to be tough, more often, perhaps, gentle.  Sometimes the foyer we create can seem almost luminous with God’s presence, sometimes we wonder if he is to be found there at all. But as ancient Greek wisdom put it in words Carl Justav Jung had inscribed over the mantel of his front door, “Whether he is called upon or not, God is present”.

And this is what we celebrate on Mothering Sunday. In every expression of good mothering, whether the biological parenthood that brought us into the world, or the intimacy of loving relationships where we give and receive the care that sustains us, or the professional care that models what it is to respect and reverence each human person, “mothering” is at the heart of life. Today at this eucharist we give thanks to the God who is our father and our mother, in whom we live and move and have our being, whose heart of love reaches out to all his creatures, every human soul, each one of us.  He invites us to feel after him and find him, and in finding him, to find our true home, and in finding our true home, learn to be God’s people once again.

St Nicholas Collegiate Church, Galway, Mothering Sunday 2019

Landscapes of Faith: the Christian Heritage of North East England

I have been preparing this lecture at my desk in the window of my study. We live in the Tynedale village of Haydon Bridge a few miles upstream from Hexham. Appropriately enough for a superannuated clergyman, our road is called Church Street. If I look to the right I can see across the road the Georgian parish church where we worship every week. If I look to the left, beyond the railway line, the valley side sweeps majestically down from the ridge where there is a clump of trees marking an enclosure. They are still rich with foliage, but in winter, I can glimpse what lies behind them: the little “old” church of St Cuthbert, now all but abandoned when the medieval village of Haydon migrated down the hill to the more sheltered location where we live, the ancient river crossing where, as the border reivers knew, there has been a bridge across the fast and turbulent South Tyne since time immemorial. Here the Greenwich Commissioners built a new church in 1791 in unadorned village Georgian with a pretty pagoda on the west tower. It too was dedicated to St Cuthbert. The Victorians found it too plain so they gothicised the windows and put coloured glass in, some of it by Kempe and very good. It has some pretty arts and crafts furnishings. 

But although it is a push up a steep hill to get there, and there is no electricity so no heat or light, the old church remains the spiritual and emotional heart of the community. It lost its nave in the eighteenth century when its stones were used to construct the new church. But the chancel remains, an exquisite early gothic jewel in a lovely walled churchyard screened by trees, a haven for wildlife. Inside is a Roman altar that now serves as the font, a reminder that we live in the borderlands of a once vast world empire whose wall stretches across Britain not five miles to the north, and just a mile or so south of the Roman road called Stanegate. It was a moving experience to baptise the Vicar's daughter in that font this year. Once a month the candles are lit and we gather in the Old Church for evensong in muddy boots wrapped up in cagoules, and enjoy hot tea or wine and canapés afterwards before tramping back down the hill and homewards across the fields. 

Much of the North East’s Christian heritage is encapsulated in that view from my window. For Haydon Old Church marks one of those sites where, it is believed, the Saxon monks of Cuthbert’s community stopped on their long journey around the north with his body and the gospel book written in his honour, the great volume we now call the Lindisfarne Gospels. Some villagers will tell you that in his lifetime, Cuthbert himself travelled along Tynedale and stopped to preach here on his journeys between Hexham or Lindisfarne and Cumbria where Bede tells us he regularly went. There is a chain of Cuthbert churches scattered across Tynedale and Redesdale. I think we can safely say that wherever you find a medieval church dedicated to him, you can presume a direct link either to the saint himself, or to his community and the estates they possessed.  

Looking out at these two Cuthbert churches, I am inevitably made to think of journeys. In comparatively recent history as things go, church and village migrated downhill, a journey that was no doubt associated with early industrialisation in the Tyne Valley, for lead was mined all over the North Pennine dales, and in places coal too: we live in a house that was once the home of the pit manager at Bardon Mill. It was named after a Tyneside colliery ship that went down with the loss of all hands in the 1880s. The North East was among the first places in England to embrace the industrial revolution. It did this with real enthusiasm, as the nineteenth century confidently committed itself to vast enterprises in railways, ship building, steel making and coal mining. In 1789, the painter John Martin was born in Haydon Bridge. His huge canvasses are well known: you can see some of them in the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle and at Tate Britain in London. Much of his work echoes the steep-sided hill country of his native Tynedale. But in his most famous apocalyptic paintings such as The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and The Last Judgment, you seem to see in those vivid oranges and reds the fires of the North East’s blast furnaces, the colossal engines of locomotion and mining, a landscape whose appearance has been transformed by the revolution the artist was living through. That he turned to the medium of industrial landscape to depict scenes from biblical narratives is itself a metaphor of how faith was needing to be re-forged in the fires of an entirely new social environment. This is a central part of the North East’s religious history because it sets the scene for how faith has been and is still experienced and expressed in our own bewildering, and sometimes apocalyptic, times.  

John Martin was baptised in Haydon Old Church. What did he know about Cuthbert and his wandering community, I wonder? For that tiny church takes us back to a memory a thousand years old when Cuthbert’s community travelled this way in the ninth and tenth centuries. So inside it you feel the pull of the Holy Island of Lindisfarne where Cuthbert had been prior and then bishop and where, after his death in 687, his shrine was set up and honoured. It was from there that his community set off in 875 in search of a permanent home. But Haydon also points us forward in time to Chester-le-Street where the community settled for more than a century on the site where the lovely church of St Mary and St Cuthbert with its octagonal spire now stands. And you inevitably feel the pull of Durham up there too, for from Chester-le-Street, they migrated to the peninsula called Dun Holme where they arrived in 995. There a Saxon cathedral was constructed, to be succeeded by the great Romanesque church we know and love today. But the important thing about Durham is that in essence, it’s no different from Holy Island, or Old Haydon, or Chester-le-Street. In these places and many others, a church was built to house a shrine, built around Cuthbert and the memory his community preserved. Durham is not a church with a saint’s shrine inside, but a shrine around which a cathedral has been built. 

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I have served as a priest in North East England for a significant proportion of the 40 years since I was ordained. In the 1980s I was vicar of Alnwick for five years, the first time I had lived outside London and the south where I was born and brought up. It was eye-opening to discover the wealth of the North East’s Christian heritage. I had read about the northern saints of course: I bought my first copy of Bede’s great History as a teenager new to Christian faith and how glad I am that somebody told me that it’s a book every Englishman (and woman) should read often. But reading even the incomparable prose of a great writer like Bede is not the same as walking the landscapes he writes about, inhabiting them for yourself, reflecting and praying in these ancient holy sites. It profoundly shaped my spirituality and ministry at a highly formative time in my life. Sixteen years later we came back to the North East when I was appointed Dean of Durham. There I found myself in the role of guardian not only of a building that the whole world loves and the north is immensely proud of, but also of the shrines of no fewer than three of the founding saints of the Saxon church: Oswald, Cuthbert and Bede. To spend twelve years in Durham was the greatest privilege of my life.

I learned a lot about heritage and how we promote it during those years. When we think of the legacy of Christian faith in this region, we tend to call to mind the headline sites associated with it like Holy Island, the Inner Farne, Hexham, Jarrow, Wearmouth, Hartlepool, Auckland Castle and Whitby. And of course Durham Cathedral. The late and much-missed development agency One North East ran an imaginative campaign to promote the region in the UK and overseas. You’ll recall the strap line Passionate Places, Passionate People that accompanied beautiful images of these places and enticed southerners to try the North East out for themselves. They were on to something that caught the spirit of the North East. I’m not sure I ever understood what a “passionate place” really was, yet the epithet felt right. Tourism-speak uses words like iconic to describe them – a little too freely perhaps, though who is going to argue that anyone who is serious about getting to know the area needs to put them on their “must-see” list? 

But if you want to touch the soul of the North East, you have to venture off the main tourist routes and explore the by-ways. The little church at Escomb, for instance, in its circular churchyard in the middle of a housing estate in a County Durham pit village. It’s an intact Saxon church, one of the very best in England. It was there in the time of Bede and it is still there fulfilling its original purpose as an ordinary working church where people worship and pray. Or Lady’s Well, a secret little place at Holystone in Upper Coquetdale where there is a pool overhung by trees and a stone cross that marks the memory of many hundreds of convert baptisms there. Or the little medieval church of Edlingham next to its ruined castle and railway viaduct set among the lonely heathery sandstone hills of Northumberland with mighty Cheviot rearing up behind: I was vicar there too and sometimes in midwinter (if I even succeeded in getting out there across the snowy expanse of Alnwick Moor), I had to break the ice in the cruets for water at the Sunday eucharist. Or the Norman chapel secreted deep within the keep of the fortress at Newcastle where the Victorians drove the East Coast railway line right across one of England’s mightiest military monuments. Or the church at Newbiggin-on-Sea perched in splendid isolation on the edge of the North Sea where the east winds howl around its precarious gothic fabric. Or Arts and Crafts done to perfection in the early twentieth century church of St Andrew’s Roker, a building of national importance that far too few know about. I could go on. 

In my book Landscapes of Faith I talk about the religious “sense of place” the North East has. What is unique about it is not how well marked the region is with the traces of Christian faith across the centuries. Cornwall, Ireland and Brittany can claim as much, as can the sites on the great pilgrim routes of Europe such as the roads to Santiago da Compostela across France and Spain. It is, I think, that the lives and stories of its Christian communities are so well documented from Saxon times right up to the present. This is a peopled heritage. It carries human memory and lived experience. And this is the next point I want to make about how we respond to the wealth of religious shrines and sites that we are fortunate enough to inherit in the North East. 

One of the things I’ve enjoyed doing in most of the places where I’ve ministered has been to write a guide book. There is no better way for a new priest to get to know his or her building, the place where it’s set, the story of the community for whom it has been a cherished symbol of hope and aspiration usually for many centuries. When I came to Durham Cathedral, the guide book was up for review. I’ll have a go, I offered, a trifle rashly I now think. In the introduction I wrote about what I thought were the three great emblems of the North East: Hadrian’s Wall, the Angel of the North, and Durham Cathedral. If you live in the region, you set your eyes on any one of these and think to yourself, this is home; this is where I belong. 

Not long after the new guide was published, a visiting Czech professor of architecture asked if he could see me. He wanted to discuss my claim about these three regional icons. He said: you’re not comparing like with like. You haven’t considered the human dimension of these sites apart from their emotional impact on people. Durham Cathedral has a dense human texture. People have worshipped here, worked, studied and prayed in and around this building for a thousand years. They still do. By contrast, Hadrian’s Wall lost the human texture it once had as a working fortification when the legions left Britannia in the fifth century and it became merely a memory. And as for the Angel of the North (I sensed a slight sniff at this point), it has no human texture at all, no community for whom it has any existential significance. It is just a piece of public art – fine enough in its brutal way, but nothing more than a huge weight of rusting iron stuck in a hole in the ground.

I have thought about that conversation a good deal. He overstated his case, of course. People who live in Gateshead near the Angel of the North like my friend the Bishop of Jarrow tell me that this remarkable sculpture has spawned a great deal of surprising human activity. Couples come there to pledge their commitment or renew their marriage vows. Children’s naming ceremonies take place there. Mining communities honour the memory of the pit that once stood there and to which the Angel is a conscious homage by Anthony Gormley. Churches hold faith events round it. Similarly, Hadrian’s Wall has become the backdrop of an astonishing variety of activity along its length, some of it scholarly and archaeological, much of it tourism-related, promoting its wonderful landscapes for the enjoyment of walkers, heritage enthusiasts and nature-lovers. 

But there’s still a truth in what my Czech friend had to say. It’s that neither the Angel nor the Wall is home to a permanent community in the way in which the Cathedral is. Like the vast majority of our built religious heritage, the Cathedral is still what it was constructed to be, a living, working, praying community of men, women and children. I call this the human texture of heritage and it is immensely precious. I think I am right in saying that what fascinates people when they visit palaces and country houses is not only their architecture, art and landscape setting. It’s the human texture of these buildings. They were once the homes of real people. The best of them still are. Compare two of the castles of the Dukes of Northumberland, Alnwick and Warkworth. Both are splendid. But while one is an empty shell, the other is the family home. Compare the noble ruins of Lindisfarne Priory or Rievaulx Abbey with the parish church on Lindisfarne, or with Durham Cathedral. Ruined heritage is hauntingly beautiful, as the Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries discovered, so much so that they created faux-ruins to adorn their landscape parks and gardens. But heritage that is “inhabited”, that has a living human texture, has an altogether different quality. It has “soul”. 

And this is vital for the way in which we interpret and promote it. I think it is only in our generation that we have begun to recognise the importance of this. The evidence is striking. In the 1950s and 60s, when my parents took me round our great national monuments, cathedrals, abbeys, castles and stately homes, I used to collect Pitkin guides as souvenirs. They were immaculately produced and illustrated but the photography studiously avoided including human beings engaged in ordinary human activities. There would be images of people prominent in the history of the place, usually the great and the good. You might have pictures of royalty ceremonially visiting, or a cathedral chapter posing in their chapter house. But quotidian activity of people doing ordinary things, or guests enjoying their visits was something you glimpsed only very rarely. The effect was to construe these places as museums and inculcate correct behaviour proper to such places. You could look across ropes or through glass, but it was at a distance. You were deferential, told not to make a noise, not to touch, not to intrude on the hushed sanctity.

Now all that has changed, and vastly for the better. You only have to look at today’s guide books to see how lively and populated they are. Gone is the formal distance that was once evoked between observer and observed. People are enjoying themselves! Interactive engagement is the name of the game. Children are not just tolerated but invited and welcomed. Heritage and history have been humanised. And this is all part of the welcome emphasis placed nowadays on what public funding bodies call “access to heritage”. Accessibility is not simply about making physical access feasible for as many as possible, though that is immensely important. It’s about humanising the past so that it can be experienced as a present reality. Human texture has the effect of making it tangible to people so that they are drawn into something that they belong to and are part of. It affirms what is central to understanding and caring for our heritage, that it is for everybody. It is not for the privileged few but for all. It’s about inclusion. 

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Inclusion means two things in particular: hospitality and interpretation. How we welcome people to heritage sites, and how we help them to be drawn into their stories and all that they mean, are vital for all who open up heritage to the public. But it is especially important when it comes to religious heritage. This is because the “religious” is already replete with meanings and associations, memories and aspirations, longings and fears and hopes. So the quality of the welcome at the porch of a cathedral or church matters as a theological and spiritual statement of what a sacred building stands for – its purpose, its values, its way of treating people. 

As a theologian, I see Christian hospitality as an expression of how God is towards his creatures. You can picture the act of creation as God opening the door and standing back behind it, as it were, so as to create “space” for the universe to spring into being and have its own existence. This is how we open our own front doors to our guests: we invite them to occupy our space and make it their own. In the training we gave to the hundreds of volunteers in Durham Cathedral whose privilege it was to welcome visitors and help them find their way around, we would say: you are the human face of the Cathedral to those who come through the door asking to share its space. How you welcome visitors makes all the difference, for good or ill. And because Durham had been a Benedictine priory in the middle ages, we would quote from the Rule of St Benedict which offers the other face of that theological insight about “making space” by saying: “receive guests as if they were Christ himself”.  The point about a sacred place is that it is God’s before it is ours. Therefore if it is going to receive guests with genuineness and authenticity, it needs to embody the values that matter to God himself.

Putting it that way makes it sound portentous and grand. But it has very practical consequences. Take one example that you will all have thought about. It’s the vexed question of admission charges to cathedrals. Everyone who works with heritage knows how very expensive it is to maintain. On top of the crippling expenses attached to keeping the fabric in good repair, you have the costs of making the visitor offer as excellent as it can possibly be so that people experience it in ways that are unforgettable and life-changing. So we have to factor in signage and interpretation, staff salaries, electronic and print guides and materials, the hard infrastructure of toilets, restaurants and shops and the wages of those who run them, advertising and promotion, and finally the burdens of compliance, especially safeguarding, and health and safety. You learn a lot about all these things when you are a dean. And you lie awake at night worrying about how you can possibly balance the books in the light of them. It’s not surprising that admission charges are now the norm in the big medieval cathedrals. No cathedral chapter has wanted to impose them, but the annual accounts are facts on the ground that can’t be evaded. Besides, people value what they pay for. What is more, in places like St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey and Canterbury where there is a huge footfall, over a million people a year, the admission charge helps to “calm the nave” and preserve the fabric from erosion by consciously limiting the numbers. 

In Durham, the Chapter steadfastly refused to go down that road. Our footfall was around 700,000 annually. We didn’t ask whether people had come as worshippers, pilgrims or sightseers, to enjoy the music and the arts, to shelter from the rain, to meet their friends in the restaurant or to take the short cut to and from the city centre. A guest is a guest is a guest. And, we argued, because the Cathedral is God’s space, and because God’s welcome is unconditional, generous and free, we should not impose a charge. Now, admission charges are not in fact something new. In the nineteenth century, if you wanted to visit Durham Cathedral, you knocked on the north door, and if you were lucky, a verger heard you and would let you in for the price of sixpence. But charging does raise questions about the contract that is set up between visitors, worshippers and pilgrims on the one hand, and the space on the other. When you pay, you have different expectations of the place and its resources and facilities, possibly even of God too. It’s a tricky marriage of idealism and pragmatism that charging cathedrals have to manage if they take their sacred space seriously and guard it from the corrosive effects of monetisation. Putting a price on everything, a habit that is endemic in our culture, can blind us to what is of true and lasting value. Church heritage could model something different, point to another set of values and invite people to think about them. Hospitality can challenge us to new ways of seeing things.

I said that “inclusion” means both hospitality and interpretation. Let me say something about the part interpretation plays in how we help guests make sense of what they are experiencing. Speaking again as a theologian, I believe that the entire task of Christian ministry, scholarship and outreach comes down to interpretation. Pilgrim’s Progress features “the House of the Interpreter” where the journey is made sense of and the destination understood. As a preacher, my responsibility is to handle the ancient text of the Bible and Christian tradition by asking not only what it meant but what it means today, and not only in generic terms, but specifically, to this community in this place at this time in our history. Heritage is just such a text that comes to us out of the past, whether it’s the recent past or antiquity. The ancientness of a sacred building like Durham Cathedral is part of what is both enticing and alienating about it. We love it because it has endured for so long, yet its very age can puzzle us. Why is it here at all? What did it mean to those who built it? What did it represent to the generations of pilgrims and worshippers who came to pray within its walls and reverence its shrines? And what does all this say to today’s guests, many of whom come from other faith traditions than Christianity, or have had no experience of organised religion in any shape or form?

As soon as we try to respond to these questions, we recognise that they are far from simple. At one level, it’s obvious (and true) that the Cathedral was built to bear witness to the reality of God. The worship of God has always been its primary role. But then, as I’ve said, its origins lie with St Cuthbert and the quest of his community for a permanent shrine. And then again, think about its position and landscape setting. It is so clearly a fortified, defended space, perched on its acropolis next to William the Conqueror’s castle, appearing for all the world to be one great defensive structure to keep the enemy at bay, those wayward Northumbrian Saxons and marauding Scots. I often used to say to visitors that Durham was as much a statement of brutal Norman military might as it was a shrine to a humble saint and a temple to the Almighty. Despite its celebrated beauty, Durham speaks volumes about political hegemony and the uses and abuses of power. Sacred space has its shadow side and we must tell the truth about that too.

But we owe our visitors more than simply an historical perspective. The “text” of a sacred building is not only its past but its present. I spoke earlier about the human texture of heritage that is alive. I have found that usually, people are genuinely interested to know what goes on in a cathedral, just as they are when they visit a stately home that is still lived in. When we stand in the Cathedral quire and tell them that each day, morning and evening prayer are celebrated in this space, precisely where the Benedictine monks gathered for daily prayer in the middle ages, they are fascinated and even moved. And even when casual visitors who have not checked the website turn up to find that they can’t walk round the church because a service is going on, they are often content to stand at the west end, or if they are brave enough, sit in the nave and witness it for themselves. 

But as I have said, it needs explaining and interpreting in a secular age. You can’t assume that visitors will know what the font is, or the altar or pulpit, or a saint, a bishop, a monk or a dean. When I was a minor canon of Salisbury Cathedral in the late 1970s, the then dean wrote what he called a “reflective guide” that didn’t simply describe the building but pointed to some of its meanings, and the significance of each particular part within it. It invited the visitor to become a participant, even for a few minutes, that is to say, not just to observe, but join in, feel the spiritual grain of the building, align his or her story to its own and perhaps understand themselves in a new way. Nowadays, all cathedrals talk readily about “turning visitors into pilgrims”, a phrase I find a trifle manipulative if I am honest. Good hospitality doesn’t require guests to conform against their will or be required to take a particular view. But I like the notion of “seeing in fresh ways”. I like the invitation, “This is how we see things. Maybe you can too?” This is surely part of the transformative effect that all heritage can have, and sacred heritage in particular. 

And this is where, in Durham, we made an important link between interpretation and hospitality. If admission to the church was going to be free, how would we balance the books? Our answer was to create the facility called Open Treasure about which I’m sure you have all heard. Better still, I’d love to think you have visited it in this first summer it’s been open to the public. I want to end by saying something about it because this project seems to me to embrace so much of what I believe about religious heritage and what we do with it. And as I do this, I want to recognise how much activity is going on across the North East to do creative things with sacred heritage. I’m thinking of the new exhibitions at Hexham Abbey, for example, and the eye-watering developments at Auckland Castle with Kynren having proved such a success in its first season. 

Durham Cathedral is a world class building in a world class setting. This was recognised by the grant of World Heritage status to this unique site more than thirty years ago. I don’t approve of rating cathedrals by stars, but I am glad that in his book England's Cathedrals which has just been published, Simon Jenkins gives Durham the five it deserves. But the building, its arts, furnishings and its landscape setting, marvellous though they are, are not everything. Its collections are world class too. And it was becoming clear during my time as dean that we needed to do more justice to our infinitely precious artefacts from Cuthbert’s era, our books and manuscripts, our Saxon fabrics, our Roman, Saxon and Norman stones, our treasures that span two thousand years of northern history. What is more, we needed to do justice to the equally cherished spaces around the cloister that constitute the best surviving set of monastic buildings still in use for their original purpose anywhere in Britain. Open Treasure is the result. I am immensely proud to have been part of its story. 

That name "Open Treasure" says precisely what we believed about our sacred heritage: that we needed to open up these marvellous artefacts and marvellous spaces to as wide a public as possible. We wanted to extend an invitation to come in, discover, learn and enjoy. But we also wanted to say that there was more to “treasure” than simply spaces and artefacts. These represented an intellectual and cultural history, and above all, the spiritual history of a community of faith, so the people of the place were a vital part of its “treasure” too. We wanted to help people grasp this, not simply as a past reality but a present one too. So the timeline through the monks’ dormitory and the great kitchen takes guests through a display that presents the community of the Cathedral and Diocese as they are today and invited them to think about how they too fit into this long story that continues into the future. 

But more than that, the phrase “Open Treasure” evokes two sayings of Jesus in the gospels. One is about how the wise steward brings out of his treasure “things old and new”; the other reminds us that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”. And that takes us back to the task of interpretation which is what Open Treasure is all about. For we cannot interpret the past without also recognising the present tense of our lives and the future tense that lies ahead. We can only look back from where we are today and hope to be tomorrow. So to tell the story of a faith community is inevitably to pose questions about its identity and purpose now. The hope is that by opening the treasure, there will be discoveries not only about history and heritage but also about human life as we live and experience it today. We would have failed in our interpretative task if we had evaded that requirement.

How does all this speak into the financial challenges our stewardship of heritage inevitably poses? Well, the origins of Open Treasure were not simply the need to rise to the challenge our collections posed and present them in the best possible way. There was a hard business case that said: if we are going to maintain free admission to the church, we need to earn income in some other way. Paid admission to the exhibitions was our answer: to make our heritage work for us by using it to help fund the costs of the sacred space itself. (Under the same rubric of letting heritage pay for heritage, we were glad to send one of our copies of Magna Carta on tour to Canada during the 1215 celebrations, a project that proved exceedingly exacting but which did earn a welcome six-figure sum for the Cathedral at a time when we were under particular financial pressure.) 

It is too early to tell what benefit Open Treasure will bring to the Cathedral’s bottom line. The Cuthbert treasures will not be installed until next year when the environmental monitoring of the Great Kitchen will be complete. His pectoral cross, coffin, portable altar and comb are always going to be the big draw - they are of cultural and spiritual value beyond compare. The hope is that in the future, when the Lindisfarne Gospels return to Durham as has been promised every seven years by an agreement with the British Library worked out before the 2013 residency, they will be exhibited in their historic home, the Cathedral precinct where they belonged to the monastic library throughout the medieval period. To bring Cuthbert and his gospel book back together again for three months in the very place indelibly associated with both of them would be marvellous. It would of course bring thousands of people through Open Treasure as genuine pilgrims for whom it would offer a profound spiritual experience. We shall have to wait and see. But we know that the secret of successful visitor facilities is to maintain ever-changing exhibitions alongside the permanent displays so as to bring visitors back again and again. That is the ambition. If it works as we hope it will, it should make a real difference to the Cathedral’s financial sustainability. 

But above all, it will have demonstrated the Cathedral’s belief in the importance of hospitality and interpretation. As the National Trust knows better than anyone, you can never invest too much in these. For each is a part of the other, and without them, heritage will never find a voice with which to speak into human life today. This always matters for our self-understanding, knowing who we are and where we come from. But as a person of faith, I want to suggest that it matters most of all when heritage has an explicitly sacred dimension. “They being dead yet speaketh” says the miners’ banner that hangs in the south transept of Durham Cathedral alluding to the Letter to the Hebrews in endearingly confused grammar. It’s our responsibility to make sure the capacity of the past to speak is as articulate and persuasive as it can be.

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I began with the view from my study window 40 miles away in Haydon Bridge, and the journeys of Cuthbert and his community. Open Treasure has brought us back to Cuthbert and to the long and wonderful story of Christian faith in North East England. I have only been able to touch on a little of it. But I’ve wanted to try to say something about the importance of religious heritage in telling a story not only about where we have come from in this region, but who we are now, today. 

We know that “church heritage tourism” is on the increase. Why this should be in an increasingly secularising society is worth speculating about. I am no sociologist of religion, but I wonder whether the dwindling of commitment to organised religion isn’t being misread in some circles as a decline of interest in the realm of what we can call the spiritual and the sacred. My lifetime in public ministry suggests to me that these elusive, mysterious aspects of life continue to fascinate and engage people very widely indeed even if they are increasingly disinclined to resort to organised religion to pursue them. “Believing, not belonging” has become the catch-phrase of those who recognise this phenomenon. No doubt nostalgia for a lost era of religious belief comes into it too; as Matthew Arnold’s great poem pictures it, we stand on Dover Beach watching the sea of faith recede. Some welcome the tide going out, but I suspect that for many, it’s a matter of wistful regret even if they remain observers rather than participants. Perhaps church tourism offers them the chance to touch the sacred without the entanglements of “belonging”, signing up to organised religion. If so, then it is all the more important to make sure that those of us who have the oversight of our magnificent religious sites help our guests articulate and respond to whatever it is they are experiencing: not to require that their experience takes this shape or that, but simply to make sure that they remain open to the possibilities of living with a deeper awareness as a result of having crossed our thresholds and – who knows – find themselves experiencing a transformation scene. 


Lecture to the County Durham division of the National Trust, 6 October 2016

Cathedrals, Sacred Space and the Theatre of the Soul: an address to the Cathedral Precentors

In this anniversary year, your conference is paying homage to Shakespeare. How could it not? The last play I went to see was The Winter's Tale. It's one of his last dramas and it’s far from easy to classify, as if in his maturity Shakespeare is reaching beyond the straightforward categories of comedy, tragedy, history and so on. It starts out as a classical tragedy where, like Othello, the tragic flaw is jealousy. Leontes imagines that his old friend Polixenes is having an affair with his wife Hermione. Shakespeare vividly depicts a man eaten up by obsessional jealousy, his mental disintegration bringing about the collapse of a family's whole world with the deaths of his wife and his young son.

But then comedy seems to break in on the hopelessness. The famous stage direction “exit, pursued by a bear” seems to introduce a note of parody, hinting that nothing is quite what it seems. There is a clown and lots of flirtatious dancing, and all is set for a happy ending with paradise restored and broken relationships mended. But Shakespeare gets there by using a device that has puzzled critics because it seems as if it resorts to trickery. At the climax of the play Paulina brings the statue of lost Hermione back to life. It's a tease, for we don't know whether she was ever really dead or had simply been hidden away and looked after by Paulina. Anyway, in a beautiful recognition scene she and Leontes are reunited and the drama achieves its resolution.

Does the play itself 'lose its mind', so to speak, does the text forget itself as it disperses the high art of tragedy into what at times feels close to farce? Does the comedy, following hard on the heels of so much grimness, mock what went before as if to say, don't take any of this too seriously: it's just illusion, a ceremony to mark the passage of the seasons? Perhaps it's a parody on both tragedy and comedy: the scarcely believable speed at which things go wrong at the beginning, the sudden lurch into an apparently careless comedy complete with songs, ballet and pick-pocketing slapstick and a miracle (if that's what it is) to end with and give us the closure we want, the happy ending? Or is Shakespeare, far from being careless, showing his mastery of dramatic form by merging the two genres in one art-work and making what is unbelievable at one level credible at another?

As a theologian and one-time liturgist, I am fascinated by the resonances in The Winter's Tale of both the central Christian story of the passion and resurrection of Christ, and its ritual “showing forth” in the eucharist.  It's not that any particular figure is an image of Jesus (unless it is Paulina whose action in the drama is to bring about both judgment and redemption). It is the drama itself that feels irresistibly Christological, taking us through a passion-like experience of suffering and pain into a realm of laughter, reconciliation and dancing that suggest resurrection and the kingdom of God. So like the liturgy, the play becomes “play” in the sense of a game that imagines us to be living in the redeemed state we call the kingdom of God. The great transformation scene leads us out of winter into spring and summer, bringing colour into the sombre monochromes with which it began. This is one way in which the movement of “enchantment” from tragedy to comedy is not just credible but ultimately necessary.

There’s a particularly telling line when Paulina says near the end: “it is required you do awake your faith”. Which is why, when the statue comes to life (and who envies the actor who has to stand there so still for so long?), you can smile at the ludicrousness of what is happening, or else find yourself believing in it and being deeply moved. Theatre is always an act of faith for playwright, actors and above all, audience. In The Winter's Tale, we seem to be summoned into an act of faith that draws us into the life of things, into God. Either parody or gospel - or maybe both, because in an important way the gospel parodies the silliness of self-important human lives and says: look beyond this and see something that is not transient but eternal. Shakespeare is always big enough for there to be endless possibilities in the way we respond. And by keeping us guessing, he always has the last laugh.

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In 1968, Peter Brook, the great Shakespeare director, wrote a little book that has become a classic for all who love theatre, The Empty Space. It’s a book every liturgist should read often, alongside that other slim but equally treasured volume, Aidan Kavanagh’s Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style published in 1982. Brook taught us to think about what takes place on a stage when something real is happening, as “holy theatre”. (He also coined the phrases deadly theatre, rough theatre and immediate theatre, all bursting with liturgical insight. I don’t know if Kavanagh knew the book but he writes as if he did.)

It’s “holy theatre”, indeed “the idea of the holy” that I intend to focus on today. I want to draw on my experience in the four cathedrals where I have served most of my public ministry. And I want to speak about the “holy” in a bigger sense than simply the liturgy, what that holy theatre is itself “about”, the theatre of human life as it is lived before God in the face of his fierce and wonderful love for the world.

My phrase “the theatre of the soul” is a conscious nod in the direction of two other books I’ve valued. They are by the psychoanalyst Joyce McDougall, Theatres of the Body and Theatres of the Mind. The first is about how the body acts out the scripts of our lives, especially those stories that are hurtful and destructive to us. The second focuses on illusion and truth as our stories get told and explored in the psychoanalytic process. It was a moment of insight for me when, thanks to the literature my psychotherapist wife was putting in front of me, I learned that the analytic space is often referred to by practitioners as “holy” or “sacred”. These connections say to me that like patriotism, liturgy is not enough. Sacred space is indeed very much to do with the holy theatre of the liturgy that is performed in it, and for which it exists at all.

But if we see the liturgy merely as an end in itself, rather than as a vehicle for transformation both collectively and personally, if we don’t recognise that the whole point of theatre is to challenge us, judge us, console us, mend our broken lives, help us to glimpse new possibilities, strengthen us to go on living, give us back our hope, we haven’t grasped its essential theological, pastoral and spiritual meaning. The theatre, the cathedral, the church, whatever is our ritual arena, they define the spaces in which human dramas get acted out and life is changed. Shakespeare understood it in ways that always surprise, amaze and delight us.

You need to know where I am coming from. Of my forty years of ordained life, nearly thirty have been in full-time ministry in three cathedrals, and in six of the other ten I was an honorary vicar choral of a fourth and as well as singing services, sang for a year in the back row of its choir when there was a lay clerk vacancy. That was Salisbury in the 1970s and early 80s. After an incumbency in Northumberland, I became Canon Precentor at Coventry, then Provost of Sheffield, then Dean of Durham from where I retired last year after nearly 13 years. You’ll understand that as a newly retired priest, I’ve been trying in the past year to gather the fragments, make sense of what my part in the public ministry of the church has been about, maybe – if I’m lucky – uncover meanings that I have not seen for what they are amid the demands of ordained life.

Now that my wife and I worship at the parish church across the road in our village, we are rediscovering what sacred space and liturgy mean on a more intimate level. After so long in cathedrals, attending a Georgian village church (Victorianised) for the Sunday eucharist and daily morning prayer concentrates the mind as to what really matters: God, humanity, community, relationships, mercy, grace, the kingdom of God. Every sacred space, even undistinguished ones like our parish church, represents and catalyses that divine-human encounter. My Christian experience started out in a Georgian church where I was a chorister. It looks like it may end in one too when singing days are done. It’s a very different kind of theatre from those I ministered in during my working life. But whatever the style, we know, as Aidan Kavanagh says, that a church is there for us to transact the business of God. It should be a tough, bracing space (very much a Peter Brook insight, that). It is not meant to imitate the soft, reassuring comforts of our drawing room. Cue memories of long DAC debates about over-carpeted churches. I wonder if the Chancellor of Coventry Diocese had read his book when he ruled against padded chairs in the church at Long Itchington?

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So what have I learned about sacred space in the cathedrals I’ve known best?

It’s obvious to you as liturgists, though not always to your colleagues, that the “sacred” is the defining category when it comes to what a cathedral or church is for. Not all cathedrals are shrines to saints, but in a looser sense, sacred spaces are always “shrines” that draw seekers after truth into the world of the holy. What we mean by this theologically is not that therefore the space outside the shrine is somehow unholy, not quite belonging to God in the same way. On the contrary: all things, all people, all spaces belong to him and what we call the “profane” is simply that which is pro-fanum, lying beyond the sacred space but still in symbolic view of it and indeed defined by it. In medieval cities like Salisbury and Durham, the cathedral was historically the very reason their cities came into being. The monks of Durham likened their city to Jerusalem, a holy community defined, we could say sacralised by, the great temple from which it derived its meaning. So sacred geography is simply a way of focusing a universal awareness of divine presence. You only have to explore Wiltshire, as we did this summer, to see how so much of that county is a ritual landscape, a sacred geography whose focal points are its stone circles like Stonehenge and Avebury, its ceremonial burial places and, most important, the liturgical pathways that connected them. Having lived among that landscape, I recognised it again when we made the journey to Compostela and began to understand how geography has been assigned ritual and spiritual meanings by the chain of sacred spaces and the Camino between them.

I spoke about meanings in the plural. We could easily think that the “sacred” carries a single, unambiguous meaning. If you read books like Edmund Duby’s La Symbolique Romane on Romanesque symbolism, or Emile Mâle’s The Gothic Image, you might think that medieval cathedral expressed a single “idea” or vision of the sacred. Of course, that is true in terms of the central tenets of the creed. A cathedral is a public space whose liturgy and spirituality evokes a vision of the transcendent breaking into ordinary time. In the “winter’s tale” that described the lives of the vast majority of medieval people, the cathedral was where life took on a new and glorious aspect, where redemptive dramas were acted out and transformation scenes embodied, where tragedy and comedy mingled and illuminated each other in the light of Christian faith. Vaults and arcades, ceremonial doorways, colour, light, incense, chanting, processional journeys from one space to another across ritual thresholds – all these contributed to a powerful sense of the numinous, precisely what Rudolph Otto called in his great book whose title I’ve already borrowed, The Idea of the Holy. And in Christian sacred space, that idea focuses on the God who comes among us as the Incarnate Lord, who is crucified and raised from death.

But within that medieval “idea” lay quite distinct notions of what sacred space actually represented. In the Romanesque era, it was a fortified, defended space that reflected the precariousness of life by holding fragile human beings safe from the assaults of demonic powers. You see this most clearly at eleventh and twelfth century Durham, perched on its acropolis next to William the Conqueror’s castle, appearing for all the world to be one great defensive structure to keep the enemy at bay (in this case, not only demons, but those wayward Northumbrian Saxons as well. I often used to say to visitors that Durham was as much a statement of brutal Norman military might as it was a temple to the Almighty. Despite its celebrated beauty, Durham speaks volumes about political hegemony and the uses and abuses of power. Sacred space has its shadow side and we must tell the truth about that too.

In the high middle ages, however, the mighty solidity of Romanesque gave way to the airy soaring of the gothic vision. Thirteenth century Salisbury was one of its earliest expressions in England, its pure Early English creating a light-filled interior in which you could imagine that you had been transported into a vision of the new heaven and the new earth – that, at least, was the Abbé Suger’s intention in creating the first true gothic church in Europe, the Abbey of St Denis near Paris. A casket of light is a very different understanding of the sacred from an impregnable fortress. And you can see, in cathedrals like Winchester, Norwich, Ely, Gloucester and Durham how the building reflects a developing history of how the sacred is understood in new ways as the architecture moves from Romanesque to Gothic, from being, if you like, earth-bound and protected in a solid, rocklike way towards reaching up to touch heaven itself.

I’ve wondered, as I’ve presided at the eucharist in medieval cathedrals, whether the architecture, Romanesque or Gothic, makes a different to the ways we perform liturgically in these different kinds of space, and even affects the way we construe the sacrament itself. It’s a question of emphasis, not of essence. When Gothic was new to Christian architecture, did its vast open spaces and sense of exposure feel different to an assembly of worshippers from the enclosed, protected feel of Romanesque? Did it call for a different kind of theatre, maybe a new take on Christian faith and experience?

I began to ponder this when I went to Coventry as Precentor. As I first experienced it, the Cathedral felt utterly different in every conceivable way from Salisbury or from the more developed gothic of the big medieval town church of Alnwick where I had been incumbent. The architectural forms of the 1950s and 60s, Graham Sutherland’s great tapestry of Christ in Glory, the John Hutton west screen, a great wall of glass opening on to the ruins of the bombed out medieval church of St Michael, the liturgical spaces in the round in the Chapels of Unity and of Christ the Servant… how did you begin to create a liturgical performance worthy of that building? (This very question is posed explicitly by Peter Brook in a fascinating section about Coventry in The Empty Space.) As always, the building wins in the end as we all know: you have to start with the grain of the building and let it suggest the kind of ceremony it needs.

To help us do this, I invited some members of the Department of Theatre Studies at Warwick University to help us understand both the sacred space itself and the dynamics of architecture, audience and performer that was taking place within it. They were mostly not habitual church attenders but they knew about theatre, and were intrigued that we had approached them with our rather unusual request. They attended services and offered some sessions with our liturgical ministers. The principal outcomes were these. First, there is no substitute for paying a lot of attention to performance skills, whatever the environment we are working in. They thought there was work to do on our posture, our way of moving around the space, and our relationship with the words we spoke (a particular challenge, that, in a cathedral that had more difficult acoustics than any other I’ve worked in). They tried to instil in us the importance of embodiment, inhabiting a role and living and breathing it stage. It was not enough to utter words by themselves. They must be “made flesh” through our bodies in a profoundly incarnational way. They thought we had a lot of work to do, and so we did.

But the more surprising insight was to do with the nature of the space itself. They looked carefully at the cathedral from a performance point of view. They took in the great gaunt slab of the high altar below the tapestry, and the John Piper vestments created for the building that are more elaborately decorated behind than in front. And they said to us: you may think of your church as the first of the modern cathedrals because the finish makes it look that way. But we are saying to you that it is entirely medieval in orientation and attitude. The west-east axis culminating in an elevated high altar below the image of Christ in Glory – it is unambiguous that this is the last of the old cathedrals not the first of the new. So you should learn from the ceremonies of the middle ages and, while you will want to reinterpret them for the twentieth century, don’t dismiss the way they had evolved over many centuries in just such grand spaces as this.

What’s more (and here was the coup de grâce), the altar and the vestments tell us plainly that you would be better to have the three sacred ministers facing east at the sacrament rather than west. For then you would all be being true to the grain of the cathedral, the strong orientation of building and people towards the face of Christ on the tapestry. Moreover, as performers you would find that the your eastward-facing posture and the vestments, by concealing so much of you, would act as a kind of theatrical mask that frees you up to inhabit the rite in ways you are finding more difficult when you stand behind a grand granite counter and face the people. (I thought of that unexpected advice apropos of the recent injunctions in the Roman Catholic Church about ad orientem mass celebrations. Once again, it all comes down to sacred space and how we construe it.)

Well, we didn’t go back to the eastward position because it would have been unthinkable in those post Liturgical Movement days. But then I went to Sheffield where there were several immovable eastward-facing altars  though the high altar itself had been moved away from the east wall. I found a new kind of freedom, particularly (but not only) in Prayer Book celebrations, in facing east, something that continued in Durham where, at high altar celebrations, there is no choice about it. I don’t think there can be a doctrine about this either way (so to speak), and I have hardly ever found lay people to be as exercised about it as clergy; but I do believe that the characteristics of the building as a whole, the way that community has chosen to inhabit its sacred space, the theological and spiritual messages we want the liturgy to convey must all play a part in informing any church’s liturgical style.  

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I spoke earlier about clergy being “guardians” of sacred space. I like the analogy and have always believed that guardianship is a very key task for cathedral clergy in particular. This is about much more than the liturgy. And the secularising tendencies of our age both inside and outside the church have greatly increased the pressures on the very idea of “sacred space”, let alone what it means to guard it against violation or abuse. Let me give a few examples from my experience.

Sheffield Cathedral has been praised for some decades for its ministry among homeless and vulnerable people. Liturgically, its worship was never given to that kind of racy pursuit of “relevance” that some seem to think is called for in the heart of a great city. But because the focus of our daily outreach in those days was the Cathedral hall, it was literally the case that the poor were always with us. As soon as the doors were opened for weekday matins at 0730, some homeless people would come straight in, sometimes with their dogs, find a bench, stretch out on it and go to sleep for the day. The early eucharist of the day was often enriched by the smells of a full English breakfast being prepared for our guests in the hall. The social context of need and deprivation in which we celebrated the liturgy could not have been clearer. No-one questioned that the nave was a perfectly proper place for homeless people to sit or lie. There were rules about smoking, alcohol and drugs which were strictly but good-humouredly enforced. The sanctuaries and altars were always regarded as “separate” (the root meaning in Hebrew of qadosh, “holy”, i.e. set apart).

But here’s what I learned about sacred space at Sheffield. It was clear to me that the public space of the nave was heavily contested. The poor reckoned they had as valid a claim on it as “their” place as anyone else. Rather wonderfully, the Cathedral community accepted this graciously; the few who were uncomfortable about it tended to gravitate to the highlands of west Sheffield and their big suburban churches. We all know from our experience of church life that sacred space, because it is usually public in character, is always heavily contested. People’s good sense of “belonging” in it, “inhabiting” it, “possessing” it can become adversarial. And when disputes about what is and isn’t “right” in the space are freighted with theological meanings, as they often are, it can become toxic. But in Sheffield, the homeless who sometimes thought they had “rights” in the nave were also its most passionate defenders. They would police it themselves. If somebody was drunk or abusive, they would show them to the door, sometimes a trifle roughly. At night, if anyone was tempted to break in or cause damage to the building, there was a loyal tribe of Cathedral irregulars who would see them off – vandalism rates in that Cathedral were remarkably low, given its setting. I’m saying that the “sacred” draws people of all sorts and conditions into the guardianship role that we might have thought belonged only to the authorised officers of the cathedral.

It seems to me that Cathedral chapters don’t give enough thought to their role as guardians of sacred space. As we know, the space itself communicates a message about its own purpose and meaning. That too is part of the “grain” of a cathedral, in this case a theological, spiritual and ethical grain. So here is where chapters, advised I suggest by precentors, should be crystal clear about the aims and values their cathedrals stand for, and make sure that their policies and liturgical plans reflect them unambiguously.

For example. In Coventry, we began the annual service during November for the commemoration of the victims of road accidents. When I wrote that first liturgy, I little thought it would be taken up nationally. We called that first service We are all Victims. It did not carry any subtext that was hostile to the automobile – least of all in Coventry with its long motor manufacturing industry. But all good things carry risk. It was a profoundly moving service at which the liturgy did what it was meant to: care for broken human beings, honour painful memories, try to bring healing and even hope.

Later, Coventry celebrated the centenary of the first motor car. This was to be a celebration of all things internally combustible. I was instructed by the Provost that there was to be a Coventry-manufactured car driven up the centre aisle and parked at the chancel step for the duration of the service. Then it was to be solemnly blessed, and driven out again. As a man under obedience, I duly complied, despite the very complex operational issues involved (how do you get a car into the nave of Coventry Cathedral where there is no great west door?). But to me, the memories of hundreds of people bereaved by road accidents sitting in that same nave at the annual service a few months before sat uneasily alongside this celebration. Somehow, the sacredness of the human stories told then seemed subverted by what we were doing. It’s an example not of what is right or wrong, good or bad; rather, the way in which sacred space, which is a world of symbols and images, magnifies the significance of every object that is brought into it, for good or ill. When I went into Ripon Cathedral a few years ago and saw a large field-gun, a 25-pounder I think, installed in the crossing as part of their Remembrance Sunday observance, I felt the same disquiet. But then I remembered how in Sheffield Cathedral, the screen surrounding the military chapel of St George and defining its space, was made of actual swords and bayonets from the Great War. Awkward.

Durham Cathedral, because it is loved by people across the world, is the most heavily contested space I have worked in. It is one of those universal masterpieces that really does belong to everyone. There, what I’ve called guardianship of the sacred space occupied a good deal of our time. When I went there, I found that the Chapter had engaged in long, careful debates about how to exercise this role, though they might not perhaps have thought of it in this way. But three policies in particular clearly enunciated a theological view about the church. First, because sacred space is God’s space, and God’s hospitality is unconditional, there were no admission charges for visitors. Second, photography was not allowed in the church because of the intrusive effect, especially of flash, on the spiritual environment in which people should be helped to be quiet, reflect, pray. And third, there was no eating or drinking other than at the eucharist, even in the nave or transepts (when we were planning my installation the Chapter Clerk made this very clear to me – I recall he seemed puzzled that I was even asking the question).

I need to be careful here. I am not saying that one set of policies can apply everywhere. Each cathedral has to do its thinking for itself. Sacredness belongs to place and will be differently understood and handled from one cathedral to another. I am only telling you about Durham. I wondered where Durham’s understanding of its guardianship role came from. It had of course been a monastic cathedral in the middle ages when the Rule of St Benedict had governed its entire life. I think that for the Chapter, the question “how do our decisions reflect that Benedictine inheritance” has always been present, usually implicitly as a kind of corporate memory, but also explicitly at times. For example, the Rule states unambiguously that nothing must ever be done in the oratory that might prevent a brother or sister from going there to say their prayers. The church, that is to say, is set apart for sacred liturgical and spiritual functions. You go to the refectory to eat, to the cloister to study or work, to the dormitory to rest. You go into the church to pray.

Now, that doctrine has never been applied uncritically in any cathedral since the middle ages and possibly not even then. In the nineteenth century at Durham, if you wanted to visit the Cathedral you knocked at the barred and bolted north door. If you were lucky, a verger would open up and charge you sixpence to look around. Admission charges are not new. But they do raise questions about the contract that is set up between visitors, worshippers and pilgrims on the one hand, and the space on the other. When you pay, you have different expectations of the place and its resources and facilities, possibly even of God too. It’s a tricky marriage of idealism and pragmatism that charging cathedrals have to manage if they take their sacred space seriously and guard it from the corrosive effects of monetisation. The same is true of the other dilemmas I mentioned.

Here’s another example. Not long ago the Cathedral was approached about holding a fashion show in the nave. It would bring lots of people into the church who had never been inside before. There would be a facility fee, a splash of good publicity, media headlines, and opportunities for us to promote our “product” (or “visitor offer” as they put it). So it would be mission. Why did we say no? Not because we were averse to the fee – the bottom line concentrates minds like nothing else can. Nor was it because we did not host a vast variety of non-liturgical events in the nave – concerts, exhibitions, lectures, drama, all the things cathedrals do. The reason was twofold. One was that we were not persuaded that this focus on wealth, celebrity and body image sat easily alongside the Cathedral’s purpose statement and values. The other was that we drew a distinction between being a venue and offering hospitality. It seemed to us that church can merely be a rather grand and beautiful venue to be hired out for others to take possession of. It would be a dereliction of guardianship. The Cathedral’s own involvement in and ownership of what went on within its walls was very much to do with the “sacred” and the trust placed in a faith community to look after it. If we had believed that a fashion show could be a kind of fresh expression that would “promote our product” (the gospel), then we would have shared the responsibility for it. Because whether we like it or not, a cathedral is perceived to carry responsibility for all that takes place within it. I found that out in a rather sharp way when we allowed an episode of the TV series Inspector George Gently to be filmed in the cathedral. Here, Durham was acting itself, not pretending to be somewhere else as it had done in Elizabeth or Harry Potter. But shots were fired in the nave and the good inspector was badly injured. There were predictable letters of outrage, though interestingly none from North East England, only from other parts of the country. Maybe north-easterners were proud to see their cathedral on television, but I could understand why others felt discomfort at this apparent, even if entirely fictional, violation of the sacred space.

But my most enduring insight into the ownership of Durham's sacred space came just after I arrived there. A retired bishop who worshipped with us took me on one side and told me about the Durham Miners' Gala which would soon be taking place in the city. As part of it. there is a huge service in the Cathedral with processions of miners' banners and colliery bands. It brings people together from across the North East: every pit village seems to be represented in an act of worship that is at once a powerful memory of Durham's great mining traditions, poignant because of the demise of that once proud industry, sad because of the memory of those killed and injured in mining disasters, and a celebration of the lives and aspirations of working people of the region. I did not know this at the time because I had not yet attended the event. But the bishop said to me: "Michael, the Miners will soon be crowding into this great space. They will claim it as their own. You will never understand Durham Cathedral until you have witnessed it and seen for yourself how deeply attached the people of this region are to their cathedral." He was right.

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So let me end by suggesting how we should relate to sacred space in our cathedrals today. Here are four principles that could help us be good guardians of our spaces and manage the problematic boundaries between sacred and profane in today’s highly complex environment.

First, we must love our sacred spaces. It’s self-evident that we who work and worship in cathedrals love them, but for some parish clergy, the church fabric, which contains our sacred spaces, is seen as a burden, not a privilege. What’s more, after a lifetime of involvement with the sacred which is what ordained ministry amounts to, I’ve seen how careless familiarity with holy things can set in and compromise the reverence that is due to them. If we are caring for numinous spaces, presiding over numinous ceremonies and handling numinous objects, we need to be careful. Scholars of ritual remind us that the holy is not to be trifled with. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” says Hebrews about not being on our guard when we encounter the sacred. I’ve found that the habitus of reverence speaks volumes to people for whom the idea of the sacred is strange, even alien. To place love at the heart of our ministry in sacred spaces, especially in the liturgy, is to invest them with the central virtue of Christian character. It’s also to deliver us professional religious types from the affliction Ritual Notes is a symptom of, what Sydney Evans, when he was Dean of Salisbury called memorably, “sanctuary-mindedness, narcissism and lace”. 

Secondly, we need to base our attitude to sacred space on a rigorous biblical and catholic theology. We can bring to our handling of the sacred over scrupulous attitudes that don’t bear close examination theologically. Lurking not far beneath the surface can be all kinds of assumptions about ritual holiness, the issues Mary Douglas the anthropologist and Old Testament writer describes in her book Purity and Danger. It’s not that policies about sacred space and rubrics governing ceremonial correctness are necessarily “primitive” or arcane, for as she points out, it’s an ingrained habit of all societies to regulate and control behaviours at symbolic places and rituals. Remembrance Day ceremonies show us how the sacred can foster attitudes of high anxiety precisely because we invest so heavily in the memories they hold. I am simply saying that as a matter of good theology, we need to know what we are doing and why when we guard our sacred spaces, beginning with the psalmist’s affirmation that “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it”. Psalm 24 is particularly important to liturgists because as a ritual of entry into the holy sanctuary, its theme is precisely how we should understand the sacred in the setting of a creation that God has already owned, hallowed and blessed.

Thirdly, we need to remember that the “sacred” does not simply belong to places, ceremonies and objects but to people and communities whose memories they hold, whose stories they tell, and who, because of their encounter with God, invest spiritual significance in them. So how we develop the building and make changes to the liturgy is always a matter of sensitivity because of their sacredness to a community. So we always need to recognise the image of God in all who cross our thresholds, and regard all of them as guests, pilgrims and worshippers rather than (God forbid) mere sightseers and tourists. If sacred space is essentially humane hospitable and generous, then access and welcome, interpretation and development become pastoral and spiritual tasks. Sacred space is for God’s people to use and find joy in. The space and its liturgy should both care for us. It’s our privilege as guardians to enable them to do that.

Finally, sacredness of space and place can only flourish in so far as they reflect our own integrity as guardians. That is to say, “this sanctuary of my soul” as the famous anthem text calls it, is as crucial as the sanctuary of the space itself. Sacred space has pastoral and ethical aspects as well as liturgical and ceremonial. I am speaking both collectively and individually. The “soul” of a cathedral chapter and community is as significant here as that of the individual. The decisions cathedrals need to make, so often driven by financial stringencies, the call to monetise everything, and the pressures of a public with their own ideas about what should happen in cathedrals, call, I think, for real “purity of heart”.

How do we undertake this in practice? It begins with the aims and values of the cathedral itself – not cathedrals generically but of our particular place: what we believe we are for, and what values we have agreed to work to. Aims and values need of course to be well calibrated by good theology and good ecclesiology, but if we have done our theological work well (and it takes a great deal of Chapter, staff and community time), our official statements will inform policy decisions about sacred space in an intelligent way.  This is what integrity means in practice, I think. And it helps us to act not out of reckless opportunism, nor out of worries about money and resources, nor out of the lazy conservatism that does not want to wrestle with issues but simply says “this is how we do things here”. Here is the secret of this “purity of heart”. It guards our integrity, ensures good process for decision-making, and above all protects us against gaining the whole world but losing our collective soul.

Cathedrals are among the most visible guardians of “soul” in our secularising western society today. Yet that same society seems ever more hungry for what cathedrals can bring to them by way of being spaces whose sacredness challenges our easy materialist assumptions, offers new opportunities for re-connecting with our humanity, invites us into the vision of God. This is why sacred space is the greatest resource for mission that we have, and why our investment in it will always be supremely worthwhile. For as the Bard is always showing us in his inimitably inventive way, the theatre of the soul is about nothing less than the re-enchantment of all life, the transfiguration of our bleak and hopeless winter’s tale by the happiness and hope of God’s glorious summer.

The Precentors’ Conference September 2016, Southwark Cathedral

 

A Long History of Care: Founders' Day at the Hospital of God, Greatham

It is a long history that we commemorate here at Greatham each Founders’ Day. When Robert de Stichill founded the Hospital of God in 1273, he no was no doubt influenced by the example of his Cathedral Priory in Durham where he had been a monk. He dedicated this chapel to St Mary and St Cuthbert, like the Cathedral: perhaps he wanted to invoke the tradition of Benedictine hospitality that lay at the heart of the Priory’s daily work and ministry. The care of the poor and needy was always a call of monks living under Benedict’s Rule. ‘Welcome everyone as if they were Christ himself’ it says.

This was why Greatham was not simply a ‘hospital’ in the medieval sense, a place of safety, sanctuary and care. It was a hospital of God. Its business was to imitate and live out God’s own hospitality to those who most needed his protection, the people the Hebrew Bible speaks of as his special treasure, the poor. Bishop Stichill was undertaking a project of love: that is what this place represents. ‘Let mutual love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels unawares’ it says in our reading this morning.

In Durham, the visible survivals of the Priory’s hospitality are scant: the foundations of the guest hall underneath what are now desirable flats in a heritage setting; the remains of the infirmary beneath the Archdeacon’s house.  The monks’ dormitory itself survives, of course: its great length running along an entire range of the cloister and its grand 15^th century timber roof make it one of the great rooms of England. It tells you something not only about the size and wealth of the Priory but about the importance it attached to accommodating the community properly.

But you have to go to France to see a ‘hospital’ in the Greatham sense whose whole reason for being was to serve the sick and the poor. This is the Hospices de Beaune in Burgundy, one of the best architectural statements of medieval charity I know.  There, a room the size of Durham’s dormitory has beds in cells along its walls and, at the far end, an altar where once upon a time the great Last Judgment triptych of Roger Van der Weyden used to hang, a proper focus for the infirm and dying who lay facing it along the length of the dormitory.  It reminded guests that it was God himself who received and entertained them. It was his kindness and care that was expressed through the hands of the staff who looked after them. Like Greatham, that charity continues to serve the sick and needy today.

It seems to me that these couple of words, of God, make all the difference: the Hospital of God. No doubt it was true, when Robert de Stichill founded it, that all charitable endeavour was done for God and in his name: this is what Christendom meant. When we consider how many of our charitable institutions in Europe originated in the medieval vision of a holistic society, whether in education, health care or the service of the elderly and poor, we have to recognise that there was something rather wonderful in the church’s commitment to emulate the generosity of God in its service of humanity.

No doubt there was a lot wrong with those centuries and their preoccupation with temporal power and wealth. Robert de Stichall was one of those who insisted most strongly on wielding his Palatinate power as a prince-bishop, and that should give us pause. But perhaps he redeemed himself by founding this Hospital, endowing large resources to Greatham so that it could care for the needy and vulnerable within his Palatinate realm. We don’t know if he or other prince-bishops had an uneasy conscience about their riches. I am not above helping the wealthy to assuage their consciences by means of substantial charitable giving. And in this place and on this day, we should pray for him as we celebrate our Founder, that he may indeed be resting in peace in gratitude for what his charity continues to do today.

In this Epiphany season, we have been hearing once more the story of the Magi who came to find the infant Christ. Perhaps the gifts they brought him out of their own wealth and power give us an image of a resplendent prince-bishop doing something similar: bending low enough to see and worship the Infant, offering him what he had to give. Can we see in the gold, frankincense and myrrh not simply valuable gifts in their own right, but symbols of the offering of all of life to God in the person of his incarnate Son? The long journey of the Magi, their humility in paying homage to the Child, the generosity of their gifts – it is all in such stark contrast to the fearful, grasping Herod whose clenched fist batters the Hebrew children and drowns their innocence in a bloodbath.  

What use had Jesus of gold? Or frankincense, or myrrh? Not much, I think. In the lovely Epiphany operetta Amahl and the Night Visitors, the composer portrays the Magi as begging shelter for the night at a woman’s hovel where she and her crippled son eke out a parlous existence as best they can. Here, seeing how the gold seduces an impoverished mother, the wise men come to recognise that a Sovereign whose kingship is not from this world does not need these things. All he needs is the homage and love of loyal subjects. The poor cripple-boy wants to make his offering to this new-born Child too. All he has to give is his crutch. As he offers it, he finds that he is miraculously healed. And that somehow feels so much more authentic a gift than all the gold in the world.

And yet, like the bread and wine of the eucharist, any gift offered and blessed through the giving has transformative power. Even poor gold such as the magi offered; like Bishop Stichill’s wealth. This Hospital is the result, still here, still true to its founder’s vision all these centuries later. That is something to celebrate on Founders’ Day. And because his money and resources were offered to God as an act of charity, this this is not just any hospital. It is the Hospital of God. It derives its name and its meaning from why and how the gift was offered. What we do here we do in God’s name, because he is that kind of god: generous, open-handed, far-seeing, compassionate, kind.  It’s not that other institutions in the business of health care and alleviating social need don’t demonstrate real excellence and utter commitment. They do, and we thank God. But I want to say that the excellence and commitment of the Hospital of God has a particular quality, a character that derives from its name, its founder’s intentions and its long, long history of care. 

It is hard to put into words, but I believe we know it when we see it, because we can recognise the hand of God in it at a conscious level. ‘Recognised or not, the Deity is always present’ wrote Carl Jung above the entrance of his clinic at Zürich. God is present, if unrecognised, in so much wonderful care exercised by thousands of people day after day across the nation.  But it is especially wonderful when God is acknowledged as the source and inspiration of what we do when we offer hospitality and care for people in name of the Christ who is the same yesterday, today and for ever. For then, strangers become friends, and angels, and we know that we belong to that larger fellowship of those who rejoice with us, but on another shore and in a greater light. To that place of glory and unending happiness may God bring us all.

Founders’ Day at Greatham Hospital, 23 January 2014
Hebrews 13.1-8, Matthew 2.1-15