Ministry for the Long Haul 1: Inhabiting the Stories of our Communities and Churches

When your Bishop invited me to speak to you about “Ministry for the Long Haul”, I asked him why he thought I might be at all qualified to do this. It’s true that I am a Londoner, though not from the Stepney Area (even if my son now has a flat in Bethnal Green, so I suppose that gives me a demonstrable connection). Most of my ministry has been in cathedrals, and although I have been an incumbent too, it was in a market town in the far north of England, nothing like the densely urban multicultural sector of London that you minister in. He replied, “well, you’ve completed the long haul, so share some of your experience about making that journey. It’s the human and spiritual insights we are looking for”. I couldn’t argue with that, and indeed today marks the first anniversary of my retirement. So here I am. 

I was ordained in my mid-20s. At that age, you believe you could do anything. But after the first decade and beyond, ministry can feel like a long haul as you look forward and, as I am doing now, back. And as the age of retirement stretches ever further our working lifetimes, it is getting longer than ever, though our forebears would have smiled at the idea that you ever “retire” from the cure of souls. But I have a hunch that for reasons we are familiar with, the sheer intensity of the demands of ministry is greater than it used to be for most clergy. Athletes know that the long haul calls for stamina and survival skills as well as fitness, the hunger to do well and the will to stay the course. That image is familiar to us from the New Testament. That image is about discipleship, not ministry specifically, but that itself tells us something obvious about public ministry, that we must never divorce it from our fundamental identity and vocation given to us in baptism. As disciples it’s our lifelong vocation to live in Jesus Christ, to become like him, and therefore – an important point this – to become more fully human, the men and women God made us to be. And that helps set our vocation as the ordained alongside every other vocation and human endeavour: whoever we are and whatever we do, our purpose is always to be good human beings and good disciples, faithful unto death. Life itself, if we are spared, is a long haul. 

It sounds like a strategy for survival, getting to the finishing line in one piece. That’s how I initially heard the Bishop’s suggested title. And I don’t deny that sometimes, maybe often – we are in survival mode in ministry. We have to be when crises and challenges threaten to overwhelm us and we wonder if are ever going to live to tell the tale. The set texts in these situations are the Psalm laments, the Book of Jeremiah and the Passion Narrative, especially Jesus in Gethsemane. 

But as I thought about it, I realised that this phrase "the long haul" was actually inviting us into a deeper kind of exploration. As I looked back at my farewell preached exactly a year ago today, it began to dawn on me. What I mean is this: that ministry for the long haul has to have shape, design, a sense of purposefulness and direction. I’m not going to reduce it to the corporate language of objectives and goals because that somehow makes ministry a mere function or set of tasks within an organisation. It’s not that I’m denying that ministry often comes down to “jobs”: every vocation is “work” in both a profound and an everyday sense, and activity needs to be purposeful if it is to be effective. In St John’s Gospel, to do the “work” of God is the same as doing the “will” of God. There is a rich theology of vocation there. Because of this, I believe it’s fundamental to a ministry that has depth, that is lasting in its effects and that is fulfilling for us who practise it, that it needs to have an architecture. 

Someone said that we should all become “artists of our own lives”. To which of course a person of faith adds the rider “under God”. To live wisely is, I think, to enter into this process of artistry and design more consciously as literally a “once-in-a-lifetime” collaboration with God as we become the people he meant us to be. I see this as an aspect of being created in God’s image. So if this is true of human life, it must also be true of vocation, of every ministry we exercise, and of public ministry in particular. My experience is that it’s at those times when I’ve been most aware of this that I’ve been happiest, because most fulfilled in what I have been and done as a priest – in the sense of doing the work of God. Though I also know from my experience how God can work through us in our dark times when, perhaps, the light more easily breaks through precisely because we are broken vessels.

But before I say more about this, let me sound a caveat. I can’t do better than quote from a book by Ruth Burrows, To Believe in Jesus. “God has given each of us the task of fashioning a beautiful vase for him which we must carry up the mountain in order to place in his hands. This vase represents everything we can do to please God, our good works, our prayers, our efforts to grow to maturity; all this God values most highly. Into the making of this vase, then, we put all we have, our whole self. It is for God we are fashioning it, we tell ourselves. When it is finished we begin our journey up the mountain. When we reach the top… it isn’t beautiful anymore. There it is in our hands, a tawdry, common pot… the vase into which we had put our all. A deep instinct is telling us that if we want God we have to go over the other side of the mountain… We can’t go down with anything in our hands; we must drop the vase, still precious though so disappointing. Beautiful or not, we cannot take it with us, we must go to God with nothing in our hands. Our spiritual achievement is our most precious treasure. It has to go.” Beware of Pelagianism!

Nevertheless, whether we have completed many decades of ordained ministry or are just setting out, God invites us into this project of collaboration. So how do we become artists of our own ministry, set about designing ministry for the long haul? Ministry, as we all know, has its outward and inward facing aspects. Spiritual, emotional and intellectual equilibrium are vital for our good health as clergy, and this requires us to pay attention to both the inward and outward if we are going to sustain ministry over many decades. Tomorrow I want to say something about inwardness and attitude. Let me today explore this outward-facing aspect of the long haul.

At my farewell service in Durham Cathedral, I preached from the feeding of the crowd in St John’s Gospel, “gather up the fragments so that nothing is lost”. (You can read it on this blog site at 27 September 2015). I linked it with a beautiful line from a poem by Edith Sitwell, “Nothing is lost, and all in the end is harvest”. It was harvest time, and the week of the Jewish Festival of Sukkot, Booths or Tabernacles which, says St John was precisely the season Jesus performed his great sign. So I looked back over 40 years of ministry and, so to speak, gathered some of the fragments of those four decades, their harvest. They seemed to me to echo the themes of Sukkot as the great pilgrim feast looked back over the 40 years of Israel’s desert journey from the standpoint of being settled in their own land.

Here, I said, is what has mattered to me over the long haul. “Thankfulness to God because to praise Almighty God, to practise gratitude, eucharistia, is the first principle of religion and the foundation of all it means to be human. Dependence on God because it is as we turn back to him and acknowledge his reign over us that we understand how he made us for himself and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in him. Living close to the earth because reverence for life, treating the world with courtesy and charity is to discover our true place in God’s creation. Remembering where we came from because the story of the great acts of God is the foundation of all Christian life, mission and the pursuit of truth and justice. And solidarity with the poor and needy such as the desperate and voiceless, the refugees and asylum-seekers, because as the sanctuary knocker on the Cathedral door announces, God’s household is a place of refuge, safety and care.”

Those five marks of the long haul belonged to a celebration of a journey. Israel’s wilderness journey to the land they believed was promised was celebrated in all three great pilgrim feasts. It called a community to reflect on its past story, inhabit it in the present in a dramatic ritual way, and allow it to bring expectation and hope to the life of faith and human experience. For us as Christians, it’s precisely the same dynamic that we are familiar with in the eucharist as the three tenses of past, present and future coalesce in a single rite. For the eucharist is a liturgy, the great liturgy in which we act out what we have been as a people, what we are now, and what we shall become in God’s time. Christian faith is to embrace the story of a redeemed community and own it personally in baptism by confessing that we belong, we pin our destiny to that of God’s people, we acknowledge its Lord as ours. “This is our story. This is our song.”

Let’s ask what this means for us as we undertake the journey of ministry purposefully and give it shape. For me in parish ministry, it was eye opening to attend a week’s workshops at the Grubb Institute and learn the distinction between person and public role. Never despise the transforming potential of good training! For all I know, this person-role distinction is obvious to all of you. But what made the difference for me was how it helped made sense of what a parish priest is there to do. I was learning how, as a priest, you are expected by many people to have special knowledge of divine mysteries, a hot line to God, and that at the very least I would be competent to say something intelligible in the face of human suffering and pain, whether brought about by natural disaster, human wickedness, or most often, in the personal lives of parishioners through serious illness or pain, the break-up of an intimate relationship, or bereavement.

My role in these situations, I began to grasp, was to be an interpreter of peoples’ stories. It was my calling to attempt to bring insight to shed light on human experience by looking at it in the light of faith, relating it to the big story of God’s coming among us in Jesus Christ. (I tried to write something about this drawing on the wisdom writings of the Old Testament in my book Wisdom and Ministry.) So when people speak about clergy being “religious professionals”, this is one aspect of what they are wanting to express. You could put it this way. As “professionals” (and I’m aware what questions the use of that word begs), we are embedded in a story that it’s our call to be telling. We are its public representatives, its spokespeople, its official guardians. When at our ordination we are solemnly handed the holy scriptures and told to “take authority”, this is the role that is being conferred on us. We belong, in the great image of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, to the House of the Interpreter. 

But the other side of this is to do with the stories of the communities we serve, and the human lives that constitute them. A good pastoral theology and practice requires us to be as embedded in these stories as we are in the church’s story that we rehearse in tell and re-tell in scripture and sacrament. And here is where I think we must be especially intentional as we take on the public role of interpreter in our parish. It’s true that people are the same in one place as another – human life is what it is in all its vicissitudes. But in another sense it’s not true. We are constructed by the communities we live in, shaped for better or worse by the concentric circles of our belonging in family, neighbourhood, town, city, region, nation and continent. There is a grain in the timber of human life, and if we don’t recognise it, we shall get the story wrong in important ways. So paying attention to the local story calls for careful eyes and ears and a good deal of discernment if we are to understand the places in which we work.

 

As a parish priest in the north, I had so much to learn about all this. And although I have learned a great deal in my ministry subsequently, I am quite clear that it was in my first incumbency that I learned most. In my thirties, suddenly finding myself in a public leadership role in a parish in a strange part of the world, the decades of ordained life ahead felt like a very long haul indeed. At times I found myself very low indeed and wondered how I would ever survive a lifetime in ministry. I can’t altogether explain it, though my uncomfortable discovery that as a priest you are constantly in the public eye and subject to scrutiny was near the heart of it. My difficulty in handling conflict and disappointment were also part of it. So was my fear of failure – not only because self-interest made me need to succeed but also for the better reason of not wanting to fail people, the church, the parish. I needed to develop healthier habits of mind and emotion. I needed to acquire resilience, learn that stamina comes into things.

You’re wondering how it is that I’m still here. There are a number of reasons. The sustaining love of God is at the heart of it of course. It found expression as it always does in many ways, some outward, some inward. I’ll say more about inwardness on the long haul tomorrow. I recall some of the books I read then that helped turn my attitude around from self-absorption to living more generously. Among them were the writings of Alan Ecclestone, especially A Staircase for Silence. It wasn’t just the content but the fact that it had been written by someone who had been a parish priest in a tough urban parish in the east end of Sheffield, a place I was to get to know well a decade later. He only started writing in retirement, not just (he said) because of the relentless demands of parish ministry but because he believed he would only have something to say as a spiritual or theological writer after a lifetime’s immersion in the agony and ecstasy of real life in the church and the world. 

I also remember how the poetry of R. S. Thomas came to my rescue, one of the greatest of twentieth century religious poets. Again, his profound insights were forged (I use that fiery analogy deliberately) in the tough setting of parish ministry in rural Wales. In one poem, he writes of his recalcitrant parishioners, “there is no loving such, only a willed gentleness”. How well he knew himself, and me too! How I longed to move beyond “willed gentleness” to love freely, sacrificially, given, like God’s. But one of the many things I have learned in ministry is that sometimes, maybe often, “willed gentleness” is all we are capable of. Like “good enough parenting” to quote Winnicott’s famous phrase, it may not be all that we aspire to, but rather than flail our poor selves out of guilt, shame and the sense of failure that so easily afflicts us, it is not only sufficient to be good and wholesome, but it is God-given too. Maybe someone can draw out of the gospels how Jesus practised willed gentleness against the temptation to be angry or to judge. Perhaps this turns out to be true love that is demonstrated in a way that is sustainable and practical. Remember that in the synoptic gospels, Jesus is only once said to have “loved” anyone, and that was the rich young ruler after whom the Lord looked with sorrow because the cost of discipleship was too high.

But what I learned from both Alan Ecclestone and R. S. Thomas was reinforced by a highly skilled mentor I was lucky enough to find. At this demanding and at times dark time, he was shrewd enough to see through my confusion and despondency and point me towards a healthier approach to ministry. And let me say before I go any further how essential I’ve found it to be to find the best possible accompaniers and guides in public ministry. If ever there is a fatal arrogance in people in public life, it is to think that they have to lead on their own. Nowadays, most of us take spiritual direction, mentoring, coaching and work consultancy for granted and gratefully avail ourselves of them, thanks to our bishops and dioceses who set aside funds to support us and encourage us to take the time we need to make sure we get the best help we can. I am quite clear that for my long haul as theological teacher, parish priest, cathedral canon and dean, these fellow-travellers were essential to my learning, my insight and my flourishing. And never more so than in the parish.

That particular mentor asked me in effect (and over many months) to do three things. The first was to try to understand what the priest symbolises and represents both in and to a local community. The second was to immerse myself in that community’s story, get to know it intimately, become part of it myself. The third was, in the light of the first two, to try to frame my own ministry intelligently and purposefully, make of it something that was not only of real and lasting value but lovely in its own right. They are of course all aspects of the same thing, but it was helpful at the time to see them as distinct. And I can honestly say that learning to reconfigure my public role in the light of these prompts and nudges was life-changing. They meant I could look back and see those few years as hugely formative – and be proud of the big steps forward that the parish achieved in that time. 

Let me take them in turn.

First, what the priest symbolises and represents. Thomas Mann said: “to live symbolically spells true freedom”. The Greek word means “to throw together”, to lay things alongside each other from which the word evolves into one standing for the other. It’s a rich idea theologically and psychologically and there is a vast literature devoted to it. But we have an intuitive idea about how a symbol opens up doors of perception in our minds and imaginations giving us access to meanings that are beyond the capacity of rational speech. 

We clergy inhabit a world of symbols all the time. We understand, because it is our job, how symbol and sacrament, ceremony and ritual belong to the Christian story we tell and clothe it with flesh and blood, incarnate it in a material and tangible way. This is especially true in the archetypal Christians sacraments of baptism and eucharist. What is less familiar is to think of ourselves in this way, in our ordained roles as deacons, priests and bishops. Now, a symbol (as opposed to a mere sign) is capable of exerting great power. A national flag, a football trophy, a wedding ring, a gift that carries great personal meaning for us because of the person who gave it to us – all these are true symbols in which heart is, so to say, speaking to heart. In church, water, bread, wine, oil, the book of the gospels, incense, lights, music, processions – all these and many more are invested with a symbolic character by the liturgy. They “glow”, as it were, with a quality we can only call numinous. So far so obvious – and so wonderful.

But by extension, the church building is itself a space that is symbolic of many things: the presence of God primarily, of course, and the worship and prayer that belong within it are what make it not just any space but “sacred space”. But it’s much more than that. It holds profound collective memories of a community; even a modern building like Coventry Cathedral where I once worked had rapidly acquired a deeply symbolic identity in just a few years. By the time I went there 25 years after it was opened, there were aspects of it that were as unquestionably iconic and sacred as the medieval bombed out church had been next door. And on top of that, a church is “sacred” to us if we worship there or did once, have been baptised or married there or said farewell to our beloved dead there. This year I walked my daughter up the aisle of Alnwick Church because she had chosen to be married there. It was a strange feeling to be the proud father of the bride in a place I’d known so well as its incumbent. 

For me, the sacredness of the place because of my memories, and of the sacredness of this unique moment in our family story came together unforgettably. All this belongs to the world of the symbol. I’m saying that when we operate in a highly symbolic environment, we ourselves become symbolic people. Like church buildings, we clergy evoke memories, expectations, longings, hopes, fears even. When we stand in the pulpit, when we preside at the Lord’s table, when we visit, when we chair the PCC, when we lead the prayers, even when we make a fool of ourselves in the parish pantomime so that people laugh good naturedly at us, we are functioning in this symbolic world. It goes with the role. It’s true to some extent of all leaders because a leader inevitably embodies and represents their institution or community to itself and to others. If you look at the highly ritualised world that, say, our politicians inhabit, you’ll see the point. In our case as clergy we stand on the elusive threshold between what is seen and what is unseen, between what is temporal and what is eternal, between the church’s story and the local and personal stories that belong to a particular place. We publicly represent and symbolise the values of the gospel, the story and teaching of the church, indeed the very mystery of God by who and what we are. 

I found it liberating to begin to understand that all this was to do with the role conferred in my ordination. I was called to inhabit it in a personal and unique way: we can never divorce person from role even if we need to distinguish between them to save ourselves from being swallowed up by the sheer demands of public office. It made sense of some of the (to me) sharp difficulties I thought I was facing in the parish, matters I now think are largely normal for us in our roles because they so often concern other peoples’ expectations, transferences and projections. It felt, and still feels, highly relevant to the long haul and how I was going to construe my ministry in a healthier way. In last year’s farewell sermon, I referred to knowing where we come from. That’s both a biographical and an existential aspect of ourselves. We need to know who and what we, “where we are coming from” in a pastoral, spiritual and sacramental sense. It empowers us to fulfil our calling to serve by feeding the hungry with good things. Solidarity with the poor in my sermon was meant to include all of human need wherever we find it – physical, emotional, spiritual. “Empowerment” to respond not only because it’s our duty but because it’s our privilege is how I have experienced that insight ever since, at least in my better moments.

The other side of this was to do with the parish itself and its story. This was my second point. For whom was I symbolic as the parish priest? The obvious answer is, to the worshipping community with whom, week by week and day by day, I broke bread and shared koinonia, that infinitely precious communion in holy things. But that was only part of the answer. You know what I’m going to say. Whatever I myself thought about it, whatever I said or did, there was no way that a market town parish was not going to pull me into the life of the whole community. Whether it was baptising, marrying and burying parishioners, national and local celebrations or disasters that the town wanted to observe in church, prayers at town council meetings, schools (not just the aided CofE school), hospital, theatre, music and the arts, trade, the historic Shrove Tuesday football match, the town wanted these activities to be ritualised, symbolised, “blessed”. It looked to us clergy to do this for them, or perhaps I should say, among them, as one of them. 

That was then, a generation ago, and there, in Northumberland. That was traditional Church of England parish ministry with a traditional northern accent. It’s 300 miles away from London and ten thousand miles away from the far more complex metropolitan worlds you are familiar with here in Stepney. But how strange it was to me at the time, schooled as I was in suburban churches in London and never having lived in the north of England before. I had to renegotiate my vocation. And I had to define the scope of my ministry in that parish and try to shape it round what I believed God was asking me to do there. And I believe the response I made, to embrace the wider parish, to be there in principle for everyone as far as I could, was the right one. I learned that the very word parish, “paroikia” means not those who go to church but those who “live around”. 

What this required of me was to develop a sense of place. The parish already had that – in abundance. But I needed to learn it for myself, embed myself in the particularities of that parish in that landscape at that time, learn its story. When we moved into the vicarage I found in the study a copy of the two-volume History of Alnwick by George Tate, published in the early 19th century. Copies are as rare as gold dust. Alas, inside the cover it said “For the use of Vicars of Alnwick. Not to be removed from the Vicarage”. From it I learned a lot about the church and the town, all new to me. I wrote a little visitors’ guide to the church – always a good way of learning about your place of work. This was a medieval building, but every church has a story as I’ve tried to say already. And from there I became fascinated with the history of the town itself, and the North East region in which it is set. All this seemed to me to be part of getting to grips with the story of the place in which I was serving as incumbent. It’s an approach I adopted everywhere else I went on to minister. In the language of my farewell sermon last year, it comes down to living close to the earth and paying attention to the story it has to tell.

And here is the point I want to make. It served me well to develop this sense of place as life-giving in its own right – after all, the parish is also our home and our family’s home: how could we not be curious about where we live? But it served me even better to see it as an essential resource for public ministry. It gained me, I think, a hearing, respect even, that I had taken the trouble to try to recognise the context of peoples’ lives and the stories of their community. It’s not a question of going native because a good parish theologian (which is what a priest is called to be) is not only there to affirm the environment with its narratives and traditions, its myths and rituals, its culture and habits, its self-understanding, its assumptions about what it aspires to be in the future. That goes for the church too, of course. Ministers must ask questions too, critique assumptions, perhaps even help a community reframe the story it tells about itself. But we have to learn and know and understand before we can stand in the House of the Interpreter, especially when, like Jeremiah, we have to pull up and destroy as well as build and plant. 

My third point was about the purposes and goals of public ministry. What did all this teach me about how to reframe my ministry at that time and set healthy directions for the future? I had no reason to think then that I would not spend three more decades in parishes. What I learned there was largely thanks to my mentor’s making me think through what ministry was about; much of it too was thanks to colleagues and parishioners who often without knowing it helped pennies to drop; and I have to admit, much of it was also through mistakes and misjudgements too embarrassing to recall.  But I look back to that experience as a time when better habits of mind and heart became at least the starting point for journeys that lay ahead. And I think I can say that as I have begun to take hold of ministry as something that has both purpose and art, they have largely stood up to some pretty robust testing since. (Don’t ever think by the way that cathedrals are refuges from the hard graft of parish life. If they were once upon a time, they certainly aren’t now.) 

In a report you know well in the Stepney Area, Church Growth in East London, Angus Ritchie speaks about having “a clear vison of goals, engaged in conscious self-reflection on being both faithful and reflective”. I think that is meant as a way of being for a healthy church that is growing and flourishing. But it maps directly on to our roles as clergy. If we are to be, as the phrase has it, “reflective practitioners” (what other kind of practitioner would any of us want to be?), then clarity about purpose and the capacity to be self-aware enough to think about what we are doing, and how, and why, are all indispensable. Indeed, I doubt that with the demands and stresses of ordained life as it is today, it is sustainable in any other way. I wouldn’t have used that language thirty years ago. But I now see that it was what I was seeing through a glass darkly. I can only say that over a lifetime of ministry, that way of thinking, behaving, pondering and praying has served me well. It has made the best of me what I am. 

In my farewell sermon, those insights about knowing where we come from, living close to the earth and solidarity with the poor were introduced by two imperatives: thankfulness to God and dependence on God. They sum up, I think, not only the whole of ministry but the whole of life. I’ll say more tomorrow. But in relation to the big story that we tell about a God who so loved the world, I hope I’ve made it clear that we as ministers are meant to be the public embodiment, the symbol, of those fundamental ways of being before God. Go back to the ordinal and see it for yourself in the emphasis laid on what clergy do and what we are. Austin Farrer spoke about the priest being a “walking sacrament”, or in an older register, "alter Christus", being as Christ to others. 

I said earlier that we can never separate ministry from discipleship. You could say that being ordained sets us up publicly as exemplary disciples. However uncomfortable we may feel about that way of putting it, I’m clear that this is how many see us. It’s where all those “oughts” and “musts” of ministry come from, rules that say clergy should behave like this and not like that. In a month when the sexuality of bishops has once again hit the headlines, we need to examine these assumptions. My point is simply to indicate that when you are an office-holder in the church, your life is up for scrutiny, and everyone has their own ideas about what is or isn’t appropriate for clergy. As symbolic people, we model something that is important not only in the church but beyond. Questions about values are bound to follow. We should welcome it because it shows that something, at least, still matters. The power of story and symbol is still there.

Of course, we know that none of us is that exemplary disciple. We are all broken, fractured human beings. We are precarious, we fall short and we fail God, the church and ourselves times without number. We know ourselves too well to be deceived on that point. This is why these two attitudes of dependence and gratitude are so fundamental to being a Christian. We are people formed by grace, and to live out of dependence and thankfulness is the only adequate way of responding to the God who freely comes to us, finds us, loves us and accepts us in Jesus. I doubt if I have learned anything more fundamental than that when it comes to the long haul. I am still learning it. 

So if we can tell the big story about God and engage with the stories of our communities consciously invoking (because it is our role to) the faith dimension of human life, if we can point to what is of abiding significance for us and give a reason for the hope that is within us, then, as Paul says in 2 Corinthians, we do not lose heart. We shall have found ourselves artists of our ministries. They will have been not only useful but beautiful. We gather the fragments with joy, and offer them to God. All in the end is harvest. 

September 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

 

At a Flower Festival

I have loved this church for many years.  It is one of the region's finest, and I don’t say that lightly, as I was once vicar of another great Northumberland church north of here.  I brought the friends of Durham Cathedral to Corbridge a couple of years ago, and they loved it too. You feel here a story that speaks of centuries, not just the middle ages but long before that, even earlier than Saxon times. For here in the Roman town of Corstopitum on the ancient road called Dere Street, now better known as the A68, there are visible traces of life and faith that take us back for as long as there has been a Christian gospel and a church. There is so much to enjoy here at St Andrew’s, both inside and out. And best of all, because I am an inveterate church-crawler, I have always found it open. An open church says so much about hospitality, not just yours but God’s. It says that this is God's place and all may freely come and taste that the Lord is good.

And this weekend you have created a wonderful flower festival. That seems to me to sum up three aspects of the life of this church: beauty, welcome and memory.  Let me try to say how.  Beauty first.  This flower festival is a feast for the senses.  Flowers give us so much to see and enjoy: shapes, patterns, colours, textures.  Some are brilliant and draw the eye at once; others are more muted, playing in a minor key.  The interplay of light and shadow in this church is the richer because of the flowers: they affect how we read the colours and textures of our native sandstone.  And then there are the more subtle enjoyments offered to other senses too: the church has a scent that is different from every day, the exquisite mingling of flowery and leafy smells with those of old stone and woodwork and fabrics.   This flower festival opens up our capacity to respond to all that is lovely in our world. 

But beauty, famously, is in the eye of the beholder. To respond to it we need to love the person or thing before us.  And that at once draws in our capacity to create, and to give ourselves to what we create.  The story of creation in Genesis shows how completely committed God is to every stage of his work: he not only gives himself totally to what he does, but he loves what he fashions and shapes.  So it is with us who are his image.  This festival is a true work of art because it is an act of self-giving and love on your part.  At one level, it shows your love for this church, and I guess that there can be few people in this village who do not care about this ancient and beautiful place.  At a deeper level, it shows your love for God that you would want to go to this degree of care in making this church what it is for these few days. What matters about beauty is where it leads us. It isn’t an end in itself: it’s a gift to lead us to God.  Its message today is: look around you at all this.  Let it teach you about trusting the God who cares for you even more than he cares for the passing beauty of a bird or a flower.  Because the hard truth is that once cut, a flower is no longer a living thing. Its beauty passes, soon to be consigned to the compost heap or bonfire.  Yet the loveliness of the human soul and the loveliness of God are eternal.  So it is the beauty of holiness that we need to nurture in ourselves and one another. And by offering what we are to him in the worship of this church, we are being true to where lasting beauty and joy are to be found: in the heart of God himself. 

My second word for this festival was welcome.  I believe this flows straight out of beauty, because it invites everyone in to enjoy it. It asks, no it demands, to be shared with as many people as possible: the beauty of this festival, this church, our life together as a community, the beauty of God himself.  Beauty is evidence of God’s love, even if we don’t always recognise it. “Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back / Guilty of dust and sin” wrote George Herbert in his most famous poem. So this festival is our way of showing love. We do this by welcoming and being hospitable to others: our friends and neighbours in this village, across Tynedale and many others from far and wide.  I said at the beginning how good it is to find this church open whenever I come.  But this weekend has, I’m sure, underlined the joy of hospitality, being an open church that welcomes everybody to enjoy it and - who knows - to find here a living, working church that offers a friendship and care that reflect nothing less than the love of God himself. 

But then there’s the third word, memory. The theme of this festival is “A Backward Glance”. And that’s about our story here in this ancient place, a story that spans the whole of what we call Anno Domini from Roman times to the present. Looking back is vitally important for all of us in our communities, and for each of us personally. My mother died this summer, and now I am having to go through her home, the house I was brought up in from the 1950s until I left to go to university. So many memories are evoked by the sights and smell and feel of that house and what it contains, not least in my own letters to her which, it turns out, she lovingly kept and cherished all her life. Of course, memories can be a painful as well as thankful, but they have formed and shaped us, made us what we are today and what we hope to become tomorrow. So it is in our village community and in the community of this church. Here at this festival, our heritage of memories both ancient and modern is laid out for us to enjoy, to reflect on, and perhaps be challenged by as well.

I hear the author of our epistle reading reminding Timothy of the importance of remembering. He tells of his past life as a persecutor and man of violence; but then he goes on to remember how God in his mercy has come to him, how his grace has “overflowed for me with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus” – not just overflowed but overflowed for me. That’s how personal he makes it. Here at the eucharist, we obey the command to “do this in memory of me”, which means keeping the events of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and glory alive in our present experience “until he comes again”. Remembering, looking back, is at the heart of our Christian faith, because it is memory that has the power to transform us in the present and give us hope for the future. At this altar, we enfold our own memories in the memory we have of Jesus that draws us together in him and makes us what we are as his household, his people, his body.

So an open church and a beautiful festival and a warm, hospitable community and a celebration of memories from the distant and nearer past are the best possible symbol of how God embraces us and the stories we tell. welcome us back into his friendship.  Call it mission if you like: what is important is that we do what we do in God’s name, and for his sake, because he is an outward-facing God for whom the world and its concerns, its joy and its pain, are always on his heart.  By throwing open the doors of our church this weekend, we are saying that they are on our hearts too.  If the spirit of this festival has touched us in some deep way, then we shall keep its spirit alive in our common life long after the flowers have become a thing of the past.  This is what God looks for us as we celebrate the life of the Jesus among us, and treasure the memories of our lives gathered up in his so that we live out his beauty and welcome in his world. 

St Andrew, Corbridge, 11 September 2016. 1 Timothy 1.12-17, Luke 15.1-10

 

St Cuthbert: our travelling companion in faith

Some of you will have heard Melvyn Bragg’s engaging series on The Matter of the North on BBC Radio 4 this week. On Tuesday he explored “The Glories of Northumbria”. His focus was the way in which Christianity shaped the origins of what we now call the North East. As a southerner, coming for the first time to Northumberland as a parish priest over thirty years ago, I began to learn not only to admire the saints of the north but to love them: Aidan whose feast day was last Wednesday; Hild, Oswald and Cuthbert, Benedict Biscop, Wilfred, and the man without whose writings we would know next to nothing about any of them, Bede. Since the 1980s, they have been my companions in prayer, pilgrimage and the spiritual life. They have played a large part in my formation as a human being and a Christian. I have tried to learn from them, though I am a long way from emulating their devotion, their fervour, their capacity to see the world lit up by God’s fierce and wonderful love.  

When I came back to the North East as Dean at Durham Cathedral, I found myself involved with the saints in a very particular way. The Cathedral is a shrine church that holds remains of three of them: Oswald, Bede and Cuthbert. But it is Cuthbert who lies at the heart of that great and wonderful building – like Lindisfarne, a spiritual emblem of Northumbria if ever there was one. The Cathedral is only there at all because of St Cuthbert and the community who wandered all over the north until they found a permanent home for his body and built a church around it. To be guardian of Cuthbert’s shrine, to have it as a focus of prayer and reflection, to welcome pilgrims who come in search of all that his memory represents – it’s been the greatest privilege of my life.

But our own story comes in at this point, here in the upper reaches of the Tyne. For on their pilgrimage in search of a final resting place, Cuthbert’s community stopped in many different places with their bishop, their Lindisfarne gospel book and the relics of their saints. Wherever they stopped, a temporary church was constructed to house the shrine. Many of them became permanent buildings, a chain of ancient churches across the north that held the memory of this extraordinary journey. Old Haydon, Beltingham, Bellingham, Corsenside, Halton, Allendale and Elsdon are among those in the catchment of the River Tyne and there are many more across Northumberland and Durham. 

So this church we worship in tonight is a footprint of a journey, a trace of a community on the move. I find great meaning in this. Bede tells us that Cuthbert himself was a great traveller, like Aidan and Wilfred before him, always journeying towards new and unknown horizons where he believed God was leading him to bear witness to the gospel. I see him as a kind of Jeremiah as we heard in the first lesson, a young man eager to go where he could uproot and destroy all that was unjust and wrong so as to build and to plant what would serve to bring about goodness and truth. In that reading, Jeremiah is promised hardship and suffering if he is to be faithful to his call. And having preached to exiles, he himself ends up as an exile in Egypt where he dies. There’s a hint of Cuthbert there too, embracing self-inflicted loneliness and exile in a hermit’s cell on the Inner Farne, not because he saw it as a place of peace and tranquility but because he looked for a harsh and testing environment where he could do battle with the demons. 

I love the idea that like Cuthbert, his family of followers saw themselves as a pilgrim people. The monks of Durham identified them with the Hebrews tramping across deserts, rivers and seas as they looked for their promised land; they saw their great Cathedral as the goal of every pilgrim’s longing, Jerusalem the golden. I used to preach about Durham, for all its rock-like stability, having been a mobile cathedral for all those decades Cuthbert’s community were on the move. And part of its pre-history is this church dedicated to St Cuthbert. Because his community rested here with its bishop, praying, preaching good news from its gospel book, remembering its saints, we can truly say that once upon a time, the cathedral was here too. And if it turned out that in his lifetime, Cuthbert came here too, that would simply add lustre to what we cherish in the long history of this holy place.

So if we are going to be faithful to Cuthbert’s memory in this our valley, in these church's dedicated to him, then we need to be travellers of the spirit in our minds and imaginations. That is to say: daring to light new lamps, begin new tasks, think new thoughts of God, hold new hopes of heaven. Our world and our lives are not at all like Cuthbert’s or his community’s. But for them as for us, life could never be about standing still. “To live is to change, and to live long is to have changed much” as John Henry Newman said. If we follow Jesus the Way, we are always a people on pilgrimage.

Embracing change can be the most difficult thing in the world. But what’s so important about travelling is that it opens us up to new possibilities. It helps us to see new things and see familiar things in new ways. A Bantu proverb I'm find of says that if you never travel, you think mother is the only cook. That’s what Cuthbert and his community can help us to grasp: that there can be transformation and renewal in the lives of our churches, our communities, ourselves. Life doesn’t have to be stuck in old habits or routines once we entertain the thought that God could make a difference. 

This was what motivated Cuthbert and the saints. They had looked into the face of God in Christ, and had grasped what St John is speaking about in our second lesson, words I treasure more and more. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called the children of God; and that is what we are. We are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” What we shall be has not yet been revealed. But we glimpse it in the death and resurrection of Jesus and his gift to us of a transformed hope and vision of life. And we make it real by following Jesus as Cuthbert and his community did, loving one another “not in word or speech but in deed and truth” as St John says. Like them, we look for the signs that God is making all things new. Like them we are learning how to live as those who are hope-filled, unafraid and glad, who believe and trust, like them, that God is among us on every journey that we make, until one day we see him face to face and travelling days are done. 

Michael Sadgrove, In St Cuthbert’s Time, September 2016


Jeremiah 1.1-12, 1 John 3.1-3, 18-end


Where It All Began: a Pentecost sermon in the church of my ordination.

It's good - very good - to be back here at St Andrew’s again. You’ll forgive me for being a little personal as I revisit this pulpit this morning where I first cut my teeth as a preacher. Forty-one years ago I was ordained deacon on this very spot, beneath the Norman Arch. I don’t know if anyone here today was in church that Sunday morning, 29 June, St Peter and St Paul’s Day 1975. Even if you were, there’s no reason why you should remember it though my memory is as vivid as if it were last week.

Last year I retired after twelve wonderful years at Durham Cathedral as Dean. Memory comes into things when you cross the threshold into retirement and look back on your working life. You try to identify themes, make connections, gather up fragments. My own working life in public ministry began here. So on this Day of Pentecost, let me try to think aloud about the significance of being in this place on this day and reflect, not on my own career but on the part remembering plays in our celebration of Whitsun and the gift of the Holy Spirit. After all, ordination is a sacrament of the Spirit and whatever the ministry we are each called to, we can only flourish as the Spirit equips and animates us in God’s service. 

In today’s gospel from St John, Jesus promises to send his disciples the Advocate, the Paraclete to be with them for ever, “the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be among you”. A little later on Jesus elaborates on one of the roles of the Paraclete. “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.” So discipleship means learning and it means remembering. Together they constitute our formation as Jesus’ followers and friends. We learn what Jesus has to teach us: truth, grace, faithfulness, love, peace, wisdom and all the other virtues of Christian life. As Benedict says in his Rule, the secret is to listen and discern. And each step in that journey lives on in our experience and our consciousness as we look back and remember what Jesus has taught us and how he has formed us and made us who we are: those same virtues of wisdom and peace, love and faithfulness, grace and truth and the other gifts of the Spirit.

The eucharist is of course the act of remembering that lies at the heart of Christian faith. “Do this in memory of me” says Jesus in the same upper room that St John was telling us about. The kind of memory he is talking about isn’t “aorist” memory, something past and finished with. Anamnesis is in the perfect tense, past acts with present consequences. It lives on in our contemporary experience where we meet and know the crucified and risen Jesus in the sacrament of the altar. Like the Jewish Passover that lies behind it, the story of God’s mighty acts in incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension and Pentecost all belong to our present reality that transforms life now and gives us back our hope. So memory has a future tense as well. “We show forth the Lord’s death until he comes.”

By extension, all Christian memory is like this, the corporate memory of the church, our personal memories as God’s people. The Advocate, says Jesus, abides in our midst so that we can learn and can remember. For all of us, I guess, this church of St Andrew has been a focus of our learning and our memory. Some of you were baptised here, confirmed here, married here. Some of you will have said farewell here to loved ones at their funerals. Some of you learned faith here through Sunday school, adult learning or Christian outreach into the community. All of you have prayed here, heard the word of God here, shared in koinonia with your fellow Christians here, been fed and nourished here in this sacrament of the eucharist. Not many, I think, can say we were ordained here, but the principle is the same. This place, this “serious house on serious earth” to quote Philip Larkin, has played an essential part in the making of us all as Christian people. It is a kind of sacrament in its own right as all holy places are. “Surely the Lord was in this place and I knew it not” said Jacob at Bethel. But we do know it, or at least glimpse it. And if that eludes us, it’s safe to say that we are here because we feel after the sense of God’s presence on this day we are thankful for the gift of the Spirit. 

All this I began to learn in my first years of ordained ministry as a curate here. It’s not of course a matter of theory or book learning. It’s being a practitioner that teaches you, the experience of doing the work of God and the memory of it as you reflect on what it means and where God is to be found in it. Pentecost is one of those days when we look back as the church and recognise how experience has formed us and we have grown in the awareness of God, of one another and of the world. 

So I came to love this church and prize what it symbolised. I can’t exaggerate the influence St Andrew’s has subsequently had on my ministry and the style of liturgy, proclamation and spirituality I learned here. We are lucky if we can look back on our curacies so positively and so thankfully. But I needed to learn something else: that the church can never be the sole container of goodness, truth and beauty. We mustn’t make the mistake of thinking that this church, any church, the church is the only repository of the Spirit’s gifts. If Pentecost means anything, it is to prize open the church from the tiny, beleagured, inward-looking community it had been to a confident, outward-facing, global movement that looks for nothing less than the transformation of the whole creation. 

And this, I believe, is a dimension the church needs to recover today. It follows from our Pentecostal learning and remembering. Jesus goes on to speak about it later in St John. “When the Advocate comes, he will testify on my behalf. You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.” To testify is to speak publicly about what we have learned and remembered. This means that in its words and actions, the church has a life-changing story to tell that is of global significance. In Acts, that first fiery rapture on Whit Sunday led to the expansion of Christianity from Jerusalem to Samaria and into the uttermost parts of the earth: it’s how Luke consciously shapes the narrative in Acts. 



And so must we shape our own story. In evangelism, in pastoral care, in apologetics, in social justice, yes and in liturgy and prayer most of all, we look outwards in imagination and in reality and see the creation as the theatre of God’s activity. It’s not that we take it there, more that we find it there already, so that by “testifying”, by bearing witness to what God is doing in human life, we interpret and articulate in ways that help us both to see and to recognise. As we do this, the story gets added to and enriched. There is yet more to learn and remember, yet more for which to be thankful, yet more that feeds our hope and prayer that God’s kingdom may come, and that we may one day know even as we are known. 



St Andrew’s Headington on the Day of Pentecost 2016. 
Acts 2.1-14, Romans 8. 14-17, John 14.8-17

A Large Room for Pentecost

This is my first Pentecost in retirement. Forty years ago next month, on Trinity Sunday, I was ordained priest in my college chapel here in Oxford. Balliol claims to have been founded one year before Merton in 1263, but we won’t let that get between us tonight.   Last year I retired after 12 wonderful years at Durham Cathedral as Dean. So this year it’s been necessary to learn how to inhabit a different human landscape with new rhythms, routines and opportunities. I’m having to redefine ‘work’ and ‘leisure’ and ask myself how best I can serve God in what they call the Third Age, and how to grow old gracefully. 

I’ve been haunted in this first year of superannuation by some words of the early 20th century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.  He is speaking about ageing.  He says in one of his Letters to a Young Poet that our life is a kind of room, but as we grow older we inhabit a smaller and smaller part of that room, pacing up and down in front of the window, tracing and retracing our steps.  Ageing, he says, means contracting gracefully into a smaller space, pulling in our horizons both literally (because of our increasing physical limitations) and metaphorically (because we no longer think new thoughts and dream new dreams).  It means accepting and making friends with our own mortality.  

This could mean the depressing prospect of diminishing into nothingness.  But Rilke goes on to say: "we must accept our experience as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it." In other words, with the inevitable contraction of our physical and mental environment should come an emotional and spiritual expansion of horizons as when we were young.  ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space’ says Hamlet.  “Old men should be explorers” said Haydn in the last phase of an amazingly fertile life as great music continued to pour out of him, forever fresh and new. 

Today is the Feast of Pentecost, Whit Sunday. We are celebrating how God comes amongst us as Holy Spirit, is to be found at the heart of life as Paraclete, Holy Wisdom, Advocate, Comforter and Friend. We usually focus on Luke’s dramatic fiery story we heard from the Acts of the Apostles. But I find St John in tonight’s gospel rather closer to my own rather quieter experience of the Spirit of Truth whom the world neither knows nor sees, but who abides in us and is within us as the One who shows us the Father. 

There’s no limit to the number of ways we could picture the Spirit, so here’s one inspired by Rilke. It’s that of a large room, of space.  For I want to see Pentecost as the celebration of God-given space in which we can grow and flourish, a room generous enough for each of us and all of us collectively to discover and live out our humanity.  

Let me explain. The origins of Pentecost lie in one of Israel’s agricultural festivals, the Feast of Weeks when the first ripe grain was offered fifty days after the Passover.  So in Old Testament times, the feast was linked to the gift of a land, space to inhabit and settle and fertilise, rich, beautiful, well-watered, productive.  The land flowing with milk and honey, the land of safety and plenty and rest is a familiar image of redemption.  What is interesting about the language of ‘salvation’ in Hebrew is that it is closely related to the idea of space.  To be confined, hemmed in, imprisoned, when possibilities are closed off, is a kind of death.  Its opposite is to have room to grow and flourish and be truly alive.  

Now "Lebensraum" has its sinister shadow: most of the invasion of history have been driven by land-hunger, the competitive struggle for territory to occupy.  Yet the idea of space to live in is suggestive.  It echoes our basic human needs for shelter, warmth, sustenance and companionship, what we call ‘home’.  And the gift of the Spirit in the New Testament enlarges this image.  The story of Whit Sunday is closely linked to the mission of the church.  At Pentecost the disciples are in Jerusalem where the risen Jesus has told them to wait.  But after the rush of wind and fire, they learn that they must take the gospel out of the city’s confines.  "Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria to the uttermost parts of the earth": those are the expanding circles of the gospel’s influence that are acted out in the mission of the early church.  The Book of Acts begins in Jerusalem and ends in Rome, as if to say: there is a new geography of the Spirit here, a new way of mapping the world.  It is space for the gospel to occupy.  It is claimed by the risen Jesus in the power of his Spirit.  It is God’s.  

We could say that the Spirit’s activity is always the creation of space in which to grow.  Perhaps the paradigm is the very first story in the Bible.  In the opening verses of Genesis, the spirit or wind of God moves over the face of the waters: the Hebrew word suggests a bird hovering over her nest.  It is the beginning of a journey that will see the chaotic flood pushed back into a place from where it can no longer threaten to overwhelm the world.  With the waters’ boundaries set for ever, space is created for the dry land to appear, and an ordered, coherent universe can begin to teem with life.  In Genesis, where the Spirit of God is at work, chaos is driven back, and pattern, order, structure, life and consciousness have room to emerge.  The cosmos becomes a home.  

Our reading from St Paul sets out a vision of what this transformed life is like, animated by God’s Spirit. “All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God” he says; not slaves to fall back into fear but the emancipated, the free who are heirs of God himself, “more than conquerors through the One through him who loved us.”  In another of his letters Paul says: “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom”. We mustn’t collapse that glory down just to what concerns us and people like us. Paul means the destiny of all humanity, of all creation in its birth-pangs waiting for the promised new day. And this means a new way of seeing and of being, turning from all that oppresses and confines us, diminishes life and imprisons possibilities. 

So Pentecost opens up a vision of the broad, generous spaces we might inhabit as the Spirit makes a home among us.  The traditional images of the Spirit all imply space: without it fire goes out, water stops flowing, wind ceases to blow.  But as the Spirit prompts and propels us into inhabiting our salvation, occupying the space God gives us to grow in, are there any limits to what we could become in his service?  A church poised for mission in the world, like the first Christians in the Book of Acts.  Each of us transformed and renewed from within, galvanised by new reasons for living.  Our society and our world freed from all that holds it in thrall to chaos and death, and embracing the release and hope it longs for.  Rilke was right: ‘we must accept our experience as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it.’  Pentecost is the portal. This large, generous, wonderful room is our home.  

Merton College Oxford, Whit Sunday 2016

Acts 2.1-14, Romans 8.14-17, John 14.8-17