The Report on Cathedrals: Further Thoughts

Last week I blogged about the report on cathedrals produced by a working group under the chairmanship of Bishop Adrian Newman and now published as a draft for consultation. I warmly welcomed the report as a real attempt to get to grips with cathedral governance in the light of the recent difficulties experienced at two cathedrals, Peterborough and Exeter.

I need to say a little more, not least following discussions I've had since the publication of the report. The first point is a general one. Several times the report asks us not to cherry-pick the recommendations but accept them as a package. I think they will (in the words of a well-known politician) have to whistle for it. It's not realistic to imagine that the reviewers will have got everything right, even when the consultation period is over and their final report written. It's true that some of the recommendations inevitably have implications for others, but that's the way of things. No text is so perfect that it can't be improved in the light of wise and patient discernment.

A central theme of the report concerns accountability. In particular, there has been a lot of discussion about the proposed direct accountability of residentiary canons to the dean (and of lay cathedral staff through the chief operating officer). I have to recognise that what follows is inevitably the perspective of a retired dean - though before serving as a dean in two cathedrals (Sheffield and Durham), I was myself a residentiary (at Coventry), one of its two full-time "Commissioners' canons". It may be a case of "well he would say that, wouldn't he?" But let me try to be as objective as I can.

I regard canons residentiary as senior roles in a cathedral, and agree with the report that exceptional gifts and talents are needed in those who are going to lead in key aspects of a cathedral's mission such as worship and music, education and learning, pastoral care and outreach. I was 37 when I became canon precentor at Coventry. That fitted the profile of the report that wants to see younger men and women appointed to these posts because they offer unrivalled opportunities for the formation and development of future leaders (not only as deans, I should say). But at Coventry, my fellow Commissioners' Canon was an older, more experienced man from whom I learned a great deal as I tried to understand the Cathedral and my role within it. So I don't buy the apparent implication that residentiary canonries should no longer be offered to those who, through their long years of parish or sector ministry also have distinctive insights to bring to cathedrals.

Indeed, perhaps only an older ordained colleague on the Chapter will have the confidence (or do I mean courage?) to challenge the dean when necessary. No team leader should be exempt from this. "Challenge" does not mean behaving seditiously or subverting the leader's authority. It means asking necessary questions so that decisions are properly scrutinised and the best outcome achieved. My experience of working with Chapter colleagues who in age have been more or less my peers was that even when their exacting questions ("challenge” is not too strong a word), were uncomfortable, they were for the best. I encouraged colleagues to speak up. I strongly discouraged deference (not that my colleagues were much given to it!). Our debates were robust at times. But because we were all trying to act in the best interests of the cathedral, I believe we were working together in an essentially healthy culture.

However, a team will only function well when roles are clearly defined and understood (this is a subtext of much of this report). This applies to its leadership. To me it is clear that the dean must be allowed to lead. He or she needs to be acknowledged as the head of a religious foundation, that is, the body corporate of the cathedral, and therefore as the leader of the senior "ministry team", i.e. the dean-and-residentiary-canons, as well as chair of the chapter as the governing body. The accountabilities flow from this. In day to day terms, I don't see how the canons could not be accountable to the dean as members of his or her team. Provisions about ministry development review (MDR) flow from this (though not necessarily exclusively - for it remains the bishop's prerogative to review anyone who holds his or her licence, including the dean and canons).

But this needs to be understood in quite a sophisticated way. Because according to the Cathedrals Measure, the ultimate accountability of both dean and canons is to the chapter itself. So the day to day relationships of canons to the dean expresses their common loyalty to the chapter. The dean has no authority independent of the chapter (except in the very limited ways spelled out in the Measure). His or her role is to be its guardian, its representative and its mouthpiece. Which is why a dean is always primus inter pares presiding over a governing body and a ministry team that are collaborative in every aspect of their work. If this is the presumption (and how could it be otherwise in today's church?), residentiary canons have nothing to fear from the new arrangements for governance and management that are proposed in the report.

However, as I've said before, no system of governance is better than the human beings who inhabit it. The best structures in the world won't protect cathedrals from abuses of power and status - and unfortunately, these don't simply reside in the pages of the Barchester novels. Only virtues like wisdom, self-awareness and emotional intelligence, married to a shrewd reading of human nature, can ensure that it all works as it should to serve the cathedral's mission. This highlights the importance of having a values statement as well as a purpose statement so that it's clear not only about what the cathedral exists to do but how it will behave in pursuit of that purpose.

But there does seem to me to be an anomaly in the report. I alluded to it in my previous blog. The review is very hot on accountability within the cathedral institution, and it is right to be. Yet when it comes to the chapter's own accountability, it weakens it considerably. It's true that it recommends that cathedrals are brought into the regulatory framework of the Charity Commission, and that make sense to me. However, top-level oversight of that kind can never be enough. There is a need for rigorous scrutiny to which executive bodies in every institution should be subject, if only to provide public assurance reports that all is as it should be. This is where the council comes in at present. I have to say that particularly in Durham, we took this very seriously (not least thanks to the quality of the council chair who had (has) wide experience in the corporate world). The discipline it imposed on the chapter was invaluable.

So while not all deans agree, I remain puzzled that the report removes the legal requirement for the council to hold the chapter to account on behalf of the bishop, diocese and wider community. Audit committees are necessary for scrutiny, but as committees of the chapter they don't have the necessary independence. The report wants to see a "quinquennial inspection" of the cathedral's operations, and this is welcome, but that too doesn't provide for continuing oversight and answerability. Bishops' visitations remain an option but because of their complexity and cost they tend only to be invoked when problems arise in cathedrals. (In nearly 30 years of cathedral ministry, I never experienced one.) So to write the legal functions out of the council's brief seems to me to be a mistake. It could open the way for a badly led chapter to behave autonomously and even recklessly in the way some were famously accused of doing before the Cathedrals Measure of 1999. And if (God forbid!) a cathedral ever suffered under a mad, wicked or incompetent dean, who, in the absence of the council (for which this is one of its statutory functions) would petition the bishop to instigate a process for his or her removal?

Enough for now. There's another big question that continues to exercise me and it's this. Running a cathedral well, even a small one, is a big assignment. And while the chapter is the body legally responsible for the life of its cathedral, it takes a special combination of spiritual wisdom, theological insight, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, organisational ability and leadership skill to equip a dean to lead such a complex entity. My question is, what do we look for when deans are appointed? What is a good dean? I'd be sorry if deans ended up as no more than ultra-competent CEOs of their cathedrals. If they did, what would be the point of deans being ordained at all? Discuss!

A New Report on Cathedrals

The eagerly awaited Cathedrals Working Group Draft Report was published last week. It is now out for consultation. I'd like to offer this blog as a contribution to that process.

I confess I had misgivings about setting up yet another review of cathedrals. My worry was that this process was a clear consequence of the much publicised crises at Peterborough and Exeter Cathedrals. It would have been so easy for the Working Group's debates to be driven by anxiety towards quick-fix solutions that would, hopefully, deal with the "problem" of cathedrals once and for all. Such imagined solutions, applied to institutions centuries old, would at best have been premature, and very probably, entirely wrong.

As a former cathedral dean, I am mightily relieved that this report, far from succumbing to those easy temptations, shows a great deal of theological intelligence and common sense. And it's good that the report starts out on a robustly positive note. These amazing places" (writes the Chair of the Working Group, Adrian Newman, himself a former dean) incorporate everything the Church of England aspires to be in its best moments: congregations are growing and visitor numbers are remarkable; people on the edge of faith experience them as safe spaces to explore Christianity; they have become a focus for enquiry and activity in the public square, gathering places for communities at times of national crisis or celebration, and a crucial source of ‘bridging’ social capital at a time when darker forces threaten to fracture the social landscape.

There isn't space for me to comment on every aspect of this wide-ranging review, so let me restrict myself to two key themes.

1 Mission, Role and Ecclesiology
The Report makes a real attempt to offer some theological reflection on the nature of a cathedral as a church. It develops the idea of a "gathering place" in the sense that it is in the cathedral, the "seat", that the bishop symbolically gathers the people of his or her diocese whether to celebrate the liturgy, teach the faith, care for the diocese and lead in mission. It recognises too that the cathedral has its own presidential "gathering" role in times of local or national celebration or lament, to bear witness to "public faith" and to keep memory alive. A mind tuned to Benedictine nuances might offer a word to complement this gathering function, hospitality.

But I don't think this introductory section quite cracks the ecclesiological question, what is a cathedral? It's good that it doesn't fall for the "parish church plus plus" idea that a cathedral is simply a local church on a bigger scale. Here and there it uses the word congregation, for example in relation to one area of growth in cathedral life, midweek services. But this is precisely where congregation is not a helpful idea. Many, and in some places most, of those who attend midweek services such as evensong are not remotely part of a resident assembly of worshippers, a congregation; rather, they are transient, visitors who happen to be in the building at the right time, or pilgrims who have made the journey specifically to attend a one-off act of worship. Even those who assemble for the principal Sunday service, attended as it often is by guests from other worshipping communities, not to mention visitors who have stumbled unexpectedly on an act of worship and stay for it, is not really a "congregation" in the parochial sense.

What word might we use then? I've suggested elsewhere that we might liken a cathedral to a religious community or monastery, one of the six ecclesial identities explored by Peter Atkinson in a recent book and referenced in the report. This emphasises the role of the foundation whose primary calling is to perform the cathedral's daily cycle of praise and prayer through the offices and the eucharist. So those who attend these acts of worship would be more like a community of oblates or a third order belonging to the monastery. They associate to the cathedral's rule of life and, to the extent that they wish or can, make it their own. This model needs a lot of drawing out, but I'm persuaded that it would free the cathedral from having to fulfil the expectations of a parish congregation and instead, live out a different ecclesiology that, alongside parishes, would enrich the life of the whole church. Maybe the next iteration of the Report might explore this.

2 Governance and Management
The problems at Peterborough were largely explained as a result of poor governance and management. I blogged about this a year ago when the Bishop's visitation charge had just been published. I pointed out how the Cathedrals Measure already provided an ample framework for good governance, safeguarding both the principle of chapter accountability and the participation of the bishop in the governance structures. It was not a question, I wrote, of revising the legislative provisions but simply of making sure that those with responsibility tasked by the legislation were doing their jobs properly. No governance structure is better than the people who have to implement it.

I feared that this report might be over-hasty in increasing the powers of both bishop and cathedral council in the direct "ordinary" governance of the cathedral. (The bishop's role as visitor remains unchanged.) But it has done neither. Indeed, to my surprise, the jurisdiction of the council over the chapter as holding its accountability is abolished, and its role reconstituted to that of a stakeholder body of friends and advisors. (The statutory role of the college of canons is also written out, other than for the election of the bishop.) So the cathedral's "corporate body" or legal entity is reduced to the chapter alone (which is as it was before the Cathedrals Measure, though then, unlike now, chapters did not include lay people, whereas in the new proposals there will always be a majority of independent lay members, one of whom will be the bishop's appointee as vice-chair).

I am clear that it has always been right to see the chapter as holding formal legal responsibility for every aspect of the cathedral's life, and to regard members as holding trustee responsibility for it. Many of my fellow deans never liked cathedral councils and found that they contributed little to the flourishing of the cathedral. I have to say that this was not my experience in the two cathedrals where I was dean. Especially in Durham, the council took its accountability and scrutiny role very seriously, and this was a good discipline for the chapter when it came to preparing the budget, the annual report and accounts, and the strategic plan. Without a council to report to, where will the chapter be accountable, I wonder? I guess that in practice, the audit committee would perform the role of making sure that there is an effective internal dialogue in the cathedral, and the capacity for rigorous self-criticism. But it will be harder for a committee of the chapter to do this than for a body that sits above it, whose chair is the bishop's appointee and at which the bishop is an attender.

I want to add that I am pleased with the recommendation that cathedrals should be subject to the jurisdiction of the Charity Commission. The role of the Church Commissioners in relation to cathedrals' legal financial framework has always been unclear, not to say anomalous. I am also pleased that parish church cathedrals will at last be brought fully into the legislation, a task that the Cathedrals Measure left unfinished. I argued the case for doing this in 2006, in an essay in Dreaming Spires: Cathedrals in a New Age (edited by Stephen Platten and Christopher Lewis). But be warned! It may be a lot easier to hold the aspiration than deliver the reality.

The Report proposes a senior executive team to perform the management functions of the cathedral, thus freeing the chapter to focus exclusively on governance, leadership, strategy, risk and managing change. In Durham, we worked hard on this; indeed, one of my chapter colleagues would alert us when we were sliding into operations by asking grumpily, "what is this doing on the chapter's agenda, and why are we discussing it?" However, even if the senior executive team met monthly, I doubt that a chapter could get away with meeting only once a quarter. The university governing body I belonged to met every two months and this seemed about right. The executive met each week. With the degree of legislative compliance that now falls to every public institution, not to mention the sheer complexity of cathedrals, I think the pattern of meetings will need to be very versatile according to circumstances.

The Report has helpful recommendations about finance, major building projects and safeguarding. Maybe I'll return to those in a future blog. For now I simply want to underline one recommendation that could be in danger of getting lost in the detail. It's number lxiv (yes, Roman numerals!): The NCIs (National Church Institutions) and AEC (Association of English Cathedrals) should work jointly on an approach to Government and large philanthropic organisations with the aim of establishing a significant, possibly endowment-based, cathedral fabric fund for the UK. While cathedrals are grateful for the funding that comes their way through the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Chancellor's two recent tranches of funding to mark the centenary of the Great War, it is nowhere near enough to safeguard and develop these marvellous buildings that belong to the built heritage of the nation. If cathedrals are to be realistically supported in the future, and continue to open their doors to millions of visitors, this is an essential requirement. There is a clear need for a strategy to deliver such an outcome. I'd hoped that the Report would take this further than it does. So a great deal of work (and I'd say, urgent work) needs to be done to take this recommendation much much further.

And finally, will the phrase Dean and Chapter, that historic, familiar and much-loved phrase in England, be restored as a legal designation of the cathedral's governing body, please? It was unkind and unnecessary of the Cathedrals Measure to excise it.

Thank you to those who are serving on the Review Group and have worked hard to present these well thought-out proposals. They deserve to be welcomed by cathedrals. I look forward to what will emerge from this consultation period and hope that this is a helpful discussion-starter in respect of some of the matters covered in the Report.

Mozart in Mono: on rediscovering a childhood LP

In my last blog I wrote about the loss of hearing in my left ear following a Christmas virus. I wish I could tell you it’s been restored. It hasn’t - it feels as lifeless as a withered arm. The doctor is reasonably sure that it’s just a matter of time. So I’m trying to get used to life in mono. Maybe it’s a bit like black-and-white photography. You sacrifice the colour in order to discover other riches in greyscale. I’m listening to music in a different kind of way. It’s more intentional, as they say, perhaps more aware of the shapes and textures than before.

I’m also aware that I’m cherishing what hearing I still have in my right ear. It makes every piece of music that much more precious, something I tried to put into words last time. And with a good set of headphones that give a full rich sound, my mind can even begin to imagine that all is as it used to be. By chance, since writing my last blog, I’ve found in a charity shop Oliver Sacks’ remarkable book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. In it he describes the experiences of people who have lost their hearing function in one ear. One person, a composer, found that what he could hear with his ‘bad’ ear was out of tune with his ‘good’ one, as I found myself when this all began. Sacks talks about how the human brain has the extraordinary ability to make up for the loss of function in one ear (or eye). It can’t heal it. But it can, so to speak, begin to reconstruct your sound (or sight) world, restore some sense of spatial awareness so that in time, the loss is partially compensated for.  

It’s funny how the right book falls into your lap just when you need it. And in another strange way, as I browsed classical music recordings on the web, I came across an album cover that was so familiar that I exclaimed out loud, even though I hadn’t set eyes on it for fifty or more years. It’s Joseph Keilberth’s recording of two Mozart symphonies with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra. Actually I’m cheating slightly. The image I found on ebay (above) is of the 1960 stereo recording. Ours at home was the 1956 mono disc, but the scarlet Telefunken covers were identical. I think it may have been the first LP my parents owned. If it wasn’t that, then it was Beethoven’s Eroica or Schubert’s Winterreise. 

At the age of six or seven, I fell in love with the Mozart disc, especially the 39th. It’s still my favourite Mozart symphony. I think it was the slow introduction that seduced me. Those few portentous bars, full of rich brass and woodwind, seemed to presage something miraculous. E flat was a key that brought forth some of Mozart’s most wondrous music - think of The Magic Flute or the Gran Partita whose slow movement Salieri so envied according to the film Amadeus. The solemn rising violin scales of the symphony’s introduction, together with one of the sharpest and most sustained discords in all of 18th century music captivated me. And when the clouds finally parted and the sun broke through in some of the happiest music in the classical repertoire, it was a revelation. 

Today I’ve found the stereo version online, thanks to the ever-obliging Spotify. Listening to it for the first time in decades, I’m aware that it’s probably not among the greatest of Mozart recordings. The Bamberg play with tremendous conviction, but tuned as we are to the delicacy of authentic performances on period instruments, it now sounds a bit rough in places. Joseph Keilberth (1908-1968) was the Bamberg’s chief conductor at the time, but he was best known for his opera interpretations, especially Wagner. His Wagner performances were famous; poignantly he died in the middle of conducting Tristan und Isolde. I doubt if you can be a truly great Mozartian and a Wagnerian conductor, though in modern times many conductors have made a convincing showing of both. Some might say you can’t really love Wagner’s music if you love Mozart’s, but that’s a different question. It would be some years before I came to Wagner but when I did, the revelation was as unforgettable as my childhood discovery of Mozart.

But now that I’ve rediscovered it, I shall treasure this recording till I die. It represents so much that was joyous in my childhood: parents who loved me and encouraged me in everything that fascinated me, whether it was riding my tricycle and not long afterwards, my 18 inch pavement bike, my first Brownie camera, my Hornby ‘0’ gauge model railway (which would be worth a fortune nowadays), reading Alice, Pooh, the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales (I always preferred them to Andersen’s - they were darker and more complex and didn’t always have happy endings) and - I admit it - Enid Blyton. 

But before all these, my parents wanted me to love music as they did. My grandmother would sit me down at the piano and we would pick out Schubert melodies like Heidenröslein. It was probably thanks to her that Winterreise found its way into our home because it was she who told me about Schubert’s unhappy wanderer as we sat and listened. Piano lessons must have begun about then, though I was too lazy to practise very much (and regret it even today). I was not too young to have a go at Bach’s Notebook for Anna Magdalena, my introduction to the other great musical passion of my life. 

So many musical memories to be thankful for. I’ve written about some of them before on this blog. But today they have been rekindled afresh as a result of seeing that LP sleeve on the web and hearing once again that much-loved disc. I suppose that when we grow old, such glowing memories become all the more precious, of remembered childhood days and the people who loved us and our awakening to God’s wonderful world as it seemed to blossom all around us. 

And maybe too, early inklings of pain and mortality in the music I was learning to love? I don’t know. I hear them now clearly enough in the introduction to Mozart’s 39th. And in adulthood, it does make me feel for the many whose memories of childhood are far from happy, whose upbringing has been occluded by pain, abandonment, cruelty or illness. How innocent and protected, how secure and happy my early childhood was, and I never knew it at the time. There is so much to learn about the world and our own selves as we grow up. What matters is that we don’t unlearn what was important to us in childhood, that we don’t, as a psychoanalytic writer once put it, lose the capacity for flowering and instead find we are unripening, shrivelling to a bud. With my one good ear, I’m trying to reflect on that for a while too.

Losing an Ear: a Winter's Tale

Last week I lost an ear. Not severed like Van Gogh, I'd better add. Yet in a sense, that is what it feels like. Thanks to the virus that so many of us have had at Christmas time, this one has left me unable to hear anything very much in my left ear. The doctor is pretty sure it's labyrinthitis, an infection of the inner ear. Partial hearing loss is only one of a number of symptoms...but I'll spare you too much information about those. He says it will almost certainly go away with time and I'll have my hearing back. But that's not yet.

On the first day, I could still hear in that ear. By which I mean that the volume was properly "turned up". But the sound itself was alarming. Not only was my tinnitus louder than I've never known, there was also a continuous roar as if I were standing by a waterfall in spate, or a motorway in rush hour. Worst of all was that the sound itself had broken up, "pixelated" you might say. The music playing on the radio sounded jumbled, confused. Even the tuning had gone awry, my left ear sounding half a semitone flatter than my right.

We were listening, as we usually do over our coffee, to Essential Classics on Radio 3. They were playing a Bach cantata, the magical motet-cantata 118, O Jesu Christ, Mein's Leben Licht (O Jesu Christ, the Light of my Life). It was heartbreaking to hear this wonderful music broken into pieces like this. I imagined Michelangelo's Pietà shattered into fragments never to be put back together again, or Rembrandt's Presentation in the Temple criss-crossed with angry knife wounds too deep to repair. I ran to the radio player, turned it off with a vehemence that took me by surprise, and burst into tears. I remember crying "What if I can never hear the music of Bach again, ever? Rather than that, I think I'd want to die".

That day felt like a bereavement. Loss isn't just to do with the people we love whom we no longer see. We can experience it just as powerfully when we move away from a place where we've been happy (leaving Durham Cathedral is still a recent enough event for me to feel a sharp pang from time to time, especially when Choral Evensong is on the radio). Or when we lose something precious to us, like a childhood toy or a wedding ring that has carried the symbolism of a cherished relationship for a lifetime. And we feel it when we lose a bodily function that's vital to our wellbeing. This is my first experience of that. I've been reading Robert McCrum's fine memoir about suffering a catastrophic stroke in his 40s (the book is called A Year Off). He speaks about losing all sensation in his left leg and arm in just this way, as a major bereavement he needed to work through.

It's made me think about disability in a new way. On the spectrum of impairment, what I'm experiencing is as nothing to those who have lost all their hearing. This happened once to a senior priest-colleague of mine called George. One day, without warning, his world fell silent. I can't begin to imagine the shock. Yet as far as possible, he wanted life to continue as it always had. His commitment to worship never faltered. I never saw him frustrated, angry or desperate. In time, he learned how to communicate with the help of some very smart gadgetry. And this wonderful man said to me: "Yes, Michael, to lose your hearing is a terrible thing, especially when you love conversation, music, theatre and all the ordinary little sounds, often unnoticed, that give colour to our daily lives. But I have the memory of them. I can still replay people's voices and my favourite music in my head. And for a lifetime's enjoyment of the gift of hearing, I shall always be thankful."

Last week, there suddenly came into my head a conversation I'd had with my mother when I must have been about five or six. She asked me, out of the blue: "If you had to lose either your hearing or your sight, which would you want to keep?" Some question for a little boy, like one of those dark choices that recur in fairy tales. I remember answering: "my sight, of course. It must be incredibly hard to live without it". She said: "But what about talking to one another? What about music? And what about the ways our hearing helps us find our way around, keeps our balance, protects us from dangers like road traffic that we can't always see but can definitely hear?" If I learned anything from that exchange, it was to try to cherish all the senses I was lucky enough to have been given. Among our close family friends at that time were a woman who had lost her sight as a child, and a man who'd been born without hearing. I'd admired how they had come to terms with such profound disability and had learned to live with it, without bitterness, as people who were as alive as I was. Just like George. Just like so many others.

Last summer we cruised up the Rhine. At Bonn, we visited the Beethoven House. My mother had been brought up in that part of Germany, and perhaps because of it, Beethoven had been her favourite composer. She told me about how the loss of his hearing, how it drove him to near-despair, how he wrecked his beautiful pianos as he tried to hear the sound of his playing. She told me about the late quartets he composed entirely out of his head. I was moved to be in this house where these tragic personal dramas had been played out. I've been thinking of him too, these last few days, and wondering how, if music were my metier, I would cope. Yet some of the greatest music in the world came out of the silence into which he was progressively and irreversibly immersed. That's true heroism in the face of adversity.

Today I listened to a marvellous broadcast in the Soul Music series on Radio 4. The chosen piece was Bach's seasonal Cantata 82, Ich Habe Genug ("I have enough"). It was, I think, the very first cd I ever bought in the incomparable recording made by Dame Janet Baker. Its theme is the Presentation of Christ soon after his birth, when the infant Jesus is brought into the Temple to be offered to God. The aged Simeon has been waiting for this moment all his life; now he sees the promised Deliverer for himself, takes him in his arms and blesses him. "Now Lord, you can let your servant depart in peace; for my eyes have seen your salvation." Contributors reflected on how this music had touched their lives. I loved the thought of infancy and age encountering each other, of living long enough to see what has been the focus of your hopes and longings all your life. My mother experienced it in hospital a few days before she died, when she met her tiny great-granddaughter for the first, and final, time. It was a radiant moment, a real epiphany.

I want to keep this in proportion. What I'm going through is a very light affliction compared to the health ordeals so many others are facing this winter. But as I listened to the programme in my personal mono, I experienced a little Nunc Dimittis of my own. It was this. If I lost all my hearing irreversibly, I'd still have my memories of that luminous Bach cantata, of the hundreds of times I've played it, and of the comfort and reassurance it has brought over the years. It would always be there, among the music I've found to be both life-changing and life-giving. I hope with all my heart that I'll be given back my lost ear. But whatever happened, I'd try to be thankful for what had enriched me so much in my lifetime. It would be a big loss, certainly, but I'd try not to see it as an inconsolable one.

I'm not saying I'd succeed. I know myself too well. But I would try to cultivate the gift to be thankful, what the New Testament calls eucharistia. Gratitude, says Christianity, is the only foundation of the good life, our prime duty as human beings, because of the great love with which God loves us and gives himself to us. So I'd try. And I'd also try to find new ways of being attentive to this wonderful world, and the people whom God has given me to love, and the voices of need that cry out for us to listen, and to whom our ears must always be turned in compassion.