Quirinius Lives: the Home Office Says “Register!”

Someone in high places wasn't paying attention when their Home Office video was launched on the Third Day of Christmas. It was early in the morning of the 27 December, the first tweet out of the Home Office after wishing everyone a happy Christmas. If you haven't heard, this is the video that tells citizens from the 27 overseas EU countries who want to go on living in the UK after Brexit how to set about applying. "EU citizens and their families will need to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme to continue living in the UK after 31 December 2020" it says. It takes 55 seconds to watch.

It's deeply ironic that this video should have been released during the twelve days of Christmas. Only a few days earlier, more than half the nation must have heard St Luke's account of the birth of Jesus read at thousands of nativity plays, crib blessings, Christingles and carol services. In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. In the ancient world you had to fit in with the requirements of a process-driven bureaucracy. Plus ca change. So Joseph and Mary have to make the arduous journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, she nine months pregnant. They get there only to find there is no room at the inn. You know how the story continues.

So around 3.2 million people will need to register before 2021. That's a lot more form-filling than even dreary Quirinius could have dreamed of. Who doesn't love a good registration? What better excuse for a public holiday? Better still if you can anticipate government coffers swelling with unbudgeted income from it, for many of our EU27 friends will have to pay for the privilege of registering. I don't know if this was entirely clear to them before.

Predictably the video has been greeted with responses ranging from eye-rolling boredom (what did you expect from the Home Office?) through mockery and sarcasm to outright fury. Most striking has been the outrage of many people from EU27 countries who have lived in Britain for decades and thought this was their home. The Guardian quotes one: "You absolute s***! I've lived here 35 years, got a stamp in my passport for indefinite leave to remain in 1985 and now you want me to apply to stay in my own home." This from a Danish citizen who lives in the UK. And this which came up on my own Twitter feed: "Wow. This is making me feel so welcome, after 28 years of life here, making friends, paying taxes, bringing up two wonderful British citizens. Thank you so much for this slap in the face, UK Home Office. Absolutely sickening".

But I've also been struck by the responses of British citizens. "Seeing the impact of this policy on people I know and work with is a wake up call. I feel angry and ashamed" writes one. "I too am ashamed. I feel that I don’t belong here. We are not a civilised nation and the government does not represent anything I believe in" writes another. And this: "Making those who share a citizenship with us register as if they were aliens is quite shocking. Now we describe a few hundred refugees arriving at Dover as a national crisis and debate whether or not we should be rescuing them".

That last remark gets to the heart of the matter. The point about registration, which will not have been lost on Mary and Joseph, is that you are made to feel that your homeland isn't your own any more. It's been taken over by others, occupied by people who think they can control you by insisting that you comply with their requirements. My Jewish mother and her family knew all about this in Germany in the 1930s under the Nazis, and the creeping subjugation of the Jewish community by what might have seemed at first to be harmless bureaucratic processes of "registration". In Roman-occupied Judea, registration was a device to keep a potentially restless population in its place. (Never mind that there's some historical difficulty about Luke's account of this event - what we do know about Quirinius is that he was appointed as Imperial legate early in the first century precisely to oversee an exercise of this kind, even though the dates don't fit Luke's chronology. The nativity story still makes a powerful point about the two kinds of authority that are always at work in the world and confronting each other - human and divine, or we might say, the politics of God and the politics of human beings. Or maybe justification by faith or registration.)

I tweeted about this yesterday: "Like the registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. It reminded the Holy Family that they lived in an occupied land. Precisely how Brexit Britain now is for all true Europeans, whether from the UK or an EU27country". That didn't please one of my followers who wanted to know in what sense the UK today is like first century Roman-occupied Judea. Who is doing the occupying he asked? "Our worst selves" I replied. We are doing this to ourselves and one another. Somewhere, out of the shadow side of our nation has come this self-destructive instinct to "take back control" in ways that distance us, even cut us off from the neighbour we are commanded to love. For reasons I don't pretend to understand, we have come to a time in our history when demons of suspicion, resentment and hostility are being unleashed in our “othering” of those who only wish us well. In terms of our collective national psyche, a spirit is abroad that threatens a healthy sense of our identity, who we are and who we aspire to be as good human beings. This is the occupying power. And it seems to have us in its thrall.

This may seem strong language. Perhaps I'm more coloured than I should be by my family's experience of the 1930s. But how could I not be? But for Britain's welcome to Jewish refugees at that time, my mother would not have survived the Holocaust and I wouldn't be here now. I can feel viscerally the effect of becoming like an exile in my own country, ill at ease, sorry, ashamed. This is not the kind, just, generous, fair-minded nation I thought I lived in. At least, not in this respect. I think many of the Windrush generation will say the same. It's not easy to sing the Lord's song in this strange land.

It's still Christmas. We are still celebrating the wonderful events that followed Quirinius' (or whoever's) registration. Incarnation, God's coming among us as a vulnerable holy human Child is wisdom's answer to the follies of mortals. The Infant of Bethlehem brings hope to our world and promises to deliver us from this occupation we are experiencing by our worst selves. I was heartened by a positive reply to my despondent Quirinius tweet. "I too sometimes feel that it isn’t my country any longer. Then I speak to one or more of the many wonderful people I know, and I am reminded that recovery is both possible and necessary."

We look into one another's faces and glimpse reflected there what we see when we look into the face of God’s Incarnate Son. What we see is nothing less than grace and truth. So my prayer is that we shall all be guided by divine grace and truth into better days in the new year that is dawning. And that grace and truth may free us from all that demeans human life by teaching us to look on our neighbours not as strangers but as friends whom we love with something like the love with which God loves each of us.

On Not Feeling God: thoughts on a saying of Sister Wendy Beckett

Sister Wendy Beckett has died. She was a remarkable woman. Her obituary in the Guardian paid tribute to her insight into great art and her ability to excite and inspire a television audience. Perhaps no one was more surprised than she was that a catholic nun could become such a TV success.

The obituarist ends with a striking reference to her understanding of religious experience. Her views on God were challenging. When asked once what she felt about God, she replied, sharply: “I don’t think anyone can feel God. Those who believe in him most are most aware of his non-feelability, as it were. God is such a total mystery. My heart sinks when the word God is bandied around glibly.”

I put that quote out on social media and was surprised how much interest it aroused. A lot of people endorsed it and recirculated it. Clearly Sister Wendy spoke for them in some important way. And the more I thought about it, the more I sensed that she was articulating my own thoughts too. I can’t speak for anyone else. But let me try to think aloud about why her words seem not only accurate but important.

I’m one of those people who is easily moved to tears, whether it’s a film I’m watching, a poem I’m reading or a piece of music I’m listening to. And yes, by singing carols at Christmas and gazing into the crib. I’m grateful for the capacity to feel and to be moved: I understand what the desert fathers meant when they spoke about “the gift of tears”. 

And yet, I don’t altogether trust my emotional responses. I don’t mean the fact of them, rather, what they mean. Just because I feel a lump in the throat during the final scene of my favourite film Brief Encounter, it doesn’t follow that my response is especially deep or life-changing. It could be sentimental or nostalgic, none the worse for that perhaps but not to be invested with profound significance. Feelings and moods are very transient. We shouldn’t assign more meaning to them than they deserve. The actor Simon Callow once said, “the important thing is not to feel deeply but to feel accurately”. 

In particular, I’m wary of assigning divine significance to my emotions. Of course, God is as present in my emotional life as he is to every other aspect of my being: he is in my thoughts, my memories, my actions, my instincts and my emotions. He is as much in my heart as in my head, as much in my feeling as in my thinking and doing. How could it be otherwise if God truly is the ground of all our being? 

But I’m increasingly reticent about claiming to experience “the divine” in some direct, extraordinary way. It’s true that numinous places can move me profoundly, places that seem to speak of the Mysterium Tremens et Fascinans, as Rudolph Otto described it in his famous book The Idea of the Holy. In the past few months I’ve been touched in that way by the Ancient Greek site at Delphi, by praying quietly in Hexham Abbey one morning, by listening to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, hearing my wife read a poem by R.S. Thomas, and by singing “Away in a Manger” with my grandchildren at the Christingle Service. These have all been, for me, religious experiences. Each has been a gift in its own way. You will I’m sure be able to speak in a similar way about the experiences that you will want to describe as “religious”. 

But far from leading me to claim that I’m somehow “feeling the presence of God”, I think I want to acknowledge how much more mysterious God seems to be precisely on account of these experiences and others like them. If God is, as theologians say, immanent within our world of experience, then I’d be wrong to privilege one kind of experience as somehow more religious than any other. The real test of how authentic my faith is has to be how far I’m able to speak about God as present within my ordinary, everyday experience, and especially  within those experiences that are difficult or baffling or painful. For if I can’t give some account of where God is to be found in the shadow side of my life, then it’s questionable whether I’ve come to understand God as embracing the whole of who I am, the dark, the light and all the greyscale in between. To “feel after God and find him” is indeed the goal of human existence as St Paul said on the Areopagus (Acts 17). But for me, that’s a rather different thing from “feeling him” directly. 

As a Christian, I was shaped in my teenage years by evangelicalism. I owe it a tremendous amount and am glad to acknowledge that debt. But as I look back, I realise that it was too definite about God’s presence and how a born-again soul should expect to experience it, too black-and-white about the endless complexities of human life. I’m learning - and I think this is wisdom - that trusting my experience is important, and that the essence of a healthy spirituality is to be able to reflect on it in wholesome ways. But I’m also learning that when we are in the presence, as we always are, of the profoundest mystery of life, which is what God ultimately is, then my experience is only an indicator of my personal response at the time, not some clue to the riddle of the universe. I might once have claimed such a thing in the face of goodness, truth or beauty. But I’m more reticent now. Practising “reserve” feels important.

Someone asked me today what I made of the Incarnation and whether beholding God’s grace and truth in the face of the Word made flesh didn’t open a door to “feeling God” in our own  sensory experience. I replied: For me, what I *feel* when beholding God’s grace & truth in the Incarnation is adoration, gladness, contrition & love. That’s a more reliable (& humble) statement than anything I could say about “feeling God”, though it’s incontestably true to say we believe he is fully present. That may seem a trifle tentative. But I think it’s important only to speak of what we know. The thing about Mystery is that it’s essentially unknowable in its fullness. Which is why, when Moses found himself in its presence at the burning bush, he could only be silent and adore. Could it be that learn this best from art, poetry and literature with their capacity to help us grasp symbolism and metaphor, “tell it slant” as Emily Dickinson said in one of her poems? 

Which is why Wendy Beckett speaks for me. And yes, my heart sinks too when the word God is bandied about glibly as I’m afraid it so often is by people who should know better. I’m ill at ease with the kind of talk that pretends to know what God is doing in the world and in the church when my experience tells me that the truth is altogether more mysterious, and more wonderful, than I can ever glimpse. This God who “plants his footsteps on the sea and rides upon the storm” is not one who is susceptible to being described or understood by my feeble sense. As C.S. Lewis put it, Aslan is not a tame lion. 

What I must learn to do is trust him for his grace. That means walking by faith, not by sight and not by feeling. Religion is a journey “towards the unknown region” in Walt Whitman’s phrase. Let’s not tame it by speaking too glibly about our experience of God, and thereby rob it of all that makes it infinitely beautiful, adventuresome and life-giving. Let’s give ourselves to this Mystery in which we live and move and have our being, and to the life of contemplation and action to which Love Incarnate calls us.

Something The Queen Said: Thoughts on Christmas Faith and Life

As I listened to The Queen on Christmas Day, a couple of sentences stood out for me. The Christmas story retains its appeal since it doesn’t provide theoretical explanations for the puzzles of life. Instead it’s about the birth of a child and the hope that birth two thousand years ago brought to the world.

In old age, Her Majesty has been increasingly clear with us all about the central place Christianity occupies in her life. It’s heartening to hear her speak about the power her Christian faith has had throughout her long life to motivate, inspire and give meaning. 

But this statement I’ve highlighted goes beyond personal testimony to offer a really important insight about how religious faith does and doesn’t function in human life. The temptation is to look to faith to explain things, probe the complex mysteries of existence, come up with answers to all that baffles and bewilders us in our human experience. 

Once upon a time we spoke of a “God of the gaps”, the deity whose existence provided accounts of phenomena that had so far eluded human explanation. Literal readings of the Bible provided ready resources for explaining the nature of the cosmos, the origins of life, the phenomenon of humanity, and the fact of suffering and pain. For many people, they still do, as we can see in the conservative evangelical right of North America for whom the scriptures provide the infallible answer to every question posed by science, ethics and faith.

The urge to explain extended to the arguments for the existence of God himself. I was taught philosophy at Oxford by Anthony Kenny who later became Master of Balliol which was my college. Kenny had trained and practised as a catholic priest but left the priesthood on account of his questioning the intellectual basis of dogmatic religion. His lectures on the arguments for the existence of God comprehensively dismantled one by one the philosophical bases of the classical “Five Ways”. Yet he was careful to say that this didn’t mean that God did not exist. You could no more prove his non-existence than his existence. Whatever affirmation you made about God essentially came down to faith, not logic or evidence. To speak of “explanation”, you could say, was to commit a “category mistake”. Rational explanation and religious faith belong to different “language games”.

I’ve spent a lifetime getting to know the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible. I’ve taught it to theology students and preached it to Sunday morning congregations. Above all, I’ve found that it’s immeasurably enriched my personal understanding of faith and the human condition. I’ve learned how agnostic books like Job and Ecclesiastes are when it comes to explaining the riddles of the world and of my own self. Whereas conventional religion likes binaries and causal explanations: right and wrong, good and evil, light and dark, reward and punishment, these writings probe deeper beneath the surface of things. They seem to discern that complexity will not be reduced to a simplistic “yes” or “no”. On the contrary. It takes faith to live with the reality of suffering (Job) or with a sense of ennui or meaninglessness (Ecclesiastes). These texts do not offer “solutions”, “theoretical explanations for the puzzles of life” to quote Her Majesty. It’s faith, not rational thought, that enables us to live with these great unanswered questions. “The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom” says Job.

Theologians calls the exploration of faith in the light of the problems of suffering and meaning theodicy. Theodicy can’t offer watertight explanations, and doesn’t try - at least, not any more. What it does is to explore ways in which faith can be understood and presented intelligently in precisely the kind of world we all know we live in, full of paradox and contradiction. This is necessary because for many, it’s questions of suffering and meaning that are a major obstacle to belief. “How can a God of love exist in a world that is so cruel and pain-ridden?” We aren’t being true to our own faith if we don’t feel the force of this question. Theodicy can help sensitise our faith to such questioning, help us articulate it in ways that place suffering and questions about meaning at the centre where they belong, rather than at the margins. 

Christmas gives us a glimpse of this way of believing. We hear afresh the story of the Holy Child of Bethlehem, we sing carols of love and praise, we gaze with wonder into his crib and are perhaps surprised to find ourselves profoundly moved by this image of a birth that brings such a joy and such a hope. This is to say that the the instinct of Christmas faith is contemplative. We look as if through an open door into a world that for a brief moment grants a vision of what life could become. We find ourselves gazing on a transformed world and a transfigured life. “Peace on earth, good will to all people!” we sing in tune with the angels. If only it were true! we say longingly to ourselves. 

The Christmas story itself embraces this longing for a world healed of its wrongs. “No room at the inn” speaks of exclusion and hardship. The flight into Egypt presents the Holy Family as exiles seeking asylum in a strange land. Herod’s massacre of the innocent children depicts the suffering of innocent victims in the most terrible way possible. “The holly bears a berry as red as any blood”, indeed. Theodicy is at the very heart of our Christmas story and the carols we love to sing.

And yet contemplative faith intuits that the greatest mystery in the universe is not suffering but love. It’s love that defies all explanation, other than that this is simply how God is in himself. This is what we understand in a life-changing way is the deepest truth of Christmas. St Francis understood this, which is why he set up the first Christmas Crib and invited people to bring to it their heart’s love. Christmas becomes real for each of us as we give ourselves to this rapturous vision, and it becomes real for our world, by anticipation, as we each live out the hope that is set before us in ways that make a difference to the lives of others, whether it’s in politics, peace-making or the pursuit of social justice. As the medieval spiritual guides understood so well, holy contemplation always leads to good action. And that’s what changes things. 

The traditional Gospel reading on Christmas Day says it all. “And we beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1.14). We beheld. This is what the Incarnation invites us to do: to look, to see, to behold. For as we gaze into the face of the Love that makes its dwelling among us, as we are drawn into the grace and truth we see there, we instinctively understand that here is the source of all that is life-changing. Those sterile causal explanations we once hankered after don’t belong here, have no relevance to this vision of God. The Queen was right about that. What matters is leaning to become contemplatively wise, discovering how this way of life becomes a source of inspiration and strength as we try to do God’s work in the world.

When religious faith comes of age and renounces its need to explain, turns instead to contemplation, and then acts on what it has glimpsed, it achieves a state of wisdom which is both life-changing and brings hope to the world.

Mary: an Advent Meditation

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

I had to study that poem at school. It was my first introduction to any great twentieth century poet. I've never forgotten it. Auden takes Breughel's painting The Fall of Icarus as an example: the ploughman carries on ploughing, and the ship that has somewhere to get to sails calmly on; and all this while a boy falls catastrophically out of the sky. Disaster strikes: someone you love dies, or you are diagnosed as being terminally ill, or your marriage breaks up, or you lose your job. And you wonder how, just outside your universe that is disintegrating, another, ordinary world just carries on uncaring, oblivious.

But about ecstasy the artists and poets are never wrong either, and it is the same truth. You are in the seventh heaven, surprised by joy: you fall in love, or find a new friendship, or have a child, or meet God. And not far away, the rest of the human race is not aware of you, still less cares about what for you is making creation sing. It is as if in both agony and ecstasy, time is attenuated, given a new quality, seems to stand still. Einstein's theory of relativity talks about dilation when space-time is distorted close to the speed of light. It takes on a new quality. But everybody else's "ordinary" time just carries on as it always has. In a sense, it's as if we are living in different worlds until the ecstasy subsides or the agony begins to be healed, and the extraordinary merges with the ordinary once more.

Paintings and sculptures of the Annunciation often depict this double world. Inside her house, the Virgin Mary is rapt in contemplation, heaven reflected in her face as she is overwhelmed by the power of the Most High that has come from beyond the farthest star to visit her. On the other side of the window sheep are grazing, people buy and sell in the streets of a town, a farmer gathers his harvest. Something of this is what I see hinted at in Josef Pyrz' sculpture of the Annunciation in Durham Cathedral's Galilee Chapel. Rapture, toughness, acceptance, pain even are written into her face and body in a physical, tactile way. I used to encourage visitors to caress the sculpture to gain a sense of the complex emotional and spiritual power of this marvellous piece.

 

Edwin Muir captures it like this:

Outside the window footsteps fall

Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way.
Sound's perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered tune.

But through the endless afternoon

These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.

Beauty and tragedy are the soil in which contemplatives are made. Mary knew both: beauty her encounter with the angel of the Annunciation; tragedy in the sword that pierced her heart as she gazed on her Son at Golgotha. But it needed more than beauty or tragedy to make her the one we honour as Theotokos the God-bearer. Many people experience beauty and tragedy but are none the wiser for it. Their souls are not enriched, their capacity for contemplation is not deepened. What then was Mary's secret?

I think it was her gift for openness to the new thing that God was doing. Words like sensitivity and awareness come to mind, the gift of realising that the world is, as they say on Lindisfarne, a thin place, and that on the other side of that almost transparent membrane lies another realm, the realm of the spiritual, the heavenly, the transcendent. You see into the life of things, to quote Wordsworth. It is what Moses turned aside to see in the blazing bush and what Elijah heard in the still small voice, and what Mother Julian of Norwich understood in the hazel-nut she held in her hand that, she said, only existed because God loved it. And what the mystics down the centuries teach us is that ordinary life can become transparent, if we learn to see it in a new way, train our faculties of sensitivity and awareness in order to discover the world as a sacrament. After all, that is precisely what we do each Sunday at the eucharist, when we take ordinary things and find them to be divine. Lesser annunciations, you might say, are waiting to happen all around us, waiting to show us the new thing that God wants to do in our lives.  
 

And what about us? God wants us, I think, to become like Mary: each of us a  theotokos, a bearer of God to others. Outside Salisbury Cathedral is a statue of Mary by Elizabeth Frink. It depicts her walking vigorously away from the Cathedral, not because she doesn't like the worship there, but because she is taking the good news to the world. This is the Walking Madonna, the Mary of the Magnificat whose contemplative vision has turned her into a woman of action who is passionate for justice, for a world where wrong is righted, the hungry fed and the downtrodden exalted.

Whatever annunciations we are given, whatever angel we glimpse when time stands still, whether it is tragedy or joyous rapture, agony or ecstasy, there is call to be obeyed. Behold the servant of the Lord: let it be to me according to thy word. So that when the time comes for the angel to depart from us, and we return to our ordinary days, it will be with God conceived, so to speak, within us, so that we can lovingly bear him and bring him forth to a world that longs to be happy and that needs him so much.

Ave Maria, gratia plena
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you, and blessed is the fruit of your womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

The Classics Are For All

This was the year I finally got to see this amazing sight. Why has it taken me sixty-eight years to visit mainland Greece and see the Parthenon, Delphi, Olympia, Mycenae and other legendary places whose names are so familiar to anyone who treasures classical antiquity? I wrote a couple of blogs as I tried to reflect on what became for me a real pilgrimage and journey of discovery (you can find my thoughts here and here).

Never one to be without something to read, I'd downloaded the Iliad on my tablet and from time to time turned to it during the trip. It was decades since I had last immersed myself in this epic tale of the Trojan War. I guess you have to have lived for a while if you're going to see beneath the surface of the text and grasp something of what Homer was trying to convey about human life that gives this epic poem universal significance. I'm not saying I've "got it" yet (but Adam Nicholson's book Why Homer Matters was an enjoyable read just before we set out for Athens). But it was undeniably momentous to sit outside Agamemnon's tomb at Mycenae and read from it. I'll never forget it.

In Greece I found myself reminiscing about childhood. One of the earliest Puffin Books I remember reading was Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales of the Greek Heroes (which you can now get in a beautiful Folio Society edition). I think I fell in love with the classics then. At the age of nine I began Latin at school. That too felt, for obscure reasons I couldn't have put into words at the time, like a big rite of passage. At the end of an introductory lesson in which our teacher told us why ancient languages still mattered in the nineteen fifties) he said (and I can still remember the exact words): "All this is why pupils at this school study Latin. Tomorrow we'll begin the actual task of learning the language: amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant. With that he swept out of the room, his MA gown swirling behind him. He knew how to make an exit. It was one of those dramatic moments of my schooldays.

The following year we began Greek. I relished both languages for the elegant architecture of their grammar and syntax. We had large-format text books specially produced by the school: the maroon Latin Book and its blue counterpart Outline of Greek Accidence. I loved the idea that we were studying "accidence" (the part of grammar that deals with the way words are inflected - conjugations, declensions, that sort of thing). "Principal parts" fascinated me (do today's students still learn them by heart, as we did?). Soon we were ready to read and translate simple prose texts: bits of Caesar, Livy, Xenophon. "Unseens" followed, passages of Latin or Greek we hadn't come across before and which we had to have a stab at translating. I still have my first Latin dictionary that my uncle gave me one Christmas. Not long afterwards, I found a copy of the giant "Liddell and Scott" Greek-English Lexicon for 6d in a jumble sale. I still have that too.

The time came for GCE O-levels and set texts for exams in both Latin and Greek. I can't remember what the prose Latin text was, Caesar probably: if I dug around in the attic, I'd probably come across the exam papers themselves that would remind me. But there was no forgetting the poetry text. This was Book V of Virgil's Aeneid that tells of the funeral games Aeneas organises on the anniversary of his father's death. It wasn't easy but with able guidance by someone who loved these texts ("you never forget a good teacher") we persevered. How rewarding it felt to have read one whole book from the pen of Rome's greatest poet!

In Greek, we had a section of Xenophon to study (Thalassa! Thalassa! The sea! The sea! - one of the greatest moments in all history writing). And for poetry, Euripedes' Medea. Looking back, I'm amazed that we were exposed as schoolboys of a tender age to all that cruelty and bloodshed (for Medea murders her own children as an act of revenge against Jason who has abandoned her). We were spared the choruses (really difficult Greek) but even so, the text felt like quite a challenge. I saw a dramatic production of it not long ago (in English), and was startled by the visceral power of this great tragedy. When you read the Greek tragedians, you feel that all of human life is there.

********

Why am I telling you all this? Because I want to convey something of the lifelong effect studying classics at an early age had on me. At a practical level, it meant that I already had ancient languages in my knapsack when I came to study theology and read the New Testament and the Christian fathers in Greek and Latin. But the debt I owe is far more than this. I think the classics gave me three things above all. The first was the start of some understanding of how languages work. We all know how much English owes to classical languages, let alone Romance languages like French which we began to learn once we had some grounding in Latin and Greek. I became fascinated by the history of words and loved discovering how etymologies often cast light on how English words came to carry the meanings they have. I still do.

The second insight was how the world of antiquity has been so influential in shaping our own culture, and how classical studies unlocks so much that is referenced in the western canon of art, poetry and literature as well as philosophy, ethics, politics, science and the world of ideas. The Bible is an indispensable part of that too, and it's worrying that today's generation of students don't have the familiarity our forebears had with the texts and concepts that have come down to us from the ancient world. And my third reason for being grateful for a classical education is that it gave me a deep love of literature and poetry that has sustained me for a lifetime. You can't read Virgil or Euripedes and not feel you are in the presence of giants. I can't claim I necessarily felt it quite like that at the time. But in retrospect, I can see how the seeds were sown. And if I've acquired any ability to string words together as a writer and preacher, then I owe a large part of it to the classics.

This week I came across Classics for All on social media. This is a charitable organisation that provides funding and support for the teaching of classics in state primary and secondary schools. They say: classical subjects are a vital foundation for a modern education. We believe every pupil deserves to benefit from the learning, enjoyment and inspiration that classics provides. Their Big Give Christmas Challenge 2018 aimed to raise £45000 to support classics in schools in the Midlands and the North East. They want to bring classics to 72 schools in areas where there is currently little or no provision. My children were all educated in both these parts of England, so I have a definite interest here! I made a donation which was doubled by a generous corporate champion. Later that day, I learned that the target figure had been met. Which is a great achievement.

I'd love to think that young people today can find as much enjoyment as I have done in the classics. Classics teaching today is no doubt very different from what it was when I was at school. I guess it's a lot more interactive and inventive, and a lot of fun. I hope it does for them what it did for me, act as a key to unlocking the world in which we live by helping us to acknowledge our debt to the past. So that when today's students clamber up the Acropolis to marvel at the Parthenon as I did this autumn, they too will find themselves in a landscape that they can read, because it is already familiar, and maybe already loved. And those students in the North East who like me live close to Hadrian's Wall will appreciate their rich classical heritage all the more.