Northumbrians: a personal take on a new book

On 5 May 1973 my wife and I became engaged. That was the day Sunderland won the Cup Final. My wife's parents were ardent Black Cat supporters. We figured that if Sunderland were to win, her father would say yes to anything, and if they lost he'd be past caring. 

Reader, I married her. And married into her North East family. Her father was from Consett, her mother from Wearside. They hadn't lived in the North East since the war. When I arrived on the scene, they had retired to the Yorkshire Dales. But the region was in their blood. My initiation into North East culture included being presented to the family matriarch who lived in Sunderland and of whom everyone seemed in awe, and an evening drinking in a well-known watering hole just down the road where the only females to be seen were serving behind the bar. (Brown ale, you ask? I'm not saying. It would be a cliché too far.)

To a young Londoner it was all very strange, even exotic. I'd only visited the North East once before, as a schoolboy applying to Durham University to read maths. I've never forgotten the November afternoon I got out of the train at Durham station. It was bleak and grey, the kind of day the North East does so well. Above the rooftops huddled below I took in the apparition of the Castle and Cathedral not, it seemed as the light began to fade, anchored to the bedrock of their acropolis but floating ethereally above. I walked through the darkening streets up to the Castle where I was to spend the night before my interview. I wondered how I had come to be so far from home. Did it cross my mind that one day this would be my home? Not for a moment. I didn't go to Durham University in the end. But the seed of my fascination with northernness had been sown.

A decade later, we were living in rural north Northumberland. That repeated north I found to be both romantic and unsettling. I'd become Vicar of Alnwick. It was my first incumbency. I came to love the place and its people, and to cherish the memory of the ancient Christianity that flourished in Saxon times thanks to the Northumbrian saints like Oswald and Aidan, Cuthbert and Hild. But I won't deny that living and working in a northern country market town posed challenges to a young vicar brought up in the metropolitan suburbs of north London. Was this because any small town was inevitably a more self-contained world? The empty landscapes were sublimely beautiful, but their silence and remoteness could feel unnerving at times. Or was the discomfort due to its northernness, a culture shock that would wear off in time? (It took three decades, I was told, even to begin to belong up here near the Scottish border.)

We went away, but the pull of Northumbria was in my blood. In time we found our way back like returning exiles. "It's marvellous to be back in the North East" I heard myself say at my installation as Dean in Durham Cathedral. I wrote many blogs during my thirteen years in Durham, so I won't say more here. Except to recall one conversation I had with a college principal during my first year as Dean. "Michael" he said, "you'll never understand this Cathedral or the North East until you've been to your first Miners' Gala". So it proved. I began to feel (not just observe) something of the bonds of loyalty and solidarity felt among the North East's mining communities, forged by the shared perils of mining, the common experience of disaster, the loss of livelihood and dignity when the pits closed and the frustration that their people had been all but forgotten about in London where power lay and decisions were taken. I also learned how old wounds ran deep, such as the bitter memories of the miners' strike of 1984 that so divided workers and their families.

Finally (to bring the story up to date) we retired four years ago back to rural Northumberland. We live in what was once a pit manager's house, named after a Tyneside collier ship that went down in the 1880s. It’s right by the railway, Britain’s earliest east-west route that was open when Queen Victoria came to the throne. The River South Tyne tumbles down from the North Pennines a hundred yards away. How very North Eastern. St Cuthbert was here too, once upon a time: the medieval church up on the hill is dedicated to him. It was probably built to commemorate one of the halts made by his community as they travelled the North in the ninth century with the remains of their saints and the Lindisfarne Gospels looking for a permanent resting-place. But an even more ancient story is told here by the Roman Wall as it strides through our parish on the crest of the Whin Sill. There's nothing like the presence of antiquity to put things (like Brexit) into perspective, especially when you find you have what looks plausibly like a substantial Roman stone mortared into your garden wall. Who are we and where have we come from, it seems to ask as I gaze out at it out from the kitchen window. I want to reciprocate with the same question. If only stones could talk!

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These memories have been stirred by reading Dan Jackson's enjoyable new book The Northumbrians: North-East England and Its People - A New History. (Point of order: do you hyphenate North East or not? When I published my own book on the Christian heritage of the region, Landscapes of Faith, my publisher decided that we wouldn't. So out of habit, I don't. The cover of Northumbrians hyphenates but Dan Jackson's text doesn't. Read what you like into that.)

I've loved this book. Perhaps I've read it too quickly because it is so readable. Its take on the North East is refreshingly different from so much other writing on the region. For all that it's called A New History, it doesn't follow any kind of timeline. Nor does it linger especially on landscape, architecture, literature and art as ends in themselves, rather, for what they tell us about the people whose land this is. For the book is a study of people and communities: at work and leisure, in war and peace, in learning and politics, public life and industry, and not least, in the ordinary days where life is lived in home and countryside, city, town and village.

Dan Jackson can write about these things so well, not only because he is a good historian but, much more importantly, because he is a native Northumbrian himself. He writes as a local from inside the experience of North Easternness - you can smell it in his prose and sense that he knows what he's talking about. He is ready to share his own experience of what it is like to grow up and live in the region - inhabit it, I mean, in a way no incomer like me ever can. So this is a very personal book. It's clear that he loves the North East and is proud to be a Northumbrian. But he doesn't rhapsodise as some literature is prone to do. He knows it too well, is too alive to its paradoxes, struggles and real pain, not least due to the steep decline in heavy industry that once made it the power-house of the nation. The book is all the better for having been written from the perspective of a critical friend.

If I had to recommend a book to someone moving to the North East for the first time to help them orientate themselves in a strange but beguiling land, this would be it. I could have done with it forty years ago. I might suggest that they begin by reading the first and last chapters. The opening chapter sets the scene and explores what and who we mean by the idea of "Northumbrian". The closing chapter ponders what the North East is becoming in the twenty-first century, what we should celebrate in the region, and what could be different and better. You'd expect me to say that I was particularly interested in the discussion about why our region voted so decisively for Brexit in 2016 (and before that, against the setting-up of a regional assembly in 2004). What's so helpful here is to begin to understand how the wider context of North East history, politics and culture have all played a part in shaping its assumptions.

For me, blown into the North East as a migrant from the south (and not properly "English" at that, having a German parent), Dan Jackson raises important questions about place, identity and belonging. I suppose I am one of Theresa May's "citizens of everywhere" who has called lots of places "home". She disparagingly went on to say that this made us "citizens of nowhere". But that's a non sequitur. It's true that part of me would love to apply the epithet Northumbrian to myself. I've lived and worked in the North East, retired here and God willing, expect to die here. So I envy Dan Jackson his authentic Northumbrian identity and the sense of place and belonging that come with it. But I know that it can never quite be mine, any more than I can still call myself a Londoner, except as identifying my place of origin. His book has helped me to see that.

My own relationship with the North East is more complex, perhaps because it's also coloured by an ever more insistent awareness that I am not simply British but European. But I can say that there is no other part of England where I would rather find myself at this late stage of life. There's nowhere alse that the bonds of affection and adoptive loyalty have ever run so deep. Which is why I've found so much to treasure in this book.

"The best things just happen to you."

It was the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who said that. I came across it while reading an intriguing book** by the child psychotherapist Adam Phillips. He is writing about how a lot of learning happens, not as a result of formal schooling but through hints and nudges. He means the things that "just happen" to us, inconsequential in themselves but for the fact that we remember them and find ourselves returning to them in our thoughts and reflections, even find that our lives were changed because of them.

He quotes a fellow philosopher who recalls a walk Wittgenstein and he were on. Wittgenstein "had seen a play, a third-rate, poor play, when he was twenty-two. One detail in that play had made a powerful impression on him.  It was a trifle. But here some peasant, some-ne'er-do well says in the play: 'Nothing can hurt me.' That remark went through him and now he remembers it. It started things you can't tell. The most important things just happen to you."

I stopped reading to think about that. Is it true, I asked myself? The most important things Wittgenstein says, not just happy conjunctions of events that please us but things that really matter, or as we might say, things of ultimate concern. Bishop Ian Ramsey of Durham, a philosopher of religion who was much influenced by Wittgenstein, spoke about disclosure experiences, "when the penny drops". Carl Gustav Jung would never use the language of coincidences. For him, the fact that we notice them at all, pay attention even fleetingly to how events have come together in a particular way, confers significance on them, gives them meaning. There are no coincidences. If they are important and matter to us, there are only synchronicities.

Personal experience has to be the test of Wittgenstein's dictum. What does my own memory tell me about this? How have the things that "just happen" been significant, touched my life in some way? Looking back over six years of blogging, I find I've mentioned some of them. For example: my love of maths that led me to read it at university; the part music has played in my life for as long as I can remember; the books in childhood that influenced me; my lifelong commitment to the continent of Europe that comes out of my having a British father and a German-Jewish mother; memories of Christmas past; and much more recently, the birth of my first grandson. In that last blog, I wrote about how I would always remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard that news. Most of us can tell similar stories about how certain events impinged on us: when our team won the Cup Final, say, or when we heard the news that someone close to us had died. Maybe that's one criterion by which we measure the importance that certain events hold for us, that in an instant, our lives as they were then seem captured as in a photograph.

But none of those can be described strictly speaking as "chance". They belong to contexts that up to a point were already shaped by upbringing or environment. What about the events that at the time seemed to "happen" out of the blue, unforeseen, unforeseeable, yet never forgotten? I've had to think about that today, but here are three I've come up with.

The first is a very archaic memory indeed, probably my earliest, but it's as clear as anything I can recall. We were in Germany where my mother needed to travel regularly to sort out her family's affairs after the war. My parents had found lodgings under the eaves in a back street of Düsseldorf, my mother's home town. My mother told me once that I could not have been more than just over two years old when we stayed there. What I remember was seeing the outline of a church tower and spire out of the window not far away. It was black, dramatically silhouetted against the sky. That evening, something awoke me. It was the sound of church bells being rung in that tower - not change-ringing as in England, but that random tolling of great heavy bells against one other that every European traveller has heard on a Sunday morning.

To me that sound seemed to penetrate my being from top to bottom. This primitive sound that seemed to batter my heart was deeply frightening, even dread-ful, yet somehow, in a way I didn't yet have words for, enticing as well. It felt as if it mattered. Was it my first encounter with that mysterium tremens et fascinans which is how some writers have characterised religion? That it was my earliest conscious religious experience I now don't doubt though I couldn't have described it in that way for many years. And while it was one of the most important experiences of my life, it did "just happen". It still colours the way I think about the Divine, that as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God". It taught me even at that tender age that religion is a serious business, not a plaything or a hobby.

The second event was altogether happier. I was in my early twenties, arriving at theological college to begin training for ordained ministry. This was a few days before term was due to start. My longsuffering parish priest in London had kindly agreed to transport my books and me to the college in his Mini-Traveller and help me settle into my room. We arrived and parked the car. No-one was around except for a young man of about my age who was busy painting a side door at the foot of a staircase that led up into the building. With the warmest of smiles he explained that he too had arrived early and was busy making himself useful. By the end of the afternoon I was established in a room next to his. Why is that day etched on my memory? Because the person concerned quickly became my closest friend and has remained so for the best part of half a century. We still talk about that day we met for the first time when our friendship was born: a time of gifts if ever there was one. The only detail that maddeningly escapes me is the colour of the paint on that door. I must ask him.

My third reminiscence is about my love of photography. By now I was in my fifties. My youngest daughter had asked for a camera for Christmas, so we had bought her a digital compact. I had no interest in photography at that stage (so much so that on a pilgrimage to Israel-Palestine a few years before, I was the only person not to bring a camera. When asked why not, I pompously replied that for me, images were best encapsulated in words, so I was keeping a journal instead.) I thought nothing more about my daughter's camera until she told us that she didn't want a digital after all, so would I buy it off her so that she could get a traditional film camera instead? I agreed. It lay around unused for a while. But then I got to thinking, I've paid good money for that instrument. Maybe it's time I started using it. Living as I did in Durham's world heritage site with one of the world's greatest buildings a few yards away across the garden, I began to realise what opportunities for photography were all around me. The rest as they say is history. I can't now imagine a life without photography, just as I can't imagine one without music. And if I'm asked where I learned what I've been able to grasp as a photographer, I always say: Durham Cathedral was my teacher.

I think I can say that all three of these stories are about what "just happened". None could have been foreseen or planned for. And all three have been amongst the most important experiences of my life. There are many more, not all of which it would be right to blog about. What matters is the spiritual exercise of asking the question in the first place. An earlier generation of spiritual guides like the great eighteenth century French priest Jean-Pierre de Caussade spoke about how we must reflect often on divine Providence, discerning how God comes to us in "the sacrament of the present moment". That's the theme of one of the best English hymns from the same century, William Cowper's God moves in a mysterious way. Maybe I'll blog about that one day. For now, enough to affirm that whether in light or in shadow, our experiences can convey gifts that transcend the circumstances themselves and, even if we don't know it at the time, prove with hindsight to have transformed us in some way.

Yes, "the best things just happen to you." But we must practise how to pay attention and notice them. Who knows what has passed unnoticed in front of us a thousand times a day with the potential to give us something wonderful, undreamed of, and we missed it? That's the question I find myself asking late in life. It's not about regrets but nurturing a thirst to be more alive, being as fully present to the gift that I am alive at all as it's possible to be. I am a slow learner, but I can now add Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Adam Phillips) to the lengthening list of wise teachers to whom to be grateful. 

 

PS The friend I wrote about above has just read this, and sent me some lines from Mary Oliver:

Let me
keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

**Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery, London (Faber), 1998, p70. 

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.

The North East in Twelve Favourite Places 2: Monkwearmouth

Last time I took you to a remote corner of Northumberland. This month I want to visit a place that at first sight looks like the complete opposite: the dense conurbation at the mouth of the River Wear that we know as the city of Sunderland.

I am fond of the place. My wife’s family come from Sunderland. We became engaged on the day in May 1973 when the Black Cats won the Cup Final. How could her father refuse me on such an auspicious day? And had they lost, he’d have been past caring anyway. In those days, shipbuilding was still a major industry on Wearside. Now the huge installations are gone, but not the proud memory of North Eastern ships that were famed all over the world.

You wouldn’t think that the city (as it has been since 1993) is one of the North East’s most ancient places. It owes it all to a man named Benedict Biscop, a Northumbrian Saxon monk who came to the north bank of the Wear in 674 to found a monastery. He travelled to Rome no fewer than six times to bring back books and manuscripts and the skills to build in stone, sing plainchant and create stained glass. He went on to found the monastery at Jarrow seven years later. But perhaps his greatest achievement was to introduce the Venerable Bede to this “double monastery” and encourage him in his scholarship. Benedict Biscop is now the city’s patron saint.

The mouth of the Wear is well worth a visit. The regeneration of the estuary is impressive and makes for an enjoyable riverside walk. On the north bank the National Glass Centre celebrates Sunderland’s long history of glass making pioneered by Biscop. Nearby is the Monkwearmouth campus of Sunderland University and – best of all – St Peter’s Church, and the remains of Biscop’s monastery.

Not much is left of this great Saxon foundation, but what remains they are! Set in a breezy grassy landscape surrounded by contemporary buildings, you are acutely aware of the contrast between ancient and modern in Sunderland. This to me is one of the delights of the city. The Saxon tower is the jewel in the crown, still standing proud and holding its own against the high rise flats and main roads nearby. Beneath the tower is the church porch through which Bede himself must have walked hundreds of times. It’s moving to walk there. When the sun is setting in the west, the Saxon architecture glows with a golden light.

If you’ve caught the spirit of Bede (and who wouldn’t?), then you’ll want to visit the twin Saxon church at Jarrow a few miles ago, and of course Durham Cathedral where his tomb has been since 1022. I have an interest in Durham, of course, having been Dean there for thirteen years. It was a huge privilege to be the guardian of Bede’s bones. He is undoubtedly one of the greatest people England has given birth to. And not just England, for Bede saw himself as totally connected to European civilisation, both classical and Christian. Sunderland may have voted decisively for Brexit, but at Monkwearmouth you feel you are at the focus of a profoundly European vision of things.

While you are there, take a walk on the bracing sea front at Roker. If you’re lucky, the wind will be in the east and the waves will be hurling themselves furiously against the breakwater that defines the mouth of the Wear. On winter days when it’s blowing a gale, you feel the full force of the North Sea at Roker. It may feel like a quintessential suburb, but there aren’t many suburbs in England where the sea is a force to be reckoned with.

A few streets back from the sea front you’ll find another great church, St Andrew’s Roker. It was built in the early twentieth century and is one of the country’s greatest monuments of the Arts and Crafts period. There aren’t many modern churches of real distinction but this is one of them. Like Saxon St Peter’s, it’s another church for Sunderland to be proud of. I’ve always thought that this city is underrated. Which is why I’ve put it on my personal list of favourite places in the North East.

The North East in Twelve Favourite Places 1: Edlingham

This year I am writing a series of twelve short articles for our village magazine Haydon Bridge News. The suggestion was to take a look at some of the less well-known places in North East England, or at some less familiar aspects of places we thought we knew. I know that many readers share my love of the North East, so I've decided to give these modest pieces an audience beyond our village.

Just to clarify. "North East" (with or without the hyphen - I prefer it without) means the land between the Tees and the Tweed. In old (Pevsner) money, that is the counties of Durham and Northumberland. I'm dotting around between the north and south of this region, old and new, urban and rural, upland and coast. There is so much to enjoy in this part of England, so much that is characterful and interesting. There's a fair amount of personal reminiscence in these articles and some photographs to liven up the text.

Here and in the next three blogs are the first four articles from January to April. After that, I'll post once each piece is published. So here goes.

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This series of pieces is about byways, not main roads.

I’m not asking you to ignore the great sights of North East England: Lindisfarne, Durham Cathedral, Alnwick Castle, Hadrian’s Wall, the Northumberland Heritage Coast, Beamish, the Angel of the North, the Tyne Bridges and many more wonderful places. How could we forget the unforgettable that have so shaped the region and made it familiar to people across the world?

But I want to take you to some of the North East’s less familiar sites, landscapes and buildings. I’m suggesting twelve to start with that are largely off the main tourist routes. And I begin with a remote little place that seems to me to sum up so much of the spirit of this part of England. It’s the village of Edlingham just off one of Northumberland’s most beautiful roads that strides across the sandstone hills between Alnwick and Rothbury.

I was vicar of this parish more than 30 years ago when it was part of a united benefice with Alnwick. Getting out to the church could be tricky on winter days. One snowy January Sunday, there were just two of us in church for the morning service. The other person had also driven out of Alnwick and across the moor, bringing with her the church silver for communion. We had to break the ice on the water cruets that morning, I remember.

This is wild, craggy country, quintessential Northumberland. The views across the Vale of Whittingham as you come off the moor are outstanding, with Cheviot and Hedgehope prominent on the horizon. The tops are often white with snow between November and May – the best time to walk the Cheviots if you don’t want to find yourself knee-deep in mud. You can see the little village below you as you drive towards the turning. 

It’s an enjoyable surprise, then, to find that Edlingham has a fine group of historic buildings: a church, a castle and a railway viaduct. Just like Durham. The viaduct used to carry the North Eastern Railway’s branch line from Alnwick to Cornhill. It barely lasted 40 years and was closed to passenger traffic in 1930. But the viaduct makes a splendid backdrop for the older buildings in front.

What is left of the Castle is an imposing ruin of a 13^th century fortified manor house. It was progressively fortified in the following centuries against the ever-present threat of raids across the Scottish border. The tower is not a keep but the remains of the solar or principal living room of a manor house. It has been voted as one of the best three castles in Northumberland.

The Church of St John the Baptist dates from around the Norman Conquest, though the mighty tower, rough-hewn chancel arch and aisle piers make you feel that it’s almost dateless, as if it has simply grown out of the ancient stony hillside. The church’s foundation takes us back indeed to Saxon times when these lands were gifted to the community of St Cuthbert that grew up around his memory (the church of Old Haydon has a similar history). Today’s community is developing plans to use the church as a gateway to the heritage of the area and for village activities.

I said that Edlingham somehow sums up the spirit of the North East. Its remoteness is part of that. But these three buildings between them symbolise the history of North East England: an ancient church connected to St Cuthbert, a castle that speaks of a marcher region that has been fought over for so many centuries, and a viaduct that recalls the huge impact of the industrial revolution on the area. All this in the middle of deep countryside. Go and see for yourself.

To get there: take the A1 to Alnwick, go through the town following the signs to Rothbury (B6341). The road climbs steeply on to Alnwick Moor. The turn for Edlingham is on the right about 5 miles along. Or just north of Morpeth, you can take the A697 towards Wooler and turn right at a crossroads on to the B6341.

 

Gathering Fragments One Year On

It's the autumn equinox. Night has overtaken day. Up here in Northumberland, the leaves show little sign of turning. But the rose-hips are swelling in the hedgerows and the rowan glows bright red alongside the magenta hawthorn and deep purple elderberries. The scent of coal fires re-lit in village hearths now hangs in the still September air. Golden stubble fields are ploughed chocolate-brown ready for winter. The new academic year has begun: children file past our front door morning and afternoon chatting excitably on their way to and from school. 

The year has come full circle. This time last year, I was in my last few days in office as Dean of Durham. It was a week of high emotion. I was filled with real sadness at the thought of leaving a place and people we loved. I blogged about it here: http://decanalwoolgatherer.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-deans-last-blog.html?spref=tw. At the same time, we were looking forward to our new life across the hills in the Tyne Valley. It would, we imagined, be quieter and gentler than Durham. Cathedrals are wonderful and exhilarating but they are fast places. You need to be intellectually and spiritually agile; you need plenty of stamina. It's not that I was running out of steam (whatever Mrs S says), but I did think I should retire before it became apparent to me and to everyone else that I was overstaying my welcome. And I wanted to be able to have something to give to church and community in retirement, try different things, volunteer in new ways.

It has turned out to be an eventful, not to say turbulent, year. If you've followed this blog you'll know about Storm Desmond and how it invaded our home last December at precisely the same time as one daughter gave birth to our second grandchild and another was rushed into hospital for an emergency operation. Having fully recovered, she sensibly got married in the spring and is now expecting a baby. But then in the early summer my 93 year old mother fell ill and died a few weeks afterwards. All this on top of laying aside a life's work, moving home and beginning again in a new place in an entirely different role, that of being "retired". Oh yes, and the EU referendum campaign and the awful prospect of Brexit.

It's the first anniversary of my farewell in Durham Cathedral next Tuesday. By coincidence (is there such a thing?), I am giving two addresses to a clergy conference that day and the next on "Ministry for the Long Haul". I asked the Bishop why he thought I was qualified to speak to his clergy on this topic. After all, I had never lived or worked in the demanding urban environment that is mostly the setting of their ministry. He replied, "Well, you've completed the long haul. Tell us what's kept you going and sustained you over forty years. Tell us what's been important to you". Fair enough I thought a year ago when we spoke. I'm now trying to work out what to say to these good people. No spoilers! You never know who is reading this blog. I'll post the talks next week. If they've gone well, that is.

But it's been valuable to have to undertake the exercise of thinking about forty years of public ministry as I look forward to the anniversary. I might not have done it otherwise. I had never tried to articulate to myself, let alone to anyone else, what I'd found to be central in inhabiting the vocation to be a priest, though I suppose some of it got expressed in the ordination addresses I gave a few years ago that later became my book Wisdom and Ministry. So I went back to my farewell sermon in the Cathedral on 27 September 2015 (how hard I'd worked on that one!): http://michaelstalks.blogspot.com/2015/09/all-in-end-is-harvest-farewell-sermon.html?spref=tw. The clues are all there, I realised, for I'd intended the sermon to be a valedictory not only to Durham but to all the places where I had served as a priest. My text was the words of Jesus in St John after he has performed another of his "signs" and fed the crowd: "gather the fragments so that nothing may be lost" (John 6.12). So that is what I've tried to do in these two addresses, share some harvest gleanings in a way that I hope is helpful and finds echoes in what others have experienced in ministry. 

It's always important in life to do our best to make sure that "nothing may be lost". I believe it to be a key spiritual task, and especially in later life. One of the gifts of retirement has been to have time (even amid the dramas of the past year) to look back and ponder. I've blogged under the "woolgathering" title for some years but this is the first time in my life when it feels as though it can mean something creative because proper time and thought, reflection and prayer can go into it. 

But the more wool I gather, the more I realise that what I think and say on this first anniversary is still provisional. At this early stage, my musings on the story of my ministry are no more than a ballon d'essai, a first go to test whether I've got it even partially right. Who knows what themes may emerge later on in retirement when the foreground has receded a bit and distance lends perspective? 

That last bit was a photography-inspired spoiler, by the way....

Bishop David Jenkins: in memoriam with great affection

Bishop David Jenkins' death has been announced today. I want to begin by sending my condolences and prayers to his family. 

David was, I believe, one of the great bishops of modern times. There will be many obituaries and public eulogies that survey his career more formally as a theologian and especially as Bishop of Durham where his influence was deep and lasting. I simply want in this blog to pay my own personal tribute to him as someone I got to know late in his life, long after his retirement.

I was one of the great crowd in Durham Cathedral at his enthronement in 1984. To my surprise, the Church Times had asked me to cover it: as a Northumberland parish priest I was relatively local. Proudly armed with my press pass, I took up position in the crossing with a grandstand view. Next to me, I remember, the artist in residence was sketching the occasion. 

None of us could have foreseen the impact the sermon was going to make. The service was already newsworthy because of the lightning strike on York Minster where he had been consecrated not long before. (What a lot of theological nonsense was talked about that disastrous fire!) But when David spoke about the bitter miners' dispute from a pulpit positioned at the heart of the great northern coalfield, the effect was electrifying. I can't recall any other sermon quite like it. It wasn't just the unforgettable phrase about the "elderly imported American". It was the conviction with which he preached, the passion with which he was ready to "speak truth to power" as we say now. If I didn't write in my report that we had a prophet among us, I certainly felt it. We all did. And as we know, as he started, so he continued. The voltage never faltered.

I didn't know then what, as a superannuated preacher I know now, which is that preaching in this way takes a lot of effort and real courage. I don't know what it cost him. But I do remember, working as I did then at the northern tip of the coalfield, how much this sermon was talked about. And not just in church. The working people of the North East loved the thought that once again they had a "miners' bishop" as Westcott had been at the turn of the century, whose prophetic fire burned for social justice. 

But as we know, this was just as true of the way David did theology. As a former professor at Leeds, he knew what he was talking about. In this he was one of a long line of scholar-bishops of Durham. And like them, he knew that theology needed to be done in and by the whole church as a community of faith, not just by academics in their libraries. He looked for a church that was not afraid of asking theological questions, of finding a language that would articulate and celebrate its own inheritance of faith in an intelligent and contemporary way. 

He was much maligned for this, and it was cruelly unfair. I remember at the time that I met up with a well known conservative evangelical theologian. "All this slanderous nonsense being put around about David Jenkins" he said. "It's quite clear to me that the man is a thorough incarnationalist who firmly believes in the resurrection." These controversies can't have been enjoyable for him and his family. But they did serve the church well, if only because they got people taking about theology in the unlikeliest of places. I think David saw this as an aspect of mission. I got into trouble when I preached about his latest contribution about Easter. But the (then) Duke of Northumberland rang me up shortly afterwards and said: "Sadgrove, I want to know more about this new Bishop of Durham. Come across to the Castle for a malt and tell me all about it." I obeyed, as you do. After two hours of discussion he said: "Well, it all seems very sensible to me. What on earth is all the fuss about?" I've often wondered why the search for a genuinely contemporary language in which to express faith was, and still is, so threatening to so many. 

I came back to the North East in 2003 which was when I first met David personally. He was always up for theological discussion and I wish I'd responded more readily to his invitations to come down to Teesdale to see him. But I treasure the memories of the times I did. And I also relish a story told me by Martyn Percy, now Dean of Christ Church, Oxford. Martyn wanted to send a gift to mark my installation. David had published his book The Calling of a Cuckoo - Not Quite an Autobiography not long before. An ideal present, Martyn thought. He want to a book launch, bought the book, explained to David that it was gift for the new Dean of Durham, and would he like to write a message in it? Martyn says that David thought for a few moments, then said: "all I can think to write is: God help him! But I'd better not. He might take it amiss." So he simply signed his name. Very understated. Very Durham. Very David too, I think. 

As I got to know the parish clergy of Durham, I was seriously impressed by the reputation David had built up in the diocese. Many of these middle-aged and elderly clergy could not speak highly enough of him. "You knew you were cared for and loved by him" some of them said. "You knew he would listen carefully to you, take an interest, support you if you got into difficulties." That is high praise indeed. And unusually, it was also coming from more than a few clergy of a very different theological or political stamp. It's not too much to say that he was very much admired, respected and loved across the diocese.

One more charming reminiscence. Once, we found ourselves standing robed next to each other at a big service. He was always well-behaved in public as behoves a retired bishop, but he never lost his wicked sense of fun. We turned over a page in the service sheet and saw that a worship song was coming next. He looked at me and grimaced. "Terrible theology" he remarked. "What is one to do with this jejune kind of stuff?" And then he said, "I won't if you won't." So we maintained a dignified silence and thought our own theological thoughts. 

The last time I saw him was when he summoned a colleague and me to talk about his funeral wishes. It was a lovely conversation in his flat in Barnard Castle. He had aged considerably but his acuity and good humour had not left him. He had chosen readings and hymns but, with typical humility, wanted to know what we thought. He changed his mind about one or two things. Above all he wanted nothing pompous or grand, just an act of worship that would be true to the values he'd tried to live by. Above all it must be true to God's love as we see it in the face of Jesus Christ.

As Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins stood in the succession of Cuthbert the Bishop of Lindisfarne who is interred in Durham Cathedral. I write this on his feast day. David might have smiled at the timing of his death. But I am one of very many who are profoundly thankful to have known him a little and to have seen the spirit of Cuthbert and of Cuthbert's Lord alive in him. May he rest in peace.