"Our Actions are our Future": thoughts on World Food Day

Today is World Food Day. I've learned that it's been observed on this October date since 1981 to draw attention to global hunger and stimulate action to support the most needy people of our world. It's also an opportunity to reflect on the food we eat and its significance for us personally and as societies. Recent themes for the day have included food security, agricultural co-operatives, food prices, migration and rural poverty. This year's focus is "our actions are our future".

As it happens, I've been thinking a lot about food this year. I went to the surgery in June to get myself checked out by the practice nurse. She looked me in the eye and said: "you're overweight with a BMI* that's well above the safe limit of 25. You need to reduce". So for the last four months I've been reducing. My ambition has been to get back to the weight I was in my mid-twenties. That would give me a BMI just within the safer zone (for as the nurse also pointed out, when you're a male of my age, you are automatically at risk of cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke. This year I've had to learn about the first two on that ominous list - but that's another story).

As we all know, there's nothing like dieting to get you thinking about food. I don't say obsessing about it - but it has a way of taking up more than its fair share of mental space. If you've watched Michael Mosley on TV (Trust Me, I'm a Doctor) or read his books, you'll know that he believes in the habit of regular fasting to stabilise our attitude to food. His 5-2 diet - five days of normal eating each week, two with significantly reduced calorie intake - has been widely adopted. My sister who is a professional personal trainer recommends it.

And of course, this matches the importance attached to a healthy rhythm of feasting and fasting in the world's religions. In the Christian shape of each week, Sunday is a festival (commemorating the resurrection) and Friday a fast (in memory of Good Friday). Lent and Eastertide offer annual seasons for self-denial and celebration. Every feast day has its vigil or fast. I dare say that if we ate and drank accordingly, we'd be healthier as a result. When I've got down to the weight I want to be (86kg since you ask - nearly there!), Christian discipline or askesis, if I stick to it and eat and drink sensibly, ought to make sure I stay there.

Eating sensibly maybe comes down to eating reflectively, thinking about what we eat and why. Here's where World Food Day comes in. "Our actions are our future." What actions might these be? There's any number of possibilities, whether we're talking about personal, or collective, political, actions. It's obvious to all of us that the unequal way the world's resources are distributed means food affluence for some (most of us in the west), food poverty for far more in the developing world. No little personal act of mine is going to make a difference to that global fact on the ground.

Yet we also know that a lot of littles can add up to a great deal. They can symbolise to ourselves and to others our resolve to work for political and economic change, to influence public attitudes so that imbalance is redressed in favour of those who are in most need. It's an offence to our human inventiveness and capacity for problem-solving that millions of people still cry out for their daily bread. It also means thinking locally: about supporting or volunteering at our nearby food-bank, for example, or at this time of year, asking what harvest festival gifts we can bring to church that will make a difference to the lives of others.

So I'm trying to be a little more reflective about what I eat and how. The sacramental quality of food becomes more important when you are careful about your habits - how much is symbolised by our eating and drinking, especially when we are with family and friends where the beautiful word companion comes into its own - literally, a "bread-sharer" as in the French word for a chum, copain. All of this is gathered up and transcended in the Christian eucharist, the sharing of bread and wine together in memory of Jesus who died and was raised up, who commanded us on the eve of his passion to do this in remembrance of him and in a shared meal, revealed himself as the risen Lord.

What's struck me most forcibly of all during these dieting weeks is how our eating habits are intrinsically bound up with the future of our planet. George Monbiot in his Guardian column has done more than most to highlight the effects our addiction to meat-eating is having on climate change. Last week the International Panel on Climate Change published its report. It tells us that unless temperature rise over pre-industrial levels is held to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the world faces catastrophic environmental damage which will lead to untold human consequences. Moreover, we have just twelve years left in which to address this crisis. Excessive meat consumption is part of the problem.

I'm struck by how disparate our attitudes to climate change are. Our government officially accepts the science behind the IPCC report and recognises the urgent need to reduce fossil-fuel dependence. Yet in the week after the report's publication, it reduces subsidies on electric cars and stands by while a court verdict allows fracking to begin again in the North of England. The public largely "gets" the message about fossil-fuels (don't use your car more than you have to, don't travel by air if there's a train you can catch, think about burning renewables rather than coal or gas) and plastics (you don't see many plastic bags being dispensed at supermarket checkouts nowadays). Yet it's far more resistant to the message about meat-eating, even though the cost to the planet of clearing forests for grazing, and of greenhouse gas emissions from cattle is unacceptably high.

So I link this year's World Food Day theme, "our actions are our future" with that of two years ago, "climate is changing; food and agriculture must change too". Food is not only about personal choices. It's political too. And as I've said, it also has profound theological and spiritual aspects. In the Lord's Prayer, daily bread really means "bread for tomorrow". I find that suggestive: if our decisions create futures for ourselves and others, so do our prayers. As for the present, our attitude to food and drink, like everything else, goes with the kind of care and responsibility we associate with mindfulness. The reflective eater, the mindful eater, the responsible eater, even the prayerful eater - I like the sound of those adjectives. They speak of wisdom. Late in time, as old age beckons, I'm trying to learn how important mindfulness is.

On last night's Look North there was a piece about the legendary Teesside Parmo that featured in a recent MasterChef broadcast. Obesity campaigners have pointed out that this North East delicacy consisting of chicken deep-fried in breadcrumbs topped with béchamel sauce and dripping with melted cheese comes in at around 2000 calories. That's close to what an average adult male needs each day to maintain his body weight. I don't want to score points but I somehow don't think this menu is for me.

By the way, I'm not a vegetarian though I love vegetarian food. I'm not teetotal. Most of fasting and dieting comes down to, not don't ever eat or drink this or that but if you do, do it with restraint. My wife tells me that portion-size is everything. Avarice and gluttony are among the seven deadly sins. Avarice is uncontrolled desire for what we don't need, gluttony uncontrolled consumption of it. Food and drink aren't the only things we desire to excess or consume too much of. But our eating and drinking can tell us much about ourselves. Which is why World Food Day is important, if only to make us think.

*body-mass index.

Seascapes: a retreat for those being ordained.

In a fortnight's time I shall be conducting a retreat for those who are being ordained deacon this summer in my home Diocese of Newcastle. They will be ordained in Newcastle Cathedral on Saturday 30 June. That's the day after the anniversary of my own ordination as a deacon in 1975. I shall give the sermon at that service. It goes without saying that I am looking forward to it. It's always a privilege to be with ordinands as they cross this crucial threshold and take up their new roles in public ministry.

The retreat will be at Alnmouth Friary on the Northumberland coast, just down the road from Alnwick where I was Vicar in the 1980s. I got to know it well at that time. Before my institution as incumbent, I spent a few days on retreat there. I made regular visits to speak with one of the senior Brothers who was a wise, kindly spiritual director. Every Friday my curate (who belonged to the Franciscan Third Order) and I would attend the midday office and eucharist there and then stay on for lunch with the Brothers. The Friary was, and still is, a real foyer, a place of warmth and hospitality.

"Thin" places where we spend times of spiritual significance often provide their own symbols and metaphors to help us reflect on whatever experience we are undergoing. I vividly remember my own priest's ordination retreat during the hot summer of 1976. I stayed with a Benedictine community, and apart from prayer times, meals and sleep (when it came), spent the entire time sitting under a lime tree in the beautiful grounds. The grass was already parched in the fierce heat, but not under that tree. There I read a lot, wrote a little, pondered much and stumbled around in my personal prayers. The community left that sunny patch of England many years ago now. I have no idea whether the tree is still there. But its shelter during those three days has remained an important grace-filled memory. It's felt like a symbol of God's care and protection, especially when the realities of public ministry kicked in as they always do eventually, and sometimes it felt hard and (here's where the metaphor of shelter is important) exposed. Like Jonah and his gourd, perhaps?

What metaphor could the Friary offer this year's candidates as they think and pray about their ordination and the lifetime of public ministry that lies ahead? It's not for me to do more than make suggestions - they must do their own search look for whatever images and symbols are there to recognise them. But an obvious one is the sea itself. What everyone loves at the Friary is the chapel which looks out on the beach at Alnmouth. At high tide you see mostly sea. At low tide, there is a broad expanse of beach, beautiful glowing sands like the ones we remember from childhood seaside holidays. Sometimes I've almost wanted to cry out in that chapel like the ancient Greeks on their long march home, ecstatic on their first sight of it: "The sea! The sea!"

The sea is the chapel altar's backdrop, its reredos if you like. Inevitably, it is always changing and this is its glory. The rhythms of the tides, the changes of weather, the alterations in the light with the ebbs and flows of the seasons - all these add their own dimension to the spirituality of the chapel where we shall gather for the daily prayers of the community and for the eucharist. Your eye is constantly drawn to what's happening out there in this magnificent seascape. It could so easily be a distraction from prayer and meditation. And I'll admit it sometimes is, the magic of what takes place when the sea meets the land. When Cuthbert created his hermitage on the Inner Farne twenty miles up the coast, he built the walls of his cell high enough to cut out the views of rock and sea - for this very reason maybe, so that he could focus more intently on God?

That's the via negativa at work, understanding the spiritual path in terms of what God is not. On the other hand, and more accessibly for most of us, we can train ourselves to try to discern where God is in what we see around us, or at least find in the world of our experience images of what God could be like. I don't mean only blue skies or glowing sunsets or cute animals or fine landscapes and seascapes, though these are all gifts of God. I mean taking in what surrounds us in all its vicissitudes: dark as well as light, storm as well as stillness, rough seas as well as calm, monochrome as well as a vibrant colour. (I've found photography to be a great teacher here in helping me not simply to see but to notice, try to see into, feel for what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls the inscape - but that's for another blog.) For me the vista is a vision of the real world as if viewed through the lens of the eucharist, glimpsed as God sees it. It draws us back into its beating heart because we are learning to see not simply with our eyes but in our souls. That makes it a living icon, written by God himself.

Here, the Friary chapel can help us integrate what we see and touch and experience with how we pray. For if the reredos, this east seaward window is not to be a distraction, then it must provide us with spiritual food for thought to inform our prayer, whether corporate or personal, and our celebration of the eucharist. All of us will find our life-experience mirrored in that window from time to time, in the ever-changing conditions of land, sea and sky. Sometimes the alterations can be so subtle that we hardly notice them, like the tide creeping in over the sand on a calm day. At other times there will be dramatic changes whose suddenness takes us by surprise, as when a storm breaks unexpectedly, or a sunburst emerges out of a sullen lead-grey sky.

And if the window is a symbol of life, it is also a symbol of the tides of ordained ministry. The seascape is always changing. Sometimes those changes seem charged with promise, at other times laden with threat. As men and women in the public ministry of the church, our calling is to enter into human life in all its variety, and in God's name help people to make sense of it, even glimpse where God might be in it all. It calls for solidarity in both storm and sunshine, troubled seas and still, perilous journeys into the unknown as well as calm sea and prosperous voyage. Our new deacons have no idea of where their ministries will take them even in a few days' time, still less in the years of their lifetimes. How can they? How could I, sitting under that lime tree more than forty years ago?

But what we can and must do is offer the path ahead to God. "Lead kindly light" were words often in my thoughts as I stood in that chapel as a parish priest and pondered on my ministry in the parish a few miles inland; and even, in a highly symbolic way, "for those in peril on the sea" when things felt rough. There's a poem by William Blake, one of England's great "see-ers", that I shall quote in one of my addresses:

Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.

Those words are embroidered on a sampler the parish gave us when we said farewell. It still hangs in the room where we spend most of our daylight hours at home. They remind me of that window at the Friary and the years of stipendiary ordained ministry I have now laid down. And now, it's time for a new generation of clergy to pick up the baton in turn. I can promise them that Blake speaks the truth, not only of human life and discipleship, but of ministry too. And it's all there, in that window and in what they will recognise as they gaze into it and say their prayers and offer their lives as God's deacons.

It goes without saying that my prayers will be with them too. And with all those who are being ordained in the coming weeks in churches and cathedrals across the country.

Lent with St John's Gospel

I'm working on a series of Holy Week addresses that I'm giving at Chester Cathedral. Once again I'm immersed in the Gospel of St John. Not specifically the Passion story this time (I preached through it a few years ago, which is how my book The Eight Words of Jesus originated). This year I decided I would offer addresses on the seven "I am" sayings in the Fourth Gospel. In the order in which they occur, they are: the Bread of Life, the Light of the World, the Door, the Good Shepherd, the Resurrection and the Life, the Vine, and the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Believe it or not, I have never preached specifically on any of these great sayings, though I've often alluded to them in sermons on St John - you can hardly avoid it when they illuminate so much of his gospel. (Actually, that's not quite true. I did once write a sermon on the Way, the Truth and the Life,  but had to abandon it when some big event in the parish supervened and I needed to preach in a different way.) So this has been a voyage of discovery for me. It's been inspiring and stimulating to research the Greek text of St John with the commentaries, something retirement gives me time to do (even if it also brings the despondent reminder of no longer possessing key books I'd have been glad to consult because they were left behind in Durham when downsizing my library).

We've been companions for half a century, the Fourth Gospel and I. I blogged about the St John Passion a few years ago and said something about the part it played, together with the music of J.S. Bach, in my coming to conscious faith. In that blog, I wrote about the last word from the cross in the gospel, "It is finished" and how significant that single Greek word tetelestai is for the author. The cry of accomplishment, triumph even, because Jesus has completed the work God gave him to do, strikes an entirely different tone from the last words in the other gospels. There, it's much more a case of abandonment and desolation ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" in Matthew and Mark), or resigned trustfulness ("Father, into your hands I commit my spirit" in Luke). In John, Jesus is not the tragic victim who is "done to" by others. He is the sovereign Lord who lays down his own life as an act of the will. It makes all the difference to the way we hear the story.

My challenge this Holy Week is to show how the "I am" sayings point towards the cross - and towards the resurrection as well, for in John, the cross-and-resurrection is a single hyphenated event as Jesus "goes to the Father" as John puts it. The ancient liturgies of Easter celebrated the cross and resurrection, not as two separate moments in Jesus' career, but as a unified redemptive event, the Pascha, the Lord's Passover. As it happens, at Chester they were keen that my addresses should remind congregants that Holy Week represents the last phase of our Lenten commitment to prepare for the celebration of Easter. That seemed to fit well into the way St John handles and interprets the "I am" sayings.

To do this properly, we need to look carefully at each saying's background in the Hebrew Bible. Take for example the saying "I am the bread of life" (John 6.51). This was the obvious text to assign to Maundy Thursday evening and the liturgy of the Last Supper. Here is John's key eucharistic text ("Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them"), this in a gospel that unlike the others does not record Jesus breaking the bread and sharing the cup in the upper room. That's already a substantial sermon in its own right. But I couldn't do it justice without noticing how Jesus' feeding of the crowd that introduces this saying is intended to remind them of how God fed their ancestors in the wilderness with manna from heaven. Much is made of this in the dialogue between Jesus and the crowd that forms the substance of this chapter. Once we grasp the significance of Jesus' saying "I am the bread of life" at Passover time (John 6.4) when that wilderness journey was remembered in a ceremony of the breaking of bread, we realise how profound the symbolism is.

In a way I find miraculous, this is how the text of the Fourth Gospel works from start to finish. It is the most densely textured of the four gospels, with layer upon layer of symbolism, key words and phrases (including the "I am" sayings), and references to the Hebrew Bible not only through direct quotation but by allusions that trigger associations in the mind of the reader. These are a bit like Wagnerian Leitmotiven - musical themes that associate to particular characters, objects, events or destinies. Their role is subliminally to enable listeners to navigate a long and complex story by reminding them of the past, foreshadowing the future or setting the appropriate mood. In St John, certain words function as archetypes that are present throughout the text: explicitly here, implicitly there, for example light, life, love, glory, work, end (as in purpose), ascent (being "lifted up"), way, king, water, bread, wine and so on.

And I am is one of those. As I shall try to explain during Holy Week (no easy task!), those words derive from the story of Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3.1-15). As he takes off his shoes (for this is holy ground) and gazes into the fire that burns without being consumed, he hears God addressing him. The voice discloses God's name: "I AM WHO I AM....Thus shall you say to the Israelite, I AM has sent me to you." This is the origin of the divine name in Hebrew, YHWH, or in its debased English form, Jehovah. What does it mean? That God can only be spoken about or described in terms of himself. For he is the essence of what it means to exist, to be alive. The theologian Paul Tillich spoke about "the ground of being". So when Jesus takes the emphatic Greek words ego eimi on his lips, "I am", John takes him to be identifying directly with the God worshipped by the Hebrews, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Jesus does this explicitly in a passage that records an argument with the community's leaders who accused him of blasphemy. He makes the extraordinary claim, "Before Abraham was, I am" (John 8.58). No wonder they tried to stone him there and then!

Enough for now. In this blog, I only really wanted to point to the infinite richness of this wonderful Fourth Gospel. I'm looking forward to being in Chester Cathedral for Holy Week and preaching through the "I am" sayings as a small act of gratitude for what has felt like a lifetime of friendship with St John. I'll publish the addresses as I give them (at http://northernambo.blogspot.com) and put the links on social media.

Lent - 40 Shades of Gratitude

If you follow The Archers you’ll know that Alan the Vicar has put forward a novel idea for the village’s Lenten observance. Let’s give up complaining, he’s proposed, and every time we offend, let’s put a fine in the sin-box and give the proceeds to charity.

I quite like that idea, though it needs a bit of calibration. Does “complaining” only cover what we do publicly, or what we are overheard doing? Does it only cover what we say or write, or should it include what we think as well? Does it only apply to named people or organisations (“The Vicar doesn’t visit enough”; “Bridge Farm yogurts have lost their taste”) or also to the ubiquitous “they” (as in “Why don’t they mend the potholes in our roads?” or “They don’t care that our trains never run on time”)? And when is a negative comment not necessarily a complaint (“Our bins haven’t been emptied this week: that’s going to cause problems, so we’d better phone the Council”)? And are Ambridge folk still allowed to talk about “bad weather” or a “poor wi-fi signal”?

Maybe the casuistry of complaining is too complex. And to rub your nose in negativity doesn’t exactly lift the spirits. That’s the trouble with Lent. It’s not that giving up things isn’t often very good for us - fasting and self-denial are important aspects of a healthy spiritual (and ordinary human) life. But so much depends on our attitude, our motive for undertaking whatever Lenten exercise or discipline we opt for. So I’m much more encouraged by a tweet from one of my favourite Twitter clergy, @sallyhitchener. “This year I'm taking up #GratitudeForLent - 40 days, 40 thank you notes to people to whom I'm grateful, for small or great things. Want to join me?”

I think Sally gets right to the heart of Lent. For a start, she accentuates the positive, always a good antidote to the negativity of complaining. But she isn’t calling for the kind of generalised goodwill clergy are so proficient at while never sacrificing their gift of vagueness. She sets a clear objective that is, as business-speak has it, SMART: Specific, Measurable (she’ll know if she’s achieved it or not), Assignable (clear about whose task this is, in this case hers), Realistic (it can actually be achieved) and Time-related (in this case, 40 days). The Muslim month of Ramadan is characterised by smart objectives for the fast which makes it all the easier to get a handle on (I don’t say easier to observe). I believe a Lenten observance that sets smart goals will be helpful in at least contemplating the journey that lies ahead.

But much more important is the content of Sally’s Lenten resolution. “Gratitude for Lent” - what could be more true to the spirit of Christianity than that? You could say that gratitude is where Christian discipleship begins, as we acknowledge with thankfulness the tender mercy of the God who has loved us in Jesus Christ and called us to be citizens of his kingdom. So to practise gratitude in Lent is to go back to the very foundations of faith. The clue is in the principle of eucharist. That word literally means “Thanksgiving”. So to live eucharistically doesn’t only mean participating in the service of worship at which we celebrate together the great acts of God. At a deeper level, it means cultivating thankfulness as a habit of the heart, training our deepest selves to respond to life in a spirit of gratitude and praise to God our Creator and Redeemer. In Lent, that gratitude is given a paschal shape as we prepare to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus, the redemptive event from which our very identity as Christians is derived.

I used the word “training” just now. Training is what the Greek word askesis means. An ascetic is someone who takes their training seriously, reckons that it’s something worth investing in. Yes, the three great disciplines Jesus speaks about in the Sermon on the Mount, prayer, fasting and giving alms, are basic to the classic Christian understanding of askesis. But motivating them all, I think, has to be a sense of thankfulness, the eucharistic acknowledgment that these disciplines are not ends in themselves, but are meant to deepen our engagement with God whose goodness has invited us into the adventure and challenge of discipleship. The ascetic journey is to travel more deeply into God’s heart of love. It both draws on our thankfulness and enhances it as we discover how infinitely indebted we are to the Love that moves the sun and the stars.

So Lent, this annual season of renewal, this springtime of the Christian year, invites us to find new ways of practising the habit of eucharistia. Where do we start? Sally gives us a practical suggestion. Her forty thank you notes will get us thinking about forty ways in which we need to be grateful - to other people, and through them, to God himself. And alongside these forty shades of gratitude, why not pray the General Thanksgiving each day? I don’t know a better way of seeing off our tendency to complaint and negativity. Indeed, I believe we shall discover that thankfulness is truly life-changing because it transfigures our perspective on life. The Thanksgiving Prayer says that we should be grateful above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ. Which is what we look forward to celebrating at Easter. Here's the General Thanksgiving in its original, magnificent form in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men. We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And, we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful; and that we show forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up our selves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.

The Silence That Sings

I am on a silent retreat this week. That is to say, I am conducting a retreat for a religious community. So the experience is not quite the same as when you opt to go on a retreat for your own spiritual refreshment and renewal, or just because you need some peaceful time away. When you are giving addresses each day, and seeing retreatants who have asked for a conversation or want to make their confession, you are not there for yourself but for others. There is work to be done. 

Nevertheless, this week is a gift. Even though it's less than a month since I got back from leading an ordination retreat, it's still a welcome and a precious time. At the heart of the religious life is daily prayer, the eucharist together with the four offices of morning, midday, evening and night prayer. This community's beautifully reordered church, its architecture and furnishings noble but restrained, speak of spiritual values we should emulate. In its clear light, you feel that this church is a place of truth where we come to transact the business of God and of ourselves as we are before before him. There's no hiding from God here. You feel that you are seen, and known. That can be uncomfortable, painful even. But you also sense that this place of truth is also a place of humane companionship where pilgrims share bread and walk together before God. And a place of love where you are held in the embrace of a community that lives out the love of God himself.

Worshipping here has a stabilising, calming effect. The ancient plainchant of the psalms and canticles have a spiritual clarity that matches the quality of light. Words are spoken very slowly, softly and deliberately so as to reverence the sacred truths we are taking upon our lips. The daily prayers give the day focus, shape, direction and structure. Life feels intentional: there is a quiet prayerful purposefulness in the way the community goes about its business. There is something graceful about this life lived together that imbues ordinary things with meaning. No one is in a hurry. Walking purposefully becomes a religious act in itself. You begin to understand how in the religious life, space and time, activity and stillness become suffused with the spirituality of the conventual church and all that happens there: eucharist, prayer, scripture, psalmody, silence. (Because of the importance of the psalms in the community's daily prayer, I am offering reflections on the psalms of the day and trying to show how the whole of human life is contained within these marvellous texts. I'm also suggesting how they can help us to pray more authentically.  You can read my addresses here. I am adding them each day as I give them.)

It's the silence of places like these that we secular Christians tend to seek when we go on retreat. For some people this is more difficult than for others. As an introvert, I'm fortunate not to find this a problem myself. I've always valued silence and solitude, perhaps to a fault - who can say? In any case, retirement is necessarily a lot more silent than life used to be when time overflowed with activities, meetings, conversations and all the business that goes into an ordinary working day. That has taken some getting used to, though it is most welcome (for now).

But silence of the kind I'm finding here is more than just the absence of noise or music or conversation or digital stimuli. It's a rule of life, a discipline that's chosen, whether permanently or simply for a while, to help us quieten our spirits, practise stillness, become more aware, learn how to listen, discern God's presence in our midst. It's this that religious communities strive so hard to maintain and protect. At first it can seem odd to live in this way, especially at meal times when common courtesy and our innate sociability suggest that conversing amicably is the natural accompaniment to eating and drinking. So it is, most of the time. But silence is far from living in some private world of your own. On the contrary, it gives you the chance to meet and get to know others in surprising ways even if you never exchange so much as a single word outside the liturgy. When you pray with people and sit at table with them day by day, strangers become friends. Don't ask me how it happens. I'm just saying that it does. 

This kind of silence, inhabited by a community of prayer, can feel highly charged. A retreat can be an intense experience, especially when it takes place at a time of personal change or transition. My retreat before being ordained priest was like that. It was an important place to explore my hopes and expectations of ordained life, offer my vocation and my gratitude for it, try to be realistic about the failures and the flaws in my life of which I was acutely conscious at that momentous threshold. I was all alone (always the introvert!) on that retreat in a Benedictine house where the silence, and the holy warmth of the community, and the beauty and generosity of its liturgy made me so welcome. For me, then, it was a vital place of truth. 1976 was a blazingly hot summer. Perhaps that has helped the memory to glow. I sat in the gardens on the parched grass and read Jean-Pierre de Caussade on The Sacament of the Present Moment, and George Herbert's A Priest to the Temple together with many of his poems. But it's the quality of the silence that I most remember. I realise forty years later how thirsty I was for it.  I've been on many retreats since. But that experience stands out as life-giving in a special way.

The Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins has a poem about silence that inspired the title of one of Thomas Merton's best known books. It begins:

Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

Silence can sing when we have ears (whorlèd or not) to hear. There is a music we become aware of when we elect for silence, attune the senses and start listening. You never know what kind of music it will be. But as the desert fathers used to say, you "go into your cell and your cell will teach you everything". It's a matter of being open to the Spirit of God, that's all. Like William Blake hearing angels singing in his garden, and seeing heaven in a grain of sand.

A Sermon in Stone: on being back in Coventry Cathedral

We spent last weekend in Coventry. I'd been invited to speak at the Cathedral on Sunday morning and at Warwick Parish Church in the evening. The Midlands are at their best in spring. The roads were lined with blackthorn. There was a profusion of magnolia in parks and gardens, and dandelions on every lawn.

April 1 was 30 years to the day since we moved to Coventry from Northumberland. I can be certain of that since the date we left Alnwick is recorded on a sampler we have on the kitchen wall. I remember thinking how lovely Shakespeare's county looked that spring. A few weeks later I was installed as a canon of the Cathedral. The abundant cherry blossom was breathtaking seen against the pink sandstones of the city and its churches in the clean washed light of spring. It was the weekend Coventry City won the Cup Final, so there was Sky Blue on every building too.

Last Sunday, then, I preached a sermon at the sung eucharist. The text was the raising of Lazarus in St John's Gospel (11.1-45). Looking back through my sermon archive, I was amazed to discover that I had never preached on this famous story - how could that be in 42 years of ordained ministry? So I welcomed the opportunity to put it right. (It's never too late to learn.)

I was struck by a coincidence of two texts. One was from the story itself: “This illness does not lead to death, rather it is for God’s glory.” The other was inscribed into the fabric of the Cathedral itself, in uneven letters just by the glass wall at the west end, “To the glory of God this Cathedral burnt". They were of course linked by the word glory which is what leapt out of the page as I imagined myself speaking from the Cathedral pulpit. But I was intrigued by an apparent connection of meaning in elliptical nature of both statements. How could you find  glory in either a mortal sickness, or in a mortally destructive act of violence?  

You can read the sermon to find out what sense I made of this intriguing alignment of texts. But I was also aware that it was Passion Sunday. So the placing of the story of Lazarus just before the events of Holy Week in St John is clearly reflected in the lectionary's placing of it on this Sunday of the year, a week before Palm Sunday. So this sermon would need to point forward to the events of Holy Week, the passion, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.



And of that, both Lazarus and the Cathedral itself are powerful images. Let me speak about the Cathedral. The obvious conception of it is as the new rising, phoenix-like, out of the old. Provost John Petty always said that to walk from the ruins into the new Cathedral is to make the journey from Good Friday into Easter. I don't dispute that. But I think a deeper reading invites us to see how old-and-new belong together inextricably. Physically, this is represented by the way the architect, Basil Spence, linked the new Cathedral to the ruins of the old by an immense porch whose canopy overtops and embraces the north wall of the shattered medieval church. It's a mighty statement of how death-and-resurrection are a single redemptive event as Christian theology understands it.

And when you look out from the west end of the new Cathedral, what you see is the place of ruination and destruction: the bombed out medieval St Michael's of which all that survives are the tower and the walls. You feel a palpable sense of what Wilfred Owen called the pity of war. For Spence, it symbolised the idea of sacrifice. But that isn't all. Above is the great sky, like a huge crack in the fabric running from end to end. When I used to preside at acts of worship out there, I felt I was standing in some kind of vast empty tomb. This was especially true when we would stand before the Charred Cross, a symbol of Golgotha if ever there was one, and pray the words inscribed on the wall behind it, Father, forgive. That ruined sanctuary spoke as much about resurrection as it did about the passion.

Which is why it isn't strictly correct to talk about the old Cathedral and the new. They are one Cathedral whose message is: reconciliation happens when we enter into the paschal movement of God's love which Holy Week proclaims to us. The ruins are still a unified sacred space. Perhaps there's an analogy with the eucharist. In bread and wine, we rehearse and celebrate the whole work of God in Jesus, especially his death and resurrection. It's a feast of the cross but also of the resurrection, the memory of the Last Supper on the night before Jesus died, but also of the Supper at Emmaus on the evening of Easter Day, and of the breakfast by the lakeside a few days later.

In the same way, Coventry Cathedral is a truly paschal cathedral. The whole of it proclaims the three tenses of Christian faith. Love's work has been accomplished in Jesus' death-and-resurrection. It continues to be accomplished in the present as the risen Christ is among us to transform our ordinary days. It will be finally accomplished when "all things are put in subjection under his feet" and his kingdom is finally realised. Every eucharist at the high altar, beneath Graham Sutherland's tapestry of Christ in Glory looks forward to that consummation.

I love Coventry Cathedral for many reasons. But best of all is its capacity to be a sermon in stone about death-and-resurrection, a sermon for these solemn "days of awe" we are about to enter. It's a place where you glimpse the glory of suffering that is healed and transfigured. I think Lazarus would feel at home here.