“Grateful Coolness from the Heat”: a rich Pentecost hymn

We all have our favourite hymns, those we can bear to sing more than a few times and imagine that in heaven we might go on singing for ever.  My desert island list is short: How shall I sing that Majesty, Of the Father's heart begotten, Praise to the Holiest in the height, Soul of my Saviour, O worship the King, King of glory King of peace and Come O thou Traveller unknown. And the eighth? It’s a hymn of Pentecost. Come, thou Holy Spirit, come, one of the greatest ever written.*  

Its author was the 13th century Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton, one of the most distinguished thinkers England produced in the high middle ages. He lived from around 1150 to 1228. They were troubled times in both church and state. Out of that turbulent era came the document dear to all the English, Magna Carta of 1215, the Great Charter of Freedoms. As Archbishop, Langton was present at its signing by the truculent King John. He may well have influenced its content. He was tireless in reforming the church and raising standards of clergy education and conduct. He was a passionate advocate of the new learning represented by the liberal arts including, of course, theology, at that time burgeoning in the recently-founded universities of Paris and Bologna and soon to flourish in England at Oxford and Cambridge.  One lasting legacy of his biblical scholarship is his division of the Bible into chapters, for he was the first to divide up the text in this way. 

So much for the author. What of his hymn? It’s known as the Golden Sequence.  Sequence refers to the position hymns such as this had in the liturgy of the mass. No-one is sure why this sequence is Golden, unless it is a comment on the beauty of its poetry and the profound spiritual insights of its prayer, for here, poetry and prayer are wonderfully married to each other.  It is an invocation of the Holy Spirit to be sung at mass on this feast of Pentecost and in the week following.  Some of the poetry is lost in translation, so listen to the Latin of the first verse: 

Veni, sancte Spiritus, / Et emitte caelitus  / Lucis tuae radium                                        Veni, pater pauperum / Veni, dator munerum / Veni, lumen cordium.  

That fourfold repetition Veni, veni, veni, veni - ‘come' is matched by a fourfold repetition of another plea in the last verse Da - ‘give'.  So the repeated cries of come and give frame the hymn and give it its intense poignancy.  And this coming and this giving respond to our deepest needs, for the hymn knows the complexity of the human soul and names it: poverty, sadness, emptiness, woundedness, weariness, barrenness and guilt.

Langton's skill is to pile up a rich array of images of the Holy Spirit that answer these needs.  They are all drawn from the scriptures, for Langton was a devout biblical scholar.  It's an extended commentary on the vision of one of the Hebrew prophets: ‘a new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.  I will put my spirit within you....'  For how life is changed when the Spirit comes! Faith is restored, hope reawakened, love renewed; all beautifully told because authentically lived in the human heart, reverencing the deep mystery of the human person and the mystery of God the Holy Spirit that is deeper still. 

In the first stanza the Spirit is the source of light and radiance, the Creator-Spirit whose energy gives birth to all life.  But he is also ‘Father of the poor', the generous giver of all that is good.  This softens the hardness of the image of brilliant yet impersonal light into a kind, personal deity who is gentle with mortals in their need.  His string of beautiful epithets has the effect of making the Spirit irresistible as the object of our hunger and desire: welcome guest, rest in labour, coolness in heat, solace in pain. It's striking that Langton turns away from the dramatic, perhaps ‘obvious', depictions of wind and fire for more tender images: the cool breezes that refresh in the heat, the welcoming hearth suggested by ‘melt the frozen, warm the chill'. It’s a very equable, well-tempered spirituality with none of the overheated rhetoric of the ‘fire of love' that is in danger of losing its currency through endless repetition. It’s what it means to call the Spirit Consolator: ‘Come, of comforters the best', the word used in the upper room when Jesus speaks about going away and sending the Holy Spirit. The poet recognises that the Greek word Paraclete can mean so many different things: comforter, consoler, encourager, strengthener, helper, counsellor, advocate.  It is one of the richest words in the gospels. 

The third stanza returns to the theme of light: O lux beatissima, ‘O most blessed light'.  The thought picks up the movement of the first verse from the light of God's being to lumen cordium, the inward illumination of God's faithful people through the Spirit.  For human beings owe everything to this light within, as the Latin makes clear.  Without it, without this heavenly light to redeem us and make us new, we are nothing.  So the next stanza becomes a prayer that the Spirit may do a divine work in us: healing and forgiving, imparting life and goodness, ruling and guiding us wayward souls in the path of holiness, melting and warming our cold hearts into loving God.  And in the final verse we reach that fourfold prayer that beseeches the Spirit to give what we who confess Jesus Christ need: the reward of virtue, a happy death, and salvation at our journey's end.  

The last word of the hymn is the clue to all of it, for it's to that word that the whole poem has been leading.  Gaudium, ‘joy', ‘happiness', ‘contentment'.  Each word at the end of every third line ends with ium.  You sense that gaudium was where Langton began, and that he needed nine other words to rhyme with it: solacium, fidelium, and in the last verse the wonderful seven-fold word septenarium.  The prophet Isaiah enumerates them in his vision of the coming Messiah who will embody them: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, the fear of the Lord.  

But gaudium embraces them all, for these joyful virtues make us happy in the profoundest sense of that word: if we want lasting joy, then only the Holy Spirit can bestow it.  Only the Paraclete can answer our longing for fulfilment, our hunger to be happy.  We may look for it elsewhere, and do.  But it’s a false trail that turns us back into ourselves.  Only in God's Spirit, Lord and Giver of Life, will we find lasting satisfaction and contentment.  Only in the very heart of God will we find this healer of wounds, this light divine, this shelter from storm and heat, this fount of goodness, this kindest and best of comforters.

When we pray “thy kingdom come!” as we have done in these days between Ascension and Pentecost, all this is what we have been praying for, life as it is transformed by the gift of the Paraclete - in our world, our society, our churches and ourselves. On the Monday after Whitsunday, ordinary time begins. What are days for? To feel after God and find him, then to live in the light of that renewed vision of human life as we glimpse when we are touched by the Spirit of God. What better words to inspire such a vision than this ancient and beautiful hymn we call the Golden Sequence?

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*Here is the text of the hymn.

Come, thou Holy Spirit, come,
and from thy celestial home
shed a ray of light divine!
Come, thou Father of the poor!
Come, thou Source of all our store!
Come, within our bosoms shine!

Thou, of comforters the best;
thou, the soul's most welcome guest;
sweet refreshment here below;
in our labor, rest most sweet;
grateful coolness in the heat;
solace in the midst of woe.

O most blessèd Light divine,
shine within these hearts of thine,
and our inmost being fill!
Where thou art not, man hath naught,
nothing good in deed or thought,
nothing free from taint of ill.

Heal our wounds, our strength renew;
on our dryness pour thy dew;
wash the stains of guilt away;
bend the stubborn heart and will;
melt the frozen, warm the chill;
guide the steps that go astray.

On the faithful, who adore
and confess thee, evermore
in thy sevenfold gift descend;
give them virtue's sure reward
give them thy salvation, Lord;
give them joys that never end.


Based on a sermon given in Durham Cathedral.

The NHS: in gratitude on its 70th birthday

Today is the 70th birthday of the National Health Service. Services and celebrations are happening across the nation. We are right to honour this great institution and be profoundly thankful for it.

I'm not one of those with a dramatic life-and-death story to tell about the NHS. I've not troubled my GPs overmuch in my lifetime. Most of my ailments have been small beer compared to what many others have had to face: childhood infections and abrasions, adolescent allergies, the odd broken limb, hypertension, mild atrial fibrillation, psoriasis. I've undergone a vasectomy, a prostate op and keyhole surgery for hernias. I have NHS hearing aids. Too much information? I suspect that for a man coming to the end of his seventh decade, it's pretty standard fare.

The Archers, the NHS and I are almost exact contemporaries. After the war, my mother became a nurse at the old Charing Cross Hospital in central London where I was born. Neither she nor my father were people of faith, but they did instil in me from a very early age a kind of hushed reverence for the NHS. (The Archers had to wait a few more years.) Our GP in north London was an elderly German-Jewish exile called Dr Landstein. I recall him quite clearly from the mid-1950s: kindly, compassionate, wise. Nothing was too much trouble for him. He enjoyed home visits and chats with my mother who like him had also survived the Holocaust. It felt like a family bereavement when he retired. I remember his successor too, Dr Giwelb. He was younger, less priestlike, more professionalised, more "modern", but he too was among the gods of my childhood pantheon (where they were flanked by Miss Bull, my primary school headmistress, and Owen Brannigan who lived three doors away on our street). Between them, they shaped my expectations of healthcare for a lifetime. And they have been abundantly fulfilled in adulthood. I'm thinking especially of two marvellous GPs had in Sheffield and Durham. Perhaps they know who they are.

When I was a parish priest, I was also the official chaplain to the town's infirmary, paid by the NHS. I learned a lot about healthcare in those years, not least when I was involved in the in-service training of doctors, nurses, administrators and support staff. I was proud to be a tiny part of that exemplary hospital, proud to have a role in an institution that was so valued in the community. If I ever entertained doubts about the virtue of universal healthcare (I'm not sure that I did), my experience in that place of truth and love quickly dispelled them.

So I understand why Polly Toynbee writes as she does about the NHS as a kind of surrogate religion. It's simply there, like the good old C of E, a benign institution that we're glad exists to bless our nation and provide for it at times of need, even if we rarely have to trouble it ourselves. For my generation and for everyone younger, it has hatched us, patched us up and dispatched us. We've felt safe and cared for. We've never known anything else. We can't quite understand why the whole world doesn't emulate the NHS, why the United States, for instance, has struggled so hard to provide even the rudimentary ObamaCare for the most needy that is now being unravelled by Donald Trump.

But we know for ourselves how politicised health care has become. No government has dared to tamper with the idea of universal healthcare free at the point of use. It would be a certain vote-loser. And yet the sustainability of the NHS is under threat in a way that would have been inconceivable even a quarter of a century ago. Conservative administrations have been reluctant for decades to say openly that excellence in healthcare requires that we all put our hands in our pockets to pay for it through our taxes. Only now is there a belated acknowledgment of this in the Prime Minister's £20 billion funding commitment. It's a welcome start. But it's nowhere near enough if the NHS is to be stabilised. It's now an urgent case of playing catch-up. Years of chronic underfunding must be put right if the founding vision of the NHS is to be honoured in our day. To achieve this, our leaders have to believe in it. Back to the NHS as a quasi-religion that needs vision and faith if it's to serve us well and flourish.

I recently read Adam Kay's book This is Going to Hurt. He was a junior hospital doctor specialising in obstetrics. He loved his work and showed every sign of going on to a promising career as a consultant. But the pressures on him as a healthcare professional became intense - not because of any failure of his, but because of "the system": impossible working hours, lack of resources, an absence of proper rigorous supervision, the ever-increasing likelihood of making a life-threatening mistake. So he resigned his position and is now a writer. His book is candid about his experience. It is by turns very funny and extremely alarming. We've known for years what GPs and junior hospital doctors have to contend with. But when you read something as personal and vivid as this, you begin to worry. You wonder how on earth the NHS can carry on as a viable institution, let alone have a future.

Like so many other things - the environment, arms sales, ethical trade, reform of our financial structures, the benefits system, Brexit, it comes down to the political will. Do we really want a future in which the founding vision of the NHS continues to play a central part in the welfare of our people? If so, are we willing to pay for it? Our politicians must come clean. And while we're on the subject, that applies to social care for the elderly too. We baby-boomers are getting old. Demographic projections show how our demands on the NHS will put it under ever-increasing strain until our generation has died out. Before that, we are going to need social care that is beyond the means of many people to afford. For those who are "just about managing" or not managing at all, the prospect of ageing is bleak and even terrifying. After a lifetime of looking after others, who will look after them?

Today we celebrate the vision and courage of those pioneers of 70 years ago who believed that the nation should look after its people from cradle to grave. That's not about setting up unhealthy dependencies so much as creating structures of mutual giving and receiving so that those who need care have access to it and need not fear that it will be denied them. It's old-fashioned to speak of "the idea of a Christian society". Yet I profoundly believe in this ideal of a public caring institution which is for all people, and from which no-one is excluded. It's a practical expression of the great commandment to love our neighbour as ourselves. On this NHS birthday, and out of gratitude for all that it represents, I believe we must renew our heartfelt political commitment to it so that our children and grandchildren may benefit as we have done.

But a birthday is for celebrating and being thankful. The NHS is not a perfect institution but I want to say, unhesitatingly, that it is a great one So this is a day to be glad and set our hopes high. As the Archbishop of Canterbury tweeted today, "The NHS is an expression of our deepest shared values. Whatever its challenges, it’s about us living out our concern for solidarity and the common good. It reflects God’s concern for every person without exception. Today let's pray, give thanks and recommit our support. The NHS can be proud of its first seven decades." Indeed.  Floreat!

Child Sexual Abuse - what does the church do about shame?

It's been very painful to follow the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) hearings which have scrutinised the Church of England, and in particular the Diocese of Chichester. The Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday: "I have learnt to be ashamed again of the Church. You can't read the transcripts, you can't read the evidence statements without being moved, at least, you shouldn't be able to...You can apologise and apologise to survivors, and I would want to put on record again - I don't know how to express it adequately - how appalled I am and ashamed I am of the church for what it did."

He speaks for all of us who care about people, especially children, the young and all those who are vulnerable to the abuse of power by people who hold positions of leadership and responsibility. We have failed those who trusted us. We need to take on ourselves the shame of our institution, feel it as ours, carry it as our own burden. Justin Welby is right that our church must not only learn from the past but institutionally repent, change its mind, rigorously examine our practices, abandon the collusive, deferential patterns of behaviour that our church has perfected so well and that both disguise and perpetuate abuse.

Many who know far more than I do about sexual abuse in the church have provided first-rate commentary on the IICSA hearings. I've valued the contributions of Linda Woodhead (via her Facebook page) and Stephen Parsons (Surviving Church) in particular. They empathise with the survivors whose voices we have heard, and whose entire lives have been terribly damaged by their abusers. But they are also shrewd observers of the church as an institution and grasp the systemic brokenness that has vitiated, sometimes fatally, so much of its ministry. I can't add to what they are saying about the hearings and their likely consequences. But I can speak about my personal experience of handling abuse in the church as a leader.

I have had four experiences of being shamed in the way the Archbishop describes. Three were to do with actual incidents of abuse with which I had to deal at the time; the fourth concerned historical abuse that had taken place several decades before my time but which came to light during my incumbency. Although two of the four quickly got into the public domain, and in all four cases the statutory agencies and safeguarding teams were fully involved, I don't think it's appropriate to write about them here, even if I were to anonymise the places and people concerned. It's their legacy that concerns me as I look back on them: their effect on the cathedrals I served at the time, their effect on me personally as a Christian leader.

What I learned is what the Archbishop was describing at the hearing. It's that shame has both a collective and a personal aspect. When the church as an institution has to say sorry for awful wrongs committed by those who were its trusted officers, there's an unsaid implication that we are both sorry and ashamed. You can't admit to grave offence unless you're prepared to go on and say: we did this, or, we allowed it to happen or, it happened on our watch, and in each case, it is to our shame. We now hear the word sorry said by institutions in a way we didn't always in the past. We hear about guilt and wrongdoing. But I'm not sure we have heard enough of shame.

It took me by surprise to feel ashamed during these incidents. But it was particularly strong when my colleagues and I were dealing with historic abuse. I felt something like this. This cathedral is such a good, wholesome place where I see people caring for one another and flourishing in their own human lives and Christian discipleship. How could something so terrible, so damaging happen among us? How could our innocent, vulnerable children become victims to a perpetrator of abuse who was not only trusted but admired in his day? How could this happen and we did not know about it? How could we not have noticed that something was amiss? Those were the questions I kept asking myself in the night watches. It wasn't about them, those who were the cathedral's leaders four or five decades ago. It was about us now, today. The first-person pronouns testified to the power memory has to bind us into a community that transcends time. It was impossible to separate myself from the past, to distinguish then from now. We were all implicated. The tenses of historical shame were not past but present.

Theological and psychoanalytic studies make a clear distinction between guilt and shame. Guilt is a forensic reality with an objective character, even if it has to do with thoughts I've entertained as well as words I've uttered and deeds I've committed. Saying sorry for something I'm guilty about, what we call repentance, can often deal with the objective nature of guilt: it can be remitted, put away by appropriate words and acts. But shame is different. It has more to do with what I am or have become, and the effect this has on my sense of self. Because so much of shame is experienced subjectively, it is much harder to address than guilt (and that's hard enough by itself!). By saying sorry, I may be able to lighten the burden of my guilt. But it may not touch my shame. Looking back over my lifetime, I can vividly bring to mind things which I am no less ashamed of today than I was fifty or sixty years ago. I said sorry for them, and believed I was forgiven and reconciled at the time. Guilt doesn't come into it any more, except when I have a hunch that someone I once wronged may still be hurting. But shame has taken root in my psyche. That's its power. I may not be haunted by it to the extent I once was. But it never fully goes away.

I've spoken about corporate shame in relation to sexual abuse. Where is that shame actually felt? I've come to the view that it is the duty of leadership to bear shame, its vocation if you like. When you lead an institution, you are its visible representative, the walking embodiment of its goals and values. When your institution fails, whether spectacularly in some public arena or in more hidden ways, you feel it deeply yourself. That's nothing to do with being personally responsible for what has gone wrong (if it's your fault, it's easy - you know what you have to do about it). I'm talking about when the institution fails around you, either because of the sins others have committed, or because secrets were kept and the truth was not told, or because vital knowledge wasn't acted upon by being disclosed and named, or because of the collusions and cover-ups that happen when an institution tries (as it always does) to protect itself. In all these ways, it is the human beings who were not only the victims of the original abuse but have now become the victims of the institution too. That also is a form of abuse and an occasion for corporate shame.

I think this is what we were seeing Justin Welby express at the IICSA hearing when, it was reported, he seemed "close to tears". He was, to quote the suffering servant song in Isaiah 53, "bearing the sins of many". And as I said earlier, this does seem to belong to the vocation of leadership. To me, the Archbishop's demeanour felt real in a way some others' had not. This is where the seeds of metanoia lie, that "change of mind" that is the seed of true penitence and healing. Perhaps this was a moment of real hope, amid the grimness of what we had heard. If the church could cultivate the gift of tears, not for the sake of public perception but because we feel for survivors, because we are ashamed of our past wrongs, because we want things to be different in the future, that can only be good. The desert fathers spoke of tears as a kind of baptism. That's what we need right now.

If we've learned anything in the past three weeks, it's that the Church of England must change. This belongs to its metanoia. It will be evidence that our tears are serious and life-changing. We must acknowledge that by not addressing abuse properly, we not only fail our victims, but we fail also to be accountable for living according to truth rather than falsehood. Our shame as an institution, and the way it is felt by our leaders, can drive us to recognise that we need to do things differently from now on, perhaps radically so.

One obvious way to demonstrate metanoia would be voluntarily to submit to independent, external oversight of the church's safeguarding procedures. I am surprised that the Archbishop didn't offer it at the hearing, because it's highly likely to be one of the Commission's clear recommendations. It would be so much better to volunteer it now than for it to be required later on. I don't say that it would deal with our institutional shame, so keenly felt by Justin Welby. Shame casts a very long shadow, and perhaps that's no bad thing. But I think it would help restore the church's credibility at a time when levels of trust have sunk so low. Can the General Synod not press for that to happen as soon as possible?

Here is a sonnet by Malcolm Guite that I shall be quoting in my Holy Week addresses next week. It speaks with uncanny insight into the predicament I've been reflecting on in this blog. I am making it my prayer for the church this week.

When so much shepherding has gone so wrong,
So many pastors hopelessly astray,
The weak so often preyed on by the strong,
So many bruised and broken on the way,
The very name of shepherd seems besmeared,
The fold and flock themselves are torn in half,
The lambs we left to face all we have feared
Are caught between the wasters and the wolf.

Good Shepherd now your flock has need of you,
One finds the fold and ninety-nine are lost
Out in the darkness and the icy dew,
And no one knows how long this night will last.
Restore us; call us back to you by name,
And by your life laid down, redeem our shame.

**Update: This Guardian leading article on the IICSA hearings was published on Friday 23 March 2018.