Quarantine: a meditation on the first Sunday of Lent.

I experienced the desert, once, for about an hour.  It was at Masada, that huge rock that rises 800 feet sheer above the western shore of the Dead Sea.  In AD 66 it was held by Jewish insurgents for more than four years in a last defiant stand against the Roman Empire.  After a long siege the Romans breached it, and nearly a thousand Jews killed themselves in a suicide pact leaving behind just a handful of women and children.  They destroyed everything except their stockpiles of food, to let the Romans know that the siege had not starved them into submission.  

I was one of the leaders of a diocesan pilgrimage.  We had travelled down from Jerusalem to Jericho, past Qumran of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the oasis of En Gedi.  At Masada there are cable cars to whisk pilgrims to the top.  But my mind was full our experience the day before when we had been to the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem.  It had moved me deeply, for members of my mother’s family had died at Auschwitz.  So here at Masada, this site of an earlier holocaust, I wanted to do more than just enjoy the view.  I wanted to make some small gesture at this extraordinary place.  

Two of us set out to walk to the top.  Our Israeli guide looked at us as though we were deranged.  In temperatures of more than 40 degrees, he declared that he took no responsibility for our safety.  Even Josephus, writing about the siege in his Jewish War, saysyou take your life in your hands on this rock.  We could see the steep path called the snake winding upwards.  We thought: a few hundred feet, half the height of the Simonside Hills where Northumberland people hop up after Sunday lunch; there are benches on the way up; we have water, sun hats, creams.  Five minutes in, we knew what we had taken on.  The sky was like brass, the air motionless.  The heat pressed down on us as if to pin us to the baked skeleton of the planet.  Nothing lived here.  Our colleagues waved cheerfully from their cable car.  We walked at a distance from each other: this was not a place to talk. I could think of only water, shelter and rest.  We stopped often.  

So this was the desert: terrible in its beauty, godforsaken, capable of driving you mad, not a little fearful.  We staggered to the top, and suddenly there was concrete to walk on, ice-creams and souvenirs on sale, and a man collecting tickets: a moment of true bathos.  Soon it was back to our buses, a salty photo-call in the Dead Sea, and drinks and salads to die for in an air-conditioned spa.  For an hour, we had ceased to be tourists and participated in the desert, experienced its grasp, its fierce demand.  We had taken a tentative step into a place of truth – an hour’s isolation from the reassuring skein of civilisation.  An hour does not give God much time.  Yet I did glimpse unforgettably, I think, how the very godforsakenness of the desert is its gift, how it strips the spirit bare of pretence and illusion, creates room for the shriving and purgation of the human heart the Bible calls ‘truth in the inward parts’.  

Jim Crace, in his strange, compelling novel Quarantine, imagines some first century travellers going into the Judean wilderness to pray and fast for forty days in order to save their souls.  Among the hot stones and scrub they encounter a mad sadistic merchant, a satan whose evil grip over their lives is complete.  But there is another character in the story, a distant figure living alone in a cave.   He comes from the fertile lands of Galilee so they call him Gally.  His real name is Jesus, and it is said that he can work miracles, heal people.  He has his own quarantine to keep in this wilderness, for he has work to do, heart-work.  ‘He’d put his trust in god, as young men do. He would encounter god or die, that was the nose and tail of it.  That’s why he’d come.  To talk directly to his god.  To let his god provide the water and the food.  Or let the devil do its work.’  The novel has Jesus as a minor character, an effect that is startling.  But in fact all the characters in the book are minor compared to the one you remember when you have forgotten the rest.  I mean of course the desert itself.  

So it is in the Bible.  Here the desert is friend, there it is adversary, but always a major presence in the story.  Always there is the memory of how Israel was born in the desert, how they entered into marriage there with Yahweh; how they were tested, faltered and fell.  But Yahweh will rerun this desert history, says the Old Testament.  There will be a new exodus journey, a new deliverance. Here, in the wilderness, the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and a redeemed community brought to birth.  All this is recalled and relived, in St Luke’s temptation story.  Jesus goes out into the wilderness to face the same ordeals that defeated the Hebrews, the same fundamental questions of Israel’s life: who and where is God, what is the bread he must live by, where does his loyalty belong, what is his vocation and destiny?  

This is heart-work.  It needs quarantine from the carpenter’s shop, even from the bodies and minds that cry for healing, the teaching of truth, and Sabbath rest by Galilee.   We sing ‘Forty days and forty nights’, surely one of the most successful marriages of dreary words and dreary music in the hymn book; and hardly grasp what even an hour in this terrible quarantine is like.  In the gospels, it foreshadows the cross, a first passion and death that is the consequence of the baptism Jesus has just undergone.  But like the cross, it is presented not as defeat but victory.  Here is the true Israelite, not like the Hebrews, who triumphs in the wilderness and emerges ‘filled with the power of the Spirit’ to proclaim the word and works of God.  The desert sets the stage for the reign of justice, truth and peace.  It prepares the way of the Lord. 

The desert fathers, those extraordinary men who turned their back on the world in order to offer their lives to God, understood that the desert offers the best education on earth for holiness.  A younger brother recently arrived in the desert went to see an elder and asked him for teaching. The old man sent him away and said: ‘Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything’.  The desert will be your teacher, and it’s all you need - that’s what he meant.  Go and face it: the hunger, the thirst, the silence, the loneliness, the desolation, the mountain madness and whatever cravings the wilderness throws at you.  Face the demons that come up from the depths of your soul, however frightening they are.  You will learn.  You will grow.  You will find the kingdom forming within you.  You will seek.  You will find.  You will see God.  

Quarantine is for our protection.  It guards our health by focusing on the issues of disease, contagion and wellness.  The forty days of Lent are a spiritual quarantine, an opportunity to attend to our spiritual wellbeing, allow the diseases of the human spirit to work their way safely out of our system.  The desert as an image of quarantine recalls us to the foundations of Christian living: dying to ourselves, turning away from sin to follow Christ, the cost of discipleship. It nurtures in us a hunger to be more serious.  

But the desert is also a place of promise and grace.  It holds the seeds of renewal and joy.  Here arid lives are watered and our desire for God is reawakened. St Augustine said that it was through longing that our hearts are made deep. Here’s to a Lent when we find ourselves longing to live in a more profound way, filled with a new desire for God. 

The Buried Life: an Ash Wednesday meditation

In our garden, once, stood a weeping-willow. (I'm sorry I don't have an image of it.) In spring and summer, it was the most beautiful of trees, its long, delicate fronds sweeping down to the grass in a graceful canopy. Our children used to wave its branches at the Palm Sunday procession.  Each morning we would waken to bird-song from its crown. One day, however, the neighbours asked for more light (a very theological kind of request). So our tree was cut right back to the trunk. It stood there gaunt and skeletal against the sky, a parody of its former self. The birds found somewhere else to sing. Our garden fell silent.

But, my neighbours keep on assuring me, the tree had its own hidden life. In a month or so, when it is spring, they said, we shall see it. The secret sap, rising now in full flow, would bear its fruit, they said. The birds would yet again sing on its topmost branches. Like Thomas Hardy at Christmas, I spent the early part of that year “hoping it might be so”. And they were right. By midsummer, the tree had miraculously grown back, if not quite to what it had been before, then at least greened over once more. Back came the birds. And the arguments over our neighbours’ right to light began all over again.

The secret life is what the Ash Wednesday gospel** is about.  It is not trumpets and the acclaim of others that herald our almsgiving, our prayer, our fasting, says Jesus: if those rewards go on mattering to you any more (and how hard it is to outgrow them!), then they are yours for the asking.  No: only one thing matters, what God sees in secret: those inward stirrings of our heart towards God, the sap rising deep within our souls. When we feel that impulse within, we know that nothing matters but that we were made for God, restless till we find our rest in him. We know our truth for which we would live and die. We know we are alive.

It's amazing to me how uncurious people can be about their inner lives, how uncurious I can be.  “People travel to wonder at the mountains, the sea, the stars, and pass by themselves without wonderment” said Augustine.  I sense that it is when I am least attentive to my own inwardness that I become less than I should be, less than human.  Perhaps it is at precisely those times that poison seeps into the organism, mingling with the sap, diluting its healing, life-giving qualities, stunting my growth.  I am thinking of how, insidiously, even over a short lifetime, habits, addic­tions, destructive attitudes infiltrate and take root, become part of us, and everything feeds them, good as well as evil, beauty, music, books, even friendship, even religion itself.  We can become obsessed with the things Jesus warns us about: what he calls our rewards. We need never know what is happening to us until it is too late. That is the really frightening thing.

Lent is, therefore, an annual gift to those who take the secret life seriously - which means all of us, for what is religion if it is not attending to our own inwardness?  Lent is a time for reckoning with our own discontent - that blissful unease of spirit that throws us into God because there is nowhere else for us to go.  It is a time to encounter God in a new way, hear him stand at the door and knock, face up to what is demanded of us if we would attain to the dignity of being human beings. 

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife, 
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life,
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course.

Matthew Arnold is right. We need to check our course constantly, I understand that. But Lent offers me the chance of an annual review of our life’s journey, and how true our bearings are to that original course God set us on in baptism. To fast from distraction, from all the voices that compete for our attention, to become, as Buddhists say, “single pointed”, intentional about why we human beings are here on this good earth is deeply important from time to time. It’s what Jesus means by having “purity of heart”.

It’s a simple enough ceremony, to receive the ashes on our foreheads as a sign of turning back to God in memory of our baptism and in anticipation of Easter. But how profoundly this movement from dust to fire sums up the meaning of our mortal existence in the light of the paschal mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection!

Maybe this Lent could be a time when I say yes to God with a new awareness of divine love stirring within. This would be to allow the sap to rise and our buried life’s flow to begin again and reach the surface. It would be to find that we are doing Love’s work in the world. For at its heart, Lent is always a work of love.

**Matthew 6.1-18

Retrospect of an Unimportant Life?

The title isn’t mine. It was Bishop Herbert Hensley Henson who, nearing the end of his life in the 1940s wrote a long three volume autobiography Retrospect of an Unimportant Life. (I added the question mark myself.) He was a predecessor of mine in the Deanery at Durham, being Dean throughout the Great War. He was already getting a name for himself as a doughty controversialist, a reputation he cultivated as Bishop of Hereford and then Bishop of Durham. He preached, wrote, argued and hectored on the issues of the day – prohibition, trades union, divorce law, liturgical revision, disestablishment and National Socialism (to his great credit he was one of the few bishops to see through its blandishments to the awfulness the Third Reich would inevitably become).

His was an eventful life lived out as a dean and bishop on a very public stage. So why did he give his autobiography this curious self-deprecating title? It sounds typically English, an understated - perhaps ironic - way of drawing attention to a career that captured the headlines and made him a household name even if he was not always fondly loved. After all, if you write three bulky volumes about yourself, you’ve got to think that the subject matter warrants it. But it’s not impossible that HHH, as he was known, was being sincere. He always acknowledged his modest working class background, said many times that he was not obviously born to be a prince of the church like his fellow bishops. Perhaps as he neared his end he began to see his career in a larger perspective where every life, however distinguished, is as little or nothing in the grand scheme of things. “What is man that thou art mindful of him?”

I would often think of HHH when I used to sit in his, and then my, study in that great medieval Deanery attached to Durham Cathedral. It’s hard not to be overawed by your predecessors especially when not one but two portraits of him hang in that amazing room. In such a place you can easily imagine you are someone, “think of yourself more highly than you ought to think” as St Paul says. These days a dean doesn’t have the leisure to offer as much to the public life of church and society as a century ago for all that I’m sure it remains a key part of the vocation in that office to do so. Decanal life is much (pre-)occupied by the immediate and never-ending concerns of a hungry cathedral, a diocese and a county, especially the first. In that sense, a dean has a less visible role outside Barchester than used to be the case. You could say that in his or her public profile, a dean lives a distinctly unimportant life.

But here’s the rub. Maybe HHH cottoned on to the fact that what made him interesting was not his dazzling public career but what went into making him a man. To me as his successor and, I admit it, a critical fan, what fascinated me was his ordinariness, his unimportance if you like. I wish he had allowed more of this to come to the surface in his Retrospect. You feel there is so much he doesn't tell you, imagines that what you really want to know about is the public persona, the performance on the national stage, the often dramatized account of this controversy or that, sometimes told, it has to be said, with a less than pleasing whiff of self-congratulation. Unimportant? Not really, not as he tells the story.

I’ve now reached the life-stage HHH had got to when he started writing his mammoth account in 1942. I’m not as old as he was (yet), but I am now superannuated after forty years of ordained ministry. Retirement is inevitably a time to draw threads together, “gather the fragments so that nothing is lost”. You find yourself looking back on your life and glimpsing connections that you hadn’t quite seen before. The nineteenth century philosopher and theologian Kierkegaard famously said that “life has to be lived forwards but understood backwards”, a saying much quoted by Jung in his account of psychoanalysis. It’s not quite what Anselm meant when he talked about “faith seeking understanding”, yet as Augustine had found when he wrote his Confessions centuries before, knowing yourself and how you have come to be what you are is an essential aspect of “understanding”.

What I’ve been feeling for during these past months was put sharply in focus for me at church this morning. Another retired priest who like me has recently moved into the village asked me over coffee whether I’d ever written about my spiritual development. He knew something about my personal story and thought it was interesting. (Who wouldn’t be flattered? – for there’s nothing in the world that’s as fascinating as we are to ourselves!) I replied that while there’s plenty of autobiographical allusion in my writing and preaching (for ultimately, all we have to speak about is what we know and have learned and experienced), I have never tried to give it any conscious shape or structure. Indeed, I can’t begin to guess what that would look like, though others may be able to offer clues.  

I’m one of those people who best discovers what I think or believe as I speak or write it. I can have quite vague notions about something until I start writing it down or arguing it out, and then there comes, sometimes quite suddenly, that point of recognition, that eureka moment. That’s it! That’s what I believe! That's how the world is! That's how God may be! That’s perhaps who I am! Which is why I enjoy social media and blogging because like a journal, they hold up a mirror to the self that can be, often is, hidden from sight until the words disclose it.

So I am going to try an experiment and blog my own Retrospect. Not at Hensonian length, and not as a book like his with its somewhat artfully imposed narrative shape. I shall simply blog a few hundred words at a time on some of the key personal and spiritual themes that are significant to me and see what happens. I’m not going to say it’s either important or unimportant, though the story is certainly important to me. However ordinary we are, our lives are unique, unrehearsed dramas in which we get only one chance at being players. As for everyone else, it may be precisely what we have in common as human beings that makes each of us interesting to other people. My “truth”, the Kierkegaardian "truth for which we live and die" will not be the same as yours, but we are all walking the same path of trying to live authentically as men and women in the world – if, that is, awareness, emotional intelligence and wisdom matter to us. That’s the kind of stuff I want to try out in these blogs.

So inspired by HHH, I’ll have a go. How many episodes? I've no idea. Maybe a dozen to see us through a year. You don’t have to read if you don’t want to. But I’d love to think that however we go about it we all want to seek and to find understanding. That's my goal (he says modestly). It’s much more fun - and we learn more - if we travel together in company. It's an unfinished story because tomorrow's experiences will cast new light on the past and present that will make even late autobiographical fragments provisional. It's also in search of a title. Any suggestions? 

New Year Resolutions: a blog for Epiphany

It’s not too late for new year resolutions. It never is. There’s always a new year that begins at some time or other: anniversaries, birthdays, festivals.  

But as most of us know by now, it’s not too soon to have broken the resolutions we made so hastily a week ago. All those well-meant intentions about sugar, smoking, alcohol, sex, exercise, social media and all the rest – have they lasted the week? Will they last the month? Will they see us through as far as Lent when we go through the ordeal of giving things up all over again?

The trouble with resolutions is well-rehearsed each year. They address behaviours that are the symptoms of our condition, but not the condition itself. They tend to scrutinise (albeit selectively) our habits, our addictions, the things we obsess about. I’m not saying that they don’t sometimes help to bring our lives into better order so that we live more healthily and well. But we all know that it’s the motivation of the boot strap. Make a colossal effort of the will and you’ll change your life. And the bigger the effort, the prouder we can be of what we’ve achieved.

But resolutions don’t tend to go very deep. They don’t on the whole explore our motivation and attitudes, our values and desires, all the things that make us what we are and lead us to behave as we do. They sit lightly upon the mysterious world of the unconscious where our drives come from. Resolutions are sticking plaster applied to wounds that need a radical kind of surgery if we are going to change in lasting ways.

As a theologian, I find the annual performance surrounding new year resolutions utterly Pelagian. That heresy, said to be especially attractive to the British, claimed that you could achieve salvation (note the words) through the effort of your own will. Divine grace was there to help you, but it was down to your decision and your continued resolve to live it out. I’ve often pondered our love-affair with this way of thinking. It’s not just about personal life. Organisations love it too. Think of those endless strategic plans and management techniques all designed to bring about development and change by a corporate act of will. Pelagius would have bellowed three hearty cheers for the organisational mind-set (not least in the church) that is addicted to these things.

It's not wrong for people and institution to have aspirations for the future and set about realising them. It's how we do this that matters, and the depth at which we do it. It was St Augustine (of Hippo) who said that imagining we can do it all by ourselves is to subvert the gospel. What changes lives, he argued, is God’s love and mercy held out and made real for us in our Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Here was the power that transformed the world and human living, offered possibilities that we could never have dreamed of, gave us back our freedom to become fully human again and live as we aspired to at the profoundest level of our existence. ‘Love God and do as you will’ he famously instructed, meaning that when God’s redeeming love makes its home at the centre of a human being, our lives and values, attitudes and behaviours become aligned to God’s own vision for his world. This is the Augustinian vision of the good news.

What we need at new year, I think, is to embrace this promised way of being more wholeheartedly. What might this mean? For me, it means living in a way that is more aware of the love of God and the goodness of things. It means being sensitised to the pain of the world and the needs of my neighbour. It means recovering joy in little things, the daily gifts of common grace. It means regaining a glad and trustful outlook rather than a suspicious or resentful ‘take’ on life where we find ourselves acting not out of hope but out of fear. It means cultivating charity. It means nurturing what lasts rather than being obsessed by the transient. It means wanting to make a difference in the world and being motivated to act on that longing, just as God’s truth and love go on making a difference to us.

Tomorrow, the sixth of January gives us a beautiful image of how God’s transforming grace works in human lives. On the Feast of the Epiphany, we remember the Magi who made the journey to worship the Holy Child. They were ‘overwhelmed with joy’ says the story. And they ‘went back by another way’ the text is careful to tell us. Yes, obviously to avoid the cruel Herod, but symbolically as an image of lives transformed by what they had experienced. The magi didn’t need resolutions. All they needed was to give themselves to what they had seen, this vision that gave them an entirely new perspective. Isn’t this what we need near the beginning of the year? And on every day that dawns?

Out with Pelagian resolutions and will power! In with Augustinian transformation and joy! In with the promises of God! In with a truly happy and hope-filled new year!