Janet Baker - In Her Own Words

Occasionally you watch something on television that you know will stay with you for a long time to come. Maybe even for a lifetime. That's a big claim to make for a broadcast. But a recent BBC Four documentary for me falls into that extremely rare category of "outstanding". It's
Janet Baker - In Her Own Words.

She had, as everyone knows, one of the greatest mezzo-soprano voices of the twentieth century. I say "had" because, to the consternation of her audiences (though for the best of reasons that she explains in the programme), she decided to retire from professional performance thirty years ago when she was just 56. She had already retired from the operatic stage a few years earlier. I won't rehearse her life story. Her autobiography Full Circle, an appearance on Desert Island Discs and above all this TV documentary tell it all - or at least, the bits she is willing to share in public for she is, as she herself acknowledges, a very private person.

We all have our favourite Baker recordings. Among mine are her Mahler songs, her Wagner Wesendonck Lieder and her Brahms Alto Rhapsody which we had played at my beloved grandmother's funeral and which had us all in tears. Two discs stand out above all, for me. The first is her radiant performance of Bach's solo cantata 82 Ich Habe Genug, recorded in 1966 with Yehudi Menuhin and the Bath Festival Orchestra. Although it originated as a bass cantata, I can only ever hear it in my mind as Janet Baker sings it, with an insight, a sensitivity and what I can only call a degree of personal commitment that are second to none.

My other favourite from a vast discography is her legendary recording of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius made with Sir John Barbirolli in 1964 (on my disc, linked with her equally legendary performance of the Sea Pictures). For many of us, that version of Gerontius will always be the definitive one. I learned to love Elgar's masterpiece through this recording which we bought when my wife was singing it (in the alto chorus line!). We had not long been married. Janet Baker was the soloist in that concert at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford - 1975, I think. I'd never heard the work before, and it came as a revelation that was life-changing for a quondam evangelical confronted with the catholic spirituality of John Henry Newman and Edward Elgar. There's so much deep magic in Barbirolli's classic recording, and not a little of it is due to Janet Baker's rapturous performance as the angel, especially in those marvellous closing pages of the oratorio. Who wouldn't willingly be lowered into the cleansing waters of purgatory if we were sung to like that?

But you don't need to know any of this to enjoy, and be inspired by, this substantial TV documentary. It's beautifully made. Janet Baker is 85 now, but she comes across as a woman of extraordinary dignity and nobility of character. During much of the conversation, the focus is on her face as she sits in an upright chair squarely facing the camera. She makes a lovely portrait, a bit like a late painting of Rembrandt. To me her features, animated, strong but tender, disclose a personality that is finely wrought over a long lifetime, radiating a deep wisdom that comes from living the reflected life. She has a wonderful way with words, by which I mean not simply her fluency, her charm, her gentle irony and her self-deprecation, but the insights with which even the most straightforward of her observations and reminiscences seem to be charged.

You feel that she conceals as much as she reveals, and you honour that. This is a respectful documentary. But she tells us more about herself in this programme than we have heard before. Not so much the facts about her career as the meaning they have carried for her. Early on, she speaks candidly about her childhood memory of the death of her much-loved elder brother from a heart condition. One morning she was told that he would die that day. She was sent down the road to play with her friends. Coming home in the early evening, her parents and she went upstairs and stood round his bedside until the end came. Her mother turned to her and said: "You're all I've got now". Baker goes back to this memory more than once in the broadcast: not surprisingly, it proved a defining moment in her life. She says that she carried the burden of being there to look after her mother from that moment onwards, how it made her into someone who was fundamentally serious about life as she put it. The programme shows her singing the Farewell from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas at the Glyndebourne Festival in the 1960s. It is achingly beautiful. You wonder how it could be done with such intensity not only of musicianship but of human feeling. When we know about the loss she had to bear in childhood, we understand where it comes from. "She could not sing something that was not deeply understood by her" says one of her colleagues.

There is so much that is deeply moving in this programme: in the quotations from Janet Baker's sublime musical performances, in the tributes of her colleagues and friends, and most of all, the awareness and humanity with which she speaks about herself and her life. Towards the end she muses about growing old, suffering, mortality and death. She speaks about how old age is a kind of withdrawal, a turning away from hectic involvement in the world, how important self-acceptance, truth-telling and solitude have become. You glimpse something of her vulnerability. She is realistic about approaching the end, about the necessity of dying. You don't see her as she speaks. Instead, you are treated to a beautiful sequence of images of the sea, the waves lapping the shore as if to say: dying is, or ought to be, a homecoming, a safe landing after the hazards and ordeals of travelling the ocean of human existence.

And all the while, we hear her sing the last of the five Rückert-Lieder by Gustav Mahler, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.

I have died to the world's turmoil,
And now I rest in a silent realm!
I live alone in my own heaven.
In my love, and in my song!

I can't tell you how poignant it is, perhaps especially when you are conscious yourself of growing old. When the song has ended, we see her turning tenderly to her husband next to her, whose carer she has been since his stroke, touching his hand, as if to say, yes, Mahler speaks the truth, doesn't he? And then her own tears come, and the camera does not flinch from them, because somehow they gather up the meaning of this extraordinary, and beautiful, human life.

"It is a difficult thing to be a singer" she says. "But it's a far more difficult thing to be a human being." The spirituality, if you like, that runs through this broadcast is something very special indeed. It's worth the licence fee by itself. It won't be on the iPlayer for ever. Watch it while you can. Have tissues to hand.

All Those Sermons! On Preaching at Easter

This is a guest blog I wrote for Sacristy Press for Easter. It was published on their website yesterday. Friends and followers of the Northern Woolgatherer may be interested. It is reproduced here as published. 

I’ve always loved preaching. I’ve found it among the most rewarding aspects of public ministry. I don’t simply mean delivering a sermon to a (usually) appreciative audience in a church or cathedral. There’s the satisfaction of preparing it, immersing myself in the biblical texts set for the day, reflecting on my own experience of faith and human life, drawing on poetry or music, film, literature or art to stimulate the imagination.

So I was delighted that some of my sermons from my time at Durham Cathedral were published by Sacristy Press when I retired in 2015. And I’m pleased that four years later, as I write, Christ in a Choppie Box is being featured as Sacristy Press’s Book of the Month. (If you find the title baffling and wonder what it means, read the preface!) Being asked to write this month’s blog gave me the chance to pull the book off the shelf and glance through it once more.

I turned to an Easter sermon that the editor chose to include (my friend Carol Harrison, once of Durham University, now the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford). It’s called ‘White Easter’ because that year it fell in March and it was proving to be a bruisingly cold spring with unseasonable frosts and snows lingering well after the equinox. I am surprised how keenly I felt the rigours of winter. I was clearly getting old.

In the sermon I link our yearning for warmth and light with our hunger for springtime and resurrection in life. “Easter answers our longings and desires,” I say. “It does this by both changing how things were, and transforming our view of them. We would not be here if we didn’t believe that something infinitely life-changing took place on Easter morning when the women went to the tomb and found the stone rolled away and the grave space empty… Here is where fantasy meets reality, where longing is transmuted into hope.”

Re-reading that sermon made me think about preaching at the great festivals. I’ve now been ordained 44 years. That must mean around forty Easter sermons—many more if you include those preached during the fifty-day Easter season. Not all of them have survived (mercifully), though the earliest sermon which I have a clear memory of preaching was, as it happens, an Easter one. That was when I’d been ordained just a few months. It was on the beautiful story of the Emmaus Road in St Luke’s Easter story (Luke 24: 13-35). The text is long lost, but not the memory of how, like the disciples, my heart seemed to burn as I tried to speak about the risen Christ. When that happens to the preacher, it’s an experience to cherish.

“Easter answers our longings and desires,” I say. “It does this by both changing how things were, and transforming our view of them. We would not be here if we didn’t believe that something infinitely life-changing took place on Easter morning when the women went to the tomb and found the stone rolled away and the grave space empty… Here is where fantasy meets reality, where longing is transmuted into hope.”

All those sermons! How does the preacher stay fresh over a lifetime of preaching? How do we not collapse into cliché time and again, or simply recycle old material from years ago? This year I’m preaching Holy Week and Easter at Southwark Cathedral. How do I say something new at first light on Easter Day? – for yes, on the south bank of the Thames, the guest preacher has to be up at the crack of dawn to preach at the Great Vigil and Liturgy of Easter.

I wish I knew the answer. Maybe it’s one of the miracles of ministry. I’m not in any way comparing myself to Johann Sebastian Bach, but when you think how as cantor of the two churches at Leipzig he had to write a new cantata every week, orchestrate it, copy out the parts and rehearse his musicians all in the space of a few days, you’re amazed that it could be done at all, let alone with such brilliance and consistency. (That was a normal workload for church musicians in those days from the greatest like Bach to the least. Meanwhile Lutheran pastors would be expected to deliver sermons lasting a full hour… you have to admire the stamina not only of preachers and musicians but also of church congregations!)

I guess there are many aspects to staying fresh as a preacher, or trying to. One is the conviction, as the Puritan Samuel Rutherford put it, that “there is always more light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word”. A lifetime of preaching is too short to fathom the mystery of God and his ways, let alone speak of it in the pulpit. But that calls for curiosity on my part as a preacher: about the text, about life, about human beings, about God. I need to continue to be animated by this lifelong journey of discovery as faith seeks understanding. “Old people should be explorers” said Haydn when he was composing his last great works. Even in retirement. (Especially in retirement?)

Michael’s sermons are both beautiful and inspiring. They draw the reader face to face with God in surprising ways, always feeding the spiritual appetite—yet leaving me thirsty for more of what we have just tasted. They are beautifully crafted, and admirably concise. The use of English is impeccable and the scholarship profound. The eclectic references to art and literature demonstrate an aesthetic talent and theological versatility that is exceptional.”
from the Foreword by Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury

Liturgy, prayer and spirituality are of course the bedrock of authentic ministry. You can’t speak about what you haven’t at least begun to glimpse, or wanted to. To be inspired by the church’s liturgy and to feel its rhythms is, I think, vital for good liturgical preaching. But so is personal prayer, especially the capacity to be still and pay attention to (“notice”, my wife says) the ebbs and flows of life where so often God comes to us. You can call it being a reflective practitioner for it’s certainly true that “the unreflected life is not worth living”. Why else would people listen to sermons if not to glean wisdom and insight from the word of God as mediated through the preacher’s own lived experience?

The golden rule of every sermon is, before you ever get into the pulpit, first preach your sermon to yourself. The same is true of blogging. I’ll try to remember that when I get into the pulpit on Easter morning.

Happy Easter to you all!

Losing an Ear: a Winter's Tale

Last week I lost an ear. Not severed like Van Gogh, I'd better add. Yet in a sense, that is what it feels like. Thanks to the virus that so many of us have had at Christmas time, this one has left me unable to hear anything very much in my left ear. The doctor is pretty sure it's labyrinthitis, an infection of the inner ear. Partial hearing loss is only one of a number of symptoms...but I'll spare you too much information about those. He says it will almost certainly go away with time and I'll have my hearing back. But that's not yet.

On the first day, I could still hear in that ear. By which I mean that the volume was properly "turned up". But the sound itself was alarming. Not only was my tinnitus louder than I've never known, there was also a continuous roar as if I were standing by a waterfall in spate, or a motorway in rush hour. Worst of all was that the sound itself had broken up, "pixelated" you might say. The music playing on the radio sounded jumbled, confused. Even the tuning had gone awry, my left ear sounding half a semitone flatter than my right.

We were listening, as we usually do over our coffee, to Essential Classics on Radio 3. They were playing a Bach cantata, the magical motet-cantata 118, O Jesu Christ, Mein's Leben Licht (O Jesu Christ, the Light of my Life). It was heartbreaking to hear this wonderful music broken into pieces like this. I imagined Michelangelo's Pietà shattered into fragments never to be put back together again, or Rembrandt's Presentation in the Temple criss-crossed with angry knife wounds too deep to repair. I ran to the radio player, turned it off with a vehemence that took me by surprise, and burst into tears. I remember crying "What if I can never hear the music of Bach again, ever? Rather than that, I think I'd want to die".

That day felt like a bereavement. Loss isn't just to do with the people we love whom we no longer see. We can experience it just as powerfully when we move away from a place where we've been happy (leaving Durham Cathedral is still a recent enough event for me to feel a sharp pang from time to time, especially when Choral Evensong is on the radio). Or when we lose something precious to us, like a childhood toy or a wedding ring that has carried the symbolism of a cherished relationship for a lifetime. And we feel it when we lose a bodily function that's vital to our wellbeing. This is my first experience of that. I've been reading Robert McCrum's fine memoir about suffering a catastrophic stroke in his 40s (the book is called A Year Off). He speaks about losing all sensation in his left leg and arm in just this way, as a major bereavement he needed to work through.

It's made me think about disability in a new way. On the spectrum of impairment, what I'm experiencing is as nothing to those who have lost all their hearing. This happened once to a senior priest-colleague of mine called George. One day, without warning, his world fell silent. I can't begin to imagine the shock. Yet as far as possible, he wanted life to continue as it always had. His commitment to worship never faltered. I never saw him frustrated, angry or desperate. In time, he learned how to communicate with the help of some very smart gadgetry. And this wonderful man said to me: "Yes, Michael, to lose your hearing is a terrible thing, especially when you love conversation, music, theatre and all the ordinary little sounds, often unnoticed, that give colour to our daily lives. But I have the memory of them. I can still replay people's voices and my favourite music in my head. And for a lifetime's enjoyment of the gift of hearing, I shall always be thankful."

Last week, there suddenly came into my head a conversation I'd had with my mother when I must have been about five or six. She asked me, out of the blue: "If you had to lose either your hearing or your sight, which would you want to keep?" Some question for a little boy, like one of those dark choices that recur in fairy tales. I remember answering: "my sight, of course. It must be incredibly hard to live without it". She said: "But what about talking to one another? What about music? And what about the ways our hearing helps us find our way around, keeps our balance, protects us from dangers like road traffic that we can't always see but can definitely hear?" If I learned anything from that exchange, it was to try to cherish all the senses I was lucky enough to have been given. Among our close family friends at that time were a woman who had lost her sight as a child, and a man who'd been born without hearing. I'd admired how they had come to terms with such profound disability and had learned to live with it, without bitterness, as people who were as alive as I was. Just like George. Just like so many others.

Last summer we cruised up the Rhine. At Bonn, we visited the Beethoven House. My mother had been brought up in that part of Germany, and perhaps because of it, Beethoven had been her favourite composer. She told me about how the loss of his hearing, how it drove him to near-despair, how he wrecked his beautiful pianos as he tried to hear the sound of his playing. She told me about the late quartets he composed entirely out of his head. I was moved to be in this house where these tragic personal dramas had been played out. I've been thinking of him too, these last few days, and wondering how, if music were my metier, I would cope. Yet some of the greatest music in the world came out of the silence into which he was progressively and irreversibly immersed. That's true heroism in the face of adversity.

Today I listened to a marvellous broadcast in the Soul Music series on Radio 4. The chosen piece was Bach's seasonal Cantata 82, Ich Habe Genug ("I have enough"). It was, I think, the very first cd I ever bought in the incomparable recording made by Dame Janet Baker. Its theme is the Presentation of Christ soon after his birth, when the infant Jesus is brought into the Temple to be offered to God. The aged Simeon has been waiting for this moment all his life; now he sees the promised Deliverer for himself, takes him in his arms and blesses him. "Now Lord, you can let your servant depart in peace; for my eyes have seen your salvation." Contributors reflected on how this music had touched their lives. I loved the thought of infancy and age encountering each other, of living long enough to see what has been the focus of your hopes and longings all your life. My mother experienced it in hospital a few days before she died, when she met her tiny great-granddaughter for the first, and final, time. It was a radiant moment, a real epiphany.

I want to keep this in proportion. What I'm going through is a very light affliction compared to the health ordeals so many others are facing this winter. But as I listened to the programme in my personal mono, I experienced a little Nunc Dimittis of my own. It was this. If I lost all my hearing irreversibly, I'd still have my memories of that luminous Bach cantata, of the hundreds of times I've played it, and of the comfort and reassurance it has brought over the years. It would always be there, among the music I've found to be both life-changing and life-giving. I hope with all my heart that I'll be given back my lost ear. But whatever happened, I'd try to be thankful for what had enriched me so much in my lifetime. It would be a big loss, certainly, but I'd try not to see it as an inconsolable one.

I'm not saying I'd succeed. I know myself too well. But I would try to cultivate the gift to be thankful, what the New Testament calls eucharistia. Gratitude, says Christianity, is the only foundation of the good life, our prime duty as human beings, because of the great love with which God loves us and gives himself to us. So I'd try. And I'd also try to find new ways of being attentive to this wonderful world, and the people whom God has given me to love, and the voices of need that cry out for us to listen, and to whom our ears must always be turned in compassion.

In Praise of Coffee

Ah! How sweet coffee tastes!
Lovelier than a thousand kisses,
Smoother than Muscatel wine.
Coffee, I must have coffee,
And if anyone wants to give me a treat,
Ah! just give me some coffee!

Doggerel on a morning when we're told on good authority that three coffees a day brings a whole range of health benefits. Those lyrics are by an eighteenth century poet known as Picander. His proper name was Christian Friedrich Henrici. He was one of J. S. Bach's most important librettists, supplying texts for a number of his sacred works including the St Matthew Passion. And for his secular cantata BWV211, the Coffee Cantata, composed in 1734 whose title "Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht" translates as "Be quiet, stop chattering". Believe me, this nonsense in praise of coffee sounds a whole lot better when you hear it adorned by Bach's glorious music.

As we know from sources like Dr Johnson and Blackadder, the coffee house was a great social institution in eighteenth century Europe. Coffee stimulated the mind and loosened the tongue. Whether they were people of science, music or letters, those who frequented them would spend hours sharing their insights and debating their implications. The Enlightenment might not have flourished so spectacularly if it had not been for coffee. How many of the world's great books owe their existence to it, whether drunk socially or through the long hours of the night in a writer's garret. At university I often used to stay up all night writing essays against a deadline of the following morning. I kept this up, though with declining results, when I taught theology and had to mark essays, and then in the parish when working on my sermons. Not good habits, maybe, but it all depended on coffee (and the Psalter - reading a psalm as each consecutive hour struck).

And now (not for the first time) we are assured that all this coffee brings added value to our physical as well as our mental and spiritual health. A peer-reviewed "umbrella study" published in the British Medical Journal concludes that "coffee drinking appears safe within usual patterns of consumption". Which is careful scientific understatement for the well-evidenced claim that coffee-drinking is linked to a lower risk of death from all causes including heart disease and strokes. It's also associated with a reduced risk of suffering from several cancers including prostate, skin and liver, and also from type-2 diabetes, gallstones and gout.

I've drunk black coffee almost all my life, apart from a couple of periods when I abstained for several months to see whether it made a difference to my quality of sleep at night. (It didn't.)  Black coffee is a virtuous drink because it is calorie-free (the report warns us not to indulge in those naughty-but-ever-so-nice treats stuffed with refined sugars and unhealthy fats like cakes and biscuits - I try not to. "Coffee is safe, but hold the cake"). And we are warned not to claim too much for coffee when the precise nature of the aetiologies is not well understood. "Does coffee prevent chronic disease and reduce mortality? We simply do not know. Should doctors recommend drinking coffee to prevent disease? Should people start drinking coffee for health reasons? The answer to both questions is 'no'."

Well, at this late stage in my life, I can't imagine that I shall stop drinking coffee unless these results are dramatically overturned by new and adverse evidence. Morning coffee - yes, three or four cups - has long been part of my habitus. In retirement, there is the added luxury, which still feels a bit deviant, of coming back from morning prayer with the vicar in church and sitting down with the daily paper over a long and rewarding coffee while enjoying music on Radio 3. I've noticed how many social media personal profiles mention coffee. What would the morning be without coffee, I've often wondered? What is it about this drink whose taste and aroma are as rich and complex as a cup of Lapsang Suchong tea (no milk), a glass of Puligny Montrachet (not too chilled) or a Talisker nightcap (with a few drops of mineral water)? As long as you buy the real thing (fairly traded, of course) and make it properly. Even the best instants are no substitute. If you're going to do it at all, do it with conviction. As Luther said, pecca fortiter! "Sin boldly."

Good old Bach. He has dispensed rich wisdom all my life. It's nice to find he could be playful too, at least when it came to his preferred drink. About coffee and so much else, the great master was never wrong. If you are already an afficionado, listen to the Coffee Cantata. Have your prejudices confirmed and your conscience stilled - and maybe, just maybe, live longer because of it.

#140: Why has Twitter Changed the Rules?

Forget Brexit, that sausage roll and who's going to win Strictly. If there's one thing that's exercising social media at the moment, it's Twitter changing its rules of engagement. As I presume everyone knows, until this year you were limited to 140 characters per tweet. But now they've doubled it to 280. And some of us are grumpy about it.

I've used Twitter since the end of 2011. I blogged about it when I was very new to it and again at the end of my first year on it. Here's what I said when I was starting out.

I've been surprised how I've taken to it.  It feels a bit like discovering photography a few years ago.  Perhaps it's because they are quite similar.  Photography captures the essence of something by putting a frame around it. Composing an image is to limit the viewer's horizons in ways that 'focus' (pun intended) attention so that we see afresh and perhaps gain 'insight'. In the same way, Twitter imposes the discipline of 140 characters which requires us to put a (pretty small) frame around what we want to share and try and communicate in a sharply focused way.

 Someone once spoke of 'the sonnet's narrow room'.  That means the 'given' shape of 14 lines with rhythms that are set: the poet who wants to write a sonnet isn't free to vary its structure.  The challenge of doing something interesting, creative and beautiful inside that 'narrow room' has fascinated poets since Petrarch.  Shakespeare's Sonnets are like Bach's Goldberg Variations: they show the endless variety that is possible at the hands of a master even when the terrain on which to work is no bigger than a pocket handkerchief.

I think Twitter may appeal to people who are miniaturists.  We like the idea that much can be said in a few words.  We value understatement and reticence, where a wealth of meanings can reside at the margins of what is said, implied by nudges and hints rather than stated openly.  'Tell all the truth but tell it slant' said Emily Dickinson, one of the great practitioners of saying much in a small space.  The truth at the centre of Christianity can be expressed in a tweet: The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten Son of God, full of grace and truth.

That has all the zeal that goes with discovering something new. Maybe I was a bit over-enthusiastic then. I hadn't seen how social media can damage people who get addicted to it, or - far worse - become victims of online haters, trolls and bullies. We hadn't heard of fake news. I'm the first to admit that an unregulated cyberspace is dangerous and puts people at risk. And not just the young. Think of Jo Cox and Gina Miller.

Yet for all that, I still believe that used responsibly, social media is an immensely powerful tool for doing good in the world. Twitter in particular had an elegance and succinctness that seemed to command attention. No wonder politicians like Donald Trump were quick to spot its potential. To be able to say something striking (whether true or not, whether wise or not) and reach millions of people in just 140 characters offered an irresistible challenge to anyone who saw the possibilities in vivid, focused communication.

Note the past tense. Because that has now changed for the worse. Open your Twitter feed and what do you find? A never-ending stream of ponderous essays of 280 characters. Your screen is crammed with text. Your eye could just about scan 140 at one go, take in the message, tell your brain that here was something worth thinking about, endorsing with enthusiasm, being grumpy about, disagreeing violently with, smiling at. Here was something had bothered to take the trouble to distil for us. When there is so much information out there clamouring for our attention, we love succinctness. But now Twitter is sprawling like Face Book, clogging up the weirs and culverts so that the flow is turbulent and muddied, and we can no longer quickly tell the difference between what matters and what doesn't.

So what has possessed Twitter to change the rules and double the character limit? We loved the discipline of 140 characters and the sharpness it gave to our writing. Dr Johnson once said to a plodding writer something like, "strike out every other word in what you have written: it will do wonders for your style." As someone who is tempted to use too many adjectives and adverbs, I've found it's been a great reminder to try to write plain English. No, the medium wasn't broke and didn't need fixing. Except in the eyes of those who thought that the more Twitter emulated Face Book, the more popular it would be and the higher the advertising revenues. The trouble is that the 140 "brand" was such a distinctive USP. Maybe adjusting it upwards to 160 would not have mattered too much. But to double it (which is to multiply by 8 its "cubic capacity" - hugely more if in my analogy cyberspace stretches beyond three dimensions) is a big risk.

I was tempted to give up half my character allowance next Lent and stick to 140 for a few weeks - like the Lent a few years ago when I gave up colour photography and worked only in black and white. Then I thought: why wait till Lent? Let's start now. So I am doggedly carrying on in the way I've learned to know and love Twitter by continuing with the 140 limit. I've been encouraged by others who've adopted my suggested #140 hashtag in their Twitter profiles. I know that without a numerical counter on the tweet screen (again, why?) it's not so easy. But all we have to do is to stop writing when the blue line hits the bottom of the circle at the "half-past" mark. Sooner if we can.

I won't be obsessive about #140. If I stray over by a dozen characters, I'm not going to worry. But we want to keep the spirit of Twitter alive. Brevity is not only the soul of wit but the soul of Twitter too. So maybe I can encourage you to give it a go? I'll follow you if you let me know you've put #140 in your profile. There's an offer you can't refuse. I'm at @sadgrovem. I've tweeted @Twitter to say I'd be glad to have their comments and to publish them here. You may want to ask them too.

"Always the supporter of lost causes" I hear you say with a sigh. "Always the remainer." Ah well. Put it down to retirement and having too much time to think. And blog. And tweet.

Evensong

It isn't quite the BBC's longest running show - which is The Week's Good Cause. But it is the Beeb's longest running outside broadcast. 90 years ago on 7 October 1926, the BBC broadcast Choral Evensong for the first time. By the time I was old enough to be vaguely aware of ethereal singing mysteriously seeping out of the big valve radio in the corner of the living room, it had been going for more than 30 years. At the age of 90 it's more popular than ever.

Last week the national cathedral attendance statistics for 2015 were published. They showed a striking increase in weekday attendances, up by 18% over the past decade. This includes weekday celebrations of the eucharist and the daily office, including of course choral evensong. (Sunday attendance remains "stable".) In some choral foundations you have to turn up in very good time to be sure of a seat in the quire. 

What is it about evensong that continues to draw people to cathedrals, greater churches and college chapels? I can't put it better than the writer of a letter to The Times, quoted by one of the producers of BBC Choral Evensong, Canon Stephen Shipley:*

I turned on Choral Evensong by accident one afternoon a year or so ago and I’ve been listening ever since. The music is beautiful, but the special quality of Evensong lies in other places too, in the paradoxical contrast between the sinewy intricacy of 16th century language, and the simplicity of the thoughts it expresses: prayers for courage, for grace, for protection from the dark, for a good death. These are things to which our minds have particularly lately turned in the aftermath of recent terrible events, but they were there all the time in the psalms and collects of Evensong. For almost 500 years the same words have been repeated by people in times of trouble or of triumph. The presence of that cloud of unseen witnesses lends an intangible quality to Choral Evensong. You could call it calm or spirituality. You could call it holiness. But it’s very precious.

In retirement, I'm often asked what I miss most from my working life. It's a question that can be answered on many levels. There's so much that I miss, however rich life is also becoming in new ways. But in terms of the way time and prayer have been shaped and ordered day by day and week by week, I unhesitatingly say that what I miss most of all is daily choral evensong. After almost 30 years of full-time cathedral ministry, with six years before that living and working in a cathedral close, it's been fundamental to my praying. Days still feel oddly empty without it.  The incomparable blend of finely wrought words, music and architecture somehow touches the human soul in a very deep place - well, it touches mine anyway. Which is why the weekly broadcast of evensong on Wednesday afternoons on BBC Radio 3 has become such an important part of the spiritual life in retirement, as are our midweek journeys to Hexham Abbey to attend evensong there. 

I was first drawn into its powerful and redemptive magic as a boy chorister in the early 1960s. Once enticed, I never looked back. Even in my most fervent evangelical Christian Union days when I sat a lot looser to formal liturgy and relished the spontaneity of the prayer meeting, I never lost the sense that evensong was a wonderful gift of the English Church to her people. My farewell service in Durham Cathedral a year ago took the form of choral evensong with music by those quintessentially English church composers Herbert Howells and Edward Bairstow among others. Nunc Dimittis sung to the Gloucester Service felt extraordinarily poignant. A lifetime of evensongs seemed somehow to be gathered up that afternoon. Looking back, I wonder how I got through it.

There is something very Benedictine about Anglican choral evensong. In cathedrals and on the radio, you feel you are tuning in to the Opus Dei, the "work of God" that is the whole church's continuous offering of praise and prayer day by day and hour by hour. All its parts are in a beautiful and delicate balance with one another: music and words, praise and prayer, scripture, psalmody and silence. And let's scotch a myth about evensong straight away. People sometimes say that it's liturgy you don't join in. How wrong that is! You do join in. But in a contemplative way, by listening, paying attention, allowing yourself to be transported into another place by what you are hearing and experiencing. 

And when the Prayer Book psalms for each of the thirty days of the month are chanted in full, you catch Benedict's vision of daily prayer that is organised around the songs of the Israelite community that are collected up in the Psalter. Celebration, lament, despair, thankfulness, comfort, anger, trustfulness, bewilderment, joy, hope and love are all there in the Psalms. They gather up all the quotidian experience of life - as it was in ancient times and as it now. I used to say to choristers in the cathedrals where I served: make the Psalms your special joy. They are like Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, the 48 Preludes and Fugues. If you can play those, you can play anything. And if you love them, immerse yourselves in them, learn some of them off by heart, they will nourish you for a lifetime. 

The surprising thing is this. I've found that choral evensong can be a powerful tool for evangelism. I've met many people over the years who have found faith through coming to this service. Maybe they came tentatively at first, not quite sure what they would find, relieved perhaps that they didn't have to open their mouths and sing or say very much. Gradually they found themselves drawn into the inward logic of prayer which is that it takes us to places beyond our immediate experience, and by doing so, helps us to see things in a new and life-changing way. For some, this has come as nothing less than a fresh expression of lived Christianity. Looking back, I think the seeds of faith were sown in me at evensong too. 

Among those who became committed Christians have been the parents and families of choristers themselves. They came at first simply to enjoy the music and support their children. As a former chorister parent myself, I can entirely understand that. Gradually, they began to see that there was more to this strange world of prayer and worship than they had imagined. Perhaps the growth in attendance at evensong is precisely because cathedrals offer the possibility of "liminality" - finding your own way of approaching the thresholds of faith and making the journey from being a member of an audience towards being a participant and a pilgrim. 

Late in life, I am still on that journey. I'm profoundly thankful for this lifetime of choral evensongs. Thank you to the cathedrals, greater churches, college chapels and other places of worship - not just in the UK but across the world - that guard our precious "English choral tradition" so lovingly and so well, and contribute so much to the rich spirituality of Anglicanism. And thank you to the BBC for its continued commitment to broadcasting the service week by week. Happy 90th birthday!

*http://www.choralevensong.org/90_years_BBC_Evensong.php

Holy Week 2016: a reflection on pain and mercy

It's a strange Holy Week, this first one in retirement. How I miss the great liturgies and profound music of Durham Cathedral. By contrast, this year feels like "Holy Week lite": no services to preside at, no sermons to write. Here in the village the liturgy is simpler and sparser though the pattern is the same. The Vicar is introducing an early morning Easter Vigil and eucharist up at the Old Church, not quite at dawn though with the clocks going forward it will feel like it. So we shall have kept the Sacred Triduum "properly", and that's good.

What's different this year is that I have a lot of time to think and reflect, to read, pray and gather wool. (And write, I hear you sigh, but no-one's forcing you to read this....) But it's not idleness, at least it doesn't feel like it. It's "work" too - spiritual work. Let me try and say where my thoughts have been leading me.

First, there's how much this week means to me, how it lies at the very centre of my Christian faith. I've written many times before about this but it's reassuring in an odd way to find that even though I am living as a lay person under the ministry of others, it hasn't in the least taken away the profound sense that without faith in Jesus' cross and resurrection, Christianity is nothing. I come back constantly to one of the greatest verses in the whole Bible, St Paul in Galatians (2.20-21): "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." You could feed off that magnificent affirmation for a lifetime. 

There are the familiar personal rituals of this season, chiefly to listen to both the Bach Passions at least once each during Holy Week. Like Galatians, they are inexhaustibly rich, so full of pain and pathos, yet charged with an exquisite confidence in tender mercy and undying love. This morning Angela Tilby spoke on BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day about the final bar of the St Matthew Passion where Bach lingers on a dissonant passing note before resolving it into the last chord of this monumental work. There is a whole theology in that bar, she said. She is right: all of this week comes down to a painful dissonance and its ultimate resolution. Today I listened to the St John, a work I've written about in previous blogs. The same is true there, except that the conclusion is less tentative, less inclined to linger on the pain, more confident, even rapturous - precisely the difference between the two evangelists that Bach, one of the greatest theologians of the western church, understood so well.

But to go back to that dissonance: this has been a shocking Holy Week as we know. The atrocity in Brussels has left in its wake so many wrecked human lives: deaths, terrible injuries, trauma, loss and bewilderment. How self-professed adherents of a noble world faith, Islam, could carry out such destructiveness in God's name is just beyond comprehension. Elie Wiesel once said of the Nazi Holocaust, maybe even God himself doesn't understand it, let alone we humans. How to speak of such events with integrity without resorting to clichés and conventional expressions of sympathy, is hard. Like Job's friends, we would be better to remain silent like the mourners standing alongside one another in the Place de la Bourse. I think there must be silence in heaven in the face of such suffering and grief. What is there for God to say?

For me as a person of faith, this is where Holy Week comes in. The Passion Narrative echoes so many of the themes we are so familiar with. Fear, betrayal, cowardice, political compromise, the power of the mob, the oppression of the innocent are all sharply-etched on the page and in the music. Most of all the suffering of the victim.  In the St Matthew Passion he is not the obedient martyr of St Luke nor the victorious king of St John. In Matthew (and Mark) he is the lonely, agonised victim who cries out in agony "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" How true to experience. And like so many who are plunged inexplicably into terrible suffering, he gets no reply. He is alone in this long and terrible darkness. Hearing Bach this week, it couldn't fail to echo Brussels and Srebrenica and Istanbul, Syria and Iraq, the continuing refugee crisis and so many other horrors past and present we have heard about in recent days. That question comes back: what is there for God to say? What is there for us to say?

But faith wants to respond: God has not been silent, even though we didn't realise it at once. He is speaking out of the very heart of suffering to all the world, especially to those whom events have led directly into the reality of crucifixion. The broken Man of Golgotha is that Word of truth, mercy and the love that loves, as St John says, "to the end". Here's how one of the best modern hymns puts it.

And when human hearts are breaking

Under sorrow's iron rod,

Then they find that self-same aching

Deep within the heart of God.

It's the good news that is old and familiar and well-tried, but forever fresh and new in its capacity to bring strength and courage to face the days ahead. Once again it's St Paul's "faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me". This Holy Week I wonder like everybody else what ordeals the coming days and weeks will bring for our world and for each of us. But what we need to do is to hold the passion and resurrection in our hearts as the truth to live and die by. These "days of awe" from Maundy Thursday to Easter will strengthen us as we tell the story that lies at the very foundation of our faith. And point to the eventual resolution of all our sorrow and dissonance, and give us back our hope.

Andy Walton, writing in Christianity Today, quotes Coptic Bishop Angaelos whose church members have encountered fierce suffering in recent years in Egypt: "The darkness we encounter daily makes us not only realise the value of the Light, but pursue and hold onto It as our only hope and strength." His faith is a true inspiration. In that spirit I wish you a holy festival, and when it comes, a happy light-filled Easter, and "even at the grave", joyful alleluias.