The Berlin Wall 30 years on

In old(er) age I find myself looking back on the times I’ve lived through and how they’ve shaped me over the seven decades I’ve been alive. I was born in 1950, the precise midpoint of the twentieth century. What have been the most significant events of world history that I can say have touched me personally in some way?

Any list is provisional of course. We can’t easily judge what events will prove defining in the grand scheme of things when we are too close to them. Even a lifetime can be too short to make sound historical judgements. There’s too much foreground; things don’t stay in place long enough to see them as part of the bigger picture. We need distance and perspective, and even then the relative significance of historical events and the meanings they carry can be hotly contested by historians. But I believe there are key “moments” in our own lifetimes that have already gathered the flow of history around them and acquired a kind of symbolic, even mythic, status.

So I’m speaking about my subjective experience of world events, those I remember as having a powerful effect on me in the first half of my life. My current seven candidates are these. (I wonder what yours are?) I’ve already blogged on two of them.

1962 The Cuba missile crisis;
1963 The assassination of President Kennedy;
1968 The student riots in France;
1969 The first moon landing;
1973 The accession of the UK to the European Communities;
1975 The end of the Vietnam War;
1989 The fall of the Berlin Wall.

On Saturday we shall commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the last of these. So let me reflect briefly on the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I paid my first visit to Berlin that very year, 1989. But I was too early to be part of history. It was June. That summer the Kirchentag, the great two-yearly gathering of German Protestant Christians, took place in Berlin. It was an amazing event. I stayed with a family in Dahlem in the then Western Sector. There was a bewildering variety of activities to take part in: lectures, seminars, music, film, theatre, art... and a lot of theological and political debate, not only in churches and lecture halls but on street corners and in pubs and clubs. Here in the UK we don’t have anything quite like this festival of culture and faith that draws tens of thousands of people, not least the young, from across the country for five days of intense engagement and festive enjoyment. I was struck by how much talk I overheard about “our common European home”, particularly of course the aspiration to unite Germany. It was exhilarating. But that summer talk of peace and reconciliation in Germany still felt like a beautiful dream, nothing more.

To gain some respite from all this heady stuff, I needed time to wander round the city, drink in the atmosphere of this extraordinary place. In particular, I wanted to visit the East. I recall a journey on the U-Bahn that took me from one part of West Berlin to another that entailed crossing under areas of the eastern sector and passing through long-abandoned ghost stations. From inside deep cuttings I could look up at the grim tower blocks of the East shielded by intimidating rolls of barbed wire laid above the rail tracks. By contrast, crossing Checkpoint Charlie on foot in either direction did not seem as big a deal as I’d expected, not for a westerner with a British passport. Even crossing back into the West didn’t entail a long wait or a search. It was a very different matter for East Berliners, that was clear. Security around the Berlin Wall did not suggest any lessening of tension at that fault line between the two Germanys, the two Europes and the two worlds of East and West.

Back at Coventry Cathedral where I worked at the time, we continued to pray for peace and reconciliation across Germany. We often thought of the German cities with which Coventry had special relationships, whose great churches had been bombed by the Allies just as Coventry Cathedral had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe raid of 14 November 1940. I’d visited three of them: Lübeck which was (just) inside the Bundesrepublik, Dresden, then in the GDR and Berlin which straddled both. There, I’d attended Kirchentag events in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church on the Kurfürstendamm, whose spire, the so-called “Hollow Tooth”, damaged by Allied bombing in 1943, served as a much-loved war memorial in much the same way as Coventry Cathedral.

So you can imagine the feverish excitement on 9 November 1989 when the news broke that something remarkable was happening around, and on top of, the Berlin Wall. We were glued to our televisions, in our case a large old black-and-white (read on to discover why this detail is relevant). It was soon clear that not only had the Wall been breached but that the East Berlin security forces were doing nothing about it, watching, a few even smiling, while people took pick-axes to the fabric of the Wall and surged across newly opened gaps. That officialdom stood by and did nothing to stop this outbreak of unthinkable lawlessness is one of the abiding memories of that day. You’ll remember it well enough or will have seen the footage scores of times.

Having been in the city so recently, and given my Anglo-German parentage, I found it immensely powerful to watch these scenes, and extraordinarily moving too. All the more so because we were expecting to commemorate the anniversary of the dreadful “Night of Shattered Glass”, the Kristallnacht of 9 November 1938 that constituted the first concerted, violent Nazi assault on Germany’s Jewish community. Instead, we found ourselves celebrating this magnificent dawn of a new future for Berlin, and Germany, and Europe. If ever I watched an event that seemed to be an image of the kingdom of God, it was this breaking down of walls, this elimination of the barriers of division, this reaching across to fellow men, women and children in peace and friendship and hope.

It felt like one of the greatest moments of my life. It still does. I was back in Germany the following year, in Bavaria this time at a conference of young adults. The joyous hope-filled energy at that week’s gathering in the mountains was palpable. And participants were in no doubt that all of them were pledged to play their part as Christians in the reconstruction and renewal of a united Germany. And not just Germany. “Our common European Home” was back on the agenda in a revitalised way. And the handful of British Christians who were there were enthusiastically embraced as colleagues and friends in that great project. “The Cold War is over. We are all Berliners. We are all Germans. We are all Europeans” we agreed, in the spirit of John F Kennedy’s happy phrase when he came to the Wall on his unforgettable visit in 1963.

In a Wordsworthian way, it felt good to be alive and see this day. Indeed, I needed to do more than merely see it. I needed to bear witness to it because of the story that would undoubtedly reverberate across coming generations. We could not have foreseen how difficult this project of reunification would prove, what stresses and strains it would place on this new Germany that was rising from the ashes. We did not imagine how hard it would be to eradicate the division between the privileged West and the more deprived East, nor the rise of far-right populist politics in cities and towns of the GDR (and not only there). We believed that the European ideal would quickly vanquish old enmities and bring about a Europe that was democratic, prosperous and free. We thought we could glimpse “the end of history” and the emergence of a new world order of peace among nations.

How naïve, you may say, this “first fine careless rapture”. And yet across Europe, people of Christian faith, other faiths and of no explicit faith but immense good will continue to collaborate for the peace and flourishing of Europe and beyond it, the whole human family. My own Europeanism has always been an important part of my self-awareness - how could it not, given my parentage? But as I look back, I now see what an impetus the events of 1989 gave me to commit to my identity more consciously. Hence my profound disappointment and sadness at the prospect of Brexit, not to mention the challenges the European Project is facing in many other parts of our continent.

But on Saturday, we should celebrate all that the fall of the Berlin Wall promised, and the real achievements that have been wrought across a reunited Germany. On this thirtieth anniversary, it’s worth pausing to be grateful for what happened in November 1989 that raised the hopes of millions of people all over the world that oppressive regimes do not have absolute control over human lives. For if the events of that month seemed like an image of the kingdom of God, then we should go on praying “thy kingdom come” with the heartfelt conviction that lasting change can happen and the lives of nations, societies and people be permanently transformed for good. That’s a prayer to make our own during the commemorations that will take place on this weekend of Remembrance Sunday.

What about that black-and-white TV, you ask? It wasn’t long before the East German Embassy in London was closed. It had state-of-the-art TVs to give away. One of them found its way into our home. Not only was it a colour set, but it even had a zapper (aka remote). For our four children, not to mention their parents, Christmas came early that year!

Thoughts on Nôtre Dame

What can I say about the fire at Nôtre Dame?

It is a terrible, terrible disaster. The burning of this great and greatly beloved cathedral church is beyond the capacity of mere words, at least in the shock of tonight’s news. What moved me more even than the images of Nôtre Dame being attacked by the flames was to see French people weeping in the streets of Paris. Old, young, people of many different cultures and backgrounds, but especially Catholics for whom this is a uniquely sacred place, all were saying that this is a tragedy for France.

But the first thing to say is that thank God, no one appears to have been killed or injured thus far by this huge destructive fire. We must keep the fire fighters and others plunged into this emergency in our thoughts tonight. Trying to save a medieval building from total collapse entails great risks to many people’s safety. But there is at least a real hope that the western parts of the Cathedral with its twin towers may have escaped the worst and can be conserved. Meanwhile, our hearts go out to the people of France tonight. Like them we are stunned by this calamity that has overtaken them

I’ve visited Nôtre Dame often. I never went to Paris without venturing inside this miracle of a gothic cathedral. It was never a peaceful place - all year round crowds surged through the building,
laughing, chattering, taking selfies on their mobile phones...and yet they came in their millions,
drawn here by something many of them could not have articulated but which religious faith wants to describe in terms of the mystery of God. No English cathedral attracts visitors in such phenomenal numbers (though some might perhaps, if they did not charge for entry). It was wonderful to think that for the vast majority of tourists, coming to Paris without visiting its cathedral was unthinkable.

This isn’t the place to lament the celebrated treasures of Nôtre Dame that will have been lost, or at least severely damaged. It’s too early to tell how much of the glorious medieval glass has survived, or the sculptures or the furnishings or the organ. The fabric itself will be capable of being reconstructed much as it appeared before; after all, this was precisely what the great nineteenth century architect Viollet le Duc achieved when the French authorities realised that the Cathedral was falling down and would soon be beyond repair. The sacred space can be reimagined, but it’s the contents that are irreplaceable.

We need to understand what Nôtre Dame symbolises for the people of France. It’s similar to the emblematic significance of St Paul’s Cathedral for the English. The famous image of St Paul’s rising serenely above the fires and smoke of wartime London that did not destroy it (though the nation feared for its survival) suggest what France is feeling tonight. But I think the French feel their attachment to Nôtre Dame even more intensely. For all its laicité, France has a powerful feeling for its great Catholic shrines. Emotionally if not spiritually, for the French, Nôtre Dame is the greatest of them all.

This is because the Cathedral has stood “strong and stable” (forgive me) over so many centuries, never yielding to the often chaotic events of France’s turbulent history, surviving war, defeat, revolution, civil unrest and neglect in ways that we English haven’t experienced to quite the same extent. It’s not too much to say that Nôtre Dame symbolises the soul of France. It is its mystic heart, if you like, its collective memory reaching back into the middle ages, and even beyond to late antiquity when her first saints worshipped and evangelised on this very site in the former Roman city. This is why this catastrophe will be felt far beyond Paris, right across the country, right across Europe, right across the world not only by the French but by everyone who loves France. As President Macron said tonight, Notre Dame is part of us alL

I learned a little about what happens to a community when fire engulfs its cathedral. I’m thinking of course of Coventry Cathedral where I worked as a canon for eight years. In 1987 when it celebrated the silver jubilee of the new Cathedral, there were plenty of people who could tell stories about the night of 14 November 1940 when Luftwaffe incendiary bombs burned the medieval church of St Michael. The new building seemed a palpable symbol of resurrection, while the ruins of the old Cathedral became a symbol of forgiveness, reconciliation and hope. TO THE GLORY OF GOD THIS CATHEDRAL BURNED AND IS REBUILT says the striking inscription set in big brass letters into the nave floor of the new building. I was always deeply moved by those words.

What about Nôtre Dame? I’ve no doubt that even tonight, many people will already be thinking about what happens next. This is an especially cruel blow to have struck this great Cathedral during the holiest season of the chuch year, just when the liturgies of Holy Week had begun to be celebrated, and the days were building up to the great Paschal Triduum from Maundy Thursday to Easter.

Yes, crucifixion comes into things. But to recognise this on Holy Monday is the clue to what must follow. There will be a resurrection of Nôtre Dame, of that we can be as certain as that we shall celebrate Easter at the culmination of this Holy Week. How and when will be questions that will need to be debated for a long time. But catholic France will not lose hope as a result of this terrible fire. What feels tonight like an irrecoverable attack on a cherished holy place is, from a larger perspective another opportunity for resurrection to be experienced. When St Paul’s burned in the Great Fire of London, a new splendour rose out of the ashes. So it was at York Minster (twice). So it was at Coventry. So it will be in Paris.

These words from one of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible were important to those who oversaw the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral after its destruction. They were spoken to the despondent exiles who returned from Babylon to Judah to find that their beloved temple was in ruins. Could it ever rise again? The prophet raises their spirits to stir them into action with a promise of hope. “The latter glory shall be greater more than it was before, says the Lord of hosts, and in this place I will give prosperity” (Haggai 2.9). As the Psalm says, “Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” Tonight must be about new life as well as death. Which is why the great word of Easter must be the last one on this evening of tears and lament: RESURGAM!

Afterthought on Tuesday morning. Thank God the fire is contained, and the core of the medieval fabric is still standing. The relics have been saved, including the Crown of Thorns, and some of the art works. The firefighters have done a magnificent job, risking their lives for a cathedral they love. Already thoughts are turning towards the rebuilding of the Cathedral and one benefactor has pledged a hundred million euros. Christians in Paris will go on observing Holy Week, but with a new intensity now, and with many tears - but, I think, with a stronger sense of resurrection hope than ever. We feel for them and pray for them today. For now, we are all Parisians.

The Ordination of Women as Priests - 25 Years On

This is one of a handful of photos that mean more to me than I can say.

It was taken at Coventry Cathedral on 11 May 1994. You will probably guess the occasion: the ordination of the first female priests in the Diocese of Coventry. And what a celebration it was! I've regularly attended glorious liturgy in no fewer than four cathedrals. But I knew on that day that this was a ceremony that would not just live on bathed in a kind of generalised afterglow. I knew that it would be unforgettable in its detail as well. Such as singing "Be still for the Spirit of the Lord is moving in this place" and, for once, truly recognising that she was.

When you are a cathedral precentor, as I was then, you train yourself to know the liturgy in all its particulars, to become familiar with the soul of it, inhabit it from the inside. Even when you have written the rite yourself, as you do on many a special occasion, you still have to learn the grain of it, intuit how it is going to "feel" in the particular liturgical space it's devised for, how the community that gathers together to celebrate is likely to respond to the words and actions, the silences and the music that you have so carefully devised for it.

We all knew that this ordination of women would be a once-for-all event, unrepeatable as a history-making act of worship. For many months I worked on the service with a small planning group of women who were due to be ordained, together with Bishop Simon Barrington-Ward and Director of Ordinands Canon, now Bishop, Mark Bryant. That preparation process was a remarkable experience in itself, both for the joy of looking forward to a great event in the life of the church and of the ordinands and their families, and for the deep sensitivity that was felt towards those who could not accept the validity of their ordination and for whom this ordination day would be one not of joy but of pain. 

I want to pay tribute to one of them in particular, Barbara Baisley who was then chaplain at Warwick University and the Dean of Women's Ministry in the Diocese. She and her husband George had both been students of mine at Salisbury (indeed, her brother Robin taught me English at school). I mention Barbara not only because of the skilled way she led those women through the delicate (and for some, highly controversial) process of becoming priests, but because she died a few years afterwards, long before her time. I also remember that a curate in the Diocese at that time by the name of Justin Welby joined the planning group in order to get a feel for how a major liturgical event is planned in a cathedral. I recall that he had his own gentle wisdom to contribute to the process.

All this was twenty-five years ago. It was in March 1994 that the first female priests were ordained in Bristol Cathedral. For those of us who had long wished and prayed for our church to take this step and had campaigned for it, the outcome of the vote in General Synod on 11 November 1992 was also a night to remember. That day, Armistice Day, is also the birthday of our youngest daughter who was nine that year. So we deferred the family fireworks that year by a few days, and as soon as Archbishop George Carey had announced the result of the vote, and we had taken it in (and shed a few tears of relief), we went out in the garden to light rockets and sparklers to celebrate what felt like a double birthday. 

As (now Archbishop) Justin Welby said this week, the contribution female priests have made to the life of the Church of England has been immeasurable. Women are now occupying every conceivable role in the church as priests: as chaplains and bishops, area deans and archdeacons, incumbents and cathedral deans. We had our ups and downs in the General Synod I was part of when it came to the question of female bishops. I won't say all that is forgotten - we mustn't airbrush out of history or our present experience the pain of those who dissent from these decisions, nor the fact that many of our sister churches have not taken these steps. My first cousin made the journey from Anglican to Roman Catholic priesthood because of the ordination of women as priests, and that made it a family as well as a church matter. Like #Brexit, you feel things in more pointed ways when they intrude upon your personal relationships. (But he and I have always remained good friends and colleagues in ministry, I'm glad to say.)

While I was taking part in that service 25 years ago, I thought back to my own memories of ordination in 1975 and 76. Ordination services have that effect on us who are deacons and priests, and it's a good thing that we're reminded of our ordination vows from time to time (even in retirement). But I had - I have - a very specific memory of the night before I was ordained deacon. Our Bishop (of Oxford - Kenneth Woollcombe) saw each of us for an hour that day. What he said to me would be imprinted on my memory for a lifetime.

The Bishop had led the campaign in General Synod that year in support of the resolution that "there are no theological objections to the ordination of women". He said to me: "Michael, you know what the Synod has resolved this year. From now on, everyone who is ordained as a deacon and thereby becomes an officer of the Church of England understands that this is the publicly stated position of our church. You must not say that the rules were changed during your public ministry. If you can't be content with that, now is the time to step back from receiving holy orders tomorrow." I imagine he said the same to all the ordinands. (But perhaps he thought I might have concerns about male "headship", trained as I was at a conservative evangelical theological college - whose last Principal, Emma Ineson, has just been ordained a bishop!). 

I've often thought back to that interview, and how influential it was, not in coming to a conclusion I'd already embraced, but in having the confidence to speak up for it publicly. It was my first experience of facing the reality of diversity in our church and learning to see it as a gift that enriches and ennobles us all. But I'm also trying to learn what Justin Welby has taught us to see as "good disagreement", how to listen carefully, practise generosity and charity alongside holding deeply to this and other matters of conviction (I'll not mention the B****t word a second time).

The Church of England still has a long way to go before it can claim to be a genuinely diverse institution. In particular, we are a long way from recognising and celebrating committed gay relationships as joyous, God-given and loving, let alone affirming and solemnising same-sex marriage - as we must, I believe, soon. Regular readers of this blog will know that I've tried to stand with my LGBT friends as they find a place of genuine, unreserved acceptance in our church. If I began to discern anywhere how we must all work tirelessly to become a more just, more equal, more caring church, it was at that marvellous ordination service in Coventry in 1994. 

Thank you to the women in the diaconate, priesthood and episcopate with whom it's been, and continues to be, such an inspiration to serve in the public ministry of the church of God. This silver anniversary brings fond memories of past ordained female friends and colleagues "who rejoice with us but on another shore and in a greater light", "those angel faces I have loved long since and lost awhile". And to those ordained women who read these words, congratulations to each one of you. This blog comes with gratitude, admiration, prayers and expectancy for all that is yet to be in the next quarter of a century.

AMDG

*** I want to add a postscript to this blog in the light of Twitter comments it’s received so far. 

One person reminded us that it is too easy to simply celebrate  without acknowledging the cost born mostly by women. An acknowledgment of the pain caused needs to go alongside a celebration of where we have got to. It is too easy to bypass the former. Another added: true, and it still goes on. Until the Institution recognises how the barriers it has imposed inhibit the full flourishing of women’s ordained ministry the cost will continue unjustly.

I responded: Yes. I can see that for all its good intentions, this [my blog] is a man’s perspective who perhaps wants too much for it all to be well. Or wants it prematurely, before real healing has had time to happen? Or doesn’t see the injustices that are still being perpetrated in our church? I wish I’d written more sensitively in the light of this. I’m aware how much this is also true for LGBT clergy in our church. We say we intend to listen and learn from people’s experience but in practice the Church goes on “othering” those who don’t fit its theological template. The recent disinvitation of bishops’ same-sex spouses to the Lambeth Conference was a case in point (the website has now removed that offending parenthesis). Nevertheless I still want the church to rejoice with and for its women who are deacons, priests and bishops, however long the road ahead that we must continue to travel.

Well done Coventry!

30 years ago this year, Coventry won the FA Cup Final. The city went wild with delight. It was said that a quarter of a million people were out on the streets to welcome their team home. Coventry was awash with sky-blue. The newly-hung cathedral bells, not yet formally dedicated, rang out for the first time to celebrate. No-one who was there will ever forget that weekend.

It's also 30 years since our family moved to Coventry. I went there to take up a post as residentiary canon at the Cathedral. I was installed on 10 May, the Sunday before the Big Match. In my sermon I wished the Sky Blues well at Wembley. There was hollow laughter, I recall. Who'd have thought that I of all people would be aware of an upcoming football event? And who'd have thought that Coventry had any chance of defeating Spurs who had won the trophy twice in the previous seven seasons?

And now, exactly three decades later, Coventry is once again walking tall. The city has been named UK Capital of Culture 2021. It deserves the honour. I can say that as someone who has known it well. We spent eight happy years there. It's where our children mostly grew up, so we have always thought fondly of the city as, in a sense, still "ours". (That's also true, by the way, of another of the 2021 candidate cities, Sunderland, where we have lots of family connections. They too put up a first-rate bid and it's a pity that when it comes to the Capital of Culture, it can't be a case of Alice's oft-quoted words "all have won, so all must have prizes".)

A few years ago I blogged about going back to Coventry. That occasion was the golden jubilee of the consecration of the "new" Coventry Cathedral in 1962. As I wrote then, I'd been one of the millions who'd visited the Cathedral that year. I was twelve when my parents took me. I can vividly recall my impressions on that late spring day, most of all of Graham Sutherland's huge tapestry of Christ in Glory, John Piper's marvellous coloured glass in the baptistery, and not least, looking down at my own reflection in the black mirror-like surface of the nave floor. I was not a religious boy in those days, but I was both stirred and moved by that great building. It seemed to speak beyond itself to something bigger and more expansive than I think I'd ever known. Looking back, I guess it was one of my early spiritual experiences, an intimation of resurrection. Twenty-five years later, one of my first jobs at the Cathedral was to organise the silver jubilee celebrations.

Living there, I became fascinated by this city of paradoxes. There was something homely and familiar about its medieval streets, so Warwickshire, so quintessentially England. Yet the pre-war planners (quoting Tennyson's "the old order changeth, giving place to new") had already laid waste to Butchers' Row, what we would now regard as a priceless piece of heritage townscape comparable to the Shambles in York). And what they didn't destroy, the Luftwaffe made swift work of on that terrible night of bombing on 14 November 1940, codenamed "Operation Moonlight Sonata". What does it do to a city to have been reduced to ashes, to be the only one in Britain whose cathedral was destroyed by enemy action?

After the war, a brave new city arose like a phoenix. Ancient and modern stood inextricably bound together in both the way the city was re-engineered, and in the experience of its citizens. So much was symbolised by the old and new cathedrals standing side by side, or rather, in these two physical expressions of one single Cathedral. With the exception of the Cathedral, the architecture of the 1950s and 60s has not fared as well as what survives of the middle ages. Perhaps Coventry was rebuilt in too much of a hurry. These days the city is not the gleaming emblem of modernity it once was. Its industries experienced a steep decline from the late 1970s so that by the time I was living there, unemployment was high and the future of its manufacturing industries looked bleak.

Yet somehow, the spirit of Coventrians was not broken by this turnabout in its fortunes. Yes, they could be good at looking west to Birmingham and envying the seemingly unstoppable success of their near neighbour. (Coventry is to Birmingham as Sunderland is to Newcastle and Bradford is to Leeds - these pairings of cities with very different characteristics are an intriguing aspect of modern Britain.) But look at what the new Commonwealth immigrants who came to work in Coventry after the war brought to the city. I found I was living in one of the most vibrant, multicultural places I'd ever known. My suburban assumptions about what it meant to be British were challenged like never before or since. We loved visiting the places of worship of other faith communities and getting to know our warm-hearted, hospitable hosts. I think that it was there that I consciously began trying to think of myself, in a famous if much maligned phrase, as a "citizen of the world".

It's important that "City of Culture" is interpreted in the widest possible way. Hull has demonstrated this most successfully in 2017 and we salute that city. Culture is a slippery word that can quickly take on a whiff of elitism if we aren't careful. The point about culture is that it is essentially demotic in character. This is because it is about what has formed and made us to be the people, the societies, the communities we are, how we have been grown. That's much more than simply a matter of museums and libraries, literature and poetry, art and architecture. Somehow, I have a hunch that the people of Coventry will be very good at sharing who and what they are, and how they have travelled together as a city across the centuries and through the recent past into the present.

As for what we call culture in the more traditional sense, there is more than enough to make the trip to Coventry worth while. Many have pointed out that Hull and Coventry (together with my own village of Haydon Bridge) have in common the poet Philip Larkin. One of the best twentieth century English poets, while he lived and worked in Hull, it was in Coventry that he was born. I have to say that in my time, Coventry had not done nearly as much as Hull to honour him, so I hope 2021 will put that right. Similarly, though less noticed, the Nuneaton-born Victorian novelist George Eliot, as great in her century as Larkin was in his, also lived in Coventry. Her greatest novel Middlemarch ("the magnificent book that...is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" said Virginia Woolf) is very probably based on Coventry.

I could go on to write about the legendary Leofric and Godiva, Coventry's history as one of England's great medieval cities, its industrial heritage, its Herbert Art Gallery and Motor Museum, to say nothing of the Cathedral itself which constitutes one of the best expressions of mid-twentieth century artistry and craftsmanship in England. I could mention the rich diversity of performing arts in the city in both dedicated venues and in the streets and squares. I could write about the two universities that contribute so much to Coventry's intellectual and cultural landscape. And I could write about how Coventry has become a symbol of international reconciliation and peace-making that has evoked the admiration of people across the world.

But most of all, it's the people who make the place. When it was announced that Coventry had won their bid to be City of Culture, I was touched to hear ordinary Coventry people speak about their city and why they loved it. I'm sure the citizens of all five shortlisted cities would have said the same of theirs. Perhaps Coventry, with its cosmopolitan and internationalist outlook, can represent the best of what they would have contributed to this celebration of all that we cherish and are proud of in the culture of these islands.

A final thought. Why can't we have a UK City of Culture every year? The quality of this year's bids shows how much potential there is across the nation to promote art, heritage, tourism and regeneration. We need more local celebrations like this to shine a light on the cultural riches of the UK's towns and cities outside London - not just on places but on their communities. It would be a modest enough claim on central funds. Thanks to the enterprise of their citizens, Hull and Coventry show how a little can go a very long way. Let's go for it, and let Sunderland have the next turn in 2022.

A Sermon in Stone: on being back in Coventry Cathedral

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Castro: Memories of Cuba and a Crisis

So Fidel Castro has died.

You have to be at least sixty to recall how his name instilled dread during those thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. At the age of twelve, I was too young to understand the Cold War and why the Soviets planned to install ballistic missiles on Cuba 90 miles from the shore of Florida. I don't recall that anyone at school helped us youngsters to comprehend it, and not having a television, the only visual content I had to go on were grainy images of warships in the ocean on the front page of the Daily Telegraph.

But I do remember, very vividly, what those days were like. On my crystal set I would listen to the BBC Home Service each day and feel the increasing sense of gravity in the way Alvar Lidell and his colleagues read the headlines. From what I was hearing, the world stood on the brink of nuclear war and all because three men, Kruschev, Kennedy and Castro were embroiled in a stand-off that focused on a Caribbean island far away. Each night I would turn the light off and pull the bedclothes over my head somehow feeling protected and safe, while wondering if the world would still be there when I woke up next day. It was my first real awareness of fear.

We all have to learn at some stage in our lives what it means to be afraid. I can be grateful that I learned it a lot later than some. But even when the crisis was over and the world breathed a collective sigh of relief, the status quo ante was never going altogether to be restored. Once you have learned fear, it's always there somewhere inside you, ready to be reawakened by the next crisis that comes along. The Cold War era provided plenty of opportunity for this. Not many years later, we had a screening at school of the film The War Game, a BBC docu-drama that was considered too frightening to be broadcast on TV. What shook me in that now famous film was the way in which the apocalyptic suddenly explodes on to the ordinary, on to streets and homes that looked utterly familiar from my upbringing in the London suburbs. Memories of Castro and Cuba came flooding back. By then I had found Christian faith. I recall that evening sitting on the top deck of the 102 bus that was taking me home praying with a fervour I have seldom equalled since.

I never dreamed I would one day travel to Cuba. But in 1991 when I was working at Coventry Cathedral, I was invited to go to Havana by the Anglican Bishop of the island to present a Cross of Nails to the Cathedral. Cuban Anglicans, supported by Episcopalians in Florida and other American states were doing excellent work in building bridges with local groups of revolutionary workers. They wanted to associate this with the Cross of Nails, Coventry's famous symbol of reconciliation and peace-making. The end-game was to be the lifting of the American embargo which was increasingly regarded on both sides of the water (apart from militant Cuban expats) as anachronistic and punitive.

Getting to Cuba in those days was a bit of a joke. I had been leading a choir tour of Jamaica, just a hop and a skip from Cuba. I had to fly via Miami. Officially in the days of the embargo, no US flights were allowed into Havana but it was an open secret that each morning in the small hours, unlisted flights would make the short journey. At Miami I had to sign an undertaking not to spend US dollars in the island. I wondered why, as a British citizen, I was subject to US law. Explaining at check-in that the large steel Cross of Nails I was carrying was not a Damoclean weapon but a religious symbol taxed my powers of persuasion to the full. The plane was full of Cubans returning home to see their families. The safety briefing seemed more casual than usual as if no-one really cared about this flight-that-shouldn't-be-happening. Once airborne it was a bumpy hour that ended with a sickening thud as the plane dropped heavily on to the runway at Havana.

I loved Cuba. The Bishop and the Cathedral community could not have been more hospitable. Havana is a beautiful colonial city with a marvellous array of heritage buildings which, because of the embargo, have not been razed to the ground in the name of "progress". Huge Buicks, Pontiacs and Cadillacs roamed the streets, rusting, ancient and colourful, their chromium glory faded somewhat, oddly patched up with ill-fitting parts, but reminiscent of Hollywood's golden days.

I could tell you about the (almost empty) Museum of the Revolution, the crumbling baroque churches, the beach at Varadero where the Bishop on a whim decided we must spend a day, the watering hole Ernest Hemingway would frequent, and the sugar processing plant we visited (I'd hoped to go to a cigar factory but this was said to trespass on state secrecy). Nowadays the island is well-known to travellers in the Caribbean, but 25 years ago it all seemed exotic and faintly deviant because of the difficulties westerners encountered in getting there.

But what I most fondly recall were the streets thronged with beautiful people - so many of them young - in whose faces I read confidence and contentment despite the difficulties the country was facing. We spent a day with a cohort of students who were helping build an apartment block in downtown Havana. Perched on concrete beams and upturned crates, we drank strong coffee and listened to them as they told us about their lives. They were warm and friendly, grateful for our interest. They were proud of what Cuba had achieved against all the odds. They pointed to a poster on the wall of Raul Castro, Fidel's younger brother and Vice-President who had overseen the development of Cuba's economy since the revolution in 1959. They spoke proudly of its health and education systems. They told us that their country had one of the highest literacy rates in the world; and if you were going to fall ill, Cuba was the place to do it. They told us that they were all atheists, but they appreciated the support of the churches and were willing to work with anyone for the welfare of their people.

I knew not to make hasty judgments on the basis of a week's visit. While there was a lot to be impressed by, there were also questions that wouldn't go away - about the limits placed on the personal freedoms most of us take for granted, about the regime's attitude to religion, the media and human rights, about a political system whose successes seemed to come at great cost to those who lived under it. But the biggest problem appeared to be the iron fist of their mighty neighbour across the Straits of Florida. If only the USA could begin a more constructive conversation with Cuba, based less on the stick and more on the carrot. Well, that would never have been easy with the memory of 1962 still vivid in the minds of the leadership. It's to Barack Obama's credit that at long last, the relationship has begun to be repaired. We must now hope that Donald Trump will not bring back the bad old days.

Today there have been reports of celebrations in the streets of Miami at the news of Castro's death. You can understand the feelings of the expat community, I suppose. But it still seems an oddly inappropriate response to a death, however much that particular constituency loathed the Cuban revolutionary and all that he stood for. But in the face of unhealed memories, wouldn't it be better to stop and reflect? Ernest Hemingway wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls in Havana in 1940. He quotes John Donne in the novel's epigraph (in the original script): "Any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

As I think back to those thirteen days in 1962 and a youngster's brush with mortality, I find myself pondering past and present once again. I am thinking and praying, not without a certain sense of foreboding, about a future that looks increasingly uncertain. Castro the dictator was undoubtedly a flawed leader with a very partial vision of the things that make for peace. But that he had a profound influence on twentieth century history can't be denied. There are lessons to be learned if we want to build a better, safer world for our children and grandchildren to inherit. "Those who fail to remember the past are condemned to repeat it" said George Santayana in a saying made famous by Winston Churchill. That seems more true than ever on a day when memories are rekindled as another name passes into history.