"The best things just happen to you."

It was the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who said that. I came across it while reading an intriguing book** by the child psychotherapist Adam Phillips. He is writing about how a lot of learning happens, not as a result of formal schooling but through hints and nudges. He means the things that "just happen" to us, inconsequential in themselves but for the fact that we remember them and find ourselves returning to them in our thoughts and reflections, even find that our lives were changed because of them.

He quotes a fellow philosopher who recalls a walk Wittgenstein and he were on. Wittgenstein "had seen a play, a third-rate, poor play, when he was twenty-two. One detail in that play had made a powerful impression on him.  It was a trifle. But here some peasant, some-ne'er-do well says in the play: 'Nothing can hurt me.' That remark went through him and now he remembers it. It started things you can't tell. The most important things just happen to you."

I stopped reading to think about that. Is it true, I asked myself? The most important things Wittgenstein says, not just happy conjunctions of events that please us but things that really matter, or as we might say, things of ultimate concern. Bishop Ian Ramsey of Durham, a philosopher of religion who was much influenced by Wittgenstein, spoke about disclosure experiences, "when the penny drops". Carl Gustav Jung would never use the language of coincidences. For him, the fact that we notice them at all, pay attention even fleetingly to how events have come together in a particular way, confers significance on them, gives them meaning. There are no coincidences. If they are important and matter to us, there are only synchronicities.

Personal experience has to be the test of Wittgenstein's dictum. What does my own memory tell me about this? How have the things that "just happen" been significant, touched my life in some way? Looking back over six years of blogging, I find I've mentioned some of them. For example: my love of maths that led me to read it at university; the part music has played in my life for as long as I can remember; the books in childhood that influenced me; my lifelong commitment to the continent of Europe that comes out of my having a British father and a German-Jewish mother; memories of Christmas past; and much more recently, the birth of my first grandson. In that last blog, I wrote about how I would always remember where I was and what I was doing when I heard that news. Most of us can tell similar stories about how certain events impinged on us: when our team won the Cup Final, say, or when we heard the news that someone close to us had died. Maybe that's one criterion by which we measure the importance that certain events hold for us, that in an instant, our lives as they were then seem captured as in a photograph.

But none of those can be described strictly speaking as "chance". They belong to contexts that up to a point were already shaped by upbringing or environment. What about the events that at the time seemed to "happen" out of the blue, unforeseen, unforeseeable, yet never forgotten? I've had to think about that today, but here are three I've come up with.

The first is a very archaic memory indeed, probably my earliest, but it's as clear as anything I can recall. We were in Germany where my mother needed to travel regularly to sort out her family's affairs after the war. My parents had found lodgings under the eaves in a back street of Düsseldorf, my mother's home town. My mother told me once that I could not have been more than just over two years old when we stayed there. What I remember was seeing the outline of a church tower and spire out of the window not far away. It was black, dramatically silhouetted against the sky. That evening, something awoke me. It was the sound of church bells being rung in that tower - not change-ringing as in England, but that random tolling of great heavy bells against one other that every European traveller has heard on a Sunday morning.

To me that sound seemed to penetrate my being from top to bottom. This primitive sound that seemed to batter my heart was deeply frightening, even dread-ful, yet somehow, in a way I didn't yet have words for, enticing as well. It felt as if it mattered. Was it my first encounter with that mysterium tremens et fascinans which is how some writers have characterised religion? That it was my earliest conscious religious experience I now don't doubt though I couldn't have described it in that way for many years. And while it was one of the most important experiences of my life, it did "just happen". It still colours the way I think about the Divine, that as the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, "it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God". It taught me even at that tender age that religion is a serious business, not a plaything or a hobby.

The second event was altogether happier. I was in my early twenties, arriving at theological college to begin training for ordained ministry. This was a few days before term was due to start. My longsuffering parish priest in London had kindly agreed to transport my books and me to the college in his Mini-Traveller and help me settle into my room. We arrived and parked the car. No-one was around except for a young man of about my age who was busy painting a side door at the foot of a staircase that led up into the building. With the warmest of smiles he explained that he too had arrived early and was busy making himself useful. By the end of the afternoon I was established in a room next to his. Why is that day etched on my memory? Because the person concerned quickly became my closest friend and has remained so for the best part of half a century. We still talk about that day we met for the first time when our friendship was born: a time of gifts if ever there was one. The only detail that maddeningly escapes me is the colour of the paint on that door. I must ask him.

My third reminiscence is about my love of photography. By now I was in my fifties. My youngest daughter had asked for a camera for Christmas, so we had bought her a digital compact. I had no interest in photography at that stage (so much so that on a pilgrimage to Israel-Palestine a few years before, I was the only person not to bring a camera. When asked why not, I pompously replied that for me, images were best encapsulated in words, so I was keeping a journal instead.) I thought nothing more about my daughter's camera until she told us that she didn't want a digital after all, so would I buy it off her so that she could get a traditional film camera instead? I agreed. It lay around unused for a while. But then I got to thinking, I've paid good money for that instrument. Maybe it's time I started using it. Living as I did in Durham's world heritage site with one of the world's greatest buildings a few yards away across the garden, I began to realise what opportunities for photography were all around me. The rest as they say is history. I can't now imagine a life without photography, just as I can't imagine one without music. And if I'm asked where I learned what I've been able to grasp as a photographer, I always say: Durham Cathedral was my teacher.

I think I can say that all three of these stories are about what "just happened". None could have been foreseen or planned for. And all three have been amongst the most important experiences of my life. There are many more, not all of which it would be right to blog about. What matters is the spiritual exercise of asking the question in the first place. An earlier generation of spiritual guides like the great eighteenth century French priest Jean-Pierre de Caussade spoke about how we must reflect often on divine Providence, discerning how God comes to us in "the sacrament of the present moment". That's the theme of one of the best English hymns from the same century, William Cowper's God moves in a mysterious way. Maybe I'll blog about that one day. For now, enough to affirm that whether in light or in shadow, our experiences can convey gifts that transcend the circumstances themselves and, even if we don't know it at the time, prove with hindsight to have transformed us in some way.

Yes, "the best things just happen to you." But we must practise how to pay attention and notice them. Who knows what has passed unnoticed in front of us a thousand times a day with the potential to give us something wonderful, undreamed of, and we missed it? That's the question I find myself asking late in life. It's not about regrets but nurturing a thirst to be more alive, being as fully present to the gift that I am alive at all as it's possible to be. I am a slow learner, but I can now add Ludwig Wittgenstein (and Adam Phillips) to the lengthening list of wise teachers to whom to be grateful. 

 

PS The friend I wrote about above has just read this, and sent me some lines from Mary Oliver:

Let me
keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

**Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery, London (Faber), 1998, p70. 

The Silence That Sings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Memoriam: Bob Jeffery, Priest, Mentor, Friend

There are just a few people in our adult lifetimes who have had a direct and profound influence on us. I think of five who, when I was still plausibly a young man, helped form me as a Christian, a priest and a human being. The part they played in shaping my mind, my spirituality and my ministry has been immense. The debt I owe them all is incalculable. Only one of them is still alive.

The four others were all priests. The last of these great souls died just before Christmas, Robert Martin Colquhoun Jeffery.** To us, he was simply "Bob". Our paths crossed quite by chance if there is such a thing. In 1974, I completed my theological training and got married. We moved back to Oxford where I was beginning postgraduate research. Looking for a place to live, we stumbled across a little detached house in Headington not far from the Oxford by-pass. The rent was absurdly low. It belonged to an academic (a theologian as it happened) who lived abroad and was looking for suitable tenants to keep the house warm for her. So Lyndworth Close became our first married home.

The bishop had decided that my getting married and being ordained in the same summer was too much. So we looked for a church to attend. By great good fortune, the incumbent of our parish church in Old Headington was one Bob Jeffery. So we started going there, and never looked back. I was ordained beneath the Norman chancel arch of that church the following year and served as a non-stipendiary curate in the Cowley Deanery of which Bob was the Rural Dean.


I said we never looked back. (Maybe I'd better revert to the first person singular and let my wife speak for herself if she wants to.)  Our time at St Andrew's Headington was a bigger watershed than it may sound. For the previous decade I had been immersed in the conservative evangelicalism of my school and college Christian Union. I owe a great deal to that experience, thanks to which I came to a consciously articulated Christian faith. I trained at an evangelical theological college. I assumed that I would minister for life in that Reformed tradition, never dreaming that I could inhabit any other way of being Christian.

Bob opened up that "other way". He did not set out to influence me or change me. He was a genuine liberal catholic (as he described himself then - we would call him an affirming catholic nowadays), with an outlook that was generous enough to believe in giving people space to develop and grow in their God-given way. The liturgy was very different from what I was used to. St Andrew's had an Anglo-Catholic history so the ceremonial seemed colourful and "advanced" by my austere protestant criteria. But to Bob, the human face of the church service was no less important than the liturgy. He believed that the church should present an intelligent, properly informed Christianity that belonged to the contemporary world. His sermons were always theological but in no way academic: his gospel exemplified an applied, pastoral wisdom. It mattered to him that the church should speak into human life in all its complexity and face outwards in mission and the pursuit of justice in society.  

It did not take long to feel at home there. Bob and Ruth made us welcome in their grand old vicarage. There was never any pretence at formality: Bob famously didn't care much about his appearance, and if he had, his four lively fun-loving young children would soon have pricked any bubble of self-importance. Indeed, I never knew anyone who was less self-important or concerned about looking the part and conforming to expectations. He was comfortable in his own skin. That by itself taught me a great deal.

I had so much to learn about ministry, about life, about myself. Bob and the parish were great tutors. I think he was somewhat bemused by my conservative theology, and we had endless conversations about what it meant to take the Bible seriously. "I'm a radical biblical man" he said to me early on, by which he meant that for him the scriptures were as central as they were to any evangelical, but it all depended on how we read and interpreted the text. Gradually, I became weaned off biblical inerrancy and the conservative theology I'd inhabited for a decade. Bob told me not to worry about ceremonial and eucharistic vestments: they were adiaphora he said, not of ultimate importance. If I preferred not to wear them, that was ok by him. Needless to say, because I did not feel under pressure, it was no time at all before I asked him to show me how to wear the alb, stole and chasuble and how to lay them out in the sacristy.

Without, I think, being aware of it, he taught me about "the beauty of holiness" and the genius of the English Church in exemplifying it. He suggested I might like to have a copy of Percy Dearmer's The Parson's Handbook, the classic manual of liturgical practice as seventeenth century Anglicanism had construed it. When I was ordained priest, he gave me Wagner's Parsifal in a boxed set of five LPs with an image of a beautiful medieval chalice on the front. That chalice crystallised for me the realisation that I had embraced sacramentalism and was becoming catholic in my outlook. Something had shifted inside me, irrevocably.

Books were a frequent topic of conversation. Bob would throw literature at me across his study, enthusing about this or that writer. Thanks to him, I started to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ronald Gregor-Smith and Jürgen Moltmann (though he wasn't sure whether Moltmann would endure). He put me on to the French post-Reformation spiritual writers: Jean Pierre de Caussade was his favourite ("why have so few clergy ever heard of him?" he grumbled, pretending not to know that I was one of them). He told me to meditate on his Self Abandonment to Divine Providence on my retreat before being ordained priest. He insisted that I read Roland Allen's book Missionary Methods - St Paul's or Ours? "You want to know how to preach?" he asked one day (surely a slanted comment on my pulpit performance to date). "Read the sermons of Austin Farrer." I did, and tried to learn how to be profound and concise at the same time.

Stephen Platten, who went on become Bishop of Wakefield, came to Headington as curate during the same year as me. The three of us met each week for a staff meeting and got on famously. There was a lot of laughter. Bob seemed to know, or know about, everyone in the C of E and would regale us with the latest ecclesiastical gossip. "Lots of problems there" he would declare about clergy who, shall we say, had got into difficulty. But soon the meeting turned to theology, ethics, biblical interpretation or whatever else had struck any of us during the preceding week. After about two hours of energetic discussion and the consumption of much coffee, he would rein us in and tell us it was time to turn our minds to  the parish.

And here his thoroughgoing pastoral-theological outlook came to the fore. He took trouble to get to know the parish well - and by "parish" he meant not only or even primarily the worshipping congregation but the entire geography for which, as a C of E incumbent, he had the cure of souls. He taught me that the occasional offices - baptisms, weddings and funerals - were not a distraction from the parish priest's role but lay at the heart of it, how these pastoral encounters were crucially important to people at the key moments of their lives. He taught me to get to know the institutions of the parish such as the schools, hospitals and businesses. He taught me to be conscientious about visiting people in their homes, but always with a clear purpose in mind. He taught me to cultivate what he called "scarcity value" - to be visible without being spending too long in any one place. When I became an incumbent a few years later, and after that a cathedral priest, I realised how much I owed to Bob's way of doing things.

Bob's kindness continued after we left Oxford. He had a gift for friendship that was lifelong. He came to all my own "rites of passage", the celebrations each new phase of my ministry as a parish priest, cathedral canon and then as dean, first in Sheffield and then Durham. He said he would always be on the end of a phone if I needed help or advice, and it was hugely reassuring to know that he was there. He was especially pleased that I was appointed to Durham because he had been ordained in the Cathedral himself and had served as a curate in a densely urban parish in Sunderland. "All the best clergy have served in the North East" he said when we went to Alnwick in 1982. In 2011, he asked if he could celebrate the golden jubilee of his ordination as a priest in Durham Cathedral. Typically, he did not want to take a leading part in the liturgy. He asked Stephen to preside and me to preach. It was a beautiful occasion, full of warmth, friendship and good memories. The only sadness was that Ruth was not there to celebrate with us. She had died suddenly some years earlier, and we all knew what a loss she was to Bob, to their children and to all of us who knew her.

And now, Bob has gone to join her. We saw him last year when I was invited to go back to St Andrew's to preach. He was ill, and he knew that it was serious. But even in his discomfort he was his usual self: warm, wry, lively, intellectually alert, bemused at the latest church goings on, worried about the worsening state of the world and how faith was struggling to speak wisely into it. He talked about what he called the "end game" - his own. He told us he had planned his funeral at Christ Church Oxford where he had been Sub Dean. Later on, there would be a memorial service in Worcester Cathedral where he had been Dean. He wanted me to preach at it. I was moved to be asked. It hasn't taken place yet. I know that this will be one of those sermons that calls for the very best of me. I am wondering how I can do justice to Bob. Perhaps when you owe the kind of debt to someone you loved as I do, the words will come naturally.

One of Bob's lasting legacies is his recently published translation of Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ (the Penguin Classics edition). He had always loved this work and been influenced by it, though in his understated way he never spoke very much about his own spirituality, at least not to me. I guess that what we look for in our mentors and guides are those we can not only admire but imitate. And perhaps the people who have helped us most are those who have practised a lifetime of imitation themselves. I mean of course, the imitation of Christ who is their and our divine Exemplar and - why not put it like this? - our best and truest Mentor. I think Bob's translation of The Imitation tells us what mattered most to him in his long and productive life. 

I write as one of many who are more thankful than we can say to have known him. May he rest in peace.

**You can read a formal obituary here.