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!

Mary: an Advent Meditation

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

I had to study that poem at school. It was my first introduction to any great twentieth century poet. I've never forgotten it. Auden takes Breughel's painting The Fall of Icarus as an example: the ploughman carries on ploughing, and the ship that has somewhere to get to sails calmly on; and all this while a boy falls catastrophically out of the sky. Disaster strikes: someone you love dies, or you are diagnosed as being terminally ill, or your marriage breaks up, or you lose your job. And you wonder how, just outside your universe that is disintegrating, another, ordinary world just carries on uncaring, oblivious.

But about ecstasy the artists and poets are never wrong either, and it is the same truth. You are in the seventh heaven, surprised by joy: you fall in love, or find a new friendship, or have a child, or meet God. And not far away, the rest of the human race is not aware of you, still less cares about what for you is making creation sing. It is as if in both agony and ecstasy, time is attenuated, given a new quality, seems to stand still. Einstein's theory of relativity talks about dilation when space-time is distorted close to the speed of light. It takes on a new quality. But everybody else's "ordinary" time just carries on as it always has. In a sense, it's as if we are living in different worlds until the ecstasy subsides or the agony begins to be healed, and the extraordinary merges with the ordinary once more.

Paintings and sculptures of the Annunciation often depict this double world. Inside her house, the Virgin Mary is rapt in contemplation, heaven reflected in her face as she is overwhelmed by the power of the Most High that has come from beyond the farthest star to visit her. On the other side of the window sheep are grazing, people buy and sell in the streets of a town, a farmer gathers his harvest. Something of this is what I see hinted at in Josef Pyrz' sculpture of the Annunciation in Durham Cathedral's Galilee Chapel. Rapture, toughness, acceptance, pain even are written into her face and body in a physical, tactile way. I used to encourage visitors to caress the sculpture to gain a sense of the complex emotional and spiritual power of this marvellous piece.

 

Edwin Muir captures it like this:

Outside the window footsteps fall

Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way.
Sound's perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered tune.

But through the endless afternoon

These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.

Beauty and tragedy are the soil in which contemplatives are made. Mary knew both: beauty her encounter with the angel of the Annunciation; tragedy in the sword that pierced her heart as she gazed on her Son at Golgotha. But it needed more than beauty or tragedy to make her the one we honour as Theotokos the God-bearer. Many people experience beauty and tragedy but are none the wiser for it. Their souls are not enriched, their capacity for contemplation is not deepened. What then was Mary's secret?

I think it was her gift for openness to the new thing that God was doing. Words like sensitivity and awareness come to mind, the gift of realising that the world is, as they say on Lindisfarne, a thin place, and that on the other side of that almost transparent membrane lies another realm, the realm of the spiritual, the heavenly, the transcendent. You see into the life of things, to quote Wordsworth. It is what Moses turned aside to see in the blazing bush and what Elijah heard in the still small voice, and what Mother Julian of Norwich understood in the hazel-nut she held in her hand that, she said, only existed because God loved it. And what the mystics down the centuries teach us is that ordinary life can become transparent, if we learn to see it in a new way, train our faculties of sensitivity and awareness in order to discover the world as a sacrament. After all, that is precisely what we do each Sunday at the eucharist, when we take ordinary things and find them to be divine. Lesser annunciations, you might say, are waiting to happen all around us, waiting to show us the new thing that God wants to do in our lives.  
 

And what about us? God wants us, I think, to become like Mary: each of us a  theotokos, a bearer of God to others. Outside Salisbury Cathedral is a statue of Mary by Elizabeth Frink. It depicts her walking vigorously away from the Cathedral, not because she doesn't like the worship there, but because she is taking the good news to the world. This is the Walking Madonna, the Mary of the Magnificat whose contemplative vision has turned her into a woman of action who is passionate for justice, for a world where wrong is righted, the hungry fed and the downtrodden exalted.

Whatever annunciations we are given, whatever angel we glimpse when time stands still, whether it is tragedy or joyous rapture, agony or ecstasy, there is call to be obeyed. Behold the servant of the Lord: let it be to me according to thy word. So that when the time comes for the angel to depart from us, and we return to our ordinary days, it will be with God conceived, so to speak, within us, so that we can lovingly bear him and bring him forth to a world that longs to be happy and that needs him so much.

Ave Maria, gratia plena
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you, and blessed is the fruit of your womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

The Wicker Man and Derby Cathedral

There's a bit of a brouhaha going on in Derby at the moment. The Cathedral is showing a series of films next month in collaboration with the local arts centre QUAD. Some are "for the whole family" such as The Greatest Showman. Others have raised eyebrows, like The Wicker Man, Don't Look Now and The Life of Brian.

In his statement, Dean Stephen Hance has set out the Chapter's thinking about this. First, the Cathedral wants to reach new audiences who, it is hoped, will be drawn in by an adventurous contribution in a unique environment to the city's arts programme. Secondly, film reflects the power of story to engage the imagination, face uncomfortable truths about our human condition, and be made to think. This, says the Dean, is central to the way Jesus taught and how faith is transmitted. And finally, there is the financial aspect. The Cathedral has to find new income streams to fund its mission in challenging times. To me, this all seems entirely uncontentious.

So why the fuss?

It's true that all three films I've mentioned as eyebrow-raising are, to quote the Dean, "edgy". But that's because they all belong to cinema's front rank, all speak powerfully by exploring the "faith, doubt, fear and obsession" (to quote the Dean again) that underlie so much of human attitudes and motives. Whether it's the corruption of a society that embraces outright paganism (The Wicker Man), the crazying effects of loss where the grieving process is distorted (Don't Look Now) or the strange capacity of parody to highlight aspects of truth (The Life of Brian), these films confront us and ask us to reflect on our identity as men and women, what we believe about our place in the world, what our ultimate aspirations and hopes really are. These are, of course, profoundly spiritual and theological questions. So alongside the films, Derby Cathedral will be offering events to "help people reflect theologically on these films", says the statement. That's as welcome as it is necessary (but of course the media don't mention this aspect of what they love to call an "unholy row").

Take The Wicker Man. (I presume it's the original 1973 version we're talking about, preferably the director's cut, not the 2006 remake which, judging by the reviews, I've no wish to see.) If you haven't seen it and intend to show up at the cathedral for the viewing, I won't let spoilers ruin it for you. Suffice to say that this intriguing film is entirely to do with religion, specifically, an island community that has embraced paganism and thrown itself heartily into its attendant myth-and-ritual. Why and how this has happened is part of the film's interest. And yes, of course the eroticism and violence of naked (excuse the word) nature-religion feature, not least live sacrifice. It's disturbing and it's meant to be.

On to this seemingly innocent island an unwary Christian policeman sets foot to investigate. The brilliance of The Wicker Man is that we the viewer are unwary too, not ready for what is to come. We are shocked by a climax that's as powerful as any I can think of in films I've seen. And central to it is the head-on encounter between Christianity and paganism, not least in the policeman's tenacious adherence to his faith and his bravery in bearing witness to it. You couldn't have a more overt faith-related film than this. That it should have become something of a cult film among cognoscenti says something about the perennial power of religion to fascinate us.

Films like those chosen for the Cathedral speak for themselves. They don't need interpretation, though they do call for interrogation and reflection. But if we are looking for an analogy to help us see the value of showing films in sacred spaces, I would suggest the morality play. Popular in the late middle ages and the early modern period, morality plays like Everyman brought home moral and spiritual truths to their audiences by personifying fundamental values and their opposites like good and evil, truth and falsehood, wisdom and folly, weakness and strength, life and death. Over all these God presided, weighing up the destiny of mortals in the light of the moral choices they made. This, I think, is akin to what is going on when religion encounters drama or film within the setting of the sacred.

Of course, it happens in ways that are subtle and nuanced, symbolic and metaphorical and not always obvious at the time. We must also understand how the setting in which a film or drama are presented makes a difference to our reading of it. A sacred space conditions us in key ways. When we are sitting in a church, the questions that come to us will often be different from those we would put in the theatre, the cinema or in front of our TV screens. And the performance will put different questions to us too. We shall often find that in sacred space, we are unconsciously pulled towards a theological and spiritual framing of our questions that is different from anywhere else. The "reader-response" is as much about our own setting and context as it is about the art itself.

I recall a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni in Sheffield Cathedral. It was one of those cut down productions accompanied by a piano and small band. But it was sung in full. The actors deployed the spaces of the Cathedral brilliantly. As Dean I got to sit in the front row in my cassock. I was taken aback when the Don took up position in front of me, knelt down and sang the famous Catalogue Aria, that musical list in which he brazenly chronicles his seductions of vulnerable women across the continent. It was as if he was parodying the act of confession by singing that aria to a priest.

Beneath Mozart's ravishing music is a terrible tale of brutality, abuse and rape. And it was being acted out in my cathedral! But the whole point of the opera is that Don Giovanni gets what he deserves. At the brutal climax, the fires of hell open before him and swallow him up. Sin is punished, wickedness condemned, goodness vindicated, noble love honoured. Ethical order in the universe is restored. It's a pure morality play. And that's why it was good to perform it in a sacred space. It challenged its audience precisely because it was being staged in a church. It was an unforgettable spiritual experience as well as unforgettable opera. I could say the same of an unexpectedly powerful student production of Romeo and Juliet in Durham Cathedral during my time.

The church has always flourished when it has cultivated a close relationship with the arts, even if it can be tense at times. Earlier this month, nude paintings were removed from an art exhibition in Portsmouth Cathedral after complaints from worshippers. In Durham Cathedral in the 1990s, a video installation, The Messenger by Bill Viola, had to be screened off from open view on the advice of the police who thought it might cause public offence. When an episode of Inspector George Gently was filmed in the Cathedral in my time, I received letters from the public (interestingly, none from the North East) objecting to the firearms that were featured in that episode, though if ever a TV drama came close to a morality play where good and evil were clearly identified, this was it. Like the poor, offence-takers will always be with us.

So I don't think Derby Cathedral should be unduly worried that their film series has provoked debate. I'd say that was a good and healthy thing. Indeed, theology and film offer incredibly rich resources to each other, as a large and growing literature demonstrates. What matters is that when decisions of this kind are made, they are guided by the values the cathedral stands for, and the purposes it exists to fulfil. Does this proposal enhance our mission, or is at least consistent with it? Not everything is appropriate in a sacred space, even if it purports to be art. But the mission of the church would be severely compromised if it only said yes to art that was conventional and bland, that did not stretch horizons or provoke debate (in which case I doubt it would qualify to be called art at all).

What they are doing at Derby does push boundaries. That may have taken some courage. But as the Dean wittily said, they won't be showing God anything he hasn't seen before. This project is about engaging with what is real in life, both the light and the shadow. Cathedrals have always been good at that, delighting, stimulating, pioneering and provoking by turns. That's a gift we can be thankful for. It's one of the reasons we cherish them.

The Great Exhibition of the North

The Great Exhibition of the North opens on 22 June in Newcastle-Gateshead. It lasts until 9 September. It's a "summer-long celebration of the North of England's pioneering spirit and the impact of our inventors, artists and designers", says the exhibition website. "It's a chance to show how our innovative spirit has shaped the world and is building the economy of tomorrow." To mark the launch of the Exhibition I've put together a selection of some of my favourite images of the North East that I've taken down the years.

I'm sure everyone at this end of England welcomes this opportunity to put the North back on the map. Having worked in the northern Province of the Church of England for exactly two-thirds of my working life in public ministry, I've seen how the large parts of the North can fall into despondency at the decline of its traditional industries, its economic challenges and how far away it can feel from the centres of decision-making in London. For example, the North East receives only one tenth of London's share of the nation's investment in public transport infrastructure. During the Great Exhibition, we shall continue to watch Pacer trains rumble in and out of Newcastle Central Station and squeal round the curves on the Gateshead loop across the river. Our southern guests might be intrigued to see these archaic trains still running up here, a phenomenon to make them wonder whether the Northern Powerhouse is reality or fantasy.

I believe it can and must be a reality. We should be glad that throughout the summer, the North of England will be girding up its loins to accentuate the positive. It will present itself to the nation and the world as a forward-looking place of enterprise, originality and innovation where people love living and working in its resilient, lively and colourful communities. When we consider how the North has influenced, changed and enriched the world's industry, enterprise, heritage and arts, it is out of all proportion to the narrow geography on which we sit here in England. Its achievements are truly astonishing - and let me emphasise the tense - it's not that these achievements were once astonishing, it's that they still are today. Newcastle and Gateshead will demonstrate this in abundance this year in all kinds of ways. It's good news that heralds a great summer of celebration.

However (there was bound to be a but), I hope this ambitious vision of a Great Exhibition of the North is big enough. Let me explain.

First, I hope that words like "innovation" and "enterprise" are understood as referring to a history that long predates the twentieth and twenty first centuries, indeed the industrial revolution whose cradle this part of England largely was. For instance, the Roman Wall that runs right across the far north of what we now call England was in its time (and still would be today, Mr Trump) a huge project that called for topographical, engineering and construction skills of the highest order. Antiquity has left its visible mark on our northern landscapes in a way that is unique on this island. I hope many of our visitors find their way into Tynedale to admire the Wall and thereby set modernity into a larger context. Every generation has made its contribution and left its imprint on our landscapes, towns and cities. It's good that history puts us in our place.

Secondly, Northumbria's "Golden Age" of Christian civilisation in the seventh and eighth centuries is an essential part of the North's heritage. You can't really "get" the North's rich character and identity if you airbrush out of its legacy the profound Christian influences that shaped it and gave it the strong sense of place that endures today. Spirituality comes into things. In 2013, when I was Dean at Durham Cathedral, we welcomed back to the city the Lindisfarne Gospels for the first residency of what is hoped to be a regular cycle of visits to the peninsula where that "Great North Book" once lived. That summer, we all learned a great deal about how precious this Christian inheritance from Saxon times still is, and how it has the power to inspire and motivate people of faith even to this day. Will all this feature in this summer's activities? I hope so. Once again, I hope our guests will find their way to Lindisfarne, the "cradle of English Christianity", or if that's too far from Tyneside, venture inside our cathedrals at Newcastle and Durham, or Bede's churches at Wearmouth and Jarrow, or Wilfrid's at Hexham Abbey. They are full of design innovation, full of spiritual enterprise. All this belongs to the North's spiritual and cultural capital.

Thirdly, I hope that the many poor and marginalised communities of the North will feel that this Exhibition is for them too. The North East has some of the most needy and deprived communities in the country, many of them within a stone's throw of the beautifully developed Tyneside waterfront. Parts of Tyneside and Wearside, as well as South East Northumberland and East Durham, are severely challenged in terms of economic growth, public services, housing, education, community facilities and, less tangibly but no less importantly, in their sense of collective wellbeing, confidence and hope.

These places of poverty and need, where people are "just about managing" or not managing at all, are often hidden from public sight and attention. These are the worlds of the TV series Broken, and films like I Daniel Blake, Billy Eliot, Purely Belter, Brassed Off and The Full Monty - all set in the North of England. I am sure that the Great Exhibition is intended to be a genuinely popular event, a ten week celebration for all the people of the North. Tyneside knows how to party like nowhere else in the country! The question is, how to take the Great Exhibition out into these communities and create events that affirm the local and the particular, that say loudly and clearly: this is for us all?

You can't do everything of course. But unless there's a strong sense of inclusion, even the best of intentions can have the effect of reinforcing the perception, no the experience, of disadvantaged people that they are on the edge of developments that are not really for them. I want to believe that this summer's events could be a wonderful way of invigorating and empowering fragile communities by offering visions of a better future. What will count is how the Great Exhibition of the North is followed up, what its long-term legacy turns out to be. It could be hugely positive. But it needs to be more than midsummer feel-good if it's to make a real and lasting difference to human lives.

Let me conclude on a personal note. I first came to live and work in the North more than half my lifetime ago when I became the vicar of a Northumberland market town in my early thirties. It was challenging to find myself in a culture so different from the one I'd been brought up in, that of suburban north London. But how enriching it was! It shaped me in ways beyond my imagining at the time. And when I went south again for a few years, I couldn't shake off my newly acquired feeling for "North". And didn't want to. I took groups annually up to Holy Island to introduce them to Northern Christianity. In due course, I returned - first to Sheffield for eight years, and then to Durham for nearly thirteen.

Now my wife and I live in retirement in rural Northumberland once more. I wouldn't live anywhere else now. I shall always be a Londoner, of course, and recognise that however much I want to "go native", we are always children of our origins. But the North has been extraordinarily good to me. Which is why I'm delighted that the Great Exhibition of the North will display the best of the North to people who may never have ventured into these (to them) far-distant lands. In today's Guardian a travel feature suggests some of the best places in the North East to enjoy a day out during the Exhibition. When I read it, I felt proud and glad to have lived and worked in this great region, and still to be a part of it. I've come to care deeply for it in all its variety. I want to champion it if I can. Hence my tribute in photographs. Hence this blog.

Come and see us. Discover the riches of the North. Bring your friends and make new ones. Experience living in a different way. Celebrate. Share our life for a while. Be inspired!

The Report on Cathedrals: Further Thoughts

Last week I blogged about the report on cathedrals produced by a working group under the chairmanship of Bishop Adrian Newman and now published as a draft for consultation. I warmly welcomed the report as a real attempt to get to grips with cathedral governance in the light of the recent difficulties experienced at two cathedrals, Peterborough and Exeter.

I need to say a little more, not least following discussions I've had since the publication of the report. The first point is a general one. Several times the report asks us not to cherry-pick the recommendations but accept them as a package. I think they will (in the words of a well-known politician) have to whistle for it. It's not realistic to imagine that the reviewers will have got everything right, even when the consultation period is over and their final report written. It's true that some of the recommendations inevitably have implications for others, but that's the way of things. No text is so perfect that it can't be improved in the light of wise and patient discernment.

A central theme of the report concerns accountability. In particular, there has been a lot of discussion about the proposed direct accountability of residentiary canons to the dean (and of lay cathedral staff through the chief operating officer). I have to recognise that what follows is inevitably the perspective of a retired dean - though before serving as a dean in two cathedrals (Sheffield and Durham), I was myself a residentiary (at Coventry), one of its two full-time "Commissioners' canons". It may be a case of "well he would say that, wouldn't he?" But let me try to be as objective as I can.

I regard canons residentiary as senior roles in a cathedral, and agree with the report that exceptional gifts and talents are needed in those who are going to lead in key aspects of a cathedral's mission such as worship and music, education and learning, pastoral care and outreach. I was 37 when I became canon precentor at Coventry. That fitted the profile of the report that wants to see younger men and women appointed to these posts because they offer unrivalled opportunities for the formation and development of future leaders (not only as deans, I should say). But at Coventry, my fellow Commissioners' Canon was an older, more experienced man from whom I learned a great deal as I tried to understand the Cathedral and my role within it. So I don't buy the apparent implication that residentiary canonries should no longer be offered to those who, through their long years of parish or sector ministry also have distinctive insights to bring to cathedrals.

Indeed, perhaps only an older ordained colleague on the Chapter will have the confidence (or do I mean courage?) to challenge the dean when necessary. No team leader should be exempt from this. "Challenge" does not mean behaving seditiously or subverting the leader's authority. It means asking necessary questions so that decisions are properly scrutinised and the best outcome achieved. My experience of working with Chapter colleagues who in age have been more or less my peers was that even when their exacting questions ("challenge” is not too strong a word), were uncomfortable, they were for the best. I encouraged colleagues to speak up. I strongly discouraged deference (not that my colleagues were much given to it!). Our debates were robust at times. But because we were all trying to act in the best interests of the cathedral, I believe we were working together in an essentially healthy culture.

However, a team will only function well when roles are clearly defined and understood (this is a subtext of much of this report). This applies to its leadership. To me it is clear that the dean must be allowed to lead. He or she needs to be acknowledged as the head of a religious foundation, that is, the body corporate of the cathedral, and therefore as the leader of the senior "ministry team", i.e. the dean-and-residentiary-canons, as well as chair of the chapter as the governing body. The accountabilities flow from this. In day to day terms, I don't see how the canons could not be accountable to the dean as members of his or her team. Provisions about ministry development review (MDR) flow from this (though not necessarily exclusively - for it remains the bishop's prerogative to review anyone who holds his or her licence, including the dean and canons).

But this needs to be understood in quite a sophisticated way. Because according to the Cathedrals Measure, the ultimate accountability of both dean and canons is to the chapter itself. So the day to day relationships of canons to the dean expresses their common loyalty to the chapter. The dean has no authority independent of the chapter (except in the very limited ways spelled out in the Measure). His or her role is to be its guardian, its representative and its mouthpiece. Which is why a dean is always primus inter pares presiding over a governing body and a ministry team that are collaborative in every aspect of their work. If this is the presumption (and how could it be otherwise in today's church?), residentiary canons have nothing to fear from the new arrangements for governance and management that are proposed in the report.

However, as I've said before, no system of governance is better than the human beings who inhabit it. The best structures in the world won't protect cathedrals from abuses of power and status - and unfortunately, these don't simply reside in the pages of the Barchester novels. Only virtues like wisdom, self-awareness and emotional intelligence, married to a shrewd reading of human nature, can ensure that it all works as it should to serve the cathedral's mission. This highlights the importance of having a values statement as well as a purpose statement so that it's clear not only about what the cathedral exists to do but how it will behave in pursuit of that purpose.

But there does seem to me to be an anomaly in the report. I alluded to it in my previous blog. The review is very hot on accountability within the cathedral institution, and it is right to be. Yet when it comes to the chapter's own accountability, it weakens it considerably. It's true that it recommends that cathedrals are brought into the regulatory framework of the Charity Commission, and that make sense to me. However, top-level oversight of that kind can never be enough. There is a need for rigorous scrutiny to which executive bodies in every institution should be subject, if only to provide public assurance reports that all is as it should be. This is where the council comes in at present. I have to say that particularly in Durham, we took this very seriously (not least thanks to the quality of the council chair who had (has) wide experience in the corporate world). The discipline it imposed on the chapter was invaluable.

So while not all deans agree, I remain puzzled that the report removes the legal requirement for the council to hold the chapter to account on behalf of the bishop, diocese and wider community. Audit committees are necessary for scrutiny, but as committees of the chapter they don't have the necessary independence. The report wants to see a "quinquennial inspection" of the cathedral's operations, and this is welcome, but that too doesn't provide for continuing oversight and answerability. Bishops' visitations remain an option but because of their complexity and cost they tend only to be invoked when problems arise in cathedrals. (In nearly 30 years of cathedral ministry, I never experienced one.) So to write the legal functions out of the council's brief seems to me to be a mistake. It could open the way for a badly led chapter to behave autonomously and even recklessly in the way some were famously accused of doing before the Cathedrals Measure of 1999. And if (God forbid!) a cathedral ever suffered under a mad, wicked or incompetent dean, who, in the absence of the council (for which this is one of its statutory functions) would petition the bishop to instigate a process for his or her removal?

Enough for now. There's another big question that continues to exercise me and it's this. Running a cathedral well, even a small one, is a big assignment. And while the chapter is the body legally responsible for the life of its cathedral, it takes a special combination of spiritual wisdom, theological insight, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, organisational ability and leadership skill to equip a dean to lead such a complex entity. My question is, what do we look for when deans are appointed? What is a good dean? I'd be sorry if deans ended up as no more than ultra-competent CEOs of their cathedrals. If they did, what would be the point of deans being ordained at all? Discuss!

The North East in Twelve Favourite Places 8: Durham Cathedral

I've been a bit remiss about posting articles I've written about some of my favourite places in the North East for the Haydon News, our village magazine.

When I began this series, I said I wanted to explore some less well-known places in the North East. So why have we come to Durham? I don’t suppose there is anyone reading this who hasn’t been to its mighty Cathedral, probably many times. It’s famous the world over as one of the greatest of all Romanesque buildings. It’s often been voted Britain’s favourite cathedral. Bill Bryson called it “the best cathedral on Planet Earth”. Having been Dean there, and lived in its shadow for nearly 13 years, who am I to disagree?

 

But even if you’ve been to the Cathedral, there may be things you have missed. It would take a lifetime to get to know it in every detail and unearth all its secrets. So here are some corners of the place and its surroundings you may not have taken in. And if you have, let this reawaken enjoyable memories.

 

1 The Sanctuary Knocker

This fierce monster greets you as you approach the main door. In the middle ages, if you had committed certain crimes such as unintended manslaughter, you could save yourself from the rough justice of the mob by fleeing to the Cathedral and grasping hold of the knocker. One of the monks keeping watch from the room above would let you inside the church where you would be kept safe for thirty-seven days. This would give you time to choose whether to give yourself up to the authorities and face the consequences, or choose permanent exile, in which case you would be escorted to Hartlepool and placed on a ship, never to return. (What you see is a copy of the original twelfth  century knocker which is kept safe from corrosion or vandalism in the Cathedral’s collections.)

 

2  The Shrine of St Cuthbert
How can you go to Durham Cathedral and not take in the shrine that is the very reason the Cathedral exists? Well, quite easily as it happens. I did it myself on my first ever visit as a schoolboy in the 1960s. If you don’t know it is there, you might miss the stone stairs up to the “feretory”, as it’s called, where the remains of St Cuthbert are buried. Since our churches at Haydon Bridge are dedicated to him, I don’t need to tell how his remains were taken on a long journey around the North (passing through what is now our parish, we believe) until they ended up on the peninsula and the Cathedral was built around them. On the wall outside the shrine, you will see the red Banner of St Cuthbert, a replica of the one that hung there to welcome vast crowds of pilgrims in the middle ages.

 

3  The Neville Screen
The great screen behind the high altar is one of the jewels of the Cathedral. It was given by the Neville family of County Durham in gratitude for the English victory against the Scots at the Battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346. Unlike the rough sandstone the Cathedral is built from, the screen is made of a beautiful white limestone from Caen in France. If you have field-glasses with you, look at the intricate detailing of the pinnacles, and the marvellous carvings of angels and animals above the canopies on each side. Once, the niches contained sculptures of the saints. These were taken down and hidden for safety just before the Dissolution in the 1530s. No-one knows where they are to this day though that doesn’t stop the choristers from guessing.

 

4  The Transfiguration Window
If you haven’t been to Durham since 2010, you won’t have seen this magnificent new window near Cuthbert’s shrine. It was installed in memory of Archbishop Michael Ramsey who had been both a canon and a bishop of Durham and who is still remembered with huge affection there. The design is by Tom Denney. It shows the Transfiguration of Jesus, one of Michael Ramsey’s favourite New Testament stories. Light pours down on Jesus on the mountain top, accompanied by the disciples Peter, James and John. Nearby the lonely figure of St Cuthbert stands by the sea saying his prayers, and you’ll also notice the Cathedral itself bathed in light. The window with its rich textures casts a radiant golden light when the sun is high in the middle of the day.  

 

5  The Cloister
Here’s another part of the Cathedral I missed when I first came as a boy. On the opposite side from the main (north) door, you come out into the cloister. In the middle ages, this would have been the hub of the monastery’s life, because it connected the principal buildings where monastic activity was focused: the church itself, the chapter house, dormitory, refectory, treasury and the kitchen. All these buildings survive and are still in use, making Durham Cathedral the most complete surviving monastic site in England.

 

6  The Monks’ Dormitory and Great Kitchen
You reach these splendid buildings from the cloister. The size of the dormitory tells you how large the monastery was in its heyday. This majestic room has one of the most remarkable timber roofs in England. The nearby octagonal kitchen is another precious survival from the medieval Cathedral with its remarkable stone vault. Both these spaces now form part of the Cathedral’s new exhibition Open Treasure which tells the story of Christian faith in the North East from Roman times to the present day. The Great Kitchen now houses artefacts associated with St Cuthbert including his famous pectoral cross, his wooden coffin and his portable altar.

 

 

7  The River BanksToo many visitors rush away without taking time to appreciate the Cathedral in its gorgeous setting. When you walk alongside the river, you appreciate what a remarkable site the Cathedral occupies, perched unassailable on its acropolis high above a great loop in the River Wear. The gorge was carefully landscaped in the eighteenth century to show the buildings to best advantage above the abundant tree canopy. It is beautiful at all times of year, but I especially love it on winter afternoons when the Cathedral glows through the bare trees by the light of the setting sun. And when you’ve enjoyed the walk, where better to reward yourself with a cup of tea and a cake than in the Cathedral restaurant off the cloister?

 

*******

 

Space doesn’t allow me to write about the font canopy, the Daily Bread Window, The Venerable Bede, the mysterious line in the floor, a mason’s mistake in one of the piers, the Durham Light Infantry Chapel, Frosterley Marble and much else. Maybe another time…

On Hearing Howells on the Radio

I was listening to Essential Classics on BBC Radio 3 this morning. We have it on every day. There's a daily fixture at half past nine, a light-hearted challenge to test our knowledge and wits in the domain of classical music. I often have a go and tweet my answer, only to find a few minutes later that I'm hopelessly wrong.

However, today Sarah Walker played a piece of church music and under the rubric "mapping the music", asked us which place it was associated with. I didn't need to hear more than a couple of bars to recognise it. It was Herbert Howells' Gloucester Service, his setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis that are sung at evensong in cathedrals and choral foundations across the English-speaking world. Howells' setting of the evening canticles are regarded as among the noblest of the twentieth century. What singer doesn't love his Gloucester Service, Collegium Regale and St Paul's Service? I learned to love them as a chorister myself more than fifty years ago. I shall always love them.

But hearing Gloucester unexpectedly on the radio this morning had an arresting impact on me, so much so that I found myself on the edge of tears. Why was this? Because it was the music I'd chosen for my last ever service in Durham Cathedral as Dean. It is barely eighteen months since we said farewell to that wonderful place. Yet in retirement in our Northumberland village on the banks of the Tyne, it already feels an age away. It's as if it was another life, a distant world far removed from this one, wonderful at the time but now like a beautiful dream that has gone forever.

Like all dreams, memories are partial and selective. I am not rose-hued about my time in Durham: there were joys and ordeals, agony and ecstasy like there are in everything we give our lives to. But as I look back on those nearly thirteen years, they do feel to have been the most privileged of my life. Saying farewell to them and laying them aside was hard when the time came. In my last blog as Dean I tried to put this into words. They were raw then, and as I re-read them, those last treasured days come flooding back. Especially the memory of that farewell service of evensong:

The final service is evensong. There is a great crowd filling the nave. I walk the Lord Lieutenant up the aisle as I would at any big event. Then I think, disconcertingly, they are here because I am leaving. I don't mean they are not here to worship God - of course that is why we are at this service at all, but valediction is what has brought so many people together. I arrive at my stall and find a colourful folder put together by the choristers with pictures, personal messages from each of them, tributes and prayers. The tears in things are real even before the service has begun. As they are several more times during the service: at that amazing leap up to a top 'A' in the Gloria of Howells' Gloucester Service, the paradisal ending of Bairstow's Blessed City, our beloved Coe Fen (How shall I sing that Majesty?'), the beautifully crafted intercessions by Sophie the Canon in Residence, the final hymn 'Glory to thee my God this night', and laying up the Dean's cope on the high altar after the blessing.

This power of music to evoke memory was what was triggered by hearing the Gloucester Service again on the radio today. And listening to it again, I realised how exactly it seemed to fit the occasion. There's an undertow of melancholy in so much of Howells' music. For all its luminous beauty, it feels autumnal, elegiac, plangent, full of wistful longing. For all that his glorious settings of praise and celebration like the Magnificat sweep the spirit heavenwards, it's as if these moments of transfiguration in a major key have to be fought for. When you know something of the personal circumstances of Howells' life, the death of his beloved nine-year-old son Michael from polio, you realise that he "drew glory from a well of grief" for the rest of his life. Every Nunc Dimittis he wrote must have brought it back to him, this song of endings by one who has waited to see the promised Messiah before he dies. "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace."

Retiring was for me a kind of Nunc Dimittis: recognising what has been glorious and still is, being thankful, laying aside, saying farewell, departing. Every leave-taking is little death. That day was not just for saying goodbye to Durham. I was saying farewell to my working life, forty years of ordained ministry, and to all the people, all the communities among whom I had lived and worked in that time. I knew when we left Durham that it was a real ending, a parting of friends. The Gloucester Service seemed to symbolise that. 

It felt bitter-sweet at the time, this amazing music. How could it not? But life goes on, and is good because it is filled with so many lovely happy things. To live out of gratitude seems to me to be the secret of fulfilment: gratitude for all that has been, all that is, all that is yet to be. Howells' music has the capacity to help me reflect on that broader canvas and remember past days and years with thankfulness. Perhaps that's the task of this stage of life I am now in, growing older, having lived the greater part of my allotted years. The capacity to see things for what they are a little more clearly, and appreciate what is of lasting value in the changes and chances of human experience - I find this is life-giving in a rather surprising way. "Then he thinks he knows / The hills where his life rose / And the sea where it goes" wrote Matthew Arnold in a poem about the flow of human life that touches me.

In the eucharist, memory is linked with thankfulness for the goodness of God by which we live and that is the source of our hope. Thankfulness is what the word eucharist means. Whatever else I was experiencing as I listened to Howells this morning, wherever those tears came from, his music made me think once again about the goodness of things, how life is always a gift, how we are endowed with a feeling for "the Love that moves the sun and the other stars". Farewells are poignant, and so is the memory of them. But gratitude is all. And if I look a trifle forlorn in the photo of my final service in the Dean's stall, I seem to have cheered up a bit in the final image as we listen to a former Head Chorister's charming farewell speech.

Deo gratias!

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.

The Girl on the Train

She started the conversation. The train was pulling out of Newcastle Central Station. It was crowded. At the last minute, a teenage girl got on and sat down next to me. As we gathered speed across the King Edward VII Bridge, she looked out across the Tyne and suddenly asked, "What makes the bridge stay up? What stops us tumbling into the river below?" 

I answered that Edward VII is a girder bridge and tried to explain how it works. And since we were crossing the Tyne, I mentioned suspension and cantilever bridges too and was glad that she didn't ask me to elaborate. Then she got her earphones out and started listening to her music. I went back to my book. 

But I'd already noticed that the device on the table in front of her was not a smart phone or tablet, but an old-fashioned CD Walkman ("Discman"). What memories that silvery saucer-sized disc brought back. How retro!  How 1990s! I'd no idea anyone still used them, least of all hi-tech-habituated teenagers. Emboldened by her curiosity about bridges, I indulged mine about her technology. "I used to have an iPhone" she said. "But I lost it. And I realised that I didn't need all this digital connectivity. I want to feel and touch life for what it is, not through a screen. All I need is a simple player for music and a basic phone for emergencies." I asked her what she was listening to. John Lennon, she replied. "I'd love to have been alive in the Sixties. People seemed kinder then than they are now."

Already nostalgic at the tender age of - what? sixteen? It sounded like a cue to reminisce for half an hour. But (to her credit) she didn't give me time to get going. She began to tell me about her ambitions in life. "I want to be a free spirit" she said, "I want to travel, see the world, enjoy myself, find out who I am. I want to experience the beauty of nature and the beauty human beings have made. The trouble is, my education isn't feeling like a preparation for really entering into life at its fullest. There are so many rules and obligations, so many oughts and shoulds, hoops I have to jump through, hurdles to stagger over. So who knows what will become of me? Anyway, the world is such an uncertain place. Anything can happen."

That was quite a speech. But as if awkward about having disclosed a little of herself to a stranger, she turned to me. "What do you do?" she inquired, winsomely imagining that I was nowhere near superannuation. The young are not always very accurate when it comes to judging age. "I used to be the Dean at Durham Cathedral" I answered. "I'm a priest." "Wow!" She exclaimed. She thought for a moment. The first part of my reply was proving a bit easier for her to get her head around than the second. "I love Durham Cathedral" she said. "I've been there several times. Didn't they film Harry Potter there?" (But then she admitted coyly that she'd not actually seen the Potter films.) She was in full flow now. "I love ancient places. I want to see the Pyramids one day. Can you go inside them? They're burial places, aren't they? I'd like to be buried in my very own pyramid." And why not, I thought. Go for it.

Back to her music and my book. But not for long. "I went to Beamish the other day" she announced. "All that old technology - the coal mine, the trams, the old shops, the chapel, the cobbles, the steam engine - what a wonderful world it must have been when everything was like that. It's why I'm not interested in the digital world. The old world feels more honest, somehow. You can see it, touch it, feel its solidity and toughness." I told her about Flying Scotsman that not many days before had been running over the very rails we were hastening along. She didn't seem to have heard of the legendary locomotive but was excited at the thought of it. I almost recommended her to google it and see it for herself but realised that for her this was very definitely not the thing to say. 

When it was time to get off at my stop, I found myself saying: "It's been a lovely conversation. Thank you. Don't let anyone ever take away from you your vision of life, the beautiful way in which you see and talk about the world. Keep the dream alive and live it. Yes," I admitted, I hope not too portentously, "this is a priest talking of course, so I would say this; but what matters is that people see visions and dream dreams. There is so much cruelty and wrong all around us. But if you can somehow not lose your hope, the vision you've caught of the goodness of things, you'll not only be a richer person in yourself but also a real gift to others. And I hope that your education, rather than being an ordeal that gets in the way, can be an important part of that journey you're making." 

I doubt the girl on the train (what else can I call her?) would welcome the epithet rapturous. Joyous maybe, or hope-filled or innocent or wholesome. Or all of them. How do I put this without sentimentality? For without a trace of self-consciousness, she seemed to echo the glowing vision of William Blake's art and poetry allied to the belief of John Ruskin and William Morris that there must be a fundamental honesty in the character and quality, the craft and the tools of living. There needs to be simplicity, what Jesus calls purity of heart. Above all, life must be experienced directly, face to face if we are to be fully human. There's time enough for her to learn that the old technology she admired was itself new and cutting edge once, that it was as much mistrusted in its own time as she mistrusts today's. 

And that goes even for her beloved Discman and Nokia brick phone. There's time enough for her to gain a historical perspective that will put things in their place. But she was reminding me that the new technologies, for all the good that they can bring us, need to be used with awareness, with, if you like, Blakean simplicity and purity of heart. We need to maintain a critical eye to our own integrity. We need to make good choices about the degree to which we become dependent on the powers we have created for ourselves. She will get there, of that I've no doubt. She's bright, and her instincts are sound.

I didn't say any of that of course. I was happy just to listen. The young can be wonderfully refreshing company, I've found as I've grown older. So the other thing I didn't say, but felt, was that this unlooked-for conversation with a teenager was a gift.  I've not been so touched by a chance encounter for a long time. Whoever she is, she shone another shaft of light on what had already been a good day. One of those "angels unawares"?