A Last Post

Today, but for the virus I should have been in London preaching at Hampstead Parish Church where I was a boy chorister. It was there in the early 1960s that the journey of faith began for me, at least in a conscious way. I owe that church more than I can say.

It would have been a special occasion for me personally. Having turned 70 this year, I’d resolved to retire properly by finally stepping aside from public ministry. The Vicar had very kindly invited me to preach for the last time in the place where I first felt the stirrings of faith. It would have been, almost to the day, the forty-fifth anniversary of my ordination. So I’d intended to speak, on what would normally have been an ordination day in the church, about vocation to ministry and how the local church, knowingly or unknowingly, can foster it.

If ever there was a case of l’homme propose, Dieu dispose, the pandemic has provided it a hundredfold for all of us. ‘How do you make God laugh? Tell him of your future plans!’ I won’t get to preach that sermon now. And this blog is not it. You can’t substitute a written text or even a live-streamed online event for the real thing when it belongs to such a specific place and time.

I’d thought about asking if we could defer the event. But the symbolism of turning seventy this year felt too significant. So I reckon I’ve now preached my final sermon without realising it. That was the last time I stepped foot inside a church, just before lockdown in March. It was to mark the launch of the pilgrim Way of St Hild at the mighty church dedicated to her on the Headland at Hartlepool. With hindsight, given that the North East has played such a central part in my life, it seems appropriate that this last homily should have celebrated the region’s Christian legacy. Hild was one of the greatest and most inspiring of all the northern saints of the seventh and eighth centuries. As I said at the end of my sermon, she ‘speaks to us across the centuries of all that represents the best and noblest in human character, giftedness and service. She is a woman … to emulate as we ask ourselves what it might mean to serve God and our neighbour in whatever capacity he calls us to at just such a time as this’. What more is there to say about our Christian vocation as men and women of God?

I wrote about finally laying aside public ministry in a blog last summer. I want to reiterate that it is not a case of giving up something because it has become a burden. Still less, despite our differences, have I fallen out with the Church of England which has nurtured and, yes, cared for me all these years. I love what Anglican Christianity stands for at its wise, humane, charitable and generous best. I am profoundly grateful to have been a priest during these four and half decades. The people among whom I have lived and prayed and served, the places I’ve experienced as holy and life-giving have left indelible memories. They have been central to my formation as a priest, a Christian and a human being. They have become a part of me.

As I tried to explain in the blog, far from leaving my life’s work behind, I want to take the fruits of it into my seventies. I want to try to reflect on what it’s all meant, to go on learning while I can. So I see it not as a negative ‘giving up’ of public roles but as a positive decision to live differently in what I imagine will be my last decade of active life (if I’m spared that long). It’s as much a vocational matter as being ordained was in the first place. I’ve tried to discern it with integrity. It feels time to live as a lay person in the church again, or if you prefer (thanks to a former colleague for helping me to see it this way), to become a more contemplative priest in my last years, rather than an active one.

And because the public platform is no longer a place where I believe I should be, I’ve decided to give up blogging as well. I love writing just as I’ve loved preaching. But there comes a time when we need to recognise that later life brings with it the call to reassess the worlds we inhabit, what we do and why we do it. We each have to do this in our own way. For me at least, this entails a necessary contraction of horizons. It feels like an ‘unmaking’ which is uncomfortable at times, perhaps because it is new and unfamiliar: I always knew retirement would be significant but turning seventy has shown me that it really is one of life’s biggest rites of passage. So I need to discover how this ‘unmaking’ can also be a ‘remaking’. It’s not a case of ‘not-working’ (God forbid!) but doing ‘work’ of a different kind. This includes the openings retired people have, as physical and mental health allow, to volunteer, involve ourselves in our local communities, develop new interests, learn new skills. I want to grasp more of these opportunities.

But in retirement I’m especially thinking of the ‘heart-work’ that begins when we realise that the most basic question we can ever ask ourselves is, what does life expect of us? Or if you like, what does God ask of us? What is the work of God in the world and what is my part in it? How do I go on responding to God and to life before I die, become the best self I am capable of being? It’s a question that, like the Hound of Heaven, pursues us down the years, though we don’t always face it in our busy working lives. Retirement gives us the time and opportunity.

I think there are three parts to this ‘heart work’. First, being more present to the here and now: family, friendships, the pleasures of nature and art, the cycles of times and seasons, the goodness of ordinary things. This feels like an important aspect of ageing: you never know when you might be experiencing something for the last time. Secondly, welcoming the perspectives we gain later in life when when we can look back and recognise patterns and connections that have run through our personal histories. ‘Life must be lived forwards but understood backwards’ said Kierkegaard in words I’ve come to treasure. And thirdly, becoming more attentive to ambiguity, darkness and suffering whether I find them in the pain of the world or closer at hand in other people or in myself. Growing old has to mean embracing both the shadow and the light.

And above all, it means nurturing a sense of gratitude, loving life, and loving the God who is the source of all life and love, from whom we came and to whom we all return.

So this is my last post, my final blog. To those who’ve been kind enough to tell me they’ve enjoyed listening in on my woolgathering, I’m grateful. Where I’ve misjudged or offended, I apologise. These (nearly) ten years of blogging have been a good adventure, and I’ve been stimulated by and learned from your comments, criticisms and challenges. Thank you for being such good company.

********

PS: I’ll leave this website up for now, along with the others here and here, where you can find my sermons and addresses, and the blogs I wrote when I was in Durham. But I shall close the comments in due course.

Something The Queen Said: Thoughts on Christmas Faith and Life

As I listened to The Queen on Christmas Day, a couple of sentences stood out for me. The Christmas story retains its appeal since it doesn’t provide theoretical explanations for the puzzles of life. Instead it’s about the birth of a child and the hope that birth two thousand years ago brought to the world.

In old age, Her Majesty has been increasingly clear with us all about the central place Christianity occupies in her life. It’s heartening to hear her speak about the power her Christian faith has had throughout her long life to motivate, inspire and give meaning. 

But this statement I’ve highlighted goes beyond personal testimony to offer a really important insight about how religious faith does and doesn’t function in human life. The temptation is to look to faith to explain things, probe the complex mysteries of existence, come up with answers to all that baffles and bewilders us in our human experience. 

Once upon a time we spoke of a “God of the gaps”, the deity whose existence provided accounts of phenomena that had so far eluded human explanation. Literal readings of the Bible provided ready resources for explaining the nature of the cosmos, the origins of life, the phenomenon of humanity, and the fact of suffering and pain. For many people, they still do, as we can see in the conservative evangelical right of North America for whom the scriptures provide the infallible answer to every question posed by science, ethics and faith.

The urge to explain extended to the arguments for the existence of God himself. I was taught philosophy at Oxford by Anthony Kenny who later became Master of Balliol which was my college. Kenny had trained and practised as a catholic priest but left the priesthood on account of his questioning the intellectual basis of dogmatic religion. His lectures on the arguments for the existence of God comprehensively dismantled one by one the philosophical bases of the classical “Five Ways”. Yet he was careful to say that this didn’t mean that God did not exist. You could no more prove his non-existence than his existence. Whatever affirmation you made about God essentially came down to faith, not logic or evidence. To speak of “explanation”, you could say, was to commit a “category mistake”. Rational explanation and religious faith belong to different “language games”.

I’ve spent a lifetime getting to know the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible. I’ve taught it to theology students and preached it to Sunday morning congregations. Above all, I’ve found that it’s immeasurably enriched my personal understanding of faith and the human condition. I’ve learned how agnostic books like Job and Ecclesiastes are when it comes to explaining the riddles of the world and of my own self. Whereas conventional religion likes binaries and causal explanations: right and wrong, good and evil, light and dark, reward and punishment, these writings probe deeper beneath the surface of things. They seem to discern that complexity will not be reduced to a simplistic “yes” or “no”. On the contrary. It takes faith to live with the reality of suffering (Job) or with a sense of ennui or meaninglessness (Ecclesiastes). These texts do not offer “solutions”, “theoretical explanations for the puzzles of life” to quote Her Majesty. It’s faith, not rational thought, that enables us to live with these great unanswered questions. “The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom” says Job.

Theologians calls the exploration of faith in the light of the problems of suffering and meaning theodicy. Theodicy can’t offer watertight explanations, and doesn’t try - at least, not any more. What it does is to explore ways in which faith can be understood and presented intelligently in precisely the kind of world we all know we live in, full of paradox and contradiction. This is necessary because for many, it’s questions of suffering and meaning that are a major obstacle to belief. “How can a God of love exist in a world that is so cruel and pain-ridden?” We aren’t being true to our own faith if we don’t feel the force of this question. Theodicy can help sensitise our faith to such questioning, help us articulate it in ways that place suffering and questions about meaning at the centre where they belong, rather than at the margins. 

Christmas gives us a glimpse of this way of believing. We hear afresh the story of the Holy Child of Bethlehem, we sing carols of love and praise, we gaze with wonder into his crib and are perhaps surprised to find ourselves profoundly moved by this image of a birth that brings such a joy and such a hope. This is to say that the the instinct of Christmas faith is contemplative. We look as if through an open door into a world that for a brief moment grants a vision of what life could become. We find ourselves gazing on a transformed world and a transfigured life. “Peace on earth, good will to all people!” we sing in tune with the angels. If only it were true! we say longingly to ourselves. 

The Christmas story itself embraces this longing for a world healed of its wrongs. “No room at the inn” speaks of exclusion and hardship. The flight into Egypt presents the Holy Family as exiles seeking asylum in a strange land. Herod’s massacre of the innocent children depicts the suffering of innocent victims in the most terrible way possible. “The holly bears a berry as red as any blood”, indeed. Theodicy is at the very heart of our Christmas story and the carols we love to sing.

And yet contemplative faith intuits that the greatest mystery in the universe is not suffering but love. It’s love that defies all explanation, other than that this is simply how God is in himself. This is what we understand in a life-changing way is the deepest truth of Christmas. St Francis understood this, which is why he set up the first Christmas Crib and invited people to bring to it their heart’s love. Christmas becomes real for each of us as we give ourselves to this rapturous vision, and it becomes real for our world, by anticipation, as we each live out the hope that is set before us in ways that make a difference to the lives of others, whether it’s in politics, peace-making or the pursuit of social justice. As the medieval spiritual guides understood so well, holy contemplation always leads to good action. And that’s what changes things. 

The traditional Gospel reading on Christmas Day says it all. “And we beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1.14). We beheld. This is what the Incarnation invites us to do: to look, to see, to behold. For as we gaze into the face of the Love that makes its dwelling among us, as we are drawn into the grace and truth we see there, we instinctively understand that here is the source of all that is life-changing. Those sterile causal explanations we once hankered after don’t belong here, have no relevance to this vision of God. The Queen was right about that. What matters is leaning to become contemplatively wise, discovering how this way of life becomes a source of inspiration and strength as we try to do God’s work in the world.

When religious faith comes of age and renounces its need to explain, turns instead to contemplation, and then acts on what it has glimpsed, it achieves a state of wisdom which is both life-changing and brings hope to the world.