Lent - 40 Shades of Gratitude

If you follow The Archers you’ll know that Alan the Vicar has put forward a novel idea for the village’s Lenten observance. Let’s give up complaining, he’s proposed, and every time we offend, let’s put a fine in the sin-box and give the proceeds to charity.

I quite like that idea, though it needs a bit of calibration. Does “complaining” only cover what we do publicly, or what we are overheard doing? Does it only cover what we say or write, or should it include what we think as well? Does it only apply to named people or organisations (“The Vicar doesn’t visit enough”; “Bridge Farm yogurts have lost their taste”) or also to the ubiquitous “they” (as in “Why don’t they mend the potholes in our roads?” or “They don’t care that our trains never run on time”)? And when is a negative comment not necessarily a complaint (“Our bins haven’t been emptied this week: that’s going to cause problems, so we’d better phone the Council”)? And are Ambridge folk still allowed to talk about “bad weather” or a “poor wi-fi signal”?

Maybe the casuistry of complaining is too complex. And to rub your nose in negativity doesn’t exactly lift the spirits. That’s the trouble with Lent. It’s not that giving up things isn’t often very good for us - fasting and self-denial are important aspects of a healthy spiritual (and ordinary human) life. But so much depends on our attitude, our motive for undertaking whatever Lenten exercise or discipline we opt for. So I’m much more encouraged by a tweet from one of my favourite Twitter clergy, @sallyhitchener. “This year I'm taking up #GratitudeForLent - 40 days, 40 thank you notes to people to whom I'm grateful, for small or great things. Want to join me?”

I think Sally gets right to the heart of Lent. For a start, she accentuates the positive, always a good antidote to the negativity of complaining. But she isn’t calling for the kind of generalised goodwill clergy are so proficient at while never sacrificing their gift of vagueness. She sets a clear objective that is, as business-speak has it, SMART: Specific, Measurable (she’ll know if she’s achieved it or not), Assignable (clear about whose task this is, in this case hers), Realistic (it can actually be achieved) and Time-related (in this case, 40 days). The Muslim month of Ramadan is characterised by smart objectives for the fast which makes it all the easier to get a handle on (I don’t say easier to observe). I believe a Lenten observance that sets smart goals will be helpful in at least contemplating the journey that lies ahead.

But much more important is the content of Sally’s Lenten resolution. “Gratitude for Lent” - what could be more true to the spirit of Christianity than that? You could say that gratitude is where Christian discipleship begins, as we acknowledge with thankfulness the tender mercy of the God who has loved us in Jesus Christ and called us to be citizens of his kingdom. So to practise gratitude in Lent is to go back to the very foundations of faith. The clue is in the principle of eucharist. That word literally means “Thanksgiving”. So to live eucharistically doesn’t only mean participating in the service of worship at which we celebrate together the great acts of God. At a deeper level, it means cultivating thankfulness as a habit of the heart, training our deepest selves to respond to life in a spirit of gratitude and praise to God our Creator and Redeemer. In Lent, that gratitude is given a paschal shape as we prepare to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus, the redemptive event from which our very identity as Christians is derived.

I used the word “training” just now. Training is what the Greek word askesis means. An ascetic is someone who takes their training seriously, reckons that it’s something worth investing in. Yes, the three great disciplines Jesus speaks about in the Sermon on the Mount, prayer, fasting and giving alms, are basic to the classic Christian understanding of askesis. But motivating them all, I think, has to be a sense of thankfulness, the eucharistic acknowledgment that these disciplines are not ends in themselves, but are meant to deepen our engagement with God whose goodness has invited us into the adventure and challenge of discipleship. The ascetic journey is to travel more deeply into God’s heart of love. It both draws on our thankfulness and enhances it as we discover how infinitely indebted we are to the Love that moves the sun and the stars.

So Lent, this annual season of renewal, this springtime of the Christian year, invites us to find new ways of practising the habit of eucharistia. Where do we start? Sally gives us a practical suggestion. Her forty thank you notes will get us thinking about forty ways in which we need to be grateful - to other people, and through them, to God himself. And alongside these forty shades of gratitude, why not pray the General Thanksgiving each day? I don’t know a better way of seeing off our tendency to complaint and negativity. Indeed, I believe we shall discover that thankfulness is truly life-changing because it transfigures our perspective on life. The Thanksgiving Prayer says that we should be grateful above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ. Which is what we look forward to celebrating at Easter. Here's the General Thanksgiving in its original, magnificent form in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

Almighty God, Father of all mercies, we thine unworthy servants do give thee most humble and hearty thanks for all thy goodness and loving-kindness to us and to all men. We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory. And, we beseech thee, give us that due sense of all thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful; and that we show forth thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives, by giving up our selves to thy service, and by walking before thee in holiness and righteousness all our days; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Ghost be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.

We Need Thanksgiving - but not Black Friday

A Song for Friday. "If you go down to the shops today, you're in for a nasty surprise." Or maybe not, if you knew that it's Black Friday, that annual orgy of shopping and spending that is enough to put some of us off shops for life.

The Guardian has an editorial today that makes interesting reading. It reminds us that the Black Friday custom originated in America (where else?) as a way of filling the space between Thanksgiving on the day before, and the coming weekend. You have a great celebration on the fourth Thursday of November. Families gather not only from across the States but from all over the world to be together on this the most important day in the calendar. It's a wonderful way to enter into and keep alive the founding myth of America, express solidarity with generations past and generations to come, and all under the rubric of giving thanks. There is something deeply eucharistic about that, allowing memory to foster gratitude for blessings past, present and future.

So you are gathered by the fireside in your home with those you love best in the world. Like the eighth square in Through the Looking Glass, it's all feasting and fun. And no doubt every American family, aware of how abundant are the gifts they celebrate, will also be sparing a thought and a prayer for the many who are less fortunate, left outside the warm glow of privileged good fortune. It's a time for generosity, large-heartedness, good will. Americans are among the most kind and generous people I've ever met.

But then Black Friday dawns. Everybody, it seems, gets up while it's still dark and heads for the shopping malls. You’re among them, thinking to yourself, “Christmas shopping”. There are bargains galore to tempt you, big budget items offering eye-watering reductions. You find that some people have waited all night to be at the front of the line at store-opening time. In the headlong rush for the best bargains, people get hurt. Sometimes there are fisticuffs. Extra security is brought in. (We Brits know all this if we’ve ever been rash enough to pay an early morning visit to the Boxing Day sales.) It's as if the normal conventions of polite behaviour (such as queuing and holding the door open for others) break down. The crowd acts out unusual (to them) behaviours that in other contexts we would call feral. If you ever wonder what would happen to humanity if civilisation were stripped away, just watch TV news following an eventful Black Friday.

I'd be glad to be told that this is a wicked caricature perpetrated by liberal elites who read broadsheet newspapers and would never be seen dead in a shopping mall on Black Friday. But even if it is, there's a deeper aspect to it that needs airing.

It's what question Black Friday is meant to be the answer to. The answer is that it's a direct response to Thanksgiving. It stands with it, depends on it like a parasite for its very existence. And yet, hard on the heels of the exquisite evening before that so affirms the American founding fathers’ and mothers’ spirit of gratitude, public faith, social and family values, the importance of remembering together, how can Black Friday not be bathos of a particularly glaring kind? On this of all long weekends, who wouldn't want to share memories and laughter in long happy conversations, play sports or games together, enjoy the fresh bracing air, read, make music, indulge your hobbies. Who wouldn't want to continue the spirit of Thanksgiving into the next few days, maybe linking it to visiting someone who is sick, or volunteering for at the local foodbank or sharing your foyer with a guest who would otherwise be alone?

It's hard to see how a shopping spree doesn't trivialise much of what Thanksgiving stands for. The dead hand of monetising everything always has that effect (“knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing”). It's as if Americans can't think of anything more creative to follow Thanksgiving than the emblematic cliche of going shopping. But in the UK it's rather worse. We have lifted Black Friday straight out of American culture and reinstalled it in our own country in both its physical and digital forms (except that there's nothing virtual about parting with money: it comes down to the same thing in the end). It has taken off in a big way. But what we didn't import along with it was the day before. Here there is no Thanksgiving to give it even the vestige of a larger meaning. So Black Friday stands alone, revealed in all its overt, rampant consumerism. It is a shameless day of homage to what we have largely become: a nation of shopkeepers and shoppers whose aspirations are to buy and sell, make profits and grab bargains. The infamous Greggs' sausage roll is placed in the manger where the Christ Child should be, and made an idol of for the Magi and all of us to adore.

I exaggerate of course. But The Guardian is right to argue that shorn of Thanksgiving, there is no case for this indulgence of Black Friday. Somehow the very name, a conscious shadowy echo of Good Friday, tells us that it can't be good for us. Among the seven deadly sins are named greed, lust, gluttony and wrath, all of which could describe aspects of the Black Friday Experience. A theologian might argue that the root of all these behaviours is perhaps the original sin of all, envy. (I gave a lecture on this a few years ago in which I made a case for its being the primal sin at the very core of Adam's rebellion against God in the mythical Garden of Eden.)

I don't want to be unduly portentous about this. I'm not one of those preachers whose Christmas sermons are tiresome diatribes against consumerism and commercialism. Let's be positive as Advent begins, and hopes and longings are reawakened. As Christian faith has always understood, it's thankfulness that is the foundation of a healthy, hope-filled way of life. There are more than enough shopping days to Christmas that allow us to go in search of good gifts for family and friends, not in the mad feeding frenzy of Black Friday, but in a virtuous, ethical, thoughtful, happy and above all thankful way. That will add quality and integrity to the precious act of giving to the people we love.

So don't let's encourage the worst instincts of a retail industry greedy for profits. Forget Black Friday. Make it a personal Thanksgiving Day instead. Because that's something we should certainly learn from our American friends. (And to any of them who are reading this, Happy Thanksgiving Day to you all!)

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!

Having Your Cake and Eating It: Advent thoughts

I'm trying hard not to be grumpy this Advent.

It's not the usual clergy preoccupation with Christmas trees, carolling and commercialism before November is even out. It doesn't become us to be pressing the dislike button too much. I used to be quite fierce about keeping a rigorously blue (or violet) Advent until Christmas Eve. Indeed, I still want to honour Advent in its entirety as a matter of personal spiritual discipline: this is a wonderful liturgical season. But my internalised Pharisee doesn't take much awakening at this time of year. So I'm learning to be more relaxed about it. In the grand scheme of things there are bigger worries to preoccupy us.

And it's these bigger things that are making me grumpy. More accurately, the bigger things in which I'm directly implicated and have to take some responsibility for. 2016 has been particularly prolific in this respect.

Take this morning's news for instance. A Government aide has been photographed in Downing Street making very free with her spiral-bound notebook. "Who is Julia? What is she?" Schubert might have sung. A quick photographer with a long lense captures her scribblings for all to see. "What's the model? Have your cake and eat it." And then: "French likely to be the most difficult." (What is it with these people who are caught more often than they should be with their literary pants down in one of the world's most scrutinised streets? You have to wonder if they are under instruction to reveal tantalising glimpses of what's going on behind closed doors.)

Yes, I'm tempted to be exceedingly grumpy about this. My parents taught me about having my cake and eating it early on in life. How it used to irritate me when they trotted out this proverb!  They said it meant trying to achieve the impossible, and always for selfish ends. As I've learned from the New York Times (http://nyti.ms/1HbHN6q), in Germany you would say that you can't dance at two weddings at once, and in Russia that you can't sit on two chairs at the same time. 

If ever a phrase captured the spirit of the Brexiters' referendum campaign it is this. It seems that we Remainers were right when we said that the mantra "Give us our country back" was utterly and unscrupulously self-regarding. In a series of blogs earlier this year, I asked (possibly a trifle grumpily) where, in the Brexit campaign, we could find real concern for the welfare of other nations, for social justice, for the project of creating a more peaceable world, for the pursuit of the common good. (The answer is that there were a few Brexit voices that called for a more just world order such as Giles Fraser's, but they were all but drowned in the shrill chorus that echoed David Cameron's negotiating stance at the Brussels summit in February: "what matters is what's best for Britain". Not the EU, not Europe, not our allies, not the poor and neglected, not a world facing irreversible climate change, not the human family as a whole. Just us here in Britain.)

It's going back to an old question to ask where this leaves the Hebrew and Christian commandment to love our neighbour as ourselves. Jesus did not say that we should have our cake and eat it. He taught us that if someone demands the cloak on our back, we must give them our shirt as well; if we are asked to travel a mile with a person who needs our help, we must go the next mile too. He taught us that in the kingdom of God, it is open-handedness and generosity that count, because that is how God is towards us. I hesitate to invoke the word surely because somehow that suggests a rhetorical cover-up for a weak argument. But surely the gospel's logic is that the love-command applies to every level of human life, corporate, national and global as well as personal. Doesn't it? 

Advent refocuses our gaze on what belongs to God's kingdom. It lifts our spirits because we believe that God has a destiny for the human race that transcends our best efforts to serve our own ends - efforts that will usually end badly. Wouldn't it be wonderful if, as an Advent gesture, our leaders started talking seriously about the role our nation could play in constructing a world characterised by generosity rather than self-interest? I may be naïve but I believe - or want to believe - that the British people are far better than the dreadful slogans so many found themselves mouthing during the Referendum. Who would not hear the knock on the door and gladly open it to someone who needed us? Who would give their child a stone when they asked for a fish? 

So have we seen an ugly truth in a spiral-bound notebook? Is having your cake and eating it now the official ethic of a virtuous Christian nation? Is it the political version of the acquisitive "must-have" slogans that fill our TV screens in Advent? Or is it just a piece of nonsense we shouldn't pay too much attention to? After all, it's just another way of saying that you can't do the impossible and square the circle. (Maybe "Julia" is even deconstructing rather cleverly the illogic of her Brexit lords and masters by making sure we notice the non-sense of their position - wanting the benefits of the Single Market but not the free movement of people that inevitably goes with it?) 

What's the antidote to feeling grumpy about all this? I think it's to focus on the Advent hope and on the more excellent way of love that the gospel invites us to walk in. It's to practise thankfulness as the fundamental Christian virtue, because it is the only possible response we can make to the generous Love that calls us to say yes to it. Having your cake and eating it just sounds feeble and pathetic when you set it alongside the Advent themes of ultimate destiny: death, judgment, hell and heaven. 

There. I'm done with it. Away with grumpiness. It has no place in this season of expectancy and joy.