Clergy and Locked Churches: the Bells Not Tolled

When I was a parish priest, my curate and I would meet twice each day to say morning and evening prayer in the church. We would toll the service bell first and wait a minute or two in case anyone joined us. Two or three usually did in the evenings. In the mornings we’d be on our own.

Overlooking the churchyard was a residential home for elderly people. A number of them had rooms that looked out on the medieval church in its beautiful setting. One day, I had to be away. It was my colleague’s rest day. So the church remained locked and the bell silent. Next morning as I walked into town I bumped into a couple of women who lived in the home. I hadn’t met them before. They stopped me, looking solicitous.

‘Are you all right, Vicar?’ they inquired. ‘We were worried about you.’
‘I’m fine, thank you. But why do you ask?’
‘Oh, it’s just that you weren’t at your prayers yesterday. We always notice you walking across to church from the vicarage and listen out for the bell. We thought there must be something wrong when we didn’t see you.’

It was nearly forty years ago, but I’ve never forgotten that encounter. I was a young incumbent and had a lot to learn. Without realising it, in five minutes those good women taught me one of the most important lessons of my life. It was that when you are a priest of the Church of England, you are there for the whole parish, not simply your congregants. You are a public representative of God, the Christian faith and the national church. And when you go into church to say your prayers, you take the parish with you in mind and heart as you lay before the Almighty the life of the community you live in and serve in God’s name. You may be alone in the building. But you’re always engaging in an act of public prayer. Because you do this on behalf of the parish, it’s an act of common prayer. And you are noticed!

This witness is part of what we’ve learned to call public faith. It’s built into the Church of England’s understanding of itself as a national church whose parish system ensures that there is ‘a Christian presence in every community’ with a duty of care to all who live there whatever their faith affiliation. The incumbent belongs to the visible sacral, social and legal symbol-system that connects the church building and the geographical parish to the persona of the ‘parson’. And this is what gives the witness of priest-in-church-and-parish its public character in worship, pastoral care and outreach.

Which brings me to the lockdown of our churches during the Coronavirus emergency. I haven’t blogged about this before because I did not want to make the life of our bishops and clergy more difficult than it already is at this demanding time. I realise it’s contentious, and ill-tempered spats on social media don’t help. But reading Bishop Peter Selby’s article ‘Is Anglicanism Going Private?’ in this week’s Tablet (£) has reinforced my original belief that the decision to prohibit (or strongly dissuade - which is it?) the parish clergy from going into their locked churches to say their prayers is fundamentally misguided. I’m sorry to say that I think it risks compromising the Church’s public witness during this crisis.

For this reason I have signed a letter in today’s Times (£ - but go to the end of this blog). It suggests that this policy ‘is a failure of the Church’s responsibility to the nation, stifling our prophetic witness and defence of the poor’. As we know, the clergy are regarded by the Government as ‘key workers’ who are explicitly permitted to enter their buildings during the course of their duties. So there is no question of challenging the law. Our concerns are more theological and pastoral. As Bishop Selby says, ‘our churches are not just optional when useful and available but are signs of hope and healing for our communities and our nation’ (my italics). Our letter speaks about church buildings ‘whose architecture, symbolism and history represents the consecration of our public life’. So we are urging the bishops at their gathering this week to change their current policy, and ask that ‘the processes and thinking which led to these decisions’ should be openly debated through the Church’s synodical structures.

Let me make four points about this. The first is that I do not doubt that the bishops acted for the best of reasons. They are concerned about public safety like everyone else. They want clergy to demonstrate responsibility in complying with the lockdown regulations and to show solidarity with the public. They are right to insist that priests should not be thought of as taking advantage of their position in ways not open (literally) to lay people.

Secondly, nothing in our letter or this blog is meant to disparage the wonderful work being done by parish clergy across the land during this crisis. I want to pay tribute to my own parish priest here. Whether it’s the streaming of services, producing resources for prayer and reflection, maintaining pastoral contact with parishioners or catalysing and contributing to local voluntary efforts in support of the vulnerable and needy, the imagination and inventiveness of our clergy has been hugely impressive. They deserve our warmest thanks.

Thirdly, there is no quarrel with the decision to suspend services of worship and close church buildings even for personal prayer. This is a clear matter of public safety, and is consistent with how all public gathering spaces have been regulated in this crisis. I did not support the plea made during Holy Week to open up our church buildings for members of the public to engage in private devotion on Easter Day. The risks would have been too high.

The final clarification is that for me, the emphasis is less on streaming acts of worship from church buildings as opposed to vicarage kitchens or dining rooms, than the more basic question of what our church buildings are for. I have to say that in this respect I think the Catholic Church’s decision to maintain the daily offering of mass in local churches, streamed or not, is exemplary. It’s true that we refer to streaming in the letter. But it’s the principle of clergy praying in their churches that has prompted it and is uppermost in my mind in writing this blog.

It comes down to this. I believe that even during this emergency, parish priests should do all in their power to keep their churches in use, even when the doors are locked. I mean that clergy should continue to ‘inhabit’ them by maintaining the sacred activity for which they were built, which is the offering of prayer. Whether it’s the eucharist, the daily office or simple acts of reflection through scripture and silence, it’s keeping the soul of the building alive that matters. To walk away from our church buildings, even temporarily, is in Peter Selby’s words a worrying sign that we may have reached ‘a decisive point in the retreat of the Church of England from the public sphere to the private realm’.

Our churches are the most visible tool of mission that we have. At times of threat, people instinctively turn towards them for solace and strength. They are places to lay burdens of worry, sorrow and despair, calm the spirit and find peace and hope. It’s a cruel feature of this emergency that this cannot take place in any corporate way. But it can still happen by engaging the imagination and the spirit. The church building is always there: inspiring, steady, reliable, a potent symbol of God’s presence among us, and of a community of faith and care for whom it is the primary focus of life together. But its witness needs a human presence if it’s to be effective. It needs the heartbeat of its rhythm of prayer to help sustain its community in hope. Like the high priests of old who bore the people on their hearts as they went alone into the holy place, the incumbent praying in church on behalf of his or her people is a beautiful and eloquent symbol of something deep within the human psyche.

Representative priesthood, public witness and the symbolic function of sacred space are rich ideas but they are not unduly mysterious. The spiritual potential in knowing that the priest is at prayer in church shouldn’t be underestimated. Far from the incumbent invoking the privilege of holy orders in order to do something disallowed to lay people, the representative character of prayer turns it into a profound act of service to the parish.

‘Those who live around’, the meaning of the word paroikia, may or may not be aware that their priest is doing this for them, and in an important sense, with them. But whether they are aware or not isn’t the point. What matters is that the incumbent sees himself or herself, not as a private individual but as a representative person who goes into church to serve. Liturgy is literally an act of service. And whatever expression it takes, formal, informal, traditional, contemporary, virtual or face to face, in the sacred space or outside it, all Church of England worship ultimately derives its validity from the church building and the geographical parish, the twin visible foci of the incumbent’s ministry as Anglicanism understands it.

Which is why the bishops’ decision is not so much distressing as baffling. It’s a lazy binary to perpetuate the cliché about how ‘the church isn’t buildings but people’. The truth is that it’s both. Ask parishioners! Sacred buildings work so well as numinous symbols because they gather up and bring into transcendent perspective the whole life of human communities whose tragedies and triumphs, fears and longings, hopes and aspirations are embodied and cherished within them. Holistic mission always means grasping the ‘both-ands’ of the material and spiritual dimensions of an incarnational way of ministering. To lock our church doors against the very people set aside to represent this servant ministry and put it into practical effect makes no sense.

How institutions behave in crises is always a big test not only of their resilience but their virtue. History will judge whether the reputation of the Church of England has suffered as a result of its response to this emergency. Its verdict may not be kind if Peter Selby is right that we are sliding ever further in the direction of a privatised, congregation-centered existence. As our letter says, we must look again at the assumptions behind this policy. And as a matter of good theology and practice, we must allow our priests inside our churches and let their prayers breathe the prayer of the living Spirit back into our beloved holy places once again.

Here is the full text of the letter (with the full - and growing - list of signatories).

The Election - thoughts at Grey’s Monument

This is a bit longer than usual. You’ll understand.

For the first time for decades, I didn't stay up all night to watch the election results. By the small hours of the night the outcome was as clear as the day. Perhaps I should have been on my knees during the watches (I blogged about praying for the election last time). Instead, I went to bed. And slept quite well in the circumstances. I woke early and for an instant thought I heard someone say "behold, it was a dream". But it wasn't. It was the morning of 24 June 2016 all over again.

What do I say about this election result, I asked myself as dawn broke. Today is St Lucy’s Day, 13 December. It used to be the shortest, darkest day of the year in the unreformed Julian Calendar of John Donne’s times, inspiring his famous Nocturnal about “the year’s midnight”. How apt! Was Boris Johnson teasing us when he chose this particular date? He is, after all, a lover of classical antiquity.

But Lucy was the Roman girl-martyr who brought light into dark places, hence her lovely name. The play on darkness obscuring light and light penetrating darkness fascinated Donne. Light and dark come into things in elections, I thought to myself. Altruism dragged down by naked self-interest, narrow tribal loyalties pierced in our best moments by an awakened conscience and a deeper feeling for humanity - there’s a real dark-and-light chiaroscuro in our thoughts, emotions, speeches and behaviour at election times. It’s what we should expect at liminal times like these, but the strength of my own feelings never fails to take me by surprise.

Here’s what I posted on social media from my bed. 

So the UK is going into exile. I must accept Brexit & live with it. It will be bitter for me personally & I think, taking a long view, for the nation collectively. The biggest mistake made by Labour & the LibDems? Agreeing to a General Election at all. That decision was a disastrous misreading of the signs of the times. And of the capacity of both party leaders to win trust on the nation’s doorsteps. Good people of all faiths & political views must now come together for the sake of the planet, for the sake of peace & for the sake of the poor. We must keep hope alive.

I chose those words carefully. And felt better for writing them. Yes, it will be bitter, I thought, not just because of Brexit, but for all the other reasons so many of us feared a landslide like today’s, especially on account of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our nation. Yet there’s a difference between feeling what we feel and acting out those feelings. I’ve consistently campaigned in this blog on the foundation that the clear command is to love our neighbour, and indeed, our enemy. Perhaps today poses precisely that challenge, not to harbour resentments and hatreds towards those for whom this has been a day to rejoice while some of us feel like strangers in a landscape we barely recognise as our political and cultural home.

It would have been easy to gaze at the TV news all day. But we decided instead to get out of the house and go into Newcastle to look for Christmas gifts for the family. We walked up from the station along Grainger Street. There, ahead of us, presiding over the city’s Christmas market, was the statue of the 2nd Earl Grey on top of his Monument. I felt a surge of admiration for this man, one of Northumberland’s greatest, who was Prime Minister from 1830-1834. In times as fractious and turbulent as our own (read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, set in the early 1830s - I blogged about her recently), Lord Grey championed and saw enacted the Great Reform Act of 1832 that abolished rotten boroughs and launched the long, fitful journey towards universal suffrage. 

What would this lover of civil and political liberty have made of today, I wondered? I’ll leave experts to comment on an unreformed electoral system that (among other oddities) gives us an outcome in which a Tory landslide of 365 seats can result from the votes of a few hundreds of thousands of voters in swing constituencies while in total, more people across the UK have voted against the Tories than for them. I think the good Earl would say that electoral reform is still a work in progress. There’s no hope of progressing it in the next 5 years, but I believe election results will lack firm credibility and ownership for as long as Parliament fails to address this fundamental problem. 

But wandering among the Christmas shoppers, I didn’t want to dwell on these challenges. Nor did I want to engage in a long post-mortem or play the blame game about the failure of Remainers to get our act together. Later, certainly, we need to think very hard about what went wrong. But not now. What was needed today was to reflect, ponder, and pray about how to manage disappointment and bitterness, and live with a result many of us had feared, yet dared to hope might be averted. Maybe I should have practised disappointment more, like Diogenes famously exploring futility by praying to a lump of rock. All of life, we have to learn to “live with”. It’s a mark of being adult that we make some progress along the path of graceful acceptance when things don’t go our way.

The Grey Monument bears witness to a man who, despite endless frustrations and discouragements, channelled his energies into what would help the nation flourish. In our time, this has to mean rebuilding the sense of being one nation again. As I said to begin with, we owe it to the planet, to world peace, and to the poor who are always with us, to come together with all people of good will to renew ourselves to pursue what is just and right and good. And to keep our hope alive.

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Maybe one way in which we do this is by learning to act more out of trust. Or (to paraphrase something Bishop Michael Ramsey once said about prayer), if it’s too soon to start trusting people again after these political storms of the last three years, at least to want to. And if even that’s too much to contemplate, to want to want to. 

Yes, there’s so much that’s wrong with our politics, both the decisions we are making and the way we are making them. We are right to challenge falsehood, mendacity and the casual disregard for careful process when we see them. We are right to be angry for the sake what’s good and true. But we must examine our motives, and make sure we’re not feeding self-righteousness. Nurturing blame and bitterness gets us nowhere. What’s needed is to help a grown-up public conversation to begin again on the basis of our common humanity. We need to make a presumption that our conversation partner wants the best for others, not the worst, that they care for their fellow human beings, for the needs of others, and for the future of the world just as we do. 

Anglicans call this the “charitable assumption”. It undergirds good pastoral practice. Yes, it strains credibility sometimes, when we wonder if others are as honourable as we’d like to think they are, yet I do believe it’s a vital principle of courteous, graceful, good-neighbourly behaviour. It entails, for example, attentive listening in the spirit of “maybe I can learn to see it your way; and is it possible that you could come to see it mine?” That’s not to equivocate about our hard-won principles, only to understand them in the context of the bigger picture which is always more complex than the simple binaries we love so much. As Bishop John Habgood once said, it’s all very well “being prophetic”, as long as you see all sides of a question. Or try to.

I was touched and moved by something my daughter wrote today to our family WhatsApp group. She’s allowed me to share it here. We had been in touch with our children to ask how they were feeling about the election. She replied:

I feel ok - perhaps that it is my role to promote a sense of steady-ness for those around me who are very upset. But you know, I am a super-rational pragmatist. 

I also feel that I too learned a lot from watching the Tory victories through the 80s and early 90s, something about coping with the disappointment, even tho I didn’t understand it. 

I feel relieved that the waiting and dreading and liminal is over. That in itself releases new energies eventually. And on that we do need to be out of this Brexit impasse so that attention can be spend on domestic agenda. So I understand that vote.

And I feel that it is better to know what you don’t understand about your country than not know. Not that we, in our liberal bubbles  know now, but we need to learn. 

And we need to be kind to ourselves and to everyone we meet, especially those whose opinions we don’t understand and especially those who are marginalised. And we need to listen to those people whose opinions we don’t understand and expand our bubbles. 

That’s what I think. But yes. Obviously awful, but we don’t know what this will mean. And we do know that there are a lot of young activists coming up, that the generation emerging is not like the generations before it so things will shift. we need to learn and to listen, to mentor and to work in whatever way we can to generate communities in which people can listen to and learn from those with whom they might fundamentally disagree. And we need to borrow coping strategies from those places for whom this kind of political marginalisation is the norm - who can ONLY rely on the state to frustrate and disempower them, which is still probably most places in the world . 

Perhaps it is denial, but I am still just grateful to have a vote and a state that provides any protection or health care at all. 

So we also need to be grateful. Not least because we are not the people who will be most marginalised by this decision. And maybe that sounds a bit selfish, but we need to try to appreciate what we have, and have a good Christmas together and emotionally nurture and sustain each other.

I will never lose faith in the power of love, of community, of relationship and of the collective. Aluta continua! Weep today. And the work of rebuilding starts again tomorrow.

So well said. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Methodist Church have also found just the right words for today. They have published an Open Letter to the Prime Minister following his return to office. This is church leadership at its best. They speak for me.

More to come (if you can bear it) as we go on trying to understand where we now find ourselves after the election. 

That Election Prayer!

Before the last general election two years ago I wrote a blog about how we might pray in the days before we cast our vote. I recycled it recently and it got a few appreciative nods. Enough said, I thought.

But then I saw the official prayer issued by the Church of England for this 2019 election. Here it is.



God of grace and truth,
send your Spirit to guide us
as we discover your will for our country.
Help us to discuss the issues before us
with courtesy, truth and mutual respect,
and grant that all who stand for parliament
will seek to serve the common good,
through him who came not to be served but to serve,
Jesus Christ our Lord.

Oh dear!

Yes, I have to say that it left me feeling decidedly uncomfortable, and I admit, embarrassed. Judging by responses on social media, I'm not alone. Everyone endorses the sentiments about courtesy, truth and mutual respect. We all want those who are standing for parliament to seek to serve the common good (but why seek to? - such a weak, padding kind of phrase when what we're longing for are men and women who will go beyond "seeking" actually to embrace "serving" without fear or favour). And I'd have thought we would want to focus our prayer specifically on those who are elected to parliament rather than simply standing. But let's not be pedantic when there's a bigger matter at stake.

It's the opening petition that's the trouble. Send your Spirit to guide us as we discover your will for our country. I don't think this will do, either as prayer or as theology. Which is saying the same thing. Lex orandi, lex credendi: as we believe, so we pray; and as we pray, so our belief is formed and shaped. Doctrine, liturgy and spirituality are not separate from one another. They are a single entity that expresses our response to the God whom we worship and serve. I'm saying that this and every liturgical text not only tells us something about how we pray. It's a mirror that unmasks and reflects back to us what we truly believe, in this case about God's will and purpose for us mortals.

Or at any rate, us mortals who make up the United Kingdom. This Church of England prayer seems to put into our minds and mouths the idea that whatever the outcome of the election, it will prove to have been God's will. This is what we are asking the Spirit to help us discover, as if having said our prayers, it's simply a matter of unwrapping an early Christmas present on Friday the Thirteenth to find out what we've been given.

Shouldn't we have learned by now that it's a dangerous doctrine to elide what actually happens in life with God's will and purpose? The seventeenth century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz may have believed that ours is the best of all possible worlds (among other reasons because a world that exists at all is arguably better than one that doesn't). Alexander Pope put it into verse.

All nature is but art unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, "Whatever IS, is RIGHT".

Voltaire was at first a keen disciple of this kind of optimism. But he had to learn through his disappointments in life that it most definitely isn't the case that whatever is, is right. In 1755 an earthquake in Lisbon destroyed the city and killed tens of thousands of innocent people. That terrible catastrophe put an end to his innocence. It gave him a feeling for tragedy. "If Pope (the poet) had been at Lisbon, would he have dared to affirm that all is well?" Candide is his witty demolition of optimism as a doctrine that does justice to the way things are. It doesn't. It's hopelessly simplistic. And for that reason, perilous.

I think the Church of England's prayer falls squarely into the optimistic trap of believing that whatever is (whatever the result of the election), is right. It seems to believe that the election outcome is the answer to the question we put when we invoke the Spirit to help us discover your will for our country. Job done. Prayer answered. The mystery of providence grasped and understood!

But what if providence were infinitely more inscrutable than this way of praying seems to affirm?

How we understand "God's will" in relation to the complexities, ambiguities and baffling realities of life, particularly to pain and suffering, is called theodicy. Some of the greatest minds of the Bible gave themselves to exploring it, most famously the author of the Book of Job. That book concludes that there is no conclusion, no answer or formula that will "explain" the mystery of providence and the reality of suffering. Events are facts on the ground, but they don't tell us about God's purpose. This was the problem Voltaire had to face when the wake-up call from Lisbon overturned his optimistic view of the world. The outcome of the election will be a fact by Friday, but whether we think it's a good or bad result is in no way connected with "God's will for our country". That's just a lazy optimistic assumption. Politicians (and clergy?) may like the convenient idea that whatever is, is right. But as an intelligent account of the world and of human life, it won't do.

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So what can we say about the election and God's providence? And how should we pray about it?

Kierkegaard said that life has to be lived forwards but understood backwards. This is the only way we can begin to make sense of how God is among us. Not by looking back at events and pronouncing a verdict ("yes, that must have been his will!") but by glimpsing how God is present in the ebbs and flows of human history and in the stories of personal life. How we try to respond when someone is terminally ill or is killed in a road accident can help us here. Intelligent faith doesn't say, never says, "Oh, it must be God's will" (whatever is, is right!). Instead, it tentatively asks where God's presence might be discerned in the very midst of a person's suffering, suggest how God is among us not as presiding over pain but as its victim. Isn't this what the passion narrative teaches us?

So yes, there are election outcomes I would prefer to see this week, and outcomes I'd find it hard to welcome. I'd go further and suggest that some of those outcomes are closer than others to my own vision of society, informed by my Christian faith. But note the pronoun! It's a personal perception. Whether it's held by many or few doesn't make it "the will of God". I'm not even sure we can confidently speak about the will of the nation in these febrile times, let alone the will of the Almighty.

Therefore, faced with the inscrutable mystery of divine providence, I'd prefer to say nothing about God's will, and not speculate about things I can't possibly know or even guess at. "Before that of which we cannot speak, we must remain silent" said the twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in one of the most important sayings of our time. To say nothing, that is, other than to urge us all to continue in the spiritual task of discerning the signs of the times and responding as intelligently as we can to whatever the present moment suggests we must do next. That can begin to happen when theology and prayer learn how to be humble, cultivate reticence, discover how not to resort to words when the silence of not knowing would be the better, wiser, more creative response.

I think this could help faith gain respect in an era when we are so much more aware of the complexity of things than our forebears. We must wean ourselves off the easy talk about "the will of God" and the old religious formula and its modern equivalents, whatever is, is right. That kind of God-talk may bring comfort in the short-term. But it won't sustain us for long, because it's not only manifestly false to our reading of events, but as we've seen in our own times, utterly discredited. It's religion-lite with an untroubled conscience, not the tough, demanding Christianity we learn from the New Testament that requires us to wrestle with the dilemmas of believing. The assumption that mortals can ever know God's will in any ultimate sense shouldn't even be hinted at in the way we pray.

And if we're ever tempted back into naive spiritual optimism, all we need to do is to whisper a word or two that symbolises what we can't know and ought not to speculate about in terms of the providence of God. We simply have to name catastrophe or evil for what they are to put paid to idle theorizing. The Lisbon Earthquake. Auschwitz. All cruelty, slavery and abuse. Or when death is untimely and wrong as it so often is. And when the pain won't go away. Or when a relationship is irretrievably fractured. Or simply when events bewilder us, when the paper the book of providence is written on seems darker than the words themselves and we can't make head or tail of them.

Why do we pray? Because we believe that God cares about the world, about nations and peoples, about every human life. It's an act of trust in our Creator and the grace and truth we recognise in him. By praying, we defy despair and affirm that we do not lose heart, whatever the circumstances. Who can say what effect this great project of hope may have? But we do know for sure how it affects us in our best moments, even if we often seem to be doing little more than holding other people in our hearts. That "work" of prayer, for me, is to do a very great deal! Prayer deepens our feeling for others, aligns our care and compassion with God's. It makes us open to new possibilities, helps shape our aspirations, commits us to act in the name of all that is right and good and so point to the grace and truth that are already among us. In the end all prayer is an act of love - for our neighbour as well as God.

Which is why we must pray this week. If we didn't love our nation and our fellow-citizens, why would we bother praying for them? Here’s an excellent prayer produced by the Methodist Church that does it beautifully.

And  here  once again is the election prayer I commended in my earlier blog. It's not a perfect text. But at least I can say for it that I'd be content to say Amen at the end if I heard it read in church. Which is more than I'm able to do with the C of E's latest offering. Sorry! 

The Berlin Wall 30 years on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ten Commandments for Brexit

I saw a tweet today from a finance company. "Ready for Brexit? Our ten-point checklist will help you get prepared. Act now to get the financial guidance you need. #LetsTalkBusiness." I retweeted it with a comment of my own. "Ready for Brexit? Nope. Are emotional and spiritual guidance on offer too?" No answer as yet. I wait in hope.

But while I wait, I'm thinking how important it is to cross this threshold with self-awareness and insight. Readers of my blog will know that I'm a Remain ultra. I believe that voting for Brexit was a terrible mistake for the nation to make. I think it is bound to have all kinds of consequences, mostly unforeseen, for the United Kingdom, not least the union of our four peoples. I can't see that any Brexit deal will benefit Britain as much as our present EU membership does. (And I write in North East England, destined to suffer the worst impact of any part of the UK in terms of its economy, manufacturing industry and employment.)

Nevertheless, I am realistic enough to recognise that Brexit is bound to happen with or without a deal whether it's in a week's time, a month's time or some time in the future. And while a big part of me will only be dragged kicking and screaming out of the European Union, a voice within tells me to get ready to leave as gracefully as I can. Not necessarily going gently into that not-so-good night, but at least trying to recognise that generosity is needed. It’s going to be hard. I'm addressing this blog to myself to begin with, and then to fellow Remainers who like me feel the pain of Brexit and yet want to go on living as good citizens, making the best of what seems like a thoroughly bad job.

So here's my answer to the question in my tweet. A ten-point checklist to help us get prepared emotionally, morally, spiritually. Ten Commandments for Brexit, if you like. #LetsTalkWisdom.

1 Understand the pain of loss.
Emotional intelligence is important here. For many of us, Brexit is a loss of identity and belonging the like of which we probably haven't experienced in our nation's life before. If you're like me you'll feel this loss in a surprisingly personal way. This is about me as well as us. So we should expect to experience the normal symptoms of bereavement such as denial, bewilderment, emptiness, anger, bargaining, depression - and maybe only much later, acceptance and resolution. The effects of Brexit on mental health have already been noted by some psychotherapists. We simply need to notice what we are going through, and be honest about it, at least with ourselves.

2 Don't feed anger and bitterness. Try to be positive.
Yes, we were lied to in the referendum campaign. This hasn't stopped since then. Inevitably we feel that the Brexit result, so finely balanced, was based on a false prospectus fed by the right-wing media. But there's nothing to be gained by nursing hurt feelings, still less by badmouthing those who misled the nation or colluded with them. We need to find healing in our nation if we are to have a future worth living for. Being positive can begin by celebrating the years we enjoyed EU membership and all the benefits it brought. Yes, we are sad beyond words to be leaving. We heartily wish we weren't. We are angry about it and are right to be. But we can resolve not to indulge in vengeful self-pity. Even in hard times, we can cultivate thankfulness. Let the power of grateful memory shed light on the way we navigate our path through this dark time of loss and grief.

3 Treat Brexiters with courtesy.
Loving my neighbour as myself is one of the two great precepts of the Torah, reiterated by Jesus in the gospels. We need to work hard at our relationships with Brexiters, and with former Remainers who have gone along with, even supported, the government's attempts to "get Brexit done". However much we may have been abused by Brexit campaigners, however easy it might have been to give back in kind, we should not compromise on respect and courtesy towards those with whom we profoundly disagree. Perhaps there are individuals to whom we need to say that we're sorry, and with whom we should try to be reconciled. It's beneath our self-respect to treat others with contempt and nurse our hatred. In a divided nation, dignity (= "worth") has been at stake during these past three years. Let's cultivate peace and friendship where we can. Let’s try to help one another speak our truth with gracefulness. And if Brexit unravels, let’s not crow "I told you so!"

4 Remain European in heart and mind.
Let's use language accurately. We are leaving the European Union but we are not leaving Europe. It matters that we go on thinking of ourselves as Europeans, and that this should continue to be a core part of our identity as British people. To be fair to Brexiters, this is a point many of them have been at pains to underline. Whatever our nation's political alignments in the future, nothing can rob us of being geographically, intellectually, culturally and spiritually at the heart of our continent. "No man is an island entire of itself." We are "part of the main". We need to affirm this ever more strongly after Brexit. Travel in Europe if you can; if not, travel in your mind and heart. We are Europeans, and always shall be.

5 Befriend EU nationals living and working in Britain.
There's a particular need right now to embrace the so-called "Three Million" from EU countries who are living among us in this country. Many of them continue to suffer great anxiety about their future, whether their application for residence in Britain will be granted, what their prospects for employment are. (And let's remember that British people resident in overseas EU countries are just as worried about the uncertainties they face, including the elderly who can't afford to move back to the UK but face big questions about their pensions and health care.) This of course is only part of our hospitality to and care for all who live among us who come from other parts of the world. We must use our imaginations and offer help and support where we can.

6 Keep the conversation about Europe alive.
Remainers are often told to take Brexit on the chin and move on. But it's wishful thinking to imagine that the debate about the EU will end on Brexit Day. On the contrary. Negotiating our future relationship with the EU, and reaching trade deals will take many years. This will guarantee that the EU will remain on the national agenda and in its consciousness for a long time to come. And I'm certain that our children's generation, frustrated beyond measure by the actions of their Brexiter parents in denying them the future they had taken for granted until 2016, will one day reopen the question of EU membership. This may happen sooner than we think. We should encourage them. We should support pro-European politicians and policies. Democracy is a conversation that never stops. There's nothing once-for-all about Brexit.

7 Challenge fake news about the European Union.
The rhetoric of the far right will continue to trumpet "taking back control" and play down the intangible benefits of EU membership such as promoting human rights and the rights of working people, sharing in the project of peace-building across the continent, collaborating in our response to the climate emergency, working together on programmes to tackle crime, slavery, trafficking, sexual exploitation and maintaining security. As good Europeans we must go on championing the EU's efforts to build a better world not just for its twenty-seven nations but for all human beings. That means challenging the lies and half-truths that will continue to bolster those who try to demonstrate how Brexit has been the salvation of Britain. The case for the EU still needs to be made, even if, for now, we shall have to help make it as fellow-travellers rather than citizen-members.

8 Play your part to make sure that Britain remains an outward-looking country.
The referendum mantra, "what's best for Britain" was an invitation to indulge the worst of self-serving attitudes. To love our neighbour means to look for the welfare of others as well as ourselves, or as the Golden Rule says, to do for them what we would want them to do for us. In the reciprocity of mutual service and self-giving lies our flourishing. What's best for us turns out to be what's best for others too. The nations of the United Kingdom, the European Union and the Commonwealth understand this mutuality and attempt to live by it, even if the reality falls short of the aspiration. Given the environmental and geopolitical threats we face, our race only has a future if we cultivate the love of neighbour among the world's peoples. To become insular, as we risk doing because of Brexit, would be to walk away from the global responsibility our nation has historically understood to belong to its vocation. EU membership was a test of our capacity to look beyond our borders to the welfare of other peoples and, ultimately, to the flourishing of the human family. It would be the death of this humane, fair-minded, civilised country if we abandoned that large and generous vision for the world and looked only to the interests of our own people.

9 Don't be nostalgic. Live in the present.
We can't know what life will be like once we've crossed the Brexit threshold. In these days of the so-called end-game, it may feel like going into a kind of exile. Nostalgia is literally, aching for home. Exiles wouldn't be human if they didn't experience it. But when Jeremiah tried to help his people make a good exile far from their homeland, he told them to invest in their present, not the past. "Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce...Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare" (Jeremiah 29.1-7). This should be our attitude for the years we shall live on Brexit Island, be they many or few. Investing in the present opens us to its possibilities. We learn to live, not out of regret for the past but attentive to the here and now. We are always the better for doing that.

10 Don't lose heart. And say your prayers.
I think this is the most important principle of them all. Brexit may have driven us to the brink of desperation, but we refuse to give up hope. What God means by this cataclysm that has overtaken our nation only he knows. It's beyond our understanding. But we mustn't succumb to despair. So we say our prayers for the family of humanity, for our European friends and neighbours, for our nation and for ourselves. We are not expecting God to save us from ourselves and the consequences of our decisions. But prayer affirms that God has not abandoned his world. To pray is to stand in hope and solidarity with the world in all its suffering and to ask what its healing and flourishing would mean. And then to commit ourselves to whatever actions arise from our having glimpsed our human condition from a larger and deeper perspective. Contributing towards a better, more wholesome politics in our nation is one way. "What matters for prayer is what we do next." That's how to keep the flame of hope burning and not lose heart.

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!

After the Vote: a Church of England Statement?

After the Commons vote on Mrs May’s Brexit deal on Tuesday, the Church of Scotland was quick to issue a statement.

I’ve been tracking the Church of England’s media feed since the vote, thinking that at a time of national crisis, Britain’s other national church would be bound to say something that could help people of faith - maybe others - try to reflect on the position our nation is now in. I’ve been surprised, and I have to say disappointed, that so far, there has been no official comment.

So in the absence of any statement, and conscious that it’s hard to improve on the Church of Scotland’s wise words, here’s my own attempt. The Church of England is welcome to adopt it without attribution if it wishes. And while my personal view of Brexit is well-known to readers of this blog, I’ve genuinely tried to make this comment as inclusive as possible.

The Church of England is dismayed that following this week’s vote on the Prime Minister’s Brexit deal in the House of Commons, our nation now finds itself in an impasse. And this just ten short weeks before the date we are due to leave the European Union. We cannot exaggerate the dangers this poses to the United Kingdom. 

Our Church is privileged to serve one of its four nations, and this means that we care deeply about the welfare of England, its destiny, and its contribution to the flourishing of the United Kingdom, Europe and the world. Because of that, we would like to offer a comment on the position our nation is now in.

Our Church is probably no more united on Brexit than the population as a whole. This is one of many matters where the Church of England needs to live courteously with difference. But we believe, as we think most parliamentarians and most of the British public believe, that to leave the EU without any deal in place would be profoundly damaging to the UK. And we are afraid that it is the poorest and most dependent of our society who would be damaged the most. Our present paralysis is therefore a cause of great concern.

We say this out of concern not only for our future trading relationships with the EU, but also for the many other ways in which our collaboration with the European Union will continue to be of immense importance to this nation. We mean our shared concern for human rights, justice, employment practice, the alleviation of poverty, security, peacemaking and the conservation of the environment. We also mean our participation in scientific, medical, cultural and educational programmes that have benefitted all the EU nations and which we believe most people would want to see continue in some form. The UK has shown leadership in all these areas, and we would not want to see these opportunities vanish on 29 March. 

We are also deeply aware of the predicament Brexit poses to our friends from overseas EU nations who have made their home in the UK, and for British people living in those EU27 nations. A “no-deal” Brexit would have a severe impact on them and on their livelihoods. We owe it to them to make sure that they have security about their future, and this lends urgency to the task of negotiating an acceptable divorce settlement and future relationships as nations. 

We urge our Parliamentarians to put the nation’s welfare above party loyalties by finding every possible way of working together to find a way forward that can win consensus. This is not a time for taking up doctrinaire positions. It is not only vital that Parliament rediscovers a sense of common purpose. It is now very urgent indeed that we emerge from this current paralysis.

It has often been said that leaving the European Union does not mean leaving the continent of Europe. So we urge all the peoples of Britain to continue to be good friends, neighbours and allies to the nations of our continent, in whatever ways our future relationships are configured. This is unknown at present. But despite so much uncertainty, we urge our leaders at least to have regard for the many values the European family of nations has in common. 

What can the Church of England offer at this critical time? 

First, as our neighbours in the Church of Scotland have already said, we can try to model respect and courtesy in the way we ourselves as church members handle issues that deeply divide people. Archbishop Justin Welby has coined the phrase “good disagreement”. Our national conversation about Brexit has become violent and abusive at times. We must resist this, and instead embody what it means to treat one another as humans who are created in God’s image, whatever our political or religious convictions. We make our plea to all politicians and those in public leadership roles to take great care in the ways they express themselves. And this of course extends to all of us, not least in our use of social media. 

Secondly, we can promise to say our prayers. This isn’t about finding answers to our political dilemmas so much as holding the nation in our hearts and offering our present cares and concerns to the God who, we believe, cares as much about continents and nations as he does about individuals. And even if prayer is not everyone’s instinctive response at such times as these, perhaps there are more people than we imagine who find comfort in the knowledge that prayer is being offered in the cathedrals and churches right across our land on behalf of us all.

Thirdly, if there are concrete ways in which the Church of England can act as bridge-builders or reconcilers at this time of uncertainty, or beyond, we stand ready to contribute in any way we can. In this, we believe we speak for Christian leaders of every tradition and in every part of the kingdom. And for all people of goodwill, whatever their faith, politics, culture or origin. Together, we can find find possibility and hope even in the most troubled of times. We pray so.

UPDATE. As I was publishing this, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York released a short statement supporting the call to prayer issued by Churches Together in Britain and Ireland (CTBI).

How shall we mark Brexit in Church?

I posted a tweet today. It was a question, addressed to the two national churches of our island, the Church of England and the Church of Scotland. I also copied in Westminster Abbey because they know about these things too. My question is, will there be church services to mark Brexit Day? 

You may laugh. With the nation so hopelessly divided about Brexit, and the negotiations themselves mired in difficulties, how on earth can we contemplate marking the 29th March 2019 liturgically? Everyone agrees that it will be a momentous event in our history, but that’s about it. Remainers and Brexiters will want to tell entirely different stories about how we got to this threshold and what we believe, or hope, or fear, lies on the other side. One side will look for celebration, the other lament.

But let’s think a little more deeply. For one thing, it would seem very strange not to hold public services around Brexit Day when we are used to marking other big national events in this way. Liturgy is one of the ways we gather up and ritualise the events that are shaping our collective lives, whether it’s the centenary of the Great War, the end of the Falklands War, celebrating a royal jubilee or in the aftermath of terrorist attacks and natural disasters. By doing this in public, high-profile ways, we hold up a mirror to our common life and understand the place we occupy within the larger story of our peoples.

And of course, we offer our story to God. That’s primarily why people of faith have a strong instinct that we should gather together at times of transition. At every threshold, especially when we are at our most febrile, we need to pause to look back as well as look forward, try to discern where God is in the events we are passing through, ask ourselves what he is calling us to be and do in the future, and above all, offer our lives afresh to him in faith and hope. 

If ever we needed to do this, it is going to be next March as one chapter of our nation’s life comes to an end and a new one begins. Yes, this process has been and still is controversial, divisive and extraordinarily painful. But that’s precisely why we need to try to find words and ritual actions that will help carry us across this threshold as we pray for whatever awaits us beyond. 

And they need to be actions that we can perform, and words that we can say together. It will be far too soon in the spring to talk about the healing of memories. It could well be that things will become more bitter and fractious before they begin to mend. But if there is going to be healing, then the memory that we came together at a time of division and tried to reach out to one another could sow a seed of reconciliation that we can build on in the years ahead. And yes, a seed of forgiveness too, for many things have been said and done in this Brexit journey for which we shall need to say we’re sorry.

There could be two approaches to a Brexit liturgy. One would be to construe it as a vigil of prayer on the eve of crossing this threshold, offering what we are about to do - for better or worse - to God’s wise and loving providence. Many of us remember the vigils of prayer that were held across England before the General Synod vote in 1992 in relation to the ordination of women to the priesthood. People of utterly different convictions recognised in one another a common, God-given need to call upon God to help us at a time of deeply divided opinion. I could see us doing something like this as we contemplate a future none of us can yet foresee. Might a national day of prayer and fasting be appropriate?

The other approach would be to ritualise the transition we shall be negotiating. This would be harder to do in an inclusive way, but that shouldn’t stop the church from trying to interpret it in the light of what we as Christians believe about nationhood, about our place in the wider Europeans and worldwide family of peoples, about our commitment to the enduring values of peace, justice, inclusion, collaboration, honour, loyalty and truth. We need to articulate a vision of the kind of society we want to become, a vision for the kind of world we want to live in. It would include thankfulness for all that has been good in the past, penitence for what has fallen short, and the offering of our nation’s life in the future with as much confidence and hope that we can muster. The register will need to be humility not self-congratulation, reticence not assertiveness, acknowledging that there is so much that we cannot know about where this Brexit Road will lead us. But equally, in the spirit of St Paul in the midst of his ordeals, we must confidently affirm that we do not lose heart.

I’ve made no secret about how very disappointed I was that the Church of England ducked the challenge of holding a debate about Brexit before the Referendum, both in the General Synod and, I’m told, in the House of Bishops. The Synod debate, when it happened, took place after the Referendum - too little too late. It was such a lost opportunity: the national church in England ought to have contributed as an institution to a big conversation about what we believed at that time England’s place in Europe should be. It still should. But it seems afraid to. Sadly.

Now, once again, our national churches have the chance to help us as we reach a historical crossroads. Yes, of course the context will be continuing disagreement, opposing views that are passionately held. But this is precisely where our churches can make a real contribution - by naming our conflicts and divisions, the difficulty of the process we are in, and then by ritualising this painful collective journey in ways that signal what Justin Welby calls “good disagreement”. I’d say that it was not only desirable but necessary. And possible.

As readers of my blog know, I’m a heartfelt Remainer. I admit that I am deeply afraid of what is going to happen in six months’ time.  I am angry and frustrated about Brexit and I dread turning over the page in the 2019 calendar that will tell me that March 2019 has arrived when that fateful threshold must be crossed. I can’t see anything that may happen before then that will change my mind. For me this is not a good night and I don’t want to go gently into it. Raging? Well, yes.

But that’s precisely why I recognise that the church must try to speak into our confusions and help us see our hopes and fears in the larger context of God’s wisdom and care for humanity. Churches are at their best, not when they preach moral sermons but when they stand with our people so that they can weep or rejoice with them - or both. Especially is this true at the liminal places of life, when we are more than usually aware of our human fragility and our need of one another and of God. Churches are good at entering into the flow of public and personal history. It’s what’s needed now.

March 2019 will see us journeying towards Passiontide and Easter. The gospel of death and resurrection will furnish us with all the spiritual resources we need as we ask how best to mark our departure from the European Union. So I want to ask our church leaders: what will we do to help the people of our nation at this time of change? How could our cathedrals and greater churches play a role in regions and localities? How could local churches become places of prayer, resolve, hope, even healing? 

There’s an abundance of liturgical and spiritual imagination to draw on in every part of the church. Wouldn’t it be a terrible failure to be defeated by this challenge on the grounds that it’s just too difficult? I admit that it will be hard. But perhaps the nation is looking to us to respond, as it often does at times of uncertainty. I hope and believe that we will prove equal to the challenge. But we need to be thinking about it now. What are we doing to prepare? That’s my question.