Why I am an Impassioned Moderate

I was struck by some words of  (Lord) Andrew Adonis today. In a speech in the House of Lords, he said: "It is because of Brexit obsessives that we are in this mess. It is time for obsessive moderates like myself to assert ourselves."

I pondered this for a while, then tweeted: *Obsessive moderate* says @Andrew_Adonis of himself today. Endorse the sentiment 100%. It’s what I am too. But *obsessive* sounds false. It suggests compulsion. How about this - “I am an *impassioned* moderate/remainer/social democrat/liberal...”? Yes, that sounds good.

This produced a swift response from an online Twitter colleague: I think there’s a big difference between you Michael! He really is an obsessive, ranging into dangerous conspiracy theory. I’d never say the same of you! I couldn't possibly comment on that. But yes, I'd like to think I was not a conspiracy theorist. Most misfortunes (though not all) happen as a result of cock-up, chaos and confusion. Even more would I like to think I wasn't obsessed. You'll have to tell me if you think I am.

Lord Adonis wants to contrast two kinds of behaviour, the obsessiveness (as he calls it) of the hard doctrinaire Brexiters, and the need for moderates to be just as fervent for what they believe in too. I think he is right about this. The challenge for remainers is not that we lack conviction, but that we won't emulate the violent and poisonous rhetoric that emanates from some of Brexit's fiercest advocates. We want to focus on issues rather than personalities, challenge dogma with evidence, try to be respectful to those on the other side of this debate, and if we don't concur, at least look for "good disagreement". But that can come over as lacking force in the febrile political environment we are in, so much milk and water at a time when stronger fare is called for.

But I don’t think the phrase obsessive moderate will do. To me obsession means the idea that takes over my mind to the exclusion of all else. It's a pathology that carries more than a hint of morbidity. An obsessive is out of control. You can't negotiate with such a person. He or she will never change their mind or be open to different insights. Obsessives live by what's called cognitive dissonance: tailoring evidence so that it fits their frame of reference, denying what seem to others to be facts on the ground, falsifying any logic that undermines their own axioms. This is the antithesis of what I understand by "moderate". I won't say that I haven't been guilty of it at times when arguing against Brexit. We all get caught up in our own echo-chambers thanks to the algorithms that decide what we see on social media. I’m also aware that “liberals” can sometimes be among the most illiberal of people when their own position is attacked. But I'm trying to be aware enough to keep a cool head, resist obsession and maintain my own judgment, however hard that can be when emotions run high.

Instead, as I said in my tweet, I'd like to go for the phrase impassioned moderate. Or impassioned remainer, or liberal, or democrat, whatever describes the position that refuses extremes and looks instead for a convinced, central, mainstream position whether it's in politics and religion.

I've seen enough of extremes in religion to want nothing to do with them: the fundamentalism whose dogmas refuse to consider the validity of female priests or assisted dying or same-sex marriage, that is so tied to rigidly-construed texts or traditions that it will not countenance the idea that God may disclose new wisdom to us as the ages pass. It’s the readiness to open up contentious questions for exploration that I’m concerned about, not necessarily the conclusions that are arrived at. Extremes in politics function in the same kind of way, whether it's the hard Brexiters of the Tory European Research Group on the right or their equally determined (that's to say entrenched) mirror images on the left. Yesterday's resignation of seven MPs from Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party was an eloquent protest against a politics that will not negotiate or seek consensus at a time when it's imperative that our nation comes together to determine the shape of its future.

Now, to embrace the via media, as Anglicans are famously supposed to do, doesn't mean cultivating blandness, the Victorian childhood ideal of "meek and mild". On the contrary. We who are moderates or liberals need to be all the more fervent in resisting the ideological nonsense that is hurled at us from every side. Political and religious liberalism as it developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were not lacking when it came to passion! The arguments that raged then over contested issues were deeply felt by liberals because so much was at stake: nothing less than the character of nation, society and church. They were battles for the soul of our institutions.

What's the essence of moderation? I think it's a deep suspicion of extremes of every kind, whether of ideas or behaviour. A suspicion too that the easy either-ors we are presented with and told to choose between are likely to mask the quest for a deeper wisdom and truth. Moderation is comfortable with complexity and ambiguity. Words like generosity, openness, tolerance, respect, inclusivity come to mind, to me, intrinsically good words. It's true that they needn't always be virtuous: we know from our own experience that they can mask cowardice or laziness, the reluctance to get involved, the refusal to test and challenge what is likely to be damaging, dangerous or just plain false.

But at their best, I believe that these behaviours are virtuous, ethical and life-giving. As a moderate I want to say: let's turn away from the either-ors that drive us apart from one another, and learn instead the way of both-and. To me, this is not some safe hiding-place from the debates and arguments that cause turbulence, raise emotions and even threaten our stability. On the contrary. I want to contribute to these debates out of my own fervently-held conviction that liberal moderation holds the key to embracing our differences in ways that respect integrity but don't result in damage to our communities and our relationships. I believe that in both religion and politics, the via media, "impassioned moderation", is an intellectually coherent position. And I want to claim that it could prove to be the key to our reconciliation and healing in the increasingly fractured environment in which we find ourselves today. I say this not least because of liberalism’s respect for the separation of powers, the checks and balances that put constraints on the powers of institutions and individuals. These are essential to the spiritual and moral wellbeing of every healthy society and faith community.

Our churches, our society, our national institutions are beset by strongly-held differences that pose real risks to their integrity. The threat of civil unrest should we crash out of the EU with no deal, or hold a people's vote should alarm us. That's not to direct policy, only to point out how serious our situation has become. At the eleventh hour of this tortuous Brexit journey, impassioned moderation has a lot to be said for it. The alternative, a future of political extremism, doesn’t bear thinking about.

The Wicker Man and Derby Cathedral

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

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

So why the fuss?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The best things just happen to you."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

The NHS: in gratitude on its 70th birthday

Today is the 70th birthday of the National Health Service. Services and celebrations are happening across the nation. We are right to honour this great institution and be profoundly thankful for it.

I'm not one of those with a dramatic life-and-death story to tell about the NHS. I've not troubled my GPs overmuch in my lifetime. Most of my ailments have been small beer compared to what many others have had to face: childhood infections and abrasions, adolescent allergies, the odd broken limb, hypertension, mild atrial fibrillation, psoriasis. I've undergone a vasectomy, a prostate op and keyhole surgery for hernias. I have NHS hearing aids. Too much information? I suspect that for a man coming to the end of his seventh decade, it's pretty standard fare.

The Archers, the NHS and I are almost exact contemporaries. After the war, my mother became a nurse at the old Charing Cross Hospital in central London where I was born. Neither she nor my father were people of faith, but they did instil in me from a very early age a kind of hushed reverence for the NHS. (The Archers had to wait a few more years.) Our GP in north London was an elderly German-Jewish exile called Dr Landstein. I recall him quite clearly from the mid-1950s: kindly, compassionate, wise. Nothing was too much trouble for him. He enjoyed home visits and chats with my mother who like him had also survived the Holocaust. It felt like a family bereavement when he retired. I remember his successor too, Dr Giwelb. He was younger, less priestlike, more professionalised, more "modern", but he too was among the gods of my childhood pantheon (where they were flanked by Miss Bull, my primary school headmistress, and Owen Brannigan who lived three doors away on our street). Between them, they shaped my expectations of healthcare for a lifetime. And they have been abundantly fulfilled in adulthood. I'm thinking especially of two marvellous GPs had in Sheffield and Durham. Perhaps they know who they are.

When I was a parish priest, I was also the official chaplain to the town's infirmary, paid by the NHS. I learned a lot about healthcare in those years, not least when I was involved in the in-service training of doctors, nurses, administrators and support staff. I was proud to be a tiny part of that exemplary hospital, proud to have a role in an institution that was so valued in the community. If I ever entertained doubts about the virtue of universal healthcare (I'm not sure that I did), my experience in that place of truth and love quickly dispelled them.

So I understand why Polly Toynbee writes as she does about the NHS as a kind of surrogate religion. It's simply there, like the good old C of E, a benign institution that we're glad exists to bless our nation and provide for it at times of need, even if we rarely have to trouble it ourselves. For my generation and for everyone younger, it has hatched us, patched us up and dispatched us. We've felt safe and cared for. We've never known anything else. We can't quite understand why the whole world doesn't emulate the NHS, why the United States, for instance, has struggled so hard to provide even the rudimentary ObamaCare for the most needy that is now being unravelled by Donald Trump.

But we know for ourselves how politicised health care has become. No government has dared to tamper with the idea of universal healthcare free at the point of use. It would be a certain vote-loser. And yet the sustainability of the NHS is under threat in a way that would have been inconceivable even a quarter of a century ago. Conservative administrations have been reluctant for decades to say openly that excellence in healthcare requires that we all put our hands in our pockets to pay for it through our taxes. Only now is there a belated acknowledgment of this in the Prime Minister's £20 billion funding commitment. It's a welcome start. But it's nowhere near enough if the NHS is to be stabilised. It's now an urgent case of playing catch-up. Years of chronic underfunding must be put right if the founding vision of the NHS is to be honoured in our day. To achieve this, our leaders have to believe in it. Back to the NHS as a quasi-religion that needs vision and faith if it's to serve us well and flourish.

I recently read Adam Kay's book This is Going to Hurt. He was a junior hospital doctor specialising in obstetrics. He loved his work and showed every sign of going on to a promising career as a consultant. But the pressures on him as a healthcare professional became intense - not because of any failure of his, but because of "the system": impossible working hours, lack of resources, an absence of proper rigorous supervision, the ever-increasing likelihood of making a life-threatening mistake. So he resigned his position and is now a writer. His book is candid about his experience. It is by turns very funny and extremely alarming. We've known for years what GPs and junior hospital doctors have to contend with. But when you read something as personal and vivid as this, you begin to worry. You wonder how on earth the NHS can carry on as a viable institution, let alone have a future.

Like so many other things - the environment, arms sales, ethical trade, reform of our financial structures, the benefits system, Brexit, it comes down to the political will. Do we really want a future in which the founding vision of the NHS continues to play a central part in the welfare of our people? If so, are we willing to pay for it? Our politicians must come clean. And while we're on the subject, that applies to social care for the elderly too. We baby-boomers are getting old. Demographic projections show how our demands on the NHS will put it under ever-increasing strain until our generation has died out. Before that, we are going to need social care that is beyond the means of many people to afford. For those who are "just about managing" or not managing at all, the prospect of ageing is bleak and even terrifying. After a lifetime of looking after others, who will look after them?

Today we celebrate the vision and courage of those pioneers of 70 years ago who believed that the nation should look after its people from cradle to grave. That's not about setting up unhealthy dependencies so much as creating structures of mutual giving and receiving so that those who need care have access to it and need not fear that it will be denied them. It's old-fashioned to speak of "the idea of a Christian society". Yet I profoundly believe in this ideal of a public caring institution which is for all people, and from which no-one is excluded. It's a practical expression of the great commandment to love our neighbour as ourselves. On this NHS birthday, and out of gratitude for all that it represents, I believe we must renew our heartfelt political commitment to it so that our children and grandchildren may benefit as we have done.

But a birthday is for celebrating and being thankful. The NHS is not a perfect institution but I want to say, unhesitatingly, that it is a great one So this is a day to be glad and set our hopes high. As the Archbishop of Canterbury tweeted today, "The NHS is an expression of our deepest shared values. Whatever its challenges, it’s about us living out our concern for solidarity and the common good. It reflects God’s concern for every person without exception. Today let's pray, give thanks and recommit our support. The NHS can be proud of its first seven decades." Indeed.  Floreat!

Balliol, the Freshers' Fair and the Christian Union

At Balliol College Oxford, the ban on Christian Union students taking part in the Freshers' Fair has been lifted. No doubt there's a lot more to this story than has been reported in the media. But on the surface the original decision emanating from within the structures of the JCR not only looked foolish and naive, but it was guaranteed to provoke an outcry not only from evangelical Christians but from all fair-minded people, including the students in their own College who quickly condemned it.

I'll come clean. Balliol College Oxford is my alma mater. I went up in 1968 to read maths and philosophy, and stayed on to do a second degree in theology. I went back as a postgraduate in 1974 and was ordained priest in the College Chapel in the summer of 1976. So you'll see that I have a lot invested in the place. You won't be surprised if I say I loved it and still do. My years there were deeply rewarding. I suppose I began to grow up at Balliol. I'm more grateful than I can say to have been a member of such a progressive, open-minded and enlightened institution.

In particular, I owe a great deal to the College Chapel and the Christian Union. I doubt I would have become a priest at all had it not been for Balliol. The Christian Union, part of the University-wide Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union or OICCU, laid down important foundations on which to shape my life as a Christian. And although that thought-world belonged unreservedly to the conservative evangelical tradition, I did not experience it as narrow or exclusive. We were ordinary members of the College alongside students of many different faiths and of none. Most Christian Union members attended College Chapel regularly, some every day. Its traditional Anglicanism helped set our fervent evangelicalism in a broader, more liberal, context. We were certainly low, hearty and happy in our churchmanship. But we were part of mainstream religion.

It's true that I now blush to think of some of the convictions I held in those far-off days. I could have defended such doctrines as the inerrancy of scripture, a literal Second Coming and the predestination to their fate of the elect and the reprobate. Everything turned on the hardest version of belief in substitutionary atonement as the only way to understand the Cross. But Balliol was a tolerant place where you could try anything intellectually, test ideas and belief by the cut and thrust of robust debate. If you believed something wildly ridiculous, your friends would smile gently and without ridicule, ask you with what logic or on what evidence you drew that conclusion.

I owe a lot to that tolerant, liberal attitude. It's what made Balliol an intellectual force to be reckoned with in modern times. This it owes largely to the vision of its legendary Master, Benjamin Jowett, one of the most eminent of Victorians. A priest of the Church of England, he got into tremendous trouble for contributing to a notorious but highly influential book called Essays and Reviews. In it, he argued as a classical scholar that the Bible should be interpreted like any other text from the past, using the same rigorous tools of textual and higher criticism and of literary interpretation as he would apply to his beloved Plato. It was, he claimed, through such ordinary processes of study that the word of God would be discerned among the words. This radical approach was not well received at the time (and the book's other contributors were not spared the opprobrium either). But today, almost all biblical scholars apart from the most conservative would endorse his approach.

Jowett's legacy at Balliol was of a College in which dons and students alike were generous and  tolerant, modern people of their own century, open to new ways of thinking, unafraid of debate. Looking back fifty years, having been at a school founded on similar lines, perhaps I unconsciously chose an Oxford college that would continue to foster these liberal ideals and teach me to practise my faith in a setting that modelled the real world where beliefs are not privileged or protected. This kind of learning is an inestimably important preparation for adult life in a contested secular age. We may not know it at the time but later we realise how its values have shaped us in hugely important ways. My faith is very different now from what it was then. I suppose I echo whoever it was (David Jenkins?) who said that as he grew older, he believed more and more in less and less. "Be tentative in theology but be sure in religion", that is, don't invest more in the speculative particularities of doctrine than you do in knowing and loving and serving God which is the heart of all good religion. That is what I shall always regard as the core of what I learned about Christianity at Oxford.

Back to the headlines where Balliol has unwittingly (and unwillingly) found itself today. I spoke earlier about its character as a "progressive, open-minded and enlightened institution". I don't know the Christian Union today so I can't speak for them. But somewhere in the JCR decision-making structure, there seems to be a mighty fear of them if these heavy-handed tactics of airbrushing them out of the Freshers' Fair are any indication. What we are told in the media reports is that out of respect for the vulnerabilities of its new students, there was a need to create a secular space that is "safe". Religion, it is argued, does not belong in such a space, least of all when it comes freighted with homophobia (an allegation that is merely stated without any evidence or justification).

Yes, no doubt religion can be oppressive, and is in many places. Homophobic too. But it won't do wildly to accuse Balliol's Christian Union of it. (And by the way, were Jewish and Islamic groups also refused permission to have a Freshers' stall and be present at it? I genuinely have no idea - please tell us. It's important that we understand the background here. There's a lot we don't know.)

This unhappy episode is all part of the debate about the limits of free speech in higher education. There are no easy answers to the question of who should and shouldn't be given a public platform to promote their beliefs in a university or anywhere else. But in a fair-minded society there should be a presumption of trust that those who publicly share their vision and ideas will do so responsibly. No-one has quoted any evidence that the Christian Union intended to do anything other than the likes of the Balliol Music Society or Rowing Club: share what they had to offer and invite anyone interested to find out more.

One final thought. If I were a fresher at Balliol (happy days!), I'd be pretty annoyed if I thought that anyone was trying to "protect" me from notions that might challenge or disturb or (God forbid)  corrupt me. I'd have said: "I'm a legal grown-up now. I have the right and the duty to make my own choices. I have come to Balliol of all colleges because I want to be in an environment of bracing exploration and debate that will form me intellectually, ethically and as a person of faith. This is the very thing you are denying me. Please stop infantilising me in this way."

Well, common sense has prevailed, thankfully. I gather that the JCR as a student body has been as outraged by what has happened as anyone. Maybe we should put it all down to the naivety of youth. Making a mistake and learning from it is no bad experience. I hope this episode helps all students to think about and absorb their College's values and treat their fellow students with respect. What's happened will have cost Balliol in terms of its reputation for diversity and inclusion. That grieves me. But what matters now is that trust is quickly restored and Balliol continues to be recognised as one of Oxford's brightest, most generous and most humane institutions.

Oh and by the way, I'm looking forward to being back at Balliol next month to preach in the College Chapel.

**I have made some minor amendments to this blog in the light of conversations today with Oxford people who are close to the events behind the media reports.

That Infamous Headline: a Question from Schooldays

Have we ever seen a more infamous headline in a British daily paper?

I mean the Daily Mail's front page on Friday 4 November. It was the day after the three High Court judges ruled that the government was bound by law to gain the consent of Parliament before invoking Article 50 and triggering Brexit. As we all know, it lined up mugshots of the three judges above the headline "Enemies of the People".

In a blog (here) the same day I spelled out what I thought was at stake in the High Court's ruling and the Prime Minister's rush to appeal it: respect for law, governance and parliamentary democracy. Many have defended the judges and many have dissented. Fair enough. Testing judgments is what legal process is for. But if you are going to dissent, it needs to be done intelligently. It's not enough to denounce, attack and stamp your foot. The Mail seems to me to be wilfully perverse in just not "getting" it. For this case in law has nothing to do with Brexit itself, whether Britain should or shouldn't leave the EU. It has everything to do with the legal process by which the referendum decision to leave is achieved. This, said the judges, was a matter for Parliament, not the Executive alone.

So the Mail's headline is based on the false premise that by interfering with the referendum Brexit vote, the judges were guilty of meddling in politics. But it's worse than that. To denounce them as "enemies of the people" is an offensive slur on their integrity and professionalism. They know the boundaries of the law's competence better than anyone. Straying beyond them in the High Court to play politics would be unthinkable. And if the judges have acted as enemies in upholding the role of Parliament in the Brexit process, that's tantamount to asserting that Parliament too is the enemy. If I were a parliamentarian, whatever my party or position on Brexit, I would be extremely angry.

This amounts to an implied attack on the independence of the judiciary. A free press is at liberty to disagree with judges just as it's free to dissent from politicians. But once it goes beyond that and starts saying, in effect, that the judgment should have found for the government because that was its business, the independence of judicial scrutiny is entirely subverted. The reality is that in the British Constitution, Prime Minister, her Executive and the Crown itself are all subject to the law of the land. It's the job of the judiciary to clarify what that law is. That's what the judges were doing as conscientiously as they knew how.

The Daily Mail has in the past won awards for its reporting and investigative journalism. So let's not disparage what the Mail has achieved just because we're at odds with it (not for the first time). But that doesn't excuse serious lapses of judgment. Cheap headlines like this are unworthy of a responsible paper. They don't clarify, they aren't truth-seeking, they don't foster serious debate and they don't help us to "disagree well" to use the Archbishop of Canterbury's phrase. All they do is to raise the temperature and fuel mistrust. They are more at home in regimes where the judiciary is in the pockets of dictators or powerful paylords, not in constitutional democracies like ours. "Enemies of the People" may achieve a dramatic effect (who will forget it?) but it's meretricious and unprincipled.

Now, the editor of the Daily Mail is Paul Dacre. I was at school with him in the 1960s: I think we were exact contemporaries. A writer rang me up a while ago to ask if I remembered him from schooldays. I replied that I hadn't known him well, but I did have a clear memory of one thing: his prowess on the rugby pitch. How I envied sporting ability like his! I was the clumsiest rugby player you ever saw and no better at cricket. Those who won their colours were like gods to me. I imagined there was nothing they could not and would not achieve in life. And becoming editor of a national newspaper is indeed a pretty big achievement.

You may have got the impression that he and I went to a typical public school where old-fashioned values were shaped by the classics, chapel services, corporal punishment, the playing field and the corps.  Well it wasn't like that at all. True, it was an independent (day) school where we did study classics and did play rugby. But our school had been founded by far-seeing and enlightened men in the early nineteenth century in pursuit of a vision for society shaped by utilitarian ideas and free of religious ideology. In the prep school I found myself in Bentham House. That says it all. For Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), virtue in a society meant "the greatest happiness for the greatest number". It has proved to be a profoundly influential idea throughout the English-speaking world thanks to the writings of John Stuart Mill.

Because of this, my parents decided to send me there. My father and mother were a mixed marriage of non-observants, Anglican and Jewish. They believed religion was a source of division and conflict in the world, and wanted their children educated in a liberal environment free of religious obligations and loyalties. (How ironic that it was at school that I found my Christian faith as a teenager, or rather, it found me. God moves in mysterious ways.) They wanted us to be good citizens of a world where religion, politics and ideas were debated in a tolerant way that was not afraid of diversity, and instead of invoking dogma, looked for understanding. They wouldn't have put it in quite that way. But it's what they were feeling for.

I realise how much I owe to that education. It's true that for a while, the conservative evangelical Christianity I'd embraced threatened to eclipse the liberal outlook I'd been formed in. I'm grateful that by the time I was ordained in the 1970s, I was able to see things in a larger context. I began to understand that if humanity is to survive, let alone flourish, we must all learn to live as adults in a world of religious, political and ideological differences. It's not that there's no place left for conviction or passion. It's how we express them and embody them that counts, and (just as important) how we listen to other people's passion and conviction. It's part of finding our place in the world where tolerance, understanding, generosity and trust are everything.

This was the school both Paul Dacre and I come from. So you'll see why Friday's headline poses a question for me. If our school influenced me in the ways I've described, I'm wondering how it influenced him too. For the editor of the Daily Mail presides over a paper that seems to me to have taken on Friday a rather different approach to the week's events from the one I'd thought he and I were schooled in. "Enemies of the People" is just not the way his education and mine taught us to do business. It tried to help us learn that we don't scream with rage or impugn one another's integrity; instead, we listen and try to understand; we argue it out, and if we differ it's without rancour. There's no place in the public discourse of a civilised society for shrillness. It brings no credit to a responsible newspaper that claims to be proud of our British values and ways of doing things.

So because I'm interested in human nature (it's my job to be), I'm intrigued by what motivates the thinking of this powerful and able man who for so long has sat at the helm of the Daily Mail. Perhaps my old school contemporary will tell us how his mind works nowadays, half a century after he and I parted company for the last time.

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Landscapes of Faith: The Christian Heritage of North East England

I have been preparing this lecture at my desk in the window of my study. We live in the Tynedale village of Haydon Bridge a few miles upstream from Hexham. Appropriately enough for a superannuated clergyman, our road is called Church Street. If I look to the right I can see across the road the Georgian parish church where we worship every week. If I look to the left, beyond the railway line, the valley side sweeps majestically down from the ridge where there is a clump of trees marking an enclosure. They are still rich with foliage, but in winter, I can glimpse what lies behind them: the little “old” church of St Cuthbert, now all but abandoned when the medieval village of Haydon migrated down the hill to the more sheltered location where we live, the ancient river crossing where, as the border reivers knew, there has been a bridge across the fast and turbulent South Tyne since time immemorial. Here the Greenwich Commissioners built a new church in 1791 in unadorned village Georgian with a pretty pagoda on the west tower. It too was dedicated to St Cuthbert. The Victorians found it too plain so they gothicised the windows and put coloured glass in, some of it by Kempe and very good. It has some pretty arts and crafts furnishings. 

But although it is a push up a steep hill to get there, and there is no electricity so no heat or light, the old church remains the spiritual and emotional heart of the community. It lost its nave in the eighteenth century when its stones were used to construct the new church. But the chancel remains, an exquisite early gothic jewel in a lovely walled churchyard screened by trees, a haven for wildlife. Inside is a Roman altar that now serves as the font, a reminder that we live in the borderlands of a once vast world empire whose wall stretches across Britain not five miles to the north, and just a mile or so south of the Roman road called Stanegate. It was a moving experience to baptise the Vicar's daughter in that font this year. Once a month the candles are lit and we gather in the Old Church for evensong in muddy boots wrapped up in cagoules, and enjoy hot tea or wine and canapés afterwards before tramping back down the hill and homewards across the fields. 

Much of the North East’s Christian heritage is encapsulated in that view from my window. For Haydon Old Church marks one of those sites where, it is believed, the Saxon monks of Cuthbert’s community stopped on their long journey around the north with his body and the gospel book written in his honour, the great volume we now call the Lindisfarne Gospels. Some villagers will tell you that in his lifetime, Cuthbert himself travelled along Tynedale and stopped to preach here on his journeys between Hexham or Lindisfarne and Cumbria where Bede tells us he regularly went. There is a chain of Cuthbert churches scattered across Tynedale and Redesdale. I think we can safely say that wherever you find a medieval church dedicated to him, you can presume a direct link either to the saint himself, or to his community and the estates they possessed.  

Looking out at these two Cuthbert churches, I am inevitably made to think of journeys. In comparatively recent history as things go, church and village migrated downhill, a journey that was no doubt associated with early industrialisation in the Tyne Valley, for lead was mined all over the North Pennine dales, and in places coal too: we live in a house that was once the home of the pit manager at Bardon Mill. It was named after a Tyneside colliery ship that went down with the loss of all hands in the 1880s. The North East was among the first places in England to embrace the industrial revolution. It did this with real enthusiasm, as the nineteenth century confidently committed itself to vast enterprises in railways, ship building, steel making and coal mining. In 1789, the painter John Martin was born in Haydon Bridge. His huge canvasses are well known: you can see some of them in the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle and at Tate Britain in London. Much of his work echoes the steep-sided hill country of his native Tynedale. But in his most famous apocalyptic paintings such as The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and The Last Judgment, you seem to see in those vivid oranges and reds the fires of the North East’s blast furnaces, the colossal engines of locomotion and mining, a landscape whose appearance has been transformed by the revolution the artist was living through. That he turned to the medium of industrial landscape to depict scenes from biblical narratives is itself a metaphor of how faith was needing to be re-forged in the fires of an entirely new social environment. This is a central part of the North East’s religious history because it sets the scene for how faith has been and is still experienced and expressed in our own bewildering, and sometimes apocalyptic, times.  

John Martin was baptised in Haydon Old Church. What did he know about Cuthbert and his wandering community, I wonder? For that tiny church takes us back to a memory a thousand years old when Cuthbert’s community travelled this way in the ninth and tenth centuries. So inside it you feel the pull of the Holy Island of Lindisfarne where Cuthbert had been prior and then bishop and where, after his death in 687, his shrine was set up and honoured. It was from there that his community set off in 875 in search of a permanent home. But Haydon also points us forward in time to Chester-le-Street where the community settled for more than a century on the site where the lovely church of St Mary and St Cuthbert with its octagonal spire now stands. And you inevitably feel the pull of Durham up there too, for from Chester-le-Street, they migrated to the peninsula called Dun Holme where they arrived in 995. There a Saxon cathedral was constructed, to be succeeded by the great Romanesque church we know and love today. But the important thing about Durham is that in essence, it’s no different from Holy Island, or Old Haydon, or Chester-le-Street. In these places and many others, a church was built to house a shrine, built around Cuthbert and the memory his community preserved. Durham is not a church with a saint’s shrine inside, but a shrine around which a cathedral has been built. 

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I have served as a priest in North East England for a significant proportion of the 40 years since I was ordained. In the 1980s I was vicar of Alnwick for five years, the first time I had lived outside London and the south where I was born and brought up. It was eye-opening to discover the wealth of the North East’s Christian heritage. I had read about the northern saints of course: I bought my first copy of Bede’s great History as a teenager new to Christian faith and how glad I am that somebody told me that it’s a book every Englishman (and woman) should read often. But reading even the incomparable prose of a great writer like Bede is not the same as walking the landscapes he writes about, inhabiting them for yourself, reflecting and praying in these ancient holy sites. It profoundly shaped my spirituality and ministry at a highly formative time in my life. Sixteen years later we came back to the North East when I was appointed Dean of Durham. There I found myself in the role of guardian not only of a building that the whole world loves and the north is immensely proud of, but also of the shrines of no fewer than three of the founding saints of the Saxon church: Oswald, Cuthbert and Bede. To spend twelve years in Durham was the greatest privilege of my life.

I learned a lot about heritage and how we promote it during those years. When we think of the legacy of Christian faith in this region, we tend to call to mind the headline sites associated with it like Holy Island, the Inner Farne, Hexham, Jarrow, Wearmouth, Hartlepool, Auckland Castle and Whitby. And of course Durham Cathedral. The late and much-missed development agency One North East ran an imaginative campaign to promote the region in the UK and overseas. You’ll recall the strap line Passionate Places, Passionate People that accompanied beautiful images of these places and enticed southerners to try the North East out for themselves. They were on to something that caught the spirit of the North East. I’m not sure I ever understood what a “passionate place” really was, yet the epithet felt right. Tourism-speak uses words like iconic to describe them – a little too freely perhaps, though who is going to argue that anyone who is serious about getting to know the area needs to put them on their “must-see” list? 

But if you want to touch the soul of the North East, you have to venture off the main tourist routes and explore the by-ways. The little church at Escomb, for instance, in its circular churchyard in the middle of a housing estate in a County Durham pit village. It’s an intact Saxon church, one of the very best in England. It was there in the time of Bede and it is still there fulfilling its original purpose as an ordinary working church where people worship and pray. Or Lady’s Well, a secret little place at Holystone in Upper Coquetdale where there is a pool overhung by trees and a stone cross that marks the memory of many hundreds of convert baptisms there. Or the little medieval church of Edlingham next to its ruined castle and railway viaduct set among the lonely heathery sandstone hills of Northumberland with mighty Cheviot rearing up behind: I was vicar there too and sometimes in midwinter (if I even succeeded in getting out there across the snowy expanse of Alnwick Moor), I had to break the ice in the cruets for water at the Sunday eucharist. Or the Norman chapel secreted deep within the keep of the fortress at Newcastle where the Victorians drove the East Coast railway line right across one of England’s mightiest military monuments. Or the church at Newbiggin-on-Sea perched in splendid isolation on the edge of the North Sea where the east winds howl around its precarious gothic fabric. Or Arts and Crafts done to perfection in the early twentieth century church of St Andrew’s Roker, a building of national importance that far too few know about. I could go on. 

In my book Landscapes of Faith I talk about the religious “sense of place” the North East has. What is unique about it is not how well marked the region is with the traces of Christian faith across the centuries. Cornwall, Ireland and Brittany can claim as much, as can the sites on the great pilgrim routes of Europe such as the roads to Santiago da Compostela across France and Spain. It is, I think, that the lives and stories of its Christian communities are so well documented from Saxon times right up to the present. This is a peopled heritage. It carries human memory and lived experience. And this is the next point I want to make about how we respond to the wealth of religious shrines and sites that we are fortunate enough to inherit in the North East. 

One of the things I’ve enjoyed doing in most of the places where I’ve ministered has been to write a guide book. There is no better way for a new priest to get to know his or her building, the place where it’s set, the story of the community for whom it has been a cherished symbol of hope and aspiration usually for many centuries. When I came to Durham Cathedral, the guide book was up for review. I’ll have a go, I offered, a trifle rashly I now think. In the introduction I wrote about what I thought were the three great emblems of the North East: Hadrian’s Wall, the Angel of the North, and Durham Cathedral. If you live in the region, you set your eyes on any one of these and think to yourself, this is home; this is where I belong. 

Not long after the new guide was published, a visiting Czech professor of architecture asked if he could see me. He wanted to discuss my claim about these three regional icons. He said: you’re not comparing like with like. You haven’t considered the human dimension of these sites apart from their emotional impact on people. Durham Cathedral has a dense human texture. People have worshipped here, worked, studied and prayed in and around this building for a thousand years. They still do. By contrast, Hadrian’s Wall lost the human texture it once had as a working fortification when the legions left Britannia in the fifth century and it became merely a memory. And as for the Angel of the North (I sensed a slight sniff at this point), it has no human texture at all, no community for whom it has any existential significance. It is just a piece of public art – fine enough in its brutal way, but nothing more than a huge weight of rusting iron stuck in a hole in the ground.

I have thought about that conversation a good deal. He overstated his case, of course. People who live in Gateshead near the Angel of the North like my friend the Bishop of Jarrow tell me that this remarkable sculpture has spawned a great deal of surprising human activity. Couples come there to pledge their commitment or renew their marriage vows. Children’s naming ceremonies take place there. Mining communities honour the memory of the pit that once stood there and to which the Angel is a conscious homage by Anthony Gormley. Churches hold faith events round it. Similarly, Hadrian’s Wall has become the backdrop of an astonishing variety of activity along its length, some of it scholarly and archaeological, much of it tourism-related, promoting its wonderful landscapes for the enjoyment of walkers, heritage enthusiasts and nature-lovers. 

But there’s still a truth in what my Czech friend had to say. It’s that neither the Angel nor the Wall is home to a permanent community in the way in which the Cathedral is. Like the vast majority of our built religious heritage, the Cathedral is still what it was constructed to be, a living, working, praying community of men, women and children. I call this the human texture of heritage and it is immensely precious. I think I am right in saying that what fascinates people when they visit palaces and country houses is not only their architecture, art and landscape setting. It’s the human texture of these buildings. They were once the homes of real people. The best of them still are. Compare two of the castles of the Dukes of Northumberland, Alnwick and Warkworth. Both are splendid. But while one is an empty shell, the other is the family home. Compare the noble ruins of Lindisfarne Priory or Rievaulx Abbey with the parish church on Lindisfarne, or with Durham Cathedral. Ruined heritage is hauntingly beautiful, as the Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries discovered, so much so that they created faux-ruins to adorn their landscape parks and gardens. But heritage that is “inhabited”, that has a living human texture, has an altogether different quality. It has “soul”. 

And this is vital for the way in which we interpret and promote it. I think it is only in our generation that we have begun to recognise the importance of this. The evidence is striking. In the 1950s and 60s, when my parents took me round our great national monuments, cathedrals, abbeys, castles and stately homes, I used to collect Pitkin guides as souvenirs. They were immaculately produced and illustrated but the photography studiously avoided including human beings engaged in ordinary human activities. There would be images of people prominent in the history of the place, usually the great and the good. You might have pictures of royalty ceremonially visiting, or a cathedral chapter posing in their chapter house. But quotidian activity of people doing ordinary things, or guests enjoying their visits was something you glimpsed only very rarely. The effect was to construe these places as museums and inculcate correct behaviour proper to such places. You could look across ropes or through glass, but it was at a distance. You were deferential, told not to make a noise, not to touch, not to intrude on the hushed sanctity.

Now all that has changed, and vastly for the better. You only have to look at today’s guide books to see how lively and populated they are. Gone is the formal distance that was once evoked between observer and observed. People are enjoying themselves! Interactive engagement is the name of the game. Children are not just tolerated but invited and welcomed. Heritage and history have been humanised. And this is all part of the welcome emphasis placed nowadays on what public funding bodies call “access to heritage”. Accessibility is not simply about making physical access feasible for as many as possible, though that is immensely important. It’s about humanising the past so that it can be experienced as a present reality. Human texture has the effect of making it tangible to people so that they are drawn into something that they belong to and are part of. It affirms what is central to understanding and caring for our heritage, that it is for everybody. It is not for the privileged few but for all. It’s about inclusion. 

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Inclusion means two things in particular: hospitality and interpretation. How we welcome people to heritage sites, and how we help them to be drawn into their stories and all that they mean, are vital for all who open up heritage to the public. But it is especially important when it comes to religious heritage. This is because the “religious” is already replete with meanings and associations, memories and aspirations, longings and fears and hopes. So the quality of the welcome at the porch of a cathedral or church matters as a theological and spiritual statement of what a sacred building stands for – its purpose, its values, its way of treating people. 

As a theologian, I see Christian hospitality as an expression of how God is towards his creatures. You can picture the act of creation as God opening the door and standing back behind it, as it were, so as to create “space” for the universe to spring into being and have its own existence. This is how we open our own front doors to our guests: we invite them to occupy our space and make it their own. In the training we gave to the hundreds of volunteers in Durham Cathedral whose privilege it was to welcome visitors and help them find their way around, we would say: you are the human face of the Cathedral to those who come through the door asking to share its space. How you welcome visitors makes all the difference, for good or ill. And because Durham had been a Benedictine priory in the middle ages, we would quote from the Rule of St Benedict which offers the other face of that theological insight about “making space” by saying: “receive guests as if they were Christ himself”.  The point about a sacred place is that it is God’s before it is ours. Therefore if it is going to receive guests with genuineness and authenticity, it needs to embody the values that matter to God himself.

Putting it that way makes it sound portentous and grand. But it has very practical consequences. Take one example that you will all have thought about. It’s the vexed question of admission charges to cathedrals. Everyone who works with heritage knows how very expensive it is to maintain. On top of the crippling expenses attached to keeping the fabric in good repair, you have the costs of making the visitor offer as excellent as it can possibly be so that people experience it in ways that are unforgettable and life-changing. So we have to factor in signage and interpretation, staff salaries, electronic and print guides and materials, the hard infrastructure of toilets, restaurants and shops and the wages of those who run them, advertising and promotion, and finally the burdens of compliance, especially safeguarding, and health and safety. You learn a lot about all these things when you are a dean. And you lie awake at night worrying about how you can possibly balance the books in the light of them. It’s not surprising that admission charges are now the norm in the big medieval cathedrals. No cathedral chapter has wanted to impose them, but the annual accounts are facts on the ground that can’t be evaded. Besides, people value what they pay for. What is more, in places like St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey and Canterbury where there is a huge footfall, over a million people a year, the admission charge helps to “calm the nave” and preserve the fabric from erosion by consciously limiting the numbers. 

In Durham, the Chapter steadfastly refused to go down that road. Our footfall was around 700,000 annually. We didn’t ask whether people had come as worshippers, pilgrims or sightseers, to enjoy the music and the arts, to shelter from the rain, to meet their friends in the restaurant or to take the short cut to and from the city centre. A guest is a guest is a guest. And, we argued, because the Cathedral is God’s space, and because God’s welcome is unconditional, generous and free, we should not impose a charge. Now, admission charges are not in fact something new. In the nineteenth century, if you wanted to visit Durham Cathedral, you knocked on the north door, and if you were lucky, a verger heard you and would let you in for the price of sixpence. But charging does raise questions about the contract that is set up between visitors, worshippers and pilgrims on the one hand, and the space on the other. When you pay, you have different expectations of the place and its resources and facilities, possibly even of God too. It’s a tricky marriage of idealism and pragmatism that charging cathedrals have to manage if they take their sacred space seriously and guard it from the corrosive effects of monetisation. Putting a price on everything, a habit that is endemic in our culture, can blind us to what is of true and lasting value. Church heritage could model something different, point to another set of values and invite people to think about them. Hospitality can challenge us to new ways of seeing things.

I said that “inclusion” means both hospitality and interpretation. Let me say something about the part interpretation plays in how we help guests make sense of what they are experiencing. Speaking again as a theologian, I believe that the entire task of Christian ministry, scholarship and outreach comes down to interpretation. Pilgrim’s Progress features “the House of the Interpreter” where the journey is made sense of and the destination understood. As a preacher, my responsibility is to handle the ancient text of the Bible and Christian tradition by asking not only what it meant but what it means today, and not only in generic terms, but specifically, to this community in this place at this time in our history. Heritage is just such a text that comes to us out of the past, whether it’s the recent past or antiquity. The ancientness of a sacred building like Durham Cathedral is part of what is both enticing and alienating about it. We love it because it has endured for so long, yet its very age can puzzle us. Why is it here at all? What did it mean to those who built it? What did it represent to the generations of pilgrims and worshippers who came to pray within its walls and reverence its shrines? And what does all this say to today’s guests, many of whom come from other faith traditions than Christianity, or have had no experience of organised religion in any shape or form?

As soon as we try to respond to these questions, we recognise that they are far from simple. At one level, it’s obvious (and true) that the Cathedral was built to bear witness to the reality of God. The worship of God has always been its primary role. But then, as I’ve said, its origins lie with St Cuthbert and the quest of his community for a permanent shrine. And then again, think about its position and landscape setting. It is so clearly a fortified, defended space, perched on its acropolis next to William the Conqueror’s castle, appearing for all the world to be one great defensive structure to keep the enemy at bay, those wayward Northumbrian Saxons and marauding Scots. I often used to say to visitors that Durham was as much a statement of brutal Norman military might as it was a shrine to a humble saint and a temple to the Almighty. Despite its celebrated beauty, Durham speaks volumes about political hegemony and the uses and abuses of power. Sacred space has its shadow side and we must tell the truth about that too.

But we owe our visitors more than simply an historical perspective. The “text” of a sacred building is not only its past but its present. I spoke earlier about the human texture of heritage that is alive. I have found that usually, people are genuinely interested to know what goes on in a cathedral, just as they are when they visit a stately home that is still lived in. When we stand in the Cathedral quire and tell them that each day, morning and evening prayer are celebrated in this space, precisely where the Benedictine monks gathered for daily prayer in the middle ages, they are fascinated and even moved. And even when casual visitors who have not checked the website turn up to find that they can’t walk round the church because a service is going on, they are often content to stand at the west end, or if they are brave enough, sit in the nave and witness it for themselves. 

But as I have said, it needs explaining and interpreting in a secular age. You can’t assume that visitors will know what the font is, or the altar or pulpit, or a saint, a bishop, a monk or a dean. When I was a minor canon of Salisbury Cathedral in the late 1970s, the then dean wrote what he called a “reflective guide” that didn’t simply describe the building but pointed to some of its meanings, and the significance of each particular part within it. It invited the visitor to become a participant, even for a few minutes, that is to say, not just to observe, but join in, feel the spiritual grain of the building, align his or her story to its own and perhaps understand themselves in a new way. Nowadays, all cathedrals talk readily about “turning visitors into pilgrims”, a phrase I find a trifle manipulative if I am honest. Good hospitality doesn’t require guests to conform against their will or be required to take a particular view. But I like the notion of “seeing in fresh ways”. I like the invitation, “This is how we see things. Maybe you can too?” This is surely part of the transformative effect that all heritage can have, and sacred heritage in particular. 

And this is where, in Durham, we made an important link between interpretation and hospitality. If admission to the church was going to be free, how would we balance the books? Our answer was to create the facility called Open Treasure about which I’m sure you have all heard. Better still, I’d love to think you have visited it in this first summer it’s been open to the public. I want to end by saying something about it because this project seems to me to embrace so much of what I believe about religious heritage and what we do with it. And as I do this, I want to recognise how much activity is going on across the North East to do creative things with sacred heritage. I’m thinking of the new exhibitions at Hexham Abbey, for example, and the eye-watering developments at Auckland Castle with Kynren having proved such a success in its first season. 

Durham Cathedral is a world class building in a world class setting. This was recognised by the grant of World Heritage status to this unique site more than thirty years ago. I don’t approve of rating cathedrals by stars, but I am glad that in his book England's Cathedrals which has just been published, Simon Jenkins gives Durham the five it deserves. But the building, its arts, furnishings and its landscape setting, marvellous though they are, are not everything. Its collections are world class too. And it was becoming clear during my time as dean that we needed to do more justice to our infinitely precious artefacts from Cuthbert’s era, our books and manuscripts, our Saxon fabrics, our Roman, Saxon and Norman stones, our treasures that span two thousand years of northern history. What is more, we needed to do justice to the equally cherished spaces around the cloister that constitute the best surviving set of monastic buildings still in use for their original purpose anywhere in Britain. Open Treasure is the result. I am immensely proud to have been part of its story. 

That name "Open Treasure" says precisely what we believed about our sacred heritage: that we needed to open up these marvellous artefacts and marvellous spaces to as wide a public as possible. We wanted to extend an invitation to come in, discover, learn and enjoy. But we also wanted to say that there was more to “treasure” than simply spaces and artefacts. These represented an intellectual and cultural history, and above all, the spiritual history of a community of faith, so the people of the place were a vital part of its “treasure” too. We wanted to help people grasp this, not simply as a past reality but a present one too. So the timeline through the monks’ dormitory and the great kitchen takes guests through a display that presents the community of the Cathedral and Diocese as they are today and invited them to think about how they too fit into this long story that continues into the future. 

But more than that, the phrase “Open Treasure” evokes two sayings of Jesus in the gospels. One is about how the wise steward brings out of his treasure “things old and new”; the other reminds us that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”. And that takes us back to the task of interpretation which is what Open Treasure is all about. For we cannot interpret the past without also recognising the present tense of our lives and the future tense that lies ahead. We can only look back from where we are today and hope to be tomorrow. So to tell the story of a faith community is inevitably to pose questions about its identity and purpose now. The hope is that by opening the treasure, there will be discoveries not only about history and heritage but also about human life as we live and experience it today. We would have failed in our interpretative task if we had evaded that requirement.

How does all this speak into the financial challenges our stewardship of heritage inevitably poses? Well, the origins of Open Treasure were not simply the need to rise to the challenge our collections posed and present them in the best possible way. There was a hard business case that said: if we are going to maintain free admission to the church, we need to earn income in some other way. Paid admission to the exhibitions was our answer: to make our heritage work for us by using it to help fund the costs of the sacred space itself. (Under the same rubric of letting heritage pay for heritage, we were glad to send one of our copies of Magna Carta on tour to Canada during the 1215 celebrations, a project that proved exceedingly exacting but which did earn a welcome six-figure sum for the Cathedral at a time when we were under particular financial pressure.) 

It is too early to tell what benefit Open Treasure will bring to the Cathedral’s bottom line. The Cuthbert treasures will not be installed until next year when the environmental monitoring of the Great Kitchen will be complete. His pectoral cross, coffin, portable altar and comb are always going to be the big draw - they are of cultural and spiritual value beyond compare. The hope is that in the future, when the Lindisfarne Gospels return to Durham as has been promised every seven years by an agreement with the British Library worked out before the 2013 residency, they will be exhibited in their historic home, the Cathedral precinct where they belonged to the monastic library throughout the medieval period. To bring Cuthbert and his gospel book back together again for three months in the very place indelibly associated with both of them would be marvellous. It would of course bring thousands of people through Open Treasure as genuine pilgrims for whom it would offer a profound spiritual experience. We shall have to wait and see. But we know that the secret of successful visitor facilities is to maintain ever-changing exhibitions alongside the permanent displays so as to bring visitors back again and again. That is the ambition. If it works as we hope it will, it should make a real difference to the Cathedral’s financial sustainability. 

But above all, it will have demonstrated the Cathedral’s belief in the importance of hospitality and interpretation. As the National Trust knows better than anyone, you can never invest too much in these. For each is a part of the other, and without them, heritage will never find a voice with which to speak into human life today. This always matters for our self-understanding, knowing who we are and where we come from. But as a person of faith, I want to suggest that it matters most of all when heritage has an explicitly sacred dimension. “They being dead yet speaketh” says the miners’ banner that hangs in the south transept of Durham Cathedral alluding to the Letter to the Hebrews in endearingly confused grammar. It’s our responsibility to make sure the capacity of the past to speak is as articulate and persuasive as it can be.

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I began with the view from my study window 40 miles away in Haydon Bridge, and the journeys of Cuthbert and his community. Open Treasure has brought us back to Cuthbert and to the long and wonderful story of Christian faith in North East England. I have only been able to touch on a little of it. But I’ve wanted to try to say something about the importance of religious heritage in telling a story not only about where we have come from in this region, but who we are now, today. 

We know that “church heritage tourism” is on the increase. Why this should be in an increasingly secularising society is worth speculating about. I am no sociologist of religion, but I wonder whether the dwindling of commitment to organised religion isn’t being misread in some circles as a decline of interest in the realm of what we can call the spiritual and the sacred. My lifetime in public ministry suggests to me that these elusive, mysterious aspects of life continue to fascinate and engage people very widely indeed even if they are increasingly disinclined to resort to organised religion to pursue them. “Believing, not belonging” has become the catch-phrase of those who recognise this phenomenon. No doubt nostalgia for a lost era of religious belief comes into it too; as Matthew Arnold’s great poem pictures it, we stand on Dover Beach watching the sea of faith recede. Some welcome the tide going out, but I suspect that for many, it’s a matter of wistful regret even if they remain observers rather than participants. Perhaps church tourism offers them the chance to touch the sacred without the entanglements of “belonging”, signing up to organised religion. If so, then it is all the more important to make sure that those of us who have the oversight of our magnificent religious sites help our guests articulate and respond to whatever it is they are experiencing: not to require that their experience takes this shape or that, but simply to make sure that they remain open to the possibilities of living with a deeper awareness as a result of having crossed our thresholds and – who knows – find themselves experiencing a transformation scene. 


Lecture to the County Durham division of the National Trust, 6 October 2016