A Last Post

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

********

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

Half-Term at Haydon: Isaac comes to stay

In other news, our 6 year old grandson Isaac has spent half-term with his grandparents here in Haydon Bridge. You’ll forgive me for laying aside the serious stuff I usually blog about. He has gone home today and we are missing him. The house is suddenly very quiet again.

It was an important week for him and for us. These were his first ever nights away from his parents. Would he lose his nerve about it at the last minute? Would he be overcome with homesickness while he was here? Would he cope with Halloween without his friends and neighbours to trick or treat? Would he sleep and eat properly? How would we fill the time? These were grown-up anxieties of course, not his. But they made us realise how out of practice we were at caring full-time for a youngster. It was as much a rite of passage for us as for him.

When I went to Leeds to pick him up, I knew I needn’t have worried. He was up for this great adventure. We spent most of the train journey talking about railways. He has obsessed about railways ever since he was a toddler. We looked at images of Mallard and Flying Scotsman in his steam loco magazine. We looked out for “Opa’s Train” on the East Coast Main Line (i.e. the Class 91 electric loco 91114 named Durham Cathedral which has my name on the cab door). He was quiet for a bit while he ate his sandwiches. I wondered what he was thinking about? The memory of saying goodbye to his parents and little sister perhaps? Or the prospect of being special for the week, having the undivided attention of his Nana and Opa?

We’ve had a great week. There was Shaun of the Sheep - Farmageddon at the Forum Cinema. The Tullie House Museum in Carlisle provided interactive Roman history and railwayana. We visited no fewer than three soft play centres - at Carlisle, Haltwhistle and Hexham. Isaac is confident and good at socialising, so he quickly finds friends to play with at these places. And it’s reading time for us adults. He came to the Oxfam book shop where I volunteer and enjoyed the novel sight of my struggling with the till to process his purchases (which included DVDs chosen for his sister and cousin: I was touched by his kindness, even if he looked expectantly at us to find the cash).

What else? We watched You Tube movies of Thomas and Friends and of sophisticated trains created out of Lego - another favourite activity of his). I read him Ronald Dahl’s Witches at bedtime, suitable literature for Halloween week (a funny, intriguing book - but a bit on the misogynistic side, I thought). He has a wicked sense of humour. Irony is going to be his forte one day, I think. He dressed up for Halloween, put a pumpkin in the window and enjoyed the comings and goings on the street. The level crossing in sight of our house was a reliable source of pleasure (thank you, Northern Rail and the RealTime Trains app). He was out of bed by dawn each morning, but we set him up with croissants and juice, and he was fine. We asked him for feedback on the week (quality of accommodation, meals, entertainment etc., with the options “good”, “very good” and “fantastic”). We did all right on the whole.

One of the nicest moments was at a soft play. A young parent came up to us and said, “That’s such a lovely polite boy you have there. You don’t often see behaviour like that these days.” This took us by surprise, not because it isn’t true (it is) but because it was unsolicited. That’s a big tribute to his own parents, of course, our daughter and her husband. And it made me realise how respectful Isaac was being during his time with us. He is no goody two-shoes, thank God, but he does say please and thank you, and at 6 o’clock in the morning bothers to knock on the bedroom door with “I’m sorry to wake you up but...”. Winsome. Endearing. Delightful.

We are lucky enough to be enjoying a retirement in which we have time to give our three colourful, talented, much-loved grandchildren Gabriel, Maddy and Isaac. As most grandparents discover, this is somewhat different from the memory of caring for our own children when they were at that age. The responsibility is bounded for one thing: there comes a time when you have to give your grandchildren back to their parents, and this affects the quality of the time we spend with them. Then there’s the fact that grandparents are at an altogether different life-stage from where we were when our children were young.

Then (and I’m aware this is a middle-class-professional’s perception), family time was heavily contested by the demands of the day job. My children are candid about how difficult I found it to be truly present to them when they were growing up. I wish I had been better at it. I really do. Grandchildren are not given to us as a second chance to make a better job of it - they are human beings in their own right who are growing up in a world in many respects very different from the one in which we tried to be good enough parents thirty or forty years ago. Our children have to bear the consequences of the mistakes we made in our parenting, and we have to live with the memory. The miracle is that mostly, they survive and flourish, despite as well as because of us. And that they seem able to forgive us.

But grandchildren do offer us the opportunity to reprise what should have been among the best experiences of our lives if we have been entrusted with the gift of children. For now, with the wisdom of years, we can try to give back something of what we have so abundantly received, and continue to receive, from those who love us. This came home to me not so much when we were enjoying outings or engaging in projects but in the quotidian uneventfulness of ordinary time: moments when we were content simply to be together whether it was at mealtimes, walking along to the village shops or reading to him at bedtime. Gone was that feeling I remembered so well that there was always something else I ought to be doing: a list of admin jobs to be tackled, a meeting to get to, parishioners to visit, sermons to write.

“What are days for?” asks Philip Larkin in his enigmatic poem. “They are to be happy in. Where we live but days?” It would be easy to project on to our grandchildren a kind of prelapsarian innocence and happiness that in adulthood we realise is lost to us. Was it ever like that? Even the best childhood is not without its shadows and its pain. Maybe our grandchildren can help us reconnect with our own childhood, not the rhapsodic dreamlike fantasy but the more ambivalent reality where the troubles of growing up are as keenly felt as the joy of being alive?

Our grandchildren are not there to heal our memories. But to be truly present to them, cherish them for the human beings they already are, love them as bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, learn how to listen and laugh and cry with them - all this is profoundly healing. It would be wrong to indulge the purple prose. It’s fatally easy to sentimentalise when writing about children. So I won’t pretend we haven’t worked hard this half-term, that there weren’t challenges we had to face. But I think I’ve glimpsed in a new way how life is pure gift. Growing old and becoming grandparents has a lot to commend it. “I love you so much” Isaac whispered when the time came to say goodbye. Heart speaking to heart when the words ran out.

It meant a lot that his parents entrusted him to us for these days away. God willing there will be many more weeks like this one for Isaac, and in time, for Maddy and Gabe. Meanwhile, we shall get used to the quiet once again. And look forward to catching up on our sleep.

On Books, Waves and Not Getting Angry with Rascals

“I have taken so kindly to idleness that I can’t tear myself away from it. So either I amuse myself with books, of which I have a good stock here at Antium, or I count the waves - the weather is unsuitable for mackerel fishing... And my sole form of political activity is to hate the rascals, and even that I do without anger.”

This is Cicero in 59BCE. He had retired from his year as consul with more time to read, write and ponder. If only we had his Secret History, published posthumously because of its fierce denunciations of his enemies. This famous book is lost to us. It would have had much to say about the turbulent times he was living through as his cherished Roman Republic entered its death-throes. The waves he watched were not only those that lapped the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea. There were political waves aplenty to watch, and despair at, and try not to get angry with the rascals who were making them.

Remind me of anyone?

Today marks the fourth anniversary of the Sunday my wife and I said goodbye to Durham Cathedral. I had been Dean there for nearly thirteen years. The historic Deanery was home to us for a lot longer than anywhere else we had lived as a couple and a family. It was a poignant day as I wrote at the time. But we soon settled into our new home in the Tyne Valley, and to the gentler rhythms of retirement in the countryside. I’ve blogged from the “front line” of retirement from time to time here, here, and recently (particularly significant for me, this one), here.

Cicero’s self-deprecating take on retirement (amid the demands of his legal practice and speech-making) rings bells for me. We have a good stock of books here at Haydon Bridge, and I’ve fulfilled a lifelong ambition to work in a bookshop (as a volunteer every Wednesday afternoon in the local Oxfam bookshop). I can’t tell you how marvellous it is to indulge a love of reading without feeling guilty.

I could write a whole blog - perhaps I shall one day - about some of the books I’ve enjoyed in the past four years - biography, railways, art, religion, poetry, politics, literature, classical history, music, the life and landscapes of North East England - and whatever else looks interesting. Retirement has demonstrated what I always thought was true of me, that I am a born dilettante. I take comfort from the Italian origin of that word, which means someone who “takes delight”, just as amateur literally means “a lover” (of activities).

“Counting the waves”: well, we don’t have many of those here in upstream Haydon Bridge, though the South Tyne creates an impressive standing wave as it sweeps over the weir below the eponymous old bridge. When the river is in spate, there are always plenty of us on the bridge contemplating this wave (and hoping that the Tyne knows its place and doesn’t invade our cellars, as Storm Desmond drove it to do just three months after we had retired here).

And contemplation comes into things in retirement. Cicero evidently enjoyed his mackerel fishing, perhaps because it made for enjoyable hours in the open air, and encouraged a reflective outlook on life, something that Izaak Walton was to write winsomely about in his classic book The Compleat Angler. For me, not an angler, there are the pleasures of walking in the Northumberland Hills, pottering round the Roman sites along Hadrian’s Wall, and other delights on offer in the beautiful environment of the Tyne Valley.

The ancient philosophers wrote about the dichotomy between the active and contemplative aspects of healthy human living. The spiritual tradition found emblems of these two sides of life in the gospel figures of Mary and Martha: Martha, busy caring for the home and managing its hospitality, frustrated at Mary whom she resented sitting and listening to Jesus when there were jobs to do. If we are lucky enough to have worked, the chances are that we have invested heavily in the active life. But retirement, with its invitation to lay activity aside at least to an extent, offers the opportunity to develop a more reflective outlook, nurture our contemplative side. I would go as far as to say that a healthy retirement requires us to do this, and learn how to quieten our spirits by being present and attentive to the moment. After all, what is contemplation but purposeful idleness? This seems to me to be the kind of spirituality we should cultivate in older age.

This is the clue to Cicero’s final point about observing politics, hating rascals but not getting angry. I hadn’t expected retirement to be so dominated by national politics and the antics of rascals. Within three months of retiring, the EU Referendum was called. I found myself writing, speaking and blogging about it, spending many waking hours reading news reports and commentary, immersing myself in it as a matter of very personal concern. (You’ll find all my blogs on this website - just trawl through the content dating from 2016 onwards.) Why was I lying awake worrying about it? Because as a child of Anglo-German parentage, Europeanism was instilled in me at a very early age. I could not bear the thought that the UK might leave the European Union, this project inaugurated by people of vision who wanted to secure peace in our continent for the sake of future generations. I still can’t.

I confess that all my life, I’ve never felt so angry about British politics as I have done in these years of retirement. “Rascals” is a benign word to describe the kind of deceit and chicanery we’ve witnessed from hard Brexiters since the campaign was launched. And yes, a propensity for hatred comes into things if you are a man or woman who believes in something passionately and wants to safeguard it against those who would wilfully dismantle it. I’m not defending myself by pointing to those Psalms where the author puts into words his visceral hatred towards those whom he talks about as his, and God’s, enemies. Yes, it can soon collapse into an ugly self-righteousness. I can be prone to that. But I simply want to notice that anger and hatred are present in the experience of the people of God. It’s not edited out of their prayer.

Dealing with anger is a spiritual issue. I really do not want to be angry in my spirit as I grow old. In Psalm 37, the Psalmist advises: “fret not thyself because of the ungodly”. The secret is, I think, the contemplative spirit Cicero exhibits. Stoic teaching (which he admired) and the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible are at one here. A quiet eye inculcates a quiet spirit - not without feelings and passions, but not ruled by them, especially the negative ones. “They who are run away with by their lust or anger have quoted the command over themselves” writes Cicero in a piece called “On Grief of Mind”. A contemplative take on politics, even the politics of madness - this is what I’m trying to cultivate. This means channelling anger towards rascals into positive action, discovering how hatred can be transcended, if not by love, then at least by what R. S. Thomas called in one of his poems, “willed gentleness”. And try to respect and to disagree well, even when we differ so profoundly.

How am I getting on? Fitfully, I think. Brexit is a big test of my Christianity. But wisdom, with its insights into who and what I am, and why human behaviour (including mine) is so wayward and liable to corruption, comes to the rescue. Contemplation brings a larger perspective. And this bigger picture is an essential spiritual aspect of ageing if our lives are not to be narrowed as we face our mortality. Today’s anniversary is an opportunity to pause and take stock.

So books, waves and not getting angry are all part of the same picture. Perhaps it’s time I took up fishing?

Called to the Priesthood, Called to be Lay

In one sense, there’s nothing provocative about that title. When we are ordained deacon, priest or bishop, we don’t cease to be members of the laos, the community of the baptised, the holy common people of God. I’ve been a lay person all my Christian life. That’s been fundamental to my vocation as a priest. The priesthood has been how my obedience to the call of my baptism has been shaped for nearly half a century.

Discerning our vocation is something we all need to do as people of faith. Often it’s far from straightforward. If only there could be Damascene moments that clearly pointed to the destined path ahead! But as we know, life is not usually like that. It can take years to recognise and respond to the call of God to take some particular direction in life. That call may at first have been no more than a whisper amid the babble of voices that competed for our attention. It almost certainly took a lot of listening, and prayer, and the accompaniment of wise, experienced friends before we were ready to say yes, even tentatively.

In my own case, it was about seven years from beginning to explore the possibility of ordination to standing before a bishop on my ordination day. How tentative those words are sounding now that I look back on the experience 44 years later! Beginning, explore, possibility. But I like words like those. They are provisional and don’t claim more than they should. Before we can rise up with confident wings like eagles, or run and not be weary, we need to learn to walk and not faint, to borrow an image from the Book of Isaiah (40.31). We need to discover how to feel our way more slowly, in God’s time and at his pace.

I think retirement is like this because it entails reimagining life in a wholly new way. You have to ask the question, what does God want me to become, and to do, here, now, in this stage of life we’re learning to call the third age? I’ve blogged on this before here, and here, and here. It’s a work in progress as I keep saying. Each time I write about it, there is something new to say about how “inhabiting” retirement is working out in the lived experience of it. And just as the journey of entering stipendiary ministry to begin with took years, so leaving it is also a journey of years, not months or days. Even if it looked as though you were working one Sunday and on the Monday morning you woke up and lo! you had retired!

I blogged a while ago about exploring vocation in the third age. I’ve since become much clearer about this. I’ve reached a (possibly startling?) conclusion that’s implied by the title of this blog even if it’s the less obvious reading. It is this: that just as I was once called to the priesthood and gladly gave my working life to fulfilling that vocation in the best way I knew how, I now discern an equally insistent call to live as a lay person once again. 

What do I mean by that?

Simply, that my way of serving God in the world and in the church will no longer be as an ordained man in public ministry. I no longer see myself called to preside at the eucharist, conduct baptisms, weddings and funerals, preach sermons, give lectures or lead retreats and quiet days. I’ve loved doing all these things and regard them as among the most privileged kinds of ministry anyone could undertake. I’ve also been immensely fortunate in living and working as a priest in beautiful environments surrounded by wonderful communities and colleagues. As I look back on my career as a curate, a theological educator, a parish priest, a cathedral canon and as a dean in two dioceses, I realise how much I have to be thankful for.

But now in retirement, the time has come to lay all this aside. I need to hand on the baton to the next generation of clergy (in whom, I’m glad to say, I have complete confidence). This decision doesn’t reflect any regret or negativity on my part. I may sometimes be grumpy with the Church of England that I serve (who isn’t?), but there is no falling out, no crisis, no parting of friends. I feel wholly positive, even excited, about renegotiating life on a new set of terms. It will open up opportunities for discovering, I hope, a different quality of life in which there will being more time for  family and friendship as well as volunteering, travel and recreation, and, I hope, productive writing. And of course to understand and make my own the spirituality of growing old. I shall continue to serve on the church committees I’m currently a member of. I intend to go on seeing clergy and ordinands for mentoring and spiritual accompaniment for as long as they want me to.  I shall go  on trying to  support the parish and diocese in whatever way I can.

I suggested in my last blog that this was the way things seemed to be leading. But I admit to being deeply influenced by watching the TV documentary about the mezzo-soprano Dame Janet Baker a few months ago. I wrote about this at the time. She made the courageous decision in her 50s to say farewell to her career in opera, and a few years later, to lay aside her recital and recording activity as well. She was at the height of her powers, and was being followed by an adoring public. In her book Full Circle, she chronicled her final year on the operatic stage and offered insights into what it was like to know that so much of her music-making was for the last time. Of retirement she said that it wasn’t about leaving a life behind so much as engaging with it more fully, in a more wholesome way. There was work to be done at that stage of life that she did not want to neglect. Human work. Heart work. The work of love. I warmed greatly to that way of putting it.

The fact that I turn seventy next Easter has concentrated the mind. I am no Janet Baker (if only!) but the human and spiritual issues feel similar: the need to change direction, the need to pay attention to matters I’ve neglected thus far. There is a time to speak and a time to be silent, says the preacher in Ecclesiastes. My time to fall silent in public ministry is coming. I won’t pretend it’s not hard, at times, to contemplate it. But it’s what my discernment  process late in life has brought me to recognise should happen.

I admit that I’m haunted by the ontology. Once a priest, always a priest. That character (as it’s called in catholic theology) is indelible. So what does it mean to lay aside the practice of priesthood, hold the order but not exercise it? I don’t know, yet. But I do know that there would inevitably come a time when old age or illness or disability would mean facing this question in any case. In my seventieth year, stamina is not what it once was. Hundreds of clergy are forced by circumstance to lay aside the exercise of their priesthood, and most do it with grace and dignity. If my discernment leads me to take this step in a more intentional way, anticipate the endgame so to speak, it’s no different in principle. And as I’ve said, living out a lay vocation in the service of God and neighbour is not pretence or play-acting. It’s what I already am and have always been.

I wrote to the Bishop of Newcastle, the Diocese in which I was once an incumbent and where we live in retirement, to outline my thinking. I hold her permission to officiate (PTO) so she had a right to know. She asked to see me so that I could explain more fully. It was a good meeting, not least because it helped to have to put inchoate thoughts into words in the presence of a kind and  sympathetic - but shrewd - listener. “It feels a bit all or nothing” she remarked. Maybe. But when you arrive at a crossroads, for whatever reason, you have to make a choice. So we reached a settlement. The deal was that I would not send her back my PTO. Not yet, anyway. “You never know” she said. True. I might need to come out of retirement to help in an emergency at the vicarage across the road. I might be asked to preside at a family rite of passage. I’ve promised to preach at the funerals of a former churchwarden and of my closest friend if they die before me. I suppose a clean ending would have pandered to my tidy mind. But instinct tells me that the Bishop was right.

Nevertheless, I am now entering the home stretch of what I’m calling my formal public ministry. I have preaching commitments during the coming months that I need to honour, including during Holy Week next year. These engagements will be all the more precious because they will be among the last I undertake. And then?

Greatly daring, I wrote to the incumbent of the church where I became a chorister at the age of eleven. In that place, the whole Christian journey began for me. What I owe it is incalculable. So I wondered whether I might recognise the part that church and its people and music had played in my life and say thank you. It’s not that I want to make an event out of preaching “for the last time”. Simply that I would love to share something of my Christian and vocational story with the community where the seed was first planted all those years ago. He has been generous enough to welcome that idea. So some time next year, aged three score years and ten, I’ll have the chance to acknowledge the debt. And in my inmost self, say farewell to a ministry that has meant everything to me. And always will.

————-

Here’s a link to a recent feature in the Church Times that’s relevant to this blog.

Growing Old Gracefully

This week I'm taking part in a 24 hour event for clergy who are coming up to retirement. So here's another in a series of occasional blogs on retirement "from the front line". This one's about growing old.

And it's trending nowadays. We baby boomers are about to add to the pressure on our struggling health and social care provision. My generation was born just after the last war. We're getting to the age when we're going to need looking-after in the last years, even decades, of our lives. Some have already reached that difficult turning-point in life where we can't go on without the help of others, whether we're wholly or partly dependent on family, friends, neighbours or social welfare.

The trouble is, we are living too long, a lot longer than was imagined in the 1940s and 50s when I was born. And this at a time when healthcare expectations and the strains on our public finances are greater than they have ever been. Many of us retired people in the so-called "third age" enjoy a quality of life that compared to most others across the world is altogether extraordinary. We look at people like Cliff Richard in his seventies and Joan Collins in her eighties, and can't quite believe they aren't still in middle age. (Perhaps they think they are!) Even at this modest age of sixty eight, I occasionally get told off for pretending to be older than I really am, old enough to be retired.

Well, most of us last played that game of pretending when we were kids, trying to get in to watch "A" films at the local cinema. Or worse... I can see you're worried. Let me reassure you. It was nothing salacious, but I was underage, eleven probably, when I went to see Whisky Galore after school one day with a friend. How grown-up it felt! (Who was that friend? I wish I could remember. Another symptom of ageing, that...)

"Be your age" we used to scold our children. But of course that's precisely the point about how ageing tends to be viewed in western society. "You're as old as you feel" we're told; "sixty is the new forty. Welcome to middle age." And while I get impatient with that kind of talk, there's some truth in it. We don't really feel our calendar age. My consciousness of being "me" tells me that I'm fundamentally the same person as I was a lot earlier in life. Inside, I feel I be back at school again, or getting married, or starting my working life, or having children. And a lot else. Use your imagination. It's when bits drop off my body and its parts start to fail or stamina falls off that I'm reminded where I am on this timeline of being, not Adrian Mole aged thirteen and three quarters, but Michael, now fast approaching seventy. It can feel hard at times.

But why should it be hard to admit that? It's a very western problem to see growing old in this nostalgic regretful way. Most other cultures respect the old. The Japanese even have a special "day of the elderly". Yes, we should look back and be thankful for all the good things that have happened to us in youth and middle-age, all that has blessed and enriched us, fulfilled us and made us glad to be alive. Thankful too for the capacity to recognise our mistakes, say sorry and try to put them right, or at least live well with memories that will always be sad or painful or dark. And especially I am trying to be thankful for God's inestimable love, as the General Thanksgiving in the Book of Common Prayer puts it, God's constant presence and care from first breath to last, whether I knew it or not. If being human means lifelong learning, then no experience we've undergone is ever wasted.  Yes, there's a lot that's been lost, and most of all the people who have loved us and have died. But "all in the end is harvest". Loss is real, but the memories of cherished souls still touch my life and continue to make me what I am.

I've just read a rather wonderful book by Lynne Segal, Out of Time: the Pleasures and Perils of Ageing. She writes with insight about the ambiguities of growing old, and how the elderly are perceived in our society, especially by the young. We comfortable baby boomers who "never had it so good" are, she observes, increasingly resented by young and middle-aged people who struggle with unemployment, lack of opportunity, poverty, poor (or no) housing and the near-collapse of proper social welfare. By contrast, as some see it, baby-boomers' self-interest has begotten consumerism with all its ills, caused financial mayhem across the planet and has continued to plunder the world's resources when we should have known better. Add to that (too late for the book) how the young regard the silver-haired generation who have stolen their future from them by voting so decisively for a Brexit they (the young) do not understand or want.

Segal recognises that there's caricature in some of this. When has any generation not scorned or blamed their forebears for the predicaments they find themselves in. And yet... I know as we all do, so many inspirational young people who want to make the world a better place and find common cause with my contemporaries who want the same thing. Self-interest is not, I think, age-specific. I'm always heartened by that saying in the Rule of St Benedict about how we need to listen to the young, for God often tells them things he withholds from those who are older but not necessarily wiser.

The book urges me to be honest and realistic as I answer the question, "how old are you?" And that's about much more than what I'm feeling. Having read it, I now want to respond as truthfully as I can and acknowledge what belongs to the age I am rather than five, ten or twenty years younger. There's dignity in that, especially when it includes facing up to our physical or mental deterioration, our dwindling beauty or attractiveness, our sexual prowess or athletic ability. It isn't always easy to own up to. We can long to recapture those first, fine careless raptures wherever, whatever they were. In one way or another, we can devote all our lives to that attempt to re-set ourselves to some point in the past.

In the end, though, it's a futile quest. We are mortal. We know that one day we shall die, even if we pretend (back to that word again) that we can sit out the summons to join in the dance of death. When I laid down my work as a stipendiary priest, I wondered whether retirement might prove to be the last really big rite of passage of my life until either my wife or I myself died - a portentous thought to concentrate the mind. But more gently, ancient wisdom invites us to cultivate the art of living well in the time that we have left, to make old age a true summing-up of all that we've tried to be in life. Paradoxically, as we contemplate death, far from finding it a depressing or sinister thought, we discover that perhaps it's the clue to embracing life in all its fulness and living joyfully in our old age. Read the great seventeenth century classics of spiritual writing, Bishop Jeremy Taylor's Holy Dying and Holy Living if you don't believe me.

Late in life, I'm trying harder to celebrate the miracle that I am "alive, alive-oh" to quote the title of a book by that doughty writer on old age, Diana Athill. I don't mean anything dramatic, simply learning how to be more present to being alive, how to pay more attention. To live contemplatively and thankfully in the present tense is truly transformative. And that's also to recognise the past and future tenses of ageing, how grace has brought me thus far, and how, I trust, it will lead me home.

I realise (how can I not?) that "old age is not for wimps". It takes courage to peer into the possible futures that could await us in this adventure of growing old. Some of them could be bleak indeed. The spiritual question I live with is, how do I keep alive the sense of God, whatever may happen? When it gets hard, I so want still to be able to sing alleluia. But even if courage fails in whatever ordeals may await, I hope I shall always hear that still small voice calling to me deep down, and be able to whisper back: For all that has been, thanks! To all that shall be, Yes!

Last Words from France: a rite of passage

Well, these are possibly not my last words ever from France, a country I have loved since childhood. But for the time being. This summer we went to our beloved hill-top town of Vézelay for one final visit. We have sold the little house I inherited seventeen years ago near the Basilica. Why did we decide to part with it? It seemed like the right time. In retirement it becomes necessary to simplify things.

But there's no denying the sense of loss. Not least the associations it came to acquire of peacefulness, spirituality and retreat, happy memories of family holidays, rites of passage it had been present to in our lives like the marriages of our children, the births of our grandchildren, our retirement, the breaking news of family deaths, the preparation for their funerals. When say farewell to a house you have had a long connection with (in this case, longer than any other I've known), things become charged with symbolism. To take a final cup of coffee in such familiar surrounding, switch off the lights, turn off the boiler, shut the front door, lock it for the last time, get into the car and drive away - what significance those everyday actions suddenly acquire!

I've blogged about Vézelay before. So I won't write about the landscapes of northern Burgundy, its Christian history, the golden limestone churches that adorn the villages, the wines (of course) and our life in the village. But let me say something about the Basilica where we have worshipped so often, and in particular, a carving just outside the north door that seems to me to symbolise life's transitions, not least how we let go, lay aside and travel into a new and unknown future.

The marvellous Basilica of the Madeleine that crowns the hill is one of the treasures of Romanesque architecture in Europe. It is to France what Durham Cathedral is to England, an incomparable masterpiece. In the middle ages pilgrims flocked here both to reverence the relics of Mary Magdalen (long story, that) and to set off on the Camino to Compostela. After the Revolution it been allowed to fall into decay. It was fortunate to find in Viollet le Duc a gifted young architect who set about restoring it - a major commission that brought him fame, fortune and some critical opprobrium too.

The west front was so decayed that much of it had to be completely rebuilt. So only one of the original Romanesque sculptures remains visible on the outside. But that single survivor on the south door jamb of the north portal is highly significant. It depicts Jacob struggling with the angel in the famous story in Genesis.

Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob’s hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” But Jacob replied, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” The man asked him, “What is your name?”“Jacob,” he answered. Then the man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with humans and have overcome.”  Jacob said, “Tell me your name, I pray.” But he replied, “Why do you ask my name?” Then he blessed him there. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.”  (Genesis 32.22-30 NRSV). 

It's a mysterious story with many layers of meaning. But the symbolism of placing the sculpted capital right next to the church door helps explain it. It is clearly about travelling across a threshold, facing the risks and uncertainties of transition and liminality. Jacob is facing a journey and an encounter that he knows will be crucial in his life. He needs to be reconciled to his brother Esau from he stole both his birthright and his inheritance. He is all alone, and frightened of this imminent meeting that could prove to bring with it great suffering, even death. The awful journey through water in the dead of night, his struggle with the nameless adversary, his emerging as the sun rose with a new name to mark a new identity, and a limp to remember the ordeal - it all speaks of a rite of passage from one stage of life to the next. Interpret it as you will: Jacob facing his demons and (partially) overcoming them, or encountering God in all his numinous mystery and grace (or both of these) - it is one of the most powerful narratives in the Bible.

The sculpted capital and its story came to mean a lot to me in that final week in our house not many metres down the hill. I kept going back to it to contemplate it and photograph it (difficult to do because it stands, literally and figuratively, at the junction of light and shadow). While not comparing myself to Jacob-Israel, I recognised that even a little rite of passage like saying goodbye to a place and the home you have made there is still an ordeal to be faced up to and travelled across. I guess that it felt significant partly because saying goodbye to my working life as a priest, closing the door of the Deanery at Durham and walking away from the Cathedral and all that it stood for in my life was - still is - all very recent. Just as one bereavement triggers memories of others, so it is with saying farewell to a place and its people and the home you have made there and the friends you have got to know.

And, I have to say, getting on the ferry and leaving France behind did feel like our own personal Brexit. It wasn't of course, and still isn't now that we are back in Britain. But there's no denying that it was often on our minds during our summer on the hill. We frequently discussed it with both French and British friends, the latter mostly expats living in Burgundy, far from certain what the future after Brexit will mean for them. One of them told us about their son's recent visit to the UK in his (French) car. On parking it in a place he knows well in England (I'd better not say where), he realised that his French number plates had drawn attention to the car, and that he was being subjected to a volley of booing and hissing. Is this the generous decent country we were brought up in, the England that has shaped and nurtured us? - that was the unspoken thought. The Referendum was itself a rite of passage for Britain and for Europe, for all of us however we voted, I thought as I gazed on Jacob and the angel. And we have emerged on the other side unhealed, limping badly, more broken than we were before, not with a hope-filled sunrise to walk into but a gloomy sunset to walk away from as it gets dark.

Ah well. We are where we are, in a truly liminal place. But whatever our future in Europe, we are grateful to have glowing memories of our Burgundian adventure to bring with us. On our last day, I wrote to the Mairie and to the Jerusalem brothers and sisters whose spiritual home the Basilica is, to thank them for these wonderful years in Vézelay. It will always have a special place in our hearts. Adieu. And Deo gratias!
 

The Silence That Sings

I am on a silent retreat this week. That is to say, I am conducting a retreat for a religious community. So the experience is not quite the same as when you opt to go on a retreat for your own spiritual refreshment and renewal, or just because you need some peaceful time away. When you are giving addresses each day, and seeing retreatants who have asked for a conversation or want to make their confession, you are not there for yourself but for others. There is work to be done. 

Nevertheless, this week is a gift. Even though it's less than a month since I got back from leading an ordination retreat, it's still a welcome and a precious time. At the heart of the religious life is daily prayer, the eucharist together with the four offices of morning, midday, evening and night prayer. This community's beautifully reordered church, its architecture and furnishings noble but restrained, speak of spiritual values we should emulate. In its clear light, you feel that this church is a place of truth where we come to transact the business of God and of ourselves as we are before before him. There's no hiding from God here. You feel that you are seen, and known. That can be uncomfortable, painful even. But you also sense that this place of truth is also a place of humane companionship where pilgrims share bread and walk together before God. And a place of love where you are held in the embrace of a community that lives out the love of God himself.

Worshipping here has a stabilising, calming effect. The ancient plainchant of the psalms and canticles have a spiritual clarity that matches the quality of light. Words are spoken very slowly, softly and deliberately so as to reverence the sacred truths we are taking upon our lips. The daily prayers give the day focus, shape, direction and structure. Life feels intentional: there is a quiet prayerful purposefulness in the way the community goes about its business. There is something graceful about this life lived together that imbues ordinary things with meaning. No one is in a hurry. Walking purposefully becomes a religious act in itself. You begin to understand how in the religious life, space and time, activity and stillness become suffused with the spirituality of the conventual church and all that happens there: eucharist, prayer, scripture, psalmody, silence. (Because of the importance of the psalms in the community's daily prayer, I am offering reflections on the psalms of the day and trying to show how the whole of human life is contained within these marvellous texts. I'm also suggesting how they can help us to pray more authentically.  You can read my addresses here. I am adding them each day as I give them.)

It's the silence of places like these that we secular Christians tend to seek when we go on retreat. For some people this is more difficult than for others. As an introvert, I'm fortunate not to find this a problem myself. I've always valued silence and solitude, perhaps to a fault - who can say? In any case, retirement is necessarily a lot more silent than life used to be when time overflowed with activities, meetings, conversations and all the business that goes into an ordinary working day. That has taken some getting used to, though it is most welcome (for now).

But silence of the kind I'm finding here is more than just the absence of noise or music or conversation or digital stimuli. It's a rule of life, a discipline that's chosen, whether permanently or simply for a while, to help us quieten our spirits, practise stillness, become more aware, learn how to listen, discern God's presence in our midst. It's this that religious communities strive so hard to maintain and protect. At first it can seem odd to live in this way, especially at meal times when common courtesy and our innate sociability suggest that conversing amicably is the natural accompaniment to eating and drinking. So it is, most of the time. But silence is far from living in some private world of your own. On the contrary, it gives you the chance to meet and get to know others in surprising ways even if you never exchange so much as a single word outside the liturgy. When you pray with people and sit at table with them day by day, strangers become friends. Don't ask me how it happens. I'm just saying that it does. 

This kind of silence, inhabited by a community of prayer, can feel highly charged. A retreat can be an intense experience, especially when it takes place at a time of personal change or transition. My retreat before being ordained priest was like that. It was an important place to explore my hopes and expectations of ordained life, offer my vocation and my gratitude for it, try to be realistic about the failures and the flaws in my life of which I was acutely conscious at that momentous threshold. I was all alone (always the introvert!) on that retreat in a Benedictine house where the silence, and the holy warmth of the community, and the beauty and generosity of its liturgy made me so welcome. For me, then, it was a vital place of truth. 1976 was a blazingly hot summer. Perhaps that has helped the memory to glow. I sat in the gardens on the parched grass and read Jean-Pierre de Caussade on The Sacament of the Present Moment, and George Herbert's A Priest to the Temple together with many of his poems. But it's the quality of the silence that I most remember. I realise forty years later how thirsty I was for it.  I've been on many retreats since. But that experience stands out as life-giving in a special way.

The Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins has a poem about silence that inspired the title of one of Thomas Merton's best known books. It begins:

Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.

Silence can sing when we have ears (whorlèd or not) to hear. There is a music we become aware of when we elect for silence, attune the senses and start listening. You never know what kind of music it will be. But as the desert fathers used to say, you "go into your cell and your cell will teach you everything". It's a matter of being open to the Spirit of God, that's all. Like William Blake hearing angels singing in his garden, and seeing heaven in a grain of sand.

Discerning Vocation in the Third Age: more from the retirement front line

Every now and then I try to take stock of this still new stage of life called retirement. In this blog I want to reflect on where Christian life and ordained life belong in it.

The first thing to say is that I am writing entirely personally. Every one of us has to negotiate this threshold into retirement in our own unique way. For clergy, it can be especially problematic because a vocation is so much more than the kind of job you can step in and out of. To have been a priest for more than forty years is to inhabit a way of life that forms you, shapes you, confers its own "character" on you, is intimately involved with your personal identity. As priests we "become what we are" just as we do in baptism and marriage. This is as true of our personal interior lives as well as our visible public roles. Which is as it should be.

I recall very clearly the experience of entering the priesthood as a young man. What we now call vocational discernment was accompanied by a vast amount of prayer, conversation, reflection, study and scrutiny. A great many other people were involved in helping me approach and then cross this threshold into ordained life. At that time I was in my mid-twenties and had been a student all my life up to then. Being ordained coincided, for me, with taking up my life's work, or if you like, taking responsibility and earning my own living. It felt like a rite of passage into adulthood.

At around the time I turned sixty, memories of that earlier vocational journey became much more vivid. I knew I had four or five years in which to prepare for retirement (not long in the sweep of a lifetime). There were inevitable practicalities to think about. Where would we live? What were our housing needs likely to be? What financial resources would we have? (I learned from older clergy who'd come to me for regular spiritual guidance that it's never too soon to ask these questions, and in today's less certain economic climate, the earlier the better.)

But I wasn't expecting these pre-retirement years to prove once again to be a time of vocational discernment. But that is precisely what they turned out to be. At the end of those four decades of ordained work, and now as an older if not wiser man, I found that the prospect of leaving stipendiary ministry felt remarkably similar to my memories of entering it. In other words, both seemed to have discernment at their heart. I found that for me, retiring was as much of a vocational issue as ordination had been. So it's important that the church "accompanies" its retiring clergy spiritually and emotionally because as every retired person knows, it's one of the biggest thresholds we ever have to cross in our adult lives. I think we are getting better at this, and that's heartening.

Discovering who we are in retirement and what we could become is a journey, of course. I am not even in media res. As yet, if I'm spared for a while, I am probably nearer the start than the finishing line. I have a lot to learn. But for what it's worth, here's my interim report on where I'm getting to.

For me (and again I stress that this is just one person speaking), I did not feel in my waters that retirement ministry could simply mean more of the same: taking services, preaching sermons, continuing in some form or other to participate in the church's public leadership. As I started to think and pray about it, I came to see how the coming years could offer all kinds of new and untried opportunities to contribute to both the church and the wider community. Some of these I have explored and begun to embrace. Some are as yet simply possibilities to be thought about. One or two have not led anywhere. But pushing at a few doors and testing volunteering opportunities has felt very much to be the stuff of discernment. I've wanted to discover if, and how, these different conversations might coalesce into a single answer to the question, "what could my life now become, what does God want it to become as I embrace the potential that comes from being released from day to day work responsibilities?"

At the core of this new vocation, and rather to my surprise, there emerged more and more insistently a desire to live and worship as a lay person once again. I mean that I wanted to play my part as a Christian not through preaching and presiding at the liturgy but as a worshipper, sitting with my wife in a church nave among the laos, the people of God. This isn't a nostalgic harking back to the first year of our marriage when this was what "churchgoing" meant. But it is to rediscover as a couple this communio in sacris, a "sharing in holy things". I'm one of those strange clergy who has always enjoyed churchgoing (even on holiday!). It's been good to find ourselves once again in that place of community where the holy-common people of God gather. I know that has always been true, whatever my role as a deacon and priest in the church. But to experience it in this new (i.e. old) way on the Sundays of our lives feels like one of the best gifts of retirement.

We are fortunate that in this village, our parish priest understands this and allows me to live out my vocation in this way. I've made it clear that if there is a need, and especially an emergency, I shall of course step up at once and help along with other retired clergy colleagues in the parish. I value the invitations to take part in special services and preach in and beyond the diocese when an invitation comes. I have the Bishop's permission to officiate. But if asked why I am comparatively rarely to be seen in a surplice or a chasuble, I try to give as honest an answer as I can along the lines I've explained. And I find that people not only understand what I'm struggling to articulate, but respect it.

What does this say about vocation at this stage of life? There's an important theological principle that I've needed to revisit. It is that the fundamental vocation of every Christian is conferred at baptism. For some of us, ordination flows out of that vocation to discipleship as a consequence. But I'm clear that the "normal" way of being a Christian and a member of God's church is the lay state. Deacons, priests and bishops do not renounce their lay-ness on ordination (nor the orders that have already been conferred on them). All the ordained continue to belong to the laos. I think it's not only good but important for us to express this from time to time. For me, retirement is - for the moment anyway - such a time.

I'm aware that this could be misunderstood. (I also recognise that other retired clergy will see it differently, and of course I respect that.) It may sound as though I have renounced my orders - as if it were possible to renounce an indelible "character" conferred by the church at ordination. Or that I am no longer interested in playing my part in helping the church to flourish. Or perhaps that I'm just not aware of the pressures local churches are familiar with through the relentless decline in the numbers of stipendiary clergy. None of these is true - but maybe it needs explaining.

(Excursus. I happen to think that our present patterns of church life, especially in the countryside, are not likely to prove sustainable beyond a few more decades, and the generosity of retired clergy should not protect the church and its dioceses, bishops and archdeacons from recognising that reality and engaging with it. I know they are already doing so. I am simply suggesting that the future of organised religion will look very different from the past, and one day there will not be enough clergy whether stipendiary or non-stipendiary, active or retired to maintain it in something like its present form. I say this with deep sadness because I believe with all my heart in parochial ministry and am uneasy that others, including some in senior leadership roles, seem to sit more lightly to it than I believe is good for the national church and the people it is here to serve.)

My response is to say that I am trying to re-express the lay aspect of my baptismal vocation - or, if you like, to live as a priest in the local church in a new kind of way. I am glad to be alongside so many good lay people in this parish who give such time and effort to supporting it. It makes me appreciate all the more how much all the cathedrals I served benefitted from our teams of volunteers. No cathedral, no parish, will go anywhere nowadays without its committed lay people. Now that I largely live as one, I see this more from the inside than I used to.

At the same time, I am glad to go across to the church on weekdays to pray the daily office with the vicar. I hope that by doing this I can offer him spiritual companionship. Reciting the psalms, hearing the scriptures read, offering intercession for parish, church and world all connect me in a deep way with the whole church and my own priesthood within it. All of this is what we call the opus dei, the work of God. Whatever form our ministry takes, whether as laity or clergy, it's our privilege to bear witness to the reality of God and do his work in the world.

How we undertake this, for people of faith, is the question that matters at every stage of life. In retirement, it's good to report that it still gets me up in the morning.

**These images are all taken in the Benefice of Haydon Bridge, Beltingham and Henshaw in Northumberland where we have made our home in retirement. Maybe there are appropriate metaphors in some of them?

Gathering Fragments One Year On

It's the autumn equinox. Night has overtaken day. Up here in Northumberland, the leaves show little sign of turning. But the rose-hips are swelling in the hedgerows and the rowan glows bright red alongside the magenta hawthorn and deep purple elderberries. The scent of coal fires re-lit in village hearths now hangs in the still September air. Golden stubble fields are ploughed chocolate-brown ready for winter. The new academic year has begun: children file past our front door morning and afternoon chatting excitably on their way to and from school. 

The year has come full circle. This time last year, I was in my last few days in office as Dean of Durham. It was a week of high emotion. I was filled with real sadness at the thought of leaving a place and people we loved. I blogged about it here: http://decanalwoolgatherer.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-deans-last-blog.html?spref=tw. At the same time, we were looking forward to our new life across the hills in the Tyne Valley. It would, we imagined, be quieter and gentler than Durham. Cathedrals are wonderful and exhilarating but they are fast places. You need to be intellectually and spiritually agile; you need plenty of stamina. It's not that I was running out of steam (whatever Mrs S says), but I did think I should retire before it became apparent to me and to everyone else that I was overstaying my welcome. And I wanted to be able to have something to give to church and community in retirement, try different things, volunteer in new ways.

It has turned out to be an eventful, not to say turbulent, year. If you've followed this blog you'll know about Storm Desmond and how it invaded our home last December at precisely the same time as one daughter gave birth to our second grandchild and another was rushed into hospital for an emergency operation. Having fully recovered, she sensibly got married in the spring and is now expecting a baby. But then in the early summer my 93 year old mother fell ill and died a few weeks afterwards. All this on top of laying aside a life's work, moving home and beginning again in a new place in an entirely different role, that of being "retired". Oh yes, and the EU referendum campaign and the awful prospect of Brexit.

It's the first anniversary of my farewell in Durham Cathedral next Tuesday. By coincidence (is there such a thing?), I am giving two addresses to a clergy conference that day and the next on "Ministry for the Long Haul". I asked the Bishop why he thought I was qualified to speak to his clergy on this topic. After all, I had never lived or worked in the demanding urban environment that is mostly the setting of their ministry. He replied, "Well, you've completed the long haul. Tell us what's kept you going and sustained you over forty years. Tell us what's been important to you". Fair enough I thought a year ago when we spoke. I'm now trying to work out what to say to these good people. No spoilers! You never know who is reading this blog. I'll post the talks next week. If they've gone well, that is.

But it's been valuable to have to undertake the exercise of thinking about forty years of public ministry as I look forward to the anniversary. I might not have done it otherwise. I had never tried to articulate to myself, let alone to anyone else, what I'd found to be central in inhabiting the vocation to be a priest, though I suppose some of it got expressed in the ordination addresses I gave a few years ago that later became my book Wisdom and Ministry. So I went back to my farewell sermon in the Cathedral on 27 September 2015 (how hard I'd worked on that one!): http://michaelstalks.blogspot.com/2015/09/all-in-end-is-harvest-farewell-sermon.html?spref=tw. The clues are all there, I realised, for I'd intended the sermon to be a valedictory not only to Durham but to all the places where I had served as a priest. My text was the words of Jesus in St John after he has performed another of his "signs" and fed the crowd: "gather the fragments so that nothing may be lost" (John 6.12). So that is what I've tried to do in these two addresses, share some harvest gleanings in a way that I hope is helpful and finds echoes in what others have experienced in ministry. 

It's always important in life to do our best to make sure that "nothing may be lost". I believe it to be a key spiritual task, and especially in later life. One of the gifts of retirement has been to have time (even amid the dramas of the past year) to look back and ponder. I've blogged under the "woolgathering" title for some years but this is the first time in my life when it feels as though it can mean something creative because proper time and thought, reflection and prayer can go into it. 

But the more wool I gather, the more I realise that what I think and say on this first anniversary is still provisional. At this early stage, my musings on the story of my ministry are no more than a ballon d'essai, a first go to test whether I've got it even partially right. Who knows what themes may emerge later on in retirement when the foreground has receded a bit and distance lends perspective? 

That last bit was a photography-inspired spoiler, by the way....

Retrospect of an Unimportant Life?

The title isn’t mine. It was Bishop Herbert Hensley Henson who, nearing the end of his life in the 1940s wrote a long three volume autobiography Retrospect of an Unimportant Life. (I added the question mark myself.) He was a predecessor of mine in the Deanery at Durham, being Dean throughout the Great War. He was already getting a name for himself as a doughty controversialist, a reputation he cultivated as Bishop of Hereford and then Bishop of Durham. He preached, wrote, argued and hectored on the issues of the day – prohibition, trades union, divorce law, liturgical revision, disestablishment and National Socialism (to his great credit he was one of the few bishops to see through its blandishments to the awfulness the Third Reich would inevitably become).

His was an eventful life lived out as a dean and bishop on a very public stage. So why did he give his autobiography this curious self-deprecating title? It sounds typically English, an understated - perhaps ironic - way of drawing attention to a career that captured the headlines and made him a household name even if he was not always fondly loved. After all, if you write three bulky volumes about yourself, you’ve got to think that the subject matter warrants it. But it’s not impossible that HHH, as he was known, was being sincere. He always acknowledged his modest working class background, said many times that he was not obviously born to be a prince of the church like his fellow bishops. Perhaps as he neared his end he began to see his career in a larger perspective where every life, however distinguished, is as little or nothing in the grand scheme of things. “What is man that thou art mindful of him?”

I would often think of HHH when I used to sit in his, and then my, study in that great medieval Deanery attached to Durham Cathedral. It’s hard not to be overawed by your predecessors especially when not one but two portraits of him hang in that amazing room. In such a place you can easily imagine you are someone, “think of yourself more highly than you ought to think” as St Paul says. These days a dean doesn’t have the leisure to offer as much to the public life of church and society as a century ago for all that I’m sure it remains a key part of the vocation in that office to do so. Decanal life is much (pre-)occupied by the immediate and never-ending concerns of a hungry cathedral, a diocese and a county, especially the first. In that sense, a dean has a less visible role outside Barchester than used to be the case. You could say that in his or her public profile, a dean lives a distinctly unimportant life.

But here’s the rub. Maybe HHH cottoned on to the fact that what made him interesting was not his dazzling public career but what went into making him a man. To me as his successor and, I admit it, a critical fan, what fascinated me was his ordinariness, his unimportance if you like. I wish he had allowed more of this to come to the surface in his Retrospect. You feel there is so much he doesn't tell you, imagines that what you really want to know about is the public persona, the performance on the national stage, the often dramatized account of this controversy or that, sometimes told, it has to be said, with a less than pleasing whiff of self-congratulation. Unimportant? Not really, not as he tells the story.

I’ve now reached the life-stage HHH had got to when he started writing his mammoth account in 1942. I’m not as old as he was (yet), but I am now superannuated after forty years of ordained ministry. Retirement is inevitably a time to draw threads together, “gather the fragments so that nothing is lost”. You find yourself looking back on your life and glimpsing connections that you hadn’t quite seen before. The nineteenth century philosopher and theologian Kierkegaard famously said that “life has to be lived forwards but understood backwards”, a saying much quoted by Jung in his account of psychoanalysis. It’s not quite what Anselm meant when he talked about “faith seeking understanding”, yet as Augustine had found when he wrote his Confessions centuries before, knowing yourself and how you have come to be what you are is an essential aspect of “understanding”.

What I’ve been feeling for during these past months was put sharply in focus for me at church this morning. Another retired priest who like me has recently moved into the village asked me over coffee whether I’d ever written about my spiritual development. He knew something about my personal story and thought it was interesting. (Who wouldn’t be flattered? – for there’s nothing in the world that’s as fascinating as we are to ourselves!) I replied that while there’s plenty of autobiographical allusion in my writing and preaching (for ultimately, all we have to speak about is what we know and have learned and experienced), I have never tried to give it any conscious shape or structure. Indeed, I can’t begin to guess what that would look like, though others may be able to offer clues.  

I’m one of those people who best discovers what I think or believe as I speak or write it. I can have quite vague notions about something until I start writing it down or arguing it out, and then there comes, sometimes quite suddenly, that point of recognition, that eureka moment. That’s it! That’s what I believe! That's how the world is! That's how God may be! That’s perhaps who I am! Which is why I enjoy social media and blogging because like a journal, they hold up a mirror to the self that can be, often is, hidden from sight until the words disclose it.

So I am going to try an experiment and blog my own Retrospect. Not at Hensonian length, and not as a book like his with its somewhat artfully imposed narrative shape. I shall simply blog a few hundred words at a time on some of the key personal and spiritual themes that are significant to me and see what happens. I’m not going to say it’s either important or unimportant, though the story is certainly important to me. However ordinary we are, our lives are unique, unrehearsed dramas in which we get only one chance at being players. As for everyone else, it may be precisely what we have in common as human beings that makes each of us interesting to other people. My “truth”, the Kierkegaardian "truth for which we live and die" will not be the same as yours, but we are all walking the same path of trying to live authentically as men and women in the world – if, that is, awareness, emotional intelligence and wisdom matter to us. That’s the kind of stuff I want to try out in these blogs.

So inspired by HHH, I’ll have a go. How many episodes? I've no idea. Maybe a dozen to see us through a year. You don’t have to read if you don’t want to. But I’d love to think that however we go about it we all want to seek and to find understanding. That's my goal (he says modestly). It’s much more fun - and we learn more - if we travel together in company. It's an unfinished story because tomorrow's experiences will cast new light on the past and present that will make even late autobiographical fragments provisional. It's also in search of a title. Any suggestions? 

Retirement: report from the Third Age front line.

I'll take a short break from writing blogs about the EU. This is the sixth month of my new life in retirement. When I started blogging under this new Woolgathering brand, I promised (threatened) updates from the front line of the Third Age from time to time. So here goes.

When we left Durham Cathedral in early October, it was in the afterglow of a marvellous farewell. You live off these heart-warming events for a long time: they are always with you. It was hard to leave behind such a uniquely beautiful place with its rich spirituality and wonderfully genuine community. But we landed happily across the hill in the South Tyne Valley. Haydon Bridge has proved to be a great village to retire into and become part of. We soon felt at home in a welcoming community, the parish church across the road and the lovely landscapes of Northumberland that we can walk from our own front door.

When you first retire, it's like being on holiday. You're full of expectations, keenly aware of the gift, as it feels to begin with, of lots of time to call your own. To enjoy your family, fresh air, music, books, photography, yes and social media, and not have to feel guilty about it (even if I'm tempted to) still feels like a decidedly odd feature of this new life. But I have also been aware of how tired I have felt and how long it takes to slough it off. I guess that's not surprising after forty years of working life. Others who've trodden this path before me have said it just needs time.

A colleague who came to see us recently asked if I had any "projects" in retirement. I've thought about this a lot. The almost universal advice at first was: don't make grand plans and big commitments early on. Don't make undertakings you might later want to get out of. Think carefully about what you would like to do in retirement. I've tried to do this. It's helped to keep a journal to soliloquise to and try ideas out on. I began it six months before retiring, and intend to keep it going until six months afterwards. It's a great help as I try to retire in a reflective way, and not find myself jolted roughly from one kind of life into another. Going into retirement is like coming up after a deep underwater dive. If you surface too quickly, you risk getting the bends. That as we know is highly risky.

One of the things that's become clear is that while I certainly want to be useful to the church and wider community, I don't want to spend however many years I am granted before I die simply perpetuating my working life by doing more of the same. I want to explore new involvements and learn new things. I'm especially keen to put something back into North East England, the region that has given so much to us over the years. So I'm having conversations around the place to see what possibilities there might be. We shall see. It's a discernment process, as important as it was when I first explored my vocation to ordained ministry. And at times, as unclear and as puzzling. And certainly a matter for prayer.

All this may sound as though these first few months have been placid and uneventful. Far from it. In December, our second grandchild was born, Madeleine, a sister for Isaac. Two days later we were hit by Storm Desmond. The village suffered badly as the normally benign South Tyne became a ferocious torrent tearing through peoples' homes. Our cellar was flooded to a depth of six feet, writing off the new and expensive biomass boiler we had just installed there. Without power and hot water, we were out of the house for nearly a fortnight. Wonderful neighbours who hardly knew us took us in. The support and kindness we found in the village were deeply moving. I won't pretend it didn't feel like a devastating crisis just when we had settled into our new home and were enjoying living in it. We learned then that there's no better way to arrive in a new community than to lay on a disaster. You make friends extraordinarily quickly!

Life has stabilised since then. The rains have subsided and the cellar is dry again. A new boiler is being constructed in the garage. We have got back to a rhythm of life: going across to church for weekday morning prayer, shopping in Hexham and attending evensong in the Abbey each week, frequent walks on the fell above the village, and a little further afield by Hadrian's Wall, listening to Radio 3 for most of the day other than when it's time for The Archers, meeting up with friends we're lucky enough to have nearby, and a lot of reading. (I've been working through Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire novels and loving them; currently well into The Small House at Allington with just The Last Chronicle to go. He is a great novelist and so easy to read - on which I feel another blog coming on soon.)

Meanwhile, the EU referendum has become an all-consuming agenda item. If you follow this blog, you'll know that a short time ago I launched "Christians for the EU" with its Twitter handle @Xians4EU. My hope was to stimulate thought and debate about a Christian case for the UK to stay in the European Union, something that I believe in with all my heart. It's taking up a large amount of time, and the official campaign hasn't even begun yet! But I've learned a great deal by the research I've needed to do, and have been glad that our efforts have been noticed by the national media. I couldn't have done this a year ago when I was still in office, not primarily because it might not have been appropriate to, but for the more pressing reason that I would never have found the time.

It all sounds very pleasant, I hear you say, and yes, it is. But there's this nagging question about what my life is now meant to be for. I blogged a few months ago about the dilemma of how to describe myself when people ask what it is I do. I said I didn't want to be an imperfect man (past continuous: 'I used to be a Cathedral dean'), nor an aorist man (past and done with: 'I practised as a priest in the C of E'). Maybe a perfect man (past tense with present consequences: 'I've been an ordained minister in theological education, parish and cathedrals and here's what I've become now').

But best of all, I'd like to be someone living in the present and even the future tense ('this is what I am, and what I hope to become'). I'm reticent about using the R-word because that seems to be haunted by those past tenses. As Kierkegaard said, life has to be lived forwards and understood backwards. Retirement is certainly time to seek understanding, reflect on the past and draw the threads of a life together. But it's now and tomorrow that I need to keep in view if I am to remain truly alive in any sense that matters. What, who, am I in this new stage of my life? That's the question. A writer? Speaker? Photographer? EU campaigner? Priest? Dilettante? Couch potato?

This, I guess, is an aspect of the spirituality of retirement. I said it was work in progress. But I firmly believe it is opus dei, the work of God. Liminal time at a threshold makes for strange days and mysterious ways. But "God is his own interpreter and he will make it plain".