How shall we mark Brexit in Church?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the End of the Year

New Year's Eve marks a threshold for everyone who feels the flow of time. For me, saying farewell to 2015 means the end of an entire era of my life. For this is my final day on the Church of England payroll as a stipendiary priest. Tomorrow I throw myself on the mercy of the Pensions Board. In twenty four hours' time I shall be indisputably, officially, legally retired.

Readers of the Decanal Woolgatherer blog will know that I left Durham Cathedral at the end of September. Since then I have been on sabbatical leave while officially remaining the Dean. The idea was to spend three months in reflection and prayer. I wanted to look back over my forty years of active ministry to draw threads together and find meanings. I wanted to prepare for a very different future, try to think about how to be 'retired'. I wanted to be present to what everyone agrees is a big life-change, perhaps the biggest since setting out on the journey of adulthood, getting married and starting work. 

Well, reality is not always what we expect or hope for. Woody Allen famously quipped: 'How do you make God laugh? Tell him your future plans'. We knew it would take time to settle into a new home and feel we belonged to the Northumberland village where we have come to live. In these far northern lands, the shepherds talk about sheep being 'hefted' on to their hill, that is, berthed in and bonded with their native soil. Maybe offcomers like us who have been blown in from somewhere else can never expect to be fully hefted. There will always be something of the exile in a quondam Londoner like me, even one who is lucky enough to have landed in a beautiful village like ours with a great sense of community.

But as some of you know, recent events have had their own way of contributing to our 'hefting' a lot more speedily than we had predicted. Barely two months into our new home and life, at the beginning of Advent Storm Desmond hit. The house (appropriately named after a collier ship that capsized in the North Sea) began taking in water. Lots of it. We can tell a long story about the drowning of our newly installed biomass boiler in the cellar: I blogged about the floods at the time. Suffice it to say that this village has been marvellously kind and supportive. We have made new friends and got to know our neighbours. This drama helped us more than anything else could have done to 'arrive' in the village and feel part of it. Already, we can't imagine living anywhere else. It's good to be able to say that.

I had decided to keep a journal for the six months before leaving Durham and the six months afterwards. It's been an important way of logging this experience of transition. When you retire, you lay aside a role you've inhabited for years, maybe (as in my case) your entire working life. For me, coming to the end of my service at the Cathedral has been to say goodbye not only to my dozen Durham years but to forty years of stipendiary ministry as a priest. As a family we've learned a bit about leave-taking as we've moved from one place to another in that time. It doesn't get any easier, however practised you are. There's always the painful business of having to say farewells to people you have come to love, leaving a community where you've been contented and fulfilled (if you're lucky enough), packing up your possessions and walking away from your physical home and the environment where you have flourished, felt at ease and been happy. 

Every priest knows that this is the deal. And every retiring priest has known that it was going to happen again, but this time in a uniquely final way. We clergy are well looked after by the Church in retirement. Yet there is still the unnerving sense that somehow, this is it. We are on our own now, responsible for our futures, responsible for the lives we choose to live, and responsible for this house we live in, not the tied accommodation we have enjoyed all these years but our very own property in which we have invested our savings. This sense of being on our own has hit home quite sharply, thanks to December's events. When the cellar floods, the power goes off and the water runs cold, there is no Clerk of Works or Parsonage Board to sort it out for you. But I guess it's good for us. Maybe retirement is the last but one event in the process of growing up (the last step of all being death?).

But we're also on our own in the more profound sense that there are far fewer external demands to control our decisions and priorities. So we are discovering how retirement is about a new experience of time spent together, sitting alongside each other in our local church at the Sunday service, learning how to pray together again. It's a bit how it was when we were first married, before I was ordained. Sabbatical time even had an odd whiff of honeymoon about it to begin with, though the flood rather exploded that perspective. But whatever our circumstances, there are no rules in retirement. We have to reinvent ourselves, develop new rhythms and disciplines, a new spirituality to shape the third age and help us to grow old gracefully. This is what I've tried to think and write honestly about in my journal.

In 2016 reality will kick in. I'm not under any illusions about the challenges it could bring. But part of my reason for asking for sabbatical time before officially retiring was to ask myself some key questions about the future. What are my personal priorities going to be? How am I going to try to be useful to the church and the wider community in Northumberland, maybe beyond? What will it mean, and how will it feel after all these years now to find myself a 'retired priest'? What is expected or asked of me in that capacity? What projects and pursuits might I take up in the next few years, whether in a public way through taking up volunteering roles, or more personally in writing, photography, music-making, walking, reading, travel and other enjoyments where I have longed for more time and have new discoveries to make? 

When the midnight hour strikes tonight, we shall be on Haydon's old bridge over the Tyne (troubled water in recent weeks) enjoying the annual village firework display and party. It's a highly symbolic place at which to mark a threshold in time, a crossing-over, as a commentator on this blog points out. We shall all in different ways be thinking about those many for whom 2015 has brought endless trouble, disaster and pain, including people we know who will be relieved to see the back of the past year. But we shall also remind ourselves, I hope, of all that is lovely and good in life, all that has enriched the past year for us, particularly in the people who love us. And in my own case, these past forty privileged years that come to an end in the coming hours.

And if the world is looking pretty desperate as we link arms and sing Auld Lang Syne, faith gives us every reason not to lose heart. We can cross tonight's threshold with a song in our hearts that's not simply wishful thinking. I'm looking forward to 2016 and discovering the doors it will open and the possibilities that lie beyond their portals. Whatever you are hoping for or afraid of in the coming twelve months, whatever the changes and chances you face, I want to wish you as personally as I can a good new year. I pray that it will be a time of gifts for those in our world who most need them. I pray that for all of us, as Pope Francis is reminding us, it will be a true Year of Mercy.