2019 DLT Books - Title Sampler. January - June.

The Table

Knowing Jesus: Prayer, Friendship, Justice

Paul Bayes

Contents Preface Acknowledgements

vii ix

Part I 1. So there’s this table 2. The banqueting table 3. The Lord’s table 4. The daily table

2 6 15 29

Part II 5. Meeting at the table Friends of God Jesus’ group in Jesus’ time Jesus’ group today 6. Drinking from the fountain 7. Watching in the moment 8. Stretching for the Kingdom More people knowing Jesus More justice in the world

38 38 49 58 78 89 96 96 115

Part III 9. The breakfast table 140 Appendix 146 Notes 153

Preface Images and ideas grow in the mind, and grow further as they are shared. This little book takes one such image, the image of the carpenter’s table. It sets out to answer the question, What might it mean for the way we live and pray and act to see the Christian Church as an open table of friends, sitting beside One who calls and sends them in love?

I am grateful to the Diocese of Liverpool and to the Church of England for the three months’ study leave which gave me the opportunity to rest, and learn, and write. Most of that study leave was spent in the United States, and I have enjoyed the generous hospitality of the Episcopal Church in a number of dioceses and institutions of learning. It is good to be in Communion with these friends and colleagues.

The Church is full of wonderful images, ideas and theological wisdom, from which I try to learn daily as I read and reflect. Among them I offer the perspectives here, as a contribution to the Church’s storehouse.

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to Mike Eastwood of the Diocese of Liverpool, to our Archdeacons and staff colleagues there, and to Nichola James, Sarah James and Phil Leigh who sustained the life of the bishop’s office in my absence.Thanks too to Bishop Richard Blackburn who held the episcopal focus of the Diocese while I was away.

In California I was grateful to Dean Mark Richardson of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, CA, for his welcome and that of his colleagues (especially Susanna Singer and Scott MacDougall), to Jude Harmon and the staff at Grace Cathedral San Francisco for a taste of their innovative ministries, and to Paul Fromberg and Rick Fabian of St Gregory of Nyssa parish for shared meals and for their gifts of wisdom and courage. Grace Flint welcomed me to California and kindly introduced this Brit to the life of the Bay Area.

It was very good to revisit Alexandria, VA, where Dean Ian Markham of Virginia Theological Seminary, Dr Robert Heaney of the Centre for Anglican Communion Studies, and Molly O’Brien of the CACS office, were kind and thoughtful hosts as ever.

In New York the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, was most generous with his time, as were his colleagues Canon Chuck Robertson and David Copley. Elizabeth Boe greatly facilitated and enriched my stay right across the US, and introduced me to Holy Cross monastery which is a heartbeat of the Episcopal Church. Liz Edman, Matt Heyd and Nigel Massey kindly shared their thinking and wisdom with me. Matthew Corkern and the people of Calvary, Summit, New Jersey, gave me a nourishing taste of the rich local life and ministry of the Episcopal Church.

Part of the chapter Stretching for the Kingdom first appeared in Journeys in Grace and Truth: Revisiting Scripture and Sexuality, a collection of essays edited and animated by Jayne Ozanne. I take this opportunity to acknowledge my thanks to Jayne, and many others in the LGBTI+ community, for their courageous witness in and to the churches.

x Acknowledgements

Six of my friends read this book in draft, and improved it. My thanks then to Nikki Eastwood, Richard Giles, Susan Goff, Paula Gooder, Stephen Lyon and Richard Peers.

David Moloney, Helen Porter and their colleagues at Darton, Longman and Todd have enabled the publication of this book, and in the process have enriched and deepened it.

None of these people is responsible for what I have written here, though many of them have inspired my thinking.

Kate Bayes is my lifelong friend and inspiration, with whom I have shared a table for more than forty years. I dedicate this book to her. +Paul Liverpool Alexandria,Virginia Feast of St Gregory the Great1

Part I

1. So there’s this table The inaugural sermon preached by the new Bishop of Liverpool, November 2014.

So there’s this table.

It’s a simple table but it’s well made, because it was made by a carpenter. The guy who made it is a poor man, but he’s generous.

He offers a place at the table to anyone who wants to sit and eat.

This is a table that started in one place but now it can stretch down every street, and it can go into every home, if people want to sit there.

It’s a table for meeting. It’s a table for talking around. It’s a table for laughing. Most of all it’s a table for eating. It’s a level table. Maybe it’s not a round table. Maybe it’s a square table, so that people can look directly at one another as they sit there. Can look each other in the eye as they sit there, beside the poor man who made it.

But it’s not a high table.You don’t have to qualify to sit there. It’s for anyone. And the poor man sits there, and wherever people sit, he sits beside them.You can sit there too, with the poor man, and look across the table, at people you like and at people you don’t like, at people who agree with you and at people who disagree with you.

Sometimes it’s a table for thumping. Sometimes it’s a table for signing treaties and for making peace. Always the poor man sits beside you.

Yes, most of all it’s a table for eating.You can’t eat alone at this table.You can’t buy a meal at this table.You can’t buy a ticket to sit here. Anyone can sit here. It’s a table like a table at a wedding.You sit with guests you never knew, and you find out about them, and they become your friends. And the table is spread with a beautiful fair white linen cloth and if you come here, like any pilgrim coming into a new house, they will clothe you in the most beautiful clothes1 and they will make you welcome.

And if you eat the food served here you will never be hungry again. Because the poor man offers the food at this table. And the

So there’s this table 3

poor man will serve you, and the poor man’s hands are wounded when he serves you, because the food came at a price, and he paid the price.

The poor man’s name is Jesus, who though he was rich, yet for our sakes he became poor so that through his poverty we might become rich. And if you sit at his table he will feed you and he will ask you to feed others; he will serve you and he will ask you to serve others; he will love you and he will ask you to love others.

I’m a churchwarden’s son and a cradle Christian, and I threw it all away in the late 1960s and early 70s to go my own way. And I was brought back to Christ through the ministry of student evangelists, and a radical Christian group, and a large suburban charismatic church, and a small inner-city Anglo-Catholic church, and a cathedral which was always open, and two professors of theology.

One day if you ask me I’ll tell you the full story. But using all those places and people, Jesus led me back to his table, and he leads me back still. As our sister Tracey2 says in her words at the back of our Cathedral church, so I can say to the poor man, Jesus; ‘I felt you and I knew you loved me’. So I did sit and eat and for fifty-three years off and on I have known him and he has never done me any harm.

And for me he will be the first and the last word always.

My brother Malcolm3 and my brother Phil4 read this earlier; prophecies about Jesus: ‘I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.’

And then: ‘He will not wrangle or cry aloud until he brings justice to victory. And in his name the peoples will hope.’

And all this, the table and the poor man and justice brought to victory, all this is my vision of the church of Jesus Christ. A mixed group of ordinary people with the most extraordinary gift to share.

And because the gift is so marvellous, that’s why I want the church to grow. Not so that we can have a bigger church, but so that we can make a bigger difference. So that the poor man’s table may be laid in every street. I want every church to grow.

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The church does not grow so that it can survive. It is not our survival that matters. The church matters because Jesus matters, he who wants everyone’s company, he who built the church on a rock, he who wants the table to be laid in every street.

The growth of the Church is a good in itself.We share the news about Jesus Christ so that people can come to know Him, and knowing Him is very good. So because I want people to hear the name of Jesus I want the Church to grow, because the poor Christ wants their company. That’s why I’m committed to our mixed economy of parish churches and fresh expressions of the church, a people who can bring from their storehouse both the new and the old, so that all might know Jesus, the poor carpenter and the beautiful shepherd who is so ancient and so new.

Now is a good time for all this.The Church of England used to be in a spiritually dangerous place: we were cushioned by privilege, we were in the middle of our society and at the top. Now, in this England, we’re on the edge and underneath - marginalised, not always taken seriously, sometimes mocked. That’s good news for us. Because on the edge and underneath is where the people are.

Pope Francis says: ‘An evangelising community gets involved by word and deed in people’s daily lives; it bridges distances, it is willing to abase itself if necessary, and it embraces human life, touching the suffering flesh of Christ in others.’ The Bishop of Rome’s vision is my vision for the church among the churches, for all the churches, as we gather again on the edge.

From the edge we give our gift, the knowledge of Jesus. Oh, that all people might know Him, and the power of His resurrection.

Man and woman, rich and poor, gay and straight, black and white, conservative and progressive, believer and unbeliever, Jesus longs for our company. And his welcome is absolute.

The growth of the Church is a good in itself. But then those who sit at the poor man’s table are called to follow their host. Jesus, who proclaimed justice, and who brought justice to victory.

In this region (Liverpool and Merseyside) we know about justice.

It does not come without a struggle. It can take a long time. It demands patience, and the utmost truthfulness.We have the example of the Hillsborough families,5 of their quiet perseverance and their patient and courageous refusal to be distracted or to despair.

So there’s this table 5

And it is a matter of great pride to me that I walk in the footsteps of Bishop James who sought to serve those families and the memory of the ninety-six, and who in this Cathedral church presented a little of that story of truth. And I honour Bishop James, and Bishop David before him6, and all those with them who sat at the poor man’s table and who seek justice for the downtrodden. I am borne up by their memory.

And I stand here now as part of the poor man’s community of justice. A bishop is always in the midst of a people, that’s why I asked our Synod to accompany me up the hill from the centre of the city to the Cathedral today. I do not arrive on my own. I stand in the midst of the poor man’s people and we are a people of justice, and from every community and every church we know those who care for the hungry and the needy and who speak for them and who lift their heads, and in the midst of you I commit myself to support you and to pray for you and to do what I can to be with you in that struggle.

Because this too is my vision of the church - a group of people who know Jesus and who proclaim justice. Because it is Jesus, we will not turn away from justice. Because it is Jesus, we will not wrangle or cry aloud or break the broken or ignore those who struggle.When I was involved as an activist in the peace movement of the 80s and 90s we had a saying, ‘there is no way to peace - peace is the way’. Peace, and telling the truth.

In that spirit we in the church are called to approach our own troubles and disagreements. I do not seek a pure church if the price of a pure church is that our sisters and brothers are excluded, if the price of a pure church is a smaller table.The growth of the Church is a good in itself, so long as the poor Christ sits beside each one of us at His table and teaches us to love.

And I promise you - we will be there for you, for all, to walk and work with you in the way of peace, to spread the table of love, until our God brings justice to victory. And in the poor man’s name the peoples will hope.

Jesus, may your name be first and last in all we say and do; and draw us to your Father in the power of the Spirit. Bring justice to victory. We ask this in your name, Jesus.

2. The banqueting table He brought me to the banqueting table, and his banner over me is love.1 From the beginning God made people to share God’s own life of love, and in living that life together to find their true selves, and God’s purpose for them.This common life changes form with times and places, but it is one life, because God wishes people of all times and places to become one in God.2

The possibility of a way As a child and then as a student I asked Jesus to meet me and to help me accept his love. Since then I have seen in Christianity the possibility of a way, just as St Luke reported in the Acts of the Apostles.You step on to it through a very specific door, as Jesus said, because it has to do with knowing Jesus personally. But if you walk along it, you find that it’s a spacious, light, open and tolerant way, trusting and relaxed in the mystery of God and vibrant with hope for the world God loves.

At the heart of Christianity is this mystery and hope.When I was a theological student in the 1970s our college had a visit from the theologian David Jenkins, later Bishop of Durham. Bishop David was a great scholar and a profoundly orthodox theologian. He took off his jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and began his lecture by saying: ‘As I get older, I find I’m believing more and more about less and less’. And he summed up his more-and-more faith in this short phrase: God is, as God is in Jesus, so there is hope.

God is, as God is in Jesus, so there is hope. It’s a phrase which does justice to the mystery of God about which the early theologians wrote so passionately. It honours the search for a better future which has marked our faith since its beginning. I’ve tried to give my life to the mystery and hope at the heart of Christianity, which is all to do with Jesus, over the last fifty years and more. I have tried to walk in this way, to discover the practical steps which are involved in walking in any way.

I’ve done this because the mystery and hope of Jesus grasped me and set the compass of my life. I chose to walk that way, but it

The banqueting table 7

has also been my experience that the way came to me, that Jesus chose me, poor and inadequate as my response to his choice has been. Jesus chose me to be one of his friends, and I said yes to his choice, not least because I had seen and known people walking this way too, people who were friends of his, people whose lives were shaped by this mystery and this hope.

They are everywhere. People living their lives in such a way that the life would make no sense if God, as God is in Jesus, did not exist.

Among all the clouds and shadows that regularly gather around the institution of the Church, these people point to, and drink from, the living stream. I want to be like them, and I want to be like Jesus who gives them strength and to whom they point. I want there to be more of those people. I want to see their calm and vibrant hope translated into the celebration of justice and love for all, and into the ceaseless struggle for more justice and more love. In that struggle I want to learn especially from the excluded and those on the edge of things, and as I learn from them I want to stand with them.

In short, I want to see more people knowing Jesus, and more justice in the world. And I aim to stand with all those who want either or both of those things too.

Of course, you can be a Christian and not yet see the need to learn from and stand with those on the edge of things, ‘the poor’ as Jesus called them in the Gospels. If you are, I hope you will let me stand beside you. But you need to know that I will be stretching and reaching beyond my own comfort zone, and beyond the temporary walls that the people of God have built. I will stretch and reach to extend my love, and our love, so that it can be closer to the fully extended love of God – the fully extended love that brings all things to reconciliation in the end.

And of course, you can fight for justice without being a Christian, or indeed a person of religious faith at all. If you do, I want to stand beside you. But you need to know that I will stand with you as a follower of Jesus, and that I will be glad of his name and his mark, and I will speak of it. Because alongside the hope for a better world that we would share, I believe too in a mystery of love beyond the world. I believe that we live in a creation, and we are borne up by a love, that will not end when this world ends.

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Love is the meaning It is that love which gives meaning to things, as that tough and gentle woman Julian of Norwich wrote all those years ago: Do you want to understand your Lord’s meaning in this experience? Understand it well: love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Hold yourself in this truth and you shall understand and know more in the same vein. And you will never know or understand anything else in it forever.

Thus was I taught that love is our Lord’s meaning. And I saw most certainly in this and in everything that before God made us he loved us, and this love never slackened and never shall. In this love he has done all his works, in this love he has made all things profitable for us, and in this love our life is everlasting. In our creation we had a beginning, but the love by which he made us was in him from without beginning, and in this love we have our beginning. And all this we shall see in God without end.3 If love is the meaning, if love is indeed Jesus’ meaning, I expect to see more people knowing Jesus and more justice in the world. I’ll work for that. I’ll work to see the increase of the people of Jesus and the willing and passionate inclusion of those on the edges; in short to see a bigger church that makes a bigger difference. I’ll work to see a world where all human beings flourish; a world where the strong use their strength to honour others and not to put them down, to lift others up and not to trample them under.With all my strength I aim to advocate for such a world, and to bless and join those who are building it.

Christianity is a simple and a practical thing. It’s a thing that you do before being a thing that you think. At least it has been so for me. In the Gospels the ones who follow Jesus are sent out, and the thing they are sent out to notice and grow is ‘the Kingdom of God here among you’, and the thing they are sent out to say is ‘Come and see’. They, and we, are sent in other words to point to the real hope, and to introduce people to the true mystery.

The banqueting table 9

The great Orthodox thinker Alexander Schmemann wrote once about preaching, and had a contrast to make: The genuine sermon is neither simply an explanation of what was read by knowledgeable persons, nor a transmission to the listeners of the theological knowledge of the preacher … It is not a sermon about the gospel, but the preaching of the gospel itself. 4 That speaks to me of the Christian life as a whole. It is God who gives life to the dying. It is the living spark, rather than a treatise on light, which will prevent people from stumbling. It is the living bread that nourishes; and though menus can look lovely with their paper and card and print, no one would want to eat one. As St Paul sharply and perhaps ruefully reflects from the perspective of his own Pharisaic training, ‘Knowledge makes people arrogant, but love builds people up’. He goes on to lay out the paradox, which in today’s church we hear insufficiently: ‘If anyone thinks they know something, they don’t yet know as much as they should know. But if someone loves God, then they are known by God’.5 And of course, this raises the sharp question, how? How do we get real and true?

What sort of communication, what sort of life, is needed for that?

The question came back again to me, sharper than ever, when I was asked to be the bishop of a Diocese in the Church. I was invited to speak to the appointed group of people, and to answer questions, so that they might discern whether I should be invited to be Bishop of Liverpool. The date for the conversation was April Fools’ Day 2014 - a date which explains a lot, or so the people of Liverpool might think.

Four years before that, I had become a suffragan bishop in the Diocese of St Albans. I was an ordained Christian minister for thirty-one years before I became a bishop. And I am infinitely grateful to God and God’s people to have become a bishop in the Church. Episcopal ministry came to me as a gift and a surprise, and I received it with the utmost delight and thanksgiving. I didn’t expect to be a bishop, and you can’t ask to be one. And I frequently pinch myself when I remember that I am one.

And of all the places where you can be a bishop, I thank God daily that I have been a bishop in Liverpool. Together with the

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strong and courageous towns around it, our city region is made up of people who endure, who are humorous, unbowed by poverty and suffering, tough, resilient, emotional, full of faith, who love justice and the struggle for justice. The ordained and lay ministers of our Diocese and of our sister churches (and many of them have chosen to give their whole lives to this region and its people) share these qualities, even as they live out the mystery and the hope of their calling in worship and service day by day and decade by decade.To stand among them is an overwhelming joy.

All this was in the future when I was asked to interview, but I saw it dimly and I felt the question sharply; what sort of communication, what sort of life, is needed to enrich and honour and bless such extraordinary people?

Singing a song My name is Leah. I love to help people and sing.6 I believe that the purpose of leadership in the Church (and not only in the Church) is basically twofold: to sing a song and to get a grip.

The ministry of bishops touches both these things, just as both are also shared with colleagues and no one can or should be expected to do all the work of Christian leadership alone.

There are many occasions in the life of the Church where it helps to get a grip. I have done so myself, and I deeply respect and honour my colleagues who do so daily as the core of their ministry. But for me the primary ministry of bishops flows from the singing of the song, the love-song of the Christian gospel.

Episcopacy is a lyric art, rather than an academic science. So when I was interviewed, and still more when I began to prepare for my public ministry, it was a lyric that I needed, a song of love, a song full of images, like the images Jesus used in his own lyrical teaching, like the images the Church has used ever since.

Images of the Christian life come into and go out of fashion over the years.There are plenty to be found in scripture, and in the history of the Church. They emerge and recede according to the social context, though many of them recur as the high images of our tradition; for example, the body of Christ, the army of God, the pilgrim people, the temple, the bride.Â

The banqueting table 11

But as I thought and prayed at that moment in my own journey, the image that came to me was none of these, though it was not original. It has been used frequently in the history of our faith and it’s used frequently now. It was the image of a table – specifically the table of a poor carpenter, at which the carpenter sits beside any who sit there. And having been appointed, I laid this image of the carpenter’s table before my Diocese when I began my ministry in Liverpool, in the sermon which forms the previous chapter here.

And I invited myself and all my companions to come to this table, to the table of the wounded Christ, and to be seated beside him, beside the poor carpenter. Sitting there we meet him and are fed by him, and we are called by him to pray, and read, and learn at the holy table, and we are sent by him to tell, and serve, and give from the open table.

That image of the carpenter’s table is the heart of this book.

In that sermon I tried to spread the table before my friends and colleagues and companions. By this image I tried to put into words some implications of the astonishing mystery and hope we see in Jesus. I tried to say how it might be to live and to walk in the way I long for, in a spacious, light, open and tolerant way, trusting and relaxed in the mystery of God and vibrant with hope for the world God loves.

Scandal To sit at a table is a common enough experience, though in these fragmented,TV-dinner days it is perhaps not as common as it should be. Jesus did it frequently, and almost as frequently it landed him in hot water with people who were keen on the difference between right and wrong. St Luke is the gospel writer who notices this most often. Sometimes Jesus was sitting at the wrong table (for example the table of the crooked tax collector Zacchaeus).7 Sometimes he was at the right table, but in the wrong company (for example at Simon the Pharisee’s table, with a notorious woman washing his feet).8 Sometimes he was at the right table, but saying and doing the wrong thing (for example at another Pharisee’s table, ritually unwashed and full of sharp words for his hosts and their arrogance).9

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The capacity of Jesus to scandalise people was legendary, and in human terms it cost him first his freedom and then his life. It is at least arguable that the real focus of this scandal was not what he said in the public square but where he ate and with whom, and what he did at the table. Certainly, this is the view of the radical New Testament theologian John Dominic Crossan, who contrasts Jesus and John the Baptist by quoting the words of their enemies: John fasted and they called him demonic; Jesus ate and drank and they said he was ‘a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’

He goes on to comment on Jesus’ parable of the banquet, which comes among several other table-stories in Luke 14 and 15: What Jesus’ parable advocates, therefore, is an ‘open commensality’, an eating together without using the table as a miniature map of society’s vertical discriminations and lateral separations.10 In San Francisco there is an inspirational local church, St Gregory of Nyssa, where St Luke’s emphasis has become the guiding emphasis of the community. The altar greets those who enter the church; if they want to see the font, they must pass through the church to a rocky outcrop behind it. That prominent and open altar carries more words from Luke, this time in Greek from chapter 15. The words are translated by one of its founding priests and theologians, Rick Fabian, as follows: ‘This guy welcomes sinners and eats with them.’11 The other side of that altar carries words from St Isaac of Nineveh: Did not the Lord share the table of tax collectors and harlots?

So then – do not distinguish between the worthy and unworthy. All must be equal in your eyes to love and to serve.12 In the gospels of course Jesus was a wanderer, you might say a vagrant. He did not have a table of his own, nor a place to lay his head. When he sat it was as a guest at the tables of others. But the mystery of our faith is that we can now sit at his table, the table of the poor carpenter built by the Spirit, the table that can change us

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utterly. It’s not always a warm and cosy table, and sometimes he sets it up in the most uncomfortable places, in the streets where the lonely walk and on the beaches where the refugees’ boats wait, and in the prison yards and in the cancer wards and in the graveyards.

But for those who choose to sit there it will always be the right table, that is Jesus’ table, and we will always be in the right company; that is, among friends, among all the wrong people, hearing the gentle words of the One who offers rest, and whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light.

The spacious and open way leads to this table and leads from it, and we are welcome there, just as all are welcome there. The poor man who constructed the table is also the Shepherd, the Beautiful One, who knows us and whom we know.13 Strangers and the despised are welcome at this table, especially welcomed by those who remember the Name of the crucified carpenter, and who can say with the people of St Gregory of Nyssa: Blessed be God the Word, who came to his own and his own received him not, for in this way God glorifies the stranger.

Oh God, show us your image in all we meet today that we may welcome them, and you, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.14 From all this I hope you will see the richness and the depth of this image of the table, and the catchiness of the song that builds a life on it. As I have reflected on that image, I think that it can take its place as the fountainhead of a stream of Christian practice. Seeing the church as a table of welcome can form the lives of twenty-firstcentury believers along the pattern laid out in scripture and in the writings of the early theologians of the Way. And certainly, this way of seeing – of seeing the church as a table of welcome – is present today as a living stream in the Church, even if it is often, as it has always been, an underground stream.

Practice I feel the need to say these things for a reason. These days the attractiveness and beauty of Jesus is not always seen and understood beyond the Church. The preoccupations, indeed the obsessions, of

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Christians are not always respected or found interesting by those who live in the world for which the poor carpenter died. This is a daily concern for me, as it is for anyone who bears the burden of the churches.

This is why I speak about ‘Christian practice’ rather than outlining yet more divisive ways for us to be ‘clear’ about our ‘teaching’. In reflecting on these things in the UK and in the USA, I’ve come very firmly to believe that ‘poor little talkative Christianity’ can only point to Jesus’ attractiveness and beauty in the world if its people stop attacking and defending one another for a while, and instead practise their religion, preferably together.

Like the stranger in Dostoyevsky’s tale of the Grand Inquisitor, the poor and imprisoned Jesus will kiss the bloodless lips of the doctrine police, and set even them free to sit at the table and to eat with the rest.

Beginning with the table, then, these chapters seek to explore what Christian practice looks like today. I’ll point to a number of traditions and ways of living and believing, most of them embraced in the wide arms of the Anglican Communion. But I have no particular steer to give, within that wide embrace, as to whether any specific ways are to be preferred to others. Instead I’m asking what the principles and marks of Christian practice should be, across the Church.The practices I describe and commend are not new; at least I hope not. They fall into four groups, and of the four, meeting at the table is the first and the foundation.

So, this is what I ask, as I practise singing the love-song of the Gospel and as I live within a world desperate for the mystery and hope that the song bears. Can we practise together in these four ways? Can we meet at the table, first and foremost? And drink from the fountain? And watch in the moment? And stretch for the kingdom?

Thank you then for picking up this book and for beginning, at least, that journey of enquiry with me.

3. The Lord’s table God is the interesting thing about religion, and people are hungry for God.1 God, who made the world and everything in it, is Lord of heaven and earth. He doesn’t live in temples made with human hands. Nor is God served by human hands, as though he needed something, since he is the one who gives life, breath, and everything else. From one person God created every human nation to live on the whole earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands. God made the nations so they would seek him, perhaps even reach out to him and find him. In fact, God isn’t far away from any of us.

In God we live, move, and exist. As some of your own poets said, ‘We are his offspring’.2

The invisible God Mystery and hope stand at the heart of the Christian religion, and faith becomes vibrant and beautiful and compelling when we connect with the truth of this. And first there comes the mystery of God, the interesting thing about religion, who is closer to us than we are to ourselves, indeed who is out of our sight because so close.

In St Matthew’s Gospel Jesus says, ‘Look, I myself will be with you every day until the end of this present age’.3 And in St John’s Gospel it says,‘No one has ever seen God’.4 We are invited to believe both these things.The closeness and invisibility of the undergirding God is a wonderful and a heart-breaking thing.Wonderful, because of the way it witnesses to God with us, to God’s love offered unceasingly and universally, present in every moment and in every place. Heart-breaking, because coming to terms with the invisibility of God is difficult.Why can God not be more obvious? Our minds and hearts rebel at the unfairness of it.We find the invisible oddness of God’s presence so difficult, indeed, that as God’s people we have largely preferred not to think about it, nor to engage with it in our prayers.We seem to find it much easier to dispute with one another about the boundaries and fence-posts of God’s love as expressed through our institutions, which are at least visible, than to seek the One we cannot see. And yet the interesting thing about religion is precisely that loving and invisible One. Jesus was once as visible as I am now in the days of my life on this earth. And today with the eyes of faith we can see the traces

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and the presence of the ascended Jesus everywhere in the world, because of the promise of the Incarnation. Especially in the lives and lessons of those on the edge of things can we see the marks of Jesus, if we trust his own promise that he would be present among them. And in the sacrament of Holy Communion we can see him present, if we have faith in the promise of the scripture. There is a lot about God to be seen in the world. And yet still it is no part of the Christian mystery to see God here on earth, whom no one has ever seen.

So when we speak of mystery we are indicating nothing weird or exalted. We have in mind a different thing from highfalutin and other-worldly ideas of ‘mystical vision’. Quite the contrary; it seems to me that ‘religious experience’, experience which is too markedly religious, has the effect of distracting people from the real world that God loves, and so in the end distracting them from the real God who loves it.

My own journey in faith, like anyone else’s, has had to come to terms with this invisibility and its disappointments. God is at once more transcendent, and more utterly immanent, than I would wish.

I would frankly prefer something more spooky and spine-tingling in my God. I would prefer the theophanies of Exodus and of the Psalms to be a daily or at least a regular occurrence, with thunder and lightning, ‘hailstones and coals of fire’.

It would be particularly satisfying if the God of thunderbolts would not only appear, but would direct his thunderbolts against my enemies while I looked on. Why can God’s action not be like the beautiful and terrible angels in Raiders of the Lost Ark who swirl around the moral arena, wreaking havoc and vengeance on all the bad people?

Elijah too might have hoped that God would reveal God’s self in these ways, when he went and stood at the mouth of the cave and heard the thunder and saw the earthquake and the fire, ‘but the LORD was not in’ these things.5 Instead we have a God in whom we live, move and exist.

At the table you sit close beside the poor carpenter Jesus, who has invited you and made room for you there. You are very close, you and he, sitting side by side and gazing in the same direction. If he were more distant from you, then you might turn and see him.

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But he is close to you, closer to you than you think, closer indeed than you are to yourself. So you can turn as quickly as you like but you cannot see him with the eyes of your body. Since the day of his ascension no one ever has. And yet we, even you, even I, can be sitting right beside him at the table, because he has invited us and made room for us there.

Of course, we do not have to sit there. There is a choice in sitting, and there is a choice in looking. As we sit, then, we may choose to look in the same direction that the poor carpenter looks.

Indeed, our growth in holiness is just that; a growth in seeing things that he sees, a development in our looking, a sharpening of our attention. If we choose to look his way, then for example we will see the needy and be drawn to meet their need.We will see the beauty of the earth and be drawn to sustain it. We will see those who sit opposite us at the table, and be drawn to speak truth to them and to love them as they really are.

Sitting and looking and acting; that is what it is to be a believer, and indeed as Aelred Squire says, ‘Unless we approach him who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves, he might just as well not exist, as far as we are concerned’.6 And as we look we realise finally that we have come to depend on the poor carpenter for food and life and strength even though, gazing in the same direction with him, we cannot see him.Yet as we look his way, then in the depth of our being, and solely by his grace, we know he is there, unseen. This is the mystery I mean.

The Christian Church is a wide and winding watercourse, meandering across the plains of history, now and again becoming lost in the salty marshlands of complacency, now and again becoming stagnant with internal politics and rank with contention.Yet always it has been fed by the living water, bubbling up in the midst of the dankest pools, springing from the edge and bursting from the rocks in the wilderness, bringing refreshment and nourishment, fulfilling the promises of the scripture that ‘wherever the river flows, everything will live’.7

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The underground stream Early in the 1980s I worked as a University chaplain in London.

A flat was provided with the job, in a well-off part of the city, in Campden Hill Square, Kensington. On the way home each day I would climb the hill, passing on the way the homes of the great and the good (Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser, Tony Benn, the then Bishop of Kensington, the then editor of The Times). But at that time only one of the houses there had a blue plaque on the wall, at number 50: ‘Evelyn Underhill 1875-1941, Christian philosopher and teacher’.

Evelyn Underhill was in many ways a typical upper-middle-class Englishwoman. Her father was a lawyer, and she eventually married another lawyer, and in her time that was all that was expected of most women - to be defined by the men in their lives, to sustain a social life, to bear children, to keep house. But there was much more than that to Evelyn Underhill. She thought and wrote about God in a way that was passionate and experiential and engaged, a way that expected God to be interesting and to be real. It was she who wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury the words at the heart of this chapter: ‘God is the interesting thing about religion, and people are hungry for God.’ In the days of Evelyn Underhill’s life, by and large, the Church paid even less attention to the thinking and writing of lay Christian women than it does now. And of course, in my own church Christian women were ‘lay women’ by definition, until very recently. But from the heart of upper-middle-class London, Evelyn Underhill produced over thirty widely-read books, almost all about the mystery and glory of God, of which the best-known was called Mysticism. And people did indeed pay attention; the interesting thing interested them.

All through the life of the Christian Church there have been people like Evelyn Underhill, reminder-people who have lived on the edge of institutional power, who seem to have had little interest in the politics of the institution or the clash of its parties or factions, who wanted instead to take on themselves the mystery of things, as if they were God’s spies. These are the people of the welling springs, the people of the living water. Most commonly they have

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been unseen and unknown in the days of their lives. Yet together their witness has become an underground stream in the life of the Church, invisible, running silently and deeply, fundamentally nourishing and enriching.

Frequently these reminder-people have been called mystics or have themselves used ‘mysticism’ as a description of what interests them, as Evelyn Underhill did. That in itself has been enough for them to be marginalised still further by the Church they felt called to serve, a Church which has so often suspected the mystical and which still does, worrying that it is unclear, or unsound, or uncontrollable. And one of my purposes in reflecting on all this is to demystify and democratise the mysterious, to which I believe God calls us all in love.

Very often the marginal reminder-people have been women.

I am writing these words in Berkeley, California, in a small suite of rooms called the Dame Julian suite, so named in memory of another woman who pointed to God as the interesting thing. Dame (Mother) Julian, who lived and died centuries ago in Norwich, is honoured today in California and across the world Church for good reason. She was a significant contributor to the underground stream, this woman of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who lived quietly, in solitude, suffering great physical pain. Out of her pain she felt that God’s love had been shown to her, and she wrote about that and made herself available from her cell to listen to and counsel those who were caught in the pain and interested in the love. The cell still stands, on the edge of the historic centre of Norwich. It is close to several blocks of low-rise flats, and though most photographs of the church artfully exclude these, it is the presence of the flats more than anything which authenticates Julian’s shrine for me, the shrine of an everyday woman of the city, a woman on the edge, unremarkable, utterly remarkable.

From here, from the edge of things and in pain, Julian wrote of the heart of things and of the meaning of things in blessedness.

Earlier in this book I have paid attention to what she said. Here is more, for those who sit at the table - the mystery in the moment: It is easier for us to get to know God than to know our own soul ... God is nearer to us than our soul, for He is the ground

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in which it stands ... so if we want to know our own soul, and enjoy its fellowship, it is necessary to seek it in our Lord God.8 And the hope in the future: For this is the Great Deed that our Lord shall do, in which Deed He shall save His word and He shall make all well that is not well. How it shall be done there is no creature beneath Christ that knoweth it, nor shall know it till it is done …9 The witness of the underground stream, witnessing to the closeness of God and the impetus of hope, almost always comes from the edge and the edgy. Often, as I say, it comes from women - who have indeed spent millennia on the edge - but not always. So for example, Herbert Kelly was a maverick trainer of the clergy, the founder of the Society of the Sacred Mission, committed to training and equipping those without an Oxbridge education for the ministry of the Church. One of his ordinands, an anxious young man, is reported to have asked him what the point of ministry was, and what he should be doing with his life. Kelly is said to have looked at the young man in silence for a while, and then to have said, ‘Oh, sonny. Oh, sonny. People today only want to know one thing. Does God do anything, and if so, what?’

The flowing of the underground stream is sustained and unbroken in the long tradition of the Church, and indeed from one point of view it constitutes the tradition itself. It is not reserved for experts in the life of the spirit. It is the birthright of all believers, the inheritance into which we can all come. Its engine is, and will always be, the centrality of God, proclaimed from the edge by people like Evelyn Underhill and Dame Julian and Herbert Kelly by people who do not fit the mould, people who are not expected, people who come at things from a different angle, people who know that God is first. And the life to which they witness remains the interesting thing about religion.

God on the streets: justice and wonder For some years I was privileged to work alongside the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and a lively, creative and diverse group

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of men and women whom they had drawn together, in the Archbishops’ Task Group on Evangelism. The purpose of the Task Group was to support and resource the people of God in the sharing of their faith, and among other things to listen to England as it is, and to find out whether people were still interested.

As part of this listening the Group commissioned some research, from agencies whose usual work was commercial and industrial rather than purely academic. The commission was not ‘market research’, however, since the focus was not on the Church and its market share, but on God. The work was done among particular groups of people who, statistically speaking, seem unimpressed with the Christian religion as it is presented to them these days.The focus was on young adults from lower-middle-class and working-class backgrounds who did not already see themselves as Christians. It is not hard to find people like this, since in this demographic the church is struggling and has been for decades.

So a number of young men and women were interviewed in the streets, most especially in the streets of Liverpool, and others were interviewed in specially-gathered small groups. The findings were partly expected and partly surprising, as the best research so often is.

The researchers reported that their interviewees had little sympathy for the idea of an institutional Church, and furthermore (unlike a previous generation of unchurched people) that they did not see Jesus as a figure particularly worthy of their respect either. This is not because Jesus had lost their affection, but because they knew so little about him and never had, and because they assumed naturally enough that he must be like his followers who bore his name, and they found those followers negative, uncongenial and uninteresting.

But although Jesus no longer had purchase on their imagination, these people still had time and room for God, that is for ‘something more’, mysterious as that something was, and hard though it was for them to articulate it.The interesting thing contained to interest them. For themselves, and still more for their children, they wanted connection with that which they did not know.

Moreover, we were told that, although the interviewees’ respect for the Church was slender, it came alive in two aspects of the life of Christians.The first was the involvement of the churches in practical

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and local issues of social justice (for example the running of food banks or the provision of debt advice, or (this was Liverpool) the advocacy of the Church for justice for the families of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster. And the second was the readiness of Christians to provide church buildings as places to go to for space, silence and peace.

Echoing my own words, mystery and hope, the Task Group’s researchers came to us with two more from unchurched England: justice and wonder. These, they said, were the connection-points between England and its Church as their interviewees saw it. And the message of the people of Liverpool in 2015 has been echoed across the country in formal and informal research conducted elsewhere.

The hunger expressed by so many beyond the community of faith is for justice and wonder. For that which is open and green, not cut and dried.

In common with the consensus of witness from many sources, our interviewees were almost unanimous in their distaste for the church as they understood it. To them it was a toxic brand. They had accepted the commonly-held caricature of Christianity; that it is a joyless, aridly intellectual, propositional, conceptual, legalistic system. They saw it as being better at defining than at opening; better at condemning than at loving; demanding correctness and soundness and agreement, deploring ambiguity or tolerance. In particular people outside the Church reported, and still report, that the Christian faith seems to them intrinsically misogynistic and homophobic, and they are unsurprised too if they see racism or abuse or the privileging of class or the sustaining of elites in the life of the community of faith. They simply did not know that at the heart of the Christian faith is a love that opposes all these things.

Truth and beauty How can this woeful tale of suspicion be redeemed by the mystery and the hope at the heart of the Christian religion? How can the vibrant and beautiful and compelling dimensions of the life of faith, the living water of the underground stream, overcome the smoky and all-too-well-founded suspicions of our neighbours?

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Not at any rate by ignoring the need for understanding truth about God, insofar as that has been revealed to us. The human condition can be explained by the teaching of the Church, and the narrative of our faith has not ceased to be compelling. We have a story to tell.

It is a beautiful and spacious story. That the world was made by God to be good; that we bear the image of God by His gift; that we have however lost the divine likeness because of the sin that preceded us and engulfs us and in which we now actively share personally and corporately; that our lostness and brokenness and the world’s bewilderment can be redeemed because of what Jesus has done in coming among us, living and dying and rising and breathing the Spirit; that Jesus’ self-giving love led him to the place of his dying; that the cross of Christ is indeed the test of everything, that for our eternal joy we depend radically on God’s grace that comes to us though we do not deserve it; that at the end of time all will be well.

But we must face the fact that our faith simply does not look that way to very large numbers of people outside it. Beauty and spaciousness do not largely figure in the public conversations of the churches either, being replaced there by finger-wagging admonitions and critiques, from people whose time seems mostly to be spent in mutual disdain and in-fighting.

That the extraordinary and life-giving truths of the Faith have no purchase on the imagination of the unchurched West represents a profound relational failure on the part of the people of God. We have settled for what is narrow, mistaking our own narrowness for the narrow gate of which our Lord speaks.10 And to reconnect with the attractiveness of the story we have a job to do. The art of Christian discipleship today must include the willingness to face, grip and dispel the caricatures, and the lamentable realities, of a supercilious condemnation.

We can do this if we use the real resources of our faith. And first among these resources is the beauty of the Christian life as it is actually lived. Christians believe that we speak the truth about God. But the way we say what is true determines whether it confers life.

And we must know that all too often the content of the teaching can be nourishing and life-bearing, but the way the teaching is

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conferred can be toxic and death-dealing. As my father used to say, ‘The truth is a sharp sword. You can kill more than falsehood with it.’

The US conservative commentator and Orthodox Christian Rod Dreher expresses this beautifully in an online dialogue: Jesus pointed to the boundaries within which Christians must live. He said clearly that he did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfil it. He also repeatedly made clear that one can be doctrinally correct and still be completely corrupt (‘whitewashed tombs’). The purpose of religion is to convert the heart. If doctrine and dogma do not convert the heart and lead one closer to union with the All-Holy, then they are a stumbling block. Yet the absence of doctrine and dogma is also a stumbling block, because we are left without any idea what God ‘looks like,’ or expects us to become.11 We can indeed know what God looks like or expects us to become, as we embrace the embodied mystery of things within the community of faith. To do otherwise is to die in the propositional desert, endlessly chewing on thoughts and ideas as though they were food, constantly seeking to be right, by – how else to demonstrate rightness? – by proving others wrong.

Word and blood In a sharp poem Edwin Muir spoke of the triumph of the propositional in religion, the triumph of a box-ticking rectitude, of cold words and thoughts over hot life and breath. Muir addresses ‘King Calvin’ from his own specific Scottish experience, which I do not share. But his sense echoes in poetry across the Christian world, echoing for example that of the Welsh Anglican R. S. Thomas, and I do not reproach him for his concreteness, and I stand with him in his uncompromising embrace of the incarnate One and his turning from the arid, disembodied, abstract word: … How could our race betray The Image, and the Incarnate One unmake Who chose this form and fashion for our sake?

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The Word made flesh here is made word again A word made word in flourish and arrogant crook.

See there King Calvin with his iron pen, And God three angry letters in a book, And there the logical hook On which the Mystery is impaled and bent Into an ideological argument.12 I stand with this way of speaking, gladly welcoming mystery and living in hope. My life is given to the hospitable table of the poor carpenter (the one who was pilloried for being a party-goer) rather than to the classroom of the clever and severe schoolmasters. I want my friends to sit at the table, not be made to stand in the dunce’s corner. For myself, I want to make the journey away from my primeval shame and fear of mortality to the table which has room for me and forever. I want these things for my own sake and for the sake of those who have missed Jesus because all they can see is the bone-dry valley of regulation, which for them has capped and polluted the wellspring of life.

Ours is indeed a faith based on God’s revelation, but the God who is revealed in scripture and tradition and reason is a God greater than we can read about or remember or grasp.

So the Bible says that Jesus is the Son of God. But of God it says, ‘Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Saviour’,13 and again: ‘Without any doubt, the mystery of our religion is great’,14 and again of Jesus himself, ‘among you stands one you do not know’.15 The theologians of the early Church, clear and accurate as they sought to be, had little time for the cut and dried. The great theologians of Cappadocia for example moved confidently through the philosophical controversies of their day, but Gregory of Nyssa speaks for them all when he says, ‘Concepts create idols of God, of whom only wonder can tell us anything’, and who went on with a familiar and rueful bitterness to acknowledge, ‘People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees.16’ The anonymous Midlander who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing could say of God, ‘He may well be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never’.17 Standing much later

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in time but immersed in the same underground stream, Thomas Merton could say drily: ‘If you find God with great ease, perhaps it is not God you have found’.

Reason too finds itself debating inconclusively whether reason has its limits, and some of the greatest exponents of reason find themselves unashamedly speechless in the face of mystery and hope. So Isaac Newton and Thomas Aquinas, separated by so much culturally, were each reduced to wonder in remarkably similar ways, so that Newton’s ‘To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me’ chimes with Aquinas’ statement, ‘The end of my labours has come, and all that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.’

Theology and prayer Scripture and tradition and reason, the great sources of the Anglican way, leave room for mystery and hope at every turn. None of this is new insight, though speaking specifically as a bishop it seems necessary from time to time to remember it and to speak of it, since it can so easily be forgotten in the harsh sparkle of over-polished clarities, the raucous clash of concept and law which so often passes for conversation in the churches.

But there is a quieter and more convincing voice. We can be open to others and to the world; we can be gentle in the face of adversity; we can enjoy a simple gladness in the face of grace and love; we can choose to endure and to forgive and to celebrate diversity and beauty. All these things are directly related to our dailyrenewed connection with the mystery of God - that is to say, our living experience of dependence on the mystery revealed as love.

The attractiveness of people of faith seems to be in inverse proportion to their sense that they have nailed down exactly what God is up to. And the lovely thing is that there is room for this attractiveness in our tradition, room for a lively sense of mystery leading to a living hope, room for mystery and hope together leading to life.

And people who think and live this way are everywhere, revived by the underground stream in the Church, quietly and courteously

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sharing the living water with those around them who are thirsty, water-carriers around whom are more people knowing Jesus, more justice in the world.

We need to hear their witness. Because those of us who sit at the table of the poor carpenter Jesus can always be distracted into long, involved and scholarly debates about what we do, rather than who God is. We will talk and talk about our own contributions to the wholly sufficient gifts of God; about the tablecloth we have added to the table, or about the kind of knife and fork we have bought and decided how to use, or about the font we have used on the menu we have printed.

Often these conversations are dignified with the word ‘theological’. ‘Theology’ is a straightforward word that means ‘talk about God’. But in parts of today’s church it seems to have become tribal, owned and used as a weapon by those with a particular approach, part of an irregular verb in the combative mood: ‘I am theological, you have not read quite enough, he/she/they are ignorant’. Similarly the phrase ‘we need to do further theological work on this’ can too often be a synonym for ‘I don’t like this outcome, and I want to postpone any decision on it’.

In Asking the Fathers Aelred Squire tells a story that redeems and reclaims the word ‘theologian’ for the whole people of God. He speaks of the eleventh-century woman St Gertrude of Helfta, who in her Revelations tells the story of her life, how she received what we would call a liberal education which equipped her to be what she calls a ‘grammarian’, someone who could use grammar and culture and language and thought to good effect. Gertrude goes on to tell of an experience of depression and soul-sickness which culminated in and was healed ‘in the dormitory after Compline on the last Monday in January, in a totally unabated encounter with our Lord’. This experience of being unmade by God, of being in the presence of infinite mystery, opens up to Gertrude the depth of life, what you might call the abyss of love. Aelred Squire sums up the effect in these words: What matters is not so much the nature of the encounter… but its effect, which tradition is unanimous in regarding as the only sure test of an experience of this kind. This effect

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Gertrude’s friend and biographer describes in a simple phrase.

It was thus, she says, that from being a grammarian she became a theologian.18 ‘She became a theologian.’ She became one whose culture and language and thought came into orbit around God, and the mystery of God. No degree is needed for such a shift, no formal accreditation.You don’t need to identify yourself with a party in the Church, or go hunting for others to ‘critique’.There is no need to give long words too much room in the mind. Instead, there is dependence on God’s mystery, in prayer. From that dependence, people of all academic abilities and of all cultures can sit at the table and speak of God with authenticity and in truth.Without that dependence, ‘theology’ is just another weapon, a way of scoring points and playing games; at its best like chess, at its worst like bullying.

In the fourth century the monk Evagrius said: ‘If you are a theologian you truly pray. If you truly pray you are a theologian.’19 It is the Lord’s table where we sit, and even if it sometimes seems that little attention is paid at the table by the often-squabbling diners, nonetheless it is God that matters, the God of mystery and hope and anything else only matters because it points to God, or because it comes from God who points to us, or from God who points us to something beyond ourselves. God is the interesting thing about religion; God who is real and whose mystery is given to us, to be honoured and entered and shared.

4. The daily table Whoever wants to do God’s will can tell whether my teaching is from God or whether I speak on my own.1 Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.2

Thinking and doing Christianity is lived in the act of being believed, or you might say Christianity is believed as it is lived. In some ways Christianity is lived before it is believed.This is because Christianity is a religion. It is unfashionable to say this today, but that does not make it untrue.

‘Religion’ has had a bad name in the past few decades. It’s come under attack on two fronts. Firstly it comes off poorly in the phrase ‘spiritual but not religious’, which large numbers of people outside the churches have used to describe themselves. The phrase opposes spirituality (good) and religion (bad). In the minds of the unchurched people who speak like this, ‘spiritual’ seems to be a heart thing, and a gentle one, to be accepted; while ‘religion’ seems to be a head thing, and a harsh and critical one, to be rejected. And goodness knows, many of these people have stories to tell, usually stories of specific rejections within the general unwelcome of the church as they have known it - stories that have given them ample reason to think this way.

And secondly ‘religion’ gets a kicking from some in the Church itself because (they rightly say) Jesus came to abolish legalistic, ritual, ceremonial ways to appease an angry and glowering God, and so (they wrongly say) ‘Christianity is just about relationship, and not about religion’.

Christianity is indeed about relationship.That is wonderful, and undeniable. God subverts and undermines all religious systems, and this is so throughout the scriptures. In the prophecy of Ezekiel we see the underground stream surfacing, in a startling image of a church with divine water damage, one guaranteed to disconcert heritage societies, churchwardens and Archdeacons alike:

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When he brought me back to the temple’s entrance, I noticed that water was flowing toward the east from under the temple’s threshold (the temple faced east). The water was going out from under the temple’s facade toward the south, south of the altar. He led me out through the north gate and around the outside to the outer east gate, where the water flowed out under the facade on the south side. With the line in his hand, the man went out toward the east. When he measured off fifteen hundred feet, he made me cross the water; it was ankle-deep. He measured off another fifteen hundred feet and made me cross the water; it was knee-deep. He measured off another fifteen hundred feet and made me cross the water, and it was waist-high. When he measured off another fifteen hundred feet, it had become a river that I couldn’t cross. The water was high, deep enough for swimming but too high to cross. He said to me, ‘Human one, do you see?’3 God, the interesting thing about religion, is not to be put in a pipe. The underground stream will wear away the hardest rock.

For myself I thank God that the Lord Jesus came to meet me in my lostness and came to save me from my sinfulness. I thank God that the radical message of Jesus has never been completely stifled by the power-games that his people play, and that the living water continues to flow out from beneath the threshold of the temple, becoming a river that cannot be crossed or stifled or dammed. But with all that, I thank God too that Christianity is a religion, and that I can practice it.

This is because I am definitely a practising Christian. Practising, because I haven’t got it right. And practising, because Christianity is a daily thing. We sit at the table, daily. We meet God and one another, daily.We drink from the fountain and watch in the moment and stretch for the Kingdom, anew every morning.

The gentle and open spirit that flows from putting God first is recognised and ingrained with practice, religious practice. In a joke famous in the Jazz world a guy approaches a musician in the street in New York and asks: ‘How do I get to Carnegie Hall?’The musician, a little ruefully, replies: ‘You practise, man.You practise.’

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None of this is to say that practice makes perfect. It is God who makes perfect. The free and undeserved gift of grace, the unconditional love of God in Christ for all, is the jewel hidden in the mud of the Christian church and in each of its broken and often deluded people. But if we are to live lives that give due thanks to God for the grace freely given, we may do so by practicing our religion, as indeed the Bible asks us over and over again to do.

On the way In the Bible an early description of Christianity is ‘The Way’.4 The word is an ordinary one and it has escaped the fate of many Biblical words, the fate of becoming Christian jargon. It is still used in the Church today, though perhaps not often enough. So, for example, if you go as a seeker into Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, you will be invited to learn and put into effect ‘…a way of life that is spiritual, practical, reasonable, mystical and in service to the community and world.’

Here is a man, the early Quaker James Nayler, who saw the beauty of this way. In his troubled life he seems to have suffered serious mental illness and delusion, and therefore to be a poor witness in the court of critiquing. Nonetheless he drank true water from the underground stream, so that from his deathbed he could say: There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end.

Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself.

It sees to the end of all temptations. As it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thought to any other.

If it be betrayed, it bears it, for its ground and spring is the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its crown is meekness, its life is everlasting love unfeigned; it takes its kingdom with entreaty and not with contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind.

In God alone it can rejoice, though none else regard it, or can own its life. It is conceived in sorrow, and brought

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forth without any to pity it; nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression.

It never rejoiceth but through sufferings; for with the world’s joy it is murdered. I found it alone, being forsaken.

I have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate places of the earth, who through death obtained this resurrection and eternal holy life.5 This is the way that overcomes all hatred. I hope that all God’s people might face death with words and thoughts like this on their lips and in their hearts.Yet if we had been present at Nayler’s deathbed to hear him we might have found his praise of quiet and indomitable love hard to understand, since his tongue had been burned through with a hot iron for saying the wrong things, and in looking at him we would have seen that his forehead bore the letter ‘B’, branded there to mark him as a blasphemer.

In the face of persecution, in the face of his own delusions and mental illness, this man seems to have understood the practice of his religion. It is by the late fruit of his prayers that he deserves now to be remembered.

‘There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil.’ How may I come to die with the fortitude of James Nayler? Surely it is by coming to the moment of dependence on God, by living the faith in real time, by speaking out for those without a voice, in short by practising my religion; ‘I felt you, and I knew you loved me’.6 In his book Reimagining Christianity Dean Alan Jones speaks of this: The way in which religion is usually presented misleads people into believing they cannot enter into a faith practice unless they wholeheartedly believe the doctrines of that faith.

But to expect belief before doing the work is getting things backward. Patient practice, sometimes a lifetime’s worth, is a prerequisite of true faith.7 Or as the Episcopal priest Broderick Greer has put it, on your bad days you just have to settle for being religious but not spiritual.

This makes sense to me. I was baptised as a child, and confirmed as a young adult in a ceremony that was emotionally deeply

The daily table 33

significant to me. And I gave my life to Christ in an intentional act of prayer and self-oblation on yet another day. But in the end I agree with Alan Jones that all these things in my life came to land because of practise. I’m a practising Christian, not only because I’m no expert and will never be one, but because only by practising can I live. Professor Martyn Percy in his excellent unfolding of Anglicanism speaks of the church as a ‘community of practice’ ‘groups of people who share a concern or passion for something they do and learn to do it better as they interact regularly’.8 Practice has about it, brings with it, a flexibility and a poetry and a beauty resilient enough to bear the stresses of experience, unlike the anxious and tense repetition of dogmatic truths, which for so many is just whistling in the dark, until some crisis comes and the carapace cracks, and another potential believer is lost to the family of faith.

In the Epistle of James we read this: True devotion, the kind that is pure and faultless before God the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their difficulties and to keep the world from contaminating us.9 This is the description of a way of life and of a set of disciplines. It points to the inner and the outer journey. It speaks of justice for the poor and of holiness. It does not link these things conditionally to the grace of God. In short it offers a model for the shaping of the Christian life after the pattern of Christ, who restored to a widow her son alive, and who was tempted just as we are, yet without sin.

Nothing we can do will make God love us any more, nor any less.

The practice of our religion teaches humility as well as holiness and justice, and may God help us if we believe that practice makes perfect.

All the same, light-hearted and gentle practice helps. Jascha Heifetz said of the violin: ‘I have never believed in practising too much … never believed in grinding.’ But he also said: ‘If I don’t practise one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.’

In speaking of practice I speak of words said and things done.

I am not concerned here with the preferences of Christians as to how these words and things are to be spoken and said, nor of the relative value of some words and deeds against others. Too much

34 Part 1

ink, and not a little blood, has been spilled over all that as the years have passed. But to learn the language of the faith, and to become fluent in it, is constantly to speak the scripture and the creeds, and constantly to enact the liturgies of the Church. Later I shall I describe this speaking and doing as ‘drinking from the fountain’.

Begin again Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better ... Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse.10 Practice is not cumulative. There is no way to become ‘advanced’.

All we will ever be is increasingly experienced beginners.

It is as if we leave home each morning, determined to get that little bit closer to God whom we believe to be miles away, high in the mountains we can see far along the road. But each morning, to our distress, we find that we are stepping over the same threshold again.The journey never seems to get properly begun. No milestone ever seems to be reached. All we do is step out each day, our foot falling on the ground outside our own front door yet again. And slowly, imperceptibly, the threshold is worn away by the erosion of our daily practice. Until in the end we find to our astonishment that we have worn through, into the presence of God, who has always been there, not in the mountains miles away but undergirding our house, patiently waiting for the repetition of our beginnings to lead us to his waiting and everlasting arms.

Following the loving one ‘In the evening of our life we will be examined in love’, says John of the Cross, following St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 - and in the evening of our life that examination will be the only one that matters. ‘By this will all know that you are my disciples’, says our Lord, ‘if you have love for one another.’ I do believe that disciplines of prayer, of evangelism and of service - in short of the practice of religion - are important here below; but their importance stops at the gate of heaven, where the eternal table is laid and the poor carpenter will sit, not beside us now but across from us, and he will look into our eyes, and love is all that will be measured there.

The daily table 35

In the end practice, discipleship, is to be seen only in the light of love, and as a response to love, and as a manifestation of love.

Disciples are simply learners gathered around a teacher at the table, or following a teacher on the road.The abiding image of discipleship for me is the sight of Jesus in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s wonderful film The Gospel According to St Matthew, a movie dedicated to Pope John XXIII in which every word spoken is taken directly from scripture.

Pasolini was an outsider; a gay man, an atheist, a Marxist, who died by brutal violence. He was just the kind of person in fact with whom our Lord was wont to hang out in the Gospel according to St Matthew, as in all the gospels. In Pasolini’s film the barefoot Jesus is seen tossing the words of the gospel over his shoulder, to his disciples, as they hurry along behind him, on the road. The words are caught by the wind, and Jesus himself is moving, moving, urgent, on the road. In this image the motivation for discipleship is not to amuse oneself or to earn a qualification. It is simply a readiness to run, to follow Jesus and to stay with Jesus, to hear those words and to be transformed by them, so that at the end of the day and the end of the road the disciples may meet at the table, and there perhaps ask him what he meant, just as his first disciples did.

I too would like to ask Jesus how best to follow him, just as my brothers and sisters did in the days of his life on earth. I believe that in the scriptures and the creeds, in the history of the Christian community, in the dialogue of prayer, his answer becomes plain - or rather, what becomes plain is what I must do, and continue to do, to receive the wisdom he will share.

In a religion built on grace, a discipleship that aims to mature and develop us is in one sense superfluous, and is certainly gratuitous.

We are indeed taught in scripture to proclaim the mystery of Christ in us so as to present our friends to God as mature people,11 and to run as an athlete runs who aims to win.12 But we follow our Lord who has already given us the gift of life. And if we follow in the spirit of the One we follow, who was anointed with the oil of gladness beyond all his companions13 then we follow playfully and joyously. We do not overlook that his road leads to, and through, the cross. Nor do we refuse to take up our own cross on that road as he asks. But we can be content on that road to be thankful and

36  Part 1

to rest as we enter his rest, since we follow the One whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light.14 For me, reflecting on that serious and playful road, four dimensions of Christian practice have come into focus. They are to meet at the table (which is the essence and the foundation), and there to drink from the fountain, and there to watch in the moment, and from there to stretch for the kingdom. I’ll spend much of the rest of this book trying to show what I mean by these.

E AVESDROPPING Learning to pray from those who talked to Jesus

HENRY MARTIN

First published in 2019 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd 1 Spencer Court 140–142 Wandsworth High Street London SW18 4JJ © 2019 Henry Martin The right of Henry Martin to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Flower and Starlit Sky, 1895, gouache on paper, Gösta Serlachius Fine Arts Foundation, Mänttä, Finland.

Photograph: Studio Tomi Aho. ISBN 978-0-232-53389-7 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Designed and produced by Judy Linard Printed and bound in Great Britain by Short Run Press Ltd, Exeter

For David Thomas

Contents

Preface

13

Shrove Tuesday and the introduction to this book

‘They have no more wine.’ John 2:2

15

PART ONE – ‘This is so much more than we imagined.’

Ash Wednesday ‘Lord, teach us how to pray, as John taught

23

his disciples.’ Luke 11:1

Thursday

‘There is a boy who has five barley loaves and 28 two fish. But what are they among so many people?’ John 6:9

Friday

‘It is a ghost!’ Matthew 14:26

32

Saturday

‘Lord, save me!’ Matthew 14:30

36

The First Sunday ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’ 40 in Lent Mark 5:28 Monday

Tuesday

‘Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher 44 any further?’ Mark 5:35 ‘Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when 48 the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.’

John 5:7

7

Eavesdropping

Wednesday

‘My teacher, let me see again.’ Mark 10:51

Thursday

‘Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean.’ 57 Luke 5:12

Friday

52

‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son 61 of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me.’ Luke 8:28

Saturday

‘Thank you!’ Luke 17:16

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The Second Sunday ‘You are the Messiah, the Son of the living 70 in Lent God.’ Matthew 16:16 Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

‘He is worthy of having you do this for him, 74 for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.’ Luke 7:4 ‘Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not 78 worthy to have you come under my roof; therefore I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed.’

Luke 7:6-7

‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the 82 children’s crumbs.’ Mark 7:28

Thursday

‘I believe; help my unbelief!’ Mark 9:24

Friday

‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the 90 words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’ John 6:68-69

8

86

Contents

PART TWO – ‘This is not what we came here for.’

Saturday

‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful 97 man!’ Luke 5:8

The Third Sunday ‘Teacher, what must I do to inherit 100 in Lent eternal life?’ Luke 10:25 Monday

‘And who is my neighbour?’ Luke 10:29

Tuesday

‘Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.’ 109 Matthew 12:38

Wednesday

Thursday

‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.’ Luke 12:13

104

113

‘Lord do you not care that my sister has left 117 me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ Luke 10:40

Friday

‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ Luke 9:56 122

Saturday

‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very 127 act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women.

Now what do you say?’ John 8:4

The Fourth Sunday ‘Look, your mother and your brothers are in Lent – standing outside, wanting to speak to you.’

Mothering Sunday Matthew 12:47

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PART THREE – More Questions Monday

‘Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but 137 your disciples do not fast?’ Matthew 9:14

9

Eavesdropping

Tuesday

Wednesday

‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, 142 that he was born blind?’ John 9:2 ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins 146 against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?’ Matthew 18:21

Thursday

‘What must we do to perform the works of 152 God?’ John 6:28

Friday

Saturday

‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for 157 any cause?’ Matthew 19:3 ‘Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s 160 brother dies, leaving a wife but no child, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. There were seven brothers; the first married and, when he died, left no children; and the second married the widow and died, leaving no children; and the third likewise; none of the seven left children. Last of all the woman herself died. In the resurrection whose wife will she be?

For the seven had married her.’ Mark 12:19-23

PART FOUR – On the Road to Jerusalem

The Fifth Sunday ‘Get away from here, for Herod wants 167 of Lent (Passion to kill you.’ Luke 13:31 Sunday) Monday

‘Teacher we want you to do whatever we ask 171 of you.’ Mark 10:35

Tuesday

‘God forbid, Lord this must never happen to 175 you!’ Matthew 16:22

10

Contents

Wednesday

‘Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the 179 sign of your coming and of the end of the age.’

Matthew 24:3

Thursday

‘Lord, do you want us to command fire to come 183 down from heaven and consume them?’ Luke 9:54

Friday

‘Lord, he whom you love is ill.’ John 11:3

Saturday

‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would 192 not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.’

John 11:21-22

187

PART FIVE – Holy Week and Easter Palm Sunday

‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’

Luke 19:39

199

Monday in Holy Week

‘Look, Teacher, what large stones and what 205 large buildings!’ Mark 13:1

Tuesday in Holy ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this way? 210 Week

For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.’ Mark 14:4-5

Wednesday in Holy Week

‘Even though all become deserters, I will not.’ 215 Mark 14:29

Maundy Thursday ‘Lord, are you going to wash my feet?’

220

John 13:6

Good Friday

‘You who would destroy he temple and build it 224 in three days, save yourself! If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.’ Matthew 27:40

11

Eavesdropping

Holy Saturday

‘Jesus, remember me when you come into 229 your kingdom.’ Luke 23:42

Easter Sunday

‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me 233

where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ John 20:15

Monday in Easter Week

‘Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who 237 does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?’ Luke 24:18

Acknowledgements

240

12

Preface

‘Lord I believe, help my unbelief!’ is something we might say when praying. We know that it is not original. Someone else said it long before we were born. We picked it up, while eavesdropping on a conversation in the Gospels. This is a line from a worried dad speaking to Jesus, who responded by healing his son. It delighted Jesus then, so we adopt and adapt it for our own needs, as we pray now.

Every day in Lent this book eavesdrops on a different 2000-year-old conversation asking what can be gleaned from then, which might enrich our praying now. Each chapter begins with words said to Jesus; a question, a comment, a demand, an instruction or even an insult. Some were well received, others not so. We consider Jesus’ responses then and return to the present by asking, ‘How does this help us with prayer today?’

In some cases, I have included an exercise, but only where this seemed natural.

All Bible quotations come from the NRSV (Anglicised version).

13

Shrove Tuesday and the introduction to this book ‘They have no more wine.’ John 2:2

I know that Lent books should begin tomorrow on Ash Wednesday, but somehow a story about an abundance of rich wine seemed better suited to Shrove Tuesday. Many people will be planning to give up some treat or other for Lent, and if that is you, a story about an unexpected gift of delicious wine, might not be the thing for Day 1 of your fast.

This book will not help with fasting. It offers no advice on what not to consume, in the run up to Easter. Lent for me is this simple, it is a season for us to draw closer to God. The important questions are, ‘Who is God?’ and then, ‘Why and how do we pray?’ If we need more time for God, we can stop doing something, but ‘What should I give up for Lent?’ is very much a secondary question. Lent is primarily for us to be with God a bit more than usual. If wine hinders this, give up wine. If social media drains all your spare time, switch it off until after Easter… you know best what distracts you the most. And be creative. I heard of people using Lent to switch to Fairtrade food. One friend sent 40 handwritten postcards, renewing contact and sending love. Another lived on the minimum wage from the start of Lent until Easter. I love these kinds of disciplines, because they meet the purpose of Lent. They lead to a greater awareness of God’s love in our world.

I recently had a pre-Lent chat with a younger man. I

15

Eavesdropping witnessed a revelation dawning upon him. His eyes lit up. He smiled and said, ‘I see what you’re saying to me. You’re telling me I need to do a food fast for forty days! And you know what?

I’m totally going for it and I’m going to do it.’ My heart sank, as this was exactly what I was trying to steer him away from. For him Lent had suddenly become a Tough Mudder/Iron Man for the soul endurance challenge. And at the end he would have an Achievement-To-Be-Proud-Of. This is fine and has a place, but it is not the point of Lent. My young friend will now be focusing on himself, how he is coping, how far he still has to go and how much respect he is earning from his onlookers.

If he succeeds I will be genuinely fascinated to find out, if his titanic efforts have deepened his relationship with God. By contrast Mary, the mother of Jesus, seems quite content with a far less ambitious achievement. She is at a wedding. Her role is to be a small, but vital cog in a much larger machine. She sees a situation, she tells her son, she leaves the rest to him.

The wedding is in the town of Cana in Galilee and this is around about the time when Jesus is preparing to make himself known to the world. The wedding is going well, for the moment, but a disaster is looming. Either more wedding guests than expected turn up, or they are far thirstier than the drink budget predicted. Whatever the reason, the wine is about to run out. The steward, who is responsible for avoiding exactly this sort of thing, is doomed. From this day forwards he will always be the guy who ruined the wedding. Who will ever forget this party? They will say, ‘Which party?’

‘You know, that party, the one that ran dry.’

‘Oh, that one!’

And, to the families’ enduring shame, this is how their children’s wedding will stick in local folklore.

Mary notices. She appreciates the implications, both for the steward and for the couple. She goes to Jesus and simply says to him, ‘They have no more wine.’

16

Shrove Tuesday and the introduction to this book This book is going to eavesdrop on many comments and questions like this, hearing how people spoke to Jesus and how he responded. Some requests delighted him, others did not.

Some he answered willingly, some unexpectedly and to some he gave a plain ‘no’. Of course, things have changed. The soles of Jesus’ feet are no longer treading this soil, so we cannot see, hear and touch him, as the people in these stories could. He has died, he is risen and ascended. But he is the same person, and my plan is that this eavesdropping, on their exchanges then, will help us as we speak with him now.

So back to Cana. Mary simply brings a problem to Jesus and then leaves it with him. She offers no solutions, nor asks him to do anything. Her job is to alert Jesus and then trust that whatever he does next will be good. She is not deterred by his rather abrupt reply (‘Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come’), and she goes straight to the servants and says to them, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ Soon the party is awash with new wine and the steward is astonished, because this wine is far better than the supposedly good stuff that he had served at the start.

So how does this help us with prayer?

Praying is often far more simple than we make it. We can babble away with lots of words when just a few well-chosen ones would do. I grew up in prayer groups that had a lot of the ‘Father, Father, we just really, want to really, just ask you, Father, Father …’ type of prayers. I was used to torrents of words, few of them premeditated and all guaranteed to fill any awkward silences. My first encounter with this ‘prayer’ of Mary came as both revelation and challenge. Could prayer really be so simple? And were our many words a substitute for trust, trust that God was already listening? Maybe God does not need a clamour to catch his attention.

‘Our solutions’ could damage our praying. Sometimes we bring not only our problem to God, but also some quite specific

17

Eavesdropping directions for him, on his best way to proceed. Mary does not fall into this trap. She sees. She tells Jesus. She leaves the rest to him. We might think she would need to do something larger, more dramatic in the face of this crisis. Mary plays her small role to perfection and does not embellish it with her own solutions. She could have taken charge and ordered her son to nip out and find more wine from whichever shops were open. That would be both sensible and practical, but Mary already knows her son’s ability to think outside the box. She sees. She tells him. She trusts him. On this occasion, it is that simple. Clearly, we are missing a catalogue of unwritten stories that gave her this trust in his creativity. We miss out further when we are too prescriptive with our solutions. God is free to answer us in ways far beyond our imagining. If we are so fixed just on our one outcome we might fail to notice that God is answering our prayer, but in a way far beyond our imagining.

If offering God solutions to problems is a key part of our praying, we might not pray at all in some truly awful situations.

If we can see no way forward, we might feel we have nothing to say. When I first saw the Separation Wall around Bethlehem I found myself stumped for prayers. I could not take in the enormity of this structure, in both its brutal physicality and its impact on the town’s inhabitants. My head was already swimming with all I was learning about the ongoing situation.

In truth, ‘drowning’ would be a more accurate word than ‘swimming’. Eventually I realised that I was not praying, and some honest reflection revealed why I was holding back; I could see no solution and had therefore decided I could not pray. Mary’s ‘praying’ helped and I adapted her words, ‘God, there is an ugly wall here.’ These small words seemed totally inadequate. Many more words will need to be said and prayed about this wall and all that it symbolises, but for me, I had found my start.

The worst prayers are those we never pray. Mary could have ignored the situation around her. She could have stood

18

Shrove Tuesday and the introduction to this book back and watched the wine run out and the disaster unfold.

It was, after all, someone else’s problem and not hers. But she intervenes, not for personal gain, but because she sees others at risk, the steward, the bride, the groom and their families and all who would be shamed by a party that ran dry.

The God we pray to is the joy-giver and not a kill-joy. His son averts a disaster. He brings a lavish gift of rich wine. He sets the steward free from anxiety. On this day, he saves both those who are aware of his acts and those who are not.

An exercise Try praying today by simply telling God what you see, however big or small. Resist the urge to offer any suggestions or solutions about God’s next best course of action and try to keep each prayer to a single sentence, just as Mary did when she said to Jesus, ‘They have no more wine.’

‘God there’s an ambulance struggling through the traffic.’

‘My friend needs a new home.’

‘There is a war that seems to have no end.’

‘He really hates his job.’

‘There is not enough to go around.’

Keep your observations simple and keep your eyes and ears open for whatever God might do next.

19

PART ONE ‘This is so much more than we imagined.’

Ash Wednesday ‘Lord, teach us how to pray, as John taught his disciples.’

Luke 11:1

I never liked the song ‘From a Distance’, not even when Bette Midler released her version of it in 1990. I think it is the insistence that God is always watching us, but only, well, as the title says, from a distance. I preferred Joan Osborne’s 1995 song, ‘One of Us’, asking how it would be if God were human, like you and me and what on earth that would look like. She imagines a face-to-face encounter with God and challenges us as to what our question to God would be, if we were allowed only one.

The disciples of Jesus have the opportunity to ask him as many questions as they want. Some of his answers blow their minds or reveal things they would rather keep hidden. Often, they blather away about trivial matters, as if they are unaware who stands before them. And then at other times they ask the kind of thing that we might, if we knew we could only have one question.

On this day, they are near to Jesus while he prays and when he finishes, they approach him and say, ‘Lord, teach us how to pray, as John taught his disciples.’ Jesus replies not with a lecture course, a reading list, a parable or even a series of exercises.

He simply gives them the perfect prayer, which in turn they have handed on to us as ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. I wonder if they recognise, in that moment, the enormity of the gift they are receiving or whether it takes them a while to appreciate how Jesus’ answer is so much more than they hoped for.

23

Eavesdropping This could be a very short book. The disciples want to know about speaking to God. They ask Jesus. Jesus gives them the perfect answer. He teaches them a prayer that, with a few simple brushstrokes, paints an astonishing picture of how things can be between us and God. This is the essence of everything we need to say to God. There are breakfast bars that purport to contain in a couple of bites all we need to keep us going for the whole morning. The marketing spin is as sugar-coated as the product is sugar-saturated. In contrast, Jesus’ prayer really does offer us all we need, a way of bringing ourselves completely to God in one small prayer.

God according to Jesus is a loving parent, to be honoured and closely trusted. This is where Bette Midler loses it for me.

In her song, God views the world as a perfect blue green planet, but he is too far away to see the guns, bombs and disease. We can see them, because we are here on the ground. But God is comfortable with his distance and he enjoys a sanitized view of harmony, eagles and love. This is not how Jesus speaks of God. He teaches his disciples that God is intimately involved, he is ‘Dad’, ‘Abba’, building his Kingdom right here among us on earth. He provides for us, pardons, teaches, guides and protects us. And the disciples come to believe that Jesus is, God with us, ‘one of us’.

It is also good to see what Jesus does not say in his lesson on prayer. He makes no mention of location, times of day, frequency, mind-set or posture. In childhood the answer to the question, ‘How do I pray?’ was, ‘Before you go to sleep, you have to kneel down by your bed, bow your head, and place the palms of your hands together,’ We might even be shown Dürer’s famous painting of praying hands. Young George Arthur had clearly been taught that this was the way to say his prayers. He is the timid new schoolboy entrusted to Tom Brown’s care in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. On his first night in a public school dormitory, he asks permission to wash his face and then changes with great hesitation into his nightgown. The

24

Ash Wednesday dormitory is a noisy awkward place, but George Arthur knows that he has a duty to perform.

‘It was a trying moment for the poor little lonely boy; however, this time he didn’t ask Tom what he might or might not do, but dropped on his knees by his bedside, as he had done every day from his childhood, to open his heart to Him who heareth the cry and beareth the sorrows of the tender child, and the strong man in agony.’ 1 Not surprisingly there are some in the dormitory who find this demonstration of piety amusing and the one who sneers the loudest gets Tom Brown’s boot thrown into his face. This makes for a sweet moral story about the duty of older boys to protect the vulnerable, but I cannot help but feel that George Arthur had been over-instructed in his lessons on prayer. No one could deny his courage, but this story tells us more about nineteenth-century British society than it does about how we speak to God. Certain key points, not found in Jesus’ lesson, clearly have been drummed into young George Arthur.

I needed chapter and verse on this story, so I typed, ‘Tom Brown - Prayer’ and Google offered up an article called, ‘How to Get Your Prayers Answered, by Tom Brown’. A modern-day Pastor Tom gives guidance on the best ways get the answers we need from our prayers. He has a list, the first being that we should find the correct scriptural verse to support our request.

Then we must be very specific in our request, making sure we ask and believe that the thing we want is on its way. Thirdly, we should thank God before it arrives, as a mark of faith. And finally, he encourages us to be entirely positive, shielding our minds from all negative thoughts about the outcome of our prayer. There is quite some distance here from the lesson Jesus gives to his disciples. Jesus teaches that God is paramount and God’s will and God’s kingdom are to be sought before our own. This is not about us getting the right deal for ourselves 1

Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, Part 2, Chapter 1

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Eavesdropping by following a prescribed formula, which, if said correctly, will twist God’s arm into acceding to our requests.

I once walked to the home of an inspirational woman. She was dependent on her wheelchair for even the most routine of household tasks. Her courage and determination floored me. However, as we sat drinking tea in her specially-adapted bungalow, I started to feel uneasy. She told me that she was, in fact, already healed. My eyebrows must have twitched or maybe she was already anticipating my reaction. She launched into a fuller explanation about how God had already given her full healing and mobility, but the problem was that she had not truly received this gift, and this was because she did not fully believe. Once she sorted out her own faith issues, she would become ‘normal’ as God intended her to be. I did not know what to say. I have, pretty much, taken walking for granted and as such I realised I was not best placed to instruct her on how to interpret her experiences (at least not on our first meeting). We prayed together, and she asked for God’s blessing to fall on me. As I made my way home I recognised a welt of anger growing within me at the additional burden that had been added to her. She had been taught that her faith was somehow inadequate and that for some bizarre motive she was withholding from herself, God’s generous healing.

Why God heals some and not others, remains a profound mystery to me, however I feel certain that this woman has no need of self-reproach for the quality of her faith. She could instead question those who were teaching her about prayer and healing.

Jesus does not insist that his disciples come to prayer with an entirely positive frame of mind. He teaches no procedure or posture or mental state that will guarantee our desired outcome when we pray. He gives us the Lord’s Prayer, which teaches us to trust God for all that we need (but not necessarily all we want) and that God’s will is to be sought over all else.

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Ash Wednesday

So how does this help us with prayer?

Prayer is something we can learn. We will never learn everything there is to know. The act of praying is almost as mysterious as the God who we meet in prayer. Apart from Jesus himself, there are no experts in this art. There are only learners and some with a bit more experience than others. Those green L-plates, that new drivers display, are something we should wear as we pray, knowing that we will never shed them, because we will always be beginners, at least in this lifetime.

Prayer can be taught. And we have the same teacher that the disciples had. If prayer is hard going, fruitless, dry or seems pointless, ask for guidance. There are people around us who can help, or we can borrow the disciple’s words and ask God directly, ‘Lord, teach us how to pray.’

If we can think of nothing else to say to God, the Lord’s Prayer is our fall back. When my praying is stuck, I will try to say this one prayer each day. And if that is all I manage, then it is enough.

This book is not a quest to sift through everything said to Jesus in the hope of distilling a perfect prayer blueprint and so guarantee we get the exact answer we want. There are numerous sites on the internet that will do this for us, if that is what we want to hear. Some are well-meaning, and others are just utter bilge. As we go through Lent we will eavesdrop on many requests and statements made to Jesus. Some of these are well worth mimicking or at least lend themselves to adaption for our own needs, but there is no magic formula. There is no one way of praying which presses some red button that God must answer. A disciple says, ‘Teach us how to pray,’ and Jesus answers by revealing the most succinct, rich and enduring prayer in history.

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Thursday ‘There is a boy who has five barley loaves and two fish.

But what are they among so many people?’ John 6:9

There is a cartoon of a solitary figure standing on a hill shaking his fist in frustration. He shouts at God, who is hidden in the clouds. In one large speech bubble, he lists the wrongs of the world, famines, climate change, inequality, waste, greed and so on ending with the impassioned plea, ‘WHY DON’T YOU DO SOMETHING!’. And God answers by simply tweaking the pointy bit of the speech bubble so that it is now coming from within the clouds and everything said is now repeated back to the figure on the hill, verbatim.

A toddler sitting in a mess of paper, glue, crayons, glitter, stickers and plastic toys might try saying, ‘Mummy, clean it up!’ at which point Mummy will empower her child to realise their own ability to engage in creative problem solving and say, ‘No, we can clean it up together - any ideas where we should start?’

Shrove Tuesday’s request involved a situation that was beyond Mary’s power to resolve. Today’s request looks similar in that the disciples face a problem whose solution lies beyond their resources. They look out and see five thousand people who will soon be hungry. They cannot help. Even if there were shops nearby they would not have the money to buy enough food. The need is so great and clearly beyond human help.

Therefore, it is down to God to intervene. Surely?

Our ‘prayer’ today comes from Andrew. But Jesus has already asked Philip for ideas about how to feed the crowd.

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Thursday He clearly expects his disciples to do something. Philip does the maths and despairs. Andrew, for want of anything better, offers what is to hand, but his hopes are not high. He says, ‘There is a boy who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?’ Jesus takes this picnic, gives thanks to God, sends it out into the crowd and soon there is food enough for everyone.

The first version I learnt of this story followed a fairly male line of interpretation. Not all males, but certainly many, believe in the ‘miracle of the socks’. This miracle happens on a daily basis and is too commonplace to attract much attention. This is how it works. Dirty socks left on the bedroom floor, by some mysterious process, vanish and reappear, laundered, paired and warmly folded in the correct drawer. If this ‘logic’ is brought to the feeding of the five thousand, then we can only conclude that Jesus did something far beyond human understanding as somehow, under his power, one small picnic became enough to feed five thousand people, with several baskets of scraps left over. I am not saying this is impossible or necessarily unlikely.

Jesus can do what he wants. If I can believe he walked on the surface of a lake and turned water into wine, then multiplying food is surely not beyond his power. And in many ways, this is such an enjoyable interpretation. Harry Potter has taken the world by storm, precisely because we like stories about fantastic things, that are beyond our normal experience. There is even a spell, the Geminio Curse or Doubling Charm, that means whenever Harry picks up one item, its replacement appears where the original was just seconds before. (This spell could work well with food and money, but not with dirty socks.)

But there is another way of looking at this miraculous feeding. And this begins with a question, ‘Out of five thousand people, do you seriously think that only one small boy had the foresight to bring some supplies with him?’ It seems unlikely.

Men (again, sorry) can be amazed by food that seemingly appears out of thin air, not having been aware of their wives or mothers

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Eavesdropping getting up a bit earlier and doing some preparation. Women are much more likely to plan ahead and pack up something to eat, if they think their families might be out all day. I believe that if women had been the earliest interpreters of this event, it would still have been recorded as a miracle, but of a different sort.

It would be the miracle of human cooperation, the miracle of human hearts choosing generosity over self-interest. John Bell from the Iona Community once asked a group of young people what they would do if they were presented with a nearly empty tray of food. They answered that, they if they had any food of their own, they would contribute some of it. Jesus takes a risk as he carries a near empty plate out into the crowd.

Some take but more give and soon it becomes clear that within the crowd there was already enough food for everyone.

Which miracle does the world need most? The miracle where Jesus conjures food from nowhere? Or the miracle where the food we already have, is generously and fairly shared? We need God for both, but especially for the second interpretation. If this miracle is to be continued, we need to learn an ever-deepening dependence on God. We can only play our part if we live and work with the God in whom Jesus believed, building the kind of character which will encourage others to join with us. The five thousand full bellies do not cease to be miraculous. It is still God’s work, but if the second interpretation is the actual miracle, we find that God is giving us a much larger role to play.

A group of people stand on a hill, looking up towards the clouds. ‘Lord,’ they say, ‘every year mountains of good vegetables are ploughed back into the soil, because they are not cosmetically pleasing. Food is flown all around the globe to the detriment of the climate. Much of the food bought by supermarkets is discarded unsold because it has passed its sellby-date. Half of the food sold to the public is thrown away uneaten. Over a billion animals are slaughtered each week for human consumption. And at the same time there are millions

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Thursday of people STARVING! Lord, this is a phenomenal mess. And it is of our own making. And we can only untangle it with your wisdom and direction. Please help us. Amen.’ And there was silence from heaven. Not the silence of neglect, but the silence of expectation, that a prayer has been heard and that people will have to work together to make God’s answers work.

So how does this help us with prayer?

It is extremely unlikely that we will ever find ourselves in a situation where we will pray verbatim, ‘There is a boy who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?’ However, there are times when we will ask for God’s miraculous provision. God might tell us that his answers are already in human hands and our job is not to wait for manna from heaven, but rather to work together to share what we have already been given.

It is never wrong to ask, and we should resist any sense of shame if our request is returned to us, because we already have the answer. Ultimately, we can do nothing of lasting value by ourselves. Even simple things, such as finding daily bread, involve God and are no less miraculous for being commonplace. Life is about discerning God’s will in all things.

In prayer, we learn both the depth of our dependence on God and his invitation for us to be so much more than passive onlookers. We can try the ‘Mummy-clean-it-up-prayers’ but our hopes should not be high. God not our personal genie who instantly sorts everything with a click of his fingers. Equally we should never say, ‘It’s clearly our mess. God expects us to deal with it alone’. God invites us to a far greater privilege, he offers us the status of being his co-workers as he brings his Kingdom to earth.

And finally, we can learn the wonder of a small boy who gave away his picnic and found that with Jesus, a little, generously given, goes an unexpectedly long way.

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Friday ‘It is a ghost!’ Matthew 14:26

‘Jesus is coming! Look busy!’ say the T-shirt and the bumper sticker. Back in the 1980s there was a sketch on the TV puppet show, Spitting Image, where a Cardinal interrupts the Pope who is playing his banjo to the crowds out of a Vatican window.

The Cardinal tells him that ‘Big J’ has arrived. Once the Pope realises that this means Jesus (and not Mick Jagger) he goes into a meltdown, panicking about the tidiness of his apartments and the state of his furniture. The Cardinal is more worried about the swollen bank accounts inside the Vatican and the starving peasants outside. They move into a last-minute Bible swotting session (the criminal released instead of Jesus was Barabbas not Kirk Douglas) before the Cardinal reveals it is all an early April Fool’s joke. He gets sent to a leper colony.

The terror the ‘Pope’ felt is instantly recognisable to anyone who misbehaved at school when their teacher left the classroom. The trick is twofold; to be more daring, obnoxious and outrageous than the rest of the class and also to be seated and studious-looking before the door opens as the teacher returns. Ideally at this point someone else would still be clowning around at the front, unaware that the teacher is now behind them. They are the one who missed the whispered warning, ‘Teacher’s coming! Look busy!’

Jesus’ unexpected arrival brought panic to the disciples on a couple of memorable occasions. On the first ever Easter Sunday Jesus appears to them, having risen from the dead. They are

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Friday alarmed, understandably. He reassures them that he is not a ghost by letting them feel the warmth of his breath and by sharing their food. On another occasion, it is night and the disciples are in a boat out on the Sea of Galilee. They set out, leaving Jesus behind so that he can pray by himself. In the early evening a storm hits them. They battle against the waves until the small hours of the morning, when in a state of exhaustion, they see a figure walking towards them, walking on the water. This boosts their fear levels from ‘panicked distress’ to ‘white-knuckle terror’.

They are not scared of being in trouble, like naughty schoolboys, they are simply terrified of drowning and the sight of this approaching ‘ghost’ does nothing to calm their fears.

We know it was Jesus all along, but they did not, and we would be foolish to imagine that we would necessarily fare better.

This is one of those situations where hindsight makes all the difference. The unknown has a tendency to be more scary. They had no idea who or what this was. Either it did not occur to them that this might be Jesus, or maybe seeing him like this was just too freaky. So, they fumbled for the explanation that made the most sense in that moment and cried out, ‘It’s a ghost!’

As we pray today we meet a God who remains largely unknown to us. God is simply too, well … ‘God’ for us to comprehensively understand. If our minds were capable of fully encapsulating God, then we would not be looking at God, but at some lesser creation of our own. We can claim to know some things about God, but only a fool would insist they hold the whole picture. And given that the unknown can be scary, maybe it is not surprising that we can find this unknown God to be a frightening figure. Priests and spiritual directors spend a great deal of time in pastoral work untangling assumptions about God that do not come from God, but rather from our experiences of authority figures: the unpredictably angry headteacher, the bullying PE teacher, the emotionally detached parent or the stern high court judge. Such characters delight in exposing our wrongdoings and are vindictive in their

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Eavesdropping punishments. God has as much in common with them as Jesus has with a ghost, but it is as easy for us, as it was for the disciples, to mistake him for something he is not.

The Bible does not help when it gives us the phrase ‘the fear of God’ as a translation for words intended to carry a sense of awestruck wonder and respect. When fear is terror, it produces no good fruit in us.

Jesus illustrates this point in a parable about a man with two sons.2 The younger son has a poor view of his dad, treating him as the ghost of a parent who has already died and left him a nice pile of cash. He disappears and blows the lot on frivolities until he has nothing left. His elder brother, who stays at home, mistakenly gets sympathy for his lot in the story. After all he works hard and stays loyal, but his own words reveal that he is just as guilty as his younger brother when it comes to carrying a false image of dad. To him his father is a ghoulish slave driver to be fearfully, dutifully and resentfully obeyed. Neither son has any worthwhile respect for their dad, that is until the youngest staggers home and is welcomed with exceptional grace and forgiveness. He learns that he has both misunderstood and underestimated dad all along.

Whether his older brother learns this, remains untold, just as it is uncertain how the Pharisees on hearing this parable, will respond to the Kingdom of Heaven. The story ends with the elder brother refusing to come home, publicly shunning his dad’s invitation to join the party. If he relents he might find that dad has never been an ogre. One of the more humbling insights from this parable is that we are capable, against all sense, of preferring our monstrous, ghostly images of God rather than admitting our mistakes and finding the embracing arms of the Truth.

So how does this help us with prayer?

The important thing about prayer is not prayer itself, but who we are praying to. If in our prayers, we think we are meeting a ghost, a slave driver or any other kind of terror-merchant, we 2

Luke 15:11-31

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Friday will do ourselves harm. Human souls often carry false images of God, that need to be dethroned, as we invite the true God in.

Prayer is the setting for good decision making. St Ignatius commends decisions which are made in consolation and not in desolation. Decisions made in terror of any ghost are not to be trusted, in direct contrast with those made in the presence of Jesus who says, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’

We do not need to be in a good place to pray. Jesus can meet us wherever we are. In fact, he can only meet us where we are and never where we think we should be. He can walk towards us even though we may be caught in a storm at sea, in a controlling and abusive relationship, or behind prison bars.

In prayer, our terrors of the unknown can be laid aside. In Jesus, the unknown God comes to us as a person. German has two words for ‘know’: wissen and kennen. A scholar may read and eventually know much about God (wissen). Anyone who prays will meet him and know him (kennen). The new believer who first truly prayed only five minutes ago knows Jesus more healthily than a professor who has amassed volumes of knowledge about Christology but has never responded to him.

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Saturday ‘Lord, save me!’ Matthew 14:30

It is so easy to make prayer too complicated. And if we have a weighty request, then surely, we are going to need some suitably impressive words to carry it to God? Maybe we fear that a couple of words or just one line will be overlooked. And then there is the argument that if we cannot be bothered to create a memorable request, then whatever we are asking cannot be all that important after all.

My friend, Stefan, bought me a ticket to a Bruce Springsteen concert. Until this point, Bruce had not made much of an impact on me and so I went as a novice, thrust into a crowd of seriously devoted fans. I had got a copy of The River and given it a few listens to warm myself up, but this was peanuts, compared to how others were preparing. On the chilly, rainy evening as we walked along the canal, from the city to the stadium, Stef continued my initiation. He told me how I would see grown men crying like they were teenagers at an X-Factor finale, and how the truly dedicated fans had already been queuing outside the venue for two days. They were hoping for one, of a limited number of places, at the very front of the stage. Many of them had made elaborate banners with requests for Bruce to sing their favourite songs. Once we were inside and Bruce had worked through the first few on his list, he started to pay attention to the banners. These had been made, working from the principle that only the biggest and most colourful would catch The Boss’s eye. And throughout

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Saturday the concert he departed from his script and sang something unplanned. A couple of petitioners even got invited up onto the stage to sing alongside their idol. The first of these was a man dressed as Father Christmas (it was May and so he stood out) and accompanied Bruce singing, ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’.

This is the way the world works. If you want attention for yourself and your requests you need to make a song and dance, carry a big banner and wear an outstanding costume.

This truth is found throughout creation. In a garden, flowers vie with one another, each seeking to be brighter and better scented to attract the bees.

So, it is intuitive to employ this same principle as we bring our requests to God. Surely for God we will need to do something truly impressive to catch his attention, something even more outstanding than donning a bright red Santa Claus costume on a dank May Manchester evening. God, after all, has planets to spin and universes to expand.

Jesus’ teaching utterly contradicts this. His starting point is an unparalleled understanding of God’s love for us. God knows us more deeply than we can imagine, so Jesus warns against babbling away in prayer, imagining that wonderful displays of long complicated words, delicately refined statements or inane repetitions might somehow ‘do the trick’. The Holy Roman Emperor Charles V reputedly said, ‘I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.’

But Jesus did not have a special language set aside for talking to God. He valued simplicity and directness and he trusted that God was already listening. He told his disciples to call God, ‘Abba’, which the church has made into the rather starchier, ‘Our Father’, but, ‘Abba’ is simply the name that any Hebrew child uses for ‘Daddy’. He encourages us to open our hearts and with a childlike trust, approach our God. An earthly parent may be impressed by a child’s correct use of complex vocabulary, but God does not require us to be

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Eavesdropping so eloquent or erudite. That said, there is a place for carefully chosen, poetic words in our prayers. Sometimes a psalm or someone else’s written prayer can frame the desire for which we had no words of our own. But at other times we will need to search for our own words. But the key is this: prayer need never be a performance to catch God’s attention. We already have that, so we can skip the banner-making stage. Our words must come from the heart. And so, the everyday language that comes most naturally to us is usually our best bet when speaking to God. Imagine the scene that follows directly from yesterday’s prayer. Peter, along with the rest of the disciples, now knows that the figure walking towards them, on the water, is not a ghost, but Jesus himself. Peter asks Jesus for an invitation to join him on the water and Jesus replies ‘Come.’ Peter then climbs out of the boat. I would love to know what the other disciples are thinking. I am guessing that some would be impressed by Peter’s nerve, whilst others might mutter, ‘Good grief, Peter, was the spotlight off you for a whole minute?’

Anyway, Peter starts off well and looking to Jesus he walks successfully on the water towards him. However, things go wrong when Peter switches his focus to the wind, the waves and the entire implausibility of his situation. The moment his attention is no longer on Jesus, his ability to remain on top of the water disappears and he starts to sink.

At this point he cannot make a banner and is in no place to devise a song and dance routine. He has no time for eloquence, ‘Oh Lord, in thine bounteous and boundless mercy, I, unworthy as I am, dare to beseech thee … etc.’. Or ‘I offer you the highest praises for your bountiful gift of water, which cleanses, refreshes and sustains all life, but am now fully respectful of its power to endanger as well as nurture life. I myself …’ and so on. Peter needs Jesus’ attention and he needs it now. He simply lets out a heartfelt cry, ‘Lord, save me.’ And Jesus does. Jesus hears his simple three-word prayer and this is

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Saturday enough. He answers by pulling Peter up out of the water and returning him to the boat.

So how does this help us with prayer?

‘Save me!’ is a good thing for Peter to say as he drowns and a good thing for us to pray, at many points in our lives.

Jesus taught, ‘When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.’3 We do not need flowery words, sparkly costumes or anything else to attract God’s best attention. We already have this. God hears the cries of our hearts. We can pray anywhere and at any time and with the minimum of words.

This kind of prayer is not a replacement for a daily pattern of praying. In fact, without a healthy discipline of prayer, we are far less likely to call to on God when a crisis hits. We forget God with alarming ease. Peter was with Jesus almost around the clock at this point in his life and so it was entirely natural that he should ask Jesus for help as he sank. We likewise are more likely to remember God on a bad day if we are already in regular contact throughout the rest of our week.

An exercise Try praying using Peter’s ‘Lord, save me’ as a template. Pray this in any number of situations today; when you hear a distressing item on the news, witness two friends falling out or discern something disturbing within your soul. Pray immediately, pray simply and pray trusting that you already have God’s full attention.

3

Matthew 6:7

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The First Sunday in Lent ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’ Mark 5:28

This is a request which is not actually spoken to Jesus. These are the words a desperate woman speaks to herself, for her own encouragement. Her words carry her deepest desire, which is to be well again. Jesus somehow, overhears her, understands this as a ‘prayer’ and responds.

This woman, exhausted from twelve years of illness and bankrupt from the doctor’s bills, is convinced that Jesus will be able to help her. She has an unstoppable bleed. Her culture has taught her that this is shameful and so she has striven to keep it secret.

Jesus’ arrival in town puts her in a terrible quandary.

She might, at last, find healing, but the very act of seeking this, necessarily exposes her condition; she has no chance of attracting Jesus’ attention without also attracting the attention of the whole crowd. Given that the crowd is made up of her neighbours, years of gossip will be confirmed all over town before teatime. But Jesus is only here for such a very short time and so if she does not do something now, she might never get well and then be forced to add regret to her sufferings.

If Jesus’ disciples are on bodyguard duty that day, they are failing. Jesus is in the middle of a scrummage, being jostled, pushed and pawed. And whilst this is uncomfortable for him and embarrassing for the disciples, it opens an opportunity for this woman. If she could wiggle her way through the crowd, she might be able to touch him and siphon off some of his

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Why Pray?

Robert Llewelyn

Unpublished writings by the former chaplain to the shrine of Julian of Norwich

Compiled and edited by

DENISE TREISSMAN

First published in 2019 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd 1 Spencer Court 140–142 Wandsworth High Street London SW18 4JJ Text © 2019 Robert Llewelyn Collection and introduction © 2019 Denise Treissman Illustrations © 2019 Jules Allen The right of Denise Treissman to be identified as the compiler of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978-0-232-53378-1 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Designed and produced by Judy Linard Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow

With gratitude and blessings to Norfolk Emergency Services and National Health Service, without whom I would not be here

Denise Treissman

Contents Acknowledgements 9 A brief introduction to 11 Robert Llewelyn My Philosophy of Life by 15 Robert Llewelyn

1. What is Prayer? 19

2.

Prayer is Waiting Prayer is Offering

21 29

Advice on Prayer 37 from Lady Julian of Norwich in Revelations of Divine Love

3. Ways of Praying 53

Silent Prayer Prayer as Praise The Sacrifice of Praise 6

55 61 69

Contents

The Rosary 77 How Robert Found the Rosary 79 The Rosary – 83 A Help in Depression Reflections of the Rosary 91 Praying for Ourselves and Others 95 What is Prayer?

99 The Best is Yet to Be ...

103 Awareness in Love Peace Peace Peace 113

4. The Fruits of Prayer 117

Thoughts from Prayer and Contemplation Insights from Over the Years

7

119 125

Acknowledgements My heartfelt gratitude goes to: Robert Llewelyn and Geoffrey Treissman for teaching me the meaning of love, prayer and meditation.

Sr Christine at SLG Press for her encouragement and permission to use text from Prayer and Contemplation by Robert Llewelyn.

Jules Allen for her inspiration in the preparation of the images within the book.

Dori Veness for her technical help in putting Robert’s work onto computer and together with Edward Jones and Sybil Jones for sharing spiritual inspiration and a love of silence.

Dr Rowan Williams for his encouragement and permission to use his words about Robert on the front cover.

9

Why Pray?

Keith Rose for his advice and help with the manuscript.

Liz French for her friendship and advice about publishing.

Paul and Joan Golightly for providing a wonderful centre of prayer and spirituality that gave a quiet place of light for my work on this book.

Andrew Taylor and Margaret Taylor for their contribution to the book.

My family and friends for their love, encouragement and support.

Special thanks go to Sandy Mason, Cathy Russell, June and John Blythe for their help after Robert’s death.

Christine Bromley and Tom Abbas for their beautiful words.

Judy Linard, David Moloney, Will Parkes, Helen Porter and the team at DLT for their help and support.

10

A brief introduction to Robert Llewelyn Robert Llewelyn was Chaplain and a ‘praying presence’ in the cell of Mother Julian of Norwich from 1976 to 1990. He was known as a man of prayer, and was generous and enthusiastic about sharing his discoveries in prayer with others.

Before he died at the age of ninety-eight on February 6th, 2008 he had asked me to look after his affairs: it has been a joy to compile his unpublished work on prayer into this small book comprising of some of his talks, articles and leaflets, spanning five decades, but with an immediacy and universal appeal relevant to life today.

People came from around the world to see Robert, to enjoy his warm hospitality and love, to share silence with him, for 11

Why Pray?

spiritual direction, and to discuss their lives with him. Robert would always know the right book to give or lend, or would offer the appropriate leaflet to answer questions: he was encouraging and informative, always gentle, with a self-deprecating humour, and was known for his love of God, of people and of silence.

When Robert found a quote that helped him, he would type it out and print it and then stick it on his lounge door for everyone to see. Two memorable ones were: ‘Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation’1 and, ‘When two or more people share a profound silence, they bestow healing on one another’.2 Robert wrote many books on prayer, the first being Prayer and Contemplation, born out of his experience of living as a teacher, priest, Archdeacon and then Principal of Sherwood College in India, and later in 1972 living as part of the Anchorhold Community 1

Fr Thomas Keating ocso

2

Donald Nicholl

12

A Brief Introduction

in Haywards Heath, headed by Father Slade; one of its former residents called this community ‘a laboratory of prayer’.

A former student of Robert’s at Sherwood College said, in the film Love was his Meaning, made after Robert’s death to celebrate his life and influence, ‘Robert taught us love. As his students, we were all of different religions but under him we were one religion and that was love.’ Also in that film, a friend who used to visit Robert for spiritual counsel said: ‘Robert made you feel as if you were the most important person in the whole world: you felt treasured, loved, mothered.’

Robert visited places in France connected with the spiritual reading he had done and was to write later in his autobiography, Memories and Reflections, of the positive influences on him of Taizé, the Curé d’Ars, St Francis de Sales and Jean-Pierre de Caussade. One of St Francis’s quotes he shares is: ‘in the end only the language of the heart can reach another heart, while mere words as they 13

Why Pray?

slip from your tongue don’t get past your listener’s ear.’

This small book offers some of Robert’s unpublished talks and writing on prayer and celebrates, as explained in a lovely way in Robert’s philosophy of life on pages 13 – 16, the importance of prayer for life.

The book is divided into four sections: What Is Prayer?; Advice on Prayer from Revelations of Divine Love by the fourteenth-century mystic Lady Julian of Norwich; Ways of Praying; and The Fruits of Prayer.

The question, ‘Why pray?’ is answered clearly by Robert’s words throughout the book in an encouraging way: as Lady Julian says, ‘for it [prayer] does good’.

Denise Treissman (Robert Llewelyn’s Literary Executor)

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My Philosophy of Life by Robert Llewelyn For my philosophy of life I must begin with a story. I picture a village in India which has all it needs to maintain a simple social life; everything that is, except that it has no water. There is a large tank which the rain kept filled in better days and a distance away there is a well whose water can be used only by transferring it bucket by bucket. Every time a villager puts aside some personal inclination to make that trek across the fields they are pouring into that village the water of life. As the bucket is brought homewards its bearer can have no idea what this pail of water will do. Will it ease the last moments of a dying child, or fertilize a tiny piece of land, or be there for the washing of clothes or the scrubbing 15

Why Pray?

of a floor? Who can say? But the water is brought, immersed in the common pool of healing, and that is enough.

We live in a global village and all that we do is inter-related. Each one of us has the choice whether or not to bring the water of life into our stricken world. St Paul bids us to pray without ceasing and this is something to which we may all aspire, seeing prayer as the perpetual inclination of the heart towards God rather than the movement of the lips, though it is the second which will be needed to establish the first. Every prayer which passes my lips or carries the desire of my heart is, as it were, a bucket filled with the water of life. I have no idea what that prayer will accomplish, nor do I ask. It is enough that I put aside my natural sloth and with such love and devotion as is given me offer what I can to be joined with the aspirations of people of good will in every place. It is revealed to Julian that we are to pray wholeheartedly even though we find no joy in it, ‘for it does good’. At the very least it does good to myself and that good 16

My Philosophy of Life

cannot help affecting the next person I meet and so a chain reaction is set up. But it goes well beyond that. Somehow, somewhere, in answer to every prayer or praise uttered, or psalm recited or prayerful silence observed, with such sincerity as may be given us, good overcomes evil, light dispels darkness, truth supplants error and, if only in the minutest measure, the world is changed. So, too, for every stranger welcomed or loving deed performed.

On April 25th 2002 there died in Buenos Aires at the age of 102 a remarkable lady, Indian by name though European by birth. Indra Devi was still doing her yoga headstand in her late nineties. But more important was her philosophy of life. ‘You give love and light to everyone, those who love you, those who harm you, those whom you know, those whom you don’t know.

It makes no difference. You just give light and love’. ‘At eventide’ says St John of the Cross, ‘they will examine you in love’, and he tells us that where there is no love we are to pour love in and we shall draw love 17

Why Pray?

out. No matter how far we fall behind the saints of every faith, the way is open for our sacrifice to be made in the knowledge that even a cup of water lovingly offered will not be despised. This I believe to be the only philosophy that can save us all.

From Five Gold Rings, edited by Anna Jeffery (Darton, Longman and Todd, 2003)

18

What is Prayer?

Prayer is Waiting I have been to Taizé only once and that was about 25 years ago. Frère Roger Schütz spoke to us on several occasions. I can remember just five words of what he said, and they have come back to me again and again. ‘For me’ , he said, ‘prayer is waiting.’

There is much in Scripture to support those words. ‘The Lord is good to those who wait for him’, says Jeremiah. ‘They that wait for the Lord shall renew their strength’ writes Isaiah. ‘I waited patiently for the Lord, and he heard my cry’, from the Psalms. And more than two thousand years later, and moving beyond the Bible to St John of the Cross, we read that in prayer we are to learn to rest with attention in loving waiting upon God. And so, when the time for silence comes, I ask you to take up your position 21

Why Pray?

for prayer (and sitting is usually best for most of us), and then, having asked the help of the Holy Spirit, to be content to wait, patiently, expectantly, lovingly, longingly. Try to realise this is all that you can do for yourself. God must do the rest.

See yourself as the parched earth looking upwards waiting patiently for the rain to fall. You can neither hasten the shower nor determine its intensity when it comes. You can only wait.

We all need healing. We are all wounded souls. We are like Humpty Dumpty: we have had a great fall, but mercifully, unlike him, there is one who can put us together again. And that one, at this time of waiting, stands at your side. ‘Rest in me’, he says, ‘and I in you.’ See yourself as resting in Jesus as a child rests in its mother’s arms.

Allow him to bear you and enfold you in his love. See him standing there and calling your name: ‘John, Margaret, I love you, and I have loved you always as if you were the only person in the whole world to love.

And now I want to heal you. Let me do the 22

Prayer is Waiting

work. Give all the strains and stresses over to me.’ And then just wait. All you need is to desire God, to desire to pray, and then to wait. Have in your mind, if it helps, a short centring word or prayer which you can repeat silently as often as you need.

Just the word ‘Jesus’, or the familiar ‘Be still, and know that I am God’ would do well. You may find it best to look mentally to the level of the heart.

It may not be long before distracting thoughts intrude. The rule here is that you may acknowledge them or recognise them, but you are not to develop them or encourage them, or in any way to get involved with them. Let them drop from your consciousness as a stone may drop into the sea. And if they won’t drop away but insist on floating on the periphery of consciousness, then be content to let them float. But do not attempt to draw them in to yourself. These distractions may be due to external circumstances, such as a neighbour’s radio, to which one may respond with forbearance or annoyance. If 23

Why Pray?

we choose the latter then an opportunity for growth in patience has been missed. Or they may have an interior cause. Anxieties, resentments, jealousies and the like may surface from the unconscious at such times that God’s healing light may play upon them. This process is not without pain. In either case, if we respond with patience and perseverance, a dying to self and a rising to new life in Christ is taking place.

Here is a part of the Holy Spirit’s work of growth and sanctification.

This period of waiting is sure to be demanding. And you will find yourself asking: ‘Is it any use? Am I really praying?’

And here are words of comfort. And they come from St Augustine. ‘Your very desire is itself your prayer; if your desire is continued so is your prayer also. Whatever you are doing, if you are desiring to pray, you are praying. If you do not wish to cease from prayer, do not cease from desire’. And these words are true, the intention or the desire is prayer whether we are speaking of vocal prayer, eucharistic prayer, office 24

Prayer is Waiting

prayer, Jesus prayer, rosary prayer or, as now, the prayer of the silence of the heart before God. If, then, you are tempted to ask whether you are really praying, all you have to do is ask yourself one question. Do I desire to pray? Am I desiring God? And if the answer is yes, then you are truly at prayer. Even if all you can do is to desire to desire to pray that is enough.

Now, this is very important. Sometimes people may speak as if correct posture is prayer. Sitting with a straight back assists prayer partly because it helps you to be attentive and alert, and partly because, it assists abdominal breathing. But correct posture in itself is not prayer. And correct breathing is not prayer. What then is prayer?

It is the intention or desire to pray.

Or you may hear that relaxation is prayer. Relaxation assists prayer because it helps us to be receptive. But relaxation in itself is not prayer. Prayer is the intention or desire to pray.

Or some may speak as if bodily stillness 25

Why Pray?

is prayer. Bodily stillness assists prayer because it helps to the stilling of the mind.

But bodily stillness in itself is not prayer.

Again, then, what is prayer? It is the intention or desire to pray.

Or not uncommonly today people may speak as if a change of consciousness is prayer. It may happen that in the silence we are taken from the ordinary workaday state of beta consciousness to that of alpha.

This is a restful experience and where it is of the Holy Spirit it will be welcomed. But in itself an altered consciousness is not prayer. It can, for example, be induced by drugs or demonic forces; or simply by deep relaxation. What then is prayer? At the risk of being wearisome let it be said once more that it is the intention to pray, or the desire for God, which determines whether we are praying.

Undoubtedly in this period of waiting, waiting, we are sometimes taken hold of.

The parched earth is rewarded with a shower of rain. St Antony the Great says that he prays best who does not know he is praying.

26

Prayer is Waiting

Watch a group of children at play. They are so engrossed in their game that they do not know they are playing. There is no corner in a child’s mind which can allow him to say, ‘Now, I am playing’. If, perchance, he does say that, then the game for him has at once lost some of its perfection. It is the same at prayer. Periods may pass when there is no corner of the mind which can say, ‘Now, I am praying’. Just as you cannot say in bed at night, ‘Now, I am sleeping’, but can only say in the morning , ‘I slept’, so you cannot now say at prayer, ‘Now, I am praying,’ but can only say later, ‘I prayed’. I am not speaking of any exalted state. If the phone rings you will hear it at once. These showers of rain, as it were, come and go, and the parched earth cannot determine their time or intensity. So, too, these periods of which I have spoken depend on God and not on us. They may be waited for, but not sought, least of all striven after: striving would in any case be in vain.

Prayer is waiting, intending, desiring God. Prayer, we might say, is a holding on 27

Why Pray?

to God, until waiting, waiting, waiting, we move into the knowledge that we are being held.

Taken from a talk at a TaizĂŠ service at Norwich Roman Catholic Cathedral on 24 November, 1995 (adapted)

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Prayer is Offering I think it helps if we can see prayer as an offering. If we are able to see prayer in this way, one important consequence will follow. We shall be relieved of all desire to make prayer successful, whatever that may mean. All sorts of thoughts may steal into our minds during prayer. Does this prayer help? Is it strengthening? Is it of any value for the person I am holding up before God? If we can see prayer as an offering we can ignore all these thoughts. A child doesn’t make an offering to his mother that he may be helped or strengthened. The offering is simply to be offered as a token of love. Whether it helps or not is beside the point. So, too, if we can see prayer as an offering, we do not have to think about, much less be concerned about, what our prayer may achieve.

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Sabbath The hidden heartbeat of our lives

Nicola Slee

First published in 2019 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd 1 Spencer Court 140 – 142 Wandsworth High Street London SW18 4JJ © 2019 Nicola Slee The right of Nicola Slee to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Thanks are due to Counterpoint for permission to use excerpts from the work of Wendell Berry: Copyright © 2012 by Wendell Berry, from New Collected Poems. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press; Copyright © 1990, 2010 by Wendell Berry, from What Are People For?.

Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press; Copyright © 2013

by Wendell Berry, from This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems.

Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press.

Thanks are due to Many Rivers, for permission to quote from David Whyte’s poem ‘Millennium’.

ISBN: 978-0-232-53399-6 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Designed and produced by Judy Linard Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain, Glasgow

For my colleagues at Queen’s and the Faculty of Religion and Theology, VU Amsterdam for the brothers at Glasshampton and the sisters at Malling with love and gratitude

Contents Preface and acknowledgements Chapter 1

Sabbaths Introduction

8 27

Chapter 2 I go among trees 52

The invitation into the woods

Chapter 3 All my stirring becomes quiet 78

The invitation to cessation

Chapter 4 It sings and I hear its song 105

The invitation to encounter

Chapter 5 Then what is afraid of me comes 129

The invitation to fear

Chapter 6 I hear my song ... and I sing it 153

The recovery of vocation Chapter 7

The day turns, the trees move Coming out of the woods

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176

Pr e f a c e A Sabbatical story I didn’t plan to write a book about Sabbath when I embarked upon a three-month sabbatical in 2014/15. I set out on a two-month trip to the west coast of the US and Canada and thence to New Zealand (the third month came later, at home), trailing a number of writing projects and plans with me, none of which came to fruition (at least, not then). I got through the American Academy of Religion (the world’s largest annual gathering of academic theologians and religious studies scholars) and then began a five-day retreat at the Spiritual Ministry Centre in the funky, laid back Ocean Beach district, right on the Atlantic. I began to feel inordinately tired, but that’s not unusual on retreat and I’d been working under ridiculous pressure for months in the lead-up to my sabbatical, so I wasn’t particularly surprised or concerned. Dressing one morning, I glanced in the mirror and noticed a vivid red rash on my upper left thigh.

I thought to myself ‘Shingles’ but immediately brushed the thought aside. Only a few days later when talking to my spiritual companion at the retreat centre, did I articulate the thought. A visit to the doctor’s confirmed the diagnosis.

I was prescribed medication and advised to rest. Shortly after, I moved onto Vancouver where I was staying with old friends I hadn’t seen for a dozen years or more. I spent virtually the entire ten days in a stupor, sleeping nine, ten, even eleven hours a night and still waking feeling drugged.

8

Pr e f a c e I was incapable of doing anything much except wandering around the house in my pyjamas, watching day-time TV (something I never do in the normal course of life) with my friend, Frances, who has advanced Parkinson’s Disease and spends most of her life on her bed. Once or twice we went out to a local café, and I managed the one gig I’d signed up to do at Vancouver Cathedral (thankfully towards the end of my time), but otherwise I saw virtually nothing of Vancouver – except for stunning views as I flew into, and out of, the city.

I was not in any real pain. The rash caused minor irritation, but the main symptom was extreme fatigue, at a level that took me back to my experience of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome some decades earlier. As with CFS, so now, the horizon of my life closed down to the immediacy of my body’s needs: the next meal, shower, TV programme and, above all, the next sleep. My brain shut down more or less completely. I couldn’t read anything intellectually challenging or emotionally demanding, had no desire to write in my journal, couldn’t face the thought of going out anywhere or meeting people, and couldn’t even begin to think about any of the writing projects I’d brought with me.

I could have regarded this as a disaster or, at the very least, an irritating intrusion into my sabbatical. Through no great will of my own, I simply acceded to the inevitable and accepted it (I didn’t have the energy to fight, and knew that would have done no good anyway). Strangely, there was a gift in being ill (but not so ill that I was in real pain or felt anxious about being away from home). I was compelled to slow down utterly, to abandon all my best-laid plans, and to rest.

And then rest some more. If I’d been at home, surrounded by my books and files and constant reminders of the writing projects I’d committed to, I might well have found it difficult to put work down. Being, first, in a retreat centre and then in a family home organized around my friend’s chronic illness, 9

Sabbath gave me permission to let go and give in to the exhaustion without guilt or anxiety. There was something very lovely about spending time with Frances at home, lolling around in our pjs watching TV, making muffins, dancing round the kitchen to one of Frances’ favourite CDs, reminiscing about old times. There was a companionable intimacy, a physical and psychological closeness that might have been much more difficult to touch if I’d been well and feeling I should be getting on with my work or impatient to be out and about in Vancouver. For the duration of my visit, we were pretty much on a level; both ill, both tired, both needing rest and care, both content simply to be with each other. It was a beautiful time, and I am immensely grateful for it.

By the time I came to move on to New Zealand, I was beginning to recover. I was met in Auckland by John and Margaret Fairbrother, who welcomed me back to Vaughan Park Retreat Centre (where I had spent a three-month sabbatical in 2009) as if I were family. I was back at the Centre, right on the beach at Long Bay, for a scholars’ gathering, which brought together a dozen of the scholars generously funded by Vaughan Park for one or three month scholarships over the previous ten years. Drawn from different continents, we had nothing in common other than the experience of having been at Vaughan Park and loving it enough to want to return for this event. We were women and men, lay and ordained, representing a variety of interests, experience, faith orientations, academic subjects and personalities. Each of us had been invited to offer a presentation to the gathering that might generate good conversation and learning. Typically, John Fairbrother set no stipulations of what form the presentation could take or what the subject matter might be.

This resulted in a wonderfully eclectic array of offerings, from readings of poems to academic papers, a singing workshop, an exploration of visual art and a proposal for reforming the United Nations Security Council.

10

Pr e f a c e I had been pondering what I could offer in my hour slot. I had a couple of papers I could rehearse, plenty of poems I could read, various topics that could lead to interesting conversation. But none of these seemed to present themselves as the best use of my time, the offering I most wanted to make. The idea began to formulate in my mind of sharing some reflections on the meaning and significance of sabbatical time and space with this group of fellow sojourners, all of whom had experienced sabbatical at Vaughan Park. I felt it could be a rich opportunity to reflect on our different experiences of sabbatical and what our time at Vaughan Park had given us. I hoped that the reflection on Sabbath time and space, whilst focusing on the particularity of our times at Vaughan Park, would have a wider relevance to the keeping of perspective, balance and order in our working lives, beyond the limited sabbatical period. I went back to a much-loved poem by Wendell Berry, the first in his long sequence of Sabbath poems, which I have used on several occasions at the beginning of retreats or quiet days.

The poem offered a number of themes and images which would give shape to my thoughts. Having been able to write nothing in the previous four or five weeks, I found my creative energy returning as I worked on my presentation, rooted in Berry’s poem and my own experience of the gift of sabbatical time at Vaughan Park. I shared the paper, and it seemed to generate good conversation and resonate with others’ experience.

And that might very well have been the end of that. Yet as I returned to the UK at the end of January 2015 and reimmersed myself in work and life back home, the sabbatical theme wouldn’t go away. It was something that continued to absorb my attention and energy. It wasn’t simply that my sabbatical wasn’t strictly over – I had another six weeks to come, having planned to take my three months in two separate stints. It was, I think, a way for me to work on an 11

Sabbath urgent question that had arisen as a result of having recently gone up from a half-time to a full-time role at Queen’s (something I said I would never do, because I had seen the demands made of my full-time colleagues and because I wanted to keep quality time for writing). The question was, how was I going to manage to work full-time in an intense and demanding work environment without making myself ill or endlessly exhausted and without sacrificing the creative inner life represented by my writing, and particularly by poetry? Or to put this another way, how was I going to exercise my new role as Director of Research in a way that modeled the kind of spaciousness and leisure to read, write and do research that I saw (and still see) as central to the role?

Who and what this book is for So I have written this book, enlarging and expanding the original Sabbatical paper. First and foremost, I have written it for myself, as I suppose most writers do (just as most preachers preach what it is they most need to hear, and hope that others listening in may also take something from their words). I have written it as a way of wrestling with an urgent question about the shape my life needs to assume since the pattern and demands of work have been drastically reconfigured and I have much less time I can call my own for writing and reflection. I want to be intentional about this phase of my life and to shape and craft it as faithfully and artfully as I can.

The decision to go full-time, whilst going against my long-held vow that I would never work more than half-time at Queen’s (never say never!), was not one I made lightly, but seemed to be the response that was needed to enable the institution to move forward into a new era. I realized I 12

Pr e f a c e was ready for the challenge of going full-time and taking up a leadership role within the institution. I had no illusions about how difficult I would find this, and knew that there would be a cost in terms of the amount of time I would be able to protect for my writing. I had fairly recently had a lovely garden room built at home – a place of stillness and reflection, without phone, internet connection or radio – and it was clear I’d get to spend a lot less time in it than I had hoped, over the coming years. Having made the choice knowingly and whole-heartedly to move into this full-time post, I knew I needed to find a way to knit together work and life in a new configuration, in a form that would fit the new demands.

My exploration of Sabbath, then, is a way to find resources for this task of knitting together work and life into an organic whole: a way of working towards a pattern that will hold, that will bind together work, play, prayer and rest in some kind of intentional whole. I want to find a form for the configuration of life and work that is good, healthy, even beautiful, a shape fit for purpose. I want to be able to balance the demands of my role as Director of Research with my own scholarship and writing which I see as central to the work, a necessary part of what I am being asked to do by the institution. Yet, as many scholars in academia bemoan, the very institution that requires us to be research-active frequently loads us with heavy burdens of administration, teaching and management that crowd out significant time to do research. I’m by no means alone in the tensions I experience in my working life and, compared to many of my colleagues at Queen’s who bear far heavier loads than I do, I have a great deal of freedom about how I manage my time and considerably more time than they do for research.

And so I did not write this book only for myself. I wrote it for my colleagues at Queen’s, as well as for our students, and for other colleagues and friends I know who wrestle 13

Sabbath with the same questions about how to order the demands of work within a whole that testifies to our deepest values and ideals about God, creation, human vocation and the mission and ministry of the Church. I look around me at my own place of work, but also more widely to university settings where other academic colleagues work and to church and ministry settings, both here in the UK and across the globe.

I see colleagues caught in exactly the same dilemmas as me, living out the tension of trying to respond faithfully to too much that is expected of them, with insufficient time and resources, and never being able to catch up with the task, let alone complete it. My colleagues at Queen’s are good people, with high ideals and a strong sense of vocation, who give themselves generously to the work to which they are called.

They believe in what they are doing, in their capacity to make a difference in the lives of our students and to contribute to a reshaping of the Church’s mission and ministry as well as to the broader political culture of our nation and the global community that makes up the wider church and world. All of them, in different ways, bring extraordinary gifts and wisdom to the mission and ministry of the Church. They are people who don’t easily withhold from the demands of the institution for which they work; they have an ethic of service, rather than self-gain, which is rare in public life but may still be found, not only in faith communities, but also in the public and voluntary sectors. Nobody goes into any of these spheres for financial gain – though it would be naïve not to acknowledge that there are hierarchies, systems of patronage and privilege, within the Church as much as elsewhere, that still encourage ambition and promote self-interest.

The dilemmas we face are not simply personal ones, of course. Whilst it may be true that every culture and time has experienced the tension between the demands of work and the need for rest and play, this tension takes on a particular character and texture in late postmodernity, in 14

Pr e f a c e both church and wider society in the Western world (and possibly in parts of the developing world too, although I do not have the experience or authority to speak about these contexts). In a climate of church decline, economic austerity and the ‘rationalization’ (i.e. drastic reduction) of theological education, fewer and fewer centres of theological learning are required to do more and more, fewer and fewer individuals are required to carry heavier and heavier loads.

Year on year since I’ve been at Queen’s (and I’ve been here over twenty years), I’ve seen the work demands increase, not only on individuals but on the institution qua institution. The structures and systems under which we must operate seem to become ever more complex and demanding. The levels of bureaucracy seem to multiply endlessly. I have heard friends and colleagues in other institutions say the same thing and, now that I am part of the Faculty of Religion and Theology at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, I see my colleagues there living and working under similarly increasing demands.

So I’m writing this book as much for my colleagues and students as for myself, both at Queen’s and in Amsterdam, and for all those myriad others in the church and other professions who seek to live and work according to some moral if not religious compass within compulsive and coercive work cultures that threaten to overwhelm them and suck the lifeblood out of them. I am thinking of colleagues in university departments of Theology no less than other disciplines, those in the Health and Social Services, teachers in primary and secondary education, indeed those who work in just about any professional setting I know – except perhaps those wealthy enough to be able to afford more spacious and kinder working conditions, and to call the shots and charge what they like for their services.

I’m also writing this book for fellow poets and artists who seek to cherish and nurture their vocation to create and yet also have to earn enough to live on. I’m writing 15

Sabbath it, too, for monastics and all who seek to live their lives as contemplatives in a world that eschews silence, solitude and simplicity. Poets and artists, monks and nuns, are not immune from the tensions and struggles the rest of us face.

Indeed, in some ways, they may experience them in a more acute form as those whose vocation puts them at odds with a materialistic and consumerist society (of which I shall say more in chapter 1). Poets, artists and monastics are people I look to for sanity in an insane world, for a sense of what really matters in life. Along with hundreds of others, I go regularly to a monastery – two, actually (Malling Abbey and Glasshampton monastery). I owe much of my sense of faith and the sustenance of my own writing life to these places dedicated to prayer and a rhythm of life attuned to nature and to the needs of the body for rest, manual labour, study and contemplation. And I read poetry more or less every day of my life, and go to hear poets read their work as frequently as I can, for many of the same reasons: to plunge into language sparingly and deeply employed, to seek the wisdom of those who have committed to live as truthfully as they know how, to learn the discipline and the craft of my own art.

Yet poets and monastics feel the strain too. Simon Armitage, in an interview in the Guardian in 2015, spoke of the challenge of building thinking time into a day, and the vital necessity of time for musing, ‘doing nothing’, in the creative life of the mind.1 I have written much of this book at Glasshampton monastery, where I often go, and know from my conversations with the brothers here – as well as the sisters at Malling – how hard they work to maintain the profound quality of peace and spaciousness that is evident to anyone who comes here. The work is endless, the monastic community small and many of the brothers elderly: they easily get tired and worn down by their efforts to preserve the rhythm and quality of life to which they are committed 1

Simon Armitage, ‘Making poetry pay’, The Guardian 26 May 2015: 21-5.

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Pr e f a c e and for which their many visitors hunger. Once a year, I bring a small group of research students to the monastery to housesit for the brothers while they are away on their annual chapter; and this has given me a tiny inkling of the hard work required to keep a large house and garden ticking over, to maintain the daily offices and keep the discipline of silent prayer that is a hallmark of the monastic life.

So I want to offer this book to the brothers at Glasshampton and the sisters at Malling, as well as to my colleagues and students at Queen’s, and my newer colleagues at VU Amsterdam, from whom I have learnt and imbibed so much. I have written it, more widely, for anyone who is seeking to build a life that is faithful to the myriad callings of work, home-making, study, creativity, rest, sleep and play, and to forge them all into an organic form, a shape that will hold.

The shape of the book As I explain in chapter 1, this book follows closely one of Wendell Berry’s many Sabbath poems, the first in his long oeuvre of Sabbath poems written over decades.2 After a general introduction to Berry’s Sabbaths project in chapter 1, and a consideration of the nature of Sabbath and how it may function as both resistance and alternative to our harried, hurried culture, subsequent chapters follow the shape of this poem and explore its key themes and images.

The poem is repeated at the beginning of each chapter, in order to make reference back to the poem easier for the reader. Each time the poem is repeated, a particular phrase, stanza or section is highlighted in bold, to indicate the main focus of the commentary that follows.

Sabbaths I, 1979, This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2013): 7.

2

17

Sabbath In chapter 2, I focus on ‘the invitation into the woods’ which lies at the heart of Berry’s poem and is core to his whole Sabbaths project. The woods represent for Berry the original wilds: the free, uncultivated natural order which is the origin and source of human culture. His poems envisage a constant passage between the woods and the fields, the latter representing land which is cultivated, tended and ordered by human beings but which, without constant labour, reverts to forest. The invitation into the woods is a metaphor, for Berry, of the invitation of Sabbath to come apart from the place of human enterprise, commerce and labour, and to rest in the world-originating beauty of the forest. Of course, the metaphor of going into the woods is an archetypal one, found in myths and fairy stories across the globe and throughout history. Chapter 2 explores the metaphor of the woods, unpacking its range of associations and meanings, and reflecting on the necessary connection between ‘woods’ and ‘fields’: between Sabbath time and space and the everyday, six-days world of work and engagement.

Chapter 3 explores ‘the invitation to cessation’ which is required by Sabbath, the necessary putting-down of our labour and the not-doing which replaces the doing of everyday life, symbolized by silence, rest and the gaps in between any creative human endeavour. Sabbath, I suggest, is the breathing space in our labours, the pause in and before and after the music, the clearing in the woods through which the light comes, the empty dark hours of night in which our minds and bodies regenerate themselves and God gives gifts, treasures of darkness, to God’s beloved. Sabbath is, as my title has it, ‘the hidden heartbeat of our lives’.

‘Heartbeat’ suggests the steady, regular rhythm of the heart which animates the human frame, and without which the organism perishes and dies. Yet Sabbath is a largely hidden undercurrent to our lives, part of its warp and weft. The title is redolent of that phrase in Colossians where Paul speaks 18

Pr e f a c e of the Christian life ‘hidden with Christ in God’ (Colossians 3:3). Not all that orders and regulates our lives is visible; the grounding of our lives in prayer, sleep and Sabbath rest is hidden from view but absolutely vital, just as the not-doing of Sabbath may look like nothing but is, in fact, the core of it.

Chapter 4 goes on to suggest that, whilst Sabbath may or may not be solitary (it usually is in Berry’s ‘Sabbath’ poems, although in Jewish tradition, Sabbath is largely understood as a family affair), it is always conversational. At the heart of the Sabbath call is ‘the invitation to encounter’. This includes conversation with the self and its longings, conversation with others, both near and far, and conversation with God, the source of all life and rest. Sabbath includes the gathering of kith and kin for relaxation, food and refreshment, but it is also a space that is open to the stranger. The Sabbath encounter allows us to engage with the surprising, unexpected parts of ourselves, as well as others who have unexpected gifts to offer.

Two of the four stanzas in Berry’s 1979 Sabbath poem concern a mysterious encounter with something or someone fearful, and this forms the substance of chapter 5: ‘the invitation to fear’. When we put down our tasks, lay aside our professional roles and identities and enter into the dark woods, who knows what we will find and whether we will ever come out again in one piece? If we dare to take the risk of entering Sabbath space, Berry’s poem suggests that we will indeed be confronted by fears, but that these very fears are, at the same time, gifts. As we face the fear of the other, the stranger, the rejected parts of ourselves and the wounded ones we do not want to recognize, gradually the fear leaves us and we hear the music of a song which, we come to recognize, is the gift of our own unique song, our own calling.

Chapter 6, then, goes on to probe this metaphor of the hearing of our own song, ‘the recovery of vocation’. At heart, Berry’s poem is a poem about recovery, remembering, restoration and transformation. The weary speaker who 19

Sabbath comes into the clearing in the woods has forgotten who he is, has lost his voice and his song – his vocation and his very identity – through the monotonous stresses and strains of everyday work. We need Sabbath to step back from the habitual round of absorbing activity in order to bring us back to our senses, to enable us to recover our sense of ourselves: to hear our song and to sing it. Sabbath reminds us that we are made for joy, for beauty, for glory: to shine out with the particular glory that is ours and ours alone and that will reflect, in a way that no other life can, something of the glory of God. Although the woods are deeply restorative, we cannot remain there. Berry speaks of the tension in which most of us live out our lives most of the time, between the solitude and renewal of the woods and the engagement with others and our work in the field. Chapter 7 explores ‘the return to the daily’, the need to leave the Sabbath space and to re-enter our worlds of work, home and engagement. Berry’s poem ends on an apparently unspectacular, utterly ordinary note: ‘the day turns, the trees move’. We come back to ordinariness, to dailiness, to the rhythm of things; but we do not return to the six-days world the same as when we left it. Healed by our Sabbath rest, we return renewed and refreshed, reminded of who we are and of our vocation to sing our own unique song and thus to contribute to the world’s music. We are content to be part of the wonderful diversity of creatures that make up the world, to play our part in caring for the other creatures, and to lift up our voice to join in the many-splendoured canticle of creation, giving glory and praise to God. So we return again to our labour, until the weekly cycle brings us round once more to the first, primal day of Sabbath when, once again, we put down tools and respond to the call into the woods. So our whole lives are embedded in the rhythm of Sabbath which is God’s good and gracious gift to creation.

Each chapter unfolds in a similar pattern. First, the 20

Pr e f a c e central idea or theme is introduced and explored by reference to Berry’s poem and to his wider Sabbath oeuvre. Then I bring in other references, both from Scripture and from other writers, widening the horizon. I root the discussion in my own life and experience, particularly through the use of extracts from my journals and the inclusion of poems of my own at the end of each chapter. Each chapter also provides questions for reflection and prayer at the end, leading into blank pages so that readers can do their own journaling in response to my own. Whilst designed primarily for individual reflection, this feature of the book could also be adapted for group study and reflection (perhaps particularly in Lent), with group members reading and making notes on each chapter in response to the questions ahead of each meeting.

I have kept a journal throughout my entire adult life, and writing in my journal is one of the main ways in which I endeavour to stand back from my life, see it whole – or at least, see it fresh – and find the form again. Poems, too, are primary forms of meditation, prayerful reflection and artful theology – for me and for many; they are language in compressed form, working intensely to reveal truth beyond and beneath rationality. Much of the thinking, wrestling and praying of the material in this book began life in my journal or my poems, and so it has seemed appropriate to include both journal extracts and poems alongside the main prose content of each chapter. My hope is that the different modes of discourse can speak to each other and unfold something of the many dimensions of Sabbath life and experience.

The journal extracts are not ordered chronologically but chosen to exemplify and embody the themes of each chapter.

I have dated them (as unobtrusively as possible, at the end of each extract) for readers for whom it may be helpful to have some sense of their placing in my life. Although I have omitted the odd sentence or two, and sometimes larger sections from these journal extracts where they did not 21

Sabbath seem relevant, and have occasionally tidied up the spelling and grammar, I have not edited them beyond that.

However it is read and used, I hope this book will support both individuals and groups – whether family, church or other community groups – who are seeking to live more healthy, gentle and disciplined lives within the ecclesia and polis which are constrained by so many pressures. I am very aware that, in many ways, I live a highly privileged life, both materially and in other ways that material security enables. I have the luxury of being able to choose solitude and retreat on a fairly regular basis, in ways that others, particularly those (and they are often women) who care for children or dependent partners or parents, cannot do – or can only do rarely and with much forethought and planning.

My ways of thinking about, and practising, Sabbath will be very different from those available to others. Nevertheless, my hope is that my own privileged access to silence and withdrawal can be a resource for others through the pages of this book. If this book encourages others to think more intentionally and critically about the rhythms, patterns and forms of their own working lives – however different from my own – and to seek to practise Sabbath as a form of resistance and an alternative to the destructive, lifedenying forces of the market and the machine that invade and dominate public and private life, including the life of the Church, I will be glad. Let the festival of freedom begin!3

Acknowledgements Those for whom I have written this book are also those to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. My colleagues and students 3 Walter Brueggemann describes Sabbath as a ‘festival of freedom’, in Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now (Louisville: Westminster Knox, 2014): 43.

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Pr e f a c e at Queen’s, over more than twenty years, are some of the best people in the world one could hope to work with, and I know myself to be deeply blessed to be part of such a community, which seeks to model open and inclusive hospitality and to honour the gifts of all within an economy of grace.

As I’ve said, much of this book was written at Glasshampton monastery, a place I have come to love deeply over the past twenty-five or so years since I have been going there. I am deeply grateful for the gift of this place, on the edge of Shrawley woods where, along with others, I come to soak myself in silence and join the brothers’ life of work and prayer for a time. In a different way from Queen’s, yet equally powerfully, Glasshampton is a place of generous and open hospitality, a place where the rhythm between the fields and the woods is played out daily in the landscape and the lives of brothers and guests. And although I have gone there rather less frequently since moving to Birmingham, Malling Abbey continues to be a place of renewal and retreat, and I owe the sisters a debt of gratitude for their faithful love and hospitality over more than thirty years. I am conscious of the twin strands of Franciscan and Benedictine spirituality weaving their ways through my life and shaping my Christian practice over many years. The creation-centred, free spirited, questing Franciscan charism is balanced by the stability, conversion of life and contemplative commitment of the enclosed Benedictine life. I love and need them both, and both strands have contributed to my developing theology of Sabbath.

Besides these communities, particular individuals have contributed to this book in ways they may or may not recognize. Frances and Richard Young first introduced me to the poetry of Wendell Berry many years ago when they gave me a slim volume of his ‘Sabbath’ poems, a gift only exceeded by the gift of their faithful friendship over decades now, since we first met in Cambridge in the early 1980s. John and Margaret Fairbrother, more recent friends, 23

Sabbath welcomed me to Vaughan Park Retreat on the outskirts of Auckland, for three months in 2009 and then again for the Scholars’ gathering in January 2015 which was the occasion that generated the impetus for this book. They are people who embody the free, spacious hospitality of the gospel, that welcomes strangers in, sets a table before them and invites them into conversation and conviviality. Without that gracious hospitality and their friendship, this book would not have come into being.

Donald Eadie, who has accompanied me for many years as a spiritual companion, shows how it is possible to live within the constraints of physical pain and limitation with great trust and receptivity to the life of the world. His small room, where he sits with all sorts and conditions of people, as well as spending many solitary hours of the day and night, has become for me a safe, bounded space where I may yet experience the boundless grace and compassion of God, mediated by a compassionate human other. Donald lives out Sabbath restraint and respect in ways which give me hope for my own advancing years. Within my primary place of work, the Queen’s Foundation, David Hewlett continues to offer me regular and supportive space to reflect on the changing shape of my working life and to encourage me to resist taking on more than I can realistically manage. That I often fail to do so reflects my own struggle to live what I write, rather than any lack in his wisdom.

Particular groups have given me the opportunity to try out versions of the material in the book. I am grateful to participants of a Methodist probationers’ retreat at The Bield, Ilkley in January 2016 and ordinands from the Lindisfarne Regional Training Partnership on their annual retreat in January 2017, for listening and responding to early versions of chapters in this book, and for praying with me some of the material that follows. They helped me to have faith that the ideas and themes in this book could be of value to others.

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Pr e f a c e A number of individuals have read the manuscript and offered comment and feedback. More than that, they have each taught me, by the ways in which they inhabit their own work and faith, something profound about Sabbath.

That David Warbrick, parish priest of All Saints, Kings Heath, Birmingham, not only found time during perhaps the busiest month of a parish priest’s year (December) to read the manuscript, but also to give it his searching and unhurried attention, speaks volumes about the kind of priest and person he is. David exemplifies a priesthood that is generous, humane and hospitable, resourced by serious study as well as astonishingly good cooking. David lives out the kind of commitment to Sabbath that I mostly only manage to write about.

Early on in his time at Queen’s, my colleague Jonathan Dean and I discovered our mutual love of the poetry of Wendell Berry, and that shared pleasure cemented our friendship. Jonathan is someone whose range of responsibilities and workload have quickly grown far beyond what any one person should, by rights, have to do.

Yet his door is almost always open, he manages to look up and smile whenever someone approaches, and he generally gives the impression of having all the time in the world for just that particular person and their precise need, at that precise moment. I hope I might cultivate a measure of his gentle graciousness if I start practising now.

My editor at DLT, David Moloney, warmly affirmed the project from the start, gave me incisive feedback on the manuscript and has shepherded the book through the various stages of production with just the right balance of directiveness and responsiveness. Others at DLT have brought their many skills to the cover design, to processes of copy editing, to marketing and so on. My thanks to Helen Porter, Will Parkes and Judy Linard. I am also grateful to all those who have generously provided commendations of 25

Sabbath the book, many of whom are good friends and colleagues: Gavin D’Costa, Paula Gooder, Malcolm Guite, Deborah Kahn-Harris, Rachel Mann, Clive Marsh and Janet Morley.

Whilst I have been working on this book, my partner, Rosie Miles, has been living through the painful process of taking voluntary redundancy from her academic post at the University of Wolverhampton, where she has worked for twenty years. Her courage in leaving a job that had, over time, become less and less life-giving, in order to follow her vocation to be a writer and a teacher, is matched only by her determination to find – or perhaps make – a new path. There has been something both ironic and deeply challenging that, just at a time when my own working life has never been more satisfying or demanding, Rosie has faced the death and loss of her own professional role (at least, in its institutional form). For much of the past year or so, we have found ourselves in very different places, requiring us both to dig deep and to ask searching questions about our commitment to work, to a life well lived, and to each other. As a poet, Rosie is deeply concerned with the quest to find the right form, for words as well as for her own life, and she has helped me find the form for many of my poems, both inside and outside this book, as well as continuing to work with me to find a form that will hold our life together. For both, I am more grateful than I can say.

As we have continued to wrestle with what it means to discern and support our different, as well as our common, vocations to life, love, faith and art, our two cats, Tinker and Pumpkin, demonstrate the tactile, animal commitment to Sabbath rest and play in a way that invites us into the same. Their presences weave their way through our lives, and occasionally turn up in the pages of this book – quite properly, as anyone who lives with animals will recognize.

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Chapter 1

Sabbaths Introduction Sabbath is a school for our desires, an exposĂŠ and critique of the false desires that focus on idolatry and greed that have immense power for us. When we do not pause for Sabbath, these false desires take power over us. But Sabbath is the chance for self-embrace of our true identity.

Walter Brueggemann4 I go among trees and sit still.

All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.

My tasks lie in their places where I left them, asleep like cattle.

4

Sabbath as Resistance: 88.

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Sabbath Then what is afraid of me comes and lives a while in my sight.

What it fears in me leaves me, and the fear of me leaves it.

It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.

I live for a while in its sight.

What I fear in it leaves it, and the fear of it leaves me.

It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor, mute in my consternations, I hear my song at last, and I sing it. As we sing, the day turns, the trees move.

Wendell Berry5

We n d e l l B e r r y a n d h i s S a b b a t h poems I have long loved this poem, amongst the whole sequence of Sabbath poems that Wendell Berry – farmer, poet, novelist, agrarian activist, cultural critic – has been writing over decades. Born and raised in a farming community in Henry County, Kentucky, Berry gave up a prestigious university career to return to farming in 1965, buying a homestead of his own in order to continue the fivegenerations long family tradition, where he still lives and writes. In the Introduction to This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems, Berry describes his Sabbath forays 5

Sabbaths I, 1979, This Day: 7.

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Sabbaths into the woods where he walks ‘free from the tasks and intentions of [his] workdays’ and in which his mind thus ‘becomes hospitable to unattended thoughts’, ‘to what [he is] very willing to call inspiration’. Out of these forays, out of the mind freed from expectations and open to the sights and sounds and life around him, poems may come. Or not. ‘If the Muse leaves me alone, I leave her alone. To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.’6 The Muse clearly has not left him alone – at least, not for long, and I am among countless readers who must be profoundly grateful for her inspiration. In poem after poem, Berry sounds the depths of the Sabbath theme, writing not only of the human Sabbath in its many aspects and guises, but also of the Sabbath that rightfully belongs to animals, plants and the land, to the planet itself.

This poem, the first of the entire sequence, is one I have often used at the beginning of a retreat or a quiet day, and it is typical of Berry’s wider Sabbath project. Luminescent in its simplicity, it yet teases with a mystery that is part of its gift. Deeply earthed in Berry’s native land and farming practice, in his long covenant with that land, as well as his Christian faith, I believe this poem possesses a wisdom that can serve as a frame for reflecting on the significance of Sabbath. I want to use it throughout this book as a means of holding and illuminating my own reflections on, and experience of, Sabbath and sabbatical time. It offers a series of metaphors which I shall explore in the coming chapters as ways into a range of themes which I believe lie at the heart of the human, and Christian, journey to find a form that will hold our individual and communal lives with their many complex and varying hungers, needs and desires, and their interlocking patterns of work, rest, play and study, solitude and togetherness. Berry’s poem offers a simple but profound 6

Berry, This Day: xxi.

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Sabbath map for my exploration of Sabbath, around which I will weave my own reflections, poems and journal jottings, as well as insights from a variety of other writers – poets, theologians, psychologists, philosophers and naturalists, amongst others.

Berry speaks of ‘the idea of Sabbath ... as rich and demanding an idea as any I know’.7 Like all the great biblical and liturgical rhythms and metaphors, Sabbath is quintessentially simple – one rest day in seven in which to honour God and creation. What could be simpler? A child can grasp it. At the same time, it is an idea of limitless depth, with a spiritual profundity and political bite that are endlessly relevant to any time or place, to all people and cultures.

Most particularly, Sabbath is an ideal vital to those harried and oppressed by the relentless rule of the market and the machine, which dictate so much of human life and the life of the planet: regimes dedicated to ceaseless production and consumption, in which rest and genuine creativity play no part. At a time when western governments ‘fail to acknowledge that infinite economic growth on a planet with finite resources is non-viable’, and ‘irresponsibly promote rampant consumerism and free-market fundamentalism’,8 the ideal and practice of Sabbath are more urgent than ever.

The rule of the money god via the market and the machine As Walter Brueggemann suggests in his little jewel of a book on Sabbath,9 we in the western world (and increasingly in other parts of the globe too) live in just such a regime. The Berry, This Day: xxi.

Open letter by nearly 100 academics to the Guardian, 26 October 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/26/facts-aboutour-ecological-crisis-are-incontrovertible-we-must-take-action 9 Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance.

7 8

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Sabbaths Church, far from being immune to our production-driven culture, very largely apes and applauds it. Productivity, consumption and the drive to succeed are endemic in church life, potent forces that reinforce rather than challenge the achievement orientation of the world. There is a demand for churches to be ‘successful’: numerically thriving, financially solvent and able to attract new members. Many such churches promote a brand of Christianity which is juvenile and idolatrous, a ‘cheap grace’ which promises salvation from all known troubles, success in one’s private as well as professional life, security and prosperity in the name of a god who looks and behaves remarkably like the benign patriarch of big business. This is a religion of works and rewards (and therefore, by default, of failure and punishment), a production machine which has nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus.

In a context of church decline and economic squeeze, such as we have been experiencing in the UK for some time now, the Church as well as publically funded institutions such as universities, may be experienced as hard task-masters. If a parish, theological college or university department fails to recruit, increase its numbers and bring in more revenue, it is threatened with closure or amalgamation – and this is no idle threat, as the shrinkage of theological education in the UK over the past twenty years or so demonstrates, mirrored also in the shrinkage of paid leadership roles in most of the churches, and the retraction of departments of theology as well as faculties of arts and humanities in British and European universities.

Yet the rewards of success are, oddly, no less punitive.

So in a thriving economy and where church membership is booming, some of the same tensions and dilemmas may be seen. If you do well (whether as a church minister, academic or theological education institution), more and more is expected of you, and there seems to be no limit 31

Sabbath to the ‘more’ that can be, or is, demanded. The Church becomes another Pharaoh, anxious about its future and driven by its insecurity to demand more and more from its members and especially its paid representatives: more bricks, more barns, more bums on seats, more innovative mission projects, more training – for less and less. This can manifest as a compulsive, competitive and coercive culture that leaves those who work for it under intolerable pressure, unable to meet the limitless demands, however hard they try. We find ourselves caught in systemic cycles, locked into forms of structural injustice, which operate in spite of the good intentions of individuals, which are self-perpetuating and self-generating. In the end, the system exhausts many who try to live by it (they become disillusioned, give it up, leave), or it breaks them (they become chronically sick or depressed), or it corrupts them (they become little gods in their own religious empires, usurping the worship and the goods that belong, by right, to God alone). In this economy, truth and justice are often sidelined, becoming inconvenient distractions from the ruling law of success. This is what John Hull describes as the rule of the money-god, in which money displaces the rule of God and ‘money has literally become the God of our culture’.10 In this economy, there is no genuine spiritual depth or creativity. It is a system of surfaces. What matters are appearances, rather than the underlying reality. The successful, confident, ever-upbeat Christian whose gospel is relentlessly positive very often hides a seething underbelly of anxiety, addiction, self-hatred and violence that can never be acknowledged or brought into the light of day. The happy Christian family in which every member is fabulously enterprising and successful frequently masks eating disorders, depression, self-harming, physical or sexual abuse.

10 John M. Hull, ‘Money, modernity and morality: some issues in the Christian education of adults’, Religious Education 95.1 (2000):12.

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Sabbaths The culture of success is so brittle it can never admit of even a momentary slowing of its hectic pace, let alone a genuine cessation. It is endlessly driven, constantly in danger of being judged wanting, of failing to live up to the exacting demands of the Master, whoever the Master may be. Depending on context the Master could be anybody from Bishop to Archdeacon to Vice Chancellor to Prime Minister or President, but these are usually merely figureheads for systems which set the rules and maintain the machines of church and political life. The machine never tires or stops, relentlessly churning out units (whether of hay or money or ball-bearings, ceaseless publications or communications), never needing to pause for rest or food or sleep. The machine simply goes on spewing out its works, greedy to be fed more and more so that it can keep on producing. The more one tries to keep up, respond, feed it, the more the machine demands.

An example: emails and digital communication A very good example of this, from which virtually no-one in contemporary life is immune, is email, as well as other forms of digital communication and social media. Quick, reliable, cheap and efficient, emails enable immediate communication at the touch of a button around the world.

I remember the excitement I felt when I was first able to communicate with friends and colleagues around the world, and how email transformed many routine tasks. Yet who now rejoices in their emails? With the possible exception of my 90-year-old father, who probably gets half a dozen emails a week, none of which is urgent, I don’t know a single person who does not experience their emails as a burden. Most of us are checking emails routinely a dozen or more times a 33

Sabbath day, via mobile phones and tablets as well as laptops and PCs, and many of us carry on doing so long after we have left work into the evenings and even in the middle of the night. The boundlessness of internet communication makes it much harder to set and keep distinct boundaries between the worlds of work and home and, while this flexibility may be advantageous in some respects, it is spiritually and psychologically fraught with danger. Indeed, Archbishop Justin Welby has recently named ‘the greatest challenge of the century’ as ‘how to manage the internet’.11 Like all machines, the internet and worldwide web never sleep, generating and proliferating more and more.

Although they require human initiative to function, we often feel as if we are in the grip of something with a power beyond us, that we can’t control. Rather than reduce chatter and clutter in one’s psyche, many of us experience the subtle (or not so subtle) ways in which social media multiply them. Every email responded to almost always generates more, and if one is participating in a group email, it is not unusual for one email to generate a dozen or more replies. The faster one responds to them, the faster the replies come back. The faster we try to placate the machine, the faster it gobbles us up, insisting on more, more, more.

So we become slaves to it, devoting every waking moment to its demands – or, even if we aren’t actually attending to our emails, the thought of them piling up is somewhere there at the back of our minds. We become addicts to the machine – our mobile phones, laptops, tablets, pcs – and for many of us it has become virtually impossible to switch them off, leave them alone for more than half an hour, let alone half a day.

Of course, machines and markets have their uses, and human life depends on them in many ways. They are not 11 As reported in ‘Welby’s “wise men and women”’, Church Times, 26 October 2018: 4.

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Sabbaths adequate, however, and positively harmful, when taken as models for the whole of human living. Berry declares his own antipathy towards machines in a late poem, ‘Some further words’. Admitting that he is ‘constrained to use them’, he nevertheless describes them as ‘dire’ for the ways in which they use up the world’s resources, ‘burning’ its ‘body and its breath’. They are ‘neither mortal nor immortal’, though they may function as if they will last forever. Berry predicts a time when they will be gone, a day he welcomes as ‘a glad and holy day’.12 The spiritual dilemma posed by addiction to electrical devices was illustrated vividly in the three-part BBC TV series, The Big Silence, which followed five individuals of different ages, backgrounds and beliefs – or lack of them – who signed up for an eight-day silent retreat at St Beuno’s, in North Wales.13 Each of the individuals manifested various resistances to entering fully into the silence, and one young woman in particular, Carrie, had a major struggle to switch off her mobile phone, as the retreat required participants to do (along with not sending emails or otherwise talking to anyone beyond the one hour a day with their allotted spiritual guide). Carrie’s mobile phone was her life-line, her connection to the world, her security blanket. By the same token, it was a fetish which kept her from paying full attention to herself and the work of the Spirit in her life. It functioned as a distraction and a protective layer against making herself vulnerable to the silence and to the interior work demanded by the silence. When she finally did manage to switch the phone off and hand it over to her spiritual guide, she experienced a crisis of anxiety and panic, followed Wendell Berry, ‘Some further words’, New Collected Poems (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2012): 360.

13 The Big Silence, BBC, 2010, first shown in December 2010. Available at https://gloria.tv/video/HaC3Bg1yPX632WhatEWqEnSZS Accessed 3.1.19 12

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To HEAL and Not to HURT

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To HEAL and Not to HURT A fresh approach to safeguarding in Church Rosie Harper and Alan Wilson

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First published in 2019 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd 1 Spencer Court 140 – 142 Wandsworth High Street London SW18 4JJ Š Rosie Harper & Alan Wilson 2019 The right of Rosie Harper & Alan Wilson to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1998.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information retrieval storage system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

ISBN: 978-0-232-53394-1 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Phototypeset by Judy Linard Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

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Contents Preface

7

Introduction: A Bad Joke?

13

1. Fifteen Tales from the Crypt 2. Why Pass By? 3. Doing Likewise 4. How do they get away with it?

5. The Way to the Inn 6. The Heart of the Matter 7. Mark 2 8. Empire or Village?

19 68 87 109 122 194 198 201

Appendices

The Cast List 205 Key to Stories 214 The Duluth Power Wheel 215 Bad Lasagne 216 Abusing the Bible 219

5

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Preface

A

t eleven o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 the guns fell silent. One hundred years later one of us stood with 350 people on a crisp autumn day in a Buckinghamshire village, by a newly restored memorial to 39 local people. Over a quarter of the village’s population attended this and other events in church that day.

The other of us was in the Market Square in Aylesbury.

It was teeming with people – families with buggies, bikers, wheelchairs, young people, parents and veterans, the great and the good, emergency and armed services, cadets, Scouts and Guides, pipe band, the lot. The crowds were so dense the parade could scarcely get through. All over the country vast numbers of people gathered in silence to keep faith with the dead, to stand in solidarity, to hope for peace and, of course, to remember.

After silence at the memorial, the Buckinghamshire villagers processed into church. One remembering morphed into another. ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ As a human and as a Christian community it’s what we do.

We remember.

Nobody at either memorial was re-living their experience.

The wartime generation has almost entirely gone. The village church held a special service that evening for those who had been recently bereaved. It was called Remembering with Love, and for an hour a large congregation, almost 200 people, deliberately stepped into a space of recollection. The love and the pain were still there, but with the passing of time memory had been distilled, so that people remembered without having to re-live.

7

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To Heal and Not to Hurt One holocaust survivor has described her experience in graphic terms. What happened to her in Dachau was like a large rock thrown into a still pond. For a while, powerful waves swamped her life. After a few years the surface looked calm. The ripples had gone, but the rock was still at the bottom of the pond. Raising it again made new waves that felt overwhelming. Remembering, for her, meant re-living.

We have learnt there is no such thing as what used to be called a ‘historic case’. The abuser may be long dead, but the pain lives on. We have also learnt that, without compassion for the person concerned, dragging up the stone from the bottom is re-abuse. The Church must learn how to take past disclosures seriously in the present.

Until that happens it is impossible to find restoration and freedom from pain.

The Christian faith is rooted in Remembering. Knowing that he was about to be killed Jesus said, ‘remember me’ and gave his friends a way to do that which is repeated constantly in churches around the world. The Eucharist, at its best, can turn re-living into remembrance, a form of love and thankfulness. A Church with a Eucharistic heart should be a good, safe, and healing place to do all kinds of remembering.

Sadly this isn’t always the case. We are only just beginning to uncover the extent of abuse that has happened.

Increasing numbers of people, with extraordinary courage, are now telling their stories. The Church is trying to respond, in its own way. Considerable resource is being put into making it less likely that people will be abused in church in future.

It’s the remembering part that hasn’t gone well. For most people who make a disclosure, speaking out and telling the story involves re-living it, and that’s where the Church’s response usually makes things worse. This book is an attempt 8

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Preface to change that. Survivors’ painful memories need to be acknowledged and owned by the whole Church community, before they can become a resource and source of wisdom.

When someone courageously speaks out about their abuse, we need to embrace that story, painful though it is, and allow the truth to dawn. When things go tragically wrong, we all have to take responsibility and understand that ‘their’ story is really also ‘our’ story. Then we can share the pain and, perhaps, the healing. Disturbingly, the way the Church has behaved towards them after things went wrong has almost always made things worse, often in life-changing ways.

We have had to pick carefully through a linguistic minefield to work out how to refer to people who have been damaged by abuse. ‘Victims’ has the virtue of conveying the seriousness of what has happened, but with the danger of defining them. Some survivors prefer to be designated as victims because that makes plain that the suffering does not end.

Some prefer the straightforward term ‘abusee’. This has some clinical accuracy, but very few people we have met refer to themselves in this way.

Unless a criminal conviction had been secured, the British Government’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse (IICSA) has referred to abusees as ‘complainants’.

Whilst technically correct, this seems to minimise the position of people who have been assaulted in ways that never came to court, including those whose perpetrators have died before justice was achieved for them in court.

Most people we have met refer to themselves as survivors. This seems to take seriously what has happened and also acknowledge the courage and resilience we have found in so many of the people we’ve met. It also points to future hope. In the end we have chosen this term more often than any other.

9

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To Heal and Not to Hurt A more technical question arises about whether or not to capitalise the word ‘church.’ We have decided to capitalise when the reference is theological or institutional, but not when speaking of a local church or generic term like ‘churchwarden’.

We are both clergy of the Church of England, and almost all the people we have talked with suffered abuse in a Church of England church or school. We do not intend in any way to imply things are better or worse within our Church. It does, however, have its own distinctive challenges in responding well to survivors, which we hope to address in a positive way. We hope our approach may also be useful beyond our own denomination.

We have encountered many professionals along our way, lawyers, insurers, academics, communications officers, and social workers. We believe they all have vital roles to play. That said the Church has the ultimate responsibility for how it behaves, and cares. It needs to embrace its distinctive calling to embody the love of Christ in the real world.

It is hard to know where to begin to thank the hundreds of people who have informed, inspired and helped us in our search for understanding and some way out of the present church crisis over safeguarding. Some of these are themselves survivors of abuse, and we acknowledge the cost to them of all they have given us.

A few have made been particularly generous with time and expertise, including friends, colleagues, lawyers, journalists, experts and academics. In random order: Rupert Bursell, Lisa Oakley, Martyn Percy, Peter Hay, Josie Stein, Matt Ineson, Jo Kind, Jayne Ozanne, Jeremy Pemberton, Andrew Graystone, Lucy Berry, Guy Elsmore, Maurice Tomlinson, Ian Elliott, Graham (Smyth Victim 004), Richard Scorer, Andrew Foreshew-Cain, Linda Woodhead, Gilo, Stephen Parsons, Vicky Beeching, Martin 10

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Preface Sewell, Carrie Pemberton-Ford, Tom Perry, and many others.

We need to emphasise that errors of fact or judgment that remain are entirely our responsibility and not theirs.

We are grateful to David Moloney and his colleagues at DLT for their help and encouragement, and especially for having the courage to publish on such a painful and complicated subject.

We are also acutely conscious of how much, in every way, we owe Tim and Lucy, our spouses and families, especially their forbearance and support in this project.

The guns fell silent on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The Church’s embarrassment and bungling with abuse survivors suggests this could be some kind of eleventh hour for the Church of England. It may well be on the threshold of its own #metoo movement.

Emphatically, we do not want the Church to stop being the Church – rather to start being truthful and authentic.

There are undoubtedly instances where the Church gets it right. We would love to hear from people for whom this has happened. Our pastoral encounters with many survivors have shown us that, as far as safeguarding goes, the Church needs more than cosmetic surgery. It needs a heart transplant.

The Bad Faithed movement (http://www.badfaithed. org) held an inaugural conference, ‘Home Truths’ in London in 2018 dealing with abuse in clergy families. The poet Lucy Berry wrote this hymn parody for it, which drew nods of recognition from many of the survivors who were present:

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To Heal and Not to Hurt In Purple, Invisible With profound apologies to Walter Chalmers Smith In purple invisible, Church only wise, remote, inaccessible hid from our eyes, self-blessed and inglorious.

Lost and in doubt we stand here before you, cast down and cast out.

You’re wholly unhasting and silent as light.

We’re wanting. You’re wasting your chance to do right.

We wither and perish as leaves on the tree.

You blossom and flourish, for naught changeth Thee.

In purple, invisible, Church only wise, remote, inaccessible, hid from our eyes, What help will you render?

Or will you decide to cross, in your splendour, to the other side? © Lucy Berry 2018

Nobody we have met wants things to be like this. We are convinced they don’t have to be. Survivors are not a threat to the Church, but a resource. They are the experts. First and foremost we have tried to listen to and understand the experiences of survivors themselves. The courage, wisdom and insight of many has been our guide and inspiration for this project. There is much to learn together from all they have experienced of the institution we represent. We dedicate this book to them.

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Introduction: A Bad Joke?

O

nce upon a time, a rich young man saw a TV programme about monks who had given up everything to follow Christ. As he watched he became sad and agitated about the gap between his life as a city trader and the simple way of life portrayed on the screen. Longing gripped him. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I must return to my Catholic roots.’ Always a man to start at the top, he decided to go to Rome and discuss the matter with the Pope.

Next week he was in St Peter’s Square. The Holy Father was passing among the crowds, offering prayers and blessings. The city trader stood there in his Armani suit, near an old nun in a wheelchair, a small girl with a bunch of flowers and a filthy old tramp. As he passed along, the Pope spoke to the nun and the little girl but, oh dear, walked right past the rich young man and made a beeline for the tramp, in whose filthy ear he had a close personal conversation.

Why had he been ignored? The man got onto Wikipedia straight away. It said that St Francis swapped clothes with a beggar and forsook his riches. ‘Of course!’ he thought.

‘If I swap clothes with this filthy old beggar, then perhaps the Pope will want to talk to me.’ ‘Dear brother’, he said to the tramp. ‘Let me have your clothes and you can have my Armani suit and the keys to my Ferrari …’

Next week he was back in the Square when the Pope came along. He spoke to an old priest, and a wounded war veteran and then, oh joy! came over to the rich young man in his rags. The Pope leaned in close and personal and whispered in his ear, ‘Look here, buster, I thought I told you last week to get lost!’

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To Heal and Not to Hurt It’s not much of a joke. Its significance is that it was told us by a survivor of abuse. It summed up his experience of the Church. He was angry and more than disappointed to have been ignored, lied to, then blocked by senior ecclesiastical figures.

What happened to him represents a major failure in Christian leadership. The Rule of Benedict (64) instructs the Abbot to order all things so that the strong may have something to inspire them and the weak nothing they need run from.

Bishops were the last people our friend expected to see using their power to protect their own position. The prayer used to consecrate a bishop in the Church of England led him to expect something very different: Give him humility, that he may use his authority to heal, not to hurt; to build up, not to destroy…

Healing is at the heart of Christianity. ‘Healing’ and ‘Salvation’ itself are closely related. In the Gospels, Jesus often says, ‘Your faith has saved you’ to people he has just healed physically.

It involves restoring wholeness and community as well.

Lepers, like haemorrhaging women, are cured physically, but also restored to their communities so that they belong again.

Healing is far more than physical cure.

People have every right, then, to expect the Church to be a place of safety and healing. Local churches are very often exactly that. People find them to be communities in which everyone matters. They show a high level of care and when things go wrong people work hard to try and put them right. In this sense, the local church can be said to be the hope of the world.

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Introduction: A Bad Joke?

If this were the whole story, we would all be in paradise.

But, unfortunately, we are not there yet.

The present authors are pastors. Between us we have racked up almost seventy years of pastoral ministry in the Church of England. In recent years we have listened with increasing dismay to more than seventy people who have had seriously damaging experiences in Church. Most of them describe themselves as ‘Survivors’ and we have used this term for them.

There is a variety of terminology, however, in this area.

The IICSA Inquiry, for example, has a more restricted definition or ‘survivors’. People are ‘complainants’ unless their abusers have been convicted. Many of those we meet, like survivors of John Smyth/Iwerne abuse, were abused by people who evaded the courts. This does not detract from the significance of their experience or the Church’s response to it. Our purpose is not to judge who has or has not been abused, but to resource a better response to them from the Church.

Our encounters have revealed the disturbing degree to which the Church, and especially its senior pastors, can fall short of its healing vocation. Many people have told us about experiences of being blocked, patronised, blamed or ignored. These compound the hurt they have suffered, in a way that amounts to reabuse. This harm is very rarely, if ever, intended. It is still experienced, and cannot be ignored.

How can an institution committed to healing people end up harming them instead?

Most institutions react poorly to being shamed. As the failures of the church are exposed and held up to public scrutiny, the pressure to circle the wagons and do nothing or do wrong actually increases. The shame of the institution works its way out on others, causing more pain. This tends to create more victims, and emotions become entrenched and toxic.

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To Heal and Not to Hurt This book is an attempt to understand why good church people end up doing bad things, when the Christian faith should be able to break the cycle of pain, shame and blame. The cross is the ultimate symbol of shame. It absorbs it in suffering, and in silence and peace it breaks the spiral of violence. It does away with any need for scapegoats, and so brings about truth and reconciliation.

All abuse is ultimately about power. It is particularly wrong when authority is abused in church. As well as instructing his followers to baptise and break bread, Jesus washed their feet and told them to follow his example. He inverts the usual pattern of power relationships.

Confronted by disciples scrapping about their pecking order he rebukes them, and their mothers: You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many‌ (Matthew 20:25-58)

The mark of a healthy and authentically Christian community, then, is not large numbers, inspiring worship, or dogmatic orthodoxy, but the way in which power is exercised within it. This principle applies at every level.

Senior leaders do not get out of its implications just because they are busy, think they are very important or feel overburdened with responsibility.

A Church that does not pay close attention to the way power is exercised among its people undermines its own mission:

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Introduction: A Bad Joke?

I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.

Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.

By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.’ (John 13:34-5)

Gandhi is often quoted as having said ‘the measure of a civilisation is how it treats its weakest members’. If this principle is true, how much more might we expect it to hold in church, which claims to be the first fruits of a new humanity in Christ?

A Church that treats those who are harmed within it appropriately will not only be doing the right thing by them, but will be truer to its core mission.

The kind of progress that is necessary is about far more than protocols, policies and professional practice.

Safeguarding is rightly considered to be everybody’s responsibility. Therefore it cannot be outsourced to social workers, lawyers or insurers.

It is often said that the real issues in safeguarding, whether in religion, sport, media, education or healthcare arise from culture. Institutions have corporate assumptions and routines that are bigger than the individuals who comprise them. Culture, we are told, eats strategy for breakfast. It is the culture that has to change.

In a memorable address, following revelations about Australian soldiers indulging in sexist behaviour, General David Morrison sought to engage the whole Australian army in tackling the cultural context in which this had happened: If you become aware of any individual degrading another then show moral courage and take a stand against it…The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.

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To Heal and Not to Hurt So why do good Christians walk by? In Chapter 2 below we explore some possible theological reasons for this.

Humanly speaking, there is a culture of ‘nice’ in the Church of England. The comedy character Reggie Perrin used to say, ‘You’re not really nice until you know how nice it is to be nice.’ People in churches don’t like to get involved or pry into others’ lives. Usually they want to believe the best of their fellow Christians. That is commendable, but when destructive attitudes and behaviours go unnoticed.

They are soon normalised, and then the most vulnerable people are likely to be hurt rather than healed. Domestic violence, sexism, spiritual abuse and bullying take many forms, especially in a culture where most things are seldom measured, including the use of power. That said, ‘Somebody else should do something about it’ is never an adequate response.

We have tried to show how diverse and complex church culture can be by basing our constructive models and proposals for the future on personal experience in many different areas of church life, not just sexual abuse.

Our purpose is to help people identify places where power is being misused as early and effectively as possible.

Until we are all fully involved and accept moral responsibility for the flourishing of everybody, especially the most vulnerable among us, church life will struggle to be more than a bad joke.

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1

Fifteen Tales from the Crypt

S

afeguarding is about real lives. Therefore we have chosen to ground what we have to say about it in stories we have written, drawn from real experience. All of them, taken together, illustrate different aspects of how going to church can be bad for people.

We understand that our stories may make distressing reading for anyone whose personal experience chimes in too closely with the characters we have drawn. Readers who experience any discomfort can skip this section without entirely losing the thread of our argument. To help, we have provided a cast of characters in Appendix 1 (p. 205ff.) that should help anyone who has not read the tales make better sense of the rest of what we have to say.

This list may also help relate the names we use later to their particular context.

We may also have, unwittingly, used trigger words that touch raw nerves. Even the names we have made up for our characters belong to real people out there. Should something from here play on any reader’s mind, it would be wise to speak to someone like: Minister and Clergy Sexual Abuse Survivors (MACSAS) 08088 010340 (www.macsas.org.uk) Victim Support 0808 1689111 (www.victimsupport.org.uk) Or the police, your doctor, a local Sexual Assault Referral Centre … or your Diocesan Safeguarding Advisor.

It is often said that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’.

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To Heal and Not to Hurt The Church can only deal with abuse by changing its culture.

Our stories identify a broad range of abusive behaviours and attitudes. These include child sex abuse but recognise that power is mishandled in the Church in many different ways. The experiences of spiritually abused young people, bullied ordinands and vicars, narcissistic clergy and victims of domestic violence need to be understood as symptoms of a broader Church culture in which power is used to harm people.

Some of the significant harm people we know have experienced in church is dramatic and some could be thought to be too low-key to matter. Some involves criminal behaviour.

Much involves subtle forms of emotional and spiritual abuse.

Some experiences have been widely reported and others have not and, perhaps, should not be. It is important that all testimonies are heard and can be talked about openly, including those that need to remain anonymous. We have fictionalised so as to be able to describe a wide range of experience, not just those cases in the public domain.

Survivor testimonies are full of sensitive details. Stories have to be real enough to shed light on some very sensitive and painful matters. We need to tell them in a way that respects personal dignity.

Churches are communities where confidentiality is often compromised, sometimes with the best of intentions, like rustling up community prayer or pastoral support.

For survivors, however, broken confidence is usually experienced as re-abuse.

To make it possible to explore the human impact of abuse whilst respecting confidentiality we have remixed many of the things we have been told into 15 fictional miniatures. These speak of incidents that are by no means the most extreme we have encountered. We have chosen to pitch our scenarios in the middle ground so as not to make any survivor we know identifiable.

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Fifteen Tales from the Crypt Many in the Church may have had experiences that resonate with ours. Our tales are fiction, but we can guarantee that everything of substance our characters say is based on genuine personal accounts.

That said, we need to underline a caveat from the movies: The stories, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

It is important to underline that most of what happens in church is far from abusive. Usually in a healthy church everybody is somebody. People relate to others with warmth and respect. At their best churches are societies of friends who find meaning, delight and challenge in each other’s company.

That’s the good story. Millions of people find it in Church of England churches all the time. So why spoil things by telling negative stories? Why not simply look on the bright side of life?

Tales from the crypt are painful. They are hard to tell and to hear. But for the sake of survivors, and the Church’s own wellbeing, it must listen to them, and act appropriately. The problem is not things going well, but what happens when they don’t. A food company may make tasty meals with many satisfied customers. Should one of the company’s products poison anybody, it has to put itself out to understand exactly what has happened and why.

Only by doing that can it address the situation and put things right. Turning a blind eye is not an option: ‘Religions that cannot admit and work to correct their lethal errors and flawed heroes do not deserve to survive. (Daniel C. Maguire, quoted in Elaine Storkey, Scars Across Humanity:

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To Heal and Not to Hurt Understanding and Overcoming Violence Against Women, 2015, p. 187)

Cultures of complacency and denial come easily to large institutions. As one memorable book puts it ‘Mistakes were made but not by me’. To avoid this phenomenon, it is necessary for the Church to pay close attention when things go wrong. Negative experiences become vital opportunities to learn and change for good.

Here are 15 fictionalised miniatures, describing damaging experiences in church. We have tried to draw our characters compassionately, including the perpetrators. It is not unusual for an abuser to have been a victim themselves. People have their own internal reasons for behaving badly. These need to be understood without excusing anything.

Although they are fictitious the situations in which our characters find themselves may well draw wry smiles of recognition from many people who know church life from the inside. We will draw on them later to give substance to the non-fictional part of this book.

1. Mark

Mark was christened at St Agatha’s by Father Archie, who seemed to have been there since the year dot. The vicar was a well-known character in his inner city parish.

People remembered him during the war in his cassock doing his rounds and saying, ‘Hitler’s not going to stop me doing my job.’

Mark’s parents had married late, and he was an only child. They seemed older than his friends’ parents. Pauline, his mother, had felt apprehensive as she wheeled Mark in his buggy up to the vicarage door, but Father Archie had sat her down with a cup of tea and she knew from that moment that she was going to try going to church more.

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Fifteen Tales from the Crypt At the christening, the vicar said, ‘It won’t be long before we’ve got a new boat boy!’

Pauline was really proud the day Mark first appeared in his scarlet cassock and tiny cotta. Stanley, the MC, had trained more boys than he’d had hot dinners.

Father Archie had been the vicar since well before retirement ages came in for clergy. ‘They’ll carry me out of that place one day,’ he said. They did. He made some noises about retiring at 80, but smoking and gin caught up with him the year before in the form of heart failure.

The new vicar was Father Ian. Inevitably he seemed to be something of a new broom. Some didn’t like him, but Pauline said, ‘You’ve got to give him a chance.’

Mark had now moved up in the sanctuary and was really happy serving in church. After some initial jitters, Father Ian got into his stride and the small congregation actually seemed to be growing for the first time in years.

Mark was one of the few who managed to stick with church through his teenage years. He was a shy boy, but he managed his Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, and by 19 was a Queen’s Scout.

He met Anita through scouting. She wasn’t as much a pillar of St Agatha’s as Mark, but was happy that he was. They married young at 24, but Mark found physical intimacy was beyond him. Anita saw a poster at the doctors’ surgery for Relate. ‘We’ll go together,’ she said.

The night before their first meeting Mark and Anita talked properly about sex for the first time. As they talked about themselves, he became progressively more distressed and broke down.

‘Father Ian ruined my life,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ she asked. That’s when everything came tumbling out.

‘Why didn’t you tell anyone?’

‘I did try,’ he said. ‘I told Mum what Father Ian made 23

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To Heal and Not to Hurt me do, but she told me off for making things up.’

‘Well, you’ve got to tell someone now,’ said Anita.

‘Quite apart from what happened to you, he could still be a danger to other kids.’

By next morning, Mark knew Anita was right.

All he’d wanted was to forget what happened with Father Ian, but telling Anita had opened everything up again and it felt raw. He had to speak to someone. Perhaps that would help him put it all behind him.

Five years ago, Father Ian had become an archdeacon in another diocese. Mark and the scouts had put on much of his leaving do. He was secretly sickened by the nice things everybody else was saying about the vicar.

He wasn’t comfortable about telling the secular counsellor at Relate, so he skirted round the subject with her. The following Sunday he went up to Father Robert after Mass and arranged a time to see him privately at the vicarage.

Mark knew and liked his parish priest. He loved being head server, but it wasn’t easy to talk about this. Being in the vicarage brought back memories. He realised he wasn’t as comfortable as he thought he should be, back again where it had all happened.

Father Robert was a good listener. He was deeply shocked by what he heard and promised he would seek advice from the bishop. He prayed with Mark, and there was real concern in his voice as he asked whether there was anything else the Church could do to help.

Father Robert was at Diocesan Synod Standing Committee the next week with Bishop Simon. They had a word together afterwards about the possibility of a curate next year. As they walked to their cars Father Robert said, ‘By the way, I meant to tell you, my head server came to see me last week and he says he was molested a few years ago by my predecessor.’

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Fifteen Tales from the Crypt ‘What?’ said Bishop Simon. ‘You mean Ian Montgomery?

Do you think there’s anything to it?’

‘Mark’s an excellent server, and everybody likes the lad.

I don’t think he’s got it in him to lie,’ said Father Robert.

Bishop Simon looked shocked. ‘His dad was my tutor at St Vincent’s. I reckon I’m only standing here today because of Father Montgomery. Great Man. Turns out he put in a bit of a word for me when this diocese fell vacant. Mandy’s my god-daughter. It’s not good. I know. Why don’t I have a word with Bishop Kenneth? This is very sensitive. Leave it with me, Robert. I know I can trust you. Careless talk costs lives, you know!’

Four weeks later, at House of Bishops, Bishop Simon collared Bishop Kenneth at a coffee break.

‘Bad news, I’m afraid, about your archdeacon Ian Montgomery. New vicar of his old parish says there’s somebody – choirboy or server or something – claiming things happened in the vestry a few years ago.’

‘Ian? No! He’s good. Gets things done. Capable mission-minded Catholic. We’ve got precious few of them around these days. He’s on the preferment list. Poor Ian. What are we going to do?’

‘Why don’t you check there’s nothing in it, your end.

An interview with coffee should do it. I’ll check with my diocesan secretary and registrar and that should do the trick. If the choirboy wants counselling, I’m sure something local can be arranged. The vicar can deal with all that.’

Three weeks later, Bishop Kenneth approached Archdeacon Ian after Senior Staff.

‘We need to have a private word, I’m afraid, Ian. Trouble at the mill. There’s a choirboy at your old place going around saying things were going on in the vestry involving you.’

‘The choir? No. I never had anything to do with them.

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To Heal and Not to Hurt Mrs Bartlett ruled the choir with a rod of iron. That might be actionable. Nothing to do with me.’

That evening Bishop Kenneth phoned Bishop Simon.

‘I’ve had a word with my Archdeacon. Nothing in it. He’s given me his personal assurances he never went anywhere near the choir. The choir mistress was a famous old dragon. The boy must be troubled in some way....’

The night after the next House of Bishops, Bishop Simon phoned Anthony his registrar. ‘Tony, just a passing cloud, I think, but it could blow up in our faces. Robert Gregory’s got a choirboy saying there were goings on in the vestry at St Agatha’s a few years ago. What do I do?’

‘Who knows about it? I’d get straight onto Lucinda at comms and get a statement behind your ear in case anything gets out. Legally, you have to stay out of this one. If there’s a CDM Kenneth will deal with it but you could have to give evidence. You did something about it. That’s what matters.’

With some relief, Bishop Simon said, ‘Okay. We’ll get a statement together. My diocesan secretary can check out any liability issues. I’ll let you know if anything else happens this end.’

He picked up the phone again, this time to his Archdeacon.

‘You won’t know anything about this, Steve, but there’s been a flap at St Agatha’s. Robert says he’s got a choirboy who says things went on in the vestry years ago. I’ve had a word with Bishop Kenneth, who’s interviewed Ian. He’s had personal assurances from Ian that there’s nothing to it.

I’m getting Lucinda to draft us a statement in case the boy goes to the press. Robert can deal with the pastoral side.’

‘Oh heck,’ said Archdeacon Steve. ‘The lad could be really messed up. We could rustle up five hundred for counselling if that helps. I’ll check with Robert. I’m seeing him at the clergy conference.’

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Fifteen Tales from the Crypt Steve had a coffee with Father Robert. ‘Bishop Simon’s told me all about your predecessor’s spot of bother in the vestry.

Bishop Kenneth has checked carefully with Archdeacon Ian, and there’s nothing to it. The boy must be making it up. There is a counselling fund, if that helps sort him out.’

‘No need for that, I suspect,’ said Father Robert.

‘Mark’s got a spiritual director, of course, and this sounds like one for him. I’ll have a word.’

Ten years passed.

Mark and Anita had worked hard at their marriage, but they didn’t make it. They divorced by mutual agreement after two years, with no children involved. They remained friends, but their friendship faded somewhat after two years when Anita married again. A year or so later she moved to Sussex and soon enough had two children.

Mark got his head down at work and in his church and scouting life, but felt life was very empty. Mark’s confidence, undermined by abuse, drained away as the years passed. The ripples ceased on the surface, but the stone at the bottom of the pond was always there.

Bishop Simon and Bishop Kenneth had retired.

One Friday the Church Times dropped through Mark’s letterbox. ‘New Bishop of Axminster’ said the headline. ‘The Venerable Ian Montgomery. Archdeacon of Bardwell ....’

Mark was devastated. Rage welled up in him. He kicked the wall and shouted. ‘Bloody hell! Father Ian? The bastards! They couldn’t! How can they do this to me? This time I’m going to the papers!’

He knew Gemma, a reporter on the local paper. She had helped with Scouting events in the past. She came round to see him that evening.

Dioceses all had Safeguarding Advisors now, and Sheila had recently been appointed by Bishop Simon’s old diocese.

The following week, she phoned Bishop Christopher urgently.

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To Heal and Not to Hurt ‘Bishop, a local journalist has been onto Lucinda for a statement about a man called Ian Montgomery. Someone at St Agatha’s is alleging abuse, years ago. The priest was a man called Ian Montgomery We need to check his blue file and get something out sharpish.’

‘Oh no!’ said Bishop Christopher. ‘Ian Montgomery?

The Ian Montgomery? He was in the Church Times last week. He’s an archdeacon up North somewhere. He’s becoming a bishop. Just got Axminster. The file’s probably gone to Lambeth. This could take ages. I’ll get Lucinda to draft us something. It’ll be a tricky one, though. We haven’t got anything here any more.’

Next month Gemma had written up Mark’s story. ‘Sex in the Vestry –Vicar and Altar Boy.’ Lucinda duly put out her appropriate statement: ‘The Church takes safeguarding very seriously especially the welfare of victims. The case may give rise to a criminal investigation, so it would be inappropriate to comment further.’

The story was a major item at next Senior Staff.

‘How are we going to handle this?’ asked Bishop Christopher. ‘If a reporter came round and poked a microphone at me, could I just feign surprise and say I didn’t know anything about Montgomery? Before my time?

That sort of thing?’

Archdeacon Steve spoke up. ‘I remember this one came up ten years ago. We dealt with it fully at the time.

There was a rigorous inquiry in the other diocese, and they decided the choirboy was probably making it up. Robert Jackson was the vicar. He handled the pastoral side. We offered the lad counselling.’

Lucinda spoke next. ‘We’ve got our statement out. The nationals haven’t picked it up, thank God. Today’s story is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper. I would leave it at that unless something else happens.’

‘I checked with Lambeth,’ said Bishop Christopher. ‘There 28

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Fifteen Tales from the Crypt wasn’t anything in the file. But it says on the back the file was weeded in 2006. Was that Data Protection? That wouldn’t look good if we ever got an inquiry. Lambeth contacted Bishop Kenneth and he says safeguarding was the bane of his life. He had a few of these, but he can’t remember this particular one.

If anything happened, it wasn’t in his diocese, anyway.’

‘What about the past cases review in 2009?’ asked Bishop Christopher.

‘Nothing,’ said Patrick, the diocesan secretary. ‘We found 127 files, so Lambeth revised the criteria down, and we managed to trim them to 32. In the end they only reported two from us. I don’t know how that happened.

We’d certainly have noticed if Ian Montgomery made the shortlist, let alone the final cut. Anyway, technically it wasn’t our diocese anyway.’

Patrick was anxious, though, about liability. Would Insurance cover it? He’d find out. ‘Do we need to get Safeguarding in here with us? Sheila?’

‘I’ve had a word with her,’ said Bishop Christopher.

‘She doesn’t know anything about it. Way before her time.

If anything else happens, I will, of course, brief her.’

Desmond had been the Cathedral Dean for over twenty years.

‘We really don’t need to make a drama out of a crisis,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a few of these down the years and they always blow over. The kid or his parents kick up, but it never goes anywhere. The best way to deal with these people is ignore them. They always go away in the end.’

2. Anna

Anna was 16. She was not brought up as a Christian, but her friend Suzy sang in the local church choir and was always on about her friends and things that happened at church.

Suzy encouraged Anna to come along to choir practice, and although she didn’t think she was particularly musical, she 29

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To Heal and Not to Hurt joined the choir. Soon she was in church most weeks.

One Sunday the vicar announced there would be a confirmation service in a few months’ time and invited anyone interested to sign up for classes. ‘Shall we?’ said Suzy. ‘Vince the curate is running them, and he’ll make it fun. We don’t have to get confirmed if we don’t fancy it.’

‘Let’s,’ replied Anna. ‘I don’t know if I fancy confirmation, but I might just get to fancy Vince!’

Every Friday evening a small group met in the choir vestry. Vince told funny stories. He made everything come alive for Anna. He took what she had to say seriously. She loved that, and when he asked her to do a reading at the confirmation service, she felt really special. It was a shame the classes were finishing, and she was delighted when Vince invited her round to talk about whether it was time to start a youth group at St Michael’s.

That first week she stayed till ten, and Vince gave her a lift home. ‘Let’s meet again next week’ he said. ‘Talking to you means a lot to me and there’s so much we could do.’

‘Shall I come with Suzy?’ Anna asked. ‘I don’t think so,’ said Vince. ‘Too many cooks ....’

Anna thought about their next meeting all week. She was bowled over on Wednesday to get a friend request from Vince on Facebook. On Thursday, she actually got a text from him – ‘Can’t wait for tomorrow.’

Six months later, during netball practice, Anna felt sharp stomach pains. An ambulance was called, and she found herself in A&E. ‘Anna,’ said the nurse, ‘have you missed any periods recently? We’ve run some routine tests.

Do you realise you’re pregnant?’

She felt desolate and utterly alone. There was nobody else, only Vince. She hadn’t gone on the pill because she was afraid her parents would find out. Vince had told her not to worry. Being together was God’s will so she wouldn’t get pregnant.

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Fifteen Tales from the Crypt

3. Jenny

Jenny grew up in a strong loving Christian family. When she was 14 everything about Jesus fell into place for her, and she committed herself to Christ. She joined the Christian Union at University. When she moved to a town in the West Country for her first job, she looked for a church where she could feel at home.

She was delighted to find a proper church – Holy Trinity. People called it HT. Mike the vicar was a dynamic leader, well known for his inspiring teaching. She made good friendships, and soon came to enjoy being part of the church family very much.

About a year later, HT had a rethink on admin and advertised for a Vicar’s PA. Jenny prayed about it and felt strongly called to apply, even though she hadn’t yet got a secretarial qualification as such. She discussed her sense of calling with her house group. They prayed about it together, and this boosted her confidence to go ahead and apply.

She was delighted when she got the job.

Three people worked in the church office, and there were often volunteers and members of the public of one sort or another around. Mike would walk through to his own office at the back in a friendly cheerful way. He saw himself as very much a people person – always there for everybody. He was often quite tactile.

One day Jenny went into work with a migraine. She felt she should probably have stayed at home, but didn’t want to let the others down. Work was far more than a secular job – a real vocation.

She told Mike she was not feeling 100 per cent. He had a powerful healing ministry and she was delighted when he offered to pray with her. She found the experience rather smothering, up close and personal. Afterwards he gave her a big long hug to reassure her God loved her.

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To Heal and Not to Hurt That was the first time she felt at all uncomfortable with Mike, but she blamed herself for that.

When Mike was out at lunch, Fiona the receptionist said, ‘That was a long time with Mike! Are you okay?’

‘What do you mean okay? He’s rather tactile, isn’t he?

I didn’t feel that good about it, but I guess that’s just Mike,’ Jenny replied.

‘Actually,’ Fiona said, ‘we’ve learnt to keep an eye out for each other when Mike’s about. A few years ago, he was rather touchy feely with one of us, and she complained to the churchwardens. They had to have words with Mike about it.’

Three months later Jenny came into work in tears. Her cat, Socks, had been run over, and she was distraught.

Fiona made her a cup of tea, and when Mike came into work, he was very sympathetic. They talked and prayed together, and, again, Mike gave her a big long hug afterwards. Now she felt distinctly uncomfortable especially when, to her horror, she realised he was sexually aroused.

She phoned her mum, who said, ‘You need to get another job!’ Jenny was now in turmoil. God had called her to work for Mike in the church office. It was a vocation not a job. Maybe she was just being oversensitive.

Anyway, if she said anything, would she ever be believed, or would people blame her for leading him on?

4. Peter

Peter is one of London’s rising young barristers. He doesn’t go to church any more except for family occasions, but when he was at boarding school, he had been involved with an Evangelical youth camp. It was targeted at boys from leading public schools. If tomorrow’s leaders could be won for Christ, the nation would be transformed.

Peter was not one of the camp’s success stories.

When he went up to Oxford he tried to get involved 32

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Fifteen Tales from the Crypt in the Christian Union, but sport and a girlfriend who was distinctly cool about Christian things took their toll.

By the time he left, he occasionally went to college chapel, but not Christian Union. Marriage and two daughters added family responsibilities to the demands of study, then a rising career in commercial law. He seemed destined for the top, anyway.

Around his thirty-fifth birthday he was picking up the day’s news after the children had gone to bed. Suddenly he recognised the face of someone he had been at school with.

He turned up the sound. Jolyon was describing in vivid terms life at the Christian camp they had both attended years before. The leader had been sentenced that day to eight years for child sex offences. The story brought memories flooding back.

Peter felt sick. He had suspected at the time something was going on involving Jolyon and others. He had not known what to do about it then, and as faith faded, he had shut off the whole world of camp.

Next day his office phone rang. It was a Tania, a journalist from the BBC. Jolyon had given her Peter’s name, saying that as his former camp officer he must have known something was going on. What light could he throw on the camps, for Jolyon’s sake if not for his own? It seemed that other boys had been involved and were seeking justice after many years.

Peter didn’t really want to have anything to do with the matter, but the reporter was insistent it would help Jolyon.

Perhaps she was right. It could help others. There was no getting away from the stories about the camps. They were all over the media. He felt bad about having said and done nothing all those years before. If he simply blocked her it might even look as though he had something to hide.

He cleared the diary for a couple of hours next day, and Tania came to see him. Strictly off the record he shared 33

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To Heal and Not to Hurt his doubts and memories of all sorts of goings on that had raised his suspicions. Just talking about it brought it all back.

A few boys had seemed especially close to the leader, a kind of personal posse. Rumour had it they had special Bible studies and times of prayer with him. One or two had disappeared suddenly from camp, and stories had circulated in the dorms. The real elite, seven hand-picked dormitory officers, were taken on special camping trips to Wales, where all kinds of off-piste activities were said to have gone on.

Tania was most grateful. He had given her two new names to follow up, and nobody else had told her as much about the Leader’s posse. Could she interview him on camera?

‘Of course not,’ he snapped. ‘Can’t you see this is private? It’s my friends you’re talking about. If it ever got out that I had spoken to the media, they would come after me. That would be the end of my career...’

5. Karen

Karen and David met at University, where they both read English. Initially, David was very much more committed to his faith than Karen, although she was very happy to string along with his Christian activities. They had a CU Bible Study in their digs. That’s where she got to know students like her who took the Bible seriously, not like Sunday School.

They had real faith. After a few months, she gave her life to Jesus. Being a committed Christian became the centre of her life and sharing it with David made it all the more special.

Both became teachers, but the day they married her mum said to her, ‘You’ll end up as a vicar’s wife, you know!’

She just laughed it off at the time, but ....

She prayed every day for her sister Jackie to become a Christian. She was so near but yet so far.

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Fifteen Tales from the Crypt ‘I don’t mind Jesus, Karen, but I just don’t think I could ever be the little woman like you are with David. You actually do obey him. I couldn’t ever do that for a man, however much I loved him!’

Ten years on, David was the Rector of St Nat’s. Life was very full on, with 350 people on a Sunday and a large student ministry. Karen gave up teaching after Asher, their fourth child arrived. Her hands were full, but she still helped lead a life group, and supported David in every way she could. She was protective of him. Lord knows he needed it sometimes, and she felt a secret glow of pride when she overheard people calling St Nat’s ‘David Hamilton’s church’.

Thursday was always a taxing day. Everyone seemed to have something on and needed a lift to it and picking up afterwards. Rebekah had dancing. Reuben went to Impact (the St Nat’s youth ministry). Asher had Little Fishes. Friday was David’s day off, but Karen was often too tired to care.

That Thursday, Leadership Team hadn’t gone well for David. His women’s minister, Emma, was usually very good in team meetings, but that day she had argued, and David felt she was getting at him. Karen had got the children off to bed, loaded the dishwasher, and was ready to fall into bed herself.

She was already asleep by the time David came up from his study and joined her. As he climbed into bed, she turned over with her back to him.

David felt angry and rejected. First Emma. Now his own wife.

‘Come on, Karen, I’ve had a hell of day!’

She turned her back more deliberately.

Then something snapped for David. Roughly, he grabbed her shoulders and pushed himself down on her ....

Next day both were sullen.

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The Sacramental Sea A Spiritual Voyage through Christian History

Edmund Newell

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd 1 Spencer Court 140–142 Wandsworth High Street London SW18 4JJ © 2019 Edmund Newell The right of Edmund Newell to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 ISBN 978-0-232-53396-5 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version. ‘Sea-Fever’ is included by permission of the Society of Authors as the Literary Representatives of the Estate of John Masefield, and the extract from David Scott’s poem ‘Skellig Michael: A Pilgrimage’ by permission of Bloodaxe Books.

Phototypeset by Kerrypress Ltd, St Albans, Hertfordshire, AL3 8JL Printed and bound in Great Britain by Short Run Press, Exeter

For Susan, Sarah and Matthew

Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

The Deep Beside the Syrian Sea A Vast Sea of Mystery A Desert in the Ocean To Unpathed Waters, Undreamed Shores The Book of Nature The Sea of Faith To Sound So Vast a Deep The Oceanic Feeling The Sacramental Sea

9 23 33 45 59 75 89 103 117 133

Bibliography 147 Maps 157 Index of Scriptural References

161

General Index

163

Preface The idea of writing this book came, appropriately, from out of the blue. In the spring of 2007 I was invited to lead the BBC Radio 4 Easter Sunrise Service.

At the time I was a Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, and I was asked by the producer to offer an early morning reflection for Easter Day while looking across London from the Golden Gallery at the top of the cathedral’s famous dome. This proved more problematic than expected, for although the view is undoubtedly magnificent it is not the sort that naturally stirs religious feelings – at least in me. Gazing across an immense urban landscape speaks to me more of human ingenuity than of God. So I had to work hard to develop a reflection that was uplifting for listeners and yet honest to my own thoughts and feelings. It proved to be an interesting and important spiritual exercise, and the catalyst for writing this book.

In preparing for the broadcast I became aware of the importance of the natural world – especially the sea – to me spiritually. Looking down from the dome I could see the river Thames; the early morning sunlight shimmering on its surface, snaking through the city. The presence of water in the urban landscape brought a quality to the vista that is hard to put into words. It reminded me that the view which stirs my soul perhaps more than any other is to look out across the Bristol Channel from one of Exmoor’s magnificent hog’s back cliffs. Had I been asked to broadcast a reflection from, say, Foreland Point, one of the highest cliffs in the country, near Lynton and Lynmouth where I grew up and to where I return time and time again, writing the script for the broadcast would have been relatively straightforward, as there is so much I could have said about the view out to sea.

The experience of recording that service turned my attention to the question it raised: why does the sea and coastline have such an impact on me? Is it because of its familiarity or association with my childhood? After all, when I was less than one year old my family moved to the North Devon coast. From our house, perched on a hillside some 600 feet above sea level, we looked across the Bristol Channel. I remember as a child watching ships go by and wondering where they had come from and where they were going.

I remember, too, the excitement of watching the hull of Brunel’s Great Britain

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being towed to Bristol from the Falkland Islands, and the unexpected sight of a submarine surfacing as I was looking out to sea. At night, I was often transfixed by the beams cast by the lighthouse on Foreland Point and the distant lights of South Wales, wondering what it was like to be on the coast across the channel, which seemed another world to me. From my bedroom I could also hear the roar of the waterfalls from the nearby West Lyn river as it plunged down towards the sea, and where, in August 1952, its waters converged with those of the East Lyn to wreak havoc by ripping out the heart of the seaside village of Lynmouth and its community, by taking 34 lives.

Later, I became a regular visitor to Lundy, the island twelves miles off the North Devon coast that I could see from my school in Ilfracombe. On Lundy I became mesmerised by watching sunlight shimmer on the vast expanse of Atlantic Ocean stretching out to the to the west, and it is where I had the eerie experience of climbing down a cliff to explore the wreck of the Kaaksburg, a German cargo ship that had run aground on the island in the winter of 1980, fortunately without loss of life.

The sense of being at home by the sea is clearly important to me, but numerous conversations spanning my work on this book have made it abundantly clear that the call of the sea, in its various forms, is widespread and can be deeply spiritual. Whether it is living by the sea, sailing, swimming, surfing, exploring beaches and rock-pools, or walking along sea-cliffs, many of those who have shared their experiences with me have spoken about an attraction to the sea in almost religious terms. I began to wonder why.

What I was also aware of, but had not thought about systematically before embarking on this project, is how frequently the sea is mentioned in the Bible, often with negative connotations. This led me to consider two further questions: do the stories of Noah and the Flood, Jonah and the whale, the parting of the Red Sea, Paul being shipwrecked, and the many other biblical references to the sea share anything in common; and why do so many of these stories portray the sea negatively? These, then, were my starting points, and the book flowed out of these initial questions.

Given that the idea for this book originated at St Paul’s Cathedral, which I left in 2008, it is appropriate that the impetus to finish it came in 2017 when I was invited back to take part in the Just Water programme – an international environmental project organised by St Paul’s in collaboration with St Paul’s Cathedral Melbourne, St George’s Cathedral Cape Town, and Trinity Church Wall Street. As well as returning to speak, I contributed an earlier version of

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this work to a special edition of the Anglican Theological Review linked to the Just Water project, under the title ‘The Sacramental Sea’ (volume 100, no.

1, Winter 2018), and it used here by permission of the Anglican Theological Review. Writing this article honed my thinking on how to structure the book, thanks to the challenging and incisive comments of the editors of the special edition of the Review, Scott Bayder and Barbara Ridpath, then Director of St Paul’s Institute.

I am grateful to many others as well who, in various ways, have helped me along the way. My former colleagues at St Paul’s provided me with the time and space to begin the research during a sabbatical. Much of the sabbatical was spent at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Wales, Lampeter (now University of Wales, Trinity St David). My time at Lampeter proved immensely productive and enjoyable, and I learned much from discussions with members of the department, especially Thomas O’Loughlin and Jonathan Wooding. Participants at the fourth Blue Mind Summit in Cornwall, theology summer schools at Oxford and Lampeter universities, a retreat at Lee Abbey, a quiet day at Douai Abbey, and a seminar at Westminster Abbey Institute provided helpful comments as I tested out ideas. Sabina Alkire, Nick Bicât, Nigel Biggar, Ian Bradley, Michael Depledge, Paul Edmondson, Ishrat Hossain, Christina Li, Verena Schiller, and Brian Shoemaker have all offered suggestions, helpful comments or advice. Rosemary Peacocke and Hannah Stammers provided much needed research assistance. Zoe Bicât and Amanda Piesse read and commented on the final draft with great care and insight. Phil Hind, Kitty O’Lone, Emmy Stavropolou, and Helen Taylor have kindly helped develop related website and social media content. It has also been a pleasure to work with David Moloney, Will Parkes, and Helen Porter at Darton, Longman and Todd to bring this project to its conclusion. I am deeply grateful to them all.

There are a further six people, living and departed, without whom this book would not have been written. My parents, Ken Newell and the late Mary Newell, made the decision to take their family to live and grow up by the sea, for which I am extremely thankful. The late Robin Craig was not only an inspirational teacher of maritime history when I was an undergraduate, but a good friend who taught me how to think about the sea. Robin died a fortnight after I began working on this book, and I often wonder about the conversations we might have had if there had been opportunity to discuss the project with him. Finally, my wife, Susan, and children, Sarah and Matthew, have lived with this project – in Matthew’s case, all his life – and have been my companions on numerous expeditions to coasts and islands. In the process

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they have endured foul weather, choppy seas and, on several occasions, violent storms when we have been camping on remote coastal sites. They have also tolerated absences from the home when I have needed time away to think and write. Without their love and support I simply would not have been able to work on this project on and off over the past eleven years, and so this book is dedicated to them.

Cumberland Lodge, Windsor Great Park April 2019

Introduction Odi et amo may well be the confession of those who consciously or blindly have surrendered their existence to the fascination of the sea.

Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea

There is something about the sea that is both enticing and fearful, so much so that, as Joseph Conrad (quoting the poet Catullus) observed, it can draw out the strongest feeling of attraction and its conflicting shadow-side: odi et amo, ‘I hate and I love’. Conrad should know. In 1874, at the age of 17, Jósef Korzeniowski, to use Conrad’s real name, heard the sea’s call and travelled from his native Poland to the south of France to join the crew of the Mont Blanc. As he set sail from Marseille on a voyage to Martinique so began for Conrad a long career at sea, during which he experienced its thrill and exhilaration, felt its peace and tranquillity, survived terrifying storms, and watched colleagues drown. Such tragedies failed to diminish his passion for the sea, but they certainly removed any false illusions about its attractions.

When Conrad turned to writing he became a most astute observer of life at sea.

Conrad also wrote, ‘The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.’1 The sea plays an important role in many religions, not least Christianity, where the ambivalence Conrad describes is particularly apparent. The majority of biblical references to the sea draw on its negative connotations, yet there are many accounts within Christian literature of people feeling spiritually uplifted, or close to God, on or by the sea. This book explores these contrasting attitudes within Christianity and shows how they have changed over time. In doing so, it seeks to show that there is a deeply sacramental quality to the sea. ‘Sacramental’ can refer to specific religious rites, such as baptism and communion. It can also refer to something that, to quote F. W. Dillistone, ‘holds more of value or significance within it than at first meets the eye.’2 It is this latter, broader, understanding of ‘sacramental’ that is used throughout this book, which seeks to show that the

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sea speaks more powerfully of the complexity of our understanding of God, and our relationship with God, than perhaps anything else. As will be seen, this adds a particular theological dimension to the pressing environmental issues of marine pollution and rising sea levels.

A key reason for the sea’s sacramental quality is that it is widely perceived as ‘other’. This, too, is something discussed in the pages that follow, together with how our perception of the sea has shaped Christian thought and spirituality as well as more ancient religious and philosophical traditions that Christianity has drawn upon, including Platonism and Celtic nature worship.

While exploring the influence of the sea on Christianity involves venturing into uncharted waters, even a cursory reading of the Bible makes it clear that the sea plays an important role in the story of salvation that runs through it as a continuous thread. From the stories of creation, the Flood, and the crossing of the Red Sea in the Book of Genesis, to the exploits of Jonah, the trials of Job, the apocalyptic visions of Daniel, the miracles of Jesus, the missionary journeys of Paul, and the vision of the new Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation, the literal or symbolic presence of the sea is crucial. In fact, as will be suggested, the biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and the vision of re-creation in the end times cannot be fully explained without reference to the sea, such was its significance in the thought-world of the 1,300 year period during which the books of the Bible were written.

Shaping the biblical imagery of the sea are the experiences of generations who have encountered it in ways best described as ‘spiritual’. What was the case for ancient civilizations has also been true throughout history and continues today. Consequently, the ‘spirituality’ of the sea is rich and varied.

As will be seen, the sea has provided the context for an important strand of Christian asceticism and monasticism, particularly in the Celtic rim of Western Europe, elements of which have been resurgent in recent years through the growing interest in Celtic Christianity.

The sea has been used by numerous theologians and spiritual writers who have gleaned from their own experiences images and metaphors for expressing what is ultimately inexpressible – the nature of God. The sea has also inspired generations of artists, poets, novelists, playwrights, musicians, and film-makers who have found its varying moods not only fascinating but an impulse for creativity, often with religious connotations. The sea’s mysterious depths have fascinated psychologists, who see parallels with the human psyche and perhaps even the soul. Those who live on the coast speak, too, of the profound spiritual effect the sea has on them, as do those who go to sea for work or leisure, as their lives straddle safe and familiar surroundings

Introduction

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on land and unknown and dangerous elemental waters. Exploring how the sea has been interpreted within Christianity therefore requires looking closely at this broader spiritual dimension as well.

The importance of spirituality as a tool for theological enquiry is now widely recognised, having long been treated with suspicion because of appearing irrational; that is, because of its association with emotional feelings.

If theology is regarded as an intellectual, scholarly pursuit, then spirituality is seen more as experiential. Yet it is only by examining the wide range of experiences of our interaction with the sea that we can understand the sense of ‘otherness’ that it evokes, an evocation which underlies the biblical texts and subsequent theological reflection. And so this book draws from a wide and varied range of sources across history, including not only the work of biblical scholars and theologians, but sailors, travel writers, oceanographers, marine biologists, geographers, psychologists, and psychiatrists, as well as the accounts of many others who have recorded having religious or spiritual encounters with the sea.

The lure of the sea is a fascinating area of enquiry. So, too, is the study of the social and geo-political contexts within which the Christian story unfolds. The sea has helped shape nations, communities, individuals, and their beliefs. Cultures are often defined not so much by political boundaries but by those that are natural, such as coastlines. Thus, it is possible to speak of the Mediterranean not only as a sea but as a region where people of different countries, languages, and religions share much in common because of the way they interact with the water around which they live. As will be seen, this regional dimension was especially important for the development of Christianity as it spread from its roots in the Middle East.

From a British perspective, being an ‘island nation’ – or more accurately an archipelago – has many implications, some of which are shared by other such countries. For millennia, the sea has formed a border across which invaders and missionaries have ventured. It has provided a means of transport and communication around the British Isles and further afield. The sea has been a natural defence barrier from armed invasion and diseases such as rabies, a source of food, a battlefield, and a playground. The sea helps determine indigenous wildlife, such as the absence of snakes from Ireland, as well as shape climate, and therefore flora and fauna. Perhaps, too, the psychological effect of the separation by water of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales from mainland Europe may partly explain the outcome of the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union.

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Britain’s place in world history, including its role in the Christian mission, has been greatly influenced by phases of maritime supremacy. This is apparent in one of the most influential religious works in the English language, The Book of Common Prayer. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s 1662 Prayer Book, which is a formative text throughout the Anglican Communion (and, of course, first disseminated across the world by sea), contains ‘Forms of Prayer to be Used at Sea’. Significantly longer than the section on marriage, it includes daily prayers for the navy; prayers for use during storms, before and after a battle, and for the enemy; various thanksgivings following storms and tempest, and an order for burial at sea. Interestingly, when the Prayer Book was due to be revised in 1928 these prayers were left intact, while the more recent Alternative Service Book 1980 and Common Worship of 2000 contain no modern language equivalents.

A growing area of academic research is the study of ‘place’: how we interpret locations, how we interact with our surroundings, and how the resulting sense of place shapes our personal and cultural identity. Studies crossing the boundaries of anthropology, geography, and sociology have spawned the new discipline of ‘geosophy’, to which contributions have been made recently by theologians such as David Brown, John Inge, and Philip Sheldrake. It has long been the case that people have been drawn to particular locations for religious reasons, and certainly in Britain and Ireland many sacred sites are by the sea. George McLeod, founder of the modern Iona community, famously described the island of Iona on the west coast of Scotland as a ‘thin place’, where the boundary between Earth and Heaven seems porous. Others would say the same of Holy Island (Lindisfarne) on the Northumberland coast; Bardsey Island, the supposed burial site of ‘twenty thousand saints’ off the Llyn Peninsula of north-west Wales; and Skellig Michael, the dramatic monastic settlement – and now UNESCO World Heritage Site and Star Wars set – off the Dingle Peninsula of south-west Ireland. This notion of the ‘thin place’ will also be explored in the pages that follow.

Living on the edge of land and sea is a formative experience for many people across the world. In Britain, with its 19,000 or so miles of coastline, many lives have been shaped by the sight, sound, and smell of the sea, and its changing temperament. A significant question for those interested in the theology of place is how God is mediated by a particular location. There is a deep truth in Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘Prayer’ that reflects on how familiar places and experiences can have a spiritual dimension – even listening to the shipping forecast: ‘Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer – / Rockall.

Malin. Finisterre.’ A Christian understanding of place may be expressed in

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5

many ways, including local customs, liturgies, hymns, church dedications and decorations, and there is much to explore here from the perspective of those who live by the sea. Again, this is something this book explores.

Despite Britain’s rich maritime heritage, popular awareness of the sea has diminished considerably in recent decades. This has much to do with the vast growth of air travel and, more recently, the opening of the Channel Tunnel. Since the first half of the twentieth century it has been possible to leave mainland Britain in ways other than by sea. These, together with the downsizing of the navy, the collapse of a once significant shipbuilding industry, the decline of fisheries, and the decreased popularity of British seaside resorts have all contributed to a reduced awareness of the sea that surrounds us. Perhaps Britain’s most important maritime activity today is decidedly land-based and hidden from public view. Through Lloyd’s of London and the Baltic Exchange, the City remains the world’s main centre for marine insurance and the hub of international shipping. Yet these important service industries are no longer located cheek-by-jowl with the great centre of trade from which they emerged. The Port of London today is a shadow of its former self, when it was at the heart of international commerce.

National awareness of the sea in Britain has diminished significantly since the Second World War. Not only was it widely recognised during the war that the sea provided a final defence against invasion, but public consciousness of the dependence on sea travel was intensified when the German navy attempted to starve Britain and stop imports of armaments and other vital equipment. This posed a severe threat and was an important factor behind the introduction of rationing, affecting the daily lives of everyone. Public attention was focused on shipping and what Winston Churchill termed ‘the Battle of the Atlantic’. In this conflict, which Churchill said was ‘the only thing that ever frightened me’, over 5,000 allied ships were sunk and 100,000 lives lost on both sides. It was a time of acute awareness – both positive and negative – of being an island nation. For the post-war generations such awareness has all but vanished, although the grounding of aircraft across Europe in 2010 because of the spread of ash from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland gave a temporary reminder, when stranded travellers returned en masse to Britain on crowded ships.

If the sea is no longer in the forefront of our minds, it still surrounds us and remains vitally important to our existence. Over 90 per cent of international trade is transported at sea, and the English Channel remains one of the world’s busiest routes for commercial shipping. Much of what we eat, wear, and use will have travelled perhaps thousands of miles across water,

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on ships crewed by sailors whose daily lives are significantly different from those of us who live on land. Furthermore, advances in technology allow us to search beneath the sea or sea-bed for resources and to exploit its power. As we have become more aware of the finitude of the Earth’s resources, the sea and sea-bed have come increasingly to our attention as we seek new sources of raw materials and energy. We are interacting with the marine environment in new ways, as we pit our entrepreneurial spirit, ingenuity, and insatiable appetite for economic growth against the natural challenges the sea poses.

What is bringing the sea back into our consciousness most of all, however, is not the opportunities it offers, but the threats it poses and faces. The large number of fatalities among migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean in over-crowded or unseaworthy boats is a disturbing reminder of the dangers of being at sea, and of how the most vulnerable people are often those most at risk. The shocking and heart-breaking photograph of a soldier carrying the body of three year-old Alan Kurdi, which had been washed up on a Turkish beach in September 2015 after his family tried to flee the war in Syria, will surely be one of the defining images of the early twenty-first century.

In contrast to horrific pictures of human suffering, the BBC television series Blue Planet II used stunning visual imagery to highlight the devastating impact of ocean plastic pollution on marine life and the food chain, and has helped champion campaigns to reduce plastic waste. While pollution poses one threat, climate change is causing sea levels to rise, putting lowlying coastal areas and delta regions and their populations at risk. It is hard to project accurately the likely extent of rising sea levels in the twenty-first century. The complexity of analysing the combined effects of the thermal expansion of seawater and the rate of melting glaciers, ice-caps, and ice-sheets means we cannot be sure what will happen in the long run, and much of the data and its analysis remain controversial. What is incontrovertible, however, is that sea levels are rising. If they rise by 83cm over the remainder of this century, as many predict, this would be enough to cause devastation to lowlying places such as Bangladesh and the Maldives, and put the Netherlands, and even London, in danger. It is salutary to note that the Thames Barrier, London’s sea defence, was closed 182 times between 1983, when it came into operation, and February 2018 – 95 times to protect against tidal flooding and 87 times to protect against combined tidal and fluvial (river) flooding, with 50 closures in 2013-14 alone.

As a result of climate change, the sea is beginning to re-emerge in the public consciousness in ways akin to the biblical perceptions of threat and danger. Startling images from around the world of flood damage, coupled

Introduction

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with increased awareness of the impact of rising sea levels around coastlines, are having an impact. Not only are they rekindling a sense of awe and wonder of the waters that presently cover over 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface and account for over 95 per cent of its environment that can sustain life, but they are also reminding us of the sea’s destructiveness and our inability to control its immense power. We are living in what is termed the ‘Anthropocene’, a geological age for which there is overwhelming scientific evidence that human activity is having an unprecedented impact on the environment. The fact that humans are responsible for climate change means that today’s rising sea levels call to mind the story of the Flood and of divine judgment on humanity. An ancient myth is re-emerging as a timeless myth, and those of us who have lost awareness of the sea and its devastating power are becoming conscious of it in a disturbing way, sharing with our neighbours in coastal regions and islands across the ‘Blue Planet’ a renewed sense of the sea’s presence.

In the light of this returning awareness of the waters that surround us, this book seeks to articulate what is often felt but seldom put into words: how we interact with the sea, not so much physically (though that is part of it) but spiritually, from the perspective of religious faith. The task before us is to put this into the bigger picture of two millennia of Christianity, and finally to offer a contemporary theological and spiritual response to this interaction.

To do this, we begin by exploring the role the sea plays in the Bible – first in the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament, and then in the specifically Christian scriptures of the New Testament. In the process we will discover that in this remarkable and diverse collection of 66 books it is possible to discern a continuous thread that stretches from Genesis to Revelation in which the sea plays a vital role.

From biblical times we move into the early centuries of Christianity, as the faith was spread by sea travel and stretched the minds of those whose world-view was shaped by their encounters with the sea. This takes us on to consider the arrival, by sea, of Christianity to the British Isles, and the development of monasticism and the distinctive way it was shaped by coastal and island locations. From there, we consider how the ‘age of discovery’ changed perceptions of the sea and geography from a religious perspective, as did later advances in science. The impact of social change in the eighteenth century is also considered as a factor in altering attitudes towards the sea. This then leads us to consider the association of the sea with religious experience, and finally its sacramental nature.

This is an ambitious sweep, and if this book can be likened to a ship’s log, it is more akin to a log for a voyage of discovery than for a cruise to

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The Sacramental Sea

a well-known destination. Taking the analogy one step further, the point of departure for a voyage is often safe and familiar, and so it is here. Any theological study of the sea must take into account one of the best known pieces of religious literature: the story of creation in the opening passage of the Book of Genesis, and it is from here that the voyage begins.

1 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus (New York: Doubleday, 1914), p. 47.

2 F.W. Dillistone, Christianity and Symbolism, (London: Collins, 1955), p. 15.

1

The Deep The idea of ‘the Deep’ is so powerful that if we listen to the word as we say it a shiver may pass through in recognition of all the associations it has jarred into resonance.

James Hamilton-Paterson, Seven Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds

‘In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind swept over the face of the waters’ (Genesis 1:1-2). With these sonorous words the Jewish Bible begins and so also the Christian story of creation, fall, and salvation. It is where this book begins as well, for there can be no better starting place for an exploration of the sea in Christian thinking and spirituality.

The opening of Genesis is familiar to believers and non-believers alike.

It is loved for its mysterious beauty and evocation of an existence before the dawn of time. It has also become controversial, and widely debated by those working at the interface of science and religion. Yet, despite its familiarity, it says something that is all too easily overlooked. It describes the original state from which the cosmos is created as a vast expanse of water: ‘the deep’ (tehōm in Hebrew). Earth is a formless void – nothing – but there is substance in the form of a primordial ocean. It is an image rarely commented on in the vast and varied literature where Genesis is mentioned.

What is also significant is that nowhere in Genesis does it say ‘God created the deep’. According to Genesis, before creation takes place there is darkness and a void (so there is no light or solid elemental material) but there is water, the surface of which is agitated by the Spirit of God as if by wind. There is no suggestion here of God creating the deep ex nihilo (out of nothing); that

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The Sacramental Sea

is a later concept in both Christianity and Judaism. If anything, this passage is suggestive of the deep as eternal, co-existing with God. The opening of Genesis should be regarded neither as a scientific description of creation nor a creation myth, but rather as a statement of faith about the relationship between the Creator and creation. The point of this is to say – clearly and boldly – that the God of Israel is in total control of the cosmos. The choice of symbolism is significant. Underlying the Genesis story is a profound sense that this primordial ocean lies mysteriously outside what was understood as the created order. The deep is something ‘other’: it is the pre-creation chaos out of which God brings order to create the cosmos. The deep therefore represents what is otherwise uncontrollable and untameable.

The theological point being made is that if the God of Israel is able to tame and control this primordial chaos, then that God is truly omnipotent.

This powerful image of ‘the deep’ lies at the heart of the Judaeo-Christian understanding of the sea. As Genesis goes on to describe, it is from the parting of the deep that ‘the waters that cover the earth’ – seas, lakes, and rivers – are formed. In Genesis, these vast expanses of water are seen as the tamed part of the primordial chaos that bring a strong sense of timeless ‘otherness’ into our ordered everyday existence. Similar ideas are found in creation stories elsewhere, and it is almost certain that ancient Israelites drew from those of neighbouring religions and cultures and wove into them a distinctive Jewish theology. What distinguishes the Genesis story from others is that it portrays God as purposeful, and firmly and serenely in control. In contrast, Ugaritic, Babylonian, and other Middle Eastern stories speak of the creation of the Earth as almost an accidental by-product of a violent cosmic battle involving sea gods. More akin to the calmer, deliberate Jewish understanding of creation is that found in Islam, where the Koran describes the throne of God as being upon water. Similarly, in the creation story in Hinduism, the divine swan Hamsa, swimming on primordial waters, hatches the golden egg of the Earth. This explains why, in India, the divine presence is sometimes symbolised by a lotus leaf floating on water.

In a similar vein, stories parallel to that of Noah and the Flood found in Genesis are also widespread across religions, sharing the theme that humanity is punished and purged of its sinfulness by a divinely ordained flood. Such narratives are found in Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and religions of the Far East; among the ancient stories of the indigenous people of Australia, the first nation peoples of North America, Mayan and Aztec cultures in South America, and communities in Hawaii and other Pacific islands; and in Scandinavian, pre-Christian Celtic, and classical Greco-Roman mythology.

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Of course, it is possible that some of these stories developed independently, as peoples in different parts of the world sought to make sense of their experiences of devastating floods through the lens of their religious beliefs. It is also likely that the kernel of the story was transmitted across some religions and cultures.

There is certainly a striking similarity between the story of the Flood found in Genesis and that in the much earlier Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, which was discovered on clay tablets by the English archaeologist and politician Austen Henry Layard in 1839, during an excavation of the ancient city of Nineveh in what is now Iraq. The Epic of Gilgamesh is generally regarded as the oldest surviving significant work of literature, probably dating from the third millennium BCE, and its parallels with the much later biblical story of the Flood are striking. In Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian gods are so displeased with the noise of humans that they decide to exterminate them all. However, Ea, the god of wisdom and one of the creators of humans, succeeds in saving one good person, Utnapishtim, telling him in a dream to build a boat and take with him the ‘the seed’ of all living creatures. After obeying this instruction, Utnapishtim, his family, and all creatures on board are saved from a devastating flood, with the boat settling on a mountaintop from which Utnapishtim sends out a dove. Given that Gilgamesh predates the story of Noah by at least a thousand years, it is hard not to believe that it lies behind the biblical Flood narrative.

What is immediately striking about Genesis and related Middle Eastern texts is how negatively the sea is portrayed: it is both chaotic (the deep) and destructive (the Flood). The more celebratory way water is generally perceived in religions throws this negativity towards the sea into sharp contrast. Water holds a special place in Islam, for example. The Koran states that water is the source of all life, with every living thing made from it. Perhaps there is a link here with Genesis, and the idea that the deep pre-exists created matter.

Also, for Muslim pilgrims on Hajj or Umrah to Mecca, a required ritual is to drink from the Zamzam well which, according to Islamic belief, sprang up miraculously on the spot where the thirsty infant Ishmael stamped his foot. The Bible, too, speaks frequently of the life-giving properties of water.

Springs, wells, and fountains of ‘living water’ and the ‘waters of life’ appear in the Song of Songs, the prophecies of Jeremiah and Zechariah, John’s gospel, and the Book of Revelation.

Some of the positive biblical references to water are metaphorical, referring not only to the importance of water for sustaining life but to what refreshes people spiritually. This imagery is used to powerful effect in John’s gospel.

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The Sacramental Sea

Here, the gospel writer uses the wonderful story of the wedding at Cana, where water is turned into wine, as a sign of Jesus’ transforming presence, heralding the coming of God’s kingdom. The setting of a wedding feast is appropriate, for a traditional image of the Kingdom of God in Jewish thought is that of a great banquet. Later in the same gospel, Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well (John 4:14) leads to the use of the symbolism of ‘living water’ as representing eternal life, which is open to Jews and Gentiles alike – including the despised Samaritans.

In many religions, water is valued because of its cleansing properties. This is particularly so in Hinduism where the river Ganges, which flows from the Himalayas (the mountains of the gods), is of special significance. Some Hindus believe that there is an imperative to bathe at least once in a lifetime in the Ganges. For centuries, holy springs and wells were widespread within Christianity, often at sites that were sacred to pre-Christian religions. This can be seen today through place-names such as Holywell in North Wales or Wells, the cathedral city in Somerset. Some pilgrim sites associated with water, such as Lourdes, remain important today as places of healing, drawing on ideas associated with water’s cleansing and life-giving properties. This is not surprising, given the importance of potable water for sustaining life.

When St Francis of Assisi wrote in his ‘Canticle of the Sun’, ‘Praised be thou, O Lord, for sister water, who is very useful, humble, precious and chaste’, it was a significant prayer of thanksgiving, as pure (chaste) water was vital for survival, something too easily forgotten for those of us accustomed to safe water supplies – though not for the 1.1 billion in the world today for whom water-borne disease is an everyday threat.

Water, too, is found as a symbol for the soul, no doubt because of its association with life and because of its mysterious, fluid properties and quixotic ability to evaporate into gas. As Goethe’s ‘Song of the Spirits over the Water’ puts it: The spirit of Man Resembles water: Coming from heaven, Rising to heaven, And hither and thither, To Earth must then Ever descend.

The nineteenth-century German philosopher and anthropologist, Ludwig Feuerbach, who turned away from the Church to become an atheist and

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arch-critic of Christianity, argued that God was an outward projection of our inner nature. He nevertheless recognised the symbolic potency of water. In his stinging critique of Christian sacraments in The Essence of Christianity Feuerbach wrote of the role of water in baptism (with the help of his English translator, George Eliot): Water is the purest, clearest of liquids; in virtue of this its natural character it is the image of the spotless nature of the Divine Spirit. In short, water has a significance of itself, as water; it is on account of its natural quality that it is consecrated and selected as the vehicle of the Holy Spirit.1 Interestingly, the Bible makes no clear distinction between freshwater and seawater. Although seawater is undrinkable (to the torment of Coleridge’s parched Ancient Mariner), it was nevertheless an important source of food in the Middle East. Sea-fishing provided a plentiful food supply, while salt, an important food preservative, was obtained by the evaporation of seawater and from the cliffs of the world’s saltiest sea, the Dead Sea. Called the Salt Sea in the Bible, the mineral-laden Dead Sea was also known in biblical times for its health-giving properties. Together, these factors suggest that the negative image of the sea in the Bible is more to do with its wild, unpredictable nature than because it is undrinkable.

This emphasis on wildness is apparent in Genesis, where there is an implicit distinction between ‘sea’ and ‘ocean’. As already mentioned, the ocean is associated with primordial chaos – it is what was left over after the sea, lakes, and rivers were created. This distinction owes much to geography of the region where Judaism emerged. The ancient Israelites’ understanding of the marine environment was shaped by their knowledge and experience, which came primarily from navigation in and around the Mediterranean. There is a sense of this in Psalm 107, a thanksgiving for deliverance from troubles: Some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the mighty waters; they saw the deeds of the Lord, his wondrous works in the deep.

For he commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea.

They mounted up to heaven, they went down to the depths; their courage melted away in their calamity; they reeled and staggered like drunkards,