IT'S 2018. I HAVE JUST BEEN APPOINTED . . .

I have updated this post from 3 1/2 years ago, because I still like it.

St Mary's Church, Kersey, Suffolk

IT’s 2018. I HAVE JUST BEEN APPOINTED ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.

Oh dear. Now what? I have an indeterminate term ahead of me, I am about to be appointed by the Sovereign, and I need to know what to do to, for, and with the 77 million Anglicans of whom I will soon be the titular spiritual head. Not in any authoritative sense, for, true to traditional Anglican muddle, Canterbury is in no way a Pope. He has no power; he has no authority other than moral and traditional; he cannot order much and can command less. And nowadays, most Anglicans will be sure to disagree with him vehemently on almost all issues they consider important. So?

This has its good points, too. Canterbury can, if he likes, be individual, eccentric, and stubborn; and if he is seen to have a touch of holiness, or even greatness, he may get away with it. Rowan Williams, on the other hand, showed us all exactly what to avoid when he said that any successor of his should proceed ‘with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other’. Under that reportedly saintly man, the Church let its agenda be set by the media, and was thus always seen to be behind. Michael Ramsey, who admittedly lived in the prehistoric age Before Twitter, is a better example. When asked by a bratty Oxford undergraduate ‘Your Grace, what’s wrong with the Church of England?’ he murmured not one word about sex, gender, or LGBT, but said crisply, ‘It doesn’t preach enough.’

So here I am, with two short months before my intronisation, and some serious praying to do. I’ll start with Don Camillo. That only slightly fictitious Italian parish priest talked frequently with the crucified Christ on the wall of his church, and dealt with local ex-virgins and would-be Communists on the strength of it. We may think him pawky, but those conversations will, I suspect, be a good way to start. Right, Lord?

What (few will ask because most think they know) is wrong with the Church of England? And those other churches in our Communion? I’d begin by showing people what’s right. It is a national Church, and one of the few; because it has the vocation to be a national Church, it cannot hide itself in a comfy closed doctrinal closet but must worry the issues until they succumb. It is on the whole a tolerant Church, a reasonably kindly Church, an unpretentious Church, a Church that functions best when assembling many people of different points if view for a liturgy of Matins or Communion followed by coffee or sherry, and cake.

It is not good at taking positions on knotty problems beloved by television talk-show hosts. It is not good at dealing with morals beyond the Great Commandments. It is not good at being Cool. It is not good at being political. It is not good at being Progressive, or Liberal, or Conservative. It is not good at being Ecological or Diverse.

So I think that I will not try to be any of those things. Journalists with microphones and enormous cameras will try to make me, and I will prepare a few good one-liners to send them home with. But I will not bite.

Instead, I will surprise them. I will give each of Britain’s parishes the choice of being, like the hexes in Jack Chalker’s Well World novels, Wild, Half-Wild, or Tame, the choice to be made by all members in a parish referendum. Wild parishes will permit everything, from gay marriage to djembe-rock services; Half-Wild will choose from a small list which changes they will adopt, but will then be stuck with those for twelve years before a review; Tame parishes will be traditional (and BCP) in every way, whether Low, High, or Broad. Once those choices are made, I will put a twelve-year moratorium on all discussions of ‘modernization’, whether of morality or of liturgy, in the Church.

The place of these will be taken by an enormous effort of spirituality, accompanied (but not replaced) by active charity. Discussion will be allowed of matters of theology, but not encouraged: I will try to steer my fractious Church in the direction of being a praying Church rather than a forum for disagreement. I will put huge effort into encouraging vocations, both priestly and religious, and maintain and encourage all Anglican religious orders. Since my appointment coincides with the 350^th anniversary of the Restoration (1668) Prayer Book, I will direct that for one year it be used in all prime-time parish services, with Common Worship relegated for that time to 8 a.m. I will institute part-time seminars on preaching for all Church of England rectors and curates, and encourage longer, text-based sermons in all Sunday services.

An easily-overlooked feature of these changes is that they are low-cost financially. On that front, I will encourage a new form of tithing compatible with high taxation, and I will appoint a committee to study the feasibility of part-time curates. I will encourage Government to increase its assistance in maintaining historic churches and their fabric, and encourage the creation of lay readers and Matins and Evensong services led by them.

Finally, I will initiate a large effort of promulgating the knowledge of Anglican spirituality and its history, including the lives of persons to be venerated; I will institute popular courses on the thought of Hooker and Burnet, on the sermons of Donne and Newman (even though he left for Rome), and on the poetry of Herbert and Watts.

Thinking about this has almost made me eager to begin. Thanks, Lord.    

Christmas Carol Service, Canterbury Cathedral

 

ODDLY LENT

Tenebrae: part of a Good Lent

In a longish lifetime I’ve found that I’m never original; so there must be others who have had a peculiar Lent with a shambolic ending. You know who you are. It’s mainly for you that I’m writing this, and of course for myself.

When one gets serious about one’s faith, or mainly so, one of the things one dreams about is a Good Lent. With a little real fasting, with lots of profound prayer, with charity and sharing: a shapely movement of the soul’s days from Ash Wednesday to Easter.  And then reality comes along.

Even when I was young and Lent was not much practiced – except for the St Matthew Passion on Good Friday, a Dutch tradition – I was always exercised about the fact that Christianity had chosen the most glorious time of year, full of bird-song, fields of flowers, trees in bloom, fresh green everywhere, the sap rising, for its gloomiest meditations. As a child and later a teenager I did not feel particularly sinful, so penitence was hardly a topical concept; I was sorry for what those people had done to Jesus, but when I was introduced to the great 17C Dutch poet Revius’s sonnet “’Twas not the Jews who crucified Thee, Jesu . . . ‘twas I, my Lord, ‘twas I did this to Thee”, my reaction was Well, no, it wasn’t.

When you get older you realise, first, that maybe it wasn’t but in the circumstances it might well have been: how do I know that had I been a believing Jew or a routine-bound Roman corporal in Jerusalem on that day I would have had the intelligence and  the courage to stand up against the crowd?

That, however, is not the point of the poem or the meditation it reflects. And as you go deeper into the faith we inherit you come to a new awareness: doing it to anyone is doing it to Him. OK, you and I have not crucified anyone lately, we’re not into torture and murder; but there are many ways of doing the dirty on others, and every one of them comes out of a bag of nails. Giving comfort to a grieving stranger or relative is comforting Him; withholding love from anyone is withholding it from Him.

As you look at your aging self in the mirror of hindsight, you see a decidedly unlovely Dorian Gray. So you acquire the dream of a Good Lent that will maybe, with some serious effort, make you ready for Easter. And then, as I said, reality sets in.

Reality provides us with all sorts of distractions, excuses, and daily messes that really muck up our Good Lent. And when Easter rolls around we know that we have not fasted enough, the theological or devotional texts we were going to read remained untouched beyond Chapter 3, our prayer has been subject to John Donne’s distractions even more than usual, we didn’t go and visit that old person in the next street or village we’d promised ourselves we’d see, we didn’t even go to church on Good Friday, our CD player was on the blink so the St Matthew Passion was out, we ended up feeding passing friends from far away, and here we are, supposedly meditating by the tomb in perfect silence like a Victorian painting of the mourning Marys, but in reality shopping for Easter food, hiding eggs, doing e-mail, and a hundred other unworthy things. What a mess.

And then there comes, at the moment when one does pray, a still small voice that says, “That Good Lent you so wanted to have, supposedly for Me – did it occur to you that that was entirely your idea, conceived by and for you? I do not necessarily want your Good Lent any more than I want smoking bulls’ meat on the altar: if you can look at your life and see the bits that really don’t go with my Father’s love, and if that view makes you miserable enough desperately to want Me, Us, to change it (because you now know that you can’t), then, little lad, you will have had a Lent that’s good enough for Me.” And you realise that you have been given a major lesson in humility. And you get ready for Easter’s celebration, with a rather tremulous joy in your heart. 

SPRING CLEANING?

The current Catholic guidelines for Lent emphasise its triple nature: fasting, prayer and sharing. I have never been good at fasting, perhaps because there was a famine in occupied Holland when I was 3. Giving up chocolate and similar tiny deprivations have always seemed jejune, yet one should do (without) something. The best Lenten fast I ever had was a few years ago when, recognising myself to be choleric in nature, I gave up anger: not only did it work but it was of genuine spiritual value. This Lent I’ve gradually given up Scotch whisky, though abandoning prejudices would have been even harder and much more valuable . . . .    

The Catholic texts I’ve read stress the fact that all three exercises, and Lent generally, are intended to clear our inner decks of the clutter that comes between us and God. This I sympathise with. Prayer, the second item, would appear at first to be a much more direct line to God than fasting; yet John Donne already noted in his Devotions how difficult silent prayer on one’s own can be. “I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.” The mind’s capacity for distraction is so extensive that one wonders if it is not diabolical.

            As for sharing, enough envelopes from worthwhile charities turn up in my mailbox that an increased level of giving is easy; yet then one wonders if that ease itself is not a snare and delusion. Shouldn’t it be harder, less pleasant, more sacrificial? That depends, I conclude, on the purpose of the exercise. If the purpose is to torment oneself, as in flagellation, then indeed one should do something more painful or at least demanding, like working in a soup-kitchen or hospital visiting. If the purpose is to bring the greatest possible amount of help to many, significant giving to good and well-run charities probably accomplishes that better. If the underlying (Lenten) purpose is to bring one closer to God and His values, each such gift should perhaps be accompanied by a serious and prolonged meditation on the people it is helping.

            Can one wish people a “Happy Lent”? It seems like a contradiction in terms, or even a sarcasm. Yet spring cleaning a house, while tiring, is a joyful experience, as everyone who has tried it knows. If we see  Lent not as a gloomy penitence but as a spiritual spring cleaning before Easter, it takes on a different colour.

            But. 

            But, says an inward voice, what about the Cross? The recent CNN documentary on  Jesus used what looked to me like clips from Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” to remind us of the sheer gory and humiliating horror of crucifixion. They were perhaps overdoing it: the expression on the Roman soldiers’ faces is likelier to have been one of bored distaste than the Gothic leers we saw on the screen. But it was a useful reminder that elegant crucifixes hide a damned unpleasant truth. Being nailed to two chunks of wood and left to die of choking was the execution method for rebellious slaves. In some way or other, we need to share in this, however great the distance.

            The prayer of the Angelus asks “that, as we have known the incarnation of thy son Jesus Christ by the message of an angel, so by his cross and passion we may be brought unto the glory of his resurrection.” Our cheerful spring cleaning metaphor breaks down on Good Friday. So what do we do?

            This, I think, is where prayer shows itself to be superior to all but the most extreme forms of fasting and almsgiving. For through prayer we can move to Galilee, to Jerusalem, even to Golgotha. Prayer, when supported by the twin pillars of reading and meditation, is the temple where we can share in the suffering, the silence, and finally the morning joy of Easter. It is the house of the Lord which we must first clear of its merchants, its money-changers, its ox and ass, its doves, its noise of fly and its rattling of coach; when we have done that, it is the house of the Lord into which, with the Psalmist, we can be full of joy to go.

            On Good Friday I try always to follow the old Dutch Protestant custom of listening to Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Doing this with real concentration is one of the finest ways I know of living that extraordinary day of pain, sacrifice and salvation. At its end, one is emptied of all emotion as the church’s tabernacle is empty of the host, and open as its door. I’ll try and write a little more about this in the days to come.