Frail humanity’s solitary boast

Oxford Cathedral this morning, to celebrate Lady Day with trustees, office holders and members of the Mothers Union from around the diocese. MU works in 78 countries around the world, has 3·6 million members, and a representative to the United Nations Commission on the status of women. People seemed refreshingly focused on others and open to accepting them as they are, strengthening marriages by networking women all over the world, and a few men. The emphasis is on bringing about a world where God’s love is shown in loving, stable, respectful relationships.

The view from the pulpit in Christ Church is interesting (above). I took as our text for the annunciation a notion first planted in my mind at a Berkshire nativity play a few years ago by the seven year old who had landed the part of Mary — “everybody knows it’s much easier to be an angel than a virgin.”

And, as daffodils begin to bloom in these parts, a slightly off the wall but powerful poem by Carol Ann Duffy, based on Max Ernst’s painting of 1926, The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus before Three Witnesses:

The Virgin Punishing the Infant

He spoke early. Not the goo goo goo of infancy,
but I am God. Joseph kept away, carving himself
a silent Pinocchio out in the workshed. He said
he was a simple man and hadn't dreamed of this.

She grew anxious in that second year, would stare
at stars saying Gabriel, Gabriel. Your guess.
The village gossiped in the sun. The child was solitary,
his wide and solemn eyes could fill your head.

After he walked, our normal children crawled. Our wives
were first resentful, then superior. Mary's child
would bring her sorrow ... better far to have a son
who gurgled nonsense at your breast. Googoo. Googoo.

But I am God. We heard him through the window,
heard the smacks which made us peep. What we saw
was commonplace enough. But afterwards, we wondered
why the infant did not cry, why the Mother did.

John Fenton RIP: wonderful man...

Sad to reflect on the death of Canon John Fenton (Times obit). His gentle presence and sharp thinking sparkled, provoked, healed and stimulated on every level and with every kind of person. I only knew him near the end of his ministry, well after his short back and sides days, but remember vividly two occasions in the nineties on which he cheerfully turfed out from Oxford to the far end of the diocese to have lunch with an improbable bunch of bored and slightly stroppy vicars in our deanery chapter.

Wind him up and off he went. We splashed about and played in the text of Mark’s gospel which John knew backwards and inside out (to the level of word counts). John showed how Scripture as is, with all its order and disorder, compexity and subtlety, is far more engaging than attempts to stitch it up into a compendium of proof texts can ever make it. Paranoia drives people to pull out soundbites to buttress their ideas about God, neatly packaged out of the messy text. These are then used as the weapons of zealotry. John showed what you miss when you do that — the glory of the text itself.

Gregory of Nyssa said “Concepts create idols — Only wonder understands!” That’s what I learnt from John Fenton, and I feel poorer in a world without him, and look forward with more anticipation to the life of the world to come, in which we all get to splash and play in the fulness of God’s wisdom; the day on which we all step outside time, but I shall still, I think, have a few questions to ask John...

On Shoulders of Giants...

I was touched and honoured to represent the diocese yesterday at a very special moment — Henry Chadwick’s memorial service in our Cathedral, of which he had been dean from 1969-79. The Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster led the prayers, honouring a key ecumenist. Professor Chadwick was a masively learned and perceptive historian, who knew from his Evangelical roots how discipleship feels from the inside, and laboured to develop an honest historical basis upon which Christians could understand their origins, and use this understanding to grow together in love.

Like other students of my generation, my view of early Christian history was based largely on Chadwick’s scholarship — glancing along my shelves I see the short Penguin History that first kindled my awareness of the subtlety and complexity of early Christianity. Just along I find his Contra Celsum translation that still commands its field after fifty years, an immaculate study of Boethius, and the fruit of his mature reflection — a wonderfully comprehensive History of the Church from Gallilee to Gregory the Great and East and West: the making of a rift in the Church.

One highlight of the service for me was a quote from John Donne’s Meditations that Professor Chadwick loved:

The Church is Catholic, universal. So are all her actions. All that she does belongs to all. When she buries a man that action concerns me. All mankind is of one author and is one volume. When one man dies one chapter is not torn out of the book but translated into a better language, and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators. Some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation. And his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another...

Them and Us — The Truth

After a bit of a blockbuster about clergy bullying, with some very interesting comment, something profoundly relevant caught my eye yesterday at our senior staff Eucharist. We were in Christ Church Cathedral, using the millennium Altar commemorating George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, supporter of resistance against Hitler and courageous opponent of saturation bombing during World War II.

The Altar is from a single huge oak, blackened. Renewed humanity is hewn out of, and emerges from, a charred and defaced reality. It carries this quotation from Bell, framed in the context of calls for reprisals in 1945. Today, from parish breakdowns to Iraq, there’s a simplistic sense among otherwise intelligent people that we are OK and they are evil. Bell exposes the root of the matter. In reality, we are all complicit, and in need of redemption:

No Nation, no Church, no Individual is guiltless. Without Repentance, and without forgiveness, there can be no regeneration.