Author: admin

I read poetry because it paints pictures in my mind, because it makes me laugh, and think, and cry. I know not very much about poetry except I would say that poets put into words the deepest emotions, thoughts and feelings any of us have. I am Rector of six small country parishes in the north of this county, blessed with five glorious mediaeval churches and one Victorian one, 3000 parishioners and a weekly congregation of 125 spread between the six churches. Some might say my role is outdated. I would not agree with them.

Philip Larkin is one of the most famous English poets of the 20^th century. Born in Coventry in 1922, he studied at St John’s College, Oxford, graduating with a 1^st in 1943. His career was as a Librarian, firstly in the Shropshire town of Wellington, then the University College of Leicester, Queen’s University in Belfast, and finally as Librarian of the University of Hull where he was to stay for over 30 years.

Throughout his working career, and indeed as a schoolboy, Larkin wrote poetry, as well as, in the early years, two novels. In 1965 he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for poetry. He also wrote Jazz reviews for the Daily Telegraph, and was editor of the Oxford Book of 20^th century Poetry first published in 1965.

He was given many awards for his writing, among them an honorary DLitt from Oxford, a CBE, and he was invited to become the Poet Laureate following the death of John Betjeman, but he declined as he said he didn’t like the limelight and high profile that would have brought him. In 1985 he was awarded the Companion of Honour – an honour in the personal gift of the Queen, but was too ill with cancer to go to BuckinghamPalace to receive the award, and died not long after in December 1985 aged only 63.

It seems to me that Larkin, like all of us I suppose, is not a straightforward character.

He is at least a three stranded rope;

The first strand is his poetry, where he has a very English voice, gentle, somewhat introspective, maybe gloomy at times, understated but able to connect well with the average reading public who have enjoyed works such as Whitsun Weddings, and Churchgoing.

Then again one can discover him in the second strand which are his letters – many of which were not found until after his death, where he seems to be totally outrageous, racist, misogynist, sexually a bit weird, foul mouthed, intolerant of his parents, and of society which he believed was truly going to the dogs.

Finally one can have found him in his life and dealings with real people, and in their reminiscences of him, where he was funny, gentle, caring, amusing, insecure, loving, exasperating and very human.

During his lifetime and in the years since, he has gone from being lauded and feted by the literary establishment to becoming something of a pariah, and now back to rehabilitation and general public acceptance, maybe even adoration….a sort of John Betjeman with a twist of lemon!

He was certainly the master of the one liner – a pithy comment no doubt designed to enrage or amuse and amongst these include comments on Hull where he is nowadays regarded as one of the city’s famous sons

“I’m settling down in Hull all right,” he wrote, “Each day I sink a little further.” It was, he said, “a frightful dump”.

Larkin apparently loathed children, sending him a baby photograph was, he once said, “like sending garlic to Dracula”, and his most well known poem, This be the verse, starting with the infamous line “They… ruin your life your Mum and Dad” concludes with the words “Get out as early as you can (from the parental home) and don’t have any kids yourself.” However, stories told by parents whom Larkin knew describe him as very good with children.

Hull nowadays has a Larkin25 festival to encourage people of all ages to discover his poetry. There are all sorts of activities for children.

 

 

One of these activities is making a pair of Larkin spectacles – a bit like Harry Potter’s – which Larkin would have found strange as he only wore glasses because he was as blind as a bat! He actually described his bespectacled face thus; “carved out of lard, with goggles on.” He had a rather poor self-image.

Perhaps the most strange of these children’s activities is making toads; two of Larkin’s poems deal with toads, but they are not the friendly froggy sort of creatures that you might finding  a Garden Centre and secrete in a flower border, rather they stand for work, which in the first poem is a sort of bogey-man whom Larkin wished he had the nerve to tell clear off and he’d manage without the pension scheme and simply enjoy freedom, whilst in Toads Revisited again the toad is work but this time the activity which saves us from becoming lonely unwanted strange people.

You might see some parallels between those two poems and the Bible reading we have heard tonight; don’t worry all the time about earthly things; instead put some effort into seeking after spiritual things, and an earthly kingdom where righteousness, peace and justice dwell.

Larkin might have been appalled to hear me say that, for he was not obviously a believer in God. He had a sense of his own mortality and maybe even a fear of death which he anticipated would find him at the age of 63; ‘I suppose,’ wrote Larkin, ‘I shall become free [of mother] at 60, three years before the cancer starts. What a bloody, sodding awful life.’ His, of course, not hers. Eva Larkin died in 1977 aged 91, after which the poems more or less stopped coming, but possibly Larkin is himself the narrator in the poem Churchgoing which we heard this evening.

The cycling traveller goes inside yet another church for a look round, even though he appears to have no faith that might need nourishing, nor any architectural or historical interest which might need feeding. He clumsily moves around the building, and yet knows bits and pieces from religious services which he acts out. His conversation with himself argues the case for and against religion, for and against the protection and maintenance of churches and vacillates between support and opposition.

The final stanza maybe speaks for a great many people today who are, as David Mitchell in that agonisingly funny sketch of the Vicar finding two young visitors in his church puts it “Oh you’re spiritual… are you?” Larkin seems to acknowledge that within each one of us is a spiritual hunger and a need for a special serious safe place where that hunger can be satisfied. What Larkin is far from sure about is the role of organised religion in the world today.

This Chapel, like all the college Chapels would once upon a time have been full on many a Sunday. Now, like most of my village churches, it is thinly populated for services – except for candle-lit specials at Christmas – but, I would argue, and Larkin might suggest, still of enormous value to the busy educational establishment where people are taught facts and ideas but maybe have to discover for themselves how to cope with life, and love, and death and success and failure… how to be a human.

The choir and their beautiful music, sung far too often only to God and to gilded frescoes, the presence of the Chaplain, the open door of this room, the round of services faithfully maintained, do what I as a country parson do, what my churches and their open doors do, do what is of enormous importance to most people at many special, difficult, hard, wonderful and significant moments in their lives;

We keep the rumour of God alive; the rumour of the God who believes in us even when we don’t believe in him; the God who loves us always whatever we are like; the God who died for us and who calls us to live eternally with him; the God who understands our doubts and shortcomings and faults and failings; and who eagerly makes contact with us whenever we let down our guard and ask him into our lives. Churchgoing meets many needs; I urge you to continue to do it.

Sermon in the week of prayer for Christian Unity 20^th January 2013 Oxford Catholic Chaplaincy by Rev’d Dr. Jonathan Arnold, Chaplain, Worcester College.

Isaiah 62: 1-5; Ps 95; 1 Cor 12: 4-11; John 2: 1-11

O come, let us worship and bow down,
let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
⁷ For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.

It is very good to be with you this morning in this week of prayer for Christian Unity and thank you to Father Simon for the invitation to preach. I’m also very much looking forward to Fr. Nicholas King from Campion Hall preaching at Worcester Chapel this evening.

At college each Monday in term I hold a discussion group over lunch. This term we are looking at the ten commandments, so of course last Monday we considered the first one: ‘I am the lord your God, you shall have no other Gods before me’. In the chat, we discussed how, in a multi-faith, pluralist and partly secular society, this commandment was to be kept whilst respecting each other’s faith. Can Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Christians all believe they are right and yet genuinely respect each other’s beliefs? One answer that emerged was the metaphor that people had been told at school, that we are all like blindfolded people trying to describe an elephant purely by the sense of touch. The person at the trunk end has a completely different idea of what the animal is than the person at the tail end or at the side. This, apparently, is how different people approach their notion of God. Each person has part of the truth but no individual or religion or denomination has the whole truth, and yet everyone is talking about the same God.

Now, I had never come across this analogy before and initially I thought it was fine and it created much merriment. But it also left me feeling uneasy. It seemed to be, frankly, a little bland – that everyone has a little bit of the truth but no one can ever have a chance of a full revelation of God. The idea that there is one big truth that everyone can see a little part of and yet which no one can fully comprehend seems appealing, but we are still left with the questions of who has the truth and who is being deceived, and surely someone must be more right than someone else? And if no one can ever get anywhere near the truth, and everyone’s view is equally valid, why bother looking for enlightenment at all? I rather think that many secularists have done precisely that. Given the plethora of religions and spiritualities out there they shrug their shoulders and say, well might as well believe nothing.

In this week of prayer for Christian unity I find myself unified with other Christians, in all our diversity, in a religion in which I can wholeheartedly believe, as I would expect a good Muslim to wholeheartedly believe in his or her religion, without the need for aggression against another’s point of view, or complacency about all religions. Indeed, having to assess just what we believe and why can be a very positive exercise. One can find that struggling with the more difficult questions of our faith is well worth while and very good for us. When I was researching for a book recently I interviewed the Scottish Catholic composer James MacMillan who related an interesting story about when he was at University and how his Chaplain arranged a forum for just this kind of scrutiny of faith:

In Edinburgh, my chaplain there was a young man, Aidan Nicholls. He laid on these talks [entitled] ‘Objections to Catholicism’, and it was just one speaker after another coming in and laying into our faith. It was a dialogue. They presented their objections to faith. Some of them were Marxist, some of them were atheists of a pre-Dawkins type and some of them were of an extreme Protestant type – Ian Paisley type figures. I think a lot of students were absolutely shocked. Not just shocked by the aggression but shocked by hearing strident opposition to the faith for the first time, and saw their faith was not just challenged but undermined by it. But that’s the risk you’ve got to take. Some of us took a different line – let’s deal with the objections head on and try to enunciate our response. I think that’s what happens in these days of increased aggression against Christianity. The Church will get better for it and purify itself. I think it already has become less slovenly in its actions as well as in its thoughts. I’m quite excited about it. It may be unpleasant at times but I feel it’s doing us good.[1]

I like James’ attitude. He has a firm idea of what he believes and has not been shy in making that public, but he is also delighted to hold dialogue with those of differing opinions, not because he goes into a belligerent position of insisting his truth over anothers, nor shrugs his shoulders to say that we are all correct in our own way, but welcoming the opportunity to scrutinize his own stance and to be forced to justify it. Diversity of opinion in our society does not have to lead to aggression or banality. As St. Paul tells the community in Corinth, there are many different roles and positions to take but there is unity in the Spirit. This acknowledges that real truth is to be found in the Spirit. The Spirit of Christ himself, our salvation and our example is one of supreme generosity, as we heard in the story of the Wedding at Cana, providing the best possible wine even at the end of days of celebrations. God’s generosity is in abundance in creation; in nature, in art, and in love and his ultimate sacrifice for us. Of course, it is our tragedy that it is so often squandered by greed, corruption and selfishness or power. Christ assured his disciples that after him would come the Spirit that would lead them into all truth and that same Spirit which came upon the disciples is there for us today. So how do we gain access to this Spirit of truth, to this unity in the Spirit? For, surely the Holy Spirit provides the strength for all Christians to find unity and harmony in our relations, whilst keeping our own identities and characters, and we must not just pray for a closer bond of love in this week of prayer for unity but throughout the year, both in our silent petitions and by our prayer in action, reaching out to one another in that same Spirit given by God.

So where do we start? Perhaps today’s psalm provides a clue. The Psalms speak of our humanity in all its experience and emotion. As the Christian philosopher Roger Scruton puts it, ‘Every single possible religious attitude is expressed in them … The fact that the Psalms are in all our church services, both Anglican and Catholic, gives them a special place …’.

Psalm 95 particularly shows us where we should place ourselves in the picture.

O come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
² Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
³ For the Lord is a great God,
and a great King above all gods.
⁴ In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
⁵ The sea is his, for he made it,
and the dry land, which his hands have formed.

Our response to God’s generosity is joy, music,  is the bow down and to worship , to sing and be joyful for all the blessings he has given us, and to be one in our gratitude, our praise, our worship, our prayer, and our love for God and for one another, and so follow the two great commandments to love our God and our neighbour.

For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture,
and the sheep of his hand.

For God has given us every possible blessing in Jesus Christ, who understands our suffering, pain, and loss as well as our joy and our happiness. He is with all of us in everything, and especially in this season of Epiphany we rejoice in his revelation to the world. This week, and every week, may we continue to pray for unity of love and purpose of the diverse Christian denominations throughout the world, and let’s also rejoice in the source of our faith and his generosity to us that has brought us life, and life eternal. Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

 

 

Micah 6: 6-8; Galatians 3:26-28; Luke 24: 13-35

It is the week of prayer for Christian Unity; and it is fashionable these days to say that the ecumenical movement has run out of steam, or hit the buffers, or run aground on the institutional selfishness of different Christian groups, or some other idle metaphor  borrowed from transport. There is something in this, of course: I was reading this morning an account of the formation of the United Reformed Church in the 1970’s, out of the Congregationalist and Presbyterian churches: it was a great sign of hope for many, but although most members of both churches gladly joined the new enterprise, there were some in both churches who could not take the step, and stayed where they were, so that instead of a single new church they now had three! And it has always been a difficulty of the Protestant Reformed tradition that it has been prone to doing the splits; but the other churches don’t do much better.

My own Catholic tradition, for example, puts immense weight on uniformity, but at the cost of authoritarian models of leadership and the suppression of dissent. And other churches, such as the Orthodox and the Anglican, find great challenges, as well as great strength, in their roles as national churches. So it is not surprising that people find themselves getting depressed instead of cheered and invigorated in this Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity.

All right – now can we find any reasons for being cheerful about it? One thing that has certainly changed in my lifetime is the ease of relationship between most people who share the Christian faith, and the fact that we can consciously say the Lord’s Prayer together. That may seem trivial, but I remember listening with mild astonishment, half a century ago, to a Catholic bishop as he argued that it was not permissible for us to say the Lord’s Prayer in an Anglican service, nor even to sing the hymns (until my mother, who was present, pointed out that she often sang such hymns in her bath, and what was the difference!).

I also remember working in South Africa in the days when apartheid was coming to its end, and talking to many Christians, of different denominations, who had found themselves in prison because of their opposition to apartheid, an opposition that arose precisely out of their Christian faith; and in prison they discovered how very much they had in common, and what a joy it was in those days to sing those hymns out loud together, even in solitary confinement, so that solitary became communion. I can also remember remote Zulu outstations, where we Catholic priests could not reach on a Sunday, and in our absence the people had no problem at all in attending the Methodist or Anglican service; our 16^th Century divisions seemed to them totally irrelevant, in comparison to what held them together.

And there is a further, deeper truth, that Christian Unity is not, really is not, a matter of how many propositions we can agree to subscribe to, but something more important. That more important something is simply our relationship to God, and our faith in (or a better translation might be “commitment to”) Jesus Christ.

To illustrate this, I’d like to look at the three well-chosen readings that we have just heard; and you will be relieved to know that there is not space, if you are to get to the excellent dinner that the Worcester chefs are even now hastening to prepare for you, to say everything about them that should be said.

The first reading is from Micah, Isaiah’s slightly junior contemporary, so he is living at the time of the Assyrian crisis, which promised to put an end to the whole people of God, and not just the Northern Kingdom. In that reading, Micah imagines his fellow-Judeans at last getting his message: “now we realise that we haven’t been faithful”, and making various suggestions about how they might put it right. The suggestions include:

Burnt offerings

Sacrificing young calves

A holocaust of a thousand rams

A thousand rivers of oil

And (worst of all, the climax to this absurd list) “would God like me to sacrifice my first-born son?”

The answer, to all of these, is “NO and no and no”. The answer is what they should already have known (and what you and I should know and all too easily forget):

Deeds of righteousness (looking after widows and orphans and the oppressed)

Loving Hesed, that untranslatable quality of God, which means something like loving fidelity.

Being humble in your walking with God (though alas the translation of the Hebrew is not all that certain). That might be a good place to start our Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity.

The second reading was that famous passage from Galatians, where Paul is coping with the divisions in the Christian Church, caused by his own radical innovation of not compelling non-Jews who believe that Jesus is Messiah, to observe kosher food-regulations, circumcision and Jewish festivals. Paul’s solution is to tell the Galatians to look at the effects of the baptism that they have experienced: they have “put on Christ” (Paul is here using a metaphor from the Greek stage – as an actor “becomes” Agamemnon or Oedipus when he puts on the costume, so they are to “become” Christ). The consequence is that all artificial distinctions, constructed by human beings not by God, simply fall away:

No such thing as Jew/Gentile (religious or cultural)

No such thing as slave/free (economic and social-political)

No such thing as male and female, (just about everything else that’s left)

Because they are all “one in Christ”. There is a really breathtaking audacity here, and we shall do well to savour it with astonishment, as we work for the unity of the Christian church.

The third reading, of course, is that loveliest Lucan creation, the story of the walk to Emmaus; and I shan’t even try to cover it all. Just look at what Jesus does (“eyes on Christ” has to be the watchword this week), and you will find that it is our story.

• He journeys with the two disillusioned disciples in their pain, and he goes unrecognised.
• He causes annoyance by asking a penetrating question about their pain, and gets the irritated answer: “are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know what has happened?” (they are talking of course, to the only one who does know what has happened)
• He listens to their pain about the absence of Jesus
• He chides them (and in doing so, of course, it is us whom he chides) for our failure to understand what God is doing: “you stupid men and slow of heart!” (so many preachers have longed to start a sermon that way, and have never quite dared)
• He pretends to be leaving them, and then gives in to their invitation to stay
• He takes bread and blesses and breaks and gives it to them; so he is celebrating a Eucharist with them.
• He disappears – and it doesn’t matter, because
• Finally he has empowered them to go back to Jerusalem, and be reunited with the Church, when only a few minutes ago it was too late to travel anywhere; and that in turn leads to
• Another, mysterious encounter with the Risen Jesus. We are, as Jesus impatiently declared, slow learners.

So what of our depression about the ecumenical movement? I should like to suggest three observations to give us hope.

First, an attentive reading of the New Testament and of church history reveals that Christian Unity has always been something to aspire to, never yet achieved.

Second, even if all Christians signed an agreement on all propositions to which they could give intellectual assent, there would still be immense cultural differences in the way in which we worship God. Consider what it would be like, culturally, if you journeyed today, in a roughly Southerly and Easterly direction, and a roughly high-low direction, and worshipping at each place: the Greek Orthodox church in Canterbury Road, St Aloysius in Woodstock Road, Worcester College Chapel, Blackfriars, The Catholic Chaplaincy in Rose Place, St Ebbe’s, and the King’s Place just across the river. So don’t expect too much.

Finally, our only way ahead is towards God, with Jesus Christ at our side, and impelled by the Holy Spirit.                     +