Sermon April 21^st 2013, Worcester College Chapel

Isaiah 63: 7-14; Luke 24: 36-49

 

As out introit suggested, the wintry earth is beginning to wake up, bringing us expectations of new life; I’m sure Simon and college gardeners are pleased that, at last, the gardens are budding with new life as we enter the Trinity Term. It is just such lovely Spring weather that we associate with Easter, the season of new life, which emerges from the ground and in the nature around us, which is both wondrous and, at the same time, predictable. It comes around every year. It is exactly what we expect to happen at this time of year, even if we have had to wait longer for it this year. But the resurrection of Eastertide, the physical appearance of Jesus to his friends, is a completely different matter. It goes against every empirical scientific evidence we possess. What a fantastical idea to posit, especially in a secular age! The most problematic of paradoxes, as set out in the final words of Luke’s Gospel that we heard read tonight, is surely at the heart of the Christian faith and, as such, these few words are some of the most important in the whole of the scriptures. If they are true, then they are surely the most fundamentally significant words in any literature, of any time and in any language.

 

Indeed, how hard it was for the disciples to comprehend the fact of Jesus’ appearance to them. After his death, from which they feel lost and dejected, confused by Jesus’ apparent failure on the cross, there He is, in the midst of them. What are they supposed to think? They do not have a set of cultural, historical and theological references to make any sense of it. There is, as yet, no Pauline theology, no Church or Christian tradition, not even the second instalment of Luke’s narrative, the Acts of the Apostles, to offer any explanation, just a plain fact: the presence of Christ, in physical form, in front of them.

 

Not surprisingly they think he is a ghost, perhaps a figment of their imagination or wish-fulfilment, a vision of their beloved friend and leader to comfort them in their grief. But this will not do, Luke tells us, Jesus confronts their emotions: ‘Why are you frightened; why do doubts arise in your hearts?’ Surely fear and doubt are the obvious reactions. Where is the evidence for such an
occurrence? Why would they accept something which is clearly outside the realms of known reality. So the empirical data is offered, as Jesus invites the disciples to look at the wounds in his hands and feet and side, to touch them even, although, like the story of doubting Thomas, we are not told whether they do in fact place their hands on the wounds.

 

With the disciples in a state of joy mixed with doubt and wondering, Jesus offers more evidence by eating cooked fish in their presence. Luke is at pains to emphasise and re-emphasise that Jesus was really there, not metaphorically or in spirit, but physically present. Indeed, at the beginning of the book of Acts he again relates that: ‘After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over the course of forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.’ For better or worse the disciples are forced to accept what is in front of them. But to what end? For it is clear, in Luke 24, that they lack understanding. They haven’t the faintest idea of what is going on. So Jesus has to explain: ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.

 

His presence there is the fulfilment of something they should know about: their Jewish history. The history which includes the acts of love shown towards the people of Israel which we heard from the prophecy of Isaiah 63: an unfailing love that liberated them from Egypt, to lead them to a better future. Everything in the law, the prophets and the psalms culminates in this moment. So Christ explains the scriptural and historical significance of the current event: ⁴⁵‘Thus it is written, that the Messiah^* is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, ⁴⁷and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.’

 

Thus, in his explanation, Jesus moves the story on from one of remarkable resurrection to future meaning and action: the whole incarnational process has a richer meaning, that forgiveness of sins has been achieved, that the relationship between humanity and God has been re-established, that eternal life with God is here. The disciples are therefore to be witnesses, but Jesus ends with a riddle: ‘⁴⁸⁴⁹I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high’,  a power that the disciples will not comprehend until they experience the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

 

Christian faith doesn’t depend for its existence on belief in the miracles that Jesus did during his ministry, or other supernatural events, such as whether or not Jonah literally spent three days in the belly of a giant fish. Christianity does rely, however, on a belief that the crucified Jesus rose from the dead by the act of God, attesting to the truth of his message and the meaning of his death as a sacrifice for human sin, and inaugurating an ultimate redemption of the world from sin and death.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the British journalist Frank Morison was convinced that supernatural religion was a myth, although like a good liberal he admired the historical teachings of Jesus. So he set out to write a book about the real human drama of Jesus’ last days, stripped of the superstitious legends. Morison wrote

 

‘I wanted to take this last phase of the life of Jesus, with all its quick and pulsating drama, its sharp, clear-cut background of antiquity, and its tremendous psychological and human interest-to strip it of its overgrowth of primitive beliefs and dogmatic suppositions, and to see this supremely great Person as He really was.’

 

The strangeness of the Resurrection story had captured his attention. His research, however, led him to discover the validity of the biblical record in a moving, personal way. The result was a book called: ‘Who Moved the Stone?’, which became a classic apologetic for the Resurrection.

 

Treating the Gospels as human documents subject to historical analysis and verification, Morison was forced to conclude that the literal resurrection of Jesus from the dead was believable truth, which the Gospel writers correctly report and interpret. If Morison is right, then the consequences are astonishing, because it means that the life and teaching of Jesus has to become the central starting point for our understanding of ourselves and our world. It was just such an understanding that inspired the early deeds of the disciples, as Morison put it:

 

‘The facts were so well known that the campaign they undertook could positively be conducted with greater success in Jerusalem, where the abandoned tomb lay, than in any other place in the world. It was this that enabled them to concentrate (as Acts clearly shows that they did) on the two vital contentions that ultimately rent Judaism asunder, viz., that Jesus was the promised Messiah, and that life had been raised by the direct hand of God. They could surely never have reached this advanced stage of the discussion so early, if the physical vacancy of the tomb had not been common ground.’

 

The historian in me is always asking: so what? What if there is truth in the story, what does that have to do with me? If the reason we read history is to learn from the past to inform our future, then perhaps it is time, in this new season, to tackle the evidence of the scriptures and the early Church head on, and to ask what we learn from this story, and to ask ourselves honestly what was it that motivated the disciples in their mission which led to their suffering and martyrdom? Was it just about an assurance of the hereafter and a nice cosy forgiveness of sins in a future life or is it about the heralding of new life in the here and now? For as one former Chaplain of Worcester College, Tom Wright, has written:

 

‘The resurrection completes the inauguration of God’s kingdom. . . . It is the decisive event demonstrating that God’s kingdom really has been launched on earth as it is in heaven …
it is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven … Our task in the present…is to live as resurrection people in between Easter and the final day, with our Christian life, corporate and individual, in both worship and mission, as a sign of the first and a foretaste of the second.’[1]

 

As we continue our academic work, whether in the lab, or for tutorials, thesis-writing, publication or exams this term, I urge you to consider the essence of the Gospel, to read it, research it and find it for yourself, in order to make up your own mind and, just maybe, to bring that resurrection reality of new life and the kingdom of God to this college, here and now.                         Amen.

Sermon Worcester College 17^th February 2013, Rev’d Dr. Jonathan Arnold

Luke 18: 9-14 and East Coker V from The Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot was arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century and, in contrast to the atheism of Larkin and the ambiguous faith of Rilke as we have recently heard, he was a devout believer. An American who moved to the England in 1914 at the age 25 he became naturalised as a British citizen in 1927, the same year as his baptism by the Chaplain of Worcester College, William Force Stead. I am indebted to our Fellow in English, Dr. David Bradshaw for this information from his fascinating article on Yeats, Eliot and Stead, published in the College Record last year. When Stead arrived in Oxford in 1927 to become College Chaplain, he was already a friend of Yeats and Eliot. It was at the beginning of February 1927 that Eliot asked Stead for his `advice, information & [his] practical assistance in getting Confirmation with the Anglican Church.’ But Eliot was also keen for it to be kept secret for, as he wrote to Stead: ‘I hate spectacular “conversions”’.[i] Eliot was finally baptised (by Stead) and confirmed (by the Bishop of Oxford) at the end of June 1927.[ii] The Chaplain reminisced of the process in this way:

 

I can claim no credit for his conversion. But I did set up one milestone along his way — I baptised him…We had been having tea in London, and when I was leaving he said, after a moment’s hesitation,

`By the way, there is something you might do for me.’

He paused, with a suggestion of shyness.

After a few days he wrote to me, saying he would like to know how he could be `confirmed into the Church of England,’ a quaint phrase, not exactly ecclesiastical. He had been brought up a Unitarian, so the first step was baptism. I was living then at Finstock, a small village far away in the country, with Wychwood Forest stretching off to the north, and the lonely Cotswold hills all round. Eliot came down from London for a day or two, and I summoned from Oxford Canon B. H. Streeter, Fellow and later Provost of Queen’s College, and Vere Somerset, History Tutor and Fellow of Worcester College. These were his Godfathers. It seemed odd to have such a large though infant Christian at the baptismal font, so, to avoid embarrassment, we locked the front door of the little parish church and posted the verger on guard in the vestry.[iii]

Soon after, perhaps as a mark of gratitude, Eliot spoke at Worcester College to undergraduates of the `The Philistines’ Society, perhaps a precursor of the Woodroffe Society that we have now, although it was more of a literary society. Stead recalled this occasion too:

[Eliot] announced on arriving that he must have lost his notes on the train from London, perhaps a polite way of saying he had not prepared any; however, he would read us The Waste Land. The poem was not widely appreciated at that time and called forth some very foolish remarks. A few remain in my memory; one youth rose at the end and said,

`Mr. Eliot, did you write all that?’

`Yes.’

`Well, I thought some of those words about the barge she sat in came from something else.’

Eliot responded with a pleasant smile that he was glad the point had been raised, and that as the speaker had recognized the passage, so he was sure others would understand these and some other well known lines as quotations used for the purpose of association. The reply was framed with such tact that the young man’s vanity would not be wounded if he was merely an honest dunce, yet if he was trying to be facetious, he would be quietly silenced. A discussion dragged along for some time until a round-faced youth bounced up and said,

`Mr. Eliot, may I ask a question?’

`Certainly.’

`Er–did you mean that poem seriously?’

Eliot looked non-plussed for a moment, and then said quietly,

`Well, if you think I did not mean it seriously, I have failed utterly.’

 

David Bradshaw writes that ‘In future years, many of Eliot’s non-religious friends and admirers would hold Stead accountable for what they regarded as Eliot’s post-conversion decline, and when he `visited Ezra Pound many years later, the poet told Stead that he had been responsible for “corrupting” Eliot’.[iv] The truth, however, is that culturally and ideologically Eliot and Stead had a great deal in common and their respective attraction to and profession of High Anglicanism simply drew them together even more closely.’[v]

 

If The Waste Land, written in 1922 is one of Eliot’s most famous poems, then the Four Quartets (of 1945) led to his award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. The four long poems were published separately: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942). Each has five sections and each includes reflections on the nature of time in some important respect, be it theological, historical or physical, with constant references to Christian thought and traditions. He employs theology, art, symbolism and language of writers like Dante, St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich.

 

Tonight we heard the fifth section of the second poem, East Coker, which takes its name from the village in Somerset, England, that was the home of Eliot’s ancestors and where he is buried. The poem concerns humanity, the natural order and the idea of renewal. It is the most explicitly Christian of the quartets and it also refers to the horror of war, so that the fourth section describes a hospital staffed by a “wounded surgeon” and a “dying nurse” where patients are not healed but are led through painful illness to death and a tenuous salvation. The section ends with a reference to Good Friday, a reminder that anything worthy must come through suffering, forbearance, and deferral to a higher authority. The final section of the poem again focuses on Eliot’s failure as a poet. He has wasted his youth and has only learned how to articulate ideas that are no longer useful. His life is a struggle to “recover what has been lost.” Finally, he settles for an unsatisfying earthly existence followed by the promise of darkness and death, in which he will finally find that “[i]n my end is my beginning.”

 

I chose this section because it speaks to me of the themes of Lent: a sense of our own inadequacies. Eliot does not emphasize Easter Sunday but Good Friday, for which humans bear responsibility. The hospital imagery and the emphasis on human malignity are obvious references to the European war raging while Eliot was writing. They also, though, represent his realization that human folly and the inability to see the larger designs behind history doom any human endeavors to failure. This applies particularly to his attempts at poetry, as set out in the last section:

 

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres

Trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it.

 

I like this sentiment, which emphasises the impossible task of articulating anything meaningful in art:

 

And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion.

 

Eliot acknowledges that

 

As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

 

However, as the world becomes more baffling the more we experience of it, the more need there is for what Eliot calls, ‘a deeper communion’

 

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

 

Eliot lived through a time of two wars when the capacity of human beings to produce unimaginable suffering was revealed. Some commentators have thought that Eliot comes close to despair in his poem East Coker, but rather I believe, he acknowledges his own weakness, imperfection and fallibility as a human being, even in his own area of articulating words. It is in that state of realisation that he reminds me of the tax collector in our Gospel reading tonight: ‘the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!”

 

Lent is a time for self examination, of our thoughts, our behaviour, our relationships, our habits, and our faith. Acknowledgement of our weakness, or in religious language, our sin, is an opportunity to stand before God, just as we are, baffled, perplexed and failing, but in the knowledge that, in God’s economy, it is those who are most aware of their need of God’s help, forgiveness and salvation, who will find him.  Amen.

 

Sermon 1^st week Hilary Term 2013, Mark 1: 4-11; R.S. Thomas

 

This term we are focussing upon exploring Christianity through the arts in several different ways. On Sunday 10 February there will be a morning service broadcast live on BBC Radio 4, centred upon faith and the Arts. Ben Quash will be preaching, Professor of Christianity and the Arts at King’s College, London. That event starts a whole week of talks, lectured, drama and music entitled Heaven sent: The Beauty of Holiness – A week exploring Christianity through the Arts hosted by the Oxford University Chaplains, and all based at the University Church. It includes the poets Nicola Slee and Michael Symmons-Roberts on ‘The Poetry of Faith’; music and discussion with composer James MacMillan; the play Two Planks and a Passion by Anthony Minghella, directed by Elisabeth Dutton; and an illustrated talk with the artists Nicholas Mynheer and Roger Wagner discussing, ‘Can Christian Art be Modern?’ Just pick up one of these cards at the back of chapel to find out all about that.

 

And in this series of sermons this term, we will be drawing about that deep and ancient relationship between poetry and faith, how words of art have been able to express our deepest spiritual longings and complexity. Our own Provost, will be speaking on that great poet, preacher and Dean of St. Paul’s, John Donne; Ronald Hawkes from the Wykham benefice in Oxfordshire will be preaching on that religious sceptic Philip Larkin; Carla Grosch-Müller from Oxford’s United Reformed Church will be here to talk about the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Alison Milbank, from Nottingham is an expert on Dante and will be here in seventh week and the series finishes with an examination of the relationship between theology and poetry by Dr. Susan Gillingham, Fellow in Theology here. But to start the series I have chosen a poet who, as the Guardian obituary wrote of him, was ‘Riddled with contradictions, and charted the decline of modern life and his native Wales in bleak poetry, tinged with faint sunlight.’

 

By all acounts R.S. Thomas, the Welsh clergyman and poet who died in the year 2000 at the age of 87, was a miserable old so-and-so and full of paradoxes. He was a fierce defender of Wales and the Welsh language and yet wrote his poems in English. Like Wordsworth, he was inspired by nature and the land and yet hated the people who lived and worked on it. He married and English woman and sent his son to an English boarding school and when he wrote his autobiography in Welsh, entitled Neb, nobody and referred to himself in the third person as the boy or the rector.

So this ‘cantankerous clergyman,’ and ‘fiery poet-priest’ was acclaimed late in his life by the likes of Kingsley Amis and John Betjeman as one of the best poets living at that time. Perhaps one of the most paradoxical of his characteristics was his love of God and seemingly at other times hate for God. What emerged in the poetry from this situation was a kind of ruthless honesty evident in poems such as Folk Tale, a touchingly honest poem about prayer:

 

Prayers like gravel

Flung at the sky’s

window, hoping to attract

the loved one’s

attention. But without

visible plaits to let

down for the believer

to climb up,

to what purpose open

that far casement?

I would

have refrained long since

but that peering once

through my locked fingers

I thought that I detected

the movement of a curtain.

 

For Thomas the image of the cross was crucial. Indeed he has said that the reason he is content to call himself a Christian is because the Christian belief that God has taken suffering into himself is the most profound and satisfactory answer to the great problem of suffering. The image of the cross occurs in a number of poems. It was a conviction he expressed in his poem ‘The Coming’:

 

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows; a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

 

But even though his theology of the cross was central, Thomas was acutely aware of only knowing God at all by his seeming absence. That is, by what we don’t know about God. A notion which reaches back to apophatic theology and the English mystical writings such as the fourteenth-century Cloud of Unknowing. Richard Harries, in his lecture on Thomas at Gresham College wrote that: ‘What he [Thomas] wants to keep as an eternal possibility is God as God, not simply preserve a hallowed image which we can control. The title of Simone Weil’s best know book is Waiting on God, which is the theme of one of the essays in it. The image of waiting is also central to one of Thomas’s best loved poems:

 

Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acted
A great role. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I,
For the message.
Prompt me, God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.

 

‘This brings out well the fact that all words purportedly from God come to us through human words, and as such will inevitably be limited, that is in some way distorting: ‘something is lost’. We can only speak of God at all through our human metaphors, and every metaphor of image we use is as untrue as it is true. So our human images that try to reach up and refer to God have continually to be made, and broken and remade. One image has constantly to be set against another, which contradicts and corrects it, and then this image in its turn has to be qualified in a new way.’ [Richard Harries]

 

So you may think that the poem we heard this evening, The Kingdom, is one of R.S. Thomas’ more positive and upbeat poems, telling us how simple it is to find the kingdom of God. And that when we do find the Kingdom of God it has much to offer

Kneeling before an altar

Of wood in a stone church

In summer, waiting for the God

To speak; the air a staircase

For silence; the sun’s light

Ringing me, as though I acted

A great rôle. And the audiences

Still; all that close throng

Of spirits waiting, as I,

For the message.

Prompt me, God;

But not yet. When I speak,

Though it be you who speak

Through me, something is lost.

The meaning is in the waiting.

 

Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life.

 

Here R.S.Thomas holds over the conclusion of each sentence deliberately disrupting the reading of each line. The effect is to underline the paradox of the Christian life: we await the coming of the Kingdom, dreaming of it, but not yet seeing it fully. But if we only dare, it is easy, he says to get there:

 

… [it] takes no time and admission
Is free, if you will purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.

 

Thomas invites the reader or listener to offer themselves green as a leaf but there is also an underlying notion that this might be impossible to achieve. ‘All you have to do is …’ this, but there is a wry smile in the poem that knows how we are not simple or green. The garden of Eden has gone.

 

The need for Christ, therefore, becomes more apparent and his Cross. The poem is perfectly apt for the paradox of todays’ new testament reading. Today we celebrate the baptism of Christ and many this morning renewed their baptism vows in churches. Baptism is the symbol of initiation into the Kingdom and of rebirth, but how hard it is even when we know that the kingdom is there for us, to live as if it is a reality. John Baptises and calls for repentance, Christ comes and is baptised, his authority as the son of God is acknowledged from on high, but, in the next passage of Mark’s gospel, Christ immediately goes into the wilderness where he is starved almost to the point of death and undergoes the mental torment of satanic temptation before his ministry can begin.

 

R.S. Thomas may have been dark in mood, but he was honest. The paradox of and his poetry, bleak with moments of sunlight, highlights the paradoxes that exist between the world and God, between faith and humanity, within ourselves and our spiritual lives. The words of poetry, just as the notes of music, can express something of the ineffable in us and the inexpressible God, and of the relationship of each to the other. I hope, as we journey together this term into the interwoven tapestries of poetry and of faith, that we can go deeper into our own realties and find, in our complex humanity, the divine spark which urges us on to seek again the creative and life-giving domain of the kingdom of God.

Worcester College Chapel, Week 8 Hilary Term 2013

 

Poetry and Theology

 

This term we have had a rich feast in our sermon series on the ‘Poetry of Faith’.  The Chaplain introduced to us the poems of R.S. Thomas, and, later, to the poetry of T.S. Eliot and his links with Worcester College. We have considered the poetry of John Donne, of Philip Larkin, of Rainer Maria Rilke, and of Dante Alighieri.    One of the clearest appreciations of poetry  I remember came from a visiting preacher, a parish priest from a Worcester Living, who said ‘ I read poetry because it paints pictures in my mind; 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 and thoughts that any of us have.’

My task tonight is to try to bring this sermon series together.  Rather than doing so through one single poet, I am going to reflect on how  Poetry and Theology  relate to one another.  However,  before we even begin to think about poetry,  we need to consider, briefly, the other side of the equation:  theology.  At some point many of us have tried out skills at writing poetry,  but who can ‘do’ theology?  Just as anyone can be a poet, can anyone be a theologian?   Or is Theology to be reserved for the experts and the professionals, whether in the Church or the Academy?

Recently our Theology Faculty has been transforming its syllabus;  the  new name ‘Theology and Religion’, and the eighty or more papers which can be chosen over a student’s three years,  tell us something about how rich and diverse the subject of Theology can be.  It  encompasses  the study of philosophy, but also anthropology; of history,  yet also spirituality; of Christianity, but of Buddhism as well;  of the language and literature of the Bible and also  of the Koran .  ‘Theology’:   it comprises two words, and its etymology can be traced back through Middle English and Norman French to Latin and so to Greek:  theos, which means ‘God’,  and ‘logia’,  which means words.  Theology simply means words about God:  discourses about God; or, indeed,  a study of God.

‘Words about God’  not only crowd out our undergraduate and graduate syllabi;  they also fill thousands of shelves in our libraries and supply a vast  number of websites. It seems we cannot say enough about who God is and what he is not. To cite Hamlet’s response to Lord Polonius, all we read are ‘words, words, words’.  Yet, in my view, using words to describe God is only a small part of what ‘doing theology’ is really about:  most of you will agree that theology should be as much about action as discourse, as much about loving our neighbour as about erudite speech.   And even if we narrow theology down to being mainly ‘a study of God’,  it need not be only ‘talk about God’:  in a believing context, Theology is also about talking to God and listening to God speaking to us; furthermore,  at its most profound, it is not about using words at all, but about being silent and ‘mindful’ of the presence of God who is not only found through words but who is also known beyond the medium of speech alone.

Human relationships might offer a somewhat imperfect  analogy here.  We all know  that at the beginning of a friendship conversation and communication are vital if we are to discover mutual interests- and indeed, our differences.  But as a friendship  develops there is less need to talk as we start  to enjoy doing things together, although discussion and exchange of ideas are still important. Our companionship is complete when we are able to sit, unselfconsciously,  in silence, mindful of their company, but without the need to voice anything  in words.  There is a sense in which  Theology encompasses these three phases as well –  it is undoubtedly a discourse about God, but it is also possible that this can progress to a mutual conversation, in prayer;  another stage is silence,  when we realize that both the mind and the heart need to be quietened in the awesome presence of God.

So we cannot ‘do’ Theology without using words, but there is more to Theology than words alone.   This is where Poetry has such an important relationship with Theology,  because it enables us to move from an exercise  which entails a more rational, propositional discourse about God to a different practice which is as much about listening and imagining and intuiting as about speaking and reasoning and explaining.  Poetry can even help us to move on to the third and most profound of all,  where we are ‘lost for words’.

One of my favourite poems by Ursula Askham Fanthorpe  (U.A. Fanthorpe)  is Rising Damp,  which starts by describing about the ‘little fervent underground Rivers of London’.  It’s not an overtly theological poem: but it moves from the observations of these innocent underground streams which ‘chew(ed) the clay to the basin that London nestles in’;  which, having once  ‘chiselled the city, (that) washed the clothes and turned the mills, where children drank and salmon swam’  disappear underground into the depths of London:   ‘Boxed, like the magician’s assistant. Buried alive in the earth. Forgotten, like the dead.’  But, after heavy rains,  they  burst through again, to ‘deluge cellars, detonate manholes, plant effluent on our faces, Sink the city.’  What starts as an innocent image ends as a chaotic one.    The poem’s final verse,  however, is particularly interesting:

‘It is the other rivers that lie

Lower, that touch us only in dreams

That never surface.  We feel their tug

As a dowser’s rod bends to the surface below’.

 

The skill of a poet is to create an effect whereby an image both reaches the depths of our consciousness  (where words are often hard to find) but also emerges at the surface where we are able to articulate what we read or hear.      I once wrote a book on reading the Old Testament and gave it the title The Image, the Depths and the Surface: I  took the idea from Fanthorpe, and its cover has an image of a stone being thrown into the water where refraction on the surface prevents us seeing where it has gone but the ripples on the water reveal its continuing effects.  I’m fairly sure most of my colleagues had no clue what I was  on about:  but I was trying to say something about the power of words, in theology as in poetry,  both  to reveal and conceal what we really mean.  Those well-known lines from Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam V’,  put it better:

‘For words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the Soul within.’

 

This means that poetry, like theology,  can be appreciated, even when it is imperfectly understood.  This is encouraging, because the Bible actually  has a huge amount of poetry,  particularly in the Old Testament, and it is often very difficult to comprehend it.  It is not only found in the Psalms and the Prophets, but in many narrative  parts as well.  The reading  from Genesis 1, which we heard tonight, which of course is a translation of the Hebrew, could easily be set in poetic form in its description of God as Creator,  with the poet playing  on the idea of ‘the word’ which brings hidden things to birth.   So God addresses the watery chaos and deep darkness: ‘ “Let there be light”.  And there was light’.  He then addresses the heavens: ‘ “Let there be a firmament.. to separate the waters”.  And it was so’.   Seven times this ‘word from God’  is pronounced,  and each time it brings order out of chaos – light out of darkness, land out of the waters, vegetation out of  the earth, and so on.  It is a dramatic illustration of an ancient poet using  words about God to describe God using words to bring mysterious hidden things to birth.

The New Testament reading from John 1, which is a translation of the Greek, could also be set in poetic form, as another writer plays with the idea of ‘the Word’  to show the Creator’s greatest ‘fiat’  was the Word which was made flesh – Christ, His only Son who dwells among us.  There are so many echoes here of Genesis 1: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’  The light shines out of darkness;  order is brought of out chaos.  This is another dramatic illustration of  a poet using  words about God to describe God calling out ‘the Word-made-flesh’ to live and work among us. There are many places in the Hebrew and Greek Bibles where the writers adapt a poetic medium as they seek to use words  to capture the indescribable. Poetry is a vital medium in the biblical tradition to speak of the mystery of God working the world.

But can we really classify Genesis chapter 1 as Poetry?  It is certainly not poetry as we might traditionally understand it.    In Hebrew,  ‘Poetry’  is not so much about the sound (it has little metre, rhythm, and rhyme, for example) as about the balance of  sense, whereby the same idea is repeated in two successive lines.  A good example is in Psalm 33,  which was sung  for us earlier:  again,  we may note the psalmist’s use of words to describe the  ‘Word of the Lord’  which is again a creative act.  (I quote from Psalm 33 verses 4 and 6 – do feel free to look at it  on pages 175-6 in your  green prayer books)

‘For the word of the Lord is true:

And all his works are faithful…

 

By the word of the Lord were the heavens made:

And all the hosts of them by the breath of his mouth’

 

In the first verse above, the ‘word of the Lord’ is parallel with  ‘his works’; and the word ‘true’ corresponds with ‘faithful’.   In the second verse,  the ‘word of the Lord’ is parallel with ‘the breath of his mouth’, and ‘the heavens’ in the first line corresponds with ‘the hosts of them’ in the second. (It is common in Hebrew poetry to omit a verb in the second line.)  The translation by Coverdale, which the choir used, had a colon after each of these ideas to make the parallelism clear, and they sung the chant by pausing between the two parts of each verse. This is Hebrew poetry:  by repetition it is able ‘paint several similar pictures in our mind’.

 

Why is  all this important?  Because it shows us  that although Hebrew poetry  is unfamiliar to us, because it conforms to  such different ancient conventions, it still has a capacity to stir our imagination  with things which are  both familiar and unknown.  We are back to the ‘tug of the dowser’s rod’ as it ‘bends to the surface below’.   The very fact we still use the psalms and gain something from reading and even praying  them is testimony to this.    Marianne Moore expresses this rather more sardonically in her  poem ‘The Past is the Present’ when she considers the mysteries of the Hebrew poetry of the prophet Habakkuk:

 

If external action is effete

and rhyme is outmoded,

I shall revert to you,

Habakkuk, as when in a Bible class

the teacher was speaking of unrhymed verse.

He said – and I think I repeat his exact words,

“Hebrew poetry is prose

With a sort of heightened consciousness.”   Ecstasy affords

the occasion and expediency determines the form.

 

 

So a good deal of poetry,  whether translated from the ancient Hebrew or Greek  or contemporised in English,  throws light on both the possibilities and limitations of what ‘doing’ theology is all about.   The image does touch the surface as well as plumb the depths;  the concealed is also revealed.   But, conversely, the image also remains in the  depths; and the revealed is also concealed.

 

I was much struck by this paradox when, for the Chaplain’s sermon some three weeks ago,  I read  in Chapel some of East Coker Part V.  Here  we find a similar struggle in T.S. Eliot’s  poetry, for he is

 

‘trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate…’

 

 

It is this ‘raid on the inarticulate’ which I have been trying to emphasise this evening, for it is at this point that both the poet and  the theologian face a similar challenge and encounter a similar paradox.   Each is constrained by words, and tries  to articulate that which, in words, is a most inadequate expression of what they actually wish to say.

 

I began with offering insights into the etymology of the word ‘Theology’:  I end with an attempt to define, similarly, the word ‘Poetry’.   ‘Poetry’  also  traces its roots  through  the Middle English word ‘poetrie’ to the Latin ‘poētria’ and so to the Greek ‘poetica’,  where the verb  poiein means ‘to create’  or ‘to make’.   So the poet is one who ‘creates’ with words:  the best term might be ‘wordsmith’.   The theologian, as we have seen, is the one who also has to use words in seeking  to understand God:  sometimes she or he might also be called a ‘wordsmith’.  I say  ‘sometimes’:   whereas the poet can only  use words, the theologian has to learn from the limitation of words that theology has a point of reference which, although initially dependent upon words, is also more than this.    Thank God for expressions of Theology in music and the arts!  For these remind us that our encounter with the numinous, and our encounter with God-in-Christ, is more than being good ‘wordsmiths’.  That encounter cannot be contained in volumes of theological tomes,  nor constrained by statements set as creeds and articles of faith; it cannot even  be encapsulated in a compendium of prayers  – even the prayers of the psalms.  It is  undoubtedly greater than all the words and the translated words  preserved in our sacred books. Theology needs words, as poetry needs words: but theology, perhaps at its most profound,  moves from an articulation using  words to speechless   ‘mindfulness’ which is about resting in the presence of God in complete silence.    Our Benedictine forebears understood this so clearly in accepting the vows of silence, according to Chapter 6 of their Rule. ‘For God alone my soul waits in silence’ (Ps. 62.1,5).

 

This sermon may contain  a subconscious word-weariness –  a reaction to having written and read  and spoken far too much throughout this Hilary Term.  Nevertheless,  I would propose that a good Lenten discipline might be the  occasional quest for silence as well as the pursuit of ‘words, words, words’.  For if we can discover God in silence this Lent,  we will certainly appreciate even more our rediscovery of Him in the rich articulation of our Easter faith.

 

 

Lent 2 Worcester College Oxford: Dante and the lure of beauty

Recently, you have heard about Rilke and Larkin, two poets with some nostalgia for the numinous but without religious faith but today I bring you a medieval Catholic Italian poet, who makes theology and the search for God the subject of his verse – though he had no time for bad popes! For the child Dante, his poetic and spiritual life began when he was nine years old and met a little girl in a crimson dress at a party. He hardly knew her, and in adulthood her greeting in the street was the height of happiness to him and the nearest he came to know her. On your sheet you have a famous painting by Henry Holiday, designer of this chapel’s stained glass, showing the time Beatrice refused her greeting because she had heard something to Dante’s discredit.

She married and died young, but for Dante she was the way into a new form of poetry and the way to salvation. The new form of poetry sought to wrestle self-obsessed courtly love poetry away from casting the woman as pretext for self-analysis towards poetry of pure praise, in which she is loved and wondered at for the miracle of her existence – her thisness, her radiant being; the way of salvation was to see her as an opening to the transcendent, with a beauty that is not self-contained but leads into the heart of God himself.

After the death of Beatrice however, Dante’s life goes all astray. He is exiled from his beloved birthplace, Florence, by his political enemies, and he loses this image of Beatrice that leads to virtue. And so his journey in the Divine Comedy is a penitential one, which takes him through Hell to see his own lostness, and to understand how poetry can deceive and foster violent hatred, before he can slowly climb the mountain of Purgatory and achieve reconciliation. In the Earthly Paradise he meets and confesses to Beatrice, who leads him through the heavenly spheres.

I could, as befits Lent, have used the Inferno, beginning in the wood of error, ‘Midway upon this journey of our life’ – and might have done had I realized about Worcester’s own ‘midway’ rite of passage. But Oxford calls the Lent term, ‘Hilary’ from hilaios, meaning cheerful or gracious, and our Lenten fasting is not life-denying but equally cheerful, and is performed out of love for our blessed Lord. Christ’s beauty on the cross or resurrected walking in the dewy garden is the lure that draws us into prayer and fasting. At one point Dante has to walk through the – purely mental – heat of the fire of purgation of lust, and is terrified. The poet Virgil, his guide at that point, encourages him by using Beatrice as a lure, saying, ‘Beatrice is the other side of that fire. I think I can see her eyes already’. To see true beauty requires purgation not just physical fasting but purgation of the desire to own, to master, to degrade, just as true faith requires the reorientation of our whole being.

To stress the importance of the lure of beauty, we heard a passage not from Inferno but from Paradiso, not long before Beatrice leaves Dante to take her own place among the blessed, where he may be part of her prayer but where she has her own destiny. She cannot be a mere idealization. And I chose a point where Dante gives up his attempt to write about her beauty, a beauty which opens to a reality beyond her through her eyes and smile. Dante follows neo-platonic thought in allying goodness, truth and beauty together, just as the fairy-tales of the ordinary people do when they make Cinderella as beautiful as the day. Like Socrates, reporting Diotima’s view of love in Plato’s Symposium, for Dante earthly desire opens the way into heavenly love. Beatrice is a window that lets the light through, ‘light not of the earthly sun but of God himself: ‘light of the intellect, light full of love,/ love of the true good, full of ecstasy,/ ecstasy that transcends the sweetest joy’. This love draws Dante out of himself and launches him on a journey into the reality of God, a journey that begins where words end. Dante’s importance to contemporary poets lies precisely in the way in which he uses poetry to describe the limits of words. When he finally sees the Trinity as rainbows and fiery circle, his imagination fails as he is unable to work out how the human figure he also discerns there relates to the Divine circling. It is, however, that very difficulty – that laborious activity of thought – that brings him into the life of God, so that the poem ends:

At that point vision failed high fantasy

But, like a wheel in perfect balance turning,

I felt my will and my desire impelled

By the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.

True desire leads us out of ourselves on a journey that will never end but is always full of delight. It is like a book, C. S. Lewis suggests, in which each chapter is better than the one before.

All this, you may say, is very attractive, but how does it relate to the Bible? I could have chosen Christ’s words in St John’s gospel, where agape and eros, desire and loving-kindness, are used together, or one of the ecstatic passages from St Paul. But I chose a passage from the book of Wisdom in the Apocrypha, which is also part of our Anglican Bible, containing books written late in Jewish history, because Dante uses it so often in the Comedy. Your sermons on Rilke and Larkin stressed the transformation of the everyday by poetry, while I have been talking about going beyond, about Transcendence. But Dante also learns on his journey how everything in the whole cosmos fits together and is related: he has a vision of the world as a great book, and Beatrice is also an image of the Divine Wisdom: Hagia Sophia, to whom churches in the east are often dedicated and who is illustrated on your sheet.

She is guide and teacher of the beauty of God’s creation. The book of wisdom is narrated as if by Solomon himself, the king who prayed for wisdom as a child. Dante may be comparing himself implicitly to Solomon in the story he tells of meeting Beatrice when he too was a child. Wisdom is both beautiful woman and craftswoman, a mirror of the divine, and Dante’s whole poem is a tribute to a world made radiant by discerning within it a beauty of structure and form: in which we see it as a made thing – God’s work of art. If we truly admire a beautiful object, or even are astounded by the beauty of a person we just glance at in the street, their beauty is not an isolated phenomenon that makes everything else dull but a revelation of how everything truly is: wisdom makes all things new. The dreary Cornmarket is suddenly illumined as if from within. The cup the person drinks from, the ground they tread upon, has a pattern and significance. In the same way, Dante is restored to normal life at the end of his poem, but it is a life now in movement, ‘impelled’ by the Love he encountered, shaped by wisdom.

It is asking a lot more of you to read Dante than pick up a short lyric by Hopkins or Larkin but I hope that once in your life you will read him, perhaps with others because that is the best way to do it. At this very moment there are little groups of people around the world reading Dante together and helping each other with the obscure names. And what I pray may happen in your reading is that the poem may open within you a desire, a longing, for something more: for holy wisdom, holy beauty, for without this divine discontent we will have no transformation, in love or in politics. So let us pray for light intellectual, light full of love, love of the true good, full of ecstasy, that we too may taste the ecstasy that transcends the sweetest joy as beauty opens herself to the aching need of our desiring souls.

Amen.

 

2013 Feb 10                        Worcester College Chapel Evensong                       CA Grosch-Miller

Luke 9:28-36; Letters to a Young Poet, RM Rilke

 

Scripture: Luke 9:28-36

Other reading:  From Letters to A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke

 

At Worpswede bei Bremen, 16 July 1903

…I have left a letter of yours unanswered for a long time.  It is not that I had forgotten it; on the contrary, it was the kind of letter anyone would read a second time if he chanced on it again among his papers, and I could recognise you in it as if you were standing beside me. …I am sure you remember it.  Reading it as I do now, in the great stillness of this faraway place, I am touched by your wonderful concern for life even more than I was in Paris, for there everything sounds different, smothered by the inordinate din that agitates everything.  Here, in the midst of this enormous landscape and of the great winds that blow across from the sea, I feel that there is no-one who could find answers to those questions of yours, those emotions, which deep within themselves live a life of their own.  Even the best of us cannot quite find words that will truly express things so subtle and virtually unsayable.  Nevertheless I believe that you need not stay unanswered so long as you keep in touch with things resembling those by which my eyes are at this moment refreshed.  If you keep close to Nature, to all that is simple in Nature, to the small things which scarcely anyone notices and which can for that very reason invisibly lead to what is great, what is immeasurable; if you truly possess this love for lesser things and if, by serving them, you can quietly win the trust of things that seem humble – then everything will grow easier for you, more unified, somehow more reconciling, not necessarily in your mind, which may hesitate, amazed, but in your deepest awareness and watchfulness and understanding.  You are still so young, so uncommitted, and I do entreat you as strongly as I can, my dear Sir, to stay patient with all that is still unresolved in your own heart, to try to love the very questions, just as if they were locked-up rooms or as if they were books in an utterly unknown language.  You ought not yet to be searching for answers, for you could not yet live them.  What matters is to live everything.  For just now, live the questions.  Maybe you will little by little, almost without noticing, one distant day live your way into the answers.    

 

 

Becoming

 

We gather in the afterglow of the transfiguration, its radiance transfixing, transforming…to contemplate a poet who caught the radiance of God in the simple things of earth and the ripening of human consciousness: Rainer Maria Rilke.  Like Gerald Manley Hopkins, who wrote the world is charged with the grandeur of God, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Earth’s crammed with heaven…., Rilke found God manifest in the creation, an immanent reality brought to fulfilment in the poet’s grasping of it.  Seeing and cherishing the things of the earth, Rilke resacralised the world. (Barrows & Macy 1996, 153)  Digging deep into his inner being, he discovered the hand of the divine awakening and “ripening” him.  In this way, he is particularly amenable to the postmodern West.  No dualism impeded his spiritual journey; no institution confined his understanding.  His passion was for the content of God emergent in earth and in humanity.

 

You have already heard some of his wisdom: closeness to Nature, attentive loving observation, patience with all that is unresolved in your heart, love the questions, live them that you may one day live into the answers.  I am most intrigued with Rilke’s poetry of becoming, his understanding and expression of how we become ourselves and that God becomes through us becoming.  The poems I will be sharing with you on this topic come from a collection he called The Book of Hours, a book of three collections: The Book of Monastic Life, The Book of Pilgrimage and The Book of Poverty and Death.  He wrote these poems in German.   I will be reading from the 1996 translation Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love poems to God, by poet Anita Barrows and systems thinker and environmental activist Joanna Macy. (NY: Riverhead Books)

 

Rilke had what he called in a letter a completely indescribable passion for experiencing God. (Barrows & Macy 2009, 33)  Born in 1875 in Prague, he was raised Roman Catholic but found his spiritual home at the turn of the century in Russia and the Orthodox Church.  There he found a God who inhabited earth and expressed its divinity in human potential.  [van der Lippe, quoting Andreas-Salomé You Alone at 10]. There, he said, God broke in on me, and for a long time I have lived in the antechamber of his name, on my knees. [You alone, 153-154]

 

The Book of Hours came to him in an outpouring, as though dictated from above.  He wrote at a feverish pace, in three sittings, between Sept 1899 and March 1903.  He wrote as though he were a Russian monk living in a cloister, summoned to the task of seeing and meeting what was most real to him in the world.  He wrote of the ripening of the self through our wrestling with God, and the impenetrability of the holy, whose firm hands hold and free us:

 

From Book I, 25 (p. 70)

I love you, gentlest of Ways,

who ripened us as we wrestled with you.

 

You, the great homesickness we could never shake off,

you, the forest that always surrounded us,

 

you, the song we sang in every silence,

you dark net threading through us,

 

On the day you made us you created yourself,

and we grew sturdy in your sunlight….

 

Let your hand rest on the rim of Heaven now

and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you.

 

He was aware of the desire we have to cling to what we discover in our wrestling, to put the ephemeral in tangible form, like Peter – transfixed by the sight of Jesus, Moses and Elijah shining on the mountaintop – who wanted to build three dwellings.  Rilke did not disdain that very human tendency to concretise and systematise religious feeling, but for him, he knew that the real faithfulness was sensing God and letting God work in us, so that we become living words.

 

From Book II,15 (p. 115):

All who seek you test you.

And those who find you

bind you to image and gesture.

 

I would rather sense you

as the earth senses you.

In my ripening

ripens

what you are.

 

I need from you no tricks

to prove you exist.

Time, I know,

is other than you.

 

No miracles, please.

Just let your laws

become clearer

from generation to generation.

 

Desire is no enemy to Rilke.  Longing features strongly in the poems, as does emotion and embodiment, and silence and solitude.  The whole of human experience is the realm in which we find God and in which we manifest God:

 

Book I, 59 (p. 88)

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

 

These are the words we dimly hear:

 

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing. 

Embody me.

 

Flare up like flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

 

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going.  No feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself lose me.

 

Nearby is a country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

 

Give me your hand.

 

Again from Book I,17 (p. 64):

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads

of her life, and weaves them gratefully

into a single cloth—

it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall

and clears it for a different celebration

 

where the one guest is you.

In the softness of evening

it’s you she receives.

 

You are the partner of her loneliness,

the unspeaking centre of her monologues. 

With each disclosure you encompass more

and she stretches beyond what limits her,

to hold you.

 

And from Book III,62 (p. 147):

I thank you, deep power

that works me ever more lightly

in ways I can’t make out.

The day’s labour grows simple now,

and like a holy face

held in my dark hands.

 

Reading the Book of Hours, we are struck by the intimacy of the relationship between God and man, God and woman; and by the earthy tenderness with which God cradles human life and brings it to its fulfilment, which is to manifest the divine.

 

He speaks to God:  Book II, 26 (p. 122)

You too will find your strength.

We who must live in this time

cannot imagine how strong you will become –

how strange, how surprising,

yet familiar as yesterday.

 

We will sense you

like a fragrance from a nearby garden

and watch you move through our days

like a shaft of sunlight in a sickroom. 

 

We will not be herded into churches,

for you are not made by the crowd,

you who meet us in our solitude.

 

We are cradled close in your hands –

and lavishly flung forth.

 

Today we remember the Transfiguration – the revelation of radiant Word made flesh, the fulfilment of God’s purpose in creation.  The Transfiguration is the apex of the incarnation, the whole of the promise that God might dwell fully in and through humanity.  Rilke’s Love poems to God reveal the way, in silence and in solitude, through our seeing, our longing and our becoming, the divine comes to life in our flesh.  Hear again:

 

You…go to the limits of your longing. 

Embody me.

 

Flare up like flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

 

May we know God’s tenderness and strength in the things of the earth and the longings of our hearts.  And may we be ripened by our wrestling, by the loving and living of our questions, as we become who we can be in the likeness of Christ.  Amen.

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.                     +

The parable this evening from St Matthew, is primarily about relationships between people. It’s about not judging and not assuming that you and I are wheat and others are weeds. When we judge others and dismiss their contributions and value, we ourselves become weeds among the wheat.
There may be something in this parable that helps us in introspection as well. Maybe it could help us survey our own inner landscape and evaluate the weeds among the wheat in our lives that perhaps need pruning, but not plucking out. That means that you and I ought not to criticize ourselves so harshly about our flaws and faults. Because, while there are aspects of our personality that shouldn’t be allowed to take over the whole field, however these flaws in the fullness of time may play their part in contributing to our life’s harvest and may make a useful contribution to the world.
The judgmental attitude of the weeders towards others, is a prime indication that their thoughts and actions have been sown by the “enemy” rather than by God. Jesus did not weed out Judas from the twelve, even though, according to some accounts, Jesus knew about the upcoming betrayal before it occurred. Jesus did not weed out Peter from the twelve, even though he knew about his upcoming denials. Jesus knew that all the disciples would run away — they all had their faults. They weren’t producing the fruit that was expected — but he did not weed them out of the fellowship. If Jesus were to weed out all the imperfections, who would be left?
Jesus says the enemy sows the weeds. Ironically God probably finds it easier to deal with his enemies, as his friends can be more difficult to control. The theologian Karl Rahner put it this way: “The number one cause of atheism can be Christians themselves. Those who confidently proclaim God and then deny Him with their lifestyles is what an unbelieving world finds simply unbelievable.” Perhaps the best defense of God would be to live like He told us to. The gospel would then have such power and attraction that we wouldn’t have to worry about defending it.
A sense that there is an enemy is common to many societies and even the religious. It is almost as though we need an enemy, an other, against whom to define ourselves. A perfect example of this were the Jews in Hitlers Germany. This need can maintain the important concept of the enemy, by creating enemies for survival. Paranoia keeps some people going and gives their lives meaning, Stalin was a prime example. There’s ‘them’ and there’s ‘us’. The simpler, the better. And Religion doesn’t escape, it can be exploited to keep prejudices in place.
The psychologist Carl Jung would have approved of the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Jung explored the nature of the unconscious “shadow” that lives in each soul. The shadow gets filled with all the things that we repress because we don’t want to know them. It is the rubbish bin of the soul where we try to throw out our unexamined greed, narcissistic selfishness and all other things which we find difficult to rid ourselves off. Out of site, this garbage rots and pollutes, and unconsciously drives our actions. We think we have rid ourselves of our junk, yet it controls us behind the scenes of our conscious thought. Jung believed that we needed to learn to recycle our waste. By acknowledging our junk and knowing it is always there, we are better able to understand ourselves, to grow and to act with true compassion towards ourselves and others. Just as we are learning to recycle and to compost, so our waste isn’t such a big problem, examining our shadow side, is healthier than trying to pitch our sins into a huge bin bag. This metaphor of junk and recycling is a modern translation of wheat and weeds. Whether we are talking about weeds or garbage, the danger is that our quest for purity can lead to the wrong result when we ignore the unrecycled issues what is within our own souls.
This theme can also be seen in Shakespeare’s early plays, where all issues are settled in the play. In later plays it is not so, even though divine intervention occurs at the end to adjust inequities. But when you read the great tragedies, such as Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear, the problem becomes too complex to bring closure at the end. The problems are pushed forward to the next world, till the final harvest.
This parable warns us against making premature judgments until the final judgment is to takes place. After all, doesn’t this parable take its meaning from within our own lives? C. S. Lewis notes that he once had considerable difficulty in the saying that one should “hate the sin but love the sinner.” It didn’t seem to make sense to him until one day it occurred to him that it was within himself that the saying showed its truthfulness. Did he not “love himself” while at the same time he “hated the sin” that so dominated his life? Is this not a reflection of the words of St Paul when he speaks of the great distress created within himself, when he did the things he did not really want to do, while not doing the things he very much wanted to do? St. Theresa of Avila prayed, “Oh, God, I don’t love you. I don’t even want to love you, but I want to want to love you.” Do we not recognize ourselves in reflections like these? The great physicist Werner Heisenberg said, “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will, what he wants to will.” He spoke for all humankind, did he not? This recognition of the weeds in our lives and how they can suffocate the wheat of God’s grace that’s planted within us.
Ultimately this parable teaches us that sometimes there is not much, if anything, that we can do about the weeds amongst our wheat. Here Jesus teaches us that there are situations in life where the weeds and the wheat are so tangled up together, that they can never be separated in this world. There are knots which no mortal can untie. Thankfully at the final harvest, God will remove the weeds from us and will gather the good wheat that is in us. Amen.

Rev’d Neil Phair, Rector of the Benefice of Cherbury with Gainfield, Oxfordshire

18th November 2012