A message from the Dean - 15 May 2020
Dear Friends,
Thank you for the responses many of you have made to my previous letters, especially last week's letter on the subject of the 75th anniversary of VE day. It has been good to stay in touch and I have appreciated the opportunity to think 'aloud'. From this week the letter can be accessed via the Cathedral Website, so we'll see what kind of reaction unrestricted circulation has.
Primarily, this letter has been directed at everyone associated with the Cathedral and I've tried to combine reflection on our times within Christian interpretation of the here and now. I want to keep that focus, in full recognition that a cathedral like ours is 'owned' by everyone who has any affection for the place. It's the job of the Chapter (the Cathedral's governing body) to ensure that it extends its welcome and spiritual hospitality to all and therefore creates the atmosphere, space and resource for good levels of understanding, appreciation and dialogue.
Permit me to go off on a riff. A wise and much appreciated lay member of Chapter (now enjoying retirement) pointed out to me the value of long car journeys when you can sit alongside your passenger, face the same direction, but not have to look at each other. (A real irritation just now is we're reliant on Zoom and other video platforms for meetings; we are perpetually looking at ourselves and trying to look alert. No time to zone out or scratch your head. Daily, I have to realise the horrible truth that a haircut is long overdue!) These long, side-by-side, non-confrontational car journeys allow a very interesting style of conversation. Both driver and passenger can observe things going on around, both have a shared destination, and if you are going to arrive safely both will respect each other's need for comfort, not taking alarming risks, but passing the time in as interesting and enjoyable way as possible. Of course, as a teenager I've sat sulkily batting away parental attempts at conversation and I've had the same treatment from my own children: "Dad, you're so boring".
Some journeys allow personal truths to get spoken, hidden wisdom discovered, frank admission of hopes and fears, modest disclosures of high points and low points in life. It's the simple truth of what's possible when you travel alongside.
Let me play with this a bit more. It seems to me that a Cathedral is here to promote that alongsideness. We've tried very hard in the last four years through our yearly themed programme, illuminations, community art projects, exhibitions and dialogues to look at big subjects that concern us all whether or not we classify ourselves as believers. We've wanted to share Christian and Biblical wisdom but the invitation has always been to look at things from a wide variety of perspectives and discover the joy and delight in discovery. For example, in contributing to making a beautiful community art installation (such as Doves, Angels, Stars and Poppies), writing reflective words, naming memories, events and people, seeing the richly imaginative work of our Artist-in Residence Peter Walker's light shows and art works.
The Cathedral has been putting something 'out there' that we can travel towards, circle around, talk about, experience together, whether that's been about war and peace, space and journeys, our beautiful planet Earth or discovering fresh wonder in the sheer beauty of the Christmas story or the agony of Jesus's suffering and death. When you add the Cathedral's architecture and beautiful music as a daily occurrence, freely available, welcoming and beckoning, the Cathedral becomes a vehicle in itself for alongside encounters.
In the Church's calendar, we are still in the Easter Season. It's such an important time we give ourselves fifty days to absorb and celebrate the Resurrection. (When we speak of 'after Easter', that, in Church terms, means Monday 1st June 2020!) The Easter stories are of people coming to terms not with a resuscitated corpse but with Jesus being raised from death to new life. My own favourite Resurrection story is in St. Luke's Gospel 24:13-35. (Go on, read it for yourselves). It's about a side-by-side journey. Two people are hurrying away from Jerusalem after the momentous Passover Festival when Jesus had been arrested, tried and executed. The two men were on the outer circle of Jesus's followers. A stranger draws alongside and there's a conversation about where they are heading, what they have been doing. The stranger draws them out: what's been going on? What do you make of it? Was this Jesus the Messiah? Well look at the scriptures again, wasn't it all there? A suffering victim, Messiah, absorbing evil, expiating, redeeming, atoning, forgiving, liberating? Wasn't this Jesus the real thing?
It's evening, time to eat. The two say to the stranger "come to the Inn and eat with us". They sit down, the stranger sits alongside and breaks bread, a sign of fellowship, at-homeness, bread of presence and rich memory. The penny drops, the Risen Jesus is seen in the breaking of the bread. The two rush back to Jerusalem remembering that as they spoke alongside the stranger their hearts burned within them. Assurance? Inspiration? Memory and hope overwhelming them? All these things perhaps, but it led to a fresh, newly-minted discovery, just like knowing a person for some time and then falling head over heels in love with them.
That Easter encounter is, for me, a paradigm of how we as a Church go about our mission. We travel alongside, we find a way of respectful, careful but highly attuned conversation. We encourage questions. We welcome the opportunity of sharing experience and wonderment, and when there's love and trust we begin the patient and privileged task of sharing our understanding of what God has done in Jesus Christ. We ourselves are only fellow pilgrims, or as a famous Religious writer once said: "sharing the gospel is about one beggar telling another beggar where they can get bread." We offer friendship, companionship (a word that at its root means sharer of bread), the willingness to address a common agenda and mine it for all its riches and possibility.
People at all stages of life have questions, moments of complete bafflement and, equally, insights unique to each person. It's the Church's job, most particularly a cathedral's job, to allow the sifting, weighing and valuing of people's experience. When in AD 627 the monk Paulinus visited King Edwin of Northumberland to persuade him to accept Christianity, the King hesitated and summoned his advisors. At the meeting, one of them stood up and said:
"Your majesty, when you sit at the table with your lords and vassals, in the winter when the fire burns warm and bright in the hearth and the storm is howling outside, bringing the snow and the rain, it happens of a sudden that a little bird flies into the hall. It comes in at one door and flies out through the other. For the few moments that it is inside the hall it does not feel the cold, but as soon as it leaves your sight it returns to the dark of winter. It seems to me that human life is much like the same. We do not know what went before and we do not know what follows. If the new teaching can speak to us surely of these things, it is well for us to follow it."
They found the answer they searched for in the message of Jesus. The great Christian task of our time is to listen carefully (prayerfully) to God and what's going on around us and try and provide the space where we can all come alongside.
With my love, prayers and blessing,
Adrian