A message from the Dean - 22 May 2020
Dear Friends,
I tend to write more clearly first thing in the morning: it’s just after six a.m. I’m looking out on a garden made lush and green by sun and overnight rain. There’s a pigeon hooting so loudly it’s an alarm call and the lime trees in The Close have a vivid freshness about them. During lockdown I guess we have all had time to notice things. There’s less background rumble of traffic, rail transport or airliners. We’ve been a bit pestered by the buzzing of naughty people flying drones round The Close and Cathedral recently. (By the way, drone-flying round here isn’t permitted. It’s a potential danger to the Cathedral’s fabric and glass and drone-snooping can be construed as a prelude to criminal activity, so I’m afraid the police will be called if we see any drones in the air over The Close.) But, having said that, the stillness and quietness has brought great opportunities to stand or sit and simply look and listen. It’s been a stimulus to a sense of amazing thanksgiving even in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis. Many people have been thanking us for online worship. Our indebtedness to Canon Andrew Stead and Ben Lamb, our Director of Music, is immense. Worship is a product of wonder and if we aren’t first opened up by wonder, our hearts and voices can become parched and shrivelled so we breathe shallowly and croak untunefully.
Thomas Traherne (1637-73) is a writer who saw God’s glory at the heart of creation and saw the world with almost child-like novelty. He was a priest and a shoemaker’s son from Hereford. His work always explores big themes: what kind of creatures are we? How can we find happiness? What about sin? How free are we? How should we live? In his day, he was writing for a wide public that had just emerged from Civil War and the Puritan rule of the Commonwealth. It was an age of immense turbulence. London saw the great plague of 1665 followed by devastating fire the following year. The big questions in life were not so different from those of our own time. What Traherne helps us get right is seeing the world as God’s gift to us.
"Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till you so esteem it, that everything in it, is more your treasure, than a King’s Exchequer full of gold and silver. Can you take too much joy in your Father’s works? He is himself in everything. Some things are little on the outside, and rough and common, but I remember the time, when the dust of the streets were as precious as gold to my infant eyes, and now they are more precious to the eye of reason."
"You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your views, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world: and more than so, because men (and women) are in it who are everyone sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world." (Centuries of Meditation: 24+29)
I go back to Traherne time and time again. C.S. Lewis described Centuries of Meditation as: ‘almost the most beautiful book in English.’ He said he ‘could go on quoting forever.’ Of course I’m not saying we all have to share Traherne’s mystical exuberance, but to be shocked somehow into delight can open us up to God and one another and it’s the beginning of true prayer.
During lockdown I have been following a lot of press and broadcast output about how people have responded spiritually to the epidemic. Born again atheists have been starting to pray or want to pray. Equally, it’s been noticeable how many people have been walking round the Cathedral, sitting on the benches on the West front, looking at the wooden cross on the lawn, and leaving prayer requests on the virtual prayer wall. In a population where half aren’t afraid to say they have no religion, something is going on. I look at the number of people who spend time looking at gravestones. I’m sure it’s not a vampire-like fascination with death. More as Philip Larkin said in his poem ‘Churchgoing’ that even atheists always find meaning in a church ‘If only that so many dead lie round.’ We’re confronted by our place in the world, our place in time, and suddenly people start to pray.
Here's Mary Oliver’s ‘The Summer Day’:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed.
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last,
and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
There’s some distilled wisdom available from our Mothers and Fathers in the faith that we can share. For some it has been the deliberate cultivation of silence and solitude when you can bring the whole of yourself before God without apology or reservation and stay there in the quiet just letting your longing or emptiness pray its way through you. For others it’s been the gathering up of every instinct and perception of blessing – like St. Francis and St. Clare on awareness of life being saturated with God. Or it can be a rehearsal of your day’s experience, a looking for the presence of God in people and situations in impulse, conversation, work, walking, stillness or exercise. It can be a daily search for the face of Christ in others, particularly in the poor and marginalised. It can be a listening for the voice of Christ in the ‘mouth of friends or stranger’ (as an Irish hymn puts it). It can be a determination to align with a big cause, the righting of a particular wrong that will take courage, endurance and hope and a daily commitment not to give up.
Before the lockdown the Church of England made a committal to be carbon neutral by 2030. Was that rash or prophetic? My cynicism about the General Synod caused me to think unfairly that the asylum was being run by the patients. But think again, I thought. We’ve seen massive public effort to fight Covid-19. What if we had the will, the sense of urgency to combat an even bigger threat – a world being made uninhabitable by climate change? What if, after Covid-19, we could harness our effort to rebuild our economy sustainably, where we don’t pollute the seas, the soil, the rivers, poison ourselves by what we eat and use? What if we could break out of the deathly cycle of gorging ourselves with consumer goods then purging ourselves? Kenneth E. Boulding, the great Quaker economist, once said that markets fail to recognise finitude and mortality, that resources are limited and we all die ‘anyone who believes in infinite growth on a finite planet is either mad or an economist.’ Instead we need an economy that is just and sustainable for 8 billion people living together on a small planet.
The current crisis has and is opening us up to new and old truths; let’s not waste it by wanting to go back to a ‘normal’ that failed our spirits, minds and bodies, our planet and wildlife. I think the question of our souls is back on the agenda.
With my love, prayers and blessing,
Adrian