A message from the Dean - 19 June 2020
Dear Friends,
Well lockdown is gradually easing and we all hope and pray that this will not lead to another “spike” in COVID-19 infections and fatalities. I have to say I’ve been deeply moved by the pictures and stories of people emerging from hospital after long periods in intensive-care units, they’ve all looked triumphant but weakened and physically diminished by their fight for life after contracting the virus. One man was on the local news last night: he as sitting in a wheelchair leaving a local hospital where he’d undergone rehabilitation and recovery. His smile and appreciation for his treatment and care were beautiful. He has a wife being nursed in a care home for dementia and when asked what he was going to do first he said, “I’m going to see my wife and give her a big kiss”. It brought home to me that in a crisis we all begin to realise what matters most, and the fundamentals of life and love are the ones that bring us joy and move us deeply. After the COVID-19 crisis, we’ll need to remember that.
During the past week the Cathedral has reopened for private prayer and we have had between thirty and forty prayer-visitors each day. We have kept the building hushed and quiet to encourage prayer and reflection. We’re also very grateful for many who have volunteered to offer sotto voce welcomes and farewells and ensure hand sanitisation takes places. We’ve received appreciations and thanks for all this and I have to say it’s been lovely to see familiar and friendly faces back in the Cathedral. Re-emerging into something like the familiar can be compared to coming out of the cinema after a day-time screening: there’s blinking and a kind of re-awakening process, a slight sense of strangeness too. But re-opening is very good and a step in the right direction. We await Government advice on when some kind of public worship can resume. We’re also very interested in when we will be able to sing to together. Studies are underway and we’re looking forward to a decision. My biggest nightmare is contemplating a non-musical Christmas! The horror of it made my hair curl.
I guess many will be looking back over the past three months and recollecting what has had to be postponed or changed or set aside. Holidays are hard to contemplate just now and birthdays and anniversaries have had to be re-engineered as on-line occasions. Here in the Cathedral I was looking forward to the Cathedral Chorus performing Edward Elgar’s “The Kingdom”. I hope it won’t be too long before this great work gets an airing. It is a big piece using a full orchestra and it fulfils Sir Thomas Beecham’s dismissal of British public taste in music. “The British like every kind of music provided it is loud”. “The Kingdom” takes up the story of the first apostles in Jerusalem awaiting the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, then how, when anointed and energised by the Spirit, they begin to preach the good news and live a life together which actualises the message of Jesus Christ: people’s hearts are moved, people are baptised, there are healings, there is communion and community and there is, of course, opposition. The persecutors and despisers aren’t far away.
I have to admit I’m a big fan of much of Elgar’s work, (I don’t care for his organ music too much, which, to my untutored ears, has a certain stew-like quality) but give Elgar a big orchestra, a full chorus and a subject that reaches for heaven and his work is supreme. All of which brings me to the subject of what we mean when we talk about the Kingdom of God. Go back to the concert hall with me, or the Cathedral nave: when we see great art or hear great music we have an encounter with truth. In the presence of great music or art we find ourselves transfixed. We dream dreams and have visions, we realise that the hints, glimpses and intimations of a greater reality than the day to day have been given us through the means of a musical performance or by looking at a work of art. These things become revelatory. As William Blake put it: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to (us) as it is, infinite”.
Jesus and Christians have been positive in saying that God’s reign must include this world and its history as well as the next. “Thy Kingdom come” is equivalent to saying, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. The good news, as Jesus proclaimed it, is that God’s reign is near, has always been near. It hasn’t fully arrived, but it is at hand, within reach. If we are bold enough we can, according to Jesus, stretch out and grab the Kingdom of God and live as though the world were already under the divine rule. Jesus did that and paid for it with his life. He invited his friends to do the same. He called it “taking the Kingdom by storm”. Jesus acted ahead of his time. Of course it’s never the right time for the Church or the world to believe and act as if every day offers the possibility of salvation, that today is the day of the Kingdom. Yet the Gospel is a standing testimony that the good things God promises can come to pass.
Look at the Gospels carefully and what do you see? Jesus actually seeing and valuing, women, non-Jews, lepers, prostitutes, people of other races, disreputable sinners, fraudsters, tricksters, the poor, the alone, the despised, and self-righteous leaders, not as everyone else saw them and judged them, but as he believed God saw them. There is a profound almost visceral pity in Jesus’s reaching out to people in their lostness and confusion. So you see a Jesus whose treatment of convention, sabbath observance, poverty and wealth, disease, or social class ran counter to that of his times because it reflected the mind of God. In the Gospel you see a Jesus who dared to be different and invited his friends and his followers to pay the price with him.
A Christian vision of the Kingdom of God is the heavenly dream brought down to earth by a small vanguard who can alive ahead of their time. I think in our Diocese of Sanctus in Stoke on Trent using a Victorian Church to provide welfare, literacy, legal advice, food and clothing to migrants, asylum seekers and refugees with no other place to go. Or again, a school I know in Jerusalem working to educate Israelis and Arabs, together, hand in hand, learning each other’s language and faith traditions so that new wise citizens might emerge in a country locked in conflict. I also think of a small holding run by Arab Christians just outside Hebron called “Tent of Nations” stubbornly defending its right to remain there and live in peace whilst being surrounded by new developments, having its water and power cut off and living sustainably and non-violently proudly proclaiming “we refuse to be enemies”. This is the Kingdom of God. This is what Jesus embodied and taught.
“Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.”
I’m told by some that the world “daily” as used by Jesus meant not “daily” in the ordinary sense, but rather the bread of the coming day. So we’re praying for tomorrow’s bread today, the bread of Kingdom come, today. It’s a kind of commitment “we’ll live God’s tomorrow now”. Let me end with R.S. Thomas’s poem “The Kingdom” (p233 Collected Poems Phoenix Press 1993&2001)
It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on:
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. It’s a long way off, but to get
There 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.
With my love, prayers and blessing.
Adrian