A message from the Dean - 31 July 2020
Dear Friends,
I’m doing my usual thing of getting up early on Friday morning, whilst all is quiet, to write this letter and enjoy the sights and sounds of early morning. Yesterday was baking hot and the garden has got that unmistakeable aroma of freshness and recovery. The start of the day is a good time to pray. It takes me longer these days to be fully awake but the transition from sleep to getting going allows time to be grateful for a new day, for the gift of life itself, for time and space to exist, and before the worries, pressures and routines of the day kick in, to practise a few minutes of stillness in the presence of God.
Michael Ramsey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, was once asked by an American journalist how long he had prayed that morning. “Two minutes” the Archbishop admitted. “Only two minutes?” the journalist asked in surprise. “Ah, but you see”, the Archbishop explained, “it took me twenty-eight minutes to get there”. The Archbishop was humbly admitting that like most of us, prayer can be a struggle and a difficult discipline. Prayer is more than reeling off a list of neurotic requests or telling God the news. It is about becoming attuned to God, listening and waiting for him, making space in the heart for encounter, bringing our need or emptiness or brokenness to God, but all the time simply wanting God, desiring what he promises. Of course, as soon as I sit down and pray or kneel and pray, I usually start to get assaulted by a thousand stray thoughts: things I need to do, things I haven’t done, regrets, bits of memory, trivial things, lapses into day dreams. It’s amazing what a rag bag consciousness can be. I used to get upset and kick myself about being so distracted in my prayers and so unable to make any progress as I thought I should. Fortunately I had a wise Spiritual Director at the time. I’d taken to her a bad case of my spiritual envy on hearing a fellow theological student say “my prayer life is wonderful, it’s so natural”. She patted my hand and said “most of us spenditwenty minutes in the dark every day hoping something will happen. Learn to love your distractions, if they bubble and fizz let them be part of your prayer, part of what God is showing you about yourself and how he is drawing you on. The important thing is to keep going”. It was the best advice I could have been given and I still console myself with it.
We live in a culture that owns up to being spiritual without being religious. People pray, meditate and reflect. There’s a real marketplace of therapies, practices and thought techniques out there helping people cope with life and cultivate an “inwardness” that makes for greater compassion and the ability to give and receive love. Up and down the country there are “Mind, Body and Spirit” fairs attracting big crowds and aiming to meet expressed needs for wholeness. After so much harsh materialism and social determinism in the twentieth century, this development is very interesting and it provides a very clear steer to the Christian Church about how it must share, teach and involve people in its own rich and beautiful spiritual tradition.
Now I’ve been ordained long enough to realise many good and faithful Christians, especially Anglicans, are practical people, “doers” rather than reflectors or contemplatives. They feel embarrassed about the part prayer plays in their life, how they get by without doing much of it, and prefer doing good works and getting on with living a decent life with decent hopes, ambitions and goals. Treating others as you would be treated is a kind of golden rule for life, work and family. It’s practical and without pretension. But looking below the surface there is, in every life a capacity for God. I spoke about this in last week’s message. It’s often when life overwhelms with joy or sorrow something stirs in the heart. This is holy ground: it is the gateway to God.
Modernity programmatically ruled out God. Faith could be practised privately but there was no generally accepted plausibility to belief. Salvation lay in prosperity, social organisation, scientific advance and individual liberty. Yet these great drives for what my parent’s generation called “progress”, have had, at best, uneven and unequal results. There is a search and yearning for what the theologian Paul Tillich called “our ultimate concerns”. So if the Church, or God forbid, this Cathedral simply presents itself as a preservation trust or only as a site of historical interest or dare it be said, solely as a place of good music and an association of nice, decent people, we will have failed.
I often like to say that churches are one of the few places in society that trade in tears. We have enough spiritual “bandwidth” to cope with the human condition. But this is something we cannot do in our own strength and with purely human wisdom. The Church is built on faith, and faith is always a reaching out to God, and that reaching takes place in our praying, our involvement in the sacraments, our reading and mulling the Bible, our simple desire and wanting for God in Christ to deepen his life in you and me.
As lockdown has eased and we were able to open the Cathedral for private prayer, it was touching to see the steady in-flow of people coming to light candles and to be still. We paid attention to the ambience: there was chant as background music, well-trained and sensitive volunteers who enabled people to appreciate the quiet. There was the odour of sanctity. There was much prayer being offered. Encouraging it to happen is another form of hospitality. It demonstrates, in Philip Larkin’s words, that we are a “serious house on serious ground”. Allowing the Cathedral to minister to a spiritually inquisitive and hungry population will be just as important as providing a sense of community and belonging, and in doing so it will be a stimulus and challenge to all of us who count ourselves as “insiders” to go deeper in our praying and not be frightened of exploring and learning more, even asking for help and direction in our attempts to be authentic disciples.
One of the best books I have ever read on prayer is by the Benedictine Religious, Maria Boulding. She died a few years ago. But in her set of reflections on Advent, (entitled “The Coming of God”) she sets out God’s call to us. Let me quote the first two rallying paragraphs of that work.
“If you want God, and long for union with him, yet sometimes wonder what that means or whether it can mean anything at all, you are already walking with the God who comes. If at times you are so weary and involved with the struggle of living that you have no strength even to want him, yet you are dissatisfied that you don’t, you are already keeping [a great longing] in your life. If you have ever had an obscure intuition that the truth of things is somehow better, greater, more wonderful than you deserve or desire, that the touch of God in your life stills you by its gentleness, that there is mercy beyond anything you could ever suspect, you are already drawn into the central mystery of salvation.
Your hope is not a mocking dream; God creates in human hearts a huge desire and a sense of need because he wants to fill them with the gift of himself … there is hope in us, and longing, because grace was there first. God’s longing for us is the spring of ours for him”.
So, my encouragement is, however feeble you are at prayer, and I speak as a fellow struggler, keep going and do more. Every morning is a chance to open ourselves to receiving God’s grace and love. Everyday an opportunity to become more attuned to all he gives us and wants from us. We simply have to open the door of our hearts. My Spiritual Director who first taught me not to give up died, saying two lines from a hymn: “Come to my heart, Lord Jesus, there is room in my heart for thee”.
Perhaps the best gift we can give to God and one another is having our hearts fixed on him, open to him, responsive to him.
With my love, prayers and blessing.
Adrian
PS. I’ll be taking a break from crafting these weekly messages in August. We’ll resume the messaging in September with an extended authorship. The Canons are sharpening their pencils in anticipation!