The Dean's Last Blog

Not my last blog ever, just the last in the role of Dean. I'm writing on my final day in Durham. You'll forgive me if it's a trifle longer than usual.

I am sitting in the medieval library of the Deanery that has been our home for the last twelve and half years. One eighth of a century. That's a mere blink of the eye in the long history of this Cathedral, but it's a significant chunk of my own lifetime. I can honestly say I have never been more fulfilled or happy. As I look at the Cathedral glowing in autumnal sunshine on a beautiful Michaelmas Day, I am profoundly grateful for the privilege of having served here and lived here during these years.  

During these last few days we've been given a truly wonderful send-off. I blogged last time about what was coming up but hadn't anticipated: the extraordinary warmth and generosity of everyone who has been part of it. You'll allow me, I hope, to say a bit about it because it's one way I can begin (but only begin) to say thank you.

On Friday night, we are dined out by the Cathedral Chapter together with our spouses. We always enjoy these convivial occasions, whether it's to welcome or say farewell to our colleagues. I've never needed to be reminded of how much I owe to a Chapter that has been outstanding throughout my time. I'm not forgetting the tough times, when it's been vital to have a strong sense of common purpose and shared values. The Vice Dean offers a beautiful (and funny) tribute to us both that leaves us deeply moved. Among many other things, the Chapter presents me with an exquisitely tooled and bound book containing all my sermons preached in the Cathedral since I arrived in 2003. (Actually, that's volume 1. Volume 2 will arrive now that my final sermon on Sunday can be included.)

Saturday is largely Sabbath. But I'm delighted that one of my last acts is to admit seven new choristers to the Cathedral choir at evensong: a case of avete atque valete. And also to have the family here and celebrate my daughter's engagement, announced today after the proposal has been put on the roof of the Deanery and her father courteously spoken to by the young gentleman. We like the proper formalities to be adhered to.

Something deep inside me does not, really does not, want Sunday to dawn. I find myself queasy and sad at the thought that it has finally come, a case of 'most things may never happen, this one will' as Philip Larkin puts it in his brilliant poem about death, 'Aubade'.

But it is the most marvellous day. The Precentor and Organist (for once) have allowed the Dean a free rein with the choice of music and hymns. Inevitably they carry a deep symbolism - perhaps unwisely because they awaken powerful memories and strong emotions. 'Live this day as if it were your last' says the first hymn at matins with an accuracy I haven't foreseen when I chose it. I preside at the sung eucharist when we enjoy a Haydn mass and a Mozart motet. The Precentor preaches on the gradual psalm (19 - 'the heavens declare the glory of God'). He draws out of it some of the themes of my ministry at Durham. You'll be able to read it on the Cathedral website. I would have urged him not to do it if I'd known what he planned, but it is a beautiful and loving sermon that I'll always remember.

At the reception afterwards, the Cathedral Community celebrates and says goodbye. We are taken aback by their extraordinary generosity. Jessica, who leads it as their representative on the Cathedral Council, eschews the spoken words and instead sings a tribute to us both to the tune of Maccabaeus (a gentle humorous poke at me for re-writing the words of 'Thine be the glory' to try to do more justice to the original French). Close friends from the past, together with the Vicar who first trained me as a curate forty years ago, are there to share in it. In my response, I pay my own tribute to the community of this Cathedral which is endlessly kind, humane, generous and forgiving. I tell them the truth of today, that it's hard to contemplate saying farewell.

The final service is evensong. There is a great crowd filling the nave. I walk the Lord Lieutenant up the aisle as I would at any big event. Then I think, disconcertingly, they are here because I am leaving. I don't mean they are not here to worship God - of course that is why we are at this service at all, but valediction is what has brought so many people together. I arrive at my stall and find a colourful folder put together by the choristers with pictures, personal messages from each of them, tributes and prayers. The tears in things are real even before the service has begun. As they are several more times during the service: at that amazing leap up to a top 'A' in the Gloria of Howells' Gloucester Service, the paradisal ending of Bairstow's Blessed City, our beloved Coe Fen (How shall I sing that Majesty?', the beautifully crafted intercessions by Sophie the Canon in Residence, the final hymn 'Glory to thee my God this night', and laying up the Dean's cope on the high altar after the blessing.

There are speeches and presentations from four people who have all become good friends. Lilian Groves, an octogenarian Cathedral guide and worshipper with a passionate love for the Cathedral, speaks for the community in another demonstration of the sheer goodness that characterises Durham. Isaac Walton, a former Head Chorister just starting out at university, is lucid and generous about my love of the Cathedral's music and my relationships with the choristers, and speaks playfully about the decanal 'glide'. Somebody was bound to. Margaret Masson, Acting Principal of St Chad's College, is kind about the outward-facing aspects of my role in her college, University, City and County. She reminds us it was she who first persuaded me to join Twitter. (Some of you may wish she hadn't.) And Mark Bryant, the Bishop of Jarrow whom I've known most of my working life, finds gently subversive but warmly affectionate things to say about my 40 years in ordained ministry and role in the Diocese.

I have heard a lot of eloquent farewell speeches in my time, but I don't think I have ever heard better. I am deeply touched. It's hard to find the words with which to respond, but for better or worse, they are on my blog together with my sermon (http://deanstalks.blogspot.co.uk). At the very end, the choir sings the psalm sung at chorister dismissals each summer, Psalm 84. It is incredibly hard to listen to these treasured words for the last time. But grandson Isaac, aged two and a half, comes to the rescue. He invites himself on to the platform ('I want to see Opa') with an uncanny sense of timing. Because of him, and his laughter and happiness, all is well.  

Today has seen my last ever public act for the Cathedral: to bless the Virgin East Coast electric locomotive 91114 now in its bright new red livery, 'Durham Cathedral'. I love the thought that this strikingly beautiful engine will carry the name and image of the Cathedral and Cuthbert's Cross up and down the East Coast Main Line between London and Scotland. The choristers sing, and I get to do the train announcement welcoming passengers and explaining the significance of the day. At Newcastle there is a short ceremony. The media love the tribute paid personally by Virgin in including my name on the design at least for today - surely every train-loving clergyman's dream. It's a terrific send-off.

I have planned to go to evensong today, my name day, the Feast of St Michael and All Angels. A wise friend has told me that I need to say my own intimate farewell to the Cathedral and its worship and he is right. So I creep unnoticed into the nave and join in the prayer of the church from near the back. It's a lovely service. The Cathedral is golden in the equinoctial light, its vaults illuminated by the setting sun. It has never looked so beautiful. I lose myself once more in the glorious music that floats in the air like sweet incense. At the end I leave with a heavy heart. One of the vergers notices, and is gentle and kind with me in these last painful but precious moments. He embodies the best of this beloved place that will always be written on my heart.

The Vice-Dean and his wife invite us for a last supper. We share memories and thank one another for what these years have meant to us. Then it back among the packing cases and getting ready for life in rural Northumberland. I've loved being Dean of Durham. It's been the supreme privilege of my life. Now it's time for more ordinary days. We shall see what they bring. It feels like a great unknown. But we know that God will be as present to us in them as he has been during these wonderful years in Durham.

This isn't my last blogging word. I'll keep this site live for now, and begin a new blog after a while with a new name for a new life. But for now, a fond farewell from this wool gathering Northern Dean, and thank you to all readers for prayers, stimulating company and good friendship.

So That is That

Well, almost.

I'm on the last lap. Almost everything is done for the last time. Files are closed, documents archived, thousands of emails deleted. The books have undergone a painful triage: when it comes to downsizing, many are called but few are chosen. Keyboard music and my Wagner scores have gone to a talented young musical friend. Our much-loved pine kitchen table with its memories of family meals, happiness, laughter and love has gone to the sale room with other furniture of less symbolism. Pictures are off the walls. Possessions are piled into desultory heaps. On the floor is a pile of ecclesiastical robes (old, worn, nothing beautiful, and not much that is useful) lies on the floor awaiting the Precentor's advice. Linda, our wonderful housekeeper with the gift to be cheerful on wet Monday mornings has gone away on holiday so we've had to say our farewells early.

On Sunday I preach for the last time at the sung eucharist. My theme is the child whom Jesus brings into the circle of disciples to teach them about simplicity and humility (see http://deanstalks.blogspot.co.uk). I spend Monday meeting Chapter members and senior colleagues one by one to say thank you and goodbye - exit interviews, only it's my exit, not theirs. I owe so much to my superb team here. Whatever the achievements of the last twelve years, I need to say we, not I about who has enabled them to happen. Next day I do a radio interview about my years in Durham, what I'm proud of and what I shall miss most. That evening we launch my new book of Durham sermons Christ in a Choppie Box, a farewell offering to the worshipping community of this Cathedral.

On Wednesday I take the Chorister School Sixth Form pupils round the Cathedral on a pilgrimage. I have led many of these spiritual journeys, and always enjoy them, but it's a particular joy that my last one should be with these lively, intelligent children. At we come to the end, I speak about the Galilee Chapel as a place of beginnings and endings, and mention my own imminent departure. We say a prayer together that I love:

Lord God, you call your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden; give us faith to go out with a good courage, not knowing whither we go, but only that your hand is leading us, and your love supporting us; to the glory of your name.

Today we have a final round of business meetings. People say kind things when you are leaving. Their genuineness is moving. At evensong the New Testament reading is St Paul's farewell to the elders at Ephesus (Acts 20). I've always found this story moving, but never more so than when I have to read it in the service tonight. My voice catches at the end where it says that Paul knelt down with them and prayed with them, and there were tears and embraces when they heard him say that they wouldn't see his face again. The music is Walmisley in D Minor, the very first canticle setting I sang as a chorister in 1961. It brings back a lifetime of memories. It's possible that but for that experience, I might not be a cathedral dean now.

Tomorrow it's my final Chapter meeting - business as usual. In the evening they will host a farewell dinner for Jenny and me. 'Dining out' members who are leaving (not in quite the same sense as the armed services use that phrase) is an old Durham Chapter tradition. It is always hugely enjoyable to spend an evening with Chapter colleagues and their partners, but tomorrow will be bitter-sweet for us.

On Saturday our children will join us for the weekend ceremonies. Words like 'celebration' and 'thanksgiving' are being used but they could just as well be called obsequies. There is a gathering of the Cathedral community after the morning service at which I shall preside at the altar. At evensong I preach a farewell sermon. It's one of the most difficult I've ever had to prepare because it marks the conclusion not just of 12 years in Durham but 40 years of public ministry. I can't predict the state of my emotions at that service, for which we have chosen all the music and hymns. There'll be a party afterwards in the Cloister. And then we shall be gone.

Actually, it's not quite the end. On Tuesday, I shall perform my last ever public act for the Cathedral. It's to all to do with the flanged wheel - I've blogged before the love affair many clergy have with railways. 'Our' East Coast class 91 electric locomotive 91114 Durham Cathedral now has a beautiful new Virgin Trains East Coast livery. It has flowing patterns drawn from the drum piers in the Cathedral, and a prominent St Cuthbert's Cross. There's to be a ceremony of blessing on Newcastle Central Station. It will be fun to go out on that note. But it will make a serious point about 'public faith' too, and the Cathedral's relationships with our many external partners who support us and wish us well.

More on this when it's happened, in a final decanal blog.

Seasons of Durham Life: September

It's the equinox. The trees, still mostly green, display yellow highlights. The vegetation looks tired. The rose garden that has brought a burst of late-summer colour to the Deanery garden is looking tired now. Leaves on the trees are tinged with yellow. Curtains around the College are drawn in the early evening. There is a chill in the night air. The heating clicks on; there is the scent of an open fire somewhere nearby. The year is closing in on itself. Before we know it, it will be winter.
 
I have always loved this time of year with its unique mix of experiences: endings and beginnings intertwined with one another as summer's lease runs out, and the annual cycle of activities starts up again, and children go back to school, and it's students rather than tourists who are now walking these ancient streets.
 
The rhythms of Cathedral life haven't quite been paused during the summer, as readers of my August blog will recall. But the pace changes with September. On the last weekend the Cathedral Choir is on holiday, we enjoy our annual visit from the Buxton Madrigal Singers. As usual they are here for the last big festival of the summer, the Translation of the Relics of St Cuthbert. On the Sunday nearest 4 September, we commemorate the day in 1104 when the first phase of the Cathedral's construction was completed. The sanctuary and quire were finished, and in an elaborate and carefully documented ceremony, Cuthbert's body was placed in his new shrine. Today the whole congregation processes to the shrine where incense is swung (yes, it's still permitted despite worries about 'legal highs'), and prayers are said. It's a high day in the calendar, and for Durham people marks the threshold between summer and autumn.
 
The Cathedral choir returns, and the rhythm of daily evensong resumes. How good it is to see and hear them again. We are grateful for all the choirs that visit over the summer, but there is nothing like your own Cathedral choir. At first, we miss the old familiar faces in the choirstalls: last term, a larger cohort than usual reached their top year in the choir and left to go on to other schools. We always wonder how the survivors can possibly reach the standards of last year...but they always do, even if the first evensong or two are a trifle more tentative than we are used to. I say to the choristers that confidence is all they need. Everything else is there.
 
This year there is a major service on Day 2 of the new choir term. This is the day when The Queen overtakes Queen Victoria as the longest-serving Monarch in British history. The Lord Lieutenant has summoned the county to celebrate at the exact time (5.30pm) this threshold is reached. The music includes music used at the Coronation including Zadok the Priest, sung at every coronation since George II's. The choir distinguishes itself magnificently in front of a large and appreciative congregation.
 
The pattern of Cathedral meetings resumes. Agendas and minutes are sent out, and non-urgent business laid aside during the summer is dealt with. A flurry of emails follows the opening of bulging inboxes. Out-of-office notices are turned off, things not done attended to. There is an air of Busyness around the campus. You're reminded that the Cathedral is a significant organisation that employs over one hundred staff to serve it. The departments include finance, property, development and fundraising, music and liturgy, library and collections, marketing and communications, the shop, the Chorister School, development and fundraising, governance and administration, volunteers, vergers, cleaners, the 'yard' which includes the Cathedral works team and the gardeners. The restaurant is run as a franchise but it still needs oversight.
 
Another way of putting this is to say that the Cathedral is a business with a gross turnover of more than £7 million. Some people don't like a Christian church to be described in that way. I don't shy away from using that word, as long as it is complemented and informed by other words like faith, spirituality, worship, mission, learning and heritage. Our purpose and values statements are important here. If we are also a business, I say: let it be a good business that is efficiently run, and above all, an ethical business.  
 
I said that with the advent of September, the year feels as though it is drawing itself in for the winter. This is true for me personally. We are just a week away from our farewell service at evensong on 27 September. I have 168 hours of deaning left. After that, retirement. Already there have been farewell dinners and parties, and some beautiful gifts, and many, many kind letters and cards to thank us for the past twelve years and to wish us well. Perhaps you only appreciate the sheer goodness and generosity of people when the time comes to say goodbye. I have done valedictory interviews for the local radio stations and the press. I'm asked: 'What are you most proud of?' 'What do you regret?' 'What will you miss most?' How could I not miss the unique and wonderful place that is Durham Cathedral with its amazing beauty, its unrivalled heritage, its quintessentially northern spirituality, its procession of holy saints and its limitless capacity to inspire? How could I not miss daily choral evensong? How could I not miss this ancient Deanery that has been our home for twelve years? 

But when I think back to this morning's eucharist, and administering communion at the altar rail, I feel an especial pang for the people of this place: the colleagues with whom I have worked here, this warm, forgiving, generous community in all its richness and diversity. They transcend the boundaries of Cathedral, Diocese and wider community. They include the many who have become, we are sure, friends for life. How privileged these years here have been.

We now face negotiating this difficult ending gracefully. But whatever other emotions surface in the next few days, I know that at the heart of it all will be a great and lasting gratitude for these Durham years. So this is the last of my twelve blogs on 'Seasons of Durham Life'. Another year has passed, and with it, our time here at Durham. Thank you for reading. I'll blog once or twice more under the Northern Dean banner. After that.... who knows? 

A Job is Advertised - Mine!

Today I got a web alert to tell me that a job has been advertised on the CofE website. Mine. DEAN OF DURHAM it says in big letters. That it should appear today, 4 September, is something to note. This is the anniversary of the day in 1104 when the relics of St Cuthbert were laid in their new shrine at the east end of Durham Cathedral. It was a great festival in Durham in the middle ages. Please don't tell me it's just a coincidence that the world learns today that Durham is looking for a new Dean. Especially when this one was installed in the Cathedral on the other St Cuthbert's Day, the anniversary of his death on 20 March 2003.

It's odd, staring at an ad for your own job before you've even left it. (I should say that I was asked months ago if I was happy for the appointment process to begin while I was still in office, and I readily agreed to it: it's in everyone's interests to see the next Dean in post as soon as possible.) But seeing the ad in cold print and reading the detailed documentation that went with it made me stop and think. A bit like stepping on your own grave. My first flippant thought was: if I applied for this post now, would I even make it to the short list?

Enough said. I am going to be scrupulous about not commenting on matters to do with the succession. Except to say that whoever is appointed will find him- or herself in a truly wonderful place inhabited by an equally wonderful community. It's been hugely rewarding to complete my full-time ministry by serving these dozen years at Durham Cathedral. I can honestly say that I have never been happier.

But it's my next thought that has haunted me all day. This is actually happening, I realised. It's real and irrevocable. The die is cast. In less than a month I shall become part of history, the thirty-ninth Dean whose name is engraved on the Bishops, Priors and Deans board outside St Cuthbert's shrine. It's not quite in memoriam. The name board is not a grave slab - yet - though it will be one day. Of all Durham's Priors and Deans, only two of us are still alive.

But when I stop and muse in front of it as I regularly do - because I enjoy lists and names and dates - I don't think morbid thoughts. On the contrary, I'm reminded that the recollection of the past is always a vital aspect of our sense of place and belonging. These servants of God still live on in our collective memory. This grand alabaster tablet is a celebration of so many honourable and good people who have given their lives to this place and left their mark on it, some of them heroically. Even after twelve years, I still feel keenly the privilege of seeing my name among them. I have tried not to take it for granted.

As I look back after the end of this month, I want to be able to say, 'This was the best of me'. Pray God that I shall be able to. Each step in this long drawn-out rite of passage called 'retirement' is an opportunity not for regrets but for thankfulness: to contemplate the past with a deeper awareness of the goodness of God, and to look forward expectantly to the days that lie ahead.

Yes, sunt lacrimae rerum: there are tears in things too, and no doubt they are permitted when we come to say farewell. As I've blogged before, leaving Durham is going to be a big wrench. But I shall - from afar - share the celebrations that will surround the appointment and arrival of the fortieth Dean. This Cathedral is the focus of so much prayer, affection and love across the world. It will give to the next Dean as generously as it has given to me. It's that kind of place, that kind of community, like its saints, especially beloved Cuthbert whom we honour today. And ultimately, that is how God is, for love is his nature and his name.

You can find the papers about the post at https://www.churchofengland.org/clergy-office-holders/aaad/vacancies/dean-of-durham.aspx

Seasons of Durham Life: March

March in Durham means two things above everything else: Lent, and St Cuthbert.

I wrote about Lent in February. This year, Easter falls in early April, the Goldilocks period that is not too early and not too late. Which means that all of March is Lent. And although the spring equinox has come, and with it a paschal new moon to eclipse the sun, it is still wintry. High pressure has brought sullen gunmetal skies and keen winds from the north and east to chill to the bone. Late snowdrops and crocuses hang on, mingling with courageous daffodils. Spring comes late in North East England.

Towards the end of March Lent is feeling long. Those high aspirations with which we began this journey on Ash Wednesday now feel like hard work. The Chapter has its annual budgets to approve, always a demanding process that falls appropriately in Lent. People are longing for sunshine and warmth. We are ready for a break before we go into the toughest part of this pilgrimage, Holy Week itself. Mid-Lent, Mothering Sunday, is known as Refreshment Sunday. But here in Durham, we do more than enjoy some gentle mid-Lent relaxation. For it’s St Cuthbert’s Day on 20 March. And that means one of the highest and holiest festivals in the entire year.

Whatever the date of Easter, St Cuthbert’s Day is always in Lent. Because of this, the Church of England wanted to move the festival to Cuthbert’s other day, 4 September, the anniversary of the dedication of his shrine in Durham Cathedral. But North East people were not having this. Cuthbert died, Bede explicitly says, on 20 March and this is when we should celebrate him. So we do, with enthusiasm and élan. There are even alleluias at the big services (the service sheet explains to the shocked why we allow ourselves to use the forbidden a-word in Lent). We say a Te Deum and sing the Gloria and other joyful music and big hymns like ‘For all the saints’ that lift the spirits.

Cuthbert’s shrine behind the high altar is the spiritual and emotional heart of the Cathedral. People came there in vast numbers in the middle ages to ask for his healing and his prayers. Today, pilgrims still come to find inspiration in his life of holiness, devotion and gospel simplicity. To the people of the North East, he has been a companion and fellow-traveller since the seventh century. So at the eucharist on the eve of his day, and at evensong on the day itself, we go in a long procession to the shrine and remind ourselves of his importance by listening to what Bede tells us about a life that was so extraordinary and so beautiful as to be remembered by all subsequent generations. 

The monks of Durham saw themselves as the guardians of his memory, the living successors of those who bore his body across the north of England to Chester Le-Street, Ripon and finally Durham’s rocky peninsula. This is still how we see ourselves today at the Cathedral. Which is why, ten years ago, we boldly reversed a sacrilegious act of Henry VIII in the 1540s and put Cuthbert’s name back into the legal title of the Cathedral. It’s why the Lindisfarne Gospels, written in his honour shortly after his death, are treasured in this place where they belonged for so many centuries.

Cuthbertstide isn’t simply a time for great liturgy. There is a range of other activities on offer: a market of local produce in the cloister, children’s story-telling based on the Saxon saints, ‘show and tell’ presentations on the Lindisfarne Gospels (using the facsimile presented to us in 2003), and demonstrations by stone-masons in the cloister garth. Visitors (and there are many) can enjoy Cuthbert’s Slice with their coffee or tea in the restaurant. Young people have constructed a model Cuthbert shrine to go into our great LEGO Cathedral. 

And there is a little spectacle to take part in. Each year, the Northumbrian Association organises a St Cuthbert’s pilgrimage from Chester Le Street to the Cathedral, retracing the steps of the Saxon community upstream along the River Wear as they brought his body here in 995. Led by pipe and drum and the St Cuthbert Banner, we end the journey in Cuthbert’s shrine where there are prayers and readings. It affirms this Cathedral’s rootedness in this evocative part of England.

This time of year holds special meaning for me because I was installed as Dean of Durham on St Cuthbert’s Day 2003. That year March was warm and still and springlike, not like 2015. Sadly, this year’s will have been my last because this is the month I have announced my retirement later this year. But that's another story I've written about already. 

Meanwhile, in Durham, this wonderful festival is over for another year. It is time for the Cathedral to return to its Lenten simplicity. Lent is very Cuthbert-like. If only we could imitate him more successfully in this complex world in which we live. Which means imitating Cuthbert's Lord whom he loved so fiercely and followed so faithfully. Holy Week will show us how. 

Cathedral with a North East Accent

I have just drafted an essay on Durham as a 'northern cathedral'. It is due to be published later this year in a collection of pieces about being the church in the North of England.
 
It's been an intriguing assignment. I have always had a feel for the gritty North Eastern qualities of this place. But it's harder to put into words. What is the 'Idea of North' (to quote the title of a beautiful book by Peter Davidson)? What is the idea of the Christian North? How does a place like Durham Cathedral embody it? What does it mean theologically?

My essay focuses on three aspects: the Cathedral's northern 'sense of place' (the kind of thing I was trying to set out in Landscapes of Faith), its northern Christian stories (especially those of Cuthbert, Bede and the Prince Bishops), and its mission activities today that have a distinctive northern 'accent'.

I am still trying to understand something I began to realise 30 years ago when I was Vicar of Alnwick in Northumberland. I had never lived in the North before, and I soon began to learn that in some ways, to a Londoner, the North is another country: they do things differently there. I read Bede and learned about the northern saints. But I found myself unmoved by the uncritical way they were often talked about by enthusiasts for 'Celtic Christianity'. The purple prose and romanticised imagery somehow didn't do justice to their sheer strangeness. It all felt a bit too cosy.

I began to go to Holy Island for quiet days. There I listened to the elements. Sometimes they were still and serene, inviting me to go deeper into the contemplation of God and the discovery of myself. That was not necessarily reassuring: even the bluest of skies can be bracing rather than soothing. Often they were wild and disturbing, shaking the foundations of a comfortable faith as in Donne's 'Batter my heart Three-Person'd God'.

Both are aspects of the Saxon saints: their quest for a faith that was unafraid of truth. But one word kept coming back to me as I returned again and again to Lindisfarne. It still does. It's exposure. As I got to know the North East, I seemed to find it everywhere. I wrote a poem that tried to sum up what this spirituality meant for me. (To my surprise it won a Northumberland poetry prize. I have hardly written poetry since. Moral: even modest success doesn't necessarily encourage the Muse.) I called it 'Northern Saints'.

You look in vain for some
Shelter at our northern
Shrines.  That is their
Forbidding glory.  These are
Bleak places without
Trees.  Nothing much
Grows here except
Holiness.  They have been
Hospitable only to
God and to prayer.  Yet a
Presence has touched the
Uncurious soil.  Its
Resonances linger on,
Bricked up beneath
Jarrow’s forlorn pavements,
Battered by the
East wind’s assault on
Lindisfarne, or
Congealed in the hardened
Veins of men pitted against
Northumberland.  You might be

Tempted to say that these shrines are
God-forsaken, for he has been
This way once and passed on.  Yet their very
Emptiness is religious.  There is
No hiding here, no
Evading his absence, no
Obscuring comfort to help you
Pretend.  Naked the
Sullen land confronts the
Souring sky, and the
Sharp line of their
Meeting is the etched-out
Truth of the north, that in such
Cruel juxtapositions is the
Holiness that forges

Saints. Religion should be as
Exposed as this.

There is more than a hint of R. S.Thomas and his poetry of the via negativa. But the last line still seems right.

At the end of my essay I say that I have tried to hint (no more than that) at ways in which I see Durham Cathedral as rooted in the distinctiveness of North East England not as something that is merely incidental, but as an essential aspect of its Christian character and identity. The 'idea of north', which includes the idea of a Christian north, is perhaps an aspect of Durham Cathedral’s unique contribution to the witness of the church in England.

To put it simply, its northern landscape setting, its history and culture, its people and communities and its relationship with locality and region, Durham Cathedral is perhaps able to affirm, in a highly public and visible way, that God cares about North East England as part of his love for the whole of creation. It can pose questions raised in the titles of the two books I mentioned earlier: 'what kind of God' is at work in the North to point to the kingdom of justice and peace? And what does it mean to talk about ‘the kingdom of God and North East England’? It can help to interpret difficult theological and spiritual questions as the life of this region poses them. It must make the most of its assets as a glorious edifice on its rocky Wear-girt acropolis to which so many are drawn.

This is at the heart of what it means to be a northern cathedral. Its unique history and heritage can, and must, be put to work for the service of the gospel in the present and point to the future that God is creating. But the ancient story of Cuthbert and his community give us another, more primitive, model of mission to discover: learning once again to be a mobile cathedral, travelling light, moving out to the people of our time as God’s love for the world always does, here in North East England, and everywhere.

Seasons of Durham Life 2: November

'Now is the time for the burning of the leaves' says Lawence Binyon of the late autumn. The trees are stripped bare. It can take you by surprise if there is an overnight storm or a sudden sharp frost. This year, November has brought calm, warm days as if to coax the golden leaves to stay a little longer. But they know it is time. And now the trees in the College and on the river banks are almost bare. The peninsula is bedding down for winter.

November is an up-and-down month in the Cathedral. It begins on an upbeat with All Saints' Day: all light and splendour and warmth. But next day it's All Souls when we remember our dead. So the liturgy takes us from alleluias to 'requiem aeternam' in the space of just a few hours. All Souls sets the tone for so much of the month: elegiac, reflective, sombre. By now it is entirely dark at evensong each day. The Cathedral vaults are lost in the gloom, though they still echo to the singing of choristers. Sometimes there are just a handful of worshippers strung out along the length of the quire, almost lost in the dark 17th century stalls. The nave may be quite empty. 

Regulars in cathedrals wouldn't wish it otherwise. When you have several hundred thousand visitors streaming through the Cathedral, you welcome these weeks marked by a quieter pace between October half term and Advent when it all starts up again. It can feel like a mini-Lent, a chance to breathe and take stock. The Cathedral has its own tranquil beauty in this quiet empty season. 'Ordinary time' is a precious gift in the liturgical calendar, just as it is in human life.

The 2nd or 3rd Sunday of November is Remembrance, with Armistice Day close by. The service that culminates in the two minute silence and act of remembrance echoes the reflective character of the month. In the 12 years I have been Dean, I have been intrigued by how big this service has become. It's interesting how many students and young people come nowadays. Undoubtedly, 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq have a lot to do with it, along with a deeper awareness of what we owe to our armed services, and how fragile peace really is. And perhaps, too, a greater sense of citizenship and how ceremony in public life, whether it is celebration or lament, can bind a society together. 

But November is also marked by a number of celebrations that are special to Durham. There are red-letter days marked by joyful services and processions as we remember those who have played a part in the story of  North East England. St Margaret of Scotland, a great 11th century friend of the Cathedral, and St Hild, the foremost female leader of the Saxon church in the 7th century, are commemorated on successive days when we go in procession to their altars swinging the incense and singing hymns. Other Durham people remembered this month include the much-loved 20th century Archbishop Michael Ramsey in whose memory a new stained-glass window was installed a few years ago, and the 15th century Bishop Thomas Langley, Chancellor of England, whose tomb is in the Galilee Chapel and who founded the two schools associated with the Cathedral.

The litany of famous North East names are gathered up in another November occasion, the annual celebration of Founders and Benefactors (or 'Bounders and Malefactors' as it is affectionately known). This service on the last Sunday of the church year brings people together from across the North East to celebrate the generosity of past ages towards our great public institutions. Civic leaders come to give thanks for the life of Durham City, its University and the Cathedral without which neither would have existed. The service culminates in a procession to St Cuthbert's shrine where posies are laid on his tomb as our tribute to the humble man of Lindisfarne to whom the North of England looks as the fountainhead and inspiration of so much of our past and present. This year we celebrate the centenary of this service in its modern form, though its roots go back to the Middle Ages when a 'Liber Vitae' recording the names of the Priory's benefactors was laid on the altar in their memory each year. We now have a modern Liber Vitae which names all who have supported the Cathedral through generous giving and loyal voluntary service in recent times, and this too is laid on the high altar together with the facsimile of the Lindisfarne Gospels.

After this burst of colourful splendour, it is back to a few more days to reflect as the daylight continues to fade, and the year grows old and prepares to slip gently into its night. By then it will be Advent. 

The Week of St Cuthbert: too much attention?

The end of Cuthbert Week. His day was 20 March. On Wednesday and Thursday we had great celebrations in the Cathedral. Today there were family activities in and around the building. This afternoon I welcomed over 120 pilgrims on the annual ‘Cuddy’s Corse’ from Chester-le-Street to Durham. This is a walk organised by the Northumbrian Association to re-enact the last leg of the monks’ long journey bringing Cuthbert’s body, together with the Lindisfarne Gospels, to Durham his final resting place. Led by a Northumbrian piper and the Banner of St Cuthbert, we walked in a merry procession to the shrine where we said prayers.

Our new Bishop was with us on Thursday, the day itself. He tweeted beforehand: ‘Durham Cathedral for my first St Cuthbert’s Day pilgrimage. I suspect Cuthbert would not have liked all the attention.’ It’s an interesting comment. We know from Bede that Cuthbert hoped to be buried on his beloved Inner Farne, but reluctantly recognised that his brothers would want him back on Lindisfarne. We know that he was famous for his simplicity and humility: he would have fought against adulation. If that wasn’t enough, we can be sure that as a Saxon he would have hated the idea of lying interred beneath a Norman cathedral. So the Bishop is right. I reckon Cuthbert would have liked his distant successor's tweet.

Yet this isn't all of the truth. The veneration of Cuthbert as a saint began only a decade after he died. His body was disinterred by his community and miraculously found not to have been corrupted. At once he was pronounced a saint – this was how they ‘canonised’ saints in those days. And this gave Cuthbert back to the world as a man in whom it was believed God had vested special spiritual power. When the Vikings destroyed his monastery on Holy Island and drove his community inland to find safety, they took with them their two most precious possessions: the Lindisfarne Gospels, and Cuthbert’s body. So ‘all the attention’ paid him goes back over a thousand years.

The paradox is that saints tend to be humble and self-effacing: that’s what makes them so attractive to us. The ‘attention’ we give them is a way of honouring a collective memory of goodness and sanctity that is precious. It recognises that their influence is profound, their capacity to inspire us and enlarge our vision undying. Not on account of their words and actions by themselves, but because of what inspired them, Jesus Christ and the gospel. We can be sure that Cuthbert would have said: don’t focus on me, put Jesus at the centre, the Lord for whom I lived and died. All the saints would say the same. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be saints.

Cuthbert’s shrine in Durham Cathedral recognises this. Above the stone slab with his name on it hangs a 20^th century tester showing Christ in Glory surrounded by the symbols of the four evangelists. It’s as if Cuthbert is lying in his tomb looking upwards directly into the face of Christ the Lord of all. And Christ in turn looks on him as a beloved child, as he does all of us. In the Hebrew Bible, it says that Moses was with God face to face, ‘as someone looks on their friend’. This mutual gaze of recognition and divine friendship is at the heart of religion.

And this, I think, is what St Cuthbert represents to all of us who speak of him as the ‘glory of our sanctuary and ever-living symbol of our apostleship’, as one of our Durham prayers puts it. Through his memory, his companionship and his prayers, he helps us to know Jesus more clearly, love him more dearly and follow him more nearly day by day. And that makes him truly evangelical in his appeal.  

Durham Cathedral's 'Open Treasure': a Big HLF Award

It is immensely heartening that in the latest round of awards, the Heritage Lottery Fund is supporting Durham and Peterborough Cathedrals. We are not the only two cathedrals to be grateful for the HLF’s generosity in recent years. No doubt it is a coincidence that both these famous and beautiful cathedrals are Romanesque, and that both their profiles are well known to travellers speeding up and down the East Coast Main Line.

The first thing I want to do is to pay tribute to the great team here at the Cathedral who worked up the bid and worked with staff, volunteers and community to prepare for its submission.  We have had great support from the officers of HLF itself, from the Cathedrals Fabric Commission and many other bodies and individuals along the way. And of course we want to say thank you to the HLF for this great news. It is a wonderful way of beginning Advent.

This £3.9 million award will mean that we are within sight of achieving our long-held dream of displaying the Cathedral’s marvellous treasures in some of its equally marvellous medieval spaces. The buildings round the cloister constitute the unique (for England) survival of an intact monastic enclosure that is still used for the religious purposes for which it was intended. Their treasures include relics associated with St Cuthbert such as his coffin, pectoral cross and portable altar. Not only that, but the Cathedral Library has retained more of its monastic collections of medieval manuscripts and early printed books than anywhere else in the country.

The collections are of international significance as a witness to the civilisation, culture and history of Christian North East England particularly in the Saxon and early Norman periods. They more than do justice to the landscape and architecture of the World Heritage Site that has been their home for so many centuries. What we have lacked are facilities to exhibit them properly. In the 21^st century, this means creating environments that conform to the highest conservation and security standards in which they can be safely displayed and interpreted. To adapt medieval buildings for this purpose while at the same time enhancing their beautiful interiors in their own right is a formidable challenge.

After years of planning, we are now poised to realise this dream. Called Open Treasure, the development will create a large exhibition space in the monastic Dormitory (which will still retain its 19^th century function as a library). Its focus will be the shaping of church and cathedral in medieval Northumbria, and how this story of a faith community has continued beyond the Reformation into the present day. A newly constructed gallery will house some of our most important and precious manuscripts together with our Saxon stones and artefacts, while the Great Kitchen will have as its focus St Cuthbert and the relics associated with his memory.

Why Open Treasure? Because we shall be opening up what has been largely hidden from public view in the past: incomparable medieval spaces, and the equally incomparable treasures they will contain. This year’s highly successful Lindisfarne Gospels exhibition, in which the Cathedral has been a partner and to which we lent no fewer than 14 items for display, has shown that there is a real appetite for Christian heritage that is beautifully displayed and intelligently interpreted.

There is another purpose to all this. We want to maintain free entry to the Cathedral itself. By opening up our ‘Treasure’ as a revenue-earning exhibition, we hope to stabilise the Cathedral’s finances so that it will never be necessary to levy an admission charge to such a fine sacred space. When we held a press call to announce the news, I was pressed hard on this point: it is hugely appreciated in North East England that the Cathedral does not charge for admission to the church itself. We want to keep it that way and we rely on Open Treasure to achieve this.

For our biggest treasure is the Cathedral itself, so much loved and admired across the world. Not just the building and what it contains, but its community that has its origins in 7^th century Lindisfarne and its saints such as Aidan and Cuthbert. Like the Benedictine house that it became, the Cathedral is still a living place of worship, work and learning and this adds contemporary human, Christian texture to the place. Our invitation to visitors to experience for themselves this rich past and present is part of our mission both of hospitality and of interpretation. We hope all our guests both young and old will not simply come here as sightseers or observers but become participants in the Cathedral’s life of prayer, community, arts, learning and outreach.

Thanks to HLF and other funders, this vision is close to becoming reality. We want to begin the works in 2014 and already have significant funds raised and pledged. Thank you to everyone who has supported us generously so far. If there is anyone reading this blog who can help us match the funding so that the project can begin all the sooner, that will be wonderful too. Call me night or day!

This is a revised version of my piece on the HLF Blog to coincide with the announcement of the award.

Farewell to the Lindisfarne Gospels

It's past ten o’clock on the last day of September. The doors of the Lindisfarne Gospels exhibition Durham have closed for the last time. 100,000 people have passed through them in the last three months. Many have spoken about how inspired and delighted they were by what they saw. I want to pay tribute to colleagues at Durham University and here at the Cathedral who have worked so hard to make this summer such a huge success.

The Cathedral worked closely with the University on this project, and as Dean I served on the project board. We were clear that we wanted the Gospels to come back not simply to Durham but to the North East. And this is one of the great achievements of the summer. It has seen an amazing outburst of creativity right across the region with local communities entering into the spirit of the visit with great enthusiasm. There have been celebrations of the Gospels’ art and design, their place in English civilisation and in the history of the book, their symbolism for the North East’s identity and character. Was ever a book so much loved and welcomed back to its historic homeland?

Local churches have played a leading part in this celebration of our Christian heritage. At its heart, this has been an invitation to discover the gospel message in the four gospels. There have been study groups, public readings of the gospels, special acts of worship, pilgrimages to places associated with the saints of the region, lectures and talks, exhibitions and displays, temporary art, street theatre, creative play and themed entertainment.  This has stimulated adults and children not only to learn about their heritage but to read the gospels with a new awareness. The Cathedral has welcomed thousands of people to its own lively programme of events throughout the summer, culminating in an unforgettable flower festival to celebrate the Lindisfarne Gospels, the northern saints and our life together in the North East today.  A Roman Catholic newsletter spoke about how the Cathedral was rising to the challenge of using the Gospels’ visit in an evangelistic way. That pleased us because it recognised the true nature of the ‘gospel-work’ we were trying to do.

Yesterday, I went to Holy Island to preach on the last Sunday of this summer of celebration. It is always moving to walk where Cuthbert walked and pray where he prayed. To do this while the Lindisfarne Gospels were in his native Northumbria added its own richness to the experience.  I spoke, as I have done all summer, about why this celebration should matter to us, and what we have learned about the Manuscript, the Man in whose honour it was written, and the Message of the Gospel Book both then and now. 

I said that what the summer has helped us to do is to understand this great book in the setting of Saxon Christian Northumbria, and specifically, Cuthbert’s shrine. This linkage was fundamental to its meaning throughout the middle ages: it would have been unthinkable to separate the saint from his book. Severed from this environment, it acquired different linkages and has come to be read in new contexts. It’s not that these are less 'valid' than the original Cuthbert context. But the intellectual case for bringing the Gospels back to Durham was to enable us to hear them speak with their original northern accent once again.

In the south aisle of the church on Holy Island stands Fenwick Lawson’s powerful sculpture ‘The Journey’. It shows the monks of Cuthbert’s community carrying his body (and by implication the Gospels) on its 120 year journey that would end on the peninsula of Durham. I thought about the journey the Gospels had made to come to Durham and be reunited with their saint, and how it was now time for them to make the return journey back to London.  The Gospels have always travelled; now they are setting off on yet another valedictory journey. We all hope they carry a return ticket.

On Palace Green tonight, I talked to one of the security guards who had done duty outside the library during these three months. He told me how much it had meant to him to be doing his bit to care for this precious book, how sad he would be to see it go.  Like Cuthbert, the Lindisfarne Gospels touch ordinary lives in ways that are both moving and inspiring.  They have certainly touched mine. 

Two Books and a Train: the Lindisfarne Gospels in Durham

Last week Durham’s Lindisfarne Gospels exhibition opened to the public. I have already visited four times. It would need a twice-daily visit to do justice to it. The Famous Book is the centrepiece of an array of marvellous books, manuscripts, sculptures and treasures that shed light on the Gospels and the world in which they were created. Will we ever see so many Saxon gospel books in the same place?  And Cuthbert’s cross, ring and personal gospel book of St John in the same room as the Gospel written in his honour? Come and see for yourself. It’s open all summer, till 30 September. I never use this phrase lightly, but it is not to be missed.

One of the things ‘not to be missed’ is the location of the exhibition. We can see the Lindisfarne Gospels at the British Library in London where it will not cost us a penny. But that is not the same as seeing it on the Durham peninsula, in the shadow of the Cathedral that not only contains but is Cuthbert’s shrine. His coffined body, together with the Gospels, were the most precious objects the Lindisfarne community possessed. When they left their island, they carried them round the north of England until finally arriving in Durham in 995.  Here they stayed, in each other’s company, until irrevocably parted at the Reformation. Yet they belong together and should never have been separated. We have Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries to thank for that. This summer gives us the remarkable opportunity to bring the Gospels back ‘home’ not just geographically but culturally, intellectually and above all, spiritually, near St Cuthbert in his very own place. The message to those visiting the exhibition is simple. You've seen the Book; now come and see the shrine of the man for whom this huge labour of love was created, whose place is the Cathedral itself. 

For me, visiting this exhibition has been an emotional and spiritual experience. To re-learn the history of how Saxon England embraced Christianity is one thing. To see and enjoy some the highest achievements of 'Northumbria's Golden Age' is deeply satisfying. But what is so memorable about Durham 2013 is how it witnesses to the remarkable devotion of our forebears: Cuthbert and so many other native saints and their communities. It's a cliché to put it like this, but I think I have glimpsed the 'gospel' in the Gospels in a new and, I want to say, compelling way. The exhibition is not only celebration and interpretation.  It is evangelism.  

There have been other events this week that have celebrated the Gospels in Durham.  Here are just two. On Wednesday, on the platform at Newcastle Central Station, we named and dedicated a locomotive ‘Durham Cathedral’. (For those who like to know, it’s a class 91 East Coast electric 91114.)  During the summer, it will also carry imagery from the Lindisfarne Gospels and invite people up and down the East Coast Main Line to come to Durham and see the book for themselves.  In addition to the name, the loco also has a silhouette of the Cathedral as seen from the railway viaduct which is also depicted. So here’s another way in which Cathedral and Gospels are linked. You never saw a happier dean than when I was presented with my own replica of the large (and heavy) nameplate that now adorns ‘our’ engine. My best thanks to East Coast, Stephen Sorby, railway chaplain, and many others for a great partnership that I am sure will continue in the future.

The second event was to launch my new book Landscapes of Faith during the week.  This too is published to celebrate the Lindisfarne Gospels in Durham. Like the exhibition, my book is a celebration of the rich heritage of Christianity in North East England. I blogged about it last week, so I’ll say no more here except to thank the team who worked so hard on it, especially Third Millennium for producing a large and beautiful book that is a joy to handle, even though I say so myself. And thanks to the large number of friends from north and south of Tyne who offered encouragement by coming to the launch. I am doing a book-signing in the shop at Alnwick Garden on Friday 12 July from 1230-1400 if you happen to be in the area.

And this is just Week 1!  It promises to be an extraordinary summer in Durham.

**I preached about the Lindisfarne Gospels at the launch service.  You can find the sermon in my Sermons and Addresses Blog on this site. Go to: http://deanstalks.blogspot.com/2013/06/on-lindisfarne-gospels.html?spref=tw

Ten Years Ago: Durham, Iraq and a New Dean

This Wednesday, 20 March, is St Cuthbert's Day. The day before, Pope Francis will have inaugurated his public ministry. The day after it will be Archbishop Justin Welby's turn. In between comes Cuthbert, also a bishop though a reluctant one. We know that Justin Welby was deeply influenced by Cuthbert's example while Bishop of Durham. I don't know about the Pope, though I sometimes call St Francis of Assisi ‘Italy's St Cuthbert’, so similar are the two saints, not least in their simplicity and humility.

St Cuthbert's Day marks an important anniversary for me too. Ten years ago, I was installed on his day as dean of Durham. I could not have asked for a more auspicious day.  It was an unforgettable experience to kneel in his shrine while a Northumbrian piper played in the nave. I felt the saint’s companionship and the promise of his protection, as if he were an old friend I had met for the first time.  Our North East ‘welcome back’ could not have been more heartfelt.  All our hopes were high.

But for one thing. 20 March 2003 was the day that the Iraq war broke out.  (Some say it was the day before, and that may be correct technically, but it was St Cuthbert’s Day when the first missiles were launched against Saddam.)  All day long I was listening to updates on the news and rewriting my evening sermon in the light of events as they happened. Half an hour before the service, I decided that enough was enough and switched off.  Here is how I began my sermon.

We shall all remember St Cuthbert’s Day 2003 as the day the war began. It is a sombre moment in our history.  We have prayed that this cup might pass from us.  Now we are compelled to drink it, and its taste is very bitter.  We gather here with sadness that it has come to this, and with fear for a future we cannot know. Many have pleaded not to go to war without United Nations backing, but we are where we are. We must pray that the conflict will be brief with as little loss of life as possible. We must pray for relations between the faith communities both in the middle east and here, for this war will ratchet up tensions that are already strained. We must pray for our leaders and the armed forces. We must pray for the Iraqi people. We must love our enemies, for this conflict will make many more of them. And because war erodes truth and brutalises people, we must pray in the words of tonight’s gospel that the darkness may not overtake us.
 
That was said with some trepidation. It is not the stuff of most installations where deans have to preach themselves in by setting out their stall. But re-reading it ten years on, I believe I was right to trust my instincts. The legacy of the Iraq war has been a terrible alchemy of death, injury, bereavement on all sides but especially among Iraqis; fraught internal relationships between different Iraqi factions resulting in at best a fragile political stasis; a deeper mistrust on the part of global Islam towards the Christian west; the irretrievable loss of heritage belonging to some of the most ancient sites in the world; and the dramatically worsened plight of indigenous Christian communities in their historic homeland whose members are fleeing the country in large numbers to escape persecution. It was a bitter cup then, and it still is.

Some will say that despite the huge cost, it was worth embarking on this adventure in the pursuit of a kinder and more just world. Others will argue that it’s simply too soon to tell what the lasting effects of the war will be. And yet others will assert that it was a disastrous mistake and the last state has turned out to be much worse than the first. I am not qualified to make such judgments.  But my misgivings of ten years ago have not gone away.

For me, St Cuthbert’s Day will be an opportunity for personal thanksgiving for the privilege of living and working in such a beautiful, privileged and holy place for the past decade (more about that in a future blog, maybe).  But for many others, it will be a more ambiguous commemoration.  I am thinking especially of those who lost loved ones in the conflict or who have been permanently scarred by it.  So along with my thanksgivings for the past decade will come renewed prayers for Iraq and its afflicted people; prayers for those who died, not least among our own armed forces; prayers for all leaders and politicians as they face the intractable complexities of living together on our planet, and prayers for good men and women of all the world faiths who look for ways of deepening understanding and working for reconciliation in a broken world, like Archbishop Justin Welby and Pope Francis.

And I am sure that St Cuthbert will want us to pray on his day that our world may know the peace and simplicity of which his own life was such a luminous example.