Retirement: an interim report from Haydon Bridge

Six weeks to go, give or take: retirement is charging down the slipway. 40 days - the same as Lent. But the prospect sometimes feels more like Lent wound back in reverse, as if retirement day, far from being some kind of Easter, is more like Ash Wednesday, a day to mourn and give things up.

No point in pretending: there will be so much to lose. It's not just the life and worship of this wonderful community here at Durham Cathedral. It's the end of forty years of full-time stipendiary ministry as 'clergy'. Not the end of priesthood, of course - that vocation is till death us do part. But it will mean the end of the way I have been called to exercise it over four decades. And that's symbolised by the names of the places where I've been privileged to minister during that time - Oxford, Salisbury, Alnwick, Coventry, Sheffield and Durham. So many memories. So much learned. Such a rich time of gifts. Yes, there have been periods of struggle and pain too. But at such dark times, these places and their people have been compassionate, wise and forgiving. They have been wise teachers. I owe them a great deal.

But as we always say at Lent, 'giving up' creates space to offer life in new ways, be open to new opportunities. 'New lamps be lit, new tasks begun' says George Bell's hymn. That's the entire point. And this weekend I've begun to glimpse this in a new way. We've spent 48 hours in Northumberland, Haydon Bridge where we shall retire, beginning the long process of turning a house into a home. It's hard work to dismantle one home, especially when you've been happy there, and start to build another. But for the first time I began to glimpse what new gifts await us as we let go of the old.

I'm thinking of simply homely things. A neighbour invites us in for coffee. The Vicar and his family call in with a bottle of wine and a welcome card. Locals help us out in all kinds of practical ways. The folk at the pub are genuinely interested in who we are and when we'll be arriving. The church clock chimes the hours reassuringly - reliably five minutes late, just like Christ Church in Oxford. Local trains trundle over the level-crossing fifty yards away. We take a late stroll and linger on the ancient bridge across the Tyne enjoying the warmth of a summer evening. Sunlight pours into the front of the house each morning and lights up the rear each afternoon and evening. We sit contentedly on the patio drinking coffee.

As it's Sunday we go to church. It's even nearer than the railway station, indeed every bit as close as Durham Cathedral is to this Deanery. It's dedicated to St Cuthbert because his body probably lay on the site of the little Romanesque church up the hill on its long journey to Durham. Cuthbert has been our constant companion and guardian these twelve years so it's a comfort to know he is here too. Jenny and I sit together in the nave as we look forward to doing for many years to come. It's good to be 'lay' as well as 'ordained'. The Vicar presides at the liturgy with care, and preaches thoughtfully about the Living Bread and how the eucharist should shape our life together as a Christian community. Afterwards there is coffee and we meet a lot of warm-hearted friendly people. No-one needs to be told who we are or where we live. The village grapevine has done that long ago.

These are simply glimpses of the future, hints of horizons that are yet to come fully into view. Who knows what life is going to be like after September? I've learned the wisdom of Woody Allen's famous joke. 'How do you make God laugh?' 'You tell him your future plans.' On the other side of this threshold, so much is unknown, inevitably. There's no way to discover what lies beyond except by crossing it - that's the nature of a rite of passage.

We need to have good travelling companions when we cross boundaries. That's why we have farewell rituals, however much of an ordeal they are. They are a chance to say thank you, and maybe sorry, but above all to affirm the relationships that have meant so much to us and will continue to do in years to come. I won't deny that my last Sunday, 27 September, is not a day I look forward to with eagerness. My emotions will no doubt be in turmoil. But as we have all found, when our lives are offered within the life of the people of God, loss has a way of being transformed into gift, even if we don't always see it that way at the time.

So to have eaten our first meal, and slept our first night, and worshipped on our first Sunday in our future home feels like a big step forward on this strange but rather wonderful journey. Because Ash Wednesday always looks forward to Easter when life begins again.

Seasons of Durham Life: April

There is a heady rush of green all over the Peninsula. In March it seemed as if winter would never end. Now it is April and Eastertide, and the trees are outdoing one another to dress for summer. The silver birch outside the bathroom window is back in the role of modesty screen, its foliage concealing us bashful bathers from our neighbours across the College. The magnolia by the Chorister School, harbinger of exams, cricket and speech day, is in glorious flower. The dandelions are out for St George's Day. Even the beech hedge, always the last to respond, is casting off last year's dowdy autumn brown as fresh shoots push through. The wind has lost its biting edge, the sun is shining daily and winter woollies are stowed away till the equinox. The time for singing has come. All's right with the world.

T. S. Eliot famously said that April was the cruellest month, but perhaps he wasn't thinking very theologically. Even when Easter is late, April always seems shot through with resurrection. Maybe I'm biased - my birthday falls on the Ides (the 13th - about which see a recent blog On Reaching a Certain Age). When I was a boy, the sun always used to shine on that day. I know this because I always used to read my birthday books lying on the carpet in front of the south-facing open front door through which the sun's warmth and light streamed in with such generosity that even in my irreligion, I felt grateful to be alive. Now that I am 65, and well into my last Durham spring, that feeling has returned forcefully. Easter has felt like a precious gift to savour this year. We shall not be here to see this generation of green leaves drop off their trees in the autumn.

This year, April began in Holy Week. On Maundy Thursday morning, the diocesan clergy come to the Cathedral in large numbers to the annual service at which we renew our vows of ministry with the Bishop. We don't speak of Durham Cathedral as the 'mother-church' of the diocese because historically it isn't - that honour belongs to the older foundations at Chester-Le-Street or Lindisfarne. But on Maundy Thursday as the diocese gathers under this sacred canopy, it feels motherly. Clergy who have not seen one another for a year greet friends. For some, it is their first Maundy Thursday in Durham - they may have been ordained here last year, or have moved into the diocese from somewhere else. For others, this will be their last before moving away or retiring. I make this point in my welcome, and point out that I am speaking about myself. I'm conscious that today, as we worship, The Queen is visiting my former Cathedral in Sheffield to deliver the Royal Maundy. We held it in Coventry while I was Precentor there, and it was unforgettable. Mandatum novum, the 'new commandment' of the upper room that we should love one another lies at the heart of Christianity.

At the Maundy eucharist that evening, I preside. At the foot of the mighty prince-bishops' throne, once 'the highest throne in Christendom', I wash the feet of the youngest choristers. I like the juxtaposition of smallness and vulnerability right next to this huge symbol of jurisdiction and power. After communion, I lead a ceremony unique to Durham known as the 'Judas Cup' where the members of the Chapter pass round a mazer of wine and we ask ourselves the dreadful question of the upper room when Jesus announces that one of his disciples will betray him: 'Lord, is it I?' Then the lights are put out, the choir sings the Lamentation, we strip the altars and leave for the vigil in the dark Galilee Chapel. The transition from joyful thanksgiving to darkness and dereliction is extraordinarily powerful. It's one of those occasions where a well-developed sense of drama serves the liturgy so well. You would have to be hard-hearted not to be moved by it.

For me, Good Friday is the most moving day of the Christian year. Late in life, I am wondering why this is so. Maybe it just is. Our preacher in Holy Week this year is Bishop Martin Wharton, lately retired from our neighbouring diocese of Newcastle, and living among us in the College this year. He delivers a magnificent sermon on St John's great final word from the cross, 'It is finished'. I once wrote a little book about the sayings of Jesus in St John's passion narrative, but as I listened to this sermon I felt I wanted to tear it up and begin again. I came to faith through singing Bach's St John Passion as a boy. Somehow this beautiful sermon on the holiest day of this final year of mine in public ministry seems to bring things to a kind of completion: a personal tetelestai! indeed, if you'll allow me to put it that way. ('Is there a text?' I ask afterwards. 'No, just a few notes scribbled on the back of a fag-packet' he replies with typical modesty). Then the great cross is processed in and as the choir sing the Sanders Reproaches, we go forward to venerate it. Some simply kneel in front of it, but at a distance; others go right up to it to touch and kiss it. There are tears in the love and devotion of that simple action. They include mine. 'It is a thing most wonderful....'

Easter Eve is the day of emptiness and waiting. I've blogged about that too, and about the significance of Easter dawn breaking into it. Not every cathedral can muster a full choir at 5.15am, but we have always believed we should invest everything into this the central liturgy of the year. The Bishop presides and preaches, and parishes bring their baptism and confirmation candidates to join ours. Everyone is asked to bring something noisy to blow or bang as we shout the first alleluias after the long silence of Lent. This year, the Sunday school has furnished the clergy with rattles that glow in bright colours as you wave them about. This replaces the Buddhist prayer wheel I used to bring to this ceremony until the head flew off dangerously a few years ago during my moment of Easter excitement. Afterwards, there are bacon butties and coffee in the undercroft restaurant, while those of us whose liturgical day is only just beginning go home to turn round before choral matins, the sung eucharist and evensong.

'Can there be any day as this?' asks George Herbert. After the exhilaration of Easter Day, it all goes quiet for a while. Maybe it shouldn't, but it's a relief after the long liturgies and intense spirituality of Holy Week. The joy does not dissipate as the Great 50 Days begin, but it's in a more restful mode for a few days while the choir is on holiday and clergy take a break. After Easter Week, Jenny and I go to Bristol and Gloucester for the annual Deans' Conference, one last opportunity to see colleagues many of whom have become friends during the couple of decades I have been deaning (in two cathedrals - which makes me one of the few who are known as duo-deanal).

Back in Durham, the Cathedral is full again for the funeral of our friend and colleague Joe Cassidy, the Principal of St Chad's College across the Bailey. After his sudden death at the very end of March, I blogged about this inspiring, generous man to whom, as I now realise, I have owed a great deal during these Durham years. Some funerals are unbearably poignant, especially when someone has died tragically or prematurely, or when the liturgical season lends a particular colour. What makes this unforgettable for me is the tribute paid by Joe's daughter (you can find it on her Face Book page - Emmeline Skinner-Cassidy). It is filled with radiant memories of faith and love, a profound sense of gratitude and an unassailable sense of terrible loss. At the end, with the family standing round, I can barely get round the coffin to cense it: it is such an intimate act, the last thing I can do for someone I have come to care deeply for. I say the words of commendation with difficulty. A few minutes later we are at the cemetery. The air is soft and clean, and there are daffodils all round. We lay Joe to rest and in turn throw earth on to the coffin. And I call to mind the words of the Russian kontakion: 'even at the grave we sing alleluia!' Take him, earth, for cherishing.

If Easter doesn't make a difference to the way we think about mortality, what can it possibly mean? What can life itself mean? Yes, for Joe's family and for so many others in the world, April has been the cruellest month. Yet faith insists on seeing in it the brightest and best of hopes - even if it sometimes means holding on as best we can, and like Abraham, hoping against hope.

On Reaching a Certain Age

This is the 23,741st day of my life.* One more day of grace. Today is the Ides of April.** More personally, I reach the emblematic age of sixty-five. I can now draw my state pension.

Sixty-five doesn’t carry the significance it once did. Gone are the days when you would be summoned to the MD’s office on your birthday to be given a carriage clock (an eloquent symbol of mortality?), a slice of cake, listen to farewell speeches of varying sincerity and be toasted with a glass of bubbly. Some retire earlier, many later. As readers of this blog know, I am staying on for a few more months. I am not ready to become history just yet. But when that day comes later this year, I don’t think, somehow, that I shall spend my days pruning my roses. There are fresh ways in which I hope I can be useful in retirement to church and wider community. Who knows?

But this is not a blog about retirement. What today marks for me has more to do with the prospect of ageing or, as we used to say, growing old gracefully. And in that respect, this does feel like a significant threshold even if not perhaps a momentous one. It’s reinforced by two other anniversaries that coincide with this 65th year: having been forty years an ordained minister, and twenty as a dean. As I look back, I realise how hugely life has changed during the time I have been ordained, not least in the nation’s religious attitudes and in the culture of the church itself.

I've set aside some months after finishing full-time public ministry to reflect on two things. The first is what other roles might be awaiting me in the ‘third age’, however short or long it may be. That’s the retirement question. The other, is more important: what the years ahead will mean for physical, personal and spiritual health, for the deepening of intimate relationships, for creativity and the enjoyment of life’s gifts, and for journeying purposefully into truth and into God. This feels like an unknown region for now. It will need negotiating with care and self-awareness with the help of those with I am fortunate enough to travel with on this journey of being a human being and a Christian.

‘Old age’ can be a rich and fertile time of life. We know this from those we see flourishing in their sixties, seventies and eighties. Clergy are privileged to have a lot to do with those whom we call ‘senior’. It is wonderful when the elderly flourish, giving so much to church and society through volunteering and the sharing of their lifetime’s experience. There is a beautiful wisdom that comes with age that the Bible, like all ancient civilisations, prizes highly. There are the pleasures in spending time with the young – our grandchildren if we are fortunate to have them, but, as I have also discovered here in Durham through my involvement with choir and school, many others as well. There is the gift of time to reflect on the world in new ways, cultivate the imagination, become more of a contemplative. I hope I can appreciate more and more the sheer wonder of being alive. These are all things I look forward to and hope to have time to enjoy.

It's not so wonderful when we see elderly people who have become diminished through pain, bereavement, suffering and disability, or by the more imperceptible ways life shuts down through disappointment, loneliness, loss of hope or physical weakness. Clergy spend much time with the vulnerable, sick and dying. I wonder how well I would – may have to – cope with the loss of my faculties, failing memory, dementia, incontinence or loss of physical function. I ask myself how gracious I would – may have to – be if I were to become dependent on other people for everyday tasks I don’t even think about right now: communicating, eating and drinking, personal hygiene, getting around. What if I could no longer watch a sunset, read a book, walk the fells or listen to the music of Bach? These disabilities are not unique to age, of course. But every year that passes makes them more likely.

And today as I flip the calendar, I can’t help being sharply aware that an even more daunting threshold awaits. One day it will be time to say farewell to this life. There is no evading the hard truth about mortality. It doesn’t do, the nearer we come to dying, to pretend any more. Philip Larkin’s chillingly great poem ‘Aubade’ plays with our ambivalence as we contemplate ‘unresting death, a whole day nearer now’. ‘“Most things may never happen”: this one will.’ He criticised religion, ‘that great moth-eaten musical brocade / Invented to pretend we never die’ – a brilliant trope, if a cruel judgment on the gospel that has sustained me for a lifetime. But I have learned a lot contemplating that poem. It’s been in my mind since a close colleague and friend dies suddenly before Easter. He was four years younger than me. It has concentrated my thoughts. As the seventeenth century Bishop Jeremy Taylor knew when he wrote his two classics Holy Living and Holy Dying, it's important to think about your own death, and how you intend to live the rest of your life in the light of that certainty.

I have a hunch that symbolically, to turn sixty-five makes it more difficult to ignore – at least, if I want to live the last phase of life honestly, wisely, thankfully and well. And of course joyfully and Christianly – ‘in sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead’ as the funeral service puts it. The Ides of April sometimes fall in Lent, sometimes in the Easter season. This year it’s Eastertide. That helps my thoughts on ‘reaching a certain age’ to be shaped in the light of Christian hope, which is how we should always think about ageing, mortality and death. It's hope in Christ crucified and risen that illuminates each day we are given to enjoy and grow old in. While we live it makes us wise, and generous, brave, loving and good. And when the end comes, as the hymn says, ‘it takes its terror from the grave / and gilds the bed of death with light’.

Meanwhile, I shall spend much of this 65th birthday on a train with my wife travelling to the other end of England for a conference. A kairos threshold embedded in ordinary time. There’ll be plenty of opportunity to gaze out of the window and ponder landscapes as they hurry by and think the thoughts that emerge. 'Each a glimpse then gone forever.' An apt metaphor of life.

*23,741 = 365 x 65 + 16. The sixteen are for the leap years.**Ides on 13th of every month except 15th March, May, July and October.

 

Harrowing Hell: the significance of Easter Eve

It's not Easter Saturday but Holy Saturday or Easter Eve. This day between Good Friday and Easter is unique. No other day feels quite like this, a day of emptiness, of waiting, of hoping.

For the Jewish community, it's the Sabbath or seventh day of the week (and this year, it's also the first day of Passover). That's an important clue to what it means. In the Genesis creation story, God finished his work on the sixth day and rested on the seventh. St John's account of the crucifixion picks up this theme when he has Jesus speak his last word from the cross, 'It is finished'. He has accomplished the new work of creation. Tetelestai! - it is complete. So Jesus can now be laid in the tomb. He can rest. He can keep the Sabbath.

Early next morning, the first day of the week, the tomb is empty. Jesus is up before daybreak. He appears to Mary in the garden. We hear the echoes of the creation story again, the garden of Eden where God places the man and the woman to look after the world that he is making. But now there is a new world. Life is beginning again on this eighth day, this first day of the rest of history. Everything is transfigured. Nothing is the same again after this Sabbath.  

So on this day we are 'between times': between old and new, between past and future, between expectation and fulfilment. Traditionally, Easter Eve is 'a-liturgical', that is, a day when the church doesn't celebrate the liturgy but enters into the mysterious pause between one era and the next. The altars are stripped after Maundy Thursday, the church is forlorn and bare, its songs have fallen silent. It's like Zion as she is depicted in the Book of Lamentations: desolate, abandoned, void. Nothing stirs; nothing happens. This is the Sabbath of the grave.

I'm speaking symbolically, of course, about the lifelessness of Easter Eve. Yet in medieval theology, it was on Holy Saturday that a great drama was acted out in unseen places. When Christ went down to the grave, it was in order to harrow hell and bring redemption to lost souls who had been condemned to die. The new Adam goes to rescue the old. 'He descended into hell' we recite in the creed. Those words aren't easy to say. Some treat them as no more than a colourful way of talking about his death.

But let's use our spiritual imagination here. One way is to say: the cross has not only personal but cosmic significance. Nothing is beyond the reach of God's redemption, and Jesus goes to the far side of all that is dark and dreadful to achieve it. Even the hells of this world are not beyond the scope of God's loving purposes. How could the gospel have a truly universal dimension without the harrowing of hell?

Back here, Easter Eve may be liturgically a day of rest, but it is also a day of preparation. There is work to do after all. Like Jewish people preparing for the Passover, there is a festival to get ready for both at home and in church. In the Cathedral, rehearsals for the great liturgy of Easter dawn take place. The best vestments are being laid out, the golden hangings are placed on the altar, the church is cleaned, and flowers and decorations are being arranged. The Cathedral will never look more beautiful than it does on Easter Day.

So as we pass symbolically through the grave and gate of death, we wait for the celebration of a new dawn. We shall be there, ready to greet him when he comes to us at first light in the breaking of the bread. Our hearts will burn within us as we hear the voice of our Beloved who calls us by name and tells us not to be afraid.

Here is my translation of a familiar Easter hymn.

Glory to Jesus, risen Son and King,
Lord of life who frees us, your new song we sing.
Radiant in the morning, angels bright come down,
Greet the day that’s dawning, hail the conqueror’s crown:

Glory to Jesus, risen Son and King,
Lord of life who frees us, your new song we sing.

See Jesus meets you, see your Lord appear!
Hear the word that greets you, tells you love is here.
Dance with joy and gladness, people of the Lord.
Banish grief and sadness, tell the news abroad!

Fear flies before him: evermore he lives!
O my heart adore him! peace and joy he gives.
Christ my mighty conqueror, Christ my gracious friend,
Christ my life and glory, till all ages end:

Seasons of Durham Life: February

It's March, and I haven't yet written the February blog. 

February is the shortest month, but pace T. S. Eliot, I've always felt it to be the cruellest. (He believed it was April, which is to disparage the month of my birth.) It is Lent, and althought the old English word means 'spring', up here in North East England it is still definitely winter. And cold. Not the fierce iciness you sometimes get at this time of year, just that relentless damp chill that creeps up from the river banks and clings to the peninsula. Maybe I am just feeling my age. 

However, the snowdrops have been spectacular this year, carpeting the precincts and river banks in a delicate white. Now, aconites and crocuses are bringing back the colour we have missed for so long. The sun is rising higher in the sky and the days are longer again, even if its rays have yet to regain their warmth. When we reach the end of evensong, it is still daytime. 

The month begins with a burst of celebration and colour. On the 2nd we keep the joyful feast of the Presentation of Christ. It commemorates Joseph and Mary bringing their infant Jesus to the temple to be blessed. The story tells how aged Simeon took the baby in his arms and spoke of him as a light for the nations. Hence the traditional English name of Candlemas. At the service, the Cathedral is lit by two thousand candles (tea-lights if I am honest). It's an extraordinarily beautiful sight - even if it's quite a job for the vergers. You see the building illuminated as its builders always intended, its magnificent vaults, arcades and piers lit from below. It's a luminous experience, literally and spiritually. 

Not many days later it is Lent. You couldn't have a starker contrast than that of Candlemas and Ash Wednesday. This solemn day is our Christian equivalent of the Jewish Day of Atonement: a time to reflect on our sin and wrongdoing, our falling short of what God wants us to be and what we know we could be. The Cathedral is stripped of decoration: the hangings and vestments are of plain sackcloth-white, the flowers are gone until Easter, the music is understated and we don't say alleluia.  At the Ash Wednesday service the choir sings the haunting Miserere of Allegri, Psalm 51, that outpouring of guilt and shame that the psalmist feels might be beyond forgiveness and healing. We try to pare things down to their essentials and ask ourselves: what is human life? What is discipleship? What ultimately matters as we walk with Jesus as his followers and friends? 

We read about the age-old disciplines of prayer, fasting and almsgiving in Jesus' teaching at the Ash Wednesday eucharist. We receive the ashes on our foreheads as we hear the portentous words that speak of our mortality: 'remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.' But we don't take our eye off the goal of it all. For that is Easter, the very centre of our faith, so we give these six precious weeks of Lent to prepare to celebrate it. 40 days. Not counting the Sundays of course, because every Sunday is the Christian memorial of the resurrection. And Lent, while it is a solemn time, should never be joyless or grim. A good Lent is a cheerful Lent. There is simplicity, but there is also joy. As George Herbert puts it in a memorable paradox, 'Welcome, dear feast of Lent!'  

So Lent will see winter give way to spring. At last. Not just the cold and the wind, the sleet and the rain, but the wintriness in our souls. R. S. Thomas has a poem that talks about the frost and rime that encrust our hearts. The liturgy and the personal discipline we adopt for Lent help us face this fact of life. They hold out the promise of transformation to come, a springtime of renewal and resurrection. 

Here's how I put it in a Lent poem I wrote some years ago. 

Lent is no fast time, but a hard long prising

Out, from winter’s fist, of spring’s gestation;

A slow, waiting season, new life’s birthing,

Atonement’s womb, Easter’s incubation.

It is year’s shaping, scaffolding under skin,

Bones bearing body, strong and spare;

Like earth’s ancient rocks, world’s silent discipline

Exposed when spirit’s topsoil is scraped bare.

Lent’s lengthening light, concentrated and clear,

Lean as plainsong, sharp as east-wind’s keenness,

Shrives air astringently, calling passion near

To wash the ashen soul in fat white cleanness.

No hasty passing over old world’s loss –

Lent’s unrelenting climb toward the cross.

Even in February the sap is rising. 

Easter: Off-beat Reflections

It may have been the coldest Easter Day on record, but in Durham it was golden. I wish it could have gone on for ever. In an ultimate sense it does, of course: resurrection is not just for Easter. And now we are celebrating the Great Fifty Days of Easter that take us to Pentecost with alleluias all the way.

The sights and sounds of Easter Day linger on. The lighting of the new fire an hour before dawn in the cloister garth as dark as grave; the rattles, whistles, bells and cymbals that accompanied the first great alleluia! shout; the quantities of water freely ladled out of the font as candidates were baptised; the new copes lending brilliant colour to the day’s celebrations; magnificent choral music (including an Easter piece by Widor of Toccata fame, said to be the loudest anthem in the choir’s repertoire); the pleasure on choristers’ faces as my wife and I gave them eggs and chocolates after the services. Worshippers came in great numbers and, from what they told me afterwards, were genuinely touched and inspired. As I was.

But two memories stand out, both of them surprises.

The first was of administering communion at the dawn vigil service. Twenty were confirmed, of all ages from young choristers upwards. It is always moving to see the candidates kneeling round the great Cathedral font as the bishop moves round the circle laying hands on them. They received communion before anyone else. And as they knelt at the altar and I gave them the sacred host, a wonderful scent filled the nave sanctuary.

It took me a short while to realise what it was: the perfume in the chrism oil that had been liberally poured on to their heads at the font. Two weeks before, I had preached on the woman who anointed the feet of Jesus with her precious ointmentThe aroma filled the house, says the gospel. But yesterday’s was the scent not of burial but of resurrection. It was an unexpectedly tender and beautiful experience.

The second also happened during communion, this time at the mid-morning sung eucharist. I was administering at the west end. What felt like a never-ending flow of people came up to receive the bread or to be blessed. Most of these I didn’t know personally: regulars are always far outnumbered by visitors and guests at the great festivals.

But at the end someone came up whom I knew extremely well. It was my eldest daughter carrying her month-old son Isaac, our first grandchild. I put out my hand to touch him and give him his first church blessing. That touch was charged with a significance I can’t put into words. It was as if all of life seemed to be gathered up in this tiny child. I wondered if Simeon felt something like it when the infant Jesus was presented in the temple. It was as if I was being offered a great gift.  It wasn’t I who was the giver, but he. The intensity of the moment subsided as it had to.  But it will be unforgettable, I am sure of that.

They were both off-beat experiences: not about sight or hearing which tend to dominate our consciousness, but about scent and touch. I have heard it said that these are the more basic, primary among our senses. A baby depends mainly on them to recognise mother. And at the end of life, touch and smell outlast the other senses leaving a person who is gently slipping away with something like the experience of beginning life.

I don’t pretend to understand these things. But I did glimpse how in a wonderful way, Easter speaks to each of our human senses. Our meeting with the risen Christ is not just a matter of seeing and listening but of allowing him to encounter all our human faculties, so that we can become more fully human through his resurrection. To recognise this and not to be afraid of it is what it means to be embodied, for the incarnate Jesus and for us.

‘The glory of God is a human being fully alive’ said Irenaeus famously. That’s one of the gifts of Easter.  Maybe it's not so off-beat after all.

My sermon on the anointing at Bethany is at http://deanstalks.blogspot.co.uk.

The Olympic Flame Arrives in Durham

In a dean’s life there are occasional diversions from the solemn business of looking after a Cathedral. 

This weekend the Olympic Torch was in Durham.  Early on Sunday morning, a lot of people gathered in front of the Cathedral to see Durham cricketer Paul Collingwood light the Torch before being taking it in procession down to the market place.  It was timed to depart at 0833 with the railway precision of a French TGV.  The Cathedral choir sang anthems (including, appropriately, Hail Gladdening Light despite the line ‘the lights of evening round us shine).  The Chorister School turned out in force, as did the civic dignitaries, the media and the public.  The rain had stopped.  It was all very merry. 

I did some interviews with press, radio and TV.  One of the media people asked a question I hadn’t expected.  Did I secretly hanker after holding the Olympic Torch for myself?  Not especially, I said, though I was pleased for the many ‘ordinary’ people who had been honoured by being asked to carry it.  Then it was time to light the flame at the Cathedral door.  I found myself standing next to Paul Collingwood so I asked him how heavy the Torch was.  ‘See for yourself’ he said and handed it to me.  I held it up in the approved way. At once a score of cameras started clicking. Apparently a cleric in a cassock holding the Torch had some novelty value, even if it wasn’t yet lit. 

I’d expected that it would all simply be a bit of fun, not much more.  But as it was happening, I realised that perhaps it carried a deeper symbolism.

First, lighting the Olympic flame outside a religious building reminded me of the origins of the Olympic Games in classical Greece. In ancient times the Games were deeply imbued with religious ceremonies and rites, indeed they were thought of as a religious event held in honour of the gods who lived on the sacred mountain of Olympus.  So what about today?  Some would throw their hands up in horror at the thought of linking the Games with God.  Yet the question is not whether God will be present in the London Olympics (we know he will be: as Carl Jung famously inscribed on the lintel of his front door, recognised or not, the Deity will always be present), but how we shall recognise and know his unseen presence there. 

Second, lighting the Torch at the door of the Cathedral recalled for me the lighting of the new fire early in the morning of Easter Day. The Easter liturgy is the greatest service of the year.  The new fire symbolises the light of the risen Christ whom we look forward to greeting in the eucharist. This unconscious resonance with Easter seemed especially apt on a Sunday morning when the early morning eucharist had just been celebrated inside the Cathedral. Light is a great symbol for all people of faith.  Perhaps the Olympic flame and the Games themselves can raise the sights of people going through dark times during this economic crisis.  Perhaps it can even bring hope.

Third, the ancient Olympics were a time of truce between peoples in conflict. Warfare was forbidden while the Games were taking place.  The Flame seems to have had a remarkable effect in bringing people together out on the streets as it passes through cities, towns and villages.  It helps to build community.  Perhaps we should cut through the dark side of sport with its obsession with power, image and big money and think of it instead as re-creation. When I was a youngster learning to play rugby, our instructor told us: ‘the object of a game is to enjoy yourself.  Never forget that’. Joy is always a clue that God is around.  So the Olympics could be a striking image of the kingdom of God.  When people of every race and background gather together for celebration and recreation, when the barriers of division are broken down, at least for a while, isn’t this a picture of the world as God would like it to be?

Finally (and perhaps I should have put this first), I thought about ancient Greece again, and how the Olympics are its gift to the world.  I recalled the agonies (a good Greek sporting word for the struggles an athlete would endure) modern Greece is going through right now.  On Sunday, while the Torch was passing through Durham, the Greek people were going to the polls in an election that the whole of Europe was watching anxiously.  Their crisis is our crisis.  As we celebrate the London Olympics 2012, it’s important that we don’t allow them to become a big distraction from the problems our world is facing. Rather, we should allow the Games to give us a new vision of God’s world as it might be shaped one day.  So this is not a time to forget the people of Greece but to hold them in our hearts and pray for a better future for them and for us all. 

It was a good start to the day for Durham.  It was fun.  And it was thought-provoking.