For I will Consider my Cat Godiva

Not quite a quotation from the poet Christopher Smart (1722-1771). He was gifted, devout and more than a little mad. Among his most charming outpourings is the long versified tribute he paid to his cat, written in the Bedlam Asylum where he was confined. It's part of his great poem on creation, Jubilate Agno from which Benjamin Britten drew the text of his marvellous work Rejoice in the Lamb.

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.

In a long list of his amazing accomplishments comes this:

For the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat.
For his tongue is exceeding pure so that it has in purity what it wants in music.
For he is docile and can learn certain things.
For he can sit up with gravity, which is patience upon approbation.
For he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment.
For he can jump over a stick, which is patience upon proof positive.
For he can spraggle upon waggle at the word of command.
For he can jump from an eminence into his master’s bosom.

I wish I had Smart's flair for words when it comes to our beloved cat Godiva who died this week. She was twenty, a great age. She could not rise to half Jeoffry's attainments (she was never much good at spraggling though she could certainly jump from an eminence, and was doing so right up to last weekend). She outlived her characterful brother Leofric who died eight years ago. And she achieved something that even Jeoffrey could not have dreamed of. She had her own Twitter feed (@HRHLadyGodiva).

Why Godiva, you ask? She was originally called Bridget when we adopted her from the cat shelter in Sheffield where we had just moved. (Leofric's name had been Carlton.) The children wanted to name them in memory of our happy eight years in Coventry. So Earl Leofric and his brave wife Godiva fitted the bill. With the years, Leo transmuted at times into the Shakespearian Leontes and then the 'Cat of Glory'. Godiva simply became Diva or Dives (and not as in 'and Lazarus').

A more affectionate creature than Godiva was never born. Especially after Leo died, she craved human company. She would wander all over this great house seeking it. She was not fussy: Susan my PA, Linda our housekeeper, John the Head Porter, the students upstairs in the eyrie all doted on her. She attended Chapter meetings, seminars on the Psalms, recitals in Priors' Hall, fundraising events in the solarium. She has met a Prime Minister, members of the Royal Family, sundry ambassadors, lords lieutenant, high sheriffs, mayors, vice-chancellors and bishops without number. She never went far from the Deanery (unlike Leo who was twice caught invading the neighbours' cat-flaps and stealing the food of other College cats). She was timid and risk-averse, near the bottom of the feline food chain.

Despite what it says on her Twitter profile, she had little sense of being a World Heritage Cat living in Grade One listed surroundings. (This is despite being a published cat: she and Leo are the subject of a chapter in Richard Surman's illustrated book Cathedral Cats, Collins 2005.) Maybe the Deanery turned her head a little, for she would follow us round the house like a puppy dog eager to please, not at all the Senior Cat she could have been by rights. To the very end, she insisted on clambering on to the amplest vacant lap or settling into a her well-shaped hollow on the sofa to keep us company while we watched TV.

Maybe Godiva's feline sense of self was prematurely arrested by Leo's bullying tactics. Dogs are famously supposed to have owners while cats have staff, but Godiva was too dependent to grasp this important principle. Freud said that time spent with cats was never wasted. Godiva believed that it was definitely the other way round. She was never more miserable than when she was devoid of human companionship. She would trust anyone, incapable of believing that anyone might wish her harm. She hated the sight of bags and suitcases in the hall which meant that we were going away.

For the last year or two, she was completely deaf but this enabled her to find her voice for the first time. She would welcome us vocally when we came into the room, or cry and wail down the long echoing corridors looking for us until we went to find her for the sake of a quiet life. Then a few days ago she went blind too. It was poignant and sad to see her wandering around not knowing where she was, colliding with the furniture, tumbling on steps, her only awareness of us being our touch and caresses. It was kinder not to let this misery go on.

Like every pet who is loved, Godiva carried so many associations. She witnessed two decades of Sadgrove history. Fond recollections of our children, family Christmases, birthdays and Easter egg hunts, celebrations and losses, the highs and lows of life come flooding back. Without her, the house seems empty and a trifle forlorn. It already 'knows' that we are leaving in a few months' time. We miss her funny foxy tortoiseshell face, her creeping around behind us, the warmth of her cherished hollow on the sofa. This parting feels like part of a long-drawn-out farewell. But she leaves behind a rich vein of memories. She has been a loving companion for half our married life, half my working life, the entire time I have been a dean. We are thankful for it all.

So on the day she died I said a prayer of thanksgiving for our pets at evensong. I don't know what I believe about life after death when it comes to animals. But Christopher Smart was right. Animals belong to the world God has made. His love embraces them as it does all of creation: Cuthbert and Francis both teach us that. In her own idiosyncratic cattish way Godiva too has been the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him. Yes, we shall consider, and never forget, our Cat Godiva.

RIP.

A Conversation about Faith and Science

I have just come back from a stimulating hour at the Durham Book Festival. I was on a platform in front of an attentive crowd to interview a local author. Tom McLeish is a Professor of Physics at Durham University. He is also a committed Christian and a reader in his local church. He and I have got to know each other in our University roles, have enjoyed theological chat and even played Brahms together (he is a proficient horn player). He has just written a stimulating book called Faith and Wisdom in Science (published earlier this year by OUP). This was the theme of our conversation.

I've read a few books on the topic of 'science and religion' (I'll explain in a moment why I put that phrase in quotation marks). To be honest, some of them were theologically naïve, and the best of the rest were usually worthy but dull. Tom's book is in a class of its own. For one thing, it's so well written. For another, it gives us a fascinating glimpse of the scientific practitioner at work. Tom draws on his own and others' research to illustrate his argument (and not an equation in sight!). The range of his writing is extraordinary: the sciences, music, classical and medieval literature, cultural history, social anthropology and of course theology. For me as a theologian, it was a surprise and a privilege to be given new insights into biblical texts at the hands of a physicist. 

The book's argument is that we need to get away from the sterile antithesis implied by the words 'science and religion'. Wisdom, Tom says, is about recognising that science and religion are both ways of speaking about everything, and therefore, are always about each other. So we need a science of theology and a theology of science: two human narratives that between them triangulate our reading of the world. Only in this way will we get beyond the the argumentative mentality (as practised by Richard Dawkins and others) that in turn pushes theology into indefensible corners such as literal readings of the creation narratives in Genesis. 

The centrepiece of the book, surprisingly, turns out not to be Genesis at all, but the Book of Job. Tom argues that it is here that we see how Hebrew wisdom contemplates the cosmos and begins to discern meanings in it. There is observation about how nature 'works', not least its wild, baffling elements, and there is insight into its moral fabric, including how simplistic theories of rewards and punishments simply can't work. If I were still teaching OT wisdom literature to undergraduates, I would put this Job chapter on my reading list. It's superb, beautifully done.

Wisdom is a contemplative activity as well as a practical attitude to life. And this, says Tom, is how science should be. Before the term 'science' entered common currency, it was known as 'natural philosophy'. Philo-Sophia: the love of wisdom as it is expressed in the natural world. I find it striking that Tom should write about the place of love in scientific endeavour. Not just the love of explanation or of an elegant theory but love of practising the 'art' itself (yes, he writes about science as an art too). Maybe that's been said before, but I found the idea most appealing. 

As a superannuated mathematician, I had more than the odd pang of regret that I no longer inhabit this scientific thought-world. The author has a passion for helping the young to love science and is its best possible advocate. He wants church leaders to become more articulate in the sciences so that the conversation between faith and science comes out of alliance, not confrontation. Tom: almost thou persuadest me to become a scientist (apologies to Acts 26.28 in the King James Version). Or at least enjoy the occasional gentle foray into maths and physics when retirement comes. 

Losing a Son to the Holy War

It is shocking to learn of Muslims from Britain who have been recruited by ISIS to fight in Syria and Iraq. The summons to jihad has proved irresistible. These young men are often bright and talented with great futures opening up before them. Now they are committed to killing in the name of a holy war.

I have been moved by listening to the father of Nasser, one of these young men. Nasser is from Cardiff and planned to go to medical school. He was brought up in a committed Muslim family whose values are 100% British. ‘This is my country’ says his father. ‘It is his country. He was born here in the hospital down the road. He has been educated here.’ Now he features in a recruitment video called 'There’s No Life Without Jihad'. What has devastated his parents is that this has come out of the blue. ‘I was shocked, I was sad, I cried’ his father says. ‘It feels as if the ground under my feet has disappeared.’ Another of his sons is also missing, presumed to have gone with his brother. It’s a double tragedy.

It seems that the lad’s idealism wedded to his feeling for suffering people has made him a ready victim to those who have set out to radicalise him and others like him.The video depicts a man his parents can’t recognise any more as the son they love and have nurtured, so far-reaching has been the change in him. They have to conclude that his mind has come under not just the influence but the control of others; it has flipped into a wholly different way of reading the world from his moderate (his father’s word) Islamic upbringing. This kind of extreme religion is a world away from his formation as a child and an adolescent. He has, so to speak, been kidnapped by practitioners of religious craziness. He is a hostage. 

Every parent will empathise with this father’s moving testimony to his lost son. You worry about your kids: will they pass their exams? will they get involved with drugs or crime? will they find good partners? will they turn out to be the responsible citizens we bring them up to be? But jihad isn't on the radar. When something like this happens, I imagine it is a kind of death. I think of the father in the parable of the prodigal son. He had no choice but to watch his son abandon his family and leave for a far country. He could not know if he would ever see him again. He knew the sorrow of bereavement.

But that father never stops loving his son. When he falls on hard times, comes to his senses and decides to return, his father goes running to meet him. There is embracing, reconciliation, the joy of a welcome home. From the way he talks about him, I sense that Nasser’s father is like that. Far from disowning his son, he will go on loving him. It’s too painful to keep the family photos on show, so he has put them away. ‘Then we will have to wait.’ This is precisely what love entails. Like Jesus in the upper room, when we truly love, we go on loving to the end. However much waiting it means. 

And I believe that this is the clue. It would be so easy to be furious with a son who has done something as bizarre as this. The point is, he is a victim too. It's hard to see it this way, but it's important. He is no longer his own person: he has become someone else. This is how radicalisers work. Young men don't join radical jihadist groups. They are recruited. The blame lies not with the victim but with those who are exerting coersive power over him, altering his mind, reducing it to a state of unthinking obedience to the group’s doctrine. To see this happen to your child must be heartbreaking.

These are parents who have done all they could for their son. Now there is nothing left for them to do except to wait, and say their prayers, and if possible, try to find hope. In all its precariousness and pain, this is what love means: to go on holding and embracing him in their hearts, right to the end. 

We are with them in this terrible ordeal. As is God who is always the Compassionate and Merciful. 

Love so Amazing: Thoughts on Good Friday Evening

At the end of the Good Friday service at the Cathedral, we sang Isaac Watts’ great hymn ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’. When we got to the last verse, ‘Love so amazing, so divine / demands my life, my soul, my all’, there was an unexpected sunburst over the great cross that had been processed in and set up at the front of the nave. Until then, it had been one of those bleak, grey days we have endured for most of March. So this unexpected light felt like a transfiguration, an epiphany. Nature imitated liturgy in the words of another passion hymn we had sung: ‘Tree of glory, tree of light’.

You can have Jesus’ last words from the cross bleak and agonised as in St Matthew and Mark.  You can have them peaceful and serene as in St Luke. You can have them victorious and triumphant, as in St John’s ‘It is accomplished’. All these are valid ways of reading the cross. Golgotha means many different things. But on Good Friday, the liturgy chooses the passion according to St John. His gospel tells of a man destined for a victorious throne where he is ‘lifted up’. It is nothing less than the cross where he finishes in triumph the work he has come to do: the work of love.

Love. For me there was another, more important, epiphany earlier in the service. The preacher was speaking about the cross as the eternal sign of God’s love. In the course of a powerful sermon he said that the problem with ‘punishment’ theories of the atonement is that they are experienced not so much as focused on divine love as on my own sin, my guilt, my shame. In this we are self-concerned, driven by the need to placate angry gods who deal only with forensic transactions without which there can’t be forgiveness or reconciliation. This sinful idée fixe subverts the very idea of love freely given.  

Let me go on in my own words. This is not to deny the central place that forgiveness and reconciliation have in the gospel. Far from it. ‘I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ says Jesus in St John. It’s a question of how we understand love. If we see it in punitive terms, God exacting a penalty in his own Son for the sins of the world, we miss the fundamental point about the nature of love. Its categories are not legal or ceremonial but personal.  It is self-forgetting, self-giving, self-emptying. There is no higher category with which to define it. Love is simply what it is. He loves us because he loves us. It costs everything and gives everything. William Vanstone puts it like this in words we also sang, drawn from his profound book Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense:

Love that gives, gives ever more,

Gives with zeal, with eager hands,
Spares not, keeps not, all outpours,
Ventures all, its all expends.

I have lived too long with punitive theories of the atonement. I don’t deny that they have a long pedigree in the church (though I do dispute the view of an online conversation partner today that substitutionary atonement is ‘orthodox’: there's never been an orthodox definition of atonement as the preacher pointed out). Nor do I deny that the New Testament draws on legal and ritual categories, nor that it affirms the idea of a victim freeing another person by standing in his/her place. I have defended the place of this imagery in some of my writings. But the point is precisely that these are ways of speaking: imagery, analogy, metaphor. They are not the heart of the person-person relationship which is where in human life we learn everything we know about the character of love.

At the Archbishop’s enthronement at Canterbury last week, we were invited to sing a song that contains the line ‘the wrath of God was satisfied’. I am not alone in questioning whether it can be right to speak about a Son who placates an angry Father. It drives a wedge right through the Trinity. It collapses God’s love into an impersonal transaction. Anyone who has ever loved knows that this is not how love is. It is more costly, more risky and more generous than that. 

The cross shows us what it means to love to the end. As Vanstone’s hymn has it:

Therefore he who shows us God

Helpless hangs upon the tree;
And the nails and crown of thorns
Tell of what God’s love must be.

On Good Friday, the darkness is transfigured and the sun breaks through the clouds. We recognise love enthroned on the cross and say 'yes' to it with all our hearts in the hope, the conviction, that one day it will be enthroned in all the globe. For amor vincit omnia.  Love overcomes in the end. 'Love so amazing, so divine.'

About Isaac

Our first grandson was born a week ago, in the hospital in Leeds where they film the TV docu-series One Born Every Minute. (My daughter wisely declined to take part, wondering why any woman would want to be immortalised in labour.)

Jo and Will have called him Isaac.  I love that name. Its root meaning is ‘to laugh’.  In Genesis, God promises that Sarah will have a child by Abraham.  She laughs because she can’t imagine conceiving at her great age.  But when the promised son is born, Sarah makes a beautiful little speech: ‘God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me…. Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age’.  To begin with her laughter was scornful. How different it is now; for even if it’s a joke on God’s part, it’s a happy generous joke that against all odds a life has been promised and now it’s arrived. 

Every birth represents hope, and every birth brings laughter into a family – at least, we want to believe so.  And like Isaac of old, our Isaac has brought happiness and laughter to our family.  He has already been loved and cherished for many months, laughingly called Pancake in the womb because he was due on Shrove Tuesday.  Now he has been welcomed into our family.  St Benedict says in his Rule that we should welcome every guest as if he or she were Christ himself.  As I held Isaac barely 24 hours old, I thought how hard it is not to see the infant Jesus in the face of a tiny child.

There is a lot more that Genesis says about Isaac.  As a boy perhaps no older than a chorister, he and his father take a long walk to a far-off mountain in the biggest ordeal either of them will ever have to face.  I wrote about Abraham and Isaac in my book Lost Sons, though I doubt that I did it justice: the Aqeda or ‘Binding’, as Judaism calls it, is a profoundly mysterious story.  And if I tried to write about it now, I would not be able to keep my grandson Isaac out of my mental image of the narrative. 

But standing back from that particular text, I am safe in saying that for little Isaac, life will mean journeys he or we cannot possibly foresee.  Most of these, we pray, will be filled with happiness and hope and Isaac-like laughter, for who does not wish for every new-born child these God-given blessings?   But inevitably, some paths will take him into hard and difficult places where there is more shadow than light; and at those times, we pray all the more that he will know that he is cherished by God as a beloved child, and be kept safe from harm. 

And who knows whether even in infancy, he does not already intuit this for himself? Who can say whether his little heart isn’t already responding to the everlasting heart of Love which framed and fashioned him in his mother’s womb and brought him into this world?  Cor ad cor loquitur: heart speaks to heart in ways that don’t need words. Childbirth is one of the joyful mysteries of life, a sacrament where laughter and human love evoke the Love that, as Dante put it, moves the sun and the other stars. I like to think that this is something all children know deep within themselves. Sadly, for many, growing up is an act of forgetting.

So we are now officially old.  But we are going to enjoy being grandparents.