A Dean is Captured on Video

Now less than eight weeks to go to retirement. It’s coming up so quickly….

I’ve been clearing out the study, deciding which books to keep and which to discard (many are called but few are chosen!). It’s a thankless task but occasionally it throws up something that makes you stop and take stock. Today I came across a historic video of one of my predecessors. He too was retiring and this short documentary was put together by Tyne-Tees TV to mark his eight years in Durham. I needed a break so I sat down to watch it.

Some of you will remember Peter Baelz who was Dean of Durham from 1980 to 1988. He had been Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford, so another in the line of distinguished theologians who have held this office down the centuries. (His predecessor had been Eric Heaton who had taught me Old Testament at Oxford in the 1970s.) But it's not an aristocratic bookish don who comes across in this endearing TV portrait but a wise, kind and thoughtful priest who had evidently relished his years at Durham and come to love the Cathedral and its people.

The film follows the Dean round the Cathedral and its environs. As he walks, he chats amiably about what it means to be Dean in such a place. Interestingly, he begins not by rhapsodising about its history or heritage, its music or its liturgy, but by telling us that the Dean’s role is like being the managing director of a small business. He points out that the Cathedral gives employment to nearly 100 people engaged in a whole variety of tasks. We meet some of them, including a young stonemason who explains what he’s doing and why it is so important.

You sense that the stones of Durham have come to matter to the Dean in an almost mystical way. But not as an end in themselves. They exist to serve a higher purpose, and this is about human beings, communities, ultimately God himself. He speaks lovingly about its saints as his companions: Cuthbert at one end of the Cathedral and Bede at the other. A cathedral, he suggests, travels through time as a symbol of the enduring values of religious faith. (He is dismissive of the ‘Land of the Prince-Bishops’ signs at County Durham’s gateways because, he says, they suggest a backward-looking church whereas Christians today must always look forward to the future in hope.)

He has a lot to say about the choristers and the Chorister School where they are educated. (I recently came across a delightful photo of Peter Baelz in the cloister on the day of his installation as Dean, surrounded by a gaggle of laughing choristers.) He shows off the newly-constructed sports hall with pride, explaining how tricky it is to build well in such a sensitive historic environment. It sounds as though the Cathedral’s daily choral worship gave him special pleasure and inspiration.  

Having watched this delightful piece, I tweeted that I wish I’d seen it twelve years ago when I arrived here as Dean myself. Someone asked me why, and what I drew out of this documentary.

It’s not so much what he says about cathedral life and Durham in particular. I’d already worked full-time in cathedrals for a decade and a half when I arrived here. No, it’s much more to do with his personal style. There is so much to admire in the way he goes about his business, something refreshingly ordinary. There is not a trace of self-importance in him: witness the little touches like waving to people as he cycles past them in the College, his personal interest in the people he meets, his curiosity in the way he talks to that young stonemason about his work, his affectionate relationships with the choristers, his personal enjoyment of his home, 'the best house in Durham', where my wife and I have lived during these years. 

Even late in our working lives, I suppose we all invoke our role models to help us make sense of our roles. I’ve always believed that the essential priestliness of a Dean lies close to the heart of what makes him or her credible as the head of a religious foundation. In Peter Baelz, the Cathedral had a Dean who understood from his own experience of parish life what it meant to be the leader of a faith community. On the basis of what I had read about him, I had already spoken about him some years ago in a lecture on Durham’s Deans as one of the wisest and the best. Today I have come to see why that instinct was right, why I recognised in him a true 'reflective practitioner'. Which is why I couldn’t have done better than to watch the video twelve years ago.

‘How are you feeling about retirement?’ asks the interviewer. He replies that part of him will be glad to be free of the burdens of the role, but another part will be hurting for all that he has come to love in Durham and that he is going to miss sorely. Well, I still have a couple of months’ ministry as a Dean to go. When Michaelmas comes, part of me will be relieved, it’s true, but another part - a very big one - is going to hurt badly. How could it not when I've been privileged to live and work in such a marvellous place and with such wonderful people?

But watching the film, I thought to myself: it’s never too late to learn from the people who inspire us. These last few weeks could still be a time to learn and to grow as a priest. God willing.

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.