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. 

In praise of... the East Coast Main Line.

In a few days' time, another chapter will begin on the East Coast Main Line. On 1 March, the railway will be operated by a new franchise holder, Virgin Trains East Coast, a partnership between Stage Coach and Virgin. So this is a good opportunity to celebrate this illustrious line.

I am one of those clergy who have loved trains since I was in a pushchair.  I was brought up in north London just a couple of miles away from the East Coast Main Line. In carefree years before adolescence, my favourite place in London was King's Cross Station. In all weathers I would spend hours on the platform end, sometimes with friends, often alone, Ian Allan train-spotter's book in hand, and watch the Gresley Pacifics setting out on their long journeys towards exotic places like Durham, Newcastle and Edinburgh. I dreamed one day of travelling to this undiscovered country of the North. 

Years later I got to make the journey. I always hoped that my maiden voyage would be behind the famous streamlined Mallard, 60022, then - and still - the holder of the world speed record for a steam locomotive. Alas, by the mid 1960s, the route was run by diesels. But it still felt like a big adventure into a strange land. That day I got as far as Durham where I had applied for a place to read maths at the University. When the train rounded the curve across the viaduct and I got my first sight of the Castle and Cathedral perched on their rocky acropolis, I had two epiphanies. The first was like the disciples gazing on the Jerusalem Temple: 'what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings'. The second was simply: 'is there a main line in the world that can be compared to the East Coast?'

I have seen a few other main lines since then, many of them magnificently engineered. But I have not lost my admiration for the ECML as it is known to its friends. You don't need me to remind you of its scenic highlights: Durham, of course; the Angel of the North, crossing the Tyne at Newcastle, Alnmouth sitting prettily on its estuary, Berwick huddled by the Tweed, the gorse-clad cliffs of north Northumberland and the Border, the uplands of southern Scotland and finally, the majestic sense of arrival you get at Edinburgh Waverley - what other destination is so romantically named? Not to mention the procession of great cathedrals and churches you pass on the way: Peterborough, Grantham, Newark, Doncaster, York, Darlington, Durham and Newcastle, and even Lincoln, beckoning on a clear day from its far-off hill top. And three of England's best railway stations: King's Cross, York and Newcastle.

In 2013, to celebrate the residency of the Lindisfarne Gospels in Durham, East Coast named Class 91 electric locomotive 91114 Durham Cathedral. I admit it was a proud moment to stand on the platform at Newcastle Central station for the naming and blessing ceremony.  In my address, I spoke about the pleasures of train travel, the links between a railway and the regions it passes through and the importance of excellent public transport. And I also reminded the gathering that County Durham was the cradle of the railways. The ECML crosses the original Stockton and Darlington line which was opened in 1825. So the railway connects us not only to the natural and built heritage of the North East but also to its proud industrial heritage and to the working traditions of this part of England. 

I ended by saying this. 'The Great Western GWR was affectionately known as ‘God’s Wonderful Railway’.  I don’t see why that quirky broad-gauge line should have the monopoly on divinity or greatness. It was on this East Coast Main Line 75 years ago this very day that Gresley's A4 Mallard achieved the world speed record for a steam locomotive. East Coast Main Line, ECML, is surely the Excellent, Classic and Most Magnificent Line. We are proud of it in this region, and I take today as meaning that the railway is proud of the region too. As a working cathedral of today and tomorrow, it is good to be linked with the twenty-first century railway system with all its positive messages about the part public transport plays in environmental responsibility and sustainability.'

Thank you to nationalised operator East Coast UK for running the line so successfully during the past few years. They have served us in an exemplary way. As we bid them farewell, and exchange Palatinate purple for red, we welcome Virgin Trains East Coast. Privatised railway operation remains controversial. The jury is still out. So please care for our much-loved railway. Treat it well, and all who travel up and down these tracks.

 

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. 

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. 

North East England: desolate and void?

We’ve all done it: got on our feet, opened our mouth, heard the words come tumbling out and wished the ground would open and swallow us up. I don’t suppose Lord Howell meant to disparage the North East in his now infamous remark about fracking, though that seems to have been the effect. ‘There are large and uninhabited and desolate areas. Certainly in part [sic] of the North East where there’s plenty of room for fracking, well away from anybody’s residence where we could conduct without any kind of threat to the rural environment.’

But as psychoanalysts are fond of reminding us, you may not say what you mean, but you always mean what you say. In an unguarded moment, a whole set of attitudes towards the North East is laid bare. It shows how, in the southern mentality, the ‘idea of north’ is of a remote, strange and essentially alien place, a liminal borderland between what we know and feel at home in, and what we don’t know and are subliminally nervous or even afraid of.

The trouble is that it is a very confused perception. There is certainly ‘desolation’, but it is found not in the remote country but in deprived urban areas that are the opposite of uninhabited: densely populated environments where people feel forgotten and abandoned by a those in power who are supposed to care for the weak and voiceless. By contrast, the remote fastnesses are in no way the 'desolate' degraded places that no-one cares about and which are therefore available for exploitation. Far from it. For it is precisely these landscapes that constitute the North East’s wonderful treasury of national parks, heritage coasts, areas of outstanding natural beauty, historic buildings and a great deal more.

But we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the idea of desolation. The Idea of North is the title of a brilliant book by Peter Davidson. Its elusive discipline of topographics links geography, culture, landscape, literature, art, social anthropology and the history of ideas. And it turns out that this Howellian southern fantasy about the north is in fact close to a widespread ‘myth’ that is found across many different cultures in which ‘north’ with its connotations of remoteness, darkness and cold is an eloquent symbol of what is alien, chaotic and threatening. ‘Here be dragons.’

Some make friends with it and embrace it. For example, W. H. Auden, a midlander, fell in love with the North Pennines as a boy. He was haunted by the wild astringent fell country with its untamed climate and the ghosts of its long-dead industries of fluorspar and lead mining. He would have said that the toughness and desolation of ‘north’ was precisely what pulled him irreversibly into its gravitational field,  'the solace of fierce landscapes'. He found his poetic voice in County Durham, at Rookhope in Upper Weardale where, idly dropping a pebble down a disused mine-shaft, he had a flash of recognition about ‘self and non-self’ and with his new-found awareness began to write. Would he have become a great poet without the North?

As a Londoner, I can echo Auden’s love for a part of England that is not only ‘North’ but is also ‘Not-South’. I wrote Landscapes of Faith: the Christian heritage of the North East as a tribute. But as I said in the book, we must be careful not to romanticise either the landscape or the people and communities who have been shaped by it. It’s important that we speak accurately about the North East and not be seduced by easy cliché. It’s interesting that much of today’s response to Lord Howell has been to cite the canon of Northumbrian beautiful views rather than probe more deeply into what lies under the skin of the North East. The opposite of desolation may not always be consolation. With its complex history shaped by power and conflict, wealth and poverty, privilege and servitude, faith and politics, industry and its decline, there are more ambivalent readings of the region, and these too are aspects of its character.

I don’t know if Lord Howell in some obscure way has intuited this.  Possibly not.  But it is how we as North-Easterners react to this unexpected opportunity to put ourselves on the map that perhaps tells its own important truth about this region and those of us for whom it is our much-loved home. 

'Landscapes of Faith' is here!

I hope this is not seen as an act of shameless self-promotion.  But yesterday, an advance copy of my new book Landscapes of Faith: the Christian Heritage of North East England was delivered. It is published by Third Millennium International, and I have to admit that I am proud of how good it looks. It will be available in early July, maybe sooner.

 

'What's the use of a book without pictures or conversation?' asks Alice. Well, this glossy large-format book at least has plenty of pictures. And even if some will look mainly at the photographs and sit loose to the text, why not? I have bought many a book just to enjoy the images.

 

I spoke about 'my' book. I must at once nuance what it says on the cover.  I am not the author of all of its text or images, more like the mysterious Mr W. H., the 'onlie begetter' of Shakespeare's Sonnets. I had an idea which caught on. A lot of talented people have played a part in its realisation over the two years we have worked on this project. I pay tribute to them and thank them.  It's only really 'mine' in the sense that I have long wanted to have something attractive and accessible that would celebrate the North East's Christian past and how it lives on. I didn't want to focus simply on famous buildings like Durham Cathedral and great artefacts like the Lindisfarne Gospel Book. There are many less well known, even secret, places that tell their own moving story about a living Christian presence right up to today.

 

I have loved writing my sections of text and travelling up and down the North East to photograph for the book. The timing is deliberate: we wanted to contribute something to this summer's exhibition of the Lindisfarne Gospels in the University's library on the Durham World Heritage Site. The Gospels are so emblematic of the North East that it seemed apt to publish a book that set it in this larger regional context.

 

But Landscapes is not confined to the 'classical' Saxon and Norman periods. We wanted to portray the rich Christian heritage of this part of England in the broadest possible way, from Saxon shrines to urban parish churches, and from remote Methodist chapels to the self-conscious splendour of the legacy of the Prince Bishops. We wanted to reflect how landscapes and townscapes have both influenced how Christian communities have been shaped, and how these communities in turn have shaped their settings.

 

In the book, I wrote:

 

We need to know our history, read our landscapes, understand our communities.  We need to sit still in our north-east’s sacred spaces and listen to what they have to tell us.  This book is offered as a contribution to this all-important conversation with our past, present and future.

The title Landscapes of Faith implies something that is visible and tangible, that can be travelled to and enjoyed for all that delights and inspires.  But the true ‘landscapes of faith’ are those of the mind and heart of individual human beings and the communities they belong to. The places we visit in this book are signs of this life of faith, hope and love that despite the depredations of secularising modernity persists across the North East as it does everywhere.  It continues to express itself with the same conviction and vitality as it has always done.  The saints, long dead, still speak to us of a message they described as good news, a life-changing gospel. They would have understood the phrase ‘landscapes of faith’ and wanted us to invest it with new meaning for our own times.

 

I hope that this book may make a small contribution to what I see as the important task of rescuing the idea of 'heritage' from a dangerous obsession with simply preserving the 'past' at all costs. Instead, we need it to be a living entity with surprising power not simply to give us pleasure, education and enjoyment, but to touch our lives in ways that are both inspiring and life-changing.

 

ISBN 978 1 906507 89 3.  www.tmiltd.com