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.

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.