Seasons of Durham Life: July

People don't always believe me when I say that in cathedrals, the diary in June and July tends to be more full than either Advent and Christmas, or Holy Week and Easter. If you've read this blog before, you'll know that I heartily dislike the word 'busy'. So let me just say that at this time of year there is quite a lot to do.

What is it that fills these July days?

Much of it is end-of-year services and events. Thousands of people come through the doors to attend them, most of them young. There are several consecutive days of big lively school leavers' services for church schools across the diocese. There are more than a dozen University graduation ceremonies that occupy the best part of a week. The ancient schools founded by the Cathedral, Durham School and the Chorister School, hold services to mark the close of the school year including Choristers' Speech Day. And at the end of a long series of valedictory events, the last Sunday of the choir year comes round when we say a fond farewell to choristers and adults who are leaving us. (For more, read my last blog on this site.)

But this isn't all. In every cathedral's calendar, summer ordinations are high days. They bring great gatherings of people from across the country (and beyond) to celebrate the rites of passage into different phases of public ministry. In Durham, we ordain the priests and deacons at separate services over a weekend, the priests on Saturday evening and the deacons on Sunday morning. This year I had the privilege of conducting the ordination retreat and preaching at both the services. This was poignant for me because I was ordained deacon 40 years ago this summer, and, as regular readers know, shall be laying aside stipendiary public ministry early in the autumn. So the ordinations gave me an opportunity to reflect on what I have learned in that time and to share a few insights with those who are now embarking on this great journey.

The week after the ordinations, July brings two big services that are quintessentially 'Durham'. The first is the Miners' Gala Service on the afternoon of the 'Big Meeting' that brings over one hundred thousand people into the city to celebrate Durham's mining heritage and the lives of the working people of the North East. It's a sight you won't see anywhere else in England. The Cathedral is always packed out. It's a most moving service at which the year's new banners are processed in with their colliery bands to be blessed by the Bishop. I've blogged about it before. Someone said to me in my first year here that I would never understand Durham Cathedral until I had been to this service and seen for myself how the people of County Durham claim this Cathedral as their own.

The other big service takes place the next morning, Matins for the Courts of Justice. Like the Miners' Service, this is another colourful piece of sacred drama, but in every other way it's a complete contrast. This gathering to celebrate the Queen's Peace brings together senior people including Lords Lieutenant, High Sheriffs and High Court judges from the four counties of Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, Durham and North Yorkshire. The High Sheriff asked me to preach this year at my last such service. Since I was speaking to an audience that included many people from the legal profession, I spoke about the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, Archbishop Stephen Langton's role in creating it, and the significance of the Great Charter's religious origins.

Meanwhile, the clock continues to tick towards 27 September when our Durham years come to an end. There have been so many 'last times' this summer, farewells not just for the summer holidays but for good. No doubt I'll write more in this vein as our retirement horizon comes into view, as it must once we start saying, as we shall have to in August, 'next month...'. How swiftly it all flies by. 'Life's but a passing shadow' quoted Rik Mayall in his final TV interview before he died. Those words of Shakespeare were etched on a sundial on the house opposite ours in Salisbury in the 1970s. I used to look at that verb sap out of my study window a dozen times each day. But its truth is coming home to me now as the days grow perceptibly shorter. 'Summer's lease hath all too short a date.'

But we want to enjoy this last Durham summer to the full while we can, to be present to each day as our time here draws to a close. In De Caussade's great insight, it's a call to practise the 'sacrament of the present moment', to see all of time as the gift of God, our yesterdays, our todays, our tomorrows. This is an incredibly beautiful place in which to have lived and worked. We have been, and are, surrounded by wonderful people in the communities of the Cathedral and of this part of England. Our lives have been touched and changed in ways that we can only just begin to glimpse, even if it will take years to appreciate them for what they really are.  

If you have the stamina, you can read the sermons I've mentioned on my other blogsite, http://deanstalks.blogspot.co.uk.

The Durham Miners' Gala

Today the Miners’ Gala has taken place in Durham. 

The ‘Big Meeting’ has been an annual fixture in the Durham calendar since 1871.  Once upon a time when coal was king here in north-east England, there were as many as 100 deep mines in the County.  Now there are none. Yet up to a hundred thousand people throng the narrow city streets on the 2^nd Saturday in July to watch the long procession of banners and colliery bands snake its way slowly towards the race course for a day of political speeches and partying.  It’s a noisy and colourful affair, the sort of thing you don’t often see in sedate English streets.  This year’s Gala will go down in history because it’s the first time for almost a quarter of a century that the Labour Party leader has spoken at it.  Once it would have been death to a leader’s prospects not to have been seen in Durham on this day.

There’s a service in the Cathedral in the afternoon, one of the biggest of the year in terms of the crowd it pulls in. Many of these are not people you normally see in church. They come from all over County Durham from its colliery towns and pit villages (you must never say ‘former’ pit villages: these are still mining communities today and you will not be thanked for speaking of their identity in the past tense). For them, the Cathedral is where miners have come since the industry’s heyday to celebrate their achievements as working people and to mourn their losses in the pit disasters of that year.  Before and after the service, people go quietly to the Miners’ Memorial in the south aisles where the names of those who have died in mining accidents are recorded.  The sense of kinship and solidarity in mining communities runs very deep.

Half an hour before the service begins, the church is already full.  A silence descends, and from outside the Cathedral, as if from a far-off place, you hear a colliery band begin to play. The solemn music, usually a hymn, grows in intensity as it enters the Cathedral. A crowd follows the band quietly, respectfully, bringing up their new colliery banner to be blessed and dedicated.  This happens as many times as there are new banners that have been made during the past year.  For yes, colliery banners are still being lovingly created and proudly presented. It always moves me to see Durham Cathedral depicted on these noble banners as it is on some of them, including one from Burnhope that was blessed today.

You might think that the Gala is an exercise in nostalgia for an industry that is gone.  It is not this at all. What strikes you as you walk the streets or look round the Cathedral congregation is how many children and young people are in the throng, playing in the bands or walking with the banners.  This year, a school in Gateshead had created a banner, and they were here in force to bring it up with pride.  An increasing proportion of people who loyally come to the Gala year after year have never known working pits – just as most of those who fill churches on Remembrance Sunday have never lived through a war. But the power of memory is palpable, and one of the aims of the event is to keep it alive.  Even incomers like me fall under its spell because it is such a genuine celebration of the life and traditions of working people in the north-east. 

The Gala has a strong political agenda too, of course.  It was always an occasion for the unions to demonstrate their muscle, and still is.  The memories of the systematic and ruthless winding down of their proud industry by distant London administrations are fresh and still bitter.  I was a parish priest in Northumberland during the 1980s, just beyond the northern tip of the Great North Coalfield. You could touch the anger and hostility of miners who felt betrayed not only by the government but, sometimes, by members of their own families. It is there in Billy Elliot (set in Easington, the site of one of Durham’s biggest, most modern and most successful pits).  But the reality was harsher than that feel-good film suggests.  Brassed Off perhaps came closer to the heart of it. 

The preacher at today’s service was Leslie Griffiths, a well-respected Methodist minister who sits on the Labour benches in the House of Lords.  He is a son of a Welsh mining community and – no doubt because of this – judged the nature of the Gala perfectly.  His sermon will appear on the Cathedral website in due course so I won’t summarise it here.  But he is only the second preacher in my time to win a spontaneous round of applause at the end (the first was Tony Benn in 2003).  The crowd recognised him as one of their own and loved what he had to say. 

It all ends too soon, with Jerusalem and then another long procession out, this time to joyful marches played by the bands and much enthusiastic hand-clapping by the congregations.  As people head for the doors, a surprising number are too moved to say much.  For so many, the sense of what they have lost is mingled with fierce pride in what the working people of Durham stand for in their achievements past and present.  I am moved by that too, because this warm-hearted, generous community includes me in its celebration, and make me feel I too am a little part of its long history.  

When I first came to Durham, a senior priest said to me: ‘Michael, you will only understand what this Cathedral means when you have been to your first Miners’ Gala service’.  He was right. There’s a powerful feeling that today the Cathedral is being claimed by the people it truly belongs to.  Whatever bishops, deans and canons may say, they know.  And of course, they are right.