On Reaching a Certain Age

This is the 23,741st day of my life.* One more day of grace. Today is the Ides of April.** More personally, I reach the emblematic age of sixty-five. I can now draw my state pension.

Sixty-five doesn’t carry the significance it once did. Gone are the days when you would be summoned to the MD’s office on your birthday to be given a carriage clock (an eloquent symbol of mortality?), a slice of cake, listen to farewell speeches of varying sincerity and be toasted with a glass of bubbly. Some retire earlier, many later. As readers of this blog know, I am staying on for a few more months. I am not ready to become history just yet. But when that day comes later this year, I don’t think, somehow, that I shall spend my days pruning my roses. There are fresh ways in which I hope I can be useful in retirement to church and wider community. Who knows?

But this is not a blog about retirement. What today marks for me has more to do with the prospect of ageing or, as we used to say, growing old gracefully. And in that respect, this does feel like a significant threshold even if not perhaps a momentous one. It’s reinforced by two other anniversaries that coincide with this 65th year: having been forty years an ordained minister, and twenty as a dean. As I look back, I realise how hugely life has changed during the time I have been ordained, not least in the nation’s religious attitudes and in the culture of the church itself.

I've set aside some months after finishing full-time public ministry to reflect on two things. The first is what other roles might be awaiting me in the ‘third age’, however short or long it may be. That’s the retirement question. The other, is more important: what the years ahead will mean for physical, personal and spiritual health, for the deepening of intimate relationships, for creativity and the enjoyment of life’s gifts, and for journeying purposefully into truth and into God. This feels like an unknown region for now. It will need negotiating with care and self-awareness with the help of those with I am fortunate enough to travel with on this journey of being a human being and a Christian.

‘Old age’ can be a rich and fertile time of life. We know this from those we see flourishing in their sixties, seventies and eighties. Clergy are privileged to have a lot to do with those whom we call ‘senior’. It is wonderful when the elderly flourish, giving so much to church and society through volunteering and the sharing of their lifetime’s experience. There is a beautiful wisdom that comes with age that the Bible, like all ancient civilisations, prizes highly. There are the pleasures in spending time with the young – our grandchildren if we are fortunate to have them, but, as I have also discovered here in Durham through my involvement with choir and school, many others as well. There is the gift of time to reflect on the world in new ways, cultivate the imagination, become more of a contemplative. I hope I can appreciate more and more the sheer wonder of being alive. These are all things I look forward to and hope to have time to enjoy.

It's not so wonderful when we see elderly people who have become diminished through pain, bereavement, suffering and disability, or by the more imperceptible ways life shuts down through disappointment, loneliness, loss of hope or physical weakness. Clergy spend much time with the vulnerable, sick and dying. I wonder how well I would – may have to – cope with the loss of my faculties, failing memory, dementia, incontinence or loss of physical function. I ask myself how gracious I would – may have to – be if I were to become dependent on other people for everyday tasks I don’t even think about right now: communicating, eating and drinking, personal hygiene, getting around. What if I could no longer watch a sunset, read a book, walk the fells or listen to the music of Bach? These disabilities are not unique to age, of course. But every year that passes makes them more likely.

And today as I flip the calendar, I can’t help being sharply aware that an even more daunting threshold awaits. One day it will be time to say farewell to this life. There is no evading the hard truth about mortality. It doesn’t do, the nearer we come to dying, to pretend any more. Philip Larkin’s chillingly great poem ‘Aubade’ plays with our ambivalence as we contemplate ‘unresting death, a whole day nearer now’. ‘“Most things may never happen”: this one will.’ He criticised religion, ‘that great moth-eaten musical brocade / Invented to pretend we never die’ – a brilliant trope, if a cruel judgment on the gospel that has sustained me for a lifetime. But I have learned a lot contemplating that poem. It’s been in my mind since a close colleague and friend dies suddenly before Easter. He was four years younger than me. It has concentrated my thoughts. As the seventeenth century Bishop Jeremy Taylor knew when he wrote his two classics Holy Living and Holy Dying, it's important to think about your own death, and how you intend to live the rest of your life in the light of that certainty.

I have a hunch that symbolically, to turn sixty-five makes it more difficult to ignore – at least, if I want to live the last phase of life honestly, wisely, thankfully and well. And of course joyfully and Christianly – ‘in sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead’ as the funeral service puts it. The Ides of April sometimes fall in Lent, sometimes in the Easter season. This year it’s Eastertide. That helps my thoughts on ‘reaching a certain age’ to be shaped in the light of Christian hope, which is how we should always think about ageing, mortality and death. It's hope in Christ crucified and risen that illuminates each day we are given to enjoy and grow old in. While we live it makes us wise, and generous, brave, loving and good. And when the end comes, as the hymn says, ‘it takes its terror from the grave / and gilds the bed of death with light’.

Meanwhile, I shall spend much of this 65th birthday on a train with my wife travelling to the other end of England for a conference. A kairos threshold embedded in ordinary time. There’ll be plenty of opportunity to gaze out of the window and ponder landscapes as they hurry by and think the thoughts that emerge. 'Each a glimpse then gone forever.' An apt metaphor of life.

*23,741 = 365 x 65 + 16. The sixteen are for the leap years.**Ides on 13th of every month except 15th March, May, July and October.

 

The Next Generation of Church Leaders: thoughts on the Green Report

I left theological college more than 40 years ago. In my leaving interview, my tutor said: ‘Michael, it’s possible that one day you might be invited to become a bishop or a dean – who knows what God might call you to? (Pause for wry smile.) But if you are approached, think carefully about which of those two paths would best fit your personality and gifts.’ When I was asked to become a cathedral dean I willingly said yes, first at Sheffield and then here at Durham. That makes me ‘duodeanal’ (cue groan). I have loved this role and would unhesitatingly say that being a dean is one of the best jobs in the Church of England.

Looking back on how I arrived here in the providence of God, I am amazed that nothing was ever done to help me think about taking on this role. Of course, my ministry before this taught me a huge amount about leadership in the church, especially being a parish priest. Then I joined the cathedral chapter at Coventry, observed my boss the provost (as he then was) at close quarters, tried to learn from his example. But most of what I now know about senior office I acquired ‘on the job’, often the hard way. I have made many mistakes, but I hope I have learned from some of them. That of course is how we tend to learn the important things of life. Experience is a great teacher.

But I can’t help feeling there was something haphazard about a system that did almost nothing to prepare my generation of church leaders. Two of my children have done the excellent ‘Future Leaders’ programme that trains teachers for senior roles in education. The selection and appointment process for deans was always thorough, but it didn't involve much 'discernment' as we now call it. There was no ‘accompaniment’, no testing of my motives, no exploration of my path in ministry. I said to bishops years ago that this should be taken with the kind of seriousness that is the norm for candidates who offer for ordination as deacons and priests. I think this is especially important for bishops because the episcopacy is the odd one out when it comes to preparing people for the three orders of ministry.

The Green Report Talent Management for Future leaders and Leadership Development for Bishops and Deans seeks to change this. At last, the Church will identify men and women from among whom the bishops and deans of the future will mostly be drawn. This ‘talent pool’ of up to 150 'high potential' candidates across the nation will be nurtured for a future leadership role in the church. There is to be a more rigorous approach to the professional development and in-service training of senior post holders. As somebody who has helped with the induction of new deans for the past few years, I welcome this thinking in principle, and have said so in broad discussions I have participated in. No-one will argue with the three components of church leadership that are identified in the report: reshaping ministry, leading the church into growth, and contributing to the common good. And no-one will argue with the importance attached to achieving excellence in both the leadership and management of the church.

My reservations are to do with what theological and spiritual wisdom underlies this thinking. Some of these are echoed in a perceptive critique from a fellow dean, Martyn Percy, in this week’s Church Times.

The tone of the report is heavily influenced by the language and assumptions of leadership and management theory. And this, precisely at a time when writers on systems and organisations are recognising that no one-size-fits-all model can be imposed on institutions that are as diverse as individuals, with their own histories, characteristics, eccentricities and if you like, ‘personality’ types.  So while there is a lot to learn from the public, private and voluntary sectors (and I am the first to admit my debt to secular leadership training), the experience of one organisation is never entirely transferable. When it comes to the church with its long and often quirky history it’s especially important to be wary of organisational ‘solutions’ that are imported from somewhere else. I doubt if an MBA can be a serious answer to the church’s search for the best possible leadership and management.

I am worried about the erosion of the traditional Christian way of speaking about vocation and the spiritual path. Words like formation, awareness, discernment and above all wisdom feature prominently in the classic writers on Christian ministry. These profound concepts, carrying as they do such deep spiritual and pastoral resonances cannot be collapsed into some generic textbook notion of ‘leadership’. I want to make it clear straight away that I don't regard any of these classical concepts as 'soft' or lacking in rigour. On the contrary: they are more exacting than any of the leadership or management criteria listed in organisational check-lists, because they go to the heart of how someone inhabits their role. I asked in a recent forum why this rich tradition was so little referenced in the report. Deans in cathedrals like mine are the direct successors of Benedictine priors, so how could the Rule of St Benedict, one of the best manuals on spiritual leadership ever written, be passed over without notice? Or Gregory the Great's  Pastoral Rule, for centuries presented to new bishops at their ordination?

I can’t speak about bishops. But I know a bit about deaning after 20 years in this role. As a dean I am many things. I preside over a part of the nation’s heritage, a medium-sized enterprise with a multi-million pound turnover, a retail outlet and catering facility, a leisure destination, a public park, a music-and-arts centre, a place of education and a sizeable piece of estate. I need, and the Chapter needs, to draw constantly on a huge amount of expertise and skill on the part of those whose day-job it is to lead and manage the various departments of the cathedral’s life. We couldn't do it without one hundred per cent collaboration and a great deal of trust in one another. I am proud of my staff who do what they do so professionally and so well.

But I need to be completely clear about what lies at the centre of my calling as a priest in this senior church role. It is to be the Head of a Religious Foundation, that is to say, a spiritual leader like the abbots and priors before me. The most important thing I do is to be in my stall twice each day to pray with this community of faith. This is where the distinctive vocational task of a dean has its source and end, and where leadership as configured in a Christian way is modelled. From there springs the dean's role as an interpreter: speaking for the cathedral in society, and for society in the cathedral. This mean helping the wider community understand what at its heart a cathedral is meant to be because of what its gospel means. And it entails helping the cathedral to grasp what it is to be a faith community in our contemporary, complex culture with its ever-loosening ties to organised religion. This is much more than being a good corporate CEO who runs a tight and efficient ship. It's a theological and vocational task, and it is at this fundamental level that nurture, accompaniment, formation and training must be focused. We could say that it is the human and spiritual ‘ecology’ within which the role of a dean and every senior church leader is lived out. 

Like the environment, we need to ‘green’ the spiritual ecology of the church if it is going to be sustainable and flourish, and not be eroded by an Athenian love-affair with whatever is the current organisational doctrine. The Green Report points in important directions and I have welcomed this new focus on leadership in the church. But it is work in progress, not the finished product. More debate is needed, particularly on how the Christian spiritual tradition can impart a deeper wisdom texture to the thinking of the working group. For example, good spiritual accompaniment will be as important as professional mentoring (which is also vital). Like some other matters in the report, it's not a case of either-or but both-and. This is something those who have been bishops and deans for a while could offer.

I'm suggesting that In the ecology of God's people, the Green report could benefit from becoming a bit more ‘green’. All of us who are currently bishops and deans will I'm sure want to contribute to that task for the good of the whole church.

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. 

An Open Letter to the next Archbishop of Canterbury

Dear Justin

So it’s official.  After weeks of speculation, and helped by Ladbrokes, we now know that you’re to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury. As your dean and colleague in Durham, I want to offer heartfelt congratulations and to promise my prayers as you begin this great journey.

I have fond memories of Coventry days when I was precentor at the Cathedral and oversaw your ordination.  You and I got to know each other a little then.  I thought at the time that you were someone with a remarkable story and rather special gifts.  You talked about your experience in the oil industry – but not much: you were too focused on being a deacon and then a priest, and too excited by the ministry that was opening up before you.

When you came to Durham last year, this was still true of you. It was moving to install you in the great bishop’s throne in our cathedral.  I almost wanted to say that I hoped its height and grandeur wouldn’t go to your head.  But I knew I had no need to tell you that. Your genuine modesty, your lack of self-importance, your wry take on the world and most of all your deep spirituality would take care of you. You were more interested in washing feet than living like a grandee as a successor of Durham’s prince-bishops. You were completely committed to being a bishop who would put God and people first.

Who would have thought that a year later you would be leaving us? I won’t deny that I feel a personal sense of loss. You have begun to be a real champion of this part of England that feels remote from the centre of things, already a very needy place before it was hit hard hit by the financial crisis. In the statement of needs that I helped write for the diocese before your appointment, we said we wanted a bishop whose heart would be in the North East (we also said we hoped the next bishop – you – would stay for several years!). Well, your heart has been with us, even when you have been in London doing the business of church and state, or overseas pursuing reconciliation in divided societies like Nigeria. It is not your fault that you have been taken from us now.

The whole world will be giving you advice as you contemplate what kind of archbishop God wants you to be.  I’m not going to add much to that: it’s not words you need right now but the knowledge that you will have wise and caring people around you to help you discern the shape of this great and awful vocation, this siege perilous.

But I can’t resist saying just this. I hope you will take with you the memory of our northern saints as you learn what it means to inhabit this office. In Durham, you are the direct successor of Aidan, founder of our diocese, and of Cuthbert in whose shrine in the Cathedral you have often prayed. In a blog earlier this year I compared Rowan Williams with Cuthbert as ‘off-beat’ bishops.  I wanted to say that a Christian leader needs to be a bit elusive, not always saying or doing the expected thing, not afraid of being surprising and keeping people guessing.

 

Already the public wants to pigeon-hole you: evangelical rather than catholic, pro this and against that.  You are bigger than that, as anyone who knows you will confirm.  You know that it needs great self-awareness to resist these easy either-ors. It also takes resilience and courage to be your own man in leadership.  It depends on keeping the spiritual garden watered by long and regular spells of solitariness, meditation and prayer. I know how important this is to you, to go to the heart of faith and keep it alive and fresh. I hope the pressures of high office drive you more and more in the contemplative direction which is the source of wisdom. I believe they will because your personal authenticity is so important to you. And I believe that you will surprise, inspire and delight us too.

When Donald Coggan was installed as archbishop, his secretary mis-typed ‘enthronement as ‘enthornment’.  That gave him food for thought.  The role was daunting enough then. How much more complex and demanding it is today. Who knows what the next few years will bring for our world, for our church and for you personally.  To be a bishop or an archbishop feels to me like a kind of crucifixion.  Yet Jesus wore his crown of thorns not only with dignity but also with hope for the joy that was set before him. I pray that joy and hope will be yours at the spring equinox when you come to be seated on the throne of Augustine.

So take the cup that is given you in Canterbury, and as you wonder how on earth you find yourself there, smile a little at God’s strange work, be thankful, and discover in the doing of his work that all shall be well.  

And thank you.

With affection and prayers,

Michael