Happy Easter!

Alleluia! He is risen!

He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Speak to us of life

Last Saturday, my wife and I fulfilled a long cherished ambition: for her it was a visit to Stonehenge and, for me, it was Salisbury Cathedral. Stonehenge holds a place in the heart and mind of most English people primarily, I think, because its raison d’etre is totally unknown. There it stands in all its primeval loveliness, and yet no-one truly knows why. Why did our forebears five thousand years ago go to the extent of carting those massive ‘blue’ stones from southern Wales? Why were the stones arranged in such a way as to catch the early morning sun on the solstice? Why was the site so important in ancient times that many wanted to be buried for eternity in the barrows which litter the skyline around the monument? Save for the possibility of some revelatory archaelogical find, we perhaps shall never know, but surely its purpose must have been in some way ‘religious’? One gem of wisdom struck me from the, very useful and full, audio guide: ‘perhaps Stonehenge was a religious site, perhaps a scientific one designed to explain the movement of the stars and planets, perhaps it was both, as the scientific world and religious world were not compartmentalised as they are today’. In the unhealthy competition between science and faith today, a little ancient wisdom of approach could be beneficial. We also visited the Avebury Circle, which is both bigger and, in many ways, more impressive than Stonehenge. One can only wonder as to why the one is more visited than the other? Perhaps sight-seeing ( or should that be site-seeing) is just as subject to fad and fashion as internal decor etc.

Salisbury Cathedral is, frankly, superb, and was a fitting arena for the excellent Palm Sunday liturgy we attended. Apart from the very English and apologetic procession of the palms from the Green, complete with out of step and soto voce hymn singing which occasioned nervous giggling in the ranks, the service was the very epitome of what is great and good about our Cathedral worship: dramatic, solemn and dignified with excellent music and, above all, fun! How wise of the Cathedral Canons not to preach on this day of all days, when the drama of the Passion story speaks for itself. In their separate ways, both Stonehenge and the Cathedral sum up something about the human spirit that cannot and will not be denied: an inextinguishable desire for the divine and eternal in life. Both stand as testimonies to humanity’s desire to set existence and its big questions in a transcendental setting. There is so much that would seek to negate this in life today, and yet all around we are faced with mankind’s dramatic and extravagant expressions of belief in, and desire for, the eternal. I thought of the excellent book by Peter C Morea called: ‘Finding God in Human Psychology’. Simply put, his thesis is that the very existence of a ‘God shaped hole’ in our psyche suggests that our yearnings for the divine and for eternal meaning are evidence for a God who is the ground of our existence. Morea’s scientific approach nicely complements the Collect’s words: ‘our hearts are restless ’til they find their rest in Thee’.

In this Holy Week: a great construct designed to centre us on the great hope of Resurrection, I offer you a quote from Morea’s book by Boethius ( a philosopher of the 6th Century):

The study of personality suggests that human potential will be fully actualised and complete happiness experienced only in the vision of God in eternal life: the endless, total, simultaneous and perfect possession of life.

Summit summat

A couple of weeks ago, I was struck by an article in my daily read: The Independent. It was a comment on the growing threat of climate change (The Independent have been ratcheting up their rather scary stories about the cataclysm that is to come in advance of the G2 summit-to good effect, I think)-’nothing wrong there’ you say, ‘a good job too’. Well, I agree, but what struck me was the reason the writer gave for addressing changes in the climate: it was because dramatic weather changes would ultimately affect the ability of the big companies to make and maintain profit. There we have it, baldly put: we don’t want to address this terrible problem because of the South Sea islands that will be washed away; because of the villages in India that will suffer flash floods or because of the risk of adding to the millions of  people throughout the world who already suffer from malnutrition, drought and appalling living standards. No, not even the thought that we may pass on to future generations a home planet denuded of fine and exotic animal species and an atmosphere filled with toxic waste, is as important as ensuring that the profit motive is maintained.

Throughout history, there are philosophical paradigms that hold the consciousness of the those who wield power in our world. On many occasions it was/is the desire to wield political overlordship over as much of the Earth’s surface as possible-sometimes for power’s sake alone. On other occasions, power was wielded by those who engaged the spiritual and religious hopes and fears of humanity. On very few occasions has the international will been held by a desire for peace, justice, equity and, dare I say it, love. Perhaps the only time we can truly say these motives surfaced was with the creation of the United Nations and it’s charitable arms such as UNICEF, or perhaps with the IMF. If you couple this chase for profit and self-interest with the burgeoning secularist and athiest agenda-which surely posits, if nothing else, the idea that there is actually no ultimate meaning of any eternal significance at all, and therefore ’spiritual’ qualities such as love, hope and faith are the muffled garblings of those crazy people who believe in an imaginary friend-then we have a recipe, in my view, for a very bleak future for humanity.

Perhaps, the idea that the profit motive is the supreme motive and is what ‘makes the world go round’ is a battle that has already been lost. Will we compound this dreadful mistake by giving into the secularist and athiest agenda as well, which is chipping away at our souls? I recall the words of St Thomas More to Richard Rich: ‘Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world…but for Wales!’

Watch the deliberations of the G20 summit carefully, and let’s see for ourselves what motives and aspirations moltivate them.

Precious Jade

When I was a young Vicar of 27 in Salford, I was asked to visit a parishioner who was sick-very sick as it turned out. Typical of that intensely poor and needy area in the 1980s, the girl I visited was very ordinary and a real child of a deprived urban area. Poverty and deprivation were endemic in Salford and this had been protrayed in Walter Greenwood’s novel ‘Love in the Dole’: actually a harrowing story about the parish I was serving. When building a new church in the neighbouring parish, the architect had noticed that the local people seemed to be shorter in stature than the average, so he measured all the congregation from the base of their heel to the back of their knees. He found, on average, that the population was some two inches shorter in this region than elsewhere-the legacy of decades of under-nourishment, poor diet, bad air and much else. He made the pews two inches shorter!  After a fire broke out on the top floor of a local block of flats and someone died, I remember commenting at Diocesan Synod that ‘not even the ladders on the fire engines are sufficient in Salford’. My new friend (shall we call her Susan?) was a product of this environment. She was the ’salt of the earth’ and ‘called a spade a spade’. There were no fancy conversations about Proust or Shakespeare, just down to earth conversations about the things that really matter: home, family, kids, the price of lager. In many ways she was a northern version of Jade Goody. But that is not where the similarity stops; for Susan was dying of cervical cancer and, even in her mortal illness, she continued to be abused: her husband left her and initiated a cruel and malicious court case to take her children from her. Then, as now, it is questionable whether those who cared for her medically acted swiftly or acurately enough. To add insult to injury, she took to going back to the church where she had attended as a child. There she was told that her illness was punishment for her sins by God and that, if her prayer was sincere and effective, she would have been cured. Not giving up on the cruel Church, the family resorted to me and I ‘cared’  pastorally for Susan during the final twelve months of her life.

At times, despite my sincere sadness for her plight, I found supporting Susan hard: she was the same age as me (27), had two kids the same age as mine and she enjoyed many of the simple pleasures I enjoyed-a drink on a Friday night with friends, a laugh and a joke. It was like looking in a mirror and, gradually, I began to realise that what had happened tragically to Susan could happen just as easily to me. How I hated those ‘Christians’ who had suggested that this outrage of an illness had happened at such a young age to someone with two dependent children because God willed it. Eventually, I began to look at my own children with the same sorrow I looked at hers and it was as if the misery of her condition was infecting my body too. When she died and at her funeral, I tried to speak of this ordinary, sometimes bawdy, vivacious victim as if she was the most important person that ever lived because, for her mother and father, for her children and for God-she was.

I thought of Susan when Jade Goody died. This other victim of early abuse and neglect, of a poor and deprived childhood and of a societal inability to recognise her need and nurture her, was also just an ordinary person. But of course ‘ordinary’ is funny to most people: her inability to pronounce ‘East Anglia’ (it became East Angular) and her belief that Liverpool was a foreign country with its own currency, all of these were held up to shameless public ridicule. There were those who shamelessly exploited her and, although she became very rich through their shenanigans, made gain out of her mishaps and malapropisms. To the end, her life was surrounded by intrigue and the media gaze as we all professed to care and to be compassionate: fickle and shallow beings that we are.

But the Susans and the Jades of this world are not extraordinary in the accepted sense of this materialist world, they are ‘ordinary’ and they are an integral part of our society. In every parish I have worked in, the people have had more in common with Susan and Jade than with the chattering classes who treat them as entertainment. They are the people that we send to war on our behalf as cannon fodder; they are those that we send down our mines or into the desert heat of our steel works; they are the ones who are condemned to feel the white heat of a recession first as they watch others receive great riches as a reward for their neglect and mismanagement of our financial affairs; they are the ones who are left in ‘failing’ schools because more academically able children with aspirational parents are jacking up the league tables in the more popular and successful schools. They are the common man and, but for fortune, they are you  and me.

The lesson we have to learn from the everyday death of a very ordinary woman like Jade Goody is that, in fact, she and all those like her, are actually quite extra-ordinary. And why? It is because they survive, with good grace and great courage, all that life and the rest of us can throw at them and still take time to think that life is good. One of the last last things that Susan said to me was ‘look after my parents, won’t you’. Almost the last thing that Jade did was get baptised and married and have her children christened too. Both signs of great hope that life is not ulimately useless and meaningless, but is a great, precious and wonderful gift and not at all ‘ordinary’.

May she rest in peace and rise in glory.

Lost memories of Alzheimer’s

This weekend, as every weekend, I paid a visit to my 90 year old mother who is in a care home in Sheffield. She has Alzheimer’s disease. Looking back, my family and I could see the signs of its early onset around the time she was sixty years old: bewildering little lapses of memory or odd actions which defied explanation. Well, now, some thirty years later, all has become clear and we know that this dreadful illness was beginning to grip her. As a younger woman, she was intelligent, lively and had a keen interest in life. It was from her that I inherited my own fascination with ancient buildings, particularly churches, and, on trips out into the country in our Morris Minor, we would be treated to a running commentary about the history of this stately home or that tiny country church: tales often peppered with stories about the unusual: ‘Why is there a human skull in the lychgate at Cantley?’

Her sickness began slowly, as always, and then accelerated in her 70s: I would be ‘phoned a couple of times a week by her asking me to come and get rid of this awful stranger who would not leave the house: the ’stranger’ was my father, to whom she had been married for fifty years and with whom she had enjoyed a devoted and deeply loving relationship: she simply could not recognise him. Eventually, she suffered dehydration and was hospitalised. We were told in no uncertain terms that she could not return home, as my father could not cope with her and also with the stroke he himself had endured. So, Mom was put in a care home and we had the distressing experience of being followed to the double doors every time we left: after we exited, she would be seen crying with an uncomprehending and distressed look on her face. Over the years, this bright and once very lovely lady, has successively ‘progressed’ from fanciful talk to gibberish and, now, to falling entirely silent. She can no longer walk and can imbibe only drinks and very soft blended foods. She has not been able to recognise me or any of the family for about eight years and, as the weight drops of her, she simply gazes out of the window to the only source of sensation she can appreciate: sunlight.

There are compensations in this dread disease: she was entirely unware of my father’s death, an event which she anticipated with foreboding and fear. Instead, she believed the day of his funeral to be a jolly outing with some vaguely familiar people: the funereal baked meats a family party. However, the overwhelming experience is of futility as you watch a much loved person robbed, not only of their physical and mental capabilities, but of the memories and communication that made them ‘them’ to you. There is a very real sense in which my mother died many years ago, leaving behind a barely recognisable husk.

There are profound theological issues at play here: what makes a human being what they are? Is it memory? If so, is Mom less of a human being than she once was? What happens when quality of life becomes so poor that death would be a better option? Are we to simply carry on caring for the body when all that made the person recognisably ‘them’ has departed? And, ultimately, where is God in all this? Experiencing Alzheimer’s, at the very least, requires a re-structuring of what we mean when we talk about a loving and provident deity.

So you may ask me whether I would consider euthansia in these circumstances. From my present vantage point, my answer would be ‘no’. Aside from the moral and ethical difficulties which surround the matter of the clinical taking of human life (the possibility that it is open to abuse; the position it puts physicians in; decisions about the stage at which we can deem that life is not worth living. etc) I believe that my mother is at one and the same time displaying the humanity and ‘creatureliness’ that reminds us that we are human and created and not divine and undegenerate: and is also still on the very human road to the perfection for which we are destined.  Mother’s ’soul’ is the total summation of all that she has been, all that she is, all that she is to be and all that she could be: and it is this true ‘her’ that we now tend and care for in her final days. As weak and as diminished as she is, her humanity still deserves respect and honour. It is for that reason that my weekly visits to her bedside, as conversationless and dispiriting as they are, are of immense importance.

With or without you?

My return from holidays and breaks is usually a rather risky affair as I am often greeted by a letter box bulging with post that has been rammed, together with, by now, soggy and crestfallen newspapers, through my letterbox. The next dilemma is this: do I open the letters straight away and risk losing the lowered blood pressure and serene countenance I have acquired on holiday as I open letters of complaint about some churchyard or other or read of the perceived sins of some poor clergyperson? Or, instead, do I leave the letters on my desk until the next morning when I am officially back at work, thus running the risk that I am delaying opening my notification from the Lottery that I have won millions (unlikely,as I never get a ticket) or that an unknown relative has passed away leaving me the mansion, yacht, Rolls Royce and Swiss bank account ( again, unlikely because all my known relatives were either Sheffield steelworkers or poor Irish immigrants). Inquisitiveness and misplaced greed always win the day, and I usually plough through a mound of adverts for Iceland, Tescos, unwanted missives about window replacement and, yes, the inevitable letter from ‘angry of Whaplode Drove’. Blood pressure suitably revived to just below boiling point and all memories of gentle breezes wafting off sandy shores now banished to the long distant past, I roam back, muttering, to the still packed bags and a bemused wife who wonders what on earth can have transformed me from a pacific, attentive husband and lover to the Church’s answer to the Incredible Hulk in such a short time.

Returning from a short half-term break this last weekend was different, for there hanging temptingly out of the letterbox (especially altered to accomodate the super size packages of General Synod business we bishops regularly receive) was a sheaf of sheet music. It was from my local parish priest who also organises the band for our regular celebration of the U2charist; and it was an open invite to play my trusty Fender Stratocaster guitar with them at the next event. In scenes reminiscent of the posturing of the footballing teacher played by Brian Glover in the film Kes (it’s Bobby Moore down the wing!) I immediately dug out the battered old instrument and began to re-live those heady days when I briefly played lead in a rock band. Of course I would play with them!  

The U2charist, which is a marrying of traditional Eucharistic words with the music of the Irish band U2(not as daft as it sounds: just listen to the words of the ‘Yahweh’ and ‘When love comes to Town’ on YouTube- (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyzPtjIP2eo) began in York Harbour, Maine under the inspiration of the parish priest: Paige Blair (http://u2charist.blogspot.com). She wanted a meaningful and yet fun way of inspiring people about the Millennium Development Goals (see side bar) and she hit on using the music of the world ambassador for the Goals: Bono of U2. Since then, the U2charist has been performed all over the world and the first British one was celebrated right here in Lincoln over a year ago, when I was privileged to be the celebrant (the full recorded version is on the U2charist Blogspot site). Since then, we have raised enough money to employ a U2charist Animator-Liz Jackson-an ordinand to be ordained next year. She is supported by a small group of enthusiasts who each week host a cafe called Be-Attitude in St Mary le Wigford’s church, Lincoln. Together, they are doing a splendid job promoting the Millennium Development Goals and their objective of eradicating poverty and deprivation.

The next one will be held in St Mary le Wigford’s on Saturday 21st March at 6.30pm-all welcome.

And, if you look really carefully, you may just see a jaded old bishop fondling a ‘Jimi Hendrix’ Fender Stratocaster guitar: in his own mind a re-vivified, latter day Eric Clapton but to everyone else a grumpy looking middle aged man with a torn up envelope and letter in his back pocket.

See you then!                                                       

No abiding city

The past few weeks, since Christmas and the New Year celebrations, have been remarkable for me in that I have re-made contact with some friends who were very close some thirty years ago, but with whom I had lost contact-seemingly irreveocably. Then, out of the blue, my daughter went to her local church to try and get my grandson baptised: the Vicar turned out to be someone who had been a good friend many years ago from my college days: I had inherited the chair of the college ‘Third World First’ society from him, and we had got up to some hairy scrapes in and around London to highlight the plight of the poor and deprived of the world: notably one hair-raising (I now realise) stunt in which we ‘arrested’ a black student in the foyer of South Africa House under the guise of South African policemen enforcing apartheid rules. I can’t remember any media splash for our daring scheme to show the obscenities of Apartheid, but I do remember a rather scary car drive through London being chased by the police!

Then, there was the ‘phone call out of the blue from a friend who worked with me when I was a parish priest in Salford: he had travelled via the seminary in Lesotho and Ireland to become, latterly, the Anglican priest to the Navajo peoples of America. He was letting me know he was returning to England. This priest’s successor as my colleague in Salford, has just moved to a parish in my part of the Diocese with his wife, who is also a priest. The two of them were good friends until our various ministry paths took us in different directions, but here we are now working together once more.

And, finally, yesterday, the office ‘phone rang and it was a girl friend of mine, again from college days. We used to live in a ‘commune’ of 8 or 9 people in Finsbury Park in the heady, post-hippy period of the early 1970s. The last time I saw her was when I was a curate and she came to visit us with her new born baby. That weekend saw a christening in our church of the time, and she asked whether I would also baptise her child. I did, and this will ‘o the wisp of a girl went on her way in life never to be heard of again, until yesterday, when she ‘phoned to see if she could get a copy of the baptism certificate for her soon to be married son (now 30!). After a carefree and unfettered young life, she is now married to a doctor and has three children. It all made me think of that time when I myself was young and looking forward in eager anticipation to what life, love and priesthood had in store and trying to imagine what might happen to us all. Now, I am able to know the life stories of just a few friends and how the great adventure of existence has turned out for them. To a man and woman, they are happy, content and fulfilled.

I tell you all this, because this week has seen me making contact with the local YMCA in Lincoln and also, their neighbour, the NOMAD Trust (www.nomadtrust.org.uk).  Both organisations deal with the increasing problem of homelessness, primarily amongst the young, and both approach the problem from a Christian, faith standpoint. Our own U2charist cafe-BeAttitude-is attracting increasing numbers of young homeless from the streets of Lincoln, so we wanted to find partners to do something about it. For information, here are some statistics:

In 2001 there were 1,115 homeless households in Lincolnshire. On any given night there are around 500 people sleeping rough in England and some 3,000 over the period of a year. 88% of rough  sleepers are male. ’Homelessness’ includes households which have lost their home for some reason; those who are sleeping rough and those who are being accomodated by friends, family or others.

The friends I have re-discovered this year are all people who were able to have hopes and aspirations and to plot their path through life. Throughout their time on this Earth, they have been supported and loved by family, friends and colleagues and they, in their turn, are now reciprocating that love and respect to others. Thirty years ago, when I first got to know them, I was surprised to find (as a rookie from Sheffield) that the streets of London did indeed have the homeless people that Ralph McTell sang about-surprised because the problem just did not seem to exist in my home city. Now, homelessness not only exists, but increases in every major city and outside them, and it is a major contributor to lives being destroyed and blighted by hopelessness and despair. It is a spiral of life decay that anyone can fall into, and its jaws are not easy to escape  and homeless people are vulnerable and socially excluded. And, in a time when local Authority housing is being demolished and reduced, there is a chronic shortage of affordable housing for those without homes. If you want to know how it can happen to a successful, wealthy and intelligent person follow: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/tv/a82594/documentary-to-follow-homeless-newsreader.html        

We are disciples of someone who said that he had ‘nowhere to lay his head’, surely we must care, as he did, for those today who, similarly, have no holes or nests in which to feel safe and loved?

Are we human or are we dancer?

Sermon preached at the introduction of the Reverend Mark Warrick as priest in charge of All Saints, Stamford…

Well Mark:  “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Or is there? For as soon as you use the word ‘probably’ surely you must also say ‘there is possibly a God’.

 

The world of science got to the point at which it said it had no further need of God: it could create babies in a test tube; manipulate the genetic code so that limbs and organs would regenerate and even propel people to the farthest sides of the universe to see the origins of creation itself. ‘We have no need of God’, they said ‘let’s challenge Him to a duel and be rid of Him once and for all’. So, in a contest like that on Mount Carmel, they drew together. God took a handful of earth and began to carefully craft it and mould it into the figure of a man and then he breathed on it and he came to life. ‘Your turn’, said God. ‘Easy’, said the scientists, and they gathered together the various test tubes and pipettes, the elements, minerals and compounds that they would need. And then, at last they took a handful of earth and God said: ‘Ah no. You get your own earth!’

 

A silly story, but one that adequately makes the point I am trying to explore, which is this: if every facet of Creation could be explained and described, if we could understand all we need to know about how things happen and the chemical processes that are entailed, we would still find it far harder to answer the question ‘why’. I don’t want to rehearse all the reasons why this particular form of fundamentalist atheism (that kind which would hire a bus to advertise itself) is debatable to say the least, only to ask ‘what God is it that they don’t believe in?’ I suspect you and I would not believe in that God either, for it is likely to be an infantile parody of faith and belief in God and far from the robust and intelligent faith held by a Mother Theresa or a Martin Luther King. This is a debate for another time.

 

However, I want to quote my favourite atheist-favourite, because he is uncompromising and thorough in his arguments and also coherent. He sometimes, also, makes the mistake of parodying Christian belief, but in the main he is worth listening to. I like him most because he is prepared not only to say ‘here I stand, I can do no other’ but also to let others hold the  beliefs they wish to hold. What he cannot do, and I suspect he shares this with many Christians, is bear those who try to enforce their beliefs on others or, indeed, enforce the insights of belief by law, violence and coercion. He is Johan Hari, who writes in ‘The Independent’ newspaper.

 

His article this morning (27.1.09) is worth quoting, for he believes that the international agreements on human rights are moving away from protecting freedom of speech to protecting all beliefs and any, even if that compromises freedom of speech:

 

By definition if you have faith, you are choosing to believe in the absence of evidence…it is psychologically painful to be confronted with the facts that your core beliefs are based on thin air, or on the empty shells of revelation or contorted parodies of reason. It is easier to demand that the source of the pesky doubt be silenced.

 

In the end, it comes to this: is creation just what we can touch, perceive and know with our senses and our intellect, or is there, indeed, a mystery at the heart of life which pierces into our hearts and minds when we look at a sunset, or  a new born baby or contemplate the death and passing of a fellow, deeply loved, human being? For, human life is the search for meaning, not just a search for how things happen. It is the discovery of the profound love one human being can have for another, even to death, not just the mechanics of how cells and tissue come together to make a human being. For the Christian, the search for meaning takes place in the context of the birth, the life and teaching, the death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ; but primarily the Resurrection.

 

At our last Lincoln clergy conference, Canon Martyn Percy, of Cuddesdon Theological College, warned us against seeing the Resurrection as just the resuscitation of a dead body: ‘to do that’, he said, ‘is to so limit the meaning of the Resurrection that it loses it’s force and power’. This is true, but there is also no doubt in my own mind that the Gospel writers are trying to point us to the stupendous knowledge that he who was dead is now alive. The story of the Christian faith is the story of how the meaning of that Resurrection is unfolding and should unfold in our lives and in the lives of our communities and nations. The realm of faith is the realm of meaning: meaning often shrouded in mystery, but no less true for that.

 

Mark, in your time here as the priest and leader of this community of Christians, will you see yourself as one who opens up and makes plain the meaning and mystery of the Christian Faith and what it means for the real lives and everyday joys and sorrows of your people?

 

I can put this no better than it has been put by the rock band ‘The Killers’ in their latest hit song:

 

‘Well I’m on my knees, looking for the answers. Are we human or are we dancer?’

 

Will this Christian community under your guidance be content to see human life, existence and experience as prosaic, ordinary, understandable and devoid of mystery and eternal meaning, or, will your ministry here be to remind us that, although human, we are also surrounded constantly by new possibilities, new opportunities and new mysteries and meanings with which our lives will be raised up to the eternal life. Will you help us dance with the Lord of the Dance?

It’s worth a look and a listen

Follow the link: sent to me by an obviously worried priest…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc80G6Yzu04

comments please…?

Silence is golden

Once or twice a year, the senior staff in the Diocese of Lincoln take themselves off for one or two nights for a residential meeting. This has taken us to Sheffield (Whirlow Grange); Launde Abbey; Edinburgh and, last week, to Whitby and the convent of the Holy Paraclete (fancy word for Holy Spirit) www.ohpwhitby.org. You will perhaps know of my profound love for this ancient fishing town (see previous blogs) but, in the years I have being going there, I have only twice before been to the convent, which is set high up on the hill just outside the north side of the town. One of these occasions was to attend their garden party and the other was to have a look at their chapel. The castellated building was once the grand home of a local businessman and was then taken over by the nuns who also ran a school in it. About ten years ago, circumstances caused the school to close down and so Sneaton Castle (as it is called) became a retreat and conference centre.

We are a slightly boisterous Staff, to say the least, when we are together and we have a tendency to enjoy each others  company no matter what internal wrangles we may be having about policy, strategy or theology. This is very healthy I think. So, we were welcomed royally to the Castle and shown to our bright, airy and modern rooms (separate rooms and en-suite-we don’t get on that well!) It was the perfect setting to ruminate and attempt to have some creative ‘blue sky’ thinking: the cliff top and Whitby Golf Club to one side and the dark, brooding hills of the North York Moors to the other. We covered a host of subjects: ‘minster’ models; the changing face of incumbency; our new ‘Mission Forums’; the proposed area episcopal scheme for the Diocese; the job description and person specification for the new Archdeacon of Lincoln; proposals for mission in the Diocese in 2009 and much more. Then it was off for a brisk walk and a tour around Whitby led by yours truly (for which Iwas tipped a whole 2p by my colleagues) and a couple of pints in the Black Horse pub.

‘But what was the highlight?’ I hear you say from out of the virtual ether. The sisters of Whitby maintain a strict pattern of prayer in their chapel of stripped-down, Cistercian austerity. At any given time, when they are not in parishes or in Africa, there are about twenty of them in the mother house and they are of all ages. We gathered with them, for midday prayer and Eucharist, for Lauds and for evening prayer. The round of prayers and Bible readings are said punctiliously with long spaces between the stanzas of the psalms; perfectly measured plainsong chanting and soft, deliberate intercessory prayers. These are no Victorian throwbacks in their modern gray habits with white collars and only the odd one or two black headscarves rather than wimples. Amidst there obvious enjoyment of the repetitive offices, there was a joy, a calm and a purposeful intent rarely experienced in the Church. I was put in mind of Larkin’s poem: ‘a serious house on serious earth this is’: for this was a place where ‘prayer was valid’ like Eliot’s Little Gidding. Those few moments of ‘valid’ prayer refreshed and re-motivated we weary and cynical workers in the world, and we returned to Lincoln just a little transformed by nothing more complicated than silence, quiet, beautiful words, music and the intent seriousness of these poor, chaste and obedient women. To return to our world from this womb was just a little difficult, but made easier for knowing that, in the middle of this frenetic, grasping, clamouring and, often, cruel, world there is an oasis of community life pointing to a better way to live and a better master to serve. If you want to be re-created, I can suggest nothing finer than a night in Whitby at the Convent of the Holy Paraclete. (www.sneatoncastle.co.uk)