The Epiphany

06 Thursday Jan 2022

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The feast of the Epiphany began as an Eastern Church celebration, designed to celebrate the baptism of Christ, bu attaching to it as it did the visit of the Magi, the Western Church celebrated something of supreme importance to us – the extension of God’s salvation to the Gentiles.

There are many signs that the Gospel writers initially thought that Christ’s mission was only to the Jews: Matthew 10:5; Matthew 15:26 and Mark 7:27, and some of the problems which Paul had with the Judaisers stemmed from this sense possessed by some of the earliest converts that Jesus’ mission was only to the Chosen People. Paul hammers away at this in his great Epistle to the Romans, and of course his whole mission was testimony to the fact that it was not ancestry and the law which saved, but faith in the Lord Jesus.

It is interesting that it should be Matthew alone amongst the Synoptic Gospels who mentions the Magi – as scholars are agreed that the community to which he wrote was a Jewish one. The parallels between the story of Moses in Exodus and of this part of Christ’s life would have been very clear to the Jewish audience. But if parts of his Gospel look backwards to Jewish tradition, the story of the Magi looks forward to the final words of his Gospel:

¹⁹Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.

‘All the nations’ are to be evangelised, not just the Jews. The Magi, who sincerely wish to pay homage to the real ‘King of the Jews’ is contrasted with the behaviour of the actual ‘king of the Jews’; the message is plain – from the beginning Gentiles worshipped the Christ. Their acceptance prefigures the conversion of the Gentiles. As Paul told the Galatians: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’

That was, as it remains, a truly radical message. We are all one in Christ. The things which divide us, indeed the things we use to define ourselves, are naught to Him or to those who are in Him.

It is hard for us to recapture how radical it was to those first Jewish followers to be told that the Samaritans could be ‘saved’: the Good Samaritan and the Samaritan woman at the well both serve, as do the Magi and the Roman Centurion at the crucifixion, of the faith that would be found in the Gentiles. There have always been, and always will be, those who feel that the Gospel message is just for them and their kind, but the coming of the Magi reminds us that it is for all who will follow His star and heed the Epiphany that Jesus is Lord.

That message would get the early Christians thrown out of the Temple, it would make them outcasts in their own land – but it would pave the way for the conversion of the whole world. At this Epiphany-tide it is good to remember those Wise Men – because they prefigure us.

Like Eliot’s Magi, we cannot encounter Jesus without being changed. Our old signposts are no longer of use, and we need to follow the new ones in this new dispensation. As St Leo the Great wrote:

“the wise men do not go back the same way they had come. It was appropriate for them, now that they believed in Christ, not to walk along the paths of the former way of life, but to take a new path and refrain from the straying that had been left behind …”
Sermon 33, 6 January 443

Eliot captures perfectly that change – and the unease it brings. At that time he was, himself, a convert, and knew whereof he wrote.

The Magi

05 Wednesday Jan 2022

Posted by John Charmley in Faith

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*Crowned: the kings in 12th-14th-century mosaics from St Mark’s Basilica, Venice*

“A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and especially a long journey in. The ways deep, rhe weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off in the ‘very deal of winter’ … the these are the difficulties they overcame of a wearisome, riksome, troublesome, dangerous, unseasonable journey; and for all this they came”
Lancelot Andrewes, sermon for Christmas Day, 1622

“A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.”

Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi was written in 1927, and those first lines are straight from Andrewe’s sermon. For both men that journey was a parable of our own journey to Christ. We are, as Andrewes commented, always coming: “To Christ we cannot travel travel, but weather and way and all must be fair.”

Eliot and Andrewes capture something easily missed in our tendency to sentimentalise the Nativity; the cost of discipleship. Often, maybe too often, we write as though being a Christian is a matter of coming from unbelief to belief, and liking, as we all do, a happy ending to the story, perhaps we are happy to collude, albeit unconsciously, in such a narrative. The Magi, whose coming we celebrate at the Epiphany remind us of a different – and more difficult story.

Once, and still among those locked into an older (but self-consciously ‘modern’) reading of Scripture, it was the fashion (and doubtless still is) to cast doubt upon the story and to read it as a symbol or a sign. But it is clear that the tradition goes back a long way, and a study of the Church Fathers and of the Suriac tradition, gives us no ground for that late nineteenth, mid-twentieth century pride that somehow the “moderns” knew best. Which is not to say that the way the story is commonly portrayed is accurate, either.

Because there were three gifts, we tend, as the icon pictured above does, to assume there were three Magi. Andrewes inherited the tradition, dating back as far as Justin Martyr, that they were from what is now modern Jordan, from Petra. Justin saw them as fuflfilling the Old Testament prophecies about the coming of the Messiah, and he saw in the three youths in the fiery furnace in Daniel 3, a foreshadowing of them. As the Psalmist (Psalm 72) said: “Yea, all kings shall fall down before him: all nations shall serve him.” Origen, citing Numbers 24:17 saw them (hence Andrewes taking the same view) as fulfilling the prophecy of Balaam” “there shall come a Star out of Jacob.”

The evidence suggests that the Early Church attached huge importance to the story of these visitors “from the East;” it is not hard to see why.

Christ came to save the lost sheep, and the evidence that the first Christians assumed that these were the Jews is abundant. Mark quotes Jesus as saying to the Syro-Phonecian woman:

Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children’s
bread and throw it to the dogs

Despite a lamentable contemporary tendency to read our obessions into it (the idea that Jesus was a racist is dealt with admirable by Dr Ian Paul here), this is another sign of how St Mark shows us that while Our Lord’s mission began with the Jews, it was not confined to them. The Magi serve a similar purpose.

The story of the Magi is significant because of what is tells us, not only about the Magi, but about the Jews.

Wherever the Magi originated – and there is an ancient Syriac text, The Revelation of the Magi which identifies them as being from the land of Shir – they were not Jews. Whether they were “Persians”, or from Petra (and the two are not incompatible), or whether they were descandants of Adam’s third son Seth, they were not among the Chosen People. When Herod consults the Jewish wise men, their system, their logic, their wisdom have nothing to tell him. They believe in a Messiah, but the idea of him being born outside a royal palace has not occurred to them. They are ignorant of him, and will for the most pasrt remain so. Herod is anxious, but they have nothing to tell him.

The Magi, on the other hand, with no Scripture to guide them, and no tradition of a Messiah, show themselves open to whatever God is doing. They do not know the way, but the star guides them; the way is hard; but they take it.

In a theological system that consigned outsiders to eternal condemnation, and where a Samaritan woman could express amazement that a Jew would speak to her, Matthew shows us, as Jesus does, how the Incarnation broke down the dividing wall between cultures. As Paul told the Colossians:

Here there cannot be Greek and circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian and Scythian, slave, free man, but Christ is all, and in all
Col. 3:11

But there was, and is, a cost. Like the Magi, the Christian travels a long aand a hard road. And we might, with Eliot’s Magus, wonder iss it a birth or a death? “I had seen birth and death,” he writes, “But had thought they were different; this Birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.” Dying to the old Adam is not easy. In Andrewe’s words:

With them it was but ‘we have seen’, ‘we are come’; with us it would have been ‘but we are coming’ at most. Our fashion is to see and see again, before we stir a foot, specially if it be to the worship of Christ. Come such a journey at such a time? No; but fairly have put it off to the spring of the year …
Andrewes, Christmas Day 1622

Then of course, it will be easier. But maybe even easier in the summer?

They came, and thanks to God, so can we. But will we?

The undiscovered ends?

01 Sunday Aug 2021

Posted by John Charmley in Faith

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From quiet homes and first beginning,
out to the undiscovered ends,
there’s nothing worth the wear of winning,
but laughter and the love of friends
Hilaire Belloc

One of things about retiring is that it tends to invite something which life’s busy routine denies – that is reflection.

The last eighteen months have been traumatic for so many in so many ways, that it seems almost callous to suggest that it might have had any benefits, but from my own personal point of view it has aided that process of reflection. When the first “lockdown” commenced in March 2020 it meant that after four years of living away from home for at least half the year, I was confined, as it were to barracks. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology and Zoom, it was possible to continue doing my job for St Mary’s from my own study at home. The loss of that “laughter and the love of friends” was a downside, as was not seeing the students and our beautiful campus at Strawberry Hill. I also missed my walks down the Thames path to Richmond and back to Teddington. If there is an occupational hazard to being a bibliophile academic, in my case it is the tendency to sit down and read books for as long as anyone will leave me undisturbed. When one’s children are younger that tendecy is held in check; mine flew the nest some years back. The Thames Path walks were a way of taking a bit of exercise. So I thought I’d do it while cribb’d, cabin’d and confin’d (to an hour a day).

I began to take what I called #norfolkexercise walks. Here in the far south of Norfolk that turned out to consist of a rich network of ancient footpaths, some of which the local farmers had actually left in a walkable condition. The timings were dictated by the demands of my timetable, but the weekends provided opportunties for a really long walk. I quickly found, as those familiar with my Twitter feed will confirm, that my steps tended toward the Church pictured above – St Mary’s, Redenhall. The tower is quite spectacular, built by the powerful de la Pole family in the fifteenth century as an example of their wealth, it is a local landmark much beloved, I am told, by pilots; it is a thing of beauty.

One of the things about long walks is that it gives one time to reflect – and pray. For the first part of every walk I pray my daily Rosary, which gets me in the right frame of mind to contemplate what I see all around me, which is the wonder of the created world. Psalm 8 came frequently to mind:

⁴What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?

⁵For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

⁶Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet:

What indeed? As the Pandemic reminded all of us of the fragility of human life and our powerlessness, the Churches decided, for perfectly obvious reasons, to close their doors. We were soon able to discover the wonder of Zoom church, and watch on-line services all over the world if we had access to a computer and the internet. But we were deprived of the Body and Blood of Our Lord. The Communion of fellowship was gone, and with it the Blessed Eucharist. It was a fast which went way beyond Lent and which drove me, at least, further into the resources of prayer. I had long before adopted the practice of praying the Offices of the Church at the week-end, and I extended this into a daily routine. Anyone getting the message I like my routines will be reading me aright. But without them, at such times, I wonder how I should have managed?

It has been an interesting discipline. The easy habits are to pray when one is joyful or sorrowful, happiness and sorrow tend to remind me of God. The daily routine has been interesting. There have been times when press of business – the ever-demanding Zoom – has made it hard to find the time. There have been times when the “mood” does not seem right. Yet this is, I have discovered, the whole point of regular daily prayer. It has ceased to be about “me” and has become about “Him”. I have found in that both a discipline and a liberation. However I “felt” when I started, I have always felt better when I finished. It has been similar with the walking and the Rosary. I have surprised myself at the extent to which it is possible to pray mindfully while walking. One falls into a rythmn, and it becomes as natural as breathing.

That “destiny” of which Newman spoke, and to which I referred in my last post, may be known only to God, but increasingly I have come to realise that Cavafy had the right of it in his great poem, Ithaka when he concluded that it was the journey, and not the destination which mattered:

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

And yes, as Ithaka approaches, Cavafy was right. The ends, in this world, may remain undiscovered, but it is the journey, and what it adds to what you brought to it that matters.

Atque et vale

30 Friday Jul 2021

Posted by John Charmley in Catholic Tradition, Education, Faith

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Universities

When I started at St Mary’s University in Twickenham in September 2016 I more or less gave up this blog. It was clear to me that participating in the Catholic Culture wars, even inadvertently, was incompatible with my new responsibilities – and anyway, I had a chance to actually do something – that is to help make a Catholic University a strong presence in the Higher Education sector – rather than simply write about these things.

As I retire, after forty-three years in Higher Education, five of them at St Mary’s, it is time to take up the reins again, not to participate in any culture wars – as my more recent posts here should have made clear, I long ago tired of that, but rather to reflect on Christianity in the public square. But first, and here, some reflections as I say “hail and farewell”.

I entered the world of Higher Education, as it then was not generally called, in September 1979 as a lecturer in the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglian in Norwich. I was even more blessed than I thought at the time. I knew jobs were going to become scarce, but none of us had any idea they would become so scarce that by 1983 even Mrs Thatcher’s Government, not well-disposed to the sector, would pump some money into what were called “new blood” posts, just to stop the situation becoming impossible. So many of my contemporaries who have jobs, got them then. The Thatcher Government distrusted Universities. It distrusted our claims of professionalism and self-governance, seeing in them little more than self-interested excuses for doing what we wanted rather than what we should be doing. The problem with this was that the Government was not terribly sure what that was, a problem shared by successive administrations, whose interventions would, but for the profesisonalism and resilience of the Sector, have totally wrecked things.

As it is, what successive Governments have managed to do is to load the Sector with a regulatory system which the old USSR would have envied, where the question “quis cusodiet ipsos cusdodes?” (who guards the guardians themselves?) is answered by the creation of ever more guardians; if this was a deliberate job-creation scheme for graduates, it would almost be admirable. As it is, even the present Government (surely in an unhappy catalogue the worst in living memory?) has realised it needs to cut back on the number of guardians. But it still has no idea what Higher Education is for. It seems, if one is to believe its rhetoric (itself an interesting philosophical question, can one believe a word that the Prime Minister utters when he so obviously has no conception of the distiction between truth and whatever suits his purpose?), it would seem that it wants “value for money degrees” and “useful knowledge.” Mr Gradgrind is back; in truth her never went away.

And yet, how ignorant this view of Higher Education is, as the University from which I am retiring has shown. With an Employability rate in the 90% range, in a university which takes more than 60% of its students from backgrounds where no one in the family has been to university, no one could accuse St Mary’s of not caring about getting good career prospects for its students. My academic colleagues put in longer hours than anyone would pay them for before they believe in the real mission of the university; they know our real Mission.

It is that mission which brought me to St Mary’s and it is that mission which took me into Higher Education, and it is a mission with a heavy religious dimension. It is best expressed in St John Henry Newman’s words:

God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons
Newman

And that, in a nutshell, is what we do in Higher Education. Our job is simple but complex, it is to help every student who is capable of studying and wants to study, to become the best “them” they can be. It’s not our job to say how many scientists, lawyers etc. the country is going to need. No one can know that. Jobs which the Government might say are essential today, may not exist in twenty years time, and jobs no one ever thought of will exist. What is needed are people who know how to think and people who are rounded individuals. Newman got it right in his Idea of a University and it is that mission which St Mary’s has continued.

St Mary’s is a special place because embedded in its DNA is a commitment to teaching. It was founded in 1850 to provide teachers for “Catholic Poor Schools.” It was not founded by any Government, it was founded by the Catholic Church to help train teachers for the Irish immigrants and other Catholics in London. That great and much-understimated man, Cardinal Manning, would not allow the construction of a cathedral in London until every parish had a school. Education pulled men and women out of poverty – and poverty took, and takes many forms.

After the Pandemic, no one can doubt that communities in this country are still blighted by material poverty, and the Churches, Anglican and Catholic, have played a noble part in helping alleviate the suffering it causes. But there is spiritual poverty, there is cultural poverty, there is the poverty of a life lived simply for work, where the riches of family and friends take second-place to the “toad work” as Larkin put it:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Philip Larkin: Toads

One of the purposes of a University education is to help each invidual find that destiny for which God has selected them, and to equip them with the wherewithal to achieve it. But that destiny has never been just to get rich. We can see what God thinks of such people not only by those to whom he gives riches, but by what he has to say about them in Scripture. Life is a gift, and teaching at any level is a privilege because we get the chance to help others become what is in them – education is about that “leading out” process.

It ws with this faith that I entered Higher Education forty-three years ago and as I retire from my Provostship I can say as St Paul did

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

I now hand on that torch, with confidence, to my successors. There is a very great deal of rubbish talked about what goes on in our universities most of it from people who are not in them. For sure, as we are fallen creatures, not all is Eden, but I thought, as I looked out with pride at my last graduation ceremony as Provost, that of all the ways of spending the life given to me by God, this was one of the better ones. My teachers made a difference to me they could never have imagined, and if by God’s Grace I have been able to do likewise, that is sufficient.

God’s wrath?

25 Thursday Feb 2021

Posted by John Charmley in Book Club, Faith, Julian of Norwich, Lent

≈ 25 Comments

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Lent Book Club, Wrath

Jessica has written eloquently on a question deriving from Mother Julian’s “showings” – God’s wrath. If we take away the idea of God’s wrath then one might well ask why it was that Jesus died upon the Cross. If, as Mother Julian states:

God is the goodness that cannot be angry, for he is nothing but goodness
Chapter 46

then our traditional theology needs a rethink.

One way of dealing with this dilemma is to do what both Mother Julian and Jessica do, which is to hold it in tension: we are sinners, God is love and loves us, how the two are reconicled by Jesus is a mystery; it is sufficient for us to know that it will be reconciled.

There is a level at which this must be true. It may be a “Man thing” but I want to worry away at it a little so bear with me.

Julian herself provides us with some clues for how we might proceed; so let us follow and see where, if anywhere, they might lead.

I saw no anger except on man’s part, and he forgives that in us; for anger is nothing else but a resistance and contrariness to peace and to love, and it comes either from lack of strength or lack of wisdom, or from lack of goodness – and this lack is not in God, but is on our part; for through sin and wretchedness we have in us a wretched and continual resistance to peace and to love, and he revealed this very often in his loving expression of pity and compassion.
Chapter 48

We are in what might be called classic Romans 7 territory – however much we will the good, we do the opposite. We know that this, by our standards, deserves condemnation – after all we are very free in condemning bad bahviour in others, almost as free as we are imaginative in finding excuses for our own. We cannot be in eternal bliss, as she goes on to say in chapter 49, until “we are all at peace and love; that is to say, in full contentment with God, and with all his works”.

Only through the working of Grace can we be made humble and gentle enough to surrender our will to God’s will:

Suddenly the soul is united to God when it is truly at peace in itself, for no anger is to be found in God
Chapter 49

As we receive the Lord in the sacraments, as we pray to Him, as we meditate on his life and teachings, as we try to follow Him, we are directed where we need to be, recognising in His love and compassion that we are loved, and responding to Him in return. The Holy Spirit is at work in us, in the Church, and as Julian puts it:

… the Holy Spirit, who is endless life dwelling in our soul, protects us most securely, and effects a peace in the soul, and gives it comfort by Grace, and accords it to God, and makes it compliant. And this is his mercy and the path on which Our Lord continually leads us, as long as we are in this changeable life
Chapter 48

God works with us in our daily lives, and so often it is here, rather than in the spaces we reserve for God, that we go wrong. Original sin, Chesterton said, is the one theological reality you can see by looking in the mirror. Is God wrathful, or do we, in our hearts, need Him to be because of our shame at our own sinful ways? Or is the idea of a wrathful God so central to our vision that even trying to understand what Julian is saying, is enough to cause wrath to rise at the very idea of a God who is not angry with us, but, saddened by our anger with ourselves, wishes to save us through Christ – to save us from ourselves and the work of sin within us?

There, I have worried away at it, not I think to any great result, but sometimes worrying away at things can be enough.

#lentbookclub is on Twitter as #LentBookClub, Facebook as https://www.facebook.com/groups/LentBookClub, and is using The Way of Julian of Norwich by Sheila Upjohn which can be bought here rather than Amazon. It runs from Ash Wednesday 20210219 to Easter Sunday-ish 20210404 and we are doing a chapter a week, roughly. Folk who are blogging about this are: Graham, at https://grahart.wordpress.com/, Andrew at https://www.shutlingsloe.co.uk/, Eric at https://sundrytimes2.wordpress.com/, Soobie at https://soobie64.medium.com/, Ruth at https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/. Come join the pilgrimage with Julian to Norwich!

Vain Repetition?

24 Wednesday Feb 2021

Posted by John Charmley in Anti Catholic, Book Club, Catholic Tradition, Faith, Julian of Norwich, Lent, Marian devotion

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Lent Book Club, Our Lady, prayer

In the Facebook Lent Book Group one member has noted that Sheild Upjohn is very reluctant to take sides in the various theological issues she herself raises. In the chapter on “prayer” this is clearest on two issue which readers of this blog will recognise – praying the Rosary and praying with the Saints.

Our old correspondent, Bosco, was very hot on these issues. Like many Protestants of an Evangelical bent (if that is what he was), Bosco objected to praying the Rosary, reminding us that we had been warned against vain repetition, adding for good measure that we shouldn’t pray to the Holy Virgin (whose virginity he, in rather poor form even for him, denied) or the saints. Ms Upjohn’s delicacy is perhaps understandable. New readers here need only to put “Bosco” into the search bar on the blog to find some prime examples of prejudice uniformed by knowledge, allied to a firm refusual to rethink once informed. It’s a way of being, but not one which commends itself to anyone who does not already hold such views.

Catholic actually pray “with” the Saints, not to them; the same is true of the greatest of the Saints, Our Lady. If you do not believe there is a “great cloud of witnesses” then so be it, but at least do fellow Christians the courtesy of informing yourself what they say they believe. Can devotion be misinterpreted? It can, and those Anglo-Saxons who feel uneasy with overt displays of emotion, may well find themselves feeling that way about some of the devotions practised by those whose culture makes them very easy with such displays; but they might like to reflect that understanding requires more than observation uninformed by knowledge. Empathy matters, and before we rush to judge others, we might think to exercise it.

It raises the issue of what prayer is for? Mother Julian is a good guide here, writing in chapter 41:

Our Lord himself is the first to receive our prayer, as I see it. He takes it, full of thanks and joy, and he sends it up above, and sets it in the treasury, where it will never be lost. It is there before God and all his holy ones – continually heard, continually helping our needs. When we come to heaven, our prayers will be given to us as part of our delight – with endless joyful tasks from God.
chapter 41

I have found praying the Rosary whilst walking an excellent way of taking two forms of exercise, and I know Jessica has found it useful after I recommended it to her. In so praying it helps my mind focus on the Scriptural passages behind each part of the Rosary. The idea that it somehow raises Our Lady to divine status could, I suspect, be raised only by one who brought it with them because of a suspicion that Catholics do that. There has been a very long history of anti-Catholicsm in the Anglo-Saxon world, and even though we are now in a more secular age, traces of it linger, and added to that we have the aggressive secularism which finds all religion a survival of what it dismisses as medieval superstition, without ever understanding it.

Here, again, Julian is helpful. In chapter 25, Jesus offers her a vision of the Blessed Virgin in heaven:

And with this very same expression of gladness and joy, our good Lord looked down on his right side and brought my mind to where our Lady stood during his Passion, and he said, ‘Would you like to see her?’ … as if he had said, ‘Would you like to see how I love her, so that you can rejoice with me, in the love that I have for her and she for me? … Would you like to see in her how you are loved. For the love of you I made her so exalted, so noble and of such worth; and this delights me, and I want it to delight you.
Chapter 25

Sheila Upjohn’s approach is irenic in the best way. Experience has taught he what it has taught others, which is that you cannot really argue about this issue, all you can do is to try to enter into an understanding of why, for so many of us, Our Lady is so loved. That is not a bad pattern for us during Lent.

Salvation in Christ’s name

22 Monday Feb 2021

Posted by John Charmley in Bible, Faith, Pastor Gervase Charmley, sermons

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Pastor Gervase Charmley, sermons

A Sermon by Pastor Gervase Charmley, Bethel, Hanley

Christ came to save sinners! The miracles of Christ are signs, and so are the signs of the Apostles. The healing of a disabled man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple was the prelude for a sermon about the sin of man and the salvation that is in Christ. The text is Acts 3

https://www.sermonaudio.com/solo/gncharmley/sermons/22121125107094/?fbclid=IwAR2U9q533AIZ-B95cOnY_rnlEjPjehyrFbZiXcvGXipwC7KpoL4E_8O-eXg

A Journey through Lent: Prayer & Julian of Norwich

21 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by John Charmley in Book Club, Faith, Julian of Norwich

≈ 8 Comments

If we are to enter into Mother Julian’s understanding of prayer as part of Sheila Upjohn’s invitation to discuss prayer in our Lent Book, The Way of Julian of Norwich then it might help to reflect on what that would have meant for her and her contemporaries. That, in turn, invites us back to a way of praying – and worshipping – which we lost at the Reformation, and which latterly practices such as Lectio Divina have revived.

Mother Julian’s world was not one where lay people read the Scriptures, it was one where they listened to them. Julian was literate, but it is unlikely that she had a copy of the Bible or read it herself. Her engagement with prayer would have come through her experience of church. A rood-screen such as the one illustrated above, from the Norfolk church of St Mary the Virgin at Tunstead, would have provided a rich source for prayer, illuminated as it was with pictures of the Saints. Above it would have hung a cross with the crucified Christ upon it – just the sort of crucific which her curate would have shown to her on what all assumed was her death-bed. It is the first thing which catches your eye if you enter a church which has one.

It is there because it was at the centre of the devotional life of the ordinary church goer in fourteenth century England. Christ was the “man of sorrows” who took upon Himself the burden of our sins. In contemplating the Cross, which usually had upon it an image of the suffering Christ, the church goer was invited to enter into His suffering. The medieval Church, prompted by St Anselm and others, counselled people to think upon the Passion of Christ as a means of evoking His love and, thereby, contemplating how we might respond to a love that great. The Franciscan St Bonaventure, and the Cistercian, St Bernard of Clairvaux, both understood from personal experience the intense feelings which could be inspired by the contemplation of Christ’s suffering upon the Cross. By this process our sinful nature could be moved to a more fitting spiritual state where we could more readily see ourselves as recipients of Divine Love. There was an encouragement to meditate on the words of Scripture by concentration on the Holy Rood. This, it was held, would encourage each of us to enter into an emotional engagement with Christ. The imagery in the church was an aid to meditation. Much was lost when a churchmanship which took words to be the be all and end all, destroyed such images

If we know this, we can see Julian’s “showings” not as some strange vision, but rather as part of what was then a devotional norm. She would have been used to meditating on the sufferings of the Lord. She herself tells us that as a girl she had wanted to receive the “three gifts” of Christ, namely: to have the “mind of his passion”; to have:

“bodily sickness in my youth at 30 years of age”; and to “have God’s gift of three wounds”. She had wanted “a bodily sight wherein I might have more knowledge of the bodily pains of our saviour and of the compassion of our lady and of all his true lovers who saw him in his pains, for I wanted to be one of them and suffer with them.”

In this, she would have been at one with many pious lay people. She sought no special vision, just to enter into the “true mind” of the Passion. This her near-death experience gave her.

But instead of her “true mind” coming from contemplation of the Rood and its Screen, it came in the form of a mediation on the crucifix shown her by her priest. Viewed in that context, we can see Julian’s “showings” as themselves the finest example of late medieval contemplative prayer. The whole of her book is a prayer.

As we enter into Lent, we shall explore how we can make use of Mother Julian’s prayers to enrich our own.

#lentbookclub is on Twitter as #LentBookClub, Facebook as https://www.facebook.com/groups/LentBookClub, and is using The Way of Julian of Norwich by Sheila Upjohn which can be bought here rather than Amazon. It runs from Ash Wednesday 20210219 to Easter Sunday-ish 20210404 and we are doing a chapter a week, roughly. Folk who are blogging about this are Graham, at https://grahart.wordpress.com/, Andrew at https://www.shutlingsloe.co.uk/, Eric at https://sundrytimes2.wordpress.com/, Soobie at https://soobie64.medium.com/, Ruth at https://becausegodislove.wordpress.com/. Come join the pilgrimage with Julian to Norwich!

Lent Book Club: The Way of Julian of Norwich

17 Wednesday Feb 2021

Posted by John Charmley in Book Club, Faith, Julian of Norwich, Lent

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Lent Book Club

Jessica set out some of the background to Mother Julian in posts a few weeks back, and for those starting afresh on this, I would recommend starting there.

I want to start with the old Commination prayer which, when I was a child, would be said at Morning Prayer on Ash Wednesday:

BRETHREN, in the primitive Church there was a godly discipline, that, at the beginning of Lent, such persons as stood convicted of notorious sin were put to open penance, and punished in this world, that their souls might be saved in the day of the Lord; and that others, admonished by their example, might be the more afraid to offend.

Instead whereof, until the said discipline may be restored again, (which is much to be wished,) it is thought good that at this time (in the presence of you all) should be read the general sentences of God’s cursing against impenitent sinners, gathered out of the seven and twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy, and other places of Scripture; and that ye should answer to every sentence, Amen: To the intent that, being admonished of the great indignation of God against sinners, ye may the rather be moved to earnest and true repentance; and may walk more warily in these dangerous days; fleeing from such vices, for which ye affirm with your own mouths the curse of God to be due.

This would seem rather at odds with what Mother Julian says about the anger of God, but I think Jessica deals well with the seeming tension when she wrote:

Mother Julian saw with insight that if God were to feel what we call “anger” even for a moment, he would cease to be the creator and become the destroyer, and we should cease to exist. Anger is what happens inside us and we attribute it to God. We are, we say in some circumstances, “standing up for God”, as though he needs our anger; well it’s an excuse isn’t it? It was human anger which crucified Christ; it is our own anger which crucifies us. It holds us in an atmosphere of conflict and fear which keeps us from peace – and from atonement and repentance;

It may be indicative of where we are in more than one way that the Commination service seems to be a rarity (though one may be had here) and that the Church, whether Anglican or Catholic, seems reluctant to talk about “wrath”. It is easier to talk about God’s “love”, not least because love is a pleasanter topic for reflection and for sermons than “wrath’. That is, in some quarters, a natural reaction, to be deplored by some of a traditionalist bent, and to be celebrated as “progress” by those of other minds.

Julian of Norwich has become something of a beacon for those who wish to emphasise love and not wrath, and she should not be held responsible for some of the things some of her latter-day admirers load upon her. Her understanding was deeper than a surface perusal sometimes allows for. But that should not be read as indicating that it’s time to go on about “wrath” more than we do. Those who lament the decline of wrath-related preaching might wish to reflect on why it has happened? Here Mother Julian has much to help us with.

“God”, she tells us, “enfolds us in love and will never let us go.” (Chapter 5). How do we react to that? It is easy to say we love God, but this Lent is an opportunity to ask ourselves a question we ought to ask of all our close relationships – how much time to we spend on it?

Our prayer makes God happy (Chapter 41) we are told by Mother Julian. But how often to do pray? I used to have three main reactions to prayer: I prayed when I felt I needed something or wanted help for someone; I didn’t feel in the right frame of mind for prayer; or my prayers felt “dry”. It became an excuse for not praying. A few years back I decided to follow the lectionary and prayed morning, evening and compline prayers – in season and out, however I “felt”. Once it stopped becoming about me, it could become about God. I recommended it to Jess, and others, who seem to have benefitted from it. Praying the Rosary while walking also helps me.

There, I was pleased to see, were among the steps recommended by Sheila Upjohn (pp. 5-8) in the first chapter of our Lent Book. She poses some interesting questions about prayer at the end of the chapter, and to this, I shall turn on the morrow.

But as we enter Lent together, let us remember that: “dust you are, And to dust you shall return.” But into that dust God breathed life, and through His Son He offers us forgiveness for all our sins. As we ponder and wonder what we should give up, let us give ourselves and each other something positive instead – like a break! – And let us take up regular prayer.

The Church of Pentecost

14 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by John Charmley in Bible, Faith, Pastor Gervase Charmley, sermons

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Acts, Pastor Gervase Charmley, sermons

A sermon by Pastor Gervase Charmley, Bethel, Hanley

On the day of Pentecost, Christ sent his Spirit upon the Church. The Spirit gives power to witness, preaching Christ, and establishes the Church in fellowship as disciples. Acts 2

https://www.sermonaudio.com/solo/gncharmley/sermons/214211159293326/?fbclid=IwAR3tZsTnaT1bswM5rhSxD6UX7vGP513_wbLw4PivmZnY2sQVdcEzUb004Ao