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A TENDER RECOGNITION
Mary stayed outside near the tomb, weeping. Then, still weeping, she stooped to look inside, and saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head, the other at the feet. They said, ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ ‘They have taken my Lord away’ she replied ‘and I don’t know where they have put him.’ As she said this she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, though she did not recognise him. Jesus said, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Who are you looking for?’ Supposing him to be the gardener, she said, ‘Sir, if you have taken him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will go and remove him.’ Jesus said, ‘Mary!’ She knew him then and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbuni!’ – which means Master. Jesus said to her, ‘Do not cling to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go and find the brothers, and tell them: I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ So Mary of Magdala went and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord and that he had said these things to her. John 20.11-18
THE MARY MAGDALENE of my own imagination doesn’t look at all like some of those depressing religious pictures. Not a haloed saint, not miserably gazing upon a skull set down in the middle of her dressing table, not wanton, bare-breasted, or mournfully reflecting upon her dreadfulness and that of others “of her kind”. No, my Mary Magdalene, first apostle, is an ordinarily beautiful, fully alive, self-aware, tactile, tender, practical, imaginative and lovely young woman. Human and humane. Someone possessed of an extraordinary ability to empathise, a bit of a loner perhaps, someone who “gets it” when Jesus speaks, someone who, just because she’s lovely – inside and out – is great to be around. And Jesus loves her.
I don’t know who made the gorgeous image above – (I’d love to know – and would gladly credit it) – but here’s the girl in my heart, using her own imagination to tell Jesus that she understands more than perhaps even he thinks she does; that she loves him; that loving him heals her and makes her whole; that her love might bring something of healing to him.
Here’s the Mary I imagine went on from this Prologue – this genesis, this in-the-flesh close-breathing, this out-of-the-ordinary, tearful, beyond-the-Law touching of the Word-before-time, this “costly” anointing, this first moment of tender intimacy, and wholly mutual acceptance – to have a thousand little conversations with Jesus, long before the ultimate events of what we’ve come to call Holy Week (“it’s no wonder they call you the Master, love. None of us have ever met or dreamed about someone quite like you”). A thousand little conversations about what was to be in the future, their future, everybody’s future (the future of R S Thomas’ “mirrors in which the blind look at themselves and Love looks at them back”) – after the “return” to “my father and your father”, to Where we came from.
Mary, imagine …, Mary, turn around …, Mary, can you feel it? …, Mary, the colours …, Mary, the joy of it …
Yes, I can imagine. I want to imagine. We all do. But if you died first, Jesus, God knows what I’ll do. You must be careful. We need you. Don’t strain so. O God. I know you’ll have to go. And I shall want you to, of course. Yes, we’ve talked about it often enough. But will you really come back to me? From the inside out? Jesus, I believe. Help me when my heart breaks. Help me in my unbelief …
Mary, Mary, Mary. I will. I will. I truly believe we’ll find each other on the inside …
If fully human Jesus was Everyman then Mary of Magdala is Everywoman. To prostitute her memory is wicked calumny – (how many unseeing men, half-dead, dull-in-heart-and-mind-and-head, have done that through the centuries?) – calumny of a kind that has led, and still leads, to immeasurable sickness of head and heart and soul and mind and body. Masculine and feminine, each needs the other. ( Both traits found in both women and in men, heterosexual or homosexual – it’s an “other” that’s the key requirement here). Thank God that the crisis wrought by precisely that sickness, and agonisingly recognised as the “hole in the heart” not just of the Church but of humankind generally today, can hardly help now but to point humankind everywhere on earth towards the light of a “more excellent”, a wholly more natural, and healthier, God-given way.
Human relationships, as much as for any of the ways we relate to the Divine, are not to be patronising, patriarchal, law-bound, or shame-laden. Human relationships will thrive, and the reign of God come to be felt among us, when they instinctively include, and resist exclusion. Love is not to be imprisoned or entombed. And, post-crisis, then and now, a wider-reaching Love is here to stay. Though patience is still required, though sin and death appear yet, in places, still to prevail, a new way of loving is here to stay. A new Way, a new Truth, a new Life.
Mr Vernon Dursley to Harry Potter about a certain (Wise old? Dove-like?) owl:
‘If you can’t control that owl, it’ll have to go!’
Harry tried, yet again, to explain.
‘She’s bored,’ he said. ‘She’s used to flying around outside. If I could just let her out at night …’
‘Do I look stupid?’ snarled Uncle Vernon, a bit of fried egg dangling from his bushy moustache. ‘I know what’ll happen if that owl’s let out.’
He exchanged dark looks with his wife, Petunia.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, J K Rowling
On Resurrection Day, “when it dawns on us”, in Mary and in Jesus, Wisdom is encountered entre deux. Wisdom’s used to flying around outside, she’s done so since the genesis of things, and before that, too; she carries messages home – for the inside, the God-side. Yes, there’s real intimacy here, a communicating communion sort of a business. But an early lesson in wisdom for all humankind is “do not cling”. Let him, let her, fly. Let the Spirit blow where She listeth. Something’s dawning. Look at the sky.
Ascension – returning – to the fullness of God lies yet ahead, though this very Resurrection morning it is an energising Hope. A hope that will ultimately change the course of the history of worlds. For there will be a returning, a tender returning, a deeply intimate, glorious, colourful, joyful, prayerful, fulsome returning for Everyone to the One who is both “my father and your father”. Don’t cling today beautiful Mary. But, believe me, lovely, knowing, wise and giving Mary, the day will dawn when we may cling, and we may laugh, and we may talk and pray and sing “We’re an Easter people! All of us! And alleluia is our song”.
And on that day I believe Jesus will be heard greeting his Mary of Madgdala as Rabbuni. Teacher. Master … She’s beautiful. Just like this painting. An ordinary, beautiful girl. Just sometimes a little bit wild. And she gets it, perhaps she is, Wisdom.
Jan Richardson and her husband Garrison Coles have made the
exquisitely beautiful The Hours of Mary Magdalene. Enjoy it here
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HOLY SATURDAY
WAITING FOR THE LIGHT that scatters night and illuminates all Creation forever and forever. Soon to swell the joyful strain …
ROTTEN OLD BUDGET …
POOR OLD WAKEFIELD CATHEDRAL got clobbered by the recent budget but Pamela Greener, the wife of the Dean, is inviting the Chancellor to have a bit of a rethink – and her grace and charm might change the way Chapter and PCC meetings operate forever 
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FAST-HEADING FOR HOLY WEEK
FICKLE, THOSE CROWDS. Fickle. I can perfectly believe that a Palm Sunday event happened around Jesus of Nazareth in Jerusalem, even if the evangelists did later engage in a smidgeon of poetic licence. Easy enough to believe, because all that palm-waving and racket can be seen in towns and cities all across the world, most days, to this very day. Fickle crowds on the look-out for some poor soul who can be commissioned to sort life out for us. Some poor soul who’ll be clobbered – maybe crucified – if it turns out they’re not all they’re cracked up to be – a condition, an imminent state of affairs, for crowd-acclaimed messiahs, for scapegoats appointed by malcontents, that’s guaranteed certainty. Fickle crowds, religious capitals, fickle (some might say dim-witted) churches are not always very nice places to be. (To a new parish priest in this Diocese, a few years ago: “Well, be warned, you won’t be at all popular if you give a sermon. On Easter Sunday you’re supposed to read out the names of everyone who’s given a lily!”) …
Christmas – Holy Week – Easter, year-in, year-out, another round of Church busy. Bishops, priests, you and me, what are we all hoping to see? Will we cheer? Will we mean it when we “sing Hosanna” – and if so, what for? Will we welcome this odd-looking “King” one minute and then in the next bolt the door? Who’s being crucified this week? What’s our “Holy Week” going to be for? Will it turn out to have been a challenge to our own fickleness? Will we blush and protest too much that we waved no palm, we were never hoodwinked, carried away, never, ever, meant anyone, anywhere, any harm?
I’m more than a little interested in these questions because I both love and – at times – hate the Church with great passion. Even after a lifetime’s close involvement I’ve been shocked and sickened by some of the responses to the truly Christ-like Archbishop Rowan’s appointment to what must surely be a dream job for him. Soon it’ll be someone else’s turn to sit in Augustine’s Chair:
Next time, could we please have an Archbishop of Canterbury who believes and articulates both privately and publicly, confessional Anglican faith and morals? …
wrote one correspondent to the Church Times of 23rd March – inducing stomach-ache in me from that day to this. May the Lord God come to the aid of Rowan’s successor, and that right early, but I give notice that I think my heart might break if such a person starts glibly bleating about “Bible-believing Christians” because they’d almost certainly count me – a “let’s take the Bible seriously” kind of a Christian – out of their respectable “Bible-believing” society – and many thousands more of us would be all lined-up to see another enormous exodus out of the pews, to heaven knows where, anywhere would do, “just so long as it’s not a church”. Goodness there’d be a lot of palm-waving on enthronement day though, and plenty of Make way, make way …
More than a little interested in what Holy Week’s going to be for, because, being a parish priest, there’s no avoiding the dark side of Christian communities, my own included. One of the sadder aspects of the life of a vicar concerns the number of awful stories – all clerical ears must quickly get used to hearing – about the disloyalty, cruelty and vain-glorious fantasy engaged in by some who would count themselves “pillars” and numbered amongst “the great and the good”. One of our ‘treasures’ recently announced, spittingly, “I hate baptisms!”. One of the guests at said Baptism asked me “aren’t Christians supposed to model The Good Life – life in all its abundance? God help me. If that guy’s the model I’ll stick to the golf course, but thanks very much anyway. Even I can see that you’re really trying. Such a shame that a few half-wits spoil the whole.”
Holy Week will have rendered Christ’s Church very great service indeed if, come Easter Sunday, the “half-wits” among us, myself included amongst these, had spent a little time examining our dim-wittedness, examining the words we sing and say and pray, blushing a little at the ridiculousness of our fickle palm-waving and bureaucratic busy-bodied-ness, and asking what Jesus of Nazareth could possibly have been modelling, could possibly have been getting at if it turned out to be true that he said “you will do greater works than these” and “I am the Way”.
Church Times preview in my email Inbox promises an interview in tomorrow’s paper with ‘after-religionist’ Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh. Thank God and hooray. That’s the first piece I’ll turn to. The title alone of his Doubts and Loves tells me that this man, at least, knows something about the road to Calvary, and quite a bit about Resurrection – along the pathways of “a more excellent way”.
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GOOD NEWS!
ONE YOUNG ADULT, one dear member of our young church, and one babe in arms (fast asleep) were baptised in Bramhall this morning, a joyful occasion for all involved, and one of hundreds of such events taking place today all over the world. Church is changing today as she has changed and changed again across 2000 years since the advent on earth of Jesus of Nazareth but, come what may, still there are millions who answer the call to “shine as lights in the world”. I suspect that Jesus would be less inclined to call these people “Christians” and more inclined to celebrate their being “fully human”. And that flags up an invitation to all of us – to celebrate light shining in the world wherever it is found, in “fully human” persons of whatever gender, nationality, religious persuasion or lack thereof. Such celebrations are invariably Really Good News.
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REDEEMING CHRISTIAN CONCEPTS
Jacob Needleman – in (excellent) conversation with Dean Alan Jones, here
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CHRISTOPHER PAGE at In a spacious place wrote yesterday of Jacob Needleman, Professor of philosophy for 5 decades at San Francisco State University
It is not necessary to agree with every aspect of Needleman’s reading of Christian doctrines. The important thing is to see that there may be other ways of looking at some key Christian concepts. Rather than tossing the doctrine, it may be possible to understand it in a new way.
Perhaps most important Needleman suggests two reasons it is difficult for so many people to open to the possibility of seeing Christian concepts in this transformative way.
First, Needleman suggests that in order to see through religious language to the deeper meaning to which the language points, “One has to treat religious language as one would treat a person: you have to learn to listen to what someone is really saying.”
Second, Needleman warns that “To peek behind the wall of language does take some maturity and experience.” So he says, if the concepts of a mystical text seem incomprehensible, or even offensive,
you may need to go live a little more and come back later. It can’t be explained to you any more than music can be explained to you. I can show you melodies and chords and talk about music theory, but that’s not going to enable you to grasp Mozart. The same goes for the deep feeling that connects you to God.
The deeper things of life require patience and time to germinate in the depths of our being. If we allow our reactivity to certain surface irritants in the concepts or language, we risk missing the depth and mystery the spiritual traditions hold for us.
HOW SHALL I SING?
Coe Fen from Salisbury
ONE OF OUR ORDINANDS has been longing to get up to Durham for Evensong in the Cathedral there for weeks. Rachael Elizabeth has described the experience (happily on St Cuthbert’s Day) as “cloaked in a golden embrace” – and was thrilled then, and will be again, by a hymn we’ll sing here on Sunday – John Mason’s How Shall I Sing That Majesty? sung to Ken Naylor’s Coe Fen. Huddersfield Choral Society have recorded the hymn and an mp3 is here. I play Winchester Cathedral’s version from Hymns and Psalms Volume 2 constantly. It’s available here.
It’s a question that’s on this parish priest’s heart every day. How shall we sing? How shall the Body of Christ in the 21st century be blessed with resources in hymnody that speak the Word of God for our day? Our theology is a living thing and God speaks “New every morning … our waking and uprising prove”. I’ve written before about some of the hackneyed old stuff – stuffed full of outdated theology – that I believe is positively dangerous in today’s searching and pluralistic society; I’ve written before too of the divisive repetition of carefully selected chunks of Scripture that are then misused to patronise, chastise and exclude. These things will only be replaced, though, when hearts are captured by something that better describes where the people of this contemporary world have got to in their journeying with God and with those many and diverse “others” who make up the one humankind.
The Church of God, like humanity herself, is in the hands of God and will therefore end only if and when God wills it. That’s wholly better news to my eyes and ears than the fulminating “evangelicalism” that bleats on and on about the certain destruction of a Church led by “non-Bible believing liberals”. Dear God help us! They’re not talking good news. There’s nothing truly evangelical about their perpetually prophesying destruction – and wilfully abrogating the responsibility of all human beings for “salvation” by turns either to Jesus of Nazareth or Rowan of Canterbury. The Primate of All Nigeria, in a statement about Archbishop Rowan’s new appointment says
For us, the announcement does not present any opportunity for excitement. It is not good news here, until whoever comes as the next leader pulls back the Communion from the edge of total destruction. To this end, we commit our Church, the Church of Nigeria, (Anglican Communion) to serious fasting and prayers that God will do “a new thing”, in the Communion.
For 2000 years no single person has shown themselves capable of pulling back an entire communion from anything at all. For pity’s sake let’s not burden Rowan’s hapless-even-before-named successor with this pretence of an expectation – only to knock them down when they don’t meet the mark either. Can’t we stretch our imaginations a bit further? Could we stop looking for unique messiahs and archbishops “possessed of unique qualities”? Could we stop insisting that our version of messiah – already come or still awaited – is the one and only – the unique possibility? Couldn’t we “apply our minds to Wisdom”? – recognising from henceforth that Divine Sophia is to be found in every atom and fibre of every created thing? “Consider the lilies of the field …”
Could we rewrite the myth (as it has been rewritten so many times before) so that instead of making scapegoats we shared responsibility, under God, every child, woman and man alive, for the “salvation” of our supremely beautiful but tired and aching world and her humankind?
Jesus has never given me the impression that he was or is chiefly interested in our recognising his personal “uniqueness” (apparently keener on being thought of as “son of man” – one of us – than as “Son of God”) ; never implied that (long after his lifetime) “Bible Believing Christians” and their myths and theologies should take precedence over the primacy of experience in the Life and Love of koinonia. The arms wide-open embrace of Jesus of Nazareth was surely an invitation to all humankind to offer similar self-emptying healing and hospitality – and especially, if an “especially” there was ever to be, for those hitherto consigned to the anguish of life’s margins.
So tonight’s music choosing meeting here in little Bramhall was heartening. 5 people engaged in some depth with a shedload of hymnbooks and tunes. We grappled with what the hymns were trying to say alongside what we believed needed to be said to elucidate the Lectionary and to inspire hearts and souls at worship in the next eight weeks. It’s a tough collaborative exercise. It takes time, effort and forbearance – even choosing how to celebrate Resurrection relevantly, worshipfully and well – but there’s no avoiding the question – Christian people who are liberal and inclusive in heart, soul, mind, body and intention must continue to ask How Shall I Sing? For
Thou art a sea without a shore,
a sun without a sphere;
thy time is now and evermore,
thy place is everywhere.
THE POWER OF A MYTH
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE the power of a myth, advises Diarmaid MacCulloch, a Professor of History of St Cross College, Oxford, towards the end of BBC2′s How God Made The English. (available at iPlayer until 8.59pm 7th April 2012)
THE BBC writes: Professor MacCulloch chronicles the roots of the idea that the English think themselves better than others and duty-bound to play a leading role in world affairs. He argues that the roots of this attitude lie in a tangle of religious motives. He traces its origins to the notion of a ‘chosen people’ – a Biblical idea which the monk and historian, the Venerable Bede, took lock, stock and barrel from the Jewish scriptures and applied to the early English.
This is fascinating and, I believe, salutary viewing. Enough material in this hour long programme for a Decade of Lent Courses! Professor MacCulloch, a wholly engaging presenter, has described himself as “a candid friend of Christianity”, but has moved away from an earlier Anglican “orthodoxy”. Fascinating, salutary and also important viewing for 21st century English Christians because the “tangle of religious motives” here presented requires some untangling!
The “received Christianity” that some forms of “orthodoxy” hang on to for dear life needs constantly to be reassessed in the ever changing light of historical perspective sharpened with hindsight. The proper exercise of untangling myths – seeking to understand their power and worth in our narrative, whilst at the same time being appraised of their destructive potential – is a task, I believe, of crucial importance. Thinking of men like Pope John XXIII, John Robinson and Richard Holloway – to name but a few – reminds me that the Church does not always show herself overly fond of those who set about the untangling task, though some of them are supremely good at it. Excitingly, television of this standard and quality is one of the most potent resources we have at our disposal to do just such a work. Still more excitingly for this English parish priest is the possibility that a “Church of England in (much reported) Crisis” might, for that reason alone, be nudged and encouraged into doing some of the necessary untangling.
We need a new myth so that in our day, as yesterday, the eyes of the blind (mine, and those of other churchmen and women) might be opened to fresh vision, and that the restoring and reconciling word and works of Jesus of Nazareth might yet be brought to deep fruition in us: “You will see greater works than these” (John 14.12) – for, like him, we’re all “going to the Father” – to the Mother and Father of everything that is.
Archbishop Rowan, speaking to the Press Association the other day, said:
Over the last few years, there have been all kinds of ideas about the Church, about the faith, which I have longed for more time to explore and write up a bit. So I’m hoping for more space to write and to think in that way.
So, all is not lost. Even the exhausting Archbishopric of Canterbury will not have prevailed over the life and soul of this pilgrim, and the richness of humanity is seen as pure gift in Diarmaid MacCulloch’s willingness to explore – before the very eyes of a million armchair critics.
Men and women in our time “seek peace and pursue it”. Letting go of one myth, and then another and another – grateful for all that they have taught and graced us with in their time – leads us on into the light of another and another until all our humankind has been set free, and all the fullness of God is seen in us and in all creation’s having evolved, “from glory into glory”, into all that mothering Wisdom herself has – over aeons – untangled us to be.
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40 YEARS AGO
ON THE FEAST OF ST PATRICK, forty years ago today, I was presented by my parish priest, Warwick Ariel Jones, for Confirmation by Gerald Alexander Ellison, Lord Bishop of Chester, at St Mark, Claughton. I remember the occasion clearly, can recall fellow candidates, Sunday School lessons, training as an altar server, chorister and lector, and some of the Confirmation preparation sessions – if not quite all of the content!
I remember the encouragement from my parents, grandparents, godparents, uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins, headmaster and school-teachers – on “your special day”. I remember the little party afterwards and the wonderful scent of the brand new, boxed, black leather-bound copy of The New English Bible that was the gift of my parents. And I realise, forty years on, plain as a pike-staff, that the debt we owe to those who have mothered us in the faith is quite simply incalculable.
My then bishop and his successor, my parish priest and many of the fellow pilgrims of my youth, are now in the nearer and deeper presence of the Fount and Source of all of our lives. Little did I know on St Patrick’s Day in 1972 that eucharistic worship ever after would bring me into conscious awareness of the continuing presence in my life of all such saints.
I’m not sure I fully understood in 1972 what Resurrection really means – and I know in 2012 that higher, deeper, broader and wider understanding is yet to be revealed. Nevertheless I’ve lived enough resurrection to know that our Easter celebration is precisely about all that I’ve been recalling.
Our approaching Easter celebration is about Life – that of Jesus of Nazareth, and that of each and every member of our humankind – your life and mine. Easter is about the reality of our being eternally drawn, every one of us who live – or who ever lived – in this world, home to the fullness of the Heart of Love from Whom we came, and in Whom we live now and forever.
Confirmation, by The Right Reverend Gerald Alexander Ellison, Lord Bishop of Chester
St Mark Claughton, St Patrick’s Day, Friday 17 March 1972
this photograph made on Sunday 19 March 1972 by Churchwarden Miss Joan Gray
LtoR back: Alan Morris, Phyllis Kell, Helen Whitehead, The Reverend Warwick Ariel Jones, Elaine Peers, Julie Barker, Paul Fryer, front: Simon Marsh, Paul Cooper & Peter Lloyd
