Shaking my fist at the heavens

Julian Barker

(tw: suicide)

 This is the story of an incident which gave a fresh dimension to my understanding of the Christian faith. 

 In the late 1960s I was Chaplain of Clare College.  In place of evensong on the last Sunday of the Lent term, as Passion Sunday and Good Friday approached, I got together with the organ scholar (John Rutter) and we compiled a service of readings and music which led up to the crucifixion.  The structure was a bit like a Carol Service.  Starting in the Old Testament the readings led through to the predictions and finally to the awful reality of the crucifixion.  I chose the Bible passages and John chose the choral pieces and hymns to fit in with them. 

 That Sunday afternoon I felt that all was ready for the evening.  I had rehearsed the readers and John had the choir well prepared.  So I decided to go and call on my very close friends Jock and Pauley Burnet who lived in Selwyn Gardens, just off Grange Road.  Jock was Bursar of Magdalene and Pauley was, among other things, a trainer of Samaritans and churchwarden St Mark’s in Newnham.  On most Sundays in term they would give a lunch for a dozen or so undergraduates and other young people which led to the formation of many friendships. 

 When I arrived at the house it was in complete darkness so I thought they must be out.  However I tried the door anyway and it was unlocked, so I walked in and went into the drawing room where I found them sitting together in silent tears on the sofa as the light faded.  They had been out to lunch with friends and had come back to find that their son Martin had committed suicide.  What is there that anyone can say?  I sat with them, mostly in silence, for an hour or two until the time came when I had to get back to college to take the service. 

 As I walked down Sidgwick Avenue and along the Backs I felt a growing surge of fury at the Almighty.  ‘How could you let something so awful happen to people so good and caring?’  It was an outrage.  As I turned into the avenue up to Clare I was almost literally shaking my fist at the heavens and shouting with anger at the so-called God of love. 

 Then I robed and followed the choir into Chapel with the anger still surging.  It was one of those services in which the priest has little part to play apart from an introduction and saying prayers and a blessing at the end.  This meant that there was nothing at all to distract me from following the pattern of the readings and the music as it led on towards its climax in the crucifixion.  And as that drew nearer I became increasingly aware that the God at whom I was shaking my fist was there in human terms as the figure on the cross, sharing in all the worst that humans can suffer and dying of torture. 

 So my mental fist began to drop as I realised that it was wholly inappropriate.  The free will we have been given can lead to terrible things.  God doesn’t stop them but he shares to the utmost in our suffering.  That is one of the greatest truths we must understand as Passion Sunday and Good Friday confront us. 

The Overtakelessness of the Cross

Shanti Daffern

1.

 I don’t like talking or thinking or writing or praying about the Crucifixion. I find it awkward, alarming, affronting. But I keep coming back, insistently, to the foot of the Cross.

 I find it hard to keep my gaze here: on Christ crucified. My thoughts – if I try to grapple with the theology – tangle and overstretch and confuse themselves. My speaking turns to platitude. The emotion – if I feel it – is unbearable. More often, though, I want to ask with Christina Rossetti:

            Am I a stone, and not a sheep,

            That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,

            To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,

            And yet not weep?

 Much of the time, a sort of gentle evasion of the Crucifixion is possible – and I don’t think I’m alone in that. It’s less possible on Good Friday.  The Cross stands stark before us.

 I don’t like talking about the Crucifixion, I said, but the Holy Spirit likes to confront me – and knows I need my signs in billboard-huge, neon letters - so last year I found myself asked to preach at a parish in Oxford on Good Friday, my first Good Friday as a baptised Christian. An overlong, hour-long draft, some books, even a virtually delivered sermon later – and I was still stuck, even while I had spoken; fastened, even while I had fed. I was not just gazing on the Cross, or averting my eyes, but held in the gaze of the crucified and risen Christ.

 Writing this reflection, I found myself wanting to adapt last year’s meditation into five hundred coherent, reflective words, because those words, at least, were fixed on paper. It didn’t work. Something else came instead.  

 ‘Overtakelessness’ is a word the poet Anne Carson uses about grief is her elegy-thesaurus-artefact Nox. ‘Overtakelessness: from Das unumgängliche – that which cannot be got round. Cannot be avoided or seen to the back of. And about which one collects facts [or words] – it remains beyond them’.

 I have been a long time in collecting things at the foot of the Cross. I email out, daily, a collected painting, a poem and a piece of music for Lent and Holy Week. I walked down the Via Dolorosa with a group of Roman Catholics, singing and praying. I sought out art made for the fourteen stations of the Cross across fourteen churches in Piran, Slovenia. For a long time I wasn’t a Christian: I still collected poems and arguments about the Cross. The only crucial thing – to take the word’s older meaning, literally ‘cross-shaped’ – to say is that when I became a Christian, it was Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection that did it.

 The overtakelessness is all: that which cannot be got round.

 We cannot go from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday except via Good Friday. The Cross cannot be evaded – or seen to the back of. You can stop reading now, five hundred words end with this sentence: stay with that which cannot be got round.

2.

 ‘about which one collects [words] – it remains beyond them’*

 The overtakelessness is all: that which cannot be got round. We cannot go from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday except via Good Friday. Via Crucis. Crux probat omnia. What God did about human sin is extremely surprising. Christ’s death on the Cross is death’s undoing; Christ’s shame on the Cross is shame’s undoing. Meanwhile a silence on the cross as dead as we shall ever be. At the still centre of Good Friday, nothing is easy, nothing is sentimental, our faith is hard as nails. This death is huge and it is human-sized. Christ’s death shakes the cosmos and it is the size of a death. To live in the Mercy of God. The complete sentence too adequate, has no give. We do not single this agony out, from all, but God singles Himself out, to bear all. My life was the size of my life. Its rooms were room-sized, its soul was the size of a soul. We do not need to say that God suffers as God to affirm that He stands with us in suffering: because this is what He does, through the incarnation, in Jesus Christ on the Cross. Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long. But I did not understand why Christians would single out this one death among so many, or how a religion with a God who became man at its centre was anything other than patriarchal, anthropocentric wish fulfilment. Still falls the Rain. At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross. Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us. Anne Carson uses the word overtakelessness of any – of every? – grief. And yet not weep? God can be God without us, but he chooses to be God with us. God is love within His own three-personed self and He is love toward us as we see His action in the Son’s incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection. The Cross is scandalous, offensive, un-aesthetic. What may I say? Here might I stay and sing. We still look up at this God, who became Man for us; this Cross, where Christ died for us; this God, who is never changing in His love for us, which is overflowing, which is endless, which is mercy. Because this is what the mercy of God looks like: the Passion of Jesus Christ: and this is simply too giving of itself to be adequate to our words. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Oh sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.               

*Most of these words are mine, no longer strung together but left to scatter. Many aren’t mine: you might recognise some. I can give you the sources if you wish. Perhaps something gets stuck or sticks for you: for I cannot say in five hundred words something that gets around, that gets to the back of the Crucifixion.

The Agony

Richard Ames-Lewis

In this painting, the artist Giovanni Bellini has depicted the Biblical narrative of Mark 14.32-43. He has been faithful to the details of the story but has placed the event in a setting which is his own invention and invested the scene with an emotional and symbolic power.

 Bellini was working in Venice in the middle of the 15th century at a time of great change. Old political structures and religious certainties were giving place to a new secularism. This painting was not intended for a church altarpiece, but as a devotional aid for a wealthy merchant, and this released Bellini from conventional iconography to an entirely new interpretation. At the same time the newly discovered medium of oil paint, more flexible than old egg-tempura, gave him new freedom of expression and use of colour.

 In the painting we see, as St Mark’s account outlines, Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. He has “thrown himself on the ground,” and is looking up into the sky at the figure of an angel carrying a cup. He is praying, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet not what I want but what you want.” His disciples, Peter, James and John are sleeping, “for their eyes were very heavy.” In the centre background, we can see “my betrayer is at hand”: there is Judas, leading a procession of soldiers “armed with swords and clubs”.

 Bellini places Gethsemane in a wide, sculpted, landscape. Jerusalem appears as three Italian hill towns, each with its church. Jesus prays on a hillock which appears to rise up to support him, almost like a prayer desk. The three disciples lie on their own bank in various postures of sleep, with St Peter, on the right, an exercise in foreshortening. The warm dawn light coming from the left illuminates the scene and picks out the figure of Jesus. Pink clouds hang in a beautiful dawn sky, and the angel carrying the cup seems to be part of the cloudscape.

 But there is a foreboding quality. A large part of the hill on the left has been sheared away, like a quarry, despoiling the scene. A lone, dead tree in the foreground prefigures the cross of sacrifice, and a wicket fence to the right, surrounding the garden, made of interwoven stakes, is a haunting reminder of the crown of thorns. Judas and his cruel procession are making their way towards the garden. They will cross a bridge over a stream, and their crossing is an irrevocable act of betrayal and violence.

 Jesus is in agony as he prays in the garden, and the surrounding landscape seems to be in agony with him, all the elements subject to the same coming sacrifice.

Easter will still come

Nicolas Bell

Easter Hymn, A E Housman

 If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

 But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

 It is surely anomalous to choose an Easter Hymn for a Lenten reflection, but these verses by A. E. Housman fall completely outside the songs of joy to which such a title would more normally be attached. Lent is a time for questioning, and the two sentences which comprise this poem leave many questions open.

 We are effectively presented with only two scenarios, each of them seemingly devoid of hope. If the reason for all the hatred in the world today is that we are still awaiting the full promise of the resurrection, then Christ’s death must have been in vain. The first verse ends all too acerbically, ‘Sleep well and see no morning’, with the Son of Man denigrated to become a mere son of man. But the second verse presents at least a glint of the possibility of salvation. If all the narrative of the Passion has meaning, then we can only plead for the Second Coming to be soon.

 Much of Housman’s verse is nihilistic, though he is rarely as apocalyptic as here. In the first verse he seems not only to be apportioning blame to Christ for compounding the devastation wrought by wars of religion, but also to be chastising him for not even imagining these consequences in dreams. This anger moves to bitter resignation in the second verse, that Christ’s death must be futile if nothing can be done to quench the smoke and fire that surrounds us today. For a brief while, the poet seems to have some sympathy with Christ’s ‘agony and bloody sweat’, but any such feeling is removed by the final command, ‘Bow hither out of heaven’ – a strangely presumptuous turn of phrase. Christ is asked to ‘bow out’, to take his last bow from sitting ‘at the right hand of majesty on high’, but also to ‘bow hither’, to lower himself from that position of majesty ‘and see and save’.

 There is much anger in this poem, but maybe after all there is some hope too. Too often it is easier to let the catastrophes which envelop our lives today overwhelm any notice of the advancements from which we all benefit. But Christ’s Cross and Passion were not in vain, and the fulfilment of the Easter promise will still come to us, provided that we never cease to yearn for it.

A Small Hint of Joy

Steve Jullien

This Ash Wednesday marks the 20th anniversary of my first service as a chorister. My parents have strange memories of the occasion. I was in the choir stalls, all robed up, whilst they were looking after my younger sister, who was sleeping in the pew.

 The anthem that evening was a setting of Ave Verum Corpus by William Byrd (1543-1623). It is a fitting communion motet as it is a Eucharistic chant, dating from the 13th century, and Byrd’s is just one of several settings. Whereas other popular versions, such as those by Elgar and Mozart, have an organ accompaniment, Byrd’s version is a cappella. Unlike Elgar and Mozart, Byrd also chooses a minor key. On the surface, this might appear to be a depressing choice, when many of us look to be uplifted by music in our worship. However, I find that the starkness of the piece always sends shivers down my spine. It also feels like a fitting setting for this Lent: not only are we entering a penitential season, but one where our lives have been stripped back drastically over the past year. We have been forced to slow down.

Byrd’s setting echoes this. Rather than rattling through the words, Byrd draws out the opening Ave phrase with long, sustained notes.  Here, we are invited to stop and contemplate the presence of Christ in our lives. As Byrd was writing before musical dynamics as we know them were conceived, there are no official directions for volume and so it is open to our own interpretation as to how we approach the words and music. If I’m directing the piece, I like to fill those opening Ave notes with crescendos and diminuendos, giving the sense that Christ remains present throughout the various crescendos and diminuendos of our own lives.

The middle section of the piece is centred around Christ’s suffering on the Cross and our redemption, and this is often the section where directors choose to have the loudest dynamic. Whilst I like the drama of the middle section, with its moving parts, I find the final section the most striking. This section is repeated and focuses on our own relationship with Jesus. As an adult bass singer, I feel this connection most strongly through the long, deep notes on o dulcis, o pie: a way of expressing love for the person of Jesus Christ.

Although my first Lent began with a serious service and sleeping children, it ended with a joyful Easter service and children chasing an Easter egg down the aisle! Whilst Byrd’s piece is nearly all minor, he ends on a major chord. Amidst the seriousness of the piece, there is a small hint of joy. Indeed, we know that after the seriousness of the Crucifixion, there is the joy of the Resurrection. So, in this starkest of Lents, let us allow ourselves to stop and recognise our relationship with Christ, whatever that may look like, and to look forward to the hope of Easter.

Ave verum corpus,
Natum de Maria virgine;
Vere passum immolatum
In crucis pro homine.
Cuius latus perforatum
Unda fluxit sanguine.
Esto nobis praegustatum
In mortis examine.
O dulcis, o pie,
O Jesu Fili Mariae,
Miserere mei. Amen.

Hail, true body,
Born of the virgin Mary;
Who has truly suffered, sacrificed
On the Cross for humanity.
Whose side was pierced,
Pouring out water and blood.
Be a foretaste for us
During our ordeal of death.
O sweet, o holy,
O Jesus Son of Mary,
Have mercy on me. Amen.

(Translation adapted from emmanuelmusic.org)

The Fragrance of her Perfume

Lesley Warren

Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, ‘Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?’ (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.’

John 12.1-8

The sisters Mary and Martha and their brother, Lazarus, appear in all four Gospels and seem to embody the life of faith. It was when he was a guest in their home in Bethany that ‘Mary sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying.’

Jesus answered Martha’s reproach of her sister Mary, for not helping with the work of hospitality: ‘Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’

In John 12 it is Mary’s complete absorption in his message, in what she obviously recognises as Jesus’ last days, and her devotion in providing the materials with which to anoint him for his burial that are compelling. She is the still point amid the bustle of a meal and its surrounding conversation. Unselfconsciously she performs the menial task of washing a guest’s feet and makes the shocking choice of uncovering and untying her hair to do so.

In all four gospels Mary’s devotion to Our Lord is apparent in the humility and extravagance of her action. Matthew describes ‘the disciples’ and Mark ‘some who were there’ as being angry and reproaching Mary for ‘this waste’. That amount of nard would have cost the equivalent of a year’s wages for an ordinary working man. Luke’s account has the host privately scorning Jesus for not recognising ‘what sort of woman this is’ but in all three gospels Mary’s actions are defended and Jesus declares that her actions ‘will be told of her’. All four gospels record an account of a woman anointing Jesus but there are differences between them and only in John is she named Mary.

The context of this story is interesting. In chapter 11, John has described the raising of Lazarus and Martha intervening with, ‘Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead for four days.’

In the next chapter of his gospel John recounts the action of Our Lord in washing the disciples’ feet before the Last Supper:  ‘If I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.’

‘A new commandment… that you love one another as I have loved you.’

Jesus loves his disciples such that he – their Lord and Master - did not avoid even the menial task of washing their feet. 

And the next day he died for us. 

Smells are evocative: from the myrrh and frankincense over which Our Lady pondered, through this account, to our use of incense for holiness in worship.

There is no mention of the smell of Mary’s nard in any other than John’s gospel where ‘The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.’

Not my will but yours

Sarah West

When Jesus was asked by the disciples to teach them to pray, he gave them 70 words that form the one prayer every Christian knows off by heart because we pray it every day. However, do we know this prayer so well that some of the words have lost their meaning? Are we praying these phrases intentionally?

Jesus tells us not to “heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do”, but when you know the words so well that they trip off the tongue of their own accord, empty phrases are exactly what they can become.

I think that it is helpful to first explore who we think we are praying to. The Lord’s prayer is also known as the Our Father, and it is these two words that put the rest of the prayer into context. The intimacy of the word Father, is more than creator, it reflects a sense of relationship and ongoing care about our wellbeing, a sense of being known and loved. Praying to the Father reminds us that we are all children before him. Furthermore, we pray to Our Father, not ‘My’ Father. We are not an only child, we have brothers and sisters. In two words, we express our belonging to God’s family and our fellowship with everyone else. It portrays something of the character of God, which is important when considering the phrase that has caught my attention recently:

“Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”.  

I wonder how often we say these words without really thinking about what this means. You could read it as God will prevail, without any action required from us. Or as an extension of the previous line: thy Kingdom come, as the fulfilment of God’s will. Or is there more to it than that? Does praying for God’s will to be done call us to get on board and participate, rather than just let it happen?

We say “Thy will be done”, but how often do we actually pray about “My will be done”. When we pray we ask for the thing that we want to happen and it’s difficult not to feel let down when God does not show up in the way we want or expect and our prayers seem to go unanswered. It is easy to get confused between our own will and the will of God. It is difficult to hear and discern God’s voice amongst all the noise and distractions of this life, to make space for God in the busyness of our minds.

On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus prays the same words that he taught the disciples earlier. “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). This is Jesus’ obedient surrender to his calling.

Thy will be done, is a challenging thing to pray intentionally. Even if we do think we know God’s will or sense what we are being called to, it can be a difficult thing to obey. It requires letting go, and putting aside our own need to be in control or our ego. It helps to remember who we are praying to, Our Father, who sees, knows and loves us, who calls us by name, and to whom it is right to pray ‘thy will be done’.

God, grant me the humility to still my own thoughts, the attentiveness to hear your word, and the courage to obey your will. Amen.

Truth

Julian Allwood

2020 was a punishing year for the word “Truth.” After President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, a journalist asked his press secretary Jen Psaki if her priority was to promote the interests of President Biden, or to provide “the unvarnished truth.” But 2020 showed us just how implausible this question is. The “unvarnished truth” about the virus changed throughout 2020, as our understanding and experience evolved. Many experts contributed well-evidenced insights with care, but none had sufficient foresight to describe a “truth” that would last in time. The “unvarnished truth” about Brexit is still far from clear. The predictions made ahead of the referendum by both sides have not yet been borne out, and the long-term consequences of Brexit will never be “unvarnished” as they will be revealed in the context of parallel stories, not least the pandemic. The “unvarnished truth” of the US election revealed like no previous event, how our tendency to read only the news stories that reinforce our existing positions allows a wide divergence in sincerely held beliefs about the “truth” amplified by our pride in justifying our own choices.

The alluring goal of a single “unvarnished truth” is an unattainable chimera. “Truth” evolves in time, is inseparable from its context and is coloured by pre-conceptions. This is challenging to my engineering background, where we teach a single “truth” based on the extent to which the blue-line of experimental measurement matches the red-line of mathematical prediction on a graph. And the history of Christianity reveals how, just as with the virus, Brexit and the US election, multiple and conflicting perspectives have been held up as Christian justification for actions that we now see as misguided, mistaken, irrelevant harmful or at worst, evil. “Unvarnished morality” is as tempting but impossible as “unvarnished truth.”

 In seeking any certainty about Christian truth, we have more chance to recognise wrong than right – what I understand has been called the “Via Negativa”. Eight of the Ten Commandments proscribe rather than prescribe, and our main knowledge of Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness is that he rejected the temptations of the Devil.

There cannot be an “unvarnished truth” about how to express our faith in our life choices. But, as experience and insight sharpen our understanding of what not to do and strengthen our resolve to resist it, the unique truth on which we can pin our Christian identity, is the offer of forgiveness for the wrong steps on our journey of attempt.

In the moment

Andrea Harrison

Read: I am a little church, ee cummings

St Enodoc, Trebetherick, Cornwall

The voice in this poem is that of a ‘little church’ situated away from ‘the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities.’ The church is ‘at peace with nature’ and ‘the shortening or lengthening days, sun and rain’. It awakes to ‘a perfect patience of mountains’. This might suggest a retreat from the often harsh realities of life but the prayers of the ‘little church’ are those of ‘earth’s own clumsily striving (finding and losing and laughing and crying)children.’ The ‘little church’ is content to be in the moment, whatever that might be, a rather pertinent hope for many of us in this third national lockdown.

 For the last 20 years (excepting 2020) our extended family has taken a holiday together on the north Cornish coast. There is a walk from Rock beach to Polzeath over the cliffs and around Brae Hill that I love. In many ways the walk represents a place of escape or retreat for me and not being able to go made me long for it even more last year. About halfway along the walk, situated in the wind-swept dunes, is St Enodoc church. No road leads to it and the dunes on two sides are almost level with the building. It is easy to miss as you walk the coastal path but then suddenly the crooked spire comes into view. John Betjeman is buried in the churchyard and he made the church famous in his poem Sunday Afternoon Service in St Enodoc Church, Cornwall:

 Come on! Come on! This hillock
Hides the spire,
Now that one and now none.

 For hundreds of years the church was almost entirely hidden, buried in those sand dunes, until it was excavated in the mid nineteenth century. The setting seems idyllic but for a long time being in the moment was being almost submerged by sands whipped up from the North Atlantic winds.

 The passing of time during this pandemic will have been experienced differently for each of us but perhaps the feeling that days are blurred is probably common to many.  And for some it’s been a bleak time. The spire of E ee cummings’s ‘little church’ lifts to ‘merciful Him whose only now is forever’ and so we can be reminded of the ‘deathless truth’ and timelessness of God’s promise to be with us always, however we experience this time.

 The spire in this poem and the spire of St Enodoc’s are ‘diminutive’ but nonetheless they are a witness to God, pointing heavenward and ‘welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness’. In reflection I wonder about our witness during this Lent.

The Return of the Prodigal

Caroline Brownlie

I’d like to link this painting and its powerful if already familiar image, with some words of Julian of Norwich which usually come to me as Lent approaches… and I paraphrase…

“keep your sin in proportion, because God’s mercy is always infinitely more important” … and this is confirmed by some sound teaching on the gradual development of Lenten practice in the early Church… Lent (and Advent to a lesser and secondary extent) began to be practised as giving the Church ‘time’ (both chronological and purposeful) to reflect on the mystery of God’s greatest acts and their purpose in the life of believers… the mystery of the Cross and their developing belief that it somehow freed us from the burden of all that is evil and wrong in ourselves and our world. They came to see Jesus giving his human life over to a death like ours as an expression of God’s overwhelming and unconditional love, for us as individuals within the human race. Gradually, the penitential aspects which we inherit came into focus, but always as the response to Christian’s belief in the love and mercy of God. Psychology has taught us that children can be helped to face wrongdoing if they know they are loved first…

Is this what we see in this painting? It wasn’t that the son hadn’t betrayed and let down his father, or brought about the jealous brother’s anger and envy; it was that in the end, what redeemed him in his father’s eyes was the overwhelming love that we hear about in the story; and his father saw him while he was still a long way off, and ran to meet and embrace him. It is as if the son needs the grace of his father’s love in order to truly feel his own responsibility and to humbly accept the embrace he is given, as we see here, with bowed head; as a young prisoner in a group of women with whom I worked noticed, “with his bare feet and worn sandals miss, he must have walked a bloody long way”.

I have squirmed and been humbled to receive someone’s real forgiveness knowing I didn’t deserve it, but Rembrandt can remind us that, with post Reformation theology still ringing in many of our ears, we need to put our real sin and responsibility in their place, as Julian says and turn to God as the prodigal son did, knowing what he needed in that moment and experiencing just how much more important his father’s love was than his misdemeanours.

So Lent can be our opportunity as the early Church discovered, to reflect on the revelation of God’s love, and to rejoice humbly that it is unconditional, making it possible for the Spirit to ‘reveal our unwitting sins’, and ‘the greatness of (your) mercy’, and reminding us that we can look fearlessly towards God, the source of all our good.

Good Trouble

Alexander Massmann

Biblical scholars famously describe the Gospel of Mark as a ‘Passion story with an elaborate introduction’. It appears to be a story full of trouble. However, in my copy of the Bible, Mark narrates the events of Holy Week on only four pages (Mark 14–15), out of the Gospel’s entirety of twenty-four pages. A lot of things take place before the Passion – certainly more than a mere introduction. How do those other stories figure in our account of who Jesus is? Can the cross, the classic symbol of the Passion, stand in for his entire life before Easter?

Although exaggerated, the view of Mark as a ‘Passion story with an elaborate introduction’ also captures a grain of truth. The story of Jesus has hardly begun, and already in chapter 3, Mark tells us of an outrageous scheme against him: the religious elites ‘immediately conspired … against him, how to destroy him’ (v. 6). In a quick burst of activity, Jesus had stirred up a lot of dust: he had exorcised a demon from a possessed person, healed four individual people and a smattering of others, including an unclean leper, and he delved right into dicey disputes with the keepers of the law. After his visit with a despised tax collector, the religious leaders see that trouble is brewing: ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ (2.16)

Jesus throws our standards of social respectability into disarray: he attends to those whom we shun; his understanding of established rules is unusual and provocative; and he heals those ill people that society has written off. Jesus also presents himself in bold, extraordinary ways: he is the ‘bridegroom’ at the wedding feast of life, or the enigmatic ‘son of man’. Very often, however, the spotlight is not on himself but on the things he does. He presents his whole life in a nutshell with the words: ‘The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news!’ (1.15)

All of this is indeed good news. However, it is also ‘not the way things are done around here.’ Shake up the customs and unwritten rules of society, and you will reap trouble. Question the governing assumptions about who is ‘in’ and ‘out’ or who settles moral disputes, and people will turn against you. There will be conflict, so it is no coincidence that the ‘good news’ of God’s kingdom implies the call to turn our lives around (‘repent’). Yet many do not follow Jesus’ call, and we hear how a world of trouble will bear down on Jesus. The good news also means trouble.

So we must hold together two things during Lent: Jesus not only endured this trouble, but the trouble arose primarily because of the good news he had already brought. It is good trouble. With forgiveness, healing and the social inclusion of outsiders, things change in the way the community operates; something new is taking place. Jesus is a ‘physician’ who brings healing – socially, mentally and bodily (2.17). His healing benefits ‘those who are sick’: the ill and those considered dishonourable. Mark’s gospel highlights powerfully how God’s kingdom brings deliverance in Jesus’ words and deeds. The entirety of Mark’s gospel is then a passion story, narrating how Jesus remains faithful to this good news, although for him, it spells trouble.

Do you love me?

Christie Gilfeather

At the end of John's gospel, in chapter 21, Jesus asks Peter three times 'do you love me?'

It is a question that cuts to the heart of our faith. In the season of Lent, when we spend time pondering our sin and our deep need of forgiveness and restoration, there is no question more important.

But this Lent is different. The pandemic has made us keenly aware that we are 'but dust'. Our frailty and fragility is on display alongside our failure and sin.

'Do you love me?' Jesus asks each of us.

During the latter part of our journey through Holy Week, we will hear of Peter's denial of Jesus.

Three times he is asked if he is a companion of Jesus, and three times he denies it. The cock crows. He remembers Jesus foretelling of exactly this event. He weeps.

The bitterness of feeling that you have let yourself, those you love and God down is particularly cutting. Most of us have borne the weight of this feeling some time in our lives. Perhaps in this season of Lent we are dwelling with a particularly powerful memory of failure. 

'Do you love me?' Jesus continues to ask us.

The denial is certainly the lowest moment that we read about in Peter's story, and he would be forgiven for thinking that there was no coming back from his denial.

Jesus, however, knew differently.

In John 21 Jesus arrives on a beach while some of his disciples are fishing in the nearby water. He builds a fire, prepares a breakfast of fish and bread. At the same time, he multiplies the yield of their fishing excursion to the point of overwhelming abundance.

Our faith is one which is focussed on several abundances. God's love, mercy and forgiveness are abundant. His mercies are new every morning, or if you like, every breakfast time.

At this particular breakfast, Jesus asks Peter 'do you love me?'

Three times he asks. One for each denial - each one wiped away with Peter's assertion that, yes, he does love Jesus. Each one unburdening Peter of the great failure of his great denial.

—

Pandemics are hard. Lent is hard. Lent in a pandemic is harder.

It is good for us to dwell fully in this period of fasting and praying, remembering that we are 'but dust'. But, in this particular moment, perhaps we need to hold the abundance of God's love and forgiveness which is for us closer than usual in the season of Lent.

The events we have seen in the last year have reminded us in no uncertain terms that we are 'but dust'. Lives lost in numbers beyond comprehension remind us of this inescapable reality.

In many ways, we have experienced a period of perpetual Lent over the last year.

On this journey, then, take extra sustenance for the road. Linger a little longer at breakfast before turning toward the darkness and difficulty of Calvary. Both are present to us. Both are necessary. In both places Jesus continues to ask us 'do you love me?' and both help us to move toward a 'yes Lord', said with our whole hearts.

Unbind him

Lucie Spiers

Standing in the ante-chapel of New College, Oxford is the last major carving by the sculptor Joseph Epstein. A formidable piece capturing the miracle of the raising of Lazarus, this figure holds us in the moment that Jesus calls him out of the grave. Its head is turned as though listening; poised between death and new life, burial and rebirth, at the moment when a heartbeat would spill breath back into him. At first sight, this sculpture captivated me with its uncomfortable tension, presenting us not with a triumphant and rejoicing Lazarus, but a man pinioned, arrested in motion, urgent for life.

In the raising of Lazarus, as we witness Jesus’ divinity, we also see his humanity. This man is the good friend and intimate of Jesus, with whom he and his sisters, Martha and Mary, shared a close relationship. When Lazarus fell ill the women had such faith in Jesus that they called for him to come, ‘he whom you love is ill’.

But Jesus waited two days before he answered their call. He could have prevented the death of Lazarus, but he knew that this illness would not lead to death, instead it was ‘for God’s glory, that the Son of God might be glorified through it’. In this miracle we see prefigured not only the resurrection of Christ but also the new life of each baptism and the resurrection of all. By delaying his arrival, Jesus shares in our intense pain, grief and loss at the death of a loved one, weeping for Lazarus and perhaps for his own journey which will lead him to the cross.

When even in the midst of her grief Martha declares her faith, saying ‘even now, I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him’, Jesus replies ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live.’ He raises Lazarus from the dead, calling loudly, 'Lazarus come out!’ and Lazarus emerges, still wrapped in his grave clothes for Jesus to then say, ‘Unbind him, and let him go’.

Epstein’s sculpture is an unsettling reminder of what Jesus’s followers encountered at Lazarus’ tomb, and the enormity of what they were asked to do. As they do Jesus’ bidding, they overturn the old law, for they touch what is ritually unclean; through this they accept the new law of the new covenant. They act as agents of Lazarus’ release from death, unbinding him from the vestiges of the imprisonment and darkness of the tomb. We too as followers of the risen Christ must seek to liberate others, knowing from experience that we can be ‘dead’ even in the midst of living; hoping for a call to life and a community that will help raise us up.

As we journey through Lent let us pray for all those who grieve, like Martha and Mary, for all that has been lost during this pandemic, and let us pray for ourselves too - what is it that we need to be unbound from? For faith in God will liberate us. Faith in He who called light out of darkness; who calls us, as he did Lazarus, from death to urgent new life.

The God I long to know

David Theaker

‘Praise the Lord, O my soul:
O Lord my God thou art become exceeding glorious;
thou art clothed with majesty and honour.

Thou deckest thyself with light as it were with a garment:
and spreadest out the heavens like a curtain.    Ps 104

How to put into words what no words can truly express?

The Creator              The Immortal                  The Almighty

        Awesome      Glorious      Worshipped     Adored

To whom will you liken me
With whom can you compare me?
I know no one – there is no other.

There is but One worthy of all worth-ship.

 Who do you trust, to whom do you turn?
To the One who is beside you every step of the way, every day of your life. 

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, not to condemn – but to save.
Our God is merciful. 

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in his justice which is more than liberty. 

For the love of God is broader than the measure of man’s mind;
And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.

But we make his love too narrow by false limits of our own;
And we magnify his strictness with a zeal he will not own.

Our God IS Merciful.

You declare your almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity.
You are always more ready to hear than we to pray.

 Last, but by no means least – God is Kind.

 Time and time again the Psalmist tells of the ‘loving-kindness’ of God,
who knows our frailty only too well.

He knows that, in words familiar to me since childhood:

We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done.
We have done those things which we ought not to have done
And there is no health in us.

But God is the One to restore our health and bring us back to his heart of love.

Some 30 years ago, W H Vanstone, parish priest and theologian wrote, in ‘Icons of the Passion’

                            Loving itself is a beginning, an invitation, an offering,

                            For the receiving which it invites but does not compel

                            Love can only wait

                            And to wait no longer is to cease to love.

God does not, cannot, cease to love, it is his essence, nor does he cease to pour upon us his loving-kindness.

He waits for us to see the truth, the life, the love which is in Jesus our Lord.

He stretches out his hand and invites us to his Heavenly Banquet.

The Lion’s Claw

Jacqui Drewe

‘A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful in his reading.’

C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

Some of us will have memories of reading C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia when we were young. Others, like me, did not take tea with Mr. Tumnus in the snowy woods until we were older. Some may have come across the stories for the first time in the recent film series; and some are yet to discover the joy of journeying ‘through the wardrobe’.

Lent is the perfect time to visit – or to revisit – the world of Narnia. At the heart of the stories are themes of repentance and renewal, of children and grown-ups who turn away from fears and self-serving falsehoods to discover the surprising joy of divine Truth. These moments of transformation happen face-to-face with Aslan the Lion, the Christ figure, as the characters discover to their relief that are not alone in facing their fear and darkness. As Archbishop Rowan Williams wrote in The Lion’s World (2012), ‘Lewis is trying to communicate – to a world that frequently knows what faith is – the character, the feel, of a real experience of surrender in the face of absolute incarnate love.’

One scene that has a powerful impact is the story of Eustace and the dragon in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The boy Eustace is sulky and resentful at being whisked away from his comfortable life in Cambridge; he is unwilling or unable to see the ‘magic’ of Narnia and threatens to report the matter to the British consul! When Eustace falls asleep on a pile of enchanted gold with ‘greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart’, he wakes up to discover that he has turned into a dragon.

It is Aslan who comes to the dragon’s aid. Aslan calls for Eustace to follow him, even as Eustace tries to resist his gaze. Aslan leads Eustace to a pool, where Eustace begins to peel off the scaly outer layer of his dragon skin as one getting undressed to bathe. He peels off layer after layer, but to no avail. He realises he cannot do it without Aslan’s help. And being ‘near desperate by now’, Eustace lies down and surrenders to the Lion’s claws. The pain Eustace feels as his deepest layers are peeled away is ‘worse than anything.’ But the pain disappears when he is tossed into the pool and gently reclothed by Aslan. Eustace is human again.

As well as the rich baptismal imagery, the significance of this scene is that the rediscovery of human identity is not something we can do in our own strength. ‘How many skins do I have to take off?’ asks Eustace. We cannot answer that for ourselves. ‘We can only signal that we want help to be stripped in that way,’ as Rowan Williams writes. Aslan cannot protect us from the pain that this entails, or the discomfort of baring our ‘self’ in the presence of complete Truthfulness. But any attempt at self-understanding is necessarily limited without it. It is only in relation to that Truth that we can be said to have a real self.

Lent is the season to submit ourselves anew to a real experience of surrender in the face of absolute incarnate love. ‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; The old has passed away; behold, the new has come!’ (2 Cor. 5:17) As Eustace learned, this ‘renewal’, the liberation of our human identity from all that is not life-giving – from darkness, from dehumanising greed, from doubt and fear and shame – is not something we can ‘achieve’ for ourselves. There is only the grace of Aslan, and our willingness to follow his call. There is only the love of Christ, and our readiness to meet him face to face. 

—

Narnia quotes from C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (London: Harper Collins, 2015, p. 85-87)

Undeserved Redemption

Heather Hutchings

Bless the Lord, my soul.
And bless God’s holy name.
Bless the Lord, my soul,
Who leads me into life.

It is God who forgives all your sins,
Who heals every one of your ills,
Who redeems your life from the grave,
Who crowns you with love and compassion.

The Lord is compassion and love,
Slow to anger and rich in mercy.
God does not treat us according to our sins,
Nor condemn us according to our faults.

As a father has compassion on his children,
The Lord has pity on those who fear him.
For God knows of what we are made:
God remembers that we are dust.

Bless the Lord, my soul, a setting of Psalm 103, has been my favourite Taizé song ever since I first encountered it several years ago. The peaceful chant and pretty counter-melodies make it a beautiful piece of music to sing, yet it has always been the rich theology in the verses that struck me.

In the first verse, we are reminded of our dependency. Personally, I find it can be all too easy to rely on our own resources in life, forgetting to look to God. It is even sometimes tempting to think that we might earn salvation and love by our own actions or strength of faith. But any such attempt is both misguided and impossible. We can never do enough to earn redemption: it is God alone who saves us.

In the second verse, we are reassured that we are not condemned or punished, despite our inadequacies. We need not fear judgement nor be crippled by guilt for our own failures, because God is merciful and forgiving. I find this a comforting thought.

And then we come to the third verse, with its exultant conclusion: For God knows of what we are made / God remembers that we are dust. Perhaps naïvely, I initially struggled to reconcile these lines with the rest of the piece. It always seemed to me incongruous, or at least irrelevant, to pair the reassurance of God’s care for us with a reminder of human mortality. It is only upon more recent reflection that I have realised that this final couplet does indeed belong. Our condition as creatures of dust is intimately connected to God’s compassion towards us.

We are imperfect creatures, limited by our very nature. We will always face temptation and we will often fail. Yet the Father who formed us understands our weakness and regards it with compassion. We are dust, and God loves us not in spite of but because of it.

Indeed, it is in our very imperfection that Jesus comes to meet us, becoming like us a creature of dust to experience our frailty face-to-face. In Lent we walk with Jesus in the wilderness. Or rather, he walks with us in our wilderness, as he came to do. The Son of God comes to share our temptations, to overcome them by his own perfection and, ultimately, by his sacrifice on the cross.

And so with the psalmist we praise the Lord, grateful that He understands us in and rescues us from our weakness, and we look to Easter with its promise of undeserved redemption.

A Voice in the Wilderness

Geoff Maitland

In thinking about the wilderness many of us will have experienced since Lent last year, as a result of coronavirus and the restrictions it has brought, a song from 1960 by Cliff Richard came to mind.  It is a song of lost love, of regret, of apology and forgiveness. It tells a very human story with a haunting melody – give it a listen above – but the words that always stick with me are:

And though there was no one, nobody to see,
A voice in the wilderness brought comfort to me;
Believe me and you’ll hear it, the voice from above,
A voice in the wilderness, the voice of true love.

 The wilderness can be lonely and dark but ultimately it can be the road to light and love.  So as I sit down to write in the midst of our third Coronavirus Lockdown, I reflect on the devastation that has been wrought by Covid-19 over the past year and ask ‘What light can we find amidst all this darkness?’.

 In our journey through Lent during ‘normal’ times, amidst the hurly-burly of everyday life we would aim to set time aside for personal reflection and self-examination, and maybe imagine the solitude of our Lord in the wilderness as he prepared himself for his ministry and for his ultimate sacrifice.  This year, there is no shortage of time to ourselves, trapped in our own version of ‘Not Going Out’, and we are experiencing that solitude with Him. There have been ups and downs of course, but for long periods we have been isolated on our own extended retreats.  So perhaps this year we do not need to think too much about what to do without, or to do differently, to bring us closer to Christ as we travel with him through the wasteland on the way to the cross.  This has been a year of personal and collective sacrifices and deprivations; so perhaps we can build on these for our Lenten journey.  How does Christ’s light shine through our darkness in lockdown?  I have picked out three rays of hope.

One shining light has been how so many people are helping each other to get through this - how in isolation and our socially distanced world we have been surrounded by so many examples of people caring for one another and of communities coming together.  From the front-line workers in the NHS and key services working to exhaustion to save lives, to neighbours helping with shopping, door-stepping for a chat or picking up the phone to check on people unable to get out – we have all seen or experienced ‘love thy neighbour’ in action.  By being apart and experiencing what that means, we see more clearly what others may be experiencing all the time.  Coronavirus has been a great leveller; we are all in this together and for so many the priority has been looking after each other, physically and mentally.  The focus on self has changed to how we as a community cope and survive.  So one legacy of all this will hopefully be a greater awareness of the mutual value of caring and how many different ways we can care for each other.  Lent helps us see how important a part prayer plays in this as well.

Another beacon shines a bit more in the distance – what might happen as and when we all emerge from this? We all comment that the world will not go back to where it was – is it too much to hope that ‘every nation may be directed in the ways of justice and peace, that we may honour one another and seek the common good’? The opportunity for the world to re-set arises rarely – is it too much to expect that, as in the 1950s, the 2020s will see a re-setting of the world, a chance for the fruits of the Kingdom to have greater visibility here on earth?  Just dream for a moment: a more caring society which seeks the common good, between cultures and between nations; justice and reconciliation starting here at home let alone in countries torn by oppression and strife; a global determination to prevent catastrophic climate change and embrace the sustainable stewardship of our planet and its resources - clean water, sufficient food, education and social opportunity for all; and unconditional respect for every individual whatever their background.  We have been to the abyss, to the edge of the precipice, had the biggest wake up call for almost a century – will we listen?  In the face of such challenges, as individuals we seem so helpless to make all this happen.  But Jesus in the face of similar massive challenges showed the way – how everyone can be loved because God loves us first.  In the wilderness he charged his batteries to achieve his mission – we can do the same.  We are charged to reflect that love, a beacon out of the darkness, fuelled by his sacrifice in which we prepare to share.  We can emerge from the darkness of lockdown renewed and refreshed to bring about His Kingdom here on earth.

A third ray of hope in the darkness is the fruit of the creativity and ingenuity of humanity.  This has brought us the vaccines and will help us overcome all our challenges. The green shoots of a sustainable, caring and inclusive post-Covid era are there; we just need to direct our individual and collective energies to loving our neighbour in all we do, through our actions as well as our words and prayers. As individuals we can all play our own small part to drive this re-set.  More than that, just as through this last year we at St Bene’t’s have loved and supported each other as a community, so as a congregation we can do so much more together.  We may only scratch the surface, but chaos theory tells us that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can ultimately affect weather patterns in Europe; in our complex world, small changes can ultimately give rise to large effects. So our unpromising immobile life as a caterpillar in lockdown can be transformed into a thing of beauty whose flight knows no bounds. St Bene’t’s Development Action Plan is a blueprint of what we can do together; when we finally emerge from the solitude of this pandemic, let us pool our individual learnings and insights and put this plan into action as our small part of the world’s re-set.  We have given up enough over the past 12 months, so this Lent let us not necessarily give something up…let us give something back.

Tongues set free

Eleanor Lancelot

Not all composers have set the Miserere, based on Psalm 51, in its entirety. Many will be familiar with the setting by Allegri, but James MacMillan’s Miserere also encompasses the complete text. The work opens with the lower voices in E minor, capturing the heavy-to-bear weight of the sin that ‘is ever before me’. Throughout the second part of the work MacMillan’s pared-back texture, with plainsong over sustained notes, speaks to the simple but exposing requirement for ‘truth in the inward parts’. 

A shift comes at ‘Sacrificium Deo spiritus contribulatus’ (‘The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit’) and soon we hear again the opening theme (now transformed, shimmering in E major), the listener’s focus moved from penitence to hope. The piece is technically demanding – a feature which perhaps evokes the excruciating hardship of the journey of the cross (and indeed of journeying through a world marred by sin) – but the final jubilant, liberated phrases are redolent of tongues set free to ‘sing of thy righteousness’. 

Hope burns on

Richard Wells

Primordial Light

 O red rose,
Man lies in direst need,
Man lies in direst pain,
I would rather be in heaven.
I then came upon a broad path,
An angel came and sought to turn me back,
Ah no! I refused to be turned away.
I am from God and to God I will return,
Dear God will give me a light,
Will light my way to eternal blessed life.

Urlicht

 O Röschen rot,
Der Mensch liegt in grösster Not,
Der Mensch liegt in grösster Pein,
Je lieber möcht ich im Himmel sein.
Da kam ich auf einen breiten Weg,
Da kam ein Engellein und wollt mich abweisen,
Ach nein ich liess mich nicht abweisen.
Ich bin von Gott und will wieder zu Gott,
Der liebe Gott wird mir ein Lichtchen geben,
Wird leuchten mir bis an das ewig selig Leben.

Translation © Richard Stokes, author of The Book of Lieder (Faber, 2005)
Music: Mahler’s Second Symphony, Movement IV “Urlicht”

Laetere Sunday[1] is always a special moment in Lent, but this year it will have a particular resonance. It represents a moment of relief in Lent, where at last we dare to peek forwards to Easter and the joy it brings. But this year, Laetere Sunday comes in the midst of a year of darkness during which we have come to yearn for a great deal that we always took for granted – but also at a time where we might just start to dare looking forwards in our everyday lives, too, to a time where our lives are safer and less restricted.

 Mahler used many traditional poems, biblical references and folk stories in his works, perhaps most memorably in his second symphony. They blend religious themes and secular stories to create a hero that lives both in the earthly and the heavenly spheres. The second symphony tells a tale of Mahler’s hero that resonates powerfully with the journey through Lent and into Eastertide – a journey from pain and suffering to resurrection. But it has plenty to say on Laetere Sunday in particular, this moment rooted in both past and future, with all the complexity that goes with it.

 In the Urlicht, a passionate movement where the orchestra is joined by a solo alto, the hero (and with him, all of humankind) lies in “direst need” and “direst pain”: he is deep in the wilderness of Lent. At the end of the preceding movement we hear what Mahler called a cry of despair, or even a death shriek. All of the musical scenery tells the story in a way that words alone never could. The key of this movement (Db major) is miles away from home (C minor), which makes its ethereal opening all the more unsettlingly beautiful. The narrative is full of unexpected twists and turns, with themes appearing only to slip away and reappear when least expected. The brass chorale at the opening leads us to expect fairly conventional development – the middle section throws us entirely off course, not quite knowing where we are headed with chromatic swings in tonality. The time signature drifts to and fro. It is both beautiful and entirely unsettled, sitting as it does in limbo - looking backwards trying to comprehend a cry of agony that still echoes around and yet being urged ever onwards, towards resurrection, light, joy.

 And yet, despite the pain, despite the confusion and the conflicting emotions – despite everything, the hero refuses to be turned away from hope. Hope burns on.

He refuses to lose sight of the light that God has promised even though precious little of it dapples his path or warms his face. Notice that all of the verbs in the final two lines are in the future tense. It’s not burst into being yet, this great promised gift – but that does not douse the fire. Whenever I hear this work, I am reminded of the inscription on the wall of a cellar in Cologne, painfully carved by an unknown hand amongst a group of Jewish escapees hiding from the Nazis: “I believe in the sun even when it does not shine; I believe in love even when I do not feel it; I believe in God even when He is silent”. Hope burns on. 

If you are reading this thinking that Mahler is not your thing – countless others have explored the same ground with equally compelling results. Try some of my favourites – have a listen to Puccini (whose cold­-hearted princess nonetheless gazes transfixed upon “the stars that tremble with love, and with hope” in Nessun Dorma) or The Greatest Showman (where P. T. Barnum sings as a homeless child, “I think of what the world could be / A vision of the one I see / A million dreams is all it’s going to take”). Or explore Sam Cooke (“It’s been a long time coming / But I know, a change is gonna come”). Why not listen to Gregory Porter’s “Take Me to the Alley” – it’s a song of pure hope and trust. Hope burns on.

The hero knows that the triumphant final movement is coming – but he has yet to hear it, and anticipation crackles in the silence, mixed with the fear and suffering which will never be quite gone. We too must wait for the final movement – we must wait both for Easter, and for easier times in our everyday lives. But we know that both are coming, and whilst we are rooted in Lent’s introspection still, it is right – above all on Laetere Sunday – to rejoice in the knowledge that we are journeying together to joyful times, bound as one body by empathy and love. Hope burns on.

---

[1] Laetare Sunday is the Fourth Sunday of Lent. Marking a moment of joy and celebration amid the austerities of Lent, it takes its name from the Introit set for the day in the Roman Mass: Laetare Jerusalem: et conventum facite omnes qui diligitis eam: gaudete cum laetitia, qui in tristitia fuistis (Rejoice, O Jerusalem: and come together all you that love her: rejoice with joy, you that have been in sorrow) – from Isaiah 66.

The Jewels of Friendship

Joy Parke

I read very few books in my childhood but when I read The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde (illustrated by Ota Janaček) it moved me profoundly and still resonates today.

There is a beauty that flows through the narrative revealed in the friendship of the Happy Prince and the Swallow that leads to a tragic end for both in this world.

As the friendship unfolds there are layers of meaning -  sympathy, service, sorrow, companionship, devotion and finally sacrifice – each layer with a beauty and colour of its own.  In the Happy Prince, I discover again, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’

These jewels of friendship, luminous and iridescent, are within Jesus….

….and these jewels, a gift, are within me glistening brightly and waiting….

….waiting to offer beauty to my narrative….opening my heart to the possibility of today….