The Lent Factor: Forty Companions for the Forty Days of Lent: The Mowbray Lent Book 2015

INTRODUCTION

The media trades in human interest stories because most of us are fascinated by other people, even those we have not met. Celebrity gossip has become an industry in itself, spawning magazines and websites devoted to nothing else. The old-fashioned talent show has been transformed into a glamorous contest, as in Britain’s Got Talent and a host of other series. New stars have been born though sometimes they make only a fleeting appearance in the celebrity sky. The X Factor proved the biggest of all such contests. X represents star quality and hidden gifts, a mysterious attribute which is a seam of pure gold. It only needs exposure and everyone sees how it gleams. The use of X in this context is no accident. X has been traditionally used as a mark of identity. It is deeply personal. Those unable to read or write, marked documents, including marriage registers, with an X. X became the mark we use on ballot papers, itself a consequence of a hitherto largely illiterate nation. For Christians, X has another dimension. It is the symbol of salvation. The character of God is revealed supremely by Jesus Christ suffering and dying for humanity on the cross. Down the centuries Christians have gazed at the Cross, prayed before it, pondered the passion narrative, and found their own identity redeemed and enlarged. X is a potent and many-layered symbol.

This book describes 40 people whose human identity I have found compelling. They are not flawless. I recall one definition of a saint as ‘someone in Christian history whose life has been insufficiently researched’. That’s a reminder that saints are also sinners like the rest of us. Those who inspire faith in others, or lead us to want to imitate their best qualities, are not without blemish. Some of the people included in this book led astonishingly active lives and achieved great fame. Others are much less well known. Some are hardly known to anyone except in my family. With some I have had a deep personal connection. Others were dead long before I was born.

If human beings are made in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1.26) then we should expect to see God’s nature reflected in our fellow men and women. These daily companions, particularly chosen for Lent, but with whom the reader can travel at any time, fall into no particular category, though what they have in common is influence in my own life. I am Cornish by origin from a family whose roots lie in the tin-mining district between Camborne and Redruth. My parents grew up in a working-class tin-mining culture and on my father’s side there was very little church-going tradition at all. By the time of my birth he had left the mining industry and had become a Congregationalist minister. When I was 11 I witnessed his ordination in the Church of England at Peterborough Cathedral and was ordained there myself 13 years later. An early ministry in two council estate parishes was followed by work at Church House, Westminster and Lambeth Palace before my consecration as a bishop in 1993. I met my wife, Julie, when she was completing her training as a midwife in Peterborough and she continues to work in nursing, now in palliative care. We have had three children, including a daughter who died during the first year of her life and who is the youngest of my Lenten companions. A degree of autobiography is included in some of the chapters to put things in context and to indicate why some of these companions have been so important to me at different stages in my life.

This is neither a traditional devotional book nor simply a series of biographies. Each companion provides a means of celebrating God’s revelation of himself within ordinary human life. For those who may wish to use the book as an aid to more specific Lenten reflection, a passage of scripture is suggested which connects with the companion’s story. A brief prayer concludes each chapter.

Each of my companions has died but all are still alive in my own life. Many sought to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. A few have been strangers to personal faith and religious commitment, but there has been something in them which has caused this believer to learn from them about the meaning of discipleship. Those of us who regularly worship often declare our belief in the Communion of Saints when reciting the Creed but too rarely see it as central to the practice of faith and discipleship.

The Communion of Saints is a glorious reminder that the Christian Church does not consist simply of those who are living now, but is a fellowship beyond space, time and geography. It is no dry doctrine. Experiencing its truth is exhilarating. In Susan Hill’s novel In the Springtime of the Year a young widow is at worship in a village church.

She became aware not of the presence of the village people sitting or kneeling behind her, but of others. The church was full of all those who’d ever prayed in it; the air was crammed and vibrating with their goodness and the freedom and power of their resurrection, and she felt herself to be part of some great living and growing tapestry, every thread of which joined with and crossed and belonged to every other, though each one was also entirely and distinctly itself.

A few of my companions would not have believed in the Communion of Saints, or wanted to be in a village church at all. But they are all part of my personal pantheon. They have joined with and crossed and belonged to each other through their influence on me and what I believe and the person I have become. They inhabit my prayers. Things they have done, what they have said, poetry they have written or art they have created – all provide a living channel to God. Christianity is not an abstract religion. The word of God became a human person, who has fascinated the world for two millennia and draws allegiance from billions today.

Christians are sometimes heard decrying celebrity culture, but the term itself is a venerable one. Celebrity emerges in late Middle English as a word in common usage. It derives from the Latin celeber and means honoured. In recent times the media has tended to restrict celebrities to film stars, singers and entertainers, with the Royal Family included as honorary members of this elite. A few religious figures have gained celebrity status. Desmond Tutu, Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa are obvious examples. John Paul II was certainly not averse to using the cult of celebrity to teach the Catholic faith and strengthen the Church by nurturing the bonds of affection for the Pope as the Vicar of Christ. His immediate successor was less comfortable in such a role, though he too knew that the Petrine office has a sprinkling of celebrity stardust to be used in the service of the Gospel. Pope Francis has quickly achieved celebrity status. Even Anglicans have got used to the Archbishop of Canterbury being given a media role and profile entirely out of keeping with the scale of his power and authority within the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion. Justin Welby understands this and is not fazed by it.

The Christian faith has as its central figure someone born in obscurity who never travelled far and whose public ministry ended in judicial execution with only a few bystanders. This reminds us that those whom God honours, His celebrities, come from a much wider range of people than those who inhabit, whether willingly or not, celebrity magazines.

1

Blessed are the Pure in Heart

Charles Causley

Matthew 5.1–10

There are some people you feel you know even though you’ve never met them. The poet Charles Causley was one such person for me. He was Cornish through and through, even if those of us from west Cornwall consider Launceston (where he lived) a long way ‘up country’.

At one level Charles Causley’s life was very unadventurous. Apart from his student years and his war service he never lived anywhere other than Launceston. He taught until his early retirement in 1976 at the same school he had attended as a boy. He travelled widely in the summer holidays but continued living with his mother in her house. He was an only child.

Perhaps Causley’s security in his life-setting was one of the reasons why he was able to stand apart from the mainstream of contemporary poetry. As a result he was one of England’s underappreciated poets of the twentieth century. He owed little to the modernist movement. Causley’s poems were inspired by ballads and popular folk songs. The novelist D. M. Thomas said of Causley, ‘The surface simplicity of his style is deceptive. Many poets are simple while appearing to be profound. Causley, like Robert Frost, is the opposite’.

Read the ‘The Ballad of the Bread Man’ or ‘Timothy Winters’ and the meaning of Thomas’s description of Causley’s poetry becomes clear. The rhythm of these poems connects with some deep folk memory. You find yourself almost singing them as you read them. Causley’s poetry is best heard, not simply read. The Bread Man is Jesus. The ballad recounts his birth, life and death. It is by turns funny, cheerful, tragic and profound. The Cornish cadences can be heard by those familiar with them. On the life of Jesus in Nazareth the poet says:

When they got back to the village

The neighbours said, to a man,

‘That boy will never be one of us,

Though he does what he blessed well can’.

And then a deep fear once held by ordinary working-class people is conjured – to be featured ‘in the papers’. The culture of my Cornish childhood was the very opposite of the vision of Andy Warhol who suggested we would all seek 15 minutes of fame.

He finished up in the papers

He came to a very bad end,

He was charged with bringing the living to life.

No man was that prisoner’s friend.

The ballad ends with the Risen Christ offering loaves. ‘Not today’ they say as if to a travelling baker. The Bread of Life is rejected again.

By contrast, ‘Timothy Winters’ seems on the surface a secular poem. Timothy is a neglected child, perhaps representative of many Causley encountered. His clothes are tattered and his hair unkempt. ‘A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters’. The poem tells of his tragic life and its dire deprivations but then ends unexpectedly. Causley unashamedly uses a Cornish dialect word (helve), which refers to the sound of the distressed pleading of a cow when her calf is removed from her.

At Morning Prayers the Master helves

for children less fortunate than themselves

and the loudest response in the room is when

Timothy Winters roars ‘Amen!’

So come one angel, come on ten

Timothy Winters says ‘Amen’

Amen Amen Amen Amen.

Timothy Winters, Lord. Amen.

A poem which begins with a vivid description of this ‘blitz of a boy’ concludes with the reader praying with and for him. How many clergy or teachers of prayer would envy an ability to draw people so subtly and confidently into praying? Yet Causley set out with no evangelistic intent. He lost his faith in his twenties and gradually regained it in middle age, though he was never any conventional churchman. He was so soaked in Christianity and its forms and imagery that his poetry is shaped by it, whether consciously or not.

When Charles Causley reached his 70th birthday many contemporary poets and writers contributed to a celebratory volume. Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin and Anthony Thwaite were among the honoured poets of their generation who did admire this unfashionable colleague and saw his greatness. Roger McGough, whose own poetry is rather more in the Causley tradition, contributed two poems, one of which was the briefest of offerings.

Causley, God, the sea:

Cornish Trinity.

So much said and implied in so few words.

Mrs Causley had a stroke in 1966. She could still speak and use her left hand but was otherwise immobile. She needed full-time care. The general opinion was that as a bachelor and only child, Charles should put his mother in a long-term geriatric hospital. Everyone told him not to give up his teaching job. Even at the time he was convinced that if he had been a single woman he would have been expected to do the exact opposite.

As it turned out, a good friend came to the rescue and cared for Mrs Causley during the working day until Charles came home from school to look after her from 4pm onwards and overnight. His life was restricted. He talked to his mother about her own childhood. Poems flowed from his pen. As his own life became more constricted, his imagination was fed. The stream of poetry continued when her decline was such that she needed hospitalization in her final years.

Causley’s ‘Ten Types of Hospital Visitor’ was written from a depth of personal experience. Causley visited his mother regularly in her long last illness. He used free verse, a sign that he wasn’t restricted to the rhythms of the ballad or folk song. That long poem provided me with insights into pastoral visiting entirely missing from my ordination training.

Charles Causley said of his mother, ‘Her simple, Christian faith never wavered … she loved a church service and for seventy-five years had hardly missed a Sunday. On the other hand my feeling was that of Emerson: I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching’. When his mother died he had no difficulty in choosing her epitaph: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God’.

Charles Causley found himself a year after his mother’s death in the Church of the Beatitudes in Galilee near where Jesus first preached the Sermon on the Mount. He wrote, ‘There the words were again: "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God". Through the great window, I could see the Lake of Galilee: burning blue as the water in my mother’s old, galvanized-iron wash tub, after she had put in the blue-bag on a childhood Monday in Cornwall, half a century before’.

The Bread Man, the Bread of Life and preacher of the Beatitudes never travelled far. He belonged to his locality so emphatically that we call him Jesus of Nazareth or the Man from Galilee. Charles Causley’s mother never saw the Holy Land. She, like her son, belonged to Launceston, but the Galilean teacher was local to her, met by her in the scriptures, in her church, her prayers and her purity of heart. He was the source of her ability to see God.

Jesus of Nazareth, you never travelled far yet you were lifted up to draw the whole world to yourself; keep us mindful that the pure in heart are blessed and the meek will inherit the earth. Amen.

2

Vessels of Grace

Michael Stagg

2 Corinthians 4.7–12

It was touch and go whether the preacher for a special service in Norwich Cathedral in July 2011 would be well enough to make it. Michael Stagg had been diagnosed with cancer and the prognosis was not good. The service was a biennial one for retired clergy, widows and widowers followed by lunch in the grounds of Bishop’s House. Michael did make it and preached a sermon never to be forgotten. He produced a glazed pot and from the elevated pulpit threw it on the sanctuary floor where it smashed into smithereens. The senior clergy sitting below nearly jumped out of their cassocks. He provided a vivid reminder of St Paul’s words: ‘We are no better than pots of earthenware to contain this