Requiem for a Bishop

Purcell; Duruflé; Fauré; and Rutter's 'The Lord Bless You and Keep You', which I find a bit soppy but says what you want it to; the Cathedral choir acquitted themselves superbly at Bishop Andrew's Requiem Mass today. Not that the order of service referred to the liturgy in those terms, but it was all very traditional. Even the piece of music that nodded most in the direction of +Andrew's usual Evangelical constituency, Stuart Townend's 'In Christ Alone' (complete with the words about God's wrath that some of us can't sing), is about as close to an old-fashioned hymn form as you get from modern Church songwriters. Serried ranks of bishops in proper black chimeres rather than the red they usually wear nowadays whether or not they are Doctors of Divinity, the Diocesan Chancellor in a full-bottomed legal wig, ++Sarah preceded by the primatial cross of Canterbury, and some Orthodox fellow in a black hood - it was all very fine indeed. The only disappointment was that the Lord Lieutenant came in a suit rather than full uniform. He even came to talk to the Swanvale Halt Men's Breakfast once in that, I must point out. Though he was on his way somewhere else, admittedly.

Resting on the coffin were 'the diocesan crozier', which I didn't know existed, a chalice and paten representing +Andrew's priestly ministry, and a mitre standing for his episcopal role. The mitre was rather nicer than the one he usually wore, and I wonder why Anglican bishops can't have nice mitres all the time. Even +Paul and ++Sarah's mitrae simplices were rather handsome in their plainness. In the picture above you can see the Dean carrying the formal crozier up to the high altar where it was laid, the bishop's pastoral ministry being symbolically relinquished. At least he didn't have to snap it in two like the Lord Great Chamberlain at the Queen's funeral, or we'd still be there.

I've already said that the manner of his dying might well have been +Andrew's greatest ministry and, while nobody wanted to say that out loud today, the same sense did hang in the air. It was a great act of faithfulness and I remember most strongly his expression of relief in his second, and last, pastoral letter to the diocese that his faith had not given way in the face of his diagnosis. He talked in a way so personal that you felt it was a kind of liberation: a pastor shouldn't be personal in a way that throws attention on themselves rather than on Christ, but this end-of-life candour was completely appropriate.

A couple of my Evangelical colleagues insisted on raising their hands in the air during the hymns as though they felt they had to, but the communion worked its spiritual wonders and I found any irritation that flashed into my heart was swiftly and rightly drowned by the amazement that after 2000 years Jesus still gives himself up for all these flawed, ridiculous human beings, of whom I am one. The Passion of the Christ draws sombrely closer.

I had an hour to wait for the next train and rather than even attempt to find any lunch at the Cathedral café I went in the other direction and down the hill where there was a 'Pan-Asian' eatery that served me tea and a spicy Indian potato fritter in a bun drizzled with chutneys. 'There were some really fresh green chillis in that' the proprietor grinned proudly. Indeed there were. 

Quiet!!!

I find my Lent Quiet Days in Simon and Clarissa's Garden Room at Bortley Mill just as worthwhile as the more extended time I spent over many years at Malling Abbey. This time as it was a Monday I wasn't fasting for the day but in homage to Catherine de Hueck Doherty's strictures about time in the poustinia I subsisted only on bread and black coffee for the day! Not that the privilege of spending a day praying and reading is a great privation. 

The Holy Scriptures aside (I had never before realised that the Parables of the Great Banquet in Matthew 22 and Luke 14 are two profoundly different stories, and I concluded the keynote of the latter is the Lord satirising social customs), the book I took with me was one recently given to me by Dr Michael Lloyd, my former doctrine tutor from Staggers and now gloriously reigning as Principal of Wyckers. God, Struggle and Suffering in the Evolution of Life (2025) is a series of written conversations between six scholars including the Revd Dr himself around the knotted issues of where God fits into the suffering we see embedded in the mechanics of the non-human world. It is, as you might guess, very dense. I was encouraged to know that not only are thoughtful people devoting energy to this ('I have been examining this subject for the last 35 years', writes Prof Paul Fiddes, with the slight suggestion that his younger colleagues might have found some of their conundrums answered by reading his earlier books), but that they actually take the trouble to listen to what each other says and deal with it respectfully, dedicating time and thought to opening debates out rather than closing them down. No odium theologicum obvious here. As someone recently congratulated me on an article I'd written for opinions I hadn't expressed, I can only rejoice. 

No flash of kingfisher by the millstream this year, only grey wagtails.

Sede Vacante

That progressed shockingly quickly. The announcement that the Bishop of Guildford had inoperable pancreatic cancer only came a month ago. Very quickly a message followed to say that the disease was advancing faster than expected - 'possibly my last letter to the diocese', he stated - and this morning he passed to his reward. Last week I went to the Cathedral to take part in a vigil of prayer for the Bishop - nothing organised, simply (and rather affectingly) people sitting quietly in the nave for as long as they wanted to - and now the journey is over. This happened recently to a neighbour, therefore a parishioner though not a member of any church, who went from diagnosis to death within a month; a much-loved member of the congregation died a couple of years ago from a brain tumour, but that took three months, and we all thought that was fast. This gives no time for adjustment and assimilation, and as I'm not sure any bishop in recent times has ever perished in an accident, such an experience is very rare. This is not something that happens to bishops: they retire, write the odd book, maybe wait for the media to start questioning the decisions they took in office. Recently I reflected that the business of his 'dying well', as he put it, might be the most important ministry +Andrew would carry out - but, as it has turned out, there hasn't even been much of that.

Of course my relationship with my diocesan has been an odd, distant one. At times I got the impression he rather preferred that, not just with me but with everyone apart from those immediately around him. He was my father-in-Christ who I was committed to obeying in all things lawful and honest, as the phrase goes, but that was about it. Nevertheless he was the one person the whole of the diocese related to, in whatever way: a bishop is 'the focus of unity' not in the sense that everyone agrees with them, or even ought to, but simply because the bishop is connected with them all and, through the bishop, they to each other (including the worshippers of the past in the diocese's churches, as the bishop is a link in a chain). So +Andrew's sudden removal plucks out a kind of axle around which everything else revolves, however eccentrically or remotely. Without a bishop, with a sedes left vacans for stretching months or years, would we spin away from one another? No, we would be kept in tenuous connection by the diocesan mechanisms of parish share and safeguarding training. But there would not even be the potential of love, which is what any relationship should include.