Exploring Faith 2022 - Tom Stacey - Our Spiritual Lacuna

Let's open some windows on the way we are, spiritually, here on the UK and surely beyond our shores too.

Do any of you hold to certain adages, which inform your inner life? Among you Christians I am going to call that “inner life” your spiritual life. That word in-form I have just used carries a hyphen: in hyphen form.

I do hang on to a little clutch of adages, which I have coined for myself as an aid to living life. I shall tell you two.

Number one is: The Soul will Out.

Now let me say at once that we do not ‘have’ a soul. In my view the Soul is a reading of us: Sub Specie Aeternitatis – ‘ in the eye of eternity’, and thus, I suggest, the deepest and most irreplaceably truthful reading of one and all of us; that is to say, we are Soul and as soul are being worked upon incessantly, and secretly and ineluctably, all of life. It cannot be otherwise.

It is us as soul which is at work in us in all our loving, and in all our creative endeavour by which we seek to reach out in earnest to our fellows in words, or music or artistic presentation – from stitching fabric, say, to landscape gardening: the entire gamut of artistic creativity.

Who said: 'One has to be so terribly religious to be an artist?'  Why, it was D H Lawrence – author inter alia of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and that marvellous poem in vers libre The Mountain Lion (which I reluctantly refrain from reciting to you in full).

Who said – in writing on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky: ‘Who is more and more wholly wrought in God’s image, or more inevitably His challenger, than the poet?‘ It was that master critic George Steiner.

And who wrote: ‘Man is trapped between the finiteness of the human condition and the infinity of the stars’? Why that was André Malreau, author of La Condition Humaine.

The Soul will Out. The trapped will, and must, escape the trap. The Soul will Out.

And the second adage of my coinage, indispensable to me, is ‘You are never so much yourself as when you lose yourself’ [Repeat].

An echo there of Jesus. ‘He who would lose his life will save it.’ The mighty paradox. (Christianity is alive with paradox – our strength is in our weakness ... possession by way of dispossession.)

            And an echo even more resonant – of that first Beatitude of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven’ (Matthew 5:3).

Poor in spirit. Who are they? – who have no regard for themselves, are utterly shorn of pride, without vanity? Who are thus readied for self-loss in God’s Kingdom? This is what we are all reaching for at the beginning of every Communion service with the self-debasing Kyrie Eleison pleading for mercy as ‘miserable sinners’. [To sin thus is no more than falling short of self-elimination, and hence vividly the wrong word in context, since the common meaning of ‘sin’ is doing wrong, committing evil. In my humble opinion, Christianity should banish that sin-word from the Kyrie Eleison liturgy tomorrow.]

Meanwhile, self-loss is immediately to hand in its entirely proper response to the gift of life. Some of you will have been in love. Yes? And by God’s grace even have had that love reciprocated in depth and ardency. Then you will have surely lost yourself in that relationship – not loss in the other, but in the love, the bond, which you will readily risk your life to preserve. That is the criterion, that we put our lives at risk for that bond, be it with lover, with offspring, with one’s country, cause or faith. Glance at today’s Ukraine, at those dying day by day and night, in unprovoked war with an evil invader: They love their country; glance at St Alban, a Roman soldier, from up the road in Hertfordshire, martyred for sheltering a Christian priest whose faith he secretly shared during the Diocletian pogrom [200AD]. Look upon the whole gallery of martyrs. [Maximilian Kolbe]

And as to the loss of self, or the ego (to borrow the handier term from Freud), let us look to those saintly female figures of subsequent study at these talks, and also to those who have lost themselves in the creative endeavour to explore the truth of the gift of life in art and music and the written word. How much I ask of you!  And here I make a point of significance.

All of the four female luminaries we are to study and dwell with during the coming weeks were themselves centrally engaged in what I like to call the 'creative endeavour', in the artistic context Hildegard most famously as a musician, a choral composer, yet also as a master of the written word, of which the most remarkable written work is her Liber Dominum Opera, in which she tells of her own virtual total loss of consciousness in spiritual ecstasy, perhaps comparable to that of the Jansenite mathematician Blaise Pascal six centuries later (17th c.) or his exact contemporary in England, Thomas Trahearne. For Julian of Norwich we should recognise her Revelations of Divine Love as a literary gem, and the same for Teresa of Avila's The Interior Castle in the 16th Century. No less true creative endeavour is the seminal treatise entitled Mysticism by our very own neighbour, till her death in 1941, Evelyn Underhill.  On the single bald peak of all mystical experience, Truth is one and the same.

You are never so much yourself as when you lose yourself. Meanwhile, the spirit is all so close, so immediately within the range of experience of each of us. Let us take music, the swiftest artistic route to us as soul.

The other day, when we were still in the season of the Proms, I attended a performance of the Mass in B-minor by JS Bach, performed by the orchestra and chorus of Age of Enlightenment (referring to the 18th century). The Albert Hall was utterly packed, to the rafters one might say, the upper gallery itself, eight rows deep, utterly packed, the Prom proscenium a squash. Possessed by the work, the vast audience were surely ‘lost’ therein and thereby in some measure. Five days later, another Prom entire:  The Dream of Gerontius, by the devout Anglican composer Edward Elgar to the poem by John Henry Newman. Newman had written that Dream of the dying sage 20 years after quitting the Church of England in mid-life for the Roman Catholics (whereat the Pope somewhat briskly appointed him a Cardinal). That inspired an inspiring work, played likewise to a packed Albert Hall. How they applauded… and – wait for it – a couple of weeks later the supreme Missa Solemnis of Beethoven, performed by John Elliot Gardiner and the Monteverdi Choir, again packing the Albert Hall with an audience of all ages – a solemn mass, composed by a devout Beethoven in advanced deafness (that Sanctus!) . . . What is so demonstrably in reach of us? Are we not witnessing a response to King David’s poem which has reached us (from around 600 Before Christ) as Psalm 42 – As the heart panteth after the waterbrooks/So panteth my soul after thee, O God?

Three supreme contributions to the civilisation that we have built and has come to uphold us over some seventeen hundred years!

Where is this Lacuna of the spiritual which is the title of my talk tonight? Surely, there will have been those, at each of those dazzling musical events, who would claim to have ‘lost themselves’, to their transcendent joy ,at least at moments or better still ‘transported’ by any one of the movements or cantatas –  or by the work in its entirety. Yet, I venture to presume that, even of those, few live a life of prevailing spiritual awareness and commitment to spiritual discipline.

Yes? They would have applauded long and loud, yet none of those three works was written for applause. Do we clap the Spirit? They were created as acts of worship, of praise, purgation, thanksgiving, spiritual elevation. None of those was conceived as entertainment, as a nice way to fill a vacant Friday evening. How many of those vast audiences and, indeed, schooled performers, would have been in the practice of regular worship and its essential discipline and self-denial and routine? My guess is, but a fragment.

For between those formidable Proms audiences captured or captivated and the culture to which they and the rest of us belong, and embeds us, there has come to be a wall of impenetrable glass. The culture is overwhelmingly secular, emphatically materialistic, geared to the polar opposite of Man as Soul, which is Man as Pride, as vanity, nurtured by self-esteem – the esteem of self – by status, power, greed, stylishness and success (that ‘bitch-goddess’ as William James labelled it).

Some of you will recall one of Father Neil's recent homilies here  – the Church of England has seemingly forbidden its clergy sermons as alienating worshippers, in favour of homilies occupying the time it takes to suck a boiled sweet –  a homily on the savage passage relayed by St. Luke when Jesus, with large crowds in attendance (enough to fill an Albert Hall), declared the price of carrying his cross and following him could entail hating one’s father and mother, wife and children, brother and sister and even life itself. Just that was the magnitude of valid discipleship. Luke never met or knew Jesus: all he reported was at second hand. But he was a scrupulous chronicler, and was telling of a Jesus who on that occasion pulled no punches. Don’t be deluded by facile discipleship: ‘I wouldn’t want you,’ Jesus would say.

The hurdle is that high. Those women mystics we are to be studying will be seen each to have leapt it. True discipleship, Neil would have us recognise, is not just another bum on the pew.

            Such indeed the magnitude of the first beatitude; in Jesus the Nazarene’s Sermon ­ – yes: Sermon – on the Mount, ‘blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven’. There are no shortcuts. No compromise. No staged or choreographed mass hypnosis with Billy Graham on the podium, no Alpha courses devised by Holy Trinity Brompton with their racket of ejaculatory testimony, which – if the HTB formula had really worked over the four decades since its initiation – would have had the whole country today thrumming with Christian believers. Patently, the country is not.

A leading researcher into HTB’s methodology is our distinguished vicar, doctor of theology, good James. True Faith, he might allow me to say, arises out of stillness and silence.

            Poor in spirit: who care not a fig for the ego, since that alone (the non-caring) is the criterion for entering the presence of the mystery to which we allocate the name of God, the All that is, Seen and Unseen, The Holy one: that appellation we make use of 42 times in the Eucharistic service, and which means, no more, and no less, than W H O L L Y – the precise etymological equivalent of H O L Y.

No one, Meister Eckhart said, has ever seen God of the Gottheit – a middle-high German term for which English has no proper translation and which I shall therefore paraphrase as the Divine in creation – or come near to seeing him. We can but aspire to enter his presence. The God of the Whole, of specie aeternitatis, loves Man, is one with Man – as Soul.  

Such did we of traditional Christendom always know, and were constantly reminded of, up to a mere century or a century and a quarter ago, with Death so very present. I offer a domestic instance John Callcott Horsley was a celebrated Victorian painter. From the age of seven he lived in the house that I do, making a living with his paintbrush and palette from the age of 12. He had three children, all sons, by his first marriage. Each of his sons died of scarlet fever by the age of twelve and their mother not long after – from consumption (tuberculosis). John Callcott Horsley the painter was to re-marry and father four more offspring of whom three survived (one with great distinction as the world’s first brain surgeon). In his autobiography the painter chooses not to dwell on any of these deaths. It was the common experience: man on earth was seldom less a participant of eternity and infinity as of the dimensionality of space and time.

In our own time death is treated as something that happens to other people. It is most conveniently swept under the carpet, or parcelled up in a funeral event for many of those attending of meaningless religiosity, with drinks to follow.

As to death, I cannot but be something of an authority, with so tiny a proportion of my life still to live. How unhealthy this obfuscation strikes me. With the gift of consciousness coming upon us humans in the metaphorical Garden of Eden (‘Who told thee thou wast naked?’), man became irredeemably aware of his finality, his time-tagged existence in his gifted garden and amid the context of dimensionality of time and space, the infinite and eternal superiority of – well – just that: infinity and eternity.

We British of the 18th century contributed to science Newtonian Physics, with the perception of the law of gravity. The bigger deal, my friends, – and I know our fellow pillar of our congregation here shares my view – is quantum physics of Einstein or Schrödinger a century ago, revealing the role of the particles of the supposedly irreducible atom defying time and space, opening upon a wholly different metaphysics and meanwhile providing us with the laser beam and the television set in our front room. Quantum mechanics should be taught in school alongside maths from the age of eight, implicitly giving us a glimpse of God.

Hiding death and the non-dimensional, we hide the Spirit. We shy from the word, we shy from the principle. It is a bit pathetic, this collusive cowering.

The other day, on Radio Three, there was to be a performance of the 1610 choral masterpiece of Claudio Monteverdi’s Vespers. I was listening closely. In the few minutes before the performance the conductor discussed the work with the Radio Three’s musically educated compère and announcer. They chatted away admiringly on the musical inventiveness and structural and harmonic innovation of the work. At no point did either tell us that this is a work written in 1610 out of the Soul of the composer as an act of worship, an act of the Spirit – a conscious spiritual pioneering that in-spired an act of devotion to the Divine. They dared not tell us, and missed the point.

The musically informed among you may recall how Vaughan Williams, at work on his fifth symphony, turned back for that work’s creative content to his abandoned score of an operatic version of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. This he did, to wonderful effect. Thereafter he wished to dub the resulting work not as a symphony but a Morality. Vaughan Williams saw the function of much music as fulfilling its performers and listeners as Soul. Such was its motive and such its function.

He was not – and is not – alone. God knows! Which of you tuning into Radio Three, the sophisticated channel, has not noticed its predilection for very early music, which almost always was for worship, and choral, attracting an unfailing radio audience in the 21st century – Josquin, Palestrina, Tallis, Byrd.

From Hildegard von Bingen of the 12th century to – for example – Britain’s outstanding composer today, James Macmillan, composers of the richest gifts have written music in the context of their Christian conviction and Christian inspiration.

Of all the arts, music is most readily the soul at work. It requires no image as does pictorial art, and often no narrative. Yet all the arts deemed as inspired and received as inspiring are surely the Spirit at work, the spiritual leaven, in the heart of human beings, and rightly seen as the work of the Divine in men and women. So too, is the work of composers here and across the landscape of Western Europe of recent times – such names as Benjamin Britten, Edmund Rubbra, Gustav Holst, Vaughan Williams, William Mathias; Olivier Messiaen, John Tavener, perhaps, Arvo Pärt of Estonia, Gorecki of Poland, writing out of the depth of Christian allegiance . . .  and comparably of our most influential poets: TS Eliot, consumed by the message and person of Christ, WH Auden, Christian.

Then my dear friends, there is the vast landscape of pictorial or sculptural inspiration – the unsurpassable oeuvre of Michelangelo and Leonardo DaVinci, of Raphael, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, El Greco . . . the Spirit at work. Yes! Just bring to mind the hands of the father of the prodigal son (of Jesus’s parable) resting on the shoulders of that very son in Rembrandt’s rendering of his return home in abject contrition. Bring to mind the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel whose fresco took Michelangelo four years to paint, lying on his back, in its depiction of the hand of God reaching for – but not quite touching – the hand of Adam. Bring to mind the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan river by John the Baptist as so wondrously conceived by Piero della Francesca . . . or the same painter’s astonishing rendering of Christ bursting from the tomb in its church in Sansepolcro in Tuscany, so miraculously saved (by 20 minutes!) from bombardment by the advancing Allies in the Second World War.

Are these not Spirit vibrantly at work?

 You will all have artistic candidates for my random list.

So what is the ‘Lacuna’ that gives the title to my talk? Yet the term is apt. Today’s younger generations are under siege of shallowness, of petty vanities, unrelenting self-advertisement and Instagram, ‘look at me’, ‘Ain’t I clever’ or original or sexy or whatever. They must stay in mindless chitter-chatter with some other, each in perpetual flight from their own vacuity of Being.  They scramble for recognition amid their circle, for endorsement of an ever fracturing identity. They dare not be alone. They are imprisoned in the shallows, in need of constant reassurance, in shallows in which one can neither swim nor run.

Such is the Zeitgeist.

So: I have indicated the unacknowledged spiritual hunger that will cram the Albert Hall. I have marked the rooting of the Judaeo-Christian message in-forming the civilisation of what was once known as Christendom in the Western world. I have spoken of the magnitude of the demand of the first beatitude of Jesus of Nazareth, who came to sacrifice his own life by the cruellest flagrant means of public execution the Roman empire could devise.

The overwhelming majority of our race today have no space in their life for worship, for praise, for thanksgiving, for prayer and meditation: no structure for cosmic wonder. They may well have brushed the heights at moments of great music or the voice of a true poet or the genius of an artist; yet the experiences are ephemeral. Among listeners or readers or viewers it will seldom engender inner discipline, or fixed points in their routine of life, or a focus of penetration – inner or outer – or a sustaining pattern of thought. The very notion of a spiritual life does not enter the mind.

The vast and varied richness of the Hebraeo-Christian story as fact and fable, symbol and ritual, parable and analogy; of dreams and visions; of wisdom, joy, despair, redemption; of narrative diverse and perverse or even contradictory, of factual and garbled history and natural phenomena misread or half-imagined, of poetry and spiritual exploration, is awaiting to reward us all and each, in our subjectivity, with its investiture of the Truth. It has come to be all but unknown to the community at large and incomprehensible in fragment – except at moments from the impact of masterworks of artistic creativity such as we have already spoken of.

That "self-loss" has flashed by and is gone. It can never make for sustained spiritual awareness, for the "spiritual life" to which we as Christians are enjoined by the founder who gave his life for us, and never make for the presence in our community of fellows providing the leaven of depth in our society and the civilisation we claim as ours. And the great majority of our population is effectively divorced from nature, the natural world, which that internationally eminent Christian scholar of this island of the ninth century, Duns Scotus Eriugena, wrote of as "a realm, which we are challenged to encounter, permeated by the divine and fundamentally orientated to spiritual flourishing."

We should not fool ourselves. Without the sustained disciplines, routines, prayer, meditation, isolation, mortification, without our own Rule, in the monastic or Ignatian sense, affecting our daily conduct and innermost patterns of thought, no spiritual life is lived. Our acts of worship can come to be sops to our anxieties, to our social isolation; expressions of comradeship with like-minded neighbours. So far so good; but not good enough. The reality we are addressing this evening is something other: a human phenomenon of psychology, a word whose psyche means Soul – each of us as soul – sub specie aeternitatis, under the eye of God, the ultimate Holy One, at all times, in all places.

I speak of a proven, self-sustaining phenomenon that can come to be self-perpetuating. The great Communion of Saints we invoke in our liturgy, in the original meaning of saintliness deriving from the Latin word for 'holy', of the Whole. Nothing spectacular, but the world of the monastery, the convent, the cloister, that vital leaven such as is scarcely in sight in the 21st Century . And yet, I suspect it is present among us individually, even in this very church this evening and those attending on Zoom.

Now then, are we here in this church, and in the broad Church of England, as standard-bearers for man as Soul, are we not failing in our role to meet the challenge of this gaping Lacuna of ignorance and virtual unawareness?

The very notion of a spiritual life remains all but unknown. Any notion of a role for Spirit in the sustaining of our civilisation has been seemingly forgotten. And here I should make a vital point, namely that civilisation in its exercise and governance and culture does not long survive the absence of spiritual allegiance. In one guise or another, the interplay of the dimensional here-and-now with the non-dimensional, the All, the Holy, is lost, and dangerously so.

Regard the pagan ideologies that have lately blighted our planet and brought death and suffering to their subjects in their tens of millions and are still present: Soviet Communism, Fascism, Maoism, Marxism and the CPC today. By contrast, did not the death of our longest reigning monarch ever, remind our island people of the sanctity, no less, of our inheritance? And what of that, two or three weeks on, have we held on to?

All enduring civilisation grows out of spiritual ground. The attainment and survivability of the civilisation reflect the nature of the spiritual base. If the personal ruler of temporal power in human affairs is deified, as it was (for instance) in ancient Egypt, or Japan until quite lately, or Rome, it will be superseded. Now, Hinduism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism draw from mystical sources, and such (here and there) can be claimed here and there for Shia Islam. Yet is it is incarnational Christianity that has, astonishingly, prevailed as the world's ethos of enlightened and sustainable governance. On continued acknowledged allegiance to Christianity will our survival hang.  

The Western world of early Christendom was once all ruled by monarchs bestowed with Divine Rights (the Divine Right of Kingship as axiomatic in national headship). Today the hands-on governance is done by politicians who win their power in the ballot box. They govern the materiality of their subjects. They do not ‘do God’ – unless it be to show off. Very few monarchs are on the scene today to invoke the spiritual. Yet our late Queen did so, not least by gently lifting the veil from her own Christian faith, and that contribution – that gloss – bringing a pervasive reward, vicariously, to a multitude of her subjects.

Governance should preach no structure of belief, yet should show itself, surely, to be beholden to the Divine. I remember vividly the outbreak of the Second World War, and specifically what was heard by all of us on the radio. I was nine at the time, in 1939, and as Father James so poignantly recalled for his congregation three Sundays ago our monarch of the day, King George VI, father of the late Queen, addressed the nation in part quoting a so-called poet, Minnie Haskins: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light and safer than a known way. So I went forth, and finding the hand of God, trod gladly into the night.’ Those lines echoed in my head throughout the relentless drama and horror of that war and are with me still. I would say to all those in high office, be they monarch or premier, commanding a national audience that they confess their frail mortality in a timeless setting – at the apt moment. It opens a window.

My opinion is that we, as worshipping Christians, should fundamentally and ruthlessly re-think the manner in which we function in a pagan society. My proposal that we teach quantum physics alongside maths, gives a hint to my manner of thinking.

We should treat children as intelligent beings who are not to be gulled when emerging from infancy. So we are to unveil the Christian story at age five or six as a consequence of mankind's need to penetrate the mystery of why we are here and how anything has come to exist. The human race, we are to tell our children, has always done this down the ages worldwide. Certain figures, extraordinarily endowed, have occurred in the history of the world to have shed astounding light on the mystery of humankind’s gift of life – in the Near East and the Far East, the Levant, in continental Europe, even England.

The supremely revealing figure beyond measure is Jesus of Nazareth, whom we call Christ, the anointed.

Now stand back, and from the midst of a comprehensively secular, urbanised world, what do we look like?

The aspect we present as Church-going Christians is that of a sect of fuddies believing the unbelievable in a manner that still prevailed in the era of Queen Victoria a century and half previously, deriving from a bunch of Jewish fishermen and a saintly local carpenter 1800 years earlier. That aspect of outdated fuddies is the reality of today’s perception. In 2022 the factual reality is that the study of theology at the Russell Group of British universities is taken up by many of the most intelligent and gifted undergraduates of the present era. They may not all be of the Christian persuasion, but they are mightily interested.

For our part, we cannot go on being seen as a struggling, waning remnant. We are to be seen as sophisticates, well aware of the vast difference between the mindset of today and that amid which Jesus lived and taught – a world of credulity in which God spoke out of the thunder, which abounded in the miraculous, of the presence of angels, and of the capricious savagery of official authority. Our seminal acts of worship must remain, yet purged of the manifestly untenable. Our historic monuments of devotion must be devoutly preserved yet seen anew as spaces embracing Man’s genuine creative endeavour musically and artistically in all its inspirational forms, as many of wisdom have advocated.

We must give Mrs Alexander a Christian burial and dig the hole deep. We must not ever again ascribe to God All Things Bright and Beautiful to children of whom some will watch their mother dying of cancer, and all of whom will witness the non-ascribable multiple gratuitous misfortunes of humankind. Let hymns continue being ancient or modern but say good-bye to the anthology we have got. (I will edit it and charge no fees!)

Here at our United Benefice, we are blessed by a team of clergy of a range of gifts and of deep conviction. As to the Church of England at large, I am sometimes moved to remark to Father James that we are Christian despite the Church. Our Church is substantially anglophone Africa’s too. Desmond Tutu was the Archbishop we never had in Canterbury. If today some of us are exasperated, not so long ago (by God’s grace) we chose Rowan Williams.

No re-entry of the spiritual into the psyche of our race can dispense with personal rigour of mind and body, inward and outward. We cannot do without the figure of Jesus Nazarene as our faultless exemplar. We truly need the repeated Eucharistic rehearsal of the magnitude of his sacrifice.

As John wrote: God is Love. Of all, everywhere, always. God loves us, according to our Christian premise. None will cavil at that.

The three words God is Love present a matching command of virtual impossibility – in that we are not up to that love. So be it. We are to strive. In this we cannot do without the preserved conveyance of the Word – indeed, of ‘every word that comes from the mouth of God’, as recorded in our scripture; but also as told of by many of the Church's revered explorers of the Spirit, of whom we shall be studying four remarkable women in this coming series of talks. Such are the leaven of our Christian community.

Then, in our function of rendering our faith accessible and acceptable to a pagan community of fellow citizens, we must make our truth, our gospel, plausible, which on the face of it, it is not. We must say with total confidence to those we encounter "Stop and listen", with that same confidence you will recall in the last couplet of George Herbert's exquisite poem entitled Love

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.  

We Christians work unwittingly in and out of metaphor. So be it. Jesus taught by parable, metaphor as narrative. As soon as we speak of the Son of God we are into unmistakeable metaphor. In the presence of the pagan, lost in his concrete jungle, we must be aware of what is metaphor. The Son of God.  'Our Father'. Metaphor in the cause of grasping Truth. For myself I hear metaphor, or myth, in the very next credal asseveration: born of the Virgin Mary. I risk being controversial. Those who reported that virginity  or described otherwise and fleshed it out with the angel Gabriel and Mary’s response, were into metaphor. Controversial to the devout, yet, I venture, supported by the silence on the matter by Jesus’ own contemporaries who never adduced such virginity as evidence of our Lord’s divinity, or referred to it: namely, two of the four evangelists (one of them being John), and St Paul, and the author of the vital letter to the Hebrews.

LET US BE PLAUSIBLE. To the pagan, the religiously untutored, the creed we recite sounds absurd. To my very self, a worshipper, it is an embarrassment, with no place in our liturgy in its present form. It treats metaphor – say ‘son-ship’ of God – as fact, albeit a biological absurdity. To treat metaphor as actuality is to nullify its purpose. Metaphor does not confine conceptual truth but liberates it. [Repeat] It reflects the musical composers’ favoured form of Theme and Variations whereby the melody is released upon our ears in a sweep of enlightening interpretations which bring its truth alive.

And now stand back, I urge, and hear our creed as a contemptuous nonbeliever.

I am consistently bemused by the reluctance of the Church to hear the insistent voice of the key unquestionable witness of the resurrection, namely John, representing the reappearances of our Lord as supra-natural, and indeed, also the voices of Luke (who was not a witness).

We shall never sell a fudged version of the Truth to today’s sceptic. We don't deserve to. Yet we can plausibly sell it as we have been given it and indeed, the entire resurrectional event as the biggest parable of all in the revelation of the Truth, entering the presence of the Divine, which remains inexpressible while lived by Love.

I pray I have upset none listening.

My opinion is that we, as worshipping Christians, should fundamentally and ruthlessly re-think the manner in which we function in a soul-starved pagan society. We absolutely need the Church. For God's sake, the Christianly ignorant need it.

Let me conclude with a word on my own entry upon antiquity. May I say to those yet to reach antiquity, look forward to it! You may be free to gaze back down upon a panorama of active life, of failure and success, of love and bereavement, joy and sorrow, attainment and rebuff.

            Antiquity is its own realm, of its own demands and challenges: of between-ness: this life and whatever else, and of the challenging demand here on earth to be born again.

            The vital centrality of Nicodemus bears upon one: the prevailing and presiding centrality of the spiritual. And the meaning of the voice of Jesus of Nazareth, however familiar, will reach you in a subtly altered context. I quote: ‘I am not alone . . . because the Father is with me . . .These things I have spoken unto you, that you might have peace. In the world you will have tribulation – but be of good cheer: I have overcome the world.’