He will come…
The Meirionnydd Archdeaconry Advent 2017 Quiet Day
St John’s Church, Barmouth, 5 December 2017
Material and acknowledgements
A booklet to accompany the day, including its liturgies and the two Philip Larkin poems that provide a starting point for its two reflections, is available here. Analysis of the poems in the reflections is drawn from and inspired by the content and spirit of Janet Morley’s readings in The Heart’s Time: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter, Haphazard by Starlight: A Poem a Day from Advent to Epiphany and Our Last Awakening: Poems for Living in the Face of Death. Biographical information about Larkin is drawn from Sir Andrew Motion’s Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life and James Booth’s Philip Larkin: Art, Life and Love. There’s also a little Malcom Guite in there. The liturgies of light draw on the work of Wellspring Liturgies.
Introduction
Welcome this year’s Meirionnydd Advent Quiet Day.
We’ll begin in a moment with a celebration of the Holy Eucharist. I’ll be saying more in an opening reflection during the Eucharist about the shape of the rest of our time together.
For now, let me just acknowledge the lack of quiet in what follows. My slightly nervous, restless, anxious personality makes me particularly edgy around silence. This Quiet Day will therefore contain quite a lot of speech, quite a lot of liturgy, quite a lot of reading, quite a lot of words. It doesn’t require too much of you — two hymns at the beginning, two hymns at the end, some responsories in between. But there’s a lot to listen to, and not much silence.
My advice — let it wash over you. Let me invite you to listen, to hear what you want to; but also to look, to think, to pray, to reflect, to be still, to be present, to be absent. Above all, to wait. To wait. For he will come…
In a few moments, we will begin with a celebration of the Holy Eucharist, the order for which begins on pages 2 & 3 of the booklet.
[…The Holy Eucharist]
Opening reflection during the Holy Eucharist
He will come…
In the lectionary of Marks & Spencer in Bangor, last Sunday was, by my estimation, the Fourth Sunday of Christmas. Advent there was quite short — as long as it took to take down the merchandise of the great feast of Halloween and to replace it with Christmas wrapping and poinsettias; although I noticed that some mince pies had already made an early appearance at the end of the September liturgical season of Back-to-School-tide. I firmly expect the celebration of Easter, heralded by daffodils, and Cadbury’s Cream Eggs at the checkout, to begin no later than 21 January.
He will come…
As the commerce and the marketing and the glitz all increase and accelerate at this time, the natural world all around us is slowing down, diminishing, emptying. Birds have migrated; animals are beginning to disappear to hibernate; fruit has ripened and fallen; leaves are shrouding the ground, soggy under foot; the wind has flayed the trees; the frost arrests morning movement; the light is austere and lateral and short. Creation seems reduced to its elemental self; it’s skeletal; you can see the structure, the bones of things. All decoration is gone. Only the bare, important things are left.
Celebration is a wonderful thing and there is great joy to be had in the real meetings of faith and friendship that fill these Christmas-coloured days. But while Advent is still Advent, it’s good to keep a quiet space, a sacred time, a sanctuary away from the the busy-ness, to be still, and to wait for the light that will come.
So let us today try to live in that Advent world today. A world in which we’re called to strip away the superfluous stuff so that only the elemental is left. A world in which we’re called to face our fears with honesty and faith. A world in which we’re called to light a candle, defiant against the dark, hopeful to the end.
He will come…
As well as awaiting the coming of the Christchild at Christmas, Advent has also been the time when the Church awaits Christ’s second coming, his coming “again in glory / to judge the living and the dead.” It’s been a time when Christians have reflected on what that second coming means for them — the end of things, the giving up of things, the culmination of things, the last things: death, judgement, heaven, hell: life reduced to its elemental self so that you can see the structure, the bones of things. All decoration, all worldliness gone. Only the bare, important things left. That will be our theme this morning.
This afternoon, we’ll think about what it means to share that which we know to be foundational, elemental, important with the world out there. We’ll reflect on what it means to take the light of Christ and allow it to shine amid the shining shop fronts, the Christmas tree decorations, the television screens glowing, aching with goods and offers — to shine brighter than the lights of the world, with a living, breathing Christmas light, a light that thrives in the depths of darkness, a light that cannot and will not be quenched.
The sentimentality of Christmas all around us is so strong that there’s a real danger that we neither keep a good Advent, nor do we celebrate a true Christmas. We will try, then, to engage with the purifying challenge of Advent this morning, and with the kindling opportunity of Christmas this afternoon.
He will come…
We’ll explore our two themes with the help of two poems by Philip Larkin. Philip Larkin was born in Coventry and died, of cancer, aged 63 in 1985. He spent most of his working life as a University librarian, largely at the University of Hull. But he combined that low-key, solitary private and professional life with a forty-year career as one of the most famous poets in Britain. Some of his fame rests on his short, punchy poems, some of them quite rude. But his reputation rests on a handful of longer poems — odes that touch with honesty and vividness and a great perception on some of the big things of life and death and love and grace. His haunting poem, “Aubade”, will help us this morning to think about death and judgment and last things. His secular-religious ode, “Church Going”, will help us to reflect on how we make manifest what’s elemental to our faith this afternoon.
He will come…
Some practicalities.
Immediately after this Eucharist, we’ll begin the morning part of our Quiet Day. Lynda will read our first Larkin poem — “Aubade”, on pages 14 & 15 of the booklet, I’ll offer a reflection, I’ll then re-read the poem and pray the Advent collect, and there will then be time for you to whatever you’d like in or outside this marvellous building — to walk, to talk, to keep silence, to reflect, to pray, to write, to think, to wait. We’ll then gather together at 12.45pm for a liturgy of the Kindling of the Light to gather our thoughts on the morning together, before then breaking for a light lunch.
We’ll then gather together again at 1.45pm for the afternoon part of our Quiet Day, which will follow the same pattern as the morning: Lynda will read our second Larkin poem — “Church Going”, on page 22 and onwards of the booklet, I’ll offer a reflection, I’ll then re-read the poem and pray the Advent collect, and there will then be time for you to pray and reflect as you’d like. We’ll then gather together at 2.40pm for a liturgy of the Sharing of the Light to gather our thoughts on the afternoon together, before then going our separate ways.
So poem, reflection, poem, collect, time apart, liturgy will be our repeated pattern.
If, during our free time, you find that you would like to be able to have a confidential pastoral conversation about any matter at all, I’m very grateful to Pam Odam and Lynda Cowan for making themselves available as Chaplains on this day. Please approach either of them at any time if you would like that opportunity for a quiet pastoral conversation.
For some Church traditions, Advent is a season where the sacrament of Reconciliation — private confession — provides a means of finding the assurance of God’s forgiveness. If your self-examination this day leads you to want to make your Confession, I’m grateful to Archdeacon Andrew for making himself available as Priest-Confessor today. Please approach the Archdeacon at any time if you would like to make your Confession, or if you’d like a conversation about what it means to make your Confession. An outline order for Confession is printed on the inside back cover of the booklet.
He will come…
So let us today try to live in that Advent world today. A world in which we’re called to strip away the superfluous stuff so that only the elemental is left. A world in which we’re called to face our fears with honesty and faith. A world in which we’re called to light a candle, defiant against the dark, hopeful to the end.
He will come like last leaf’s fall.
He will come like frost.
He will come like dark.
He will come like child.
He will come…
With those many words, would you please stand.
[…The Holy Eucharist continues]
First reflection: “Aubade”
[“Aubade” is read]
He will come…
Philip Larkin had something of a love-hate relationship with his widowed mother, Eva. In some ways he thought of her as a burden. When he was 45, in 1967, he wrote to a friend (with a cynicism and a pessimism that was typical of him in later life) speculating about his mother’s death and saying “I suppose I shall become free at sixty, three years before cancer starts.” In other ways, he was devoted to Eva, taking her without fail on her annual holiday to the seaside, visiting, speaking on the phone, and his emotional attachment to her must explain in part why Larkin never married and why his relationships with other women were never wholly giving and easy. And when she did die, in the autumn of 1977, Larkin was spurred to complete his last great long poem, “Aubade”. It was published that winter, forty years ago, on 23 December 1977, in the Times Literary Supplement, with Larkin grimly anticipating the Christmas dinners it would spoil. His own Christmas dinner that year was the first he would have not with his mother.
However, it’s not a poem about grief or loss, but about mortality and the anticipation of death as extinction.
In the first verse, it’s four in the morning, and our insomniac narrator is in bed. It’s dark but he feels that he sees clearly — sees “what’s really always there” — “unresting death a whole day nearer now.” He is caught in the glare of thoughts about “death and being dead” — “ of “where and when I shall myself die”.
In the second verse, he tells us why he finds this so horrific. It’s not because he’ll be regretful when he’s dead — for “good not done” or “love not given” — it’s not that he’ll be regretful for not living life to the full. It’s horrific because death for him is “total emptiness for ever” — it is “The sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always.”
In the third verse, he dismisses traditional explanations that might have soothed him. “No trick dispels” the gloom. Not religion — “Created to pretend we never die” — and not rationalist philosophy — that tells us that we can’t “fear a thing [we] will not feel.” Indeed, it’s that nothingness that’s most terrifying — “no sight, no sound, / No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, / Nothing to love or link with, / The anaesthetic from which none come round.”
In the fourth verse, he has a go at the ways we cope — company, drink, being courageous so as not to scare other people. Of course, all of these don’t stop the inevitable. “Death is no different whined at than withstood.”
In the fifth verse, morning breaks. The “curtain-edges… grow light” and “the room takes shape.” The advent of light. A light that exposes — some of the feverish fear falls away in this verse — death and the knowledge of death is just there, plain as the wardrobe that’s also surely a coffin. The light also hides — it signals that the day’s structures and routines are at hand. With the help of those, we will cope in this “rented world” — but there is no hope.
He will come…
The structure of the poem is quite formal — it’s an intricately rhymed Keatsian ode; it has a steady iambic five-beat line (that’s only varied for emphasis in the penultimate line of each verse); and some of the language is quite florid — for example, on religion being “That vast moth-eaten musical brocade.” But on the whole there’s a lyric naivety here; a casual, conversational tone; a lack of élan; some bald prose — “nothing more terrible, nothing more true” — an expressing of things plainly — all in all, a candid dismay at death — a saying of things that other poets (that we…) might shy away from in embarrassment.
He will come…
The Church used to own the monopoly on how to cope (with hope) with our poet’s dismay and terror. Death, the Creeds of the Church tell us, is not “total emptiness for ever”, not “sure extinction”. For, after a period, Christ “will come again in glory / to judge the living and the dead.” “We look for the resurrection of the dead, / and the life of the world to come” in which Christ’s “kingdom will have no end.”
Lo! He comes, with clouds descending…
Every eye shall now behold him
robed in dreadful majesty;
those who set at nought and sold him,
pierced and nailed him to the tree,
deeply wailing
shall the true Messiah see.
A worshipper in even the simplest of our medieval churches would likely have seen, week by week, at the west end, a depiction on the lime plaster of that “coming” “in glory” — of the Last Judgement — of Christ holding a sword and the scales of life — and of the angels and archangels helping him to separate the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats — the saved entering the ordered ranks of heaven to join the communion of saints; and the damned thrown into the nether reaches of hell, where there would be gnashing of teeth and much worse. “But, Mr Paisley,” Ian Paisley was once asked during one of his fiery sermons about the gnashing of teeth and the other tortures of hell that awaited the godless, “but, Mr Paisley, I’ve lost my teeth; I’m all gums.” “Teeth,” he instantly replied, “will be provided.”
We’re less keen on the Last Judgement nowadays. An understanding of biology, physics, geological time, geographic and cosmic space, the displacements of industrialisation and globalisation, even the widespread use of cremation, all combine to make it impossible to believe in bodies lying in the churchyard waiting to be roused by the Last Trump and dispatched up to glory or down to worse.
We don’t sing “Lo! He comes, with clouds descending” at funerals. We prefer to be vague about what happens next; and, if we have to be more specific, we’d probably settle for the last verse of “Abide with me”:
Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom, and point me to the skies;
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.
Inasmuch as there’s a geographic movement there, it’s all upwards. Our forebears could only cope with the thought of the Judgement to come by theologies of good works and sacramentalism, or theologies of grace and election. We’ve settled for the gentle, Thora Hird hope that “Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee.”
He will come…
When we talk and preach about death, it’s usually about the death of others — about All Saints and All Souls — about loss and grief, about the comfort that (in some way, beyond our comprehension) all will be well.
We mostly manage to avoid both that medieval fear of judgement, and also its cousin, that Philip Larkin fear of nothingness. Occasionally, we can’t avoid it and it’s forced on us. Somebody in our local communities will face a terminal diagnosis, or a celebrity or somebody in the national press will talk about how they’re coping with their terminal illness — where death “stands plain as a wardrobe” and must be talked about. On the face of it, we say how brave they are, how terrible it must be. But I suspect we also admire something at a deeper level — that they have to face that thing which “people and drink” and the structures and routines of everyday life allow us to avoid — living in the glare of our own mortality.
He will come…
When we talk and preach about death, it’s usually about the death of others. For centuries, the Church taught us to prepare for our own death, for our own resurrection, even for our own Last Judgement — to be ready, to be prepared, to have faith in what lay ahead, to have hope. To make sure we’re tidy — like the resurrected bodies in the Stanley Spencer painting. That can become mawkish; it can become excessive; it can be manipulated. But it is not worthless.
The invitation to think about our own death, our own mortality, our temporal-ness, is a precious invitation to look at our lives in the light of immortality and eternity.
What would it mean for this to end — “The good not done, the love not given, time / Torn off unused”?
What would it mean for this be judged? To be wrapped in white garments, our names written in the book of life. For the shame of our ethical nakedness to be made manifest?
What will it mean to walk from the inevitable human darkness of shame, and dysfunction, and broken-ness (that is within us all) towards the light of Christ. “Look: I stand at the door and know; should anyone hear my voice and open the door I will enter in to him, and I will dine with him and he with me.”
He will come…
[“Aubade” is re-read]
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility; that on the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Friends, we’re back here for our liturgy at 12.45pm.
Second reflection: “Church Going”
[“Church Going” is read]
He will come…
Philip Larkin was baptised in Coventry Cathedral. The Larkin family home was nearby. In the winter of 1940, Larkin was a first-year student at Oxford University, when Luftwaffe bombs rained down on Coventry. He heard nothing from his family for two days, despite travelling to Coventry with a friend to look for them, until finally there came a telegram to say they were safe with extended family in Lichfield. Coventry Cathedral, that first church that Larkin visited, was, of course, utterly destroyed.
In 1983, Larkin, now 61, bought a large-print Bible from Oxford University Press and set it up on an ugly lectern stolen from the University Library and placed in his bedroom. Though Larkin’s life had been surrounded by a sort of cultural Anglicanism, that Bible was his first real personal engagement with Christianity since his baptism. He would read a few verses every day while shaving. He had finished it all (Genesis to Revelation) by the time he died two years later at 63; (the cancer came, eight (not five) years after his mother’s death); finished reading it in time to write to a friend saying: “It’s absolutely amazing to think that anyone ever believed any of that. Really, it’s absolute nonsense. Beautiful, of course. But nonsense.” Larkin, a big swearer in this letters, didn’t actually say “nonsense”, preferring to refer to an item of the male anatomy.
As a reasonably avowed baptised atheist, it’s therefore more than a little ironic that Larkin’s most loved poem is a reasonably affirming “Ode on Faith” about visiting a church. I wonder how annoyed he would have been to know it, one of his earliest published poems, was one of a small handful read at his memorial service; though one suspects he would have been rather pleased that it was held, in 1986, at the last church that Larkin visited, so to speak, namely Westminster Abbey.
He will come…
“Church Going”. There’s a pun, of course, in the title. It’s about going to a church, though the person going to the church doesn’t actually “go to church”; and it’s about a building and an institution that’s going, that’s on it’s last legs, and whose demise Larkin envisages. “Church Going”.
Our narrator has stopped by to visit a church. He’s an interloper — he stops to make “sure there’s nothing going on.” He’s slightly goofy, taking off his cycle-clips. He’s a little disrespectful, mocking the Vicar with his “Here endeth” at the lectern. He’s a bit bored by this church — just “Another church: matting, seats, and stone, / And little books.” He’s a bit uninformed, wondering about the age of the roof. He’s even a bit underwhelmed, leaving only “an Irish sixpence” — something between proper money and nothing at all. All in all, his first impression is of the Church as a moribund thing, a dead-weight authority to which he won’t defer.
But in the third verse he catches himself wanting to understand the building a bit more; a bit sorry that it’s not in better nick; and wondering what will become of it. He takes it for granted that it will fall into disuse, and verses three, four and five involve his speculations about its future — what it’ll be like when it’s become some sort of ancient monument where holy things once happened, but which is now let out “rent-free to rain and sheep;” when all that remains, in the words of that depressing list, is “Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky.”
And then, in verse six, the man, baptised in Coventry Cathedral, memorialised in Westminster Abbey, speaks for everyman — speaks for those people who don’t go to church but who know, almost instinctively, that here is sacred place, here is sacred time. Here, above all, is something serious. “A serious house on serious earth it is, / In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, / Are recognised, and robed as destinies.” Here, in this place, in this company, our human needs, our human frailties, our human weaknesses, meet with something Other, and are clothed with wisdom, with dignity, with importance.
God only gets a name-check once in the poem, in the first verse, where Larkin almost swears “God knows”. But God’s there by the end, un-named, but presiding over time and eternity.
He will come…
In the Orthodox tradition, the Feast of the Epiphany is given greater liturgical weight than the Feast of the Nativity, than Christmas itself. It is to the Orthodox the feast of “God shining forth” — of “God made visible.” They celebrate on that dat not only the arrival of the wise men in Bethlehem, but the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan, and the turning of water into wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee. The common theme running through those three events is that they show God in Christ shining forth, God in Christ made visible:
At the manger, the three kings (kneeling there as representatives of the non-Jewish world, brought there by the use of Gentile wisdom), the three kings (kneeling there are representatives of you and me and all out there) see in this child the Saviour of the World — God in Christ shines forth, and they see the light.
In the rivers of the Jordan, as John the Baptist was baptizing Jesus, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were open to Jesus and the Spirit of God descends like a dove and alights on him. And a voice from heaven says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” — God in Christ shines forth, and John and the others see the light.
At the wedding feast, Jesus first replies “My hour has not yet come,” but he follows his mother’s insistence; and, as the Gospel of John says: “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” God in Christ shines forth, and the disciples for the first time see the true light.
Christopher Wordsworth intertwines these three events in his great hymn:
Songs of thankfulness and praise
Jesu, Lord, to thee we raise,
manifested by the star
to the sages from afar…
Manifest at Jordan’s stream,
Prophet, Priest, and King supreme;
and at Cana, wedding-guest
in thy Godhead manifest;
manifest in power divine,
changing water into wine;
anthems be to thee addrest
God in man made manifest.
That Orthodox insistence on the fulness of what Incarnation means tells us that this is not just about a baby, angels and shepherds. This is to just about a Christmas card scene. This is not the work of one starry night in the Judean provinces. Christmas, Nativity, Incarnation, Epiphany means showing God in Christ shining forth, God in Christ made visible. It means others seeing the light. It means others, in the hay by the manger, in Jordan’s stream, at the wedding banquet, in an ancient church building, knowing that here is something serious — that here is wisdom, dignity, importance. Christmas, Nativity, Incarnation, Epiphany means others seeing the light. It means us sharing the light with others.
He will come…
We want our churches to be busy. We want our Messy Churches to be busy. We want our fresh expressions of church to be busy. We want, God knows, our church fêtes to be busy. But don’t we, above all, want buildings, communities, lives that show God in Christ shining forth, that show God in Christ made visible. Buildings, communities, lives that say to the world — here is something serious — here, in this place, in this company, your human needs, your human frailties, your human weaknesses, will meet with something Other, and will be clothed with wisdom, with dignity, with importance.
He will come…
Thousands will come to our churches across the Diocese of Bangor this Christmas season to hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the Babe lying in a manger. Let us also, in the time that we have now, pray that they come also even unto the Jordan, even unto Cana of Galilee, and see there, more than a Babe, “a place to grow wise in.”
He will come…
[“Church Going” is re-read]
Almighty God, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and to put on the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which your Son Jesus Christ came to us in great humility; that on the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Friends, we’re back here for our closing liturgy at 2.40pm.
