Chrism Eucharist, Portsmouth Cathedral
Maundy Thursday, 11a.m. Thursday 24th March 2005
Readings: Isaiah 25: 1-5; Rom. 12: 1-8; Lk. 4: 16-21
Last November, Sarah and I spent a couple of days clearing out my parents’ family home. Nothing seemed to have been thrown out for 50 years, except what had been given away either to me, or to my brother and sister, or the grandchildren, during that period. Up in the attic I came across piles and piles of architect’s plans, representing a whole professional career, building houses, altering them, restoring and adding to old ones, as well as some work for the Church.
One or two of these sets of plans brought back memories, particularly at the first meeting with the clients, usually during an evening, when they and my father would generally test each other out. Always the priorities were to find out how much money was available, how much land, how large the property was to be, and a host of other factors, like the politics of the local planning committee, and the (known or unknown) attitudes of potential neighbours. Part of that initial encounter was to strike a balance between maintaining the enthusiasm of the clients, and getting across to them the limiting factors and collective disciplines that would have to be brought into play between that exploratory meeting and the time when they could at last move in to the completed building. Alongside those discussions I recall snapshot experiences, such as when my father remarked, ‘a building, however good, is out of date the moment it is completed, if not before’; and that reminded me of being taken round a large, brand new hospital at the start of my second curacy in Boston, Lincolnshire.
It’s not rocket science to see KAIROS in those terms: first conversations become sketches, which become plans, which become more detailed plans, which have to be discarded and re-drafted, or negotiated and adjusted, in the light of costs, collective disciplines, and local opinion. Even when the completed project sees the light of day, there is still more work to do, especially if some flexibility is built into the project, or new owners may arrive with new priorities, and contrary needs. We rightly speak of plans. Plans usually mean either something very specific and focused like a parish vision statement worked out in detail, or else something much vaguer and grander, like what we think God’s plan is in terms of our discipleship, however much that may be at variance with everybody else1 Planning, in specific terms, needs to go hand-in-hand with provisionality, with being only partially fulfilled: and that applies to all of us. If I may carry the assonance further, it is about pilgrimage, which means not being encumbered, hence all that important KAIROS rhetoric about being leaner, as well as broader and deeper. The two worlds of the practical and down-to-earth, and the visionary and the provisional, need somehow to meet. If they don’t, we become unnecessarily bogged down in detail, or else we are left up in the air.
It has been an interesting experience to eavesdrop on how the KAIROS planning stage has been going! Over and above the thinly-veiled self-sufficiencies here, or the conveniently-found theological objections there, much more is going on. Some of our people have felt ‘permitted’ to speak about God and the Kingdom in a way that has not always been the hallmark of the duller agendas of our local PCCs and Deanery Synods. To ‘think the unthinkable’, however, is not about leaping to easy, convenient, nineteenth century solutions to our very different world. And to insist on paddling one’s own canoe because we know better than everyone else is not really good enough, and hardly a sign of what John Wesley once dared to describe as ‘the Catholic Spirit’. The territorial character of the Church means putting up with people who do not always agree with us. The consumerised Church, on the other hand, will only lead us to a desperately unattractive, thought-police-driven ghetto of the like-minded. That is not real discipleship; and it certainly isn’t basis for good theology, as it is lived in our communities.
One recurring theme of those plans in my parents’ attic was flexibility. Yes, the basic structure had to fit the budget and the environment, and utilities, like kitchen and toilet, and everything else. But after that, there was everything to play for. A bedroom could become a study, or a small sitting room; a conservatory could be added; and there was always some potential in the loft as well. Such a rich series of possibilities always made for a mix of roles: whose room would this be, and who might use it in the future? Applying this analogy to the reconstruction of our life together as a diocese raises two questions, one positive, the other more challenging.
The first is that once flexibility is even whispered, people start seeing the picture whole. Why are clergy and laity treated separately; why can’t training and development be carried out, at least in some areas,together? After all, we occupy the same rooms, and the words bishop, presbyter, deacon, reader, warden all imply some kind of relationality: who is being overseen, who is being encouraged into deeper discipleship by prayer and sacrament, who is being served, who is being ‘read to’, who is being watched, even protected. Of course, boundaries are necessary, so that people can be secure in what they are doing. But the way those roles, those tasks, those ‘orders’ interact effectively, and with loving trust, matters, and matters a great deal.
But there is a greyer area in all this, and that is the sheer result of the difficult position we are in as Western Christians, sharing a common history, and a brittle, confused social culture that doesn’t really know where it is going. To plan in the context of a shaken collective memory is hard. For when an individual, or a group, an institution or a community, is badly shaken, two potentially dangerous dynamics easily take over. One is nostalgia – a false, warped memory of a supposed golden age, which must be reproduced at all costs: let’s ‘reconstruct’ and ‘perform’ a piece of theological heritage as it might make us all feel a bit better. The other dynamic is to cut ourselves off from the past in an exercise of individual or collective amnesia. No memory is needed: let’s start again, and find a way to the future from a glossy, over-personalised self-view of the present.
Neither of these approaches will do. In the shadow of the cross – God’s last word to the human race, God’s eternal planning permission for eternity - we have to start where we are, and recover a sense of new possibilities within the here and now of where God has placed us. And the cross has no time either for nostalgia, or for our pet ego-trip dreams, because it is about us as a living sacrifice, being transformed by the renewing of our minds. The cross, like the Spirit, leads us where it wills, and elicits a response from each one of us, of a probing, questioning discipleship, through a call that finds physical expression in the oils soon to be blessed, and the ministries in which we have been placed – by God.
+ KENNETH PORTSMOUTH
