City Service – Portsmouth Cathedral
Sunday 21st May 2006, 11.15a.m.
<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Readings</st1:place></st1:city>: Is 26:1-9/Heb 11:8-16
Put it down to a sheltered upbringing, but I only saw Clifton Suspension Bridge for the first time last summer. Of course I knew it from pictures. But it wasn’t until I looked at it in real life that its sheer size, boldness and elegance hit me between the eyes. How anyone managed to design a structure of that slimness and elegance must have baffled the folk who came to see it as it went up in the 1830’s. It’s a worthy tribute to one of Portsmouth’s sons, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, though sadly he never lived to see it completed, and opened by Queen Victoria, who also walked across it.
But Brunel doesn’t just witness to the art of engineering, all those bridges, steam-engines, and ships. He tells us something else about the genius of Portsmouth across the centuries – the capacity for this community to absorb people from elsewhere. He may have been born here 200 years ago, but his father was French, a Norman from across the Channel, who had fled his native land for the USA at the time of the Revolution because of his royalist views – a happy piece of background during the month of our Sovereign’s 80th birthday. The chief engineer for the city of New York then came to England, perhaps spurred on by a homing instinct for Europe, where his talent for experimentation earned his keep, and spilled over into his even more talented son.
Portsmouth does indeed absorb outsiders. Clergy who come here from elsewhere speak of ‘going native’, because there is something special about this City and the surrounding terrain. Perhaps it’s the sea air, blowing in from the Solent at different speeds (and at low tide in summer, differing odours!). To absorb a French engineer like the young Brunel, baptised in St Mary’s Portsea (the medieval font is now in St Alban’s, Copnor), is just one more in the long list of people who have come here and made their home, rather like some of the doctors and nurses in the Q.A.Hospital who looked after me so well during my illness last autumn and winter. It all makes us ask questions about diversity in our society, and those big words, much bandied-about in public discourse, multicultural, multiracial, and multifaith – which are about very different things.
Multicultural means different cultures being able to mix together. The simplest local example is being able to choose between a Thai, a Vietnamese, an Italian, or a French restaurant, as you can at places like Gunwharf and Southsea. You mix and match, and you are enriched (and sometimes confused) by the experience. Then things go up a notch when we become multiracial. The simplest example for me comes from my childhood: in the village where I was brought up, we had a German ex-P.O.W. from Pomerania at the farm, a Polish airman whose son was in the same class as me at school, and a Ukrainian farmer who ran a small-holding up the river, and grew the best strawberries in the region. That experience – and my own crazy Viking origins - prepared me for much of what has happened to me over the years, including six years in Manchester as University Chaplain. Portsmouth continues to score low in these national stakes, but things are going to change over the years: at St Luke’s School, whereas ten years ago, 2% of students came from ethnic minorities, the figure is now nearer 20%, the largest group (8%) being Bengali; there are now 18 different languages in the school.
And that brings me to the third level – multifaith - which is a different notion altogether. Here, a lot of rhetoric from the secularists reveals a less than helpful agenda, which is really about neutralizing all faiths, and getting them out of the picture, especially historic Christianity, and most of all, the Church of England. But that is to fly in the face of the facts on the ground: often St Luke’s will be the first choice for Muslim parents precisely because it has a religious base. Multifaith means learning to respect and be challenged by other faiths, while being secure in one’s own; there are few things that leaders of non-Christians faiths find more patronizing than some of the well-intentioned but superficial approaches from the secularist lobby, which fails to engage them at the level of faith.
To service a society that can be described in these terms requires real commitment, and cost. And this is one of the reasons why we gather year by year in this Cathedral – to celebrate so many areas of the City’s life, civic, educational, legal, naval, industrial, commercial; and to offer it all to the blessing of God. For the fact of the matter is that religion is back on the world’s agenda, whether we are black Nigerian Anglicans, or Tibetan Buddhists, or one of those Muslim children in our schools. It is one of the responsibilities of having an Established Church to provide some kind of hospitality to all these groups, both the increasingly diverse Christian community and those from other faiths, through out schools, and voluntary work, as well as through our witness of prayer for one another. I was very moved to be reminded at Mayor-Making on Tuesday of the places that remembered me in their prayers during my fight with leukemia, including the synagogue. All this can help us become what we often are called to be, a mirror of what the rest of society could be like, where tolerance, respect and understanding are not just talked about in armchairs, but made into a local reality.
If you read between the lines of the Bible, you will find an acute sensitivity to different racial and religious backgrounds, as important points of origin, that express peoples’ identity. But the Bible is always stretching us, pressing us beyond our sometimes narrow points of origin, so that we can be enlarged by a wider, deeper experience….something we can call God, the God revealed in Jesus Christ, in whom there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female, straight or gay, French or English, Malaysian or Chilean, engineer or sailor, professional or volunteer – even neither bishop nor layperson! The list could go on. It’s about our one-ness as a human race.
But let me return to bridge-building. Not the eye-catching, effortless superiority of Brunel’s Clifton suspension little number, but the day-by-day bridge-building that is the hall-mark of our communities – at their best. It is indeed costly to build bridges between different groups, and even more costly to keep going when misunderstandings occur, and tensions break out. For all the recent talk of ‘British values’, there is no way that we can move towards some kind of single manner of being a community, unless there is some kind of vision to which we can aspire in a dynamic, diverse manner. The bible is the only book that begins in a garden – the Garden of Eden, a place supposed innocence – and it ends in a city, the City of God. That city is characterized by reconciled diversity, and it’s a wonderful-sounding place, a strong city, as the Old Testament lesson reminded us, a city whose architect and builder is God, as the Lord Mayor read to us in the New Testament lesson. But for me there is one exception: dogs are banned from its borders, and as a dog-lover I have a problem with that!
So how do we reconcile diversity in our midst? Well, we can start by paying attention to religion and its place in our common life. We may well be a multicultural and a multiracial society, but for all that other faiths are strong in this country, we are, in fact, far from being a truly multi-faith society. With 72% of the population claiming to be Christian, the second largest group are the Muslims, at just over 3%. And with 86% of the population having visited a Church last year for some reason or another, and 40% having attended a Carol Service (a higher proportion than took part in the recent Local Elections!), the message needs to be heard again and again that we are very much in business.
But Christian witness needs a base for it to be real. One http://www.portsmouth.anglican.org/?id=of the reasons for launching the recent Cathedral Appeal is to help build up the mission and ministry of this place in the life of the community, with prayer at the centre of its whole being; a place of hospitality and exploration, a place of bridge-building in the City of God.
+ Kenneth Portsmouth
