St Matthews Church, Big Lamp, Summerhill Street, Newcastle upon Tyne

Dying at the age of seventy-six or thereabouts, Saint Augustine lived to an uncommonly old age for his time – surprisingly so, given the frequent bouts of ill-health, which punctuated his life. There can be no doubt that he was a driven man; and, doubtless, it was his energy that carried him on and on.

However, as we know, there was a shadow-side to that driven-ness. The concubine, whom he didn’t even deign to name in his writings despatched to a convent when an advantageous marriage loomed in Milan; and Adeodatus dying in adolescence, apparently un-mourned by his father: one might even think that the death was rather convenient.

People like to smirk at the remembrance of Augustine’s dissolute youth – though it wasn’t anything like as salacious as popular comment suggests: not salacious, but curious, perhaps, in one who later devoted so much time reflecting on the love of God.

Did he, I wonder, spend much time in his later years thinking about his common-law wife and his son? Little bits of his writings suggest that, in his own mind, he sought rationalise his conduct. The relationship with the woman was never happy: and the birth of the boy, the fruit of a discontented relationship, brought him no joy. Of course, all this happened before his Baptism at the hands of Saint Ambrose; new life in the Spirit washed clean the slate.

For sure, times were different then … and there in North Africa. Life was hard and Christianity was embattled – its ascendancy was not yet assured. None-the-less, there is a feeling of self-absorption about Augustine’s career: his appetite for inquiry and intellectual satisfaction; his ambition; his desire to live in a community of which, of course, he was the dominant figure; his struggle for the heart and soul of the Church.

Certainly, from this single-mindedness emerged profound thinking and great insight, which still today, nearly seventeen centuries later, exercises great influence over the life of the Church and her theologians even unto the papal throne.

Yet, to my mind, Adeodatus and his mother remain unresolved issues in the remembrance of Saint Augustine of Hippo, Doctor of the Church - almost sacrifices on the altar of his life’s odyssey; and, like his, their memory has lessons for us.

We, none of us, live in a vacuum; our choices and actions inevitably touch on the lives of others. Sometimes, of course, hard decisions have to be made and people will be hurt by the paths we follow. Jesus never promised that discipleship would be unproblematic or cost-neutral.

However, we should not be blasé or indifferent to the impact that our choices – even our obligations - impose on others. The relentless pursuit of the Will of God as it has been understood has brought great shame on the Church over the centuries, inquisiting and crusading her way across Christendom and beyond: practices, which have not completely waned with the succession of generations.

Even when we are correct in our evaluation that particular ends do justify their necessary means, we should be attentive to the collateral damage of our actions: we may move on, but God’s love does not; and how we honour that truth is a particular challenge as our lives turn a page. Our patron’s accomplishments are deemed to have manifested virtue of a saintly measure; but that does not mean that Adeodatus and his mother ceased to matter. Augustine inherited at least some of the qualities that made him a saint from his mother; and as in life, so in death, Monica pursued her son, even through the gate of Heaven; I hope that there is a place there for her son’s family as well.

Fr. Richard

Sunday XIX 2010 The Science of Faith

To some contemporary ears, the assertion in the Epistle to the Hebrews this morning that faith can prove realities will sound faintly ridiculous. For the minds to which such ears are connected, faith is the very antithesis of proof: People who believe, in the sense of faith, critics would say, cannot prove what they believe.

By a sleight of argument, they move from this proposition to two further suggestions. First, that since the tenets of faith cannot be proved, they must be trivial – often characterised as fairy stories or some such pejorative reference; and, secondly, that being ungrounded in empirical demonstration, they have no place in the public realm: people should indulge their delusional fantasies in private.

The problem with which people of faith contend is that this view is seeping into the very fabric of our society. We are forced onto the defensive even to the point, in practice, of conceding the argument. We can be reticent to assert the rights, which this secular framework accords to us, to hold our religious views and embody them in the manner in which we live our lives.

To be swayed by this assault on religion is to fail properly to understand the nature of the Faith we profess.

In the first place, it is extraordinary to suggest that the content of our Faith is trivial. If there is a God and He has a Purpose for His creation, it surely follows that understanding that Purpose is of crucial and ultimate significance for all of us. It is our view that the attempted exile of God from the public realm is an aspect of the sin gripping our world: and a rejection, on which is predicated the greed, corruption and injustice endemic in our midst – a connexion, which has been made since the times of the Prophets.

The phenomenon of Christ’s risen Presence in the world, calling humanity to revoke the ostracism of God, we consider a fact in the same way that it is a fact that Summerhill Street runs past the West door of this church. Scholarly inquiry has not, as yet, developed the means of demonstrating this fact just as it has not yet unearthed the capacity to discern most of the facts about the Universe in which we live; but it is a fact, none-the-less.

However, God has sown into the human character the capacity to recognise His Presence. This is what we mean when we say that man is made in the image of God: there is a seed of the divine within each of us, which can respond to the encounter with its Maker. It is this in which inheres the faculty of faith. Faith transcends the limitations of human investigation, affording us glimpses of realities far beyond the progress of scientific discovery.

Why, then, people might ask, does not everyone experience this insight? The answer lies in a complex interaction of factors, which include the reality that few human beings achieve their full inherent potential; that we have a capacity to ignore and suppress things to which we do not wish

to animadvert; and that this faculty, like all others, requires education and training if the inchoate promptings of the divine image are to be given an intelligible form and structure.

This last observation indicates that Faith creates the science of theology, which endeavours to interpret and understand the pieces of evidence that it yields. It is not, as some would maintain, a dimension of the supernatural; but very much rooted in the natural order, which God has created; it is not, therefore, an alternative to the other branches of scientific activity, but complementary to and integral with them.

Like any academic discipline, progress is at an intermediate stage. There are some questions we consider settled; some matters are still subjects of debate; and there are myriad issues of which, as yet, we know nothing; and, of course, we have our fringe groups proffering minority outlooks.

It is unfortunate when we are caught in the middle of a discussion, presenting differing, even conflicting views to the world; since such occasions supply an impetus for our detractors to renew their assault. However, in all spheres of human exploration, there are some areas that are at this midway stage of consideration and when experts espouse conflicting opinions – it is just part of the untidiness of human life.

Gone are the days when theology is considered by most the Queen of the Sciences. None-the-less, we should not lose confidence in the importance of Faith and its dependant reflexion. The fruits of Faith are indispensable for the restoration of a healthy human society.

To us, who have been given the gift of Faith, falls the responsibility to stand firm in that Faith. The temptation may be, like the devout children of worthy men in the first reading, to offer our sacrifice in secret – in private, waiting for more propitious times.

Of course, it may come to that whatever we do: the Christian Faith was, after all, born and nurtured in persecution and its image hangs over our assemblies. Even then, however, we would need always to be alert to opportunities profitably to stand by and for the Faith to which we commit ourselves.

This is the significance of the words of Jesus in the Gospel reading. We can never know when Christ shall call us publicly to stand witness to the realities, which He has revealed to us; but we must ever be ready to respond to His summons regardless of the pressures to confine our knowledge to the privacy of our homes.

If we are withstand the tide of resistance to religion, we must maintain within ourselves confidence in the identity and stature of the Faith we profess; for if we don’t appear to believe in it, we shall struggle to convince the sceptics.

Fr. Richard

Sunday XVIII 2010 The God of the Gaps

One of the more enduring snipes at Christianity, if not religions more widely, is the characterisation of our Faith as the God of the gaps. It derives its animus from what was certainly the humbling of the Church as many phenomena ascribed to direct divine action were explained though the discoveries of science.

The Church – certainly the Western Church – did not handle the flowering of scientific advance well, despite the fact that many of its roots lay in the experimentation, investigation and inquiry of avowedly Christian people – often clerics or religious. Pope Pius X enforced a vow against modernity on all Roman Catholic clergy at the beginning of the twentieth century; and most Anglican bishops of that time were equally strident in their resistance, though lacking the levers available to the Pontiff.

The result has been that we have found ourselves more-or-less continually on the back foot in this age of science, which continues through the present generation and doubtless into the future. In a very real sense, we were victims of our own vanity, believing that we knew everything there was to know, understanding all that there was to understand and constructing our self-image on that supposed omni-competence.

The root meaning of vanity is emptiness – that is, when we peer into the picture we create of ourselves, we find that what we claim is not really there. As the Old Testament lesson makes clear, the supreme vanity – the vanity of vanities – is to assure ourselves that we are self-sufficient: that we are able to work sufficiently hard, to study sufficiently profoundly, to live sufficiently ethically that there is no more to be achieved.

The theme of the Old Testament is picked up in the Gospel reading where the rich man has become so wrapped up in his wealth that it is all of which he thinks; but in a trice God takes it away – and he is left with nothing as he travels to the next world.

The advance of science has been for the Church a similar reckoning. For centuries, theologians and canonists picked over the details refining and further refining the minutiae of Christian doctrine, oftentimes ad absurdam. Yet all the while the seed of science was germinating in the monasteries and vicarages of Europe and little by little it broke through the shell of ecclesiastical complacency rather like those weeds have risen from the concrete in my yard.

Viewing the burgeoning scientific data as weeds in her beautiful theological garden the Church tried to cut them down – even poison them, when her response should have been to use the considerable intellectual resources at her disposal to incorporate the fruits of this growing source of knowledge into her own wisdom.

We are beginning to do this now; but the legacy of our past is still heavy. The puncturing of our vanity has been humbling, if not humiliating. Yet, this has taught us a valuable lesson. The proper disposition before the infinity of God’s creative work is humility, for we cannot know everything; and the recognition of the partiality of our knowledge will, in fact, improve our proclamation.

In the first place, mindful of our ignorance, it will restrain the arrogance to which we can be prone in stating our case; and secondly, it will make it all the easier for us to accommodate and assimilate new information as it emerges.

However, this humility, which is proper before the world is not simply a discipline for ourselves; it is also an example that we can set and recommend to those managing the more secular dynamics of our society.

Whilst, of course, many strands influence world development, we might take two as examples: one is science itself and the other is capitalism.

Adam Smith, the great exponent of Capitalism, said that for it to work perfectly, the markets must be privy to all the relevant information – otherwise, the responses of those markets will be dysfunctional; and since nobody can ever be sure they know everything they need to know and rarely, if ever, succeed in such a quest, the functioning of the markets could not be the perfect servant of society as its proponents often suggest.

Similarly, scientific explanation is always vulnerable to the next discovery. An incomplete set of facts can paint a very misleading picture. Furthermore, knowledge rarely, of itself, can explain how it should be applied: that question of how we should employ the understanding unearthed in laboratories requires a broader skill-set than that developed by scientific training.

Science and capitalism have their gaps, just like the Church’s theology; but whereas we were accustomed to insert the direct intervention of God into these holes, the exponents of these other disciplines are tempted simply to ignore them, leading them to assert their views with a self-confidence, which matches that of the Medieval theologians.

It is often said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, since we do not know sufficient to realise how little we know. It is but a short step from this ignorance, gilded with scanty knowledge, to the intellectual vanity that we know everything.

Every bit as much as wealth, knowledge can stimulate within us an arrogance about ourselves: that like the man in the Gospel, we can quickly think that we have it all – and by our own endeavour. It is the sin first described in the story of the Tower of Babel, but which has perjured the generations; and it is a sin that brings catastrophe in its wake: a sin from which we must repent. It behoves all of us – theologians, financiers, scientists – to concede that in the face of this infinite creation, our knowledge is, in fact, infinitesimal.

In the second reading, the Colossians are encouraged to strip away the old self, the old behaviour so that they can progress towards true knowledge. It is interesting to contemplate what difference it would make to human commerce in its broadest sense if we could all of us, theologians, financiers and scientists assume a properly tentative presentation of our views, conceding the gaps in our knowledge and the part that other disciplines could play in expanding our own expertise.

Fr. Richard

St James the Great 2010 Pilgrimage

This weekend, the Spanish city of Santiago di Compostella throngs with pilgrims who have travelled to celebrate the festival of S James the Great at the supposed site of his tomb. There will doubtless be an endless sequence of Masses in the basilica, which houses his shrine; the great thurible will swing across the transepts; and the saint’s image will make its progress through the streets, accompanied by people in all sorts of curious outfits, which speak of a time when Spain’s devotional life was – well, intense.

Pilgrimage is not quite what once it was. In the first place, fewer people, certainly as a proportion of the population, feel the call of such an undertaking; but, also, the challenges are not so great in these days of cars, coaches and aeroplanes. It is easy to forget, now, that the journey was as a considerable part of the pilgrimage experience – as Chaucer’s contemporary accounts make clear.

The village where I spent the first few years of my life – and will which, doubtless, become a destination of choice for the veneration of the faithful once the full extent of my sanctity is recognised – that village sat on one of the pilgrimage routes to Canterbury. Further afield, Europe – and beyond – was criss-crossed with such routes, since it was rather safer to travel in company.

The road to Santiago di Compostella was travelled by the presenter of one of the seemingly endless series of programmes on BBC4 about Baroque art. At many of the stopping-off places, the local bishop had commissioned great edifices of Renaissance architecture for the edification of the faithful as they made their way to the great shrine.

Although the Christian life does not include pilgrimage in quite the same way as once was the case, the practice of pilgrimage has been assimilated into Christian consciousness by way of metaphor: our Christian discipleship is often described in terms of a pilgrimage – the destination, of course, being deification and our final reward in Heaven.

Although, of course, each of us makes our own way towards the goal of our journey, as with Chaucer’s pilgrims, we often travel in the company of others – indeed, it is inherent to the Christian enterprise that we do – and, as well, there are stopping-off points along the way.

These milestones are not just places dripping with Baroque bling; but people and experiences, which touch our lives. Unlike the churches along the route to Saintiago, these people and experiences can dramatically alter the course of our pilgrimage. Sometimes they encourage us to greater passion for our journey; but others can deter us, on occasion destroying our appetite for the whole undertaking.

Equally importantly, we need to remember that we ourselves and the experiences that we create for others in their encounters with us are stopping-off places in their Christian pilgrimage. This constitutes a challenge for us.

Perhaps at the least expected moment, our path will pass through the life of someone else, maybe only for a short while, but for whom the experience, for whatever reason, will be hugely significant. Our purpose, as Christians, is to allow Christ to touch that life through the manner in which we treat them.

This calls to mind the warning of Christ that we know neither the hour nor the day when He shall come again: the admonition that we should always be ready to respond to the demands of our Christian commitment. If we then consider the parable of the sheep and the goats, we realise that we should always greet life’s pilgrims as if we were greeting Christ Himself.

Of course, there is often a judgement to be made. Mediaeval pilgrimage was a blend of the devout and the racket. Many cynically sought to profiteer from the charity that was available; but the abuse was not only on the part of false pilgrims.

The Boxley Rood was a notorious example of institutional fraud, quoted often by Henry VIII and Cromwell as they suppressed the monasteries – together with the holy blood of Hales Abbey. Nowadays, charlatanism is less spectacular, but equally destructive for all that.

When Christians – individuals or communities – are not what they claim to be, the impact of disillusionment can be great. In part this means that we need to modest about who we are, emphasising that we are, none of us, the finished product – that we recognise only too well our own sinfulness and frailty.

However, there is only so much qualification that we can apply before our own discipleship becomes meaningless. By this, I mean that as well as being honest about our own weaknesses and failings, we have to accept that our vocation is to do better. We must not simply acquiesce in every foible, pleading our mortal nature, but resolve little by little, probably, to improve ourselves.

This, of course, is part and parcel of our own pilgrimage: learning to radiate more fully the loving nature of God, which we have experienced, not just in Word and Sacrament, but in the outliving of the Gospel by those who have preceded us on the journey of Faith.

Eminently among them today was Saint James the Great, the patron saint of pilgrims; but also an Apostle – one sent out by Christ to continue His Ministry in the world. Our pilgrimage is also an apostolate. We embark on our lifetime of pilgrimage, not just so that we can reach that ultimate shrine of Heaven, but to share in the task of enabling others to enter the Heavenly Sanctuary as well.

Fr. Richard

The Archive

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Charitas in Veritate (File size 72 KB)

The Credit Crunch (File size 44 KB)

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