Recent Sermons
A sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral by the Rt Revd Dr Christopher Herbert, formerly Bishop of St Albans on Sunday 16 May 2010
"FESTIVAL OF THE PATRON"
About four or five miles from Glastonbury, there is a small village called Baltonsborough. This is the village, so local story has it, where Saint Dunstan was born, and the house I used to visit as a child was said to be the very site of his birthplace.
It was a long, low, grey-stone house surrounded by lush gardens and orchards. Inside, it was heavily beamed; low ceilings, deep shadows, thick oak doors covered in iron studs and strap work. It was a place of great stillness and, for me, had a magical, timeless quality. I loved the garden, the pond with large, lazy goldfish; the summer house, damp and cool, smelling of apples and old canvas deck-chairs.
It is perhaps not surprising then, many years later when I wrote a series of meditations on the Magnificat, that I imagined Mary there in that house and in those gardens. I suggested that she had come to Glastonbury with Joseph of Arimathaea; an elderly lady who would sit in the shade of the copper beech, the sun dappling the lawns, shelling peas into a colander, and stopping once in a while to remember her early years as a young woman in Bethlehem…
Well. There is, of course, not a shred of historical evidence that Mary ever came to England, but that did not stop me picturing her in a Somerset garden drowsy with the scent of roses, and a smoky-grey cat arching itself around her legs before sauntering off to watch, yet again, the eternally unreachable goldfish in their stone-encircled pond.
In creating imaginary scenes for Mary, I was in a long and lovely tradition. There are claims that after her son’s death she went with the Apostle John to Ephesus. In 1881, a French priest discovered an old building on the outskirts of Ephesus which he suggested might have been Mary’s house. I have been there; it is now a place of Franciscan hospitality and stillness, shaded by trees from the blazing Mediterranean sun.
And then there’s Loreto, that amazing basilica set high on a hill in the province of Ancona, which contains the Holy House. Legend has it that in 1291, the Holy House was carried by angels from Nazareth to Croatia, and a few years later, in 1294, under the threat of Muslim invasion, was carried across the Adriatic by the same angels to Loreto.
Go there now, and you will see grooves worn around the marble plinth on which the Holy House stands; grooves made by pious pilgrims as they shuffle on their knees in prayerful longing…
And then, in our own country, in Norfolk, there is Walsingham and its Holy House. It was built as the result of a vision by an Anglo-Saxon woman called Richeldis in 1061.Until the Reformation, Walsingham was a pilgrimage place of great importance. It was re-discovered, so to speak, in the early 20th century and has grown as a place of pilgrimage ever since.
There is something about the life of Mary, it would seem, which calls out from story-tellers, artists and visionaries, a warm and perplexed admiration.
Think, in our own country of Henry Moore’s Madonna and Child at St Matthew’s, Northampton, commissioned by the Vicar, Walter Hussey, Moore was baffled by the commission and, as an agnostic, tried to say what he thought the difference was between a Mother and Child and a Madonna and Child: “It’s not easy”, he said, “ to describe in words what this difference is, except by saying in general terms that the Madonna and Child should have an austerity and a nobility and some touch of grandeur(even hieratic aloofness) which is missing in the everyday Mother and child idea”.
And I don’t need to say anything here in Salisbury about Elizabeth Frink’s statue of the Walking Madonna, except to read again those clear, ringing words of Professor Frances Young: “Striding forth to bring Christ into the world- not as the teenage Virgin, pregnant with the new humanity, but an older Mary, stripped down, thin, ascetic, stomach hollow, face pinched and haggard with suffering-one who has been through the experience of the Pieta and held the dead body of her son across her knee, but now is determined and invigorated with resurrection life…”
Every generation of artists, pondering Mary, creates new images of her. In the 20th century, it was the work of Henry Moore and its reference to hieratic aloofness, and Elizabeth Frink’s Walking Madonna. In the 19th century there was that painting by Millais, “Christ in the house of his parents”, which caused such an uproar when it was exhibited. Dickens said of it, and of Mary, “…a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat), she would stand out from the company as a Monster in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England…”
Or, go back a few centuries to Rogier van der Weyden’s astonishing altarpiece of the Deposition, where Christ is being taken down tenderly from the cross, and Mary swoons in grief: the pattern of her own descending body matching exactly that of her son’s corpse. She was portrayed as literally com-passionate…
Or, back further to the mosaics in Ravenna of the 6th century, which show Mary as a beautiful Byzantine empress sitting on a jewelled Imperial throne with the Christ-child in a toga on her lap, his right hand extended in welcome…
Or, go even further back to those remarkable and enchanting apocryphal stories from the 4th or 5th century: the Six Books of the Dormition, in which Mary, close to death, goes to her home in Bethlehem, and the Apostles, scattered across the globe, are summoned to her side by the Holy Spirit, to be with her. “Simon was in Rome…and the Holy Spirit said to him, The time draws nigh that the mother of Thy Lord should depart from this world: go to Bethlehem to salute her…” Paul was in Tarsus and received the same message; as did Thomas in India and Matthew on board ship in a howling gale, and James in Jerusalem…
What is it about Mary that has called out such delight and imaginative longing from so many artists and story tellers across the centuries?
It’s partly, I suppose, that as human beings we have an in-built need to complete stories. None of us knows what happened to Mary after the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and so we fill that gap with our own creations.
But it’s more than that. Mary was the one who bore the Christ, the Son of God. She was unique, chosen, holy, and precious: the one who also heard those terrible words of Simeon, “… and a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also.” Her “Yes” to God began a story which has captured all our hearts. Is it any wonder that we not only want to complete the narrative, we also want to ponder the theology of her calling. The “Ave”, as the medieval theologians used to love saying, which reversed the sin of “Eva”. But I suggest that our thoughts about Mary go deeper yet to the paradox, the paradox that the infinite was enfolded in the finite; the eternal was embraced in her mortal arms; the creator became himself created, subject to all the vicissitudes of our humanity.
And then we go deeper still to a place where words simply fail.
Many of us here will know that on seeing our first child/ grandchild/ nephew/ niece/ godchild, we were taken in to a place of awed silence: the newness, the fragility, the potential, the miracle, the sheer inexpressible glory of it all.
And Mary (doesn’t she?), represents for us that deep, perplexed, rejoicing stillness that many of us have experienced, and for which no words, no legends, no paintings, no sculptures are ever quite adequate: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory…”
You are deeply blessed in Salisbury by this building dedicated to Mary’s Assumption: a building which points to the possibility of time being radiant with eternity; of earth being a foretaste of heaven; and of God coming amongst us with infinite courtesy, and placing himself in the arms of a young girl.
The story of Mary rings with the sound of the eternal, and it is to our joy that artists and story-tellers in each generation have enabled that mystery to refresh our eyes and hearts and souls. It is to our delight that we can recognise that what ultimately makes our lives confident and purposeful and strong, is that there really are eternal truths, and that there really are eternal beauties, and through the grace of Christ born of Mary, those truths and those beauties have been revealed by God for all of us to see…
Return to the sermons list.
It was a long, low, grey-stone house surrounded by lush gardens and orchards. Inside, it was heavily beamed; low ceilings, deep shadows, thick oak doors covered in iron studs and strap work. It was a place of great stillness and, for me, had a magical, timeless quality. I loved the garden, the pond with large, lazy goldfish; the summer house, damp and cool, smelling of apples and old canvas deck-chairs.
It is perhaps not surprising then, many years later when I wrote a series of meditations on the Magnificat, that I imagined Mary there in that house and in those gardens. I suggested that she had come to Glastonbury with Joseph of Arimathaea; an elderly lady who would sit in the shade of the copper beech, the sun dappling the lawns, shelling peas into a colander, and stopping once in a while to remember her early years as a young woman in Bethlehem…
Well. There is, of course, not a shred of historical evidence that Mary ever came to England, but that did not stop me picturing her in a Somerset garden drowsy with the scent of roses, and a smoky-grey cat arching itself around her legs before sauntering off to watch, yet again, the eternally unreachable goldfish in their stone-encircled pond.
In creating imaginary scenes for Mary, I was in a long and lovely tradition. There are claims that after her son’s death she went with the Apostle John to Ephesus. In 1881, a French priest discovered an old building on the outskirts of Ephesus which he suggested might have been Mary’s house. I have been there; it is now a place of Franciscan hospitality and stillness, shaded by trees from the blazing Mediterranean sun.
And then there’s Loreto, that amazing basilica set high on a hill in the province of Ancona, which contains the Holy House. Legend has it that in 1291, the Holy House was carried by angels from Nazareth to Croatia, and a few years later, in 1294, under the threat of Muslim invasion, was carried across the Adriatic by the same angels to Loreto.
Go there now, and you will see grooves worn around the marble plinth on which the Holy House stands; grooves made by pious pilgrims as they shuffle on their knees in prayerful longing…
And then, in our own country, in Norfolk, there is Walsingham and its Holy House. It was built as the result of a vision by an Anglo-Saxon woman called Richeldis in 1061.Until the Reformation, Walsingham was a pilgrimage place of great importance. It was re-discovered, so to speak, in the early 20th century and has grown as a place of pilgrimage ever since.
There is something about the life of Mary, it would seem, which calls out from story-tellers, artists and visionaries, a warm and perplexed admiration.
Think, in our own country of Henry Moore’s Madonna and Child at St Matthew’s, Northampton, commissioned by the Vicar, Walter Hussey, Moore was baffled by the commission and, as an agnostic, tried to say what he thought the difference was between a Mother and Child and a Madonna and Child: “It’s not easy”, he said, “ to describe in words what this difference is, except by saying in general terms that the Madonna and Child should have an austerity and a nobility and some touch of grandeur(even hieratic aloofness) which is missing in the everyday Mother and child idea”.
And I don’t need to say anything here in Salisbury about Elizabeth Frink’s statue of the Walking Madonna, except to read again those clear, ringing words of Professor Frances Young: “Striding forth to bring Christ into the world- not as the teenage Virgin, pregnant with the new humanity, but an older Mary, stripped down, thin, ascetic, stomach hollow, face pinched and haggard with suffering-one who has been through the experience of the Pieta and held the dead body of her son across her knee, but now is determined and invigorated with resurrection life…”
Every generation of artists, pondering Mary, creates new images of her. In the 20th century, it was the work of Henry Moore and its reference to hieratic aloofness, and Elizabeth Frink’s Walking Madonna. In the 19th century there was that painting by Millais, “Christ in the house of his parents”, which caused such an uproar when it was exhibited. Dickens said of it, and of Mary, “…a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat), she would stand out from the company as a Monster in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England…”
Or, go back a few centuries to Rogier van der Weyden’s astonishing altarpiece of the Deposition, where Christ is being taken down tenderly from the cross, and Mary swoons in grief: the pattern of her own descending body matching exactly that of her son’s corpse. She was portrayed as literally com-passionate…
Or, back further to the mosaics in Ravenna of the 6th century, which show Mary as a beautiful Byzantine empress sitting on a jewelled Imperial throne with the Christ-child in a toga on her lap, his right hand extended in welcome…
Or, go even further back to those remarkable and enchanting apocryphal stories from the 4th or 5th century: the Six Books of the Dormition, in which Mary, close to death, goes to her home in Bethlehem, and the Apostles, scattered across the globe, are summoned to her side by the Holy Spirit, to be with her. “Simon was in Rome…and the Holy Spirit said to him, The time draws nigh that the mother of Thy Lord should depart from this world: go to Bethlehem to salute her…” Paul was in Tarsus and received the same message; as did Thomas in India and Matthew on board ship in a howling gale, and James in Jerusalem…
What is it about Mary that has called out such delight and imaginative longing from so many artists and story tellers across the centuries?
It’s partly, I suppose, that as human beings we have an in-built need to complete stories. None of us knows what happened to Mary after the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and so we fill that gap with our own creations.
But it’s more than that. Mary was the one who bore the Christ, the Son of God. She was unique, chosen, holy, and precious: the one who also heard those terrible words of Simeon, “… and a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also.” Her “Yes” to God began a story which has captured all our hearts. Is it any wonder that we not only want to complete the narrative, we also want to ponder the theology of her calling. The “Ave”, as the medieval theologians used to love saying, which reversed the sin of “Eva”. But I suggest that our thoughts about Mary go deeper yet to the paradox, the paradox that the infinite was enfolded in the finite; the eternal was embraced in her mortal arms; the creator became himself created, subject to all the vicissitudes of our humanity.
And then we go deeper still to a place where words simply fail.
Many of us here will know that on seeing our first child/ grandchild/ nephew/ niece/ godchild, we were taken in to a place of awed silence: the newness, the fragility, the potential, the miracle, the sheer inexpressible glory of it all.
And Mary (doesn’t she?), represents for us that deep, perplexed, rejoicing stillness that many of us have experienced, and for which no words, no legends, no paintings, no sculptures are ever quite adequate: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory…”
You are deeply blessed in Salisbury by this building dedicated to Mary’s Assumption: a building which points to the possibility of time being radiant with eternity; of earth being a foretaste of heaven; and of God coming amongst us with infinite courtesy, and placing himself in the arms of a young girl.
The story of Mary rings with the sound of the eternal, and it is to our joy that artists and story-tellers in each generation have enabled that mystery to refresh our eyes and hearts and souls. It is to our delight that we can recognise that what ultimately makes our lives confident and purposeful and strong, is that there really are eternal truths, and that there really are eternal beauties, and through the grace of Christ born of Mary, those truths and those beauties have been revealed by God for all of us to see…