Charles Williams was a member of the group based in Oxford, known as the Inklings – a group which also included the more famous CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. Williams wrote poetry and novels, literary criticism and some theology. His novels are set in the society of the 30s and 40s but always include a supernatural element which acts as a focal symbol for the moral, spiritual and theological theme of the novel. Whether it be a pack of tarot cards, a stone from the crown of King Solomon, mysterious life and death experiences on All Hallows Eve, or the depiction of a man in process of damning himself, Williams comes back over and over again to the idea of exchange and co-inherence. To refuse that idea is to separate oneself from the nature of things. Mutuality, reciprocity, exchange are the key notes of human life. Co-inherence is manifest at all levels from birth to death, in our personal, social and religious lives. We are dependent on those who love us – parents, siblings, husband, wife, children, friends – we are dependent for good or ill on those who politically and economically govern the country and community we live in, and ultimately we are dependent on God who creates and redeems us. ‘We may or may not live for others, but whether we like it or not, we do live from others.’ If we can accept this, if we know its truth deep inside us, then it can have a revolutionary effect. All we have is gift – we are one link in a chain of gift giving – so to give should be natural to us.
The month of October is a month for considering these things because it is our stewardship month – the one month in the year when we focus particularly on what the church gives us and what reciprocally we can give to the church. October is also the month in which we consider the harvest and celebrate the gifts of nature. Harvesting is an image which Jesus often refers to in relation to discipleship. And yet as Williams points out his use of the image reinforces the idea that all that comes to us is gift.
Jesus ‘looked on the fields, he saw them white to harvest, he cried out of wages and fruit and eternal life, and at once of him that sowed and him that reaped and their common joy. And even as he said it he flung his words into a wider circuit: ”Herein is that saying true, one soweth and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour; other men laboured and ye are entered into their labours” ……The harvest is of others, as the beginning was in others, and the process was by others.’ (p. 93 ‘He came down from heaven’ Faber 1950)
At St John’s we have inherited the labours of past generations going back perhaps even before the Norman Conquest to the work of the Benedictine monks of Westminster. Stone masons, glaziers, architects and labourers, painters, musicians, priests, preachers, readers, cleaners and flower arrangers, endless contributors to collections, those who brought their children for baptism and their loved ones for burial, those who prayed in desperation, or boredom or with simple devotion, those who went out to rule the land or to serve over a counter or to teach in schools, into their legacy we have entered. They gave what they could and when they could out of their riches or their poverty to ensure that we might be here today worshipping the same God they worshipped, sharing the words they heard and said, and giving thanks for the communion in bread and wine that they too received.
You will early on in the month receive a letter outlining our needs, I hope you will respond as generously as you can, so that vicars in the future can look back on this era as a time of great generosity of which they have reaped the fruits.
The Vicar Writes
Stephen Tucker