This was my childhood church. I came here with my parents and sister in the 1940s and 50s – my father was a GP practising from 21 Church Row; Poh Sim and I were married here in 1964 and two of our three children were baptised here. In the 70s and 80s I moved up the road to London’s highest church – geographically not liturgically – Christ Church, and had a lovely time there till 1990 when I became a Roman Catholic. Since then St Mary’s Holly Place has been my church – but not the only one: I’ve read poetry with the Baptists, heard lovely music at St Peter’s, sat in silence with the Quakers, taken part in a quiz night at St Andrew’s, and often been back to St John’s, for carols, weddings, funerals, memorial services – including one for my father – plays, and for the most beautiful of all Anglican services, the one we’re celebrating this evening, Evensong.
And for the last five years or so, I’ve been part of Churches Together in Hampstead, an inter-church group that meets three or four times a year to share problems and pleasures and to see what we can do to make life a bit better for people inside and outside the community.
The thing that has run through my religious journey, like a fine thread, and which, in my opinion, has nothing to do with which particular branch of the Christian church one belongs to, and everything to do with the ground-bass of Christian faith – what, in fact, binds us together, is the dramatic sweep of the Gospel story, what that means for the way we live, and how it’s been celebrated, in music, words, and fine-art. I’ve often thought that ‘passion’ – and I don’t mean ‘happy clappy’ or evangelical zeal – is rarely talked about when we discuss Christian belief and practise. The Gospel and the gospels are profoundly exciting, full of dramatic insights and epiphanies, which in the parables, the miracles, the meetings, the confrontations, and the reconciliations, continually connect the earthy with the transcendent, the small things of life with the great. And, for me, it’s so often writers, composers, and artists who make those connections clear.
We’ve had two examples this evening: in the New Testament reading from Luke, chapter 24 [there’s a pictorial connection here], and in the extraordinary anthem – almost like a mini oratorio – in which Gerald Finzi sets Richard Crashaw’s richly poetic version of some words of Thomas Aquinas.
Luke first: the confused disciples are gathered together in Jerusalem after the crucifixion, when the two who’ve met Christ on the road to Emmaus and witnessed the ‘miracle’ of the blessing of the bread in the inn – “Did not our hearts burn within us?” – arrive and are in the middle of telling the others what happened when Jesus appears among them, not a ghost but flesh and blood:
And while they yet believed not, for joy, and wondered, He said unto them, have ye any meat?
Perfect: the earthly and the heavenly joined together in a sentence. Up the road an hour or two earlier, that extraordinary moment when Cleopas and his friend had had their eyes opened. One of my favourite paintings, brim-full of wonder and drama, is Caravaggio’s 1599 painting ‘The Supper at Emmaus’. Caravaggio painted the scene twice, but this version – in the National Gallery – is the one I prefer – you probably know it: at a table, richly clothed and laid with fruit, roast chicken, bread and wine, sit the three men; Christ, young and beardless, is raising his right hand over the food in blessing, and the two disciples are literally ‘flung’ into awareness, the one on the left about to leap from his chair, the one on the right throwing his arms wide in amazement, his left hand almost breaking free of the frame; the inn-keeper, who, like most inn-keepers, is chiefly concerned to make sure the food’s appreciated and doesn’t realize the significance of the moment, looks on quizzically. The whole scene is wonderfully lit from above, Christ’s shadow thrown on a patch of bright wall behind him.
Caravaggio, called by one of his greatest interpreter’s, the art historian Michael Kitson, ‘the painter who makes the leap from the imitation of nature to the power of imagination’, has perfectly caught the moment’s drama.
Then this evening’s anthem – and, by the way, what a choir this church has: I came last week to evensong and was bowled over by them, it’s just happened again, and I shall try and come next Sunday to be astonished once more – this evening’s anthem, Gerald Finzi’s 1946 setting of 17th century poet, Richard Crashaw’s version of Thomas Aquinas’ 13th century meditation on the Eucharist – does it again: the sacred and the human are brought together in a 20th century composer’s passionate interpretation of a great medieval theologian’s and metaphysical poet’s text. The lines that stand out for me are these:
Rise Royal Sion, Rise and sing/thy soul’s kind shepherd, thy heart’s king./Stretch all thy powers; call if you can/harps of heaven to hands of man.
‘Harps of heaven to hands of man’.That’s it: that terrific joining of the heavenly with the human. Which is what the Gospels are all about. They are an invitation to us all to make connections and celebrate our faith with the artists who, like Caravaggio, Finzi, and Crashaw, make it reverberate in painting, in music, and in poetry.
Now this beautiful church is about to lose the priest who has led it for the last 15 years, a man to whom the arts and the arts in faith are profoundly important. Under Father Stephen, music, drama, and the beauty of the liturgy, have flourished here. His sermons, his lectures, his care for language, and his enthusiasm for drama – he’s performed in plays here himself and I’ve had the pleasure of reading poetry and prose with him on several occasions – have lit the place up. The late Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, Basil Hume, once wrote that a priest’s task is to animate not dominate. Father Stephen has certainly animated St John’s. He will be much missed. But not, I think, forgotten. And it’s been a great honour to be asked to preach here this evening and say something about the things which I know mean so much to him.
One of the best intellectual defences of Christianity I know was published last month: Rupert Shortt’s ‘God Is No Thing’. I warmly recommend it, if you haven’t read it. The book finishes with a quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge which seems to me to sum up brilliantly the great richness of our faith, its emotional and intellectual power. Let me end with it too.
As long as our hearts listen, we have the means to recognise in Christianity the substantiating principle of all true wisdom, the satisfactory solution of all the contradictions of human nature, of the whole riddle of the world.