Mercy outranks condemnation

 

My Bishop (suspended in February) has resigned.  The Pastoral Letter from his Suffragans telling us so is honest in saying As we move into this new season, we are conscious of the limits on our capacity as a senior leadership team in the past seven months.  Nevertheless I learn we cannot expect his successor to be in post much before Easter 2028, more than two years after he was suspended, which doesn’t feel as if it makes real sense.    

The Pastoral Letter says We recognise that this news… may unsettle you and encourages mutual support, prayer, and sticking at the developing diocesan strategy.  So, unsettled, I touch instead on some texts which have been around to settle.

I’ve reflected before on the way I long mistook O Lord open thou our lips; and our mouth shall shew forth thy praise (which is Psalm 51.15, as used to begin Matins and Evensong) for fire the starting pistol and I’ll begin when it is much more I can’t even begin unless you begin in me.  I sometimes now render it Open my mouth, O Lord, and fill it with your praise.

This all came back to me when I recently heard Michael Dennis Browne’s Pilgrims’ Hymn sung beginning Even before we call on your name to ask you, O God, when we seek for the words to glorify you, you hear our prayer.  I’ve just also heard one of Michael Symmons Roberts’ poems read ending Prise my teeth apart, O God, that I might learn to praise.

And, preparing a session to help train new Cathedral tour guides, I find a pair of grave slabs of chantry priests (those staffing foundations to pray for the dead) from the 1540s each represent their priest’s stoles as carrying the words super exaltat mia iudiciu, abbreviated Latin for mercy triumphs over judgement (which is James 2.13).  I’d quite like freely to render it mercy totally outranks condemnation as I savour super exaltat as much as m[isericord]ia.

The quality of my recent photographs (of the grave slabs and of two weeks with a friend in Germany) have been particularly poor, but those of this fountain (in the courtyard of an important church near Bonn) has the winged creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation doing the typical thing of representing the four evangelists, and I liked Matthew’s human face best.