New favourite windows

This newish window in St James’, Cross Roads gives me pleasure each time I go in, but all the more so yesterday when the light was streaming through it.

Meanwhile, at St Michael’s, Haworth, I’ve been doing some amateur work (substantially helped, and at a couple of points just slightly hindered, by a brilliant set of notes made for the church’s tour guides) on the East Window of 1880.  Here is just one panel, including two of twenty-six occurrences in the window of the shout of praise Te deum laudamus.

On the left, apparently not identified recently, is clearly John Keble.  He is carrying his then very popular volume of poems The Christian Year (the fact that it appears to read Christian Near may not have helped recent identification).  The hymn New every morning is the love is almost all that survives of The Christian Year in regular use today.  

Keble only died in 1866 so it is striking that he is being represented in stained glass just fourteen years later (mind you, an entire Oxford college had been opened in his memory in less than half that time).  His presence is a clear indication of the then parish priest's Anglo-Catholic leanings.

On the right is John Milton, easily identified, and portrayed as already having gone blind, with his great work Paradise Lost at his feet.

K&WVR

We are five minutes walk from a station on a heritage railway, and having an overnight visitor yesterday means we have now travelled the length of it for the first time.

Weaving grief and hope

Among the thousands of requests left on the Prayer Tree in St Michael’s, Haworth, I was told early on that the most frequent refer to cancer and to early death.

Given that Patrick Brontë lost his wife to early death by cancer, one of my first thoughts was whether a Haworth-branded leaflet about his bereavement would be a helpful thing to have available by the Prayer Tree.

Here is an initial version which I have just drafted.

The Revd Patrick Brontë had only been the parish priest of Haworth for seventeen months when his wife Maria died of cancer of the uterus on 15th September 1821 aged 38.

It had been a long and harrowing illness.  There was no pain management such as a modern hospital or hospice can now provide.  Maria was also extremely distressed at leaving her six children.  Among them, Charlotte was five, Emily was three and Anne was one.

Soon afterwards Patrick wrote these words to a friend:

Tender sorrow was my daily portion; oppressive grief sometimes lay heavy on me and there were seasons when an agonising something sickened my whole frame, which is I think of such a nature as cannot be described and must be felt in order to be understood.  And when my dear wife was dead and buried and gone, and when I missed her at every corner, and when her memory was hourly revived by the innocent yet distressing prattle of my children, I do assure you, my dear Sir, from what I felt, I was happy at the recollection that to sorrow, not as those without hope, was no sin; that our Lord himself had wept over his departed friend, and that he had promised us grace and strength sufficient for such a day.

Several things stand out from those words.

First, his grief was so extreme that he could not even explain what it was like.  It is rarely helpful to tell someone that we ‘understand what you are going through’. 

 

Secondly, he did not feel that there was anything wrong in expressing that grief (‘to sorrow was no sin’); he remembers that Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus.  There are cultures in the world where bereaved people are expected to wail, and the modern English habit of trying to hold everything together probably doesn’t help anybody.  

Third, it is striking that he doesn’t say: ‘my faith has saved me from feeling extreme grief’.  Nor does he say the opposite: ‘this tragedy has destroyed my faith’.  Those would be far too simplistic reactions.  The much deeper genuine reality for him was that his human ‘agonising’ and his Christian ‘hope’ were woven together in his grief.

His friend would have recognised two quotations from the Bible in what Patrick wrote; these were the threads of hope which he was able to weave around what he said ‘sickened his whole frame’.

The first comes from the earliest Christian writing in St Paul’s first letter to Christians at Thessalonica: 

I do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope, for we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.

The second came when St Paul wrote later to Christians at Corinth, telling them that several times he had pleaded with God to take acute pain away from him

But God said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’  Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

Lord Jesus,

you wept

at your friend’s graveside;

weep alongside us,

alongside those whose

grief is indescribable;

mix resurrection hope

with our tears;

grant enough grace to us,

enough strength to them.

Amen.

Last week's picture was the view from the vestry window at Stanbury, so here is a view inside the church, including the pulpit from which Patrick Brontë preached when it was actually in Haworth Parish Church.

Real presence

A first piece of scriptural exploration with a congregation has been around Jesus’ promise that those who give ‘a cold drinking cup’ to ‘these little ones’ (I enjoy the fact that this is literally ‘microns’) will not be unrewarded. 

In the process I’ve revisited my sense of how sacramental this appears to be.  The Church of England has taught from the start that the two sacraments of Baptism and Communion are such because they are commanded by Christ, have a clear outward sign, have an equally clear inner grace, and are a means of conveying this grace, so I can’t see why the giving of a cold drinking cup to those others would miss doesn’t count.

It would certainly turn the stale debate about whether there are two or seven sacraments on its head if one was to propose that there in fact thousands of them.

The picture is the view from the vestry at our smallest church on the edge of the moor at Stanbury.

A first piece of potential faith exploration with the community sadly revolves around the prevalence of young adult suicide: one of the local Baptist Ministers identified this as a local issue to me independently of the request to take a funeral for a young mother who had taken her own life, and I find it identified as a national issue too.

Being involved in the funeral has actually been a privilege for all sorts of reasons, including what a remarkable young women she was and the quality of her family and friends who I have encountered in the process.

I need to take care rather than jump in, but I have the feeling that what we display in the heavily visited church at Haworth and how we talk about meaning with those who prepare for their children’s Baptism and for their own Weddings may be just some of the things affected by this. 

The picture is a close-up in our greenhouse; having sadly left behind in Grimsby a substantial fruit cage and it growing crop, we have been fortunate to inherit a carefully developed garden with much fruit of its own, and we have certainly not had a vine before.

Twelve days in

I’ve been meeting all ages at St James’, Cross Roads whose ‘usual Sunday attendance’ is about two dozen but who will also pray with at least as many toddlers, Primary School children and mothers at Toddler Praise and Friday Church each week.

 

I’ve been including at Matins prayer requests picking off from those left by hundreds of visitors on the prayer tree in to St Michael’s, Haworth, and the tree was cleared after the service yesterday morning as these requests were all distributed round praying members of the congregation.

And at St Gabriel’s, Stanbury yesterday a third of the congregation at the Book of Common Prayer Communion resolved themselves into a Gospel Choir and followed the service with enthusiastic performance.

Meanwhile Cross Roads Village Gala (at whose procession the pictures were taken), Haworth’s ‘Poetry at the Parsonage’ event, Stanbury church’s annual Fun Dog Show and Bradford’s Literary Festival means I’ve been at everything from a workshop led by the poet Kei Miller who I admire to listening to Keertan Rehal sing Sikh prayers.

Smiles

Two happy pictures from June.

First, at St James' Palace early in the month, the Princess Royal with the Master of the Haberdashers' Livery Company presenting Deborah with her prize from the Company for outstanding performance in stitched textiles.

Second, at St James', Cross Roads last Wednesday, the Dean of Bradford (as a Patron), me and the Bishop of Bradford after my Institution and Induction as Rector of Haworth and Cross Roads.