From Temptation to Transformation:
2. Tempted by glory
Lent 2, 7th March, 2004
The Rev'd Dr Craig D'Alton
Assistant Priest, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
Have you ever experienced glory?
It was nineteen years ago last week. I had thought that it was twenty, but on checking I discovered I was wrong. Nineteen years ago I attended my first High Mass at St Peter's. It was St Matthias' Day, 24 February 1985, celebrated on what would otherwise have been the first Sunday of Lent. The celebrant that day was Fr John Bayton; the deacon and preacher Fr Rowan Strong. There were 120 communicants. The choir under the direction of Geoffrey Cox sang Gabrielli's Missa Brevis and Tallis' O sacrum convivium. The processional hymn was number 204 on the Old English Hymnal – "Who are these like stars appearing?". I was just one of the 120 faces in the crowd; a sixteen-year-old schoolboy from Frankston – and I had never seen or experienced anything quite like it in all my life. As the procession came down the aisle for the second or third time, incense billowing and banners aloft, I remember very clearly that I found myself crying. Nothing dramatic, but my eyes were wet; wet, I think, with relief. At last, my soul seemed to be saying, you've found the right place. When a few minutes later the choir started the Kyries I was transported from relief into a kind of bewildered joy. This was the sort of music I had only ever heard on the radio. Somehow I had always known that church COULD be like this, but only really in my dreams, or in Europe, which at that stage of my life amounted to much the same thing. With the help of the parish archives and a phone call to Geoffrey Cox I can recreate it all with scary academic exactness. Thanks to Geoffrey's records I can even tell you that Julie Smith and Trish Brown were absent from the choir that day! At the end of mass I went straight home, replaying every moment over and again in my head. I can still remember clutching onto the pew sheet as I walked through the little park on the Parliament corner. I determined to return as soon as I could, and did so on Easter Day. Never will I forget the first time I sang "Light's glittering morn bedecks the skies"!
By the end of that year I had completely abandoned my outer-suburban parish and made the hour-long trip in and out of town every weekend. It was the highlight of my week. The other day I found a picture of myself as a torchbearer in a sanctuary party photo taken I think on Christmas Day 1985. The vestments you would recognise, but so much else has changed. Apart from John Crocker, no one else in that photo is still here.
And another photo, this time of me in the choir, taken in 1987 – once again, total change. Only one face, that of Margaret Robbins, would be familiar to anyone who has joined the parish in the past few years.
I was on the mountain that first feast day at Eastern Hill. The glory of God had been, in some small way at least, revealed to me. And I was dazzled. My God, how I wanted to preserve the experience, and to recreate it over and over again. And, as you would have gathered, the memories still stir up nostalgic thoughts. For a time, in my adolescent insecurity, it felt as though the world would cave in if anything changed. Just as long as I could preserve the glory of the mountaintop scene, the ritual of that first high mass, everything would be well.
Ten years later, in Holy Week 1995, I was a candidate for ordination and, putting it mildly, going through an emotional and spiritual rough patch. At this low point, when I found it difficult even to receive the sacrament, I succumbed to temptation, took a day off in the parish where I was on placement, and returned to St Peter's for Maundy Thursday. The mass was, as it still is, a concelebrated solemn mass at the nave altar. For some reason I had forgotten this change, which I think David Farrer brought in in his first year, and so delicate was my spiritual state that I had what can only be described as a minor panic attack. I left before the service even began. I had been looking for the glory of the mountain-top, just as I had left it, the scene fully preserved; tents transformed into temples of stone. But the scene had changed, and I did not cope at all well.
Thirty years ago Fr Colin Stephenson, sometime vicar of the little piece of Anglo-Catholic heaven that is St Mary Magdalene's, Oxford, and subsequently Fr Hope Patton's successor as warden of the shrine of Our Lady at Walsingham, had much to say about the impact of change on Anglo-Catholics in the final chapters of his hilarious memoir, Merrily on High. It was for him a great sadness that, in the wake of the impact of Vatican II, so many of his friends were succumbing to the temptation to tie down the glory of God to particular manifestations, particular ways of doing things, to the glory of the great Anglo-Catholic congresses of the 1920s and 30s, for example. He commented that "The irony was that I had grown up thinking of Walsingham as the ultimate, but when I found myself in charge it had become obvious to me that unless it broke out of the rather restricted party circle with which it was associated the future was somewhat blank . . . The trouble was that æextreme Anglo-Catholics had begun to feel insecure and this made them rather edgy and anxious that Walsingham should be a funk hole where only the elite could gain entry . . . I was saddened that when it came to the point Anglo-Catholics could display exactly the same sort of intolerance and lack of charity which I had always associated with extreme protestant groups." (pp.174-5)
Fr Stephenson was spot on. World-wide those Anglo-Catholic parishes which have tried to preserve an unchanged and unalterable version of "the true church as it always has been" have either closed down, become tiny rumps, or become centres of quite alarming intolerance. St Peter's, thank God, has not gone down such tracks. Change has been gradual, and perhaps for some far too slow, but it has been there and it has been constant. As a community we have resisted the temptation to tie down a vision of the glory of God to a single manifestation of it, æthough I do sometimes wonder whether we could afford to be just a little more "advanced" and alive. Indeed, I wonder whether this Lent we might not only resist the temptation to rest content with the glories of the past, but might further commit ourselves to be active and open to transformation as a growing and inspiring parish community, building on our Anglo-Catholic heritage, and constantly finding new ways to express God's transforming power through the reinvention of the glories of our traditions.
Peter, James and John up there on the mountain were given a glimpse of the glory of the resurrection, but the resurrection itself could never have happened if they had built their tents and stayed on the mountain for ever. For God's purpose to be fulfilled Jesus had to descend both from the mountain and even into death. And those three disciples had to become apostles; ones who did not bask in the glory of the mountain, but who were sent out to preach the good news and to build the Church of God. We are called to do the same; to be witnesses, apostles, of that glory to a much wider community than that which gathered here on the first Sunday on which we ourselves appeared. Just like Peter, James and John, we must be prepared to change ourselves and remake ourselves over and again that God's work might be done through us.
We can look back – quite rightly – with longing at our experiences on the mountaintop, at those times when we felt ourselves to be experiencing a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. And we can be fortified by the memory. Indeed, just as in the Mass our remembrance of Christ is also a re-making of his promise to be with us forever through the sacrificial sacramental act, so we are called to live sacramentally; not merely to remember past glory, but to do what we can to recreate the truth of past experiences in ways that make their essence real to the next generation who were not there. However just as in the Mass we cannot recreate in exact replica the Last Supper when the Eucharist was instituted, so as a eucharistic community we cannot, indeed must not, seek to replicate in exact detail the moment at which we were converted. When we succumb to such temptation we turn our parishes and our liturgies into museum pieces, which they are not and must never become.
The temptation to hold on to our own version of glory, and to brook no other, is a great temptation to succumb to the sin of pride. I suffered from it as a youth, I was guilty of it in 1995, and I am tempted by it even nine years later again. I often want to nail God down, as it were; to build a nice strong tent of stone within which I can bask in my nice neat memory of the glory of God. But Jesus, as he persuades his friends to leave the glory behind, does not allow me to do so. The past is for remembering and may indeed serve to inspire. The future is for hope and the kingdom, but the now is for God to work through us as he will. The glory of God will indeed be revealed, as He wishes, and in His time, and in His way. Let us this Lent recommit ourselves to resist resting content with the tempting vision of our past glories, and instead to seek to build new opportunities for God to be made manifest and alive to our city, and to show the Church at large that Anglo-Catholicism is very, very far from finished.
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