Planting promise
SOUTHWARK CATHEDRAL, Kew Gardens, and St Anne’s, Kew, recently got together to offer a day’s retreat to the clergy of the diocese. As well as the chance to stroll around the Gardens, hear me expound on Mary Oliver’s nature poetry, and attend evensong with a sermon by the Dean of Clergy Wellbeing, those who came also heard a fascinating talk about the scientific work of the Gardens.
Hidden underground in rural Sussex, for instance, at Wakehurst Place, managed by Kew, is the world’s largest collection of seeds from wild plants. The Millennium Seed Bank is home to more than 2.4 billion seeds, representing more than 39,000 different species of the world’s storable seeds. This is the most diverse wild-plant species genetic resource on earth — a global insurance policy to store and conserve seeds from common, rare, or endangered useful plants.
“A sower went out to sow,” began the second lesson at the end of the day. For the first time, I realised how that sower had the future in his hands, in more ways than one, and how so much of what we know as “gospel” is also currently endangered in our world and our Church. The Gardens are one of the most bio-diverse places on this planet. Our visit was a call to both our hope and agency. If you haven’t been recently, maybe it’s time?
Soul food
PANTO came early to the cathedral this year when I was told by a parishioner that an ancient mummy had just been discovered in Egypt, covered in nuts and chocolate. “They think it’s Pharoah Rocher,” he grinned.
I’m starting to feel a bit ancient myself these days and, as Christopher Hitchens used to point out, one of the melancholy lessons of advancing years is the realisation that you can’t make any more old friends. So, I make do with those I have — and thank God for them.
One of them has just sent me a copy of Howard Barlow’s R. S. Thomas: Lasting impressions: a new book of photographs of the great poet, interspersed with his poems.
Once again, I am struck by Thomas’s depictions of an eel-like God who slips through our fingers, back into the depths where he belongs. Thomas is the poet who reminds us that, when it comes to God, there is a difficulty for every solution. I find that I return to Thomas more and more when the Church is too often tempted to serve fast-food religion just as people are looking for serious nutrition.
Aye to the future
ONE of Donald Trump’s favourite words appears to be “beautiful”. He has used it to describe the letters sent to him by Kim Jong-Un, fossil fuels, his own body, and the Bill that has caused the break-up between him and Elon Musk. He has also used it to define the big wall that he wants to build between the United States and Mexico. I’m with Pope Francis: it’s more beautiful to build bridges than walls.
Bridges, though, can also be places of tragedy, and it was very humbling recently to go out, very early in the morning, for a two-hour patrol with “Bridge Watch”. These 50 or so volunteers walk the bridges of central London each night with the aim of preventing suicide, listening with care to people of all ages at the worst point in their lives. London is fortunate to have them.
Afterwards, I went to see the team of the Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM), just down the road. CALM is, similarly, working imaginatively to reduce the devastating impact of suicide. The statistics are alarming:125 people take their own life every week in the UK, and suicide is the biggest killer of men under 50; the number of suicides among young women under 24 is experiencing the steepest increase since records began.
I was struck that, when the political focus is on assisted dying, these amazing people were engaged in assisted living. Beautiful.
Towering achievement
I WAS privileged recently to be among people invited to a dinner on one of the most famous bridges in London: Tower Bridge. Opened in 1894, and later painted red, white, and blue for the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth, it was, when it was built, the largest and most sophisticated bascule bridge ever completed.
In 1910, the high-level walkways — designed so that the public could still cross the bridge when it was raised — were closed, owing to lack of use . . . except by sex workers. On this occasion, dinner was served up there. I wasn’t sure whether my head was spinning because of the wine or the view of the river beneath my feet, as I peered down through the glass floor.
Clergy have a longstanding relationship with bridges. At one time, religious orders are said to have helped to build bridges. Indeed, bishops of the medieval period granted indulgences to those who had paid for, or laboured, to build one. They knew, I guess, something that G. K. Chesterton later expressed: “In the breaking of bridges is the end of the world.”
Pontifex disinclinatus
AS CHAUCER knew, Southwark is a good place from which to set out on pilgrimage. I embarked with 22 winemakers and -sellers for a weekend visit to the shrine of St Martin, in Tours, France.
Martin is the patron saint of vintners because he is thought to have introduced the chenin blanc grape into the Loire. Never short of a few words now that I am a Dean, I was able to introduce the story of Martin to my fellow-travellers before we made our way to his relics (a bit of his skull) to say some prayers, sing a hymn, and unveil a plaque.
The story of Martin is much more radical than many famous paintings would have us believe. His friend Sulpitius tells us that Martin had been distributing his clothes to the homeless all day; by the time a very cold night fell, he had only his cloak left. It was this that he cut into two for a beggar, thus making him and the supplicant equals, and making his fellow soldiers laugh because he had no clothes on.
My favourite bit of the Martin story is his reluctance to be made a bishop. He hid in a shed full of geese to avoid the call of the people of Tours, but the geese gave him away with their loud honks.
Anyone who doesn’t want to be a bishop gets my vote — or would, if I had one. Frankly, anyone who is asked to sit on large and long committees and discern episcopal candidates needs not only our support but a lot of prayer and a very big glass of that chenin blanc.
The Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley is the Dean of Southwark, and Whitelands Professorial Fellow at Roehampton University.
