A Place for God: The Mowbray Lent Book 2018

A PLACE FOR GOD

CONTENTS

Introduction

1 8115 Vila Kazi Street, Orlando West, Soweto, South Africa

2 Pool St Martin’s, Cornwall

3 The Pantheon, Rome

4 Shepherds’ Fields, Beit Sahour

5 Flinders Ranges, South Australia

6 St Benet’s Abbey, Norfolk

7 Center Parcs, Longleat

8 Leptis Magna, Libya

9 The Woolsack, House of Lords

10 Christ the Redeemer, Corcovado, Rio de Janeiro

11 Bishop Bridge, Norwich

12 St Enodoc’s Church, Cornwall

13 Holborn Underground Station

14 Papua New Guinea 1: Popondetta

15 Shaw’s Corner, Ayot St Lawrence

16 Norwich Cathedral 1: The Bishop’s Chair

17 Norwich Cathedral 2: St Luke’s Chapel

18 Norwich Cathedral 3: The Hostry and Refectory

19 Devil’s Island, French Guiana

20 Cana in Galilee

21 Victoria Falls

22 Walsingham Abbey

23 Christ the King, Welwyn Garden City

24 St Peter’s, Weedon: The Ringing Chamber

25 Butrint, Albania

26 Papua New Guinea 2: Kwima, Jimi Valley

27 Conques, France

28 Lambeth Palace Chapel

29 Lakeland Motor Museum

30 Gammelstad, Lulea, Sweden

31 Beeston Priory, Norfolk

32 Must Farm, Whittlesey

33 The Holy House, Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, Norfolk

34 Jorvik Viking Experience, York

35 Hellfire Corner, Redruth Recreation Ground

36 Dominus Flevit, Jerusalem

37 The Sixth Floor, the Texas School Book Depository, Dallas

38 Huer’s Hut, Newquay

39 The crypt, Canterbury Cathedral

40 The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Cornwall

Easter Collect

Acknowledgements

Permissions

INTRODUCTION

Whenever I am asked, ‘Where do you come from?’ I refer invariably to my Cornish ancestry. Yet I have spent only 16 years of my life in my native county. Origins and identity matter to me, as they do to most people. We want to place ourselves in the world. I was tempted to call this book ‘Location, location, vocation’ because my sense of vocation, both as a Christian and as a priest, has been related more to place than I have sometimes been willing to admit.

Like many clergy I have encountered a deep loyalty to place, which can lead to a parochial outlook that is unwilling to see value in being linked with that parish next door and hesitant about any form of change. Loyalty to place is not always liberating, and yet it is unmistakeable that location matters in the Christian story. Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Capernaum: the places we associate with Jesus are real enough for millions of people today. Whenever I lead a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, I am reminded how frequently locations are identified by name in the Gospels. The Christian faith is not a philosophical abstraction.

All places of encounter with the divine become holy to us. They may not be regarded as sacred by others but there is no limitation on where we may meet God, encounter Jesus Christ or receive a gift of the Holy Spirit. There was nothing originally sacred about the place we know as Bethel. But it became a holy place when Abram built an altar there on his way to Egypt (Genesis 12) and its sacred character was assured when Jacob dreamt there of a ladder stretching from heaven to earth (Genesis 28). Jacob anointed the stone he used as a pillow. The name of Bethel (‘house of God’) became, centuries later, a common designation for nonconformist chapels in England and Wales. Even a tradition with a very limited understanding of sacred space (and sometimes hostility to the very idea) found that Bethel, and other biblical names such as Moriah, Ebenezer and Bethesda, were acceptable dedications for their chapels as places of encounter with the living (and biblical) God.

My earliest years in Cornish nonconformity provided little sense of sacred space beyond the chapels I knew best (two of which are included in a chapter here). I knew them as special places which people dusted and polished, and where they arranged flowers, established children’s corners, sang hymns, said prayers and engaged in a short but very special service after the main one where small cubes of bread and tiny glasses of wine were distributed. (Children were generally excluded from this additional service, which seemed to be only for the very devout.) Above all, these chapels were not accessible shrines. Outside service times, they were resolutely locked.

When, at the age of 11, I began attending Anglican services (not of my own volition but because of a major change in family allegiance), I sensed an immediate difference. The church we attended was a place of daily worship. It was open for people to pray there whenever they wished. A candle flickered before the Blessed Sacrament. A sense of the presence of God, while mysterious and elusive, was much more definitely located. I became aware that sacred space had a character and identity.

It was much later that my understanding of sacred place and space broadened further, but was challenged too. When Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman at the well, he tells her that in future ‘neither on this mountain [Gerizim], nor in Jerusalem, will you worship the Father’ (John 4.21). This could be interpreted as the clearest command from the Lord himself that the gospel knows of no special sacred places, no hallowed locations, no pilgrimage beyond our journey through this life. There is only the heavenly Jerusalem to which we are called. Meanwhile, we walk as ‘strangers and pilgrims on earth’ (1 Peter 2.11). We are called to be living stones in a church without physical construction, which is a sign of God’s coming and universal kingdom.

‘The earth is the Lord’s, and all that is in it …’ (Psalm 24.1). That conviction is central to the Hebrew Bible, but there is a discernible tension between God’s presence everywhere and the place of his dwelling on earth. The Ark of the Covenant was the manifestation of God’s physical presence in this world. When the Ark travelled, it was constantly accompanied by clouds, a common symbol of God’s presence. When the High Priest entered the sanctuary on the Day of Atonement, he did so under the cover of a cloud of incense, perhaps to prevent anyone from seeing God in all his glory (Leviticus 16.13).

And yet here we encounter a strange phenomenon in the Hebrew Bible. The holiness of the Ark of the Covenant is so great and so concentrated, so saturated with divinity, that it’s dangerous. When the Philistines capture the Ark, some who merely look at it are killed by its power. In Numbers 4.20 we are told that if those who serve the Tabernacle view the Ark at an improper time they will face immediate death.

This is a warning that God is not to be taken lightly, nor is the divine presence a comfortable one. Even Solomon, upon the completion of what may be the greatest religious building the world has ever known, the temple in Jerusalem, exclaims, ‘The heaven of heavens cannot contain you. How much less this house that I have built!’ (1 Kings 8.27).

This collection of places where I have encountered God in my life does include religious buildings; considering how much time I have spent within them, it would be surprising if it were otherwise. Even so, many of the settings for an encounter with the divine are not conventionally religious, and the experience was not always immediate. Neither was every encounter initially pleasurable, peaceful or joyful. Places and experiences linger in the memory. A perspective subtly changes; a conviction is reshaped; a sense of calling is confirmed; a glimpse of divine joy comes unbeckoned; a sorrow is redeemed.

Occasionally there is fear. The fear of the Lord may be the beginning of wisdom, but if the living God does not sometimes shame us by the purity of holiness and love then we would hear no call to righteousness and justice at all. Although there are 40 chapters – one for each day of Lent for those who wish to read regularly then – this is a book for every season of the Church’s year. It isn’t conventionally devotional, though there is a suggested (and short) reading from scripture related to each place. A brief prayer concludes each chapter, with two exceptions where the poems quoted are prayers in themselves. The reflections are far from exhaustive, but my hope is that enough will be triggered in the reader’s own heart, mind and experience to aid further contemplation, prayer and thought. What’s written is an invitation to travel, but the destination is not the sort found in travel brochures; rather, it is in our pilgrimage with and to God revealed in Jesus Christ. Our response to the sort of experiences recorded here is always fitful and incomplete, but I find it hard to understand how so many people can live, as they seem to do, without a place for God.

1

8115 Vila Kazi Street, Orlando West, Soweto, South Africa

Matthew 12.46–50

Nelson Mandela moved to this address with his first wife Evelyn and their eldest son in 1946. It was a standard house built by tender and commissioned by the Johannesburg City authorities. The South West township of Soweto some 15 kilometres from the city centre was then being developed as a place for black South Africans to live. Nelson Mandela said of 8115 Vila Kazi Street, ‘It was the opposite of grand, but it was the first true home of my own and I was mightily proud. A man is not a man until he has a house of his own.’

Nelson and Evelyn Mandela divorced in 1957. She had become a Jehovah’s Witness and their perspectives on the world diverged significantly. In 1958 he was joined in the house by his second wife, Winnie. He and Winnie scarcely lived a normal married life at all as Mandela became increasingly committed to his campaign for a truly democratic society marked by racial equality and justice. He was absent at the time of the birth of both his daughters. It was not that he was careless of family life, but the vocation which claimed him scarcely permitted it. We can have more than one vocation and they can clash. In 1961 Mandela went underground. Arrested in 1962, he was given a sentence of life imprisonment for treason in 1964.

On his release from prison in 1990, Mandela insisted on returning to the home he had not seen for 30 years. His familiarity with confined space would have meant this small single-storey house might not have seemed too cramped at the time: it was a symbol of the freedom for which he had waited so long. Mandela wrote, ‘That night I returned with Winnie to number 8115 … I knew in my heart I had left prison. For me number 8115 was the centre point of my world, the place marked with an X in my mental geography.’ A huge crowd gathered outside and when he addressed them Mandela said, ‘I have come home at last.’

In the event, Nelson Mandela stayed there for just 11 days. The world’s media were camped around this small unprotected property. That, in itself, made any attempt at an ordinary life impossible. It quickly became clear, too, that Nelson and Winnie’s marriage, which had never been a lived reality, was not likely to be the supportive context for the life for which Mandela himself yearned. It took him the better part of two years to admit this truth. For his dream of freedom while in prison was linked not just to his house and home but to his family and marriage. The house was a reality. The marriage was not.

Today the house is a museum, the rooms containing original furnishings and Mandela memorabilia. It bears the scars of its history. Scorch marks by the front door are evidence of Molotov cocktails hurled in anger. Bullet holes in the walls betray how this house continued to be a battleground long after Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. Winnie Mandela’s prominence in the insurgences against apartheid led to her banishment in 1977. She and her younger daughter were relocated to Brandfordt, a small Afrikaans speaking town in the Free State where scarcely anyone spoke Winnie’s native language, Xhosa. The house they were given had no electricity or running water. Winnie remained there under house arrest until 1986. The experience nurtured the belligerent and unpredictable radicalism for which she became noted in later years.

I had known what Nelson Mandela had said about his house well before first visiting 8115 myself. Its small scale and primitive design were a striking reminder that the freedom of home has little to do with spatial dimensions, facilities and comforts. Within our homes we determine how we will live. Our sense of freedom is also related to our ability to come and go from home as we please. Those were precisely the freedoms which Mandela, like other prisoners, was denied for so long. No wonder home and freedom are so interlinked in the human imagination.

Even so, Mandela could not stay there if he was to fulfil his mission following his release. It would have become another prison. Although Jesus seems to have lived at home in Nazareth for most of his earthly life, his mission could not be completed from there either. He had to leave home to call disciples, preach and teach, suffer and die. When he began his ministry, his mother and the rest of his family sought him out to ask him to come home. After all, he had no need to rely on the hospitality of others; he had a family who would care for him. What did Mary make of being told by her son as he