Sermon: A Journey to Scotland

You have to be ready for anything in this job.  Last Tuesday, I was invited to visit Dunfermline Abbey. Unknown to me, that very day was the 700th anniversary of the death of William Wallace, that legendary Scottish warlord and harrier of the English.  As a guest of the Abbey, I was led out by bagpipes along with the great and the good of Fife to a ceremony by a hawthorn tree in churchyard.  There we stood under an awning in the rain while a large crowd of ordinary people got very wet.  The Lord Lieutenant, the Lord Provost, the Cardinal and the local aristocracy all spoke.  Then without warning came the dread invitation: would I also like to say a few words?  So I found myself in front of TV cameras improvising on the theme of William Wallace and his significance for Scotland, a special subject I had not exactly worked up for the day, and about which any Englishman speaks at his peril.  Too late to regret not having seen Braveheart, I told the assembled company how Durham Cathedral is famously ‘half church of God, half castle against the Scot’ where Norman kings had installed prince bishops to guard the northern frontier of England against just such men as Wallace.  I ended by saying that despite a bloody history, I came in friendship, and that seemed to go down well.

What took me to Scotland, however, was to honour someone of a very different stamp, whose name has linked Durham and Dunfermline since the 11th century: St Margaret, Queen of Scots.  She was married to King Malcolm III, who was present when the foundation stone of this cathedral was laid in August 1093.  Her confessor, friend and first biographer was Durham’s Prior Turgot.  Malcolm and one of her sons were to die later that year at the Battle of Alnwick, another place I have some connection with; out of grief as well as illness and the rigours of fasting, Margaret herself died a few days later.  To honour her memory, her son David, a great builder of monasteries, had Dunfermline Abbey built, its great incised drum piers so reminiscent of Durham; indeed, he probably used Durham masons for its construction. When she was canonised, her body was re-interred in a shrine which is there to this day.

Here in Durham, we have our own project to celebrate this remarkable woman.  The St Margaret Altar, with its new hangings and kneelers will be dedicated on her feast day in November this year.  But the painting by Paula Rego commissioned by the Cathedral is already in place in the Chapel of the Nine Altars.  Paula Rego is without doubt one of our greatest contemporary artists.  Her painting shows Margaret near the end of her life, perhaps having heard about her double bereavement.  She is gazing into the far distance, as if her sights are already set on the next world, like Jesus in our gospel reading, setting his face to his imminent passion and death.  Her face is lined with the marks of suffering.  Her hand rests upon her cherished gospel book.  At her feet sits David her son and king-to-be, wise beyond his years, perhaps caught between the lure of the weapons lying like a child’s toys around him, and the summons of his mother’s gospel book to fight different, spiritual, battles.  Son and dying mother: a kind of pietà in reverse that echoes Fenwick Lawson’s sculpture nearby of the Virgin holding the body of her son. And in a way, the themes are the same: a kingship not of this world, a vocation where royalty means walking a via dolorosa, the path of suffering servanthood lived out and died out by the one who entered not into glory but first he suffered pain. 

It is not a comfortable painting, but then Margaret was not one to reign in easy state while others suffered.  Her story strikes a very contemporary note.  A Saxon-in-exile, she was brought up in Hungary, and having come to England, was once again exiled as a result of William the Conqueror’s ruthless policies towards the Saxons, this time to Scotland.  Malcolm took her in as an asylum-seeker and married her.  She and David were perhaps the great architects of medieval Scotland.  Her devotion to the Holy Trinity and to the cross, her wisdom, her care for the poor and needy were legendary even in her lifetime.  These are symbolised by the gospel book in her hands.  But the resolution, courage and resignation written in her face to me says something about how hard-won are the civilising Christian influences of learning, charity, justice, spirituality that she sought to instil in the people of Scotland – the values of the transformed life spelled out by St Paul in today’s epistle.  They were constantly at risk in a cruel age when poverty, disease and war meant that for most people life was nasty, brutish and short. 

It’s no accident that St Margaret’s symbol is her holy rood or black cross that, after being captured from the Scots at the Battle of Neville’s Cross, was brought here and hung in the south aisle of this Cathedral until the Reformation when a reforming Dean’s wife probably burned it for firewood. The cross is the theme of today’s gospel where Jesus speaks about the cost of discipleship.  He says that we can only count ourselves as his followers if we are willing to walk in his way and take up the cross.  He tells us that he himself is called to suffer, and the only way of discipleship is this cruciform way where our existence, the values we live by, are radically redefined, reconfigured, by the cross: ‘those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it’.  This, says Jesus, is to be transfigured, as he himself is about to be.  It is to have our sights lifted above what is transitory and illusory to what endures forever, to have our restless hearts quieted as they find their rest in God, as St Augustine, whose feast day it is, put it.  This is not palliative care that takes away the pain of living, a safe haven from life’s storm and stress.  It is the promise of the gospel to give us the courage, the faith, the inward stability and the joy with which to sail life’s seas with equanimity. 

This is the challenge of Paula Rego’s painting.  It says to me, and I try to listen because I hear the gospel saying it too, that the great mistake of our age is to think, when the thorns begin to press into our flesh, that somehow this is unfair.  There is always a cost of discipleship: I cannot make Christianity mean anything else.  But the painting, and the gospel, holds out the possibility of something more: that we can become wounded healers, our pain transformative so that we are sensitised in heart and imagination and can begin to offer a new kind of compassion to those in pain.  And most of all, it speaks of the hope and promise that we can know peace of mind and tranquillity of spirit even in the worst of times.  As another great Christian woman was to write 300 years later, ‘he said not: thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be afflicted; but he said: thou shalt not be overcome. God willeth that we take heed to these words, and that we be ever strong in sure trust, in weal and woe. For he loveth and enjoyeth us, and so willeth he that we love and enjoy him and mightily trust in him; for so all shall be well’.