Sermon: How to Vote (and How to Pray)

People come to this cathedral for a variety of reasons. The noblest, perhaps, is to pray; and one of the main purposes of the team of stipended and voluntary clergy who are associated with this place is to help people to pray. Thus we provide three or four ‘normal' services a day and help people with special services for special occasions.    Together with the stewards and Bedesmen, we strive to create an atmosphere conducive of spirituality and prayer.  It is not for nothing that people are admitted without charge and then inhibited in their desire to take photographs.  The point is to honour and build on the capacity that this place has to be a place of spirituality.  The way in which over the years we incorporate art and devotional objects into the cathedral further reflects this great aim and purpose.  We also supply some aids to prayer. Among these the votive candle stands are a significant modern success story, and we are adding to their number with some elegantly made stands which are currently waiting in the Chapter House but will soon be put into service.

Paying attention to what goes on around the votive candle stands can be edifying.  Increasingly people make a bee-line for them; ignoring the greater attractions of the building or indeed an event.  It was at the Maundy Thursday morning Eucharist when the cathedral was full with the clergy of the diocese, that someone slipped in and rather assertively made her way to the candle stands to make her prayer.  There was a determination about that which is telling.  She had a desire, a need to pray and, while she could have done it anywhere and in any method, there was something about lighting a candle here which helped give voice to the desire or need or pain in her soul.  Others light candles towards the end of their visit. Some spend time getting themselves ready for the moment; some are quite perfunctory about it. Some will light a candle every time they come; for others it will be a once in a lifetime or once in a blue moon event. There are different styles of candle-lighting but all of them carry spiritual weight and significance.  All of them are a heartfelt attempt to bring reality to God and therefore both an encounter with reality and an encounter with God. Such is prayer. And often, often, that dual encounter takes us beyond the realm of words into symbolic actions or, as St Paul knew, signs and groans to deep for words.

Why have I started this sermon with this refection on prayer and votive candles? It is of course in order to invite you to engage in a deep and spiritual way with the duty and joy which will probably be yours next Thursday.  The word ‘vote' and the word ‘votive' are not, when you think about it, so very different.  Both have their roots of the meaning in the human will. When we pray in a votive or intercessory way we are expressing our will and trying to align it with the will and wisdom of God.  When we vote we are expressing our will and trying to align the future of our country with the will and wisdom of God.

This might not be the way in which you ordinarily tend to think about voting. If you are the thinking type you will probably see the decision to vote as a complex intellectual exercise involving evaluation of the merits of the clusters of policies that the parties present; if you are a traditional and loyal person you will see voting as the duty to support ‘your party' - the one with which over the years you have established a strong bond, possibly a membership; if you are a  person moved by strong feelings and impulses you will be monitoring those feelings as you watch the performance and absorb the promises of the leaders of the parties, all of whom are seeking to move you to vote for them. The reality is that we are, all of us, all three of these people - traditional, rational and emotional - and that it is the interplay of all these kinds of considerations which makes voting seem such a perplexing business. No wonder so many people decline to vote, or long for a single issue party or candidate to resolve the complexity and anguish of it all. No wonder so many people desire the end of party politics. No wonder so many people seek to discredit the whole difficult business by drawing attention to the moral failings of politicians and the actual failings of well intended policies.

Last Friday night a retiring local MP was speaking to students of the university here.  He describes himself as a ‘democrat with a capital ‘D''.  His fundamental point is that democratic politics with its inevitable burden of taxation is not only an engine of civilisation and prosperity but also the best way of trying to live together. We all know that it relies on talk - lots of talk - but his point is that, while we might get sick of it all, at the end of the day ‘jaw-jaw' is better than ‘war-war'.  Tiresome as political speeches and ballot boxes might be, they do not, whatever the IRA said about it, go hand in hand with the Kalashnikov.  In democratic politics, the loser lives to fight another day.  That is the underlying dignity of democratic politics - and it is not to be sneezed at, taken for granted or abused by neglect.

One of many vivid memories from a sabbatical visit to South Africa in 2002 was speaking with a man who was involved in a peacemaking NGO in Kwa Zulu Natal.  It had been a very violent area and he had been doing very dangerous work. ‘Then' he said, ‘come the end of apartheid we realized we had a massive task: we had to teach people how to vote. We had to help them know where to be when and what to do with the ballot paper.  They really had no idea'. 

Teaching people how to vote is an interesting prospect. We might even fear that it is tantamount to corrupting the democratic process.  As you know, when sermons preached here are put on the website they are given a title. Suppose I was to give this one the title ‘how to vote'?  What would people think?  This is politics in the pulpit! We can't have the clergy abusing their position by telling us how to vote! 

Well, I think I might risk it. (Reader, I have!) Not because I am going to tell you who to vote for but because I am going to invite you consciously to make a connection with the two great votive activities of lighting a candle and putting a cross on a ballot paper.

Today's Collect can help us see the point of this connection:  we pray ‘grant that, as by your grace going before us you put into our minds good desires, so by your continual help we may bring them to good effect'. The prayer takes us to the heart of prayer itself - to the place of will and desire.  It suggests that desire comes from our mind but we often experience desire coming from a deeper place; our heart, our guts, our depths.  And we often experience not one simple desire but many complex ones, not all of which are compatible with each other. Maybe, then, we should ask God to help us to discern which of our deeply felt desires are the good ones and then ask for help and determination in acting on them until they have led us to make a real difference in the world. That would be a true prayer, a ‘kingdom seeking' prayer. One that is both profoundly spiritual and potentially political.  It is engaged, responsible, realistic prayer; the kind that it might be not only worthy of us at our best, but also worthy of God's attention and response.

Today, we often struggle to appreciate the spirituality of politics.  We see the squabbling but don't feel the passion; we read of the failures but forget the successes; we have the charlatans paraded before us but the ordinary good and sometimes saintly politicians rarely make the headlines. Curiously, most people think that their own MP is better than the average MP. If you think about it, that is a statistic that tells us more about the electorate than the elected. 

And so, unless we get some sort of gip on the intrinsic connections between spirituality and justice, between prayer and progress, between God's kingdom and the kingdoms of this world our faith will be in danger of becoming a self-indulgent, other-worldly, fantasy and our politics will be a self-indulgent, this-worldly, fantasy. The point about spirituality is always to engage in this processes of connecting of this world with God's kingdom and of allowing our desires to be formed by God's will.  That's why prayer is both the number one activity in this great building and the number one purpose of our ministry. And that is why I am going to conclude this sermon by telling you how to vote.

Let me put it three ways. First: please vote in the same state of mind and spirit as you would light a votive candle. See it as a prayer, an expression of your deep desire which also opens you to the will and love of God. 

Second: vote in the same way as you approach the Eucharist - that is with a sense of unworthiness and at the same time with a sense of both duty and joy. Voting is demanding. It involves a little sacrifice of time and peace of mind.   Think of it as a sacrifice made for the benefit of others. You are making the sign of a cross, after all.

 Finally, approach the ballot box as you would your own marriage. That sounds odd but the marriage service has words in it which summarise how we should approach many major decisions: and the way we vote should be a major decision. Like marriage, voting, ‘must not be undertaken carelessly, lightly or selfishly but reverently, responsibly and after serious thought'.

The individualist in us might see our own vote as trivial. But if we remember that in a body corporate each member has a unique part to play without which the whole is incomplete and unhealthy, we will walk to the polling station with genuine dignity and real pride and humble prayerfulness.