Sermon: Report from France

Last month I was with the Cathedral Friends’ pilgrimage to the Christian sites of Burgundy. I wish I had time to tell you of the places we visited: Autun, Pontigny, Fontenay, Vézelay, Beaune, Dijon, Tournus…. We learned about monasticism, Romanesque art and architecture, the history of Burgundy and the church in France. We reflected and prayed together. We enjoyed sunny landscapes and drank the best wines in the world.

But there is one place we visited that made many of us despondent. This is paradoxical, because this place could not be more important in the history of monasticism. Its basilica was the largest church in medieval Europe. The mother house of almost a thousand Benedictine monasteries, its name resonates across the centuries. Yet of this vast church, begun at the same time as this Cathedral, next to nothing is left. Just a couple of towers, part of a transept, some ruined walls and a few sculptures survive. It was razed to the ground, not in the 16th century like so many English monasteries, but less than 200 years ago, well into the modern era, six or seven generations back. Our grandparents’ grandparents’ generation would have remembered how their little town was dominated by the backdrop of the vast Abbey, like Durham and its cathedral. It is one of the most tragic spiritual and cultural losses our continent has ever sustained.

The name of this forlorn place is Cluny. We stood at what was once the west end of this huge church looking east. There we read two passages of scripture. The first was Solomon’s prayer of dedication of the temple: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built!” And then this passage from St. Mark’s Gospel: “As Jesus came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!’ Then Jesus asked him, ‘Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” I wanted us to ponder the transitoriness of things, how even the greatest and noblest of human projects offered for the service of God will not last forever. What is spared the depredations of human destructiveness, time and the elements will devour in the end. Even if it long outlasts us, nothing made with human hands can escape it. It was true of Solomon’s temple. It was true of Cluny. And one day, it will be true of Durham too.

Meditating among the tombs of the medieval grand projet at Cluny, your thoughts are indisputably lifted to what ultimately endures. And what is eternal is of course the very inspiration that lay behind its construction: to lift the eyes and hearts of mortal creatures to their God, to recall them to their primary duty in life which is to love him above all things. This was St Benedict’s project: to write a rule for monks that would enable them to live the ordered life of work, study and prayer that would enable them to live by the light that is given us in Christ, and therefore to prepare them for eternity. Benedict calls this ‘a school for the Lord’s service’. He begins his rule: “Hearken, my child, to the precepts of your master, and incline the ear of your heart”, an allusion to our first lesson where the teacher summons his pupils to follow the way of wisdom and find in it their life’s direction. This was what the stones and buildings of Cluny were for.

And here in Durham, as heirs ourselves to a Benedictine priory, we walk in that same tradition. We are fortunate, and grateful, that our stones and buildings were largely spared the worst excesses of reforming and revolutionary fervour that saw the end of Cluny. Nevertheless, our great building only exists to serve the same end, which is the worship of God and the service of our neighbour. This is the royal road of wisdom of which our reading says that “her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace”. Our holy and beautiful house, every sacred space on earth, points not to itself but beyond itself. We need to look, not at it but through it, allow it to be transparent to us so that so that we learn to see in a new way and the glory of heaven break through. You could say that the cathedral is a sacrament, a sign, a symbol, a pledge both of the light and love of Christ in the present, and of the glorious freedom of the children of God which is our future. It is there for the knowledge of God, to make us faithful disciples.

As we stood at Cluny, I thought of the work of the Benedictine historian Professor David Knowles who wrote the definitive, magisterial account of the Religious Orders in England. He concludes his third and final volume on the dissolution of the monasteries in words I find both moving and sobering. At the end of this long review of monastic history, with its splendours and its miseries, and with its rhythm of recurring rise and fall, a monk cannot but ask what message for himself and for his brethren the long story can carry. It is the old and simple one; only in fidelity to the Rule can a monk or a monastery find security. A Rule, given by a founder with an acknowledged fullness of spiritual wisdom, approved by the church and tested by the experience of saints, is a safe path, and it is for the religious the only safe path. It comes to him, not as a rigid, mechanical code of works, but as a sure guide to one who seeks God, and who seeks that he may indeed find. If he truly seeks and truly loves, the way will not be hard, but if he would love and find the unseen God he must pass beyond things seen and walk in faith and hope, leaving all human way and means and trusting the Father to whom all things are possible. When once a religious house or a religious order ceases to direct its sons t the abandonment of all that is not God, and ceases to show them the rigours of the narrow way that leads to the imitation of Christ in his Love, it sinks to the level of a purely human institution, and whatever its works may be, they are the works of time, not of eternity. The true monk, in whatever century he is found, looks not to the changing ways around him or to his mean condition, but to the unchanging everlasting God, and his trust is in the everlasting arms that hold him. Christ’s words are true: he who doth not renounce all that he possesseth cannot be my disciple. His promise also is true: he that followeth me walketh not in darkness but shall have the light of life.

And this is precisely what we heard in our reading from St John’s first letter. We should imagine these words emblazoned on the threshold of this church as we step inside and find ourselves uplifted and inspired in mind and heart and imagination: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called the children of God; and that is what we are. Beloved, we are God’s children; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: that when he is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” This is the purpose our cathedral serves. And – I speak to myself here - only by recalling this each day do we keep ourselves from idols.