Sermon: Geoffrey Moorhouse RIP

I knew Geoffrey long before I came to Durham and persuaded him to write a book about this Cathedral.  We first met in Hawes parish church many years ago, where my wife and I had been married and where her father still lives.  I was one of a large following who enjoyed his writings and recognised in him a true artist of the written word, for he knew how to write in a way that was not only well informed, wise and entertaining but also sounded good.  This week I opened up a score of emails he had written me.  Even these digital ephemera about visits to Durham or church life in Hawes were a joy to read.  ‘I may have found my level at last’ he writes in one of them, ‘having been recruited by The Oldie to write a monthly column on Life in the Pennines. Back to journalism again.  Clogs to clogs in one generation!’  That short-lived Oldie column was a late flowering of his literary skill as a miniaturist, with his playful wit, sharp observation and shrewdly probing mind. 

There was a palpable northern-ness about Geoffrey.  He was a native of Lancashire, but migrated across the Pennine watershed to make his home in white-rose Wensleydale by waters that flow towards the North Sea.   He had a strong sense of place, not only when it came to exotic destinations like the Sahara, Sydney, the Skelligs, or even Lord, but also, and especially, in relation to the landscapes of home.  Yorkshire’s rough fells, its sharp keen air, its fickle climate and constantly changing light, its stout, rugged, kind-hearted people brought out the best in him.  Like Auden, another writer who loved our northern fells, maybe he found in them a powerful metaphor of the skull beneath the skin to shape his tough yet beautiful prose.  No-one who was present at his funeral at Hawes will ever forget the poignancy of walking in procession up the fellside to his grave in the dying light of a raw December afternoon.  It was quintessentially Pennine and quintessentially Geoffrey.  You felt he was there, and that in a few days we would read about it in meticulously crafted prose (or was it almost poetry?) in the Guardian or the Oldie.   

We honour him in Durham because of his last book about the dissolution of Durham Cathedral Priory in 1539.  It was the final volume of his trilogy on the England of Henry VIII which had covered the Pilgrimage of Grace (another northern theme) and Henry’s navy.  I think that for him, Durham more than any other cathedral symbolised the idea of ‘north’, not only in its architecture and heritage but as a spiritual focus for an entire region, for instance in the annual gathering of Durham miners that we look forward to this coming Saturday.  He loved the idea that mining communities could look to a Cathedral as a kind of mother house and process their brass bands and parade their banners in this shrine of St Cuthbert.  It appealed to his northern, proletarian instincts: the beauty of cathedrals is not to be patrician and aloof but belongs to working churches that serve the nation by witnessing to the possibility of the transcendent in ordinary life. 

And faith mattered to Geoffrey, both public and personal.  He relished theological argument, loved the rhythms and cadences of the Book of Common Prayer, cherished the traditions of Christian faith in its Anglican incarnation.  Anglicanism suited his temperament, for its understated ‘perhapses’ and ‘maybes’ are the language of the explorer and pilgrim drawn to distant horizons.  For the landscapes that fascinated him were not only physical and historical, but belonged to the geography of the human spirit.  In their different ways, his books explore what makes us human, what meanings life has, where God is to be found in this world.  He did this with a light touch and a gentle humour: his writings, like his spirituality, were reticent when it came to speaking about God, for it is ultimately not what we can say about God that matters so much as what we can’t.  He embodied what Philip Larkin called a ‘hunger to be more serious’, and looked to the church to help him on this journey.  He could be angry when the church failed to be true to itself and to God, when liturgy collapsed into a Sunday entertainment.  He once said to me that he had become a rather grumpy Anglican in old age, but I can’t think of a more committed one. 

In our reading, Jesus speaks about following him:  ‘this is my commandment: that you love one another’.  Geoffrey knew enough about the flaws in human character not to fall prey to idealising love as preachers often do.  Yet his ‘reach’ was amazingly broad: he was a citizen of the world in his compassion for the human race in its wonderful, bewildering variety.  When you inhabit a big world, you learn charity and humility.  Perhaps his sense of life as gift gave him his generous vision of the world as a good and beautiful and hope-filled place – even if it is also a tragic one - because it is God’s.  To love is an act of reverence, of gratitude that we are here at all as creatures to whom the Creator reaches out in friendship.  In words that we shall hear again in a moment, Geoffrey gives us his testament as a man of faith: ‘We may not be big on penance any more, or very keen on exile in pursuit of an ideal; but let us hope at least to learn that secret of loving…, and so, please God, may peace be upon us all.’  A lot of living, and suffering, and hoping against hope went into those hard-won words which is why they have the ring of truth.  Thank God for him.