From the Chantry Priest
An article in the current Intercession Paper
It was on Easter Tuesday 2020 that I received Bishop Norman’s invitation to write this piece for the next Intercession Paper: three weeks into the ‘lockdown’, and at the point where we were being promised at least another three weeks of the same. I hadn’t said Mass in our Chantry Chapel at Walsingham since Sunday March 22nd. We ‘over-70s’ were supposed to be self-isolating for 12 weeks and the Shrine grounds were locked; so I created an upper room ‘oratory’ in my small second bedroom. I immediately realised as I celebrated a solitary Mass there, facing the top end of Knight Street, that I was looking out on the village War Memorial. With my varifocals I was even able to read some of the names carved on it. Rather wonderful, since it was the experience of many Forces Chaplains on the ‘killing fields’ of the 1st World War which contributed to this significant addition to the 1662 BCP ‘Prayer for the Church Militant’ in the 1928 ‘revision’: and we commend to thy gracious keeping, O Lord, all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear, beseeching thee to grant them everlasting light and peace. (I wonder if the millions of deaths from the ‘Spanish ‘flu’ epidemic at the end of the Great War played a part as well). No doubt the Guild of All Souls, founded some 50 years earlier, was also an important voice at the time, in encouraging wider practice of prayer for the departed. So despite the strangeness of offering Mass on my own, and reading aloud the names of departed members of the Guild each day on their ‘year’s mind’ with no one on earth to listen, I have felt a deep identity not only with the Saints and all who have gone before us, but also an involvement with the history and objectives of our Guild. I would hope that all of us, over the weeks of isolation from the Church’s public worship, might have discovered something similar about what it means to be part of a community which breaks the boundaries of time and physical space, and to live within an ongoing story of witness to vital aspects of Christian discipleship.
My increased consumption of books during the lockdown included Diarmaid MacCulloch’s ‘Thomas Cromwell’ (I find it rather a joy to be a Chantry Priest in 2020 when recalling what happened in the 1530s!), and also ‘In search of the soul’, by the Roman Catholic philosopher John Cottingham. He writes of the ‘hope that the significance of our lives, and those of our loved ones…is more than a series of events terminated in death’: and of the Mass as the context in which we ‘orientate ourselves towards that for which we long’. Some of you will recall Psalm 43 which used to be said as part of the Preparation for Mass: O send out thy light and thy truth that they may lead me, and bring me unto thy holy hill and to thy dwelling; and that I may go unto the altar of God, even unto the God of my joy and gladness. I love that connection between the movement towards ‘God’s holy hill, God’s dwelling’, that ultimate goal for which we long, and ‘going to the altar of God.’ In whatever limitations we endure in this life, and in the hour of our death (and beyond that), may the offering of the Mass lead us, and the faithful departed, to God’s holy hill, and to His dwelling.
Fr Andrew Greany
My increased consumption of books during the lockdown included Diarmaid MacCulloch’s ‘Thomas Cromwell’ (I find it rather a joy to be a Chantry Priest in 2020 when recalling what happened in the 1530s!), and also ‘In search of the soul’, by the Roman Catholic philosopher John Cottingham. He writes of the ‘hope that the significance of our lives, and those of our loved ones…is more than a series of events terminated in death’: and of the Mass as the context in which we ‘orientate ourselves towards that for which we long’. Some of you will recall Psalm 43 which used to be said as part of the Preparation for Mass: O send out thy light and thy truth that they may lead me, and bring me unto thy holy hill and to thy dwelling; and that I may go unto the altar of God, even unto the God of my joy and gladness. I love that connection between the movement towards ‘God’s holy hill, God’s dwelling’, that ultimate goal for which we long, and ‘going to the altar of God.’ In whatever limitations we endure in this life, and in the hour of our death (and beyond that), may the offering of the Mass lead us, and the faithful departed, to God’s holy hill, and to His dwelling.
Fr Andrew Greany
An article from the previous intercession paper:
Joined in closest union
Neil MacGregor’s book ‘Living with the Gods’, based on his 2018 radio series, contains a chapter entitled ‘Living with the Dead’. He asks whether the dead and the living are bound, ‘for a while at least, in a network of reciprocal obligations’, and claims that on the whole our societies have ‘lost the habit of asking how they look after…the dead’. This claim was reinforced for me when by chance I watched one episode of Miriam Margolyes’ recent BBC documentary on death. Admittedly her concern was mostly with facing death and exploring ways of overcoming people’s reluctance to speak about death; but it was striking that she made no reference at all to any way in which a religious faith might affect our thinking and speaking about death, and our preparation for it. There were indeed very moving conversations with a woman dying of cancer, and with her young daughter, who was to find comfort after her mother’s death in listening to recordings of her voice; and on the lighter side, we saw Margolyes trying out a coffin for size. Members of the Guild of All Souls should certainly be glad to hear of death and dying being discussed openly and honestly in our culture; but it is disturbing that in an hour’s exploration of the subject there should be no reference to the many ways in which different cultures and faiths, not only Christian, have sustained a vision of the union of the living and the dead. Is it not the loss of that vision which has made death a taboo subject?
MacGregor in the same chapter quotes some fascinating comments on Inca culture: ‘for them all time is together: the present, past and future exist concurrently’. It’s not that ancestors are in the past, we in the present, and our descendants in the future. Here are resonances with Christian faith. It is surely one of the responsibilities of the Guild of All Souls within the Church of today to proclaim with confidence the Christian understanding of the truth that in Christ all are one. Richard Parsons’ great Eucharistic hymn (NEH 310) expresses it like this in the second verse:
With thee in blest communion
The living and the dead
Are joined in closest union,
One body with one head.
Not only, to return to MacGregor’s words, are the dead and the living bound in a network of reciprocal obligations, but that network is prayer; and what binds the network together is Jesus Christ, our great High Priest, Who is living Bread from heaven. It is above all in the offering of the Mass that we rejoice in the ‘closest union’ of the living and the dead, one in Jesus Christ; and this is what the Guild of All Souls is called to proclaim with confidence.
Fr Andrew Greany
Neil MacGregor’s book ‘Living with the Gods’, based on his 2018 radio series, contains a chapter entitled ‘Living with the Dead’. He asks whether the dead and the living are bound, ‘for a while at least, in a network of reciprocal obligations’, and claims that on the whole our societies have ‘lost the habit of asking how they look after…the dead’. This claim was reinforced for me when by chance I watched one episode of Miriam Margolyes’ recent BBC documentary on death. Admittedly her concern was mostly with facing death and exploring ways of overcoming people’s reluctance to speak about death; but it was striking that she made no reference at all to any way in which a religious faith might affect our thinking and speaking about death, and our preparation for it. There were indeed very moving conversations with a woman dying of cancer, and with her young daughter, who was to find comfort after her mother’s death in listening to recordings of her voice; and on the lighter side, we saw Margolyes trying out a coffin for size. Members of the Guild of All Souls should certainly be glad to hear of death and dying being discussed openly and honestly in our culture; but it is disturbing that in an hour’s exploration of the subject there should be no reference to the many ways in which different cultures and faiths, not only Christian, have sustained a vision of the union of the living and the dead. Is it not the loss of that vision which has made death a taboo subject?
MacGregor in the same chapter quotes some fascinating comments on Inca culture: ‘for them all time is together: the present, past and future exist concurrently’. It’s not that ancestors are in the past, we in the present, and our descendants in the future. Here are resonances with Christian faith. It is surely one of the responsibilities of the Guild of All Souls within the Church of today to proclaim with confidence the Christian understanding of the truth that in Christ all are one. Richard Parsons’ great Eucharistic hymn (NEH 310) expresses it like this in the second verse:
With thee in blest communion
The living and the dead
Are joined in closest union,
One body with one head.
Not only, to return to MacGregor’s words, are the dead and the living bound in a network of reciprocal obligations, but that network is prayer; and what binds the network together is Jesus Christ, our great High Priest, Who is living Bread from heaven. It is above all in the offering of the Mass that we rejoice in the ‘closest union’ of the living and the dead, one in Jesus Christ; and this is what the Guild of All Souls is called to proclaim with confidence.
Fr Andrew Greany