The Empty Tomb as the New Mercy Seat of God: Whitterings, May 2010

The spirituality of the Jewish world in which Jesus lived was marked by separation. A prayer from Jesus’ day read

“Blessed is he who distinguishes between the holy and the profane, between light and darkness, between Israel and Gentiles, between the seventh day and the six working days, between water above and water below, between priest and Levite and Israelite.”

Holiness was marked by keeping the clean away from the unclean, the righteous from the sinner. Perhaps the most marked distinction was between what was alive and what was dead. The High Priest was not even allowed to acknowledge death and was forbidden to take part in the funeral rites even of his closest family.

The religious rites of the Temple were also ordered in this way with a succession of areas which one could only enter after successive levels of purification. Yet even when one kept all of the laws the presence of God was still closed off. At the very end of the Temple was the great veil or curtain that hid the Holy of Holies. Behind the veil was the Ark of the Covenant flanked by two golden Cherubim between which was the Mercy Seat of God. This was the place where the presence of God dwelt. Only one person, the High Priest, ever beheld it and then only on one day of the year, the Day of Atonement, so he could sprinkle the blood of propitiation upon the Mercy Seat. For everyone else the Mercy Seat of God was forever hidden and out of reach.

The holiness of Jesus was in marked opposition to this holiness of separation or Puritanism. He broke the Sabbath laws, did not keep the customs of ritual cleansing, associated with collaborators, with prostitutes and even let them touch Him. He touched lepers and the handicapped and even the dead. He taught us about finding Him in the sick and the imprisoned and the hungry, He taught us about gathering in the beggars from the streets to dine at the banqueting table of God. The theologian Nicholas Boyle wrote:

“The presence of what is alien, pagan, unholy, unclean at the heart of the Church is essential to its nature. When the Church finds what is unholy, then it must say ‘For this too Christ died’...In such moments the Church too must die, must swallow its pride, give up the boundary which it thought defined its existence, and discover a new and larger vocation. And that new vocation will itself be defined by a new boundary which in time the Church will also have to transcend.”

So you would assume that the Church would be the first community to recognise when it is defining itself as an ‘us’ against a ‘them’. If only it were so. Our history is one long, continual, struggle against the old purity holiness of the temple. There is always a new ‘them’. For the Anglican Communion today it is either ‘conservatives’ or ‘liberals’, ‘orthodox’ or ‘heretics’. Usually these lines are drawn because of differing understandings of human sexual orientation. There will always be some tribal, clan identity against which we will attempt to define ourselves against. The saddest part is that this type of spirituality discredits all religion and even makes it dangerous to humanity.

We should not be overly harsh with ourselves however because we evolved this way. From our earliest days we lived in small groups that were always on the lookout for the ‘other’ tribe who was out to get us. We are, after all, a particularly violent species. Even today, when we are threatened our first response in to retreat back into the clan for protection. In a world that has dramatically changed almost overnight most people feel threatened. For most of the world’s population their most primal clan identity is that of their religion. Of course this is not real religion in that true religion is not afraid and seeks to move outwards in worship to explore in faith the creation and all other creatures. Instead it is the opposite of faith – it is created out of fear. Thus this world is filled with fundamentalists whose hardness of heart too often betrays the absence of love and a fearless faith.

Father Timothy Radcliffe, the former Master of the Dominican Order (who introduced to me the concept behind this article), said in his book Why Go to Church:

“And who are the people whom we, the Church, thrust out, or at least leave hanging around on the edge, as second class citizens: the divorced and remarried, people living with partners, gay people. There must be a place for them around our altars, rejoicing in Christ’s hospitality along with everyone else. Often our Churches keep alive Old Testament understanding of holiness, separating off our communities from those who have gone astray. This may look like keeping up standards, refusing the moral relativism, but actually it is just failing to catch up with the novel holiness of Christ.”

We must keep pushing outwards to grow and be transformed like I discussed in my last column. For us as Christians this means seeking Christ in one another especially in those we find alien – the stranger and the enemy. He is seldom where we want Him to be. I never tire of reminding people that Elie Wiesel thought that if you had to choose between Christ and the Truth you must always choose the truth because if you choose Christ you are only choosing who you think He is, an idol of Him, and not who He really is. Remember the disciples did not recognise Him after He had risen. Mary Magdalene was looking for him in the tomb and did not recognise Him when He stood outside of it but rather thought He was the gardener.

At the Easter Day Mass this year most of us read the Resurrection account by St Luke:

“They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen.’” LUKE 24:1-5

On Good Friday we read the Passion according to St Luke:

“It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole eland until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed: and the curtain of the temple was torn in two.” LUKE 23:44-45

Even more dramatic is St Mathews account:

“And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom; and the earth shook, and the rocks were split...” MATHEW 27:51

Do you see it? When Christ died the veil of the temple was ‘rent in twain’ revealing the Holy of Holies – the empty space between the two Cherubim – the Mercy Seat of God. That which had remained hidden, cut off from the people because they were not pure enough, was revealed - an empty space between two angels. God was no longer separated from His people. He was no longer to be found there.

On Easter morning a group of women, the very first people to encounter this new reality, found another empty space flanked by two angels. He was not there either.

The first painting is by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones entitled ‘Mary Magdalene and the Risen Lord’.

The second painting is by Joseph Love and is a Sumi ink drawing entitled ‘The Veil oft he Temple was Torn’.

Little Gidding and the Father Founders of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd: Whitterings, January 2010

If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

If you turn onto the old, rutted, one track roads in the isolated western part of Cambridgeshire, called Huntingdonshire, you will probably get lost fairly quickly. If you are lucky enough to find yourself on the desolate Old Western Road and head north you will come across the small hamlets of Steeple Gidding, Great Gidding, and if you are very lucky you will find Little Gidding and the small farm lane that leads through the fields to dead-end at the 12^th century church of St John’s -‘The World’s End’. There is really no hamlet left since the Great Plague wiped out the inhabitants in 1348 and the Parliamentarians wiped out the resettled community in 1646. There is not much to look at. Just a very small church with no particular attributes, the ‘Dull Facade’ referred to by Eliot, at least not physically. Spiritually it is a place of enormous power and of great importance in the history of the human heart.

Here in 1625, Nicholas Ferrar resigned from Parliament and settled with his extended family to found the first religious community since the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII in 1536. The Ferrar family set up residence in the old manor house and restored the abandoned church. Archbishop William Laud Ordained Nicholas to the Diaconate the same year. The community Read the Daily Offices from the Book of Common Prayer including a daily recitation of the entire Book of Psalms. They also kept a continual vigil of prayer in the sanctuary. They wrote books and stories of a spiritual nature, fasted regularly, and kept a life of poverty so as to be as free as possible financially to give to the poor. They spent their days in good works in the wider community teaching the children, caring for the sick and infirm, and visiting the old and vulnerable. King Charles I was so inspired by the religious zeal of the community that he visited it twice. The last time he was fleeing there for refuge after his defeat at the Battle of Naseby towards the end of the English Civil War: ‘If you came at night like a broken king’. Nicholas Ferrar died in 1637 and was buried in a tomb immediately in front of the church, Eliot’s ‘Tombstone’. His community continued however until the Puritan Parliamentarians under the rule of the Regicide denounced it as ‘an Arminian nunnery’ and forcibly dissolved it in 1646.

Although the community did not last long it set an example of what an Anglican Religious Community could look like. It was open, family orientated, and spiritually centred on the Book of Common Prayer. They were held together by the bonds of friendship and family and did not require formal vows. In 1913 during one of their yearly retreats to Little Gidding the Father Founders drew up the constitution of, and formally founded the Oratory of the Good Shepherd. They took Blessed Nicholas Ferrar as their patron. Years later the Oratory would found a parish church in Cambridge in honour of him.

Over the church door at Little Gidding is the quote taken out of the mouth of Jacob after he wakes from his dream about the angels ascending and descending the ladder from heaven:

“This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” Genesis 28.17

As Eliot rightly points out, Little Gidding is a thin place that reminds you that the Peace of God is accessible everywhere and at all times. Even though wars may be raging there is still a peace that runs in eternity underneath of time. Eliot himself was trying to write in London during the air raids of the WWII and only broke his writers block by visiting Little Gidding. In places like Little Gidding that have been hollowed with prayer it is easier to remember to kneel down, open your heart to God, and let go. When one does then anywhere can literally become the ‘Gate of Heaven’. Then all falls into place “and what you thought you came for is only a shell, a husk of meaning”. We must remember with humility, that this is the chief purpose of our churches, to remind us of God. When we are able to pray deeply then each one of our parish churches becomes ‘The House of God’.

As one leaves the church one passes underneath the stained glass window that holds within a simple blue circle the dying words of Nicholas Ferrar to his brother John:

“It is the right good old way you are in. Keep in it.”

Soeteriological Efficacy is the key to knowing on this side, or more simply put, you shall know a tree by the fruit it produces. Nicholas Ferrar and the community of Little Gidding showed that at the heart of the Book of Common Prayer was a path of holiness that united prayer and good works, holiness of life and love for humanity. They proved that the Anglican path led somewhere, that the tree could produce the fruits of the Spirit. There were good reasons the Father Founders of the Oratory looked to Little Gidding as their spiritual home and their inspiration. Little Gidding gave encouragement and hope that the Religious Life in the Church of England could once again take root, sprout, and bear the fruit of the Catholic Faith.

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

Quotes from ‘Little Gidding’, The Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot, 1942.

The Feast Day for Nicholas Ferrar, Deacon, in the Anglican Church of Canada is December 4^th.

The Feast Day for William Laud, Archbishop & Martyr, in the Anglican Church of Canada is January 10^th.

The Feast Day for Charles Stuart, King & Martyr, in the Anglican Church of Canada is January 30^th.