WHEN we glance back at our lives, we recognise objects which were a vital a part of our faith journey: they’re, to confer with the unique meaning of articulus, small connecting parts of the entire. The first I might want to provide thanks for in my very own life is a book: Collected Poems, 1945-1990, by the Welsh poet-priest R. S. Thomas. Seamus Heaney called Thomas “the Clint Eastwood of the spirit”, and, as you read his work, there’s a way of a spiritual interrogator moving into town who might just shoot a glass in your table.
When I used to be training at theological college, I had a difficult time on a placement at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. As a chaplain to the HIV/AIDS wards, I saw many young men of my very own age die. Afterwards, I joined a friend on a visit to India, pondering that I wouldn’t return to school because I couldn’t make any sense of such callous suffering and our each day praise of a loving God. I took one book in my backpack (slightly a heavy one, because it turned out), and browse the poems as I made my way around Uttar Pradesh, in crowded buses, low-cost city hotels, and on small boats on the Ganges within the early morning.
Slowly but surely, in India’s vast and disarming landscape, Thomas was prompting my inner life to burst its banks and to kneel more comfortably with ambiguity, honest complexity, and a God who — like an owl — occasionally brushes us along with his wing at midnight. Truth isn’t easily won in Thomas’s poems. When it’s momentarily glimpsed, though, the revelation entails re-evaluation. In my life, it was Thomas who put God back on the horizon.
EVER since I did my A levels, I actually have been drawn to Shakespeare: to the spiritual adventures available in his language, and the ways by which he’s capable of amend our imaginations. The late Bishop Geoffrey Rowell gave me a book on how Shakespeare might be utilized in psychotherapy: the therapist within the incessant seek for resonant rhythms and mutative metaphors that create empathy and make for deeper communication and comprehension. Exploring Shakespeare’s narratives concerning the human condition helps us to discern the stories that we may be trapped in, and those that we’d yet move into.
After I preached the Shakespeare Sermon, Paul Edmondson, head of research on the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, gave me a cutting of rosemary from land in Stratford once owned by Shakespeare. When I once preached at an ordination, I gave a pot of rosemary to every ordinand as I recalled Ophelia’s words: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.” My cutting has grown right into a potted bush; now that I live next to the Globe Theatre, the pot sits outside, back on land known to Shakespeare. His language, making its way ahead of me and calling back to me to catch up, and the rosemary — like liturgy and ritual — help me remember to recollect, with gratitude.
A KIND friend once gave me a small painting of Mother Maria Skobtsova, knowing that I had a special admiration for her. This Russian refugee, who found herself in Paris, sheltering and feeding other refugees from her homeland, with little money handy, after which, later, doing the identical for Jews from Eastern Europe, was a unprecedented woman. She became a nun, and it is tough to think about a less nun-like nun: a divorcee, a single mother, a one who loved arguing politics over plenty to drink, as she smoked her cigarettes, and whose neighbours often complained concerning the noise and late-night laughter. Her faith, she said, had taught her that life was only begun whenever you gave up possessiveness.
With the local Orthodox priest, Fr Dimitri Klepinin, she forged baptism certificates to assist Jews to flee. “If we were true Christians,” she reflected, “we’d all wear the yellow star.” Eventually, they were each arrested. When Fr Dimitri was being interrogated by the Nazis, he was asked whether he knew any Jews. Dimitri held up the crucifix that he was wearing and said, “Yes, this one.” Both Maria, placed within the gas chamber on Holy Saturday, and Dimitri died within the camps. Her journal writings are poetic and galvanizing. “Piety, piety,” she wrote, “but where is the love that moves mountains?”
Maria was made a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2008. She is referred to as “Mother Maria of the Open Door”. I cannot consider a more urgent image for the Christian vocation in the meanwhile than to have our doors open — to the vulnerable, unsafe, and hunted. I keep her picture in my prayer corner at home, and recall Shakespeare again: “Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge.”
The Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley is Dean of Southwark and Canon Theologian of Wakefield Cathedral.
