‘Keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation’

The Apostle Peter and the Apostle Paul in a fresco in the Church of the Four Martyrs, Rethymnon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

11.30 a.m.: Saint Brendan’s Church, Kilnaughtin, Tarbert, Co Kerry, Morning Prayer.

Readings: Exodus 3: 1-15; Psalm 105: 1-6, 23-26, 45c; Romans 12: 9-21; Matthew 16: 21-28.

May I speak to you in name of God, + the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

There is a wonderful contrast in our Gospel reading and our Epistle reading this morning between the Apostle Peter, who gets it wrong, and the Apostle Paul gets it right.

Last week [27 August 2017], in our Gospel reading, we saw how Saint Peter could get it right with his confession of faith, a rock-solid faith that had firm foundations.

This week, Saint Peter becomes a stumbling block because he thinks Christ has come to defeat those he sees as the enemies of the people, and he wants to share in the victory he hopes Christ will win. From rock to stumbling block in the space of a week.

Saint Peter is going to share in Christ’s victory, but it is not that kind of victory. It is a victory won not by killing enemies, but by forgiving them. It is a victory won on the cross, and Saint Peter will share it when he is ready to take up his cross and follow Christ.

On the other hand, Saint Paul, who once used rocks and stones in another way – at the stoning of the first, early Christian martyrs – now provides us with his own concise summary of Christianity faith, life and love. It reads like his own retelling of the Sermon on the Mount, or Christ reading in the synagogue in Nazareth (see Luke 4: 18-22).

Saint Paul tells us: ‘Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour (Romans 12: 9-10).

A summer wedding in a monastery in Crete … but should love last longer than the ‘Summer of Love’? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

This time 50 years ago, we were coming to the end of the ‘Summer of Love.’ All last week, in the background on television soaps like EastEnders and on late night radio shows, they have been playing Scott McKenzie’s hit from that summer in 1967, ‘San Francisco’ or ‘Be sure to wear flowers in your hair.’

It was the No 1 hit in Britain for a full week from 9 August 1967, displacing the Beatles and ‘All you need is love,’ and it was No 1 until the beginning of September. It was also a No 1 hit in Ireland 50 years ago for a week in September 1967.

For those who come to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there.

The words have no lasting poetic or literary value. The song was written in just 20 minutes and was written for a purely commercial reason – to promote the Monterey International Pop Music Festival that summer.

But the song was a success. All across the nation, as the words of the song predicted, there were people in motion. Thousands of young people came to Monterey and thousands more descended on Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco throughout the late 1960s.

Scott McKenzie’s song has been called ‘the unofficial anthem’ of the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, including the Hippie, Anti-Vietnam War and Flower Power movements. It never reached No 1 in the US charts, but it was one of the best-selling singles of the 1960s across the world.

Half a century later, the Summer of Love looks wilted and faded. It sent out mixed messages about promiscuity and psychedelic drugs. It was brash and immature. But it also encouraged a whole generation to make appropriate connections – how love for one another is not just enough, how we must connect love for others with love for the wider world.

There are different kinds of love. But, sometimes, we are afraid to, we are threatened by, exploring what we mean by love.

Perhaps we feel too embarrassed to explore what we mean by love because, in some Victorian way, we think this involves private emotions and feelings that should not be discussed in public or in polite company.

Perhaps we return to teenage feelings of blushing and being unable to find appropriate mature language to discuss what love truly means beyond our own emotions.

Perhaps because of past experiences, we can confuse attention with affection, affection with love, and so go on doing things to gain attention so that this compensates for a lack of affection and for not being fulfilled in our needs to be loved.

Few of us grow up being taught how to think about love and what it is, in its broader, theological, spiritual and psychological meanings.

What does the Apostle Paul mean by love in this morning’s New Testament reading?

On the one hand, Saint Paul’s idea of love means something very different from Saint Peter’s love of our own that turns to hatred of the other. And, on the other hand, his idea of love means something very different from a love-in in San Francisco.

The Belfast-born writer CS Lewis (1898-1963) is best known as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, the Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. But in his last few years, while he was Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance English at Cambridge (1954-1963), he wrote The Four Loves (1960).

In this book, written in 1960, CS Lewis identifies the four loves as: affection (στοργή, storge), which he calls the humblest love and which is unmerited; friendship (φιλία, philia); eros (ἔρως); and caritas or agape (ἀγάπη).

In this morning’s reading, Saint Paul draws on three of these words, so that he talks about love in all its fullness. He talks about ἀγάπη (Romans 12: 9), and the need for it be genuine, without duplicity. He refers to the word στοργή, unearned or unmerited love, when he talks about φιλόστοργος (verse 10), honouring one another and loving without counting the cost. He talks about φιλαδελφία (philadelphía), mutual love for one another that is so much more than the affection described in the English translation and so much wider in scope than ‘brotherly love’ which is often used instead (verses 10 and 12).

He gives a balanced and considered approach to what love is. And yet there is not one word in it about marriage, sex or gender.

Rather than offering mere words that label love, Saint Paul provides practical examples of how love is expressed, how it is not just a feeling but is only genuine when it is put into action.

He tells me that love is mutual, shows honour, is the best way to serve God. I must rejoice, be patient, pray for others, give to others, welcome strangers, bless those I see as threats and as enemies and never to curse them.

I am to rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. I am not to be a social or an intellectual snob.

I am to live in peace with all, and let God take care, in God’s own way, of those who do me wrong. I am to feed the hungry, give something to drink to those who thirst, I am to respond to evil with good.

What a different Church we would have today if these were our priorities when it comes to mission.

What a different world we would have today if these values shaped the political manifestos of every politician and party.

The story in our Old Testament reading (Exodus 3: 1-15) is a reminder that God’s love is expressed in just the same ways that Saint Paul describes the love that we should have and that reflects God’s love.

When Moses comes into the presence of God on Mount Horeb or Mount Sinai, long before God tells Moses his name, God tells him he sees the misery of the people, that he hears the cry of the oppressed (verses 7), that he knows their suffering (verse 7), that he wants to deliver them from slavery and to bring them to freedom, that he wants what is best for them (verse 8).

He emphasises that he has heard their cry (verse 9), and he wants them to be free.

In freedom, and only through their own choice, can they worship God freely, become free to be consumed in his love.

It is only then, after a long experience and a long dialogue, that God reveals God’s name, ‘I am who I am’ (verse 14), ‘I am’ (Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν). God makes himself known in his promises of love, and then, only then, does he reveal his name. First of all, he says what he does, then he says who he is. And he is who he is, faithful for ever.

God’s love for us, like the bush that is blazing on the mountain, never burns out. It is a flame that is never quenched, that never burns up.

Later, back on this mountain, God is going to tell Moses who God is once again, ‘… merciful and gracious, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin …’ (Exodus 34: 6-7).

Those words are echoed in Saint Paul’s words in our Epistle reading.

In a lecture on that book by CS Lewis some years ago in Cambridge, the great Orthodox theologian Metropolitan Kallistos Ware spoke of the Holy Trinity as the model of mutual love, and the fountain and source of love. He said if God is love (John 4: 8), then God cannot be one person loving himself, and a circle of two persons would be closed and exclusive.

The Trinity shows us that love should not only be mutual, but that it should be shared. The doctrine of the Trinity is a way of saying that God’s eternal being is self-giving.

God is God, and we are truly human, because of our ability to relate to others, to love others. We are what we are only in relation to other persons. There is no true person unless there are two or three persons in communication with each other.

In other words, love is at the centre of our understanding what it means for God to be God, and what it means for us to be human. We love like this because God is like this.

If we keep it all to ourselves, it is not love. When we put love into action it becomes genuine. It rejoices and is patient, it looks out for the needs of others, it welcomes the stranger. It hopes, it prays, it rejoices with those who rejoice, and weeps with those who weep. It does not repay evil with evil, it lives in peace with all, it gives food and drink to those who are hungry and thirsty, without discrimination, and it overcomes evil with good.

And that is love that lasts far longer than the summer of love. That is love, like Moses experiences it, that is love that is never quenched, love that never burns out.

And so, may all we think, say and do be to the praise, honour and glory of God, + Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

The Burning Bush, an icon by Mikhail Damaskinos (ca 1585-1591) in the Museum of Christian Art in Iraklion, Crete (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Collect:

Almighty and everlasting God,
you are always more ready to hear than we to pray
and to give more than either we desire, or deserve:
Pour down upon us the abundance of your mercy,
forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid,
and giving us those good things
which we are not worthy to ask
save through the merits and mediation
of Jesus Christ your Son our Lord.

(Revd Canon Professor) Patrick Comerford is Priest-in-Charge, the Rathkeale and Kilnaughtin Group of Parishes. This sermon was prepared for Sunday 3 September 2017.

A love that lasts longer than the Summer of Love

A summer wedding in a monastery in Crete … but should love last longer than the ‘Summer of Love’? (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

9.30 a.m.: Saint Mary’s Church, Askeaton, Co Limerick, the Parish Eucharist.

Readings: Exodus 3: 1-15; Psalm 105: 1-6, 23-26, 45c; Romans 12: 9-21; Matthew 16: 21-28.

May I speak to you in name of God, + the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

There is a wonderful contrast in our Gospel reading and our Epistle reading this morning between the Apostle Peter, who gets it wrong, and the Apostle Paul gets it right.

Last week [27 August 2017], in our Gospel reading, we saw how Saint Peter could get it right with his confession of faith, a rock-solid faith that had firm foundations.

This week, Saint Peter becomes a stumbling block because he thinks Christ has come to defeat those he sees as the enemies of the people, and he wants to share in the victory he hopes Christ will win. From rock to stumbling block in the space of a week.

Saint Peter is going to share in Christ’s victory, but it is not that kind of victory. It is a victory won not by killing enemies, but by forgiving them. It is a victory won on the cross, and Saint Peter will share it when he is ready to take up his cross and follow Christ.

On the other hand, Saint Paul, who once used rocks and stones in another way – at the stoning of the first, early Christian martyrs – now provides us with his own concise summary of Christianity faith, life and love. It reads like his own retelling of the Sermon on the Mount, or Christ reading in the synagogue in Nazareth (see Luke 4: 18-22).

Saint Paul tells us: ‘Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour (Romans 12: 9-10).

The Apostle Peter and the Apostle Paul in a fresco in the Church of the Four Martyrs, Rethymnon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

This time 50 years ago, we were coming to the end of the ‘Summer of Love.’ All last week, in the background on television soaps like EastEnders and on late night radio shows, they have been playing Scott McKenzie’s hit from that summer in 1967, ‘San Francisco’ or ‘Be sure to wear flowers in your hair.’

It was the No 1 hit in Britain for a full week from 9 August 1967, displacing the Beatles and ‘All you need is love,’ and it was No 1 until the beginning of September. It was also a No 1 hit in Ireland 50 years ago for a week in September 1967.

For those who come to San Francisco
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair
If you come to San Francisco
Summertime will be a love-in there.

The words have no lasting poetic or literary value. The song was written in just 20 minutes and was written for a purely commercial reason – to promote the Monterey International Pop Music Festival that summer.

But the song was a success. All across the nation, as the words of the song predicted, there were people in motion. Thousands of young people came to Monterey and thousands more descended on Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco throughout the late 1960s.

Scott McKenzie’s song has been called ‘the unofficial anthem’ of the counter-culture movement of the 1960s, including the Hippie, Anti-Vietnam War and Flower Power movements. It never reached No 1 in the US charts, but it was one of the best-selling singles of the 1960s across the world.

Half a century later, the Summer of Love looks wilted and faded. It sent out mixed messages about promiscuity and psychedelic drugs. It was brash and immature. But it also encouraged a whole generation to make appropriate connections – how love for one another is not just enough, how we must connect love for others with love for the wider world.

There are different kinds of love. But, sometimes, we are afraid to, we are threatened by, exploring what we mean by love.

Perhaps we feel too embarrassed to explore what we mean by love because, in some Victorian way, we think this involves private emotions and feelings that should not be discussed in public or in polite company.

Perhaps we return to teenage feelings of blushing and being unable to find appropriate mature language to discuss what love truly means beyond our own emotions.

Perhaps because of past experiences, we can confuse attention with affection, affection with love, and so go on doing things to gain attention so that this compensates for a lack of affection and for not being fulfilled in our needs to be loved.

Few of us grow up being taught how to think about love and what it is, in its broader, theological, spiritual and psychological meanings.

What does the Apostle Paul mean by love in this morning’s New Testament reading?

On the one hand, Saint Paul’s idea of love means something very different from Saint Peter’s love of our own that turns to hatred of the other. And, on the other hand, his idea of love means something very different from a love-in in San Francisco.

The Belfast-born writer CS Lewis (1898-1963) is best known as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, the Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. But in his last few years, while he was Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance English at Cambridge (1954-1963), he wrote The Four Loves (1960).

In this book, written in 1960, CS Lewis identifies the four loves as: affection (στοργή, storge), which he calls the humblest love and which is unmerited; friendship (φιλία, philia); eros (ἔρως); and caritas or agape (ἀγάπη).

In this morning’s reading, Saint Paul draws on three of these words, so that he talks about love in all its fullness. He talks about ἀγάπη (Romans 12: 9), and the need for it be genuine, without duplicity. He refers to the word στοργή, unearned or unmerited love, when he talks about φιλόστοργος (verse 10), honouring one another and loving without counting the cost. He talks about φιλαδελφία (philadelphía), mutual love for one another that is so much more than the affection described in the English translation and so much wider in scope than ‘brotherly love’ which is often used instead (verses 10 and 12).

He gives a balanced and considered approach to what love is. And yet there is not one word in it about marriage, sex or gender.

Rather than offering mere words that label love, Saint Paul provides practical examples of how love is expressed, how it is not just a feeling but is only genuine when it is put into action.

He tells me that love is mutual, shows honour, is the best way to serve God. I must rejoice, be patient, pray for others, give to others, welcome strangers, bless those I see as threats and as enemies and never to curse them.

I am to rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. I am not to be a social or an intellectual snob.

I am to live in peace with all, and let God take care, in God’s own way, of those who do me wrong. I am to feed the hungry, give something to drink to those who thirst, I am to respond to evil with good.

What a different Church we would have today if these were our priorities when it comes to mission.

What a different world we would have today if these values shaped the political manifestos of every politician and party.

The story in our Old Testament reading (Exodus 3: 1-15) is a reminder that God’s love is expressed in just the same ways that Saint Paul describes the love that we should have and that reflects God’s love.

When Moses comes into the presence of God on Mount Horeb or Mount Sinai, long before God tells Moses his name, God tells him he sees the misery of the people, that he hears the cry of the oppressed (verses 7), that he knows their suffering (verse 7), that he wants to deliver them from slavery and to bring them to freedom, that he wants what is best for them (verse 8).

He emphasises that he has heard their cry (verse 9), and he wants them to be free.

In freedom, and only through their own choice, can they worship God freely, become free to be consumed in his love.

It is only then, after a long experience and a long dialogue, that God reveals God’s name, ‘I am who I am’ (verse 14), ‘I am’ (Ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν). God makes himself known in his promises of love, and then, only then, does he reveal his name. First of all, he says what he does, then he says who he is. And he is who he is, faithful for ever.

God’s love for us, like the bush that is blazing on the mountain, never burns out. It is a flame that is never quenched, that never burns up.

Later, back on this mountain, God is going to tell Moses who God is once again, ‘… merciful and gracious, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin …’ (Exodus 34: 6-7).

Those words are echoed in Saint Paul’s words in our Epistle reading.

In a lecture on that book by CS Lewis some years ago in Cambridge, the great Orthodox theologian Metropolitan Kallistos Ware spoke of the Holy Trinity as the model of mutual love, and the fountain and source of love. He said if God is love (John 4: 8), then God cannot be one person loving himself, and a circle of two persons would be closed and exclusive.

The Trinity shows us that love should not only be mutual, but that it should be shared. The doctrine of the Trinity is a way of saying that God’s eternal being is self-giving.

God is God, and we are truly human, because of our ability to relate to others, to love others. We are what we are only in relation to other persons. There is no true person unless there are two or three persons in communication with each other.

In other words, love is at the centre of our understanding what it means for God to be God, and what it means for us to be human. We love like this because God is like this.

If we keep it all to ourselves, it is not love. When we put love into action it becomes genuine. It rejoices and is patient, it looks out for the needs of others, it welcomes the stranger. It hopes, it prays, it rejoices with those who rejoice, and weeps with those who weep. It does not repay evil with evil, it lives in peace with all, it gives food and drink to those who are hungry and thirsty, without discrimination, and it overcomes evil with good.

And that is love that lasts far longer than the summer of love. That is love, like Moses experiences it, that is love that is never quenched, love that never burns out.

And so, may all we think, say and do be to the praise, honour and glory of God, + Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

The Burning Bush, an icon by Mikhail Damaskinos (ca 1585-1591) in the Museum of Christian Art in Iraklion, Crete (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2017)

Collect:

Almighty and everlasting God,
you are always more ready to hear than we to pray
and to give more than either we desire, or deserve:
Pour down upon us the abundance of your mercy,
forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid,
and giving us those good things
which we are not worthy to ask
save through the merits and mediation
of Jesus Christ your Son our Lord.

Post-Communion Prayer:

God of compassion,
in this eucharist we know again your forgiveness
and the healing power of your love.
Grant that we who are made whole in Christ
may bring that forgiveness and healing to this broken world,
in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.

(Revd Canon Professor) Patrick Comerford is Priest-in-Charge, the Rathkeale and Kilnaughtin Group of Parishes. This sermon was prepared for Sunday 3 September 2017.

Strolling along the Backs in Cambridge

My rooms on Staircase H in Sidney Sussex looked out onto Chapel Court (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

I was back in Cambridge once again this summer, staying in Sidney Sussex College for the annual summer school organised by the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies. This year’s theme was “Love,” and our lecturers looked at this topic in Scripture, the writings of the Early Fathers of the Church (Patristics), and from the monastic perspective.

This was my second year at Sidney Sussex, and I am amazed at the number of Irish friends who ask me about this being the place where Oliver Cromwell’s head is buried. Because last year marked the 350th anniversary of the death of Cromwell, there was some re-evaluation of his role in Irish history, but one old school friend, who lives only a few miles outside Cambridge, still told me he would never go into the chapel at Sidney because of those associations.

Of course, I am more that a little sceptical about the veracity and accuracy of the claims made for the provenance of what is supposed to be Cromwell’s head. But Sidney has some other interesting and more positive Irish connections.

After all, there is a tradition in Sidney – first advanced by Dorothy Sayers but taken up with enthusiasm by fellows and students alike – that this is the college where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sent the young Sherlock Holmes as an undergraduate. Historically, the former fellows and students of Sidney include John Bramhall, the restoration Archbishop of Armagh; John Sterne, the founder of the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland; John Garnett, who was Bishop of Ferns and Leighlin (1752-1758) before becoming Bishop of Clogher (1758-1782); and – more recently – Brian Lenihan, the Minister for Finance.

Monastic foundations

But Sidney’s Irish and Church connections date back even further. For, like most Cambridge colleges, Sidney is built on a monastic foundation, and this was once the site of Greyfriars – not the fictional school of Billy Bunter, but a large mediaeval Franciscan foundation in Cambridge. Among the great mediaeval philosophers and theologians who lived in Greyfriars was the Irish Franciscan, John Duns Scotus (1265-1308), who was known as “Doctor Subtilis” because of the subtle distinctions and nuances of his thinking.

The arguments continue about the Irish origins and birth of Duns Scotus. He and his Franciscan contemporaries are commemorated on a plaque in Cloister Court in Sidney Sussex.

This year, my rooms were on Staircase H in Chapel Court, looking out towards the day-to-day bustle of life on Sidney Street and onto the Chapel, with its curious bell turret. Like all Cambridge colleges, the chapel is at heart of the day-to-day life of Sidney.

During my time there, as I strolled around Cambridge, it was interesting to visit many of those college chapels, and to realise the extent to which monastic life and theological training shaped the development and the history of those colleges.

Although the summer school used the Chapel in Sidney twice a day during the week for Morning Prayer and Vespers, regular chapel life had come to an end for the summer holiday period. So, on my first weekend, I attended both Choral Evensong on Saturday and the Choral Eucharist on Sunday in the chapel of King’s College, the most majestic of all the college chapels in Cambridge.

Fame and antiquity

King’s Chapel is famous worldwide – thanks to its choir and the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on Christmas Eve each year. Tourists queue on end to gain entry to King’s Chapel, and we had to queue with them to get on both occasions. But the choir was still resident, the music was glorious, and on Sunday morning we were treated to Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G Minor, which is one of his most English compositions, dating from 1921.

The preacher on the Sunday morning was the Revd Dr Stephen Hampton, the Dean of Peterhouse, the oldest college in Cambridge. Cambridge University was founded in 1209 and this year is celebrating its 800th anniversary. But the colleges are little younger, and Peterhouse was founded in 1284 by Bishop Hugh de Balsham of Ely.

Peterhouse may have taken its name from the neighbouring, quaintly named Church of Saint Peter’s-without-Trumpington-Gate, where the scholars worshipped from the beginning. When the church was rebuilt in 1340, it was renamed Saint Mary the Less. But Peterhouse retained its name and the scholars continued to worship there until the college had its own chapel built in 1628 by Mathew Wren, uncle of the more famous Christopher Wren.

Despite the ravages of the Cromwellian era, the chapel still retains its East Window with its Crucifixion, based on Le Coup de Lance by Rubens.

The East Window in Peterhouse Chapel is based on Le Coup de Lance by Rubens (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Across Trumpington Street, Pembroke College has the oldest gatehouse in Cambridge. The college was founded in 1347 by the Countess of Pembroke, the widow of a direct descendant of Strongbow. In 1355, she obtained a Papal licence to build the college chapel. The chapel has since been turned into a library, and the present restoration chapel is the first completed work by Christopher Wren.

Time for the scientists

Further along the street, neighbouring Corpus Christi was the first Cambridge college to have a quadrangle or court, as they are called in Cambridge. The first students were charged with praying for the souls of the deceased members of the Cambridge civic guilds of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary, who founded the college initially for theology students. They used Saint Bene’t’s Church, with its Saxon tower, as their church until a college chapel was built in the 16th century.

Archbishop Parker, a 16th century master remembered in the carvings at the chapel door in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The 16th century Masters of Corpus Christi included Archbishop Matthew Parker, one of the primary architects of the 39 Articles, who saved many of the monastic manuscripts and books now in the Parker Library in the college, including King Alfred’s copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a Psalter that once belonged to Thomas à Becket, and a sixth century Gospel, believed to have been given to Saint Augustine in 597 and now used at the enthronement of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Archbishop Parker is commemorated in a carving on the doorway into the new college chapel.

The college properties include Botolph Court, which houses 30 students. It is said to be built on the site of a 17th century plague pit and slowly sinking into it. A more attractive site for tourists is the Cirpus Clock, which was unveiled on 19 September by the physicist Stephen Hawking. The clock is called the Chronophane – the “Time Eater” – but is known among the students of Corpus as the “Time Lord” and is only accurate once every five minutes. It was conceived, designed and paid for by Dr John Taylor, who donated it to his alma mater.

The Eagle ... where great discoveries are made over a pub lunch (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Corpus owns The Eagle, one of the best-known pubs in Cambridge with its old courtyard serving as a beer garden. Because the beer garden is overlooked by Corpus student accommodation, it must be cleared by 10:30 p.m. every night. When the Cavendish Laboratory was still at its old site nearby in Free School Lane, the Eagle was a popular place for lunch for the laboratory staff.

Here Francis Crick famously interrupted lunchtime chatter on 28 February 1953 to announce that he and James Watson had “discovered the secret of life” after they had come up with their proposal for the structure of DNA. The story is told in Watson’s book, The Double Helix, and is recalled in a plaque near the entrance to the Eagle.

Unique bridges

Corpus faces Saint Catharine’s, whose Master and three Fellows were originally to study nothing but “philosophy and sacred theology.” The college is named after Saint Catharine of Alexandria, and her symbol – the Catherine wheel on which she was martyred – can be seen as the college logo on the college gates.

Behind Saint Catharine’s and abutting King’s College, on Queens’ Lane is Queens’ College, which stands on the site of an old Carmelite friary. Here Erasmus lived while he taught Greek in Cambridge. The college retains its cloisters, and has some of the finest half-timbered late mediaeval and Tudor buildings in Cambridge.

Queens’ College has one of the few known moondials in the world (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Queens’ is also known for unique moondial – one of the few known moondials in the world – and for the Mathematical Bridge, which was first built in 1749. Legend had it that the Mathematical Bridge was built without using bolts or nails, but this was found to be untrue when the bridge was damaged by a storm and rebuilt to the original design in 1905.

The bridge links the old, mediaeval college buildings with Friars’ Court, which stirred controversy when it was built in the 1960s. It is the work of Sir Basil Spence, who also designed Coventry Cathedral, and was the first modern building on the Backs.

Further north along the Backs, past King’s College, is Clare College is the second oldest college in Cambridge. This was the college of Bishop Hugh Latimer, one of the martyrs of the English Reformation in 1555. Above the altar in Clare Chapel is The Annunciation (1763) by Giovanni Battista Cipriani, one of the founders of the Royal Academy.

Clare College Chapel with The Annunciation (1763) by Giovanni Battista Cipriani (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Clare College has the oldest bridge now crossing the River Cam. But perhaps the best known bridge over the River Cam is the so-called Bridge of Sighs at Saint John’s. Saint John’s, which dates from 1511, but which has a monastic link with the foundation of the oldest college, Peterhouse.

The Bridge of Sighs (1831), designed by Henry Hutchinson, links the older courts of Saint John’s with New Court, a masterpiece of Gothic Revival architecture. But, in fact, the bridge has little in common architecturally with the Bridge of Sighs in Venice beyond the fact that they are both covered.

Reminders of love

The Gate Tower of Saint John’s includes an image (right) of Saint John the Evangelist with a poison chalice, drawing the potion in the form of a serpent from the cup before he drank it.

Throughout the summer school, we were constantly reminded of Saint John’s words that God is love. As we climbed the stairs to the Old Library in Sidney Sussex for our closing dinner, I realised we were dining above the ante-chapel, where Cromwell’s head is supposed to be buried. But smiling down benignly on us was a portrait of a former fellow, Bishop John Garnett of Ferns and Clogher.

But then Sidney Sussex had Irish connections from the very beginning: Lady Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex, who gave her name to the college, was the second wife of Thomas Radclyffe, Viscount FitzWalter, who was Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1556 before succeeding his father as the 3rd Earl of Sussex in 1557. Today, the chaplain of Sidney Sussex is the Revd Dr Peter Waddell, is from Newcastle, Co Down. And so the Irish connections live on.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute. This essay was first published in the August 2009 edition of the Church Review (Diocese of Dublin and Glendalough).

Dance me to the end of love

The Bridge of Sighs at Saint John’s College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

My summer school in Cambridge ended around lunch time yesterday [Friday]. With an afternoon free, I thought it would be nice to spend a little time visiting some colleges I had only had a glimpse of before, and so I strolled off to see Saint John’s with its “Bridge of Sighs,” Clare with the oldest bridge of its kind on the Cam and its views of the river and the Backs, and Queens’, with its spectacular Mathematical Bridge.

The summer school, organised by the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, was on the theme of love and many of the speakers spoke of how God’s love for us and our love for God is a ladder or bridge across the gap between heaven and earth, between God and us.

I thought of that as I crossed each of these bridges, and those thoughts kept coming to the fore as I realised how almost every Cambridge college had been set up as part of a monastic or religious foundation, with the chapel at the heart of each college.

Saint John’s was founded by Lady Margaret Beaufort at the instigation of her confessor, Bishop John Fisher, who was later one of the Catholic martyrs of the English Reformation.

On the Front Gate is an image of Saint John the Evangelist, with his symbol of an eagle and holding the poison chalice from which he drew the potion in the form of a snake or serpent. The chapel was built by Gilbert Scott and has a choir that is almost equal to that of King’s in fame and reputation. The Bridge of Sighs, built in 1831, links Third Court at Saint John’s with New Court.

Punters under the bridge at Clare College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Clare College is the second oldest college in Cambridge. The chapel has an altar piece by Cipriani of the Annunciation and an octagonal antechapel. Clare also has the oldest bridge crossing the Cam and the first in classical style. From the bridge, there is a stunning view of the Gibbs Building and the Chapel at King’s College next door.

The Mathematical Bridge at Queens’College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Picturesque Queens’, with its mediaeval brickwork, Tudor half-timebering, cloisters and unique moondial, stands on the site of a former Carmelite friary. Erasmus lived here in 1510-1514 when he taught Greek in Cambridge.

The Mathematical Bridge, linking the older, mediaeval buildings with the very modern parts of Queens’, was first built in 1746. Traditionally it was supposed to have been built without nails. But this was found to be untrue when the bridge was rebuilt in 1905 … it always had iron screws or bolts at its joints.

Crossing back over the bridge again, I thought again once more of the image of God’s love as a bridge, and the theme of love that ran through our summer school all this week. Back in Dublin this afternoon, when rain put an end to watching cricket on the television, I was sitting listening to a recording of Leonard Cohen’s concert in London last year and started looking back at last year’s concert in Dublin and looking forward to this month’s concert in Dublin too.

I joked once again that at my funeral it would be nice to have my coffin taken out of the church to the sound of his Dance me to the end of love.

During the funeral itself, the hymns I would like include Abide with me, Lead kindly light, Thine be the glory and How shall I sing that majesty. But Leonard Cohen’s poems and songs are deeply spiritual with strong Biblical images. As I listened, I thought of the dramatic impact of David Frost’s reading from the Song of Songs earlier this week. If you read Dance me to the end of love as a prayer or a psalm, then it becomes a song of love, describing the love God has for us and the love we hope God receives from us.

Dance Me To The End Of Love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We’re both of us beneath our love, we’re both of us above
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now,
though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love.

‘God is love and the true man is love’

Punting on the River Cam or the Backs, behind Clare College and King’s College Chapel, on a lazy summer afternoon in Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Each year, participants in the summer school of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies go to Tolleshunt Knights in Essex to spend a day at the nearby Stavropegic Monastery of Saint John the Baptist. On Wednesday [8 July 2009], we spent a day in the monastery, attending the liturgy in the monastery church, and listening to the spiritual wisdom of Sister Magdalen.

This morning, the monastery came to the Cambridge, when one of the best-known monks at Saint John’s, Archimandrite Zacharias (Zacharou), spoke at the closing session of the summer school in Sidney Sussex College

Father Zacharias he is a senior member of the community at the Monastery of Saint John the Baptist, where he is much-loved as a spiritual director. He was born in Cyprus, earned his doctorate in Thessaloniki, and for 27 years worked closely with Father Sophrony until his death.

He is the author of Christ, Our Way and Our Life, The Enlargement of the Heart and of The Hidden Man of the Heart (2007). His latest book is a series of presentations on the place of the heart in the spiritual life of the Christian, with special reference to the writings of those two contemporary spiritual giants who have guided his life, Saint Silouan the Athonite (1866-1938) and his disciple and spiritual son, Elder Sophrony of Essex (1896-1993).

This morning, Father Zacharias spoke to us in two sessions on the topic “God is Love and the True Man is Love.” Throughout the week, we were told to expect that these were going to be meditations rather than lectures. But his heart-touching, deeply spiritual reflections on God’s self-less, absolute love were a fitting conclusion to a summer school that had “Love” as its theme, reminding us precisely why this is an important focus in theology and spirituality.

Throughout his talks, Father Zacharias showed how deeply he had been influenced and inspired by the teachings of Saint Silouan and Elder Sophrony.

Father Zacharias reminded us that our God is a revealed God, a Trinitarian God, and a God of love. We are made also in the image of this God and each of us is truly a person when we have love.

This love of God produces a vision of the greatness and the beauty of the love of God, while on the other hand it makes us conscious of our miserable state. The love of God leads to the state of prayer, which receives the love of God. It is God’s will that all should be saved. And so, the person of love becomes an intercessor for the whole world.

Love is the most excellent of all the gifts that God gives us, and invites us into eternal life in the living God. He did not fail to wrestle with the topic of holy “self-hatred,” which he said is necessary for regeneration and for restoring us to the image of God, who is holy and who is love. God is Love, so the truly human person is Love.

Drawing on Saint Gregory of Palamas, he said we can see the whole world in God, and feel love for the whole world in our deep heart, for there is an ontological unity of all people. It is for the praying Christian to pray lovingly for all of humanity, to live the tragedy of the whole human race, to have compassion and prayer for the whole human race and to suffer with all those who suffer.

Praying for the whole of humanity becomes participation in the redeeming work of Christ. Prayer for the whole world often meets with resistance and hatred. But in their prayer, the saints are pleasing to God and God’s blessing descends on the whole world, so that their prayer sustains the world and is a participation in a cosmic event.

We should not be dejected by the state of the world, but participate in its suffering by praying for the whole world.

Later we had a very engaging discussion on suffering and pain in the world, theodicy, and the potential for salvation of all.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute

A Puritan foundation with a High Church chapel

The interior of the chapel in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, with The Holy Family, by the Venetian painter Giovanni Pittoni, above the altar

Patrick Comerford

Throughout this week, the participants in the Summer School of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies have enjoyed the daily hospitality of the chapel at Sidney Sussex, and the convenient location of the college in the centre of Cambridge.

Sidney Sussex College is also conveniently opposite Sainsbury’s. Tourists are often confused by the fact that the college is often known simply as Sidney or even – because of its location – as Sidney Sainsbury’s. Every morning, I have been buying The Irish Times on the day of publication in Sainsbury’s across the street from Sidney Sussex on Sidney Street.

As a small college, Sidney Sussex and its grounds have changed little since it was founded in 1596, despite extensive reworking of the buildings in the 1800s. With about 350 undergraduates and 200 graduate students, this is still a small college, even by Cambridge standards. Indeed, this was rarely a wealthy college –some say that indeed this was a distinctly impoverished college until about 50 years ago.

Sidney performs mid-table when it comes to academia and sporting achievements. The unofficial Tompkins Table of undergraduate performance ranks Sidney at 14 out of 29 colleges, although traditionally Sidney’s students have excelled at history, law and engineering. However, a table like this fails to show that Sidney has strong women’s sport teams, and that the college team is always placed highly in darts and pool each year.

Sidney students – undergraduates and graduates alike – wonder whether there is a connection between these achievements and their bar. I wonder. The bar is a point of pride for them as it is the only student-run bar in Cambridge … and the cheapest. Since the students are only present during term-time, the bar has an unusual tradition of holding a “drink-the-bar-dry” evening every term on the last day of the licence. Drinks start out at the usual prices, but the prices decrease in inverse proportion to the remaining supply. And it is said all remaining drinks are free for the last hour of the licence.

Mind you, I have yet to experience this to confirm it. For the last few evenings, I have adjourned with friends to the Mitre in Bridge Street or the Eagle, across the street from Saint Bene’t’s in Benet Street. The Eagle dates back to 1625, and is still legally the property of Corpus Christi, whose Masters have included Archbishop Matthew Parker.

Apart from darts, pool and bars, Sidney Sussex students are proud to point out that they have always performed well on television in University Challenge, with winning teams in 1971, 1978 and 1979. Indeed, the 1978 team went on to win the “Champion of Champions” reunion competition in 2002.

Sidney alumni

This is all hard to credit to a college that was supposed to be affirmedly Puritan from its inception. When Sidney Sussex was founded in 1596 by Lady Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex, this was supposed to be a firmly Puritan foundation. No wonder Oliver Cromwell was among the first students here and that thee college had an important role during the English Civil War – even if I am sceptical about the claims that Cromwell’s head is buried beneath the floor of the antechapel.

Better, perhaps, to think that, apart from Oliver Cromwell, the college's most famous alumni include Sherlock Holmes, well, yes, and Carol Vorderman, five Nobel Prize winners – which is the fourth highest figure for a Cambridge college – or even those Sidney graduates who were integral in breaking the Enigma Code at Bletchley Park.

But Sidney Sussex is older than Carol Vorderman – indeed the college might even claim to be older than Lady Frances Sidney Sussex, who has been smiling down on me benignly morning, noon and night at breakfast, lunch and dinner in the Hall all this week.

The plaque in Cloister Court remembering the Franciscans, including Duns Scotus, who lived on the site of Sidney Sussex College (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Although Sidney Sussex was founded in 1596, this college stands on an older, mediaeval site. The Grey Friars, or Franciscans, including Duns Scotus (1266-1308), one of the most important theologians and philosophers of the High Middle Ages, lived here for almost 300 years at their foundation in Bridge Street – now Sidney Street. Arguments continue over whether Duns Scotus was born in Duns in Berwickshire or in Ireland.

Greyfriars was a common name for Franciscan houses, just as Blackfriars was the name of Dominican houses. From the mid-14th century, Greyfriars in Cambridge included a church and cemetery on the site of the present Cloister Court – last year, my room there was on Staircase K. But the cloister itself was on the site of the present Hall Court, and it is said Sidney’s wine cellars below Hall Court are mediaeval structures from this lost monastic world. Greyfriars also had a refectory and several other buildings.

Cloister Court in Sidney Sussex College … the site of the Greyfriars’ church and cemetery (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Over half a century ago, excavations in 1958 unearthed traces of a huge complex of buildings, a lay graveyard complete with skeletons that have since been reburied, bucket-loads of superb shattered stained glass, and a massive Saxon jar.

Until the reformation, Greyfriars’ Church was used regularly for Cambridge University ceremonies. But in 1538, at the dissolution of the monasteries, the Franciscans were forced to leave this site, Henry VIII gave the freehold of the site to his new foundation, Trinity College, and most of the Greyfriars’ buildings were demolished.

It is said that after the dissolution Trinity removed much of the stone from Greyfriars to build its own chapel, and that 3,000 cartloads were removed in 1556 alone. Even the conduit from Greyfriars was redirected and it still supplies the fountain in Trinity Great Court.

A Puritan foundation?

A generation or two later, the foundation of Sidney Sussex was supposedly as a Puritan, Protestant seminary. But is it true to say that Sidney was ever really a Puritan college?

When visitors are shown around Sidney Sussex and the college chapel, guides relish in pointing out that Anglican churches are traditionally oriented on an East-West axis, but that the chapel here is oriented on an a South-North axis in some sort of Puritan protest. But is this so?

Perhaps it was due to the exigencies of the available site after a bruising battle with the Masters and Fellows of Trinity for possession of the former Greyfriars’ site. Perhaps nothing theological was intended at all. After all, the chapel at Emmanuel College, which is only a short walk away, had a similar orientation until Christopher Wren was invited to design a new chapel in 1667.

Shortly after the death of Lady Sidney Sussex, the Harrington and Montagu families became closely identified with the life of the college. Both families were among the rising powers in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England. One of the first aristocratic students here was the glamorous and talented Sir John Harrington, a son of one of the executors of Lady Sidney Sussex and the closest friend of Prince Henry. Sidney’s first master, James Montagu, was James I’s editor and one of the translators of the Authorised Bible (1611).

Men like this drew around them a remarkable body of fellows and students at Sidney in the decades preceding the English Civil War. Among the Puritans was Thomas Gataker, a classical scholar and Puritan theologian who became embroiled in a debate about predestination and gambling. William Bradshaw was the author of the important history English Puritanism (1605). Jeremiah Whitaker, a friend of Cromwell, moderated at the Westminster Assembly of Divines in 1643. Thomas Adams, the “prose Shakespeare of puritan theology,” was a major influence on John Bunyan. And there were the two related Daniel Dykes – one a puritan divine who refused to wear a surplice, the other a Baptist minister who was one Cromwell’s chaplains.

On the other hand, royalists prospered at Sidney too. Sir Thomas Adams founded an Arabic professorship at Cambridge. Walter Montagu, the author of The Shepherd’s Paradise, an eight-hour masque for Queen Henrietta Maria in the 1630s, was arrested as a spy in France and was sent to the Bastille by Richelieu. He converted to Roman Catholicism, and ended his days as an abbé in France. John Pocklington was a High Churchman and a Hebrew scholar whose Sunday No Sabbath was burned in 1635.

Sidney sent £100 to help Charles I during the English Civil War. The Caroline Restoration seems to have been the beginning of a deep and troubling change in at Sidney, which suffered under the stigma of its Cromwellian connections. Yet John Bramhall (1594-1663), who matriculated at Sidney, became the restoration Archbishop of Armagh in 1663, and is the subject of a major essay by TS Eliot. A little later, the celebrated Bishop of Winchester, Seth Ward (1617-1689), was at Sidney, as was John Sterne (1624-1669), the first president of the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland.

Ward was the restoration Bishop of Exeter and then of Salisbury. While Ward was at Salisbury, James II imposed Joshua Bassett, a Roman Catholic, was imposed on Sidney as Master. But Bassett fled overnight with the arrival of William of Orange.

Richard Reynolds (1674-1743), the early 18th century Bishop of Lincoln, was also at Sidney. But the most important figure at Sidney in the early 18th century may have the theologian and moral philosopher William Wollaston. His Religion of Nature Delineated (1724) achieved huge sales and led to his being chosen as one of five British “worthies” – along with Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle – who were sculpted by Rysbrack for Queen Caroline’s Hermitage at Kew. John Garnett, a Fellow of Sidney Sussex, became Bishop of Clogher (1758-1782), and his portrait still hangs on the stairs up to the Old Library, where we had our dinner last night, above the ante-chapel and looking out onto Chapel Court.

A new chapel

It is probably true that the one surviving building from the old Greyfriars was the refectory and kitchens, and that these were converted into the college chapel. However, the present chapel in Sidney Sussex dates from 1780, when the last buildings of Grey Friars on the site were torn down.

The new chapel was re-designed by James Essex in the 1770s. It appears he had tough taskmasters, as he produced four plans for redesigning the chapel before he was allowed to proceed with his work. In the end, it was an impressive makeover of a plain if evocative 17th century religious space, meeting the classical tastes of the day.

One of the most striking features on entering the chapel is the remarkable Catholic altar-piece, The Holy Family, by the Venetian painter Giovanni Pittoni, which was bought in 1783 for 20 guineas. This Catholic work of art and its presentation would have been unthinkable in previous generations at Sidney Sussex … or would it?

By the early 19th century, Sidney was a very small college in terms of undergraduate admissions. And so it must have been a surprise for many Victorians period that was in effect an Anglican seminary. The “massive” Victorian, Robert Machray, became Canada’s first Anglican archbishop. The controversial Anglo-Catholic, Thomas Pelham Dale (1821-1892), was jailed in 1880 for his ritualism. Later, John Wale Hicks, who became Bishop of Bloemfontein, was typical of his time in publishing books on both doctrine and inorganic chemistry.

Despite this theological history, the reforms at Cambridge from 1850s on, despite being resisted fiercely by the Master of Sidney, Robert Phelps, changed Sidney’s intellectual course forever. From the largely theological and mathematical college it had been for its the first two centuries or so, it became a power-house in the rapidly expanding medical, natural, physical and chemical sciences, due principally to the inspiration of Clough Williams Ellis.

The laboratories that once stood along the Sidney Street wall beyond A Staircase, now a bicycle shed, were among the first in Cambridge. There, a string of important experiments were carried out by the metallurgist FH Neville. Neville’s portrait hangs at the top of the stairs leading to the Old Library. Following his conversion in 1904, Neville became the first-ever Roman Catholic fellow at Sidney Sussex ... the Jacobite master, Joshua Bassett, might have been pleased.

Meanwhile, the chapel, which had been redesigned by James Essex, was proving to be inadequate in size. It only extended to half its present length. However, between 1911 and 1923, TH Lyons completed the present proportions of the chapel, along with its fine neo-baroque interior.

His work suited the High Church complexion that had become part of the life of Sidney by then. He altered and lengthened the chapel, and gave it elaborate oak-panelled walls, a variegated marble floor and Sidney’s distinctive bell turret. The side chapel has the reserved sacrament.

The distinctive bell turret seen from my room in Sidney Sussex ... it was part of the alterations to the chapel a century ago by TH Lyons (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

In transforming the sanctuary of Cromwell’s college into an Anglo-Catholic chapel, the Edwardian high churchmen inscribed above Pittoni’s Catholic Venetian altar-piece, The Holy Family, in large, capital, gilt letters the Latin phrase “Gvstando Vivimvs Deo.” Those words, “gustando vivimus deo,” “by tasting we live in God,” are taken from the seventh century Latin hymn for Easter Vespers, The Lamb’s high banquet we await.

Some more recent additions to the chapel include the panels of stained glass fragments that have been inserted into the antechapel window. These fragments were unearthed during the archaeological investigations about half a century ago in 1958 and they appear to come from the mediaeval windows of the former Franciscan church.

And so, in some unexpected way, the Franciscans have found a new place in the daily worship life in the chapel of Sidney Sussex College, and not merely in the presence this week of this former pupil of the Franciscans at Gormanston.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, Dublin.

Approach Scripture with love – and you will see its beauty

A view of my room and Staircase H through the arch at the Porter’s Lodge in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Love is a prerequisite for reading Scripture according to the Syriac Fathers as they were introduced to us this morning by Professor Sebastian Brock, when he spoke at the summer school of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, this morning [Thursday 9 July 2009].

The foremost and most influential academic in the field of Syriac language, Dr Brock, is a former Reader in Syriac Studies at the Oriental Institute in the University of Oxford and is currently a Professorial Fellow at Wolfson College.

Dr Brock studied at Cambridge and completed his DPhil at Oxford. With scholars like Professor David Frost, he worked on the Liturgical Psalter, which has been used in the Church of Ireland, the Church of England and other churches throughout the Anglican Communion. He is widely published and his books include The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian and The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life.

His paper this morning drew on a Christian tradition that is in danger of being neglected or forgotten by the rest of the Church and the rest of the world. The Syriac tradition is the tradition of many Middle Eastern Christians, including those of Iraq, where half the Christian population has been driven out and is now living in miserable conditions in Syria, Jordan and other neighbouring countries.

Dr Brock described how the Syriac fathers had a tradition of producing sermons in verse, many of them very beautiful poems, and he drew delightfully from sermons and poems by three particular writers – Saint Ephrem, Jacob of Serugh and Isaac the Syrian.

Saint Ephrem lived before the great divisions in Christianity and so is part of the shared tradition of all the churches. Jacob lived at the time of the Chalcedonian divisions but is also regarded as a saint in the Maronite tradition, and so bridges the divide between Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian traditions. Isaac is part of the post-Chalcedonian Syriac tradition, but has been translated in Greek, Latin, Slavonic and other languages, so that he both speaks to monastic life today in a very modern way and speaks to all Christian traditions.

Saint Ephrem (306-373) wrote a wide variety of hymns, poems and sermons in verse, as well as prose Biblical exegesis. His writings remained popular for centuries after his death, and he has been called the most significant of all of the fathers of the Syriac tradition.

Saint Ephrem spoke of the divine initiative requiring a human response. There is a chasm between the creator and the created, and only the creator can cross this. If God had not initiated this, we would not have any knowledge about God at all. The first step is taken by God.

A common metaphor in the Syriac tradition is that of taking off one’s clothes and putting on one’s clothes. God is described by Ephrem as putting on words, allowing himself to be described in human terms and descending to our human level.

Humanity is endowed with free will, so God’s self-revelation in not imposed on human beings but is a matter of choice. Yet God remains hidden, and the response of faith is needed to see God in nature and in Scripture. They are symbols pointing to the hidden divine nature, which can only be seen through faith.

Saint Ephrem says the Bible is not to be read literally, and he warns that literal readings misrepresent God’s majesty and are ungrateful. Metaphors should not be taken literally:

“The Scriptures are laid out like a mirror
and the person whose eye is luminous
sees therein the image of Divine Reality.” – Hymns on Faith 67: 8

Ephrem saw the proper balance between truth and love:

“Truth and love are wings which cannot be separated,
for Truth without Love is not able to fly.
So too, Love without Truth is unable to soar up
for their yoke is one of harmony.” – Hymns on Faith 32: 3

In the Syriac tradition, Jacob of Serugh (451-521), “who lived in a backwards part of Syria,” is only second in stature to Ephrem the Syrian – while Ephrem is known as the “Harp of the Spirit,” Jacob is the “Flute of the Spirit.” His prodigious corpus includes more than 700 verse homilies, although so far only 225 of these have been edited and published.

For Jacob of Serugh, love is one of the prerequisites for reading Scripture: love:

“Approach Scripture with love – and you will see its beauty,
for if you do not approach it with love, it will not allow you to see its face.
If you read it with love, you will not get any profit,
for love is the gate through which a person enters into its true understanding.” – Homily 117.

Isaac the Syrian, or Isaac of Nineveh, was a seventh century bishop and theologian who is remembered today for his 91 surviving homilies on the inner life. Like Jacob of Serugh, Isaac the Syrian describes the Scriptures as an ocean:

“The readings of Scripture is manifestly the fountainhead that gives birth to prayer – and by these two things [reading and prayer] we are transported in the direction of the love of God whose sweetness is poured out continually in our hearts like honey or a honeycomb, and our souls exult at the taste which the hidden mystery of prayer and the reading of Scripture pour into our hearts.”

This afternoon, Dr Brock spoke about “Christ, ‘the Bridegroom of our souls,’ in the Syriac tradition.’

In the Gospels, Christ speaks of himself as the bridegroom, as in the parable of the wise and foolish virgins in Matthew 25, or in John 3: 29, where Christ is implicitly the Bridegroom. This theme is taken up in Syriac liturgy, including festal and baptismal hymns and the Lenten Troidion for Monday of Holy Week:

“You are the Bridegroom of our souls,
and in You alone do we take delight.
Catch us with the fishing net of Your beauty,
capture us with the sweetness of Your love.” – Fenqitho (Festal Hymnary)

The liturgical texts of all the Syriac Churches include the references o the “Bridal Chambers of Light” or the “Bridal Chambers of Joys” as a regular substitute for the Kingdom of Heaven.

Once again, Dr Brock drew on the writings of the Syriac fathers, including Saint Ephrem and Jacob of Serugh. He quoted from Saint Ephrem who in one of his hymns referred to Christ in these verses:

“The soul is Your bride, the body Your bridal chamber,
Your guests are the senses and the thoughts;
and if a single body is a wedding feast for You,
how great is Your banquet for the whole Church!” – Hymns of Faith 14: 5

Staircase H in Chapel Court, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

In the morning, Dr Marcus Plested of IOCS spoke on “‘Wounded by Love’: Insights from Scripture and the Fathers,” looking at how three particular Patristic writers, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius, treated the Song of Songs.

To end the evening, Father Alexander Tefft offered three observations on the conference theme of Love. Love is relational, love is in its essence impenetrable, and love inspires in us a sense of wonder and awe.

This evening we are invited to dinner in the Old Library at Sidney Sussex, and the summer school comes to an end tomorrow.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute.

Who was Lady Sidney Sussex?

Frances Sidney, Countess of Sussex ... her portrait hangs in the Hall of Sidney Sussex College, to which she gave her name

Patrick Comerford

Each day during the IOCS summer school at Sidney Sussex we have worshipped in the beautiful college chapel, and three times a day we have been well-fed in the Hall, sitting beneath the portraits of Oliver Cromwell, past Masters of the college, and Lady Sidney Sussex, the founder of the college who gave her name to Sidney Sussex.

But who was Lady Sidney Sussex? Who was the woman with the unusual name that is still recalled over 500 years after her death? How did she give her name to the college that stands on the corner of Sidney Street and Sussex Street?

Frances Radclyffe, Countess of Sussex (1531-1589), was born Frances Sidney, the daughter of Sir William Sidney of Penshurst Place, Kent, and his wife, the former Anne Packenham. Her father was a prominent courtier during the reign of King Henry VIII and Lord Chamberlain to King Edward VI. She was a sister of Sir Henry Sidney, and the aunt of the famous poet Sir Philip Sidney and of the 1st Earl of Leicester.

She was a Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth I in 1555 when she married – as his second wife – Thomas Radclyffe, Viscount FitzWalter, a senior courtier and soldier. He was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1556 and who succeeded his father as the 3rd Earl of Sussex in 1557.

At Elizabeth’s court, she was an adviser and patron of literature and music. In later life she lived at Bermondsey near the royal palace at Greenwich, and at the magnificent New Hall at Boreham, Essex. At Boreham, her neighbours were the Mildmay family who founded Emmanuel College, a Protestant foundation in Cambridge.

Frances and Thomas Sussex had no children, and so in her will, Lady Sussex left the then small fortune of £5,000, as well as with some plate, to establish a new college at Cambridge “to be called the Lady Frances Sidney Sussex College.”

Lady Frances’s will was written just after the Armada, five years after her husband’s death. He had been a loyal Catholic under Queen Mary and was a fierce rival of Leicester and his protégé, Lady Frances’s nephew, Sir Philip Sidney.

Why did she leave this money to found a college in Cambridge? Was it her own idea, or was she prompted to do so by her theological mentor, the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, and his circle?

Archbishop Whitgift had been Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in Cambridge, and had successively been master of Pembroke and Trinity. As a moderate Calvinist, he was a confirmed enemy of radical Puritanism, and so wanted a serious transformation of the training of English priests. Sidney Sussex College would have been an ideal opportunity to support this as an “advance guard” in the creation of the new nation.

In the fraught political atmosphere of the 1580s, Lady Frances believed others were “complotting” her ruin. A libellous pamphlet by Arthur Hall – a notorious rogue MP who tried to woo her – was burned by her nephews the Harrington family in 1588. Was it because of these accusations and plots that she adopted her motto, Dieu me garde de calomnie, which became the college motto? Was it these libels that moved her to ensure she would be remembered in grand physical monuments? Did she plan her funeral monument at Westminster Abbey and a second “goodly and godly” one at Cambridge to help repair her reputation? And what exactly were the accusations against her?

Lady Frances died in 1589 and her main executors, supervised by Archbishop Whitgift, were Sir John Harrington, who was guardian of the doomed Princess Elizabeth, and the lawyer Henry Grey, Earl of Kent. Without these men, Sidney Sussex would never have been founded.

Lady Sidney Sussex wanted her new college to be a Puritan foundation, “some good and godlie moniment for the mainteynance of good learninge.”

It would have bee easier for the executors to give her money to Clare, as the will allowed. Their plans also faced stiff opposition from the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, which had been founded by Henry VIII, who gave Trinity the freehold to the site, which was once Grey Friars’ House.

So why did these men persist despite the difficulties they faced between the reading of the will in 1589 and Saint Valentine’s Day 1596, when the deed was signed?

Eventually, Queen Elizabeth intervened on their behalf with the Master and Fellows of Trinity College and building work began in 1595, following the plans of the Cambridge architect, Ralph Symons. By 1598, Hall Court, including the Hall and the Master’s Lodge, was ready for occupation.

Today, Sidney has one of the few master’s lodges that is still in heart of the old college. In all, 200 students live on the main college site, and in term-time, meals are served for fellows and students three times a day in the Hall.

Around 1750, the original hall, which was an Elizabethan tie-beamed hall, was extensively remodelled on classical proportions by the Cambridge scholar and architect, James Burrough, who gave it its fine plaster ceiling, the musicians’ gallery. It is a pity, perhaps, that the surviving huge roof is now obscured to view.

The hall was repainted in 2002, and can now be appreciated as one of the finest rococo interiors of Cambridge. Three times a day, as we eat in the hall, the portrait of Lady Sidney Sussex looks down on us benignly.

The monastery as a school of universal love

Sister Magdalen ... spoke to us today about the Monastery as a school of universal love (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

Patrick Comerford

I spent most of today [Wednesday, 8 July 2009] in a Greek Orthodox monastery in south Essex. The Monastery of Saint John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights, near Maldon, is marking the fiftieth anniversary of its founding in 1959 by the saintly Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov.

The Patriarchal Stavropegic Monastery of Saint John the Baptist is a mixed monastic community for both men and women, has been directly under the Ecumenical Patriarchate since 1965. The Greek term σταυροπηγιον means the community is directly under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch, acknowledges him as its bishop and commemorates him in all its liturgical services.

The monastery is unusual, if not unique, in being a double monastery with a community of both nuns and monks. The community of about 15 to 20 nuns and a smaller number of monks lives a monastic life centred on the Jesus Prayer.

Elder Sophrony, a disciple of Saint Silouan, was a monk on Mount Athos and then lived in Paris before moving to England in 1959. he was anxious that the new community should focus on inner asceticism, and so the typikon of the monastery consists of the repetition of the Jesus Prayer for about four hours a day and the celebration of the Divine Liturgy three or four times a week (Sundays, Tuesdays, Saturdays, Feastdays, and sometimes on other weekdays).

The monastery is also known for its writers and publications, and two of its most celebrated writers are Elder Sophrony’s grand nephew, Hieromonk Nicholas Sakharov, author of I love therefore I am (2002) and Sister Magdalen, author of Children in the Church Today and Conversations with Children: Communicating our Faith (2001).

Mural icons on the side of the Church at the Monastery of Saint John the Baptist at Tolleshunt Knights (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2009)

The visit to the monastery today was arranged for the participants in this year’s summer school of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, which is taking place in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. After an early departure from Cambridge, we arrived at the monastery in time for this morning’s celebration of the Divine Liturgy, and after breakfast Sister Magdalen spoke to us appropriately on “The Monastery as a school of universal love.”

Sister Magdalen conceded that some people think of the monastery as place of “dried-up love” but she related the title of her paper to a quotation from the Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, who said: “The monastery is a school … what we have to learn is love.”

Sister Magdalen spoke of a universal love that is all-embracing, including God and all his creation. That is what it means to be a human person … to love as the love that is in the Holy Trinity.

She said the ascetic effort is not selfish or about purifying myself, but is directed towards love. Salvation involves accepting the divine gift of love in its fullness. Prayer is a mirror of the monk’s love of God.

There was an echo of the introduction to the “four loves” of CS Lewis by Metropolitan Kallistos yesterday when Sister Magdalen spoke of Father Sophrony’s understanding of four types of love: eros (ἔρως), which he said should be exclusively confined to a man and woman in marriage; affection (storge, στοργή), which cannot be universal; friendship (philia, φιλία), which cannot be shared with everyone; and agape (ἀγάπη), which is unlimited. He believed the other three forms of love needed a “good dose” of agape in order not to become destructively exclusive.

Relating love and prayer in the monastic life, she quoted Saint John Klimakos who said: “Love is greater than prayer, because prayer is a particular virtue, but love embraces all the virtues.”

The highest charismatic gift, she suggested, is to pray for the whole world as you pray for yourself. Monasteries are the lungs and engine room of the world. They are not places of escape – “if it were escape, we would be millions.”

In a humorous aside, she recalled how some children had asked why the nuns and monks of the monastery wore black. “I said it was to remind us to be sad because we are very happy.”

When we returned to the summer school in Cambridge, the Revd Professor Andrew Louth – who is Professor of Patristic and Byzantine Studies in the Department of Theology and Religions at Durham University – contrasted and compared two of the greatest Patristic writers on love, one from the West and one from the East, Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Maximos the Confessor.

Father Andrew has been in Durham since 1996, for most of the time as Professor of Patristic and Byzantine Studies. Before that, he taught Patristics and Byzantine and early mediaeval history in Oxford University and Goldsmiths College, London. His research interests are mainly in the history of theology in the Greek tradition, Romanian and Russian theology and mysticism. His most recent book is Greek East and Latin West: the Church AD 681-1071 (2007).

He is a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Orthodox chaplain to Durham University, editor of the journal Sobornost, and has described Archimandrite Sophrony as “one of the greatest startsi of the twentieth century.”

“Augustine doesn’t just talk to us about love, he makes us feel it,” he told us. And for Augustine, the point of the monastic life is about loving God. It was a fitting conclusion to the day.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute.