Tout est grâce

The Very Revd Dr John O'Connor OP
The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity

10.30am

Choral Eucharist

Isaiah 9.1-4     1 Corinthians 1.10-18     Matthew 4.12-23

This summer, I spent a pleasant afternoon enjoying local wines and visiting what are known as ‘shared churches’ in villages outside Strasbourg. I admit that I was surprised at the existence of these churches shared between Catholic and Protestant congregations well before the ecumenical thaw of the 1960’s and the Second Vatican Council.

Such pre-Vatican II practices are in sharp contrast with my grandmother sneaking into a Protestant Church - as Anglican churches in Ireland were known – whilst she was on holiday in the 1960’s. She dared to sneak into a Protestant church only in a place where no one knew her. Goodness knows what extraordinary (even shocking!) things she expected to find inside. But, unsurprisingly, she left a little disappointed. It was all very sober and restrained. As for her motivation for sneaking into the Protestant church, it was due not simply to natural curiosity. She had a shop and, truth be told, she respected and even preferred many of her non-Catholic customers to some of her own tribe.

When Douglas Hyde, President of Ireland, died in 1949, because he was a member of the Church of Ireland, his state funeral took place at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, the church of the great Dean Swift. But the Catholic government ministers, apart from one solitary rebel, remained outside unable to attend a non-Catholic service on pain of sin. But things in Alsace were not, however, as straightforward as the shared churches might cause one to think: the shared churches, I am told, were, alas, sometimes more a matter of keeping the peace than of ecumenical bonhomie.

I think too of someone whom I met as a child who married a vicar’s son many years before, and whose father refused to see her again because she married a Protestant, though he wrote her an occasional letter addressed to ‘Miss Cassidy’ (I disguise the name). He also refused – tragically - to see the children of the union, his grandchildren.

These things of which I speak were not thousands of years ago. They are within what is still living memory. It was a very mixed picture, this attempt to express fidelity to Christ: the imposition of rules and standards from on high and embedded in social expectation, and an unquenchable natural care, affection, and esteem that emerged simply through people mucking along together, conducting business with one another, giving a helping hand and being kind to one another. And, as I have indicated, there were also lives badly scarred.

In our time of mutual high regard, we risk taking for granted all that has been achieved in recent decades, even if, quite rightly, we wish things had gone a lot further than they have.

Indeed, one only has to read some of the statements of expectation from those heady, almost giddy, years following the Second Vatican Council, when people were no longer forbidden from taking part in shared worship but were positively encouraged to do so. This is the world into which I came. And, yes, every Christmas we would happily sing carols and hold hands together in the local Anglican church.

Yet, full union, a more complete unity among Christians, eludes us. We are in a curious space in which there are also numerous statements of common accord, a great deal of cooperation, a mutual learning from each other, and a wealth of ties of affection and care – not least families who navigate workable solutions because, say, one spouse is Catholic and the other Anglican (or perhaps not even Christian at all). The generosity of those who support loved ones every Sunday even though they are not themselves of a particular fold, and who enrich our worshipping communities as “honorary members” (as it were), should not be forgotten. We are all blessed bountifully by their presence.

I was told by a Dominican confrere, Timothy Radcliffe, that when the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie, met with Pope John Paul II, to discuss moves towards unity, the pope said to Archbishop Runcie, who was disappointed with the seeming lack of progress, that we need to be patient, that good foundations were being laid, since affective collegiality comes before effective collegiality.

So how are we to assess this situation of vast strides in mutual understanding and cooperation, of affective collegiality, and yet a full union between us still seems quite a bit off?

I hope that what I will say will be of more help than hindrance. I give you my evolving thoughts in genuine humility as someone who is still learning, to a congregation perhaps with far better insights than I have. Indeed, please feel free to put my thoughts to one side if they are not of help. Furthermore, there are many important points I am unable to even allude to in the compass of a sermon. My job is not, however, to resolve these complicated matters, but, rather, to reflect on ways of handling a situation in which there is much to be grateful for but that we all would like to be better than it is.

More personally, I come as someone who has a deep personal debt of gratitude to the Church of England. I have been enriched by the holiness I have found within it, by the insights of its thinkers (helped immensely by studying theology here in Oxford), and through personal friendship. I also have very positive experiences of how the Church of England exercises its role within the public life of this nation. My personal experience is of this role being exercised in an inclusive and gracious fashion, protecting a role for different Christian traditions and other religions too.

At this point, though, various thoughts flood into my mind. I am reminded of a wonderful essay by Rowan Williams, The Finality of Christ, in which Williams reflects on, among other things, St Paul’s anguish at the lack of success of the early mission of the followers of Christ to the Jewish population. A point Williams makes can, it seems to me, be largely transferred from the Pauline context, to the intra-Christian situation of today. This is what Williams says:

“Israel’s resistance to absorption by the Church is a refusal to grant that the meanings of Israel are contained and subsumed in the Christian institution, and that refusal is essential to the truthfulness and faithfulness of the Church [itself], tempted as it is to claim a distorted kind of finality...’

Within the workings of Divine Providence, the existence of those who refuse to be “absorbed” – not at all the best word for the ecumenical context, and anyway, it should ever be simply a matter of mere absorption - into unity with the other group is an invitation to humility tempted as we might all be to a distorted kind of finality (to use Williams’ phrase). God can teach us many things through our failures: God can extract some good. “God writes straight with crooked lines.” And all that. Yet, this same division remains a scandal, it undermines our witness to our world, it weakens our internal life.

In his 1995 encyclical, Ut unum sint, That They May be One, an encyclical focusing mainly on the Eastern Church, Pope John Paul used the image of the Church as breathing with two lungs, one Western lung and one Eastern lung, as it were. But, if this is the case, and taking this image further, we are in the West, it seems to me, all breathing on less than the one lung due to our internal Western divisions among Christians.

So often when Catholics lament the Reformation, the talk can be of numbers and public impact; but often much less is said about something a good deal more uncomfortable: that internal Catholic life was itself damaged and imbalanced to some degree by the divisions. Arguably a certain defensiveness crept in, responses to certain issues reflecting more a reaction against what others were doing than a freer examination of the issues themselves. Indeed, one interpretation of the Second Vatican Council is that it was partially about undoing the internal damage, the elements of internal lop-sidedness, that post-Reformation Catholicism arguably suffered from even if the full extent of that could not be openly acknowledged since it was an admission of vulnerability among us Catholics. As imperfect creatures, we too are tempted by a distorted kind of finality. So I come to you as a member of a wounded Church.

Now, at this point in the proceedings, with some of the positives and some of the negatives in view, it might seem that we are left with a choice – either to get terribly worked up by the continuing failure to achieve full union; or, to be not so overly bothered, given the depth of mutual esteem and affection that has been achieved. But, despite appearances of an either/or choice, perhaps we need both at the very same time. To quote TS Eliot: “Teach us to care and not to care; teach us to be still.”

Because we need both to care deeply and in a sense not to care too much, not because of any lack of appreciation of significance, nor even because of all that has been achieved, but, perhaps most of all, because ultimately these matters are in God’s hands. The grace of God has primacy. We must do our utmost, but “if the Lord does not build the house, in vain do its builders labour.”

At the very end of her life, the young Carmelite nun, now St Thérèse of Lisieux, at the age of 24 dying of tuberculosis, was too sick to receive Holy Communion. She is recorded as saying: “It’s good all the same; everything is a grace”: tout est grâce: all is grace, grace is everywhere.

We should care that full union, eludes us. Because of the primacy of grace, it should scream out at us that we have failed in what the grace of God calls us to. In a societal context in which Christianity is, let’s face it, on “the back foot”, that we cannot even come together straightforwardly as one is indeed disedifying. It undermines hugely what we have to say to our world and creates many other complications.

And, yet, also because of the primacy of grace, we can at the very same time in a certain sense not care too much. To quote the great Julian of Norwich: “All shall be well; and all shall be well; and all manner of things shall be well. “It’s good all the same; everything is a grace” - tout est grâce: all is grace, grace is everywhere, in our weakness grace abounds all the more.

I, for one, rejoice in the examples of inspiring holiness, devotion, witness, friendship, laughter, insight and conversation that I have received and continue to receive from Anglican sisters and brothers and others too. Frankly, I suspect that many of those of whom I am thinking have managed to be better friends to God than I have. And I feel truly honoured and moved to be with you this morning. Thank you.

I rejoice too that the Catholic martyrs and the Protestant martyrs are listed together on the wonderful plaque in this church, not as separated tribes, but in historical order. For they are, we pray, united now in love: Edmund Campion enjoying a celestial G&T with Cranmer and Ridley! They now enjoy that full and total communion that lasts eternally and to which we with our faltering and steadfast steps wend our winding way.

In this week of prayer for Christian Unity we pray: Thank you, Lord, for your blessings thus far, but please keep them coming. We are still – all of us - very much in need of them. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done. On earth as it is in heaven. For thine be the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, forever and ever.  Amen.