Diocesan News05 Oct 10

Institution Service in Kells Union of Parishes (Meath & Kildare)

Bishop Richard, Revd Ása Björk Ólafsdóttir, and her daughter, after her institution

By any standards one of the greatest poets in the English language over the past century was a Welsh clergyman -  an Anglican priest, abrupt, irascible and tetchy, one of those Rectors who apparently scared the living daylights out of his parishioners - R S Thomas..

But Thomas was also a man of immense pastoral insight and also indeed capable of sympathy of a strange kind, and his poetry, for all its jaggedness, comes from a deep if austere Christian faith forged through a furnance of pain and discomfort. In one of R S Thomas’ wonderful poems, he looks at the cross and the way in which we of the Church today have tamed and domesticated it -  a Tree

at whose feet
we must fall to be set again
on its branches on some April day
of the heart.

And so, in trying to relate what this eccentric Welsh Rector may have to say to the Icelandic Rector of an Irish parish, we should be clear that R S Thomas speaks firmly and seriously to each one of us - not only to Ása Björk and the parishioners of Kells and Donaghpatrick in the specifics of the new ministry beginning tonight, but also to the generality of all Christian discipleship in the second decade of the twenty-first century. And so R S Thomas speaks of God’s need of us in a place of challenge and even of menace.

He needs us
as a conductor his choir
for a performance of an unending music.
What we may not
do is to have our horizon bare,
is to make our way
on through a desert white with the bones
of our dead faiths.

(I did warn you that Thomas  was rather grim..)
But what he is saying is, I believe, crucial to the future of the Church in every place. We are not to lurch on through the white bones of dead faith, trying to resurrect what we once were but are no longer. We must be honest about what has gone. We as the Church are not fashionable,  we are no longer seen as useful or required, and nor are we the object of admiration, and we should not behave as though a little tweak here or there in the way we do business will make everything right again – that is a desert of skeletons.

Nor should we believe that there is no horizon ahead of us, for hope or for opportunity. No, we will have to take a very different place in the landscape of Irish society (no longer as a respected if slightly archaic pillar of that society) but we must be ready always to speak to the world around us with confidence in God’s love, God’s justice and God’s beauty as revealed to us in Jesus Christ. If we as a Church, or indeed as a parish, cannot go forward with real and vibrant hope, we will disappear and rightly so.

Instead we are -  in R S Thomas’s metaphor (although of course not original to him) – to be  the music of God in a noisy, strident and inharmonious world, and this is an unending music – that which is not only of beauty but also speaks of the eternal and of the glory of God. This is something that people long to hear, not as an escape from reality, but as a transformation of reality.

Kells with its surrounding area is a place of ancient tradition and culture. Kells was, as we know, a diocese in its own right before it was subsumed into the diocese of Meath in the thirteenth century (although that does not, I’m afraid, make you a bishop, Ása). Kells has also the very ancient monastic culture exemplified by the great Gospel Book that bears its name, and it is surely a pleasant and not entirely fanciful thought that perhaps some of those Irish monks who travelled to Iceland bringing the Gospel of Christ may indeed have had links of some kind with the great monastic community of Kells. In that case, the traffic has not been entirely one-way, as tonight confirms!

Kells is a place with deep Christian roots, a holy place of deep-rooted Christian culture. Ása Björk now brings a new and different Christian culture to Kells, and this is something exciting and innovative for us all. Christianity everywhere and in every context needs constant refreshment and renewal, needing to experience the riches of other Christian traditions and emphases in a globalised world, and this is one of the great gifts of the Porvoo relationship between the Anglican Communion, and other northern European churches which, unlike Anglicanism, are within the Lutheran tradition. We need to learn from one another and to grow together in the Gospel, and so to grow in Christ. But Ása Björk not only represents a different Christian culture, she is also -  in a different sense -  a person of culture with immense interests and talents in music, in dance and in the visual arts. I believe that she has great gifts to bring to us and to share with us, gifts that will enrich not only the life of this parish and its wider community but also the diocese as a whole, and this is something in which we must all truly rejoice tonight.

But Ása is very clear that her first priority is of a pastor. Her bishop in Iceland -  Bishop Karl Sigurbjörnsson whom I have known for a number of years, - in commending Ása Björk to the diocese, spoke warmly of her gifts as a pastor and of the love in which she is held by those among whom she has ministered in the years since her ordination. She will, I have no doubt, care for you all as a diligent and loving pastor. But you must also care for her, and also of course for Messiana. Indeed, when I have instituted her as your new Rector, I will ask of you that  you support and encourage her in her ministry.. and I mean it..  It is the clear duty of every baptised Christian to give encouragement and love to those who are called to care for them within the Body of Christ. I truly believe that you in the Kells Union of Parishes are very fortunate that Ása Björk accepted my invitation to become your Rector. Yes, some things may in some respects be different, and what precisely is wrong with that? This appointment is not a shallow “moving with the times”; it is an exciting enlargement of our vision as to what the mission of the Church means today and into the future -  it is to be a Christian adventure.

In welcoming Ása to the parish and the diocese, we offer to her our support, our prayers and our love. We ask of her that she will care for you as your Rector, and that she will use her God-given gifts to enrich the life of the parish and of the diocese.

Christians went from Ireland to Iceland in the early centuries of the Church to bring a new message -  the message of Christ - to the people of Iceland. Another Christian has now come from Iceland to Ireland with hope and enthusiasm for the Gospel.

I began with a Welsh poet of the late twentieth century. Let me conclude with an Irish poet of the earlier twentieth century. He was in fact a son of the Church of Ireland, even the son of a Church of Ireland bishop (although not, it has to be said, very Church of Ireland himself) - Louis MacNeice.

In the late 1930s MacNeice visited Iceland with another great poet, W H Auden, and he wrote a letter in verse back to some friends in England. He found himself reflecting on the first missionaries, those Irish monks who had gone to Iceland many centuries earlier..

And certain unknown
Old Irish hermits, holy skin and bone,
Camped on these crags in order to forget
Their blue-black cows in Kerry pastures wet.
Those Latin-chattering margin-illuminating monks
Fled here from home without kit-bags or trunks
To mortify their flesh – and we must mortify
Our blowsy intellects before we die,
Who feed our brains on back-chat and self-pity
And always need a noise,

And so you and I need -  in our time and place -  to listen, not the incessant and unrelenting noise of fear, despair and anger, but rather to hear the unending music of the eternal God of beauty, of hope  and of love.  Your calling, Ása Björk, is to help us listen with new ears to that sound of God’s music in our midst.