FOUNDATION DAY MASS 2024
This perpetual conversation, in which the past speaks to the present to create the future, is fundamental……..
Fundamental. “Fundamental to what?” you might ask.
I think it is fundamental to the operation of tradition and neatly expressed in that little piece of signage from a museum in Florence.
Tradition is much more than the handing on of something by one generation to another like a kind of heirloom.
Tradition is the perpetual conversation in which the past speaks to the present to create the future.
In this Church of the Resurrection, where the recitation of psalmody is natural to us, today we offer one psalm for the Saints who before us have found their reward.
Many brethren of the Community and students of the College who have gone before us, will be no more than names on a roll, …. souls who are prayed for in turn…but each was an earthly character who worked on the texture and fabric of their life – a weave of vocation and temptation, capacity and frailty.
Some of you will have known, among them, saints who have prayed their prayers into the very walls of this place such that they could almost sing out the psalms in our absence.
Tonight we remember them gladly for the heritage they have left us…..for the whole bag-full of experiences and bequests that belong to the treasure-chest of Mirfield’s Tradition, Mirfield’s collection of things, ancient and modern, each of which may be drawn into dialogue with the present to help envision a future.
There’s a whole library of wisdom, some of which was penned by Charles Gore, Walter Frere, Raymond Raynes, Trevor Huddleston, Harry Williams, and Benedict Green (to name a few) – but all that is set amidst the reading of other volumes which has filtered into teaching, preaching and spiritual direction of countless students, who like these stones became holy as they became infused.
There’s an archive of experience recorded in Naught for Your Comfort, Alan Wilkinson’s Centenary History and other works.
The ventures of CR, at home and abroad, ‘successes’ and ‘failures,’ as well as the publications – mean that the tradition has leaked, seeped out and sometimes gushed out into South Africa, Zimbabwe, Leeds University, the Royal Foundation of St Katherine, Coddrington College, Covent Garden, countless Parish Missions and numerous Holy Weeks.
The memories, the results of many ventures are still there to be drawn into conversation with the present to generate a future.
There is memory; there is text; there are stories and legacies that, between them, are the Mirfield tradition ready to be drawn into conversation with the here and now of our own lives and so to help generate our futures.
Tradition is not a slave of the past but the dialogue that enables or even forces it to give to the future.
It is the mechanism that allows the learning, experience and wisdom of every age to make itself known in speaking to the present……to utter warnings, to whisper encouragements or perhaps to refine developments.
It is what prevents us becoming prisoners of our own time and its dominant thought…
We are set free by the authority of voices with another experience.
Tradition is the mechanism that allows the scriptures to speak to us today as they have spoken the saints who before us have found their reward.
The scriptures – as a body or ‘canon’ of texts, have been given the right to address every follower of Jesus through the ages….
They cannot demand obedience to literal interpretation but they do demand a hearing, a right of audience.
Early witnesses to the works of God wish to speak to the world today as they have conversed with every age since Simon and Jude.
Tonight, St Paul speaks of us being citizens with the saints and built into a living Temple, a dwelling for God.
If we are such a dwelling, we are built on the foundation of the Apostles and the prophets with Jesus himself as the cornerstone.
For all the difference of our experience in a changing world, it is our participation in tradition, listening to the saints, the apostles, the prophets and for the voice of Jesus himself, that unites us in him.
But it is not simply listening to Jesus and our fellow citizens within his household that unites us to Him.
We are United to him in our experience of rejection.
We are not greater than our master and the baptismal path leads to salvation only via the cross we are called to pick up daily.
When it comes to our individual crosses, Jean Vanier speaks both of death by martyrdom and of martyrdom by daily pinpricks…..both a consequence of rejection, of not being recognised as God at work in human flesh.
Vanier articulates what it is like to be treated as Jesus was, unrecognised in different times and in different places……. Martyrdom and the Martyrdom of daily pinpricks – both find their place in the tradition of Christian experience.
Whether or not you find yourself in the Kalendar perhaps depends upon who’s looking; whether or not you find yourself bound into that spiritual Temple in which God dwells, has more to do with the offering of yourself in thought, prayer and the carrying of his cross, – to Jesus – who is revealed in the lives, thoughts and prayers of the saints who before us have found their reward. May God almighty bless with His Spirit’s guidance, our every conversation with the past, our every engagement with its wisdom and experience……and so may He write in our lives, the next chapter of Christian tradition.