Sunday 5 May 2024

Revd Canon Harriet Neale-Stevens

In the film, Keeping Mum, we meet the Revd Goodfellow, a middle aged and weary vicar who looks after a parish somewhere in rural England. The depiction of his parish is exactly how you might imagine it to be in what is a gentle British comedy-cum-murder mystery.

The flower arrangers rule the church, the agendas of certain characters trump the needs of everyone else, and the congregation has dwindled to a handful of faithful, if slightly bizarre, personalities.

The Reverend Goodfellow is tired, he’s become unimaginative, and rather jaded. He’s rapidly losing touch with his teenage children and his wife is seeking companionship and satisfaction elsewhere.

And so enter Grace – an elderly woman who comes, all of a sudden, into the life of the Goodfellow family, for reasons we only discover at the end of the film. But in the meantime, Grace slowly transforms the vicar, his family, and indeed his whole parish, from the inside out.

In one such moment of grace, the Reverend Goodfellow is in his empty church practicing for a talk that he’s giving at an upcoming conference – his words are dry, and boring, and he’s in despair over it. Until Grace wanders in and gently suggests he work in some jokes.

Later, in an attempt to help him reconnect with his wife, and something of his humanity, Grace suggests to the Revd Goodfellow that he go away and read the Song of Solomon – it’s all about sex, she says – no, replies the vicar, it’s about God’s relationship with his people – no, says Grace, abruptly. It’s about sex. Read again.

And so he goes away and reads it – he reads the words of the Song of Solomon out-loud and slowly, inspired by Grace’s insistence. And he finds that the words begin to have an effect on him, he smiles to himself as he rediscovers something he thought was lost – love – and joy – and playfulness – and the potential for intimacy – with those whom he loves – including his God, who has visited him in this text that he’s reading aloud.  From here on in, his life changes, and that has a beautiful effect on everyone around him.

The Song of Solomon, also known as the Song of Songs, has been a starting point for many in thinking about humanity’s search for God.  We know that as human beings, we experience desire – it manifests in different ways – we desire for food, comfort, often wealth and possessions, sex, power, self-sufficiency, and so it goes on. There is a deep longing that sits at the heart of our human experience which we try to satisfy in any way we can. But perhaps, very deep down, this endless desire that we experience is a longing for God, masked and hidden in our cravings for everything that is less than God.

The 4th C bishop and theologian Gregory of Nyssa was interested in human desire and how the desires we experience in this life might in fact be a path to God.  Our desires, as human beings, are necessary in sustaining human life and well-being – they are not bad in themselves. But Gregory suggested that however much we try and satisfy our cravings and longings, they come back time and time again. We are made this way, he thought – always feeling this yearning and longing – always in need of fulfilment, but never attaining it, never really possessing what we most deeply need – we’re made this way so that we never give up on our search for God – who is the source and the salve of all our longings.

The church in Laodicea, of which we heard in our 2nd reading, is scolded by John, the writer of the book of Revelation, because its people think they have already found their fulfilment. ‘We are rich’, they say, ‘we have prospered, we need nothing’. And indeed they were rich – the city was a wealthy one, a banking and financial centre, it had an enviable hospital and medical service, its people had everything they needed – they were self-satisfied, and self-sustaining. To the extent that after the city suffered an earthquake, they refused any assistance from the Roman Empire to rebuild it, and did it all themselves.  In Laodicea, they made the mistake of thinking it was possible to find an end to desire and longing – and in doing so the church had closed itself off to the desires and longings of its God. Like the Revd Goodfellow in his parish, the people had become lukewarm, dispassionate, uninterested.

And like Grace who encourages the Revd Goodfellow to hear God speaking to him intimately, John writes to the Laodiceans, bringing the words of Christ directly to their ears:  ‘Listen!’ says the Lord to his people, I am standing at the door knocking, if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.’

The Lord who knocks at the door – of the church in Laodicea, and at the door of our own hearts – is like the lover in the Song of Solomon – who waits outside in the street, persistently knocking at the door, until the door is opened -- and he sees the one he loves and longs for – and takes his place at the banqueting table.

For Gregory of Nyssa, our human error, is to ‘want to stop wanting’ – to think we can we can be satisfied, and to stop searching. To think we can salve the aching longing of God within us. To think that we can identify something that will bring a sense of completion, or fulfilment, and to think that when we have that thing, we will no longer need to orient ourselves towards it – this is one of our great human follies. For Gregory – the Christian life is about living with desire – as difficult and uncomfortable as it might be at times – so that we are always open to more, because God always has more to show us and more to give us. And so we are called neither to try to satisfy all our longings, nor to shut ourselves off from them.

At the very end of his Narnia series, when the world has been renewed, and the children are experiencing this world for the first time, C. S. Lewis describes their experience as being called to venture ‘further in and further up’ – as God’s world opens up for them, scene upon scene, each more real than the last.  God always has more to show us and to give us.

Milton’s text, in today’s anthem by Parry, imagines a time when we will be so restored in the image of God, and so attuned to the love-song of God, that we will sing in perfect harmony, and rightly answer the music of heaven.

Until then, we live with our longings, trusting that in them is the path to life and love.

St Augustine put it beautifully when he prayed: ‘you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless ‘til they find their rest in you.’

See Rowan Williams, Passions of the Soul, London:2024