Constitutional Tinkering Whilst The Economy Burns

Dear Mr Clegg, With the greatest respect, I think the idea of Lords Reform is cobblers. It is a distraction from what is most necessary now, which is to address accommodation costs, the poverty trap, unemployment, pensions, social mobility, and a whole raft of socio-economic problems which are just getting worse as successive budgets unravel, and policies are not thought through, or subjected to proper consultation before they are announced. This is grossly incompetent government. No one is addressing the question of how the Lords and Commons will relate to one another. What, precisely, is it that the House of Lords is at present doing badly, that will be done better by a another tranche of PR-experienced elected politicians, with no principles and no gumption? The value of most peers is that they know something, have succeeded in their careers, and that they have actually lived. A really good reform might be forbidding anyone from entering the House of Lords who has been an MP, or a candidate for the House of Commons, in the last ten years. Sorry to sound cross, but you are in serious danger of mucking up one of the few bits of the Constitution that actually works, for the sake of a "democratic" principle that demonstrably doesn't (and about which the electorate doesn't give a fig anyway). What next? Boris Johnson for Queen? Yours sincerely,

Complete Joy

A Homily for Holy Communion on Thursday, 10th of May, 2012, 9 a.m. for the Sisters of the Love of God Fairacres Priory, Oxford John 15:9-11 Complete Joy + Alleluia, Christ is risen. He is risen indeed, alleluia. Perhaps you have been to Ireland? I went in 1986, and loved it. It was the year my maternal grandmother died, and I went to stay with one of her brothers, in their birthplace in Co. Leitrim, “the smallest, poorest, and wettest” county in Ireland. One of the places we visited was a little café in Mohill, whose proprietor was a Christian of the kind who liked to adorn his place of work with the kind of cutesy posters you often used to see on the bedroom walls of evangelical students at the time – kittens, and ducklings, appearing appealingly alongside an improving text from the Bible, or some Christian classic. One time, I quoted one of them, in my amateurish way, in an essay for Rowan Williams, “faith isn’t faith until it’s the only thing you’re hanging onto”; when he marked it, he wrote in the margin, in his small, neat, but authoritative, hand, “I think you’ll find it’s St John of the Cross”. Another I recall said simply “the surest sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit, is joy”. How are we to discover this joy, especially in times of adversity, when joy seems the furthest thing from our hearts? One of the things I have learnt lately is how to arrange a funeral. I’ve taken scores, maybe hundreds, of funeral services, but never had to arrange one before. At one stage there were five different diaries to reconcile – and that was even before asking the family. One of the hardest things was informing old friends of my parents that my father had died. My mother’s oldest friend is a greyhound trainer. It was no easy thing for her to make preparations to leave behind a hundred – literally - baying hounds and be with my mother by teatime. But she did it. Nor was she the only friend who did so. And, amidst the tears and grief, there was, as there has always been, much laughter and joy. The laughter and joy had, of course, over six decades, always been there; they were and are the heart of their friendship, but they stood out with clarity and poignancy in new and unexpected circumstances. Jesus says in today’s Gospel “that my own joy may be in you, and your joy be complete”. I have wondered, does it really take a death for us to discover this completeness? Of course, not. The joy of friendship is always there. But sometimes when we are at our saddest and most alone, we experience it afresh, and with a new intensity. My imagination took a sideways step to the Jacob Epstein sculpture of Jesus in the tomb, in the Tate Modern Gallery, in London. It is entitled “Consummatum Est”. Those, in Latin, are the words of Jesus on the cross in John’s Gospel that we normally hear in English, rather more blandly, as “it is finished”. But a consummation is not an ending. “That my own joy may be in you, and your joy be complete”. In the love of friends, we glimpse the love of God; the transfiguring mystery of eternity breaks into mundane time. “Consummatum est”; it is not an ending: it is the beginning. Alleluia, Christ is risen. He is risen indeed, alleluia. Amen. Richard Haggis Littlemore, Oxford May 2012

John Metcalfe, Churchwarden, Diplomat, Christian

JOHN ISMAY METCALFE 1st August 1929 – 9th April 2012 A REMINISCENCE John’s funeral was on Thursday, an occasion to return once more to the remarkable church and parish of Saint Giles-in-the-Fields, in the West End of London, which I had the privilege of serving for just over three years from 2000. Funerals are always sad occasions, but S. Giles is not a sad place, and John was one of the many people whose character and qualities made it so. Nor would he have wished his funeral to be sad, being a marker of the culmination of the Christian faith and hope in which he had lived all his life. He had expressed the wish to me, and I’m sure all the parish’s clergy over the years, that he should not have a eulogy at his funeral, but a simple service, according to the Book of Common Prayer. Nor did he countenance prayers for the dead. When we depart this life, he believed us then to be “past praying for”. At first this seemed rather a harsh – if typically logical – doctrine, but in John’s case there was some very considered theology behind it. He suggested that if, for instance, his late wife’s eternal destiny was to be influenced by his own prayers, the prayers of a weak, and sinful, and occasionally forgetful, man, then what sort of pressure would that place on him? And what sort of God would God be, to be open to such influence, and such infinite opportunities for caprice, and neglect? Would the popular be more likely to enter the kingdom of heaven, because they would have more to pray for them? He found no warrant in Scripture for that. It was a compelling argument, and since that conversation I have preferred instead to “pray with thanksgiving for the lives of those who have died”, seeking that, in the spirit of the Prayer Book, we might so “follow their good examples” that we too might have the hope of heaven. He was a highly educated man, who read the lessons in Greek before the service, and afterwards too, if he thought the sermon had deviated from acceptable doctrine. That was a daunting thing to any preacher, especially one who might have to preach to him twice on a Sunday, because, faithful to his duty as churchwarden, he was there in church, without fail, come rain or shine, or leaves on the line, from his home in Black Heath, morning and evening, Sunday by Sunday. But this is to make of him a much more dry and dusty man than he was. He had a dry wit, but a real sense of humour, bordering on the saucy at times. He had a zest for life, which was genuinely catching. Sometimes, if the service, and the bell-ringing, and the music, had particularly moved him, he didn’t mind saying so – “if I hadn’t wanted to be there for every minute, I’d have gone out into the highways and byeways, and compelled them to come in!”. It was typical of him to express his enthusiasm with an apt reference to a Gospel parable. He was a most convivial man, and whilst I couldn’t share his enthusiasm for sport, and what he called “being a football hooligan”, it delighted me to know that when other members of the supporters’ club brought their tinnies along on the coach, he made careful selections of vintage claret from his cellar, and shared his offering without a care for its cost or value. Although, the original cost would have been relatively little – he said he’d never spent more than a fiver on a bottle for his cellar, but over the years those fivers would have appreciated more than the most carefully chosen stocks and shares. He had hoped, he said, to share that cellar with his wife in their retirement, but then she had gone and died, and he was bereft of someone to share it with over dinner. He took me to the Travellers’ Club one time and seeing something on the wine list said “I’m sure I’ve got this downstairs, let’s see what it tastes like”. My guess is that it was priced at considerably more than a fiver. And to taste – well, its value was far greater! But I don’t think money interested him. He was meticulous with it, and paid his dues to the church and other good causes annually, not weekly or monthly like the rest of us, and he was very supportive of the measures we took to smarten up the finances of the parochial charities at S. Giles. Because that was another, integral, part of his work as churchwarden – to be also a charity trustee for some millions of pounds, donated long ago for the education and welfare of the poor of the parish. Our own parish school had closed in the 1960s, but the trust still allowed us to make grants to neighbouring schools, and he not only came and visited some of them, being, with Jill Hutchings, his fellow-warden, possibly the first trustee in many years to do so, but also connived with me to bend the rules of the charity so that we could benefit others just outside our boundaries too. The church, and its benefactors, meant to do good, and good they must do. I found him not only a convivial and encouraging man, but also a peacemaker. There was a time when an anxious young man, a little over-devoted to Prayerbook rubrics, had brought his copy with him to the altar rail. He had lately been rather scathing in his criticism of both the rector and myself, for failing to follow the rubrics, and he had seemed not to want to receive Holy Communion. So, I gave him a blessing – it is the tradition in many churches that that is what you do when someone carries a book, or the order of service to the rail. But no, this wasn’t what he wanted at all – he had wanted the full words for the distribution of Holy Communion, and finding us lacking (because we had agreed to use only the first half, that the rector could remember), was going to make good himself. He accused me of excommunicating him. As it happened, I did give him communion, when he explained what he really wanted, but it rattled me a lot, and I asked the wardens – John, and Peter Whitfield, back then – to come into the vestry after the service to explain it all. They not only calmed me down, but also stressed that the poor fellow was clearly very upset, and hadn’t meant to make a scene. It poured needed oil over those briefly troubled waters. It saddened him, too, that the rector wasn’t happy in his role, and he wondered how we might make things better for him, which prompted me to put in a good word for him when the Deanery of Christ Church came up. It didn’t work, but at least I tried. I think John was rather more successful in dealing with the British and Spanish governments over the equally vexed business of Gibraltar, earning an MBE in the process! The most lasting thing I shall remember of John was something he said after the bombings in America in September 2001. It was the Sunday night, after evensong, and we were discussing what on earth the future might hold, and someone asked John what he thought the answer might be. “It’s obvious”, he said, “we must convert them”. And whilst our eyes were rolling at what appeared to be a Colonel Blimp comment from a man wearing a pound sign on his tie, he added “by example”. And that, 11 years into the Afghan War, is the single wisest thing I have heard said about the whole wretched affair, and the single bit of advice that has not, alas, been heeded. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God”. May one presume to say, rest in peace, thou good and faithful servant? Richard Haggis Littlemore, Oxford May 2012

Letter from Littlemore, No. 25 - My Father

Letter from Littlemore, No. 25 Dear Friends, After some months of holding my breath as my family and his other friends slowly entered a world in which it was becoming ever clearer that my father would soon enter another, the time has come to write again. I hope it isn't cheating to attach what I said about him at his funeral. One of the very hardest pieces I have ever had to write, despite, if I am honest, many mental (but not written - that would have made it all too final) drafts beforehand. The night before, it was 2,500 words, so on the morning, I started from scratch at 6.30, and whittled it down to these few. There is so very much more I want to say about him, and to record before precision lapses, and recollection muddles, but that can wait to another time, and another medium. I find myself experiencing the truth of the thing I have said so many times to grieving families - that when someone dies the landscape of our own lives changes forever. What was once there on the path all about us, is now something we have to turn our necks to see again, no longer in the dependable here-and-now, nor the hopeful future, but in the eternal past. But present all the same, like all our histories. Dad was a most unusual man. Someone - one the teachers at his grammar school, I think - called him "an enigma". He liked that. Well, he was our enigma. And we were very proud of him, and loved him more than sometimes he knew, or realised he deserved. With thanks for so many kind thoughts expressed, and prayers offered, And love Richard Littlemore, Oxford, May 2012 A Few Words for the Funeral Service of my Father GORDON HAGGIS 2nd January 1943 – 8th April 2012 S. Margaret’s Church, Angmering, West Sussex 27th of April, 2012 This day was always going to happen. Given that Dad had long life on both sides of his family, and a healthy life of his own, without vices, it would not have been unreasonable to imagine it might have been in twenty or even thirty years’ time. But we reckoned without the lurking asbestos dust, and the cruel savagery with which it can strike a strong man down in such a short time. We have watched, helpless, as in a few short months, we have been brought with so little preparation to this sad day. Dad would never knowingly have put his life at risk, he cared for us too much, but unknowingly, that is what he did all those years ago, working to care for his family, which was his most precious treasure. But that is not what Dad would wish us to remember. So, though it is not easy to do, I am going to turn my thoughts not to the last few months, but to the sixty-eight good years that went before. Obviously, I am bound to speak as his only son, just as Sarah was his only daughter. And he was our only father. But he was also a husband, first and foremost, a grandfather, a brother, a nephew, an uncle, a cousin, and a loyal friend. In what I have to say, I hope you will recognise something of your own experience of Dad. So what kind of man was my father? He was a family man. He was born into a huge family, with a battalion of aunts and uncles on both sides. His father’s family was, well, let’s call them colourful; his mother’s, the Italian side, was close-knit, and steady. Thankfully, he took after the Italian side. He and his brother and sister, for all their dissimilarities, are just about the closest siblings I have ever known. Home was the centre of his life. For years he used to refer to his parents’ house as “home”, until he realised he had made a new one of his own, with Mum, and with us. I’ve always thought of Dad as a man of science. He liked things that moved, he liked engines, and machinery, was fascinated by how things worked, and how things were made. Metals are essential to almost all of that, so as he left school to join the family scrap metal business – re-cycling and green, way ahead of its time - he taught himself metallurgy. He learnt how to identify metals and alloys by chemical and spark testing, which was fascinating to watch - especially the spark testing, because that was like a miniature bonfire night. For children, the yard was a magical place to be. Sometimes he could take his science a little too far. When he was a small boy, he was fascinated by the material the steering wheel on his uncle’s car was made of. So he decided to test it, to see if it would burn. It did. So did the whole car. With characteristic quick thinking, he ran and hid in the bath, because until then, no one had used it. By the time they found him, they were too relieved to be angry. I imagine Grandad had to settle up for the car. He had a fine mind, and applied it to solving problems, and keeping accounts. When the VAT man came to call to examine the books, he put them on the table in the corner of the kitchen, and went off up the nursery with a quietly confident smile. When the man was done he said “there’s a discrepancy”. “Oh dear”, said Dad, “How much?” “Fifteen pence”. He put his hand into his pocket and produced the fifteen pence saying, “but I’ll need a receipt, for tax purposes”. Later I asked him, knowing how meticulous he was, how there could have been a discrepancy. “Because I put it there - I didn’t want to waste his morning’s work, and if he hadn’t found something, he might have come back”. Then he started chuckling. “And anyway, he got it wrong, it was thirteen pence.” He was just as precise with words as with numbers, and although there’s less profit in them, there’s more fun. He had a great feel for the proper meanings and use of words, and how using them wrongly or strangely could be funny. His sense of humour - the Goon Show, Stanley Unwin, anything written by Ronnie Barker, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, amongst many others - was rooted in verbal comedy. And he relished comedies of manners too. As a child I remember him watching an episode of Fawlty Towers - I’m not sure, but my money’s on the episode called “The Germans” - when he laughed so much he actually fell off the sofa. There is no one here today who hasn’t laughed with Dad. There were two watershed moments in his life, times when things changed, never to be the same again. The first was in September 1962, nearly half a century ago, when he met the girl who two years later was to become his wife, and the mother of his children. He was dark, and handsome, (yes, I missed out “tall”, but a son must surely be allowed to trump his father in at least one small regard) and smart, and funny, and well-mannered, and softly-spoken, but with a steely determination to succeed (and, though he kept this privately between them, a decidedly romantic side, which is why at the end of the service we are going to play “Moon River” because they used to dance to it). He was a catch. And she caught him. But he thought just the same about her, and they never looked back, nor sideways, but made their lives together ever after, and brought their children into a secure and loving home. Looking at their wedding picture now, when I am older than both their ages combined, a part of me wonders “who let these children out?” I think their parents thought that. But the doubters were wrong, and Mum and Dad were right - this wasn’t dressing up, this was the real thing, and so it has remained, and will remain, always. The second watershed was in 1981 when we moved to Merry England Nursery. We four dyed-in-the-wool Londoners were unlikely rural incomers, but it has been the backdrop for our lives, and latterly for Jaz and for Tara, for over thirty years. He didn’t turn out to be great with flowers - they are, after all, a bit different from metal, you can’t whack a flower with a spanner - but he loved the space, the greenery, the quiet, the wildlife. There was a huge garden in which he could play with his spaniels, Gunner, and then Bertie, and become again like a small boy with a puppy. His last work on the nursery was to adapt the stable doors, so that the swallows could get to their nests, but the magpies couldn’t. That’s the sort of man he was. There was no profit it in, save the pleasure of knowing he had done a favour to small creatures who needed his help. So, if you are visiting Merry England in the summer when the swallows are there, remember that they, and we, owe a debt of gratitude to my father, who my mother has always called “a good man”, and if any of us is inspired to go out and care for swallows of our own, then he would find that the most fitting memorial of all. Richard Haggis Angmering April 2012

The Day That Judas Died

Some Good Friday Thoughts
6th of April, 2012

The Day That Judas Died


Radio 4 offers a wide range of sometimes brilliant comedy, of which perhaps the most brilliant over more than forty years has been “I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue”. One time, the panellists were asked what a list of famous people, including Judas the Betrayer, had in common. It turned out, they were all red-heads. “Good heavens,” said that eminent Biblical Scholar, Barry Cryer, “Judas is carrot!”. Of course, there’s not a shred of evidence for this, and if anything Christian art portrayed Judas as a redhead not because he actually was, but because red was the colour of the world, the flesh, and the devil. (Sorry, redheads, I know you have enough to contend with already.)

It’s hard to feel that history’s judgement on Judas has been entirely fair. Dante, I believe, put him in the seventh and coldest pit of hell – with Brutus, amongst others – because he betrayed a friend, and most Christian art and homiletic has taken the same line. In the Eucharist we have for many years heard the words “who in the night that he was betrayed …”, but as William Vanstone pointed out in one of his masterly, sedate, sad, beautiful, books, “The Stature of Waiting”, the more proper translation is “handed over”. Jesus wasn’t betrayed into doing anything, he let himself be handed over. That is the real meaning of “the Passion”, not a lot of rushing about by hot-headed gingertops, but the complete opposite of “action”, a letting go, into a world of heart-breaking vulnerability, which leads to his trial, torture, and the cross.

The Gospel accounts lay the blame for Jesus's cricifixion squarely on the shoulders of the Jewish authorities, and yet crucifixion was not a Jewish punishment, and if the two thieves crucified with him were robbers, death was not the penalty in the Jewish law. This was a battle with Rome.

There is a school of thought – you can find in Nikos Kazantzakis’s “The Last Temptation of Christ”, but it is older than that – that far from being a money-grubbing traitor, Judas believed so passionately in Jesus’s mission that he wanted to force his hand; that he believed the salvation of Israel meant its liberation from the Romans, and was prepared to push Jesus into unleashing angelic armies to force the Romans into the sea. There is no evidence for this either, but it makes sense of Jesus’ mysterious last words to Judas in the Garden, as recorded by Saint Matthew – “Friend, do what you are here to do” (26:50). Would he call a traitor, “friend”?

And just suppose the conjecture is right, that Judas meant good to come from his actions, disguising as financial greed a much bigger and more devastating plot for the salvation of Israel, two questions come to mind: what was he hoping to get out of it? And what if he hadn’t done it?

Maybe Judas was one of those people who likes to play his part, to think that he can one day be a big fish in a big pond, by getting the moment right, by forcing circumstances to happen. Did he envisage becoming a chief priest in that new Temple Jesus had promised to build in three days? Perhaps by lineage he was debarred from being a priest in the old one, but he knew it was a nice little earner and he would surely not be debarred from the new, and he would have liked the dressing up? Perhaps he just hated the Romans so much that he longed for his people to know freedom for the first time since the days of Solomon? Perhaps he just wanted to see the teacher he had followed and loved live out the fulfilment of his own vision? If you back the right horse, you might not be the jockey, but you still look good.

But what if he’d backed another horse, and his winnings were more than 30 pieces of silver in a first century lottery? What if he’d though, oh, just let’s wait and see, what can I do anyway? What if the fuss of Palm Sunday – which in any case must surely have been the rumpus that sealed Jesus’s fate with the Roman Authorities – had died down? Maybe Jesus and the disciples would have gone back to Galilee, started a kibbutz, settled down and led normal lives. Perhaps Jesus would have married the Beloved Disciple (controversial, but it’s been said before!) or Mary of Magdala (as my friend Alan would dearly wish was the case), and died in his bed with his socks on. What then? Would we still have had salvation? Surely God can’t have actually needed the death of his own son, his own self, to guarantee us that? Of all the offensive Christian doctrines, the “penal substitution theory of the atonement” is the most loathsome: the idea that God needed to be sated by innocent blood for the sins of mankind. Such a God would be a monster, and to use the word “love” in his regard would itself be a blasphemy. Did Jesus need to die?

Judas didn’t stay around long enough to find out how wrong he was – if money was not his motive, although the story says he regretted even that, returned it, and hanged himself (Acts says he blew up). Ever since, suicide has been regarded as one of the gravest sins and even, in English law, a crime until the 1960s (reflected in the severe penalties for those who assist a suicide to this day). Yet surely even Peter the Denier could not have felt and expressed a more bitter, a more desperate, remorse.

Let us not judge Judas – as Jesus will not judge those of us who do impetuous and foolish things, with good intentions, and no real understanding. And let us spare a prayer for him, too, because the prayer is for ourselves, and all frail, fallible, humanity.

“Friend, do what you are here to do”. From tragedy, God wrought a glory far more than even Judas, in his vainest moments, anticipated.

“Here might I stay and sing.
No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King,
Never was grief like thine.
This is my Friend,
In whose sweet praise
I all my days
Could gladly spend.”

Four men died that first Good Friday.

Richard Haggis
Littlemore, Oxford
April 2012

Louis Armstrong and the Power of the Gospel

A Homily for Holy Communion on
Wednesday, 28th March, 2012, 9 a.m.

for the Sisters of the Love of God
Fairacres Priory, Oxford

Daniel 3:14-20 & 24-25 & 28

And They Had A Very Good Time In the House of Babylon

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


One of the benefits of being an anachronism is that you sometimes find out about things that others don’t. I doubt that those who listen to contemporary popular music have ever heard a song which was a commentary on the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, but that is precisely what Louis Armstrong (who died the day after my fifth birthday) sang.

The story is too absurd to be meant to be taken literally, so we don’t have to think of anyone actually being thrown into a furnace, which would be a vicious crime and a sin, although we know from history – and maybe still in our own day – that appalling things like that are possible. So, the combination of the story itself, with Mr Armstrong’s wonderful charism of endless cheerfulness, is thoroughly uplifting.

If I were a better man, or maybe a worse one, I would sing it to you, but best not, and I leave it you to judge which I might be.

Three things come to mind, having listened to it afresh last night.

The first is that Mr Armstrong is obviously a theological liberal, adding the trombone and the clarinet to the hilarious list of instruments that the king wants played when his new idol is to be worshipped. Doubtless he thought that although they didn’t exist in Nebuchadnezzar’s time, if he had known about trombones and clarinets, he would certainly have included them.

Then there is the marvellous “Hey there!”, when King Nebuchadnezzar sees the four figures walking unharmed in the middle of the furnace. This is about as close as we can get to the A-word that we don’t say in Lent. His “hey there!” is for Nebuchadnezzar the beginning of a journey, the opening up of a new understanding, taking him from the making of idols to the worship of God.

And there are those final words of the song “and they had a very good time, in the House of Babylon”. Well, the Israelites were certainly not expecting to have a good time at all – they were captives in a foreign land, and being land-less, they had thought they would be God-less too, because God would have been left behind with the land and homes and flocks they had lost. But no, God had come with them, and here God was, in Babylon. They too were on a journey of discovery, one which must have appealed to Mr Armstrong, with his roots in the American South, where so many people had been taken captive into slavery until only a generation before his own.

We all have our Babylons, the choices and decisions we don’t want to make, the journeys and treks we dread going on but are forced by circumstances beyond our control, but “the power of the Gospel” as Mr Armstrong puts it, is that if God goes with us, these things can go well, and we may yet “have a very good time in the House of Babylon”, which we weren’t expecting. Amen.


Richard Haggis
Littlemore, Oxford
March 2012

Being In Communion With Thomas Cranmer

Yesterday was the anniversary of the day in 1556 when Archbishop Thomas Cranmer was put to death by burning, in Broad Street, here in Oxford, on the orders of Queen Mary I. He was first ceremonially de-frocked in Christ Church Cathedral and "tried" in the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin (an altogether nicer Mary). He had done his best to recant his "heretical" views, and escape to his wife and children in Germany, eventually he realised the game was up, and so, as the flames began to rise, he held out his writing hand into the fire, saying that the hand that wrote the recantation deserved to be burnt first. A macabre gesture, in a brutal age. To make matters worse, it was a damp and dismal day for burning(yesterday actually turned out rather nice and sunny), and so, in an act of mercy, boiling oil was thrown at the dying archbishop to speed it up, and end his agony. They say that in the cellars of Balliol College they keep a door that was scalded in the line of fire (as it were).

Cranmer is a fascinating figure, a man of huge intellect and deep learning, ancient and modern. Before he became archbishop, he had not even been an archdeacon, and was leap-frogged into the top job because of his commitment to the King's causes - to disentangle himself from the Queen, Katherine of Aragon, and from the Pope. Cranmer managed to stay in Henry's service for nearly twenty years without having his head chopped off, which is no mean achievement, and testament to his adroitness, tact, and sheer commonsense. But there is another element too - he really did believe that Henry had been put there by God. Henry thought that too, although perhaps in a different way: Henry thought God had put him there to do what Henry pleased, and Cranmer thought God had put Henry there to do what God pleased. There are two famous portraits of Cranmer, one before, one after Henry died. The latter shows the archbishop with a long grey beard - as a sign of mourning for (whatever you think of him as a man) a majestic king (the first king to use the title, Majesty, which has stuck ever since), he never shaved again.

One of the longest-standing controversies about Cranmer concerns his eucharistic theology - what did he think happened in the Mass, Holy Communion, Lord's Supper, Eucharist, or whatever else you want to call it? The text of his first, 1549, Prayerbook, is compared with his second, of 1552, which, with a few changes, evolved finally into the Prayerbook of 1662 which prevailed unchanged until the 19th century, and is still legal, and sometimes even used, today.

I'll leave it to the historians to judge whether Cranmer's own thought was evolving in the 1550s, but the text of the 1662 book is there for us all to read. In the 16th century you could align yourself on a scale from the Mediaeval belief in transsubstantiation (that the bread and wine actually become Christ's body and blood, and that his sacrifice on the cross is re-enacted on the altar), to the Zwinglian view that the ceremony is just a solemn memorial - "do this in remembrance of me". In the 1662 book you can find comfort for both views, and quite a few in between. Whether deliberately or not - and I tend to think it is deliberate - the text has been drafted to offer something to everyone.

In his book about the Lord's Supper, Cranmer takes a dim view of "magic words", as he makes fun of transsubstantiation, when understood at its literal worst. In fact, there is even what must pass as a 16th century joke, as he imagines saying "this is my bo ..." and lifting the veil to see if bread has turned to body yet. I suspect he would be in sympathy with the drafters of the American Anglican Book of Common Prayer, in which only one "amen" is printed in capital letters - the one at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, suggesting that it is not the words of the priest, but the amen of the people, which makes the sacrament. This would fit with these very early words of the liturgy: the priest says "Let us give thanks unto our Lord God", and the congregation answers "It is meet and right so to do". This represents the permission of the people to the priest to continue on their behalf. I once stopped a little communion service because I couldn't hear that reply, and I told a slightly surprised congregation, that if they didn't give me permission to continue, we'd all have to go home to breakfast early and without communion. So, we tried again, and they spoke up!

Cranmer's innovation - and he was little given to novelty, preferring instead to translate, edit, and elide the words and phrases of the Greek and Latin Fathers - was to make the service more dramatic. In common with many reformers, he deplored the way that the laity would come to hear and see the Mass, but not actually to receive communion. So, he gathered them round the table, and distributed the bread - and the wine, previously usually reserved to the priest alone (I wonder why ...?) - immediately after reciting the "words of institution", the ones that Jesus used at the Last Supper in the Gospels. This innovation has not found favour with modern liturgists, but centuries after Cranmer first started to encourage it, regular communion, and the bread and wine for everyone, have become much more the norm.

However, returning to the question "what did Cranmer think happens in the eucharist?", I think we make a mistake in concentrating too much on the bread and the wine. In his book, the archbishop writes eloquently about holy communion being not only something that happens with comestibles, and not only an encounter between the believers and their God, but also a sign of a deepening relationship one with another. The key to this can be found in his "Prayer of Humble Access", which in a revised form is available for us in Common Worship, just before the distribution:

"We do not presume to come to this, thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under they Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen."

For Cranmer, the essence of the sacrament was this mutual indwelling, not just of God-with-us, Immanuel, but also one with another. The idea of saying, for instance, "that I may evermore dwell in him, and he in me", would have been a nonsense to him - the sacrament was communion-in-community, modelled on the community of the Divine Trinity itself. That is why, after the Reformation, Church of England priests were not to celebrate Holy Communion on their own.

One can only presume that Elizabeth I's famous dictum "I do not desire windows into men's souls" was influenced by this view. It is in our gathering together to share the sacraments, that the reality of communion can live and grow, not in our doctrinal disputes about who is right, who is wrong, and who doesn't really understand. There is much argy-bargy about "communion" in the Anglican churches at the moment, all of which misses the point that if you are arguing about "who's in and who's out", you're ALL out. And that is why the Anglican position has been, with very few qualifications, that if you want to come to communion, you are welcome to come, and if you do, you are in communion with everyone who welcomes you.

And those who won't come to communion, or refuse it to others, might bear in mind, to take another line from Cranmer's Prayerbook "how grievous and unkind a thing it is", and a "great injury and wrong" done unto God himself.

Richard Haggis
Littlemore, Oxford
March 2012