After Dinner Speech to Westcott Alumni, Jerusalem Chamber

27th July 2011

Bishop Stephen Conway

I recently attended the joyful funeral of the Roman Catholic Bishop of East Anglia, Michael Evans. At the end of Mass, Graham James, our Bishop of Norwich, offered a tribute. He told a wonderful story of another Michael, Michael Ramsey, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury. As a very old man, Bishop Michael was cared for in the St John’s Home in Oxford. As he became more and more incapacitated, he was regularly visited by the Moslem shopkeeper who had supplied him with stamps. On one occasion, not long before Bishop Michael was promoted to glory, this Moslem visitor asked Ramsey how long he had been a priest of God. In his inimitable style, Ramsey said, “Sixty years, sixty years, yes, yes”. “That is a long friendship, Father,” the shopkeeper said.

Not all of us will live to celebrate sixty years in the priesthood; but some of us will. As some of you heard me say on Ascension Day in Westcott garden, I visited a priest in his late nineties quietly to discover why he still wanted the renewal of his PtO when he was blind and unable to stand. He simply said, “On your knees, Bishop, I can still absolve sinners.” What is vital, whatever our age, is our friendship with God in Christ. The much-beloved icon in Westcott Chapel centres us on that wonderful passage in John 15 which assures us that our ministry is of God’s choosing. In the same passage we are given the extraordinary and exhilarating gift that we are not servants but friends, in other words co-heirs with Christ, called to the full stature of humanity which Christ inhabits completely already and which in his New Creation he invites us to participate as women and men made in the divine image and likeness.

In every generation, people have sought to label Westcott House and we its fruits, fruits that are meant to last. We have been labelled the self-deprecating staff college of the Church of England, producing one generation all but one of whom became bishops who decided not to form a cell group so as not to draw attention to one member of the group. Certainly, the Westcott crafted by BK Cunningham was seen as gentlemanly and so united in heart and mind through prayer and the study of Bible and Tradition that codes and rules were thought to be unnecessary, a view gently sent up in the memory that the only rule was that gentlemen should not smoke in chapel.

A college like Mirfield could easily adopt the view that given that there are only two smells in the life to come, incense or brimstone, it is important to get used to one of them now. The use of incense has been regular but not frequent in Westcott for the very reason that one should not be fetishistic about such things one way or the other. Bishop Westcott was very determined that Westcott House should not be a party college, but one which attracted genuinely Anglican ordinands who provided between them the savour of many tastes within the Tradition. Bishop Compton, one of my predecessors as Bishop of Ely, was quite low church and aspired to be more advanced. He decided that he would wear his predecessor’s cope and found in the drawer a skimpy pink stole which he chose to wear with it. Subsequently, he discovered that this stole was, in fact, Bishop Woodford’s favourite book mark. It disappeared quickly back into the study.

What counts at Westcott is not whether it is a high church or low church college. It is not altitude but attitude which matters. In a Church with tribal tendencies, it seeks not to define itself over against anything except unfaithfulness, injustice, plain stupidity and the fallacy that one can save people by cruelty. One powerful insight into the road to Calvary is that Jesus becomes the scapegoat precisely because he refuses to define himself over against anybody and so brings upon himself the violence of the world. Bishop Westcott was a broad churchman who as a bishop was tolerant of every shade of churchmanship. So much more important to him was that clear association of mystical devotion, sacramental discipline and orthodox critical scholarship. All of this was then at the service of the poor and downtrodden. The title of one of the collections of his lectures and sermons, The Incarnation and Common Life, sums up his lifelong commitment to living the true life of the ordained, between Christmas and The Triduum, between the absolute identification in context as the deacon to the transformative role of the priest as the person who applies everything wrought on Calvary to every penitent heart and every crucifixion situation in society.

This common life is nothing less than living not just for the sake of community but within something so much more significant which is full communion with the Blessed Trinity. There is much talk about communion and covenant in our Church today but too much about censure rather than gift. The call to friendship with God is a call to being a grown up person, which is what a parson is called to be, an inhabited version of a public person at home albeit in modifying skin, alert to one’s own need of forgiveness but also to the beauty that springs from it. I cherish those friends who cannot get it that it is an imperative of our salvation that this saving, crucified beauty encompasses both women and men not only in its enjoyment but in its representation. And I cherish them because there are enough arrogant tribal liberals around and the genuinely sacrificial calling of women and men trained at Westcott House is to desire the flourishing of all short of colluding in sin or madness.

I could bore you rigid with recollection of particular key and extended experiences which accounted for my formation for the priesthood while I was at Westcott House. In a life predictably and repeatedly being the good son and senior student, it was vital that my formation hinged on being in a long relationship with residents at the Ida Darwin and Fulbourn Hospitals for those with multiple learning difficulties and acute mental illness.  Like Lightfoot before him, Bishop Westcott always had half a dozen young Cambridge graduates living with him and his family at Auckland Castle being formed for ministry by serious missionary and pastoral engagement in challenging communities, many of which I know well. It was a mutual exchange as people were challenged by new experience and brought their own skills and confidence to bear. I am encouraged by the continuing commitment of Westcott House not only to theological literacy and apologetics but also to cultural and civic literacy in real communities of faith and unbelief. Westcott himself is a wonderful case study in how to celebrate a robust attachment to the Academy at the same time as being drenched in evangelistic and pastoral formation in parishes and other networks. I am thrilled that Westcott House is in conversation with the Diocese of Ely about extended and formative placements in parishes around the counties of Cambridgeshire and Norfolk to match the quality of reflective engagement in Manchester or at Yale.

Bishop Westcott was committed ahead of his time to serious ecumenical dialogue and relationship and hosted international ecumenical gatherings at Auckland Castle. The Cambridge Federation is an even more diverse and generous a body than when I was a student. There were inevitable and sometimes comic langueurs caused by insufficient explanation on the part of Westcott students when a student visitor who had never led an Anglican Office before gave thanks for ‘Your Servant N.” I spent a year of my time at Westcott House on loan to the Huntingdon Methodist Circuit, leading worship from lofty now re-ordered preaching desks where altitude did probably win out against attitude. I rejoice that the framework of the Federation breeds in us the discipline to do everything together that we can in outward mission and real local covenant so that we are not guilty about we are called to do with integrity separately. Most of all, I am continuing to learn that communion and covenant are not linear and tidy. This is an affront to the preferences of my INTJ personality and my love of the beauty of doctrine and of order; but even this old dog is engaged in lifelong learning and is inhabiting old tricks in new ways.

Once he became Archbishop of Canterbury, Ramsey was assailed at least three times a week by letters from his predecessor, Geoffrey Fisher, itemising his failings. Ramsey became quite depressed, evidenced by his stopping singing to himself. One morning he disappeared in the car on his own. Neither Joan nor the chaplain had any idea where he had gone. At lunch time he returned, bubbly and back to his Winnie the Pooh best. When asked where he had been, he burst into peals of laughter and said, “I’ve been to Madame Tussards, I’ve been to Madame Tussards, and they have melted down Geoffrey Fisher and turned him into me!” The one thing that is assured is that we shall change and change often. It was a rather challenging change for Westcott to go to succeed a younger man as Bishop of Durham. We are in a melting pot of change with regard to theological education and formation. Government funding ort the lack of it poses real challenges to the settled realities of access to vocational second degrees and the over-arching need to attend to the education of all disciples to live and explain the faith that is in us, one part of which is to educate and form people for the ordained ministry as deacons, priests and bishops. Of course, we can behave like romantic antiquarians and at best reverse into the future. Or we can be prophetic pragmatists and learn and apply what God is teaching us from the facts on the ground. I think that it was Mother Mary Clare of the Sisters of the Love of God at Fairacres who wrote that we are experiencing the unravelling of the cloth, the unweaving of what we have relied upon in order that the Holy Spirit will guide us in weaving something new and even more glorious. It may not be welcome to all of us that this is a call to a new asceticism rather than aestheticism, to a paring away of any indulgence or laziness of thought or organisation and a rallying call for clarity of purpose and for healthy partnership. Westcott’s future depends upon being a national and, indeed, international centre which proudly forms scholar-priests for the Church but which is also developing patterns of mixed mode and part-residential training for the priests who will make a more extensive difference in parishes and chaplaincies around the region AND who will be resource\d regularly to return to Westcott throughout their ministries to be sustained as agents of God’s kingdom for a joyful lifelong ministry in company with a growing and more focused throng of God’s priestly people.

When I was an undergraduate in Oxford, I lived and worshipped in Pusey House at a time when it was less conservative but much more eccentric than now. The recently retired Bishop Ramsey, as he chose to be styled, was the visiting preacher. As the regular MC, I was his minder for the morning. I was instructed that, as he was unsteady on his feet but a large man, I was to be ready to catch him if he fell. Somehow he got to hear of these instructions and made a point of swaying particularly alarmingly at the lectern while preaching. Every saintly lurch was mirrored by the outstretched arms of the terrified acolyte. After Mass, there was a question and answer session. I ventured a question about whether the love of self was ever appropriate. He looked at me from under his formidable brow and said, “Yes. Bernard…Bernard.” I said, “I’m sorry but my name is Stephen.” “Yes. Yes. Read Bernard of Clairvaux on the rightness of loving self.” As he left he twinkled at me and said, “Goodbye, Bernard.” Ramsey is a wonderful example of the truth that we are not called to be good but to be holy. This is not an invitation to a life of licence but to a grace-filled freedom in Christ, a call to a playfulness in liturgy and life which takes the risk to continue to grow and learn in the presence of God the Father, greater than great, God the Son more loving than love and God the Holy Spirit closer than close. In his last sermon in 1901 just before he died, Bishop Westcott said at the Durham Gala, “If Tennyson’s idea of heaven was true, that ‘heaven is the ministry of soul to soul’, we may reasonably hope, by patient, resolute, faithful united endeavour, to find heaven about us here, the glory of our earthly life.” For us who are current students or alumni of Westcott House, part of the glory of our earthly life is hovering still over Jesus Lane, just as the glory of the Name of God dwelt in the Temple, not as a constrained or restricted point of access but as a well of salvation, not needing fences or ramparts, but as a location of living water welling up to eternal life.

Bishop Stephen