The Installation of Dom Edmund Power as Honorary Canon |
They shall build the old waste places and thou shalt be called the repairer of the breach; the restorer of paths to dwell in. Isaiah LVIII: 12.
The Installation of Dom Edmund Power is rich in symbolic freight.
He was educated in St Albans, site of the martyrdom of the first known martyr in Roman Britain where the Abbey Church, a great Benedictine foundation was built around his relics.
He is now an Abbot of a community in Rome which is charged with the care of the great basilica of St Paul outside the Walls which also grew up around the burial site of the martyr Paul.
In 604 the task of reconverting London to the Christian faith was entrusted to a Roman Abbot, St Mellitus who built the first and no doubt rather smaller St Paul’s Cathedral on this hill.
The Roman basilica of St Paul once had a special link with the English crown which may have been established by Henry VIII, the five hundredth anniversary of whose coronation we have celebrated this year. The King became an honorary Canon of St Paul outside the Walls and the Abbot an honorary Prelate of the Order of the Garter.
Henry played his part of course in destroying the unity of the Western Church. The Church was fragmented and every one of the fragments appealed in different ways to Paul in a process of over-defining mystery in the interests of polemics.
Tonight we are doing a little to retrieve the precious fragments of our shattered unity; repairing the breach and restoring the ancient paths.
But this is no mere antiquarian exercise. We meet at the conclusion of a year in which the bi-millennium of the birth of St Paul has been celebrated. It was inaugurated in St Paul’s outside the Walls by Benedict XVI, Patriarch of the West. On that occasion he declared that “a special aspect that will need much care at the different stages of the Pauline bi-millenary is its oecumenical dimension. Especially involved in bringing the Good News to all the peoples, the Apostle to the Nations did all he could for the unity and harmony of all Christians. May he lead and protect us .. helping us progress in a humble and sincere search for the complete unity of all the parts of the mystical body of Christ.”
Paul himself in writing to the Christians of Rome in the passage we have heard read this evening, declared “I long to see you that I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me.”
The repairing and restoring of breaches made and paths torn up in the sixteenth century has been proceeding at a leisurely pace but while humane, tolerant people of faith have been idling, the religious map of the world has been redrawn by the kind of authoritarian literalism, chiefly Christian and Muslim that always flourishes at times of stress.
At the same time the consequences of editing God out of our world view and replacing him with the modern self’s will to power has become startlingly apparent in the scars on our planetary home and in the emotional flatness that comes from a loss of a sense of meaning in life.
Denying god; despoiling nature and diminishing humanity describes the interlocking crisis of the 21st century. The church is called to be the transforming community working together across every barrier to open the fissure in our times so that God’s future can stream in.
We long to see one another because we want like St Paul to be encouraged and strengthened by our mutual faith. Like Paul we are not ashamed of the gospel of Christ for it is the power of God for the health, well being and salvation of every one who believes.
