St Katherine’s Foundation. Opening of the new buildings. |
“I set before you an open door”
How good it is to be here to celebrate the realisation of a dream which would not have come to pass without courageous leadership and shrewd stewardship of the resources of the Foundation by Lord Churchill and the Court; this day would not have come without the vision and long suffering of the Master, Celia and the team at St Katherine’s; we should have been the poorer without the inspiration of Alan Younger whose death we mourn and whose achievement we honour; we would not be assembling in this refreshed gate of heaven without the fine professional skill of Higgins City and the artistry of Jonathan Dinnewell, an architect with whom it has been a delight to work and lastly we would not have been at this point without the encouragement and faithfulness of our Royal Patron whose nearly fifty years of service to this foundation we record with profound thanksgiving and in whose memory we dedicate this resurrected chapel.
This place was founded by the Empress Matilda and blessed by my predecessor Bishop Robert of London at a time when England was ravaged by civil war. A contemporary chronicler reported, “Men said that Christ and his saints slept”. Our lot has fallen in greener pastures but there are still challenges and the Foundation must adapt as it has always done to change.
This is the age of the seeker but in a way which is sometimes bewildering for faithful members of the church, the seekers are often reluctant to see the church and its resources as relevant to their quest.
In a needy world of fear and fragmenting relationships, threatened by loss of meaning and haunted by the fear of death, popular culture has given birth to parallel churches and even parallel sacraments in a quest to satisfy its spiritual hunger and thirst.
A couple of weeks ago I was opening another new extension to HTB, Holy Trinity Brussels. HTB is in the red light district next door to a night club called Crazy Love.
As I enquired about what went on next door, it began to dawn on me that the club scene was a clear example of displaced spiritual hunger in which huge numbers of people are involved. Many clubs in the UK are actually housed in former church buildings. They have names which vaguely resonate with a half buried Christian world – Joy; God’s Kitchen, Ministry of Sin are real examples and come to think of it Crazy Love is not such a bad name for a church.
The clubbing experience offers many of the aspects of church life at its best and which, to our shame, the real spiritual temples often do not match. Clubs offer regular celebrations, where you can get out of yourself and join others in dance and song, liberated from any merely utilitarian purpose. There are preparation rituals like donning the right dress and saving up for the night out. Then there is a sense of belonging and openness to one another and sometimes even what people describe as a mystical experience, an oceanic experience induced by the music, dancing or alas by drugs. Ecstasy, the drug comes with a mystic sign embossed upon the tablets.
The music also is often explicitly concerned with spiritual themes. Take the band Pink and their song God is a DJ. The chorus runs thus,
If God is a DJ
Life is dance floor
Love is the rhythm
You are the music
If God is a DJ
Life is dance floor
You get what you’re given
It’s all how you use it.
Christians are not absent from this scene. There is an attractively designed web site entitled Clubbers Temple, explicitly but not embarrassingly Christian. Its mission statement says that “Clubbers Temple is for those who know that there is more to life…for those who believe the truth is out there and the invisible is more real than the visible.”
Now what am I saying? Do I see the future of the Foundation as some kind of Christian night club? No. There is hardly anything more ridiculous than the sight of an ageing follicley challenged ecclesiastic wearing a pink wig and gyrating to some primeval stomp. I shall not be asking Viscount Churchill to learn the electronic guitar. But there is much to learn from contemporary culture and its judgements and there is room for experiment and for taking risks. The challenge now is not always “how to make people spiritual” but how to re-connect spiritual people hampered by their negative notions of the church, with a creative re-telling of the story of Jesus Christ in a re-imagined and rejuvenated community context.
The motto of this Foundation is “Worship Hospitality Service” and this is a place where we can experiment with new variations on these ancient themes, free from some of the associations and structures which sometimes trouble our contemporaries. The church must be forever building the Temple of the Spirit of Christ for the church on earth is always decaying and changing.
But although the superstructure must be renewed, the foundation in the love of Christ stands. As Jacob recognised, This is the gate of heaven – and heaven is the infinite possibility that flows from the love and energy of God. We do not know what will come after and in that we are like the Empress Matilda and her ally the Bishop of London in the beginning of this place. We can only make the best of the opportunities and the time we have been given and I believe that you have risen to the challenge and that you have opened a door to a future we can only dimly see.
What can we glimpse through the open door this evening guided by the scriptures and the symbols of this holy place which point beyond what we can know? He has called us out of darkness into his marvellous light says St Peter and here in this chapel we have great windows and a gate into heaven and we shall soon open the door to the garden which awaits re-pristination as a Paradise. Here is a place of vision.
There is a stone from Sinai where the relics of St Catherine herself are revered in the monastery of the Burning Bush. The monastery under the shadow of Jebel Musa, the Mount of Moses is a holy place for Jews Muslims and Christians and a place of hope in our modern world which touches Tower Hamlets very specifically and profoundly. Within the walls of the monastery there has been for time out of mind a mosque for the prayer of the Muslim Bedouin who have guarded the monks since the time of the Prophet.
Like the monastery, this is an oasis and a place of welcome expressed in the ministry of our present Master with his gift for friendship but it is also the gateway and an open door to the kind of exploration that the seekers of our age are calling for. Having rebuilt the Temple, this will soon be the home for the North Thames Spiritual Academy which will be moving its heart here next year. Today NTMTC has the task of training 70 candidates for the priesthood, a joint venture between London and our old East Saxon allies in Chelmsford. Tomorrow who knows whether we shall be able to replace the ugly initials or how the academy will develop. This is all in tune with the searching spirit of the times.
There has always been a community here but the kind of community changes with the needs of the time. Now the Foundation is equipped to be hospitable to a community of learning, where members do not take life vows but seek temporary retreat from a world, hyperventilating on hectic activity, in order to be more effective agents of Christian transformation
The foundation of this work as our second reading says is Christ’s gift of his blood to bring new life. New life comes through those who are prepared to give their lives, their blood in service. Our Foundation rests on the blood of the martyrs like Catherine who opened up a new door. She defied the conventions of her time which restricted the freedom of women. Those restrictions were early marriage for girls and the denial of higher education to women. The story of St Catherine may seem quaint but in her refusal of the suitor selected for her and by displaying her learning which was sufficient to confute forty pagan philosophers she opened the door to a new world for half the human race. All the themes cluster together at the open door into the infinite possibilities to which God in Jesus Christ is calling us.
This place has always been under the protection of women, our patron saint Katherine, the Empress Founder and following her a long line of Royal Queens. Tonight as we contemplate the open door, we remember with gratitude what has been achieved in the time of Queen Elizabeth and now that the Queen has been pleased to join the royal succession which stretches close on a Millennium we look forward with hope and expectation to the great Christian centuries to come.
“I set before you an open door.”
