Author: Chris Swift

A writer, researcher and speaker on faith, spirituality and wellbeing. Enthusiastic about spirituality and belief in a community setting; challenged and changed by the theological questions raised in daily life. Author of 'Hospital Chaplaincy in the Twenty-first Century (Routledge)

Where the Heart is

Chris SwiftLeave a comment

On holiday I am enjoying the time to read three very different books. One is poetry; another a novel; and the third theology. Despite being different, I am also seeing (or making) many connections between the narratives. This is unsurprising in one sense as I am their common denominator: the one reading. Like the handmade and unique marbled pages in each of the first edition volumes of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, we perceive our own patterns as we mark and experience the stories mediated by print.

I came to A Dark and Stormy Night by Tom Stacey via an unusual route. At home we have a sculpture bequeathed by an old friend. In doing some research about the sculptor I came across the fact that her husband was a writer. In this novel, a bereaved suffragan bishop – a Dante scholar – gets lost in a forest in darkness while seeking a redundant chapel. It is notable that the bishop lived with and through his wife’s dementia – something Tom Stacey knew about at first hand. His description of this resonates strongly with what I experienced of my mother’s cognitive decline several years ago. Stacey’s insight evidently comes from deep and costly personal experience:

You are forever packing and re-packing to go home. To tell you we are at home only serves to rile you. This lost inner home of yours is never locatable.

Transgressing the boundaries of normal or accepted behaviour is a strong theme of Allan Boesak’s Children of the Waters of Meribah. Boesak is a South African theologian with an abiding commitment to liberation theology.

In a chapter exploring the story in Matthew’s Gospel of the Canaanite woman who comes to Jesus seeking healing for her daughter, Boesak conducts a masterclass in hermeneutics. Experience shapes both writing and reading. Unsurprisingly, Boesak is alert to the location of this account:

She is a Canaanite, the people whose land had been conquered and occupied by Jesus’s people.

What should have been home was no longer home or, at least, a place now made strange and punitive. The experience of being South African leads Boesak, and the scholars he cites, to read this account with the painful insight of experience. The woman comes to Jesus in a “spirit of protest and reclamation”.

The final book is a collection of poetry by Koleka Putuma entitled Collective Amnesia. It is a work that has set records in South Africa in terms of poetry sales. Inevitably, with a heritage of the Group Areas Act, this is a nation that continues to live with “ongoing collective trauma” for countless reasons, not least the dispossession of peoples’ homes. Putuma writes out of her experience with skill, candour and wit.

You will realise that the elders in the room

Learned the alphabet of hurting and falling apart differently

For you, healing looks like talking and transparency

For them, it is silence and burying

And both are probably valid

And

Then

You will realise

That

Coming home

And

Going home

Do not mean the same thing

From the poem ‘Graduation’ in the book ‘Collective Amnesia’ by Koleca Putuma

Sins of the Fathers

Chris SwiftLeave a comment

Until Ash Wednesday I had never thought my ancestry was connected to slavery. My forebears were working class people, engaged in factory labour and domestic weaving. They acquired no wealth and owned no property. Like so many in Lancashire in the 19th century they were caught up in the Industrial Revolution, trying as best as they could to survive. However, their connection to slavery was to spin the cotton that was at the heart of the exploitation of people and the associated growth in international trade.

It may seem odd to think of this as a connection with slavery. The usual focus is on the wealthy institutions that owned slaves, controlled plantations or invested in the transatlantic trade. However, it was a business that involved almost everyone. From governments to the academy, the creation of public libraries and art galleries, the economic benefits gained from slavery are in the fabric of British society. While there is a range of opinion about the precise economic advantage that resulted from transatlantic slavery, it is estimated that the British working class benefited by a small but significant rise in their living standard:

The change in worker welfare is the population-weighted average of the change in the real wage in each location and equals 3.06 percent, implying substantial welfare gains for domestic free workers from the enslavement and exploitation of black Africans in colonial plantations.

Heblich, S., Redding, S. J., & Voth, H. J. (2022). Slavery and the british industrial revolution.

It is understandable that Ash Wednesday made me think of this connection. Isaiah tells us: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?” Sadly, one of the most grievous sins of our age is the toleration of inequality and the yawning gulf that exists between rich and poor. At the end of a year living in Argentina, almost 40 years ago, I had a conversation with my Spanish teacher. During my time in South American I had witnessed the severe challenges facing many communities. In my early 20s, I undoubtedly had a more passionate idealism than I do today. I asked her how I could return to my life in the UK knowing about the huge disparities in wealth and power which I’d seen. The answer was: “you’ll get used to it; you’ll feel differently over time”. It was a wise and accurate prophecy. It might be the greatest sin to accept – even joyfully embrace – this kind of moral anesthesia. To remain untroubled by the way of the world or simply wring our hands at the daily TV news, saying: “if only there was something we could do!”

The scriptures for Lent speak about lament that leads to action. We are not required to exhibit our distress, or acts of justice, but we are required to feel the shocking truth of the reality that our world falls far short of the Kingdom of God. It is only when we see and understand the terrible reality of a world which is constructed by entrenched inequality that we can ever hope to find a different path. It is tempting to see ourselves as unconnected from the blasphemous operation of transatlantic slavery, but the economic advantage it delivered is rooted in the institutions of the West (not least the Church). Work is being done to respond to this truth, but it is yet to be seen how successful it will be in achieving any kind of restitution. We speak of both financial currency and the body’s blood being in “circulation”. Money earned through oppression and slavery may be produced in on particular place but, once it is in the financial system, it becomes impossible to point at one part of the economic body and say “it isn’t there”. How would we know with complete certainty?

The bonds of injustice continue to shape our world. Visiting South Africa I am reminded once again of the legacies of slavery, not least in the system of apartheid. The abolition of laws is one thing, but the calling to be awake and alert for the ingrained divisions of an unequal world requires soul-work if we are to prevent the slide backwards into attitudes now surfacing in the USA and elsewhere. Restitution is more than reparations and requires a profound recognition of an evil which must be countered step by step, each and every day.

“Slavery cannot end through laws alone. We who survived were taught to hate ourselves, our bodies, our histories. I learned this in the way that I held my body as a thing despised, ashamed. Why do we need a museum of slavery? Surely the cobbles, the walls and the hills scream of that past. But outside all we hear is the forgetfulness of the city. Here, in this museum, we will call again into memory our languages, our resistances, the worlds we made in the city of slavery”

Quotation from Gebeba Baderoon, 2020, in the Museum of Slavery, Cape Town, South Africa

The Sombre Season

Chris SwiftLeave a comment

Lent is almost upon us. Somehow, unlike several of our continental neighbours, England maintained the old words for this time, even as the Church’s Latin altered so much of our language. Lent probably came into English through Old Saxon, but its exact history is lost in the folds of antiquity. Nevertheless, the meaning is clear. It is to do with something long, possibly reflecting the lengthening days brought by spring in the northern hemisphere. Maybe, also, the sense that days of abstinence might be long days and, consequently, Lent is a season to be endured. It ends, of course, in Easter – another ancient name from Old English, with origins linked to Northumbrian Eostre. Perhaps the name of a Goddess, or a word for dawn, but in any event adopted by the early Christians of these isles as a fitting word for the new life that awaits at the end of Lent.

While our warming winters have changed our experience of the seasons, we may still see churchyards transformed with a late frost, or layered in a final fling of snow’s fleeting transformation. There is an added poignancy that these occasions are becoming fewer, with such brief visitations acting as a nostalgic reminder of how we once experienced these months. Much of English literature describes the tyranny of enduring and unavoidable cold, when even a hearthside might offer only limited and temporary relief.

Given their appearance in or around the start of Lent, purple is often the colour of choice for crocuses planted amongst the grave stones that surround our ancient parish churches. A fitting sign of both our mortality and also the liturgical season. From this coming Wednesday, until mid April, many churches will be draped in purple, signifying the Lenten focus on “self-examination and spiritual discipline”.

… crocuses
Pale purple as if they had their birth
In sunless Hades fields.

From The Sun Used to Shine by Edward Thomas

Perhaps ‘sombre’ isn’t the right word for these 40 days. As regular readers of this blog will know by now, I completed a project last year to write a Lent book for distribution before March 2025. A Sterne Lent refers in many places to the sermons preached by the vicar-novelist, Laurence Sterne. It is estimated that at least one third of these 45 homilies were preached in the time of Lent. This is not surprising as even in the 18th century the penitential season was marked by some effort towards thinking and reflection upon religious convictions and actions. For Sterne the denial of joy for such a lengthy period would have been a trial. Laughter spilled out of the unlikely parson, and a significant proportion of his 42 sermons (there are another 3, but those develop content from previous ones) were preached during Lent.

According to the Julian calendar, Sterne preached his sermon on ‘Penances’ on Palm Sunday 1750. Based on some circumstantial evidence it is probable that it was preached in York Minster. Sterne explores some of his core convictions which, alongside a side-swipe at Methodists, centres on a Deity who doesn’t want us to be endlessly glum, or excessively earnest. We were not created “on purpose to go mourning, all our lives long, in sack-cloth and ashes”. However, Lent is a time when our restraint can:

dispose us for cool and sober reflections, incline us to turn our eyes inwards upon ourselves, and consider what we are, – and what we have been doing; – for what intent we were sent into the world, and what kind of characters we were designed to act in it.

It is in this season that Sterne feels the discipline of Lent is intended to “call home the conscience”. In particular, Sterne is critical of our wasteful use of time. We fill up diaries with distractions, “parcelling out every hour of the day for one idleness or another”, and seem eager that when it comes to time we are endlessly inviting others “to come and take it off our hands”. Sterne cannot abide the idea that we reach older age only to discover we have lived “a life so miserably cast away”.

Lent is a time to contemplate what we are here for; how we spend the time we have been given – but not, as Sterne would see it, to fill up the season with so much dour reflection that there is no space for joy.

Is God Calling?

Chris SwiftLeave a comment

I usually skip through the online edition of The Church Times over breakfast on a Friday. It is a newspaper with a venerable history, having first hit the presses in 1863 (between the publication of The Origin of Species and the first sales of Turkish delight). In 1981 a scurrilous and highly enjoyable spoof of The Church Times was published under the title Not The Church Times, reflecting the popular use of the ‘not’ brand of satire in the 1980s. It came complete with adverts for high office, one of which stated:

Applicants are invited to apply, stating their public school, Oxbridge college, year at Westcott House, and Lodge.

Sadly, I would qualify on only one of these criteria and even then, by 1990, Westcott was no longer the powerhouse of episcopal chumocracy for which it was once renowned. This undoubtedly explains why, when there is presently a surfeit of episcopal vacancies in the Church of England, no mitre is likely to fall on that pate so propitiously cleared of hair, which would be enhanced immeasurably by the imposition of a pointy hat. Alas, as Cervantes put it in Don Quixote – quoted later by Sterne – with a head so beaten about by the vagaries of life, if mitres were “suffered to rain down from heaven as thick as hail, not one of them would fit it.”

In recent years the criteria for preferment have undoubtedly changed from those in the 1980s. Favour has fallen on evangelical candidates; those perceived to have been successful in an organisation other than the church; and, more than anything else, priests who have a story of leading church growth. Once again, my credentials would make little impression in these categories of assessment.

All of this came to mind as I read through the classified section of this week’s issue of the ecclesiastical newspaper. My eye was drawn to an advertisement from my home diocese, the See of Blackburn. A creation of William Temple, consisting of parishes carved out of the rapidly growing Diocese of Manchester – itself an earlier Victorian offspring of the Diocese of Chester. The ad that caught my eye had a headline in a style not uncommon in The Church Times:

I pondered whether this was the same God responsible for the creation of the universe. That is, the entire reality identifiable from earth, which is at least 28 billion light years in diameter. The God who predates time and will draw time to a close. That God? I imagine that this God probably has rather a lot to do but, God being God, perhaps there would be an infinite supply of time so that spending a few minutes reviewing the needs of the Blackburn Archdeaconry wouldn’t be too onerous.

However, wouldn’t it be more honest and meaningful to ask: ‘Do you want to be the Archdeacon of Blackburn?’ Shouldn’t our desires be material to the concept of vocation, rather than being cast into doubt under a pall of implied sanctity. Perhaps it would lead to much greater honesty and candour if we explored the motivations of why anyone wants any particular role. As the Church of England struggles to address the abuse that has happened, and is happening, in situations where piety has been asserted and manipulated, it might produce a better culture if we began with a humble recognition of our own wants and needs. Wants and needs where, in various ways, God is already present and active. Teasing these out may be the best way to achieve greater honesty; self-knowledge; deeper discernment; and a safer Church.

Perhaps spiritual directors should run the C of E – they are the people, usually, who cut through the flummery and ask this kind of inconvenient question. Might God be calling any of them to Blackburn – or even to Canterbury?

The Outer Marker

Chris SwiftLeave a comment

Interpreting complex and dynamic information is never easy. As a hospital chaplain I was familiar with the necessity to appraise a situation and make a decision under significant time constraints. Finding the right words, rituals or other aspects of pastoral care, when death is imminent, has the capacity to focus both heart and mind. On rare occasions, when the family and friends of someone nearing the end of life presented a wide range of beliefs, great care was needed to find a form of recognition and support which was of genuine service to all concerned. Getting it “wrong” can have enduring consequences for the bereaved.

Five years ago we were getting to grips with the new phenomenon of SARS-COVID-19. Hardly anyone in society had experienced a serious pandemic in the UK. Working in the care sector, it soon became apparent that many leaders lacked the heath care background which would have supported a speedy awareness of the consequences inherent in the unfolding events. Perhaps most significantly, the understandable desire for clear evidence and guidance prevented early actions to stem the rate of infection. As I commented at the time, in a pandemic, waiting until the evidence is utterly compelling is the definition of leaving it too late.

“we want to avoid any over-reaction but preparation seems wise”

Chris Swift email 11 February 2020

Viruses are most effective in the period when there is no immunity from prior infection; people feel no motivation to alter their routine behaviours; and when a delay between infection, illness and public reporting lasts several days. In care homes, where vulnerable people are kept close together, rooms are warm and many residents might forget requests to change behaviours, the risks of an easily transmissible respiratory infection are severe. By 5 March 2020 there was sufficient evidence available to determine that this wasn’t a rehearsal – but the emerging reality of a disease which spread quickly and had a high mortality rate amongst older populations. This was probably the prime date in the UK when decisive changes in behaviour would have saved the greatest number of lives. On 11 March 2020, I wrote to a colleague stating that, in my judgement, we were passing the outer marker of when it would be most beneficial to act. Finally, on 23 March, the UK went into its first national lockdown.

In 2020 different people came to a realisation of the need to act at different times. However, those differences undoubtedly had real-world consequences. If prompt actions made no impact there would, presumably, be no differences in the mortality rates of different countries. But there were significant disparities. Probably the best time to have acted in the UK would have been in the first few days of March. By the 11 March it felt as though we were heading into uncharted waters, beyond the zone in which wise actions would have made a significant difference to the incursion of infections. Sadly, in the UK and elsewhere, this delay undoubtedly multiplied the number of deaths; the incidence of care staff’s trauma; and the inevitable distress of relatives unable to be with loved ones at the end of life.

Five years still feels to be too brief a time for the world-changing events of 2020 to be fully digested or understood. It might be the case that we are in a phase of denial, finding it too difficult or too contentious to rake over the ashes of SARS-COVID-19. However, a time will come when we are ready to talk about the remarkable and tragic events which transformed our collective experiences of everyday living. Perhaps, when the UK Covid-19 Inquiry finally reports, we’ll be in a better place to take a measured view of what the global pandemic meant for us, and the lessons we can take into the future. Sadly, watching the world in the past five years, the international solidarity of lock downs and a shared experience of a sudden increase in mortality, appears to have done little to generate an enduring sense of our common humanity and interdependence. In times when threats to human life are intensifying and growing, the need to interpret dynamic data at a point when wise actions can still shape events, remains a critical need.

Lent Preachers

Chris SwiftLeave a comment

As the Church approaches Lent, some Christians might have begun thinking about what to give up, or what to take up. Perhaps a small resolution of abstinence – alcohol or chocolate – and a desire to read something that will draw us a step closer to understanding everything to which Lent points. In some churches, while Holy Week might feature a visiting speaker to lead people through the final week, it has been the custom in cathedrals and elsewhere to have a different guest preacher each Sunday. This practice goes back a long way and can be found in various notices and signs that have survived the passage of time.

In 1725 Ash Wednesday fell on February 10th. Or did it? This statement requires some qualification. The calendar at that stage was still in the Julian form, meaning that the year began on 25 March, hence the Lent preachers list for St Paul’s is described as the year 1724-25. This practice was known as ‘dual dating‘ and caused considerable confusion. It finally ended in England in 1751 with the British Calendar Act and an effective transfer to the Gregorian calendar used by most of the rest of the world.

As the notice from St Paul’s demonstrates, Lent sermons were not confined to Sundays. The advertisement offers distinguished clerics on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, throughout the 40 days. These occasions were not for the minor clergy, but moments when the cathedral staff themselves, or various other deans and bishops, might pronounce their theology and spiritual message.

Laurence Sterne, who was a well known and popular preacher, was aware that his humble station in the Church meant that he was unlikely to be invited into the nation’s highest pulpits. The steps that grace the cover of A Sterne Lent – Forty Days with the Celebrity Parson the Church Forgot, are elegant, simple and modest. They are the pulpit steps of All Hallows, Sutton on the Forest, where the preacher stands only a few feet higher than the congregation. Today, I understand that a less formal way of leading worship (and perhaps fewer parishioners) means that this beautiful 18th century piece of furniture is seldom used.

Many of Sterne’s surviving 45 sermons were first preached in the season of Lent. In keeping with the motif found across Sterne’s work, he was mindful of the contrast between success as an author and the skepticism about his character which would keep him out of high office in the Church.

“I just received a Translation into french of my Sermon upon the house of Mourning, from a Lady of Quality – who proposes to print it, for the Caresm, & to give ye people here a specimen of my Sermons – so You see, I shall be Lent Preacher at Paris, tho’ I shall never have the honour at London”

Letter from Laurence Sterne to Henry Egerton, written in Paris, March 8 1762. Quoted in Volume 7 page 233 of The Florida Edition

In a style characteristic of Sterne’s humour, his letter to Henry Egerton in March 1762 makes reference to the fact that his own death had been reported in newspapers back in England. Sterne’s congregation in Coxwold went into mourning. It took more than a week for corrections to appear in the English press. Sterne would undoubtedly have been fascinated by the eulogies which were published in the intervening days.

St Paul’s never beckoned the peculiar rural parson who had found fame – and a little fortune – through both his published sermons and Tristram Shandy. Undoubtedly Sterne has the last laugh, as the great names of that era, who graced the pulpits of the nation’s cathedrals, are now unknown. Yet, somehow, Sterne’s radical approach to the novel continues to stir the creative spirit of contemporary artists and authors across the world. I believe they also have a much neglected spiritual significance.

Perhaps one of the most attractive things about Sterne is his refusal to conform simply in order to ‘get on’. Yes, it rankled with him that there would be no palace to live in, or ample stipend to live off in a lavish style. Sterne can’t quite let go of the cost – the sacrifice – which witty writing and ecclesiastical satire had imposed on his prospects. Friends advised him to temper his writing until he was in the kind of exalted position no one could touch. However, I suspect that Sterne knew this beguiling suggestion for what it was, and that it would blunt the sharpness of his writing. Too many people have entered the church, or politics, certain that when they ‘arrive’ they will enact their intention to do something dazzling and different. Alas, how often do these well-intentioned ambitions become paralysed in the sticky web of power’s compromise? Sterne may not have preached in England’s most exalted pulpits – but the life we encounter in his writing is an enduring lesson on human weakness and hypocrisy, redeemed only by a God whose sense of forgiving humour is so much greater than the dismal depths of our everyday folly.

Unappropriated Forever

Chris SwiftLeave a comment

St Luke’s church in Cleckheaton is a barn of a building. Like so many of the churches thrown up to meet the needs of urban populations, this Victorian Gothic edifice had the working classes in its sights. A nearby Medieval church had assigned seating, and was no doubt the preferred place of worship for the landed gentry and families that looked to the countryside for their employment. St Luke’s, by contrast, was marking a new path in religion and a foundation stone in its porch made known the more egalitarian ambitions of its approach. As The Church Times of 28 October 1887 reported from the laying of the foundation stone: “It is to seat 650 persons, and the sittings are to be free and unappropriated”.

I was reminded of this bold statement of intent during this morning’s edition of Sunday on Radio 4. An item from BBC Radio Solent told the story of an Anglican church that has doubled up as a badminton court for more than 50 years. At Christ Church Melplash, one of the locals interviewed read out the statement made at its foundation that “the seats in this church are to be free and unappropriated forever”. The instruction was given by James Bandinel, the son of a cleric and a civil servant involved in implementing the abolition of slavery. His role was to supervise the suppression of slave trade activities and this included the seizure of boats. Bandinel received a good salary based on the funds generated by selling condemned slave ships. In turn, Bandinel used his wealth to fund the construction of Christ Church Melplash.

The approach to founding churches without assigned seating, or pew rents, perhaps responded to growing militancy in the population at large about privilege in the Church of England. Another example of churches taking this line includes Holy Trinity Stowupland, in Suffolk. Perhaps due to the nature of the its rural character, there were only two of these cheap, plain churches built in the county to meet the growing needs of urban populations.

‘here in the porch is the original foundation board, beginning This church was erected 1843. It contains 250 sittings,and in consequence of a grant from “The Incorporated Society for promoting the enlargement, building and repairing of Churches and Chapels”, the whole of that number are hereby declared to be free and unappropriated forever‘.

www.suffolkchurches.co.uk – a journey through the churches of Suffolk

Plaque at the Church of the Holy Trinity, on the outskirts of Toronto: “free and unappropriated”

Which leads me, inevitably, to the Church of England today. The unique characteristics of the C of E mean that this is a church that belongs to the people of England – free and unappropriated. It’s why, in the current turbulence of the resignations; uncertainty; and instability, the outcome of events is more than a matter to be resolved by clergy and congregations. It must involve a wider consultation and engagement with parishioners and enable the Church to continue its historic mission to serve the people of England in the name of Christ. That’s why, on 27 November 2024, I wrote to the Prime Minister to express concerns about the ability of the C of E to resolve its own problems.

‘While the nature and resources of the Church of England has changed significantly over the past twenty years it continues to have an unparalleled presence across the cities, towns and villages of England. It has often played a key role in developing inter-faith relations, community cohesion and pastoral care, especially at times of national crisis or change. I believe that this role continues to be valuable and worthy of political support. However, it appears very uncertain that the Church of England can reform itself within the provision of its existing structures and leadership. The safe operation of the Church remains a concern”.

Extract from my Letter to Sir Keir Starmer, 27 November 2024

Unsurprisingly, the reply from the Correspondence Officer in the Cabinet Office did little more than refer the matter to the Honours Secretariat. In turn, the Secretariat pushed the issues into the court of General Synod. Perhaps the only slight indication that there is some concern at the level of political leadership has come in the form of a communication from the Charity Commission to members of General Synod. The letter is hosted on the UK Government website. The tone of the letter suggest that it is intended to be a “shot across the bows” of the C of E, reminding Synod members to “remain aware of your legal trustee duties during debate and voting on relevant Synod business”.

Over many centuries the C of E has benefited from charitable endowments and donations. It is duty bound to manage the charitable aspects of its structure for the good of the people it serves, in this case, the entire population of England. Narrow religious enterprises which fail to demonstrate public benefit must be brought under examination and the central purpose and mission of the C of E cannot be watered down in an attempt to shape itself to what many other churches already do very well. The C of E has a clear character, heritage and purpose. This must be upheld; funded; supported and encouraged.

Hear Our Voice

Chris SwiftLeave a comment

Churchyards are often depicted as ghostly places. A kind of hinterland between the lit windows of a “frowsty barn”, where prayers to the eternal are stacked, and the nearby houses and shops containing all the business of the living. Perhaps this cordon sanitaire around a church makes a fitting threshold between the mortal and the immortal. The hope of eternity and the certainty of the grave. They are always places that incline me to contemplation as I read each brief epitaph. How is a life of 90 years reduced to so few words? The dates of our arrival and departure; our names; perhaps a verse of Scripture or of sentiment. The information leads me to say, in whispered tones: “how young”; “how old”; “how many”.

Of course, this orderly arrangement of death feels a far cry from the magnitude of human loss recalled in the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (in Polish: Oświęcim). Tomorrow marks 80 years since its liberation. During my ministry I have spoken with two people who were prisoners in that utterly dreadful place. One of them is still alive. The other, who converted to Christianity not long after the war, had lost none of her ferocity when I encountered her in 2016. Seldom have I met someone so passionate for justice; so committed to the common good; and so entirely unafraid of asking difficult questions. Such souls are the pillars of a forthright and determined decency which upholds the fabric of caring communities.

I have been to Auschwitz once. During the time of its operation there were no graves dug to bury each victim of the wickedness which thrived in this place. Murder on an industrial scale. I wonder how far outside its evil centre the graveyard would extend if each person had been given a decent burial? Miles upon miles in all directions. A cemetery that would be visible from space. Instead, the scale of destruction is remembered in the piles of shoes; hair and other remains of the horror carried out by one people against another. On the day we visited, standing by the remains of the camp’s cremators, as dusk fell, the recitation of prayers came as an expression of hope in the face of an atrocity whose remembrance had left us dumbfounded.

I fear that as the last survivors of this terror leave us, we are entering a phase when history may be repeated. It was the legacy of liberating the concentration camps, and the truth about them which shocked the world, that gave energy to so much humanitarian work in the second half of the 20th century. There was an air of determination that human beings must never be treated this way again by any state. Tragically, they have been and they are, but our tolerance of the intolerable seems to be growing. Like so many in Nazi Germany who had doubts about the regime, we wring our hands and turn away. The questions and demands are too great. We’d like to help but…

In the entrance to Leeds City Art Gallery there is a painting by the artist Jacob Kramer (1892-1962). Kramer was born on the eastern edge of Ukraine, then in the Russian Empire, and spent part of his life working in Leeds. His painting “Hear our voice O Lord our God” was given to the Gallery by the Jewish community of the city in 1920. The text relates to one of Judaism’s most important prayers. This theme of the work reflected the reason Kramer fled Russia: the Pogroms that followed the killing of the Tsar. In the painting the widowed woman offers an agonising cry and an aspect of despair. It brings to my mind the words of Jeremiah chapter 31:

A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more.

Let us remember, not to despair – but to act.

Midwinter Spring

Chris Swift1 Comment

Most poets love the liminal. At the University of Hull, in the mid 1980s, the poet Philip Larkin served as librarian. I recall him saying that the reason he chose to live and work in the city was that “it was more the end of England than anywhere else”. Being at the margins suited his temperament and talents. Little wonder that he declined the invitation to become Poet Laureate. Far too central – too Establishment.

For TS Eliot the edge of England was a place in the middle, a remote inland location, which fitted the bill: Little Gidding. Here was “England and nowhere”. Perfectly pleasant, dull, undulating agricultural land, punctuated by small villages and hamlets. Like transmitters of divine communication, the tower bells of Great Gidding speak to the distant spire of the now defunct Steeple Gidding and, in-between them, lies the humble chapel of Little Gidding. There is nothing glamorous about these buildings and little to attract the people hurtling between London and The North on the nearby A1. Perhaps the occasional pilgrim seeking to walk in the steps of Eliot, or of Nichols Farrer but, by and large, a deep, settled and impenetrable stillness. Yes: this might well be the end of England.

The Chapel, Little Gidding

Spaces at the end of things are, paradoxically, close to becoming something else. As the land of Wales begins to run out, the fields of England are drawing nearer. The final hours of a year beckon in the coming days of January. In these moments are the possibilities of change. Perhaps when we are between what has been and what is to come, there is a moment to redeem the past and shape the future. Transitions have a life and quality unlike anything else in human experience.

I write this having just said farewell to one decade and commenced another. This threshold puts me in mind of liminality, and the division of time humanity constructed from the ever rising and setting sun. Tempus fugit. Winter birthdays have their own character, when days are short and the light can be all the more impressive for its brilliance and rarity. In his poem Little Gidding TS Eliot wrote in response to the special quality of these days, as “sun flames the ice”, where “Between melting and freezing The soul’s sap quivers”.

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire…

Extract from TS Eliot, Little Gidding

Byland Abbey, as seen reflected across flooded and frozen fields, 17 January 2025

Ancient ruins, perhaps especially religious haunts – scarred by the most bitter of human disputes – are also liminal places. Between past and present Byland Abbey stands in remote Yorkshire fields as one of the county’s many deserted religious houses. The area in the mid-1400s must have been a sight to behold – a countryside strewn with these ornate factories of prayer and produce. It is only a relatively short distance from Byland to the sites of Rievaulx; Rosedale; Newburgh; Mount Grace and Lastingham. For countless years. visitors have paused in these ruins and sensed the steps that lie below their steps; the footfall of centuries corralled into a single hallowed house. Lying less than two miles from Coxwold, Byland Abbey was visited by the parson-novelist Laurence Sterne on many occasions. He refers to the “delicious Mansions of our long-lost sisters”. Places to muse about the past and the present; to wonder perhaps, as he did about the English Civil War, of the repeatedly un-learned lesson of history, that in order to end one tyranny, we end up creating another. That sometimes the uncertainty of the liminal is far better than the heavy boots of certainty.

There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

Extract from TS Eliot, Little Gidding

A Season of Sterne

Chris Swift1 Comment

For the past 18 months I have been journeying with the unlikely, contradictory and inspiring Laurence Sterne. In a few weeks’ time I’ll be making the formal launch of the Lent book which is the product of this reflection: A Sterne Lent: Forty Days with the Celebrity Parson the Church Forgot.

People have asked me, as well they might, why on earth I picked Sterne’s work as a muse for the serious spiritual reflections of Lent. There are a number of reasons. Firstly, being in the centre of York, I became aware of multiple connections with Sterne, all within a few yards of where I am living. Indeed, the cleric who built this house, William Ward, might be described as the creative impulse that launched Sterne’s literary career and consequent fame. This creative impetus took the form of Ward’s death. The demise of Ward opened the door to a deeply personal, bitter and decade-long dispute between the Archbishop of York’s legal officer and the Dean. It only ended when Sterne wrote his first book, a satire on the controversy, which was so accurate and witty that the Archbishop ordered all copies of A Political Romance to be burned. Thankfully a few survived.

Effigy of Richard Sterne, Archbishop of York 1664-1683. North Quire Aisle, York Minster

Inside York Minster, Laurence’s great grandfather lies in repose. This is Archbishop Richard Sterne, and his recumbent form was carved by Grinling Gibbons (detail pictured above) the notable Anglo-Dutch sculptor. Outside the Minster, but only a matter of yards away, are two civic plaques. The first is in celebration of Elizabeth Montagu, the “Queen of the Blues”, who led a group of privileged women interested in education and mutual support for the development of their respective interests. Montagu was a correspondent with Sterne and also his wife’s cousin. A little further along the same cobbled street is the plaque to Jaques Sterne, the writer’s uncle and one-time Precentor of the Minster. As a Prebendary, Laurence Sterne would often have been in the Minster, preaching or attending meetings of the governing body. On the opposite side of the cathedral, down the ancient Roman road of Stonegate, a stained-glass commemorative disk records the place where Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was first published. As it happens, this printer’s business lies in the lineage of the publisher of A Sterne Lent, Quacks The Printer, which is today found a short distance away on a road parallel to Stonegate.

All this is interesting – possibly – but there is more to A Sterne Lent than geographical convenience. Sterne’s work continues to be significant in the arts and humanities. Tristram Shandy has a sustained and enduring influence on English literature, and literature in other languages. In the fine arts Sterne’s legacy still generates new works. Yet in the Church, Sterne is largely forgotten. Unlike Samuel Johnson or John Donne, he is absent from the religious calendar. When I re-read Tristram Shandy, and took a look at Sterne’s sermons and other writing, I discovered themes that are relevant today and, in many respects, were absolutely groundbreaking in the 18th century. For example, he uses satire to make explicit the repeated absence of female voices from decisions about their bodies and financial independence. It never occurs to the men who pontificate on the acceptability of using a cannula to perform an emergency baptism, to seek a woman’s view about the matter. When spurious pseudo-scientific and legal arguments are cited during a dinner after a major church service, involving the disinheritance of a widow, no female voice is in the conversation.

I do not know what readers will make of A Sterne Lent. As DH Lawrence famously commented: “never trust the teller, trust the tale”. Perhaps that is true in particular for Lent books. Sterne is an unlikely figure to choose as a conversation partner for the most sober season of the Christian year. He is full of mirth; jocularity; and satirical juxtapositions. Giving up some pleasure for the sake of his soul would probably have seemed a bizarre suggestion to Sterne. He is full of humour and weaves a thread of radical and counter-intuitive thinking across his writing. Not only in the prose, but in the physical presentation of the novel, he deploys startling surprises, twists and turns. Like the fluidity of the marbled page, the narratives jostle together and suddenly find themselves emerging into a new and unexpected digressions. Is Sterne taking us for a ride – or on a revelatory and challenging journey? Never trust the teller…

The unsettling ambiguity of Sterne’s writing may help us see the world anew, and fashion questions we had not thought to ask. At a time when there is so much turmoil in the Church of England I would contend that this Lent book offers reflections which have found their moment juste. With a vacancy at Lambeth, Sterne’s writing on vocation, ambition and patronage, are as pertinent today as they were in 1759. If the Church is to change for the better it needs to interrogate and understand the historic power which continues to tick in the mechanism of its present. As any reader of Tristram Shandy will tell you, when it comes to important matters in life, we must at all costs mind what we are about – consider how much depends upon what we are doing – or live with the consequences.

A Sterne Lent can be obtained from Quacks books or Amazon – where a Kindle edition is available. The photograph at the head of this blog features Shandy Hall, Coxwold, the Museum dedicated to the life and work of Laurence Sterne.