WHEN we look back at our lives, we recognise objects that have been an important part of our faith journey: they are, to refer to the original meaning of articulus, small connecting parts of the whole. The first I would want to give thanks for in my own life is a book: Collected Poems, 1945-1990, by the Welsh poet-priest R. S. Thomas. Seamus Heaney called Thomas “the Clint Eastwood of the spirit”, and, as you read his work, there is a sense of a spiritual interrogator moving into town who might just shoot a glass on your table.
When I was training at theological college, I had a challenging time on a placement at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. As a chaplain to the HIV/AIDS wards, I saw many young men of my own age die. Afterwards, I joined a friend on a trip to India, thinking that I wouldn’t return to college because I couldn’t make any sense of such callous suffering and our daily praise of a loving God. I took one book in my backpack (rather a heavy one, as it turned out), and read the poems as I made my way around Uttar Pradesh, in crowded buses, cheap city hotels, and on small boats on the Ganges in the early morning.
Slowly but surely, in India’s vast and disarming landscape, Thomas was prompting my inner life to burst its banks and to kneel more comfortably with ambiguity, honest complexity, and a God who — like an owl — occasionally brushes us with his wing in the dark. Truth is not easily won in Thomas’s poems. When it is momentarily glimpsed, though, the revelation entails re-evaluation. In my life, it was Thomas who put God back on the horizon.
EVER since I did my A levels, I have been drawn to Shakespeare: to the spiritual adventures to be had in his language, and the ways in which he is able to amend our imaginations. The late Bishop Geoffrey Rowell gave me a book on how Shakespeare can be used in psychotherapy: the therapist in the incessant search for resonant rhythms and mutative metaphors that create empathy and make for deeper communication and comprehension. Exploring Shakespeare’s narratives about the human condition helps us to discern the stories that we might be trapped in, and the ones that we might yet move into.
After I preached the Shakespeare Sermon, Paul Edmondson, head of research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, gave me a cutting of rosemary from land in Stratford once owned by Shakespeare. When I once preached at an ordination, I gave a pot of rosemary to each ordinand as I recalled Ophelia’s words: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.” My cutting has grown into a potted bush; now that I live next to the Globe Theatre, the pot sits outside, back on land known to Shakespeare. His language, making its way ahead of me and calling back to me to catch up, and the rosemary — like liturgy and ritual — help me remember to remember, with gratitude.
A KIND friend once gave me a small painting of Mother Maria Skobtsova, knowing that I had a special admiration for her. This Russian refugee, who found herself in Paris, sheltering and feeding other refugees from her homeland, with little money to hand, and then, later, doing the same for Jews from Eastern Europe, was an extraordinary woman. She became a nun, and it is hard to think of a less nun-like nun: a divorcee, a single mother, a person who loved arguing politics over plenty to drink, as she smoked her cigarettes, and whose neighbours often complained about the noise and late-night laughter. Her faith, she said, had taught her that life was only begun when you gave up possessiveness.
With the local Orthodox priest, Fr Dimitri Klepinin, she forged baptism certificates to help Jews to escape. “If we were true Christians,” she reflected, “we would all wear the yellow star.” Eventually, they were both arrested. When Fr Dimitri was being interrogated by the Nazis, he was asked whether he knew any Jews. Dimitri held up the crucifix that he was wearing and said, “Yes, this one.” Both Maria, placed in the gas chamber on Holy Saturday, and Dimitri died in the camps. Her journal writings are poetic and inspiring. “Piety, piety,” she wrote, “but where is the love that moves mountains?”
Maria was made a saint of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2008. She is known as “Mother Maria of the Open Door”. I cannot think of a more urgent image for the Christian vocation at the moment than to have our doors open — to the vulnerable, unsafe, and hunted. I keep her picture in my prayer corner at home, and recall Shakespeare again: “Sweet mercy is nobility’s true badge.”
The Very Revd Dr Mark Oakley is Dean of Southwark and Canon Theologian of Wakefield Cathedral.