Memorial Service for The Revd Sally Muggeridge

Here's the sermon that I preached today in the Memorial Service for Sally Muggeridge held at St Stephen Walbrook:

The opportunity to minister at St Stephen Walbrook together with Sally was one that I greatly enjoyed and appreciated. I greatly valued having her as a colleague. She was a special colleague with great insight and ideas coupled with real humility and a servant heart. We were very fortunate to have enjoyed Sally’s assistance and ministry at St Stephen Walbrook during her curacy and were particularly grateful for the links she established with the City and with businesses locally.

Her time with us also broke down barriers as she was the first woman to preside at the Eucharist in St Stephen Walbrook. It was a privilege to be at the ‘At Home’ for WATCH during which she celebrated her first Eucharist and became the first woman to celebrate the Eucharist in that church. I also remember with real pleasure our conversations about her uncle Malcolm Muggeridge and his impact as well as all she did to work on his legacy. I will always remember her time with us and all she brought to ministry with deep gratitude.

As we have just heard, Sally had her calling as a priest confirmed to her as she cared for and sat through the night with a lady in Calcutta who was dying while in the care of Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity. This remarkable experience culminated with a moment of communication between the two just before the woman died and coincided, in a God-incidence, with the death of Sally’s own mother, who received a call from Desmond Tutu just before she died.

Reflecting on these experiences would have confirmed a priestly call for Sally because they are experiences of being with, something that is at the heart of what priestly ministry involves. Being with is based on the belief that to find the meaning of life we need each other. We need to spend time being present and attentive to others who may be different to us and to ourselves and the world around us. As we do this, we can discover a way to be attentive to God and discover that God is present to us.

This discovery occurs because God has always been with, although never more so than in his incarnation as Jesus. The kingdom of God comes near to us when Jesus comes near because Jesus is God with us. That is what the incarnation, the crucifixion and the resurrection are all about. The Gospel of Matthew begins with the angel's promise that the Messiah will be called Emmanuel - God with us. The Gospel ends with Jesus's promise to his disciples, "Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age." In between we get Jesus's promise to the church, "Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there with them." … And, perhaps most significantly of all, the Gospel of John says "The Word was made flesh and dwelt with us." Jesus's ministry is about being with us, in pain and glory, in sorrow and in joy, in quiet and in conflict, in death and in life. God is with us when Jesus comes near, which is, in reality, all the time. That is our witness as Christians and it is also our ministry. If the heart of the Gospel is that God is with us in every circumstance and into eternity, then our task is to be with others in order that they experience God with them.

This was Sally’s experience and was at the heart of her priestly ministry being the key aspect of her ministry about which she spoke when she was profiled by the Financial Times: “My role is now one of pastoral care of stressed City workers. So many seek chats, prayers, a quick discussion [about] a worry about family life and work. A prayer needed, a smile, a service — I can help with examples and encouragement.”'

She was able to do this so well because of the time she had spent in the business world and the experience gained. Being with those who work in the City involves making connections between faith and working life and Sally was able to do that supremely well because of the prior experience that she brought to ministry. Again, this featured in the FT profile where it was noted that: "Throughout her career, Revd Muggeridge has been a vocal advocate of increasing the role of women in business and the church.”

As such, Sally organised a 'Women in the City of London - More than just a place of work' event which highlighted the civic, cultural, charitable and social opportunities in the City of London, including networks as a route to fuller participation. She also contributed to a series of events we ran to explore the place of faith in the world of business. We titled this series as ‘plus+ presentations’ flagging that we were seeking to add value to the experience of being in the City. Sally spoke from personal experience about campaigns to increase the numbers of women on Boards. She also chaired a Volunteers from the City event which explored the benefits of volunteering, preparation, training and support for volunteers, and the part that Corporate Social Responsibility plays in volunteering. These are just a few examples of the links she established for St Stephen Walbrook with the City and with businesses locally. They, and other gatherings, were opportunities to meet and be with the City workers to whom she ministered pastorally.

She also contributed regularly to Start:Stop, our popular ten-minute Tuesday morning reflections, one of several initiatives that created ‘a new pattern of missional engagement at Walbrook.’ These included the uplifting ‘Discover and Explore’ series of services on Mondays, which featured different themes accompanied by the music of the Choral Scholars. This service involved speaking on an eclectic but interesting variety of topics depending on the theme. Among the topics on which Sally spoke were the following: Lanning Roper, Love, the Temple of Mithras, Christopher Wren, George Croly, Hope, Sir John Vanburgh, Chad Varah, John the Baptist, Guidance, Faith, St Paul in Rome, and St Columba. Always, however, with a deep perception of where God was to be found with us in relation to the topic.

In speaking once about architecture, she noted that this impulse: “the planning and specification of buildings, is perhaps as old as man’s wish to build. But we also know we cannot look to any building, however majestic, for permanence. Buildings are by nature, like us, transitory, here today and gone tomorrow. In the search for true permanence and stability, in wishing to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, we must look to God.”

That thought brings us back to the permanent nature of God’s being with us in the reality of life experiences that are changing and transient. As we heard in the reading from Romans, “nothing can separate us from his love.” That remains true in all that we experience as we go through life.

As Sam Wells has said: “God doesn’t spare us from the fire. God doesn’t rescue us from the fire … God is with us in the fire. ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for you are with me.’ ‘When you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.’ That’s the gospel …

Jesus isn’t spared the cross. Jesus isn’t rescued from the cross. Jesus is with God on the cross. The bonds of the Trinity are stretched to the limit; but not ultimately, broken. When we see the cross we see that God is with us, however, whatever, wherever … forever. This is our faith.”

As Henri Nouwen says: “God’s protection is not a promise that nothing will happen to us, but that nothing—absolutely nothing—will separate us from His love.”

As a result, we can say with the Psalmist: “If it had not been the Lord who was on our side … then the flood would have swept us away, the torrent would have gone over us; then over us would have gone the raging waters.” May we know that truth in whatever difficulty we face currently.

Finally, though, God’s being with in the incarnation and in the vicissitudes of life is so that we can be with him forever in the coming kingdom of God where there will be nothing for us to fix and where there will simply be being with God, with each other and with creation. That is now Sally’s experience having come through all that she experienced in this life with the knowledge that Christ was with her in all things.

And, as will be of great importance for someone who was always learning, growing, developing and doing something beautiful for God, that experience of being with will not be static, formulaic and dull but instead will be exploratory as there is always something more to know of love, joy and peace in the never-ending depths of God. Although at rest, Sally remains on her journey of faith, exploring her calling, discovering more of the beauty in God, in others, in herself, and in creation. May the same also be true for us. Amen.

My review of 'Jesus, The Man Who Lives by Malcolm Muggeridge, with an Afterword by Sally Muggeridge, can be read here.

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Heart and Voice recital with The Choral Scholars of St Stephen Walbrook.

Review - 'Jesus: The Man Who Lives'

 

Jesus, The Man Who Lives by Malcolm Muggeridge (Creed & Culture Books, 2026)

Melanie McDonagh’s Converts is a fascinating account of Catholic converts in the twentieth century from amongst artists, writers and intellectuals. Although, Malcolm Muggeridge was a later convert and doesn’t feature in McDonagh’s book, he was nevertheless part of that significant movement of the Spirit and was probably the first of those eminent Catholic converts that I read in any depth.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, as a young Evangelical Christian, I read a lot of Muggeridge’s books alongside the likes of Francis Schaeffer and Hans Rookmaaker. My interest was primarily with those who related Christian faith to wider issues albeit, at the time, within a relatively conservative framework. My bookcases still house copies of Jesus Rediscovered, Something Beautiful for God, A Third Testament, Christ and the Media, Chronicles of Wasted Time, and In a Valley of this Restless Mind, but not, surprisingly, Jesus, the Man Who Lives. It may be that, as books were harder to come by at that time and available funds were lower, I thought that by reading Jesus Rediscovered I had already encountered Muggeridge’s key ideas when it came to Jesus.

While that would not have been entirely inaccurate, what I would have missed out on at the time was, in the words of Sally Muggeridge (Malcolm’s niece), a skilfully constructed ‘portrait of Jesus’ ‘from the perspective of an artist’. Muggeridge was, first and foremost, a great writer in his ‘uniquely free journalistic style’ which meant that he ‘engaged in conversation with his reader’. He possessed the gift of composing memorable phrases – ‘God Incarnate was Jesus, and Jesus Resurrected was God’ - while also being adept at the interweaving of engaged commentary with journalistic description and the apposite piling up of similes in ways that overwhelm emotionally and aesthetically. All these skills came into play in this intriguing profile of Christ, his incarnation, death and resurrection.

Peter Hitchens, who provides the Introduction to this Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, situates our reading of the book in relation to the ‘strong, reasoned and spirited counterattack’ that followed the “new atheist” assault on faith and has subsequently ‘revived interest in religion among the young’. As a child of his time, some of Muggeridge’s commentary relates primarily to the issues and affairs of his day, and some (particularly discussion of mental health) uses now obsolete or unhelpful language. However, that is not where the burden of this book lies, and so Hitchens’ point is a fair one flagging the potential of this revised edition to contribute to contemporary debate.

Muggeridge structures the book as a free-flowing meditation on the life of Christ covering his incarnation, three years of ministry, and death and resurrection in three chapters. The respective length of each indicates something of where Muggeridge’s interests primarily lie. Although the crucifixion and resurrection are the ‘climax of the story of Jesus, the point to which everything has been leading’, his account of both and their significance is actually relatively brief.

This means he realises the significance of the incarnation itself which, to use the frame developed by Samuel Wells, is about God simply being with us as opposed to doing with us or doing for us. In The End of Christendom Muggeridge neatly summarises the argument made more expansively in Jesus, the Man Who Lives:

‘Thanks to the great mercy and marvel of the Incarnation, the cosmic scene is resolved into a human drama. God reaches down to relate himself to man, and man reaches up to relate himself to God. Time looks into eternity and eternity into time, making now always and always now. Everything is transformed by this subtle drama of the Incarnation, God’s special parable for fallen man in a fallen world.’

His great hymn to the significance and impact of the Incarnation was written in response to what he called ‘the fathomless inanity of D. H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died’ and the draining of the New Testament of ‘its transcendental elements’ as found in Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus. Ever the journalist and satirist, Muggeridge needed a target to inspire the taking flight of his engaged prose.

Although Muggeridge became closely associated, through initiatives such as the Festival of Light, with a reactionary and conservative Christian agenda, this was not principally how he came to faith or where his faith interests primarily lie. The examples provided by saints and mystics who genuinely followed in Christ’s footsteps, whether contemporary, as with Mother Teresa, or literary, as with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, were what inflamed his incipient faith. He writes that it is on behalf of the ‘Holy Words’ of the Gospels:

‘that majestic buildings like Chartres Cathedral have been constructed, and that great saints like St. Francis of Assisi have so joyously and wholeheartedly dedicated their lives to the service of God and their fellow men. To the greater glory of these words Bach composed, El Greco painted. St. Augustine laboured at his City of God and Pascal at his Pensées; in them a Bunyan found his inspiration in describing a Pilgrim’s journey through the wilderness of this world, and a Sir Thomas More comfort on his way to the scaffold. In our own time, they enabled a Dietrich Bonhoeffer to go serenely to his death, and a Simone Weil to derive solace and enlightenment from the affliction that was her lot.’

Here, in summary, is the argument later made more expansively by Tom Holland in Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, that ‘everything truly great in our art, our literature, our music’ comes from ‘the moral, spiritual, and intellectual creativity’ which derives from the way ‘that was charted for us in the birth, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ’.

Although his ‘despair at the decline of morality in a new age of relative affluence’ endeared him to those of a more conservative, even literalist or fundamentalist mindset, such supporters cannot have been reading Muggeridge’s actual writings on the Gospels, which were often – as with his musings on the role of Judas or the literalism of the resurrection – light years away from the established views of fundamentalism. Muggeridge’s realisation earlier in his career of ‘just how often the truth is suppressed’, which Hitchens notes as a key moment in his life and thought, led him to challenge such suppression wherever he saw it. As a result, he rarely and wholeheartedly identified with any group or movement. This quality is a part of what continues to make his prose worth reading, both in its enthusiasms and challenges.

Sally Muggeridge, in her Afterword, accurately summarises her uncle’s achievements both as a ‘controversialist’ and as a writer with ‘a unique literary style’ able to ‘write, lecture, and broadcast about faith and ethical issues’ in ways ‘to which many people found they could personally relate and respond’. Jesus, the Man Who Lives is rightly reckoned his masterpiece. One that, as well as ‘providing a fresh insight into the life of Jesus Christ and its transcendent meaning’, also enables us to ‘learn a lot about its author as an ardent convert’.

Muggeridge argued that ‘Every writer, however lowly, must seek above all else to produce words that are alive, in the hope that they, too, may go on existing gracefully and truthfully’. He then stated, ‘How much more so when they relate to the Word which became flesh in the person of Jesus!’ This is Muggeridge’s intent and achievement with Jesus, the Man who Lives, to have crafted a poetic portrait of Jesus that imparts ‘heartfelt truth’ in ways that continue to touch the lives of many, whether public figures or ordinary men and women around the world.

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James MacMillan: Tu es Petrus.

Revd Sally Muggeridge R.I.P.

At the beginning of December 2025 I received the sad news of the death of The Rev Sally Muggeridge, who served with me at St Stephen Walbrook as our curate. Sally's obituary has recently been published by The Telegraph, who characterise her as an Anglican priest who defended the reputation of her renowned uncle Malcolm Muggeridge. Ordained a vicar after a career in business, she ministered to ‘stressed City workers’ while at St Stephen Walbrook.

The opportunity to minister at St Stephen Walbrook together with Sally was one that I greatly enjoyed and appreciated. I greatly valued having her as a colleague. She was a special colleague with great insight and ideas coupled with real humility and a servant heart. We were very fortunate to have enjoyed Sally’s assistance and ministry at St Stephen Walbrook during her curacy and were particularly grateful for the links she established with the City and with businesses locally. 

Her pastoral heart combined with her business experience and insights was absolutely the right combination for ministry at Walbrook. Her understanding of the pressures of life in the City helped her provide the support others needed. As she said in an FT profile, “My role is now one of pastoral care of stressed City workers. So many seek chats, prayers, a quick discussion [about] a worry about family life and work. A prayer needed, a smile, a service — I can help with examples and encouragement.”'

Her time with us, as well as creating new links and initiatives with the business community, also broke down barriers as she was the first woman to preside at the Eucharist in St Stephen Walbrook. It was a privilege to be at the ‘At Home’ for WATCH during which she celebrated her first Eucharist and became the first woman to celebrate the Eucharist in that church. Her legacy also includes all she did to work on the legacy of Malcolm Muggeridge and I also remember our conversations about him and his impact with real pleasure. I will always remember her time with us and all she brought to ministry with deep gratitude.

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Choral Classics with the Choral Scholars of St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Malcolm Muggeridge: Accurate prophecy in many areas

Sally Muggeridge, our curate at St Stephen Walbrook, has written an excellent comment piece for the Church Times this week about her uncle, Malcolm Muggeridge.

Sally reviews her uncle's life and thought suggesting that: 'The legacy of the writer, journalist, and Christian apologist Malcolm Muggeridge can be viewed in retrospect as one of accurate prophecy in many areas. Although he did not always get it right, he expressed legitimate concern on many of the issues of our time: sexual permissiveness, immigration, ethical questions over advances in medical science, the spread of Islam, lowering of standards in the media, the fantasy world introduced by technology, and others.'

'Writer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge died 14th November 1990 at the age of 87. To mark the 25th Anniversary of the passing of her uncle, Sally Muggeridge will be leading the 10.30am service on Sunday 15th November at the Parish Church of St Mary Magdalene, Whatlington, Sussex.

As President of the Malcolm Muggeridge Society, Sally will review the life of her uncle and his spiritual journey as a twentieth century pilgrim towards faith. All are welcome. A display of the extensive literary legacy of Muggeridge will be made available to view.'

John Stott once characterised the Prophet Muggeridge as courageous, perceptive, awkward and exaggerated. Intended as a compliment after Muggeridge's London Lectures in Contemporary Christianity entitled Christ and the Media, Stott's summing up captures some of the complications that made Muggeridge fascinating as a journalist, broadcaster and writer. Stott characterised him as a prophet while the then Director-General's of the BBC and the IBA who also chaired these lectures, in order to neutralise what they thought to be his attack on them and their work, preferred to characterise him as a jester. 

He was first and foremost a journalist who, in the course of his life, reported from the key continents and ideologies of his time - Imperialist India, Communist Russia and Capitalist America. He documented his dissatisfaction in his memoirs, Chronicles of a Wasted Life, and in his novel, In a Valley of this Restless Mind.

His life took a new, and to his mind, more purposeful direction when his dissatisfaction with the transient waste of what he until then done and seen, led to conversion and a commitment to Catholicism. His new commitment was expressed both through and against the new media of television. 

As a broadcaster he was involved in programmes that allowed key figures such as Mother Theresa and Alexander Solzhentitsyn airtime to communicate. Yet he also viewed television as a shallow, superficial medium. This, in itself, would not be incredibly harmful if television was not presented or viewed as the ultimate reality - the window on the world. It was this that Muggeridge argued was so damaging and which ultimately meant that television, rather than mirroring reality, was actually creating fantasy. For these reasons he argued, in the lectures collected as Christ and the Media, that, if offered by the devil, a fourth temptation of a primetime television slot Jesus would have rejected the temptation because his reality could not be conveyed using the fantasy medium of television. 

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Malcolm Muggeridge - Face your Image.

St Stephen Walbrook: Autumn Newsletter

The Autumn Newsletter for St Stephen Walbrook is available by clicking here and features information about new curate Revd Sally Muggeridge, feedback on our Discover & explore and Start:Stop initiatives, news of a programme of events focusing on Philanthropy in the City, details of our Business Harvest Festival, and news of our art and music programmes.

This year’s Business Harvest Festival takes place at St Stephen Walbrook on Wednesday September 30th at 1pm, and will be followed by a Reception.

Traditionally harvest is a time when the country gives thanks for the natural gifts of the land and the safe harvesting of them. We give thanks for that, but in the City of London we also take the opportunity of bringing to the altar symbols of the work we do in our City. It might be hospitality, accounts, commodities, money, building, the wine trade or any of the variety of businesses associated with the wider family of St Stephen Walbrook. By tradition the parish has been a centre for the insurance markets, banking, hospitality, tourism and law. You could add, at this time, the building industry and property developers.

We have a tradition that companies designate someone to bring an object to represent their work and to place it on the altar as a symbol during the service. All are most welcome and we very much hope that you will include your business associates in the invitation and ask you to pass on to them our hope that they might join you for this traditional celebration of harvest with a modern slant.

This is a time of change and at such times it is encouraging to be reminded of the continuity of life and the many blessings we each receive focused on harvest time. The Business harvest includes all aspects of the wider parish of St Stephen and has representations from the City Civic as well as the City of London Police and the Friends of Walbrook.

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Barclay James Harvest - Hymn.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

The first sermon preached by Sally Muggeridge at St Stephen Walbrook can be heard on the London Internet Church website. Entitled 'Don't worry, be happy', Sally explored Jesus' teaching about anxiety from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6. 25 - 34).

The photos of Sally's ordination are from www.lacdao.com.

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Bobby McFerrin - Don't Worry, Be Happy.

New curate: Revd Sally Muggeridge

Following her ordination as Deacon yesterday at St Paul's Cathedral, I am very pleased to be able to welcome the Revd Sally Muggeridge as curate at St Stephen Walbrook.

Sally studied at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Westfield College, London and Henley Business School. Following a successful business career embracing several board level appointments in Marketing and Human Resource Management she became the Chief Executive of the Industry & Parliament Trust, a registered charity, a role held for seven years. She then joined the board of Total Oil UK.

With a long held and affirmed calling to ministry Sally commenced theological study with SEITE in 2008, initially as a self-supporting student, and graduated in Theology for Christian Ministry in 2013 at Christchurch University, Canterbury. She became a Reader (LLM) the same year, taking services and preaching widely in the Diocese of Canterbury and elsewhere by invitation.

As the niece of Christian apologist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge, Sally has managed his legacy through a literary society, publishing several religious books including Conversion, Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith, and Something Beautiful for God. She also initiated and edited a membership newsletter called The Gargoyle. Sally was an elected lay member of General Synod from 2010-15, and a Church Commissioner from 2012. She has also been serving as a churchwarden. These lay roles have been necessarily relinquished due to ordination.

A Freeman of the City of London, Sally became Master of a City Livery Company in 2013 - the Worshipful Company of Marketors. She has also held the position of Executive Vice President of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and is an Honorary Life Member of the Academy of Marketing.

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Malcolm Muggeridge - A Third Testament.

The modern and contemporary Catholic novel (2)

Joseph Pearce suggests in Literary Converts that:
"[G. K.] Chesterton's 'coming out' as a Christian had a profound effect, similar in its influence to Newman's equally candid confession of othodoxy more than fifty years earlier. In many ways it heralded a Christian literary revival which, throughout the twentieth century, represented an evocative artistic and intellectual response to the prevailing agnosticism of the age. Dr Barbara Reynolds, the Dante scholar and friend and biographer of Dorothy L. Sayers, described this literary revival as 'a network of minds energizing each other'. Besides Chesterton, its leading protagonists included T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Siegfried Sassoon, J. R. R. Tolkien, Hilaire Belloc, Charles Williams, R. H. Benson, Ronald Knox, Edith Sitwell, Roy Campbell, Maurice Baring, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Dorothy L. Sayers, Alfred Noyes, Compton Mackenzie, David Jones, Christopher Dawson, Malcolm Muggeridge, R. S. Thomas and George Mackay Brown. Its influence spread beyond the sphere of literature. Alec Guinness, Ernest Milton and Robert Speaight were among the thespians whose lives were interwoven with those of their Christian literary contemporaries."
Chesterton provided a model for the engaged and engaging journalist (to be followed by the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge and Tom Davies). Engaged because of the breadth of topics to which he jointly applied his pen and his faith. Engaging because of the good-humoured wit that characterised his satire and sugared the tough arguments that he doled out. It was this combination that first caught the attention of C. S. Lewis. In Surprised by Joy Lewis makes it clear how much Chesterton's writings and, in particular The Everlasting Man (a history of mankind's spiritual progress - "[I] saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense", said Lewis), helped him become a Christian. He then took Chesterton for a model in many of his own attitudes to his faith, particularly in his combative approach to apologetics.

Another Inkling, Charles Williams, was influenced by Chesterton in his early poetry while an early novel War in Heaven draws on both The Man Who Was Thursday in its treatment of the supernatural and on Chesterton's detective priest Father Brown in the character of the Archdeacon. W. H. Auden wrote that Chesterton's Greybeards at Play "contains some of the best pure nonsense verse in English, and the author's illustrations are equally good". A whole string of topical versifying satirists - Nigel Forde, Stewart Henderson, Adrian Plass, Steve Turner - have followed in Chesterton's train down through the century.

Marian E. Crowe notes, in Aiming At Heaven, Getting The Earth, that the influence of Chesterton and Belloc came primarily through their non-fiction - "especially their vigorous defense of Catholicism" - but that they did write some fiction which had bearing on the development of the English Catholic novel:

"Chesterton used allegory and fantasy to express religious themes, a technique that would be utilized by later novelists. Although weak in terms of character development, his novels like Napoleon of Nottinghill (1904), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), The Ball and the Cross (1909), and The Return of Don Quixote (1927) effectively convey Chesterton's sense of Christianity as a robust, life-affirming religion, and a vision of humanity as flawed and unable to improve without supernatural help ...

There is a possibility that Belloc, who spent a good part of his youth in France (his father was French), may have read Huysmans and some of the other French novelists, for in his novel Emmanuel Burden (1904), a satire on the moral debasement of a mercantile English family, he writes with the kind of interiority and emphasis on the salvation of one's soul typical of the French Catholic writers."

Crowe continues that "Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, both of whom started publishing fiction in the late 1920s, were the most important English Catholic novelists of what is referred to as the golden age of the Catholic novel":

"Perhaps because of his robust enthusiasm for his new faith and his pugnacious disposition, Waugh made no apology for the less salient aspects of Catholicism ... By making that choice, Waugh produced novels that arouse repugnance in secular readers (as well as in some Catholics), but also provide for many Catholic readers a fiction that explores with great depth and subtlety the religious world in which they live. Although Waugh's approach alienates some, it is possible that his boldness in unabashedly insisting on Catholicism as a supernatural entity gives his fiction a depth and intensity that resonates with many readers, even many secular ones ...

Whereas Waugh looked to the Church as a principle of order in the chaotic decadence of modern life, Greene was more focused on the personal drama of good and evil, sin and grace. Also, although Greene had no illusions about the depravity to be found in the secular world and depicted it in stark detail, he was also attentive to a critique of the Catholic community. Perhaps for this reason, he did not arouse as much ire among critics as did Waugh. Like Mauriac, whom he very much admired, Greene is particularly hard on self-righteously pious Catholics who keep the letter of the law but have little charity."

Joseph Pearce writes on CatholicAuthors.com that:

"Graham Greene is perhaps the most perplexing of all the literary converts whose works animated the Catholic literary revival in the 20th century. His visions of angst and guilt, informed and sometimes deformed by a deeply felt religious sensibility, make his novels, and the characters that adorn them, both fascinating and unforgettable.

His fiction is gripping because it grapples with faith and disillusionment on the shifting sands of uncertainty in a relativistic age. His tormented characters are the products of Greene's own tortured soul, and one suspects that he was more baffled than anyone else at the contradictions at the core of his own character and, in consequence, at the heart of the characters that his fertile and fetid imagination had created."

Crowe writes that:

"Muriel Spark ... is one of the most important English Catholic novelists after Waugh and Greene ... Spark believed that her conversion enabled her to write: "Nobody can deny that I speak with my own voice as a writer now, whereas before my conversion I couldn't do it because I was never sure what I was. ... I didn't get my style until I became a Catholic because you just haven't got to care, and you need security for that." One critic refers to Spark's Catholicism as her "rock," a position from which the believer can survey the human condition. She herself said that Catholicism helped her become a satirist. "The Catholic belief is a norm from which one can depart. It's not a fluctuating thing." Spark's narrative voice is sure and confident, able to survey the foolishness in a fallen world without ever quite falling into cynicism. The irony, though sharp, is open to the possibility that God may bring good out of sin and evil."

Crowe wrote in 2007 that "the past eighty years have seen high-quality Catholic novels by Maurice Baring, A. J. Cronin, Compton Mackenzie, Antonia White, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Braine, Rumer Godden, and Anne Redmon":

"... Alice Thomas Ellis, David Lodge, Sara Maitland, and Piers Paul Read ... do not hesitate to include the "craggy" and "paradoxical" parts of Catholicism. Yet ... they have produced highly accomplished fiction in which religious meaning emerges from and is inextricably entwined with human experience. Some of their novels make extensive use of explicitly Catholic material. Others are deeply informed by a Catholic vision without much use of explicitly Catholic material ... Clearly they have not been doing the same kinds of things that Mauriac, Bernanos, Waugh, and Greene did, yet their fiction exemplifies exciting possibilities for the Catholic novel ... they have more than most contemporary English novelists, allowed their faith to inform their writing and have exemplified very different and interesting ways of integrating Catholicism into their work in ways that are substantial, imaginative, and serious."

Crowe concludes regarding Ellis, Lodge, Maitland and Read:

"These novelists do not hesitate to delineate with trenchant irony, biting satire, or simply devastatingly realistic description the ways in which the Church fails. Their angles of vision diverge and their critiques are distinctly different, focused on sexual teachings (Lodge), patriarchy (Maitland), or post-Vatican II developments (Read and Ellis). Yet they still see their world through the categories, the symbols, the stories, and the rituals of Catholicism - not just because they are literarily useful, but also because they undergird the story with a meaning that transcends the secular."

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James Macmillan - On Love.

Transfigured Vision and Everyday Apocalypse

I've just finished reading Faith, Hope and Poetry by Malcolm Guite which is about transfigured vision and am just beginning to read David Dark's book about Everyday Apocalypse. Each are different sides of the same coin; the coin in question being epiphany understood as a moment of revelation.

Guite writes that:

"sometimes ... the mirror of poetry does more than reflect what we have already seen. Sometimes that mirror becomes a window, a window into the mystery which is both in and beyond nature, a 'casement opening on perilous seas'. From that window sometimes shines a more than earthly that suddenly transforms, transfigures all the earthly things it falls upon. Through that window, when it is opened for us by the poet's art, we catch a glimpse of that 'Beauty always ancient always new', who made and kindled our imagination in the beginning and whose love draws us beyond the world."

It is those moments of transfiguration, he writes, "those moments when the mirror a poem holds up becomes a window into the Divine," which are the subject of his book.

Dark, by contrast, writes that:

"We apparently have the word "apocalypse" all wrong. In its root meaning, it's not about destruction or fortune-telling; it's about revealing. It's what James Joyce calls an epiphany - the moment you realize that all your so-called love for the young lady, all your professions, all your dreams, and all your efforts to get her to notice you were the exercise of an unkind and obsessive vanity. It wasn't about her at all. It was all about you. The real world, within which you've lived and moved and had your being, has unveiled itself. It's starting to come to you. You aren't who you made yourself out to be. An apocalypse has just occurred, or a revelation, if you prefer."

Two contrasting revelations but both meeting the requirements for an epiphany. James Joyce set out the requirements or conditions for an epiphany in Stephen Hero (the early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) where he writes:

"By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual transformation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they are the most delicate and evanescent of moments ...

... First, we recognize that the object is one integral thing, then we recognize that it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that it is that thing, which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany."

This description of epiphany seems more aligned with Guite's sense of transfigured vision than it does of Dark's everyday apocalypse, although it is Dark who claims Joycean understanding. On the one hand this is because Joyce draws heavily on theology for his understanding of epiphany. He wrote, for instance, of the work that would become Dubliners as being "a series of epicleti." This term Terence Brown notes, "derives from the Greek Orthodox liturgy and refers to the moment in the sacrifice of the Mass when the bread and the wine are transformed by the Holy Ghost into the body and blood of Christ." It is at this moment of consecration that "the everyday realities of bread and wine are charged with spiritual significance." Similarly, the literal meaning of epiphany is manifestation but, in the Church calendar the Feast of Epiphany commemorates the manifestation of Christ's divinity to the Magi. Bernard Richards notes that with this definition Joyce "comes close to the aesthetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his philosophy of haeccitas ('thisness')."  Richards also notes that, "For centuries writers and mystics have experienced sudden insights that seem detached from the flow of everyday perception. He cites William Wordsworth's The Prelude and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Sudden Light as examples, before stating that often these epiphanies "have been on a borderline between the secular and the religious: what has been revealed in the mystical moment has been a sense of God, of the whole shape of the universe, of the unity of all created things."

On the other hand, Dark is right in stating that Joyce's use of epiphanies in his work was more to do with everyday apocalypse than with transfigured vision. Francesca Valente writes that:
"Joyce himself confirmed this in a letter of July 1904 to Curran, where he said that he intended Dubliners "to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city" (Joyce, Letters 55). Joyce therefore conceived this work as a sequence of "fifteen epiphanies"-as he stated in a letter dated February 8, 1903 to Stanislaus (Ellmann, James Joyce 125)-which were written to let Irish people take "one good look at themselves in his nicely polished looking-glass" (Joyce, Letters 63-64). What emerges from these words is that both the fictional characters of the tales and the readers are meant to undergo an epiphanic confrontation."

The two sides of the coin are, to some extent, combined in the stories of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy (Dark says that O'Connor "is perhaps the best example of how the Yes and the No can coincide"). Percy writes about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; an everyday apocalypse in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. Thinking along similar lines O’Connor wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ (an epiphany of transfigured vision).

In the American South, there is a tradition of Appalachian country death songs; gothic backwoods ballads of mortality and disaster. The Violent Femmes took that tradition and used it in Country Death Song to confront their audience with an epiphany of the reality, ugliness and consequences of sin. They told a story in which the central character acts in a way that all of us recognise as sinful and then spoke about the reality of hell as a consequence of what he that did. This song is, therefore, an example of what Flannery O’Conner was talking about when she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In that situation she said, you have to make your vision apparent by shock and that is what the Violent Femmes did.

In her novels Flannery O’Connor also wrote about the way in which the holy interpenetrates this world and affects it. St Paul, in Philippians, tells to go through life with an attitude of looking out for things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely and honourable. He expects us to find these things in our ordinary lives, if we look for them. Over The Rhine say in the song Jesus in New Orleans that you never know just what on earth you'll find in the face of a stranger or in the dark and weary corners of a mind because, here and there, when you least expect it, you can see the Saviour's face. In their story of meeting a stranger in a bar in New Orleans in whose face and words they see something of Christ the holy is interpenetrating their world, and ours, and affecting it. In this way Over The Rhine created an epiphany that reveals Christ for us in the ordinary experiences of life.

American Literature and American Music frequently oscillate between epiphanies of grace and epiphanies of terror. Compare and contrast Emily Dickinson and Flannery O'Connor, for example, Victoria Williams and Jim White, The Innocence Mission and Sixteen Horsepower. Fear and threat on the one hand, mystery and enamour on the other - the twin poles of American music (see my post here). Legends, bibles, plagues, vegetables and death, roses growing out of people's brains, lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're all in the mix. Epiphanies are songs of sin and salvation as sung by the wild, unshod, soot-covered orphans of God.     

Dark recalls an interview given by Malcolm Muggeridge in which he says:

"Let's think of the steeple and the gargoyle. The steeple is this beautiful thing reaching up into the sky admitting as it were, its own inadequacy - attempting something utterly impossible - to climb to heaven through a steeple. The gargoyle is this little man grinning and laughing at the absurd behaviour of men on earth, and those two things both built into this building to the glory of God ... [The gargoyle is] laughing at the inadequacy of man, the pretensions of man, the absolute preposterous gap - disparity - between his aspirations and his performance, which is the eternal comedy of human life. It will be so until the end of time you see ... Mystical ecstasy and laughter are the two great delights of living, and saints and clowns their purveyors, the only two categories of human being who can be relied on to tell the truth; hence, steeples and gargoyles side by side on the great cathedrals."   

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Over The Rhine - Jesus In New Orleans.

Closing the gap between beliefs and actions

Simone Weil was a French Jewess who, in the opinion of Malcolm Muggeridge, was the most luminous intelligence of the twentieth century and who was reckoned by others to have had the most powerful mind of those in her generation. She was a Marxist who experienced Christ taking possession of her. Throughout her life she sought to close the gap between her beliefs and her life.

After completing her studies, instead of becoming an academic, as those with her abilities were expected to do, she began working on the production line of a factory to identify with working people. She later fought in the Spanish Civil War, worked on the land during World War II. Each of these decisions and actions affected her health and her life later ended because, while in hospital in England, she would only eat what those in the Resistance were able to eat and, as a result, starved herself to death. She has been an inspiration to many, partly for his writings but also for the committed, and even extreme, way in which she attempted to eliminate the gap between what she believed and how she lived.

That gap is there for all of us, which is one reason why it is so important that the letter from James, of which we have heard an extract this morning, is included in the Bible. James argues that if we allow the gap between what we believe and what we do to grow too great, then our faith is dead:

“Dear friends, do you think you'll get anywhere in this if you learn all the right words but never do anything? Does merely talking about faith indicate that a person really has it? For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, "Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!" and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup—where does that get you?” “In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” (James 2. 14-17)

This letter is arguing that we must consistently re-examine the gap between what we believe and what we do in our lives because our tendency as human beings is to say the right things and then do something completely different. Our tendency can even be to deceive ourselves about the way that we live our lives. Church can be used as part of that process of deception so that, for example, we might subconsciously think that by coming to church – praying the confession, reciting the creed and so on – we have done our Christian duty and can therefore relax and be ourselves for the rest of the week before coming to church again to, in a sense, baptise our hypocrisy once again.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. I’m not saying that this is a particular fault of people here at St Johns but I am saying that it is something that applies to some extent to all Christians. At the end of the day, we generally aren’t prepared to do what Simone Weil did and die for our beliefs. Some sort of gap always exists between the demands that our faith makes of us and what we are prepared to do. That what the letter of James points out and that is perhaps what Jesus was testing out in our Gospel reading when he was so awkward with the Phoenician women. What he discovered by way of his unhelpful and discouraging responses was that her faith was not just words but was real.

One way in which we are able to re-examine our lives and the extent to which we still need to marry up our faith and our lives is through Stewardship. In thinking about Stewardship we think about the way in which we use our time and talents for God, the extent that we give financially towards God’s work plus our involvement in the community and our care of the environment. Stewardship is about going through the self-examination process of which I have been speaking together and seeing what results. Let us pray for good results as each of us re-examine our lives and actions to ensure that our faith is not dead because it continues to result in action.

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Philip Bailey - I Am Gold.

A great Catholic, writer and man

G. K. Chesterton was a Renaissance Man. A well established journalist and reviewer by the age of twenty one, he went on to publish biographies, literary and art criticism, essays, history, nonsense verse, novels, poetry, and to illustrate his verse.

Chesterton was a major influence on the shape of Christian writing in the twentieth century. He provided a model for the engaged and engaging journalist (to be followed by the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge and Tom Davies). Engaged because of the breadth of topics to which he jointly applied his pen and his faith. Engaging because of the good-humoured wit that characterised his satire and sugared the tough arguments that he doled out.

It was this combination that first caught the attention of C. S. Lewis. In Surprised by Joy Lewis makes it clear how much Chesterton's writings and, in particular The Everlasting Man (a history of mankind's spiritual progress - "[I] saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense", said Lewis), helped him become a Christian. He then took Chesterton for a model in many of his own attitudes to his faith, particularly in his combative approach to apologetics.

Another Inkling, Charles Williams, was influenced by Chesterton in his early poetry while an early novel War in Heaven draws on both The Man Who Was Thursday in its treatment of the supernatural and on Chesterton's detective priest Father Brown in the character of the Archdeacon. W. H. Auden wrote that Chesterton's Greybeards at Play "contains some of the best pure nonsense verse in English, and the author's illustrations are equally good". A whole string of topical versifying satirists - Nigel Forde, Stewart Henderson, Adrian Plass, Steve Turner - have followed in Chesterton's train down through the century.

He was criticised of course for his use of humour in explaining and defending orthodox Christianity. His defence was that fun and seriousness were not opposites and that whether "a man preaches his gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question of whether he preaches it in prose or verse. Chesterton's humour and invention was not, as Lewis noted, gratuitous but integral to his argument - "humour which is not in any way separable from the argument but is rather (as Aristotle would say) the 'bloom' on dialectic itself". He particularly valued the way in which use of the grotesque tends “to touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to the intrinsically miraculous character of the object itself”. As an example he gave the impact of seeing St Paul’s Cathedral upside down. The effect would be that we should “look at it more than we have done all the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations”. It is, he thought, the “supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to make the world stand on its head that people may look at it”.

Chesterton's imagination enabled him to understand and explain aspects of Christianity which for many had seemed impossible or naive or impossibly naive. In his biography of Saint Francis of Assisi he memorably characterised Francis as the Court Fool of the King of Paradise, who sees the world upside down and cannot see the wood for the trees. As he explores these phrases we begin to understand the way in which conversion turns our life and life itself upside down (or, as we now see from God's perspective not man's, the right way up) so that a nobleman becomes a fool (for Christ), the son of a prosperous merchant who is provided for in every way become dependent on God, and sees every part of God's creation as an individual character and brother, even the trees. In understanding Francis and his actions Chesterton inadvertently explains the inversions, metamorphoses, defiance’s of gravity and fabulous zoo of Marc Chagall's art which, like Chesterton, is imaginatively revealing the spiritual reality experienced by the likes of Francis of Assisi.

For all these qualities Chesterton fully deserves the praise awarded him by Lewis - "A great Roman Catholic, a great writer, and a great man."

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Kathleen Battle & Branford Marsalis - Come Sunday.