COLIN SEMPER

SERMON 2 of 5 – 13/01/008

THE DESCENT INTO SECULARISM

Last time in this series of addresses I said that we had diminished God to make God acceptable to a godless generation. And whilst the motive was utterly honourable, it has been a fundamental mistake.

Now – when the Archbishop of Canterbury was appointed I remember there being a kind of clamour of disunity. Is the person to be left of centre, right of centre, liberal, conservative, New Labour, New Tory, balanced on the role of women, on homosexuality – and so on. Whereas my response was, and is, we need a person touched by God who radiates a distinctive Christian holiness, who can influence that secret place that we all carry about with us, with an inspiration that can affect our lives, our society, the way we behave, the way we pray, the way we love. The late Cardinal Hume was such as person. I knew him a bit; we used to go to Books Etc. on Victoria St. I did not agree with everything Cardinal Hume said or did. But that doesn’t matter. If you had asked him to describe the distinctive spiritual life of the Christian, he would have been able to do it because he lived it. I don’t live it – well, not like him – but I think I know what it is and, ever so briefly, I would like to describe it. Why? Because over recent years, we have allowed that it has been edged out of the way by the New Age Movement.

The New Age Movement is a portmanteau term, an umbrella. It covers a whole range of interests of body, mind and spirit, as Waterstones says. Health and well being, therapies and self help, concerns for humanity, the environment, respect for nature and the nature of wisdom. Whether it’s reflexology, or aromatherapy, or kinesiology or acupressure, New Age practitioners believe that there is a different way to be which is life enhancing – that we have more potential than we are realising – and, most important this – it’s only by changing ourselves that society as a whole can be transformed. So the key is self-realisation.

Now, with every bit of authority I can muster – in the Christian spiritual life we don’t do it. God does it. And God gives it to us for nothing. God is the reward. St Paul said – the life I now live is not my life but the life that Christ lives in me. So what I saw in Father Basil Hume in Books Etc. was God in him, living in him. St. Teresa of Avila, a wonderfully down to earth woman, said - we need no wings to go in search of God, but have only to find a place where we can sit alone and look upon God present within us. Or the magical words of St. Augustine – O Beauty ever ancient, ever new. Too late have I loved you. I was outside and you were within me. And I never found you, until I found you within myself.

So – do you hear this basic principle. I am not saying that reflexology won’t help you, or the great edifice of yoga. I am saying that the myriad of self-realisation rituals have drowned out the basic spiritual life of the Christian. And the basic principle of the Christian life is that God is given into our hearts because, in the bible, it is only when the heart of a person is touched, burned by fire, that the Christian life is in its proper stride. Nothing else can save you from yourself. Did not our hearts burn within us, said the disciples on the road to Emmaus. My heart was strangely warmed, said Wesley. Jeremiah at a pivotal moment in the Old Testament had God saying – I will put my law in their inward parts and in their heart will I write it.

Now, we go just one step more this morning and say that if God gives the gift, silence is the vehicle which carries it into the innermost centre of our being. There, the God-in-me, the Holy Spirit we say in the Christian tradition, broods over the waters of my chaos just like the spirit brooded over the waters of chaos at the foundation of the world. So tension is released, the nerves relax perhaps, there is greater balance, egotism and prejudices melt away – there is greater compassion, serenity and, yes, a greater social awareness. It is a kind of British disease which says the spiritual struggle is somehow useless in the public domain. As Dag Hammerskjold said – the more faithfully you listen to the voice within you the better you will hear what is sounding outside.

But it is a lifelong work. St. Paul said – these are the things that God has revealed to me through the spirit, for the spirit reaches the depths of everything, even the depths of God.

Let me leave a final word from someone you might not think of in this context, Henry Longfellow.

Let us then labour for an inward stillness

That inward stillness where the lips and heart

Are still, and we no longer entertain

Our own imperfect thoughts and vain opinions

But God alone speaks in us, and we

Wait in singleness of heart, that we may

Know His work, and in the silence of

Our spirits, that we may do his will,

And do that only.

Amen