Sermon: Evensong - 4 July 2010

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 4th July 2010
Service:: Evensong
Readings:: Mark 6:7-29

‘Take nothing for the journey’ – words from the sixth chapter of Mark’s Gospel. ‘Take nothing for the journey’.

On holiday in Italy I’ve been reading two quite different books, and both have given me pause for thought. One, The Tantalus and the Pelican by Nicholas Buxton is a re-examination from within his own experience of the tradition of the desert fathers, the ascetic work of the monk to find God, both from a Hindu and a Christian perspective, including spells in an Indian Ashram, as well as at Worth Abbey, so well known now through the television series. Then with the austere and almost impossible-to-live life of the Carthusians at Parkminster, not far from Horsham. There’s something about writing from within experience with all its disappointments, dead ends and cul-de-sacs, heartbreaks and re-examinations, that makes this search for God come alive in a way that an academic history of spiritual practice can never do.

The other book is also about journeys, Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance. By some strange serendipity or providence, I was looking at some of Edmund de Waal’s ceramics, now on permanent display in the new ceramic galleries at the V&A, when I stumbled upon his book at Hatchards - one after the other, what he’d made with his hands and what de Waal writes about, the importance of the hands and that which we touch. How marvellous it was that he was here the other day, Edmund de Waal, one of the great potters to receive an honorary degree from the University College of the Creative Arts at Farnham, whose degree-giving takes place here. De Waal’s book is about the terrible journey of 264 wood and ivory netsuke, none of them larger than a matchbox - the journey taken by this exquisite collection of tiny Japanese artefacts and the family who treasured it across continents and centuries, a gripping tale of war and peace, passion and loss. We already know the de Waals through the Benedictine writer and teacher, Esther de Waal, Edmund’s mother, and his father Victor de Waal, one time Dean of Canterbury.

So, two books about journeys, about leaving things behind, in the case of the de Waals and the Ephrussi family, great Jewish financiers like the Rothschilds, whose world of privilege, success and art ended in the gas chambers, and Nicholas Buxton’s journey, The Tantalus and the Pelican, about that which confines and constricts, or releases and feeds in the spiritual life, a journey of discovery made through abandonment and loss.

‘Take nothing for the journey’ comes from an interesting part of the first century in Mark’s Gospel, where the early Church is getting going. Some commentators question whether Jesus did send out the disciples during his lifetime, because their commissioning reflects the circumstances of the early Church, the Church that followed on from Jesus, but the tradition is certainly, scholars think, pre-Marken, since this picture of a mission by the disciples to some extent contradicts Mark’s own portrayal of them as far from comprehending the truth about Jesus. It was experience that led to comprehension of the truth; the experience of loss as well as the experience of gain moved the Church on. But in this early tradition, there are these beginnings, and these words, ‘Take nothing for the journey’. Such spiritual teachings: ‘Take no thought for the morrow’, ‘He who looks back is not fit for the Kingdom of God’, ‘Leave the dead to bury their dead’ are uncomfortable. They lodge in the mind, especially for those of us with responsibility for complex institutions, for the raising of the money necessary for the handing on of a tradition, and yet we are told. ‘Take nothing for the journey’.

Some of you know that I am fortunate enough to have been able to save up over the years for a little flat in London. It’s extremely small, it’s only got two rooms, and I wonder whether I can live in two – I’d prefer to have three, and then I should be satisfied. But it’s a good exercise in the years that lead to retirement, especially as I’m fortunate enough, privileged enough to live here in a house with six bedrooms, a book-lined study and books in sitting room and hall and landing and bedrooms. For sooner, rather than later, they will have to go away, as will the dining room table and chairs and the two sofas in the sitting room, and the large collection of arm chairs, and the library table and the desk in the study, and the contents of all the bedrooms, and nearly a lifetime’s collection of paintings and drawings, etchings and lithographs and icons, abstract art and art dating back to the 15^th century – it will all have to go. ‘Take nothing for the journey’.

Tudor deans sometimes had on their desk a momento mori in the shape of a skull. A modern momento mori is down-sizing, getting rid of stuff. I was amused many years ago in New York to see in a shop window a bag labelled, ‘Takes more stuff’, but the fact is that stuff gets in the way. It was taken by force from Edmund de Waal’s family and only the box of 264 wood and ivory netsuke remain. For Nicholas Buxton’s spiritual journey there’s been the personal and realised experience of much renunciation, of being forced to let go. So perhaps these words from the sixth chapter of Mark, ‘Take nothing for the journey’, point to what religion might really be about. Religion is the practice of living in such a way that we are able to let things go, and even to say goodbye. ‘Do not cling to me’, says Jesus in the story on Easter morning to the Magdalene, but Oh, how we do cling!

My holiday practice in the house in Tivoli was to sit at my desk at the beginning of each morning for a period of prayer, turning over and over a sentence or image in order to draw near to God, or to let God draw near to me. Edmund de Waal and Nicholas Buxton helped and have both led to a deeper consideration of the sixth chapter of Mark’s Gospel, and tonight’s sentence, ‘Take nothing for the journey’.

A friend I did VSO with in Borneo died a few years’ ago, and another friend, who was sitting with him at the end, said to me, ‘Alan held my hand and said, “This is goodbye”, but Jane told me she said to him, “It might be hello”’.