The significance of a chair

It was good be at the Installation of Bishop Alan Hopes as Fourth Bishop of East Anglia on Tuesday. What a magnificent Cathedral they have in East Anglia; it’s hard to believe it was built just to be a parish church.

The heart of an episcopal ‘installation’ is just that: you install the bishop, you put him where he is meant to be, like a household appliance or a new piece of computer software.

The ‘place’ where he is meant to be is the cathedra, the bishop’s chair, which signifies his authority as the chief shepherd and teacher within the diocese. A cathedral, remember, is not just the biggest or most beautiful church in a diocese, but the one that contains the cathedra; and in Rome, for example, it is therefore St John Lateran and not St Peter’s.

The photo shows Archbishop Vincent Nichols addressing Bishop Alan just after he has been led to the cathedra.

This text gives you a flavour of this central moment:

The Archbishop leads the Bishop-Elect to the cathedra and says:

In the name of God, I, Vincent Nichols, Archbishop and Metropolitan of Westminster, do install you, Alan Hopes, Bishop in this Church of East Anglia. May our Lord Jesus Christ watch over you now and always.

The Archbishop installs the Bishop in the cathedra.

The Archbishop presents him with the Book of the Gospels saying:

Bishop Alan, receive this Book of the Gospels and preach the Word of God to the Church of East Anglia, teaching always with zeal and love.

The Archbishop then presents the Crozier to Bishop Alan saying:

Bishop Alan, at the wish of the Holy Father, Pope Francis, you have assumed the pastoral charge of the Church of East Anglia. I hand you this Crozier, the sign of the shepherd’s office and ministry. May the Lord sustain you in your care for the people of the Diocese.

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Faith is meant to transform the culture and not just use it

Every month in the seminary we have a Day of Recollection: a brief moment of silence and retreat, from supper on Friday until the Vigil Mass on Saturday evening. It’s not a long time, but it means that we are forced to put the brakes on every few weeks, even in the middle of a busy term; and a lot can happen in 24 hours if you really give yourselves over to the silence, the times of Office and Exposition in the chapel, and the reflections that are offered by the retreat giver.

Last weekend we had Fr Christopher Jamison lead the Recollection, the Benedictine monk from Worth Abbey who is now Director of the National Office for Vocation. I won’t even try to summarise the talks he gave (which connected the writings of Cassian and the Desert Fathers and Mothers with our own spiritual lives). A number of thoughts stayed with me, including what seemed to be a throwaway line about St Teresa of Avila.

Fr Christopher was talking about the famous ‘different ways of collecting water’ metaphor in the Autobiography of St Teresa. And just by way of background, he spoke about how he had come to know the Autobiography not as a monk, but when he was an undergraduate studying Spanish at Oxford. Why was this masterpiece of the spiritual life on the curriculum at a secular university? Because, he explained, it was the first major literary work in Spain to use the ordinary language of ordinary people to describe the everyday occurrences of ordinary life. OK, you can hardly call St Teresa of Avila ‘ordinary’; but the autobiography, as well as being a guide to the mystical life, is one of the clearest, funniest, wisest, most honest and compelling accounts of what it is simply to be human, to get through a life, to get through a day. And – this is the point – it was one of the first.

Her faith, in other words, didn’t just use one element of the culture to communicate itself, it almost singlehandedly created a new form of culture, a new genre, to express something that couldn’t be expressed in any other way. It’s like St Mark (if he was the first!) deciding to write a ‘gospel’ when there was no such thing as a gospel before then. It’s like the Cathedral builders of the Middle Ages searching for new forms of architecture that could express the Christian mystery in ways it had never been expressed before.

These people, and many more (please add your own examples from other centuries) were not just using the culture, they were transforming it; they were inventing new forms of culture in order to communicate the faith that had already transformed their own hearts and vision.

We often talk as Christians about being more engaged with contemporary culture, or about allowing the Christian culture we have inherited to have a greater influence on the culture of the contemporary world. The harder and more interesting question, however, is whether it is possible for us today to create new forms of culture in order to express and share our faith. What are some examples today? What are the signs or even the seeds of this renewal?

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