Sixth Sunday After Trinity - Evensong - The Canon Chancellor

When I was a teenager a school friend of mine died very suddenly. And many years later, her mother published her daughter’s diary – which she had kept through all her teenage years. As I had been a close friend, it was no surprise that I featured in the diary from time to time. What was most disconcerting on reading it, however, was what my friend said about me! It wasn’t that she painted a wholly different picture of me, but certainly, the person I thought I was, was not quite the same person she thought I was.

Reading her diary opened my eyes to just how differently other people perceive us. We think we know ourselves, we think we behave in certain ways, we think we come across in a certain way – but we can never be too sure. To a certain extent, our vision and our understanding of ourselves is clouded, as is our understanding of those around us.  Getting to the real essence of who we are and who other people are is really quite difficult.

The story of Joseph, which we heard a part of in our first reading this evening, is a classic biblical tale of deception and duplicity, where the characters’ ideas about what is going on is clouded and misunderstood. In the chapters that precede this evening’s extract, we learn that Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery as a way of disposing of him because they couldn’t cope with the jealousy and envy they had for him. They pretended to their father that his beloved son Joseph, their brother, was dead.

Later when Joseph’s brothers experience famine in their homeland and come to Egypt to buy food, they have no idea that the man now standing before them as governor is in fact Joseph, the brother they sold to the Egyptians many years ago.  And so they continue with their story, almost having convinced themselves of it, that one brother is no more. When Joseph tests them, accusing them of being spies in the land, the brothers have huge trouble satisfying him that their need of food is genuine and that they are not there to spy.  It’s only when Joseph temporarily imprisons them, and they begin to meet the various conditions he places upon them, that they become aware of their past sins and the damage they have caused to their brother and their father.

And despite the wrong that has been done him, Joseph manages to keep his vision unclouded – he can see the brothers for who they really are – beloved brothers and children of God – albeit marred by sin and shame. And so he works to draw them into greater self-awareness, and true repentance, eventually restoring them to himself and to God. But even Joseph’s actions at times are difficult to understand until all is revealed at the end of the story.

All this goes to say that human beings are complex – and we very often act on the basis of misunderstanding, or mixed motives, we go by half truths and very limited vision at times.

And we very often we need guidance to help us to see ourselves for who we really are, under our layers of self-deception, so that our true selves may be revealed, so that our motives and our dealings with one another may be more true and authentic.

I’ve recently been reading some of the Starbridge series by Susan Howatch – if you’ve not heard of it, it’s a series of novels about the Church of England, set in a fictional cathedral city spanning the 1930s-1960s. It contains all the usual people – a bishop, deans, canons, a monk, and various other characters that together create a compulsive network of plot and intrigue.

What’s striking about these novels however is not so much the content – although the author weaves a good story – but the way in which her characters each undergo their own journey of discovery which reveals to them the truth about themselves. Howatch works on the premise that behind a character’s outward appearance and outward behaviour, is a hidden self, a truer self. The outer layer is like a protective shell, hardened by the hurts and trauma of life, and created to cope with all the changes and chances encountered –  it's the self we very often put on to face the world.

Beneath the hard shell, which is good at keeping up appearances and performing particular roles as required, is a self that’s in need of healing and repentance, and love, and attention.

Cleverly, as she tells the story of Starbridge and its comings and goings, Howatch enables each character to discover that they are not what they thought they were. That they don’t have to keep wearing their outer shell to please others, that they don’t have to keep up appearances in order to get through life. There is, as we see, in the lives of the characters, a better way, a truer way.

Her central character in the first book, is a young successful priest called Charles. He’s a protégé of the Archbishop of Canterbury and is sent by him to visit a prominent bishop to suss out whether there is anything going on in the bishop’s household that might create a scandal should it reach the public eye.

Charles dutifully goes off to stay with the bishop, under the guise of doing some study in the cathedral library, but all the while conducting his investigation into the bishop’s private life and curious domestic arrangements. But as Charles uncovers more and more about the bishop and his household, he finds that his own life is intrinsically linked to the lives of those he’s investigating, and he begins to unravel emotionally and mentally. He becomes so wrapped up in the strange goings on at the palace, that he has a complete breakdown.

And it’s only then, under the wise direction of a monk who sees him on a daily basis for spiritual counselling, that Charles can begin to make sense of his life, and the dark corners of his spirit, and begin to understand why he reacts and behaves the way he does, why he feels he has to keep putting on a false self to hide the real person inside.

The result is, of course, that Charles comes out of the ordeal much better than he went in, and the careful direction of the monk enables him to approach life and the people with whom he must interact, in a more honest and fruitful way, without the trappings of self-deceit, and eventually we see Charles completely remade in the knowledge of God’s love.

The 14th C English mystic, Walter Hilton wrote on the spiritual life, and he was particularly concerned with the reformation not just of our faith but our feelings also.  ‘Wretched is the man or woman’, he said, ‘who abandons the inward guarding of the heart to concentrate on cultivating only the outward appearance of virtue.’ In other words – what we are on the outside needs to be a true projection of who we are on the inside, otherwise we shall find ourselves wearing all kinds of masks and costumes, deceiving not just those around us, but most of all ourselves.

It’s the same thing that Paul is guarding the Corinthians against when he warns them, ‘If you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons…you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Or are we provoking the Lord…Are we stronger than he?’

Paul calls for integrity inside and out – in the inner spiritual life, and in the outworking of that life in society and in practice, in our hearts and in our outward habits. But it’s not something we can achieve in our own strength – rather it is God working in us, drawing us closer to his love and his creative spirit through the circumstances of our lives.

When Charles, the priest in the Starbridge novels, reaches a crisis point, and is rescued by the wise monk, he says to him, I’ve prayed and prayed for help. And the monk replies – then your prayers are being answered.

Charles responds – I’ve broken down so utterly that I’m unable to continue as a clergyman, and you say this is God answering my prayers?

Of course, replies the monk. Do you think God’s been unaware of your difficulties and the suffering you’ve endured? And do you think he is incapable of reaching out at last to bring you face to face with your troubles so that you can surmount them and go on to serve him far better than you ever served him before?

He’s come to your rescue at last. And here in this house, here in this room where you’ve hit rock bottom, here’s where your new life finally begins.

Our hope is not in our ability to remake ourselves, but in the faithfulness of God, and in Christ who makes all things new.