This is both the final of my three love letters and the final Living God blog. In the last couple of weeks I have written to London and the Church of England but I wanted to save the Cathedral until last. Thank you for following this blog. In the future I may realise that I have other things to say and so will have to reinvent a blog at some time, but until then, bless you.

Dear Southwark Cathedral

I really don’t know how to begin this letter. I have been putting off writing it because I know that it will only upset me as I begin to put into words what I feel, and I suspect, I hope, that you will feel similar things about me. After all we have been together a long time and experienced so many different things over these years. It has been wonderful, but now it’s time to part ways.

I don’t want you blaming yourself, it’s nothing that you have done. It’s me. I have got older and you deserve someone younger, someone with new, fresh ideas, someone who can take you places where you haven’t yet been . You are just so full of energy, forever young, you keep your looks, you are as beautiful as ever. When we met I was a lot slimmer, I had more hair, I was a good deal younger. But I fell in love with you as soon as I saw you – I think you knew that. Don’t get me wrong, I’d seen others like you before, beautiful churches, historic places, but there was something about you that struck me from the first encounter as very special.

The first time I saw you was from a train. I was heading from Greenwich, where I was staying with a friend, to Charing Cross. I just happened to look out of the window and there you were. You seemed close enough to touch, nestled strangely alongside the railway viaduct. Then as quickly as I’d seen you, you were gone. But a few years later I got off the train and came in. Two friends were being ordained, two women, in the first batch of priests. One was in the afternoon, the other in the evening. You’d been hard at work all day, but your spirit never flagged, your welcome never lessened. And that phrase from the Old Testament, from Jacob’s dream, came to my mind then and has stayed with me since.

‘This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’ (Genesis 28.7)

So, it was amazing when I could move down to be with you, when I could move in with you, when I could get to know you so much better, when we could spend so much time together. It’s 28 years since I came down, since I first stood at one of your altars, 24 years since I was given my own stall in your choir, 12 years since I was wedded to you as Dean. At each stage I have loved you more.

We’ve had some good times. Can you remember when we celebrated the anniversary of the Great Fire of Southwark in 2012? I had a great idea to have fireworks from your tower – and managed to block your drains with the debris. Sorry, but you did look spectacular even if the rain did overflow into the nave afterwards! What about when the bells were taken out and then brought back? Gleaming, they sat in a river of wool in the nave and then they were hauled back into the tower to ring again. Do your remember the flower festival when they dressed you in blossom and Sue Pollard joined us? Can you remember when Doorkins arrived and found as generous a welcome as I had done, and then stayed and made her home with us. And then Hodge, finding his vantage point, on the pulpit, in anyone’s chair, from where he can survey the scene.

But you also bear scars. That night, that warm early summer evening in June 2017 when terrorists struck at the people enjoying life in your shadows, killed around your walls. You were broken into, the doors blown open, you still wear the scars of the night as we all do. You kept the marks like marks of the passion. ‘These wounds I received in the house of my friends’ we said – and you keep faith with it, even bearing on your outside walls the face of local hero of that night, Wayne Marques.

I shall never forget that day when we had to lock the doors and leave you. We had been told to lockdown, lock you down. I was the last person in with the verger and I cried as I said goodbye – when would I see you again? You were sealed like a tomb, you, so full of life. But you stayed resilient and soon people from around the world began to recognise you, online, streamed, spreading the word, being yourself for an even wider audience, so that even more people would say, ‘Southwark Cathedral, you are so beautiful, so life giving’.

And The Queen, standing there at the west end, here to visit you, not for the first time but for what would be her last. She walked all round you, admiring your glass, meeting more of your friends, smiling and relaxed in such a lovely, holy place. It’s that holiness that is so special. Forget fireworks and flowers, forget cats, however cute, forget trains and river, kings and queens, it’s that holiness, that sense that you are a thin, touching place, that as T S Eliot wrote of another special place, makes everyone who enters realise

You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

We kneel and stand and sit and worship the God who incarnates the divine in place and time, in this place at this time, in our place, in our time. Somehow you hold that mystery at the heart of this great city of London, showing a good face of the Church of England, the face we wish others to see.

I can’t bear the thought of leaving you, but I have to go. Another will come and love you, I hope, but in my heart you will always have a place. I probably won’t be able to say goodbye properly but as you see me walk away hold me as you have already held me all these years and held so many who have found in you a place in which to encounter the Living God.

With love

Andrew

Living God, your life gives life to the world; live in us, live in me, may our lives reflect your life. Amen.

I promised last week that my final three blogs for ‘Living God’ would be a series of love letters. Last week I began by sharing my letter with the beautiful and ever young London. It has often been the hippest place to be, always reinventing itself yet with the dignity of a very long history that you encounter on the streets alongside the manifestations of what it means to be one of the greatest, most modern cities in the world.

My letter this week is one I have longed to send; it feels more like writing to a family member or rather a family of which I am a member.

Dear Church of England

I wanted to write to you, I perhaps should have done before now, but as they say, better late than never. You won’t remember this, but I was brought to see you at All Saints, Wigston Magna, when I was a very little baby. I was blissfully unaware, in the arms of my mum and dad, their first child, that I was even meeting you. I know you should never mention a lady’s age, but you were quite old then and your even older now! But I want to thank you for accepting me into your family and looking after me over these years. Little did that baby know just how much you would look after me; little did you know how much you would look after me.

There are some amazing people in your family and they live in some of the most amazing places. Early on, when I was a child, they all seemed as old as you, grey haired, slightly dusty, a little eccentric. But they were all very kind to me, mostly. People like Annie Looms, you will remember her, always in church, no children of her own, looking after other people’s children. People like Miss Wade, always slightly cross, ready to tell us to be quiet, drink our tea and eat our crusts. People like Mrs Freckingham, dignified, with the air of a farmer’s wife, though we were nowhere near a farm, deeply polite and solidly caring.

Then there were the priests. Fr Davies, clever, holy, a bit like a monk. Fr Green, back slapping, fag smoking. Fr Irving, charming, challenging, friendly and the first black priest I had ever seen. Fr Stephen, opening his house to the teenagers, putting the kettle on, opening the jar of instant coffee and letting us get on with it.

They were lovely days, innocent days. I knew nothing of the rows going on behind your net curtained windows. But as I got older, I became more interested in knowing more about your family and I found that you could read all the family news every week in a paper called ‘The Church Times’. Goodness, what a dysfunctional family you have! But it didn’t put me off, knowing more about you. In fact, I was so intrigued that I finally gave in to God and let you decide if I could become a priest, a minister, a vicar – and surprisingly you said, yes.

It was surprising because I was quite shy, very innocent, inexperienced, young – but you must have seen enough in me to give you confidence to let me move forward. So, I did want to thank you for having the confidence in me, when I was so untested.

They were different days, but things were being discussed, the ordination of women, new ways of worshipping, the place of people of colour in the church, how we understood sexuality. But we were also thinking about big issues beyond your walls – ‘The Church and the Bomb’, the state of our inner cities, ‘Faith in the City’. We were really engaged with ecumenical relationships, agreeing on reports about baptism, the Eucharist and ministry, reading ARCIC together, fully committed to the work of the World Council of Churches.

And then, and this must have hurt you then because I know it hurts you now, we began to fall out. It can happen in families, I know, and family rows can be terrible. But we started to fall out. But it wasn’t about nuclear weapons, or poverty in our communities, or the growing inequality in our society, it was about women and it was about gays.

Why I needed to write to you, Church of England, is because whilst I’ve had the most wonderful time as part of your family and have never really wanted to be part of any other family, it just makes me want to weep. We lost our way, we wandered off, forgetting the poor, forgetting the passion that was heard in the post-Falklands War sermon that annoyed the government – again – so much, and we just turned inward and spent our time talking about women and sex, or rather, gays, and talking to each other and not to the nation and then not really dealing with the issues but just going round and round in circles. And then we ask ourselves why the family is shrinking, why so few come to visit you now.

I know that you’re old, a bit dusty, slightly eccentric, but you are the greatest gift to this nation. I thought that as I watched you all dressed up at the coronation of King Charles III. I was so proud of you and so proud to be able to say, ‘that’s my church’, ‘that’s my family’, ‘that’s the dear old CofE at her very best.’ And millions and billions saw it. So don’t lose that moment, don’t just go back to talking about women and sex, it’s so boring and no one is interested in it, apart from your family members, no one is interested.

But they are interested in what Jesus says about truth and peace, and equality and our neighbour and the excluded and the rich and the lawyers and justice and injustice, and children and the excluded.

Don’t worry, I’m not leaving you, I love you too much for that. I love that you have been so kind to me, that you recognised something in me that God had recognised, and that you took a punt and gave me the chance and let me do so many things for you and speak to so many people in so many ways about the things that I know, deep down, are at the heart of who, of what we, what you are.

Bless you, Church of England. Draw back the nets, throw open the windows and speak to the nation and the world as I know you can do.

Your son,

Andrew

PS Loving God, fill your church with the fire of the Holy Spirit to be the church she needs to be. Amen.