It has been a tough week in Southwark. A week to look for God, if not always to find God easily. Amid much else, events have made me stop and consider the ways I've had my own gaze turned towards God across the years.
No big unmistakable miracles, nor encounters on the Damascus road for me, but often the silent gospel of a life lived according to the law of love, and so often heaven brought close through the compelling power poetry or of music in worship.
I was a teenager when I served as Head Chorister in my school choir, directed by John Walker. We singers adored him forming our own community around him as he helped us to use our gifts to make the intoxicating magic of choral music.
JW was loud, funny (often sharing very slightly naughty jokes to the delight of his teenage audience) and deliciously irreverent about many of the trappings of life in a minor public school. He must have been an impossible colleague at times, causing the Headmaster many a sleepless night for some of the self same reasons his choristers loved him. Expansive both in girth and hospitality he was generous in all things but was utterly serious about only two: the pursuit of excellence in music for worship and (though he rarely spoke of this directly) the love of the God to whom our worship pointed.
The morning after my father died he changed the music list for the school Eucharist so our anthem was Jesu joy of man's desiring ."You'll need Bach", he said.
Looking back, those two years singing for John were among the most formative of my life as he gave me a gift that has endured ever since....of looking beyond the music to the beauty of God that inspired it. I'm not the only one of his singers to find myself ordained...
This week here at Southwark we are all reeling under the shock of the sudden, death on holiday in Austria, of our own director of music Ian Keatley. This morning I find myself reflecting on the ways in which Ian's passion for music, his perfectionism, his utter focus in worship will have impacted those who sang for him.
To watch him conducting, to see the chemistry between him and the choristers, was to see what Irenaeas described as "the glory of God, a human being fully alive". To hear the excellence he drew from them time and time again was to find yourself arriving on holy ground even on a gloomy evening in a near empty cathedral. Of course I will treasure memories of his grand occasions, the installation of Dean Mark, my first Southwark Easter, the extraordinary diocesan festival which crammed the nave with choirs from near and far for a glorious Choral Evensing extraordinaire. I'll never forget his last service, when the Cathedral Singers led Evensong for the Church Commissioners: fabulous music, flawlessly performed and comp,iments flowing as generously as the champagne afterwards.
But I'll treasure too the random moments: meeting him in the link leading the boys choir back to the Song School from their Sunday lunch he stopped them dead and demanded they offer "Three cheers for the Precentor!"...the times when our meetings ended in gales of helpless laughter...his kindness when I fluffed the Responses.
And my strongest memory: standing in the quire after the 1st lesson on a day when a tummy big meant that Ian had suggested the unthinkable: that he might pass on conducting Evensong to his second in command. That didn't happen. Come 5.25 he was there with the choir for inevitably his longing to be with his singers outweighed any vestigial queasiness. As I watched I could seee him drawing energy and strength from being in the centre of their music, the way his focus on each singer brought out the best in them, even when they were uncertain they had a "best" to give.
He was so very alive, and this made the rest of us more alive as well, as Ian used his gifts that the music might throw open windows onto heaven
So...we are shocked, bereft, but deeply grateful to have travelled with him across holy ground in the worship of the place he loved, and in the service of the God he loved.
In that light we dare to look forward too.
So listen...to words from poet Stuart Henderson, that look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come
this day in paradise
new feet are treading through
high halls of gold
this day in paradise
new legs are striding over jewelled fields in which
the diamond
is considered ordinary
this day in paradise
new eyes have glimpsed the deep fire ready
to flame the stale earth pure
this day in paradise
new blood, the rose red juice that gushed at golgotha
now ripples and races down the pure veins
of a recently arrived beloved
this day in paradise
a new heart pounds in praise
a new body shaped by sacrifice
this day in paradise
the daunting dart of death
has no point
no place
and no meaning
and whilst we mourn and weep
through these human hours
this day in paradise
the blazing embrace
between saviour and son goes on and on and on..
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