Remembering Edith Thompson

Address at University College London on the 90th anniversary of Edith's death

9 January 2013


For about 20 years now a service of remembrance has been held on this day at St Barnabas, Manor Park, Edith’s parish church, where she and Percy were married in 1916. It was while I was there as a student on placement that I first encountered her story. Parish churches have a particular role in English culture, as they are there, available, for the wider community, of all faiths and none, as well as for the congregation of worshippers. They are historic buildings, visible signs of continuity, places which hold the memory of a locality.

Remembering is about giving life, like putting back together a body, re-membering. It is about finding our place, our membership, in the community of narrative. Just as the Eucharist, the central act of Christian worship, for which parish churches were built, is an act of remembrance, anamnesis, not forgetting.

People remember because they are concerned about keeping faith with the truth. By truth I don’t simply mean empirical facts, though those are important, things like the evidence in a trail and the verdict of a court. I mean a commitment and attention to the truth of the human person, the profound and mysterious identity which stands before us and yet which eludes reduction to mere data. Each human person is unique, unrepeatable, a world of possibility and a depth of mystery. And that unknowability is perhaps part of what is meant when the Book of Genesis says that human beings are created “in the image of God”.

Attention to the truth of the person matters because it is so often obscured and forgotten, and when that happens the person herself is in danger. Would it have been possible, I wonder, to have hanged Edith Thompson if her character had not first been blackened, if she had not been reduced from the mystery of a person to the merely empirical mask of an immoral adulteress?

The anthropologist René Girard has I think contributed greatly to our understanding of how the mask of myth comes to obscure the truth of the person. According to Girard, human desire is mimetic, that is we imitate – unconsciously – one another’s desires. So I and the person I am imitating will desire the same thing, and if we can’t both have it we are in danger of rivalry, and even of conflict and violence, for desire is never static, and forgetting the original object of rivalry shifts into a mutual obsession of the rivals themselves. This triangular nature of desire is well known, but Girard’s genius lay in showing how these triangles join up, how desire and rivalry can spread through the interconnecting networks of a wider group, a whole society. 

And if a whole society is threatened by its own violence, mimesis produces another phenomenon: the scapegoat. The mimesis of the group resolves itself against a convenient victim, all against one. The violence that threatened the group is defused by being unleashed against someone who, crucially, has to be seen by the group as deserving what they get. So, classically, scapegoats are held guilty of taboo breaking crimes, of offending the gods, of bringing the plague, of mysterious and impossible poisonings, and so on. The key thing is that they must seem to be completely different from the group. The truth of their human identity – that they are actually just the same as everyone else – has to be obscured for mimesis to do its unconscious work.

In Edith’s story I think we can see both these things going on: both the triangularity of desire and its disastrous consequences, and the escalation to her designation as the scapegoat, the descent of the veil of myth over the truth of the person. Before the court she became a different kind of being, removed to the other side of a boundary of taboo where, somehow, death did not appear as violence but as justice.

Girard himself, having been an agnostic, became a Christian once he had read the Bible, for he realised that the Bible generally doesn’t do this. Unlike the other ancient texts he had studied, the violence in the Bible – and there is a great deal of it – is not disguised, the humanity of the victim never quite disappears from view. This is perhaps most obvious in the crucifixion of Jesus. The whole scapegoat mechanism is in plain view: the murderous mimesis of the mob, the accusation of blasphemy, the ritual boundary of separation outside the city wall, the actual innocence of the victim, the unconsciousness of his killers. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” What it all amounted to was a denial of truth. Jesus, on trial for his life before Pontius Pilate, said that he had come into the world to bear witness to the truth, and Pilate had replied, “truth - what is that?”, before washing his hands of the whole notion.

Avis Graydon also came to faith after her sister’s death, and remained devout for the rest of her life. It was Avis who requested that there be an annual Mass offered for members of the Graydon family on the anniversary of Edith’s death. 

But of course it is not only Christians or religious believers who wish to remember Edith, to keep her story alive. Attention to the truth of the person is fundamentally about recognising our common humanity. It is about resisting the veil of myth that tries to reduce a person to a scapegoat. The deaths of Percy, Edith and Freddie were acts of absurdity, a denial of meaning, a turning away from the truth of the person. 

And such denials and absurdities have not ceased. The death penalty persists in many parts of the world, and we cannot afford to be complacent about it never coming back here. It worries me that we have a government which likes making noises about unravelling our commitment to European Law and human rights. It worries me that in December British subject Lee Aldhouse was extradited to Thailand to face a murder charge apparently without the UK authorities first obtaining the usual assurances that the death penalty would not be sought. It worries me that our government wants to bring in a law to allow homeowners to kill intruders, the Prime Minister announcing the plan to the applause of his party conference and saying, “When that burglar crosses your threshold, invades your home, threatens your family, they give up their rights”. 

As a Christian priest I am someone who remembers a particular narrative, who interprets the world through the story of a particular person who was betrayed and handed over to death. Christians place that narrative in a framework of faith because we believe that it did not end with the killing of the victim on Good Friday, that after human violence had done its  perennial worst something new, unlooked for and wholly creative entered the world. For Christians the resurrection points to a creative principle behind the universe which simply will not give up on us; it is an assurance that absurdity will not win in the end, that the truth of the person will not finally be lost, that the human project will not ultimately fail.

I would like to suggest that that leads us to a common ground, whether or not we happen to identify with a particular religious narrative. Believers view the project of creation as embracing the whole cosmos and everyone in it - not just the minority with a religious outlook. And it seems to me that, whatever one’s faith, to be attentive to the truth of the person entails rejecting absurdity and the denial of meaning. It is to be committed to a true humanism which affirms that each person is unique, unrepeatable, and profoundly mysterious, and that therefore each person actually matters. It is to keep faith with the truth. And that, I would suggest, is reason enough for us all to remember.

Sermon at Parish Mass, Epiphany 2013

Isaiah 60:1-6

Ephesians 3:2-3a, 5-6

Matthew 2:1-12

The TV quiz programme “QI” sometimes has some trick questions to which no-one knows the answer, such as “how can you tell the age of a lobster?” and “what do the signal bars on your mobile phone mean?”.  The contestants can win extra points if they spot this and wave their “nobody knows” card. 

Another “nobody knows” question that could be asked is, “who were the Magi?” We meet them, of course, today, the feast of the Epiphany, and we know what they did in their brief appearance in St Matthew’s Gospel. But Matthew just says that they were Magi, magoi in Greek, without explaining what that means. He says that they came, literally, from “the land of the sunrise”, which is poetic, but doesn’t actually locate them anywhere. The land of the sunrise is like the end of the rainbow: however far east you travel, it’s always further still. He also doesn’t say how many there were - the idea that there were three of them is surmised from the fact that there were three gifts. And he certainly doesn’t say that they were kings.

So these Magi, these visitors from the land of the sunrise, are quite mysterious. They must have been wise, scholarly, well versed in astronomy, and with the means to undertake a long journey carrying expensive gifts. And that’s about all the clues we have. They could have been priests or astrologers from Persia or Babylon. But they could equally have come from  almost anywhere else. And perhaps that’s the point. The Magi represent the whole gentile world, the whole world outside Judaism, with all its richness, learning, and wisdom. 

Quite early on the tradition of the Church amplified the story of the Magi to make this point. In art, we usually see them as men of three different races, representing the three known continents of the time: Europe, Asia and Africa. Quite often, too, one is old, one young, and one middle aged. They were assigned exotic foreign-sounding names - in Western tradition those that stuck were Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, but other parts of the church have different names. The Magi are very inclusive! The very mystery that surrounds them makes them universal. 

They are outsiders - people from beyond Judaism, outside the covenant and the law of Sinai - and yet they receive a sign from heaven calling them in to the heart of all that the law and the covenant mean, into the heart of God’s revelation of himself. They represent all the longings and insights of every culture and race, converging on Jesus. They are drawn out of themselves by the mystery of Christ’s birth, only to find themselves on the inside after all, at the heart of the mystery that called to them from afar.

And they are called to worship. That is the most important thing that the Magi do. Before they present their gifts, they worship the Christ child. They fall down before him and worship. 

The Magi are called out of themselves, out of their familiar world, to seek Christ, and worship him. And these mysterious outsiders stand for all of us. The vocation of all human beings is to be drawn out of ourselves into the mystery of God. The journey of the Magi represents our own interior journey, our fundamental orientation as created beings - to go beyond the boundaries of our ‘self’, so that we can truly find ourselves in God. And it is also, paradoxically, a journey into unity, just as the Magi gathered at the crib represent all nations gathered into one in Christ. It is a journey which seems to have two directions, which are really one: into the mystery of God, and into unity in Christ.

For Christians this is expressed above all in the worship of the Church, the liturgy that we celebrate day by day and week by week. Our corporate worship reminds us both that we are drawn together as one people, united in Christ, and that we are called beyond ourselves into the mystery of God. 

This is realised above all in the Mass, the Eucharist, which is the one act of worship we have received from Christ, “do this in remembrance of me”. Although a priest or bishop presides, Christ himself is the true celebrant at every Eucharist, his real presence is at its heart. The Eucharist is the highest worship we can offer, for in it we are united with Christ in his own offering of himself, his eternal and perfect worship of the Father. 

It is in the Eucharist above all that we see the two directions of worship, like the two directions of the Magi’s journey. We are gathered together in one, made one Body in Christ through the sacrament of his Body - not just this congregation gathered here today, but every Eucharistic community throughout time and space, all are one body, one Church.  

And the Eucharist also points us beyond ourselves into the mystery of God, into the very worship of the Trinity that the Son offers to the Father in the Holy Spirit. In the Eucharist every human group is broken open and made partakers in the cosmic mystery in which we worship with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven. 

All the apostolate and service of the Church flows from this worship, from partaking in the life of the Trinity. Just as the Magi bowed down in worship, and then offered their gifts, so too the Church lives a life of service and self-giving in the world because we draw that service and self-giving from the heart of the worship of God. It is a grave mistake to see the Church as a human group committed to social activism first, and worship second. The Divine worship given to us in the Eucharist is fundamentally what we are about; everything else flows from that.

The two directions of worship are expressed physically and symbolically in how we celebrate the Eucharist. The use of set liturgies, holy days, vestments, forms that have been hallowed for centuries, are not actually part of Christ’s commandment to us, but remind us that the Eucharist is something we do not devise ourselves. It is worship that comes to us from beyond us, that we receive and enter into. 

And the adornments of worship, music, incense, lights, images, all speak to us of the transcendent, our worship drawing us beyond ourselves into the mystery of God. But at the same time we gather together to celebrate the Eucharist as the people of God, joining in the assembly with our brothers and sisters every Lord’s day.

As you may have noticed, during Christmastime we have rearranged the sanctuary and have been celebrating Mass facing East, in the older tradition of the Church. This is a temporary arrangement, partly occasioned through the way we have had to use our limited space at this season. But it does help to remind us of the transcendence of our worship. As we pray we all stand facing the same way, facing East, the sunrise, the symbolic direction of the resurrection. This helps to remind us that our worship calls us beyond ourselves, from out of the closed group into the mystery of God. 

And when the altar is back and we celebrate in our more usual way, with the clergy facing the people, we will be reminded more of being gathered together into one in Christ. 

But whichever way we arrange the sanctuary, we need to bear in mind that both things are always going on: our worship draws us out of ourselves into God, and at the same time draws us together into the unity of the Body of Christ. Our worship would be impoverished if we forget one or the other. 

This feast of the Epiphany, at the beginning of a new year, is a good day to commit ourselves afresh to offering the best we can in intelligent and lively participation in this greatest act of worship. Christ calls us, like the Magi, to seek him and worship him, so that we can be drawn into the very life of God, and at the same time discover our unity with one another in Christ. This is our fundamental vocation as human beings. The Church worships in Christ, with heaven, and on behalf of all creation, so that in God’s purposes all things may find their fulfilment in his Kingdom.

Parish Bulletin, Christmas 2012

As I write the second TV series Merlin is currently showing on Saturdays. Its retelling of Arthurian myth has both ancient and modern elements; set in a world of magic, mystery and high adventure, it uses this backdrop to explore issues of our own time: pluralism, belonging, the place of the individual in society. But something is missing from the tale: faith. There are plenty of references to the “old religion” of magic and druidism and the spirits of nature, but none to any “new” religion. There is no church or cross or image of a saint anywhere in sight, nor any mention of any belief system other than the forbidden arts of magicians. The BBC’s Camelot, it seems, is a secular realm in which faith has been sidelined and the spiritual is mistrusted, a metaphor perhaps for our own age whose inchoate spiritual longings seem at odds with any too confident public expression of faith. 

The Arthurian myths became popular, formulated into epic poems, in the high middle ages and then, too, explored issues of their own time. In retelling the stories of a past golden age these poems were commentaries on their contemporary society, but unlike Merlin are rich in Christian symbolism and insight. In an age of violence and aggression, it is Christ and the saints who inspire the best actions of the characters, and the chivalry of the knights, which could have been a violent ‘code of honour’, is reinterpreted as the heroic quest for the Christian virtues. And yet, alongside these, is a world of pre-Christian belief, of magic and ‘faerie’, of wizards and nature spirits who somehow seem to have carried on existing in this Christian narrative.

The mediaeval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the great stories of Arthurian myth. It begins with the celebration of Christmas at Camelot. There is feasting and merriment:

For there the feast was unfailing full fifteen days,

with all meats and all mirth that men could devise,

such gladness and gaiety as was glorious to hear…

With all the bliss of the world they abode together,

the knights most renowned after the name of Christ,

and the ladies most lovely that ever life enjoyed.

(From JRR Tolkien’s translation, Unwin, 1975.)

But, too, there is Christian worship, the very reason for the feast:

When the king was there come with his courtiers to the hall,

and the chanting of the choir in the chapel had ended,

with loud clamour and cries both clerks and laymen

Noel announced anew, and named it full often.

Into this scene comes the Green Knight, an extraordinary apparition, with green skin, green beard, green clothes and on a green horse. He sets a challenge to the knights, taken up by Sir Gawain, who then has to seek out the Green Knight a year later, in his ‘green chapel’ in the forest. His quest sets him many challenges rich in Christian meaning and symbolism.

The Green Knight is almost certainly the ‘Green Man’, a mysterious figure, half man, half tree, found carved in many mediaeval churches. He is probably a survival of a pre-Christian nature deity, a symbol of rebirth, herald of the return of spring and new growth. His appearance in churches, and in Christian-framed narratives such as Sir Gawain, has puzzled some. Should he really be there? Nor is he the only reminder of a pre-Christian age. Across our country, customs such as well dressing and maypoles remind us of folk history and instinctive beliefs that go back long before the coming of Christianity.

The feast of Christmas was instituted by the Church around the fourth century to mark the birth of Christ, but it builds on a pre-Christian celebration. December 25 was chosen to mark the birth of Christ as this was already a day of feasting marking the winter solstice, “Yule” as it was known in northern Europe. This celebration in the depths of winter of the imminent return of the sun and new life was deemed appropriate for the birth of the Son of God, the light of the world and the creator of life. But many of the customs of Yule continued. Holly and ivy, evergreen in the midst of winter, and representing masculine and feminine principles, were revered by the Celts; and were later given a Christian symbolism in carols. They are still used to decorate our homes and places of worship at the time of the solstice.

The old Yule had celebrated creation and the insight that this was a divine gift. But it did not say much about what the ‘divine’ might actually be like. The fear that the gods might turn out to be cruel, capricious or uncaring still lingered.  But in the birth of Jesus a new light shone into the world: God dwelling among us as a vulnerable child, showing that God is love by enacting that love in a human life. In WH Auden’s long poem For the Time Being the angels, announcing the birth of Jesus to the shepherds, sing:

After today 

The children of men 

May be certain that 

The Father Abyss 

Is affectionate 

To all Its creatures, 

All, all, all of them.

St Paul, speaking to the philosophers of Athens in Acts chapter 17, asserts that God is not far from anyone, for “in him we live and move and have our being”. That insight seems to be common to all times and cultures. But in the birth of Jesus we see so much more.  His coming into the world is God’s revelation of himself, what we could not have known with certainty from nature alone: that God is personal, that he loves us, and has created us so that we can share in his divine nature forever in heaven. 

Jesus, born for us in our world, is both the face of God turned towards humanity and the face of humanity turned towards God. He is the meeting place, where earth touches heaven, where human lives touch their ultimate meaning; and he shows that the nature of that meeting is love.

This is what the poets of the old Arthurian myths knew, but the modern scriptwriters of Merlin seem to have forgotten. The old insights and mysteries and celebrations of pre-Christian days are not annulled by the coming of Christ, but find their place in a larger picture and a greater light. The gift of creation, as it were, turns out to have a gift tag on it, and it reads: “from your Father, with love”.

So, this Christmas, enjoy that gift: food and wine, feasting and merriment, friends and family. Enjoy the crisp frost under foot of a walk in the countryside or through a park, and look out for a Green Man if you happen to be visiting any old churches. Enjoy the long dark nights, knowing they will soon give way to the growing light and springtime in the cycle of the seasons, of death and rebirth. But I hope you will also celebrate the birth of Christ, the light of the world, the Word of the Father through whom all things were made, born in time in substance of our flesh, Jesus, the Redeemer and Lord of all creation. 

My very best wishes for a merry Christmas and a happy New Year to you all.

Father Matthew