A Sermon preached in Blackburn Cathedral for Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Blackburn
27 June 2008
Let me begin with music. I once saw part of a class given by the legendary French music teacher, Nadia Boulanger. In it she made a remark which has always stayed with me. She said, “If we wish to understand music, we must learn the rules. If we wish to write music, we must forget the rules.”
She was right. If we wish to appreciate more fully the genius of Haydn or Beethoven or Benjamin Britten it helps to have some awareness of what technical skills they have brought to their work. That is why music students spend hours learning to harmonize chorales in the style of Bach, and so on.
Now I’m misleading you slightly because music, like every other kind of art, does not actually have rules. What it has is the accumulated practical wisdom of those who have gone before us, and we learn the techniques they found effective. That does not mean that composers will simply imitate earlier musicians, but they learn what they did to save the bother of having to invent it for themselves.
What I’m talking about is what we call Tradition, and tradition is the handing on of knowledge and skills from one generation to another. But it’s more than that, and in this Founders’ Day service we’re asked, among other things, to consider tradition.
Tradition is one of those excellent words which in recent years has been given a bad press. (The word elite is another example). By some process which I don’t fully understand, to say that something or someone is traditional now implies that they are stuck in the mud, or wedded to pointless conventions and unwilling to move into the future. The fact that this meaning has been foisted upon the word Tradition ought to make us uneasy, because it should indicate to us that something important is being lost.
I said that Tradition was more than just handing on knowledge and skills, and so it is. Tradition is that process by which we are linked with our past. Tradition gives us roots. It gives us a sense of where we’ve come from. Let me give you an example from my own childhood. I come from Manchester (and proud of it), and I can recall those streets like Coronation Street where you might find members of one family – Grandma, Mum and Dad, children, your sisters and your cousins and your aunts – all living within a few minutes’ walk from each other. The strength of this situation was that the extended family members had a strong sense of their past. There would be endless stories about relatives long dead and gone, but still part of the family memory.
Most of that has disappeared. Families now fragment quickly and do not stay rooted to the spot. To move away from you background to find greater opportunities is no doubt good, but it brings losses as well as gains. Your sense of being part of a continuing tradition is weakened, and what is true for families is true of wider community. We seem now to be a society which in a disturbing way is losing its grip on a sense of how we have come to be where we are. Our age of instant information, instant gratification and instant communication can too easily distract us from our roots, and when that happens we become increasingly a free-floating collection of individuals with nothing much from past collective experience to support us.
Last week there died a priest who was not only one of the Church’s greatest scholars but one of the greatest scholars in the world. That great man, Professor Henry Chadwick, once gave a stern warning to the Church of England. He said, “Nothing is sadder than someone who has lost their memory; and the Church which has lost its memory is in the same state of senility.” And what is true for the Church is true for wider society, and I imagine true for a school.
I can not say too much about schools in general, because my school experience was pretty much the same as that of the writer G. K. Chesterton, who said that when he was at school he was taught by people he did not know things he did not want to know. I’m sure it is very different for you. I’m sure you are well prepared for getting through those dreadful examinations, and I’m sure there is much more to your school life than just academic work. Nonetheless, this school has an even greater duty toward you, namely, to give you a sense of the tradition of which you are now a part – nearly five hundred years of tradition. That is why you need a Founders’ day Service – to remind you of those people in the past who took a gamble on the future – a gamble on you – when they acted as benefactors to this school.
We are often told today to invest in the future – an uncertain investment at any time. Your Founders and benefactors did just that. But we are not told often enough to remember those people in the past who have made our present possible. To remember your Founders and benefactors is a means to giving you your tradition.
Actually, though, a Founders’ Day Service places you, whether you know it or not, in an even older tradition, a tradition of the Christian Church by which we remember before God the members of the Church who have made us what we are – those Christians who now live for ever in God’s eternity. They include the Saints, of course, but also countless faithful Christians who have handed on the Christian faith by living it. On two days in November, All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day we praise God for these our fellow Christians. And that, to come to an end, is where your Founders’ day Service is rooted – in thanksgiving to God for men and women who looked beyond their own interests, handed on the fruit of their experience, and invested in people yet unborn.
Remember our Second Lesson, Jesus’s parable about the foundations needed for a strong house. That is what Tradition should be – a strong foundation. Remember what happened to the house built on sand. Best of all, remember that the only sure foundation for all of us is life rooted in the greatness of God.
Father Barry Orford