A sermon preached for the125th anniversary of the foundation of the Pusey House
2 November 2009
Monday, November 2nd 1987 (twenty two years ago today) was a truly memento mori day for me. As you know it has been the laudable custom here – at the Requiem celebrated on the first Monday of each month and on all the ferial Mondays in November – to mention in the prayers, as we shall today, the list of great and the good Anglo-Catholic figures of the past, the founders of the House, benefactors and departed principals. My predecessor had died just a fortnight before and so for the first time I realised that the next name on that list would be my own! Father Jonathan is at least a generation younger than I am and he seems fit and in good health, so it is still likely that mine will be the next name on that list! That is both sobering and comforting. We all hope that someone will remember us and pray for us.
To remember is one thing, that is the easy part, but the heart of the Christian faith is not mere remembrance: for Christians don’t simply remember; we pray, we anticipate, we make the astonishing claim in this earth-bound life that death is not an end but a means, not simply a transition but a beginning; and anyone who fails to contemplate the substance of death while living will negate and fail to embrace the substance of life while living. That is why we observe these solemn and thoughtful occasions, and in this most selfish and self-centred of all ages it is good to be reminded by Holy Mother Church that death is about the dead and not about the living: it is for them that we who remain pray.
In a requiem we invoke eternal rest upon the dead, remembering that while they were here they worked and played, they prayed and suffered, lived and lusted, but in death we pray that they may now “rest from their labours.” But for the Christian, rest is far from the notion of idleness. Rest is not the absence of work but rather the presence of joy in which work is no longer necessary. (Is work, I wonder, a consequence of the Fall of Man?) To “rest in the Lord” is to find at long last that peace which the world tries to sell but which it can neither give nor take away, that peace which indeed passes merchandising and understanding, that peace which is also not a negative – not merely the absence of stress – but the discovery of all that to which we have aspired, the reunion of the creature with the creator.
When we plead rest for the dead we are asking that God give them that which life itself could never give: no matter how distinguished or great and glorious, we pray for them in that place and state in which ambition and failure, frustration and achievement all pass away as the illusions that they really are; we rest from our labours and we move towards that state in which we enjoy forever that for which we were created in the first place, the presence and the beauty of God.
St. Augustine, in his famous phrase, tells us that we are restless by nature – without rest – because we are meant to be with God, and we will know the truth of God’s rest only when we know the truth of the presence of God: “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.”
This world is a restless place, full of getting and doing and managing and coping and manipulating and fussing and striving. We do not have to invent or imagine the torments of hell; all we have to think of is a life such as the one that we are presently leading that never ends. We don’t need Dante to tell us that; and rest from that – from even the best of this life – is what we ask on behalf of the dead. If for this life alone we live and weep and work we are among the most deceived, for we cannot find our achievement, our “consummation and bliss,” as the collect puts it, here. This may be all that we know and all that we can understand and all that we do, but if we are limited to what we know and understand, then what a dismal life we live.
Thus we ask for the dead that which we cannot give them and what we ourselves cannot have and we do so not out of pure and selfless motives but because we too hope that someone will wish the same for us, will pray for us, will unite themselves with us, will wish us in eternity rest, hope, peace, and joy, and in that hope are the living and the dead united: the rest of the dead and the work of the living are each consecrated and upheld in this holy sacrament; this is always true but never more true than today as we sing our requiem and make our communion.
You know the story of this House as well as I do. We have rehearsed it over this weekend and many times before, and you do not need me to instruct you in our history. Yet there is no more appropriate place or time to recall it than at this service at which we commemorate him in whose honour this House was founded, our pious founders and other benefactors, and in which, as well, we give thanks to the God who preserves us as surely as he preserved them. But having said all this, and said it that you may hear it well, I must go on to caution you that though the Bible encourages us to praise our “famous men and our fathers that begat us”, it also warns us of the temptations that accompany commemoration of this sort.
The first temptation so readily available on such a weekend as this is to dwell ever so contentedly in these realms of the past. The nobler and the more enterprising the history, the greater is the temptation to retreat into it. In our world of chance, chaos and change, the past gives great security. Here in this lovely Chapel, in this House, and in the University, steeped in antiquity and whose very stones cry out to us from the past, we might easily be persuaded by ourselves and by others that times past are better than these, that could we but reproduce the circumstances of another age we too might be caught up in great acts of faith, innovation, daring and courage. There is an escapism, a nostalgia, an antiquarianism that seduces us into the past, especially when we are so much surrounded by the past.
But there is another temptation of equal danger. That is to place our contemporary confidence, our hope, our courage and our reason for thanksgiving in the tangible signs of our success and of our accomplishments. Oxford is, after all, a terribly tangible place. In the busy daily round of work and study we see before our very eyes centuries of academic stonework: we can see and smell the beauty of the gardens; we can look at (but not walk upon) exquisitely tended lawns; we can touch the tablets and the memorials; we can finger the manuscripts and the incunabulæ; we can demonstrate our prowesses in the laboratories; we can publish and preserve them in the libraries. We are privileged, powerful, clever and winning men and women, holders of many degrees and makers of many books. We are rich and we are venerable; we are youthful and we are aggressive.
But now I must remind you, young friends and former colleagues, that a commemoration of All Souls is not a luxury, nor is it an indulgence by which we humour the dead. No, it is a necessity, an absolute moral obligation placed upon you and me – the living – to render our thanks and our gratitude to those whose labours have made it possible for us to dwell in this place. It is a necessity to remind us materially-minded souls “of realities we cannot see”. All Souls and the commemoration of our predecessors and benefactors makes us transcend the tangible by which we are so often and so dangerously seduced. We are reminded that that which animated our pious founders was an adventure first and foremost of the spirit, an exercise of the heart, a vision for wholeness and holiness, which itself cannot be measured in the laboratory or preserved in the archives. It is, after all, not the myth of a man called Pusey and his disciples whom we honour this weekend by our worship and our presence, but rather it is the God whom they served and loved, even that same God who is ours and who is with us now.
Indeed the great gift of God by his incarnation in Christ Jesus our Lord is the assurance that we shall ever have in him a God who is not absent, but who is among us – not just back there in history, not just in the lives of others, not just in the epochs of another age or place, and not simply out there in future space, but with us right here and right now, even as he has ever been and ever will be.
“Deus Scientiarum Dominus” was the vision that animated our founders both to dare and to do great things for God, for God was at the heart of their vision and at the heart of this foundation. And for us, their heirs, no less a vision and no less an obligation will do. The Talmud says “If you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there,” and this is so. Simply wandering in the academic and moral wilderness will not do, no matter how interesting the journey or companionable your friends. When, on the afternoon of Dr Pusey’s funeral, the great and good of the time met in Christ Church little did they know what life in the Church of England would be like 127 years later. But they knew full well the end toward which the life and efforts of Edward Bouverie Pusey were directed – “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever”.
I confess there were times during my twenty-one years as Principal that – having just about got through celebrating the centenary of the House – I wondered whether it would ever see its quasesquicentenary (“We know words like that in Oxford: or at least, we look them up”!). My last sermon as Principal on Advent Sunday 2002 concluded with the words “Our best days are ahead of us; the best is yet to come.” How true that has been. Pusey House is not only still here, but in this glorious weekend of celebration it seems to me it is better than ever! For that we thank God, and continue to pray for all those who have gone before in this place. Requiem æternam dona eis.
The Revd Canon Dr Philip Ursell Warden of Ascot Priory