“Happy are they who dwell in your house! * they will always be praising
you.”
Psalm 84:3
“How
did we get a recliner and a coffee table up in the Rood Loft?” I asked Father
Philip. “Oh,” he smiled, “I guess you
haven’t heard the story about our anchoress.”
But let me back up a bit. I was a seminarian at the time, and a member
of the congregation and an altar server at Pusey House. Pusey House is technically not a church, but
a “house of piety and learning,” and it’s the chaplaincy for high-church
Anglican students at Oxford University.
It is housed in a beautiful neo-Gothic chapel, designed by the great
Temple Moore, and the chapel is dominated by a life-size rood, a statue of
Jesus on the Cross with St. Mary and St. John.
The rood is placed on a large platform called the rood-loft, a kind of
balcony that goes across the breadth of the church about ten feet up, dividing
the Chancel of the Church from the Nave.
If you’ve spent much time poking around old churches, you will know the
Rood Screen, which is a smaller version of this—we had one in my last
congregation that was maybe a foot wide.
But the Rood Loft at Pusey House was really a room of its own, 6 or 8
feet wide, with a tall stone parapet on either side. I had been sent up onto it to retrieve some
obscure liturgical implement, and that’s where I discovered the dusty recliner.
The Rood Loft,
Father Philip went on to tell me, had been the home of Pusey’s resident
anchoress for a few months a decade or so before. An anchoress is a person called by God to a
life of solitary prayer. It’s a bit like
a hermit, but while hermits tend to live in caves in the wilderness, anchorites
or anchoresses live inside churches.
Back in the Middle Ages they were quite common, and Julian of Norwich,
the beloved mystic quoted by Rev. Mary Thorpe in her sermon last week, was an
anchoress in the Church of Saint Julian in Norwich back in the fourteenth
century. These days, they are much rarer. In fact, as far as I know, the one from
Pusey’s Rood Loft may have been the only anchoress in the modern history of the
Anglican Communion.
She was a rather
eccentric old woman who had presented herself to Father Philip claiming she had
a vocation, and in an uncharacteristic fit of whimsy—or maybe it was spiritual
obedience--he agreed. Day and night, she
stayed on the loft praying, reading and thinking. She ate MREs, and only came down the stairs
for showers and bathroom breaks. For a
while, it was deeply inspiring to everyone concerned, but then she went off her
meds and things didn’t go so well. She
began to snore on her recliner during Father Philip’s sermons, and she would
sing loudly when she wasn’t supposed to.
The breaking point came one Sunday morning, when she began throwing nuts
at the priests while they were at the Altar celebrating High Mass. She was sent packing that afternoon.
Now I confess
that, like most of you, I find the concept of living as an anchoress a bit strange. But there’s also something very powerful
about making the house of God your home.
I loved that Chapel: the dear friends who gathered in it, and the
beautiful worship that was offered there, yes, but also the stained glass, the
lingering smell of incense and the musty prayer books. The Chapel was a place of deep peace, where
God seemed close at hand, “enthroned,” as the Psalmist says, “upon the praises”
of his people.[1]
Today’s Psalm is
about this longing to dwell in God’s House.
It may well have been written by an ancient anchoress, someone who lived
within Israel’s temple. For the
Israelites, the temple was God’s dwelling in a singular way. He had commanded Solomon to build it, and its
Holy of Holies contained the Ark of the Covenant. God’s Presence had rested there ever since He
came with glory when the temple was dedicated by the king in the passage that
is today’s Old Testament lesson. Every
day, in the temple, God’s people gave thanks to Him for filling the world with
good things and preserving their nation in peace. Every day, they sought forgiveness from Him
in the sacrifice of atonement, and His mercy was poured out afresh. At the great festivals, Jews gathered from
every part of the earth to remember His goodness in the past and ask His
guidance for the future. It was their
national home, the place where God was close at hand to renew and refresh them.
And naturally,
some people felt drawn to remain there. The
temple wasn’t just a matter of altars and prayer halls. Much of the complex was taken up with
dormitory rooms. These were for the
priests and Levites to stay during their duty shifts, and for these ancient
anchorites, who dwelt in the house of the Lord, praising him, as the Psalm
says, continually. You might recall one
of them from the Gospels, the prophetess Anna, who had lived in the temple for
many decades before rejoicing to see the infant Christ on the day of his
presentation in the temple.
The Psalmist sings
of the joy of abiding in such a holy and life-giving place. It is a beautiful place and a safe one, where
God’s protection is assured, as He shelters His people like swallows in the shadow
of the Altar. Above all, the Psalmist
speaks of the joy that comes from being in God’s Presence in His holy
house. The word “happy” recurs
repeatedly in the translation we use—“blessed” is better, I think—a continued
and sustaining gift from God. His
presence fulfills the deepest desire of Psalmist’s soul, and it calls forth a
deep exaltation. There flesh and heart cry
out for the living God. This is the
language of destiny. We are made to be
in God’s Presence, in the company of His holy people. This is our supreme good, the oft-hidden goal
behind our straining after so many other things that never seem to
satisfy. It is a joy so great, that
once we have found it, we would never want it to end. Remember how the most-loved Psalm of them all
closes—“surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of our life, and
I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
But unlike the
Psalmist, for us that Presence is first associated not with a place, but a
Person. God’s mercy is poured out to us
through the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ, and it is through Him that we draw nearest to the
Father. In our Gospel lesson, this is
what He means when he says, “Those
who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.” The temple was destroyed
millennia ago, and the precious ark lost centuries before that. But Christ lives forever, raised in glory on
the third day. He sustains us now by drawing
us together and naming us His own, and then giving us His own precious Body and
Blood, week by week in the Holy Eucharist.
Tis building is a
holy place, a sanctuary, as the temple was long before. It is holy because Christ dwells within in
it. The great sign of this mystery is
the light that burns here day by day before the tabernacle, a word that recalls
the shrine where God dwelt with His ancient people. In the tabernacle, we reserve the bread and
wine that have been made Christ’s Body and Blood in at the Altar. It is good to bow to it when we enter the
church and to pray before it, offering our praises and petitions to the One who
dwells within it.
The call to serve
God as an anchoress may be a rare one.
But this longing for God’s Presence, this delight in the Holy Eucharist
and this love for His house have an important place in the spiritual life of
every disciple. These days, we tend to
place great emphasis on doing God’s work in the world, being active, making
things happen out there. There are many
good things about that, and it’s true of course, that Christ is often found out
in the bustle of the world, especially among His beloved poor. But our activism will be remarkably shallow
if it is not nurtured by the blessing we find in here, singing God’s praises as
the Psalmist did, resting in His Presence.
For the anchoress and the Psalmist, and also for each of us, He is the
goal of all our striving, the source of our highest joy. Abide with Him now, until He calls you to
your true and perfect home, to rejoice in His Presence in heaven forever.
Funny and lovely--a combination that you mastered long ago.
ReplyDeleteI have had an idea related to anchorites for a long time. Maybe I'll get around to writing it some day. In my head, it's a novel, or maybe a novel with a long poem inside of it.