Br. James with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.
washed those first disciples’ feet. The sign of continuity in the person of Archbishop Rowan filled me not simply with gratitude for the past, but hope for the future as I found myself entering that unbroken stream of prayer, worship and service. On Good Friday, I faced the most daunting task of the week, preaching seven times and presiding at the Three The high altar of Canterbury Cathedral is prepared for the celebration of the Eucharist.
Hour Service. When I asked how many people would attend this service, I was casually told that they prepare 700 bulletins and that I could expect two to three hundred people at any one time. For the whole of the three hours, during strategically placed hymns, streams of people came and went. For the next several days many of them stopped me in the Cathedral, out in the Precinct or in the town to comment on what I had said. For centuries, Canterbury Cathedral has been a place of pilgrimage. It hosts not simply grand occasions and magnificent liturgies, but it is also a place where many find quiet moments and sheltered corners to pray, to cry, to rejoice, to hope. I was overwhelmed by the masses of people who simply felt at home, as if somehow this Cathedral belonged to them and they to the Cathedral and all that it stood for. This 16
is a building not simply for archbishops and princes, deans and clergy, monks and choristers. It is also a building for the ordinary and the unknown. And all have their monument. During my last days in the Cathedral, I became fascinated, not with the grand tombs of the dead great, but with the simple scratchings of people long gone and mostly forgotten. Along with wonderful monuments to the great, the Cathedral is filled in dark corners and behind Graffiti in a corner of the Cathedral, carved by a pilgrim in 1603.
doors and pillars with graffiti monuments to the not so great, and not so powerful. Oddly enough the graffiti I found throughout the building was to me more a sign of hope for the life of the church than were the great monuments of the powerful. The oldest dated graffiti I found was cut into the cloister wall in 1603 and the newest, in pencil, from this year. Just as the continuity personified in the person of the archbishop filled me with hope for the church, so too did continuity signified by the graffiti, for it reminded me that the church belongs as much to those who scratch their names in walls as those who shape history. Today the world and the church long for hope. This Holy Week I discovered hope in a building vibrating with prayer, in a simple act of remembrance over bread and wine, in a man kneeling to wash my feet, and in initials scratched in stone. Each one of those moments connected me with an ancient past and a yet unborn future and there standing between what has been and what will be, I found a sense of hope for the church, for the world and for myself. SSJE