Peterborough Cathedral is anything but an Ivory Tower

with my conscious mind that he was dead until I heard myself asking him if he was. I think it was his unblinking gaze and the fact that he was not breathing that gave it away, writes Peterborough Cathedral Canon Missioner Sarah Brown.

Just call me Sherlock. Once I had cottoned on to the fact that my pastoral efforts were probably unappreciated I prayed for his soul and went to find a member of staff to inform them of his passing. The care manager of the nursing home looked at me in astonishment.

“Yes. He died half an hour ago. We thought that was why you had come.”

It is a relief to know that the direct death-alert hotline between the Almighty and His ministers is functioning efficiently. My arrival was (probably) an accident, although the Next of Kin was clearly impressed at the service when he arrived and I transferred my ministry to him, covertly checking out his vital signs before I started. Clearly God is better at His job than I am.

Failing to distinguish between life and death is a rookie error to put it mildly.

That episode took place the same day as the Shrove Tuesday Pancake Race which has become Peterborough’s answer to the Pamplona Bull Run but with extra blood. In this sporting extravaganza lithe, athletic young things in Lycra (and some Morris men) run insanely around the precinct. For some reason the clergy competed. I, at least, remained upright. (The Doughnut diet proves its worth once more. A large bottom and short stumpy legs provide a low centre of gravity and structural solidity.) Not so my willowier colleagues. The Dean and Vice Dean both went down in style filling their faces and hands with finest cathedral pea gravel and are still black-eyed and fearfully scabby.

So when I received a letter from a former parishioner enquiring about life in my (I quote,) “ivory tower” my first response was to laugh. The Cathedral may be many things: House of Prayer; Beacon of Hope; Iconic Image Of Peterborough; Place of Pilgrimage; Passport Office Waiting Room; Repository for Dead Queens; Home for Abandoned Pomegranates; Dinosaur Enclosure; Gin palace; but Ivory Tower is not one of them. If an ivory tower is distant from the realities of life and the problems of the world then a less appropriate description is hard to imagine! 

It is true that the Cathedral’s function is to point heavenward beyond the muddled realities of life and that some of what we do there is rarefied with our prayer and choral aesthetic, our quiet daily services, the hushed peace of the soaring arches and the beauty of light on stone.

Maybe some looks like Ivory Tower but the truth is that those things proclaim God and attract real life like a magnet.

Every day my colleagues and I meet more real life than we are quite equal to. The sick, the sorrowful and the frightened are regulars here, as are the mentally ill, the cold, the hungry and the homeless. We try to help in God’s name with love, prayer and practical help through collaboration with others in the city. Hurting human beings can be volatile and difficult. In the last two years I have been stalked, received death threats and played the inscrutable card while someone, for kicks, engaged me in a highly explicit barrage of innuendo. I’m not complaining. Most frontline public servants and charity workers get the same thing. It’s just ordinary everyday life in your local ordinary everyday ivory tower! We also encounter the cream of humanity: the curious, the loving, children, the impassioned, the faithful, the creative, the practical. All of which points to the muddled, messy, terrible and sometimes splendid reality of being human.

The Church is currently marking Lent. This is a season for remembering our potential through the lens of our vulnerability and our propensity to screw things up. It is a time to seek newness of life in Christ because the old life is frankly not that great. Facing up to the realities of life (and death) is what we do. Ivory Tower? Pah!