A superstar who hit rock bottom and came up again

I want to tell you about someone whose life was changed - a man in the depths of despair who found new life and hope. He had been a great musician. As a child he had overtaken all his teachers. He had begun composing in childhood, and by his twenties he was fabulously wealthy - the highest paid composer in the world, packing in the crowds wherever he went.

FROM RICHES TO RAGS

At the same time, he was rude, arrogant, and self-opinionated. He drank too heavily, and he could swear like a trooper in three different languages!

For forty years he composed breathtaking music for the royal family. But musical tastes change, and his works fell out of fashion. He tried everything, but he couldn’t resurrect his career. He became bankrupt, poverty-stricken, depressed and physically ill. Things were so bad that he thought he might end up living out his days in a London debtors’ prison.

Who am I talking about? George Frederick Handel (1685-1759). As if things couldn’t get worse, in 1737 he had a cerebral haemorrhage which left him paralysed down his right side and unable to walk or write. Very slowly he managed to regain some of his strength.

One night in 1741 he shuffled listlessly down a dark, creepy London street, bent over - a man seriously old before his time. England was in the grip of an extremely cruel winter, and Handel was physically and emotionally worn out.

As he trudged on he came to a church. He paused, and suddenly from the depths of his being he cried, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Eventually he went home to his very modest lodgings. On his desk was a package - a set of words that he had promised a friend he would try to do something with musically. In fact the words were all Bible verses arranged in such a way as to emphasise the salvation won for us by Jesus. Handel opened the package and his eyes fell on the verse, ‘He was despised and rejected of men.’

THE GLORY OF GOD

He reached for his pen and began to write. Then something mysterious - even ‘miraculous’ - happened to him. He just kept writing . . . page after page after page! He actually worked non-stop for twenty-four days, hardly eating, and having almost no rest. He refused to see friends. But on the day he finished, a friend managed to get in. Handel was sitting at his piano, sheets of music strewn all around him, and he had tears running down his face. ‘I do believe I have seen all of Heaven before me, and the great God Himself,’ he said to his friend. He then flopped onto his bed and slept for seventeen hours. He woke up renewed in body and in soul. Looking back on this experience, and borrowing a phrase from the Apostle Paul, he said, ‘Whether I was in my body or out of my body I know not. God knows it’!

  

Right from its first performance, Handel’s Messiah has been regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces ever composed. It has stunned multitudes. To this day it is performed at Christmas and Easter all over the world, and people who know nothing else about classical music always recognise the Hallelujah Chorus! More than that, Handel’s music has brought a vision of the glory of the Lord to countless unsuspecting souls.

WHAT ABOUT US?

Why have I recounted the story of George Frederick Handel? Simply because I know that so many of us find ourselves exactly where he was. We think that life is useless. We feel that there is no hope. Maybe it’s related to a business failure or the disintegration of our relationships. Or we might be successful financially, in our careers and in our family life. But for reasons we can’t understand we’re there, right at rock bottom in other ways.

Of course we can speak to friends. And professional counselling is a good idea, too. Medication can often make a big difference. These things are important.

How bizarre it is, though, that we so easily neglect the ‘spiritual’ aspect of our being, when ‘God . . . has put eternity into man’s mind’ (Ecclesiastes 3:11). There are even in our universities today professional observers of human behaviour who agree that we seem to have an inbuilt instinct to reach out to ‘the transcendent’. So many people discover that ‘giving in’ to that instinct is the most important life choice we ever make, because in the context of the relationship with God that develops, deep spiritual and emotional healing begins to take place. 

On the other hand, if we refuse to come to terms with our deeply spiritual needs, all other measures are a bit like putting sticking plaster on symptoms rather than treating the real illness. (Sticking plaster is, of course, handy. But on its own it’s not going to heal us!)

Those facing big issues in our lives, or who are on the brink of despair - as many are right now at this stage in the ‘lockdown’ - ought to need very little encouragement to open up to the Lord’s love and healing. Maybe the story of George Frederick Handel will inspire us to do it!

JUST DRIFTING ALONG?

An intriguing insight in the Bible is that we can drift spiritually without even realising what is happening to us.  One of the saddest bits of the Old Testament is when Samson, so full of promise and raised up by God to deliver his people, became captive to his lusts. Do you know what it says? Judges 16:20 tells us, ‘He knew not that the Spirit of God had left him.’ Isn’t that so sad. He drifted. 

We are warned about that happening to us in Hebrews 2:1: ‘... we must pay the closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.’ In his commentary on this verse, William Barclay points out that in the original language the expression for ‘drift away’ is meant to conjure up the idea of a ship drifting to destruction because the pilot is asleep!

COMING BACK

We matter to God. He loves us with an everlasting love. He doesn’t want us just to drift along. Whatever tangles or trauma we are in the middle of, he wants to help us, support us, strengthen and sustain us, so that we come through. We don’t have to drift. Nor do we have to be strong enough or wise enough in our own strength and wisdom. We can rely on him. We can let his love reach us through prayer, through the Scriptures, through receiving the Sacraments, through the support of our brothers and sisters in Christ. We really can open up our lives to his healing love.

Speaking through the prophet Jeremiah God says to us: ‘You will seek me and find me; when you seek me with all your heart.’ (Jeremiah 29:3)

S. James says, ‘Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.’ (James 4:8)

And Jesus himself said: ‘Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you . . . for he who seeks finds.’ (Matthew 7:7)

George Frederick Handel had his life turned around and put on track because he encountered the Lord in a new way. Isn’t it time for each of us to seek the Lord with our whole heart, to draw near to him, and to experience his love and healing more deeply than ever before?

Handel's memorial in Westminster Abbey

To get you started in Advent . . .

OUR SOWING TIME

Our short lives on earth are sowing time. If there were no resurrection of the dead, everything we live on earth would come to nothing. How can we believe in a God who loves us unconditionally if all the joys and pains of our lives are in vain, vanishing in the earth with our mortal flesh and bones? Because God loves us unconditionally, from eternity to eternity, God cannot allow our bodies - the same as that in which Jesus, his Son and our savior, appeared to us - to be lost in final destruction.

No, life on earth is the time when the seeds of the risen body are planted. Paul says:  “What is sown is perishable, but what is raised is imperishable; what is sown is contemptible but what is raised is glorious; what is sown is weak, but what is raised is powerful; what is sown is a natural body, and what is raised is a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:42-44). This wonderful knowledge that nothing we live in our bodies is lived in vain holds a call for us to live every moment as a seed of eternity.

The wonderful knowledge, that nothing we live in our body is lived in vain, holds a call for us to live every moment as a seed of eternity.

- Henri Nouwen (Bread for the Journey, Harper SanFrancisco.)

ADVENT JOINS MEMORY AND HOPE

Advent is concerned with that very connection between memory and hope which is so necessary to man. Advent’s intention is to awaken the most profound and basic emotional memory within us, namely, the memory of the God who became a child. This is a healing memory; it brings hope. The purpose of the Church’s year is continually to rehearse her great history of memories, to awaken the heart’s memory so that it can discern the star of hope… It is the beautiful task of Advent to awaken in all of us memories of goodness and thus to open doors of hope.

- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger 1986 (Pope Benedict XVI)  - Seek That Which Is Above (Ignatius Press)

THE GRAND MIRACLE

The Christian story is precisely the story of one grand miracle, the Christian assertion being that what is beyond all space and time, what is uncreated, eternal, came into nature, into human nature, descended into His own universe, and rose again, bringing nature up with Him. It is precisely one great miracle. If you take that away there is nothing specifically Christian left.

~ C.S. Lewis, “The Grand Miracle”  - God in the Dock

Dean Church’s 1885 Advent sermon on Hope

Richard William Church (1815-1890) was a well-known priest of the Church of England who served as Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, from 1871 to his death. He wrote a number of books, including a definitive history of the Oxford Movement. The following is a passage from his sermon on Hope, taken from his  book of Advent Sermons preached in 1885 and available online HERE.

Is it not a duty, in solemn and quiet self-recollection, to put before our thoughts that unbroken and continuous line, which joins this very present moment with that hour which certainly is to arrive, when we must be changed, when we may be changed into the spotless blessedness of the saints of God? You - you yourself - with your trouble, your temptations, your sin, small or great, your conscious weakness, your insensibility and ignorance; yet you yourself are one of those of whom, if you will, all this wondrous future will, must, come true. 

There is no blessedness of the soul of man, no rest from weariness, no refreshment after toil, no opening of the eyes to beauty never seen by mortal eye, no delight in goodness, no rejoicing in perfect love, no ineffable sense of the sweetness and tenderness of God's mercy - none of these that may not be hoped for; hoped for with all the warrant of the Almighty's promise, by each soul here present, with its identity unbroken, with that individual character which makes it what it is. And is that great hope to be practically all a blank to us?

It is not to be told how much we lose of strength, of gladness and enlargement of heart, of power to do God's service cheerfully and happily, by not realising and dwelling on the great hope "set before us." We let ourselves be blinded, fretted, disheartened by the present, because we will not look up and see what is as certain as the present, in the not very distant future. Many of us, today, remember with more or less regret that this is the last Sunday of the year; that another year has gone out of our tale of days. Its days are gone and will never come back; nor that which they brought, and took away with them; the pleasant times which those days gave us, the glad meetings, the sunny holidays, are gone; gone, with the happiness which its days wrecked, with the health that they have broken, with the old friends, the lives, some of them noble and precious ones, which they have taken with them into the past. 

Here, as at a deathbed, we feel the close of all earthly things, the inevitableness and the drawing near of death. With us the natural thing is to look back to the past; the word that naturally rises to our lips is, "Another year gone." It is natural with us: with St Paul it is just as natural to reflect, "Now is our salvation nearer than when we first believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand" (Romans 13:11). It is the last Sunday, and that must give us much to think of. But it is not only, it is not chiefly that. About us are the songs, and the joy, and the innocent gladness of Christmas. About us, as we are reminded today, are the "bright beams of light which God casts upon His Church" (Collect for St. John the Evangelist’s Day) bright indeed to us now, but only the faint quivering of the dawn of that Eternal Day. 

We, at least, if we are not Christians in vain, can join the stern and awful thoughts that accompany the lapse of time - awful enough, indeed, to make the boldest anxious - with the deep and chastened sense of realities beyond it, certain, final, ineffable, over which time has no power, which are warranted to men. We can pass on to the great hope which from end to end fills the Bible - the hope which ennobles and gladdens our mortal life; such a hope as carried St Paul in strength and joy through the long "daily dying" of his Apostleship, and burst forth in such impassioned yet most reasonable conviction - "For I count," he says, "that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us . . . For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:18, 38).

A Living Hope - Bishop Martyn Jarrett's York Minster sermon

The retirement of the Bishop of Beverley, the Right Reverend Martyn Jarrett, takes place on 30th September. Bishop Martyn, formerly Bishop of Burnley, has been Bishop of Beverley for the past eleven years. So, last Saturday's Northern Provincial Festival in York Minster was particularly significant for him, as well as for all those to whom he has ministered since becoming the Provincial Episcopal Visitor ("P.E.V." or "Flying Bishop") for the Northern Province. 

The parishes for which Bishop Martyn has had particular pastoral care have experienced renewal and growth and are making an increasingly significant contribution to the life of the Church of England. In an official statement, the Archbishop of York said: “Bishop Martyn has served the Province with a real pastor’s heart, with cheerfulness and Christian virtue. The people and parishes he has looked after as the Provincial Episcopal Visitor will miss him greatly and so will the Bishops. I will miss his generous and wise counsel, and his friendship . . .” 

Here is the sermon Bishop Martyn preached last Saturday: 

A LIVING HOPE

By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living home through the resurrection of Christ Jesus. (1 Peter 1 v3) 

Those who have listened to my preaching across the years will know that I have one abiding hope. It is that Bristol Rovers might one day win the FA Cup! Before anyone laughs too much remember that, statistically speaking, there is more chance of that happening that of anyone of us winning big time on the Lottery. And, unlike playing the lottery, my particular fantasy costs me nothing. 

All of us, in one way or another, have our dreams for the future. Following the recent royal wedding a little girl told me just how much she wanted to be a princess. The hard-pressed parent who spends her last pound on a scratch card desperately hopes that this will be the win that solves her immediate financial worries. It is a hard lesson for some of us to learn. Games of chance can only truly be great fun when, from the very first, we never seriously believe that we are likely to win. You and I might hope for a better summer next year than this year's. Nothing, however, can be done about it. We just have to hope and then wait and see. Compared with such hopes for the future the subsequent fortunes of Bristol Rovers begin to look a little better every time I consider them. 

We Christians, though, are called to understand hope in quite a different way. Hope, for the Bible, is not to be thought of as longing for something that might just turn up. The Bible calls us to a faith that speaks of confidence in the future. The Bible talks the language of backing an absolute certainty. Jeremiah tells us that, even where God's own people are bent on ignoring Him, those who continue to trust in the Lord will be held as securely as a tree that sends its roots ever more deeply into the ground; roots that are sure of finding the water that eventually will provide the necessary nourishment. Jeremiah's confidence that God will look after the future, even as the present is falling apart all around him might well be a feeling that many of us gathered here today recognise all too easily. Yet, even Jeremiah's confidence is as nothing when viewed in the light of Easter Day. God shows us, then, that nothing whatsoever can defeat the love Jesus has shown on Good Friday. Even death is not going to have the final word. If there is one thing above all others to underline in every preparation for Baptism or for Confirmation it is that great truth. Nothing is going to defeat God's purpose. Jesus' death and resurrection are, as it were, the seal, the rubber stamp, on God's promise never to give up on us or to let us down. The First Letter of Saint Peter, our second reading today, might even have come originally from a sermon preached to folk as they were about to be baptised and confirmed. The very first thing of which those new Christians are reminded is that in their new birth, that is their baptism, they are going to share a living hope. A living hope is one certain that all the negativity with which you and I meet in our world will never have the last word. Ruth Etchells, that great theologian from Durham, only recently died, used to speak of her father's constant reassurance during wartime. Whenever Ruth would express her fears as to how the war might end, even in the darkest moments of such times as Dunkirk or the Blitz, her father, immediately and confidently, would reassure her that eventually Hitler would be defeated. God offers a similar reassurance to you and me. Anything that stands in the way of God's loving purpose will eventually be swept aside. If you or I should doubt it, all we have to do is turn once again to the message of Good Friday and of Easter Day. 

Yes, we Catholic Anglicans do live in difficult times. Some within our church still seem determined on backing away from the promises made to us in the Nineteen-nineties. We view, with some concern, the outcome of the recent House of Bishops Meeting. We fear a retreat from the recent proposals that seemed to throw us a lifebelt even in these latter stages of the debate about the rightness or otherwise of women bishops. Many of us here today could probably offer long lists of seemingly unfair treatment we have received in the past, not to mention our fears for something even worse in the future. We Catholic Anglicans, though, are not to reconstitute ourselves into some kind of society for the promoting of despair. God is in charge. The Church is Christ's Body. Christ is the Church's head and no-one else. You and I need, perhaps, to see both ourselves, and our present situation, just a little more in proportion. God, in the words of the famous hymn, is working His purpose out. You and I have a living hope. We do not need to use up so much of our energy in worrying about final outcomes. T S Eliot wrote these famous lines: We had the experience but we missed the meaning. I sometimes fear that you and I are so busy seeking the meaning amongst the arguments that at present consume our church that we then lose out on the wonderful experience of what it is to live, trust and hope as a Catholic Christian in the first place. 

Christ is Lord of the Church. It is His will that is going to prevail in the end. That ought to give you and me a little more confidence to live with some untidy anomalies as we wait for God's will to prevail. How strange that so many of those who wish radical1y to alter the Church's age long practice as to who might be ordained, claim, almost in the same breath, that anything that would allow a proper accommodation of our needs, would be a gross breach of Catholic Order. You and I can only hold to a doctrine of open reception on this issue because, ultimately, we believe, it is Christ, Lord of the Church, whose Spirit will lead us into all truth. We must now have the courage to go forward in such trust. It is not unreasonable, though, to seek the same humility in those who see things differently from us. 

The lives of many of us here today have been overshadowed, for the past forty or so years, by the wonderful work of ARCIC, the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission. That great work is only going to be finally brought to completion when our two churches are once again united. If ever that great day is to come, there must first, surely, be a consistent and determined group of Anglicans who hold to a Catholic understanding of the Church and are determined to win around the rest of our Church to that same viewpoint. Conviction politicians do not give up when they are losing in the polls. They seek, rather, to hold their ground and fight for a comeback. Unless, or until, the Church of England should take from us the guarantees of a true Catholic ministry, refusing us genuine bishops, we should be seeking to hold firm and to fight the battle confident in our living hope, Jesus Christ. And, dare I say it, even if, as we sometimes fear in our worst moments, there were eventually to be no honourable place for us within the Church of England and you and I had to go, we would do so without bitterness. We would still remain confident in Christ, our living hope, who would in His own time and His own way, resolve the situation. 

Movements within the Church rise and fall. Even Bishops of Beverley come and go! This particular Northern Festival, for me, of course, is overshadowed by the fact that it will be the last I share with you as Bishop of Beverley. The future, though, belongs to Christ; not to any of us, no matter how important we might think ourselves to be. 

When the General Synod was meeting in February a young Anglican rightly asked us to start talking about Jesus and not of such items as the ordination of women to the episcopate. How right she is; save for one thing. The Church is Christ's Body. The ministry within it is Jesus' ministry. You and I seek nothing more than to proclaim Jesus. Our passion for Catholicism stems only from the conviction that within it we find Jesus most authentically proclaimed. Here today you and I, in this Holy Mass, show the Lord's death until He comes again. Jesus, our living hope, is here with us. You and I are caught up, once again, in the timeless worship of heaven. Our living hope is now a present reality. Your concern and mine is to offer that saving experience to our world.

Looking forward . . . do we WANT to be healed?

In Philippians 3:13-14, St Paul says: ". . . one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus." 

The words "I press on" are so important. Looking forward, not looking back. 

One of the most amazing blockbuster sermons I can remember from my teenage years was at a healing service. It was one of those few sermons that was like a riveting personal counselling session - except that there were about 1500 other people present! The preacher was basing his remarks, his stories and his "therapy" on John 5:1-9 where Jesus asks the man by the Pool of Bethesda who had been paralysed for 38 years, "Do you want to be healed?" 

The preacher pointed out that most people could not think of a more stupid question to ask such a man. 

But he went on to explain how - having been slapped down by people, circumstances, bad fortune, illness etc etc - most of us tend to "settle into" our predicaments and allow them to rob us of any dreams for the future. Eventually our sickness (or whatever the situation is) becomes reassuring like an old friend, a crucial part of how we define ourselves as persons, and even the means of gaining attention or feeling special. If we allow this to happen, whether we are talking spiritual, psychological or physical sickness (or even - as we would say today - "stress"), there comes a point at which any kind of intervention by God, including the gift of supernatural strength to cope better with our circumstances, is more or less unwelcome because of the challenge we are then faced with - the challenge to define ourselves in some new way . . . by faith. 

Regular readers of this blog won't be surprised that I have something on this theme by that most practical of no-nonsence Anglican spiritual directors, Evelyn Underhill. It comes from her book, Light of Christ: Addresses Given at the House of Retreat Pleshey, in May, 1932, available from Amazon.com HERE:

In every healing act of Christ, the patient’s own will must be called out to complete the cure. “Immediately he rose up before them,” says St Luke, “and took up that whereon he lay and departed to his own house, glorifying God.” He had recognized and accepted the gift of healing love and was not under the weather any more. His psychological renovation was complete. His full manhood, responding to God and His human world, was restored and brought into play, That alone is health.

Even the influenza patient is not cured while he still crawls about saying, “You see I have had a touch of the ‘flu!” but only when he forgets all about it and gets on with his normal life. In the same way when the healing touch of Christ is laid on our souls, His real successes are not those grateful patients who never forget how ill they have been and are terribly afraid of another temperature: they are the ones whose faith and gratitude make them forget themselves and their poor little sins, who stand up and glorify God and go forward in the new energy of His power and love, dropping themselves and their unfortunate past. 

Some of the greatest of the Saints are among Christ’s moral cures — from Mary Magdalene to Charles de Foucauld — but they always look forward, not backward, with a wonderful combination of fresh vigorous initiative and absolute and grateful trust. People who “enjoy bad health” whether spiritual or physical will never respond to His healing power with the fullness and faith He asks.

Now, this is not said in order to make us guilty for having been crushed and broken, whether through our own fault or through circumstances beyond our control, and feeling exhausted by the very thought of trying to get onto our feet. Indeed, God's community of love - the Church - is to embrace us with such compassion, care and real love when we reach our lowest point, that a tiny spark of hope for a future is created within us, regardless of the past. That's all God needs to work with . . . the tiniest spark of hope. Every now and then he seems to give it to someone "direct from heaven", so to speak. But usually we get it through the love, care, nurture, support and understanding of others. That then gives us the courage to take the risk of being open to God's healing power. 

It's sad that churches are sometimes not very good at doing this, because it is one of the main things God wants us to do. Speaking personally, I want to say that in a couple of the parishes I've been privileged to serve, there have been such reservoirs of love and compassion among the people of God, that many who had thought of themselves as hopeless have found hope and then healing of one kind or another. Laus deo! 

Forward in Hope

This is an abridged transcription of one of the Lenten reflections given during a retreat for the Roman Catholic bishops of Ireland in 2002 by the Papal Household Preacher, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa.

After the events of 11th September, people were all of one mind in the conviction that "Nothing will ever be the same again". The end of the cold war left us believing that the world, as we now assumed it to be, would last indefinitely. Without warning, this assumption vanished into thin air, and all the old problems, including even the traditional ideas of war and peace, came back into discussion.

What will those who believe in Christ do, what will the Church do, in circumstances like this? The church cannot simply unite her voice with what Psalm 31:20 calls "the strife of tongues". She needs to be able to speak a word that, like the words of Jesus on the events of his day, will carry the resonance of truth and of eternity.

Many centuries ago, the Church found herself in a situation that in many respects matches the present one. On August 28th in the year 410, the hordes of Alaric, king of the Goths, stormed the city of Rome, put it to the sword and burned it down. In the world of that time Rome was all that New York is today, and something more besides. It was not only the capital of culture and commerce, but also the centre of a world political power. The emotional impact, even on Christians, was enormous. Many had believed that the Roman Empire had been the power that was restraining "the mystery of lawlessness" until the time had come for it to be revealed (See Thessalonians 2,6-8). If that was so, it is easy to see how readily they would have come to believe, confronted with the sack of Rome, that the end of the world had come. The world was shaken to its very foundations.

Pagans of the time had their own explanation for the events. The catastrophe was clearly the result of having abandoned the traditional religion and the gods of Rome, and the fault clearly lay with the Christians. The Christians, from the time of Constantine, had been saying that the freedom given to the Christian religion had proved a greater support and protection to the Empire than the pagan gods had ever been.

In this sad state of affairs, everyone was looking for an answer. And Augustine, the bishop of Hippo, did have the answer: If so many Christians find themselves demoralised by the new situation and begin to murmur against God, saying that he should not have allowed such a thing to happen, it is because they have not yet grasped the real meaning of their faith.

For in fact it is not so much in God that they believe

as in something they have looked upon

only as a means to enable them to enjoy undisturbed

the goods and pleasures of this world.

Continue reading HERE . . .