Sermon preached at Evensong on the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity 2024

You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

This short stanza, which comes towards the end of the first section of T.S. Eliot’s poem Little Gidding, first published in 1942, casts a relationship between the themes of prayer and place. Holy places, which I’ve been considering during this month’s sermons at Evensong on Sundays, are often those sites which have been infused with Christian presence and prayer, where many feel that the veil between heaven and earth becomes ‘thin.’ In previous weeks, I’ve considered the Scottish island of Iona, and the Norfolk village of Walsingham, as places which teach us something about the untameable volatility of holiness, and the challenge to align our own wills to the living water of God’s love. What we think of as heaven and earth are one in the Incarnate Christ, whose ascended nature has taken our humanity to the heart of the Holy of Holies. It is this renewed humanity which we are invited to share through our baptism, which is shaped in the Eucharist, and offered in love for love in Christian living. 

You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. 

Little Gidding is a small village in Huntingdonshire. In 1625, a scholar from Cambridge called Nicholas Ferrar, relocated here with a small group including his mother, brother and sister and their families. A year later, Ferrar was ordained a deacon by the future Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud. The Ferrars established an intentional religious community of sorts, centred around the manor house and the church. They were committed to a life of communal prayer, teaching and study, the care of local sick children, and manual work such as embroidery and bookbinding. The phrase, ‘House of God and Gate of Heaven’, was inscribed above the door of the Church, this sacred space set apart for the serious business of liturgical and private prayer. But although it had many of the characteristics of the religious life, there was no formal Rule as such, nor were the residents under vows. 

Almost as soon as the Ferrars arrived, Little Gidding quickly became a place which evoked much curiosity. The poets Herbert and Crashaw visited, and the renown of the community and its life led King Charles I to stay on several occasions, including in the aftermath of his definitive defeat during the English Civil War at the Battle of Naseby in 1646.

In an age where religious polemic was often bitter, suspicious and caricatured, Ferrar was accused of being both a papist and puritan. This was a reformed household, aiming at Christian perfection. And although its set-up and patterns were unique at the time, many reformed writers and preachers compared families with ‘seed-plots’ and ‘seminaries’ in which the tender plants of godly religion and good citizenship could be nurtured, and with ‘beehives, out of which swarm the materials for greater assemblies.’ However, through Nicholas Ferrar’s travels on the continent, and therefore his observation of much European catholic worship, he was convinced of the need also to look to the practices of the early church. Night vigils and the recitation of the whole psalter each day must have seemed profoundly curious to the reformed mind. Thus, a strange—indeed unique—family community was created in the house and in the church which was contemplative and ascetic.

Some of Little Gidding’s religious practices marked the community out as resonating with particular trends in theology and worship. Bowing at the holy name of Jesus, and also upon entering the Church or when approaching the communion table, was one such commented on both positively and negatively by visitors. Those who defended modest liturgical gestures such as these in the early seventeenth century argued that the worship of God was not only an inward matter, "with our hearts and not our hats," as Lancelot Andrewes' memorably put it. Although it would be anachronistic to call the Little Gidding community monastic, those who lived there did look to engage both the heart and the head, and a pattern of Christian works was set alongside a serious rhythm of daily worship. This was a place where prayer was more than just the texts of reformed worship, the Bible and preaching, it was also a place of those night watches, hymn singing, fasting, and private contemplation. In Eliot’s sense, prayer was ‘…more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.’ 

This autumn here in Westminster Abbey, we are thinking quite a lot about poets, about the order of words. There is a stone in Poets’ Corner to TS Eliot. There is also a memorial to Jane Austen, whose words we heard in this afternoon’s anthem, and about whom we have been encouraged to think. Austen was writing in a very different context to both Nicholas Ferrar and TS Eliot. Hers was Georgian England, happily settled in domestic peace, despite what was unfolding over the channel. Many of Austen’s novels diagnose and highlight the corrosive effects of individualism. As the American theologian Peter J. Leithart writes,

‘In all her novels, Austen displays her assumption that moral life is always lived in community. We need others to guide and teach us, and several of Austen’s novels hinge on the ability of a woman to find a suitable mentor (Emma finds Knightley, Catherine Morland finds Henry Tilney). Living in community also means recognizing that our actions are not our own, but always affect others.’ In one of her best-loved novels, Mansfield Park, Austen’s character Fanny believes that a family at regular prayer is part of ‘what such a household should be.’

The story of the Ferrars of Little Gidding teaches us that holy ground might be found in family, community, fellowship, relationship. It teaches us the value of a patterned life, and of the importance of finding patterns which can offer reliable shapes of living in which we might grow in love and contemplation. Since the New Testament period, Christians have spoken of one another using sibling language. The household at Little Gidding develops this: it is the setting of a family life, but not actually one completely traditional. This is not to immediately privilege anything like the straightforward nuclear family as such. Ferrar himself was neither married nor had children of his own; he wrote to his niece that within their shared life, he sought not to be a master, but a ‘partner and fellow student.’ The community, so shaped by his insights, survived after his death in 1637. It was clearly a place where guests played a part interweaving with those who lived there, and where ideas were exchanged. This was a strange and experimental, if admirable and beautiful project, which sought a fuller expression of the Christian life within a rather unusual and porous household: ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name’ says Jesus, ‘there am I, in the midst of them.’ 

That is why even the contemporary visitor to Little Gidding kneels ‘where prayer has been valid’, a richness always known when a life of worship and devotion is worked out alongside a commitment to solidarity and mutual flourishing. We teach one another as Christian disciples, and very often, it is the stranger patterns of encounter, rhythm and holiness which open us to a richness we would otherwise fail to notice.