Sermon preached at Evensong on the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity 2024

The mosaics in the great Capella Palatina of Monreale in Sicily stand as a testament to the intimate and entwined relationship between east and west in southern Italy at the end of the twelfth century. That immense mosaic cycle is even larger than that in St Mark’s Venice, and makes the interior of the chapel glisten like an open jewel box in the bright sun. Much of the scheme is very traditional, with a huge Christus Pantocrater staring down from the apse. But there is at least one slightly surprising figure, standing full-length with his hand raised in blessing, carrying a Book of the Gospels. This is St Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, martyred in December 1170 and canonised only three years later. Within a decade a half of his canonisation this mosaic was made. The earliest image of St Thomas of Canterbury is not in Canterbury itself, but in the south of Italy; another Norman capital, where The Princess Joan (daughter of Henry II of England who had ordered his knights to murder Becket) had married William II of Sicily. The kinship forged through marriage, alongside trading routes, and other alliances looped threads of connection right across Europe.

Over this month at sermons during Evensong on Sundays, I have been exploring British holy places. We began on the windswept island of Iona, off the wildly beautiful west coast of Scotland, before moving to Walsingham in Norfolk where Our Lady is believed to have appeared during the reign of St Edward the Confessor, and stopping last week in Little Gidding, where the deacon Nicholas Ferrar settled with his household prior to the English Civil War, and lived an intentional life of Christian community. Today, we land in Canterbury, since 597 the metropolitan See of the southern province of England, and the seat of its archbishop. These days, Canterbury is not only a holy place for the Church of England and other English Christians, but also for the wider Anglican Communion, most of whose provinces claim their own succession through this church, and who see their relationship with the See of Canterbury as one of those Instruments which somehow keeps the fragile reality of global Anglicanism more-or-less together.

St Augustine came from Rome to England in the year 597, and evangelised the Kingdom of Kent. The King, Aethelbert, allowed Augustine and his missionaries to settle in Canterbury – his capital – where they built an abbey and other churches. Other parts of Britain were already Christian, evangelised by the Celts, including those monastic missionaries from Iona, disciples of St Columba. But Augustine’s arrival heralded a connection with Rome, the Apostolic See of St Peter and St Paul, and inaugurated a direction of travel for British Christianity. Slowly, all the British kingdoms embraced Christianity. Augustine was sent a pallium in 601 – a liturgical vestment which symbolised his own jurisdiction, and the relationship of his diocese with the papacy. Augustine’s successor as archbishop, Laurence had travelled with him from Rome, and some of the most saintly figures associated with the See of Canterbury over the next centuries were similarly exotic in origin. Llanfranc, from Italy, Theodore from Tarsus, Anselm, from Aosta in Burgundy. Some, of course, were British, Wulfred and the saintly Dunstan amongst them, shaping something of an indigenous English holiness which would find its most widely-revered ambassador in St Edward himself in the early years of the second millennium. But Canterbury’s history is profoundly European, much of the Cathedral’s architecture drawing from styles perfected across the channel in Norman France.  

There is a potential dichotomy when we consider whether what we think of as holy places have an intrinsic sanctity which somehow sets them apart from other ‘ordinary’ places. It is, after all, precisely in the ordinary, the day-to-day, that the Christian life is lived out for most of us. In some of the earliest writing found in the New Testament, letters written by and attributed to St Paul, we hear how Jesus’s incarnation was a kind of ‘macro’ event: in a particular place for all places, at a particular time for all time. As the Gospel spread across the eastern Mediterranean and beyond, it was in the proclamation of the message, within the prayer of the Christian community itself, and in the frequently heroic, self-sacrificial witness to that message, that lives of holiness and communities of transformation were formed. Although the earliest surviving account of a Christian pilgrimage to the holy sites of Jesus’s own death and resurrection in Jerusalem dates from the 380s, certainly such pilgrimage was already happening on quite a scale. Perhaps it is simply that some places root us more viscerally in aspects of the Christian story, and that as sensory beings, our encounters with these places especially matter. Our senses and our imaginations helpfully befriend our discernment, as we allow ourselves to wonder at the inexhaustible depth of God’s love in Christ. Maybe value-laden language of one spot being intrinsically ‘holier’ than another is overladen with difficulty, but we can instead perhaps use the language of intensity. An intensity of holiness, which sometimes leads us to insights, sensations, assurances, consolations, we otherwise might not have.

In 1935, TS Eliot published his short drama, Murder in the Cathedral, which draws substantially on the eyewitness account of the Canterbury monk Edward Grim, who witnessed the murder of Becket. Towards the end of the play, the chorus sings,

wherever a saint has dwelt, wherever a martyr has
given his blood for the blood of Christ,
There is holy ground, and the sanctity shall not depart
from it.
Though armies trample over it, though sightseers come
with guidebooks looking over it;
From where the western seas gnaw at the coast of Iona,
To the death in the desert, the prayer in forgotten
places, by the broken imperial column,
From such ground springs that which forever renews
the earth
Though it is forever denied. 

So many places described as holy have seen their stones razed to the ground. Iona, repeatedly destroyed by the Vikings as the blood of the monks melded with the sand of beach. Walsingham, pillaged by Henry VIII’s commissioners with its sub-prior Nicholas Milcham hanged outside the priory gates. Little Gidding, a laboratory of reformed holiness, destroyed by the parliamentarians who sought a simpler, more radical expression of the faith. Canterbury itself, its stones stained by the blood of Becket, and its shrine despoiled; a modern altar at the Sword’s Point where St Thomas bled out to death, and a single candle burning on the site of his entombment. And yet, still pilgrimage remains. The stories of these Christians, at once familiar and foreign to our age, refuse to be airbrushed out. ‘From such ground springs that which forever renews the earth.’ Similar more recent stories are told in Iraq and Syria, on a famous beach in Libya, where ordinary faithful Christians refused to renounce their faith, and met with the brutality of ISIS. Today, the Holy Land itself is increasingly scarred and abused, as relentless cycles of revenge and hatred cut through the innocent and those voices which plead for peace.

When we ask what holy places like this might teach us, one essential lesson is that we Christians do not know where our debts begin and end. These holy places connect us to strange events of the past, including the political machinations and intrigue which so often lead to violence and greed. Land called holy today is not spared the brutality of war and gross injustice. In our prayer and through our solidarity, we learn that the stories of these places are our story, too. We encounter within them an unbreakable connection to people we have never known, as such, and to a story of salvation and reconciliation which we share. The story of Canterbury, the Mother Church of the Church of England, warns us against parochialism or any narrow-minded exceptionalism for Anglicans. Its Italian, Burgundian, Norman, Saxon archbishops, alongside those millions of faithful people from our own shores, all proclaiming the same faith from different cultures. They teach us the holiness of catholicity. That is to say that we become the Christian community we were made to be when we appreciate how the same Gospel binds together in love people of different cultures, ethnic backgrounds and languages. The celebration of that Gospel is what we call the catholicity of the Church. And, luckily for us, that catholicity is a gift; not dependent on us, not ours to jealously guard for ourselves or to weaponise as a tool to shut others out, but rather to receive in gratitude, and to allow it to transform our lives and communities. When we allow that to happen, our ground becomes holy, too. Renewed in the intensity of the love which is the remedy for our brokenness, and the binding up of the world’s wounds.