You shall love your neighbour as yourself
‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’
A sermon by The Very Reverend Nicholas Papadopulos
Hebrews 9:11-14
Mark 12:28-34
‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’.
The question is: who is the self we are bidden to love? We might claim: a self which has freely made professional, economic, and relationship choices. We might accept: a self comprising the behavioural oddities, habitual frailties, and interpersonal aversions that we loosely call ‘character’. But we cannot avoid: a self moulded by social, familial, and historic conditions over which we have no power.
The powerlessness of working-class men and women in nineteenth-century England – their fundamental inability to control their own destinies – resonated profoundly with the designer, craftsman, writer, and thinker William Morris. Noting ‘the unhappy life forced on the great mass of the population by the system of competitive commerce’ he published his work of fiction, News From Nowhere, in 1890. In it he offers a romantic and radical reimagining of a future English life. There are no factories. Instead there are ‘places where people collect who want to work together’. In these the work done is creative and pleasurable – it is not harsh or exploitative.
Among the crafts practised is glassblowing. Morris gives these words to one of his characters: ‘As to the crafts…the glassblowing is rather a sweltering job; but some folk like it very much indeed; and I don’t much wonder; there is such a sense of power, when you have got deft in it…It makes a lot of pleasant work’. The craft gives power back to its practitioner.
Morris was not only what we might call a gifted creative: he was a dynamic entrepreneur whose workshop produced prodigious quantities of furniture, tapestry – and glass – for the chattering classes of his day. Among his clients was this Cathedral. Our Morris-produced window was installed in the South Quire Aisle 1879. It comprises images of two ‘Ministering Angels’ and two ‘Praising Angels’, designed by Edward Burne-Jones, surrounded by wreaths of acanthus leaf designed by Morris himself.
As many of you will know, early this year Sam Kelly, our Head Glazier, and his three colleagues, removed the window from its place for the first time in 145 years. Regular inspection had revealed its deterioration, and urgent intervention was needed. With the panels lodged securely in the workshop the team have been able to assess their condition.
Much of the painted detail has been lost. The team’s assessment is that the glass was fired too quickly at too low a temperature. In consequence the paint was never properly sealed into the glass, and the condensation of decades has simply washed it away. The irony is that for all Morris’s critique of Victorian capitalism and for all his praise of honest and unfettered labour it looks as though the pressure on his workers was considerable. The order books were full; the stately homes, municipal palaces, and deans and chapters were impatient; and corners were cut – with the results we are seeing now. It may even be that in the general haste certain details were never included at all. The ‘Praising Angels’ hold harps, but the strings of one are partially missing, as though the artist never got around to adding them.
‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’.
The question is: who is the self we are commanded to love? Like the artisans of Morris & Co, we live in a particular place; we live at a particular time; we have been subject to particular influences; we have grown to maturity in particular conditions. We are like Morris’s glass: under pressure, under-fired, and under threat. Sam Kelly’s team have done the research; they know what details have been eroded; and they are adding additional layers to the window, layers which will reintroduce the under-fired lines that have been lost. If we are to love ourselves perhaps we too have work to do, work at understanding better how we have been made – the things that have been included in our formation, and the things that have not.
What, though, of those behavioural oddities, habitual frailties, and interpersonal aversions that comprise our characters? What of the talents which give us life? What of our sexuality? What of the weaknesses that return to plague us? As News From Nowhere makes clear, Morris was a champion of mouth-blown glass. He did much to restore that medieval skill to English craft. Look at the faces of Burne-Jones’s angels – look at their furled wings and their flowing robes. Look at these, and tiny bubbles and ripples are evident in the glass . Contrast this with, for example, the modern sheet glass of the Refectory roof, and it has depth and texture.
Christ offers himself without blemish, as the author of the Letter to Hebrews notes. We do not. But here’s the thing: look at the glass in the workshop and the blemishes do not obstruct the light. If anything, they concentrate it. What we have too often been taught to think of as blemishes may in fact be anything but. Look at the glass, and it is through and around the striations that the light gleams the strongest. If we are to love ourselves then perhaps we need to wake up to everything that we have been given and assess it afresh. Does this – or that – impede the light, or give it new clarity?
And finally, there is the self which has freely made professional, economic, and relationship choices for itself and which has all too often made a right pig’s ear of them. Morris’s glass is filthy. The muck and grime of the years has accumulated on it, and a very basic part of the team’s work now is to give in a gentle clean. Pride, envy, lust, fear, rage: these are the layers that accrete around most of our days; these are the layers that most of us add to and even nurture. If we are to love ourselves then perhaps we lastly need our own gentle clean – perhaps we need to seek others’ and God’s forgiveness.
In New Seeds of Contemplation Thomas Merton writes: ‘…we all become doors and windows through which God shines back into His own house’. For Merton, windows are not things we look through. Windows is what we are. You and I are the windows through which the light, love, and grace of God pour into our world. Windows fired in the kiln of our particular place and time; windows comprising a marvellous diversity of gifts; windows from which the detritus of every day is regularly removed by the loving mercy of God. Windows through which the light, love, and grace of God pour for all.
Of course, George Herbert knew and loved Salisbury Cathedral. 250 years before the Morris/Burne-Jones window was installed here he writes:
Lord, how can man preach they eternal word?
He is a brittle crazie glasse:
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
This glorious and transcendent place,
To be a window, through thy grace.
Amen.