The Bishop of
Stafford, the Right Revd Gordon Mursell, has used a pastoral letter in February’s Parish Magazines across the Diocese
of Lichfield, to consider the consequences of leaving home. The bishop will be retiring to Scotland in June after being warned
by doctors that he risks losing his voice completely unless he stops talking too much.
The
full text of the letter reads:
Leaving Home
One
of my favourite paintings is called “The Last of England” by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown. It’s
in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and it depicts a couple on a windswept cross-Channel ship, with the white cliffs
of Dover on the right, and an expression of deep sadness on their faces as they leave to begin a new life in a new country.
Only when you look closely do you notice the details: the woman is holding the tiny hand of a baby hidden beneath her grey
coat, and a row of cabbages hang from the ship’s side.
As I write this I feel something of the couple’s emotions. I too am leaving home for another
country. In mid-June my wife and I are moving to southern Scotland, after five years as Bishop of Stafford and just under
37 years in the full-time ministry of the Church of England. But then life is full of experiences of leaving home, as most
of you who read this will know. To be born is to leave the warm security of your mother’s womb; to leave school means
stepping out of the familiar into the unknown; to go into hospital means embarking on a journey whose outcome you can’t
entirely predict. And to lose someone you love means leaving home, not always literally, but spiritually; for “home”
means people as much as places, and the loss of someone very close to you changes that forever.
The Bible has some profound wisdom to help
us here. First, there is no way back. At the start of the human journey, Adam and Eve had to leave home and step into the
lonely world east of Eden. There was no way back. Abraham never went back to Ur, nor Jacob and Joseph to Israel; and the only
place that Jesus could work no miracles was when he tried going back home to Nazareth. Of course you can return to where you
once lived; but it won’t be home any more. You can (and usually do) return home from a spell in hospital; but you won’t
go back - you can only go forward, because your spell away will have changed both you and your home as well. Nostalgia is
good news for no one. Better to leave home and start anew, however fearful the prospect, than risk becoming the skeleton at
the feast.
Secondly,
we must learn to travel light. That’s desperately hard in a consumer society which prizes stuff, and acquisitiveness,
before all else. Recently I read a review of a new book called “Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.”
The author makes the point that the internet has made available a staggering, unimaginable quantity of information, infinitely
more than anyone could use. But it has also made it much harder to delete things. The result? We keep kidding ourselves that
we can go on through life simply adding more and more (things, experiences, memories, qualifications) to our spiritual luggage,
without ever having to let anything go. Yet Jesus told his disciples to leave home and step out in faith with no spare bag
or tunic (Matt.10:10). Leaving home obliges you to ask: what matters most in my life? What can I - must I - let go of? What
illusions about myself, what status symbols, what dark resentments, what accumulated clutter, need releasing if I am to travel
on in faith?
Lastly,
and however hard it is to believe, the best is always yet to come. The next bishop, the next vicar, the next occupant of the
house you called “home”, will probably do better than you; and you should rejoice if they do, for what you left
behind may have helped to make that happen. And for you or me, leaving home and travelling on with more grey hairs and an
aching mix of sadness and deep gratitude, what lies ahead? We don’t know, for the future is not in our control. But
God is a nomad too, and walks with us into the unknown. The supreme symbol of leaving home in Scripture is not the closed
gate of Eden but the Cross of Good Friday; for there, and in our place, Jesus let go the most precious thing of all - his
life - in order to receive it back from the Father on Easter morning in a form even death could not destroy. That’s
why, as C.S.Lewis famously said, Christians never say goodbye - only “until we meet again”, in this world or the
next. And that’s why, for those willing to take the risk of leaving home, the best is always yet to be.
Gordon Mursell
February 2010
