ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Sermon preached by Fr. Gerald Beauchamp at Solemn Evensong and Benediction on the Third Sunday of Lent, 7th March 2010

Readings: Genesis 28. 10-19a; John 1. 35-end

The third sermon in the series Passionate about Novels

The mystery of wood is not that it burns, but that it floats (p 24)

This is a quotation from the novel that I want to explore this evening: Fugitive Pieces by the Canadian author, Anne Michaels. The novel was published in 1996 and was her first. (Citations here are from the paperback edition, Vintage Books, New York 1998.) Before that she'd made her name as a poet. For me, that's the key to the novel's success. It's wonderfully written. You have the sense that every word, every syllable, every grammatical mark, even the layout of the page has been thought about deeply. Anne Michaels doesn't just write: she quarries and sculpts her language.

The story goes like this:

The year is 1942. We're in a small town in Poland. Jakob, a seven year-old Jewish boy, is hidden by his parents as Nazis go house to house searching for Jews. His family are murdered or abducted. Jakob escapes and after hiding in a forest is rescued by a man called Athos. Athos is a Greek geologist. He's working on a geological site nearby. He's an expert on what happens to wood as it fossilises.

Athos smuggles Jakob to his home on a Greek island where he successfully hides him during the German occupation. They live together alone. Athos's wife died during World War I. Athos becomes Jakob's mentor. He teaches him life's great lesson: to make love necessary. (p121)

After the war they move to Toronto. Athos goes to Canada on a research project. Jakob becomes a man: a poet, a teacher and a translator. His first marriage ends in divorce. Later he meets Michaela and through falling deeply in love he transcends the tragedies of his childhood.

As Jakob gets older, his life and work inspire a younger couple, Ben and Naomi. Ben's family has also been blighted by the Holocaust. Jakob's wisdom enables Ben to live beyond his parent's nightmare and to discover himself.

(The book was turned into a film two years ago and is now available on DVD).

Fugitive Pieces isn't a Christian novel in the obvious sense. Anne Michaels isn't a theologian. But as with all holocaust novels it's a warning that what has happened can happen again. It's a warning to Christians to take heed of their Jewish heritage.

The novel is almost monastic. The hero is called Athos. Mount Athos is a holy mountain. Monasteries have existed there for centuries. Like the mount that bears his name we're told that Athos like most Greeks ... arose from the sea (p 19). Athos is a widower, a celibate who takes under his wing the young Jakob. Athos is more than a substitute father who brings up the son he never had. He's more like an older monk who guides a novice through the storms of life. When the decision is made to leave for Canada, a neighbour remarks to Jakob "So. The monk runs away to join the circus." (p 174)

Judaism is the father of Christianity. Sometimes the offspring needs to hear the old, old story because the old, old story is the perennial story of the human condition. There's always drowning and destruction; violence and war. To be truly human means to transcend the dark side not to escape it.

Jakob reminisces:

While I hid in the radiant light of Athos's island, thousands suffocated in darkness. While I hid in the luxury of a room, thousands were stuffed into baking ovens, sewers, garbage bins. In the crawlspaces of double ceilings, in stables, pigsties, chicken coops... While I was ... learning ... geology, geography and poetry Jews were filling the corners and cracks of Europe, every available space ... I didn't know that when there were too many for the ovens, corpses were burned in open pits, flames ladled with human fat. (pp 45-46)

Human history can be terrible. Its upheavals are analogous to the geological periods that laid down the rocks. We are all 'limestone'. We're carved: shaped by history. Limestone is Athos's favourite stone. It is the crushed reef of memory (p 32). It lines the halls of Toronto's Union Station (p 90). Geologists are surgeons fold(ing) back the skin of time (p 33). When the prisoners were forced to dig up the mass graves, (we're told) the dead entered them through their pores and were carried through their bloodstreams to their brains and hearts. And through their blood into another generation. (p 52)

And the killer? Jakob answers: I knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate (p 79). Words, like wood, can burn or float. They can wound or they can sustain. They can be noisy like the crackling of a fire or they can soothe like warm water.

From his cross Jesus spoke. He uttered the world's pain (the burning): I thirst (Jn 19. 28); My God, my God why have you forsaken me? (Mt 27.46) But he also spoke the sublime: Father, forgive ... (Lk 23. 34); Today you will be with me in paradise (Lk 23. 43); Into your hands I commit my spirit (Lk 23. 46); Mother, behold your son (Jn 19. 26); and at the end - It is finished (Jn 19. 30)

For John the Evangelist (as we heard this evening) Christ is the Lamb of God that takes away the sin (the pain and the burning) of the world. As we walk the long walk to the altar rail to receive communion at the high mass the choir surrounds us with the Agnus Dei - that most poignant reminder of who and what we encounter.

We enter the peace of God that passes all understanding: a peace for which the world craves; a peace that's present in some but all too few people. Athos is a man of such a peace. Jakob describes his death.

On his last night, Athos had come home from a lecture on the conservation of Egyptian wood. It was about half past ten. He usually reported some observation of the evening, or even recounted the main details of the talk, but since I'd typed it for him earlier that day the latter was unnecessary, he was tired. I heated some wine for him and went to bed.

In the morning, I found him at his desk. He looked as he often did, asleep in the middle of work. I embraced him with all my strength, again and again, but he would not come back. It is impossible to reach the emptiness of each cell. His death was quiet; rain on the sea. (p 113-114)

The mystery of wood is not that it burns, but that it floats. Athos isn't someone who's floated through life playing no part in it. Quite the opposite. He's a righteous man who wears his moral qualities lightly. In so doing he breathes life into others. He's a saviour and salvation is apparent in Jakob. Jakob becomes, like Athos a great listener. He is not like a priest who listens for sin, but like a sinner, who listens for his own redemption (p 208). This novel is about good news in the face of calamity.

Religion can enrich life or diminish it. We don't need religions that burn but there's a lot of it about. Towards the end of his recent book on Christian history Diarmaid MacCulloch says Throughout the world at the present day, the most easily heard tone in religion (not just Christianity) is of a generally angry conservatism (A History of Christianity p 990). Christianity has had its fair share of burning: heretics in the Middle Ages through to the flaming crosses of the Ku Klux Klan. Prophecy is making a comeback even in some parts of the Church of England although from what I hear it's at best one group of people telling another group of people what to do and at worst it's a form of institutional bullying.

Good religion is taught us by the Jews especially one Jew from Nazareth. He showed us through the wood of his cross that the mystery into which he invites us is not one that reduces us to ashes. There's no fuel in ashes. Christ's mystery is one into which we are baptized. Like him we can rise above the clamour of war. We can transcend this world's evil.

The mystery of wood is not that it burns, but that it floats.

Amen