Dedication of Mucknell Oratory, 25 March 2011

Homily given by Archbishop Rowan Williams

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Very familiar words, and if we stop to think about them, might be puzzling us. Mary is already full of grace, the Lord is already with her, but this is a story of how the Word of God comes to her in and through the angel’s message. What’s going on in Mary before the angel speaks, and before life kindles in her body? Part of the answer to that, surely, is that God the Word is with us in every moment of our being, every corner of our existence. We are, because God has spoken. The Word God has spoken is never withdrawn. So the very depths of each one of us is already, always, the Word of God. God inviting, God summoning, God speaking to us by name, God writing on his own heart our uniqueness, our distinctiveness. Mary is full of grace, the Lord is with her, because she’s received the grace of going into that depth, where the Word is, and absorbing its reality, recognising it, drawing it into the light, so fully that it’s possible for the Word to become flesh in her very body. She has supremely the grace of listening – that’s the grace she’s full of. And because she’s had that grace of listening, she has the silence – the room – for the Holy Spirit to enter, to overshadow, and to bring Christ to flesh.

The grace that communities like this one pray for is surely, supremely, the grace of listening like that. The very beginning of the Rule of St Benedict – which if you’re American you might want to translate ‘Listen up!’; I’m not, so I don’t – sets the tone for the whole of the Rule and the whole of the life. This is a life about listening God into your flesh, into your heart, into your mind and soul. This is a life about the grace of listening, so that the Word becomes flesh, not in individual and individual and individual, but in the life of mutual obedience and mutual service lived under this Rule. That is how the Word is heard in this life and in this place. So foremost among our prayers today will be the prayer for the grace of listening to God and to one another as the Rule suggests, inseparable from one another.

And there's another kind of listening that arises out of this, and it's perhaps appropriate as we think about what's gone into the building of this wonderful new home. And that's something like the grace of listening to the world. This new home for a community has been designed and constructed with deep attention to the kind of world we’re in; the kind of world where it won’t do to ignore considerations about ecological balance, sustainability and the health of the whole environment. And surely that’s part of the same listening: listening for the creative Word in things, in the stuff of the world; listening our way into the depths of what is around us, so that the Word comes alive in what we do with the things that are around us, the stuff we live with and live on.

It’s always an integral part of monastic witness at its best that it involves a listening, not only to God, not only to one another, but to the world itself; a patient and light way of standing on the soil; an attentiveness to what this earth actually gives us, and we need to give in reply in mutual obedience of listening to the earth and us. So that our next prayer will be that what is spoken here in the life of the community and the nature of this home which houses it – what is said here – will be heard, that this place will be part of God’s means of creating and shaping the grace of listening in the wider community, shaping the grace of listening for those who come here and go away to their various responsibilities, shaping the grace of listening in a church which is not always brilliant at listening either to one another or to God, and is only learning very slowly about listening to the environment. So, ausculta, listen, as the Rule says. But also speak, be who you are, be who you say you are in this place. Let this place be what it is, and let all of that together be God’s Word to this wider environment.

We go back to the events that we celebrate today, because that call and that invitation is for all of us, not just for the community. It’s for all of us as alarming and disorienting as it was for Our Lady at first. How can this be? How can all of this happen? How can we – noisy, selfish, anxious people – listen the Word into flesh?

Gabriel says the Holy Spirit will overshadow us, and the power of the Most High will come upon us. And that’s the last prayer we pray today, quite simply, for overshadowing by the power of the Most High, which as the Collect reminds us is most decisively shown in mercy and pity. The power of the Most High, which is the power to give away all that protects, all that darkens, all that limits. May that power of Holy Spirit be here in the lives lived together, in the ministry shared with all those who come here to be welcomed. And that power, that spiritual energy, be a very place in itself, so that, standing lightly on the soil, we may sing the Word of life and death, so that the world may hear and love and be transfigured.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.