St Neots Parish Church

Every day here the Bible is read, morning and evening. Sometimes it seems remote, even barbaric. Sometimes though it speaks with an immense power such that it makes men weep as they read it. That is the common experience of those for whom it is the substance of their praying. It doesn’t happen always, as I said, but occasionally, it hits the reader between the eyes.

I wonder whether it was so in the case of a pious member of this church in the year 1878. Was he, I wonder, reading this little known story from our gospel about the widow of Nain, that so struck him and altered the course of his life? His name was Charles Perceval Rowley. He was the younger son of the Lord of the Manor George William Rowley. His elder brother George Dawson Rowley was an explorer and an ornithologist; Charles remained in St. Neots with his parents. His most lasting project was to fill the windows of this church with the story of our Lord from his birth to his Passion, resurreciton and ascension. He started at the east end with the window which you see and which we restored half a dozen years ago, and proceeded , via the lady chapel to the nave working westwards, but keeping in mind the order of the story so that a visitor could tell the whole story of Christ’s life, window frame by window frame from the lady chapel westwards, around the west end and up the north aisle eastwards to the entry into Jerusalem opposite me now. He worked westwards on both sides, no doubt in order to prevent the lighting of the church to become unbalanced during the progress of the project.

He had got on rather well, reaching almost the back of the church when on November 11th. 1878 he father and his brother both died, within hours of each other. We are used to death, we Christians. We enter church each Sunday surrounded by the expectant dead in the churchyard; the resurrection we celebrate on Sundays, offers us a personal hope. I wonder if we can imagine now his reaction to this double blow. Did his mind run immediately to the gospel story today or did he find it and have it explode in his imagination? His thoughts were not of his own grief, but of that of his mother. Losing a husband and a son on the same day, she is doubly bereaved. In those pre-electronic days she must have heard of her son’s death some days after that of her husband. A devoted son now turns his attention to supporting her.

How do we know this? Well, the evidence is before us or, more accurately, behind us. He immediately changed all his plans about the windows and commissioned a new window in the south west corner which tells of his and his mother’s double grief: the raising of the son of the widow of Nain and, just to complete the story and tell us something more: at the very same time he commissioned another window, Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, surrounded by the birds which his brother might have discovered, and which is in the Jesus Chapel. It requires little thought to understand where he was coming from.

The Gethsemane window, of course, fits into the story he was wantng to tell - though he had to put it in an obscure place where it cannot easily be seen to fit into the chronology; he had been following St. John’s version of Christ’s ministry. But the Widow window should have been of the Feeding of the Five Thousand if he was following the gospel. His personal tragedy and, more particularly, that of his mother, interfered with it. He finds himself seeking the consolations which Christ offered that he who raises the dead and himself experiences the pain of loss, shares in our pains and lifts us out of them.

The Victorians were, we are told, much obsessed by death and even in our secular age, it is still the area of life where religion still keeps its greatest hold in the popular imagination. Though there are more humanist funerals and do-it-yourself customised funerals, the feeling that death is not the end remains, even amongst those for whom the significance of religion in the rest of their life has quite faded.But while I am more than ready to comfort the bereaved and undertake those tasks which many regard as morbid, but which have always been one of the acts of mercy required of Christian people, the burial of the dead, it seems to me that there is more to be said.

As I have often said before, the claim of the Christian faith to be able to claim to be the truth rests on its capacity to reach into every crevice of human existence, to speak in the dark and also in the broad day light. The windows that surround us filter the light of the sun through biblical narratives, interpreting the means by which we see anything at all through Scripture. But what passage of Scripture is filtered is a matter of our own choosing.

If we, now were commissioning a new window, what would we think of? What would the interaction of our own life experience and the sayings of the Bible produce? At once we might honestly admit that, for the most part, our reading of the Bible is less frequent than that of Charles Rowley and his contemporaries; but given that. What might we want? (I can safely ask this without setting your thoughts upon fundraising because there are no clear windows left; this is an exercise of the imagination not another project for the restoration committee).Would we begin with our own life and then look for something in Scripture to fit? That can be dangerous, simply using the faith to bolster our own preconceived plans. Or should we let Scripture speak out our having dwelt upon it in all its diversity, praying it as well as reading it, sharing it and questioning it, arguing with it as well seeking illumination?

Charles Rowley’s plan had been to follow St. John’s gospel in dealing with our Lord’s ministry. In this he was knocked off course. He fell upon Luke - the widow picture- out of personal experience. For our part, we have been and shall be following Luke ourselves this year, as we do every third year. Luke is, in many ways our sort of bloke. A towny, a cosmopolitan, not a Jew, his gospel is well-known for the story of the Good Samaritan, which we shal hit sometime in July. That might knock us sideways: there are plenty of foreigners about in our world whom we might despise but who could turn out to be the one we need most of all; our neighbour. Then there is a Prodigal son: the wastrel youth who wants nothing but a good time - he is very modern too; who needs forgiveness. But as I think of the world which bursts in on me daily through the media, what moves me is the sheer weight of numbers in our world: too many people, too many hungry people, too many who have so little when we have so much and yet are not at all contented with our lot. That is a key to our condition. If we were grateful for the largesse which fills our shopping malls; if we were happy, generous people prepared to give whatever we had, be it so little compared with the needs of the world, that would be something. But what have I among so many? Five barley loaves and two small fishes? Rather more I think. You can see where I am coming from. My window would be filled with the people of Darfur or northern Uganda, full of the half-drowning citizens of Bangla Desh, not five thousand, but almost five thousand million. That is what I would commission.

But in order to engage properly in the task, it would not be enough for my window to simply reflect my mood. The Widow window is not just about grief; if it was the product of prayerful reflection it was also about the triumph of love. My Five thousand window must be about more than guilt; it must be about the triumph of generosity. Brooding upon the Scriptures begins with the interaction of possibly accidental similarities, happy coincidences, but it is informed by our knowledge of the character of our Lord. We come to internalise what we encounter so that it becomes part of our self which is, itself, changed. Good intentions, which so infamously pave the path to hell, become so embedded that they become good actions and take our hearts somewhere else entirely. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, that story, from St. John’s version, was what Charles Percival Rowley may have originally intended.