Cathedral Oasis

The first thing I noticed when I read the summer issue of the Inverness Cathedral Messenger was the news that the Provost, Alex Gordon has been invited to be the next Chaplain of Holy Trinity Church in Geneva and will leave Inverness at the end of September.

I’m very grateful to Alex – I went to talk to him some years ago when I was unsure whether I would ever attend a church again, and was greeted with warmth, empathy, wisdom and theological insight – and a welcoming mug of coffee. When I began regularly to experience the weekday Eucharist at the Cathedral, it was Alex who led the worship. I also enjoyed the spiritual and intellectual stimulation of the weekly discussions Alex organised throughout Lent.

John Dempster and Provost Alex Gordon

 In The Messenger, Alex emphasises the importance of keeping the Cathedral ‘open and accessible’ through the day, ‘an oasis of peace for prayerful encounter with God.’ I have certainly found the building to be this. Often there will be people sitting quietly, letting the peace embrace them, deep in reflection.

The Messenger also outlines minor adjustments it’s planned to make to the Cathedral lay-out to bring the physical structure into line with current convictions about worship.

For the way we design our churches reflects our beliefs about what is involved in worshipping God, and what is happening when we worship. 

Worship at the Cathedral follows a formal liturgy, with a sense of order and tradition, an awareness of the place of beauty in worship, and a humbling recognition of the holiness of God. Other churches meet in houses or (by necessity) school halls – expressing the conviction that God is present everywhere and can be worshipped everywhere, and that it is possible to revere God in a fairly informal setting.

Hilton Church which I attend on Sundays was built in the 1950s – there’s a long auditorium, and the intention was that the minister would lead from the front.  But now Duncan Macpherson stands at a simple lectern in the centre of one of the long walls, on the same level as those who have come to worship, leading from the centre.

Two changes are planned in the Cathedral. At present between the nave and the choir there stands a richly-carved wooden screen, a memorial erected in the 1920s to those who died in the Great War. It’s planned to move this to a position where it will be seen clearly to be a War Memorial. This move will have the added benefit of removing the barrier between the congregation and those leading the service emphasising that we come to God as one people.

When the Cathedral was designed in the 1860s, the layout reflected the tradition that in celebrating Communion the priest would stand before the Altar at the East Wall, back to the congregation, which might have encouraged the misunderstanding that what the priest was doing was somehow appeasing an angry God. The second proposed change is to create a new altar in the centre of the nave

In fact most of the Cathedral Eucharists are led from existing side-altars where the priest stands in front of people, an approach which emphasises that the Eucharist is a family meal, focusing on God’s love for us and God’s provision for our needs in Jesus Christ. 

Some churches where communion is celebrated very simply may regard Cathedral worship with some suspicion. But having experienced both it seems to me that both approaches to Communion  aim to make the once-for-all-time death of Jesus real to us in the present, as real to us as if it were happening now,  so that we can experience afresh what Christ has done for us, and the new life he shares with us. We respond in ‘thanksgiving’ – which is what ‘Eucharist’ means.

At the heart of the oasis is set a family table to which all who seek God through Jesus Christ, however feeble our faith, are welcomed in love. This is at the core of Christian worship, and if anything in our way of doing church is diluting the power of it, then we need to be prepared to make changes as the Cathedral is doing.

But oases for the soul are not only to be found in peaceful, consecrated buildings and in worship services. My visit to Alex Gordon’s study that day was, to me, an oasis. And in a profounder sense, the Christ whom we encounter in our hearts is a perpetual oasis within us.

Alex Gordon leaves us for the oasis that is Holy Trinity Church, Geneva. But there, as here, he will through his living faith be himself an oasis. We are each called to be an oasis wherever we are so that others, stopping by for a while, will find peace.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 7th August 2014)