good morning and welcome to the dinery garden at canterbury cathedral on this morning of saturday the 30th of october we've come out this morning into one of the greenhouses because the rain which we prophesied yesterday came through the night and is uh uh just paused for a moment but is the clouds above are very very deep so we've come in to join the the creatures on this animal saturday should we say we've got lavender hen in front of me and her chicks and uh we've got lizzie behind me with her pulse and tiger here having his breakfast we've no sign of sleepy hedgehogs here but there are three of them in here somewhere and also two tortoises so here we are all together in the greenhouse sheltered on a morning like this and wherever you are in the world please feel that you are welcome and bring your own concerns your own intentions to our prayers of course our thoughts are still with the g20 leaders in rome but tomorrow all that will shift to glasgow when we think of the climate change conference of the many many leaders gathering in glasgow as they begin their conference tomorrow with the care of our planet utmost in their minds so let's begin our prayers on this saturday morning oh lord open our lips and our mouth shall proclaim your praise may christ the true the only light banish all darkness from our hearts and minds blessed are you creator of all to you be praise and glory forever as your dawn renews the face of the earth bringing light and life to all creation may we rejoice in this day you have made as we wake refreshed from the depths of sleep open our eyes to behold your presence and strengthen our hands to do your will that the world may rejoice and give you praise blessed be god father son and holy spirit blessed be god forever the night has passed and the day lies open before us let us pray with one heart and mind does we rejoice in the gift of this new day so may the light of your presence o god set our hearts on fire with love for you now and forever amen our psalm on this morning of the month is psalm 144 blessed be the lord my rock who teaches my hands for war and my fingers for battle my steadfast help and my fortress my stronghold and my deliverer my shield in whom i trust who subdues the peoples under me oh lord what are mortals that you should consider them mere human beings that you should take thought for them they are like a breath of wind their days pass away like a shadow bow your heavens o lord and come down touch the mountains and they shall smoke cast down your lightnings and scatter them shoot out your arrows and let sunder roar reach down your hand from on high deliver me and take me out of the great waters from the hand of foreign enemies whose mouth speaks wickedness and their right hand is the hand of falsehood oh god i will sing to you a new song i will play to you on a ten-stringed harp you that gave salvation to kings and have delivered david your servant save me from the peril of the sword and deliver me from the hand of foreign enemies whose mouth speaks wickedness and whose right hand is the hand of falsehood so that our sons in their youth may be like well-nurtured plants and our daughters like pillars carve for the callers of the temple our barns be filled with all manner of store our flocks sparing thousands and ten thousands in our fields our cattle be heavy with young may there be no miscarriage or untimely birth no cry of distress in our streets happy are the people whose blessing this is happy the people who have the lord for their god it's a lovely sound to read on this morning when we are continuing the story of the actual exodus of the people of israel the children of israel as they are so often called from egypt on their long journey to find the promised land and as we read that description then the psalmist vision of what the promised land looks like safety from foreign enemies and a place where all can be fruitful and also the singing to god on a ten-string harp and the way in which the creator over arches all that we do all of that coming on here and at the same time um we are going to go to that lesson in exodus now and continue where we left off yesterday let's give some of this stone to lavender hen here i don't know where she's gone here come on come on so i'm starting this morning in exodus from where we left off more or less at the beginning of chapter 13 and chapter 13 begins with a description of the exodus itself and some instruction of moses to the people the lord said to moses consecrate to me all the firstborn whatever is the first to open the womb among the people of israel both of humankind and a beast is mine then moses said to the people remember this day in which you came out from egypt out of the house of slavery for by a strong hand the lord brought you out from this place no leavened bread shall be eaten today in the month of abib you are going out and when the lord brings you into the land of the canaanites the hittites the amorites the hevites and the jebusites which he swore to your fathers to give you a land flowing with milk and honey you shall keep this service in this month for seven days you shall eat unleavened bread and on the seventh day there shall be a feast to the lord unleavened bread shall be eaten for seven days no leavened bread shall be seen with you and no leaven shall be seen with you in all your territory you shall tell your son on that day it is because of what the lord did for me when i came out of egypt and it shall be to you as a sign on your hand and as a memorial between your eyes that the law of the lord may be in your mouth for with a strong hand the lord has brought you out of egypt you shall therefore keep this statute at its appointed time from year to year when the lord brings you into the land of canaanites as he swore to you and your fathers and shall give it to you you shall set apart to the lord all that first opens the womb all the first born of your animals that are males shall be the lords every firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb or if you will not redeem it you shall break its neck every firstborn of humankind among your sons you shall redeem and when in time to come your son asks you what does this mean you shall say to him by a strong hand the lord brought us out of egypt from the house of slavery for when pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go the lord killed all the firstborn in the land of egypt both the firstborn of humankind and the firstborn of animals therefore i sacrificed to the lord all the males that first open the womb but all the firstborn of my sons i redeem it shall be as a mark on your hand or front blitz between your eyes for by a strong hand the lord brought us out of egypt moving on lizzy here we are i think it's sort of breakfast time for these come on that lesson is of course really important to us when we think of mary and joseph bringing their own firstborn later on to the temple and the firstborn of mary and joseph the child jesus presented in the temple to be redeemed just as all the first-born males of that people in which jesus was brought up were redeemed by the offering of a sacrifice and the two pigeons were brought so when we read that second chapter of the gospel of saint luke and come to the time when jesus himself as a tiny baby is brought into the temple and first everything that was prescribed by the law was done then also the new covenant continues by the coming of simeon and of anna and recognizing the anointed one as they come and of course simeon then as he takes the baby into his arms says his name dimitrius lord now let his south i served depart in peace according to thy word for mine eyes have seen thy salvation and he talks about a light should lighten all nations he realizes that this is not only the sign but the living representation of the new covenant that the human life of jesus redeemed himself for as he says to john the baptist when he is baptized it is good that we should fulfill all righteousness but as he is presented according to the law by his parents there on that day in the temple this chapter of the exodus is being fulfilled but let's remember now all the chaos that we were talking about yesterday with the exile and what people had brought and the way in which all that had come together in the chaos of going out in a panic and this morning of course we are back with as i've said almost placenta's instructions for the laws of the feast are being laid down one by one and as moses lays them down he's talking in this passage and i can't help but feeling that this has been refined over all those hundreds of years until this was written down refined into an orderly way of keeping the festival the redeeming of the firstborn but there's also a description of the land flowing with milk and honey which was given to us more fully by the psalmist in psalm 144 when we were reading that but before they reach that land flowing with milk and honey and all the blessings that await them they have a long and torturous and a journey and a journey not without incidents of grumbling and rebellion against moses and aaron because the going goes tough and so the easy writing of the liturgy for these days is going to be followed by that journey through the wilderness and all the dangers that they face as they go along and still the sense let's go back to the psalmist um asking to be saved from foreign enemies still the sense of the pharaoh's armies that behind them possibly coming to overtake them and stop all that they're doing there's great danger hanging around this morning as we um see to all of this well let's look at some dates today and the first of those um is a a date um which is the 30th of october 1958 when james rose macaulay died and the second is a date in 1894 the 30th of october 1894 when the composer and writer philip hesseltine who who like to be called peter warlock when he was writing music was born those two are two people of huge creativity but who gathered almost you know as a as we say a jack door gathers things which which are attractive and places them together and dame rose mccauley was just like that some of you will have read some of her writings and their very attractive writings she was brought up as a child as almost a a tomboy type of childhood in italy and that childhood she always remembered the beauty of italy and and having all that freedom before she was brought back to a formal education and both at school and at somerville college she she sean but at the same time she was self-effacing she knew deep inside her that she had to write and she wrote and wrote and wrote and there are so many of her books on the way through and she had a special love for this the 17th century now her meeting remember reading one of her books it was called they were defeated which is centered around the ordinary life of robert herrick the poet who lived at civil war times but was on the wrong side he was the parish priest and he wrote beautiful and happy poems about the countryside and about the love poems and musical poems and at the same time uh herrick had great unhappiness with the events of the civil war and they were defeated is talking about what happened to those who took that side uh it's a novel that's still in print and it speaks of the the century that she imagined herself back in but at the same time she could collect things about herself and write those to the world my wilderness she wrote in 1950 and that was a post-war novel about her own sense of loss she didn't flee from london she'd been on war service but at the same time she lost everything that was precious to her when her home was blitzed she totally lost her precious library with all the books she loved she lost so many things which reminded her of the years gone by and she then wrote this book about post-war loss but also about finding life springing up and flowering amongst the ruins of the city of london when the war was over and it's a novel about loss but also about gain and in that way um hey come on all gone out of the way for your breakfast hey come on um it's it's also a a novel about enormous fruitfulness and enormous creativity perhaps the novel that she's best known for and perhaps i could even get rid of that word perhaps the novel she is best known for is the towers of trebizond which unites all her love of writing about travel and she did write about travel in a huge way in other books as one called from the pyrenees to portugal by road in 1949 and that describes that coast from the pyrenees all the way down to portugal and at the same time she wrote about other people traveling traveling she wrote the lives of her friends from time to time but she was an enormous friend of virginia woolf of vita sackville west of e.m foster and towers of trebezon seems to sum all this up but it is in so many ways a totally humorous account and it is also a spiritual account with a particular background and the characters there seem to be on a pilgrimage as well it's a novel which begins with one of those sentences which have become famous like the beginning of pride and prejudice towers of trebzon begins with the sentence take my camel dear said my aunt dot as she climbed down from the animal on her return from high mass and that gives you a flavor of this pilgrimage accompanied by father chantry pig with two g's and he all these characters are derived from other people that she knew but at the same time not absolutely that and you can look at the narrator maybe as she herself but not exactly that it was a late book but it simply was the summer of all that she had collected together and at the same time but published posthumously in 1961 and 62 were collections of letters letters to a friend written in 50 and between 1950 and 1952 and then last letters to a friend 1952-58 but both published posthumously after she died and she'd been given a dame hood and for her many many writings but those letters were written to a cowardly father father hamilton johnson whom she had met many years before but who in the early 1950s wrote her a letter and it prodded her into a correspondence a deep correspondence and the letters are lovely to read they're a bit like what we're doing now anything that comes into her mind she writes to father hamilton johnson and he writes back and the way in which we read those letters to a friend actually we're looking at a spiritual journey it's a journey which quite early on brings her back into the regular life of the church but it's a journey also that revealed to her friends posthumously a secret relationship which she had had with a former roman catholic priest gerald o'donovan now married and with children a long secret affair between 1918 and 1942 when he died and that even her friends knew nothing about so there had been this private section of her life so when we're looking at the world my wilderness written in 1950 she's not only lamenting the loss of all her books and precious things and mementos and everything she owns with the destruction of her apartment in london but also she's looking at the loss during the war of a long-term relationship about whom which no one knew anything and that secret kept inside her and also now in the letters to a friend the the agony of the way in which that fits with her newfound christian faith at that time father hamilton johnson said later i simply needed to nudge her back into the church and those letters which again are still in print are the tale of a wonderful spiritual journey from someone who could write with enormous color but had a diverse and very fruitful creative life let's turn to peter warlock or philip hesseltine which was his real name born in 1894 and he having enormous unhappiness um firstly at school in board stairs but especially at eaton which he hated at the same time found music to be the thing which gave him solace and he found himself first of all absolutely hero worshipping frederick delias the composer after hearing his music and even more so after meeting him early in life that hero worship blossomed and delias said to uh um phillip shall we call him philip hesseltine for the moment um he said you should absolutely make music and the writing of music you're you've got a gift just follow it that's the only thing you need to concentrate on but actually phillip hesseltine peter warlock was someone who couldn't concentrate on anything for more than five minutes had something else would attract him or something else would actually take him over some new obsession with a person or more damagingly with alcohol um would take him over and sir thomas beecham wisely said about delias's advice to philip hesseltine frederick should never have committed the psychological blunder of preaching the doctrine of relentless determination to someone incapable of receiving it for his character just couldn't cope with that absolute concentration so many people inspired him songwriters inspired him he wrote beautiful songs but at the same time he would always should we say fall off the path and have to be as father hamilton johnson said about rose mccauley nudged back onto it and in nudging uh him back onto it sometimes there were fruits from which we now benefit well i like to think of the years from 1925 to 1928 when he was not living in london but was living in ainsworth in kent it's right over on the western part of kent uh between seven oaks and the dartfold crossing but it was a village in kent where he had a house and it was always almost like a musical commune of people coming there and he found those years creatively fruitful and from those years 1925 to 1928 we have two pieces of music for which he is best known the first is a whole suite for string orchestra or for full orchestra or for two pianos he scored it over those years in those particular ways so people could enjoy it differently it's called the capriol suite and i remember playing my cello in that in the school orchestra and enjoying that music hugely now if uh rose mccauley loved the 17th century and was all in favor of the the the jacobian and caroline poets and the the the ones who were defeated in the civil war but came back with the reign of charles ii then peter warlock phillip hesseltine loved the elizabethan age and everything about the music there and he was a great scholar of that from time to time and wrote lovely things about it from time to time and at the same time it in the capriol suite you can hear the rhythms and flavor of elizabethan england and it was a lovely thing to play on the cello the stamping rhythms of some of the movements and at the same time the the lovely lyrical movements of others the soft melodies which he brings out in so many of his songs and then in 1927 perhaps my favorite piece of all of his is the carol the christmas carol bethlehem down which he wrote all in a moment before once again going off to drink with his friends at the five bells pub opposite and the life of that commune sometimes aroused the notice of the the neighbors police had to be sent in by the noise in the middle of the night and all of those kinds of things but from it come those two wonderful pieces bethlehem down which i always look forward to mostly sang it epiphany but sometimes sung at christmas carol services and the capriles suite which those like me not massively skilled at the cello but could play with enormous enjoyment and at the same time on the piano with another person playing it too as a piano duet he sadly died in 1930 at uh but had in 1929 conducted his capriol suite at a prom and that is the i think the only recorded time of him conducting in a a a really important place with a full orchestra and he got a huge ovation but it wasn't enough to save him from himself so we remember his creativity and what it cost now before going on to our prayers and our prayers will take us to the elam valley again but this time to folkston and i wanted to just go back to yesterday and remember that we prayed for liminge and at liminge there the church of sint ethelberger is built on the foundations of the monastery and convent laid by sin ettelberger herself who was the daughter of ethelbert and bassa the king and queen who welcomed augustine and she became a nun and formed her own monastery there convent there but first she's gone north to be edwin's queen in the north and paulinus took uh she took paul linus one of the monks of this monastery here with her and porninus is well remembered in york but when edwin was killed he managed to to get her back to kent in safety and it was in at that time that the church of saint ethelberger and the monastery the convent there there were two sections in the year six three three they were deep into the time when she would remember those monks who came in five nine seven that's only 36 years before and poor linus who was he didn't come with the first batch but he came later bringing books and things from rome with him and was her spiritual counselor rather like father hamilton johnson with rose mccauley and when they came back and formed that monastery and convent it became a center of spirituality and learning but at the same time of course there were incursions of the danes and the buildings were destroyed but the lovely thing is that they have now been excavated and the shape of all of that and even the projected place of where the tomb of since the shrine of sindh ethelberger was are now very evident if you go there and just a little way off is the source of the nail-borne yesterday i was also talking about central augustine going and speaking with the villagers there now the story of that we have recently recorded and read for a friend of ours who's very sick matthew in the united states and he's being looked after by becky and tom his mother and father and we've made a a whole um shall we say collection of memories from from canterbury and fresher has put together a film to send to him and all of that is a lovely thing because each of our departments have sent greetings and told stories and one of those stories was the reading of the legend of the uh of augustine and the nailborn born as a stream which only flows in winter when there weren't the rain's falling and it had stopped flowing so that the source of all that is very near just in ethel burgers church and at the same time we thought we'd put it on for you this morning so that's that's put there as a as a part of this right at the end let's then say our prayers for this morning the rain is falling again now so this morning we're praying for the diocese of guyana in the church in the province of the west indies and we're praying here in this diocese for justin our archbishop and for rose bishop of dover and also for emma bishop at lambeth and in still in the elim elim deanery uh the area of around elim we're praying for the church of saint john the baptist foxton and for adam denley in his ministry there and the life of that pole parish so we are using the prayer for this week for the last time bring your own prayers and intentions as we do so blessed lord who has caused all holy scriptures to be written for our learning grant that we may in such wise hear them read mark learn and inwardly digest them that by patience and comfort of your holy word we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life which you have given us in your son our savior jesus christ amen the our father in whatever language you like to use our father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever amen moment of silence now for your own prayers on this saturday morning [Music] is is [Music] [Music] is [Music] is [Music] [Music] in the quietness i've been rejoined by tiger here things have calmed down now breakfast time is over but the pheasants and everything behind me lizzy and lavada hen are enjoying the morning in shelter the peace of god which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of god and of his son jesus christ our lord and the blessing of god almighty the father the son and the holy spirit be upon you for those whom you love and those whom you would pray for today and always amen this is the last day of the canterbury festival and tonight we have the final concert is a really big one in the cathedral and it's all mozart and haydn uh it'll have in it one of my favorite mozart pieces which is the clarinet concerto but also a lovely anson by haydn which is in sane and vane corey which means insane and vain cares and uh it's it's a asking them to be just to pass away and let tranquility reappear and the music of uh the two sections which talk about the insane and vain cares that plague us is tempestuous well it's tempestuous haydn can be he's always rather ordered um but the music of the the uh uh tranquility is very very beautiful indeed as it comes in two separate passages last night we had a lovely concert in the crypt which was all mozart by a string trio and the uh carlos string crea trio played the long developmental with all its movements with reminiscences from so many songs in mozart's operas so the festival's been a great triumph and the people of canterbury have enjoyed it this year it couldn't happen last year but it's happened this year and been a really happy coming together in cathedral and many other venues well this is going to be a day inside i think isn't it a nice restful day inside yeah the story of saint augustine uh and the villagers uh when he went out to to the nailborn is reminiscent of the of moses aaron by the denial with the contest with the say egyptian gods at that time because this was augustine the emissary of the new covenant and and god's emissary here in kent going out to face what the villagers thought was the drying up of the stream by pagan gods so as i say that was that was told again in this little collection of films for matthew and matthew is actually um as i said very ill but he is he was the chairman of the friends of canterbury in the united states and this film which is taking a little while to collect together if tom and becky are watching this morning is almost ready and we'll be with you soon and so it we hope will be lovely scenes of canterbury to watch with many many memories matthew on this lovely september afternoon as the sun begins to get lower we followed the guinea fowl across the grass and come to the orchard and the stream running through the orchard which you and becky will know well from our walk around the garden so many times and i'm reading from a book which fletcher found called tales of old kent it's a story not about canterbury but about the nail borne stream and saint augustine one of kent's many beauty spots is the elam valley which takes its name from the lovely little village of elam between canterbury and dover it is a place of sweeping hillsides and pretty miniature views through which runs a celebrated nail-borne stream the stream is spring fed and traditionally it waters its course only once every seven years that regularity is not entirely reliable but no one begrudges it a little license in the matter in any case to question its behavior would be almost irreverent in the circumstances for if tradition is to be believed this was a dry valley a thousand years ago in the days when saint augustine then simply father augustine came to kent despite the familiar story that augustine baptized egbert king of kent at easter and ten thousand of his subjects the following christmas kent did not abandon the old saxon gods easily even among those who were baptized there were many who embraced the new christian religion as an addition to rather than a substitute for their old beliefs which lingered on in the more rural areas for long after augustine was gone in several of the older kent churches there are still reminders of pagan influences and there are customs to observe to this day which can be traced back to pre-christian times although their present day observers do not always realize or acknowledge it throughout his life in kent augustine had always to be striving to drive the old ways deeper underground and to demonstrate whenever he could the greater benefits of christianity the elam valley nailborne stream was one such demonstration the story goes that the people of the valley were suffering particularly badly from a drought which was shriveling their crops and parching their fields they made all the customary pleas to the old gods to help them but the gods withheld their help the people were in despair in his abbey in canterbury augustine heard about the plight of the people of the valley and he rode out to see them and tried to bring some comfort when he arrived he realized that they were in no condition to listen to his breaching words were not going to win them over what they needed was action specifically action that would bring water to their unwatered lives so augustine knelt down and prayed to his god asking him to help these poor people his prayers over he stood up again and where he had been kneeling a spring of clear water burst from the earth and began to flow in a stream through the valley the people of course were overjoyed they were very impressed too their prayers to their own gods had achieved nothing yet this holy man had come among them and by his prayers had prevailed upon his god to give them the water they craved augustine had no difficulty at all in persuading them to convert from their pagan ways and adopt the christian faith but the old gods although they had been deaf to the pleas of their own worshipers were not blind to what was happening in what they regarded as strictly their own parish angered they conjured up a great storm which swept through the valley uprooting trees causing havoc the people wanted water did they well now they had it plenty of it they didn't need a pathetic little spring with which this interloper had sought to impress them so they caused the court storm to stop it up again so that the water no longer flowed then having swatted the efforts of augustine and his god they allowed the storm to abate and retired to see how the foreign holy man would handle this small demonstration of their own powers the local people naturally were not anxious to have the whole sequence of events repeated they no longer doubted that augustine would bring them water if he chose to but if this were going to provoke the old gods into hurling trees about and flattening their crops on the whole they reckon they'd be better off relying on the natural swings and roundabouts of good and bad seasons just as they always had done but augustine could not allow his god to be seen to have been defeated so he prayed some more recognizing the dilemma in which the local people found themselves this time he asked that the elam stream should flow not all the time but just once every seven years that will be enough to overcome the effects of any intermediate droughts and relieve the worst of any suffering they might cause but also in its own way provide permanent evidence of the power of his god a stream that ran all the time would come to be taken for granted but if it's just if it sprang from the earth only once every seven years it would be a regular reminder to the people of the power that caused it to behave in such a very unconventional way the old gods it seems did not recognize the subtlety of this they saw it as a victory for themselves and chose to be magnanimous enough to permit the arrangement so it was according to tradition that the nail-borne stream flowed through the elam valley once every seven years a recurrent reminder that the christian god was both more powerful and more wise than the old saxon gods who gradually lost favor and were abandoned as a matter of record the nailborn does not flow always at the seventh year but who is to say that over the fullness of time through which it it has and will fulfill its god-given destiny its activity will not average out into seven year cycles so so so foreign