How can life go on? Reflections for HMD 2017

Personal reflections following a first visit to Auschwitz in January 2017

Two weeks ago I flew out of Cracow having been in Poland visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time. It was my first visit to Auschwitz and I was there as part of a group of Anglican clergy led by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

That question: ‘how can life go on?’ is addressed to all humanity. The implications of the question are huge. How can life go on in the face of crimes against humanity, genocide and pernicious, virulent anti-Semitism? How can life go on after the Nazi’s brutal, systematic attempt at exterminating a whole people?

But I want briefly to give a very personal, rather unformed response in the wake of my visit to Auschwitz.

I have woken today with a heavy heart and, as I knelt to say my prayers this morning, tears that filled my eyes, just as when I was there, remembering that this day marks the ‘liberation’ of Auschwitz.

Those tears were prompted as I walked around Auschwitz 1 and the site of beatings, hangings, shootings, starvation, torture, gassing and sadistic brutality.

Those tears were prompted as I stood by the railway line at Auschwitz 2, Birkenau, where families - men, women and children - were separated and sent to die by gas or by hard labour, starvation or random acts of malice.

The railway at Birkenau and 'Death Gate'

I stood there considering what would happen if I and my family had been taken there: would I be judged fit to work? What of my fit, sporty 17 year son? Would he be assigned to the Sonderkommando to the work of removing bodies from the gas chamber and putting them in the crematorium, after extracting gold teeth and cutting off women’s hair? What of my skinny 14 year old son, the right age to be spared the gas but would he be judged strong enough? What of my 12 year old son, could he be passed off as 14 and thus not go straight to the gas chamber? Perhaps. Perhaps not. What of my 8 year old daughter? What of my wife? The chances they would live beyond their first day at Birkenau would be limited, and I would never see them again and not be able to say goodbye. How can life go on?

The entrance to Auschwitz 1 - 'Work Makes You Free'

Images and thoughts assaulted me throughout my visit. I know others in my group were struck by the same things as me: walking under the Arbeit Macht Frei gates; through the death gate at Birkenau; the close proximity of the house of Rudolf Höss, the Camp Kommandant, where he lived a normal family life next to his murderous day job and where he was hanged after the war because of his crimes. (The 2024 film 'The Zone of Interest' documents this).

And there were other images that will stay with me. Being January there was snow on the ground and the landscape looked beautiful and innocent as snow does. But the dissonance between the beauty of the snow and the sunsets over Birkenau with what happened there was acute.

I was astonished not to see any walls, but just thin strands of barbed wire meaning that the prisoners could see out and the locals see in. I was revolted, almost physically, to learn more about the programmatic degradation of human beings so that they felt disgusting to one another and to themselves. I simply stood in silence by the pits into which the ashes of the dead were dumped, and where they still remain. How can life go on?

But life did go on for some. And, thanks be to God, the Jewish people were not eradicated, but are here and contribute to the diversity of society and our world.

The liberation of Auschwitz came 72 years ago tomorrow [80 years ago now].

What sort of liberation was it? Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi’s accounts as survivors of Auschwitz remind us that the liberation for them was not a joyous time for a party like VE Day 1945 here. Rather, it initially meant being force marched in appalling weather to other camps.

But following the end of the war and the uncovering of all that the Holocaust was, the question ‘how can life go on?’ is a haunting one. Perhaps after my visit my first response is that it does: life does go on.

One of the great contributions of the Jewish tradition to humanity is the priority of life. One of the great sayings of wisdom in the Jewish tradition, if not a direct quote from the Scriptures, is the toast ‘l’chaim’, which means, so I am reliably informed, ‘to life’ or ‘for life’.

Life goes on but never to be the same.

With the Archbishop and fellow clergy we reflected on deep and painful themes such as the Church’s relationship with God’s ancient people the Jews; deeply aware given where we were, of the inglorious part played by the Christian churches in fostering antisemitism in Europe over centuries and the almost total silence of the Church in the 1930s during Hitler’s rise to power.

How does life go on? It goes on in never letting the memory of Auschwitz fade or be denied. Life goes on in all the times we speak out about genocide, in all places where it happens. Life goes on in an uncertain world if we can name and expose anything which snuffs out life, or fosters hatred and death, for example, where people are identified in groups as somehow less than the ideal or norm, whether based on their faith, ethnicity, sexuality, gender or physical abilities.

Returning from Auschwitz my life does go on, but never to be the same again.

 © Andrew Bishop 2017/2025

Searching for Wonderful Things: A University Carol Service

Address at the University of Surrey Carol Service, 2016.

Guildford Cathedral during the current works, December 2016 Photo Trish Lambert

Look around you: what do you see? At first glance this cathedral is full of disappointing, grey, dirty scaffolding, ugly red plastic barriers and warning tape. Not terribly Christmassy.

But if you try and look behind it you might start to see it a bit differently. Perhaps then you can see that the scaffolding represents work in progress, of restoration, renovation and transformation.

Of course if you’re a University of Surrey civil engineering student you’ll be fascinated by it. As I speak, you’re probably calculating the weight bearing capacity of the beams supporting the scaffolding way up in the heights.

As you gaze up what do you see? Being poetic for a moment you might look up into the dark voids and spaces and ponder the mystery of universe and world and your own place in it. You might engage with the final reading tonight which speaks of ‘The light [which] shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it’ and proclaims, ‘The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.*’

This enlightenment changes how we understand the world and being human. Universities rightly pride themselves on generating learning through accumulating information and building knowledge. Universities search out and re-search knowledge.

The great challenge in a rapidly changing world is to ask an ancient question, ‘where is wisdom to be found?’ The habits of thinking that we have from our own disciplines will give us different insights and prompt us to wonder.

At the heart of this is the question of why sound waves oscillating at different speeds become music; why the tiniest micrometres of silicon are images of captivating beauty; why the stars, that have always prompted humanity to wonder, poetry and art, also contain clues and codes to understanding the depths of the story of the universe in which we exist. Wonderful things.

Where’s this all going? Where’s Christmas gone? Well, it’s right here. I just wonder if you had been a shepherd, called by angels, or one of the Magi, guided by a star, and you arrived at the manger in Bethlehem on the night of Christ’s birth what you would have made of it.

The scene was most unlikely as a holy place, a bit like this cathedral at the moment. A stable or cave, where animals live, an exhausted woman who has just given birth, and scared man, anxious about the mother of the child lying in the feeding trough.

Into that unpromising scene is born a child who is declared to be ‘Emmanuel, God with us’. It is a most extraordinary claim.

This claim is encapsulated by St John, who we will hear in our final reading. God, all that has been, is and will be, is now to be found in one particular place at one particular time with global, cosmic impact. John connects the very beginning of all things with the lives we live now, because in Jesus Christ is life, transformation and hope. John connects human knowledge and learning with God’s deep wisdom of the art of being human in faith, hope and love.

Mary famously declared, ‘my soul magnifies the Lord’. To magnify is, at the same time, to enlarge and make more intense. A magnifying glass can expand our vision, and can intensify the sun’s rays to burn. This Christmas look beyond: look beyond the obvious, the tinsel, mince pies and glitter, search and re-search what magnifying the Lord means for you.

Over that unpromising scene in Bethlehem, a messy stable, a man and woman and baby, sang choirs of angels because in Him the fullness of God is pleased to dwell: and you know, looking at that, I’m sure they sang, ‘wonderful things happen here’.

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

Seeking Wisdom: St Benedict and Universities, Ancient and Modern

‘The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day’ (Proverbs 4.18 AV)

‘But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? (Job 28.12 AV) Those are the questions that underlie the great Hebrew tradition of wisdom writing. The answer from the book of Proverbs is, in a nutshell, that, ‘The fear of the Lord is beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and understanding’ (Proverbs 1.7 AV). Proverbs is a book that restates that question and answer, and explores wisdom and her benefits and contexts. The question for the Christian is how far that wisdom tradition informs us today as those living in the hope of the gospel.

I want to use the Rule of St Benedict as a way into that and as a lens through which to see the pursuit of wisdom and the love of God, not least in the context of learning in Universities.

The Rule is laced with Biblical references, predominantly from the book of Psalms, with the next largest number of citations from the book of Proverbs. There is a clear relationship between the opening of Benedict’s Rule and Proverbs: from Proverbs: ‘Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding’; and from the Rule: ‘Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart’ (RB, Prologue, 1).

It’s not overstating it to say that St Benedict’s Rule is the conjunction and application of both the Hebrew wisdom tradition and the vision of Christian society. The pedagogy of both may seem remote from our times, laced with patriarchy, but The Rule is, at its heart, a practical and very pragmatic set of guidelines and instructions for living in Christian community, and some of the disciplines that go with that, centred on worship, hospitality and deep attention to God and neighbour. It is a powerful statement of finding wisdom in the heart and love of God.

Universities and collegiate foundations flow from and echo the monastic ideal: a resident, learning community that pursues wisdom (in the library or scriptorium); that eats together (in the refectory or hall); that ponders in company (in the cloister or quad); and that prays together (in the chapel or oratory). The survival and promulgation of learning and Christian teaching through the so-called Dark Ages has been attributed in large part to The Rule and those living it. They were faithful to the disciplines that go with the pursuit of wisdom, centred on worship, hospitality and deep attention to God and neighbour.

What Benedict advocates is a patient, unhurried pursuit of wisdom. For those pursuing wisdom, patient habit forming is at a premium. ‘Habit’ for a monk has a double meaning, the robe he wears and the formation in which he engages. So it is that Benedict states his aim of creating ‘a school for the Lord’s service’ (RB Prologue, 45) and this is about habit forming in the virtues and in wisdom. In emphasising, like Proverbs, the acts of hearing and attending as we pursue wisdom, Benedict’s Rule takes the wisdom tradition of the Hebrew scriptures and weaves it together with the New Testament and his deep conviction that the Christian should, ‘prefer nothing to Christ’ (RB 72.11).

In a hurrying world the ancient question uttered by Job still has a place: ‘where is wisdom to be found?’ Many things conspire against us: short terms for undergraduates, REF applications for academics, modern living and all hours’ social media. Whether we are monks or not, the disciplines that go with the pursuit of God’s wisdom, centred on worship, hospitality and deep attention to God and neighbour still matter but are still hard to pursue.

How we do that is in the forming of the habits of patience and attending to God are also shaped in those times and places where the hurry to a conclusion is not essential, and recognises that not everything concludes tidily anyway. Perhaps that’s why the Rule gives attention to the washing up in the monastery kitchen as much as to the cleaning of the vessels of the altar. Nevertheless, wisdom is rooted in God; a place like this is a witness to the divine patience where you are invited to stand on the threshold of God’s time: ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’.

But we cannot do this alone. The pursuit of wisdom is relational and inter-generational, as Proverbs and Benedict know. Hence the reference to father and son, that extends out into understanding that the wise community is not simply a teaching community, but a learning one too, drawing on and interpreting that which is handed on to us.

This patient, relational wisdom comes out in Benedict’s use of verses from the First Letter of John. How should the monastery deal with the admission of those seeking to join them? Benedict answers quoting 1 John, saying, ‘Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets have gone out into the world’ (1 John 4.1). This isn’t the desperate, grasping anxiety to recruit and boost numbers, characteristic of our contemporary church. This is a sense that ‘trying the spirits’, what we might call discernment, which is not to be hurried or rushed, but to be right both for the community and the individual: an act of wisdom.

So, then, there are connections between Proverbs and attending to wisdom and our second reading which is a meditation on love and listening to God. The Rule of St Benedict starts the process of incorporating wisdom and practical daily living in Christian community: as he says, it is a Rule ‘for beginners’ (RB 73.8). Such is the nature of wisdom that there is a practical and prosaic dimension to it. The wise ordering of the community is one aspect, but also wisdom as the basis for our ethical thinking and acting. The Christian Gospel roots that in love; not as a soppy sentiment but in the redeeming, sacrificial love of God revealed in the cross, which is, as St Paul puts it, scandal to Jews and the polar opposite of wisdom to the Greeks (cf 1 Corinthians 1.18-25).

So where is wisdom to be found for you and me? The culmination of Benedict’s pursuit of wisdom in relation to life in Christ comes as he connects it to the way of humility, the way of the cross, and how that shapes practical wisdom and the living of the virtues. So, he says, ‘after ascending all these steps of humility, the monk will quickly arrive at that perfect love of God which casts out fear (1 John 4.18)’ And he goes on to say that this can be exercised, ‘no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit and delight in virtue’ (RB 7.67, 69). Benedict is alluding to the verses from 1 John which capture John’s theology, ‘he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God…Herein is our love made perfect…There is no fear in love but perfect love casts out fear…We love him because he first loved us’ (1 John 4. 16-20 AV).

That’s the task for us as Christian disciples, within and outside Universities, to continue to pursue wisdom in all that we pray and think, speak and learn and do, so that it may be said of us, ‘The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day’ (Proverbs 4.18). 

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

Christmas reflection: Humanity on a Journey

This was first preached as an address at the University of Surrey Carol Service, 2^nd December 2015, in Guildford Cathedral. The collection at the service was for the Unicef: Syria Children Appeal and raised £1148 on the night.

+ In nomine Patris…

“After the border check the couple continued on their way. It was all getting very hard. The woman was pregnant, expecting her first child, the man carrying as many of their possessions as he could. His paperwork was checked to confirm that he was authorised to be in that town. So they had arrived, but would they have anywhere to stay?”

You may be wondering what that account is of. What’s it got to do with Christmas?

It could be an account of Joseph and the pregnant Mary arriving in Bethlehem, having their papers checked, and yet finding nowhere to stay.

Or, it could have been a contemporary report of a family of refugees today, on the borders of our European comfort zone having journeyed from Syria or Iraq.

It is, of course, both.

And after the birth of Jesus, as we know, King Herod sought to kill him. And again Mary and Joseph were on the move, fleeing into Egypt as refugees, to avoid the massacre of innocent children.

These journeys of flight from war, terror and murder are not how we want to, or should, live.

Humanity itself needs to go on a journey of transformation, and this is what Christmas invites us to: a changed, renewed world as we live the promises and purposes of God.

God does not will for us a world where we see, ‘the boots of the tramping warriors and all the garments rolled in blood’ (Isaiah 9.5) as the prophet Isaiah described, but rather, a world in which all authority rests upon the shoulders of the one named, ‘Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace’ (Isaiah 9.6)

Journeys, transformation and the movement of people are central to the Christmas story: journeys to God and from God.

Shepherds in the fields leave their task of looking after the sheep and go on a journey to Bethlehem and seek the new born child, the Good Shepherd.

Magi, who today might be known as the ‘boffins’, the equivalent of today’s academics, searching and researching after knowledge, wisdom and truth, got up from their desks, walked out of their labs, as it were, and sought and found truth in the Child of Bethlehem.

The journey of the Magi is interesting because they came by one route and, as the gospel tells us, they went home by another route, signifying a change of life and purpose (Matthew 2.1-12).

That change of purpose is effected through the person at the heart of Christmas: Jesus Christ, the beginning and the end of all our journeying.

Our final reading from St John’s gospel, in deeply mystical language, tells us two really significant things that challenge us today.

The first challenge is that God, in Christ, ‘dwelt among us’, which literally in the original Greek of the New Testament should be translated, ‘pitched his tent among us’.

Someone who pitches a tent is on a journey. A journey stripped of everything but the basics for life.

Tents pitched in camps have become the sign of the refugee, and just as God in Jesus Christ shares our lives, so he is with those refugees today.

The second challenge is that Jesus, just like the refugees today, received no hospitality, neither in the inn, not ultimately in the world: he died on a cross outside the walls, the comfort zone of the city.

The final reading tonight, from St John’s gospel, tells us, ‘[Jesus’] own people did not accept him’ (John 1.11).

But with those two challenges, of God dwelling among us in a tent and not receiving hospitality, is a promise.

That promise, St John says, is that, ‘to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God’ (John 1.12, 13)

At Christmas, today, every day, Jesus Christ is on a journey towards you and me, unworthy as we might think we are, and he comes and stands knocking on the doors of our hearts (Revelation 3.12). ‘You are precious, worthy and loved’, he say. ‘Do you hear me knocking?’ he says. ‘Will you open the door and allow me in?’ he asks.

May you be most blessed this Christmas: and being blessed, hear the cry of the refugee, the lonely, the homeless and outcast. Hear the knock of Jesus, the one born in the manger, give him the warmth of your life and receive his love.

© Andrew Bishop, 2015.