Looking forward
Anne Lamb
I do not know much about angels. Their appearances, not always visible, occur in moments of high crisis to bring a message, an intervention, the unseen presence of divine power to someone in great trial and necessity. Of the four Archangels, Gabriel has a specially conspicuous place.
Charles Edward Brooke, speaking of the mission of the College, wrote that none, apart from the clergy,
“...have so good an opportunity and therefore so great a responsibility, as those who are called – and it is a calling or vocation – to teach our children. Day by day hundreds and thousands of children are brought under their influence: for four or five hours in the day the teacher is supreme, and who shall measure the importance of her example; her manner; her voice; her patience; her love. A child’s life at school, reputedly the happiest, may be the most miserable. Whichever of these it is depends mainly on the teacher. Certainly her personality and her work leave a lasting mark on the life of the man or the woman.
The school is, next to the home (if the home is a religious one), the place where the child gets the first impressions of religion: where he learns to love what is good and true and pure, when it is presented to him in the attractive form which a good and religious teacher knows so well how to do; where he first learns with simple faith the old, old story of the love of God. The way that this story takes hold of the children, and the influence it has on their life, depends on the teacher, who is indeed a sower of the good seed. How necessary it is, then, that the teachers should be sent out well equipped for the work they have to do.
It is this that caused the promoters of St Gabriel’s College to take up the vast work they have embarked on...”
A hundred years later, these words are resonant in Camberwell and elsewhere, in any inner city, rural parish, any neighbourhood, fortunate or deprived, now as then. Each teacher and every child may hear again the message of the angels, the good news, glad tidings of great joy. The Archangel Gabriel communicated expectation of new birth, the birth of the hope of the world. Life on earth evolves in this continual presence: in faithful, believing hearts and minds.
The Kingdom of God
O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!
Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
The eagle plunge to find the air–
That we ask of the stars in motion
If they have rumour of thee there?
Not where the wheeling systems darken,
And our benumbed conceiving soars!–
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.
The angels keep their ancient places;–
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estranged faces,
That miss the many-splendoured thing.
But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
Cry;– and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry;– clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!Francis Thompson
Francis Thompson’s poem evokes the first levels of grief such as the disciples knew on the evening of Good Friday. Angels are there when the stone is turned.
Augustine on his death bed at Hippo in AD 446 knew that the vandals were at the gates of the city. He had written his Confessions and expounded his vision of the City of God. Another Augustine, named after him, was despatched to Britain commissioned to bring the Gospel to the Angles – looking like angels, bright and fair, seen for sale in the slave market at Rome. The mission reached Canterbury in AD 597. A century later, Bede (673–735) realised with Dionysius Eriguus that no event in history could compare with the Birth of our Lord Jesus Christ at Bethlehem. He called the year Anno Domini. Two thousand years have rolled beneath the ‘angels’ strains’ heard by the shepherds and sung again at Christmas: on earth peace, good will to all people.
St Gabriel’s College lives on in the work of St Gabriel’s Trust and the St Gabriel’s Programme. With faith, determination and resources, with good will to act, the Trust is continuing in the Spirit which gave life to the College, that gives life to the world: the Word of Life, the Living Word. This one and sure foundation is the living Word of Love. Years accumulate into centuries, centuries into millennia: that birth, life, is remembered yesterday, today, every day, for ever. Old men and women ought to be explorers, says the poet. This spirit of adventure, in faith and hope, makes all things new.
St Gabriel’s began as a Training College for Teachers and became (in later terminology) a College of Education. Staff were appointed for their gifts as teachers and pastors, good at communicating their subjects clearly, sympathetically and effectively to meet the needs of students to become good teachers; ready to innovate without surrendering personal integrity and erudition. Changes in style and fashion in education are increasingly led by politicians, sociologists and civil servants rather than by people with a vocation to teach and the wisdom of devoted professional experience. Current efforts to reintroduce necessary numeracy and literacy in primary schools and to nourish exceptional ability at the secondary stage are recognition of the danger inherent in neglect of these needs. There is pressure to emphasise Personal Social Education rather than source values in Divinity and Scripture, but both are needed rather than an inclination towards amorphous RE. There is a clear consciousness of the acute need to cultivate virtue. Cultural climates change. Science and Economics, invaluable for balance and progress, tend to swamp belief with materialism: with gods that fail. Yesterday’s language becomes dated: new words are needed to represent, to re-present the Living Word: words of life.
The unknown writer of The Cloud of Unknowing knew that ‘by love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never’. T S Eliot echoed this, and concluded his fourth Quartet with words of Julian of Norwich: ‘And all shall be well when all is gathered in Love’.
Words old and new, ancient and modern, in the farewell discourses recorded by John, are welcoming, warning, sustaining, powerful and universally creative. We read of the Kingdom within and the vision of the City of God. Change and decay present positive opportunities to rebuild, restore and recreate: to look and to fare forward. This is the challenge every day and into the third millennium, in particular to St Gabriel’s people: former students, teachers, Trustees, all those who work for and who may benefit from this Trust.
