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JESSICA:

Welcome to Ely Cathedral, a place of prayer for exactly thirteen hundred and fifty years – ever since its original founding as a monastery by a Saxon Princess, Etheldreda, inÌý 673, when Ely was no more than a hill set in a long landscape of marsh and rushes.

My name is Canon Jessica Martin, one of four clergy at the Cathedral, and I’m joined by my colleague Canon James ReveleyÌý to lead our service, which today celebrates our foundress, Etheldreda, her choice of the life of prayer rather than the glittering world of power-politics and dynastic negotiations.

It’s fitting, then, that we begin with an introit that celebrates living that life of prayer in a holy place – ‘Lord, I have loved the habitation of thy house’. The words are from Psalm 26, set to music by Sarah MacDonald, Director of Ely’s girl choristers.

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CHOIR: ANTHEM: Lord I have loved the habitation of thy house (Sarah MacDonald)

JESSICA: We turn to God in a prayer that invokes the life and witness of St Etheldreda and envisions the beauty of the community of heaven.Ìý

JAMES:

Let us pray.

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Eternal God, who bestowed such grace upon your servant Etheldreda that she gave herself wholly to the life of prayer and to the service of your true religion: grant that we, like her, may so live our lives on earth, seeking your kingdom, that by your guiding we may be joined to the glorious fellowship of your saints; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Amen.

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JESSICA:

As today’s service unfolds, we will explore a little of Etheldreda’s extraordinary story; but first we sing our opening hymn, which looks towards the splendour of the heavenly city for those who, like Etheldreda, are faithful to God’s calling in this world. We stand to singÌý ‘Blessed City, heavenly Salem’.

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CHOIR/ORGAN/ALL: HYMN: Blessèd City, heavenly Salem (Westminster Abbey)

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JESSICA:

St Etheldreda was a person extraordinarily responsive to the promptings of the Spirit.Ìý Daughter of an East Anglian King, she was married young to a neighbouring ruler, Tonbert; and when he died she was married off again, this time to a Northumbrian ruler, Egfrith, who was only a boy.Ìý Yet all through this political horse-trading her burning desire was to enter a monastery, and after twelve years in Northumbria she achieved her heart’s desire and became a nun.

 

In the year 673 she travelled to the sparsely inhabited bit of marshland we now call Ely, given her as dowry by her first husband; and there she founded a monastery for twelve men and women, exchanging jewels for a nun’s habit, and luxury for an obscure life of plainness and devotion. Barely six years later she died.Ìý Yet after her death her place of prayer was to become a famous place of pilgrimage, marked by a majestic cathedral and revered across the medieval world.

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The choir now sings verses from psalm 18, a psalm of faith and protection, of God as the bringer of light into the dark places of the soul.

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CHOIR/ORGAN: Psalm 18 vv 1, 19-22, 27-28 responsorial

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We hear words from the apocryphal book ‘The Wisdom of Solomon’ – words that value, above all things, above riches or splendour or power, the wisdom that comes from God and brings humanity into intimacy with the divine mind.

 

JAMES:

The first lesson is written in The Wisdom of Solomon, the seventh chapter, beginning at the seventh verse:Ìý

I called on God, and the spirit of wisdom came to me. I preferred her to sceptres and thrones, and I accounted wealth as nothing in comparison with her. Neither did I liken to her any priceless gem, because all gold is but a little sand in her sight, and silver will be accounted as clay before her. I loved her more than health and beauty, and I chose to have her rather than light, because her radiance never ceases. All good things came to me along with her, and in her hands uncounted wealth. I rejoiced in them all, because wisdom leads them; but I did not know that she was their mother.

I learned without guile and I impart without grudging; I do not hide her wealth, for it is an unfailing treasure for mortals; those who get it obtain friendship with God, commended for the gifts that come from instruction.

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Here ends the first Lesson.

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JESSICA:

The choir sings an anthem by the contemporary composer Alan Bullard, setting words in praise of wisdom from the Book of Job.Ìý

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CHOIR: ANTHEM: O wisdom (Alan Bullard)

JESSICA:

We hear now a reading from Gospel of Matthew, where devotion to God is represented as a light set in a high place where its gifts will spread.

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JAMES:

The second lesson is from the Gospel of Matthew, the fifth chapter, beginning at the fourteenth verse.

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[Jesus said], You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

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Here ends the second Lesson.

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JESSICA:

We stand to sing a visionary hymn addressed to God the Holy Spirit in the semblance of a dove: ‘She sits like a bird, brooding on the waters’. Its words and music are written by the priest and musician of the Iona Community, John Bell.

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CHOIR/ORGAN/ALL: HYMN: She sits like a bird (John Bell)

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JESSICA:

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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‘A city built on a hill cannot be hidden’, said Jesus. The Fen country around Ely is not known for its hills, neither in our time nor in Etheldreda’s; but when she came to build her community, she chose rising ground. Although she had walked away from earthly power, her community drew people from the first – for entirely practical reasons, to do with the physical necessities of a praying community. As the little group of nuns and monks settled into their new, demanding life, a small settlement grew up around them providing them support, a settlement that would one day be a city, named ‘Ely’ after the abundant eels in its many waterways.

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But it wasn’t Etheldreda’s intention to found a city made by human hands. The Norman splendours of tower and arch, vault and pillar that would come after - those were not in her vision. She intended to build a different kind of city, one that looked towards the majesty of God for its splendour, built of the dedicated bodies and souls of a community at prayer.

 

There wouldn’t have been much of visible splendour in the life they lived -Ìý in the cold and the damp; in the plainness and sparseness of the food; the spartan accommodation and coarse clothing; the remote nature of the terrain; the relentless daily regime of the times of prayer. Something in that difficult life killed Etheldreda relatively quickly; she had only a little while in which to live out her heart’s desire. Nothing in what she chose speaks of ‘success’ – the criterion, above all others, by which we modern people judge and are judged. This princess disappeared into the marshes, never to emerge again.

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Yet, in the years after her death, strange stories grew up.Ìý How her God made floodwaters rise to protect her from pursuers as she fled to Ely. How the dead wood of her walking staff flowered when she stuck it into the ground.Ìý Even though all she had worked for seemed irreversibly destroyed as long ago as the ninth century, when Viking invaders burned her community to the ground, the strength and passion of her desire for God blossomed in its dust and ashes. The great Norman Cathedral of Ely, a Benedictine foundation, grew up where she had first prayed in her hut of reeds: it looks out today across the Fens, visible from miles about, like a great city on a hill.

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The first reading we heard speaks of the ‘spirit of wisdom’ that comes from God.Ìý The speaker prefers wisdom to ‘sceptres and thrones’ and declares the radiance of that spirit to be brighter than the light that illuminates the physical world. This transcendent light is one that ‘never ceases’ – it is part of God’s eternity, where all that is lovely flourishes beyond the destructions of time. If we choose the things of God, we are bound into the invisible world of God’s endless being; we live, as the reading says, with an ‘unfailing treasure….friendship with God’.

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It was that friendship – an intimate, daily companionship with the maker and lover of all that ever came into being – that Etheldreda sought in her community of marsh and reed, work and prayer. She knew that beyond the obviousness of material reward lie the things that always abide: God’s light, truth and presence.Ìý For those who seek the face of God find it in unexpected places: not in the distracting pleasures of this present world, but in a holy trust which assists us to lay our distractions down and to learn slowly to become as steady, as pure and as transparent as the light that illuminates a house.

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Our world is full of people who love steadily and faithfully.Ìý Their unspectacular commitment to the flourishing of others keeps our tumultuous world steady. We don’t usually hear about them; few of them will become famous for their miracles or their sanctity.Ìý It may look, to those who loved them, as if the work of their lives drops into the abyss of the past, forgotten within a couple of generations. But in God’s eye that is not so. To God they are his companions and friends, as precious, and as foundational, as the light that began the world when he spoke it into being at the creation of all things.

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And now to that only wise God, the light through whom we see light, be all honour and praise, now and always.Ìý Amen.

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CHOIR: ANTHEM: Locus iste (Bruckner)

 

JESSICA:

We sit or kneel to pray.

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BARBARA:

We thank thee, O God, for the saints of all ages; for those who in times of darkness kept the lamp of faith burning; for the great souls who saw visions of larger truths and dared to declare them; for the multitude of quiet and gracious souls whose presence has purified and sanctified the world; for those we honour today, Etheldreda and her companions in the foundation of this holy place.Ìý Accept this our thanksgiving through Jesus Christ, our mediator and Redeemer, to whom be praise for ever and ever. Amen.

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JAMES:

Heavenly Lord of time and of the heart, we give thanks for the life and witness of Etheldreda, saint and queen; for her steadfast devotion to a life of holiness and simplicity; for the signs of your favour she received in miracles of protection by water, and of resurrection in green, living growth from her staff’s dry stem: We pray that we might be held safe from all we fear, and see within our lives new growth from dead wood, and resurrection out of loss and sacrifice; all this we ask for your love’s sake.Ìý Amen.

 

BARBARA:

O Thou whose eye is over all humankind, calling us into a kingdom not of this world: Send forth thy Holy Spirit into all the dark places of life.Ìý Let her still the noise of our strife and the tumult of the people, carry faith to the doubting, hope to the fearful, strength to the weak, light to the mourners, and more and more increase the pure in heart who see their God; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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JAMES:

Almighty God, who fills all things with your boundless presence, yet makes your chosen dwelling place in the human soul: come, gracious and willing Guest, and abide in our hearts; that all unholy thoughts and desires within us be cast out, and your holy presence be to us comfort, light and love; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

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We pray with confidence as our Saviour has taught us.

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ALL:

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,for ever and ever.

Amen.

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 J·¡³§³§±õ°ä´¡:

We come to the end of our service by standing to sing the hymn ‘Christ is our Cornerstone’.Ìý In it we affirm that our solid and lasting joys are held in heaven, and that the gifts of love and service we offer on earth, however quiet, however plain, are never lost in the eyes of God,Ìý but ‘smell sweet, and blossom in the dust’.

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CHOIR/ORGAN: Christ is our Cornerstone (Harewood)

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JAMES:

God give you grace to follow his saints, In faith and hope and steadfastness;

And the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always. Amen.

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ORGAN: VOLUNTARY

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