Sunday of St Mary - Year C

Isaiah 61.10-11; Luke 1.46-55
Today we are celebrating the Feast of St Mary, whose song of joy and liberation, the Magnificat we just heard as our Gospel reading. That Magnificat is at the heart of our worship every evening in this Cathedral, in the myriad versions composed for Evensong. ‘Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.’ Blessed is she.
This Cathedral is dedicated in her name, of course – and so this Feast is our Patronal Festival: an opportunity in the midst of our Festival city to celebrate the particular gift and calling of this place. An opportunity to reflect particularly on how that calling connects us with Mary, with the one in whom the Body of Christ is made flesh, is incarnated. What might it mean for us also to be those in whom the Body of Christ becomes flesh, is made a reality, a living presence?
In our first reading from Isaiah we heard these words of acclamation, a description of the work of God: ‘As the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.’
Every Sunday morning, our Chaplain Janet – we will soon have to think about who does this in her stead – climbs the stairs to the bell-ringing chamber, up there above the choir. She then leads the assembled bell-ringers in a prayer before they embark on ringing the bells that summon and welcome people to this Sunday morning service. The prayer includes the names of the virtues after which the different bells are named; the prayer has had to be adapted, since it was written, to include the names of the two bells added more recently in 2009 – the bells of Justice and Fortitude. The full prayer asks this:
Shed abroad, O Lord, in our hearts, and in the hearts of those to whom the sound of these bells shall come, the manifold gifts of thy Holy Spirit – the graces of humility, temperance and patience, of devotion and holy fear, of justice and fortitude, of peace and joy, of faith, hope and charity; and grant that they may, in our lives, bring forth the fruit of good works, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Shed abroad the manifold gifts of thy Holy Spirit. Ed Bruce’s dramatic banners, cascading down from the bell-ringing chamber, are a visual representation of that joyful cacophony of sound and skill that is a peal of bells. The prayer invites us to reflect on what the bells are bodying forth, what the banners celebrate. The names of the bells articulate that what they announce and summon people to, is connected with the development of virtue, of character. We are here to grow together in humility, in temperance, patience, devotion and holy fear (or awe perhaps), justice, fortitude, peace, joy, faith, hope and charity (or love). We’re often told that the business of religion is to declare what is right and wrong. To talk about the gift of virtues as being at the heart of this place is to recognise that prior to any questions of morality, is the question of character – who we are; how we might be encouraged to become the people God has created us to be, both collectively and individually; how to body forth the gift, the grace that we are.
The other artwork offered to us this Festival is the Cathedral Body – Carla Angus’ representational tent set up there in the Resurrection Chapel, dappled right now in the play of light from the Paolozzi window.
The title of Carla’s piece, the Cathedral Body, is playful; for here the Cathedral is reimagined as stripped of its usual monumental solidity; the walls of Carla’s tent are porous, and the ways that the Cathedral might reach out and beyond itself – just as the bells ring out over the city – are made visible.
But it is recognisably the Cathedral: its 3 spires in appropriate proportion. A thing of beauty; the stools inside invite you to sit a while; to talk and listen within the beauty. The walls of the tent depict a map of Edinburgh – or at least the area that the sound of our bells, and the signal of the mobile masts set in our spires, might reach. It’s a map that picks out the 148 green spaces within that area, connected to the gardens and trees within which the Cathedral is set by the ecology and web of life upon which we all depend; paths for insects and bees to pollinate; trees connected by webs of mycelia. The Cathedral Body exists in a wider network, both speaking to it, but depending on it too; a wider network of those green spaces that don’t exist finally for any functional or utilitarian reason; but because without space, without that web of life, we wither and die. The green spaces of our city body forth the grace, the gift of life; and we are part of that web.
The first grace, gift, virtue that is named in our bells is humility. Carla’s tent invites us in to listen and notice the connections. A peal of bells, that complicated changing pattern and order of bells to be rung, requires the skill of attending to the other ringers and so together communicating, and connecting the city. The music that gives voice to our praise, the singing of the Magnificat, requires both attentive listening to others and the giving of the best of oneself, to body forth our song.
And at the heart of what we do, after we have been gathered by the call of the bells, is to listen; and through that listening, that attention, to be formed by an act of communion. To become the body of Christ by receiving the Body of Christ. And then we are sent out, beyond the walls of this place, to follow the peal of bells out. Like Mary, to body forth, to make real, in lives of deepening virtue, the gift that we have been given and are made to be. ‘As the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.’ Amen.