Geoffrey Studdert-Kennedy, the charismatic military chaplain universally known as ‘Woodbine Willie’, was one of those who tried to make sense of this. What he wrote can still shock and challenge in deep ways. One of his meditations on ‘God and Prayer’ begins by evoking a scene in the trenches: ‘I wish that chap would chuck his praying. It turns me sick. I’d much rather he swore like the sergeant.’ So is prayer useless? Is God truly absent and powerless? Studdert-Kennedy simply answers that prayer won’t save us from suffering any more than it saved Christ from his cross. But it is the only thing that makes us able to fight against evil in the only way that will actually transform the situation as Christ did ”“ by selfless compassion, with all the risk that carries.
In all his work, in his sermons, his meditations, his astonishing poems, so many of them cast in the voice of the ordinary soldier in the trenches, full of protest and apparent blasphemy, Studdert-Kennedy argues against the bland problem-solving God. His commitment is to the God who is discovered in the heart of your own endurance and pain ”“ not a solution, not a Father Christmas or a fairy godmother, but simply the one who holds your deepest self and makes it possible for you to look out on the world without loathing and despair.
Shocking and stark as it was, the way Studdert-Kennedy talked and wrote was pretty well the only religious response that was at all credible to those who were living through the daily nightmare.
Brilliant from start to finish. I recommend choosing to listen with the link.
There is no doubt that this is Rowan at his very best. It was a deeply moving sermon in the midst of a deeply moving service.
Brilliant, profound, important.