Goodbye to Canterbury

For 14 centuries, Canterbury Cathedral has been

the spiritual headquarters of the nation.

A place of historic sacred power,

coveted by kings, popes, pilgrims and princes,

and the focus of forces which have torn the country apart,

and fought for the souls of everyone in it.

This is the mother church of England.

And for most of the cathedral's history,

you didn't have a choice about which church you belonged to in England.

That meant that what happened here in the mother church had a lot to do

with what happened everywhere else, and what everyone thought and felt,

how they prayed, how they imagined themselves.

A battle about how this space was going to be used

was in part a battle for the very soul of England.

'Over the last ten years, I've seen a few of those battles

'between forces that want to define and divide us,

'or in some sense lay claim to us.'

'In my final weeks as Archbishop,

'I want to search out for the last time the hidden corners,

'the hidden messages in a place that has taught me more

'about God and more about this country than anywhere else.'

'It's time to say goodbye to Canterbury.'

BELLS PEAL

While the rest of the world changes,

some things seem timeless,

indestructible.

It's easy to forget that 70 years ago,

we almost lost Canterbury Cathedral.

AIR RAID SIREN

For three nights in 1942,

Canterbury was attacked by the Luftwaffe.

130 high explosives

and over 3,000 firebombs landed on the medieval city.

The bombers' target?

Not the town itself, but the cathedral.

A symbol of Britain's will to resist.

But they underestimated the people of Canterbury.

Townspeople worked in shifts,

throwing flaming incendiaries from the roof of the cathedral.

The town was devastated, but the cathedral was saved.

In fact, what the raid achieved was to remind us

that this was somewhere worth saving.

People risked their lives to leave us Canterbury Cathedral,

and the least those who follow them can do is to stop

and ask why they did it.

I don't imagine that all of them were just enthusiasts

for Gothic architecture, and probably a lot of them

weren't even Christians.

So what was it about this building that was so important to protect?

'It's a question that I take to heart,

'because, ten years ago, the duty to safeguard that legacy fell to me.'

'On February 27th 2003,

'I entered here a fairly anonymous bishop,

'and was asked to add my name to the pages of history.'

'Above my head a vault erected during the reign of King Henry IV.

'Beneath my feet,

'foundations dug before there even was a King of England.'

'This is a space that Chaucer knew, and Elizabeth I.

'It's seen Saxons, Vikings, Normans come and go,

'empires rise and fall.'

'And when each new archbishop is enthroned,'

a new generation of our leaders is asked to think about

what this building and its heritage might mean.

I do wonder a bit what was going on in some people's minds that day.

It can't have been a very usual sort of experience.

There must've been a lot of people wondering

what on earth they were doing there and what this was really all about.

And they could be forgiven for thinking an occasion like this

no longer demands our attention in the present day.

Just a peculiar legacy of Britain's past.

But I don't think so.

To me, Canterbury Cathedral is a potent reminder

of another way of looking at England.

'A country you can't define just by its prime ministers,

'its kings and queens.

'A nation whose heritage is more than just political.'

This is the throne of the Archbishop of Canterbury -

the cathedra, as it would've been called in Latin and in Greek.

And that, of course, is where the word cathedral comes from.

It's the church that houses the bishop's chair.

And if it's true that this chair makes the cathedral what it is,

it's also true that the cathedral makes the person who sits here

what and who he is.

'When you sit in this chair,

'you become the leader of the Church of England,

'a role that, uniquely, asks you to try

'and speak to every soul in the country.'

Whatever you've done before, this is different.

Here, you're never just speaking to the people in front of you,

preaching to the converted.

What gets said here gets noticed throughout the country,

and beyond.

And you've got to find a way to articulate the concerns of everyone,

'young or old, Christian or non-Christian.'

And believe me, that feels like a pretty tall order.

It's physically impossible to fill this throne,

and that shouldn't be surprising

since it's certainly spiritually impossible to fill it.

The first time you sit here,

you realise that you have countless new ways of getting things wrong,

countless new responsibilities and expectations laid on you, and that

the likelihood is that you're going to make a mess of most of them.

'It's a daunting prospect,

'but the cathedral itself is there to guide you.

'It reminds you you're not the first to take on the job.

'Of the 104 Archbishops of Canterbury,

'50 are still in this building.

'I'm just the only one who can get up and walk.'

They're a diverse bunch.

There are a few stern Victorian headmasters,

18th-century gentlemen,

scholars, cardinals and princes of the medieval church.

Each had his own approach

to sitting on England's spiritual throne.

And they give you an opportunity to get a word of advice

from the people who actually built Canterbury Cathedral.

Here's one of the most spectacular monuments in the entire cathedral -

a bishop in his full vestments, an Archbishop, in fact,

surrounded by saints and angels.

At his feet, a couple of very tiny choirboys holding books for him,

and angels smoothing his pillow.

And here's who he is.

"Hic iacet Henricus Chichele."

"Here lies Henry Chichele, doctor of laws and Chancellor of England."

Henry V's Archbishop, one of the great public men of his time.

Then, bring your eye down a bit.

And here is not Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury,

Chancellor and doctor of laws.

Here is a naked corpse, emaciated, almost a skeleton,

loosely wrapped in its shroud.

And underneath, an inscription which tells us what to think.

"Pauper eram natus, post primas hic elavatus.

"Iam sum prostratus et vermibus esca paratus."

"I was born a poor man. Then I was raised up here to be Archbishop.

"Now I am laid low and turned into food for worms."

And just in case you haven't got the point, at the very end,

a very blunt instruction.

"Ecce meum tumulum. Cerne tuum speculum."

"Here is my tomb.

"Look into your mirror."

And who did he think he was talking to there, I wonder.

And there is an answer to that question.

Chichele built his tomb

right opposite the Archbishop's seat in the choir.

So all of us have had to sit here looking at him ever since.

It calls to mind fairly dramatically the central message of the Church.

You're going to die,

and how is money or power going to help you then?

It jolts you back into the mindset of the people who built

this cathedral in the Middle Ages.

The magnificence around us

was intended to remind those who stood here

of the kingdom of heaven...

..and how small and how temporary our lives are on earth,

to provoke us to ponder what might be beyond.

BELLS PEAL

'Strip the cathedral of all its adornment

'and it's a purpose-built factory for prayer,'

'and has been since AD 602.'

It's our oldest national institution

and the only building we share as a nation

that's been used for the same purpose since the nation began.

CONGREGATION SINGS

Prayers were said here for 300 years

before there was a single kingdom of England,

and the building around us

we owe mostly to the period from the 11th to the 15th century.

It's a building whose very shape brings the way we do things today

into direct contact with the beliefs

and the practices of our medieval past.

To state the obvious, this looks like a church.

Even people who never go to church have a pretty clear idea

of what to expect when they come into a church.

A big old building, a large space.

And yet, in the Middle Ages, this would have been very different.

This would have felt much more like a huge entrance hall,

an oversized church porch, almost.

When people came here, they often did rather worldly things.

They'd gossip and do business and discuss market prices.

Sometimes they used this part of the church as a sort of short cut

between different bits of the town, and there are complaints

in the records about people doing that too often and too noisily.

Centuries ago,

when there wouldn't have been an altar or a pulpit there,

just this great empty space,

the sense would have been of something immensely important

happening just out of sight, just beyond that screen.

'If you mount the steps to the east, you enter a different world.'

'A place most of our ancestors never set foot.'

'The choir.'

'Coming here, you are walking into the medieval holy of holies.'

'Then, Canterbury wasn't just a cathedral, it was a monastery,

'and this spot was the exclusive domain of its 80-100 monks.'

In the Middle Ages, this was the very heart of the building.

This was where the most important thing of all happened -

where the monks, several times a day, would gather to sing the praise of God

in what was called the divine office, literally the divine duty.

The duty you owe to God.

And they'd offer prayers for all those who'd asked for their prayers,

for the whole society around them,

for all those people wandering around in the rest of the church

while the monks were getting on with their business,

the core business of this cathedral.

The whole country could rest easier while the monks sat here,

the people who knew how to make contact with God.

'Those prayers were the focus of everyone's hopes.'

That children be born healthy,

that dead relatives go to heaven, not suffer in hell.

Ultimately, these are the kind of issues Canterbury is here for -

the really difficult things that never change about being human.

'You can't always solve them, but you can look beyond them.'

But how do you look beyond your everyday experience?

It's not something that's easy to do in the supermarket

or on the bus to work.

For many of us, it's something we look for, if at all,

in the arms of lovers or the company of friends.

And don't be fooled that things were ever different.

But Canterbury is a reminder that our ancestors

went out of their way to create a space for those issues.

They walled off both buildings and people,

people who could wrestle with eternity on behalf of the rest of us

who didn't have the time.

Everybody had an investment in Canterbury's cloisters.

The monks here were a specialised tier of society

with a charge from the rest of us to explore the unknown.

Their lives rarely strayed from the walls of the monastery.

But their horizons were broader than anyone's outside.

Ancient texts and new scientific ideas were sought out

by the monks in their mission to rise above the ordinary,

not just in the life of the mind,

but in architecture that seemed to defy nature and gravity,

and in art that still feels genuinely miraculous.

-These are amazing, aren't they?

-Absolutely, yes.

Wonderful to be so close to them, isn't it?

Yes, they're meant to be 20 metres up in the air!

'These are two 13th century stained-glass masterpieces

'depicting Old Testament figures.

'They've come down to the workshop for restoration by Leonie Seliger.'

What you realise, seeing them close up, is how lively,

-how much movement there is.

-Oh, yes, yes.

These are made by one of the great masters of European art,

who is actually called the Methuselah Master after this very figure.

If we knew his name, we might actually mention him

in the same breath as Michelangelo and, I don't know, Jackson Pollock.

The cutting edge designs that he produced,

the way he fills the space with his big sweeps of an arm

all the way down to the foot.

Whirlpools of lines here, these rhythmic strokes here.

There are cascades there.

You just have to enjoy the way he confidently puts on these lines

in such a rhythmic way, with a long-handled brush,

not hanging about, just sort of painting this.

He was one of the superstars of cutting edge art

in Europe at the time.

So Canterbury got the best of the best to work on the new building.

The detail is extraordinary, because, of course,

these weren't as close as we are to them.

They were yards and yards away. They were out of sight.

They are designed to work on that long distance,

so they have that really monumental feel.

But, of course, the detail is there because God sees it.

And why stained glass at all?

I know there's a lot of thinking and philosophising about light,

the uses of light and the meaning of light in buildings like this.

Of course, there was this wish to have more and more light

in the building. But not any old daylight.

It had to travel through these very, very richly coloured

and very expensive stained-glass windows.

Light on the outside

is then transmitted through the stained glass,

and picks up the essence of the figures

and of the stories and the deeds that are told in the stained glass,

and is enriched and refined by that.

So, inside the building, you have enriched superlight, if you will.

So it's as if the light coming from God is received by these

holy figures and is separated out into the colours

and by a kind of alchemy, really, comes through to you

and makes a difference to your life?

-Yes, yes. The quintessence of light they create.

-Yes.

Today, they still create a sense of wonder,

changing with every passing cloud.

The nearest thing the world had to the moving image

before the modern age.

The medieval eye, as it settled on these windows,

could see not only the hand of the painter,

but the hand of God.

Canterbury is much more than a functional building.

'It's an effort to make sense of the cosmos

'and reach out to its maker.'

Whether or not you want to talk about God,

you can't help but stand back and admire what humans can achieve

in pursuit of transcendence.

From the 7th to the 16th century, the people of this country,

the labourers, the masons,

the monks, the benefactors,

came together as never before or since

to focus their efforts on conjuring heaven,

a vision of a nation and its god in harmony.

But delve deeper and there's another story.

Ten years getting to know Canterbury as a working building

has taught me not to take anything about this place at face value.

If you know where to look, you can see some of the cracks

'and the joins in that medieval vision of harmony.'

In the cathedral's upper reaches,

you get a sense of how many other Canterbury Cathedrals

there have been that we no longer see.

'It feels like being backstage in Britain's oldest theatre.'

'Lovingly crafted Regency fixtures and fittings

'now clutter the cathedral's attic, gathering dust.'

'What one generation treasures, another buries in bubble wrap.'

'And I find that time spent here

'can start to shift your perspective on the process that's brought

'the cathedral to the form it takes today.'

This is a building that doesn't stand still.

It's been rebuilt almost in its entirety more than once.

But even over the last 600 or 700 years,

work has gone on on the building.

It's constantly reinventing itself,

rethinking itself for different purposes and different visions.

At Canterbury, change has always been about more than just architecture.

'This church once determined the beliefs of the whole country.'

The people who erected these columns, this vaulting,

'weren't simply celebrating the glory of God.'

'They were shaping the perspective of the people below,

'imposing their vision on everyone in England.'

Changes in vision aren't always easy or bloodless.

That means that battles over what the vision should be

that shapes a building like this

are not always going to be smoothly resolved.

There's a darkness in this building, as well as light.

Conflict as well as harmony.

All the medieval magnificence around us

is a shadow of the cathedral as our forebears would've seen it.

So much has been lost to England's wars of religion.

Below stairs, the Norman crypt conceals the last traces

of a world of mysterious splendour

swept away in the English Reformation.

These wonderful paintings were rediscovered by workmen

in the 19th century.

They belong to the very earliest days

of this bit of the cathedral,

painted on almost as soon as the crypt was built,

and they remind us that almost the whole of the cathedral

would've been covered with painting like this.

We see here the birth of St John the Baptist.

We see other saints in roundels under the arches.

And looking at all this, and sensing just how much of the life

of the imagination flows into all this, you wonder what on earth

would've prompted people to want to cover over these paintings.

What would have motivated people to want to destroy beauty like this?

These 12th century paintings, the crypt itself,

hint at the magic of medieval Canterbury,

a building that used every device at its disposal to access your soul,

to work its way into the darker recesses of your mind -

your inborn sense of fear and wonder.

I love bringing parties of schoolchildren into this chapel,

because I can show them the monsters on the pillars here.

Quite friendly monsters, quite cheerful ones, in fact.

Here's a couple making music, one playing a fiddle,

one playing a sort of oboe.

On the corner, there's even one playing a harp

with some bits of paintwork still visible there.

I suppose that in a slightly thin and rational world,

all of this has tremendous charm and attraction.

This is a world where imagination can run riot.

This is a world of colour and splendour and drama,

a world where all sorts of emotions

and all sorts of imaginative strands weave in together.

Why should anyone want to destroy it?

I think that part of the answer is that this can induce

a kind of claustrophobia in people.

If you look at the end of the Middle Ages,

the beginning of the Reformation period,

that's the sense you may have.

This is a world absolutely crowded, packed with images.

As much as an American shopping mall today,

you're assailed on every hand by images telling you what to think,

how to feel, how to make connections between one thing and another.

It must sometimes have seemed

as if nothing was ever allowed just to be itself,

and so it's not entirely surprising

if an impulse begins to rise up in the European soul

to break through all this, to break through the screen

or the dome of images that covered life over,

looking for something more direct.

A world of mystery was giving way to a world of reason.

As the Middle Ages came to an end,

people had begun to see a contradiction

between the simple message of Jesus and the Gospels

and what they were seeing in the cathedral.

In 1514, the Dutch theologian Erasmus visited Canterbury

and wrote...

"Good God! What a pomp of silk vestments was there,

"of golden candlesticks.

"What possible excuse can there be

"for decorating and enriching churches

"when meanwhile our brothers and sisters waste away

"from hunger and thirst?"

It was a foretaste for Canterbury of the Protestant Reformation,

a conflict in which the Archbishop would have to take sides.

This is the monument of Cardinal John Morton,

Archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 1500.

For many years, he'd been one of the great figures of English politics,

in effect Prime Minister to King Henry VII.

He represented a kind of fusion,

a kind of balance of powers in church and state.

And here, in his monument, he is depicted,

like so many of his predecessors, wearing all his regalia

and surrounded by these small figures of monks and clergy

who are there to say prayers for him.

But these praying figures have lost their heads and their hands.

It's not just the ravages of time,

because if you look at the whole of the monument, you will see

that the saints around the edge have lost their heads and their hands.

All of them have been carefully vandalised,

vandalised as a result of the revolution in religion

that took place under Henry VIII.

That was the time when the cardinal's hat disappeared,

literally, from English life,

and what remained was the Crown,

the red and white Tudor roses,

the Tudor monarchy in all its power.

One bit of Morton's carefully balanced world of church and state

had quite literally displaced the other.

Only decades after Morton's death,

the church in England was taken over by the state.

Henry VIII was incensed at the church authorities in Rome

when the Pope refused him a divorce,

and the King became an unlikely champion of reform.

Your experience at church would no longer

be centred on mysterious images or the monks' rituals in Latin,

but on the Bible in English,

there for anyone who could read.

Radical Protestants had found a licence from the top

to tear apart the fabric of the English Church and start again.

Bare walls, plain glass,

and empty niches remain where once there were glorious images

whose intoxicating power the reformers so abhorred.

A battle raged here for over a century

between the cult of the image and the cult of the word.

It has left the cathedral a divided building,

one part telling us, "Be inspired, surrender to the imagination."

Another saying, "Don't be taken in by the beauty.

"Decide for yourself in the clear light of day."

When today symbols, images and idols are built up and smashed down,

I'm glad to have this place to retreat to

and remember that these are arguments that never go away.

It's a mistake we make too easily to think we've progressed

beyond the moral questions of the past.

But what we can put behind us are institutions that fail us.

The monastery was the other casualty of the Reformation,

a once radical institution that had grown complacent and comfortable.

The king's agents came here in 1539

and left with 26 wagonloads of treasure.

Few protested at the demise of the monastery

or all the hope once invested in it.

I suppose it's quite a sobering lesson to be learned here for today.

Institutions develop because people invest a lot of trust in them.

They meet real needs, they represent important aspirations.

Whether it's monasteries, media or banks,

people begin by trusting these institutions,

and gradually the suspicion develops

that actually they're working for themselves, not for the community.

We've been through a major crisis of trust in our own culture

in the last couple of years where banking is concerned,

and it's perhaps worth thinking about

that, at the end of the Middle Ages, nobody would really have expected

the monasteries to be vanishing from the scene within a generation.

Yet they did. Change does happen.

That's the advantage for me

of keeping one place at the centre of our lives for centuries.

It's a reference point when the same problems rear up again,

as they always do. And not just the religious ones.

Canterbury is England's church, and it's always been asked to bear

the scars of England's conflicts,

to fly the flag for a vision of nationhood.

But a national church is bound to struggle to accommodate

the symbols of national identity alongside the symbols of God.

The cathedral manifests physically one dilemma we can all recognise.

What do you put first?

Loyalty to the country you live in,

or loyalty to things wider than the borders of nations?

It's a question that goes right back

to the origins of the cathedral...

Origins that lie a long way from Canterbury.

For a national church,

Canterbury Cathedral isn't where you'd expect it to be.

It's on the edge,

not in the heart of the country, but in the far South East.

It's only seven miles to the English Channel.

It's easy to forget how near the sea Canterbury is,

but that fact tells us, of course,

at Canterbury has always looked in two directions,

not just inland to England,

but across to the continent of Europe as well.

Of course, it's no accident that Canterbury Cathedral

is where it is, because according to local tradition

it was somewhere around this spot

that the first Archbishop of Canterbury

landed for the first time on the English coast.

His name was Augustine, he was a monk from Rome

who'd been sent by Pope Gregory

to convert the heathen English to Christianity.

Coming as he did from Rome - Rome, with its long traditions,

Rome with its wonderful churches, with the papal court -

I wonder what on earth Augustine felt at the prospect of confronting

the heathen barbarians and trying to convert them?

In AD 597, this side of the Channel was beyond the pale,

the domain of pagan Angles and Saxons.

Augustine's mission?

To convert and to civilise,

to bring them into the fold of the Catholic Church in Rome.

The success of his mission was due in part to a cultural import,

both Christian and Roman, which miraculously survives even today,

conserved by historian Christopher de Hamel.

The Augustine Gospels were my first introduction

to the incredible antiquity of the mission to which I'd been called.

I regard it as one of the most important

and evocative artefacts in Christendom.

It is the earliest illustrated Gospel book in the Western tradition.

It has been in England since the late sixth century.

I think it is probably the oldest object in England of any kind,

which is not archaeological.

Of course, there are things that are older, like Stonehenge,

still in the ground, or things that have been dug up and brought in.

It's always been above ground.

Always belonged to somebody, always been in use, since the 500s.

I can't think of anything else that could have survived as long as that.

And we've got here pictures,

especially of the last week of Jesus's life, it seems.

Yes, this is the opening of Luke's Gospel.

These are scenes which are either characteristic of

or unique to Luke's Gospel.

They're very vivid little pictures, aren't they?

Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey.

What's that? "Iudas Iesum osculo tradit."

-"Judas betrays Jesus with a kiss."

-Yes.

-And the Last Supper.

Indeed, one of the earliest illustrations of the Last Supper in Europe.

The Gospels have inspired more art than probably any other text.

But this is the earliest example we have of European art

which is based directly on the Gospels.

But the very fact of a book must have been extraordinary

for the Anglo-Saxons. They wouldn't have seen a book,

they wouldn't have seen pictures like this.

Christianity, like Judaism and Islam,

is one of the three great religions of the book

and they would have turned up to us pagan Anglo-Saxons with this,

what then must have been a revolutionary message,

bringing books and literacy to England for the first time.

And when... I expect people argued with them and when people said,

"How do you know?" they would have said, "We have a book.

"We can prove it."

And it plugs England back into the classical world,

because one of the things that strikes me,

I know this is a picture of St Luke, isn't it?

This is Luke shown almost like a Roman senator.

It's a very graphic reminder that mainstream Christianity

in the late sixth century came to England from the Mediterranean.

This is southern and classical and rounded arches and pale colours

and those soft terracottas.

This is absolutely mainstream Mediterranean into Canterbury.

So this is really plugging England

-into Continental culture in a big way.

-Absolutely.

From that moment on,

Canterbury remained a foothold in England for European culture.

The first place to see Romanesque architecture and then Gothic.

A forest of mosaics and classical columns.

This building never let you forget

it drew its spiritual authority from Rome.

But it couldn't forget either what made that authority a reality.

The conversion and the support of King Ethelbert and his successors.

The land that the Crown granted to us in the old town of Canterbury.

Canterbury was born with two different royalties.

To the country around it

and to the wider Christian world.

Today, there are millions of Anglican Christians abroad.

And millions in Britain with religious leaders overseas.

Relations between what we owe to God or our fellow believers

and what we owe to our country don't get any simpler.

As Archbishop of Canterbury today,

you have a particular loyalty to the British state.

But your faith compels you to think internationally.

It was a quandary I found myself in within weeks of arriving here,

when Britain went to war with Iraq.

I've been fairly vocal in my criticisms of plans for war,

not least because of a sense

that Iraqi lives mattered, as well as British ones,

that war could suck the whole region into chaos

and also because of an interest in the concerns,

the vulnerability of Christian minorities in the region,

a factor which not everybody seemed very much aware of at the time.

But once the war had actually broken out

and once there were British troops on the ground,

putting their lives at risk,

it then seemed a little bit of a luxury

just to sound off from a distance.

It could sound a bit like grandstanding

when other people were really paying the price.

And so I found my focus was much more then on what would

an exit to the war look like,

what would justice after the war look like,

and trying to insist on people focusing on that kind of question.

And that leaves you satisfying nobody, in principle.

People who think you ought to be swinging behind the Government are disappointed,

people who think you ought always to be making loud and clear noises

about global ethics will be disappointed.

But I still think it's a path worth treading,

because the important thing about archbishops speaking in public

is I believe that they shouldn't ever be speaking in ways

that have no cost when other people are paying a price.

Risking unpopularity, taking the flak,

is what archbishops are here for.

It's the stuff of the job.

It's something you realise the more you work here,

that maybe Britain benefits from having someone to get angry with.

And that compared to my predecessors I've got off lightly.

I share a house, as well as a job, with men burned at the stake,

men executed for treason, men lynched by the mob.

And when I look across the garden at the cathedral,

I can't help remembering

that the whole place was once built around martyrdom.

The price paid by an archbishop when Church and state clashed.

Much of the building we have now is a monument to its most famous son,

murdered here,

Archbishop St Thomas Becket.

Becket has become a symbolic figure,

the embodiment worldwide of the treacherous fault line

between religion and political power.

The son of a merchant from Cheapside in London, a man of the world,

who become fixer in chief to King Henry II.

In 1162, Henry made him Archbishop of Canterbury.

He was charged to take on the power of the Church,

to bring the bishops in line with the will of the King.

But the job seemed somehow to transform Thomas Becket.

He refused to sign the document that made Henry's word law,

an act of treachery that a king like Henry could never forgive.

What happened to Becket reverberated around Europe.

And in the Victoria and Albert Museum, you can get a sense why.

This beautiful object shows

the end of Thomas Becket's career as Archbishop of Canterbury

and the beginning of his career

as an international spiritual superstar.

Here we see Becket's murder.

Standing in front of an altar,

being attacked by three of the knights who killed him,

and two shocked clerics on the right-hand side.

Up above, we see Becket's body laid out for burial,

his soul ascending into Heaven.

In fact, it's not an accurate depiction of what happened

when Becket was killed.

He wasn't celebrating mass at an altar.

But that's how it felt to people across Europe,

as if the very heart of the Church's life and worship

had been brutally interrupted by this act of terrible violence.

All across Europe, the story was spreading,

people were turning their eyes towards Canterbury

and then beginning to travel to it.

We know that within just a couple of years of the murder,

people were celebrating his memory in Hungary.

And pilgrims came because they wanted to be in touch

with this great figure.

Quite literally to touch where he had suffered and died.

And caskets like this

were meant to hold little containers for his blood,

bits of his bone, perhaps bits of cloth that had been on his body.

Everybody, you could say, wanted a piece of Becket, quite literally.

In death, Becket became a saint and a popular hero.

Roads across Europe became thronged

with pilgrims making their way towards Canterbury.

Becket's body, it was said, had begun to perform miracles.

Proof that here, conscience could defeat a king.

It gave the cathedral a completely new focus.

It transformed the building, both spiritually and architecturally.

A dramatic new journey took you upwards and eastwards

to the cathedral's new climax...

..The Shrine of the Saint.

The very bones of Thomas Becket.

The shrine itself has long since disappeared.

But what hasn't disappeared is this groove in the stone,

worn by the knees of hundreds of thousands of pilgrims

over the centuries.

In front of them, they'd see a stone superstructure

of the saint's actual tomb,

blazing with gold and colour and jewels and coloured marble.

We know from the pictures

that there were large holes in the side of that superstructure,

so that if you wanted, you could put your hand in

to touch the saint's sarcophagus.

You could even put your head inside to kiss it.

Because it mattered to be physically close to the saint,

that's what you'd come for, to be as close as you could to a holy body.

The shrine was destroyed by King Henry VIII.

And that says a lot.

It was a symbol of an authority distinct from the King's.

People thought of Becket as one of their own.

Someone who could stick up for them in high places,

who could put in a word with God in the highest place of all.

The windows that still ring the site of the tomb

show not prophets or angels,

but the ordinary people who came to this spot in search of a miracle.

There are some very poignant stories recorded here.

About halfway up this window,

we see a woman in a long dress with two attendants.

One of them with his stick raised, as if he's going to beat her.

Her name was Matilda and she came from Cologne.

Her brother had murdered her lover.

And Matilda, driven mad by this traumatic experience,

had killed her own newborn child.

She was violent and uncontrollable and in the Middle Ages,

the only way they knew to deal with that was to beat people,

to try and restrain them.

So there she is in the middle, at the shrine itself, being beaten.

But she's cured.

And on the right, she kneels in prayer at the shrine.

The attendants are putting down their sticks.

And one of the monks is getting ready

to listen to what she's been through.

Somebody profoundly disturbed

and somebody who at last finds a place where there's a person

who will listen to her and do something about her condition.

As reasonable 21st century people, we're bound to ask,

"Did all this really happen?

"Are all these stories real history?"

Well, nobody's going to be able to answer that question in detail.

But look at the vigour and the variety of the stories here.

Something was going on here.

Something extraordinary and intensely hopeful

for a lot of ordinary people with their troubles of mind and body.

They came here, they were caught up in this big story.

Their lives changed and that's what we really need to know

about the impact of St Thomas here.

Miraculous or not, there is a power in this space

that hasn't diminished since the bones were taken away and burned.

We're left with a gap. A ghost of a shrine.

A space to fill with our own thoughts and ideas.

But that's one thing I feel today's Canterbury offers.

A question and the broken relics of the past's attempts at an answer.

But it's not just the building.

It's the rhythms, the rituals,

that can make those unsettling connections across time.

Every night for 14 centuries, someone's been here,

saying evening prayer.

And it was at that time of day that the knights came to get Becket.

He was at home, where I live today.

Ten years in this job have forced me personally

to confront Canterbury's difficult questions.

And the answers still don't seem easy at all.

These vestments that have been laid out for me

here in the chapel of the Archbishop's Palace

are exact copies of vestments that belonged to Thomas Becket himself.

Every year, I put on these vestments on the 29th of December

to celebrate the Eucharist on the spot where Thomas Becket died.

Putting on these vestments and standing in the place

where Thomas was martyred produces some very complicated feelings.

It can feel like play-acting, dressing up as a saint.

And yet, at the same time,

like other kinds of drama,

it has its effect.

It invites you to think about what it might be like

to have the kind of courage, the kind of inner stillness

that Thomas seems to have shown on that occasion

and that other people in similar situations show

right up to the present day.

Trying to imagine that from a very, very long way away.

It's an experience that pushes you to the edge of your comfort zone

and a good bit beyond.

CHOIRBOYS SING

Last chorus then? Good.

Let's try it again, really get the words to the front of the mouth.

THEY SING

My last few hours as Archbishop in Canterbury

will be spent in the same place Thomas spent his.

It's one way the cathedral can make ordinary experiences extraordinary.

Abstract terms turn into concrete dilemmas.

Would I give up my life?

Would I desert my loved ones to make a point, however important?

And perhaps that's the ultimate legacy of Becket's choice

to die in this spot.

Making for the cathedral, rather than making for safety.

Thomas and his attendants came to the church by the cloistered door,

just as evening prayer was beginning.

Not surprisingly, there was a great rush to bolt and bar the doors.

Thomas said, "No, I'm not having the Church of God turned into a castle."

He was determined to die in this building.

The silliest thing in the world is to dramatise yourself,

to imagine yourself in the position of people

greater, holier, more heroic than you are.

But every year, as I stand in this place

and hear those doors being flung open, I have to ask myself -

"What is it that makes it possible

"to take a stand for the Kingdom of God?

"What is it that's going to make that possible for me,

"for the people standing around?"

As long as there's one cathedral for the whole country

that looks out beyond our borders, that talks to the state,

there'll be someone like me confronting these problems.

Should governments be able to dictate people's beliefs?

Should images that offend be allowed or banned?

Should religious leaders abroad have influence in Britain?

The more diverse we get, the more I think we need Canterbury.

We need a shared space to have these arguments.

And we need someone at the heart of it,

trying to point to a way forward.

If there's one thing

that nothing really prepares you for in this position,

it's the level of public scrutiny.

All your mistakes and errors of judgment are out there in public straight away.

If you say anything silly

or anything that could be made to sound silly,

it's out there immediately for comment,

with plenty of people to tell you exactly what you should have said or should have done.

So these years have been more about old-fashioned patience

than martyrdom.

And in any case, ten years is the blink of an eye in this story.

What matters most about this place is that it goes on.

It goes on, never mind the personality

or the agenda of this archbishop or that.

It goes on standing for what it stands for.

It's the point of intersection

between the Kingdom of God, the values of God,

and all the skill, the art,

the problems, the politics of human beings.

Every Archbishop, I think, needs to know

how very, very important this place is for their ministry.

I can only say that as I look back on

ten years of association with this building,

I do so with the most immense gratitude.

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