The best gifts come as a complete surprise. Even better if it's something you never even thought might come your way. At the recent gathering of UK Baptist College Principals in Oxford we had scheduled time for a visit to the Bodleian. For those who know him, you will know that Sean Winter equates the Bodleian Library with heaven proleptically anticipated. Now he's never said so in these words, but you can see words like that in his eyes when he's talking about his visits there!
Well our guide who was one of the senior members of staff, took us to a secure room where several items had been brought from special collections for us to view, and even touch. Two of those items were breathtakingly important, and left me deeply moved, and consciously privileged to be able to see them, touch them and hear them described for the treasures they are.
The first complete English book, the translation into Anglo Saxon of Gregory's "Pastoral care" by Alfred the Great, dates back more than 1100 years. And I was standing beside it, touched it, and sensed the benign weight of history in those thick parchment pages, written with painstaking care, with stylus and ink, by whatever lights were available once the sun went down. And on page after page, the glosses of successive scribes who came after, explaining, correcting, commenting. The illustration shows all this activity – though conveys little of the mystery and holy labour that was invested in translating, copying, annotating. Standing there gazing at such a gift, the miracle of Amazon, Google books and e-books begins to seem ordinary, even vulgar. Here is a book reeking of holiness, born of the hunger for sacred knowledge distilled as pastoral wisdom, celebrating the passionate patience of the scribe content to toil, reminding us that it is the faithful resolute conservation of words rightly spoken and faithfully written, that enables us to express the depths of human questing and longing for God, for love, and for the love of God.
I'll tell you about the other one later in the week.
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