MetaCatholic

The sermon the Archbishop preached at Charlie Moule’s memorial service is online here. There are some real gems in it, including these:

Greatness in the Kingdom of Heaven, the kind of greatness spelled out in that luminous passage from Ecclesiasticus which is so unmistakable a portrait of our beloved friend, is at least, at least as much to do with patience, the devoting of the soul to a definite place and task and group of people as it is to do with the volume of business (and, it’s tempting to say, the busyness of volumes) …

What happened in those long Cambridge years – and beyond too, in retirement in Sussex and Dorset – was the shaping of countless lives not only in scholarship but in discipleship. It is impossible to guess how many people’s assumptions about the relation of scholarship to discipleship were turned upside down by Charlie

And there was the sheer manner of the man: the unforced humility, the shy warmth – and sometimes, at the most unintentionally comic level, the way in which he would make it perfectly clear to you that someone or other’s book wasn’t really worth bothering with: ‘Of course, it’s a monument of careful work by a first class scholar, with all kinds of suggestive aspects, and I so wish I could persuade myself that it was true’…

This is what Charlie taught, consistently and vividly; he taught, more, he communicated, a way of reading the New Testament whole in this perspective – which was why those lectures on New Testament Theology were crowded, even (unthinkable now) on Saturday mornings. But it was also what was going on in him. As in every holy person, living in the Spirit, Christ was happening in him. And Christ can happen in his disciples and lovers because he is risen, with utter literalness in the sense that there is no dead body to mark the memory of someone who has gone into the past, only the unqualified and limitless life that now ‘contacts’ us in the Spirit.

Read it all. It is a most appropriate memorial to the man.