FESTIVAL MASS: Archbishop's Homily

Homily of Archbishop Leo Cushley of St Andrews & Edinburgh, Festival Mass, St Mary’s Metropolitan Cathedral, Sunday 10 August 2025. (All images Ieva Marija Photography).

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My dear friends,

A warm welcome to our Cathedral on the happy occasion of the Edinburgh International Festival.

In your name, I’m pleased to give a very warm welcome to Councillor Robert Aldridge, the Right Honourable Lord Lieutenant and Lord Provost of the City of Edinburgh, our city’s bailiffs and councillors, distinguished representatives of the City’s Consular Corps, representatives of the Knights and Dames of the Order of Malta, of the Holy Sepulchre and of St John, the city’s High Constables.

I’m also pleased to welcome Bishop John Armes of Edinburgh and the Reverend Scott Rennie of the High Kirk of St Giles, and many other distinguished guests and friends. Thank you for honouring us with your presence today.

In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking finishes this famous book in a very interesting way.

After taking us on a tour of time and space, and our wonderful but also somewhat incomplete knowledge of both, he ends by talking about knowing the mind of God, and how we poor human beings might, one day, actually come to know the mind of God.

What he appears to be getting at is, if we are one day able to unify our theory about space and our theory about time, and if we can find a way to observe and verify and reconcile our views about space and about time, we will have arrived at a unified theory of everything.

*Deacon Matthew McCafferty reads the Gospel.*

We will understand what space and time are, and therefore we will know where we – and everything else - came from, where we are, and where we are going in the future. In this way, as Hawking puts it very neatly and briefly, we will then know the mind of God.

And wouldn’t that be interesting, to say the least.

A scientist, away at the earlier end of the twentieth century, believed that we were very close to understanding how space and time worked.

In fact, he more or less said, “We are six months away from the end of the science of Physics”.

Well, he turned out to be wrong.

Some eighty years later, Stephen Hawking, with clarity and humour, asserted that we were closer than ever to a unified theory of space and time, but he also saw that it was still out of reach.

He didn’t live to see a unified theory of everything, and here we are, still trying to work out where we all come from, where we’re all going, and what, if anything, it all means.

In spite of help from the likes of Newton and Einstein, we’re still struggling to tell the time, the real time.

All we know is that time is very slippery stuff.

Our watches owe their twelve hour faces to the ancient Egyptians of 1500 BC, and we largely owe our 24 hours in the day to the ancient Sumerians’ remarkably accurate observations of time - a very long time ago.

As a species, we’ve been at this for a quite a while, then, but we’re still not there.

We still don’t know the mind of God. But we do have a few glimpses of it.

*Members of the The Society of High Constables of Edinburgh.*

The Lord also has something to say about this. The gospel text today finishes with Jesus saying, “The Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect”.

Of course, this adds something to our view of time.

Of course, Jesus isn’t quite talking about astronomy, but about the time we have this side of eternity, about the time we are alive, about our moral compass and about how much time we have left to get things right.

As individuals, we know empirically that we won’t be here for ever, and that surely ought to add a little urgency to what we’re going to do with the time we have.

At this point, anthropologists and environmentalists chip something as well. One of them once famously said, “Men and women are party animals”.

In other words, people are mostly interested in the good times, and don’t want to hear about the bad times, and certainly not about the end of time.

When we look at Edinburgh festivals, we see a lot of partying. They certainly propose a good time for everyone, and the numbers of visitors to our festivals speak for themselves.

And yet, somewhere deep down, we must acknowledge that there will be a time when it all has to get real, and a time when we’re not here anymore. And what does that mean for you? More partying? More anaesthetic? Do you push it away? Or does it make you pause, and think, and value just a little bit more the limited time you undoubtedly have?

Our city is the home to the third largest ticketed event in the world: after the Olympics and the World Cup comes us and Edinburgh’s festivals.

It’s a tribute to the human wish to party on, to enjoy the time we have here.

But it can also help us stand back, and notice that life’s not always like that.

It can become an opportunity to notice the many things we do enjoy during the festivals, to be grateful for the friendships, and the fun, and the beauty of what we can achieve when we put our minds to it – and also to notice that we won’t always be here.

*Provost Robert Aldridge receives a blessing from Archbishop Leo Cushley.*

We don’t know the day or the hour of our own departure or of the end of all this. If we did, we would know our purpose, we would know the mind of God.

But let’s already endeavour to glimpse and acknowledge that our place here is a small one, a brief one. Let’s make our time here count, not in complete craziness, but in knowledge of self, in contentment with what we have, in magnanimity to strangers, and in love to friends.

Then the day and the hour can come, and we will be a little readier for it, and little more content to face eternity.

Have a wonderful festival, thanks for listening and God bless you all!

Archbishop highlights harmony at Festival Mass

Homily of Archbishop Leo Cushley of St Andrews & Edinburgh, Festival Mass , St Mary’s Metropolitan Cathedral, Edinburgh, Sunday 11 August 2024.

My dear friends,

A warm welcome to our Cathedral on the happy occasion of the Edinburgh International Festival.

In your name, I’m very pleased to welcome Councillor Robert Aldridge, the Right Honourable Lord Lieutenant and Lord Provost of the City of Edinburgh, a number of our city’s bailiffs and councillors, several distinguished representatives of the City’s Consular Corps, representatives of the Knights and Dames of the Order of Malta and of the Holy Sepulchre, the city’s High Constables, and other distinguished guests and friends.

Thank you for honouring us with your presence today.

*The High Constables of Edinburgh provide a ceremonial role for the City of Edinburgh Council.*

You may have noticed the second reading, from one of St Paul’s letters, on this occasion to the Christians of the little church in Ephesus, now the Turkey of today. The reading is an appeal to be kind to each other, to live harmoniously.

He is not the first person to say it, but he expresses it in relation to faith in Christ: “Never have grudges against others – he says - or lose your temper, or raise your voice to anybody, or call each other names, or allow any sort of spitefulness.

Be friends with one another, and kind, forgiving each other as readily as God forgave you in Christ.”

It goes without saying, or perhaps it bears restating in the world of today, that St Paul’s letters and the rest of the New Testament remain a definitive touchstone for the whole Christian world.

But it’s not the only thing from the middle of the first century, a turbulent one to say the least, that has come down to us.

We all continue to be fascinated by the first century, as Rome slips from Republic into Empire.

Our civilisation remains fascinated by Rome and by the first century AD – and this is proven not by the number of pious movies made about the life of Jesus, but by the latest big thing being pushed on stream with Anthony Hopkins as emperor in 69 AD, gladiators and charioteers running around the Coliseum, and life and death hanging by a thread down in the Forum.

We are seduced by Rome’s power, its reach, its cruelty. But we are also heirs to much of it, because it has shaped our civilisation. But I’m not thinking of Rome’s power or reach or cruelty.

The most enduring legacy of Rome for me is perhaps its legal system. The Romans loved law.

They legislated enthusiastically, and Roman citizens participated actively in the governing of their city and their state. And their legal principles and laws form the backbone of our own law and our own outlook on civil life to this day.

But if the Romans were people of law, the civilisation that they admired and copied was that of the Greeks.

The Greeks were politically and legally original in their thinking, and the democracy of Athens remains a standard and an example that is unique in history.

So, the Greeks were better at ideas, at thought, at philosophy.

They were the first to ask the questions that we’ve all been trying to answer ever since. No other ancient people did this like the Greeks; not the Egyptians, or the Chinese or the Indians or the Persians.

It was the Greeks who first asked in the way that we still do, Where does everything come from? What are things made of? Why are we here? What is a human being? Is there any meaning to our existence? Is there right and wrong?

And to this day, when we’re not at the Festival or watching gladiators on Netflix, we are still trying to answer these important and intriguing questions.

One thing the Greeks noticed was what became mathematics. Through geometry and arithmetic and music, they began to notice patterns, things that always came out with the same answer.

They began to notice how music had natural harmonies in it.

And through both, they found things that were always true, “eternal truths”, and they concluded that geometry and music and harmony all spoke of the hand of something eternal, even a creator. The logic and the harmony spoke, not of chaos, but of predictable order in the universe, and of a benign order at that.

Music was therefore seen by the Greeks as something sacred.

Sure, it was fun too, but its deeper beauty lay not in the satisfaction that Mick Jagger was looking for, but in the truth and the beauty and the harmony displayed in the way that music always works: it is always telling us something true and good and right, and eternal.

Perhaps this is one way to look at what happens in the Edinburgh International Festival.

Through music, Sir Rudolph Bing wished to confirm the return of peace to Europe and to underline the restoration of harmony among nations.

And music does that brilliantly in several ways: it does so when it is played and sung beautifully, as by our choir and organist this morning, it does so in our wonderful international festival; it does so as an illustration of the political will and intentions of those who promoted the Festival in its early days; and it does so in an intellectually satisfying way, since music is a demonstration of the eternal and of the order and harmony at the centre of our universe.

The chaos is not where we’re meant to be; we’re meant, as St Paul says to us today, to be in harmony; in harmony with each other, at peace with the earth, in harmony with the cosmos.

I hope that the beauty and the harmony of the music on display at the International Festival this year, as in the past, will continue to illustrate and underline the intentions of Rudolph Bing; the shared desire for peace and harmony in our troubled world; and our firm political resolution to work for peace and harmony, especially Europe, but elsewhere in our world as well.

Have a harmonious and happy Festival, and God bless you all!