Apr 24 - Arthur Michael Ramsay - Where the Glory Breaks Through

Host (Paul): Hi, welcome to Commemorations and Holy Days in the Anglican Church in North America Podcast, where we celebrate and remember the faithful departed, held in Christ's love, and consider their way of life so that we might imitate their faith. My name is Paul. Today I'm joined by Adrian to talk about Arthur Michael Ramsay — the one hundredth Archbishop of Canterbury. Adrian, welcome. Where do we even start with this man?

Expert (Adrian): With the eyebrows, honestly. Ramsay had famously extraordinary, bushy eyebrows — cartoonists barely needed to draw anything else to get a perfect likeness. But beneath those eyebrows was one of the most serious and genuinely holy minds in twentieth-century Anglicanism. A man who thought rigorously, prayed constantly, and refused to look away from the world.

Host (Paul): Let's set the scene a little. Who was Michael Ramsay?

Expert (Adrian): Born in Cambridge in 1904, into a remarkable family — his father was a Congregationalist mathematician who became president of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and his older brother Frank was a distinguished logician. Michael studied theology at Cambridge, was drawn deeply into the Anglican tradition through the Church Fathers and the Oxford Movement, and was ordained in 1928. He served in Liverpool, taught at Lincoln Theological College and then at Durham, and became Bishop of Durham in 1952, then Archbishop of York, and in 1961 was enthroned as the hundredth Archbishop of Canterbury.

Host (Paul): And he led through the sixties — not exactly a quiet decade for the Church.

Expert (Adrian): Not at all. His response wasn't to retreat. He published a book in 1969 called God, Christ and the World, engaging the secular challenges to faith head-on — neither surrendering to them nor just defending old walls. The Gospel, he insisted, belongs in the middle of the world. That was his deepest conviction.

Host (Paul): What was the theological center of his thought?

Expert (Adrian): The Transfiguration. In 1949 he published The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ, and that became the heartbeat of everything. God's glory isn't stored somewhere beyond creation — it breaks through within it. In Christ on the mountain, created matter becomes transparent to the divine. And that changes everything: the material world matters, God is active in history, our engagement with the world is where we encounter him. It's what some call new creation — not the replacement of the old, but its healing and filling from within.

Host (Paul): That connects directly to his work for justice.

Expert (Adrian): Directly. In 1970 he called for economic sanctions against apartheid South Africa — a genuinely courageous stand for someone in his position. And in 1966, he traveled to Rome to meet Pope Paul VI — the first meeting between an Archbishop of Canterbury and a Pope since the Reformation. They exchanged rings. For Ramsay, the Church's visible divisions were a contradiction of the Gospel itself, not merely an awkward inconvenience. That visit gave impetus to what became the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission.

Host (Paul): And through all of that, I understand he was a man of deep, sustained prayer.

Expert (Adrian): Extraordinary prayer. He would kneel motionless before the reserved sacrament for hours at a time. He wrote a small, beloved book in 1982 called Be Still and Know — a guide to contemplative prayer, particularly cherished by older readers and those in quieter seasons of life. He was utterly clear: prayer wasn't withdrawal from the world. It was the root system that made everything else possible. Without it, he warned, the Church's action becomes mere activism.

Host (Paul): Our listeners are often in the later chapters of their lives, thinking about what lies ahead. What does Ramsay offer them?

Expert (Adrian): Quite a lot, I think. He taught that the resurrection isn't only a past event or a distant promise — it's a present reality that we're already drawn into. Death, on that account, isn't extinction, and it isn't escape from the world either. It's a deeper entry into the life already begun in Christ. Ramsay himself died on April 23rd, 1988 — the eve of St George's Day — having received the Church's last rites. Not anxiously. With the quiet serenity of a man who had spent eighty years praying to a God he trusted completely.

Host (Paul): Is there a closing word you'd leave our listeners with?

Expert (Adrian): Just this: Ramsay's life was a sustained argument that God is not somewhere far off, waiting for us beyond death. God is present, active, here — in prayer, in justice, in another person's face. The last chapter of a life, as Ramsay lived it, isn't a narrowing. It's a deepening into the life that was always real.

Host (Paul): Beautifully said. Michael Ramsay is commemorated on April 24th. Adrian, thank you. And to our listeners — if you want to sit with his thought a while, his little book Be Still and Know is a wonderful place to begin. May we, like him, be still enough to know.