Remembering Philip Roderick (1949-2025): Eulogies
Eulogy: Revd Kate Lawson, Chair of Trustees, Quiet Garden Movement
I have the privilege of being Chair of trustees of the Quiet Garden movement, which began in 1992. Philip was working in the diocese of Oxford, when he observed a lack of places available where individuals could go to embrace silence and stillness and simply ‘be’.
He said as a teenager, walking quietly alone in nature one evening, he became aware that in the stillness of the natural world, his mind was more open to greater clarity and a deeper spirituality. This moment stayed with him into adulthood and through his training as an Anglican priest and eventually shaped his vision for a network of quiet places with a simple ethos of ‘hospitality and prayer’, where people could step away from the busy-ness of daily life.
One day, while enjoying the peace of his own garden, he realised that all that was needed for this simple ministry was a welcoming host with a home and a garden.
The first Quiet Garden opened in Stoke Poges in Buckinghamshire, and since then, more than 250 Quiet Gardens have opened across the UK and the world. In addition to individuals becoming hosts in their gardens, Quiet Gardens can now also be found in churches, community gardens, schools, hospitals, prisons and retreat centres.
Philp said -We live in a world where we are swamped by methods of communication and yet we find ourselves unable to communicate. Silence is the missing and vital ingredient. Even as little as five minutes can be restorative and healing.”
My involvement in the Quiet Garden Movement began when I attended one in West Sussex run by Revd. Tessa Holland, who is also part of Contemplative Fire. I have been a Quiet Garden host since 2016, and I was very fortunate to have Philip and Jill living near me in Saltdean. Philip attended my Quiet Garden on several occasions, which was at first worrying, to have the founder in my garden, but he was, as you can imagine an absolute joy! Philip blessed us by leading the Lord’s Prayer as a body prayer, which was very memorable as my garden is on quite a slope.
Since 2020, and Covid, my Quiet Garden is online rather than physical, with people joining on zoom from Israel, Finland, America, and different parts of England. This has continued as we are now a family, and last month our theme was Philip and his legacy and I would like to tell you of five of the wonderful comments:
“During the past few days, I’ve been reflecting Philips vision in creating Quiet Gardens and how his pioneering spirit has grown into a movement that has influenced people around the world.
Secondly
“Philip was a man of great vision who realised we all need to find stillness and quiet in our very busy and often stressful lives. Quiet Gardens provide the opportunity to do just that and allows us time to take stock of our lives and for a short time to simply ‘be’.”
Thirdly a Quiet Garden Day is rather like taking a retreat during the busy week. It provides time for us to relax, be spiritually fed and nourished and to recharge our batteries.
Fourthly -Our zoom Quiet Gardens are a wonderful opportunity to meet people online from around the world – sharing our thoughts, praying for those in need and making good friends. It’s something I really look forward to.
And lastly -Hosting a Quiet Garden is a real privilege – sharing my garden with others is a joy. It is a wonderful ministry of hospitality and gives the opportunity to share one’s faith.
I also run a Quiet Garden at my church in Saltdean and as Chair of Trustees, I hope to see this wonderful ministry of welcome, spiritual companionship and pastoral support, continue to flourish and grow.
To aid this we have an excellent administrator Sarah who looks after our website, our garden hosts, and our team of trustees and we also have excellent patrons.
The right Reverend Dame Sarah Mullaly, Bishop of London is one of our Patrons and she said, “I give thanks for the Quiet Garden Trust and the vital work of ensuring that such places are available to as many people as possible, in as many places as possible. Gardens are tools of transformation and healing. May we cherish that gift.”
We asked her to be our patron in March 2024 when Philip was awarded the Points of Life award, recognising his exceptional service in creating the quiet garden movement.
Another patron Brian Draper, author and retreat leader says
The Quiet Garden network has been gently cultivating and tending an organic network, a flowering of set aside spaces, to which anyone can come, to be still, to be restored and to be enlivened.
Mary, one of our zoom family, met Philip in 1992 and was one of the first garden hosts. She said “I owe Philip such a lot. The pleasure, friends, and spiritual blessings which are part of being involved in Quiet Gardens I owe all to Philip and his vision, which has borne so much fruit world-wide.”
She says ‘I remember his musical talents too – is he drumming in Heaven now?! Well, I suspect so don’t you?!
Eulogy: Jo Rowbotham (Companion, CF) & Revd Ali Dorey (Trustee, CF)
Jo Rowbotham:
I am Jo Rowbotham, and I had the life-changing and life-giving experience of being CF’s first staff member after Philip and Jill, in the very early days when we were seeding it as a Fresh Expression of Church in the South of England.
For me the fuse was lit in 2001 when I first met Philip, actually about something else entirely, but it did get me on the mailing list as Contemplative Fire was beginning the slow burn into being.
In 2004 I received the official CF launch email, saying that Philip had stepped out in faith to launch the Contemplative Fire ministry. Jill, Justin, Hannah and Philip had left the Vicarage in Amersham to move to their little Diocesan house in Weston Turville. Jill had given up her jobs to assist Philip full time. The show was on the road.
In 2005 their funding meant they could advertise for a part-time member of staff, and I got the job. As Philip had a global vision, it seemed unimportant that I lived in Gloucestershire and he lived in Buckinghamshire – and actually in the coming 3 years, neither of us were in either place, or any place, for very long. An infra-red map of Southern England would have shown little clusters of Contemplative Fireplaces starting to glow along the South coast and inland, as the reality of an inclusive network church community began to take hold in people’s homes and hearts.
In 2008 the funding, and my post, came to an end; the following year, Philip and the family embraced the next level of brinkmanship as he moved north to combine his leadership of CF with becoming the Bishop of Sheffield’s part-time Spiritual Adviser.
2009 was also the year Philip turned 60, and at his birthday bash I was invited to review our first few years.
In common with many of the saints and prophets, Philip was prone to reckless leaps of faith. So it felt appropriate to ponder on who might have provided his templates for ministry.
As you may know, Philip had a particular fascination with Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, partly because he was Welsh and musical – I mean Philip was Welsh and musical – and had a love of polysyllables. I did wonder about a deeper connection. What we know they had in common was that extraordinary gift of telling it so you feel you were there. You know how when Philip told you how he ate muesli with Father Thomas Keating, or did body-prayer on a Hawaiian beach at sunset and all the porpoises joined in, you could actually experience that along with him?
Dame Julian of Norwich was another possible template, this time because of their enormous shared optimism. If I can take you, in imagination, to a Contemplative Fire evening gathering at Dorchester Abbey in midwinter. I would like you to visualise its beautiful, shadowed aisles, uneven floors, unexpected steps, electrical cables taped to the floor with gaffer tape, and some quite elderly participants processing past miles of lighted tea-lights – naked flames – placed on the floor, just at trouser-hem level. You have to have a very certain vision that ‘all will be well, and all manner of things will be well’, to turn off ALL the electric light on an occasion like that.
But I reckoned John of the Cross was our best fit. Into silence and contemplation from his early 20s. Went barefoot whenever he could. Surrounded by crowds of competent women. You see where I am heading. Of course, John was big on suffering and Philip wasn’t all that keen, but then I figured that of course, Philip would calculate that John of the Cross just needed to play percussion and have more fun. He needed to go to Greenbelt Festival and play drums in the rain at six a.m. and wake up the campsite. He needed to hold open-air beach-eucharists, and mountain eucharists, and circle dance, and plant gardens inside prisons, and hold up Land rovers on country estates by doing contemplative slow-walking with 30 people down the track in front of them.
He needed to make music out of cardboard boxes. He needed to invent the kind of church that people who didn’t know about church wanted to come to, and they did. They still are.
They say you can tell a lot about someone from their bookshelves. If Philip’s mind was a bookshelf, it would be Foyle’s in London: five floors of the esoteric, the popular, the erudite and the arcane, with a massive all-singing, all-dancing multimedia department. He once held a teaching day on ‘the roots of Contemplative Fire’, which included references to Scripture and sacrament, desert and garden, Eastern Orthodoxy and Celtic Christianity, imagination and the arts, meditation and mystical theology.
Of course, the flyer for the day also included practicalities: Weather permitting, we shall celebrate a simple communion either in the woodland or in the walled garden.
Please bring a packed lunch and bring boots and outdoor wear in case it is wet.
And if you can tell a mind by its bookshelf, you could read Contemplative Fire by the event titles. We had Around the Hearth gatherings, but also Wisdom on the Way. We Lived the Mystery. We made Pilgrimages to Now, Here. We explored what it is to be community, and what it is to be at the edge.
Philip was not only enormously creative himself, but he nurtured and inspired creativity in others. Season after season, new and inspirational Lent resources and Advent resources were generated from amongst the growing number of CF companions. Gatherings were held, retreats and community weekends offered, and pilgrimages led in wild places and edge places but also in centres and cities around the country.
And for Philip, an essential thing was to remain in dialogue with established Church, fed by its teachings but also offering Fresh Expressions of them: a fresh expression of what he had loved all his life, a sweet water well to draw in all who were thirsty.
Amidst CF’s meteoric pace of life, the G-force created some symptoms: Philip was suffering a trapped nerve somewhere in the shoulder joints: ‘Makes body prayer a little challenging’. Nor was CF exempt from the slings and arrows of ordinary church politics: an email from Philip mentioned that they would know ‘next Wednesday’ re possible diocesan job cutbacks. Unthinkably, Whirlow Grange itself was under serious threat. Jill spoke of shifting sands; Philip emailed that busking was looking attractive!
Between June and August 2013, Jill commented that they’d turned into
a permanent guest house, with non-stop visitors for 2 months and regular 14 or 15 hour days. ‘But at the same time – We’re really happening, blimey! And we broke-even this year!!’
In November 2013, Abbot Stuart Burns telephoned Philip with his congratulations to welcome Contemplative Fire as a new Acknowledged Community. Sister Rosemary and Bishop Paul Bayes became our Senior Accompanier and Bishop Accompanier respectively.
CF published its ‘Rhythm of Life Resource Book’ . Rt Rev’d Paul Bayes, the then Bishop of Hertford, described it as a ‘beautiful, intuitive, visual / verbal resource for growth in the Christian Way. It speaks to the left and the right brain, and to the deep heart also… I commend it to you most warmly’
Philip messaged that whilst he was not planning to “sail off into the sunset”, it was vitally important that we should consider the issue of succession planning and the most appropriate leadership model for CF .
Jill wrote to me, ‘I just wanted to let you know from the horse’s mouth that I had a diagnosis of breast cancer on 18 December. There is a good survival rate and it has been caught early so all fingers crossed.’ Jumping forward to 10 years ago – and 10 years of CF:
The Lent Resources in 2014 reflected the mood and the need of the Sheffield group, who were facing impending grief and loss and pain and change. Jill began her intensive course of radiotherapy, prayed for by the community. Philip’s easter message 2014 concluded, ‘having negotiated the Lenten beckoning to “Risk Reality”, our invitation now is to “Welcome Life”.
The Trustees’ 2014 Advent Letter to the CF Community confirmed that Philip’s job as Bishop of Sheffield’s Spirituality Advisor had been axed as part of Diocesan cutbacks. As their housing was tied to the Diocesan job, they also faced the loss of their home. Philip and Jill were enabled to purchase a house in Saltdean, near Brighton with a plan to move south in 2015, and take time to rest and recover, leaving behind – as a result of the enormous amount of work put in by Philip, Jill and community members – a strong Contemplative Fire presence in the North.
On 1 March 2016, the first day of Philip and Jill’s retirement from Contemplative Fire, Philip received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. Then the new work began, of first discerning and then dealing with all the implications of that.
I’m going to pause here and hand over to Ali, as we’re past the end of the beginning, and into the beginning of the next bit. Philip and Jill’s grand-daughter, Riley Elizabeth, was born to Hannah and Ben in December 2015, and Riley’s brother Dylan was due to make his entrance in another 3 years. As well as the sea, the South Downs and the garden, Jill and Philip were loving the brand new experience of living close to family for the first time – and with time to spend with them.
* * *
Revd Ali Dorey:
I am Ali Dorey. I’ve been a Companion on the Way with Contemplative Fire for around 13 years now. I am a trustee of CF and I work with people exploring Companionship with us.
I’ll begin by reading a short tribute from Bishop Anne Hollinghurst, who is the Bishop Visitor for Contemplative Fire…
“…I first met Philip through my husband Steve, and… Peter and Charlotte Wright when a local CF gathering began meeting in the church of St Albans where I was then vicar. I was impressed by his gentle yet inspirational presence. His own yearning and seeking for a more contemplative way… in tune with the mystery and wonder of the natural world, resonated with the search of many…– myself included. But it was not a path of individual mysticism… rather that of forming a community that sought a… way of travelling lightly but dwelling deeply… He was a remarkable person, and his legacy is a remarkable community that is faithful to the contemplative adventure.
My prayers are so very much with Philip’s family and wife Jill at this time, and with all of those in the community who loved him…. +Anne Hollinghurst”
* * *
I have been struggling all week with having far too much to say about Philip. I am so grateful to Jo and Kate for saying so much already, in such a wonderful way.
Everything that Jo has already mentioned continued and was sown deep in Sheffield and the surrounding area: chants, body prayer, pilgrimages, Wisdom on the Way days, often outside, connected with nature. Many contemplatives were unearthed, and before long, CF North was born.
A few particular memories:
My earliest memory of Philip was at a big event in Sheffield Cathedral. I was hiding at the back, and I overheard him quietly asking a bookseller, “Have you got a spare cardboard box?” Next thing I knew, he was walking down the aisle playing the box with his hands, singing a chant in such a playful, inviting way that all 300 of us joined in.
The first time Philip introduced Lucy and I to the Angels chant we will sing in this service, harmonies formed themselves with ease and depth. We later discovered the story of the birth of the chant. It came to Philip fully formed in the square by St Ethelburga’s in London; a prayer following the 7th July bombings. When Philip revealed this to us, Lucy told us that her cousin had died in the bombings. As she spoke, I felt the floor give way. Profound moments happened often with Philip.
The Bible was a rich resource for Philip and he often shared his own deep reflections on it in worship. But he also welcomed our reflections. One time, he read a short gospel text and invited us to contemplate it. After a short silence, he invited us to turn to our neighbour and “haggle”, as the rabbis do, over its meaning. The hubbub and the profound sharing in that room was remarkable.
Philip deeply valued ancient tradition, but he was also a great democratiser of worship spaces, inviting everyone to bring their gifts to share. This particular flavour has deepened and flourished in Contemplative Fire latterly. It prepared us well for Philip’s retirement in 2016 and has stood us in very good stead since.
Philip was a prolific inventor of new things. In 2010, just one year after moving to Sheffield, he founded Hidden Houses of Prayer. His vision was for a network for those engaged in the largely solitary ministry of hidden prayer in their homes. The network would provide “solitude connected” across the globe. The Hidden Houses of Prayer network, like Contemplative Fire and the Quiet Garden movement, continues today.
The Covid-19 pandemic arrived in the UK in 2020. We began using Zoom which proved invaluable for connecting us with one another and also for reconnecting us more deeply with our sister community Contemplative Fire Canada as well. Retirement notwithstanding, Philip’s endless energy for starting something new once again surfaced. He rang, wondering whether he might be able to run, “a little online course in Mystical Christianity”? I thought, “Is he mad? Can he not… just… stop??!” But something he said (how did he do this?) made me realise maybe this was a God thing. So we held bi-monthly Mystical Christianity sessions on Zoom. (We nearly had to extend our Zoom licence after 100 people signed up for the first session.) After the course had finished people wanted to continue, so we set up a few online groups for it. Philip himself chose to be in one of them. Sometime after Philip’s diagnosis with Parkinson’s, when the disease had begun to cause serious discomfort to him, I asked him how the community could accompany him well in this new reality. After some thought, he said that really his online Listening 3 and Mystical Christianity groups had been such a profound delight, and just what he needed.
Philip was an educator, a theologian, a mystic, a visionary and a pioneer as well as a priest. He did encounter challenge. Latterly, he met challenge with curiosity rather than fear – a trait I really admired. But most often Philip was so playful and quietly inoffensive and a bit… well, let’s be honest, odd (with his hang drum and cardboard boxes), that people didn’t really have a category for him, so they humoured him and then were delighted. One time when a colleague disengaged and wandered off, the rest of us humoured Philip, and within the hour came back “bringing sheaves with us”, recounting our deep encounters with God that moved pretty much every one of us to tears.
‘Put out into the deep…’ was one of the founding words for Contemplative Fire. Perhaps it was for Philip’s life, too? But as with everything, this was a paradox for Philip, who was also deeply drawn to edge places. (CF is “growing a community of Christ at the edge”.) Philip shared his instinctive draw to the edge with Jill, in their love of the seashore – the edges of the land, sea and sky. Throughout their life together they had many trips (pilgrimages really) to Aberdaron, St David’s and St Non’s and Marloes Sands – all edge places. And they so enjoyed their time here post retirement, relishing walking by the sea most days. When Philip was less frail, he loved his run-walks on the South Downs too, and was delighted with Hannah’s running as well (recently to raise money for Parkinson’s research).
Philip’s genuine curiosity, borne of contemplative practice, enabled him to be mostly fearless. He was often invited to share stages with big names and to speak in all sorts of places, including ‘mind, body and spirit fairs’, festivals, on podcasts, and internationally renowned radio shows. Even since his diagnosis with Parkinson’s he talked with delight on podcasts about what he was learning from this phase of life – often from his grandchildren.
In the last few years, Philip and Jill were both really overjoyed to be so near their family, and so grateful for the support they received from Hannah and Justin. And the utter present-moment-joy that Riley and Dylan brought was such a great gift.
In 2021, the then Archbishop Justin Welby honoured Philip with the Dunstan Award for Prayer and Spirituality, which is a Lambeth Award for his outstanding contributions to Church and Society.
Philip was of course far from perfect, and actually his greatest gifts could be exasperating at times (only a few weeks ago he was still trying to create 15 new things before breakfast, in spite of his frailty). But he was an inspiration, an encourager and a joy, and I know I speak for so many of us when I say we are so grateful for the communities he co-created with us and with God, which are bearing so much good fruit.
One last story…
As has already been mentioned, Philip was often playful. One time at our Community Weekend, he introduced the sharing of the peace in a terribly serious way, inviting us to offer peace to one another with a sober handshake. He then pressed “play” on the music, and Latin American steel drums filled the air. Joy and delight arrived on every face and our sober handshakes became a glorious “strip the willow”-style community dance!
* * *
Jo Rowbotham:
On one occasion, the title for a Wisdom on the Way at White Waltham was – for reasons now lost, I’m afraid, in history – ‘New Suits and Green Bananas’. Richard Craig, its facilitator, took as his theme a quote from TS Eliot:
“Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity” T S Eliot
Philip didn’t make particularly old bones. But he was big on intensity, and stillness, and movement. And I like to think that he still is, and that light of his is now indivisible with God’s, and that they are enjoying each other very much.
As Philip would always sign off,
May each of us be graced to travel light and dwell deep.
Love and solidarity
And please bring a packed lunch, boots and outdoor wear in case it is wet.