Living Intimately with Strangers
- a Postevangelical Pilgrimage?
(Published in The Postevangelical Debate, SPCK, 1997)
- a Postevangelical Pilgrimage?
(Published in The Postevangelical Debate, SPCK, 1997)
Northwest Spain was a revelation to me. As the plane circled round to land in Santiago de Compostela, I could see rolling green hills below and a landscape more reminiscent of my native Sussex than the arid desert regions of Spain, where I had stayed before in Zaragoza. The Cathedral, built over the bones of St James (‘Santiago’) the Apostle dominates the old city. It has been a great place of Christian pilgrimage for a thousand years and there were many travellers there when I visited the shrine a few days later. Most of the pilgrims had walked for many miles over many days to reach their destination. They simmered on that hot August day with all the joys and weariness that a long pilgrimage brings; savouring the new friendships and shared stories; the heightened faith and sense of belonging to the Church both militant and triumphant; at best, a greater devotion to Christ for whom they had undertaken the discipline of the walk. Pilgrimage has a long and noble tradition within the church, much neglected by Protestants because often abused by Catholics.
Some of the visitors, like me, had only flown in a few days before. They came from that part of the Christian family that does not understand pilgrimage. To them all this smacked of mumbo jumbo and salvation by works. They decided to sing some choruses in the nave and to pray ‘out’ the spirit of superstition that obviously pervaded a place where people genuflected, lit candles and kissed relics. An usher approached them and politely asked that they should stop singing and causing a disturbance. Vergers in Westminster Abbey would probably have done the same. Later that evening, back at the campsite, I heard some of these singers asking us to pray for the godless and misguided pilgrims. What further proof was needed of their unregenerate state, they said, than that the authorities had forbidden chorus singing in the cathedral.
Incidents like this have provoked in me an indefinable mental discomfort and pause for thought since I was a small, precocious boy in the Christian church. In recent years I have come to understand more about myself and the Christians who have nurtured me. I have reflected on the obvious sincerity and zeal of people who seem certain that they not only have the truth, but that their way of doing the truth is superior to all others. And these people have been my friends who loved me and cared for me. Yet somehow there was often a disjunction between what we were doing and the ordinary life of my unchurched family and wider circle of friends.
I sat on the hillside overlooking Compostela, at the foot of a huge cross, and remembered some of my early attempts at evangelism as a boy of 10 or 11. On Sunday afternoons in the summer, my church held open air services down on Shoreham beach. We would wade through the pebbles on what we judged to be the most densely populated part of the beach - always better at high tide when the masses could not spread themselves out so much - and set up a little peddle harmonium, a couple of outdoor PA speakers, and an old valve amplifier powered by a car battery that one of the stronger men lugged from the road. Then we would sing songs from ‘100 Favourite Hymns’, read from the Authorized Version, share testimonies and invite the oiled and bikinied multitudes to church that evening. My task was to go round, sweltering in my Sunday Best collar and tie, offering people hymn sheets in the vain hope that they might like to join in. I tried to ‘act natural’ when I came across a cluster of my school friends or neighbours. But it wasn’t natural. It was a cultural oddity, justified on theological grounds as ‘preaching the Gospel’.
Ten years later at university in the early 70s, Monty Python’s Flying Bible Study had at least been an ‘encultured’ attempt to share the Gospel, although I realised looking back that it still worked on an Us-versus-Them model of evangelism. But it was better than the prevailing method of thrusting Chic tracts up people’s noses, because, apparently, once a man had been converted by having a Chic tract nasally applied, and he had gone on to be a famous evangelist.
Another ten years later in the 80s, I was a Baptist minister, sitting in a boat moored off Torquay seafront on a Saturday evening. There was the familiar PA system, now transistorized, but with the same old car battery - this one with a dodgy connection which gave a surreal effect to the voice as it ebbed and flowed on the prevailing winds: “Welcome to the Boat Open… on these Satur… then do take one… … joy it!” There was an accordion, a choir, testimonies and solos, and two surly boatmen who sat like Gog and Magog at bow and stern with mugs of tea and fags hanging out of their mouths. One Saturday I remember the elderly speaker started off by shouting up to the promenade: “You may wonder what we are doing here?” I exchanged knowing smiles with many of the youngsters sitting around me. What were we doing there?
In 1996, as an Anglo-Catholic priest, I led a pilgrimage from my parish to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. I helped sprinkle at the well, anointed with oil at the Healing Mass, and sang all 37 verses of the hymn telling the Walsingham story as we processed round the garden behind the statue of Our Lady. It was a strange experience and I don’t think I will ever get into the Mary thing in a big way. I had been at Spring Harvest a few weeks earlier and there were marked cultural similarities although major theological differences; and of course a lot more gin and lace in evidence - at Walsingham, that is.
These and many more are the gallimaufry of religious experiences which have shaped my life and ministry over the last 40 years and I count myself lucky to have so many Christian friends who have shared with me the strengths and the weaknesses of their own traditions. I have never minded the walls of denominationalism, but I have always objected to broken glass on top of the walls. And I am but one of a growing number of Christians who have not only looked over the garden walls of very different denominations, but have walked through the gate. In a postmodern society where choice is of the essence of life, the church is in a strong position, with 57 varieties to suit most tastes and temperaments, all with one central, Christological and Trinitarian message. If only we could celebrate that diversity and love one another.
For me and many of my contemporaries, a dominant theme during these recent decades of social fragmentation and religious uncertainty has been integration - my life, my personality, my faith, my theology, my career, my spiritual life… And even integration of the wider church, allowing for individual choice with conviction, yet resisting the temptation to rubbish all other positions in order to make me feel more secure in my own. This has been the growing problem of the sect-like nature of some evangelicalism and some Anglo-Catholicism. We have seen others go along a road called Faithful to the Tradition and realised that for us it has become a cul-de-sac called The Myth of Certainty. There are no more certainties; only reasonable grounds for confidence. This must give us a degree of humility in our walk with others of differing theological positions, and in our dealings with those struggling with faith and practice.
Good friends often see the changes we are undergoing before we notice them ourselves. I can remember the day when walking through a little Oxfordshire village in the late 80s, a former colleague, David Coffey, asked me if I thought I would become an Anglican, or even a Roman Catholic. I was taken aback by the seriousness of the enquiry. It had never really occurred to me to change denominations, but David obviously thought I might. Later, he explained my denominational move to others who were perplexed by what appeared so rapid a change of allegiance, in a way that helped to clarify matters for myself. He said that my theological, spiritual and career paths had converged. Let me retrace my steps along those three paths, albeit rather sketchily and sadly leaving out a number of significant people and events.
The Emotional Blackmail of a Sound Theology
As soon as I could walk, I joined my neighbours’ kids at the local Baptist Sunday School. I had three, then four, then five, then six brothers and sisters and so Sunday School got you out of a crowded 3-bedroomed house, both morning and afternoon in the 50s. I liked Sunday School: lots of friends; a colour-in book with beautiful gummed pictures to stick in each week; Sunday School anniversaries with presentation books for good attendance over the year. And many godly older men and women who loved me and gave time to me. As I grew older I joined the choir and the youth group and the Christian Endeavour and the Boys’ Brigade and went to church pretty well all day on Sunday. I began to learn theology and to hear tales of liberals who dwelt beyond the Bible Belt which was the Sussex coast. Then there were the great Missionary Conventions at Holland Road, Hove, and charts of Dispensations and End Times, together with detailed models of the Tabernacle and Solomon’s Temple. By my teens I was reading Scripture Union notes, and IVP books and at 14 I started lay-preaching around the Tin Tabernacles of Sussex villages.
Church had given me the impetus to pass my 11-plus and go with my friends to High School in Worthing. It was there that I grew to love mathematics, physics and self-conscious evangelicalism under the aegis of charismatic mentors, mostly from the Brethren. Jim Gravett taught us Latin by speaking nothing but Latin when we were in class. He threw blackboard rubbers at us, kept chickens and ferrets outside his classroom and led Bible studies in the lunch hour. Taffy Evans was the headmaster who was at once fearsome and playful and who taught us Religious Instruction and muscular Christianity. Beaky Martin was a polymath who inspired me to learn about everything and who somehow taught more philosophy and theology in a Maths lesson on differential calculus than I had heard in many a sermon.
The Joy of Science was only matched by the Joy of Sound Theology. (There was no Joy of Sex of course…) I was introduced to the Banner of Truth, to Reformation Today and to the writings of Francis Schaeffer. I bought Berkhof’s Systematic Theology and formed sound opinions on everything from women in ministry (OK as long as they weren’t presiding elders) to the Established Church (some evangelicals were alright - I had been to the bastions of Broadwater, Worthing and Bishop Hannington, Hove). Once I had got the theology of the charismatic movement sorted - admittedly a trickier problem in the 60s - I was ready for CICCU: the Cambridge Inter Collegiate Christian Union.
Cambridge was to be the finishing school of my conservative evangelical credentials, although I hung around a lot with charismatics and sang in the Selwyn Chapel choir, and this lost me serious brownie points. To be really ‘sound’ you sided with John Stott rather than Martyn Lloyd-Jones; and you prayed in your college CU prayer meeting for Chapel and those who went there. You didn’t attend yourself. You went to the Round Church, or to one of the Brethren halls, or joined me at Eden Strict Baptist Chapel. While studying science and the history and philosophy of science I also became a Young Earth Creationist, a position I held and championed for over ten years.
Being convinced of sound theology meant that you treated all others who claimed to be Christians but who held loose to evangelicalism as slightly suspect. Students who left CICCU to join more liberal churches and chapels were backsliders. Those who couldn’t hold to the strict moral codes of evangelicalism were beyond the pale and you prayed for them with tears in your eyes. This was genuine compassion, but it was fuelled by a sectarian theology that saw all other theologies as deficient discipleship. Like all sectarian thinking, it held a powerful emotional hold on you. The intimacy of fellowship would be broken if you forsook the evangelical way. You would wander off into the relativity of liberalism if you departed in any matter from ‘biblical’ Christianity.
This is a hard mind set to break free of. Although I can no longer call myself a conservative evangelical, I still feel an inner pain every time I move a marker post. In 1984 I became the Laing Scholar at London Bible College (now the London School of Theology) and spent two years full time, studying Genesis Chapter One. At the end of that exercise I had all but forsaken Young Earth Creationism. Eventually I realised it was only an emotional attachment and a fear of disappointing my creationist friends that made me in my dissertation allow for the creationist position as a possible reading of Scripture. In the course of my research I had in fact become angry at the way that Creationists (like me) manipulated the Bible and church history to make their case. It is hardly surprising that some people find it less painful to ‘give up’ on Christianity altogether (although they usually haven’t) rather than move away from evangelicalism to… postevangelicalism? In my church in Torquay we had a number of families who had been badly hurt by the Exclusive Brethren. They rarely came into church membership, because it had so many unhappy connotations, and some had a constant niggling feeling that they were bound for hell, and had forsaken the true path; the narrow way that so few enter. I understand their feelings now in a way that I could not at the time.
It is hard for exclusive theologies, and conservative evangelicalism was such in the 60s and 70s, to allow for a mind really open to other possibilities and points of view. Departing from the prescribed truth is too costly both in terms of inner turmoil and uneasy relationships. I know when I visit them, that some of my friends are praying that I will return to the truth and become an ‘effective’ evangelical again. How else could they pray?
A Subversive Spirituality
I was born at 2am one snowy Sunday, on Christmas Day, 1949. I was almost called Noel, but my parents plumped for the good Bishop of Myra, Nicholas instead. (One of my congregation in Torquay was born exactly 50 years before me and was called Yule, which made me grateful that I had not been called Holly, or even Turkey.) In a strange way, being a Christmas baby always made me feel special, and close to Jesus, the boy who shared my birthday. I never remember a time when he was not a part of my inner reality. I always spoke to Jesus and resisted any attempts to get me to ‘make a decision for Christ’ or to ‘let Jesus into my heart’ in adolescence. I was never converted. My metaphor of faith from infancy appears to have been that of evolution rather than sudden change; gradualism rather than catastrophism. Evangelicalism has been very prone to benchmark faith - conversion, baptism, backsliding, repentance, renewal, baptism in the Spirit, rededication… For some people this works well when set against a backcloth of progressive growth in grace. But for some who are ‘forced’ into this model of spiritual growth it begins to wear thin, and disillusion can set in, usually against a backcloth of increasing guilt.
There were three key elements in my early spiritual development. I grew up between the South Downs and the Channel on the banks of the river Adur. The 1950s were full of fun on beaches and in chalk pits; messing about in boats on the river; exploring among the tank blocks and the old air-raid shelters over at the airport. Shoreham-by-Sea was a wonderful playground. Secondly, my father is a radio ham, so the house was always full of electrical components, tools and mechanical wonders for managing masts. I could solder soon after I could walk and blame the recent degeneration of my brain on the many electrical shocks I received in my boyhood. A third element was the beauty of music. I had a strong singing voice and very early learnt the pleasure of making music with others in choirs and orchestras. My treble voice turned tenor by the time I was 12. By 18 I realised that male alto carried more kudos and was more marketable than an indifferent tenor. This was a decision that, somewhat surprisingly, altered the course of my life more than I could have imagined at the time.
These worlds of nature, science and music developed in me a strong sense of the power and mystery of God. Natural theology informed and gave stability to my spiritual growth, and from my 20s onwards began subtly to confuse my Christian life. My evangelical faith looked fine on paper and in the cut and thrust of student debate, but it didn’t ‘feel’ right, or make sense of the culture in which I lived. Now I knew, of course, that I must not follow my ‘feelings’, those unreliable doorways to sin. I must follow my mind, that ennobled arbiter of Christian living. But even then, my reformed training reminded me of my ‘total depravity’ and that my reasoning too was faulty. This began to throw me back on God in a way I did not really understand at the time. I felt like John Donne:
Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, youIt was all this poetry and music and liturgy and art so closely woven into Christianity that began to produce in me a sort of spiritual dualism. The focus of the culture which was confusing me at this time was Selwyn College Chapel. I had auditioned for the choir and joined the other three male altos, who were all much better than me, but the organ scholar desperately needed a fourth to balance the all male choir of about 20 voices. This introduced me to a régime of daily Eucharists and evensongs which was at once both utterly foreign to me and utterly compelling. Furthermore, although I knew that none of the clerics who still littered Selwyn in the 70s, were evangelicals, I realised two important things about them: they were not lacking in the brain department and could give good reasons for their ‘middle of the road’ (a pejorative term from my background) theological positions; and they were godly, and displayed a gentleness of spirit and devotion to God which did not fit the stereotypical picture that countless ‘sound’ sermons had painted of liberals. Even Bishop John Robinson, of the infamous Honest to God debates of the 60s, when I met him over dinner at Selwyn was a bubbling and charming Christian man - in favour of believers’ baptism as I recall!
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely’I love you,’and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,’untie, or break that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee. (Sonnet xiv)
My chaplain, Bob Hardy (now Bishop of Lincoln) lived next door to me on D staircase and there we had many group discussions with the older chaplain, John Sweet, a prayerful, caring academic with a dry sense of humour; and with the Master of Selwyn, Owen Chadwick. He was a powerful personality and a silent mentor for me. I would often serve for him at the early morning Eucharist where he murmured the prayers by the light of the altar candles and often thrust the Gospel book towards me if the reader had not turned up - his eyesight was not up to the candlelight. I read the lesson for him at Great St Mary’s, the University Church, when he was installed as Vice-Chancellor, and he took a kindly interest in my ‘free church’ progress after I left Selwyn.
After a difficult first term in 1969, feeling I was compromising my faith by being so involved with Chapel, I received a helpful letter from my old Worthing High School guru, Charles (Beaky) Martin. I had written to him of my concerns and he had wisely urged me to identify with ‘the household of faith’ in the college, even if I had some theological reservations. For the next four years, I worshipped daily in College Chapel and pedalled off after the Sung Eucharist on Sunday morning to get to Eden Strict Baptist Chapel for 45 minutes of David Smith’s great Bible exposition. Then after a very formal Sunday Evensong in Selwyn, I joined the 500 plus from CICCU at the Evangelistic Sermon in Holy Trinity. I was becoming a closet Anglo-Catholic.
My tutor at Selwyn, an engineer with a quiet devotion to Christ, always in Chapel (and now Master of Selwyn, Sir David Harrison), arranged for me to go and do my teaching practice during my fourth year at Lancing College, up the hill from my home in Shoreham. He was a governor at the school and knew that the head of physics was coming to be Schoolmaster Fellow for Easter term. It was a fantastic term, and as the Baptist Ministerial Recognition Committee for Kent and Sussex had just turned me down for training as a Baptist minister, I stayed on for two more years at Lancing. The school chapel is bigger than many cathedrals and was built as the central minster of the Woodward Foundation, an Anglo-Catholic educational trust. I was back in the choir again, deeply involved in chapel life, as well as attending my home church, Shoreham Baptist, down the hill. The ‘dualism’ continued and I thrived on the mystery and awe of a Sung Solemn Mass and on the intimacy and immediacy of happy clappy Bappy services.
During the late 60s and early 70s, I had also been deeply affected by the charismatic movement. I was at school with Stuart McAlpine and Michael Clark, and their fathers, Campbell and Dennis, and the wider circle of their friends which included Arthur Wallis, Cecil Cousen and Gean Darnall, had all made a deep impression on me. Despite the loony fringes of the movement, there was an authenticity and transparency about these men and women which again pointed me beyond the formulaic doctrines of conservative evangelicalism to the mystery of the interaction between the divine and the human - the working of the Holy Spirit. Capel Prayer and Bible weeks and the Intercessors for Britain weeks at Ashburnham Place gave me insights into prayer which I was not to come across again until I started reading some of the Fathers & Mothers of the church: Chrysostom, Francis, Hildegaard, John of the Cross, Julian, Merton…
I began to admit to myself, and others by my 30s, that I was theologically a Baptist, but aesthetically an Anglo-Catholic. This subversive spirituality eventually had an effect on my theology. The focus of my faith was subtly moving from ‘head’ to ‘heart’. When I was 20, I was very secure in what I knew, but very insecure in who I was. By 40 I was very secure in who I was, but quite insecure in what I knew. There were many fuzzy edges in my faith, and the old certainties seemed naive and unworkable. I remember standing around with half a dozen lecturers at London Bible College one afternoon discussing some particularly fundamentalist student. We had all been at Cambridge together in the 70s. I remember commenting: “You know, we’ve all become those woolly forty year olds that we despised when we were twenty!”
It was a great relief to me when I first realised that trying to get back to the fervent faith of my teens was an enormous guilt-inducing mistake. Pilgrimage requires change and if we cannot change our minds, then we cannot really change anything. I was struck by Carl Jung writing on preparing people for retirement:
“We take this step with the false presupposition that our truth and ideals will serve us henceforth. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning - for what was great in the morning will be little at evening… I have given psychological treatment to too many people of advancing years, and have looked too often into the secret chambers of their souls not to be moved by this fundamental truth.” (Modern Man in Search of a Soul)At the same time as all this change was going on in my spirituality/theology, my ecclesiology was also consequently undergoing a transformation. During my 11 years at LBC I realised that interpreting the Bible was a much more slippery enterprise than I had hitherto thought. And I saw that the church played a much more determinative role in biblical hermeneutics than I had supposed. I only had to look at the way that evangelicalism had viewed the issues of divorce and the role of women, during my lifetime, to see this demonstrated. The creeds were important, for they mapped the interpretive debates of the church. The Roman Catholic and Reformed Catholic (as some would call Anglo-Catholicism) church had maintained credal Christianity for nearly two millennia.
I led a pilgrimage to Assisi in the late 70s and was fascinated by all I learned of Francis. I had already met Anglican Franciscans at Lancing and at Cambridge. Then I began to read Brother Ramon’s books and eventually started meeting with him. He had been a Welsh Baptist, a charismatic, and now he was a Franciscan priest - presently a solitary up at the Prayer House in Glasshampton. While still a Baptist minister I became a Third Order Franciscan. This helped to discipline my spiritual life, gave greater focus to my pilgrimage and fuelled the Spirituality courses I was teaching at LBC.
Calling or Career?
Mathematics and the Baptist Ministry were the competing vocations of my teens. By the time I was 17 and in the Science Sixth Form I had decided to pursue both. My teachers suggested I applied for Selwyn because it was full of ordinands and clerics who would understand someone reading Mechanical Sciences in preparation for the ministry. Cambridge has a long tradition of science and mathematics as a limbering up exercise for the Queen of Sciences, Theology. I have never regretted the decision, although I must admit that I did a bare minimum of detailed Science while being involved in music and sport, the Christian Union and Chapel, politics and lectures by interesting people in other disciplines. These were the days of the Garden House riots, the English Faculty sit-ins, the formation of the Cambridge Students’ Union (as opposed to The Union - the expensive debating society), the first mixed colleges (women were not admitted to Selwyn till 1976), charismatic splits and decimal coinage.
After 2 years of teaching at Lancing, I entered Spurgeon’s College in 1975 to train for the ministry - an appeal had persuaded the Ministerial Recognition Committee to (reluctantly) change it’s mind about my suitability. Supply teaching in Steyning Grammar School (a 2,300 pupil comprehensive school) helped me to survive financially during my 4 formative years at Spurgeon’s. Ray Brown was the Principal. He was a church historian who also taught spirituality, both by his life and in class. He helped me to begin the integrative process between my baptist theology and my catholic spirituality and also made me realise that although I wanted to be a pastor, I also wanted to be a teacher and trainer.
I left to be Assistant Minister at Upton Vale Baptist Church in Torquay, where Ray had been the minister and here I experienced ‘high church’, pietistic, baptist worship. We had a robed choir and worked hard to give our services liturgical coherence. There was a strong brethren influence and a significant charismatic group in the church, which both served to undermine, in different ways, liturgical development - although they added much else in other areas. I had a basically Lutheran view of communion (the ‘real presence’ of Christ in the elements) but was aware that my congregation were essentially Zwinglians who saw the Eucharist as a memorial only (caricatured as the ‘real absence’).
Peter Barber was my boss for my first year. He was a protestant Scot whom I remember saying to me as we stared at a glorious triptych behind the high altar in some cathedral, “Doesn’t it make your protestant blood boil?” Well no it didn’t. I had been used to gentle Cambridge Catholics and Peter’s experience of Catholicism had been in Glasgow. I began to realise that temperament and formative experiences shaped your theology as much as the Bible. I could not imagine anyone who would be as good a mentor and teacher as Peter, but when he left to become General Secretary of the Scottish Baptist Union, he was followed by David Coffey who proved to be his equal as a gracious teacher and, like Peter, a man who gave me space to develop my own spirituality.
I wanted to work with students and after nearly five years at Upton Vale left to pursue research at LBC, which I knew to be a necessary preliminary for theological teaching. I began to examine my ‘calling’ and to sift the comments that I used to get in Torquay: “You’ll soon want your own church I suppose…” I didn’t. I enjoyed having fingers in many pies, being a gatekeeper in so many evangelical networks, having the freedom to travel, write, teach. Furthermore, I began to understand myself as a political animal, always wanting to influence the decision makers, always scared that I might manipulate committees rather than let decisions emerge.
When the time came for me to move on from LBC and to think about the next twenty years of my working life, I was at a loss to know what to do. I wanted to be a chaplain in an academic environment, but as a Baptist minister, such opportunities were few and far between. If only I were an Anglican, I thought… And then everything came together in my mind and I felt sure that this unthinkable step was indeed the next one. It was a sudden decision which I knew I must test carefully. Ramon sent me a long letter in which he showed, like David Coffey, that he knew my direction better than I did. “It was really not ‘whether’ but ‘when’ you would make the change” he wrote, and speaking of his own denominational change he said, “I also recall that although there was a long period of inward thought and debate within my own mind and heart, yet there was a ‘moment’ which seemed to turn the tide.”
But I was afraid that this change might be seen as a ‘career move’, and indeed I questioned deeply my own motivation. Was it primarily my career? Or aesthetics? Or theology? Or life style? However, my two close friends David Coffey and Steve Gaukroger both encouraged me to make the move and reassured me, and my Bishop, Graham Dow, gave wise advice and direction that facilitated a smooth transition.
For many, change is often seen as weakness - Major and Blair viewed by Thatcherism and Old Labour. But “change is the angel of a changeless God” (Archbishop Temple) The change has been a change in emphasis akin to moving from one focus of an ellipse to the other. I am more at home with the transcendent than the imminent; with mystery than explanation; with priests as the focus of the priesthood of all believers, and as a channel for transcendence, rather than ministers who equip; with paradox and uncertainty rather than closure and assurance. My earlier theology stressed beginnings - conversion; and action - busyness and behaviour, achievement and fervour. My new position embraces endings - heaven; and process - life and being, openness and reflection.
As ever, Jack Clemo puts it well
Broad AutumnI have a long way to travel but I have good travelling companions. Relationships have been my lifeblood along the way, even when sometimes those I have intimately lived and worked with have been strangers to many areas of my interior life, as I have been to theirs. The Church is undergoing a transition that may well turn out to be a paradigm shift. Working out how we can remain faithful to the tradition and each other, while genuinely open to the Spirit’s working through the Church and the Culture, takes a lifetime - and then some.
True faith matures without discarding:
All I unearthed, each sky-sign crudely mapped
On the white rasped hills of youth,
Warms me still by rowan-tapped crags
Far up the autumnal mountain,
Incredibly remote in climate, texture, weathering
Of bare stones, from my first insights:
I left no wreckage on those low rasped cones.
There is no snarl of tools
Where broad wisdom calls across the cordial heather,
But the hacked glints my young heart stored
Still tone the subtle comforts and the sharp
Fearful shifts of shade as the blood cools
To admit, and clarify, the expanding mental range.
No pestilence of proud ripeness,
Urbane, agnostic, cankers the wide braes
Which my spirit, eagle-keen now, calls native
In the pale sun’s gloss. The spikes of raw praise,
Sparse once on the white hills,
Glow ruddier here against the thinned
Thieving of the schooled foreign crows.
I have not changed my country;
I have grown and explored
In my faith’s undivided world.
I discard no primal certainty, no rasped
Sky-sign of the Cross;
But now in broad autumn, feeling a new peace
And the old poise of defence,
I accept the pure trysting lochs,
The full antlers in the glens.
Harrow, Holy Week 97
