Tag: christianity

Man of the Borderlands

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One of the things I do remember about that St Albans diocesan clergy conference in 1971, was one of the small discussion groups I was part of. One of the chapters in the book of preparatory reading, included the thought that, in order to engage with contemporary culture, Christians would need to be ‘people of the borderlands’, as Jesus was. Bridging the gap between people who were usually considered to be ‘in’, and those who were considered to be ‘out’.

I was taken with this idea. So much so that in between sessions I was inspired to write a poem about it. Not only that, but also to share that poem in the small group session. (I now think that was a bit bold, maybe presumptuous, for a brand new curate. But maybe I was too young to know better.) The poem:

God’s Debatable Lands

We all are people who fight shy of borders:
we want to life safe, deep in black, or white;
are creatures of light or darkness, fearing twilight.
Look how we build up fences against marauders,
miles, miles of wire that shout mankind’s disorders
in empty lands. There Love cannot alight —
it is a frightened bird flung into flight,
a beaten madman cringing from his warders.

Loving our brittle refuge better than God,
we shun his country, the Debatable Lands.
— But then, by brambly ways we never trod
there comes to us, with broken, bleeding hands
which hold out risk, and healing — not a rod —
our Jesus, Christ, the Man of the Borderlands.

You’ll notice, maybe, that it’s a sonnet. Malcolm Guite writes more of them. And better.

Stewards of the Mysteries of God

Tony1 Comment

In the course of nearly six decades of adult life, with numerous changes of address, most of them upsizing to a larger house, but latterly including a major downsize, we’ve acquired large numbers of books. Anyone who thinks ‘too many’ is clearly not One Of Us – for We all know there is no such thing as too many books. Nevertheless, there comes a time when downsizing means there will not be enough shelf space for all of our books… and certainly not enough for all the books we are bound to continue to buy. So during those six decades, we have not only acquired, but also from time to time shed books.

I’ve often wondered about the criteria for deciding which books to get rid of, and which to keep. Sometimes it’s easy enough: ‘I hated that’, or, ‘I’m never going to want to read that again.’ Sometimes you get rid of a book and later regret it and buy it again. In the worst case, you buy a book you think you got rid of, only to find the original copy is still there on your shelf. But that doesn’t happen very often. And sometimes there is something that makes you keep a book you haven’t opened for 20 or 30 years, because – well, what? Because it has some special significance in your life, because you feel it spoke to you or changed you in some really important way.

I was reminded of one of those books this week, when the Collect for the Third Sunday of Advent asks God to ‘grant that the ministers and stewards of your mysteries may … prepare and make ready your way’. It’s a reference to St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, where he writes ‘Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God’s mysteries. Moreover, it is required of stewards that they should be found trustworthy.’ (1 Cor. 4.1) The slender book on my shelves (only 88 pages) that takes its title from that verse is Stewards of the Mysteries of God, edited by Eric James, published by Darton, Longman & Todd in 1979 at £1.95.

It was a collection of essays written by a number of theologians whose names read like a Who’s Who of the Church of the 1970s. Richard Harries – not yet the Dean of King’s College, let alone Bishop of Oxford or Baron Harries of Pentregarth… Richard Holloway, not yet the Bishop of Edinburgh. But all of them, in some way, connections of the then Bishop of St Albans, the Rt Revd Robert Runcie. The book was planned as a preparation for the St Albans Clergy Conference in September 1979, but published as something of interest to the wider Church (as well as, incidentally, to help with the costs of producing the book and so save the diocese money.)

And the significance of that clergy conference, for me, was that it was the first major diocesan event that I attended after my ordination as Deacon just two months before. I can’t remember how many clergy attended – it must have been a few hundred – but we all travelled to the University of Kent at Canterbury, then a mere 14 years old. And there were all the things you would expect a clergy conference to include: worship, lectures, discussion groups, meals, drinks in the bar… Of which I remember almost nothing. It was 45 years ago, after all.

And yet. And yet. I believe now that the conference, and the book that I had (obediently, as a new young curate) read in preparation for it, represented a big turning point for me. It was perhaps not the first thing, but certainly one of the first things, that opened my eyes to the undoubted truth that there was more to Christianity than ‘Conservative Evangelicalism’ had to offer1.

So I took the book off my shelf and read it again, and find it does indeed have many insights which may not always have been part of my faith before then, but certainly have become important in the years between.

Concerning the importance of Mystery in the Christian faith, rather than certainty. The mysteries of God are not things that are secret or concealed, but things we could not discover by our own efforts, which God reveals to us. The ‘deep affinity between the mystery of God and the mystery of humanity’. Gabriel Marcel writes, ‘A mystery is something in which I am myself involved’. Patrick White’s epigraph to his book The Solid Mandala:
There is another world,
but it is in this one.2
I thought I came across this only years afterwards with the shock of recognition, ‘Yes, that’s true!’ but no, I first read it in 1979.

Vanstone, on the Church’s purpose:
“The raison d’être, the responsibility, of the Church is to recognize what is happening in the world, and what is actually at stake in what is happening. What is at stake is the triumph or the tragedy of the love of God.”
And on What God needs: (How radically daring it was, to consider that God needs anything!)
“God needs only that which love itself needs — the response of the beloved other, without which love’s own work of giving remains incomplete.”

Richard Holloway, on the proper role of the Church, following Jesus, a ‘spiritual terrorist’, out of whose mouth came both the certainty of hell and damnation for sinners, and a gentleness and pity for us in our lostness:
“The Church is really the trades union of the damned. … I have come to believe that it is always the Church’s task to plead with the divine anger on behalf of the divine mercy. I say this because I believe that this, finally, is the meaning of the mystery of Christ. … The final mystery, then, is forgiveness.”

And Richard Harries, arguing that the Church needs to take seriously the reasons for the radical unbelief of many in contemporary society. While remaining faithful to our own convictions, we must not immediately leap in to refute unbelievers, but listen and give full weight to the reasons for the unbelief that is in them. We must learn to be comfortable with inhabiting the space between faith and unbelief: “A person will therefore be a person of the borderlands, to use a word of Professor Donald MacKinnon.”

Listing some of those ideas now, they all seem so obvious. They make it sound like discovering Stewards of the Mysteries of God was a small thing. It wasn’t, at the time.

  1. Oh, you noticed that none of the worthies contributing to the book came from that wing of the Church? ↩︎
  2. This is often attributed to W. B. Yeats, but was actually by the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard who wrote, “Il y a assurément un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci”. ↩︎

Thoughts on the Makin Review

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Long, long ago, I used to think I was a ‘Conservative Evangelical’. Maybe I even was one. All through theological college, while I was studying for my B.A. in Theology, and other qualifications for ordination, I somehow felt that I had to ‘hold the line’ against the liberalism (or whatever?) of modern academic theology. I have no idea where this came from… Perhaps it’s matter for another blog post sometime.

This didn’t survive for very long when I went to serve my curacy in a ‘Conservative Evangelical’ parish. I quickly learned that this wasn’t quite where I stood after all; I wanted something different and maybe broader; I realised there was more to truth than I had thought.

The things that I valued about the tradition I thought I belonged to were: love of Scripture; devotion to Jesus; personal faith and commitment. Somehow, unaccountably, I had learned that these were the special characteristics of this brand of Christianity, which were not shared by any of the other groups that called themselves Christian. Again, I have to ask where this came from, and how I could possibly have believed it. It’s one of the mysteries of my reflection on my faith journey, the way we pick up and believe and live with and find it so hard to move on from, what we are taught (or sometimes only imbibe subliminally) in the tradition we find ourselves in.

Looking at the Makin Review makes me not only wonder how I continued to think of myself as a ‘Conservative Evangelical’ for so long. It makes me wonder how anyone can still feel happy to subscribe to the narrow beliefs of that particular subset of God’s people. Of course, not every ‘Conservative Evangelical’ is going to be an abuser. Most people who call themselves ‘Conservative Evangelicals’ will have been as appalled as the rest of us, at the report of the Review’s findings. But at the same time, it’s obvious that John Smyth’s long history of physical, sexual and spiritual abuse, of his family first, and later of hundreds of boys and young Christian men, had its roots in the kinds of belief that were, and still are, often found in ‘Conservative Evangelicalism.’ A particular kind of emphasis on sin and repentance which focuses more on sex than on any of ‘the weightier matters of the Law’ like injustice, love and mercy, the abuse of power… Together with patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, belief in corporal punishment, self- and body-hatred. The image of God that Smyth must have had, to believe and behave as he did, must have been a hideous, cruel and bullying, idol.

I was particularly horrified by the quote from one of Smyth’s victims, describing the policy of the Iwerne Trust and its summer camps:

“The philosophy was … that you could only really serve God with a dog collar around your neck in the Church of England and that the job, the mission, the task, the quest was to get boys of real promise to become ordained in the Church of England, to become bishops and archbishops, and for the Iwerne tribal, evangelical, narrow-minded brand of Christianity, which is anti-gay, as Smyth was with the Whitehouse trials, to infiltrate the whole of the Church of England and to take it over.”

The sectarian arrogance of believing ‘We’re right and every other variety of Christian is wrong’, and ‘Therefore we plan to take over the whole of the Church of England’ beggars belief. It’s as if they had never read the Bible, either the teachings of Jesus, or St Paul’s injunctions to love one another and consider other Christians better than oneself. In the end, I guess that was one more reason why I left ‘Conservative Evangelicalism’: I wanted to be a biblical Christian; and for all their claims and posturings, I don’t believe that’s a priority for ‘Conservative Evangelicals’.

One more thought about the Makin Review, is about all the men who were involved in covering up Smyth’s abuses, not only when they first became known around 1981, but even after he had fled to Africa where he continued his activities. I knew some of these men, I went to some of the churches where they had been active. They were apparently sincere, honest, intelligent, educated men. So how could be so stupid? One of them, David Fletcher, explains why he did nothing to pass on what he had learned about Smyth’s abuses:

In an interview with us, David Fletcher said: “I thought it would do the work of God immense damage if this were public.”

How could he really imagine it would not inevitably become known some time down the line, and by then do even greater damage to the ‘work of God’?

Another leading Evangelical figure, also now deceased,

said that he was told of the abuse by a curate at Winchester College and was “sworn to secrecy.”

It’s a strange kind of morality that gives more value to ‘keeping a confidence’ than speaking out against evil, and telling the truth, even if it means ‘betraying’ a confidence (which should never have been asked for by a Christian clergyman in the first place), if it means saving not one but hundreds of victims from harm and trauma. Surely, that’s a sorry kind of modern Pharisaism, like the one that believes you can protect the work of God from damage by covering up the Truth?

I haven’t read all of Makin’s review, and don’t know if I have the stamina to get to the end of it. No doubt the repercussions will run and run. Who else will resign or be called on to resign? It’s good if we now have a culture of safeguarding which brings abuses to light sooner than the 40+ years it took for Smyth’s to be fully known. Or do we, yet? I pray, and long, for this battered old Church that I love to become a safe and inclusive space for everyone. Sooner, rather than later.

Coming ‘Home’

TonyLeave a comment

So, I’ve been away. For quite a time – it’s coming up towards two years since my last post. The truth is, I’ve been on a Journey. A Pilgrimage, maybe, towards some holy destination. Or a Quest, to seek and find my True Self.

In my last post, I wrote about a part of that spiritual journey I had been on since retiring back in 2016. It’s a mistake to suppose that, if you’ve been a Christian for 45 years and a vicar for 37 of them, you have somehow ‘arrived’. At certainty, or a place where you no longer have any progress to make, or something. Pretty much the opposite of the case. I’m sure I’m not the only retired vicar who finds themselves

a) relieved beyond measure that they’re no longer responsible for running a parish, filling in all the returns required by the Bureaucracy, keeping up to date with the law regarding marriages, burials and what have you

b) but also, asking themselves, What was that all about? I know it’s impossible for people in many professions to measure how successful they’ve been, but: Did I actually achieve anything? Was it worth all the hard work and soul-searching? Do I really believe all the things I used to preach to others, or at least, thought I ought to preach? Was it all even true?

So yes: some time around the start of the Pandemic, I had been disturbed by reports of growing antisemitism in many European countries, including the UK. I started reading about the history of antisemitism, and especially the role of the Church, and many of its most famous preachers and theologians (St John Chrysostom, Martin Luther, et al.) in promoting and institutionalizing this hatred of Jews and Judaism. Soon I was wanting to learn about what it was that they hated: Did I even know very much about Judaism.

To cut a long story short, I fell in love with the faith I was reading about. The contribution that Judaism and its adherents have made to the world is beyond reckoning, far greater than you would expect from a people who number probably less than 0.25% of the world’s population. I thought that Christianity grew out of, or at least alongside, the Rabbinic Judaism we know nowadays. Yet I found that many of the articles of Christian faith which I found most difficult and unpalatable were simply not there in Judaism. Like Original Sin. The need for blood sacrifice to turn away God’s anger so that He will not punish us for our sins. The need for people to ‘believe in and accept Jesus Christ’ in order to be ‘saved’. Because God incomprehensibly chose to create a human race of which the vast majority are destined for everlasting punishment if they don’t believe the right things about Him. The dualism of ‘Spirit Good, Matter Bad’. The Patriarchy and suppression of women’s voices and contribution.

You could say (as I did), “I don’t like Christianity very much.”

As well as reading a lot about Judaism, I also started using Jewish prayers for my daily prayer. And I loved them! There’s so much less of the whinging and grovelling that Christian prayers sometimes feel like, trying to curry favour from a mean and ungenerous Deity. The standard mode of Jewish prayer is Thanksgiving, in the form of blessing God 100 (or more) times a day. Blessing God for everything. The prayers frequently take the form of

  • Blessing and praising God because He does X
  • Asking God to do X
  • Thanking God for doing X.

For a time, I even contemplated converting to Judaism. I spoke to a rabbi about it, and she said “You can’t.” (I think that, like the Benedictines, they deliberately don’t consider wannabe converts until the fifth time of asking, because it takes five attempts to prove they are serious.)

The great thing about that episode of ‘not liking Christianity very much’ was that I never stopped believing in God. In fact, I came to believe in and love God even more, as I learned to thank God more and more, in and for all things. And came to suspect that He often doesn’t like Christianity very much at the moment. And I’m immensely grateful for this time of wilderness wandering, when I was not entirely sure about who I was, or where, or where I was meant to be and meant to be heading.

And then, Someone apparently decided it was time for me to come ‘Home’, or at least somewhere approximating to it. Alison wanted to go to a week’s conference at Lee Abbey – a place that’s hard to get to without a car. So my services as chauffeur were required. I hadn’t been to Lee Abbey for years, and was glad for the incentive to go again. So we both went to a conference entitled ‘The Call of the Wild: The Feel of the Holy’, on the themes of Pilgrimage, holy journeys and places, and the Celtic Christian tradition, led by Michael Mitton and Russ Parker. They are great friends and a great team; their talks are much more like witnessing a dialogue between two men who know each other well, have abundant wisdom, and above all enjoy each others’ company and their subject.

I found the ‘worship’ hard going. There were lots of ‘worship songs’ which as far as I’m concerned were anything but. But the talks, the walks around the Lee Abbey grounds, and the opportunities to talk and pray together at the seashore, among the trees, and on the hilltops, were times of real blessing. Russ recommended to me a book on theories of the Atonement, which for all that it was weighty, was very readable and helpful. By Fleming Rutledge, it’s called The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ.

I thought I’d give Christianity, especially of the Celtic variety, another chance. This was how, about six weeks later, I found myself driving Alison to Swanwick for the Annual Gathering of the Community of Aidan and Hilda, which is “a dispersed, ecumenical body drawing inspiration from the lives of the Celtic saints.” Getting excited about it as a ‘place’ that offers refuge and encouragement to people like me who feel disillusioned with much of what we see in the contemporary Church, and applying to become an ‘Explorer’, as they call wannabe members of the community.

So yes, it feels like coming ‘home’. And it feels like taking some tentative steps away from the spiritual home I’ve known, though not really away, but let’s say, forward, on new adventures of life and faith.

Watch this space, then…