Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

Are 400,000 Church of England laypeople, 2,000 clergy and 50 Bishops imminently going to go RC, just to capture the predicted numbers in various Fleet Street Organs? I very much doubt anything like that number are sufficiently into fear, surprise and and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, but we’ll see in a couple of years time.

Ben Hecht once suggested

trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

Indeed. One interesting take has come, not from a journalist, but Oxford Church History professor Diarmaid MacCulloch in the Observer:

John Paul II and Benedict have created the most centralised regime that Catholicism has ever known – a far cry from its state in either the medieval period or the Counter-Reformation. It is with an anxious ear for those alternative voices, not much different from those of mainstream wishy-washy liberal Anglicans, that Pope Benedict seeks to encourage those who think like him beyond the walls, and to bring them inside the fortifications.

Much is left unsaid amid the present triumphalist crowings of those Catholics who see this as a victory over a feeble, tottering Anglicanism, since Anglicans are temperamentally disinclined to blow their own trumpets. The Church of England is not about to disintegrate, as anyone who knows its day-to-day life, rather than listening to what journalists say about it, will be aware. Most Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals are fed up with all the name-calling, intolerance and calls for revolt...

There is one killer fact about the pope's present move. "Traditionalist" Anglicanism is a shotgun marriage between incompatible groups: extreme Anglo-Catholics and extreme evangelicals...

Their alliance with the traditionalist Anglo-Catholics has been one of convenience, because both sides cannot stomach women in positions of clerical authority (for entirely opposite reasons) and hate the idea that homosexuals might be just part of the spectrum of boring normality in God's creation. (Anglo-Catholics are more muffled in their outrage on this one, given how many of them are gay themselves.) So the pope's move will split the traditionalists down the middle and reveal how fragile their alliance is. The best law in church history is the law of unintended consequences.

In one sense, this is a storm in a teacup, stirred by an elderly cleric in the Vatican with a private agenda and a track record of ill-thought-out policy moves. In another, it is a fascinating moment in a confrontation as much a struggle for the soul of the Church of Rome as of the Church of England. Once we have got past the screaming headlines, we should keep an eye open for the real story.

The Church of England has always functioned as more of a coral reef than a model trainset, mainly because that’s how Christianity was usually done in these islands before the sixteenth century, and the English were characteristically averse to clericalism and control. For Protestants unsatisfied by such pragmatism, there were New World colonies. The people with get-up-and-go got up and went, especially after the Civil War, leaving the rest of us a rather pragmatic, unassuming, and messy lump. Since the 1830’s, those sufficiently scared of the modern world to be attracted by New Model Ultramontanism usually ended up by becoming Roman Catholics. Thus all the Vatican politics behind the denunciation of Anglican orders in 1893 — a quaint marketing ploy for a different, positivist, age.

Anglo-Papalism, an idea that first appeared in the last quarter of the 19th Century, only takes in a small section of Anglo-Catholics in the C of E. They may be colourful people, but any historical assessment has to take into account everybody else. Something similar could be said of extreme Prods. The vast bulk of the Church of England has always been more multifaceted, its Protestants closer to Richard Hooker than Walter Travers — boring, but true.

It could be that a Coral Reef Church, with an open and creative base in the Creeds, the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, might eventually turn out to be as sound a home for faith and holiness, as one predicated on Imperialism and control. Like Professor MacCulloch, I suspect this question will be answered over the next hundred years or so bottom-up, rather than top-down.

Intercommunion: finding a way home

Interesting personal coments on Eucharistic exclusion as a tool of ecclesiastical diplomacy. I take Steve Hayes’ useful point about the dangers of Church Consumerism, about which I generally agree with him, but I need to say that Dr Steffensky was coming from somewhere entirely different in Bremen.

Steffensky was emphatically not saying “You should have it because you want it and have a right to choose.” He was starting at the other end, with the nature of the Eucharist, as that which constitutes the Church. To have a category of Christians who are grudgingly acknowledged to be so but excluded from table fellowship is a wrong answer to St Paul’s fundamental question “Is Christ divided?” By his death and resurrection Christ has broken down every dividing wall; then we go and build a few of our own. Steffensky objected to anything that turns unity into a human and institutional achievement, rather than something Christ has made by his death and resurrection. He was trying to take fully seriously the forward-looking and sacramental meaning of Communion. A modern Club mentality was exactly the thing to which he most deeply objected. His ground conviction was that the Eucharist makes the Church, far more than the denomination defines the Eucharist, and that’s why, he would say, real liturgical terrorism is making a holy Sacrament into a weapon in the ongoing historic game of denominational cowboys and Indians — unworthy and destructive behaviour.

I’m reminded of words that struck me years ago, about a correspondence between Henry Westall and the Bishop of London as the Church of England attempted to enforce an insitutional ban on the use of reservation, portable lights [candles accompanying Gospel processions] and Incense, in 1900. Bishop Creighton had said:

I always wonder what horses think about a coachman. I imagine that they think him stupid, unjust, particular about unnecessary trifles, and always checking them needlessly. But his business is to get the coach along without upsetting it. He is on the box and he sees more than anybody else. He is not responsible for the obstacles in the road, and if he could regulate all the traffic, he could make things easy all round. But alas he is limited to the obscure and ignoble duty of steering his own vehicle to the best of his power.

Bishop Mandell Creighton to Henry Westall, 3 April 1900.

‘True, My Lord,’ Mr Westall might have replied, ‘but in a fog the coachman, from his box, sees no further than anyone else can, while the horses (poor unreasoning beasts) can at least feel the solid ground under their feet, and sometimes their instinct will lead them safely home.’

W.Scott, “An ‘advanced’ view of the ‘Church Crisis’,” Nineteenth Century, April 1901, p 692.

The other great discovery of this post and comments has been students at Lampeter are being introduced to Dom Gregory Dix, whose classic Anglo-Catholic view of the Eucharist I have often reflected about ever since I first came across it 30 years ago:

[Jesus] had told his friends to do this henceforward with the new meaning ‘for the anamnesis’ of Him, and they have done it always since.

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuges of fugitives in caves and the dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetish because the yams have failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the think June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc – one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundred part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei – the holy common people of God.

Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, (London 1945), p744.

Incarnation and ghetto blasting...

Tunbridge Wells is is a game of two halves. There’s the propserous touristy bit, and there's a smallish underbelly that originally provided the servants for the rest. In living memory two lines of children walked down Camden road to school, the ones on the right side with shoes, and many of the ones on the left without. For over 150 years, St Barnabas has unashamedly served the ones without shoes.

The Church was built by an enterprising Victorian slum priest in the classic mould, raising a noble edifice that must have seemed extraordinarily bold and beautiful at the time, on what had been a quarry and a rubbish dump. In this parish, the Gospel begins with the Magnificat

he hath put down the mighty from their seat,
he hath exalted the humble and meek
and the rich he hath sent empty away.

This may sound a tad off message for Tunbridge Wells as conventionally conceived, but that is the Christian Faith, if its mission is more than providing veneer and designer fig leaves for the bourgeoisie.

I was really moved and enriched by spending a day as the honored guest of a community that has had considerable ups and downs, but is clearly and profoundly aligned with its founding purpose, whilst looking out and pursuing a vigorous gospel agenda. Fr Ed Tomlinson took me round, and introduced me to various people in Church and community — his story of the day is here. We prayed together, talked and walked together, through the various realities that bear on St Barnabas as a missional community.

The closer you come to the streets, the more things make sense. This is not to minimise the importance of grand debates on the natonal level, which do have a local impact, but to try and establish what matters here. In word and deed this parish is about Incarnation — a clear and profound response to the incarnation of the Son of God by living it out sacramentally and in social action. Accessibility is secured by being there, not by diluting or dumbing down.

It is a very diverse congregation, where people are accepted for whom they are, to grow into being what they could be, not clones. I was struck by two or three stories of people being grabbed by a sense of holiness in the place, for some quite dramatically. It is a growing congregation, with a school which is integral to the common life, not tacked on. Here again, the St Barnabas story is about clear, honest leadership and hard work. Congratulations to Theresa Anderson, head, and colleagues. Spot the fire-breathing dragon above: hint — there isn’t one. It’s all about growing confidence among and within children who, historically, were sometimes seen as a problem.

We live in a context that increasingly reduces human beings to cardboard cutouts — just say the word based on the notional “-ism” and that’s enough to blast away with. I think we all need to be very careful about the use of language to label, stigmatise and belittle others. I remember George Kitson-Clark the historian, saying the only “ism” he’d allow in historical essays was “baptism.” Wise man.

“Do not be afraid,” says the Lord. “I have overcome the world.” There’s always been a degree of walking apart in the C of E, rather than engaging different organs in the Body of Christ to work together. Back in the Victorian age this was the tacit agreement that Anglo-Catholics could do their own thing in the places that didn’t matter, as long as the boat wasn’t rocked in the places that did. Every now and then open hostility broke out, as when neighbouring vicars denounced St Barnabas as the road to hell! Seems funny now, but they meant it. A Church experience that does not engage us deeply and radically with our fellow Christians is not enough. How can it be said that the love of God lives in such a parody of Church?

These days everything is tamer, but shame on any of us, if we go through the motions of tolerating others for whom Christ died, and in whom Christ lives, rather than striving to understand and support them wholeheartedly. And if we do this on the basis of hearsay and cliché, double shame on us. What will the Lord say on the Great Day? “If only you had known the things that make your peace, but you would not...” A ghettoised world needs a more than ghettoised Church.

The old armed neutrality, or political balancing act, is just not adequate to build the kind of Church we need to be, that the world may believe. The first principle of Benedict’s way is to come together; not primarily to debate, but to pray and share faith. Doing that then changes our perceptions of the matters at issue between us. A day’s appreciative inquiry in somewhere with strong particularity is worth of year’s management training. And given the various matters at issue involving traditionalists a solution grown by “indaba” between real people may yield a sound basis for detailed work that, doubtless, must be done by conventional parliamentary methods...

Dwinding congregations: the Truth?

When and why did the English stop going to Church en masse? Earlier than we think, perhaps. The Church in an Age of Danger, Parsons and Parishioners 1660-1740 is a rewritten PhD thesis by Donald Spaeth, that pokes about in the unfashionable basement of popular religion in 17th/18th century Wiltshire. He suggests the rot set in earlier than we like to think, and for relational rather than theological reasons.

Health warning: I have received considerable spiritual benefit from Evangelical and Tractarian revivals, and spent 21 years of ministry as a resident parson in a parish. What follows is hypothetical historical sketching, not bitter twisted comment on any of those fine things in themselves. But, remembering Ronald Reagan’s wise words “Don’t be afraid to see what you see,” here goes...

Evangelical and Tractarian historiographies have tended to suggest their people saved the Church from terrible neglect.

Terrible it may have been, but, paradoxically, far more people went to Church. Every place had its own story, but the mass of people seem to have become detached from their village churches as relationships broke down. The English did not become anticlerical like the French did, but got into habits of ploughing their own furrows, as the Church became more top-down, professional and exclusive.

So here’s one possible historical narrative of how congregations dwindled.

With box pews, churches began to look and feel like cattle pens, or our swimming pool changing rooms. Religion was becoming radically privatised. The parish church became an icon of class division, imposing a top-down order, dismantling previous relationships and practice, enforcing various new model ideologies. This set the stage for three new reforming clerical waves:

1. the Evangelical revival, with clergy enforcing their own particular apparently narrow bands of belief, Calvinistic or Arminian, as the way to salvation.
   
   
2. Resident gentlemen clergy after residence was legally enforced in the early nineteenth century. In came big Georgian rectories, out went peasant curates who were less learned and often part time, but radically incarnational in village life.
   
   
3. the Oxford movement, with robed choirs in the chancel and powerful organs to deal with the rough and ready village band.

All three waves brought new model professional guardians of the sacred, each with powerful authoritarian notions of how things should be, and a tendency to impose their will regardless. Each new wave recruited smallish groups of enthusiastic blue eyed boys & girls, but alienated all the others. As people moved to industrial towns in the 19th century, the village church was part of the social baggage they gratefully left behind.
Et Voilà! Any questions?

Cardinal Newman on development...

...no bones about it. Best weekend story has to be Ruth Gledhill’s, that after 118 years there’s nothing recoverable in Cardinal Newman’s grave. Andy the gravedigger once told me human remains last 80 years in a hardwood coffin, 25 in MDF. Andy was right.

Some saint stories feature incorruptible bodies — not this one. I have to confess that relics put me off not on; When I learn that one medieval collection contained “a piece of bread eaten at the last supper” I rather agree with Luther in thinking that by 1517 the relics business had reached a kind of silly vanishing point. Newman will have to be a culturally English rather than Mexican saint.
The Cardinal himself, being dead, yet speaks.

And what does he say? His 1845 Essay on Development, almost Copernican in its impact, asserts that in the providence of God the only way to do real theology is live, contextual and dirty — Skip to the fundamental last sentence if you like:

whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world around, such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. It is elicited and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy. Nor does it escape the collision of opinion even in its earlier years, nor does it remain truer to itself, and with a better claim to be considered one and the same, though externally protected from vicissitude and change. It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary, and is employed in efforts after freedom which become wore vigorous and hopeful as its years increase. Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. At first no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same.
In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

If Newman is correct about this, measuring orthodoxy by simple conformity to what has been said or done in the past, becomes impossible. “Traditionalists” take note, and “Progressives,” too —
all your notions can only be proved in the crucible of real shared discipleship over extended time.

My second favourite Newman quote? It’s the epitaph he devised for his memorial:

Ex Umbris et Imaginibus, in Veritatem

“out of shadows and fantasies, into the Truth...”

Love and Death — and coming alive

Bishop Stephen brought a fabulous love poem to today’s senior staff Eucharist. Reflecting on the physicality of Anglo-Catholic worship, and the propensity to kiss altars, books, even human beings sometimes, this poem somehow made sense of breaking bread — a kind of St John of the Cross thing. The poem is from Carol Ann Duffy’s extended exploration of love’s moods and realities, Rapture.

If I was Dead

If I was dead,
and my bones adrift
like dropped oars
in the deep, turning earth;

or drowned,
and my skull
a listening shell
on the dark ocean bed;

if I was dead,
and my heart
soft mulch
for a red, red rose;

or burned,
and my body
a fistful of grit, thrown
in the face of the wind;

if I was dead,
and my eyes,
blind at the roots of flowers,
wept into nothing,

I swear your love
would raise me
out of my grave,
in my flesh and blood,

like Lazarus;
hungry for this,
and this, and this,
your living kiss.

Carol Ann Duffy, 1955-

And then, precisely timed in the great scheme of things, I noticed a quote from Howard Thurman on Maggi Dawn’s blog:

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive.

Yes!

Keeping the Faith in High Wycombe

70th anniversary mass last night for one of our (comparatively few) Anglo-Catholic churches in Buckinghamshire. Set in a tough urban landscape, St Mary & St George Sands has been a real landmark since 1938. This is a simply lovely place to sing Mass; it has a simple resonant interior. Its real glory, however, is a wonderfuly mixed and close congregation — which has grown a recent ordinand, with another on the go. There’s a warmth and spirit here, exemplified by the celebration cake (The roof was fudge flavoured icing).

I was struck by three quite particular indications of spiritual strength in depth here:

1. SMSG featured on one UK TV news channel after the arrests of nearby alleged terrorists in 2006, as an extremist mosque! OK, it’s got a green dome. It’s also got a 9 ft Cross on top. You'd think that would be enough to make a UK TV editor question whether it really was a mosque but, er, you’d be wrong.
2. SMSG took in and for two years cared for Fr James Mukunga, a Zimbabwean priest subject to official persecution. Fr James is now working in the Southwark diocese. For him and his young family it was a place of recovery, healing and hope. This may be a comparatively small congregation, but it’s generous and focused on the needs of the real world.
   
3. As part of thier recent celebrations, SMSG hired in an Earth Balloon, filling the area under the dome for a day with the 16 metre blow-up globe, so that local children of all ages could come and discover amazing things about the real world in Church, in a way they will remember for the rest of their lives.

Mother Susie Simpson is leaving soon, to follow a calling to serve as a priest among young offenders at the (original) Borstal in Kent. There’s a fabulous job here, wating for the right person...

Anglo-Catholic roots and branches

Back this morning to our little ol’ medieval house of prayer in Great Missenden. Last Sunday, after days worshipping with a wonderful rock band at Willow Creek, Lucy and I went Anglo-Catholic in Chicago, at the Church of the Atonement. The congregation at the third service, very full for the vacation season, seemed delightfully diverse after the slightly WASP feel of the previous few days. The Episcopal Church welcomed us, generously and delightfully.

It was great joy to be in a church family where people broadly rub along in realistic ways. They readily kitted me up (incuding mitre) to be part of a joyful shared experience in which everything fitted together smoothly. Mother Jackie Cameron presided beautifully, though I realise Brother Ronald Fox and others work hard behind the scenes to make everything hum along seemingly effortlessly.
Given alarmist rumours this side of the pond about the Episcopal Church, many stoked up by its own dissidents, it was deeply normalising and a great honour to be right at the middle of this eucharist, expressing clearly how we all belong together, different as we are.

Celebrating the Transfiguration at the Atonement was a bit mountain-top. God’s light shone through clearly, showing me the centre, like a trip to the cleaners. I was delighted to meet various people afterwards. Many had personal stories to tell about being there, some involving recovery from various kinds of religious abuse. If this congregation is “liberal,” though, frankly, it would be pretty meaningless to call it particularly so, it would not be a matter of ideology, but an understandable instinct in people who had been impacted negatively by more “illiberal,” manipulative or chauvinistic religion. Atonement had the breadth to take it and could, it struck me, be a real healing place.

I first experienced Anglo-Catholicism as a teenager. I was fascinated by Anglo-Catholics’ ability to engage with God in Church with solemnity but without taking themselves too seriously. At the pub aftrewards, people were real and really humerous about what had actually happened in Church. Aged 17, a friend and I bumped into the priest in a pub, and wondered whether we would get a rollicking. Far from it. We got a drink, along with a pin cross to wear and an injunction never to be ashamed of being known for a Christian wherever we were. This incident said something powerful to me that I hadn’t quite caught yet in more earnest and self-conscious Protestant discipleship, and I’ve never forgotten it. I was so captivated that years later when invited to find a subject in historical theology I wrote a thesis on historical Anglo-Catholic ecclesiology.

It’s a shame that the word “Catholic” in itself stirs the blood less these days than a hundred years ago. There seem to be two different ways of using the term “Catholic:”

Use (A) of “Catholic” refers to a mark of the Church named in the creed, extended in time and space. You become part of the Catholic community of Christ’s people throughout the world in baptism; it’s an objective characteristic of Christ-followers (to use Willow Creek terminology) and God sees them whole, both in the scope of their life together, and their eternal destiny. In this sense the Prayer Book talked about “the whole company of Christian people.” One of the most powerful experiences of Lambeth was to be surrounded by people saying the Lord’s prayer in over 100 languages simultaneously, gathered freely from autocephalous local churches all over the world. It expressed particularity and true Catholicity perfectly.

Use (B) of “Catholic” is as a kind of designer label. It’s a particular house style or, even worse, a term of exclusion. It can even be reduced to a denominational tag. Once this bizarre piece of reductionism happens, people can develop an anal retentive fascination with whether Rome, or someone else, has the best exclusive franchise on the club. Such a process applied to this word, of all words, is bizarre, if you think for a moment about what it actually means. Who on earth could be silly or arrogant enough, really, to think that their particular denomination was somehow everything? Everything to them, if they like, but the Catholic whole is so much more diverse, particular, gifted and resourceful than the local. It would be good, especially after Lambeth, to capture that dimension increasingly back home. The Church of the Atonement was a great place, personally, to do that.