Communion

As a child, I grew up in a large Vicarage with a huge garden. My favourite place in the garden was the mulberry tree, which long before had fallen over, but was still alive and still produced many leaves, as well as delicious Mulberries. Now there is a certain caterpillar which lives off mulberry leaves, known as Bombyx Mori. They are very uninteresting and, later on, they give rise to the most boring of moths. What marks them out as special is the chrysalis they make on their journey from caterpillar to moth. The chrysalis is made out of silk and indeed the common name of the caterpillars is Silk Worm. Having a mulberry tree, my parents got us some silk worms, which we cared for and fed year by year, as we observed their annual lifecycle and collected in the brilliant yellow silk-made chrysalises.

In commercial silk-farms, they keep the silk by boiling the chrysalises. Doing that kills the developing moth and preserves the silk of the chrysalis. The chrysalis becomes the creature’s tomb. It must not be allowed out, for in escaping it destroys the chrysalis. By contrast a chrysalis that is broken open is a sign of life. It is no longer a tomb, but the starting point for new life. You either preserve the chrysalis, and kill the life within, or you release that life, and allow the Chrysalis to be destroyed.

The final sacrament of the seven is Holy Communion. We take bread and wine, we give thanks over them, we break the bread and we share the bread and wine. We do so because Jesus tells us we must do so – in remembrance of him. In taking the bread and the wine we discover a sacramental moment, because we are brought face to face with a real death, a real body broken and real blood outpoured. In Holy Communion, we find ourselves at one with the crucified Lord Jesus.

But I suggest that just taking the bread and the wine is not enough. Did Jesus really just want us to sit in churches and hold services of Holy Communion? Might it not be that he wanted us to live like bread, broken for the world, and wine shed for the world? Perhaps, when we try to preserve the life of the Church, we are acting like the silk-farmers, who in preserving the chrysalises end up killing the life within. The alternative, this day, is for us to live like broken chrysalises, that is as people who are broken open in self-giving for every neighbour we meet. To live like that is to set the Spirit free.

Marriage

In 2005 Jane and I went to Auschwitz, that terrible concentration camp in Poland where more than a million people lost their lives in the Second World War, 90% of them being put to death for being Jews. While we were there we visited the cell in which the Franciscan Friar Maximillian Kolbe was starved to death. An attempt had been made to escape from the camp and the authorities had responded by picking a group of prisoners for execution. They were to be shut in a cell and starved to death. One man, who was picked, cried out “my poor wife and children!” Kolbe, who as a friar was unmarried, stepped forward and said: ‘this man needs life more than me, let me take his place’. The astonished guards agreed and Kolbe was led off with the group to die. The story goes that they went to their deaths singing hymns. Although they died, in a sense they had won. In that dark place which was designed to remove all traces of humanity from the prisoners, Kolbe had shown all the prisoners that they were of such value that he was prepared to give his life for one of them. Nothing the Nazis could do could invalidate that.

Of course Kolbe acted as he did because he believed that his Christian Faith demanded it. His inspiration was Jesus, who gave his life for his friends, even though most of them had totally let him down. The heart of the Christian Faith is this self-giving death on a cross and the victory of love over death that is represented by the Resurrection.

Nothing we, the human race, did to Jesus could defeat the transforming love of God. That is why the Christian Gospel is such Good News.

Marriage is seen as a sacrament, because it provides the possibility of such transforming and self-giving love to be lived out in the deep commitment between two people who give themselves to each other in total commitment. As the rings are exchanged, each says to the other, not only ‘all that I have I share with you’ but also ‘all that I am I give to you’.

Marriage therefore becomes an arena in which we work out in practical ways the kind of love that God has for his world. As we go about this day, we should remember that each of us is so precious that Jesus was prepared to give his life for us. To be held in such love transforms all human living.

Orders

I am often asked why I went into the church. I have to reply that I really do not know. I was only 50 days old at the time and I was not consulted over the fact of my baptism into Christ. I later experienced moving into an adult expression of faith. I was in my late teens, searching for meaning in the landscape of a faith that had been instilled in me from childhood and I came to a moment when I was filled with God’s Spirit and I found my life set on fire with the love of God. It profoundly changed me. It took me into a place in which my relationship with God was intensely and deeply personal. I never say that I became a Christian at that moment, because I refuse to write off my childhood experience of following Christ. Yet becoming an adult Christian in a so profoundly life-changing way set me on a course which led to my ordination as a priest.

Ordination is seen as one of the sacraments. It can also be called Holy Orders, which gives an insight to what ordination is about. It creates the framework by which the Church can grow and thrive. It is a ministry that provides the scaffolding by which the Church can be the Church. Yet it become something corrupting if the ordained ministry is seen as BEING The Church.

I sometimes struggle when faced with people who think that helping me, The Vicar, is a good thing to do. I try to turn it the other way round and say that my role is to help them be a Christian.

It is true that, for me, being ordained brings a sense of joy in that I feel I am fulfilling God’s purpose for my life. This is often called having a vocation. The point is that every Christian has a vocation to follow and a ministry to exercise. I am not a professional Christian, but simply someone whose particular ministry is to help other Christians live out their calling. Each of us should reflect daily on that calling. Where is God leading us today? It seems to me that to live this day in tune with what God wants for you is to fulfil your calling to live as a child of God – and to live in that way is not only to be blessed, but to live a life which becomes a blessing for others

Anointing

I was once fortunate to go away on a parish weekend. It was before I had started training for the ministry and I went with a group from the church I attended in London. That retreat was a life-changing experience. I had never heard of the African priest who led it, but it appeared he was working in England as a member of the Staff of the World Council of Churches. He was brilliant and, after the retreat was over, I looked him up on the internet. Desmond Tutu was his name. In one of the sessions he talked about his enemies. It was only later, when I discovered who he was, that I realised that he had real enemies who actually would love to have killed him. For every person he met, he told us, including his enemies, in his mind he made a sign of the cross over their heads to remind him that this person, he was talking to, was a child of God for whom Christ had died.

One of the sacraments is called Unction. It means anointing with oil and, once upon a time, it was associated with the ‘last rites’ or the ministry a priest gave to someone who was dying. Today we use oil much more often as a special way of praying with a person. We might well include making the sign of the cross of the forehead as we pray for them. It can be a powerful experience to receive such a ministry.

I like to think of it as the ministry of touch. There are many people in our world who are never touched by others and some can feel isolated and lonely. Sadly there are many others who have been touched in inappropriate ways. I don’t just mean the many victims of abuse, but also the countless people who are being beaten, tortured or killed in some of the dreadful situations of conflict in our world today.

Perhaps each of us might consider how we touch others and whether we do so for their benefit and wellbeing. It may not be appropriate to go and hug every person you meet today, but why not try doing what Desmond Tutu does and in your mind just making the sign of the cross over their heads in blessing. Try it especially with those you do not get on with and see what a difference God can make.

Confession

In some times people have the fortune to live at a moment of significant change. For whatever reason, history is being made. I suspect that the arrival of Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Rome is one such moment. He is Pope Francis and his ministry is touching many lives in a most profound way. He is a man who knows his own sinfulness and what it means to live in the loving forgiveness of God. He once said that the slate of the past is never wiped clean, but we bless the past by facing it with contrition, forgiveness and atonement. That means being sorry for what is past; learning to forgive what others have done to us, and also learning to forgive ourselves; and atonement is about making amends for what is past and learning to live at-one with yourself.

Confession is one of the sacraments of the church. Going to a priest and confessing your sins is very much part of the rhythm of life for many Christians, whilst others finding it a strange practice. Does it mean ‘do what you want’ and then God forgives you? Well not really. I think what Pope Francis meant is that you cannot just sweep the past under the carpet as if it no longer matters. Instead, we need to face our past and learn to bless it – that is to find healing from that past. We need to face up to the people we are, which is only possible because God already sees us as we are and loves us, despite what we are. It is then that we find healing, new life and release from what is broken in our lives.

As we go about our lives today, it is worth at least pausing to reflect on what shapes our lives and makes us the people we are. If what shapes our life today is a weight of pain from the past, then letting God in to deal with that pain is a step towards finding the liberation and freedom to live the lives that God always wanted for us. To let God bless what is past is to allow God in to heal that past, which in turn will transform our today , but also make us far more compassionate towards every wounded person we meet this day.

Baptism

In the early Church the sacraments we now call Baptism and Confirmation were one and the same thing. At a moment in which a person found a whole new world opening up to them, as they accepted Jesus as Lord of their life, they would be taken down to the river and plunged in. As they began to drown, their previous life would flash before them and they would rise up out of the water with that previous life washed away and a new life open before them.

There are few churches which will allow a repeat of baptism. If you have given your life to Christ, you do not have to keep making that decision. In traditions, such as my own, we baptise children, because they too are welcome and included in God’s saving love, but we do so on the basis that they will be encouraged, one day, to come back and confirm those baptismal promises for themselves. The point is that, included in God’s embrace, they still need to make their own decision to give their lives to Christ.

Yet there is a connection between what once happened to us, our baptism, and how we live this day. It is similar to a marriage. Those of us who are fortunate to have had long and happy marriages, will remember the day on which we got married. We cannot keep repeating that day. And yet a marriage is something that has to be built, day-by-day and year-by-year, if it is to have any meaning.

It has to be a dynamic and living relationship, if it is to remain a relationship at all. And if we are fortunate, it will be a relationship which grows and deepens and matures over the years. In a sense, it is a journey of discovery – a shared adventure.

I suggest that baptism is the same. Once we were baptised, but each day we need to live out what it means to give ourselves to Christ. In all the busyness of the present moment, in what ways will we live for Christ and so grow in his love?

Embracing the Sacramental

There have been many special moments in my life, when somehow the lid of ordinariness has been lifted and I have discovered something that is both deep and full of wonder. I remember, as a young teenager, being taken by my father to the Royal Festival Hall to a concert. The experience was one of being taken into a world beyond everyday living and to a place which somehow touched the depths of my soul. The music was Elgar’s Cello Concerto and the soloist was Jaqueline du Pre, one of the greatest ever cellists. It was a moment I will never forget.

The church provides such deep moments of meaning. It calls them ‘The sacraments’, but all too often such sacraments are just churchy rituals, rather than windows into deeper living. As a priest in the Church of England, I am involved in administering the sacraments, but I have a great deal of sympathy with the Quakers, who do not recognise any such sacraments, for to them all life is a sacrament.

I think what they mean by that is that we can choose. Either we just go through life without ever finding deeper meaning in anything, or we so live our lives that everything we do is open to the possibility of wonder and deep joy. Perhaps it is through music, or through the drama or sport, or through watching a beautiful sunset, or resting in the arms of someone we love.

There are many ways in which the lid or ordinariness can be lifted and something deeper is found. That ‘something deeper’, is what I call God. Sacramental moments are God-filled moments and that encounter with God is something He invites us to share. 

Jesus had a certain amount to say about people with eyes, who cannot see, and with ears, who cannot hear. What he meant was that many people go through life entirely unaware of the presence of the Divine in their lives. Jesus challenges us to be open to that Divine presence. As he put it, ‘The Kingdom of heaven is at hand’. Look for it, like someone who gives everything to find a hidden treasure, and you will find it.

I wonder – at what point today each of us might lay aside the ordinary and dare to open our hearts to God? For if we let him, he will surprise us.

Reverence for Life

The latest bill to go before Parliament seeks once again to introduce the possibility of assisted dying. Eventually one such bill will surely succeed and the dam will be broken. Change will follow. The current proposal is to allow physician-assisted dying in cases in which a six-month terminal prognosis has already been given. It seems not unreasonable, but the inevitable cry is that this is the thin end of the wedge. Indeed it is. If assisted dying is permissible in the case of someone who has been given less than six months to live, the principle of allowing assisted dying has been conceded. It will then be a short step to say that someone who is not going to die, but is in a long-term degenerative state, will also be allowed to have their life ended. We risk entering a culture in which the disposal of people is seen as being normal and a reverence for life will be lost. The weak and the vulnerable will be at risk. I believe that, if the culture of our society changed in this way and if I faced such a degenerative illness, I might well accept a way out. I might choose death, both to spare my children the pain of seeing me in such a degenerative state and to protect my estate so as to allow it to be passed on to my children. Something has shifted here, for however valued I might be made to feel by my family and friends, I would have to live with the option of exiting life. Is this what we want to impose on those who are old, sick or vulnerable?

Yet I am haunted by the words of Desmond Tutu who says that he has changed his mind in this matter because of what they did to his friend Nelson Mandela. They kept him alive with drugs and machines while world leaders were photographed with him. But, says Tutu, his friend was no longer there. He should have been allowed to die. For me, part of the problem lies in the attitude that life is a disposable commodity and that end of life issues are a matter of personal choice. I disagree. These are matters which should concern society and which should be a matter of corporate debate and decision making. What value to we place on life and what sort of society do we wish to live in? Do we not have a duty to protect the vulnerable who might be under attack to do the decent thing and end it all? Yet there also needs to be a degree of compassion for those who can no longer face life and seek to die. If there is to be a public debate it needs to move away from the area of personal choice to an acceptance of death as a natural thing towards each of us must move. I was horrified by the story of an elderly person who was saved by medical science and then had to endure some years of suffering. Why was she saved? Why was she not allowed to die? Why could not nature have taken its course? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that we cling to life at all costs, until it no longer becomes bearable, and then each of us wants a way out, if we should need it. The prolonging of life to every increasing ages opens the way to an increase in the illnesses of old age and so sharpens the challenges of suffering in that old age. Life is extended and so the challenges of how life should end is sharpened. The Church can no longer just hold a line against assisted dying. There is an issue to debate and real questions to answer as to how we value life, protect the vulnerable and yet also exhibit real compassion to those who suffer. I was once opposed to assisted dying, but now I think there is a real issue that needs to be addressed.

The Whale

Whales are special creatures. On one level we might think of them as belonging with fish, but we know that they are mammals and therefore somehow connected to us. They are majestic creatures and people pay good money to travel to the places where they play, feed and bring up their young. Sadly, whalers can end up being beached. They often die, collapsing under their own weight and quickly carcass both poisonous and dangerous to human health. Beaching is thought to have various causes. The whale might well have lost its sense of direction, either mistaking the guidance of magnetic fields or being confused by human generated sonar. Beaching can also be caused by moving into too shallow waters and then finding that the tide has gone out.

There is a sense that a tide is going out for the Church of England. On 29th March 2014 it became possible to two people of the same gender to get married in our country. The Church of England has remained firmly in the same place in this matter. It is the rest of society that has changed. I remember from my childhood places where there were large beaches of gentle incline. In a very short period of time the water where we played was gone and a huge area of sand was revealed. The change in attitude over same-sex relationships has happened in a very short period of time. The Archbishop of Canterbury has spoken of this change in terms of living in a time of revolution. But we will not change with society. We insist on remaining in the same place, despite the shoreline moving to a new place. That shoreline is where the people are. It is where people play and enjoy life. So we proudly sit on our sand, like a beached whale. In the distance we hear the laughter and the chatter of people's lives, but we are no longer engaged in such living. We have made a virtue out of maintaining our position, but it is no longer where people are living. And here we will die, collapsing under our own weight of righteousness and festering inner infection. We lost sight of the need to play where the people are and to give ourselves in showing them how to celebrate life and to claim the blessings of God. They are learning to live and to discover such blessing without us.

Our mistake was to think we could survive out of the water and somehow have an existence set apart from the culture of our society. Indeed we thought that being counter-cultural was a clever thing to be, but then we completely misunderstood what such counter-culturalism might look like. Sitting on our beach, far removed from the place where people are falling in love, committing their lives to one another and finding the joy that brings, is not being counter-cultural. It is to withdraw from our involvement in culture and to set ourselves apart as a group with as much impact or influence as the Flat Earth Society.  We become an anachronism. We cannot be counter-cultural if we have ceased to engage in that culture.

We face the probability of collapse and then rotting, but even now we could at least try to re-enter the water and find life in the place where the people play. In terms of the 29th March, we could say that we will open our churches to anyone getting married, straight or gay. We could make a stand, not for heterosexualism, but for marriage, and we could be counter-cultural in the way we stand for permanent, sacrificial and sacramental relationships. By the way in which we engage in our culture, we could demonstrate the possibility of living Christ-filled lives. By the quality of our humanity, we could give ourselves to living for others in a way that is creatively life-transforming. We could live as a community in which is fulfilled the promise of Christ, that he came to give us life in all its fullness. That is counter-cultural, but what we choose instead is to be anti-cultural. In doing so we become more and more beached, mistaking the holding of a traditional perspective on gender for the vocation to live in costly self-giving as the face for Christ reaching out to heal a broken world. Instead of being the embodiment of a love that gives life, we will become, even more, an expression of a homophobia which is seen more and more as something rotten and to be avoided.   

The Cracked Veneer

I was recently revisiting Jung’s book ‘Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy’. In that book, Jung writes:

‘The Church   assumes, not altogether without reason, that the fact of semel credidisse (having once believed) leaves certain traces behind it; but of these traces nothing is to be seen in the broad march of events. Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to be found outside – in image and in word, in Church and Bible – but never inside. Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old; that is to say the inner correspondence with the outer God-image is undeveloped for lack of psychological culture and therefore has got stuck in heathenism … Too few people have experienced the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls. Christ only meets them from without, never from within the soul; that is why dark paganism still reigns there, a paganism which, now in a form so blatant that it can no longer be denied and now in all too threadbare disguise, is swamping the world of so-called Christian civilization.’

I find this an extraordinary picture. Perhaps the language is rather rich and dramatic, but it expresses Jung’s experience of patients, who display a veneer of Christianity, but who show no signs of inner transformation. Too few, he writes, have experienced ‘the divine image as the innermost possession of their souls.’ I find myself to be reticent in claiming such experience. It seems to me that there is always the danger of seeking to believe that my faith is somehow genuine, whist others have not reached the degree of faith that I have found. My reticence lies in not believing that I possess the divine image as much as I should, nor in thinking that I make a particularly good job of being a disciple of Christ. At the same time I am wary of those who fight their corner on the basis that their view of Christianity must be right and everyone else is either misguided or, at best, a second class Christian. Yet it must be possible to write of what it means to possess the divine image, not particularly as an expert (which I would never claim to be) but simply as someone who knows what it means to have one’s soul infused with that image and seeks to share something of the reality of that experience.

I claim to be an orthodox and biblical Christian. I was brought up within the Church and both scripture and the rich tradition of the Church has shaped the person I am. That tradition, through the ongoing worshipping life of the Church, and particularly the sacraments and the witness of Scripture, has brought me to discover the reality of the risen Christ. Such things as scripture and tradition are the veneer of the Christian faith, which have held that faith before me and defined its life. But it has led to a deeper reality. Strange accounts from the pages of Acts, of divine wind and tongues of fire, have moved from being a rather odd story to being a lived out reality. I have experienced the wind of the Spirit and I know what it means to have had my heart set on fire with the love of God. It came to me through the experience of contemplative prayer and it so changed me that my favourite aunt asked what has happened to me, for she could hardly recognise me as the same person. Indeed it was life changing. Not only did I experience the divine image as the possession of my own soul, it altered every perspective I had on life. It levelled every relationship I shared, whether with friends or with anyone who might have been my ‘neighbour’ at that moment in time. Whether Monarch or beggar in the street, each of us was a sinner needing God’s love and redemption. At the same time each of us was so precious that Christ gave his life for us. There was here an extraordinary truth that could only bind us together in a fellowship of those who knew what it is to be loved, forgiven and set free.

All of this changes perceptions of the place of scripture and tradition. They become seen for what they are, which is the scaffolding of faith. Without the scaffolding of the ongoing tradition of a worshipping and praying church, and without the witness of scripture, I would not have found my faith. Yet faith, if it is to be a matter of being infused by the divine image, needs to deepen and grow. To follow scripture and tradition is to be governed by law. To be infused by the divine image is to live by grace. There is a contrast here which can be illustrated by considering the task of the preacher. If scripture and tradition are The Faith, then the task of the preacher is to engage in a process of exegesis with any given text. The skill of the preacher will lie in the scholarship that she brings to the exercise and the way in which she relates that text to the experience of life. But if faith has become a matter of finding the divine image as the innermost possession of my soul, then my task as a preacher is to speak from the heart of that inner experience. The authenticity of my preaching lies in the integrity with which I speak of that which I know in my heart. Scripture and tradition remain the scaffolding that provides the language both to interpret my experience and to preach about it in any meaningful way. We might also call both scripture and tradition the veneer which presents the outward appearance of The Faith, but what must be spoken of is that which lies within. Otherwise all that is presented is a veneer.

  

There is a negative consequence to all this, which I offer without wanting to pass judgement on fellow travellers in The Way. If the scaffolding of scripture and tradition are taken to be The Faith, then they have to be defended, for a broken veneer makes the whole edifice worthless. The interpretation of this particular piece of scripture must be defended at all costs, otherwise all scripture falls under suspicion. The integrity of scripture is everything. The same is true of the sacraments. ‘Sacramental assurance’ becomes an issue. There is no room for even the slightest shadow of a doubt as to the validity of the sacraments. So it is that the scaffolding of scripture and tradition have to be fought over. The Church becomes obsessed with defending what is a veneer. What people hunger for, but perhaps cannot so easily define, is to discover what it means to find the divine image as the innermost possession of their souls. What they see in the Church, they recognise as all veneer. But I argue for something different, which is to present a cracked veneer to the world. Perhaps scripture sometimes gets it wrong. Perhaps sacramental moments can be experienced without the presence of a priest. In truth, you need to look not AT the scaffolding (or veneer) but THROUGH it to discover the authenticity of lives lived in possession of the divine image. The validity of a woman’s ministry as a bishop (to give but one example) will flow, not through whether she has fulfilled the exact requirements of scripture and tradition, which somehow determine the validity of her orders, but rather through the way in which God’s grace flows from a soul, which knows what it means to possess the divine image, and a life which is given to serve Christ in such a way that that grace is given to others. The challenge we face, as the Church, is to value both scripture and tradition as part of our equipment, but to so live as people who possess the divine image in the innermost place of our souls that we can dare to strip aside what is veneer and present what is a treasure beyond all value.

The Vocation to Life

In 2010 I was awarded the degree of Master of Arts by the University of Winchester. I had studied for this degree through the Sarum College course on Christian Spirituality. For my dissertation I examined the relationship between the great medieval preacher, Meister Eckhart and the present day theologian Matthew Fox. There are several connections. First of all Matthew Fox wrote a large scale commentary on some of Eckhart’s sermons. Secondly, both men were Dominicans, members of the Order of Preachers. Thirdly, both were condemned by the Inquisition (or the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, as that body is now known).

Much of Eckhart’s writing is in the form of sermons. He is rightly regarded as one of the greatest spiritual writers in the history of the Church. Despite being posthumously condemned as a heretic, that condemnation has been ‘lifted’ and there has even been the suggestion that Eckhart should be declared to be a Doctor of the Church. The process of him being condemned by the Inquisition began when he was still alive and we have at least part of his defence again the charges brought against him. He described his opponents as ‘fools’ and ‘asses’ as he fought back to state his case. Eckhart’s writing and his preaching are gloriously God-centred. He describes all images that we have of God as provisional. Indeed if we think that any given image has brought us to God, then we are deceived. We have reached a brick wall if we cannot understand that we must see through images if we want to begin to experience something of the deep mystery of the Godhead, which always lies beyond. A key word to describe this approach is ‘detachment’. Letting go of images to move into the life of the Godhead is the essence of the Christian life and the ultimate destiny of all creation. Perhaps it was inevitable that someone so vibrant in his perception of the divine should perish at the hands of the vested interests and politics of the church life of his time. He was up against experienced and learned theologians, who could argue the toss about what was or was not a valid theological position, but who could not see the truth about the life of the Godhead that Eckhart proclaimed. They had positions to defend and protect. Eckhart himself was a great theologian, twice holding the Dominican Chair of Theology at Paris, but he was a man who was both open to the Spirit and deeply committed to an expression of the spiritual life, which seeks to explore the mystery of God, rather than champion the fixed positions of orthodoxy.

The reasons why Matthew Fox was expelled from the Order of Preacher are complex, but his support for gay and lesbian people and his support for the ordination of women were not issues which enamoured him to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, the head of which was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Fox found himself cast out from the community which had been his home. Not only did he have to leave the Order of Preachers, but he also left the Roman Catholic Church and became an Episcopalian. Fox uses strong and brilliant images to drive home his point. His language might be considered to be extreme at times, yet so often thereby he cuts through stale debates in a way which is radically challenging. He has his own point to make, fuelled by his experience of exclusion from the Church which nurtured him. Fox calls for a New Reformation and a divorce between what he describes as two forms of Christianity. ‘One form is patriarchal in nature, links readily to fascist powers of control and demonizes women, the earth, other species, science and gays and lesbians. It builds on fear and supports empire building’. The other form recognises awe as the starting point of true religion. The first form of Christianity, Fox describes as the ‘Museum Church’ and it should be left to bury itself. Those with a love of life should allow spirituality to replace religion.

Recounting a dream that he had, on the night before Ash Wednesday in 1994, Fox describes what it is like to feel you are outside the Church. He stands at an iron gate outside a garden. He wonders what his purpose might be. Then he cries at the simplicity and the clarity of the image. His place is there outside the garden. His role has been to share his vision with others. He has been dumped by the Vatican, but maybe his life and his life’s work have some meaning after all. Fox looks again at the gate. It is rusted and the garden that lies beyond is a garden no more. It has become a cemetery, a place of death and grief. For Fox, not only the Church is dying, but also society itself. Yet what he describes as the ‘vocation to life’ will continue beyond those structures.

I remain part of the Church because, in some crazy way, I feel that that ‘vocation to life’ has been given to me through a tradition and through structures which often seem so very corroded. I remain, sometimes by the skin of my teeth, in the hope that the Church is actually God’s Church and not mine. I do not know whether this Church I love will survive, but I live with the absolute conviction that the power of the resurrection life will continue to transform human lives, as indeed it has transformed my own. So I understand Fox’s image. Being outside the gates is a painful place to be, but it is where we begin to encounter others, real people, who have no interest whatsoever in the power-play of synods, but who long to celebrate life in all its fullness. I am also challenged by Fox’s image. At what point does being faithful to the ‘vocation to life’ become impossible amidst the weeds of the garden? At what point does living a life, which reflects the very mission of God in the world, become so compromised by prejudice, tribalism and fear, that claiming that ‘vocation to life’ can only be done by walking away from the Church? At what point does responding to Eckhart’s vision, of joining in the journey into the Godhead, become more of a lived out reality if we escape from the museum? I suppose my answer is that I still value the museum, because it is made up of people and in the relationships, which make up the web of the Church, there God can be found and the joy of the ‘vocation to life’ celebrated. Yet I am constantly challenged by the politics of church-life and I keep coming back to the question. Is what we are doing today leading others to discover that ‘vocation to life’?

Transforming Trinity

After the great liturgical journey of Advent through to Pentecost, the very next Sunday is kept as Trinity Sunday, which has no other purpose than simply to celebrate God as God. It is interesting that some of the sermons, which stick in my mind from my childhood, are those from Trinity Sunday. I remember the regular annual attempt to explain how God can be both three and one at the same time. Earlier in my career as a preacher I myself kept this tradition alive, each year attempting to explain what is meant by the Holy Trinity. Such preaching was about metaphysics and the attempt to unpack the world of Greek philosophy of some seventeen centuries ago. I now think that such preaching is wrong, because it misses the point. Trinity Sunday should be about celebrating the reality of God and not an occasion when we need to feel obliged to explain what the Athanasian Creed describes as being ‘incomprehensible’.  But then my own perspective of Trinity has radically changed as I have moved through life. I would be interested to trace whether scholarship has radically shifted over my lifetime, or whether I have simply moved deeper into the life of God. Or perhaps it is a combination of both of these. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is important to me, for it was a way of seeing God I grew up to accept, even if I found it hard to understand. But my journey of faith has led me to leave behind Trinity as a metaphysical concept. I have moved into the experience of the Divine as a dynamic community of life in which God calls the tune and I am invited to dance. This has been a radically different understanding of faith as I have grown into a living experience of God. It is characterized by what is often called the apophatic tradition. For me a key staging post was the discovery of the book The Cloud of Unknowing and the realization that prayer needs to lead beyond all pictures, symbols and language about God into a place in which we encounter the mystery that lies behind these pictures. So I am bemused by the sterile debate between fundamentalist Christians and the New Atheists. What some Christians fight so hard to protect, and what people like Richard Dawkins fights so hard to condemn, is a perspective that I left behind several decades ago.

The Trinity epitomises a perspective on God which has been fundamental to my faith all my life, but which has led me to a place in which the landscape has changed beyond all recognition. I love such change and I believe that, rather than seeing the Christian faith as being a description of another world, expressed in terms of the language of this world, Christ leads us into an experience of the Divine which lies at the heart of this world, but which opens up new perspectives on what it means to live a fully human life which are radically life changing. What is more, we need to be prepared to be surprised by God and by this new world each and every day of our lives. It is about such things that I plan to write from time to time. Perhaps no one is listening, but the thought that someone might read this helps to sharpen the mind and focus on the need for clarity in sharing my perspective.

Trinity is also the name for what might come to be seen as the most important event of the Twentieth Century, which was the birth of the atomic age and the point at which humankind began to unleash the very processes by which the dust of which we are made came to be formed in the stars. Trinity was the name of the first atomic bomb, the one detonated in a desert in New Mexico on 16^th July 1945. It represents that moment in which we finally managed to turn mass into energy and we opened up a whole new world and the risk of new possibilities, both good and bad. I often weep in frustration at a Church which tries so hard to defend the status quo in life and fails to be the agent of transformation and new life.  The transforming life of the Trinity draws us into mystery in which life becomes so much more vivid and transfigured and in which the scaffolding of religious faith ceases to be of any value, unless it is to draw us into such new living.