Category Archives: Anglicanism

How unbelievable?

02 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by in Anglicanism, Faith

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They are at it again, I thought, when I read (and thank you C451) the Rev Marcus Walker’s stirring piece in The Critic on the Church of England. Not, I hasten to add, the good Reverend himself, who is a candle in the darkness, but the usual suspects.

After more than forty years presiding over a decline in parishes across the country, the Rev David John Keighley has come up with a cunning plan to reverse the decline – intensify the causes of it! I jest not, you can read it all here, though it would take a heart of stone not to alternate weeping and laughter. What does he want to do? There may be a familiar ring to it, so apologies to those suffering from PTSD on this: sell off many of the churches for housing (erm, I thought we’d been quietly doing that?); get rid of outdated doctrine and historic prejudices; (by which he seems to mean the idea of the bodily resurrection of Christ and the Virgin birth, and the miracles (erm, we’ve had forty years of doing that too – just saying); and he is convinced that:

the idea of God as some kindly, bearded patriarch sitting on high in Heaven, while the Devil resides below in Hell, is ill-suited to the modern, critical mind.

Golly, how original! Well it was back in the nineteenth century or so!

The good Rev appears to think that junking all of this will bring young people into the Church. Well I guess I am no longer “young” being in my late thirties, but this sort of stuff almost drove me out of the church when I was, and I can’t imagine it would bring anyone over the age of 70 into it!

The best antidote to this stuff is to read what Marcus Walker writes. It hits home. He rightly points out that:

If you find a priest crossing his fingers during the creed or wincing at the mention of the Virgin Birth it is likely he was ordained many decades ago and is now floating around the edge of retirement. It is also very likely that he is a he, as at the height of the modernist movement only men could be ordained in the Church of England.

That has certainly been my experience, and may well be part of why the Roman Catholic Church, which is full of such old men (including the Pope) has the same problem. What he writes next cheers me up and certainly reflects my own lived experience (as they say):

Younger priests just don’t have this affliction. They may be dripping wet, they may preach about Brexit or refugees, they may not know their way around the Prayer Book, but you really can’t say they don’t believe. The vision of the Church of England as primarily a social organisation is one which, while still live in the public imagination, simply does not match reality.

That is my experience. It boils down, as he says, to the fact that where, once upon a time there was a social cachet to being a member of the Church of England, that has quite vanished:

It has never been cool to go to church, but now it isn’t even really respectable. There is simply no market for a church which doesn’t really believe in God. If you’re going to take the social hit of admitting to being a Christian, you might as well actually be a Christian. 

Quite so. It has been our younger priests who have been at the forefront of further efforts by the old men to go further down the modernist route – which is, as C451 once put it to me “a one way line to perdition”. More than not, it is often younger priests who oppose a continuation of the bankrupt policies of the past few decades:

And of the younger priests, it’s the gay ones who are often at the forefront of the battle to defend the creeds and Christian orthodoxy (if my more traditional readers can park, for a moment, their disbelief in the separation of questions of sexuality from orthodoxy). A study by the Dean of Virginia Theological Seminary showed that, across the American church, “our LGBT seminarians are not interested in a vacuous liberal theology that has no authority, no God, no Christ, and no sacraments”.

As Marcus Walker puts it:

Once again we see that if you’re going to embarrass yourself in front of your peers by being a Christian, you might as well actually find God in the process 

This certainly matches my experience. The American “culture wars” is American, and I can’t speak for those experiencing it, but what I can testify to is that in the Church of England, not least among priests of my generation and younger, there is a real commitment to the Creeds. We don’t cross our fingers when reciting it, neither do we think that “science” has disproved God. I can’t quite get my head around a charitable explanation as to why a retired priest who believes that

the teachings of Jesus provides just one of many ways to experience ‘God’, and that progressive Christianity is focused on creating a community that is inclusive of all people, regardless of sexual identity and even if they are “questioning sceptics or agnostics”

stays in the Church. He imagines that the “product” behind the Church remains “woefully out of date”. I have bad news for him and those of his generation who think likewise – it is they who are out of date. Those of my readers who are of that generation are not, I know, of his persuasion, so take heart, the cause for which you have fought is alive and well and prospering, It may be that on some matters we look to you “unorthodox”, but when it comes to the Creeds and belief, we are Christians because we are. We stand here and can do no other because whatever the Rev David John might believe, we believe in God, the Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son … and all the rest of it.

So cheer yourself up by reading Marcus Walker!

How not to disagree

28 Sunday Feb 2021

Posted by in Anglicanism, Faith, Persecution

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We have had much discussion here lately about the tensions between the ideas of God as Love and eternal damnation. It has been a good, well-mannered discussion which I hope has helped those of us reading it; it has helped me. Disagreement is a fact of Christian (as of other) life, and how we express that disagreement is a matter of great importance. How we disagree is also a witness to the faith that is within us.

With that in mind, and after biting my tongue and bridling my internet pen for a day of so, I want simply to say that the statement recently issued by the Anglican primate of Nigeria on “gays” is one of the most digraceful and shameful I have read from a Christian leader. Lest you think this is Jess getting all hyperbolic, let me quote:

 A Gay is a Gay, they cannot be rightly described otherwise. In the same vein, we cannot describe people as ‘Christian Murderer’, ‘Christian Adulterer’ and ‘Christian terrorist’; neither should we even have ‘Gay Christian’ or ‘Gay Anglican’. “Without Holiness, no man shall see God” (Hebrews 12 :14).

It might be that the Archbishop might ponder that quotation from Hebrews next time he looks into a mirror. To imply that to be “gay” is to be in the same category as a murderer or a terrorist is simply disgraceful. But, in case that does not quite insult “gays” (really, does anyone still use that language?), he gets his JCB digger and goes deeper:

The deadly ‘virus’ of homosexuality has infiltrated ACNA. This is likened to a Yeast that should be urgently and radically expunged and excised lest it affects the whole dough (Luke 13:20-21; Gal. 5:9).

I make bread every third day at the moment, or did before I got ill again, and it maybe this is a woman/man thing, but I am charitably assuming that the Archbishop does not know that without yeast bread will not rise? But, how DARE the man liken other human beings to a “virus”! Chalcedon, historian that he is, always warns against likening anything to the unique evil of the Nazis, but here the parallel is striking:

 “Today,” Hitler proclaimed in 1943, “international Jewry is the ferment of decomposition of peoples and states, just as it was in antiquity. It will remain that way as long as peoples do not find the strength to get rid of the virus.” Both the death camps (the gas chambers of which were modeled on delousing chambers) and the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary death squads that roamed across Eastern Europe followed in the wake of the advancing German army) were responses to what the Nazis perceived to be a lethal pestilence.

‘Less Than Human’: The Psychology Of Cruelty

Given the recent history of ISIS-inspired atrocities against Christians in Nigeria, one might have expected better of the Archbishop. When you live in a gunpowder arsenal, lighting naked matches seems, to put it mildly, unwise.

Same-sex attraction, same-sex marriages, sexuality in general remain hot issues in the Church, despite Our Lord saying rather little about them, and it is understandable that they do, but however strongly one feels, I cannot for the life of me see the justification for writing about other human beings in such terms. The “gays” love someone of their own gender, that is neither “murder” nor is it “terrorism”, and quite often it isn’t “adultery” either. We can, and do, disagree, but this is a prime example of how not to do it. Is anyone going to feel as though this sort of thing is going to change anyone’s mind? Of course not, it is a power-play, designed to say “I am in charge and this is how it ought to be”.

I will pray for the Archbishop as I am told to pray for those who “hate”, but more than that, I shall pray for all those whose “crime” is to love someone of their own gender. When an Archbishop equates love with crime in inflammable and hateful language, one does not have to enquire about the form of witness given. One can only pray for him and those who think that way – and pray for comfort for faithful Christians wounded by such words.

There have been calls for Archbishop Justin to disinvite the Archbishop from the Lambeth conference. That would be a bad way of responding. He should come, and should be open to a dialogue where he can explain how he thought he was helping the Church, and perhaps listen to those who think he was shooting himself in both feet.

Faith examined: some comments

26 Tuesday Jan 2021

Posted by in Anglicanism, Epiphany, Faith

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Nicholas’ post here ttps://jessicahof.blog/2021/01/25/faith-examined/ is a fascinating one, but maybe I am not just speaking for myself if I say that as a non-philosopher, I found some of the terms rebarabative. I am so grateful to Nicholas for explaining them so well, and wasn’t, as it were, to riff off them to say something about faith.

In the first place by definition for me, faith is about a belief in something you can’t prove. It’s not like gravity. If you say you don’t believe in gravity, jump out of an upstairs window to check it!

I have believed in God longer than my conscious memory can recall. When I went to Sunday school as a small child it all just made sense if things. I’d always known I was not alone, even though I was an only child. Even though I had no mother, I felt there was a maternal love that was gifted me from someone. So when the Sunday school teacher explained about Jesus loving me, I knew who that someone was. It resonated with what I knew by intuition.

Was I indoctrinated? All I can say is that if so, it was a poor programme, as few of those who went to that class stayed with the Faith. I saw the other day that the head of the Humanist organisation in the UK, Professor Alice Roberts wrote about indoctrination in Church schools. That actually made me giggle. I can only assume that the professor has never been taught in one? Still, as she also likened the UK to Iran, and thought that the Bishops who sit in the Lords were part of the “goverment” maybe we should not take her too seriously? For sure, none of the Church schools I attended did much by way of indoctrination.

I actually loved school assemblies, but was one of the few girls who did. I also loved early morning chapel when I was a boarder, but again, was one of the few who did. In other words, while there was nothing in my environment growing up (other than my atheist father and a secular society, so nothing major then!) which militated against my believing, there was certainly nothing in the way of indoctrination. Indeed “Religious Studies” lessons were often more about other religions than they were my own.

It may be that I am just unusually suggestible. I loved my Confirmation classes and found them helpful. I love going to church. Communion, which I am denied at the moment, is so important to my well-being that it feels like the hardest and most prolonged Lent ever.

So, when atheists and others start up with the old routine of “where’s the evidence?” apart from their bad faith, as we all know there is nothing by way of an answer that could ever satisfy their sad reductionist idea of what evidence is, the thing that strikes me is the irrelevance of the question. The evidence is inside me. It is the love I know God has for me which draws my love out to Him.

The Creeds give me all the framework I need. I like my Church precisely for the reasons others don’t. It takes a very broad approach to membership. It often seems illogical and a bit vague on some issues, usually those where logic and precision might harm individuals. It gives a lot of voice to the laity, and it refuses (any longer) to torture itself over the place of women in the ministry, and in the absence of a Pope, we don’t get too worried about the obiter dicta of our chief Bishop. It still sees itself as a place where all who live here can go, and it allows you to come and go as you wish without too much in the way of expectations.

Most of all, it is a Church which recognises we are all sinners and which refuses, as a Church, to throw stones. There is a Judgement. But it will be God who judges, and if we are wise and humble, we will not attempt to anticipate it.

I believe because quite literally, I can do no other. There have been, and there are, times when God seems more remote, but I know why that is. He is where he has always been, it is me who has wandered off. But he’s there when I come back. There I have found praying the daily offices of the Church a real help. Even at the times I feel remote, I feel the connection tighten. Like any relationship, you get out what you put in.

As we approach Lent, it is a time to ask ourselves what we do put in? I am going to be running a Lent Book series, but more about that tomorrow. What we can all do at this time of pestilence and fear, is to be kind to each other, and loving, and examine what our Faith tells us about how we come through to better times. I am not sure that keep on keeping on is a philosophy, but it sounds awfully Anglican, so I will go with it.

End of year …

28 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Blogging, Faith

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Remember not the former things, nor consider of the things of old

Thus says the prophet Isaiah as he prepares the way for the one who is to come and make all things new. But for those of us coming to the end of the church year, with the new one starting tomorrow with the first Sunday in Advent, it is hard not to remember the former things. Advent is a time of preparation, and part of that, for me, is grounding myself.

For all of us this has been a year of struggle, and struggle in a way none of us could have anticipated only a year ago. The very idea that we would have been wearing face masks to go into a shop would have been laughed out of court; now you could find yourself in court for not doing it.

A year ago I was still not sure if I would write here, or anywhere else, ever again. As some of you know, I had what is often referred to as a “breakdown”. It was more of a “burn out”. I had left nothing undone, which was part of the problem, sometimes your body needs a break, even if your mind is saying otherwise. I have always lived more in my mind and paid it more attention than I have given to my body. The spirit has always been willing, it turned out that it and the flesh disagreed, and the latter has its own way of making its view felt if it feels ignored. But, with rest, and help, about this time last year, I began to emerge from the darkness, a darkness so black that it has helped me cope with the current darkness. At least now I see a light – and know it is not the oncoming train.

I am one of those fortunate people who has never doubted that God exists and is with me. I have often doubted the version of him that is sometimes served up to me. What I have experienced by way of love and mercy does not cohere with the view of a Father who would condemn many of his children to eternal torment. That’s not a doctrinal claim for universalism, it’s more an inability to believe that the God who has been with me through the very darkest times is the same God as preached in some quarters. As I recently commented to one of our longest and loveliest commentators, Paul was right – we see now through a glass darkly – but one day we shall see clearly.

And that is what looking back at this juncture tells me as I sit in the silence of my room with just my Rosary for company. Breaking down is a way to building back up, and building better. Making time to be with God every day, recognising that assuming he is there is fine, and right, but the only person in this relationship who suffers if I don’t make time for him is me.

Prayer is a habit, and by ensuring that I pray Morning and Evening Prayer, and Compline last thing, and my Rosary between times, I have found something which I probably ought to have known, but didn’t. When I started it felt like me addressing God, thanking him for his mercies to me and putting my petitions for others before him (I have real trouble praying for myself, but am getting there), but as I have gone on it feels different. It feels like tuning into something that is ongoing all the time – and during this period between All Saints’ and Advent, I really have felt as though I was accompanied by a great cloud of witnesses.

The lectionary readings too, are well-chosen. Through this last few weeks we have been following Isaiah and the writer of Revelation. The darkness through which Israel passed has been vivid in my mind, and the horror of the vision of John has, at times, been disquieting and even disturbing. But the Collects and the Prayers of Thanksgiving have carried me along. I have come to love the Blessing of Light that I use in place of the preparation for Evening Prayer, and as the last contribution here before Advent starts, I shall leave you with it:

Blessed are you, Lord God, creator of day and night:

to you be praise and glory for ever.

As darkness falls you renew your promise

to reveal among us the light of your presence.

By the light of Christ, your living Word,

dispel the darkness of our hearts

that we may walk as children of light

and sing your praise throughout the world.

Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit

Core membership

27 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Bible, Faith

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Not for the first time, I ended the day reflecting that the comments to this blog are often better than the posts. The comment on my post two days ago by Alys summed up a particular, and widespread point of view very well:

The Church Of England is dying and will soon be completely dead thanks to weak leadership, female ordination, watering down of scripture and the word of God, identity politics and failure to recognise that the more it attempts to berelevant the less appealing it becomes to what should be its core membership.

That puts in very understandable terms what I have not only often heard, but also read, indeed as I said in my response, I was reading something from the Restoration period recently saying much the same, leaving out, of course, the reference to women’s ordination. Much the same was said in the period marked by Wesley’s ministry. Christianity, or at least the Church, is always about to die, and the leadership is usually at fault. You can’t be surprised, look at that Peter fellow, he even denied knowing Jesus. Has there ever been a time when the leadership,of the Church has been held in universal, or near universal, high regard? As for watering down God’s words, how clear could he have made it that certain foods were. It to be eaten? That Paul fellow claimed to have had a vision to the contrary, but we have only his word for it, and even he was willing to admit circumcising might be necessary. Things change, sometimes even the Church leadership is willing to see the Holy Spirit at work, as the Council of Jerusalem did over diet.

I jest, a little, because in truth, there have been those from the beginning convinced that the Church was going to the dogs and that its leaders were rubbish. Even St John faced break away groups from his church who claimed to know better than he did what Christ meant. It is a permanent feature of Christian life and isn’t going to change any time soon this side of Christ’s coming again in glory.

What did intrigue me was the idea of “core” membership. That set me thinking and rereading. I could see only one “core” in the teaching of Jesus, and that was the Jews. There were many occasions when Jesus made it clear that the ‘bread’ was for the Chosen People. Even among them, Jesus’ “core” was considered odd – his tendency to dine with wine-bibbers, tax collectors and fallen women was not well-regarded by the “core” membership of the synagogues, any more than that same group welcomed the evangelism of the disciples.

A Church that takes Jesus seriously has only one core, I thought, sinners. That’s all of us, and for all its failings as an institution, as long as there are sinners, there will be a Church. It may be that those who have laboured in the vineyard all day will look askance at those who came in the last hour, even as the elder brother had his views about how their father had treated the prodigal. But that’s Christianity for you, all that gratiutous love and grace. As I have been given freely, so I have received, and so I will give, or try to to others. It isn’t just the comfortable and the established who need to feel the church is for them – it is those who think it isn’t. Perhaps they are the “core”? At any rate, there are more than enough lost sheep to keep the shepherds busy.

Advent Book Club

26 Thursday Nov 2020

Posted by in Advent, Anglicanism

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The Revd. Dr Carys Walsh and our Advent Book

As we approach Advent, I thought it might be an idea to do something different here. As some of you know I come from Wales originally, and still love the north Walian landscape, the mountains and the sea. As some of you know, I am immoderatly fond of poetry, and one of my favourite poets combines just about everything I love – Wales, churches, rural landscapes – and God – and that is R.S. Thomas. Chalcedon451 bought me, for my recent birthday, the book featured in the photograph heading up this post – Frequencies of God by the Revd Dr Carys Walsh, who is a curate at All Saints’ Kettering. I would like to use this as the cornerstone of our new idea – an Advent Book Club.

I have to confess I have never even been part of a book club, let alone run one, but with the invincible optimism that keeps getting me in hot water and then out of it, I’ve decided, with C’s approval, to go on and do it.

Once a week I propose to do a post on the theme of that week’s poems. Dr Carys has divided them thus:

Week 1 – Waiting: Poems: The Coming. In a Country Church. In Church. Kneeling. Suddenly (1975). Suddenly (1983). Sea-Watching.

Week 2 – Accepting: Poems: Amen. This to do. The Moor. The Bright Field. Emerging (1975). The imperative of the instincts. In Context.

Week 3 – Journeying: Poems: Wrong. Migrants. Pilgrimages. Evening. I know him. The Moon in Lleyn. Llanno

Week 4 – Birthing: Poems: The Un-born. Blind Noel. Nativity. Top left and angel. Energing (1978). Other incarnations, of course. The Gap (1978)

Week 5- Seeing: Poems: The Kingdom. Tidal. The Absence. Adjustments. The God. That there … . The first king.

Her chapters on the poems are simply wonderful, and that’s why I recommend it so strongly. I think it is the sort of things which readers of this blog will find spiritually enriching. To quote from the introduction:

R.S. Thomas, the Welsh priest and poet (1913-2000), is a profound and compelling guide for this season. A parish priest in Wales for all of his working life … he wa a prolific writer of poetry that explored his beloved homeland, the people among whom he ministered, and the beauty of the natural world. But it is for his startlingly original, prophetic and devotional religious poetry that many know and love him.

That’s just an example of the beauty of Dr Cary’s writing. As you might be able to tell, I just love the book, and talking with C it occurred to me that it might do us here very well – if I only knew how to do a book club! But goodness, let’s go, all the same.

What I will try to do is to comment on the theme of the week with reference to the poems for that week and to what Dr Carys writes. Let’s see how that works. It may of course, sink the blog, but my best efforts so far have failed, and even my little stories at Neo’s place, have not managed to sink his, so, buoyed up by all of that, I thought I’d have a go here.

I do hope that some of you will buy the book and benefit from that, and that you will join us on our prayerful journey through Advent.

Church with a mission?

25 Wednesday Nov 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition

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I can hardly say how much I wanted the current discussions at Synod on the Church of England to inspire me. The title of Archbishop Cottrell’s Report, “A Vision for the Church of England in the 2020s ‘Christ centred and Jesus shaped. Simpler, humbler, bolder’,” struck a good note, although the subtitle ‘A commentary to accompany the picture’ gave cause for concern. I recognise such diagrams. I have worked with enough ‘consultants’ to recognise the genre.

By sheer serendipity, I was reading my copy of the Church Times over morning coffee, and a review of a book whose title interested me God’s Church in the World: The gift of Catholic mission, which finished with a sentence that resonated in the light of the document:

Just at the moment, when we might be tempted to streamline and rebrand the way in which we market the Anglican operation, the contributors to this book invite us to pause and take stock. The mission of God is entrusted to us as a gift, not a commodity. This is a book that might inspire us to talk, walk, and eat more slowly, in order to be attuned to a redemptive encounter with the Word who speaks our language but in the cadences of eternity.

How I wish that the Bishop of Chichester, had had more say in the report. Our mission is a ‘gift’ and not a ‘commodity’. We have not been ‘given’ the power of ministry, we have been lent it and, as stewards, we have to account for it. How often do we appear to be like that steward who buried the talent and was intent on escaping punishment by hoarding it so he could hand back what he had been given?

I am all in favour of our being ‘bolder’, and there can be times, especially out here in the country, when we seem like a club, but I am unsure, to put it mildly what is ‘bold’ about this report. It seems more like a meditation on how to manage decline.

It may, of course, be that it is laywomen like me out in the community who are out of touch with what our leaders see as essential, but I’d love to know more about the sources of this vision. It reminds me of my time in teaching, where ever and anon some ‘expert’ would pop up with a vision for the future which looked to those of us in the class-room so remote from our lived reality that it was little wonder that nothing much came of whatever it was. Focus groups have their place, but I cannot help think that the Bishop of Chichester is right. Pausing and taking stock is necessary, but if this is the result?

There is much in it with which no one would want to disagree, but my question is what does it add up to? Of course I want a

a younger and
more diverse church, a church that serves
children and young people and involves
them in its leadership and ministry; a
church where black lives matter

but if we are going to do lists to signal our virtue, why aren’t women and LGBTI+ people on it? If anyone really thinks our Church fully reflects women’s voices, they aren’t listening, and as for the gay, lesbian and transgender voices …?

Yes, it is obvious we are ‘not as big’ as we used to be. But what does that mean other than the obvious? Smaller and more faithful and missionary can be better than numerically large and lukewarm. There seems little sense here of how we got from there to here and the lessons to be learned. Where were the historians in this?

I am not sure what a ‘Jesus-shaped’ Church looks like, but I do know what a ‘Management consultant shaped’ Church looks like, and I think I know which this looks more like.

As the discussion proceeds, perhaps there will be things to cheer me up – I was ever an optimist.

Saturday Jess: Taking sides?

14 Saturday Nov 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Church/State

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As some of you know from my occasional contributions to Neo’s blog (what do you mean you haven’t read it! Golly, here’s the link, though those of a liberal frame of mind may need a trigger warning, but more of that in a moment) I am by way of being an Americanophile. I spent a year in the mid-West when I was ten, and fell in love with small-town America. There were no fewer than ten churches in a town of about ten thousand people, and I loved the Episcopal Church at which we worshipped. But there is one aspect of American culture which I wish we had not imported – the so-called “culture wars.”

I suppose I come at this from what I’d call a Church of England direction. I was brought up to believe that the Church of England has a mission to the whole country. As I grew up I came to value that side of things more and more. Regardless of creed, class or colour, the doors of our churches are open to all who want to go there (well, okay, they were, but don’t start me on Mr Johnson and his government). I don’t take the view that religion has no place in public life, and I value the role that the Church plays in this country. It is not just (although it is also) the work done selflessly and quietly locally through foodbanks, or through hospital and university chaplains, it is that local presence.

As a politcal näif, it came to me but slowly that there were “parties” in the church. At university I went along to some Christian Union meetings, but soon retreated to the calm of the College Chapel. I’ve never been one for jumping up and down and proclaiming my thanks for my salvation. C 451 tells a story of a politican who, on being asked by a Street Preacher whether he was saved, said “yes”, only to be asked “why are you not proclaiming it?” To that he responded as I would: “It was a close shave so I don’t like to shout about it.”

College chapel was like home – Alternative Service Book, decent sermon, seemly and, well, for me, a bit boring. Being an inveterate church hopper, I found one which was not boring. The Blessed Sacrament was reserved, there was incense, and the Book of Common Prayer was used. It wasn’t long before I’d bought my first mantilla and Rosary, and I asked Father to bless the latter – and he blessed the former too. I found a spiritual calm there which neither the College Christian Union, nor the Chapel gave me. But it never occurred to me to think that my preference was somehow “better”; it was different, and difference was, I thought, and still think, good.

Some at the Church I attended would refer to what had happened at the time when the Church of England had ordained women in the way that you might refer to a great disaster. As I came to know more, I realised that my Church was part of a group called “Forward in Faith“. There was considerable hostility among some of my fellow worshippers to those who, in their view, had “betrayed” the Church by agreeing to the ordination of women. Meanwhile, talking to friends at College, where I still attended early morning prayers in the Chapel, I encountered a similar hostility to the “dinosaurs” who opposed the ordination of women. As a woman, I was expected by my peers to share that view, and I was asked more than once “how I could bear” to “worship with those people?” I had a very good (male) friend in another College who was a keen Evangelical, and he used to ask me how I “could bear to worship in Laodicea”; he never darkened the door of the College Chapel.

It may just that I am a wishy-washy liberal sort of woman (guilty as charged by the way, and proud of it), but I did not see then, nor do I now, why they could not all “live and let live.” My other half (who only takes an interest in these things insofar as living with me requires it) asked me last night why I ran a “conservative blog” if I favoured the ordination of women and thought that LGBTI+ Christians should always be made welcome in church. I tried to explain that my Catholic views on the sacraments and the nature of the Church were not “conservative” to me, and constituted no bar to an inclusive view of that Church. I am not sure they were any the wiser, or even better informed.

On both sides of the Atlantic we seem to be living in sharply divided political cultures where the traditionally intolerant attitude by conservatives to things like gay rights are reciprocated on the left by a “cancel culture” to anyone with non-progressive views. This does seem to be an import, and it exacerbates existing divisions. In my own church it can seem, sometimes, as though those taking a traditional view of marriage and other social issues, are being marginalised. I was struck, as I thought and prayed about this, puzzled as to what a Church which has a national mission should do, by what Canon Angela Tilby has written in the latest Church Times: “we can take on that protective task only if we resist a too-easy identification of progressive causes with the values of “the Kingdom”.

It is a timely reminder that balance is one of the great virtues of Anglicanism, and so I leave you this Saturday, with her wise words:

We should nourish more diversity of thought, a wider theological intelligence. Scriptural truth, after all, is multi-layered. We misread our mission if we think that it is all about us and our personal preferences. In the same spirit, we should ensure that the conservative-minded among us are not driven to the edges, not only because this could encourage animosity, but because they retain insights that we need. We will engage effectively with secular society only if we know where our roots lie

Enjoy your Saturday!

Of Books and more and yet more …

13 Friday Nov 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition

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When it comes to buying books, as my other half would affirm, I am a one-woman ‘keep independent bookshops open’ dynamo. As most of what I want is secondhand, and as an affectionado of the usual internet sources (I use Amazon only when I have no alternative), I can usually keep within budget, but birthdays and Christmas are easy for family and friends – a booklist is provided. So when I say I am not in favour of more books, it is clear I must be referring to something other than my habit.

When I first went to church as a girl, the Rector was a firm “Book of Common Prayer” man. It came as something of a shock when I first encountered the mysteries of the Alternative Service Book. I liked Rite B, mainly because of the resonances with the BCP, but really couldn’y quite greet it with enthusiasm. But it was what was on offer, and being a good girl, I got on with it. Language mattered, but if this was the language my church wanted to use, best get on with it. What mattered more was who I encountered in the Eucharist.

I found the advent of Common Worship a change for the better, but still preferred to go to eight o’clock services where BCP was in use. I got used to Common Worship, and use it in my personal devotions, but there is a good deal of leeway given as to how one conststructs Communon Services, which I know some priests find a creative opportunity and others a “challenge’, but not ina good way. At last count, examining the Rector’s shelves, there were eight different books. At what point is enough, enough? For me, as for others, it’s time for well, frankly, a Book of Common Prayer.

There’s no reason why a revised single volume could not have modern and traditional language versions as the 2000 Common Worship has. I think the American Episcopal Church has a single volume, and maybe Audre could enlighten me?

This isn’t a call for some sort of liturgical reform, this is hardly the most important issue at the moment, but I think Cranmer got it right – a single Book of Common Prayer which we can carry with us and whose language infuses our own was a good idea in his day – it remains one. There are, I have discovered, situations in which you can have too many books.

The Catholic Church?

09 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition

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Sometimes we Anglicans don’t help ourselves. Not long before lockdown mk.1 I welcomed a newcomer to the Church. He arrived just as I was beginning to set things up, so we had a good talk. He was, he told me, an ‘agnostic’ who had become interested in Christianity whilst involved in discussions at university to “prove” it was wrong. That was a good start. The Rector came in and said hello before she went to vest, and he turned to me shocked – “oh,” he said, “I thought this was a Catholic Church.” I assured him it was, but after he referred to the fact that “the Catholic Church does not ordain women”, I told him I’d take it up afterwards over coffee and a biscuit. I did, and he is still coming, I am pleased to say.

Talking with the Rector afterwards, she said it was “our own fault” for not being clearer about such matters – hence my first sentence.

I did us a little leaftlet to explain, and I want to set some of it out here.

“Catholic” comes from two Greek words meaning, literally: ‘according to the whole.’ In the Latin used by the Church Fathers, it means universal – as St Vincent of Lerins put it, ‘that which has been believed everywhere, always and by everybody.’

Now, unless one takes the view that the Oriental Orthodox and the Eastern Orthodox are not holding to what was believed from the beginning (a hard one as they have changed far less than we have in the West) then they are ‘Catholic’. That, following the schism of 1054, the Latin Church chose to arrogate the word to itself, does not mean that anyone else agrees, or had to agree with it.

After the Reformation some churches, including my own Church of England and the Old Catholics, continued to use the noun as it was the best description of the historical tradition of which are part. In the nineteenth century, especially under the influence of the Oxford Movement, the idea of the ‘branch theory’ became popular, the idea that the ‘tree’ of the Catholic Church had split into three branches (or more). Those who like that sort of thing will do so, but it seems to me and many other Anglicans, an interesting but unnecessary idea.

We are Catholic because we inherit from the past the historic doctrinal formulations agreed at the first five ecumenical conferences. We inherit the view that the consecrated bread and wine ARE the body and blood of Christ; the how and the why are deep mysteries, and wisdom suggests that we just accept what Christ said. We venerate saints, especially Our Lady. We understand the priesthood as needing an episcopate.

The former Archbishop of York, John Habgood, expressed it best when he wrote: ‘True catholicity belongs as much to the future as to the past. It entails the creative development of tradition as well as humble respect for it.’

We welcome, of course, that at Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church recognised the existence of other churches, even if it has occasionally to call them ‘ecclesial communities’, and that it wants to talk ecumenism. Naturally we hope it will work towards a better understanding.

I finish though, with our newcomer, who said afterwards that what, with kneeling at the altar, altar lights, the reserved sacraments, communion of the tongue and statues of Our Lady, our church seemed “more Catholic” than the one hae had attended, which had had none of those things. In the spirit of ecumenism my response was that we were both Catholic!