The Scapegoating of the Archbishop of Canterbury

I wrote this little piece for Covenant blog yesterday (www.covenant-communion.com):

I am concerned about attitudes toward this present Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems by many of those of the GAFCon persuasion to have become the scapegoat not only for his own shortcomings in this confusing crisis, but also everyone else’s. I have found myself wondering what the attitude of the GAFCon loyalists would have been if George Carey had still been the ABC — and who/what the scapegoat would have been in those particular circumstances. Scapegoating is, quite honestly, a very easy way to shrug off one’s own responsibilities for the situation.

Yes, the office of Archbishop of Canterbury does seem to have colonial overtones, but again, is the anti-colonial argument pressed because it can be used to great affect against Rowan Williams whose public persona is eminently difficult for most people to grasp (especially when the media have finished messing with his idiosyncrasy)? It needs to be asked if the office would be disdained in this particular manner if John Sentamu was Archbishop of Canterbury instead of York: I rather doubt a once-persecuted Ugandan with a huge and extrovert personality and faith would be dismissed with the scorn afforded the gentle Welsh scholar who inhabits Lambeth Palace.

One of the frightening things about the whole turmoil of events since 2003 is that it has become so wrapped up in issues of personality that the principles of theology, ecclesiology, and anything else have been molded in response to attitudes toward people rather than truths and errors. Now I realize that it is almost impossible to separate persons from beliefs and ideas, but it does seem that increasing numbers are not willing even to try.

What has grieved me more and more as this whole sorry game has played itself out is that both grace and truth seem to have become victims of the fight. I suspect that it is going to be increasingly difficult as time passes for the scars of the wounds now being inflicted to be soothed — yet seeking some kind of reconciliation has to be our priority if we are truly bearing with Christ his Cross.

There were all sorts of responses to this piece, and several of them lashed out at Archbishop Rowan. So here is my clarifier:

Either I did not make myself clear or the point I was trying to make has been missed. In the first sentence of what I said I had hoped I had made clear that Rowan Williams has his shortcomings. He is in an almost impossible position and since his accession to the See of Canterbury I have felt that he may not necessarily be perfectly equipped for times like this; let's face it, few individuals are.

However, what has happened is that Archbishop Rowan has been turned into the issue and made to accept almost everyone's blame. I state quite clearly that he has not led as I would have liked him to lead, but this pickle has been stewed up and then made worse by people on every side of the spectrum. Conservatives, liberals, and everyone in between has made this mess, and everywhere we look instead of humility and grace what we see is self-righteousness and posturing.

For saying something like this I have been roundly accused of being soft, of having lost my theological bearings, of compromising biblical truth, and so forth. Although this is untrue, people have the right to their own perceptions, but nothing could be further from the reality. It is because I am committed to biblical truth that I say what I do. Rowan Williams should not be blamed in the way he is, we should all take upon ourselves the responsibility for the chaos and the seemingly endless stand-offs that just lead to a downward spiral. The Archbishop can surely be criticized for some of what has happened, but then so can everyone from the Primates and bishops down to you and me.

Brothers and sisters, this situation is about being honest and it is about the Cross. The Cross challenges me in ways that I do not find comfortable, but without that Cross I am lost and in hopeless despair. There is nothing comfortable about the Cross for it demands of us integrity, humility, and a willingness to put ourselves under God's microscope -- whatever other people might do. The Cross is not there for us to use to hit others over the head. The truth is that we have had rather an insipid theology and practice of Cross-centered Christianity.

Let me be brutally personal about what the Cross means. I have said (and done) some pretty awful things about those with whom I disagree in these troubles, and who I believe have played a major role in bringing this crisis on the church. I have been presumptuous, judgmental, bitter, arrogant, and unkind. I have had some of the worst years of ministry I can remember, and have wept copiously. Much of what I have done has been grounded in pride and self-rectitude. However, regardless of what I believe to be the errors of others, I cannot load the consequences of my sins on anyone else's shoulders. I must take responsibility for them, and then share them with the Lord who died for me and rose again -- if I do not do this then I am of all men the most to be pitied.

I would plead with those who seem to want to blame Archbishop Rowan for everything to reconsider and look first into their own hearts. This is a case of the one who is without sin throwing the first stone...

How I have changed

My wife has a picture that was taken of us on the damp cold March day in 1969 when I was ordained deacon in an equally damp, cold church in North London. I was looking at that picture the other day and wondering how much is left of that couple setting out on life together, grinning broadly, and with their arms around each other. Every morning when I stare at the mirror I recognize that beneath the surface somewhere is that skinny man with a thick mop of dark hair, but these days I feel the face I am looking at is more like my fathers did than that twentysomething uncomfortably clad in his brand-new clerical collar.

Today's waistline isn't anything like it used to be, my collars are several sizes larger, and I have less hair and it is turning pepper and salt gray. I am still pretty fit for a sixtysomething, but my back and knees tend to creak a little, if left to my own devices I drop off to sleep in my chair around 8.30 pm, and the beauty to whom I had been married for only seven months when that picture was taken is now a grandmother -- which, come to think of it, makes me a grandfather!

Back then I would have considered someone my age now incurably old -- but the funny thing is that despite the occasional aches I don't feel old. In some ways I feel younger now than I did ten or fifteen years ago. Certainly, our concerns are those of any couple our age, like how we fund our old age so that we are not a burden on our children, but I still have that same sense of excitement that goes with having something useful to do in God's Kingdom.

There was a similar excitement back then when we were setting out on our life's journey, and whilst a seasoning has taken place over the years there is still essentially the same flavor. I don't know how I would be feeling if I was staring down the barrel of the gun of retirement because that is not something to which I am looking forward. Spending and being spent for the Kingdom is a lot more fun!

Neither has the substance of my theological presuppositions changed much. Again, there has been a maturing and I have wrestled with my share of doubts and agonies related to the faith over the years, but at the heart is still the crucified and risen Jesus Christ as revealed to us in the Scriptures -- which I maintain now as back then to be God's Word Written. Part of that maturing has been discovering a richness that I didn't know was there when I was first ordained, and an exposure to scholarship and attitudes that have forced me to think through my own positions very carefully, modifying some of them, but whose foundation is firmly laid and stands firm despite all my sins and shortcomings.

I think that points to another factor: I am more conscious today of my sinfulness in a way that I am not sure I was when I was young. I grieve that while I might have made some progress in the process of sanctification, there are so many flaws in my character and personality that I had believed then I would grow out of. They are still there, and like Paul's thorn in the flesh they harry me daily. I press on toward the goal of God's call, but as I perceive the holiness of God when compared to my own innate fallenness I realize just how unworthy I am of God's grace.

Most of those years since that picture was taken were spent in the USA, and coming back to England points up just how much my American experience altered me. The other day a friend was comparing me to another American who we both know and who has lived in England for a long time; he said that this individual had become as British in his attitudes to the same extent that I had let go of my Britishness to become American. Most of the time I can see it in myself, but there are occasions when I say and do something that is quintessentially "New World" and it has to be pointed out to me.

I have shed a lot of the middle class English conditioning that had shaped that newly-minted deacon in the photo, and instead a middle class American conditioning has taken its place. I was never particularly comfortable with a lot of those English attitudes that once shaped me, but it wasn't until I got back here that I recognized just how many of them I have during my American years shed.

My political bias in the 1960s was of a distinctly more radical and leftish flavor than the one I adhere to now. In those days I believed the Conservative Party for which my family had consistently voted for ever and aye was so far to the right that no thinking Christian could possibly support them and retain their integrity. By contemporary American standards I suppose my political views are now perhaps slightly in the center or, perhaps, slightly to the left, but while I have changed so have the political parties here. These days I look at the three main parties here and consider them all a bit too progressive for my liking. I am not particularly comfortable with the 'nanny state' and neither do I have a lot of time for a lot of the social engineering that is so chi-chi in all quarters. In my youth I thought I knew what the political values appropriate to citizens of the Kingdom might be, now I am far from certain!

I was talking to my old liturgics professor a while back (one of the pleasures of returning to England has been remaking links with folks of whom you had lost track), and said to him that I felt that I had left England as one who was gently radical when it came to Christian worship and had come back three decades later as a hopeless traditionalist. I was not here for the full-scale Vineyardizing and Wimberization of the evangelicals in the Church of England took place, and from whose worst excesses Anglican evangelicalism has yet to recover.

What the Episcopal Church did was to allow me to realize just how much liturgical worship can sing and it formed me away from the overly informal approach to worship that English evangelicals have tended to glory in. Interestingly, I probably have an approach to liturgy, ceremonial and ritual that condemns me to minority status everywhere. In Tennessee I was considered a snake belly low churchman, while among evangelicals here I am a tad further up the candle than most would like... and don't get me talking about the quality of the lyrics of so many of the more contemporary pieces of music that we sing -- and the endless and unthinking repetition of verses, choruses and phrases.

I don't know how the young man in the picture would respond to what I have just said because there was no such thing as contemporary music of that kind in church settings back then -- we listened to the Beatles and Rolling Stones sing that stuff!

I know that the seeds of what I was going to become were there back then, but I'm not sure that I would have guessed how the youth would give birth to this older man. If God gives me another quarter century of life then it will be interesting to see how the even older man then will look back on the relative youngster I am now, and the mere babe in arms I was then. I hope to goodness that I am not a bad-tempered old curmudgeon!

A Week of Weeks

The Prince of Wales talking to me together with the Principal and Bursar
after viewing the plans for new buildings at Ridley Hall

As you can see from the above picture we have had quite a week at Ridley Hall -- probably one of the most momentous and busy in the whole of my forty years of ministry.

The Prince of Wales dropped by for tea on Tuesday, and it fell to me to coordinate and stage manage the event. The Prince seemed to enjoy himself very much and had good conversations with sixteen Ridley students training for ordination in the Church of England or for youth leadership. It was valuable for the future Supreme Governor of the Church of England to meet some of those who will be ecclesiastical leaders when he comes to the throne.

I don't want to leave you with the impression that this is something that happens every day for this was the first royal visit to the college since its doors opened in 1881. It has certainly raised our profile in Cambridge, with Ridley being on the front page of the local paper twice in a couple of weeks. My impression of the Prince having met him briefly is rather different from the image that the media paint of him.

But that wasn't the end for the week, because on Thursday we had a major event at Lambeth Palace hosted by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It kicked off among major donors and potential donors the campaign that we hope will put new academic and residential facilities for students at Ridley Hall -- the first building of its kind since 1914. Again, it was my responsibility to make it happen. It didn't help that there were torrential rains all afternoon and evening despite nothing being forecast. However, it went off well and we seem to have gathered some new friends who we believe are going to help us to make the expansion of Ridley Hall a reality.

But that isn't the end of it all. At this very moment, even as my fingers hit the keys, the Council of the College are working toward the selection of a new Principal and we were all tied up in that yesterday. Meanwhile next week we have a very important Council meeting, an Alumni/ae event with 150-200 participants, and the first lecture in a series of public lectures in memory of Professor Charlie Moule with Bishop Tom Wright as the speaker. We aren't quite sure how many visitors will be coming for that, but we have learned someone has made it the primary reason for coming from the USA.

Someone suggested to me the other day that I might be slowing down now in preparation for retirement. I had to chuckle because I have never being going so hard in my whole life. While I expect retirement will happen one of these fine days, right now it is a dirty word as there is just too much to do for the Kingdom of God!

The Challenge of Adjusting

Author Laurie R. King, in whose company I have been spending a lot of time since coming to England

During the last eight months I have been less than assiduous about keeping up my blog, and I apologize to any regular readers for this -- if there are any regular readers left! Some of you probably think that I have more or less dropped off the edge of the world, while others might be relieved they are hearing less from me! I haven't disappeared and am still here on the edge of the English Fens, working as hard as I ever have, and puzzling to adjust to the British way of doing things!

I have to confess that while there are times of great delight and satisfaction, there are also days of utter frustration. The truth is that I was in the USA for so long that I don't think or respond to life and reality as Brits do. Also, my use of North American vocabulary has been the source of entertainment to some of my colleagues at Ridley Hall.

In the midst of all this there are times of a deep and even painful missing of the United States. It is fascinating that I still dream in American, as it were. I do not remember in the nine months that I have been here ever dreaming in an English setting -- they have all been set in Tennessee or some other part of the US (last night, for example, I dreamed I was elected a US Senator for Texas -- glory knows where that one came from!). The other night I woke in the wee small hours and lay there for a full thirty seconds trying to work out precisely where I was and what I was doing here. All this, I have concluded, reflects a massive dislocation and disorientation at a significant depth in my psyche.

One of the side effects of this is the amount of mental and emotional energy I am using up as I adapt to a new life and lifestyle after three decades in the States. A by-product is that my concentration and creativity quotient are both at a very low ebb. I can just about manage to put together an occasional sermon and writing my daily devotions, but apart from what is required for my work I tend to be short of the emotional and spiritual wherewithal to do some creative exploring and branching out mentally and imaginatively.

Making major adjustments upsets the life of different people in different ways. Some may gobble up intellectual stimulation as a result of being tossed around so much, but I am finding the demands made by transitioning to be so enormous that reading serious books that are filled with significant content requires more intellectual energy than I have, and I sometimes fear that I might never get that side of myself back.

Instead of digging into works that are meaty and demanding, I am reading far more fiction than I have for a long time. Having been recently introduced by my elder daughter to the Mary Russell mysteries written by Laurie King, a San Franciscan who has some transatlantic roots in Oxford, I am devouring these with a passion. It is as if my psyche and imagination need taking care of and recharging before I am able to launch back into heavier fare.

It just was as I started writing this that I met a man who had recently gone through a similar episode, and it was a comfort to know I am not alone in attempting to garner the concentration levels and capacity to do things that make a high demand. After a heavy business schedule with much traveling globally for years and years this particular individual began slowing down as he felt the end of his career approaching. He was actually considering how he would redirect his life. This was the point at which his brain seemed to clam up, and coupled with a bout of ill health it had taken eighteen months to get his head back on so that he could read significantly and write again.

It is obviously a human shortcoming to refuse to accept that there are certain life events that leave us hollowed out and in need of recovery time if we are to be generative and creative in the future. I plead guilty to being one who finds it difficult to listen to the inner voice that prompts me to slow down a bit at times. I like to think that this fallow time for me is being a bit like a connoisseur laying down a cellar of fine wine that isn't yet mature, but will be able to be enjoyed later on.

So I have been spending the last months observing and learning again what reality look like from a British point of view so that I can eventually participate in and draw upon the seeds of ideas being stored up. In a way I suspect what I am doing is a little like adjusting to sharing my life with a new spouse, a process that probably requires meeting some of the unknown or overlooked darker and nastier sides of one's partner personality and being -- as well as enjoying the nice, sunny, and enjoyable components of their identity in a more intense and satisfying way.

The underlying truism is that this country has changed enormously since we left and this is what we are trying to come to terms with, discovering things about this land that I didn't really wish to know. Such reality therapy takes a toll. I am developing this impression that while Britain has succeeded in the material world after fighting world wars followed by a long time in the economic wilderness, the price it has paid has been its soul. The country in which I now live is wealthier and more prosperous by far than the one I left, and in true British fashion is muddling through, but it is a country that has happily sacrificed much of its historic identity.

The solid and serviceable have given away to the transitory and garish, in everything from the way people furnish their homes to the kind of lives they set out to lead. Being British today is more about supporting a soccer team than belonging to a nation. In some ways Britain feels very much like a historic building whose innards have been gutted and replaced with decor that may for the moment be fashionable but in every other respect are transient.

I hope in due course I will have some mature and constructive comments to make about this reality, but right now I'm not ready so must continue nurturing my psyche and soul with the hope that in due course I can enter into British life with the kind of verve that I enjoyed those many years in the USA.

Trying to Sell an Environmentally-Friendly House in Tennessee

A Fenland Landscape

Early this morning, soon after the sun had risen, I took Freddy, our Silky Terrier, for a long walk over the Fens where on the lodes (or drainage canals) we saw a spectacular cross-section of waterfowl. Walking in the cool English spring sunshine helped clear my brain following an unexpectedly difficult week.

Perhaps at the heart of the week was the deepening realization that in my growing sense of being settled here I had let certain guards down and had started talking and trying to relate to people as if they were Americans. Even as I turned over in my mind a little presentation I made yesterday afternoon to an essentially friendly group, I probably was a little too unguarded for most of my listeners. Americans tend to reveal more of themselves and allow themselves to be read far more readily than the British.

Three decades in the USA have left little of the English reserve with which I crossed the Atlantic in the 1970s, and now I am having to work out how to synthesize the American me with the British way of doing things and managing relationships. With this comes another level of reverse culture shock, one which after seven months or so here is not so readily forgiven by my British friends and colleagues who probably believe I have now adjusted back to this land. So, as I walked across the Fens this morning I was doing some painful reassessing of myself.

In the midst of all these ponderings I found myself gazing at an indescribably beautiful wooden house, and that got me thinking about my own house in Tennessee that has not yet sold despite being on the market since the end of last August.

I found myself ruefully wishing that I had it here in Britain where it would be not only a relatively easy sell, but I would get mucho, mucho pounds for it! Not only is housing here exotically expensive, but environmental sensitivity is far higher here than it is among the general public in the USA, An environmentally-sensitive house like ours would be in very high demand -- probably with people bidding, counter-bidding, and scrambling over one another to get it.

There sits our beautiful home in Tennessee and the only offers we have had have been derisively low -- what one Tennessee friend with a lot of financial smarts has described as carpetbagging. While we know we are experiencing the post-sub-prime blues, it does sadden us. Our home sits on three lovely acres, overlooking a beautiful valley, it is well-insulated and generates its own electricity while at the same time heating its own water, but no one seems to want it unless we are almost prepared to give it to them.

That is probably a sad commentary on environmental consciousness in the USA, especially in Tennessee, the state which we love the best and where we lived the longest. Whatever you believe about global climate change, and I think the evidence is overwhelming that it is happening, just being a responsible steward of the planet should encourage us to think in these terms when it comes to housing. What we have learned from our realtor is that some of those who have viewed it have been more concerned about the lack of granite counter-tops than the things that make the house such an energy treasure!

I suspect that we were such pioneers when we built the house as far as America is concerned that even the early adopters are wary of doing something that might make them look silly (tree-hugging wackos) -- even if it does leave them several thousand dollars a year better off each year when it comes to utility bills! But not only are the bills lower, so is your carbon footprint -- again, not a bad thing.

Yet having said that an environmentally-friendly house would sell like hotcakes on this side of the Atlantic, I was talking to a scientist researcher a month or two back who was telling me that in North America in general there are far more opportunities to explore and experiment with alternative fuels and energy sources than in Europe, and that despite all the words that come from official chatterers in this country the USA is probably ahead on the technology. The problem here, he asserted, is that regulation is out of control -- and land to do such things is very difficult to find.

I guess that on all sides of the world we are struggling to work out how to live on a small planet with such limited (and over-stretched) resources. I suspect that for the next few years the issue of food security is going to be as high up the agenda as the climate, partly because there is such a food crunch and partly because our food situation has been made more difficult by uncertainties created by the climate.

The challenges before us are enormous.

Easter and Human-Aminal Embryo Research

Hybrids are made from an animal egg mixed
with human genes

Over the Easter period perhaps the biggest issue in the British news has been that of scientific research using animal-human hybrid embryos. The issue has been smoldering for a while, but legislation is being thrust with indecent haste through Parliament to allow British scientists, within careful limits, to create and use in research these chimeras. Last week in his Easter message this development was challenged by the Cardinal Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland.

Cardinal Keith O'Brien stated, "It is difficult to imagine a single piece of legislation which more comprehensively attacks the sanctity and dignity of human life than this particular bill." The Cardinal's words hit the nail firmly on the head, and others have supported and endorsed his deep anxiety about what is going on. Bishop Tom Wright of Durham said in his Easter sermon that "Our present government (is) pushing through, hard and fast, legislation that comes from a militantly atheist and secularist lobby."

Bishop Tom goes on to say, "We create our Brave New World here and now; so don’t tell us that God’s new world was born on Easter Sunday. Reduce such dangerous beliefs to abstract, timeless platitudes. The irony is that this secular utopianism is based on a belief in an unstoppable human ability to make a better world, while at the same time it believes that we (it’s interesting to ask who ‘we’ might be at this point) have the right to kill unborn children and surplus old people, and to play games with the humanity of those in between. Gender-bending was so last century; we now do species-bending. Look how clever we are! Utopia must be just round the corner."

For some years now I have been asserting that one of the most pressing issues before us is just what does it means to be human. As Tom Wright implied on Easter Sunday, the whole sexuality debate and controversy is merely a symptom of the confusion that prevails, for the culture has abandoned anything that approaches a Judeo-Christian understanding of humans as beings made in the image of a sovereign God, while at the same time providing no alternative to take its place. Indeed, not only has no clear alternative emerged, but those who question this so-called scientific advance are being painted (and not for the first time) as spoilers and obscurantists, and that their thinking is an attempt to draw a red herring across the path of scientific advance.

Yet what is spoiling and obscurantist about insisting that we need carefully to define our terms in order to understand where we are and what we are doing before we proceed with a particular course of action? As I have listened to the debate over this past weekend, it has appeared that the government is utterly determined to shove legislation allowing this kind of scientific activity through the House of Commons, so much so that it has little sympathy for the conviction of members of its own party who for religious and/or ethical reasons are saying, "Hey, wait a minute..."

The reasoning for proceeding with this course of action is pretty threadbare:

1. There are nationalistic commercial reasons for doing this -- we don't want to tie our scientists' hands behind their back in such a way that it prevents Britain from retaining its position as a global leader in biogenetic research. Such an argument should hardly surprise us because we live in an environment in which economics is king, and if there is an unstated definition in our society of what it means to be human it is that homo sapiens is a consumer and creator of wealth: "I spend, therefore I am."

2. The stated morality behind research of this kind is that out of it might come cures for some of the dreadful diseases that assail millions of people, old and young, around the world. Evan Harris, A Liberal Democrat MP who is a member of the House of Commons Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Select Committee, has said that it is right to conduct research that "might be used to treat people with terrible diseases".

There is a legitimacy to such an argument, but to date the track record arising out of so much biogenetic research suggests that the promise is more significant than outcomes and results. Besides, is it justifiable to destroy or radically tamper with life in the hope that from such activities will come positive outcomes for the human race?

In the last forty years I have been up close to many of the diseases researchers are determined to eradicated, and have pastored (and buried) many who have been suffering from them. Of course, I would love to see such horrible maladies wiped out because I have seen their consequences in the lives of sufferers and their families, but I find myself stumbling over the question of whether it is right to destroy life in order to save life. In this case, does the end justify the means? If we believe that human beings reflect God's image then it is hard to answer in the affirmative. Those who argue along these lines have succumbed to the crudest form of utilitarian thinking.

3. The third argument is that science must be allowed to advance for we stand on the brink of a whole new frontier, and we won't know what opportunities might lie just around the corner if we don't follow this path. True, but the counter-question then has to be posed whether it is appropriate for our race to find out. Just because something is possible does not make it either necessary or right. It is entirely possible for a pilot to land a plane full of passengers on a busy road or a playing field, but only in one landing in a million is it right to do so.

Behind such thinking as this, and it has been expressed variously in a number of books that I have read, is the conviction that we are on the cusp of a new evolutionary development -- and what is so exciting about it is that this time we human beings can control and direct that development (and do not have to leave it to outside, supposedly random, forces). This is a notion that is deeply ingrained in the whole transhuman movement, and that movement is of significant influence in certain scientific circles. While I am not saying that pursuing such a path of research has Frankenstein qualities, I am saying that those who enthusiastically pursue such studies either have not properly thought through the long-term consequences of their actions, or are quite happy about being in such a driver's seat.

The mentality of those who believe this line of research is right seems to reduce human beings -- men, women, babies, fetuses, embryos, -- from being flesh that reflects the divine nature into products to be used and mixed in the process of manufacture -- whether it be manufacture of cures for diseases, or ends up as being something more sinister.

Now as soon as someone says such a thing the champions of such research throw their arms in the air and say that we untutored ignoramuses are meddling in something that is not any of our business. We might respond by affirming that while we may not be experts in this field, is it appropriate for a self-appointed scientific priesthood to make these kind of decisions for the whole human race, for human-animal embryos are playing with the DNA that is at the very root of every persons' being.

It also seems that today, especially when Christians start raises objections to something that is going on, the rejoinder is that it is none of our business, and shouldn't the Church keep its nose out of areas of endeavor and discovery that do not concern it. We have to respond in this instance, "Sorry, but this does concern us very much. We are human beings, we believe there is purpose in God creating us in the way he has, and while meddling with the building blocks of life in this way may not immediately result in some terrible disaster what does it say about the value of being human?"

Let me leave the final words with Bishop Tom Wright:

"Have we learnt nothing from the dark tyrannies of the last century? It shouldn’t just be Roman Catholics who are objecting. It ought to be Anglicans and Presbyterians and Baptists and Russian Orthodox and Pentecostals and all other Christians, and Jews and Muslims as well. This isn’t a peripheral or denominational concern. It grows directly out of the central facts of our faith, because on Easter day God reaffirmed the goodness and image-bearingness of the human race in the man Jesus Christ, giving the lie simultaneously to the idea that utopia could be had by our own efforts and to the idea that humans are just miscellaneous evolutionary by-products, to be managed and manipulated at will. The Christian vision of what it means to be human is gloriously underscored by the resurrection of Jesus, and we as Easter people should make common cause with all those who are concerned about the direction our society is going in medical technology as in so much besides.

…The resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of the final putting-to-rights of all things. In the light of the resurrection, the church must never stop reminding the world’s rulers and authorities that they themselves will be held to account, and that they must do justice and bring wise, healing order to God’s world ahead of that day. Those who want to depoliticize the resurrection must first dehistoricize it, which is of course what they have been doing enthusiastically for many years - and then we wonder why the church has sometimes sounded irrelevant! But we who celebrate our risen Lord today must bear witness to Easter, God’s great act of putting-right, as the yardstick for all human justice."

Choosing A Bishop

During the last couple of years I have found myself close to the selection of a new bishop on either side of the Atlantic, and the contrast between the two approaches could not have been more different.

On Monday morning at 11.00 a.m. London time it was announced from 10 Downing Street that Chris Cocksworth, the Principal of Ridley Hall, is to be the new Bishop of Coventry. Chris had shared this piece of news with just a handful of us in the leadership of the College before the weekend, but it would have been a great embarrassment to all if the statement of the Queen's approval of his nomination for election to the position had been upstaged. Even the people in the Diocese of Coventry did not know until a smiling and nervous Chris was brought out into the ruins of the old blitzed cathedral to meet them and the press.

There are wheels within wheels in back rooms that produce bishops here. There is a process of feeling out, approaching of candidates, checking credentials, etc., which eventually lead to the bishop-elect's name being announced and everyone applauding. It certainly means that someone of ability can be selected for the task, and while the diocese is involved in the process far more than was the case thirty years or so ago when I left England for the USA, there is still this pall of secrecy that hangs over things. However, it only takes a few months.

What a contrast to the long drawn out battle that we had in the Diocese of Tennessee when we attempted to elect a new bishop. The first stirrings of the process were in the latter part of 2004, the whole of 2005 the Episcopate Committee worked assiduously at the task, and because we took four bites at the cherry before electing John Bauerschmidt as bishop, it wasn't until October 2006 that we had a successful candidate, and then early 2007 before he came on board.

The great thing about the American process was that it is about as public as it could have been, with only those components kept confidential that needed to be. There was an effort to listen to all the voices in the diocese and to take them into account, and then it was up to the diocese itself gathered in convention to do the electing. Finally, the bishops and standing committees of the church had to endorse the election that had been made. A lot of people were involved in the selecting and making of the bishop.

I am absolutely convinced that an English style of electing would not work in the US, given the culture and history of the nation; but given the sort of House of Bishops that it has thrown up in the last couple of generations it has to be asked whether it is working particularly well. On the other hand, given how theologically detached from historic Christianity the Episcopal Church has become, I am not sure that I would want some unknown network of individuals working in private to come up with potential leaders for the dioceses.

I am delighted for our Principal at Ridley that he will soon be the youngest diocesan in the Church of England, and while we will certainly miss him here, my prayers go with him. However, the part of me that has been well-marinated in the American way of doing things wishes that the people could have a lot more say than they seem to get here.

"Rowan Williams is a Wimp" -- or is he?

I confess to being very disappointed when Rowan Williams was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, but as is too often the case I made my judgments about him prematurely and on the basis of limited (or even flawed) information. Perhaps I am a contrarian, but as the general opinion of the leading inhabitant of Lambeth Palace has tended to slip my attitude toward him has been one of increased admiration. That is not to say that I am in agreement of all that he does and says, but I respect the manner that he has attempted to remain faithful to the radical teaching of Jesus Christ while steering his ways through today's impossible and polarized landscape.

At times I am stunned at the accusations made against him, for many of them just do not stand up under careful cross-examination. I suspect that the vast majority those who yell the loudest or throw the smelliest eggs at him have neither listened to what he is saying nor read with care what he writes. I suspect that Rowan himself would not be very patience with those who take his every word as gospel, but I suspect also it must irritate him no end when people attack him for things he neither is nor has said. While he is warm in personal conversation, welcoming, and has a tremendous consideration for those who come into contact with him, he is also one of the most significant minds of our time -- certainly there hasn't been an Archbishop like him since the time of Michael Ramsey (and Ramsey did not have to deal with such a predatory press as that which savages Rowan on a regular basis).

This is all preparation for saying that during the last few weeks my respect and admiration for Rowan Williams has grown. This is not to say that I agree with all that the Archbishop has said or done, but I stand in awe of the manner in which he has handled himself. It is when a person is under great pressure that we see of what they are truly made, and it seems to me that if you look more closely at the man behind the events of the last few weeks (and years) then the Primate of All England has acquitted himself as an intelligent, holy, and gracious Christian leader should.

Lambeth Palace was, perhaps, more than a little naive in the manner it handled the press in the lead-up to the Archbishop's now infamous lecture at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Maybe if he had to do it again he would alter the timing of his interview to the BBC and answered some of the questions put to him with different wording, but I respect him enormously for not backtracking from the substance of what he actually said (rather than he is reputed by journalists to have said), and neither did he apologize for raising a very difficult and emotional issue for a pluralistic and multi-religious society to address. He was subsequently sorry for any pain he might have caused, and that is entirely within character, but he spoke from the basis of mature reflection on the dilemma presented to British society by a large Islamic minority in our midst.

I have since gone through the lecture the Archbishop gave with a fine tooth comb, and while I am not entirely in agreement with him, he did not say anything that a faithful and orthodox Christian need be ashamed of. It is significant, I think, that we have heard support for the Archbishop from both the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and several leading evangelical ethicists, which suggests that Rowan Williams is not so far out on a limb as the press would like you to believe -- just that he has courage to put onto the table a pressing social issue that has strong theological overtones.

Through this whole sorry business the Archbishop has handled himself graciously and firmly, and with great integrity. It is this which I find myself admiring. A couple of the days after the storm broke, he preached in Cambridge at the memorial service for Professor Charlie Moule, and in the pulpit we saw and heard from a man who is captured by and committed to the living and risen Lord Jesus Christ. I have never heard a memorial service address with such conviction and depth. Then during the last few days both English archbishops were in Cambridge for the kick-off of the university's 800th anniversary and the Diocese of Ely's 900th, and although I was not present the addresses given and the way in which together they handled theological students and seminarians from across the spectrum reflected commitment, intelligence, and godliness.

Perhaps there is an inevitability in an aggressively secular society for Christian leaders, especially if they appear a bit quirky or are intelligent way beyond anything the lowest common denominator can imagine, to be attacked, misrepresented, and ridiculed by the forces that are at play. What is more difficult to stomach is when these individuals are set upon by those who should be their own spiritual kith and kin. Some of the things that have been said about Rowan Williams in the last few weeks, and by those who are fellow-travelers along the Christian way, have been at time scurrilous. I just hope the Archbishop doesn't sit up late at night surfing the web looking for them, for they would cause him a great deal more pain.

As I have watched Rowan Williams these last few months (and you get a much closer view in England than the USA), I have seen a man who is an example of Christ to me. He appears to be someone who has been so captured by the redeeming love of Christ that it is reconciliation and forgiveness that he seeks, even when being bombarded by viciousness from Christians and secularists alike (although for different reasons). As a person he seems to be in the process of thoroughly absorbing the message of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, of forgiving his enemy and turning the other cheek. Wherever we are on the spectrum of the conflict that is tearing at the very fabric of the church, this is an example from which we can all learn and seek to emulate.

Neither does the Archbishop shirk responsibility for what he says and does, or hide from his detractors. Some of the nastiest things have been said about him by those (often professing to be Christian) who are delighted to lash out on the Internet, but then hide behind fictitious aliases or wear the cloak of anonymity. To me this distasteful Internet practice demonstrates an unwillingness to stand behind your own words and convictions, and is in many respects both cowardly and dishonest. Rowan Williams can be accused of neither.

Like so many who are denigrated in their own time, I suspect that when the history of these times is written that Rowan Williams will be treated more kindly than many are treating him at the moment. While I am not asking readers to like him or even to agree with him, I would encourage them to (if only grudgingly) admire him and respect him as he attempts to do one of the most impossible jobs in the Christian world.

Out of the depths...

The container being backed into our driveway in Waterbeach, near Cambridge, England

After one hundred days spent living separately on different sides of the Atlantic, Rosemary and I are now together again under the same roof with our dog and cat, and just a few days ago our container of household goods was backed onto our driveway and out poured the old friends that make our house feel more like our home. Our furniture and treasures had survived its journey across the choppy waters of the North Atlantic in winter.

Yet while domestic life is more settled there has been a sense of anxiety about what is going on in the church back in the USA, together with a sense of distance and powerlessness to do anything. In the next couple of days the Diocese of Tennessee will be holding its convention, and for the first time in as long as I can remember I will be absent. We had a battle at a recent convention over the feasibility of proxy votes, and part of me wishes that I had one! Then hardly a day or two passes without some announcement or event that confirms the steady unraveling of what was once the Episcopal Church.

Every time I think that I might be getting inured to what might be going on something happens that makes my stomach heave, brings tears to my eyes, makes me see red, or just drops a pall of deep sadness over me. Just as it was hard for me to let go of our home in Tennessee, so it is hard to live at a distance from what is going on back in the States, particularly the parting of friends, as John Henry Newman described it.

What is hardest is when people alongside whom you have labored in the Gospel for many years cut off communications with you, probably because they know you will not be sympathetic with the course that they have chosen to pursue. Tangentially, I read a little piece on a website the other day by a woman agonizingly anticipating the break-up of her marriage, and found myself feeling many of the same emotions over the break-up of the church in which I have been a priest for more than three decades.

It seems we have reached such a point in the process of fragmentation of the church where the thinking is that if you are not with us, you are against us - so we just don't want to have anything to do with you. Add to that the inner confusion that we all feel when such things happen, not knowing quite how to relate with or reach out to others who have taken a very different path from the one that we would prefer them to have followed. Also, those who separate are implicitly passing judgment on those who remain by their actions, even if that is not their intention.

In some ways many of the feelings I have been trying to come to terms with are a bit like the ones I had when the Charismatic Renewal began asserting itself. I am old enough to have been there to see almost the beginning of this movement in the life of the church, and have watched it wax, wane, change shape, and mutate over the intervening years.

I was a greenhorn in seminary in London, naive and enthusiastic, when the charismatic thing burst upon us. I remember vividly around the middle of my first term that Dennis Bennett arrived from the United States and addressed a crowded gathering of seminarians after dinner one evening. In the wake of that meeting what had seemed to be the stable life of the college community was disrupted as some received what was being described as the baptism of the Holy Spirit, others wanted to but did not, while others still had profound theological and spiritual questions about whether it was appropriate at all. For much of the rest of that year there were often unspoken dividing lines and uncomfortable tensions as we struggled to come to terms with what was going on around us.

By my final year there most of us had worked out how to live with this new phenomenon, but when we got out into ordained ministry and the movement continue to spread its wings and flourish, we found ourselves dealing with it in our various parish settings. Those tensions and implied judgments were very much part of the spiritual and relational geography of church life - especially if you were (as I was) working among young people. There was a sense of there being First Class and Second Class Christians dependent upon the nature of your experience and the exuberance with which you wore it.

Of course, within the context of these tensions subtly different cultures developed with variant hermeneutical approaches to the Scriptures' teaching about spiritual gifts. Naturally, dependent upon your experience of the Spirit in these circumstances was the line of thinking and acting that you followed.

Thankfully much of the tension that went with that particular tide has ebbed and with it has come to a more holistic and balanced understanding of the nature and ministry of the Holy Spirit. However, the recent unpleasantness in the Episcopal Church has, in me at least, revived that sense of implied judgment that is being made. Maybe I am interpreting this wrong, but there is the sense on the part of those leaving that those of us who remain on the basis of what we believe to be good reasons rooted in Scripture and the catholic faith, are hopelessly compromised. We are Second Class Christians who are not taking Scripture seriously, and consorting with those who have sold the Gospel down the river. Of course, every side considers itself more Anglican than the other, and there are no exceptions here.

Add to this the further complication that some have shrugged their shoulders and said a plague on Anglicanism altogether, we don't want to be part of any of this any longer, and so have gone off to Rome or Constantinople. What has surprised me with some of them is that a few have in a relatively short time done such a flipflop that they are affirming beliefs that they gave the impression just a few months ago were nowhere on their radar scope. Their attitude now is that they have found the true truth and, perhaps, have put on all the Ultramontane clothing necessary to demonstrate their new allegiance, and scorn those of us left squirming in the Anglican pit.

And so far I have just been talking about the so-called "conservatives."

Those on the other and "progressive" side of the theological and ideological fence are demanding an almost subservient loyalty to the institution, and are saying woe betide you if that does not happen -- we will use the full force of the canons against you to get you to comply. This is a wrestling match and submission is being demanded. Reading what some of them write there is an extraordinary sense from many of them that they are correct and enlightened, while the rest of us are lost in Neanderthal thinking and backward-looking obscurantism.

This is all such a muddle of attitudes and mindsets that it is almost impossible to weave any meaningful way through it. Human fallenness and arrogance rears its ugly head at every corner, and perhaps most of us think better of ourselves and our positions than we really should.

I sat this morning for a while with the only book written by my late friend, Michael Howard, God in the Depths. Michael had a sequel in mind for this remarkable little tome, but alas, he died just months before he was due to retire and to get on with that work. The depths (or the deep) about which he talks are that encircling darkness that is always there within the context of the human condition. They are the gale across the heaving ocean, they are the chaos and emptiness that are an intimate part of being human, "they are 'non-being' out of which, in God's hands, things 'become'" (Page 31).

In institutional and ecclesiastical terms this is what we are wrestling with. The depths now roil in the life of the Church, the community of faith having itself been made chaotic. Howard tells us that thius is the opposite of community. "The Church is a partner with the Spirit in the re-creation of the earth through the victory of Jesus over the powers of the deep," Michael Howard wrote, but in the process we will find ourselves embracing the deep by living with doubts, uncertainty, incipient chaos, and mystery (Page 131).

The church as we know it is being swamped by the deep, and perhaps all of us crave for Christ to stand on the prow of the sinking vessel and say to the churning waters, "Peace, be still." But that would be to short-circuit the process of finding our way through the discomfort, fear, and anguish bearing the Cross, being borne by it, and allowing the Cross to form and shape us anew. The Cross clearly has to be the starting point for any rebuilding of the Church, and the Cross is the ultimate place of letting go, the place above all others.

As I look at us all in the Anglican family, especially the Anglican family in the United States, we don't have a lot to be proud of or arrogant about, however we might be preening our feathers. We have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, all of us, in destroying a large part of what we inherited, and now seem set on policies that will tear what remains to shreds. There are no simple answers to the questions with which we struggle, but right now every one seems to determined to stand upon their own self-righteousness and to vaunt themselves up. As we do so, we tumble further into the Deep.

Keeping a Spiritual Journal

The other day a friend said to me that he was thinking about starting the practice of keeping a journal and I had kept one for a while, hadn’t I? We chatted a little about it, but it was neither the time nor the place to go into any depth. Since we had that conversation Christmas has passed, the Kews have moved with animals across a wide ocean, and now we have a long weekend to adjust to being a family of husband, wife, dog, and cat together in our English home before I get back to work and Rosemary begins teaching online.

As I couldn’t talk to David while in Tennessee I am going to talk to him through this entry – and allow anyone who wants to eavesdrop on what I say. With the New Year beginning, starting to keep a journal might be something that others want to do.

I got into the business of journaling forty years ago. I didn’t set out on my journal for any highfaluting reason but because I was having trouble concentrating on my prayers. Praying has never been an easy business for me as I have one of those minds that zips off after every red herring. While sometimes red herrings can be substance for prayer, most of the time they are distractions and diversions with little to do with the task in hand. My journal began as an act of desperation: the only way I could keep my mind on my prayers was writing down what I wanted to say to God.

So, having purchased a modest notebook I set about the process. It wasn’t clever or sophisticated, but it did the trick because I find myself writing jibberish if I don’t keep my mind on the task. I really envy those for whom prayer seems to come naturally, with a flow of words between themselves and God that is akin to a conversation!

I guess from that point onward what I was doing evolved, and over the years it has been on the pages of several dozen rather ordinary notebooks that I have wrestled through my relationship with God. Here’s the first important point about keeping a journal, what you write in it is between you and God, and is certainly not the business of anyone else, even your nearest and dearest.

A few years ago I was reading a biography of Tolstoy. The great Russian novelist kept a journal for many years, but his biographer suggested that he wrote with one mind on eventual publication and so there was some posturing. Also, as his relationship with his wife deteriorated he realized that she was reading it after he went to bed, which then prompted him to use it to poke at her knowing that she would never admit to peeping. This was obviously a man engaging in keeping a journal for questionable reasons!

What began for me as a place to record my petitions gradually moved beyond that. Certainly all these years later I write out my prayers like I always did, and it is obvious that the journal is addressed to God, but it is also the place where I bring into the presence of God far more of myself than that.

I am writing this the day after Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Pakistan, a cause for great anxiety and much grief both in her homeland and beyond. Her death will definitely have a profound impact upon the world and I found myself writing and praying about that, but I went beyond looking at parallels in history and the meaning of God’s providence in such tragic circumstances. My journal entry became about God’s nature and purpose, enabling me to ponder the mysteries of the divinity as they intersect with the fallenness, evil, and foolishness of humankind. I said nothing new and definitely did not develop my own understanding of the Lord any further, but it enabled me to grapple with and lift to God a tragedy within the context of my praying.

Sometimes my journal is fed by the Scripture that I am studying in my own devotional life, and I might meditate on a the whole passage or just one tiny fragment of it. At other times I find myself ruminating on something someone has said or an insight (pleasant or otherwise) about myself. My journal is a place where I can bare my soul not only to God, but also to myself for I find myself able to identify and tussle with things about me and my personality that I would often prefer to avoid.

Yes, my journal is filled with joy and delight, but it is often a place of confession and penitence, and there have been occasions when the writing has been accompanied by tears and deep heartrending. It is because my journal is designed for the Audience of One that I am able to do this, pulling no punches about myself as I do so. I hate let’s pretend religion, and have discovered that this spiritual diary has the capacity to keep me honest not only in God’s presence but with myself and with others.

If a journal is a place of confession and penitence, it is also a place where the immensity of life is agonized over. One of the problems for many of us is that we tend to live life on the surface, either ignoring or avoiding some of the deeper and more tangled challenges. There are many doubts and fears that I find myself mulling over and trying to work through. I loved what Os Guinness wrote years ago that doubts are the growing pains of the soul, and my journal is definitely a place where doubts of all kinds surface and are explored.

Sometimes, like a sore in my mouth that my tongue refuses to leave alone, I will come back to these issues ad infinitum, kicking them around, poking at them, and trying to get inside why it is that this thing might be troubling me. But this is what God intends for us. Our faith does not grow and deepen if our life remains unexamined, and a component of prayer is examining ourselves and our mind in the presence of the Most High God.

What is fascinating when going through journals years or even decades later is how things that seemed insurmountable issues back then have now either melted away or been put into an entirely different perspective. In addition, requests are made and there is a record of those prayers being answered. Diaries and journals that have a prayer-related orientation are a wonderful record of God’s dealings with each of us. One of the pleasures of keeping such journals is going back over them and discovering not only how we have grown and changed, but also how within the context of this happening we have gained a clearer understanding of what God is truly like in the manner that he confronts, cares for, and shapes us.

Just as I am bound to spend time with Scripture each day, because my journal and prayer life are now so closely interwoven I also try to spend daily time with it. Now there are days when I don’t manage it, and I don’t put myself onto a guilt trip for missing this important part of my life. It is when I go two or three days in a row without getting into my journal that I start getting anxious because it tells me that I am letting my spiritual disciplines slip. But there is more to it than that, because when I avoid my journal it is evidence to me that I am seeking to avoid something in my life that needs to be dealt with: be it sin, shame, confusion, guilt, a relationship gone bad, or whatever. I probably know in my heart what it is, but I am not necessarily eager to see what my heart thinks there in blue-and-white upon the page.

And it is important to me that it is written on the page because I know I would never do it properly if I used my laptop. Others might be different, but just as it is important to me to receive communion kneeling if I possibly can, so it is important to me to have the white, lined page before me and the pen in my hand. There is an indelibility when the words are on the page, while on the computer it can be erased or edited until I think I have got it right. Often what goes on the page, even if the spelling is rotten and the grammar awful, is the heart truly speaking.

Sometimes I will open my journal not knowing what I will be writing about, at other times the subject matter may have been on my mind for days and now I am letting it out to see the light of day. On those days when I don’t know where to begin I just start writing, seeking God to guide me into all truth. It is often amazing what come flowing out and some of those entries are the most fruitful.

Entries don’t have to be long. Sometimes I will write no more than half a dozen sentences, and there are rare occasions when I might write several pages, but most of the time it is 300-500 words. This works for me, but others may go about this in an entirely different way.

Not long after C. S. Lewis’s death, his brother, Warren, was discovered making a mighty bonfire in the garden at The Kilns of letters and journals by his brother. While some were retrieved, others were lost. I like to think that my journals will be destroyed in the same way by my survivors after I am gone from this world because there is much in there that is between me and my Maker. Through my journals I have learned to pray, and praying can at times be a raw and messy business, as are some of these books.

So, David, I hope that will get you started…

Going down to the sea in ships

For nearly two and a half years I have lived in the company of several remarkable men. I met the first of them in a chance encounter with an audio book which I listened to on a long car ride, and this set me off on an odyssey that almost three dozen novels later is nearly over. The men I am talking about are Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin, the product of Patrick O'Brian's productive mind, then more recently I've come back into contact with C. S. Forester's hero, Horatio Hornblower.

It was Patrick O'Brian who launched me on this journey that has given me such delight while feeding my own imagination -- something that I have always believed especially important for a preacher to do. I am not a nautical person. My father-in-law was a civil servant with the Royal Navy so my wife has always had this yearning for the sea, but I am a landsman who will get a touch of seasickness on the shortest ferry journey. Yet I have found myself deeply stimulated by my immersion in the period of the long drawn out conflict that was the Napoleonic Wars.

Because we had read O'Brian's Master and Commander series Rosemary and I went on to read the whole Horatio Hornblower saga. The Hornblower stories were written by C. S. Forester during the years that straddled World War Two. I had tried them when I was a kid and had not acquired the taste, but fifty years later I came back to them with gusto, and reveled as much in the glorious tapestry of adventure and interrelationship as I did in the Aubrey-Maturin tales.

Now, as this epic spasm of novel reading draws to a close I find myself determined to learn a great deal more about the Napoleonic conflicts against whose backdrop our fictional heroes lived out their lives, fighting, prevailing, and often grieving deep wounds and loses. I had never actually been able to place the Napoleonic Wars when it came to their importance in world or British history, but now I realize them to have been a major turning point. They enthrall me -- as have the fictional characters on whose lives I have eavesdropped.

Jack Aubrey, Patrick O'Brian's creation, is a complex personality, a gentlemanly mixture of swagger and kindness. He is an extrovert, a man's man, someone who grabs life with both hands, and seemingly loves nothing better than a good fight -- especially if it helps him acquire prizes by capturing other vessels and their cargoes with the result that he and his crew get a percentage of their value. His foil is Stephen Maturin, the ship's doctor, who is an even more complex individual, an Irishman with a Catalan father who aligns with Britain because of his loathing for Napoleon and the evil that he wreaked in the Iberian peninsula.

Jack Aubrey is shrewd and cunning at sea, but he is also a lamb for the slaughter when on land -- a fool who is easily parted from his money by those who promise to make him richer quicker. He knows how to fight and inspire men, but you always sense that he is a little at a loss when he is in the company of his wife, family, and polite society. I suspect that his shortcomings on land was fairly typical of sailors of that age used to tours of duty that would be months or even years in length.

But there's another side to Jack Aubrey, for he is the man of war who loves music. In this he is a complete contrast to Horatio Hornblower for whose wooden ear turns music into a raucous din to be endured rather than enjoyed. Aubrey is a halfway decent violinist, and it is music that cements his deep, brotherly friendship with Stephen Maturin. There's many an evening when they have sat in the captain's cabin playing string duets, for Maturin was a pretty good cellist. If other musicians happen along, then they are dragged into this business of music-making, even music writing.

While Jack Aubrey is bluff and hearty, Horatio Hornblower continually fights internal battles with himself. Like his hero and namesake, Horatio Nelson, a little while on land and he has lost his sea legs, so seasickness is his unwanted companion whenever he gets back on board a ship after time a-land. Then there are these inner uncertainties that dog him even as he rapidly ascends the ladder of naval promotions, proving himself a strong and courageous leader. It is as if Hornblower never really grows out of being the uncertain boy who was rowed across Portsmouth Harbour to the HMS Indefatigable, where he became a midshipman.

He creates a kind of shell around himself to protect his seemingly fragile psyche, with the result that he barks at subordinates unnecessarily and cannot even tell his best friends his appreciation of them. He makes decisions well, but then in the quiet of his cabin second guesses himself, scared that if the action goes wrong or if the unexpected happens his career will be at an end and the respect that people have for him will evaporate. What thoughtful leader, if honest, has not had such fears and anxieties in the dark of the night after hard decisions have been made?

While Jack Aubrey has a lusty appetite when it comes to the opposite sex, Hornblower doesn't have much of a clue about women. He stumbles backwards into his first marriage to Maria, seemingly unable to walk away from a kind young lady who is the first to show him feminine affection. It is an inappropriate marriage, and throughout he wrestles to hide his pitying true feelings from this poor creature who is his adoring wife. Maria has a sad life, losing two children to smallpox, then dying in the process of giving her husband his son, Richard (what an excellent choice of name!).

Hornblower is off fighting Bonaparte when this tragedy takes place, but it sets him up to marry a woman who he believes is so far above him both socially and in every other way that she is beyond reach. He has the good fortune to become the husband of Lady Barbara Wellesley, the younger sister of the soon-to-be Duke of Wellington, England's greatest general. With such a match to a woman he adores, his continued rise is almost guaranteed.

I have loved the interplay of warfare, the hard life of sailors in those days, the relationships with wives, sweethearts, naval bigwigs, politicians, and the enemy, to name but a few of the factors that are so artfully woven together. Hornblower emerged from the leftovers of a film script that C. S. Forester, an English resident in California for much of his life, was writing. The Master and Commander sequel was imagined into existence by Patrick O'Brian, an Englishman who wished he were Irish and lived much of his adult life in Southern France with his wife. How is it that two determined exiles should write such glorious books about this England about which they had such mixed feelings?

The naval escapades of the Napoleonic Wars were in many ways the climax of the age of wooden ships. For millennia when men went down to the sea in ships and carried out their business in the great waters they had done so in small and by our standards flimsy vessels. The ships that fought in the early Nineteenth Century might have been the climax of wooden ship technology, but although their sailors did not know it within a generation or two they would be replaced by metal creatures driven by steam engines and requiring coaling stations all over the world.

O'Brian and Forster capture the squalor of those old boats: the close quarters in which men lived, the stench between decks, the ghastly food, the damp cold of wintery oceans, the terror of storms tossing them all over the place, the hard work and the countless hardships endured by officers and men alike. The authors have great respect for these tars, for they were a tough race, beyond anything most of us are likely to experience today, and the discipline with which they lived could be cruel and harsh.

But it was upon their backs that the British Empire blossomed. By prevailing at sea against Napoleon's navy, the Britain that emerged from those years of endless warfare was poised to become the preeminent global power. The British developed a supreme confidence, gathered colonies so that the sun never set on the Union Jack, and they were both the dominant trading nation and manufacturing power. The British were to be feared and envied after Napoleon had been finally defeated in 1815, and although not without challenges, they remained the world's top dog for a full century. That dominance slipping from their hands first in the trenches of Flanders and later in the battle to the death against Hitler and his Nazis. In those conflicts British and French were not enemies but fought side-by-side.

The Royal Navy remained the premier sea force for nearly 150 years, finally surrendering this privilege to the Americans during World War Two. Alas, it has continued to shrink and atrophy, and today is a mere shadow of its former self. I don't think the Royal Navy is worried about playing a supporting role to the Americans, but perhaps the tragedy today is that it continues to be pruned and reduced as once Great Britain adjusts to being Little England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

I have enjoyed my thirty months spent with fictional characters who represent beings who laid the foundations of something proud and significant. While these individuals have warts and shortcomings they also reflect an ideal -- men of honor prepared to die for the cause for which they were fighting if that is required of them. We live in an age that glorifies self-interest, and old-fashioned notions like this are either unknown, unrecognized, or unappreciated. I have no desire to romanticize war, and in one of the Hornblower books Forester launches into a tirade against it, but the real battles of life are ultimately only won by men and women of enduring honor and integrity. Furthermore, honor and integrity add touches of civility to a society that has become a dog-eat-dog affair.

Good fiction should stimulate rumination over these and larger concerns. I think that these naval sagas are good fiction and do just that. Characters are given time in book after book to develop, much as personalities grow and mature in real life. I suspect that some of the facets of these players that I have met in my reading have influenced me, and will continue to shape my thinking for a long time to come.

The View from the Bleachers

My memories of the many games of rugby that I played when I was younger were of the tackles, the bumps, the bruises, and those occasional wonderful moments when I could tuck the ball under my arm and run. Because I was on the field my experience of the game was just what my own eyes saw and my own body felt. When I watch a game today, whether live or on television, I have a much better picture of what is actually going on, and can tell you with far greater accuracy what is really happening.

I feel that having moved to ministry in the UK I am now watching the fate of North American Anglicanism working itself out from a seat in the bleachers. In some ways, because I am no longer involved on a day-to-day basis and experiencing the rough and tumble, I can step back a little and try and work out exactly what is going on. Obviously, it is a very personal set of observations, but they come from someone who spent many years, as it were, on the field of play.

When you have an opportunity to stand back from what is going on, you are better able to see all the players in action, and it is a little easier to measure their play against a common set of reference points. Quite honestly, it seems to me that denial of the realities is standard at both ends of the spectrum. The voices of those who ally themselves with the "establishment" and the National Church seem as determined to read the situation through their own set of colored lenses as those at the other end of spectrum to put their own spin on the realities. While those who want everyone to kiss and make up are more sentimental than realistic.

If Kevin Martin is correct, and I think he has been fairer in his analysis of what is going on than most, then for those who continue as part of the Episcopal Church a crunch point is fast approaching when declining numbers and funds will no longer be capable of upholding the infrastructure that presently exists. You might have been able to say until now that its only a relatively small number of parishes that are causing all this upset and, by and large, other than them everything is fine and dandy, but it is no longer just parishes heading for the exit. When dioceses start doing the same then you have to change your tune.

But then, those who are conservative, orthodox, or whatever other label you want to give them, have their own blinkers on when it comes to looking at the realities. It might be a wonderful sense of relief for those leaving to get out from under the antagonistic leadership of the Episcopal Church, but it is incredibly hard and grueling work to create a whole new infrastructure in which to be church. Having been at the front end of a number of new ventures in my time, I know from personal experience the grinding agony of having limited financial resources, relatively little land or property, and how incapacitating it can be to do pioneer work after you have got over the euphoria of getting the new ministry (or whatever) up and started. It requires guts and a special mix of gifts to be a pioneer.

If you look at those who split away from the denominations at the time of the Fundamentalist Crisis in the 1920s, it wasn't until the 1970s that they were in a position to move forward having put a complete new set of structures, seminaries, and so forth, in place. While the parallels between the 20th and the 21st Centuries are not precise, there is plenty of evidence from history that movements take at least a generation to take root and much longer than that to make a systemic difference.

What makes it more tricky for those who are attempting to plough a new furrow is that in many circumstances they are facing crippling legal challenges. I almost gagged when I heard the size of the legal bills facing the CANA congregations in Northern Virginia. If you are starting afresh sums of the size they are having to cough up to the attorneys are crucial in the launching of new initiatives and the firmer establishment of what is there already. It is very handy to blame these lawsuits on Dr. Schori and her legal advisors, but when you take the action of separating from the denomination, knowing what the situation is regarding the ownership of the property, then you have to admit that you walked into this one with eyes wide open.

It is handy to blame what has happened on other people, and certainly the disastrous decisions of the 2003 General Convention were the climax of a long build-up to this crisis, but scapegoating those who you believe caused the problem does not find a way forward, neither does it seem to square with the spirit of Scripture's teaching about finding reconciliation. There is a dysfunctionality on all sides, let's call it fallenness, that has intensified the depths of this tragedy. Put in the language of heaven and earth, the Devil has been having a field day and we have all cooperated with him.

Watching the Rugby World Cup in September and October, what struck me about the way England played was their ferocious determination after a terrible start in the tournament not to let their opponents score. They were dogged in their defensive play, but their problem was that instead of going out to score tries and goals, they tended to play to prevent the other side from scoring against them. When in the final they came up against South Africa, they encountered a team who played a different kind of rugby and knew how to sidestep England's defensiveness.

What I see in the American church right now is that same dogged defensiveness. Each side is saying, "We are not going to let those who are against us win." The result is unappetizing, a war of attrition, which ultimately no one can win, and from which only the lawyers and those who nay say the gospel are benefiting.

Right now the orthodox/conservatives are winning nothing, in the medium and long-term the Episcopal Church loyalists are going to be really digging a deep hole for themselves, and meanwhile the Anglican Communion teeters on the brink of division and, worse, extinction. Clearly, the Anglican experiment as we have known it is floundering in deep water and the outcome for the advance of the Gospel is hardly very encouraging. I am sure that those who are passionate that they are right are going to stomp all over me for what I have just said, but that is what the game looks like from someone who is no longer actively involved. All I can do is grieve and pray, and ask God that at some point he will raise up wiser heads whose voices will be heard above the din.

It is because there are no easy answers that I write as I do. The church as we have known it probably is way beyond any kind of repair, but the dynamics now in place seem to me to promise further rending, further parting of friends, and further bloodlettings. Such a course is one that only leads steadily downward. Each time through history that major crises have shaken American Anglicanism the result has been to further weaken the witness of the church. Isn't it about time that we started to learn from the mistakes of the past while attempting to create a Kingdom future? This isn't about compromise, this is about what does it mean to be faithful to the Lord Jesus Christ.

The End of Term

Looking forward to seeing my animals again!

It seems amazing, but my first term as Development Director at Ridley Hall is now drawing to a close. In a few days I will be boarding a plane back to the USA, and will be reunited with my wife, Rosemary, after our longest time away from one another in nearly forty years of marriage. One of the things that these fourteen weeks apart has re-emphasized to me again is that I am not constitutionally suited to bachelordom and the single life. As Scripture says, "It is not good for man to be alone..." I say "Amen" to that!

What has been interesting, and it came up in a conversation this morning, is how I am perceived by the students and my colleagues here. In the USA I am very obviously English, but here folks are not sure of that at all, and over breakfast with the Principal, an American, and a Canadian student, it became obvious that in this community I am perceived to be an American. That will probably make some of my American friends chuckle, but that's the way it is in perfidious Albion.

This very much came out yesterday at a trustees meeting of the seminary. I will not bore you with the details, but apparently from the way I presented my report, and from a slap across the wrist that I received from one of the bishops, I had forgotten in such situations how to be haved with necessary English reserve. I would hasten to add that I have no desire whatsoever to rediscover how to become English like that again, although perhaps I will have to be a little more careful. There is nothing wrong with a little brashness every now and again, especially if it keeps people thinking and discourages them from being stuffy.

It fascinates me what I have missed in these last few months. Obviously, I have missed Rosemary very, very much, but I have also missed my dog and cat, too. I am looking forward to having them all here in Cambridge with me. But almost as much, I have missed what can only be described as the priestly rhythm of life. It is now more than four months since I last presided over a Communion service, and nearly as long as that since I last preached the Word. These activities, the ministry of Word and Sacraments to which I was ordained in the late 1960s, have shaped the pattern of my life and suddenly they were taken away which left me floundering.

Here I have had no opportunity to exercise these tasks, merely to sit in the congregation and be ministered to. Perhaps that did me a world of good. Certainly, I have learned to squirm as parishioners do, and last Sunday if I had not been a visitor at the church where I was worshiping I would have been tempted to walk out because of the vacuous error that was being proclaimed angrily from the pulpit. Sitting as the recipient of ministry in a congregation is a good place to learn some fundamental lessons about humility and self-control!

I mentioned how empty life could seem without celebrating and preaching to our fellowship group on Monday morning. We were pondering and praying over the high points and low points of this first term of the academic year, and the Principal and I were the only two ordained members of the group. I wasn't fishing, but within minutes I was asked if I would be the celebrant of the end-of-term eucharist for the group, and that was a great joy. Then within 24 hours my phone rang and I was asked to preach and celebrate on a regular basis at St. Andrew's, the village church that I have been attending. Suddenly, after this enforced lay-off I was being given back something that I realize is much more precious to me than I had previously imagined.

So, I return home to Tennessee for two last weeks on Monday. I say home because I realize that home for me on earth is where Rosemary is. It is also my home because that is where one of my houses is, for our beautiful Tennessee homestead is like so many tens of thousands of others, trapped high and dry by the sub-prime crisis. There are nights when I have lain awake getting quite mad at the greed that has created the mortgage crisis that is now enveloping the markets here. I pray that we won't be paying two mortgages for too long.

What has been an interesting phenomenon is that as far as I can recall, I have not dreamed about once about England the whole time that I have been living back here. Instead, I have been dreaming about America -- perhaps that says something about where a large part of my soul is lodged.

Is the worm turning?

There is a piece on today's BBC website in which Tony Blair, Britain's former Prime Minister, admits that his Christian faith is hugely important to him, that when traveling he always sought a church in which to worship on Sundays, but that he kept quiet about it when he was in office because people might think him "a nutter." The program in which he says this is to be aired later this evening, and if I can stay awake until then, I will watch it!

In that one comment Blair summed up the way the British have been enculturated over several generations to assume that a forthright affirmation of Christian faith by anyone, whether they have influence or not, is a somewhat screw loose kind of thing. Richard Dawkins, whose book about God's apparent non-existence was ironically on the Christmas-buys shelf at Borders in Cambridge the other day when I was in there, plugs into that mentality and represents it at the elite end of the spectrum.

This notion that Britain and Europe have shed every last vestige of their Christian heritage is accepted all over the place as the right way of interpreting the facts, but I would suggest that folks should be a little more cautious before drawing such conclusions.

When I was meeting in London this last week, a contact close to the hub of things, told me that actually there are now more churchgoers in the Cabinet that an any time in probably more than a century. While that doesn't prove anything it is certainly worth pondering. In addition, there is regular creative contact between 10 Downing Street and Lambeth Palace, just across the River Thames, and it ought to be remembered that the present Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is a Preacher's Kid who affirms many of the lessons he learned growing up in a Presbyterian manse.

It isn't only in secular Britain that this is happening. When I made my one trip to Australia more than twenty years ago there was a book going the rounds at that time entitled, "Can God Survive in Australia?" With the phenomenon of churches like Hillsong, it is clear that God is surviving, and now the Australians have elected a Prime Minister who makes no secret of his Christian profession. Is the worm turning, and could such a thing happen in other places in the secularized West?

The United States is unique in the openness of its prominent leaders to faith, but most of the rest of the western world is embarrassed when Presidents, senators, members of Congress, or governors talk freely about such things. The chattering classes here see such overt religiosity as gauche, naive, simplistic, reflecting an unthinking childishness that is altogether irrelevant in today's complex and increasingly troublesome world. They wonder what is wrong with such people, which illustrates the anxieties of Tony Blair, and his concern to his faith be under wraps for fear that he would be considered weak in the head -- and therefore unfit to govern.

Meanwhile, if the statistics are to be taken seriously Christian (and Jewish) religious observance in Britain continues to bump along the bottom. The question is how should such figures be interpreted, and should they be allowed to stand alone without prodding or questions being asked of them? Could it be that higher levels of Christian observance by those in political leadership here and elsewhere in the world are merely straws in the wind of something larger that is happening, or are they mere coincidences that mean little? Perhaps it is too soon to answer such a question, but a few years hence we may have a better perspective on a whole array of realities -- and this could suggest that it is the line pushed by the popular media that is amiss.

I have been guilty of over-optimism regarding all sorts of issues and concerns in the past, so it is necessary to keep that side of myself in check. However, as I re-acclimate to the British environment there are other factors that I see. Certainly, there is an undercurrent of distrust of organized religion, but I find myself asking fundamental questions about whether this means that faith itself has been flushed down the toilet.

One of the things that has impressed me is the potential long-term impact of Alpha. While well over two million people have attended an Alpha Course in the UK since 1993, and while Alpha may not be growing as fast as perhaps it once was, there is certainly no evidence of it fading away. Living and working as I do in the heart of one of Britain's healthiest theological colleges there is plenty of evidence that we are seeing some of the fruit of Alpha coming through our doors.

Just as in earlier generations there was a bubble of candidates seeking ordination several years after a Billy Graham Crusade had been held in Britain (some of my contemporaries at seminary came to Christ through Graham), today there is this steady surge coming from the ranks of those whose lives have been touched by Christ through Alpha. Last year, for example, and no one seems to have a clear explanation for it, there was a significant and unexpected increase in those seeking ordination.

A quarter of the British population knows about Alpha, and one person in thirty has attended Alpha, which would suggest that something has to be going on -- and will continue for a while. When I was first ordained the Diocese of London was the fastest shrinking when it came to church attendance, now it is seeing healthy growth in membership and average Sunday attendance. Alpha seems to have been one of the causes of this, together with a diocesan bishop who is willing to think strategically and use tools like Alpha to improve the health of his diocese.

If Alpha is a work of God, then we can expect some kind of long-term impact in altered lives, enriched families, and strengthened moral values. It takes only a relatively small critical mass to experience a transforming faith for that to filter through into wider society. I am not suggesting that Alpha is the one and only reason for spiritual advance, but it is certainly evidence that something is going on, which belies a wooden interpretation of the statistics which might lead us to think God is permanently on the back burner in Britain.

I suspect that Alpha has received the kind of response that it has because of a lot more than clever marketing and Nicky Gumbel's way with words and winning smile. I suspect that Alpha is one of several things that has touched a deep chord of longing in the British heart and psyche. In America, especially the American South, there is a general assumption within the wider culture that life is about a lot more than being a consumer, but that assumption is nowhere near as strong here. This leaves people fishing around for something more.

In Britain you see people living from one self-indulgence to the next. Right now it is Jingle Bells time, but as soon as that is over the television will be shouting to people to start booking their holidays -- a time when sun-starved Brits can turn themselves into sweaty lobsters in Florida, the Mediterranean, or some more exotic spot, convincing themselves that they are having lots and lots of fun, and this is what life is about. And so the cycle continues. I sense that a small but growing number are stopping and asking themselves whether life is about more than this. It only takes so many to do so before the pendulum starts swinging.

Furthermore, I have also found myself in conversations about the Christian faith since being here, where ordinary secular folks are trying to make sense of it in light of the Islam that they see around them. I don't think many native British people find Islam particularly attractive, but I sense that although it is hidden at the moment there are growing numbers asking how Christ stacks up when compared to Mohammad. Such popular comparative religion is probably at an early stages, but I sense we will hear more about it in the years to come.

Then there is this other fascinating phenomenon of Christian in-migration to the UK. We hear an awful lot about Muslims flocking here, as they are, but it could very well be that even more overt Christians are finding their way to these shores. 600,000-700,000 Poles have revitalized the Roman Catholic church in this land, and many of those who have come from Africa or Asia are themselves strongly committed to the Lord Jesus Christ. While the ethnic variety of Britain is far greater than it was thirty years ago when I left this country, within this new diversity are followers of Christ who in the years to come will have a lot to say and do here.

Maybe I am a Pollyanna, but maybe also a worm is turning. Certainly, it can no longer be assumed that Europe is speeding inexorably down a secular highway, although the voice of those who have no religious belief will be loud and strong. Neither can it be assumed that Christianity has lost all its dynamic and spine in the face of secularism and other faiths moving onto its turf. Something seems to be happening here. The Christian church has been written off far too many times in the past and then has popped back for me to want to do such a thing now.