On holiday in Falmouth this summer, and wandering through the town, I was irresistibly drawn in to a bookshop, as I sometimes am. And there on the shelf I saw a book by George Monbiot who writes for ‘The Guardian’ on environmental matters. In it he makes an eloquent plea for the re-wilding of some of our moorland areas.

But what drew me was the book’s title: ‘Feral’. I wasn’t sure why I was drawn in until I read his definition of ‘feral’ as being “in a wild state, especially after escape from captivity or domestication.” And then the lights came on.

Of course I am a feral priest: called to escape the captivity of the institutional Church many years ago by God, and who has since exercised a ministry mainly in spiritual direction outside its domestication. I remember well how scary it felt to leave. A friend described me ‘as a man about to jump off a cliff’ and so it felt. And yet it also seemed that there was no real alternative. And I remember to my great surprise how no longer being a stipendiary clergyman of the Church of England felt a huge relief. I was free: scared but free! I remember how it seemed as if scales fell from my eyes and I beheld a world in glorious colour which previously had been in black and white. And I realised something of what captivity and domestication had done to me.

As a feral priest I had to learn a different set of skills. I had to learn to place my trust in God where previously the unstated assumption was that I should trust the institution and its leaders. I had to trust God to provide, through the agency of Her children, enough money to survive, a roof over my head, and the means to exercise the ministry to which He was calling me.

I also had to learn to trust myself, my own intuitive sense of what priesthood meant. I often talk about ‘internalised’ priesthood as the state in which I have learnt to trust that because God has called me to be a priest there must be something essentially ‘priestly’ about me and that if I try to be truly myself then that priesthood will flow out through me without much conscious effort on my part. I no longer need the external props of ‘priesthood’ as once I did. Don’t get me wrong, I continue to enjoy leading worship and preaching when invited to do so, but my priesthood is not dependent on my doing those things.

Jesus, of course was ‘feral’. He exercised His ministry on the edge of, or outside the religious institution in which He had grown up, and by implication challenged it. So did Francis of Assisi. So do increasing numbers of men and women today: and not just priests, indeed mainly not priests. It is one of the joys of spiritual direction to see someone escape the domestication of what they’ve been taught they should think and do, for the freedom of what they know deep down themselves. There are large numbers of ‘feral Christians’ on the loose. George Monbiot might be encouraged. The process of ‘feralisation’ is a bigger one than he perhaps imagined.

I’m reminded of a phrase of, I think, Richard Holloway, who spoke about feeling himself to be part of a church ‘in exile’. But the two phrases don’t carry the same sort of energy for me. To be ‘in exile’ in a Biblical sense carries overtones of being cast out against one’s will, excluded from what feels like home, and sent to a place to which one does not want to go and where one feels a stranger. It’s a place of pain. To go ‘feral’ may include experiencing all of the above, but for me it also meant a sense of call rather than exclusion, and it points to a sense of discovered freedom and delight in what has been newly discovered. It’s a place of precarious, gracious joy.

Indeed it surely does not need to be like this. Surely something more creative and real could be devised? Let me dream a little.

[1] The 24 tasks in the ordination liturgy together make up a fine statement of what the aims of the Christian Church should be. Why not reframe the language to make it clear that these are the tasks of the whole Church ?

[2] Why not make it plain that this is so by setting the ordination of priests and deacons alongside the licensing of other Church workers, and the confirming and baptism of lay members, in one service? Maybe each Anglican Deanery should have an annual service at which all new clergy, lay workers, and confirmation candidates to be authorised to serve in that Deanery are welcomed and have hands laid upon them. Make sure there is at least one baptism too to complete the cycle.

[3] Why not have a section of the liturgy in which Bishops, Archdeacons and other diocesan officers commit themselves to the resourcing God’s people for these tasks, and accept responsibility for so doing.

[4] Why not have a penitential section in which the Church recognises that while its record over the centuries has been quite good with respect to some of these tasks, in others it has failed miserably, and needs to confess its failings and seek God’s forgiveness?

[5] Why not name that the Church is not the only instrument that God has called to address these tasks, and those being authorised to act in the Church’s name will find themselves working alongside people of other faiths and none who are equally agents of God’s grace and should be treated respectfully and in a spirit of mutual co-operation.

A service along these lines feels to me to be much more in touch with current realities. It links the authorising of the whole of God’s people with a vision of the task to which they are collectively called, and the bigger picture of God’s work in the world of which the Church is but a part. It would not surprise me if people attending such a service with no great Christian commitment might feel called by God to join in this visionary activity; and others already caught by the vision might feel affirmed and encouraged.

I have recently attended Ordination services in two Anglican Cathedrals and I have to admit that it was a mixed experience! I went to support women friends who were being ordained as priests: they are lovely women, who will be excellent priests and the Church is richly blessed that God has called them to serve in it. It was a joy and privilege to be present. The Church of England tends to do these services rather well, and these occasions were no exception.
You can sense that there is a ‘but’ coming and indeed there is, because for me there was also a sense of hopeless unreality, verging on madness, about both occasions which left me feeling thoroughly depressed.

Let me quote what the liturgy required these newly ordained men and women to agree to do as priests: it’s a long list!

They are:
1] to proclaim the word of the Lord and to watch for the signs of God’s new creation.
2] to be messengers, watchmen and stewards of the Lord;
3] to teach and to admonish, to feed and provide for his family,
4] to search for his children in the wilderness of this world’s temptations, and to guide them through its confusions, that they may be saved through Christ forever.
5] to call their hearers to repentance and to declare in Christ’s name the absolution and forgiveness of their sins.
6] to tell the story of God’s love.
7] to baptize new disciples in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and to walk with them in the way of Christ, nurturing them in the faith.
8] to unfold the Scriptures, to preach the word in season and out of season, and to declare the mighty acts of God.
9] to preside at the Lord’s table and lead his people in worship, offering with them a spiritual sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.
10] to bless the people in God’s name.
11] to resist evil,
12] support the weak,
13] defend the poor,
14] and intercede for all in need.
15] to minister to the sick and prepare the dying for their death.
16] to discern and foster the gifts of all God’s people, that the whole Church may be built up in unity and faith.
17] to be diligent in prayer, in reading Holy Scripture, and in all studies that will deepen their faith and fit them to bear witness to the truth of the gospel?
18] to lead Christ’s people in proclaiming his glorious gospel, so that the good news of salvation may be heard in every place?
19]] to faithfully minister the doctrine and sacraments of Christ as the Church of England has received them, so that the people committed to their charge may be defended against error and flourish in the faith?
20] to strive to be an instrument of God’s peace in the Church and in the world?
21] to endeavour to fashion their own life and that of their household according to the way of Christ, that they may be a pattern and example to Christ’s people?
22] to work with their fellow servants in the gospel for the sake of the kingdom of God?
23] to accept and minister the discipline of this Church, and respect authority duly exercised within it?
24] to, in the strength of the Holy Spirit, continually stir up the gift of God that is in them, to make Christ known among all whom they serve?

I have a number of problems with this list.

Firstly, it contains 24 things that they agreed to do with God’s help. You could focus exclusively on just one of these 24 and be fully and usefully employed all week and yet be painfully aware that much had not been done. But to imply that priesthood requires you to try and do all of them is hopelessly unrealistic and damaging to the health and welfare of clergy. Such a list sets the clergy apart as a race of elite super Christians equipped to do everything, it can’t but lead to a sense of guilt and failure, and is likely to encourage a culture of workaholism. It also inevitably devalues the laity.

Secondly, it’s inconsistent. Anybody attempting to honour just a few of these commitments
is likely to become a largely absent partner and parent, and thus to be in breach of number 21: ‘to endeavour to fashion your own life and that of your household according to the way of Christ, that you may be a pattern and example to Christ’s people.’

Thirdly, it makes no mention at all of what in practise takes up the bulk of most parish priests time today: namely church administration, concern about attendance figures, paying the Diocesan share, and keeping the buildings serviceable.

So this language describing the priestly calling is totally out of touch with the reality with which they will find themselves having to contend. It reminds me of those First World War campaigns to recruit young men for the army with idealistic slogans, when in reality they were going to be sacrificed as cannon fodder in the trenches.

Just to make things worse both services were presided over by smiley Bishops who acted for the most part more like TV quiz show hosts with their cheerful repartee and enthusiasm for how wonderful all this is. They appeared to be either in complete denial of the realities of parish life, which I doubt, or acting what they must surely know is a lie. The strain upon them to behave like this must be awful.

And yet……I’m sure that my two friends will be fine priests: they will serve faithfully and well as do most parochial clergy. But why burden them with this dishonesty? It need not be so.

I’ve been thinking more about what I have already written about in ‘Has the English church a future’ and ‘The spirituality of Jesus and why it matters.’ I’d like to develop my ideas a little.

The Church of England is in decline. But so are the other main-line churches in England. So its not a peculiarly Anglican problem. The same thing is happening across much of western Europe. So its not a peculiarly English problem. There’s a massive loss of confidence in institutions generally, be it the press, the politicians, the bankers, the judiciary etc, so its not a peculiarly religious problem. There is something bigger, much bigger, going on here.

So what is a loving God up to? Where is the gift in all this?

A common theme in spiritual direction, and why many people are seeking it, is that they are looking for support and encouragement in trusting their own experience of God, their own inner voice, rather than what those in power are telling them.

These two themes seem to me to fit together: the loss of trust in the corporate wisdom of the institutionally powerful and the discovery of an inner God-given wisdom which people are wondering if they can trust. I discern the activity of God in these two complimentary movements: together they sound rather like an updated rendering of The Magnificat.

And as in The Magnificat, there are all manner of signs of the New Thing that God is bringing into being. I have previously described those that I hear as a spiritual director.

Jesus was faced with a very similar situation I sense. God spoke to Him at His baptism, telling Him of a loving, accepting, encouraging God of few words. A God Who didn’t tell Him what to do. Jesus had to go away to a quiet wilderness place to discern what it meant and what He had to do, and to learn to accept and trust it as being of God.

Having done so He had to live and act out of it, and He soon discovered that while some ordinary people responded to what He said, the religious authorities of His day did not. Indeed they were more preoccupied with maintaining their religious and national institutions than in responding to the authentic voice of God that He had heard. So they opposed Him and eventually sought His death, arguing “that it is more to your interest that one man should die for the people, than that the whole nation should be destroyed.” [Jn 11:50]

My experience is that as with Jesus, so with many today: trusting in one’s own experience of God is likely to lead to the new and exciting things of the Kingdom, but it often comes at a price, as it may well bring you into conflict with the hierarchy of the church. Prophets are rarely welcome!

A few weeks ago as the leaves were coming into bud, I saw these trees alongside the River Nene in Peterborough.  The sight reminded me of this poem by Macrina Wiederkehr:

Slowly

She celebrated the sacrament of

Letting Go…

First she surrendered her Green

Then the Orange, yellow, and Red…

Finally she let go of her Brown…

Shedding her last leaf

She stood empty and silent, stripped bare

Leaning against the sky she began her vigil of trust…

Shedding her last leaf

She watched its journey to the ground…

She stood in silence,

Wearing the color of emptiness

Her branches wondering:

How do you give shade, with so much gone?

And then, the sacrament of waiting began

The sunrise and sunset watched with

Tenderness, clothing her with silhouettes

They kept her hope alive.

They helped her understand that

her vulnerability

her dependence and need

her emptiness

her readiness to receive

were giving her a new kind of beauty.

Every morning and every evening she stood in silence and celebrated

the sacrament of waiting.

Macrina Wiederkehr

I was recently in a church I love for an act of worship with a small congregation, and I found myself wondering ‘At what point does this act of worship begin? And when does it end?’ Does it begin with the words of the opening prayer? Does it end with the Blessing?

I wonder.

Is worship something that we do from time to time in a particular place? Or might it also be a quality of being that could happen at any time or indeed all the time?

The previous afternoon I sat in the sunshine in Greenwich Park smoking my pipe. In front of me were flowers of many different colours all beautiful: red, orange, purple, yellow, white. And all, so it seemed to me, offering worship to their Creator in the only way they knew, simply by being.

There were trees, with fresh bright spring leaves, that have been there from before I was born and will be there still when I am dead, all worshipping their Creator simply by being.

The squirrels worshipped as they played, the birds as they sang and courted each other, the ducks as they bobbed up and down in the water. All worshipping their Creator simply by being, and seeming to enjoy it, and without undue effort.

As I walked back across the heath the sun shone and warmed me as it worshipped, the clouds hurried across the sky as they worshipped, and the wind worshipped as it buffeted my face.

If the rest of creation can worship simply by being, and all the time, then why not me? What is so difficult?

A little over a year ago my wife and I were blessed with twins. Now we have four daughters, and I am surprised at the depth of emotion each of them evokes in me. Whereas once I scarcely felt I had enough love for just me, I now have love for five. I never knew, and even now am surprised to discover, that I have such a reservoir of love within me which seemed to grow deeper the greater the demands placed upon it.

Even when the twins won’t go to sleep at night and I get angry, and the older children wake them once they’re asleep, and I get angrier, yet I know that I love them.

Surprised by these hidden depths of love within me, I reflect on God’s love, and feel that I know it better now. If I can love like this how much more can God? Hosea seems to come by a similar path to a realisation of God’s love, through his love for his faithless wife [chapters 1 & 2], and for his son [chapter 11], both of which he sees as images of God’s love for His people.

I remember clearly how once a woman bringing up her children on her own, not always with manifest success, said to me that she had stopped believing in God when her husband left her. Gradually I have concluded that what she meant was that when she believed that her husband stopped loving her, then she was no longer able to believe that God loved her. Our ability to know God’s love is dependent upon our knowing human love. How else can we know what the experience means?

Jesus preached about God’s love, and demonstrated his own love for the loveless around him –the broken, the poor, the rejected. Perhaps He did that because He knew that unless those people experienced human love they could never grow to know divine love. And He became known as God incarnate, love in a human form, by those who had come to know the love of God of which He spoke, having first been loved by Him.

Perhaps I, in a much lesser way, also become God incarnate in as much as I love my children, and they knowing [I hope] that love, come to grasp God’s love too.

But this depth of human love is shown by all manner and condition of men and women, to their children, their families, to neighbours, to relative strangers even. In them too I see the love of God incarnate, although I don’t imagine for a minute that they would call it that – they would think that I was being very pompous if I named I thus. And in a sense they’d be right. Often I seem to be drumming up to great significance, virtues which some people live with, day by day, very humbly.

The Spirit of God quietly goes about Her business, evoking this love in people for each other; whereas I struggle to talk about it with an air of profundity as if it were a subject only Christians had some experience of.

Last week my step son, his wife and their two children came to stay with us. Their eldest child is a little boy of rising three who talks incessantly and bustles about with great energy and curiosity. His sister is only a couple of months old, so she sleeps a lot, waking to feed and have her nappy changed, and just occasionally she sits in her bouncing chair and gazes at the world. Life goes on around her.

I felt that I’d like to get to know her better, so sometimes I would pick up her chair and balance it on my knee so that we were physically close. I looked at her, waited patiently, and hoped to make eye contact, usually with some success. Her eyes would focus and I found myself looking at her while she looked at me. If I smiled she would often smile back: sometimes she would smile first. She is starting to make sounds and I discovered that if I made sounds in response we got into what might be called a conversation, sometimes light –hearted, sometimes serious : making sounds to each other and both clearly enjoying the experience.

Other members of the family found this amusing, and then I would offer to interpret to them what she was saying! However what delighted me most was the simple business of communication: what passed between us I couldn’t begin to put into words. She and I entered into a sort of communion together. It seemed as if soul was speaking to soul, and I felt that we got to know each other better than I would have thought possible. It was a joy and a delight!

If she became distressed then I would just gently place my hand on her and she would calm down almost immediately. The communication went beyond sounds.

None of this is very surprising. Any parent or grandparent will recognise what I am talking about. I must have done the same years ago when my daughters were small. But as I reflected on it, I realised that what she and I were engaged in is very like prayer. Might even be prayer? Me looking at God, God looking at me, and through my fumbling attempts at communication, and if I was patient and open, finding ourselves closer than I had imagined possible. This little girl taught me something quite profound.

You don’t need a small child to do this of course, gazing intently at almost anything with the right intent, can take you into the same place. But it’s so easy and simple that we mostly overlook the possibility, and fail to find or name the treasure that awaits us there.

Writing this down reminds me of a piece I wrote many years ago, on a similar theme, ‘Fatherhood’, so I’ll add it too.

The spirituality of Jesus and why it matters.

I have been wondering about the spirituality of Jesus, and how I might describe it. Nowhere in the Gospels is it described directly as such, so I need to try and infer it from what we know. There seem to me to be at least several recognisable elements.

[1] Jesus clearly stands within a tradition [see my piece on ‘Did Jesus have a spiritual director’]. He was brought up as a Jew, knew His Scriptures and the traditions which flowed from them. He was versed in rabbinic teaching. So He had a language and a symbolism which He could use with ease when talking about the things of God. Yet He also appears to have felt comfortable in criticising that tradition. For example you might expect Him to have done most of His teaching in synagogues, that would seem the obvious place, but He’s rejected at the synagogue in Nazareth, is described as preaching in the synagogue in Capernaum once, and doesn’t appear in a synagogue after that. And the experience is the same in Jerusalem: He preaches in the Temple there and the authorities want to arrest Him and eventually arrange His death. His relationship with the institutional guardians of His tradition was not an easy one.

[2] He had a number of formative religious experiences in which He felt that God was speaking to Him. The first that we know of was His Baptism which the Gospel writers present as inaugurating His public ministry. It is interesting to notice that scholars seem clear that the words that Jesus heard spoken to Him by God are quotations from two Old Testament passages, one from the Psalms and the other from Isaiah: so God spoke to Him out of the tradition with which He was familiar.

Jesus appears not to know immediately what these words actually meant for Him, and so He withdrew into the Wilderness to reflect on them. The Wilderness is a place with a great deal of symbolic significance for a Jew and Jesus choice of it as a place to go is certainly significant. When Jesus is tempted in the Wilderness by the Devil He answers with quotations from the book of Deuteronomy and in particular from the speech that Moses gave to the Israelites as they were preparing to enter the Promised Land. That too I’m sure is significant. So Jesus sought to interpret the meaning of His religious experiences out of the tradition within which He stood. He recognised the possibility of mis-using and mis-understanding them; and this was a struggle that seemed to stay with Him throughout His life.

Jesus had other religious experiences too. The story of the Transfiguration, which we hear from the viewpoint of the disciples who were there with Him, must have been, first and foremost an experience that Jesus had. Likewise the story of His Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Crucifixion. The Gospels give us some insight into what these experiences might have meant to Jesus. But there are other experiences into which they offer us no insight: the Resurrection and the Ascension. It is fascinating to wonder what those events meant to Jesus and how He understood their meaning.

There may well have been others too, of which we are completely ignorant. Perhaps some before His Baptism, as a young man? Maybe others during his times of solitude and prayer during His ministry? We simply don’t know. But the ones we do know about seem to have been formative for Him.

[3] We know that prayer was something that Jesus took very seriously. He taught His disciples the Lord’s Prayer, which reads like a summary of His teaching and presumably reflects His own experience.
He addressed God as His ‘Heavenly Father’ having been addressed by God at His baptism as ‘my beloved son’, and taught His disciples to do likewise.
The use of the Aramaic word ‘Abba’ as the name of God suggests that He taught them to pray to God in their own everyday language rather than in the holy language of Hebrew.
He taught them that their prayer should be brief.
He Himself went off alone to pray, sometimes all night when He must have been mainly silent.

[4] God spoke to Jesus through the everyday events of life. Given that Jesus was well versed in the Jewish Scriptures and its traditions it is surprising that so much of His teaching does not seem to start from them, but rather is drawn from everyday events that everybody must have experienced but few saw the significance of.

The parables that He used are all drawn from ordinary life: a man sowing seed; somebody throwing a party; people working in a vineyard; a shepherd losing one of his sheep; a woman losing a coin; a farmer wondering when to harvest his crops; a decision about where to build a house.

I wonder if these were first of all images that spoke to Jesus about the questions He was asking Himself, before being shared with others? So, for example, I imagine Jesus questioning Himself about the very mixed success of His teaching: there was much initial enthusiasm but much less long lasting commitment. And then He found Himself watching a man sowing seed, and realised that much seed had to be sown in order for a small percentage of it to produce a sufficient harvest: sowing inevitably meant that much would seemingly be wasted. This appeared to be God’s way of doing things. So He shouldn’t worry about measuring the success of His preaching: much would appear to be fruitless; but in God’s good time there would be a sufficient harvest; and He had to learn to trust in that just as the man sowing seed did.

I recall reading the suggestion that the story of the Good Samaritan might well have been born out of Jesus own experience. Maybe He knew from personal experience what it was like to be beaten up and robbed on the Jericho road and to have religious people pass by on the other side, before a man whom He had assumed to be an enemy actually stopped and rescued Him at considerable personal risk. Perhaps this changed Jesus views on who was His neighbour and then was used by Him as a story to illustrate the point to others?

I wonder if the story of His encounter with the Syro-Phoenician woman taught His something similar and changed His views on foreigners and on women. I must admit to delighting in the notion that Jesus was taught a lot by God through other people.

[5] God seems to have provided Him with more human support than we might think. It would be easy to imagine Jesus as a lonely figure, and I’m sure that there is some truth in that. His religious experiences singled Him out as different as did His capacity to find God speaking to Him in all sorts of ways and places that nobody else seemed to notice. His willingness to trust in, and to speak from, His own experience of God was not always appreciated and often provoked considerable opposition. He must have been in some ways a solitary man; one who ‘had nowhere to lay His head.’

But this is not the whole picture. He did have followers and supporters. There seems to have been an inner group of three [see my piece on ‘Did Jesus have a spiritual director’]; but there was also a group of Twelve; there were women who supported them; there were individuals like Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, Simon the Pharisee, the man who let Him use his upper room in Jerusalem for the Last Supper; Mary, Martha and Lazarus with whom He stayed. He was regularly sharing meals with others, whether in His own home or theirs. God never seems to have left Him without human support, until the very end, when He found Himself facing a cruel death totally alone.

I sense that all of the above is important because these elements of Jesus spirituality are potentially ours too. We don’t need a complicated system of teaching in order to grow as people and in relationship to God. All we need to do is the follow Jesus’ example.

[1] We all stand in a tradition which shapes our thinking. It may be the Christian tradition and its language and symbolism to which we can go when we try to talk about our life under God. But it may be that we feel ourselves to stand in a tradition which lacks any religious belief or language. There are obvious disadvantages but there is also the plus that we come to these matters with new eyes and a certain freshness. Like Jesus, we can be nourished by the tradition in which we stand, but we will also feel called to challenge it.

[2] Research suggests that nigh on 70% of the adult population of the UK claims to have had an experience of ‘something greater’ than themselves, which many of them would call God, and which is overwhelmingly found to be personally affirmative and encouraging. The problem appears to be not that people lack religious experience, but that they rarely talk about it, perhaps don’t recognise their religious experience for what it is, and often don’t appear to give it the significance it merits. Like Jesus we can recognise it, take it seriously and give it reflective space. Like Jesus we will also be tempted to mis-understand and mis–use it, and can expect to meet opposition when we seek to honour it.

[3] Sister Wendy Beckett wrote that if prayer is important and God is love, then prayer cant in principle be difficult. Jesus makes prayer sound very simple. The majority of people admit to praying from time to time. Again the problem appears to be not that we don’t pray, but that we often don’t attach to it the importance that it merits. Like Jesus we can make time for prayer, time of withdrawal to pray, and a willingness to place our prayer at the centre of our life not its periphery.

[4] Once we have taken on board the Biblical notion that God can speak to us through any and everything, and have begun to watch out for instances of it in our own lives, and then to trust the wisdom we find in them, it is surprising how often they can occur. Like Jesus we can ‘stay awake’ to the God who encounters us in unexpected ways in the midst of ordinary life, and learn to trust the insights that come to us.

[5] Despite the fact that for many the spiritual journey often feels like a lonely one, if we look for a guide it is surprising how often we will find one. As the saying goes ‘When the pupil is ready the teacher will come.’ And in my experience there are always ‘angels’ [messengers from God] along the way who provide support and encouragement from unlikely sources. We are rarely left alone, and when we are we can trust that it is for a purpose. Like Jesus we can learn to accept the support of others, and to stay open to the possibility that our ‘enemies’ may be our greatest teachers.