This week between Christmas and New Year, I have been re-reading Harry Williams’ The True Wilderness, first published in 1965 and bought and presumably read by me in the 1980s. Today my heart and soul yearn for the wisdom of priests and teachers and preachers who describe Christianity from the depth, wisdom and truth I am finding again in Harry Williams. The book is a selection of addresses given when he was Dean of Trinity College, Cambridge and teaching academic theology. He had come to the conclusion that any knowledge imparted in teaching academic theology could never be anything but external to the self. He decided, or rather, the Spirit (over which he says he had no control) decided that what he proposed to say in his addresses had to come from the depth of his own experience.
In his introduction he concludes that we must therefore look for God in what we are, in the whole kaleidoscope of our personal experience. And in this sense, he says, would it be wrong to speak of a theology of the self. I live in the conviction that a theology of the self, lived through the kaleidoscope of personal experience, is essential to the truth of Christian life and is sadly lacking in today’s church.
Fifty-six years later, I find myself living outside a Church of England that distrusts my experience as a gay man. It refuses to accept that I can fall in love and enjoy sexual intimacy as a priest or find Church approval for God’s blessing and anointing of my relationship because the Church refuses to allow any gay relationship to be blessed in Church. My lived experience, honed through fifteen years of therapy, forty years of priestly ministry and over sixty-five years of active Christian life, tells me that the Church is shockingly and abusively wrong in its practice and teaching about LGBTIQ+ people. It systemically denies Harry Williams’ profound and hard won conviction as a gay man himself that living faith, truth and love come from within, from the depth of our own experience. The Church tells me I am not to trust my experience. I’ve never accepted this teaching. It is deadly to me and my faith.
This is a sombre New Year’s Eve blog.
In the address The Pearl of Great Price Williams writes:
“Some people will tell you that the kingdom consists in obedience to a traditional system of ethics. Do this and don’t do that, and yours is the kingdom. Obedience of this kind often looks like a virtue. In fact it is always a blasphemy. A blasphemy against oneself. To base and regulate one’s life upon other people’s rules – even when they call them God’s Law – this is blasphemous because it is to choose slavery when you could be free. Freedom involves discovery by each of us of the law of our own being: how we, as a unique person, can express sincerely and fearlessly what we are. And this discovery can be made only by the courageous acceptance of experience, through suffering and joy, through disillusion and fulfilment. If you are content to be conventional or conventionally unconventional, if you are content to be like somebody else and accept as your own the rules of a given type of person, then you have abandoned looking for the kingdom of heaven.”
What the House of Bishops, the Next Steps Group and the Living in Love and faith book, materials, and process teach is a blasphemy. It teaches LGBTIQ+ people not to trust ourselves, not to trust our intuition, not to trust our feelings and inner wisdom and truth. The authorities of the Church teach us to live in denial of our true selves and asks or expects us to deny ourselves the sacramental gifts and the life-fulfilling experiences allowed to the heterosexual majority. It is a deadly, evil culture, maintained because the Church authorities allow themselves to be bullied into maintaining teachings that contaminate the pearl of great price, corrupting Christian truth and practice.
In another address, Gethsemane, delivered on Maundy Thursday, Harry explores the reality of our belief that Jesus was truly God and fully human. This means, he said, that Jesus’ experience as a human being was identical with our own. He did not know everything in the past and in the future. He knew just as much and just as little as we do. He had no more power in reserve than the ordinary human person. He was in all things like unto us.
“In Gethsemane Jesus was left entirely alone with his panic and horror. For Jesus there was no escape. But there was victory. Yet how, if he died deserted by his companions and feeling forsaken by God? How victory?
“The victory consisted precisely in not running away, in not trying to escape. It meant squarely facing the enemies inside – the doubts, the despair, the perplexity, the panic, the isolation. From these enemies inside, Jesus did not hide under a cloak of illusion, pretending to himself that things were better than they were and that he was feeling like a hero.
“Our material circumstances may unexpectedly change for the worse. Or something we had set our heart on and were working for devotedly may collapse into nothing. Or perhaps we have already discovered that our real enemies are inside us, that we have an unfortunate temperament in this way or that, that we are assertive or quarrelsome or timid or prone to worry and be anxious, vaguely but disturbingly frightened of something – we don’t quite not what. Or perhaps we shall be ploughed up, turned inside out by a turbulent, unsatisfied love.”
Our real enemies are inside us, says Harry Williams. The enemy that we habitually obey, that tells us we must conform to other people’s expectations and the modes of living approved by the Church rather than claiming our freedom to live and love according to our heart and soul’s longing and desire. Choose life, life in all its fulness, Jesus proclaimed. Too often, still, I suppress my inner truth, energy and wisdom, often in deference to the people around me, colluding with them in conforming to what we think the Church expects of us because the hierarchy clearly can’t cope with the truth of our real selves. The bishops are funking it. The whole Living in Love and Faith process has become part of the continuing “great avoidance of the truth scheme” that the Church of England is so habituated to, the scheme that says LGBTIQ+ people cannot yet be taken as fully equal in the kingdom of God. And why not? Because being inclusive is more important. Maintaining unity is more important. Preserving the Anglican Community is more important. Because following a safely comfortable “friend of sinners” Jesus is more important than resurrection, justice, truth and unconditional love. Because reconfiguring the parish system and the deployment of clergy is more important (see Martyn Percy’s Rickety Religion Advent blogs).
As for me, I’ve had enough avoidance of reality for LGBTIQ+ people in the Church of England, enough of the House of Bishops’ avoidance of my reality and experience as a gay man, enough of suppressing the energy and love of the divine presence within me. Welcome 2022, as a year of campaigning vigour unfolds.