A photograph of the welcome poster that greets visitors to Newport Cathedral. poster was shared earlier this week on Facebook. The Newport Welcome Beware poster highlighted the absence of an essence in today’s Church that I have been yearning for in recent years, a Church of England with a Christian faith that inspired and enriched me in earlier decades of my life. I didn’t know back then that it was feeding me with something whose absence I would come to mourn in later years.
Welcome Beware expresses this essence from earlier years, the 60s, 70s and 80s and into the 90s, from childhood in the Diocese of Southwark to post-university years in Basingstoke and theological college training that took me back to Southwark. The generous, open, energised quality of Christian life in which I was then immersed has absented itself from today’s Church. I had thought it impossible to recover this fulness of life in which I once lived and flourished. I crave what has gone missing, a Christian culture that knew the essence of Welcome Beware to be the truth, the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It was once more passionately and truthfully lived in dioceses and parishes across this country and in every century of the Christian era, though often fragile and liminal.
Church House Bookshop – source of hope
I have taken to visit Church House Bookshop on post-Covid visits to London. It has become a source of liminal hope. I’ve visited the Bookshop three times this year in the hope of finding contemporary work that builds on the wisdom published in the decades before and after Honest to God (1963).
Visit one
On my first visit in January I had a long conversation with the guy at the desk, asking what he might recommend that was today evolving the vision of earlier decades. He tentatively suggested The Godless Gospel: Was Jesus a Great Moral Teacher? by Julian Baggini. I found the book helpful. Baggini edits together ‘the moral philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth’. He reminded me that the wisdom of Jesus is common to all humanity and underpins the values that create heathy human lives and culture. Today’s Church is tortured by its inability to synthesise a similar Jesus wisdom, distracted as it is by unresolved conflicts about gender, sexuality, race and disability.
Visit two
I returned for a second visit in February. The guy at the desk had continued to think about what I was searching for and produced Goodbye to God: Searching for a Human Spirituality by Chris Scott. This is more what I was searching for, a companion to Honest to God or But That I Can’t Believe (1967).
Visit three
On Monday this week the guy at the desk (I must ask him his name) pointed me to Young, Woke and Christian: Words From a Missing Generation edited by Victoria Turner. This collection of essays is dynamite. It is provoking me into re-examining my stance as a campaigner in the context of Living in Love and Faith. Nosayaba Idehen’s chapter on Racial Inclusion, Josh Mock’s Queer, Christian and Tired, and Molly Boot who writes about When Did I Start Calling my Body ‘it’? are all radical and astonishing. To give you a sense of the depth of their work, Molly references the Song of Songs and quotes Hadewijch of Brabant, a thirteenth-century beguine and mystic. The Newport Welcome Beware poster is inspired by the mystical tradition as are the authors assembled in Young, Woke and Christian. In this book, inspiration, deep truth and prophetic vision and energy, deeply orthodox, traditional and Christ-filled, are offered with passion (Young, Woke and Christian, ed. Victoria Turner (SCM Press 2022).
Hadewijch of Brabant
After that he came himself to me, took me entirely in his arms, and pressed me to him; and all my members felt his in full felicity, in accordance with the desire of my heart and my humanity. So I was outwardly satisfied and fully transported. Also then, for a short while, I had the strength to bear this; but soon, after a short time, I lost that manly beauty outwardly in the sight of his form. I saw him completely come to naught and so fade and all at once dissolve that I could no longer recognise or perceive him outside me, and I could no longer distinguish him within me. Then it was to me as if we were one without difference. It was thus: outwardly to see, taste, and feel, as one can outwardly taste, see, and feel in the reception of the outward sacrament.
Hadewijch, the Complete Works, ed. C. Hart and P. Mommaers (New York: Paulist Press, 1980)
BEWARE!
Here we try to practice the inclusive Gospel of Jesus Christ
This means that here you may be mixing with seekers, searchers,
and those who are bruised
those who limp and those who mourn
and those wounded by war;
refugees, asylum seekers and foreigners of all kinds,
citizens differently abled from yourself,
black, indigenous and people of colour,
bishops and priests, men and women, who may be struggling,
leaders who are worn out, clapped out, burnt out,
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and allies,
couples and singles and searchers,
children and teenagers, those transitioning through middle age
and those living with hope and experience into maturity,
the wealthy who are trying to get through the eye of a needle,
and the poor who are struggling to maintain their dignity,
the emotionally deprived and harmed,
people of other faiths or of none,
fundamentalists and liberals,
radicals and traditionalists,
those who have failed to love
and those who are afraid to receive love:
those rejected by their ministers and their churches;
those who have broken their promises,
those bowed down with burdens,
those who teeter on the brink of breakdown,
those who have been abused physically, emotionally, sexually and spiritually,
those for whom the grip of alcohol or work, drugs or sex,
gambling or unnamed powers, is getting stronger
and those for whom the grip is loosening,
those struggling with faith and doubt,
and goodness knows how many others…
Indeed, anyone like those who Jesus mixed with.
The Christian Church is not a private club
but a public space open to all people of goodwill.
And though we are not yet strong
and vulnerable enough
to show the unconditional love of God at all times,
we hope we are moving in that direction.
WELCOME!