Fifty years ago I found Harry Williams in Heffers bookshop in Cambridge. In Harry’s books I found wisdom and truth, honesty and humanity, integrity and playfulness, that reinforced my courage to believe and the freedom to trust my own intuition. Among others. Harry gave me courage to believe disbelievingly.
In the sermon Life Abundant or Life Resisting? published in The True Wilderness Harry Williams asks whether our Christianity makes for a better and happier world or does not. He believed that quite often it does not - that Christianity in many of its forms is not a good but an evil thing. I think the theology of Living in Love and Faith draws on an unhealthy conception of God. The Christian story, it says, “is about our rebellion, disobedience and refusal to depend on one another and on God – a disorder which has infected the whole of creation. This results in a form of Christian teaching that makes the Church of England an unhappy place for me, a gay man.
How do you present a really radical argument about the revolutionary change in today’s society for LGBTIQ+ people to a Church that refuses to take on board the implications of the revolution? I have used extensive quotations from chapter four, Resurrection and Goodness, of Harry Williams’1972 book, True Resurrection, to describe what I think are the implications of Changing Attitude England’s campaign to give content to the radical new LGBTIQ+ (because that’s what it primarily has to be about) Christian inclusion advocated by the Archbishops.
I’ve been reading a review of Some Day I’ll Find You and the opening chapters of True Resurrection, books written by Harry Williams, priest (1919-2006), a member of the radical 1960s school of Cambridge theologians and later a member of the Anglican Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield. Fr Harry has restored me to a sane, emotionally more stable place after a week in which events in the Church of England and my personal life severely disturbed my emotional equilibrium. Harry has restored my confidence in my own spiritual and wisdom core when the Church seems to be heading more and more deeply into a realm of dangerous, abusive and very un-Christian LaLaLand
