When the Church endows Jesus with a divine nature and magical powers and his followers with spiritual powers way beyond anything we are capable of, the result is fantasy faith, the belief that God has and will intervene to short-circuit human emotions and experience. That’s where conflict in the faith of the Church of England resides today.
In 1957, aged nearly 12, I knew with an arrogant conviction that if God disapproved of me loving another boy, then God was wrong and I was right. I knew I was right to trust my feelings and physical desire for intimacy and love. I trusted my intuition, my awareness of who I am. I have had to learn again to trust the arrogant wisdom of my youthful self. Today I am still learning to trust and listen to my contemporary self, my body and feelings, and the energy within.
I have been re-reading Harry Williams’ The True Wilderness, first published in 1965. My heart and soul yearn for the wisdom of priests, teachers and preachers who describe Christianity from the depth, wisdom and truth I am finding again in Harry Williams. He decided that what he proposed to say had to come from the depth of his own experience. He concluded that we must look for God in what we are, in the whole kaleidoscope of our personal experience. Our real enemies are inside us, he says. 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. 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.
My daily faith experience is woven around the always elusive presence in which silence, attention, presence, self-giving, experience, quality, emotions, the unconditional, uncertainty, goodness are ingredients and essences, everywhere. Trusting deeply in what I can’t prove but know is my core, my essence, deep within, touched by, feeling it. The Church faces me with many images of God – homophobic, misogynistic, white bearded, authoritarian, judging, cruel, partisan, rejecting. The disconnect the Church maintains, between an imaginable God for the twenty-first century, and the God of co-dependency, abuse, depression, anxiety, and neurosis, is unsustainable.
Classical Anglican teaching is held to be rooted in the three-legged stool of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason based on Richard Hooker’s teaching in The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. More recently, some have argued for the addition of a fourth leg, that of experience. Conservatives opposed to the full inclusion of LGBTI people in the church rely primarily on Scripture, arguing that the other two legs are utterly dependent on this. They deny that experience can be legitimately added as a fourth leg. We live in a society where experience is accepted as a given, an essential component of life. Conservative Christians argue against this cultural change.
My suspicion is that talk about the uncertainty of the God experience is more difficult for Christians and within Christian communities now than it was four and five decades ago. How do I come into the presence of God? My question is not well framed. The better question is: How do I become aware of or conscious of God’s always present presence? The presence of the holy, the divine, the infinite, unconditional, utterly loving other is often elusive. It takes me time and the setting aside of deliberate intent to find myself in the presence. And that’s how it happens – finding myself there. I don’t make it happen – can’t make it happen.
We may think that there is just one version of Christianity that we who are Anglicans share with every denomination and all Christians. Not so - we are living with many versions of Christianity, not just within the variety of denominations, but within each denomination and within the Church of England. Within the church there is an invisible, underground, disconnected, boundary-crossing set of people who are letting go of orthodoxy and dogma. In my dreams this group will reach a critical mass as the reality of the ways in which people are reconfiguring faith becomes more widely known. It’s the great secret of the current decade that dare not speak its name, though it has been emerging for decades.
I experience myself as being 'haunted', 'lured', 'pursued', seduced by folly, over and over and over again. Nothing that can easily be named or described, of course (the ultimate other is far too tender and subtle for that) but the experiences add up to confirmation for me that the ultimate other is after me and, as an ingredient of the pursuit, has ideas about me, totally benign, trustworthy, authentic ideas that flow with unconditional, infinite love. To call them plans would be far too concrete - nothing about the experience of God can ever be that certain - that way danger and madness runs.
