A personal timeline
I’ve previously described my experience at the age of eleven in 1957 when, in my final year at primary school, I fancied like crazy a boy in my class and realised that I was gay. I knew this was my identity for life in contrast to my peers who were attracted to girls. This week I’ve been reading The Spectrum of Consciousness by Ken Wilbur (1977, 1993), one of the rain damaged books from my shed that I thought I was going to throw away. I’m glad I didn’t. Wilbur has helped me connecting the experiences of my life in a newly revelatory way. I now realise that at the age of eleven I already had the awareness and confidence to trust my intuition, experience and feelings.
From my later teenage years and through my twenties (1960 – 1975) thanks partly to the influence of a young curate down from Cambridge, the publication of Honest to God, my peer group at St Barnabas Southfields and my location in the Diocese of Southwark, I can see that it was my innate intuition, experience, feelings and confidence that opened me to respond so positively and immediately to the new movements in theology and liturgy that were energising Christian life at Southwark Cathedral across Southwark Diocese in general.
This experience continued when I moved to Basingstoke to work as an architect and became involved with the newly formed team ministry (1973-1976). The seven clergy in the team were infused with the same liberating, adventurous, imaginative energies and vision that had nurtured my faith in Southwark. Intuition, personal experience, adventurous vision and energy were integral to the flourishing Christian life in the town centre.
In 1976 I left architecture and started training for ministry at Westcott House, Cambridge. At Westcott that I found myself in an environment that welcomed and respected my sexuality. I wasn’t alone. I was introduced to theological study, meditation and the Church Fathers and a new circle of friends. Westcott affirmed my innate characteristics - my intuition, experience and feelings. It was by chance that my training was curtailed by two terms, the result of a visit by Mervyn Stockwood, bishop of Southwark, who was on the lookout for an ordinand to replace a curate who had been forced to leave with immediate effect, So it was that I returned to Southwark and for the next seventeen years was firstly curate at St George’s Camberwell (previous incumbents Geoffrey Beaumont and Eric James) and then vicar of St Faith’s Wandsworth (not noted for previous incumbents). I flourished in the context of a diocese with extensive pastoral care and counselling and spiritual direction networks and, from 1991, the first diocesan lesbian and gay support network. I also found the best of spiritual and wisdom and adventurous clergy colleagues in the national Anglican Lesbian and Gay Clergy Consultation.
As the nineteen eighties unfolded, the presence of the HIV virus and the AIDS pandemic, primarily affecting gay men, began to impact on my life. Partly in response to this, I started seeing a psychotherapist and at the end of the decade, began training at the Chiron Centre in Ealing. The therapy and training introduced me to new understandings of myself and of God (who, curiously, hasn’t had a mention in this narrative until now). Why not? Because God hadn’t been a question or a problem until therapy required me to explore myself and my emotions and assumptions more deeply.
For three years I worked as a part-time hospital chaplain and in 1995, with the guidance of Fr Bill Kirkpatrick, founded Changing Attitude to campaign for LGBT (plus, later, QIA) inclusion in the Church of England (and again, later, in the wider Anglican Communion). The Lambeth Conference of 1998 and the infamous resolution 1.10 mark the moment when my life became both more exciting and adventurous and at the same time, increasingly enmeshed in conflict and hostility, and so it has continued to the present. The campaign continues and the conflict continues. The conflict over the acceptability of both LGBTQIA+ people and people hostile to our equal status in the Church of England continues, unresolved. This period (1998–2025) marks a darkening era in the Church to suppress and erode the Christian culture that I had lived within for the first five decades of my life, a culture that was open, generous, intuitive, experiential, evolving, adventurous and infused with divine, sacred life. I had known intuitively from childhood and through the entirety of my Church experience that what I felt and knew in my core was authentic to my awareness of the mystery of God, my understanding of the Gospels and the impact of the life and teachings of Jesus. The negative culture that developed in the past three decades began to challenge my identity, my intuition, my faith and my experience of God.
A twentieth century timeline
Let’s jump back over a century to follow an entirely different timeline that begins in the 1910s with the work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and Carl Jung (1875-1961) who laid the foundations of psychotherapy and analytical theories that evolved into the holistic, person-centred body work I learnt at Chiron. Freud and Jung transformed our understanding of human consciousness and the unconscious.
The timeline continues in the 1920s with the work of Niels Bohr (1885-1962), a Danish physicist and philosopher and a promoter of scientific research who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory. Building on Bohr’s work, Max Planck (1858-1947) proposed that energy is not continuous but comes in discrete packets or quanta. Einstein applied Planck’s theory to the photoelectric effect and Niels Bohr to sub-atomic physics; Louis de Broglie (1892-1987) showed that matter as well as energy produced waves and Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) formulated the theory of quantum mechanics and Werner Heisenberg’s (1901-1976) Uncertainty Principle of 1927 stated that we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy. All this work, counter-intuitive to reality as then understood, took place within a generation in the late 1920s.
Scientists wanted to measure the sub-atomic “particles” comprising the atom. These were supposedly the ultimate and irreducible elements composing all of nature but there was a problem. Any attempt to ‘measure’ electron would cause the electron to change position in the very act of trying to measure it. In some mysterious way, the subject being observed and the act of observing were intimately united, mutually affecting each other. This was and is a problem woven into the fabric of the universe – a “God” question. Science had until then worked on the assumed dualism of subject versus object, of an observer’s ability to objectively measure and verify an object or event.
The research into the uncertainty and mysterious behaviour of the “building blocks of matter” affected subsequent Christian awareness and theological thinking. European theologians published from the 1930s onwards were conscious of the developments in physics questioning the assumed fundamentals of reality. Among them were Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) who wrote The Cost of Discipleship (1937) and Life Together (1939). Letters and Papers from Prison was published posthumously in 1951. Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was writing about cosmic theology from 1927, but his work was banned by the Vatican and only published posthumously. Paul Tillich (1886-1965) born in Germany, emigrated to the United States in 1933 publishing The Shaking of the Foundations in 1948 and his Systematic Theology in 1952. Many other writers and theologians have influenced me including Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, Sebastian Moore, William Johnston, Bede Griffiths, Jean Dechanet, Matthew Fox, Anthony de Mello, Ken Leach, John Austin Baker, Harry Williams, Hugh Montefiore and John Robinson.
Honest to God (1963) was the book which brought developments in Christian theology to more popular awareness. It reassured me that my intuitive, experiential, emotional, non-dogmatic belief that had largely discarded faith in an anthropomorphic God up or out there somewhere was fine. It wasn’t a problem in the dioceses of Southwark or the Basingstoke part of Winchester. It wasn’t a problem in selection for ordination or at Westcott House, nor on my return to Southwark. It only began to become a problem from 1998 onwards after the passing of resolution 1.10 at the Lambeth Conference that year and the rejection of homosexual practice as being incompatible with scripture. Fortunately, my psychotherapy training and the developing Changing Attitude network and meetings with trustees and local groups gave me confidence to pursue my reading and research into sexuality, gender and process theologies where radical ideas could be lived and affirmed. Mine was and still is an intuitive and experiential faith – contemplative and mystical – deeply influenced by the largely post-war flourishing of radical ideas.
A twenty-first century timeline
My psychotherapeutic experience as a client and later in training at Chiron had introduced me to the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. They developed ideas about the human mind and consciousness in the first decades of the twentieth century that subsequently evolved in many directions, one of which was into humanistic and transpersonal psychologies. Chiron helped me understand the value of various Eastern modes of philosophy, meditation and spiritual understanding. As a result my daily contemplative practice gradually evolved and continues to evolve. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, I began to read the work of psychotherapists and philosophers that “traditional, orthodox” Christians might dismissively label “new age”. I read Ken Wilbur, John Rowan, Wilhelm Reich, Alexander Lowen, Fritz Perls, Carl Rogers and many others. I began to learn that the scientific and psychological ideas that dominated the first decades of the twentieth century were instrumental in the formation of a Christian faith and life that was and is intuitively my faith.
Last week I went through three bread-crates of books I had set aside ten years ago as being of no further value, damaged by water and eroded by snails. I was going to bin them but as I dusted them off, I realised that they were absolutely not to be disposed of. Half were LGBTQIA+ related books from the 1980s (some of them inherited from Fr Bill Kirkpatrick). Others dated from my psychotherapy training at the Chiron Centre. I brushed off and sorted every book, selecting a few of the psychotherapy books as potentially relevant to the “movement” that has been forming in my mind over the past decade. Having read Ordinary Ecstasy: Humanistic Psychology in Action by John Rowan (1925-2018) I turned to Ken Wilbur’s (1949-) substantial The Spectrum of Consciousness starting with chapter 3, Reality as Consciousness and continuing with chapter 4, Time/Eternity, Space/Infinity. It finally dawned on me nearly seventy years on that in 1957 the eleven-year-old gay me “knew God” almost exclusively through trusting my intuition, experience and feelings.
I have always known God intuitively but have struggled of late to trust this, such has been the effect of the corrosive hostility of conservative reactionary movements in the Christian Church. Although I was totally unaware of the developments in evolution, science, physics, philosophy and theology that had occurred in the half century preceding my birth, I was living in an epoch influenced by these movements that were in the process of, transforming human knowledge and understanding, a transformation that has deeply impacted my Christian faith throughout my life.
Intuitive faith as against dogmatic faith
William James (1842-1910), the American philosopher and psychologist noted that there are two ways of knowing things, knowing them immediately or intuitively, and knowing them conceptually or representatively. We human beings generally operate with a conventional, symbolic-map knowledge, linear, abstract. This characterises the Christian thinking and faith constructs that have come to dominate the last two decades of my life, representational thinking Christian using spatial symbols such as height and depth of this or another world “ruled” by an anthropocentric God. The second way identified by James is that of intimate or direct or non-dual knowledge. Ken Wilbur notes that this is characteristic of Taoism and Hinduism, natural knowledge that understands life directly, intuitively, intuitively, immediately. It is found more peripherally in the Christian tradition, when symbols disappear, freed from conceptual elaboration. It is Meister Eckhart’s “daybreak knowledge, perceived without distinctions”, the “divine manner of knowing, not by means of any objects external to the knower.”
Ken Wilbur shows how the work of Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Einstein, Freud, Jung, de Chardin and Bonhoeffer reveal the uncertain dynamics of life in which subject and object, the knower and the known, are not separable. Relativity and the uncertainty principle require a non-dual mode of knowing whose nature it is to be undivided from what it knows, counter-intuitive to the reality I had been taught. Dualism must be abandoned. The barrier or separation we believe there is does not exist. The common division of the world into subject and object, inner world and outer world, body and soul, is no longer adequate, but this is the model that even more today, dominates Christian thinking and teaching.
Seamless evolution and personal responsibility
As my faith, spirituality, philosophy and awareness have developed I have come to understand that we members of the human species are integral to the creative evolutionary process and the essence of creation. All life, all systems in the universe, are seamlessly integrated, a unity of cause and effect. On our fragile, beautiful planet all systems are equally seamlessly integrated: economic, social, political, climatic, religious, ethical, philosophical, scientific, spiritual. This is a matter of personal belief as much as it is of scientific truth, but then I’m a Christian and I’ve been taught that personal belief is an essential element of human life, even if these elements are not subject to scientific proof.
More blogs on this theme will follow. We are living in an era when conservatives, political and religious, are suffering from locked-in syndrome, unable to see what lies beyond and within their limited awareness and imagination. They deny and denigrate the spiritual, emotional, intellectual, intuitive wisdom and energies of people like me/us, suppressing, ignoring and denying their own innate, intuitive consciousness. This is one of the primary sources of abuse within the Church of England and results in the acting out of unhealthy, abusive desires.
Key words and phrases:
Flourishing
Life in all its fulness
Goodness, love and wisdom
If you would like to invite me to come and talk to a group or meeting about “life in all its fulness” based on these and other ideas or if you would like to come and have one-to-one conversation with me once I’ve moved to London, please DM or email me using the contact form at the top right of the blog home page.