Origins

Origins

It shocked me a bit when the rector said “what's a Baptist doing reading that stuff?”. It wasn't the book, a life of the Anglican poet/priest George Herbert, but the fact that more than forty years had elapsed since I parted ways with the church of my upbringing. I know I'm just an Anglican 'pretender', but I had long since ceased to regard myself as anything else. So why would this very fine Anglican priest, whom I held in high regard, take exception to my reading about another Anglican?
 
I was aware that his wife had come from a Baptist family before becoming an Anglican, so I wasn't the first of that background he had met. Perhaps it just surprised him that I, as a former non-Anglican, would take an interest in such a person. Another possibility was the alacrity with which I had on one occasion made an off-the-cuff remark about an aspect of his morning sermon. It hadn't occurred to me at the time that gratuitous comment about his preaching, however positive, may not be welcome. Perhaps he detected a slight lack of respect for his priestly duty, or that I thought I might know more than him!

The incident was soon forgotten, but I have since made an important discovery. Notwithstanding the lapse in time, Baptist culture (e.g., expressing a personal opinion on a theological topic) continues to inform my thinking in many ways. Priesthood is one such area and I was well aware of a critical tenet of Baptist belief that distinguishes that denomination from Anglicanism (and most other protestant churches) as well as the Church of Rome: insistence on the “the priesthood of all believers”, and rejection of “Apostolic Succession”.
 
With every member an autonomous conscience in relation to God, this leaves a Baptist congregation not so much a church as an assembly, a gathering together of individual believers without hierarchy, prelates, bishops or priests, functioning within an intentional democratic system of ecclesial government where laity and leaders (ministers) serve as equals. In practice, this may be less evident than proposed, but the principle is integral to the way Baptists see them selves, as I remember.
 
I'm beginning to think the years have not blunted my understanding of this fundamental difference and its unique, if flawed, place in church polity. At least at an unconscious level this teaching must have stuck, continuing to influence my thinking about 'doing church', long way after I'd moved on. However this may be, the good vicar must have sensed something less than attractive in my commenting, perhaps the presumption of a liberty to offer, unsolicited, any sort of opinion at all as a layman. It woke me up, I must say, and on further reflection turned me back to look once again at doctrines once taken for granted.
 
Many years ago and after a period of neglect, as if by an invisible hand I found myself opening the books of scripture again, reminded that “the word is very near you, in your mouth, that you may observe it” (Deuteronomy 30: 14). So it boiled down to this: a necessary and inescapable search for truth, involving the willingness, and the freedom, indeed the responsibility to study and think about the scriptures for oneself, independently and untethered from accepted dogmas; to form one's own opinions on what the Bible says. 

I think that this freedom to act independently has always been a very 'Baptist' way of thinking that is not generally evident in Anglicanism. In practice, it's a freedom that might find scant support even among Baptist ministers, maybe acknowledged, but not welcome.

So where does that leave me now? Nowhere other than where I am, a regular if jaded communicant in an Anglican church, an enthusiast for traditional Anglican liturgy, wherever one can find it. I have learned, I hope, to keep my opinions to myself and at the same time to distinguish the differences that define traditions. I think also I can safely say I wouldn't be who I am without my Baptist upbringing, but it took an Anglican priest to remind me of the fact.






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Diary of a Realist: Clive James

Diary of a Realist: Clive James

Poem: “Event Horizon” (from 'Sentenced to Life' – Poems 2011-2014)

For years we fooled ourselves. Now we can tell

How everyone our age heads for the brink

Where they are drawn together into the unplumbed well,

Not to be seen again. How sad, to think

People we once loved will be with us there

And we not touch them, for it is nowhere.

But once inside, you will have no regrets,

You go where no one will remember you.

Poetic realism (or license) from a Realist?  But to see all this differently, I have chosen religious faith!   Elsewhere, the poet has a line (in 'Nina Kogan's Geometrical Heaven'):   

                                                                            

                                                       “ . . . .  any vision of eternity 

                                                        Is with us in the world, and beautiful . . . “

Faith also provides us with an undeniably 'earthly' vision of the hereafter, grounded nowhere if not in the here-and-now (dogma aside). How does the faith of a Realist react to the thought of “life after death”?  Eternity, by this reckoning may be visioned more as a relationship. Only a deep and sincere faith implicating the 'other' can make this relational, rather than an abstract. Else, fooled again!

The poet continues (in “Event Horizon”):

Into the singularity we fly

After a stretch in time in which we leave

Our lives behind yet know that we will die

At any moment now. A pause to grieve,

Burned by the starlight of our lives laid bare,

And then no sound, no sight, no thought. Nowhere.

What is it worth then, this insane last phase?

When everything about you goes downhill?

This much: you get to see the cosmos blaze

And feel it's grandeur, even against your will,

As it reminds you, just by being there,

That it is here we live, or else nowhere.

Diary of a Realist

“Miracles will never confound a Realist” (Dostoevsky), and the poet is more a Realist than anyone. Except, perhaps, a Realist with deep religious faith, “because it is not miracles that make a Realist turn to religion". A true Realist, if he is an unbeliever, “will always find the strength and the ability not to believe in a miracle (or mystery), and if faced with a miracle as an undeniable fact, he will sooner disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact”.

In a Realist, faith does not arise from the miracle, but the miracle from faith. The “miracle” of Jesus' Resurrection was believed by the Apostle Thomas – a Realist - “only because he wanted to believe, and maybe he already fully believed in his innermost heart even when he said, “except I shall see, I will not believe” (thoughts and quotations from reading Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”).

A True Realist

One of those crucified with Jesus, a “malefactor” who acknowledged who Jesus really was and made the request, “remember me when you come in your kingdom” (Luke 23: 42) was a Realist who deliberately elected to believe. His faith was real. In response, he was told “today, you will be with me in paradise”, that is, “remembered in Eternity”. This “good thief” chose not only to remember God with his last breath, but asked to be “remembered” by God in Eternity, in contrast to the ridiculing of the crowd and insults offered by the fellow criminal. Choosing to “fear God”, he was rewarded with “Memory Eternal” (Cf. a song or Chant from the Eastern Orthodox Christian Liturgy). The relational character of this exchange is evident in the “remembering” now, and the being “remembered” in the hereafter. Still nowhere, but Eternity? What a difference!

“I want to understand something of the truth which my heart believes and loves. I do not seek thus to understand in order to believe, but believe in order to understand.”   St Anslem of Canterbury c.1033-c.1109

The Apostle Thomas . . . believed only because he wanted to believe, and maybe he already fully believed in his his innermost heart even when he said, "except I shall see, I will not believe".          Dostoevsky "The Brothers Karamazov" 

                

 

A Quiet Moment at Erindale

Thin shafts of sun-light

Stream through assembled storm-clouds

In cold air; the Mall's wet pavements in quietness,

Undisturbed, in stillness set.

In silence and peace, where, too, my soul is at rest,

A different light diffuses; where the spirit is

There is no sound, no footprints on the pavement;

Only thin shafts of light in rarefied air.

A myriad drops of rain on the windscreen

Appear diamond-clustered, pin-points of purest gold

Transformed by lesser gleams, utter unspeakable truths

The Word incarnate: love.

Watching and waiting, inner recesses

Are by this love illuminated; neither dispersed in rain,

Chill air, or by cloud diminished; by this same

I too, have access to your house.

Ineffable light of God, uncreated Word and

Fount of life. Illumination of soul's deep,

Spirit's gift; implant of intellect and secret sense;

Beauty beyond compare.

Now dimly seen, from purest vision hid,

Your gift, desired beyond all sense and images;

Object of faith alone and kindled hope

This is my resting place where Spirit says, 'my home'!

No intellect unformed by faith informs the heart,

Nor memory when hope is its neglect

Or will, untouched by love, in truth alone

I must believe, and so, by this, to understand.

Geoff Wellings

1995

Two Stories - Dostoevsky and Christopher Keller

A Bolt From the Blue and a Blind Date

Finding “self-hood” is a principal theme in Dostoevsky's 'The Brothers Karamazov'. The attainment of freedom from “self” was the whole aim and purpose of the mystical Alyosha's early submission to the Elder as a spiritual guide. Self-renunciation was his chosen path, “to avoid the lot of those who live their whole lives without finding themselves in themselves”.

Alyosha's brothers followed very different paths in their individual search for self-hood. A “bolt from the blue” (he is wrongly accused of murdering his father) leads Dmitri (Mitya) to discover a “newly risen self . . . shut up inside him but only made manifest (remembered) by the thunderbolt of relationality let loose by his father's death”. Person-hood is only possible when the false freedom of self-willed autonomy gives way to relationality.

Confined to the “peeling walls” of his prison, Dimtri's “wild speech” is a confession to his mystic brother that “the time has come for me to pour out my soul to you. During these past two months, Alyosha, I've felt the presence of a new man in me – a new man has arisen in me!”

Dmitri has found a “self” he did not know: “he was shut up inside me, but if it weren't for this thunderbolt, he never would have appeared. Frightening! What do I care if I spend twenty years pounding out ore in the mines, I'm not afraid of that at all, but I'm afraid of something else now: that this risen man not depart from me! Even there, in the mines, underground, you can find a human heart in the convict and murderer standing next to you, and you can be close to him, because there, too, it's possible to live, and love, and suffer! You can revive and resurrect the frozen heart in this convict, you can look after him for years, and finally bring up from the cave into the light a soul that is lofty now, a suffering consciousness. You can revive an angel, resurrect a hero! And there are many of them, there are hundreds, and we're all guilty for them!

“Because everyone is guilty for everyone else . . . I'll go for all of them, because there must be someone who will go for all of them. I didn't kill father, but I must go I accept! All of this came to me here . . . within these peeling walls. And there are many, there are hundreds of them, underground, with hammers in their hands. Oh, yes, we'll be in chains, and there will be no freedom, but then, in our grief, we will arise once more into joy, without which it's not possible for man to live, or for God to be, for God gives joy, it's his prerogative, a great one . . .

“And it seems to me there's so much in me now that I can overcome everything, all sufferings, only in order to say and tell myself every moment: I am! In a thousand torments – I am; writhing under torture – but I am. Locked up in a tower, but still I exist, I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, still I know it is. And the whole of life is there – in knowing the sun is . . . “