What was there like the New Testament or even the first ages now? . . . there was nothing completely like them, but of all unlike things the Church of England with its ‘smug parsons’ and pony carriages for their wives and daughters seemed to him the most unlike; more unlike than the great unreformed Roman Church with its strange, unscriptural doctrines and its undeniable crimes and alliances, whenever it could, with the world. But at least the Roman Church had not only preserved but also maintained at full strength through the centuries to our day two things of which the New Testament was full, and which are characteristic of it – devotion and self-sacrifice. The crowds at a pilgrimage, a shrine or a ‘pardon’ were much more like the multitudes who followed our Lord about the hills of Galilee – like them probably in their imperfect faith which we call superstition – than anything that could be seen in the English Church.
It was what happened after Newman’s departure for Rome that gave the movement its finest moment and its most heroic phase. The second generation of the Anglo-Catholic revival did not stay in the university debating theology. Instead:
it plunged into the dark places of our awful cities. It spent itself, with sacrificial ardour, in the service of the Poor. It shirked nothing: it feared nothing. It took blows and insults with a smile. It went ahead, in spite of menace and persecution. It . . . wore poverty as a cloak, and lived the life of the suffering and destitute.74
When the Anglo-Catholic movement went into what Canon Scott Holland described in that passage as ‘the dark places of our awful cities’ it chose unfashionable addresses in which to establish itself, places like Carrubber’s Close in Edinburgh or Paradise Row in Saint John’s New Brunswick. Paradise Row was an unpaved alley near the docks. The church was built at the tram terminus, and locals called it ‘the last stop before Rome’. But whether it was Old Saint Paul’s Edinburgh, Saint James Vancouver or Saint Peter’s London Docks, the spirit and purpose were the same. In the grimmest areas they built churches of great beauty and numinous power where they gathered the poor round them and fanned their ‘faith into a golden blaze’ by the use of colour and ceremony. This was what had captured me as a boy, this sense of a mystery both given and withheld, within reach yet always eluding my grasp. What the second phase of the Anglo-Catholic movement achieved, the phase that moved it from the university to the slum, was to tie worship and social action inextricably together. At Old Saint Paul’s, the Ritz was as important as High Mass. What happened in the soup kitchen validated what happened in the sanctuary. How could we claim to encounter Jesus in the Eucharist if we refused to encounter him in the poor? How could we lift him high in the sanctuary if we did not also work to lift the oppressed out of the conditions that held them down? But from the beginning there was a tension in Anglo-Catholicism that would lead to its fragmentation. It was the gravitational pull of the past and the way it distorted our efforts to respond to the future.
The yearning in Anglo-Catholicism for ‘the now of then’ cast a long shadow. Its love of the past, when faith was fanned into a golden blaze, its nostalgic journey back to the way things were, had two flaws – one of which was, in time, to prove fatal. The less damaging flaw was self-conscious attitudinising. People who live in a truly traditional society tend not to reflect upon their situation. They take it for granted as the way things have always been and always will be. But when people from a later generation reach back into history to restore its practices and values, they cannot do so without being self-consciously aware of what they are doing. This inevitably lends a studied retro-chic air to the process. This was why in the upper reaches of the Anglo-Catholic movement a lot of play-acting and costume-changing went on. We all did it, especially if we were candidates for the priesthood and our ordination approached. Clergy had to acquire a uniform before embarking on their calling, though it was fairly simple for priests. Coloured stoles were usually provided as gifts from family and friends, the tradition being that the mother of the young priest provided his white stole. The big items were the cassock and surplice, and we usually bought these ourselves. But what kind would we go for? The traditional Anglican cassock was a double-breasted garment that buttoned at the side. It was sometimes called a Sarum cassock, because it was held to have been worn at Salisbury Cathedral from the eleventh century till the Reformation. The other option was the Latin or Roman cassock, a single-breasted item with a lot of buttons down the front from neck to shoe. It came in a more elaborate, caped version, called a soutane, which was favoured by really flashy dressers. Catholic-minded ordinands on limited budgets, like me, usually opted for the Latin version of the cassock, eschewing the flamboyance of the cape. On the other hand, I did opt for the Sarum version of the white surplice that was worn over the cassock. The Sarum surplice was a voluminous garment like a Victorian nightie, which almost reached to the floor. It had capacious sleeves that encouraged dramatic gesturing in the pulpit at Evensong. Ecclesiastical tailors sent their agents round theological colleges at ordination seasons to drum up business, though there were only two options in my day, Wippell or Vanpoulles, the latter being considered more Catholic than the former. Both were tucked away in Tufton Street behind Westminster Abbey, and pale young curates could be seen gazing longingly into their windows at displays of mitres, copes and chasubles – and the dazzling futures they promised. There was little harm in any of this, though it did demonstrate the mysterious weakness of the human male for dressing up in elaborate uniforms and insignia. Though it was not a fatal vanity, it could be silly and precious; when it was done mischievously, archly, it could have charm and humour; but it was never without self-consciousness.
If reaching into the past to ransack its wardrobe and props department was relatively harmless, the second flaw in the Anglo-Catholic movement was more serious. This was its lack of interest in the future as a source of new inspiration, and an absolute refusal to believe any good could come from it. ‘No man having drunk old wine desireth new: for he saith, The old is better.’75 The entirely conservative mind mistrusts change. It believes that what has survived from the past into the present must have had what John Henry Newman called ‘chronic vigour’, so why risk losing it for something never tried or tested that may turn out to be worse? The trouble with philosophies of repetition like this is that they go on repeating the bad as well as the good, since both inevitably co-exist in any human tradition. The pain of unstoppable time is felt most keenly by the conservative mind at those moments of transition when the bad elements of the past are being challenged and have to be let go if the tradition itself, cleansed and renewed, is to be carried into the future. As usual, it was a poet who captured the essence of the dilemma:
If there has been no spiritual change of kind
Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man
And none is looked for now while the millennia cool,
Yet each of us has known mutations in the mind
When the world jumped and what had been a plan
Dissolved and rivers gushed from what had seemed a pool.
For every static world that you or I impose
Upon the real one must crack at times and new
Patterns from new disorders open like a rose
And old assumptions yield to new sensation;
The Stranger in the wings is waiting for his cue,
The fuse is always laid to some annunciation.76
There was too much melancholy in my make-up to make me unconcerned about whatever the Stranger in the wings had in mind for us. Change could make me sad, but it did not make me afraid. More importantly, it never made me angry. Anger at new annunciations is the mark of the invincibly conservative mind; and it is futile, because we can no more stop history than we can hold back the sea. Though I could not know it at the time, my instability or capacity for change, my ability to look both ways, was to provoke a deep seam of anger in the leadership of the Anglo-Catholic movement. I began to gauge the power of its resistance to change at my first encounter with its institution
al life.
A few years after the Pentecostal wind had blown in one door at Old Saint Paul’s and blown out through another, and things had settled down again, a different excitement asserted itself, one that was more congruent with the traditions of the place. In 1978 an attempt was made to revive Anglo-Catholicism as an organised movement in Anglicanism. For those who wanted to maintain it as a separate tradition within the Anglican Church, its own success had become the biggest threat to its survival. What had started in Oxford in 1833, as a conservative protest against the British government’s efforts to curtail the privileged position of the Established Church of England, had broadened into a movement that contained many strands, some of which would have been anathema to the Oxford fathers. In addition to restoring a social and political dimension to the ministry of the Church, it had completely changed its liturgical aesthetic by bringing back a lot of the colour and pageantry that had been lost at the Reformation. As with other reform movements in history, many of the things it had championed against the odds in its early years became, in time, the practice of the majority. It could have been said that its work had been accomplished. It had radically altered both the ceremonial style and the theological self-understanding of Anglicanism. However, the first law of institutions is their own survival. They rarely dissolve themselves when they have accomplished what they set out to achieve. When it looks as if their significance is fading, they go into revival mode. Anglo-Catholicism tried to stage a comeback as the sesquicentennial of the Oxford Movement in 1983 drew near. Inevitably, the first gesture towards revival was a conference, held to mark the launch of what was to be called Catholic Renewal. It met at Loughborough University in the spring of 1978, and I was invited to be one of the keynote speakers. We had a new brace of curates at Old Saint Paul’s by this time, Alan Moses and Graham Forbes. Graham was too busy working with disaffected youngsters in the Canongate to be bothered, but Alan was interested, so he joined me on the jaunt to Loughborough.
The best way to describe the ecclesiastical scene in the late Seventies is as the phoney war before the real one broke out. Just as nothing much happened in the first six months of World War II, so not much happened immediately after the Loughborough conference of 1978, but the ensigns had been hoisted aloft and the forces were preparing themselves for battle. There was the usual mixture of workshops and lectures. And there were some enormous set-piece liturgies, not unreminiscent of National Socialist rallies, in which hundreds of priests in white chasubles concelebrated High Mass, an emerging trend at the time. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. In my own lecture I anticipated the issues that would soon divide us, but I did so indirectly. My Janus-headed mind was looking both ways, I suppose. I was coming to realise that I felt little loyalty to the movement as such – or to any other organisation for that matter – which is why I was destined to disappoint those who had seen me as a leader-in-the-making whom they might follow. The conservative part of my mind well understood why traditional institutions, including the Church, tried to protect humanity from the destructive floods of time. But I was also coming to recognise that I could not privilege any institution above the individuals who composed it. When it came to a choice between them – which was usually when it meant applying the rules against them – I noticed that I usually came down on the side of the individual. I had never put E.M. Forster’s challenge to myself in the precise way he did – that if it came to a choice between betraying his country and betraying his friends, he hoped he’d have the courage to betray his country – but in practice that is what I had been doing. I had gone the other way, on occasions, in favour of the institution instead of the individual, and had always regretted it. At Loughborough I did not tackle the issues head-on that were soon to convulse the Anglican Communion, but I did tilt at a few windmills. I talked about the way some priests were not much good at respecting the authority of the ecclesiastical wood because they knew, loved and lamented over so many of the individual trees. I went on:
For instance, homosexuality is not a moral issue for them – it is Jim and Harry, their confusion, frailty and search for love. The marriage of the divorced is not an ecclesiastical issue for them – it is a succession of people they know, often stunned by failure and desperate to redeem it in a new future. Maybe even the ordination of women is not an issue so much as a person, quiet, pacific, unaggressively but surely aware of her vocation.77
The words I spoke at Loughborough were to prove predictive. The wood did rise against the trees, but that was still a few years away. For me and my family, the main, if indirect, outcome of the Loughborough Conference was to be another major upheaval. Present at the conference was the warden of the Anglican Institute in Chicago, and he invited me and Graham Leonard, then Bishop of Truro and titular head of Catholic Renewal, to come to America to lecture and preach the following spring. The Institute turned out to be a ramshackle affair, but my visit to it occasioned the next big change in my life.
I arrived in Chicago in March 1979, weeks after one of the biggest blizzards in the history of America. Every street was lined with buried cars, still covered in the dirty snow that had been blasted over them when the ploughs had cleared the city weeks before. The Institute was in a rickety old mansion in the Hyde Park district, and I travelled from it to preach and lecture. To accompany me on these trips by train and airplane, I bought the twelve-volume paperback edition of Anthony Powell’s novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, and managed to get through it all before my return to Scotland. Anthony Powell turned out to be a more congenial companion than Graham Leonard. My difficulty with the Bishop of Truro had nothing to do with any unpleasantness in his personality. He was warm and friendly and an entertaining gossip. Among many other titbits, he told me that he had recently sat at a dinner beside Harold Wilson, the former Prime Minister. Like Graham Leonard himself, Wilson was a professional pipe-smoker. Leonard said he was amazed at how filthy Wilson’s hands were, presumably from too much fussing with his pipes. What I came to realise in my discussions and debates with Graham Leonard was the role non-theological factors played in theological debate. In particular, we are all experts at finding intellectual arguments for decisions we have actually taken on temperamental or emotional grounds. I soon realised that Graham Leonard had a unipolar mind, and it was fixed undeviatingly on the past. He did not swivel or swither like me, tugged between the now of then and the now of now. He was a profoundly conservative human being, and his conservatism was a part of his not inconsiderable charm. But it baffled me. We spent a lot of time speaking to groups about the ordination of women, a change that had already been accomplished in the American Episcopal Church. He was implacably opposed, as I well knew, but I became increasingly aware of a submerged iceberg in his thinking that demonstrated how temperamentally different we were. On the surface he presented the familiar arguments. Most opposition to social change in Church and Society follows a familiar trajectory. At first there is opposition to the proposed reform on instinctive rather than rational grounds, and an attempt is made to halt it for allegedly rational reasons. In the case of women’s ordination, Graham Leonard paraded the supposedly theological objection, which was as simple as it was crass. Jesus was a man. At the altar the priest represents Jesus. Therefore the priest has to be a man. A number of rejoinders were possible to this. Jesus was a Jew. At the altar the priest represents Jesus. Therefore the priest must be a Jew. Jesus was circumcised. At the altar the priest . . . and so on. He would have none of it. But he was embarrassed by the arbitrariness of his own logic. It was then the tip of the iceberg bobbed above the surface, and it revealed the anxious nature of the conservative mind as it negotiates change and contemplates doing something for the first time.
What he really believed was that, whether desirable or not, the Anglican Church did not have the authority to make such a change. It was a broken-off branch of the universal Catholic Church and did not have the right to take such a momentous decision on its own. Only if the Pope decreed the
change could it be made. For him the issue was not about justice or injustice, it was about obedience to appropriate authority. It was the institution that defined and guarded value. Right and wrong were what it said they were, which is why a Jesuit once drily remarked that in Rome everything is forbidden till it is made compulsory. I saw things the other way round. If the Pope could command it, couldn’t he see that it was already the right thing to do, because not even the Pope could make a wrong thing right simply by fiat. If he could say it was all right to do it, even though he had not yet said so and might never say it, then it must already be right in principle. If it is not principle or truth that delays it, but only the time it will take to change one man’s mind, then it is unjust to delay. I was rating justice for trees as a higher value than the wood’s authority to manage their lives for them, while Graham Leonard believed the opposite.
I do not want to moralise the difference between us, to claim my view was virtuous and his was vicious. The issue was much deeper than that. It showed that he was au fond a believer in a way that I never had been. He, a decent and kindly man, obeyed the Church, even if it meant acting unkindly, because he believed in the Church as God’s Kingdom on earth with the Pope as God’s Vicar. I knew I had never believed this. If I had, would I have disobeyed the Church’s rule on marrying divorced people, as I had consistently all my ministry? Would I have officiated at my first gay wedding in the Lady Chapel at Old Saint Paul’s in 1972, in spite of centuries of opposition in Christianity to homosexuality? As I have already observed, I did not perform these actions in any spirit of revolt or rebellion. I did not announce them, parade my own rebelliousness. It just seemed impossible not to respond to the people in front of me, confused about their own failures, needing a kind of mercy. It takes a lot of belief, a lot of divine assurance, to deny people mercy, to turn away from the woman quietly seeking to serve the church, the person with a broken marriage behind them, the gay couple wanting acceptance and stability. I did not have that assurance of belief. The ultimate test of belief is obedience, particularly when it goes against your human grain. Had I read the signs, I would have recognised that I had never possessed that capacity. Au fond, I was not a believer. Or one of my minds wasn’t. I could see the beauty of the great institution of faith and the security it gave those who could obey it against the protests of their own heart. Lacking that capacity for obedience, I also lacked the fundamental capacity for faith that is its essential concomitant. I did not figure out all the possible consequences of this uncomfortable knowledge, but it would prove to be a solvent that would burn away much of what I thought I believed. But here in Chicago in these debates with the Bishop of Truro, it had already marked me as suspect in the eyes of the leadership of Catholic Renewal.
Leaving Alexandria Page 21