A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

January 2021

When I first sensed a call to ordination, I naively thought it would mean that ‘I shall have paid time to walk in the woods to wonder about the big questions of the existence of God and the meaning of life, and that I will find myself in conversation with others about these questions.’   Being brought up as an Anglican in a Christian culture, priesthood seemed the obvious means of exploring this vocation. Had I been born into a Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Animist or atheist culture then the means of exploration would have been different but I assume that the exploration would have been similar.

It was brought into consciousness for me in Confirmation classes in my early teens, when my memory is that I was always asking questions, which were always taken seriously. My secular education never raised the questions that I was asking, but I continued to ponder them in my walks in the woods and in my meetings with the young priest who’d led the confirmation classes. It was he who suggested that I might think about getting ordained.  Several years later I knew that that was what God was calling me to.

Looking back I’m intrigued that I trusted that sense of call, which came as an inner knowing. But of course many people have a sense of inner knowing about what their calling is, although most would not describe it as coming from a divine source. Many of them know they should trust it and do so. Some are able to earn a living by it, others cant but instead follow it in their spare time. There are pluses and minuses with both. The minus with earning a living following my vocation was that the institution that employed me, in time  circumscribed how I was able to pursue it  The plus was that I served a formative apprenticeship that nurtured a range of gifts and experience.

I continued at school, a year on Voluntary Service Overseas and then at University, asking my questions but with no one to talk with about them. It was a spiritually lonely time that I sense left me with an empathy for others who are spiritually lonely.  But I did become friends, on VSO, with a woman teacher, a bit older than myself, from whom I learnt, by osmosis, of the importance of prayer.  And at University studying theology for the first time, I was blessed with two influential tutors: Eric Heaton who nurtured a love of the Bible in me, and David Jenkins who was always encouraging the asking of questions. 

I spent two very happy years at theological college, mulling on what I felt that I’d learnt from my degree course in theology, & having time to explore the arts: I read lots of novels and poetry, visited art galleries, and listened to a lot of music, discovering a deep spirituality in all of them, which has continued to nourish and challenge me. With hindsight I’m astonished that no attention was given to my call experience, there was no encouragement to reflect on what it might be telling me about God and the ways that God might speak to me & to others, and no notion that a central role for any priest was to encourage people to recognise their own ‘calls’ and to take them seriously as of divine origin.

What would I have done if the Church had not confirmed my call?   I don’t know. I don’t believe that the call would have gone away. How I might have explored that other than through being ordained, I’ve no idea.  I’ve always thought of the priest as a creative artist. I don’t know where that idea came from, but in my imagination I’ve sometimes wished that I’d had the skills to be an artist or a poet or even maybe a singer, but I don’t. I was clear that I didn’t want to be a teacher, I wasn’t bright enough to be an academic. I did wonder, soon after ordination, if I was called to be a monk, but knew that I wasn’t, because I knew that the answers to my questions & my calling needed to be found and lived in the midst of the everyday lives of ordinary people, not apart from them.  

VSO taught me the wisdom of trying not to take my own agenda with me to wherever I was sent, but rather of trying to respond to the agenda of wherever I found myself.  My Biblical studies led me to revere Amos & Hosea, and especially Jesus, to whom God spoke through the events of ordinary everyday life. These two insights dovetailed into each other: you take no agenda, but wait & pay attention to what God reveals.  Thirdly I had learnt to trust my own intuitive inner voice as God‘s way of addressing me in the midst of life, to take it seriously, and to trust it, even though it sometimes led me to act in ways others didn’t understand. At some level I knew all three of these things prior to Ordination.   So at Ordination where my brothers all seemed to have a clear idea of what they would be doing in the parish they were sent to, I did not. ‘I have no idea what I shall be doing, but I’m sure that God will make it clear when I get there’ was my attitude, with the implication that I’ll know it when I see it.  There were some words of TS Eliot and a Russian Orthodox prayer that meant a lot to me then, and still do.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope 

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; 

Wait without love 

For love would be love of the wrong thing; 

There is yet faith 

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. 

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: 

So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing                        TS Eliot 

O Lord grant me to greet the coming day in peace. 

Help me in all things to rely upon Thy holy will 

In every hour of the day reveal Thy will to me

Bless my dealings with all who surround me 

Teach me to treat all that comes to me throughout the day,

with peace of soul, and with firm conviction that thy will governs all. 

In all my deeds and words guide my thoughts and feelings 

in unforeseen events let me not forget that all are sent by Thee. 

Teach me to act firmly and wisely, without embittering and embarrassing others. 

Give me strength to bear the fatigue of the coming day, with all that it shall bring. 

Direct my will 

Teach me to pray 

Pray Thou Thyself in me.                                                         Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow

With hindsight, I think that Ordination was important as an external validation of my sense of call, which then set me on the path that provided the context within which I explored what it meant and where it might lead.  I’m grateful to the Church of England for that, and for the most part enjoyed parochial ministry, learnt much, & found it fulfilling.  My curacies and years in the inner city gave me time ‘to walk in the woods & ask my questions’ although opportunities for conversations were more rare. In suburban Surrey external, and some internal, pressures to be active and busy largely eliminated reflective space although I did begin to explore the ministry of spiritual direction. Then a personal crisis left me feeling lost & in a dark hole, from which I was rescued when ‘God spoke’ to me: “I love you, accept you, and trust you, all will be well.” It was an experience, the like of which I’d never had before, and I knew that I had to ‘set it at the centre of my life and live out of it’ without much idea of what that might mean.  

However, I discovered that most people claim to have had a religious experience like the one I had had, but rarely speak about it.  That led me to recall my original sense of what my calling was, only in addition to my questions I now had a life changing experience of God, and I had found spiritual direction. Now I could name the priesthood I had been called to incarnate: it required me to take my own spiritual journey under God seriously, and to support others in theirs. When I shared this with my Bishop he replied that  what I was talking about ”had nothing to offer to the serious business of running the church.”  I knew then what I would have to do.  So, after over twenty years as a parish priest I stepped out into an exploration of priesthood outside the structures of the Church, under The Annunciation Trust, an exploration that has now lasted nearly thirty years.  For most of that time I’ve seen myself as having one foot inside the church and the other outside it, but two years ago I returned my Permission to Officiate to my local Bishop, in part because I no longer needed it, no longer being used in the local parish and having asked for my name to be taken off the Diocesan list of spiritual directors when it was reorganised, and partly because I sensed that God was calling me to explore what priesthood might mean if I was set free of an increasingly inward-looking church structure. Rationally I didn’t need to return my PTO to do that, but intuitively I knew that I wouldn’t feel free unless I did. It has felt like a wonderful liberation.