A CONTEMPORARY SPIRITUALITY

September 2022

Spirituality..is our search for depth and meaning in our lives, beyond what we know is superficial, and living out of what is discovered.  Spiritual direction encourages & supports someone in that search.

Feral spirituality is searching beyond an institutional religious framework.

Becoming ‘feral’

1 On holiday in Falmouth a few years ago,I was drawn to a title in a bookshop, entitled ‘Feral’.  The author defined feral as being ‘in a wild state, especially after escape from captivity or domestication’, and the lights came on.  Of course I am a feral priest: called by God to escape the captivity of the institutional church many years ago, who has since exercised a ministry mainly in spiritual direction outside its domestication.  It had felt scary to leave, but once I had done so it seemed [St Paul-like] as if scales fell from my eyes and I beheld a world in glorious colour which previously had been in black and white, and I realised something of what captivity and domestication had done to me.

2 As a feral priest I have had to learn a different skill-set: to place my trust in God and not in a human institution; to trust that God will make my ministry clear, and provide the resources to exercise it; and lastly to trust myself and my own intuitive sense of what my call to priesthood means, as well as recognising the necessary signs.  I also had to let go of ways of exercising priesthood that become familiar to me and which I’d enjoyed. So there was also a sense of loss.

3 Looking back I can see that the roots of all this had their beginnings many years ago. 

[a]   I grew up attending a middle of the road Anglican Church which was a friendly safe place that encouraged an intuitive questioning faith in me without offering any prescriptive answers. My sense of being called to priesthood came at the end of a Christmas Midnight service I attended there in my teens with my mother. Had I been asked then what I sensed I’d be doing as a priest, I’m clear that I would have said that it would give me time and space to explore my questions about the meaning of life and of God, and that I would find myself in conversation with others about those matters. Nothing there about institutional activity!

[b]   I served for a year between school and university, with VSO in the South Pacific. VSO put us through some training in preparation for that, and there was one piece of wisdom that I’ve never forgotten:  ‘Wherever you go, try not to take your own agenda with you, rather spend time trying to hear the agenda of the place, and then do your best to respond to it’.

[c].  Having read Theology at University the assumption at Theological College was that I would do a further period of academic study. But I felt that having come new to theology at University which I had found a rather barren place spiritually, I wanted instead to have time to reflect intuitively on what I’d already learnt and to have time for friendships and conversations with men who felt like spiritual peers. Luckily I was allowed to do so. 

[d]   I remember at my ordination, while others of my brethren were clear what they would do as ordained ministers of the Church of England, I had no idea what I would be doing but I was confident that God would make it clear to me and that I’d be able to do it well enough.

[e]   In my first Incumbency I was heavily involved in a scheme in which four local inner city churches each called out one or two of their number whom the Diocese then trained for ordination. In the midst of it I realised to my great surprise that all the external skills of priesthood that these men were being equipped with, no longer seemed that important to me, for I had internalised priesthood. It was something that I am rather then what I do. I was happy to continue to exercise the external expressions, but my priesthood was never again dependent upon them.

[f]   That all came to a head many years later, when in the midst of a personal crisis God spoke to me in a way that I’d never experienced before.  It turned my world upside down. I knew that I had to put the experience at the centre of my life without having much idea of what that might mean.  I discovered that most people claim to have had a similar experience at some time in their lives, but that people rarely talk about it. And it re-awakened my original sense of what priesthood was about for me: exploring questions and having conversations. 

There’s no time for that in the life of a busy parochial clergyperson, so it seemed as if God said that I should find another way to be the priest that I’d been called to be, one outside the institution. I talked to my Bishop about it who clearly thought that I’d lost the plot, ‘what you are talking about is fine for your day off or a sabbatical’ he said ‘but it has nothing to offer to the  serious business of running the church.’  I was appalled! But of course what he said was, sadly, very true. 

4 The call to be spiritually feral is an ages old one of course, once you think about it. Its not new.

The tension between the prophets of the Old Testament and the religious institution of their time prefigures it.

Jesus was feral of course, having grown up within an institution, His religious experience led Him to challenge it for a bigger vision, & the institutions leaders connived at his death.

The early Church was feral, escaping the confines of Judaism with its discovery that new wine required new wine skins. One of the most important but under-rated stories in the New Testament is the one that tells how the persecution of Christians in Jerusalem caused them to flee that city, no doubt in fear and trembling, but also to discover a greater freedom in the Roman world.

I guess that Luther and other leaders of the Reformation were, in their own way, feral. 

So were the Methodists, the Quakers and other Christian denominations who, over the centuries, have separated themselves from the main body of the institutional Church.

Its one way in which God brings about renewal and change, when old models are declining.  So its not surprising that its happening today.

My exploring ‘feral’ is not the only current expression of this. The number of flourishing independent churches is another. Yet another was highlighted by a book ‘A Churchless Faith’ that tells of research in New Zealand into why people leave Evangelical/Pentecostal/Charismatic churches.  Rather than having lost their faith, it appears that often then reverse is true. Peoples’ faith remains strong but they stopped going to church because either they were asking questions that were not acceptable, or were exploring answers that were not acceptable.  They often continued to meet informally for mutual support.

5 Over the years a pattern of life has evolved for me that includes 5 things:

Prayer

Reading, thinking, mulling

Ministry to others

Time to explore

            Relaxation

6 Over the years I have been gradually led away from the institutional church

On leaving parish ministry I was loaned a house for 18 months by a friend

House for duty in a CofE parish in Old Maldon, Surrey

            House for no duty in Doncaster, courtesy of the Bishop of Sheffield

            Own house in Worcestershire, where I offered duty in our local parish that was first accepted & then declined.

A reorganisation of the way the ministry of SD was organised in Worcester Diocese, led to my asking to be taken off the Diocesan list of spiritual directors.

Having no longer any need for a Diocesan PTO        I returned mine to the Bishop in the autumn of 2018.         

NB 1    John Keats phrase ‘Negative Capability’ to describe the ability to accept ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ captures for me something of what I’ve come to experience as ‘feral’.

NB 2    Joseph Campbell: ‘a priest is a functionary, serving the community. A Shaman seeks the experience [and follows it]”

NB 3    I’m a feral Christian priest. I know that there are other feral Christian priests who express their feralness differently from me. I know that there are feral lay Christians. I assume that there are ferals of all the major religions and of none.

HV’s Reflection 

Some thoughts as a preliminary response.

Broadly, we are helped I think by some of the more modern understandings of institutions that reach us via social science approaches and which pick out some fairly consistent features of them. Such as developments to (the taming of) the original vision and purpose, the tendency to become ends rather than means, self-perpetuation and even the means of (or at least capacity for) covertly doing harm. Ivan Illich (priest, polemicist, writer, cf Deschooling Society, Medical Nemesis. BTW he liked to describe himself as ‘an errant pilgrim’) is good on these themes. I want to read more of his.

Applied to the (institution of) the Church we see enough evidence of the truth of the claims: a tendency to codify the kind of responses our hearts and souls may make to the Gospel in the ways you describe, the provider of careers for its officials (hard to respond freely when income and roof are tied to it). I won’t go on, but it seems fair to note – without judgement or criticism of people – that in trying to witness to the uncontainable God the church must of necessity clip many wings and precisely contain aspects of the uncontainable.

I’m struck by how often you have forsaken the protection of things to follow your leading.

Where you cite examples of feral developments in Xnty, mentioning Luther and non-conformists I thought, yes, but then look: the same process returns of domestication &c. So we always need to be on our guard. No abiding home and all that.

So domestication seems to me as possibly an inescapable drift and tendency about which we must always be alert. And for some people, its encroachment will reach a stage or level where all we can do is break free. (Maybe the Church deserves some acknowledgement for its ability to contain all sorts of feralness without breaking into a sweat. Maybe something to talk more about).