Since the age of nine I have been driven by a force beyond my control that I call a vocation. I lay it at the feet of a visionary experience that I perceived quite out of the blue while away at a boys’ preparatory school on the south coast of Sussex in 1954. I took it to mean that I was to be ordained as a priest in the Church of England. I did not come from a particularly religious family at the time. We rarely attended church. Scripture was probably my least favourite subject at school and I never prayed. So, why did it happen to me?
The vision in my memory was of a large but empty wooden cross that rose up above the gorse and grassy headland that climbed up to the left of the seaside town of Seaford. From the big schoolroom window, when we were assembled to drink that government-issue regulation third-of-a-pint of milk at 4:00 p.m. before afternoon classes, I clearly saw this rugged cross rise up and a voice boom from it that only I could hear. Like those World War I recruiting posters of Lord Kitchener pointing straight at me, the voice boomed out, “God needs you.” From that day on it became my goal to be ordained—my vision somewhat bolstered by the flamboyant clerical robes that I saw the vicar of Seaford wearing every Sunday when marched off to Morning Prayer for the Sunday schools’ service designed to accommodate the numerous private boarding schools that the town attracted.
I started to pray, but very privately, usually ‘out of bounds’ among the bushes and trees that were beyond our school playing fields, until one day I was caught. I was rebuked for being ‘out of bounds’, but not punished in days when the hairbrush or the cane were frequently used. After all, it was difficult to punish a nine-year-old boy for praying. I became known as the boy who was going to become a bishop, which somewhat resonated with a plausible distant cousin of my forebears in the Nineteenth Century. He was the Most Reverend Charles Thomas Longley, Archbishop of Canterbury. His claim to fame was that he founded the Lambeth Conferences of bishops from the worldwide Anglican Communion.
I think it is important to note that there was no image of the crucified Christ on that wooden cross of my visionary experience. I paid some attention to the stories of Jesus in those boring school Scripture lessons, but only saw him as a good man who taught love and compassion and never as my Saviour or the Son of God. I believed he was crucified, but attributed that to his upsetting the religious authorities of his day, and I am not sure that I ever truly believed in his resurrection or ascension. Easter with my family was all about baby chicks and chocolate ‘Easter’ eggs and a roast lamb lunch that if it had any significance was more about the last supper before Jesus was unfairly betrayed, arrested, tried and crucified. My relationship with the Divine was from that first real encounter onward always with God, the mystical power that created all that is. I tended to seek this divine power more in nature than in humanity. I never saw man as made in God’s image to laud it over the rest of God’s creation, but just another part of an evolving world that was all equally dependent on the divine force.
It was only natural, therefore, that once I was confirmed at the age of fourteen and could partake of the sacrament of Holy Communion, in my day more or less a rite-of-passage in our boarding-school life, I found it hard to accept any concept that I was being served the body and blood of Jesus, the Christ. I saw Thomas Cranmer’s prayers in the Eucharist as cannibalistic, and in essence I still do. I did, however, sense the mystery of this communion with God, and for that reason Holy Communion became important to me. Awe and mystery are very important in worship. They place us in a relationship with the unknown Divine.
In 1962, in order to fulfil my vocation, I attended my Church Advisory Council for the Ministry conference at Jesus College, Oxford. Beforehand, as a prospective candidate I had attended a retreat at Shallowford House in Staffordshire, where I appreciated the silence of private time in nature that continued to be my main access to God. I had also received word from St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, that my application to read theology there from 1963-66 had been accepted, so confidently I felt that my path to ordination and the fulfillment of my vocation was set. Then came a serious blow. I heard from the Church Advisory Council for the Ministry that my application for ordination was to be placed temporarily on hold as the advisors ‘felt I came from too privileged and sheltered a background, and that I should work in industry for a while before re-applying.’
After a GAP year in Ireland acting as a private tutor in an American family, I took up my place at Cambridge to read theology. Somewhat disheartened, I asked my senior tutor if there was any chance of my switching to read history. My request was not granted, so I settled into three years studying the Theological Tripos. At first, I found it rather daunting with two languages to master, Greek and Hebrew, as well as a great deal about Jewish history and the Christology of Jesus that were pretty unknown to me, my never having been much of a biblical scholar. The history came to me easily, however, and I learned what I thought from my reading were the right interpretations of Christology.
Christology is a field of study within Christian theology which is concerned with the nature of Jesus Christ, particularly with how the divine and human are related in his person—much of which I don’t believe.
There was an important moment in that first year, however, when I wrote a paper on Christology for my New Testament supervisor, the Reverend Geoffrey Styler. He wrote at the end of my paper—after I had given all the right answers according to the standard reading material—‘This is not radical enough.’ I wanted to be radical and to question the whole doctrine of Jesus as the Son of God, but feared to do so. Geoffrey Styler now gave me the green light.
Cambridge University in the early 1960s was the most forward-thinking liberal theological centre of the world. I was now able to throw myself into the benefits of all those great Cambridge theologians of the era from Bishop John A.T. Robinson to Dr Alec Vidler, Joe Fison, Hugh Montefiore, John Bowker, Henry St John Hart and Mervyn Stockwood. As John Bowker, my Old Testament supervisor in those days, recently said after a long life seeking and searching in the theological world: ‘Religions, like the sciences, are explorations of the worlds in which we live: the inner world—who and what we are; and the outer world—the cosmos. Originally, they all belonged together as part of the same exploration, and only recently have they come apart in terms of organisation, method, purpose, and so on. Even so, they both remain iconocosmic—they create pictures of the worlds in which we live—and, therefore, as I try to show in my books, they have much to offer to each other.’
It was John Robinson’s books, Honest to God followed by The Honest to God Debate that truly illustrated the excitement of Cambridge theology at that time. Here, problems that had been surfacing as natural sciences evolved through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came to a philosophical head. The concept of a super human God ‘up there’ in whose image we are made, and who sent us Jesus as his Son to reconcile us to Him in Jesus’ supreme sacrifice of himself, was turned upside down and inside out. The Cosmic God was born—a God not of human likeness ‘up there’, but of universal vibration ‘everywhere’—the God within all that is.
Some called it the God of our time—the secular God—the God without religion—the God of spirituality, and in the western world it appealed to an increasing population of nominal Christians without churchgoing allegiance. I sometimes describe the revolution in thought that came out of that 1960’s movement as a reverse image. Instead of seeing God through a telescope as an ever greater supreme being up there, we look down into the microscope and see God in the ever-increasing atoms, molecules, elements and nano-particles that make up all that is, animate and inaminate from solid forms to amorphous gases—the totality of our universe. In essence we are all as one in the oneness of time, in the moment of now as Meister Eckhart Tolle shows in his book The Power of Now. In spiritual terms everything past, present and future is one in its divinity. What was once blasphemy is now seen as truth—Everything is divine, implying that we, too, are the essence of God. God is the energy of the universe, the totality of all that is.
Naturally, this brings the essence of the divine in all religions and philosophies into a certain unity, but it also makes it difficult to accept a doctrine or dogma in a faith that sees its central purpose in proclaiming salvation through a God-appointed saviour such as Jesus Christ. In my student days, it not only took me into a great interest in my theology, but also into a bold critique of the doctrine and dogma of twentieth-century Christianity. In a sacrilegious manner, I remember intentionally needling a group of my fellow CACTM-approved ordinand fellow students after receiving Holy Communion, suggesting that maybe ‘I had received the Lord’s eyebrows at the altar’. Of course, this was to refute Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s cannibalistic re-write of the Latin Mass that gives us our Anglican Eucharistic prayers and was meant in its banter to start among us a discussion of different views on transubstantiation, consubstantiation or a Calvinistic memorial of the Last Supper—all raging arguments of the sixteenth-century reformation.
A few years later, after the Church of Ireland had accepted me as a candidate for ordination and I had been appointed as a licensed lay-reader and preacher, I brought the subject up in a more serious way as a representive of the Diocese of Cashel and Emly, Waterford and Lismore at the General Synod in Dublin. Needless to say, I was asked to stand down by the Archbishop of Armagh for tampering with the Thirty Nine Articles of the Anglican faith, but at the same time I was advanced by my Bishop for training in television for religious broadcasting at the RTE studios, a course that only emboldened me more. In 1974, that same bishop encouraged me further by asking me, even as a layman, to act as Dean of Cashel Cathedral during a nine-month interregnum. I never was ordained in Ireland, where professionally I was the estate manager of a castle in Co. Tipperary. When it was sold in 1977, I moved to the USA.
In the post Honest to God debate, theologians around the western world spent much time researching into the Historical Jesus to find more meaning in his teaching, compassion and healing abilities rather than just depending on the difficult doctrines and dogmas of his role as the sacrificed son of God. I devoured the works of this new generation of theologians like Robert Funk, Father Dominic Cross, Elaine Pagels, James Veitch and Bishop John Shelby Spong, all of whom had a more scholastic and less literal approach to the study of scripture. One of Robert Funk’s most revealing titles echoes John Robinson: Honest to Jesus: Jesus for the New Millennium. Bishop Spong’s title, Why Christianity must Change or Die, certainly caught my attention. All of these theologians were a part of the Westar Institute to which I also became an associate member.
As theologians and historians we applied historical critical analysis to our source materials. These scholars were not afraid to look for a greater truth in the scriptures by examining them like a forensic scientist, looking at them from every viewpoint available to us in academia. However, they did not veer away from scripture and made no attempt ‘to throw out the baby with the bath water.’ Their intent was to study the scriptures as fully as they could to unearth truth rather than a blind faith in the literal ‘word of God,’ but they never embraced speculation. One can only really understand Christianity in the terms of first-century thought and language as the movement developed in the Graeco-Roman world of the First Century AD. Religions grow out of the human endeavour to explain the relationship between our daily lives and the divine. Jesus, and more so, St Paul, lived in a world that was steeped in legends of gods and humans mingling in their attempt to steer humanity through the pitfalls of life. They were also steeped in the traditions of their Jewish background with sacrificial allegiance to a tribal God, who took care of His people. The Second and Third Centuries AD saw fledgling Christian communities torn apart in their attempts to reconcile these two ideals of the divine godhead. Later, in the post-Constantine church, Christianity adopted the hierarchy of Roman Imperialism and in essence has been governed that way ever since with allegiance to Jesus as the Son of God and great high priest who can intercede for us directly with his divine father, God Almighty – but in our contemporary science-based world it is difficult to conceive of such a God and that order has difficulty in serving the Cosmic God.
All religions work out a system whereby man seeks a future for himself in the divine order. In essence, we created our religions out of our need to see some order in the purpose of our creation and an ultimate divine plan. As John Bowker said, ‘Religions, like the sciences, are explorations of the worlds in which we live: the inner world — who and what we are; and the outer world — the cosmos. Originally, they all belonged together as part of the same exploration. But times have changed, we realise now that we are not the pinnacle of God’s creation but a rather fragile species facing the enormity of possible extinction in an ever-evolving universe. We came from nothingness to return to nothingness in a universe of nothingness, for nothingness is all that is, and as such it is universal divinity, all else is illusion.
It is not surprising, therefore, that many people ask me: ‘Why do you still go to church?’ Perhaps it is to experience the awe of nothingness.
As humans we are fraught with emotions. Ironically, from an ecclesiastical point of view, this first came to me when as a licensed lay-reader and preacher in the Church of Ireland I started to administer the chalice at Holy Communion. I may not have believed in transubstantiation or that in any way the elements of bread and wine had changed, but I could sense the power that this simple ritual gave as I passed the sacred cup to others. I think what we are looking at here is ‘Focus’—the intense concentration momentarily as we focus on the Divine. In a similar way, this is how I see prayer, and in many ways it is what Jesus taught us about prayer in St Luke’s and St Matthew’s gospels. I have no doubt that Jesus in the First Century AD believed that the God of the Jews could hear his petitions and words, but he also chastises the religious authorities for the use of their fine words in prayer using examples of focus on actions rather than words (St Matthew 6:5-15). I doubt in the framework of our Cosmic God we can still believe that we are conversing with a multi-lingual humanoid ‘up there’, but we can sense the power of focus that our prayers can generate.
It is this focus that becomes the strength of ritual. The words that accompany the ritual are outmoded and out of date, but the focus they create even in this post-Darwin, Einstein and Hawking world, can be powerful. We are moved by our emotions. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever,’ said the poet John Keats in his famous poem Endymion based on Greek mythology. The important thing that the poet tells us is that beautiful things give unending pleasure and can change our lives. He repeats this in his 1819 poem, Ode to a Grecian Urn: ‘When old age shall this generation waste, thou shalt remain, in midst of other woes than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
Some of the most beautiful music ever to have been composed accompanies the rituals of the Christian church. It truly is ‘the music of the spheres’ and when heard in awesome spaces of worship it ignites the Divinity within us, whether it be in the simplicity of plainsong, the peel of bells, the vigour of the Victorian hymnal to the beloved favourites of Charles Wesley, or the magnificence of Mozart and the reverence of Bach. We become one with all around us. It focuses on and unites us with the divinity of all that is.
The beauty of vestments that moved me all those years ago in Seaford Parish church, the light of candles, and the perfume of incense personally moves me, and they hold much in common with other faiths seeking union with the Divine in differing cultures around our world. But this is not everyone’s taste, I have equally been moved by the beauty of butterflies fluttering in the plain glass east window of a country church in Ireland and by one of my earliest memories of the then still-bonneted members of the Salvation Army playing their brass instruments in a London park of the late 1940s.
For twenty-five years after I moved to the USA in 1977, I was a cruise director. I spent many hours just watching the sea, the great ocean that covers 70 % of our planet making it the beautiful blue place that some have been privileged to see from space. It is a part of the universe, and the ocean holds the building blocks of life as we know it. It was not always there and it will probably one day disappear in our planet’s evolution, but it has given us that chance to know that we are one with the divinity of all that is. It has given us the knowledge of the peace of God.
I do not worry that intellectual Christianity as we once knew it might be dying or have died, for it has played its part in giving us the knowledge of our divinity, and if we focus on that, it becomes eternal. I have found the peace of the divine in Hindu temples, Shinto shrines, Buddhist stuppas, massive Moslem mosques, colossal Christian cathedrals and tiny empty country churches spanning centuries of time. I have endlessly watched sunsets and sunrises as they record the rhythm of our days, but all these things are not manifestations of truth, they simply provide focus for truth, and that is why I still go to church.