There has been no small amount of discussion in several blogs since I wrote to Bishop Marsh to ask him about what bishops thought they were doing when they signed the Roman Catholic catechism and a petition, wearing copes and mitres (symbolic of their roles as bishops and pastors of their flocks) and on the altar of St Agatha’s church in Portsmouth.
Just today, a comment arrived from a convinced Roman Catholic who frequently writes to Fr Smuts’ blog. I let it through because the author was courteous and has shown a certain nuanced attitude, but I had to remind him in a following comment that I been very severely burned in the (Roman) Catholic Church and am not going back for more. As things were under Archbishop Hepworth in around 2009, it seemed that we priests labouring under canonical irregularities would be protected and sheltered and dispensed on the strength of belonging to a stable community and not presenting a threat. For me (and others whose names I will not mention), this would not be so, and I would have had to be fully exposed to the same humiliation I suffered from my former superior back in 1997.
So, from me it’s Thanks but no thanks. But that doesn’t mean I defend just anything!
Perhaps the pigs are being told that the squat concrete building where they are being taken is a nice warm mud bath – but it’s a slaughterhouse. This is my blog and the slaughtermen with their stun guns and sharp knives will be contested and fought. It’s as simple as that. Fortunately for pigs, they don’t understand what’s happening to them!
A certain “orthodoxy” has established itself, and I am no longer prepared to discuss this question. I was present at the College of Bishops meeting in question, and I had my impressions. When I mention them I am disputed, so I keep quiet this time. As a simple priest, not even a vicar general, I did not sign anything. I took a few photographs. I was officially there as a French – English translator (some people from the Congo were in mind), but I had no translating to do. I was little more than a “passenger”.
I began to do my “survey” of the TAC. The USA and Canada are up to date and clear with news. South Africa has a new website forthcoming. The Australians still have some of their clergy waiting for an outcome for their application to the Ordinariate, and some expect the ACCA not to survive the last reception into the Ordinariate. England seems to be as I described it. Quite frankly, I didn’t set out to write an apologia for the TAC, just to try to get information and make it clear for those who care to read it.
This is the central point about my blog. I inform and educate. I don’t tell people what their religious loyalties should be, or which Church they should leave and which one they should join. I have readers who are continuing Anglicans, establishment Anglicans, Orthodox, Roman Catholics, all kinds, and I respect each and all of them. Apologetics are of no interest to me. Christianity in itself is hard to defend in rational terms, and its conservative version often depends on the eclipse of reason. The same accusation can be made against modern atheism, so no one need be concerned that I might go down that road.
Mankind can go one of two ways, new blood feuds and wars over “truth” or an agreement to be tolerant and to respect freedom of religion and conscience. Why do we fight each other when the Sunni or Shiite Muslim would cut our throats for less? I continue my blog in the spirit of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, classical Anglicanism and the reconciliation of faith and reason.
Some may suspect that I “play games”, possibly looking for favours. What could I be looking for? A mitre? Of what? I can only be critical of information I receive when I have other points of view based on evidence.
So, when you think I’m playing games or trying to defend the undefendable, just take a deep breath and remember that I respect you for what you are and that we don’t yet live in a totalitarian world.
The Blue Flower 
Hear! Hear! When it comes down to it, we can share our points of view about diverse things, on broad themes or big picture perspectives, or on details of interest or differences. Many of our conversations or exchanges show that we each place higher or more compelling value on one thing rather another. We are all using reasoning and some logic. From time to time we may each make technically unsustainable inductive leaps or deductive reductions but at root we are trying to give expression to a hunger for meaning and fulfilment in a holistic sense, where both material and non-material considerations are to be addressed. This is what “faith” and “the spiritual quest” involve. The way I see it, if faith is perfectly equivalent to truth, or that either are perfectly equivalent to what someone has written down in a catechism or liturgical manual, then what need have we for humans? All we need are computers on two legs! Belief is not the same as knowledge. We are talking often here either about the God “than which no greater being can be conceived” (or, as I hope Anselm forgives me for amending, “who is greater than anything we can conceive”) or else human constructions like whether it is permissible to give solemn Benediction on this or that day and so on. It seems to me that it is partly true to say that we believe what we want to believe (albeit from deep sincere motive) and that we only know what we think seems to be the case.
We’re all enmeshed in our lifetime of experience and formation. What we think and say and feel at 16 is not identical to what we think and say and feel at 30, or 55 or 70, even if only at the level of scope and style! What one of us has not been burned, as Father Chadwick puts it, by another, or by some experience? Do all burns heal the same way? I find myself resisting the idea that we can ever pronounce anything definitive about God, Incarnation and so on, and yet in a way it may be perfectly true and understandable that the God we imagine, the Incarnated Jesus and the Church we make sense of, is the true God for each of us. If we are so individual and yet so sharing of a common nature, does it not make sense that God is both at the same time as diverse and as singular?
Even this perspective of mine is strictly speaking expressed in a way particular to myself, no matter how many others can say “I think that too!”. The same goes for the other philosophical and theological views each has. How accurate on the whole is it to speak of a unity of faith, i.e. meaning a unity or commonality of understanding and mental adherence, when even within communities, we bring to each moment what are largely idiosyncratic capacities and experience? Don’t you notice that, across centuries, across cultures, the wise are those who tend to speak less and speak less anxiously?
I think the particular challenge of Christianity is how to love, not what to believe or how to conduct service (even though I have my conclusions and my preferences respectively!). I realise that at one level these things may appear linked and we certainly do link them, but I increasingly think that revelation is personal, albeit discussed and explained in common, and that in one way or another, “all will be revealed when we die”.
In the meantime, we have the Psalms to meditate upon: “O God you are my God, for you I long, for you my soul is thirsting. My body pines for you like a dry weary land without water” etc.