Le Dialogue des Sourds

Posted on Wednesday, 19 June, 2024 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

News has broken over the past few days about an alleged intention of the Vatican (the Pope) to ban the “extraordinary form” of the liturgy once and for all. I have been listening to various podcasts on Youtube from devout traditionalists and information claiming to be a little more serious on Rorate Caeli. The story goes that Pope Francis, with his archons in the Vatican department that deals with the liturgy, intend to bring out a document on 16th July to bring a formal end to the old Roman liturgy. Obviously, it would be a massive act of intolerance, institutional hypocrisy and iconoclasm.

We do well to read with an open and sceptical mind the following interview between a traditionalist Italian blog and the lay expert Andrea Grillo: An astonishing interview of the main lay ideologue behind Traditionis Custodes and the desire to ban the Traditional Mass. With my somewhat bitter experience with Roman Catholic traditionalists between 1981 and 1997, I would be tempted to cheer him on and “get my revenge”. Such an attitude would not be Christian, and more than some of the exaggerations of the traditionalists. I find something of a parallel between Grillo and Robespierre in his intolerance and fanaticism. Such men die on their own guillotine!

I have sometimes found sympathy with Pope Francis, with these ideologues and with other globalist liberals and their cultural Marxist ideologies. However, I see through the gaslighting and the cigarette-and-the-fist approach in manipulating other human beings. The biggest argument of this ecclesiastical Robespierre is blind fidelity to the institution. At the same time, traditionalists have not really been able to extricate themselves from this cognitive dissonance. We find ourselves at the same Achilles heel I confronted in the 1990’s as I concluded “from Anglicanism whence I came, to Anglicanism I return”. Even Anglicanism is far from perfect with the same paradigm consisting of a Protestant institution with a desire to re-find a “magical-idealist” Catholicism. The English way has softened and become more tolerant, and founding parallel churches is less taboo, but I see the analogy. Many people of our time struggle with the tension between the Christian ideal and the merciless political institution the “official” Church has become. Either one finds a way to live as a Christian as an outsider (read Simone Weil’s works) or one sheds belief in God and anything other than brute matter.

Before you abandon this posting in despair, I give you this link to Michael Martin’s Report from the Between. He and I have converged from our different experiences of life onto Christian Romanticism. Roman Catholic priest and theologian Fr. Dwight Longenecker published an essay in which he discusses Michael Martin’s poetry collection, Mythologies of the Wild of God. From having been a hard-core “one true church” apologist, Fr Longenecker says:

His poems are rooted in his life in the countryside, and in our increasingly artificial life, they resonate with a reality that is refreshing. These are poems with blood on their hands—they reek of the guts and glory of farmland—the worms of woodland, wild beasts, meadows, livestock, hunts, and hard labor. Envision Robert Frost filtered through Cormac McCarthy.

Within the earthy musk of these poems there simmer sexuality, sensuality, and spirituality. Martin is deeply, physically, spiritually Catholic, and his poems wrestle with his masculinity, humanity, and reality. They surge with a surprising, stunning insights and enlighten with new perspectives. They meld poetry and prayer together just as they should—modern, intimate, powerful, and personal. I will come back to Michael Martin’s poems because they remind me of a gutsy and gritty reality that I have lost in this gasping, gurning, gargoyle world.

He has understood something that our Grillo-Robespierre in Rome will never understand, at least from what we read.

I have little to say about the present-day political situation in the UK and Europe. It seems the tide is turning from a kind of liberalism that has shown its intolerance and hypocrisy, to nationalist populism in its various forms. The demonstrations on both sides are shrill and noisy, not something with which I can relate. At an intellectual level, I see the need for change and for a forward view of history, as happened in 1789. However, France got Robespierre and the guillotine. It sufficed to disagree with the Jacobin ideology to be sent to La Veuve. At the end of the Terror, the change had to come, even if people rarely understood the deepest issues. Grillo might despise the Pilgrimage of Chartres, but I see it in parallel with the present populist uprising. He fails to see the new page of history beyond his liberal certitudes.

I have many memories from my time at Fribourg University. My tutor was Fr Jakob Baumgartner  (1926-1996) who represented the ideal of liturgical reform in its most radical Swiss-German form. He also showed me the tolerance of a university scholar as he dealt with my desire to write about the Tridentine Reform of 1570, Missa Tridentina. He merely expected my tolerance. This relationship taught me many things in life. I admired his scholarship and knowledge of his subject. He was a passionate and fatherly man, and I wish I could find the same qualities in Andrea Grillo. He would not answer the interview in the way he did without such qualities.

Grillo makes a caricature of traditionalists. His first argument is numbers. What for him is the winning group? The one that is the most collectivist and that tolerates no difference?

Little more than a sect that experiences infidelity as salvation, and is often linked to moral and political positions, and very concerning customs.

I have found sectarian tendencies in the traditionalist movement, but also in his camp. We can only deal with fanaticism and ideology through tolerance and kindness, not through pogroms and killing (physically or spiritually). Repression, force and fear will only make the perceived problem worse.

The Church is not a “club of notaries or lawyers” who cultivate their aesthetic passions or plan to instrumentalize the Church as “the most famous museum”.

Who said it is? You’re not going to blow the whole thing up with an atomic bomb because a minority might be young or old fogeys. What are you going to do? Send them to Auschwitz? Line them up in front of a machine gun or stuff them into a gas chamber? If you are a Christian, Grillo would see that Christ did not scheme with the Sanhedrin to have the Pharisees repressed. The living word and the spirit were what was needed, then as now. There are indeed many problems with the traditionalist world, including nineteenth-century stuffiness and another form of identity politics. You don’t deal with that with a machine gun, but through teaching, writing books, the nobility of spirit.

… forms of fundamentalism

I wonder if he would say the same about American evangelical mega-churches or Islamist terrorists. There is the old joke about the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist – you can negotiate with a terrorist. Ha,ha. There is some truth there. Grillo has a point that some aspects of traditionalism might have roots in post-modern identity ideologies. The point merits study and research.

First, the “dearth of seminarians” and “young people fleeing” is not just a negative fact: is the sign of a necessary travail for the entire Church. The “easy” solutions (i.e., let us fill traditionalist seminaries with militarized young men modelled on 17th or 18th century priests) are only blunders, whose costs are primarily borne by those involved. They don’t generate a life of faith but often great resentment and personal hardening.

This resonates with me, and my own fragile spiritual and mental health was not strong enough in this world. Perhaps I should have been a boat builder! Seminaries and regimented monasteries are very much a product of the Counter Reformation. I belong to a small Church body that ensures that candidates for the priesthood follow a course of theology, typically through a university faculty – like the old Church of England, and then spend a time mentored by an experienced priest in parish ministry. There are no easy solutions, but clericalism has been a justified target of Pope Francis. Unfortunately, he fights clericalism with clericalism – the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of politics.

Grillo expects complete conformity and collectivism in the name of fidelity to the Pope and Magisterium. At the same time, the Pope is making concessions to establishment Anglicanism and Protestantism. We have a clear situation of double standards.

Responding to the idea of “failed” liturgical reforms, Grillo traces the history of people finding problems with the liturgy in their time.

You say, “the liturgical reform has failed” and you reason in terms of numbers. You think like this: if something in history is before something else, then what is before is the cause of what comes after. It is not difficult, thus, to believe that the responsibility for the evils of the 70s-80s-90s, up to 2024, lies with the Second Vatican Council, and particularly the liturgical reform. This way of reasoning, however, is not historically well-founded. The crisis in the Church began in great part before the emergence of liturgical thinking: Guéranger and Rosmini speak of a “liturgical crisis” as early as 1830-40.

The argument is not wrong, but is weak. However, Grillo is not going to convince me that the liturgical movement beginning with Guéranger and promoted in French and German monasticism is the same in terms of ideology and culture as the Bugnini reform of the 1960’s.

I come to some form of provisional conclusion based on my own experience and observations about the modern world to which I have alluded. The biggest error of all institutional Churches, including Anglicanism, is the principle Cujus regio, ejus religio. The king we are talking about is not the dwarfed Charles III of England – but the real powers like the banks and multinational business and finance. It is the god of Mammon, raw money and power to which human beings will lust in their competitivity and primeval struggle. Perhaps this is the Ubermensch of Nietzsche, if his idea was not something more noble. This is the issue of politics, not the common good of persons and society – but money and power for the winner. The endgame is techo-feudalism and The Machine. This is the Archon King, and its religion will be that of the established Church.

Perhaps the tide is turning, but national populism will only go so far. The true King is Christ, not as a political ruler (or whose name is used as a justification for a particular political ideology) but as nobility of spirit. Maybe right-wing politics will help to clear the way and challenge the Machine, but it will only succumb to the same corruption unless it is based on the love, tolerance and kindness, spiritual mind, of the Gospel.

Grillo would have his place in the House of Commons, sitting there on his green leather bench with his legs crossed and a smirk on his face.

“I always voted at my party’s call.
And I never thought of thinking for myself at all.”
I thought so little they rewarded me.
By making me the ruler of the Queens Navee”.

Sartre expressed it in his little book as La Nausée. I sense our age as one that makes us sick of being human. Mélenchon and Macron in their little manœuvres make me feel as nauseous as Starmer and Sunak the other side of the Channel. Common sense has been crushed under the weight of technocracy and greed. Our Continent is ripe for revolution, which I why I quoted Wordsworth as it happened in France in 1789: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive! I reserve my enthusiasm lest the ghost of Robespierre should blind us all and summon us to the triangular blade and the basket. Our only way out is Christianity, but one that is neither of the caricatures of Grillo or the traditionalists as a mass movement.

The temptation is to be done with institutional, and therefore sacramental, Christianity. Perhaps the Quakers have a problem with historical relevance. Atheistic materialism, the basis of The Machine, will not satisfy our Sehnsucht any more. This blog is the main part of my ministry as a priest of a small Church, too small to become corrupt with the Archons of this world. I have a feeling that things are going to change. However, Oscar Wilde gave us this salutary warning:

There is something so unique about Christ. Of course just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ. For that we should be grateful. The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since. I make one exception, St. Francis of Assisi. But then God had given him at his birth the soul of a poet, as he himself when quite young had in mystical marriage taken poverty as his bride: and with the soul of a poet and the body of a beggar he found the way to perfection not difficult. He understood Christ, and so he became like him. We do not require the Liber Conformitatum to teach us that the life of St. Francis was the true Imitatio Christi, a poem compared to which the book of that name is merely prose.

He wrote these words in prison, a system designed to kill him spiritually. I say to the traditionalists that Benedict XVI, though I esteemed him as a scholar and one who sought to reconcile Scholasticism with German Idealism, was such a false dawn. What I went through with the TAC and the Ordinariates in c. 2010 reiterated my bitter experience with the traditionalists. The traditionalists, and traditionalist Anglicans too, are a false dawn. We can only wait in our poverty of spirit to receive the new and true dawn with Christ’s blessing. Living as a solitary here in the French countryside, I will probably be long forgotten before the Spirit of God, the Word, is breathed onto our parched and barren world. I am of no importance. If we can arrive at such a degree of humility, then there is hope.

Rewilding is a theme that is not easy to understand or conceive. I already mentioned Michael Martin, and have had a recorded talk with him. He is a layman, a country dweller, a farmer, an intellectual, a family man. He writes so beautifully in his blog. I am a priest, shortly to resume writing my book Christus, the person and not only the ideal of Christianity or Christendom. I will be in a sailing rally next week, but the month of July is coming, when I intend to be at home. That will be my time of reading, writing, prayer – and doing practical work. Things have to begin on the ground, in our own hearts – the place where we can do something. Rewilding can take different forms, surviving on one’s own away from institutional bureaucracies, or maybe small Churches on condition that the bishops and priests have learned a lesson of humility and remember the real purpose of any Church (or communion in which the Universal Church is present). The word will resonate in our minds without our having any fixed idea. As Novalis thought, magical idealism comes with hovering (schweben) as reality and truth remain beyond our grasp. As we yearn and wait for the Blue Flower, our indeterminacy or restlessness keep us in that state of instability whose dialectical opposition bring us to new ways of thinking and feeling.

The world changed tragically and optimistically at the close of the eighteenth century. We now face an analogy of the same revolution and revival of the Romantic and Idealist spirit. I go forward with hope and faith…

* * *

One day after I wrote this, this inspired and passionate article was written by the Benedictine monk Dom Alcuin Reid. EXCLUSIVE: Dom Alcuin Reid’s Response to Prof. Grillo’s Interview

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Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!

Posted on Saturday, 1 June, 2024 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

History does not repeat itself, but it seems to produce analogies of itself in more or less predictable cycles. This is the fourth time on this blog that I have introduced a posting by this famous and poignant quote from William Wordsworth:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!

Each time, I approached it with a different and more or less profound understanding. So, here is another one.

We find here an expression of exhilaration as the world reached a cusp between an era of increasingly contrasting wealth and poverty, power and helplessness. It was the beginning of joy experienced by those who were sick and tired of the madness of George III, the opulence of the French King Louis XVI (though he was trying to introduce reforms) and the political power of the Church. Revolutions were happening everywhere in the late eighteenth century: American independence, the emancipation of slaves, the later reaction against Napoleon. The Industrial Revolution employed starving country folk in factories, but they were hardly better off in terms of wages and working / living conditions. The Romantics responded, not by political activism and violence, but by poetry and the liberty of the spirit. Perhaps some of the most powerful poetry in this movement were Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and Ode to Liberty. As the world changed for good or for evil, noble souls sought to understand the inner workings of the collective consciousness.

The initial elation of change in France of the 1780’s quickly became a revolting sight of guillotined heads on an industrial scale, since it sufficed to be opposed to Robespierre’s Jacobin ideology to be condemned to die. Wordsworth fled back to England and the peace and safety of my native Lake District.

Our own world is beset by so many problems in society and politics. Economically, we all become poorer as house prices soar, as do food and energy costs. On the other side it becomes more difficult to find employment or succeed in business. Wages and salaries stagnate. Homelessness is at monstrous rates, all over – the UK, Europe, the USA and all over the world. Illegal immigration is at such a level as it is not only an economic problem but a cultural one too. Liberalism and democracy faced being replaced by any number of possibilities: Islam, techno-feudalism and The Machine, cultural Marxism aka “woke”, the stuff of dystopian novels written by Orwell, Huxley and others. We are governed increasingly by fear or force, threatened by fines for things we took for granted only a few years ago – all in the name of apocalyptic climate change. At the same time, we still find catastrophic quantities of plastic and toxic substances dumped in the sea by industry. Is all that about to change?

There will be activists of all political tendencies, left and right, but the concern of my own thought is to do something about the problems in another way entirely. We have to renew our own minds, just a few of us, but with the weapons of the spirit in the words of St Paul.

Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God: with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints; and for me, that utterance may be given unto me, that I may open my mouth boldly, to make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in bonds: that therein I may speak boldly, as I ought to speak.

The weapons of war are therefore truth, righteousness, preparing the Gospel of peace, faith, the Spirit, the word of God, prayer, boldness. Plato would have added beauty and goodness to this knowledge of truth. These weapons do not kill, destroy or devastate, but they build a new world. Novalis sought to make a way ahead over new paths, to innovate in the ways of tradition and in what has proven to be good. His key to understanding his vision of a renewed medieval Christendom was a concept known as magical idealism.

Atheists use this notion to condemn Christianity for lacking realism. What is real? Power, money and sexual satisfaction? Materialism? Magical idealism is built on German Idealism but with an added human dimension on top of the use of reason. I am presently reading Laure Cahen-Maurel’s Novalis’s Magical Idealism: A Threefold Philosophy of the Imagination, Love and Medicine which claims to demonstrate that “Novalis’s views on both magic and idealism, not only prove to be perfectly rational and comprehensible, but even more philosophically coherent and innovative than have been recognised up to now“. I have yet to get my mind round this concept, so much that I have been indoctrinated to consign children’s fairy tales to the dustbin of things we put aside on becoming adults. We all have gone from this sense of imaginative wonder to the ugliness of modernity!

Everything is converging in my mind with Jakob Böhme, Nicholas Berdyaev whose books I “devoured” when I was at seminary to counter the semi-nominalism of scholasticism, with Novalis and the Jena group, Steiner, Owen Barfield and the Inklings. Every single mind who has inspired me found the same Gnosis, Sophiology and spiritual wisdom. What I have not yet understood philosophically, I feel in the depth of my being.

Romanticism was born of the early dreams and aspirations of the Revolution and the run-up in the second half of the 18th century. There have been other currents of thought and human experience since that time, perhaps using other names and labels. Cynics who “know the cost of everything but the value of nothing” (Oscar Wilde) will call our world Cloud-cuckoo land. There will be a new Romanticism, a new world brought about by divine souls. This Romanticism never died because it is a part of the immanence of God in those human souls that accept it. Those who call us deluded or mad are challenged to produce their own fruits of truth, beauty and goodness.

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Parochial Idealism

Posted on Thursday, 23 May, 2024 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I received some messages on Facebook about what I would call the ideal parish, the stuff of old people reminiscing about the distant past (40 years ago or more) or even priests who remembered their days of World War II and earlier. A few days ago, I turned 65 and wondered why I did not have the same nostalgia about the 1970’s. 1974 was fifty years ago. For me, it was a brutal time that had no esteem for beauty. I have never understood why some people like ugliness and noise. In many ways, our own times have continued the same brutalism, though some urban architects have adopted more classical and aesthetically pleasing designs for their projects.

In 1982, I was living in London, one year after I had converted to Roman Catholicism through the Society of St Pius X. I had listened to the noisy apologetics salesmen and taken it all in. I went to traditional Masses both with the Society of St Pius X, the elderly retired monk Fr John Coulson in Wimbledon and the Latin Mass Society in various “real” churches in London. It was all impressive to the Anglican I was from a middle-of-the-road background with a passion for church music and the organ. At the same time, I played the organ for Mass in an east-end parish church with a most uninspiring Novus Ordo liturgy, resembling our old 1970’s Series 3 services I had known at school when modern English was being rolled out.

Traditionalist Roman Catholicism in London seemed to be resumed into rubrical nit-picking, devotional crankiness and apocalyptic ideologies. I even met one of Oswald Mosley’s old supporters whose opinions on Jewish people and Freemasonic conspiracies could have been taken from Streicher’s Die Stürmer! Had I known the full extent of this man’s ideas, I would have run more than a mile! Truth to be told, I was more fascinated by medieval English Catholicism and its surviving churches in the English countryside, the pre-Reformation ideal, the Sarum liturgy and other local uses like York. I was tempted by the idea of monastic life until I eventually discovered its collectivist, regimented and repressive reality. I had also been to France on holiday with my family several times. What if France was a “new old England” without the Reformation or modern liturgies?

I erred by Idealism and Romanticism, forgetting the role of Reason and thinking out the realities. Nevertheless, I decided to go to France – by bicycle (apart from the Newhaven to Dieppe ferry crossing, and the journey from London by train). Fr Coulson gave me a list of names and addresses including Fr Montgomery-Wright in Normandy and a few monasteries and old eccentric priests. I have already related the story:

With the passing years…

Fr Montgomery took his Anglo-Catholicism to the RC Church, and discovered that he would have more or less the same freedom to be an eccentric priest in France as in the Church of England. In his mind, more or less, was a merger between the idealised Sarum liturgy of medieval England, the surviving local rites of Normandy and the Roman Catholic “one true church”. He sympathised with Archbishop Lefebvre but kept his distance from the political and collectivist ideologies of many French traditionalists. During the few months I spent in the presbytery in Le Chamblac, I remember the visits by young French traditionalist idealists from Paris. Each week, Fr Montgomery went to Paris and celebrated a private Mass at St Nicholas-du-Chardonnet. I know, because I served that Mass. At the same time, he kept a respectful distance and a discreetly critical attitude.

The people who went to Mass at Le Chamblac were mostly traditionalists coming from a certain distance. A very few were actual parishioners. Le Chamblac consists of the church and presbytery, the chateau, the Mairie and a few farms dotted around. That’s all. He had two other parishes which were already dead. Fr Montgomery said Mass during the week for a community of nuns in Bernay and Sunday evening for a group of traditionalists in Alençon. The chapel was a hired room and everything was set up before Mass and taken down afterwards, and kept in someone’s home. He got about, accompanied by Christian, who was a man with Down syndrome. This life might be idealised, but the actual parish life was quite bleak which certainly motivated Fr Montgomery to minister to traditionalists in the area. It was less of a local-community parish than one would like to imagine.

When I was at seminary, after my Fribourg days, in the early 1990’s, I had the occasion to use my organ-building skills I had acquired with Harrison & Harrison and London College of Furniture. I began to be asked to find redundant organs in England, transport them and reassemble them in churches. One such priest who asked me to provide an organ was Fr Jacques Pecha at the parish of Bouloire in the Diocese of Le Mans. Fr Pecha was born locally in 1920 and went to seminary in the late 1930’s. He lived through the misery of the Nazi occupation from 1940. His family narrowly escaped being deported to Germany for slave labour for health reasons. He was ordained a priest in 1943 by Cardinal Georges Grente of Le Mans. Like Fr Montgomery, his parish tenure was very long until his death in 2002. I found the organ in Nottinghamshire, dismantled it and loaded it into a van, and installed it in 1992.

Card image cap

The parish of Bouloire is quite unlike Le Chamblac. It is a large village / small town of two thousand inhabitants.

The church of Saint-Georges and the place of the Château

I spent some time with Fr Pecha during the installation of the organ, and also in 1997-98 when my vocation was in a mess. He acted as Archdeacon at my uncanonical ordination to the priesthood in 1998 by an independent Ngô Đình Thục succession bishop living near Limoges. He was an independent-minded priest, also in regard to political and “militant” traditionalism. Some of his congregation were from the parish, but most were traditionalists who drove from their homes to Bouloire. Liturgically, Fr Pecha was less eccentric than Fr Montgomery, and celebrated in the Roman rite with some adaptations from the 1965 pre-Novus Ordo rite. He was much more inspired by French monastic styles than medievalism. He got on very well with his brother Olivier who played the organ, and we often went to have supper with Mme Alix (la “Mère Ollie”) the sacristan or some of the other people who had known him for decades.

Some years before I went there, the diocesan bishop decided to put a stop to this independence. Fr Pecha Pecha replied something like: “I won’t be there when you come, but I fear that my people will be guarding the church with tractors and pitchforks“. A very Vendéen response (sometimes called Chouannerie) lodged in the collective historical consciousness of French Catholics. This courage and independence is something that attracted me to France, even though some of the political reactions (both left and right) of the past few years are quite intimidating. My experience of a whole different world, confirmed my own anti-authoritarian instincts as someone on the autistic “spectrum”. My idealism prevented me from recognising toxic religiosity and fanaticism for what it is.

My prognosis is harsh with the conflict between idealism and reality. My discovery of Idealism and Romanticism has innoculated me from many of the absurdities of internet religion and literalism, or indeed any kind of metaphysics based on materialism. Fr Pecha only ever wanted to be a hard-working and pastoral parish priest. Fr Montgomery was also hard-working and pastoral, but never ceased to be an Anglo-Catholic.

There are still parishes where there is a good sense of community. The liturgy might or might not be to our taste. The fact is that the parishes are dead or dying, except in the cities where people are more educated and motivated by ideas and ideologies. The church in my village (Champgenéteux, Mayenne) is a seventeenth-century building and usually open during the summer. It is well maintained by the Mairie (moderately green and left-wing), and there are occasional Sunday Masses, funerals and weddings. I discovered the old presbytery when I went for a walk yesterday evening, a building that seems to be in fair condition with modern windows, but without sign of life. Perhaps the Mairie has a use for it.

My prognosis? It is the end of Christendom, and Christianity will become an underground movement in cities.  The countryside is becoming a desert, and many houses are secondary residences, at least in touristic areas. My own village is slowly becoming a refuge for very modest income people looking for cheap houses – as is my own case. Interestingly, many people here are English expats – who can aspire to some stability if they have a French passport or permis de séjour, since Brexit has put paid to free movement. Many such people have a rather resentful view of life and have absolutely no interest in religion. So much for the idea of an “ethnic” community! Someone came up with the idea of turning the old boulangerie into a café which is run as an association and not as a business. It is one of the brightest ideas anyone has come up with here, but the melancholy remains. I feel it.

Georges Bernanos said in his Journal d’un Curé de Campagne – “Je me disais donc que le monde est dévoré par l’ennui. Naturellement, il faut un peu réfléchir pour se rendre compte, ça ne se saisit pas tout de suite“. The world is devoured by boredom. It needs thought to become aware of it because it is not obvious. Boredom is like dust that gets everywhere, on your face and hands, everywhere. So, to be rid of the dust, people resort to activity and agitation. Am I an exception? I think not except for something intellectual and spiritual that makes me human. Bernanos was writing a hundred years ago. It was as modern then as now! Village life is boring except to someone with something of a monastic view of life. I stayed for six months with the monks of Triors in 1997, but I could not relate to the absolute collectivism and regimentation of their life. It was a brutal reality that clashed with my inner idealism. It seemed so little different from The Machine of the modern world – so paradoxical. Contemplative life can only be lived by those who are aware of their humanity, person and spiritual freedom. Where is the balance between self-disciple and structure – and letting go of the shackles, like sailing a ship into unknown waters and a new world.

I have found American Transcendentalism (Walt Whitman, Emerson, etc.) very appealing in its optimism compared with the gloom of English Romanticism. Perhaps in a past time, I might have wanted to go to the New World. I was tempted in the early 2000’s as I found sympathy with the late Dr John Grady of the Order of St John in Tennessee and an independent traditionalist bishop in Florida. Something held me back. America is mostly an illusion and a deadly error I had the good sense to avoid. Many Americans I know are very good people, but something always kept me away.

I read many prognoses about the future in America and here in Europe. Are we teetering towards some kind of “Communist-Islamic” nightmare? Or an even worse nightmare of The Machine and techno-feudalism? Christ taught us not to worry about the future – carpe diem. Many threatened future events will happen only after our own deaths. The old priests I knew in their parishes are now gone. I have seen their graves and the signs of their flocks’ love and memories. They take their place alongside Dr Pusey, Fr Mackonochie, the Curé d’Ars and so many others, canonised by the Church or forgotten.

I quote from Michael Martin’s introduction to Novalis’ fragment Christendom or Europe.

A belief in the omnipresence and immanence of God would not on the surface suggest heresy – or even atheism, as some have suggested – but it does lead to an existential moment in which, if God is truly immanent in Creation, “present equally within everyone alike, then we all have equal access to him, and there is no need for a religious or political elite to establish and confirm our relationship with him”.

Christianity or Europe is not a nostalgic fairy tale, but a piece of writing that laments the loss of the Christian imagination. Novalis sought to re-enchant medieval Christendom to counter both the materialist Machine and the west’s own “islam” – bible-bashing Protestantism. Bucolic French parish life is a tiny contribution to the vast vision of those hundreds of young people at the Chartres Pilgrimage. I see the link, but the efforts of the traditionalists pale before the Idealist and Romantic vision. Ironically, those we used to call Modernists may well have had a more firmly grounded aspiration to Christendom than today’s traditionalists. Simply, the label Modernist was glued onto anyone who in the 1900’s dared to suggest the immanence of God and seek a deeper and more spiritualist vision than Aristotelian materialism (you only arrive at the Universal Idea by abstracting from particular matter or foundational truth) and ecclesiastical authoritarianism. The real enemy is aggressive secularism!

We look to the past in order to sheet in the sail and steer towards a new world, one of childhood and magic, of imagination and beauty, of humanity and spiritual freedom. Reality divorced from Idealism is a mirage and an illusion. I am a priest but my parish is cosmopolitan via the technology of the internet. It has taken all this time to learn to be myself, through experience of those ebbing lights of French parishes to the imagination that always “clears new ground”.

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Christian Atheism

Posted on Friday, 22 March, 2024 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have a friend who is cultured, courteous and has a good sense of humour. However, he has an almost unique position of upholding Christianity (to some extent) whilst denying God, the Spirit or the supernatural. He seemed sympathetic to my being a priest, but he could not tolerate anything that would deny ordination for women, pastoral welcome to LGBT people. I think he draws the line at transsexualism, but I am unsure. Am I being intolerant at being totally confused with a conviction I have not encountered.

In fact I have encountered it in my old Vicar from Kendal Parish Church. He was honest and resigned his post to devoting his life to his interests, his family and nature. It is something people from our part of the country do, whether it is hiking on the mountains or sailing or rowing on the lakes.

The Church Times wrote in his obituary:

Until he embraced atheism, John Hodgkinson, who died on 11 June, aged 91, was an outstanding Vicar of Kendal for 19 years. He had been swimming in the Sea of Faith movement and had concluded that the Church was mistaken to interpret the resurrection as implying a life after death. He thought that the idea of heaven was a distraction from seeing transcendence in the real world. (Though he enjoyed the writings of Richard Holloway, he considered him to be not a proper atheist).

No longer able in conscience to recite the Creed, at the age of 62 he took early retirement into the barn-conversion home he had built with his own hands. Relieved of the burden of official subscription to what he considered the unnecessary add-ons of the Creed, he remained a willing celebrant at weekday eucharists and a much-appreciated occupant of rural pulpits, preaching only what he honestly believed. He was always a much-loved pastor and, in spite of or perhaps because of his doubts, was often invited to conduct humanitarian funerals. He took his last funeral only a few months ago.

We his faithful and choir members (I sung there under William Snowley from 1975-76 and had organ lessons with him), loved John Hodgkinson and esteemed his love of nature and his skill at making musical instruments in his home workshop. Above all, this was a man of integrity and complete honesty. What went wrong with his faith in God? We have truly to go back to our theology. What or who is God? One thing of which I am sure if that materialism is too grim and bleak to consider as “all there is”! I cannot be so simplistic as to judge and condemn – but it is a terrifying mystery why someone would deny God. Perhaps it is a case of:

I don’t believe in the god you don’t believe in.

Would he have believed in God with a different understanding? At the same time, the venerable Canon had studied theology and the Scriptures at Cambridge University. What came out in the obituary is that he was a part of the Sea of Faith movement, something considered as quite eccentric, but sharing in the general tone of secularising Modernism and the demythologising promoted by some German Lutheran theologians in the nineteenth century. I suspect that my friend had come into contact with this or a similar movement during his student days, or something like that.

What was the point of Jesus Christ if there is no God? Was he a social justice warrior or a political activist against the Roman occupation and hypocritical Judaism equally? Could we transpose this notion to the present times and use “spare parts” of scrapped Christianity to persuade Christians to become Marxist materialists? That seems to be what Liberation Theology is all about, oversimplifying it. It is certainly subject of current concern with the Woke and BLM movements and the extension of these claims to other minority groups.

So, how can someone claim to be Christian and atheist? I have been grappling with this one for a long time, as I have read authors like Stephan Höller, Elain Pagels and some integral traditionalist authors like René Guénon about Gnosticism. Gnosticism (there are orthodox versions like Origen and St Clement of Alexandria) classically makes a distinction between the Demiurge or Yaldabaoth and the God above God, the ultimate divine principle. The real issue is the problem of evil. How do we reconcile the cruelty of the Old Testament God and the spiritual nobility of Christ. Many have attempted to delve into this terrifying mystery. I think of Jakob Böhme the German cobbler who was detested by his local Lutheran pastor, and had such influence on men like Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, Novalis and Nicholas Berdyaev.

He agreed with mainstream Christianity about the Fall, and that there were fallen angels, and that God was set to restore the world to a state of grace. However, he rejected the Lutheran teaching on justification by faith alone, and had an alternative explanation, closer to Catholicism. Not did he not claim that God sees evil as desirable, necessary or as part of divine will to bring forth good. Evil was necessary for man to reach God, almost as the later thesis-antithesis-synthesis of Hegel. What is clear is that this mystery of evil is beyond any of us. We can either find an acceptable way of understanding it partially through theology and philosophy – or we say that God is a load of bunk, a mere symbol created by the human mind.

On the other hand, Christ shows a spirit of goodness, kindness and refusal to judge. We are particularly moved by the Sermon on the Mount. However, how do we understand the miracles? Healing from sickness and spiritual trouble or diabolical possession. Do we just take the bits we like and spit out the rest?

Our modern “culture” rejects the supernatural and the spiritual, and all that remains is a minority of “cultural Christians” – who go to church but only for the social aspect.

* * *

I began to write this article on 3rd March, and became quite distracted. I was set back on the rails by a discussion with some gentlemen who advocate the “rewilding” of Christianity. This term would seem to mean the continuing of some spiritual form of Christianity without the institutional churches (Anglican, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, etc.). This is a tendency we will find from about the time of World War II with figures like Simone Weil and Dietrich Bonhöffer among others. We find ourselves at a branch-off movement between “free” spirituality and living according to Christian moral principles without belief, prayer or belonging to the institutional church.

I should mention the extraordinary personality of Simone Weil who is described in The Year of Our Lord 1943, Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis by Alan Jacobs. The Allies and the Soviets defeated Hitler’s evil regime, but would the victors continue their life with more moral virtue and nobility of spirit? Darkness was beaten by blood and tears, but in 1943 darkness still covered Europe and most of the world. This book makes previously unseen connections between the ideas of five major Christian intellectuals in WWII — T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, Simone Weil, and Jacques Maritain. Society had to be based on an authentic spiritual life without need for force or fear to keep order.

The French Jewish philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909 – 1943) died very young. She is often called “a kindred spirit for church outsiders”. The point I make is that too many people get complexed about what they do in church, as if it mattered to other people or the collectivity. I have known holy and silent souls who just evaporated away after having sown the seeds, allowing others to reap the harvest. Many such souls will not be seen or noticed in church, but it doesn’t mean they are atheists or bad people. If we can comprehend such an idea, maybe the experience of institutional churches and liturgy will be that much more authentic and a source of grace. We might judge Weil for not accepting Baptism, but in her view of the Church, there was another way to Christ. I say this as a priest, horrified by the example of too many churchgoers.

The institutional church has been exhausted for a long time, and attempts to found alternative institutional churches eventually leads to the same impasse. The “wild” church idea seems to be an appealing message. What is a “wild church”? A family? A group of friends? What? An agreement to found such a thing would involve some measure of institutionalism. On reading different opinions on the subject here and there, the essential message seems little different from various strands of early Protestantism and the rejection of priesthood or clerical structures, except the various boards of “elders” who would become a new clerical caste in time. Perhaps those who are attracted to such a vision could simply join the Quakers. I have a great deal of respect for the Quakers, and they seem to represent the notion of a community without the problems of an institutional church and with an aura of sincerity and firm principles.

My best experience of Catholicism has been spending time with old country parish priests in France and who resisted the post Vatican II changes. It was a form of the traditionalist reaction, but less radical and more rooted in the place where the parish was situated. Sooner or later, such parishes came to an end with the mortality of the ageing priests. I joined the Institute of Christ the King after my university days in Switzerland and encountered the spirit of the founders, not so much Msgr Wach and Fr Mora who were ordained in Italy under the aegis of Cardinal Siri of Genoa, but the old French parish priests of Opus Sacerdotale. This association still exists and I am happy to see that it has a website. I don’t think that spirit of simplicity went very far in the Institute as it went the way of the old chapters of secular canons. Those little French parishes seemed to me to embody some degree of “wildness” but within essential canonical boundaries all in resisting anti-traditional authoritarianism.

It was quite a number of years ago that I looked at the idea of the intentional community after the example of Eric Gill and Ditchling. I am sure there are some very good and democratic communities, just as there are collectivist, communist and sectarian communities. It seems to be a domain where certain contemporary Marxist-inspired ideologies can take hold. They certainly need to be visited and acquaintances made with people. I remember a conversation with a Benedictine abbot who admitted to me that monastic life is totalitarian and collective, a form of communism – though opposed to Marxism as a philosophical system and theory. The thought is sobering and the alternative is living alone. How far must self-sacrifice go?

“Wild” Christianity is given the analogy of a biological organism, generally a plant or a tree. The seed is sown in the ground, which then germinates into a plant with roots, a stem and leaves, then with a reproductive system, generally flowers with insects as the vectors of pollination. For a “wild” Christian community, must the idea come from a single person or a group? How do we distinguish the good leader from the narcissist lusting after power, money and control? There are spiritual communities, both Christian and following other religions and ideas, and each has to be assessed on its own merit. There are many others also outside the UK. Some are almost “lay monasteries” and others are less structured.

* * *

After this little excursus on “alternative” Christianities, I set out to criticise this idea of Christian atheism. It is not a monolithic movement, but rather a tendency with different strands and variations. A good introductory article is Christian Atheism. The article ends with a quote from C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity objecting to the claim that Jesus was merely a moral guide:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. … Now it seems to me obvious that He was neither a lunatic nor a fiend: and consequently, however strange or terrifying or unlikely it may seem, I have to accept the view that He was and is God.

The apologist is treading on brittle ground, and often suggests triumphalism and an attitude that suggests “ownership” of truth. Any apologetic argument can be circumvented, in particular by claiming that the choices on offer are not the only ones. I appreciate Lewis like the other scholars in the 1920’s and 30’s who represented a kind of neo-Romantic movement.

Christian Atheism is a formidable foe. The notion is quite depressing, but reveals many fault lines in traditional teachings about God. For many of us, the notion of a dictator who rewards and punishes like a Judge & Jury or an old-fashioned school headmaster with his well-worn cane no longer holds authority. Some Gnostic views suggest a God who is beyond human imagination other than being the transcendence that lives in us all and in whom we participate with love. Plato’s metaphysics give more of an understanding than fundamentalist “biblicism”. Josef Ratzinger was insistant on the role of philosophy and the role of reason to give credibility to Revelation. Faith and Reason must cohabit.

The thought of life without spirit is too bitter and depressing to contemplate, leaving only brute materialism, itself without lasting credibility and leading to insanity. As we were taught in university, morality and ethics are a consequence of spirituality and love. We may be swimming in the sea after the ship of the institutional church has sunk. We may be struggling and experiencing solitude, being on the outside and without roots. God is understood in many different ways, but they all give meaning to life.

The Jewish discovery that God is not a god but Creator is the discovery of absolute Mystery behind and underpinning reality. Those who share it (either in its Judaic or its Christian form) are not monotheists who have reduced the number of gods to one. They, we, have abolished the gods; there is only the Mystery sustaining all that is. The Mystery is unfathomable, but it is not remote as the gods are remote. The gods live somewhere else, on Olympus or above the starry sky. The Mystery is everywhere and always, in every grain of sand and every flash of colour, every hint of flavour in a wine, keeping all these things in existence every microsecond. We could not literally approach God or get nearer to God for God is already nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is the ultimate depth of our beings making us to be ourselves. – Herbert McCabe

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Woke!

Posted on Wednesday, 28 February, 2024 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have had a very unpleasant experience with the “woke” leviathan these last few days, albeit on a very small scale, a true microcosm of something that is killing thousands, and millions in the past in its various manifestations. It is a particularly wicked and deceitful demon. I will keep the exact circumstances to myself. It concerned some of my posts on Facebook and my affirmation of belief in Christianity as a spiritual life. There was a number of postings that englobed the same ideology in the person in question. He would even deny that the “woke” ideology exists and that it was a creation of extreme-right fanatics and bigots against people suffering poverty, gay people, women, transgenders. He had obviously taken onboard the entire ideology, not merely particular points with which he sympathised. I have taken precautions to silence or even cancel these conflicts.

Since yesterday I have modified this posting because I had linked to a podcast on YouTube. I have been informed that the podcast in question is questionable, so I have removed it. It is not proven, as far as I can see, that there is a connection between Islamic Jihadism, mass immigration and Marxist critical theory and the ideology calling itself or being called “woke”.

Is the “woke” tide turning? I can only go by opinions and ideas I read, because I am out of touch with modern urban life. Perhaps we can be optimistic that people will truly awaken and reject this new form of what amounts to a repeat of twentieth century totalitarianism.

Such an idea brings me to a new idea – taking over the word Woke to mean something entirely different, the spiritual nature of humanity. I would like to research this idea more profoundly from a spiritual Christian point of view. We are called to wake up by Bach’s Cantata Wachet auf ruft uns die Stimme. As Dr Michael Martin has quoted in his most recent Substack article, The Sophianic Knighthood.

William Blake captures all of this in the opening lines to his illuminated book, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion:

Of the Sleep of Ulro! and of the passage through
Eternal Death! and of the awaking to Eternal Life.

This theme calls me in sleep night after night, & ev’ry morn
Awakes me at sun−rise, then I see the Saviour over me
Spreading his beams of love, & dictating the words of this mild song.

Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine. Awake.

There are so many verses in the Scriptures on this theme of awakening, either using the word or implying it. Here are a few:

Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. Ephesians 5:14

And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. Romans 13:11

These things said he: and after that he saith unto them, Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep. Then said his disciples, Lord, if he sleep, he shall do well. Howbeit Jesus spake of his death: but they thought that he had spoken of taking of rest in sleep. Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead. John 11:11-14

Awake, awake; put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city: for henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean. Isaiah 52:1

This awakening can mean different things, ceasing to be apathetic, coming to spiritual knowledge (γνώσεως), becoming more noble, rational and original in our thought and not following the mob, so many things. They are a universe away from the madness of post-modernity and the Enemy, the Father of Lies.

We should appropriate the word Woke in this spiritual and Christian meaning. We can make nonsense of the cultural Marxists pretending to uphold Islamic Jihad, LGBT (etc.), transsexualism, cancelling culture and history, promoting the Klaus Blofeld-Schwab world domination agenda and so forth. Who could sow the seed with force and credibility? I remember a film with a speech of Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna during World War II calling Christ the true Führer instead of Hitler, taking from the enemy the meaning of the words they were using to manipulate the people. The story of Cardinal Theodor Innitzer (1875 – 1955) is particularly poignant. After having been deceived by the strength of Hitler’s Anschluß, and having woken up to reality, he preached to the crowd assembled for the Feast of the Holy Rosary:

Meine liebe katholische Jugend Wiens, wir wollen gerade jetzt in dieser Zeit umso fester und standhafter unseren Glauben bekennen, uns zu Christus bekennen, unserem Führer, unserem König und zu seiner Kirche…

Einer ist euer Führer, euer Führer ist Christus, wenn ihr ihm die Treue haltet, werdet ihr niemals verloren gehen.

For that act of courage, his Archbishop’s house was ransacked by the Nazi fanatics, not without Innitzer having saved the Blessed Sacrament before escaping through a secret passage. The scene is portrayed in the film I mentioned which is delightfully available on YouTube, The Cardinal, made in 1963 that impressed me very deeply.

This is a spiritual war and we must have courage, even if we must lay down our lives as our forefathers did in other times.

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places (Ephesians 6:12).

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Facebook

Posted on Tuesday, 27 February, 2024 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have come to the decision to stop writing on Facebook except on groups that are not concerned with politics or religion. My account on FB will stay open and those wishing to correspond with me can do so by private message or e-mail. This is not simply a Lenten observance but my own brennender Sorge about the way the world is going and its effects in my own life. So it is back to blogs and books…

Several factors have combined to shake me to the core. One is finding myself confronted with what is more or less well named “woke” ideology. It is a disease that infects society all the way to certain persons more or less close to me. I smell its fetid breath all over me. It is truly a demon from hell. It has taken over our political and formerly spiritual institutions. It brings our world ever closer to total war.

It is better not to give any more details than that.

Perhaps it is my dribbling short texts on Facebook that has worn down my desire to write more serious blog articles or books, or even to read. Other writers have faced the same burn-out or writer’s block, the feeling of having nothing to write about.

For now, the best thing is to make a good Lent – eat more simply, get exercise, spend more time in prayer and serious reading. The sea sailing season is not yet with us, but there are rivers to explore by kayak in my area. Closeness to nature is essential.

I am thinking of returning to the Northern Catholicism theme on which I have already written but which I need to develop. The notion is usually severely criticised by Roman Catholic apologists for sinning in the same way as phyletism in Orthodoxy, meaning the desire to link the Church to the destiny of a specific nation. This notion could be seen as implicit in Gallicanism and Anglicanism, even though the former remained in communion with Rome and was absorbed into the Ultramontanist mainstream in the nineteenth century.

Another thing that motivates me is the political pressure we are suffering against Christian and western culture. Few people identify with that culture, having become atheists or “woke”. Perhaps my aspiration remains at the stage of Novalis’ fragment Die Christenheit oder Europa. Also read Kleingeld, Pauline (2008). “Romantic Cosmopolitanism: Novalis’s “Christianity or Europe”. Neither Novalis in his time or I in mine are deluded to think we can bring back the European middle ages. It is a parable of principles and ideas that we are called to live in our own time. Our own time is not modernity or modernism, but a pilgrimage to God’s kingdom, all the aspirations and inspirations than built northern Europe.

I believe in Europe, not the bureaucracy in Brussels that is bringing us to a dystopian Orwellian nightmare, but in what emerged from the ashes of the Roman Empire and the so-called Dark Ages. There was a world of harmony, beauty and spirituality – even if there was also human sin, sickness and death.

I am minded to follow Novalis’ example by writing. I am not a poet, but I write reasonable prose. Language is only an imperfect vehicle for conveying ideas, and it must not be poisoned by the ideologies of madness surrounding us like unchained demons. As I have said before, this is my priestly ministry. I must try to focus better as the years have passed from my marital separation and my soul and mind begin to heal.

I regret having been distracted by writing little ditties on Facebook and losing my energy to write more seriously. I am thankful never to have dabbled in Twitter, Instagram and the like. I have a YouTube channel, but my videos are rare and of poor quality, and mostly about sailing trips. I should be able to get back into shape after a short time. Lent provides a perfect opportunity.

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C.S. Lewis and Sehnsucht

Posted on Friday, 1 December, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

An Orthodox priest I know often writes on Facebook and quotes his favourite spiritual authors. One from Elder Saint Nectarios of Aegina:

The heart of the unbeliever is no longer full of infinity and is always groaning, seeking and longing, but never satisfied. This is because the pleasures of the world are powerless to fill the emptiness of his heart. The pleasures and amusements of the world, when they are extinguished, leave only bitterness in the heart, while vain glories have sorrows for companions.

We are led to perfection by the Lord, who comes and dwells in us when we do His commandments. And one of the first commandments is to do in our lives the will, not our own, but God’s. And to be done with the precision that is done in heaven by the angels.

I remember my parents trying to teach me not to want so much in life and to be content with little. Don’t yearn for the impossible, otherwise you will be disappointed. On one side, these are wise counsels. On the other side, if we have no desire, we surrender our humanity and fit into our predetermined slots. Christianity, like Judaism, is full of this theme of desire and longing. A few years ago, I wrote O for the Wings of a Dove. I referred to a choral piece by Mendelssohn who was both a Romantic and of Jewish origins. Longing and yearning are emotions that fill the psalms. Here are two examples:

By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, * when we remembered thee, O Sion.
As for our harps, we hanged them up * upon the trees that are therein.
For they that led us away captive, required of us then a song, and melody in our heaviness: * Sing us one of the songs of Sion.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song * in a strange land?

Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, * so longeth my soul after thee, O God.
My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God: * when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?
My tears have been my meat day and night, * while they daily say unto me, Where is now thy God?

This sense of alienation is one of my most profound and enduring emotions. I was electrified when I discovered the notion of Sehnsucht in Novalis, C.S. Lewis and a few others. Lewis spoke of an inconsolable longing within us for we know not what. That object of our desire is our own far off country . . . for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. This Sehnsucht is a German word translated as longing or yearning for something inexpressible. We Christians believe that this yearning is not a temptation but an experience given by God of eternity. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says that God hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.

For a child in a not-very-religious family, I too could not identify this mysterious world. Sometimes a film at the cinema might give me some inkling, especially a world of another time, or a fantasy world full of absolute beauty. Words and images would convey something other than their conventional meanings as understood by most people. If I spoke about these “impressions”, I would be told that it was all in my imagination, and that I should be working harder with my writing and arithmetic. All my life, including now, I have felt this alienation and longing for roots, that ideal world. As I grow older, I make the distinction between being happy with what I have in this world, and what I yearn for through the veil of death. I know that I am not alone, but most of us are careful what we say lest we be taken for mentally ill people with delusions. We should welcome these thoughts and feelings as a gift from God, something that pulls us from our worldly concerns to the ultimate reality.

This yearning is not an end in itself. It has what we call in moral theology the finis operis, the final purpose of a moral act or emotion. We can take a knife to cut food or to kill someone – taking a knife in itself has no moral significance. God reveals himself to us by means of what I analogically call an icon. Of course, this icon may take the form of an image of Christ or the saints, but our emotional and imaginative reaction to the transcendentals of truth, beauty and goodness are meant to lead us to the final end, which is God and our eternal union with him. As a small boy, I had no notion of this finality, so yearned to live in the worlds I saw in Walt Disney films, to sprout wings and fly like a bird, to sail the seas and explore new worlds. As an adult, I made the latter a reality by learning to sail and buying a boat.

I remember in philosophy that one of the “proofs” for the existence of God is that we desire him. St Paul wrote to the Hebrews: But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city. Sehnsucht brought C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity to conclude:

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

This is a thought I can bring into my mind when I am filled by anxiety because of my feeling of having little in the way of roots. Had I been un homme du torrent living in my home town of Kendal, doing a humdrum job, would I be happier? Remaking one’s life is absolutely futile. May this Advent be a longing for the Incarnate Word who made our desire for God possible in spite of the veils of our sinfulness. Children have Advent calendars to live each day towards the Light. We have the liturgy and the ancient Messianic Prophecies to guide us on our way.

The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart hath trusted in him, and I am helped : therefore my heart danceth for joy, and in my song will I praise him (Psalm 28).

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Stella

Posted on Friday, 1 December, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

From 1964 until 1967, I went to the local primary school, Castle Street School in Kendal. It was a run-of-the-mill nominally Anglican primary school for children of 5 to 11 years old. Pupils were prepared for the Eleven-Plus, a test of intelligence which would determine whether boys would go to the Grammar School, girls to the High School or to Longlands Secondary Modern which would lead to apprenticeships in more manual occupations. It was a bit of a rough mix between different social classes. By 1967, my parents decided that it was not really the solution for my education and human development, but rather that I should attend a small private school for boys in Ambleside. That involved a return journey by bus each day from the stop opposite Kendal Post Office, via Staveley, Windermere, Troutbeck Bridge to Ambleside Bus Station. I was at Castle Street for three years.

Castle Street School was led by a kindly lady of near retirement age by the name of Miss Cliburn. One day, a black girl called Stella came to the school, and we were told to be kind to her. She looked different from all the other kids of the school because she or her ancestors came from Africa. We had been brought up on stories about British missionaries exploring Africa and other parts of the world to bring the “savages” to Christianity. This was an innovation for us white northerners that could provoke some serious bullying. As Miss Cliburn introduced this little girl, there were some nasty comments from children around me, and some would even do monkey imitations and pinch their lips together to mock the thick lips of African people. Personally, I was confused. Apart from the colour of the skin and slight facial differences, Stella was for me simply a human being, a child brought to learn to read and write, learn about other things and socialise with the other pupils. Two things were foreign to me, and it was not Stella. They were the racist behaviour of some of the children, but particularly the awkward and patronising way we were told not to be racist. The 1960’s were a long time ago!

I am not an expert in sociology or politics, but I have ideas about apparent things that I observe from my secluded distance. What I am targeting here is conventionally called identity politics or ideology. A few days ago, I discussed the gender issue, that of people rejecting their biologically assigned sex / gender and having recourse to medical and surgical means to identify as the opposite sex. Just yesterday, I saw a video sequence of a busload of male-to-female transsexuals meeting Pope Francis. It was frankly grotesque, especially the mincing and giggling – and profoundly anti-human! In today’s posting, I am considering people of different races and cultures, from different parts of the world. Returning to Stella and my first reaction on seeing a black child, my concern was not to put her into a category but simply to accept her as the human being she obviously was. She is probably a grandmother now living somewhere in England.

I have known nasty racism in the 1970’s. At school, boys got away with insults like You fucking Jew! They spoke of Pakis in Bradford, less about niggers than in America. Most of the immigration into the UK at that time was from Pakistan and India. Black people mostly came from the West Indies, so would be descendants from slaves who had been transported at some time to that part of the world. I have lived in the East End of London, and some of the nicest people I have known were from the ethnic communities. I ate many an Indian curry in Brick Lane in the late 1970’s. In the early 1990’s, I walked around the Algerian districts of Marseille in my cassock and bought things in their shops. They were charming and most respectful, as I was of them, also in their long baggy thobes. Muslims are far from being all terrorists or murderous! Some Algerians are risky, as Fr Charles de Foucault found to his cost, but generally the Moroccans and Tunisians were (are) polite and respectful of traditional Christians. What is in my mind is living with the humanity of people regardless of their culture, faith and ethnic origins. I simply have no problem with them, unless someone wants to do me some harm or steal from me. I am myself an immigrant into France – I was born in another country (England) and came here by choice – and went through the official process of acquiring dual-nationality. I speak the language and get on with people just fine.

The problem with the modern ideology is that, for our woke activists and politicians, multiculturalism asks us to concentrate on their differences. People are defined by identity: being of non-white races, women, gay, bisexual, transsexual and all other acronymes that have been added to the alphabet soup. In the 1970’s, homosexual people were under pressure to come out, and not to stay in the closet. The problem is that when a person thrusts his life and ideology in my face, I am not obliged to believe that it is right or normal for all, quite apart from the Church’s moral teachings. That person has created conflict rather than living his or her private life in a discreet and dignified way. Transgenderism has become almost a fashion as opposed to a small minority of people who have exceptional medical conditions or the recognised psychiatric condition of gender dysphoria. The busload of false women meeting Pope Francis deeply disgusted me – and many others! The problem is that each identity asserts itself and becomes opposed to all the others. Thus we now have pro-Palestinians who are saying the same horrible things about Jewish people as the Nazis did in their time.

Radicals like to emphasise the idea that rational universalism has failed and society has fragmented because it undermines the grip and control of the dominent elites. The problem with emphasising difference and fragmentation is the creation of a new form of racism and discrimination like I knew in the 1970’s. Racial thinking consists of believing that people are fundamentally different, and that some are perhaps sub-human. In past times, white people (Arians) were considered as being at the top of the ladder, and then other races were put on different rungs, going down to people who would be assimilated to apes or other non-human animals, or even trash to be disposed of. This ladder has simply been turned onto its side, and categories of people are still divided and opposed. If this is so, human beings cannot transform themselves and transcend their circumstances of life. We remain in the same dialectical and binary thinking.

This division is a most profoundly anti-human way of looking at humanity. We are now trapped forever in the identity that is projected on us – until individuals break out of the identity cells. In Iran, women are fighting with their lives to get rid of the hijab or veil. In Europe, the hijab has become an identity symbol, and the women concerned have no voice to protest. There are black men in the USA who vote for Donald Trump (we have the right to disagree with them) and believe in conservative and western values. Humanity is more important to them than being black, as it is for us whites, or Indians, Chinese, etc.! We are not caricatures but humans. This is true cosmopolitanism such as Novalis aspired to in the 1790’s. This does not mean the melting pot, or surrendering our local traditions and beliefs. What is does mean is that the value of the human person transcends our local and cultural characteristics and that we can find unity and put an end to war.

I believe I have come a step nearer to criticising the ongoing ideologies in the name of Christian humanism and our aspiration for a more just and peaceful world. At least, I try, given the difficulty we have in finding accurate information about what is going on in the world.

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The Night of Advent

Posted on Tuesday, 28 November, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

We come around once again to this night of Advent as the gloom of winter encircles us who live in the northern hemisphere (it is now the turn of the Aussies to get their boats out and go sailing). For us people of the north, the liturgical year seems to match the moods of the seasons.

Back in December 2018, I wrote Cry to the Night in which I discussed the themes brought up by the more sensitive souls of recent history:

In these gloomy Advent days, I mediate on the words of Novalis in his Hymnen an die Nacht, which I read in English translation. I also find inspiration  in my favourite Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. Both he and Freidrich von Hardenberg were inspired by the great German cobbler and mystic Jakob Böhme. The theme of the night (the Ungrund) pervades Christian mysticism, especially the Carmelite saints like John of the Cross and Theresa of Avila. Holiness comes through suffering and long periods of desolation and spiritual hardship. Winter is a time when the days are at their shortest, but the true Sol Invictus, the incarnation of God in Christ, brings us light and inner deliverance within from whatever can befall us.

These themes remain with me, and shortly after writing Cry to the Night, I discovered Dr Michael Martin and his interest in Sophiology, the study of the Holy Wisdom. A few years ago, he wrote Post-Christianity: How Christianity Failed and Continues to Fail and You Are Here: Nikolai Berdyaev Calls the Eschaton. Michael too is a fan of Nikolai Berdyaev, whom I discovered during my student days at Fribourg. It was a time when I was tempted by Orthodoxy, but there was as much difference between Orthodoxy and Berdyaev as between the German Lutheran establishment and men like J.S. Bach and Jakob Böhme.

Either a new epoch in Christianity is in store for us and a Christian renaissance will take place, or Christianity is doomed to perish

Berdyaev wrote in The Fate of Man in the Modern World. He also wrote in the same work:

We are witnessing a judgement not on history alone, but upon Christian humanity…. The task of creating a more just and humane social order has fallen into the hands of anti-Christians, rather than Christians themselves. The divine has been torn apart from the human. This is the basis of all judgement in the moral sphere, now being passed upon Christianity.

When Christian humanism is gone, we finish up with the parable written by William Golding, The Lord of the Flies in 1954. It is a story of a group of apparently innocent pre-adolescent boys who were “plane-wrecked” on an uninhabited island. The dominent boys formed a gang, driven by superstition and obscurantism, and sank into barbarity. I don’t know if this work is still analysed and taught in schools, but this is how I knew of it. Films were made in 1963 and 1990, the latter being an American version. The plot is impressive and almost a theme of latter-day original sin. Calvin came up with his theory of double predestination and total depravity. This utter pessimism leads to one possible conclusion: the collective suicide or annihilation of humanity.

A few days ago, I saw one of those “fear-porn” videos on YouTube about the third secret of Fatima, which is as incoherent as they come. Pope Francis would be the Antichrist, and this is why all but the first page of the secret would have continued to be covered up by the Vatican. So we have something little different from the sweating and Bible-thumping of Ian Paisley! The point I bring up here is that evil would prevail, and God as a true psychopathic demiurge would proceed with the Great Chastisement. This, presumably, would take the form of nuclear Armageddon or an asteroid hitting the earth. If either of these did not annihilate the totality of mankind, few people would remain, presumably shut up in their homes with the two blessed candles (!). In the end, Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart would triumph… Over a charred earth made even more lifeless than Mercury or Mars? What triumph? Heaven, the Afterlife, whatever you want to call it? The end of the world is possible, but Christian eschatology has other layers of meaning than our individual deaths and human extinction.

I suppose that the quote of Samuel Johnson – Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully takes on a new meaning. Humanity languishes in its condemned cell and hears the work of the carpenters at work assembling the gallows in the public place outside the prison. It is going to be wonderful feast for the townsfolk! Need I insist?

The traditionalist RC fear-porn wears thin, and it would not convert me if I were an atheist or of another religion. The history of the Church shows the presence of the Parousia in the minds of Christians. Jesus, having suffered death, risen miraculously and ascended into heaven, will come again to judge the quick and the dead. What does this mean? Many of us will already be dead and will have been through our judgement and our fate for eternity. Would this universal judgement affect only those still living at the time, or all of us? We need to develop our knowledge and understanding of eschatology, to arrive at a more mature way of seeing things. The Kingdom of Heaven is not a courtroom or a bank, but a much more profound and spiritual concept.

For Berdyaev, eschatology is more about regeneration, of the world and each one of us. We experience salvation whilst still in this life through θέωσις, deification , participation in the divine consciousness. The eschaton or full revelation announces itself through the prospect of our death, something we will not avoid whether we are good or evil, strong or weak. We have to experience transformation, to let go of our present comforts, passing through the darkness of night, chaos and Ungrund to enter a new world.

Our world is going through a crisis of ideologies, differently from the 1920’s and 30’s, but a certain analogy can be seen. As Berdyaev would have seen with the rise of Hitler and Stalin, we no longer trust our political institutions and we are confused by the lies and contradictions. Many talk of decivilisation and collapse. Mobs of young men in our cities burn cars, loot shops, attack the police with improvised weapons, and there seems to be no solution to it all. To quote Berdyaev:

The world is living in a period of agony which greatly resembles that of the end of antiquity. But the present situation is more hopeless, since at the close of antiquity Christianity entered the world as a new young force, while now Christianity, in its human age, is old and burdened with a long history in which Christians have often sinned and betrayed their ideal. And we shall see that the judgment upon history is also a judgment upon Christianity in history.

Something of great concern to us is artificial intelligence and technology. Mankind is becoming mechanised. Transsexualism by medical and surgical means is frightening, as is planting electronics into people’s brains. Berdyaev like Charlie Chaplin back in the 1940’s saw it coming.

No political system seems to have a solution. Their role is occupied by anti-Christians. As Michael Martin said: Christianity, furthermore, failed to save culture, because it failed to be Christian. The aspiration to unite churches through the ecumenical movement has failed. Policies like those of Pope Francis drive the traditionalists further away, aware that an existence outside the Papal communion removes from them all claim to coherence. There is still a multiplicity of Christian confessions and traditionalist dissidences.

This tendency began when Christians turned from eschatology to the institution. The first monasteries assimilated their life to the martyrdom suffered under the Roman Empire, but symbolically. Gradually, the institution formed after the Donation of Constantine (forged document) came into being, and the essence of Christianity was lost. I may seem to be writing like a Protestant, but they too have gone the same way.

Only Christianity can save the world from Christianity. That would seem to be an outrageous thing to say. Berdyaev exhorted us away from static traditionalism to the prophetic mission of Christianity. Does this mean a capitulation to “progressivism”, liberalism and Woke? No, the way lies elsewhere. It is difficult to judge whether we can find hope or just pessimism in Berdyaev. C.S. Lewis called his autobiography Surprised by Joy. Where is the wonder that beauty is meant to provoke in us, shocking us to seek something beyond every thing we know? This was the theme in my recent posting Beauty will save the world.

For as long as some of us have these aspirations in spite of our unworthiness, I think we can believe in a future Christianity built on beauty, truth, goodness, love and everything that inspires us who are critical of The Machine. I believe it is this movement of conversion, invisible to most, that would bring about the triumph of the Holy Wisdom and the Mother of God we invoke in our prayers. Let this light bring hope in this gloom as we prepare for the true Christian feast of the Nativity of Jesus.

I leave you with this poignant piece by Holst.

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Beauty will save the world

Posted on Tuesday, 21 November, 2023 by Fr Anthony Chadwick

I have always been impressed by the Romanticism and idealism of Pope Benedict XVI, especially regarding the apology of Christian faith offered by beauty. The best-known quote is “I have often affirmed my conviction that the true apology of Christian faith, the most convincing demonstration of its truth…are the saints and the beauty that the faith has generated”. Conversely, the militant atheist Richard Dawkins bewailed the greatest challenge posed by the way art, music and literature can convey the reality of a spiritual and divine consciousness.

We are familiar with the old saying beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. People have their favourite composers and artists. I can like the music that others detest and find ugly. This seems to make the concept of beauty quite subjective and ephemeral. There are people who will say that 1970’s brutalism and atonal music are beautiful. I have always gone by the principle that beauty is objective and is based on eternal principles like, for example, harmony and melody in music. What is beauty. Someone like St Thomas Aquinas would recognise beauty by integrity, proportion and its ability to enlighten. Another way to recognise beauty is our experience of it, the effect it has on us. Beauty can lift us out of our selfish self-pity and nihilism and gives us “wings” to transcendence. It can shock us and cause suffering. For the Romantics, beauty brings us to long for the Universal Idea of beauty of which the beauty we experience is only an icon.

I remember my first impressions of entering York Minster, that great cathedral of the north of England, and hearing the choir and organ. Medieval cathedrals were built to draw souls to the infinite, away from the commonplace routine of our lives. The dominant dimension of a cathedral is the vertical, expressing the Sehnsucht of the human spirit for God in his truth, goodness and light. The human arts and nature convey the message of the Gospel through allegory and parable. As I recently mentioned during an interview with Dr Michael Martin, I have never been impressed by biblical literalism and “dogmatic” apologetics. I have been to the trouble of studying theology, because all the dimensions of God’s communication with man are important. Like many, I relate to art, music and nature.

As a musician, I was never keen on the “pop” music of the 1960’s and 70’s, but I would prefer to listen to what is generically named “classical” music. I began piano lessons at the age of 8 in response to having heard the organ in my parish church during the Christmas service. Unlike most people I knew, I actually noticed details of architecture and likened them to churches. Our family was respectful in regard to religion but never particularly devout. As popular music developed into things like “heavy rock”, I saw people who were stimulated by it. It repulsed and frightened me. The oof-oof-oof drumbeat and vocal screams of this a-musical monstrosity made me think of those old films about cannibal tribes with the missionary in the crock-pot being cooked alive. I had the same experience with musical modernism in the total chromatic atonal system devised by Schönberg in 1912. He had pushed romantic chromaticism to the limit and began to deconstruct the principles of harmony and melody, like Derrida in philosophy. These are the archetypes of the cancel culture of the woke ideology. As the twentieth century wore on, music and art would be utterly destroyed in displays of random splashes of paint and the effect of a dog striking notes on the piano with his paws and howling.

Another place of beauty is the natural world, especially the coasts of the land seen from the sea, mountains and forests. These are icons of God in Creation. Nothing has given me a new impetus of faith more than putting to sea in my little boat and exploring the cliffs, caves and islands of Brittany. We have to understand the role of the icon. It is not simply a picture, but conveys the presence of the person or spiritual truth portrayed. We are given windows to the transcendent.

Beauty is also to be found in persons who are close to God, especially through the innocence of children and the wisdom of many elderly folk. Benedict XVI once said “The beauty of Christian life is even more effective than art and imagery in the communication of the Gospel message. In the end, love alone is worthy of faith, and proves credible. The lives of the saints and martyrs demonstrate a singular beauty which fascinates and attracts, because a Christian life lived in fullness speaks without words. We need men and women whose lives are eloquent, and who know how to proclaim the Gospel with clarity and courage, with transparency of action, and with the joyful passion of charity”.

Beauty is also to be found in friendship, which is why I became endeared to St Aelred of Rievaulx and his famous book inspired by Cicero on friendship. Some claim St Aelred as patron of the alphabet soup of homosexual identities, which is a travesty. St Aelred was a Cistercian monk and Abbot of his community, and would have been very strict about sexual contacts between monks. However, he encouraged friendship, not something always found in monastic communities. Friendship with other human beings and God is a capital mark of spirituality. I would not bless a gay couple, but I would bless a friendship, even if I knew nothing about the private life of the persons concerned.

In my first contacts with the Church and awakening of a desire to know God and Jesus, I discovered church buildings and music. I sensed the sacred in all these expressions of beauty. Another landmark in my life was Anglo-Catholicism, already a big part of the services in York Minster thanks to the legacy of Dean Eric Milner-White. I went to London in 1978 and began to discover Anglo-Catholic parishes with the full liturgy. The combination of an eastward-facing altar, vestments, incense, music and ceremonies spoke another language. Does the liturgy lift us up, or drive us down to a parody of secular life? Anglo-Catholic worship can be quite affected and can itself become a caricature, making Evelyn Waugh write in his novel Brideshead Revisted about Charles’s cousin Jasper advising him to “Beware of the Anglo-Catholics—they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents. In fact, steer clear of all the religious groups; they do nothing but harm”.  The implication here is the aestheticism of a certain breed of late Victorian men who were attracted to a superficial level of beauty and were active homosexuals on the “gay scene”. It is tempting to dismiss the beauty of the liturgy for this simple reason. Abusus non tollit usum.

One who wrote a lot about aesthetics and beauty was Oscar Wilde. I recommend an attentive reading of De Profundis, the letter he wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas in January to March 1897, close to the end of his imprisonment in Reading Gaol. I have mixing feelings about this cri de coeur. Wilde’s sufferings were caused by his decision to prosecute the Marquis of Queensberry for libel. The legal establishment fell on him like a ton of bricks. The tone often reeks of self-pity and narcissism. At least that is the impression one can get. Many of the ideas are profound, and the condemnation of Victorian self-righteousness, philistinism and hypocrisy arouses sympathy in the reader, even to us born more than a hundred years after Wilde. We also take comfort in what a nasty character the Marquis of Queensberry was. Wilde identified with Christ in his suffering, and I see something sincere and noble in this. It gave his own suffering meaning. Wilde portrayed Christ as a Romantic artist and his Passion as a Greek tragedy. Christ was utterly original as a person, not a product of social conformity. Wilde emphasised the ideas of love and beauty, attributing them to Christ. Perhaps we can read these ideas as allegory and analogy rather than literally. Wilde was received into the Roman Catholic Church by a priest in Paris shortly before his death in November 1900. Wilde was certainly fascinated by Catholic liturgical aesthetics and the role of suffering and sacrifice in ritualistic symbolism. This is an example of beauty to which Wilde could relate rather than apologetics and moralising homiletics, a religion of text and word.

We now come to a notion of true and false beauty. These would surely be distinguished by the effect they have on us. There are expressions of beauty displayed on TV, advertising and popular culture. Are these expressions a delusion, dazzling and superficial, inspiring a desire for power, pleasure and possession – instead of bringing us out of ourselves and opening us up to the true freedom above? Beauty alone does not necessarily make us good, for many of the Nazi leaders were musicians and Hitler himself was a talented artist (even if he was rejected by the art academy of Vienna). Perhaps the difference is in our response to this beauty, being “surprised” (as C.S. Lewis would have put it) into love, truth and virtue.

I have not been into the philosophy of beauty for this little posting, something that would require a tremendous amount of study and work. There are works on aesthetics by Plato, Aristotle, Philo of Alexandria, Cicero, Plotinus, Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, and others. From medieval times, we have Bonaventure, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas in particular. The whole idea is expressed by the Romantics and analogical tendencies to this day. Dostoevsky came out with this famous slogan Beauty will save the world in his book The Idiot. He could not separate beauty from goodness and truth. The three Platonic transcendentals are a “trinity” of forms of a single absolute Idea.

The subject of beauty is far from concluded, but I am sure that without it, I would never have related to Christianity and my life would have taken a different course.

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