Sorry – this one’s a bit heavy, but it’s been burning away at me for many years and it needed to be written.
This is probably a sideways compliment to the Buddhist saying that if you meet the Buddha on the road you should kill him, but sadly, the Christian churches capitulated long ago to the temptations of systematic theology and mansplaining exactly what God was supposed to do to maintain their (his?) contract of employment. As for me and my heretical disposition, I stay committed to the idea that the Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao. I remember asking the librarian one day in the library at theological college where I’d find the works of Thomas Aquinas. She looked heavenwards towards the mezzanine and waved a languid arm around the lines of shelves. Being an evangelical college, the lines of books were untroubled by readers.
I’ve absolutely no desire to write at any length about the rather bracing day that left me standing under a bridge in Hay on Wye watching the flooding river and knowing that in a kind of reverse baptism it wasn’t my sins that had been washed away but my beliefs. All I felt was a kind of relief that at last things were clear; along with an aching sense of the loneliness of a life without the distractions and consolations of what we used to call “stamp and circumponce“. I could abandon the comfort of the old dictum ex opere operato that says as long as you get the ritual and the words right it doesn’t matter how mendacious, greedy, ambitious, stupid or corrupt you are; the sacrament is still valid. That was the bishops’ favourite defence in the promotional chess game.
When I was a curate I stood in occasionally as a chaplain at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. I was called on one day to perform an emergency baptism on a severely burned child who was not going to survive. When I got there I discovered that the child was so swathed in bandages there was nowhere it was safe to baptise conventionally, so I improvised with a couple of drops of water and a smear of oil on the bandages. The memory still haunts me. My boss; who was a stickler for the correct procedures – criticised me in front of the whole chapter at our next meeting and announced that the child had died unbaptised. Forty years later I cannot even begin to fathom the cruelty of valuing the blather of ritual over compassion for a child and his grieving parents. Things never really got better.
I treasure a talk I once attended, given by a very ordinary (that’s a compliment by the way) – man called Ian. He was neither wealthy nor clever and he’d saved up for ages to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Galilee. He told us how, on a blisteringly hot day he’d queued in the sun to visit the empty tomb in Jerusalem and when he eventually got to the front he noticed a sign that read (in several languages) “He is not here, He is risen”. In a completely artless way he described the sense of disappointment that swept over him as he realized that, in an experience he still hadn’t grasped huge depth of, he’d found exactly what he’d come for. Faith can only begin where belief lies dead on the floor
