Apologia pro vita mea I

Apologies for the title. I'm not claiming to be another Father Newman (as if I could!), but it makes sense for me in my present state of existence to write down a few words about why I believe what I believe.

First and foremost, I find myself being pressured into silence by local agencies and the local ethos. It seems to me that the Church of England is choosing the easy way to "attract" more members through flashing lights, funky music, modern liturgies expressing modern thoughts, and an all-inclusive ministry (including people who don't believe in God, or don't believe in the authority of His word). These members do not stay, but soon evaporate into the aether when things go wrong. The Lord did not tell the parable of the sower for nothing. I try to say my piece, to challenge the status quo but am silenced for being a pedant.

For seed to grow it needs soil. The soil is the Church, for the Word of God grows within the soil, and this soil needs to be deep. The Church is perfect for this because it has the depths of centuries of teaching and worship which has not changed, a good fertile soil which has borne much fruit and been a place of refuge for the weary soul.

I am being described as stubborn, a stick-in-the-mud, Lord Carey has called me a heretic (not personally you understand!), a morphobic, a bigot!

Are these insults? Are these thrown at me to tell me that I am in the wrong or to make me "see sense"? I will ready to admit to being stubborn, pedantic, stuck in the mud, because these are true and, in my mind, not always bad things. I simply refuse to conform to the world's-eye view of how things ought to be. In the Bible, particularly in the Prophets, I see time and time again the faith and worship of God embellished (i.e. tainted) and watered down by thinking that does not come from God. This whole theme is re-iterated in the letters of St Paul, particularly the letter to the Galatians where the Christian were being pressured into becoming Jews again and living under the law.

Am I therefore being a hypocrite by living under a law myself, i.e. the "rules" of the "old Church", for not accepting the modernisation of the Church? Surely by preaching the rules, I am saying that following the rules is more important than following Christ? Does being a Christian mean that I am now allowed to commit adultery? No. If in the (unlikely, but still possible) event that I do, then it isn't the end of the world. If I honestly confess and repent, accepting my sin as my own fault and not passing it off on other people, and deeply apologise to God, I shall be forgiven. So what has the teaching of Christ actually changed? Nothing. Sins are still sinful, only by the blood of God are we set free. Thus lying with another man as with a woman is still sinful. It's not irredeemable, it doesn't make the people who commit this sin any worse than anyone else, or somehow under more judgment, but it is still sinful.

So should the Jewish laws on food and the like still be adhered to? Am I a sinner because I am wearing clothes made of two materials. The Lord threw out all the moneychangers and sellers in the temple courtyard, not because of what they were doing, but because they were stealing the space for Gentiles to come into the court to pray to God. The Court of the Gentiles was as near to God as the Jews allowed them to get. In casting them out, the Lord casts out all obstacles that prevent anyone finding God.

The Jewish food laws, et c. when emptily observed merely constitute obstacles to those that are new to the faith, or who are even curious. They are the first things that non-Jews see about our dear Jewish brothers and sisters and one can get the impression that this is all there is about them. However when observed as part of a lively faith, then they are glorious and mean so much. These food laws are meant to separate God's people (and the Jews have not ceased to be God's people) from those who are not God's people. The Passover is a wonderful example of the symbolism of the richness of detailed and apparently pernickety ritual, and is a joy to behold when the people actually believe what they are doing.

Likewise the ceremonial of the Anglo-Catholic Tradition shines through those who truly believe, but stifle and confound when peformed as empty ritual. The Jewish food laws pertain to ritual and to health: they do not pertain to morality, and neither do the rituals of the Church.

In the Church of England, I see too much ceremonial badly done, i.e. with no respect for the rubrics which have arisen from well-founded Tradition. For example, the Collects were designed with an oremus from the priest followed by a short silence so that all the individual thoughts and prayers could be collected together in the silence of the heart before being focussed on the intention of the Office or the Mass in the collect prayer. How many congregations read the collect aloud with the priest, or say it instead of the priest?

Okay, why am I letting these little things bother me? Who cares? I'm just being a pathetic little pedant out to make people's lives a misery with my know-all attitude and fault-finding, aren't I?

You might think that. I don't see it that way. I do this because I care. I care about the tiny little rituals and words for the simple reason that each one of them means something quite beautiful. The fact that the priest should not open his fingers after distributing the host for fear of letting a single stray particle of consecrated wafer fall by the wayside shows the amount of respect that he has for the Body of Christ Who (whether through Transubstantiation or not) is somehow present in that morsal.

The fact that the Church spent the best part of 5 centuries wrangling about the Christian Faith, putting them into 3 gloriously worded, and correct Creeds shows how much thought has been given to the subject, and then some Revisionist comes along and replaces them in the liturgy after a few years of planning with an Affirmation of Faith, designed to make it understandable to the person in the pew. These days Church of England priests seem to just make it all up on the spot. There is no common worship in the Anglican Church any more.

These Ceremonials are supposed to make worship rich and meaningful, laboured over with discipline and love. These Ceremonials can open the way to God in unseen ways, deeper than any experience. Yet they are done without that care and devotion these days, seen as a symbol which doesn't need the planning, working, or thought. So now they clutter the passageway to God like the moneychangers in the temple court. If a priest wants to do it, then let him do it properly, otherwise just put it away and read the prayerbook.




I am, of course, indebted to my friend, Ed Pacht, who has helped me in this expression of what I feel. I'm not a great feeler but fortunately, Ed's around to help me out in matters like this.