Not so breakaway after all.

From the Provincial Website

The College of Bishops of the Original Province met October 16th and 17th in Shelton, Connecticut, where they took important steps toward the reunification of Continuing Anglican jurisdictions. In addition to voting to receive former ACC Bishop Thomas Kleppinger back into the Church, a report on Validation of Orders was approved, paving the way towards closer relations with the Anglican Church in America (ACA) and Anglican Province in America (APA). Reception of a new diocese in the Republic of South Africa was conditionally approved and representatives were appointed to respond to a request for dialog from a large group of Anglicans in Burundi. For more information on this and related matters, see the upcoming issue of The Trinitarian.

It looks as if there are some very encouraging signs within Continuing Anglicanism and I am very pleased with this development as it should make my relationships with my brothers in different jurisdictions easier. I have a great number of friends from all over the Anglican spectrum. I am in communion with some but regrettably not others. They are still friends and Christian brothers though.


There is a fervent desire among Continuing Anglicans to make common cause. This may be, in part, due to our tiny sizes, but also due to the fact that we have so much in common. The ACC is already communio in sacris with UECNA and APCK. UECNA is very much a BCP, 39 articles brand of Anglicanism,  but we Anglican Catholics are happy to accept our relationship as sister churches. We may not agree about the confessional status of the Articles, but we recognize each others' Anglicanism and common ancestry, and the mission to promulgate the Christian Gospel to all people as once delivered to the saints. Archbishop Robinson is as Anglican as you can get and in the best way too, especially with his Northern English Accent.


In the U.K. Anglican Catholicism is hated in the mainstream churches. There are some in the Established Church who will take every opportunity to distance themselves from us, declare us invalid, improper, label us, perhaps even slander us. To them, we are the "mad church" that says that women can't be priests. We have been shouted at and dismissed in equal measure. The view of such people is that we are a straw man which they can knock down with ease. They will not talk with us or dialogue with us, despite the fact that, within the Established Church, there are entire congregations who believe what we believe. Is this any surprise? We continue to believe now what the Church of England itself once believed and now does not.


Continuing Anglicanism is at an exciting time. We are pulling together and hope that we may find more in common with each other. We may not walk in the same lane, but we can walk together. Admittedly, we'd like to be able to do that with the Church of England too. We don't hate it at all. They may see us as breakaways but, in fact, we are the folk whom they have left behind. We have merely tried to be honest and to seek the truth honestly. There are still things that we are working out, and we look to the Undivided Catholic Church for the answers. The Church of England has its own interpretation with which we cannot in conscience agree. Their belief is, in our understanding, simply not Catholic. That does not mean that they are not a Christian Church. It does mean that, in our belief, they are inconsistent and that the truth could be considered to be clouded by the complexity which they have introduced.


So what do we do?


It is very important for the Anglican Catholic Church to write no-one off. We don't do that in this Diocese. We have our canons and constitution by which to live and at the heart of everything is the love of Christ which writes no-one off. We should look for ways in which we can offer a warm handshake, invite folk for a cup of tea, find a common sense of humour, pray for each others' growth in Christ.


I have so many friends in the CofE. Perhaps some of my words have stung a little, or perhaps they just dismiss my criticisms as one of my rants. I don't seek to hurt old friends, nor to belittle their belief. I rather ask the CofE to give us the room to thrive and be respected. If they are intent on ensuring that different integrities within their government can flourish, are they going to enable those different integrities to flourish? Will they not give the ACC some room to exist and seek the truth apart from the establishment to which they must answer and we need not? I do think that the ACC asks some good questions of the Established Church which have not yet been answered, and they must understand the depth of belief that we had in order to form in the first place.


In turn, we in the ACC should think carefully about the message we send out and show that our missives, statements and announcements are thought through well. We're not an angry church, so let us not rant and rave. We're not a bitter church, so let us show that we're for everyone and have some degree of humanity not born from intellectual argument and theological discourse. We're not a breakaway church, so let us not distance ourselves from people but only distance ourselves from doctrine we believe to be errant. We're not an established Church, so let us not try to force a political agenda on people. In fact, let us see our lack of establishment as a freeing of our religion from secular constraint as well as allowing people the freedom to make the choice themselves in the secular arena of our society.


Brethren, let us love one another and do so properly.

Waves of Sin, Waves of Merit

Watching the rain drops fall into a puddle is delightful when the rain is light enough for individual drops to disturb the surface sending out those concentric ripples across the water. Every drop affects the whole surface, though dissipation stops us from seeing the full effect.


It takes me back to a time when I studied water waves. There are some wonderful equations that explain the behaviour of water. My favourite has to be the Camassa-Holm system which I studied a while back. These equations model water waves in a shallow pond and we can see their predictions on the surface of the Earth. In comparison with the size of the Earth, the oceans are comparatively shallow which means that the Camassa-Holm system provides a good model for sudden impacts.


It was, with great sadness, that the same mathematics showed up in the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. The water waves, travelled inexorably, as predicted by the mathematical model, and thousands of people met their deaths. As a mathematician, it was all very well and good for me to predict the movement of the water, but there was nothing I could have done about it. One event (namely a collision of two tectonic plates) travelled across the ocean to wreak havoc and destroy people. For me, as a mathematician, I have never felt so helpless or so pointless.


One of the current theories for the state of physical reality (though this is actually quite old and I suspect some changes have happened since I last looked into it) is that the universe is actually a series of complicated ripples spreading on a vast drum-skin. In this theory, all matter and energy are essentially different modes of vibration. The Big Bang is simply the result of two such drum-skins banging together, according to Professor Turoc a decade or so ago.


If this is true, and it's not exactly provable and for that reason falling out of fashion, it seams that one ripple in the universe can spread dramatically.


I do believe in free-will very strongly, though I'm not sufficiently learned to understand precisely how I believe it. I believe that, however limited my abilities are, that I have a significant responsibility for my own actions that is only attributable to me and not external to me. That may be more expressible in terms of "free-won't" rather than free-will, since it is presently thought that we consciously choose not to do something rather than choose to do it,  but the effect is pretty much the same. Physics does not rule this out at all. Certainly our understanding of the universe is less deterministic than it used to be. Given that physics can only describe what is material, there is certainly a limit on what it can know about our abilities, and our free-will. You can't really use physics to answer all moral questions, otherwise PETA and the RSPCA will be most concerned about the welfare of Schroedinger's cat!


It does mean that my actions create ripples through the universe. How far they travel, I don't know - I'm not sure I can mathematically calculate the dissipative quantities of a non-mathematical concept. Nonetheless, what I do matters.


I know that God is responsible for the entirety of the universe. He is the reason for its existence as well as the reason for its continued existence. He it is that sets the ripples in motion, though for Him, all instants of time are in His present. And all ripples are good. They fulfill his purposes whether or not we impede them by our intention or not. Our sins spread through the universe, as do our merits. Of course, our merits we cannot attribute to ourselves but solely due to the goodness of God. Our sins we are responsible for through our own intention. We can choose to impede the goodness of God through our intentions and thus sin. We can choose to facilitate the goodness of God through our intentions. Whether we actually can impede or facilitate the goodness of God is another matter. I suspect that the answer is that we cannot, and I would cite (as always) Romans viii.28 for this.


As a Catholic, I believe that the merits of the saints affect my life and salvation. That is because these saintly folk have chosen not to impede the goodness of God. It is through God's grace that I am saved, unworthy though I may be for the sins that I have committed. The ripples that the saints have set in motion spread across my life as they spread across the universe, and I can use those merits to inspire and form my own intention because they have their origin solely in God Himself. The ripples of my sins affect those around me and, indeed, the Creation around me, but they only have their source in me since I am not God. If I follow saintly merits, I will find God, since as the ripples spread out from God, they return to God who is Alpha and Omega - the beginning and the end. If I follow the ripples that come from sin, I will only find death since sin does not come from God, and certainly will not end in God.


When the rain falls harder, the surface of the puddle becomes a mass of ripples all passing through each other, causing much disturbance on the surface. Things become complex and less recognizable. The system becomes more chaotic and less determined. Our lives themselves are pulled one way and another by the demands made on our wills. We fear choice because it may mean that we will be swept along on a course that cannot be fully determined. The waves of the merits of the saints can influence our course and, given their source and their end, can put us back on a better route which may not be any less choppy. God has given us saints so that we can become saints ourselves. What waves will we choose to send out?

Playing the Tabor lightly

Sermon preached at Our Ladyof Walsingham and St Francis on the Sunday in the Octave of All Saints

You may not know that the Anglican Catholic Church accepts the Seventh Oecumenical Council.

Now that sounds a lot like priest-speak, but it's actually very important. The Seventh Oecumenical Council states that images of the saints and of Our Lord may be venerated. This does NOT mean that we worship pictures and statues as some may think of us. That would break the Second Commandment.

The point is that when we venerate an image, we are recognising the person depicted and respond accordingly, much as we would respond emotionally to a photograph or picture of our parents and other family photos.

If we see an image of Our Lord, then we think of Him and we worship Him. If it is an image of Our Lady, then we recognise the Queen Mother of Heaven and we pay due respect. If it is the image of a saint, then we see a human being pointing to God. We show them respect and look where they're pointing.

Most images we see in Church come in the for of ikons. The pictures are written by people who undergo spiritual discipline in order to faithfully show the likeness of the citizens of Heaven. Each saint is painted in a particular way. It looks as if light is breaking out of their skin. This is called the light of Tabor, the same light that shone from the face of Moses when he came down to the Israelites from Mount Tabor. Citizens of Heaven shine with this light, for this is the light of God.

Sainthood, as you know, is bound up with holiness- being set apart by God for His purposes, especially shining His light in the world. We are all called to be saints; we are predestined for sanctification, but this does not mean that this is a foregone conclusion.

You may have noticed that, when you look in the mirror, your face doesn't shine with Divine Light. We're not exactly obvious when it comes to shining God's light in the World. It is there though, so how do we see it?

"Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God."

Seeing God is a matter of looking inwardly into ourselves and realising the ways in which we are not pure in heart. This is a lifetime's work - you can't do it in a day. Yet it is the way in which our eyes are opened to the saints around us. Not just the obvious ones like St Francis or Our Lady, but in everyday folk, the people around us.

All are capable of being saints.
All are capable of shining with Divine light.
All can receive purification if we pray for it and allow God's grace to enter our lives to cast out all impurity in our thinking, words, deeds and even our being.

We should venerate our saints by bowing down to the God with whose light they shine like stars for all Eternity. When will we see this light in the mirror?

St Benedict's Priory Salisbury 2014: Keeping the Flag Flying

Sadly, just a short trip this year, but well worth it. This was my first visit as a priestly oblate, but all was in order. I only saw two of the monks this year and it was clear that the community is still doing things even if they are unable to accept new postulants. The prior was attending a conference at Mirfield and Dom Bruce attending a function at the House of Lords.

This left Dom Francis and Dom Kenneth to hold the fort. They have built their new chapel complex in the same vein as the chapel when they moved in. Dom Francis celebrated his golden jubilee in March having professed fifty years ago in Nashdom Abbey. His is a life lived by the Rule and clearly he has thrived from it.

We were joined by a small contingent from St Alban's Romford who are also holding the fort being the only Forward in Faith Parish in their deanery in Chelmsford. This is a situation which I have known well from my experiences in the CofE. Whilst the hierarchy of the Established Church say that all theological positions in the priesthood of women debate should be allowed to flourish, they do not say that they should be enabled to flourish. That is a much different matter.

My own experiences were that, when a Forward in Faith Parish fell into interregnum, the PCC were "encouraged" to drop the resolutions because the bishop had a "wonderful new priest" for them who would only come if the resolutions were dropped. I have even heard tell that some dissenters to the Ordination of Women vote in 1992 were prevented from voting so that the measure could pass. There is a lot of politics in the Established Church and much which has come in from the culture, not from the Divine!

So there we were, Dom Francis the last Nashdom monk, Fr Hingley and his companions in the last Catholic Church in that deanery and myself in the tiny Anglican Catholic Diocese of the United Kingdom.

We share much in common - a rejection of Anglican Calvinism, a love of Benediction and Solemn Evensong and that sense of humour that only Anglo-Catholics possess. Of course, I'm in a different part of the Catholic Church from them and it remains to be seen whether we will be able to accommodate more in our little Anglican Catholic Church which can guarantee Catholic Orders and Apostolic Succession, unlike the CofE.

Of course, we can all be taken over by a sense of nostalgia and dream of the happy days of Fr Patten and his enormous biretta, of the sound of plainchant over the Burnham evenings, of Dom Gregory Dix giving the bishop's grand-daughter a shilling for locking the bishop in her Wendy-house. Of course, it's the now that we have to worry about. For us Anglo-Catholics, it's a case of witness.

We're often criticised for our flamboyance and fretting about the length of lace on albs. People wonder why we bother to wear saturnos and cinctures and maniples and piping. They don't understand that we do so because of the unique colour of our Christianity. Yes, of course it's possible to celebrate Mass with a chipped tin mug for a chalice, but if we have the means to make things a beautiful as possible, then we should.

Flag-flying is important. We priests wear our collars to demonstrate the visibility of the Church in society. We may not always be the best exponents of the Church, but the Church is still there. Catholicism is a highly objective and sensual expression of the Christian Faith. We believe wholeheartedly in the presence of Our Lord with us and we are proud to show it. We are also able to laugh with others (usually at ourselves) and enjoy the sights, sounds and colours which remind us of Emmanuel.

Of course, the world finds us a bit ridiculous, but we laugh and say, "fools for Christ" and pootle on waving our banners and flags, presently in declining numbers and hostile environs. Nonetheless, when the last Anglo-Catholic is laid to rest, the occasion will be a bang, not a whimper!

Flipping the Faith

I'll be having a somewhat short retreat to Salisbury this week. Events have overtaken me this year and rather than spending a working week with the Benedictine Community, a day and two halves will have to suffice. From what I observe in the world, it's been a year of contrasts and tensions. This seems to be playing itself out in the Roman Church quite obviously over the issues in the family.

I must be going through a bit of a Kantian phase (or even Hegelian -though I rather hope not!), rather than keeping true to my scholastic preferences. What is interesting me at the moment is the fact that the dichotomies with which we're presented in life seem to point at something more fascinating.

I've mused upon the reward-punishment problem earlier. Rewards and punishment seem to be the two sides to one coin, but it seems that the coin is of less value than one would normally give it, rather, attributing value to such a coin could very well lead to promulgating a purely materialistic worldview.

This could very well bring us back to another two sided coin of matter versus spirit. This dualism is an age old problem in the Church, falling down on one side or the other forces us into one or other of the heresies that can tear one away from the Church.

The model we must always look to is Christ Himself. In this sense, Christ is the coin of greatest prices for he has the two sides, God and Man, which are distinct but completely inseparable. He is King and Servant, showing us that status is really nothing in the eyes of God. We can see how Christ satirises the whole notion of "higher" and "lower" when he tells us that the first will be last and the last first. He is Priest and Victim showing us that our very lives are sacrifices which are only sanctified by God through our offering ourselves to Him at His prompting for sanctification which can only ever be painful. He is Dead and Alive showing that Life is not just something that flickers into being and then gutters out, but rather our life exists beyond the extremes of birth and death.

It's amazing how we always want to come down on one-side or other. That's how we make our decisions in life, by flipping a coin. Sometimes, however, we fail to see the value of the coin that we're flipping.

Anglicanism and Theseus' Ship

"The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same." — from Theseus by Plutarch ,

Identity is something that we hold very dear, and yet it is something with which we struggle. As the example of Theseus' Ship goes (or, if you prefer, the problem of Trigger's Broom) how can we account for our identity over time. Do we have an identity over time? Seeing that all the cells in our body have been replaced several times from our birth, how can we be sure that we are in fact the same person as we are when we were born?

Aristotelian metaphysics may help if we understand our substance and accidents but, of course, Aristotle's philosophy is not "in vogue" today nor does it solve the problem completely. St Augustine would point the very fragility of who we are, sandwiched between the past which no longer exists and the future which does not yet exist. He did not have recourse to the possibility of viewing the world in four dimensions and thus see our existence as beings in space-time. Whatever our point of view, the Christian must look to the fact that in God "we live and move and have our being". All that we are and all who we are is determined by God alone.

Now, I've been involved in a bit of a discussion with Mr Christopher Little, a newly-made Deacon in the AMiA. Deacon Little is a champion of Classical Anglicanism who is very clearly concerned with the Reformed nature of Anglicansim. He and I do disagree on the nature of what it means to be Anglican: while I argue that "Anglican" is a meaningful adjective from before the Reformation, he would argue that in order to be truly Anglican, it is necessary to embrace the Articles from a Reformed viewpoint. His description of me would be that I am not an Anglican but an English Catholic.

I don't object to being described as an English Catholic, but I do feel that I have some claim to the adjective "Anglican". My orders, for example, were bestowed by Bishop Damien Mead last year. He in turn was consecrated by Bishop Rommie Starks in 2008, and one of Bishop Starks' consecrators (back in 2000) was then Bishop, later ACC Archbishop, Br John-Charles Vockler who was consecrated bishop in 1959 during the days of the orthodoxy of the Anglican Communion and received into the Anglican Catholic Church in 1994. Br John-Charles was Bishop of Polynesia, but also served a time as an assistant bishop in the Church of England. Thus, the Anglican Communion cannot claim that the ACC Diocese of the United Kingdom is without direct links to the Established Church when it was actually orthodox. My point is that I believe that the ACC has at least one point of continuity with the Anglican Church through its bishops, at least until the Church of England ceased to be orthodox and introduced doubt into the validty of the Sacraments that they now claim to distribute.

I'm not using this to convince Deacon Little of my Anglicanism - I doubt that I can given that his idea and my idea of what it means to be Anglican are so diverse - but rather more to demonstrate that our traditions have commonly spun out of that period called the Reformation. My Archbishop, Mark Haverland, has been seen at various inter-Anglican events, most notably at the investiture of Archbishop Foley Beach as primate of ACNA. I cannot comment nor wish to do so about what my Archbishop was doing there save that I am convinced that he was there in the spirit of Christian Charity and with a desire to express the well-wishing and prayers of the Anglican Catholic Church whom he serves as Metropolitan.

However, if I were there, for what reason would it be?

His Grace has indeed written about the fragmented nature of the Anglican identity and has stated quite clearly that he believes that it is necessary for us to adopt the identity of Anglo-Catholicism as what it means to be properly Anglican. Given that the later Anglo-Catholics were Romanisers whose seeking re-union with the Roman Church has produced the Ordinariate, our rejection of the Papal claims must mean that we have to look to the original identity of Anglo-Catholicism as Anglicanism reviewed through Patristic eyes. The Anglican Catholic Church is a Truth-seeking Church and in order to seek the truth faithfully, it must start somewhere. One cannot begin an inquiry without stating the basis of that inquiry. The Continuing Anglican movement is forty years old, the AMiA even younger, but we come with baggage amid the fog of confusion which we have inherited. We are still in early days: while there is much of which we can be, there is much that is still in a state of flux.

If I were primate, and most assuredly I am not and think it statistically impossible that I would ever be so, then I would attend an ACNA investiture out of respect for the common ground out of which the ACNA and the ACC have sprung and to which we claim continuity. I would attend because, though there are many issues over which we disagree both practically and theologically (even seriously so), because I would see in ACNA a serious and heartfelt attempt to seek the same truth which I would be seeking. We might be walking apart, but we might be walking apart in the same direction which can only lead to unification in Christ Jesus. As I say, that is what I would do. However, I am a newly minted priest and not privy to issues involving the polity of my Church. It is not my place to draw any conclusions on matters which don't concern me. I trust His Grace and his leadership, and pray that he may continue to lead us faithfully in the way of Our Lord to Whom I am most sure he is committed.

Deacon Little would claim that his understanding of Anglicanism is also Patristic. I believe him to be sincere about this and would humbly suggest that he has more in common with Anglican Catholics that he might like to think. After all, Protestant is not the opposite of Catholic and I am sure that he would agree that he is much a part of the One Holy Catholic Church as he confesses with me in the Nicene Creed. I am sure that he would reject with me the heresies of the revisionists in ECUSA and the CofE on largely the same grounds, that we look for the same faith from the Source, and have an appreciation for the ritual of the Prayer-book. Again, he and I would differ on the use and authority of the Book of Common Prayer but one can see the tenacity of American Anglicans as they fight for their Anglican identity against a body whose wholesale rejection of the 1928 BCP in favour of a revisionist 1979 BCP. This latter revisionist, heretical attitude of the ECUSA has led to the existence of ACC, ACNA and AMiA as well as other noble Anglican bodies. We have much in common.

As Theseus' Ship shows us, the continuation of identity is a thorny affair. Each continuing Anglican body has had to make a decision in order to know what to continue. We Anglican Catholics believe we have chosen the path as laid out by the Church before the East-West split and that is where we look. This leads us into conflicts and painful decisions yet we seek to walk in the truth and in the tradition that we have recived. Until the smoke clears, we must persevere with the choices that we have made by conscience and in loyalty to the ideals and principles that we have received. These are still early days - a mere 50th part of the lifetime of the Church so far and only God knows what will be.Until then, as Plato says, be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle!

Greasy poles and other humiliations

Sermon preached at Our Lady of Walsingham and St Francis on the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity.


Why on earth would anyone want to climb a greasy pole? There are, apparently, greasy pole climbing competitions around the world, probably in the same places as cheese rolling and dwile flonking. It seems an easy enough concept to understand, try to get to the top of a pole that’s been greased: the one who gets nearest to the top wins! We use the image of the greasy pole to describe the way that some people strive for promotion, power or influence. Look at the boy in the packing room planning his way to becoming CEO of the company. See how he plots every move that he intends to make, and figures out every hurdle he has to jump.

What does he hope to gain?

[PAUSE]

Our Lord would have seen nothing wrong in seeking leadership in society or in a company. Things need to be in good order: after all, God created order from chaos! He bids us render to Caesar that which is Caesar’s, that is, to observe the order of society and the government, but also to render unto God that which is God’s. We know that everything is God’s and of His own Creation do we give Him and that includes ourselves. We obey governments because that’s what God wants us to do.

Christians are to see leadership as a duty and service, not as a privilege and right. Christians are not to see leadership as an opportunity to enforce their own wills upon others.

[PAUSE] Our Lord scolds the scribes and Pharisees for using arbitrary laws to enforce their own power and their own prestige. They command things because they can, not because it’s good. The only reason why they will not allow healing on the Sabbath day is because they command it. When Our Lord confronts them with the sheer emptiness of their commandment, they cannot answer Him. All that awaits the scribes and Pharisees is a humiliating slide down the greasy pole.

[PAUSE]

Humiliation brings everyone down to the same level, or up to the same level. Humiliation really means being brought to ground level, or indeed up to ground level! God has created each of us to play a part in His creation and this means being grounded in that very Creation. We exist because of Him and for His good pleasure. Any rank or value we put upon things is arbitrary and will pass away when we die. This is because the values that we have belong to us and are not necessarily from God. If we truly seek God’s values, then we must seek the truth about Creation. We might seek to make things holy for ourselves, separating them from others by our own values, but God truly makes things Holy by separating them out for Himself. We are all called to be saints, all called to be holy, but our holiness depends only on God and not on our rank in this life.

[PAUSE]

Our Lord reminds us that we will be seen for what we really are. If we think we’re anything more than a child of God, then we’re going to be severely disappointed!

Are Anglican Catholics really Anglican?

Edit 13th October 2014: It has come to my attention that there are blogs out there who seem to be reading into this post more than is intended. They state that I imply what they actually infer. They seem to think that I am in some way representative of my Province, despite my disclaimer categorically stating that I am not. They state that I am making statements about the Protestant nature of Anglicanism when the "heresies" I refer to I have deliberately left for the reader to understand. If people wish to read into my posts that which isn't there, then that is their business and I am not going to enter into any debate about it, especially if they are going to be rude, triumphalist and deliberately polemical.

I’ve just been reading this which asks the question about whether the GAFCON churches, the ACNA, and the AMiA are really Anglican. It shows that the Archbishop of Canterbury seems to think that a defining attribute of Anglicanism must reside in being in communion with his office. Of course, the ACNA would disagree with this, as would the continuing Anglican churches. It all sounds just a little bit Papal, doesn’t it? One can only be a Roman Catholic if one is in Communion with the Holy Father. Can one’s identity as a Christian be truly bound up in deference to one man? It has to! It must! That man being Our Lord Jesus Christ – none other! After all. St Paul says:

“And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men? For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal? Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.” (I Cor iii.1-7)

Questions of our identity are ultimately useless if we treasure our adjectives more than our nouns. My friend Ed Pacht always says that he is a Christian first, a Catholic second and an Anglican third. Of course, one could debate whether one can be a Christian without being a Catholic, but such debates, while seeking clarity and confidence, end up separating people, most often unnecessarily.

What, then, do our adjectives do? We’re taught at school that “nouns are ‘naming’ words”, “verbs are ‘doing’ words” and “adjectives are ‘describing’ words” Adjectives modify our language and are largely based on the colour that our experience discriminates the genus from the species. A skilled translator knows that not only does one have to translate the noun correctly, but also the adjective. Consider the French for “lost property” – “l’objets trouvés”. One is probably justified in translating “objets” as “property”, though to go from a simple item to a piece of property demonstrates perhaps the human propensity to attribute ownership to things. What one loses, another finds – it’s the same idea but seen from different angles.

What does the adjective “Catholic” do to the noun “Christian”? Well, this is the tricky one because of the shifting nature of language. If one truly follows Christ, then one has to regard His doctrine and His establishment as having the supreme importance and one’s personal view of Christianity must surely be bound up therein. This doctrine cannot change in the light of time or space neither can the sacraments as vehicles of Grace change because every person, past, present and future is of equal worth in the eyes of God – all need His grace, all need His Word. This is the original sense of Catholic; it is inextricably bound up with the visibility of the Church. To be a Catholic means to be seen to be part of the Church as it was, is and will be.

It is fitting, then, that we should always look to the original meanings of words if we are meant to be sharing those words with those who have come before us in order to have communion with those who come after us. Catholic should not them mean “Roman Catholic”, after all, the Orthodox are just as Catholic, but without the Holy Father as a monarch. That is also how we Anglican Catholics see ourselves.

The original meaning of Anglican was simply as an adjective notably used in the 13^th century to mean “English” Of course, many Anglicans now disagree with that definition because it has come to acquire Reformation connotations. That is why Anglicanism is often seen to be defined by adherence to the 39 articles or to Protestant confessional formularies.

If that is what Anglicanism has come to mean, then the Anglican Catholic Church is not really Anglican.

Even then, I suspect there are many in the ACC who would disagree with me, such as the reverend Father Robert Hart. The way I see the Anglican Catholic Church is not a concerted attempt to forget the Reformation but to look further back beyond it, rather than as a defining mark of Anglicanism. Others find this a betrayal of the Reformation. Given that there are a lot of Protestant heresies that came out of that turbulent time, the ACC is rather justified in trying to continue Anglicanism across that era as well as the 20^th Century. If a rejection of Protestant doctrine means that an Anglican Catholic is not Anglican then the answer should be that they never were Anglican, but rather that they have always been Anglican Catholic.

I would not describe the Anglican Catholic Church as being Anglican. I would describe it as being Anglican Catholic. I do not see the two adjectives which describe my Christianity as being separable, but unified in their intention. True Catholicism is rooted in the visibility of the Church as the distributor of God’s grace and proclaimer of His word. We Anglican Catholics strive to be visible in our Catholicism and do so in a characteristically English way. This does not mean dressing up in fancy robes, though our vestments are part of our expression. Our true visibility MUST be bound up with how we live our lives with other people.

Each Anglican Catholic faces the challenge of proclaiming the Gospel by living it. This means performing the corporal and spiritual works of mercy that have always been practised by the Church albeit with that English flavour. This is why accusations of not being Anglican don’t actually bother me so much these days. I am not Anglican if it means being in communion with Archbishop Welby and his succession. That communion is not Catholic and I am, so I can’t be in communion with them: we used to understand things the same way, but that understanding is different now. Anglican Catholics understand the original meanings; the Anglican Communion has changed those meanings.

Not being Catholic compromises one’s visibility as a Christian, but then the actions of the Westborough Baptist Church compromises their visibility more. Our Lord says, “by their fruits shall ye know them.” If one’s actions are driving people from the Church, then the fruit of one’s labours is nearer to the wild grape than the cultivated grape. It is by our actions that the world outside the Church interacts with us. Our actions as Christians manifest our identity to an unbelieving world. This is why Christopher Hitchens’ book “God is not Great” really does hit home. People’s view of God is coloured by how we are seen to worship Him.

To live a Christian life is more Catholic than proclaiming that one is Catholic. We can attempt to proclaim with banners and Facebook pages and blogs (mea culpa) that one is Catholic, but these are just so secondary to the task. Self-publicity is far from being the Church’s first priority. The light that we should shine before all men is the light that comes from Christ. It is the light of Tabor, the tongues of fire that God places upon the head of the Confirmed that is meant to shine in our lives. If we want people to see the Church, then they need to see that light – not the light of gaudy advertising! Our actions should speak for themselves and then only speak the Word of God. Only then will we have Christianity in our substance rather than in our appearance.

Are Anglican Catholics actually Anglican? Not in my understanding of a post-Reformation definition. It is of no consequence: we should make sure we are Christians first!

Beauty, Happiness, Mathematics and God

I was struck by a bit of a vision today. By this, I don’t mean that I was thrown to the floor by bright lights, angelic choirs and the glory of the Beatific Vision – I’m not meant for that yet, otherwise it would have happened.

As I sat in the college chapel, my mind conjured up the image of a plane of glass in the chapel floor which raised itself up at an angle. I thought that within the glass was a picture of a cloud as one might find painted onto glass in a stained glass window. As I looked more closely, I could see that it was a galaxy, moving and swirling like a drop of milk in black tea. Of course, this is in perfect keeping with the origin of the word galaxy. It occurred to me that I was being given a window into another dimension, a vision of another multiplicity of worlds beyond the shallow horizons of my own little mind.

I do love looking at astronomical photographs. I still cannot take in that what I’m looking at is not just millions of miles away, but millions of miles in size and millions of years old. The scales are mind-boggling, and yet perhaps we forget that there are a million square millimetres in a square metre. The telescope is capable of giving us windows into the infinite, resolving angles ten-thousandths of a degree wide. Here is William Blake’s infinity in the palm of our hands.

Being a (largely failed) mathematician, my mind is always looking for the structures inherent in Creation. That’s probably high-minded of me and I do confess that praying Psalm 131 is not an easy task. Is it high minded of me to try and comprehend what’s going on? I’m hoping that it isn’t in the proviso that I understand that I will never completely understand what is going on until I have seen God face to face. Even then…

I often wonder what my students find beautiful. For teenage boys, it seems that beauty is an ill-defined affair and perhaps that’s because they lack the language for saying why something Is beautiful. They have not yet refined and honed the senses or the descriptors that will inspire them the most, but they are surely capable of appreciating beauty. In my teens, I remember being struck by the beauty of the solitary church bell and by Italian Renaissance Organ intonations. They certainly transported me beyond my own little world. Yet, I cannot be sure that my school mates had ever had that experience, and I dared not ask them. If they did, then perhaps this beauty was something that was so personal to them that even in the telling it would ruin it for them. Sometimes language destroys a dream rather than brings it into existence.

Beauty has always been something difficult to define, perhaps rightly so if the adage “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is correct. What is certainly clear is that beauty resonates within the individual like that solitary church bell. I fail to see how it is possible for someone to register beauty without reacting to it on more than just the rational level. The resounding of that bell of beauty allows the senses of our mind to be transported to places beyond our physical senses. There is a sort of happiness here, even when one finds beauty in a sad film like Atonement. There is a happiness in one’s emotion, as if one is feeling pleasure in actually feeling something other than the background level of emotion.

Sometimes language destroys a dream. I don’t find that with mathematics, though. Mathematics doesn’t destroy dreams in my experience, largely because mathematics deals with the necessarily abstract. I’ve challenged some of my students to tell me what algebra is, but find the repeated phrase “it’s maths with letters in it” coming back to bite me. When one realises that algebra is looking at the processes of arithmetic without taking things for granted, one can see some truly wonderful structures coming into play. Algebras allow us to ask the great “what ifs” of arithmetic. What if two times three is not the same as three times two? What would happen to subtraction if we weren’t allowed to have negative numbers? What happens if I allow negative numbers to have square roots?

Algebra answers these questions by producing new algebras, rings, groups, semigroups, division rings, and quandles. Thanks to Descartes, these lead into geometry and topology in which shapes bend and warp, blow up, project and expand in so many ways, even into higher dimensions in which situations make more sense. We understand more about our universe by looking at space and time together. This gives us four dimensions, though we are hard pressed to visualise anything that might be going on in 4D. Tesseracts and hyperspheres are the province of the fiction of Robert Heinlein and his ilk, but that just shows how mathematics yields dreams rather than destroys them.

I know that mathematics passes most people by. I can sympathise as it has passed me by too. There is another old adage, “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Mathematically, I fall into the latter category.  I’m not fishing for sympathy here: while I’d like to have progressed further into academic mathematics, I was simply not clever enough to do so. There is no shame in that, and perhaps it does help me appreciate that mathematics is a hard mistress to woo. I have some affinity, then, with those who struggle with the rough terrain that comes before one enters the darksome mathematical jungle. I can lead the curious to the edge of the wild but, if they can go, they must go without me.

Fractions frighten people, and negative numbers really do upset those whose experience of the world is knowing how many beans make five. How many of us know how many beans make minus five? Of course, what may well be going is in effect a category mistake, after all, negative numbers are not numbers that can count how many physical objects there are. They can count how much money someone owes, or what the temperature of liquid nitrogen is – you need a reference point for that, a zero level. However the realisation that, under the same basic rules of arithmetic that everyone knows that minus one times minus one MUST yield positive one is a moment when one can appreciate that mathematics has a strange beauty that doesn’t really intersect this world in ways we would think.

Yet mathematics goes further and gives us a glimpse of the Divine. Those of us who cannot understand how God can exist without physical space or time would do well to know that numbers do just that also. We can determine statements of truth and falsehood about numbers just like we can with physical objects, and so their existence is assured. However, they have no space, nor time. They do not exist in an area of the brain, but are objective in their presence. Numbers really do point the way to God.

Of course, there are those who would read strange numerological significances in Holy Scripture but take them too far. Seven signifies perfection, forty the nature of penitence, three the completion of the loving family. These numerological fancies are just illustrations, just stories to colour our understanding of the world around us. Those who try to force arcane meaning or significance onto numbers are missing the point. This includes physicists who try to impose ridiculous limits on mathematics by meaningless notions like adding up all the positive whole numbers and getting a negative twelfth. Forcing that kind of physical limitation on that which is not physical is as destructive as language is to the dream.

As I look at my students, my worry is that they will seek contentment in the material world. There is nothing wrong with God’s Creation as I said in Sunday’s Sermon, but to look at the world and see everything in terms of clumps of matter and worth and commodity and fashion misses the true beauty that exists in what is really there. Can they see beauty in a muddy puddle or a plastic bag blowing in the wind? If they can, then perhaps our walk together has been fruitful for all of us.

Creation and control

Sermon preached at Our Lady of Walsingham and St Francis on the Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity being our Harvest Festival.


It seems that Our Lord would not think a great deal for harvest festivals. After all, we seem to be ploughing the fields and scattering needlessly. He says quite categorically: “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?”

Perhaps we should behave like the animals do, and just let things happen. Actually, Our Lord does have a point.

Animals don’t sin.

We might think they do when they leave presents on the carpet, but we know full well that we cannot attribute that to wickedness or unkindness. What do we say? “They don’t know any better.” But we do, and that’s the problem.

[PAUSE]

St Francis reminds us that we are not just creations of God, we are all part of one single creation. We’re in this together. In that sense, the animals are as much part of our family as we are. We can take that further and say that the wheat, and the barley and crops are part of our family too.

That sounds as if we’re going a bit too far. You’re not going to count a geranium as your grandmother and invite her to tea. However, we are as much part of God’s Creation as a rock or a stone or a piece of algae or a plant or a duck. Whatever He has created He has created on purpose.

[PAUSE]

What separates out human beings in Creation are our ability to know, our ability to reason, our ability to shape Creation around us, and our ability to go against God’s will. When Our Lord tells us that we are “better” than the fowls of the air, He is speaking of our ability to shape and use God’s Creation according to our own free will. We have been created for God’s good pleasure, to enjoy and look after the world around us.

Our Lord is not criticising us for having barns and for reaping and sowing, He is criticising the fact that we worry about the future believing that we alone have the power to control it. He criticises us for living for the Creation when we should be living for the Creator. We forget that we are part of Creation.

We seek to exempt ourselves from how Creation works by thinking ourselves the only ones who deserve to exist because of our ability to shape the world around us. Yet, “we plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land, but it is fed and watered by God’s almighty hand”. God sustains us all. Unless we learn to trust God as well as work hard, we will eventually lose sight of God and our own purpose in Creation.

We come to our harvest festival in a spirit of thanksgiving. We remember that we rely on God to provide for us, but we also remember our duty to the world around us, the duty to feed others, take care of others and allow others to grow.

As Christians, it is our job to sow the seeds of love into the world and water them. It is also our job to enjoy what God provides for us. We should not feel guilty for what we have; we do, however, need to make sure that others (animals included) have the opportunity to enjoy Creation too.

Rewarding Punishments or Punishing Rewards?

What use is a reward really? I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Should I reward a pupil who has done good work? Should I punish a pupil who has done bad work? Of course, my work as a teacher would be completely undermined if I allowed pupils to get away with doing no work and I would do a great disservice to the child who put his heart and soul into his homework which I then ignored. Children need to be valued and their work respected. Do rewards really do this?

What does a reward for good work actually achieve? Well, it means the work gets done, this is true. In that sense, I have what I wanted - completed work for me to mark and assess. It’s only a short-term quick-fix. What does the child really get?

This is where I get worried. If I reward a child for doing good work, then I’ve reinforced the idea that everything is a transaction, i.e. if you do well then you will be rewarded. The child doesn’t do the work in order to learn, to gain understanding, further development and progression to the adult world. No, the child does the work so that he gets a reward. Look at the logic here.

A) If I do the work then I get a reward.
B) If I don’t get a reward then I don’t do the work.

The two statements are effectively contrapositives. The reward sets the tone as to whether the work gets done, and we lose the idea that the actual doing of the work is the goal in itself. If our children see every action on their part as something transactional then this may indicate why we’re becoming more and more materialistic. We have that well-used phrase, “what’s in it for me?”

Work then has a definite value placed upon it, namely the value of the reward, rather than something done for its own sake. One might then suggest that all human interaction becomes little more than experimentation and conditioning of laboratory rats. That might be a bit too far, but it’s perhaps not hard to see how we could reach such a conclusion.

What then about punishment?

Again, this very much depends on whether a punishment is used as a negative reward. We might punish a dog for making a mess of the carpet and it learns not to do it again – though I hope we would find better ways of house-training a puppy! Lab rats again are conditioned through the awful use of electric shocks to keep them according to the correct behaviour. Should human beings be dealt with in the same way?

St Benedict says:

“Every age and degree of understanding should have its proper measure of discipline. With regard to boys and adolescents, therefore, or those who cannot understand the seriousness of the penalty of excommunication, whenever such as these are delinquent let them be subjected to severe fasts or brought to terms by harsh beatings, that they may be cured.” (cap. XXX of the Rule)

Discipline involves modifying behaviour. We humans do need to be conditioned in the way that leads to God. Pelagius effectively tried to show that human beings could condition themselves to produce the correct behaviour for entry into Heaven. We are fallen, and that means we need to discipline ourselves against sin.

Christianity seems to have perpetuated the notion of heavenly reward and eternal punishment. It’s not the only religion. One can consider the Islamic Hadiths:

“[I]f somebody commits suicide with anything in this world, he will be tortured with that very thing on the Day of Resurrection.” (Bukhari Volume 8, Book 73, Number 73)

Thus suicide bombing is actually condemned in mainstream Islam!

In Christianity, we have the fates of eternal bliss in the beatific vision or the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the outer darkness.

Yet, are these really rewards or punishments?

When we come to confession, we can come with either perfect contrition or with imperfect contrition. We confess our sins because we are sorry that we have offended God, or because we are frightened of going to Hell. Imperfect contrition is enough, but perfect contrition is most desirable.

Imperfect contrition is very much like the conditioning of lab rats. We fear the electric shock and so we seek to prevent that shock from happening. It can lead to leaving God out of the equation. Yet, to fear Hell is a Benedictine virtue. This is true, yet this hinges on the proper understanding of what Hell really is. So what is the true Christian reward?

The answer can only be God Himself. If we start seeing God as our reward, then we do lose the legal and arbitrarily judgemental side of Christianity. If God is the reason why we exist then we can only but find true happiness in Him, because “in Him we live and move and have our being.”

We fast on Friday. Why? Because the Church tells us to? Because it is a mortal sin to eat meat on Friday? Or because we remember that Our Lord died for us on Friday and we want to honour that love shown for us of our own free will. Should we therefore fast on Friday to gain a reward for doing so? Or because we fear punishment for mortal sin? Or should we fast on Friday because we want to?

If we look at this issue in the sense of reward and punishment, then we see that it is an exercise in conditioning behaviour, but it is not always edifying people. Unless there is a specific desire to fast on Friday, we have nothing more than a learned behaviour in the hope that God will reward us for not eating meat, or at least will not burn us in Hell for doing so. This is where the laws of the Church are in danger of becoming arbitrary and damaging people’s real relationship with God. It is also where the laws of the Church can become Marx’s opiate of the people. The Church thinks so that you don’t have to! That can’t be right!

Not everyone is going to be a theologian. Likewise, one does not get to Heaven by what one knows. The point is that one seeks God. This sounds desperately individualistic and that Individualism is very much the bane of Traditional Catholicism, for we get the rather protestant notion of personal salvation and private readings of Scripture alone sufficing for one’s justification. We know that membership of the Catholic Church is required for Salvation, because we are all members of the body of Christ. The Way is contained in the Faith of the Church which is changeless. Nonetheless, we, each of us, must seek God as the person He created us to be as a part of the body of Christ. It is not a question of reward or punishment. It is a question of finding love, life and happiness as opposed to hatred, death and misery.

Our whole life is, then, an exploration for God, learning to know where God is and where God is not. Thus Human beings necessarily need a knowledge of Good and Evil if they are to achieve their goal of finding God Himself. The Church possesses the method even if the teachers are no better than the students. If we’re seeking to be rewarded for our actions then either we will be extremely disappointed in the case that what we’ve been after isn’t actually God, or we receive grace upon grace upon grace more than we can actually conceive and so the microscopic managing and apportioning of reward becomes meaningless and trivial. St Paul tells us that whatever we experience now in this transitory existence is nothing in comparison with what is already within us, namely the image of the invisible God.

It seems to me that many folk, even ourselves, often have an all too legalistic interpretation of Christianity. The Church has law in order to keep good order, to ensure that the truth about Christ is evident, and to make fair and liberal provision of the grace of God through the Holy Sacraments. Yet, the Lord shows us that burdening the people with arbitrary law is contrary to their being able to live. We need to know what sin is, yes, but we also need to know how to be free from sin. We need to know what grace and mercy are as well as justice. The Law killeth, but the Spirit giveth life! What then are the alternatives to rewards and punishments? Well, somehow, I need to demonstrate to my pupils the beauty of mathematics for its own sake and for its relevance, nor only in their lives, but in living itself. If they seek something of material worth, then they will find nothing.

Likewise, all we Christians can do is demonstrate that we have something valueless (and thus useless to a world where value matters more). Yes, we should cry out at the way that the world treats the children of God, but the true worth of our Faith is how much we show that worldly matters, squabbles, and disputes are too tiny to be considered in comparison to the Divine.

I’m not out for a reward in life. I’m looking for something better than that. Aren’t you?

Daily Mail Christianity

I often think to myself what I would do if a female Church of England minister asked me to donate her one of my kidneys. It's one of those little hypotheticals that we often use to test the limits of our morals, our orthodoxy and our understanding. There are lots of these hypotheticals about which are brought up to challenge the way we think, often to expose the fault-lines of belief and tolerance.

 We've all seen the type:

•  What would a priest have done had one of the September 11th terrorists come to confession before committing his acts? Should he have told the police?
  
• Is Richard Dawkins right to tell a mother to abort an unborn baby with Down's Syndrome? Easy? What if that child was incompatible with life?
  
• Is it right to deny birth control to a poor nation to control the size of the population?
  
• Is organ donation right or, given that it necessarily involves the brain death of the subject, is it a near occasion of sin?

These are fine and challenging questions, worthy of careful consideration and investigation. One tool that theologians use is St Thomas Aquinas' rule of double effect.

However, it does seem that there are Christians out there whom one might regard as Daily Mail Christians. For my readers outside of the British Isles, the Daily Mail is a newspaper whose general approach to the news is... how shall we say?... reactionary. The situation becomes a bit like that of a non-rational creature with a given response when a certain stimulus is applied. With some Daily Mail readers, one can apply the stimulus "immigration" and be met with the answer "Not in my back yard!" I wish I could say that this is a parody, but there truly are people out there like this.

The human mind has evolved with automatic, emotional and rational centres. The automatic centre is often called the reptilian brain and seems to be devoted to basic stimulus-response decisions. Hungry = search for food: Frightened = release more adrenaline, et c. The Limbic system, in the current scientific theory, seems devoted to the emotional side, where our feelings and reactions are processed. Finally the outer and largest part, the neocortex, seems to be related very much with how we process rational thought. All three parts of the brain involved as we take in information from the world around us, and then make decisions based upon that information.

If we have three parts to the brain, then God has clearly intended us to have three parts to the brain (though I confess that I am using a rather simplified model) and, if the brain is used to process the data received, then surely all three parts are needed. This means that we need to approach big problems from the gut, the heart and the head all in conjunction with each other - all three need to be involved i n the process. Anglican Catholics might liken that to the use of Scripture, Tradition and Reason, the three-fold chord that binds our personal faith with the faith of our Fathers.

Removing one part of the brain from the thinking process does produce problems. The gut reaction is always immediate; the emotional reaction follows close behind as the situation sinks in; the rational part necessarily lags behind as it ponders the details more thoroughly with detachment and logic. One of the problems with the modern milieu is the search for quick decisions. For these, the emotional system is most dominant in our rationalisation and offers a quick response. However, quick responses are not always reliable. Likewise, a decision arrived at without the colour from the emotions loses a great deal of the humanity. In one episode of Star Trek, the ever logical Mr Spock was confounded by his use of logic when dealing with human problems. In one notable stand-off, his response was that of a chess player, while Kirk solved the problem as a poker player.

For the Christian, particularly the Conservative Catholic, it is all to easy to resort to the classical Catholic reasoning unthinkingly. Yes, there are answers and precedents from theologians and doctors of Divinity and saints. On many issues the teaching of the Catholic Church is clear and true. Yet too often, it has to be said, we Catholics can go straight to the standard answers without really listening to the question, particularly when that question involves the well-being and health (both in body and soul) of an individual.

There are some dreadfully complex moral questions out there. While the Catholic Church does indeed possess the keys to the kingdom of Heaven, as I've written before, it does not possess any key to the Abyss. This is of vital importance. Does the Church possess all knowledge of God's will? No, because the ways and means of God are beyond human scrutiny. Does the Church possess any knowledge of God's will? Yes of course. We know that Jesus Christ is the Way the Truth and the Life and that means literally extra ecclesia nulla salus. Is the Church visible? Yes it is. Does this mean it is completely visible? Only to God. Can we categorically say, then who is in Heaven and who is not? Clearly not. There are some who cry, "Lord, Lord" who will not enter the kingdom of Heaven.

And what of sin? The Church MUST speak out against sin. Of course it must! The will of each person is not enough to bring them into Heaven, they must know God and they must see what God is not. Since sin (presumably) affects each of us (though I can only categorically say that I definitely am a sinner), the Church must speak out on issues that are unjust and contrary to the will and law of God, and that run counter to the covenant which He has with us. Yet, there are situations on which the Church has only the eyes of humanity and not the eyes of her Master. The eyes of the Body of Christ are in the Head, are they not? Yes, the Church does have knowledge on what sin is, but it does not have the full knowledge of particulars, nor full knowledge of the will of God. Since the Church does not possess full knowledge of the will of God whilst it is militant, this means that there must exist situations in which the Church simply cannot pronounce "sinful" one way or the other. It cannot possess all the information.

This is where the Church must be so careful and speak with the heart in conjunction with the gut and the intellect. Sometimes, Church Authority must have the humility to remain silent on specific cases. Further, true Church Authority must only ever pronounce in true love. It cannot pronounce simply from the rule book. While it is good for the Church to take up arms of protest, it must first seek to offer something. It is naive and ridiculous for the Church to campaign loudly against prostitution if it has nothing to offer those who are slaves to necessity.

How might that conversation go?

Church:       An end to prostitution!!

Prostitute:    I need the money to fuel my addiction to heroin.

Church:       Well you shouldn't have got addicted to heroin in the first place. Now stop being a prostitute and corrupting our city's morals.

I don't need to say how silly and unrealistic that is. It's a straw man through and through, but it does illustrate a point. The Church and the World have different morals. What is legal in the World is not always the will of God, and vice versa.  Prostitution may be legal for the world, but it nonetheless is a sin against the body and the self. Yet, condemnation and voluble protest from the Church is not what is going to save prostitutes. That argument cannot be won, unless there is some mechanism that the Church can provide that will be able to release such a person from that slavery - and that means material as well as spiritual.

The Church provides such a valuable resource in Confession to absolve the penitent of all sin. That authority is promised to the Church. It works, it works effectually and it works effectively. Thus anyone struggling with guilt will find such assurance of the love of God in the confessional. However, what does the Church do about the material needs? How does the community of the Church rally around any one who has been caught in prostitution? How will it meet the needs of a prostitute wrestling with addiction?

There are plenty of organisations out there to help. They will be the first to demonstrate the need for less judgementalism from the Church and others who might revel in the "holier than thou" attitude. If we're going to protest loudly against gay marriage, then we need to ensure that we have a way of ensuring that gay couples can be loved for who they are and that any true love that they may have for their partner is recognised. If we're going to protest loudly outside an abortion clinic, the we're going to have to make very sure that we have some concrete, practical, loving, supportive and generous help for each of the women who may be considering using that place. If we're going to protest loudly against birth control, then we are going to need to find away to help any family to support any additional little mouths that arise from the decision not to use birth control.

It does stand to reason. Our Lord God Himself came to save. He protested loudly against the sins of humanity, the sins of the scribe and pharisee, the sins of the world. Yet, He showed us very clearly that we need to put our money where our mouth is. He did something about that sin. He did something about all the people whose lives were blighted by sin, not by empty reaction or impotent rhetoric, but by loving action. He condemned the sin AND saved the sinner. He demands no less of the Church. We may not have His eyes, but we have His heart. If we're truly the Church, then if we make an decision without engaging the heart as well as the gut and the brain, then we're empty and foolish.

We should not be Daily Mail Christians, spluttering our tea when we read of the latest "outrage" doing the rounds. We should be out there, making a real difference with the love Christ gave us.

So, would I give up a kidney for a female Church of England minister? What do you think?

Getting cross with suffering

Sermon preached at Our Lady of Walsingham and St Francis on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

How many times a day do you make the sign of the cross? How many times have you made it during the Mass so far? Have you ever wondered why?

It’s a strange fact that the sign of the Cross is actually a sign of blessing. When we cross ourselves outside of Mass, we say “In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” and thus ask for God’s blessing upon us. Only Our Lord could turn a device meant for torture, pain, humiliation and death into a symbol for blessing. Just think. In other ages, it could be the sign of the rack, the noose, the stake. All of these devices have been used to destroy some innocent people, or at least some misguided people. None of them, however, have been as designed explicitly for torture, pain, humiliation AND death as the Cross.

Why then, have we the Cross as a symbol of blessing if it represents such a terrible, gruesome and miserable way to die?

[PAUSE]

It is surely hard for us Christians to think of those who are dying in the Middle East in such horrible ways. Our minds try to run away from the facts, and we do not wish to think upon them. Millions of innocents (and not just Christians, it should be remembered) face agonies around the world at the hands of other human beings. There are many folk out there who say that because Man is so abominable to his brothers and sisters, a loving God cannot possibly exist.

Of course, this is false. Human beings have been given freedom by God, and that includes freedom to behave as we choose. We are free to choose to do evil just as freely as we choose good. Without God, though, we lose all sense of what is truly good. Even what we think is good can turn out to be the worst possible evil. The chief priests and Pharisees think that they are doing a good thing by protecting the people from Our Lord’s teaching.

“Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles.  If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation.  And one  of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all,  Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.”

They seek to make an example to prevent people from following Jesus, and so they subject him to the worst death imaginable at the time – crucifixion.

If human beings do this to the Son of God, what will they do to each other?

[PAUSE]

We have to remember God will deal with every single act of injustice.

How can we be so sure?

Well, that’s the point of the Cross. It shows that God’s goodness is more powerful than any evil that can come from man.

Our Lord suffered the worst that Mankind could throw at Him – torture, pain, humiliation and death – and rose above it. Indeed through the Cross, we have grace! It is through the Cross that God clears the way between Him and us. Just as He washed the world clean of sin in the flood, so does He wash us clean with the flood of love that comes through the cross.

Each time you cross yourself and each time you are blessed by the sign of the cross, whether at the end of Mass or at Baptism, you have the opportunity to be washed in the flood of God’s blessing.

This does not mean that the cross has been emptied of its heavy weight. Our Lord tells us that we must bear our crosses if we are to be His disciples. We Christians are not going to have an easy life just because God loves us. It is because he loves all people, even those who work wickedness, that we cannot be exempt from our crosses. We are in this together, and that’s hard to bear sometimes.

However, we may bear our cross, but does the Lord not bear it with us?

 

Can an Anglican Catholic change a lightbulb?

Sermon Preached at Our Lady of Walsingham and St Francis on Trinity XII 2014, the week following the retirement of the parish priest Fr. Raymond Thompson.




My dear friends, here we are at our new chapter. Fr Ray, we hope, is enjoying his well-earned rest, but we must move forward without him present physically, though he is with us in spirit. This is a big change for us all, and perhaps we are rather daunted by the thought of what happens next.



There is a popular viewpoint that we Anglican Catholics don’t do change very well. Some will say that the only reason that we exist is because we refuse to change. We are being told, “get with the times! This is the 21st century.” Actually, we have! We have a digital hymnal with which we can sing our hymns. It takes a bit of programming and often the wrong button might get pushed, but we survive. Perhaps we should move further into the 21st century and use lightbulbs on the altar instead of candles. You’ve heard of e-Cigarettes – electronic devices that give the ex-smoker a shot of nicotine. Perhaps we should get an e-thurible?



Progress is one thing, but we have to ask ourselves, progress to what? What are we going forward to?

The future is a scary place. If the news today is anything to go by, then we’re right to worry about what the future holds. We worry about the future for our little ones and how they are going to cope with the problems that our generation has caused. This is only natural and with good reason.


However, we are Christians, and this is the good news. We hear our Saviour say, “take no thought, saying , What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”



You have heard these words many times but they tell us about our progress. Progress to what?



Progress to God! It is worth noting that there is a difference between being Eternal and being everlasting. Everlasting means not dying, continuing as things rise and fall around you. It means that things continue to progress. Eternal means not being affected by the passage of time.



Eternal beings do not change or progress. God is completely changeless. If He is completely changeless then the Truth that He reveals to us is changeless too, so that every Christian in every age is told the same thing about the Eternal Salvation that comes from God. There is no progress in the Christian Faith! This gives us Anglican Catholics the strength to be in the world as it changes, knowing that the Faith, Hope and Love that we have received from God cannot change.



We preach “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.” We can trust God, for “Such trust have we through Christ to God-ward: Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God; Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”



If our intention is to go forward in the same faith of our fathers and mothers, then we will find life, but we must continue in our trust. We progress towards the changeless God And Him alone.


This parish will have to change a few things in order for it to continue in that faith but, by-and-large, things will stay the same. There will always be candles on the altar. There will always be charcoal in the Thurible and, if it gets programmed correctly, there will always be hymns in the digital hymnal.

Let us go forth into the future, knowing God’s changeless hand upon us and know that our future is much brighter than the world can understand.

Faithful Resolutions?

Bishop Damien reminds us that we are called to be Faithful, something that we in the Anglican Catholic Church have resolved to do from the outset. He states something that every Anglican Catholic finds out very quickly: the Anglican Communion (the Lambeth Communion or Canterbury Communion or whatever you prefer) is out to dismiss the Faith that we Anglican Catholics seek to continue. This is a bit bonkers since the Faith that we are trying to continue is precisely the Faith to which the Anglican Communion itself held very dear.

I blogged below on the nature of Schism and how the Anglican Continuum has a proven record of preferring heresy to schism. If that's the way they choose to operate, then that is very much their affair. It is not the way that the Continuing Anglican Church works, though. Whilst that may demonstrate the intensity with which we desire the Truth, people may think that it is the cause of our fragmentation.

Yet, the ACC does have good relations with other Churches who do not feel the least bit threatened by our presence. I, personally have good friends in America who are in the ACA and the APA, the TAC, UECNA and the REC (I apologise for the acronyms - no wonder the Continuum is called Alphabet Soup) and who certainly do not feel threatened by our existence. I enjoy a happy relationship with the Old Roman Catholic Church - we may not be the same in out origins but, God willing, we will be the same in our endings, and that goes for all faithful Christians. God has no beginning, nor does He have an ending, but we have both. Following the call to be Faithful means doing our best to walk in the path that a timeless God has woven into the fabric of our existence. Our call to be Faithful is a call to eke out and present to this turbulent world the character of Eternity.

Bishop Damien recalls Resolution IV.11 from the 1998 Lambeth Conference:

Resolution IV.11 'Continuing' Churches  

 This Conference:  

a.  believes that important questions are posed by the emergence of groups who call themselves 'continuing Anglican Churches' which have separated from the Anglican Communion in recent years; and  

b. asks the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates' Meeting to consider how best to initiate and maintain dialogue with such groups with a view to the reconciliation of all who own the Anglican tradition.

As the Bishop laments, the Anglican Communion seems to have forgotten that in its dismissal and rather sneering attitude towards us as if we aren't really real. there are even those who would seek to destroy Anglo-Catholicism from the root - Prof. Diarmaid Macculloch for one who seeks to aim his final kicks at the "twitching corpse" of High Anglicanism. 

In may ways I can't blame them too much. I know that I have been very critical of what the Anglican Communion does - if they wish to be critical of us, then they have every right. I suppose I try to make sense of what they are doing and yet run up against the same inconsistencies. Yet, I do feel that I have some right to be critical for the Church of England is The Established Church and part of my taxes go to support that church. I do have a right therefore to worry about what this body is putting forward to be the Christian Faith. Admittedly, I do criticise the Roman Church, but mainly in reaction to those former Anglicans who have been vociferous in their hatred for the church they have left and seek to justify their departure by trying to bring down the whole aedifice.

I repeat that I do not wish either the Anglican Communion or the Roman Church any ill at all. Indeed, I wish that we could be better related and better disposed towards each other. I wish that we could see ways f working together against the common Foe and for the common Lord. As I said below, if we have the same intention then we cannot fail to be united. However, the resolutions above need to be dealt with.

So what would a rapprochement between the Anglican Communion and the Continuing Anglicans achieve?

Admittedly, unless there is a change, the impediments to communion will remain. Dialogue is one thing, but to what end? The ACC has its statement of unity and the other Continuing Anglicans will have theirs. We cannot walk with the Anglican Communion while the sacraments are in such disrepair and the influence of the Secular world so great in matters sacred. The ends of good dialogue are for us to understand each other and to envisage how we can work together for a common good. This look hard, and there will be hard admissions to make, but we must both be willing to do this.

If it's any consolation to the Anglican Communion, they will find the Anglican Catholic Diocese of the United Kingdom to possess a sense of humour. Perhaps then, we can learn to laugh together. We do recognise that that we have the perception of being an "angry church". Yes, there are still wounds caused by the way some members of the ACC were forced to leave the CofE, but we must all seek healing and wholeness.

 Hopefully, the CofE will see that, actually, we are a passionate church which does not set itself up as The One True Church, but rather sees itself as part of a bigger picture.Firmly we believe and truly, and they must know that they will not shake that desire for the original faith from us. We may come across as Kripkean, but they must realise that a Faith that has been tested and tried in the previous twenty centuries is not something that can simply be interpreted as differently as modernity demands. We hear the arguments, we weight them and we do consider them, but they are flawed because they seek to change what is an Eternal truth.

That doesn't mean, however, that we cannot at least consider the mission of Christianity together. Humanity has many questions for its Maker and we, the Church, are that interface, that royal priesthood that presents the world to God and God to the world. We Anglican Catholics have our own way of thinking. It may not be to everyone else's cup of tea, but it is valid, based on a sure method and desirous for truth.

The fact of the matter is that we exist and are alive, much to Prof. Maccullough's disgust, I'm sure. We also seek Christ, and that first and foremost too. I think we are ready, willing an capable of good, robust and good-humoured dialogue. Is the CofE?

Intending to ape

Intention is a vital part of the Catholic Sacramental theology. Without intention, our words are literally meaningless; we can also say one thing and intend another which, if you think about it, is exactly how lying works. We also know that God examines carefully the intentions of our hearts, our motives for our actions more than the actions themselves. Those intentions are very valuable indeed. They align us with each other. All through Space and Time, Christians are united in their intention to worship the Triune Godhead, no matter where they are or in whatever circumstance they find themselves.

For example, Bishop Damien Mead has made an appeal to our Diocese to make a special intention in the Leonine prayers for the relief of the suffering of the persecuted Church. What does this really mean? Will we just be able to pray away the suffering just by having good intentions?

We must remember that prayer is not an exercise in asking for wishes from a genie: God is not like that and it is an offence against the First Commandment to think in this way. Prayer is our first duty to God and to our neighbour for the alleviation of his suffering and the growth of his happiness. We know full well that there will always be suffering and persecution in this world. Our Lord promised both quite categorically. He showed that, in the ascent of the soul to God, we will suffer much because we will encounter much that is not Him. Since we can only ever be happy in Him, we will be in pain without Him. As long as there is both Love and Death, there will be Suffering.

 In praying for others, we make a conscious effort, not only to wish their pain away, but to go further and choose to suffer with them. Until their pain is ended, we suffer too because we know that their pain is not ended. This is one of the marks of true love. The suffering we feel here is the sheer futility of not being able to end someone else's pain. That's such a valuable thing, and it is that intention that God holds so dear. Of course, how He answers that prayer is up to Him, but it is worth knowing that the suffering we have now, no matter how awful it is, may well be the vehicle not only of our own ascent to God by participating in the suffering of Christ, but also that of others. We may be judged by God as individuals, but we are saved by Him as the Body of Christ.

Intention, then, is more than just an add-on to our Christian way of life, it is vital. Our prayers need to be said with right and examined intention. Often just choosing to say a particular prayer realises that intention, but we do have to be careful with the words. Words express our intentions and, yet it is probably impossible for us to express those intentions accurately. Our prayer books do help us in ensuring that we allow our intentions to be aligned with others. We do have to be careful and know what we are saying before we start praying.

An alteration or difference in words can interfere with the intention, but then it can not. Take, for example, the Anglican Ordinal of 1550. What is the intention behind the ordinal? Well, in the preface, we read:

"It is evident unto all men, diligently readinge holye scripture, and auncient aucthours, that from the Apostles tyme, there hathe bene these orders of Ministers in Christes church, Bisshoppes, Priestes, and Deacons, which Offices were evermore had in suche reverent estimacion, that no man by his own private aucthoritie, might presume to execute any of them, except he were first called, tried, examined, and knowen, to have such equalities, as were requisite for the same. And also by publique prayer, with imposicion of handes, approved, and admitted thereunto. And therfore to the entent these orders shoulde bee continued, and reverentlye used, and estemed in this Church of England, it is requysite, that no man (not beynge at thys presente Bisshop, Priest, nor Deacon) shall execute anye of them, excepte he be called, tryed, examined, and admitted, accordynge to the forme hereafter folowinge."

 We see clearly that the intention is very much to ordain Bishops, Priests and Deacons, as were generally understood by those terms from the ancient Church, and that the orders should be continued. Indeed, this preface is used in all the books of Common Prayer and within the ordination services themselves. It sets out clearly, from the start, that the intention is to continue that which has gone before. But suppose you didn't accept this to be true...

Well, of course, if it isn't true, then any "Sacrament" distributed by such an ecclesial body holding this doctrine would merely be aping the truth, wouldn't it? It would all be a sham, There you'd be in your valid mitre, and valid cope and valid stole, et c., and they'd be playing dress-up, copying you but just pretending.
However, we then run slap-bang into the problem of intention. What happens if the ape is praying your prayers, indeed choosing to pray your prayers with the same meaning understood, nay believing the same words in your prayers. There must be some common bond here forged by that common intention, some similar approach to the Divine Master, some commonality upon which a bond can be built between you and the ape. The ape ceases to be an ape but rather your sibling in Christ whether heretical or not. His intention and your intention are identical in the eyes of God: you are of one mind.

Intention is of course completely interior to the individual and only visible to the eyes of God. In the funeral service, we pray

"Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee."

Our End is to stand before God either to accept Him and be perfected fully and bound for Heaven, or to be shown that we have always rejected Him and still reject Him and thus find our wish to live apart from Him granted - eternally so! Our choice and our intention matter. The will is part of the human soul, and the exercise of the will is in choice. Our freedom to choose is very much part of who we are, of what it means to be an individual human being. As I say, intention is more than just an add-on to our Christian way of life, it is vital: it is indeed part of who we are. And yet, our choices do divide us: they can divide us as far apart as Heaven and Hell.

 If we seek to divide, then we simply cannot intend that commonality of suffering with others and thus not intend love. Yet there are those who would look down on others because they fail to follow Ritual Notes as precisely as another, or to disassociate from another because of a clause in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. There are plenty of folk who seek to engage in polemics for the sake of appearing superior or orthodox ad condemning others as Not-We. If we take pride in being different, then we cannot intend to mourn with those who mourn, nor rejoice with those who rejoice - we cannot love and that is fundamental. The Ritual Notes-perfect Mass may be wonderful to experience, but if the intention is to set itself up above all other Masses, then it ceases to be a Mass and is nothing more than dress-up and play

In practice, I do doubt this happens as, surely, any priest will have solemnly prayed

"I intend to offer this Mass and the consecration of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to the use, order, and discipline of the Holy Catholic Church; to the honour of Almighty God and of all the Church triumphant; to the benefit of myself and of all the Church militant and expectant; and for all those who have commended themselves to my prayers both in general and in particular; and for the good of the whole state of Christ's Church, Holy and Catholic. Amen"

Yet, in the grand scheme of things Ritual Notes will pass away, as will Fortescue, as will Dix, as will all the exteriors of our faith. Only our interior intentions will make a difference: the secrets of our hearts, how we have loved, and how we have suffered with those who do suffer. The suffering of one child is of more Eternal significance than a thousand catechisms, creeds, councils and confessions. The suffering of one child is dearer in the eyes of God, and for all our human knowledge we often cannot see it so. With the end of Faith comes knowledge of God and with knowledge of God, catechisms, creeds, councils and confessions vanish away. The Truth within them shall not.

It is through intention that we really cannot dismiss Christians who do things differently from us. We can disagree fundamentally with another Christian group, but we cannot call them un-Christian until they demonstrate themselves to be un-Christian through an act of hatred. If two people deliberately and consciously choose to say the same prayer with the same words, then they have the same intention, regardless whether one is Catholic and the other Heretic. If both actively pray the Lord's prayer, then they will both find themselves faced with the worship of God the Father, the submission to His authority, the sincere desire to do His will, not only the recognition that He provides for us but we must also ask Him for what we need, the recognition that we need forgiveness and that we MUST forgive others in our intention, and finally that we actively hate Evil and beg to be removed from it. If Catholic and Heretic pray this prayer properly with the same meanings and intentions, then they are literally singing from the same hymn sheet. It builds a bond that transcends even the Catholic-Heretic divide.

Of course, it may be necessary for Christians to walk apart for the sake of integrity to doctrine for such integrity allows a focus for good, honest intention. We must all answer to Our Creator for the choices that we make. What we believe may be right or wrong, but it is with the honesty of our intention that we must make our answer. An honest mistake is better than a life of loyal lip-service. We have a duty then to God and ourselves to inform our consciences fully, allow our faith to be tested, and never, ever to forget the potential of another human being to be a child of God. There is no shame in believing another to be wrong, mistaken or ill-advised in matters of Faith. There is plenty of shame, however, of being so proud of not being wrong, mistaken or ill-advised and forgetting that the very act of making a choice is a fundamental part of being human. There is plenty of shame in the sneer of snobbery that points out with glee the deficiency of another's work.

Those who ape with honest intention are sometimes more human than the ones whom they are aping.