Christians Who Know Best

Those of us who are perhaps more liberal than others theologically find that we become a source of reassurance to other Christians who have been exposed to a particular behaviour on the part of other Christians. I call myself liberal but only insofar as I am not harshly dogmatic. I know my Scripture and take a perspective in my faith that regards that the works and desires of the Lord are constantly unfolding. 

There are those, however, who take a different stand-point. I cannot say that they are wrong, and would never presume to think that they are - but I do wonder about how these levels of certainty are born when found in some of my bothers and sister in faith. 

I am fairly certain about a good many things, but by no means all things. My head and heart is but one place that God speaks and I am not the best listener. I try and I fail, and as a priest, I often worry. Yet, and it happens quite often, that people cross my path or the path of those in my 'care' who walk with absolute convicted certainty. They KNOW God's will, they KNOW God's plan and they KNOW what the right and wrong of that is. And because they KNOW it (as distinct from 'think' it, 'believe' it or maybe even 'suspect' it), will have a clear plan for the world. I am sure it is great if you have that certainty - but so many people do not.

I can't pretend to fully understand the mind of my beloved wife and adored children - what chance do I have with my other best-friend, the God of the Universe and Everything?

The problem with those who are certain of all this stuff is when they meet someone who is less certain and indeed less equipped to fight the advancing conviction that seeks to compel them on. Experience has taught me that people like that come away feeling like they are somehow deficient or indeed insufficient. The spiritual disposition of many Christians is one of willing uncertainty. They probably think that they don't 'do' it right, but proceed in faith and let God do what God does. Some give up and we lose them from our churches forever. 

I speak to many people whose opening gambit is of the order of "where am I going wrong?" or else "how do I do it right?", or else "how do I become a better xyz?". Then I have those who tell me that after a conversation with one who KNOWS, they feel like a failure and very much like giving up. I reach for Psalm 139 very frequently, or else speak of the road to Emmaus. I hope it helps. 

This post serves two purposes really. To the 'certain' Christians I would gently ask you to consider whether you have ever had doubts, how they felt, and whether certainty (often a blind form of that certainty) would have helped you. If you have had no doubts at all, then frankly you trump Jesus himself who did. Then to those Christians who feel that they fall short, or worse have been made to feel that they fall short by other Christians (wittingly or otherwise) - God is bigger than any Christian I have ever met - and I am fairly certain that God can cope with your foibles. To quote Michael Ramsay (badly), if you want to love God - great. If you can only manage to want to want to love God, then God delights in that too. 

Let's face it, if God can love me and put me in a collar, he has both a sense of humour, and the ability to deal with whatever you feel you have in shorter measure. Rejoice and do nothing else but know. 

1                 O Lord, you have searched me out and known me;  
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
     you discern my thoughts from afar. you know my sitting down and my rising up;     you discern my thoughts from afar. 

2                 You mark out my journeys and my resting place
and are acquainted with all my ways. 

3                 For there is not a word on my tongue,   but you, O Lord, know it altogether. 

4                 You encompass me behind and before
and lay your hand upon me 

5                 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
so high that I cannot attain it. 

6                 Where can I go then from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence? 

7                 If I climb up to heaven, you are there;
if I make the grave my bed, you are there also. 

8                 If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 

9                 Even there your hand shall lead me,
your right hand hold me fast. 

10               If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will cover me
and the light around me turn to night,’ 

11               Even darkness is no darkness with you;     the night is as clear as the day;
darkness and light to you are both alike.  

12               For you yourself created my inmost parts;
you knit me together in my mother's womb. 

13               I thank you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;   marvellous are your works, my soul knows well. 

14               My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was made in secret     and woven in the depths of the earth. 

15               Your eyes beheld my form, as yet unfinished;
already in your book were all my members written, 

16               As day by day they were fashioned   when as yet there was none of them. 

17               How deep are your counsels to me, O God!
How great is the sum of them! 

18               If I count them, they are more in number than the sand,
and at the end, I am still in your presence.   

19               O that you would slay the wicked, O God,   that the bloodthirsty might depart from me! 

20               They speak against you with wicked intent;
your enemies take up your name for evil. 

21               Do I not oppose those, O Lord, who oppose you?
Do I not abhor those who rise up against you? 

22               I hate them with a perfect hatred;
they have become my own enemies also.  

23               Search me out, O God, and know my heart;  try me and examine my thoughts. 

24               See if there is any way of wickedness in me  and lead me in the way everlasting.

What They Don't Tell You at Theological College

If you want to know about Ernst Troeltsch, immanence, the correct means of ringing a chapel bell before Evening Prayer on a Tuesday in Epiphany, how so many people are phased by a healthy Mariology, what Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησου Χριστοῦ means, or indeed the greater joys of the latest Kevin Mayhew assassination of a good tune, where do you go? 

Theological College innit. 

You will get all of those things there, served (in the case of my college, Gawd Blessit) with fine food, alarmingly cheap liquor (I recall setting the prices one year) and the company of lovely ordinands - natural leaders called to work almost completely alone for the next four decades or less (which is short hand for that fact that ordinands are a suspicious bunch not fond of being led because they are the leaders, innit). 

You go to your Vicar, tell him/her that you feel The Call (like the Force felt by Jedis but with less Yoda). S/he sends you to the Diocesan Director Of Ordinands where you shalt be grilled until thee be verily dead of the exertion  and with any luck a season ticket to a BAP (not a flour topped roll, but a secret panel where you will be stared at by people who will smile at you while they do it). If you pass the flour-topped bread roll, you will be invited to give up your salary (or much time after work) to study the finer recesses of the psychology of Dr Troeltsch (sat next to some lovey who will have all his books under her pillow already, and will thereby make you feel like a pilchard). After that, you have your pretty new stole blessed, clip on the collar and launch forth into the unsuspecting world of Christians and all their enormities. 

Then you make some discoveries. 

During your curacy (if you are lucky like I was), you will blessed with a training incumbent who will walk you through the 300 million things you didn't learn at college in a meaningful and organised way. You have three years for that - no time at all. 

Then, if that is your Yoda Force, you go on to be the Landlord Spiritual of a lump of London or somewhere else. Semantic prestidigitation on the Application Form will discreetly hide that fact that you were only a curate when you applied and know sod-all really. Day one - all alone except the "to do" list (which will have grown since six months before the interregnum started that you just ended).  

This last few months, I have wrestled with the the parish finances. I have just escorted a very nice man indeed through his redundancy. I have just drafted a Person Specification for a job role that I have just been called to create, and will venture down the fraught road of employee rights and human resource frivolities. I have had to manage border disputes, manage those who don't wish to be managed, be the chairperson of a charity which I needed to register with the Commission (automatically becoming bound by the law in such things). That is before having to find the words to comfort a mother to a baby who may be dying, the woman who sees no hope in life any more, or the man who seeks absolution after a lifetime of alcohol abuse. I have had to be the nice man, the polite man, the man who takes the hits and hides the bruises. I have to have a sense of absolute certainty in all that I do, without apparent personal weakness or the human scuffles that emerge for us all. I have overseen a significant building project blessed as I was this time around that I had a gifted and qualified parishioner to take the lead. Then we come to the stuff of eternal life and salvation - much of that is communicated by me, in my own frailty and oft doubt. I have been on the telly, the radio and am a public name in some places - that requires a certain amount of edification, but is never going to form part of the College Curriculum. 

I don't blame college, or indeed the system. If theological college launched a course that covered all of the above, I'd still be at college or worse, I would have run a mile before applying. The world of the Vicar just isn't what you might ever expect in your wildest or worst dreams. We are, in a very real sense, the jack of all trades and master of none. I thank God daily that he forced me through the world of work that preceded my ordination by fifteen years, because there was the training I use now. Right there. 

Though, to be sure, it is still be best job in the world. Deo Gratias. 

Doubt

A brief moment bound up in a couple of exchanged comments with Dr Bex Lewis has provided something of the last straw for me. No, she has said nothing to upset me, just nudged me to write about something very close to my heart that I regard as the shadow in me that I seek to avoid, or at the least look away from.

I don't have a great deal of time for guilt as a pastime. I see no point in it, no sense in it, and regard it as an emotional millstone that for some comes with a set of halogen lights to attract best attention. It takes effort to carry, brings with it no collateral gain, and is just not a phenomenon I can be too involved with! Make a mistake, live with it, learn from it, move on. Life is a moment more 'over' than it was just then. Waste none of it ...

However, I have my own millstone. It is one that I think is largely universal, but in the circles that I mix in - Christian ones, ordained ones - it is 'an inconvenient truth' for many. But I have to say in clearest terms, that there are times when I have doubts about it all. 

My doubt has a catastrophic face. It isn't a doubt about the virgin birth, the resurrection, angels or anything like that. No, my doubt is bigger. I have little moments, my bubbles of 'nothing', where what I believe the other 525,540 minutes of the year, seems like the greatest pile of nonsense ever thought up. It feels like a hoax, that actually, of course we are just an accident of chemicals and energies a fortunate distance from a star. How on Earth do dead people become not dead? How the dickens can a women hold a child without exchange of cells with another human? I have moments where I am convinced that I have got it all very very wrong indeed. Oddly, that is when I feel guilty - not for thinking the thoughts, but that I have been complicit in the greatest con ever known. These moments happen, not often, but they do. 

Then they pass. Doubt can be less catastrophic in its ankle-pecking for me too. I encounter 'blog despondency' (I am not alone) more than you might imagine. This is about the sheer presumption of hoping that even one person would read what I write. Such laudable blogs exists, and there is a list to the left of these words - yet I presume to add my  two pennyworth. Even pleasing 'results' don't assuage that one always. The dog-collar thing is another one. There are times when I feel like I am in fancy-dress, that this retailer will wake back up and be back counting rugs, like he should be. This priesthood lark is too good to be true, and at times, that translates into '...so it can't be'. I would hate to suggest that God made a mistake, but days come around where I wonder if he broke his duck with me (assuming we overlook the Fiat Multipla). 

I will post this in the morning, at the start of a new day. Today has been a good day, and the culmination of a wonderful weekend completely devoid of doubt. Why am I writing about this now? Partly Dr Lewis, partly because if I tried to write about this on a 'bubbles' day, I'd probably delete this blog outright.