What follows is the text of a sermon preached on Ruth 4 (part of a series on the Book of Ruth) for a Service of the Word at the chapel of Cranmer Hall and St John’s College, Durham, on 27.05.2021(Art: ‘Whither Thou Goest’ by Sandy Freckle Tongagon).
So this evening we arrive at the end of the Book of Ruth. And in a way, it’s a happy ending. In fact, in two ways it’s a happy ending, with two different good outcomes for the characters we’ve been following. And just to make things difficult, both of these good endings are described in the text with the word ‘redemption’, but it means a different thing in each case. So we’ll look at each in turn and see what this might all mean for us.
Elimelech’s Redemption
The first happy ending is for Elimelech, who was the husband of Naomi. Now, Elimelech is dead, in fact he’s been dead since way back in chapter 1. So the extent to which he can enjoy the bit of good luck he gets in this chapter is debateable. However, Elimelech was a man, and being a man in this culture brought certain privileges, privileges that would come a man’s way whether or not he had a pulse. Now, I’m sure you’ve noticed from the previous three chapters that this story has seen Elimelech get into rather a bad position. And I don’t just mean being dead. I mean of course, that he no longer has a male heir!
I know you’ve probably been distracted during the last few sermons by the whole Naomi and Ruth subplot, but I assure you that the central issue the men at this time were anxious about was that Elimelech has no male heir, his two sons are dead, so who is going to inherit his property? It needs to be passed on to a man.
Now, Boaz, being a man, understands the issue at stake, and what’s more he knows the expectations of Levirate marriage, which means, when a man like Elimelech dies without an heir, his next of kin should marry his widow to produce a son who would be considered Elimelech’s legal heir. They might also, as happens here, assume ownership of the deceased relative’s land, which called ‘redeeming’ the land. So lets see how this plays out: Boaz convenes a meeting of what appears to be the Parish Council Planning Committee to decide which male relative will redeem Elimelech’s land, and acquire Ruth, his son’s widow, to produce an heir who will inherit the property. The patriarchal power players assemble, which means both living male relatives of Elimelech, plus ten male elders. Ruth and Naomi don’t even get a voice at the table, Ruth is just part of the property of her deceased male relatives.
The closest next of kin doesn’t see the property as worth redeeming. Fortunately for Elimelech though, Boaz steps up to redeem his property, including Ruth, and with Ruth he produces a male heir to inherit the land and continue Elimelech’s family line.
So a happy ending for Elimelech. The men with power have rallied together to ensure that the male line of inheritance continues and that any land and property remains under male ownership. So a happy ending for the patriarchy too, I suppose. The established centre of male power is secured and protected, happy days.
The Women’s Redemption
However, as I mentioned at the start, there is a second happy ending to the Book of Ruth, a second kind of ‘redemption’, and this one is for the women, Ruth and Naomi. Here the word ‘redemption’ has its usual sense of ‘being saved.’ For poor women like Ruth and Naomi whose economic position has been hanging by a thread throughout this story, ‘redemption’ is simply about survival, it’s about something as basic as food security, so they don’t have to glean bits of grain from someone else’s field just to stay alive.
In a patriarchal culture, their survival is determined by their relationships with men. We’ve just seen that men hold the power, and so women only gain long-term security through marrying men, or having male children. So Ruth has to engineer her and Naomi’s survival by strategically engaging with men in such a way that she gets both a husband and a son, and so guarantees security both for herself and for Naomi.
This is not a straightforward romantic ending, this is about economic survival. It reminds me somewhat of a scene from Greta Girwig’s 2019 film adaptation of Little Women, where Laurie presents his very romantic, poetic idea of love and marriage. To which Amy responds:
‘Well I’m not a poet, I’m just a woman. And as a woman there’s no way for me to make my own money, not enough to earn a living or to support my family. And if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And if we had children they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition, because it is. It may not be for you but it most certainly is for me.’
For women in a patriarchal culture, like Amy, like Ruth, there isn’t a great deal of room for romantic idealism. Marriage is an economic proposition. It can’t be disentangled from the daily struggle to survive and put food on the table.
The writer of Ruth seems absolutely to understand what’s at stake for Ruth and Naomi. We see Ruth being compared to three other women in the Old Testament: Leah, Rachael, and Tamar. All three are women who used some kind of trick or deception to manipulate men with power into giving them children. These were resourceful women who knew that remaining single and childless in a patriarchal society did not have good survival prospects. They all took action to secure relationships with powerful men by any means necessary in order to win their economic security. Ruth is put in this line of resourceful women, because she knew that in her culture she needed to secure a relationship with a man to guarantee her survival.
And she does it, the curtains close on these women with a husband and son in the picture, and their prosperity assured. It’s a happy ending – a redemption – for the women, in the most basic sense that they are saved from poverty and they get to survive.
Challenge to the Church
So two happy endings: Elimelech gets his male heir, and male power and property ownership is secured. Meanwhile, Ruth and Naomi curry favour with the male power players and get to survive in relative economic security.
Now, it also seems clear that the Book of Ruth wants us to see one of these endings as more important than the other. Elimelech’s line of succession is not the focus, in fact he doesn’t even get a mention in the final genealogy, which is meant to chart the male line of succession. Though the men are clearly the ones with the power, the story only brings them in as a necessary plot point, before returning to the real focus, which is of course Ruth and Naomi. So the story ends with the spotlight squarely back on the love between Ruth and Naomi. Incredibly, the son that is born to Ruth is valued as a fruit of the love of Ruth for Naomi, and we even read that Ruth means more to Naomi than seven sons. This is the only place in the Old Testament where the love of women is described as better than relationships with men. The narrative focus of this scripture is on the happiness and security of the marginalised, the woman, the widow, the foreigner, and the fact that it’s from her that the Messiah, the redeemer of all, comes to us. The protection of patriarchy or other centres of power and privilege is not at all the concern of this scripture.
When this text was read in the first centuries of the Church, there was a strong awareness of this. The Church Fathers saw themselves, the Gentile Church, as having the place of Ruth, this marginalised figure, grafted in by grace to the covenant people of God. There was an acceptance that the margins were where God’s providential story was focussed, and the Church as this persecuted community of misfits was part of that.
But of course, times change and the Western Church moved from the margins to becoming itself a centre of power. Its interests became more like those of Elimelech and the men in the story, about protecting its established power, privilege, and possession of land and property. From there comes the temptation for the Church to be more interested in the protection of its institutional power rather than the survival of marginalised people. Just in my brief two years of training, we’ve seen too many instances of the Church looking to redeem itself and its reputation rather than those who needed saving. We’ve seen it in sexual abuse scandals highlighted in the ICCSA Report, and even more recently in what we’ve seen of the institutional racism in the Church. Both cases where the Church was more interested in protecting its own position than in the salvation of marginalised or vulnerable people. Therefore the call we hear in the Book of Ruth, to reframe the narrative so that those on the margins are at the centre, is more pressing than ever. The LLF process will be just the latest test of whether that call is heeded.
Postscript
That brings us to the end of the Book of Ruth, but tantalisingly it finishes with a genealogy, which might be a way of saying ‘to be continued.’ The genealogy traces Ruth’s descendants down to King David, and Matthew’s Gospel takes it from there all the way to another poor unmarried woman called Mary. In Mary’s womb the true redeemer is at last conceived, and his coming is announced in the strongest terms. In terms we don’t even hear whispered in Ruth, but which are part of Mary’s Song: that God will ‘bring down the mighty from their thrones, and lift up the lowly, fill the hungry with good things, and send the rich away empty.’ Where Ruth and Naomi had to curry favour with the powerful in order to survive, Mary now proclaims that in God’s kingdom, it’s the powerful whose survival is in question. In the kingdom of God the hope of the marginalised is no longer in being resourceful enough to find a route to survival in a hostile world. The hope is instead that the crooked ways will be made straight and the rough ways made smooth, that the valleys will be filled and the mountains made low [Isaiah 40:3-5]. That the landscape of the world, of its systems of power and privilege, would be so changed that all flesh would see the salvation of the Lord. The challenge for us as a Church is whether we can say that this is our story, our song, the hope we are sharing with the world.
The next day, that is, after the dayof Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilateand said, ‘Sir, we remember what that impostor said while he was still alive, “After three days I will rise again.”Therefore command that the tomb be made secure until the third day; otherwise his disciples may go and steal him away, and tell the people, “He has been raised from the dead”, and the last deception would be worse than the first.’ Pilate said to them, ‘You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can.’ So they went with the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone.
Reflection
This passage seems like light relief in the emotionally heavy journey of Holy Week. Few places show more clearly that Christianity is essentially a comedy – a story in which good ultimately wins out, and which is often simply funny. We watch the authorities fuss and fret about making Jesus’ tomb ‘secure’ – ‘secure until the third day’, ‘secure’ with ‘a guard of soldiers’, ‘secure by sealing the stone.’ There’s a comedic over-compensating for their own insecurity about what might happen. And of course, we know what does happen; all the ‘security’ is comedic folly in the face of the living God who will not be kept entombed.
It’s funny watching the authorities trying to God-proof a grave, but if they’re the butt of the joke, who are the ones laughing along? Those others who come to the grave are far from laughing at this point. Jesus’ disciples have just lost their Lord and their friend, the person on whom all their hopes were pinned. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus’ female disciples bring spices to the tomb. Unlike the authorities, they have no pretensions about making things secure, their vulnerability is on full display. They come to anoint the place of their defeat. Faith and hope have passed away, love alone brings them to the tomb. A part of them is buried there with Christ, echoing the Psalmist’s cries: we too are ‘forsaken among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave.’ This is Holy Saturday. The day of grief, which is loving even in defeat.
But by placing no guard on their vulnerability, they place no guard on the work of God. And so after three long days, when God does move, they are caught off guard, just like the best comedy always does. Those who are weeping become those who laugh, the defeated become the secure, and the ‘secure’ are shown to be defeated. On Holy Saturday we are encouraged to put no guard on our vulnerability before God, in his presence we anoint the very place of our defeat, and in doing so we find ourselves in just the place to catch the transformative, hope-renewing punchline of the divine comedy.
This is the adapted text of a homily preached on Luke 21:5-19 for a Sunday Eucharist at St Andrew’s Church, Stanley (Co. Durham), on 17.11.2019.
This week I’ve been at the Lumiere light festival in Durham and have been blown away by all the artistic displays created around the city, as well as the huge crowds of people coming to see them! I was based in the Cathedral where we were with a team of people offering a space of prayer for those visiting to see the installations. The Cathedral becomes one of the most popular places to be during Lumiere, partly because of the beautiful art displays, but mostly just because it’s a warm place to be on a cold night in Durham. As a festivalgoer looking at the artwork around the city, there comes a point when you can’t feel your toes any more and you know you’ve got to retreat into the Cathedral. And so the whole building becomes packed with people sensibly seeking shelter from the elements.
In our Gospel reading today Jesus is speaking not about a Cathedral, but about the great building at the centre of Jewish religious life, the Temple in Jerusalem. He seems to have the opposite instinct to any sensible Lumiere festivalgoer. Telling his disciples that their place will not be inside this great building. No, they must be out facing the elements, the persecution of the authorities, the cold rejection of those around them, the constantly changing winds of the world. Because in fact, before long he says there will be no great Temple for them to retreat into for shelter. The Temple, the building where God was present with his people, where the beating heart of Jewish religious life was found, this Temple was shortly going to come tumbling down. There’s no point, Jesus seems to say, clinging to these stones when the winds of the world start howling, because ‘the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.’
He doesn’t give these warnings to terrify people; indeed he actually says ‘do not be terrified’. We might think that’s easy enough for him to say, but with how stormy and uncertain it always seems out in the world we have every reason to be terrified and to seek for shelter! In response Jesus offers the line: ‘by your endurance you will gain your souls’. Well what on earth does that mean? ‘Soul’ is a word that we can hear a lot but not get any closer to understanding what it means. There’s a new series you may have seen on the BBC on Sunday nights called ‘His Dark Materials’. It’s set in a world where people’s souls exist outside their bodies in the form of animals. This is actually quite helpful for understanding what ‘soul’ meant in Jesus’ Jewish culture. The soul was understood to be at the core of who you are, your very identity. But the soul was also active, it had longings and hungers and needs just like an animal. It’s no wonder the Psalmist writes ‘As a deer longs for the water brooks, so longs my soul for you O God.’ The soul is our core identity longing to be fulfilled.
By going outside the comfort and security of the Temple, and facing the turbulence and rejection of the world, Jesus said his disciples would ‘gain their souls’. Far from being left terrified, they would have their deepest longings met and their identity fulfilled. They would encounter Jesus there, the one for whom their soul longs, and we read that all their activity in the world will be in his name, fulfilling their identity as his disciples.
Jesus doesn’t comfort us with promises to build a new Temple, a new building to shelter in. He promises that when we go into the world to build his kingdom, to serve our neighbour, to share our faith, he meets us there, and that is where our identity as Christians is fulfilled. Working as a chaplain at Lumiere was certainly out of my comfort zone as a fairly new Christian, but seeing the Church going out and engaging people at that festival, in prayer, and in conversations around faith, I did feel we were gaining our soul. Faith does not to lead us into the stone Temple of rigid religion, but out to serve the one who is alive and on the move, who himself faced the elements and powers of the world and in being broken by them, gained the victory.
It’s no coincidence that in Luke’s Gospel this passage is followed immediately by Jesus celebrating the first Eucharist with his disciples. Our gathering today at the Lord’s table only makes sense in light of our being out in the world in the service of Christ. So that, in the words of the prayer after communion, ‘we who share Christ’s body live his risen life; we who drink his cup bring life to others; we whom the Spirit lights give light to the world.’ We’re gathered today to receive in worship, word, and sacrament, food for the journey, so that we might be sent out – that we might indeed ‘go – in peace – to love – and serve the Lord. In the name of Christ. Amen.’
Last summer our church organised a book club on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I’m sure for many in the group, expectations were low – what could a children’s book from over 80 years ago possibly have to offer a group of Christians today? It is unfortunately common to have a certain condescension towards children’s literature, even in the Church, where we fail to remember the words of Christ: ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’ [Matthew 18:3]. So we were surprised when Tolkien quickly whisked us off on a journey of deep spiritual discovery, such that I can point to this happy month of reading, and what followed from it, as an important moment in the development of my faith. Here I hope to share just one central thread which our reading group drew out that summer; the way in which Bilbo Baggins and his journey seemed to point us ever more to Jesus Christ. This is not to say that Bilbo is a straightforward Christ-character in The Hobbit. All I would deign to say is that as the light of Tolkien’s own strongly Catholic and Christ-centred imagination perforated into his storytelling, not a little of it seems to have collected on the character of Mr Baggins. Perhaps this is unsurprising given that Bilbo’s journey is most clearly one of self-discovery, and for Tolkien as a Christian, becoming most fully our true selves looks like living more and more deeply into the image of Christ. But whatever the reason, when I read the story of Bilbo, it points me towards my own Christian journey of bearing the likeness of Christ; I hope these reflections will do justice to that grace which Tolkien’s work has given to me.
Bilbo’s Confirmation
Bilbo Baggins is an everyman (or indeed, ‘everyhobbit’) character: ordinary, pleasant, and with moderate, homely tastes. He represents the natural state of most people – a little on the materialistic side, but with a certain common goodness and a middling degree of virtue. Bilbo’s starting presumption is also relatable: he does not wish for his comfortable life to be shaken up by anything so disturbing as an adventure. Yet there is a contrary instinct smuggled away somewhere in Bilbo’s subconscious, which I think we can also recognise. You see, Bilbo also has a ‘Tookish side’ which appears to be awaiting the inspiration to find a something more in life than this pleasant but somehow shallow existence.
Fortunately for that Tookish spark in Bilbo’s soul, inspiration is quite literally just around the corner in the form of Gandalf. The wizard Gandalf is one of the most theologically interesting characters in Tolkien’s writing. However, in The Hobbit we are still dealing only with the flower buds of these theological themes and so there is just one primary point to be made about him. To make it we must take a brief detour into Tolkien’s pneumatology – the place of the Holy Spirit in Middle-Earth. One aspect of Eru, the God of Tolkien’s universe, is ‘The Flame Imperishable’, which Tolkien describes in his own words as:
‘[…] The Creative activity of Eru (in some sense distinct from or within Him), by which things could be given a ‘real’ and independent (though derivative and created) existence. The Flame Imperishable is sent out from Eru to dwell in the heart of the world, and the world then Is […] It refers to the mystery of ‘authorship’, by which the author, while remaining ‘outside’ and independent of his work, also ‘indwells’ in it, on its derivative plane, below that of his own being, as the source and guarantee of its being.
The resonances of this language with Christian beliefs about God as Trinity, and particularly about the Holy Spirit, are clear. What is also clear in Tolkien is that Gandalf acts as the representative of the Flame Imperishable in Middle-Earth. Indeed, his character is surrounded by fire-imagery. He is the bearer of one of the three elven rings: Narya the Great, the Ring of Fire. We read in The Hobbit that his magical specialism is ‘bewitchments with fire and lights’. He also memorably confronts the Balrog of Moria with the words: “I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor.” The importance of all this for Bilbo’s story is that Gandalf’s role as representative of the Spirit chiefly gives him licence to inspire – to move where he wills through Middle-Earth kindling the desire for adventure in the hearts of others. As Craig Bernthal writes: ‘Gandalf’s main function in Middle-earth will be to rouse people—to throw Bilbo out of his Hobbit hole and send him on the road for an adventure […] Gandalf is the catalyst of spiritual response.’
The precise form this takes in Bilbo’s call to adventure seems quasi-liturgical. This shouldn’t really surprise us: allusions to baptism and confirmation often bubble up at moments of transition in Tolkien’s stories (most clearly for example, at Frodo’s crossing of the Bruinen, or at The Council of Elrond). These sacraments are simply the rites that mark moments of the transition in the Catholic tradition that shapes Tolkien’s imagination. Gandalf begins with some kind of catechesis – gently questioning what Bilbo means when he talks about the good:
“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”
[…] “What a lot of things you use Good morning for!” said Gandalf. “Now you mean that you want to get rid of me, and that it won’t be good till I move off.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, ch: An Unexpected Party
Bilbo’s understanding of goodness and the good life is not wrong, but Gandalf seems to perceive that it could be deepened. This is followed by perhaps the oddest moment in the encounter, where Gandalf ‘pardons’ Bilbo, giving him absolution in a moment that would seem even more strange if there were nothing liturgical going on:
“Indeed for your old grandfather Took’s sake, and for the sake of poor Belladonna, I will give you what you ask for.”
“I beg your pardon, I haven’t asked for anything!”
“Yes, you have! Twice now. My pardon. I give it you.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, ch: An Unexpected Party
In response to this and the other elements bound up in the call-to-adventure Gandalf makes on Bilbo, the hobbit need only make the slightest sign of acceptance: inviting Gandalf for tea (which he moments later regrets). The fact that an element of free-will response is vital comes straight from Catholic theology. The whole episode is sealed with Bilbo being given the mark of his confirmation. Rather than a sign of the cross in oil, Gandalf scratches the runic symbol for a burglar on his door. This is the vocation Bilbo has been called to. It begins in this strange, near liturgical brush with Gandalf, the Holy Spirit of inspiration in Middle-Earth. Even here at the start there are shadows of the beginning of Christ’s own ministry in the liturgical context of baptism with the presence of the Holy Spirit, the descending dove.
A Eucharistic party
The flame has been kindled, the adventure has started, and now it begins in earnest to boil things up in Bilbo’s life – beginning that very night. The aura of Tolkien’s liturgical imagination continues to shed light on what we read, for the adventure begins with a meal. Bilbo finds himself playing host to Thorin Oakenshield and his twelve dwarf disciples as they arrive for a last supper before setting out on the road. The Christian life is centred on a particular meal as its ‘source and summit’: the Eucharistic meal in which by eating bread and wine we consume the very body and blood of Christ. Some of the theological ingredients we can detect in Bilbo’s meal are reflective of Eucharistic themes, and set the tone for the rest of his adventure.
On one level the Eucharist, and likewise Bilbo’s meal with the dwarves, is a communal act – an act in which ‘though we are many, we are one body, for we all share in one bread’. Here Bilbo is removed from his isolated and solitary life of comfort and plunged headlong into the uncomfortable arena of community as dwarves pile into his home and stretch his polite hospitality into something more radical. This sets off a journey in fellowship where Bilbo will be drawn out of himself by the gravity of communal life. One commentator observes that for Tolkien, friendship is a ‘school of sacrifice‘, which instills the love that makes it possible for us to let go of selfishness. In his meal Bilbo is roughly initiated into this school of sacrifice. His self development will not be achieved by introspection, but rather by letting go of self-sufficiency, and being reorientated towards the Other.
This leads us into the second theme of the journey present at its inaugural meal. The Eucharistic meal in Catholic theology is a participation in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, and is commonly referred to as ‘the sacrifice of the mass’. Bilbo’s having to sacrifice control of his home – its food, furnishings, and prized crockery – to the hungry dwarves sets the tone for a journey marked by sacrifice and renunciation. This breaking of bread is the start of what will be a Eucharistic adventure for Bilbo, one in which he will die to the comfortable goodness of home in order to come alive to a deeper goodness, chiefly characterised by selfless fellowship.
Together these themes of fellowship and sacrifice prepare Bilbo for his later redemptive role in the quest in which he must rise to the greatest act of love: laying down his life for his friends. But there is also another preparation that takes place during the feast, in which Gandalf plays a further role. First the wizard reaffirms Bilbo’s vocation as something freely chosen by him, but only understood by Gandalf. He seems to know best of all the real extent of Bilbo’s potential, and especially his capacity to give of himself, as Bilbo grumbles, “[He] seems to know as much about the inside of my larders as I do myself!” But here Gandalf goes beyond his work of inspiring adventure, and proceeds to resource it, just as the Holy Spirit supplies spiritual gifts (‘charismata‘) to those she inspires. His gifting of the map and key mean the company now have all they need to achieve the goal of their quest.
The next morning Bilbo has to leave without his handkerchief, but because he does so Gandalf brings him not only his handkerchief, but many more handkerchiefs, and his pipe and tobacco too. We might think here of Christ’s words that the one who loses his life will find it: Bilbo gives up his domestic home life in order to embrace a more challenging, but deeper and richer experience of living well. Whenever he regrets this choice on the road, it is framed as Bilbo being less himself. We see this even on the first morning after the meal, when he resists setting out on the journey, prompting Gandalf to respond: “you are not at all yourself this morning”. For Tolkien, our hero’s quest of self-discovery will inevitably have a Christlike shape, which we will see in the rest of the story.
Falling and rising
The fist major obstacle which Thorin and company must overcome in order to reach their goal is the Misty Mountains. It’s quickly apparent that beyond even the physical challenge the mountains present, for Bilbo in particular this is to be a formative moment. Indeed, we might even go as far as to classify it as a baptismal episode in Bilbo’s journey. This comes to mind by way of its similarities with other such events in The Lord of the Rings, most especially the ‘baptism’ of the Fellowship undergoes in descending into and then rising from Moria, which initiates them into their unified vocation after their having been formed at the Council of Elrond. Though other baptismal events in Tolkien’s writings involve water (Frodo’s crossing of the Bruinen, for example), this is not an essential feature. Indeed, in baptism what stands behind the act of being submerged and then brought out of water is the reality of our being joined with the death and resurrection of Christ. Jesus himself used the term ‘baptism’ in this deeper sense; when speaking about his coming passion, death, and resurrection, he says in Luke 12:50 ‘I have a baptism to be baptisedwith’.
It is then by no means outside the realms of reasonable interpretation to read Bilbo’s crossing of the Misty Mountains as baptismal (out of liturgical order with previous episodes because we are speaking here only of allusions). Bilbo is first plunged into the darkness and evil of the goblin realm – and eventually into unconsciousness – before rising again into the light on the other side of the mountains. Along the way he overcomes the power of the anti-king, the Great Goblin, and confronts the imprisoned spirit of Gollum (bound inwardly by the malevolent influence of the ring) – events which bear an echo of Christ’s harrowing of hell. However, there is an even more important purpose to this event. Baptismal episodes in Tolkien are always connected to liminality or transition; baptism being, after all, a sacrament of initiation. So it is here that Bilbo seems first to be initiated into, and to embrace, his identity as a burglar. Having bested Gollum and the goblin horde, he emerges with a strong sense of that identity which Gandalf had called him to. Interestingly, he has made it through this initiation not by becoming a great fighter of wicked monsters, but by a great act of mercy. ‘The pity of Bilbo’ in choosing to spare Gollum’s life is just a small act of kindness, but no loving act is ever for nought in Middle-Earth, and the consequences of Bilbo’s choice will echo down through the ages of Tolkien’s legendarium.
The wilderness
Mirkwood represents another critical episode in Bilbo’s journey, and undoubtedly that of deepest darkness. It also strikes us with some of the deepest and most interesting theological motifs. Mirkwood is a vast and dense forest saturated with shadow and unease which the company must cross in order to reach their goal. The only way they can do so is by a single path which they will traverse by ‘luck’ (always read ‘luck’ as providence in Tolkien). As we chart the spiritual landscape of Bilbo’s quest, this stage strikes us as a concrete manifestation of what St. John of the Cross described as a ‘dark night of the soul’. A crisis of faith in which the believer finds themselves in complete spiritual darkness and doubt. In Mirkwood no light enters, nor any breath of wind, and the travelers find no sustenance (neither food nor water). At the crisis moment even the will to pursue the quest, and any memory of having started it, is taken away as Bombur undergoes a kind of anti-baptism in the enchanted river.
Particularly surrounding this experience with Bombur there are also signs of another spiritual battle: acedia. This spiritual listlessness, hopelessness, and inability to live fully in the present, seems captured in Bombur’s enchanted sleep. Indeed the whole company soon falls into hopelessness in the midst of their seemingly unending dark night. Bilbo is sent up a tree to see if it will ever come to an end, and he sees only more forest (though interestingly, this is an illusion created by their being in a valley – they were actually almost through the experience, though it didn’t feel like it). Having abandoned hope, the company are easily led off the narrow way by the tempting pleasures of feasts going on in the surrounding forest. Yet these pleasures are only a mirage and the company never find satisfaction in them – rather, they become increasingly isolated from one another in the darkness.
Alongside the these echoes of Christian spiritual battles, there are resonances here with Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness as the company suffer the absence of food and water and contend with temptations. Yet as it was with Christ, so with Bilbo this journey is not ultimately destructive but confirmatory of his vocation. It is the first time we see clearly that Bilbo’s calling is a salvific one – he is called to save the dwarves. In this case he liberates them from the clutches of the spiders (descendants of Ungoliant, a primordial evil), but this salvific pattern will repeat now through the rest of his journey in both practical and spiritual forms.
Breaker of chains
Bilbo’s next salvation of the dwarves is a practical one, and follows on from the unfortunate events in Mirkwood forest, after the company are finally captured by the Elvenking. Though not himself captured, Bilbo chooses to enter into the captivity the Dwarves are experiencing by allowing himself to be shut into the Elvenking’s cave in order to be able to save them from within. After a couple of weeks lying low in the cave, Bilbo begins to exercise his secret incarnational ministry, whispering the good news of his presence to the Dwarves, news which gives them the hope they needed to resist giving in to their captor’s power. The way to salvation which Bilbo eventually finds is a water-gate. Their escape from captivity is baptismal in character. Bilbo’s watery act of salvation leads him to the darkest part of the cave, and is not something he can explain to them, they must simply have faith in him as he prepares to plunge them into the water.
If the Misty Mountains represented Bilbo’s baptism into his vocation as ‘burglar’, this watery prison break is the baptism of the whole company into trusting in Bilbo’s vocation to save them. The baptismal imagery of the escape is further emphasised when Bilbo later sums it up to Smaug in his list of titles for himself: “I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them alive again from the water”. What is most interesting in this first great proof of Bilbo’s vocation is that as he is growing into his potential, christological imagery is starting to cluster around him.
End of a worm
After their escape, the company eventually reach the Lonely Mountain. Here Bilbo ventures through a secret entrance to fulfil his vocation as a burglar, and now comes to his Gethsemane moment. The greatest battle Bilbo fights is not with Smaug himself, but within his own heart in that tunnel in convincing himself to go on, just as Christ wrestled in Gethsemane with the fate set out before him:
It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone […]
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, ch: Inside Information
When he reaches the tunnel’s end, Bilbo find himself in the headlights of a critical confrontation. At this point it is worth introducing Smaug the dragon; conspicuous for most of this tale by his absence, and when present offering a theological counterweight to the goodness of Bilbo. Smaug is the archetypal figure of evil in the Hobbit, after whom the fallenness of various other characters (into ‘dragon sickness’) is named. Early on we learn that Smaug had seized the dwarven treasure and become guardian of it under the mountain. His sinful greed has led him into a kind of symbolic death where he became entombed underground with his treasure (in a sense, he is possessed by his own possessing). He is unable to enjoy the wealth, and has a purely economic (as opposed to aesthetic) appreciation of it. He is also unable to create anything himself – evil being only a negation of reality in Tolkien’s Christian thought. In contrast to Bilbo’s littleness and humility, Smaug is huge and proud, and against Bilbo’s journey of fellowship with the dwarves, Smaug represents absolute individual isolation – even the birds and beasts around his mountain tomb having long since fled.
Bilbo’s battle with Smaug is not physical, but appears rather as a confrontation of identities. Bilbo flatters Smaug with illustrious details of the dragon’s reputation, before offering his own identity in a long series of poetic names that show how his sense of himself has developed during the course of the adventure. Smaug is the ultimate anti-Bilbo; something we learn even in the very first line of the story. Bilbo’s hobbit hole is ‘not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms‘; some commentators have read these last words as also meaning that Bilbo is free from the goals/desiresof dragons. Bilbo’s immunity to the power of the dragon, and more importantly the dragon sickness that follows, make him perfectly sited to his vocation, and reflect Christ’s own resistance to the devil (portrayed as a dragon in The Book of Revelation). He is able then to resist Smaug’s power and defeat him not with force, but by causing him to seal his own fate. He courts his pride to make him reveal his underbelly wherein lies his missing scale, and so evil undoes itself in the end, just as death is defeated by Christ’s own dying.
Thief in the Night
However, with Smaug defeated we quickly find that the final end of Bilbo’s vocation is to effect the spiritual salvation of Thorin and the dwarves by another act reminiscent of Christ’s atonement. The very title of this chapter prepares us to think in this theological way; ‘A Thief in the Night’ being taken directly from the New Testament (1 Thessalonians 5:2, and less directly in many other places).
Thorin and company have succumbed to dragon sickness and made the mountain a den of robbers, walling themselves in against the elves and men of Lake-town who seek to share in the treasure. They have forgotten that the only value and purpose of wealth is in its being exchanged; by keeping it all to themselves they are charting a certain course for starvation, and to perish like its previous owner. The dwarves are too stubborn and too far gone to save themselves, they must be saved – and this is to be Bilbo’s greatest act of heroism yet.
Bilbo knows that in Thorin’s eyes the most valuable gem in the mountain is the Arkenstone. As its name suggests, it plays a similar role to the Ark of the Covenant for the Israelites, representing the covenant or divine authority wielded by Thorin’s royal forefathers over their kingdom (another memorable example of a covenant object from Tolkien’s legendarium is the Tree of Gondor). We will now follow the process of how Bilbo uses the Arkenstone in his salvific scheme, with careful attention for more hints and glimmers of christology.
Bilbo’s great self-sacrificial act begins as he persuades one of the dwarves to allow him to take his place on the watch (substitution is a key theme in atonement theology). He then splashes through a pool towards the elven camp, being baptised into this moment of his vocation being fulfilled. The elves notice the splash and wonder what it might be – first suggesting a ‘fish‘, then guessing the dwarves’ ‘servant‘, both of which are christological images (the ‘ichthys’ fish symbol for Christ, and Christ as the ‘suffering servant’ of Isaiah). Bilbo decides to announce his presence, which he does with the words ‘let’s have a light!’ Light is a key image for Tolkien, who was deeply influenced by St John the Evangelist, for whom Christ was ‘the light of the world’ [John 8:12]. When he is brought before the Elvenking, Bilbo cannot explain his saving plan for the dwarves, he can only show it. He gives all his own treasure to the Elvenking in order to ransom the dwarves from their own self-willed imprisonment.
In making this great sacrifice, Bilbo does not end strife in the story – the great battle of the armies of good and evil is still to come. Nor does he even secure the affections of the dwarves – like Christ, he is rejected by those he saves, and at first Thorin even deems him the Judas of the company. Yet his act paves the way for a deeper redemption of Thorin and his companions, and the king under the mountain parts company with Bilbo with dying words of repentance, friendship, and even new creation:
“Farewell, good thief, […] I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed. Since I leave now all gold and silver, and go where it is of little worth, I wish to part in friendship from you, and I would take back my words and deeds at the Gate.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, ch: The Return Journey
Thorin’s final act is to affirm Bilbo’s goodness: “There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West”. At last, after coming so far since Gandalf’s strange interrogation on the nature of a ‘good morning’, Bilbo has found that the greatest good is in eucharistic sacrifice; in giving all for the sake of his friends.
Resurrection
Bilbo’s sacrificial redemption of Thorin and the dwarves does not result only in the reconciliation of himself with Thorin, but spills over into a flurry of gift-giving and reconciliation between different characters and races at the end the story. Dain and the eagle chief, the Elvenking and the dwarves, Bard and the Master, all exchange gifts and are reconciled to one another. Even Bilbo’s journey home is studded with a series of gifts he gives out, and in return for which he is himself blessed. The great blow of his eucharistic act has completely broken Bilbo’s isolated self-sufficiency and made him and all those he comes into contact with open to gift and reconciliation with the Other.
When the intrepid Hobbit finally crosses the river into the Shire he is baptised back into his old domestic surroundings. The great challenge for Bilbo now is to bring the spirit of his eucharistic adventure into humdrum ordinariness of daily life. At the end of every Eucharist is announced ‘go in peace to love and serve the Lord’. The question for the rest of our weeks is: how do we do this? How will Bilbo live-out his changed-ness in familiar surroundings? Bilbo is not the Baggins he was at the beginning of the journey; as Gandalf says: “Something is the matter with you! You are not the Hobbit that you were” – none of his handkerchiefs now survive – he has been transformed in the eucharistic school of sacrifice. He is very much like the house he returns to (which is presently being ransacked and its contents given away), no longer closed and comfortable, but radically open to the Other.
Bilbo finds that he has been presumed dead, and we read that ‘it was quite a long time before Mr Baggins was in fact admitted to be alive again’ (and indeed not everyone was convinced). The way the seemingly resurrected Bilbo lives out his new life is like one who is ‘in the world, but not of it’. He is somewhat estranged from other Hobbits now, but has closer friends beyond the borders of the Shire. A stranger contented with the friendship of other strangers. Indeed, his strange newness has changed his perspective on his ordinary life, and things now seem altogether more beautiful than they did before, and are themselves supplemented by the treasures he has brought home from the journey.
It seems evident that Bilbo’s journey in The Hobbit has subtle yet profound Christian and even christological undertones. We can read his story for signposts on our own journeys of discipleship. Bilbo the everyman, woefully unprepared to undertake the adventure into christlikeness and eucharistic sacrifice, yet who by stumbling steps is brought to its conclusion by a loving providence. Jesus tells us that we are to be like ‘one of these little ones’, and after all, who is more little than Mr Bilbo?
If you are interested in discovering more about the manifold Christian themes in the writings of J.R.R Tolkien, I heartily recommend Tolkien’s Sacramental Vision: Discerning the Holy in Middle Earth by Craig Bernthal.
The Diocese in Europe is the largest diocese geographically in the Church of England by an enormous margin. Its chaplaincies are spread across 40 countries, spanning the length and breadth of the continent, and even spilling over into Africa and Asia. Yet despite dwarfing the small part of the Church of England located in England, the Diocese in Europe is a mystery to many. It faces an uphill battle to make its existence known, let alone understood. For three of the last four years I have lived and (for two years) worked in this strange diocese and hope that in sharing my experience of the unique aspects of mission here I might pull back the curtain a little for others.
When I first moved to Belgium four years ago I felt an immediate and disheartening sense of culture shock. I couldn’t understand any of the labels in supermarkets, or talk to people without betraying my foreignness, and had only a smattering of compatriots with whom to share the ordeal. One Sunday though, I wandered into the local Belgian Church of England church, and as a priest with an English accent boomed out Amazing Grace, I felt at home again. I treasured the stubborn bubble of Englishness I found in this church, and enjoyed many evenings drinking tea (with milk!) and lamenting the latest political news from home with my fellow Brits. Yet in spite of my best efforts, I inevitably slid into being a European, and write this now as a bilingual Belgian resident married to a Dutch woman, having now lived half of my adult life on the continent. What I learnt through that transition and the intervening years of my ministry in the Church in Belgium is that integrating oneself into a culture requires sacrifice. Integrating is hard work, and I can say for sure that closing ranks with people of your own culture offers a much more appealing prospect. Years of frustration go into learning a new language, and even then it’s always easier to speak your mother tongue. Integration requires us to take the more difficult road, to go outside of our comfortable bubbles, and give large amounts of our time and money to adjusting ourselves to our new country.
Perhaps a few decades ago one could have gotten away with ministry in the Diocese in Europe without making such a sacrifice; when congregations were mostly British ex-pats. But now that here in North West Europe the Anglophone proportion of congregations is down to just 30%, and attendance by local residents is exploding, we’ve lost our excuse for taking the easy road. Lacking the linguistic and cultural skills for the country we minister in is now counter to mission in this context. I see the future of the diocese in those churches where the ministers have mastered the local language and passionately resource their worship and work with the cultural and linguistic treasures of their surroundings.
As we become less and less a diocese of ‘Brits abroad’ and more and more European, a vocation also opens up not only to embrace that identity, but to reflect it back to our brothers and sisters in England. Even as the UK pulls away politically from her European neighbours, we have a call to be the European heart of the Church of England. To remind the Church of whom we are a part that no matter the political circumstances, she is still intricately connected to the European continent through hundreds of chaplaincies. As we develop an authentic passion to learn from the cultures we minister to, we have a calling to share those European insights with our coreligionists in Britain. Our diocesan bishop, +Robert, is wonderfully articulate in this regard. I wish next to pick up on a couple of gifts I’ve learnt in the European mission context that I will take back with me to ministry in the UK.
One of the greatest gifts I have found in this diocese is a witness against tribalism both within and without. This must be understood in the context of our being a tiny minority Church on the continent. Despite what I have said about the enormous size of the diocese, in numbers we are small and thinly spread. This context means that there’s not the ‘luxury’ of tribalism here. When there are only a handful of Anglican lay and ordained ministers in a country, there is no room to retreat into the camps of different traditions. As a tiny minority, we are bound closely together by the defining identity of being Anglican and work in step with one another without question. Not only this, but because a given Anglican chaplaincy will be the only Anglican church in its city (or even country!), it must offer within itself a space for Anglicans of all stripes – a microcosm of the breadth of our Church. I’d never known churches could be so liturgically open and flexible until I came to this diocese and experienced everything from a high mass to a charismatic worship service in the same church!
This witness to unity in diversity as a minority Church on the continent also extends to our churches’ ecumenical partnerships. Each Anglican church in Europe is a tiny island scattered far from her sisters, and with minimal resources. In that setting, ecumenism is not an add-on to our mission, it is a necessity of our survival. To take the example of the chaplaincy in Leuven with whom I spent the best part of my time here, we would not have a place to worship without the generosity of a Roman Catholic community. Ecumenical meetings and public events are a regular part of the life of every church I have had contact with in the diocese. It’s also remarkable that at Sunday services in our churches, Anglicans are frequently in the minority, as people who identify with a range of denominations and traditions find a home in our communities. In some sense this means Anglican identity becomes secondary as we look to include all (last Sunday I was at an Anglican chaplaincy in the Netherlands at which the ecumenical congregation were welcomed to the altar with the words: ‘this is not an Anglican table, this is the Lord’s table!’) Yet in a deeper way, it is the generosity and flexibility of the Anglican tradition that allows this sort of hospitality to flourish.
Along with giving rise to this blessed witness to Christian unity, our smallness also has less comfortable dimensions. It means the strange experience (for a British Anglican) of being a little-known minority Church in a country whose culture has been shaped by a different Christian tradition. Compared with Churches that are ‘indigenous’ to the continent, here the Church of England is out of place linguistically, culturally, and historically. This leads, in my experience, to two connected questions arising.
First: what is this strange, exotic branch of Christianity called ‘Anglicanism’? Here in Belgium Anglicanism is, by a quirk of royal history, one of the few officially recognised religious groupings, and so most Belgians will have some vague notion of it from school. However, the fact that the majority of people here would only be able to talk about it as the Church that Henry VIII started means a lot of our conversations require us to be ready to educate others about our tradition. This entails that we ourselves develop a stronger sense of what it is to be Anglican, because that identity sticks out here more than it does in the UK. Happily I have found that the ‘exotic’ oddity of Anglicanism does lend itself to invitational mission. People are often open to coming along to an Anglican service to see what it’s like and where it differs from their native tradition.
This leads on to the second question that comes up: why is the Church of England here? Historically the answer has been ‘to serve British expat communities’, and this is still the answer in large parts of the diocese. However, I would not bet on it being the future direction of travel. I have already mentioned that here in the Archdeaconry of North West Europe, less than 30% of our congregations are now native English speakers. The great transition has come with an explosion in local (especially Dutch) interest in Anglicanism. On a recent visit to the newest C of E chaplaincy in the Netherlands, I was blown away seeing it packed with worshippers, almost all of whom (from what I could tell) were Dutch. I cannot say with any certainty what the reasons are for this demographic change. Dutch culture certainly has a streak of Anglophilia, and there are other particular local factors to consider too, but I don’t think these offer a complete explanation. My hypothesis based on anecdotal evidence is that those who drift away from established local traditions (Roman Catholicism in Belgium, and the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands) seem to be able to find a home in the Anglican expression of faith. The Anglican ‘middle way’ seems to be providing a safe and open harbour for those adrift from the Churches of their upbringing.
If this does go some way to explain the growth of Anglicanism in North West Europe, it should give us some confidence when faced with the question ‘what is your Church doing here?’ The generous orthodoxy of Anglican theology, the beauty of the Anglican musical tradition, the seriousness with which it takes the ministry both of word and sacrament, rejoicing in the leadership gifts of women, living in the tension of Catholic and Reformed identities, and thinking rigorously on the three-legged-stool of scripture, tradition, and reason. All of this has proved an attractive expression of Christian faith for those brought up outside it, and especially for those who find themselves spiritually in-between traditions.
The Church of England here does not enjoy even the waning spotlight of being the established Church. Here she is just a late-comer to the continental Christian party, with a thick accent and odd mannerisms. Yet she finds that far from being a spare part on the continent, many have found something in her to admire. In her mission here she has become, in a typically paradoxical Anglican way, a small Church for the whole world. Bringing people into her worship of God from all traditions and corners of the continent and the globe. If anything typifies what I’ve seen of the beauty of this diocese it has been the vision of the Eucharist being celebrated at Holy Trinity Anglican Pro-Cathedral in Brussels. Hundreds of people from as many as 60 countries coming together as one church to receive Christ:
I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb
Disney’s The Lion King when it was originally released in 1994 became a cinematic landmark for a whole generation, myself included. So when the 2019 live-action re-make was released recently, many of us made a pilgrimage to the cinema to re-live the magic. Though it didn’t manage in every way to re-capture the spirit of the original (and how could it?), there were many impressive moments that seemed to go beyond the scope of the 1994 version. One of the most striking things was the way in which the philosophical explorations tied up with the narrative were unpacked more explicitly. It was always clear from the original that there were certain spiritual or even religious connections: Rafiki’s role as priest and prophet; Mufasa’s self-sacrificial kingship; or Scar’s self-destructive will-to-power. But in the new version a central moral drama seemed to come more clearly into view. A conflict between an ethic rooted in inter-connected identity, and one of atomised individualism. Mufasa’s philosophy of life as a circle is contrasted with Timon and Pumba’s notion of life as a line.
Simba begins exploring his identity and how he should live already as a cub, the over-confident young prince of the Pride Lands. His father, king Mufasa, raises him in preparation for his future kingship with a high ethic of duty. Rather than kingship being a position of pride, it is an identity that Simba must take on in humility as only one part in the great inter-connected ‘circle of life‘, and which should guide a life of service to the world around him. However, Simba ‘Just can’t wait to be king’ and views kingship from a position of individual self-will, something he wants to possess that would exalt him out of his loathed position of being a cub.
In the film’s crisis moment, the death of Mufasa, Simba flees out of guilt into exile from his home in the Pride Lands. In doing so he relinquishes his claim as king and his place in the order of things. Now lost, Simba collapses in the desert – a place symbolic of the vacuum of identity created by his exile. Yet he is met there quite unexpectedly by Timon and Pumba, the comedic prophets of an alternative ordering philosophy of life, with another catchy anthem: ‘Hakuna Matata‘.
Timon and Pumba bring Simba into a new way of living, based on total freedom and individualism. There is no ‘circle of life’ they say, rather, each individual’s life is a straight line with no connection to the lives of those around them. They live as they please in a paradise of plenty, with no fear of any consequences from their actions. This seems to be the perfect medicine for Simba, a young lion ridden with guilt for the consequences of his own actions. At one point, Timon summarises his invitation into their way of living with the expression: ‘you do you’. This leads Simba to the conclusion that he should simply do whatever he wants, and that he is of no significance in the lives of those around him. He tells Rafiki that as far as anyone else is concerned, he is ‘no one’ – having abandoned any idea of real connectedness to other beings.
Yet Rafiki’s prophetic role in Simba’s story is to take this listless ‘you do you’ idea and remind him what ‘you‘ really means. A heavenly vision of Mufasa calls his son to ‘remember who you are’ – calling him to live out of an identity he had forgotten. Nala breaks the illusion that his individual freedom has no consequences for others when she tells him how the Pride Lands have fallen into chaos under Scar’s rule. Only in Simba’s remembering his true identity in which he is integrally connected to those around him, and then acting out of that self-remembrance, can the world return to fruitful order. In this active self-remembering Simba finds not only true personal fulfilment, but also creates the context for the fulfilment of others.
As an additional note on the progression of the story, it is interesting to see the way in which Simba’s time with Timon and Pumba occurs in parallel with Scar’s reign in the Pride Lands. Timon and Pumba’s life of ‘we can do what we want’ is paired chronologically with Scar’s words on seizing power: ‘we can take what we want’. It’s as if they share the same basic philosophy of life, but act it out passively in one case, and violently in the other. Both live for the pursuit of individual desires rather than considerations of a deeper relational identity.
The modes of living that Simba must overcome in the story are therefore both forms of an orientation towards the self rather than finding identity in orientation towards the Other. This places The Lion King in dialogue with the original myth of humanity in the Bible’s Book of Genesis. Here too the world falls into chaos and disorder through the assertion of the individual self as opposed to the self-in-relationship. Adam and Eve decide to pursue their desires and believe that they can be gods with absolute free agency, rejecting their original orientation towards the ultimate divine Other. Yet just as in the Pride Lands, this way of living has consequences and throws the world into disorder, or ‘fallenness’.
In The Lion King the Pride Lands come back into order through Simba’s remembrance of his true identity which is connected both horizontally to his fellow creatures, and vertically to a heavenly frame of reference – the kings of the past who dwell in the stars. In the same way at the heart of the Christian life is a call back to an identity in relationship with God and with neighbour. Like Simba we are called to look at ourselves more deeply than as atomised individual agents: we are in the image of God, temples of the Holy Spirit, and disciples of Jesus. This is a deeper tapestry of identity which must be lived out in action towards the God and the neighbour with whom it connects us. By living from this remembrance we will find not only the fulfilment of who we are, but also that this is connected with the fulfilment of all things in new creation.
To the question of how I became a Christian I have for the last six years given superficial answers, or responded dismissively: ‘it’s a long story’. The reason for that is that it is a very long story indeed and I simply never made the time to write an account of it. Yet over those years I did from time to time write bits and pieces which I have finally drawn together in this inordinately extensive account for anyone who wishes to read it. It might be more accurate to view this as a series of shorter accounts covering each of the steps in my conversion(s), however I thought it worth publishing them together because even if it would be ambitious to read them in one sitting, they are at least all part of one narrative.
Writing this has been confounded by the fact that the part of my life I’m going over was a time of profound internal confusion. Though I do have a great memory for detail, I must admit that some things may be remembered with an emphasis they did not have at the time they were first thought, or may be laid out here in a slightly less chaotic order than they happened in the heat of battle. No doubt in the process of interpreting my experiences I have brought together frayed edges and ironed out creases for the benefit of the narrative telling. I have however endeavoured to tell the whole truth of how I, by a long and winding road, arrived at the position I occupy today.
Even if this work is helpful to no one else, it will be of no small help to me in understanding the period of my life in question. I have often had the feeling of someone who has woken up in a strange place without any clear idea of how he came to be there. So this retracing of steps is as much for my own self-understanding as it is to adequately answer the many people who have asked about my journey of faith over the years.
First Things First
‘BIG BANG’ by Virginie Lauzon
By way of framing what follows, it’s worth noting briefly the religious content of my upbringing. I grew up like most children in secular Europe, with about as blank a slate as can be when it came to spiritual matters. I had no religious family members or friends, and only went into a church once or twice in my life for a carol service or some other such seasonal event. Yet for me, religion was made conspicuous by its absence and God somehow managed to carve out a now-and-then place in the outer orbits of my thinking. Naturally this proto-religiosity was not encouraged at home. I remember once when it had been many years since our family last had reason to enter a church, I pointed out of the car window at one of those funny old buildings and asked what went on inside. My mother replied after a moment’s hesitation that it was a ‘church’, a place some people went to get comfort when they were afraid of dying. I remember not feeling entirely satisfied with that answer, but thinking as all children do, that my mum must know more than me about such things.
At school I quickly found that ‘atheism’, was what my family thought, and more than that, it was what just about everyone thought. In one of my religious studies classes the teacher asked the atheists to raise their hands, and then the theists. At the call for atheists, a forest of hands were raised high, but not mine. This was not out of any profound revelation about the divine, it was in fact out of the shallow conviction that I didn’t want to be like most people, I wanted to be in the special, peculiar, minority. And so, I declared myself a believer, and spent the rest of the class nervously listening to the few real religious children so as to work out what it was I was supposed to believe in.
Despite that shallow beginning, I quickly took to my new ‘belief’ and held it firmly against any who would disparage it. I remember heated arguments with my more stridently atheist classmates; these prompted me to find a basis for my defence of God – to gather around me arguments and proofs. I particularly enjoyed the cosmological argument (based on the idea that there must surely be a first cause for everything). This I would trot out again and again in clumsy efforts to fend off the attacks of atheist classmates, before resorting to ‘well you can’t prove there isn’t a God!’ Anything to defend my new and strangely shaped religious identity; no straw was ungrasped, no logical fallacy untried, I simply could not be made to become an atheist, that would not do at all – this ‘God’ character just made things so much more interesting.
But what I believed about God was not at all clear. I was not part of any religion, that was evident enough, and I did not pray (except in that bargaining sort of way that asks for help finding a lost toy in return for empty promises of ‘properly believing’), yet I also rejected the label of ‘deism’. I decided on the odd term ‘general theist’, supposing in my head that this meant I generally believed in some kind of God who generally did stuff, but I didn’t really know what. Things carried on in this vain, some idea of God was there, but on the periphery, and my motives for holding to that notion were dubious, yet this was all to change when I first encountered a real and living religion.
Whispering the Shahaddah
‘A Muslim at Prayer’ by William James Muller
Coming from a background of such vague ideas about God, I suppose it was only natural that the first thing I had to work out was what the God I proposed to believe in was up to in the world. I knew my religion was only half-formed, and that the missing piece had to come from outside myself. I was looking for a faith I could call my own, a religion in which I could put down roots and draw up some certainty about God and the nature of things. My school primarily taught Islam in its Religious Studies classes, and it was the first time I really saw the manifest beauty of religion, and the unrestrained love of a religious family, so it’s perhaps not surprising that this was the faith to which I first became attached.
In a way characteristic of the internet age, my journey into Islam properly began in internet forums. I found where the religious folk were and asked them to demonstrate why I might want to convert to their religion. On top of my familiarity with Islam from school, I also found the Muslims online made the most compelling case for their faith. I was taken in quickly and was soon watching hours of videos by sheikhs and Muslim apologists online. I would read the Qur’an, study the life of Muhammad, pray salat (ritual prayer) facing Makkah in my room, I even gave dawah (proselytising) to friends. The one thing I was too cowardly to do was walk down to the mosque and say my shahaddah (declaration of faith) publicly. I was then, very into Islam, but certainly not a Muslim. You can’t be a Muslim on your own, cut off from the community of believers, any more that I could now be a Christian with no connection to the Church. Perhaps I had some sense this wasn’t the end of my journey yet, but more realistically I was just a very shy kid and the thought of walking down to mosque and proclaiming my faith in front of a bunch of strangers slightly terrified me.
In the end I never did step through the mosque doors because my relationship with Islam was on the wrong foot from the start. Though I thought myself a believer, I was not really a person of faith. I became an idolater of the rationalisms made by many Muslims as the justification of their beliefs. I was convinced quickly by people that Islam was verifiably true on account of ‘scientific miracles’ in the Qur’an – things in the Qur’an that were beyond the knowledge of Muhammad’s time and context, and therefore miraculous. No matter how much I read and learned and prayed, because of this my connection with Islam was always hanging by a thread – if it was shown to me that this rationalisation was false, I had nothing to fall back on. And that’s exactly what happened.
Born Again Atheist
‘Christopher Hitchens’ by Adrian Covert
After a year exploring Islam, my inward affinity towards that faith had gone deep while outwardly I cautiously avoided full public commitment. Whatever that Islamic identity was, I remember only a few moments of real faith and spiritual experience. For the most part I busied myself building a foundation of proofs and evidences and found my comfort in the certainties these gave more than in the true and living presence of God in my life.
In the end the fragile pillars of my conviction about the truth of Islam came tumbling down quickly and dramatically. I got talking with an ex-Muslim online about the miraculous nature of the Qur’an and his rebuttals to my arguments were indisputable. I remember the feeling as I saw each of my arguments dismissed and disproved. When the dust cleared I felt as thought I had been hit with a ton of bricks. Desperate, I asked Muslims I knew if there were any more proofs that might salvage the certainty I had enjoyed. They, being people of faith in full bloom, were perplexed by my need for proofs, assuring me that in the end their beliefs rested on a deep trust in God. It is testament to how immature my religious sense still was that I found this a damning evidence against their belief. In the death throws of my religion, I collapsed into the chair at my desk and prayed, close to tears. I no longer remember the words of my prayer, and I did not wait for an answer, but quickly rose and walked to the window overlooking our garden. In a last gasp of belief I tried to praise Allah for the wonders of creation I saw before me in the trees and plants there, but the words died in my mouth. In that moment, the Islamic chapter of my life came to an end, but in the same instant a new chapter was already beginning. As I stood at the window looking out over the garden, the most overwhelming revelation hit me; in my minds eye I could suddenly see how each of these trees and plants and birds could have evolved by the blind processes of nature, and in this vision there was no room for God. There was no God at all. This was my Damascus road moment, and now I was born again. An atheist.
Beyond the initial shock of this irreligious experience, I adjusted remarkably quickly to my new reality in which God did not exist. My books about the Qur’an, and the life of the prophet were quickly replaced by The God Delusion and others from the strident ‘New Atheist’ movement. I found myself just as much at home learning at the feet of Professor Dawkins and company as I had done with the sheikhs of my former tradition. Where before I would have privately confessed the words of the shahaddah, that ‘there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His messenger’, the transition to atheism seemed as easy as dropping everything after the first four words. It was a frictionless shift because the rationalist foundations I was working from endured unshaken through the process. On the whole I felt light, and a glorious sense of freedom coursed through me, the sort one feels when hearing John Lennon asking us to ‘Imagine that there’s no heaven, […] no hell below us, above us only sky’. My free agency was suddenly unencumbered by religious doctrines, dogmas, and commandments, my life was unclaimed territory, liberated from any will but my own. The universe had an eerie quietness, its most conspicuous occupant having recently been evicted; now endlessly it extended, unchecked, unordered, wild and strange, and here I sat, gloriously insignificant within it.
To be an atheist was a great joy, I would not hesitate to say it was the most comfortable time of my life. Not least because for the first time I was with the majority, and was pleased to discover that it felt good. Being a card card-carrying atheist gives you a priority ticket into feeling superior to everyone who professes a faith. I quickly turned on those I had just recently called brothers and savaged them in argument after argument for their delusions about a supreme being. My reputation became that of the most vociferous and militant atheist in our school, and woe to any believer who sat next to me in the dining hall! Those who knew me from that period took a long while to believe that in the end I became a Christian, yet that, dear reader, was what happened – however impossible it seemed at the time. Despite all appearances, the honeymoon period of my atheism was passing away, and the clock was ticking on my unbelief. Yet this next conversion of heart was to be altogether different from those that had gone before; it was a strange and slow transformation that began with a chance encounter.
Meeting Jack
‘C.S. Lewis, Literary Legend’ by John Springfield
Before the catalyst for my abandoning atheism came onto the scene, I was already slipping towards the fringes of the New Atheist crowd. This began simply out of mundane disaffection. I was preparing to go off to study Theology at University (this may seem odd, but it is fairly common in the UK for atheists who are interested in the social phenomenon of religion) and I found that in New Atheist circles this was a source of much ridicule. I believe Sam Harris, one of the leaders in that circle, referred to theology as ‘ignorance with wings’. In light of this I was beginning to think I must be an odd sort of New Atheist, since it was usually against the party line to spend any time thinking about religion in a serious way.
At the same time, in the course of my thinking and preparing for theological study, I was discovering that many religious people were actually very intelligent indeed. They did not seem to be at all ‘deluded’ as Dawkins and co maintained. Hairline cracks began to form in my atheistic certainties, unbeknownst to me at first, but through them doubts started bubbling up. This was the beginning of my skepticism of Skepticism and saw me over time shaking off my reverence for Dawkins and others, whose strident confidence I began to think was not completely well founded and whose criticisms of religion appeared increasingly flimsy. For a time I maintained my connection to New Atheism through allegiance solely to Christopher Hitchens, whose more nuanced unbelief seasoned with wit and good humour remained attractive even when my affection for others had waned.
When Hitchens passed away on 11 December 2011, I was devastated; the one thinker I still looked up to as an atheist was gone. Yet even did this did not sever my last ties to the camp of unbelievers. On the contrary, there was a period of leaning in to Hitchens’ legacy of argument against religious faith. My atheist convictions regained some of their lost strength, but only as a thing appears to regain strength in the midst of its death throes. The prevailing drift of my thinking was away from New Atheism, and even the intellectual legacy of Hitchens could not completely halt this. Alongside his genius, his discourse on religion was still marked by irritating simplifications, catchy but fallacious claims, and repetitive arguments – in this way he was still cut from the same cloth as Dawkins and the others. All their devotees regurgitated these over and over, gaining a great measure of security in their certainties, but my certainty had departed and without it the arguments were left feeling hollow.
If I were to compare my initial atheist position with my later discovery of theological thinking and religious philosophy, I would use this analogy. It was as if New Atheism baptised me into the waters of reason, but never really tried to leave the shallows. Initially this was all good fun, and one could enjoy the safety while feeling joyfully superior to those who daren’t even leave the shore. However over time, especially when occupied in the field of theology, there was an increasing draw on the eye out into the deep ocean, where great figures waded out on the horizon. When I began to be confronted with those great figures of faith; St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, or in our own time the likes of Rowan Williams, the idea that all religious believers were irrational seemed increasingly to be the real point of delusion.
New Atheism seemed to be a shallow and circular system, shouting against the ‘celestial dictator’, an idea of God few believers actually shared. Religion and its adherents seemed simply to be a whole lot more nuanced in reality than the atheist idea of them. More than that, even the very claim of certainty which is strong in New Atheism – that reason points clearly towards unbelief and that believers are deluded – was an argument that grew cold for me in the face of growing unease at the overwhelming mystery of reality.
Into the midst of this slow falling out of love, this becoming sceptical of Scepticism, landed a book. My Religious Studies teacher had loaned me a pile of his books for my Cambridge interviews, and after he’d put in my arms a heap of weighty texts, he picked up a small yellowing book and looked quizzically at it, as though wondering whether to put it in, then threw it on top of the pile. The book was by C.S. Lewis, and entitled simply: Miracles. It was going to be the catalyst that would change the course of my life.
I cannot remember exactly what was going on in my head when I first opened that little book. Perhaps the dissatisfaction I have described was giving way to a feeling that something was missing, and that perhaps in this book I might find it. In any case, having laid down in bed and read the first couple of chapters, I got straight back up thinking ‘by Jove! There might actually be a God after all!’ The argument in those first chapters was something along the lines of human ‘ground–consequence’ reasoning pointing beyond simple ’cause–effect’ processes and therefore suggesting that nature is not a completely self-contained thing. It was an argument against naturalism and not at all a proof of God, but the importance of it for me was as a sign that not all reason pointed towards the New Atheist naturalist line; that it was possible to think, and think reasonably, about the possibility of the existence of God.
Perhaps even more important as I devoured page after page was actually listening to and getting to know a believer for the first time, in ‘Jack’ Lewis. Through his writings, he became my fellow pilgrim and I continued to read his works avidly. Though I did not know it yet, this was the beginning of my slow ‘Emmaus Road’ conversion, and I would only see in retrospect who was walking close at hand.
Christ at the Crossroads
‘Purple Cross’ by Paul Riccardi
Strange as it seems now, though reading a book by the famous Christian apologist C.S. Lewis was what reawakened me to the possibility of God’s existence, becoming a Christian was not my first thought thereafter. I don’t remember ever thinking of Lewis as a Christian, even as I read his book. Christianity had always seemed a little old-hat and rather dull to me. In fact, I wasn’t quite ready to consider joining any religion at all, despite the promise of my initial reaction to Lewis. After the initial joy, pain followed quick and heavy. I leapt from the New Atheist bandwagon, but rather than landing on some other sure foundation, I crumpled in a heap on the road with no telling where I was headed. In short, I developed an extreme case of agnosticism – my condition was one of total doubt. Looking out at the universe, the overwhelming mystery of it hit me. It wasn’t just an Agatha Christie ‘who done it?’ mystery, I wasn’t just asking ‘who did the universe?’ The questions that crowded in were: ‘what is the meaning of everything? What is my life for? Why am I here? Why is there anything at all?’ I cannot describe the existential pain I was in for those many months, these questions screaming in my head whenever I had a moment alone, such that I rarely had any peace. Long hours I spent staring out of my window at the world which confronted me as a giant ‘why?‘
After almost a year in this miserable condition I became quite convinced that something had to give. I don’t believe anyone can live as an agnostic without armouring their soul with some degree of apathy. The great mysteries we come up against in life can do us no harm if we do not care about them. My problem was that I cared very much, and because of that the questions were wounding. In the end I decided that though I had sat on the fence for a long time, I could not sit there for life – it was simply too painful. I’d become convinced that there was no certainty out there, no proof for anyone’s story about the world. The most fundamental truth about the world as far as I could see was that it was a mystery. Yet I’d found agnosticism was not good for my health; as John Henry Newman observed, our minds demand a ‘view’, a perspective on the world from which to live, without which all we have is that blurry agnostic existence. With the world being mysteriously reluctant to compel any particular understanding of itself, all I had to base my ‘view’ on was my experience. I had to ask ‘which story best explains the experience I have of the world’. I didn’t feel that personal experience was something I could (or indeed should) step outside of, any more than I could step outside of my own skin. I wanted to find a ‘view’ from which the world and its mysteries could best be approached, and without abstract objective directions to find it, I just had to follow the signposts I encountered in my own life.
It’s as though I’d now come to a spiritual crossroads, knowing I had to take one path in order to move on in life, but having first to weigh each possibility in my heart. The first path I crossed off was atheism, finally concluding my journey out of that camp. I decided this because there were things in my experience which seemed to ‘point beyond themselves’, to fit less well with a purely naturalistic account of the world than with God in the picture. C.S. Lewis and others had got this ball rolling by questioned the idea that truth–orientated reasoning could emerge from cause and effect natural processes alone. I also struggled to place my profound experiences of beauty, holiness, or human value within a purely naturalistic universe. I even (and this sounds really silly) watched the movie remake of Les Miserables when it came out and was profoundly struck by its themes of redemption and forgiveness. These themes in human experience seemed to tower above a naturalist understanding of morality as a simple accident of evolution. The naturalist account of morality still bore the mark of its lowly origin, and grated against the high vaulting reaches of moral epics. Trying to maintain high morality on naturalist origins was like building a cathedral on sand. If we say morality is only creaturely, only from evolution, it must always crawl upon the earth with us creatures and never soar. It must always be subject in principle to change, to evolution – goodness might always have been otherwise. This struck me most of all, that if morality really was something that had evolved merely because it benefited the propagation of our genes, there might be another possible world where a different morality might have been more beneficial. There might very well have been a world where morality said ‘let the weak die, the strong should survive’ as seems to be the line of much of natural selection. And yet I felt it must be absolutely right to help the weak, not just right as an accidental product of evolution. This feeling I now remembered having caused me doubt when I was an atheist; it was something I had suppressed then, but which I now followed to its natural conclusion. The meagre cup that atheism provided seemed to overflow when I poured in the wine of reality as I experienced it.
After this, all the other arguments for God’s existence piled on too: how did the universe begin from nothing? Why is there anything at all? Why is the universe so ‘finely tuned’ for life? Quickly I was left with the strange conclusion that the world as I experienced it seemed to demand something beyond itself, some supernatural reality or God. Whatever this divine reality might be, I expected one religion or other must have got a good idea of it at some point – or, at least, a better one than I could come up with on my own. So I immediately bought the most complete encyclopedia of world religions I could find and went through it systematically. The first religion to jump out at me was The Bahá’í Faith, a monotheist religion with a strong belief in equality and pluralism, which believes that Jesus, Muhammad, and all religious founders were manifestations of God. This struck me as a wonderfully satisfying view of things initially. Yet the illusion of having found a ‘perfect’ religion quickly fell away as I read about the history of that faith. Doubts crept in, and disillusionment followed. Back to the big book then, and next I rediscovered Sikhism, again an inclusive monotheistic faith, yet again I wasn’t satisfied. Sikhism seemed to have a lot of difficult practices: never cutting your hair, a holy book treated like a revered prophet, special items of clothing, etc. Perhaps I just couldn’t see myself doing all these practices, or maybe there was an intuition that whatever the God out there would be revealing, it would be a little more simple, accessible, and less particular.
So eventually, almost as a last resort, I came to that boring ‘mainstream’ faith, Christianity. Already being acquainted with C.S. Lewis, it was through books of his, like Mere Christianity, that I first learned about this faith. Quickly I realised that this time something was different; something was resonating fundamentally with my experience of life. Christianity said that we live in a fallen and broken world, and that God was engaged in a rescue project. The meta-narrative that Christianity told about the world and God’s redemption of it was incredibly compelling. It was’t some distant God who calibrated the universe in order to test the faith of some unlucky subjects. It was a raw and real reckoning with the awfulness of the world, and the need for this broken reality to be fixed, and fixed not with a magic snap of the fingers or flick of a wand, but by God’s costly reaching into the mess of the world and lifting it up into the light. The more I read about the Christian faith the more I felt it made instinctively sense. God revealed himself to the world by stepping into the world; God saved humanity by taking on humanity; God unites us with that work by the simple bond of faith. This all seemed somehow more raw and real than all the notions of gods who revealed themselves through books, and for whom salvation came by following a set of rules. I agree very much with the Catholic Bishop, Robert Barron, who notes that ‘arguments’ for faith have had their day – it’s rare that you can convince someone by out-arguing them. The real persuasive power is in narrative – the compelling and converting influence of a story – and Christianity has the best story ever told. The great myth-made-history of the dying and rising God that echoes through every story told ever since, from The Lord of the Rings even to Harry Potter.
Within the tapestry of the Christian story all my loose-thread experiences, like morality and beauty, which had appeared out of place in atheism seemed now to weave together. A famous quote from C.S. Lewis sums up the gist of this experience: ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else’. Christianity not only seemed good and beautiful and true in itself, but it also made the most sense of my experiences of goodness and beauty and truth. I know the scientifically minded will be disappointed with the lack of absolute proof here. However, think of it like this: a ‘proof’ in the scientific method is a theory that best accounts for the data available. In life, the data we have is our experience, and my conclusion was that Christianity was the theory that best accounted for that data.
I would argue that my ‘faith’ (such as it was at that point) did not come as an escape from mystery into certainty. The mustard seed at the root of my faith remained a confrontation with life as an absolute mystery. I’d made a fumbling approach to that mystery, following the prompts and nudges of my experience, and in doing so I’d stumbled upon something I hadn’t expected to find. The most dull, bottom of the barrel, last resort religion I explored was speaking about the mystery I experienced in a way that tallied beautifully with my authentic experience of it. It had begun to convince me that the world’s mysteriousness was not a nothingness, but that it had a story, and perhaps even that as I was looking into it, it might be looking into me.
Curiouser and Curiouser
‘Jesus Christ Portrait’ by Rembrandt
In some sense I was now on the home-straight of my long and winding road to the Christian faith. I had reckoned painfully with the enigmatic nature of reality and accepted that the holding candle of personal experience was the only light I had by which to navigate its mysteries. This transition away from seeking logical proofs for God towards adhering to the more subtle data of experience belies a deeper shift in my perspective. In the proof-seeking mode of an atheist rationalist I had viewed God merely as a logical proposition to be examined. Now though, I realised that if there was a personal God, He would be more akin to a personal presence trying to communicate. The theologian John Henry Newman had a similar realisation, which led him to the thought that such a personal God would not only communicate himself to us by means of formal logic, but also by the more subtle things of our lived experiences. From my previous restrictive interrogation of God as a proposition, I had moved to a position of wondering if God might actually be there, and if so, whether perhaps I should be listening for Him. This opened me to notice even the most everyday experiences that seemed to point beyond themselves towards God.
The journey began in quite a general way – looking at where my experience of life matched up with the great plot-points and themes of the Christian narrative. I would become a believer not by systematic examination of particular doctrines, but by becoming convinced that Christianity’s story gave integrity to my experience of life. The broad sweep of the story Christians told about the world, a call to journey out of ourselves and into God, was compelling. However, I felt that to become a Christian should mean I first read the fine print and consent to the plethora of doctrines with which the Christian story had become encrusted over the last two millennia.
The most difficult doctrinal sticking point I found was Christian beliefs about the cross (doctrines of the ‘atonement’). I approached this with the bluntly practical question ‘how did the cross work?’ What is the process by which, because Jesus died on the cross, salvation became possible for those who believe in him? What made this more difficult was that no Christian I could get in contact with seemed to be very sure how it ‘worked’. Their faith was in the mystery of Christ’s death on the cross, while I was stubbornly searching for the mechanism. In time, beginning again with C.S. Lewis’ writings, I began to run into images and articulations of the cross which painted a compelling picture of what it might be all about. But this was my first lesson that if Christianity was bringing me close to what Lewis called the ‘deep magic’ of reality – the inscrutable workings of a supreme creator God – I may come up against mystery again. The peaks of salvation history seemed to be out of the altitude-range of human language, and certainly of any neat philosophical formulation. Christianity was about a relationship between God and the world, and such a thing could hardly be logically formulated – it’s the stuff of poetry or art if it can be described at all. Here my early encounter with mystery had finally found its proper place within the life of faith. I was also beginning to notice the wonderful interworking of different Christian doctrines, all rhyming and being tied to one another. They seemed intricately woven together into a beautiful veil that overlaid the central story I had already come to know.
I should mention that so far in this relationship with Christianity I had maintained some distance – reading about the God I’d found through the second-hand reports of theological writers like Lewis. I’d not yet gone into a church, nor had I read the Bible for myself. Opening the Bible, I decided, would be my next step. We didn’t have one in the house so I ordered one online and started reading Mark’s gospel (thinking the gospels must be the most important bit, and choosing Mark because it was shortest). Quickly I realised that the Bible was trouble. The Jesus who wandered in its pages was not quite the same as the Jesus of the apologists. Their beautifully crafted prose did not convey the wildness of this strange figure. To give just one example, the Jesus of the Bible seemed to spend much of his time battling demons – something the apologists mostly avoided talking about. What should I make of this unruly exorcist? Demons weren’t something I’d ever experienced or had reason to believe in, and yet they seemed pretty important to Jesus. In what way could I relate to him then? I looked at the first chapters of Matthew and Luke to see if they were just as strange, and was confronted with another problem. These gospels didn’t seem even to agree on what happened at Jesus’ birth! Could I even trust that this whole thing wasn’t just the fanciful invention of a cabal of first century writers?
This crash into the Bible’s wild otherness gave me reason to pause. Could I commit to a faith that seemed to give as many questions as answers? The Bible was a major stumbling block and after finishing Mark, I put it (and Christianity) on the shelf for a while. Yet during those few months the figure of Jesus who I had so recently glimpsed seemed to have taken up quiet residence in my mind. He was wild and Other, with a mysterious origin story, yet like his God, this Jesus was strangely compelling. Eventually I had to go back to find out more – I read the rest of Luke, and then Matthew as well. The gripping allure of the figure of Jesus grew, and I decided to give him the benefit of finding out more about some of the stranger aspects of his life. This Jesus was like fire – unpredictable and uncomfortable, yet somehow shedding light onto an otherwise vague picture of God. He burned up the beautiful and interesting writings of the apologists, but in doing so gave something unexpectedly attractive that really warmed the heart. I don’t think I will ever stop being challenged by the character of Jesus, and yet I was drawn to continue the journey I was on into the Christian faith, in part to learn more about this figure at the centre of it all.
The End of the Beginning
‘Mountview Chamber Choir at St. Andrews Anglican Church’ by Simone Ritter
Some time ago my wife asked me about the moment I fell in love with her. Honestly, thinking back, I couldn’t give one moment. I remembered our first walk in the forest near where she was living, our first time watching a film together, and the first time we found ourselves holding hands as we walked to her bus stop. All of these moments and more worked together as a journey into love, though I can’t say precisely when I crossed that border. It was a similar story with my journey into the Christian faith. I remember when I first called myself a Christian when talking with a friend, when I told my mum I wanted to start going to church, and the terrifying moment of first stepping over the threshold into a church building for a service. There were many moments of realisation, but I cannot say that I was a witness to the moment of my own ‘crossing the border’ from unbelief into faith.
There did though come a point when I realised I was deep in Christian territory. By the time I left home at 18 and arrived at university I had decided to start this new chapter of my life as a practicing Christian. The only problem was that one cannot practice being a general ‘Christian’ any more than one can ‘support football’ – a big part of taking the thing seriously is picking a team. Christianity, it seemed, had a lot of different teams. In light of this fact, I’d already been looking up different Christian groups and denominations to see where I might best place myself. When I got to university I’d narrowed the options down to the Church of England and the Eastern Orthodox Church. The former because it was the Church I’d been baptised into as a baby, and the latter because I found its particular theological positions very compelling.
On the first Sunday of fresher’s week, while most of my peers were sleeping off hangovers, I trotted down to my local C of E parish church. After standing at the door for about a minute, debating whether to go through with it, I went in. There were tins of beans and other food products around the church, which was a bit odd (I soon learned that this was what Christians did on ‘Harvest Sunday’), and an adorable children’s choir practicing some songs. I had no idea where to sit, so I asked an older lady who looked to be in the know. She replied jovially: ‘we’re Anglicans dear, we fill in from the back’. The not understanding continued through all the sitting and standing and shouting things out that seemed to make up the best part of what Christians did in church, but I got through it keeping one eye on the person next to me. The whole experience reminded me a lot of watching The Vicar of Dibley when I was younger – everything was very quaint, people were happy, and nothing was taken too seriously.
After that I felt a gut conviction that the C of E was where I belonged. But being ever minded to conduct a thorough investigation, I thought I would go along to the local Eastern Orthodox church just to compare. The service was beautiful, the sermon was fascinating, the whole experience was one of deep spirituality. But then it ended; the priest disappeared into the bowels of the church and the congregation chatted in their various national groupings, leaving me feeling like a bit of a spare part. After a few sips of bitter black coffee, I quit the church firmly resolved to go back to the C of E next Sunday. I didn’t feel I would fit in with the Orthodox community, and there was no effort to make me feel like that would ever change. The C of E parish church on the other hand had been so profoundly friendly and welcoming – the two experiences were like day and night.
I quickly found that starting going to church was only the end of the beginning of a lifelong process of conversion. My conversion had, up to this point, been very cerebral and intellectual, but now I was plunged into the Church’s full bodied life of prayer and worship. It took me a long while to get the hang of this – probably around two years before I had anything like a regular prayer life – but like a stone placed in a fast-flowing stream, slowly the life of the church began to shape me. It’s as if my faith’s centre-of-gravity began to descend from my head to my heart as my notion of God continued to develop from a proposition I accepted to a reality I now encountered. I remember my first time praying for someone other than myself: I broke down in tears. A conversion of heart had begun.
The rooting and growth of faith within me did not mean the exchanging of scepticism for certainty. As should be clear from my story so far, mystery and doubt were integral to my coming to faith, and remained in view during its growth. A deeper doubt does also come now and again like a forest fire, which at first appears to plunge me back into the ashes of agnosticism, but out of which the deep-rooted plant of faith springs back stronger. Doubt is nothing unique to this Christian part of my life, I resonate with my fellow convert C.S. Lewis when he writes in Mere Christianity that as an atheist he had just as many doubts about his position as he did as a Christian.
Despite having now found a living and life-giving faith in Christ, and a community of believers in which I feel at home, I do sense that the journey I took in getting here has left me with a limp. At first the limp was more severe, now I wonder if it’s become as slight as to be just part of my own manner of walking. What I mean is that even as I became a Christian, there still lingered in me a certain ‘cultural atheism’ that manifested in a self-conscious awkwardness when articulating my faith or using religious language, and even a difficulty in developing the habit of prayer. Having lived in different countries over the years I can say quite emphatically that becoming a Christian has involved the biggest culture shock of all. Those brought up in the faith often little realise how they are soaked in a language completely alien to those outside. So many references to Biblical stories I’d never read, and using words and phrases I’d never heard. Lacking cultural Christianity and tramping into the Church as I have done, decked out in an untidy cultural atheism, has been a mark left on me by this long journey. I bear marks also from Islam, and there are certain habits I still have which began as imitations of the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Yet perhaps I’m being too harsh in decrying this baggage from the journey as nothing more than a limp – there is treasure in the baggage of a convert too. I have come to faith, to Christ, and to the Bible, with fresh eyes and wonderment – and without preconceptions. The Bible for me was not domesticated by years of Sunday school, I have read it for the first time in complete surprise, every page a new revelation. For these and a million other reasons, I am thankful for having been led the long way round. Conversion comes with a lot of bumps and nocks on the way, but when we converts reach Christ we come like the wise men of the nativity stories: we come bearing treasures.
This is the text of a reflection given at a Good Friday devotional service in Holy Trinity Pro-Cathedral, Brussels, on 30.03.2018.
We gather here on Good Friday to meditate on the violent final act of Jesus’ life on earth. And this year we do so one hundred years after the final act of one of the most violent episodes in the history of our world, the First World War. Amidst all the political turmoil of twenty-eighteen we mustn’t forget to reflect on the lessons of nineteen-eighteen. The Great War was an episode that saw a whole generation of Sunday School boys plunged into hell on earth. And not only the boys, but also the men who preached to them from the pulpits, who flocked in their thousands to serve as the chaplains of the trenches. Or so they had thought. In fact, for the first year of the war, army chaplains were forbidden to go down to the front line for fear that they would just be in the way, or worse, that seeing them injured or killed would damage the men’s morale.
And so for that whole year, a soldier would have experienced ministry only behind the frontlines. He would have prayed with a priest who shared nothing of his experiences. Whose faith was tested in the theology faculty, not in the trenches. Who turned to God in the quiet of the chapel, not under the scream of artillery shelling. You can almost imagine them sitting side by side, the muddy shell-shocked soldier and the pristine priest, with an impossible distance between them.
This sense in which the religious life can start feeling distant and disjointed from the gritty reality of living is something that’s not unique to the trenches. In our own lives we never experience more distance from God, more isolation in our faith than when we’re suffering through hell, and our idea of God is as the one ‘up there’, pristine and immutable, contained to highest heaven and far removed from the frontlines. Reflecting on this, the author Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz concentration camp, tells the story of an execution day on which a child was hung, and as the inmates filed past the cries went up: “Where is merciful God, where is He?” “where is God?” The silence of a distant God makes suffering even more difficult to bear, prompting even Jesus to cry out, ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
But back in the trenches, the situation was changing as, under pressure, the British Army now permitted chaplains to minister on the frontlines. They stayed up nights with the men on watch to help them stay awake, and in the day crawled through the mud to offer Holy Communion even to men pinned down by shelling. Scores of priests were killed, but they kept putting themselves there with the men, the blood of priests and soldiers flowing mingled down through no-man’s land. And as they did that, they closed the distance between religious and reality; the two were churned up together by the shelling. And now you might see a scene both strange and moving: a muddy priest sat with a blood-stained soldier, praying together out of a hell they shared.
Just like the army chaplains of the First World War, God’s mission, finished on Good Friday, was about closing the distance between Himself and humankind. No longer is our pain confounded by a distant, uncomprehending heaven. God shares in our need, God shares in our wounds, and God dies with us. And so our most painful experiences need no longer make us feel distant from God in heaven, but our suffering becomes itself a place of contact with the God on the cross.
It’s right that on Good Friday the focus of our reflection is on the defeat of sin through Jesus’ sacrifice of himself as the ultimate High Priest. Yet whenever we talk about Jesus as ‘High Priest’, the image we get is a distant figure in the temple. This is not Jesus. The shape of Jesus’ High Priesthood is muddy and bloodstained; He is the chaplain of the battlefield of our world. In His life and His death closing the distance between God and His suffering people, throwing himself into the frontlines of our pain, to bear His unquenchable life into our shell-shocked world.
This is the text of a sermon preached on Mark 6:1-6 for midweek communion in Holy Trinity Pro-Cathedral, Brussels, on 31.01.2018.
Five years ago I left home to go to university in Durham. I don’t know if anyone’s ever been to Durham, but to look at it, the skyline is dominated by one giant structure, the great Cathedral the Normans built for the Prince Bishops of Durham to guard the northern frontier of England against Scottish raids. As a nearby carving proclaims, it is ‘half church of God, half castle ‘gainst the Scot’ – an awesome fortress of faith. Now, coming from a tiny village in the East of England, at first I would just stand stunned, gazing up in awe, and wondering how such a massive building could exist, let alone have been built by human hands over 1000 years ago. I kept that look of amazement for a few weeks, but when you live with something day-in, day-out, for years, it’s remarkable how fast things can go from awesome to ordinary. Over months walking through the Cathedral on my way to lectures, it actually seemed to be getting smaller, until I wondered how I could possibly have found it impressive in those early days. Now it was definitely unimpressive, and the gawping tourists made me roll my eyes, ‘it’s only the Cathedral’, I would think, ‘what’s so great about that?’
In Jesus’ return to his hometown we see a similar trend at work. Christmas was amazing – the incredible story Mary told, the scandal no doubt surrounding her family, awesome claims about visits from angels, and strange visitors calling this child the King of the Jews. Whether you believed it all or not, this child’s story would have captured your attention. But Christmas seems so long ago now – for the people of Jesus’ hometown it had been 20 years since those amazing events. The awesome has become the ordinary, and Jesus is now just the carpenter, he’s just Mary’s son, he and his brothers and sisters were much the same as anyone else in the village. How can he have any special wisdom to teach? How can he do miracles? He’s just Jesus.
As people of faith, we often live-out a similar story. Even if we don’t have a dramatic conversion moment, we may well have had our Christmas seasons in faith; seasons when Christ seemed to be at work in our lives in amazing, dramatic ways, and we felt God with us. But most of the journey of faith doesn’t seem so awesome; it’s just ordinary, familiar, the same church, same prayers, familiar stories. We readily confess our faith, but it’s a rare day that it gets our heart pumping, and we’re not normally expecting any miracles. Like with Jesus’ neighbours in the story, time and familiarity wear out our relationship with the carpenter God.
So what can we do? We wish it could be Christmas every day, but how do we refresh our relationship with God? Well like with any relationship, there is no silver bullet solution. But perhaps it’s helpful to contrast the life of a person from Jesus’ town to the life of a disciple. Both of these groups of people were familiar with Jesus, the difference with the disciples is that this familiarity was radical. They didn’t just see him around the village when he was passing through, they left everything to follow him. They didn’t just bring him their broken chairs and coffee tables, they brought all they had and all they were. And they did not dismiss his teaching, they practiced radical obedience, so that in the next passage when Jesus sends them out without food or money, or even a change of clothes – they go! As Jesus’ disciples now, we too are called to live lives of radical familiarity with Jesus, to follow him 24/7 above all else, to share everything with him in prayer – every joy and sorrow, and even to obey his call on our lives. When we live this close to Jesus, we open ourselves to His re-capturing our sense of awe and wonder. Because our familiarity with him is no longer just coasting along at the same level year after year, but we begin to know Him deeper and deeper day by day. And in the soil of such rich faith, Jesus can do remarkable things in our lives.
Yet, should we expect that as we become more radical disciples, all feelings of ordinariness in our faith will disappear? That every time we say the creed it will be with hearts on fire? No. For the first disciples, the awesome and the ordinary existed side by side – they ate the last supper with their Lord, and then presumably they did the washing up. So it will be for us, that along with the wonder that comes with living lives radically centred on Jesus, we will still come to the same church, say the same words, and hear the same stories. Yet even here something changes. In the context of a life of discipleship, ordinariness no longer points to a shallow relationship with Jesus, as it did with the people of Jesus’ hometown, but instead it speaks of a deep relationship of trust. A trust that we can relax with familiar words because we know God in our lives, we don’t have to conjure him up by our own efforts in worship. These old red service books, used by many devout disciples through the years, speak of that deep, relaxed trust in God’s presence in the ordinary worship as well as the awesome. The relationship we are called to is like that of a child with their father: radical closeness, obedience, dependence, together with relaxed, trusting familiarity. To bring us into that level of relationship is the greatest miracle Christ does for his disciples.
My maths teacher bought me 12 doughnuts for passing maths GCSE, and to this day I believe it is the only good thing that ever came from my passing maths GCSE. I wasn’t made for maths, I always found it quite terrifying, and that’s okay. If anything needs to be emphasised in education it’s that no one is good at everything, and that’s absolutely fine. Good teachers understand this, they help and encourage, but never pressure. They understand that their subject is only one patch of colour on the canvas of a child’s education, and if at the end of the day she’d much rather be making brush strokes somewhere else, the more the better.
Nevertheless I’ve encountered this pressure many times in the Church and in theology, without it ever really being challenged. I’ve heard talk of Greek as ‘essential for ministry’ or ‘vitally important for the study of theology’. Yet I can honestly say that in my years of studying I have never once encountered the need for it, nor have I ever heard a good sermon that started with ‘If we look at the Greek word…’ Certainly, if I were in the business of dealing with early manuscripts it would be essential, but I’m not. I consider Greek to be one arrow in the limited space of a minister’s quiver, which may equally well include knowledge of philosophy, Hebrew, Jewish culture, science, history, and innumerable other skills. By all means it would be great to have a super-priest who knew everything relevant to his ministry, but the Church is not in the business of hiring supermen. Unfortunately the only thing I have certainly seen Greek improve in ministers is their ability to think they have been greatly improved by the study of Greek.
Why am I writing this anyway? Well clearly I succumbed to this pressure myself and made the silly mistake of studying Greek despite knowing full well it was not for me. I rather hope that one day someone who is simply awful at languages (perhaps a dyslexic kid like me) need not be faced with the same condescending looks as I did as she explores the field of theology, or pursues her vocation. I would wish that she be valued for the gifts she has, and not the ones she doesn’t.
The world is bursting with beautiful and interesting things to know about, and populated by beings with a wonderful diversity of gifts. To cherish one drop of this abundance above the ocean is to defile it, and to single out one kind of person for special praise is to be blind. God saw the linguist and the historian and said that it was good, He saw the philosopher and the scientist and said that it was good, and He saw that one could not know all things, and He said that it was very good.
Farewell to Shadowlands 