I recently heard a fellow priest say that she had never heard a convincing theology to justify the use of vestments in church. Needless to say, that made me think I should have a go. As someone who pretty much daily puts on a variety of vestments to preside at the Eucharist and at Evensong, it seems reasonable to think about what we’re doing when we put on priestly garments (other than fulfilling the promise we made to follow the canons of our church which require us to do so, dear nameless colleague!). So here goes.

My first suggestion would be a general one, which is about the identity and demeanour of the person presiding at the church’s solemn and joyful offering of worship to God. In putting on clothes that belong to an order of ministry rather than clothes that represent our personal tastes, we are giving ourselves in humility to the exercise of a ministry that depends not on our personality but on our calling and on the grace of God’s Spirit. This does not make us anonymous and does not obliterate our personality, but willingly sets the ‘constructed’ aspects of our identity aside while we express the representational role of the priest for the church which offers the Eucharist. The church’s priest wears the church’s clothes to offer the church’s sacrifice or praise.

My second general suggestion concerns the ritual aspect of this offering. Putting on special clothing to lead a corporate act of worship enhances that act with something that visually marks this time out as a departure from everyday business and is a participation in something timeless. The same argument can be made for sacred spaces set aside for sacred purposes. Vestments are an indicator of transcendence.

My third suggestion is more theological. St. Paul talks of being clothed with Christ (Galatians 3:27) and this relates to baptism. Priestly garments are a reminder of the baptismal garments in which we all were clothed to mark our incorporation into the cosmic Christ. Again, this is not an obliteration of our individuality but the incorporation of that uniqueness into the One who gives it to us in the first place.

None of this is about power, and yet it acknowledges that the messages sent by our clothing are powerful. Simple and beautiful priestly vestments point to the ‘something greater’ that happens when we offer all of human life to God, including the human artistry with which these garments are made. They say that life is for more than consumption. We could see this as a choice not to wear a label, but, instead, the simple robe of baptism which says that life is fulfilled when it is lived in the pattern of Christ, not when clothed with the patterns of exploitative human fashion.

I love the writings of David Hinton, an American poet and translator of Chinese poetry. If you don’t know his work, Existence: A Story, I strongly recommend it as a way into understanding Chinese art. One of his latest projects is a translation of the collection of 48 koan we Zen types know as the Mumonkan (Wu-Men Kuan in Anglicised Chinese and ‘No-Gate Gateway’ in Hinton’s title). It is a Chinese collection from the 13th Century and is known to Western Zen practitioners in several translations, many with commentaries by contemporary Zen teachers.

I should get round to writing something about the koan themselves, as that’s far more interesting, but I was intrigued by a sentence or two in Hinton’s excellent introduction where he insists that the Ch’an teachers in whose intellectual world the koan came to their current form did not consider themselves to be ‘religious’ but ‘philosophical’ in their disciplined exploration of the Great Matter of life and death. This reflects a common question that often hangs around Western explorations of Buddhism: is it a religion? Well, that depends what you mean by that word. Some would restrict it to systems of thought and practice that include a belief in a supreme being or deity. This, however, reflects a Western bias based on the Abrahamic faiths and may also reflect a contemporary awkwardness in dealing with anything that looks like language about ‘God’. Anyone who is familiar with Mahayana Buddhism will confirm that it is not a stranger to metaphysical speculations or, indeed, deities, even if it does not posit a creating God who is infinite, ultimate and beyond the realm of ‘things’.

The question of Buddhism as a religion or not may well be in the ‘walks like a duck’ category of silliness but it opens up another related question: is Christianity a philosophy or a religion? Certainly, early Christian thinkers like Origen were not shy of claiming it as a philosophy and it seems likely that other ancient philosophical schools would look much more like ‘religions’ than the kind of ‘schools of thought’ that inhabit Western universities in modernity. They would have had practices, defining characteristics and patterns of belonging that we would more readily associate with religions. In the modern world, adherence to a school of thought might have little impact on how your live your life day by day unless you make a living by writing books about it. But a Buddhist monk’s entire life is committed to the investigation of the Great Matter through meditation, study, communal life, rules for eating, dress, ethical conduct…

Ultimately, it is of little importance whether you call something a religion or a philosophy. What matters is the way it shapes your life. I bow respectfully to anyone who commits themselves to a serious and disciplined inquiry into this whole business of being alive!

I frequently puzzle about the rise of atheism in this peculiar corner of the globe – it’s a professional hazard – and while I’m sure it’s impossible to account for it in terms of a single cause, there must be some contextual factors that have led to this anomaly. Of course, some atheists would not see it as an anomaly but as the inevitable banishment of superstition by the triumph of scientific rationalism – a statement of pure faith if ever there was one. In global and historic terms, however, it is indeed an anomaly and one that seems to have greatest purchase in areas where there has been a significant historic presence of Protestant Christianity. It is, therefore, an anomaly that many of us in this western outpost of northern Europe face day by day but I think that Christians are best to avoid complaining about this phenomenon, at least until they get to grips with their own part in its appearance.

And so I have a simple proposal: atheism is, in part, a response to simplistic accounts of God. If Christians have given the impression that God is simply a bigger and invisible version of a human being, then atheists are quite reasonable in their rejection of God. If Christians give a simple account of the human response to divine will – God tells me to do stuff and I do it – then I would be at the front of the queue of those asking, ‘just how do you know that this is what God wants of you?’ And if we insist on the Creator simply being a rather more complicated sort of engineer, then it’s fair enough for aspiring human engineers to aim high and assume that they will eventually match the Creator’s ingenuity and do away with any need for him altogether. Of course, we should know very well that God is not a ‘maker’ but a ‘creator’, not an artisan but the Originator. Similarly, we should know that discerning the will of God is complex interaction of the human mind and heart with One whose mind and heart are not entirely knowable to us. But we fail to give a nuanced account of God because we fall into the trap of thinking that language about God works only on the level of how we give an account of any sensible phenomenon.

Language about God does indeed include the language of philosophy (though surprisingly few moderns and very few scientists are well versed in its subtleties and forms of argumentation) but also the embodied language of ritual and of wordless contemplation (wordless but not entirely uncommunicable). In other words, discourse alone is insufficient to give a suitably nuanced account of God. If we do not participate in the deeply symbolic and cumulatively effective language of practised religion, we are unlikely to get a sufficiently credible sense of who and what God might be. This, I guess, is the distinctive problem of some protestant accounts of religion that dismiss ritual or embodied practice and favour the word alone (not a problem for Pentecostalists though). They risk giving the impression that God is an object of inquiry like any other.

However, none of this is to suggest that we simply keep quiet about God unless people are prepared to take the whole range of religious language on board. On the contrary, it rather compels us to put the record straight on some of the impressions that we might have given while also insisting on the importance of ritual and embodied knowing. One thing it does require is that those who deal in traditional theological language let their voices be heard amid the louder voices of more simplistic accounts of God shaped by modern rationalist categories (by which I mean fundamentalisms of various sorts). The public square is famously inhospitable to complex ideas, but I think it’s worth trying, don’t you?

Humility features very prominently in Christian spiritual traditions as one of the most necessary of all virtues. A classic example of this in the Western tradition can be found in the 7thchapter of St Benedict’s Rule for Monks with its carefully described 12 stages. The Christian East is no less concerned with this most vital virtue. Here is one interesting example, from Diodochus of Photike’s Discourses:

When the irascible part of the soul is stirred against the passions, remember that it is time for silence- the hour of battle. But upon seeing that the upheaval is passing, be it through prayer or almsgiving, then it is the moment to let yourself be drawn by the ardent love of God’s words, affixing the wings of your mind to humility. For is a person does not humble himself exceedingly, he will never be able to speak of God’s greatness.

In Diodochus, humility is the necessary awareness of the inability of human intelligence to speak intelligibly of divine things – the things of God are beyond normal interpretive discourse. At times, the Christian tradition can seem to be saying that it is the inherent sinfulness of the human person that makes communion with God impossible and this can lead to the heavily value-laden judgements on human nature – we are simply too wicked, too undeserving, too base to be allowed into God’s presence. But I wonder if Diodochus is offering us a rather different angle. Might it in fact be the case that it is not our wickedness that holds us back from full awareness of God’s presence but the limitations of the ordinary workings of our minds?

An example from Buddhist tradition might offer a way into this rather different approach to humility. There is a traditional Buddhist teaching story that is included in an excellent little compilation of such parables by the Venerable Myokyo-ni called ‘Look and See’, published last year by The Buddhist Society in London. It goes like this:

King Milinda asked the Venerable Nagasena, ‘What is the difference between one who has passion and one who is free from passion?’
‘The one clings, the other does not cling.’
‘What do you mean by clings and does not cling?’
‘The one covets, the other does not covet.’
‘But as I see it, both he who has passion and he who is free from passion have the same wish, that, whether hard or soft, his food should be good; neither wishes for what is bad.’
‘He who is not free from passion experiences both the taste of the food and also the passion due to that taste; while he who is free from passion experiences the taste of that food, but not the passion due to that taste.’

In other words, the normal working of our minds often adds either desire or at least some level of expectation to the things we experience. We do not see things as they are but as we expect or desire them to be and this can lead us to a sense of dissatisfaction because we can say for sure that our desire will not be quenched by the experience of the thing we long for. The one who practices detachment from desire is thus enabled to experience things for what they are without expecting anything more from that experience. In that way, the food is tasted more purely and simply. The practice of learning how not to see things only in ‘my way’ is a practice of humility, but one which is simply conscious of the limitations of our habitual patterns of thought, not one which questions our fundamental value as human persons.

Diodochus may use the language of good and evil to describe our habitual patterns and, by contrast, a life lived in a godly manner, but his anthropology is fundamentally optimistic – it is quite within our reach to school our souls to be ‘readily disposed towards the good’. His method for doing this is not that far away from Buddhist practices of meditation and mindfulness – it is the constant remembrance of God through the prayer of the heart, through gratitude and through humility which is self-forgetting, not self-despising.

So said Dom Bede Griffiths in his book, The New Creation in Christ. This was a published version of his 1991 John Main Seminar in which he gave some of his clearest teaching on meditation. He recognised that, in a globalised world, religions inevitably had to rub up against one another but his concern was much deeper than the negotiation of inter-cultural encounters. His vision for Christian faith was a cosmic one (he would say simply a ‘catholic’ one) in which all people seek to ‘integrate their lives by bringing everything into the inner centre of the heart and finding the meaning of life, not in the external world, but in the inner reality of which the external world is a reflection.’ He considered the phenomenal world to be transient and that it may be transcended through a deep acquaintance with the fundamental reality of the Infinite. Such acquaintance is nurtured in the deeply human practice of meditation, a practice shared across religious traditions.

Of course, not everyone who meditates has an interest in exploring the realm of the infinite, but the religious traditions from which all forms of meditation ultimately derive are consistent in their insistence on this dimension of the practice. This is as true of Buddhism (which may be described as non-theistic, but only if you’re careful about what you mean by these terms!) as it is of any of the more straightforwardly theistic religions.

One of the big questions faced by any religious person who seeks to deepen their familiarity with another faith tradition is that of the nature of their encounter. Some suggest that there is a real possibility for multiple religious belonging, others seek a mutually illuminating dialogue. But one interesting attempt at a middle ground can be found in a conversation between Mark Vernon and Rupert Sheldrake, which you can listen to here. Vernon suggests a kind of ‘crossing over’ to another tradition in order to return to one’s own with a new insight. Many of those Western Christians who have looked to the East for religious inspiration have found that their immersion in the worlds of Hindu or Buddhist thought and practice have brought to light forgotten aspects of Christian spirituality. William Johnston is a fine, if slightly overlooked, example of this phenomenon which we might more readily associate with Bede himself or with Merton, Abhishiktananda, Tony de Mello or Enomiya-Lassalle. The chief gain for Western Christianity has been, I would argue, a reappropriation of Christian traditions of meditation which might otherwise have remained very marginal to our practice of Christian faith.

This project seems to me to have a lot of life in it yet, though I wonder if the early enthusiasm of the first generation of inter-faith explorers has been sustained. There are notable Christian voices still exploring this realm – Paul Knitter and Ruben Habito come to mind – but I wonder if there has been something of a reaction against this approach in favour of a more inward-looking emphasis as Western Christianity faces a decline in contrast to global trends in the opposite direction. I feel strongly that this is a poor response to a decline which masks a consistently strong demand in our culture for authentic spiritualities that are rooted in practice and open to other influences. It is interesting that the energy for such an approach appears to lie on the fringes of the church rather than at its heart (Russell Brand is a powerful advocate for this). We might do well to listen to these ‘fringes’!

It happens too often that, in ecumenical conversations between Anglicans and churches whose ministry is not ordered by bishops in historic succession, the question of ministry becomes the sole sticking point, thus appearing to give the ordained ministry of the church a greater importance than our understanding of salvation or the Trinity. Of course, there may be some Anglicans who will insist that there is no salvation outside the sacramental life of a church ordered with bishops in apostolic succession, but I imagine that they are a tiny minority. After all, our common baptism has been recognised ecumenically for some time.

Briefly, the standard Anglican position on the importance of the apostolic succession of bishops is that it is a necessity for churches who unite but is not essential for the recognition of the sacramental efficacy of ministry in other churches. If it were, there would be no possibility of entering the kind of local ecumenical partnerships that happen all over the UK. Bishops in historic succession are seen as a sign, but not a guarantee of the apostolicity, unity and catholicity of the church. The Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, which has stood as a standard position for Anglicans for over a century, places historic episcopate locally adapted, alongside the Scriptures, Dominical Sacraments and historic creeds as the conditions necessary for the uniting of churches. This statement could, of course, be altered by a Lambeth Conference, but this is not likely in the near future and I would be among those arguing for a maintenance of the place of the historic episcopate in our church, albeit constantly evolving in response to changing circumstances. I wonder, though, if it is possible to imagine an approach that does not alter this position, but makes one simple step that would remove a significant block to ecumenical progress in many places. That simple step would be the removal of the necessity of episcopal ordination, but not oversight, for any presbyter or deacon seeking to work in an Anglican context, either in a permanent or occasional capacity.

As a starter, I would suggest the following rationale and conditions for such a move:

• First of all, the reason for the change would be to allow greater sharing of ministry in a context where mission is the key driver for the church’s ongoing life and witness. The missionary focus of ecumenism is increasingly recongised in the WCC (The Church, Towards a Common Vision and Together Towards Life) and in the thinking of Pope Francis (Evangelii Gaudium).
• The key theological rationale for this move would be the acceptance that God’s action through the sacramental life of the church is not primarily dependent on the nature of the minister’s ordination, but on the operation of the Holy Spirit in free and gracious response to the prayer of the church.
• In order to accept each other’s churches as expressing apostolic faith, there has to be a significant level of agreement between these churches on doctrine, founded on the historic creeds but including sacramental theology and ecclesiology (including a theology of ordained ministry as necessary to the right ordering of the sacramental and missional life of the church). This agreement would also recognise the exercise of episkope in each church. I would regard ecumenical texts such as Reuilly and Meissen as possessing such a level of agreement. To spell this out in terms that make sense in our local context, a Presbytery of the Church of Scotland clearly exercises episkope.
• One of the features of that eccesiological agreement could be the recognition of the continuity of apostolic faith expressed in the sign of a continuity of ministers ordained in historic succession (ie presbyteral rather than episcopal succession) but that this continuity is at the service of apostolic faith, not the sole guarantor of apostolicity.
• Presbyters and deacons working in an Anglican context would recognise the ministry of their bishop as a personal expression of episkope and as a sign of continuity apostolic faith. They would also accept the disciplines of that church, as an Anglican priest would do if they were working, for example, in a Reformed church.

It seems to me that this small move would signal a serious intent for Anglicans to work more closely in mission with partners in non-episcopal churches without losing the distinctive apostolic ministry of bishops. The question of the place of bishops in united churches belongs to a later stage of our growing together, but I think it would be a good first step towards greater unity if we were to leave behind the notion that only those presbyters who have been ordained by a bishop in historic succession exercise a valid sacramental ministry. Surely the Holy Spirit is not bound by such constraints.

I would be grateful if others could comment on this little bit of ‘thinking aloud’ as I think our ecumenical conversations need to grasp this nettle in creative ways as a matter of some urgency.

If you look at a map of the Sinai peninsula, you might wonder what route could possibly have taken forty years for the people of Israel to navigate from Egypt to the Promised Land. Following in the footsteps of that paradigmatic journey, you might similarly wonder why a two minute conversation with the Tempter in the desert took Jesus forty days. There seems to be a chronic case of inefficiency in the biblical world. Why don’t they just get on with things? Why do things take so long? Where’s the sense of purpose and direction?

Yes, we do like a sense of purpose and ‘wasting time’ seems like a crime against life. But what if our desire for control and ‘productivity’ is, in fact, a problem rather than a virtue? It seems to me that the long periods of wandering in the featureless landscapes of the desert – though Sinai is very beautiful in its rugged barrenness – are designed precisely to take the wanderer beyond the level of what it is merely ‘interesting’ to the deeper place of growth and wholeness. We often have a tendency to over-value our likes and preferences, our ideas and opinions. While these have their place, it is a mistake to think that ‘I’ am simply the sum total of these characteristics. Our true self is something much less clearly defined, because our true self consists in our capacity for openness, compassion and attentiveness. The testing time of desert wandering, chosen or involuntary, can be a process whereby we learn how to loosen our grip on superficial things in favour of a simpler and stronger open-heartedness. This process can be long and occasionally painful if we are very attached to these superficial things, but it’s fundamentally an enlivening process. It is also one that does not require effort so much as patience and a willingness to bear with a degree of uncertainty or ‘unfinishedness’.

Meditation is one of the ways we can practice this disposition in a regular way and Lent affords an opportunity to recommit oneself to a life of deliberate wandering.

 

I learned something new about agriculture yesterday (most things I might learn about agriculture will be new to me…). It was that there is a method of farming that rejects the tilling of the ground on the basis that the soil retains more of its nutrients when it is not disturbed. This approach also helps prevent erosion and increases the retention of moisture.

Given that ‘cultivation’ is a metaphor we use in the spiritual life, I was drawn to the idea of an uncultivated field as a different kind of metaphor for spiritual growth. In addition, I am always drawn to the cluster of metaphors around ash, dust, soil and dirt that are so prevalent on Ash Wednesday. So here goes with a bit of metaphor-stretching:

What if we turn away from ideas of the purification of the soul by removing the weeds that infest it towards an idea of the retention of all of our ‘organic matter’ – our dirt and soil – because we recognise it to be the fertile ground of our lives? Might it not be healthier for us to look towards an integration of all that we are, our faults and misdeeds included, rather than seeking a purgation of those elements of ourselves we judge to be ‘dirty’? I see a couple of good reasons for doing this. One is that we don’t always know for sure what is dirt and what is fertile soil, or what is wheat and what is weed. There may be an experience of wrongdoing that tells us something rather important about ourselves. Another is that self-judgement can easily lead to self-hatred, and I wonder how easy it is to forgive others when we can’t forgive ourselves.

Another dimension of this metaphor of an untilled field is that it suggests an approach to the spiritual life that is not over-concerned with method or refinement. The spiritual mind is our natural mind and we allow that natural mind to do its thing by letting it get on with the business of ‘minding’, ie paying attention. The Zen teacher Irmgard Schloegl was fond of the idea of ‘gentling’:

‘There clings an aspect of primitive wildness to the heart which is in need of taming, gentling, and transforming to that which it is by nature’ (The Zen Way, p.62)

For no-till agriculture is still agriculture – it requires some activity to allow the soil to be what it is by nature. Our spiritual practice, which gets an extra focus during Lent, might then be concerned with the ‘activity’ of simply letting the fertile field of our lives be what it is. It does not need forceful intervention, it just needs our attention, a quality of mind that is accepting, open and still.