A Facebook friend recently posted a review written a few years ago of Harry Williams’ autobiography Some Day I’ll Find You. The title of the book, a Noel Coward song, refers both to the God Harry had difficulty finding and to his own failure to find a life partner despite his delight in a few consummated relationships in his thirties and forties.
I’m sure I had a copy of the book but today I can’t find it. I do have four other books by Harry Williams and I’ve been re-reading True Resurrection (1972), of which more in a subsequent blog. Reading the review of Some Day I’ll Find You and the opening chapters of True Resurrection has restored me to a sane, emotionally more stable place after a week in which events in the Church of England and my personal life severely disturbed my emotional equilibrium. Harry has restored my confidence in my own spiritual and wisdom core when the Church seems to be heading more and more deeply into a realm of dangerous, abusive and very un-Christian LaLaLand - more of this, too, in a subsequent blog.
I thought about trying to meet Harry but never did. I bought and read his books between 1977 and 1979 when I was an ordinand at Westcott House, Cambridge. I didn’t know then that Harry Willliams taught the New Testament in Westcott in the early 1950s and, from 1951, as a Fellow in his old college. He had trained for the priesthood at Cuddesdon and was ordained into a curacy at All Saints’, Margaret Street, the Anglo-Catholic Mecca not so distant from Soho and Rupert Street, later to become the Gay Mecca of London. His mother had become an Evangelical fundamentalist. Harry had know he was gay from a young age, but his mother’s influence combined with the closet culture of his generation meant that he remained in the closet, sexually inactive. He was a dogmatic, repressed Anglo–catholic priest but it was hearing the confessions of gay men at All Saints that forced on him awareness of the disconnect in his own identity as a gay priest and plunged him into a mental breakdown.
Later Harry became the Chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was loved by generations of students and atheists. One day he had a vision of the God that opened him to realize that the cruel tyrant that had been created in his imagination by his Christian upbringing wasn’t, and couldn’t be, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus the Christ. He rejected this tyrannical God of Fear, turned to the God of Love, and was transformed psychologically. Harry’s fear had been very real: the God of whom Harry was afraid was not. That God was something he’d conjured up in his imagination.
The psychological transformation exploded into an intense and prolonged nervous breakdown. Teaching the New Testament and studying it more closely he concluded that very little could be known about the historical Jesus. He also became convinced that the Catholic Church, so far from being the continuing Body of Christ, had for many centuries exploited people’s guilt and credulity. He felt this particularly because he confronted the fact that, although hitherto chaste, he would in Catholic or Evangelical eyes be guilty of a sin so serious as to be unmentionable if he fell in love with a male colleague, as he now did, passionately but not fruitfully, despite his longing. “I slept with several men, in each case fairly regularly. They were all of them friends,” he writes in Some Day. “Cynics, of course, will smile, but I have seldom felt more like thanking God than when having sex. I used in bed to praise Him there and then for the joy I was receiving and giving.” I hope that lesbian and gay clergy today take to themselves the freedom Harry found, giving thanks for the joy given and received, ignoring the injunctions of the hierarchy and enjoying sexual liaisons with partners and lovers. Forty years on and despite the revolution in society the Church of England still invokes the tyrant God who imposes sexual taboos.
He began to feel and say publicly that “religion” should be exposed as the enemy of humanity and that the God he had worshipped was more rightly hated as a sadistic monster. “Religious establishments invariably give me the creeps,” he wrote, and “religion is to a large extent what people do with their lunacy, their phobias, their will to power and their sexual frustrations.”
“I mixed up God and the devil, not knowing which was which. It was a muddle which needed a severe breakdown before it could be slowly sorted out. The sorting out led me to discover that in order to love God I often had to hate religion and I began to catch glimpses of God’s glory in places where, on any ecclesiastical estimate, that glory had no right to be.” In this he discovered that “what passes for virtue has been a far more destructive force than what passes for vice.”
His despair resulted in a physical collapse as he felt totally isolated. For 14 years he was kept sane and encouraged to be himself by Christopher Scott, a therapist without any professed religion. True Resurrection celebrates and advocates the deliverance he now experienced. He came to see Jesus alive as the supreme rebel against any religion that was not humane.
“I fell in love with a colleague; totally, hopelessly and catastrophically in love. The sexuality which the savage hypnotist [the false god] had so far compelled me to ignore, at last exploded. It was, as I saw later, the victory of my humanity over the forces bent on destroying it, the victory of health over sickness, of good over evil, of the true God over the idol.”
When he told friends of his ambition in 1969 to be accepted as a member of the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield, the usual reaction was that the idea of him as a monk in Yorkshire was either a joke or a very serious mistake. He half-thought it himself. It did not help when Hugh Bishop, who had presided over his admission, left the community, announcing that he could no longer live without his male partner. After this radical change of life at the age of 50, Harry, like his successor Bishop John Robinson as Dean of Chapel in Trinity College, settled down as a lost leader for radicals in the Church of England. More than anything else he wanted peace and time in which to pray, finding God after finding his true self including scepticism, anxiety, sexuality, and worldliness.
Re-reading Harry Williams today, I am rediscovering a priest who had distilled from his great suffering a spirit of realism, of compassion for fellow humans, and of awareness that God loved him unconditionally, infinitely, and intimately.
I have never had a breakdown but I’ve had breakthroughs. The most significant breakthrough happened around 1988. I had been seeing a counsellor and then a therapist for a few years. I had a permanent pain on my chest, a heart pain. I knew the pain but I did not know my feelings. I became aware that my feeling self, the inner world of my emotions and physical sensations, apart from the heart pain, was an entirely unknown territory. I followed a gay priest friend into a holistic, body-centred therapy at the Chiron Centre in Ealing, and then into the training, and there began my journey inwards, a journey the priestly formation I had received in the Church of England had entirely failed to address.
Events in the Church of England show that the divorce between head and heart, mind and emotions, that had provoked a breakdown for Harry Williams and a recognition in me of my divorce from my inner, soul realm, continues to have a damaging affect on the Church today. Harry’s cruel tyrant of a God is still with us. Much has changed in the secular world, of course, and as a result gay and lesbian lay people can marry and priests can now contract a civil partnership – but not marry. The Church won’t allow marriages or civil partnership to be blessed in church and clergy are not allowed (in theory) to ‘have’ sex. The sadistic monster of Harry’s primitive God continues to approve of a literal reading of Scripture that enforces taboos against same-sex love.
The newly-adopted ‘inclusive’ stance of the Church of England requires the Living in Love and Faith (LLF)process to engage with the abusive homophobic and transphobic teachings and practice of so-called traditional, orthodox conservatives as well as the Inclusive Church model that embodies a genuine inclusion for all and invites everyone to a generous valuing of difference, something the conservatives will not concede. LGBTIQ+ people are still very unequal partners in the process, and even the best of LLF advocates fail to see how abusive this is.
Changing Attitude England is campaigning for the radical equality that Harry Williams longed for and began to find for himself by finding to courage to open himself to sexual intimacy with friends.
Changing Attitude’s goal is to achieve the freedom for LGBTIQ+ people in the Church that Harry longed for five decades ago and that brought him to emotional breakdown. Today we want full equality for LGBTIQ+ people in ministry and relationships, a goal that is on the horizon for the LLF process though rarely acknowledged. Equal marriage is admitted as a possibility but this alone would not transform our place in the Church. The systemic homophobia, transphobia, discrimination, prejudice and abuse that is integral to the arguments and theology of those who oppose full inclusion has to be confronted if we are to achieve justice, freedom, and life in all its fullness for all, the transformation implied by the Archbishops’ commitment to a new radical Christian inclusivity.
I have yet to hear any real content to the language of inclusivity. Eeva John alluded to it when outlining the development of the LLF process at General Synod on 10th July 2021, without beginning to describe how this would transform LGBTIQ+ lives.
The systemic prejudice and inequality in the Church of England is founded on so-called traditional, orthodox, biblical Christian teaching. This teaching underpins and justifies the prejudice and inequality and is responsible for emotional, physical and sexual abuse in the Church. It is not the teaching of Jesus nor a manifestation of God’s unconditional, infinite, intimate love for al creation.
Five decades ago Harry Williams underwent a dramatic revolution in his experience of God, a radical conversion from hatred and abuse to unconditional love, transforming his image of and understanding of God. It was a conversion of Pauline intensity and drama. It was, for me, a manifestation of what is possible when we fully inhabit and integrate our emotional and cognitive selves. But the Church has regressed in recent decades and still doesn’t begin to understand the damage done by its teaching and practice.
In True Resurrection, Harry Williams wrote:
“To substitute mental concepts for the living experience and so to keep the living experience at a safe distance is one of the results of equating man with mind and mind with machine. Did not Jesus accuse the religious elite of his day of doing precisely this? They had reduced Moses and the prophets to a conceptual system safely possessed and behind this shield they protected themselves from the impact of the living God. They had their law and did not want its comforting security broken into by any contemporary prophetic word.”
Changing Attitude England is exploring what the content of a radical new Christian inclusion might look like. It’s going to look a lot more like a Harry Williams vision of God and the Church and Jesus than today’s Archbishops might be imagining.
To explore with us a radical new LGBTIQ+ vision of Christian inclusion, join Changing Attitude England’s Facebook group.