I was born in 1945. As I’ve recounted before, in 1957 aged eleven I was intuitively confident that I desired the company of other boys, knowing that the other boys in my class were being attracted to girls. I rejected what I understood to be the taboos of my family, my church, Christian teaching, Biblical authority and the authority of God that desire for someone of the same sex was abhorrent to God, sinful, an abomination. My arrogant independence of mind meant that in rejecting the teaching of all these authorities I was determining that the Church, the Bible and God were in the wrong when they condemned my sexuality and my emotional desires.
Five or so years later and certainly prior to my eighteenth birthday, the result of my rejection of what conservatives name as orthodox, traditional, Biblical teaching in relation to homosexuality meant that I had carved out a freedom myself to question everything else in the teaching of the Church that didn’t make sense. It was a huge relief when Honest to God was published because I already knew that I didn’t believe that God was a being or that Bible stories of a virgin birth, angels, miracles and appearance after death were accounts of things that actually happened. Despite this, I had been confirmed and was deeply involved in the life of my local church and later in the life of the diocese. A decade and a half later I was accepted for training as an Anglican priest. No questions were asked about my faith or my sexuality. Theological college initiated in me an increasingly deep and personally important contemplative spiritual life. The foundations of my experiential, contemplative, activist faith were enhanced and deepened by my practical experience as a curate and parish priest in the 1970s and 80s.
It was the quality of life and the friendship of people in my parish church and diocesan networks who nourished and inspired me. My church social, theological and intellectual life was rich and energised. The Christian community and my network of friendships were more important than anything else. I learnt by experience that Christian life woven around the Gospel message of Jesus Christ was the way in which the lives of individuals, communities and human societies were being inspired and transformed.
It was obvious to me that either everything about Christian faith had to be true or that little or nothing was true. In my forties I decided to live “as if” everything was true, not believing that all the events and stories recounted in the Bible were literally true. . I committed myself to live “as if” it was true because the practical life of the church was good and nourishing. I didn’t know for sure what was and wasn’t true about Christian teaching. There was great beauty and power in the metaphors, mythical stories and wisdom teachings, yes, but my conviction of the value of Christian faith and life was rooted in my personal experience and intuition.
Non-realist faith
I had what I would now understand to be a non-realist, non-theistic, humanistic religious faith. It was faith not in the doctrines and dogmas of the Christian Church but in a way of life exemplified by Jesus and manifest in the Gospel accounts of his life, teaching, wisdom and practice. I did not believe in a supernatural, interventionist God. Freedom within the Church of England to believe in God in this way was its great, spacious gift to me. I recognised in the Church of England’s Jesus a person who set out to recruit a group of men and women to whom he gave the freedom to think differently. They had the insight and courage to continue to think and live differently after he was crucified.
Today’s Church of England is a deeply troubled institution. As a contemplative, spiritual gay man, I am less secure now in trusting that the Church provides a safe, nourishing, enriching, healthy environment in which to live and explore faith. It is no longer obvious that today’s God and Jesus are trustworthy inspirations for healthy, spiritual, nourishing Christian faith. Prejudice and abuse have become systemic. The overcoming of prejudice and discrimination against women and LGBTQIA+ and black and disabled and disempowered people is no longer a fundamental element of Christian life, faith and vision.
This contemporary reality has driven me to re-examine my Christian basics. What is “God”? What is “God” really like? Is it no longer acceptable to live “as if” Jesus’ teaching about the essence of God in the Gospels is true? The Church of England now has great difficulty distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy patterns of life, behaviour and belief; between healthy and unhealthy theologies, constructs of God and understandings of the wisdom, teaching and life of Jesus of Nazareth.
I can see the changes that have taken place over the nearly eight decades of my life with greater clarity now, mapping the more recent changes in our Anglican ideas about God. The essence of hope for the future lies in the wisdom and lives of people on Earth. This is the only place where wisdom and Mystery can ever come to be known – and will always be evolving.
Our individual human responsibility
The most important value in any religion lies in its ability to affect the quality of our lives for better and not for worse; not to indoctrinate us with a belief system, creeds and dogmas, but to open us to our personal glory as created, conscious beings living on a finite planet in a universe with apparently infinite dimensions. Religions are doing “the work of God”, nurturing the divine energy of creation and evolution, when they are providing people with the resources and nourishment to grow and flourish, to know ourselves well, to become compassionate, integrated, emotionally aware, relational, loving, self-giving, visionary people. What God is “like”, therefore, is like the something that informs and inspires our individual lives. That something is, of course, the medium within which we are born, live and grow; our parents and extended family, our immediate social network and society, our culture, our location and moment in history, our education and religious background. All these elements are variable and uncertain, fragile, subject to human insecurities and prejudices, sometimes toxic, sometimes deeply creative and healthy. We can too easily become entrenched in our cultural norms and values, emotionally dependent, addicted to our dominant tribal conditioning. Our freedom to develop a healthy spiritual life and practice is essential, incorporating self-examination and reflection, self-awareness, contemplation, learning to nourish and value the essences of love, goodness, wisdom, truth, justice and compassion with which each of us is endowed.
Listen to everything until it all belongs together and you are part of it
Three decades ago I moved from being a parish priest to become a full-time campaigner, a ‘contemplative activist’, three decades in which the conceptual environment of the world in which I live has changed dramatically. The reality of evolution has become integral to my world view and my conception of Christian faith. More recently, the seamless nature of everything in creation has become a vital theme. We are born into an evolving universe and over the course of our lives our faith and the faith of the Church will continue to evolve. We are part of a seamless whole, coinherent, co-creators in life. Whether we are conscious of this or not, we are seamlessly involved with all members of the human community, embedded as we are in the emergent environment of our fragile biosphere.
Our Christian foundations of faith are always evolving, “shaking” as Paul Tillich noted eighty years ago. The seamless reality of creation and life of which we are very slowly becoming aware is being strenuously resisted by reactionary movements in religion, politics and economics. Seamless awareness requires us to move beyond our inherited, traditional, orthodox models of dogma and doctrine towards more human and humane, experiential, inclusive, relational models. Progressive Christian movements understand that the new seamless vision of life requires us to reappraise our inherited models of human gender and sexuality. The foundations of Christian faith are enshrined in the concept known as God, revealed in the life of Jesus Christ and manifest in the mystical presence of the Holy Spirit. In the evolving seamless awareness of all matter and life in creation, I find in Jesus’ life, wisdom, teaching, practice, parables and relationships, a model for the values and ideals common to the necessary wisdom and health of all humanity. The ultimate seamless harmony of all faith traditions has to exemplify and seek the well-being of every individual life and of our mutual lives on this planet. Human flourishing is the path to which we are all called.
Institutional religions and the institutional Church are finding this evolutionary step, the call to listen to everything until it all belongs together and we are part of it, very difficult to imagine, let alone adjust to and integrate in its teaching and practice. Sexuality, gender, inequality, economic injustice, the climate crisis, how people function and malfunction, emotionally, physically and spiritually, the well-being of our planet and environment, globalisation, artificial intelligence and the manipulation of what we take to be reality, dysfunctional political and spiritual leadership, are all requiring us to make sometimes massive adjustments to our lives in faith.