Diocesan News
The Rt Revd Richard Henderson's Presidential Address to the Tuam, Killala and Achonry Diocesan Synod
TUAM, KILLALA AND ACHONRY DIOCESAN SYNOD
Thursday, 21st September 2006Downhill Hotel, Ballina, Co Mayo.
Address given by the Bishop of Tuam,
Presidential Address by the Bishop of Tuam, Killala and Achonry,
The Rt. Revd. Dr. Richard Henderson
Dear Friends,
Once again it is my pleasure and privilege to welcome you to our annual meeting. In particular I welcome our visitors and those who will be mounting exhibitions stands in the foyer. This year, in the interests of geographical parity, we are meeting in Ballina, and so it is my special privilege to welcome Bishop John Fleming, Bishop of Killala. We also welcome Anne Barrington of the Forum on Europe. All three of us will be addressing you this morning, and there will be time for a general discussion. The actual diocesan synod business is scheduled for the afternoon, starting immediately after lunch. We also welcome Martin O?Connor of Bishops? Appeal; Albert Hempenstall of Protestant Aid, Jean Beattie of the GFS, and Philip Mc Kinley of the Hard Gospel Project and visitors who have come to be with us for the day.
Before I get to the bones of what I want to say, I would like to pay a special tribute to Anthony Previte who has recently retired. He has been a wonderful archdeacon, friend, colleague, pastor to his flock and a strong voice of Christian social conscience in the West. And, wherever he has been, he has put his words and convictions into action. We shall miss him greatly, and so much hope that he and his wife Christina will enjoy richly deserved happiness in the future.
But now, to give our distinguished guest speakers their own proper time and space to be heard ? and to give you time for questions and discussion, I shall cut to the chase and say what I want to say ? briefly for once!
I want to talk in the broadest terms about the nature of God, and the outworkings of this for Christian religious society ? represented in microcosm by our beloved but beleaguered Anglican church - and for wider society. Absurdly ambitious for fifteen minutes, even pretentious I suppose, but there seem to me to be a series of connections that need urgently to me made.
For us to talk about the nature of God, we must start with the Trinity - Father, Son and Holy Spirit. A mystery to be explored, but never to be encompassed. We believe that our God is social. If I may call God ?He?, I would say ?He can live with Himself?. This is at the heart of thinking about the Trinity. It is a society of love, holding together by consent a relationship of diverse unity, with no division; a unity without uniformity. It is a society of love, respect, mutual identification, indwelling.
As an outflowing of this, we believe and assert that humankind is made God?s image - the image of the Trinity. So this must mean that we are, or ought to be, social too ? with all that that means about diversity and unity. And likewise we are, or ought to be, building and inhabiting a diverse society of love - held together by consent, perhaps even by convenant. This society is called the Kingdom of God, inclusive but demanding (demanding because if you cannot readily exclude, you have to live with what you include!)
This is our origin and mandate. Perhaps you might call it a template for human existence, though it is not always very well followed. Obviously we are struggling; you only have to perform the upsetting daily task of opening the newspapers, or switching on the radio, or even scanning the contents of your own mind to see this. So the image is marred, and we are, to put it bluntly, fallen. And it?s worth noting this: our upset is because we view these realities with a sense of something lost, that things need not be this way, and that there is something that can be done.
A lost image ? seeking restoration.
The reality is that we humans have problems living with ourselves ? in all our shapes and forms. We don?t like living with too much diversity, especially if its origin, opinion and practice differ from our own ? the more so when we feel our origins, opinion or practice are being threatened, trampled on or crowded out by others. And so it becomes all too easy to turn to thought patterns that define ?us? as against ?them?! (This competition is acceptable (though agonizing) when it?s Mayo versus Kerry, but not when it?s real warring between religious or ethnic groups).
When this, the threat of being annihilated, terrorised, overrun or colonised, happens, we get fearful of losing our identity, even our life ? maybe the two are felt to be the same. And when we are full of fear, we quietly turn in on ourselves or are driven to startling aggression ? or episodes of the two; both can give us the temporary comfort of reinforcing our identity ? but the price paid by us for this fear is that it narrows our religion, battens down the hatches of sympathy or influence - and often makes us live in wistful retrospection. Others too pay a price for our absence: or worse, a terrifyingly high price for our presence if we turn to aggression. So we are all losers, and society is impoverished through loss or damage.
This is the perilous climate of fear that nourishes fundamentalism. It can be endorsed and reinforced by both religion and politics, often the two inextricably together. I shall return to these later. By fundamentalism I mean an outlook within society that is insufficiently broad, or deep. It sounds irreducible, rock-solid, to do with fundamentals. But it is better defined as depth of conviction than depth of truth.
We can be afraid, very afraid, of too much diversity, especially when it is close to home, in the family as you might say. This is the more obvious crisis in our beloved Anglican church. We are not sure of our elastic limit ? do we break in to pieces or a loose federation, or do we take the long view, keep on stretching, painful though it may be, hoping for something new and joy-giving to be born? I know what I think, but it hurts!
There is a really powerful antidote to this sort of fear, and it is not as simple as courage, great though that virtue is. The scriptures say that ?there is no fear in love?. The reverse is also profoundly true: ?there is no love in fear?. The test for us at the moment is to do with love. How much love is there in the attitudes that are motivating our assessment of the limits of diversity? If fear is one of these attitudes, it is not of the God who is love. On the other hand, if it is full of love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, kindness and self control, then it is. Simple really!
Actually, I think the real crisis in Anglicanism may not be so much to do with breadth, as with depth. To put it simply, we have not gone deep enough to cope with our increasing breadth. You could reverse these metaphors if you like, but the point is that you need three axes for anything three-dimensional, anything of substance. The third, mysterious axis, is love.
From the depth point of view, we can see how fundamentalism flourishes. Fear of the deep, especially when there are indistinct or murky things that are seen but not defined, tempts us to retreat into the security of shallow certainties. I wonder whether people have been straying away laterally from the church because they have not found the waters of our baptism deep enough for immersion. Inadvertently, and for the most plausible reasons, we have lost the mysterious depth of our faith in an effort to make it attractive, colourful, instant, attainable, ready - just like everything else ? as someone has said, Microwaveable. We have tended to cap our deep wells of faith and tradition and made them into paddling pools where there is a danger we shall splash about, inadequately supported, noisy and dangerous. So when people are suddenly forced to face into mysteries ? of grief, bewilderment, pain ?or even the heart-wrenching beauty of music or art for example - they may not be able to find established in the churches the depth of spirituality to interpret what is happening to them. This they so much need. Yet the voice of Christ insists across the centuries: ?put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch?.
To move from depth to height, how I love the image of the cloud on the Mountain of Transfiguration ? a bright cloud, simultaneously illuminating and obscuring. Are we content in our spirituality with such a deep yet partial revelation? I think we need to be.
But there is infinite depth in the Gospel stories, and the ancient practice of the Eucharist: remove the cap, dive in, cross the strata of time, and swim in the glorious meta-narrative of the Trinity! This more than anything else tells us how to live, and to live together. Let the world deride or pity ? if it?s true, why not say so?
Which raises again the question of fundamentalism and apparent depth. So we have to ask: what is truly fundamental? Here I move to a rather partial view of geology as a way of returning to the Trinity. The truth seems to me to be that you cannot ignore the overlaying of layer upon layer of the strata of human history and climate. This is where the wrong sort of fundamentalism (or more-or-less any -ism) really gets out the pick and shovel and is at its most dangerous ? mining away at just one level, ignoring and endangering the whole. It is incontrovertibly true at its level. But in the context of other levels it is obviously deficient, even dangerous. What we need to retain in Anglicanism, and it would be tragic if we lost this, is something akin to a core sample ? all the different layers viewed together as a whole. A diverse unity, representative of as wide a range of history and environment as possible.
Of course, you might say that the true bedrock lies underneath all the sediments and accretions of time: if we could get to this, then at last we would be on solid ground. But as you know the earth?s bedrock is just the hardening of the outer skin of a fluid core. There it is again ? a fluid core, and the hardenings only bear image of the centre in a limited way. Thus our rigidities, and shallow things that are surface deep, are derived from but do not describe the nature of God ? the living rock.
This is why I think, as Christian churches, we need unashamedly to return to the fluid core of our faith, to the flow of love in the under girding Trinity. This is like the inaudible law of harmony that governs how notes should relate to one another to make music, the invisible grammar that governs how words must respect each other in their proper place to make sense of everything.
Because the church lives in the world, this ?everything? must include a right relation between religion and politics if only because they seem to be asking substantially the same questions ? how should we relate to each other, person to person, tribe to tribe, nation to nation? Both must ask questions about limits of diversity, both are concerned with rights and responsibilities of individuals in society, both are striving for a better and fairer world, believing this to be possible. Equally, both are vexed and endangered by shallow but intense conviction because of the bizarre truth that both, if they do not go deep enough, are prone to reversing the eirenic vision of harmonised diversity and can encourage or make us anti-social, small-minded and even violent. Perhaps this is one reason why there is a great deal of suspicion of the two! But there need not be suspicion between the two. They need not be rival interpretations.
Indeed, I have recently been struck (if I may say so) by how deeply theological some of the conclusions reached by our most courageous and adventurous political leaders have been. Not long ago I heard John Hume speaking with disarming simplicity on the essential attitudes that make for peace; listening, respect for difference, readiness to be influenced? these might appear obvious, but are deeply reminiscent of Trinitarian truth ? a simplicity costing not less than everything. It is (to my ears) wonderful to hear politicians articulating such mature conviction, and with such clarity, what seem to me to be metaphysical truths; their hard-won veracity is proven by their efficacy. To use modern jargon ? these ancient truths ?cash out at local level.?
So, in my final remarks, I want to appeal for a proper understanding of how religion and politics could cooperate more in an essentially common endeavour that might be put like this: How should we liberate and celebrate the diversity of human identity, yet how can we agree to regulate the same in order to live with ourselves?
I have long felt that if religion is part of the problem it needs to be part of the solution. We cannot solve all our social problems in merely political terms. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has said, ?If religion is not part of the solution, it will certainly be part of the problem?. .
In just this vein, we might go further than asking religious leaders to comment politically on matters of political importance, important though this is. I would wish that, at least sometimes, religious leaders would be asked (or volunteer) to speak theologically about political questions ? just as, say, sociologists would expect and be expected to speak sociologically. From theology, we might ask, unselfconsciously, What is happening under God? How is God?s image marred, and how might it be restored? What are the religious issues that are motivating people? How is it possible to have diversity without division, unity without uniformity? How can we be inclusive, yet true to our own tradition? Are there ways of helping people accept that their own religious tradition is bound to be provisional? Are there ways of helping religious people search more deeply their own tradition with a view to accepting those who lie beyond it?
Further, religion and politics are, very frequently, inextricably interwoven; sometimes lethally dangerous, sometimes sublime. (It was, after all, a particularly nasty admixture of religion and politics that sent Christ to the cross, and yet, significantly, the resurrection and dawning of hope is also to be worked out in just such a climate.) Because they are inextricably mixed we have a problem ? but it could be an opportunity. As by definition they cannot be extricated one from the other, we cannot have a whole view if we consider one, without the other. It seems that we need twin spotlights (or filters) on the same weft and warp. Not disentangling, but discriminating ? and with a view to resolution (healing) in situ. And all this would be to work towards wholeness of understanding and completeness of healing.
It might help to restore the lost image.
To collect together all that I have been trying to say, I choose the following from our Holy Scripture:
Speaking of the task of making plain the mystery of the hidden things (and hear how the Trinity frames the whole passage), St Paul says:
For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom the whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses all knowledge ? that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.