About

This site seeks to be a holding place, pausing space, reflection base …

It is a continuation of a blog called RevisingReform, through which, alongside college and colleagues, I discovered life in the power of the Spirit, a call to serve the church and a renewal of my own engagement with the scriptures. I am now a vicar in West London.

Introduction to this space:

I seek to discover how the church might rely less on music and art and poetry and the natural world for its revelation of God (not denying, of course, that God does reveal himself there) and more in revelation in the life, death, ascension, resurrection and glorification of Jesus Christ, as attested to in the scriptures and in the power of the Holy Spirit poured out on all believers. 

‘Many holy people have not studied [the liberal arts] at all, and many who have studied them are not holy’ (Augustine, Retractationes i.3.2).  

I took my stimulus to begin again from Augustine as I began to renew my understanding of him, after completing formal studies to Masters degree level after hand-in, 2017. I also began to wonder if, in a more peaceable season of church life, I could begin to express myself again, on a public platform.

So I remembered that we are constantly in a state of renewal, just look at the changes in Augustine: (354 – 430AD) Bishop of Hippo (for the last 34 years of his life). He described himself as ‘a man who writes as he progresses and who progresses as he writes’ (E 143) and I can relate to this.

There has been something of a vacuum since I stopped blogging and studying formally. I stopped writing, bar the occasional sermon, and I lost something: clarity of thought which the writing process stimulates, vocabulary, even.

As I write I refocus and as I refocus, I write. I am a woman who ‘writes as she progresses and who progresses as she writes’. Walter Ong describes how “writing restructures consciousness” (Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy : The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982, page 78) and I find that to be true.

We are confused, these days, in the church, by the idea of the ‘love’ of God, believing that ‘life in all its fullness’ has more to do with self-determination and self-definition;  that human flourishing is a product of affirmation and freedom to choose. We see this play itself out most obviously in the gender and sexuality debate although I am mindful too of the idol that the church has made of the nuclear family. We need to redefine self-hood christocentrically.

Augustine’s idea of ‘original sin’ we find perplexing and it seems to be something we have wanted to deny, as if somehow our perfectibility is a quest worth pursuing. I find that I preach often about God’s sanctifying Holy Spirit, without whom we struggle and are in fact unable to help ourselves. Quite how much God is able to see something of his  Grace at work in movements for the common good or whether as my more conservative friends will tell me, he sees nothing good outside deeds done in the name of his Son, I am yet to fathom. 

I am interested, though, in pursuing joined up thinking, shades of grey, nuance. I do not want to be known for what I am against but for what I am ‘for’ – all His promises are Yes and Amen but we have to be careful as regards what it is to which we think he is saying yes. This has to be worked out in community and from God’s word and in ways consonant with the Spirit of God and the life of Jesus Christ.

Augustine was captured by a form of Platonic philosophy: Neoplatonism which had its starting point in mind, not matter. Augustine came to believe, in time, to the contrary that God is not beyond being: ‘And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you’ (Exodus 3: 14 ) . God is being itself, ipsum esse: that which truly is, is he. For God to exist and be just, good, and wise are one and the same. Man exists without being just, good, or wise; God cannot. God ‘is what he has’. This is why all our human doing and being has to have its source, its guidance in and from God. We are not able as human beings to decide what pleases him and what does not without consulting him. As we fall further away from God as a society, we create our own ‘good’. 

I think those first coming to Christ will often go on a kind of Augustinian journey as they work out, like he did, that there is something to be learned from philosophers such as Cicero who decided that self-sufficiency and happiness are not found in self-indulgence. Therein lies wretchedness and distraction from the pursuit of higher things. The seriousness of the questions raised by Cicero about the quest for happiness had Augustine pick up a Latin Bible but find niaïve, Adam and Eve, and unconvincing the morality of the Israelite patriarchs. The incompatibility between the two genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke turned him off and towards astrology and then to Mani’s theosophy. Those coming to the scriptures for the first time, have similar problems, hence one of the sermon points I often find myself including is that we must be learning communities alongside each other – no lone ranger Christians. Yes, we understand God through revelation and the Spirit but that revelation comes through Scripture. Why would we think we can arrive at God in any other way? For many, there is the God of the imagination and this god is ultimately one we have made in out own image so I am keen to learn alongside others, from the Scriptures, just who it is God declares himself to be.  

Another affliction for Augustine was his running after Manicheism, which regarded ‘the lower half of the body’ as the disgusting work of Satan so that sex was evil and celibacy the answer. Sexual relations had evil origins. Pauline language about the conflict of flesh and spirit (Galatians 5 and Romans 7) was taken by the Manichees as a foundation for their belief that the body’s sexual impulses are at the root of all evil. Of course, bible college taught me that Paul’s flesh had little do do with some kind of soul / body dichotomy, as Martin Davie explains in Glorify God in your Body, published by Latimer, we are psychosomatic wholes and sarx (flesh) is the Adamic nature which we overcome in Christ.

I want to teach that matter matters to God and that the incarnation declares flesh good but then also that as our will is aligned with God’s through the power of the Spirit and in submission to his word, we will be given power to know God better in the sacrifice than the self-indulgence of our appetites. He is a good, good Father and has particular things to say about what will have us flourish.

Thankfully, Augustine came to doubt the Manichean idea that the supreme force for good was impotent against the Dark and that a deity so powerless should be a subject of worship.  In such a state he arrived in Milan in 384 as the city’s new professor of rhetoric and met Christian intellectuals: Ambrose the bishop and an older man named Simplicianus.

With the latter he read Plotinus and Porphyry.  Plotinus was an ascetic: minimal food and sleep, vegetarianism;  disconnected from his body: ‘He always seemed ashamed of being in the body. He believed in an intimate correspondence between reality and human thought and that in all things there is unity and permanence, perpetual change which presupposes a substratum which remains permanent.

Changelessness is perceived with the mind and flux by the senses.  In the great chain or continuum of being with god at the summit, Plotinus identified the higher level as the cause of whatever is immediately lower. Plotinus spoke of the hierarchy of being as ‘emanation’. With emanation there is loss but this loss can be overcome in the return to source. At the apex of the hierarchy are three divine existences: the One, Mind, and Soul. The One is supremely Good, and all else less than perfectly good.  Mind, for example, has delusions about its own grandeur. Soul has the power to produce matter but matter is evil. 

Manicheism acknowledged truth in all religious systems, and rejected orthodox catholic Christianity for being too exclusive. This sounds rather like the liberal Christianity of which I have had experience. Manicheism understood Jesus as a symbol of the plight of all humanity rather than as a historical person living and then crucified with the crucifixion as only a symbol for the suffering which is so for all human beings. It posited that little fragments of God, or Soul, have become scattered throughout the world in all living things. 

The Neoplatonic school disagreed, then, about the efficacy of external religious acts. Animals were too earthbound to purify the soul by their being ritually sacrificed. Instead ‘flight from the body’ by abstaining from those acts which make you most conscious of the body and its driving, namely eating and sex helped the soul to free itself from its bodily fetters. ‘Exercise yourself to return to yourself; gather from the body all the spiritual elements dispersed and reduced to a mass of bits and pieces’. ‘The soul is thrust into poverty, the more that its ties to the flesh are strengthened. But it can become truly rich by discovering its true self, which is intellect.’ The soul can ascend to its true fulfilment which is ‘the enjoyment of God’ a phrase Augustine was to make his own as he fell away from the Neoplatonic school and came to understand God through the scriptures and in the power of the Spirit. Something of the Neoplatonic spirit still grips the church, I think and it is interesting that Tom Wright wrote for the Church Times in this way recently (03/08/2017):

Sir, The articles by Clare Foges (“Gender-fluid world is muddling young minds”, July 27) and Hugo Rifkind (“Social media is making gender meaningless”, Aug 1), and the letters about children wanting to be pandas (July 29), dogs or mermaids (Aug 1), show that the confusion about gender identity is a modern and now internet-fuelled, form of the ancient philosophy of Gnosticism. The Gnostic, one who “knows”, has discovered the secret of “who I really am”, behind the deceptive outward appearance (in Rifkind’s apt phrase, the “ungainly, boring, fleshly one”). This involves denying the goodness, or even the ultimate reality, of the natural world. Nature, however, tends to strike back, with the likely victims in this case being vulnerable and impressionable youngsters who, as confused adults, will pay the price for their elders’ fashionable fantasies. The Rt Rev Prof Tom Wright. St Mary’s College, St Andrews

Augustine attempted deep meditation & felt a liberation from the Manichee notion of God as hidden luminous matter, however he lamented that this experience did not also set him free from earthly passion. He began to hope and pray that he would eventually attain his freedom from lust ‘but not yet’ (C viii.16). How funny and how difficult is this journey towards sanctification. At last, God intervened, though, and Augustine is delivered and finds himself unable to resist the grace of God.

In July 386, Augustine went into the garden  of the house in Milan where he was living with his mother, Monica, and former pupil Alypius (a competent lawyer who in 386 was still shedding Manichee beliefs, later Bishop of Thagaste) and had an epiphany when reading the letters of Paul . In the 8th book of his Confessions he describes opening his bible and landing on Paul’s writing as an answer to his inner sense of conviction – the concluding words of Romans 13, contrasting sexual wantonness with the calling to ‘put on Christ’. He describes hearing a voice telling him to ‘pick up and read’ (tolle, lege). Monica’s prayers for his conversion were answered and he resigned from teaching and was baptised 8 mths later with a conversion which he compared to pregnancy.

I love that he used this kind of language – it reminds me of the kinds of prayers I have prayed for both my own journey and that of the church. The Spirit intercedes for us (Romans 8). I guess this must be such a common conversion experience then. I had this image constantly as I was going through the discernment and the diaconate experience. Augustine also writes of ‘coming into harbour after a stormy passage’. I have spoken with such language especially about the choppy Church of England. 

Augustine began to submit to the authority of the church and its doctrine. Submission is at the heart of what I teach and pray for myself and others.

Augustine came to believe that God has acted in temporal history in Jesus and Jesus is our model through a unique relationship as Son embodying the love of God in his humiliation for us: incarnation and death. I like that we are saved by our faith in Christ and Christ’s faith in God. Galatians brought this home to me.

As I seek to teach the sufficiency of Christ, I am struck that Augustine was powerfully convicted regarding the particularity of Christ, understanding man as united to God and our promised resurrection and its transformative power. God is known through His self-disclosure in Christ.  Access to God is through faith, the faith community and the sacraments of water, bread and wine.

I seek to discover a way in which the church relies less on music and art and poetry and the natural world for its revelation of God (not denying, of course, that God does reveal himself there) but to renew us again so that we might see that God has revealed himself perfectly in the life, death, ascension, resurrection and glorification of Jesus Christ as attested to in the scriptures and in the power of the Holy Spirit poured out on all believers. This is my aim. So help me, God.