was deeply gratified when GTS invited me to speak about Scriptural Reasoning during the opening conference of the Desmond Tutu Education Center last month, and very disappointed that I could not attend for reasons of health. I am delighted that Peter, David and others, including some Muslim participants in Scriptural Reasoning, led two workshops (I know that a film of this has since been broadcast on PBS [public television]), and also that the practice had such a warm reception in the seminary. Might I take advantage of this occasion to commend Scriptural Reasoning to you as warmly as possible? It is one way of going deeper simultaneously into one’s own faith and into the faith of others through study and mutual mentoring, and in my judgement holds considerable promise for the twenty-first century, not least in building much-needed forms of peaceful sociality between the Abrahamic faiths. Its fruitfulness has most recently been seen in last week’s10 Muslim message, A Common Word, addressed to Christian leaders, and I hope that this seminary might be a place where that message of love for God and neighbour is responded to wholeheartedly. If only the Anglican Communion could learn this too! My involvement in the 1998 Lambeth Conference and participation in some of the Primates’ meetings during the years that followed made me long for a reconciliatory imagination and practice centred on Scripture and nurturing a deeper and richer sociality, touching healingly the depths of each person. May the new Desmond Tutu Center serve this divine purpose well!
This evening’s happy event brings my theological career since its beginnings in this seminary full circle. I end with two thoughts.
The first is on my own vocation. I see it as having been primarily about the seeking of God’s wisdom. It has been prophetic insofar as it has attempted to engage more deeply with life in all its particularity. It has been priestly in tracing that prophetic wisdom to its source in the divine intensity of love and in seeking to mediate that love through the Church for the whole world, concentratedly in the Eucharist: light and love together. The second is a tribute to the thinker who has perhaps more than any other been my teacher and inspiration over many decades, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He engaged deeply with God and most aspects of God’s creation – intellectually, imaginatively, practically, spiritually, emotionally and through much personal suffering. Above all he responded in all those ways to the attraction of the divine. He discerned the Word and the Spirit endlessly present, active and innovative, lifting the world from within, raising it into its future – giving us a huge hope in God and God’s future, and inviting us intensively and unremittingly to participate in that, as we are drawn through divine love into levels of existence of which we can hardly begin to imagine or dare to dream.
In this spirit I conclude with one of the great Christian prayers, in which I invite you to join:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.11
(Daniel W. Hardy, 18 October 2007)
On that same day when we talked about colour and my father said, ‘I think I probably am dying,’ I asked, ‘Are you ready, then?’
He answered peacefully, ‘Yes, I think I am, I think I am ready to just slip away. My main concern is the unfinished business: mostly this book. It’s not the shape I first imagined it would be.’
‘Is there still much to do?’ I asked. ‘It sounds like you’ve already come a long way.’
‘It’s indeterminate,’ was his reply. And of course he was suddenly speaking about the pain of recognizing all he had to let go of, too: particularly his beloved friend, Peter. This was the closest he ever got to acknowledging some of his own pain and loss in his dying. I empathized, but told him that the process of this book had been amazing to me. It seemed even more appropriate, somehow, that it would have to be continued and finished in the presence of his absence. It had a life of its own, which was bigger than him, and, as he handed it over and entrusted it to us, it would draw us and others up into its life and energy even after his death. As we worked on it, he would be right there in our midst (and he has been): and we went on to speak of the dynamic of the Trinity and of the Eucharist – gathering everything up and together in its life and truth.
Peter describes him as
a pastor’s pastor – seeing light in the other, light as attractiveness in and with the other. He is a pastor of others within the Eucharist; within the Anglican Communion, pastor on behalf of Abrahamic communions and to human communities more generally, all of whom he sees lit up by the divine attractiveness itself: the great cosmic and ecclesial and divine communion of lights which draws him to it and to us and draws us to be near him.
The actual genesis of the writing of this book was when the three of us (Peter, David and I) gathered in the room (at home) where he had breathed his last just a few days earlier: gathered to simply be together and to pray and keep watch over his body before his burial the following day.
We had decided to open our scriptures together, ‘Scriptural Reasoning-style’12 (something that mattered hugely to my father and in which he ‘found’ himself most fully in recent years13): the founding fathers of SR and (because one father was now dead), a daughter, too. Peter turned to a psalm in his prayer book to be read by Jewish mourners after the death of a loved one, so we decided to make that our text.
It was a profound time and is impossible to recapture adequately here, but as we honoured the life of this beloved father and friend together and tried to make some sense of his life and death in the midst of our grief, something amazing happened as the Word came alive and our hearts ‘burned within us’.
Psalm 42
As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God:
when shall I come and behold the face of God? (vv. 1–3)
In the shock of our grief, we had forgotten that this psalm had been so much at the heart of my father’s pilgrimage in the Holy Land: itself a psalm of pilgrimage, and somehow able to draw all our pilgrimages into one. He described his longing for God at the headwaters of the Jordan14 as ‘my almost insatiable concern for God, not just for knowledge of God but a more insatiable thirst again than that’: the intensification of a lifetime’s prompting, the mystery of going deeper into God, the ‘living water’, who, in the very process of satisfying, creates the thirst and desire for more. It was our prayer too. It echoed our longing and need to know God amid the barrenness of our loss, and there were also echoes (for me, at least) of ‘For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we shall see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known’ (1 Cor. 13.12). This was the beginning of orienting ourselves to a new place and way of seeing and experiencing things; my father had passed over a threshold where we could not yet go: ‘Where I am going you cannot come . . . I give you a new commandment . . .’ (Jesus to his disciples, John 13.33–34).
My tears have been my food day and