visiting’ – was rich and fulfilling for all of us. It would take some explaining to say why, but the combination of university work and life (including church life) in a place with such cultural and religious variety was wonderful. University, church and city – which in England go well together – mixed in all kinds of ways.
One of the joys over the years was to see a gradual blossoming of friendships and conversation partners towards the end of his life and to see how he was finally able to begin taking the initiative in relationships, which became increasingly intimate and mutual. Particularly significant among these were postgraduate students, the Society for the Study of Theology, the American Academy of Religion, David Ford (starting during Birmingham days) and the Peter–Dan–David threesome that began through CTI and was to become the foundation for Scriptural Reasoning and a new realm of relationships and friendships with those of other faiths and disciplines.
I say to God, my rock,
‘Why have you forgotten me?
Why must I walk about in gloom,
oppressed by the enemy?’
Killing me to the core,
my oppressors shame me,
taunting me all day long:
‘Where is your God?’
Why are you downcast, O my soul?
And why do you throw me into confusion? (vv. 9–12)
But the deeper he went into God, the more aware he was of the light and the beauty and attractiveness of God, the more aware he was of the darkness, too: ‘To confess to the light is to acknowledge you’ve strayed: the light reveals both the grace and the dis-grace of creation.’19
Hope in God, for I will yet praise him
for his saving presence. (v. 12)
That was always the last word for him: trusting in ‘the light [that] shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it’ (John 1.5), in the God who continually turns his face and attention towards us and invites us into our fullest meaning and dignity in and through relationship with him. ‘For it is the God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness”, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 4.6).
My father loved the beauty in things. He had a life-long love and hunger for music, opera, theatre, poetry, art and architecture; wherever he was, he would find those things. I have warm and vivid memories of him sitting with his head back and eyes shut, savouring the beauty and wonder of music in a range of settings: the Birmingham Bach Society and CBSO (Birmingham), the Endellion Quartet and others performing in West Road Concert Hall (together with various college chapels in Cambridge), stretched out on the grass at Tanglewood (the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Massachusetts). And I remember just as clearly how, whenever the music stopped or an interval started, he would immediately pull out his little notebook to capture the latest thought or insight it had given. He found deep meaning and resonance in nature and the arts; they gave a form and expression that he often struggled to find for himself.
Humour was like that, too: as if it somehow needed to be given permission and a way to find expression in him, and when it was and he laughed, he laughed – and his laughter grew as he discovered and let go into the joy and wonder and communication of God. Explosions of laughter and delight would often simply erupt from the study or from the shore of the lake – or wherever it was that he was deep in theological conversation with those closest to him. Playfulness for him was primarily in the realm of ‘musement’: the acrobatics of abstraction.
The psalm captures well the sense of restlessness about him, perhaps a prophetic dimension of his calling, something ahead of his time, restless for the ‘more’ of God, living the tensions of the ‘already and not yet’ of the fulfilment of God’s Kingdom: Bonhoeffer’s ‘penultimate’.20 He was someone who wrestled with things: there was a deep remedial or reparative dimension to his thinking and yet somehow he never seemed to resolve the problem. He is (already) renowned for his: ‘I’m afraid things are just not that simple.’ He said, ‘I am always reaching for more than what seems to be there or possible, so I am always coming up against the limitations.’
And yet the paradox (as he well recognized) was that the difficult things and times in his life were also blessings and shaped and led him into what often became his greatest strengths and opportunities.
He described how his very critical approach to everything had arisen from both hopes and disappointments much earlier in his life and how these were still at the heart of what motivated his thinking:
The world should be translucent to the divine: that’s what I hope for, but the world does not show itself as it was divinely originated. So I am disappointed when it doesn’t: perhaps a little how Moses feels when he comes off the mountain, and he sees the reality of where humanity is and how and why the world has not continued in God’s presence. In a sense it does show the divine, but I am disappointed in the world when it gets overly caught up in its extensity – its sheer spread out-ness – and becomes confused and chaotic. It loses its intensity and the potential for order and containment within that.
We have this polyform world in which we live – and we barely know how to hold it together – this plurality of things and activities of people always in a state of disorder and un-formation. There are two things operating: extensity is the sheer polyformality of things and second is the chaos that comes from that. The first is not emotionally charged: it is just the way things are – but chaos is. Since I could do nothing about creation – and I suspend judgement in relation to the ‘why’ in relation to the natural order – I have had a deep desire to do something about that dimension of the chaos, to sort out the disorder: the extensity that lies within the human scope. That’s why I did ecclesiology; my whole life and work has been an ecclesiological response to the malaise of extensity. The intensity I seek has a maternal dimension. I seek maternal being in ideas: a light attracting me with its warmth. God has maternal intensity, which extensity does not provide.
His theology could only be reparative because it assumed the light and the will to believe in ‘the light that shines in the darkness and has not overcome it’ (John 1). ‘That’s the paradox,’ he said, ‘the sheer enormity of a light which never overwhelms or coerces us, so that it attracts everyone into its warmth.’
The Episcopal Church (into which he was baptized)21 has in its baptism service the prayer: ‘Give him (or her) an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.’
This spirit shone in him increasingly, and especially when he embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Jerusalem 2007
On Easter Day 2007 he set out with members of Great St Mary’s Church, where he served as an assistant priest during his time in Cambridge, on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which was to change his life. It is difficult to capture here in a way that begins to do justice to what it meant to him: something so ‘big’ happened that afterwards he was only able to give ‘glimpses’ of it, often quite fragmented ones. But there was a coming together and new integration of his thinking and feeling, and his imagination and senses were liberated in new ways.
I shall try to follow and quote my father’s own narrative (as told to me) as closely as possible.
‘The Beginnings’: The Jordan
I’d been to Israel a number of times and for different reasons, but mostly for academic