Why someone is/becomes an Anglican/Episcopalian? For what reason do people decide to become/remain a member of one of the churches of the Communion in state of crisis, sometimes taking the risk – especially if they live on the British Isles – of attending emptying churches? Today we start posting various answers to this question. And – not really humbly – Pradusz, the “commuting” Anglican, will speak out as first.
The question makes me go back 6 years in my thoughts. I was then a member of one of the Dutch reformed churches – the Remonstrant Brotherhood (Remonstrantse Broederschap); better known in the Anglo-Saxon world as Arminians ) and at the same time I was a pastor of the ecumenical basis community of St. Dominic in Amsterdam. In my everyday work I had to do with people of various confessions, but also with a huge number of those who neither wanted nor could identify themselves with any particular Christian denomination (sometimes they even found it difficult to call themselves Christians). This kind of work “turned me on” (and it does until now, because I still work in a similar basis community), yet at the same time I was becoming convinced that, among other things precisely because I worked there (however for other reasons as well), I need a stronger sense of being rooted in the universal church. Stronger than the one given by belonging to the Remonstrant Church, which doesn’t oblige its members to accept any obligatory confessions of faith. Besides that both the first encounter with the pastoral work and a whole chain of events in my personal life have lead me to questioning the – typically Protestant – faith in the power of the spoken word and moved my attention to the transverbal dimension of fatith, to the “liturgical action” and, above all, to what St. Augustine called “the visible Word” – the sacraments.
Of course, I could use one of the already existing contacts – intense and important ones. Since many years – more or less often – I have attended services in the Old Catholic church in Leiden and for almost this long I have been associated with the Dominican centre in Utrecht, where I was working as a voluntary (I was organizing meetings, running courses). Besides that – still searching for a deeper liturgical inspiration – I came back to the old fascination with the Christian East, once a month taking part in the liturgy in the Brotherhood of St. John of Damascus in Den Bosch, which belongs to the Roman Catholic jurisdiction yet of ecumenical character and whose member I am till this day. Nonetheless, though I descend from a religiously mixed family, I was brought up in the Protestant spirit and it was difficult for me to admit that I actually was slowly abandoning the Protestant tradition and becoming a Catholic (this “abandoning” is perhaps not the best word, because I haven’t the impression of abandoning anything, but rather of revaluing what I already had in my “religious luggage” and adding new elements to it). Attending the services in St. Dominic’s church almost every Sunday I didn’t have too much time for “liturgical trips”. Help was first offered by the internet. Using the time difference I was able to follow the live broadcasts of the services from the Trinity Church, NYC, and subsequently the liturgies in Grace Cathedral, San Francisco – with the excellent sermons preached by Alan Jones – and with time also in the Washington National Cathedral. This way I discovered the American Episcopal Church. Of course, this wasn’t the only form of Anglicanism I had contact with. At the same time I started to read books by Archbishop Rowan Williams, whom I met and had a chance to talk to a few years thereafter (I’ll say frankly that I’m still a little proud of it, hence the attached photo). An occasion to makes these ties with Anglicanism tighter occurred after a few months. I could remember that Anglican services take place every Sunday afternoon in the Old Catholic Cathedral in Haarlem. It was a solution as if prepared for me! On my way back from Amsterdam to Leiden, after the service in “Dominick”, I could make a stop in Haarlem and join the 2:30 pm Anglican Eucharist. The first service I attended had paradoxically nothing to do with the high-church decorum I like. It was a so called “reflection”: a meeting with discussion about the ecumenical creed, taking place in a side room and completed with a said Eucharist. Only the following week I was given a chance to smell the smells and hear the bells, because the then priest-in charge of the Haarlem congregation, Fr Brian Richards, turned out to be an extraordinarily devoted representative of the Catholic tradition within Anglicanism (I won’t call him an Anglo Catholic, for he could feel offended as a Welsh!) and the congregation itself was the most high church Anglican community in the Netherlands.
To give Brian and the role played in this story justice I would have to write a separate post. Actually the only the fact that met him and he undoubtedly became my spiritual father for the time he ministered in Haarlem was a lesson of the Anglican comprehensiveness. An admirer of Joseph Ratzinger’s theology, an opponent of the ordination of women, treating homosexuality as a kind of retardation and finding it, if “active”, as an obstacle to priesthood. Thus a perfect candidate for the papal offer contained in Anglicanorum coetibus (I actually don’t know if he has eventually used it, because we have lost touch, but something tells me – however it may be just wishful thinking – that he hasn’t). On the other hand a man who – never concealing his own opinion – could live and work together in a community with both a woman priest and an “active homosexual” who was a church warden. What drew toward each other came from a completely different area. Let me start with a both surprising and funny fact. Brian, who has ministered for many years as a military chaplain in Berlin, was a big “fan” of the German language and culture. Even today I can remember that evening in Wales when I visited him just after he left Haarlem – when German folk and military songs sounded in yhe ancient rectory in rural Llangwm (don’t try to pronounce it – he probably won’t be able to anyway!). But it was above all spirituality that brought us together. In some way he combined what was important or was becoming important to me: fascination with the Christian East, from Origin to Bulgakov, monastic life (he is an associate of the Carmelitan Order), a sense of the church’s continuity, the profoundly experienced sacramental piety, an interest in gnosis and the ezoterical tradition and, last but not least, Celtic fascinations. A mixture to be encountered probably only in Anglicanism. Just as only in the Anglican context one can, using the words of Alan Jones, “become a Catholic from a Protestant without changing their church membership”.
The myth of the “undivided church of the first centuries” is a myth, just as – on our eyes – the Anglican comprehensiveness turns out to be a myth to a large degree. The Christian church NEVER HAS BEEN TRULY UNDIVIDED and Anglicanism is just failing the test of the unity in diversity. But a myth is not untrue only because the historical reality doesn’t support it. What a myth has to do is to build a bridge between different levels of reality, discovering for us those areas that usually remain inaccessible.
Bishop Geoffrey of Gibraltar in Europe with fr. Brian Richards
Yes, in a sense Anglicanism is not and never has been a reality, but a dream. A dream that it is possible to connect continuity with reformation, a sense of being rooted in tradition with openness to new things, attachment to orthodoxy with continuous questioning: asking both questions derived from the present and those the orthodoxy solved in the past – if often only outwardly – being both a Catholic and a Protestant, at the same time feeling a deep connection with Eastern Orthodoxy and exploring the traditions the church rejected in the past. I myself believe that this – profoundly human – dream, shared not only by Anglicans, but – in a larger or lesser degree – by everyone and in every community, reflects the DREAM OF GOD. Therefore WE MUSN’T give it up, we mustn’t cease trying to embody it, even if we know that its full realization doesn’t depend on us and doesn’t belong to this reality, but to the eschatological reality. Rev. Tomas Halik, a Czech Catholic thinker, states that Catholicity is an eschatological category, a promise…
Despite the optimistic visions of the XIX century humanity doesn’t go straight towards realization of the eschatological promises. Between the world we live in and the promised world lies an abyss. To build a bridge over it we need symbols and myths. We need also constant attempts to fulfill them here and now and – maybe even more – humbling failures in this work. For me such an – closest and dearest to me – attempt, the Divine attempt – and at the same time fully human – is the coming of Jesus Christ to this world and his continuing presence in it, whose sing the church tries to be. The church that on one hand really exists from generation to generation (I have never lost the fascination with “continuity”), on the other HAPPENS when “two or three” gather around the altar’s table to celebrate “the victory of our Lord” and – with their lives – set forth the story of his life, because it is in him that they discover their own deepest identity.
Here arises a question: am I still talking about Anglicanism or about the church in general? Of course, I’m talking about the church in general and… therefore about Anglicanism. If I oppose creating any additional guidelines of “Anglican identity”, it is not only because they will immediately become “an instrument of discipline”. What I mean is above all that from the beginning Anglicanism wasn’t about being Anglican. The church of England perceived itself as a local Catholic church of the British Isles and had no other ambitions than to fulfil the universal vision of Christianity in the English context. The same understanding of their mission was shared by the Dutch Old Catholic Church, the Church of Sweden (not without a reason it is called neither “Lutheran” nor “Protestant”, even though it isn’t ashamed of its reformational identity!) or the local Orthodox or Oriental churches. Nowadays in many of these communities there is a tendency to stress their own “specificity”, (precisely) defining their own identity. It’s understandable. After all we would like to explain somehow why we have chosen this community and not another, place it on the present “market of possibilities”. Yet I think that we shouldn’t totally follow this tendency. Above all it shouldn’t override what it was about from the beginning and still has to be: about being Christian – or simply about fulfilling what a humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam, called “the philosophy of Christ” – a “philosophy” that has never been for him an empty speculation, but a way of practicing humanity. “Ecce homo” – it was said once about our Lord. Said with irony and mockery. For us – people who have tied the stories of their lives with his story – these words have a different meaning. Jesus Christ, revealing the mystery of divinity to us, unveils also the depths of humanity. To follow his way should eventually mean nothing else than fulfilling the same humanity: here and now. One doesn’t necessarily have to be Anglican to reach this conclusion, but the way I reached it leads through Anglicanism. And that is what I wanted to tell about…
