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PART ONE

1

A Portrait of My Father Daniel W. Hardy

9 November 1930 – 15 November 2007

Deborah Hardy Ford

. . . When he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him; and he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’1

On the day when he said, ‘I think I probably am dying . . .’, and shortly before he stopped being able to speak, my father and I suddenly started thinking and talking about colour. 2 He described how

[t]his light I’ve talked about and see infused in people and between people and things isn’t white light, you know. It is colour: colour in its full and wonderful range. How do you see colour? The colour in you and in the people you meet and how you relate to one another?3

And seeing as I’d never thought about it quite like that before, I had to say ‘I don’t know: I’ll have to think about it . . .’

‘What colour do you see yourself as?’ I asked.

‘Brown, I think,’ he answered. ‘Not too dark a brown . . . a warm, rich brown, probably with quite a lot of yellow, red, orange, and maybe some blue in it too: an earthy colour. What about you?’

My father never liked to talk about himself for very long: he was much more interested in looking outwards and discerning and recognizing God in the people and world around him, in the particularities of the people and systems he was part of. Quite early on I discovered that the best way to spend time with him was to talk about God. He could never get enough of that. ‘Here’s all this’ (as he put it). ‘How is it of God?’ Everything was related to God: whether it was the quantum measurement of subatomic particles or the details of Western intellectual thought or a Bach fugue or the hinge on a kitchen cabinet. It was Aquinas’ sub ratione Dei: understanding everything in relation to God:

I want to explore things in relation to one another: the intensity of the Lord and his presence and action in the world. Dedicated attention to the intensity of God: that’s the source of theology; it’s not about any academic contrivances. It has a doubling role: to explain but also to invite deeper into the mystery. It’s a form of prayer done deeply within the Spirit and it requires sustained inquiry in many directions, by testing the major theologies, philosophies and sciences of modernity.

True to the colour brown, he preferred to be in the background than in the limelight (‘behind the scenes’): complementing others and encouraging them to grow into the light in them in a rather hidden and underground way, creating an environment where new things could be cultivated and nurtured with the utmost patience, care and attentiveness. He was always ready and willing to encourage, praise and affirm the life and beauty deep within each person he met: captured in the spirit of this poem, written by one of his favourite poets and friends (who read another of his poems at his funeral):

Sunflower

The danger of tautening towards the sun:

To lose is to lose all.

Too much gravity and I’m undone;

If I bend, I fall.

Tell me it’s all worth this venture,

Just the slightest reassurance,

And I’ll open a bloom, I’ll flower

At every chance.

Then praise me all the way to the sky,

Praise me with light, lover,

Oh praise me, praise me, praise me

And I live for ever.4

He had a remarkable gift and capacity for seeing the light and potential in other people and situations and, somehow, to anticipate the light: to hope, believe and trust in it, and to discern and nurture it in such a way that things and possibilities you never dreamed were in you could come into being. He was intrigued by ‘how the Divine reaches within people and forms new life within them. How does it happen in the “inmost texture” of people? How does it lift and transform them?’

That is what it was like when you knew that you wanted to talk and think about something, but had no idea yet what that thing might turn out to be. He could stay with you in what were often very pregnant spaces: long, awkward, silences; waiting and not knowing, without ever imposing himself or any of his ideas until you were ready. But at other times, when whatever it was that you wanted to explore with him was more developed in you, it meant subjecting yourself to a rigorous and sometimes seemingly relentless critique and scrutiny: that ‘spirit that searches everything – even the depths of God’ (1 Cor. 2.10). It was a hugely demanding and refining process but a necessary part of getting to the essence of whatever it was. He was never prepared (or let you be prepared) to settle for less than the best.

It became well known within a certain Cambridge graduate community that being put through your paces in supervision with Professor David Ford was only a shade of things to come on the day you were deemed ready for a meeting with Professor Dan Hardy . . .

He was a critical judge, but one who knew what it was to be ‘the judged’,5 and whatever rigour he might require you to apply to your (or another’s) thinking, he first applied it just as thoroughly to his own. He asked a lot of himself. As a child I often wished he would be gentler and more compassionate with himself, but he did change and mellow quite a lot in latter years. He became less dogmatic, less rigid and abstract and more embodied and accepting of his own and other people’s limitations: more compassionate. As well as being judge, he was also advocate, utterly on your side.

I remember an occasion when I had just passed my driving test. I was a rather unsure 17-year-old, who nevertheless thought that she was pretty clever for passing her test the first time. I slowly built up my confidence – often taking the dog with me for moral support – and gradually undertook more challenging and adventurous journeys. But the really big thing was that I was now allowed to drive not only our family estate (which I felt to be a bit of a banger), but also my father’s car. He had a very beautiful and special 1930s’ Mercedes, which had been passed down to him by his mother. She had shipped it all the way from America. It was shiny polished grey, with wonderful leather seats, and he was very proud of it. So you can imagine how chuffed I was that I was now considered trustworthy enough to drive it too. I took it out a number of times, purring through the streets; it was a dream to drive, and I loved it too. Until one day I suddenly found myself rather too close to the cars parked on either side of the road which I needed to manoeuvre through (it was quite a wide car and happened to have a left-hand drive) – it suddenly seemed a very narrow gap – and I was going too fast to be able to do anything about it. I took a deep breath in (as if that might make us smaller), but then scraped (and screeched) against the side of the car parked to my right. What made matters even worse was, when the driver of the car emerged from within, and asked me (rather surprised) what was going on . . . I soon noticed that, because his car was a Land Rover, the external knee-height ‘step’ accessing the passenger seat had gouged and grooved its way down the entire length of my father’s car. We had come out by far the worse. The driver was surprisingly nice about it, but it’s hard to describe how awful I felt: simply wretched, the shame and guilt at the consequences of my own poor judgement and recklessness, but even more so at the disappointment my father would feel at my damaging the precious car that he’d entrusted to me. I decided I had to confess immediately and drove straight (and very carefully) to his office. To my relief he happened to be there. He was rather surprised to see me, but when I finally blurted out the reason, he simply said, ‘Well, never mind . . . We’ll sort it out.’ No anger, no harsh judgement, no retribution. I couldn’t really believe it. And he never mentioned it again. It may seem a rather trivial example, but I can assure you it wasn’t. The depth of love and mercy in his response was overwhelming.

He was humble, endlessly generous and giving of himself and his time and energy, but he was always there if you needed him – especially at the end of the day when he often worked late into the night. No matter how ordinary or insignificant something might seem to you to be bothering him with, whatever mattered to you mattered to him, and he was endlessly patient in listening to it. He never made you feel small or ignorant or stupid; he listened and attended to you in a way that raised you up to a fuller dignity and stature. He called it ‘engaging people from within’. His face was gentle and kind: rich, warm brown eyes with a loving smile and light in them – that ‘apple of my eye’ look.

In recent years we had an ongoing conversation that went something like this: ‘I’m bored, Dad: I love my work and all that I do, but intellectually I’m bored.’

‘We must do something about that,’ he said.

I had tried to talk about it with other people. but had not got very far. People had been kind and thoughtful, but somehow either too full of their own ideas of what they thought I might be interested in, or too reticent about even exploring the possibilities, unable to stay open to encouraging the as yet unrecognized raw potential or longing within. It became increasingly urgent, as he became iller and the windows of opportunity for deep conversation narrower. Until one day we finally got straight to the point (although, as was so often the case, only in response to my initiative).

‘What is it that you want to think about?’ my father asked.

‘I’m not sure . . . That’s the whole problem . . . I can’t decide.’

We sat in silence together, deep calling to deep, anticipating and trusting something to emerge; some deep hope, dream or desire that I had not yet been able to recognize. ‘Maybe laughter . . . or silence . . .’ (We had already decided that ‘remorse’, on which I had already written, had had its day.) But they soon fizzled. We sat some more. (There was something very Quaker about it.) And then suddenly, from almost out of nowhere, yet also deep within myself, I knew: ‘Imagining!’ I said. ‘That’s it! That’s what I want to think about for the rest of my life: not imagination, but the act of imagining.’ It had happened and I was full of excitement, energy and wonder.6

One of the great sadnesses to me was that we had very little chance to take the conversation any further. In the months to come, my father’s illness consumed him more and more, and he had to preserve whatever energy he had for what mattered most: particularly communicating the contents of this book. So it was only able to be a beginning – something that would have to be taken up and carried on with others beyond his life – and yet hugely significant in all that it had accomplished in opening up possibilities yet to come.

There was something very solid about him, but you were plunged into deep waters with him, too. He had a yearning for truth – and always (then) for fuller and deeper wisdom and truth: ‘I’m always interested in everything: that’s one of my problems!’ His favourite summer ‘book bag’ – always crammed to the point of bursting – provided a wealth of reading not only for him but for the whole family, with the newest cutting-edge books on the humanities; literature; music; art; the sciences . . . He came up against the limits of language as his mind stretched and discovered new capacity and categories for the reality he was trying to do justice to; and he had endless struggles in trying to articulate, write and communicate the ‘density’ of what he was discovering and conceptualizing. It wasn’t that he couldn’t say things in plain English; I often used to say to him, ‘But what do you mean, Dad?’, and after a few minutes he could usually explain what he (or someone else) meant in perfectly simple language. But somehow, creating new words and redefining old ones was an inherent part of the ongoing expansion of his heart, mind and soul – vital to him. Language and concepts stretched him and each other into new realms, and new words and phrases came into being as he participated and went deeper into the re-creative life of the Word itself: the God who says ‘I am who I am. and I shall be who I shall be,’ endlessly innovative and new. My father always made you know that you were part of something much, much bigger.

And although I sometimes just wished that he would be satisfied with the ‘good enough’ and not always have to think everything through for himself (usually right from the start) once again, I grew to realize what a gift it was: to think with such freedom, openness and boldness. He was never intimidated by anything or anyone.

Some of the difficulty he had in trying to find words (he published very few of the many books he had in him) went right back. He was born in New York on 9 November 1930 into an affluent conservative American family (his European ancestors were among the earliest ‘pilgrim’ settlers in the USA) – the third of four children (boy, girl, boy, boy) – to ‘Mr and Mrs John Alexander Hardy’ (as they were always known; his mother’s name was Barbara). While privileged economically, educationally and culturally, the family was perhaps less well off in other ways. Just before my father was born, his paternal grandmother died, and his parents complied with his grandfather’s request that they move to live with him, so that his mother could keep house for him/them. So the family was very much under the rule and thumb of ‘Grandpa’, until he died in 1947 (18 years later, when they finally moved into New York City). This was an ongoing source of tension within the family, particularly with my father’s parents. Another was the fact that one day shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, and without a word to anyone, his father took himself off and signed up for the army.

They lived in a large house on a peninsula in Whitestone, a wealthy Long Island suburb, with a series of Irish nannies, so although his mother adored him, he perhaps had less of her attention than he might have (especially after the arrival of his youngest brother), and he described her as very formal and emotionally distant. The children went to the best (private) schools, but were always reminded that they were not as affluent as their peers, and were very isolated. They felt socially insecure and were never encouraged to develop friendships or to bring friends back to the house. My father remembered being very shy and how he suffered with a stammer throughout his childhood and adolescence: ‘It was much easier to think and map than to speak.’ He described himself as speechless in some ways (even in later years), particularly in the area of emotional speech and language.

Dan with siblings: in order from the left: Jack (John A. Hardy Jr), Dan, Ann and Dick)

Petrol rationing during the war made it increasingly difficult to travel back and forth to school every day, so the children were sent off to boarding school: Dan (aged 12) and his brothers Jack and Dick to Emerson and then on to (Phillips) Exeter Academy (New Hampshire), and his sister Ann to Abbot Academy near Boston (Massachusetts).

Perhaps one of the saving graces for this generation of the Hardy family was that they found their own place of sanctuary at Twin Lakes in the Berkshire Mountains in upstate Connecticut, where they spent every summer. My grandfather (an engineer) designed and built the much-loved house, which my father later went on to own and tend for himself and which became ‘home base’ (in the USA) for his own family in years to come. Again, it was isolated and often lonely, but a place of great beauty, peace and the elements: a place where (as a child) he read, thought, swam, rowed, kept ducks and boats, and developed his interests in photography, film, classical music and sound systems. Church (fairly low Anglican) seems to have played some – but not a very essential – part within the life of the family as a whole during these years.

He is remembered as having quite a temper, being very stubborn at times, as frequently losing all track of time (so absorbed was he in whatever he was doing), being late for everything, as well as being fundamentally kind, responsible and sweet-natured. Even then, he was the primary care-giver of the family, tending, herding and rescuing, eager to give generously and unconditionally. He was tidy and practical, but is particularly renowned for a moment on his wedding day, when, towards the end of the reception, it suddenly became apparent that Dan was missing, only to be found some time later (much to the relief of his new wife Perrin, together with the whole party), back in his apartment, absorbed in packing for his honeymoon – oblivious of what all the fuss was about.

And my father always loved penguins, for as long as anyone can remember, especially emperor penguins.

But the lake home was also a place where he faced a lot of pain and wrestling. He suffered several prolonged and excruciating bouts of osteomyelitis7 during his mid-teens (just before the days of penicillin); there were many summers when he was longing and yet somehow unable to write. And he was there for his last summer, too – shortly before his death, when, as well as being the place he most wanted to be, it often felt like Gethsemane.

In spite of his reluctance to talk about himself, there was one occasion when my father had no choice. Shortly before his death, he was awarded an honorary DD8 by General Theological Seminary (‘GTS’ in New York City) and was invited to travel to receive it, together with giving a speech about himself, his life and his ministry.

Although there was no question of his being able to travel at this point, he was thrilled at the possibility of my being able to receive the degree and speak on his behalf; and while unable to put anything on to paper, he was still adamant that he wanted to come up with something to say. So he asked us to help him (David his colleague, friend, co-author,9 son-in-law; and myself, his daughter, also an Anglican priest). And we spent time reflecting on his life in a way that had never been possible before: he was somehow able to say things about himself through us that he’d never been able to until then. This is the message he sent:

Dear Friends in Faith,

It is a delight and an honour to receive this honorary doctorate from General Theological Seminary and to be represented by my daughter, the Revd Deborah Ford.

The genesis of my vocation to ordination lay in my years as a student in Haverford College and in the finding of oneself before God that was encouraged and enabled by participation in its regular Quaker worship. The rhythm and pattern of worship of ‘General’ [Theological Seminary], (four services a day in chapel) then built on this and was the most formative thing during my time as a student here. It was a daily invitation to go deeper into the intensity of God, an attraction that has perhaps been the most fundamental dynamic of my life.

My title post (served in Christ Church, Greenwich) added a second key dynamic. This is exemplified best through my engagement with a group of young people – beginning with what really mattered and was significant for them, and then trusting, discerning and helping them to recognize the source and energy of life (God’s Spirit) already at work within their lives – [and] making the deep connections with the truth of the gospel. They were hungry for this, and the group began to thrive in just a short space of time. The curacy culminated in helping to design the new daughter church of St Barnabas, strengthening an interest in architecture that in later years has proved fruitful again and again both with actual buildings and with the architectonics of theology and institutions.

I returned to GTS as a fellow and tutor for two years, accompanied by my wife Perrin, who, together with our growing family, grew to be central to my life. The experience of teaching and a sense of the crying need for theological thinking led to further study in Oxford University. Yet that was in many ways a painful disappointment, finding a theology that was too influenced by positivist philosophy and rarely confident enough to explore the depths and wonders of God and God’s ways with the world.

The 21 years that followed were spent teaching in the University of Birmingham. The ‘golden thread’ of those rich and varied years was the pursuit of a theology that might give dedicated attention both to the intensity of God and to the way the world is, especially as described, interpreted and explained by theologians, philosophers and scientists since the sixteenth century. Exploring and testing their thought was a slow and often lonely task, but for several hours each week there was intensive conversation with the colleague who became my son-in-law, David Ford. They were wonderful hours, exploring through the lens of praise and the superabundance of God’s truth and love.

Moving to the Van Mildert Professorship of Divinity in the University of Durham and a canonry in Durham Cathedral was like spiralling back to a GTS-like combination of daily worship with academic work. If I were to choose just one key element in those years it would be the fresh, multifaceted involvement in ecclesiology that has remained at the forefront of my thinking ever since.

Then I re-crossed the Atlantic to be Director of the Princeton Center of Theological Inquiry for five years. Much of my time there was spent in rethinking the Center (along lines now happily being pursued by the current Director) and in working closely with individual members from many disciplines and many countries. But judged in terms of long-term results it is probably the relationship with one member, the Jewish philosopher Peter Ochs of the University of Virginia, that has been most fruitful. He, David Ford (of Cambridge University) and I have spent much time over many years since the early 1990s working together with others to develop the practice of Scriptural Reasoning, the shared study of our scriptures by Jews, Christians and Muslims.

I 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 night,

while they say to me all day long,

‘Where is your God?’ (v. 3)

Although at first it was difficult for us to get a sense of this in relation to my father’s life, as we sat and listened to the psalm in my father’s voice, we began to be honest about some of the difficult and darker strands of his life: particularly the Oxford years, of which he wrote:

If I had wanted some trials by which to refine my calling, they were there all right. At the time, Oxford philosophy – and such was its influence, much else besides – was largely in the grip of logical positivism, a movement that reduced Christian belief either to nonsense or simple moral guidance . . . It was not a comfortable time, not least because no one, certainly not those with whom I worked, had very helpful ideas of the way forward. It was good because intensive study day after day developed my capacity for concentrated thought, but the options open to theologians like me were very limited, and it was a deeply frustrating time.15

More recently, he referred to this experience as a ‘black hole’ (his words) and began to speak more openly of the experience of having his doctoral thesis rejected and his agony and shame in feeling completely misheard and misunderstood: ‘a misfit’. He was offered an MPhil instead and refused to accept it, and for years there was a lingering sense of bitterness in him in relation to it. The years at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton had their difficulties, too:16

Those were interesting years, gathering the best scholars and helping them work together, while also establishing regular consultations, bringing together leading specialists from around the world to meet regularly to address special topics, but the tensions with the seminary and the politics of the time inhibited the potential there and when it became evident that I had brought the place as far as I could without further assistance, and none was forthcoming, it seemed right to retire from there and get back to work.

These things I remember as I pour out my soul:

how I went with the procession

and led them to the house of God,

with joyous songs of thanksgiving:

a festive multitude. (v. 4)

And yet we remembered how (as for the psalmist), no matter what he might be going through, regular, faithful worship was always such a priority for him.17 The deeply formative rhythms of prayer and worship established through his years at school, college and seminary, with their daily dynamic of reorientation to God, were continued through his involvement in a series of local churches. He was committed to the daily discipline and nurture of the ordinary things as well as the highbrow. Preaching, pastoring and regular participation in celebrating the Eucharist were essential to his vocation; so, at times when his jobs were in more secular settings, he was careful to develop his priestly role and presence in local worshipping communities:

Which are the most reliable companions? Scripture, Eucharist: consistent living in and participation in the church’s life is terribly important to me, and constant exposure to that. That’s why I really do rely very heavily on the church. For me a lot of these things are like living in a house of abundance and simply drawing on that, rather than going for particular ways of thinking. The abundance is around all the time.

He often felt quite on the margins of things but nevertheless treasured his many years as an Assistant Priest at St Mark’s, Londonderry (West Midlands), together with All Saints’ (Princeton), Christ Church Canaan (Connecticut) and Great St Mary’s (Cambridge); and he found his role as the Van Mildert Canon Professor (Durham University and Cathedral) particularly fulfilling, enabling the academic theologian and the priest in him to come together in new ways. He was also a well-known face at evensong in both St John’s and King’s College Chapels (Cambridge), which he loved to attend with Perrin whenever he could – right up to the week before he died.

Why are you downcast O my soul?

And why do you throw me into confusion?

Hope in God, for I will yet praise him

for his saving presence. (v. 5)

Worship and praise were fundamentally for God’s sake and central to his whole vision and understanding of full human being and society, ‘shaping and aligning our desire with the Lord’s’.

My God, my soul is downcast.

Therefore I remember you

from the land of Jordan and Hermon and of Mount Mizar.

Deep calls to deep at the sound of your cataracts;

all your breakers and your billows

have gone over me. (vv. 6–7)

At some level he felt (and always had felt) deeply ‘unloved’: no doubt this was one of the reasons he identified so closely with the marginalized and with the life and work of Samuel T. Coleridge. He had great integrity; he had no time for the games people play (which also had its flip side; he was surprisingly naive and idealistic, reluctant almost, when it came to being political); and he always had just as much (if not more) time for the outsider or underdog as he did for the many high-status people he engaged with. This was perhaps something personal to him, but it also had an element of prophetic dissatisfaction about it (see below, p. 22).

Throughout my childhood, I was often aware of a sense of loneliness and heaviness (sadness?) about him and wondered why he had virtually no close personal relationships or friends. He related intellectually with his colleagues and with those for whom he had pastoral care/responsibility, but it was much more difficult for him to share his own feelings and emotions. In later years he sometimes spoke himself of the difficulties he felt he had in communicating, particularly about himself, and in relating to and trusting others. In many ways he was a deeply private and solitary person, with areas that were quite encapsulated18 and defended within him: he was always responsive, but hardly ever took the initiative, however much you might long for him to (see below, pp. 20, 138 for more on this).

By day may the Lord send forth his loving kindness,

so that by night I am with song:

a prayer for the God of my life. (v. 8)

But the work of God’s Spirit in him, ‘abyss calling to abyss’, meant that the black hole (whatever shape or form it took) never had the last word, and, despite times of real darkness, he was not someone who lived in despair; he was always more attracted to the light and able to keep hoping and trusting in God’s goodness.

He never regretted his decision to remain in the UK:

People in Oxford encouraged me to look for a teaching position in England, a possibility we had never dreamed of. And there came a time when I was offered two posts: one in England and one in the USA. It became clear that the post in England was the better one. Most positions in US universities offered no opportunity to develop as a theologian, but the one at the University of Birmingham (England) was the first ever lectureship in England in contemporary theology. Finding myself in a good, imaginative department of theology in a major civic university in a Midlands city (the second largest after London) was a wonderful gift. And gradually, never intending to stay long, Perrin and I found ourselves and our family (by now our two daughters (Deb and Jen) and son (Dan) were joined by Chris) increasingly settled and happy. The time and opportunities stretched on, academic work enlarged and became still more fascinating, and life there – the city wrongly described in US guidebooks as ‘a smoggy place not worth 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 study outside of religion. In the 1960s (while I was at Oxford), I went to the Hebrew University for an academic conference on the Philosophy and History of Science – and more recently for an inter-faith conference at the Hartman Institute, but that was also a non-religious visit, even if for inter-faith conversation: both visits had been for reasons other than a full engagement with the Holy Land. So it made a lot of difference to Perrin and me that this was pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and I give real credit to those who put the trip together. It was conceived by Yazid Said (who had been born in Nazareth and reared as a Christian, so he knew the situation and place well) in collaboration with others at Great St Mary’s, and they planned it well. They were trying to introduce us to the whole situation there, political and historical and religious, and we were confirmed in our desire to do the trip by the way it was organized. We rested quite easily in it . . .

The pilgrimage began at Nazareth where we were taken to the Church of the Annunciation. It seems the intention was to expose us to a place where there had been a divine address – the Annunciation of the angel to Mary – and then there was a sequence of places and events after that: the Sea of Galilee, a boat trip and a visit to some of the shrines along the shores, but these were external, cultural events in a sense – not spiritual.

So it all really began when we went from the guesthouse in Nazareth where we were staying to visit the headwaters of the Jordan . . . a place where people had been touched. On the bus on the way I was asked to give a homily on ‘The Shaping of Desire’ (based on Psalm 42)22 – and this seemed to strike people quite powerfully. When we got there, there were waters simply ‘bubbling up’ out of the ground. We all gathered around the place where this ‘bubbling up’ was happening, and I was asked to read the psalm, ‘Like as the heart desireth water brooks . . .’ Then we shared a Eucharist with a renewal of baptism vows. There was a strange ambience. It was almost like being encircled by the waters, and, although it wasn’t a very polished exercise, there was a basic kind of renewal going on. People were folded into the atmosphere of the place – disappearing and then reappearing in the mists by the waters . . . It showed how we can be incorporated in something beyond ourselves. People realized that something was really happening; it was not just an ‘exercise’ to be observed, but a drama to enter into. This is when the pilgrimage really began.

At the Headwaters of the Jordan

I’ve no idea if it was as significant for the others as it was for me, but for me it was the beginning of an experience of the play of light. It was an opening into a new understanding of the dimensions of what is going on: the light really going deep into people and transforming them from within: irradiating them. And I noticed qualitatively different relationships between people: people were more open and prepared to engage with one another; it was no longer now a notably social tourist group. And of course it was not only what was happening to and within them, but the way I saw.

The Road to Jericho

Security wall on the road to Jericho

After the Jordan, we went down towards Jericho. I’d prepared for it a lot, as I was taking the Eucharist there. It is in the West Bank: a Palestinian area of the Holy Land – land that has already been measured and configured for its use within the divine purpose – that is now surrounded and cordoned off by Israel.

So the notion of Divine Measurement was on my mind and an important preparation for Jerusalem. What is it to be measured for God’s purposes? And what might it mean in this place: Jericho, this precursor to the measured city of Jerusalem? I thought about the notion that the world is ordered in a certain way and the ‘Chicago School’ understanding of this in phenomenological terms . . . But I also wondered how to move beyond this to something more ontological: not just decided by human beings, but an understanding that acknowledges something already given and dwelling in the place. Perhaps there could be another kind of measurement that rests not only on bodies and objective knowledge, but more in line with quantum theory, which is trying to measure things by their position and is relational. This opens up the possibility that divine measurement is not simply about God setting something down in a body and leaving it there, but that there is a more fluid, dynamic view that follows the divine purpose.

And what might this mean for the city of Jerusalem? Perhaps that being measured out as special in God’s purposes would not be because it is embodied there in any final sort of way, but because it is a place where something could be learnt and recognized: a dynamic to be entered into . . . This would be a hugely significant shift in emphasis and understanding.

But it has also become a very problematic place, a place of deep struggle about something people won’t bring to the surface: ‘the deep and dark places’ (religious, political, social). How do we even begin to think of these things? If the creation of light brings darkness, perhaps holiness creates envy – or greed – a claim to a right of possession and a need to possess God, to be God. Perhaps that is what’s at the heart of idolatry and at the heart of the competition and fighting that have become such a part of Jerusalem’s history.

And what can counter this? A shift from Paul Ricœur’s ‘human economy’ of equivalence and exchange to the ‘divine economy’ of abundance and excess.23 God is not competitive: what is best for him is best for us, too. That’s the mystery of service: entering and going deeper into relation with God is not about loss and restriction, but gain. But there is a great sense of urgency about it all.

Entering Jerusalem

Jerusalem overlook: The old city

I found our entry into Jerusalem very powerful: the Holy Mount/Temple; the Wailing Wall and, even more so (to me), the entrance to the tunnel under the Western Wall. It’s not easy to say quite why, but what struck me as we walked down under the excavations of the old wall was the power of the place: the most ancient stones of the Temple, leading up to much later ones. It’s not the physical mass of the place in itself, but that it is alive: radiant with light. There was a Bat Mitzvah taking place down there and a steady stream of people stopping to pray. It gave me the sense of this being the repository of God’s light. One could see it phenomenologically, but it’s far more than that: it takes eyes to see it, that’s all. I just found I was embraced by the light.

Light on the temple walls

It was the sum total of all this that gave me a sense of the huge power of God’s light and energy and how the divine is at work. But the question is, ‘How to get it across?!’ It’s an infinitely probing thing: not so much light’s searching as light’s penetrating. What is it that attracts someone to something better? The strong sense I have is that the Goodness simply draws them to something fuller. It’s an opening and enabling process: an attraction and recognition of the life and source of life within. It is like a granulation of patterns, words, light, senses: things percolating up just like the waters of the Jordan; and a whole range of things coming to the surface, with a new awareness of the simple wonder and beauty of creation and life itself; and with that, the awareness of how little we’ve ‘got it’. So with the light comes sadness and loss but also a yearning to live from this source and to be oriented to it: to the life and health bubbling up deep within. The sense of sorrow is sharing in the grief of God and his longing for the best for his people and the world: longing for us not to be distracted or to waste time. It’s about recognizing how much more there is than you’ve ever seen before and being attracted by it and lifted up to it. This light is something that’s capable of lifting you deeply from within: the word I’ve used a lot for it is simply ‘attraction’.

The ‘Dominus Flevit’ Chapel (the site where ‘the Lord wept over Jerusalem’)

Something about the light is its openness and not being exclusive; its being open is inherent to it. We can’t contain the light however much we might want to or try to. Remember YHWH: ‘I am who I am and I shall be who I shall be . . .’ Our human attempts to hold and define God become inimical to the light. We cannot grasp hold: like trying to grasp Israel for the Jews. It is one thing to have a homeland, but it’s quite another to possess it and restrict it. Think what it’s like to have a child: it’s a gifting of responsibility.

So what is it to indwell somewhere and have a homeland without possessing it? How can we participate honestly in the huge reality of the light without needing to possess it? The divine light is lifting you to something you don’t need to possess: it is lifting you to another sphere. It enters you non-possessively and filters up within you. We’re regenerated – transformed and rebuilt – from deep within.

People don’t believe things can be renewed in that way. They’re too stuck, too fixed; that’s the heavy imprint of materialism that most people live with. But what if we were freed from that? What if we were given new categories and could shift away from the Aristotelian fixed units of measure to something new altogether? Into a sphere of indefinite possibility and the realization that this energy can reshape and redefine everything from within? That’s the language of the resurrection: measurement is redefined. It is not pre-ordained things, plans or units that define, but this ‘unit’ of the most primal energies – the life and energy of the Spirit. I wrote a paper once, while I was at the Center of Theological Inquiry. It was never published, but it was uniquely important for me: ‘Spirit of Creation, Reconciled’. It taught me the power and depth of the Spirit that I hadn’t grasped before: that the Spirit is primary in the Trinity, the bedrock of the Trinity. It was quite a shift for me. I think, like most people, I had a fairly conventional notion of it until then, seeing the Spirit as a sort of add-on dimension to the Trinity, not deeply intrinsic to it. But then I began to realize that it is much more fundamental. I began to recognize it as the energy of the divine: always there at the beginning and before the beginning, right at the heart of God.

People are often habitually drawn away from the light. So how, with all the leaves falling, covering it up and burying the light, how do we uncover it? This is our tragedy: extensity. We’re caught up in this thing after that thing and then another thing. When we meet someone who is open and drawn into this light – whose eyes are opened to see – it’s not just their personal experience. Something is happening in that person on behalf of humanity and he/she is making an authentic contribution: fulfilling something vital. People lose and miss the significance of who they are and what their purpose is. Sharing is important because if something good is not shared, something is missed. It’s about us sharing and participating in the depths of God and God’s goodness, indefinitely and infinitely. That’s where things get really exciting: there’s a depth in God that is fathomless. That’s where it gets quite dazzling: what might be! The infinite potential of the world. We limit ourselves so much! But the invitation is to get caught up in the re-creative Spirit of the divine: the Trinity.

Marc Chagall’s ‘The Tribe Simeon’ window at the Hadassah Hospital Synagogue, Jerusalem24

The world has huge potential that it’s sunk away from. But it’s important not to focus on the remedial: to focus, instead, on the huge potential: God’s goodness and Spirit at work in and among us! We need to be clever in the ways of the world and to see what’s gone wrong – and even perhaps why – but not get stuck there. It’s a matter of identifying the blocks and then moving on. It’s easy to get stuck in the blockages rather than focusing on the wonder and glory and vision of God and getting swept up and caught up in it. It’s not a matter of us working out ‘how’.

There is a strong temporal thrust of movement forward, a perfecting movement towards the fullness of God’s creation and God’s work, far beyond what we can see. What is the fullness of God’s work with the world?25 That’s plainly what it’s all directed to: there’s a huge panoply of things that need to be attended to.26 The dynamic is there, but we have to participate in it and identify what’s involved in it. It’s partly a matter of being swept up in and by it, but it’s also a matter of acknowledging that these responsibilities are there. So often we get distracted. What is it that both attracts and limits the Church? It has become over-concentrated on its inner meaning. We need to learn how to persist with our task in the world. What are the essentials of this? Opening up the true potential and resources of human life: liturgy is one way of facilitating and helping people to enter into this creative dynamic and drawing them deeper into the light, letting it penetrate them and ‘irradiate’ them. But it’s certainly not exclusive to the Church; there are lots of other ways, too, and we need to recognize and interpret them in public life. It’s about how the Church relates to the world.

Emerging from the Walls: From Jerusalem to Sinai and Home

After emerging from the tunnel we went beyond the Wailing Wall and then back to where we were staying. Until this point we had been one whole group, but this was the end of the trip for most people, so we had a time of re-gathering and recollection before saying farewell to those who were about to leave. It was a significant time of sharing, listening to what different people had made of it all, and those of us who’d decided to go on went back to Bethlehem, where we had had a day visit earlier in the trip.

Emerging from the tunnel under the Wailing Wall

It was appalling to see how reduced the Palestinians had become: from our chintzy purpose-built hotel we could see all too clearly the huge wall that has been built to serve as a barrier to any communication between Bethlehem and Israel. It was deeply symbolic – and it was ominous, with sections of concrete abutted together.

So it was a strange thing. We were sort of suspended into this unbelievably posh hotel, and we spent the night there, surrounded by elegant showrooms where we had the opportunity to buy whatever we might have wanted. But we could do absolutely nothing, until leaving on a bus for Sinai early the next morning.

It was a very, very long trip – way down past the Dead Sea – and there were a few minor stops. By then I was finding it all pretty gruelling; perhaps that’s when I realized I was getting too tired.

I had toyed with the idea of going up Sinai, but that wouldn’t have been the wise thing to do. Ideally I’d have loved to, and some did: setting off in the dark early hours – some opting for camels – and then when they came down we spent a good part of the day around the monastery there, built over the site of the burning bush.

It looks like it was just another step in a tourist trip. But it wasn’t. It had become a pilgrimage when right back at the Jordan people realized they were inside the whole thing, being re-baptized. Then it wasn’t simply an exterior thing, but their own drama. So at the monastery at Sinai, although it could all have been treated as a museum experience, it was something much deeper. It was about a reality confronting you that was far more impressive than conventional philosophy will allow.

The monastery sitting at the base of Sinai isn’t just an interesting geological artefact. It’s an impressive ancient Christian monastery: hugely significant for Christians and Jews and filled with connections. It has a Jewish presence there, and there is no over-rating its huge importance for Jews: it is not possessed and remains a vivid reminder of Moses’ encounter with YHWH at the burning bush. This is the burning, living bush, the living presence of God. The monastery is called ‘The Monastery of the Divine Fire’. It is a very special place; in a sense, it’s almost a bore-hole into the divine fire, with the light that goes with it: a place of ongoing light.

The Monastery of the Divine Fire at Mt. Sinai

It’s a place of transfiguration, hinting at an unending source of light: the ‘I am that I am’. What does that mean? That there’s an ‘I am’ always reaching back to a further ‘I am’, and there’s no end to that process. It’s often taken as a statement of ontology, but it’s more than that if you go into it. It takes you further into the ‘I am’ and into the infinity of the light that emerges. For years, I’ve found that to be the most nourishing thing of all: that there’s no sudden halt to the direction you can go; there’s always more, and that is pretty unquestionably linked to the light. The simple resplendence of the light here paralleled my experiences in Palestine.

It is amazing, the burning bush: it’s a primitive ‘symbol’ and yet it is not consumed. It means that the divine can indwell the world without damaging it or taking it over. The transfiguration is more complex, but what supervenes them all is this enormous light. If you think of creation as in some sense a breaking through of the light, there are real parallels with the transfiguration and with the end times, with the unifying, consistent theme being the light, with its gentle and yet strong attraction.

How do healing and reconciliation happen? This light heals without overburdening; that’s not in its nature. Christians often want a strong right arm. They talk in the language of power, but that’s not what it’s about; it’s about a gentle infiltration from within, not coming at you from outside, like a ton of bricks.

How does light happen within the world? It irradiates from within. It’s like seeing people ‘light up’ within; it’s a huge privilege, and we have to recognize and discern it in one another and to embrace and delight in it.

That’s what working with postgraduates is about: gently edging forward the things that are being prompted in them. Things take on a new kind of tentativeness. It’s about letting them recognize and articulate for themselves what is happening and what it is that they’re a part of; that’s the wonder. That’s what Jesus did. He didn’t say, ‘Here I am: this is what to do . . .’ He didn’t come with the purpose of giving a standard or doctrine; he met with people, and the meeting has to show itself as deeply as possible, to reveal who he is for – and in relationship with – each person. Read the Gospels: suspend your judgement and let him come alive afresh. I’ve learnt a lot in the last month about how Jesus happens for people. I’ve moved from understanding Jesus as a given who presents himself to you – and you can either take him or leave him – to realizing that it’s much more about Jesus walking alongside people and interacting with them/us. It opens up a much bigger space with Jews and Muslims: walking with Jesus allows you to walk with other traditions. It provides a wonderful opening because you can imagine Jesus walking with others, too. It’s a triple hermeneutic as Jesus meets with Jews and Muslims too. Just imagine the Emmaus Road story as a story of Jesus coming and walking among his disciples: Christian, Jew and Muslim. Simply look at all the things that Jesus did: his ‘love statements’ opening out the light in things and people, just being there in the flesh with them.

Coming Home (Back to my voice!)

This is where my father ended his ‘narrative’ account of his pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

He returned home full of the Spirit. Something so powerful and deep had happened that afterwards (every day) he could not rest until he had found ways to do justice to it and to articulate more of it. Now there was a sense of Jeremiah’s ‘within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot’27 – but with more of the praise and wonder of the Magnificat (‘My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour’), too!

He had a new conviction of his purpose and deepest vocation and identity, and he was swept up in articulating the profound glimpse of the light and glory of God he had had during the pilgrimage.28 There was a new sense of integration and ability to articulate, too.

But he also returned with an unexplained and never-before sense of exhaustion: ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me: I’ve never felt so tired in my whole life. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older and I’ll pick up again when I get some rest . . .’ But he didn’t. When I asked him to describe what it felt like (on the way to the hospital), he said, ‘Usually my mind is reaching out for things – for ideas and information: all the time, but now it’s as if I can’t . . .’ And within days he was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour. A friend, who is a doctor, said to us: ‘Just pray it’s not a GBM.’29 But it was. All he needed was enough time, and from that moment he began to talk with Peter every day about the contents – ‘their part’ – of this book.

Notes

1 ‘Now on that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus . . . and talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him’ (Luke 24.13ff.).

2 At the time of writing I do not have enough distance on his life and death to be able to call him anything but ‘my father’.

3 Cf. Arvo Pärt (one of his favourite composers): ‘I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener’ (On Alina: Spiegel im Spiegel, ECM New Series 1591, 449 958–2, ECM Records GmbH 1999).

4 Micheal O’Siadhail, Hail! Madam Jazz, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992, p. 14.

5 K. Barth, Church Dogmatics IV.I, Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1958.

6 ‘Truly my life is one long hearkening unto myself and unto others and unto God. And if I say hearken, it is really God who hearkens inside me. The most essential and deepest in me hearkening unto the most essential and deepest in the other. God to God’ (Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life and Letters and Papers from Westerbork, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995, p. 204).

‘When I pray, I hold a silly, naïve, or deadly serious dialogue with what is deepest inside me, which for sake of convenience I call God . . . I repose in myself. And that part of myself, that deepest and richest part in which I repose, is what I call “God”’ (Hillesum, Interrupted Life, p. xv).

7 A deep infection of the bone – in his case, his left shin, following a soccer injury.

8 Doctorate of Divinity.

9 Jubilate: Theology in Praise, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1984. Now available under the title Living in Praise: Worshipping and Knowing God, second edition, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2005. Also published in the USA as Praising and Knowing God, Louisville, KY: Westminster Press, 1985.

10 Published 13 October 2007.

11 Ephesians 3.14ff.

12 ‘Scriptural reasoning or SR for short, refers to a way in which those of different faiths share their scriptures together, originally derived from a practice called “textual reasoning” among a group of Jewish scholars out of which Scriptural Reasoning has evolved. It’s a way in which Christians, Muslims and Jews share their scriptures together (texts from the Bible, the Qur’an and the Tanakh – often quite difficult and challenging texts). What makes it work is the very open, trusting and enquiring spirit within which it is done. One of the ways Dan described it was “discovering the patterns of Scripture and how they relate to patterns within other faiths”.’ For further information about Scriptural Reasoning visit http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/jsrforum/pastconferences.html (University of Virginia). There is also a film: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week1106/cover.html. SR is growing fast in a number of countries around the world as a means of inter-faith dialogue.

13 My father died during the week when he had hoped to be at the annual SR gathering at the American Academy of Religion. Days before, when I told him that Peter wanted to come to see him, he protested (knowing how much SR meant to Peter) that he should go San Diego instead. When Peter decided to come anyway, he was only pacified when we agreed that we would do SR here, so that he could be part of it too. Sadly, Peter arrived just after he had died, but it seemed very fitting to honour this commitment anyway.

14 The New Jerusalem Bible suggests that ‘the land of Jordan and Hermon’ (v. 6) might refer to a place/stage on the route of the Israelites in exile.

15 Daniel Hardy, ‘Thoughts on a lifetime so far’, unpublished paper.

16 But he was later deeply encouraged by the appointment and vision of Will Storrar as one of his successors there.

17 When we discussed various options for his funeral, he said adamantly: ‘The most important thing is that it’s an act of worship, and that the person and place facilitate that.’

18 ‘Autistic’ in the psychoanalytic sense of the word: see Frances Tustin, The Protective Shell in Children and Adults, London: Karnac, 1990.

19 See Chapter 5, pp. 102–03.

20 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, New York: Macmillan, 1955, p. 125.

21 St George’s Church, Flushing.

22 Only at the time of writing did it dawn on me that this was the psalm we studied together at the vigil before his funeral (see above).

23 Paul Ricœur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and the Imagination, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.