Читать книгу One Priest’s Wondering Beliefs - John E. Bowers - Страница 6

4:47am on a Sunday morning in May, 2007: I awake in the dark hours of this morning from a particularly vivid dream. I’ve been sorting files in my office. It seemed only days before the moment of my retirement, and I was cleaning out, going through boxes and boxes of saved stuff (I’m a packrat of ideas). In one box, two bundles of paper napkins, neatly stacked together and bound up: notes of important things to remember from luncheons and conversations, from ruminations, from studies. But they are old, have not even been looked at for years, and really are not worth examining; they probably were not worth keeping. I tossed them. Ted Blumenstein, several years dead, came walking through the office, marveling at some of the stuff I was throwing away. Pictures, short articles, longer ones, chapters out of books, conversations, all sorts of stuff. Susan Lehman was there too, and other old, unidentified friends. Sometimes they were surprised at what all I kept and what I decided to throw away. In my daytime world I have this habit of making booklets of what I choose to garner and keep. And part of what I was doing in my dream was sorting through old collections and deciding what to keep, what was worth gluing together into a makeshift book to be put on my shelf as a referent.

And that is what these pages are about too, sorting through, and deciding what to keep, what is worth binding into my reference books (a relatively small collection), and what is worthy only of the dustbin.

This book is about where this retired and aging Episcopal priest finds himself wandering spiritually today. When I packed it in over sixteen years ago from being a professional churchman, an advocate of orthodox doctrine, within a few years I found myself wandering, theologically, spiritually, exploring. In my younger years I’d heard of priests who’d lost their faith. Now I was acting like one of those but, oddly enough, I didn’t feel I was losing anything. I was questioning, challenging, looking in different directions. But I wasn’t losing anything. Instead I seemed to be wandering into new places, thinking about things in new ways. My fields had broadened. And I felt I was gaining, growing. But I was also pretty sure my fellow clergy could not appreciate where I was wandering. This was not something I thought they’d want to hear from me. So mostly I kept my mouth shut about these things. I tried to broach the subject at lunch one day with my closest clergy friend, also retired. He remained stoically quiet, listened, but said not a word back. I did not venture the subject again. Nor did he. We let it lay right where it had plopped. But now is the time to raise the subject again.

I must lay out one disclaimer: I expect this volume to be ripped to shreds by theologians, philosophers, and professional churchmen as unscholarly and in many ways inaccurate, perhaps even sloppy thinking. But I’m not writing to them. I’m very clear with myself, and with you, that I am no scholar. You will see in these pages brief flourishes of what appear to be scholarly stuff. They are not. They are the remnants of the preacher’s tools I’d accumulated over thirty years, bits and pieces of scholarly stuff I’d captured and stored away. They are useful pitons, but my work is not that of a scholar, but of a spiritual pilgrim. These pages will probably elicit a fair amount of wrath from fundamentalist and evangelical Christians, maybe even some mainline Christians. I am goring many oxen here. So if these pages anger you, just put the book away, I’m not writing to you either. The audience I am trying to reach is those Christians whose beliefs have started to grow beyond the orthodox hedge, who have begun to wonder and question and disagree, who have begun to think, “Hey, wait a minute . . . ” But who feel alone or unfaithful in doing that.

To give you a context for these chapters I’ll tell you how I got to this spiritual place. I did not set out to come here. It just happened. Naturally. No traumatic precipitant. Just a slow wandering, a searching, a groping for what might make sense where the old sense-making was unraveling. A seeking. Until I found myself here. If there were any goads I would identify two, both on the same day. On December 31, 1998 I retired from thirty-four years of active ministry in the Episcopal Church. At the modest retirement party the suffragan bishop made me a present of a book, Jack Miles’s God: a biography which immediately found a resting place on my bookshelf and stayed there untouched for several years. Retired, I was no longer professionally required to stay within the bounds of conventional orthodox doctrine, and as I listened to preachers, I began to wonder (or, perhaps, wander). Several years later I finally picked Miles’s book off my shelf. His conclusion was a bit startling, but sound. At St.Luke’s Church I offered to teach Miles’ book at the Sunday morning adult sessions. To teach something one must become fairly intimate with it, and I came away from those sessions quite shaken by Miles’ book.

In hindsight, I actually had begun this pilgrim wandering many years before. Not quite a decade before retirement I was stumbling across increasingly frequent references to “Celtic Spirituality” and the “Celtic Christian Church,” and had become curious. A few light books roused my anger that the first 800 Celtic years of my Anglican heritage had been suppressed and withheld from me. I explored, learning that the Western version I’d received as gospel was not the sole evolution of Christianity. Meanwhile my understandings of the Christianity I had been preaching were becoming less convincing to me. I reached out to those Celtic roots of the Anglican experience. I found Sr. Cintra Pemberton leading pilgrimages into Celtic lands (Wales, Scotland and Ireland) and eventually went on five different pilgrimages with her, learning about those different understandings and expressions of the Christian experience. And now knowing there are other ways to be a Christian, I began to wander theologically, searching for understandings more sensible than those that had been fed to me. So by retirement time I was ready to wander even farther afield. It took several years to get started, but then, wander I did.

To tell the whole story would be long and cumbersome. There were several paths I wandered, and several pilgrims with whom I wandered. In Part One of this volume you can catch the flavor of those spiritual wanderings, and a few of the people and places. Those chapters are not terribly germane to the central effort of this volume, but the evolution of my faith is an important part of the pilgrimage, so I start by sharing some of that. Eventually I found a small group of pilgrims wandering their own similar paths and we have shared for three years now. That group has been helpful and comforting, a coterie of fellow pilgrims to walk strange new paths with. Our discussions have not only informed me, but clarified my thinking.

For the moment I have arrived at a resting place in this pilgrimage, a place where I can reflect, and sort through, and begin to piece together. I’ve done some of that now, so the time has come for me to share more widely. I tell out these thoughts, not because they are so wonderful that others ought to know about them, but because I suspect that many unknown others are also wanderers and wonderers who are no longer adequately filled up by what the church doles out as spiritual fodder. I unveil these thoughts in the hope that other wanderers will be encouraged in their wanderings and wonderings, and perhaps even be willing to risk sharing with a few others whatever wonders they see and hear and feel and think and wonder as they search out the God’s way in the God’s world.

I need to mention one piece that was perhaps most critically useful for me in my pilgrimage. Our associate pastor, a trained spiritual director, perhaps catching a whiff of some distress in me, offered to talk with me one day. I unburdened onto him where I was in my pilgrimage, and he loaned me a book I didn’t really want, James Fowler’s Stages of Faith. While the other books I’ve read prodded me along my pilgrimage, Fowler’s book actually showed me the path I was on, and that I was not lost, merely growing, getting on. The best piece of soul medicine I’ve had as a pilgrim.

What I have to share at this moment is not a complete, well-organized systematic theology, merely a collection of thirteen chapters. I have written them each to be free-standing, but since I have written them in a clutch, they are inevitably somewhat intertwined. I begin with those three chapters which will give some idea whence my pilgrimage began, and what were my club-haulers along the way, and some journaling which shows the course my pilgrimage has taken and gives some taste of just how that happens. Then follow in Part Two eight chapters. The first is on Sin, which I consider the very linchpin of Augustine’s theological system, and therefore of Western Christianity’s thinking. I believe sin a deplorable, and very dysfunctional organizing principle for holding a theological system together, so I have sought to jerk it clean out of the structure to see where the other pieces might fall. The next three chapters then follow in course: about the God, Jesus, and the institutional church. Those four discussions together will feel like tearing things down. The next three chapters cover other doctrines I think pertinent to and supportive of my pilgrimage. And then I attempt to sum up with a piece on where I net out, intended not as a final and earth-shaking revelation, but simply what I see as I look around at this resting place. My pilgrimage will probably continue onward. In Part Three I attempt some rebuilding (which is the core of my faith, though it may not be yours). I offer my critical thoughts about our current American scene, and conclude with my own vision of where the Christ might want us to go, i.e., my vision for our future.

If all this gives a little support and courage for your own spiritual pilgrimage, then I will be satisfied. And if it does not, then I simply did not intend this volume for you.