to his wishes, and went back to school.
I was quite familiar with the college, having lived in its residence from 1947 to 1951 while taking the arts degree at University College. While seminary is usually pictured by outsiders as a dull or somewhat staid place, for good reason, the moments one seems to remember are the ones that were anything but pietistic or sedate. They appear ridiculously immature now; however, at that time these stunts served a role as sharp relief from the seriousness of studies. Looking back, it’s a wonder that any of us made it to ordination. There were water fights, usually following a “tubbing party” in which victims were rousted from bed in the middle of the night and unceremoniously dumped in a tub of icy water, often creating a cascade of water down the ancient college stairs. One night a student spied an enemy from Trinity College below his window. He dumped a pail of water on the unsuspecting foe, only to find that the innocent man was not a student at all but simply somebody waiting for a friend.
After the rigours of Oxford, the courses at Wycliffe were relatively easy. I was permitted to condense the three-year course into two because of the work I had already done in Greek, philosophy and the history of the ancient Greco-Roman world. Because learning Hellenistic Greek was a major hurdle for most young men entering the Anglican priesthood, I was made a tutor in Greek to most of them and so was able to cover the fees together with room and board. The bishop made me a deacon during my first term and so I was able to assist or stand in for clergy who were sick or otherwise unavailable on weekends. The Varsity rugger squad persuaded me to join in, and after a lengthy search for boots large enough— size 14 or 15, depending on the make—I played with considerable enjoyment. It’s a rough sport and I’m certain that some Sundays the various congregations must have wondered what I’d been doing the night before when I mounted the pulpit covered with bruises and Band-Aids. My preaching, which I would now describe as “evangelical-lite,” seemed popular enough, and overall I found the experience enjoyable and somehow managed to win the prize in Homiletics, or preaching, in my first year.
There are some risks associated with preaching, and I learned early on that communication is a tricky business. Not infrequently a person leaving the church afterwards would comment on how much they enjoyed the sermon and then say how they particularly liked some specific point that was made. The problem was that what they thought you said and what you knew (or believed) you had actually said were sometimes not the same at all. That’s why later on in the ministry I made a habit of stopping the sermon earlier than before and coming down from the pulpit to take questions from parishioners. The “I talk, you listen” version of communication still prevails in many churches today, although in our highly interactive culture that’s about the only place left where this is so. The Internet and the ubiquitous social media now carried in virtually everyone’s purse or pocket have changed the way we communicate forever.
The other danger associated with preaching is much more subtle: the way clergy are seduced by the praise into believing they really are as eloquent and wise or spiritual as their flock would have them believe. There is a great spiritual trap there, and nobody at the college warned about it. Often it’s only recognized after a fall or in some cases disgrace, as in the episodes we’ve witnessed in recent years with a few highly popular American evangelistic preachers.
What really interested me most during the two years of seminary was Biblical studies. Though Wycliffe’s approach to the Bible was ultra-conservative without being actually hard-core fundamentalist—the college motto was Verbum Domini Manet (“The Word of the Lord Remains,” or stands solid)—there was a large, up-to-date library and I knew how to use it to full advantage. So, for the first time I was able to research for myself what contemporary scholars were saying about the Scriptures, and what I discovered was quite a shock. It had already become very apparent from what some of our professors were teaching us that there was a considerable gap between what seminaries teach and what people in the pews are told (although that gap was to be greatly narrowed several decades later with the arrival on the scene of the Internet and search engines such as Google). However, what I began to learn as I read more widely for myself was that there was an even larger lacuna between what our professors were teaching us and the latest scholarship of the day. In other words, Wycliffe wasn’t exactly in the vanguard of critical thinking at that time. I was a little surprised, for example, to find that there isn’t a single teaching in the whole of the Sermon on the Mount that is original. Everything in Matthew chapters 5 to 7, where the Sermon is found, can be matched or found already existing in the Judaism of the time, either in the Old Testament itself or in the Talmud or the Mishnah. Some of the sayings are anticipated in Plato, about four hundred years earlier.
Even more surprising—something that was so cataclysmic in its implications that I deliberately shut it off from full consciousness for many years—was the virtually total dearth of evidence for a historical figure at the centre of Christianity. Because of the fundamentalist “slant” of the overall program, we were never taught to question the Gospels themselves, or the Acts of the Apostles, or the letters attributed to Paul; so it seemed as if there was an abundance of historical material behind Jesus. Certainly the Jesus Story itself had a very long history—but so too had the story of Lucifer! Looking behind the scenes through the eyes of modern critics, I searched in vain for the kind of evidence that my Oxford studies had trained me to watch for: genuinely contemporary eyewitnesses, secular histories, inscriptions, and other archeological artifacts such as busts, coins or artwork of different kinds. This issue would come back to haunt me in future years, but for the time being it had to be repressed. Too much was at stake to venture far into such possibly treacherous waters.
Unfortunately, unless one did as I did and roamed more widely than the courses strictly required, there was little in the seminary experience to kindle either one’s imagination or one’s intellect with any kind of “divine fire” or passion for Christian renewal. I enjoyed the sports, the company of my fellow students and most of the lecturers, especially the principal of the time, the Reverend Dr. Ram-say Armitage, a truly Christian gentleman and a most Christ-like personality. He glowed with a love of God and a love of people. Most especially he glowed with a love of England. “A stout stick and the Sussex Downs,” was his favourite expression, and obviously very close to his idea of heaven. (Once I had been on the South Downs in spring, I knew what he meant.) He is the only person I ever knew who had twice walked the entire length of the Roman wall built by Hadrian to keep the Scots from invading Roman Britain.
When term ended in the spring of 1956, I gave the valedictory address as Senior Student or President of the graduating class. My proud parents were there, together with my two sisters, Elizabeth and Jane, and my brother George. We graduates were ordained to the priesthood in a solemn ceremony at St. James’ Cathedral in May.
The Cree Indians of my student missionary days had no word in their vocabulary for the two crucial stages of becoming a deacon and then a priest of the Church. In both ceremonies, as well as in Confirmation, which all Anglicans receive, the presiding bishop puts his hand on your head as he utters a prayer, using a phrase which in Cree quite literally means “having your head squeezed.” I felt that I had my head squeezed in ordination to the diaconate in 1954 and then again when I was “priested” in 1956 because I felt that I was being “squeezed” to fit a specific mould. I remember being extremely self-conscious as I donned a clerical collar, black stock and sober suit for the first of these ceremonies. I dressed without once looking in a mirror and it was only upon walking along Bloor Street to the ceremony that I first caught sight of my image in a restaurant window. With a sinking feeling, I felt as though I were now part of a sort of “third sex”—cut off from others as a “professional holy man.” It was what I had been planning for and studying for over many years, but the reality gave me a genuine shock. I fervently hoped I was making the right choices. I wanted to serve God and my fellow men, but I honestly didn’t feel very religious per se. I knew what the martyr to Nazism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, meant when he wrote about “the end of religion” in its narrowest sense.
Of course, at that time the ministry was still considered a noble calling and a great deal of respect was paid to clergy. In time I got used
