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
