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,
