Wilderness Spirituality – stories about God and the
search for meaning
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My
spiritual life has increasingly been focused around what I call a wilderness or
desert spirituality. In this the desert fathers and mothers of third and fourth century
Egypt have become central but I have also explored many other spiritual
traditions in the process from the Greek Orthodox church of Cyprus through to
English Nonconformist Evangelicalism and encompassing, along the way, expressions
as diverse as Caribbean Pentecostalism and the Water Buffalo Theology of Kosume
Koyame. But from the beginning: My family
is firmly rooted in nonconformist Christianity. My paternal grandfather
and maternal great grandfather were lay preachers and I was brought up in the
Baptist church although Methodism, the Brethren and independent Evangelical churches
feature in my ecclesiastical family history. I went through an
evangelical conversion experience when I was about 12 years old at a Crusader camp
in Dorset and this experience of feeling my heart strangely warmed has
continued to be central to my life. On a more intellectual level Nonconformity
has always been important to me, in many different senses of the word. It
is therefore, perhaps, strange that I’ve ended up, at least for the time being,
in a liberal Anglo catholic church, but this perhaps, illustrates that
denomination and even traditional theological categories are not as important
as they used to be. Our personal spiritual journey has become all
important, and this is true for me although I do retain an unfashionable
adherence to the importance of religion. Around
the age of 16 I began to take my religion more seriously. Richard
Foster’s Celebration Of Discipline was an important book for me as it began to
give me a framework for serious spiritual work. The open minded, middle
of the road Baptist church where I had been brought up and where I was baptised
on Easter day 1979 was also a very nurturing environment. A more shadowy
and eccentric influence was Dostoevsky’s book Notes From Underground which
resonated very deeply with me, shining a light as it did into the complexities
of the human heart. As did the Bible. I was converted to the Bible
by reading the first few chapters of Ezekiel – a wonderfully weird and
apocalyptic vision celebrated in the spiritual Ezekiel Saw The Wheel.
I’m glad I’m not the only person who’s been inspired by this wonderful passage
and my favourite parts of the Bible have continued to be some of its strangest
byways. I love Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs and Job have been important to
me. In more recent years I have come to love the Psalms and Luke’s gospel
has had a very significant impact on my life. Parts, such as the Pastoral
Epistles, I still struggle with, but generally I find it in a wild and
passionate book full of wonderful stories that has been the touchstone for my
theology and daily life. I particularly like its tendency to tell stories
more than once but in slightly different ways, if we made this fact more
central to our theology we would be wiser people and better Christians. I read
Religion with Literature at university. As my working life developed I
sometimes wished I had studied social sciences, but this came later and I
think, in retrospect, this combination of art and theology was the most
nourishing for my soul. University was also a time of Christian community
which was deeply important to me and I retain close, if geographically distant,
relationships with two friends from that time. There is also an element
of tragedy in what has subsequently happen to my friends, one died young
falling off a mountain in Pakistan, one became depressed, one has suffered from
a very nasty degenerative disease and one has been in prison for murder.
It is a trajectory of stories worthy of a sobering novel. After
university I didn’t know what to do. Eventually I ended up in Cyprus
working as a volunteer for the Middle East Council of Churches. This was
a great experience. Meeting Coptic Bishops here, began my interest in the
desert fathers and mothers and a lifelong respect for the Eastern Orthodox
churches. I was seriously thinking about going back to work in the Middle
East – a number of my friends did this, but as it turned out I started working
in London and got caught up in a city where you can travel the world without
getting on a plane. In London
I was exposed to black spirituality and the religion of the Caribbean and
African diaspora. I have particularly come to love the spirituality of
Caribbean women, a spirituality rooted in the Bible, struggle and an
irrepressible Spirit. It has deeply influenced me in ways which are
difficult to put into words, but which, I think, resonates with my own family
roots in evangelical Nonconformity. It also made me reflect on my
Englishness and my own Anglo-Saxon roots. In all this I became
interested in urban spirituality. What is it that sustains us in the
urban? What resources can we draw on to reflect the reality that,
although, the Bible may begin in a garden, it ends in a city? For many
years this search obscured my own deep love of nature and wild places, but in
its own way London is a wild place uncontrolled by human reason. For a
time I lived in a tower block in South London and it was here that I discovered
Thomas Merton. I had bought and read his book New Seeds Of Contemplation
at university but it had not greatly impressed me. Returning to it whilst
living in an example of early seventies brutalism was a revelation. It
returned to me to that spiritual quest that I had begun as a sixteen year old,
but in a more mystical way. I began to see, as it were, angels ascending
and descending on the stairs of the tower blocks – a mood which was greatly
helped by listening to Van Morrison! During a break with my parents who
had moved to a village in the South Downs I had a powerful mystical experience
of interconnection with the world and my spiritual life shifted permanently. Religion
was always present in this spiritual exploration. The Baptist church was
my home but I had plenty of contact with other traditions through my work and
increasing community involvement. I became a deacon of Battersea Chapel
and began preaching. I found this a contradictory experience because I
have always had an ideological prejudice against preaching, preferring
practices which involve dialogue and interaction. The problem was that
preaching was part of me. I had always been involved in drama, I enjoy
words and I have a powerful and resonant voice. I’ll never forget the
organist at Battersea Chapel, a retired printer, coming up to me and saying
‘that is the best sermon I have ever heard’. Whether I like it or not I
am inextricably part of the tradition of Nonconformist preachers, like my
grandfather and great grandfather before me. I loved
living on the Winstanley estate but it also felt like a wilderness. Reading
Merton and the desert fathers, living in this concrete desert and my increasing
ill health, all sowed the seeds of my wilderness spirituality, but it was not
to fully mature for a few years. Whilst living in a flat in the top of
the vicarage I met my wife to be and fell in love. Within a year we were
married and I had taken up a post as lay pastor of a tiny URC church on an
estate in south Lewisham. Being
married change to me. Not dramatically, but slowly over the years the
warmth, beauty and love of my wife has nourished my heart and rounded my
personality. I learnt how to engage with my feelings more deeply.
An important change was holidays together, often in the hills of mid
Wales. This reconnected me with the love of nature in which I had been
nurtured. I came to love those weeks away with my wife in the solitude of
the hills and began to explore the practice of taking retreats. This bore
fruit some years later in a three week solitary retreat in a Welsh cottage
which was one of the defining experiences of my life. Because of this I
became deeply committed in a new way to the desert fathers and mothers and
adopted the practice of reading one of their sayings everyday. They are
also one of the roots of so-called Celtic Christianity, a tradition I also find
helpful. Throughout
this time I was nurtured by my friendship with Brother Bernard SFF. He
particularly encouraged my writing and interest in the contemplative life and
when he left London I missed him greatly. My health also deteriorated, I
found being a lay pastor physically challenging and looking back on it now I
can see that I became burnt out. When we left Lewisham to move to Hackney
I hoped that my health would improve but it didn’t and I became increasingly
disabled, eventually I became dependent on cabs to get around independently and
this affected my spiritual life greatly. I reached a particular low point
when I lost the use of my voice, this was a great loss but I did manage to find
a strange acceptance when I was at my lowest point. I remember lying on
the sofa one spring morning with the sun’s streaming in through the window and
thinking to myself “all you have left now is to think beautiful
thoughts”. From this point my health improved, even though it remains problematic and
difficult, but as I have lived with it and reflected on it, it has become more
and more central to my spiritual life. Now my
wife has become a priest. It is easier for me to work in a freelance
capacity as I find that my time is under my own control. Increasingly I
have been trying to find a rhythm which enables me to work within my physical
constraints. I have a simple life circulating around our flat, the
garden, the church where my wife is a curate and the great luxury of a
neighbouring park. Often people come to visit me and occasionally I make
visits using cabs. This is a very different life from the one I came to
live in London, deeply engaged with the life of the Winstanley and Bellingham
estates and the busy world of urban mission. I
continue to be involved with religion. I have become particularly
involved with developing what people call Alternative Worship, at present this
means being involved with developing an "Evensong for Stoke Newington".
This has meant my experience of worship has become more intellectual, which
bothers me, but I have also enjoyed the opportunity to use poetry in worship
and write liturgy. This has also, perhaps, contributed to an increasing
desire to re-engage with the theology I studied at university. I find
myself pondering the nature of God, what it means to be a follower of Jesus and
therefore the nature of the church after Christendom. Also as my voice slowly
improves I find myself re-engaging with the art of preaching. |
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