One Priest’s Wondering Beliefs. John E. Bowers

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      Part I

The Pilgrimage from There to Here

      Chapter 1: Foundation Stones

      When I first realized I had begun to wander theologically, away from the orthodox compound, I did have the wits to take a quick look around and make note of the spiritual foundations that had carried me thus far, to this place I seemed to be now leaving. It may be useful to point out to you as we begin, the spiritual foundation stones that sustained me through thirty-four years of ministry, and then when I retired, launched me into this spiritual pilgrimage.

      Theological Foundations

      I can still remember, though not with absolute clarity any more, the days of my seminary years, especially the middler year. The church, particularly the Episcopal Church, had been important in my life from the age of eight. I became as active as a child and teen could be in a very small, struggling congregation all those years. My dad had been an acolyte in his tender years, so I was one now. I was carefully building up my understandings, what it was about, how it worked (the it here is sedulously undefined). I was a lector long before we had lectors, a watcher of priests, and rarely even a preacher. It was equally observed and concluded by all that I was headed for the ministry. So it came about that in that horribly dark and painful middler year of seminary all of my tenderly laid, childish foundations were being carefully and methodically demolished, torn down, block by block. Not maliciously, but lovingly and very deliberately, with what felt like sledge hammer blows. It had to be if I was to become a theological priest who really thought and cared about Christian and spiritual foundations.

      That was an incredibly painful year. I went to seminary expecting to fill in small gaps and round off unshaped edges; instead the center was being ripped out of me and carefully reconstructed, but this time with sound, mature and intellectually competent, well crafted, state-of-the-art foundation stones. And that foundation was sound enough to sustain me in building my spiritual life alongside others through my thirty-four years of active ministry. Good foundation stones. Stones well-jointed together into a solid reliable, and very functional, quite orthodox (though some might suggest “flaming-liberal”) foundation for a serviceably theological and spiritual dwelling. It has served me quite well through my ministry. But as I neared, and have now lived into retirement, when orthodoxy is no longer more important (as a professional and sworn orthodox priest of the church) to me than understanding the spiritual world in which I have found myself, I have noticed, underneath the moss that’s grown on the north side of those foundation stones (and on and other sides as well) that the weather has finally gotten to them. Spiritual winds have etched and eroded them. Like old sandstone they’re getting a little soft and crumbly, at least around the edges. I’ve studied hard through my thirty-four years of ministering to keep them well tuck-pointed, sturdy, soundly jointed. And to keep them current, consistent with the latest and best discoveries and understandings of the Scriptures. And then, some cumbersome spiritual experiences have accumulated too. And as I’ve lived into my retirement life, taken time to look around, to ponder how these unexpected and fairly extra-orthodox spiritual experiences that have tumbled into my life without my asking, and occasionally on request, how these might fit in, I’ve noticed that the old, carefully constructed and fairly orthodox foundation no longer contains or underpins what I discover is now building up in me. So I find myself re-examining those old stones, and how they are put together, and what stands atop them as my spiritual dwelling place. I find myself quietly, reflectively wondering. What I am gradually coming to discern СКАЧАТЬ