New Baptist Kidd on the Blog

Where shall I start? – in this instance, not an easy question to answer.

I shall start with the description of an experience, develop a reflection out of and around it, and conclude with some more technical connections into the archives of Christian traditions.

It was during my stay at St Bueno’s, exploring in a new way what it might mean to speak of ‘Christ in me’ that an old memory lurched back to mind. It had returned several times before through the intervening years; but now, once again, it returned with peculiar relevance. As I described the recollection in my journal a few weeks ago, it read like this:

“It was during my days as an undergraduate in King’s College, Cambridge – so that makes it 1971, thirty-five years ago. I specially remember it as the time when I was first coming into contact with a highly innovative charismatic prayer group, just beginning to meet in Cambridge, recently inspired through a contact with the work of David Watson in York. Heady days! All of which left me with a disturbed and disturbing sense of longing to experience the immediacy of the Holy Spirit in more powerful ways, as others at that time seemed to be doing.

On this particular day, I was the person appointed to read the Gospel at Evensong in King’s Chapel; something I did quite often, though always an inspiring and challenging thing to do. When I looked up the lection for the day, however, particularly given the preoccupation with my intensified search for the gifts of God, I was notably shocked to find I would be reading the dramatic words from Matthew 18:19 “… if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you …” – so I was already becoming alert to a heightened sense of drama.

Anyway, there I was, all togged up in gown and surplice, perhaps thirty seconds before leaving my seat to read at the lectern, when the stranger sitting next to me, without any words or acknowledgement passing between us, handed me a scrappy sheet of paper on which he had just penned some words. This is what he had written:

God in us
trust
trust
else
we’re
less
than
dust.

I felt a kind of shock wave run through me, convinced that something quite extraordinary was happening to me, though quite what I really had no idea. I read the lesson with unusual conviction, returned to my seat still shaking, and tried to concentrate on the remains of the liturgy. When it was complete, I waited until almost everyone else had left the chapel and then turned to the man, who showed no sign of rushing to leave, inquiring who he was, and how I should understand the significance of the paper he had shown me. In one sense the story he told is quite simple, just one more thread in the everyday passage of time and of things, but in another ...

He was a poet, from the United States, visiting Cambridge for one day and, overwhelmed by the beauty of King’s Chapel and the music of King’s Choir, had penned these few words – immediately wanting to show them to someone. That turned out to be me. By this stage, as we sat in the quietening Chapel, he could see how shaken I actually was, but he never allowed me space to intimate that he might in any way have been functioning for me like a messenger from God - though I have always suspected he felt an intimation of this in himself too. I invited him back to my rooms overlooking the river and the King’s bridge over the Cam, for coffee and conversation. What American tourist could refuse an offer like that! We chatted for a while, although, for some reason I now cannot fathom, I ended up with no record of who he was or how I might be in touch with him into the future – and soon he went on his way. I have never seen him again, but the words he showed me on that flimsy scrap of paper have remained scorched on my mind as if it were yesterday – and perhaps, all these years later, I begin to understand a little more what they could possibly be about.”

The whole event felt strange - even as it was happening. Inevitably it all became interwoven with my personal search for some kind of charismatic renewal. As an event, I have certainly never forgotten it, though I do not think I have ever really known how to make sense of its potential significance. Thirty-five years later it becomes significant again for two particlar reasons: first, it is associated for me with a time when ‘strange happenings’ seemed to pass my way with much more frequency than I then recall for most of the intervening years; and second, because the content of the message, that focus on ‘God in us’, now comes back on my agenda with fresh and insistent force.

In the last few months, seemingly without invitation, the frequency of ‘strange happenings’ has shot back up the scale. Like the event in King’s Chapel, none of them is strange in the sense that it is not susceptible to perfectly rational explanation; but all of them are strange ‘to me’, because that is how they strike me, and because they do seem to impact my own life and the lives of others in ways which matter more than run-of-the-mill. Just one illustration must suffice: there I was late one evening on Stockport Station a few weeks ago – very much deserted, and quite a hostile environment for the lone traveller. The only other person in sight was a young woman, and I recall thinking to myself that I needed to keep my distance from her, since a tall bearded stranger could easily present as intimidating at that time of night.

But as I bought my ticket at the machine, I realised that she had come right up and was standing immediately next to me. As I turned to look, she said something like, “I have a terrible headache; it has been an awful day at the hospital.” My first inclination was to look over my shoulder to see the person she was speaking to – but clearly it was me, and she was calling out for help. In retrospect, I can see that I was right about her more than normal vulnerability; my guess is that she had a modest level of learning disability – which, of course, is something I have thought about and worked with a great deal over the years. Well, it turned out we were heading the same way, and I think it would be fair to say that I kind of ‘became her guardian angel’ for while, until finally I said good night to her, still on the train, got off and headed home. It could happen to anyone, any evening, yes; but it happened to me, that particular day, and it had a quality of strangeness, which makes me think again about God at work ‘in me’, ‘in us’.

Which, of course, brings me back to the content of the poem(?), and the phrase ‘God in us’ – without which there not a lot to write home about but dust. I am beginning to develop a new way of feeling for what this might mean – or perhaps better the equivalent phrase ‘Christ in us’. ‘Christ in me’ seems to be quite a good description of this fresh opening up I have been experiencing in my life through recent days. Thomas Merton is in no doubt that it is ‘Christ in me’ and ‘Christ in us’ which is the key to almost everything of significance in spiritual experience.

I suppose I find myself both drawn to and hesitant about the idea of Christ being, in some literal sense, in me. Positively, it offers a convincing, really quite thrilling, framework for understanding the energetic, almost resurrection explosion I have been experiencing within myself. Negatively, however, I hesitate at the apparent exclusivism of its seemingly closed Christian explanation of things. Perhaps another of my own poems from a few weeks ago can offer a way through and beyond this discomfort. I titled it ‘God in us’, and it reads like this:

GOD IN US

Christ,
God giving Godself in the world.

God giving Godself
in bud and leaf-burst
in all people and everywhere.

God giving Godself in me.

God giving Godself
in Confusius, in the Buddha, in Mohamed

and for me, I do confess,
quite amazingly in Jesus.
_____

I am choosing here a very particular way of understanding Christ, or better perhaps ‘Christness’, through the dynamic concept of ‘God giving Godself’. And I am recognising that such giving can take a multitude of forms and expressions. (One friend of mine repeatedly comes out with the line, ‘There has to be more to Christness than Jesus’ – and I now begin to get more of a handle on what he might be meaning.) Without wanting to buy too strongly into some kind of Rahnerian model of the ‘anonymous Christian’, I am wanting to say that the thing I am knowing through my encounter with the person of Jesus is exactly the same thing that others also find in measure by other means – but I am in no doubt that Jesus is the one who has made it happen for me, and I want to confess his importance to me, as clearly and as coherently as I can.

I have found myself renewed in my commitment to what I suspect properly belongs under the heading of evangelism – a word I have shied way from for a number of years. But this kind of evangelism has a very unforced, quite natural mode of expression. Intellectually it relies on the conviction that ‘Christness’, God giving Godself, is a reality in all human beings everywhere, a kind of pre-condition of their very humanity. That is a widely documented theological strategy to which I have also subscribed for some years – it is most certainly in the Roman Catholic theology of Karl Rahner, to whom I alluded earlier, but it is also in the writings of many recent and contemporary Protestants too.

So could these ‘strange happenings’, which have the texture of evangelism, be described as the ‘Christ in me’, as it were, signalling to the ‘Christ is others’?

Let me explain. If I take the example of the girl on the station, she, in her frail and rather broken humanity, was that evening specially open for ‘Christ in her’ to surface through the prompting of her particular movements and words. (This is a quality I have long associated with people who have significant learning disabilities, actually a quality which more able folk like me have typically closed down in ourselves with our excessive of self-confidence and self-assurance.) On the same evening, my guess is that my own more-than-usual heightened openness to Christ, meant that the ‘Christ in me’ could, as it were, call out to the ‘Christ in her’ and a ‘strange happening’ was free to take place.

Well … I merely offer it as a narrative which might illuminate some of the stranger things that happen to us. I works quite well in accounting for a number of things I am struggling to understand. It accounts, for example, for this renewed increase of frequency in ‘strange happenings’ in my own life. And thinking back to 1971, poets are, by trade, dedicated exponents of openness, so it is not at all surprising that a poet could be someone intuitively open to this signalling between persons, which would account at least in part for the striking juxtaposition of certain dimensions in the King’s Chapel event. And it also accounts for the new wave of ‘evangelistic’ encounters which seem to be becoming more a part of my life – in shops, and bus queues, and ‘chance’ encounters with all kinds of folk.

Lastly, then, it has all taken me back to think again about a very specific theological conundrum I wrestled with in the theological biography of the early twentieth century protestant theologian, Paul Tillich – who I studied at length some years ago. Tillich, like many others, became quite convinced early in his theological pilgrimage that, as he would say about the narrative I have offered above, all theological language is ‘symbolic’ – that was his word, today others might say ‘metaphorical’ and mean much the same. But he never rested comfortably with this conviction, and explored in a number of his writings whether perhaps there is at least one non-symbolic (or non-metaphorical) statement lurking somewhere in the background – a statement which would enable, as he once wrote, ‘the whole theological edifice to have a leg to stand on.’ At one time he toyed with the statement, ‘All theological statements are necessarily symbolic’ as the possible leg – the one non-symbolic statement – but its claim on him could not be sustained, and my understanding is that he ended his life with the conviction that no such statement is to be found.

I now think I can see more clearly what was going on in Tillich’s quest. I share with him the desire for a leg on which the whole theological edifice can find a perch – without one I will struggle to find sufficient confidence in my faith convictions to dare the boldness of evangelism. But I wonder if Tillich’s error was the fact that he repeatedly looked for a ‘conceptual’ statement to break through the impasse. Surely this was always doomed to fail, because every conceptualisation is bound to be susceptible to precisely the same symbolic analysis. The ‘leg’, the non-symbolic, the non-metaphorical, can never be more than what Karl Rahner and many other contemporaries, speak of in terms of the pre-conceptual, some immediately given horizon (David Tracy’s phrase) which is the possibility of all genuinely credible knowledge. That it is pre-conceptual is not to question its reality or its crucial importance, but merely to question its epistemological standing. This pre-conceptual givenness, this horizon, is what I think I am calling ‘Christness’, God giving Godself to us. It is ‘Christ in me’, the immediate (non-conceptual) encounter, the most real encounter I shall ever have, which is the ultimate hope of salvation, mine and others.

Now I studied all this, and wrote about it at length in working for my doctorate back in the 1980s – but I think I have come to understand it for the first time with any real force over the course of the last few months. ‘Christ in me’ really is the key – to life, to faith, to salvation, to evangelism – you name it, and ‘Christ in me’ gets in there with notable significance.

I shall clearly be wanting to write about this again from other angles. If you have struggled with the latter paragraphs, just go back and enjoy the stories nearer the beginning – but I would like to think that the whole piece is worth further, perhaps hard, reflection.

As I begin to think about returning to work at the end of this sabbatical on 1st September, I am intensely aware that the first sermon I shall preach will be on the 30th anniversary of my own Ordination, on the first weekend of September 1976. One of the promises I made on that day was ‘to do the work of an evangelist’. I would like to think that as I work away at the renewal of those promises on the coming anniversary Sunday, that particular promise will be made with heightened intent.