Letter to an old friend

Thank you for giving us a celebratory meal last night. One of the (many) things I like about you is – no nostalgia! (and not much medical talk either) which is refreshing and necessary at my age as we approach our 50th wedding anniversary.

It occurred to me this morning that next year will also be the 50th anniversary of my ordination as a Church of England priest but I have no inclination to mark that. One of the reasons why is contained in the book I am sending you. I first came across this French philosopher [Andre Comte-Sponville] when I was doing an OU course on virtue ethics about four years ago and read his ‘A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues’. This latest book [A Little Book of Atheist Spirituality] is a compassionate contribution to the somewhat sterile debate sparked off by Dawkins et al about the existence or otherwise of God.

For me the core of the book is on page 192: “Whether they are believers or not, mystics are those who no longer lack God. But is a God who is no longer lacking still God?” To discover in my mid 70’s that I no longer lack God (or as Martin Laird puts it in ‘Into the Silent Land’: “God does not know how to be absent.”) has been one of the most profound gifts of my life; my only regret being that I did not get it when I read Honest To God in 1963. But then I suspect even John Robinson himself didn’t fully realise the implications of what he was saying. Bishops, as well as us priests, had too much invested in keeping the institution going to see the implications of a ground of Being approach. Plus, nobody taught us the simple ‘how to’ of contemplative prayer. It was considered too otherworldly, too monkish, and what we wanted above all was to be relevant, God help us. (See, there I go again, expecting help from outside when it’s already here inside.)

Looking back I can see that, like a goldfish nosing against the side of the bowl, I was looking blindly for this insight. It caused grief to [my fiance] during our engagement because I felt torn between marriage and ordination. I hadn’t understood Bonhoeffer’s definition of chastity: ‘the total orientation of life towards a goal’. Nor had I understood (along with almost everyone else in Christian churches) what Jesus may have meant by ‘deny yourself....’. Just think how much unnecessary grief and suffering that verse has caused sincere Christian people! It has taken two non-Christian writers to help me over this threshold into the promised land – Eckhart Tolle and Andre Comte-Sponville. Of course since then, armed with their insight I have rediscovered that ancient Christian tradition of contemplative prayer. The irony is that those who are now teaching it in ways which ‘ordinary’ lay people can understand and practice are mostly Roman Catholic monks. Does the Vatican know what they are saying? I hope not because their most holy and reverend father Ben would probably silence them.

Perhaps with your combination of psychotherapy and Shakespearean insight you have avoided the worst excesses of our spiritual inheritance. Perhaps you have known much longer than me how to “take upon’s the mystery of things”. I hope so dear friend.
My love to you