Pentecost, 2000
Pentecost Sunday: 11th June, 2000
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden,
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's Eastern Hill
For all the many times that we may have been told that Pentecost represents a kind of birthday for the church - a way of somehow taming the rather bewildering and strange event described in Acts, giving it a frame and a limit - I am not sure that Anglicanism generally feels completely comfortable with Pentecost. It's all a little irrational, a bit too much excitement and emotion. Edna Everidge's New Australians were said to like colour and movement and Continental Europeans, especially Roman Catholics are expected to have emotion and sex, but for Anglo-Celtic Anglicans, a hot water bottle might be safer. Lukewarmness, not too much emotion, is preferable to risk and rising temperatures. Now that may sound just like a send-up, except that I fear that it represents a large element of truth.
And that Pentecost should be a fraction disquieting for many Anglicans is hardly surprising. For as long as it was largely a communion of Anglo-Celtic people, the preference for not too much emotional excitement (leave that to foreigners) was almost a national as much as a religious characteristic. It simply wasn't British to get too passionate about ideas and ideals let alone a religion. A nation of shop-keepers, the British were called; a race that preferred pragmatism, distrusted mysticism and enthusiasm, and felt uncomfortable with anything that veered too far away from the pragmatic.
There is also another reason why Pentecost hardly featured among the favourite readings of earlier Anglicans, if we consider Anglicanism as having in its history a role for centuries as a church whose membership was not primarily created through individual response of a personal kind that included some real emotion, but instead as a body enjoying special privileges through national government backing To belong was not a matter of feeling but of common sense, to come and make one's communion at least three times in the year as well as being there on the other Sundays was a basic prerequisite for having entre to a range of desirable jobs - no C of E communion, no job.
If you were on about strong feeling, about commitment, you might well look at some other teams first - the Roman Catholics at one end, or the Quakers at the other. There was more risk, more to lose, but more conviction and passion as a result. Not just in 16th and 17th century England, but down to the 20th, many bright lights who converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism - Graham Greene, Ronald Knox, Father Faber, Evelyn Waugh - sought not only a particular kind of authority that they decided was lacking in Anglicanism, but a degree of passion and enthusiasm. Even Ronald Knox, an Anglican bishop's son, brilliant linguist and litterateur, typical of those who went to Rome seeking a water-tight authority system, wrote a cautionary volume that looked at great people and movements in Christian history in which emotion had gone astray. He called it (not surprisingly) Enthusiasm. Wesley was there, so was George Fox; so were various Roman Catholics, their lives marked by passion, personal conviction and zeal, who were judged wanting by the standards of doctrinal experts in Rome. On the surface, a cautionary tale: but Ronnie Knox' long dwelling on the risks of emotion was a very thin mask for his admiration of deep feeling, his way of recognising its importance. And he acknowledged this quite overtly as he brought his tome to its close. After all, he expressed his conviction about the church of his choice in quite impassioned language, and regretted Anglican lukewarmness as much as he regretted doctrinal fuzziness.
Indeed, you could make a very good case for suggesting that a whole stream of Anglicanism had an unhealthy distrust of any kind of emotion, and that when it fails to allow room for deep feeling, it has always been to its detriment. It is not just the Knoxes, the Waughs, the Greenes that it has lost. Remember our good 18th century Anglican Bishop Butler saying : Sir, the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing - a very horrid thing! He was speaking to another Anglican priest, one John Wesley. When the Wesleys succeeded in reaching out to many alienated by Anglican structures, and brought them in by offering belief with feeling and conviction, expressed at times in somewhat hysterical conversion experiences, Anglicanism drove out Wesley and those the Wesleys were reaching. Enthusiasm was a dirty word.
It is of course possible to see this all as part of a wider phenomenon that has been characteristic of much European culture for some time: that is, a separation of intellect from emotion, the dissassociation of sensibility as TS Eliot's generation called it.
It might seem strange that what has so far been an implicit justification for the recognition and integration of the emotional into our spiritual lives should be coming from someone like myself, hardly perceived as an individual motivated through a volcanic emotional drive, or a seething mass of emotional repression, let alone more harmless and popular forms of emotion such as warm fuzziness. But even the apparently aloof and cerebrally driven icebergs like myself are obliged both by a degree of common sense, as well as by the gospel, to recognise that the denial or repression of emotion is a matter of both distortion and risk.
What is demand of Gospel? If the Judaeo-Christian understanding that God seeks the whole human being, and not just some part, then this includes a dimension of emotion. The older liturgical forms referred to our offering of 'our souls and bodies' and I have been inclined to read this as encompassing both inward passion and a wide range of emotions - it meant among other things, that we are called to a combination of expression and of control of theis element of our humanity, as much as we are also called to express and govern our intellectual dimension. So, a recognition and acceptance of emotion for Christians, even for Anglicans, is grounded in our conviction that our creation and calling is by a God who is holistic. He can and does redeem feeling, emotion; and wants these things to find an appropriate channel through our responses to him.
When it comes to the part of the European cultural tradition that has often separated intellect from emotion, my comment would be that we need to acknowledge that we (the church) operate in context of a culture or cultures. We are influenced by our setting, and cant avoid that. But need to remember Gospel invites us to be critical, not mindlessly accepting of cultural setting: 'the world'. And as we are well aware, the cultural setting in which many or most of us were born has been undergoing major and rapid shifts for some time. The changes include the rejection or criticism of elements of national cultural inheritance; for many Anglo-Celtic people, this has included attitudes towards emotion - public and private, and a renewed interest in holistic attitudes. Some Christians have been all too quick to seen this as a 'New Age' element, instead of a serious expression of discontent with major shortcomings in inherited culture.
What about us Anglicans? Even for us, there is some hope. That we are not an established church is something to be very thankful for: it can help to free us from the worst kinds of formalism - though we may use all kinds of formalism to hide behind from things we don't want to face, such as emotion - and I suspect most Anglicans havent yet really learnt to integrate deep emotion into their spiritual lives in any overt way.
Secondly, as far as Anglicans go, a good look at everything from photographs of the Lambeth conference to statistics of the most rapidly growing parts of our communion, and even a look at the quite different backgrounds of parishioners here at St Peters (where parishioners come from something like 25 racial and cultural groups) remind us that we are also free from another part of our past history - an overwhelming Anglo-Celticness. It causes regret and bewilderment to some to find African and West Indian drums, clapping and dancing as well as incense in a London bishop's church; but this not only represents the cultural forms of a very significant part of our membership, it expresses in a healthy way some of the things we have offered little outlet for in either our worship or given only lip-service to in our theology in the past.
Lastly, not all Anglicans have been the spiritual couch potatoes whose preference for lukewarmness I have already described and questioned. We have been a communion subject like others to revivals (for some another dirty word), producing people excited about what they belonged to and were called to. It was not just the various phases of evangelical or the more recent charismatic revival that have been marked by strong emotion. So has our own Anglo-Catholic inheritance. The more formal low church critics of 19th century Anglo-Catholic worship werent only appalled at what they feared as a sell-out to doctrine that was foreign: again and again, it was the strongly emotional content of much early Catholic preaching and the atmosphere of liturgy, that drew the comment again and again (both in the UK and here in Australia) that Anglo-Catholicism had a female among women, precisely because it was emotionally based, and women, of course, unlike men, were not able to control their emotions, and were constitutionally incapable of rational thinking. Leaving the extraordinarily dated gender profile aside, the loss of the more overtly emotional aspect that characterised the appeal of the Catholic revival in its first generation is our loss;
but there are echoes even of that when I hear someone say to me that in their earlier years, they fell deeply in love with the Catholic religion, and that sense of attraction has not ultimately left them.
As we recall the quite peculiar behaviour of the first Pentecost, we need to acknowledge that our emotions as well as the rest of our humanity, are God's; we mightnt pray to be slain in the aisles; but at least we should pray to be freed from any fear of what might happen if the Spirit of God were to touch us with something akin to the fire of Pentecost. This is infinitely preferable to agreeing with Bishop Butler's conclusion that 'pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is a horrid thing - a very horrid thing!'
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