[Oe List ...] 6/25/09, Spong: Wales: Where Visions of a Christian Future Are Being Born

Thu Jun 25 12:44:41 CDT 2009

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Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell
Bishop Spong's next book will be published on September 1, 2009, but you can pre-order now at Amazon.com.

Review:
"Fear of death is the most fundamental fear of human existence. The only way it can be conquered is through knowledge and experience of your eternal being. Eternal Life: A New Vision is elegant invitation to find this part of yourself and be liberated." 
— Deepak Chopra, author of The Third Jesus 

Thursday June 25, 2009 

Wales: Where Visions of a Christian Future Are Being Born

The land of Wales is a beautiful, intriguing and mysterious part of the world. Most Americans would be hard put to answer the question as to which four nations form the United Kingdom. Yet Wales, a land of some four million people, is one of them. The Welsh people are proud and fiercely independent, most of them dedicated to preserving their ancient Celtic language and heritage. Parts of Wales were never subdued by the Romans or any other invader and remain today quite isolated and very traditional. Wales' best known poet, R. S. Thomas, has described his homeland this way, "You cannot live in the present, at least not in Wales…there is no present
 in Wales and no future, there is only the past, brittle with relics, wind bitten towers and castles with ghosts." In a recent surge of Welsh nationalism, this nation now requires that all children be educated in two languages, Welsh and English. This means that a number of people are employed to teach Welsh to immigrant children. When I asked on my recent visit to this country which nation provided most of the immigrants for these classes, I was told, "England." Most people would have never guessed that answer.
I have been privileged to visit Wales on many occasions in the past. I have done lectures in Cardiff, Swansea, Aberystwyth, Hawarden and Barrie. One of my four grandparents was a Welshman, so I have always been drawn to this land and its people. This past spring I had two assignments to fulfill in that wondrous land. One of them took me deep into northwest Wales to the town of Porthmadog, and the other to the eastern edge of Wales about ten miles from the ancient English fortress city of Chester. What I experienced in both places, however, was not the shadows of the past, but the profound energy of Welsh people pressing the edges of knowledge and engaging the future. Both of my stops caused me to wonder if Wales has changed since their poet R. S. Thomas wrote his words about Wales having only a past. 

Porthmadog, my first assignment, is a small town in a sparsely populated rural part of Wales. Set in the midst of exquisite mountains and on a tidal river, this community refl
ected the beauty for which Wales is famous. The power and the energy that I met there, however, was quite unlike what one would expect from the stereotype of contemporary Welsh people. They were totally engaged with the future. The energy that produced this invitation came from a group of people who were expressing discontent with the current state of Christianity in Wales. So instead of simply complaining, they decided to put on a weeklong conference to be held in the center of that town to which people from the entire region were to be invited. Although the sessions were held in a Welsh church, the agenda was clearly to point institutional Christianity in another direction. They called the conference "Prifio," which is a Welsh word meaning "growth." The vicar of St. John's Church, where the conference was held, was the original source of the vision. His name was Aled Jones Williams. In addition to being an Anglican priest, he is also a poet and a playwright. Indeed, he had a play entitled "Christa," about Jesus as a woman, which is even now playing to packed houses in Cardiff. It is not his recognized genius, however, that was so remarkable to me; it was rather his ability to bring other people who shared his interest in his vision. Two of these were incredible lay people. Nick Golding, the co-owner with his partner, Michael Bewick, of a highly regarded bed and breakfast known as Plas Tan-yr-allt, was one, and Carys Lake, who teaches "Immersion Welsh" for newcomers to Wales, was the other. Two of
 them were clergy: The Rev. Nia Morris from Bala, and the Rev. John Butler, who once served as Chaplain at the University of Wales at Bangor. Demonstrating that this conference was not one person's dream, these four people took over the details of the conference and drove it successfully to a conclusion without Aled even being present, since an illness removed him from any participation at all in the scheduled week. 

Among the invited guests who served as the faculty for this weeklong gathering were Richard Holloway, a Scottish writer and broadcaster, who retired as the Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church in 2000 and who calls himself today a "Post Christian" or even "Post Religious." There is no doubt from his most recent writings that this gifted man walks the religious frontier. Others were Mark Vernon, formerly an Anglican priest, who left the priesthood to become an atheist and who now describes himself as an agnostic, and Menna Elfyn, a poet and playwright, who has been appointed "Poet Laureate" for the children of Wales and who describes herself as a "Christian anarchist." No one would mistake the speakers at this conference to be those who would turn this event into one more humdrum act of religious propaganda. This faculty was specifically called together to define quite openly the reasons why Christianity was in the death throes and what it might take to enable it to return in a new form. It is hard for me to imagine many church groups that would assemble such a faculty, especially for
 a conference to be assembled in a parish church in a small town in rural Wales. Yet that is what happened at Porthmadog and I found it not just dynamic and exciting but beyond any of my expectations.

I served as the closing lecturer at the "Prifio" conference in the final session held on Saturday night. More than 200 persons crowded into that small church to participate. My topic was "Why Christianity Must Change or Die." In the discussion that followed the lecture, there were no questions that revealed threat, fear or the kind of anger that so often marks religious behavior. I know of few religious groups able or willing to talk with their critics or to listen to those who have moved beyond religion or out of religion in order to learn why traditional religion no longer satisfies them. Yet this is exactly what these people in Wales did. 

Other tangential but interesting things were noted. A number of women, both lay and ordained, were in significant leadership roles. Openly gay and lesbian couples were visible and involved and the number of clergy who had ventured far out of their security systems were present sharing in leadership. This conference empowered people to dream. Seldom have I personally received so sustained and long lasting applause following a presentation. It was as if the presence of a Scottish bishop to open this conference and an American bishop to close it conveyed permission for the people to venture beyond traditional boundaries. A community of people that bold and that vi
sionary is clearly living in the present and preparing for the future. 

When this conference ended we traveled through Wales about two hours north and east from Porthmadog to Hawarden, where St. Deiniol's Library and Conference Center is located. This library is named for a Welsh saint and was originally part of the estate of William Gladstone, Prime Minister of England in the 19th century. It was built to house the prime minister's extensive library, but it grew into a center to which scholars come to do research, and an Anglican Church center housing small but intense conferences of about 50 people. St. Deiniol's is, I believe, unique among the church-related conference centers of the world. I have led conferences there on six occasions over the past 12 years. Its trustees have elected me to the honorary position of being a "Fellow of St. Deiniol's Library." If one were to look at the prefaces of my last few books, a number of references to St. Deiniol's would be apparent. Here I developed the material that would later form my books. The title of this conference was the finally adopted title of my yet to be published book, Eternal Life: A New Vision…Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell. This was to be the last testing place. 

Under the brilliant guardianship of its current warden, Peter Francis, this center has become a place of challenging and progressive thought. In a church that so often has been visibly afraid of contending with new thought, in a faith that condemned
 Galileo, resisted Darwin, and encourages a ghetto religious mentality, St. Deiniol's has become a place that celebrates and welcomes the future with all of its challenging new knowledge. In the Anglican Communion that seems to place ecclesiastical unity ahead of either truth or justice, St. Deiniol's has become a place where the search for truth and justice is held to be the highest virtue. In a religious tradition that hides and resists with passion and anger the world's emerging new consciousness that relegates the prejudices of yesterday, like racism, sexism and homophobia, to the dustbin of history, St. Deiniol's Library welcomes in both word and deed those who help to open up to the light of day yesterday's darkness. In a world in which the traditional forms of the Christian Church are in steep decline, St. Deiniol's Library is dedicated to being a place where the world can glimpse what the church of tomorrow might be like. 

The New Testament warns Christians time after time against the distortions that come when churches forget that their purpose is not to conquer, to dominate or even to shape the world. The New Testament assumes that Christians will never be more than a determining minority. Christians are to be the saving remnant, light in the darkness, salt in the soup and leaven in the loaf. The age of Christian domination of the western world has long passed, yet institutional Christianity still pretends to have vast power and it still assumes that people listen to its medieval pronouncements, h
olding steadfastly to these illusions even when death surrounds it. No Christian future is to be found there. That future will rather be discovered in tiny cells of people like those I found in Wales. R. S. Thomas might think that Wales is a strange place to look for the future, but the gift of Wales to me this spring was to remind me once again of what seems to be a fact of history, namely that renewal always comes from the edges of institutional life and that it is in those that the institutions tend to marginalize that future hope is always born. 

– John Shelby Spong

Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong

Ted Cheshirefrom La Mesa, California, writes: 
Riding my faithful donkey around La Mesa, I was struck (tense used for theological purposes only) with the similarity between you and Dorothy Sayers. She said much of what you say. There is a 40 to 60 year difference in time. You both say the same word and in many cases the same interpretation. She always claimed orthodoxy and argued it well. Her "Image of God" and "The Other Six Deadly Sins" are as compelling today as they were then. Thank you for carrying the torch — 'tis a pity that few know how far the fire extends.

Dear Ted,

Thank you for your letter. I have not read Dorothy Sayers in years, but I always enjoyed her when I did. One hardly ever knows what is the source of an idea that one thinks is one's own, so it is quite possible that I have b
een significantly influenced by Dorothy Sayers or that both of us were influenced by some third person a bit farther back in time. 

My known influences are Paul Tillich, who taught Theology at both Union Seminary in New York and Harvard Divinity School; John A. T. Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich and New Testament Professor at Cambridge University; and Michael Donald Goulder, New Testament professor at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. Only Michael Goulder of the three remains alive today.

We are all dependent on those who have gone before us. The reason any of us can see beyond the typical line of vision is that some of us have been privileged to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Enjoy your faithful donkey!

– John Shelby Spong

Send your questions to support at johnshelbyspong.com 

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