I myself had received no help from anyone, least of all the Church (which I left for thirteen years), until I became involved in one of the first self-help groups to be formed, called Parents Enquiry. There are now a few more groups of parents in various parts of England who are willing to help by just listening and giving understanding. It is not easy to hear a father sobbing on the telephone, or a mother's trembling voice, when they hear of their child being Gay, because one re-experiences their sorrow.
One of the first denominational groups to be formed to help homosexuals was one by the Quakers. A few years ago there came The Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement which is doing fine work in spite of opposition from a minority of clergy, and other denominations are becoming involved. All that is needed is a caring attitude and I feel that Radicalism has great potential in this respect.
My own pain must have been as nothing compared to the trauma that my children must have experienced, but, nevertheless, it was devastating and worst of all was the secrecy, not being able to confide in anyone, as twenty years ago the subject was rarely mentioned in public.
After twelve years my husband died and, as I had been speaking to various organisations in other parts of England, I decided to 'come out' to my friends. My son was already being open among his friends, so with the agreement of the whole family I consented to appear on television on a subject which dealt with the difficulties that parents of Gay children were experiencing.
After bringing up my son and daughter thinking that they were heterosexual I had to completely turn around my whole thoughts. When I experienced the release of my burden I was then able to become myself again, a woman with nothing to hide and who could stand up and be counted. Even so, although I myself am heterosexual, I still have to face up to the criticism of homophobics, and I ponder the challenge of Aids. But how does this relate to Radical Christianity ?
Radicalism is similar, the process was almost the same in my case. First there arose doubts about what one had learnt in the past about Religion, then came the suspicion that some things did not add up, for instance the Resurrection and Virgin Birth. Next began disillusionment with the Church, with its dogma, with its creed, and its insistence on guilt and sin. Then came the internal arguments regarding women priests and, more importantly to me, its indecision regarding Homosexuality. Finally I discovered the sincerity of other faiths and cultures and began to think with Meister Eckhart that "the eye with which I see God and the eye with which God sees me, is one and the same eye". Therefore I had to undergo a complete turn around in my thinking for the second time in my life. It is known as metano/j translated as 'to take a new view of things', 'change direction', and I decided once again to stand up and be counted and joined the SOF Network.
For fifty years, apart from an absence of thirteen years, I had attended my village church. This has now become fundamentalist and I have had to leave it and found one where the theology taught is more radical. I consider that I am very fortunate in being able to find one even though it entails travelling seventeen miles each Sunday.
I still call myself Christian because I believe in Christian ethics and am also bound by my love of humanity in the broadest sense of the words and I am still a member of the Church of England. Possibly this is because I have in the past had inexplicable experiences and have received strength from Something subjectively experienced outside myself which is 10 SOF Magazine 8, Winter 1991-92 incomprehensible and I am still occasionally overwhelmed by the mystery and power of prayer.
When I am conversing with others at the conferences, and sense the frustration, anger and anxieties that they are experiencing, I feel their relief at being able to share their problems with another who also grapples with the same ideas. There is also the strength and purpose of the groups, very similar to the sharing which takes place when I am counselling the parent of a Gay child, the empathy which takes place with another.
In moments of reflection I know that I have had to throw away much which cluttered up my faith to attain liberation, but I still retain my Joy at being alive in an amazing world. I do not pretend to understand the mystery of Life but Radicalism gives me the opportunity to delve into the ebb and flow of my inner doubts. I wonder how many others are wanting to change their own way of thinking, and also how many will dare to 'come out', stand up and be counted - and become liberated. How many will be able to be Radical Christians - and proud of it ?
A CONTRIBUTION TO A MODERN SPIRITUALITY DONALD RUTHERFORD 1928 - 1991 Introduced by Reg Snowdon Donald Rutherford, who died unexpectedly last summer, was a member of the SOF Network and the author of a small book called A Viewirom the Hill which is not, perhaps, as well known as it deserves to be.
Donald was born and grew up on Tyneside. After graduating in Politics and Economics from Durham University, he became a farm-worker for two years as a conscientious objector to military service. He eventually gave up his pacifism, but he never lost his fundamental conviction that moral truth was the essence of religion. It is many years now since Donald said to me that on at least one crucial respect Don Cupitt had got it right : religion was a spirituality - an ethic and a way of life - or it was nothing.
In England, Donald's career as a teacher was interrupted in the Fifties to train as a Methodist minister at Richmond College, London, although he did not go on to be a full-time parson. Instead, he went to India to work in teacher-training. He was ordained into the Church of South India and, in September and October 1963, he gave a series of eight sermons at Egmore Wesley Church, Madras.
The subject was the then Bishop of Woolwich's book Honest to God, which had come out earlier in the same year. Donald said that to him the book came as a breath of fresh air, making him feel in less of a false position in the church, less isolated.
But, to commend Honest to God publicly, at that time and in that place, must have been quite a brave thing to do, I think. I remember his conclusion. Donald predicted that even the radical views of the author would provide no final resting place. When I read this, some years after the event, I remember feeling uneasy - my complacency threatened, I suppose. But, he was right.
In 1968, believing his views to be unorthodox, Donald resigned from the ministry. Immediately prior to his death he was collecting material for a book to which he had given the working title : APost-Christian View of Jesus,_PauLand the Chumh. It was very early days, of course, but my feeling is that, in Donald's mature thought, the church was not likely to appear in a very attractive guise. In an alternate working title the term "Post-Christian" became "Agnostic".
The five extracts assembled here, however, are from a different kind of book, written four years earlier.
Essentially, A..Viewirom the Hill is about how we ought to face death without the support of a traditional religious faith. At first, these passages may appear too simple. This is deceptive. They are a real contribution to a modern spirituality. And they have a lifetime of thought and experience within them.
SOF Magazine 8, Winter 1991-92 11 THE MEANING OF LIFE ( from Chap. 2 ) "What is the meaning of life ?" is not the sort of question that commends itself to people. Professional philosophers find it variously meaningless, tiresome, and irritating and it is so obviously what philosophy ought to be about but is not, that those who ask it are usually perceived as ignorant and ill-mannered. Most of us find it faintly uncomfortable, like someone suddenly saying "let us pray" in the middle of a party.
If it has a proper context, you would say that it belongs with dim lighting and an alcoholic haze, where instant matiness and instant profundity go hand in hand. For that is its problem - it is a question both awkward and personal. It is not seen as a question remote and abstract but as one which requires me to sum up me - difficult at any time, dangerous perhaps, possibly distasteful and not normally to be done in company. There is an unpleasant hint that if one were to get near an answer one would only discover that it cast an unkindly light on whatever course of action or style of life one was pursuing at the time.
And there are those who think that asking the question is a waste of time anyway. After all, life is for living, not talking about. Words are sometimes a substitute for life, an evasion. Some people will do anything to avoid decisions, action, encounter - and that is where life is. Look at professional philosophers, they say, or academic people generally - there is no evidence that cleverness leads to happier, wiser, saner lives. All of which one would grant.
Talking about life can be an attempt to escape from it. But not always, and there is at least an initial case for supposing that if we can frame the question and fee/it, we should at least attempt an answer It needs to be said that the discussion of fundamental questions is not best left to academic people. In these matters there are no specialists. The meaning of life is as accessible to shepherds as it is to wise men.
Indeed, in so far as pride is a notorious hindrance in the search for the truth, the wise men often have a hard time of it. They lose their way, mistaking their own glitter for stars Part of the resistance to the question about the meaning of life arises from those who dimly discern that the question as it is posed is the short form of another question : "what is the meaning of life if soon we are to die ?". The resistance is instructive. It reminds us that we all have a wish to consider that life is the norm, being alive is what counts. But the truth is that mortal life, finite life, is the norm. It is our mortality we wish to forget.
Wisely, you might think. Can any good come from thinking about our mortality ? Certainly there is little point in making plans for after our death - then we shall be disposees rather than disposers.
Yet the picture of life within which we plan our actions should be as real, as life-like, as possible. And to forget our mortality is to falsify it.
FACING THE UNKNOWN ( from Chap.4 ) Ideas of immortality, or eternal life (beyond resurrection) can distort our understanding of the human condition, just as the apparent security of modern life can. We can actually begin to think of having endless time, time that does not need to be counted. But this is a false view. A man is born and dies. If he rises again it is in such a different form and in such a different world as not to affect our understanding of the basic fact - he is born and dies and the time between the two events is measurable and not far from the biblical three score years and ten. To forget death, to think too much of eternal life, is to forget how time-bound, limited, rationed, life is. And the strangeness is, when we think of it, that the idea of endlessness does not enhance our experience of life but diminishes it. If there were an infinity of Christmases, each would be less remarkable - and primroses for ever might seem less beautiful We are going to die, and in a few years' time. Our instinct, of course, is to stay alive. Our bodies and minds fight for life, take precautions, leap out of the way of buses. But no amount of agility will avoid the last enemy. Not that we have really worked out the implications of life for ever - would we defeat aging, or simply go on getting older - or would we prefer to stay alive at a certain age ? Forevernesses are decidedly less attractive when we try to see them in detail.
The life we know and the life which, deep down, we approve of, is one of ceaseless change, of comings and goings, meetings and partings - and with them joy and sorrow and beauty. This is life - the only life we know - in which we grow old and die. And because, whatever darknesses we have known, we love this life, then the thought of leaving it forever causes us grief. This is the starting point of our thinking When we were young we knew that life was wonderful but took it as our due. Now that we are older we see that all the wonderful things that have happened to us were not of our doing - they came, they happened, they were given to us. Whatever we contributed depended on the gift of our talents and skills - nothing ultimately was ours. We were the receivers of gifts. I say nothing about the giver, if indeed he should be personalised - that is another story. But that we have received gifts seems undeniable. And this must be the second point of our understanding If we have received so much, then, there can be only one feeling which dominates our outlook, our attitude 12 SOF Magazine 8, Winter 1991-92 - that of gratitude. It is not merely that we feel grateful but that with our minds, as we seek to understand where we have been, where we have come from and where we are going - with our minds, we know that we should be grateful. It is not merely the passing feeling but the cast of all one's thinking. So conscious and deliberate must it be that it must almost be vocal, spoken - explicitly understood.
HORIZONS ( from Chap.5 ) The present is full of our anticipation of the future and one problem that could bother us in later years is : what can we hope for ? So much of our mental well-being, our frame of mind, our peace, depends on what we look forward to, on our horizons. As we grow older, death looms larger - a blight on our hopes.
What shall we hope for as time visibly shortens ?
It is right and proper that a rational man should approach his final days with a considered attitude.
We know nothing of what is beyond our last breath but it would seem reasonable to approach that entry to a timeless future on the basis of all our previous experience. And if, looking back, we see so much to be thankful for, how can we not look forward with hope ? What other attitude would be reasonable ?
It may well be that the hope of immortality is our last hope, a hope rather than a belief, and a hope based on the fact that we go to join the dead (to rest with our fathers) and on the happy remembrance of life received with them. It is obviously a selective hope - it is the good and happy we hope to see again, just as it is the good and happy if life we remember.
At the end of life, hope (which is forward looking) and gratitude (which is backward looking) come together.
At the end, to have a hope which is full of immortality is an expression of thankfulness. And if we ask whether this hope is real enough to support us through our final days, then we have to affirm that the truly generative power to live comes only from a grateful heart, because it is unthreatened by anxieties for life, by the need to grasp, to hang on. It has received fully and can accept release from life whenever the time comes. Gratitude is the purest motive for living, the least self-interested, the most assured and confident. It can take risks and accept great odds for its targets are all achieved, leaving only joy to be expressed and songs to be sung.
AN ADEQUATE ANSWER ? ( from Chap.7 ) Not all who die before their natural time go in peace.
For many the yet unlived years are a source of SOF Magazine 8, Winter 1991-92 bitterness. So much might have been but now cannot be. It scarcely matters that some of the dreams were only that. The opportunities will never come. And since so much was yet to be, and will not be, how can anyone feel gratitude ? It is not difficult to be grateful at the end of a long and happy life. But how can one be grateful for that which never came ?
It is difficult, not being in that place, to speak of it. It is easy to say that in so far as there were expectations, grounds for hope, there must at least have been some things to have been grateful for, the grounds of those expectations. But in the bitterness of a future swept away, how easy is it to feel gratitude for the past which gave hope ? Even so, what we have had, and what we hoped for, both were gifts and not possessions. It can be a snare as we look forward to unlived years to see them as years of possession, as things we have. But as we know from looking back, we pass through them and do not possess them.
Even brilliant futures must be given up, and become remembrances and thanksgivings. If they are seen as thanksgivings from beyond, why not from before ? Is it not possible to be grateful for an unlived future as well as for a lived past ? I do not know. The words may be easy, the reality not.
CONCLUSION ( from Chap.8 ) In the last resort the picture we draw of life and death, the meaning we give to them, is our responsibility.
The meaning does not lie wholly there - outside - but is partly in us to create. How can one generalise from one's own small experience about all mankind ? Yet the truth is that praise and gratitude have come from the most unlikely situations. Wretched men have praised God, and the painfully dying have given thanks. And there lies our last freedom. No matter how constrained our circumstances, no matter how confined our bodies or wearied our minds, whether we shall praise or condemn is ours to choose. Both are our assertions against the world and bring their own rewards. I will sing a new song unto the Lord, wrote the psalmist, and whether we have a God to sing to or not, the song is the privilege of us all, the poetry of humanness. We alone decide whether it shall be of lament or praise, a dirge or thanksgiving.
Selective quo/a/ions above ale from Rutherford, Donald. A View from_the Hill, Souvenir Press, 1987, vi + 6Opp. £5.95 h/b, by kind permission of the publishers.
REG SNOWDON is a retired teacher living in Northumberland.