The Fountain: Form and Flux Grenville Gilbert responds to The Fountain by Don Cupitt Clothed in Story I’m not sure whether it was the words that drew me into church. I think it was more something about finding a place to belong, be ordinary, and find friendship. The wrestling with words has been an ongoing theme, however. At school there was our form teacher (a young nun) leading us to question the themes in Simon and Garfunkel’s songs, for example:
I am a rock. There was also angry debate with her after a visiting evangelistic group called on people to come forward and commit themselves to Christ. What does this mean? At university the challenge came from a flat-mate: ‘Are you born again?’ Again – what does this mean? For a while I was a fairly hardline evangelical and looked rather sniffily on folk in my home church, who didn’t look committed or born again to me. But, something didn’t quite fit. The story, the words of faith, didn’t match with the words, the story of life. I felt it was like trying to live in two different worlds.
It’s been people who helped me continue this human exploring and crafting, to bring faith down to Earth. The vicar at my home church who was so patient with me showed me an unostentatious, committed and unselfish way of living out the Christian faith, that maybe one day I’ll get close to copying. Becoming a mother was a life altering experience that once again shook up the story I had about myself. I needed another language for the ‘work’ I was doing.
Friends within and without the church helped in this discovery and mining of words, including the discovery of a range of descriptors for God that were not limited to male. Questions and doubting, metaphors and ideas, pushed the boundaries and opened the possibilities of faith for me. Being introduced to SOF while David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, was opening my eyes to the metaphorical language and story of faith, continued to show me a way of communicating faith that felt life-giving.
Attending SOF conferences has been a refreshing encounter with fellow word crafters and seekers of the story of faith as an integral part of the human experience.
I value the writers and thinkers familiar to these pages (Holloway, Borg, Crossan, Pullman, even Cupitt sometimes!) Poetry is an important element to telling the story of faith and life. And I sometimes wonder where the women are? (Apart from Editor’s input, her promotion of poetry and encouragement of male and female contributions.) And now I find myself in the role of an ordained minister in the Church of England. Was this a naïve and backward step to take? What does this mean for the story of who I am and the work I do? I work to find words, story and language to lay alongside the life experiences of the people I am with, in their times of celebration, loss, commitments and new beginnings.
And I hope that people will find for themselves a way into a story where they belong and become the truest of themselves. So I have to end with a story that I told a few years ago at the 2006 SOF conference:
Truth and Story In the beginning Truth went about among the world naked. It was not a pretty sight. In fact, it was quite scary, and people were frightened by his nakedness, and ran away, and kept their children indoors, so that Truth was forced to go about the world only under the cover of darkness.
At first people were cautious of her and shied away, but soon discovered that when they talked with her or even just touched her clothes, they dreamt the most amazing dreams. These dreams changed them. They became more open to learning and grew in love for themselves and for others. One night, Truth crept up to the stranger who was creating such change. He asked her, ‘Who are you?’ The stranger smiled and said, ‘Do you not know me? We have been companions for many years, though you have not recognised me. My name is Story.’ She gave Truth a gift. She gave him her cloak to wear. And from that time on people were not afraid to encounter Truth, for Truth always went about the world clothed in Story.
Hilary Campbell is Team Vicar of the Parish of Kidlington with Hampton Poyle.