Dear People, Neighbours, and Friends of St. Thomas’s,
It is a rare thing to be given a window into how others see and experience us, and James Yuan has given St. Thomas’s a great gift in his essay, a piece that stands in the great tradition of personal testimonies to God’s work in our daily lives. I am profoundly grateful to James for his honesty, humour, and vulnerability in sharing his experience of being a newcomer here.
As I told him, however, it’s not just his “newness” that we appreciate, but his “youness.” That is to say, each of us brings “ourselves, our souls and bodies” to life in community, with all our gifts and all our growing edges. Each of us is “simul justus et peccator”—a saint and a sinner—at the same time. And God’s attitude toward each of us is, as I’ve said from the pulpit, “I can work with that.” We often “have no power of ourselves to help ourselves,” as a prayerbook collect puts it, but God always has the power to work in us “more than we can ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20-21). God’s modus operandi in the world is to redeem. Thus, when we are honest and vulnerable about who we are, God gives us the grace to live into our particular identities in ways that are fully integrated with our core identity as human beings made in the imago Dei. As people who by baptism are adopted into the Household of God, and through lives of discipleship, we are given the grace time and again to discover what it means to live a life marked by forgiveness, faith, hope, and love. Our wills, when united to Christ’s will, cooperate so that what is lacking in us is brought to perfection through him.
Each of us, no matter how traditional or progressive, how orthodox or heterodox we may be in our theological outlook and commitments, has, as James puts it, a God-given “hunger for meaning and beauty.” I personally believe that this hunger is linked to the hunger for holiness, a word we don’t use much in this culture because it’s so often misunderstood. But Anglo-Catholicism is unashamed of the “beauty of holiness,” as the Psalmist puts it (cf. Psalm 96:9), for in it we find reverence, wonder, love, and praise. The meaning we find here gives us a sense of purpose and mission (though we sometimes find ourselves at a loss on how go about fulfilling “The Vision Glorious,” to borrow Geoffrey Rowell’s words).
I often like to say that Anglo-Catholicism has a high tolerance for eccentricity. But as James Yuan puts it, “Lukewarm tolerance, which says, ‘I will accept you in spite of these parts of you,’ heals nothing; the frightful questions remain open. Only a more radical attitude—we may call it love—moves the wounded spirit: ‘I will accept you the more for these parts of you.’ I have been endlessly surprised by the dedication of my friends and mentors at St. Thomas’s to this radical principle. They celebrated my eccentricities even as I struggled to suppress them.”
In his essay, James names something that will gladden the hearts of many of us, and trouble others. He writes with bracing frankness, “My queerness is linked with an intense spirituality, something I cannot explain, but which I also find in many of my friends in the queer community, though so many of them tell me how the Church, rather than feeding their spiritual needs, cast them out.”
This is Elephant Number One in Anglo-Catholicism, in this parish as with every other Anglo-Catholic parish I’ve ever experienced. And, as the recent conflicts over human sexuality at the Lambeth Conference demonstrated so painfully (see the articles here and here), we Anglicans too often forget that our “issues” have human faces. Personally, I take no issue with anyone who has strong opinions about the definition of marriage one way or the other, because there are legitimate theological and sacramental questions at play. The matter is hardly settled doctrine in the Anglican Communion, though many individuals and parishes have found their own sense of clarity.
Our own diocesan bishop has recognized that there are two opposing doctrines in this diocese, and while I might wish the “issue” didn’t exist, I certainly rejoice that some of the people who find ourselves at the centre of it still find the courage to say, as the Greeks who approached Philip in John 12:20-21, said: “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” And Jesus’ response, then as now, is, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
I have conservative queer friends, some celibate, some in lifelong partnerships, who oppose any change to the meaning of sacramental marriage. And I have progressive friends whose lives make a compelling, if inconclusive, case for a more expansive view. As I’ve discovered over the past year, St. Thomas’s is no different from the rest of the Church in where we are coming from and where we end up. Sometimes it’s healthy for a community to leave some things unresolved. Sometimes it decidedly is not. For me, one way of discerning what is of God and what is not is by looking at how any proposed course of action enriches our discipleship and deepens our formation as Christians.
One of the things I love about our Anglo-Catholic tradition is that at our best, we follow Jesus’ lead and meet people where they (we) are. We want to see Jesus, too. At St. Thomas’s, I am hardly indifferent to the issues or stances that set us at odds as a community, both locally and globally, but I’m more interested in people. My litmus test is simply this: If Jesus would hang out with me, I should hang out with you. This doesn’t resolve the doctrinal disputes that many of us have. We have no Magisterium to settle any given matter. Nevertheless, I firmly hold that we are called to love and honour one another in our collective search for meaning and beauty, trusting that “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Matthew 5:6).
What does this mean for the future of St. Thomas’s? I’d like to know the answer to that myself! A couple of years ago, when this and other hot-button topics came up in conversation with the Selection Committee, I emphasized that I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, and my chief vocation is as a pastor and teacher, not an activist. This inevitably disappoints some people, but I believe that we first need to be honest about where we find ourselves today and understand our history before we can discern how we can be most faithful to God’s call to us in the future. Because of this, while I have my own views, I don’t have any personal agendas to push, and I tend to push back against the agendas that others occasionally try to push on me, whether from the left or from the right. I’m much more comfortable living in the reality of ambiguity than forcing some sort of resolution to any given dilemma that does not honour the dignity of every human being. So whatever we face, I am committed to facing it together, come what may.
I don’t know much, but I do know that God wants us to continue to bring “ourselves, our souls and bodies” to the font and to the altar, and to reach out to all people, especially to alienated and marginalized people, including marginalized conservatives, some of whom I happen to know are queer as three-dollar bills. (Paradoxes abound; assume nothing.)
James writes,
Spiritual hunger, we often say, is there in everybody, even in those who don’t realize it. And fear and alienation—we less often acknowledge—are the normal feelings of outsiders to the Church, especially of outsiders as distant as I. Fear and alienation are usual. What feels unusual, sometimes miraculous, is not just that a love existed for me, as it does not for so many others like me, but that it reached me, as it does not reach so many others. I give thanks for my miracle, which I hope will be another usual thing some day for many others.
Fear and alienation can also be the normal feelings of insiders, too, when we forget that “the truth shall set you free” (John 8:32). Sometimes, our fear of conflict, and specifically my fear of opening up a can of worms that’s best left on the shelf, can lead us to avoid the painful truth about where we are as a community, and when we do that, we can heighten the fear and alienation of anyone who might look to us for freedom from those shackles.
Ultimately, parish life is about reaching others with the love of Jesus, and allowing that love to break through all their and our defences, fears, and anxieties. I hope that St. Thomas’s will hold fast to its identity in Christ, that we will not be tossed to and fro like so many other parishes, but rather that we will focus on keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing: Feeding people’s spiritual hunger with food that satisfies. As we do, we will inevitably find ourselves feeding people’s physical hunger with real food, be they sandwiches on Friday or the Bread of Heaven that is both physical and spiritual. And if you have any ideas about how we can better welcome and serve others in Jesus’ name, I’m all ears.
Finally, if you have your own testimony to share, whether you want it published in the Thurible or not, I’d be eager to read it, or to talk with you, whether in person or via Zoom, preferably in air-conditioned rooms.
Yours in Christ’s service,
Fr. Nathan J.A. Humphrey