Expository Times, Apr 2010
Harry Williams, Anglican priest, theological teacher, Mirfield monk was one of my heroes in the faith. I too had images of God to have to loosen from my baggage. I remember the excitement when, in 1972, I read his book True Resurrection, and came across his description of what resurrection is like: when, for example, an artist finds her imagination being stirred into life, or a scientist whose experiments don’t confirm his theory suddenly hits on another theory they do fit; or the person who is constantly irritating suddenly sees how funny he seems to other people.
Of course none of these experiences is resurrection. They are analogies of resurrection, but they excited me because I had spent most of my life by then with friends who could not understand my interest in the Christian faith and I could not think of any way simply show them what mattered to me. Until Harry Williams, in addition to so much more, introduced me to analogy.
And that introduction remained relatively dormant until I was interviewed for a job in BBC Scotland’s Religious Broadcasting Department. At the interview I was asked to describe the sort of programmes I would be interested in producing. Harry Williams, by way of Harold Evans, recently editor of The Sunday Times came to my rescue.
I had just been reading Harold Evans book about Sunday times days, Good Times, Bad Times. They had struck me as a perfect example of someone so committed to journalism that it was a secular illustration of what religious people call “vocation”. And I thought if I could use an example from the everyday world to illustrate such an other-worldly concept as “vocation”, I might have found a way to communicate to the non-religious what religious people go on about.
I have no idea what that programme idea had on the interviewing panel, but I got the job, and the first series of programmes I produced was called “A Sense of Place” in which I tried to use someone’s sense of how a particular place meant more to them than the geographical location or physical landscape and conveyed the impression of what theologians describe as “the numinous”, the sense of awe.
In the first programme I took Richard Holloway, then just returned to Scotland as Bishop of Edinburgh, to a cottage he once owned below the Ochill Hills and from where he left for a time to work in America. He talked movingly and powerfully about how the “little deaths” of leaving a loved, familiar place are preparations for a far bigger, greater death.
And I realized that there is an extended truth: the little resurrections we experience in life are not simply preparations but also hints, glimpses, signs, what the New Testament calls “foretastes” of a greater resurrection; and to wonder whether for Jesus resurrection was something which happened at the end of the Gospel story, or whether, when he rejected Peter’s flattery at Caesarea Philippi, or when he deliberately took the road to Jerusalem, or when he chose to enter the city on the back of a donkey, or took the hard way out and let the cup pass from him, these were for Jesus, little resurrections, which found their completion on Easter morning.
This Lent I have been reading Harold Evans recently published autobiography*. Quite apart from being beautifully written, it is a portrait of vocation at its highest: an unswerving commitment to truth, a scarifying portrait of integrity and in the causes which he took up in the newspapers Evans edited a passionate pursuit of justice. I sensed again the same power of vocation, but something else. Evans could spot potential. After his career in journalism he went to America and became a publisher, and in 1994 he read a book by a young, first time writer not long out of university, and thought the book was so good that he gave the author an advance of $40,000. His name was Barack Obama and the book, Dreams from my Father.
* Harold Evans, My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times, Little Brown £25.00