Across Another River

May 27, 2022May 27, 2022 / Rick Yoder / 2 Comments

The Lamb of God at the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, Walsingham, Norfolk. Photo taken by the author.

Then, at last, when he had crossed the Old Road, and had gone by the Lightning-struck Land and the Fisherman’s Well, he found, between the forest and the mountain, a very ancient and little chapel; and now he heard the bell of the saint ringing clearly and so sweetly that it was as it were the singing of the angels. Within it was very dark and there was silence. He knelt and saw scarcely that the chapel was divided into two parts by a screen that rose up to the round roof. There was a glinting of shapes as if golden figures were painted on this screen, and through the joinings of its beams there streamed out thin needles of white splendour as if within there was a light greater than that of the sun at noonday. And the flesh began to tremble, for all the place was filled with the odours of Paradise, and he heard the ringing of the Holy Bell and the voices of the choir that out-sang the Fairy Birds of Rhiannon, crying and proclaiming:
“Glory and praise to the Conqueror of Death: to the Fountain of Life Unending.“
Nine times they sang this anthem, and then the whole place was filled with blinding light. For a door in the screen had been opened, and there came forth an old man, all in shining white, on whose head was a gold crown. Before him went one who rang the bell; on each side there were young men with torches; and in his hands he bore the Mystery of Mysteries wrapped about in veils of gold and of all colours, so that it might not be discerned; and so he passed before the screen, and the light of heaven burst forth from that which he held. Then he entered in again by a door that was on the other side, and the Holy Things were hidden.
Arthur Machen, The Secret Glory, Chapter II

Yesterday was a liturgical confluence of some personal importance for me: St. Philip Neri, St. Augustine of Canterbury, and the Ascension. The liturgical Providence of God thus epitomized my full life of faith on one day. St. Philip Neri, whom I love particularly among all the saints, stands as a good figure for my past. The Ascension points to my own future hope of salvation, when I might join the Ascended Christ, my King and High Priest, in Heaven. To quote a favorite hymn:

The great I AM hath sworn; I on His oath depend.
I shall, on eagle wings upborne, to heaven ascend.
I shall behold His face; I shall His power adore,
and sing the wonders of His grace forevermore.

That leaves St. Augustine of Canterbury, father of the English Church. He is the sign of my present.

On that triple feast, I made my confession in the Episcopal Church and was conditionally baptized under the patronage of the Blessed Patriarch Enoch, “who walked with God” (Gen. 5:24). I then took communion for the first time since Leap Day 2020. As Pascal put it, “Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie.”

I have long held some doubts about the validity of my Methodist baptism as an infant in 1995—for which I have no records beyond family photos, but which was for some reason acceptable to my parish and Archdiocese when I completed RCIA. I thus felt it was necessary to rectify that situation. I am now, without any doubt, baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The reason I did this in the Episcopal Church and not a Roman Catholic one is that, for nearly a year, I have been attending my local Anglo-Catholic parish. St. John’s, Bellefonte, has been a tremendously edifying community. Indeed, it is the only parish where I have felt genuinely wanted, and not simply tolerated. I started attending last summer in the midst of a very deep spiritual crisis. This crisis, which had been percolating off and on since August of 2018, was one that, had I stayed a churchgoing Roman, would certainly have caused me to leave Christianity altogether. It was only by the grace of God that I found spiritual sustenance and safe harbor at St. John’s. It felt like escaping into fresh air from a very large building which is slowly filling with smoke, because an unchecked fire is raging in its wings. It felt like jumping into a lifeboat from a rather majestic cruise-ship that is sinking, even as people keep dancing and the band plays on. It felt like escaping to a beloved aunt from a bad mother who beats you mercilessly (even when you do what she says!) and denigrates you at every opportunity, taking every chance to remind you how much better your siblings are—all while claiming to love you. A mother who asks for tremendous sacrifices and gives no help to accomplish them. A mother who requires all until she forbids all, and forbids all until she requires all, and then demands you forget everything that came before. The Church is a bad mother, not just because of her many spiritual abuses, but precisely because she is inconsistent, all while claiming that such inconsistency is impossible! And who do we believe: the Church, or our lying eyes?

I did not advertise my transition to regular worship in a TEC church because I wanted to see if I might find any reason to stay in Rome, both through my online interactions and when I went to Catholic Masses upon my visits home. But the hook that I was half-hoping would convince me to stay on the far side of the Tiber never appeared. If anything, I became even more convinced that I should leave. And then, as the day drew near and the details were finalized, I did not tell anyone because I did not want to risk losing my nerve in the face of the old psychological traps. But now that the deed is done, I can, like Ozymandias, explain my “master-stroke” a bit.

I have never written the story of my conversion to Roman Catholicism; somehow, describing my loss of faith is even harder. I am not going to do that here. This is not my Apologia Pro Vita Sua. And I am not here to write a Chick Tract; I remain grateful for much of what I received in the Church of Rome in happier days. I know that no matter what I say, it will not be adequate to describe my own sense of disillusionment, of loss, of bitterness. And I know that, even were I to express at great length, with reason and evidence, all of my historical and theological misgivings about the post-Vatican I Papal Church, or my serious doubts engendered by the still-unresolved Silverstream scandal and similar cases, it would still not matter; many of you will attribute everything to my personal life. So be it.

The chapel of St. Stephen’s House, Oxford, on the very first morning I set foot there nearly five years ago. I will, happily, be able to receive communion there upon my next visit.

I don’t feel that I need to justify myself. But I will state my position, briefly.

I have done what I needed to do for the very survival of my faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I repudiate nothing of Catholic Tradition that is true, and good and beautiful; I reject everything that causes scandal, disedification, and injury to the Kingdom of God. I embrace the traditional, episcopal, conciliar constitution of the Church which still exists, however imperfectly, in the Anglican Communion (itself in communion with the Old Catholic Church of Utrecht). And, with all my heart, I abjure the Pope.

I emphatically don’t wish to burn any bridges with my many Roman acquaintances by this disagreement with their theology and separation from their communion. Mostly, I am leaving behind friends. That is my only sadness. I have countless fond memories—Easter Vigils in Charlottesville celebrated with friends, stirring moments of devotion and worship next to friends at the various British Oratories of St. Philip Neri, giving the eulogy at my own grandmother’s Catholic funeral in Aiken, and everywhere engaging in edifying conversations with friends who genuinely believe in Christ and will reach Heaven before me. I wish them well. As long as I could focus on orthopraxy beside such wonderful people, I could ignore the tremendous unpleasantness and the doublethink that being a Roman Catholic actually entailed for me personally.

But I can’t do it anymore. I have no regrets about my decision. God will draw us all together in the last day. I have no doubt that I have not left the one eternal Church of Christ. I have simply moved to a different (healthier?) part of it, one where God in His mercy has deigned to meet me in my terrible distress. To quote a man holier than me, “A mark of the Christian Church is that it is catholic, embracing all the angels of heaven, all the elect and the just on earth, and of all times.” And again: “There is nothing more spacious than the Church of God; because all the elect and the just of all ages comprise it.”

I have come to realize that all I can do to persevere in that Church is trust in the grace of God, focus on the local, and work out my salvation in fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12). I am under no illusions that my new home will be perfect, that it is free of divisive error, or that I will always be happy here. But neither is Rome: it was full of rather shocking evil, various divisive errors, and keen, mounting unhappiness for me personally.

Our Lady of Walsingham, St. John’s Episcopal Church, Bellefonte, PA. Photo by author.

Anglicanism is not perfect. Even as someone convinced of the historical validity of Anglican orders, I recognize this. It is wracked with schism. There are rather atrocious liturgical abuses from time to time. People like John Shelby Spong, James Pike, and John A.T. Robinson exist in their episcopate. Most seriously, there are sexual abuse scandals here, too.

But Anglicans’ focus on Christ and the Scriptures, their minimalist approach to doctrine, their “inclusive orthodoxy,” their localism, their seemly forms of vernacular worship, their quiet and decorous approach to personal holiness, their epistemic humility, their irenic stance towards Christians beyond their communion, their welcome to LGBT people, their poetic and moderate devotions, their customary aversion to dogmatism and legalism and enthusiasm, their respect for conscience, their aestheticism, even their sense of humor—all of it is vastly superior to what I have found to be the modus operandi in the Roman Church, whether in the typical Novus Ordo parish or in one of the Traditionalist ghettos. But above all, I am attracted to Anglicanism because I find the faith, hope, and charity of Christ there.

And so, “I was glad when they said unto me: We will go into the house of the Lord” (Ps. 122:1 BCP). Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, once wrote,

For while the Anglican church is vindicated by its place in history, with a strikingly balanced witness to Gospel and Church and sound learning, its greater vindication lies in its pointing through its own history to something of which it is a fragment. Its credentials are its incompleteness, with the tension and the travail in its souls. It is clumsy and untidy, it baffles neatness and logic. For it is sent not to commend itself as “the best type of Christianity,” but by its very brokenness to point to the universal Church wherein all have died. Hence its story can never differ from the story of the Corinth to which the Apostle wrote. Like Corinth, it has those of Paul, of Peter, or Apollos; like Corinth, it has nothing that it has not received; like Corinth, it learns of unity through its nothingness before the Cross of Christ; and, like Corinth, it sees in the Apostolate its dependence upon the one people of God, and the death by which every member and every Church bears witness to the Body which is one.
Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church, pg, 188; emphasis my own

This ecclesiological vision rather perfectly captures my own view of the Church, a view I have tried to express elsewhere.

Illustration from *All Glory: Brush Drawing Meditations on the Prayer of Consecration*, by Allan Rohan Crite (Cambridge, Mass: Society of Saint John the Evangelist, 1947). My priest was kind enough to give me his copy of this absolutely extraordinary work as a baptismal gift, from which this photo is taken.

And to be quite honest, becoming an Anglican feels a bit like coming home. And not just because, during the Evensong which immediately preceded my baptism, we happened to recite Psalm 24, my old school Psalm. During my first conversion, family friends in the Anglican Continuum were very kind to me and nurtured my fledgling faith. My first copy of the Book of Common Prayer was given to me by another dear family friend, who has since departed this mortal life. Her funeral in Virginia was, I think, one of the first proper Episcopalian liturgies I ever attended (and sang at). I spent two years as a graduate student at St. Stephen’s House, Oxford, one of the most Anglo-Catholic seminaries in the Church of England. It is a community of men and women to whom I will be forever grateful. There are many others to thank, among whom I will mention only those who directly and personally encouraged my conversion since last summer: Father B., Mother R., Father J., Father S., CD, KH, RB, JC, and my interlocutors in the EC. You know who you are. I confess, I am grateful as well to those few Roman Catholic friends who, whether out of affection for me or sincere piety, did try to persuade me to stay.

Most of all, I have to thank the people of St. John’s, including my priest, Fr. Carlos de la Torre, a truly tremendous pastor, and Deacon Alex Dyakiw, who has shown me nothing but kindness and who stood as godfather for me. If I ever reach heaven, it will be in no small part due to the example, charity, and prayers of these two good and faithful servants.

There was a moment at the last Easter Vigil that furnished a perfect picture of what I have received at St. John’s. I got to the church early and was so absorbed in my pre-Mass readings that I forgot to pick up a candle. Once the Vigil started at the back of the nave, I realized that I was the only one without a light. Yet my priest, seeing my lack, brought me one. He graciously let me light it—while he was processing with the paschal candle up the aisle. He even paused the procession to give me the flame. This little moment, which no one but me would remember, was a powerful image of grace itself, and how it works in our hearts. That grace, which binds us to the very life of Christ, brings us into the New Jerusalem, builds us into the Eternal Temple, and makes us members incorporate of the Kingdom of God—that almighty grace is “the one thing needful” (Luke 10:42). It is because of that grace that I can say, with a confidence born of faith,

One thing have I desired of the Lord, that will I seek after;
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to enquire in his temple.
Psalm 27:4 KJV

It by that grace that I have been baptized into the Jordan, by that grace that I have swum the Thames, and by that grace that II hope to drink one day from another, supernal river, flowing from the Throne of God and the Lamb (Rev. 22:1). I beg your prayers that I may always be faithful to the grace that I have received.

On Faith and the Priesthood of Christ

May 26, 2022 / Rick Yoder / Leave a comment

And he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his hands, and blessed them. And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy: And were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God. Amen. – Luke 24: 50-53

Many years ago, shortly after the start of my faith journey, I received some very good advice from an Anglican friend of mine. Or rather, I received a very good prayer. She told me that whenever she was anxious or worried or stressed about anything, she resorted to a prayer that ran like this:

“Jesus Christ is my High Priest, and He will always see me through.”

There is much consolation in these simple words, as I have had frequent occasion to learn in the years since then. And, to be honest, I am most drawn to Christ in the mystery of His High Priesthood. I often find myself asking Him to pray for me, not in the sense that one asks a friend or a saint to pray, but as one can only ask a sovereign and perfect intercessor. This sense of Christ as High Priest has become part of the basic structure of my own faith. Yet today’s feast, the Ascension of Our Lord into Heaven, invites us all to dwell upon this mystery in a more explicit way.

The Ascension from the *Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry* ©Photo. R.M.N. / R.-G. Ojda (Source)

It is a curious fact of the Church’s kalendar that in those solemnities when she most fervently celebrates the Incarnation, she also insists most firmly upon the hiddenness of God. In Christmas, we observe Christ born in a lowly shed at night, disclosing His presence only to those shepherds who resemble Him in their poverty, humility, and obscurity. Today’s feast of the Ascension is composed of a similar doubling. It brings before our eyes the Incarnation in its most radical implications—while reminding us that we live in and with Christ’s apparent absence.

It is, therefore, a salutary lesson in the virtue of Faith. I think that we too often lose sight of what Faith really is. Scripture tells us: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1 KJV). But what does this really mean?

God’s absence is felt in two ways. First, we feel it through the insistent reality of evil. The agony of the world we live in is too great, too universal, and too obvious to need any underlining. The Church is no different. How many malicious and mediocre priests seem to cloud the pure light of the Gospel! Their sin weighs more heavily, for they have been given a greater charge. Yet there is some comfort in the High Priesthood of Christ. If our earthly priests falter and fail, Christ never will. He remains forever a spotless offering in the sight of the Father, and His blood is all-cleansing. The invisible pontiff of an invisible, all-embracing, and everlasting temple, Christ never abandons His children, who linger below with expectant eyes.

Let us pass on to the second sense in which God hides Himself, leaving us with, in the words of R.S. Thomas,

this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply.
R.S. Thomas, “The Absence”

The past is forever dead to us, an enormous absence, a distantly glimmering mirage that fades even as we approach it. Sacred History, even supported by texts and archaeology, is not a special case. There is a sense in which the facts of the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ are no different here. We may participate in them, but we cannot directly experience them as historical events, in historical time.

The great High Priest in Heaven. (Source)

So, what are we to do? How do we deal with the fact that God’s acts of revelation lie hidden behind the curtain of time? Quite simply, we must have faith. We must declare that faith is not certainty and not knowledge, but an engraced movement to trust those little lights given unto us. Those lights are, mainly, Scripture and Tradition, particularly the Liturgy, in which the Church as a body transcends the limits of earthly time through her collective remembrance. There is a tendency in Catholicism to downplay the “memorial” function of liturgy. This is a mistake. In fact, there is a sense in which the essence of the Liturgy (or rather, the Liturgies of the various Catholic Churches) is memory. But it is the memory of the Church as the very Body of Christ, a memory which realizes and re-presents the object of remembrance, not mere empty symbolism. Orthodox theologians have been better on this point than Western ones, perhaps because they have not been so fearful of the specter of Zwingli. But I digress.

All of this is to say that we cannot state with the certainty of historical science whether Sacred History is true. There is no real evidence for most of revelation, and we should not let the apologists delude us on this point. They’re far more addled by modernity than they realize. But by grace we can and should leap boldly across the chasm of our natural uncertainty, avoiding the Scylla of Apologetic Positivism and the Charybdis of Naturalistic Doubt. The result is not knowledge, which has no meaning here, but faith.

We would all be better off in a position of greater epistemological humility. For instance—let’s be honest—we have absolutely no knowledge of what happens after death. The data is inconclusive: annihilation, a flash of light, reincarnation, hauntings, purgatory, heaven and hell. We know nothing. It may seem like a commonplace, but it bears repeating, that our fate after death is a mystery. All we can do is have faith that what we have been promised is true. But none of this is certainty, not even for our own salvation. Do you know you will be saved? No. For no one can know what comes after death. Eternal hellfire or an infinity of mute blackness or a strange new human life could come instead. The only thing to do is to pray for mercy “in fear and trembling,” placing our faith in the Hidden God (Philip. 2:12).

Rebecca Dulcibella Orpen, *The Risen Christ (The Ascension)*, National Trust, Baddesley Clinton (Source)

Do not say to me that you “know” these things because you “know” your Bible or because you “know” Church teaching or even because you “know” Jesus. To be frank, I don’t believe it. In fact, I’m not confident we can know God at all, in the sense of positive knowledge. God’s existence is not like a mathematical theorem or the date of the Battle of Waterloo. Nor do I think you can know God or any of His saving mysteries like you can know another person. You cannot see God; you cannot touch Him; you cannot hear Him like you can hear a friend or lover or even a stranger passing in the street. Simply put, I don’t believe that our “knowledge” of God, the Infinite and loving ground of Being, should be called “knowledge” at all. In fact, I rather suspect that this fixation with “knowledge” has been a very substantial problem for the Church throughout her history.

To interject a personal note; I look back at my life and I sometimes wonder if I ever really knew Christ. There are others I doubt as well. False mystics and visionaries abound, as the Church chokes on her own prelest. But when I look at my own case, I remain unsure. I certainly know a lot about the Church, and have ever since I eagerly began RCIA nearly ten years ago. But did I know Christ? Was I just enamored with my own exaltation, with the fool’s-gold assurances of spiritual certainty, with the glittering baubles that float like empty bottles down the Tiber? Is it even possible to know Him? Or must we just choose, by grace, to have faith—to place our confidence in Him, trusting that He will guide us through the overwhelming darkness of uncertainty which is the very tissue of our lives?

I have come around to the latter position. The virtue of Faith has nothing to do with knowledge per se, and is as far from certainty as East from West. It is granted to us precisely because we lack certain knowledge of the immense realities it comprehends, and probably must by our very nature. Eliot writes in “Burnt Norton” that “Human kind/cannot bear very much reality.” We forget our weakness too easily.

Jan Matejko, *The Ascension of Christ*, 1884 (Source)

Happily, the substance of our faith does not reside in the natural faculties of understanding. As Pascal says, “It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.” In a sense, the Ascension is the true beginning of the Christian faith in history, for it inaugurates our sensible separation from Christ. Our eyes grow dim, but not our hearts. The blindness of nature is transformed into sight by grace.

In Exodus, God tells Moses that “Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.” (Ex. 33:20 KJV). The Ascension is the triumphant reversal of these words. For today, a man greater than Moses, a man greater than Enoch and greater than Elijah, but a man all the same, sees the Face of the Father. He has “ascended into Heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty.” Godhead wraps Himself in human nature, and humanity is plunged into the abyss of everlasting Light. A human being stands at the threshold of eternity. The Ascension brings humanity into the very Holy of Holies of the cosmos. We truly participate in this Ascension if we unite ourselves to Christ through the grace given us, especially the grace of the sacraments. If we one day enjoy the Blessed Vision of the Divine Essence, it will be through the eyes of our High Priest, our Head, the Lamb who is the Lamp of the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:23). John Donne puts it thus:

Behold the Highest, parting hence away,
Lightens the dark clouds, which He treads upon;
Nor doth he by ascending show alone,
But first He, and He first enters the way.
John Donne, “Ascension”

By grace, we shall follow these luminous steps, someday. So many saints have – including today’s great saint, Philip Neri, Apostle of Rome. Their stories remind us that now is the time of faith, and hope, and the charity that breathes life into both.

If the Ascension is a lesson in Faith, it is just as much a lesson in Hope. It shows us which way we must go. It tells us that we must look to the hills, from whence cometh our help (Ps. 121:1). We need go neither backwards nor forwards, neither to the East nor to the West—but rather, up. Up, into the hidden mystery of the Divine Life. Our help is not from man but from the God-Man, the one who brought our very nature beyond the veil of the celestial temple. And what do the Apostles do? They imitate their Head and repair to the visible and earthly temple, there to sing and praise and preach the Gospel of the Lord. So have all the saints throughout the long, dark centuries since the Ascension. And so should we.

But even as we tabernacle in the visible Church, we are truly cloistered in the heart of the Most High. As St. Paul writes to the Colossians,

If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.
Colossians 3:1-3

Let us pray with the Apostles that we might one day ascend with Christ. And let us ever hold in remembrance that Jesus Christ is our High Priest, and He will always see us through.

An Ecclesiological Note

November 23, 2021 / Rick Yoder / 4 Comments

Perhaps the fundamental flaw of our ecclesiology is that we think the Church was founded. By that I mean, that Christ came, set up the Church, sent the Holy Spirit, and it’s all been moving onward, outward, and upward ever since. One points to the words of Our Savior – “thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” – and leaves the question at that. (Matt. 16:18). A somewhat more sophisticated version of this argument extends the Church’s life – her gestation, if you will – into the covenants of the Old Testament.

This kind of ecclesiology weds the Church to the vicissitudes of history, and the necessary fruit of this unhappy union is a Tradition that oscillates between mythopoetic antiquarianism and charismatic presentism. Tradition is either an ark to carry us across the sea of changes, or the constantly renewed speech-act of the Pope, or people, or Council, or some ill-defined combination of the three. And whether one reads this historical narrative in a traditionalist or a progressive key, one always ends up interpreting the story of the Church in the light of the past’s dying embers.

Icon of the Synaxis of All Saints. (Source)

But that is not the model of the Church we find in Scripture. The Church which is the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, the Redeemed Heaven and Earth, all this is the self-same Church that sojourns in history (Rev. 21:1-2). But in the Apocalypse we observe her at her true birth beyond time. It is in the culminating moment of all creaturely existence, in her final and lasting Union with God in His essence eternal, that the Church takes her true being. It is the bright light of that ageless day which illuminates history, and not the ever-dimming torches of chronological time. Indeed, history furnishes no light of its own, only dim reflections of God’s glory that we misunderstand in uncountable ways. In the words of the Apostle, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” (1 Cor. 13:12).

In the same letter, he writes, “And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.” (1 Cor. 15:28). Here we have an image of the eschaton – that redeemed dimension in which everything that is, is Christ, by the grace of participation in Him. The eschaton is thus non-different from both Christ and the Church. All souls participating in the eschaton likewise share in Christ’s singular mediation before the Father, albeit in ways proper to their scope. Humans are His Body, the Angels are His High Priestly garments, and the new heavens and the new earth are the temple. For the eschaton – the Wedding Feast of the Lamb – mediates God’s salvific action with creaturely, chronological reality (Rev. 19:9). It is like the upmost layer or outer shell of time, giving all creation its true shape. It is the blissful union by which God weds the cosmos.

A genuinely eschatological ecclesiology, an ecclesiology that takes apocalypse seriously, must demote any definition of Catholicity that relies too heavily upon the unstable facts of history. If the Church is, as the Apostle writes, “the pillar and ground of the truth,” then it must be rooted in a life that exists beyond the vicissitudes and fallibility of the creaturely world. (1 Tim. 3:15). However, this raises a question of knowledge with soteriological ramifications.

Too often we hear from Catholics (or Orthodox) in an apologetic mood that “We know we are in the True Church because we have Apostolic Succession.” No, you are in the Church because you are saved by the grace of Christ; your Judgment has already taken place beyond time, your eternal place in glory allotted, your soul blissfully united to the Lord – but you haven’t consciously arrived there yet. This is the mystery of Predestination, but not, as commonly misconceived, in a linear, chronologically anterior direction. Election does not happen before time, but above it – or rather, both before and after history. When St. Paul writes, “And whom he predestinated, them he also called. And whom he called, them he also justified. And whom he justified, them he also glorified,” he is fundamentally describing a single divine work in the eschaton. (Rom. 8:30). To be in the Church is to be a child of God. However, the grace of divine adoption is eschatological in both its root and in its orientation. Scripture says, “He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be my son.” (Rev. 21:7). And elsewhere, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God.” (Rev. 21:3). This image, which comes from one of the final visions of St. John, depicts the Church’s eschatological life, and not her earthly existence. Thus, only the Saints in Heaven are the Church, properly speaking; the damned have no part in Christ’s Body. Ultimately, there is no third category.

The True Church is thus, like God Himself, hidden. She abides in and beneath the purple trappings of worldly glory, but takes no part in it. The tendrils of grace that reach down from the supernal world move invisibly and invincibly to the hearts that are hers; they are as so many crooked and narrow paths up to the temple, lit by the lamp of Revelation. As the Psalmist sings, “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.” (Psalm 118/119: 105).

This is not to say that apostolic succession is unimportant. It has its uses, insofar as it preserves and passes on the saving truth of the Scriptures and Creeds, the threefold order of ministry, and the seven sacraments by which we receive certain graces. In this sense, it is a gift of God’s condescension to us mortals. But apostolic succession is not constitutive of the Church’s essence. Only final participation in the eternal life of Christ can do that.

Christ the Judge, mural in St. John’s Episcopal Church, Memphis, TN. Mural by John DeRosen. (Source)

Which brings me to a question I have been wrestling with lately: what is Catholicity? When we confess in the Nicene Creed that the Church is “Catholic,” what does that really mean? The common answers one usually hears on this point are either “communion with the Pope” or “possesses apostolic succession.” The first of these is an irrelevant, Ultramontane fable. The second simply confounds the question of Catholicity with the question of Apostolicity.

My own attempt at an answer would divide the question thus: we may speak of what Catholicity looks like, and we may speak of what Catholicity is. Catholicity looks like those things I have already mentioned: teaching the faith of the Scriptures and Creeds, prayerfully distributing the seven sacraments, and preserving the threefold ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons in apostolic succession. In what it seems to be, Catholicity means wholeness. But Catholicity is participation in the eschatological Church which is already united to Christ, that is, the whole body of the saved, whosoever and wheresoever they might be. In this sense of its utmost reality, Catholicity means universality. Thus, Catholicity means different things when applied to the Church visible and the Church invisible, with the latter taking priority.

The temporary Church visible and the everlasting Church invisible are never completely commensurate. But one can nevertheless “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” more confidently in a church with these elements, and where one can be reasonably sure that the priest is offering a true oblation to the Father. (Phil. 2:12). One can never truly be sure that one is a member of the Universal Church simply by virtue of the necessary historical features I have outlined. A Christian can still be damned, even if he is a churchgoer; surely, no Catholic who is paying attention could say otherwise. As we move through time, who can know whether any of us will prove to be Saints in that last and most surprising Day? “Watch and pray.” (Matt. 26:41). As M. Quesnel said of the two thieves at the Crucifixion, “Un se convertit à la mort, espérez; un seul, craignez.”

I said earlier that this issue is a question of knowledge with implications for our salvation. But that’s not quite true. One’s adherence to the True Church is not a question of knowledge, even with all the best historical or empirical evidence we can gather. It is, rather, a question of faith. Too many Catholics are uncomfortable with real faith. The over-exalted epistemic claims of our church means that far too often we treat our doctrines and even our own salvation as matters of knowable fact, and end up forgetting that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Heb. 11:1). Let us pray to receive the grace of rediscovering epistemic humility, for with it, faith will follow.

On Sexuality, Christianity, and Language

February 24, 2021 / Rick Yoder / 1 Comment

The knight Richard Puller von Hohenburg and his servant, burned before the walls of Zürich for sodomy, 1482. (Source)

The recent controversy in ACNA about the language of homosexuality has been deeply unedifying. It has been aggravated in the last few days by an open, co-signed letter that, while doing the bare minimum, nevertheless was far more affirming than the original pastoral statement to which it replied. In a move I can only describe as scandalous, the principal author’s bishop then stepped in and ordered him to take it down.

I am for the most part uninterested in the internal politics of ACNA. I have friends in that communion, and after all, it is neither my circus nor my monkeys. I am, however, keenly interested in the issue at stake: what kinds of language sexual-minority Christians use, why, and what this says about their broader place within Christianity. Especially as some of these same issues have come up repeatedly in the Catholic context as well. That relevance to my own situation moves me to write, when I might otherwise keep silence.

When the original statement came out last month (no pun intended), a gay Christian friend of mine wrote, “I am starting to think that this tired conversation about sexual identity language is actually *designed* to keep the Church from caring for sexual minorities by addressing its pervasive homophobia.” Much of what follows therefore comes from what I wrote in reply, with a few edits and additions here and there.

It seems to me that this debate about language – the alleged moral valences of words like “homosexual” or “gay,” and whether or not it is appropriate for Christians to self-identify with these words – serves a multipronged function:

(1) It distracts from urgent issues, like sexual minorities being disproportionately subject to homelessness, political oppression, intimidation, healthcare discrimination, targeted murder, and suicide.

(2) It subsequently distracts from the historical and ongoing complicity of heterosexual Christians in these phenomena, and absolves them of any effort to help fix it.

(3) It puts the entire onus of subjectivity-formation on the gay Christian individual and thus places them in a defensive posture which prevents them from making further demands. It does this in three ways:

(4) It deprives them of a language in which to articulate their own subjectivity and needs.

(5) It isolates them by preventing them from using the language by which they can form bonds of solidarity with other sexual minorities.

(6) It further isolates them by cutting them off from the history of other sexual minorities, whatever terms they may have used (sodomites, inverts, homosexuals, fairies, queers, gays, LGBT, etc.).

(7) All of which is to say, the debate mainly functions to control sexual minority Christians by making their own experience more and more illegible to them.

(8) It works very well because it exhausts a lot of emotional energy from LGBTQ+ Christians. This is intrinsic to the debate’s function as a mechanism of control.

(9) It is doubly effective when, as in the ACNA document, it reverts to the most clinical and pathologized language imaginable. “Christians afflicted with” or “who struggle with same-sex attraction” is not only unwieldy, it’s obviously stigmatizing. SSA might as well be leprosy.

(10 This is not to say that gay Christians who feel that the language of “same-sex attraction” or SSA best expresses their experience shouldn’t use it. We should all use the language that best fits our own embodied story. But when straight Christians use it this way, they are robbing them of the freedom to make that decision for themselves.

(11) In the Roman Catholic Church, there is the added rigmarole around vocations. No man with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” can be ordained…but what does this mean? If you have sex with men (or at least want to) but don’t call yourself gay, do you have these tendencies? What are we to make of the considerable number of gay priests that are already ordained? It hides hypocrisy.

(12) I am reminded, for instance, of what Roy Cohn says in Angels in America.

(13) The most insidious thing about the ACNA statement, though, isn’t even the matter of terminology. It’s the deeper point from which the terminological discussion grew: a claim that homosexuals can become straight again.

(14) If this were coming from an old-school queer theorist or even second-wave feminist who insisted on the radical flexibility of gender and sexuality, I wouldn’t have too much of an issue. But the obvious problem here is the latent moral imperative that moves from is to ought (also the erasure of bisexuals, but that’s a bit of a tangent).

(15) Going from “some people can move between kinds of attraction” to “you must become attracted to the opposite sex,” as this document does implicitly, is an awful lapse into conversion-therapy thinking. And we know how harmful this is, especially to queer youth.

(16) But this pathologization is itself, once again, a mechanism of control. Religions are social bodies that require adherents in order to survive. And like it or not, gays have historically been a major part of the Christian fold – including in Anglicanism!

(17) The reasoning advanced by ACNA is thus, quite precisely, an ideology. It is a logic that helps the oppressed buy into their own oppression. They are hardly unique in this; many in our own Church of Rome offer the same false narrative for the same ends.

(18) I would like to end this thread on a hopeful note, though I have very little hope to speak of. The best I can say is that LGBT Christians need to make their own communities. We need to use the terms that best express our own subjectivity. This is quite apart from the issue of sexual ethics, which does not hinge on what we call ourselves.

(19) Straight Christians, including Catholics, should accept that we are going to use the terms that we choose. It is not up to them. Their time would be better spent helping on the very urgent issues I outlined earlier. And maybe trying to understand what it’s like for (Christian) sexual minorities in the Church and in society at large.

(20) Finally – the best thing to help on the issues of terminology is for sexual-minority Christians, where it is safe to do so, to come out. Even clergy. Articulating your own experience is truly liberating, even as it opens up a new vulnerability. But freedom is worth it. Honesty is worth it. Visibility is worth it. Life is worth it.

An Interview on Anglican Occultism

April 1, 2020 / Rick Yoder / Leave a comment

Recently I had the great honor of being interviewed on the podcast Poststructuralist Tent Revival (PTR) about my research into Anglo-Catholic hermeticism and occultism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thanks especially to Jacob Given for a great conversation. Please consider subscribing to PTR‘s Patreon! They do some really great stuff.

And for those who want to learn a little more about the broader phenomena I discuss here, you might want to check my brief article in The Church Times, Dec. 2018, on the same subject. While it doesn’t go as deeply as my actual academic work did, it gives an overview of the landscape.

Elsewhere: The Anglo-Catholic Mormon

October 25, 2019 / Rick Yoder / Leave a comment

I must refer my readers to a particularly interesting blog. If you thought The Amish Catholic was an odd title, just try The Anglo-Catholic Mormon. Featuring poems by St. John Henry Newman, theological considerations of the Trinity, and arguments in favor of theology itself, The Anglo-Catholic Mormon is a unique offering in the Mormon blogosphere. It is also, as far as I know, the only blog uniting broadly Catholic and Mormon spiritual traditions.

The pairing is not so implausible as we might immediately think. There are a number of similarities between Roman Catholicism (if not Anglo-Catholicism) and the Mormon church. Both believe in a visible Church governed hierarchically. Both have a more expansive view of revelation than Protestants, including a form of magisterial authority invested in the visible head of the Church. They share some common moral teachings. And both Catholics and Mormons seem to be some of the most enthusiastic disciples of Dr. Margaret Barker, drawing upon her “Temple theology” to enrich and illuminate their respective traditions.

The anonymous author puts it this way:

At the surface, the two distinct faith traditions seem irreconcilable and perhaps they are. However, it is this blog’s purpose to explore, not the tensions between the two traditions, but Mormonism from an Anglo-Catholic-inspired reading of Church History, theology, art, music, liturgy, et cetera. This blog is written, mostly, by Latter-day Saints for a, mostly, Latter-day Saint audience. The Anglo-Catholic Mormon is a blog dedicated to the exploration of Latter-day Saint doctrine, theology, history, and culture from a Latter-day Saint perspective—albeit one influenced by Anglo-Catholic aesthetic, theological, musical, and liturgical sympathies.
The Anglo-Catholic Mormon

Apparently – and this is news to me – the Mormon blogosphere is known as the “Bloggernacle.” The titular Anglo-Catholic Mormon has described his place within this phantastic landscape as such:

From this keep, paladins, mages, and scholars publish key theological tracts based upon the teachings of the (Restored Catholic) Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Their premise is that the ancient Christian Church, the universal or catholic church as established by Christ and led by the Prince of the Apostles, St Peter, is continued under the guidance of the current heir to the Throne of St Peter, in Salt Lake. Only by uncovering the mysteries of the past can they bring unity to the Mormon Bloggernacle.
The Anglo-Catholic Mormon

Catholics are likely to scoff at the claim that the See of St. Peter is truly located in Salt Lake City. Nevertheless, they ought not miss that unusual idea for what’s really interesting – namely, the fact that a Mormon is thinking (in public!) with these very Catholic categories.

It seems to me that this blog is engaging creatively with both Catholic and, as far as I can tell, Mormon teaching. The author ostensibly remains a Latter-Day Saint. I would of course urge him or her to convert to the Church of Rome – or at least seek Trinitarian baptism. Nevertheless, I am eager to see what he or she produces in the future.

To my readers: watch this space. I have no doubt that the author wishes to gain a Mormon rather than a specifically Catholic audience. Nevertheless, we Catholics (Roman and otherwise) should pay attention to what’s going on here. Perhaps we will see a Mormon Oxford Movement spring up out of these posts. And what will follow then?

“Reversed Thunder, Christ-Side-Piercing Spear”

February 27, 2019 / Rick Yoder / 2 Comments

The holy side-wound of Christ, from a Book of Hours (Source)

Today is the Anglican commemoration of George Herbert, the great English cleric and metaphysical poet of the 17th century. He died on March 1st, 1633. In honor of this bard of the spirit, I offer to my readers one of my favorite Herbert poems. Every time I return to it, I find new edification.

“Prayer (1)”

George Herbert

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

Anglo-Catholics and the Occult: My Church Times Debut

December 14, 2018 / Rick Yoder / 1 Comment

The Abbey in the Oakwood, by Caspar David Friedrich.

The Church Times have just published an article in which I summarize some of my research on the connection of Anglo-Catholics and the occult world. I’d like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Sarah Apetrei, and co-supervisor, the Rev. Canon Robin Ward, for their support throughout all of this. I’d also like to thank Fr. James Lawson for the early help he provided as well as Dr. Michael Yelton and those various other figures who have discussed the matter with me over the past year, often in words of encouragement. Hopefully the full paper will be published someday. For now, read here.

The Charism of Eccentricity

October 30, 2018January 21, 2019 / Rick Yoder / 2 Comments

The 18th century was a Golden Age of clerical satire – and clerical eccentricity – in England. (Source)

What a day of loons it has been. After discovering the narrative of that wandering bishop which I brought to my readers’ attention earlier this afternoon, I have since come across two wonderful articles about the venerable tradition of eccentricity in the Church of England. The first is over at the Church Times. The Rev. Fergus Butler-Gallie, a curate in Liverpool, has written a book entitled A Field Guide to the English Clergy (One World Press, 2018). In his article at the CT, Butler-Gallie provides a taste of what is assuredly a very fun book indeed. Take just one of the bizarre figures he profiles:

William Buckland, a Victorian Dean of Westminster, became obsessed with eating as many animals as possible, from porpoise and panther to mole fricassee and mice on toast, even managing to gobble up the mummified heart of King Louis XIV while being shown round the Archbishop of York’s stately home.

He was no fool, though. The first person ever to excavate an entire dinosaur skeleton (although he was more interested in other prehistoric remains, writing on a desk made out of dinosaur faeces), he once disproved a supposed miracle in France by being able to prove (by taste, of course) that a supposed saint’s blood was, in fact, bat urine.

Or consider this parson:

The Revd Thomas Patten was a real-life Dr Syn, helping to run a smuggling operation on the north-Kent coast. Patten would preach interminably boring sermons until a parishioner held up a lemon, a sign that someone had agreed to buy his drinks for the evening at the tavern opposite, at which point he managed to terminate the service with astonishing alacrity (a ruse, I’m sure, no clergy reading this would even consider replicating).

If the rest of the book is as fascinating at these anecdotes suggest, it will be a classic in no time – right up there with Loose Canon and The Mitred Earl. Apparently it’s been getting rave reviews. (I’ll add that if any of you are looking for a Christmas gift for your favorite Catholic blogger, it’s going for under £10 at Amazon).

Today I also came across an article about one of Butler-Gallie’s subjects, the Rev. R.S. Hawker, also known as the “Mermaid of Morwenstow.” Alas, as I am not a subscriber to The Spectator, I cannot read it. Those who can are encouraged to do so.

One of my favorite clerical eccentrics whom I doubt that Butler-Gallie covers is the Rev. William Alexander Ayton, vicar of Chacombe in Oxfordshire. You can read more about him in my article, “On the Wings of the Dawn – the Lure of the Occult.”

Though of course there are few stories of clerical eccentricity as amusing as the infamous dinner related by Brian Fothergill in his life of Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry. Fothergill tells us that

On one occasion when a particularly rich living had fallen vacant he invited the fattest of his clergy and entertained them with a splendid dinner. As they rose heavily from the table he proposed that they should run a race and that the winner should have the living as his prize. Greed contending with consternation the fat clerics were sent panting and purple-faced on their way, but the Bishop had so planned it that the course took them across a stretch of boggy ground where they were all left floundering and gasping in the mud, quite incapable of continuing. None reached the winning-point. The living was bestowed elsewhere and the Bishop, though hardly his exhausted and humiliated guests, found the evening highly diverting. (The Mitred Earl, 27).

Hervey also built what must have been one of the greatest gems of British Palladian architecture, Ballyscullion House. Alas, it is no longer extant, but has been reduced to a respectable if far less elaborate mansion. (Source) For a 3D model, see here.

If there’s one thing for certain, it’s that Anglicanism as lived in history is not a dry religion.

Allow me to indulge in a bit of crude cultural observation. It occurs to me that the national church of the English would inevitably partake of that quintessential English quality – eccentricity. Americans don’t produce real eccentrics. We breed individualists and, less commonly, outright weirdos. But the great British loon is mostly unknown to us. Eccentricity requires a certain localism, even an urban one, that has been mostly lost in the sprawling homelands of the American empire. Suburbs don’t produce eccentrics.

And more to the point, why should strangeness be so unwelcome in the Church? Why should the Church be bland and conformist and comfortable? Why must we labor on through the nauseatingly boring bureaucratic lingo and platitudinous sound-bites that so often seem to make up the bulk of our ecclesisatical discourse? Where is the sizzling fire cast to earth? Where is the light and heat of the Holy Ghost? In reviewing the proceedings of the recent Youth Synod, I was dismayed to find so little that genuinely spoke of the sacred. It so often seems that our Bishops are more interested in crafting a Church of the self-righteous liberal bourgeoisie than they are in the Church that Jesus left to His Apostles.

Eccentricity may not be a strategy, but it’s at least has the potential to become a reminder that the supernatural reality is completely other. As that Doctor of the Church, David Lynch, once said, “I look at the world and I see absurdity all around me. People do strange things constantly, to the point that, for the most part, we manage not to see it.” Well, God does far stranger things far more often than we do. Eccentrics – especially the Fools for Christ – can speak to that.

Butler-Gallie gets at this well in his article when he writes,

Church of England with more rigour and vigour might have its appeal, but the evangelising potential of the strange increasingly appears to be a casualty of the drive to be more, not less, like the world around us. An embracing of our strangeness, failings, and folly might free us to eschew conversion via tales of our usefulness — be that in pastoral wizardry, wounded healing, or nifty management speak — and, instead, “impress people with Christ himself”, as suggested by Ignatius of Antioch (who, though not an Anglican, did share his fate with the 1930s Rector of Stiffkey, both being eaten by a lion).

…Perhaps less strangeness is a good thing. It is certainly an easier, safer thing from the bureaucratic and behavioural point of view. I’m more inclined, however, to agree with J. S. Mill — hardly a friend of the Church of England — who suggested that “the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time.” Or, to put it another way, a Church that represses its strangeness is one that is not more at ease with itself and the world, but less.

I can only applaud this point. Ross Douthat said much the same in my own communion when, in response to the Met Gala last Spring, he suggested we “Make Catholicism Weird Again.” Or what Fr. Ignatius Harrison CO was getting at when he gave that wonderful sermon on St. Philip Neri’s downright oddity. And though Flannery O’Connor may never have actually said it, I can’t help but agree that “You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you odd.” Indeed, my readers will know that I have hammered on about this point ad nauseum. Butler-Gallie’s writing encourages me to keep at it until we in the Christian West more widely recognize the charism of eccentricity.

Prelates dancing to the Devil’s music. (Source)

“A Wandering Bishop I, a Thing of Shreds and Patches”

October 30, 2018October 30, 2018 / Rick Yoder / 1 Comment

“…of miters, rings, and snatches / of episcopacy!” (Source)

Those of my readers who take an interest in such things will no doubt find a series of articles over at the Anglicanorum Coetibus Society about the (inevitably) strange case of a modern episcopus vagans. It’s got everything: multi-syllabic titles of nonexistent sees, complicated episcopal genealogies, a brush with the Old Catholics, incongruous vestments, a sex scandal, batty old women, Freemasons, just a whiff of diabolism, alleged “Patriarchal Cathedrals” in mortuary chapels, Gnosticism, a false knighthood, Dracula’s seaside town of Whitby, suspicious jaunts off to Malta, obscure saints, a drunken celebrant, and false triple-barrelled names.

Whither Anson and Brandreth?

If these are the sorts of things that might divert you as we enter into All Hallowtide, do give the good folks at ACS a few views. We are in debt to Simon Dennerly for his painstaking reporting on this troubling narrative. Connecting all the dots in that field of very bizarre orders and bishops and patriarchs and abbots and princes can be dizzying work. One must have a great deal of patience – not to mention the stomach for it.

Here are the articles:

James Atkinson-Wake: “who wears the Mitre of Satan”

(Incidentally, “Who Wears the Mitre of Satan” sounds like one of those wonderful old Hammer Horror films starring Christopher Lee).

Philip James French: the Fake Catholic Bishop of Whitby

The Reckoning of the Fake Catholic Bishop of Whitby?

One rather wonders how the story will end. Then again, we know how all stories end: death, judgment, Heaven, and Hell.