Timothy Ashworth

 From ‘Stepping Out of Bounds: Learning from the Breakthrough and Struggle of the Earliest Christians’

Chapter 1 Rooted in experience

 On Saturday at 5.30 on 4th June 1989 my parish priest passed me a note in the sacristy just before we made the brief procession on to the sanctuary of the Catholic Church in Yorkshire where I was curate. Father Thompson had just heard that troops had moved in to Tiananmen Square, Beijing.  I remember inviting the congregation to pray for the people gathered in the square with a sense of the awful import of that moment. There were more such prayers as the year went on and crowds confronted guns in Prague, Leipzig and Sofia, and then towards Christmas in Bucharest. On Christmas Day Leonard Bernstein conducted a multi-racial orchestra playing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in Berlin near the recently collapsed wall, while the Ceausescus, the brutal president of Romania and his wife, were summarily executed.

 Perhaps dramatic world events are inevitably a marker by which we trace our own life dramas; perhaps they influence them too. I wasn’t conscious of any connection and even by the first week of December the possibility of dramatic change in my own life had not entered my head. But before the end of the month I had left my parish and the priesthood. My life had been turned upside down.

 *****

 The story of that completely unexpected change in my life is part of the backdrop to this volume. Leaving the priesthood marked a deepening, not a lessening, of my engagement with the Christian tradition, the Bible and the history of the early church, and it is that deep engagement which I bring to these pages. I offer the following account of the journey I embarked on in December 1989, and which I am still pursuing, as context to my approach – of scholarship and fresh questioning. There are formative Anglican as well as Catholic roots behind this exploration, which is given shape in the book by a Quaker understanding of the nature of religious experience and many years of conversation, research and teaching.

 My journey began with a journey. On December 3rd I travelled to Rome on my way to the Gregorian University to talk with the principal about post-graduate studies in the next academic year. To prepare for teaching in seminary I was being encouraged by my bishop to experience international Catholic life.  Back in England a week later I looked forward to returning to Rome in August to begin my studies.

 As I had planned, I drove straight from Heathrow to Devon to meet up with one of my closest friends. James had been a companion for more than ten years in my meditation group, and we had shared many conversations on my journey into Catholicism and the priesthood. We had wrestled with questions about meditation, eastern religion and Christianity as, week by week, we travelled the forty-five miles or so south from York to Sheffield where the group met, usually staying overnight with other members of the group. James had invited me to Devon for the particular purpose of encountering a teacher who was making powerful sense of those questions, for James and others.

 I had a week to spend in Devon before returning to the parish for the busy Christmas period and had planned to stay at the Benedictine monastery of Buckfast Abbey. That arrangement gave me the opportunity to stay rooted in my Catholic world as I engaged with teaching and conversations I knew might present challenges. Sessions took place each evening and the teacher drew on both Buddhist and Hindu ideas. In that context I was asked if I felt able to set aside my regular religious practices for the time of the teaching. This was not an insignificant request and he was clearly aware of that. I remember hesitating before I said I could. On becoming a priest I had committed myself to saying the set prayers and readings of the divine office four times a day; the heart of my spiritual practice was the daily celebration of mass. But even by this early stage of the week, I was already aware that something out of the ordinary was happening to me and I was familiar with the reason that was given for this request: the need to let go of ‘names and forms’. Here was a central element of eastern thought, which also has a place – even if controversial – in the Christian tradition: that the unity we seek in our religious practice lies beyond words and rituals.

 At the next session the teacher spoke of his own experience of enlightenment, of a burning sensation he had felt through his body. I asked him a question: ‘in prayer and meditation’ I said, ‘I sometimes experience what I might describe as a small flame. How does that small flame become the fire you describe?’ His response was simple and immediate: ‘You have to surrender everything’. The style of teaching was often apparently flippant but the effect on me of the explanation for this has stuck for almost thirty years: ‘You surrender 5%, you get 5%; you surrender 10%, you get 10%; but you surrender 100% and all the limits fall away.’

 That session of teaching finished late in the evening and I returned to the dark abbey, already silent. I woke at three that morning. I can still vividly remember my very clear intention as I stood by the bed: ‘I want to surrender everything. No more compromise.’ Despite the strength of purpose I felt, I did not know what to do. I went to a communal space where there was a kitchen and a small electric fire, made a cup of tea and simply sat. I picked up something devotional to read and quickly put it down again. I started to meditate, and that seemed unnecessary too. Then something curious happened. Before the tea was drunk, I began to feel an odd heat in the centre of my body, at first quite faintly so that at moments I was not sure it was happening. But as the sensation became unmistakably stronger, and clearly not just the warming effects of a cup of tea or a one-bar electric fire, the heat grew and what felt like sharp burning streaks crackled up my body. It was painful but I certainly did not want it to stop. As the fire grew in intensity I was aware of my senses opening up. Sound, smell, sight were all becoming more rich and alive, and I felt a growing sense of wellbeing. I did not have to do anything beyond simply co-operating with what was happening – just accepting it, assenting to it. By the time the winter sun rose, the burning was constant in my body; no longer now the sharp darts of pain but a sustained heat and a deep steady feeling of being extraordinarily alive.

 For the next few weeks, this inner heat and powerful state of being continued pretty much unabated - with dramatic consequences.

 *****

A few days after the onset of this experience, I drove from Buckfast Abbey very early in the morning to Yorkshire, arriving in time for the baptism I had arranged before my trip to Rome. I had no idea what this new aliveness would mean when I got back to my ministry in the parish, but I was increasingly confident that, despite the strangeness of this new life, what was happening was good and could be trusted.

I had spent time during November with the baby’s mother to prepare her by looking at the promises she would make. As far as I am aware, no one would have noticed anything unusual in how I led the baptism service. Yet for me everything had changed. For the first time I saw it very differently. Baptism is one of the most significant events in the church’s life – awe-inspiring in its symbolism and story. Its meaning rests on profound and serious promises. On this particular day I could not ignore a feeling of compromise about my part in what for most others present was primarily a sweet social event. After the service as I put things away in the sacristy it suddenly became clear what I had to do: I must leave the priesthood and the parish. I could not ignore the sense of deep incompatibility between my new and profoundly affecting experience and what I knew staying would require of me. I phoned my bishop straight away and arranged to see him the following afternoon.

That same December evening I went to visit a friend, a curate in a parish in York, arriving after mass had begun. As a priest, the Eucharist was the heart of my life. The eastern meditation I began in my late teens had opened the door to Catholicism. Once I had entered I continued to meditate but the Eucharist became more and more meaningful, deepening as I studied and prayed and practiced my faith. Here, in a form beyond words, was the death and resurrection of Jesus, here was his teaching of self-giving, here was where the community found nourishment. In the consecrated bread and wine was Spirit-filled creation, a sign of the hope and purpose that shaped my life. But on this occasion, just a few hours following my clear intention to leave the church, it felt very different. I could appreciate the seriousness and devotion of my friend as he led the service, but the mass seemed flat, as if the meaning I usually found there had been pulled out of it. In contrast, what I had been experiencing now for a few days was vividly alive and three-dimensional. I was also acutely aware that all the fullness and purpose I usually found in the Eucharist was in fact everywhere rather than especially here. As with the baptism, I felt distanced from the celebration of the mass, precisely where I normally felt my deepest commitment.

Next day I spoke of my experience of the baptism and the Eucharist when I told the bishop I would be leaving the parish and the priesthood. I remember there were tears in his eyes as he spoke of how the church does not expect perfection, how it is compassionate with our limited understanding and appreciation of the things of God, that it exists to meet people in their everyday reality. I understood what he was saying. I did not disagree. But I had been seized by a totally unexpected experience that demanded something new of me – even though I did not know what the next step would be.

*****

 Before I recount the next step there’s an important detail about that day of intention and decision that is worth recalling here. After the baptism and just before I rang my bishop something strange happened, something that continued to mark the following extraordinary three months. As I came from the sacristy to my room to make the call, I was aware I was taking a step that would change the direction of my life. I know I had enough detachment to decide that before I saw the bishop I should talk this through with a friend. So I got my friend’s number and reached for the phone. In the same instant I heard a clear voice, ‘You don’t need to do that.’ I didn’t make the call. In that moment I had no doubt about the rightness of taking this next step.

 Did I imagine the voice and those words? Well, I knew it was not an external voice – perhaps it was simply an amplified thought. But that was not at all how it seemed, it sounded to me distinctly ‘other’. Was hearing the voice even an indication that everything that was happening to me was a kind of madness? This is still the understandable conclusion of some of those who knew me best. It is a plausible explanation, not least because I was unable to distance myself from the experience to reflect on it objectively. My usual ability to take a step back and observe myself thinking and acting was definitely affected.

 But mad or not, when I ‘heard’ this voice I had already been immersed for several days in a life of the most extraordinary beauty, meaning and depth. Everything I had ever sought through meditation and prayer was overwhelmingly present. And then came this: out of the burning that I continued to feel came a voice, and I had no reason to doubt its goodness. But hearing it set me off on a journey, which would certainly lead the church and my colleagues and friends in the priesthood to a view that this experience of mine – wonderful as it might feel – was not from God.   

 *****

 The next step following my meeting with the bishop was also in response to ‘hearing’ what I had to do: there was someone in particular I needed to go to. Clare and I had met some years earlier during my six-year training for the priesthood. We had been good friends for a year before we had to acknowledge that the relationship was becoming deeper. We struggled to separate, a painful experience for both of us. During the two years after my ordination we had seen each other briefly on just three occasions. Now, I ‘heard’ that I should go to her. Over this decision I found myself forced to stand back and look at what I was doing. Over the whole course of the day when I saw the bishop I was asking myself the question about going to Clare, ‘Is this right?’ And the affirmation was gently but firmly insistent. My life was changing direction in a way that would have been inconceivable even a day or two earlier. Surely this could not be from God? Rather than being led to make some heroic self-denial or risky public witness, I was being led towards the joy of ending a painful struggle. This was not the spiritual path my Catholic faith had led me to expect.

 So after a long drive at the end of the day, at two in the morning I knocked on the window of Clare’s London flat. And I stayed that night. The fire was still powerfully there the next day, full of a sense of goodness and purpose. Three months later we met in the Zouche Chapel at York Minster and by then we were absolutely clear we would get married, which we did – the following month. And the day after our wedding I attended my first Quaker meeting for worship.

 *****

When Clare and I met in York in March I was staying at Ampleforth Abbey and things were a good deal calmer. I had been in close touch with Clare since my visit to her in London, and this time back in Yorkshire felt like a period of discernment. I was participating in the daily worship of the Benedictine community and spending the days reading – first the English mystics: The Cloud of Unknowing, Richard Rolle, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton; and then the Spanish mystics: John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. I found many points of connection with what I was still experiencing.  But there is no denying that I also found many passages that were distinctly challenging in view of my relationship with Clare. All of these writers, steeped in the Catholic tradition, linked spiritual depth and sexual abstinence. The only one who was married was Margery Kempe and her story tells in a direct earthy way of the trials of her husband as she left the marriage bed, only to be subject to the mockery of the people of Lynn as she, a married woman who had borne at least fourteen children, felt moved to dress in white to signify her purity.

 Finally, I read the Bible from cover to cover. In the light of what I had been through, particular sections lit up and stood out in a new way. All the thousands of references to the word of God being heard by people – first in the Old Testament, then in the New – came intensely alive for me.

‘Though the Lord may give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying “this is the way; walk in it.”’

Isaiah 30:20-21

 And then there were the references to fire:

‘If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name’, then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”’

Jeremiah 20:9

 I became especially attuned to noting the moments of breakthrough when people are led to take radical steps beyond their normal lives. Such moments are the ground of the whole biblical story – central to the lives of all the key figures from both the Old and New Testaments. What I had previously read as a poetic or metaphorical way of speaking now had a visceral resonance with the new realities in my own life. The terror, surprise and joy of their experiences made vivid sense.

 *****

 So how is this account of my own spiritual transformation in the winter of 1989 essential to the purpose of this book?

 In the three months following my decision to leave the priesthood and all that ensued, I could see there were links to be made between my experience and what I was reading and discovering during my stay at Ampleforth in the spring of 1990. In a much calmer frame of mind than at the heady start of that period of life change, I was well aware of the temptation to make superficial connections. So a key decision while at Ampleforth was to apply to do postgraduate study at Oxford. My focus sharpened: what was the nature of the experiences that could lead a group of faithful, committed Jews to step outside the boundaries of their inherited traditions as they did? Beginning with Jesus, they were willing to open themselves to verbal and physical attack. But even more challenging for them, they were prepared to risk the charge that they were betraying God’s people, and implicitly, God himself.

 As I read the New Testament accounts of revelation, transformation and radical action in the light of my own experience, I was deeply aware that the early Christian breakthrough appears much less like the creation of a new religion than an expansion out of the formality of religion into something widely and directly experienced. Each serious controversial step beyond the designated religious boundaries is marked by moments of revelation, of encounters with God. It is only following a vision where Peter hears that he is to kill and eat ‘profane or unclean food’ that he comes to a truly disturbing conclusion, which at first he resists. God whose Law establishes the Jews as ‘holy’, ‘his chosen people’ (Deuteronomy 7:6) is asking Peter to break that Law. The radical conclusion he draws remains a revolutionary aspiration.

‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him.’

Acts 10:34-35

 The first Christians, all Jews steeped in deeply held and valued beliefs and practices, had to wrestle with an ‘expanded’ understanding of God, demanded of them by their experience of transformation and what they saw in the life and teaching of Jesus.  The multiple voices in the New Testament writings are all speaking about the struggle brought about by this expanded vision. The very fact that we have the New Testament is an indication of their practical impact and influence. But they did not communicate an idealized picture. The church at its most triumphal has often conveniently ignored the evident conflicts among the early Christians. But their honesty combined with the willingness of those who gathered the New Testament texts together to place these realities in front of us are a profound gift for what they reveal about the serious challenge of spiritual transformation.

 Examining the breakthrough and the subsequent friction it causes provides the raw material for this book. Approached in this way, the distinctive diversity of the Christian scriptures, with its range of witnesses and interpreters, contains a remarkable quantity of information on the vital but frequently fractious relationship between breakthrough and resistance, between spiritual transformation and religion in ways that are significant not just for Christians or even people of faith.

 I have come to feel that an examination of these matters is an urgent task of far more than historical interest. The upheavals of our present time are giving us challenges that require a level of co-operation and collective action beyond anything humankind has previously faced. The opening to this introduction recalls a turbulent time that may well have been pushed out of our mind by subsequent events, but it serves not just as a marker of that historical moment but also as a reminder that our present travails demand of us a social and political vision far wider than national or individual self-interest.

It is such a vision that characterizes the early Christian breakthrough. If those of us concerned with the Christian tradition and a religious perspective more widely are to effectively bring the insights of our inherited faiths to bear on the evolving world, we need to connect with the inspiration that seized the first Christians. It is not a question of imitation. Our time is so different. But faced with the needs of the world, the challenge for the Christian community, in all its diversity, is to recognize and respond to an invitation to expand beyond historical boundaries and limitations into a new understanding of what God requires, an understanding that will inevitably stretch any fixed ideas of Christianity and church.

 The New Testament provides us with evidence of how the Christian religion takes form partly as a kind of protective shell in reaction to a series of struggles and threats. It is a process that preserves the deep insights that have shaped western society but, at the same time, provides defensive boundaries marked by antagonistic words and actions. As Christian history shows, the structure of the church that emerges, despite helping to inspire much selfless service, is prone to generate serious friction, undermining the liberation it aims to communicate. We now have the potential and need to disentangle the lively breakthrough initiated by Jesus from its more rigid container. 

 There would be no Christians today if it were not for those Jews who had the courage to run with their absolute faith in what they heard as God’s invitation, God’s call to let go. They did this with serious difficulty and anxiety, honest dialogue and sometimes fierce argument and the risk and fact of conflict and life-threatening violence.  And they were being called to deeply reconsider so much that was most precious to them – ideas, practices, rituals, ways of doing things, ways of understanding God and each other. These had been the things that defined them, rooted them, made life meaningful and brought them joy, and which had nurtured their community for centuries.

 My instinct is that more of us, perhaps many more, may now need the courage of those first Jewish Christians. They responded to prompts to make faithful steps outside the bounds of their religious structures. Today, similar bold steps are needed, working creatively with the extraordinary riches we have inherited, moved today by the world’s need for a new outpouring of the transformative love at the heart of our faith.

My plan is for each chapter to have a final section called ‘study notebook’ which can identify and expand on some of the references in the chapter. Here is what I have prepared for the first chapter.

Study notebook

I pondered long and hard before deciding to open the book with this personal introduction. In the end, the value of explicitly rooting the book in my effort to understand the experience that led me out of the Catholic priesthood trumped inevitable questions about appropriate academic detachment. The book is more honest as a consequence. I would never have had the bloody-mindedness to pursue the academic questions I tackle in the book without being confident that I had seen something in my own experience that was worth pursuing and that might illuminate the relationship between the New Testament story and spiritual experiences that can still happen today.

 1989

I begin the story in the momentous events of December 1989. Many readers today will have their own memories of that dramatic year but for those whose personal recollections do not stretch back that far, Revolution 1989: the fall of the soviet empire by Victor Sebestyen (W&N, 2010) provides a substantial but very readable account. The story of Tiananmen Square and its subsequent systematic suppression in Chinese thought and memory is told in Louisa Lim, The People’s Republic of Amnesia (OUP, 2015).

 Beyond names and forms

If you try and explore the idea of ‘names and forms’ (nama-rupa) in Buddhism or Hinduism you will quickly be confronted by some intellectually challenging eastern philosophy. My awareness of this concept came through my meditation group in texts such as this one in the famous translation of The Ten Principal Upanishads by Purohit Swami and W. B. Yeats, first published by Faber in 1937, regularly reprinted since and still readily available.

Truth lies beyond imagination, beyond paradise; great, smaller than the smallest; near, further than the furthest; hiding from the traveller in the cavern. Nor can penance discover Him, nor ritual reveal, nor eye see, nor tongue speak; only in meditation can mind, grown pure and still, discover formless truth. (from the At the Feet of the Monk (Mundaka-Upanishad), Bk III.1)

 English and Spanish mystics

Copies of the writings of the English and Spanish mystics are relatively easy to track down. New editions are published regularly and there are versions online. Some of the excellent Penguin Classics versions are still in print and others are available second hand. I was already familiar with The Cloud of Unknowing and Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich as well as the poetry of St John of the Cross, so it was coming afresh to The Book of Margery Kempe and The Fire of Love by Richard Rolle that made most impression when I read them in January 1990. Both were crucial in helping me make sense of my experiences.