Return to the Empire

On Japan, Gospel Simplicity, Fr Crouse and Whitsuntide

Photo by David Edelstein on Unsplash

O-hisashiburi: it has been a while. Fear not! These bones live yet. But there have been interesting times. I haven’t written of late because, frankly, I’ve been knackered. Were I not so concerned to maintain an unconvincing air of manly old-school sangfroid, I might even submit that I have been “emotionally exhausted.”

You see, after just a year in England, I have returned to Japan. There was an unwanted tenant in the Rectory and the vicissitudes of the English legal process dragged out the months it should have taken to evict him. When the anniversary of my living out of suitcases (two convents, one flat) with my wife and children thousands of miles away drew not, we wondered whether God was holding the door shut there for a reason. Add to that the fact that the children had got used to living in what was meant to be our holiday home - school, friends etc. - and despite loving my parish and people, despite having a sound and superlative bishop, despite coming back to no job here, it was time to leave.

So here I am, in aforesaid house of traditional wooden construction. We’ve got the carpenter in, putting new shelves in to hold my somewhat prodigious library. The new pine smells as though Ise Jingu is undergoing its periodic rebuild in my house. The books and sundry possessions are still in their unopened boxes in England awaiting the inevitable complexity of Japanese Customs before it can board the boat. The coffin full of fresh grave soil is apparently problematic and some of the more superstitious sailors are spooked by the sudden surge in rats.

The full mushi-atsui mugginess of the intolerable Japanese summer has not yet descended, but even now my vaguely Celto-Saxon corse (we Plants are all scions of an antique Welsh polygamist) is sweating like swine. Never again will I complain of the British weather. At least it won’t kill you.

But you are not here for my reminiscences on Japanese life (are you? If you are, do say). You subscribed to the musings of an English priest with an unusual Japanese angle, and that is what you will get rather more of henceforth, for obvious reasons.

So, you may wonder, what have I to say of substance today? Two things, for now.

First, you may be wondering what I am going to do here in Japan, with no church and no teaching post. More will follow when details are finalised, but for now let me titillate you with the prospect of a new mission house and church in Japan, and the prospect of coming here for spiritual formation, pilgrimage, study and mission to Japanese Christians. Nothing is finalised, but talks are underway. Watch this space, and let me know in the chat if you might be interested in partaking. I’ll also be available to offer reading and study courses online.

Gospel Simplicity

Second, I had the pleasure of returning to Austin Suggs’ excellent Gospel Simplicity podcast today for an interview on King Oswald’s Heirs. If you don’t know him yet, you need not take my recommendation alone, because over 100,000 people consider it worth their time subscribing.

My conversation with Austin ranged quite widely from metaphysics to demonology of a sort, counter-enchantment, cultural identity, and the question of whether to stay in your church or seek the “perfect” one. Towards the end of the interview, he asked for some reading suggestions in the Anglican tradition. I was glad to hear that he is going to record an interview about the great spiritual director and writer Martin Thornton (I am guessing that it may be with Fr Matthew C. Dallman, a true acolyte). But he hadn’t heard of the inimitable Fr Robert Crouse, and it struck me that you, dear readers, may not have heard of him either.

Fr Crouse

Today, then, let me effect an introduction to this unsung hero of the Canadian Church. You may wonder, given its current decrepitude, whether any good thing can come from Canada. Fr Crouse and his coterie of disciples answer in the affirmative.

Fr Crouse lives now on the other shore, but you can know him by his fruits. The Crouse stable boasts many fine, but typically modest, successors. I can embarrass some by name: Dr Stephen Blackwood of Ralston College, Fr Westhaver of Pusey House, Sarah McDonald of Selwyn College chapel music fame, the noted spiritual director Fr Gary Thorne, academics Fr David Curry and Wayne Hankey, and the limelight-allergic but deeply scholarly Fr Harris of St Giles Reading: all were part of the Crouse circle. There are no doubt many more I do not know.

That circle represents what Fr Crouse himself was. He was a classicist by training, an Augustinian Platonist by conviction, and an Anglican by sheer dogged loyalty to the tradition which sustained his faith. He was a scholar-priest who embodied the great tradition of the Western Church, as at home with Boethius and Dante as with the Book of Common Prayer. He saw these as being in continuity with one another, and especially lamented the decline in use of the ancient Western Eucharistic lectionary preserved in the Prayer Book, since it had formed so many great minds.

You will find many of Fr Crouse’s sermons, along with others of his circle, at Lectionary Central, easily the most useful website for anyone preparing sermons on the traditional Prayer Book lectionary. But if you want to look at his work more specifically, see Fr Thorne’s site, the Works of Robert Crouse. There you can sign up for a paper copy newsletter. You will also find three books of Crouse’s sermons and retreat addresses for sale and well worth the purchase. Indeed, I reviewed one of them for Touchstone a while back. The full text of the review is also here:

Whitsun

Since we old Kalendrists are still in the octave of Pentecost (just because Rome suppressed something in the 60s doesn’t mean Anglicans have to), let me share some of Fr Crouse’s thoughts on Whitsun, before I build on them with a few of my own:

Pentecost is not just ecstasy of spirit, not just dreams and visions. The Spirit of God is the spirit of order, and not of chaos; and the spiritual life must be formed and shaped in the precise clarity of doctrine, and must be nurtured in the settled forms of institutions, in fixed patterns of worship and forms of prayer. Thus, as St. Luke records, the disciples, baptized by the wind and fire of the Spirit, “continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers”.

The Spirit of order – a Platonic sentiment if ever there was one. But this is no dry Atticism at the expense of some supposed atavistic Hebrew wildness, nor the eclipsing of Dionysus with Apollo. The Spirit from the outset of Scripture breathes order because it breathes only and always with the Word. He is the Logos who soothes the chaotic voids and brings forth the solid ground needed to sustain existence. It is through the Logos that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, revealing who God is by what God does. And there is no conflict, no possible divergence, between the Word and Spirit. What the Word Incarnate and the inspired Word in Scripture teaches and does, which is to say in His “clarify of doctrine,” in the “settled forms of institutions” He founded, and in the “patterns of worship and forms of prayer” He fixed, are equally the unchanging and irretractable work of the Spirit. The Spirit does not contradict the Word.

There is much to be said for the apophatic way, and for recognising that God exceeds all human words, concepts and possibility of rational apprehension. There is therefore much to be said for the still small voice of calm experienced in the silent spiritual practices of the Church, wherein we invite the Spirit to speak, to paraphrase the Apostle, in wordless groans through us when our words fail. But the apophatic, as St Dionysius taught, must always be balanced against the cataphatic. We cannot directly intuit God by our own natural reason; it will get us only so far, perhaps as far as the Good or the Unmoved Mover. Only by God willing to reveal Himself supernaturally can He bring us to know Him with the intimacy that He demands. And, in fact, He has done so and continues to do so, in Holy Scripture, in the person and deeds of Jesus Christ, and in His continued Incarnate present in Holy Church. But He does so, necessarily and inevitably, in words and images which we can understand, from the natural realm. The natural, in the end, is the only meeting point we have for the supernatural. The material is the vehicle of the Spirit. And it can be so because it is exists within the bounds of the Logos and is animated by the selfsame Spirit. There is no part of nature untouched by Him and ungraced. The cosmos is a ladder to God not only because it is made by Him and bears His carpenter’s mark, but because it is in Him that all things live and move and have their being, as even pagan poets knew.

In one sense, namely the cataphatic, we can call Whitsunday the “birthday of the Church.” But forgive me if I do not crack out the jelly and ice cream or hoist the multifarious balloons. For in another sense, apophatically, we must deny this intuition quite forcibly. Living in a temple of time and space, we cannot but see things historically, in a linear fashion: creation, fall, election, struggle, Incarnation and redemption, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Judgment, resurrection. But if we ask, when did the Spirit come for the institution of the Church, the answer does not offer a neat dot on this line. Especially if you ask St John. He breathed His last: clearly a reference to the sending of the Holy Spirit, and that was from the Cross. He breathed on the Apostles in the Upper Room, again before Whitsun. But more fundamentally than that, in the beginning was the Word. There is no time when He was not, and there is no time when the Spirit did not breathe. This was all in Day One. The Johannine point of reference is to Genesis 1, not before time, but beyond it.

This is what reason alone cannot grasp. This is where even the imagination fails. The circumference cannot escape the centre, even though it is as invisible as the radius which binds the two. Our reason is likewise circumscribed by laws natural and metaphysical which sustain our existence.

The Church was not, ultimately, born in a moment of time. She was always there. You may hear it said that the Church is not the building, it’s the people. Neither the negation nor the affirmation is true. The Church is neither the building nor the people alone, but both, and everything else besides. She is the architecture of the cosmos, which the stones and wood of churches faintly echo. Indeed, the Church is the cosmos fully realised. She is the Alpha and Omega because it is the Body of Him who is First and Last, origin and eschaton. The purpose of the Church is to offer everything back to Him who gives and sustains it. There is no time when she was not. She is at once already been born and yet in the pangs of delivery. Hence the Spirit groans.

I could go on about how linear “salvation history” models, which one might blame partly on the technological innovation of the book, with its beginning and end held between two covers, have distorted our ideas not only of the Church, but also of the cosmic role of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the cult of saints, concluding in certain errors of the Reformation, but that, dear reader, is another story for another day.

Let me leave you with a very generous review of my new book:

Review - King Oswald's Heirs: Meditations on the Catechism of the English Church

If you haven’t read it yet…

God bless!

Fr Thomas