Wording a Radiance. Daniel W. Hardy

      Wording a Radiance

      Parting Conversations on God and the Church

      Daniel W. Hardy

      with Deborah Hardy Ford, Peter Ochs and David F. Ford

      © Daniel W. Hardy, David F. Ford, Deborah Hardy Ford and Peter Ochs

      Published in 2010 by SCM Press

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      The Authors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Authors of this Work

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

      A catalogue record for this book is available

      from the British Library

      978–0-334–04208–2

      Typeset by Regent Typesetting, London

      Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham SN14 6LH

      Contents

       Preface

       Part One

       1. ‘A Portrait of My Father’: Daniel W. Hardy – Deborah Hardy Ford

       ‘Holy Land Pilgrimage’ – Daniel W. Hardy (as told to Deborah Hardy Ford)

       Part Two

       An Ecclesiology of Pilgrimage – Daniel W. Hardy (as told to Peter Ochs)

       2. ‘At the Headwaters of the Jordan: The Energetics of Personal Transformation’

       3. ‘Jericho: Measuring God’s Purposes’

       4. ‘Jerusalem: Jesus’ Steps, Measuring the Church’

       5. ‘A Light in the Tunnel under Jerusalem: A Eucharistic Pneumatology’

       Part Three

       6. ‘Living Theology in the Face of Death’ – David F. Ford in conversation with Daniel W. Hardy

       Part Four

       7. ‘Farewell Discourses’ – Deborah Hardy Ford in conversation with Daniel. W. Hardy

       Bibliography: Daniel W. Hardy

      For Perrin, Dan, Jen and Chris

      ‘Some love is mine,

      And always mine. A peace. A radiance

      I’ve wanted to word but can’t . . .’

      (Micheal O’Siadhail)

      ‘I’ve been content ever since the onset of this cancer to be drawn into death, but I don’t take this negatively at all: it is also being drawn into life and the two are closely tied together . . . I don’t know how: being drawn into death is also being drawn into life . . . Perhaps I am being a sort of sign of attraction, going ahead of you into the mystery, an attraction not into anything clear and unambiguous but into a light that is the mystery of death and life, and therein God.’

      ‘These things are to do with fundamental impulses in me: to go deeper and deeper into things, for myself and with others; but it is more than that, it’s how you reach into that to find greater depths which are found again to be the depths of God. This is about my almost insatiable concern for God, not just for knowledge about God but a more insatiable thirst again than that . . .’

      ‘. . . it is a question of allowing the divine to flood in without inhibition. I can’t get away from the fact that a lot more is to be said about how things and people are knit together in the divine abundance – an indefinite resource of human wholeness, and wholeness for the universe too. What is it that people are growing into? There is a far more profound human integrity than we have yet glimpsed. What is it that grows a good, whole human being and a good society?’

      (Daniel W. Hardy in conversation, September – November 2007)

      Preface

      Farewell, farewell! But this I tell

      To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!

      He prayeth well, who loveth well

      Both man and bird and beast.

      He prayeth best, who loveth best

      All things both great and small;

      For the dear God who loveth us,

      He made and loveth all.

      (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

      In one of his last published works, an essay on Coleridge’s Opus Maximum, Daniel W. Hardy reflects on the dynamic of love in these few (his favourite) verses: ‘The scope . . . widens from all that is animate . . . to include everything’; ‘the intensity of love increases from “well” to “best,”’; correlatively, the intensity of prayer increases from ‘well’ to ‘best’; and ‘the greatest intensity of prayer (relationship to God) becomes actual not because of human capacity but because God made and loves both us . . . and all things . . . (accordingly) prayer includes not only loving attentiveness but also the reasoning of that which is made by God’.

      The last six months of his life had that quality of intensity: the unprecedented element in which was his experience of being drawn deeper into God’s light and love while on pilgrimage in the Holy Land.

      This book draws on three series of conversations, which he sustained during those months with his co-authors: Peter Ochs, his friend; Deborah Ford, his daughter; and David Ford, his son-in-law. Of course there were many others too. It tells the story of his experiences on pilgrimage to the Holy Land just weeks before the diagnosis of an aggressive brain tumour; of his coming to terms with those experiences and his approaching death.

      Daniel took this time very seriously and dropped many of the activities and commitments that previously took up his time and energy. There were painful decisions about whom to meet with (giving priority to family, graduate students and a few friends, with whom he was used to having sustained conversation); and one of the most agonizing decisions was to give up on the hope of writing a book on the Church he had contracted with Cambridge University Press, which during its long gestation (going back around 20 years to his time in Durham) had become a lens through which he thought about the whole of theology and society.

      Yet