What is Anglicanism?. Urban T. Holmes III

let us acknowledge that the roots of our peculiar way of looking at the Christian experience are provincial; they evolved from the English province of Christendom. This should bother us no more than Roman does the Roman Catholic Church. I mean by Anglican, to be specific, nothing more than those Christians who worship according to some authorized edition of the Book of Common Prayer and who are in communion with the see of Canterbury.

      In this spirit, I find it much easier to identify Anglicanism with persons rather than a system, although I do not agree that we lack a system. This personal approach has dictated the design of the study, inasmuch as each chapter draws upon some one individual whom I judge to epitomize the point to be made. This will, it is hoped, make the subject matter concrete and more readily appropriated. We are a people-oriented church and it is important that we make a concerted effort to know and celebrate our heroes.

      There is no intention to pursue the many obvious loose ends that each chapter leaves dangling. This book is intended to make a beginning for whoever reads it — priest or lay person, inquirer or lifelong member — and to invite an intelligent and ever more informed quest. I am of the opinion that it is neither possible nor desirable to make a neat package, but there is spiritual growth in the effort.

      Sometimes the only thing outsiders recall about the Episcopal Church or Anglicanism is that it is supposedly divided into high church and low church. Inasmuch as this is a gross simplification of a very complicated history of Anglicanism and is fundamentally untrue, there is no discussion of that issue in this book. I have sought to take a position which I believe to be consistent with the theology of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church. This book promises among those who listen to lay to rest the so-called churchmanship controversies that have sapped the energy of the Anglican Church for far too long.

      Some years ago I had the occasion to preach in a seminary chapel on the Feast of the Bestowal of the American Episcopate (November 14). It provided an occasion for a “cradle Episcopalian” such as myself to ask why he was an Anglican. The answer that came to me then and remains with me is that, with all its irritating nonsense, I know of no place in which I could have more freedom to be that Catholic Christian which we are called to be. I leave it for the reader to ponder my meaning.

      On how many occasions have I delighted in expressing thanks to those who made a book possible. The list always differs a bit. This time there is the University of the South and Robert Ayres, its Vice-Chancellor, who acknowledged my need for a sabbatical leave. Robert Haden, LaRue Downing and Ed Hartley all gave me a place to work and time to do it at the Kanuga Conference Center in Hendersonville, North Carolina. I am grateful to Lisa Kirby, who typed the manuscript. The Rector, Alex Viola, and the people of St. James Church, Hendersonville, warmly welcomed my wife and me to their lively community, and as a result, I found new enthusiasm to write thankfully of our Anglican heritage.

      The book is dedicated to one who lives in Hendersonville, a quiet, deeply devoted priest, who has been my mentor and friend for more than thirty-eight years. As one grows older he realizes who counts to him, and Gale Webbe is one right at the top of my list.

      Urban T. Holmes

      Monday in Holy Week, 1981

       Chapter One

      The Anglican Consciousness

      Anglicanism is a mode of making sense of the experience of God. To put it another way, Anglicanism is a particular approach to the construction of reality, or to the building of a world.

      What do I mean by “building a world”? The point is crucial for our discussion; so this illustration may help. Three couples are planning to take a vacation together and they are discussing whether or not to go to the beach. One couple strongly urges that they go. Think of the sun, the sound of the ocean, they say, lying on the beach with nothing to do but relax. They recall their own youth when trips to the beach were the happiest occasions of their lives. Another couple resists. One of them recalls when as a small child she almost drowned in the ocean. She retains a deep fear of water. The husband finds lying on the beach a waste of time. He recalls a life of having to prove himself by hard work. The third couple is willing to go, but memories of sunburn and a week of rain two years before dampens their enthusiasm.

      What is the question here? It is not what is intrinsically the nature of an experience of the beach — “the beach in the raw.” None of us ever experience the beach that way. It is what each couple makes of the experience of the beach based upon their memory and its way of shaping their consciousness of the beach that makes the difference. It is not necessarily a matter of whether one couple is right and the rest are wrong, although it would be if one insisted the beach was inhabited by man-eating tigers. Each couple has a distinctive way of building a world of meaning or constructing a reality around the experience of the beach. That world of meaning obviously determines each couple’s willingness to go to the beach.

      One way of understanding Anglicanism is to know that it is a unique way of looking, making sense, and acting in the experience of God disclosed to us in the person of Jesus Christ. This is to say that it is a manner of being conscious, which manner was given birth in the history of a people whose culture, language and institutions came into being in the British Isles. It is well to remember that these islands, until the discovery and colonization of the New World by Europeans, were the frontier of the civilized world, removed from the centers of culture. It was the end point of successive invasions from the north and east: the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons, the Norse and the Normans (who were Norse that had originally settled in France). Anglican consciousness is the product of a montage of geographical, social, political, economic and racial forces that have created a peculiar historical memory. That memory has been handed on through the centuries, and while modified by subsequent events (e.g., the colonization of North America) remains distinctive at heart.

      An example of Anglican consciousness is Julian of Norwich, an obscure fourteenth century anchorite. In some ways Julian was a commonplace phenomenon of her age. She lived in a cell attached to the parish church in an East Anglia town. From a window in her cell she could view the Eucharist and from another window she could assist people seeking spiritual counsel. There were many such persons in later medieval England, but none known to us of the genius of Julian.

      In 1370, Julian received a series of revelations or showings, in which the crucified Lord appeared to her. The image of the suffering Christ, which was the persistent form of these visions, was not remarkable for the times. It was consistent with the popular religious art of the century. What is arresting is Julian’s reflections upon this experience setting forth the world she constructed out of her experience.

      Julian lived in a time of suffering and confusion. The Black Death had wiped out perhaps as much as a third of the population of England. The once proud and noble warrior-king, Edward III, was living out his last years in senility, mourning the death of his promising son, the Black Prince. Edward III was followed by his grandson, Richard II, who was broken against the misfortunes of his times despite his efforts to resolve England’s problems. Deposed, Richard II died in prison. Throughout this period England was enduring an incredibly cruel and draining war with France, which we know as the Hundred Years War.

      It is in this world that Julian spoke with a certain calm. “Our life is founded,” she said, “on faith with hope and love.” The basis of her faith was the Christ, who described himself to her as “the ground of her beseeching.” Julian was no foolish optimist. She had a deep awareness of our sin, yet believed that God has allowed us to fall that he might raise us up that much higher. “Sin is necessary,” she says; but immediately adds in her best known words, “All will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.”

      What kind of world does Julian see which allows her such confidence in a time of confusion and despair? It begins, first, with sensibility. I use the word “sensibility” in an unfamiliar meaning. It is the ability to apprehend or incorporate into our awareness the totality of an experience in all depth and breadth. Sensibility refers to the capacity to be sensitive and to accept what our senses tell us, even when that is not what fits into our neat categories. It implies an openness to experience, even when the meaning of that experience