The intention for this series, based on a study day held on Pentecost Eve in Canterbury, is simply this:

Too often we know too little about where we have come from (the history of our church), and because of that, we know too little about where we are going (the future of our church).

Perhaps this doesn’t convince you: you might think that we should be concentrating on the challenges of the present and the future, rather than doing the naval gazing of looking over where we have come from? After all, we all know that history is bunk, don’t we?

And yet, there is something profound, vital even, which is lost if we don’t know where we come from. I propose to give four justifications for undertaking a “rooting exercise” in understanding who or what Anglicans might be.

The first justification comes from a most curious source, a Franco-Jewish radical, trade unionist, philosopher and professional troublemaker: this woman, Simone Weil— born in 1909 in Paris, died in 1943 in (of all places) Ashford, Kent.

Weil was one of the most original, brilliant, intense, and enigmatic thinkers of the twentieth century. Born to a family of notional Jewish heritage, Weil placed much more emphasis on left wing political activity. At the age of six she refused to take sugar in solidarity with the suffering of the French soldiers on the Western Front. As an adult she became active in the trade union and workers’ education movements in France. Her fierce moral earnestness and certainty earned her the nickname “the Categorical Imperative in skirts”. She was a pacifist until the rise of fascism in Spain, when she briefly served with the Republican forces before her physical frailty and ineptitude made her such a liability (she gave herself second degree burns over a cooking fire!) that she reluctantly returned to France. She worked as a manual labourer on farms and in the Renault car factory, until the outbreak of the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of France. Weil sought ways to be involved in the Resistance, but at risk because of her Jewish ancestry, she was forced to flee France, and in 1942, after a short detour in the US, she finally settled in London. Determined to share in the privations of the people she had left behind, and further weakened by overwork, and overcome by self-doubt and depression, When she died in August 1943 she was just thirty-four. She was buried in Bybrook Cemetery, where her grave can be seen today.

In 1942 she had been invited by the Free French government in London to consider what would be needed for the reconstruction of France following liberation from Nazi control (this was back in the days when governments did post-war planning). Her thoughts were articulated in this work, L’Enraincement, which was published posthumously in 1949, and translated into English in 1952 under the title The Need for Roots. This is what Simone had to say about the title:

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.¹

All of which is true, if a little dry.

If you need more persuading, then let’s try something English. Steve Knightley and Phil Beer, otherwise known as the incomparable Show of Hands, produced an album in 2005 called Witness. The single taken from the album, “Roots”, expressed the perennial frustration of the English folk musician, working in a time and culture which seems to have forgotten all its own songs.

Which is what Anglican Roots is all about (in a way)².

Some of you might still uncomfortable with the justifications I have produced for studying our roots; a French radical and an English folk group. Would a bishop do?

Stephen Sykes, formerly Bishop of Ely, wrote:

… it is a mistake to think that if one is English one has no need to study this history [Anglicanism]. A Church which has not examined its past, with the best methods of analysis and interpretation open to it, is liable to misinterpret its present situation. We live from our memories as well as our hopes, and our accustomed way of telling our own story needs to be purged of vanity and illusion.³

Some of you might even feel that a bishop is not justification enough for such a historical exercise. Well then, will these words do?

“… the parable is this: The seed is the word of God. The ones on the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. The ones on the rock are those who, when they hear the word, receive it with joy. But these have no root; they believe only for a while and in a time of testing fall away.”⁴

Remembering where we have come from, in a way which unpeels (perhaps) some layers of myth, falsehood and ignorance, so that we might have some kind of better idea of where we are, so that we might be open to hearing God tell us where we are to be.

1. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (London: Routledge & Paul, 1952). Part Two : Uprootedness, p. 41 [↩]
2. Visit the Show of Hands website and download the full length video for yourself— and then the rest of their albums. You won’t regret it! [↩]
3. Stephen Sykes, ‘The Genius of Anglicanism’ in Unashamed Anglicanism, (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1995) p. 219. [↩]
4. Luke 8:11-13 [↩]

Being praised or explained?

I am more or less happy when being praised, not very uncomfortable when being abused, but I have moments of uneasiness when being explained.

Arthur James Balfour, (1848 - 1930), Prime Minister 1902 to 1905. Quoted in Alan Bennett Writing Home (London: Faber, 1994) p. 321