Bishop's Charge to Ordinands - 2004
ARTHUR MICHAEL RAMSEY – HOLY MAN, TEACHER OF THE FAITH, PUSHER AT BOUNDARIES
The longer the Church lasts – and I am completely confident that it will last, in some form, until the end of time – the more anniversaries there are to celebrate; and this year is no exception. For the 14th November will mark the centenary of the birth of one of the greatest men to be Archbishop of Canterbury in the 20th century. Arthur Michael Ramsey, who died on the 23rd April sixteen years ago, was a towering presence wherever he went: those huge eyebrows, the billowing cassock, the halting speech with the repetitious mannerisms, and above all the laughter. It was my privilege to get to know him in his retirement; it was my delight to talk with him about his friendship with my Danish grandfather, whom he knew well through the early years of the Anglican Lutheran post-war dialogue; and it was my happy duty to visit Joan Ramsey regularly in her Oxford home after his death. When I was first ordained, there were Michael Ramsey stories everywhere, even in the Army. But an Ordination Charge should be a disciplined address; and I want, therefore, to concentrate on three areas of Ramsey’s ministry which have a direct bearing on what we are here to be and to do – and he would like that distinction to be made, especially before an ordination.
The first is holiness. Michael Ramsey was the master of the short devotional book. One in particular stands out – Be Still and know: A Study in the Life of Prayer – which was Archbishop Runcie’s Lent Book in 1982. Like much of what he wrote in the latter part of his life, it is not to be gulped, and ‘read’, as if one were ticking the box or buying the T-shirt. I remember trying just that as a busy University Chaplain in Manchester, and failing miserably. The process made me able to say one or two quick and clever things about Ramesey’s exegesis of scripture, in the first part, or his handling of some choice figures in the mystical tradition, in the second part. But what did the book say to me about my life of prayer, and my way of being with myself in God? Like Rowan Williams and Basil Hume, Ramsey had the advantage of looking graciously preoccupied with another world while at the same time being thoroughly earthed in the present. He looked holy. But what does that really mean? Not a great deal to the rest of us. We are all called to be saints, but sanctity cannot be faked. Many is the time when I have had a plastic smile presented to me by someone spiritually lusting after me, and it hasn’t rung true. Holiness is a gift of God, and it takes as many outward forms as there are people on this planet. What Be Still and know continues to say to me are two thing: there is always more to discover about prayer, and the lift of God; and the simpler and unwordy the forms, the more chance there is for silence to break through and nourish us with a presence that is beyond us.
Secondly, teacher of the faith. Michael Ramsey went around and taught the Christian faith wherever he went, whether it was preaching in a village Church, lecturing in a University, or even speaking in the House of Lords. The book I keep returning to is The Christian Priest Today (1972), which is based on ordination retreat addresses, and with a wise appended chapter for bishops. Here is the result of contact with ordinands and curates that had accumulated across the years. At every stage, one is made aware of the relational nature of our work, whether as bishop, priest or deacon. Don’t make special friends among those with whom you work, otherwise there may be troubles; accept humiliations, even though they may hurt terribly; be aware of the real questions that people bring to their faith, otherwise you will find yourself churning out platitudes; never underestimate the importance of thinking about what you are going to say in the pulpit; and in an age that was beginning to become quite cosy with the eucharist, he would constantly warn us about the sacrifice which the Holy Communion is supposed to commemorate, and the sacrificial aroma of eucharistic living. As a teacher, he seldom lost touch with his audience, though he could tell on those occasions when he didn’t quite make it – as we all do. I am not sure what he would make of Myers Briggs; I suspect he would see its point, but at the same time objects strongly to the way it is often misused to drive a wedge between thinking and teaching, for the lines on his face were the result of the best combination of both – hard-thinking and soft feeling. The atheism of his brother Frank was a cause of deep personal disappointment; but it made him aware of how narrow and self-preoccupied the Church could be. Ramsey smiled a great deal, but he had to practise frowning when he visited, as Archbishop of Canterbury, the South African apartheidist leader, Dr. Vorster, in 1970. You can’t teach the faith without having to put it into practice.
Thirdly, Ramsey pushed at boundaries: and this is exemplified in his greatest book, The Gospel and the Catholic Church, (1936), which was written while he was Sub-Warden of Lincoln Theological College. Without doubt his most original work, there is a sense in which everything else he wrote is derivative from it. The book’s main thesis is that life and being of the Church are to be seen in the death and resurrection of Christ. In many respects, the book echoes the ecumenical, liturgical, and biblical theology movements of the time. He wanted Evangelicals to be less dismissive of Church order, and Catholics to be less rigid about it. He wanted people to see the liturgy in terms of its ancient and living roots, and less tied to getting the words right. And, above all, he wanted biblical exegesis to be a lively, imaginative exercise, that related to the rest of the theological enterprise, and the whole life of the Church. Perhaps the fact that he served longer as a bishop than a professor made him more reluctant to push at boundaries as his ministry grew in years. This may explain why, on his own admission, his initial response to Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God (1963) was less than adequate. He could in time see that there were new and more chilling questions that had to be asked of the Church in an increasingly secular world. But the early book stands out as a paradigm of what a young theologian can achieve, rather like Rowan Williams’ The Wound of Knowledge (1979), with its determination to see theology and spirituality as integral to each other, and, in that sense, healthier when the boundaries between them are breached.
There is much else that could be said about Ramsey, as I am sure will be the case later this year. Personal reminiscences will abound, like the long silences when he was thinking of something else, or his total lack of physical co-ordination – which I always found a great personal comfort! Were he standing in my place tonight, you can be sure that you would never forget the experience. I once gave him communion in the Chapel of Lincoln Theological College, when he was paying one of his retirement visits, and I was a part-time tutor; and I can still see him kneeling there, with his head deeply bowed, and stretching out his hands. He encouraged me, a second-hand theologian, as I learnt to call myself, in burrowing away at the borderlands of history, liturgy, and theology. In the context of imminent ordination, I can only be faithful to his memory if I say that in reflecting on his ministry, one has to take all of it. You cannot convenience-pack Michael Ramsey, and go for holiness, without also taking in the teacher of the faith, with the world of today’s aching questions; or, indeed, some of the many boundaries that we need to risk breaking if the Christian theological enterprise is to have any future in the life and mission of the Church – and that includes the KAIROS process in the Portsmouth diocese. Perhaps all this explains why David Edwards’ Obituary to him in the Independent two days after his death ended with a three-word sentence: ‘He was loved’.
+ KENNETH PORTSMOUTH
