CHARISMATICS IN BRITAIN

...Apart from the immediate and obvious dangers (cults of personality, superstition, regressions into various kinds of fundamentalism) there is the much bigger problem of its primarily middle-class appeal...

...The idea that we should pray and worship with our whole selves, body as well as mind, heart as well as head, was of course a familiar truth I had long acknowledged-notionally...

...But it will certainly be necessary for the renewal to work out much more fully and consciously its own political role, both within the church and in society...

...There is no doubt in my own mind that the charismatic renewal is one of the most important, perhaps the most fundamental, kind of renewal that is occurring among Christians today...

...Nevertheless, it scarcely needs to be said that the larger truth remains: namely that the embarrassment was but a trivial side-effect of something infinitely more important, even irresistible...

...But at the same time, the renewal can only become fully Catholic by somehow overcoming this fundamental social limitation...

...Why then were we (or perhaps I should say "I" from now on, as I'm talking now only about my own reaction) so unprepared for what we actually found...

...So when the chance came along of attending a big conference here in Birmingham, my wife and I decided to go and see for ourselves...

...It is something of an orthodoxy, I feel, among the more experienced members, to say that you can only change society for the better by first of all changing individuals-the old Dickensian "change of heart" solution, but backed up by a genuine sense of the transforming power of the Holy Spirit...

...But we were also aware of the genuine theological basis of the whole thing, and of the obvious sincerity of the people we know who were "in" it...

...mainly because the more they talked, the less relevant the sort of facts I had in mind seemed to become...

...It is impossible to describe such a reality as was evident at the conference without giving an impression of mawkish sentimentality: suffice it to say that especially in the prayer-groups, in the spontaneous praying over individuals for particular gifts or healings, and in the individual statements by people of what had personally happened to them, an intensity of sheer light was cast upon the proceedings (I can't think of any less metaphorical expression) which was surely irresistible in its appeal to the spiritual eye of anyone not already blind...

...To speak of a profound self-renewal, of course, is much more difficult...

...Not only does it offer to established Christians bread where most of the other supposed sources of nourishment (ecclesiastical commissions, nostalgic "traditionalism," modernistic liberal theology, ecumenical discussions, Christian/Marxist dialogues and the rest) offer only stones: it also offers (as did the apostles in all their acts) something of immediate interest and value to unbelievers, namely the restoration to daily experience of extraordinary manifestations (it would be wrong to call them miracles) of an energy unmistakably good and perplexingly powerful...

...To take the embarrassment first, not only did I find the singing and music trite and banal (Oh, for some Palestrina or some Messiaen...

...But the actual manifestations of this truth, in fairly timid physical gestures (the upraised arms, the rhythmical clapping to an insistent beat) somewhat repelled me...

...But it is worth saying at once that we found a charity and integrity of purpose among that large crowd of miscellaneous people which showed to us, almost for the very first time, what was meant by the saying that you could distinguish the Christians by one thing alone-how they loved one another...

...and that part of it which either belongs to, or has been educated by Catholic congregations of religious, of either sex, is possibly more inhibited than the rest...

...What was impressive about the Church then, for me, was precisely the chance it gave, within Christianity, of discovering and putting into practice the truth of what T. S. Eliot had once described at the level of art and the artist: "What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable...

...Furthermore the renewal is liable to see its social role purely in terms of individualistic good works...

...NUMISMATICS IN BRITAIN BRIAN WICKER Some time ago I thought it might be useful to write something about the Catholic charismatic renewal in Britain so that Commonweal readers, who are probably much more aware of the "charismatic" phenomenon than are their British counterparts, could compare their own experience with what has been happening over here...

...Perhaps an answer can only be given in true "charismatic" tradition via a little bit of autobiography...

...What was it about the meeting that Was disturbing in so fundamental a sense, unsettling to the rut one had got into over the years, worryingly insistent and demanding of a personal response...

...but still remained for all that, within a critically and rationally aware intellectual tradition...

...Given such a background, plus a more recent concern to see develop a powerful understanding of the political responsibility of the Church in the modern world, the immediate impression given to me by the charismatic renewal was a complex one: of profound self-renewal and yet, initially, of profound embarrassment too...

...As far as I was concerned, to jive or rock-and-roll would have been a more adequate expression of that truth...

...And plenty of others more or less like ourselves: open-minded enquirers, but suspicious of the emotional side as well as of the possibility of an irrational fundamentalism and even superstition...

...The charismatic renewal will not have come of age until it has got to grips with this dimension of its responsibilities to the church and to the many thousands of those it already so hopefully nourishes...

...Thus, it would be a mistake to suppose that the charismatic renewal is somehow exempt from having any "political" aspect: it clearly does, as various people working in Northern Ireland, and formerly in Chile, made clear at the conference...

...Working-class people may have other physical and emotional outlets: at football matches, in pubs, above all perhaps in the physicality of work itself...

...The bishop was converted from a skeptical observer to a participant: so was I. To have been anything else would have been a betrayal of something so unambiguously right that it would have been almost awesome in its perversity...

...In a sense they are right...

...Of course, this is not to deny the obvious limitations, dangers and weaknesses of the charismatic renewal in Britain at the present time...

...So one of the things one finds in the charismatic renewal in Britain (speaking, for the moment at a purely sociological level, prescinding from the essential Christianity of it all) seems to be a yearning to be able (and permitted) to expose emotions otherwise usually suppressed in the religious context...

...But this was not as easy as I thought it would be...

...Things won't get out of hand: one can take that much pretty well for granted...

...We were frightened of the talk that we'd heard about "tongues" and miraculous healings, and much more so of talk about exorcisms and casting out evil spirits...

...The church provided a liberation from the burden of self and, in a sense, of that critical self-consciousness which is bred by a university education...

...an energy which is capable of lifting people out of the rut of disease, despair and isolation in which they are often plunged, and of inspiring sons and daughters to prophesy, young men to see visions and old men to dream dreams...

...So I went along to talk to one or two local people I knew to be involved pretty deeply, to try to get some basic facts...

...In Catholicism one found the sense of a monumentally inescapable past still somehow present in doctrine, in morals, in liturgy, in art, in culture and language...

...for we were no longer under the burden, familiar to any Catholic who is over forty, of a certain kind of fear: of what Eliot called "fear of fear and frenzy, fear of possession, of belonging to another, or to others, or to God...

...I became a Catholic in the early fifties in what we now recognize (though one never saw it so at the time) as the fag-end of an ecclesiastical era...

...Nor is it surprising eventually to find that in the end this does not matter except marginally...

...So I suppose the true source of my embarrassment lay in the fact that while I had painfully to recognize how exactly I myself fitted into that middle-class world (indeed I was surprisingly and worryingly at home in it), yet at the same time I did not much like having to acknowledge this fact to myself quite so candidly as the prolonged exposure seemed to require...

...If Bonhoeffer's "religionless Christianity" for a world "come of age" has, alas, proved a dead end, perhaps the charismatic affirmation of the rejuvenating power of a spirit which is defiantly "religious" will prove to be a thoroughfare to a new, and less middle-aged, heaven and earth...

...The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continuous extinction of personality...

...Of course we were far from the only newcomers: there was a skeptical bishop, for example, who said he had been "detailed" by his fellow-bishops to go along and see what was going on...

...but the very vocabulary seemed to me retrogressive, reminding me of connections long since forgotten, with various forms of Protestant fundamentalism that still hang around in the atmosphere I associate with earlier generations of my own family...

...Any genuine return to the roots of Christianity in the New Testament must at the same time be a return to a situation in which Christians have to confront "the world:" and this means confronting imperialist oppression, economic domination, military might, religious conformism, state bureaucracy and continuous temptations to violence in the support of good as well as bad causes...

...The English middle-class is, I suppose, a pretty inhibited sector of the human race...

...That "the heart has its reasons" becomes a truth, in the context of the charismatic renewal, at a level almost inconceivable in any other context: and it is perhaps not surprising that these "reasons" find expression in forms and styles that are initially disturbing to any middle-class, intellectually overdeveloped and emotionally undernourished person like myself...

...But this middle-class yearning is combined with an implicit assumption that, even when the emotional key is unlocked, a genteel style of expression will still prevail as the norm...

...You can't understand it, they said, without seeing and taking part in it yourself...

...Furthermore, it did not take long for one to become aware of the essentially middle-class nature of the whole gathering...

...yet also a sense that there was always a place for eccentrics, saints: these two senses offered a liberation from personality and the "undisciplined squads of emotion" which for me were associated with other forms of collective allegiance, whether religious or political...

...That qualification of the Dickensian thesis is of course literally crucial: but it is not enough, not because of any constraint on the Holy Spirit, but (I venture hesitatingly to suggest) because of a limitation in thought by those who are its instruments...

...This, I believe, is a more intractable problem than most "charismatics" are likely to admit, for on the whole they tend to see the "renewal" as above sociology, above ideology, even above theology itself...