Defying gravity

...Michael's demarcation of territory forces me to ask myself what part fundamentalism has played in my own life--as a youthful member of the Church of England...

...I remember being completely passive in the minister's hands...

...One brother had lapsed from the faith, another had become a theosophist...

...There were no grounds here for seeing his approach to Catholicism as a journey from darkness into light...

...Official Ecumenism When these examples of personal ecu- menism are ignored and attention centered only on authorized dialogue, ambiguity begins to cloud assessments of the con- temporary status of ecumenism...

...For Reggie himself, a more significant memory had been sitting, at the age of twenty-four, in his Honorable Artillery Company uniform behind the lines of the Ypres salient in the refectory of the convent in which he and other stretcher-bearers were billeted...

...In the opinion of an agnostic cousin, the economist Lionel Robbins, she was the saint of the family...

...I know by now, having done my research, that Christadelphians are exclusive, would confine our Lord's promise of salvation to members of their own cult...

...He had a voracious appetite for the 25 January 1991:45 flavor of the month--Maritain, Teilhard, Simone Weil, the poetry of Eliot or Berryman...

...Childless myself, I give him the verbal support he wants, hoping that I, too, would have had the courage of my convictions...

...Experiences like these are less cerebral, highly personal, less clerical, and spreading rapidly...

...When the (Catholic) host of another "agape" died suddenly in his mid-forties, a friendship developed between the widow and a missionary daughter of Lily's...

...They feel a certain impatience with the seeming slowness with which various church authorities are dealing with the results of nearly twenty years of fruitful and successful interchurch dialogue...

...This is evidenced by some leading theologians, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox, who have publicly commented that ecumenism has come to a standstill...

...I remember that, the first time I sat in this chair, my own declaration of reli- gious allegiance was received in silence, and am left to wonder if the images it produces are of Inquisition torture chambers and Smithfield burnings--scenes from those slide-shows I watched in the fifties as a member of a Protestant youth group...

...Stephen's church selling matches, and from the flower- women selling flowers on Rosslyn Hill...

...but the imagery that stimulates prayer as like as not misses the respectability that scholarship confers...

...He had never seen his baptism by com- plete immersion at the age of thirteen as less than an opening of the floodgates of joy, and had written movingly about it in his memoir: I asked for prayers from a beggar-man who was a well- known figure in Hampstead, sitting on a seat by St...

...I soon dis- covered that the new kids had been dropped off by parents on their way to Mass at the local Catholic church...

...He had known these since the time when he persuaded his family and the elders of the Mount Zion Chapel to allow him to proceed to adult baptism and full membership of their community at the early age of thir- teen...

...I think of retaliating and trying out on him a slightly lurid piece of street-corner evangelism--a poor thing but my own...

...Would he accept that picture as a symbol, not perhaps of Christ's church, but of so much that in any one life represents religious formation----our inspirations, our misroutings, our men- tors, our controversies, our prejudices, as seen from that unimag- inable location, "space...

...Is this, perhaps, a valid approach after all: the mind firmly partitioned--on one side Einstein, quantum mechanics, space probes...

...And he gave the canon a complete set of three, inscribed with his name, and containing several personal souvenirs, such as his nephew's ordination card...

...Discouragement sets in for the participants in official consultations...

...the heroic surgery resorted to when a traumatized adolescence had sapped the energies that might normally have been expected to resolve the conflict...

...a postcard of Michelangelo's Adam with a poem written for the occasion, typed, and pasted onto the back...

...The world seemed a new place of innocence and hope, and I thought that I understood perfectly the old match-seller's remark...

...But there's another side to it: Something we see briefly between the shots of the gleaming spire and the control-room computers racheting to count-down: the rocket's placenta, the gantry of steel girders and hoses puffing spurts of angry steam, an edifice in itself, a giant Beaubourg yet, finally, no more than a means to an end, so much discardable scaffolding tethered to earth...

...t was tempting to treat Reggie Lawson's friendship with Mother Josephine, their correspondence, his reception into the Catholic church in 1922 and eventual adoption / of the religious life as a triumph story---all roads lead to Rome...

...It has been a lengthy process of collating personal recollections, letters, impressions from friends and colleagues, an outspoken, self-critical memoir, and my own research into the background of a life that had begun in a Strict Baptist enclave seven months after the death of John Henry Newman and ended in a friai-'s "cell" close to the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome...

...No false piety in this, though there may have been a mild exhibitionism: he enjoyed, or perhaps saw as a vocation, the encounters his "uniform" brought him...

...as a balding Catholic (I read biblical criticism...

...Above all, the habit was the badge of a discipline that had brought him freedom...

...and the symbolism of the elements, the water, and the words "I baptize thee, Reginald, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" entered my soul...

...9 Viewing the television presentation of Archbishop John May of St...

...The authors, like their varying styles and opinions, were ulti- mately dispensable: means to an end...

...ALL ECUMENISM IS LOCAL (Continued from page 44) .9 Commemorating the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's birth at a Lutheran-Catholic service in Chicago's Holy Name Cathedral where the homilist was none other than Dr...

...Fundamentalism can no longer be dismissed with a mocking glance at Bishop Usher and a universe that materialized on an autumn afternoon in B.C...

...Michael's preparations to leave his crumbling, unrestorable premises coincide with the final stages of my work on a biography of a friend who died in 1985, missing his century by six years...

...In the summer of 1971, he wrote: I was overshadowed in the tram and an eerie voice said, "Why do you read Protestant theology...

...There were ironies to provide some scaffolding for the story...

...Perhaps even as we aspire we should admit the basis in pure chance (of being born at this time or in that place) of the support systems whose only--and ultimately discardable--func- tion is to launch...

...9 Congratulating a Catholic colleague who had been named president of the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago, the largest YMCA in the world...

...He was the youngest of five children and had remained, at long distance, a devoted family man, weathering the incom- prehension that had greeted his conversion to Catholicism...

...Louis greeting twenty-five hundred Lutherans assem- bled in the Catholic cathedral to celebrate the formation of Re Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and opening with these words: "mi casa, su casa...

...Will they be ab- sorbed into the ecumenical movement by those who have been appointed to shepherd it...

...David's surviving sister, Lily, remained within the Strict Baptist tradition and perhaps by sheer example kept a bevy of descendants within it...

...But to the protagonist it had been a matter of rescue: a life that had become a tug of war between idealism and compulsion...

...Martin E. Marty, the pride and joy of most American Lutherans...

...4:6...

...it was like death...walking on the water") but a sense of homecoming could be felt in his enthusiastic response to its young leadership...

...he watched the nuns at the other end of the room, noticing that they sometimes wept over their work...

...One left with the conviction that, whatever it meant for oneself, for Brother David this had been a Christian love-feast...

...hat, for Brother David (as he had become) was one symptom of grace...

...At first glance these might have seemed worldly occasions--the guests an assortment of Catholics, Anglicans, and "honest enquirers," the conversation never dull, and in the vicinity of David, frequently paradoxical...

...He had joined his order at the age of forty, and with his eyes open: there were to be no regrets...

...When I inherited his battered Jerusalem Bible I found it written over in the waver- ingly flexible italic of the artist manque: one could follow the track of his enthusiasms--the Gospel and Epistle of John, Deutero-Isaiah, the Wisdom literature, the Psalms, the song of Hannah in I Samuel, of Azariah in Daniel, David's hymn of praise in I Chronicles, the concluding chapter of Hosea, Romans, and Corinthians, the Epistle to the Hebrews...

...The excitement of living on the very edge of Vatican Council II spilled into his letters: Since the beginning of May we have had a spate of visitors including four Anglicans...

...4004...

...Talk to them agreeably and with a flavor of wit" (Col...

...Religion is by definition otherworldly...

...But," said the pope, "your breviary is very old...

...In the margin of his Bible, against Ephesians 1: 10-11 ("...that he would bring everything together under Christ, as head, every- thing in the heavens and everything on earth"), David wrote, ECUMENICAL---grand style...

...public and private events had taken away his certainties...

...Knowing him as a man, who, at the age of eighty-six, had confessed ruefully to "preaching three sermons in five minutes" to a virtual stranger, it was exciting for the biographer to discover that at the age of fourteen Reggie Lawson had regularly taken his stand with other "Apostles of the King's Highway" to proclaim the gospel on a London street comer not far from the present Regent's Park mosque...

...Not all his friends shared his enthusiasm for the charismatic movement, but in the terms of this life it was a striking demonstration of a wheel that came full circle...

...The match-seller, who was noted for the white- ness of his beard and for his gentle manners, asked if he might come to the ceremony of my "new birth" to see with his own eyes my being born again...

...There was a certain ruth- lessness about this reader, avid for anything--be it Catholic, Protestant, Sufi, or Buddhist--that would set the nerves of his personal mysticism vibrating...

...As they multiply, they go beyond official ecumenism to broaden the ecumenical movement's base and accelerate its progress...

...To a bystander his life in the church seemed to revolve round the steady application of a strong will to learning the art of love...

...He wrote that "the ecumenical move- ment has become noticeably quieter...

...He saved his small weekly allowance to buy a present for each of the guests: a plastic replica of columns from the Roman Forum (they illustrated the theory of the Golden Rule and the proportions of Beauty...

...He discovered Kierkegaard...

...He recalled that only two decades earlier he and other Catholics had been warned from the pulpit not to join the YMCA...

...In August 1977, at the largest of the "agapes"--a room had been hired in a hotel near Piccadilly Circus--the family appeared in force...

...In his son's sci-fi film the emphasis will have been, rightly, on the gleaming spaceship, the weightless trajectory, the cathedral- high rocket that achieved this defiance of gravity...

...Another, by which he set much store in his last years, was the "agape"--his name for the, at first informal, reunion of friends and visitors who had passed through his hands in Rome (it took place, usually in or near London, every other year in the course of his home leave...

...He must have known the advice given to the church leaders of Colossus, "Be tactful with those who are not Christians...

...He showed the Holy Father his Roman breviary, with an imaginetto of the pope inside...

...From this source, literally has the force of revelation...

...One of them, Canon Rea of Chichester Theological College, haffa private audi- ence...

...My purpose is to highlight the importance of other ecumenical encounters, like the eight recounted above...

...Now, at the age of eighty he offered himself for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit when a group of young men and women per- formed the laying-on-of-hands...

...In the darkness we stare forward in search of the infinitely distant point...

...As a boy he had annotated his Bible in inks of three different colors, tracing the references to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost...

...As a Dominican lay brother in his thirties he had resisted his superiors' promptings to become a priest--he continued to wear his black and white habit in the streets of Rome when most of his confreres were abandoning theirs...

...Yet all this seems irrelevant when the matter at hand is children and TV or Michael's pleased discovery that I have sufficient knowledge of the Bible to be a relatively informed outlet for his gags...

...At a deeper level there was no divide...

...Racier things were passed on to him by departing visitors: a subsequent, staider pilgrim might look askance at the paperback that had just been pushed into his hand--I'm O.K., You're O.K., Mister God This Is Anna...

...The infectious optimism of the 1960s, fed by Vatican II, succumbs to the disquieting pessimism of the 1990s...

...9 Listening to a friend from Baltimore, who once supervised the Sunday nursery at Messiah Lutheran Church, explain her encounter with ecumenism: "One year I noticed more and more strange preschoolers in the nursery...

...At one level, Catholicism remained for Reggie the sign of a release into a wider culture from the subjectivism and soul-searching that, as a young man, had brought him to the edge of despair...

...The women were strangely moved and told me rather shyly that they were Roman Catholics but that they would pray for me "all the same...

...on the other a scriptural inheritance to be kept intact for fear of mislaying the pearl without price...

...The New Wave of the sixties was bonus, not release...

...He came to Catholicism in search of a father--of authority...

...At the deepest level of community and charity there could not have been much to choose between the Dorset Square Baptists of 1904 who came to congratulate the neophyte in his damp blue tunic and the religious of Rome 46: Commonweal he describes the incident, and from the hint of a question mark still hovering above it...

...In the last quarter of the nineteenth century his grandfather, a Calvinist minister, had wielded almost single-handed that flail of the orthodox, the Protestant Echo, a weekly chronicle of the sins of Canterbury and Rome...

...48: Commonweal...

...The late Thaddeus D. Horgan, S.A., reported on the changing attitude toward official ecumenical give-and-take in 1988 when he was associate director of the National Council of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs...

...What was significant to me...

...Who were they...

...These experiences and similar ones enjoyed by friends and neighbors point to an ecumenism radically different from official interchurch commissions and the like...

...It was the voice of a dear old priest, who was not at all consoled when I replied that it was Christian philosophy based on Catholic theology...

...He approached this group of a hundred or so English-speaking "religious" with some dread ("I've now led them twice," he wrote in 1980...

...He drove himself hard, in his manual work (keeping the door, serving in refectory and sacristy, cleaning rooms and corridors), in the shepherding of his "pil- grims" around Rome (he had become a tireless and inspiring cicerone), and in the leisure hours that he devoted to prayer, letter writing, and reading...

...I have two copies, may I offer you one of them...

...I wonder if it had been marked as a contribution for one of the Pentecostal meetings that, throu~h- out the seventies, he attended on Sunday afternoons in a hall belonging to the Gregorian University...

...What had been significant to my friend as he reviewed his long life...