last post... probably

This will probably be my last post for a while. I'm not really doing much anything interesting, except enjoying the Liverpool summer. When I do return to blogging, I will drop an email to those who might be interested.

But til then, here is the reflection I wrote down as an imaginary response that I would give if they ask me at church to briefly tell people about my time in New York.


"It may very well be that many of you are interested in the sheer secular delights that New York offered and I was able to enjoy; and indeed they are many and varied. I was able to take in every form of entertainment, from Henry V off Broadway, to $5 improv nights, from free flute recitals at Manhattan School of Music, to local jazz cats at Cleopatra’s needle, to the most incredible rock I have ever witnessed, courtesy of the Smashing Pumpkins. I ventured often up into Harlem, ordering snacks and drinks and bantering with shopkeepers in Spanish, I spotted movie stars in Greenwich village, and walked past dejected –and recently unemployed- members of the Lehman Brothers’ law firm on the morning it crashed. All this and more, in the city of New York, the centre of the world.

Others of you will be directly interested in my studies, even if, after having explained it, some of it still remains stubbornly opaque. For you, I suggest we leave those discussions to another night, a night where we can warm some bread, pour a glass of wine, and recline on the sofa, allowing our bodies to rest complacent while our minds perform daring feats of intellectual gymnastics – and suffer the inevitable crashes and falls that accompany such an endeavour.

But most will want to know –have I changed? To which I reply that change per se isn’t desirable. But I know what you mean. You mean, why go all that way, and do all that study if it didn’t do anything for you, if it didn’t affect, benefit… change you somehow?

I will, to this question, reply in the positive –yes, I did learn ‘stuff’ and yes it did change me. But there are many ways in which learning can lead to change. For example, one may learn how to repair a flat tyre, and this new piece of knowledge brings about a change by making one into the kind of person that can repair tyres. This is not the kind of change I experienced.

I learnt many things this year. I read major theologians from the earliest patristic periods, through to medieval authors, to giants of the Reformation. I learnt the content of their thought, but I also learned how they came to their conclusions. Even more, by looking at the long line of development from one generation’s thought to another, I learnt how the history of Christian thinking progressed and what influenced each of the major writers. Studying that history parallels in some ways learning the history of a conflict between friends. Perhaps you once heard a story about a friend that put them in a bad light, and you thought ‘Gee, I didn’t realise so and so was like that’. But then perhaps months later you heard a further detail from someone else that put the original story in context, and made your friend’s action suddenly seem appropriate. In learning the history of a dispute, you might change – from being a person that jumps to a conclusion, to being a person who becomes more cautious, more thoughtful, more patient. And this is the kind of change I have undergone. In studying the history of Christian thought, in studying the details, and the contexts, and the reasons why people said what they did, I am now less likely to jump to a conclusion about them… or, about God they were trying thereby to explain…. And I’m now more likely to seek further information. I’m more likely to wait, to ponder, to…seek. For as the greatest theologians have always described it, the life of the Christian mind is one of fides quarens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. And where does one seek? Where else can one go, but to him who has the words of eternal life? Thus, the kind of seeking that theological study inspires is one which does its seeking in the place of prayer, at the feet of the one who left heaven and entered earth to be a light in the darkness."