MetaCatholic

I’ve been tagged by Nick Norelli with a meme, “Convert or die”, which I’m struggling to respond to. He puts it like this:

If your life depended on it and you absolutely had to change your denomination/religion, what denomination/religion would you convert to?

I’m not looking for any super-pious ‘I’d rather die than change’answers… I’m looking to gauge how far away from or how close to one’s present denominational/religious affiliation people would be willing to go if their lives depended on it.  In other words, I want to see how staunch folks are in their religious convictions or if we have some closet doubters who are already thinking of ways/reasons to convert to something else.

I think I can only answer by telling a bit of my story. I have only ever inhabited the Anglican tradition, although I have moved around within both Anglicanism and the wider Christian world in strands that have focussed on the catholic, evangelical, charismatic and liberal traditions. My “home” is broadly within the catholic tradition, in which I think I integrate many aspects of those other strands.

There was a period in my life, not long after a “conversion experience” in my late teens, which marked a return, a coming home, to the faith within which I was brought up after an agnostic, verging on atheist, wandering. On one side stood the Christian Union, inviting me into a particular confessional evangelicalism that transcended denominational boundaries. On the other side stood the Roman Catholic Church, and a friend who was a very evangelical and charismatic Roman Catholic. In between were a range of friends of varied Christian convictions and none, so that right from the moment of my return to adult faith, I was being pulled in different directions by those who thought I should become their sort of Christian.

I have to say that my Roman Catholic friend was the most sympathetic. He prayed with me, accompanied me to both charismatic (and ecumenical) prayer readings and evangelical (and Protestant) bible expositions. He took me to a Sunday Folk Mass with him, and sometimes joined in the life of the Anglican college chapel with me. I felt no pressure from him to choose anything other than what seemed right to me. Nearly everyone else made me feel a little like they wanted my scalp for their belt. I also found the Folk Mass the most welcoming of all the various gatherings, and one of the Catholic chaplains the most approachable and human priest I’d met. This Folk Mass had not only lively worship and music, but a great sacramental community sense, combined with real participation – anyone in the congregation could join in the bidding prayers with their own extempore petitions. Unlike many of the more evangelical prayer meetings with extempore prayer, there was no sense of “I can pray anything better than you.”! It simply seemed unforced and natural. It was also significantly different from an ordinary RC parish.

I spent a good six months taking the possibility of “conversion” very seriously indeed. During this time I was privileged, because the senior chaplain, the recently deceased Maurice Couve de Murville (God be good to him), latterly Archbishop of Birmingham, gave me permission to receive Holy Communion, with the understanding that if I made my mind up to remain an Anglican, I should cease doing so as a regular practice. The Roman Catholic Church, as I encountered it in this chaplaincy, was very attractive indeed.

What stopped me? I think, above all the sense that I had received the same grace of the sacraments, the same fellowship of the church, the same word of the scriptures, in the Anglican tradition in which my parents brought me up. I was also well aware that RC parish churches were in many ways a different kettle of fish. On a more intellectual level, I had real problems with questions of authority, and some of the excessive language of Marian devotion. My theological and intellectual question marks have stayed with me and developed in more subtle and nuanced ways. I would say now that my question is primarily one of how God exercises authority over the Church rather than just in it, to which I don’t believe Catholicism returns a very satisfactory answer, which for me is bound up with Scripture.

I don’t believe that if I had grown up Roman Catholic, my questions, disagreements and rebellions would have ever seemed like a sufficient reason to leave the Roman Catholic Church. Equally, I found in the end that my questions, and dissatisfactions with Anglicanism were not a sufficient reason to leave the Church of England. She has indeed been the mother of my faith, nurturing me with the sacraments and teaching me with the word, even if we sometimes have a stormy relationship. Born into either communion I think I could believe what I now believe with a good conscience, but I equally think I would have to be more thoroughly and comprehensively convinced of the full virtues of either to convert from one to the other.

So, if I had to convert, I don’t think I have any doubt about the most likely option, but I don’t pretend it would be an entirely comfortable experience for me, or indeed for the church that received me. But, despite endless frustrations, not least with our current sexual obsessions and bad-tempered arguments, Anglicanism still feels like the place I want to call home.