John Henry Newman: a personal debt

Tomorrow, John Henry Newman is to be canonised in a ceremony at the Vatican. He will be the first English man or woman to be pronounced a saint since the seventeenth century. So this is an event of major significance to Christians in this country as well as worldwide.

And I mean Christians in an ecumenical sense, not just Catholics. For Newman was the most famous (some said notorious) Catholic convert of the nineteenth century. He was brought up as an Anglican with evangelical tendencies. But his studies of the Christian fathers and the medieval church led him progressively to contemplate a vision of the church that was larger in its embrace and more profound in its theological and spiritual reach than the protestantism in which he had been reared. As one of the leading Tractarians of the Oxford Movement launched in 1833, he preached and wrote energetically in defence of the Church of England as an organic part of the ancient catholic church, for the time being divided but always yearning for ultimate union.

That theological position proved unsustainable for Newman. Always a man of conscience and integrity, he came to realise that the logic of his developing convictions was pointing him away from Anglicanism and towards Roman Catholicism. He crossed the threshold in October 1845. It’s not correct to say that “the rest is history”. His was a questing, searching pilgrim soul, so beautifully and accurately described in his famous hymn Lead, kindly Light. Perhaps he was always too much of an Anglican to regard his conversion as any kind of terminus. Books like The Development of Doctrine articulated his belief that revelation, illumination, “faith seeking understanding” as Anselm said, never stops. “To live is to change” said Newman, “and to live long is to have changed much”. Even a cardinal of the Catholic Church!

On the eve of his canonisation, I want to recall the influence of John Henry Newman on my own formation as a Christian and a priest. In my teenage and student years, I was a fervent evangelical of the most conservative kind. I embraced Calvinism to a degree that was thought extreme even by Christian Union mentors. As an ordinand I inevitably chose to train at what was then regarded as the most reformed and protestant of all the Anglican evangelical theological colleges. (It amuses me now that some colleagues conjecture that I must have studied at Westcott House or Cuddesdon! Let the reader understand.)

In those days, nearly five decades ago, if you had a degree in theology, your training for ministry could be improvised around the Bishops’ modest academic requirements alongside gaining practical experience in pastoral ministry. My tutor sat down with me and asked what I thought I needed to do by way of study during my final year before ordination. I replied that my theology degree had given me a rigorous grounding in the Bible and the Fathers. But my knowledge of church history more or less stopped at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Perhaps I needed to dip my toe into modernity? My tutor’s response was immediate. “Your experience of church has been limited to protestantism. But there’s a bigger world out there. Have you ever read John Henry Newman’s Apologia?”

It’s one of those questions I’ll always be grateful for. Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua was published in 1864. It is his “defence of his own life” in response to Charles Kingsley’s attack on him for lacking honour and integrity in abandoning his Anglicanism. It’s one of the classics of spiritual autobiography of the Victorian or any other age. I found a copy in a secondhand bookshop and paid, I think, 20 pence for it. I don’t want to dramatise things, but it’s not too much to say that it changed my life.

As I began to read, I found I was struggling somewhat. Not with Newman’s limpid writing (he was an acknowledged master of English prose). It was his intellectual and spiritual thought-world. I almost said sound-world, an interesting comment on the almost aural effect of reading him. It was so different from, even alien to, what I was used to. This was a different kind of journey, or at least a differently described quest for holiness from what was familiar to me. We didn’t use the tiresome language of comfort-zones (being out of) in those innocent days, but this was where I was finding myself. Thank God for discomfort!

What changed everything were three insights in particular. The first was the realisation that Christian belief and the church's experience walk hand in hand. What we call “the tradition” isn’t a fixed immutable body of biblical texts or formal dogma so much as a living memory of how the church has reflected on its faith across the centuries. This is what Newman had come to call “the development of doctrine”. It echoed a saying of one of the Scottish Covenanters that I’d come to love: “God has more light and truth to shine out from his holy word”. I glimpsed how the formulation of Christian thought - any thought - was a dynamic process. Tradition means that which is “ handed on”. Newman’s reverence for tradition as a process recognised how each generation cherishes what it has received in order to pass it on to the next. It shouldn’t have been a startling discovery (not if I’d been paying attention to St Paul in 1 Corinthians).  But for me, a light had been switched on.

The second insight from the Apologia was about the place of conscience. For Newman, conscience was crucial in the forming of Christian mind and character. The externals of belief could never stand on their own, disconnected from their inner reception and embrace by the believer’s conscience. That’s about integrity and honour, "truth in the inward parts" as the Prayer Book version of Psalm 51 puts it, the very qualities Kingsley had accused Newman of lacking. And quite suddenly I realised that this was a personal dilemma for me too. It dawned on me that my evangelicalism was not going to survive this Tractarian scrutiny unchanged. And that would mean a serious renegotiation of my faith and my relationship with what I was coming to speak about as my own tradition. Again, I won’t dramatise by speaking of a “Here I stand” moment. But this profoundly disturbing yet liberating discovery of the role of conscience did, I think, prove life-changing.

Newman’s final gift to me was the spirituality with which his writing was imbued. Quite simply, I found it irresistible. Possibly for aesthetic reasons that bear closer  examination (how easy it is to be seduced by Newman!) I was becoming catholic not only in my thinking but also in my praying and feeling. I found myself increasingly at odds with evangelical worship, especially its relentless stream of words, its extraverted busyness and its lack of feeling for the numinous. I can see that this probably sounds like a caricature, but it’s what I was experiencing at the time. No doubt personality type, temperament, comes into liturgy and spirituality. If so, I owe to Newman the instinct to take it more seriously. Eventually I came to serve as a curate in what we would now call an affirming catholic parish where they wore eucharistic vestments, swung the censer from time to time, preached a socially inclusive intelligent Christianity and reserved the sacrament. How much I learned there! It set the direction of my entire ministry.

So it seemed fitting to include a hymn by Newman in our marriage service, “Praise to the Holiest in the height”. A year later my wife sang Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius with the local choral society and I heard that great work for the first time. Newman’s poem, from which the hymn is drawn, is not without its flaws. But somehow that performance in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre set the seal on a personal journey I knew would be lifelong.

Decades later I found myself in the company of - well, I won’t name him because he is a well-known church leader. Without any preamble, as if he’d been saving up for this moment, he looked me in the eye: “Michael, back in the seventies we were looking to you as a future leader of evangelicals in the Church of England. It all looked so promising. What happened to you?” It was hardly the question I’d been expecting as we sat over a cup of tea enjoying Belgian biscuits. But I didn’t hesitate with my answer. “I read John Henry Newman” I replied. “That’s all.” “Ah. I see now” he said and smiled. And changed the subject.

After all these years, how better to acknowledge the debt than to echo Newman’s own praise to his Creator and Redeemer, the Holiest in the height: “in all his words most wonderful, most sure in all his ways!”

** There are many Newmans. Like all great men and women, he encounters us in different ways. Here's another blog about him on the Laudable Practice website. It's a somewhat different take on him, but well worth reading. This week's edition of The Tablet also has a number of thought-provoking articles.

Janet Baker - In Her Own Words

Occasionally you watch something on television that you know will stay with you for a long time to come. Maybe even for a lifetime. That's a big claim to make for a broadcast. But a recent BBC Four documentary for me falls into that extremely rare category of "outstanding". It's
Janet Baker - In Her Own Words.

She had, as everyone knows, one of the greatest mezzo-soprano voices of the twentieth century. I say "had" because, to the consternation of her audiences (though for the best of reasons that she explains in the programme), she decided to retire from professional performance thirty years ago when she was just 56. She had already retired from the operatic stage a few years earlier. I won't rehearse her life story. Her autobiography Full Circle, an appearance on Desert Island Discs and above all this TV documentary tell it all - or at least, the bits she is willing to share in public for she is, as she herself acknowledges, a very private person.

We all have our favourite Baker recordings. Among mine are her Mahler songs, her Wagner Wesendonck Lieder and her Brahms Alto Rhapsody which we had played at my beloved grandmother's funeral and which had us all in tears. Two discs stand out above all, for me. The first is her radiant performance of Bach's solo cantata 82 Ich Habe Genug, recorded in 1966 with Yehudi Menuhin and the Bath Festival Orchestra. Although it originated as a bass cantata, I can only ever hear it in my mind as Janet Baker sings it, with an insight, a sensitivity and what I can only call a degree of personal commitment that are second to none.

My other favourite from a vast discography is her legendary recording of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius made with Sir John Barbirolli in 1964 (on my disc, linked with her equally legendary performance of the Sea Pictures). For many of us, that version of Gerontius will always be the definitive one. I learned to love Elgar's masterpiece through this recording which we bought when my wife was singing it (in the alto chorus line!). We had not long been married. Janet Baker was the soloist in that concert at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford - 1975, I think. I'd never heard the work before, and it came as a revelation that was life-changing for a quondam evangelical confronted with the catholic spirituality of John Henry Newman and Edward Elgar. There's so much deep magic in Barbirolli's classic recording, and not a little of it is due to Janet Baker's rapturous performance as the angel, especially in those marvellous closing pages of the oratorio. Who wouldn't willingly be lowered into the cleansing waters of purgatory if we were sung to like that?

But you don't need to know any of this to enjoy, and be inspired by, this substantial TV documentary. It's beautifully made. Janet Baker is 85 now, but she comes across as a woman of extraordinary dignity and nobility of character. During much of the conversation, the focus is on her face as she sits in an upright chair squarely facing the camera. She makes a lovely portrait, a bit like a late painting of Rembrandt. To me her features, animated, strong but tender, disclose a personality that is finely wrought over a long lifetime, radiating a deep wisdom that comes from living the reflected life. She has a wonderful way with words, by which I mean not simply her fluency, her charm, her gentle irony and her self-deprecation, but the insights with which even the most straightforward of her observations and reminiscences seem to be charged.

You feel that she conceals as much as she reveals, and you honour that. This is a respectful documentary. But she tells us more about herself in this programme than we have heard before. Not so much the facts about her career as the meaning they have carried for her. Early on, she speaks candidly about her childhood memory of the death of her much-loved elder brother from a heart condition. One morning she was told that he would die that day. She was sent down the road to play with her friends. Coming home in the early evening, her parents and she went upstairs and stood round his bedside until the end came. Her mother turned to her and said: "You're all I've got now". Baker goes back to this memory more than once in the broadcast: not surprisingly, it proved a defining moment in her life. She says that she carried the burden of being there to look after her mother from that moment onwards, how it made her into someone who was fundamentally serious about life as she put it. The programme shows her singing the Farewell from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas at the Glyndebourne Festival in the 1960s. It is achingly beautiful. You wonder how it could be done with such intensity not only of musicianship but of human feeling. When we know about the loss she had to bear in childhood, we understand where it comes from. "She could not sing something that was not deeply understood by her" says one of her colleagues.

There is so much that is deeply moving in this programme: in the quotations from Janet Baker's sublime musical performances, in the tributes of her colleagues and friends, and most of all, the awareness and humanity with which she speaks about herself and her life. Towards the end she muses about growing old, suffering, mortality and death. She speaks about how old age is a kind of withdrawal, a turning away from hectic involvement in the world, how important self-acceptance, truth-telling and solitude have become. You glimpse something of her vulnerability. She is realistic about approaching the end, about the necessity of dying. You don't see her as she speaks. Instead, you are treated to a beautiful sequence of images of the sea, the waves lapping the shore as if to say: dying is, or ought to be, a homecoming, a safe landing after the hazards and ordeals of travelling the ocean of human existence.

And all the while, we hear her sing the last of the five Rückert-Lieder by Gustav Mahler, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.

I have died to the world's turmoil,
And now I rest in a silent realm!
I live alone in my own heaven.
In my love, and in my song!

I can't tell you how poignant it is, perhaps especially when you are conscious yourself of growing old. When the song has ended, we see her turning tenderly to her husband next to her, whose carer she has been since his stroke, touching his hand, as if to say, yes, Mahler speaks the truth, doesn't he? And then her own tears come, and the camera does not flinch from them, because somehow they gather up the meaning of this extraordinary, and beautiful, human life.

"It is a difficult thing to be a singer" she says. "But it's a far more difficult thing to be a human being." The spirituality, if you like, that runs through this broadcast is something very special indeed. It's worth the licence fee by itself. It won't be on the iPlayer for ever. Watch it while you can. Have tissues to hand.