1968: The Year I Came of Age

It's fifty years ago this week that the second French Revolution didn't quite happen. May 1968 is remembered as the month when students brought France to a standstill. Their protests caught on across the nation and beyond. That month felt as though it could be a watershed in the political and social life of Europe.

Those caught up in the événements came to be called soixante-huitards, 1968-ers. Perhaps I can just about lay claim to that title. I was in France in the first half of 1968 between leaving school and going to university. It was a long way from Paris to the orphanage where I was working in southern France. In the rural uplands of the Ardèche, beautiful but impoverished, what went on in the capital felt like another world. It was only when working people started striking in solidarity that it began to feel real. I recall cycling over the main line from Paris to Marseille. With no trains running, the tracks were already rusting over. That's when it hit me that it doesn't take much to bring normal life to a halt.

I was born in 1950, and had my eighteenth birthday in France (a big rite of passage, your first birthday alone in a strange land). I was not quite an adult because the age of legal majority in the UK was only reduced to eighteen on 1 January 1970. Technically I became a grown up at an Adrian Mole kind of age, nineteen and three quarters. Nevertheless, looking back fifty years I see how formative those months in France were, this threshold between childhood and adulthood. It was the first time I had lived away from home. I had left school. I was financially independent (earning the princely sum of ten new francs a week - but with full board and lodging, there was not a lot to spend your money on in this deep countryside). I was speaking a foreign language. I was walking tall. Not yet legally adult, but then not not-adult either.

In that liminal place, I obscurely admired the students at Nanterre who, protesting against being policed by the university authorities, claimed the right to have sex with their partners in their own bedrooms. To me as a devout evangelical Christian, this seemed not so much to be about sex (God forbid!) as taking responsibility for their own lives as grown-up human beings. This was precisely the personal path I was navigating myself. I now know of course, how the events of May 1968 were a confused concatenation of ideals and causes, some ideals more noble than others, some causes lost from the outset. Historians will argue about that for decades. But that they coalesced around a generalised dis-ease with hierarchical rule and authoritarian control is a plausible reading of that spring. The Fifth Republic certainly felt the shock-waves: it was never closer to the brink of collapse than it was in May and June 1968. And maybe postwar France came of age - or thought it did - as a result.

I was a late developer when it came to political awareness. The "never had it so good" days of the late 50s and early 60s didn't encourage radical questioning among most middle-class baby-boomer kids. I'd briefly woken up to the reality of world events in 1962 with the Cuba Missile Crisis. But in my teenage years, my conversion to conservative evangelical Christianity took over my life. Politics took a back seat and never got anywhere near the front of my consciousness. (When I was visiting schools in connection with the EU Referendum campaign two years ago, I was heartened to find how politically engaged so many teenage students are today compared with then.).

But in France in the spring of 1968, politics was impossible to ignore. Which was important at that stage of my personal development. A few months later I went up to Oxford. The spirit of Nanterre was alive and well that first academic year. The Oxford Revolutionary Socialist Students (ORSS) famously besieged All Souls College in protest against the privileged academic life symbolised by its emblematic plum pudding. In my college (Balliol), ORSS students daubed the senior common room with revolutionary slogans in red paint to mark a visit by Ted Heath. They marched along Broad Street carrying placards demanding "Prove there are no files!" which provided the agenda for a tutorial on linguistic philosophy I was having with Anthony Kenny at the time.

It was a long time ago. But in important ways that era influenced me. I was not altogether conscious of it at the time - far from it. But more and more as I look back, I realise how formative the late 1960s were when "revolution" was the metaphor being claimed in so many areas of life and endeavour: politics, theology, education, art and culture. It wasn't so much a case of "bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" as Wordsworth said of his own revolutionary times. But I couldn't fail to warm to the soixante-huitard mantra, "Be realistic. Ask for the impossible!" with its blend of radical questioning and witty sense of paradox. 1968 in France had its ugly side. But in its best moments it had a lightness of touch as well.

For Philip Larkin, 1963 was the year (when "life was never better than...."). For me it was 1968 that was the watershed in my journey towards adulthood. To be in France and be a back-row witness of what happened there that year gave me insights that have, I think, been profoundly important for the rest of my life. It taught me (or began to) not to accept the status quo but critically to test assumptions, ask questions of people who have (or claim) authority, not be afraid of argument, go back to the sources of established political, intellectual or theological standpoints. It made me into a liberal - even if it has taken a lifetime to understand what thaword means. But I believe I glimpsed, even then, that Christian faith is fundamentally liberal in the sense of being generous, inclusive and exploratory. For it calls us not to be enslaved to entrenched positions but to become questioners of the environment we live in, as Jesus himself abundantly demonstrated. That's the kind of Christianity I've tried to practise as a disciple and as a preacher.

Which is why I'm glad - proud even - to be a Soixante-Huitard. I now recognise how much I was shaped by that liminal year. The fact that we are still talking about what happened fifty years later shows that its historical importance continues to be felt. And if I am typical, then it's not just societies that have been influenced by it, but individuals too.

Balliol, the Freshers' Fair and the Christian Union

At Balliol College Oxford, the ban on Christian Union students taking part in the Freshers' Fair has been lifted. No doubt there's a lot more to this story than has been reported in the media. But on the surface the original decision emanating from within the structures of the JCR not only looked foolish and naive, but it was guaranteed to provoke an outcry not only from evangelical Christians but from all fair-minded people, including the students in their own College who quickly condemned it.

I'll come clean. Balliol College Oxford is my alma mater. I went up in 1968 to read maths and philosophy, and stayed on to do a second degree in theology. I went back as a postgraduate in 1974 and was ordained priest in the College Chapel in the summer of 1976. So you'll see that I have a lot invested in the place. You won't be surprised if I say I loved it and still do. My years there were deeply rewarding. I suppose I began to grow up at Balliol. I'm more grateful than I can say to have been a member of such a progressive, open-minded and enlightened institution.

In particular, I owe a great deal to the College Chapel and the Christian Union. I doubt I would have become a priest at all had it not been for Balliol. The Christian Union, part of the University-wide Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union or OICCU, laid down important foundations on which to shape my life as a Christian. And although that thought-world belonged unreservedly to the conservative evangelical tradition, I did not experience it as narrow or exclusive. We were ordinary members of the College alongside students of many different faiths and of none. Most Christian Union members attended College Chapel regularly, some every day. Its traditional Anglicanism helped set our fervent evangelicalism in a broader, more liberal, context. We were certainly low, hearty and happy in our churchmanship. But we were part of mainstream religion.

It's true that I now blush to think of some of the convictions I held in those far-off days. I could have defended such doctrines as the inerrancy of scripture, a literal Second Coming and the predestination to their fate of the elect and the reprobate. Everything turned on the hardest version of belief in substitutionary atonement as the only way to understand the Cross. But Balliol was a tolerant place where you could try anything intellectually, test ideas and belief by the cut and thrust of robust debate. If you believed something wildly ridiculous, your friends would smile gently and without ridicule, ask you with what logic or on what evidence you drew that conclusion.

I owe a lot to that tolerant, liberal attitude. It's what made Balliol an intellectual force to be reckoned with in modern times. This it owes largely to the vision of its legendary Master, Benjamin Jowett, one of the most eminent of Victorians. A priest of the Church of England, he got into tremendous trouble for contributing to a notorious but highly influential book called Essays and Reviews. In it, he argued as a classical scholar that the Bible should be interpreted like any other text from the past, using the same rigorous tools of textual and higher criticism and of literary interpretation as he would apply to his beloved Plato. It was, he claimed, through such ordinary processes of study that the word of God would be discerned among the words. This radical approach was not well received at the time (and the book's other contributors were not spared the opprobrium either). But today, almost all biblical scholars apart from the most conservative would endorse his approach.

Jowett's legacy at Balliol was of a College in which dons and students alike were generous and  tolerant, modern people of their own century, open to new ways of thinking, unafraid of debate. Looking back fifty years, having been at a school founded on similar lines, perhaps I unconsciously chose an Oxford college that would continue to foster these liberal ideals and teach me to practise my faith in a setting that modelled the real world where beliefs are not privileged or protected. This kind of learning is an inestimably important preparation for adult life in a contested secular age. We may not know it at the time but later we realise how its values have shaped us in hugely important ways. My faith is very different now from what it was then. I suppose I echo whoever it was (David Jenkins?) who said that as he grew older, he believed more and more in less and less. "Be tentative in theology but be sure in religion", that is, don't invest more in the speculative particularities of doctrine than you do in knowing and loving and serving God which is the heart of all good religion. That is what I shall always regard as the core of what I learned about Christianity at Oxford.

Back to the headlines where Balliol has unwittingly (and unwillingly) found itself today. I spoke earlier about its character as a "progressive, open-minded and enlightened institution". I don't know the Christian Union today so I can't speak for them. But somewhere in the JCR decision-making structure, there seems to be a mighty fear of them if these heavy-handed tactics of airbrushing them out of the Freshers' Fair are any indication. What we are told in the media reports is that out of respect for the vulnerabilities of its new students, there was a need to create a secular space that is "safe". Religion, it is argued, does not belong in such a space, least of all when it comes freighted with homophobia (an allegation that is merely stated without any evidence or justification).

Yes, no doubt religion can be oppressive, and is in many places. Homophobic too. But it won't do wildly to accuse Balliol's Christian Union of it. (And by the way, were Jewish and Islamic groups also refused permission to have a Freshers' stall and be present at it? I genuinely have no idea - please tell us. It's important that we understand the background here. There's a lot we don't know.)

This unhappy episode is all part of the debate about the limits of free speech in higher education. There are no easy answers to the question of who should and shouldn't be given a public platform to promote their beliefs in a university or anywhere else. But in a fair-minded society there should be a presumption of trust that those who publicly share their vision and ideas will do so responsibly. No-one has quoted any evidence that the Christian Union intended to do anything other than the likes of the Balliol Music Society or Rowing Club: share what they had to offer and invite anyone interested to find out more.

One final thought. If I were a fresher at Balliol (happy days!), I'd be pretty annoyed if I thought that anyone was trying to "protect" me from notions that might challenge or disturb or (God forbid)  corrupt me. I'd have said: "I'm a legal grown-up now. I have the right and the duty to make my own choices. I have come to Balliol of all colleges because I want to be in an environment of bracing exploration and debate that will form me intellectually, ethically and as a person of faith. This is the very thing you are denying me. Please stop infantilising me in this way."

Well, common sense has prevailed, thankfully. I gather that the JCR as a student body has been as outraged by what has happened as anyone. Maybe we should put it all down to the naivety of youth. Making a mistake and learning from it is no bad experience. I hope this episode helps all students to think about and absorb their College's values and treat their fellow students with respect. What's happened will have cost Balliol in terms of its reputation for diversity and inclusion. That grieves me. But what matters now is that trust is quickly restored and Balliol continues to be recognised as one of Oxford's brightest, most generous and most humane institutions.

Oh and by the way, I'm looking forward to being back at Balliol next month to preach in the College Chapel.

**I have made some minor amendments to this blog in the light of conversations today with Oxford people who are close to the events behind the media reports.

In Memoriam: Bob Jeffery, Priest, Mentor, Friend

There are just a few people in our adult lifetimes who have had a direct and profound influence on us. I think of five who, when I was still plausibly a young man, helped form me as a Christian, a priest and a human being. The part they played in shaping my mind, my spirituality and my ministry has been immense. The debt I owe them all is incalculable. Only one of them is still alive.

The four others were all priests. The last of these great souls died just before Christmas, Robert Martin Colquhoun Jeffery.** To us, he was simply "Bob". Our paths crossed quite by chance if there is such a thing. In 1974, I completed my theological training and got married. We moved back to Oxford where I was beginning postgraduate research. Looking for a place to live, we stumbled across a little detached house in Headington not far from the Oxford by-pass. The rent was absurdly low. It belonged to an academic (a theologian as it happened) who lived abroad and was looking for suitable tenants to keep the house warm for her. So Lyndworth Close became our first married home.

The bishop had decided that my getting married and being ordained in the same summer was too much. So we looked for a church to attend. By great good fortune, the incumbent of our parish church in Old Headington was one Bob Jeffery. So we started going there, and never looked back. I was ordained beneath the Norman chancel arch of that church the following year and served as a non-stipendiary curate in the Cowley Deanery of which Bob was the Rural Dean.


I said we never looked back. (Maybe I'd better revert to the first person singular and let my wife speak for herself if she wants to.)  Our time at St Andrew's Headington was a bigger watershed than it may sound. For the previous decade I had been immersed in the conservative evangelicalism of my school and college Christian Union. I owe a great deal to that experience, thanks to which I came to a consciously articulated Christian faith. I trained at an evangelical theological college. I assumed that I would minister for life in that Reformed tradition, never dreaming that I could inhabit any other way of being Christian.

Bob opened up that "other way". He did not set out to influence me or change me. He was a genuine liberal catholic (as he described himself then - we would call him an affirming catholic nowadays), with an outlook that was generous enough to believe in giving people space to develop and grow in their God-given way. The liturgy was very different from what I was used to. St Andrew's had an Anglo-Catholic history so the ceremonial seemed colourful and "advanced" by my austere protestant criteria. But to Bob, the human face of the church service was no less important than the liturgy. He believed that the church should present an intelligent, properly informed Christianity that belonged to the contemporary world. His sermons were always theological but in no way academic: his gospel exemplified an applied, pastoral wisdom. It mattered to him that the church should speak into human life in all its complexity and face outwards in mission and the pursuit of justice in society.  

It did not take long to feel at home there. Bob and Ruth made us welcome in their grand old vicarage. There was never any pretence at formality: Bob famously didn't care much about his appearance, and if he had, his four lively fun-loving young children would soon have pricked any bubble of self-importance. Indeed, I never knew anyone who was less self-important or concerned about looking the part and conforming to expectations. He was comfortable in his own skin. That by itself taught me a great deal.

I had so much to learn about ministry, about life, about myself. Bob and the parish were great tutors. I think he was somewhat bemused by my conservative theology, and we had endless conversations about what it meant to take the Bible seriously. "I'm a radical biblical man" he said to me early on, by which he meant that for him the scriptures were as central as they were to any evangelical, but it all depended on how we read and interpreted the text. Gradually, I became weaned off biblical inerrancy and the conservative theology I'd inhabited for a decade. Bob told me not to worry about ceremonial and eucharistic vestments: they were adiaphora he said, not of ultimate importance. If I preferred not to wear them, that was ok by him. Needless to say, because I did not feel under pressure, it was no time at all before I asked him to show me how to wear the alb, stole and chasuble and how to lay them out in the sacristy.

Without, I think, being aware of it, he taught me about "the beauty of holiness" and the genius of the English Church in exemplifying it. He suggested I might like to have a copy of Percy Dearmer's The Parson's Handbook, the classic manual of liturgical practice as seventeenth century Anglicanism had construed it. When I was ordained priest, he gave me Wagner's Parsifal in a boxed set of five LPs with an image of a beautiful medieval chalice on the front. That chalice crystallised for me the realisation that I had embraced sacramentalism and was becoming catholic in my outlook. Something had shifted inside me, irrevocably.

Books were a frequent topic of conversation. Bob would throw literature at me across his study, enthusing about this or that writer. Thanks to him, I started to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ronald Gregor-Smith and Jürgen Moltmann (though he wasn't sure whether Moltmann would endure). He put me on to the French post-Reformation spiritual writers: Jean Pierre de Caussade was his favourite ("why have so few clergy ever heard of him?" he grumbled, pretending not to know that I was one of them). He told me to meditate on his Self Abandonment to Divine Providence on my retreat before being ordained priest. He insisted that I read Roland Allen's book Missionary Methods - St Paul's or Ours? "You want to know how to preach?" he asked one day (surely a slanted comment on my pulpit performance to date). "Read the sermons of Austin Farrer." I did, and tried to learn how to be profound and concise at the same time.

Stephen Platten, who went on become Bishop of Wakefield, came to Headington as curate during the same year as me. The three of us met each week for a staff meeting and got on famously. There was a lot of laughter. Bob seemed to know, or know about, everyone in the C of E and would regale us with the latest ecclesiastical gossip. "Lots of problems there" he would declare about clergy who, shall we say, had got into difficulty. But soon the meeting turned to theology, ethics, biblical interpretation or whatever else had struck any of us during the preceding week. After about two hours of energetic discussion and the consumption of much coffee, he would rein us in and tell us it was time to turn our minds to  the parish.

And here his thoroughgoing pastoral-theological outlook came to the fore. He took trouble to get to know the parish well - and by "parish" he meant not only or even primarily the worshipping congregation but the entire geography for which, as a C of E incumbent, he had the cure of souls. He taught me that the occasional offices - baptisms, weddings and funerals - were not a distraction from the parish priest's role but lay at the heart of it, how these pastoral encounters were crucially important to people at the key moments of their lives. He taught me to get to know the institutions of the parish such as the schools, hospitals and businesses. He taught me to be conscientious about visiting people in their homes, but always with a clear purpose in mind. He taught me to cultivate what he called "scarcity value" - to be visible without being spending too long in any one place. When I became an incumbent a few years later, and after that a cathedral priest, I realised how much I owed to Bob's way of doing things.

Bob's kindness continued after we left Oxford. He had a gift for friendship that was lifelong. He came to all my own "rites of passage", the celebrations each new phase of my ministry as a parish priest, cathedral canon and then as dean, first in Sheffield and then Durham. He said he would always be on the end of a phone if I needed help or advice, and it was hugely reassuring to know that he was there. He was especially pleased that I was appointed to Durham because he had been ordained in the Cathedral himself and had served as a curate in a densely urban parish in Sunderland. "All the best clergy have served in the North East" he said when we went to Alnwick in 1982. In 2011, he asked if he could celebrate the golden jubilee of his ordination as a priest in Durham Cathedral. Typically, he did not want to take a leading part in the liturgy. He asked Stephen to preside and me to preach. It was a beautiful occasion, full of warmth, friendship and good memories. The only sadness was that Ruth was not there to celebrate with us. She had died suddenly some years earlier, and we all knew what a loss she was to Bob, to their children and to all of us who knew her.

And now, Bob has gone to join her. We saw him last year when I was invited to go back to St Andrew's to preach. He was ill, and he knew that it was serious. But even in his discomfort he was his usual self: warm, wry, lively, intellectually alert, bemused at the latest church goings on, worried about the worsening state of the world and how faith was struggling to speak wisely into it. He talked about what he called the "end game" - his own. He told us he had planned his funeral at Christ Church Oxford where he had been Sub Dean. Later on, there would be a memorial service in Worcester Cathedral where he had been Dean. He wanted me to preach at it. I was moved to be asked. It hasn't taken place yet. I know that this will be one of those sermons that calls for the very best of me. I am wondering how I can do justice to Bob. Perhaps when you owe the kind of debt to someone you loved as I do, the words will come naturally.

One of Bob's lasting legacies is his recently published translation of Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ (the Penguin Classics edition). He had always loved this work and been influenced by it, though in his understated way he never spoke very much about his own spirituality, at least not to me. I guess that what we look for in our mentors and guides are those we can not only admire but imitate. And perhaps the people who have helped us most are those who have practised a lifetime of imitation themselves. I mean of course, the imitation of Christ who is their and our divine Exemplar and - why not put it like this? - our best and truest Mentor. I think Bob's translation of The Imitation tells us what mattered most to him in his long and productive life. 

I write as one of many who are more thankful than we can say to have known him. May he rest in peace.

**You can read a formal obituary here.