Reading the fascinating article outlining the pilgrimages that Jack Chisnall and Josh Dolphin have undertaken (Divine comedy: the standup double act who turned to the priesthood, 22 September), I was reminded of a lecturer in Durham who underlined that the phrase “born again”, in its original Greek language, implies a process, and not a single event.
So, I might describe myself as “born again” on Sunday 6 January 1980. But I was also “born again” when a gay couple, who I had been alongside in their challenge, came for communion. To my credit, the question that I asked of myself, when they approached the altar rail, was not “Can I give a gay couple communion?” but “Have they been confirmed?”
There have been other occasions when meeting evidence of the divine in the people whom I have drawn alongside – as a chaplain to a hospice, for example – has sparked something that I might describe as a “born again” moment – including no longer seeing myself as a part of the Church of England’s life. The church, dominated as it is by its two extremes of Anglo-Catholicism and evangelicalism, has seen itself too often as a body that takes God out into the world, rather than a body that finds the God that it says it believes in out in the world.
Even Jesus, when challenged to respond to one outside “the faith” – the Canaanite woman begging him to heal her demon-possessed daughter – admitted that God might be present in that moment. “Woman, you have great faith!” (Matthew 15:28).
Rev Trevor Smith
Narberth, Pembrokeshire
• Thank you, Lamorna Ash, for a serious account of why and how men and women become priests in the Anglican church. It sensitively illuminated how a spark of faith can be fanned into a flame, and now we will look to see how Josh Dolphin and Jack Chisnall’s comedic gifts can be recycled as grist to the ministerial mill. As a bishop said to me many years ago: “If God didn’t have a sense of humour, he wouldn’t have called you and me.”
Rt Rev John Saxbee
Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire
• As an alumnus of St Stephen’s House, the Anglican theological college in Oxford, after reading Lamorna Ash’s long read I would like to assure readers that Anglo-Catholic spirituality does not have to be associated with rightwing social mores. Upholding the sanctity of fully human life not only prioritises women’s need over male seed, it also leads to pacifism and anti-militarism. The article referred to the Nunc dimittis, but not to the other evensong anthem, the Magnificat, highly topical at the moment, which “casts down the mighty from their thrones” and “sends the rich empty away”.
Rev Dr Clive Barrett
Leeds
• Buried deep within your long read is the innocuous-sounding phrase “evidence for the existence of a loving God”; full marks, then, to Lamorna Ash for preceding it with the crucial qualifier that human experiences have to be “reworked” in order for there to be any such “evidence”. Thus the “loving God”, perhaps like comedy itself, remains a matter of interpretation.
Fr Alec Mitchell
Holyhead, Anglesey
• The “black tablets” in the thurible described by Lamorna Ash are, in fact, charcoals infused with saltpetre, on to which the grains are sprinkled. As a former thurifer at York Minster, I was incensed by this solecism.
Harold Mozley
York
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