AUTHENTIC FAITH? – where is it to be found? What makes for authenticity? – the kind that children instinctively understand when it’s present, and shrink from when it’s not. Is the worship we’re offering today authentic? Does what we do religiously represent what we believe truly? Does our worship give worth-ship - honoured recognition of “the place” of the Source of All Life in our lives? Does our church community strike others as genuinely Godly? As Real?
This is the stuff with which Kaleidoscope – a kind of theological think-tank, a Breathing Space, a round-the-table-home-seminary is engaging in our parish – with the specific task and purpose of shaping the way we present our Christian faith in acts of worship to God, to children and young people particularly, and to all interested persons, ourselves included, generally.
The word authentic features again and again in our discussions. The word authentic invites us, over and over, to an honest assessment of the way things actually are in the Church and the world of the twenty-first century so that we can even begin to get a handle on the shape of things to come.
The word authentic invites us to ask why many shrink from the “life and witness” of the contemporary Church. And this involves some hard thinking, together with vigorous appeal to our imaginations. This in turn leads to the stirrings of worth-ship, to an as-yet rather nebulous, shapeless but nevertheless-Real excitement.
This grappling “in the Spirit” with Word and Sacrament brings us into company with the very first disciples of Jesus of Nazareth – bewildered, even stupefied sometimes, like them, in the company of parables we can’t quite grasp the meaning of but recognise are important somehow and which, invited or not, echo repeatedly, somewhere in the depths of us. Why do you speak in parables? – we ask, like frustrated disciples before us. And Jesus smiles. Silently. Calling us home to a new authenticity, to a new (blessed relief!) un-knowing, un-doing.
The Welsh priest and poet R S Thomas was certainly authentic – sometimes even to the point of seeming brutal, harsh, even hopeless. Tonight we shared a bit of the truth that he found himself up against in his lifetime and we know that this, too, will echo and challenge and plead with us to persevere …
The Chapel
A little aside from the main road,
becalmed in a last-century greyness,
there is the chapel, ugly without the appeal
to the tourist to stop his car
and visit it. The traffic goes by,
and the river goes by, and quick shadows
of clouds, too, and the chapel settles
a little deeper into the grass.But here once on an evening like this,
in the darkness that was about
his hearers, a preacher caught fire
and burned steadily before them
with a strange light, so that they saw
the splendour of the barren mountains
about them and sang their amens
fiercely, narrow but saved
in a way that men are not now.R S Thomas
Collected Poems, page 276
