Coming Around Again

One of my current projects is to reunite as many as possible of the Spiritual Instructions of Fr Reginald Somerset Ward, the Anglican spiritual director in whom I’ve had an interest for some while. He issued more or less one a month for years, eventually totalling about 450. Some time ago I was sent printed copies of the majority of them, and I now have copies of his books in which many more were published in extracted form. Some are lost, but it should be able to compile three-quarters or more of them.

Fr Ward eventually gave up issuing his Instructions in 1957 on doctor’s advice (he was already 76 by then) and was evidently flagging a bit in the years before that, sometimes only managing one missive to his directees every two months. I wonder whether the slowdown was caused not only by health but by the lack of much new to say after forty years or so. I am only scanning the documents rapidly at the moment rather than reading them, but even so I can detect pet themes and writers being repeatedly mentioned. In contrast, I’ve only been ordained 17 years but there are already many times when I finish composing a little homily for a quiet said mass that I am pretty sure I’ve said essentially the same thing, on maybe more than one occasion!

Nevertheless the round of preaching, driven as it is by the lectionary cycle, does mean you try to come up with new thoughts. At least they may be new to you: it seems to me vanishingly unlikely, even when I produce something I’ve never considered before, that nobody else in the past two thousand years of Christian history has ever stumbled across the same motif.

Now and again you draw something from the texts you are given which seems to offer you some help as much as your audience, but it turns out to be a variation on a theme. Last Sunday was the Baptism of Christ and I spoke, naturally enough, about the relationship between Christ’s baptism and our own. Take whatever it is that causes separation between you and God, and drown it in the waters, I said, or something like it. But is that very different from nailing it to the cross – the kind of imagery we might use in Lent?

The supposed spiritual insights we happen across either for ourselves or from others have a resemblance to, say, dieting fads: here is the thing, the new thing, which is going to make the lasting difference. And we fall on it enthusiastically, pursue it for a little while, and then find it not working, and eventually forget about it.

But perhaps such spiritual techniques can only work for a short time, and that’s all we can expect from them. I try to follow the advice of Metropolitan Anthony, and draw a phrase or verse from my morning Bible reading which shapes my thoughts for the day ahead, usually turning to a new one the following day. I find Fr Somerset Ward counselled the same sort of thing: to take something from your morning meditation (he assumed that would be when you’d do it) and use this as the basis for spontaneous prayers through the day. None of these phrases are supposed to be the one thing that can revolutionise your spiritual life, because nothing will. It’s a long-term business, and such is the dullness, perhaps, of the human soul that we constantly need some new direction to approach God – which will do no harm, provided we recall the unchanging nature of the one who draws us near.