The Pensive Pilgrim

"I don't really believe in the supernatural."   So said a priest friend of mine recently. I was somewhat taken aback. He is, after all, a man of great faith who passionately believes in God. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word supernatural as that which is ".....beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature".  Surely this is true of God? Indeed one might well ask what would be the point of God if he weren't supernatural? My friend is in fact a devout Anglo-Catholic; he therefore believes at the very least  that when he recites the eucharistic prayer, invoking the Holy Spirit at the Lesser Epiclesis and repeating Our Lord's words of institution ("This is my body which is given for you; this is my blood.....which is shed for you") Christ becomes especially present in the bread and wine - or more - that their very substance is mystically transformed. My friend also believes that this consecration of the elements happens b...

Today I celebrate thirty-one years as a priest in God's Church. When I set off down the path to ordination, I foolishly made a number of assumptions - principally that I had a working lifetime of parish ministry ahead of me.  But this wasn't to be. After serving two Curacies - the first of which was a profoundly unhappy and dispiriting experience,  the second of which was a real joy - I faced a major crisis of conscience. It was 1990, and following Tony Higton's notorious Private Member's motion to General Synod in 1987, the Church of England was winding itself up about human sexuality. Having struggled for years with the realisation that I was gay - and having survived well-meaning but misguided attempts to 'pray the gay away' - I had eventually been convinced by a number of sympathetic clergy (some gay themselves, others not) that my sexuality was totally compatible with being a priest, and that I basically had two options - either to be celibate, or to ...