In my interview for Chelsea I was asked what I understood by the term “liberal catholic”. It’s a question I loved answering!
For me – it’s what being an Anglican is all about. “Liberal” in the sense that while we make “absolutist” statements (in our creeds) we don’t make a claim for absolute knowledge; that we welcome doubt and exploration and curiosity and life-long questing for the revealing of God. And “Catholic” because we stand in an (I believe unbroken) line of faith from the early church to today, with our liturgy, the Eucharist and a shared language of worship across the globe that keeps our eyes on something bigger than just our own congregation.
Anglicans have a biblical confidence rooted in God: I get anxious about those who appear to have a human certitude rooted in self. Jesus had quite a bit to say about those who feel “sure and certain” in their own opinions. The danger of such certainty is that it becomes a kind of spiritual compaction: nothing new can germinate because the ground is already claimed, defended, and trampled.
Honest questions, honest doubt, is a refusal to seal the ground of the heart and mind. It’s a willingness to be opened up to new ways of thinking and understanding God’s actions in the world. Not in the sense of being swayed by latest fashions, but a realisation that each new generation has something to say and teach about how God interacts with his creation.
I would dare to suggest that the opposite of faith is not doubt – it is certainty. And the fulfilment of faith is not being “right” – it is in exploration of the God who ever goes ahead of us, leading us into greater and deeper truth and relationship with him.
From the place of certainty,
the cherry will never blossom.
The ground where we are certain is hammered hard,
layered thick with the tramping of right-shod feet.
Doubts are the
mole hills
and love is the plough that cuts through;
yoked to the One
who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.
Rev’d Lydia