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After describing myself as Charismatic and Anglo-Catholic a friend on Twitter asked ‘So it’s High Mass and then the Fire Tunnel?’ I admit I had to look up what a fire tunnel was, although I could make a pretty good guess. If you are wondering - It involves walking through a tunnel of people praying over you, and sometimes results in some sort of ecstatic experience.
This short talk is not about High Mass and Fire Tunnels, but it is about experience, because the brief is to talk about Being. So what does it mean to Be Charismatic Anglo-Catholic?
Firstly to be Anglo-Catholic. Which is hardly a straightforward thing in itself to define.
I’d like to pinch an idea here from Ben Edson – who himself borrowed it from Frost and Hirsch, who took it from Paul Hieber. They all explore how groups define themselves, either with boundaries or centres. Or in the real world – if you are keeping sheep in a wide open space like the Australian Outback you have two choices – you either build very long fences, or sink deep wells that the sheep will be drawn towards and be sustained by. The idea then is that groups can define themselves either by fences or by wells.
And to be honest, to be an Anglo-Catholic is inescapably to be defined by wells, because it is to be outside the fences of other larger communions.
The watering holes that Anglo-Catholic’s gravitate towards are not all centred in the Vatican. There is the Orthodox tradition, The Ancient Churches of Syria and the East, India and Africa. There are springs in Wesleyanism and Scandinavian Lutheranism, as well of course as the British Church before and after either Rome or the Reformation. To be an Anglo-Catholic is to live in this fertile terrain of spirituality, worship and theology, enriched by history, sign and symbol. The American Roman Catholic writer Eric Stotlz refers to those who inhabit this territory as ‘The Apostolic Communions’.
