So, about a year after fulfilling the eleventh commandment for young clergy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, “Thou shalt get thy church deeply in debt,” by building the new St. Margaret’s, I applied for acceptance as a doctoral candidate at Oxford. The choice of Oxford over an American or Canadian university seemed wisest because, as a graduate student there, I had already fulfilled the basic residence requirement. By returning to my old college, Oriel, for one year, I could then be approved and come home to write the thesis on my own turf. The bishop, Rt. Rev. George Snell, was not very happy about my decision when I announced it to him in a hastily called appointment in his Adelaide Street office. He grumbled about my leaving the parish so soon after the dedication of a new and costly building. But he was somewhat mollified when I said I would come back for at least a year after Oxford to “round things off” properly.
Unfortunately, the entire Oxford project was not planned or thought out as fully as it ought to have been. Wycliffe was pressuring me to rush ahead because the New Testament professor, Rev. Dr. Ronald Ward, had served notice he would be leaving his post in the spring of 1964. It was already about mid-March 1962. There was no scholarship money available and, since I had decided to take the family, there would be considerable expense involved: the boat passage there and back for two adults and two children, house rental, food and transportation for a year, plus the university fees and other sundry expenses.
In retrospect, one can see only too readily that it was one of those times and places where youthful exuberance combined with failure to consult one’s own inner wisdom rather than that of others. The result was undue haste and poor planning. In any case, I arranged for my father to sell our car, and having contracted for a retired American Episcopal (Anglican) priest to live with his wife in the rectory and administer the parish in our absence, we set sail for England in August 1962.
It proved to be one of the most conflicted years of my life in spite of some moments of great illumination as well. The house we rented on Aston Street, off the Iffley Road in east Oxford, was dark and dingy beyond belief, its walls and furnishings every possible shade of brown. The only heat, until purchase of a coal oil–fuelled space heater, was a small fireplace in the kitchen. Coal for it had to be purchased at an ironmonger’s shop, brought home in a bag on the handlebars of the “sit-up-and-beg” antique bicycle I used for transportation, and then hammered into usable pieces in a dark dungeon of a cellar. There was no refrigerator, just a “cold cupboard” near the rear wall of the kitchen that actually had mushroom-like fungi growing out of one or two shelves because of the dampness. We managed to make the kitchen and upstairs bathroom reasonably bright and cozy, but the whole experience had a lot of the features of a year-long camping trip.
The really important thing was getting on course for my research. Because of my own ongoing interest in and commitment to a practised faith, one that made sense not just intellectually but experientially too, I had decided to do my research on one of the greatest preachers of early Christianity, St. John Chrysostom. His very name in Greek means “golden-mouthed” or, in other words, superlatively eloquent. Chrysostom (c.347–407) was made the Patriarch of Constantinople in 398. The city had been inaugurated in 330 by Emperor Constantine as the capital city for the Eastern Roman Empire. I knew that all of Chrysostom’s hundreds of sermons and commentaries had been faithfully recorded in Greek (with a Latin translation added later), and it seemed logical to me that a faithful investigation of this huge store of wisdom could be worthwhile. What, I wanted to ask, did such a great expositor of the Bible and of earliest Christianity teach as the essence of a living faith in day-to-day experience? Eventually, I sharpened the focus: the work and experience of God’s Holy Spirit in the life of a believer, according to Chrysostom.
Two problems immediately presented themselves. In the first place, Oxford was at that time totally out of sync with graduate studies programs at American universities. There was a system in place in the sciences, but in the humanities it was a very mixed bag indeed. Very few of the college dons had doctoral degrees themselves, and not all professors had one either. The MA (Oxon.) in Greats that I had earned previously was considered equivalent to a doctorate and sufficient academic preparation provided the person concerned had gone on to make good use of the tools already given to him or her. More particularly, however, amazing as it seemed to me, there was nobody in the theology or other faculties of the numerous colleges who was judged, on inquiry, sufficiently well read in the work of the great “doctor of the Church” to become my supervisor. I spent several anxious weeks in September and October interviewing nearly a dozen of some of the best-known Biblical and patristic scholars at the university, including Henry Chadwick, George Caird, Samuel Greenslade and the Dean of Christ Church, Dr. F.L. Cross, who edited the first edition of the well-known Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. These were all noted scholars and acknowledged authorities on early Christianity; their collected published books would make a small library. But none of them saw Chrysostom as his “cup of tea,” as one of them put it. One or more of them nevertheless urged me to bring my knowledge of German up to speed, and so I added a German tutor to my schedule.
Finally it was decided that my best recourse would be to seek out the guidance of a non-university Anglican priest of immense learning who occasionally helped out with unusual situations such as mine. His was a small but very ancient parish deep in the countryside south of Oxford. It was arranged that I should go down by train to meet him, have lunch at the rectory, discuss my aims and return to Oxford the same afternoon. The Reverend Father Chitty was an energetic, wispy-haired man of advanced years whose agile quickness belied his age. His black outfit and white collar at once marked him out for me on the platform as the train pulled into the station, and I soon was having the ride of my life as we careened around narrow, winding lanes at breakneck speed in his beaten-up old Austin. As we lurched around one particularly sharp bend, the passenger door flew open, struck the stone wall and banged shut again. This happened twice more as he shouted out something about meaning to get “the blessed thing” fixed.
I counted us both lucky when we at last pulled up in a lane with a picturesque Norman-style church on one side and a three-storey eighteenth-century rectory on the other. It was a labyrinthine, drafty old place within, but we were soon in his study with its stacks of books not just on sagging shelves to the ceiling on all sides but piled high on every available inch of space on chairs and on the floor itself. In spite of a glowing coal fire, the air seemed damp and smelled of mildew.
We talked for a while about Chrysostom and he pulled out a couple of tomes and hunted for a particular passage he wanted to share. When he found it and urged me to take a look, I found the Greek text almost impossible to read because of something I had never come upon before: some of the characters were illegible because there were actual wormholes through the pages. One hears of bookworms, but apparently they’re very real. Their presence in his library didn’t affect his obvious enthusiasm, however, and the time passed very quickly.
My spirits had been sagging badly, but the possibility of being mentored by such a learned and lively character gave a glimmer of hope. Chitty had kindly invited me to stay for the noonday meal, and since the impression it left with me has lasted all down the years, a brief description should be forgiven. At the ringing of a bell, a most varied collection of people—relatives both distant and immediate, plus a couple of elderly parishioners—descended the stairs and gathered around a large oval table in the capacious dining room. Some wore several sweaters and scarves. A couple were wearing rather soiled neckcloths or bandages denoting, I supposed, some kind of throat ailment. One had a racking cough. As we