Study of Chrysostom’s voluminous sermons now consumed many hours each day. Sometimes I worked in the Oriel College library above the senior common room. At others, for a change of atmosphere, I toiled in the world-famous Bodleian Library or went over to Pusey House, several blocks west of Oriel and built on a much smaller, more intimate scale. The connecting thread of my growing notes was anything that threw light on the central theme of the life of faith as viewed through a towering early Christian understanding and perception. When I tired of the Greek, I read the Latin translation, and my facility in both languages steadily deepened and grew apace.
Every month I sent a newsletter back to West Hill to be read aloud at a Sunday service in order to keep my congregation up to date with our activities and our impressions of life in a thriving though ancient university city overseas. On one occasion I even gave a sermon by telephone link-up that was broadcast from the pulpit in St. Margaret’s-in-the-Pines at a regular eleven a.m. service. The late Aubrey Wice, religion reporter for the Toronto Telegram, did a special feature article on it in a Saturday edition.
Few places I have known can be more depressing, in spite of all its beauty, than Oxford in the autumn when the fog rises up from the Isis and from the Cherwell River, blotting out the landscape and colleges alike. One rather dismal, foggy afternoon near the end of October, I was walking past Christ Church College garden when I had a most significant encounter. Walking towards me in the semigloom was my old Greek and Roman history professor, Peter Brunt. He carried a cane, as was his habit when he took his obligatory exercise break each day, and his hair was as tousled as I remembered it being when last I saw him nearly a decade earlier, in 1954. He always ran his hands through it as he listened to one’s essay or strove to make a point in his critique of the same.
Brunt, who was to go on to hold the prestigious chair in Ancient History not long afterwards, told me that he had heard I had come back. Pointing his cane at me, he then demanded, “What are you doing here?” I explained that I had returned to do a Doctor of Philosophy degree (D.Phil.) in order to teach at my old theological college. He almost snorted with surprise and not a little indignation. He said, “What kind of American nonsense is that? You have an excellent MA in Greats from here that is certainly the equivalent of any doctoral degree elsewhere. You have the brains and have gained the tools for research to add to the overall sum of knowledge. I should have thought you would have been better to stay at home to get on with it!” I was left practically speechless by this, and after promising I would bring Mrs. Harpur and the two girls to tea at the college the following week, I mumbled a hasty farewell and walked on into the gathering night.
Brunt’s words came as a numbing shock. I thought about them over and over as I walked around Christ Church Meadow and listened as the melancholy bells of the college clocks and the churches, more per acre than in any other city on earth, counted out the passing time.
During the weeks that followed, the research went on as before, punctuated by breaks when I attended specific lectures to broaden my knowledge of the state of Biblical studies and of the latest thinking about the origins and nature of early Christianity. But the words of my former tutor kept sounding in my mind. As I thought about returning to the rush and pressure of a busy, growing parish, teaching one day a week at Wycliffe, and at the same time trying to pull my research together and begin to write the thesis, it began to sink in that I had really taken on a vastly tougher assignment than I had originally bargained for.
A letter soon afterwards from Rev. Dr. Leslie Hunt, Wycliffe’s principal, informed me that I had been appointed in absentia as Associate Professor of New Testament and Greek. I was to assume part-time duties in the fall of 1964, one year after my return from fulfilling the residence requirement in Oxford. My duties—and, not insignificantly, my salary—would be part-time to permit me to complete the D.Phil. It was expected I would augment my wage with an honorary appointment as assistant on weekends in one of the more well-to-do suburban parishes. Lodging for me and the family would be a large, drafty apartment in the college itself overlooking Hart House. The previous New Testament professor, Dr. Ward, had also lived there for some years during his tenure.
The prospect of the next few years—seemingly endless studies, insufficient funds with more debts already beginning to accrue, a family to provide for and, at the height of my vigour and ability, having to be in effect a sort of second-grade professor alongside the rest of a faculty who were all full professors—began to depress me. I seemed engaged in one of the world’s most solitary tasks, sitting for hours by myself in a chilly library surrounded by voices from the past. Oxford in the deep mid-winter is not, as already hinted, the most jocund spot on earth. The depression grew darker and I began to find it hard to concentrate. Sleep was difficult and troubled. Praying seemed to be in vain. In one way, it was a dark night of the soul. I became aware of a growing, pent-up anger. It was rage, but with an unknown cause or object. I began to blame myself for a lack of faith. But more prayers and attempts at piety—Bible reading and churchgoing—only seemed to make things worse.
Then one Sunday evening I went to a lecture called “A Christian Psychologist Speaks Out” at an Anglican church in the city centre. The speaker was Frank Lake, MD, a former counsellor to Christian missionaries in India (whoever would have thought that missionaries needed clinical counselling?). He impressed me so much and I was feeling caught in such a quandary that I went up to him afterwards and asked if it might be possible to see him sometime about my problem. We agreed on a time and place for a week later, and it proved to be one of the wisest steps I had taken in a very long time.
We met for two very lengthy conversations overall. Gently, but at the same time firmly, he helped me to bring to consciousness my undue anxiety to please my parents, especially my father. He helped me to see the sources of my anger, so long and so carefully concealed under a “nice guy” persona. He helped me to unpack all of my reasons for being back at Oxford and showed how some were noble, some were much less so, and how one stood out above all: “because my father said I should go.” Most helpfully, he said there is a place for right-directed rage. “You will be depressed because you are holding down so much anger,” he said. “That takes great energy. Get out in the country alone somewhere and shout it out. Allow yourself to be angry with God, too. He can take it!” He added that whatever I decided to do about my future, it was very clear that I had some big decisions to make.
I have necessarily condensed this episode, but it was a turning point in my life in so many ways. I felt gradually a great sense of release and of returning energies. It was as though I had been standing with a foot on the hose while at the same time hoping for water. I wrote home to my parents to say that I was going to accept the post at Wycliffe, after fulfilling my promise to the bishop of a full year back in the parish, but that I was reconsidering whether or not to pursue a D.Phil. My father’s dream had been of my being a staff member, a professor, at a leading evangelical place of higher learning. Well, he would have his dream, but no longer on his terms.
Experience has shown me that once you make the right decision, events have a way of coming together so as to confirm it, sometimes again and again. I was about to receive a couple of very clear signs of my need to change tack.
I had been attracted to Chrysostom in the first place because of my deep interest in a theology not of the academy but of the heart. He had the reputation of being the most eloquent preacher ever to grace a pulpit and of garnering packed crowds whenever he spoke. I wanted to discover and lay out for myself and others his power to connect. My thinking had been particularly influenced by a passage from Carl Jung that I had read while in the parish some months earlier. In his marvellous little book of essays already cited, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung speaks of the many hundreds of people from every race whom he had treated over the years. He writes: “Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over age thirty-five, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious