I tried to confide my feelings to Eileen, but she was bearing the burden of a growing family, and as a protective father and husband I felt inhibited from sharing them fully with her. Much later I realised that I was wrong to carry this all alone – Eileen was more than capable of understanding, and would have been an enormous help. Nevertheless, only those who know something of the ‘dark night of the soul’ can comprehend the darkness I was feeling then. Of course, as anyone in the priesthood knows – and for that matter anyone in any profession where strong convictions prevail – one can fool people a great deal of the time, and I am sure that few of those around me knew anything of my inner turmoil. But one cannot fool oneself. These struggles went on for many months, and were resolved in an unexpected manner.
The summer of 1972 was spent in London, Ontario, with Eileen’s widowed mother, and her sister Evelyn and brother-in-law Roy and their family, who had moved to Canada some years earlier. We were now a family of six, as Elizabeth had joined our brood eight months earlier. It was a delightful holiday with much bonding, laughter and fun. I took time out to study the Canadian Church, and read a great deal besides.
I refused all offers to preach or lecture – except one, to preach at Little Trinity, Toronto. Little Trinity, a large evangelical church, was led then by Harry Robinson, a dynamic minister and a very effective leader in the Canadian Church. The engagement necessitated a trip on my own, and I was put up in a community house on the evening prior to my sermon. I shall never forget what happened after I was shown to my room. I walked across to the bookshelves and saw a charismatic book that was very popular at the time, Aglow with the Spirit by Robert Frost. As I skimmed through its pages, I seethed with indignation at the author’s interpretation of the work of the Holy Spirit. Uncharacteristically I tossed the book away from me in disgust, and to my shame it hit a picture, which fell to the floor with a crash. As I walked over to replace the picture and retrieve the book, I found myself thinking that it is easy enough to throw away a book, but that what I could not discard was the faith, the confidence and the sheer joy of the Christian life.
I sat down and began thinking more about my faith, my spiritual state and my hopes for the future. I thought back to the start of my spiritual journey and the deep convictions I had had then, and which I no longer felt. I traced that journey of faith from my origins in the East End of London to Dagenham, and to the trust that others had placed in me. I knew that I still longed to serve God, but my personal integrity was crucial to my survival as a believer. In that quiet Toronto room I began to wonder if it was possible to recover my former assurance when it seemed that the iron of deep unbelief had entered my soul.
I decided to bury my pride, and fell to my knees. I remained wordless for a very long time. Then a prayer started to form which was, I suppose, in essence a confession of failure and an admission that intellectual pride and human arrogance had stopped me hearing God’s voice. How I longed to come home, I said to myself and to that ‘Other’ who was listening. Then something happened. There was no answering voice, no blinding light or angelic appearance – only a deepening conviction that God was meeting me now. I felt the love of God and His tenderness towards me. As I prayed out loud – a practice I strongly recommend – I felt a sense of joy and elation, of reassurance and hope as I resumed my walk with God.
I returned to my feet after what had been a very long period of quiet prayer, reflection and encounter. Even now, many years later, it is impossible to say why that moment was so important to my life and experience. Was I so longing to believe that I made myself believe? That might be possible, but so strong in me is the spirit of enquiry that such an interpretation could not sustain me in the long run. I am not the kind of person who is afraid of doubt – indeed, I regard it as an essential component of faith. The steadiness of my faith since that encounter in 1972 is for me an assurance of the reality of faith, not an illusion. It represented a ‘coming home’ to the roots that alone hold one fast. The nearest approximation I have read to what I felt then is by the scientist F.C. Happold, who in his book Religious Faith and the Twentieth Century recounts his own experience:
It happened in my room at Peterhouse in the evening of Feb 1st 1913 when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge … When I tried to record the experience at the time I used the imagery of the Holy Grail; it seemed just like that. There was, however, no sensible vision. There was just the room, with its shabby furniture and the red shaded lamp on the table. But the room was filled with a presence which in a strange way was about me and within me, like light or warmth. I was overwhelmingly possessed by Someone who was not myself, and yet I felt I was more myself than I had ever been before.
That seemed to capture the essentials of my experience.
Two things flowed immediately from this unspectacular but important event. First, the grave doubts and spiritual darkness were a thing of the past. I was now able to move on with contentment and trust – and with no little joy. Of course, such experiences of God’s love do not mean the end of doubt or distrust. Any thinking Christian will encounter the unknown, the darkness within and without. Doubt, as I have observed, is an important element for faith and may at times even be the engine that drives trust. But what I had dealt with – or rather, what God had sorted out in me – was that terrifying shadow that had clouded my faith and work.
The second result of that meeting with God was that it denoted for me an awareness of the Holy Spirit and, as a consequence, an experiential discovery of the Trinity. I guess that many evangelicals encounter God through Jesus, and this can result in an overfamiliar view of God that scorns mystery, distance and wonder. In the same way, there are Catholics whose Christian experience seems wholly theistic, avoiding any personal intimacy with Jesus Christ. I recall once overhearing a Bishop say: ‘I’m a God-the-Father kind of Christian’ – a code that intimated that he found ‘Jesus’ talk too embarrassing to handle.
My Toronto experience unexpectedly opened up the Trinity for me in a most exciting way. It dawned on me that I had never thought much about the Holy Spirit, who up to that point had been for me either a doctrine in the Creed or a mysterious force at work in the Bible. Now I saw Him as a living reality in the Church today, and at the heart of what we mean when we say ‘God’. This led me to a greater sympathy with Charismatic theology and practice, whilst still rejecting the two-stage baptismal theology that some believed in. Where I found myself overlapping with Charismatic thought was in the realisation that there was so much to discover, experience and understand about God’s love. In the wonderful words of John Taylor, Bishop of Winchester: ‘Every Christian is meant to possess his possessions and many never do.’
This new experience of God’s love in Christ, made known again to me through the Holy Spirit, was like a second wind to me in my work. I returned to St John’s bursting with energy and eager to get on with the job. The remaining three years of my time at the college were very creative ones, in which I completed my first book, I Believe in Man, which explored human nature and sexuality. But the Toronto experience led me to reconsider my future. After nine years in two theological colleges it was time to move on, and put into practice all I had gained in theology and experience. In 1975, at the age of thirty-nine, I became vicar of St Nicholas’s, Durham.
‘I have no difficulty in saying how I conceive the work of a parish priest. My object is first of all to gather a congregation; large, converted, instructed and missionary-hearted and then set it to work. Forge, temper and sharpen your sword – then wield it.
Peter Green of Salford
THE DECISION TO LEAVE ST JOHN’S and return to parish ministry was not taken lightly. There were those who felt that I should stay on at St John’s and consolidate my work, but the ‘Toronto experience’ had given me a thirst to work out what I felt God was teaching me. I considered a number of parishes which the Bishop of Southwell asked me to visit, but an invitation to St Nicholas’s, Durham, caused my heart to beat in excitement. St Nic’s, as generations of Durham undergraduates still call it