Journey Home - 2017-10-30 - Deacon Michael Ward

[Music] good evening and welcome to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host for this program once again you and I joined here a story EWTN gives us this great privilege to do that tonight we welcome dr. Michael Ward a former anglican priest the author of planet Narnia Michael welcome to the journey home my pleasure I've looked forward to this I really have semi ever since I read your wonderful book planet Narnia and I told the early ava's digging around everywhere trying to find my copy so you could sign it I think I gave it away to didn't give it away I lent it to somebody to get their it sorry yeah interest I've been a CS Lewis fan most of my adult life yeah and I did not see what was coming in your book and so it was a great thrill so I hope in this second part of the program we'll we'll talk a bit about the book it's well let's set that aside because we're here to hear your journey yep so if I could let me get out of the way and by either take us back let's hear all of your journey started okay right well I was born in Sussex in the South of England into a very god-fearing lively Christian family my parents were very keen members of the local Anglican Church I have two older brothers I don't want to be cynical but the fact that they were a god-fearing Anglican family isn't always know anymore that it's always true that a Catholic family has really got here exactly know exactly but they were they were very developed and it was a lively local church still it's a very lively local church and of the evangelical stripe of Anglican isn't right and I was into that family I was born and I was baptized an infant and brought up in that place my dad still lives there my mum last died a few years ago but they taught me the faith I was taken to church every week and we had a very good children's ministry at that church taught to pray and loved everything that I was being taught and I remember when I was about five I think I prayed a little prayer you know Lord Jesus come into my heart that kind of prayer which I was encouraged to pray and I prayed it and I've never looked back and a lot of our audience here in the States may not understand that evangelical branch the more Catholic branch of the Anglican Church but in many ways the evangelical branch was was really where Newman came out up front that's right yeah yeah he came from an evangelical background just like me yeah he also became a Catholic at the age of 44 in Oxford just like I did well that's where the similarities end but the evangelical would be on the one hand therefore not a desire to become more Catholic or even liturgically or they no no no I mean even Anglo Catholicism was a little bit suspect in in tradition I was brought up in we were very much told about the importance of you know lively faith and sincerity and spontaneity to a certain extent I mean we were a liturgical Anglican Church we still use the prayer book for many of the services so it wasn't you know wasn't like the free church that you can now actually experience within the Church of England it was still fairly liturgical fairly traditional it wasn't very much actually in the John stopped tradition of of English Anglicanism I was wondering geo packer and John stand and University mm-hmm yeah those were big names and big things growing up but yeah I mean the fact that I was encouraged to pray that little prayer even though I had already been baptized was tells you something about kind of theology that I was raised in and when I think about evangelicals in America which would be trans denominational that I would I would say that the authors and the literature that fed American evangelicalism would have come out of that branch yeah and that doesn't make giant Packer in jeonse Todd yeah varsity in that hole you have big influence in America yes yes Louis you know you know very big influence in America yeah and CS Lewis began to be a big influence on me from an early age my parents used to read The Chronicles of Narnia to me and my brothers as we were growing up I have strong memories of us piling into our parents bed on a Sunday morning and my mum reading us the latest chapter of the latest Chronicle before we all had breakfast and went off to church that's thought about this your parents then would have related to the the Narnia tales in a different way because they might have remembered the background of what Lewis is talking about in part of them you know the bombing of London that's true yes my parents were both evacuees during the Second World War well actually yes that's true my mum was bombed out her house was destroyed around their ears and she was then evacuated to the country just like the children in the line which my dad was evacuated five times around England so I'm lucky to be here stop me from being born but you were early on then introduced a good old Louis I was and I loved him my parents told me just a little enough to pique my interest about the the sort of second meaning in the stories about Aslan being a bit like Jesus and that intrigued me because most books that I was reading about as a stage didn't have second levels of meaning and the fact that this was a Christian level of meaning made it all the more enticing right we'll get to it later because I'm curious as to whether when Louis weren't they read on the radio the Lamia Christianity talks originated on the radio they were but I wasn't sure if you were did the Narnia feels on a radio I mean they have been adapted by the BT right now but yeah but I'm again wondering at the time when they were written where the audience would have gotten the other levels of it when you look at what was going on in England at 9:00 but so there you are and maybe the key thing is as a young man as an Anglican you had a faith yeah of your own right yeah I loved my faith I prayed I read the Bible I read the whole Bible when I was about 10 or 12 I remember my good news edition of the Bible with the little pictures i ploughed all the way through that and liked it a lot learnt a lot I'm not sure I always understood that Minor Prophets and things like that but I made it all the way from Genesis to Revelation a good proud Anglican history and all well might my father sometimes used to say that we were Anglican more by convenience than conviction that this local church was just so lively and a good thing to be part of that that that was the obvious choice to be to belong to you I think he might have been a Baptist or Methodist in another town there was a little bit of anti-catholicism growing up we were taught to be a little bit suspicious of Catholics and indeed anglo-catholics because of you know the suppose it empty ritualism of their traditions and i don't think that i knew i didn't knowingly meet a single catholic before I went away to university so it's a very Protestant world in which I lived I had a lot of Baptists and Methodists and Brethren friends but I never knew an angle ik and was pretty suspicious maybe wrong with being brought up in the Sussex here you were in the neighborhood of Belloc's old ya backyard that's right yes so or Aaron dole just south of you out there that's right so there was good Catholic yes historical spots yes well you know in my parish church we ancient parish church it goes back to I think the oldest part is that is its twelfth century so you would look at I would look at this building and I would see little niches little all breeds I think they're called where the sacred vessels would be held for the mass except they were never used anymore because it was such a low celebration of the Lord's Supper there was a Rood screen or a locked up passage to the old rude loft and I you know I wonder what what is a Rood screen why did why did they have these things they'd all been you know obliterated but there were these traces in the building which alerted me to the fact that there was this Catholic past which we were no longer connected to for some reason in America one of the most pervasive ideas amongst especially I separated brethren is that when it get when you push comes to shove what's necessary is Jesus not what church you belong to hmm as long as you got Jesus mmm is maybe the most pervasive theology running coast-to-coast in America you said your parents probably have been Baptists Methodists that they had been in another town was there a little bit of the same thing no I don't think so I mean they were pretty solidly Anglican for all that they said it was just convenience and so it wasn't just Jesus Jesus Jesus it was a proper properly Trinitarian theology that I was raised you know I got very good catechesis actually in this youth ministry it went from climber's through pathfinders through explorers through Wayfarers in fact my dad used to run the Wayfarers group and there was a local re teacher who who gave us actually very good solid teaching in those sessions and it wasn't even that particularly sola scriptura kind of setting either i mean obviously the bible was held in great reverence but we knew enough about anglican history to know that there was also this thing called tradition and that there was a certain proper place for and personal experience so you know the three-legged stool of Anglicanism was something I was introduced to fairly early and of course you know once I got into reading CS Lewis for myself and began reading things like Mia Christianity I was introduced a an even larger kind of understanding of the tradition our guest is dr. Michael Ward the author of planet Narnia which we'll talk talk about later Louis in C as in mere christianity it does in the end talk about the it's been a while since i read the book but a big house with many doors in the hallway that you go through yeah right you know it kind of doesn't doesn't push only to the idea of all you need Jesus doesn't matter what church again it kind of pushes that envelope a bit that really what's important it may be as traditional Christianity but where you're getting and is not as important so it's a little bit in there well but so there you were committed to Christ committed to the traditional church was the idea of priesthood for you an early thought well my grandmother used to ask me and my brothers whenever we visited my grandparents she would ask are any of you ever going to become a clergyman my brothers would always say no but I would sometimes say possibly grandma maybe I think she wanted to put it into our minds that idea and it did actually Lodge in my mind and walk perhaps come back to that later on but but yeah CS Lewis I think he he was already sort of expanding my horizons in into us not that I would have called it this at the time into a Catholic direction because of his you know great respect for creedal Orthodox historic Christianity and you know he would sometimes refer to st. Augustine or just in Mato or whoever it may be figures that we would normally not hear about from the pulpit at my church and you know the more I read into Lois the more I realized that he though an Anglican nonetheless had quite a lot of what I would call Catholic what I would have called Catholic habits you know he went to confession he believed in purgatory he had a high view of the priesthood he believed in the real presence and none of those things was on my radar from my upbringing and I wasn't really embracing them either myself but I knew that Lois was embracing them and therefore I thought they can't be that bad which were expressing some Lewis's own trajectory right in his growing from yes atheist also had been raising quite an evangelical Anglican home in in Ireland and then went through a phase of unbelief yeah and then in part due to friendship with Tolkien and other Catholics he he ended up quite a high Anglican actually though he always used to say he was not especially high nor especially low nor especially anything else well that was just a strategy to to avoid being pigeon-holed because I have sitting in my office down the hall a collection of his Latin letters to her mm-hmm a Catholic they used to again priests oh he was he was in dialog oh yeah you know and he was putting me into into if not an active interesting things Catholic he was at least showing me that there was there was a large Christian community outside evangelical Anglicanism and it was through Louis that I I began reading people like Chesterton and and talking for that matter and I knew that Chesterton and Tolkien were Catholics yet they seemed to be quite good chaps so my my Catholic my anti-catholic training I mean that's to overstate it but my anti-catholic suspicions that I've been raised with were already beginning to evaporate from a fairly early age thanks to Lewis and Tolkien and Chesterton you know there's a I think it was Chesterton that talked about in his book conversion in the Catholic Church talks about the three stages of conversion and the first is that when you if you give the Catholic Church is a little open door you're in trouble yeah you know I think the second stage is back and way off at least the first stage is a little bit so were you saying then at that stage in your life opening to Chesterton open to Tolkien maybe other Catholic writers was opening the door a little bit or at least you're not quite as negative about the church but yeah you're not moving in that direction I'm not I'm not consciously moving in that direction but I'm I'm taking down some of the the walls of suspicion yeah so I shall I move ahead yes I go off to Oxford to do my degree in English I choose Oxford I think largely because Lewis and Tolkien have been there and for the first time as part of my degree in English I study CS Lewis more seriously more formally and that will be of interest later on in my story but I'm still not at all engaging with Catholic friends I'm still not all though I'm beginning to meet them occasionally I meet for instance Walter Hooper he would have been Louis's secretary in the last few months of Louis's life and he actually while I was an undergraduate Walter himself became a Catholic and that was a little bit gave me a little bit of a start because I still thought you can be over you know there's no need to to leave the Church of England the Church of England is doing fine and I had no thoughts of being anything other than an Anglican but I was already beginning to think at that stage about possibly becoming ordained and I went to him to a you and the Ministry lunch at my local church in Oxford to just explore but I thought at that stage I was too young I wasn't ready for it so I put that on the back burner and then I graduated and spent two and a half years trying and failing to be a writer that was quite a difficult period I became quite depressed I think and and was beginning to struggle a little bit in my faith because I'd had a pretty easy life I mean I had a very solid loving background I had always had good health I'd have very adequate education I'd had a you know a very blessed charmed life you might say and this was the first period in my life when things were going a bit wrong for me and so I think I became a bit depressed and it's beginning to struggle a little bit in my faith thinking well you know aren't you meant to be blessed if you're an obedient faithful Christian why should I have to put up with you know unemployment and some bad health and things like that I was thinking that that particular theology university johnstad yes Lewis I mean Jay Packer in that group of folk would have encouraged you to say okay Lord what are you telling me in this yeah and that's the sort of question I did ask and I just had to you know knuckle down and realize that you know God was not some sort of pet that I could know my fingers out and get him to do exactly what I wanted he was God and I was his creature not the other way around but this was really the first time I understood that and so the question of submission even when you're not getting what you want came alive for me for the first time in that period some of that from Lewis yes I did because you know Lewis gives us plenty of examples of struggling with darkness his grief observed yeah the problem of pain and when he was when his wife died and you know he'd been through the first world war he'd lost his mother when he was a young boy he knew quite a lot about not getting what you want so Lewis what's very helpful yeah but I was not myself getting any help with regard to hey deployment iearned precisely 250 pounds from my pen in two and a half years fifty pounds every six months which I like to say was a regular income but it was not enough to live on and so eventually I gave up the idea of becoming a writer and moved back to Oxford I'd been living with my parents for two and a half years after graduating but I moved back to Oxford in the hope of getting some career in publishing or something but that didn't transpire either I got a fold on this thick of rejection letters but gradually an alternative an unexpected career began to develop in CS Lewis my old tutor at Oxford remembered that I'd done this undergraduate thesis on Lois and so he got me to give her a one-off lecture and then he asked me to do a short course of tuition and by little and little it sort of snowballed into a career of teaching and lecturing and writing about CS Lewis and and eventually I ended up living in Lewis's house the kilns he lived there for half his life he died there in fact and I was the resident warden or you know curator for us for three years I lived I slept in Lewis's old bedroom and I had his study as my study for three whole years which was an interesting experience and what jump ahead too much but at that time during that was that when your awakening to the planet Narnia ideas were laying yet no no no no that comes a bit later okay but I was back in Oxford I was going to again an evangelical Anglican Church enjoying my faith helping out in the the youth group and cobbling together a career from these various sources of income but I realize it's not going to be a long term thing and what am I going to do with my life so I think at this point that I should look more seriously or donation again but it's around about that time actually this is just before I moved back to Oxford that I that the Church of England votes to start or dating women as priests and that's like throws me a bit of a curveball actually not so much for the content of the decision but just for the the way the decision was made for the first time in my life I had to you know wrestle with the question of authority in the church why do I trust the Church of England to make right decisions because this is a new decision this is changing what we've always understood so why should this General Synod of the Church of England be trusted when all of its forebears have said something different so that actually was quite a big issue for me at the time I would say that the first to journey home programs 20 years ago where first one was Tom Howard and the second was Graham Leonard the former bishop London London yeah and that was the issue that struck him here he is the Bishop of London and this decisions being made and in was he if I remember what he said it wasn't so much the issue no it's the authority yeah I've some in the making I'm deciding what's true Church of England where does it happen yeah yeah how do you know you're on secure ground and that really rocks me back on my heels and makes me think this is 93 I I think I probably went try to pursue ordination so that's what precipitates the the move back to Oxford and the and the cobbling together of the career but then in 1999 I think now I probably should explore ordination again and although the Church of England I think is perhaps moving in a direction which is not ideal nonetheless there will be an ongoing place for me I can just find some corner of the Church of England where I can you know have good ministry and so I explore the option for a third time and this time all the doors open in front of me and I and I go through all of the doors and I I go off to Cambridge actually to train for the yankin ministry the Theological College in Cambridge called Ridley Hall which is the evangelical College in Cambridge and that's all good I spent five years at ridley actually I could have done in two but I but hey I wonder they get a second degree from Cambridge in theology and that made it a three year course and then on top of that I decided it was time for me to do a PhD and the obvious subject for me to study was CS Lewis because I was really pretty expert in his writings and I do that degree actually not Cambridge but at st. Andrews in Scotland this is my st. Andrews time anyway so I am studying CS Lewis and his theological imagination and a half way into my researches I have this revelation as it seems to me about the Narnia Chronicles I'm not actually studying Narnia I'm looking at Lewis's imagination in theology more generally but one night I'm reading a long poem that Lewis wrote about the seven heavens of a medieval cosmos I'm reading the lines about Jupiter and the things that Jupiter was responsible for symbolically speaking in medieval thought one of the things he was responsible for was winter past and guilt forgiven these are the lines in Lewis's poem and they hit me between the eyes and I think winter passed and guilt forgiven that's like a five word summary of The Lion the Witch and the water it's all about the passing of the white which is winter and the forgiving of Edmonds guilt and it's that that really triggers in my mind the possibility that there might be an additional level of significance to the Narnia Chronicles B but beneath the ones that people have previously noticed so I take my idea to my PhD supervisors and they they encouraged me to pursue that and I spend the next year rereading everything Lewis had ever written rereading everything that I've been written about Z as Lewis in order to check out this theory and everything I discover just confirms over and over and over again that this is indeed his undergirding imaginative blueprint to their chronicles of narnia it was stunning I felt amazed at what I was turning up and then I published the book as Planet Narnia and I've been lecturing and speaking and teaching about this and ever since now did you publish the book before your ordination when did the ordination - oh yeah thank you yeah the ordination took place in 2004 okay and I went straight into chaplaincy ministry I didn't serve accuracy in a parish and unusually I started out as chaplain of Peter house which is the oldest of the colleges at Cambridge that's where I'd been attached while I was not an end and they just happened to want a chaplain at just the right time so I went and served Peter house for three years and it was actually at the end of my time at Peter house that the book came out planet Narnia was published in 2008 the Bishop of Rochester who was martyred during the Revolution was he at Peter house was he he was at Cambridge John Fisher yeah I was wondering where he was at Cambridge whether you had walked in the footsteps of yeahi'm why you were there no he wasn't a Pete house but Peter house was quite a Catholic College actually for before the English Reformation yeah so we'll take a break now and so Michael we've got you and you're ordained you've served you've you've written your planet Narnia and published and which is the theory that no one else was seeing coming and there it is and that's why I felt when I read it but yet it's like waits it makes sense yeah let's take a break because we come back how did the Catholic issue of your life then arise in the midst of that wasn't maybe in the writing implanter will find out that to break them alright see but [Music] [Music] welcome back to the journey home I'm Marcus Grodi your host our guest is dr. Michael Ward former anglican priest author of planet Narnia and there is a website wwm ichael Ward net if you want to find out more about his speaking and writing and it's a good place to go all right Michael I've interrupted you you're an Anglican priest and you've published planet and our neon hopefully was I was wondering how I was first received when they'd hit the stand pretty well I'm pleased to say yeah had you started your Catholic journey by the time that was written and published not knowingly no okay as I say I'd had that sort of deep deep laid problem at authority you know put into me in 1990 two or three while I was training for the Anglican ministry there were one or two other little sort of pinpricks in my Anglican AMA when I had to do for instance an essay on sexual ethics when I was training for the ministry and for the first time in my life I read Catholic teaching on sexual ethics I read some encyclicals I read a Humana vitae and things like that and they made sense to me I was impressed these people had thought these issues through I felt and it hung together much better than anything I was being offered I'm afraid to say in the Church of England difficult teachings to be sure but they were coherent so that was another little sort of undermining of some of my Anglican confidence but I was not even thinking about doing anything other than being an Anglican clergyman for the rest of my life but I rather good thing happened actually when I just before planet nirn II was published I my three-year chaplaincy in Cambridge was just coming to an end and I needed to apply to stay on and I applied but I didn't get the job which was a real blow to my my self-esteem but a very good blow I think I now in retrospect think if I had got that job which would have been a very luxurious job I probably would still be there to this day I'd be more enduring away my life in this we're with these sort of golden handcuffs on so I'm very grateful I didn't get that job and instead I spent the whole of 2008 on the road actually promoting Planet Narnia both in this country and in the UK but after that year I came back to England and I needed a job and I thought I better move back to Oxford because with my CS Lewis interests Oxford is the obvious place to live so I I buy a house in Oxford and rather wonderfully her job comes is offered to me over another chaplaincy position actually in Oxford st. Peter's College Oxford are looking for a chaplain so I moved from Peterhouse Cambridge to st. Peter's Oxford there's this pet trying thing beginning to develop you know I don't understand the significance of it at the time and I have three years as well I start as chaplain of some Peter's College Oxford doing very similar work to what I was doing in Cambridge my continuing my academic pursuits lots of teaching and writing and speaking on Lois but then an interesting thing begins to develop I realize that during the university vacations when I'm not running my own services in the college Chapel but I'm not terribly keen on going to church there is a local parish church to my house which is beautiful and ancient and I go there occasionally and I don't reconnect with my old evangelical parish which is on the other side of town and strangely I feel a distinct lack of interest about getting involved in a local church and I suddenly realized one day that I I now belong to the Church of Michael Ward I will go to services when I'm running them and if I'm not in charge I'm not so interested and I've got sufficient self-awareness to realize that this is not a healthy state of affairs and around about that time I develop a good friendship with a recent convert of the Catholic Church an American he had been an evangelical he'd been at Wheaton College and he's the president of the Oxford CS Lewis Society so I see him quite a bit his name is David and David with all the zeal of a convert about him begins sort of pummeling away at some of my Anglican presuppositions and asking me some difficult questions which is very good for me and I his faith and I know he's a godly man and there's Walter Hooper to there in the background he gives me a rosary and he's I know he's praying for me and and so some of my Anglican presuppositions are beginning to be cut away the key moment comes when we dated David in conversation with me one day is talking about the Pope papal authority and remember authority have been quite a question roomier Lee Iran with regard to the Church of England and I think well the Pope is a good man but you know what's to say that he can't sometimes go wrong there have been bad Pope's very bad Pope's and I say to my friend you know if I were to accept in advance all the things that will a Pope might teach this is one of the objections that Louis used to make about the church the Catholic Church you're not having to so much sign up to what a person has said you having having to sign up to whatever he might say in the future and I say to my friend David how does that differ from you know any kind of cult that I might be enticed to join I just have to check my brain at the door don't I and have to submit regardless and my friend very wisely I think rather than just trying to scuttle away from the the term cult takes it head-on and says yes the Pope is the cult leader but this is the cult that Jesus himself has established because a cult is not a dirty word it's not in itself a bad thing cult just means a form of worship and the Christian cult has been established by Christ with a particular Constitution to it he has designated st. Peter and st. Peter's successors as his vicars as his right-hand men as those who carry the keys they are the rock on which Christ builds his church so if it's good enough for Christ it ought to be good enough for me and I've always said you know being a fairly devout Christian all my life that I would I would do whatever Christ told me but if Christ is teaching me through this duly appointed prime minister as it were christ the king the Pope the prime minister then in submitting to the Pope I'm only submitting to Christ so where's the problem now that was a breakthrough for me I'd never seen it like that in those times before and that if I if I were to single it down to one particular critical moment it was that conversation and I remember exactly where we had it we were sitting in a restaurant by the River Thames we were just about to see a play at the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and that was a really critical moment and I think it was around about that time while soon after that I was walking around Oxford one day and a voice spoke to me as it were from the depths of the earth you are going to become a Catholic and it was announced to as a done deal this was an established fact it was going to happen the only question was when and where and how but the weather had been set it had been settled and that was actually a very reassuring moment for me I'm not I'm not given to hearing voices and when I say that the voice spoke from below my feet I don't think that spoke from hell what I mean is it spoke from the rock yeah but I was standing on this is the secure ground and that is where Christ is calling you you know that question that you were posing about the Pope you know but commit to the idea of papal Authority I'm committing to everything he says in the future you know that that can that could paralyze you to not move forward yeah but that could be said for every Christian group that there is exactly yes even some tiny little conventicle with you know only 30 members you're still gonna trust the pastor until the pastor says something you disagree with and then you what do you do you either submit and you assume that he knows what he's talking about better than you do or you assert your authority overhears and you go off and start a new church or find a new congregation so even if it's just wherever two or more gathered in my name if that's week when the end you become your own poll no you're the one that decides waiting on the edge of your seat for that person to make the wrong decision so you can decide yeah I'm making them move on and there you are yeah yeah and I had never thought of ecclesial authority in those terms before I've never understood that my submission to the Church of England was was already in a sense provisional because I didn't really equate the Church of England with the Church of Christ but of course if Christ has established a church it ought to be visible it ought to be knowable it ought to be recognizable and definable or else what what does the Incarnation mean because the Incarnation is all about you know if they love this the sacramental izing of time and space but if you can't see a church in time and space that you want to belong to then the incarnation didn't really work now you you mentioned Lewis and Tolkien in Chesterton and and others but you've not really mentioned Newman at all was he on the screen at all in your journey no interestingly although I spent so many years in Oxford and although I was you know a literary type person with a strong love of the 19th century know Newman had not particularly crossed my path and I asked it because in America we presume every Englishman know Mannie which is interesting because I know the last time I was over there looking in that big bookstore whatever it is there you know in Oxford that there were a lot of books that you know negative on Newman and then kind of a modern way of looking at it and I wonder if he's kind of pushed off the scene so really didn't I mean I did read his apologia around about the time I was having these key conversations with my friend but I didn't find the apologia particularly helpful to be honest it's a it's a very wordy book but you know I have this voice saying you're gonna become a Catholic and then I think oh dear well I better than I'll have to do something about that won't I interestingly when I began my job at some Peters I I am was sort of saying to myself three years would be about the right time to spend in this job I don't quite know why I said that to myself but I did and as the third year was coming towards its close the college offered to make the position permanent and I could have stayed there in a quite an attractive position in the centre of Oxford again for the rest of my life so it's very similar actually to the sort of situation I'd been offered at Peter house in Cambridge here it was again sort of being dangled in front of me a nice cushy permanent position at the heart of Oxford for the rest of your career and that day the very day that I receive that letter from the college authorities offering to make the job permanent I remember I was driving home and I stopped at some traffic lights and there was a bus in front of me at these lights and on the back of the bus there was an advert for Turkish Delight fries Turkish Delight which is a popular English chocolate bar now you know where I'm going with this Luis Scola Turkish Delight could only mean one thing to me temptation because of course it's we the Turkish Delight that the witch and snare as Edmund in The Lion the Witch and the watering so I think as I look at this advert this letter I've just received from the college which I've got in my pocket is a temptation and I need to resist it but it was a really hard temptation to resist and when I finally wrote my own letter to the college announcing my resignation handing in my notice that was probably the hardest decision I've ever taken because I that was irrevocable that was a moment of no return I was you know burning my bridges at that point but eventually I thought I've got to do this because I've heard the voice I've had all these problems intellectual problems solved as it were by my friends well you've resigned from this position and now you're that we do use the word free yes to move forward to the church yeah really what was happening at that point for you yes I'm to be honest I'm in a whirl I'm everything I do and say in experience seems to be sort of loaded with significance it was a very meaningful period of my life you know there was this is a funny story so I'm at some Peter's College Oxford I'm we're celebrating some Peters day I invited a guest preacher to come and preach about some Peter he than the passage I set for the for the service is Matthew 16 and we get an old guy a former fellow of the college to read the the lesson from some Matthew and he's only got one eye this old man and as he comes to that key moment in in Matthew 16 who the people say that who do men say that I am and Peter says you are the Christ the Son of the Living God the old man he's reading the lesson he skips over that key verse we do not hear Peters confession he just jumps to the next verse I looked up all startled but the one Catholic that I knew was in the congregation he didn't actually catch my eye but I was really amazed the confession of son Peter was not read on some Peters day in some Peter's college and then the preacher gets up in the pulpit and he's he's preaching away and we hear some sound coming down the street from outside the college Chapel is right next to the road and we hear this sound of an advancing group of people singing a hymn and it gets louder and louder and louder so now that the preacher says I think I'll just stop for a moment while we let them pass and I later discover that this is the procession for the feast of Corpus Christi it's the local Catholics who are parading through the town singing a acoustic him and it's drowning out the preacher in some Peter's College celebrating some Peter's day so these are some of the the signals that God had to give me as it were so make me think the place where you are is not the place where you should stay so when you came into the church then was it soon after the Hat or was there any other major birds to go before you could make the final job well that was another interesting moment when I took I went with the college Chapel Choir to Liverpool where they were singing in the Anglican Cathedral for a week and I went up to spend a few days with the choir there are two cathedrals in Liverpool one Anglican one Catholic they are either end of a street called Hope Hope Street the Anglican spire is slightly higher than that of the Catholic cathedral but the Catholic cathedral is built on higher ground and make of that what you will but I've never been to Liverpool before and I'm interested in seeing both cathedrals particularly the Catholic cathedral given where I see my future I check into my hotel I go up to my room and I'm a bit worried about my car which I've parked in the hotel car park because I'm not sure I've parked in the proper space I might be blocking someone in I might be in an illegal space so I look out the window to my car just to check on it all the while thinking oh I must go must go down and see the Catholic cathedral and then I think I better check on it again and then I check on that third time and the third time I check on the car I'm not making this up I suddenly look up from my car and they're filling sort of three-quarters of the sky is the Catholic cathedral I've been so concerned about checking on my vehicle that I completely missed the side of this building I'd come to see it was hilarious so that was another little moment where I thought but it's still more a symbol of how I was overlooking the thing which was confronting me right all this time anyway by this stage I have handed in my notice and I'm working out three months notice over the summer and during those three months I begin I begin going for catechesis with a local Catholic priest called father John say word whom you've had on this wave of John yes yeah the idea is that I'll work out my three months notice and at the end of September I will be received on the Feast of Michael and All Angels given that I'm called Michael that seemed to be appropriate and that is indeed what happened and father John say what receive me at the Church of st. Gregory and st. Augustine a well named church from reading on September 29th 2012 almost exactly five years ago so you become a Catholic which also automatically means your angle cut orders that's right I'm a layman but that's okay I think to myself I really need to learn how to be a Catholic layman before I ever begin to think about possibly being ordained as a Catholic and again that's what happens I I say to myself give let me give myself three years just being a Pew filler in the in in these churches in Oxford where I began to go and let's not even consider the possibility of ordination for at least three years I just need to learn how to be a Catholic now and that was a good decision I think because it's well it's what our Lord as a pair of all he talks about the wedding feast and he says when you come to wedding fees don't take the front-row seat yeah take the back yeah and there's a great wisdom in that for convert clergy I think that yeah you know being a layman is is so important and then see whether you're called forward yeah absolutely yeah yeah just a little bit like some pool who after the Damascus Road experience goes off to Arabia for isn't it three years in his case do you know you need to work out you need to process what has happened to you because it was relatively sudden for me I you know even a year or 18 months out I wouldn't have predicted that it was going to happen and and the ones like regret I have about is that I didn't really give enough signaling to my nearest and dearest that this was coming I slightly sprang it upon them which I am now regret that I should have broken them into it a little more gently but because it was relatively sudden I mean in one sense it took 20 years this decision to make but the final endgame was quite quick and because I had not been you know steeped in Catholic or Anglo calloc culture there were quite a lot of you know just aesthetic changes to become used to anyway after three years I went to Rome for the first time in my life and to Assisi and I came back from that visit for the first time thinking if ever I'm gonna be ready to offer myself I'm now ready as far as I can tell I will put myself before my parish priest and see what he says and and father John savoured was supportive and very encouraging and he directed me actually to the Ordinariate the thing for former Anglican priests and the Ordinariate seemed to be the way to go so I began training with the Ordinariate and I was made a deacon just three months ago now I was under the impression that the Ordinariate as opposed to the pastor provision that the ordinary it was for Anglican priest bringing with them a group of folk well that's often the case yes yes but not always okay yeah so that's it's more open yeah yeah individuals can come into the ordinary - okay yeah and whereas the pastor provision you're becoming a diocesan priests not part of the you know the Ordinariate yes yes alright was a part of your hesitancy dealing with what what your Anglican orders meant before because you had to let those behind was it an issue of those three years dealing with that at all not particularly no I wasn't especially wedded to the idea of myself as an ordained Anglican in fact I remember having a dream when I left Cambridge and when I was on this year's tour promoting Planet Narnia I had a dream of my my clerical collar moving away from my neck and floating off into the air say you've read Louis a lot we have about a minute two minutes left because I want to make sure that one thing I thought about before of those what advice you give for people reading the seven tails hmm given your theory of plant narnia which the audience should read yes and a parent wants to read the Narnia's how can they really really differently given your theory well in one sense the important thing is just to enjoy the stories and you can enjoy them at two levels principally you know as a young child just enjoy the fairy tale The Adventures if you're looking for the Christian parallels the biblical imagery then that gives you an additional level of meaning the the level of meaning that I've uncovered in my book is it's really not something you need to focus on or look at the whole point of it is that it escapes your conscious awareness this is just the imaginative blueprint that Louis was working to as he shaped those worlds and those stories but the idea is to get beneath your radar so that you're just held as it were in this imagery you don't need to know about it at all if you do know about it all sorts of things about the books become suddenly much better explained much more interesting and the books begin to be much more coherent as an imaginative creation but you don't need to know about it at all so I'd only encourage people to read Planet Narnia if they if they just have been perplexed by the Chronicles if there have been little oddities which they've said to themselves why is that like that when you come at them from the planetary perspective all sorts of things begin to make sense and that's Lewis's way of suggesting that the world itself or the real world is full of God's purposes even though they're not always obvious to us God is to the real world as CS Lewis is to Narnia and he's working his purposes out Michael Ward thank you very much for joining us on the journey home and again for the audience it's Michael Ward dotnet if you want to find out more about his speaking in his writing thank you and once again audience I do pray that Michaels journey is an encouragement to you god bless you I'll see you next week [Music]

Channel: EWTN

Views: 8,652

Rating: 4.647059 out of 5

Keywords: JHT, JHT01590

Id: VTbYWExIktI

Length: 56min 10sec (3370 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2017