Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 4 is here.
Part 5 is here.

I spent quite a long while in a state of serious conflict. I’d become nearly convinced that the Roman Catholic Church was what she said she was; and if those claims were true it was hard to see any alternative to joining the Church. At the same time I did not want to leave St. Luke’s; and Jane, though worried about the future viability of Anglicanism in the United States, didn’t want to either. We talked about it (we’d been talking about for quite some time), and we made the following decisions:

• We wouldn’t leave St. Luke’s unless we saw clearly where we were to go. Any move must be essentially positive, moving to something better, rather than negative.
• Whatever we did we would do united as a couple, and as a family. God called us to a life together, and He had blessed our time at St. Luke’s; we figured he’d want us stay united.

And so we prayed a lot, and I spent a lot of time studying up on the Roman Catholic Church and talking about it with Jane, and I talked it over with a number of friends. Eventually we had a long talk with Fr. Ed Dover, the priest at the local Catholic church (the church, in fact, where I was confirmed). Jane and I were interested in asking the question, more or less, “If we did decide to become Catholic, what would happen?” This was with special reference to community–what opportunities would be available for us to get to know people. At this point Fr. Ed made something perfectly clear: he wasn’t going to talk about “programs” with us. The Faith had to come before utilitarian issues. He was happy to “give us refuge” for as long as we needed it, and to discuss the Faith with us, but unless we came to believe that Catholicism was true the programs at St. James were irrelevant.

So we came away very thoughtful, without most of the answers we were looking for, but with some new questions and realizations. First, I wasn’t ready to make such a move, and Jane certainly wasn’t. Second, Fr. Ed had asked whether we’d discussed this with our pastor at St. Luke’s….which, well, we hadn’t. And in all fairness, I realized that I hadn’t given Anglicanism a chance. I’d spent the better part of a year looking into things Catholic, but I’d never at any time spent any effort on learning about the foundations of Anglicanism. When I first became an Episcopalian I’d been told that Anglican theology was compatible with the Roman theology I was familiar with, and until recently I’d never questioned that or felt the need to look further.

So I went and had a long talk with Fr. Ron Jackson, our pastor at St. Luke’s; and he pointed me at a number of books he thought would be helpful during my investigations about what Anglicanism is all about. The one to start with, he said, was Anglicanism, by Stephen Neill; it was a complete history of the Anglican Communion. And so I spent two months studying Anglicanism, reading that and other books. My goals in this search were as follows:

• To discover the essential core of Anglicanism, that which makes Anglicanism Anglican and gives it its identity within Christendom.
• Having found it, to decide whether it was enough, whether it was, for me, a viable alternative to the claims of Rome.

Now we get to the ticklish bit. The trend of this series of posts has no doubt been clear for a while, so I can hardly be expected to be praising Anglicanism to the skies; at the same time, I do not wish to appear to be bashing Anglicanism. Let me be very clear about this. I spent twenty years as an Anglican before heading back to Rome, half of the canonical period to be spent wandering–but if I was wandering, it wasn’t in a desert. Rather, during those twenty years the Lord led me through green pastures, and by running waters, and blessed me more than I can say. And the tool He used to do it was Anglicanism in general and St. Luke’s in particular. I love the people of St. Luke’s, and I have no quarrel with any of them.

Anyway, here’s what I found. I found a church that in every time period had a strong body of devoted Christians, but no fixed or systematic theology. In one era the most serious tended toward the more Protestant end of the spectrum; in another toward the more Catholic. What there was, was the Book of Common Prayer–by itself almost the entire basis for Anglican unity. Everyone agreed on the Book of Common Prayer…but they didn’t necessarily agree on what it meant. They prayed the same words, but they didn’t necessarily mean the same thing by them. (As an extreme case of these, one book I read, a survey of Anglican theology in the early 20th century, revealed half a dozen distinct meanings for the term “Real Presence”, shading from an almost-but-not-quite-Roman sense to a purely symbolic sense.)

I did not see any general building up of a body of knowledge like the one I found among the Romans. I saw plenty of evidence of Jesus working in the Anglican Church, as various bodies of Anglicans clung to him for dear life–as well they should!–but though I saw evidence of the Lord working through Anglicans, I didn’t see any evidence of Jesus working within Anglicanism as a whole in the sense that I saw Him working within and in preservation of Catholicism. There were great men of God among the Anglicans, and writings of great truth, but nothing that could be described as definitively normative for all Anglicans at all times. At last I was forced to conclude that that wholeness and unity I was looking for simply wasn’t there.

I am quite likely going to be thought unfair by my Anglican brethren, for which I beg forgiveness. They are quite likely right. I like to find evidence that bolsters my preconceptions as much as anyone, and my own desires were seriously in conflict during this period of time. I had found the Church of the See of Rome to be a lovely and glorious thing, and I wanted to be united with it; I’m afraid that deep down, though I didn’t want to leave St. Luke’s, I wanted to find reason to. If I had found reason to stay, I’m not sure what I would have done.

My constant prayer at this point was, “Lord Jesus, if you want us to leave St. Luke’s, to leave the Anglican Communion for Rome, please make it clear. Please make it clear that we should go, and please make it clear where I should take my family on Sundays.”

What I was hoping for was some overt sign…that, maybe, Jane and I would make a new friend, who would invite us to their parish. Really, what I wanted was an engraved invitation from God himself, telling me that the pleasure of our company was requested at such and such a locale. Didn’t happen. What I got was a series of sermons at St. Luke’s, going back, I eventually realized, for at least a year, in which the basic message was this: “You need to step out in faith when God calls. It may be a step out into the darkness. You might not see any floor there to walk on. But you need to step out. If you step out in faith, God will be faithful.” Mind you, Fr. Ron wasn’t intending to encourage us to step right out of the congregation.

Then Fr. Ron left St. Luke’s himself to take on a teaching position at a seminary in England…and the interim pastor hit the same point, only he went a little farther. He said (I paraphrase from memory, and it’s been some weeks) that we often look for signs before stepping out in faith, but that as mature Christians we should be past that. Once we’ve figured out what we need to do, we should just do it.

God had already given me my marching orders. Not through signs or wonders; he’d used the intellect he’d given me, the studying I had done, the conclusions I had come to. I knew the right answer. I loved it; I was afraid of it. My desire to stay at St. Luke’s began to look more like huddling in safety than holding fast to that which is good (though it was very good). God was asking me to step out in faith, trusting in His faithfulness.

Part 7 is here.