Fathomless Riches

Christian friends sometimes say, ‘Malcolm you really ought to read…’ They quote a book or author that’s helped or encouraged them. That’s good.

When I retired 13 years ago I’d ‘been a Christian’ all of my adult life. I was secure and confident in what I believed – I’d preached and taught it. But I needed to re-discover my Christian faith. I decided to read more widely, to explore those whose beliefs, experience and practice was different from mine…

A couple of years ago I read the autobiography of Richard Coles, ‘Fathomless Riches’. Richard became famous in the 1980s with ‘The Communards’; he describes his rock-and-roll life of sex and drugs with honesty and humour. He’s openly gay and he describes how a number of his friends suffered with and died from HIV…

It was from this background that he changed; he’s now a vicar, well-known on radio and TV.

He came to faith at St Alban’s, Holborn, a church with incense, vestments, candles and bells, at a Sunday morning Mass. He describes what my Christian tradition and experience would call ‘conversion’.

‘…it was as if iron bands, constricting my chest, broke and fell away and I could breathe; and a shutter was flung open, and light flooded in and I could see. And I wept and wept…’

He likens his experience to ‘…Charles Wesley’s thumpingly protestant hymn ‘And Can It Be’: ‘I woke, the dungeon flamed with light; My chains fell off, my heart was free…’’

‘…I realised that the imagery of the dungeon flaming with light and the breaking chains have a longer heritage than what happened to me that Sunday morning in Holborn in 1990. Indeed I was to discover that it goes back further , to the New Testament itself, and another witless man in a mess…’

…I’m musing on the testimony of a man who experienced a classic protestant conversion at an Anglo-Catholic Solemn High Mass…