Conversation

MP We have both been very much influenced by Dan's Hardy's work – as graduate students of his, and also through his writings. And we both testify to the many ways in which his work continues to shape our thinking, and that of the wider church and the academy. Stephen, which of his works particularly stand out for you?

SPGod's Ways with the World (1996) was a significant collection of Dan's essays, and I think after that Finding the Church (2001) was another series of essays with an Anglican focus – another of Dan's abiding preoccupations. Dan was an American Episcopalian priest resident in England for over four decades of his life. He was my supervisor for six years when I was in Durham through the 1980s. He was a very significant person for me. He helped to shape my theological outlook and also gave me a lot of the theological apparatus that I needed. He was quite a remarkable person, gentle and kind, a powerful and generous intellect and so self-effacing.

Working with Dan as supervisor was a spiritually nourishing experience as well as intensely stimulating intellectually. There was a sense of freedom because he seemed to be able to give the gift of helping people believe in themselves and that was certainly a gift he gave to me. I remember one story. At the end of a session I was totally puzzled, and I said ‘Dan, where do you get that?’, meaning some sort of understanding, and he said to me, in his resonant New Jersey accent, ‘Stephen you get it from thought’. That was the end of the supervision. I walked out the door, and I have never forgotten it. Because by the time I got home (a 25 minute walk), I realized that if that was his response he obviously believed that I could think it. And if he believed that the person could find it, then that was an affirmation of belief in the other. He believed that we can find the thing that we're looking for. The effect was to increase energy and wisdom, but free the spirit. What about you, Martyn?

MP I think my experience of Dan was similar but different, partly because I was younger and less understanding when I first encountered him. He was also my doctoral supervisor when I was at Durham for a couple of years, and I think the memories I take of those supervisions were of somebody who had an incredibly capacious mind. Supervisions, on one level, meandered all over the place. They could start anywhere, go anywhere, begin and end anywhere. And he seemed incredibly comfortable in a range of disciplines, and it didn't seem to occur to him that theology could have nothing to say to those disciplines. That was the very striking thing about him. I was also very struck by his very sort of gentle husbandry. Of a mind and the trajectory of a project which he was prepared to let move and move into all sorts of spheres, but was able to bring you back at several junctures during the supervision to the matter in hand which was: ‘so what does God think about this?’ or ‘what do you think is going on, theologically?’. So you could just in a sense get away with endlessly expansive conversation.

SP I'd agree with that.

MP What I tend to remember more than anything else is his phrases and turns. He was a great inventor of words. He would add ‘-ality’ -sociality, conditionality, and so forth – to almost any word, and you could sense what Dan meant by this, and where that was moving and why he would do that. I remember once, when in a graduate seminar, a question came up: ‘what might we think would be worth dying for, in a sentence, as far as the Christian life was concerned?’ Being ordinands based at Cranmer Hall, we had plenty of worthy things to say. But Dan's was ‘the infinite expansiveness of God which is his wisdom’, which I did like. This thought just took the rest of the term to work through – the infinite expansiveness of God which is his wisdom. This gives us, in a sentence, an extraordinary sense of both theological cosmology and cosmic Christology.

Dan was brought up in a Quaker boarding school, so raised in a sort of soft, generous orthodox slightly liberal environment, shaped a little bit by Presbyterianism through Princeton. But fundamentally, in Wording a Radiance he reveals these extraordinary Quaker roots which percolate up deeply from his childhood. I think the great book he wrote, with David Ford, is Jubilate: Theology and Praise (1984), and I can still today divide the theological world with folk who ask what on earth it is all about, and others that say that is a stunning piece of work. I'm firmly in the ‘stunning piece of work’ camp. I think phrases from the book about speaking in tongues as constituting a ‘cathedral of sound’ is just an incredibly resonant idea. The whole notion of jazz being a medium through which we worship and move our being, spiritually, is very powerful. The idea that musical tradition of Western Europe is a combination of improvisation and composition, which he then just maps that on to theology, is hugely impressive and inspiring. So you end up with somebody, who in the way that they speak, and in the way that they reason, dances.

So I think for me, Dan means a great deal, because in a sense it was about freedom and permission to think theologically, and also to reify things theologically – even in institutions, which he was also very passionate about as well. To live the theological life had consequences. It wasn't just about personal embodiment. It's the way institutions in the end become shaped by one's theological priorities. The only way to attend to the possibilities and pitfalls of that was to attend to your theology; and be reasonably self-disciplined and self-critical about this. Until I met Dan, I hadn't ever operated in a world where that kind of level of ‘thinking through’ had ever really happened.

SP Dan thought very deeply about these things, and deeply about institutions. In the touching first chapter of Wording a Radiance, his daughter Deborah records conversations with her dying father, and she reflects that when she was growing up her father would come alive when he could talk about God. He wanted to talk about God a lot, and in a very unaffected way. I remember a conversation I had with him seven years ago, reflecting on my experience in theological education and the institution I was in in Australia. As I was talking about what was happening, we found ourselves having a conversation about joy in institutional life; not something you would expect, but it was quite illuminating and convicting about how important it is to think into institutional organizational life in such a way that you can see the joy of God as a possibility in those places. And that is the vision that ought to drive theological education. In these personal conversations you would find yourself moving as smoothly and seamlessly into things of significant momentum, not just of a personal nature, but in what it meant to be a human being in the world and in institutions and theological education. It stays with you.

MP I would echo that as well. That the striking thing about Jubilate was that distinction between order, disorder and non-order, and Dan's sense of joy in the non-order and finding joy in the non-order. In the end that is where some of us have to live. In institutions there is an element of disorder, and you can have some order; but a lot of living in institutions is living in non-order, frustrating as that can be. But Dan had that sense of wanting to find the joy in that, and he talks about it in virtually Pentecostal terms in Jubilate.

SP I can't imagine him with his hands raised, but his theology was certainly buoyed by the Spirit of Pentecost.

MP Theology was the overflow, and that's a word which is constantly occurring in Jubilate: overflow of abundance of generosity and grace. And that's why that question that he sometimes puts, as I do now, is – ‘what is the fundamental problem facing the Church?’ And people scrabble around all sorts of ideas, but Dan's answer to that ‘is coping with the overwhelming abundance of God’. That's the problem. It's always the problem. And the same theme reappears in his reflections in Wording a Radiance. But here the overflow is in terms of ‘light’.

SP Well, what about this book Martyn?

MP I'd like to start with the cover, really, because this has got some very familiar things going on in it, which, unless you are a very skilled Hardy reader, they will be lost on you. Wording a Radiance is just one piece of a line taken from a poem by the Irish poet Michael O'Siadhail (probably Dan's most quoted poet). The poem seems to get to the heart of what Dan is trying to do in his theology, which is give a text, a sense, a word to something which remains forever elusive and alluring – like trying to word a radiance. How do you do that? And under the book title we've got this modern painting of the Road to Emmaus. Given that there are three figures on the road, it is most probably the journey to or from Emmaus. What it offers is a really insightful view of what the book is about – disclosure, things being hidden, things being revealed; epiphanies. Yet the epiphanies, when they come – even if it is Jesus breaking the bread (‘then their hearts were opened’) and then as it were, he went from their sight – still leave us with that extraordinary puzzle.

This book is about Dan's end of life thinking, some of which has been conditioned by his inter-religious work and dialogue. I think his Quaker roots are where he got permission to find wisdom in Islam and Judaism, but without necessarily feeling that anything has been compromised christologically or theologically in an orthodox way. So wisdom, in a sense, emerges as one of the major themes of the book, and where it is to be found and what it does to the individual, to society in particular. It is about sociality, as Dan would say, and what God does in the Church.

SP Dan died in November 2007, but after Easter that year he was part of a parish pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and that was quite a moving experience for him. It was when he returned from the holiday that he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. In the event, and following an operation, he lived for six months, during which time he dictated portions of this book to one of his very close friends, Peter Ochs, who is a Jewish philosopher, and who subsequently preached at Dan's funeral. It was Peter and David Ford who began 15 years ago or so the Scriptural Reasoning project in this country that is now part of the American Academy of Religion. The bulk of this book is conversations with Peter about the Church and God. But it's topped and tailed with the voice of his daughter, Deborah, and son-in-law, David. Deborah's voice takes you on a deeply spiritual journey, as you listen to her engaging in issues about life with her father. That really brought me to tears. It is so moving – and I have heard you say the same Martyn. And then not surprisingly, the last chapter is by David Ford commentating on Dan's ecclesiology. It's quite a feast – so full of teasing, mysterious and open spaces which lure you forwards, draw you into conversation. It's unusual to have a book like this, because it is a distilled version of an ecclesiology he had been working on for at least two decades. The central motif is one of travel. He speaks about a travelling Eucharistic ecclesiology. There is a simplicity here that is compelling and elusive. The Emmaus road points to a church on the move; on a pilgrimage.

MP Dan did not believe there was any material that somehow didn't and couldn't shape ecclesiology. There's a story here, at the beginning of the book from Deborah, about when she damaged the sacred Mercedes which had been in the family many years. Deborah was in fear and dread about what her father would say after having been specifically told to drive it very carefully –and all parents have had this moment. Dan's response was generous, yet not lacking in discipline; but fundamentally shaped by an economy of generosity. For some reason, I don't quite know why, it instantly reminded me of a debate we had in Cranmer Hall as students which was doing the rounds over the endless conversations going on in General Synod about the ordination of women. For some reason or other we'd all got absorbed about keeping the order of the Church, and Dan just gave a seminar one day remembering the created order. So he just took us back to something more fundamental, which was also an economy of generosity which made you think we need to cast all these debates in a larger light. When you can't see the larger vision and light, you actually reach a different, more impoverished decision. So then you've got to work out what you do about that. He would say that, in a way, finding that vision and light was key. And that insight would be offered in a manner that was capacious, and flecked with warmth and generosity, so people were not marginalized by the wisdom and insight.

SP The last comments in the book concern the context for theology. Living with the shadow of death, not at some anticipated distant future, but very close and present, makes a difference. Dan's expansiveness and conceptually rich theology is woven into highly personal autobiography, which was so unlike him. It was noted by both Deborah and David in this book that on this occasion he seemed to have an agenda, intent on a purpose; and you never had a sense that Dan had an agenda. But in Wording a Radiance, a deeply spiritual, personal thread was woven all the way through. And it centres on being attracted to God, and the work of God, to draw us towards the light. As he says, ‘everything is toward God, attracted to God … The activity of being attracted is something within the creature, not outside it.’ (p. 48). He felt it keenly on the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where he felt ‘embraced by the light’ and had a sense ‘of the huge power of God's light and energy and how the divine is at work’ (p. 28).

This had been fundamental for Dan for many years. He could also speak of experiencing ‘light suffused around other people, especially in a pastoral context’ (p. 101). Light and attraction to the light weave their way through this book and to my mind they are both deeply personal and profoundly theological and mystical. The notion of attraction comes from Coleridge. Later in the book he deploys Coleridge's notion of abduction to speak about the process of being drawn into God and others. It seems to be at the heart of his ecclesiology.

MP Coleridge, of course, had not just a flirtation with Unitarianism. He was Unitarian for a while, and it took him back to a Unitarian Chapel as a minister before re-embracing Trinitarianism, and effectively broad orthodox Anglicanism. But for Coleridge, of course, his poetic sense, and his theological sense, was starting to move towards the more Blakeian world than the Miltonian world. But actually, it hasn't got very much darkness in it. What it has is a lot of light and illumination; a huge amount of generative excitement, which is a rather underwhelming word for what's at stake. Again, I think Dan's own Quakerism meant that the only darkness you think you really see is the darkness of brokenness and ignorance. It's not the darkness and brokenness of intentional sin.

This takes us into another complex area. I do remember Dan on a Society for the Study of Theology Conference, about 20 years ago – and the theme was evil. There were two papers on the Holocaust. At one point Dan said he thought we needed to say that God was present in the suffering, but we have to face up to the fact that there was joy there too. You could hear a pin drop. There was a lot of exasperation about that; but Dan wanted to say in the acts of solidarity and sociality in the death camps, God was there – and there would have been light and joy. So this business about sociopoiesis, which is very close to this attraction, is the other side of the coin – which I think is sort of semi-autobiographical. In the book (p. 53), Dan grounds sociopoiesis in a Eucharistic pneumatology of the Church. Central to his claim is that sociopoiesis is imminent in each creature. In Dan's thinking, sociopoiesis is all about the ways in which we are raised before God, and society is raised to its true status and calling, as it slowly turns to face God's face. Our true selves become more real, redeemed and apparent the more we face God, and God faces us.

Another central claim of the book is the creatures’ primal attraction to its creator. So when that attraction is ‘veiled’, via a creature's self-attraction, the creature is in need of redemption. To be redeemed is to recover one's attraction to God, which includes attraction to the other and to all others. Dan employs the term ‘abduction’ for this. So is there a dark side to this? Well it's only the darkness of ignorance I think. I don't think that Dan had a strong doctrine of sin, in some respects.

SP It's a slight puzzle for me too. In one place in the book, he refers to his experience of light – and it's accompanied by how dark we are outside the light. While in Israel there was the amazing experience of light, but he goes on to say that he was at the same time more powerfully aware of wrongness than ever before. It's quite interesting. He doesn't know he's dying at this time, though he had some severe headaches. He said ‘the more powerfully I experienced the light, the more powerfully I was moved by a disappointment, of failure, a sense of the weightiness of the whole world which having failed, was being carried down into greater darkness’ (p. 101). There's something going on here, but he doesn't begin in that dark place. He begins in the light, and in the light, one becomes aware of the darkness. And I suspect he would say that that is the way things are; the abundance about the way things actually work in the world, in human relationships; the light is primary. And for Dan, the light increases in intensity and overflows through conversations.

MP I think there was a real purity about him – and a trust in the created order, and the life God gave. It reminds me of one conversation I had with him some years back. He disclosed that he couldn't see any problem with natural theology, other than that he didn't think it went far enough. For Dan, the idea of redeeming natural theology was pregnant with possibilities. What really enchanted him was that there must be a theology of all things. And that must somehow be about wisdom. For Dan, there is no real distinction, in the end, between spirituality and theology. But there is one problem with it which I think most practical theologians would pick up. Which is, where do you locate the darkness, and the intentional abuses of power?

SP The themes of sin, darkness and evil are somewhat muted in his theology. In reading the account of his early life, as narrated in the book, there does emerge a certain absence and aloneness and the loneliness of that. As you say, Martyn, Dan was focused on the upward call of Christ and being drawn into God and towards the light. His theology did not remain long in the shadowy dimensions of life. It was attraction to God that was the key. The word ‘attraction’ may seem an odd word. You can understand it mechanically: it's what scientists use to talk about particles, and you can receive it as a word in full effect and in human relationships. But Dan uses it primarily in relation to God. This is really important for Dan's theological method. Not only was he good at inventing words, he was, I think, much more adept at retrieving language and redirecting it. He would redeploy familiar language as it was used in life and the various disciplines of knowledge, always believing that such language could have theological significance. So the language of ‘attraction’ is bent and re-directed. One of the best examples in this book is the word ‘granulation’. He says for example:

MP Yes, he switches from the medical sense of a word to its significance for the renewal of the persons and church. Thus, when he comments on the healing of the woman in Luke's gospel (Chapter 8), he says that this

SP Exactly; he's talking about the process of granulation. And immediately he then applies it to his own experience of inner healing: ‘When I awoke that night, I knew of that kind of healing: a powerful presence that goes down to the depths, surfaces slowly and attracts a kind of healing’ (p. 81). This way of granulation is how the Spirit might help us to understand how communities that have been violent begin to move in the direction of peace and healing.

MP This conversation highlights a real strength in Dan's theology, but also a potential area of weakness, perhaps. The business about granulation points to this – not so much an appeal to a supernatural theology, but a proper natural work of God from within the system. Thus the body has enough strength within itself to repair itself: let it be, and you will see the miracle take place. Yet wounds are messy, and need cleaning and dressing to facilitate the work of healing. And that requires somebody to do it. In actual fact, the body won't do its job unless somebody's prepared to offer the additional skill and care. And that is where I sense an absence in his theology. I think this theory of granulation and healing has to land practically – politically, for justice and peace. And this takes us into some difficult political and economic issues; to some truly demanding and difficult aspects in the darkness of life.

SP Although as you mentioned before, Dan's response might be that in order to see a shadow you actually need light; you can't see a shadow without light. And Dan might say, I am providing the light.

MP Yes, that's quite true, and I suppose the question we are asking is, how do you give a full account of what it is that isolates people in those dark places, and in which the light has yet to shine? What I hear Dan say is, when you glimpse what is going on in the light, that then throws light on your darkness.

SP There is a very interesting reflection on the spiritual journey where he talks about pilgrimage and being drawn into God's ‘measure’:

When I read this, I was struck by the sense of being given-over to God, and the destruction of all types of self-measure. But it takes remarkable freedom of the spirit to become such a pilgrim – and this is sharing somehow in God's self-measure. Dan doesn't presume to say how that actually happens, but it's the loss of self-criticism, in a positive sense.

MP I found it interesting to see the life of the discipleship as moving more and more with others in God, and losing attraction to self-measure. We tend to make judgements about ourselves either internally or about others – everybody's judging everybody. But he would say ‘but by what measure are we making our judgements, and how do we live in God, and the measure that God has in relation to us?’ There is a certain self-forgetfulness here at the heart of pilgrimage. But this is where the language of retreat and spiritual direction enters into Dan's theology.

SP It is related to the deeply pastoral dimension to Dan's theology. It emerges in his own reflections on what it means to be cared for while he was dying. He ponders the difference between when the Pastor who is looking after people and when the Pastor has needs, and how that is community forming (pp. 106-107). He uses the illustration of his sickness and what happens when community gathers around someone's need. In the book he extends this reflection to the nature of ministry. And then he talks about Jesus suffering in the flesh, and in this Jesus becomes a place of need. The idea of Christ being a place of need around which a community is built is a remarkable insight into suffering and what might happen and the potentialities of community. By caring for Jesus and imitating Jesus in his care for others, those he cared for became active care-givers and active members of the caring Church. There is something here about ecclesial life around the place of need and as the people gather around the place of need, wherever it is, the Church emerges.

I was struck by this when my wife Jennifer and I were in Italy in July. One theme that became important to both of us in the religious art we saw was ‘The Deposition’. It was not something that has played a very large part in my own spiritual journey but there was so much in mediaeval and renaissance art about The Deposition – about caring for the broken body. It is quite moving. How the community cared for the body became the pattern for the way of the future church in the world. Attending to the suffering body is community forming. Dan's reflections gave The Deposition of Christ an added significance.

MP It was true for a male colleague of ours who died earlier this year after a long battle with cancer. For him and his wife pictures of The Deposition towards the end of his life really mattered to them both. I remember her saying one day, towards the end, that ‘this for me, this caring of this broken and emaciated body, is the most powerful thing that I can hold at the moment’. There is something about this going on in Wording a Radiance. This is about how the rest of the world holds what was once powerful, but now powerless; with the light leaking out of it, gradually. Perhaps there is a kind of theology of creation lingering there under the surface – one that touches on death. Yet the book affirms the fullness of life, redemption and resurrection.

SP Yes, in Wording a Radiance we have an ecclesiology – it is a nod towards the one he never wrote. Yet the book is a profound theological sketch, inviting others to participate and join in the conversation.

MP Yes, I can hear Dan saying, ‘well, what do you think?’ and then inviting us into further conversation. It was fitting that his Memorial Service in 2008 included a lecture and some seminars. There can't be many Memorial Services like that. Intentional theological conversation pleased him. It meant that we all could talk about God, together. And only from there, could we think about the shape and possibility of the church, as well as reflect meaningfully on our own lives. That's what Wording a Radiance is ultimately about – gazing on the beauty of God and the face of Christ, with all that bright illumination, and finding that our faces, reflecting this light, shine a little too. But it is hard to find the words for this. It's all about grace, attraction, poetry, art, beauty and mystery. Dan was better than most at finding a vocabulary for God's ways with the world. His was a theology devoted to praise.