via media

Today is the commemoration for John Henry Newman. Newman, although he ended his life as a Roman Catholic Cardinal, began his ordained life in the Church of England. He is often sited as an Anglo-Catholic hero as he, with Pusey, Keble and Froude (who died very young) were responsible for the "Tracts for the Times" which greatly influenced a resurgence in Anglo-Catholic worship.

However, an often lost facet of this movement was its somewhat radical mission to slums. Newman had been a curate at St. Clement's in Oxford which had seen rapid urban expansion and suffered from the problems of cramped housing, low incomes and little infrastructure. This experience of ministry with the most needy as a curate seems to have really set into Newman. He always holds his office as a priest as both blessing and burden - but that this is God's will and therefore his joy he holds no doubt.

The via media is a phrase which has come to represent a sort of liberalism which the Church of England holds, spanning the space between the Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions and weaving in strands of each. But the sort of Church which the Tractarians actually gave rise to was often much more practical than academic. Beautiful buildings made sense in areas of great poverty - there people could be lifted above their every day filth and despair and find hope. But in the Church, also, they would find material help, education and training to improve their physical as well as their spiritual lives.

It is easy to think of Anglo-Catholicism as cocooned and precious because that is, too often, what it as become - leaving social outreach and conversion to those who use very different images and language for God. If incarnation and adoration are to mean anything they cannot be confined to inside, they have to erupt into the everyday and be found in ordinary life.

Perhaps that blessing and burden to which God calls all God's people is a sort of Via Media. We rejoice to praise God in height and depth but we also hold sacred trust - a trust which calls us to look beyond our safety and into the eyes of the waiting world.