One Of Us Is God…
Welcome, paid subscribers,
My new book One Of Us Is God, is in the final edit stage before publication. In advance of the public release, I’d like to share a chapter each week with paid subscribers here on Substack. I would love to hear your reactions, comments and questions. Let’s have a conversation about re-centring our faith on the incarnation…
If you’re happy for your comments to be cited in marketing materials, all the better. Here is the first instalment, Jesus on the Wild Side…
The Word of God came in His own Person, because it was He alone, the Image of the Father Who could recreate man made after the Image. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation
The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man. Matthew 13:37
Two important things happened to me in the spring of 1973, six months into my fourteenth year of life. The first was that I bought a copy of Lou Reed’s single ‘Walk on the Wild Side,’ described by the New York Times as ‘a ballad of misfits and oddballs that became an unlikely cultural anthem.’ With ‘Perfect Day’ as the B-side, the song introduced me to Reed’s chocolate-and-gravel voice and I was instantly hooked. I later secured a copy of the Transformer album, produced by David Bowie and as perfect a snapshot of post-60’s wild-side culture as you could hope to find.
The second important event was that I became a Christian. ‘Became’ is perhaps the wrong word. In a sense I already was a Christian, but the change was nonetheless dramatic. I had spent my early years as a Catholic; learning my catechism; taking my First Communion; attending Mass and Confession. My schools in Ireland and Canada were faith-based, with nuns and priests swishing down over-waxed corridors in their black, always black, robes. At home, though, there was a fault line. My father, a self-declared atheist, would have nothing to do with the church. He might give us a lift to Mass and pick us up when it was all over, but set foot on sacred ground he would not. My mother, by contrast, was raised in a working-class family in northern England where poverty and Catholicism were the two constants. She had her leather-bound Missal; her black lace head covering and her operatic voice for the hymns. The rituals of Rome ran in her blood.
I was ten years old when the fault line broke open. My father abandoned the family, leaving my mother with four children, no job, no car and no home. The elastic of her faith, having stretched already to accommodate both his unbelief and his unfaithfulness, snapped completely. She gave up on the church. We moved from Canada back to the UK and simply didn’t bother to find a parish. Nothing much was said about this change, and it would be several years before we even picked up the conversation. Church had always shimmered in the background of my life. Now it fell silent, the lights out.
